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For the sake of learning: essays in honor of Anthony Grafton [1]
 9789004263307, 9789004316928, 9789004263314

Table of contents :
For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Editors’ Preface
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Anthony Grafton: A Short Biography to 2015
Anthony Grafton: A Bibliography to 2015
Part 1: Scaliger and Casaubon
1: Confidentiality and Publicity in Early Modern Epistolography: Scaliger and Casaubon
2: Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon
3: Chronology and Hebraism in the World of Joseph Scaliger: The Case of Arnaud de Pontac (Arnaldus Pontacus)
4: Joseph Scaliger in England
5: What Does an Oriental Scholar Look Like? Some Portraits of Joseph Scaliger and Other Sixteenth-century Oriental Scholars: A Selection
6: Joseph Scaliger’s Treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum (ca. 1591)
Part 2: Knowledge Communities
7: Streetwalking and the Sources of Citizen Culture
8: Baudouin Ronsse as Writer of Medical Letters
9: Performing Humanism: The Andreini Family and the Republic of Letters in Counter-Reformation Italy
10: A Spanner and His Works: Books, Letters, and Scholarly Communication Networks in Early Modern Europe
11: Managing Cardinals’ Households for Dummies
12: Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning
Part 3: Scholarship and Religion
13: Pomponio Leto’s Life of Muhammad
14: Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding
15: When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek during and after the Council of Trent
16: Theology and the Conditions of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Discernment of Spirits
17: John Selden in Germany: Religion and Natural Law from Boecler to Buddeus (1665–1695)
18: “Crouch for Employment”: Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot
19: Lutheran Islamophiles in Eighteenth-century Germany
20: The Sacrificing King: Ancients, Moderns, and the Politics of Religion
Part 4: Cultures of Collecting
21: Privatbibliotheken antiker Christen
22: An Imagined Library in the Italian Renaissance: The Presence of Greek in Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria
23: A New World of Books: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina
24: The Rediscovered Third Volume of Conrad Gessner’s “Historia plantarum”
25: Suchen und Finden vor Google: Zur Metadatenproduktion im 16. Jahrhundert
26: The Vatican Library Alphabets, Luca Orfei, and Graphic Media in Sistine Rome
27: On the Production and Dissemination of a Hebrew Best Seller: Pinḥas Hurwitz and His Mystical-scientific Encyclopedia, Sefer Ha-Brit
28: For the Birds: Collecting, Art, and Natural History in Saxony
For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Part 5: Learned Practices
29: Visualisierungen mittels Tabellen
30: Paduan Extracurricular Rhetoric, 1488–1491
31: Cardano’s Malicious Horoscope and Gaurico’s Morbid Horoscope of Regiomontanus
32: Lingua Adamica and Speculative Philology: Philo to Reuchlin
33: Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559–1651
34: Campanella and the Disciplines from Obscurity to Concealment
35: Spirits in the Laboratory: Some Helmontian Collaborators of Robert Boyle
36: Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais
Part 6: Approaches to Antiquity
37: King Arthur’s Merry Adventure in the Vale of Viterbo
38: Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies: Humanist Hermeneutics and the Language of Relics
39: Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius
40: The Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in Renaissance Scholarship: From Annius of Viterbo to Johannes Boemus
41: Imagining Marcus Aurelius in the Renaissance: Forgery, Fiction, and History in the Creation of the Imperial Ideal
42: Marcus Aurelius and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-century Antwerp
43: Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, Politicians: Sources and Uses of Early Modern Jesuit Natural Theology
44: Henry Savile Reads His Euclid
45: Natur und Zeit: Antike Motive im Umfeld von Rousseaus Emile
46: The Whig Interpretation of Homer: F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in England
Part 7: Uses of Historiography
47: Quae vires verbo quod est “classicum” aliis locis aliisque temporibus subiectae sint quantumque sint eius sensus temporum diuturnitate mutati
48: History and Antiquity at French Pilgrim Shrines: Three Pyrenean Examples
49: Inventing the Middle Ages: An Early Modern Forger Hiding in Plain Sight
50: Goethe and the End of Antiquarianism
51: Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist
52: The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung
53: Authenticity, Autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
54: Time Offline and On
Epilogue
55: “Studied for Action” Revisited
56: The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition
Index

Citation preview

For the Sake of Learning volume 1

Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions Editor M. Feingold (California Institute of Technology)

VOLUME 18/1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/slci



Portrait of Anthony T. Grafton. Photo: Jennifer Rampling.



For the Sake of Learning Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton volume 1

Edited by

Ann Blair Anja-Silvia Goeing

LEIDEN | BOSTON

 Cover illustration: Jaede, “Die Bibliothek,” in Carl Friedrich Lauckhard, ed.: Die Welt in Bildern. Orbis pictus. Bilderbuch zur Anschauung und Belehrung, 3rd revised edition with more than 600 colored illustrations (Leipzig: E.J. Günther, n.d. [1872]), vol. 2, plate xxii, 2. Courtesy of a private library in Switzerland. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blair, Ann, 1961- editor of compilation. | Goeing, Anja-Silvia, editor of compilation. | Grafton, Anthony, honouree. Title: For the sake of learning : essays in honor of Anthony Grafton / edited by Ann Blair, Anja-Silvia Goeing. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions, ISSN 2352-1325 ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005113 (print) | LCCN 2016016478 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004263307 (set, hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004316928 (Vol. 1) | ISBN 9789004316942 (Vol. 2) | ISBN 9789004263314 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Learning and scholarship--History. | Intellectual life--History. | Historiography--History. | Learning and scholarship--Europe--History. | Europe--Intellectual life. | Historiography--Europe--History. Classification: LCC AZ231 .F67 2016 (print) | LCC AZ231 (ebook) | DDC 001.209--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005113 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2352-1325 isbn 978-90-04-26330-7 (hardback, set) isbn 978-90-04-31692-8 (hardback, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-31694-2 (hardback, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-26331-4 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.



To the memory of Lisa Jardine (1944–2015)







Contents Editors’ Preface XV List of Figures and Tables XIX Notes on Contributors XXIV Anthony Grafton: A Short Biography to 2015 XXXVII Ann Blair and Nicholas Popper Anthony Grafton: A Bibliography to 2015 LI C. Philipp E. Nothaft

Volume 1 Part 1 Scaliger and Casaubon 1 Confidentiality and Publicity in Early Modern Epistolography: Scaliger and Casaubon 3 Dirk van Miert 2 Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon 21 Nicholas Hardy 3 Chronology and Hebraism in the World of Joseph Scaliger: The Case of Arnaud de Pontac (Arnaldus Pontacus) 39 Joanna Weinberg 4 Joseph Scaliger in England 55 Mordechai Feingold 5 What Does an Oriental Scholar Look Like? Some Portraits of Joseph Scaliger and Other Sixteenth-century Oriental Scholars: A Selection 73 Kasper van Ommen 6 Joseph Scaliger’s Treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum (ca. 1591) 91 Henk Jan de Jonge

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Contents Contents

Part 2 Knowledge Communities 7

Streetwalking and the Sources of Citizen Culture 107 James S. Amelang

8

Baudouin Ronsse as Writer of Medical Letters 123 Nancy Siraisi

9

Performing Humanism: The Andreini Family and the Republic of Letters in Counter-Reformation Italy 140 Sarah Gwyneth Ross

10

A Spanner and His Works: Books, Letters, and Scholarly Communication Networks in Early Modern Europe 157 Daniel Stolzenberg

11

Managing Cardinals’ Households for Dummies 173 Laurie Nussdorfer

12

Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning 195 Richard Serjeantson

Part 3 Scholarship and Religion 13

Pomponio Leto’s Life of Muhammad 215 Margaret Meserve

14

Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding 232 Arnoud Visser

15

When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek during and after the Council of Trent 251 Scott Mandelbrote

16

Theology and the Conditions of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Discernment of Spirits 268 Stuart Clark

Contents

17

John Selden in Germany: Religion and Natural Law from Boecler to Buddeus (1665–1695) 286 Martin Mulsow

18

“Crouch for Employment”: Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot 309 Bruce Janacek

19

Lutheran Islamophiles in Eighteenth-century Germany 327 Alastair Hamilton

20 The Sacrificing King: Ancients, Moderns, and the Politics of Religion 344 Jonathan Sheehan

Part 4 Cultures of Collecting 21

Privatbibliotheken antiker Christen 367 Roland Kany

22

An Imagined Library in the Italian Renaissance: The Presence of Greek in Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria 393 Christopher S. Celenza

23

A New World of Books: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina 404 William H. Sherman

24 The Rediscovered Third Volume of Conrad Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” 415 Urs B. Leu 25 Suchen und Finden vor Google: Zur Metadatenproduktion im 16. Jahrhundert 423 Helmut Zedelmaier 26 The Vatican Library Alphabets, Luca Orfei, and Graphic Media in Sistine Rome 441 Paul Nelles

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xii 27

Contents Contents

On the Production and Dissemination of a Hebrew Best Seller: Pinḥas Hurwitz and His Mystical-scientific Encyclopedia, Sefer Ha-Brit 469 David Ruderman

28 For the Birds: Collecting, Art, and Natural History in Saxony 481 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Volume 2 Part 5 Learned Practices 29 Visualisierungen mittels Tabellen 507 Paul Michel 30 Paduan Extracurricular Rhetoric, 1488–1491 542 Anja-Silvia Goeing 31

Cardano’s Malicious Horoscope and Gaurico’s Morbid Horoscope of Regiomontanus 561 N.M. Swerdlow

32 Lingua Adamica and Speculative Philology: Philo to Reuchlin 572 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann 33 Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559–1651 581 Peter Stallybrass 34 Campanella and the Disciplines from Obscurity to Concealment 602 Kristine Louise Haugen 35 Spirits in the Laboratory: Some Helmontian Collaborators of Robert Boyle 621 William R. Newman 36 Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais 641 Arthur Kiron

Contents

xiii

Part 6 Approaches to Antiquity 37

King Arthur’s Merry Adventure in the Vale of Viterbo 661 Ingrid D. Rowland

38 Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies: Humanist Hermeneutics and the Language of Relics 675 Hester Schadee 39 Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius 692 James Hankins 40 The Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in Renaissance Scholarship: From Annius of Viterbo to Johannes Boemus 711 C. Philipp E. Nothaft 41

Imagining Marcus Aurelius in the Renaissance: Forgery, Fiction, and History in the Creation of the Imperial Ideal 729 Thomas Dandelet

42 Marcus Aurelius and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-century Antwerp 744 Jill Kraye 43 Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, Politicians: Sources and Uses of Early Modern Jesuit Natural Theology 761 Brian W. Ogilvie 44 Henry Savile Reads His Euclid 780 Robert Goulding 45 Natur und Zeit: Antike Motive im Umfeld von Rousseaus Emile 798 Jürgen Oelkers 46 The Whig Interpretation of Homer: F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in England 821 Diane Greco Josefowicz

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Contents

Part 7 Uses of Historiography 47 Quae vires verbo quod est “classicum” aliis locis aliisque temporibus subiectae sint quantumque sint eius sensus temporum diuturnitate mutati 845 Salvatore Settis 48 History and Antiquity at French Pilgrim Shrines: Three Pyrenean Examples 854 Virginia Reinburg 49 Inventing the Middle Ages: An Early Modern Forger Hiding in Plain Sight 871 Paula Findlen 50 Goethe and the End of Antiquarianism 897 Peter N. Miller 51

Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist 917 Suzanne Marchand

52 The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung 933 Glenn W. Most 53 Authenticity, Autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 955 Lorraine Daston 54 Time Offline and On 974 Daniel Rosenberg

Epilogue 55

“Studied for Action” Revisited 999 Lisa Jardine

56 The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition 1018 Jacob Soll Index 1033



Editors’ Preface: A Republic of Letters in Action Amicitiae natura socia est et comes gratificandi voluntas. Ideo amicitia potest multùm: et ut multùm potest: ita saepenumero ad id faciendum im­­ pellit: quod alioqui non facilè susciperemus. Haec etiam mihi eius, quod antea in animo non habueram, causa fuit….1 martin crusius, 1554



Martin Crusius would have found today’s academic world a source of wonder and perplexity. Disciplines and institutions have proliferated since the early modern period, triggering both great growth and ever more subdivisions. Today, scholars typically find multiple intellectual homes: first, within a university department, possibly leavened by an interdisciplinary program, and secondly, as part of national and international communities defined by conferences, journals, and professional associations. These various entities provide money, support, structure, and disciplinary integrity. But the joy of collaboration and communication comes most strongly from the improvised, informal connections that scholars form across differences of age, nationality, and professional affiliation to investigate questions and sources of mutual interest. When friendship accompanies these interactions we can feel close to fulfilling the ideals of the early modern Republic of Letters for, as Martin Crusius marveled in 1554, we are able to accomplish much more than we would have otherwise. This book is a Festschrift for Anthony Grafton, eminent scholar, great friend and colleague, and catalyst of collaboration and community—presented by those who have worked with him in some capacity, on the history of scholarship, of books, of Renaissance humanism and early modern culture, among other topics. For more than forty years, Tony has brought exceptional energy, acuity, and generosity to a remarkable range of intellectual fields and activities. With his indefatigable energy for meeting new people, mentoring scholars (young and not-so-young), and engaging in collaborative projects, he has played 1 “The desire to oblige is by nature the ally and companion of friendship. Therefore friendship is very powerful. And as it is very powerful, thus it often pushes us to do things that we would otherwise have been slow to undertake. For me too this was the cause.” Martin Crusius, Commentariolum in primam Demosthenis Olynthiacam Sturmianum (Strasbourg: Blasius Fabricius Chemnicensis, 1554), preface sig. A2r.

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a crucial role in forming a complete province of the modern-day Republic of Letters spanning members from many disciplinary and national backgrounds and all phases of academic (and some nonacademic) careers. This volume brings together new work from a cross-section of the multi-faceted and constantly growing community of Tony’s acolytes. We are keenly aware that many other colleagues might also have been included, for the province that Tony inhabits is especially capacious. In particular, none of the research essays was contributed by those who were Tony’s direct doctoral students. Tony’s advisees were the focus of a conference celebrating Tony’s sixty-fifth birthday held in Princeton in May 2015, some record of which can be viewed at www.graftoniana.princeton.edu. The contributors to this volume fall into six other major categories of collaboration with Tony over the years. Some are “readees,” on whose doctoral committee Tony served though he was not their principal adviser, and who kept working with him after becoming professional historians. A second category comprises those who organized one or more conferences with him, which often resulted in a coedited volume, while a third group of colleagues invited him to publish a chapter in one of their books. Others coauthored articles or books with Tony. We have also included faculty colleagues from Princeton and, finally, scholars who served with Tony on the editorial team of a journal or book series. The essays take a predominantly historical approach, but the authors come from a number of different disciplines, including art history, classics, Jewish and Oriental studies, church history and theology, English and German literatures, and many strands of history—political, social, intellectual, cultural, and the history of science and book history. The contributors write in English, German, and Latin, and their home countries range from Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and the uk to North America. Their links to Tony were generally formed through intense face-to-face collaborations, sustained by Tony’s regular travels to other institutions and by the opportunities generously provided by Princeton University for hosting visitors to Tony’s home base. The fifty-six scholarly contributions gathered here were inspired by a wide range of Tony’s work—fittingly, considering the breadth of his scholarship. We have arranged them roughly chronologically within thematic sections that highlight Tony’s long-standing interests. From his 1975 dissertation on Joseph Scaliger to his 2011 book with Joanna Weinberg on Isaac Casaubon, Tony has returned throughout his career to these two most famous scholars of late Renaissance Europe, whom he brought back into the limelight by explicating the most technical elements of their work, whether in chronology or Hebrew philology—hence the section on Scaliger and Casaubon. Tony also uses studies of individuals (Scaliger and Casaubon but also Alberti and Cardano, for

Editors’ Preface

xvii

example) to shed light on the codes of conduct of the communities in which they moved, though these were rarely articulated explicitly (Knowledge Communities). Tony has explored the interaction of scholarship and religious commitments, for example in Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical history and in attitudes toward Jews (Scholarship and Religion). He has examined the impact of ideals and institutions of collecting as visible in libraries, encyclopedias, or museums of paintings or curiosities (Cultures of Collecting). Through his holistic attention to primary sources in their original forms, Tony called attention to the practices involved in becoming and being learned, such as reading and note taking, visualizing and composing, proofreading and publishing, even before doing so was called book history (Learned Practices). Already as a child Tony sought out the best classical education he could find, and since then he has pursued the study of antiquity, especially through the lens of early modern humanists and later historians (Approaches to Antiquity). Just as he has studied past practices of history writing (Uses of Historiography), his role at the forefront of recent historiographical trends invites us to examine the context of signal moments of his own career (Epilogue). The biography and bibliography included here offer a more detailed look at Tony’s broad range of achieve­ ments to date—and many more projects are under way, the publication of which will be recorded in the online bibliography at www.graftoniana .princeton.edu. In editing this volume we have relied on the support of many. Urs Leu first suggested this project in 2012 and has been crucially involved in its completion, since he has organized the conference commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Conrad Gessner in Zurich in June 2016 at which this volume will be presented to its honorand; we are grateful to the Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte der Universität Zürich for hosting that event. Mordechai Feingold welcomed the volume in his series at Brill entitled “Scientific and Learned Culture and Their Institutions” and has generously given advice throughout, including the title for the book. At Brill, Michiel Thijssen and Wendel Scholma have been exemplary editors and the production team led by Pieter van Roon displayed consummate skill and patience. Our copy editor, Janis Bolster, took on the daunting task of creating consistency across so many essays with remarkable effectiveness and good cheer. Lin Maria Riotto created the extensive index of proper names and topical keywords, which Anja edited further so that it may serve as an informative entry into the many topics addressed in this work. Warm thanks to Philipp Nothaft for his exacting work on the bibliography and to Nick Popper who co-authored the biography and contributed wise counsel at many stages of the process.

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We are also grateful to those who served as peer reviewers, and for editorial assistance with various essays to Samantha Wesner and Dr. Nicola Schneider. This project was generously supported by Harvard University, the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, and the Zentralbibliothek Zurich. This volume would not have been possible without the great enthusiasm and thoughtful essays of all its contributors. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work on this project, solidifying long-standing relationships and building new ones across the Republic of Letters. We deeply regret that Lisa Jardine was not able to witness the completion of this project and we dedicate this volume to her memory, with gratitude for her pathbreaking work in our field and her role in inspiring others to join it. Finally, we would like to thank Tony Grafton for all the guidance and support he has given us each individually, and for creating around him such a remarkable community. We aim to channel the sentiments of all those involved in this volume as we borrow these words from Conrad Gessner: Dearest Tony, “we want to dedicate this book first and foremost to you. This gift might not be worthy of your favor, but whatever little drop of appreciation you have for it will continue to live, in the eyes of others and even beyond the borders of our age. We would have liked to prove our gratitude to your humanity in another more splendid way. However, our ability only sufficed to the present work that we hope you accept cheerfully and sincerely.”2 Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing

2 This citation has been slightly modified from Conrad Gessner, Compendium ex Actuarii Zachariae Libris De differentijs urinarum, iudicijs et praevidentijs (Zurich: Froschauer, [1541]), sigs. A2v–A3r, dedication to Petrus Iacobus et Stephanus: “Volui autem in primis tuo nomini, Charissime Petre Iacobe, libellum hunc ascribere, non quidem ut te dignum munus, sed quantulumcunque saltem amoris in te mei, dum vivam, perpetuò duraturi, monumentum: et fortaßis apud alios quoque etiam ultra nostrae terminos aetatis. Optarem alio modo splendidiore meam gratitudinem humanitati tuae probare posse, sed quod solum in praesentia opis est nostrae; id spero hilaris et candidus accipies.”



List of Figures and Tables Figures 5.1 Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, ca. 1593 75 5.2 Johannes Cornelisz van ’t Woudt, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, ca. 1608–9 84 5.3 Etienne de Cahaignes, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, 1608 86 5.4 Esme de Boulonois, Portrait of Guillaume Postel, seventeenth century 88 11.1 Author portrait, Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (1606) 182 11.2 Title page, Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (1606) 185 11.3 Title page, M. Bortolomeo [sic] Scappi dell’arte di cucinare con il mastro di casa e trinciante (1643) 189 11.4 Note by London book dealer dated 1654 in front flyleaf of Combi’s 1643 edition of Scappi’s Arte di cucinare 192 14.1 Luther’s New Testament ii, 156 233 14.2 Title page of Luther’s copy of Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament (1527) 236 14.3 Luther’s New Testament ii, 430: a pointing finger drawn by Luther to mark a passage in Erasmus’s comment to 1 Corinthians 7 240 14.4 Luther’s New Testament ii, 213: Luther directly expressing his anger to Erasmus in his comment to John 1:6 244 17.1 A list of commentators on Grotius that Boineburg has noted on the flyleaf of Boecler’s commentary on Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (1663) 288 17.2 Boineburg’s underlinings and comments on Selden’s De jure naturali (1640) 291 18.1 Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms 320 24.1 The cedar in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” and the original drawing by Johannes Kentmann 418 24.2 The tulip in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” and the original drawing by Johannes Kentmann 419 24.3  Ranunculus thora (formerly Aconitum) in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” and in the publication from 1577 (Conrad Gessner, De aconito primo Dioscoridis…) 421 26.1 Simone Verovio, Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime (1587) 447 26.2 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus (ca. 1589), title page engraving 452 26.3 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 6, partial Latin alphabet 455 26.4 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 10, Gothic alphabet 457

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List of Figures and Tables

26.5 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 11, Greek alphabet 458 26.6 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 17, Samaritan alphabet 459 26.7 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 9, Egyptian alphabet 460 26.8 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 16, Etruscan alphabet 462 28.1 Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Two Dead Bohemian Waxwings, around 1530 486 28.2 Johann Joachim Kändler (1706–75), Meissen porcelain manufacturer, Blue Macaw, 1731 488 28.3 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93), Study of a Claw 490 28.4 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93), Winter, 1573 492 28.5 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93) (with later additions), Coati, 1577 493 28.6 Zacharias Wagner (1614–68), Arara from the Thierbuch 496 28.7 Interior of salon with ceiling paintings by Albert Eckhout (attributed) 499 28.8 Attributed to Albert Eckhout (1610–66), Arara, detail of ceiling paintings 500 28.9 Attributed to Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn (1576–1612), copy after Giuseppe Arcimboldo (?), Falcon 502 29.1 Beispiel für die Kategorien (aa)/(ba): „Fleckmittel“, Der Volks-Brockhaus [1941] 509 29.2  Cyclopædia Or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences […], by E. Chambers, London [1728], Artikel „Fishery“ 510 29.3 Der Hinkende Bott auf das Jahr 1832, Ausschnitt aus dem Monat August 511 29.4 Gregor Reisch, Aepitoma Omnis Phylosophiae, Alias Margarita Phylosophica, Tractans de omni genere scibili [1504] 512 29.5 Darstellung als Venn-Diagramm. Philippe Rekacewicz, Atlas der Globalisierung [2009] 513 29.6 Ältere, redundante 1 × 1-Tabelle, Raffaele Maffei, Commentariorvm Vrbanorum Raphaelis Volaterrani [1530] 513 29.7 „Einmal-Eins“ aus einem Kalender, Der Hinkende Bott auf das Jahr 1832 514 29.8 Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die PHYSICA SACRA, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in Heil. Schrifft vorkommenden natürlichen Sachen, deutlich erklärt und bewährt [1731–1735] 515 29.9 Artikelformen des Deutschen 516 29.10 Links: Set von Tabellen des Belichtungsmessers ombrux von Gossen (1933 oder etwas später) — Rechts: Volvelle des General Electric Exposure Meter (ca. 1946) 517 29.11 Der kleine Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in einem Band [1926] 519 29.12 Der Große Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in zwanzig Bänden [1935], „Altersaufbau“ 519

List of Figures and Tables

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29.13 Hans Conrad Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel der Stadt St. Gallen von den Anfängen bis 1520 [1959–60] 521 29.14 Conversations-Hand-Lexikon [1831], zum Stichwort „Höhe“ 522 29.15 Petit Larousse Illustré. Nouveau Dictionnaire Encyclopédique, publié sous la direction de Claude Augé [1917], „Hauteurs“ 523 29.16 Fieberkurve: Dr. Hoppeler’s Hausarzt. Ein treuer Freund der Familie in gesunden und kranken Tagen [1923] 524 29.17 Knaurs Konversations-Lexikon [1934], „Bevölkerung“ 524 29.18 Spinnennetz-Graphik 525 29.19 Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens, Band 4 [1908], Artikel „Diagramm“ 526 29.20 Herman Chernoff, “The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically,” Journal of the American Statistical Association [1973] 527 29.21 Anzahl der Bibliotheks-Benutzungen als Manhattan Chart 528 29.22 Der kleine Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in einem Band [1926], „Arbeitslosigkeit“ 528 29.23 [Regiomontanus], Temporal, Deß weytberümpten M. Johan Künigspergers natürlicher Kunst der Astronomey kurtzer Begriff, von Natürlichem eynfluß der Gestirn, Planeten, unnd Zeichen, etc. [1534] 529 29.24 Schweizer Pestalozzi Schülerinnenkalender [1924], „Womit die Schweizer ihr Brot verdienen“ 530 29.25 Große Herder. Nachschlagewerk für Wissen und Leben [1935], „Winterhilfswerk“ 531 29.26 Der Große Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in zwanzig Bänden [1935], „Eisenbahn“ 532 29.27 Die Welt von A bis Z. Ein Lexikon für die Jugend, für Schule und Haus [1953] 533 29.28 Émile Levasseur, La population française. Histoire de la population avant 1789 et démographie de la France comparée à celle des autres nations au 19e siècle précédée d’une introduction sur la statistique [1889–1892] 534 29.29 Walter Möller, Angewandte Menschenkenntnis. Einführung in die Handschriften-, Gesichtsausdrucks- und Schädelkunde [1916] 535 29.30 Skizzenhafte Umzeichnung des im Original mehrfarbigen Bilds durch den Verfasser. Daniel Dorling, Mark Newmann, Anna Barford, Der schlaue Planet. So haben Sie die Welt noch nie gesehen [2008] 536 29.31 Wilder Penfield and Edwin Boldrey, „Somatic Motor and Sensory Representation in the Cerebral Cortex of Man as studied by Electrical Stimulation“. Brain. A Journal of Neurology [1937] 536

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29.32 Gregor Reisch, Aepitoma Omnis Phylosophiae, Alias Margarita Phylosophica, Tractans de omni genere scibili [1504], Liber ii: de principiis logice, Tractatus primus 537 29.33 Compendium octo partium orationis [um 1495] 538 29.34 Knaurs Konversations-Lexikon [1934], „Bevölkerung“ 540 29.35 Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon [1910], zum Artikel „statistische Darstellungsmethoden ii“ 541 30.1 Bibliothèque de Genève, ms lat. 86, fol. 269r: Peter of Ravenna, Phoenix, chess pieces 558 31.1 Cardano’s Horoscope of Regiomontanus with equal houses of 30° measured from the horoscopus 562 31.2 Gaurico’s horoscope of Regiomontanus with houses computed by Regiomontanus’s “rational” method 566 37.1 Cardinal Defuk arrives in Montefiascone. Contemporary label for the Est!Est!!Est!!! wine of the Cantina Cooperativa di Montefiascone 667 37.2 Church of San Silvestro 672 37.3 The valley of Faul, city wall, and Faul Gate 673 42.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Caspar Gevartius 750 44.1 Detail from Savile’s Euclid, p. 13 796 44.2 Detail from Chamber’s Euclid, fol. 15v 797 46.1  Minerva Repressing the Fury of Achilles, by John Flaxman (1795), which appeared in Pope’s Iliad 837 46.2 John Flaxman’s jasperware chimneypiece, The Apotheosis of Homer, made by Wedgwood (1786) 839 48.1 Engraving from the title page of Pierre Geoffroy, Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason (1607) 858 48.2 Engraving from the title page of Pierre de Marca, Traité des merveilles operées en la chapelle de Notre Dame du Calvaire de Beth-Aram, 2nd ed. (1648) 865 49.1 Macchiavelli’s defense of the female doctorate in the medieval Studium 877 49.2 Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi presenting her legal theses before Isabella Farnese, queen of Spain, at the Spanish College in Bologna (1722) 879 49.3 Portrait of Bettisia Gozzadini, allegedly made in 1241 880 49.4 Anton Francesco Ghiselli’s account of Gozzadini’s 1236 degree 883 49.5 Alessandro Macchiavelli’s calendar for the medieval Studium, with an entry describing Gozzadini’s 1236 degree 886 49.6 Macchiavelli’s critical edition of Carlo Sigonio’s Historiae Bononiensis (1733), with a footnote about Gozzadini’s 1236 degree from his Kalendarium 894 49.7 Giovanni Fantuzzi’s marginalia in Macchiavelli’s Delle donne bolognesi (1740) 895 52.1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hans Joachim Mette and Karl Schlechta (1933 ff.) 948

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52.2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook P 1 (Fall 1866–Fall 1867) 949 52.3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (1967 ff.) 950 52.4 Nietzsche on the manuscripts of Theognis 951 54.1 Mark Twain’s Memory Builder 976 54.2 Ludlow’s Concentric Chart of History (1885) 979 54.3 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, The Polish-American System of Chronology, Reproduced, with Some Modifications, from General Bem’s Franco-Polish Method (1850) 980 54.4 Samuel L. Clemens patent application for game apparatus, 9 October 1884 983 54.5 Letter from us Patent Office to Samuel L. Clemens regarding “Game Apparatus”, 14 April 1885 985 54.6 Screen capture from Mark Twain’s Memory Builder 2.0 by Daniel Rosenberg and Interactive Media Group, University of Oregon 995

Tables 26.1 Table of inventors and letters 443 29.1 Tabelle von Belichtungszeiten 517 29.2 Anzahl der Bibliotheks-Benutzungen als typographische Tabelle 528 29.3 Allegorie als Paralleltabelle 538 31.1 Computation of the sun and moon for 1436 June 6, 4:40 pm with the Tabulae resolutae 569

Notes on Contributors James S. Amelang is Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid. His main fields of interest are the social and cultural history of early modern Spain, and the urban history of southern Europe (especially Barcelona). His current project is to finish The Oxford History of Early Modern Spain. He obtained his PhD in 1981 at Princeton, where Tony Grafton served on his dissertation committee. Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. Her work centers on book history and the cultural history of early modern Europe, including the relations between science and religion. She is the author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010) and is currently working on the role of amanuenses in early modern authorship and scholarship. She was one of Tony’s first PhD students at Princeton. Christopher S. Celenza is Charles Homer Haskins Professor of Classics and German and Romance Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. A former Director of the American Academy in Rome, he currently serves as the chair of the Classics Department. His publications include The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (2004) and Machiavelli: A Portrait (2015). He shares with Tony a passion for the work of Angelo Decembrio. Stuart Clark is Professor Emeritus of History at Swansea University. He is interested in early modern witchcraft and demonology. His monographs include studies on the language and idea of witchcraft, and Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (2007). He was visiting professor at Princeton in 2008–9. Thomas Dandelet is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is generally interested in political exchanges between early modern Spain and Italy, and has coined the notion of imperial humanism, based on theories of global empires in early modern Europe. His most recent monograph is The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (2014). Tom spent three years as Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

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Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her interests include the history of probability, objectivity, scientific observation, and the sciences of the archives. Her department has hosted numerous Working Groups of scholars aiming toward collective publications, including Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014), and the Working Group on “Learned Practices of Canonical Texts” organized by Tony and Glenn Most (in press). She is currently writing a history of rules. Mordechai Feingold is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. He studies the intellectual and institutional development of science from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and the relations between science and religion. His latest book is Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013), coauthored with Jed Z. Buchwald. He has worked with Tony in many contexts, including most recently the conference held at Oxford in July 2014 on Scholarship, Science, and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) and Henry Savile (1549–1622). Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994) and has published on many other aspects of science, society, gender, and culture from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. She co-directs the Mapping the Republic of Letters digital humanities project. This essay is part of her research on Inventing Medieval Women: History, Memory, and Forgery in Early Modern Italy. Anja-Silvia Goeing is Anniversary Fellow at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and Privatdozent at the University of Zurich. She is currently preparing a book on practices of knowledge transfer at the Zurich lectorium in the sixteenth century. Her work includes studies on fifteenth-century biographies written about the Italian humanist Vittorino da Feltre (1999; 2014). She has worked with Tony in organizing conferences and editing volumes about late medieval and early modern textbooks and collectors’ knowledge. Robert Goulding is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. After his

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PhD at the Warburg Institute, 1999, he was a member of the inaugural class of the Society of Fellows at Princeton from 2000 to 2003, where he was Tony’s mentee. He has published Defending Hypatia: Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History (2010) and is at work on a book on Thomas Hariot’s optics. Alastair Hamilton is Arcadian Visiting Research Professor at the Warburg Institute, University of London. He works on the history of Arabic studies and on Orientalism in early modern Europe. He collaborated with Tony and Joanna Weinberg on “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (2011). James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard and the founder and General Editor of the the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press). His research focuses on the history of Renaissance political thought, the history of philosophy, and the history of the classical tradition. Recent publications include an edited volume on The Rebirth of Platonic Theology (2013). He and Tony have contributed articles and chapters to one another’s edited volumes, such as Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (1993), and The Lost Continent: Neo-Latin Literature and the Birth of European Vernacular Literatures (2001). Nicholas Hardy is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His Oxford DPhil thesis, “The ars critica in Early Modern England,” was examined by Tony in 2012, and is under contract for publication in the Oxford-Warburg Studies series. It examines the transformation of late humanist philological scholarship under the confessional, political, and intellectual pressures of the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on pre-Restoration England. In other recent and forthcoming publications he examines the King James Bible, Isaac Casaubon, and the censorship of Protestant scholars in baroque Rome. Kristine Louise Haugen is Professor of English Literature at the California Institute of Technology. She holds a PhD from Princeton, where Tony advised the dissertation that later became an intellectual biography of the classical scholar Richard Bentley (2011). She is currently completing books on the rise of the discipline of English poetic meter and on intellectuals in prison, both of which explore connections between the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

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Bruce Janacek is Associate Professor of History at North Central College, Naperville, Illinois. He has studied alchemical writing as a feature of early modern intellectual activity in times of political crisis, notably in his Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England (2011). He is currently working on an intellectual history of virtuosity in seventeenth-century England. Lisa Jardine (1944–2015) was Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She published over a dozen books on early modern culture, for example on Erasmus, Bacon, Hooke, Huygens, and Wren among many other topics. Her friendship with Tony began in 1973. It included important collaborations, such as From Humanism to the Humanities (1986) and “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy” in Past & Present (1990) and was sadly cut short by her death in October 2015. Henk Jan de Jonge is Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at Leiden University. His recent research centers on various aspects of the history of early Christian ritual. Most recently he has published a critical edition of five apologetic writings of Erasmus against the attacks of his Spanish opponents López de Zúñiga and Sancho Carranza (2015). Together with Tony and Jill Kraye, he was supervisory editor of The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, 8 vols., ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert (2012). Diane Greco Josefowicz holds a PhD from mit and an mfa in creative writing from Columbia University. Together with Jed Z. Buchwald, she wrote The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science (2010). Roland Kany is Professor of Church History in Antiquity at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He has written books on Augustine (Augustins Trinitätsdenken, 2007) and on Hermann Usener, Aby Warburg, and Walter Benjamin (Mnemosyne als Programm. 1987; Die religionsgeschichtliche Forschung an der Kulturwissen­ schaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, 1989). He has long-standing ties to the Warburg Institute and has served with Tony on the editorial team of the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte.

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Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann is Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is interested in early modern European art in a global context, and his recent publications include Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia (2014). He has been a colleague of Tony’s at Princeton since the 1980s. They have taught together and shared many conversations, for example about the visual representation of readers, scientists, and collectors, and other elements of antiquarian and scholarly culture, particularly in the seventeenth century. Arthur Kiron is the Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He directs the Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project, which includes the GershwindBennett Isaac Leeser Digital Repository, now viewable online. Most recently, he curated the exhibition and edited the companion volume Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1555–1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica (2014). Jill Kraye is Emeritus Professor of the University of London and Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute and has known Tony since they were students in London in the 1970s. She is interested in Renaissance humanism and philosophy, the later influence of classical philosophy, and European intellectual history between 1350 and 1650. Together with Tony and Henk Jan de Jonge, she was a supervisory editor of The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger (2012). Urs B. Leu directs the Rare Book Department at the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. He is interested in early modern libraries and book production and dissemination, and one of his main research areas is the work of Conrad Gessner. Together with Tony he published a critical edition of the heavily annotated Chronologia of the Ancient World with transcriptions, written by Henricus Glareanus (2013). He has organized the conference marking the 500th anniversary of Gessner’s birth at which this volume is to be presented to Tony. Scott Mandelbrote is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he is also Perne Librarian. He codirects a project on the Bible and Antiquity in the long nineteenth century and is editorial director of the Newton Project.

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With Tony Grafton, he is currently working on Archbishop Matthew Parker and his library. Recent publications include an edition of The Warden’s Punishment Book of All Souls College, Oxford: 1601–1850 (with John Davis, 2013), and a collaborative volume, Dissent and the Bible in Britain (with Michael Ledger-Lomas, 2013). Suzanne Marchand is Professor of History at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She has worked extensively on the history of the humanities in German and Austria. Her book German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (2009) explores the origins of nineteenth-century German Orientalism in Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis. She has two books underway: one on the history of the porcelain industry in Central Europe and another on the reception of Herodotus since the 17th century. Margaret Meserve is Associate Professor of European History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. She first met Tony in London while working toward her 2001 PhD at the Warburg Institute, and she spent three years at Princeton as a Lecturer in History and the Humanities Program. In Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (2008) she surveys how fifteenth-century historians and political commentators explained the rise and fall of Islamic empires, especially that of the Ottoman Turks. For her next book project, she explores the circulation of news, information, propaganda, and disinformation in Rome in the first decades after the arrival of print (ca. 1470–1527). Paul Michel is Professor Emeritus for Older German Literature at the University of Zurich and a leading representative of research on encyclopedias and the formation of public knowledge. Together with Anja Goeing and Tony, he edited Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded (2013), which was based on the proceedings of two conferences, one held in Zurich and the other at the World Heritage Site Müstair in the Grisons. Peter N. Miller is Professor and Dean at Bard Graduate Center. He is interested in the history of historical research, among other topics in cultural history. He has edited many volumes on antiquarianism and related topics and has recently

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­completed a multivolume study of Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc comprising Peiresc’s Europe : Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (2000), Peiresc’s History of Provence (2011), Peiresc’s Orient (2012) and Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (2015). He has worked on the history of antiquarianism with Tony at many cafés and bars in New York, Berlin and points between. Glenn W. Most was trained in comparative literature and classics in Europe and America; he is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, also teaches at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought, and is an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His publications include the monograph Doubting Thomas (2005) and, together with André Laks, the forthcoming Loeb edition of the Presocratic philosophers (2016). Together with Tony and Salvatore Settis, he edited the reference book The Classical Tradition (2010). Martin Mulsow is Professor of History at the University of Erfurt and Director of the Forschungszentrum Gotha. His research includes many aspects of the ­philosophies and cultures of knowledge present in early modern Europe. He is the author of numerous books, including Das Ende des Hermetismus (2002) on dating practices of late Renaissance natural philosophy, and Prekäres Wissen (2012) on the disparate forms of loss of knowledge. Owing to their shared ­interests, Tony is a long-standing and recurring guest at Martin Mulsow’s ­conferences and workshops. Paul Nelles is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University. His research interests include the history of the book and of libraries. He is an expert on Jesuit techniques of recording (e.g. note taking and observing). He has also studied Conrad Gessner’s organizational methods, notably in “Reading and Memory in the Universal Library: Conrad Gessner and the Renaissance Book,” in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture (2009). William R. Newman is Professor of History of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests focus on early modern “chymistry” and late medieval “alchemy,” and much of his research has centered on the history of mattertheory and on the history of early chemical technology. His many publications

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include Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (2006). Together with Tony, he edited the volume Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (2001). C. Philipp E. Nothaft is a Postdoctoral Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His publications include Dating the Passion (2012), which explores the premodern origins of scientific chronology, the volume Medieval Latin Christian Texts on the Jewish Calendar (2014), and a new study and edition of the works of Walcher of Malvern (2016). He is currently working on his next book project, the History of Calendar Improvement in the Latin Middle Ages. Laurie Nussdorfer is Professor Emerita of History and Letters at Wesleyan University. She researches the city and citizens of Rome in the Renaissance and Baroque era, and likes to think about Rome as the political as well as spiritual capital of the papacy. Her publications include Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (2009) and “Masculine Hierarchies in Roman Ecclesiastical Households,” European Review of History 22 (2015). Jürgen Oelkers is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Zurich. He has published widely on the history of educational concepts and philosophies from Bacon to Rousseau and beyond. He invited Tony for a visiting scholarship at the University of Zurich in 2006 and taught with Tony a doctoral seminar at the University of Lucerne. Brian W. Ogilvie is Associate Professor of History at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is author of The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (2006), and his research interests cover the history of science, scholarship, and religion from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. Nicholas Popper is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. His interests include the history of early modern science, intellectual history, book history, and the history of political practice. He completed his PhD under Tony’s supervision at Princeton in 2007. He is the author of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (2012).

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Virginia Reinburg is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where Tony served on her dissertation committee. She teaches courses on early modern European history, the Reformation, early printed books and their readers, and witch trials in early modern Europe and early America. Most recently she has published French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (2012). Daniel Rosenberg is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His works include Histories of the Future with Susan Harding (2005) and, together with Tony, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (2010). His current research concerns the history of data. Sarah Gwyneth Ross is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She met Tony while she was a member of the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Her work connects scholarly humanism with social history. She published The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England in 2009, and is now working on the representation of the literary lives of physicians and actors in early modern Italy. Ingrid D. Rowland is Professor at the Rome Global Gateway of the University of Notre Dame, where she studies the narratives that Renaissance and Baroque Italians created about antiquity and about their medieval roots and traditions. Her recent books include From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (2014), which examines the responses of visitors to the site of the ancient city. She shares with Tony a passion for the work and collections of Athanasius Kircher. David Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (2010) and A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinḥas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy (2014). From 1994 to 2014, he was the director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where Tony was a Visiting Fellow in 1999–2000. Hester Schadee is Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter, with a research focus on Renaissance Italy, Classical Reception and Humanism. She studied at

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the University of Oxford and was subsequently a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, and a research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, where the research for this contribution was carried out. She has published on humanist historiography and political thought, and is currently completing a monograph on the reception of Julius Caesar in Renaissance Italy. Her next book project is entitled “Cult of Antiquity: How Christian Habits Shaped Humanism.” Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at the Free University of Berlin. His research projects include the history of the Christian kabbalah and the history of political theology. Most recently, his Geschichte der christ­ lichen Kabbala appeared in four volumes (2012–2015) offering a comprehensive treatment from the origins of kabbalah to 1850. Richard Serjeantson teaches history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has also been a Mellon visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the shared histories of the natural and human sciences in the early modern period. His publications include Generall Learning: A seventeenth-century treastise on the formation of the general scholar by Meric Casaubon (1999) and studies of Francis Bacon. He is currently working on a book about a newly discovered manuscript draft of René Descartes’ “Regulae ad directionem ingenii.” He worked with Tony Grafton during a fruitful year spent as a Procter Fellow in the Graduate School at Princeton. Salvatore Settis is an Italian archaeologist and art historian. He was Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (1994–99) and of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (1999–2010). His books include Futuro del “classico” (2004, which also appeared as The Future of the “Classical” in 2006) and Se Venezia muore (2014, translated as If Venice Dies, forthcoming). Together with Tony and Glenn Most, he edited the companion The Classical Tradition (2010). Jonathan Sheehan is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is interested in early modern exegesis and theology, the history of scholarship and science, and the rise of the modern disciplines. His most recent book, written with Dror Wahrman, is Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (2015), and he is currently working on the history of sacrifice.

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William H. Sherman is Director of Research and Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he is leading the development of the V&A Research Institute (vari). He has taught at the Universities of York, London and Maryland and has been a visiting professor at Caltech and Keio University. He has published widely on the history of books and readers and his recent publications include Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England and a special issue of jmems on Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading. Nancy Siraisi is Distinguished Professor Emerita in History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, cuny. Her research interests include the history of late medieval and early modern medicine, and the genres of medical knowledge and commentaries on learned letters. Her collaboration with Tony spans decades and includes exhibitions, classroom teaching, and edited volumes, such as Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (1999). Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California. He is interested in the origins of modern politics. His latest book, The Reckoning (2014), examines the role of information technology in early modern times, with a focus on the history of accounting. He is currently working on a study of eighteenth-century libraries. He is coeditor of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World, together with Ann Blair and Tony. Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in the act of reading and the history of material texts in Renaissance Europe, and he coauthored Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) and Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (2006). He has directed the seminar on the History of Material Texts at Penn since founding it in 1993 and he coedits the Material Texts series for the University of Pennsylvania Press and has enlisted Tony among the editors. Daniel Stolzenberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is currently working on a book about scientific communication and confessional conflict in the Republic of Letters and has a particular interest in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. His recent publications include Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (2013).

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N.M. Swerdlow is Professor Emeritus of History, Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He is also a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Interested in the history of astronomy from antiquity through the seventeenth century, he is author of The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (1998). Noel Swerdlow was one of Tony’s first teachers at the University of Chicago “back in the day,” as he would say. Dirk van Miert is a teacher and Research Fellow at Utrecht University. He specializes in the history of knowledge, in particular the Republic of Letters. He is editor in chief of Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources, and has edited three volumes on Dutch humanists and on the communication of observations. With Paul Botley, he edited the critical edition of The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger (2012), a project that was organized by Tony. His forthcoming monograph is on biblical criticism from Joseph Scaliger to Isaac Vossius. He currently works on German classifications of knowledge around 1800. Kasper van Ommen is Co-ordinator of the Scaliger Institute, the Special Collections Research Center of Leiden University Libraries. He has published extensively on the history of collections, such as the portraits of sixteenth-century humanists (J.J. Scaliger, J. Lipsius, and B. Vulcanius). Among his most recent publications are two exhibition catalogs: “All my Books in Foreign Tongues”: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden (with A. Vrolijk, 2009) and Facebook in the Sixteenth Century? The Humanist and Networker Bonaventura Vulcanius (with Hélène Cazes, 2010). He is currently working on a PhD on Scaliger’s Oriental legacy. Arnoud Visser is Professor of Textual Culture in the Renaissance Low Countries at Utrecht University. He is directing Annotated Books Online, a digital platform for the study of early modern reading practices, in collaboration with partners from Ghent, University College London, York, and Princeton. His publications include Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (2011). Joanna Weinberg is Professor of Early Modern Jewish History and Rabbinics at Oxford University. She coauthored with Tony “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon,

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the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (2011), and together with Tony is working on Johann Buxtorf the elder and his copybook, analyzing the reading practices of this influential and outstanding Hebraist. Helmut Zedelmaier is Extraordinary Professor of History at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. Tony has long recommended his Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta (1992) as the place to start a study of early modern systems of organization. Helmut Zedelmaier is also the author of Der Anfang der Geschichte: Studien zur Ursprungsdebatte im 18. Jahrhundert (2003) and coeditor of volumes on methods of scholarship and compilation, among other topics. He is currently working on the characteristics of search engines in early modern times.

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There is a dragon by the steps leading into Anthony Grafton’s Princeton, New Jersey, ranch home (see Frontispiece). Built by his wife, Louise, who makes stage props, it hovers over the front door with a genial ferocity that suggests less the demand to stand guard than the desire to welcome. Like its wards, this dragon could breathe fire, but it prefers conversation. Next to the dragon is a standing red British mailbox, the first in a series of communication technologies that the dragon invites visitors to inspect, for each has facilitated the owner’s lifelong effort to investigate, understand, and circulate valuable knowledge of the past. Inside the house, a book wheel (made to Renaissance specifications for a library exhibit) bears heavy tomes—Latin and Greek dictionaries, and other works open to pages of current interest—while nearby shelves bulge with books and papers, including countless binders of notes, taken in pencil in rare book libraries before the days of laptops, and carefully treated with spray to keep the pencil from smudging beyond legibility over time. Various electronic aids strewn about—laptop, iPhone, iPad—attest to the fact that this historian of early modern European scholarship works not only with the traditional tools of human memory and ink on paper, but also with the digital tools of today.

Backing into the History of Classical Scholarship

At age ten, in sixth grade in the public schools of Ridgefield, Connecticut, Tony Grafton asked his parents if he could learn Greek. As the offspring of Jewish immigrants they did not particularly share this enthusiasm, but they were supportive parents with sufficient means, so they hired a tutor. The extracurricular instruction in Greek continued through the family’s move back to New York, where Tony’s father, Samuel Grafton (originally Lipshutz), then a freelance writer, had previously been an editor at the New York Post. Tony’s mother, Edith Kingstone Grafton, was also a magazine writer, who collaborated with Samuel on scripts for live television drama and worked as a publisher in her later years. Tony attended the Trinity School by day and family dinner conversations featuring a number of New York’s liberal Jewish thinkers in the evening—he was exposed early to the model of the public intellectual. He finished * An earlier version of this biography was circulated at the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association to mark the end of Tony’s presidency and is available from the aha website.

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high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he won the Catlin Prize in classics. Accepted at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he chose the latter, only to find an undergraduate classics curriculum that did not easily accommodate a student with strong Greek and Latin who was not yet ready for graduate work. He ventured into the Department of History instead, where Hanna Holborn Gray taught him in a course on Renaissance history and introduced him to the vast, understudied world of Renaissance Latin texts. Ever since, Grafton has devoted his career to reinvigorating the study of humanism and classical scholarship by demonstrating their importance to early modern European culture and by bringing to light complexity and vitality in fields and figures in which historians least expected to find them. The experience of college in the late 1960s was also inflected by politics—by demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, in which Grafton took part, and by a massive sit-in at the University of Chicago in 1968–69 and outbreaks of political violence, which left him feeling, as Erasmus had, that he would stick with his liberal church in the university, whatever its faults, until he found a better one.1 When Grafton graduated with a ba in history in 1971, the academic boom of the 1960s was on the verge of a crash. The Danforth Fellowships—established in 1951 to stimulate the production of PhDs by funding graduate study for one hundred of the nation’s best students in all fields—were suspended in 1979, after their endowment had dropped by two-thirds and the academic job market had shriveled. But as the recipient of a Danforth in 1971–75, Grafton was set for graduate school. He chose to stay at Chicago, supervised by Eric Cochrane, an expert on the late Italian Renaissance with a particular focus on historical thought. Those were the days of large graduate classes and massive attrition. Grafton was among some seventy-five admitted in history, and among the fifteen or so to receive a PhD—in his case, just four years later. For his dissertation, Grafton sought to examine the connections between humanism and science, two fields that historians had more often portrayed in hostile opposition. Noel Swerdlow, one of his undergraduate mentors, suggested Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), a French Huguenot who became one of the most widely respected and highly paid classical scholars of his time. Though his name remained proverbial for learning and brilliance, intellectual historians had rarely studied his technical work. Scaliger has proved a lasting source of inspiration for Grafton, from the publication of his first book in 1983, to the project funded by his 2002 Balzan Prize and 2003 Mellon Distinguished Achievement 4

1 See his interview with James Romm in The Fabulist, http://www.aesop.com/usa/the-fabulist/ anthony-grafton.

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Award to identify and publish Scaliger’s scattered correspondence, which was published in eight volumes in 2012. Grafton’s mastery of Scaliger’s rich scholarly corpus has also informed many of his thematic books. Grafton set out to recover what was so exciting about Joseph Scaliger to his contemporaries: why he was considered, with Isaac Casaubon and Justus Lipsius, one of the greatest philologists in Europe’s most philologically expert generation, and why he devoted his later life to chronology—the discipline of dating past events from all available sources, biblical and classical, literary and astronomical. Grafton alighted at University College London in summer 1973, for a year of research focused on Scaliger’s philology, much of which he spent across the street at the Warburg Institute. Of the many luminaries there at the time (including Frances Yates and D.P. Walker), Arnaldo Momigliano—whose chair was at ucl and whose seminar met at the Warburg—proved the crucial guide. His advice spurred Grafton to recognize that contextualizing Scaliger’s contributions required recasting the history of textual criticism. Carlotta Dionisotti, to whom Momigliano referred Grafton, also provided expert counsel in humanist philology. The third-year graduate student immersed himself in an abundance of primary sources. At the Warburg Library Jill Kraye and Lisa Jardine became his friends, as did Henk Jan de Jonge in Leiden, who offered essential support to his work in the Scaliger manuscripts. Whereas Lorenzo Valla had typically been credited with founding humanist criticism in his unmasking of the Donation of Constantine, Angelo Poliziano emerged in Grafton’s account as the dominant figure, who systematized philology by basing it on technical comparisons between Latin and Greek and on a differentiated understanding of the historical contexts of ancient authors. Instead of following the historiographical consensus among Americans that humanism had developed a deadly sclerosis by the early seventeenth century, or any one of the nationally inflected historiographies he encountered in Europe, Grafton insisted on building a historical account from first principles. He paid close attention to the citations and claims of the participants themselves rather than relying on historians’ truisms, and attended to sources that had often been left aside, notably manuscript notes, collations, and marginal annotations in printed books. By showing how those sources were themselves enmeshed within their authors’ intellectual, personal, and institutional circumstances, Grafton created a portrait of classical scholarship in action from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and generated an expansive model for an intellectual history that encompassed practices alongside ideas. Characteristically, he formulated these innovations as indebted to, rather than in conflict with, the existing historiographies, in a spirit of collaboration among scholars across different times and places.

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Though he would later warn his students against doing so, Grafton billed his first book as volume 1 of a two-part set. Volume 2 appeared a decade later, in 1993, larger and more original still, for in it he created the first account of the discipline of chronology in early modern Europe in order to explain Scaliger’s contribution to it. This work reflected Grafton’s ability to master a wide range of scholarly tools. As with the first volume—and much of his subsequent scholarship—it highlighted his enviable grasp of Latin, not only its classical form but also its early modern iteration, which, given the lack of didactic aids, is acquired principally by extensive reading in original sources. As a result of his voracious reading and near-perfect recall, Grafton can make sense as few can of both the crabbed and the polished imitations of classical Latin, from florid prefaces to acerbic polemics, and he recognizes irony and intertextual allusions as well as effects of style and subtle errors. But Scaliger volume 2 required an additional set of even more recondite skills: mastery of the full range of calendrical and astronomical systems (Babylonian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian, Saxon, and Arabic among them) from which Scaliger, along with many contemporaries, sought to date in one coherent timeline all the events of world history. Grafton followed Scaliger from his entry into this field with a 1579 edition of Manilius’s Astronomicon, to his articulation of systematic procedures for critical evaluations, and finally to his own chronological syntheses of 1583 and 1606. After analyzing the extensive controversies these works generated, Grafton concluded that Scaliger became increasingly aware of the limitations of textual criticism, in the face of competing methods and claims advanced by newly confident astronomers. Scaliger volume 2 is more than a masterwork of exceptionally difficult historical and technical reconstruction. Intellectual historians had tended to locate the significance of the late sixteenth century predominantly in transformations in political and natural philosophy, and even sympathetic historians had frequently reduced the vibrant activities in more arcane provinces of the Republic of Letters to the desultory indulgences of petty squabblers. Grafton, by contrast, demonstrated the central place of chronology on the map of early modern European scholarly concerns, and his work offers a lifeline for all those who venture into this challenging field.

The Renaissance and Beyond: Branching out

As a student at Chicago, Grafton met Louise Erlich while both were working at the Court, the outdoor Shakespeare Theater in Hyde Park. They were married in 1972. Louise taught at DePaul University while Tony took his first job as an

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instructor at Cornell before he had finished his dissertation, but they moved together to Princeton in 1975, when Tony was hired as an assistant professor and Louise as a prop maker for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Proud ­references to Louise’s work on countless productions—from the Big Apple Circus in New York, to the Old Vic during a stay in London, to the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, where she works regularly now—and to their children, Sam (born in 1980) and Anna (in 1982), and granddaughters, Alice Mutton (b. 2013) and Catherine Grafton (b. 2016), have always featured prominently in Tony’s conversation. Grafton joined the History Department at Princeton as an extraordinary cluster of early modern historians was forming. Lawrence Stone, Theodore Rabb, and Robert Darnton were already there; Natalie Zemon Davis came in 1978, and Peter Brown—who worked on an earlier period but shared many of their concerns and interests—in 1986. Carl Schorske, a cultural historian who specialized on the 19th and 20th centuries, was also an inspiration. Grafton did not share the others’ focus at the time on Annales school historiography and Geertzian anthropology, but he was known as a wunderkind. He dazzled students with his lectures in Western Civilization and colleagues with talks delivered in his characteristic style—in elegant, elaborate sentences that leave the listener thrilled by the contest between the volume of vivid detail to convey and the need to breathe, which forces the occasional concession of a short pause. Forgers and Critics (1990) resulted from one such public lecture at Princeton. In it Grafton developed an insight that has proved crucial to subsequent interpretations of the “early modern”: that the impulses so often highlighted and valued as modern were also deeply intertwined with other, seemingly contradictory ones. In particular he showed how the rules of textual criticism for which Renaissance scholars were renowned were in fact indebted to practices of forgery and, moreover, how they had been used—even by some of the same people—for making forgeries as well as for debunking them. Grafton steered a nuanced course through the competing shoals of glorifying and demonizing the human figures at the center of his analyses. This work exemplified his affinity for the complexity of the past and his refusal to generalize about a cultural mentality to make it seem either familiar or foreign. Here, as in subsequent work, he emphasized the inextricable connections between seemingly disparate scholarly practices, revealing the interconnections between the forgeries of Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo and Isaac Casaubon’s debunking of Hermes Trismegistus. Similarly, in What Was History? (2007) Grafton pondered the coexistence of critical acumen and “credulousness” in early modern scholars who, for example, rejected the notion that descendants from Troy settled France but also asserted that “Walloons” had earned their name for asking “où

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allons-nous?” as they migrated to Flanders. By studying the practices of early modern history writing in conjunction with the ars historica, a peculiarly early modern genre offering advice on how to read and write history, Grafton traced the slow demise of history as a prudential search for moral and political advice. A genuine, if sometimes bemused, sympathy pervades Grafton’s attention to the foibles and confusions as well as the remarkable intelligence and seriousness of his subjects. That same sympathetic outlook governs his engagement with other scholars. Grafton’s was a voice of calm amid the strident tones of the Culture Wars of the 1990s. He calls for and puts into practice an intellectual irenicism and eclecticism, which values above all solid, innovative research. In recent years he has written eloquently on the significance of scholarship driven not by ulterior motives but by the search for a fuller understanding of often-forgotten corners of the world or of the past. In a 2010 issue of Perspectives he pointed out, for example, that “what members of one generation saw as a purely scholarly inquiry into Islam in South Asia turned out to be the next generation’s source of enlightenment on the origins of the Taliban.”2 His commitment to engaging readers beyond the academic world dates from early in his career. From the 1970s Grafton has been writing for the American Scholar, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. In the mid-1980s he started writing occasional reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. His curation of an exhibit at the New York Public Library on “New Worlds, Ancient Texts” in 1992–93 led to a book of the same title (written with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi) that won the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and brought him to the attention of a wider audience. In subsequent years, he has become a prominent voice in multiple journalistic venues—including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, but especially the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books—all of his 116 or so essays becoming research forays into a vast array of topics. Grafton first developed a public profile in the early 1990s, but his path to wide scholarly celebrity was unintentional and began with a project borne of circumstance and improvisation: his Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fuẞnote (1995), composed during a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and published in a revised version in English in 1997 (he has, remarkably, multiple publications in German, French, and Italian). On arriving in Berlin for a year of research in 1993—in the days before online library catalogs—Grafton discovered few primary sources relevant to his planned research on Girolamo Cardano’s astrology. Instead, after a casual discussion of the history of foot5

2 “History under Attack,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 1 (Jan. 2011), 5–7, at 7.

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notes elicited enthusiasm from a reporter for the Frankfurter Rundschau, Grafton plunged into the Ranke archives at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz and opened the way for the studies of methods of working that have since multiplied, as scholars have mined the historical architecture and structural transformations of their own practices. His original Berlin project, strengthened by his contact there with Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, returned to the fore during subsequent research stays in Vienna, Jerusalem, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he published Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer in 1999. Grafton tracked Cardano through the phases of his career from small-time doctor to court physician, university professor, and contentious author, showing how for this versatile multitasker, humanist reading and writing was also shaped by pragmatic concerns. Similarly, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (2000)—developed from a series of lectures Grafton was invited to deliver as the Meyer Shapiro Visiting Professor of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University—surveyed how ancient sources inspired Alberti not only to write in innovative ways about art and technology, but also to become an architect and master builder himself. By focusing on individuals like Cardano and Alberti, Grafton could highlight the interdependence of disciplines too often treated separately by historians—notably the role of humanism in technical fields like medicine or architecture—while offering an integrated analysis of ideas in relation to the practices of reading and writing, observing and inventing. Grafton attended to manuscript annotations, drafts, and working methods well before interest in the history of the book was widespread. He has been instrumental in the development of that field, both by pioneering these methods of analysis in his own research (for instance, in his 1981 article on student annotations in a sixteenth-century Paris schoolbook or his 2011 Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, based on his 2009 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library) and by shepherding the projects of others into the public eye. Just as he has shown how early modern scholars invested their antiquarian study with contemporary urgency, so too he has explored and reflected on the impact of electronic technologies to facilitate scholarly communication and communion with texts, from his beautifully crafted Codex in Crisis (2008) to a session he organized at the American Historical Association on the Google Ngram project. Grafton has never worked on just one project at a time, but juggles multiple publications in press and in various states of preparation. Currently in production, for example, is a textbook on the history of Western civilization, written with his colleague David Bell; manuscripts in progress include Faustus and Friends: Magic in Renaissance Germany and Past Belief: Visions of Early

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Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, the latter based on the six A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that he delivered in 2014 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc. Grafton is also plotting “Colonial Pedants,” a study of learned reading and annotation in the American colonies and the Atlantic world, to center on Adam Winthrop, John Winthrop, John Winthrop Jr., and Waitstill Winthrop; Richard Mather, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and Samuel Mather; James Logan; and others. The succession of Grafton’s publications is astonishing beyond recounting in detail. The current count stands at eighteen major monographs (four of them coauthored), seventeen coedited volumes, and three collections of essays (Defenders of the Text, 1991; Bring Out Your Dead, 2001; Worlds Made by Words, 2009), taken from his 150 scholarly articles and almost as many book reviews and journalistic essays.

Constantly Working with Others

Alongside a solo virtuosity that is hard to match, Grafton has throughout played in duets and ensembles, beginning even from his years as a younger scholar, when historical writing was rarely collaborative. His collaborations with Noel Swerdlow on the history of astronomy and chronology started at Chicago. Those with Lisa Jardine, begun when they were both at Cornell, were carried on mostly through summers spent in London. Their masterfully erudite analysis of the practical implementation of humanist pedagogy, From Humanism to the Humanities (1986), caused considerable controversy for portraying humanist education as, among other things, a means by which an elite reproduced itself through the mastery of peculiar forms of Latin style. Some reviews were negative, which attested principally to the novelty of an account that departed from the single-minded lionization of that pedagogical program. Grafton’s involvement in the history of reading owes much to the criticism and advice of Princeton colleagues. In the 1980s, Robert Darnton was working on, among many other subjects, the history of reading. He was skeptical about whether individual experiences of reading could ever be recovered. Grafton, who had worked extensively with marginalia, suggested that these could provide essential evidence. As an example he cited Joseph Scaliger’s marginal notes on a printed treatise on papyrus by Melchior Wieland, which he had studied in a 1979 article.3 Darnton argued that these marginalia were too formal 6

3 “Rhetoric, Philology and Egyptomania in the 1570s: J.J. Scaliger’s Invective against M. Guilandinus’s Papyrus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 167–94.

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and elaborate to represent reading in a recognizable sense. These discussions, which Lisa Jardine joined immediately when she arrived in Princeton for a stay at the Davis Center in 1988, provided the framework for Jardine and Grafton’s study of Gabriel Harvey. They first presented their results at a special meeting of the Davis Center. Darnton immediately pronounced himself convinced, not only of their arguments about Harvey, but also of the larger thesis that formal marginalia could record experiences of reading. His comments—and those of Lawrence Stone, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Brown, Rachel Weil, and others— did much to shape the article that resulted. Jardine and Grafton’s “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present (1990), has been widely cited, assigned, and imitated as a model for the study of marginalia in historical context. They showed from Gabriel Harvey’s notes in his copy of Livy’s histories that Harvey read to extract lessons from the classical past to share with his noble patron, Robert Dudley, first Earl of Leicester, as he faced the decisions typical of a “man of action” engaged in politics. With James Zetzel and Glenn Most, both of whom taught classics at Princeton in the 1980s, Grafton published an annotated translation of the work that started the debate over Homeric authorship (F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, 1988). Joined by Salvatore Settis, Grafton and Most have recently edited The Classical Tradition (2010), a massive reference work bursting with innovative entries and perspectives on the reception and impact down to the present of classical cultures, predominantly of Greece and Rome, with unusual attention to ancient Egypt and the Near East. Glenn Most and Grafton are now finishing an edited volume on the learned practices applied to canonical scriptures in many cultures, a comparative enterprise that is the product of a summer-long workshop at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin in 2012.4 The resulting collection of essays, Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, is in production at Cambridge University Press, scheduled to appear in 2016. Obelisk (2009), written with Brian Curran, Pamela Long, and Benjamin Weiss, focuses on the long career of one classical icon in European imagination and urban design. Grafton’s coeditors and coauthors run the gamut from those more senior than he (Nancy Siraisi, Natural Particulars, 2000) to students (Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, 2006, and Ann Blair, The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1990) and other younger scholars (Daniel Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, 2010). And in 7

4 For some description see http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/wissenschaftsgeschichte -warum-die-moenche-rechtecke-malten/6916166.html.

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remarkable prefaces to modern editions he has, in some sense, collaborated with his own ­subjects, like Vico, Cardano, Erasmus, Machiavelli, and predecessors like C.V. Wedgwood, Theodor Mommsen, and Jacob Burckhardt. Most recently, Grafton joined forces with Joanna Weinberg to produce a beautiful book on Casaubon’s annotation and study of Hebrew books, which they pursued in four libraries on two continents over many summers (“I have always loved the Holy Tongue,” 2011). At the New York Public Library, he is currently working with Andrei Pesic and Paul Davis to prepare an exhibition of the library’s greatest treasures, which is scheduled to open in 2017. He is also embarked, with his colleague Jenny Rampling and ­current and former students Richard Calis, Frederic Clark, and Madeline McMahon, on a collaborative study and experimental theatrical presentation of the reading and book-buying practices in the Winthrop family across several generations. These ventures—so often into different areas and contexts from those typically associated with the classical tradition—­exemplify his commitment to collaboration in the name of expansive scholarship.

In the Service of Others as Teacher and Mentor

Grafton’s willingness to work on an equal footing with collaborators of different ages and ranks reveals his decidedly New World attitude to Old World erudition. Unpretentious and antihierarchical, he is exceptionally generous with his time and attention, particularly with students and younger colleagues. He has mentored countless undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral visitors to Princeton, in addition to scholars he has met from around the world during his travels and longer stays all over Europe. He has stimulated scholars whose pursuits quite often lay at the peripheries of his galaxies of knowledge. In some forty-five dissertations he has supervised or is currently supervising in history at Princeton, Grafton has encouraged students to blend and bridge intellectual history into fruitful new syntheses with subdisciplines such as history of the book, art history, and urban history. Accordingly, his students’ works have opened up new avenues of inquiry and spaces of investigation while also invigorating studies of canonical works. Their topics have ranged from the textual practices of Petrarch to the memory of the Renaissance in nineteenth-century Germany, from early modern martyrdom to Enlightenment philosophy, natural philosophy, and antiquarianism, from the circulation of news in early modern Constantinople to the circulation of Moriscos into early modern New Spain, from British engineering to Spanish law. He treats those working on topics within

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his vast area of expertise—such as students of the historical revolution or of classical studies in the Renaissance—with infinite generosity and blessed patience, enduring draft after draft with equanimity, deftly guiding them to ­independent revelations without imposing his own certainties. More than one of his advisees has expressed astonishment at how ably he communicates what he has learned from their work, despite their conviction that he already knew what they had discovered. In addition, Grafton has served on vast numbers of dissertation committees: fifty-nine, plus eight in progress, at Princeton and twenty-one at other institutions.5 Leading by example, he strives to facilitate his students’ scholarly autonomy and ability to navigate whatever scholarly challenges they choose for themselves. In recent years, an annual graduate conference that he co-organizes to alternate between Harvard and Princeton has served to enhance the sense of community within and across both programs. Along with his expansive scholarly interests, this advisorial orientation has enabled Grafton to contribute to a broad range of graduate work within and outside Princeton. But it has also infused the whole scope of his pedagogical mission at Princeton, where he has spent nearly all his teaching career, though he has also held appointments as visiting professor at the Collège de France, the Louvre, the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, the Warburg Haus in Hamburg, and Columbia University, as well as visiting fellowships at Merton and Pembroke Colleges, Oxford, and Christ’s and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge. Tenured in 1979, he was Andrew Mellon, then Dodge, Professor of History; since 2000 he has been the Henry Putnam University Professor. He directed successively Princeton’s interdepartmental committee on European Cultural Studies (1995–98), the Shelby Cullom Davis Center (1999–2003), and the Center for Collaborative History (2007–12). As Chair of the University’s Council of the Humanities, he was instrumental in founding Princeton’s Center for the Study of Books in Media in 2002 and the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows in 2009, as well as a new leave program for faculty who agree to contribute during their leave to intellectual life on campus. Grafton promotes the humanities at all levels, from a humanities outreach program for prospective freshmen to the postdoctoral Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. On campus he is known as a talented intellectual impresario who masterminds innovative events open to a general public, and as the author of provocative blogs in the Daily Princetonian. He has also been instrumental in implementing institutional changes designed to intensify undergraduate exposure to a liberal arts 8

5 For a full list of Tony’s advisees and those on whose dissertation committees he has served, see https://graftoniana.princeton.edu/graftonians/.

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education, serving as founding director of Princeton’s freshman seminar program. Grafton is a consummate classroom teacher. His lecture courses are enthusiastically received, and he has a deep love of seminar discussions. He views the classroom as a laboratory of new ideas and approaches to learning, and accordingly has encouraged Princeton to expand its undergraduate curriculum. His own teaching choices have been designed to enrich his knowledge of unfamiliar subjects. He has frequently co-taught courses at the both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Because he uses his graduate courses to investigate emergent strains of scholarship, each session is infused with the energy of new discoveries; his graduate seminars are events that enroll eager students from many departments. These courses he supplements with a large dose of graduate reading courses that would be unsustainable to anyone but him; he is especially pleased when the reading lists that students have devised lead him to sources with which he was unfamiliar. Long after other Princeton faculty desisted from the practice, Grafton continued to serve as a teaching assistant for colleagues—even those junior to him—in undergraduate courses well outside his expertise. His commitment to undergraduate teaching has remained unwavering, and only someone with his talent for it could have inspired a former student to lampoon him, tongue in cheek, in the 2004 novel The Rule of Four for stealing his students’ ideas. As a constant advocate of liberal arts education, he encourages students to take small courses and regularly advises three or four senior theses per year, but he is also a fan of the broad survey. A few years ago he resumed teaching Princeton’s Western Civilization lecture course after a hiatus of ten years. Grafton has chosen his professional commitments carefully to ensure that he is able to play an active role in each. For Phi Beta Kappa, he served as a visiting scholar delivering lectures at colleges around the country, as president of the Princeton chapter, and as a pbk senator. He is still a member of the editorial board of American Scholar. As coeditor of the Philadelphia-based Journal of the History of Ideas with Ann Moyer, Warren Breckman, and Martin Burke, he is helping this august journal weather the many changes striking the academic and publishing landscape. He served for ten years as a member of the Board of the American Academy of Rome, and explains that he first became a regular at the aha to support his students who were giving talks. Before he realized it, he was Vice-President of the Professional Division of the aha in 2004–7. During those years he helped set up and model best practices for graduate schools, from admissions procedures to posting placement records, and professional protocols for interviewing, hiring, and negotiating. While almost everyone who

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can avoid the tension-filled environment of the job fair does so, Grafton attended regularly to offer support to job seekers in their most stressful moments. While President of the aha in 2011, Grafton worked with Executive Director Jim Grossman to destigmatize nonacademic job outcomes for history PhDs, opening up extensive discussions online.6 Grafton also played a crucial role in introducing digital humanities into the aha annual meeting, first through a high-profile session at Boston in 2010 and then more systematically, thanks to Dan Cohen, in the meeting that he chaired as President in Chicago in 2012. Grafton has received many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the International Balzan Prize (2002), and a $1.5 million Andrew Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2003), from which he funded, among other scholarly endeavors, a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton. In 2005 he was the Trevelyan Lecturer at Cambridge, and in 2006 the Camps Lecturer at Stanford and the Tanner Lecturer at Yale; in 2014 he delivered six Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. He was elected in 1993 to the American Philosophical Society, in 2000 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2010 to Pour le mérite—an order first founded in the eighteenth century, whose medal features a blue-enameled cross. He has received honorary degrees from Leiden University (2006), Oxford University (2013), and Bard College (2015) and an Honorary Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge (2015). For every honor and award he has received, he has also helped others achieve recognition, employment, and promotions, parlaying the respect he has earned into gains for others across many areas of specialization. His generosity is legendary: not only his students, but also dozens of recent PhDs and colleagues of all generations, have benefited from his advice and support. 9

Those who know him have often wondered how he does it all and with such good cheer. He admits that he sleeps little and starts the day early, devoting his first hours to writing, following the ancient motto of “no day without a line.” His memory is prodigious and his working conditions have been excellent— whether at Princeton, in London or Oxford and Cambridge during the summers, or on research leave in a variety of institutes and libraries. Above all, Tony Grafton has a seemingly insatiable appetite for work, for the study of 6 See for example “No More Plan B,” with James Grossman, Perspectives on History 49, no. 7 (Oct. 2011), and Chronicle of Higher Education (9 Oct. 2011); “Plan C,” with James Grossman, Perspectives on History 49, no. 8 (Nov. 2011); and “Time to Craft a Plan C,” with James Grossman, Chronicle of Higher Education (1 Nov. 2011).

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difficult texts and for teaching and writing about them. But work is the wrong word. He does what he does with a joy undiminished by his accumulated experience—the joy of making new discoveries and new connections and of sharing them with others. Ann Blair

Harvard University

Nicholas Popper

The College of William and Mary



Anthony Grafton: A Bibliography to 2015*

10

C. Philipp E. Nothaft

PhD Thesis

Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) and the Humanism of the Later Renaissance (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Department of History, 1975).



Major Monographs

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, 1795. Translation with Introduction and Notes, with Glenn W. Most and James E.G. Zetzel (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985; paperback repr. with corrections, 1988, 2014). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, with Lisa Jardine (London: Duckworth; Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1986). Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990); German trans.: Fälscher und Kritiker: Der Betrug in der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1991; paperback repr., Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995); French trans.: Faussaires et critiques: créativité et duplicité chez les érudits occidentaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993); Italian trans.: Falsari e critici: creatività e finzione nella tradizione letteraria occidentale (Torino: Einaudi, 1996). Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995; paperback repr., 1997); rev. English version: The Footnote: A Curious History (London: Faber & Faber; Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997; paperback repr., 1999); French trans.: Les origines tragiques de l’érudition: une histoire de la note en bas de page (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998); Brazilian Portuguese trans.: As origens trágicas da erudição: pequeno tratado sobre a nota de rodapé (Campinas: Papirus, 1998); Spanish trans.: Los orígenes trágicos de la erudición: breve tratado sobre la nota al pie de página (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998); Italian trans.: La nota

* Many thanks to the editors for entrusting me with this bibliography and to Theodor Dunkelgrün, Jan Machielsen, and Tony Grafton for their valuable input.

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a piè di pagina: una storia curiosa (Milan: Bonnard, 2000); Turkish trans.: Dipnotlar: Merak Uyandıran Bir Tarih (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2012). Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Work of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999); German trans.: Cardanos Kosmos: Die Welten und Werke eines Renaissance-Astrologen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1999); Italian trans.: Il Signore del tempo: i mondi e le opere di un astrologo del Rinascimento (Rome: Laterza, 2002); Chinese translation forthcoming. Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill & Wang; London: Penguin, 2000); German trans.: Leon Battista Alberti: Baumeister der Renaissance (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002); Italian trans.: Leon Battista Alberti: un genio universale (Rome: Laterza, 2003). Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, with Megan Williams (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2006); Italian trans.: Come il cristianesimo ha trasformato il libro (Rome: Carocci, 2011). What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback repr., 2012). Obelisk: A History, with Brian Curran, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2009). Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, with Daniel Rosenberg (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010; paperback repr., 2012) German trans.: Die Zeit in Karten: Eine Bilderreise durch die Geschichte (Darmstadt: Zabern, 2015). “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship, with Joanna Weinberg (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2011). The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, The Panizzi Lectures 2009 (London: British Library, 2011). La page de l’Antiquité à l’ère numérique: histoire, usages, esthétiques (Paris: Hazan et Editions du Louvre, 2012). Henricus Glareanus’s (1488–1563) Chronologia of the Ancient World: A Facsimile Edition of a Heavily Annotated Copy Held in Princeton University Library, with Urs Leu (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Textbooks The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, 2nd ed., with Eugene F. Rice Jr. (New York: Norton, 1994). David Bell and Anthony Grafton, Towards the Modern West (New York: Norton, forthcoming 2017).

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Pamphlets Joseph Scaliger: A Bibliography, 1852–1982, with Henk Jan de Jonge (The Hague: CristalMontana, 1982); rev. version: Joseph Scaliger: A Bibliography, 1850–1993, repr. as supplement to The Scaliger Collection, ed. Rijk Smitskamp (Leiden: Smitskamp Oriental Antiquarium, 1993). Johannes Petreius (c. 1497–1550): A Study in the History of Learned Publishing, The Harold Jantz Memorial Lecture, Oberlin College, 1 November 1997 (Oberlin College, 1998). Traditions of Conversion: Descartes and His Demon, Doreen B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers 22 (Berkeley, ca, 2000). Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe, Dibner Library Lecture, 15 October 2002 (Washington, dc: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2005). Athenae Batavae: The Research Imperative at Leiden, 1575–1650, Scaliger Lectures 1 (Leiden: Primavera, 2003). Codex in Crisis (New York: Crumpled Press, 2008); Chinese trans.: 書本的危機 (Hong Kong: Chen Yun 2011); repr. as ch. 15 in wmbw. Humanists with Inky Fingers: The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, The Annual Balzan Lecture 2 (Florence: Olschki, 2011).



Essay Collections

Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991; paperback repr., 1994) [= dott]. Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001; paperback repr., 2004) [= boyd]; Chinese translation forthcoming. Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009; paperback repr., 2011) [= wmbw].



Edited Volumes

Die Wissenschaft des nicht Wissenswerten: Ein Kollegienheft von Ludwig Hatvany, ed. with Hugh Lloyd-Jones et al.; Engl. annotations by Anthony Grafton (Oxford: Pergamon, 1986). The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. with A.C. Dionisotti and Jill Kraye (London: Warburg Institute, 1988). The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. with Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; paperback repr., 1998). Proof and Persuasion in History, ed. with Susan L. Marchand = History & Theory Theme Issue 33 (1994).

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Arnaldo Momigliano, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung, ed. with Glenn Most and Wilfried Nippel, vol. 2, Spätantike bis Spätaufklärung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999). Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. with Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1999). Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. with William R. Newman (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2001). Der Magus: Seine Ursprünge und seine Geschichte in verschiedenen Kulturen, ed. with Moshe Idel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, ed. with John H.M. Salmon (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 2001). Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing, ed. with Kenneth Mills (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. with Kenneth Mills (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective, ed. with Marc S. Rodriguez (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 2007). Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. with Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, and Anja Goeing (Geneva: Droz, 2008). The Classical Tradition, ed. with Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2010). The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert; supervisory eds. Anthony Grafton, Henk Jan de Jonge, and Jill Kraye, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012). The Warburg Institute: A Special Issue on the Library and Its Readers, ed. with Jeffrey F. Hamburger = Common Knowledge 18, no. 1 (2012). Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded/Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen: Wie Sammler entscheiden, ed. with Anja Goeing and Paul Michel, with the assistance of Adam Blauhut (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, ed. with Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).



Exhibitions Curated

“New Worlds, Ancient Texts,” New York Public Library, Fall 1992–Winter 1993. “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture,” Library of Congress, Winter–Spring 1993. (with Daniel Rosenberg) “Cartographies of Time,” Art Museum of Princeton University, 25 June–18 September 2011.

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Exhibition Catalogs

New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 1992; paperback repr., 1995). Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington, dc: Library of Congress; New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, in association with the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1993).



Scholarly Articles in Journals, Collected Volumes, and Encyclopedias (see also Articles on the History Profession, below)

“Michael Maestlin’s Account of Copernican Planetary Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117 (1973): 523–50. “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History & Theory 14 (1975): 156–85. “J.J. Scaliger’s Indices to J. Gruter’s Inscriptiones antiquae: A Note on Leiden University Library ms Scal. 11,” Lias 2 (1975): 109–13. “Joseph Scaliger’s Edition of Catullus (1577) and the Traditions of Textual Criticism in the Renaissance,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 155–81. “On the Scholarship of Politian and Its Context,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 150–88; repr. as Chap. 2 in dott. “Rhetoric, Philology and Egyptomania in the 1570s: J.J. Scaliger’s Invective against M. Guilandinus’s Papyrus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 167–94. “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 101–29; repr. as Chap. 9 in dott. “Teacher, Text and Pupil in the Renaissance Class-Room: A Case Study from a Parisian College,” History of Universities 1 (1981): 37–70. “Wilhelm von Humboldt” (in part a review of Wilhelm von Humboldt, by Paul Sweet), American Scholar 50, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 371–81. “Humanism and the School of Guarino: A Problem of Evaluation,” with Lisa Jardine, Past & Present 96 (August 1982): 51–80. “From Ramus to Ruddiman: The studia humanitatis in a Scientific Age,” in Universities, Society, and the Future, ed. Nicholas Phillipson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 62–81. “Mark Pattison,” American Scholar 52, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 229–36; repr. as Chap. 11 in wmbw. “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 78–93; repr. as Chap. 5 in dott.

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“Pietro Bembo and the ‘Scholia Bembina,’” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 24 (1981 [1984]): 405–7. “Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850,” History of Universities 3 (1983 [1984]): 159–92; rev. French trans.: “De polyhistor en philologue,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 135 (2000): 25–38. “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,” Central European History 18 (1985): 31–47; repr. as Chap. 9 in boyd. “Scaliger’s Collation of the Codex Pithoei of Censorinus,” Bodleian Library Record 11 (1985): 406–8. “From De die natali to De emendatione temporum: The Origins and Setting of Scaliger’s Chronology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 100–143; repr. as Chap. 4 in dott. “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 615–49; repr. as Chap. 1 in dott. “Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro, Censorinus and Others,” with Noel Swerdlow, Classical Quarterly, n.s., 35, no. 2 (1985): 454–65. “The Horoscope of the Foundation of Rome,” with Noel Swerdlow, Classical Philology 81, no. 2 (April 1986): 148–53. “Greek Chronography in Roman Epic: The Calendrical Date of the Fall of Troy in the Aeneid,” with Noel Swerdlow, Classical Quarterly, n.s., 36, no. 1 (1986): 212–18. “‘Man muss aus der Gegenwart heraufsteigen’: History, Tradition, and Traditions of Historical Thought in F.A. Wolf,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 416–29. “Portrait of Justus Lipsius,” American Scholar 56, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 382–90; repr. as Chap. 12 in boyd. “The Availability of Ancient Works,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 767–91. “Close Encounters of the Learned Kind: Joseph Scaliger’s Table Talk,” American Scholar 57, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 581–88. “Higher Criticism, Ancient and Modern: The Lamentable Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls,” in The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A.C. Dionisotti et al. (London: Warburg Institute, 1988), 155–70; repr. as Chap. 6 in dott. “Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden,” in The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 59–78; repr. as Chap. 6 in boyd. “Joseph Scaliger’s Manuscript of His Father’s ‘Poemata,’” Bodleian Library Record 12 (1988): 502–5. “Calendar Dates and Ominous Days in Ancient Historiography,” with Noel Swerdlow, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 14–42.

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“Editing Technical Neo-Latin Texts: Two Cases and Their Implications,” in Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. John N. Grant (New York: ams, 1989), 163–86. “Humanists and Sewers: A Comment and a Coda,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 812–16. “Humanism, Magic and Science,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay (London: Longman, 1990), 99–117. “Barrow as a Scholar,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291–302. “Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 8–38; repr. as Chap. 3 in dott. “Ricci, the Chinese, and the Toolkits of Textualists,” with Howard L. Goodman, Asia Major, 3rd ser., 3, no. 2 (1990): 95–148. “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” with Lisa Jardine, Past & Present 129 (November 1990): 30–78. “Petronius and Neo-Latin Satire: The Reception of the Cena Trimalchionis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 237–49; repr. as Chap. 11 in boyd. “Arnaldo Momigliano: A Pupil’s Notes,” American Scholar 60, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 235–41. “Humanism and Science in Rudolphine Prague: Kepler in Context,” in Literary Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1555–1720, ed. James A. Parente Jr. et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 19–45; repr. as Chap. 7 in dott. “Humanism and Political Theory,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7–29. “The Renaissance,” in The Legacy of Rome: A New Apparaisal, ed. Richard Jenkyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 97–123. “Renaissance Readers of Homer’s Ancient Readers,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1992), 149–72. “Germany and the West, 1830–1900,” in Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks, ed. Kenneth James Dover (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 225–45. “Reassessing Humanism and Science,” with Ann Blair, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 535–40. “Kepler as a Reader,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992): 561–72. “Joseph Scaliger et l’histoire du judaïsme hellénistique,” in La République des lettres et l’histoire du judaïsme antique, XIVe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. Chantal Grell and François Laplanche (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1992), 51–63. “The Attic Calendar from Theodore Gaza to Joseph Scaliger,” Studi italiani di Filologia Classica, 3rd ser., 10, no. 2 (1992): 879–91. “Tradition intellectuelle et découverte du Nouveau Monde,” Le genre humain 27 (Summer/Autumn 1993): 41–54.

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“The Ancient City Restored: Archaeology, Ecclesiastical History, and Egyptology,” in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, ed. Anthony Grafton (Washington, dc: Library of Congress; New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, in association with the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1993), 87–123; repr. as Chap. 2 in boyd. “The Footnote from de Thou to Ranke,” in Proof and Persuasion in History, ed. Anthony Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand = History & Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 53–76; Italian trans.: “La nota a piè di pagina: da De Thou a Ranke,” Intersezioni 15, no. 2 (1995): 245–73. “L’umanista come lettore,” in Storia della lettura nel mondo occidentale, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 199–242; Engl. version: “The Humanist as Reader,” in A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 179–212; French trans.: “Le lecteur humaniste,” in L’histoire de la lecture dans le monde ocidental (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 209–48. “Chronology and Its Discontents in Renaissance Europe: The Vicissitudes of a Tradition,” in Time: Histories and Ethnologies, ed. Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 139–66. “Panofsky, Alberti and the Ancient World,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside; A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1995), 123–30; repr. as Chap. 1 in boyd. “Tradition and Technique in Historical Chronology,” in Ancient History and the Antiquarian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Michael H. Crawford and Christopher R. Ligota (London: Warburg Institute, 1995), 15–31. “Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds of a Renaissance Magician,” Mitteilungen/Zentrum zur Erforschung der frühen Neuzeit 3 (1995): 7–17. “A Fifteenth-Century Site Report on the Vatican Obelisk,” with Brian Curran and Angelo Decembrio, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995 [1996]): 234–48. “Comment créer une bibliothèque humaniste: le cas de Ferrare,” in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques: la mémoire des livres en Occident, ed. Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 189–203. “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203–23; repr. as Chap. 5 in boyd. “Causaubon, Isaac,” “Estienne, Henri ii,” and “Scaliger, Joseph Justus,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1:270–71, 2:68–69, 3:490–91. “Eclipses,” “Scholarship, Classical, History of,” and “Time-Reckoning,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; 4th ed. 2012), 502, 1365–67, 1527–28; the

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l­atter two entries repr. in The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; 2nd ed. 2014), 642–46, 726–27. “Descartes the Dreamer,” Wilson Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 36–46; repr. as Chap. 13 in boyd. “Birth of the Footnote,” Lingua Franca 7, no. 9 (November 1997): 59–66. “The Death of the Footnote (Report on an Exaggeration),” Wilson Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 72–77. “Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum: Fragments of Some Lost Enterprises,” in Collecting Fragments—Fragmente Sammeln, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 124–43. “From Apotheosis to Analysis: Some Late Renaissance Histories of Classical Astronomy,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 261–76. “Girolamo Cardano, oder: der gelehrte Astrologe,” in Zwischen Narretei und Weisheit: Biographische Skizzen und Konturen alter Gelehrsamkeit, ed. Gerald Hartung and Wolf Peter Klein (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), 179–91. “Martin Bernal and His Critics,” with Suzanne Marchand, Arion, 3rd ser., 5, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 1–35. “The Origins and Impact of the Renaissance Sense of History: Notes on the Humanist as an Intellectual Type,” in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. Sarah C. Humphreys (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 253–75. “The Revival of Antiquity: A Fan’s Note on Recent Work,” American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998): 118–21. “Correctores corruptores? Notes on the Social History of Editing,” in Editing Texts— Texte edieren, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 54–76. “Girolamo Cardano und die Tradition der klassischen Astrologie,” Scientia poetica 2 (1998): 1–26. “Girolamo Cardano and the Tradition of Classical Astrology: The Rothschild Lecture, 1995,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 3 (September 1998): 323–54. “Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and Others,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1998), 17–38; repr. as Chap. 15 in boyd. “Kaspar Schoppe and the Art of Textual Criticism,” Zeitsprünge 2, no. 3/4 (1998): 231–43. “Arendt and Eichmann at the Dinner Table,” American Scholar 68, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 105–19; repr. as Chap. 14 in wmbw.

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“Astrologie, Philologie und prisca sapientia bei Pico della Mirandola,” in Wissensbilder: Strategien der Überlieferung, ed. Ulrich Raulff and Gary Smith (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 95–116. “Juden und Griechen bei Friedrich August Wolf,” in Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Reinhard Markner and Giuseppe Veltri (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 9–31. “Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context,” I Tatti Studies 8 (1999 [2000]): 37–68; repr. as Chap. 2 in wmbw. “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999 [2000]): 241–67; repr. as Chap. 10 in boyd. “The Condition of History: Cliff Notes,” Rechtshistorisches Journal 18 (1999 [2000]): 477–84. “Starry Messengers: Recent Work in the History of Western Astrology,” Perspectives on Science 8, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 70–83. “Morhof and History,” in Mapping the World of Learning: The Polyhistor of Daniel Georg Morhof, ed. Françoise Waquet (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 155–77. “Geniture Collections: Origins and Uses of a Genre,” in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49–68. “Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe,” with William R. Newman, and “Between the Election and My Hopes: Girolamo Cardano and Medical Astrology,” with Nancy Siraisi, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 2001), 1–37, 69–131. “Der Magus und seine Geschichte(n),” in Der Magus: Seine Ursprünge und seine Geschichte in verschiedenen Kulturen, ed. Anthony Grafton and Moshe Idel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 1–26. “Latinland,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 12, no. 1–2 (2001): 5–12. “Les correcteurs d’imprimerie et la publication des textes classiques,” in Des Alexandries I: Du livre au texte, ed. Luce Giard and Christian Jacob, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2001), 1:425–42. “Living through Media Revolutions: Some Help from History,” Gazette of the Grolier Club, n.s., 52 (2001): 5–30. “John Dee Reads Books of Magic,” in The Reader Revealed, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron (Washington, dc: Folger Shakespeare Library; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 31–37. “Joseph Scaliger as a Reader,” in Old Books, New Learning: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Books at Yale, ed. Robert Babcock and Lee Paterson (New Haven, ct: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001), 152–77.

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“Where Was Salomon’s House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 21–38; repr. as Chap. 5 in wmbw. “Error Messages: Night Thoughts Inspired by James O’Donnell’s Avatars of the Word,” boundary 2 28, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 191–205. “The Public Intellectual and the American University: Robert Morss Lovett Revisited,” American Scholar 70, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 41–54; repr. as Chap. 13 in wmbw. “Cardano’s Proxeneta: Prudence for Professors,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 7, no. 2 (2001 [2002]): 363–80. “Macht über die Natur: Technik und Magie,” Gegenworte 9 (2002): 87–89. “Martin Crusius Reads His Homer,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 64, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 63–86. “Obelisks and Empires of the Mind,” American Scholar 71, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 123–27. “Some Uses of Eclipses in Early Modern Chronology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no.2 (April 2003): 213–29. “Dating History: The Renaissance & the Reformation of Chronology,” Daedalus 132, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 74–85. “The Precept System: Myth and Reality of a Princeton Institution,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 64, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 467–503. “Les lieux communs chez les humanistes,” in Lire, copier, écrire: les bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Elisabeth Décultot (Paris: cnrs, 2003), 31–42; German trans.: “Die loci communes der Humanisten,” in Lesen, Kopieren, Schreiben: Lese- und Exzerpierkunst in der europäischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Ripperger & Kremers, 2014), 49–66. “Renaissance Research Today: Forms and Styles,” in L’étude de la Renaissance nunc et cras, ed. Max Engammare et al. (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 57–68. “Renaissance,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. J.L. Heilbron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 717–19. “Conflict and Harmony in the Collegium Gellianum,” in The World of Aulus Gellius, ed. Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Amiel Vardi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 318–42. “Momigliano at the Warburg: The Origins of a Style,” American Scholar 73, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 129–32. “Kircher’s Chronology,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 171–87. “1515–1517: The Mysteries of the Kabbalah and the Theology of Obscure Men” and “1860: A Model for Cultural History,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery et al. (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2004), 219–25, 603–8.

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“Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner at the University of Chicago,” in A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain, ed. John A. Marino and Thomas Kuehn (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 1–13. “A Note from inside the Teapot,” in Teaching New Histories of Philosophy, ed. J.B. Schneewind (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Center for Human Values, 2004), 317–26. “Architectures of Love and Strife,” in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 161–65. “The Commonplace Bee: A Celebration,” in The Revolt of the Bees: Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive Is Declared, ed. Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation, 2005), 34–53. “The Identities of History in Early Modern Europe: Prelude to a Study of the Artes historicae,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005), 41–74. “Libraries and Lecture Halls,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238–50. “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–32; repr. as Chap. 10 in wmbw. “The Chronology of the Flood,” in Sintflut und Gedächtnis, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2006), 65–82. “History’s Postmodern Fates,” Daedalus 135, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 54–69. “Auf den Spuren des Allgemeinen in der Geschichte: Der wilde Gott des Aby Warburg,” in Der Hochsitz des Wissens: Das Allgemeine als wissenschaftlicher Wert, ed. Michael Hagner and Manfred D. Laubichler (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 73–95. “Reforming the Dream,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 271–92. “Roman Monument,” History Today 56, no. 9 (September 2006): 48–50. “José de Acosta: Renaissance Historiography and New World Humanity,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 166–88. “Momigliano’s Method and the Warburg Institute: Studies in His Middle Period,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 97–126; repr. as Chap. 12 in wmbw. “The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine,” in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 46–62.

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“Renaissance Histories of Art and Nature,” in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2007), 185–210; repr. as Chap. 4 in wmbw. “Textbooks and the Disciplines,” in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi et al. (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 11–36. “Un passe-partout ai segreti di una vita: Alberti e la scrittura cifrata,” in La vita e il mondo di Leon Battista Alberti, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 1:3–21. “Apocalypse in the Stacks? The Research Library in the Age of Google,” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 87–98. “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (1 May 2009), http:// arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/sketch-map-lost-continent-republic-letters; repr. as Chap. 1 in wmbw. “From Roll to Codex: A Christian Initiative,” in Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Cultures, ed. Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2009), 15–20. “Isaac Casaubon’s Library of Hebrew Books,” with Joanna Weinberg, in Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009), 24–42. “The Treasure House of Time,” Omslag: Bulletin van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden en het Scaliger Instituut 7, no. 3 (2009): 16. “De Emendatione Temporum,” in “All my Books in Foreign Tongues”: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden, 1609–2009, ed. Arnoud Vrolijk and Kasper van Ommen (Leiden: Leiden University Library, 2009), 91. “Alberti, Leon Battista,” “Calendars, Chronicles, Chronology,” “Cartography,” “Cicero and Ciceronianism,” “Commentary,” “Donation of Constantine,” “Forgery,” “Herodotus,” “Heyne, Christian Gottlob,” “Historiography,” “Ptolemy,” “Scaliger, Joseph Justus,” “Tacitus and Tacitism,” and “Wolf, Friedrich August,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21–22, 165–68, 170–74, 194–97, 225–33, 280–81, 361–64, 434–35, 436–37, 441–48, 789–92, 865–88, 920–24, 987–89. “In Clio’s American Atelier,” in Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 89–117. “Petrus Apianus Draws Up a Calendar,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 42, no. 1 (February 2011): 55–72. “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–26. “Introduction: Warburg’s Library and Its Legacy,” with Jeffrey F. Hamburger, in The Warburg Institute: A Special Issue on the Library and Its Readers, ed. with Jeffrey F. Hamburger = Common Knowledge 18, no. 1 (2012): 1–16.

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“Mercator Maps Time,” in Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin (London: Palgrave, 2012), 187–204. “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 1–39. “Isaac Vossius, Chronologer,” in Isaaac Vossius (1618–1689): Between Science and Scholarship, ed. Erik Jorink and Dirk van Miert (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 43–84. “De la page à la Toile: une rupture essentielle?” with Roger Chartier and Yves Hersant, Critique 68, no. 10 (October 2012): 854–65. “A Graphic Renaissance,” with Daniel Rosenberg, Hedgehog Review 14, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 58–72. “Chronologia est unica historiae lux: How Glarean Studied and Taught the Chronology of the Ancient World,” with Urs B. Leu, in Heinrich Glarean’s Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth-Century Musical Humanist, ed. Iain Fenlon and Inga Mai Groote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 248–79. “Chronologies as Collections,” in Collectors’ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded/ Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen: Wie Sammler entscheiden, ed. Anja Goeing, Anthony Grafton, and Paul Michael (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 145–62. “Subtile Jagden: Die Gelehrtenrepublik in den amerikanischen Kolonien,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 7, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 5–18. “Corrections and Clarifications,” in Emprynted in thys manere: Early Printed Treasures from Cambridge University Library, ed. Ed Potten and Emily Dourish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2014), 146–47. “The Jewish Book in Christian Europe: Material Texts and Religious Encounters,” in Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity, ed. Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2014), 96–114, 243–47. “Christian Hebraism and the Rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism,” in Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, ed. Richard I. Cohen et al. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), 169–80. “Arnaldo Momigliano and the Tradition of Ecclesiastical History,” in The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray (London: Warburg Institute; Torino: Aragno, 2014), 53–76. “Humanist Philologies: Texts, Antiquities and Their Transformations in the Early Modern West,” in World Philology, ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2015), 154–77, 360–62. “Johann Buxtorf Makes a Notebook,” with Joanna Weinberg, in Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, ed. Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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Articles on the History Profession

“Historians’ Rocky Job Market,” with Robert Townsend, Chronicle of Higher Education Review (11 July 2008). “The Parlous Paths of the Profession,” with Robert Townsend, Perspectives on History 46, no. 7 (October 2008). “History under Attack,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 1 (January 2011). “A Discussion Continues,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 2 (February 2011). “Loneliness and Freedom,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 3 (March 2011). “Historians at Work: Rutgers-Camden,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 4 (April 2011). “The Imperative of Public Participation,” with James Grossman, Perspectives on History 49, no. 5 (May 2011). “The Arc of Writing History: Building Bridges from the Periphery to the Center,” Perspectives on History 49, no.6 (September 2011). “No More Plan B,” with James Grossman, Perspectives on History 49, no. 7 (October 2011), and Chronicle of Higher Education (9 October 2011). “Plan C,” with James Grossman, Perspectives on History 49, no. 8 (November 2011). “Time to Craft a Plan C,” with James Grossman, Chronicle of Higher Education (1 November 2011). “Historians at Work iii: Public History,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 9 (December 2011). “The Humanities in Dubious Battle,” with James Grossman, Chronicle of Higher Education (1 July 2013). “Habits of Mind,” with James Grossman, American Scholar 84, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 31–37.



Prefaces, Forewords, and Book Introductions

Foreword, in The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, trans. George Boas (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1993), xi–xxi. Introduction, in Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1995), xi–xiii. Introduction [to four essays by historians], in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside; A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1995), 109–12. Introduction, in Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, 1999), xi–xxxiii; repr. as Chap. 14 in boyd. Introduction, in Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1999; rev. repr., 2003), xv–xxviii.

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Introduzione, in Girolamo Cardano, Il prosseneta: ovvero della prudenza politica, ed. Piero Cigada and Luigi Guerrini (Milan: Berlusconi, 2001), xxi–xli. Introduction, in Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life, trans. Jean Stoner (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), ix–xviii. Introduction to “ahr Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (February 2002): 84–86. Introduction, in Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (New York: Norton, 2003), xv–xix. Introduction, in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Folio Society, 2004), 21–28. Foreword, in C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), vii–xi. Introduction, in Theodor Mommsen, A History of Rome: From the Foundation of the City to the Sole Rule of Julius Caesar, trans. W.P. Dickson, ed. C.J. Shepherd (London: Folio Society, 2006), xi–xxi. Preface, in The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology, and Classical Studies in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. Alan M. Stahl and Gretchen Oberfranc (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Library, 2009), xiii–xvii. “Roy Rosenzweig: Scholarship as Community,” in Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), ix–xxiv. Preface, in Zachary S. Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), ix–xii. “Arnaldo Momigliano: The Historian of History,” in Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ix–xvi. Introduction, in Pliny, Natural History, vol. 1, Preface and Books 1–7, trans. H. Rackham (London: Folio Society, 2012), xi–xviii. Introduction, in Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), vii–xi. Foreword, in Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2015), vii–xxii. Foreword, in Michael A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), ix–xiii [first published in Times Literary Supplement (10 April 1998)]. “Foreword: Living the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century,” in How to Build a Life in the Humanities: Meditations on the Academic Work-Life Balance, ed. Greg Colón Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xi–xv.

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Book Reviews in Academic Journals

“From Politian to Pasquali” (review of The Classical Text, by E.J. Kenny), Journal of Roman Studies 67 (1977): 171–76. Review of The Great Instauration, by Charles Webster, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 167–71. “The Origins of Scholarship” (review of History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, by Rudolph Pfeiffer), American Scholar 48, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246, 256–58, 260–61. “Copernicus without Tears” (review of Introductions à l’astronomie de Copernic, intro., trans., and comm. H. Hugonnard-Roche, E. Rosen, and J.-P. Verdet), Journal for the History of Astronomy 11, no. 1 (February 1980): 63–68. “The Importance of Being Printed” (review of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elisabeth L. Eisenstein), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 265–86; repr. in Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader, ed. Harvey J. Graff (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 106–25. Review of Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft, by Mark Phillips, Journal of the History of Philosophy 18, no. 4 (October 1980): 471–73. “Glimpses from a Lost World: The Need for a New Map of the Republic of Learning” (review of From Humanism to Science, 1480–1700, by Robert Mandrou, trans. Brian Pearce), Minerva 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 531–35. Review of Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 4, ed. F. Edward Cranz with Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Quarterly 35, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 61–63. “Censorinus’ Aureolus Libellus” (review of Censorini de die natali liber ad Q. Caerellium, ed. Nicolaus Sallmann), Classical Review 35, no. 1 (1985): 46–48. Review of Humanists and Holy Writ, by Jerry H. Bentley, Speculum 60, no. 2 (April 1985): 383–85. “Holland without Huizinga: Dutch Visual Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (review of The Art of Describing, by Svetlana Alpers), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 255–65. Review of Iter italicum, vol. 3, by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 508–10. Review of Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics, by Erika Rummel, Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 3 (July 1987): 463–64. Review of Hercules at the Crossroads, by Ronald G. Witt, American Historical Review 95, no. 2 (April 1990): 481–82. Review of The Measure of Times Past, by Donald J. Wilcox, American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (June 1990): 775–76. Review of Trigonometrisch-astronomisches Rechnen kurz vor Copernicus, by Armin Gerl, Isis 83, no. 3 (September 1992): 486–87.

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Review of Galileo Galilei: Tractatus de praecognitionibus et praecognitis and Tractatio de demonstratione, ed. William F. Edwards and William A. Wallace, Isis 83, no. 4 (December 1992): 656–57. Review of The Uses of Antiquity, by Stephen Gaukroger, Isis 84, no. 1 (March 1993): 151–52. Review of De opkomst van de historische en literaire kritiek in de synoptische beschouwing van de evangeliën van Calvijn (1555) tot Griesbach (1774), by M.H. de Lang, Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 73, no. 2 (1993): 232–33. Review of Les langues du paradis, by Maurice Olender, Revue de l’histoire des religions 210, no. 4 (October/December 1993): 463–66. Review of Johannes Kepler: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, ed. Jürgen Hübner et al., Isis 84, no. 4 (December 1993): 798–99. Review of The Atlantic Vision, by Gunnar Eriksson, Isis 86, no. 2 (June 1995): 328. Review of Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, by Liane Lefaivre, with Brian Curran, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 4 (December 2000): 528–30. Review of Investigations into Magic, by Martín del Rio, ed. and trans. P.G. MaxwellStuart, Journal of Religious History 25, no. 2 (June 2001): 214–15. Review of Defining the Architect in Fifteenth-Century Italy, by Liisa Kanerva; Ornamentum, by Veronika Biermann; and Leon Battisa Alberti: Das Bauornament, by Candida Syndikus, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 3 (September 2002): 402–4. “Science across Cultures” (review of Lost Discoveries, by Dick Teresi), American Scientist 91, no. 2 (March/April 2003): 169–71. Review of An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566), by Owen Gingerich, Early Science and Medicine 9, no. 1 (2004): 53–55. “Life, the Universe and Everything” (review of Maps of Time, by David Christian), American Scientist 92, no. 4 (July/August 2004): 379–81. “The Middleman” (review of The First Copernican, by Dennis Danielson), American Scientist 95, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 177–79. Review of Forgery, Replica, Fiction, by Christopher S. Wood, Art Bulletin 93, no. 2 (June 2011): 253–56. “John Selden: The Life of Scholarship” (review of John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, by G.J. Toomer), Huntington Library Quarterly 74, no. 3 (September 2011): 505–13.



Reviews and Articles in Magazines and Newspapers

“In the Spider’s Web of Magic” (review of Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, by D.P. Walker, ed. Penelope Gouk), Times Literary Supplement (7 February 1986).

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“Sleuths and Analysts” (review of English Classical Scholarship, by C.O. Brink), Times Literary Supplement (8 August 1986). “Reading the Friendly Skies” (review of A History of Western Astrology, by S.J. Tester), New York Times (31 January 1988). “A Vision of the Past and Future” (review of Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), by Richard H. Popkin), Times Literary Supplement (12–18 February 1988); repr. as Chap. 8 in dott. “The Battle of Beliefs” (review of Galileo Heretic, by Pietro Redondi; and Theology and the Scientific Imagination, by Amos Funkenstein), New Republic (11 April 1988). “A Love of Convention” (review of Marullus, by Carol Kidwell), Times Literary Supplement (22 December 1989). “A Lost Latin World” (review of Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, by J.W. Binns), Times Literary Supplement (8 March 1991). “The Peasants’ Prophet” (review of Thomas Müntzer, A Destroyer of the Godless, by Abraham Friesen), New Republic (18 March 1991). “The Man Who Saved History” (review of The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, by Arnaldo Momigliano), New Republic (19/26 August 1991). “Through a Glass Darkly” (review of The Broken Staff, by Frank E. Manuel), New Republic (1 June 1992). “Dressed for Success” (review of The Art of Worldly Wisdom, by Baltasar Gracian), New Republic (5 October 1992). “The Sense of an Ending” (review of When Time Shall Be No More, by Paul Boyer; and The Creationists, by Ronald Numbers), New Republic (8 March 1993). “Signs of Spring” (review of The Portrayal of Love, by Charles Dempsey), London Review of Books (10 June 1993). “The Return of Greek” (review of From Byzantium to Italy, by N.G. Wilson), Times Literary Supplement (11 June 1993). “Fear and Loathing in Naples” (review of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, by Mark Lilla), New Republic (20/27 September 1993). “Frets and Knots” (review of A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 1, by David McKitterick), London Review of Books (4 November 1993). “Die Auslegekunst der Frühaufklärung,” Frankfurter Rundschau (24 January 1994). “The Soul’s Entrepreneurs” (review of The First Jesuits, by John O’Malley; Ignatius of Loyola, by W.W. Meissner; and Jésuites: Une Multibiographie, by Jean Lacouture), New York Review of Books (3 March 1994); repr. as Chap. 8 in wmbw; rev. German trans.: “Erneuern und Erobern im Namen Gottes,” Frankfurter Rundschau (19 April 1994). “From Norwich to Naples” (review of The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, by John Hale), London Review of Books (28 April 1994). “Archäopteryx der Wissenschaft” (review of Mundus combinatus, by Thomas Leinkauf), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (18 August 1994).

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“The Hand and the Soul” (review of The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, by Joseph Leo Koerner), New Republic (19/26 September 1994); repr. as Chap. 3 in boyd. “Ah, Wilderness” (review of Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, by Christopher S. Wood), New York Review of Books (20 October 1994). “Kein Mensch liest Italienisch” (review of Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, by Giovanni Santinello et al.), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (23 December 1994). “Speaking Volumes” (review of God’s Plagiarist, by R. Howard Bloch), New Republic (30 January 1995). “Miracles in Miniature” (review of The Painted Page, by Jonathan J.G. Alexander), New York Times (12 March 1995). “Der Mythos der zwei Vergangenheiten” (review of Jüdische Geschichte und ihre Deutungen, by Amos Funkenstein), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (16 May 1995). “Intellektuellengeschichte ohne Ideen” (review of Agent der Königin, by John Bossy), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (6 July 1995). “The Forest and the Trees” (review of Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama), New Republic (7 August 1995): 37–42. “Authors and Climbers” (review of Impolite Learning, by Anne Goldgar), London Review of Books (5 October 1995); repr. as Chap. 8 in boyd. “Geschichte im großen Bogen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (16 November 1995). “Strange and Desperate Cures” (review of Gehennical Fire, by William R. Newman), New York Review of Books (16 November 1995). “Nabokov unters Volk Bringen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (24 November 1995). “Vermeer’s Mystery Theater” (review of Johannes Vermeer, exhibition catalog by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.), New York Review of Books (11 January 1996 [published late December 1995]). “Born to Network” (review of The Fortunes of the Courtier, by Peter Burke), London Review of Books (22 August 1996). “Quotations on Demand” (review of Reading in Tudor England, by Eugene R. Kintgen; and Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, by Ann Moss), Times Literary Supplement (31 January 1997). “Der Intellektuelle und die Orthodoxie: Philip Melanchthon,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (16 February 1997). “Castellios großer Bruder” (review of Erasmmus of the Low Countries, by James D. Tracy), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (25 March 1997); repr. in Ein Büchertagebuch: Buchbesprechungen aus der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 418–19. “The Rest vs. the West” (review of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, by Walter D. Mignolo; and Reframing the Renaissance, ed. Claire Farago), New York Review of Books (10 April 1997); repr. as Chap. 4 in boyd.

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“Hello to Berlin” (review of The Ghosts of Berlin, by Brian Ladd; The Berlin of George Grosz, by Frank Whitford; Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), ed. Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher; Berlin: The City and the Court Smith, by Jules Laforgue; George Grosz: Berlin-New York, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster; Reading Berlin 1900, by Peter Fritzsche; and The Writing on the Walls, by Shimon Attie), New York Review of Books (14 August 1997). “The Obelisks’ Tale” (review of Moses the Egyptian, by Jan Assmann), New Republic (24 November 1997). “Beyond the Joke” (review of Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, by M.A. Screech), Times Literary Supplement (10 April 1998). “Botticelli and the Built-in Bed” (review of Behind the Picture, by Martin Kemp), London Review of Books (2 April 1998). “Believe It or Not” (review of A Collector’s Cabinet, May 17–November 1, 1998, exhibition catalog by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.; Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park; and Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, by Rosamond Purcell), New York Review of Books (5 November 1998). “Remaking the Renaissance” (review of The Culture of the High Renaissance, by Ingrid Rowland), New York Review of Books (4 March 1999). “Diary: Warburg,” London Review of Books (1 April 1999). “The Jew from Tangier” (review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, by A.B. Yehoshua), New York Review of Books (24 June 1999). “The Varieties of Millennial Experience: The Latest Trends in Apocalyptic Thought” (review of Apocalypses, by Eugen Weber; Longing for the End, by Frederic Baumgartner; Vision and Violence, by Arthur P. Mendel; Questioning the Millennium, by Stephen Jay Gould; and Assassins, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins), New Republic (8 November 1999). “A Mine of Prophecy” (review of The Apocryphal Apocalypse, by Alastair Hamilton), Times Literary Supplement (21 April 2000). “The Bright Book of Strife” (review of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, by Francesco Colonna), New Republic (5 May 2000). “A Fertile Garden” (review of Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, by Philip C. Almond), Times Literary Supplement (6 October 2000). “Over the Rainbow” (review of Utopia, exhibition catalog by Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent), New York Review of Books (30 November 2000). “A Passion for the Past” (review of Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, by Lionel Gossman; and The Greeks and Greek Civilization, by Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern), New York Review of Books (8 March 2001). “Der Gelehrte als Held. Mit manchem Makel wollten sie sich gar nicht erst abgeben: Biographien als Wegbereiter der Wissenschaftsberichterstattung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (29 September 2001).

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“The Historian as Hero” (review of The Light of the Eyes, by Azariah de’ Rossi, trans. Joanna Weinberg), New Republic (8 October 2001). “Es wehen starke Winde aus der Erde” (review of Aufstieg aus dem Untergang, by Johannes Fried), Süddeutsche Zeitung (10 October 2001). “Thank You for Your Letter” (review of Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, by Françoise Waquet), London Review of Books (1 November 2001): 16–18; repr. as part of Chap. 7 in wmbw. “Where It All Began: Spinoza and the Dutch Roots of the Enlightenment” (review of Radical Enlightenment, by Jonathan Israel), Times Literary Supplement (9 November 2001). “Lost New York” (review of five books by Ben Katchor), New York Review of Books (15 November 2001). “Great Walls” (review of Tapestry in the Renaissance, exhibition catalog by Thomas P. Campbell et al.), New York Review of Books (9 May 2002). “The Witch Hunters’ Crusade” (review of Demon Lovers, by Walter Stephens), with Ingrid Rowland, New York Review of Books (26 September 2002). “The Magician” (review of Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner), New Republic (3 March 2003). “Surviving Auschwitz, Surrendering to Despair” (review of Primo Levi: A Life, by Ian Thomson), New York Times (8 November 2003). “In No Man’s Land” (review of Judaism and Enlightenment, by Adam Sutcliffe; and The Languages of Paradise, by Maurice Olender), New York Review of Books (26 February 2004); repr. as Chap. 9 in wmbw. “Reading Ratzinger,” New Yorker (25 July 2005). “Writer’s Block” (review of A Little History of the World, by E.H. Gombrich), Wall Street Journal (1–2 October 2005). “College Makeover: Wrestling with Greco-Roman Ideas,” Slate (16 November 2005), www.slate.com. “Starstruck” (review of The Fated Sky, by Benson Bobrick), Washington Post (20 November 2005). “Big Book on Campus” (review of The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason), New York Review of Books (23 September 2004). “The Ways of Genius” (review of The Newtonian Moment, exhibition catalog by Mordechai Feingold), New York Review of Books (2 December 2004). “Prague, the Glorious Moment” (review of Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1437, exhibition catalog by Barbara Drake Boehm and Jirí Fajt), New York Review of Books (15 December 2005). “Rediscovering a Lost Continent” (review of Italy Illuminated, by Flavio Biondo, ed. and trans. Jeffrey White; and twelve other titles in the I Tatti Renaissance Library), New York Review of Books (5 October 2006); repr. as part of Chap. 7 in wmbw.

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“The Way to Eden” (review of Mapping Paradise, by Alessandro Scafi), New Republic (25 December 2006). “Military Academy,” New Republic (29 January 2007). “Getting the Word Out” (review of In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000, ed. Michelle P. Brown), New Republic (22 January 2007). “The Nutty Professors: A History of Academic Charisma,” New Yorker (23 October 2006); German trans.: “Charisma und Askese: Universitätsgeschichte zwischen Traditions­ pflege und Modernisierung,” Lettre International 76 (Spring 2007): 72–76. “Stoppard’s Romance” (review of The Coast of Utopia, by Tom Stoppard), New York Review of Books (31 May 2007). “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents,” New Yorker (5 November 2007): 50–54; Spanish trans.: “La lectura futura,” Trama & Texturas 5 (May 2008): 17–26. “Say Anything: What the Renaissance Teaches Us about Torture,” New Republic (5 November 2007). “Mark Thy Words: Renaissance Readers with Pen at Hand” (review of Used Books, by William H. Sherman), Bookforum (December/January 2008). “The Wonders of the Loom” (review of Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, exhibition catalog by Thomas P. Campbell), New York Review of Books (17 January 2008). “An Urban Scientific Community” (review of The Jewel House, by Deborah E. Harkness), American Scientist 96, no. 2 (March/April 2008): 156–58. “Yesterdays” (review of A History of Histories, by John Burrow), New Republic (11 June 2008). “Violence in Words” (review of Books on Fire, by Lucien X. Polastron; and Burning to Read, by James Simpson), Times Literary Supplement (25 July 2008). “‘But They Burned Giordano Bruno!’” (review of Giordano Bruno, by Ingrid Rowland), New York Review of Books (20 November 2008). “Mein Buch” (review of Hitler’s Private Library, by Timothy W. Ryback), New Republic (24 December 2008). “Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith” (review of Morton Smith and Gershon Scholem: Correspondence, 1945–1982, ed. Guy Stroumsa), The Nation (7 January 2009). “Did Thucydides Really Tell the Truth?” (review of Thucydides, by Donald Kagan), Slate (19 October 2009), www.slate.com. “Kindled” (review of The Case for Books, by Robert Darnton; and On the Commerce on Thinking, by Jean-Luc Nancy), New Republic (18 November 2009). “Scholar and Blogger,” New Republic (8 February 2010). “Humanities and Inhumanities” (review of The Marketplace of Ideas, by Louis Menand), New Republic (11 March 2010): 32–36.

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“Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities,” New York Review of Books (8 April 2010); Spanish trans.: “Gran Bretaña: la vergüenza de las universidades,” Pasajes 33 (October 2010): 61–63. “The Pope and the Hedgehog,” New York Review of Books (28 April 2010). “In a Fantastic, Lost World” (review of two exhibitions: The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy, and The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry), New York Review of Books (13 May 2010). “‘A Jewel of a Thousand Facets’” (review of The Book That Changed Europe, by Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt; and Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, ed. Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt), New York Review of Books (24 June 2010). “Save the Warburg Library!” with Jeffrey Hamburger, New York Review of Books (30 September 2010). “Jumping through the Computer Screen” (review of Reinventing Knowledge, by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton), New York Review of Books (23 December 2010). “Scholars of the World Unite!” (review of Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus; and Crisis on Campus, by Mark C. Taylor), National Interest 111 (January/February 2011[released 16 December 2010]): 75–80. “Beyond Comparison,” New Republic (17 February 2011). “Learning and Pleasure” (review of History and the Enlightenment, by Hugh TrevorRoper; Letters From Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, ed. Richard Davenport-Hynes; and Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography, by Adam Sisman), New Republic (3 March 2011). “About Time” (review of Palaces of Time, by Elisheva Carlebach), Tablet (14 April 2011), http://www.tabletmag.com. Review of The Information, by James Gleick, Washington Post (13 May 2011). “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” (review of The Faculty Longes, by Naomi Schaefer Riley; The Fall of the Faculty, by Benjamin Ginsberg; The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel; Unmaking the Public University, by Christopher Newfield; Crossing the Finish Line, by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson; Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; Education’s End, by Anthony T. Kronman; and Saving State U, by Nancy Folbre), New York Review of Books (24 November 2011). “Those Limbs We Admire: Himmler’s Tacitus” (review of A Most Dangerous Book, by Christopher Krebs), London Review of Books (14 July 2011). “The Most Charming Pagan” (review of The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt), New York Review of Books (8 December 2011).

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“Can the Colleges Be Saved?” (review of College, by Andrew Delbanco), New York Review of Books (24 May 2012). “Search Gets Lost: Why Does Amazon Now Have Customers Do the Search Chores It Used to Do for Them, and in Innovative Ways?” The Nation (18 June 2012). “Of Chymists and Kings” (review of The Secrets of Alchemy, by Lawrence M. Principe), Science (21 December 2012). “Evil Imaginings: The Sordid Representation of Jews in Western Culture” (review of Anti-Judaism, by David Nirenberg), New Republic (21 October 2013). “He Had Fun: Athanasius Kircher” (review of Egyptian Oedipus, by Daniel Stolzenberg), London Review of Books (7 November 2013). “Time Lords: In the Catacombs” (review of Heavenly Bodies, by Paul Koudounaris), London Review of Books (31 July 2014). “The Enclosure of the American Mind” (review of Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz), New York Times (22 August 2014). “Maps to Markets” (review of London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689, by Robert K. Batchelor), Times Literary Supplement (1 October 2014). “A Great Master at the Met” (review of Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, exhibition catalog by Elizabeth Cleland), New York Review of Books (8 January 2015). “Not Dead Yet: Latin” (review of Latin: Story of a World Language, by Jürgen Leonhardt), London Review of Books (8 January 2015). “Latin Lives: Is the Revival of a Dead Language Breathing New Life into the Humanities?” The Nation (26 January 2015). “The Ravishing Painting of Piero di Cosimo” (review of Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence, exhibition catalog by Gretchen A. Hirschauer, Dennis Geronimus, et al.), New York Review of Books (7 May 2015). “A Hero of the European Mind” (review of Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, by Peter Miller), New York Review of Books (19 November 2015). “Tell Me a Story: Who Was Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, Other Than Perhaps One of the Greatest Shapers of How We Understand History? A Former Pupil Investigates.” Tablet (December 2015): 20–30. “Lisa Jardine (1944–2015).” Nature vol. 528 (3 December 2015): 40.



Blog Articles

“Google Books and the Judge,” New Yorker Page-Turner Blog (18 September 2009).

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“Google Books, Back to the Drawing Board,” New Yorker Page-Turner Blog (13 October 2009). “A Nazi at Harvard” (review of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, by Stephen Norwood), New York Review of Books Blog (2 November 2009). “Wisconsin: The Cronon Affair,” New Yorker News Desk Blog (28 March 2011). “The Cronon Affair: Wisconsin Answers,” New Yorker News Desk Blog (3 April 2011). “Academic Freedom after the Cronon Controversy,” New York Review of Books Blog (4 April 2011). “The Wrong Way to Lower College Costs,” with James Grossman, New York Review of Books Blog (31 May 2011). “My Blue-Bound Loves,” Harvard University Press Blog (12 November 2012). “Scrawled Insults and Epiphanies” (review of Readers Make Their Mark, exhibition at the New York Society Library), New York Review of Books Blog (19 February 2015). “In memoriam: Lisa Jardine, April 12, 1944–October 25, 2015” Renaissance Society of America Blog (2 November 2015). “Konrad Peutinger Reads a History,” New York Society Library Blog (posted 2 November 2015).



Articles in the Daily Princetonian

“Fairer Harvard?” 25 September 2006. “Design Princeton for Humans,” 9 October 2006. “Tiger? Bulldog? Tiger?” 23 October 2006. “What Profs Do When Not Teaching,” 13 November 2006. “Labyrinths?” 27 November 2006. “Universities: Public, Private, Middlesex,” 11 December 2006. “Unlearned Privileges,” 12 February 2007. “Service Station?” 26 February 2007. “Service Station: Part Two,” 12 March 2007. “Grade Inflation, the Other Way,” 2 April 2007. “Collaboration: The Thief of Time?” 16 April 2007. “The Academic Life—As Others Live It,” 30 April 2007. “A Modest Proposal: A College at Princeton,” 14 May 2007. “Paradise When?” 1 October 2007. “Getting and Spending,” 5 November 2007. “Where Have All the Books Gone?” 3 December 2007. “Class Tells,” 14 January 2008. “Dulce bellum inexpertis,” 18 April 2008. “Thoughts on the Summer Whine,” 9 May 2011.

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“pdf Bums?” 10 October 2011. “The American University and the World,” 14 November 2011. “Lost Causes,” 12 December 2011. “Talking with the Plumber,” 30 April 2012. “What Will You Do with That Humanities Ph.D.? Even You May Not Know,” 13 February 2013. “Watching the Bungee Jump,” 1 April 2013. “Bothering the President,” 29 April 2013. “Today I Lived,” 20 September 2013. “The Recommendation Whisperer,” 13 October 2013. “Is This the End for Butler?” 17 November 2013.



Tony on Himself

“A Premature Autobiography?” Acceptance speech: Premio Balzan 2002 per la storia degli studi umanistici, http://www.balzan.org/mo/premiati/anthony-grafton/a-premature -autobiography-inglese-grafton. “A Professor’s Day,” Princeton Alumni Weekly (29 January 2003), http://www.princeton. edu/president/tilghman/pages/20030129. Word of thanks for the honorary doctorate of Leiden University, 8 February 2006, in Henk Jan de Jonge, “De laudatio van Professor Nicolette Mout en het dankwoord van Professor Anthony Grafton, uitgesproken bij Professor Graftons erepromotie op 8 februari 2006,” Frons: Blad voor Leidse classici 26, no. 1 (March 2006): 19–24, at 22–23. “Anthony Grafton: How I Write,” Interview conducted by Noah Charney, Daily Beast (17 July 2013), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/17/anthony-grafton -how-i-write.html.



Work in Progress

Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, A.W. Mellon Lectures, Washington, dc, 2014. Gabriel Harvey. With Lisa Jardine, Nicholas Popper, and William Sherman. A History of Renaissance Europe (a volume in the Penguin History of Europe). Faustus and Friends: Magic in Renaissance Germany (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press; London: Penguin). Historical Chronology from Petavius to Newton. Colonial Pedants: Learned Reading and Annotation in the American Colonies and the Atlantic World.

Part 1 Scaliger and Casaubon



chapter 1

Confidentiality and Publicity in Early Modern Epistolography: Scaliger and Casaubon* Dirk van Miert Introduction The surviving correspondence of the seventeenth century sometimes includes letters that the writer asked the recipient to destroy by “dedicating them to Vulcanus.” There is, for example, a letter of 1608, from Jan Boreel to the great Hugo Grotius, in which Boreel resorts to using Greek and even Hebrew to conceal a message and asks Grotius, in any case, to burn the letter (in the following translation, the Greek is in italics, the Hebrew is underscored): I first had misgivings about the letter that I include. But I thought I would be unworthy of your most dignant letter if I failed to send anything in return at all. And I do this indeed in the hope, yes even the trust, that you offer this letter to Vulcanus as soon as you have read it. I am not quite surprised that you find yourself unable to steer a middle way between the patriots and the warmongers in order to demonstrate your support for both parties. I experience the same thing here [in Zeeland]: hardly any action, hardly any conversation at all is safe from reprehension. I have torn up one letter in which I had informed you about the state of our affairs, and while I trembled, I had boldy ventured to write that now was the hour of exile from Zeeland, which I still think it is.1 * This article was written in the context of the research project Biblical Criticism and Secularisation in the Seventeenth Century (OND1316730), which was financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (nwo). I am indebted to Piet Steenbakkers, Jetze Touber, and in particular Henk Nellen for their comments on earlier versions, and to Ann Blair, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and the peer reviewers for corrections and helpful remarks. 1 J. Boreel to Grotius, 13 Dec. 1608, in Hugo Grotius, Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, ed. P.C. Molhuysen et al., 17 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928–2001), 17:42: “Ista quam inclusam mitto antehac displicuit, sed indignus mihi visus sum dignissimis tuis si nihil omnino rescriberem. Atque hoc quidem facio ea spe, quinimo fiducia, uti meas ubi legeris Vulcano tradas. Quod inter ϕιλοπατρίδας et ϕιλοπτολέμους ita te medium gerere non potes uti utrisque tuum studium probes, haud sane miror. Idem nobis hic accidit; vix ulla actio, vix ullum colloquium a reprehensione tutum est. Laceravi epistolam unam qua te certiorem feceram quo in statu res nostrae essent, et cum tremerem ἀποτολμῆσας scripseram esse nunc ‫יה‬ ָ ‫עת גָ לּות ַה ְּס ַלנְ ִד‬,ֵ quod ipsum adhuc iudico.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_002

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There are other letters extant in Grotius’s correspondence that were destined for destruction, but that were in fact never burned.2 Most of these letters contain sensitive religious or political inside information. Such intelligence provided a good reason for destroying letters. And recipients were not the only ones to do so: posterity also could make sure letters disappeared. Almost all the letters that Theodorus Beza received from French authors were destroyed in order to prevent them from being found should Geneva be captured by the Duke of Savoy, a scenario that would seriously compromise Geneva’s secret allies.3 In the practice of Renaissance epistolography, recipients customarily showed letters to their peers, who sometimes copied them out or excerpted them. It was therefore of paramount importance for letter writers to weigh their words and keep track of what they had sent off. Even if the writers forbade their addressees to discuss the contents of their letters with anybody else and completely trusted in the integrity and confidentiality of their correspondents, they might still use concealing language and ask to have the letters destroyed, lest the written word eventually escape the recipients’ studies. Unauthorized circulation could have very serious consequences for the reputation of a writer, in particular if she or he was of some standing. Enemies could take advantage of the information (as we will see below in the case of Casaubon), but so also could authors and publishers who wanted to enrich the paratext of their books with a letter from a famous author (as happened in Scaliger’s case). It was therefore necessary for the letter writers to keep as much control as possible over the circulation of their work. How did they do this? To answer this question, I will look at two cases: one from the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger, and the other from the letters of his friend Isaac Casaubon.

2 J. Wtenbogaert to Grotius, 2 Sept. 1603, in ibid., 1:28: “Interea quas a me tenes litteras tibi habe et Vulcano sacrifica.” J. de Groot to Grotius, 2 Aug. 1621, in ibid., 17:185: “Tu literas hasce Vulcano trade, ne quandoque reperiantur.” D. Baudius to Grotius, 4 Mar. 1605, in ibid., 1:51: “Scriverianam litem etiam curae tuae fiduciaeque commendo. Non est quod te rogem, ne foras eliminentur quae hic temere effutio; satis me tacente intelligis non esse proferenda, nec ulli concredenda nisi Vulcano nostro, vel si mavis Veneris marito.” J. Boreel to Grotius, 7 Feb. 1614, in ibid., 1:297: “Vale amicorum decus. 7 Febr. 1614. Lectas Vulcano.” Grotius to N. van Reigersberch, 15 Feb. 1624, in ibid., 2:344), on the back: “Mons. Grotius. xv Febr. 1624 A Paris. Vulcano.” Grotius to N. van Reigersberch, 15 Feb. 1624, in ibid., 2:342, at the end of a letter in Dutch: “Vulcano haec epistola sacrator.” 3 Alain Dufour, “Le dit et le non-dit dans la correspondance de Théodore de Bèze,” in L’épistolaire aux xvie siècle, ed. Frank Lestringant et al. (Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 2001), 135.

Confidentiality and Publicity in Early Modern Epistolography



5

Scaliger’s Strategies of Concealment

In contrast to Grotius’s correspondence, we find only one request for destruction in Scaliger’s letters. Instead, Scaliger asked his correspondents not to share the contents with others if the contents were delicate. In a postscript to a letter of 1578 to his friend François Vertunien, Scaliger wrote: “I beg you to keep this letter as little circulated as possible.”4 Scaliger knew that his letter would be read by more than one person, and he seems not to have objected to this, as long as the distribution was kept to a minimum. This letter was not printed until 1879—maybe not out of respect for Scaliger’s wish but because that happened to be the year of the publication of the first edition of his French letters. In 1580, when Scaliger criticized Siméon Dubois’s edition of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, he wrote to Claude Dupuy: “I only ask you to keep this between the two of us, because, really, I should only speak of this man with respect, because of his erudition, his integrity, and his position.”5 This letter was printed likewise only in 1879. In 1598, Scaliger wrote a note to Janus Dousa, curator of the University of Leiden and an influential member of the High Council of Holland and Zeeland. Scaliger (the son of a staunch Aristotelian) asked Dousa to help stop the spread of Ramist influences at the university. He rounded his letter off by begging Dousa “by the law of friendship to prevent any of your colleagues or someone else’s finding out that I had words with you or wrote any letter at all about this case.” Dousa may have kept his mouth shut, but in 1627 Daniel Heinsius published this Latin letter without leaving out a word.6 But not all of Scaliger’s secret letters were published. One confidential ­letter saw the light only in 2012. In this letter, Scaliger explicitly asked JacquesAuguste De Thou to speak with nobody about the contents, which concerned the book of Judith. This relatively early letter (27 Apr. 1591) was written when Scaliger was in Preuilly, two years before he accepted the invitation to come to Leiden. Preuilly was a relatively safe place in southern France: the small 4 Scaliger to Vertunien, 29 June 1578, postscript, in The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 1:226, line 87: “Je vous prie que la presente soit le moins divulguée qu’il vous sera possible.” 5 Scaliger to Claude Dupuy, 7 July 1580, in ibid., 1:294, lines 13–17: “Seullement je vous prie que ceci demeure entre nous deux. Car au contraire je ne dois parler de lui qu’avec respect, tant pour sa doctrine, que pour sa probité, et aussi pour le reng qu’il tient.” 6 Scaliger to Janus Dousa, 5 Mar. 1598, in ibid., 3:105, lines 20–22, and critical apparatus ad loc.: “Oro autem te per ius amicitiae, ne aliquis collegarum tuorum, aut alius, resciscat a me tibi de hac re verba facta, aut ullam epistolam scriptam.” See Heinsius’s editon of the text in Joseph Scaliger, Epistolae omnes quae reperiri potuerunt, ed. Daniel Heinsius (Leiden: B. et A. Elzevir, 1627), 130–31.

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town had a Protestant community and Scaliger himself lived in a fortified stronghold on the hill, which dominated the town and the surroundings. Scaliger’s own patron at the time, Henri Louis Chasteigner de La Rocheposay, was a Catholic who had fought the Huguenots for three decades. The confessional differences between the two never seem to have jeopardized their relationship. But in 1590–92, the political and religious situation in France was particularly uncertain: after the murder of Henri iii in 1589, Henri of Navarre, leader of the Protestant cause, had become the sole heir to the crown, and Chasteigner suddenly found himself in the position of possibly serving a ­former enemy. Like other Catholics, Chasteigner might have foreseen that Navarre would eventually convert to Catholicism, for it was inconceivable for the throne of France to be occupied by a Protestant. On the day that Scaliger wrote his last letter from France, Sunday, 25 July 1593, Henri did indeed convert, by attending mass in the church of Saint-Denis. It is understandable that Scaliger, after three decades of bloody religious turmoil, was careful in the volatile years leading up to Henri’s conversion. He made sure not to criticize Catholic authorities in his letter, but still felt the urge to ask De Thou not to circulate it. In the letter, Scaliger provided several arguments against the historicity of the book of Judith. These problems pertained to chronology, geography, textual transmission, and historical tradition. After explaining all these, Scaliger said he left it to De Thou to draw his own conclusions when they met again, “pourveu qu’il n’y ait que vous et moi.” Scaliger warned, in a mixture of French and Latin, against ultramontane Catholics, whom he denoted by using a Greek epitheton, and he begged De Thou, “Ne communiques ceci à personne, je vous prie,” reaffirming this request with a Latin quotation from Horace (Odes 3.1.1) to fence off the unlearned.7 The use of covert Greek and indirect Latin quotations indicates that Scaliger tried to conceal his critique of a book that was canonical in the Catholic Bible. A couple of months later, he referred back to the letter, indicating its subject (the book of Judith) in Greek, begging De Thou: “Ne communiques poinct nos lettres à personne. Prennes en vostre entendement ce qu’il vous plairra: reliquum tardipedi deo dica.”8 So here we meet our “slowfooted god” (Catullus, Odes 36.7) again, the lame Vulcanus. Scaliger’s request was ­evidently ignored in one instance, but of course we know very little of the cases in which it was not.

7 Scaliger to De Thou, 27 Apr. 1591, in Scaliger, Correspondence, 2:160, lines 63–69. 8 Scaliger to De Thou, 4 June 1591, in ibid., 2:176, lines 8–10.

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7

Scaliger’s Discretion

Scaliger employed another strategy to conceal information: he used veiled references that were clear for the recipient, who was aware of the silent context, but that would not be immediately clear to outsiders. Thus in a letter to Casaubon in which Scaliger complained of the professor of theology François du Jon (his colleague at Leiden, better known as Franciscus Junius the Elder), Scaliger refrained from mentioning Junius by name, and limited himself to rubbishing the man’s work: “Have you ever seen the Heidelberg-edition of Manilius?” Scaliger’s student Daniel Heinsius, who posthumously published this letter in 1627, thought this reference was too thinly disguised. He replaced the words “the Heidelberg-edition of Manilius” with “the edition of ***.”9 Likewise, when Scaliger wrote to Casaubon again, he spoke, in the context of his own edition of Manilius, about someone who “hardly knows Latin,” as was evidenced by “that Heidelberg-edition” of his, as well as by his “notes on the ecclesiastical African,” knowing all too well that Casaubon would immediately recognize that it concerned Junius’s Manilius edition and his notes on Tertullian, the Church Father who was born in the Roman province of Africa. Again, Heinsius thought that Junius’s identity was too lightly concealed and proceeded to replace with asterisks three of Scaliger’s references. Instead of “my Manilius,” Heinsius printed “my ***” (so as to obscure that it was in the context of Manilius that Scaliger complained about someone); he replaced the word Heidelberg with asterisks again; and he had asterisks printed instead of “the ecclesiastical African.”10 Scaliger came back to the issue in a third letter. This time, he spoke of “someone of great reputation,” who continuously criticized Scaliger in his public lectures and who knew hardly any Latin at all. Scaliger was immediately put off when he opened this man’s commentary on To Atticus. “If you want to see it for yourself, read his Manilius-notes, read his [edition of] Cyprian’s teacher.” All this time, Scaliger refrained from mentioning Junius, and referred only to Junius’s work: the commentary on (Cicero’s Letters) To Atticus, and that on “the teacher of Cyprian,” who was of course Tertullian again. Heinsius replaced only the word “Manilius-notes” by asterisks.11 These interventions raise the question of what an editor was allowed to disclose and what not. What was Scaliger’s opinion of the possible publication of his own epistolary legacy?

9 10 11

Scaliger to Casaubon, 27 Mar. 1598, in ibid., 3:109, line 27. Scaliger to Casaubon, 23 Oct. 1598, in ibid., 212–13, lines 18, 24–25. Scaliger to Casaubon, 16 May 1599, in ibid., 281, line 28.

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The Intricacies of Publishing Scaliger’s Correspondence Posthumously12

Scaliger himself never planned to have his letters printed. “Is it a blessing for us if people, without our asking for it and knowing it, make faulty and in every aspect mutilated editions of our letters, verses, trifles?” he rhetorically asked Casaubon, two years before his death in 1609.13 Yet, he did consider it, as is clear from his hostile response to a German pastor, Theobaldus Meuschius, who published two letters from Scaliger as part of the paratext of his Harmonia Evangelica,14 without informing Scaliger: Il y a un fat de ministre qui a fait imprimer de mes epistres. Je le reprens bien en son Harmonia Evangelica. Il n’aura garde de faire imprimer cette epistre-là.15 Scaliger went on to predict that his friend Janus Gruter would be wary of printing the letters he had received from Scaliger (these letters were full of instructions on how Gruter should print the corpus of Latin inscriptions, and of complaints on Gruter’s slow progress): Gruter n’a garde de faire imprimer celles qui je lui escris, car je l’instruis de plusieurs choses. Scaliger subsequently ridiculed men who attempt to make a name for themselves by publishing the letters of a greater man: C’est à faire à un ignorant de faire ainsi imprimer des epistres pour estre honoré.16 12

13

14 15 16

This subheading is borrowed from Henk Nellen, “Confidentiality and Indiscretion: The Intricacies of Publishing Grotius’ Correspondence Posthumously,” in Produktion und Kontext. Beiträge der Internationalen Fachtagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition im Constantijn Huygens Instituut, Den Haag, 4. bis 7. März 1998, ed. H.T.M. van Vliet (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 135–44, where a similar case is discussed. Scaliger to Casaubon, 8 Mar. 1607, in Scaliger, Correspondence, 7:80, lines 11–12): “Beant nos denique qui nostro iniussu, nobis insciis, epistolas nostras, versus, nugas, omnia trunca, mendosa edunt?” These two letters are Scaliger to Meuschius, 2 June 1602 and 27 Aug. 1603, in ibid., 4:305–07, 5:132–33. This letter, in which Scaliger apparently upbraided Meuschius sharply, has not come down to us. See ibid., 6:47, lines 10–11. Scaligerana, Thuana, Perroniana, Pithoeana et Colomesiana. Ou Remarques historiques critiques, morales, et litteraires de Jos. Scaliger, J. Aug. de Thou, Cardinal Du Perron,

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Finally, he professed to dislike the idea of his letters being printed. “If I wanted them printed, I would polish them.” This is not to be read as a plan; on the contrary: Scaliger did not polish his letters because he had no plans of publishing and would have to be forced to do so: Entre les siens [i.e., Scaliger’s] on escrit tumultuairement sans ordre, quidquid in buccam venit. Si vellem excudi, polirem. Je seray contraint de faire un petit volume d’Epistres, et desavoueray toutes celles qu’on feroit imprimer.17 We have no drafts or copies of Scaliger’s outgoing letters, and if he made mistakes in his autographs, he corrected them immediately by crossing out a word, and carried on writing. A few grammatical mistakes in his autographs imply that he did not care to read his letters over before sending them off. For Scaliger, letters were primarily carriers of information, and writing them was not in the first place a literary pursuit. But according to his student Daniel Heinsius, Scaliger was not hostile to the idea that others would publish his letters after his death. Perhaps Scaliger trusted that letters with delicate information would be treated with due caution, given that confidants like Isaac Casaubon had proved trustworthy. But Casaubon wrote to De Thou after Scaliger’s death: If someone were to publish all the letters of this man, not only those that he wrote with a certain, intended content with more attention, but also those that he dashed off, he would in my opinion render no bad service.18 Casaubon used a Plinian tag to indicate the letters Scaliger had given special attention: Pliny the Younger spoke of publishing those of his letters that “I wrote with more attention” (curatius scripsissem).19 But Casaubon also thought it worthwhile for scholars to take notice of Scaliger’s straightforward, day-to-day letters (perhaps we may say familiar letters). Scaliger would not have agreed.

17 18

19

Fr. Pithou, et P. Colomies, ed. Pierre des Maizeaux, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Cóvens et Mortier, 1740), 2:307. Ibid., 308. Casaubon to De Thou, 29 June 1610, in Joseph Scaliger, Opuscula varia antehac non edita, ed. Isaac Casaubon (Paris: Hadrianus Beys, 1610), sig. í2v: “Si quis omnes huius viri epistolas, non solum quas certo proposito argumento accuratius scripsit, sed etiam quas subito exaravit, publicaret, eum ego existimem non male operam positurum.” Pliny the Younger, Epistles 1.1: “Frequenter hortatus es, ut epistulas, si quas paulo curatius scripsissem, colligerem publicaremque.”

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Scaliger’s correspondence marks a watershed in the history of epistolary self-presentation.20 From Petrarch to Lipsius, humanists had often tried to control their own public profile by means of carefully editing their own letters. Judith Henderson has the impression that humanists wrote and published letters in the late fifteenth century because the new opportunity for self-promotion to a larger audience proved irresistible. The humanist letter collection became the equivalent of our literary review or scholarly journal as a forum for professional discussion and career building.21 Scaliger had witnessed Justus Lipsius churning out carefully selected and continuously reprinted (and retouched) volumes of letters for over a decade.22 But precisely at this time, about half a century before scholarly journals would conquer the world, things changed. Learned men, at least as far as the Low Countries are concerned, increasingly left it to posterity to publish their ­letters posthumously, often more than once in expanded editions, as in the cases of the letters of Dominicus Baudius (fourteen editions),23 Isaac Casaubon (three editions),24 20

21

22 23 24

Dirk van Miert, “Het presenteren van de geleerde ander. Een diachronisch overzicht met enkele methodologische overwegingen,” in De menselijke maat in de wetenschap. De geleerden(auto)biografie als bron voor de wetenschaps- en universiteitsgeschiedenis, ed. Leen J. Dorsman and Peter Jan Knegtmans (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013), 45–46. Judith Rice Henderson, “Humanist Letter Writing: Private Conversation or Public Forum?” in Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, ed. Toon Van Houdt et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 25. For an overview of the repeated editions of Lipsius’s Centuriae, see the bibliography in Scaliger, Correspondence, 1:lxxiv–lxxvii. See ibid., lx–lxii. See also Philip C. Molhuysen, “Dom. Baudii Epistolae,” Tijdschrift voor Boek- en Bibliotheekwezen 1 (1903): 243, who identifies only ten editions. Paul Dibon, “Les Avatars d’une édition de correspondance: les Epistolae i. Casauboni de 1638,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2, no. 2 (1982): 25–63; see, in addition, Heinsius to G.J. Vossius, 22 Oct. 1629, ms iii C 18 no. 55, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Amsterdam, Heinsius to Jacobus Rovenius, 1 Feb. 1637, ms Sup.ep. v, fol. 49r, Staats- und Univer­ sitätsbibliothek, Hamburg; and James Ussher to Ludovicus de Dieu, 9 June 1632, postscript, ms copy Thysiana Archief 170, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden (I am indebted to Elizabethanne Boran, Edward Worth Library, Dublin, for letting me know the date and addressee of this letter, which she has edited from an autograph, in Elizabethanne Boran, ed., The correspondence of James Ussher: 1600–1656; with Latin and Greek translations by David Money, 3 vols. (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2015), 2: 582–87. The second edition, edited by Johann Georg Graevius (Magdeburg and Helmstedt: Chr. Gerlach, 1656), was expanded with eighty letters, and the third edition (Rotterdam:

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Hugo Grotius (ten editions),25 Caspar Barlaeus (one edition),26 Claude Saumaise (one edition),27 and Gerardus Joannes Vossius (four editions).28 What had Scaliger himself said about the posthumous publication of his legacy? He bequeathed his unpublished papers to Leiden University Library, but on the condition that none of these be published, not even abstracts of them.29 The papers contained not only unpublished but also unfinished material. The will says nothing about Scaliger’s letters. His testament pertained only to what he owned; what he had sent off was not in his possession anymore. Letters, as soon as they were posted, were out of the control of their senders. Scaliger thought he ought to be consulted if someone wanted to publish his letters (as is clear from the Meuschius case), but he was unable to appeal in his testament to any legal rule. The same applied to any items attached with letters: short essays, treatises, occasional poems, lists of corrections and remarks, charts, tables, drawings of monuments, and so on. The recipients of such schedia, schedae, or chartae usually detached them from the letters and filed them separately.30 A number of such small works had already been printed during Scaliger’s life. The first edition of his Opuscula appeared in Paris in 1605. He did not initiate the edition and did not oversee it, and he was annoyed that some corrections that he sent to the editor, Charles l’Abbé or Carolus Labbaeus, arrived too late to be inserted. Isaac Casaubon, who lived in Paris and who was close to Labbaeus, promised Scaliger that in the next edition everything would be settled. Here we see a reason why Casaubon in 1610 published an expanded version of the Opuscula, this time posthumously, and now with inclusion of letters.31

25 26 27 28

29 30

31

Caspar Fritsch et Michel Böhm, 1709) with three hundred (Saskia Stegeman, Patronage and Service in the Republic of Letters: The Network of Theodorus Janssonius van Almeloveen [1687–1754] (Amsterdam: apa-Holland University Press, 1995), 51–52). Jacob ter Meulen and P.J.J. Diermanse, eds., Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 604–11. Epistolarum liber (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu 1667). Epistolarum liber primus (Leiden: Adrianus Wyngaerden, 1656). Epistolae (London: S. Smith, 1690; Augsburg: typis Schönigianis, 1691; London: S. Smith & B. Walford, 1693); Epistolae selectiores, in Vossius, Operum tomus quartus (Amsterdam: P. & J. Blaeu, 1699), sec. 6, 3–398. Henk Jan de Jonge, “The Latin Testament of Joseph Scaliger, 1607,” Lias 2, no. 2 (1975): 255. See Dirk van Miert, “Concluding Observations on Communicating Observations,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500–1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. van Miert (London: Warburg Institute; Torino: Nino Aragno Editore, 2013), 231–33. See our discussion in Scaliger, Correspondence, 6:106–07.

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Casaubon wrote in his preface to this edition that he would have preferred Scaliger to have published the material himself, but Scaliger had replied that he had written many works on demand, works of which he had kept no copy.32 Casaubon in his preface was careful to account for his choices and for his sources: he made sure that he printed only genuine works. Although he limited himself to what he could find in Paris,33 he stated that he had asked Daniel Heinsius in Leiden for more material.34 Why Heinsius? Because Heinsius, as librarian of the university and as Scaliger’s favorite student, had been responsible for guarding the legacy of Scaliger in the university’s library. Heinsius proved unwilling to send the material, because of Scaliger’s prohibition of publishing anything. Casaubon envied the Dutch, who not only “possessed” Scaliger during all those years he spent in Leiden, but even continued to do so after his death. Casaubon wished France had not been robbed of these treasures. The letters exchanged between Casaubon and Heinsius corroborate Casaubon’s account. Casaubon put pressure on Heinsius by writing to people close to Heinsius, and he even mobilized the authority of De Thou.35 But Heinsius remained reluctant to send Casaubon the material he had asked for, such as a numismatic treatise by Scaliger, as he let Casaubon know in a letter from February 1610. Heinsius expressed joy that Scaliger’s small works were being (re)printed in Paris. But he regretted that he could not comply with Casaubon’s request to send more material from the Leiden library, owing to Scaliger’s own prohibition.36 But Heinsius did approve of printing letters: “When he was still alive, Scaliger showed himself not terribly opposed to this idea, the many times I told him this

32 Scaliger, Opuscula, sig. év. 33 Ibid., sig. é3r. 34 Ibid., sig. í3r. 35 Casaubon to Heinsius, 19 Apr. 1609, in Casaubon, Epistolae, insertis ad easdem responsionibus, ed. Theodorus Janssonius ab Almeloveen (Rotterdam: typis Casparis Fritsch et Michaelis Böhm, 1709), 331; Casaubon to Heinsius, 3 Jan. 1610, in ibid., 340; Casaubon to Janus Rutgersius, 3 Jan. 1610, in ibid., 340–41; Casaubon to Rutgersius, 5 Jan. 1610, in ibid., 341; Casaubon to Heinsius, 12 Jan. 1610, in ibid., 341 (“Scimus isthic vos habere multa lectu dignissima, quae vel ipsi edite, vel nobiscum communicate. Hoc Praeses Thuanus te mecum rogat: at scin’ quomodo? ut nihil magis obnixe queamus.”); Casaubon to Thomas Erpenius, 13 Feb. 1610, in ibid., 341–42; Casaubon to Heinsius, 1 May 1610, in ibid., 347–48, postscript 348. 36 See, e.g., Heinsius to Casaubon, 21 May 1610, ms Burn. 364, fol. 231r–v, notably 231v, British Library, London.

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was going to happen.”37 In fact, Heinsius supervised what became the dominant early modern edition of Scaliger’s letters—the Leiden edition of 1627. A letter to Pierre Dupuy of 1626 shows that Heinsius struggled to find a balance between the printer’s wish for bulk, his readers’ expectations of selectivity, and his own inclination to select on the basis of style and contents. We also see him evaluating the editorial principles of one of his predecessors, Casaubon, who had been more selective than he. Heinsius excused himself for the relatively large number of letters that carried little weight in his eyes because they were not always up to the best standards of style and content. He said he was unwilling to expose some of Scaliger’s careless letters, and he left out letters that painfully showed Scaliger’s mathematical shortcomings. Nevertheless, to please the printer Heinsius added other letters, some of which were fine; about the quality of others, he remained silent.38 Not everyone particularly appreciated Heinsius’s edition of 1627. When it came out, Gerard Johannes Vossius complained more than once that Heinsius had insufficiently censored some of Scaliger’s scathing criticisms of Vossius’s father-in-law, Franciscus Junius the Elder, who was still all too easily recognizable. In fact, he thought Heinsius would have done better to omit entire letters instead of superficially censoring them.39 Ironically, it was Vossius’s own son Isaac who in 1666 published the infamous Scaligerana, which recorded Scaliger’s sayings from within the even more private setting of conversations in the seclusion of the scholar’s own house, as recorded by some of his students. This often-scandalous publication proved such an immediate success (it was reprinted in 1667, 1668, and 1669) 37

38

39

Heinsius to Casaubon, 14 Feb. 1610, ibid., fol. 230r–v, at 230r: “De libellis Scaligeri quos apud vos excudi scripsisti vehementer gaudeo. Utinam conferre vobis aliquid possem. Nam quaecunque bibliothecae reliquit, edi vetuit. Inter ea est doctissimum De re nummaria scriptum, sed quod, nisi fallor, etiam in vestris manibus versatur. Poemata quae sparsim edita sunt, aut alibi edenda adhuc latent, coniungi a me voluit et publicari: quae Lutetiae excudi cum praefatione mea vellem, modo commode cum reliquis excudi, et divendi possent. … Existimo multas apud vos illius viri elegantissimas extare literas, quae edi cum delectu publice interesset, neque ipse ὤν ἐν ζῴοις cum id saepe di[ce]rem futurum, vehementer refragari videbatur.” (There is some loss to the right margin, unfortunately.) Heinsius to Pierre Dupuy, 6 June 1626, ms Coll. Dupuy 19, fols. 113r–14v, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. The passage about mathematics is not cited in our quotation in Scaliger, Correspondence, 1:xliii–xliv. See G. Vossius to Grotius, 23 Aug. 1627, in Grotius, Briefwisseling, 3:160–61; and G. Vossius to Franciscus Junius F.F., 22 Sept. 1628, in Sophie van Romburgh, “For my worthy Freind [sic] Mr Franciscus Junius”: An Edition of the Correspondence of Francis Junius F.F. (1591– 1677) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), no. 59(h), 342.

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that it gave an existing genre of table talk (think of Luther’s Tischreden and James I’s Table Talk) a new impulse and inaugurated a veritable craze in publishing the apophthegmata and sententiae of learned men: the genre of -ana, which became immensely popular in the second half of the seventeenth century.40 The entry “Junius” in the Scaligerana paints a particularly nasty portrait of Franciscus Junius as someone who read himself into ignorance, while thinking himself a better Grecian than Casaubon. “Junius despises the whole world. He thinks he is the greatest man of his own time, of past and of future ages. … He had two Flemish wives and he still never learned Flemish.” The entry carries on like this for two pages (it is among the longest in the entire Scaligerana), and one can understand why such gossip was avidly consumed in the tightly bound network of the Republic of Letters. Riding the crest of this wave, Isaac Vossius’s good friend Paul Colomiès (Colomesius) even proceeded to publish a key with “solutions” to the censored passages in the editions of the correspondences of Scaliger, Casaubon, and Claude Saumaise. Whoever wondered who was hiding behind Heinsius’s asterisks was much helped by Colomiès.41 Colomiès’s “solutions” share some characteristics with a genre popular in the eighteenth-­century historiography of learning: catalogs of names revealing the identity of anonymous or pseudonymous authors.42 But Colomiès’s keys were also a set of belated footnotes to, or even a commentary on, the posthumous 40

41

42

See Francine Wild, Naissance du genre des -ana (1575–1712) (Paris: Champion, 2001). Michael Lilienthal’s “Observatio vi de libris in ana,” in Lilienthal, Selecta historica et literaria (Königsberg and Leipzig: Literis Reusnerianis, 1715), 141–77, gives an overview and evaluation of no less than forty-five different table talks. On the freedom of discussing heterodox theories at the dinner table, see Martin Mulsow, Die unanständige Gelehrtenrepublik. Wissen, Libertinage und Kommunikation in der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2007), 122–28; Dirk van Miert and Henk Nellen, “Media en tolerantie in de Republiek der Letteren. De discussie over Isaac de La Peyrère (ca 1596–1676) en zijn Prae-Adamitae,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 30, no. 1 (2014): 3–19. Paulus Colomesius=Paul Colomiès, “Clavis Epistolarum Josephi Justi Scaligeri Aginnensis, Lugduni Batavorum 1627, 8°,” “Clavis Epistolarum Is. Casauboni Genevensis, Hagae-Comitis A. 1638. curante Cl. Gronovio,” “Clavis Epistolarum Claudii Salmasii Divionensis, editore Ant. Clementio. A. 1656,” and “Clef des Epîtres Françoises à M. Joseph Juste de la Scala. Recueillies par Jacques de Reves, à Harderwyck l’an 1624,” in Colomiès, Opuscula (Paris: Sebastian Mabre Cramoisy, 1668), 147–91, at 150–51, referring to pp. 165 and 173–75 of Heinsius’s edition. See the apparatus criticus in Scaliger, Correspondence, 3:109, line 27; 212, line 18; 213, lines 24–25. Martin Mulsow, “Practices of Unmasking: Polyhistors, Correspondence, and the Birth of Dictionaries of Pseudonymity in Seventeenth-Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 219–50.

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work of recentiores such as Scaliger.43 Theodorus Janssonius ab Almeloveen, who like Colomiès was a facilitator, knowledge broker, and supplier of building blocks for the history of recent learning (it is no coincidence that he authored a Plagiariorum syllabus),44 pillaged Colomiès’s keys in his monumental third (and definitive) edition of Casaubon’s letters of 1709.

Isaac Casaubon and Early Modern Authors’ Rights

Exercising control over one’s own letters could be a difficult affair. Authors’ rights were acknowledged by most authors themselves, but were generally not legally formalized. Only printed material could temporarily be protected within the jurisdictional territory of a ruler. The interests of authors and printers often clashed. Although a letter became the physical property of the addressee, the sender still felt he had a moral right to control its fate. In 1644, René Descartes became angry with the physician Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius for adding his correspondence with Descartes to the 1644 edition of the philosopher’s Fundamenta. The decision to include these letters was made without Descartes’s consent, and the two stopped exchanging letters.45 The prudent scholar Isaac Casaubon harbored strong opinions about the difference between work for private communication and work for the public sphere. He attacked the publication of one of his letters to Joseph Scaliger by his enemy Kaspar Schoppe.46 In this letter, Casaubon deplored the poor 43

For example, where Scaliger speaks of a “maximi nominis vir,” Colomiès identifies “Petrus Victorius,” or when Scaliger mentions an “Apologia homuncionis nescio cuius,” Colomiès clarifies: “Mathematica pro Lucano Apologia Francisci Insulani, Parisiensis procutoris; de qua quaedam diximus in Gallia Orientali in Syllabo scriptorum adversus Scaligerum” (Colomesius, “Clavis Epistolarum Josephi Scaligeri,” 148). 44 Stegeman, Patronage and Service, 51; Herbert Jaumann, “Öffentlichkeit und Verlegenheit. Frühe Spuren eines Konzepts öffentlicher Kritik in der Theorie des ‘plagium extrajudiciale’ von Jakob Thomasius (1673),” Scientia poetica. Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und der Wissenschaften 4 (2000): 79n.35. 45 Mihnea Dobre, “Early Cartesianism and the Journal des Sçavans, 1665–1671,” Studium 4, no. 4 (2011): 237. 46 Kaspar Schoppe, Alexipharmacum regium, felli draconum et veneno aspidum sub Philippi Mornaei de Plessis nupera papatus historia abdito oppositum; et serenissimo D. Jacobo Magnae Britanniae regi strenae Januariae loco muneri missum (Mainz: ex officina typographica Ioannis Albini, 1612), 16–18.

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­erformance of the Calvinist leader Philippe du Plessis-Mornay at the p Conference of Fontainebleau (1600), an orchestrated showdown between Catholic and Huguenot leading intellectuals.47 The Catholic controversialist Schoppe capitalized on this critique of one great Calvinist scholar by another, by inserting, between square brackets, biting anti-Calvinist paraphrases of Casaubon’s carefully couched phrases. Feeling that Schoppe had rubbed salt into his wounds, Casaubon was infuriated. In a letter to Georg Michael Lingelsheim, written in 1612, he reflected on something that today we would call authors’ rights. The passage is worth quoting in full, because Casaubon is very explicit in his condemnation of publishing material without the author’s consent (again, the italics represent what was put in Greek): Although through God’s virtue I could rightly ignore the evil speaking of this Thersites,48 I cannot and ought not be silent about the notorious injustice he caused me. He has laid hands on a letter that I once wrote to the great Scaliger, in accordance with our mutual bond. With the impudence of a prostitute, the idiot has published part of it without consulting me. The wretch did not realize that he could not bring forth someone else’s letter without incurring the accusation of manifest theft, indeed of the most disgraceful kind. For where did he get the letter? Who gave it to him? Or what else than theft is it to hand over something that belongs to someone else against the will of the owner? I had learned from the writings of the most serious men that this sneaky bookish predator once in his youth heinously pillaged the manuscripts of Obertus Gifanius. Now his own evidence betrays him as a shrew-mouse. So this thief is a ­gallows-rogue and one who is caught in the act of a most shameful type of theft. Litterae ad familiares are not governed by public law, they are in the purview of private law and are private property.49 Thus in the times when among the pagan Greeks and Romans a virtue reigned that in the false Christians of today we can only long for, great leaders refused to inspect the letters intercepted from their enemies. And rightly so. For whoever violates the law of literature, violates the law of nations and disturbs the laws of the entire human society. He therefore is a criminal, 47 48 49

Casaubon to Scaliger, 22 Sept. 1600. We neglected to consult this incomplete editio princeps for our edition of Casaubon’s letter in Scaliger, Correspondence, 3:497–501. An ugly figure who is proverbially given to evil speaking and contemptible. See Homer, Illiad 2; Juvenal, Satires 8.269; Erasmus, Adagia, no. 3280. That is, the property of the recipient. Of course the recipient should handle a letter in accordance with the interests of the sender.

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a cursed man in need of expiation. “For he that foments civil discord is a clanless, hearthless outlaw.”50 Casaubon then goes on to blame the ignorance and “diabolic malice” of “this monster,” who “contaminated with his own filth” (i.e., added paraphrases of) Casaubon’s words, partly because he did not know any Greek (of course Schoppe did know Greek, but he was not sure all his readers did). When invoking antiquity, Casaubon may have had in mind a passage in Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius that relates how the Rhodians, who were under siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes (305 bce), intercepted letters from Demetrius’s wife to her husband but left them unopened, just as Athenians had once done after capturing the messengers of Philip of Macedonia: the military letters were opened and read, but the one from Philip’s wife, Olympia, was sent back with the seal unbroken.51 The passage suggests that antiquity drew a line between a private domain as something personal and a public domain as something political. Adolf Deissmann classified epistolography into official letters (epistles) and personal correspondence (letters).52 Of course, such dichotomies hardly ever reflect situations in real life, in which letters can carry all sorts of information. Every letter, no matter how personal or public, how real or fictitious, how well wrought or dashed off, is the product of a selection of information 50

51 52

Casaubon to Georg Michael Lingelsheim, 9 Aug. 1612, in Casaubon, Epistolae, 483: “Quum igitur Thersitae istius maledicentiam, Dei virtute, possimus iure contemnere; insignitam iniuriam quam fecit nobis, tacere non possumus, nec debemus. Nactus enim epistolam quam ad magnum Scaligerum pro mutua coniunctione nostra aliquando scripsimus, prostituti pudoris nebulo nobis inconsultis partem illius edidit. Non cogitavit Alastor, epistolam alienam proferre se non posse, quin furti manifesti, et quidem turpissimi, reum sese ipse perageret. Nam unde habet? Quis illi dedit? Aut quid furtum est aliud, nisi alienae rei invito domino tractatio? Didiceram ex gravissimorum scriptis felem hanc librariam viri clarissimi Oberti Gifanii scrinia olim in iuventute sua nefarie compilasse. Nunc prodit se indicio suo sorex. Fur igitur est iste furcifer, et quidem in maxime infami furti genere ἐπὶ ἀυτοφώρῳ deprehensus. Literae ad familiares scriptae iuris publici non sunt, privati iuris, privatae possessionis sunt. Itaque olim quum inter paganos Graecos et Romanos virtus vigeret, quam in falsis Christianis cogimur hodie desiderare, magni duces captas suorum hostium literas inspicere noluerunt. Recte. Nam qui ius literarum violat, ius gentium violat, humanae totius societatis iura conturbat. Scelestus igiter est, ἐναγὴς et piaculiaris: Ἀφρήτωρ, ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέστιός, ἐστιν ἐκεῖνος [Homer, Iliad 9.63].” For this passage, see Patricia A. Rosenmayer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–2. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, trans. Lionel R.M. Strachan (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927).

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controlled by the author.53 Early modern writers ascribed different grades of privacy to letters depending on their status. Theoretically, humanist epistolography was ambivalent about the permitted level of personal expression. The reliance on classical rhetoric in the manuals on the art of letter writing until deep into the sixteenth century shows how the letter was expected to reach a public readership. Most authors, especially those who expected to publish their letters during their lifetimes, were reluctant to discuss personal convictions when communicating religious and political news.54 But the rise of Protestantism, which encouraged personal investigation of one’s own soul, contributed to an increasingly personal character in the letter, which made it more private. Because of the wars of religion, scholars turned to stoic philosophy; the Ciceronian ideal of style, associated with republicanism and public debate, grew less important. Instead, room was created for individual expression.55 The letter thus acted as a carrier of personal convictions and motives. In his expression of outrage Casaubon discusses the private domain and the public sphere by using a vocabulary that connotes the legal system: injustice (iniuria), theft (   furtum), accused (reus), other people’s belongings (res aliena), proprietor (dominus), evidence (indicium), thief (   fur), caught red-handed (ἐπὶ ἀυτοφώρῳ deprehensus), public law (ius publicum), private law ( privatum ius), private property ( privata possessio), inviolability of mail (ius literarum), and even the law of nations (ius gentium). In fact, the entire idea of private and public is derived from Roman law. The idea of theft (   furtum) was also applied later in the seventeenth century to a related form of literary crime: plagiarism.56 Casaubon assigns “private law” to litterae familiares. This would mean that even if letters were read by people surrounding the recipient, as they ­usually were in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Casaubon still 53 Rosenmayer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 5, 10–12. She also criticizes a classification by M. Luther Stirewalt, Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), who nevertheless maintains the distinction between “official letters” (6) and “personal familiar letters” (10). 54 Karl Enenkel, “Der neulateinische Brief als Quelle politisch-religiöser Überzeugungen. Theoretische Reflexionen zur Diskursivität einer ambivalenten Gattung,” in Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigating the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeanine De Landtsheer and Henk Nellen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3–16. 55 The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2010), s.v. “Letters, and Epistolography,” 523. 56 Jaumann, “Öffentlichkeit,“ 69. On author rights, see also Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things In Common. Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 5–7.

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regarded this practice as falling within the boundaries of the confidentiality of mail, even if he himself never specified how to define the circle of those authorized readers. Casaubon put his case very strongly because in addition to his personal reputation, Calvinism itself was at stake. His strong feelings on this matter may constitute a sign that the expectation of privacy for epistolae familiares was increasingly widespread in his milieu. This “private” domain, then, was not the personal privacy of the modern age but was seen as the domain of the familia: the household and the peers of the recipient. Did Casaubon expect that his letters would be read by other people than Scaliger alone? It is unlikely that Scaliger, who despised Schoppe even more than Casaubon did, showed Casaubon’s letter to the wrong person. Far more likely, Casaubon’s letter was intercepted and copied out. After all, Casaubon was closely monitored at the time by ecclesiastical authorities in Paris.57 Casaubon was not the only one to draw the boundary between privatus and publicus in terms of authorial control. During the seventeenth century, this distinction was omnipresent. Printing was generally thought to be an act of crossing the boundaries between private and public, as is clear from the oftenused idiomatic expression publici iuris facere (to place under public law) to denote “publishing.” We may locate the dichotomy of public versus private in a legal framework of publication, even if “private” does not connote the privacy of modern times but refers to a semiprivate sphere shared by the recipient of a letter and the friends of that recipient, as long as these were well disposed to the author of the letter. Conclusion Scaliger reckoned with the possibility that uninvited readers read his letters, and he disguised information by making implicit references only. He appealed to his authorial rights against Meuschius because he had not been consulted. From Casaubon’s protests we may conclude that there was a code against breaching the confidentiality of mail. He protested strongly in legal terms. A similar apprehension likely surrounded the prospect of letters being published posthumously, especially as this pattern became dominant after the mid-seventeenth century. But the keys of people like Colomiès show that 57

Dirk van Miert, “The Limits of Transconfessional Contact in the Republic of Letters around 1600: Scaliger, Casaubon, and Their Catholic Correspondents,” in De Landtsheer and Nellen, Between Scylla and Charybdis, 390–97.

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personal objections of deceased authors were deemed less important than serving the greater good of the community of scholars, who were entitled to have information on the good and the bad in the history of scholarship. This development may point to a growing commercialization in the Republic of Letters, as well as to the rise of the idea that historical facts deserved greater consideration than historical reputations.58 Of course, authors continued to insist that their moral rights be respected in their lifetimes, but dead scholars were abandoned to the not-so-very-tender mercies of a growing commercial literary market. This market, which produced the scholarly output known as historia literaria, aimed at a mixed readership of students and of people who were not professionals, but who could steep themselves in reading journals, −ana, keys, bio-bibliographies, and an increasing apparatus of footnotes in posthumously published collections of correspondence. The more sensitive the information, the more attractive was the collection. We are no less curious ourselves. In fact, every time we come across ­evidence that Vulcanus was not properly served by recipients of letters, we experience a sense of relief and satisfaction. The failed burnt offerings will keep us busy to the moment we retire. And hopefully long afterward.

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Intriguingly, Paul Botley, who is editing the correspondence of Casaubon’s English years (1610–14) comes to the conclusion that the early modern editors of Casaubon’s correspondence carefully manipulated Casaubon’s image by silently censoring harsh passages, critique of Protestant authorities and references to his domestic life. Hereby, they constructed a somewhat less passionate, more detached and more masculine public image of Casaubon. In this case, at least, it would appear that historical reputation did trump historical fact. Paul Botley, “The Censorship of Isaac Casaubon’s Letters,” paper read at the conference Epistolary Cultures. Letters and Letter-writing in Early Modern Europe, University of York, 18 March 2016.

chapter 2

Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon Nicholas Hardy* This chapter presents a text and translation of a new item of correspondence from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon, written in August 1612, and containing a discussion of Caesar Baronius’s Annales ecclesiastici, which Casaubon was preparing to attack in print. Sarpi makes the otherwise unattested claim that certain passages in the first volume of the Annales were inserted by Baronius at the behest of one of his scholarly assistants, Latino Latini, who wished to discredit Baronius’s history in the eyes of its more discerning readers by lacing it with patently absurd “proofs” of contemporary Roman Catholic doctrines. The letter is therefore of obvious interest to scholars of Counter-Reformation historiography. However, it also illustrates the ways in which citizens of the early modern Republic of Letters could disagree with one another over matters of intellectual and political principle. Sarpi’s comments on the Annales were shaped by his disapproval of Casaubon’s desire to concentrate on Baronius’s philological and historical errors, and by Casaubon’s increasing alignment with the religio-political agenda of his patron, King James i of England. Furthermore, the oblique manner in which Sarpi communicated his disapproval serves as a reminder that learned letter writers sought to manipulate their correspondents with a variety of generic conventions, stylistic registers, and other formal techniques: in order to evaluate the information a letter conveys, scholars first need to understand its literary as well as historical context. In corresponding about Baronius, Sarpi and Casaubon were discussing intellectual and religio-political problems that had affected their careers since 1606. At the beginning of that year, Venice was in a dispute with Rome, occasioned by its recent passage of laws expanding its jurisdiction over ecclesiastical property held within its territories, and its imprisonment and trial in civil

* I would like to thank Simon Ditchfield, Filippo de Vivo, Jean-Louis Quantin, Noel Malcolm, Thomas Roebuck, and Jan Machielsen for help regarding Sarpi’s letter; and Theodor Dunkelgrün, Scott Mandelbrote, Kirsten Macfarlane and Gian Mario Cao for comments on this chapter.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_003

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courts of two clerics.1 The dispute escalated in April, when Pope Paul v placed an interdict on the kingdom of Venice. The interdict excluded the people of Venice from participating in rites of the church and even sacraments, although it stopped short of outright excommunication. Sarpi’s recent appointment as official consultant to the Venetian Senate in theology and canon law placed him at the center of the controversy.2 In the following months, he wrote private memoranda for the government, and authored or made major contributions to various state-sponsored publications.3 Two of the papacy’s main defenders were the cardinals Robert Bellarmine and Caesar Baronius, whose comprehensive works of theological controversy and ecclesiastical history had become cornerstones of the Counter-Reformation church.4 Baronius made a speech in the papal consistory in favor of an interdict that was published three months later.5 Bellarmine became even more prominent, clashing directly and indirectly with Sarpi in a series of pamphlets disputing the nature and limits of ecclesiastical and civil power.6 Part of the Venetian response was to seek help from abroad. In May 1606, the Venetian ambassador to France, Pietro Priuli, approached Casaubon, among other Frenchmen, to write in support of Venice. He had secured his aid by October of the same year, having shown Casaubon the pamphlets published by Sarpi in the intervening months.7 Casaubon was impressed by the antipapal stance Sarpi had taken, as well as by his learning and his literary talents.8 The main product of Casaubon’s admiration emerged in June 1 Paolo Sarpi, Histoire du Concile de Trente: édition originale de 1619, ed. Marie F. Viallon and Bernard Dompnier, trans. Pierre François Le Courayer (Paris: Champion, 2002), xviii–xx. 2 Bartolomeo Cecchetti, La Republica di Venezia e la Corte di Roma nei rapporti della religione (Venice: P. Naratovich, 1874), 1:11–12; Vittorio Frajese, Sarpi scettico: Stato e Chiesa a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 289–90. 3 Gaetano Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi tra il Cattolico Philippe Canaye de Fresnes e il Calvinista Isaac Casaubon,” Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano 1 (1959): 85–86. For a list of publications regarding the interdict from 1606 to 1607, see Filippo de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri: politica e comunicazione a Venezia nella prima età moderna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2012), 369–403. 4 Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes, 3 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1586–93). 5 Generoso Calenzio, La vita e gli scritti del cardinale Cesare Baronio (Rome: Tipografia vaticana, 1907), 749–50; de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri, 302–03. 6 Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 97–99. 7 Paolo Sarpi, Lettere ai gallicani, ed. Boris Ulianich (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1961), xxviii–xxxi; de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri, 101–02. 8 See the notes taken between late Aug. and early Nov. 1606, when Casaubon was at La Bretonnière, in ms Casaubon 27, fol. 39r, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Casaubon to Paulus Petavius, 4 Nov. 1606, in Isaac Casaubon, Epistolae (Amsterdam, 1709), 279–80. See also

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1607, two whole months after the interdict had been lifted: a treatise entitled De libertate ecclesiastica.9 By the time the papal nuntius to France, Maffeo Barberini, prevailed upon the king to suppress Casaubon’s book, 264 pages had been printed, and copies of the unfinished volume were widely available.10 The De libertate ecclesiastica echoed, and even intensified, the minimalism of Sarpi’s definition of the church, and his appeals to scripture and primitive Christianity: most crucially, the rights of the early church had not encompassed clerical exemption from civil jurisdiction.11 Furthermore, Casaubon agreed with Sarpi that civil power was guaranteed not just by natural or human law, but by divine law enshrined in scripture. This separated the two men from many of their Gallican correspondents and collaborators, and united them in opposition to Bellarmine.12 As well as imitating Sarpi, Casaubon’s book disguised the confessional identity of its author by suppressing his belief that the pope was the Antichrist and thus eschewing the prophetic interpretations of scripture that characterized other Calvinist interventions in the controversy.13 Casaubon’s work also distinguished itself from its Calvinist counterparts by the range of its scholarly method and historical coverage: it blended scriptural and

9

10 11

12

13

Casaubon to Scaliger, 11 Mar. 1607, in The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 7:87; cf. Casaubon to Scipione Gentili, 18 Mar. 1607, in Casaubon, Epistolae, 285–86. Isaac Casaubon, De libertate ecclesiastica liber singularis: Ad viros politicos, qui de controversia inter Paulum V. Pontificem Maximum & Rempublicam Venetam, edoceri cupiunt, 1607. See the entry for 23 June 1607, in Pierre de l’ Estoile, Journal pour le règne de Henri iv, ed. Louis Raymond Lefèvre and André Martin (Paris: Gallimard, 1948–60), 2:251. Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, Raison d’état et raison d’église: La France et l’interdit Vénitien, 1606–1607 (Paris: Champion, 2009), 411–14. Boris Ulianich, “Considerazioni e documenti per una ecclesiologia di Paolo Sarpi,” in Festgabe Joseph Lortz, ed. Erwin Iserloh and Peter Manns, vol. 2 (Baden-Baden: Bruno Grimm, 1958), esp. 366–85. For Casaubon, see Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 100–101, 105, 107; Jaska Kainulainen, Paolo Sarpi: A Servant of God and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 182; Ulianich, “Considerazioni e documenti,” 386–87; Casaubon, De libertate ecclesiastica, 33–34. De libertate ecclesiastica, 39; Sarpi, Lettere ai gallicani, lxxv, lxxvii, lxxx; Kainulainen, Paolo Sarpi, 208–13; cf. Ulianich, “Considerazioni e documenti,” 398. For further criticisms of Bellarmine in the De libertate ecclesiastica, see 42–44, 74, 188–92, 198–99. Casaubon to Scaliger, 8 Apr. 1607, in Scaliger, Correspondence, 7:124; Filippo de Vivo, “Francia e Inghilterra di fronte all’Interdetto di Venezia,” in Paolo Sarpi: politique et religion en Europe, ed. Marie F. Viallon (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010), 180; Nicolas Vignier, De Venetorum Excommunicatione (Saumur, 1606), 35, 43; Daniel Tilenus, “Ad AntiChristianam Cardinalis Baronii Paraenesin Responsio,” in Nicolas Vignier, De Venetorum Excommunicatione, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1607), 43, 52–53.

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patristic argumentation with precedents from Roman and French law that might more plausibly have been adduced by a Gallican lawyer than by a Huguenot minister. The suppression of the De libertate ecclesiastica did not deter Sarpi, or Casaubon himself, from hoping that it might one day be completed, or from developing further interests in antipapal legal history and political theory.14 Casaubon’s Venetian correspondents exhorted him to finish his long-awaited work on Polybius, the historian of the early Roman republic.15 Ideally, this would replace the work of the famous Roman Catholic scholar Justus Lipsius, whose work on Roman politics and history had addressed itself primarily to subjects of absolute monarchies.16 But expectations for Casaubon’s Polybius were to be disappointed: all he produced during his own lifetime was an edition and translation of the text.17 Moreover, the Venetians soon realized that Casaubon remained committed to ecclesiastical scholarship, controversy, and reform. In letters that accompanied a copy of his Polybius, Casaubon revealed to Sarpi that his true interest lay in reconstructing the early church, and establishing the consensus of the Fathers on various problems currently confronting Christendom.18 Sarpi responded skeptically, reminding Casaubon that the Fathers themselves had discouraged their readers from attaching too much authority to their statements. Further correspondence exacerbated the gap between them.19 Casaubon’s growing dissatisfaction with certain Protestant theologians and their disrespect for antiquity was drawing him closer to the 14

See the letter from Philippe Canaye de Fresnes, the French ambassador to Venice, to Jacques-Auguste de Thou, 15 May 1607, in the former’s Lettres et Ambassade (Paris, 1645), 3:579; Canaye to Casaubon, 28 June 1607, in Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, ed. John Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), vol. 1, Notes, 164; Casaubon to Scaliger, 13 Apr. 1608, in Scaliger, Correspondence, 7:502. 15 Albert Martin, “L’édition de Polybe d’Isaac Casaubon (1594–1609),” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 10 (1890): 4. 16 Giovanni Francesco Biondi to Casaubon, 12 June 1608, ms Burney 363, fol. 93r, British Library, London; Domenico Molino to Casaubon, 18 Jan. 1609, ms Burney 367, fol. 28r–29r, esp. 28v; cf. Sarpi to Casaubon, 22 July 1608, ms Burney 365, fol. 285r. On Molino, Casaubon, and Sarpi, see Paolo Sarpi, Opere, ed. Gaetano Cozzi and Luisa Cozzi (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1969), 286, 556–57. For Lipsius, see above all his Politica, ed. and trans. Jan Waszink (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004). 17 Polybius, Historiarum libri qui supersunt, ed. and trans. Isaac Casaubon (Paris, 1609). 18 Sarpi to Casaubon, 22 June 1610, ms Burney 365, fol. 287r. 19 Sarpi to Casaubon, 17 Aug. 1610, ibid., fol. 288; for Sarpi and Casaubon’s theological differences during the years 1608–10, see Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 132–35.

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Church of England and further from Sarpi, who proved indifferent to his concerns.20 Casaubon became physically as well as intellectually closer to England after the assassination of Henri iv in 1610, when he accepted the patronage of Archbishop Richard Bancroft and James I and moved to London. His relocation worsened his estrangement from Sarpi, who lacked Casaubon’s enthusiasm for the English Church, and regarded James as a liability in the struggle against Habsburg Spain and the papacy.21 Perhaps hoping to counteract the influence of James and his bishops, Sarpi and his associates kept encouraging Casaubon to concentrate on confessionally neutral areas of scholarship, including Polybius. They also stressed the need to strip his work of theological elements if he wanted any further forays into anti-Roman controversy to appeal to Venetian readers.22 But in 1612, when Casaubon announced to Sarpi that he had started writing a refutation of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici, he proved himself to be less malleable than they had assumed.23 The list of contents printed at the beginning of the De libertate ecclesiastica promised that its penultimate chapter would deal specifically with errors in the Annales.24 Sarpi, or any reader of the De libertate ecclesiastica, might have expected this chapter to dwell on political and legal problems arising in later volumes of the Annales, rather than the first volume’s account of Christ, his first disciples, and the sacraments, ceremonies, and hierarchy they were held to have instituted. 20

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W.B. Patterson, King James vi and i and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127–37; Corrado Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), 345–46. Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 137–40; John L. Lievsay, “Paolo Sarpi’s Appraisal of James I,” in Essays in History and Literature Presented by Fellows of the Newberry Library to Stanley Pargellis, ed. Heinz Bluhm (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1965), 109–17. Domenico Molino to Casaubon, 22 Apr. 1611, ms Burney 367, fol. 35v: “astenendosi dalle cose de dogmi che qui sono abhorrite, et stando sù le Politiche, et sù le morali ancora”; Molino to Casaubon, 10 Apr. 1612, ibid., fol. 38r. On Molino and Sarpi see Sarpi, Lettere ai gallicani, lxxvi–lxxvii. Sarpi to Casaubon, 8 June 1612, ms Burney 365, fol. 289r, published in Sarpi’s Lettere ai protestanti, ed. Manlio Duilio Busnelli (Bari: Laterza, 1931), 2:219–20. Sarpi was responding to a lost letter of 30 Apr. 1612. De libertate ecclesiastica, 20–21. For the development of Casaubon’s interest in Baronius, see Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 317–18; Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2011), 176.

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As Casaubon now described it, however, this work would be less narrowly political than the De libertate ecclesiastica. Casaubon had already promised to another correspondent, the Huguenot diplomat Jacques Bongars, that it would undermine a number of Catholic superstitions. One example Casaubon gave was Baronius’s proof of the antiquity of the cult of images, adduced from a story in Acts attributing miraculous powers to Peter’s shadow: just as a shadow, the “image” of the man who cast it, had become an object of devotion, so too should other kinds of image.25 There was nothing particularly original or technical in this aspect of Casaubon’s critique: in fact, the same section of the Annales had already been ridiculed in one of the Calvinist interdict pamphlets.26 Bongars, who had made his own scholarly contributions to the campaign against idolatry, was likely to approve of the direction Casaubon’s work was taking.27 But Casaubon, who tended to fixate on and repeat certain talking points to various correspondents for weeks or months at a time, may have made similar comments to Sarpi. He had grounds for expecting Sarpi to support his plan, since the friar’s writings had revealed a strong disdain for the accretions of medieval Christianity. However, Sarpi’s response to Casaubon’s announcement was unenthusiastic. As Sarpi put it, Casaubon’s refutation would proceed smoothly from one of Baronius’s sources to the next: each one would provide another opportunity to expose Baronius’s ineptitude or credulity.28 In Sarpi’s view, Baronius’s perfunctory research had not merited the scrupulous investigation of sacred history that Casaubon eventually provided. The Counter-Reformation historian would be considered fortunate to have fallen at the hands of “the great Aeneas.”29 As well as questioning whether Casaubon was wasting his time in refuting the first volume of the Annales, Sarpi’s other writings suggest a measure of respect for Baronius, founded on his occasional willingness to criticize Catholic superstitions and the political machinations of the Spanish kings.30 Sarpi also 25

Casaubon to Bongars, 2 Apr. 1612, in Casaubon, Epistolae, 456; Casaubon is referring to the discussion of Acts 5:15 in Baronius, Annales ecclesiastici (Cologne, 1609–13), vol. 1, cols. 262–63 (34 ce, secs. 274–75). 26 Tilenus, “Responsio,” 56. 27 [Jacques Bongars], ed., Synodus Parisiensis de Imaginibus Anno Christi dcccxxiv (Frankfurt, 1596). Casaubon’s annotated copy is C.54.b.16.(2.), British Library. 28 ms Burney 365, fol. 289r: “Nulla pars est quae confutari non possit, solo adminiculo earum quae alio in loco ab eodem proferuntur.” 29 Ibid.: “magni Aeneae dextera cadet [Virgil, Aeneid 10.830], et tu ab obliuione, quae imminet illum uindicabis.” 30 Stefano Zen, “Paolo Sarpi, il cardinal Baronio e il calvinista Isaac Casaubon: polemiche storiografiche e Interdetto su Venezia,” in Società, cultura e vita religiosa in età moderna:

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recognized that parts of the Annales’ history of papal jurisdiction lent genuine support to the papacy against Venice: in such cases, it would be safer for the Venetians to replace historical precedent with legal theory.31 Sarpi’s qualified respect for Baronius was joined by misgivings about the relevance of the accusations Casaubon was planning to make, which concerned Baronius’s character as well as his erudition. In his response to Casaubon’s letter, Sarpi warned him that if he accused Baronius of deliberately abusing his sources, his refutation would not meet with the approval it deserved. It was better to regard Baronius as credulous than as biased or mendacious. Sarpi added that his judgment was based on his personal knowledge of Baronius: they had met in Rome in the 1580s.32 Despite his own views about James I, Sarpi celebrated Casaubon’s good fortune in enjoying the king of England’s patronage.33 Casaubon treated Sarpi’s comments as a subtle attempt to determine whether Sarpi himself might be welcomed as an exile in England, and passed the letter on to the king via the royal librarian, Patrick Young.34 It was known throughout Europe that Sarpi had suffered more than one assassination attempt since the lifting of the interdict, and Casaubon may even have regarded Sarpi’s apparent enthusiasm for England as a first step toward conversion.35 On 12 August 1612, less than two months after Sarpi wrote his letter, he received a message from the English ambassador to Venice, Dudley Carleton, informing him of James’s respect for him, and inviting him to declare more clearly the intentions he had hinted at

studi in onore di Romeo De Maio, ed. Luigi Gulia, Ingo Herklotz, and Stefano Zen (Sora: Centro di Studi Sorani “Vincenzo Patriarca,” 2009), 561, 568–76, 580. 31 Sarpi, Opere, 544–45; Filippo de Vivo, “Historical Justifications of Venetian Power in the Adriatic,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 2 (2003): 167–75. 32 ms Burney 365, fol. 289r. 33 Jacob Bernays regarded Sarpi’s tone here as sincere: Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1855), 179: “wer den Stil des Verfassers der Geschichte des tridentinischen Concils kennt, wird zugeben, dass diese Ausdrücke zu stark sind, um blos aus politischer Absicht erklärt werden zu können.” 34 See Casaubon’s letter to James’s librarian, Patrick Young, June 1612, in Johannes Kemke, Patricius Junius (Leipzig: M. Spirgatis, 1898), 14. 35 See, e.g., the entry for 24 Mar. 1609, in de l’ Estoile, Journal, 2:438. For Protestant speculation about the confessional allegiance of Sarpi and Venice following the interdict, see Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 118; Fulgenzio Micanzio, “Vita del padre Paolo,” in Sarpi, Istoria del Concilio tridentino, ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 1385–86; Sarpi, Lettere ai gallicani, xxxii–xxxiii; for a general study of Sarpi’s relationship with Protestantism, see Frajese, Sarpi scettico, esp. 255–78.

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in his letter to Casaubon.36 As well as showing Sarpi’s letter to James, Casaubon wrote two letters to Sarpi about the possibility of asylum in England, only one of which survives.37 The letters prompted a response from Sarpi, published here for the first time. Sarpi began by correcting Casaubon’s misapprehension about his desire to visit England: as he had already told Carleton, he had no intention of leaving, and ceasing to serve, the kingdom in which divine Providence had placed him.38 But Sarpi also continued the line of argument he had been developing about Baronius. He expanded his previous letter’s claim that Baronius was gullible, rather than mendacious, into a long anecdote that demonstrated the full extent of Baronius’s credulity. This part of his letter differed from the elaborately formal refusal of James’s offer that preceded it. The tone of what followed, by contrast, was playful and colloquial. As Sarpi put it, it was “more familiar,” and even self-indulgent, although it was also supposed to give a further impetus to Casaubon’s work.39 Sarpi knew that Casaubon was planning to focus his attack on the first volume of Baronius’s Annales. That particular volume, he claimed, had been polished and corrected by Latino Latini, a distinguished patristic scholar living in Rome. According to Sarpi, Latini was unimpressed by Baronius’s antiquarian labors, especially when they served as a basis for captious arguments for the supremacy of the pope over the rest of the church. Latini, however, was a quietist who preferred not to engage in public debate, so he kept his opinions to himself and found a way of undermining Baronius’s enterprise that only intelligent readers could detect. As well as improving Baronius’s Latin style, he convinced Baronius to augment his narration with nugatory and inept “proofs” of doctrines such as the “omnipotence” of the pope or the worship of saints’ relics. The former, for example, was bolstered by a passing reference in Acts to the miraculous powers of Peter’s shadow; the latter, by a similar story about the curative virtues of Paul’s handkerchief.40 36

37 38 39

40

Carleton to Sarpi, 12 Aug. 1612, in Sarpi, Opere, 643–45; cf. 637–38; Noel Malcolm, De Dominis, 1560–1624: Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984), 37. Casaubon to Sarpi, 1 July 1612, in Epistolae (Rotterdam, 1709), 472–73. Sarpi to Carleton, 14 Aug. 1612, in Sarpi, Opere, 647; ms Smith 74, 245–46, Bodleian Library. ms Smith 74, 246: “quia tecum familiarius ago, calamum retinere non possum quin ad Baronium excurrat, et ad operis incaepti prosecutionem te adhorter, licet importunè currenti stimulus addatur.” For the shadow, see n. 25. For the handkerchief, see Baronius, Annales, vol. 1, cols. 466–67 (55 ce, secs. 8–11; Acts 19:12).

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There are good reasons to be suspicious of elements of Sarpi’s story. As we have seen, Casaubon had already singled out one of these examples for ridicule in a letter to Jacques Bongars. He may well have added the other in one of his lost letters to Sarpi. If so, Sarpi was not attributing particular passages of the Annales to Latini; he was simply saying that such arguments as Casaubon found especially ridiculous were quite likely to have such a provenance. However, the claim that Latini helped Baronius is not, in itself, implausible. Latini’s relationships with renowned classical scholars such as Fulvio Orsini connected him to an international elite that was Catholic, but not exclusively clerical.41 He certainly contributed to Baronius’s major work of ecclesiastical scholarship preceding the Annales, his annotated edition of the Roman martyrology.42 He followed the printing of the first volume of the Annales closely, and he praised Baronius’s devotion to detail and to the truth in effusive letters to the Paduan humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli.43 Despite Latini’s obvious familiarity with Baronius, the other surviving information makes it hard to say whether he held the skeptical and even subversive view of ecclesiastical scholarship alleged by Sarpi. As consultor to the Congre­ gation of the Index, Latini censored the copies of works by earlier patristic scholars such as Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus that he had been given license to read, and he was complicit in the suppression of theologically inconvenient readings in ancient biblical manuscripts.44 He seems to have 41

42 43

44

Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983, 1993), 1:65; Jacques-Auguste de Thou, La vie de Jacques-Auguste de Thou  =  I. Aug. Thuani vita, ed. and trans. Anne Teissier-Ensminger (Paris: Champion, 2007), 324 (1.10.9); Lipsius to Everardus Pollio, 2 Sept. 1588, in Justus Lipsius, Epistolae, ed. Aloïs Gerlo, M.A. Nauwelaerts, and Hendrik D.L. Vervliet (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1978–), 3:126–27. Martyrologium Romanum, 2nd ed. (Antwerp, 1589), 165, 264, 315; Latino Latini, Epistolae, coniecturae, & obseruationes, ed. Domenico Macri (Rome; Viterbo, 1659–67), 2:vii–viii. Latini to Pinelli, 11 Nov. 1586, quoted in Une correspondance entre deux humanistes, ed. Anna Maria Raugei (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 1:358; Latini to Pinelli, 15 Nov. 1586, in ibid. Pierre Petitmengin, “Latino Latini (1513–1593): une longue vie au service des Pères de l’Église,” in Humanisme et église en Italie et en France méridionale: xve siècle-milieu du xvie siècle, ed. Patrick Gilli (Rome: École française de Rome, 2004), 394–98; for censorship of Beatus’s patristic scholarship, see Charles Munier, “Les annotations de Beatus Rhenanus aux éditions de Tertullien (Bâle, 1521, 1528, 1539) et leur mise à l’Index librorum prohibitorum,” in Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547): lecteur et éditeur des textes anciens, ed. François Heim and James Hirstein (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 235–62.

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regarded textual criticism and philological interpretation as dubious enterprises that failed to achieve certainty about what authors had written or thought.45 Furthermore, he appears to have concurred with Sarpi that individual Fathers, however distinguished, were too human and fallible to be depended on as sources of orthodoxy: that, at any rate, was the basis of his argument that there was no need to censor patristic editions, even if modern authors did not escape correction.46 Some of these details reinforce elements of Sarpi’s account, but they also expose its tendentiousness. He did not enable Casaubon, who probably had no independent information about Latini, to judge the validity or significance of his story. Sarpi used a single action by Latini to illustrate a set of general values that he was supposed to have held. Latini and Baronius became characters in a moral fable, as well as actors in history. Sarpi’s own part in the story was similarly vague. He told Casaubon nothing else about the years he spent in Rome, whereas the account of those years in Micanzio’s biography makes no mention of Baronius or Latini.47 From the mass of his experiences there, Sarpi detached a single anecdote that bore conveniently on the issues his other letters to Casaubon had already covered, and delivered a neat, rounded lesson: sensible men like Latini, even if they were great philologists, did not base an entire ecclesiology on the minute details of a single ancient text. Sarpi’s words could have been a warning to Casaubon, as much as a reflection on Baronius. In other words, Sarpi may have thought that Casaubon’s Exercitationes were just as “nugatory” as the work they sought to demolish. This opinion of Casaubon’s commitment to philological research was not unique to Sarpi. Lancelot Andrewes, for instance, rebuked Casaubon for wasting time on chronological particulars when he ought to be discussing more strictly “ecclesiastical” questions.48 Instead of Casaubon’s passion for criticism and documentation, Sarpi presented a different strategy for contending with Baronius: a secret history of Rome’s learned and clerical institutions, supplemented by general observations on human nature and political prudence. The aphoristic style in which Sarpi expressed Latini’s preference for subterfuge over open dissent recalls the political maxims of Justus Lipsius, and the realism that characterized his 45 46 47 48

Petitmengin, “Latino Latini,” 400–01. Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 136–38. Micanzio, “Vita del padre Paolo,” 1295–1300, esp. 1295–96. Andrewes to Casaubon, 23 Aug. 1612, in Casaubon, Ephemerides, vol. 2, Notes, 1203; original in ms Burney 363, fol. 26r; cited in Grafton and Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue,” 168.

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discussions of political prudence and the arcana imperii.49 Sarpi’s anecdote provided a language with which to discuss the motives, beliefs, and psychological characteristics of historical actors, and the institutional and social practices that shaped the texts they wrote, rather than the research that informed them. Casaubon, however, showed little interest in Sarpi’s strategy. His Exerci­ tationes do not proceed far enough to arrive at either of the specific passages that Sarpi identified as having been influenced by Latini, although Casaubon was apparently preparing to discuss them in the next volume of his refutation.50 Nonetheless, he could have dwelled on the composition of the Annales in his prefatory material. His manuscript notes suggest that he received and read Sarpi’s letter, and may have considered mentioning Latini: not as a subversive practical joker, but as a collaborator in a task that Baronius was not equipped to undertake alone.51 In the end, however, he did not. This indicates Casaubon’s commitment to a different mode of historiography. His pursuit of Baronius’s text was relentless, encompassing its style, its argumentative structure, and the documentary sources that it cited or ought to have cited; but he refrained from analyzing the social, political, and institutional factors that shaped Baronius’s research. Sarpi’s account pointed him in the direction of such factors, but it did not give him the tools or knowledge with which to assess them properly. However illuminating, Sarpi’s anecdote remained within a rhetorical, literary paradigm rather than a critical, scholarly one. It adhered to different standards of demonstration from early modern scholarly correspondences that dealt with other 49

David Martin Jones, “Aphorism and the Counsel of Prudence in Early Modern Statecraft: The Curious Case of Justus Lipsius,” Parergon 28, no. 2 (2011): 55–85. 50 In ms Casaubon 3, 9, Bodleian Library, Casaubon makes a connection between Baronius’s discussion of saints’ relics and his discussion of Peter’s shadow. He makes the same connection elsewhere in this manuscript, on p. 2 of the separately paginated section “De potestate praesertim temporali Pontificis Romani.” However, there is no evidence that he connected these two passages in the light of Sarpi’s letter, rather than on his own. 51 ms Casaubon 26, fol. 43r, contains remarks concerning the project of writing a universal (“oecumenica”) history; the comments on Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Evagrius also appear in his De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes (London, 1614), sig. *******1v. Below these comments in the manuscript, Casaubon discusses the amount of time Baronius required to write his history, before asking, “quis illum venia dignum censeat in tanta lentitudine?” followed by “Latinus Latinius”; For Baronius’s own comments about the gestation of the work, see his dedication to Pope Sixtus v, Annales, vol. 1, sig.)(4r–v. For the comments on the gestation of the Annales that Casaubon did eventually publish, see De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes xvi (London, 1614), sig. ****4v.

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kinds of document or event, such as inscriptions or eclipses.52 Its style is that of a “familiar” letter that draws on conventions of Latin epistolography as old as Cicero and Seneca, and it bears a resemblance to parts of his similarly colorful and documentation-free History of the Council of Trent.53 As far as we know, this is the last surviving letter between Casaubon and Sarpi. It reinforces the intellectual and religio-political differences between the two men that had emerged since the interdict controversy. In 1606, Casaubon had regarded Sarpi as an example of how to use humanist erudition in the service of contemporary religious and political causes. In his next few publications, and especially in the De libertate ecclesiastica, he would flirt with the more rhetorical, less heavily documented and meticulous style of writing that Sarpi had developed. But the Exercitationes would be a work of purer erudition than anything Casaubon had written in the interim, including the two other interventions in religious controversy that he had published at the behest of King James.54 Sarpi went in a different direction. He used the occasion of Casaubon’s and James’s invitation to England to establish a regular correspondence with the ambassador, Dudley Carleton, despite the risk to his career and to his person.55 He would also, like other Venetians who had initially courted Casaubon, develop a taste for the works of Francis Bacon, with their anticlericalism and their prudential and psychological evaluation of history and modern life.56 Casaubon and Baronius were both, in their own ways, committed to antiquity, and, if we believe their own rhetoric, to a Christendom that could still be united by correspondence and by scholarship in the face of political differences and religious obstacles. While Casaubon was trying to leave a fitting

52 Dirk van Miert, “Philology and Empiricism: Observation and Description in the Correspondence of Joseph Scaliger,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500–1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. van Miert (London: Warburg Institute; Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2013). 53 Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 11–48; Sarpi, Istoria del Concilio tridentino. 54 Ad Frontonem Ducaeum Epistola (London, 1611); Ad Epistolam Illustr. et Reuerendiss. Cardinalis Perronii Responsio (London, 1612). For Sarpi’s lukewarm reaction to both publications, see his letter to Casaubon, 8 June 1612, ms Burney 365, fol. 289r. 55 Sarpi, Opere, 648ff. 56 Vittorio Gabrieli, “Bacone, la Riforma e Roma nella versione Hobbesiana di un carteggio di Fulgenzio Micanzio,” English Miscellany 8 (1957): esp. 195–218; Gino Benzoni, “Giovanni Francesco Biondi. Un avventuroso Dalmata del Seicento,” Archivio Veneto 80 (1967): 34–36.

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monument to his life in letters, Sarpi and Casaubon’s other Venetian correspondents were still in the early stages of their political and literary careers.57 Like Bacon, they were interested in political action, and in intellectual reforms whose need for erudition was not always clear. They maintained less frequent, more carefully targeted, cautious, and even paranoid correspondences with scholars outside Venice than Casaubon had. They also discovered more informal, vernacular ways of communicating and engaging in political debate.58 Tony Grafton has taught us that these distinctions matter. In his work, the specific forms, locations, and practices of early modern intellectual life have taken their place alongside political thought and religion in broader histories of cultural change.59 Sarpi and his followers may not be natural citizens of Grafton’s Republic of Letters.60 But seeing Casaubon from their point of view can make the history of scholarship that he embodied, and that Grafton has recovered, appear even more precious and distinctive.

Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon, 17 August 1612

Below I present the text and translation of ms Smith 74, pp. 245–48, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The letter is a copy in the hand of Thomas Smith, the fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford who was temporarily ejected in 1688 for resisting James ii’s attempts to Catholicize it, and permanently ejected in 1692 for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to William and Mary once James had been deposed.61 Throughout his career, Smith maintained an interest in the biography of earlier seventeenth-century scholars. It is not clear from where Smith copied the letter, or when. He may have found the original, or an earlier copy, among the correspondence of Patrick 57

For Molino’s later career, see Antonella Barzazi, “La biblioteca di un mecenate: i libri di Domenico Molin,” in Amicitiae pignus: studi storici per Piero del Negro, ed. Ugo Baldini and Gian Paolo Brizzi (Milan: Unicopli, 2013), esp. 310–13. 58 Filippo de Vivo, “Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” Media History 11, no. 1–2 (2005): 37–51, esp. 39 for Sarpi’s correspondence. 59 Pace H.R. Trevor-Roper, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,” in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, and Other Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984), esp. 202, 235–36. 60 Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (2009). 61 Theodor Harmsen, “Smith, Thomas (1638–1710),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25912, accessed 4 Oct 2015.

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Young, who had been the conduit for Sarpi’s previous letter to Casaubon when Casaubon wanted to show it to James. Smith possessed a substantial collection of Young’s letters.62 However, Smith’s copy is accompanied by another item of Casaubon’s correspondence of which no other witness survives, whose provenance is unlikely to be the Young family.63 Smith appears not to have shared either letter with Theodor Jansson van Almeloveen, the editor of Casaubon’s correspondence to whom he imparted other relevant material.64 However, Smith did consider withholding material from Jansson, especially such as pertained to Casaubon’s time in England.65 Smith’s other correspondence and papers indicate his own interest in Sarpi and his manuscript Nachlass, but I have found nothing that pertains directly to the present letter.66 I have silently removed Smith’s cancellations, incorporated his corrections of his own copy, and preserved his underlinings. I have used chevrons to indicate words that need to be supplied where the binding of the manuscript is too tight to read them clearly. Text Isaaco Casaubono Paulus Sarpius Venetus. Praeclarissime Domine, mihique maximè colende, Cum & gravi et molesto morbo aliquâ ex parte levatus essem, opportunè mihi binae a te epistolae redditae fuerunt, quibus maximè sum recreatus; praesertim ob ea, quae nomine Serenissimi et Potentissimi Regis scribis in prioribus, et in posterioribus repetis. Quod de heroicis Sapientissimi Regis virtutibus, et de maximâ a me exoptata illius protectione, ad te scripseram, non eo fuit scriptum, ut Regi innotesceret; nunquam enim tantum ausus essem, sed quoniam quid de tuâ faelicitatate [sic] mihi videretur, non poteram exprimere, nisi ad meipsum transtulissem; tamen praeclarè mecum actum existimo, et maximi beneficij loco duco, id a te esse praestitum, quod maximè cupieram, nec audebam. Cum verò legerem, quae de potentissimo Rege ad me in tuis epistolis scribis, et ejus nomine spondes, obstipui meae indignitatis conscientiâ, et tanti 62 63 64

65 66

See n. 34; Thomas Smith, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium virorum (London, 1707), x–xi. Didier Hérauld to Casaubon, 13 Nov. 1600, ms Smith 74, 249. See Jansson’s letters to Smith in ms Smith 46; Edward Bernard to Smith, 11 Sept. 1692, ms Smith 47, fol. 116r; Smith to Bernard, 31 May 1694, ms Smith 57, 399; John Batteley to Smith, 26 Dec. 1698, ms Smith 47, fol. 4. Smith to John Batteley, 22 Oct. 1698, ms Smith 56, 23. Gilbert Talbot to Smith, 27 Nov. 1686, ms Smith 54, 1; Smith to William Hayward, 5 Dec. 1686, ms Smith 61, 51.

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Regis munificentiâ tam singulari, tamque sine exemplo, qui non multâ supplicatione fatigatus, sed voto vix et obliquè insinuato, immerentem suae protectionis sponsione honorare dignatus sit. Ejus majestas, inter excelsas suas virtutes, hâc etiam praestat, mortalibus omnibus, ut de cujusque officio certum judicium ferat; pro summâ suâ sapientiâ censuit mihi incumbere, quod unum etiam mihi semper proposui, nempe in hâc, ut ita dicam, speculâ manendum, et divinae vocationi obsecundandum, tamdiu, donec divinae Majestati beneplacitum fuerit meâ operâ (quaecunque tandem sit) efficere aliquid, quod in ejus gloriam cedat et Dominis meis non sit ingratum: quod si futura aliam rerum faciem tulerint, ut nunc potentissimi Regis beneficentiam intimo cordis condo, ita tunc reipsa fruar. Interim ejus clementiae genua omnia meae vitae servitiu sisto et voveo, ac si in ejus regno, et ejus beneficio viverem. Reliquum esset, ut pro tantâ munificentiâ sublimi aliquo gratiarum genere uterer: cui rei cum sim impar, te pro nostrâ amicitiâ rogo, ut meo nomine submississimè hoc munus obeas, et quod opportuniùs et efficaciùs pro tua educatione excogitaveris, eo me Majestati Regiae representes. Rei, de qua scrips magnitudo exposceret, ut nihil aliud adjungerem: sed quia tecum familiarius ago, calamum retinere non possum quin ad Baronium excurrat, et ad operis incaepti prosecutionem te adhorter, licet importunè currenti stimulus addatur. Erit opus et te dignum, et Ecclesiae apprimè utilissimum. Quae de Baronij auctoritate istic a Pontificijs circumjactantur, levia sunt ­collatione eorum, quae in Italiâ ei tribuuntur. Olim audiebat quintus, nunc audit solus Evangelista; et quantum deterrent homines à divinorum librorum lectione, tantum ad hujus studium exstimulant. Hoc te non latere volo, ante annum mandatum fuisse a Romanâ Inquisitione omnibus Episcopis et Inquisitoribus per Italiam, ut nihil scribi, neque ullum verbum contra Baronium proferri paterentur, neque alibi scriptum importari: vident illi, quantum caussae eorum conducat, ut sub personâ fidelis Historici delitescat. Caeterum cum contra primum tomum opus urgeas, animadvertisse te puto ejus tomi ab alijs styli discrimen; ejus rei caussam an scias, ignoro;—sed si fortè nescis, non sine voluptate a me auditurum puto. Caepit eum librum anno 1585. Cum ego Romae commorarer; in eâ Urbe degebat tunc Senex doctus, Latinus Latinius Viterbiensis; ad eum conveniebant plures, qui Romae erant literati, praesertim qui Patrum lectione capiebantur; erat enim in eorum scriptis maximè versatus; inter alios Baronius ejus domum frequentabat: erat ille vir in literis humanitatis non levitèr eruditus, et quae a Baronio scribebantur, Lituris ornabat Eâ causâ factum, ut Liber sit mixtus faece Baronianâ et puriori latice. Ille saepè mihi dicebat, se Baronij farragines emendare, quo illum exerceret, non quod opus luce dignum putaret, neque censebat ultra Apostolorum tempora progressurum. Vir ille erat pius,

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sed ex ijs, qui arbitrantur bonum virum sub tyrannide vivere posse, si modò non quid sibi detur, sed quid ille recipiat, attendat: ille mentem suam non quidem Baronio nec sui similibus aperiebat, sed ijs, quos capaces nosset. Dicebat ille, frustra insumere operam eos, qui contra receptam doctrinam scribere satagunt, quod legi non possint, nisi ab ijs, qui non indigent; esse tamen aliam apertam viam subveniendi deceptis, si juxta Italicum proverbium, ultra equum transiliatur, et receptae opiniones adeò ineptis aut levibus probationibus confirmentur, ut sic homines cordati in suspicionem falsitatis inducantur. In eo tomo hujus consilij vestigia aliqua invenies, quibus Baronius quidem deceptus fuit; sed vir cordatus excitari a somno potest, veluti, uti ex umbra Petri Omnipotentiam Papalem, ex sudario Pauli Sanctorum adorationem probat. Meae in te benevolentiae dones rogo, si te serijs occupatum in his nugis detinui; tantâ voluptate tecum colloquor, ut gravibus sermonibus destitutus, quicquid occurrit, in tuum sinum effundere non verear. Vale. Die 17. Aug: 1612.

Humillimus et devotissimus servus P.S.

Translation Paolo Sarpi of Venice, to Isaac Casaubon. Most excellent Sir, whom I care for above all, Once I had been somewhat relieved of my serious and debilitating illness, I had the fortune of receiving two letters from you. They restored me as much as anything else; especially what you write in the name of the most serene and powerful King in the first one, and again in the second. I would never have dared to write what I wrote about the heroic virtues of that wisest King, and my surpassing desire for his protection, for the attention of the King himself; but I could not express my feelings about how fortunate you are in any way other than by imagining myself in the same position. However, I think things have turned out very well, and I regard what you’ve done as a great benefit. I had desired it very much, but was not bold enough to ask for it. But when I was reading the comments in your letter to me about that most powerful King, and the proposal you make in his name, I was astounded, conscious that I did not deserve such a great King’s benevolence, which is so singular and without parallel: he has deigned to honor an undeserving man by pledging his protection to him, not after being worn down by plea after plea, but after the barest and most unobtrusive hint of what he wished for. Among his excellent virtues, His Majesty stands out particularly for this: that he has a sound judgment about what any given

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man ought to be doing. In accordance with his most lofty wisdom, he has judged that I should remain focused on the one task that I have always regarded as mine: namely, to remain in this watchtower, as it were, and to comply with my divine vocation for as long as it may please the divine Majesty to use my labor to achieve anything that may redound to his glory and earn the thanks of my masters. But if my affairs change in the future, just as I currently hold that most powerful King’s beneficence very dear indeed, so then will I take actual advantage of it. Meanwhile, on both my knees I vow and present my life’s service to his mercy, as if I were living in his kingdom and under his patronage. But such generosity would seem to merit some extraordinary form of gratitude, of which I am incapable; so I ask you in the name of our friendship to carry out this task on my behalf, and make very modest representations to His Royal Majesty for me: let them be as appropriate and effective as your training can devise. The importance of the matter about which I have been writing would prevent me from writing anything else: but because we are such close friends, my pen can’t help itself from carrying on to Baronius and making me urge you on in the pursuit of the task you’ve begun—however unfair it is to spur you on when you’re already galloping. The work is worthy of you, and, most importantly, will benefit the Church very much. The boasts which the Papists make about Baronius’s authority over there are nothing compared with what people say about him in Italy. In the past he was called the “fifth” Evangelist, but now he’s styled as the “sole” Evangelist; and all their efforts to deter men from reading sacred texts serve to drive them to concentrate their reading on him. I think you should know that a year ago, the Roman Inquisition decreed to every bishop and inquisitor in Italy that nothing should be written, nor a single word uttered against Baronius, nor even imported from abroad. They see how much it aids their cause for him to hide behind the mask of a “faithful historian.” On another note: since you are pushing on with your refutation of Book i, I suppose you’ve noticed how that book’s style differs from the others. I don’t know whether you’re aware of the reason for that, but if you happen not to, I suspect you’ll enjoy hearing about it from me. He began writing the book in 1585, at which time I was staying in Rome. Living in the city at that time was a learned old man, Latino Latini of Viterbo. Many men of letters who were in Rome used to go and visit him, especially those with an interest in patristics, since he was especially well versed in the Fathers. Baronius was among those who used to visit him at home. That man was a highly skilled humanist, and he used to act as a corrector for what Baronius was writing. The result is that the book mixes Baronius’s dregs with water drawn from a purer source. He would often say to me that he was sifting through Baronius’s farrago to keep himself sharp, not because he thought that

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the work deserved to be published; and he did not think that it would proceed any further than the age of the Apostles. He was a pious man, but one of those types who believe that a good man can live under tyranny as long as he just worries about what he can do for himself, and not about what is his by right. He didn’t reveal his thinking—not to Baronius, anyway, or men like him, but just to those who he knew would appreciate it. He used to say that those who make a fuss of writing against the doctrinal status quo were wasting their effort, on the grounds that the only people who will be able to read them are those who don’t need to. But there was another way available of helping people who had been deceived: if, as the Italian proverb goes, one were to “jump over the horse,” and support received opinions using such hopeless and trivial proofs as to arouse the suspicion of sensible men that something untrue is being said. You’ll find some traces of that advice in that very book. They escaped Baronius’s notice, but a sensible man who isn’t dozing can spot them: for instance, when he proves the omnipotence of the Pope using Peter’s shadow, and the cult of the saints using Paul’s handkerchief. If I have detained you with these trifles when you are busy with serious matters, I ask you to bear in mind my goodwill toward you and forgive me; I take such pleasure in speaking with you, that if I have nothing significant to talk about, I don’t shrink from piling up your desk with whatever comes to mind. Goodbye. Your must humble and devoted servant, 17 August, 1612. P.S.

chapter 3

Chronology and Hebraism in the World of Joseph Scaliger: The Case of Arnaud de Pontac (Arnaldus Pontacus)* Joanna Weinberg “Chamber pot,” “tiara-bearing,” and simply “Bishop of Bazas” are some of the designations used by Joseph Scaliger and friends to refer to Arnaud de Pontac (Pontacus), a Catholic scholar from Bordeaux who had unwittingly strayed into Scaliger territory when he set out to publish a critical edition of Jerome’s version of Eusebius’s Chronicle.1 Pontacus’s text, which eventually came out in 1604, two years before Scaliger produced his monumental Thesaurus, was, according to Casaubon and others, a laughable matter that did not warrant any scholarly angst.2 Yet, throughout Scaliger’s correspondence, and until Pontacus’s death, the rival project and its imminent publication featured as a newsworthy topic. Although Pontacus’s work on the Chronicle was virtually unanimously dismissed as a lost opportunity, such an assessment had to be repeated constantly, apparently to assuage not only Scaliger’s fears but also those of all his allies.3 Despite all the ridicule Pontacus’s work elicited, it * My sincere thanks go to Jill Kraye, who discussed this article with me and offered many useful suggestions. 1 Arnaldus Pontacus, Chronica trium illustrium auctorum Euesebii Pamphili episcopi Caesariensis D. Hieronymo interprete D. Eusebii Hieronymi Presbyteri D. Propseri Aquitanici episcopi regiensis ab Abraham ad an. Christi 449 ad…(Bordeaux: S. Millangius, 1604). 2 All manner of allegations about Pontacus are made in the various exchanges, including Scaliger’s suggestion to Simon Goulart (27 Aug. 1603) that Pontacus was annoyed that a Calvinist should be tampering with matters that belonged to Catholic jurisdiction. The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 5:130–31: “quand ce ne seroit pour aultre raison que pour faire mentir les Jesuites de Bourdeaux, qui m’estiment mal propre pour entreprendre une telle besogne, qui appartient plustost à un catholique qu’à un calviniste.” 3 In his meticulous monograph on Scaliger Tony Grafton has given us the last word on Scaliger’s reconstruction of Eusebius’s Chronicle, highlighting the differences between Scaliger’s approach as textual critic and that of Pontacus, who was more interested in examining the traditions of Jerome and the medieval continuators than in reconstituting the chronological tradition transmitted by Eusebius. Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 514, 524–25,527–28, 533, 574–75, 596, 621.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_004

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still—with all its defects and different assumptions—belonged to the same shared scholarly endeavor. Indeed, Casaubon had even acquiesced to Pontacus’s request for help—though it is true that Casaubon also used the opportunity to test out the Catholic scholar’s competence.4 Scaliger himself eventually admitted that Pontacus was learned, and in a letter to Justus Lipsius made a show of grief about his rival’s recent demise.5 The ambivalence that Scaliger’s colleagues and friends entertained about Pontacus comes to the fore in Jacques Gillot’s letter of 1604: We realize that the author is very erudite in Hebrew and letters but he is the type who hides antiquity if he believes that the truth will not go down well in Rome. He is just like his teacher Génébrard who not only behaves like a monk but gets hysterical about any word that in his view is not represented in the Spanish books that he extolls.6 Pontacus is despised for his lack of integrity, a personal defect that he shares with his teacher, the Benedictine Regius Professor of Hebrew and militant

4 Scaliger, Correspondence, 6 Jan. 1604, 5:219: “De antagonistae tui cessatione non magis tu sollicitus es quam ipse sum. Omnino cumulus aliquis gloriae tuae accedet, si praecedat eius editio. Sed bono animo esto. Nuntio tibi fervere opus Burdigalae, nisi decepit me nuper nescio quis, a quo mihi communicati sunt loci aliquot in Eusebio conclamati, quorum restitutionem ostiatim tota urbe petit per suos novus ille editor. Quid multa? Cum nullus esset Aesculapius repertus, ventum ad me. Erant quaedam de quibus non censui eundem in consilium. Pag. 3 editionis Basiliensis: ‘Latona Iovis coniux tunc palitia fugit’. Respondi statim legendum esse ‘coniux usurpatitia’, hoc est, παλλακή. De caeteris, responsum a me adiret ad alios quibus otii plus quam nobis. Sed quoniam tam bella occasio est oblata, volo ea uti, ut penitius omne hoc negotium cognoscam, et tibi certo referam quo loco res sit. Confide fore mihi hanc rem curae, nec defuturas rationes omnia explorandi et certo cognoscendi.” 5 Pontacus died in Feb. 1605, shortly after the publication of his work. Scaliger to Lipsius, Correspondence, 3 Apr. 1605, 5:592: “O μακαρίτης Arnaldus Pontacus, Episcopus Vasatum, olim puero puer mihi notus et studiorum socius, suum mihi misit, neque diu postea in vivis fuit. Hominis optimi et doctissimi vicem doleo. Librum adhuc non inspexi, propterea quod statim compingendum tradidi. Quantum ex primo oculi coniectu iudicare potui, diversa via in eodem argumento grassati sumus: ille optime, utinam ego non male.” 6 Scaliger, Correspondence, 15 Nov. 1604, 5:445: “Nous cognoissons l’aucteur fort sçavant en hebrieu et aux lettres, mais d’humeur qui celera l’antiquité si il croit qu’à Rome on ne la trouve pas bonnes voires la verité, comme son precepteur Genebrard, qui se monstre non pas seulement moine, mais furieux à declamer sur un mot qui n’a pas jugé estre en des livres d’espagnols qu’il extolle.”

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s­ upporter of the League, Gilbert Génébrard.7 Pontacus’s character is impugned here, but not his scholarship. Like Scaliger, Arnaud de Pontac had gone to school in Bordeaux and had acquired a good classical education at the Collège de Guyenne.8 He was sent to Toulouse to study law, during which time he was in contact with the prominent Catholic apologist Jean de Albin de Valsergues, for whose treatise on the sacraments he later offered a short poem written in faltering biblical Hebrew. These verses were meant to support Jean de Albin’s response, “the truly enlightened one,” to that of the fools—that is, the “enemies of the Catholic Church.”9 In later life, once he had been to Rome and been appointed bishop of Bazas, Pontacus continued in Jean de Albin’s footsteps. He was chosen to head the delegation of the clergy to represent the case for reform to Henri iii, and in July 1579 he declaimed his Remonstrance, an impassioned plea for the implementation of the statutes of Trent as a means of ensuring universal adherence to “ecclesiastical discipline.”10 In Paris Pontacus studied theology and Hebrew with Gilbert Génébrard, but soon assumed the role of collaborator, taking full responsibility for some of the material in the second half of Génébrard’s monumental Chronographiae libri, both in its original shorter form (Paris, 1567) and in the later expanded editions of four volumes.11 Certain entries in this second part of the chronology were to 7

8

9 10

11

Among other contemporaries Jacques-Auguste de Thou attacked Génébrard for insincerity: see Ingrid de Smet, The Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617) (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 82–83. In his History of His Own Time, (Paris: Hieronymus Drouart, 1609), lib. 63, p. 167, de Thou speaks of Génébrard as a theologian and regius professor of Hebrew literature, a man of broad erudition, but of a wicked and insincere character. The biographical information is culled from the “Oraison funebre messire Arnaud de Pontac evesque de Bazas,” written by G. Dupuy, “chanoine of Bazas,” printed in Arnaud de Pontac, évêque de Bazas. Pièces diverses, recueillies et publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque (Bordeaux: Paul Chollet, 1883). Jean d’Albin de Valsergues, Les Six livres du Sacrement de l’Autel pour la confirmation du peuple Françoys…(Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, 1567), sig. aiiii r. “Remonstrance du Clergé de France prononcee devant le Roy, par R.P. en Dieu, Messire Arnauld de Pontac, Evesque de Bazas, le 3 de Juillet 1579,” published in Recueil des remonstrances, edicts, contracts, et autres choses concernans le Clergé de France (Paris: Jean Richer, 1599), 1–11. For the historical context of Pontacus’s active role as delegate of the clergy see Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 92, 293–94, 296. Pontacus is the named author of the second book of the editio princeps: Secundus liber chronographiae de rebus gestis a Christo nato ad nostra usque tempora, id est ad annum mdlvii, Ar. Pontaco auctore (Paris: M. Le Jeune, 1567). Later editions, such as that produced by the same printer in 1580, state that additions have been made to Pontacus’s Chronology and refer to the work as a response to the lies of the Centuriators:

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receive their own response from English puritans who were incensed by Pontacus’s assessment of Elizabeth’s reign.12 But even before he had immersed himself in chronology, both modern and ancient, Pontacus had followed the example of the great French Hebraists of the time, including Jean Mercier, Jean Cinqarbres, and his own teacher Génébrard, and set out to guide Christian readers into the world of Jewish exegesis. By the mid-sixteenth century there was a multiplicity of ways in which the Hebraic element in the trilingual ideal could be translated into literary expression. Catholics no less than Reformers valued Hebrew—the holy tongue, as is sometimes suggested, was certainly not the exclusive domain of Protestants. Each scholar or theologian or reader encased his knowledge of Hebrew within his own cultural edifice, seeking out texts that somehow fitted with his scholarly or religious enterprise. Not unlike many modern biblical scholars, Christians thought that the medieval Jewish commentators and the Aramaic paraphrases (Targumim) could illuminate their understanding of the Hebrew text of the Bible. As Sebastian Münster put it, “Had Jerome been able to avail himself of the commentaries of an ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, Gersonides or David Kimhi, he would not have needed a living [Jewish] teacher.”13 The texts were available in print in a variety of formats. Apart from volumes of selected texts in Latin translation, the commentaries of the standard Jewish expositors were enshrined in the Venetian monumental rabbinic Bibles that had already been issued three times by the middle of the sixteenth century; they were also printed in Robertus Stephanus’s reader-friendly editions with their wide margins. Presumably taking his cue from Génébrard, Pontacus participated in this

Chronographiæ libri quatuor. Priores duo sunt de rebus veteris populi… Posteriores, è D. Arnaldi Pontaci… Chronographia aucti… Universae historiae speculum, in Ecclesiae praesertim saeculo, a mendacii, maculis, imposturis Centuriatorum, aliorumque haereticorum detersum… Subiuncti sunt libri Hebræorum Chronologici eodem interprete. Detailed and analytical study of this important work is yet to be undertaken. See Frederick Purnell Jr., “Patrizi and Hermes Trismegistus,” in Das Ende des Hermetismus…, ed. M. Mulsow (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 112n.13. 12 Laurentius Humfredus, Ioanni Juelli Angli episcopi Sarisburiensis vita e mors, eisuque verae doctrinae defensio, cum refutatione quorundam obiectorum… Pontaci Burdegalensi (London: J. Day, 1573), 101–06. 13 Sebastian Münster, Miqdash Adonai En tibi lector Hebraica Biblia Latina (Basel: Henricpetri, 1534), Praefatio in Vetus Testamentum, sig. β2r: “Hebraeorum commentarii non contemnendi.” “...Nec dubito, si Hieronymo fuisset vel Aben Ezrae, aut Moses Gerundensis, aut Ben Gersom, aut David Kimhi commentarius, vivo praeceptore opus non habuisset.”

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fashionable trend for medieval Judaica.14 In 1566, he published Latin renderings of the books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Zephaniah; the Targum; and the commentaries of Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and David Kimhi.15 At a first glance, Pontacus’s annotated Prophets appears simply to resemble the other Hebrew-Latin compilations produced by his contemporaries. But the novel ingredient that Pontacus added to his exegetical work in the pages following the dedication to his father swiftly dispels such an impression. This modest innovation lent a certain authority to his entire undertaking and may have been one of the reasons that led the Leiden professor of Hebrew Guglielmus Coddaeus to republish Pontacus’s Vitae in 1621.16 The dedication of the volume followed rather stereotypical lines: an exhortation based on the words of Jerome to return to the fount, that is, Hebrew. For that reason, Pontacus explained, he had provided a Latin translation of the Jewish commentators whose works had not yet “reached Latin ears.” What was novel, however, was not the actual enterprise of translating the Jewish commentaries into Latin, but rather the method of presenting their authors to a Christian audience. Jewish writers such as the favorite author of Génébrard, the twelfth-century Abraham ibn Daud, had included small snippets of biographical information in their chronicles. In his encyclopaedic compilation, the Chain of Tradition (Venice, 1587), the Italian writer Gedalya ibn Yahya penned biographies or hagiographies of some of the great Jewish luminaries, including Rashi and Maimonides. David Gans packed his chronicle, the Stock of David (Prague, 14

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E.g., three years earlier Génébrard had published Joelis Prophetae vaticinium et Chaldaea eius paraphrasis quatenus ab Hebraeo differt, cum trium rabbinorum Selomonis Iarhii, Abrahami Abben Ezrae, David Kimhii (Paris: Martin le Jeune, 1563). On Mercier’s publications in this area see Jean-Pierre Rothschild, “Les éditions hébraiques de Jean Mercier et les manuscrits Hébreux,” in Jean (C. 1525–1570) et Josias (C. 1560–1626) Mercier. L’amour de la philologie à la Renaissance et au début de l’âge classique (Paris: Champion, 2006); and Stephen Burnett, Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Vaticinationes Abdiae, Ionae, et sophoniae, prophetarum, caldaea expositio, quatenus variat ab Hebraeo, et commentariis trium insignium Rabbinorum Selomonois Iarhhi, Abraham Aben Ezrae, et Davidis Kimihhi illustrate interprete Ar. Pontaco aquitanico Burdegalensi. Quibus accesserunt nonnulla ex D. Hieronoymo et veteribus aliquot theologis (Paris: Martin le Jeune, 1566). Guglielmus Coddaeus, Hoseas propheta ebraice et chaldaice cum duplici versione Latina (Leiden: Johannes Maire, 1621). The Vitae were reprinted again by Johann B. Schönemann, Grammatica Rabbinica J. Henr. Maji Hebraicae et Chaldaicae harmonica Accedit Joh. Buxtorfii Fil. consilium de studio Rabbinico et vitae Schel. Jarchi Abr. Aben Esrae et Dav. Kimchi, iuxta descriptionem Arnaldi Pontaci (Giessen: Henning Müller, 1710).

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1592), with biobibliographical facts about the notable men of the ages.17 But Pontacus’s enterprise of 1566 was different from that of his predecessors and successors. Following Western medieval and Renaissance practice, he introduced his authors to his readers by prefacing his Latin translations with “Lives of the Rabbis Salomon Jarhi [Rashi] or [Solomon ben Isaac], Abraham ibn Ezra and David Kimhi.”18 For the first time, the lives of the Jewish exegetes had become connected to their commentaries.19 In the hands of a Catholic bishop these venerable Jewish expounders of the Hebrew Bible had been converted into “illustrious men.” Before attempting an explanation for Pontacus’s new venture it would seem appropriate to examine the contents of these potted biographies. What manner of accessus to the Jewish auctores did Pontacus provide? What kinds of facts about these rabbis and their commentaries needed to be communicated to Christian readers? Not surprisingly for a writer committed to the discipline of chronology, Pontacus attempted to situate all three commentators in their historical context and in relation to one another. He had noted that the commentators referred to their predecessors, continuing a virtual discussion over the centuries.20 It is also quite plausible that he was aware that in some parts of the rabbinic Bibles all three commentators inhabited one and the same page. But though Pontacus submitted all commentators to the same treatment, identifying birthplace, writings, literary style, and approximate dates of floruit, he also succeeded in singling out the specific characteristics of each exegete. Pontacus’s life of Rashi includes both fact and misinformation. Pontacus called attention to the possibility that Rashi was born in Troyes (the correct view) and not in Lunel (the more common view among Christians), but he 17

18 19

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Some of Gans’s information was culled from Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer yuhasin (Book of genealogies), which was printed after the death of the author in Constantinople in 1566. There is no evidence that Pontacus read the work. Vaticinationes, sig. A3v: “Vitae Rabbinorum Selomo Iarhhi, Abraham aben Ezrae, et Davidis Kimhhi, ex interprete.” A comparable phenomenon in Jewish presentation of the biblical text is described by Eric Lawee, “Introducing Scripture: The Accessus ad auctores in Hebrew Exegetical Literature from the Thirteenth through the Fifteenth Centuries,” in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfiish, and Joseph W. Goering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 157–79. See too Arthur Lesley, “Hebrew Humanism in Italy: The Case of Biography,” Prooftexts 2, no. 2 (1988): 163–77. E.g., in Vaticinationes, sig. A4r, he refers to Kimhi (1160–1235) citing Ibn Ezra, speculating quite correctly that he lived not long after Ibn Ezra (1089–1164): “Vixit non multo post Aben Ezram, quem saepe citat quantum coniectura assequi possum.”

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also suggested that the acronym Rashi (i.e., Rabbi Shelomo Yizhaki) signified “head of the tribes of Israel” (Rosh Shivtei Yisrael), a tribute, he suggested, to Rashi’s prominence among his coreligionists.21 Hebrew abbreviations, in which identical sets of letters have different denotations, could cause confusion and certainly did in Pontacus’s case. Unlike Jean Cinqarbres, another French Hebraist, Pontacus was unable to discern the different usages of the same abbreviation in different contexts.22 Such was his appreciation of Rashi’s “most learned and eloquent explanations” that Pontacus imagined that he had detected Rashi invoking Jerome by the honorific title of “the priest.” He may have been misled by “Rashi’s ape,” the less than flattering sobriquet used by Pontacus and many others to describe the Franciscan Nicholas de Lyra, whose Postillae accompanied readers of the Latin Bible much as Rashi served as the vade mecum for readers of the Hebrew Bible. But Pontacus was clearly an incisive reader of de Lyra, noting correctly that Rashi’s elliptical (and impure) style had led de Lyra to take too much license in his rather free and numerous renderings of the Jewish exegete.23 Unable to find documentation about Rashi’s dates, Pontacus inferred that he must have lived before 1182, the date of the expulsion of the Jews from France as documented in the standard historical sources that he had read.24

21 Ibid., sig. A3v: “Rabbi Selomo Iarhhi, patria (ut ferunt) Campanus Trecensis, aut ut aliis placet, Lunensis, qui vicus est Narbonensis Galliae, non longe a Montepessulano (id enim coniectant ex cognomine ‫ ירחי‬Iarhhi, nam ‫ ירח‬est Luna: quanqaum aliis id sit ipsius familiae nomen) certe natione Gallus erat, ut ex eius scriptis liquet, in quibus passim Gallica inculcat. Tantae est apud Hebraeos authoritatis, ut cognomentum retulerit Capitis tribuum Israel. Nam ex primoribus literis ‫ רשי‬quibus ille significatur, faciunt ‫ראש שבטי ישראל‬.” 22 Johannes Quinquarboreus, De notis Hebraeorum liber, hoc est, de literis multarum literarum…(Paris: Martin Le Jeune, 1582), 84: “‫ רשי‬Rabbi Selomo Iarhi, inter illos celeberrimus, Gallus Trecensis, ut nonnulli volunt. Vel potius Rabbi Selomo Lunaeus, sive Lunensis ab oppido Aquitaniae, quod Lunel appellatur, a ‫ ירח‬enim nomine significante Lunam, videtur formatum nomen adiect. ‫ ירחי‬lunaeus, sive Lunensis. Fuit itaque ille Aquitanus Gallus, quo tempore Iudaei erant in Gallia. Significant etiam interdum ‫ראש שבטי ישראל‬ caput tribuum Israelis.” 23 Vaticinationes, sig. A3v: “Quod fecit ut Nicolaus Lyranus non pauca adferat nomine R. Selomonis, quae in eo nisi quodam circuitu et quasi signo non habentur.” Cf. pt. 4 of Hermann Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), who makes a similar point. Pontacus also refers to Rashi’s use of French glosses as well as his use of Talmudic and Aramaic vocabulary, a recipe for “impure style.” 24 He refers to the very popular Paulus Aemilius’s De regibus Francorum Chronicon and to the Chronicon of the Italian Dominican friar Antoninus (bishop of Florence).

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The Spanish exegete Abraham ibn Ezra received somewhat different treatment, partly because of the nature of his extant literary corpus, and partly because Pontacus clearly was drawn to the learned grammarian, philosopher, and mathematician. Ibn Ezra’s distinction lay also in the fact that Marsilio Ficino had referred to him as an “astrologer” in his commentary on Plotinus.25 Pontacus scoured ibn Ezra’s works for biographical information, demonstrating his extensive familiarity with ibn Ezra’s original Hebrew works. Among those he cited is the grammar Sefer haTsahot (Book of purity [of language])— which he dated to 1146, following the date of Tishre 4906 provided by ibn Ezra at the end of the book.26 But ibn Ezra’s “concise, subtle, and clearly philosophical style of composition” is what Pontacus found particularly commendable. Such was his admiration for ibn Ezra’s art of composition that he bestowed an accolade on the Jewish commentator—in the form of an analogy that brings to mind the way Isaac Casaubon drew on classical tradition when intent on understanding ancient Jewish texts, thereby transcending linguistic as well as religious boundaries.27 Ibn Ezra, Pontacus asserted, was worthy of being compared to Homer’s Menelaus as described in the Iliad: “Menelaus spoke fluently, few words, but very clearly.”28 The Greek lines stand out on the page, and ibn Ezra is recast in the role of Homeric hero. But the choice of Menelaus as the exemplary orator is not Pontacus’s. Well schooled in classical oratory, Pontacus knew his Quintilian and was here echoing Quintilian’s comment about the Homeric depiction of Menelaus: “For Homer himself assigns to Menelaus an eloquence, terse and pleasing, exact (for that is what is meant by ‘making no errors in words’) and devoid of all redundancy.”29 In an undoubtedly unconventional appraisal of the medieval exegete, Pontacus transformed ibn Ezra into a paradigm of rhetorical virtue. 25

See Marsilio Ficino, In Plotinum…libri liiii, in Opera (Basel: Henricpetri, 1576), vol. 2, bk. 4, 1748, where he refers to “Astrologus Abraham.” I am grateful to Dilwyn Knox who helped me to locate this reference. 26 Sefer Tsahot (Venice: Bomberg 1546), 194v. This book contained several grammars including that of Ibn Ezra and was brought to print by Elijah Levita. 27 Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2011), 73. 28 Vaticinationes, sig. A4r: “Caeterum eius locutio pura quidem est, sed concisa, subtilis, ac plane philosophica: ut illud Homeri non minus vere de eo quam de Menelao dici possit [ἤτοι μὲν Μενέλαος] ἐπιτροχάδην ἀγόρευε, παῦρα μὲν ἀλλὰ μάλα λιγέως” (Iliad 3, line 210). 29 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 12.10.64: “Nam et Homerus brevem quidem cum iucunditate et propriam id enim est non deerrare verbis et carentem supervacuis eloquentiam Menelao dedit, quae sunt virtutes generis illius…”

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Reading ibn Ezra is not always plain sailing, a point that Pontacus admitted with yet another classical allusion: “But he also jests with riddles such that on occasion an Oedipus is required.”30 The reference to Oedipus is ambiguous and need not simply be interpreted as an allusion to the obscurity of ibn Ezra’s writing style. It is quite likely that Pontacus had in mind the many riddles that ibn Ezra composed, and specifically the Riddle on the Quiescent Letters, a truly enigmatic, though didactic, poem about the Hebrew letters that was first printed in Daniel Bomberg’s Rabbinic Bible in Venice in 1525.31 With this reference to the enigma in ibn Ezra’s writings Pontacus concluded his “humanist” life of the exegete. Pontacus gave his third and last commentator, David Kimhi, a similarly appreciative assessment, and once again used a classical figure, but not a mythical one, to illustrate the distinctiveness of his subject. He certainly needed to promote Kimhi. The latter’s frontal attacks on Jesus and Christianity in several passages of his commentaries were well known—Génébrard had good reason for applying to Kimhi the epithet “enemy of Jesus.”32 Nevertheless, like most Christian scholars, Pontacus also appreciated Kimhi’s straightforward mode of exegesis: Kimhi’s commentaries were superior because they were untrammeled by the more creative or imaginative exegetical explorations of the rabbis. But Pontacus’s conventional commendation of Kimhi as an exegete of the “historical” or plain sense of scripture is double-edged. Conscious of the purple passages of anti-Christian polemic in which Kimhi displayed his familiarity with Christianity, Pontacus put forward the weird hypothesis that Kimhi had all the makings of a good Christian: “he could have been imbued with Christ’s doctrine.”33 Yet, simultaneously—within the same sentence—he admitted that Kimhi had attempted to undermine Christian dogmas, an 30 31

32

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Vaticinationes, sig. A 4 r.: “Quin et ita ludit aenigmatibus, ut interdum opus habeat Oedipo.” The riddle was printed on sig. 1,1r. See Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, “Riddle of the Four Quiescent Letters of Abraham Ibn ‘Ezra,” in Sha‘arei lashon: Studies in Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish Languages Presented to Moshe Bar-Asher, ed. A. Maman et al. (Jerusalem: Bialik, 2007), 1:88–100. Gilbert Génébrard, Hebraeorum breve Chronicon (Paris: Le Jeune, 1572), 6r: “David Kimhi (quantus, Deus immortalis, nostri Jesu hostis!)” Génébrard often repeated this appraisal of Kimhi. Vaticinationes, sig. A4r: “RABBI David Kimhhi, Hispanus, ingenio foelix, doctus et parum tribuens Talmudicis et Cabalicis allegoriis, ut qui sit sensui historico et comparationibus scripturarum addictior, idoneus sane quem CHRISTUS sua coelisti doctrina imbuisset, a qua alioqui est alienior, ut ex eius commentariis quos in universum fere vetus testamentum aedidit, intelligitur in quibus sacras Christianorum expositiones quae ad religionis dogmata pertinent, convellere nititur.”

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endeavor that he shared with his father, Joseph, who had written an antiChristian polemic.34 Pontacus did not dwell on Kimhi’s anti-Christian proclivities; rather, he sang the praises of the whole “tribe,” father and brother included, and in particular lauded Kimhi’s prowess as a grammarian and lexicographer. No better approbation could be noted than that the Dominican Hebraist Xantes Pagnini had thoroughly appropriated Kimhi’s lexicon, Roots, for his very popular Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language.35 Elegance, clarity, and brevity were, according to Pontacus, the hallmarks of Kimhi’s style.36 In a flight of Plutarchan fancy Pontacus compared Kimhi’s oratory to that of Aristotle. Invoking an ancient source, Pontacus claimed that Aristotle spoke neither too much nor too little. He was reputed to be a terse writer on profound or obscure matters. True, his early modern defenders, such as Leonardo Bruni and Phillip Melanchthon, emphasized Aristotle’s elegance and clarity of speech to refute the more common humanist portrayal of him as frequently obscure like a cuttlefish.37 But precision in writing is not, as far as I know, recorded as a specific virtue of Aristotle’s style, while it is of Demosthenes’s. Strangely, it appears that Pontacus confused Aristotle with Demosthenes. Without revealing his source, he had appropriated Quintilian’s favorable depiction of Demosthenes in book 10 of the Institutio oratoria: Such is his energy, so compact is his whole language, so tense, as it were, with nerves, so free from anything superfluous, and such the general character of his eloquence, that we can find nothing in it that is either too much or too little.38 34 35

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38

For a discussion of Kimhi’s anti-Christian polemics see Frank Talmage, “R. David Kimhi as Polemicist,” Hebrew Union College Annual 38 (1967): 213–35. Vaticinationes, sig. A4r: “…et libro Serasim i. radicum, ex quibus fere ad verbum, ordine paululum commutato, Sanctes Pagninus suas illas Institutiones et suum linguae Hebraeae Thesaurum exscripsit.” Pagnini’s lexicon was first printed in 1529 and there were many subsequent printings. It was included in Christopher Plantin’s Polyglot, but not in the revised version of Johannes Isaac discussed by Anthony Grafton in The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 116–31. Brevity is not a particular characteristic of Kimhi’s Hebrew style, although it is noted for its clarity. This is probably the reason that his commentaries, unlike those of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, were never accompanied by supercommentaries. See Frank Talmage, David Kimhi: The Man and His Commentaries (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1975), 60. See Charles B. Schmitt, “Aristotle as a Cuttle-Fish: The Origin and Development of a Renaissance Image,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 60–72. I am grateful to Jill Kraye and Rita Copeland, who discussed this conundrum with me. I am indebted to Peter Mack for pointing out that Pontacus was probably referring to Quintilian’s statement about Demosthenes.

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According to Pontacus, Kimhi wrote so precisely that “nothing can be de tracted without damaging the sense and nothing added without causing redundancy—and he was an Asian (prorsum Asianus)!”39 Quintilian (and Cicero) had used the term “Asianus” to describe the group of professional rhetoricians marked as non-Attic by reason of their origin and so-called bombastic style of rhetoric. By means of a magnificent play of words based on Quintilian, Pontacus bestowed the highest accolade on Kimhi—like Aristotle the exegete had written in the “Attic” mode, an amazing feat for an Asiatic Jew. Pontacus’s very brief lives are an original and remarkable curiosity.40 No previous author, Jew or Christian, had undertaken to write biographies of the Jewish exegetes. Brief references to the names and writings of the Jewish commentators are to be found interspersed in earlier bibliographical works. The comprehensive Conrad Gessner, for example, discussed so well by Ann Blair, included all three exegetes in his Bibliotheca universalis (1545).41 And of course chronologers such as the Génébrard and Pontacus duo also inserted biobibliographicial snippets about prominent Jewish literati and even short appraisals into the narrative.42 In one of several references to Rashi, for example, they bestowed on him the very respectable title “glossator ordinarius.”43 But these kinds of entries, which hardly presented substantial information, did not fulfill the task that Pontacus seems to have set himself.44 Superficially resembling 39

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Vaticinationes, sig. A4r: “Phrasi usus est pura eleganti et compta, in qua brevitas certat cum perspicuitate, nihil in ea parum nihil nimium, ut de Aristotele quidam scripsit, cui nihil detrahi potest, quin sententia efficiatur mutila, nihil addi quin sensus sit redundans, et prorsum Asianus.” The three lives together amount to one folio in length. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010), 56. The various editions and contents of Génébrard‘s Chronologia require proper study. Here it is just interesting to note that the entry for Rashi differs slightly from Pontacus’s statement in his Life of Rashi: “Inter eos fuisse aiunt R. Selomonem Iarhhi, quos rex in germaniam expulit. Est autem magni nominis Rabbinus, ordinarius veteris testamenti et Thalmud interpres, qui videtur cognominatus Iarhhi, q. Lunensis, luna autem oppidum est Provinciae aquitanicae, ubi Iudaeos mansisse scribit D Greg, lib 3. Epist. 2.” Chronographiae libri… (Paris, 1580), 372. Rashi did go to Germany, but his travel to Germany was not in the context of expulsion. Chronographiae libri (1580), 374: “Sub ann 1190. Tota francia Iudaeos expulit in germanias qui tamen paulo post rediere, quousque sub an. 1323 penitus exigerentur. In hac eiectione R Salomonem Iarhi ordinarium veteris testamenti glossatorem fuisse aiunt.” Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca universalis sive Catalogus (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1545), 2r (ibn Ezra), 193v (Kimhi), 590r. By conferring such a title on Rashi they are certainly according him a place in the history of biblical interpretation. Their use of the Latin

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the medieval Accessus, Pontacus’s Lives instruct their readers and cajole them simultaneously. The dangers of penetrating the alien world of the Jews become negligible. Instead, readers are confronted with exemplary figures of the Jewish medieval ages whose commentaries are going to serve as a guide to their reading of the prophecies of Obadiah, Joel, and Malachi. Clothed in symbols of classical antiquity, these three Jewish exegetes become, as it were, part of the establishment. Having made Jewish exegesis acceptable, Pontacus still had to ensure that these lives represented and communicated the “Christian” message. He achieved this goal by means of two literary devices.45 The current predilection for biography as exemplified by the writings of the Benedictine humanist Perionius (Joachim Périon, 1499–1559) is reflected in the first case. Chiefly known for his periphrastic translations of Aristotle into Latin and as official examiner of the work of Ramus, Perionius also contributed to the contemporary fad for biography and enigmas.46 He authored a whole stream of biographies: Life of Jesus Christ,47 Lives of the Patriarchs,48 Lives of the Apostles,49 and Lives of the Prophets and Holy Women. The Lives of the Prophets provided Pontacus with very brief sections that served as leads into the biblical and medieval texts.50 In this undertaking Pontacus not only used the life as

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expression “glossator ordinarius” is comparable to the way certain Christians described the Talmud as Pandects of the Jews. See the forthcoming article of Anthony Grafton, “‘Pandects of the Jews’: A French, Swiss and Italian Prelude to John Selden,” in Jewish Texts and Their Readers: Aspects of the Intellectual Life of Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, ed. Scott Mandelbrote and Joanna Weinberg (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Pontacus also wrote Hebrew verses “Ad lectores” printed at the end of the volume with the same purpose in mind. These lines emphasize the Christological interpretation of all three prophetical books. Perionius produced the first edition of the enigmas of Symphosius in Paris in 1533. Joachimus Perionius Benedictinus, De vita rebusque gestis Iesu Christi, generis hominum conservatoris, ex quatuor iis qui Evangelia scripserunt quasi Monotessaron, id est unus ex quatuor. (Paris: Philippe Rithou, 1553). Joachimus Perionius Benedictinus, De sanctorum virorum, qui Patriarchae ab ecclesia appellantur, rebus gestis ac vitis, Liber (Paris: Theodor Graminaeus, 1555). These biblical lives are totally based on the Catholic Bible and include Tobit and several personalities related to the time of the Maccabees. Joachimus Perionius, Benedictinus, De rebus gestis vitisque apostolorum liber (Cologne: Theodoer Graminaeus 1551). On this work, see Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 307–10. Joachimus Perionius, De vitis rebusque gestis prophetarum Dei ac sanctarum mulierum testamenti libri duo plane aurei (Paris: Frederic Morel, 1565).

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Perionius had possibly conceived it—to prove that the biblical texts supplied all the models for good living—but also applied it as a necessary complement to the text itself in which patristic testimony combined with the biblical source amounted to a succinct biography of the prophet. In addition, the inclusion of Perionius’s short lives as prefatory reading to the text and commentaries contributed to the sense that this was a shared Catholic “orthodox” undertaking. Génébrard, who had given the Lives of the Prophets his prefatory approbation, also introduced his own Latin edition of the book of Joel with Perionius’s life of the prophet.51 The brief lives of the Jewish exegetes are an integral part of the package that Pontacus supplied to his readers. So presented, they appear to measure up to both humanist and Christian expectations. His Jewish Menelaus, Jewish Aristotle, and a Christ-imbued interpreter in potentia, conjured up familiar and respectable associations. But all this, apparently, did not suffice. Like Jean Mercier and Gilbert Génébrard, Pontacus took even more precautions to ensure that his Latin translations of the medieval commentators would be palatable for his prospective readers. Following each verse or verses of his translations of the Jewish exegetes (which are generally accurate), he appended an “Accessio” of ecclesiastical interpretation that for the most part was supposed to counter some of the more outspokenly Jewish interpretations of the rabbis. This order of play gave Pontacus the last word, as it were. Similarly, but with a reverse strategy, Génébrard gave pride of place to his own “Auctarium” in his annotated commentary of the book of Joel. In contrast, the layout of the translations of another Hebrew professor of the Collège royale, Jean Mercier, presupposed a greater equality between the commentators of different persuasions. (This may have been due to the intrusion of Theodor Beza or Pierre Chevalier, who edited Mercier’s works after his death.) For example, there seems to be no obvious hierarchy in the way the commentaries are laid out in Mercier’s edition of the Minor Prophets. Strikingly, Jerome’s glosses are followed by those of de Lyra, Mercerus (himself), Oecolampadius, and the “doctorum commentarii R Selomo Iarhi, R Aben Ezra R David Kimhi.”52 Apparently, then, 51

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Ioelis prophetae vaticinium et Chaldaea eius paraphrasis ab Hebraeo differt, cum commentariis trium Rabbinorum Selomonis Iarhii, Abrahami Abben Ezrae, Davidis Kimhii, G. Genebrardo benedic. Interprete (Paris: Martin Le Jeune, 1563). For example, Johannes Mercerus, Commentarii locupletiss. In Prophetas quinque priores inter eos qui minores vocantur. Quibus adiuncti sunt aliorum etiam et veterum (in quibus sunt Hebraei) et recentium Commentarii, ab eodem excerpti (Geneva: H. Estienne, 1570). See Petrus Cevalerius’s prefatory letter to the Christian reader, in which he speaks of Mercier’s inclusion of ancient and modern authorities “quae in illis utilissima et scitu dignissima.” He also states that Mercier reproduced the Jewish scholia in their entirety

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Mercier intended that the medieval Jewish exegetes should be read side by side with representative figures of the Catholic and Reformed Churches. Pontacus’s edition of the Minor Prophets was less ambitious than Mercier’s in layout. But his Vitae of the Jewish exegetes constituted a self-conscious act of adaptation of ancient, medieval, and contemporary forms of life writing. In some respects, they also bear comparison with the humanist hagiographies described by Alison Frazier, which used medieval forms in a “changing historiographical and rhetorical context.”53 The portraits of the Jewish exegetes inserted into his volume served both to promote the Jewish writings he was translating and to assert his orthodoxy as translator and transmitter of Judaic traditions. Though brief and limited, they nevertheless belong to the rich annals of Renaissance biography. In a letter to Génébrard printed in their joint Chronologia of 1585, Pontacus referred to his annotated translation of the remaining nine books of the Minor Prophets, complete with the commentaries of Rashi, ibn Ezra, and Kimhi, which he was now sending to his teacher for critical scrutiny.54 Pontacus’s involvement in things Jewish was clearly not a passing phase. For Pontacus as for Génébrard, the history of the Jews was part and parcel of his own history. In conceiving the grand lines of their Chronology they took account of Jewish traditions and history and filled the spatium historicum with countless details drawn from the archives of the Jews. The story of Pontacus’s collaboration with Génébrard is yet to be written, but one incident related to their joint venture may help us to evaluate their preoccupation with Jewish history. In the first edition of the Chronologia in the entry for 900 ce Pontacus had written: “Unhappy era, deprived of distinguished men of intellect and learning, during which nothing memorable happened…”55 Such a morose depiction of the early Middle Ages caught Génébrard’s eye. In his quest for documenting the history of the Jews he had read the few extant chronicles that Jews had written: Abraham ibn Daud’s Sefer haKabbalah (Book of tradition), the Seder Olam Rabbah (The big order of the world), and the Seder Olam Zuta (The little order of the world). Not only did he publish these works several times, in Latin translation, occasionally accompanied by the original Hebrew texts, but his understanding of universal history was clearly

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(not excerpts) to enable readers to acquire knowledge of grammar and rabbinic methods of study. Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 26–27. Chronologiae libri (Paris: Aegidius Gorbinus, 1585), sig. a4v. Chronographia in duos libros (1567), sig. G3r.” Infoelix saeculum exhaustum hominibus ingenio et doctrina claris, in quo nihil fere dignum memoria posteritatis gestum est…”

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influenced by his reading. In the prefatory letter of his first publication of the chronicles he berates Pontacus for not having sent him a complete Hebrew Seder Olam Rabbah published in Venice (1545), a copy of which he had asked Pontacus to acquire for him during his time in Italy.56 As Génébrard argues, such valuable evidence was needed for the Christian historian for whom Jewish history was of great importance, since it bore witness to the sorry state of the Jews ever since they had repudiated Christ.57 But this strident and polemical tone suddenly evaporates, and after a reiteration of the complaint against Pontacus, Génébrard initiates a rather different discourse: You are right to bemoan the fact that for us that unhappy era around the year 900 was a time of complete extinction of distinguished men of intellect and learning—practically nothing memorable happened in that time. But among the Jews of this era there were plentiful numbers of great people; no era possessed more distinguished doctors at least as far as they are concerned—they are called Geonim as Rabbi Abraham Levita states…58 This unexpected acknowledgment and appreciation of the flourishing world of the post-Talmudic rabbis, the Geonim, is most intriguing. Génébrard has let down his guard, revealing a somewhat more objective historical curiosity than his use of the topos of Jewish misery would lead the reader to believe. Reading the vivid description of the Babylonian academies and their leaders written by ibn Daud (Rabbi Abraham Levita), Génébrard had become aware of a key period in the history of Judaism (from about the late sixth to the mid-eleventh century) in which, according to the conventional narrative, the 56

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The first edition of the Hebrew text of this Midrashic chronography, most recently dated to the end of the first century ce, was published in Mantua in 1513, but Génébrard was apparently unaware of this publication. Hebraeorum breve chronicon, 2v: “Scis enim, quam altum sit de Iudaeorum rebus silentium in vulgatis historiis, et tamen multum interesse Ecclesiae, ne nos ipsius membra plane ignoremus, quid iste populus agat post repudiatum Christum unicum suae salutis perfugium…” Ibid., 3r: “Maxime autem, quoniam saeculum illud infelix, quo sub annum 900 recte conquereris fuisse apud nos exhaustum hominibus doctrina ingenioque praestantibus, in quo nihil fere dignum memoria posteritatis gestum sit, apud Hebraeos summis viris abundavit, nullumque saeculum plures et insigniores doctores tulit, quod ad eos saltem, qui ‫ גאונים‬appellantur, ut R. Abraham Levita in sua Cabbala historica, Chronicis illorum adiuncta commemorat.”

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Geonim functioned as the spiritual and religious leaders for a large portion of Diaspora Jewry. Somehow, in his perusal of ibn Daud, Génébrard had inhaled a positive picture of Jewish life that he did not attempt to counter. Pontacus listened to his teacher, and in subsequent printings of the Chronologia the text accompanying the year 900 communicated a different message. The statement about the “unhappy era” was retained, but it was followed by cheering news: “It was a somewhat happier time for Greeks and Jews… The Jews in particular, called Geonim, were at that time famous for their learning—this is apparent from R. Abraham’s Cabbalah.”59 As Anthony Grafton has taught us, Arnaldus Pontacus was no Joseph Scaliger. Pontacus simply did not know how to ask the critical questions that help to develop and shape intellectual endeavor. He was not at the vanguard of sixteenth-century humanism. More important, unlike Scaliger, he had too many religious axes to grind, and these ultimately affected the quality of his scholarly production. As a student of Hebrew literature Pontacus was also not Scaliger’s equal. Yet in writing his portraits of the exegetes Pontacus, like Génébrard, manifested a predilection for the Jewish material that transcended the polemical. And for the first time in Christian scholarship Jewish authors were recognized as deserving of a posthumous life.

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Chronologiae libri (Paris: Martin Le Jeune, 1580), 317: “Infoelix dicitur hoc saeculum exhaustum hominibus ingenio et doctrina claris, in quo nihil fere dignum memoria posteritatis gestum sit unde ferunt tunc repertum fuisse quoddam monstrum capite canino. … Apud Graecos et Hebraeos aliquanto foelicius. Nam Greci sub Leone philosopho doctrina et rebus bellicis florebant Hebraei praesertim hi qui Gheonim appellantur nomine literario tum erant clarissimi ut e Cabbala R. Abraham Levitae apparet.”

chapter 4

Joseph Scaliger in England Mordechai Feingold* In 1593 John Eliot—journeyman, translator, and aspiring author—published a French conversation manual entitled Ortho-epia Gallica. Structured in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and a prospective client, Eliot’s manual promised to teach the French language “truly, speedily and volubly,” by utilizing his “double new invention.” All “English gentlemen, who will endevour by their owne paine, studie, and dilligence,” could thereby “attaine the naturall accent, the true pronounciation, the swift and glib grace of this noble, famous, and courtly language.” Scholars have long recognized the facetious character of the Ortho-epia Gallica. Modeling himself on Rabelais, Eliot targeted for mirth and abuse the leading foreign language teachers of the day, openly advertising his intention in the preface: “I have written the whole booke in a merrie phantasticall vaine, and to confirme and stir up the wit and memorie of the learner, I have diversified it with varietie of stories, no lesse authenticall then the devises of Lucians dialogues.”1 In the second dialogue, Eliot enumerated what he considered to be the principal languages of the day: Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French. Despondently, the student lamented the impossibility of acquiring them all, only to be reassured by the teacher that, actually, “there is a man in the Emperours Court who speaketh them all naturally: and speakes besides many others most eloquently.” As evidence, Eliot translated a stanza from Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s La Sepmaine, where such a polyglot was discussed: Scaliger, our ages wonder, The learned’s Sunne, who eloquently can Speake Spanish, French, Italian, Nubian, Dutch, Chalde, Syriak, English, Arabike, (Besides) the Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Greeke. O rich quicke spirit! ô wits Cameleon! Which any Authors colour can put on. * I wish to thank Ann Blair, Carol Magun, William Poole, and Gerald Toomer for their assistance. 1 John Eliot, Ortho-epia Gallica Eliots Fruits for the French (London: John Wolfe, 1593), sig. B1v.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_005

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Such a high opinion, Eliot concluded, is shared by “all those who know him well: for he is knowne all over Europe, to be a man of an admirable wit.”2 Assuming that Eliot’s invocation of Joseph Scaliger was laced with some irony, his outlook mirrored the mixture of veneration and antagonism that characterized Scaliger’s reception in seventeenth-century England. Expressions of reverence abound. The popularity of Du Bartas’s Divine Weekes, for example, ensured that his homage to Scaliger received broad airing. It was even included in a 1600 anthology of “the choysest flowers of our moderne poets.” That same year, while mourning the passing of Sir Horatio Palavicino, the obscure John May also found occasion to eulogize Scaliger: “our ages woonder. /The learneds Sun, wrapt in whose admiration, /The rarest wits are fir’d in euery Nation.”3 Equally instructive are John Owen’s and John Donne’s clever epigrams. Under the title “O Tempora, O Mores!” Owen versified in the 1590s: “Scaliger annosi correxit tempora mundi: Quis iam, qui mores corrigat, alter erit?” (Learn’d Scaliger The Worlds deformed Times/Reformed: Who shall Now reform Mens Crimes?)4 Donne’s version, entered on a flyleaf of his copy of De emendatione temporum, expanded the metaphor: “Emendare cupis Joseph qui tempora, Leges/praemia, Supplicium, Religiosa cohors/Quod iam conantur frustra, Conabere frusta; /Si per te non sunt deteriora sat est.” (You, Joseph, who want to improve the times, will hardly succeed where laws, rewards, punishment and the horde of clergy already failed: it is enough if you don’t make them worse.)5 There was nothing novel, therefore, in Caleb Dalechamp’s 1624 invocation of Scaliger, except perhaps for its excessive stringing together of tributes made by other scholars. According to Scaliger—“the Alpha of Letters of this age, the Varro of our age, the Hercules of the Muses, the great son of a great father, 2 Ibid., pp. 17–18. I cite Joshua Sylvester’s more elegant translation: Guilaume de Saluste Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Joshua Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 1:430. 3 Theophilus Field, An Italians Dead Bodie, Stucke with English Flowers (London: Thomas Creede for Andrew Wise, 1600), sig. D2. 4 John Owen, Epigrammatum Joannis Owen (London: Nicholas Okes for Simon Waterson, 1612), sig. A3; John Owen’s Latine Epigrams Englished, trans. Thomas Harvey (London: Robert White for Nevil Simmons, 1677), 3. Thomas Pecke attempted a more expansive rendering of the epigram: “Renowned Scaliger, in the worlds Eye, /Was the Refiner of Chronologie: /The shrivel’d Face of Time is washt. The Man/That will correct the Manners; finde who can.” Thomas Pecke, Parnassi puerperium: or, some well-wishes to ingenuity, in the translation of six hundred, of Owen’s epigrams (London: J. Cottrel for Thomas Bassett, 1660), 4. 5 John Donne, The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems, ed. William McClung Gary, A. Stringer, and Jeffrey Johnson, vol. 8, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 12.

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‘whom a wiser world, laying down the fasces, /deservedly bestows power’”— Dalechamp wrote in his defense of poetry, “in the poets there are certain impious situations in which a pure soul never finds himself, but strenuously sails past, free from care.”6 This and similar excesses prompted Robert Burton in 1621, when commenting on the passions of scholars, to scoff at the burgeoning cult of Scaliger. He marveled at the extravagant encomiums contemporaries had showered on Scaliger: the “High-Priest of Wisdom,” the “perpetual dictator of literature,” the “wonder of Europe”, the “incredible excellence of genius…more comparable to gods than to men in every respect, we venerate his writings on bended knees, as we should the golden shields which fell from heaven.” And yet, when scholars were at odds, no one showed himself more “absurd” than Scaliger himself, whose “Satyricall invectives” exceeded Ovid or “Archilochus himselfe” in their bitterness.7 Burton was hardly alone in dwelling on Scaliger’s legendary censoriousness— an attribute, it was generally agreed, he inherited from his father. In 1625 Stephen Jerome, the puritan chaplain to the first Earl of Cork, felt compelled to account for the profusion of citations in his Englands Jubilee: “I know I write, as in a curious, a carping, catching age, so manie Readers, so many Controulers of Magnificate, Correctors of the Presse, everie Sonne to Master Shallow, presuming to be another Joseph, or Julius Scalliger, a Cato censorious, a criticall Aristarchus, (or starke-Asse).”8 In the same year Peter Heylyn issued the second (and expanded) edition of his Mikrokosmos. The new material included an attempt to refute Scaliger’s identification—“in spight of reason”—of Darius the Mede as Nabonides, the last king of Babylon. Heylyn proposed to examine the arguments of “so worthy a man,” along with “the scoffes, which very ­prodigally he bestoweth on such as maintaine the contrary opinion.” Having proved Scaliger’s error to his own satisfaction, Heylyn concluded: “But in this, wee must pardon Joseph: scorne and contradiction was a part of his essence. 6 Caleb Dalechamp, “Artis poeticae et versificatoriae encomium [1624],” in Latin Treatises on Poetry from Renaissance England, ed. J.W. Binns (Signal Mountain, tn: Summertown for the Library of Renaissance Humanism, 1999), 175–77. Dalechamp cites encomiums by Thomas Morton, Isaac Casaubon, and Justus Lipsius. 7 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. J.B. Bamborough et al., 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999–2000), 3:21–22, 6:15. 8 Stephen Jerome, Englands iubilee, or Irelands ioyes Io-paean, for King Charles his welcome (Dublin: Society of Stationers, 1625), sig. A2v. Elsewhere Jerome added a jibe: “though a profane person should have moe tongues then Mithridates, Scaliger, or Calepine, yet till God scrape or wash his tongue from oathes and blasphemies, …he never can speake to any purpose, except in hypocrisie as did Judas, Jezebell, and Ioab…any thing Theologically good, tending to Gods glory, and the good of others.” Ibid., 127.

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For had he not beene in some things singular; in all, peremptory: he had neither beene a Scaliger, nor the sonne of Julius.”9 The antipathy lurking behind these and other comments, to be discussed below, was mutual. Scaliger appears to have formed an indifferent impression of the English while touring the island in 1566, and such an impression intensified in subsequent years—not least on account of his learned feuds with the likes of Henry Savile and Thomas Lydiat.10 To friends he intimated in the early years of the seventeenth century that the English had remained barbarians, further damning many of them as “fanatics”—meaning “puritans.” Small wonder that in 1604 he attempted to dissuade Isaac Casaubon from settling in England: “I could tell you much of the English, what a disagreeable people they are, inhospitable to foreigners, particularly churlish to Frenchmen, against whom they cherish a traditional antipathy.”11 Not all Englishmen, of course. William Camden received unqualified praise from Scaliger, as did two learned puritans: William Whitaker—president of Saint John’s College, Cambridge, whom Scaliger described as “bien docte”— and John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, whose passing in 1607 moved Scaliger to genuine grief: Viri pereruditi Iohannis Rainoldi excessum ignoravi hactenus, qui magna, ut tu quidem ais, Anglicanae Ecclesiae, ut ego iudico omnium ecclesiarum, iactura contigit. Quanti ego doctrinam eius fecerim, non semel ex me audire potuisti. Et certe, vicem potius nostram quam illius doleo, qui ad portum quietis delatus, nos in tempestatibus reliquit. Quas evadere facile esset si illis lectissimis plantis excisis, aliae meliores, aut certe 9

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Peter Heylyn, Mikrokosmos. A Little Description of the Great World (Oxford: John Lichfield and William Turner, 1625), 635–36. As late as 1693 John Edwards chided Scaliger for denying the existence of an “Artificial Meter” in the book of Psalms. Scaliger did so “with some Earnestness and Sharpness,” for “otherwise he would not shew himself his Father’s own Son.” John Edwards, A discourse concerning the authority, stile, and perfection of the books of the Old and New-Testament (London: Richard Wilkin, 1693), 376–77 (3rd pagination). Scaliger’s outlook may well have been influenced by his father’s animus toward the English, whom he had described as “perfidi, inflati, feri, contemptores, stolidi, amentes, inertes, inhospitales, immanes” (faithless, full of themselves, savage, scornful, dull, mindless, sluggish, inhospitable and truly frightening). Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1561), 102. Pierre Desmaizeaux, ed., Scaligerana, Thuana, Perroniana, Pithoeana, et Colomesiana, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Covens & Mortier, 1740), 2:190–92; Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614, ed. Henry Nettleship, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 265–66; Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. vol. 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 120.

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non deteriores, succrescerent. (Until now I was ignorant of the death of that most learned man, John Rainolds: his loss is a great one for the English Church, as you have said; or, as I might say, for all Churches. You have heard me speak often about how greatly I esteem his teachings. Without question, I am more sorry for our loss than for his: he was carried off into that peaceful harbor, leaving us amidst stormy seas. These would be easy to flee from if, when such excellent sprouts were cut down, other better ones—or, at least, no worse—sprung up.)12 It helped, of course, that both men admired Scaliger. A celebrated scholar himself, Rainolds was among the first in England to appreciate Scaliger’s extraordinary erudition. Already in the early 1580s he discouraged a former student, George Cranmer, from idling his time with Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Cranmer would do much better to dip lightly into Petrus Ramus, more into Juan Louis Vives, and above all follow Scaliger. A single Scaliger, Rainolds assured Cranmer, was worth more than six hundred Scotuses and Aquinases.13 In subsequent years, Rainolds freely exploited the scholarship of the Protestant Goliath in combating Catholic erudition—that of Cardinal Bellarmine especially—as well as homegrown puritan zealotry. William Camden shared Rainolds’s admiration. Already in the first edition of his Britannia (1586) he availed himself of Scaliger’s learning, extolling the man as “eruditionis lumen,” “literatissimus,” and “singulari eruditione.”14 Scaliger, who borrowed a copy from Claude Dupuy in 1588, was gratified by these compliments as much as by the subject matter, avowing that it had given him “un singulier plaisir et contentement.” Six years later, having received a new edition of the Britannia, Scaliger hailed it as “opus eximium καὶ παντὸς φθόνου κρεῖττον” (an extraordinary work, beyond the reach of all envy), and in 1607 he dubbed Camden “optimum et doctissimum virum” (the best and most learned man).15 On rare occasions, however, Camden politely, but firmly, disagreed with Scaliger. In his notes on Tibullus, Scaliger introduced an emendation to Seneca’s satire on Claudius, substituting “Scoto-Brigantas” for the original 12 Desmaizeaux, Scaligerana, 2: 621; The Correspondence of Joseph Julius Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 7:200. 13 Richard Hooker, Works, ed. John Keble, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1874), 1:106. 14 William Camden, Britannia (London: Ralph Newbery, 1586), 9, 40, 44. 15 Scaliger, Correspondence, 2:51, 58, 473; 7:200; Gerald J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols., Oxford—Warburg Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 22n.75.

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“Scuta Brigantas,” further exclaiming that since he “was the first to emend this passage, the Scots owe [him] this antiquity of their race.” Camden demurred: “I, against my will, cannot join him in applauding this opinion, though I have always respected him and admired his learning. For this conjecture comes not from the texts but from his native wit.” Camden continued to censure George Buchanan—who eagerly embraced Scaliger’s conjecture—as one who “would rather rave as his and the other gentleman’s cleverness dictates than be right with the received reading, [and who] shows remarkable warmth in his praise of this conjecture.”16 Camden’s protégé, John Selden, went further. He modeled his scholarly career after the fashion of Scaliger, whom he praised in an early publication (De duello, 1610) as a “great linguist.” Two years later, in his learned comments to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Selden hailed more emphatically the “mighty prince of learnings state,” the “All-penetrating Joseph Scaliger.” Such tributes, however, did not imply slavish following. While he embraced the estimation of the “great Dictator of Knowledge” on the origins of the word “Dulcarnon,” for example, Selden rejected Scaliger’s claim that it concerned Alexander the Great. The “warranted opinion of [his] learned friend” Thomas Lydiat had convinced Selden that the term originated twelve years after Alexander’s death, during the reign of Seleucus Nicator. Elsewhere, Selden also criticized elements of Scaliger’s analysis of tithes—a topic to which he returned six years later.17 Nevertheless, by the time he published his Titles of Honor (1614), Selden could hardly restrain his expressions of reverence. His epithets for Scaliger included “the most noble,” “the Phoenix of learned men,” divine (four times), “incomparable,” “noble,” “great,” and “most judicious.” Such effusiveness, and reliance on Scaliger’s works, lends credence to Selden’s admission that Scaliger had been his teacher. Noteworthy in this regard is that on the rare occasion when Selden sought to correct Scaliger in this book—on the origin of the title “Sophi”—he prefaced his dissent with an apology: “I am easily perswaded to bee of Scaligers mind for the reason of the name.”18 The commendatory poem Ben Jonson contributed to Titles of Honor styled Selden as “Monarch in Letters.” Such acclaim, joined with the scope of Selden’s 16 17

18

Scaliger, Castigationes, in Catulli, Tibulli, Propertii nova editio (Paris, 1577), 159, cited in Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 79–81. John Selden, The Duello or Single Combat (London: G.E. for John Helme, 1610), 39; Michael Drayton, Poly-olbion (London: Printed by Humphrey Lownes for M. Lownes et al., 1612), pp. 10, 184, sig. A3, p. 147. John Selden, Titles of Honor (London: William Stansby for John Helme, 1614), 11, 45, 52, 53, 66, 76, 87, 94, 103, 107, 111, 164, 166.

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learning, rendered Camden’s reference to him as “our Scaliger” (in a 1617 letter to Claude Fabri de Peiresc) quite fitting—especially as Camden drew the comparison when informing Peiresc about the publication of Selden’s De Diis Syris, a book inspired by, and vying to equal, if not surpass, Scaliger’s treatment of this and related topics.19 Selden’s aspiration became even more pronounced the following year, with the publication of Historie of Tithes. As early as 1614, he drafted a critical summary of Scaliger’s Diatriba de decimis in Lege Dei, and by 1617 he was hard at work on a full treatment of the subject. Selden’s ambition, as well as his debt to Scaliger, appeared in plain view in the Historie: from the conception of the work to the sources he used and the general conclusions he reached. Selden’s critics recognized, and exploited, just such congruity of purpose and execution. Sir James Sempill’s attempt at a refutation, for example, treated the two as cut from the same cloth, while chiding Selden for taxing “all of ignorance that have not used Scaligers helpe.” Selden remained unrepentant: “I owe that great name so much in that I have learned from his incomparable works, that being thus joined with me, I ought to justify him.”20 Equally significant is Selden’s apparent embrace of Scaliger’s blazing scholarly persona in addition to his erudition. “Blesse me, Mercurie,” he thundered at the opening of the preface to Titles of Honor, “from thy old Enemie, the Daring Ignorant! I know his hate to thee.” In 1618 he affixed a far more audacious motto to the title page of The Historie of Tithes—which subverted the pacifism intended by the classical source he drew on by supplanting it with an explicit confrontational stance: “Non partis studiis agimus. Sed sumpsimus arma Consiliis inimica tuis, Ignavia fallax.” (“We are not moved by party p ­ rejudice, but have taken up arms against your counsels, deceitful Sloth!”)21 But the violent reaction to Historie of Tithes had sobered Selden, forcing him to recognize the boundaries of unfettered erudition. Such sobering up may help explain 19

Ibid., sig. b2; Toomer, John Selden, 213. Selden’s “debt to Scaliger in De Diis Syris is not confined to topics directly connected to the subject matter. It is apparent that in his whole approach Selden has set himself the example of Scaliger as the scholarly model to imitate.” Ibid., 212. 20 James Sempill, Sacrilege Sacredly Handled (London: William Jones for Edmund Weaver, 1619), appendix p. 31; John Selden, Opera Omnia, ed. David Wilkins, 3 vols. in 6 pts. (London: J. Walthoe et al., 1726), vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 1351. 21 Selden, Titles of Honor, sig. b3; John Selden, The Historie of Tithes (London, 1618), title page. Translation taken from Toomer, John Selden, 265n.39. Cf. the original: “Non partis studiis agimur, nec sumpsimus arma Consiliis inimica tuis.” (We are not moved by party spirit; nor did we take up arms in opposition to your designs.) Lucan, The Civil War Books i–x (Pharsalia), trans. J.D. Duff (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1962), 199–201.

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why he “never again published a book which might exhibit him as an ‘English Scaliger’”—beyond the realization, as Gerald Toomer put it, “that his talents would best be developed in other fields, especially those involving law.”22 Many other Englishmen shared Selden’s admiration for Scaliger’s erudition— as well as the desire to outshine him. Paradoxically, however, such aspirations often ensured that explicit acknowledgments of debt were rarely made. Scaliger was mentioned by name primarily in order to be corrected or refuted. Case in point: John Bainbridge, Savilian professor of astronomy in Oxford, whose careful study of Scaliger’s chronology (and its sources) enabled him to demolish much of the latter’s theory of the ancient Egyptian calendar. John Greaves, Bainbridge’s successor as professor, memorialized this accomplishment in the inscription he commissioned for the tomb of the deceased at Merton College Chapel. Bainbridge, the inscription read, “corrected Scaliger with more success than Scaliger himself emended chronology.”23 Henry Savile, the founder of the Savilian professorships, entertained similar ambitions. According to Thomas Hobbes, Savile “would faine have been thought…to have been as great a scholar as Joseph Scaliger.” A measure of such ambition can be inferred from Isaac Casaubon’s reproof of Savile’s uttering “at every third word that Scaliger is a mere grammarian, a most foolish philosopher, a mere mathematician and nothing more.”24 However, in contrast to the unfettered “secular” pursuits carried out by laymen such as Camden, Selden, Savile, and Bainbridge, most English scholars were divines, whose learned endeavors were often constrained by considerations of propriety or orthodoxy. To complicate matters even further, Scaliger’s works and known opinions often engendered consternation among pious Calvinists, on the Continent as well as in England.25 Thus, the publication in 1583 of De emendatione temporum alarmed many among the godly in the 22 Toomer, John Selden, 256. 23 “qui Scaligerum foelicius correxit, quam Scaliger emendavit tempora.” Anthony Wood, The History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1786), 20; Anthony Grafton, “Barrow as a Scholar,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 293–95; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 207–8. 24 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Kate Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon, 2014), 2:264; J. Pearson & co., A Catalogue of rare and valuable autograph letters, historical documents (1907), 45. 25 Anthony Grafton, “Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and Others,” in his Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 297: “Scaliger’s worried statement that ‘there are more than 50 additions or changes to the New testament and the gospels. It’s a strange thing, I don’t dare to say it [in print]; if it were a pagan author, I would speak about it differently.’”

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Geneva Academy, and Scaliger immediately found himself obliged to defend his book. He became especially incensed at the patronizing suggestion by the Hebrew professor Cornelius Bertram that he stop meddling in “controversial positions on points of importance to the church.”26 The Genevans obviously considered Matthieu Béroalde’s Chronicon (1575) far more edifying; Béroalde not only argued that the Bible contained all necessary information for establishing scripture chronology, but even averred “that to combine biblical with pagan records was to plunge pure light into Cimmerian darkness.”27 Scaliger, Anthony Grafton has noted, “ruffled the feathers of the Genevan divines by going much further” than Erasmus and Valla, who had “bravely insisted on treating the New Testament as a document transmitted and corrupted by fallible men,” regarding “the New Testament as only a partial record of the early history and practice of the Church,” conceiving of it “as a document not only corruptible but lacunose.”28 Nowhere did Scaliger’s historicization of scripture prove more offensive than in his reliance on pagan sources for determining the chronology of the Persian monarchy—the foundational timeline for the elucidation of the precise duration of Daniel’s seventy weeks’ prophecy. In contrast to contemporary Christian interpretation of the prophecy as encompassing the 490 years that purportedly spanned Daniel’s time and the birth (or death) of Christ – according to the day-year principle – Scaliger boldly proposed an idiosyncratic, and radically different, periodization, stretching the seventy weeks “not altogether consecutively, from the time of Darius Nothus to the onset of the war that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple.”29 Scaliger’s solution had a mixed reception in England, where Béroalde found many defenders. Chief among those was the renowned Hebraist Hugh Broughton, whose Concent of Scripture (1588) boasted success in establishing an exact chronology from Adam to Christ, based solely on scripture. Broughton’s 26

Joseph Scaliger, Epistres Françoises des personnages illustres & doctes (Amsterdam: Harderwyck, 1624), 66–68; Scaliger, Correspondence, 1:416, 431–32, 439; Anthony Grafton, “From De die natali to De emendatione temporum: The Origins and Setting of Scaliger’s Chronology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 100–43, at 129. 27 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 268–69. Scaliger, in contrast, found Béroalde’s outlook contemptible. While granting him piety and some learning, Scaliger felt such aversion toward the “fanatical Beroaldistae” (Scaliger, Correspondence, 6:485) that he declared his refusal to allow the Chronicon to pollute his library (Joseph Scaliger, Elenchus utriusque Orationis chronologicae D. Davidis Parei [Leiden: Henrick van Haestens, 1607], 34). 28 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:324. 29 Joseph Juste Scaliger, De emendatione temporum (Paris, 1583), 287–90; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 305–12.

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literalism irked two of Scaliger’s English admirers, John Rainolds in Oxford and Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew in Cambridge. Both set out immediately to refute in their public lectures the validity of Broughton’s approach, as well as the evidentiary basis upon which it rested. The critique deeply offended the prickly Hebraist, so much so, in fact, that for the rest of his life he endeavored to vindicate himself, against Rainolds especially. Broughton repeatedly inveighed at the manner in which Rainolds “denied the precise fulfilment” of the seventy weeks, in adding seventy years “to the prophesied 490 years between Daniel and the Incarnation.” Such tampering with scripture chronology, he cried, “shaketh Gods word, whereby prophanenesse only will beare sway, and the Gospell shall be nothing worth.” To bolster his cause, Broughton published in 1590 a translation of that portion of Béroalde’s Chronicon dealing with the Persian monarchy, and broadcast elsewhere his concurring opinion that “the holy story is disturbed by seeking helpe” from profane sources.30 Scaliger became embroiled in the controversy directly, as Broughton convinced himself that Rainolds’s actions stemmed, in no small part, from a desire to vindicate De emendatione temporum. Broughton in 1591 praised Scaliger as a “rare learned man” and subsequently, during his sojourn in Leiden, became acquainted with Scaliger, who lent him some rare books, as Broughton publicly acknowledged. Nevertheless, on the matter of Persian history, and of Daniel’s prophecy in particular, he considered Scaliger to be Rainolds’s ally—and his own adversary. Scaliger’s “strange” identification of Darius the Mede as Nabonides, Broughton charged in 1592, “condemneth all the thousandes of Diuines, who do thinke that Darius the Mede. Dan. 5. gate Babylon by conquest.” Indeed, “Such wryters shoulde be hated, who deceyue so learned men, as M. Scaliger is knowen to be of all Learned men.”31 As his campaign intensified, Broughton continued to criticize Scaliger, whom he ultimately came to consider a greater threat than Rainolds. By 1611 Broughton even conceded that Rainolds equaled Beza in deserving “rarely of the church,” proving himself “syncere in all, saving his defence of M. Scaliger against the churches.” Broughton proceeded to offer a retrospective account of his lifelong defense of his interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy. When De emendatione temporum 30

31

Hugh Broughton, An Apologie in Briefe Assertions Defending that our Lord died in the time properly foretold to Daniel (London: William Kearney, 1592), sig. A1v); Hugh Broughton, Seder Olam (London, 1594), sig. *2. Hugh Broughton, A Treatise of Melchisedek, proving him to be Sem (London: Gabriel Simson and William White, 1591), sig. A4v; Broughton, Works (London: Nathaniel Ekins, 1662), 254; Broughton, An Apologie in Briefe Assertions Defending that Our Lord Died in the Time Properly Foretold to Daniel (London, 1592), sigs. Ciii, E3.

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“came forth, many churches were troubled: because it brought an other length of time then their narrations would suffer. Hereupon I tooke in hande to shew a chaine of times from Creation to Redemption.” He had also “warned of Heathen lying workes and forged,” Broughton continued, “which in athean blindnes should trouble the holy meaning of the Bible”—for example, Scaliger’s claiming Nabopollassar to have been Nabuchodonosor’s father, in contradiction to Jeremiah’s prophecy. Scaliger “should have seen this” danger, and for this and related transgressions, “all should blame his boldnes.”32 Broughton’s zeal earned him derision from Scaliger—who dubbed him “furiosus et maledicus” (an abusive madman)33—as well as contempt from those who rejected the puritanical undercurrents informing his views. One such person was William Smith, master of Clare College, Cambridge, who found occasion in a 1606 sermon preached before James I to refer to “the divers opinions of our distracted Chronologers,” while expounding on the enigmatic manner in which 1 Samuel 13:1 recounted the duration of Saul’s reign. Such digression led Smith to congratulate the lot of the English Church, whose “faith is no way founded on these fond Braughtonists,” whom he contrasted with Joseph Scaliger, “the mender of times, and learnedst of them all.”34 Samuel Purchas trod more delicately on the genealogy of the Persian kings: I dare not take upon me to bee umpire and decider of those many altercations amongst Chronologers: but have simply followed Scaliger, whose verie name is able to shield mee from contempt, if not to yeeld mee commendation. Let others, that have more lust and leisure, traverse these matters at their pleasure: my intent is, most of all, the Histories of religions: and the successions and alterations of States I have lightly touched: But precisely to determine in what yeare of the world every King began his reigne, and to dispute the same with all opponents, would bee somewhat tedious to the Reader: to mee (perhappes) in these varieties of opinions, impossible.35 Yet there is no denying that Scaliger’s works unsettled the religious sensibilities of  many Englishmen. In 1590, the thirty-year-old Richard Harvey, fellow of 32

Hugh Broughton, A Require of Agreement to the Groundes of Divinitie Studie (1611), 10, 89–90. 33 Desmaizeaux, Scaligerana, 2:244. 34 William Smith, The black-smith (London: Ed. Allde for Martin Clarke, 1606), 13. 35 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1613), 59–60.

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Pembroke College, Cambridge—and already a veteran of polemics over Ramism, astrology, and the Marprelate polemic—published A Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemeies, the first half of which lambasted real and imaginary critics of Christ’s dual nature, followed by a further attack on Marprelate. A scriptural literalist, Harvey abhorred the many enemies of Christ who refused to accept him as the “lambe of God, that taketh away sinne.” Having covered doctrine, Harvey turned to confuting those who by “their owne carnall humor, and in their grosse worldly sense tooke upon them to judge of all matters, as well spirituall as corporall, by the only direction of their natural reason, or rather fantasticall conceite, which otherwhile carried them headlong into all error and blasphemie.” Pride of place among those Harvey accorded to the Scaligers, father and son. He deemed Julius Caesar only marginally better than a Mahometan, a Nestorian, or other deniers of Christ’s divinity: a “suttle maister of late yeares, suttle as a spinners web full of cunning and simply good for nothing.” Indeed, owing to “the pride of his name…or of his wit, or militarship,” divines everywhere found him “like those Mahometicall impostors which deceived the king of Moluccae with their Manucodiata a bird of paradise, for dreaming and fayning many matters, thereby to lead the people into vaine hope and maintaine their opinions or sects.” As for Joseph Scaliger, Harvey damned him as “the writer of the Judaicall historie and himselfe a Jewish priest, who reporteth of Jesus but as of another good wise man, or a good prophet at the most, because he could say no more then he knew, or would not seeme to be wiser then his countrymen, from whom both the turkish and all other ungratious violent doctrines had their beginning.”36 Harvey may have been an irascible zealot, but others shared his misgivings regarding Joseph Scaliger. John Owen, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, articulated the underlying dilemma in 1659. With the growth of the knowledge of learned tongues, he wrote, “the use of that knowledge in critical observations did also increase.” But however useful such learning proved for the elucidation of scripture, “as the best things are apt to be most abused, so in particular it hath fallen out with this kind of learning and study.” Protestant scholars, such as Theodore Beza, Joseph Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon, were the primary contributors to such scholarship. And yet, as “the mind of man” tends to be “exceedingly vainglorious, curious, uncertain, after a door to reputation and renown by this kind of learning was opened in the world, it quickly spread itself over all bounds and limits of sobriety.” Archbishop James Ussher, Owen recollected, had often expressed his concern over the “manifold inconveniences, if not mischiefs,” that 36

Richard Harvey, A Theologicall Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemies (London: John Windet for W.P., 1590), 77, 84–85.

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have followed on the heels of “boldness and curiosity of some in criticising the Scripture”—a glaring instance of which Owen found in Brian Walton’s recent edition of the London Polyglot Bible.37 Ussher, in fact, expressed his anxiety as early as 21 December 1607, in a letter to William Eyre, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. The twenty-six-year-old Ussher, who had recently been appointed professor of theology at Trinity College, Dublin, had been hard at work on a defense of the Masoretic version of the Old Testament, and he appealed to Eyre for assistance. Among other things, Ussher mentioned a design by the “most learned Scaliger” to make public “rare and previously unheard-of information” pertinent to Ussher’s project, including evidence for the Masoretic vowel points to have postdated Jerome’s time. “I am accustomed to admire that man’s multifarious erudition,” Ussher intimated, but such news upset him: “if I can predict anything,” Scaliger would “play around in this work,” just as he did when he encumbered his edition of [pseudo] Virgil’s Culex with numerous—and to Ussher’s mind unproved— emendations. In “these sorts of trifles,” Ussher continued, Scaliger may “play around as much as he likes: the fortunes of Greece are not in his hands. But in serious and very important matters I would have wished for a pious and modest heart.” Hence he urged Eyre “to fight this growing evil, and take care that the Christian world does not suffer from it. This is a war-machine that has been built to threaten our walls; or some hidden error lies in it.”38 Eyre embraced the idea: “I have long had it in mind…to explore more deeply than hitherto some matters about the authentic edition of the scriptures, and the antiquity and rationale of the Hebrew pointing, vowels, and accents.” He hoped such exploration would help “vindicate the purity and integrity of the sources from the carelessness of copyists and conjectures of some critics.” Consequently, Eyre, too, voiced concern over the “new opinion” that the “most illustrious” Scaliger had advertised in his Animadversions on Eusebius, specifically, that the “letters in which the Jews today write down their sacred books and all their records are recent inventions, distorted from Syriac ones, and those in turn from Samaritan.” Eyre proceeded to describe the kind of evidence he believed could make it “possible to prove that Scaliger’s opinion is openly false and out of bounds,” while expressing great admiration for the great 37 38

John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 24 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1850–53), 16:289. The Correspondence of James Ussher 1600–1656, ed. Elizabethanne Boran, 3 vols. (Dublin: Irish Manuscript Commission, 2015), 1: 13n.8, 21. Later Ussher added: “The critics are being wanton, and their petulance must be suppressed; were it not plausible, I would not believe them.” Ibid., 22.

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scholar himself, whom he had hoped to consult personally during a projected trip to Leiden.39 Alas, he informed Ussher on 5 December 1608, “that ornament of this age” lies gravely ill, and is not likely to recover: “If he dye now, my desire to make a journey there before I come into Ireland is unlike to grow to a resolution.”40 Another friend of Ussher’s, Thomas Morton, future bishop of Durham, articulated a contrasting opinion. Morton was an admirer of Scaliger. In 1609 he announced in the dedication of his defense of the English Church against the Catholics an intention to demonstrate the just cause of Protestantism “out of the testimonies” of Catholic writers themselves. Such a defense would render true “the answer which Scaliger (the Alpha of learned men of this age) made unto our Adversaries…when they objected unto Protestants novelties and innovations: Nos (saith he) Novatores non summus, sed vos estis Veteratores.” Morton described Scaliger the following year as “the Phoenix of this age,” and in 1631 as “Myrrour of Grammarians.” Hardly surprising, therefore, that upon being informed in 1618 of Ussher’s “diligent search of antiquities ecclesiasticall, for the trial of such points as are controverted between us and the Romanists,” Morton advocated caution: “When you come ad emendationem emendationis I doubt not but you will be very circumspect, for you know that to correct Scaliger is tangere pupillam oculi literaturae humanioris.”41 Scaliger’s interpretation of Daniel’s seventy weeks remained a concern for English interpreters of prophecies throughout the seventeenth century. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More, for example, contended in 1681 that Joseph Mede went astray in his interpretation of the seventy weeks primarily owing to his following in Scaliger’s footsteps—“of whom through his innate modesty he might have an overweening opinion”—whereas More deemed the reckoning of Thomas Lydiat, “that other singular ornament of our English Church,” to better account for this crucial epoch. Lydiat “has removed all blocks and rubbish which either Scaliger, Kepler or Suslyga have cast in his way,” More insisted, and his work “may convince any unprejudiced man that reads him, that he is in the truth touching the time of the Nativity of our blessed Saviour.” Three 39 40 41

Ibid., 24–25, 27. Eyre cited Joseph Juste Scaliger, Thesaurus temporum (Leiden: Thomas Basson, 1606), 103 (2nd pagination). The Correspondence of James Ussher, 1:65. Thomas Morton, A Catholike Appeale for Protestants (London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1609), sig. A2v; Thomas Morton, The Encounter against M. Parsons (London: John Bill, 1610), 109 (2nd pagination); Morton, Of the institution of the sacrament of the blessed bodie and blood of Christ (London: William Stansby for Robert Mylbourne, 1631), 5 (2nd pagination); Ussher, Works, 16:351.

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decades earlier, More had recalled Ralph Cudworth’s public lectures at Cambridge during the late 1650s, in which his fellow Cambridge Platonist “undeceived the world, misled too long by the over-great opinion they had of Joseph Scaliger.” Embracing Funccius instead, Cudworth “demonstrated the Manifestation of the Messiah to have fallen out at the End of the sixty ninth week, and his Passion in the midst of the last, in the most natural and proper sense thereof.”42 More’s estimation of Lydiat’s worth furnishes an additional clue to account for the antipathy toward Scaliger in England. Lydiat’s Tractatus de variis annorum formis (1605) denounced all existing chronologies, both ancient and modern, as hopelessly corrupt, offering instead the octodesexcentenary period of 592 years, which, he boasted, had restored the original lunisolar calendar that existed in Noah’s time. Scaliger reacted violently to Lydiat’s book, and the savagery of his critique offended the English, many of whom considered Lydiat to be in the right. James Worthington, for example, recorded the opinions of certain “Grandees” of the republic of letters, who ranked Lydiat, Joseph Mede, and Francis Bacon as the preeminent English scholars of the time. Lydiat, Worthington argued, masterfully contested Christoph Clavius “with the whole Colledge of Romish Mathematicians,” as he did “that great Goliah of Literature, Joseph Scaliger, whom yet he so manifestly worsted, as to make him forsake his Weapon, and to betake himself unmanly to his Tongue.”43 Robert Plot offered a more expansive contrast between Lydiat and Scaliger in his Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677). Scaliger was indeed a man “of great Learning, but withal so confident and imperious, so abusive and assuming, that whenever he wanted Arguments for the support of his cause, he always sought revenge upon the person of his Adversary.” For evidence Plot turned to Scaliger’s insulting references to Lydiat in his correspondence, where he hurled at his hapless opponent such epithets as the “greatest monster that ever England produced,” “the veryest fool in the whole world,” and “a beetle.”44 True, Plot noted (after citing Peter Heylyn’s damnation of both Scaligers for their “rash censure on the whole English Nation”) Joseph Scaliger “spake Honorably of some of the English.” However, “these touched not the apple of 42

43 44

Henry More, A plain and continued exposition of the several prophecies or divine visions of the prophet Daniel (London: M.F. for Walter Kettilby, 1681), xviii–xix, 127; More, An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness (London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1660), xvi. Joseph Mede, The Works, 3rd ed. (London: Roger Norton for Richard Royston, 1672), xliii–xliv. For a sample of such comments, see Scaliger, Correspondence, 6:221, 231, 233, 261, 290–91, 350; 7:275.

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his eye, nor endeavored the ruin of his great Diana, the Julian Period, of which he conceited himself the Inventor,” though, in fact, the discovery properly belonged to Robert de Losinga, bishop of Hereford in the late eleventh century. Scaliger merely “fitted it to Chronological uses; but whil’st in the midst of his glorious attempts, behold him shaken by meek, and modest Lydiat, the happy Inventor of a more accurat period, whereby he so disturbed and confounded all his supputations, that (if we may believe the most Learned of the Age) he laid his angry Rival flat upon his back.”45 The belief that Scaliger’s animus toward England prevented him from recognizing the merit of scholarly contribution emanating there may be further substantiated by citing his curt dismissal of William Gilbert’s scientific work. According to the Oxford Orientalist John Gregory, he who “holdeth not himself convinced of the principles of Magnetical Philosophy, is not to be taken for a man of sense or reason.” Such a conviction led Gregory to reflect on a comment made by Scaliger in his correspondence: “tres amplissimos Commentarios edidit, in quibus magis mihi probavit doctrinam suam, quam Magnetis Naturam; nam incertior sum quam dudum.” (He edited three very long commentaries in which he proved to me his doctrine more than the nature of the magnet; indeed I am more uncertain than before.) “We know what he meaneth by amplissimos,” Gregory remarked wryly. But why “tres Commentarios” when Gilbert’s De Magnete actually comprised six books? Surely Scaliger did not read the rest, which is hardly surprising: “England was a kind of Nazareth to this great Scholar; he would not endure any good should come out from hence.”46 Gregory’s perception of Scaliger’s blind spot is telling, for he genuinely admired the Leiden scholar, modeling his scholarship on Scaliger’s. Chronology 45

46

Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-Shire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1677), 222–24. According to Roger Twysden, Scaliger publicly responded to Lydiat but once, “because his reasons were too strong to be refuted.” However, some time later, Lydiat, “lying in his bed had his house broken, and was himself sorely beaten and wounded by disguised persons, who were never known, nor took thence the value of one farthing: insomuch that many suspected that usage to come from the forge of Scaliger, who not being able to answer his reasons, thought fit to be revenged upon him with clubs.” Twysden claimed to have received the information “from the mouth of a person of great integrity, who saw and spake with [Lydiat] when his face was swelled, and ill with the said beating.” John Twysden, Medicina Veterum vindicata: or an Answer to a Book, entituled Medela Medicinae (London: J.G. for John Crook, 1666), sigs. a6v–a7v. John Gregory, Gregorii Posthuma: Or, Certain Learned Tracts (London: William Dugard for Laurence Sadler, 1649), 283; Scaliger, Correspondence, 5:287. Three months earlier Scaliger wrote similarly to Casaubon: “quidam Anglus ante triennium libro de magnete edito nihil dignum exspectatione ea quam excitarat protulit.” Ibid., 227.

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“hath received greatest perfection from that excellent work of Scaliger,” Gregory stated, “upon whose grounds” Calvisius and Helvicus improved, thereby making “Chronologie everie waies absolute, and brought to such a perfection as needs not to bee added unto.” In addition to regularly praising Scaliger as “the great,” and “the learned,” Gregory sprang to Scaliger’s defense when occasion called—for example, exposing Peter Heylyn’s mistake in arguing that Nimrod built Nineveh upon the River Euphrates, rather than the Tigris. He would have desisted, Gregory avowed, had Heylyn “himself spared great Scaliger in a lesser matter.” But Gregory occasionally begged to differ, as he did when challenging what he considered to be Scaliger’s uncritical acceptance of Syncellus’s dating of Abraham’s birth to 292 years after the Flood. In justifying his critical stance, Gregory insisted that the centrality of such a dating to chronology “seemeth to deserv more at our hands, then to bee carelesly committed to the protection of a bare Assertion; meriting rather som peremptorie proof, especially since learned Scaliger hath conceived the contrarie. Rather therefore then wee will doubt of his credit, wee will for his sake call the truth in Question.” What moved the “great Scaliger” to fix Abraham’s birth to Beluchus’s reign, Gregory wondered, “long after Ninus,” when Gerard Mercator, Seth Calvisius, and Louis Cappel, all agreed that he was born in the forty-third of Ninus’s reign? “Thus to the probable falshood of renowned Scaliger,” Gregory “set down the probabilitie of the contrarie.” Scaliger’s “greatness” he countered with the only slightly lesser renown of the aforementioned trio, “who cannot but demerit our belief, becaus their process is Astronomical, and their Chronologies faithfully contracted out of the larger Volumes of Celestial Revolutions and infallibly grounded upon the Laws of Heaven.”47 Elsewhere, Gregory controverted another issue: the etymology of the name Baal-zebub (fly-god), the Philistine god of Akron: “But for the reason, if any could be given, Scaliger was likely to give as good as another, and yet his reason is, that the Scripture put this name upon the God of Ekron by way of derision.” Scaliger inferred his opinion from a statement made in the Talmudic Tractate Pirke Avoth, to the effect “that a Fly was never seen in the Slaughter-house of the Temple.” However, Gregory countered, “that therefore the God of Ekron should be call’d the Fly-God, is a reason below that mans sagacity. He was properly so called, as the most learned Selden” has demonstrated.48 Gregory evidently viewed himself as following in the path charted by Scaliger and trodden by Selden, the latter of whom he reverentially referred 47 Gregory, Posthuma, 173, 191, 229–30. 48 John Gregory, Notes and Observations upon some Passages of Scripture (Oxford: H. Hall for Edward Forrest, 1646), 41–42. For Selden’s opinion, see Toomer, John Selden, 242–43.

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to as “another Scaliger of our own.”49 However, despite initial enthusiasm for the Scalige­rian model in England, the new model of Continental criticism ultimately foundered on its way to putting down roots there. As noted above, most English scholars were divines, whose willingness, or ability, to contribute to that challenging—and seemingly not altogether orthodox—enterprise was nowhere to be taken for granted. By the late 1620s, Selden himself shifted his scholarly interests in a different direction, in part because he believed, as Toomer suggests, “his talents would best be developed in other fields.”50 Yet, just as significantly, he must have recognized the resistance to the Scaligerian model of scholarship in England—articulated most vociferously in Richard Montagu’s Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (1621)—on account of its incongruousness with the “proper task” of the learned divine: that is, to pursue patristic scholarship with theology firmly in sight. Further discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay. Here I merely seek to present a prolegomenon for a future in-depth analysis of the precise manner by which Englishmen incorporated aspects of Scaliger’s ­scholarship into their work. Or rejected it. Such a study will require not only a careful investigation of a broad swath of published and unpublished works (as well as correspondences and marginalia) but also, as I’ve sought to suggest, a weighing-in of Scaliger’s Anglophobia and English chauvinism in the process of ­diffusion and assimilation of his ideas.51

49 Gregory, Posthuma, 200. 50 Toomer, John Selden, 256. 51 Two forthcoming books would prove essential for such an analysis. Paul Botley’s Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, c. 1569–1613: The Life and Letters of a Renaissance Scholar (Leiden: Brill, 2016) would elucidate the career of Scaliger’s most important source of information about English scholars, while the revised version of N.J.S. Hardy “The Ars critica in Early Modern England” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 2012)—forthcoming from Oxford University Press— would shed considerable new light on the nature and quality of English erudition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

chapter 5

What Does an Oriental Scholar Look Like? Some Portraits of Joseph Scaliger and Other Sixteenth-century Oriental Scholars: A Selection* Kasper van Ommen In this essay I want to focus on the portraits of one of the most famous early modern Orientalists, who was involved in the study of the “new” Oriental languages in the sixteenth century: Joseph Scaliger. Are the portraits that were being made and distributed of this scholar different from those in other fields of scholarship? Are such portraits mere expressions of the individual scholars, or do they have any common features that distinguish them from other types of portraits? Is there a certain iconology present in the images such that we can instantly recognize the scholar portrayed as an Oriental scholar? The paratext—the elements closely associated with the main text of literary and scholarly works—present in these portraits can provide us with valuable information on the persons portrayed and if, and then why, they were portrayed in a special way. Before embarking on his journey from France to Leiden in 1593, where he would accept the position of honorary professor in Latin language, antiquities, and history at the newly formed university, the eminent scholar Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) commissioned the university’s curators to design and execute engraved portraits of his father and himself. The purpose of this action was to notify the members of European courts and universities that he would arrive in Leiden as decus academiae later that year.1 The celebrated Haarlem artist Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) was given the assignment by the curators of the university and the burgomasters of Leiden and duly designed and executed a beautiful engraving of each scholar for the sum of 216 guilders. The print run of the engravings was five hundred copies, enough to secure a wide distribution. The curators decided that the copper plates should be stored * I should like to thank Professor Frederik de Wolff, Dr. Martin Baasten, Professor Albert van der Heide, Professor Chris Heesakkers, and Professor Henk Jan de Jonge for their indispensable help with the translations of the Hebrew and Latin verses. Professor Richard Todd and Professor Henk Jan de Jonge were a great help in proofreading the text. 1 P.C. Molhuysen, De komst van Scaliger in Leiden (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1913), 9. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_006

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in the holdings of the university library, where they still form part of the special collections today (see Figure 5.1).2 Joseph Scaliger is depicted as a man of about thirty-five years of age in Goltzius’s engraving (although he was actually fifty-three at the time when he came to Leiden). Goltzius’s is the earliest known engraved portrait of Scaliger, but as the inscription on the engraving tells us, he worked from an earlier painted portrait, possibly a miniature sent to Holland that is unknown to us today.3 Goltzius’s portrait is set within an oval bearing the text “Iosephus Scaliger Iul. Caesaris F. Aet. xxxv A°. M D lxxv.” The oval portrait itself is set within an aedicula, an architectural border. On the pillars, the basement, and the pediment we see six putti holding a book, a globe, a scroll, a laurel and laurel wreath, a royal crown, and a carpenter’s square. On either side of the portrait are allegorical figures: Mercury on the right (personifying Commerce and Eloquence)4 and Urania on the left (Astronomy and Science), with their attributes. The choice of Urania is appropriate because Scaliger was famous as a chronologer and astronomer. In the top center is the coat of arms of the Della Scala family with the scala and the double-headed eagle.5 From a letter by Jan van Hout (1542–1609), the secretary to the curators of Leiden University, we learn that Scaliger specified some requirements regarding the portrait and its execution in a Latin letter to the curators.6 The letter 2 “Ord. om M. Henricus Goltius” in Jan van Hout’s Dachbouck (ubl, ac 100, fols. 267v–68r) of 14 Aug. 1592, in P.C. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Leidsche Universiteit (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1913–24), vol. 1, 1574–1610, 205*; the original copper plate of the portrait of Joseph Scaliger is depicted in K. van Ommen, “‘In imagine picta.’ De portretten van Josephus Justus Scaliger,” in Adelaar in de wolken. De Leidse jaren van Josephus Justus Scaliger 1593–1609, ed. P.G. Hoftijzer (Leiden: Scaliger Instituut/Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, 2005), 140. 3 The lines “Josephi visi sibi tantùm in imagine picta/Hanc tibi dat vivam Goltzius effigiem” are engraved underneath the portrait. The Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam (olim collection Van der Willigen) holds a copy of the engraving by Goltzius with this text printed in letterpress that was pasted underneath the portrait. Cf. W.N. du Rieu, “De portretten en het Testament van Josephus Justus Scaliger,” in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Leiden, 1881), 98. See, on the portraits of Scaliger, Van Ommen, “‘In imagine picta,’” 138–63. 4 Mercury is normally depicted alongside Minerva, the goddess of philosophy and wisdom. Both are associated with reason and understanding. 5 E. Pelinck, “Goltzius’ portretten van de Scaligers,” Oud Holland 81 (1966): 259–62, makes a reference to Joseph Scaliger’s Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligeræ, et Iul. Cæs. Scaligeri vita (Lugduni Batavorum: ex officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1594) and to the two coats of arms depicted in this publication. Scaliger refers to the eagle as a gift from the emperor to his ancestors on p. 32. 6 The letter of Van Hout in which Scaliger’s letter is discussed in Pelinck, “Goltzius’ portretten,” 259.

What Does an Oriental Scholar Look Like?

Figure 5.1  Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, ca. 1593. Engraving, 273 mm × 196 mm. bn 1232, Leiden University Libraries

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itself, and so the specific requirements dictated by Scaliger, are regrettably lost to us. It seems likely that Scaliger had specific examples of aedicula portraits in mind for the portraits of his father and himself. Examples of this kind circulated in France at the time as book illustrations and works of art.7 It may be noted that aedicula portraits were often used for portrayals of royalty and nobility.8 With the portrait Scaliger wished to express a specific claim to his descent from the noble Della Scala family of Verona. One year later he would do the same thing but more vigorously with the publication of the Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligeræ, et Iul. Cæs. Scaligeri vita of 1594, a printed demonstration of his noble descent.9 The Epistola includes a genealogy of the Della Scalas, a biography of Joseph’s father, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and an autobiography of Joseph himself. In the book Scaliger places himself consciously in the ranks of the nobility of his time: Regibus, principibus et proceribus noti sumus. Clarissimi et illustrissimi sumus…10 The aedicula portrait was completely appropriate to the larger framework of Scaliger’s self-representation. Joseph Scaliger (or to give him his French name, Joseph De Lescalle) was not really to blame for holding the conviction that he was descended from the Della Scalas. This fable, for it was a fable, was planted in the mind of the young Joseph by his father. To paraphrase Anthony Grafton: it is remarkable that the man who set out to seek the truth (veritas) in scholarship by emending and restoring classical texts initiated his career with a falsification of history received from his father. Scaliger dedicated many years of his scholarly career to proving that several texts on chronology were actually fakes. While reconstructing the lost first book of the Chronicle of Eusebius, Scaliger recovered the lost remains of the Egyptian dynasties by the third-century Egyptian historian and priest Manetho. Manetho’s text was not unknown to Scaliger, because he was familiar with the printed edition by Annius of Viterbo of 1498, which Scaliger was able to identify as a forgery because of his own discovery. This way 7

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Pelinck mentions the portrait of King Henry ii (1556) by Nicolas Beatrizet and the portrait of Emanuel Philibert of Savoye by Jan Sadeler i as possible examples. See ibid., 262, and illustrations on 265. Goltzius also engraved an aedicula portrait of Henri iv of Navarre (1553–1610) in 1592 and another in 1600. See on fact and fiction about the descent of Joseph Scaliger from the Della Scalas K.A.E. Enenkel, “Autobiographie als Genealogie: Joseph Scaligers Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae (1594),” in Enenkel, Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 728–55. “We are known among Kings, Princes, and Nobility. We are extraordinarily famous and respected.” See Scaliger, Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligeræ, 62.

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of working characterizes Scaliger’s attitude to the process of reconstructing the most reliable version possible of an ancient text.11 Yet Scaliger consistently defended the false claim of his own noble ancestry in spoken word and written text until his own death in 1609. In 1594, after arriving in Leiden, he published the Epistola with the publisher Franciscus Raphelengius (1539–97), to prove that he descended from the princes of Verona and to honor his father. Many of Scaliger’s friends, among them the curators of Leiden University and the magistrates of the city, never doubted this claim and even supported Scaliger in defending it.12 Other contemporaries, most notably the Jesuits, attacked Scaliger fiercely and did all they could to reveal the truth about his family history. In early 1607 the Jesuit Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649) published Scaliger Hypobolimaeus (The suppositious Scaliger), in which Schoppe proved the falsity of Scaliger’s pretensions to a Della Scala ancestry. In 1589 Schoppe published Julius Caesar Scaliger’s medical diploma from Padua, which was discovered by Melchior Wieland or Guilandinus (1520–89)13 and which proved that Joseph’s father was actually named Giulio Bordone.14 Scaliger, supported by his pupil Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), fought back by publishing a Confutatio fabulae Burdonum in 1608, but Schoppe’s invective and defamation affected him deeply; he died a few months later, on 21 January 1609. The university paid homage to its “prince” with several funeral orations, a commemorative monument, and the Arca Scaligerana—the ornamental bookcase holding the Oriental books Scaliger bequeathed to Leiden University Library. This shrine can be regarded as the intellectual counterpart of the Arche Scaligere, the funeral monuments of Verona’s ruling Scaligeri family in the churchyard next to the private chapel of the Della Scalas, the Romanesque church of Santa Maria Antica in Verona.

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A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–1993), 2:682–85, 711–20. The French crown also accepted the nobility of his family. Jacques-Auguste de Thou called Scaliger Sr. “Julius Caesar, Filius Benedicti Veronensium principis” (Julius Caesar, Benedictus’s son, Prince of Verona). Wieland, the director of the Hortus Botanicus in Padua and professor of botany, disputed with Scaliger about some matters regarding the papyrus plant and considered that Scaliger had gravely insulted him. As a result Wieland set out to find out the real Scaliger family history. See Enenkel, “Autobiographie als Genealogie,” 741; and A. Grafton, “Rhetoric, Philology and Egyptomania in the 1570s: J.J. Scaliger’s Invective against M. Guilandinus’s Papyrus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 167–94. The Jesuits took the family name Bordone as referring to Burdo, meaning the insult “hinny.”

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Scaliger clearly understood the power of the image in communicating his impending arrival at Leiden University to a wider audience, thereby promoting his status as a famous scholar. In this he may have been emulating two other internationally renowned humanists: Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). “Like Alberti before him, Erasmus had an abiding interest in his own appearance…and basing himself on Cicero’s De Amicitia, he evolved a cult of friendship which expressed itself in the exchange of portraits.”15 Scaliger must have felt some kinship with these two scholars, and he felt not in the least restrained from adding his name to the list of famous Renaissance men. In Scaliger’s correspondence we do indeed find evidence of the exchange of portraits: for instance, he donated a portrait bust, probably made of wax, to the famous antiquary Giovanni Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601) in Padua for his museum in the year 1601.16 Scaliger gave a painted portrait by the artist Daniel Hagiensis17 to the Greek scholar Carolus Labbaeus, also known as Charles Labbé de Monvéron (1582–1657), in 1604.18 In 1605 he promised the Dutch scholar Helias or Elias Putschius (Elias van Putschen, 1580–1606) that he would send him a painted portrait, but he had difficulty finding a painter for the job, because the man who first painted me has gone to Italy. His brothers, skilful artists, have portrayed me as someone different from me, and I prefer my face to remain unknown rather than to be ridiculed with the public through such a specter. There remained as last hope and replacement, Daniel of the Hague and his daughter, who have imitated the forms of my face more successfully.19 15 16 17 18

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J. Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1979), 92. Scaliger [Leiden] to Giovanno Vincenzo Pinelli [Padua], 13 Aug. 1601 in The Correspondence of Joseph Scaliger, ed. P. Botley and D. van Miert (Geneva: Droz, 2012). This is most likely the painter Daniel van den Queborn or Queecborne (1552/1557– 1602/1605), who lived in The Hague from ca. 1594 until his death. Scaliger [Leiden] to Carolus Labbaeus [Paris], 20 June 1604, in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence. Scaliger was clearly satisfied with the result by the painter and engraver Daniel Hagiensis: “Effigiem meam longe meliorem et elegantiorem quam eae sunt quas hic vidisti tibi curavi. Daniel Hagiensis pictor fecit.” This portrait is now in the collection of Leiden University Libraries: Van Ommen, “In imagine picta,” 152, 155, no. D2. “De pictura dolet mihi non posse statim explere desiderium tuum. Qui primus me expressit, is in Italiam abiit. Fratres eius peritissimi artifices alium potius quam me pinxerunt, et quidem malo meum vultum ignorari quam eiusmodi μορμολυκείῳ apud gentes traduci. Supererat ultima spes et subsidiaria, [Danie]l [the letter is cut short here, but the missing

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These remarks are particularly striking in view of the fact that the gifted artist Jacques de Gheyn ii (1565–1629), a close friend of Scaliger’s pupil Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), was still living in Leiden at that time or was just about to move to The Hague. We know of three drawings of Scaliger by De Gheyn that have survived. Two of these, probably made after 1600, depict Scaliger and a pupil (in view of the globe in one of the drawings, it is believed that the student depicted is the geographer Philippus Cluverius [1580–1622]) studying together at a table.20 The other drawing depicts Scaliger reading a book and could well have been made by De Gheyn as a study for a portrait.21 De Gheyn depicts Scaliger in the last years of his life. Heinsius gives a good description of Scaliger’s physiognomy at that time: “he was well built,” but “his sunken and hollow temples often gave him cause for pleasantry… He did not grow a beard until he came to Holland, which, even untrimmed, became him very well. For in France, as his friends remember very well, he had it cut more precisely and from time to time even shaved. At the end of his life he had hardly a tooth left…”22 The small group of drawings testifies that De Gheyn was closely connected to Scaliger, drawing him while he worked in his private quarters. Another Leiden painter who was involved earlier in painting a portrait of Scaliger and was still active during Scaliger’s later lifetime was Isaac Claesz van Swanenburgh (1537–1614). In 1599 Leiden University paid him for adding the coat of arms and lettering to the portrait of Scaliger painted by Paullus Merula

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words are probably Daniel Hagiensis] eiusque filia, qui felicius vultus mei fila imitati sunt.” Scaliger [Leiden] to Elias Putschius [Heidelberg], 29 May 1605, in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence. Daniel’s daughter was the painter Maria van den Queecborne (?–1654). The drawings of Scaliger and the pupil are in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Céramique de Rouen, inv. nr. 975.4.289, and the Print Room, Statens Museum for Kunst, in Copenhagen. See I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), nos. 703–05. Inv. 19.999, Collection Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre, Paris. J.J. Scaliger, Epistolae omnes, quae reperiri potuerunt, nunc primum collectae ac editae. Caeteris praefixa est ea quae est De Gente Scaligera; in qua de autoris vita; et sub finem Danielis Heinsii De morte eius altera (Francofurti, 1628), 771: “Forma eximia fuit nisi quod collapsa tempora ac cava saepe materiem iocandi illi darent…” Heinsius cited by J. Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz; London: Williams and Norgate, 1855), 118–19. On the basis of the description by Heinsius, van Regteren Altena believes the drawing of Scaliger was made toward the very end of his life, and regards the three drawings as documents humains.

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(1558–1607).23 He was, however, also a gifted painter in his own right who produced several portraits of Leiden professors. Scaliger apparently succeeded in finding a suitable painter, because at the end of 1605 a portrait of him was ready to be sent to Putschius. On another occasion, in 1607, Scaliger distributed copies of an engraved portrait, probably the engraving done that year by Bartholomeus Willemsz Dolendo (ca. 1589– 1626),24 to several friends in France, among them the physician François Vertunien (sieur de Lavau, ?–1607), who praised the portrait and the resemblance of Joseph Scaliger to his esteemed father.25 Other recipients of portraits were Scévole de Sainte-Marthe (1536–1623) and Ignatius Hanniel (?–1608), the professor of history at the University of Rostock.26 Scaliger also used the engraving as a companion to written contributions in alba amicorum of visiting students and other acquaintances, for instance in the album of the collector Ernst Brinck (1582–1649).27 Apart from self-promotion, an important reason for sharing portraits, at least in Scaliger’s case, was to elicit by reciprocity gifts of books or other items from the portrait recipients.28 In the early sixteenth century the production and the exchange of friendship portraits was already a well-established practice. Scaliger extended the 23

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Curatorenoverleg of 8 Nov. 1599: “Overgelevert zijnde declaratie van Mr. Isaac Claesz., schilder vant geene hy verdient hadde over t’afsetten van D. Iosephus Scaliger, D. Iunius ende D. Iohannes Secundus.” Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Leidsche Universiteit, 1:388*. See Van Ommen, “‘In imagine picta,’” 146–47. Vertunien wrote to Scaliger on 13 Apr. 1607, in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence: “Vos lettres…, avec vostre excellent portraict, …, jugent que vous avez bien raison de dire ressembler du tout à celuy de vostre Trismegiste pere et du tout incomparable heros. Car certes il y a fort peu de difference entre l’un et l’autre.” For the lifelong friendship between the two scholars see R.L. Hawkins, “The Friendship of Joseph Scaliger and François Vertunien,” Romanic Review 8 (1917): 117–44, 307–27. See François Vertunien [Poitiers] to Scaliger [Leiden], 13 Apr. 1607; Scévole de SainteMarthe [Poitiers] to Scaliger [Leiden], 16 Apr. 1607; and Ignatius Hanniel [Rostock] to Scaliger [Leiden], 24 Aug. 1607; all in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence. Album Amicorum of E. Brinck, fols. 55v–56r, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Den Haag [133M 86]. Below the engraving is a verse by Daniel Heinsius: “Tempora qui nobis, qui veros reddidit annos, / Qui docuit priscos certius ire dies, / Juliades sic ora tulit: quae regna parentum / Fortuna abstulerat reddidit ipse sibi. / Nunc, licet invita sors te, majora capessit. / Sceptraque, sed nulli praeripienda gerit.” See on Brinck C. Swann, “Memory’s Garden and Other Wondrous Excerpts: Ernst Brinck (1582–1649), Collector,” Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 40 (2012): 5–19. See N. Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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function of the portrait beyond its role as a token of friendship, to make it a part of his public relations within the Republic of Letters. Self-awareness, pursuit of self-interest, and the discovery of the individual are key elements in the Renaissance portrait.29 The portrait seems to convey one of the most important paradigms of Renaissance culture. This goes for the pictorial genre as a whole, as well as for singular portraits of Renaissance individuals,30 in a period of rapid developments and remarkable artistic and intellectual changes. Within the courts, churches, and universities, the humanists’ self-definition was “paramount as they had to contend for a position within the existing framework of intellectual life…”31 Scaliger’s self-confidence as commissioner of the portraits and as the person who is depicted next to his father reflects this attitude. Other new forms of such self-definition among the humanists include the biography and autobiography. The printed or painted portrait can be seen as a supplement or addition to these kinds of written documents, or for that matter to all written texts by the humanists. In several scholarly printed books engraved portraits were added to familiarize the reader with the physical appearance of the author. Portraits of this kind were introduced in Italy around the year 1550. The portrait (emphasizing likeness) and the biography of the author (emphasizing truth) went hand in hand.32 The engraved frontispiece portrait, for instance, was regarded as a kind of preface to the book itself and more generally to the life of the author.33 “The rise of both the biographical preface about a writer and the frontispiece [portrait] illustrates the rise of the assumption that information about a writer helps us understand his or her work.”34 This also explains why many of these portraits are accompanied by dedicatory poems, praising the author or indicating why the portrayed person 29

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The individual in the Renaissance is most notably present in the second section of K. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1976): “Entwicklung des Individuums,” 121–57. K. Enenkel, “The Author’s Portrait as Reader’s Guidance: The Case of Franciscus Petrarch,” in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, ed. C. Brusati, K.A.E. Enenkel, and W.S. Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 151. See the introduction to K. Enenkel, B. de Jong-Crane, and P. Liebregts, eds., Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 2. See K. van Ommen, “The Portraits of Bonaventura Vulcanius,” in Bonaventura Vulcanius: Works and Networks, Bruges 1538–Leiden 1614, ed. H. Cazes (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 103–19. These engravings were sometimes also distributed as independent works of art. P. Burke, “Reflections on the Frontispiece Portrait in the Renaissance,” in Bildnis und Image. Das Portrait zwischen Intention und Rezeption, ed. A. Köstler and E. Seidl (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 150–62, at 160.

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was famous and supplying the reader with additional information on the content of the book. In a practice dating back to antiquity, painted portraits of scholars were often displayed on the walls of libraries and Wunderkammern, alongside their books, naturalia, and all kinds of donations, gifts, and acquisitions. The ­historian Pliny discussed the “novelty that has also been invented, in that ­likenesses…are set up in the libraries in honor of those whose immortal spirits speak to us in the same places…”35 In this way Pliny was indicating the bond between the author’s portrait and physiognomy, and at the same time between the portrait and the concept of the individuality of authorship.36 In a later period, the portraits of professors share some common features: they are generally more or less life-sized busts or half-figure portraits and were made for the senate rooms of universities, for example that of Leiden University.37 Although this room dates back only to the eighteenth century,38 this type of portrait was already quite common in Leiden in the previous century. One of the other important innovations of the Renaissance was the increasing knowledge of Oriental languages. Alongside Latin and Greek, scholars at this time first explored Hebrew grammar and other aspects of this language, followed by the study of other Near Eastern languages: Ethiopian, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. Arabic in particular seemed of special use for the purposes of maintaining and expanding trade relationships all the way to the Far East. If we return to the engraved portrait of Scaliger by Goltzius, there are no special paratextual elements that specifically identify Scaliger as an Oriental scholar. That may strike us as remarkable, because at the time Scaliger traveled to Leiden he was primarily known as a chronologist and Oriental scholar. The allegorical figures in the engraving, however, do bear references to his activities as a man of classical letters and an astronomer (a discipline closely linked with chronology). One of the main reasons for inviting Scaliger to Leiden was his knowledge of Oriental languages and his rich collection of books in this field.39 35 Pliny, Natural History 35.2.8–11. 36 Burke, “The Frontispiece,” 160–61. 37 R.E.O. Ekkart, Icones Leidenses. De portretverzameling van de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden (Leiden: Universitaire Pers, 1973); Ekkart, “De professoren en hun portretten,” in Kleurrijke Professoren: 375 jaar portretkunst in de collectie van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, ed. E. Bergvelt et al. (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA/Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 16. 38 Cf. W. Martin, De senaatskamer der Leidsche Universiteit. Hare geschiedenis, benevens een volledige catalogus der geschilderde portretten (Leiden: Van Doesburgh, 1932). 39 Scaliger’s collection of Oriental books and manuscripts was bequeathed to Leiden University in 1609 and kept in the library in the ornamental cupboard specially designed for holding it, the so-called Arca Scaligerana. Above the cupboard, a painted portrait of

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Later portraits of Scaliger do seem to emphasize Oriental scholarship over the other fields of research in which he worked.40 The last two known portraits of Scaliger show him immersed in the study of Arabic. The most famous and probably the last painted portrait of Scaliger, the so-called Senate Room depiction by Johannes Cornelisz.van ’t Woudt of 1608 (see Figure 5.2), depicts him holding a quill in his right hand while writing in an Arabic manuscript, which oddly enough is depicted upside down. Judging from the red dots, the manuscript is most probably one of the six quarto fragments of the Koran in Scaliger’s possession .41 The fact that the manuscript is painted upside down is an indication that Scaliger was probably not present as sitter and that the portrait may even have been painted after his death in 1609.42 The portrait bears a peculiar resemblance to that of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) of 1523. Each is portrayed in profile and in a contemplative posture, with a quill hovering above the paper he holds. The painting, however, is a direct reflection of one of Scaliger’s scholarly activities at the end of his career: the study of Arabic. In his correspondence Scaliger made several references to this “new” field of research. Although we may regard him as a pioneering Arabist, he himself was always modest about his achievements. In a letter to Isaac Casaubon he even proclaimed that he regarded himself as a mere novice in the study of Arabic.43 Arnoud Vrolijk has observed that such modesty “was an essential component of the image cultivated by humanists in the sixteenth century…”44 It stresses once more Scaliger’s

40 41

42 43

44

Scaliger was displayed, making the whole ensemble a kind of shrine to Scaliger’s endeavors in Oriental scholarship. See K. van Ommen, “The Legacy of Scaliger in Leiden University Library Catalogues, 1609–1716,” in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. M. Walsby and N. Constantinidou, Acts of the Third Saint Andrews Book Group Conference, 7–9 July 2011 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 51–82. The majority of the portraits of Scaliger that we know of today were made in the period 1600–1650. Leiden University Libraries ms Or. 241. See A. Vrolijk and K. van Ommen, eds., “All my Books in Foreign Tongues”: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden, 1609–2009 (Leiden: Leiden University Library, 2009), 19–20, 70–71. The inscription by Gerard van Papenbroeck on the back of the painting, on the other hand, suggests that the portrait was painted shortly before Scaliger’s death. Scaliger [Leiden] to Isaac Casaubon [Paris], 22 Jan. 1602, in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence: “Ego, mi Casaubone, multa volumina Arabica versavi, magnam silvam verborum mihi ex illa lectione comparavi. Nihil tamen aut parum me praestitisse sentio. Adhuc tiro sum.” A. Vrolijk and R. van Leeuwen, eds., Arabic Studies in the Netherlands: A Short History in Portraits, 1580–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 26.

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Figure 5.2  Johannes Cornelisz van ’t Woudt, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, ca. 1608–9. Oil on panel, 70 cm × 61 cm. Icones Leidenses 31, Senate Room, Academy building, Leiden University

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mindfulness when it came to presenting an image of himself to the world around him. Later in his life, Scaliger wrote that he was entangled in “the most difficult task that I have imposed upon myself…of copying Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew books that are temporarily in my possession.”45 The portrait captures this phase in his life in a simple but very effective way. In a similar portrait of Scaliger in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-art d’Agen the Arabic manuscript on the table has been replaced by one in Hebrew. Apparently the artistic freedom of the painter or the preference of the client made these kinds of alterations possible. Among his contemporaries Scaliger was also renowned for his excellent knowledge of the Hebrew language, so the choice of a Hebrew manuscript is certainly appropriate. This practice shows that by changing a certain element in an image (the rest of the portrait is identical to the original), the whole context changes and tells the spectator a different story altogether. The other late portrait of Scaliger was painted six months before his death by his student Etienne de Cahaignes Sieur de Verrières (1591–?)46 (see Figure 5.3). Scaliger is depicted sitting on a white wooden chair at a desk while writing a letter to his friend Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614). In his left hand he is holding a scroll with the Arabic text ‫‘( ليوسف سقالغر‬li-Yūsuf Saqālighar, “to Joseph Scaliger”). This is quite possibly the Arabic letter that Scaliger received in the autumn of 1608 from the Copt Yūsuf ibn Abī Daqn or Abudacnus.47 It is striking that Scaliger never actually met either correspondent in person, but the very fact of his correspondence with them attests to his extensive network of 45

46

47

Scaliger [Leiden] to Isaac Casaubon [Paris], 30 Sept. 1605, cited (with the incorrect date 20 Sept. 1605) in G.W. Robinson, Autobiography of Joseph Scaliger… (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1927), 48: “Sed difficillimam provinciam mihi imposui describendi libros, quorum mihi ad tempus potestas facta est, Syriacorum, Arabicorum, et Hebraicorum.” Scaliger copied a Syriac lexicon with an Arabic translation by Jesus bar Aly in 1605 (Or. 213 Leiden University Libraries). See R.P.A. Dozy, Catalogus Codicum Orientalium Bibliothecae Lugduno-Batavae, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1851), 58; and Vrolijk and Van Ommen, “All my Books,” 46–49. On 30 Sept. 1607 Scaliger copied among other manuscripts a Persian lexicon and grammar from the library of Franciscus Raphelengius (1539–97) (Or. 2019 Leiden University Libraries). See Vrolijk and Van Ommen, “All my Books,” 75–77; Scaliger to Casaubon, 13 Oct. 1607, in Botley and Van Miert, Correspondence). The brothers Jacques and Estienne de Cahaignes matriculated at the University of Leiden on 9 Oct. 1607. See W.N. du Rieu, Album studiosorum Academiae Lugduno Batavae mdlxxv–mdccclxxv. Accedunt nomina curatorum et professorum per eadem secula (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1875), col. 88. See Vrolijk and Van Ommen, “All my Books,” 103. See on Abudacnus A. Hamilton, “An Egyptian Traveler in the Republic of Letters: Josephus Barbatus or Abudacnus the Copt,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 123–50.

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Figure 5.3  Etienne de Cahaignes, Portrait of Josephus Justus Scaliger, 1608. Watercolor, 18.5 cm × 15 cm. Icones Leidenses 32, Leiden University Libraries

correspondents from Europe to the Near East. De Cahaignes, who wanted to “paint his [master’s] image in color from life with a brush,”48 was granted permission to do so explicitly by Scaliger. According to a letter dated 28 July 1608 to Scaliger from the physician Jacques de Cahaignes (1548–1612), a relative of Etienne, Scaliger gave him this portrait, or possibly a copy of it, as a token of their friendship.49 Both painted portraits of Scaliger seem to have been conceived as homage to his Oriental scholarship, and especially to his efforts to learn Arabic, a relatively new field of scholarship at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We do not know if Scaliger had a direct hand in orchestrating these two portraits, 48

49

“[…] ut sibi liceret effigiem illius coloribus adumbratam ad vivum penicillo exprimere.” Petri Danielis Hueti, Alnetanae Quaestiones […]. Venetiis, excudebat Nicolaus Pezzana 1761: 276. The artist Jan de Leeuw used this portrait as the model for an engraving of Scaliger’s portrait in 1707. See Van Ommen, “‘In imagine picta,’” 157–58, No. F2-F2/2.

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but it seems likely that he was very conscious of the message that his last portraits would convey to the spectator, and even to spectators many generations later. Scaliger was actively involved in shaping the image of himself in at least some of the portraits made of him during his lifetime, while he was at the height of his international fame. By contrast, other portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Orientalists are more difficult to “read.” Some, like those of Nicolaus Clenardus, Paulus Fagius, and Johannes Reuchlin, were produced posthumously.50 In other cases (such as images of Guillaume Postel), an engraving based on an existing portrait (a painting or a drawing) involved no direct exchange between the artist and the person depicted, so that the sitter could have no direct influence on the result. For comparison purposes I have surveyed the engraved and painted portraits of other Orientalists, namely those of Nicolaus Clenardus (by the workshop of Philip Galle, ca. 1560–90), Paulus Fagius (by Hendrik Hondius, 1599), and Sebastian Münster (by an unknown seventeenth-century artist), and the painted portraits of Thomas Erpenius and of Franciscus Raphelengius by Isaac Claesz van Swanenburgh (from 1614 and 1596 respectively).51 If we have a closer look, for example, at the seventeenth-century engraved portrait of Guillaume Postel (1510–81) by Esme de Boulonois (1645–81; see Figure  5.4),52 we see a rather commonplace depiction of the French linguist, astronomer, Cabbalist, diplomat, professor, and religious universalist.53 Postel is “widely regarded as the founder of academic oriental studies in Europe.”54 He traveled extensively in the Orient (Egypt and Constantinople) in the period 1534–37, accompanying the French ambassador Jean de la Forest and collecting a great many manuscripts. He was the first occupant of the chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal in Paris in 1539. Postel wrote an Arabic grammar for Western students between 1538 and 1540. He believed, as did many other scholars in the sixteenth century, that Hebrew should be regarded as the original language of the human race. This is probably the reason why, in two engravings of Postel, the engravers have included some characters and lines in Hebrew. 50

51 52 53 54

There is no contemporary portrait known of Reuchlin, the author of De rudimentis hebraicis (1506). As audiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed a wish to know what Reuchlin might have looked like, portraits were “invented” by several artists, giving Reuchlin a particular “modern” face. Both painted portraits are in the collection of Leiden University Libraries, Icones 26 and 96. In I. Bullart, Académie des Sciences et des Arts (À Amsterdam: se vendent chez les héritiers de Dan. Elzevier, 1682), vol. 1, pt. 4. J. Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1955), 37–44. Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies, 12.

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Figure 5.4 Esme de Boulonois, Portrait of Guillaume Postel, seventeenth century. Engraving, 183 mm × 139 mm. In Isaac Bullart, Académie des Sciences et des Arts [Paris, 1682], vol. 1, pt. 4, 691 A 14, Leiden University Libaries

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Underneath the first portrait is a verse in Hebrew, obviously written by somebody not well acquainted with the language.55 Many letters are lacking their distinctive characteristics (for instance, there is no distinction between the hé and chet and between the waw and yod). Also the aabb rhyme is unusual among Hebrew poets and suggests a composition by someone writing in Hebrew from a Western framework.56 The engraved portraits of Postel are all based on a contemporary drawing by François Quesnel (ca. 1543–1616/19).57 The engraved portrait shows Postel as a universal scholar, with several common attributes relating to scholarship in general: books, (celestial) globes, a pair of compasses, and a magnifying glass. There is no special reference to the Orient or Oriental scholarship in the image, but the objects may refer to Postel’s publications and scholarly activities on (Arabic) astronomy and geography. Other engravings or paintings of Oriental scholars from the seventeenth century provide us with a similarly generic depiction of scholar without reference to specifically Orientalist elements. Conclusion Apart from the two later portraits of Scaliger by ’t Woudt and de Cahaignes, only a very limited number of portraits of other seventeenth-century Oriental scholars bear any specific reference to Oriental scholarship. The portraits of Postel and Münster include some words in Hebrew to associate the sitter with Oriental scholarship. One can wonder about the impact on viewers who would not often have been able to read the language, although they might have recognized the letters as Hebrew. The objects depicted by the artists who designed and/or executed portraits signal scholarship and learning more generally. Occasionally the accompanying 55 56

57

I wish to thank Professor Frederick de Wolff for the transcription and translation of the verse and the additional information and observations that he has provided on it. “Lashon achat barosh hazeh medabberet divre ummot / k.sh/s.m.t [?] hu demut hazot mesovevet kol meqomot / W’sekhel [Yiskal?] ish bekhol m.y.kh.kh.’ [Mecca?] melumad bekhol limmudim / Ahuv ‘yhyh [?] asher echad ha’el modim.” (One tongue in this head speaks the languages of all nations. / Now that he is dead, his likeness is everywhere around us, / And the sense of a man in the whole of Mecca [?] is learned in all studies. / Loved […?] is the singular one, we [they] thank God.) The drawing of Postel by Quesnel was once part of the collection of the bibliophile Charles-Marie Fevret de Fontette (1710–72) of Dijon and is nowadays still part of a private collection.

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verse, a paratext within the paratextual image, refers to Oriental learning, sometimes even in Hebrew type, as in the portrait of Postel. In most cases there is no specific message in these verses, which are meant only to evoke an exotic language. It seems that the Oriental knowledge of these scholars was regarded by their contemporaries as just a part of their general scholarly knowledge and not a remarkable feature, as it appears to us now. The only clear references to Arabic scholarship are the Arabic (and, in another version of the portrait, Hebrew) manuscript and scroll in the portraits of Scaliger. We may assume that the selfconfident Scaliger had a direct hand in the way he was depicted and an indirect one in the way we should remember him: as one of the greatest Oriental scholars of the sixteenth century.

chapter 6

Joseph Scaliger’s Treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum (ca. 1591)* Henk Jan de Jonge In his Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship,1 Tony Grafton discusses some passages of Scaliger’s short treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum, in order to shed light on the critical skills with which Scaliger evaluated the biblical Apocrypha. The skills Scaliger displays in this treatise justify the publication of the full text of the treatise, which was still unpublished when Grafton drew attention to it. I supplied Grafton with a transcript I had made of a manuscript in the British Library. Later I located another manuscript in Paris. The time has come to publish a critical edition of the whole treatise, provided with text-critical and explanatory notes. This is what I intend to do here, in celebration of an old collaboration and more than forty years of friendship. First let us characterize the treatise in general. In it Scaliger discusses a number of deuterocanonical writings belonging to the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, which he calls by the Protestant term Apocrypha.2 He limits his discussion * I wish to thank Dr. Grantley McDonald (Salzburg) for his critical comments on a prior draft of this essay. 1 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 696–99. 2 “Apocrypha” is Jerome’s term for books that he did not find in the Hebrew Bible but that did appear in the Septuagint (lxx) or Vetus Latina; see Jerome, prologue to Samuel-Kings, in Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. B. Fischer et al., 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Württember­ gische Bibelanstalt, 1994), 365: “quicquid extra hos est, inter apocrifa seponendum.” The Council of Trent (1546) decreed that these books were part of the canon. However, Luther and the reformed Protestants relegated them to a lower rank and excluded some of them altogether. Martin Luther, Biblia: das ist die gantze heilige Schrifft Deudsch (Wittemberg: Hans Luft, 1545), ed. H. Volz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 1674, gives a selection of Old Testament Apocrypha under the heading “Apocrypha, das sind Bücher, so der heiligen Schrifft nicht gleich gehalten, und doch nützlich und gut zu lesen sind.” For the history of the term “apocrypha,” see E. Kautsch, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1900), 1:xi–xiv; E. Hennecke, Handbuch zu den Neutestamentlichen Apokryphen (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1914), vii–ix; Chr. Markschies in id. and J. Schröter, eds., Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012) 1.1, 18–21.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_007

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almost entirely to books of a narrative or “historical” content and leaves wisdom books like Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus (Jesus Sirach) entirely out of consideration. He is primarily focused on the question whether the books at issue are historically trustworthy. He also deals with questions concerning the original language, the date of origin, and the textual transmission of some books, but he touches on such questions only in order to assess the historical reliability of each book. There is only one book that he considered worthy of unrestricted appreciation: 1 Maccabees. Furthermore, he also considered that the Letter of Jeremiah contains some interesting information relating to the history of religion. According to Scaliger, the other books are historically unreliable and should not be used in historiography or chronology. In accepting and using these books for chronological purposes, Christians have acted uncritically and become the defenders of lies. Scaliger’s tract may be summarized as follows. The Apocryphal books of the Old Testament were taken over by the Christians from the Jews, but the Christians have used them without sorting historically reliable elements from nonsense. Books 3 and 4 Ezra are full of ineptitudes. In 4 Ezra 7:28, the name of Jesus is a mendacious Christian interpolation, meant to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. Baruch is a forgery, but has much in it to satisfy a pious and learned reader. Chapter 6 especially, comprising the Letter of Jeremiah, contains interesting information on the Chaldean religion, which is consistent with that presented by Herodotus. It is clear that the book was written by a Babylonian Jew. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, Chapters 13 and 14 added to the Greek version of Daniel, were composed by a Greek-speaking Jew. They never existed in Hebrew. Scaliger implies that they are late legends. The story of 1 Maccabees, ending in the institution of the festival of the Renewal of the Temple, is much more impressive and important than the canonical book about Esther and the institution of Purim. The book, originally written in Hebrew, is free of deceit. It would have been of greater interest to have the Hebrew text of 1 Maccabees than that of the book of Esther. The Jewish canon of the Bible ought to have included 1 Maccabees, but the fact that it was written after “the cessation of prophecy” prevented it from being admitted to the canon. By contrast Esther was written early enough to be incorporated in the canon, although it hardly deserved this honor, since it does not even mention God. The second book of Maccabees, an abridgment of a work by Jason of Cyrene, was compiled by a Greek-speaking Jew. It contains much twaddle. The Latin book of Tobias is a different book from Greek Tobit, and Judith in Latin is a different book from Judith in Greek. The barbarisms in the Latin

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v­ ersions of these two books seem to indicate that these versions are not those made by Jerome. Moreover, the Hebrew text of Tobit current among the Jews cannot be the source of the Greek and Latin versions. Scaliger implies that the textual tradition of Tobias/Tobit and Judith makes it difficult to use these works as historical sources. The worst of it is that Tobit and Judith are teeming with chronological and geographical blunders. These books have no historical value whatsoever. Scaliger concludes by observing that Christianity has always suffered from a lack of critics capable of discerning trustworthy and true information from falsehood and deceit. As a result, numerous monstrous lies live on, for which people fight and clamorous sophists rage.



The text of Scaliger’s De apocryphis Bibliorum has been transmitted in two manuscripts: ms Lat. 17.238 (sixteenth–seventeenth century), fols. 8r–9r, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. This textual witness will be designated henceforth as P. ms Burney 367 (sixteenth century), fols. 183v–84v, British Library, London, designated henceforth as L.3 Neither of these manuscripts is an autograph of Scaliger. Furthermore, there are good reasons to conclude that these two witnesses are mutually independent. As a result of homoeoteleuton, L omits a passage in Chapter 10 (“falsus liber Iudith…falsus ille Tobiae”) that occurs in P and is clearly part of the original text. In its turn, P omits a passage in Chapter 12 (“quoque… Olophernem”) that occurs in L and obviously belongs to the original text. Consequently, a critical edition has to take both witnesses into account and to reconstruct their common source. The date of origin of De apocryphis Bibliorum can be ascertained with great probability. On 27 April 1591, Scaliger wrote a letter in French to JacquesAuguste De Thou in which he argued that the anachronisms and geographical errors in Judith compel the critic to the conclusion that this book must be considered a fictitious story.4 In passing, he also denounced 3 and 4 Ezra, Susanna, 3 This manuscript contains material that once belonged to Isaac Casaubon; see P. Botley and D. van Miert, eds., The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 1:xxiii. 4 See ibid., 2:158–61.

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Bel, Baruch, and Tobit as products of fantasy. In subject matter, content, and phrasing, De apocryphis Bibliorum resembles the letter to De Thou to such a degree that we are almost certainly justified in concluding that the two texts were written at about the same time. Consequently, the Latin treatise can most likely be dated to 1591.5 The letter to De Thou is apparently an answer to a question De Thou had submitted to Scaliger: De Thou must have asked Scaliger what he thought about the historical trustworthiness of Judith. Once Scaliger had dealt with this question in his reply, he decided to treat the reliability of the Old Testament Apocrypha once again in a special essay in Latin, probably at the request of someone whom he had told about what he had written to De Thou. The person for whom Scaliger wrote the Latin treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum has not been identified until now, but chances are very high that it was the physician François Vertunien (ca. 1544–1607), one of Scaliger’s closest friends.6 This can be inferred from a remark that the Huguenot theologian Andreas Rivetus (1572–1651), then working in The Hague, made in a polemical work directed against Hugo Grotius in 1643: Librum ii Maccabaicum inter Canonicos nec ab Ecclesia Iudaica unquam, nec ab Ecclesia Christiana semper fuisse receptum certum est. De quo hoc iudicium legi illustris Scaligeri: “Alter liber Maccabaeorum ab Hellenista Iudaeo abbreviatus est ex quinque libris Iasonis Cyrenaei, in quem multa nugatoria, hoc est, Iudaica inculcata sunt”: in dictatis Scaligeri quae olim mihi communicavit Franciscus Vertunianus.7 This passage in Rivetus, with its quotation from Scaliger, was first pointed out by Scaliger’s nineteenth-century biographer, Jacob Bernays.8 He supposed that Rivetus had quoted Scaliger’s words “Alter…sunt” from a manuscript of the Prima Scaligerana, a collection of oral and written dicta of Scaliger that Vertunien collected in the period 1573–93. Since the passage in question does not occur in the published and current version of the Prima Scaligerana (first printed at Saumur in 1669), Bernays concluded that Rivetus had access to a more complete recension of these Scaligerana than the one later published. However, in this Bernays was mistaken. The passage quoted by Rivetus is taken, 5 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:696. 6 On Vertunien, see the Biographical Register in The Correspondence of Scaliger, 8:154–55. 7 Andreas Rivetus, Apologeticus pro suo de verae et sincerae pacis ecclesiae proposito (Leiden: Elsevier, 1643), 136–37. 8 Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: Hertz; London: Williams and Norgate, 1855), 236–37.

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not from the Prima Scaligerana, but from De apocryphis Bibliorum (Chap. 8), a transcript of which Rivetus had received from Vertunien. It is more than probable that Vertunien was also the person for whom Scaliger composed this Latin treatise. Bernays’s error is comprehensible and forgivable in light of the fact that De apocryphis Bibliorum had not yet been published in his day. Had it been published, Bernays would not have committed this error. All the more reason, then, why the publication of this treatise should not be postponed any longer. In the text edited below, chapter numbers have been introduced by the present editor.

Iosephus Scaliger

De apocryphis Bibliorum 1. Iudaei praeter canonica scripta habuerunt habentque hodie aliquot quae vocant ‫גְ נּוזִ ים‬,1 hoc est ἀπόκρυφα, omnia illa quidem informandorum ad pietatem animorum,2 sed tamen tota argumento et personis commentitia. 1 That is, ‫ספרים גנוזים‬, “books removed from sight,” “hidden, concealed books.” Scaliger may be thinking of such writings as the Book of Enoch, quoted by Syncellus; Jubilees, quoted by Syncellus, Cedrenus, and others; the Martyrdom of Isaiah, mentioned by Origen and Epiphanius; and Iannes and Mambres, referred to by Origen and the Decretum Gelasianum. However, Jewish tradition does not know a category of “apocryphal books.” Scaliger is here projecting a Christian concept on Jewish literature. The alleged identity of phraseology of ἀπόκρυφα and ‫“ )ספרים) גנוזים‬is a mistake. Talmudic literature knows nothing of a class of ‫—ספרים גנוזים‬neither this phrase, nor an equivalent occurs—not even in ‘Aboth deRabbi Nathan’ i, 1, though the error appears to have originated in the words ‫ גנוזים היו‬used there”; so G.F. Moore, s.v. “Apocrypha,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), 2:2. In L, ‫ גנוזים‬is missing. L leaves a blank space here of the length of about nineteen Latin letters. Scaliger defines “Jewish apocrypha” differently in Thesaurus temporum, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Janssonius, 1658), Animadversiones in Eusebium, 106b: “Iudaei ‫גְ נּוזִ ים‬, id est ad verbum ἀπόκρυφα, vocant ea quorum lectione abstinent imbecilliorum animos, ut non ad ea admittantur, nisi et aetate et iudicio maturi, quale est initium Ezechielis, totus Ecclesiastes,” etc. 2 “Informandorum ad pietatem animorum” is a genitive of possession denoting “belonging or pertaining to,” “having the property, nature, mark, custom or duty of.” The verb “esse” with gerundive in the genitive of possession denotes “tendency, effect, etc.”; see Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), col. 1799c, s.v. “sum” ii, B, 4 (β). Scaliger means: “these may all serve to educate the readers’ minds to piety, but…” The phrase echoes Luther’s “nützlich und gut zu lesen”; see our introduction, n. 2 and the Confessio Belgica (1566), art. 6: “…les livres apocryphes, lesquels l’Eglise peut bien lire et d’iceux prendre instruction ès choses accordantes aux livres canoniques….”

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Cuiusmodi quae extant hodie apud illos, Christianis omnibus omnia ignota sunt, praeter pauca paucis. Contra quae ex veteribus Iudaeis apud nos eius argumenti reliqua sunt, ipsis Iudaeis ne fando quidem nota sunt. Ea sunt Iudith, Tobia, Baruc, Susannae et Draconis historia, appendices ad librum Ester, Epistola Manassis regis, Tertius et Quartus Esdrae,3 et si quae sunt alia id genus, in quibus stylus Iudaicus licenter4 vagari solet.5 2. In his libri ultimi6 Esdrae ineptiarum pleni sunt, Hieronymo et Iudaeis aequalibus temporum Hieronymi derisi,7 qui mirabantur Christianos eis libris patienter dare operam. Vide8 ingenia corybantica9 eorum, qui illis perinde ac Danieli fidem haberent propter septimum caput iv libri, ubi fit mentio caedis Christi.10 Sed mali critici sunt. Nesciunt enim Iudaeis persuasum, Christum 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10

Scaliger here lists a number of deuterocanonical books belonging to the Old Testament canon of the Latin Vulgate (3 and 4 Ezra occur in the Vulgate, not in the Septuagint), but only those with narrative content. He omits the wisdom books and the nonnarrative additions to Daniel. Scaliger intends to assess here the historical value of the narrative material contained in the Apocrypha. “Omnibus omnia” is my conjecture; L and P: “hominibus omnia”. For “licenter” (L), P reeds “libenter.” For “solet” (L), P reads “solitus.” For “libri ultimi” (P), L reads “tertius et iv,” probably a lectio facilior. Jerome expressed his aversion to 3 and 4 Ezra in his preface to the canonical book of Ezra: “Nec quemquam moveat, quod unus a nobis editus liber est [containing canonical Ezra and Nehemiah], nec apocriforum tertii et quarti libri somniis delectetur, quia…quae non habentur apud illos [sc., Hebraeos] …procul abiicienda.” See Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. R. Weber, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1994), 1:638. Jerome repeated his unfavorable judgment on 4 Ezra in his Contra Vigilantium, where he criticized Vigilantius for his use of this “liber apocryphus,” “quem ego librum numquam legi,” because “Ecclesia non recipit” (Migne, Patrologia Latina 23.344–345). For Jerome’s judgment on 4 Ezra, see A. Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 25. From Jerome’s preface to Ezra, quoted above, it follows that he had access to 4 Ezra in Greek, but was not the translator of the Latin version of iv Ezra appended to the Vulgate. For “Vide” (L), P reads “Vidi,” but the final -i has been written over an -e. “Insane.” The adjective “corybanticus” occurs in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Onomasticon, but with only one attestation, derived from the conjecture “corybantice” that F. Bücheler (1837–1908) proposed for †coriatice† in Claudian, Carminum Appendix, 6, l. 3. The following “eorum” is omitted in P. 4 Ezra 7:28–29: “Revelabitur enim Filius meus Iesus cum his qui cum eo, et iucundabit qui relicti sunt annis quadringentis. Et erit post annos hos, et morietur Filius meus Christus…” For “Christi” (P), L reads Χριστοῦ. Authors who regarded 4 Ezra 7:28–29 as a genuine Jewish prophecy include Ambrose, Bonaventure, Galatino, and Bibliander; see Hamilton, Apocryphal Apocalypse, 23, 27, 50–51, 61.

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quem expectant caesum iri; nam hoc iamdudum praedixerat Daniel capite ix.11 Et Rabbi Kimhi in Commentariis in Zachariam caedis Messiae meminit.12 Sed13 Christiani veteres, qui putabant regnum Christi promovendum mendaciis esse,14 ut persuaderent Iudaeis eum quem negabant15 Christum, Iesum vocari, nomen Iesu addiderunt16 commati 28 eiusdem capitis.17 3. Liber Baruc,18 quamvis commentitius, tamen multa habet quae lectori pio et erudito satisfaciant, praesertim in epistola Hieremiae,19 in qua multi ritus Chaldaicae superstitionis exagitantur, de quibus etiam Herodotus meminit,20 ut appareat librum a Iudaeo Babyloniensi conscriptum. 11

Dan. 9:26: “Et post ebdomades sexaginta duas occidetur christus.” The following “Et” (P) is missing in L. 12 David Kimhi (1160–1235), the Jewish biblical exegete who wrote commentaries on Genesis, Psalms, Chronicles, and the prophets, including Zechariah. See Rabbi David Kimhi, Commentarii in Haggaeum, Zachariam et Malachiam prophetas, ex Hebraïco idiomate in Latinum sermonem traducti, interprete Thoma Nelo Anglo (Paris: Martinus Iuvenis, 1557), 68: “Plangentque super eo [Zech. 12:10]: non aliter ac pater quispiam filium quem unicum habebat, morte sublatum, lachrimis abunde prosequi solet, aut qui primogenito orbatus est. At enim maiores nostri (quorum memoriae ac recordationi suus habetor honos), ad Messiam Iosephi filium haec referunt: quippe qui inter praelium interficiendus sit. Sed illam ego interpretationem admiror: quomodo eundem occuluerint, nulla prorsus ipsius facta mentione.” 13 For “Sed” (P), L reads “At.” 14 Cf. Prima Scaligerana, ed. P. des Maizeaux (Amsterdam: Covens & Mortier, 1740), 122: “Mendaciis et falsis miraculis putaverunt veteres se posse regnum Dei provehere, in quo graviter errarunt”; and Scaliger to Casaubon, 9 Nov. 1605, in The Correspondence of Scaliger, 6:216, lines 59–60: “Adeo verbum Dei inefficax esse censuerunt ut regnum Christi sine mendaciis promoveri posse diffiderent?” 15 For “negabant” (P), L reads “negabunt.” 16 For “addiderunt” (P), L reads “dederunt.” 17 For “28” (P), L reads “xxvi [sic].” The reference is to 4 Ezra 7:28. Scaliger means, on the one hand, that the prediction of the death of “my Son Christ” in 7:29 ought not to have been a reason for Christians to give credence to 4 Ezra, since the notion of a future Messiah who would be killed was current in Judaism (in this Scaliger is wrong, but he is thinking of Dan. 9:26 and, possibly, Isa. 53:7–12); on the other hand, that the name “Iesus” in 4 Ezra 7:28 is a Christian interpolation. The paragraph on 4 Ezra is discussed by Hamilton, Apocryphal Apocalypse, 233–34. 18 This whole paragraph is quoted, translated, and discussed by Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:698. 19 In editions of the Vulgate, Ep. Jer. is usually included as an appendix to, or the final Chapter (6) of, Baruch. In editions of the lxx, it normally figures as a separate work (which it is). 20 The kind of prostitution mentioned in Ep. Jer. 43 is reminiscent of that described in Herodotus 1.199. The temple prostitution alluded to in Ep. Jer. 10 lxx, ἐπὶ τοῦ τέγους, may be related to that mentioned in Herodotus 1.181–82.

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4. Historia Bel et Susannae21 a Iudaeis illis conscripta est qui dicebantur Ἑλληνισταὶ22 neque unquam Hebraice prodita fuit, argumento ineptissimarum etymologiarum σχίζεσθαι, ἀπὸ τοῦ σχίνου, πρίεσθαι ἀπὸ τοῦ πρίνου.23 5. Prior Maccabaeorum24 Hebraice conscriptus fuit, nulla25 mendaciorum labe contaminatus. Quem Hebraice extare pluris intererat quam librum Esteris.26 Nam propter liberationem quam per Esterem fecit Deus, institutum est solenne simile Hilariis et Bacchanalibus paganorum,27 quod hodieque annua die in mense Adar apud eos instauratur.28 At propter victoriam quam divinitus Macchabaei consecuti sunt, institutum solenne in Cislev29 octonum

21 22

23

24 25 26

27 28

29

Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are two different additions to the book of Daniel; Scaliger takes them together here. By “Hellenists,” Scaliger means those groups of Jews of the Greco-Roman period who spoke Greek, read the Bible in Greek, used Greek in their synagogues, and were unacquainted with Hebrew or Aramaic. Thus, Scaliger rediscovered the historical category of Hellenistic Judaism, distinguished from other ramifications of Judaism. On the significance of Scaliger’s identification of the Hellenists, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:413–20. For σχῖνος, “mastic tree”/σχίσαι, see Sus. 54–55; for πρῖνος, “holm-oak”/πρίσαι, see Sus. 58– 59. These “etymologies” had already been used by Jerome as evidence of the Greek origin of Susanna; see his preface to Daniel; Biblia Sacra, ed. Weber, 2:1341. Jerome says that Africanus (ca. 250 ce) had used the same argument to dissuade Origen from treating Susanna as authentic. On this, see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Tradition of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991), 165; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:697. This whole chapter, from “Prior Maccabaeorum” to “praedixerat,” is quoted, translated, and discussed by Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:697–98. For “nulla” (P), L has “multa,” but a marginal note here says: “scribendum: nulla.” For Scaliger’s appreciation of 1 Macc., see also Secunda Scaligerana, ed. P. des Maizeaux (Amsterdam: Covens & Mortier, 1740), 436: “Machabeorum librum primum maximi faciebat.” See also Scaliger to Drusius, 9 Feb. 1598, in The Correspondence of Scaliger, 3:94–95, lines 5–8: “Tu praestantiam eius libri [1 Macc.] iamdudum scis, quae res maximi momenti est ad opus aggrediendum.” A marginal note in L says: “Ex his apparet J. Scaligerum dubitare an sit liber Esther canonicus, quod non pio ulli venit in mentem. Nam Amphilochius in carmine quo libros utriusque Testamenti recenset, post omnes enumeratos libros Veteris Foederis, addit ad extremum: Τούτοις προσεγκρίνουσι τὴν Ἐσθὴρ τινές.” The inauguration of the Jewish feast of Purim is narrated in Esther 9:20–32. Adar is the twelfth month of the Jewish year (Ezra 6:15, Esther 3:7, 2 Macc. 15:36 lxx, etc.). In this month, which coincides with parts of February and March, the feast of Purim is celebrated. For “Cislev” (L), P has “Caslev,” with the first syllable underlined and a sign in the margin, but not the correction “Cis-.”

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dierum,30 instar σκηνοπηγίας.31 Quid mirum si pellax mulier illecebris suis a rege stolido eblandita est edictum crudelitatis plenum, quo septuaginta quinque hominum milia inhumaniter trucidata sunt,32 ut propterea huius33 rei memoria quotannis luxu solutissimo repetenda fuerit?34 At contra quis non miretur exigua manu piorum hominum duce Ionathan tot exercitus Antiochi fusos, profligatos, caesos?35 Adde quod Daniel hancce36 victoriam iam ante praedixerat.37 6. Haec sola satis erant monendis Iudaeis, cur libro illi excellentissimo38 locum facerent in canone divinorum librorum. Sed superstitio eius gentis vernacula non sivit. Nam animis Iudaeorum opinio antiquitus inolevit, prophetiam durasse usque ad imperium Syro-Graecorum;39 hinc visionem cessasse. 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39

The feast of Dedication, or Renewal, or Restoration (Hanukkah), which celebrates the reconsecration of the Jerusalem Temple in 165 or 164 bce, begins on the 25th of Kislev, the third month of the Jewish year (Neh. 1:1, Zech. 7:1, 1 Macc. 1:54 lxx, etc.), which coincides with parts of November and December. For the inauguration of this feast, see 1 Macc. 4:54–59. For σκηνοπηγίας (L), P reads “scenopegiae.” “Scenopegia” is the feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth). Esther 8–9, esp. 9:16. For “huius” (P), L reads “eius.” Esther 9:16. Scaliger is not referring here to any passage in 1 Macc. in particular, but to the tenor of the book as a whole. 1 Macc. 3:27–4:35 does narrate the military successes of Judas Maccabeus against Gorgias and Lysias, generals of Antiochus iv Epiphanes, but 1 Macc. does not relate that Judas’s brother Jonathan ever defeated this Antiochus. For “hancce” (L), P reads “hanc.” With “hancce victoriam…praedixerat” Scaliger refers to the ending of canonical Daniel (12:12) as interpreted by Porphyry. Porphyry’s interpretation is recorded by Jerome, Commentarii in Danielem, ed. Fr. Glorie, ccel 75A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964), 994: “Porphyrius hunc locum sic edisserit, vt quadraginta quinque dies qui super mille ducentos nonaginta [Dan. 12:11] sunt, victoriae contra duces Antiochi tempus significant, quando Iudas Machabaeus fortiter dimicavit et emundavit templum idolumque contrivit et victimas obtulit in templo Dei.” For “cur…librorum”, L reads “cur libro illi excellentissimo in canone divinorum librorum non ponerent,” which is an anacolouthon, distorts what Scaliger intends to say, and is evidently a corruption of the text transmitted in P. For “excellentissimo” (L), P reads “elegantissimo.” One would be inclined to identify the beginning of the “imperium Syro-Graecorum” with that of the Seleucid Empire in ca. 305 bce, or with Alexander’s conquest of Syria in 333 bce at the earliest. But eight lines further down (chap. 7; cf. n. 49 below), Scaliger ­implicitly dates the end of the prophetic period to the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes (i), 465–424 bce, a whole century earlier.

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Quod tempus vocant ipsi40 ‫ימת חזֺון‬ ַ ‫ח ִת‬,ֲ ἐπισφραγισμὸν ὁράσεως.41 Nam per ὅρασιν intelligunt τὸν κατ’ ὄναρ χρηματισμόν,42 et omnem vim prophetandi. Ergo ab eo tempore Urim et Tummim cessasse, non solum prisci Talmudistae,43 sed et44 Iosephus ipse prodidit.45 7. Quia igitur liber ille46 praestantissimus conscriptus fuit post obsignationem visionis, censuerunt inter propheticos libros non habendum, quod prophetico spiritu scribi non potuerit, obsoleta iam omni47 prophetia. Hinc illae lacrimae.48 At liber Ester longe ante illa tempora conscriptus fuit, sub Xerxe Persarum rege.49 Quem librum interpretans50 doctissimus Iudaeus Aben Ezra

The Hebrew means “sealing of the vision.” P reads ‫ימת חזֺון‬ ַ ‫ה ִת‬,ֲ L reads ‫( החתימת החוֹן‬sic). The word “ipsi” (L) is missing in P. 41 L reads εἰσφραγισμὸν ὁράσεων. 42 That is, prophecy given in a dream. 43 According to Baba Bathra 14b–15c, prophecy lasted only from Moses to Ezra (ca. 450 bce). Cf. Seder ‘Olam Rabba (2nd century ce) 30, where it is said that at the end of the Persian period (333 bce) the prophetic spirit departed from Israel: this necessitated the final canonization of the holy writings; see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), 6:448. Cf. Secunda Scaligerana (1740), 234, s.v. Biblia: “Depuis Esdras on n’a point recue…de livres canoniques. Ipse postremus libros coacervavit in canonem: multi libri post a reliquis sancti fuerunt, sed non admissi in canonem et potuerunt citari.” On the whole question, see L. Stephen Cook, On the Question of the “Cessation of Prophecy” in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 44 L omits “et.” 45 Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.40–41: “From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life. From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.” Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, in Josephus: The Life. Against Apion, lcl (Cambridge, ma.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 179. The Persian king Artaxerxes, who ruled 465–424 bce, is identified elsewhere in Josephus (Antiquitates 11.184), in the lxx, and in Jewish Midrash with Ahasverus of the book of Esther, wrongly so (see below, n. 49). He is mentioned here by Josephus because of his supposed connection with that work, chronologically the latest of the “thirteen books.” Thackeray, Josephus: The Life. Against Apion, 178–79. 46 That is, 1 Macc. 47 For “omni,” L reads “etiam.” 48 Terence, Andria 126; Erasmus, Adagia 268, in Opera Omnia Erasmi, asd ii, 1, (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1993), 378. 49 Xerxes, king of Persia, 486–465 bce, to be identified with Ahasverus of the book of Esther. 50 In L, a note in the margin says: “statim initio.” This is not meant as a textual correction. 40

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stomachatur, quod nusquam in eo libro Dei mentio facta sit;51 et valde eum eius52 libri taedet pigetque. 8. Alter53 liber Macchabaeorum ab Hellenista Iudaeo abbreviatus est ex quinque libris Iasonis Cyrenaei,54 in quem multa nugatoria, hoc est Iudaica, inculcata sunt. 9. De libris Tobiae et Iudith mirum est, eorum alium auctorem Latinum esse, alium Graecum;55 nam sane iidem auctores non sunt, Tobiae Latini et Graeci, Iudith Latinae et Graecae. Hieronymus cum ex Chaldaicis exemplaribus eos libros recuderet, multa quae in Graecis superflua erant circumcidit, ut ipse testatur;56 et sane plura continent libri Graeci57 Tobiae et Iudith quam Latini58 qui hodie in manibus sunt. Sed an Latini sint Hieronymianae interpretationis, equidem dubito.59 Nam multi barbarismi in Tobiae et Iudith codicibus Latinis60 sunt quos nego esse Hieronymi. Quin etiam, quantum meminisse possum, Tobias Hebraicus61 qui hodie inter Iudaeos extat, multum a Graeco et 51

Abraham Ibn-Ezra (1089–ca. 1164), the learned Spanish commentator of the Pentateuch and other biblical books. See D.U. Rottzoll, Abraham Ibn Esras Kommentare zu den Büchern Kohelet, Ester und Rut (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 272: “Siehe, (daher) gibt es in dieser Schriftrolle keine Erwähnung des Namens (Gottes), sie aber ist (eine) von den heiligen Schriften.” Ibn-Ezra explains that the author of Esther, Mordecai, avoided using God’s name because he expected that the book would be copied by Persian idolaters; to prevent them from replacing God’s name by that of their idol, he omitted God’s name altogether. 52 For “eius” (P), L reads “illius.” 53 This paragraph is quoted by Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger, 237, from Andreas Rivetus, Apologeticus pro suo de verae et sincerae pacis ecclesiae proposito (Leiden: Elsevier, 1643), 136–37. See the introduction, pp. 94–95 above. 54 L reads “Aramei,” but P and Rivetus have “Cyrenaei,” which is probably the correct reading, since 2 Macc. 2:24 (lxx 2:23) says that 2 Macc. is an abridgment of a work “ab Iasone Cyreneo quinque libris comprehensa.” 55 Scaliger means that Latin Tobias is another book than Greek Tobit and that Latin Judith is another book than Greek Judith. 56 Jerome, prologue to Judith, in Biblia Sacra, ed. Weber, 1:691. 57 L has “Graeci,” but a marginal note in the same hand proposes the reading “Latini.” 58 Both P and L read “Graeci,” but a marginal note in L suggests the reading “Latini.” 59 Doubts about Jerome’s responsibility for the Vulgate of Judith and Tobit are not expressed by Robert Hanhart, Septuaginta viii, 4: Iudith, and Septuaginta viii, 5: Tobit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979, 1983). Cf. Franz Kaulen, Sprachliches Handbuch zur bibli­ schen Vulgata, 2nd ed. (Freiburg, 1904; repr., Hildesheim: Olms, 1973), 2: “Die Übersetzung des hl. Hieronymus haben wir…auch bei den beiden Büchern Tobias und Judith.” 60 For “codicibus Latinis” (P), L reads “Latinis codicibus.” 61 Scaliger is referring here either to the Hebrew version of Tobias published in Constantinople in 1516 and reprinted by Sebastian Münster in 1542 or to the Hebrew version published in Constantinople in 1517 and reprinted by Paulus Fagius at Isny in 1542.

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Latino discrepat.62 Qui ne ipse quidem prototypon esse potest, cum auctore Hieronymo63 Chaldaice primum tam Iudith quam Tobias scripti fuerint. 10. Iudith istius ne tenuis quidem aura ad hodiernos Iudaeos pervenit.64 Is liber est commentum hominis temporum, historiae et locorum imperiti. Temporum, cum ait Ecbatana condita esse ab illo Arphaxad stramentitio,65 cum Herodotus, aequalis eorum temporum quibus ea Iudith fuisse fingitur, Ecbatanorum tanquam vetustissimae Medorum regiae meminerit.66 Sed et Tobia67 fingitur fuisse temporibus filiorum Salmanassar68 regis,69 hoc est, plus quam ducentis annis ante Ioiakim pontificem70 et Iudith. Is liber Tobiae memi­ nit Ecbatanorum.71 Quod si verus est liber Tobiae, falsus72 liber Iudith, qui tum primum condita Ecbatana scribit.73 Si verus liber Iudith, falsus ille Tobiae, qui

62 63

64

65

66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73

Both these medieval Hebrew versions were included in Walton’s London Polyglot, 4 (1657). On these translations of Tobit into Hebrew, see E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman, vol. 3.1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 230. Scaliger owned a copy of Tobias cum Latino Munsteri; see the list of books he bequeathed to Leiden University, in Catalogus librorum Bibliothecae Lugdunensis (Leiden: n.p., 1612), 82. This copy is no longer in the Leiden University Library. Scaliger also possessed a copy of the 1542 edition by Fagius; now Leiden, University Library, shelf mark 874 D 7. This copy contains his manuscript annotations. For “discrepat” (P), L reads “discrepet.” Jerome, prologue to Tobias, in Biblia Sacra, ed. Weber, 1:676: “librum Chaldeo sermone conscriptum”; prologue to Judith, in ibid., 691: “Chaldeo tamen sermone conscriptus.” “Chaldeus” and “Chaldaicus” mean “in Aramaic.” This sentence seems to echo Origen, Epistula ad Africanum 13: “The Hebrews use neither Tobit, nor Judith. Nor do they have it in Hebrew among the apocrypha, as we learned from them when we asked after it.” For the weak attestation of Judith in Hebrew and Aramaic in ancient and more recent times, see Schürer, Jewish People, 3.1:219. Jth. 1:2 lxx. This Arphaxad is a fictitious figure, but presented in Jth. 1:5 as a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar I, king of the Assyrians (605–562 bce). For “stramentitius,” see Petronius, Satyricon 63.8: “stramenticius vavato,” “a puppet made of straw.” Herodotus 1.98, 110, 153; 3.64, 92. P reads “Tobia”, L “Tobias.” L reads “Salmanazar.” Tob. 1:2, 13, and 18–19 mention Shalmaneser v, king of the Assyrians, 726–722 bce. However, since Scaliger states that this king preceded Judith by more than two hundred years, he appears to identify the Shalmaneser of Tob. 1 with Shalmaneser iii, king of the Assyrians 858–824 bce. Jth. 15:8 lxx: Ιωακιμ ὁ ἱερεὺς ὁ μέγας. Jth. 15:9 Vg.: “Ioachim autem summus pontifex de Hierusalem venit in Bethuliam.” Tob. 5:8. L omits “falsus liber Iudith…falsus ille Tobiae” through homoeoteleuton (“Tobiae”/“Tobiae”). Jth. 1:1 Vg.

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Ecbatanorum meminit. Sed cum Herodotus, si bene memini, Ecbatana describit, nihil de prodigiosa moenium, turrium, propugnaculorum latitudine et altitudine dicit,74 quae hic75 noster auctor τερατεύεται madidis Sostratus alis.76 11. Historiae sese imperitum quoque profitetur,77 quod, cum sub pontifice Ioiakim (ita legendum, non Ioachim78) haec accidisse dicat,79 eo tempore Arphaxad regem Medis, Nabuchodonosorem Assyriis imponit.80 Atqui a rege Cyro81 ad Alexandrum Magnum ab Indo flumine ad deserta Libyae unus rex Persarum imperavit, quod et pueri sciunt.82 12. Locorum quoque83 et geographiae magna inscitia. Unum tantum locum producam: cum ait Olophernem illum λόγῳ θεωρητὸν84 vastasse 74

Scaliger is not entirely right: Herodotus 1.98, too, describes Ecbatana’s concentric ringwalls as big and strong and the enceinte as about as long as that of Athens (about 27 km). 75 Jth. 1:2–4 lxx. 76 Juvenal, Satires 10.178: “that Sostratus with his wings dripping with sweat,” a sarcastic designation of someone who exaggerates in telling improbable, fishy stories. For “Sostratus,” L reads “Nothus.” This is an adaptation of Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.264: “madidis Notus evolat alis” (the South-wind flies forth with dripping wings). It cannot be the correct reading here, since the Latin quotation from Juvenal occurs also in Scaliger’s letter to De Thou of 27 Apr. 1591, in The Correspondence of Scaliger, 2:159, lines 29–30. 77 Sc., the author of Judith. 78 L reads “Ioachim,” P “Ioachin.” 79 Jth. 15:8 lxx: Ιωακιμ; 15: 9 Vg.: Ioacim. 80 Jth. 1:1 lxx. 81 Cyrus, king of Persia 559–530 bce. Cf. P. Briant, s.v. “Persia,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1144: “The Achaemenid period represents a turning point in Middle Eastern history: for the first time, countries from the Indus to the Balkans, from Central Asia to Elephantine in Upper Egypt were embraced by one, unifying political structure.” 82 Scaliger’s criticism appears to be based on his presupposition that the Ιωακιμ/Ioachim of Jth. 15:8 lxx/15:9 Vg must be identified with the Joiakim mentioned in Nehemiah (2 Esd.) 12:10, 12, and 26. This latter Joiakim was a high-priest in the fifth century bce. In Scaliger’s letter to De Thou of 27 Apr. 1591, in The Correspondence of Scaliger, 2:159, lines 14–19, this becomes clearer: the author of Judith shows his ignorance of chronology, “quand, aiant supposé Judith estre du temps de Joiakim (ainsi fault lire, si non Joachin), grand prestre de la loy, qui estoit du temps de Xerxes et Artaxerxes [2 Esd. 2:1, 5:14, 13:6], rois de tout l’orient despuis le Ganges jusques aus colonies ioniques et isles grecques, il a songé un Arphaxad en Mede et un Nabuchodonosor en Assyrie; qui est une aussi grande témérité à le controver qu’ignorance à le croire.” Xerxes i ruled over Persia 486–465, Artaxerxes i 465–424 bce. 83 P omits “quoque… Olophernem.” 84 “Discernible by reason, or contemplation, alone,” that is, obscure, unknown, the opposite of ἐμφανής, visible, manifest, conspicuous, well known. Cf. Epicurus ap. Diogenes Laertius

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Rases,85 postea traiecto Euphrate pervenisse in Mesopotamiam,86 deinde ad Mare Ciliciae.87 Ergo haec nova geographia Mesopotamiam collocat88 citra Euphratem pergentibus in Syriam. Quod quis non rideat? 13. Sed omnia recensere est tempus perdere, χρῆμα τιμαλφέστατον.89 Inepti ergo theologi et chronologi nostri, qui ei libro fidem habent eique locum in suis90 chronologiis dant. 14. Pro coronide dicam Christianismum semper hactenus penuria criticorum laborasse,91 et ex illo fonte omnia mendaciorum portenta, pro quibus homines digladiantur et clamosi sophistae92 debacchantur, derivata fuisse.93

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10.139: θεοὺς λόγῳ θεωρητούς, and Ps.-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum 376c: λόγῳ θεωρητὰ μόρια. The phrase occurs frequently in Philo Alexandrinus and especially in Galen. Jth. 2:23 lxx: Ρασσις. L reads “Rasses.” Jth. 2:24 lxx. Jth. 2:24–25 lxx. For “Mesopotamiam collocat” (P), L reads “collocat Mesopotamiam.” The idea that time is the most precious of possessions and should not be wasted is a commonplace in Scaliger’s letters; see, e.g., his letters to Casaubon, 4 May 1601 (The Correspondence of Scaliger, 3: 633, line 20); to Casaubon, 18 Feb. 1602: “Ecquis satis aestimare possit iacturam χρήματος τιμαλφεστάτου” (4:213, line 19); to Welser, 13 Aug. 1602 (4:363, line 8); and to Casaubon, 16 Mar. 1603 (4:610, lines 3–4). Cf. Plato, Timaeus 59b: τιμαλφέστατον κτῆμα, said of gold; and Seneca the Younger, De brevitate vitae 8.1: “tempus, …re omnium pretiosissima.” For the history of this commonplace, see Erasmus, Apologia respondens ad ea quae i.l. Stunica taxaverat, in Opera omnia Erasmi, asd ix, 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1983), 61, n. to line 17. L omits “suis.” Scaliger concludes his discussion of Judith in his letter to Casaubon, 27 Apr. 1591 (The Correspondence of Scaliger, 2:160, lines 65–69), in a similar way, but with a warning not to tell others that in his opinion Christianity has always suffered, up to the present, from its lack of critics: “Car notes que hactenus Christianismus criticos non habuit, qui decouvrent les folies non seulement des sophistes modernes, mais de ceux qui valoint plus qu’eux, voire τῶν ἀποθεωθέντων. Ne communiques ceci à personne, je vous prie. Tibi sapias. Oderis profanum volgus, et arceas. Et c’est asses touchant ceci.” For “clamosi sophistae,” L reads “clamosophistae.” But “clamosophista” or “calamosophista” do not occur in the online Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (accessed 26 Sept. 2015). Nor do “clam-” or “calamosophistes” or “-sta” occur in R. Hoven, Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Nor does καλαμοσοφιστής or κλαμοσοφιστής occur in the online Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (accessed 26 Sept. 2015). For “derivata fuisse” (P), L has “fuisse derivata.” The final sentence is quoted, translated, and commented upon by Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:698–99. L, the only textual witness available at the time, reads “clamosophistae.” I emended this to “calamosophistae,” which Grafton translated felicitously as “pen-wielding sophists.” However, now that we have P, its reading “clamosi sophistae” seems preferable.

Part 2 Knowledge Communities



chapter 7

Streetwalking and the Sources of Citizen Culture* James S. Amelang One of the more persistent themes within the remarkably varied oeuvre of Anthony Grafton as it has evolved during the past four decades is his longstanding insistence on the public valence of what we in the present see as largely private writing. Time and again—most recently in his study of the eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian graphomaniac Francis Daniel Pastorius— Grafton has dragged early modern scholars out of their studies, to show the various ways in which their solitary, reclusive work found broader resonances in the world outside.1 This essay explores one specific trajectory within this exchange between the personal and public spheres. It focuses on citizen-scholars, that is, learned men who acted as collectors, assayers, and communicators of information within and about urban societies. These often idiosyncratic individuals spent much of their lives moving back and forth along a continuum that stretched from scribbling in the quiet isolation of their own homes to meeting in the marketplace, as Coriolanus put it. Following a series of linkages from the gathering of news to the writing of history, they infused private activity with public purpose. What moved them to do so was a sense of commitment to a citizen culture, understood as a variably defined but deeply felt assemblage of ideals, practices, and loyalties. Such characters are not difficult to locate. This brief overview starts with three near contemporaries, and then introduces some additional figures, as a means of highlighting the traits and interests they had in common. − John Chamberlain (1542–1628) was known as the author of a single oeuvre, several hundred letters he wrote from 1597 to 1626. Membership in a family * Preliminary versions of this essay were delivered in 2011–12 at a conference in Barcelona, and as seminars in Cambridge and London (Royal Holloway). A translation of the first of these has appeared as “Pujades’ Dietari and the Forms of Urban Knowledge,” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 53 (2014): 333–50. I am grateful to Xavier Gil for his helpful comments on both texts. 1 Anthony Grafton, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 1–39. Note the strong echoes of an earlier article cowritten with Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (Nov. 1990): 30–78.

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of wealthy London merchants endowed him with sufficient income, and study at Cambridge provided excellent political and social connections. While his letters registered the most important events at court and in the city, they are also valued for the impressive amount of precise particulars they offer on daily life in early Stuart London. Yet Chamberlain did not only take the pulse of an extremely wide range of news. He also enriched this information with his own assessment and commentary. It is precisely this play between information and evaluation that confers greatest value upon his epistolary as a historical source.2 − Pierre de l’Estoile (ca. 1546–1611) was a barrister who held a venal office in the Parlement of Paris. His duties there were not onerous, which allowed him to keep an unusually detailed diary from 1574 to 1611. A moderate Catholic close to the politiques, he ran into serious trouble when the radical League triumphed in Paris; indeed, he was imprisoned for several months, and feared for his life. Like Chamberlain’s letters, the eleven manuscript volumes of his Mémoires-journaux cover a multitude of subjects. He naturally had a great deal to say about the world of law, and the business of Parlement in particular. But he also mixed in references to high and low politics in and around the court, the royal family, and different political and religious factions in the city, as well as prices, the weather, songs, rumors, gossip and scandals, duels and crimes, obituaries, what have you. Also like Chamberlain, he focused resolutely on public matters. Neither of them had much to say about his family or his private life. Finally, he further resembled his English colleague in not limiting his efforts to recording information. Rather, he also added his own opinions and interpretations, which he often marked by placing them in parentheses.3 − Like Chamberlain and l’Estoile, Jeroni Pujades (1568–1635) studied law. Although he worked as a barrister in and around the royal appeals court of Barcelona, a seat on which he unsuccessfully strove for all his life, he was deeply committed to antiquarian research, and built a sufficiently strong local reputation to be named the official chronicler of the Principality of 2 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939). 3 The scholarly edition of the Registres-Journaux l’Estoile wrote from 1574 to 1611, by Madeleine Lazard, Gilbert Schrenck, et al., published by Droz in Geneva beginning in 1992, has completed the reign of Henri iii (1574–89) and now has under way that of Henri iv (1589–1610). For this essay I have relied on a well-known anthology, The Paris of Henry of Navarre as seen by Pierre de l’Estoile: Selections from his Mémoires-Journaux, trans. and ed. Nancy L. Roelker (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1958).

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Catalonia. Pujades kept a minutely detailed daybook of events in Barcelona from 1600 to 1635. And as in the case of Chamberlain and l’Estoile, the information he registered covered a broad swath of subjects, but only occasionally referred to events of an intimate or familial nature.4 A background in law and a penchant for turning curiosity into correspondence or personal chronicle were not the only traits these writers shared. All three also recorded on paper at least one frequent, even daily, custom. Walking may well have been the activity that early modern citizens did most often and thought about the least. But Chamberlain, l’Estoile, and Pujades belonged to a special class of walkers: those adult male citizens whose wanderings included pattern and purpose. Above all, their walking left behind a paper trail. This essay is concerned less with reconstructing the actual deed than with examining its consequences. The two are linked in a chain of movement that begins with each of our protagonists leaving his house, frequenting specific places within the city, and then returning home to record on paper not so much the fact of the walk as what he learned while it took place. To cite merely one example: on 5 March 1602, Pujades prefaces a particularly juicy bit of political gossip by noting that “I was there when the abbot told this to Archdeacon Duran…when I was walking with them through Saint James Square,” that is, through the central open space in front of the city hall of Barcelona.5 And one can easily adduce other instances of all three specifying the precise topographical origins of a news item in a conversation that took place during a walk. Strolling was not just good exercise, it was also a regular source of privileged information. It was moreover a practice identified with a relatively new character in the early modern urban scene: the citizen who specialized in ferreting out and gathering all sorts of news and rumors. These men-about-town were seen as novel enough to have contemporaries invent new terms to describe them. Thus “intelligencers” and “newsmongers” appeared in late sixteenthcentury English to designate (positively or negatively) a social type or function with clear equivalents and even predecessors elsewhere, most notably in Venice.6 The locus classicus in which this new public figure was dissected was 4 Jeroni Pujades, Dietari, ed. Josep Maria Casas Homs, 4 vols. (Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1975–76). For background on the author and his text, see my “The Mental World of Jeroni Pujades,” in Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 211–26. 5 Pujades, Dietari, 1: 179. 6 For the terms used in sixteenth-century Italy, see Mario Infelise, “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Political Avvisi: Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Cultural

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Ben Jonson’s 1626 satirical comedy The Staple of News. The editor of the standard edition of Chamberlain’s letters suggests that Jonson may have been alluding to him in the passage that mentions one “grave Master Ambler, newsmaster of Paul’s,” the latter—the interior and immediate environs of Saint Paul’s cathedral—being the best-known center for gossip and news in London.7 This may be a bit far-fetched, but it certainly is true not only that Chamberlain frequently alludes to his daily walk to this building in his letters, but also that contemporaries were also aware of his haunting its precincts. What is more, Saint Paul’s and the other places where he gathered information that he then mentioned in his correspondence coincide neatly with the spaces that Jonson singles out as the “four cardinal quarters” of information in London (1.2). (The other three were the court in Whitehall, the Royal Exchange, and the law courts at Westminster Hall.) Finally, it is not surprising to find these venues appearing in relation to the same informational functions in other contemporary texts, such as Thomas Middleton’s earlier city comedy The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary; or, The Walks in Paul’s.8 The fact that ambulatory urban “intelligencers” like Chamberlain were seen as the objects of satire also invites us to ponder the literally obsessive way in which these diarists and correspondents registered their news. When reading over the monumental disorder of l’Estoile’s volumes, it is hard to avoid the impression that he was trying to record for posterity everything he found not just said aloud, but also written and read within the city. (Note how he even Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, vol. 3, Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33–52. Excellent studies of what was at the time the most lively urban news sector in Europe include Peter Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian CityState, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 389–419; and Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7 While Ambler is referred to thus in Jonson’s 1624 play Neptune’s Triumph, his name appears more often in Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 16–17, 32, 76, 77. For the (tentative) suggestion that Ambler was modeled on Chamberlain, see The Letters of John Chamberlain, 1:6. 8 Originally written in 1604, it has been edited by Paul Yachnin in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 183–94. For the relations between Jonson and Middleton, and more generally on contemporary theatrical depictions of news gathering, see Alan B. Farmer, “Play-Reading, News-Reading, and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 127–58.

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copied the graffiti he saw on the walls of buildings as he made his daily rounds.)9 Yet their efforts did not stop at hunting and gathering information. All three walkers turned urban informers also acted as urban revealers, that is, men in the know (and gender limitations here are very much in evidence) who went on to explicate and comment on the news—a crucial piece of value added that, more than once, comes to the rescue of future historians. I can attest from my own experience of working on early modern Barcelona that Pujades’s diary is frequently the best source for reconstructing what actually went on in municipal politics. Where the official records of the city government and other local institutions are silent on the sort of discussion and disagreement that took place within them, Pujades often offers the only insider testimony to the sorts of conflict that they housed and then kept hidden. An obvious question takes us to the third link in our emerging chain, that of communicating the news so laboriously gathered and then committed to paper. If we ask for whom these scroungers of data were seeking and sorting this information, we are led in two directions, one quite definite, the other considerably more diffuse. Chamberlain’s case is crystal clear. He did not write for some undetermined public, much less for himself. Instead, he labored mightily to sift and craft the news he collected into terse epistolary prose, which he then sent on in the form of letters to two specific readers: Ralph Winwood and above all Dudley Carleton, both diplomats and his intimate friends.10 Chamberlain specialized in the type of letter a contemporary guide to rhetoric described as “Epistles Nunciatory,” which sought to “advertise the news of any public or private matters unto our friends.”11 In so doing he saw himself as providing an informational lifeline through which he could keep his two associates well informed and up to date on the latest developments at court and in the city, which could prove to be of vital importance to them in their ambitions to climb higher on the ladder of royal favor. Pujades and l’Estoile, on the other hand, had no such concrete interlocutors in mind. To divine their audiences one must look in other directions. One particularly valuable clue can be found in the close ties 9 10

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For examples see The Paris of Henry of Navarre, 190–91 (Aug. 1590). Many of Carleton’s letters to Chamberlain have survived as well. For a selection, see Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters, ed. Maurice Lee Jr. (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1973). Angel Day in his English Secretorie (1592), quoted in David Randall, “Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper, and the Public Sphere,” Past and Present 198 (2008): 20. Chamberlain was not the only such figure in London; for the parallel career of a Welsh contemporary, see Lisle C. John, “Rowland Whyte, Elizabethan Letter-Writer,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 217–35.

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between their jotting down of fresh news and their habit of assembling the writings and news-laden items of others. L’Estoile was well known as a collector in his own time. He had his own private museum, which housed his numismatic cabinet and library, and where he proudly received many visitors, including foreigners as well as French notables. In fact, in 1601 he sold his parlementary office in order to devote all his time to his library, his coin collection, and his diaries. At the same time he oversaw a parallel effort, a separate collection of documents, which he kept in a series of scrapbooks known as Recueils.12 These were albums stuffed with broadsheets, pamphlets, satires, royal proclamations, and the like, many of which he enriched with commentaries he wrote in their margins. Pujades, on the other hand, did not separate external documents from his diary, nor did he transcribe them; he sewed them in, between his manuscript folios. Thus one finds him literally stitching into his journal engravings, pamphlets, printed legal briefs, and correspondence from friends outside Barcelona, such as the (regrettably few) confidential letters he received from a correspondent at the court in Madrid in 1621, Alonso Aguado.13 One should also keep in mind that during the later years of his diary keeping, Pujades had to leave Barcelona to work as a seigneurial officer in the Empordà, in the countryside north of the city. That correspondence then substituted for the walks that he had relied upon for keeping up with the news in the past can be seen by his prefacing his diary entries by calendaring letters and other texts received from others. Here we reach a crucial intersection: the nexus between gathering, redacting, refining, and commenting on information, on the one hand, and the process by which the results are communicated outward via forms that range from private letters to various more public media. Not surprisingly, it is precisely within the latter that one begins to find references to deeper purposes. Up to this point, the label “intelligencer” has served to characterize an individual set apart for his association with a series of activities in which all three of these city dwellers participated. Intention, however, now drives a wedge among them, and makes it hard to find a common designation for their endeavors. Chamberlain’s aim was to help two ambitious friends advance their careers within a political system that they and others may have regarded as woefully in need of regeneration, but within which they made their way all the same. 12

One such assemblage has been edited as Fragment des Recueils de Pierre De L’Estoile, ed. Isabelle Armitage (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1976). For more on l’Estoile’s reading habits, see Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010), 348–52. 13 Pujades, Dietari, 3:293–302 (3 Apr.–1 May 1621).

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Pujades and l’Estoile, however, had other priorities in mind. Contemporary discourse offers several specific terms with which to describe them, and one of the more appropriate comes directly from Pujades’s Catalan context. In 1679 a local jurist wrote a prologue to a recent chronicle of the city of Girona. In it he praised its author—a patrician named Jeroni de Real—for defending the public interest, and in this vein referred to him as tant bon repúblich, “such a good republican.”14 A slightly less literal translation would be “defender of the commonwealth.” Pujades had previously won the same reputation for various reasons, but the one he stresses the most in his diary is his intervention in a turbulent session of the city council during which he defended the longstanding principle of popular representation in municipal government against strong opposition from the oligarchy of honored citizens and urban gentry.15 Not surprisingly, l’Estoile similarly saw both himself and his writing as instruments for the public good, even if he almost always opted for a via negativa when wording his concern for the commonweal. Hence his tireless denunciations of the visible lack of devotion to it on the part of selfish and warring elites (Huguenot as well as Catholic), and his habit of meeting their claims to be pursuing anything beyond their own narrow interests with bitter skepticism.16 At this point, two words of caution are in order. In my darker moments I have the impression that we early modernists of late have been mesmerized by the public sphere, and that things have gotten out of hand. It behooves us not to lose sight of the basic fact that in the early modern era it was the condition of privacy, not publicity, that most effectively protected innovative or dissenting discourse.17 Chamberlain himself makes this quite clear in the following remarks to Carleton in 1598: You see how confidently I write to you of all things, but I hope you keep it to yourself and then there is no danger… I am so used to a liberty and freedom of speech when I converse or write to my friends, that I cannot easily leave it…18 14

La Catalunya del Barroc vista des de Girona. La crònica de Jeroni de Real, 1626–1683, ed. Joan Busquets Dalmau (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1994), 1:12. 15 Pujades, Dietari, 1:75–79 (6 Feb. 1602). 16 As when the king’s brother affected to care more for France than his own benefit; see The Paris of Henry of Navarre, 44, 87 (17 Sept. 1575, July 1582). 17 Note along similar lines Barbara J. Shapiro’s gentle chiding of recent students of the public sphere for privileging printed sources as opposed to “the full range of paper-based and non-paper-based venues,” in her Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558–1688 (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2012), 284–85. 18 Letters of John Chamberlain, 1:59 (modernized spelling).

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Here Chamberlain shows himself to be perfectly aware of the need to protect communicative practices that are far more private than public. Moreover, within this reserved sphere, what starts as news can easily turn into the sort of political and moral commentary that claims for itself the liberty of being frank and actually quite negative. The strictly personal nature of this communication prevents any direct linkage with the public sphere.19 Yet the value placed on liberty within confidential conversation clearly has a broader resonance, and one that takes us to the backdoor steps of what could be labeled citizen culture. There is also the problem of how to depict the different varieties of citizen culture that these diverse lines of communication sustain. If at least two of the three writers I have been focusing on can be called commonwealth men—I fear that including Chamberlain would stretch the point—they are the sort who kept their definition of the public good grounded in politics, and very distant from any social questions.20 Here one brushes up against the sort of basic distinction Samuel Glover offers between elite and popular republicanism in his suggestive study of Leveller discourse in the Putney debates.21 One can hardly deny that questions of social valence and provenance mattered greatly in early modern notions of citizenship, especially where the rights of speech were involved. In fact, we can see such distinctions at work in an earlier 19

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This is an important distinction. Despite their strong interest in public events, my protagonists operated at a highly personalized level below that of the collective, subscriptionbased manuscript newsletters written by professionals that began to proliferate in this period, and that would soon be overtaken by printed news. On this difference see in addition to those sources mentioned in n. 14 Sabrina A. Baron, “Manuscript News/Printed News: The Two Faces of Dissemination in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (London: Routledge, 2001), 41–56; and Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), esp. 87–94. Chamberlain rarely uses the terms “commonweal” or “commonwealth,” and when he does they lack ideological connotation. His own views regarding (non-factional) politics were fairly conventional; for example, when commenting on the friction between James and Parliament in 1621–22 he defends the latter’s prerogatives without being overtly critical of the king (as in The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2:419). Samuel Dennis Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elitist Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80. For broader background focusing mostly on “classical” political versions, see Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); for a complementary view of the urban context, see Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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dispute over terminology. When Sir Thomas Elyot, in his widely read 1531 Book of the Governour, posed the question of how to translate into English the Latin res publica, he rejected “commonweal,” preferring “public weal” instead. He went on to explain that he found the latter term more neutral; “commonweal,” he argued, was too intimately associated with the people—tellingly, “plebs” is the word he uses here—as a social class.22 Yet if for Elyot and others like him, commonweal was too close to commoner for comfort, other early modern writers—including some newsmongers—did not hesitate to cast citizenship in social as opposed to exclusively political terms. Pere Joan Porcar (1589–1628) was a Valencian parish priest of popular origins who wrote a diary at roughly the same time (1589–1628) and in the same language (Catalan) as Pujades. In it he recorded news hailing from throughout the kingdom of Valencia, and especially the capital city.23 While its contents covered the same broad range of happenings we find in the other texts mentioned above, he stands out in at least one respect: the focus of his harsh, relentless political commentary. Where Pujades gripes about both local and courtly corruption, as well as the betrayal of Catholic principles by “reason of state” politicians in Madrid, Porcar voices bitter complaints against the social and political elites of his own city and kingdom, condemning them for their exploitation of the poor, for their greed and senseless acts of violence, and above all for their willingness to sell the “fatherland” (pàtria) and its privileges in exchange for offices, rents, and other bribes.24 His most violent outburst expresses indignation at the betrayal of the public good by the deputies attending the 1626 session of parliament:

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Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, ed. S.E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 1–5, “The signification of a public weal, and why it is called in Latin Respublica.” I first encountered this passage in the interesting discussion by Geoff Baldwin in his “The ‘Public’ as a Rhetorical Community in Early Modern England,” in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), 201–2. Coses evengudes en la ciutat i regne de València. Dietario de Mossén Pere Joan Porcar, capellán de San Martín, 1589–1629, ed. Vicente Castañeda Alcover, 2 vols. (Madrid: Góngora, 1931–32). I quote below from the abridged edition: Pere Joan Porcar, Coses evengudes en la ciutat i regne de València. Dietari, 1589–1628, ed. Fernando Garcia Garcia (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1983). Porcar also shared l’Estoile’s interest in graffiti, and transcribed several instances of local opposition to the policies of the Olivares regime (an example from 22 Mar. 1626 appears in Coses evengudes, 263–64).

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In these unfortunate days the traitors of the fatherland agreed like tyrants to vote the subsidy that everyone opposed and that they evilly extorted and promised the king against all justice, reason and law… God who is most patient, merciful and just will show himself against these infamous traitors to God and their fatherland and the laws of the land, which they have wreaked against the poor in order to enrich themselves, and one can be sure that Our Lord will avenge their cause, which is against the poor people, and will shorten the days of our lord the King, just as one reads about many other kings who levied heavy taxes against all law, reason and justice, and who with so much extortion and oppression and heavy taxes have used fear and threats to force them to approve [such taxes].25 This extraordinary passage (from a parish priest!) makes clear the need for caution when painting early modern ideological fields with the broad brushes of republicanism, constitutionalism, and the like. At first sight the political attitudes of Porcar and Pujades seem quite close to each other. They both give their frank opinions regarding politics in their intimate writings, and express a deep pessimism in which they repeatedly identify politics with corruption and the triumph of private interest. Yet if we compare Pujades’s account of his successful defense of the participation of merchants and artisans in the city council with Porcar’s statement, we immediately perceive a fundamental difference between their strands of republicanism: the Valencian’s incorporates a vision of social justice that is lacking in Pujades. The latter’s understanding of popular interest hews strictly to the political plane. More institutional and redolent of legal reasoning, his diary is limited in social resonance, while it reserves the heightened biblical tones of Porcar’s jeremiad for other, less socially specific grievances.26 It is time to return to our initial concern, walking in cities. Obviously, much more could be said about a practice that had many dimensions besides the 25 26

Ibid., 274 (undated, 1626). A close contemporary analogue in terms of a strictly political understanding of republicanism is Thomas Scott. Like Pujades and l’Estoile, he joined diary keeping with part-time work as a historian (and was in fact a friend of Sir Robert Cotton). He moreover persistently intervened in local and national politics as a pamphleteer of strong political and religious views bereft of any social radicalism. Also like them, he left behind a diary that constitutes an exceptionally rich source for reconstructing his deep dissatisfactions with contemporary politics, especially in regard to religion. See Peter Clark, “Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 1–26; and Peter G. Lake, “Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 805–25.

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informational one underscored here. For example, a wide range of urban dwellers resorted to walks for rhetorical frameworks for presenting cities on paper.27 And thanks to the survival of certain sources, one can even retrace the real itineraries of real walks with considerable precision. The level of detail in Samuel Pepys’s diaries, to cite one famous instance, has allowed scholars to reconstruct his ambulatory (as well as amatory) wanderings.28 Nevertheless, I have tried to draw attention here to something different. Pepys enjoyed walking, gossiping, and keeping up with the news as much as any of my authors. However, what he wrote after indulging these pastimes lacks any external connection. His was a resolutely private diary, so private in fact that he protected his entries by using shorthand. The writers featured here engaged in something different, a sort of republican rambling in the minimal sense of focusing their efforts in an outward rather than inward direction. Some of them even strove to gear their documents, if not to contemporary public debate, then toward the sphere of what Hobbes called “civil history,” which he famously defined as “the History of the Voluntary Actions of men in Common-wealth.”29 That there were other ways of yoking commonwealth and history in early modern political culture is suggested by an aspiration shared by the two diarists among our walkers. It is telling that both Pujades and l’Estoile claim that their private collection of information serves a public purpose, by affirming that they collate and comment on their materials to aid either themselves or others in the future writing of a history of the present. Pujades—once again, the official chronicler of Catalonia—offers this as the explicit justification of his keeping his diary. As he states in its preface, “since we cannot live forever in order to tell and make known to our children and posterity what happened in our times…it is good to write and leave a record of what is now happening, so that by means of writing it will be known in the future.”30 And one can find the same in l’Estoile, who frequently inserts comments regretting the tendentious or even false nature of the text he is copying, while noting that it contains 27

For examples from England and Spain see my “The Walk of the Town: Modelling the Early Modern City,” in Mapping the Early Modern Hispanic World: Essays in Honor of Richard L. Kagan, ed. Kimberly Lynn and Erin Kathleen Rowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 28 See for example John S. Pipkin, “Space and the Social Order in Pepys’ Diary,” Urban Geography 11, no. 2 (1990): 153–75; and Ian Archer, “Social Networks in Restoration London: The Evidence from Samuel Pepys’ Diary,” in Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England, 76–94. 29 Leviathan 1.9. 30 Pujades, Dietari, 1:67 (undated, 1601).

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“many things that are worth knowing…and will be useful when someone writes the history of our times.”31 Much the same dual concern for commonwealth, once again understood largely in political as opposed to social terms, and for history can be found in other walkers who shared the same goals and produced the same sort of texts as the three figures featured here. The widely shared belief that one of the most important means of promoting or defending a commonwealth was to write its history certainly marked the career of the greatest republican thinker of seventeenth-century Italy, the Venetian Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623). What is more, Sarpi referred in his very active epistolary to his daily walks through the commercial district of the Marzaria/Mercerie in search of international as well as local news.32 Venice also produced an earlier and even more active predecessor in Marin Sanudo, arguably the best candidate for the creator of the prototype under discussion here. Sanudo (1466–1536) was notorious in his own time for collecting a massive amount of contemporary documentation in the form of an ostensibly private diary, which he began in 1496 and kept until 1533. His writing was a very public act; everyone in the Venetian political elite knew him as a maniacal scribbler who was constantly gathering all sorts of information. He then used these laboriously assembled data in a very special way. Himself a patrician and a member of the political elite, he created for himself the public persona of an irritable curmudgeon who was the pedant to consult when one needed to know the letter of a law, the exact historical precedent, or any other bit and piece of the civic past and present. Like l’Estoile and Pujades, Sanudo justified this obsessive collecting to himself and others by constantly affirming that he gathered these raw data to serve as sources for a formal history of the city—an endpoint he never reached, however, largely because the task of collection itself simply overwhelmed him.33 Much of this information 31

32

33

The Paris of Henry of Navarre, 37. Not accidentally, l’Estoile’s first known text was a manuscript bearing the revealing title “Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France depuis 1515 jusqu’en 1574” (ibid., 13). According to his biographer Fulgenzio Micanzio, Sarpi’s “greatest pleasure was to discourse with those that had beene abroad, and would give him a true relation of countryes, of customs, of people, and of religions, having himselfe also had an extreame desire of peregrination,” quoted in Filippo De Vivo, “Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” Media History 11, nos. 1–2 (2005): 41. Marino Sanudo, I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. Rinaldo Fulin et al., 58 vols. (Venice: Deputazione R. Veneta di Storia Patria, 1879–1903). As in the case of l’Estoile, I cite from a highly useful English-language anthology: Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Sanudo spent

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was found in documents, but important pieces of it were not. And here is where walking as well as talking fitted in. As he explained to the Council of Ten in 1531, “I was continually in the public squares investigating every occurrence, no matter how minimal, how unimportant it was.”34 And as in the case of all three of our informants, his papers reveal the urban spaces wherein he obtained his news. Among these, two were particularly important: the Ducal Palace (both indoors and outside) and above all the area around the Rialto bridge, the central place not only of commercial exchange but also for the flow of all sorts of strategic information. Nor can one overlook the most famous urban walker in early modern England. The sixteenth-century historian John Stow (1525–1605) clearly took to the streets of London more to research its past than to convey news about the present. Yet he also manifested strong interest in the latter as he gathered materials with which to update his contemporary national chronicles, and above all his best-known work, the Survey of London (1598). This unique presentation of a metropolis via a ward-by-ward “perambulation” is the book that has led recent scholars to refer to him as a “citizen historian,” that is, one who was not university educated, did not study law, had no humanistic training, never traveled abroad, and had no ties with the court.35 Instead, Stow found and fostered a broadly defined middle-class readership, an effort that won him the scorn of many social superiors who dismissed his writings as “daily fare for common people.” In fact, his striving to produce a specifically “citizen much of his life writing and revising a chronicle known as the Vite dei dogi, along with various other works of history. In the end, he managed to produce at least one laudatio, along with a formal description and analysis of the workings (past and present) of the Venetian government; for the latter, see De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis venetae, ovvero la città di Venetia, 1493–1530, ed. Angela Carraciolo Aricò (Milan: Ed. Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1980). More generally on Sanudo as a historian, see Gaetano Cozzi, “Marin Sanudo il giovane: Dalla cronaca alla storia,” Rivista Storica Italiana 80, no. 2 (1968): 297–314; as well as the briefer references in Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 81–82, 167–69, 226, 229, 230, 378. That not only Sanudo but also his fellow diarists and collectors Pujades and l’Estoile all wrote historical works, but never got around to writing the contemporary histories for which they claimed to be gathering so many sources, is a coincidence worth pondering. 34 Sanudo, Venice, xxvii–xxviii. 35 Barrett L. Beer, Tudor England Observed: The World of John Stow (London: Sutton, 1998), 17; although see also Edward T. Bonahue Jr.’s thorough exploration of this question in “Citizen History: Stow’s Survey of London,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38 (1998): 61–85. The standard edition is The Survey of London, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

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history” is something his contemporaries recognized as well. Thomas Fuller, the seventeenth-century historian of Cambridge, used this term in his The Worthies of England (1662) to mark Stow’s works as popular in both origin and destination. What is more, he stood up for Stow, noting not only that “hard it is for a citizen to write a history,” but also that while his betters such as Francis Bacon or William Camden condemned him, they did not fail to borrow from him.36 Interestingly, even if Stow’s understanding of “citizen” hovers around institutional membership in the broader urban political community, his resolute focus on the middling classes as the driving force in the urban setting and the way he links history in the dedication with promoting the “common good” pick up some of the same moderate social echoes present in Fuller’s use of the term. And I would be very surprised were we not to find much the same sort of ambivalence elsewhere, in a host of other early modern cities and their texts.37 To recapitulate: no matter what we call these characters—intelligencers, newsmongers, informers, communicators, or facilitators—there is a substantial advantage in looking at them in a comparative framework instead of in isolation, which is the usual approach in urban history, where normal practice is to tackle one city at a time. Putting them together shows right away that we are talking about a sociopolitical type, and one very well known to contemporaries, even as an object of caricature.38 Once this type has been identified, closer inspection turns up significant variations. The most visible to have emerged in this discussion have been the differences between, first, diarists and correspondents who mention walks as sources for their news gathering, 36

37

38

“Though not mentioning his name, [they make] use of his endeavours,” in Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: Nuttall and Hodgson, 1840), 2:380, as well as in Beer, Tudor England Observed, 18, 23. Pujades similarly affirms in the prologues to his historical works that one way to defend a commonwealth is to write its history; on this see Eulàlia Miralles, Sobre Jeroni Pujades (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010), esp. 23–37, 113–45. The preface to the Girona chronicle cited above stresses the same connection. Following the reference to Real as “such a good republican,” and after affirming that “the first obligation that men have at their birth is to look after not only themselves, but also others, and in particular their fatherland and [public] utility,” the prologuist asserts that an important duty of “Governors and Fathers of the Commonwealth” is “to look backward, to consider what has taken place before, in the past” (La Catalunya del Barroc, 10, 12). Our protagonists inspired future readers as well. For example, l’Estoile served as a model for at least two lawyers cum walker-diarists in eighteenth-century Paris, according to Laurent Turcot, “Un chroniqueur curieux de Paris et de la promenade: Edmond-JeanFrançois Barbier et son journal, 1718–1763,” French Historical Studies 33, no. 2 (2010): 204–7.

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and then just leave it at that, and those who after doing the same thing migrate (or hope to do so) toward other types of writing, including history and even more direct forms of political discourse. In other words, one can strain out of these individual exemplars a sort of composite trajectory. This—the chain to which I alluded at the beginning— starts with a walk, and then proceeds through ordered linkages to the end result of information (often enriched by analysis) sent to a correspondent or expounded to a present or future public. Four basic stages in this transformation can be distinguished: 1. 2.

3. 4.

a starting point in the form of direct, explicit reference to a walk in a city. After the return home this is followed by indoor recording and redacting in diaries, commonplace books, and the like the information obtained while strolling. Then the walker-author faces two choices: to convey this information to others or to keep it to himself. Those who opt for the former can either pass on this information (enriched with interpretation and commentary) in the form of letters, the medium of scribal communication most deeply lodged in the sphere of privacy, or move in the opposite direction, by converting personal information into public knowledge. This literally dutiful writing can take several final shapes: a chronicle, a city description, or a work of contemporary history—all fully visible means of participating textually as a citizen, and from a citizen’s perspective, in the res publica.

None of the city dwellers I have mentioned accomplished all four tasks, as they wound up choosing between the third and fourth steps, between privacy and publicity. Still, there are lots of intriguing ways of combining and even mixing up these stages. One especially interesting hybrid comes into view at the overlap between Sanudo and Pujades, the two writers who most insist on their identity as historians of both past and present. Far from being private purveyors of hot news and gossip regarding the court and city à la Chamberlain, they had self-images that were both more public and more scholarly. And it was no accident that the two of them shared, and even deliberately fomented, the same reputation for grouchy republican patriotism—a stance that was looking increasingly old-fashioned by the seventeenth century, if not before.39 39

On Sanudo’s commitment to republican ideals, see Felix Gilbert, “Venice in the Crisis of the League of Cambrai,” in his History: Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1977), 269–91; and Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice

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All of these figures—Chamberlain, l’Estoile, Pujades, Porcar, Sanudo, Stow—look idiosyncratic in their individual contexts. Seen together, however, they do not seem so unusual. Instead, they resemble other republicans of letters who painted forth the “whisperings of the people.”40 As they did so they made their cities their primary public sphere, a micro-model for a Republic of Letters much more localized than its continent-wide counterpart, but marked by the same habit of researching and writing about the past as a way of addressing issues in the present. Abandoning their studies to stretch their legs, they wound up bringing their learning to bear on the world outside—very much like their modern counterpart whom we celebrate in this volume.

40

(New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 251–80; as well as Edward Muir’s respectful dissent, “Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello,” in Martin and Romano, Venice Reconsidered, 137–67. Sir Philip Sidney’s observation in a 1580 letter that a historian is “a Poet in painting forth the effects, the motions, the whisperings of the people” is quoted in Jardine and Grafton, “‘Studied for Action,’” 77.

chapter 8

Baudouin Ronsse as Writer of Medical Letters* Nancy Siraisi The life and publications of the physician Baudouin Ronsse (ca. 1525–97)1 merit examination in the context of any one of several aspects of the early modern Low Countries illuminated by recent historiography: natural knowledge and the history of science and medicine; urban politics and particularism; local patterns of religious change. And Ronsse’s career pattern was also distinctive in the context of the sixteenth-century medical profession. Educated at the University of Leuven, where he was a student of the humanist professor of medicine Jérémie de Dryvère (Thriverius), Ronsse became a relatively prolific Latin medical author who maintained contacts in the world of academic medicine throughout his life.2 Yet these interests and connections * My thanks to Melissa Lo and Chelsea Schields for their assistance with Dutch materials. 1 The dates are those provided by F.W.T. Hunger, “Boudewijn Ronsse (Balduinus Ronsseus) 1525?–1597,” Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 74, no. 1 (1930): 2887–905, containing probably the most detailed biographical account of Ronsse and based in part on archival sources in Gouda, where Ronsse spent much of his career. L. Elaut, “Ronsse (Ronssaeus), Boudewijn,” Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek 6:817–20, consulted online at http://www .historici.nl/retroboeken/nbwv/#source=6&page=417&accessor=accessor_index&view =imagePane), gives 1525–96. 2 In addition to the collection of medical letters that are the subject of this essay (see next note), Ronsse’s works of medical relevance included these titles: De hominis primordiis hystericisque affectibus centones. Ejusdem De Hippocratis magnis lienibus, Pliniique stomacace seu sceletyrbe epistola… (Leuven: Apud Antonium Mariam Bergainge, 1559). (I have not seen this edition and cite it from the online catalog of the National Library of Medicine. These treatises appeared in subsequent editions during the author’s lifetime; the treatise on scorbutus was also reprinted in Ronsse’s posthumously published Opuscula Medica [see below] and with Daniel Sennert’s work on the same subject.) Patricio Tricasso, Enarratio pulcherrima principiorum chyromantiae. Ex qua facillime patere possunt omnes significationes, quorumcunque signorum chyromanticorum. Ejusdem… Tricassi…opus chyromanticum absolutissimum, nunc primum in lucem editum. Item Chyromantia incerti authoris. Opera Balduni Ronssei…in lucem edita cum ejusdem in chyromanticen brevi isagoge (Nürnberg: [Apud Joannem Montanum & Ulricum Neuberum] 1560). In his Isagoge Ronsse claimed that chiromancy was not magical, but a form of natural knowledge related to physiognomy. Venatio medica: continens remedia ad omnes, à capite ad calcem vsque, morbos (Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1589). (This was a poem on remedies obtained from animals; republished in Ronsse, Opuscula Medica [see below].) © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_009

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were not, as in the case of various other learned physicians of the period, developed over the course of a career in an academic faculty of medicine. Rather, Ronsse spent his entire professional life in medical practice in the service of public authorities, moving between contractual obligation to a civic government and appointment as court physician to a princely ruler. The goal of the present essay is to situate Ronsse in yet another context, as a contributor to a favored genre of sixteenth-century medical publication, the printed collection of a physician’s letters on medical topics. Ronsse’s Miscellanea, seu epistolae medicinales (1590) is one of many such collections published in the century following the appearance of the first edition of the Epistolae medicinales of the humanist physician Giovanni Manardo of Ferrara in 1521.3 Both historians and literary scholars have drawn attention to the role of letters in early modern erudition and exchange—of ideas, of arguments, of objects of interest to collectors. Studies and editions have been directed to such topics as humanistic epistolarity, the concept and realities of the Republic of Letters, and the correspondence networks of celebrated individuals.4 Among the most Celsus, De re medica libri octo. Accessere in primum ejusdem, Hieremiae Thriveri Brachelii commentarii doctissimi: in reliquos vero septem, Balduini Ronssei Gandensis, Reipub. Goudanae medici enarrationes (Leiden: Ex Officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1592). (Ronsse’s contribution continues a commentary begun by his teacher Thriverius.) Opuscula medica: i. Epistolae medicinales. ii. De morbis muliebribus. iii. De venatione medica. iv. De scorbuto. Accesserunt quidam aliorum celebrium medicorum de scorbuto tractatus (Leiden: Apud Johannem Maire, 1618). 3 Baudouin Ronsse, Miscellanea seu Epistolae Medicinales (Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana, Apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1590), consulted in the digitized version of the copy at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/resolve/display/bsb10186978 .html; the letter collection was republished under the title Epistolae Medicinales as the first item in Ronsse, Opuscula Medica (1618). For an overview and analysis of collections of medical letters by twenty-one different authors published between 1521 and 1626, see Ian Maclean, “The Medical Republic of Letters before the Thirty Years War,” Intellectual History Review 18 (2008): 15–30. See also Maclean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 59–86, esp. 60, 85–86. 4 Useful studies on the subject of Renaissance and early modern letters and letter writing include A. Gerlo, “The Opus de conscribendis epistolis of Erasmus and the Tradition of the Ars epistolica,” in Classical Influences on European Culture a.d., 500–1500, ed. R.R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 103–14; Cecil H. Clough, “The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections,” in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 33–67; Marc Fumaroli, “Genèse de l’épistolographie classique: rhétorique humaniste de la lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 78 (1978): 886–905; Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,”

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important recent such contributions is surely the eight-volume edition, inspired and supervised by Anthony Grafton, of the letters of Joseph Justus Scaliger.5 The sixteenth-century rise of the practice of publishing collections of letters by physicians on medical topics in volumes entitled epistolae medicinales or something similar thus belongs to a much larger history of early modern European learned and scientific correspondence. Ronsse’s modest collection shows many affinities with volumes of letters by better-known learned medical authors—most of them Italian, some from the German lands—published during his lifetime.6 But before turning to the content of Ronsse’s letter collection, let us first situate its author somewhat more fully in his own time and places. After studies at Leuven, Ronsse seems to have spent a short period in Paris, perhaps for in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 331–55; Henderson, “Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives’ De conscribendis epistolis,” Renaissance and Reformation 7 (1983): 89–105; Claudio Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1986), 70–101; Erika Rummel, “Erasmus’ Manual of Letter-writing: Tradition and Innovation,” Renaissance and Reformation 25 (1989): 299–312; Gideon Burton, “From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribendi epistolis: Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism,” in LetterWriting Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 88–101; Toon Van Houdt, Jan Papy, et al., eds., Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002); Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 3, Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 2. Regarding the Republic of Letters, mention should be made of the digital project at Stanford University, Mapping the Republic of Letters: Exploring Correspondence and Intellectual Community in the Early Modern Period (1500–1800), https://republicofletters .stanford.edu/; see also Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (1 May 2009), http://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i01_Grafton _071609_0_0.pdf. 5 The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, supervisory eds. Anthony Grafton, Henk Jan de Jonge, and Jill Kraye, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012). 6 For some examples see Nancy G. Siraisi, Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

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further study. His early associations were with the southern Low Countries (his family came from Ghent), and he first established himself as a medical practitioner and received his first appointment as civic physician in a small town in Flanders; however, in 1551 he moved north to accept an appointment as civic physician in Gouda, the city with which he was to be associated, on and off, for much of the remainder of his life. In 1565 he became personal physician to Duke Eric ii of Brunswick-Lüneburg, then in the Netherlands in order to raise troops for Philip ii. Ronsse returned to Gouda in 1569 and was again appointed city doctor. Notwithstanding efforts by the Gouda magistrates to hold him to an exclusive commitment, he was once more in Duke Eric’s service from 1577 to 1582.7 In 1582 Ronsse finally returned to Gouda, where his civic appointment was renewed. Subsequently he worked to introduce civic regulation of Gouda’s apothecaries, having earlier advocated such measures regarding surgeons.8 (Similarly, one of Ronsse’s letters uses a surgeon’s erroneous identification of cause of death to call for greater care in surgical examinations.)9 Other letters show that Ronsse necessarily worked in close association with members of both these occupational groups: several of his correspondents were pharmacists and, as will become apparent, he wrote extensively on remedies; he recorded his collaboration with “a very studious pharmacist” and a surgeon in treating a patient; and a letter in which he evaluated internal and external medications for wounds and fractures suggests close familiarity with—and perhaps experience of?—contemporary surgical practice.10 7

For Ronsse’s service to and travels in the entourage of Eric ii, and for discussion of some of Ronsse’s letters relevant thereto, see Wolfgang Kunze, Welfenross und schwarze Reiter: Herzog Erich ii von Braunschweig-Lüneburg Militärunternehmer in der Epoch Philipps ii (Hannover: Hahnsche, 2012), Chap. 18, pp. 320–31. My thanks to Thomas Rütten for calling my attention to this valuable study. 8 Hunger, “Boudewijn Ronsse,” 2894; J.M. Buwalda and E.O. Buwalda-Prey, “Boudewijn Ronsse en de opleiding van de chirurgijns,” Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 86 (1942): 1093–97. 9 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 12, pp. 36–41, “De quodam qui ex ebrietate aphonus convulsus mortuus est.” 10 Ibid., pharmacist correspondents: no. 26, pp. 81–84, “De medicamentorum quotidie in usum medicum venientium varietate”; no. 32, pp. 99–104, “De lumbagine et tabe dorsali: ad Gerardum Regelin”; no. 55, pp. 193–96, “Aloeticorum usum ad sanitatis conservationem utilem: ad Gerardum Kegelin [sic]”; and see n. 15 below. Collaboration with surgeon and pharmacist: no. 7, pp. 19–21, “De scirrhoso tumore ex ore excrescente, ad Hadrianum Iunium.” Surgery: no. 12 (see n. 9 above); no. 66, pp. 226–31, “Num vulnerariae potiones extremis artubus vulneratis, aut fractis, ad continui solutionem uniendem omnino necessariae sint.”

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The Circle of Correspondents

Although most of the letters in the printed collection are undated, Ronsse evidently gathered copies of his letters to learned men over many years before Miscellanea, seu epistolae medicinales saw publication in 1590.11 The range of topics and the circle of named correspondents reflect the vagaries of a long career (including travels in the entourage of Eric of Brunswick) as well as the scope of the author’s interests. Since the addressees of almost a third of the seventy letters (sixty-nine numbered letters plus a letter of dedication) in the volume are unnamed, it seems likely that those whose full names were included were men with whom, for one reason or another, Ronsse wished to announce his connection. Ronsse may have been unusual in this practice, but he was not alone; the two collections of epistolae medicinales published by Johann Lange (1485–1565) similarly omit many names of addressees, or provide only a given name or a sobriquet. Most of the addressees named in Ronsse’s collection are represented by a single letter, only twelve being addressed in multiple letters. Physicians in the latter category included such well-known figures as the botanist Rembert Dodoens,12 the demonologist Johann Weyer,13 and the antiquary and humanist Hadrianus Junius. Ronsse and Junius exchanged a number of letters between 1569 or earlier and 1575, the last year of Junius’s life. The letters touch on literary matters and occasionally 11

Five of Ronsse’s letters had been previously published as an addendum in his De magnis Hippocratis lienibus…commentariolus…. Accessere ejusdem epistolae quinque ejusdem argumenti (1585), 61–97; these letters correspond to Miscellanea, no. 31, pp. 97–99, “Quare apud Amstelredamum, Alcmariam atque alia vicina loca, magis quam aliis locis familiaris sit scorbutus: ad Hadrianum Iunium”; no. 32, pp. 99–104, “De lumbagine et tabe dorsalis: ad Gerardum Regelin,” dated from Liesveld, 1568; no. 33, pp. 105–10, “Sceletyrben ac stomacacen dictam, esse magnorum lienum accidentia, nec esse distinctum morbum scorbutum a magnis Hippocratis lienibus: ad Cornelium Heydium”; no. 34, pp. 110–13 “Balnea ferrata aut acida dicta scorbuto sint utilia”; no. 35, pp. 114–16, “De Hollandia.” 12 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 38, pp. 124–30, “De zytho, courmi, et cerevisia ad D. Rembertum Dodonaeum”; no. 39, pp. 130–35, “De iisdem Remberti Dodonaei epistola”; no. 40, pp. 135–38, “De iisdem ad eundem.” Dodoens’s reply (no. 39) is the only letter to Ronsse included in the volume. On Dodoens (1517–85), see “Dodoens (Dodonaeus), Rembert,” in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 4 (Detroit: Scribner, 2008), 138–40, Gale Virtual Reference Library, accessed online 3 Nov. 2013. 13 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 49, pp. 173–76, “De matricis clausura: ad clarissimum Cliviae ducis medicum D. Ioannem Wierum”; no. 50, pp. 176–82; “De fascino variae historiae ad eundem.” On the content of these letters see further below and n. 31.

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on public affairs, but the topics are mostly medical, for Junius repeatedly reported to Ronsse on the deteriorating state of his, Junius’s, health.14 Addressees of more than one letter who were not physicians included a Gouda pharmacist,15 a friend of the master of the Harlem Latin school and humanist Latin playwright Cornelius Schonaeus,16 and a public official— Arnoldus Cobelius (Coebel), treasurer of the province of Holland.17 In the case 14

Ronsse’s letters to Hadrianus Junius are ibid., no. 7 (see n. 10); no. 31 (see n. 11); no. 65, pp. 223–26, “De febris definitione. Ad Hadrianum Junium”; and presumably no. 24, pp. 76–78, “Multa in usum nostrum irrepsisse quorum utilitas ignoratur,” in which the addressee is termed “mi Hadriane.” Five letters from Junius to Ronsse are included in Hadriani Junii epistolae,quibus accedit eiusdem vita et oratio de artium liberalium dignitate (Dordrecht, 1652), 348–51, 482–84; this volume also contains, at 626–28, an edition of a letter from Ronsse to Junius, dated 1575, the last year of Junius’s life. Ronsse is also mentioned in a letter from Junius to Jean Monton of Tournai, ibid., 217. On Junius’s correspondence with Ronsse, see also Chris Heesakkers and Dirk van Miert, “An Inventory of the Correspondence of Hadrianus Junius (1511–1575),” Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 37, no. 2 (2010): 109–268, at 118–19, 145–46, 201, 203, 219 (my thanks to Dirk van Miert for drawing my attention to this inventory); the inventory includes, in addition to the letters printed in Ronsse, Miscellanea and Hadriani Junii epistolae, an additional letter from Junius to Ronsse preserved in manuscript in Utrecht University Library, ms 829, 47v–48r and, another copy, 161r. On Junius, see Dirk van Miert, ed., The Kaleidoscopic Scholarship of Hadrianus Junius (1511–1575): Northern Humanism at the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and Van Miert et al., eds., Hadrianus Junius (1511–1575). Een humanist uit Hoorn (Hoorn: Publicatiestichting Bas Baltus, 2011). 15 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 32, pp. 99–104, “De lumbagine et tabe dorsalis ad Gerardum Regelin”; no. 55, pp. 193–96, “Aloeticorum usu ad sanitatis conservationem utilem ad Gerardum Kegelin [misprint for Regelin?]”; no. 28, p. 88, which refers to “officina Gerardi Regelin pharmapoei Goudani.” 16 Ibid., no. 15, pp. 46–50, “Cur aegris remedia praestantes praecinere dicantur. Ad Eugenium Peerboom”; no. 20, pp. 61–62, “Cur laqueo strangulatus dicitur is qui relicto vino aufugit: ad Eugenium Peerboom.” The friendship of Eugenius Peerboom (or Pereboom) with Schonaeus is mentioned in A.H. Garrer, Schonaeus: bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der Latijnsche School te Haarlem: aan het Haarlemsche Gymnasium bij de herdenking van zijn 500jarig bestaan opgedragen (Harlem, 1889), 10, 29–30; Schonaeus dedicated both a collection of epigrams and some individual items within it to Pereboom: see Cornelius Schonaeus, Terentius Christianus, seu comoediae sacrae Terentiano stylo tribus partibus distinctae… Editio nova (Amsterdam: sumptibus Henrici Laurenti, 1646), pt. 3, pp. 230–31, 261. 17 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 52, pp. 184–87, “Aestate merum vinum non dilutum bibendum esse: ad Arnoldum Cobelium.” Coebel was also the dedicatee of Hadrianus Junius’s work on emblems; see Arnoud S.Q. Visser, Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in Late–Renaissance Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 118–19; and Ari Wesseling,

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of Johannes Heurnius, professor of medicine at the recently established Leiden University, the two letters to him in Ronsse’s Miscellanea of 1590—the letter of dedication and the concluding letter describing a recent epidemic—offer only a partial view of an important epistolary relationship. A larger group of Ronsse’s letters to Heurnius dated 1588–97, together with one response from Heurnius, survive in manuscript in the library of Leiden University. Letters in this group reflect Ronsse’s admiration for and desire to maintain good relations with (and possibly make useful contacts through) Heurnius and his colleague at Leiden the humanist and philologist Bonaventura Vulcanius, professor of Latin and Greek.18 In letters to Heurnius, Ronsse praised Heurnius’s works on medicine, declaring them equal to the writings of Jean Fernel and Johannes Guinter of Andernach, and expressed gratitude for the gift of Heurnius’s Institutiones medicinae.19 But he also sent his own poem, “Venatio medica,” to Heurnius, asking him and Vulcanius to read it; it seems likely that the two Leiden scholars helped in securing its publication.20 At the end of Ronsse’s life Johannes “Devices, Proverbs, Emblems: Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata in the Light of Erasmus’ Adagia,” in van Miert, Kaleidoscopic Scholarship, 214–59. Coebel may also be the addressee of Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 26, pp. 81–84, “De medicamentorum quotidie in usum medicum venientium varietate,” the recipient of which is termed “mi Arnolde.” 18 Leiden University Library, Special Collections, mar 3, 1588–1594, Brieven van Balduinus Ronsseus (c. 1525–1596) aan Johannes Heurnius (1543–1601) (9 letters); mar 3, 1597, Brief van Johannes Heurnius (1543–1601) aan Balduinus Ronsseus (c. 1525–1596); vul 105:1, 1588, Brief van Balduinus Ronsseus aan Bonaventura Vulcanius (1538–1614). I am grateful to Melissa Lo for drawing my attention to these letters. My thanks to the Department of Special Collections, Leiden University Library, for supplying photocopies. One other letter to Heurnius is included in Ronsse, Miscellanea, namely no. 69, pp. 237–42, dated 16 Feb. 1590, “De novo quodam et inaudito morbi genere, primum in Germania viso, et de alio item mirando symptomate: ad doctissimum D. Dom. Iohannem Heurnium,” which describes an epidemic in the duchy of Lüneburg in 1581. On Heurnius, see I. Snapper, “Heurne, Jan Van (or Johannes Heurnius),” in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 6:359–60. On Vulcanius, see Hélène Cazes, Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks: Bruges 1538–Leiden 1614 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 19 Leiden University Library, Special Collections, mar 3, letter of Ronsse to Johannes Heurnius, dated at end “tert. cal. decemb. 1588”; letter of Ronsse to Heurnius, dated at end “xi Aprilis 1592.” 20 Ibid., mar 3, letter of Ronsse to Heurnius, dated at end “3 id. Oct. 1588”; vul 105, letter of Ronsse to Vulcanius, dated at end “Gouda mdlxxxviii, oct. decemb.” Boudewijn Ronsse, Venatio medica, continens remedia ad omnes, a capite ad calcem usque, morbos… (Leiden: Ex Officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1589), was the first work by Ronsse to be published in Leiden and by the Plantin-Raphelengius press (the Leiden

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Heurnius wrote to him in very friendly terms; and it was Otto Heurnius, son of Johannes and also a physician and professor of medicine at Leiden, who undertook to edit the posthumously published volume of Ronsse’s Opuscula medica.21

Topics and Themes

1 The Religious Context Ronsse lived in a tumultuous age of confessionalism, but his own religious position during different periods of his life remains ambiguous. He moved with apparent ease between service of the Gouda magistrates and at the court of the Catholic Eric of Brunswick. Gouda was officially Reformed from the time of its conquest by followers of William of Orange in 1572, but the magistrates were conservative and locally particularist, and popular enthusiasm for religious change seems to have been limited.22 Ronsse’s associates among Reformers in the Netherlands included two men well known for their rejection of strict Calvinist views and advocacy of religious tolerance among Protestants: the Gouda minister Herman Herbertsz. and the philosopher and controversialist Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert.23 Only a handful of the letters in Ronsse’s printed

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branch of the Plantin press), which thereafter produced several of his publications. Plantin-Raphelengius was the publisher of numerous works edited or translated by Vulcanius as well as several by J. Heurnius. Leiden University Library, Special Collections, mar 3, letter of Johannes Heurnius to Ronsse, dated at end “Leyda mdxcvii die xxv Januarii stylo novo.” Otto Heurnius’s dedicatory letter to “Amplissimo et celeberrimo viro Iano Rutgersio invictissimi Svecorum regis Gustavo ii consiliario aulico,” in Ronsse, Opuscula medica, pp. 1–2, explained that Ronsse had dedicated the works collected in the volume to the elder Heurnius. Hunger, “Boudewijn Ronsse,” 2904, conjectures that while in service of Eric ii Ronsse must have presented himself as Catholic, but also notes that Ronsse and his family were buried in Saint Janskerk, Gouda. On the conservatism (religious and political) and particularism of the Gouda magistrates, see Paul Rosenfeld’s review of C.C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–1588 (Utrecht: H & S, 1983), in Persée: Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 65 (1987): 484–86. Charles H. Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 158, 162–63, comments similarly. Ronsse attended Coornhert (1522–90) on his deathbed and was a friend of Herbertsz; see Hunger, “Boudewijn Ronsse,” 2904–5, and H. Bonger, The Life and Work of Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, trans. Gerrit Voogt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 153. On the limited reception of the views of Herberts and Coornhert in the context of the process of

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collection give any sense of his religious views. The sole identified theologian among his correspondents (the great majority of whom, named or unnamed, were evidently medical men) was the Catholic Georg Cassander (1513–66), best known for his efforts to mend relations between Catholics and Protestants. But the topic of Ronsse’s letter to Cassander, a fellow Fleming whom he had known at Paris, is linguistic and antiquarian, not religious: the superior purity and greater antiquity of “linguam nostram Belgicam” to Italian, Spanish, and French.24 By contrast, in writing to the Delft physician Cornelius Heydius, Ronsse was sharply critical of the medical practice of the Alexian Brothers, a religious congregation dedicated to care of the sick in Gouda since the late fourteenth century. But the hostile critique of monastic medicine in this letter, probably written around the time in the early 1570s when the Gouda magistrates confiscated the Alexian Brothers’ cloister and turned it into a Latin school, seems to stem from professional criteria—and doubtless rivalry— rather than religious issues.25 One other correspondent seems to have had a special interest in religious topics. Writing to “mi Theodore,” probably Theodorus Soupyrgus, the addressee of the letter discussed in the next paragraph, Ronsse described a dinner party at which he presented himself as having vigorously repudiated a fellow guest’s denunciation of music as frivolous and of numerous minor religious festivals as merely Christian adaptations of pagan rites. Ronsse argued further that even customs engaged in for superstitious reasons might nonetheless have a valid basis in nature: thus lighting bonfires on the feast of John the Baptist rested on superstitious belief in the saint’s protection against disease, but was also consonant with medical knowledge of fire as purifying putrefaction.26 confessionalization in the Netherlands, see also Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 370–74. 24 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 42, pp. 141–45, “Vocabula nonnulla belgica e Graeco Latinoque manare fonte: ad Georgium Cassandrum.” The letter is undated but refers to “annis octodecim, aut eo amplius dum Lutetiae Parisiorum familiariter conviveremus.” 25 Ibid., no. 37, pp. 119–24, “An in pestis prophylactice alvi deictio vomitusque conveniat. Ad D. Cornelium Heydium.” At 119: “… Alexianos istos vespillones monachos habebimus, qui quum neque literas, neque nare norint, non verentur artium omnium praeclassimam medicinam profanare, atque per hominum mortes periculum facientes de rebus ambiguis tanquam ex tripode sententiam proferre?” See Parker, Reformation of Community, 62, 91. Heydius is identifed as “doctissimus medicus D. Cornelius Heydius reip. Delphorum primarius medicus” in Ronsse, De morbis muliebribus, preface, fol. +2r–v, in Opuscula medica. 26 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 23, pp. 67–75, “Consuetem olim fuisse inter epulas canere, de festivitate luminum, theoxeniis, pithegiis, robigalibus, sementinis feriis, et pyris quae pridie nativitatis Ioan. Baptistae extruuntur.” In no. 15, pp. 46–50, “Cur aegris remedia

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In the letter addressed to Theodorus Soupyrgus, Ronsse considered the uses of natural knowledge in the interpretation of scripture, examining episodes in both the Old and New Testaments from the standpoint of medicine and natural philosophy. According to Ronsse, Mosaic dietary prescriptions were established for health reasons, some of Christ’s miraculous healings made use of natural substances, and many biblical episodes could be explained in terms of natural philosophy.27 Ronsse similarly applied medical or natural philosophical learning to scripture in a letter asserting that the “dudaim” or “mandragora” requested by Rachel in Genesis, Chapter 30, must refer not to the poisonous mandrake discussed by Dioscorides but to a plant described by Theophrastus as aiding fertility and identified by Ronsse with melanzana (eggplant).28 Ronsse also drew on biblical authority to endorse his rejection of a fundamental tenet of Galenic physiology. In a letter to one of the most celebrated physicians among his correspondents, the so-called Dutch Hippocrates Petrus Forestus, Ronsse insisted, against Galen, that the heart, not the brain, was the praestantes praecinere dicantur. Ad Eugenium Peerboom,” Ronsse wrote enthusiastically about the medical effects and benefits of music. 27 Ibid., no. 59, pp. 204–10, “Nonnulla in sacra scriptura quae artem medicam concernunt, ad naturales rationes utcunque reduci posse. Ad Dominum Theodorum Soupyrgum.” At pp. 205–6: “Nam sicuti Galenus noster, sicut volunt, omnia naturae fert accepta, sic quoque sacrae literae, ea quae artem nostram concernunt, etiamsi a natura quam maxime disuta, atque aliena esse videantur, ac miraculi (sicut sunt) plena, tamen si diligentius expendantur, ad naturae leges nonnihil accommodata videbuntur.” The second edition of Ronsse, De magnis Hippocratis lienibus, Pliniique stomacace ac sceletyrbe, seu vulgo dicto scorbuto commentariolus (Antwerp: Apud viduam Martini Nutii, 1564), was dedicated to “Ioanni et Theodoro Honiis a Soupyrgo”; the same edition includes prefatory poems to Ronsse by Theodorus Soupyrgus also found in the enlarged later edition, De magnis Hippocratis lienibus, Pliniique stomacace ac sceletyrbe, seu vulgo dicto scorbuto commentariolus. Accessere Eiusdem epistolae quinque eiusdem argumenti. Ioannis Echtii de scorbuto epitome. Ioannis Wieri de scorbuto observatio. Ioannis Langii epistola duae de scorbuto (Wittenberg: Clemens Schleich excudebat, 1585). For other examples of medical authors who considered the Bible from the standpoint of natural philosophy, see Andrew D. Berns, The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Search of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 28 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 60, pp. 210–11, “De mandragorae malo rubenitico.” Ronsse cited Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, bk. 6, at the end of Chap. 2, quoting from the Greek text. On natural knowledge, natural history, and collecting in the Netherlands see Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), Chaps. 1 and 2; and Claudia Swan, “Making Sense of Medical Collections in Early Modern Holland: The Uses of Wonder,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1899, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin H. Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 199–213, 325–30.

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seat of reason. Ronsse made this claim without mentioning Aristotle, the traditional source of arguments for the primacy of the heart. Instead he cited the views of Stoics and the words of Christ in the Gospels that named the heart as the source of thoughts and desires.29 2 Medical Content Ronsse’s letters to learned men, like his other writings, are conscious products of medical humanism, displaying their author’s knowledge of, and veneration for, ancient Greek and Roman medical authorities. Yet with an eclecticism not unusual in sixteenth-century medical writing, the collection also reveals Ronsse’s continued respect for Arabo-Latin medical works dear to previous generations.30 At the same time, several letters show that Ronsse shared the heightened anxieties of his own age about the prevalence of witchcraft and witch-caused illness. Writing to Johann Weyer, Ronsse claimed, in response to Weyer’s modified skepticism: “use and experience teach that they [witches] have a certain limited power over our bodies.”31 In other letters, Ronsse gave supposed examples of witch-caused injury and insisted on the truthfulness of 29 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 61, pp. 212–15, “De rationis ac intellectus sede, ad praeclarissimum medicum D. Petrum Forestum.” At p. 214: “Huc usque Chrysippus ille non prorsus aliena a Christi enunciatis Matthaei decimo quinto capite, et Marci septimo dixisse videtur…adeo ut, (ni me moveret senis Coi, et Galeni auctoritas, iamque a multis usque seculis ab omnibus philosophis recepta opinio) non vererer rationis sedem cor statuere.” For Galen’s view, see Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain: Anatomical Knowledge and Physiological Speculation the Second Century a.d. (Leiden: Brill, 2003); for discussions of Aristotle and Galen on heart and brain by medieval philosophers, physicians, and theologians, see Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1981), 186–95; and Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010). 30 The characterization of Ronsse as especially retrogressive or decadent in L. Elaut, “Boudewijn Ronsse (Balduinus Ronsseus): dekadentie van de humanistische geneeskunde tijdens de zestiende eeuw in Noord-Nederland,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 85 (1972): 410–17, and Elaut, “Ronsse (Ronssaeus), Boudewijn,” rests on comparisons with celebrated medical innovators, rather than on a broader picture of sixteenth-century medicine. 31 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 49, pp. 173–75, “De matricis clausura: ad clarissimum Cliviae ducis medicum D. Ioannem Wierum” (this letter had been previously printed in the 1583 Basel edition—and, according to Worldcat, also in several earlier editions—of Weyer, De prestigiis daemonum…libri); no. 50, pp. 176–82, “De fascino variae historiae ad eundem,” which concludes, “usus tamen, et experientia limitatam quandam potestem habere [lamias] in corpora nostra docet.” Helpful analysis of Weyer’s views is found in Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. Chap. 13. Ronsse and Weyer also differed on other

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witches’ confessions, including those obtained by torture. In this context, it may be noted that Ronsse’s patron Eric of Brunschweig both prosecuted and burned witches and in 1572 accused his estranged wife, Sidonia of Saxony, of witchcraft.32 But whatever the intellectual or cultural frame of reference, Ronsse’s letters are primarily those of a practitioner. The focus of most of them is medicina practica, disease and treatment; medicina theorica and its relation to scientia naturalis receive relatively little attention; and, notwithstanding the examples cited in the preceding paragraphs, discussions of natural philosophy, natural history, or human physiology are infrequent.33 Letters in the collection address all three of the traditional “instruments of medicine,” diet, medication, and surgery (diaeta, potio, et chirurgia), although of the three medication receives by far the most attention.34 Some letters recount and reflect on episodes from Ronsse’s own practice; others offer generalized medical advice; and, as will become apparent, even letters that address topics not immediately connected with medicine often introduce medical considerations. Sixteenth-century medical letter collections often include numerous consilia, that is, letters of medical advice for individual patients.35 By contrast, just one of Ronsse’s letters—containing his recommendations for the lower back pain of a patient at Gouda—falls into this category. Ronsse wrote this consilium in 1568 while he was in Duke Eric’s service, dating it from a town (near Gouda) then under the duke’s control.36 In this instance both consultation and diagnosis may have been carried out by correspondence, but the episode

issues, as Weyer had criticized some parts of Ronsse’s treatise on scurvy (according to Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 33, pp. 105–10; see n. 11 above). 32 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 48, pp. 170–73, “De fascino: ad doctum Petrum Hollaers”; no. 51, pp. 182–84, “Quibus indiciis lamiae dignoscantur.” On Eric of Brunswick’s accusations against Sidonia, see Kunze, Welfenross, Chap. 9; and on Ronsse’s letters on witchcraft, ibid., 327–29. 33 To the examples of discussion of natural philosophy, natural history, and human physiology cited in nn. 27–29 above may be added Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 49 (see n. 31), in which Ronsse disputed Weyer’s account of female physiology, claiming that Weyer had misread the work of Antonio Benivieni and confused the hymen and the mouth of the womb; and no. 25, pp. 78–80, “De usu sylvestris vitis ad dentium dolorem,” pointing out discrepant descriptions of wild vine by Dioscorides and Serapion. 34 For letters referring to surgery see n. 9 and 10 above; for diet, see further below. 35 On the medieval origins and development of medical consilia, see Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Les consilia médicaux (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994). 36 N. 15 above.

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reveals Ronsse in touch with patients at Gouda even while serving Duke Eric, just as he stayed in contact with Duke Eric’s court while employed by Gouda.37 Ronsse’s other letters about individual cases neither offer advice directly to a patient nor consult with a colleague, but are retroactive accounts intended for a medically informed reader. Like other medical authors of the period, Ronsse seems to have selected for description either cases that he found rare or unusual and/or those that demonstrated successful outcome of treatment he prescribed. It is also clear that he was an attentive reader of some other recent collections of medical cases or letters and perhaps viewed them as models. Certainly, he repeatedly cited the collection of cases illustrating “the hidden and remarkable causes of disease” by the Florentine physician Antonio Benivieni (d. 1502) and the medical letters of the Palatinate court physician Johannes Lange (1485–1565), which, like Ronsse’s own collection, largely avoided including consilia.38 Cases from Ronsse’s own practice in his epistolary miscellanea include a woman who spontaneously recovered from melancholy and delusions after a fall when sleepwalking, a woman with a large facial tumor successfully treated by Ronsse in collaboration with a surgeon and a pharmacist (after empiric, that is, informally trained, practitioners failed), instances of worms excreted from a variety of bodily orifices, a couple of miscarriages, and the unfortunate sailor who accidentally drank “aqua segregationis” (probably aqua fortis, or nitric acid, used in alchemy) under the impression it was aquavit.39 A few other letters belong to the category of observationes. In one, Ronsse recounted his 37 38

Hunger, “Boudewijn Ronsse,” 2890–92. Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanitationum causis, ed. Giorgio Weber, Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” no. 142 (Florence: Olschki, 1994); the first edition of Benivieni’s work was published in 1507. Ronsse’s citations of Benivieni: Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 2, pp. 4–8, “De paracentesi,” at pp. 7–8; no. 3, pp. 9–12, “De muliere casu a melancholia liberata”; no. 8, pp. 21–26, “Pectore suppuratus rupta vomica liberatur,” at p. 24; no. 10, pp. 30–34, “Vermis per meatum urinarium eiectus”; no. 49, pp. 173–76 (see n. 31 above). On Lange (1485–1565) and his letter collections, see Siraisi, Communities of Learned Experience, Chap. 2, and bibliography there cited. Ronsse’s citations of Lange: Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 2 (cited earlier in this note), pp. 7–8; no. 28, pp. 87–90, “De faba et nuce praenestina catharticis, aliisque ex novis insulis allatis simplicibus.” 39 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 1, pp. 1–4, “De foetu mortuo sensim per frustula excidente. Ad celeberrimum medicinae professorem Carolum Goswinum”; no. 3, pp. 9–12, “De muliere casu a melancholia liberata, ad Iacobum Varentium”; no. 5, pp. 14–17, “De puero hydrocephalico”; no. 7, pp. 19–21 (see n. 10 above); no. 9, pp. 27–30, “Nauta epota aqua segregationis, quam fortem vocant, sanitati restituitur”; no. 10, pp. 30–34, “Vermis per meatum urinarium eiectus.”

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chance observation of a gutted cow with only one kidney, an incident that led him simultaneously to reflect on the idea of the monstrous as divine vengeance (with reference to the famous Cracow and Ravenna monsters)40 and to cite Realdo Colombo on anatomical anomalies.41 Another described Ronsse’s examination “more than twenty years ago” of a healthy, robust, elderly man who had no perceptible pulse.42 In letters on general issues in medicine, Ronsse at times presented himself as strongly critical of current practices, usually accompanying his charge with assertions that ancient medical authorities supported his own view. Thus he denounced what he described as “the received custom everywhere” of denying clean bed linen and nightclothes to invalids and women in childbed, citing Galen and Avicenna on the health-giving effects of sweet-smelling things. He was equally dismissive of the use of emetics to ward off plague, of the claim that medicines should always be administered tepid, and of the beliefs that patients with morbus gallicus should be forbidden salt and kept on a reduced diet (an idea he attributed to agyrtae [wandering charlatans]).43 Most of Ronsse’s letters criticizing current medical practices do not attack individuals, but a few are fiercely ad hominem. The most prominent object of his ire was Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66). Fuchs is now chiefly remembered as the 40

On the widespread circulation, and the various interpretations, of accounts of “monstrous births” in sixteenth-century Europe, see Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present 92 (Aug. 1981): 20–54; Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Alan W. Bates, Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe, Clio Medica 77, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) (but see also the review of the last work by Brian W. Ogilvie in Medical History 52 [2008]: 298–99). 41 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 4, pp. 12–14, “In bove exenterato, unicum inventum renem, ad Cornelium Heydium.” 42 Ibid., no. 11, pp. 34–36, “De quodam qui ad multam usque aetatem vixit, non apparente manifesto arteriarum motu.” At p. 34: “annis ab hinc viginti, Furnis civitate Flandriae… non semel mihi observasse contingit.” In margin p. 34: 1550. 43 Ibid., no. 36, pp. 116–19, “An tersa mundaque linteamina puerperis et aegrotis conveniant”; no. 37, pp. 119–24, “An in pestis prophylactice alvi deiectio vomitusque conveniat. Ad D. Cornelium Heydium”; no. 43, pp. 145–51, “Utrum in morbo gallico conveniat exquisita tenuisque victus ratio: ad Guliermum Pantinum” (Pantinus, a physician at Bruges, was the author of a commentary on Celsus [1552]; no. 44, pp. 151–53, “Num a sale, salitisque in totum abstinendum sit iis, qui morbo gallico laborant”; no. 63, pp. 218–20, “Praeter rationem et artis usum facere eos qui medicamenta actu tepida semper administranda censent.”

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author of a major sixteenth-century herbal, but in his own day he was also known for works on “the errors of recent physicians” and “paradoxes of medicine” in which, inter alia, he denounced physicians who continued to rely on the medications and methods of medieval Arabo-Latin medicine. Ronsse, in turn, denounced Fuchs’s anti-Arabism. More alarmingly, he also poured scorn on Fuchs’s objection to giving purgatives to patients with dysentery. Ronsse’s rejection of Fuchs had personal as well as intellectual roots, as Ronsse’s own teacher Thriverius had been a principal object of Fuchs’s attacks.44 But despite the thrust of the attacks on Fuchs, comments on new remedies in other letters indicate a measure of cautious openness to innovation. Writing in 1569 to a pharmacist who complained about the flood of new remedies, Ronsse concluded that the diligence of the spagyrics (Paracelsians) had found many effective remedies, although they should be used with caution, only in lengthy illnesses, and only after Galenic herbal remedies failed.45 To a physician colleague in 1583, Ronsse again wrote appreciatively of the indefatigable labor of the chimisti in preparing new medicines and also noted the numerous plant remedies from the newly discovered lands (by this time, it would have been hard to ignore either development); but he concluded by declaring his own preference for long-established and proven Hippocratic remedies.46 Nonetheless, in still another letter he enthusiastically announced the addition of rhubarb to a local pharmacist’s stock and described its medicinal value.47 44

Ibid., no. 56, pp. 196–98, “Leonarthum Fuchsium interdum vehementem plus aequo esse in redarguendo Ioanne Mesue: et Garciam Lopium praeter rationem omnia tempori tribuere: ad Danielem Brouchusium.” Inc.: “Dolendum prorsus et in arte nostra praeclaros viros adeo esse obstinato animo, ut nihil nisi quod Graecis acceptum ferre possint, admittant, atque optime etiam ab Arabibus dicta perstringant, redarguant, atque in calumniam vertant”; no. 57, pp. 198–201, “In dysenteria, contra Leonardi Fuchsii opinionem non solum astringentia, sed et laxantia requiri.” For Fuchs’s attacks on Thriverius, see Richard J. Durling. “Leonhart Fuchs and His Commentaries on Galen,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 24 (1989): 42–47; and John L. Heller, app. 10, “Adversaries of Fuchs,” in Leonhart Fuchs, The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, 1542, ed. Frederick Gustave Meyer et al., (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2:798–99. 45 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 26, pp. 81–84, “De medicamentorium quotidie in usum medicum venientium varietate.” 46 Ibid., no. 27, pp. 84–87, “De vitro stibii. Ad clarissimum medicum doctorem Livinum Sanders.” At p. 85: “Sed ut omnia quoad fieri posset, si non cum physica ratione, saltem cum deliberatione matura, et iudicio exhiberem, si quando usus ita postularet: potior enim mihi semper fuit vetus illa hippocraticaque medicina ut quae cum certis legibus, et demonstrationibus constet, quam nova haec.” 47 Ibid., no. 28, pp. 87–90, “De faba et nuce praenestina catharticis, aliisque ex novis insulis allatis simplicibus.”

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In addition to providing recommendations regarding diet in morbus gallicus, Ronsse addressed the third instrument of medicine, diaeta, in letters extolling the health benefits of eating ocean fish, especially North Sea herring.48 Other letters concern beer and wine. In a disputatious correspondence with the medical botanist Rembert Dodoens, Ronsse criticized Dodoens’s interpretation of ancient accounts of beer and similar beverages and discussed the health benefits of various northern European regional beers.49 To Hector Mithobius, son of Eric ii’s personal physician, Burchard Mithobius, Ronsse wrote enthusiastically of the exceptional properties of yet another local beer, while on a further occasion he sent Mithobius a review of medical opinion on drinking before meals.50 But two letters on the merits—or not—of diluting wine, both incorporating remembered conversation, occupy a borderland between medical advice and the record of convivial enjoyment. One recalls a dinner party at the house of “our pharmacist” (phamacopoeum nostrum), and cites Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, as well as medical authorities; the other evokes a dinner at Duke Eric’s court marked by variety of dishes and an exceptionally good wine.51 3 The Intersection of Humanism, Antiquarianism, and Medicine Ronsse’s letters are pointedly entitled a miscellanea, a varied collection of the type beloved by literary humanists. As already noted, some of the letters have elements of symposia, recording convivial conversation at the dinner table. And in some, Ronsse, a member of a humanistic circle in the entourage of Duke Eric and a friend, at least by correspondence, of the antiquarian Hadrianus Junius, took up such topics as the antiquities, the physical environment, and the proverbs and customs of the region he knew best. He reflected on the origins of the name Holland and compared the disease environment of Amsterdam with that of other cities.52 He justified his interest in proverbs and 48

Ibid., no. 29, pp. 90–94, “De halece an edendo salubris sit. Ad D. Iustum Walthusium Cancellarium Brunsvic”; no. 30, pp. 94–97, “Num pisces pelagici aegrotis administrari possint. Ad Antonium Busennium.” Busennius was a professor of medicine at Leuven (1548–50) and author of a commentary on a work by Galen. 49 Ibid., nos. 38–40, pp. 124–38 (see n. 12 above). 50 Ibid., no. 41, pp. 139–41, “De embecensi cerevisia: ad D. Hectorem Mithobium”; no. 64, pp. 220–23, “Num vini potio ieiunis semper noxia sit: ad D. Hectorem Mithobium.” On Mithobius, see Kunze, Welfenross, 322. 51 Ronsse, Miscellanea, no. 18, pp. 54–57, “De diluendi vini modo, et quare dicatur ‘vinum lymphaticum, cito potatum, facit ad lepram,’ ad Antonium Realem”; no. 52, pp. 184–87 (see n. 17 above). 52 Ibid., no. 31, pp. 97–99 (see n. 11 above); no. 35, pp. 114–16, “De Hollandia.”

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customs by recalling that he had heard “from my teacher Thriverius that proverbs often have a certain hidden energy, and…sometimes can even be reduced to philosophical reasoning.”53 Ronsse argued strongly against the idea that custom was, or should be, “another nature”; but he also maintained that many apparently meaningless customs hid real significance, and he criticized Aristotle for interpreting a proverb about the effects of eating mint in a purely naturalistic physical sense.54 For Ronsse, as for other authors of such collections, a published volume of epistolae medicinales doubtless served as valuable evidence of the breadth of his learning, his professional status, and the distinction of at least some of his professional contacts. And the letters provide some striking illustrations of the diversity of topics that the general heading “medical letters” could embrace. Ronsse’s letters range from accounts of cases he had attended to disquisitions on proverbs intended to show that even the most apparently trivial saying can reveal a deeper meaning. And the miscellaneous character of such a collection allowed Ronsse to present himself as simultaneously (if implausibly) unafraid to criticize current medical beliefs and practices, a humanist disciple of Galen and Hippocrates, and an appreciative reader of Avicenna, with a cautiously favorable view of Paracelsian medications.

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Ibid., no. 20, pp. 61–62, “Cur laqueo strangulatus dicitur is qui relicto vino aufugit: ad Eugenium Peerboom,” at p. 62: “nam si (ut olim ex D. Hieremia Drivero, quondam praecptore meo, mihique non nisi honoris titulo nominando audisse memini) publici illi mimi, aut adagia, occultam quandam energiam habeant, at quantumvis ludicra sit, quantumvis abiecta sint, et sordida, aliqua metaphora specia fucata esse, et nonnunquam etiam ad philosophicas reduci rationes posse.” Other letters discussing proverbs: no. 16, pp. 50–51, “Unde natum sit adagium ‘Quid cani et balneo’?” (in which Ronsse tried to improve on Erasmus’s account in the Adages); no. 19, pp. 57–61, “De somno pomeridiano, et quare dicatur ‘Mensibus quibus R, noli dormire magister.’” Ibid., no. 67, pp. 231–33, “Consuetudinem non recte alteram appellari naturam”; no. 24, pp. 76–78, “Multa in usum nostrum irrepsisse quorum utilitas ignoratur”; no. 21, pp. 63–64, “Quare dicatur, belli tempore mentham nec serito nec edito” (with reference to Aristotle, Problemata 20.2); and see also n. 29 above.

chapter 9

Performing Humanism: The Andreini Family and the Republic of Letters in Counter-Reformation Italy Sarah Gwyneth Ross Arbiters of morality have cast a censorious eye upon theater people since the classical era. In this sense, commedia dell’arte performers in late-sixteenth century Italy confronted long-standing tensions as they went about attracting patrons and luring audiences into indulging in the guilty pleasure of their performances. But these theatrical troupes also faced resistance particular to their own era. Tridentine reformers attacked lay drama as a source of moral corruption and women performers as transgressors who captured the sexual attention of male audiences, thereby ruining families and ultimately states. On this point, even fellow thespians in different cu ltural contexts agreed. Ben Jonson, for one, characterized the women who acted, sang, and danced on Italian prosceniums as “tumbling whores.”1 Despite the obstacles, however, some theatrical companies earned praise, not censure. One such troupe was the Compagnia dei Gelosi, whose most celebrated members were Isabella Andreini, her husband, Francesco, and their son Giovan Battista, who would ultimately form a new troupe, the Fedeli, with his wife, Virginia Ramponi. Scholars have studied the contributions of individual members of the family, above all Giovan Battista, to the commedia dell’arte.2 And thanks especially to Anne MacNeil, Julie Campbell, and Meredith Ray, we are learning a tremendous amount about Isabella Andreini’s 1 On censorship, see esp. Ferdinando Taviani et al., La commedia dell’arte e la società barocca (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969); M. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the Visual Records (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 90; Joseph Connors, “Chi era Ottonelli?” in Pietro da Cortona, Atti del convegno internazionale, ed. Christoph Frommel et al., (Milan: Electa, 1998), 29–35; Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini and Others: Women on the Stage in the Late Cinquecento,” in Women in Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. L. Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), esp. 317. 2 Maurizio Rebaudengo, Giovan Battista Andreini. Tra poetica e drammaturgia (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994); Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 103–5, 175–81, 210–15; Fabrizio Fiaschini, L’ “incessabil agitazione”: Giovan Battista Andreini tra professione teatrale, cultura letteraria e religione (Pisa: Giardini editori e stampatori, 2007); Vittorio Tranquilli, La regola e

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_010

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dual career on stage and in print.3 Joining the conversation, this essay elucidates the Andreini family’s rhetorical strategies in the aggregate and within a framework of collaboration, although focusing on its three most famous figures. Without overdetermining Tridentine censorship, it is safe to say that avoiding opprobrium, particularly concerning the sexuality of Isabella, required strategy.4 Neither wealth nor status can explain the success of the Andreini family; they had little of either asset. Instead, I am arguing that they accumulated cultural capital through strategic participation in the humanistic respublica litterarum eloquently defined by Anthony Grafton as a “virtual community” of citizens linked by epistolary bonds who “carried no passports, but they could recognize one another by certain marks (not wealth, of course— then, as now, scholar did not rhyme with dollar). They looked for learning, for humanity, and for generosity, and they rewarded those who possessed these qualities.”5 As Grafton reminds us, Latin remained the republic’s national language well into the eighteenth century.6 But vernacular literary contributions proved residency if not full citizenship.7 While Isabella, Francesco, and Giovan la trasgressione. Dalla commedia dell’arte al Don Giovanni attraverso Giovan Battista Andreini (Rome: Aracne, 2010). 3 Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2003); MacNeil, introduction to Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini, ed. and trans. James Wyatt Cook (Lanham, md: Scarecrow, 2005); Julie Campbell, ed. and trans., Mirtilla: A Pastoral (Tempe, az: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002); Meredith Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), esp. Chap. 5, “Between Stage and the Page: The Letters of Isabella Andreini,” 156–83. See also Richard Andrews, “Isabella Andreini,” and Conor Fahy, “Women and Italian Cinquecento Literary Academies,” both in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000). 4 Two useful (if divergent) recent approaches to cultural life after Trent are Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); and Edward Muir, Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines and Opera (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007). 5 Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 20. For other treatments of the ­seventeenth-century Republic of Letters and its discontents, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995); and Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6 Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 140. 7 The most synthetic treatment of languages and their social meanings remains Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2004). For humanists publishing in the vernacular, see especially James Hankins,

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Battista Andreini had only a reading knowledge of Latin, their elegant Tuscan, familiarity with ancient topoi, and tendency to favor Neo-Petrarchan and moral philosophical subjects displayed fluency in the central discourses of the humanistic intellectual community: eloquence, classical learning, ethics, and kinship. The success of the Andreini in parlaying that erudition to ennoble themselves and their profession attests to the wide boundaries of the possible that still obtained in Counter-Reformation Italy for those who performed humanism. Act i: Marriage, Propriety, and “Manly” New Beginnings The Andreini’s literary performance began with a wedding. The marriage of Francesco and Isabella around the year 1575 served as the first act of their honorable literary scenario, constructing a metaphorical nobility upon unstable social foundations. Eighteenth-century biographical encyclopedias made Francesco a member of the Cerrachi family of Pistoia (later called Dal Gallo), although the name Francesco gave his father in notarial records was Antonio Andreini.8 According to Giovan Battista’s later account, Francesco began professional life as a soldier serving the Medici family, but upon returning to Italy after suffering capture and spending eight years in a Turkish prison he took up a second career on the stage.9 Isabella’s origins remain as murky. According to her death record, Isabella’s father was named Paolo Canale, but no earlier documents elucidate this relation; her self-characterization as a “Padovana” fused with a long tradition of Paduan self-congratulation marking her as born there.10 Whoever her family was, they would hardly have condoned a nubile



8 9 10

“Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance, ed. Christopher Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and Hankins, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s De summo bono and the Popularization of Ficinian Platonism,” in Humanistica. Per Cesare Vasoli, ed. Fabriziio Meroi and Elisabetta Scapparone (Florence: Olschki, 2004). Claudia Burattelli et al., eds., Comici dell’Arte: Corrispondenze, 2 vols. (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1993), 1:98, hereafter cited as Comici dell’Arte. Giovan Battista Andreini, La ferza. ragionamento secondo contro l’accuse date alla commedia (Paris: Nicolas Callemont, 1625), sig. F1r. On Isabella’s birth, MacNeil, Music, 188; on Isabella’s use of “Padovana” legally, e.g., on Giovan Battista’s baptismal record of 1576, Comici dell’arte, 66; on Paduan self-congratulation, Torelli Sensi, “Illustri figli di Padova: Isabella Andreini,” in vol. 6 of the Estratto della rivista Padova (Padua: Società Cooperativa Tipografica, 1938), esp. 3, 12.

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female relative joining a theatrical troupe hundreds of miles away, as Isabella did when she took up with the Gelosi in Bologna. At all events, neither Francesco nor Isabella had blood kin who stepped forward to offer support. The real family histories of this couple, then, began with their marriage and the construction of a lineage under Francesco’s stage name of “Andreini.” The wedding itself might even have been a construction in the linguistic sense. No parish records have emerged attesting to the union. Granted, well into the seventeenth century Tridentine attempts to regularize marriage protocols awaited consistent implementation. The couple’s itinerant lifestyle, moreover, meant that they might have tied the knot in any number of localities, and the relevant documents may be lost. In any case, scholars now query statements about the Andreini long considered certainties but derived from unsubstantiated claims in old biographical encyclopedias and from the family’s own mythmaking.11 Indeed, the Andreini wielded domestic and humanistic discourses deftly, building networks within the European cultural elite that included even Medici, Gonzaga, and Valois patrons. Scholars have rightly stressed the necessity of marriage for Isabella, but we should be wary of making the strategic utility of this union too one-sided. Francesca de’ Angelis, Julie Campbell, and others emphasize that, given the contemporary tendency to make “actress” and “prostitute” synonyms, Isabella’s reputation for virtue depended upon the presence of her husband.12 Yet Francesco gained as much credibility from marrying Isabella. After a mediocre military career, he decided to become an actor, a position low on the ladder of courtly clientage. By that time, he was also well into his thirties, unmarried, and apparently childless. His masculinity quotient ran low, by the standards of the day. Virility meant self-determination in sociopolitical and domestic realms, which often also encompassed displays of sexual dominance and paternity.13 11

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Anne MacNeil notes often that Isabella Andreini’s family history rests on hazy references in her death record (e.g., “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999): 274.n.6), and Emily Wilbourne has observed that the supposed 1601 marriage of Giovan Battista Andreini and Virginia Ramponi is an undocumented assertion by Francesco Bartoli in his 1781 biographical dictionary; see Wilbourne’s “Isabella ringovinita: Virginia Ramponi Andreini before ‘Arianna,’” Recercare 19 (2007): 63. Francesca de’ Angelis, La divina Isabella: Vita straordinaria di una donna del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1991), 31. See also Julie Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 57. On procreation and masculinity, Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003); for masculine cultural scripts more broadly, Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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Francesco may have played on those expectations and his problematic relationship to them in choosing (or keeping) the cognomen Andreini as his stage name. This name would have reminded literate contemporaries of the false but standard Greek etymology of andreia (manliness) that humanists gave the name “Andrea.” As we will see, the Dutch humanist Erycius Puteanus attempted to rework this gendered trope as a compliment when writing to Isabella “Andreina.” Taking into account the usual Italian diminutive suffix, “Andreini” would mean “Littlemen,” a lineage potentially connoting suboptimal virility.14 Once married and a father, however, Francesco’s masculinity seemed less diminutive. We do best, then, to think of this union as a form of mutual legitimation and part of a collaborative enterprise. Indeed, the marriage of Isabella and Francesco proved productive at all levels: on the stage, in their progeny (seven of whom survived to adulthood), and in their publications, one of which was literally coauthored. Performing normative domesticity conferred an unusual degree of social respectability upon these actors; performing humanism brought them unprecedented levels of cultural credibility. But the latter development depended upon Isabella. The prima donna, potentially her company’s greatest liability, became its strongest asset. The literary cachet she would achieve and the connections she made offered her relatives and colleagues points of entry into intellectual communities, which in turn brought them further respectability and an expanded range of cultural motion. Act ii: L’Accesa and the Republic of Letters Isabella Andreini’s career transpired on stage and in print and even included the rare honor of membership in an academy. In 1588, she published Mirtilla, a pastoral drama that would be in its tenth printing by 1616. Written in ottava rima and loaded with classical allusions, this work of vernacular humanism occupied Andreini for much of her career. She dedicated her Lettere, a collection of essays on a wide range of themes but centering on Petrarchan love and classical moral philosophy, to Carlo Emmanuele I, Duke of Savoy. The Lettere proved immensely popular as well, enjoying ten editions before a final printing,

14

1998); Jennifer Feather and Catherine Thomas, eds., Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Laurie Nussdorfer, “Men at Home in Baroque Rome,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17 (2014): 1–27. Virginia Brown analyzes this trope compellingly in her edition of Boccaccio’s Famous Women (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003), xviii.

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together with other fragments of her work, in 1652. So, too, Andreini’s collected poems, her Rime, apparently interested a fair number of eruditi, appearing in five editions between 1601 and 1696. Andreini also garnered the signal honor of membership in the Accademia degli Intenti of Pavia, where she took the name “L’Accesa,” the burning one. This sodality welcomed Andreini into its midst shortly after the first edition of her Rime appeared. She referred to herself as “L’Accesa” or “Accademica Intenta,” sometimes instead of her company tag “Comica Gelosa” and sometimes in conjunction with it, for the few remaining years of her life. Isabella’s academic credentials appeared on all the posthumous editions of her work, and her heirs emphasized them when introducing themselves to the literary world. A performer known for her linguistic skills, including a famous polyglot mad scene, Andreini in her dedicatory epistles showed herself equally adept at modulating personae in seeking entrance to the Republic of Letters and earning honor within it.15 In 1588, dedicating her pastoral drama Mirtilla to Lavinia della Rovere, Marchesa del Vasto and an established patron of poets, Andreini presented herself only as a student of poetry. In 1601, corresponding with Puteanus, the intellectual heir of Justus Lipsius, Andreini adjusted her student persona to suit humanist epistolary conventions. That same year, however, she also donned an authoritative mask: she informed Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, already patron of the poet Torquato Tasso, who was among Andreini’s admirers and now the dedicatee of her own Rime, that she was the parent (specifically the genetrix) of her collected poems. For her final appearance in the Lettere, Andreini saluted her dedicatee (this time Carlo Emmanuele, the Duke of Savoy) in the guises of Anaxagoras, Demosthenes, Cicero, Scipio, and even Socrates, claiming to be a “citizen of the world.”16 Andreini was the first theatrical performer to win serious literary attention. Even this brief survey of her literary identities shows us an impressive range of literary personae, which she modulated according to career stage, genre, and patronage context. But since 1600–1602 represented the turning point in her career from notable dramatist to literary authority, let us focus on l’Accesa at this moment, decades after Mirtilla and long before the posthumous editions of her Lettere. Writing to Puteanus, a humanist cresting to mid-career in 1601 and 1602, constituted a daring bid for respect. Accordingly, Andreini crafted a student persona to suit the conventions of elite epistolarity. She had worn the student guise loosely in dedicating her pastoral drama to Lavinia della Rovere, but with 15 16

On the mad scene, Anne MacNeil, “The Divine Madenss of Isabella Andreini,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 120 (1995): 195–215. Isabella Andrieni, Lettere (Venice: G.B. Combi, 1617), sigs. A2r–A4r, at A2v.

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Puteanus she played the role punctiliously, even accommodating conventions of feminine decorum that she ignored in other contexts. Women intellectuals had since the fifteenth century approached male interlocutors as daughters to fathers, a stance that both emphasized their deference to fatherly expertise and desexualized the encounter. Andreini leaned on familiar tropes in this humanistic context, arguably more so than Puteanus. Addressing Puteanus, who wrote to her in Latin, Andreini in her Italian responses voiced the virtuous virtuosa: the female student equally insistent on knowledge and sexual propriety. In one early letter to Puteanus, she expressed her desire to further her education by corresponding with him. “Of all the reasons that induce me to write to Your Lordship,” she explained, “the most important are these two: that writing to you gives me some patina of your own infinite virtù and teaches me, who lives so desirous to learn.”17 As their correspondence continued, Puteanus tried to recategorize Andreini as a colleague, a fellow author, academy member, and participant in the Republic of Letters. If anything, Puteanus insisted, Andreini’s successes on the stage made her a model for him, rather than the other way around. Playing upon the “manliness” (andreia) of her married name, he complimented her for her virile achievement with respect to intellect and the arts and her feminine achievement with respect to bearing both biological and literary children. He also confessed to performance anxiety before lecturing and wished the goddess Persuasion would favor him as much as she did Andreini—even hoping to become as virile a rhetorician as she. Inspired by her ability to speak “boldly and to the point,” Puteanus vowed, “I will masculinize my spirit and make a special effort to uphold the name of a man.”18 Uncomfortable with the egalitarian scenario Puteanus seemed to want, Andreini refused to break character. She could not construe their correspondence as an “exchange,” she cautioned, “since exchange denotes things of equal value, which cannot apply to your works and mine, since mine are full of ignorance, whereas yours are full of wisdom.”19 Maintaining the persona of a female humanist pupil, “eagerly awaiting the latest fruits of 17

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For Italian text, de’ Angelis, La divina Isabella, 51: “Tutte le ragioni hanno da persuadere V.S. allo scrivere, ma particularmente queste due: che scrivendo ella indora le carte della sua infinita virtù et ammaestra me che vivo tanto desiderosa d’apprendere.” Erycius Puteanus, Epistolarum Fercula Secunda (Leuven: Ex Officina Flaviana, 1613), 32– 33: “Utinam propitiam tuam Suadam experiar, et audacter ac feliciter dicam! Utrumque subdifficile…sive mea natura, qui timidior, sive verecundior sum. commasculabo animum, et conabor inter paucos viri nomen retinere.” Transcriptions of Andreini’s letters to Puteanus are preserved in Charles Ruelens, Erycius Puteanus et Isabelle Andreini: Lecture faite à l’Académie d’Archéologie le 3 Février 1889 (Antwerp: Van Merlen, 1889). For this passage, ibid., 26: “Ma che dic’io di cambio? Il cambio

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your beautiful genius, to satisfy my hunger for learning,” she also followed her usual custom of conveying the warm regards of her husband and their mutual friends.20 That custom became especially important here, given all the talk of desire and hunger—literary desire and hunger, of course, but without a good measure of domestic discourse an uncharitable reader might have entertained darker suspicions. Andreini’s rhetorical strategy in her correspondence with Puteanus should not be considered an abnegation, failure of confidence, or passive internalization of gender norms; rather, here we see another case of a woman intellectual adopting the filial persona that had proved useful to many others in forging relationships to men of letters.21 Paradigmatically, Isotta Nogarola approached the celebrated pedagogue Guarino Guarini of Verona in 1436 by presenting herself as a daughterly pupil: “How much utility and honor, father Guarino, will I gain from you, the very light and virtue of goodness… I commit myself to your boundless dignity, wisdom and authority…whatever is honorable and praiseworthy in me, I profess that it has come from you.”22 Men also adopted filial postures when approaching or discussing more established scholars. The fifteenth-century humanist Sassolo da Prato, for instance, figured Vittorino da Feltre as a father.23 Yet sons and daughters, in rhetoric as in life, occupied different positions. Young men expressed deference in their filial rhetoric, but approaching other men did not court accusations of

20 21

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s’intende delle cose eguali, il che non può seguire tra le sue e le mie, poi che le mie sono piene d’ignoranza, e le sue sono l’istessa sapienza.” Ibid., 26–27: “Starò aspettando con desiderio i nuovi frutti del suo bellissimo ingegno, per satiar la fame dell’imparare, in tanto rendo i saluti a V.S. con mio marito e’l Sr. Gio. Paulo.” Ingrid de Smet, “In the Name of the Father: Feminist Voices in the Republic of Letters,” in Lettered Women in the Renaissance: Proceedings of the International Conference, Brussels, 27–29 March 1996, ed. Michel Bastiaensen (Brussels: Peeters, 1997); Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009); Pal, Republic of Women, Chap. 3. For a contrasting view, MacNeil, Music, Chap. 3, esp. 93–95. Eugenius Abel, ed., Isottae Nogarolae Veronensis. Opera quae supersunt omnia, 2 vols., (Vienna: Gerold et Socios, 1886), 1:77–78: “Quantum enim utilitatis et honoris, Guarine pater, ex te lumine virtutis et probitatis habitura sum…me…amplissimae tuae dignitati, sapientiae auctoritatique tuae trado atque condono tantum iam tibi reverentiae, pater, adhibui ut te loco parentis existimem teque, venerande pater, iam pectore toto accipio et quodcumque mihi honoris laudisque est, ex te manasse profitebor.” See Anja-Silvia Goeing, “Sassolo da Prato’s Correspondence with Leonardo Dati, ca. 1443– 1444,” in Summus Mathematicus et Omnis Humanitatis Pater: The Vitae of Vittorino da Feltre and the Spirit of Humanism, ed. Goeing (Dordecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014), 65, 78–87, 91–92, 119.

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sexual exchange in the way that communication between women and men outside family networks risked. Accordingly, claiming the status of a “son” did not inherently argue for one’s sexual continence; claiming the status of a “daughter” did. When women used filial tropes they acknowledged hierarchies both of intellectual status and of gender. Andreini’s daughterly positioning in this case suggests her awareness of the rules that obtained in the humanist elite, where discourses of virtue bordered on obsessiveness. Andreini’s willingness to play this game signals her desire to make academic connections, and even to interweave her theatrical and intellectual networks. The results rewarded her effort. Andreini’s link to Puteanus brought tremendous cachet in the Republic of Letters. It is no coincidence that Andreini joined the Intenti in the same year as much of this correspondence took place. Having garnered humanistic recognition, her personae could further diversify. In the same years that Andreini played the pupil with Puteanus, she refashioned herself as a poetic matriarch in bringing her Rime to press. Here she appears as the genetrix of her verses—a feminine image, too, but this time an authoritative one. She praised her dedicatee, Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, as a new Lycurgus for his compassion toward those (like herself) in humble circumstances. Then she complimented herself as the parent of her verses, which she construed as “beloved to me in the same way that a father loves his own children…he will do anything to see his little ones excel.” If a father will do anything to place his children well, she continues, “imagine how I must feel, who am at once father, mother, and nurse to these [poems], my children.” Having surveyed different forms of parental authority and ambition, Andreini chose archetypal motherhood, excusing her self-promotion as a form of “maternal piety, which forever seeks her children’s prosperity.”24 In writing to Puteanus, even her maternal imagery had a different quality. For instance, claiming to be startled that Puteanus had shown her compositions to his mentor, she worried that Lipsius would find them “insipid, or the sad and sour little children of my badly trained mind.”25 Presenting her poems to Aldobrandini, however, she exhibited little self-abnegation. Virginia Cox has shown that 24

Isabella Andreini, Rime (Milan: 1607), sigs. A3v–A4r: “…e però da me amati in quella stessa guisa, che s’amano i propri figli; ne i quali non pur si tien caro il bello, e’l buono, ma l’istesse macchie, e difetti aggradiscono, e piacciono; e se à grandezza di quelli tutto ardisce il Padre, e tenta il tutto, perche io, che sola à questi miei figli son Padre, Madre, e Nutrice…iscusimi appresso di lei la materna pietà, che’l bene della sua prole continuamente desidera.” 25 Ruelens, Erycius Puteanus, 26: “Del Sr. Lipsio dottissimo non mi burlo io, ma temo che’l suo perfetto gusto non trovi insipidi amari od aspri i putti del mio mal colto ingegno.”

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­contemporaries understood drama and lyric verse as genres suited to “feminine” emotionalism.26 Theories of genre no doubt influenced Andreini’s more authoritative mask here, but so did her academic credentials. Enshrining her new status, a Latin epigram by Puteanus that appears opposite Andreini’s portrait on the double-frontispiece of her Rime praises Andreini as a hybrid of three goddesses: Venus genetrix and Juno underscore her motherhood and wifeliness, but Pallas Athena her intellect. Other academic admirers, for instance, Francesco Pola and Leonardo Todeschi Medici, echoed Puteanus in praising Andreini as divinely favored across the domestic and academic worlds.27 While the modern reader finds the feminized imagery troubling, it accomplished crucial legitimizing aims at the time—perhaps so much so that she could appear in her Lettere as a new Anaxagoras, Demosthenes, Scipio, and Socrates. Contemporaries seem to have been able to hold in mind the image of a female Socrates, a new Socrates whose life fate cut short in a different way. Andreini died in 1604 from complications attendant on the birth (or late-term miscarriage) of her ninth child. Isabella’s literary, domestic, and moral exemplarity had sufficient power to make an asset of a major social liability: the fact that she performed in public, which contemporaries often framed as prostitution. Images of Andreini as a learned woman and dutiful wife forestalled criticism. This polyvalent honor had effects long after her death. Francesco and Giovan Battista Andreini used l’Accesa’s image to launch their literary careers, taking up the connections she forged between actors and intellectuals and directing them to their project of reviving the ancient case for theater as a medium for transmitting humanist values to broad audiences. Act iii: Apollo’s Lament,28 or the Humanistic Eulogies of the Captain and Lelio The third act of the Andreini’s performance of the intellectual family involved extensive discursive collaboration with the matriarch. Francesco and Isabella 26 Cox, The Prodigious Muse: for gendering of genres, esp. xviii–xx, and for drama and lyric verse, Chaps. 2 and 3. 27 For Puteanus’s imagery, Andreini, Rime, sig. A2; for others’ echoing his approach, see the collection of encomia in Andreini’s Lettere (Venice: G.B. Combi, 1617), sigs. A4–A8. 28 I borrow the title of a lengthy funerary lament in verse that Giovan Battista Andreini published shortly after Isabella’s death: Pianto d’Apollo: rime funebri in morte d’Isabella Andreini (Milan: Girolamo Bordoni & Pietromartire Locarni, 1606).

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Andreini had worked together as actors and as spouses, even codirecting the Gelosi, a point substantiated by Francesco’s patronage letters and extant receipts of payment.29 The Andreini partnership was also literary. Father and son, together with a longtime colleague, the nobleman, actor, and impresario Flaminio Scala, responded to contemporary moralizing constraints by campaigning on behalf of their art. A primary instrument of credit for this campaign remained connection to Isabella Andreini, accessible through stewardship of her literary estate, reliance upon her patronage networks, and even the use of her publishers. Francesco began to publish his own improvisations, theoretical writings, and poetry, as he emphasized, only after Isabella’s death. The Latin epitaph that he penned for her suggests that he derived considerable honor through having a celebrated wife. As Puteanus had done, Francesco wove Isabella’s professional accomplishments into her personification alongside the traditional wifely virtues of marital devotion, piety, and fertility. He characterized his wife as “marked by her great virtue, a shining gem of probity, the honor of marriage and modesty, eloquent in her speech, fertile in her thoughts, religious, pious, a friend of the muses and head of the theatrical art.”30 Figuring himself as a heroic widower, Francesco emphasized his love for Isabella and the benefit of association with her. In 1609, for instance, he published the improvisations he had devised for his most famous role as Capitan Spavento da Val Inferna (Captain Shell Shock from Hell’s Valley), the caricature of a Spanish soldier whom Francesco portrayed with brilliant classicizing bluster, but who never got the girl. Francesco dedicated this monument to his professional achievements to a brother of the same Duke of Savoy who had been a member of the Intenti and one of his wife’s patrons. Francesco’s dedication positions Isabella as the foundation of his own literary hopes. “Because my wife Isabella had in mind to dedicate a [republished] compendium of her most beautiful Lettere to His Most Serene Highness, your brother the Duke,” Francesco explains, “and since I myself want to follow her good wish, with the same affect and effect, I dedicate this, my little labor, to Your Excellence.” Francesco confesses that it is only Christian piety and the thought of protecting his motherless children that 29

30

One example is a letter to Vincenzo Gonzaga of 13 Apr. 1583, quoted in N. Mangini, I teatri di Venezia (Milan: U. Mursia Editore, 1974), 23. For payments made to Isabella, see MacNeil, Music, 48n.30. Latin quoted in de’ Angelis, La divina Isabella, 58: “Isabella Andreina Patavina, mulier magna virtute praedita, honestatis ornamentum, maritalisque pudicitiae decus, ore fecunda, mente fecunda, religiosa, pia, musis amica et artis scenica caput, his resurectionem expectat.”

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keeps him from taking his own life from grief.31 Following this lament, Francesco provided a first-person letter to the reader that cited Isabella’s publications by title, recalled her membership in the Intenti, and insisted that he began publishing only to ensure her posterity, which he hoped to enhance further through his own writings.32 In 1612, dedicating his Ragionamenti fantastici to Giovanni Querini, a fellow dramatist and protégé of Carlo Emmanuele, Francesco construed his new work as a votive offering at Querini’s Apollonian temple, trusting in the same gracious acceptance, he specified, that “my wife of blessed memory Isabella, Comica Gelosa, your former devoted servant,” had previously enjoyed.33 At once tending his wife’s literary legacy and enhancing his own stature in the humanistic community, even in his last years Francesco continued to play the heroic widower. In 1617, for instance, he republished Isabella’s Rime and brought out, in collaboration with Flaminio Scala, the first edition of her incomplete writings, entitled Fragments. Francesco positioned this collection of dialogues on love as a coauthored work, thus standing behind his wife’s authorial persona. His deferential strategy was highly atypical for a male author, but it made sense given her relative stature in the Republic of Letters. The work’s sole aim, he insisted, was preserving “the happy memory of Isabella the actress, and member of the Academia degli Intenti, my wife. Concern­ ing these, I have devoted myself to serving her glory, in not leaving them in Fortune’s power. These, my little labors, are all amorous and all of them concern honest love, so as not to display for the world, or introduce, wicked behaviors.” Urging that the theatrical profession could be a vehicle for promoting virtue, Francesco asserted his Neoplatonic belief in the power of art to inspire the sort of “honest love” that he and his wife had embodied.34 His claim to 31

32 33

34

Francesco Andreini, Le bravure del Capitano Spavento (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somasco, 1609), sig. +3v: “E perche l’animo d’Isabella mia Moglie era di dedicare il Compendio delle sue bellissime Lettere all’Altezza Serenissima del Signor Duca suo Fratello, ho voluto ancor’io accompagnare la sua buona volontà, col medesimo affetto & effetto, dedicando a V.E. questa mia piccola fatica… Anima cara, amata mia Consorte, il congiugale Amore, che vive, e sempre viverà nel mio petto, mi sprona a seguitarte: Ma la pietà congiunta con l’amore de’ nostri teneri Fanciulli, e nostri communi Figli, mi ritiene in corso.” Ibid., sigs. +3v, +4r, ++1v, ++2v. Francesco Andreini, Raggionamenti fantastici (Venice: G.A. Somasco, 1612), sig. +2v: “…mi confido, e riposo, come già faceva la felice memoria d’Isabella Comica Gelosa mia moglie, tanto sua servitrice…” Isabella and Francesco Andreini, Fragmenti (Venice: G.B. Combi, 1617), sig. A5r: “…con le mie sono annesse alcune poche scritture, avanzate alla felice memoria d’Isabella Comica, & Accademica Intenta, mia moglie; delle quali m’è parso servirmene à gloria sua, per non

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credibility in the field of letters, the foundation for his project of elevating contemporary perceptions of the theater, was his connection to his wife. Giovan Battista followed his father in making Isabella Andreini the cornerstone of his authorial career.35 The fame of both parents facilitated his entry into the commedia dell’arte. But Isabella’s literary reputation offered an entrée to intellectual circles in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. As Fabrizio Fiaschini puts it, noting that Isabella’s friendships with literary stars orbiting Milan paved the way for her son in that city during the age of Borromeo dominance, Isabella became “the tutelary deity of his own artistic career.”36 In the years immediately after his mother’s death, Giovan Battista brought his first publications to press: Florinda, a tragedy and vehicle for his wife; La divina visione, a celebration of Archbishop Carlo Borromeo; and La saggia Egiziana, his first defense of drama as a humanistic enterprise. In 1606, he edited an anthology of poetry honoring his mother, Apollo’s Lament. These initial literary ventures capitalized in various ways on connection to Isabella and, thorough her, to academic circles. Maternal legacies linked him no less to Milan than to the Florentine academy of the Spensierati, whose members furnished him with an initial set of testimonials to include in his publications. Among those recommending Giovan Battista’s intellectual, literary, and moral virtues was the academy’s founder, Francesco Vinta, nephew of the Medici secretary and beloved factotum Belisario Vinta, with whom Isabella had corresponded regarding payments to the Gelosi.37 A few further pieces of evidence reveal how closely Giovan Battista followed in his mother’s footsteps in joining the intellectual community. The Spensierato who received pride of place in the prefatory material in Florinda was the Veronese physician and philosopher Leonardo Todesco Medici, who, as we

lasciarle in poter della Fortuna: Queste mie poche fatiche sono tutte amorose, e d’honesto amore sempre ragionano, per non apportare al mondo & per non introdurre cattivi costumi.” 35 For synthetic treatments of Giovan Battista Andreini’s career strategies and writings, see esp. Fiaschini, L’ “incessabil agitazione”; Maurizio Rebaudengo, Giovan Battista Andreini. Tra poetica e drammaturgia (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994); Vittorio Tranquilli, La regola e la trasgressione. Dalla commedia dell’arte al Don Giovanni attraverso Giovan Battista Andreini (Rome: Aracne, 2010). 36 Fiaschini, L’ “incessabil agitazione,”, quotation at 29 (“assunta in morte a nume tutelare della propria carriera artistica”); for Isabella’s particular “sanctification” as self-sacrificing wife and mother, ibid., 113, 168; on her connections in Milan, ibid., 17, 55–59, 62. 37 On Giovan Battista and the Spensierati, ibid., 15–17, 21–54. On Isabella’s connection to Belisario Vinta, MacNeil, Music, esp. 48.

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have seen, was also an admirer of Isabella.38 Giovan Battista even followed his mother’s choice of publishers. He would find many printer-publishers in Italy and France, but two of his first compositions emerged under the auspices of the Milanese publishing house of Bordone and Locarni, who brought out the first and several subsequent editions of Isabella’s Rime. In 1613, Giovan Battista returned to Bordone for publication of the dramatic scenario that would become his best known, L’Adamo. Matrilineal connections to academic circles lent Giovan Battista the requisite authority for beginning his project of ennobling the theatrical profession. Continuing an ancient line of reasoning adduced in passing by his father, Giovan Battista argued forcefully that the theater was a school of virtue teaching audiences erudite morality while entertaining them. Nevia Buommino has observed that Giovan Battista used his learned household to legitimize his theatrical and publication ventures.39 Fiaschini has also noted that Giovan Battista represented the theater as a source of “polyvalent knowledge that planted its erudite roots in the rapprochement of…humanistic Neoplatonism and Christian authority.”40 Examining the Andreini family in a collaborative framework, however, tightens the interpretive ligatures. We can see how Giovan Battista’s discourses of legitimation derived not only from the general strategy of merging two fields of humanistic endeavor but also specifically from his use of the figure of Isabella, herself celebrated for fusing erudition and morality. Isabella remained the best evidence in support of Giovan Battista’s favorite argument. In his final defense of the theater, La ferza (The scourge, 1625), Giovan Battista pointed once again to his mother as proof that the theater inculcated not moral corruption but the beautiful and the good. Citing Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Horace, among other ancient authorities, he reminded his readers that the ancients considered the drama a school for virtue. Gliding past the fact that his authorities would not have condoned women “lecturing” in this school, he argued that actors of both sexes teach audiences good morals while sweetening the lessons with eloquence and a little decorous fun.41 The topic of oration brought Giovan Battista to kneel again at his mother’s shrine; for this “filial ardor, the divine commandment to honor one’s Mother,” he asks his readers’ indulgence, reminding them that Isabella had indeed been “a 38 39

Giovan Battista Andreini, Florinda (Milan: Bordone and Locarni, 1606), sigs. B1v–B2r. Nevia Buommino, “Lo specchio nel teatro di Giovan Battista Andreini,” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, 9th ser., 12 (1999), fasc.1, 85–88. 40 Fiaschini, L’ “incessabil agitazione,” 16. 41 Andreini, La ferza, sigs. A3v, B1v.

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fertile orator [oratrice faconda] admired in the world of the theater and immortalized by her writings,” and stressing her membership in the Intenti as the ultimate proof that she was a learned rhetorician, not a libertine entertainer.42 Turning to Isabella’s life offstage, he portrayed her enduring the “the vigils and hardships” that learned people suffer as they serve both the public and their families. Giovan Battista quoted Isabella’s Lettere at length on this point and offered his readers a cinematic tour of her hectic days and nights as wife, mother, humanist, and performer.43 At night after a tiring performance, “she returns to her room and despite being exhausted scrutinizes—O lynx-eyed matriarch!—the activities of her household. She is especially keen to hear and see what her little ones have studied that day.”44 Giovan Battista thus transformed the memory of Isabella into evidence that even (or especially) women of the theater performed humanism. To be sure, both parents helped Giovan Battista ennoble the theater. “Every city that [my parents] visited,” he announced in concluding La ferza, “celebrated them as the very image of tender marital love and heralded this beautiful pair of Virtuosi—these twin images of gentility—celebrating their dual success as excellent actors and superb teachers at home.”45 Explicating the glories of his parents, Giovan Battista again displayed the forces of legitimation embedded in the discourses of learning, virtue, and kinship. But his mother’s example moved often to the foreground because, by the standards of the day, her achievements conferred more authority than his father’s. Even in a letter written around 1650, two years before his death, the septuagenarian still used Isabella as his literary calling card. Writing to a new Gonzaga patron, Carlo iii, Giovan Battista did not take for granted that family’s tradition of sponsorship or even his own hard-won celebrity. To his company name “Lelio, Comico Fedele,” he added, “Lelio, figlio d’Isabella.”46

42

43 44

45

46

Ibid., sig. B4v: “… Isabella (assolva l’ardimento filiale, celeste precetto d’honorar la Madre) oratrice feconda, ammirata ne’theatri, sublimata ne’gli scritti, non fu degna sempre alla vertute intenta d’essere INTENTA?” Ibid., sigs. B4v, D1v. Ibid., sigs. E1v–E2r: “…stanca alle stanze s’invia, e si ricovra, e dispogliata a pena, a pena rimirarti (Lince della famiglia) i fatti pubblici della sua casa, udito, veduto quello che studiarono il giorno i pargoletti Figliuoli…”. Ibid., sig. F1r: “…le Città altro dir non sapevano, che dello suicerato, trabocchevole amore ch’ambi si portavano; della bella copia di Virtuosi, e della copia della gentilezza loro, dell’esser così bene in theatro eccellenti Recitanti, come nella casa esquisiti Educanti.” Giovan Battista Andreini to Carlo ii Gonzaga, doc. 76 in Comici dell’Arte, 1:166–67, quotation at 166, contextualized, 167n.3.

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Epilogue: Comici dell’arte and the Vernacularization of Humanism The Andreini created, in the terms that Anthony Grafton has recently given us, a “world made by words.” Their performance of humanistic scripts brought them into contact with the European intelligentsia and undergirded the project of ennobling the theatrical art. By the time Giovan Battista died, Italian theater enjoyed greater recognition as a forum for literary and religious ideals. There is not sufficient room here even to sketch that new cultural landscape, but we may explore one of its artifacts in conclusion. The humanist and canon Tommaso Garzoni’s enormously popular Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (first edition, 1585) offers one helpful index of post-Tridentine values. Taking his role as arbiter seriously—indeed, encyclopedically—Garzoni still had fun with his Piazza. The idiosyncratic ordering of material defies any coherent interpretation; we see a crowded marketplace in which civil and manual trades, nobility and commoners, soldiers and clergy, nuns and prostitutes, produce and cultural production all mingle. But the placements often suggest wry wit, as when physicians appear between butchers and theologians. This encyclopedia is serio ludere (serious play): Garzoni kidded, but was never just kidding. What did Garzoni say about theater? He castigated bawdy troupes with relish but framed them as exceptions, turning to a defense of the art. The Andreini family, especially Isabella, offered a central example in the laudatory assessment. “The gracious Isabella Andreini, honor of the stage and ornament of theaters, emblem no less of virtue than of beauty,” he gushed, “has herself proved the worth of the theatrical profession in such a way that as long as the world lasts, as long as the ages roll by, as long as the laws have force, every voice, every tongue and all acclaim will trumpet the name of Isabella.”47 Garzoni also praised the Gelosi as an honorable company whose charming and clever scenarios taught audiences to live well and whose publications furnished conclusive proof of honor. Garzoni defined the respectable dramatist as the one who printed edifying material. “Without the least doubt,” he insisted, “greatly to be praised are those comedians and tragedians (both ancient and modern) who, not performing but writing, have filled their publications with irreproachable models for behavior, keeping before their eyes that admirable 47 Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice: G.B. Somasco, 1593), sig. Aaa1v: “La gratiosa Isabella decoro delle scene, ornamento de i Theatri, spettacolo superbo non meno di virtù, che di bellezze, ha illustrato ancora lei questa professione, in modo, che, mentre il mondo durarà, mentre staranno i secoli, mentre havran vita gli ordini, e i tempi, ogni voce, ogni lingua, ogni grido risuonarà il celebre nome d’Isabella.”

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goal of teaching the art of living wisely, as befits a thespian.”48 Drama earned respect in the Republic of Letters, then, when it upheld not just pious but also humanistic ideals. Garzoni praised the Andreini, because he could classify them as participants in the vernacularization of humanism, a project that defined his own career. His formulation hints that humanists by this time may have wanted theatrical audiences almost as much as dramatists needed humanist respectability. But he tells us directly the same story the Andreini did: membership in intellectual communities brought thespians a credibility that could make their Counter-Reformation more like another Renaissance. 48

Ibid., sig. Aaa2v: “Ma senza dubbio alcuno, & senza replica in contrario, di molta lode son stimati degni i Comici, e Tragedi cosi moderni, come antichi, i quali, non recitando, ma scrivendo, hanno di moralissimi costumi ripieni gli’ lor scritti, ponendosi avanti a gli occhi quel fin lodevole d’insegnar l’arte del viver sapientemente, come al Comico si conviene.”

chapter 10

A Spanner and His Works: Books, Letters, and Scholarly Communication Networks in Early Modern Europe Daniel Stolzenberg Since the end of the fifteenth century, the printed book had become the means par excellence for the diffusion of knowledge. hans bot and françoise waquet, La République des Lettres, 128

The letter remained throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the means par excellence for the diffusion of knowledge. hans bot and françoise waquet, La République des Lettres, 129

In recent years, the network has emerged as a pervasive concept for thinking about the social practices of early modern science and scholarship. As a metaphor, the network implies the existence of nodes (individual scholars), distributed through geographic space, and connected to one another by various means of communication that facilitated the circulation of knowledge. The metaphor of the network serves as a powerful analytical tool because it highlights issues—communication, standards of communal behavior, the coordination of collective enterprises—that loomed large in the minds of early modern scholars. Those individuals did not speak of networks, however. The dominant metaphor that they used to think about similar issues was “the Republic of Letters” (respublica literaria). This metaphor posits the existence of citizens (individual scholars), distributed through geographic space, and connected to one another by a common interest (res publica) and bonds of mutual obligation that ensured the circulation of knowledge (literae) by various means of communication.1 It is not by chance that historians’ interest in 1 The best overview of the early modern Republic of Letters is Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, La République des lettres (Paris: Belin, 1997). See also Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (2009), http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/sketch -map-lost-continent-republic-letters; Marc Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 143 (1998); Peter Burke, “Erasmus and the Republic of Letters,” European Review 7, no. 1 (1999);

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_011

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the early modern concept of the Republic of Letters has grown in tandem with interest in social networks. The emic category, the Republic of Letters, and the etic category, scholarly communication networks, are significantly congruent. In studying the networks that connected early modern scholars, historians have adopted a variety of approaches, from quantitative research aspiring to some degree of cliometric rigor to more qualitative explorations of the representations and practices that gave form to the scholarly community. Among the former, a number of innovative, large-scale projects are under way that use digital technology and social network analysis to interpret databases of information about relations among early modern scholars.2 Across this methodological spectrum, historians have accorded a privileged role to correspondence, and with good reason. As Anthony Grafton puts it, letters “constituted the fragile but vital canals that connected and animated intellectual commerce,” forming “a capillary system along which information could travel from papal Rome to Calvinist strongholds in the north, and vice versa—so long as both had inhabitants, as they did, who wished to communicate.”3 The growth of state and commercial postal services during the Renaissance created unprecedented possibilities for long-distance communication, which European scholars were quick to exploit for their own ends.4 From the sixteenth century onward, the exchange of letters was considered a fundamental duty of all would-be members of the Republic of Letters, and the epistolary networks they formed were an essential factor in the creation of an international scholarly community.5 This essay instead highlights the importance of books as a medium of scholarly communication. It may seem unnecessary, if not retrograde, to make the case for print rather than manuscript communication. The printed book has

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Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995). Among the most notable are Mapping the Republic of Letters, http://republicofletters.stanford .edu; Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750, http://www .culturesofknowledge.org; Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, http://ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl; and Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Reassem­ bling the Early Modern Social Network, http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com. Grafton, “Sketch Map of a Lost Continent,” 9. Steven J. Harris, “Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange,” in Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 347–50. Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, eds., Commercium Litterarium: La Communication dans la République des Lettres, 1600–1750 (Amsterdam: apa-Holland University Press, 1994); Paul Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica Literaria of the 17th Century,” in Dibon, Regards sur la Hollande du siècle d’or (Naples: Vivarium, 1990).

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long been the privileged source of intellectual historians. Even among those who attend to scholarly practices, the thriving subfield of the history of the book has kept “print culture” in the fore. Perhaps it is precisely because the book looms so large that, at times, it becomes lost to view. This seems to be the case in some recent scholarship that more or less equates scholarly communication (and the Republic of Letters) with correspondence networks, giving the role of print short shrift. The website of the Cultures of Knowledge project at Oxford University, for example, asserts that “correspondence was the information superhighway of the early modern world,” while a recent article in the journal History of European Ideas describes “exchanges of letters between scholars” as “the central mean[s] of [the] circulation of knowledge for at least the period 1600–1800.”6 Statements like these, drawn from longer passages that make no mention of books, point to a historiographic blind spot for which this essay seeks a corrective. My claim is not that books were more important than letters—although, if one seeks an early modern analogue to the information superhighway of the digital age, print certainly has a strong claim. The essential point is rather that both media were indispensable components of the early modern communication infrastructure, each with its own distinct advantages.7 For disseminating information broadly, reliably, durably, and in large quantities, the printed book was without rival. By contrast, the letter offered accessibility, speed, reciprocity, and greater freedom from censorship, all of which made it the ideal medium for communicating news or engaging in long-distance conversation. As complementary media, books and letters functioned together within a single information order.8 While this essay focuses on the relationship of books and correspondence, these were far from the only modes of communication among early modern scholars. The exchange of manuscripts, antiquities, botanical specimens, 6 “About | Cultures of Knowledge,” Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750, http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?page_id=2, accessed 30 July 2014; Mark Gingras, “Mapping the Structure of the Intellectual Field Using Citation and Co-citation Analysis of Correspondences,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 338. 7 For clarity and concision of argument, I treat (printed) books and (manuscript) correspondence as a simple dichotomy. A finer-grained analysis of early modern scholarly communication would complicate this picture by considering the circulation of manuscript treatises and by distinguishing among different kinds of printed media, such as treatises, textbooks, reference works, and journals, not to mention published collections of letters. 8 For the notion of an “information order,” see C.A. Bayly, Information and Empire: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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astronomical observations, anatomical drawings, portraits, and other objects were other common practices of the Republic of Letters that enabled the circulation of knowledge. So too was face-to-face conversation, facilitated by the humanist tradition of learned travel and the emergence of specialized sites of intellectual encounter, such as libraries, bookshops, collectors’ cabinets, and academies.9 Drawing on various combinations of these practices, early modern scholars found diverse means to respond to the Republic of Letters’ key imperative: to communicate information and thereby advance knowledge. In order to present a richer, more accurate account of early modern scholarly communication, this essay draws on the insights of social network analysis. Many studies of correspondence and the Republic of Letters are based on the tacit assumption that the reciprocal exchange of information with a large and diverse group of interlocutors is a uniquely effective method for contributing to the circulation of knowledge. While individuals who have such a wide range of interlocutors tend to be the most conspicuous information brokers, social network analysis teaches that there are other powerful ways to facilitate the exchange of information. In particular, “boundary spanners,” who link groups that would otherwise be isolated from one another, can play as important a role as individuals with larger and more diverse sets of connections. To illustrate the variety of effective communication strategies as well the pitfalls of studying correspondence in isolation from print, I will use the example of one of the seventeenth century’s most famous scholars, Athanasius Kircher, sj (1601/2–80). Throughout his long career Kircher made membership in the Republic of Letters a defining feature of his scholarly persona. He incessantly invoked the concept in publications and private correspondence, speaking of his duty to share his studies with the Republic of Letters, and describing his publications as contributions to its “greater good.” In many books he explicitly called attention to the social networks that assisted him in their completion, depicting the results as de facto collaborations, even as he boasted of his personal genius and tireless labor. As the impresario of the Musaeum Kircherianum, one of Europe’s most famous collections of natural and artificial curiosities, Kircher styled himself as one of the republic’s “living monuments” (so-called by Peter Burke) who connected the world of scholarship by serving as “objects of tourism” for learned travelers.10 He tended a large network of correspondence, which he 9

10

Bots and Waquet, La République des lettres, 126. See also Grafton, “Sketch Map of a Lost Continent”; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Goldgar, Impolite Learning. Burke, “Erasmus and the Republic of Letters,” 10. On Kircher’s museum see Angela MayerDeutsch, Das Musaeum Kircherianum. Kontemplative Momente, historische Rekonstruktion,

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eventually turned into a display in his museum, where visitors could admire twelve thick volumes containing letters sent to him “from popes, emperors, cardinals, and princes of the empire, as well as scholars, philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists from all over the world.”11 (Over two thousand letters are extant, involving almost eight hundred correspondents.)12 There is no question that Kircher wished to be seen as an important and exemplary citizen of the Republic of Letters. But serious doubts have been raised about whether his dedication to its ideals and practices amounted to more than ostentatious display and empty rhetoric. Before turning to the specifics of Kircher’s case, it is worth asking what precisely it means to question a historical figure’s place in an entity such as the Republic of Letters. Although it is common to use the term as a synonym for the community of scholars, or some subgroup of it, strictly speaking it is a metaphor that early modern scholars used to represent an ideal of what their community should be like.13 (As a normative ideal it thus differs importantly from the descriptive concept of the network, despite the aforementioned isomorphism of the two notions.) The earliest known usage of the term Republic of Letters is from the early fifteenth century, but it was not until the sixteenth century, especially owing to the influence of Erasmus, that it became widely used. While the term knew various usages and definitions, it is possible to identify a commonly agreed meaning that would have been recognizable to most learned Europeans between roughly 1550 and 1750. By imagining themselves as collectively constituting a “Republic of Letters,” European scholars asserted that they belonged to a universal and autonomous community, transcending political and religious divisions and united by a common interest in the advancement of learning. The conviction that the progress of knowledge was a collective project, requiring the coordinated collaboration of the scholarly community, fostered a system of values and practices. At the center of this

11 12

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Bildrhetorik (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2010); Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1995). Giorgio de Sepibus, Romani Collegii Societatis Iesu Musaeum Celeberrimum (Amsterdam: Ex Officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678), 65. The bulk of Kircher’s surviving correspondence in the Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University has been digitized: “Correspondence,” Athanasius Kircher at Stanford, http:// web.stanford.edu/group/kircher/cgi-bin/site/?page_id=7, accessed 30 July 2014. Herbert Jaumann, “Respublica litteraria/Republic of letters: Concept and Perspectives of Research,” in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism, ed. Jaumann, Wolfenbüttler Forschungen 96 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001).

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system was the obligation to “communicate” (communicare).14 All the various practices and values that defined the respublica literaria can be understood as means to the end of facilitating intellectual exchange among scholars in a Europe divided by religion and politics. It goes without saying that the reality of scholarly practice fell short of the normative ideal, which nonetheless had significant influence as a regulative force. The question, then, with respect to Kircher is: did he share its values and goals and engage in its practices, not perfectly, but more than superficially? The case against Kircher’s good standing as a member of the Republic of Letters has been made forcefully, and with some influence, by Noel Malcolm, who describes Kircher’s frequent use of the term as “little more than a token,” and his actual “modus operandi,” especially his use of correspondence, as outside the “mainstream” of the republic’s practices.15 As opposed to a supposedly genuine exemplar of the Republic of Letters like Marin Mersenne, who deployed a massive correspondence network in order to facilitate sustained, complex, multidirectional, and reciprocal flows of information, Kircher typically used letters either to gather information for his own research or to answer queries sent to him. Furthermore, Malcolm argues, with most of his correspondents he exchanged only a single letter, and the majority were Catholic and Jesuit, whereas the Republic of Letters was multi-confessional. (It is important to note that Malcolm’s argument for Kircher’s marginality in the Republic of Letters is also based on the claim that Kircher’s views about the relationship of power and knowledge were antithetical to the republic’s implicit “ideology of the non-political.” Since it is not directly relevant to my present concern with books and letters as channels of scholarly communication, I do not engage this part of Malcolm’s argument in this essay.)16 In an article on Kircher’s museum, Paula Findlen has offered a contrasting, vivid portrait of Kircher as participant in the Republic of Letters, paying due attention to his many modes of intellectual sociability.17 For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus more narrowly 14 15

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Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica Literaria.” Noel Malcolm, “Private and Public Knowledge: Kircher, Esotericism, and the Republic of Letters,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2004), 298–99. I agree with Malcolm (and others) that the Republic of Letters was based on the conceit of a circumscribed realm in which scholarship was isolated from divisive political and religious matters. But I disagree that the individuals who constituted the republic believed that scholarship and politics should be kept separate in general. I will treat this subject at length in a separate article on ideology and the Republic of Letters. Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome.”

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on the relationship between print and correspondence in Kircher’s scholarly activity. Malcolm’s description of Kircher as falling so far outside the customary epistolary practices of the Republic of Letters is debatable.18 One can certainly find examples of Kircher using correspondence in more complex ways, for instance in his studies of magnetic declination, discussed below. But exactly how much weight to assign such examples—are they the exception or the rule?—is not obvious. Conversely, more systematic analysis of Mersenne’s correspondence (the standard against which Kircher has been measured and found wanting), which has not yet been digitized, could yield a surprise like that registered by Dan Edelstein upon inspecting a data visualization of Voltaire’s epistolary network, which turned out to be far less cosmopolitan than he previously supposed.19 Furthermore, it should not be taken for granted that virtuosic deployment of correspondence of the sort attributed to Mersenne was more typical or exemplary of the Republic of Letters than more superficial exchanges. The single, flattering letter that a young German Protestant named Gottfried Leibniz sent to Kircher in 1670 did not lead to an ongoing epistolary relationship, and may seem to confirm the shallow nature of Kircher’s correspondence. (As John Fletcher observed, “It is rather startling to realize how great a proportion of letters written to Kircher by various learned and famous men say nothing at all.”)20 But writing to an illustrious scholar was an important rite of passage for the tyro savant, a fact well understood by Leibniz, who subsequently boasted to other correspondents about his “commercium literarum” with Kircher as well as with Robert Boyle and Christiaan Huygens.21 With his prompt and encouraging reply, in which he 18

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Paula Findlen, Iva Lelková, and Suzanne Sutherland have undertaken an in-depth study of Kircher’s correspondence, which shows it to have been considerably more complex, diverse, and multidirectional. I thank the authors for sharing a draft of their initial results: Paula Findlen, Iva Lelková, and Suzanne Sutherland, “A Jesuit’s Letters: Athanasius Kircher at the Edges of His World,” American Historical Review, forthcoming. Meredith Hindley, “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2013), http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/ novemberdecember/feature/mapping-the-republic-letters; “Voltaire and the Enlightenment,” Mapping the Republic of Letters, http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/casestudies/voltaire .html, accessed 2 Aug. 2014. John Edward Fletcher, A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, “Germanus Incredibilis,” with a Selection of His Unpublished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of His Autobiography, ed. Elizabeth Fletcher (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 304. Paul Friedländer, “Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Polyhistorie im xvii. Jahrhundert,” in Friedländer, Studien zur antiken Literatur und Kunst (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), 667.

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responded point by point to Leibniz’s several queries, Kircher cheerfully fulfilled his republican duty.22 For the sake of argument, however, let us grant that overall Kircher acted as Malcolm describes. The chief assertion of this essay is that, even if this were so, it by no means should lead to the conclusion that he was not a mainstream participant in the Republic of Letters. The claim that Kircher did not engage in the kind of communication enjoined by the ideal of the republic is based on two implicit assumptions about the social network of early modern scholars. The first assumption is that that the individual who communicated with the largest and most diverse group of interlocutors contributed most to the exchange of knowledge. Thus, the most exemplary citizens of the Republic of Letters were those who had the largest and most heterogeneous correspondence networks, figures like Mersenne, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Henry Oldenburg, and so forth. The second implicit assumption is that the early modern scholarly communication network was held together primarily by means of letters and thus can be adequately reconstructed and analyzed through the lens of correspondence. Both these assumptions are flawed. Here some sociological terminology can be helpful. In social network analysis an actor’s importance is measured in terms of “centrality,” of which there are three types. “Degree centrality” measures an actor’s number of ties or connections. Individuals with high degree centrality appear most obviously to be near the center of action in a network. “Closeness centrality” measures the distance between an actor and the other members of a network—essentially, an individual’s ability to reach another node by the fewest steps. Finally, “betweenness centrality” measures an actor’s ability to connect subgroups that otherwise would be isolated from one another and thus to serve as a gatekeeper. Such “boundary spanners” can play as powerful a role in a network as actors with high degree and closeness centrality.23 The great early modern correspondence masters, the so-called épistoliers or “secretaries” of the Republic of Letters, such as Mersenne and Peiresc,24 were powerful information brokers 22 Fletcher, Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, 351–55. 23 Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 177–92; John P. Scott, Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2000), 82–99. These concepts have mathematical definitions that allow computational analysis of networks. Here I use them qualitatively. 24 See Hans Bots, “Marin Mersenne, ‘secrétaire général’ de la République des Lettres, 1620–1648,” in Les grands intermédiaires de la république des Lettres. Etudes de réseaux de correspondants du xvie au xviiie siècle, ed. Christian Berkvens-Stevelinck, Hans Bots, and Jens Häseler (Paris: Champion, 2005); Justin Grosslight, “Small Skills, Big Networks: Marin

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because of their high degree (as well as closeness) centrality. Kircher, too, was an important information broker, but he accomplished this task as a boundary spanner, funneling information from Jesuit information circuits, collected by correspondence and other means, to an international, multi-confessional audience through the medium of print. This dynamic is invisible if one considers his correspondence in isolation. In other words, if Kircher’s correspondence network was predominantly Catholic and Jesuit, and if he used it primarily to gather material for his own studies rather than to help other scholars with theirs, we should not conclude that he aspired to use correspondence in the same manner as Mersenne or Peiresc, but did it badly. Kircher’s role in the world of scholarship was different, and it would be a mistake to judge how well he fulfilled the Republic of Letters’ ideal of communication by the same standard. Above all, he was the author of books, and his use of correspondence needs to be seen in that light. If we pay attention to Kircher’s overall communication strategy, the supposed defects in his modus operandi turn out to be features of a sophisticated system for gathering information from a powerful social network and sharing it with the learned world at large. Consider Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher’s magnum opus on the hieroglyphs and so much else.25 The multivolume work appeared in 1655, but Kircher had first announced the project almost twenty years earlier. In an appendix to his pioneering treatise on Coptic, Prodromus Coptus, he printed an outline of his work in progress. Appealing to their concern for the “promotion of the ­common good,” Kircher asked readers to send him any material, textual or artifactual, relevant to his research.26 Over the next twenty years such information flowed to his study at the Collegio Romano via the post. Jesuits played an important role, especially those at various courts who could provide material from princely collections, but so did non-Jesuit correspondents from many parts of Europe. In the preface to Obeliscus Pamphilius (in all but name the first volume of Oedipus Aegyptiacus), Kircher acknowledged these debts in detail, offering a rich description of the social network that had contributed to the work’s

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Mersenne as Mathematical Intelligencer,” History of Science 51, no. 3 (2013); Peter N. Miller, “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Mediterranean World: Mechanics,” in BerkvensStevelinck, Bots, and Häseler, Les grands intermédiaires culturels de la République des Lettres. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus: hoc est, Universalis hieroglyphicae veterum doctrinae temporum iniuria abolitae instauratio, 3 vols. in 4 (Rome: Ex typographia Vitalis Mascardi, 1652–54). Athanasius Kircher, Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus (Rome: Typis S. Cong. de Propag. Fide, 1636), 333.

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completion.27 Twenty-five hundred pages later, he concluded his hieroglyphic studies with the declaration, “All for the greater glory of God, and the improvement of the Republic of Letters.”28 Kircher’s attempt to create a global map of magnetic declination offers another example of his communication strategy. The underlying idea—not original to Kircher—was that since a magnetic compass deviates from true north to different extents at different locations, such a map might solve the longitude problem in navigation.29 At its outset, Kircher’s project seemed full of promise to some of Europe’s leading astronomers and natural philosophers, including Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi, who recognized that only a centralized, global missionary order would be capable of carrying out such a complex enterprise.30 If the project’s inspiration came from the Republic of Letters, its execution depended on Kircher’s ability to exploit the Society of Jesus’s unique institutional resources—its centralized communication system, worldwide network of missions, large pool of competent mathematicians, and hierarchical command structure—in the name of experimental science. In 1639 Kircher took advantage of the meeting in Rome of the Congregation of Procurators (an assembly of representatives from the Society’s provinces) to provide the departing delegates with detailed instructions for obtaining observations of magnetic declination and longitude. The delegates communicated the instructions to Jesuit mathematicians in missions and colleges around the world, who sent their results to Rome. As it happened, Kircher never completed his “magnetic geography.” (He attributed the failure to a purloined manuscript, but more likely he gave up after learning that declination was not stable over time.) But he shared the initial data that he received from Jesuit and non-Jesuit informants in his widely read treatise on magnetism, Magnes, sive de arte magnetica, published in 1641.31

27

Athanasius Kircher, Obeliscus Pamphilius, hoc est, interpretatio nova & hucusque intentata obelisci hieroglyphici (Rome: Typis Ludovici Grignani, 1650), 333; Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 124–27. 28 Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 3:590. 29 Michael John Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher’s Magnetic Geography,” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, which this paragraph follows. 30 Ibid., 244; Noel Malcolm, “Five Unknown Items from the Correspondence of Marin Mersenne,” The Seventeenth Century 21, no. 1 (2013): 76–81. 31 Athanasius Kircher, Magnes, sive, de arte magnetica opus tripartitum (Rome: Sumptibus Hermanni Scheus… Ex typographia Ludovici Grignani, 1641).

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Further evidence of Kircher’s coordinated use of correspondence and print can be found in almost any of the dozens of books that he published. I will limit myself to one more example: China Illustrata, published in 1667.32 Kircher’s treatise on China was his most collaborative work, being largely a compilation of material from Jesuit missionaries. He devoted its preface to acknowledging these debts, detailing in particular his reliance on the reports of Martino Martini, Michael Boym, Filippo Marino, Johannes Grueber, and Heinrich Roth. His most important informants had supplied him with information personally while visiting Rome, either in conversation or by delivering manuscripts. “While I am writing this,” Kircher announced in the preface, Grueber and Roth “are here with me, and continually tell me things.” He also depended heavily on previously published Jesuit texts on China, especially the Novus Atlas Sinensis by his former student Martini, although he downplayed this kind of debt in the preface, instead presenting himself as the disseminator of fresh information collected by his missionary colleagues. “While the fathers were working for the salvation of souls,” he explained, they lacked time, leisure, and means. Yet, they made notes on rare things which they observed in all these vast regions where they journeyed. They asked only that those notes made with so much labor and exertion shouldn’t be left to the roaches and worms, but that I should publish them for the common good of the republic of letters.33 Despite being Kircher’s most explicitly Jesuit work, China Illustrata was also his most popular, spawning a pirate edition and Dutch and French translations, as well as a partial English one. Given the importance of correspondence in the functioning of the Society’s global missionary network,34 it is somewhat ironic that correspondence per se played a relatively small role in its composition. Nonetheless, China Illustrata amply confirms the larger point about Kircher’s communication strategy, which involved gathering information from 32

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Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis, quà sacris quà profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata (Amsterdam: apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & Elizeum Weyerstraet, 1667). Ibid., **v–**2v, trans. slightly modified from Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata, trans. Charles D. Van Tuyl (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1987), iv. Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 313–15; Noël Golvers, “‘Savant’ Correspondence from China with Europe in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1 (2012).

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Jesuit circuits and making it available to the universal Republic of Letters through the medium of the printed book. If Kircher’s correspondence network tended to be Catholic and Jesuit, although by no means exclusively so, his readership was profoundly multiconfessional as well as international—indeed, global.35 China Illustrata, like most of his works from 1666 onward, was published by Protestant printers in Amsterdam, the center of the international book trade. As Anne Goldgar has argued, one of the fundamental obligations of members of the Republic of Letters was to make information from one’s local environment available to distant colleagues.36 Kircher did just that, but with the difference that his local environment happened to be the nerve center of the Catholic world. Rome was the most active postal center in Italy, if not all of Europe,37 while the Society of Jesus possessed the most sophisticated and geographically extended information bureaucracy of the seventeenth century, rivaled only by the Dutch East Indies Corporation.38 By necessity, the Republic of Letters was parasitic on existing channels of communication, political, ecclesiastical, and commercial. In this respect, Kircher’s use of Jesuit information channels (which he also exploited to great effect in distributing his publications) was not unlike the strategy of Gisbert Cuper, who took advantage of resources at his disposal as a Dutch diplomat to develop an influential scholarly correspondence network devoted to antiquarian research.39 Whatever doubts many European scholars 35

Kircher’s non-European readership is best documented for the Americas. See Paula Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World: Athanasius Kircher and His American Readers,” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything; Ignacio Osorio Romero, ed., La luz imaginaria: epistolario de Atanasio Kircher con los novohispanos (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993); J. Michelle Molina, “True Lies: Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata and the Life Story of a Mexican Mystic,” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. 36 Goldgar, Impolite Learning. 37 Peter Burke, “Rome as Center of Information and Communication for the Catholic World, 1550–1650,” in From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–1650, ed. Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 38 Markus Friedrichs, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitorden 1540–1773 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011); Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1996). 39 Bianca Chen, “Digging for Antiquities with Diplomats: Gisbert Cuper (1644–1716) and His Social Capital,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (2009), http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/digging-antiquities-diplomats-gisbert -cuper-1644-1716-and-his-social-capital.

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had about the content of Kircher’s scholarship, they widely praised his work as a cultural broker.40 As Robert Southwell wrote to Robert Boyle, Father Kircher is my particular friend, and I visit him and his gallery frequently. Certainly he is a person of vast parts and of as great industry. He is likewise one of the most naked and good men that I have seen, and is very easy to communicate whatever he knows, doing it, as it were, by a maxim he has. On the other side he is reputed very credulous, apt to put in print any strange, if plausible, story, that is brought unto him.41 Kircher was nothing if not a communicator. Kircher’s method was not unusual. A generation ago, Elizabeth Eisenstein called attention to the practice, common since the mid-sixteenth century, of authors using correspondence networks to collect information out of which they composed books.42 For Jesuits who aspired to participate in the Republic of Letters publication had a special importance, since they sometimes faced constraints on corresponding with Protestants, whereas print was less affected by confessional boundaries.43 As Luce Giard and Antonella Romano have argued, Kircher followed the model of Christoph Clavius, his predecessor as mathematician at the Collegio Romano. Clavius perfected a strategy that built on the Society of Jesus’s powerful system of internal administrative correspondence in order to create a scholarly epistolary network that sustained his work as an author. Like Kircher in his wake, Clavius depended on correspondents (including former students) to provide information that he used to produce his  publications and also to disseminate them. In a positive feedback loop, which Kircher replicated, Clavius’s references in his books to correspondents 40 41

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Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome,” 259. Robert Southwell to Robert Boyle, Rome, 30 Mar. 1661, in Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, In six volumes. To which is prefixed The life of the author …, A new edition (London, 1772), 6:299. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 98, 109–11, 232–33, 488, as noted by Luce Giard and Antonella Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance. Sa mise en pratique par le mathématicien Christoph Clavius (1570–1611),” in Rome et la science moderne: Entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Antonella Romano (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2009), http://books .openedition.org/efr/1926, n. 15. Giard and Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance,” 77; Mordechai Feingold, “Jesuits: Savants,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, esp. 23–24.

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f­ unctioned as invitations to readers to become collaborators by contacting him through letters.44 It is no coincidence that when the phrase respublica literaria emerged in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it did so in a humanist printshop. Apart from an isolated instance in an early fifteenth-century letter by Francesco Barbaro, the earliest known use of the expression comes from Aldo Manuzio, director of the great Aldine Press in Venice.45 Beginning in 1491, Manuzio popularized the concept of the Republic of Letters in the influential prefaces that he contributed to various Latin and Greek editions issued by his publishing house. The metaphor conveyed the humanists’ self-conception as participants in a collective effort to recover classical literature (bonae literae). As the case of Barbaro indicates, this vision predated Gutenberg, but it was only with the arrival of the printing press, and its adoption by classical scholars, that this grandiose ambition passed from utopia to reality. More than anyone before, Manuzio recognized the potential of the new technology to contribute to the humanist project by disseminating and preserving the ancient texts that Renaissance scholars had rescued from oblivion.46 As time went on, the learning (literae) that defined the mission of the Republic of Letters expanded beyond the horizons of classical scholarship, but the book retained its central role. When René Descartes, in the Discourse on Method (1637), referred to his duty to communicate his discoveries to the public (rendered in the Latin translation as “respublica literaria”), he was thinking especially of the printed book and its ability to speak across generations.47 Books were not necessarily the most important media of scholarly communication; but they were certainly the most important output of the Republic of Letters’ cooperative system of knowledge production. One might go so far as to say (paraphrasing Jack Hexter) that the purpose of the Republic of Letters, including the indispensable practice of correspondence, was to see to it that scholarship got written and printed.48 Correspondence itself confirms this. If one examines the content of early modern scholars’ letters, one of the most 44

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Giard and Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance”; Antonella Romano, “Epilogue: Understanding Kircher in Context,” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, 6–9. Bots and Waquet, La République des lettres, 11–13; Fumaroli, “Republic of Letters,” 136–39. On Aldo Manuzio, see Fumaroli, “Republic of Letters,” 147–51. René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols. (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897–1909), 6:61–63; Fumaroli, “Republic of Letters,” 136. J.H. Hexter, “The Historian and His Society: A Sociological Inquiry—Perhaps,” in Hexter, Doing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 96: “The purpose of the society of professional historians is to see to it that history gets written.”

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frequent topics—perhaps the most frequent—was books: information about the latest publications, discussions about authors and controversies, reports about works in progress, and so forth. Moreover, a crucial function of epistolary networks was to exchange books as well as letters. In the learned journals that came to play a large role in scholarly communication by the late seventeenth century (in effect, taking over functions formerly belonging to private correspondence) “news of the Republic of Letters” meant above all news about books. As for those icons of the republic who served scholarship through correspondence rather than publication, in many cases a primary function of their correspondence was to facilitate the publication of other scholars’ texts. Peiresc, who liked to call himself a “midwife” with regard to his protégés’ publications, is an outstanding example of this dynamic.49 If such middlemen were sometimes more celebrated than the authors they assisted, that was in large measure because they were recognized as playing at least as important a role in helping knowledge find its way into print. In their survey of the Republic of Letters, written before the historiographic pendulum had swung so far in the direction of correspondence, Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet felt the need to specify that not every member of the republic was the author of books; some played an essential role by furnishing others with materials for their research or by communicating information through letters.50 Why, then, have some more recent discussions of the Republic of Letters and scholarly communication tended to minimize the importance of print? One reason may be that correspondence makes a better emblem of the republic. Unlike publishing, exchanging letters was a duty that every would-be member could fulfill, and it more obviously embodies the values of sociability and reciprocity. Another significant factor is that correspondence lends itself to social network analysis in a way that books complicate. This is especially true when it comes to the most tantalizing new approach to the history of scholarly communication, projects to map the Republic of Letters digitally.51 Typically, a letter has one sender and one recipient, each with a specified geographic location. As such, a correspondence network can be converted into a database and then analyzed and visualized by existing methods and software. To create an analogous map that would capture how information was disseminated through printed books as well would be vastly more complicated and 49

50 51

E.g., Peiresc to Dupuy, Aix, 21 May 1633, in Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 7 vols., Collections de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888–98), 2: 528–29. Bots and Waquet, La République des lettres, 93. For examples, see above, n. 2.

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imprecise, if indeed it is even possible. While some of the current digital initiatives are also exploring methods that apply data visualization to printed media,52 as far as I know, none attempt to integrate print and correspondence into the same network.53 Digital maps of correspondence are promising analytic tools, as has been recently demonstrated for the specific case of Kircher.54 But they offer a very partial representation of an early modern information order in which private letters and published books were symbiotic and complementary components of a single system. To understand the circulation of information among early modern scholars, we need to examine how different media functioned together. In the future it may be possible to create digital maps of early modern scholarly communication that integrate letters and books in a unified web. Until then, we must not lose sight of what the new digital methods leave out, lest a partial but useful perspective becomes a misleading and distorted one. If that were to happen, a major conveyor of scholarly information might be mistaken for a marginal outlier in the Republic of Letters. 52

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For example: “Voltaire’s places of publication (1712–1800),” Mapping the Republic of Letters, http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/casestudies/voltairepub.html, accessed 2 Aug. 2014. A step in this direction would be to enhance digital maps of correspondence networks (such as those being produced by Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project) with visual indicators of an individual scholar’s publishing activity—most simply, the number of editions he or she published; more ambitiously, the geographical extent of their dissemination, the frequency of their citations in other books, etc. This would reveal at a glance, for example, whether an individual at the margins of a correspondence network was a prolific author. Findlen et al., “A Jesuit’s Letters,” is an exemplary model of the creative and judicious use of data analysis to study scholarly correspondence.

chapter 11

Managing Cardinals’ Households for Dummies* Laurie Nussdorfer One of the great discoveries of sixteenth-century Italian publishers was the remarkable appetite consumers had for instruction. Far from limiting themselves merely to school texts, readers saw themselves, in the argot of our contemporary universities, as “lifelong learners” keen to find out from books how to give birth, play tennis, write an elegant hand, or plan a banquet. Authors, booksellers, and printers put advice on a vast array of subjects into circulation, as they exploited the new possibilities for guidance, and profits, opened up by print. “Books for the home,” as a recent study terms them, were part of this growth sector in early modern Italy, and it is within this generous category that we find manuals for managing the households of cardinals.1 Consisting of five texts published in a total of sixteen editions between 1543 and 1678, this subgenre, as identified by Gigliola Fragnito, focused on Rome and was largely produced there.2 The volumes generally bore a title indicating that that they were instructions for the chief of staff of a princely household, an official known in Italian as the maestro di casa. The majority of works of household advice composed in Renaissance and early modern Europe adopt the perspective of the married father, like Leon Battista Alberti’s famous On the Family.3 In the so-called Hausvater tradition good domestic management meant preservation of a patriarchal hierarchy in * I am indebted to the staff of the following libraries for their courteous assistance: Beinecke Library, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale-Firenze, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, British Library, Houghton Library, Schlesinger Library, and Wellcome Institute. I would also like to thank Patrizia Cavazzini, Massimo Ceresa, Paul Gehl, Renato Pasta, Virginia Reinburg, and especially Gigliola Fragnito. I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Wesleyan University Project Grant and a Small Meigs Grant, which enabled research for this essay. 1 Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 37. 2 Gigliola Fragnito, “La trattatistica cinque e seicentesca sulla corte cardinalizia,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 17 (1991): 135–88. 3 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1969).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_012

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which husbands and fathers governed wives, children, and servants. This was a vein of didactic literature that drew on classical treatments of the oikos, the household as an economic and moral unit, revived in the Renaissance and updated appropriately for either Protestant or Catholic readers.4 Indeed in Counter-Reformation Italy clerics frequently chose this genre to deliver lessons in prudent household finance as well as in proper relations between husbands and wives.5 In important ways manuals for running cardinals’ households were not like these texts. Although they focused on domestic management, the “homes” they envisaged were the courts of men who were seen, and saw themselves, as ecclesiastical princes. The seventy members of the Sacred College of Cardinals may in reality have varied strikingly in wealth and social status—some were the brothers of reigning Italian dukes, while others were the sons of gardeners— but ceremony and politics converged to stress their shared aristocratic rank vis-à-vis laymen. Another difference from the standard Hausvater genre was that these handbooks discussed “families” without women and children. In the imagination of these texts the personnel to be managed were eighty to a hundred men ranging in age from their late teens to their sixties, most of them laymen and most of them celibate or, in any case, without resident wives. These manuals thus clearly expressed the social perspective of the household patriarch and of the gentlemen who advised him rather than of the cook and coachman.6 While most European vernaculars eventually produced advice for the father of the family, it was Italy’s distinctive contribution, as the seat of the papacy and the Sacred College, to provide instruction in running large ecclesiastical establishments. More puzzling is why authors and publishers should think that guides to managing the staff in a cardinal’s household could justify publication at all, and once embarked on that enterprise, then go on to reproduce them repeatedly for more than a century. Apparently targeting a niche market 4 Otto Brunner, Vita nobiliare e cultura europea (Bologna: Il Mulino, [1949] 1982), Chap. 4; Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1969); Daniela Frigo, Il padre di famiglia: governo della casa e governo civile nella tradizione della “economica” tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1985), Chap. 1; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chap. 3. 5 Frigo, Padre, 38–42; Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 43. 6 Laurie Nussdorfer, “Masculine Hierarchies in Roman Ecclesiastical Households,” European Review of History 22, no. 4 (2015): 620–42. The actual careers of several of these gentlemen advisers are the focus of Natalia Gozzano, Lo specchio della corte, il maestro di casa: gentiluomini al servizio del collezionismo a Roma nel Seicento (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2015).

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and a highly specialized problem, these manuals do not seem like an obvious formula for publishing success.7 Can we figure out how and why these books might have found their way to readers, and who might have read them?

The Texts

The curial humanist Paolo Cortesi first drew attention to the institution of the cardinal’s court in his massive folio volume of 1510, but, according to Fragnito, it was the later humanist Francesco Priscianese who inaugurated the maestro di casa genre in 1543.8 Unlike Cortesi’s work, Del governo d’un signore in Roma is a slim quarto volume of thirty-six sheets.9 Filled with practical advice on personnel and finances that might have discomfited his predecessor, Priscianese’s text nonetheless inhabits Cortesi’s literary world more easily than would later versions. His was the work of a man of letters shaping an ideal cardinal’s court, a court Cortesi would have praised, where not one but four literati kept the cardinal padrone company and collected generous annual salaries. Like Cortesi, Priscianese published his text on his own press rather than sully it by commerce. That Vincenzo Luchino found it worthwhile to bring out a pirate edition a decade later, however, was a harbinger of the genre’s fortunes in the years to come.10 7

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Evelyn Lincoln points out that this was an experimental period for Italian publishers in general. Given the novelty of printing for a mass market, they did not really know what would succeed: Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2014), 7. Paoli Cortesii, De cardinalatu [In Castro Cortesio: Symeon Nicolai Nardi, 1510]; Fragnito, “Trattatistica,” 141. Francesco Priscianese, Del governo di un signore in Roma (Rome: per Francesco Priscianese, 1543); my citations are to the modern edition: Francesco Priscianese, Del governo di un signore in Roma, ed. Lorenzo Bartolucci (Città del Castello: S. Lapi Editore, 1883), which does not include the original dedication. Four Italian copies of the original edition are listed in the database Censimento delle edizioni italiane del xvi secolo (edit 16) misattributed to Cola da Benevento, to whom the work is dedicated. Priscianese’s debt to the ideal courtier of Baldesar Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (Venice: nelle case d’Aldo Romano e d’Andrea d’Asola, 1528) is apparent. For a detailed comparison between the texts of Cortesi and Priscianese see Gigliola Fragnito, “Le corti cardinalizie nella prima metà del Cinquecento: da Paolo Cortesi a Francesco Priscianese,” Miscellanea Storica della Valdelsa 108 (2002): 55–59. Francesco Priscianese, Del governo di un signore in Roma (Rome: Vincenzo Lucrino [sic], n.d. [1552–59]). Under “author” Cola da Benevento edit 16 lists eleven copies of Luchino’s edition in Italian libraries. Gigliola Fragnito, “Buone maniere e professionalità nelle corti

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The 1590s saw a fresh burst of publications, the first to bear the words “maestro di casa” in their titles. Reale Fusoritto from the hilltown of Narni in Umbria published the earliest in 1593.11 With Fusoritto authorship of these texts shifted decisively from humanists to the men who worked at the tables or in the corridors of the great palaces themselves. Fusoritto was a carver (trinciante) of meat and fowl (a position of responsibility and prestige within the hierarchy of domestic servants), with thirty years’ experience in service to some of the most exalted cardinals in Rome. He was also in 1593 already a published author who was bringing out the second edition of an illustrated text on slicing meat, poultry, fruit, and fish that he had first printed in Venice in 1581. It was to this detailed ninety-page carving manual that he appended the brief dialogue on managing a cardinal’s household. More precisely, he attached it to the Roman edition of his earlier work; the Venetian edition that also came out in 1593 did not include the maestro di casa text.12 In Fusoritto’s dialogue a carver named “Reale,” employed, as the author was, by Sixtus v’s nephew, Alessandro Peretti Cardinal Montalto, asked questions of a certain “Cesare Pandini,” maestro di casa to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Fusoritto’s former employer. After nineteen pages describing fourteen service positions, including a passage in which Cesare praised the salaries given by Cardinals Farnese, Madruzzo and Sermoneta, but hinted that most padroni were less generous, the dialogue abruptly broke off. However strange Fusoritto’s text seemed at the time, it appeared even odder a few years later when the Roman Cesare Evitascandalo brought out Dialogo del maestro di casa, and the two works shared almost nineteen pages of identical content and wording.13 What looked like a clear case of plagiarism turned out to be just that, though it was Fusoritto who was culpable rather than Evitascandalo. Evitascandalo’s opening words to the reader in the second edition gently but firmly established the true source of Fusoritto’s fictive dialogue between Reale and Cesare. In the 1570s and 1580s he, Cesare, had composed

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romane del Cinque e Seicento,” in Educare il corpo educare la parola nella trattatistica del Rinascimento, ed. Giorgio Patrizi and Amedeo Quondam (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 81n.11. Reale Fusoritto, Il mastro di casa (Rome: ad istanza di G. Burchioni nella stampa di Gabbia, 1593). Reale Fusoritto, Il trinciante di M. Vincenzo Cervio ampliato et ridotto a perfettione dal Cavallier [sic] Reale Fusoritto da Narni (Rome: ad istanza di G. Burchioni nella stampa di Gabbia; Venice: heirs of Giovanni Varisco, 1593); Luigi Firpo, ed., Gastronomia del Rinascimento (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torineses, 1974), 26–32; Anne Willan, The Cookbook Library (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 84–85. Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (Rome: appresso Gio. Martinelli, stampato per Sulpitio Mancini, 1598).

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three little books about specific jobs in princely service, including one on the maestro di casa, but it had never been his intention to publish them. All his friends knew about the manuscripts, he shared them with “other gentlemen of the profession,” and the one on the maestro di casa in particular had spent several months in the hands of Reale Fusoritto two years before Fusoritto’s book came out.14 Ultimately prevailed upon to publish, and in a moment of leisure in 1595, Evitascandalo expanded his text, reworked it as a dialogue between a Signor Oratio and a Signor Mutio “so that it would be less tedious,” and found a willing publisher in bookseller Giovanni Martinelli. Evitascandalo clearly aimed higher than Fusoritto; his Dialogo covered a total of fifty-three different service posts and weighed in at 256 pages. Nor was this Evitascandalo’s final word on the subject of the maestro di casa. In 1606, when he updated the book with a thirty-two page “Aggionta,” complete with its own title page, he covered some of the changing practices of the previous twenty years.15 Structured as a dialogue between a new set of characters, Camillo and Ascanio, it comments frankly on the many ways readers could misinterpret a text as well as on the mistakes, excuses, and motivations of the author Evitascandalo himself. A generation later a priest who was also a maestro di casa, don Antonio Adami, contributed a new version of the handbook. He had composed the 248-page Il novitiato del maestro di casa after retiring, probably when he was in his early fifties.16 Like Fusoritto he was a papal subject, from Roccacontrada in the Marche, but after initial service to the Della Rovere there he had moved to the employ of their kinsman Cardinal Marcello Lante and other prelates in Rome. Adami’s title stressed the training required to become an effective maestro di casa and nicely conveyed his didactic purpose and tone. Eschewing the dialogue form, he entertained his readers for the first fifty pages with the fine points of writing payment orders. Adami had read his Evitascandalo respectfully. The one topic that he thought needed expansion was shopping; Evitascandalo had failed to say how much the maestro di casa should spend on 14 15

16

Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (Roma: appresso Carlo Vullietti, 1606), “Al lettore,” n.p. Cesare Evitascandalo, Breve aggionta al dialogo del maestro di casa (Rome: appresso Carlo Vullietti, 1606). Some confusion arises from the fact that Evitascandalo described the 1606 edition as the third edition, claiming that Martinelli had run out of copies of the first two printings. However, the only edition listed in edit 16 is that of 1598, and I have not yet found a second edition predating 1606 in libraries elsewhere in the world. Antonio Adami, Il novitiato del maestro di casa (Rome: appresso Pietr’Antonio Facciotti, 1636), 252. In tone, if not content, Adami shares in the tradition of Counter-Reformation economic writing discussed by Frigo, Padre, 38–44.

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provisions for the cardinal’s household. So in place of an inventory of service posts Adami provided lists of tradesmen and tips on when to purchase their products. His most significant departure from earlier texts, however, was to follow the volume “on princely households” with a second, slighter volume addressed to the (masculine) heads of ordinary families.17 Implicitly conflating the professional maestro di casa with the patriarch of an artisan household, Adami saw a difference of degree, not kind, in the skills and knowledge they both needed.18 Adami’s social reach and moral fervor had no precedent and no imitator in the maestro di casa genre, but a reprinting of his text in 1657 seems to have provoked the Roman Francesco Liberati into a three-volume response that would prove to be its final flowering. A maestro di casa with thirty-five years of service for, among others, the Duke of Bracciano and Cardinal Alessandro Bichi, Liberati explained that he had retired to his “poor” villa on Monte Mario at the time of the 1657 plague.19 Whiling away the hours, he had picked up a book discussing the management of courts and private households. A fine topic, it was badly handled by the author, who “taught the opposite of what is necessary” for good domestic economy.20 In his own version of what happened next, Liberati gathered together the notes that he had made over the years for his personal use and produced his rebuttal.21 Liberati may or may not have forgotten the sources of those notes. A close reading of book 1 reveals an uncanny resemblance to Evitascandalo’s volume, minus the dialogue form, and book 2 owes a good deal to the disdained Adami.22 Perhaps Liberati’s own experience was the source of the innovative third book, instructions to the maestro di casa on how to celebrate the elevation of a new cardinal. Liberati did learn from Evitascandalo’s “mistake” in listing the service posts alphabetically; he treated them in order of importance. Moreover, he was the first to include a general overview of how servants and 17

The claim that the manual would be useful to all heads of households had been made earlier by publishers, as we shall see, but this was the first time an author actually directed advice to the laboring classes. 18 Adami, Novitiato (1636), 183. 19 Francesco Liberati, Il perfetto mastro di casa (Rome: per Angelo Bernabo` dal Verme, 1658), bk. 2, preface, n.p. 20 Ibid., 125–27. He was especially critical of Adami’s instructions for making a carriage and the advice he gave on purchasing stockings and hats. 21 Ibid., 2. The three volumes were 124, 106, and 35 pages, respectively. 22 Ibid., 160–61; cf. Adami, Novitiato (1636), 92–93. It is useful to remember that the information on cardinals’ households retailed by Liberati is therefore at least fifty years out of date.

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masters should behave toward one another.23 Although Liberati brought out a new edition in 1663, which consisted of the original and a revised preface, this had a short life as an independent work.24 Instead publishers seem to have taken over his 1658 text, added a section on villas, and reprinted the hybrid two or three more times over the next twenty years.25 They were, in effect, treating Liberati’s plagiarized compendium as a summa of the entire genre.

The Authors

While the manuals span the dramatic changes in religion and politics that mark the Counter-Reformation and the rise of Baroque courts, they are most directly the product of an enormous expansion in Italian book production.26 This meant more readers, of course, but it also meant more writers. Although the humanist Priscianese, and perhaps even the priest Adami, might in another era have composed texts for circulation, the presence of men who managed cardinal’s households or carved meat at their tables among our authors reflected something new. Historians have noted the growing sense of professional identity characterizing many occupations in sixteenth-century Italy, and literature by and for such professionals was an important factor in this development.27 Dedications illuminate the careers and patronage networks of some of these men. The first edition of Fusoritto’s carving manual had been dedicated to his employer at the time, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and ventriloquized as the lessons of his predecessor in the position of carver, Vincenzo Cervio.28 When he brought out the first Mastro di casa in 1593, it was appended, as we have seen, to a reprint of that same 1581 carving manual. Fusoritto used this fresh opportunity for dedications to trumpet his new post as carver to Cardinal Montalto and to publicize his nephew’s recent appointment as carver to the 23 Liberati, Mastro (1658), 1–10. 24 Liberati, Il perfetto mastro di casa (Rome: heredi del Corbelletti, 1663). This is the last edition in which the author addresses the reader or patron. 25 See discussion under Publishers below. The sample budget for a cardinal’s household that Liberati included in 1658 was updated in 1663, but subsequent editions simply reprinted the 1658 estimates. 26 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 15. 27 Fragnito, “Trattatistica,” 140; Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 83–85; Willan, Cookbook Library, 79, 82–83, 87. 28 Il trinciante di M. Vincenzo Cervio ampliato et ridotto a perfettione dal Cavallier [sic] Reale Fusoritto da Narni (Venice: heirs of Francesco Tramezino, 1581).

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Cardinal San Marcello, Benedetto Giustiniani. He proffered the cribbed Mastro di casa to his direct supervisor, Cardinal Montalto’s maestro di casa (or maggiordomo), explaining that he wrote not as someone with experience of the job, but as might a common soldier about an excellent general under whose command he had served. In the 1650s Francesco Liberati also deployed publication to lubricate a critical moment of transition in his career. Cardinal Bichi had died in 1657, while Liberati was still completing the three volumes of Il perfetto mastro di casa. Publishing it the following year allowed the author to make three gestures of gratitude, dedicating each tome to one of the late cardinal’s male kinsmen, two of whom had assumed him into their own households.29 Cesare Evitascandalo’s publications shed similar light on his career, and they also show how he used print to create new patronage relations. Unemployed in 1595 at the time when he reworked his manuscript as a dialogue, perhaps owing to the death of his padrone Cardinal Filippo Spinola in 1593, he dedicated the 1598 volume to his current boss, Cardinal Innico [Iñigo] d’Avalos d’Aragona.30 After Cardinal d’Aragona died in 1600 Evitascandalo, probably in his fifties, was perhaps ready for a less taxing job. In 1606 he dedicated the new edition of Dialogo del maestro di casa to the two brothers of the reigning pope, Francesco and Giovanni Battista Borghese, making sure to mention his two other unpublished manuscripts, on the carver and the steward, as he did so.31 Sure enough, three years later, the same publisher also brought these out in separate editions, both dedicated to the pope’s nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese and proudly displaying the pope’s and the cardinal’s arms on the title pages. The 1609 books also trumpeted Evitascandalo’s new title, “scudiero del Nostro Signore,” and indeed we find his name on the roll of the papal household in 1611.32 The reasons manual writers gave for composing their handbooks pointed toward a variety of sometimes overlapping purposes. Reputation counted a good deal in Rome, where, in theory, any cardinal could be elected monarch for life. Priscianese, Evitascandalo, and Liberati all wanted to enable the cardinal 29

Liberati had dedicated his first book, a “translation” of Xenophon’s treatise on equitation, to his earlier employer Paolo Giordano ii Orsini: Perfettione del cavallo (Rome: heirs of F. Corbelletti, 1639). 30 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1598), “al lettore,” n.p. 31 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1606). 32 Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del trenciante (Rome: Carlo Vullietti, 1609); Evitascandalo, Libro dello scalco (Rome: Carlo Vullietti, 1609); Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome, Introiti e esiti, no. 40 (1611), 10v, where his surname is given as “Vitascandalo.”

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to enhance his image by displaying a well-run court to the world. As Priscianese explained, he wrote so that lords would “know how to be better honored by the famiglia that they employ.”33 A related purpose was to teach new cardinals how to dress, act, and entertain in the increasingly elaborate ceremonies of Baroque Rome and to codify innovations in public rituals.34 By contrast, the priest don Adami was more interested in the state of the servants’ souls than in the padrone’s reputation, though he shared with the other authors a fervent desire to instruct men in their professional duties. While some authors, like Fusoritto and Evitascandalo, may have wanted to elevate their professions by means of this instruction, the pious Adami thought that to be the best possible manager of a courtly or artisan household was a job worthy in itself. At a time when authorship was a considerably more fluid concept than it is today, some manual writers left useful clues about how they viewed their literary production.35 The most self-conscious was Cesare Evitascandalo, whose name, “avoid scandal,” sounds like a pseudonym, though he also used it in nonauthorial contexts. Even more than the actual man of letters Priscianese, Evitascandalo engaged with the notion of being an author and reflected on the way his work was read. His was the only handbook to carry an author portrait (Figure 11.1) and poems in his own praise. Penned by a colleague in Cardinal d’Aragona’s household, the sonnets promised that his instructions would win him eternal fame.36 Evitascandalo defined authorship as publication, but was curiously ambivalent about print, as we see in a passage from his Dialogo. The characters Mutio and Oratio discussed “their friend” Cesare’s handwritten manuscripts and agreed that these were not credible sources of information; only if he had published them would he be recognized as the “true author.”37 Oratio went on to repeat the opinions of Cesare, however, and at the end of the text, when Mutio thanked him and said that as soon as he reached home he was going to write down every word of their conversation and publish it under Oratio’s name, Oratio cautioned him rather to seek permission from Cesare. Mutio asked whether he would grant it, and Oratio replied that he thought so because he would not have to pay to print it. His friend Cesare had never wanted “to spend 33 Prisicanese, Del governo, 3–4. 34 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 16, 23. 35 Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013), 207. 36 Sonnets by the unnamed colleague appeared in the 1598 edition; new ones by Bernardo Aprosio are found in the 1606 edition. 37 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1606), 130.

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Author portrait, Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (Rome: appresso Carlo Vullietti, 1606). This is the only example of an author portrait among the books in the maestro di casa genre. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, ct

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a thing on printing…because it was a trivial matter and he did not want to appear too attached to his works.”38 Evitascandalo also meditated publicly on the reception of his text. Oratio in the original dialogue worried that what he had said about the proper way to organize the household would be taken as satirical, and the new characters Ascanio and Camillo in the Aggionta of 1606 returned to this concern.39 There were only two kinds of critics, they agreed, both with bad intentions: those who were jealous and those who were defensive. The latter called Evitascandalo’s book a harsh satire meant to expose the defects of those who served in cardinals’ courts. It was they, no doubt, whom the author had in mind when he explained in the preface to the Aggionta that he had added it to silence those who had interpreted the dialogue “in their own way.” In fact, he continued, he did not recommend this revision to them, but rather to the disinterested who would read it “without passion and with a sincere mind.”40 Although no one else matched Evitascandalo’s degree of self-reflection, a sense of authorial proprietorship was not absent. Francesco Priscianese received a ten-year papal privilege for his self-published edition of 1543, and in the seventeenth century two of the manual writers also solicited this protection. Both Adami in 1636 and Liberati in 1658 received a papal privilege giving them the exclusive right to publish their texts for ten years.41

The Publishers

Evitascandalo’s ambivalent feelings about publication drew fodder from observing the printer’s apprentice at work; he blamed him for numerous errors in the final product.42 Nevertheless, authors needed publishers if they wanted their lessons to make a difference, and publishers, especially if they were based in Rome, wanted manuals on running a cardinal’s household. They printed multiple editions of every one of the five texts; even Priscianese’s, which had only a single printing on the author’s own press, received the compliment of a 38 Ibid., 153–54. 39 Ibid., 153; Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 5. 40 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 4. 41 Nuovo carefully distinguishes this short-term protection of an investment from modern notions of copyright: Book Trade, 202–4, 246–47. See also Massimo Ceresa, Una stamperia nella Roma del primo Seicento: Annali tipografici di Guglielmo Facciotti ed eredi, 1592–1640 (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 32. 42 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 8.

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pirate edition.43 By the late sixteenth century Roman publishers were beginning to contend with the long-dominant Venetians in the book trade, and their involvement in producing maestro di casa guides reflects some of the traits that made that possible.44 With this literature Romans showed more sustained interest and a more flexible and innovative approach to marketing, although Venetian bookmen played a distinctive role in its circulation. Roman booksellers (librari) doubling as publishers launched the first manuals in the 1590s. Giulio Burchioni, bookseller at the sign of the golden door, brought out Fusoritto’s Mastro di casa in 1593, and Evitascandalo approached the long-established Giovanni Martinelli to produce the full version of what Fusoritto had surreptitiously abridged.45 Martinelli took the opportunity to seek the favor of the Spanish royal historiographer Antonio de Herrera. In his dedication of 1598 he wrote flatteringly that Herrera would enjoy Evitascandalo’s portrait of a “beautiful and well-managed court. It’s like the very sweetest musical performance in which the diversity of the various offices is all harmonized and regulated by an expert and provident Maestro di Casa.”46 Although Evitascandalo gave a warm account of his relations with Martinelli in the preface to the 1606 revision of Dialogo, he had in fact switched to a new printer, Carlo Vullietti. Vullietti put up the money for his own ventures, and he seems to have had an enterprising eye, building his business from scratch in a mere decade to the point where he had steady customers in the Jesuits and a diverse product line.47 This publisher-printer from Chieti completely overhauled the design of Evitascandalo’s volume, changing the format from an octavo to the more dignified quarto, attaching an author portrait, adding reader aids like an index of “notable things in the present book,” and splashing the Borghese coat of arms across the front. Most radically, Vullietti made a direct appeal to a new audience. In the 1598 edition Martinelli had promised that the work would be “useful to all padroni, courtiers, and officials and servants of the court.” On the 1606 title page Vullietti added, “and to any head and father of a family” (Figure 11.2). It was a publisher’s intervention; Evitascandalo’s text actually said it discussed only cardinals’ courts, but the appeal to a wider 43

Even Evitascandalo’s thirty-two page addition of 1606, “Breve aggionta,” received a second printing by Roman publisher Stefano Paolini in 1610; see Beinecke Library, New Haven, ct, call number 2007 1482. 44 Nuovo, Book Trade, 254–55; Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 104. 45 Saverio Franchi, Le impressioni sceniche (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1994– 2002), 2:21, 29, 43; Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1598), n.p. 46 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1598), n.p., cited by Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 83. 47 Franchi, Le impressioni, 1:779–80, 2:36.

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Figure 11.2

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Title page, Cesare Evitascandalo, Dialogo del maestro di casa (Rome: appresso Carlo Vullietti, 1606). Vullietti’s title page is the first to address readers from all types of households. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, ct

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audience was a strategy followed by all subsequent printers of maestro di casa manuals.48 No book could be published in Rome without permission from the censors, but it was don Antonio Adami’s Il novitiato del maestro di casa (1636) that made the greatest effort to call attention to its imprimatur, perhaps because it was delivered with such enthusiasm. On the reverse of the title page the man to whom the Master of the Sacred Palace had delegated the task of vetting Il novitiato explained that not only did the book contain nothing contrary to the faith, but it was “full of great learning.”49 Censors frequently called on outside experts, even laymen as in this case, to review technical works, and perhaps it was not by chance that they had chosen a maestro di casa whom Adami might well have known from his old neighborhood.50 Adami had selected a long-established print shop, also in his former quartiere, run by Pietro Antonio Facciotti. In 1636 Facciotti published a total of four works; these included Il novitiato (252 pages), a short legal oration, a duodecimo on disease, and a work by a well-known physician on how to keep a Lenten diet (264 pages).51 This represented a moderate amount of business at a time when fifteen to twenty books a year would have been considered intense.52 Notable, however, is Facciotti’s focus on books on health, which suggests, as Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey argue, that one of the contexts for reading household management guides was for their medical benefits.53 By choosing to reprint maestro di casa texts publishers demonstrated that they believed they had a market. Most editions—Evitascandalo’s in 1620, Adami’s in 1657 and 1670, and Liberati’s in 1665, 1668, 1678—were reprints without authorial intervention.54 While prices and dates in the original texts miraculously stayed the same over the decades, publishers did make efforts to appeal 48 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1606), 2. On a more personal note, Evitascandalo must have liked what he saw because, as we have seen, he had Vullietti publish his two final works, Dialogo del Trenciante and Libro dello Scalco in 1609. 49 Adami, Novitiato (1636), n.p. 50 Ceresa, Una stamperia, 34–35. Giovanni Battista Pastore was maestro di casa for Cardinal Cosimo de Torres, who lived on Piazza Navona not far from Cardinal Lante’s residence at Sant’Eustachio. For Pastore’s married status see Archivio Storico del Vicariato di Roma (asvr), Sant’Eustachio, Morti, 1638, 150v. 51 Ceresa, Una stamperia, 13–17, 250–51. 52 Franchi, Le impressioni, 1:521. 53 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 42. 54 The only two editions revised by the authors were Evitascandalo’s Dialogo with Aggionta (Rome: Carlo Vullietti, 1606) and Liberati’s Il perfetto mastro (Rome: heirs of Corbelletti, 1663).

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to diverse customers, to attract new patronage, and to cut costs.55 The Discepoli brothers in Viterbo, who gave Evitascandalo’s dialogue its last printing, shifted back to the cheaper octavo format that would allow a larger press run and, potentially, a wider audience for the text.56 The Roman booksellers at the sign of the crow saw Adami’s guide as an opportunity to gain favor with the new pope, Alexander vii, by dedicating the book to the maestro di casa of his nephew Cardinal Flavio Chigi.57 Angelo Bernabò must have had piles of Liberati’s unbound sheets from the 1658 printing lying around, because his editions of 1665 and 1668 simply replaced the existing title page and tacked on 108 pages about managing a rural estate without changing the page numbers.58 Michele Ercole chose a different stock, that of the Corbelletti heirs, when he brought out Liberati’s revised text of 1663 with a new title page in 1678. These “refreshed” editions saved money and helped to clear the publisher’s warehouse.59 Venice played a special role in the circulation of maestro di casa books, particularly that of Reale Fusoritto. Venetians, who had built the Italian market for books, were prominent publishers of food-preparation manuals situated in Rome.60 The great Tramezino firm had put out the first edition of the cookbook of famous papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi in 1570 and of Reale Fusoritto’s carving guide in 1581.61 One of those inheriting that business was Giovanni 55

Updated information appeared in Evitascandalo, Il maestro di casa (Viterbo: Pietro and Agostino Discepoli, 1620); Adami, Il novitiato del maestro di casa (Rome: ad istanza di Giovanni Battista and Gioseppe Corvo per Tomaso Coligni, 1657); and Liberati, Il perfetto mastro (Rome: heirs of Corbelletti, 1663), but not subsequently. 56 Evitascandalo, Il maestro di casa (1620); Franchi, Le impressioni, 1:214–15; Nuovo, Book Trade, 110. 57 Francesco Cerioli was the official honored in Adami, Novitiato (1657), n.p.; on Cerioli, Giovanni Battistelli, Organi e cantorie nelle chiese di Roma (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1994), 159 and Gozzano, Lo specchio, 72, 170, 265; on the Corvo firm, Franchi, Le impressioni, 2: 23. They also changed Adami’s book from an octavo to a duodecimo format. 58 Bernabò added Con una esatta cognitione de tempi, Aria, & Acqua, lavori, e d’altro per formare una buona Villa to the full title of Liberati, Il perfetto mastro (Rome: per Angelo Bernabò, 1665), and Liberati, Il perfetto mastro (Rome: per il Bernabò a spese di Federico Franzini, 1668). 59 Franca Nardelli Petrucci, “Torchi, famiglie, libri nella Roma del Seicento,” La Bibliofilia 86 (1984): 165–66; Nuovo, Book Trade, 136. 60 Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 98. 61 Bartolomeo Scappi, Opera di M. Bartolomeo Scappi (Venice: Michele Tramezino, 1570); Fusoritto, Trinciante (Venice: heirs of Francesco Tramezino, 1581); Willan, Cookbook Library, 87–92; Nuovo, Book Trade, 77, 109; Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 19.

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Varisco, whose heirs published the second edition of Reale Fusoritto’s Il trinciante in 1593.62 Another was Alessandro de’ Vecchi, who reprinted Scappi’s Opera in 1596 and 1598. It was De’ Vecchi’s desire to give Scappi a fresh look that eventually led to the publication in Venice of the first book of advice on running a cardinal’s household in Rome. De’ Vecchi apparently aborted his initial plan of 1605, which was to combine Scappi with both Fusoritto’s texts, Il trinciante and the purloined nineteen-page Mastro di casa.63 Five years later, however, he did manage to print all three texts together, making sure Venetians would not feel slighted by dedicating them to a homegrown chef, Matteo Barbini.64 The new marketing strategy must have worked because De’ Vecchi published them again in 1622. So successful a combination did it seem to the Venetian firm of Combi that they reissued the trio in 1643 for the last time (Figure 11.3).65 Because of the wide European interest in Scappi’s cookbook, with its three hundred pages of recipes and its twenty-seven extraordinary copperplate engravings, the three Venetian editions that included Fusoritto’s slight contribution to the maestro di casa genre were a notable means of expanding its audience beyond Rome.

Readers and Owners

One reader drew a finger pointing to a line in Priscianese’s guide that enjoined great lords to be generous, another added columns of figures to the empty pages at the end of Liberati’s 1668 edition, and a third asserted vigorously that the 1610 Fusoritto/Scappi belonged to Marco Antonio Fusconio.66 Because such annotations are not numerous, in order to answer the question of who read these books we must look for other clues. Some consumers seem to have 62 Nuovo, Book Trade, 110n. This Venetian edition did not include the Mastro di casa, published the same year for the first time in Rome by Burchioni. 63 A 1605 title page promised the two Fusoritto texts, but no known copies actually include his Mastro di casa. On De’ Vecchi, Le edizioni veneziani del Seicento, 2 vols. (Milan: Editrice Bibliografia, 2006), 2:504–5. 64 Bartolomeo Scappi, Opera… Aggiontovi nuovamente il trinciante, & il mastro di casa (Venice: Alessandro de’ Vecchi, 1610). 65 M. Bortolomeo [sic] Scappi dell’arte di cucinare con il mastro di casa e trinciante (Venice: Combi, 1643); Marco Menato, Ennio Sandal, and Giuseppina Zappella, Dizionario dei tipografi e degli editori italiani: Il Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Milan: Editrice Bibliografia, 1997), 1:306. 66 Houghton Library, Cambridge, ma, IC5 P9385 543d, 16v; Biblioteca Nazionale CentraleVittorio Emanuele, Rome (bnc-ve): 14.4.I.35 (“tassa dei vitalizi”); Bibliothèque Nationale de France (bnf), Paris, res-v-1667, Mastro di casa, 22.

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Figure 11.3

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Title page, M. Bortolomeo [sic] Scappi dell’arte di cucinare con il mastro di casa e trinciante (Venice: Combi, 1643). Fusoritto’s Mastro di casa circulated widely attached to Scappi’s cookbook; this is the final edition of the compilation. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale—Firenze, nenc.F.4.4.19 su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo della Repubblica Italiana/Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale col divieto di ulteriore riproduzione con qualsiasi mezzo

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encountered maestro di casa manuals within two broad reading contexts, literature on good health and on household economy. Historians of medicine emphasize the importance of such guides to readers interested in staying healthy.67 In a series of titles belonging to the Lincean Prince Federico Cesi, Evitascandalo (1598) was listed among a group of medical texts, and, as we have seen, Adami’s first publisher, Facciotti, had a distinctive focus on health in his output for 1636.68 While their position within the early modern genre of household economy seems obvious from the manuals’ concerns about thrift and domestic peace, it finds confirmation in a volume in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris.69 Fusoritto’s short Mastro di casa (1593) has been detached from the carving manual and bound with eight other Latin and Italian works, five of which are extracts from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics or Xenophon’s Oeconomicus or commentaries on these. The best clues to their intended and actual audiences come from the texts themselves. Evitascandolo implied that ecclesiastics of any rank, not just cardinals, would want to know how to comport themselves correctly in Rome, but historians argue that the authors actually lure lay readers by downplaying distinctions between laymen and clerics.70 Many aristocratic families in Rome employed mostly male staffs and could have applied the advice in these books without much change.71 Moreover, commercial and religious motives converged to broaden their appeal. Publishers like Vullietti, keen to expand sales, and a Counter-Reformation priest like don Adami intent on proselytizing artisan fathers deliberately bid for secular readers far from the world of the court. Social motives may also have operated, as a heterogeneous upper class struggled to construct a noble identity in an Italy that had renounced its feudal aristocracy.72 The texts go beyond these generalities, however, to show us specific readers and their reading practices. It is clear that manuscript instructions circulated among the men tasked with running cardinals’ households and directing their table service—the carvers, stewards, and maestri di casa who emerged as the 67

Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 40–41. See also the publisher’s preface to the 1610 Fusoritto/Scappi. 68 Maria Teresa Biagetti, La biblioteca di Federico Cesi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2008), 475, 35–39. 69 Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, 4o-14316-8. 70 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 17, 21; Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 106; Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 43; Nussdorfer, “Masculine Hierarchies.” 633. 71 Gigliola Fragnito, e-mail message to author, 28 Jan. 2014; asvr, Sant’Eustachio, Stati di anima, 1629, n.p.: see households of Vincenzo Giustiniani, Bernardino Nari, Duke Ferdinando Orsini. 72 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 44–45.

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authors of these publications.73 This same audience of professionals appears in the texts, whether it is Fusoritto discussing how he happened to read Evitascandalo’s notes or Liberati describing his reaction to Adami’s book. In his new edition of 1663 Liberati tried to fill in the omissions his friends had pointed out.74 Evitascandalo replied to readers among the lower servants who bewailed his apparent approval of watering their wine and defended himself from critics who said he should have placed the chaplain’s job first rather than proceeding alphabetically through the staff positions.75 This new client of the Borghese also subtly intimated that at least one cardinal, Camillo Borghese before his election as Pope Paul v, had appreciated his 1598 Dialogo.76 The market for sixteenth-century Italian books was transnational.77 Inventories after death, library catalogs, and ownership marks in extant copies show that maestro di casa texts circulated far beyond Italy, even finding their way to English owners. Within eleven years of its publication a London bookseller was dealing in the 1643 Scappi that included Fusoritto (Figure  11.4).78 Liberati (1668) reached Mexico, and copies of Evitascandalo (1620) belonged to a Portuguese bishop, the family of Pope Urban viii (Barberini), and the library of the Sorbonne. Seventeenth-century collectors like the letterato Prospero Mandosio and the Medici librarian Antonio Magliabecchi took an interest in these titles, and, in the 1760s, so did a pair of obscure seminarians in Ascoli Piceno.79 Books bought by or donated to religious institutions have a better chance of surviving than those belonging to private individuals, and of thirtyseven copies with ownership marks in ten modern libraries more than half have such a provenance. In addition to Roman orders like the Camilliani and the Jesuit professed house, these included the Dominicans in Florence and the Discalced Augustinians and Génovéfains in Paris.80 Contemporary owners are of course much harder to identify, but they include the lay aristocrat Federico Cesi (1585–1630) and at least one cardinal. 73 Fusoritto, Mastro (1593), 145, 155; Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 8; Evitascandalo, Scalco, n.p., preface. 74 Liberati, Il perfetto mastro (1663), 161. 75 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 23–24, 8–9. 76 Evitascandalo, Dialogo (1606), n.p., dedication. 77 Nuovo, Book Trade, 195, 269. 78 British Library, London, 1037 h7; John Lievsay, The Englishman’s Italian Books, 1550–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 33–64. 79 Beinecke Library 2007 1482; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale-Firenze (bnc-Fi): Magl.3.8.845. 00000, Magl.12.4.187, Magl.25.10.14.00000; Wellcome Library, London, EPB/B 1414/B. 80 bnc-ve: 14.4.I.35; 6.43.B.28; bnc-Fi, Magl.12.4.187; bnf 35448; Bibliothèque Mazarine 8o-55656-2; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, Réserve 8 T 632(3) Inv.2281.

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Figure 11.4

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Note by London book dealer dated 1654 in front flyleaf of Combi’s 1643 edition of Scappi’s Arte di cucinare. Copyright The British Library Board, 1037.h.7 front flyleaf

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The personal library of Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621) held a copy of Evitascandalo’s 1606 revised edition, which was bequeathed with the ecclesiastic’s other books to the Jesuit Collegio Romano.81 Of more humble “fathers of families,” alas, we have as yet no trace.82 Conclusion Texts on managing a cardinal’s household in Rome emerged first out of the literary tradition of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, as a portrait of an ideal court, and later, independently, out of the notes that Roman maestri di casa originally made for themselves and circulated among other adepts in the profession. Their translation from empirical practice to publication probably owed something to the example of printed cookbooks, menu plans, and carving manuals. It also owed much to professional competition among Roman maestri di casa and to their desire to win respect and renown by advancing to ever more prestigious patrons and by creating literary reputations. Roman bookmen were the first to take a chance on the new advice genre, and, despite at least one important Venetian platform, Romans remained the most committed to and ingenious about marketing it. Roman publishers added textual enhancements to enable readers to find their way around the books more easily, and they deliberately appealed to a broad audience beyond those employed by cardinals’ courts. They experimented with a quarto and a duodecimo edition, but in the end favored the octavo format characteristic of popular vernacular works. Undeniably the gamble paid off with ecclesiastical readers. Although there were only a few cardinals among these, the manuals journeyed well beyond Rome to religious houses and institutions throughout the Catholic world. The cardinal’s court clearly served as a model for large clerical residences. What about lay readers? For noble families with many male servants the volumes had direct relevance, even if they did not need to know what color vestment the cardinal wore when he said mass on Corpus Christi.83 For the Everyman “father of a family” to whom the publishers appealed, it would seem an odd choice to purchase a book that told him to remove his hat when the cardinal 81 82

bnc-ve 6.15.D.33. Cf. Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 107n.92; Renato Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, trans. Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 187–214. 83 Evitascandalo, Aggionta (1606), 8.

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took a sip of wine at table or how to keep the accounts of a cardinal’s revenues. Yet the fact that second and subsequent editions rarely updated any information suggests that practicality was not the main appeal of these guides. Certainly the texts retailed an elevating social, if not moral, message about cleanliness, hierarchy, and domestic tranquility that the aspiring of any rank could embrace.84 Nevertheless, the absence of a contemporary genre of domestic management for secular households suggests another possibility. Roman bookmen had managed to turn the Counter-Reformation cardinal into a symbol of the most advanced practice in courtly etiquette, and they had guessed correctly that consumers would be interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Perhaps it was the perfect sales strategy: dummies could emulate or they could just gawk. 84

Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 8, 42, 44–45.

chapter 12

Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning Richard Serjeantson Anthony Grafton’s contributions to our knowledge and understanding of the long European Renaissance are numerous and varied. But one that is especially significant is his demonstration of the role played by humanistic learning in the transformation of natural knowledge across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No longer do we see this period as witnessing the separation of two increasingly opposed cultures of scholarship and of science. On the contrary: the history and philology of the Renaissance had far-reaching consequences for the natural sciences.1 Indeed, some of the most cherished aspects of this era’s revolution in the sciences can now be seen to have had their origins in humanistic scholarly practices. We now know, for instance, that Francis Bacon’s epochal insistence that research into nature should be the work of collaborative research groups, rather than the preserve of solitary savants, had its roots in the collaborative labors of the team of Protestant ecclesiastical historians led at Magdeburg by Matthias Flacius Illyricus.2 Francis Bacon is also the subject of this contribution. One of the great modern questions in the interpretation of his life and writings has concerned the relationship between his politics and his science. According to one perspective, Bacon was a proponent of a “politics of science,” in which natural philosophy would support a powerful and well-governed British state.3 An opposite 1 Anthony Grafton, “Humanism, Magic and Science,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay (London: Longman, 1990), 99–117; Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 178–203; Grafton, “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203–23. 2 Anthony Grafton, “Where Was Salomon’s House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 21–38; repr. in Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98–113. 3 Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 141–75; developed by Stephen Gaukroger, Francis

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_013

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perspective, however, sees Bacon’s humanist Machiavellianism as quite distinct from his ambition to transform human understanding of the natural world: they were simply “two different projects.”4 But what if the question itself is badly posed? Though Bacon wrote about the improvement of knowledge (de augmentis scientiarum), he was not a scientist. For him, the worlds of natural knowledge and of moral and political philosophy were comprehended under a single rubric, of “learning.” What do we find, then, if we ask not about Bacon’s politics of “science,” but about his politics of learning? i

A Conquest of the Works of Nature

The politics of learning was a theme that Bacon first essayed, speculatively, in the “Orations” that he wrote for performance at Gray’s Inn in the New Year of 1595. As part of these saturnalian revels the Inn gave itself a monarch—the “Prince of Purpoole.” Bacon’s contribution appoints counselors to this prince, each of whom delivers a speech on the best means by which their sovereign may obtain honor and happiness for his state. These Gray’s Inn orations thus offer a remarkably unconstrained insight into ways in which monarchical politics could be approached when the writer was not actually having to address a real monarch.5 In opposition to the “force” advocated by the first counselor, the second counselor’s speech proposes that his monarch cultivate instead the faculty of reason. It is in “the exercise of the best and purest parte of [his] mynde” that the prince will find his glory, and the conquest that the second counselor proposes is not military empire, but the “conquest” of the “works of nature.” The oration then goes on to present a concrete vision of what it is that sovereignty can do for learning. The prince is enjoined to undertake four philosophical projects in particular. The first is to found a “most perfect and generall library”—as the emperor Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–10; and Sarah Irving, “‘In a Pure Soil’: Colonial Anxieties in the Work of Francis Bacon,” History of European Ideas 32 (2006): 249–62, esp. 250–51. See also John E. Leary, Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), esp. 257–58. 4 Markku Peltonen, “Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 279–305; see also Peltonen, “Bacon’s Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 283–310. 5 Francis Bacon, “Orations at Graies Inne Revells,” in Early Writings, 1584–1596, ed. Alan Stewart, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 583–606. Portpool was the manor on which Gray’s Inn was built.

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Trajan had done in Rome, perhaps? The second is to plant a “spacious and wonderfull gardin,” such as John Aubrey records Bacon himself later planting at Gorhambury. The third is to erect a “goodlie huge Cabinett” containing the works of art and nature; perhaps Bacon had in mind the example of Rudolph ii at Prague. The last and most characteristically Baconian project is to erect a “still-house” furnished with “mills, furnaces, instruments, and vessels.”6 In the second of these Gray’s Inn orations, therefore, Bacon’s politics of learning is also a politics of natural philosophy. It is true that Bacon never again stressed quite so explicitly the advantages to a sovereign of the study of nature. Yet this oration should nonetheless be seen as a kernel of the much more ambitious discussion of the relation between learning and sovereignty in the later Advancement of Learning. ii

“The Best Times”

Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) is a kind of negative encyclopedia, a catalog of the deficiencies rather than the proficiencies of learning. As such, it contains discussions of almost every aspect of the late Renaissance circle of learning. Bacon duly treats “civile knowledge” as the last item of human learning, and he divides his account into three parts. The first of these is “the wisedome of conuersation,” which he allows has been “elegantlye handled”— no doubt (we are to assume) by Baldassare Castiglione and Stefano Guazzo.7 The second part is “[t]he wisedome touching Negotiation or businesse,” which Bacon asserts has been neglected, and of which he goes on to provide an extensive and original account. The third and final part concerns “generall rules and discourses of pollicie, and gouernment.”8

6 Bacon, “Orations,” 597–99. See also Paula Findlen, “Anatomy Theatres, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections,” in Early Modern Science, ed. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 272–89, at 272; Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 201–3 (libraries); John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898), 1:77–84 (Bacon’s garden); Bruce T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,” in Daston and Park, Early Modern Science, 251–71, at 263–67 (cabinets). 7 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 157, 158, and editor’s note at 340. Bacon himself composed some “Short Notes on Civil Conversation,” in Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–64), 7:105–10. 8 Bacon, Advancement, 158–79, quotations at 158, 179.

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Strikingly, however, Bacon has almost nothing to say about this third part of politics, the art of government, which he avers is due “a reuerent and reserued handling.”9 This is a rather remarkable omission, when one considers the literature that Bacon is forbearing to discuss: such celebrated books, and ones so well known in England, as Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la république (1576), Justus Lipsius’s Politica (1589), or Pierre Gregoire’s De republica (1596). This omission must surely be explained by Bacon’s attention to the addressee of his book: King James. Bacon was extremely conscious that he was writing “to a king that is a maister of this Science” of politics—and one who had demonstrated his mastery both in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and in the Basilikon Doron (1599, 1603).10 It therefore suited Bacon’s purposes not to tell his monarch his job—or to suggest, even by implication, that James had left any part of the art of government deficient. In these circumstances it was no doubt politic to say little explicitly about the art of ruling. But Bacon’s silence in book 2 of the Advancement of Learning about the core part of late Renaissance political philosophy does not mean that there is not a rather thorough and original political theory at work in Bacon’s treatise. It is simply that this theory is presented in a different place. It appears not in the discussion of civil doctrine in book 2, but instead in the introduction to the entire work, in book 1. We know that Bacon wrote this book first, and that he came to regard it as a “Page”—that is, an attendant or messenger—to the second book.11 Book 1 as a whole constitutes a noble oration, addressed directly to the learned King James, “concerning the excellencie of learning and knowledge.”12 One ancient model for what Bacon is doing in this book is offered by the younger Pliny’s Panegyricus to the emperor Trajan, a work that had recently been edited by Lipsius.13 More recent models were offered by the numerous demonstrative orations in praise of learning that were published, mostly by Italians and often in an academic context, across the sixteenth century, including those by Tommaso Landriani (1551), Vincenzo Terminio (1572), Giovanni 9 On this point, see also Peltonen, “Bacon’s Political Philosophy,” 300. 10 Bacon, Advancement, 179; Bacon had previously alluded to both books on 143–44. On Bacon’s dialogue with James’s writings, see Kiernan, introduction to Bacon, Advancement, xxxix–xli. 11 See Bacon’s letter presenting the published volume to his friend Tobie Matthew, in James Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1861–74), 3:356. 12 Bacon, Advancement, 5. On Bacon’s expressed view of James’s “wonderfull judgment in learnyng, and…singular affection towardes learnyng,” see his letter to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere of 2 Apr. 1605, ms el 128, fol. [1v], Huntington Library, San Marino, ca. 13 Justus Lipsius, Dissertatiuncula apud principes: item C. Plinii panegyricus liber Traiano d­ ictus (Antwerp, 1600).

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Antonio Viperano (1581), and Domenico Ponsevi (1596).14 More proximate instances still are offered by two examples from Oxford: Walter Haddon’s “Oration in Praise of the Sciences” (de laude scientiarum oratio) and the thema written “in praise of learning” (in laudem doctrinæ) by Toby Matthew, the future archbishop of York and the father of Bacon’s closest friend.15 Yet Bacon is determined to make clear that his work should not merely be regarded as a panegyric oration or “laudatiue of Learning,” such as he had himself delivered in his early speech “The Praise of Knowledge.”16 Book 1 of the Advancement is a forensic rather than a demonstrative oration, ostensibly written “without varnish or amplification,” and which has as its purpose “iustly to weigh the dignitie of knowledge in the ballance with other things, and to take the true value thereof by testimonies and arguments diuine, and humane.”17 A central aspect of Bacon’s argument concerns what we may call the politics of learning. An exhortation to King James to encourage learning, and a statement of the advantage that will accrue to him by doing so, it is also a defense of the place of learning in politics. Bacon argues forcefully, and with all his formidable rhetorical resources, against the “disgraces which learning receiueth from Politiques,” and in favor of the view that learning serves to “inable” policy and government rather than hurting them.18 Book 1 of the Advancement, that is to say, constitutes more than an extended oration on the excellence of learning and knowledge; it is also a treatise on the 14

Giovanni Antonio Campano, “Oratio de scientiarum laudibus,” in De ingratitudine fugienda…libri iii (Mainz, 1532), 158–201; Francisco Decio, De scientiarum et academiae Valentinae laudibus…oratio (Valencia, 1547); Tommaso Landriani, De scientiarum omnium laudibus oratio (Milan, 1551); Giovanni Antonio Viperano, sj, Orationes vi (Antwerp, 1581) esp. 20–34 (oratio 2, “De utilitate scientiarum”); Domenico Ponsevi, De laudibus scientiarum oratio (Florence, 1596), edited from this edition and from a manuscript in Dirk Sacré, “De Dominico Ponsevio scriptore Florentino,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987): 252–95, at 278–83, who comments, “Exemplaria vero rara sunt.” Also (not seen) Vincenzo Terminio, Oratio…de scientiarum laudibus habita (Ancona, 1572; repr., Perugia, 1575). 15 Walter Haddon, Lucubrationes (London, 1567), 17–36; ms Rawlinson D. 273, pp. 201–2, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 16 Francis Bacon, “Of Tribute,” in The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–51, at 34–36; see further Vickers’s introduction at 514–16. 17 Bacon, Advancement, 32–33. On the rhetoric of bk. 1 of the Advancement, see R.W. Serjeantson, “Testimony,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 179–94. 18 Bacon, Advancement, 5, 9, 10. Joseph Scaliger was much more pessimistic: see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–1993), 2:377.

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political benefits of learning and knowledge. This might at first sight appear a Neoplatonic theme, and Bacon duly introduces his discussion of sovereignty and learning by quoting Plato’s Republic on the philosopher-king.19 Yet there seems little else that is particularly Neoplatonic about his account. Instead, Bacon is concerned not only with “the excellencie of Learning and Knowledge,” but also with the “merit and true glory” to be obtained in its “Augmentation and Propagation.” But the centerpiece of his argument for the compatibility of politics and learning comes farther on in Book 1 of the Advancement. Developing his case for the lenitive effects of learning on the “savage and unreclaymed desires” of men, Bacon proposes that the happiest condition of all is “when Kings themselues, or persons of authoritie vnder them or other Gouernours in common wealthes, and popular Estates, are endued with Learning.” As Bacon goes on to emphasize, “vnder learned Princes and Gouernours, there haue been euer the best times.”20 iii

Adieu, Erasmus

Book 1 of the Advancement is then, in large part, an argument for the “blessed effects of Learning in souereigntie,” and an assertion of “the coniunction of learning in the Prince, with felicitie in the people.”21 Yet how does this account differ from that most pervasive of all humanist political traditions, early and late: the treatise on the education of a prince? How, in particular, does it differ from the prescriptions offered in the most influential of these books in the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani, written for the young emperor Charles v in 1516 but then rededicated in 1518 to England’s Henry viii? Bacon’s vision of the politics of learning is in fact quite different from the Erasmian one. Demonstrating this will take us back to the Gray’s Inn orations; both to the second speech given in favor of philosophy, and now also to the fifth oration, in favor of monarchical virtue. These speeches serve to distinguish Bacon’s conception of “Learning in souereigntie” quite decisively from the earlier Erasmian insistence on princely education. It was a fundamental tenet of the Erasmian tradition of the institutio principis that the purpose of education was to produce virtue in a hereditary prince. It was vital, according to Erasmus, to get the prince young and to use all possible means to inculcate virtue in him. This virtue was necessary if the 19 Bacon, Advancement, 39, quoting Plato, Republic, bk. 5 (473d). 20 Bacon, Advancement, 39. 21 Ibid., 42, 43.

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prince was to realize that his true glory lay not in the military conquests of “bandits” such as Achilles or Julius Caesar, but in a concern for the “needs of his subjects.” This view had two far-reaching consequences. One was the argument that Christianity and philosophy—by which Erasmus meant moral philosophy—were entirely compatible; indeed, that “Being a philosopher is in practice the same as being a Christian; only the terminology is different.”22 The prince must always have more than one eye on his heavenly goal. A further consequence of the Erasmian vision of princely government was that it made a very strong equation between education and virtue.23 Such Erasmian arguments suffuse the fifth of the Gray’s Inn orations, which is delivered in favor of “Gracious Government.” Bacon has the counselor tell his monarch that the main thing is “to make you a good and a vertuous Prince.” “It is the meriting of your Subjects, the making of Golden Times, the becoming of a Natural Parent to your State; These are the only and worthy Ends of your Grace’s vertuous Reign.” The prince must refer all his actions to heaven. And to this end he must pursue Erasmian public works: rewarding virtue, repressing faction, purging “multiplicity of laws,” hastening their execution, and punishing corruption. Above all, the prince must “Trust not to your Laws for correcting the Times, but give all strength to good Education,” and hence see both to the government of his universities and to “the private Order of Families.”24 The second of the Gray’s Inn orations also sounds an Erasmian note when it begins by invoking the “iust censure of the wisest men,” who have compared “great Conquerers” to “greate Rouers and to witches.” But the relationship that we find in the second speech between learning and sovereignty is quite different from that of the fifth. We hear nothing about education or laws; instead what is recommended is “the excellent exercise of the best and purest parte of your mynde,” which is also “the most innocent and meriting conquest being upon the works of Nature.” “No conquest of Iulius Cesar,” the speaker goes on, “made him so renowmed as the reformation of the Calender.” The philosophy in play here is natural, not moral. The examples of the Persian Magi and the Gynosophists patronized by “the Princes of Asia” further show that “those Kingdoms were accounted most happy, that had Rulers most addicted to

22 Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine, trans. N.M. Cheshire and M.J. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 62, 26, 15. 23 On the role of the virtues in Renaissance political thought, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:228–36. 24 Bacon, “Orations,” 603–4.

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Philosophy.”25 It is not education that is being recommended here, but learning tout court. And although each of the speeches in the Gesta Grayorum responds to those that have come before, and hence (implicitly) supersedes them, nonetheless in the later Advancement it is the case for learning that survives, and the case for education and virtue that is dropped. The politics of learning in the Advancement, in short, no longer follows Erasmus’s lead. Bacon is participating in the general supersession of the Erasmian model of princely education which took place around the beginning of the new century.26 iv

The Limits of Lipsius

This is not the first study to suggest that, as well as serving as an introduction to a treatise on general learning, Book 1 of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning should also be seen as work of politics. Geoffrey Bullough argued long ago that the book “carried on the ideals of the Essex group.”27 More recently, such a view has been extensively developed by Adriana McCrea, who—notwithstanding John Salmon’s thoughtful counter-case—sees Bacon as a thoroughgoing Neostoic in the Lipsian manner, and who also sees Bacon’s “enlarged program of learning” as straightforwardly “vindicating Tacitism.”28 Yet one may question whether Bacon’s treatment of learning per se, and even his defense of learning against politique attacks on it, is inherently Tacitean. Markku Peltonen has justly observed that Bacon’s “whole discussion of the nature of the moral good” in Book 2 of the Advancement “was presented as a critical commentary on the central principles of Tacitean humanism: skepticism, self-preservation, and apathy.”29 Nor can Bacon’s book easily be co-opted in support of the newly emerging doctrines of reason of state: Bacon explicitly asserts in the Advancement that there will “seldome” be use in matters of 25 26 27 28

29

Ibid., 597–98. Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Sixteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Geoffrey Bullough, “Bacon and the Defense of Learning,” Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1–20. Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 80, 87–96, 122; and see also Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 108. Contrast, however, J.H.M. Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 199–225, at 212. Peltonen, “Bacon’s Political Philosophy,” 297.

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government for those “points of conuenience, and accommodating for the present which the Italians call Ragioni di Stato.”30 It is also implausible to see Bacon as a slavish follower of Justus Lipsius.31 Of course, like many of his contemporaries throughout Europe, Bacon was engaged by Lipsius’s writings; we are surely justified in believing he had studied the Politica, which is mentioned in a letter of advice to Fulke Greville that we now know to have been written very shortly after its appearance.32 Unsurprisingly, too, there is evidence to suggest that it was in one of Lipsius’s editions that Bacon read his Tacitus.33 And Martin Dzelzainis has convincingly shown how closely Bacon’s essay “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” first published in the 1625 edition of the Essayes, engages with Lipsius’s Politica.34 To this evidence, as well, we should also add a distinctly Tacitean passage at the end of the Advancement. Bacon’s thought that the “natures and dispositions of the people” ought to be “cleare and transparent” to “Princes and States, and specially towardes wise Senats and Councels,” had previously been a central argument in Lipsius’s Politica. Quoting Tacitus’s Annales, Lipsius had argued there that “Whosoeuer then thou art, that desirest to attaine to wisedome and dexterity in matter of gouernment, thou oughtest to know the nature of the common people, and by what meanes the same may be discreetly gouerned.”35 Bacon clearly regarded the Tacitean injunction noscenda vulgi natura as worth emphasising; it was a sentiment he elsewhere articulated in terms of Martial’s 30 Bacon, Advancement, 11. 31 For the strongest statement of this case, see McCrea, Constant Minds, 95–96. 32 Francis Bacon (attrib.), “Letter of Advice to Fulke Greville (c. 1589),” in Early Writings, 1584–1596, 207 (Stewart’s early dating of this letter is convincing). 33 See Michael Kiernan, “Commentary,” in Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 250. 34 Martin Dzelzainis, “Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation,’” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 233–40. See also Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 102. 35 Bacon, Advancement, 179; Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), 67. For the original, see Justus Lipsius, Politicorum, siue, ciuilis doctrinae libri sex, qui ad principatum maximè spectant (London, 1590), 72 (bk. 4, chap. 5): “Quisquis callidus peritusque regendi esse vis, Noscenda tibi natura vulgi est, & quibus modis temperanter habeatur.” See further Mark Morford, “Tacitean Prudentia in the Doctrine of Justus Lipsius,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. T.J. Luce and A.J. Woodman (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1993), 129–51, at 148.

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sententia that “Principis est Virtus maxima nosse suos” (the greatest virtue of a prince is to know his people).36 But Bacon does not mention Lipsius by name, nor even allude to him, in the Advancement of Learning, and the politics of learning he develops in book 1 of the Advancement has little in common with the doctrines elaborated via Lipsius’s cento of quotations in the Politica. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lipsius did not explicitly accord learning a particularly important role in politics. It is true that the prince of the Politica is briefly instructed that it is a virtue to “aduance learning, which languisheth.” But the account of “prudence” (prudentia) that Lipsius goes on to give is not one that emphasizes learning as a preeminently desirably quality either in the prince or in his counselors.37 Moreover, later on in his career, Bacon launched what looks suspiciously like an attack on Lipsius. In his discussion of editing and textual criticism in the 1605 Advancement, Bacon went so far as to endorse the view that “the most corrected copies are commonly the least correct.” He gave as an example of this a foolish emendation made to the text of the Vulgate by an unidentified “Priest” ignorant of the Latin word Sporta.38 In the 1623 De augmentis scientiarum, however, Bacon changed this example to one drawn from the text of Tacitus (Historiae 1.66). He noted that “a certain critic, not one of the least,” had needlessly emended a tum to tantum in way that suggested he had had missed Tacitus’s acid irony in the passage in question.39 As Robert Ellis pointed out, the critic in question was none other than Lipsius himself, in his first edition of Tacitus’s writings in 1579.40 (Lipsius dropped the emendation in subsequent editions.) Bacon’s politics of learning, then, is more distinctively Baconian than it is Lipsian. But there is also a further reason why we might hesitate to see him as a straightforward follower of the Flemish Tacitist. We are familiar with a chronology of humanist interest in Roman history that sees its focus shift in the course of the later sixteenth century from Livy, the historian of the virtuously 36 Tacitus, Annales 4.33.2. Bacon cited Martial, Epigrams 8.15, in letters to Elizabeth i (1593) and James vi and i (1603), and in his essay “Of Counsell” (1612). See Bacon, Essayes, 66, 217. 37 Lipsius, Politicorum…libri sex, 44 (bk. 2, chap. 17): “doctrinam nonnihil ad hunc finem promoue: quæ languet” (trans. from Lipsius, Sixe Bookes, 40). On Lipsius’s book as a cento of loci communes, see Ann Moss, “The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the CommonplaceBook,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 421–36. 38 Bacon, Advancement, 131. See also Bacon, De augmentis, sig. 2X1r (bk. 6, chap. 4): “Exemplaria maximè castigati sint sæpenumerò minimè omnium casta.” 39 Bacon, De augmentis, sig. 2X1r (bk. 6, chap. 4): “At Criticus quidam, non ex infimis, Verbum Tum expunxit, & Tantùm reposuit.” 40 Bacon, Works, 1:708. See also Kiernan, “Commentary,” in Bacon, Advancement, 326–27.

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militaristic Republic, to Tacitus, the historian of the secretive and dangerous imperial court.41 Of course, in the hands of late humanist readers Roman history does not always divide up so neatly as this—as the example of Bacon’s slightly older contemporary Gabriel Harvey (1550?–1631) also shows. And Bacon himself was entirely capable of speaking pure Cicero when it was the “true rules and habits of duties and moralities” that had to decide matters, as in his 1604 Apologie for his questionable behavior toward the Earl of Essex.42 But it also seems possible that in the Advancement of Learning Bacon was deliberately effecting a further shift of interest to a later and self-consciously postTacitean—and post-Lipsian—period of Roman history. The evidence for this shift of focus within Roman imperial history comes from Bacon’s historical proofs of his argument for the “felicitie of times, vnder learned Princes.” According to Bacon, the period that best demonstrates this happy politics of learning is “the age, which passed from the death of Domitianus the Emperour, vntill the reign of Commodus: comprehending a succession of sixe Princes, all learned or singuler fauourers and Aduancers of learning.” The age, that is to say, of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, and Marcus Aurelius, “for temporall respects, was the most happie and flourishing, that euer the Romane Empire, (which then was a modele of the world) enioyed.”43 There are precedents for Bacon’s judgment of the felicity of the NervanAntonine dynasty, notably by Machiavelli in the Discorsi.44 Moreover, no less a Roman historian than Edward Gibbon may have later elaborated his own glowing assessment of that age from this passage of Bacon’s Advancement.45 Yet when Lipsius himself had occasion to cite examples of Roman leaders and emperors who encouraged learning, in the panegyric he 41

Evidence for this shift is furnished by Peter Burke, “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 135–52. 42 Sir Francis Bacon his Apologie, in Certaine imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex (London, 1604), sig. A3r. Compare the hierarchy of duties Bacon presents here with the injunctions in Cicero, De Officiis 3.10.43. 43 Bacon, Advancement, 39–40. See also account of the “Golden Age” that followed Domitian in Bacon, “Offer of a Digest” [ca. 1621], in Certaine Miscellany Works (London, 1629), 139. 44 See Niccolò Machiavelli, I discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (“Palermo” [i.e., London], 1584), fol. 19r (1.10), for praise of “i tempi da Nerua a Marco,” during which the emperors were “tutti buoni.” 45 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–87], ed. David Wormersley (London: Penguin, 1994), 1:103: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of

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delivered to the archduke Albert and his wife Isabella in 1599, he spoke not of Trajan or of Marcus Aurelius, but of Pompey, Claudius, and Tiberius.46 In contrast, by the time Bacon wrote the Advancement, knowledge of the Roman emperors after Tiberius had been significantly advanced by Isaac Casaubon’s groundbreaking 1603 edition of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. These Scriptores (as Casaubon himself christened them) were not regarded as particularly excellent authors: Bacon left them out of his list of exemplary Roman historians in the Advancement.47 But the ones who went under the names of Aelius Spartianus and Iulius Capitolinus had written approvingly about the earlier emperors of Bacon’s “happie and flourishing” age (Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, and Marcus Aurelius), and Casaubon himself in the prolegomena to his edition had described Neva and Trajan (in the course of accounting for their absence from the Historia Augusta) as two princes who were “conspicuous for their excellence.”48 Indeed, Tacitus ­himself had suggested as much in his Agricola, in a sentiment that Bacon quotes (or rather, misquotes) in the Advancement: “Postquam diuus Nerua res olim insociabiles miscuisset, imperium & libertatem” (afterward the divine Nerva combined two things that were formerly incompatible, authority and liberty).49 By 1610, at least, it was clear to his court that King James was rather hostile to Tacitus.50 Is the “commemoration” of the immediately post-Tacitean emperors in the Advancement a signal by Bacon to his monarch of his recognition that under James’s rule there ought to be less utility found in Tacitus, and more in a newer and better kind of politics of learning?51

Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” The parallel has also been noticed by Roland Hall, “Baconian Echoes in Gibbon,” Notes and Queries 18 (1971): 60. 46 Justus Lipsius, “Dissertatiuncula apud serenissimos Albertum et Isabellam Belgarum principes extemporanea,” in Dissertatiuncula apud principes, sig. *4v. 47 Bacon, Advancement, 67, listing Livy, Polybius, Sallust, Caesar, Appian, Tacitus, and Herodian. 48 Isaac Casaubon, ed., Historiae Augustae Scriptores sex (Paris, 1603), sig. e3r: “… Neruam & Traianum duos bonitate insignes principes.” 49 As Kiernan, “Commentary,” in Bacon, Advancement, 238–39, notes, Tacitus’s text in fact reads: “sed quamquam primo statum beatissimi saeculi ortu Nerva Caesar res olim dissociabiles miscuerit, principatum ac libertatem” (Agricola 3). 50 Alan T. Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism and the ‘Utility’ of Tacitus,” Huntington Library Quarterly 45 (1983): 127–55, esp. 138. 51 Bacon, In felicem memoriam Elizabethae (1608?), in Works, 6:296, similarly invokes the felicissimus Trajan and the imperator optimus Antoninus Pius.

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Politics out of Books

One early reader of Bacon’s Advancement who may have thought so was the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614). Since Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine drew attention to it, Casaubon’s comment on the role of Henry Cuffe in the Essex affair has become celebrated.52 For the Huguenot scholar, Cuffe was a “dreadful instance” (tristissimum exemplum) of that most dangerous of things, the “book-trained politician” (politicus e libro), whose interpretation to Essex of a line of Lucan had proved fatal to the earl.53 Casaubon’s views on Bacon’s politics of learning may therefore be revealing. Fortunately, they can be established from his annotated copy of the Advancement, which ­survives in the Huntington Library.54 It is not clear when Casaubon came by his copy of the book: while it was probably after he arrived in England in 1610, it is not impossible that he acquired it before King James enticed him over. It is even possible that the volume was presented to him by its author: the book is not inscribed by Bacon, but it is a large-paper copy, and its errata have been meticulously corrected in a hand that is not Casaubon’s.55 There is no direct evidence that Bacon and Casaubon knew each other personally: Bacon is not mentioned in Casaubon’s Ephemerides, nor in his extensive correspondence.56 But once he arrived in England Casaubon became close 52

Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78, at 75. See also McCrea, Constant Minds, 79; Alan Stewart, “Instigating Treason: The Life and Death of Henry Cuffe, Secretary,” in Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, ed. Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 50–70, at 61. 53 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 239. 54 Huntington Library, shelf mark rb 56251. For an account of this volume, see Kiernan, “Appendix i,” in Bacon, Advancement, 388n.1. For further discussions of Casaubon as annotator, see T.A. Birrell, “The Reconstruction of the Library of Isaac Casaubon,” in Hellinga: Festschrift, ed. A.R.A. Croiset van Uchelen (Amsterdam: Israël, 1980), 59–68; Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 78–93, at 81; Grafton, What Was History? 246; Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2011). 55 See Huntington Library, rb 56251, e.g. sigs. E4v (deletion of “then”), M1v (insertion of “tend”). 56 Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, ed. John Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1850); Isaac Casaubon, Epistolae, ed. Paul Colomiès (Rotterdam, 1709), digital edition at http://www .uni-mannheim.de/mateo/cera/autoren/casaubon_cera.html. On this point see Spedding, Letters and Life, 4:146.

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to Lancelot Andrewes, a correspondent of Bacon’s in this period. More directly, among some of Bacon’s papers in Lambeth Palace Library there is an undated draft of a letter from Bacon to Casaubon, thanking him for the interest in his writings that he had expressed to the French ambassador Sir George Carew (ca. 1556–1612).57 Although these writings are not identified, they would almost certainly have been either the piece In felicem memoriam Elizabethae that Bacon had sent to Carew in 1608 or 1609, with a request to pass it on to JacquesAugust de Thou (1553–1617) for his Historia sui temporis, or the De sapientia veterum (1609)—or both.58 If it was the piece on Elizabeth, then Bacon’s decision to send a copy of his work to Paris was well taken, for when Thomas Coryate (1577?–1617) had visited Casaubon there a few years earlier, Casaubon told him that he hoped that “some learned man in England” might “write the life and death of Queene Elizabeth in some excellent stile.”59 How did Casaubon read Bacon’s Advancement? Evidently he began by using it to improve his understanding of English. Throughout book 1 and the start of book 2 he has marked the stresses on thousands of words. He has also translated numerous terms into whichever language possessed most significance for him in each case—sometimes French, sometimes Latin, sometimes Greek. As he also does in other volumes, Casaubon extracted what he took to be the key point of Bacon’s book and drew attention to it on the title page. His comment makes plain that he has grasped the nub of Bacon’s Janus-faced perception of himself as someone who both sought to recover a lost “wisdom of the ancients” and was also a herald (Buccinator) of a new age. Casaubon’s note reads: “How far antiquity is to be deferred to, and on the antiquity of the present.”60 The passage he picked up on is one of Bacon’s most equivocal insights: “And to speake truly, Antiquitas seculi Iuuentus Mundi. These times are the ancient times when the world is ancient, & not those which we count antient Ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from our selues.”61 Thereafter Casaubon has been through and anatomized the whole of book 1 in Latin, summarizing its heads of argument, and drawing attention to allegations of ancient texts in which he was particularly interested. It almost goes 57

ms 936, fol. 272r, Lambeth Palace Library, London. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4:146n.1, points out that the letter is a draft to dictation, and that a fair copy may never have been sent. 58 Bacon to Sir George Carew, ms Add. 5503, fol. 41r–v, British Library, London. 59 Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 32. 60 Huntington Library, rb 56251, title page: “23. Antiquitati quantum deferendum, et de antiquitate hodierna” (the reference is to fol. 23v). 61 Bacon, Advancement, 28–29.

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without saying that he picked up ruefully on Bacon’s comment about the poverty of scholars.62 But he also paid attention to Bacon’s suggestion that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were the two historical figures who had successfully combined “knowledge of letters and of military service in the same person and time.”63 Casaubon was interested, too, in the question whether learning makes politicians more effective.64 And he was particularly exercised by Bacon’s treatment of ragione di stato, writing the phrase out in capitals in the margin and observing a little later on that Bacon was referring to it again when he commented that if the moral virtues are cultivated in political affairs, “there will be seldome vse of those other”—against which Casaubon has written, “namely, Reason of State.”65 Casaubon’s annotations run out—as such annotations so often do—shortly after the beginning of book 2.66 So we do not know his reaction, if he ever reached it, to the passage toward the end of the work when Bacon comments that the failure to collect into writing that part of politics which was concerned with “wisedome touching Negotiation or businesse” had been “to the great derogacion of learning, and the professors of learninge,” and also notes the opinion enshrined in the adage that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men: “That there is noe greate concurrence betweene learning and Wisedome.”67 Nonetheless, enough evidence exists to show that Casaubon identified in Bacon’s Advancement a politics of learning that caught his attention. vi

A Late Renaissance Politics of Learning

Bacon’s politics of learning, then, is characteristically his own. His suggestion in the Gray’s Inn orations that a knowledge of natural philosophy is the foremost way in which a prince might win glory is, so far as I know, unparalleled in late Renaissance political thinking. But in a more general way it seems likely that a concern with the politics of learning—although not necessarily a Tacitist politics—is characteristic of the late Renaissance more generally. One particular view of the politics of university learning had been influentially promulgated by the Calvinist Johannes Althusius in his oration on the antiquity, utility, 62 Huntington Library, rb 56251, sig. D1r: “Paupertas doctores.” 63 Ibid., sig. F4v: “scientia literarum et militia iisdem personis et temporibus.” 64 Ibid., sig. C1r. 65 Ibid., sig. C2r: “nempe Ragioni di Stato.” 66 Casaubon’s last annotation appears at ibid., sig. 2C1v. 67 Bacon, Advancement, 158.

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and necessity of the schools that concludes his Politica of 1603.68 A concern with the health of the schools and the learning they impart is characteristic of other Protestant authors at this point as well, particularly Lambert Daneau in his Politices Christiana (1596) and Bartholomäus Keckermann in his Systema disciplinae politicae (1608).69 These authors, however, are above all concerned with the politics of learning as a propaedeutic to the politics of the true, which is to say the Reformed, religion. By contrast, Bacon’s politics of learning generally omits religion; indeed, in the Advancement of Learning he even goes so far as to suggest that his times have brought about “The consumption of all that euer can be said in controuersies of Religion, which haue so much diuerted men from other Sciences.”70 An even closer comparison with another late Renaissance politics of learning is offered by Bacon’s slightly younger contemporary Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). Campanella was absorbed by a vision of politics in which rule was not given to the noblest, nor even just the best, but to the wisest: a polity governed by knowledge and by the possessors of knowledge.71 This argument emerges most clearly from Campanella’s Città del Sole (1602), but it is also apparent in his Politica of 1623, to which a Latin version of the City of the Sun was published as an appendix. “It is natural and good therefore,” wrote Campanella in his Politica, “that wisdom alone should rule; not a sophistical, but a philosophical wisdom; not a reclusive, but a civil wisdom; a wisdom not opposed to God, but placed under God.”72 Bacon was intimately familiar with the writings of Campanella’s philosophical mentor Bernardino Telesio, but the question whether he had read Campanella’s book remains unresolved; certainly 68

Johannes Althusius, “Oratio panegyrica de utilitate, necessitate et antiquitate scholarum,” in Politica (Herborn, 1603), 969–1003. For discussion of this oration see further R.W. Serjeantson, “Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, ed. Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 113–39. 69 Lambert Daneau, Politices Christianae libri septem, (n.p., 1596); Bartholomäus Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae (Hannover, 1608). 70 Bacon, Advancement, 181. See also Bacon’s letter to Tobie Matthew of 10 Oct. 1609, in Spedding, Letters and Life, 4:138: “So I see that controversies of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences.” 71 Tommaso Campanella, La Città del sole: dialogo poetico, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1981), esp. 92–96. 72 Tommaso Campanella, Realis philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatuor, hoc est De rerum natura, Hominum moribus, Politica (cui Civitas solis juncta est) et Oeconomica (Frankfurt am Main, 1623), 373–74: “Bene igitur ac naturaliter sapientia sola dominatur; non sophistica, sed philosophica; non eremitica, sed ciuilis; non opposita Deo, sed supposita.”

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his New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1626) has often been compared to the City of the Sun.73 Perhaps what comes out most clearly from Campanella’s politics of learning, by contrast with Bacon’s, is that Bacon was not willing to extend his commitment to the virtue of learning to an explicit critique of the hereditary principle—something that Campanella did not hesitate to do.74 This has not been a study of Bacon’s New Atlantis.75 But perhaps Bacon’s authorship of that work, too, suggests that there is something inherently utopian about the late Renaissance politics of learning which it has been the goal of this essay to explore. Yet the endeavors of the Society of Jesus, which took as its goal the education of the ruling classes of late Renaissance societies, and whose schools—as Isaac Casaubon noticed—Bacon clearly admired,76 also suggest that there is something more than merely utopian to the distinctive late Renaissance view that the path to the best society comes not just from educating rulers in virtue, but in having them truly learned. It remains misleading, then, to yoke Bacon’s natural philosophy too closely to his political thought. Yet while Bacon did not obviously have a “politics of science,” he did elaborate a thorough and original politics of learning. 73

See esp. E.D. Blodgett, “Bacon’s New Atlantis and Campanella’s Civitas Solis: A Study in Relationships,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 46 (1931): 763–68; Michèle Le Dœuff, “Utopias: Scholarly,” Social Research 49 (1982): 441–66. 74 Campanella, Realis philosophiae partes quatuor, 374. 75 A pertinent one is offered by David Colclough, “Ethics and Politics in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 60–81. 76 Bacon, Advancement, 17, 37; Casaubon has written “Jesuitæ” in the margin against both passages (Huntington Library, rb 56251, sigs. D2v, H4r).

Part 3 Scholarship and Religion



chapter 13

Pomponio Leto’s Life of Muhammad Margaret Meserve This is the story of a text that never was or, at least, one its author never meant to be. De exortu Maomethis is a brief essay on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, published in Basel in 1533 and credited to the most famous Roman humanist and antiquarian of the previous century, Pomponio Leto. The words that were published were Leto’s, but they were never meant to appear under this title; a later editor extracted them from Leto’s much longer Compendium of Roman history and repackaged them for his own editorial purposes. What Leto has to say about the founder of Islam, together with what happened to his words after he composed them, reveals much about what Muhammad meant to Renaissance readers—indeed, what Islam itself represented and could be used for in Renaissance historical, political, and literary discourse. The story of Leto’s original composition, as well as its later fortunes at the hands of various Renaissance readers, editors, and publishers, follows a winding course across the European intellectual landscape, through the worlds of Roman antiquarianism, Venetian state historiography, and early Habsburg propaganda, over contending European discourses of anti-Turkish polemic and fascination with global exotica, both past and present. In August 1533, the Basel printer Heinrich Petri issued a folio edition of the crusade history of Robert the Monk, the twelfth-century French crusade historian also known as Robert of Reims or Robert of Saint Rémi.1 Petri prefaced the text (to which he gave the title Bellum Christianorum principum) with a brief letter to the reader and included several shorter historical tracts at the end of the volume.2 1 Bellum Christianorum principum, praecipue Gallorum, contra Saracenos anno salutis ­m lxxxviii pro terra sancta gestum, autore Roberto Monacho (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1533), hereafter cited as bcp. For a modern critical edition with comments on the identity of the text’s author and its editorial history, see D. Kempf and M.G. Bull, eds., The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk (London: Boydell Press, 2013). 2 On Heinrich Petri (1508–79) see A.F. Johnson, The First Century of Printing at Basle (London: Benn, 1926), 7; Heinrich Grimm, “Geadelte deutsche Buchdruckerfamilie im 16. Und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 37 (1962): 257–71, at 265–68; Alfred Hartmann and Beat Rudolf Jenny, eds., Die Amerbachkorrespondenz, 10 vols. (Basel: Verlag der Universitätas­ bibliothek, 1942–95), 7:177–82.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_014

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In his prefatory letter, Petri deployed a number of humanist flourishes to recommend Robert’s text to his readers: the medieval crusade chronicle should be valued not only for its miraculous rhetorical elegance (what Petri went so far as to term its “Ciceronian splendor”),3 but also for the unwavering faith of its pious monastic author. Petri had been amazed to learn that no edition had yet been printed of the crusade history, which surely deserved to circulate in many thousands of copies.4 After an “ancient” manuscript copy came into his hands, Petri had seized the opportunity to produce the edition that he now offered to the reading public.5 So far, so conventional, but Petri then enlarges on the theme of Robert the Monk’s virtues in an intriguing way. The event the historian describes, the First Crusade, was vitally important, Petri explains, for never before nor since had Christian armies engaged the infidel foe in so serious or decisive a conflict. And yet, despite its triumphant conclusion, the crusade of 1099 could also be understood as merely the start of a much greater war, an enduring conflict (aspondos polemos) between Christendom and Islam that continued down to the present day.6 In this sense, the First Crusade was but the opening chapter in a stilldeveloping story. The victories the crusaders won then were crucially important for the insights they could offer the reader now. At this point, one might expect Petri to expand on the threat posed to Christian Europe by the Ottoman Turks or on recent attempts to launch a new crusade against them. But Petri argues instead that the story of the First Crusade was relevant because it 3 bcp, sig. a2r: “Ciceronianus nitor.” 4 Ibid., sig. a2r: “Porro mirari satis nequeo quod ille Robertus omnino hactenus impressus non fuit, quem oportuit multis millibus exemplaribus evulgari.” Petri was wrong to call his edition the princeps: the text had been printed in Cologne around the year 1472 (Hystoria de itinere contra Turchos ([Cologne: Printer of Dares (Johannes Solidi or Schilling), ca. 1472]), ir00207000). A German translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel appeared in print a decade later: Histori wie die Türcken die cristelichen kirchen angefochten haben (Augsburg: Johann Bämler, 22 Apr. [14]82), ir00208000, on which see Friedrich Kraft, Heinrich Steinhöwels Verdeutschung der Historia Hierosolymitana des Robertus Monachus: Eine Literarhistorische Untersuchung (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1905). 5 bcp, sig. a1r: “ex antiquo et scripto exemplari.” The Historia Iherosolimitana was the most widely copied crusade history of the medieval period, with over eighty manuscripts surviving, nearly half of them dating to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Kempf and Bull, The Historia Iherosolimitana, lxv–lxxiii). Later editors regarded Petri’s edition as poor, Jacques Bongars terming it “depravatissimo” (ibid., xlviiin.132). 6 bcp, sig. a2r: “Neque enim Christiani cum Turcis gesserunt ullum bellum unquam aut gravius, rarissimis fortunae casibus magis varium. Nam susceptum in principio, statim factum est aspondos polemos…”

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offered a glimpse of “the character of the Roman Church of five hundred years ago, what tactics and strategies our ancestors employed against the enemy, and how, by relying on consensus, innocence of life, prayer, and other weapons proper to the Church Militant, they eventually triumphed.”7 Petri’s letter veers away from typical humanist commonplaces on the infidel threat toward a more pointedly ecclesial reading of the medieval crusade text as an exhortation to reform, an illustration of what the church had once been and what the modern institution should aspire to be. Such a “Reformed” reading of crusade history could make sense in the Basel of 1533, only a few years after the Lutheran takeover of the city council and just months before the publication of the Basel Confession.8 But other factors argue against a specifically confessional impetus for the text’s publication.9 Petri presents Robert the Monk’s history as a celebration of the eleventh-century church, the era of Gregorian reform to whose ideals of hierarchical centralization and papal supremacy the First Crusade itself contributed much. This is hardly an obvious epoch to invoke as exemplary to an evangelical audience. Even more surprising, in this context, are the smaller historical texts Petri printed at the end of his edition. These include, first, the Italian humanist Carlo Verardi’s account of the crowning achievement of the Spanish Reconquista, the capture of Granada and expulsion of the Moors by the Catholic kings Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492; second, Christopher Columbus’s letter to those same sovereigns, published the following year, describing the new islands he had discovered in the western sea; third, a recent account of a legation sent by the king of Ethiopia to Pope Clement vii and the king of Portugal, together with an ethnographic essay on Ethiopia and its people; fourth, the Italian humanist 7 Ibid., sig. a2r: “…cuius ingentium incredibiliumque gestorum et factorum cognitionem utilissimam arbitror, et ut videamus quale fuerit ante annos quingentos ecclesiae Romanae ingenium, et ut discamus quibus artibus et rationibus maiores nostri hostem illum tractarint et vicerint, animorum nimirum consensu, vitae innocentia, orationibus, aliisque armis militantis ecclesiae propriis.” 8 Oecolampadius, who oversaw the abolition of the mass in Basel on 9 Feb. 1529, composed a first draft of the confession shortly before his death in 1531. It was revised by Myconius in 1532 and issued by the Basel city council on 21 Jan. 1534: Arthur C. Cochrane, ed., Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2003), 89–90. 9 Ian MacLean notes that over his long career Petri published texts emanating from both sides of the confessional divide, a deliberate move away from the more explicitly Lutheran publishing program his father, Adam Petri, had pursued: Ian MacLean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 142–43. For Petri’s life and career see Hartmann and Jenny, Die Amerbachkorrespondenz, 7:177–82.

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Giambattista Egnazio’s historical essay on the origins of the Turks;10 and fifth and last, Pomponio Leto’s biographical sketch of the life of Muhammad.11 Taken together, the medieval crusade history and the shorter fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, covering events from prehistory to the present day, painted a truly global picture of Christendom’s aspondos polemos: a panorama of enduring conflict and far-flung victory for a church at once militant and triumphant. To understand what Petri intended by publishing this small miscellany of texts, I want to focus on the last piece in the collection, Leto’s life of Muhammad. The topic seems an unlikely one for Leto. The Roman humanist and academician, who had died at the close of the previous century, was renowned in his day as in ours for his antiquarian and philological interests, his fascination with the civilization of ancient Rome, its monuments, inscriptions, and institutions, and with the textual remains of its poets and historians, the more challengingly arcane the better.12 Throughout his career in Rome, but especially after the painful events of 1468, when he and his followers were accused of promoting heresy and conspiracy against the pope, imprisoned, and subjected to torture and disgrace,13 Leto seems to have taken very little interest in political affairs and practically none in the question of contemporary Islam or its significance for Christian Europe. In an age when every self-respecting humanist had a crusade oration or two in his rhetorical repertoire, Leto rather stands out for his lack of interest in the popular contemporary themes of crusade, Islam, or the Turkish threat. So why did he write a life of Muhammad? 10

11 12

13

Listed on the title page, bcp, sig. a1r: “Carolus Verardus, De expugnatione regni Granatae; Christophorus Colom, De prima insularum in mari Indico sitarum lustratione; De legatione regis Aethiopiae ad Clementem pontificem vii ac Regem Portugalliae; item de regno, hominibus, atque moribus eiusdem populi qui Trogloditae hodie esse putantur; Ioannes Baptista Egnatius, De origine Turcarum.” bcp, 146–49. Identified on the title page as “Pomponius Laetus de exortu Maomethis,” the text is headed “Pomponii Laeti de origine Maomethis” at 146. Vladimir Zabughin, Giulio Pomponio Leto: saggio critico, 2 vols. (Rome, 1909); Giovanni Lovito, L’Opera e i tempi di Pomponio Leto (Salerno: Laveglia, 2002); Lovito, Pomponio Leto politico e civile (Salerno: Laveglia, 2005); Pomponio Leto e la prima Accademia Romana, ed. Chiara Cassini and Myriam Chiabò (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2007); Pomponio Leto tra identità locale e cultura internazionale, ed. A. Modigliani, P. Osmond, M. Pade, and J. Ramminger (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2011). Susanna de Beer, “The Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto,” in The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 2:181–218; Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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Pomponio Leto’s Muhammad

A brief survey of Leto’s narrative may help answer the question. Leto’s biography recalls earlier Christian lives of Muhammad but also differs in some important respects. Leto’s “Maometh” was a strikingly handsome Arab boy, born to parents of little account, kidnapped as a young child, and sold into slavery. He was bought by a merchant, “Abdimoneplis,” who treated him more like a son than a slave and set him to work on his caravans, where his looks and charm helped turn handsome profits. A little later, a corrupt Greek monk, Sergius, took refuge with the merchant and, noting the teenager’s talents, was able to “lead him astray.”14 Just what this means is left unclear. Leto next explains that when the merchant died, his widow looked to the monk Sergius for advice. On the monk’s recommendation she took as her new husband the handsome youth Maometh, who now took over the family business. The marriage hit a rocky patch when Maometh began to have epileptic fits, but the canny Sergius again devised a solution, telling Maometh to tell his wife that his fits were in fact ecstasies of divine revelation; not only did she believe him, but she told her friends, and soon Maometh was acting as guru to a large circle of credulous women. If anyone doubted the truth of the young man’s visions, they were silenced by violence, and it was not long before he had gathered a sizable gang of followers about him, a group that eventually became an army. Now the young mystic began to dream of greater things, of political power, military conquest, and imperial domination. Here Leto interjects some editorial comment: Maometh would indeed go on to accomplish enormous things, as everyone knows, but he hardly deserved the credit. For it was not his talent, but rather the negligence of the Romans, that allowed his influence to spread.15 Leto explains: when Maometh’s followers took up arms and stormed out of Arabia into Syria, the Roman emperor Heraclius remained in Constantinople and failed to respond. As a result, the Arabs went from raids to acts of conquest: they seized Roman Damascus, plundered its churches, and turned them into mosques. Next they attacked Sassanian Persia, where, tellingly, the Persians put up more of a fight than the Romans had. What was more, for support in his Persian campaign Maometh appealed to certain Arabs serving in the Roman army whom Heraclius had neglected to pay. The disgruntled men turned on their masters, threw their lot in with Maometh, and helped throw 14 15

bcp, 148: “Maomethi plurimum favens, nactusque iuvenis facilitatem atque promptitudinem, in diversa haud difficulter deduxit.” Ibid.: “Negligentia Caesari Augusti…desidiaque nostrorum, pernitiosa tabes crevit, cui fomentum medicae manus adhibere nequeunt.”

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the entire Roman East into Arab hands. Maometh then negotiated a truce with Heraclius and settled down to “issue laws and be a legislator.”16 Not long after, dissension broke out among his heirs, who conspired to poison him and claim his empire for themselves. Nevertheless, even after his ignominious end, the Arabs went on to conquer Egypt, Africa, and even a good part of Europe— because, time and again, the Romans allowed them to.17

Medieval Precedents

Leto’s portrait of Muhammad owes much to earlier sources. There was a limited supply of details about the life of Muhammad available to Latin Christian writers of the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the same few anecdotes tended to be recycled again and again. Still, there are important differences from earlier traditions that help to clarify Leto’s purpose in tackling this topic in the first place. The medieval Latin Vita of Muhammad was a corpus of material with elements drawn from Byzantine, Syriac, and even early Arabic sources that coalesced in the early twelfth century at the hands of a series of monastic chroniclers of the First Crusade.18 These writers conceived of Islam primarily as a threat to the Christian religion, a spiritual contagion that imperiled the salvation of Christian souls. In their eyes the crusade was a holy war intended to punish heresy and unbelief and to safeguard orthodoxy. To explain the origins of the conflict, it was necessary to understand the origins of the heresy, and it was through this prism that they viewed the figure of Muhammad. The polemical biographies they inserted into their crusade histories emphasized 16 17

18

Ibid., 149: “aperuisseque leges, et fuisse legislatorem.” Ibid.: “Demum desidia Romanorum principum, eo superstitio crevit ut magnitudine eius atque armis perterritus oriens et bona pars Europae, non sine clade et nostra ignominia desciverit.” Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960); K.B. Wolf, “The Earliest Latin Lives of Muhammad,” in Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 89–101; Svetlana Luchitskaja, “The Image of Muhammad in Latin Chronography of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 115–26; John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See also the important work of Kristina Szilágyi, “Muhammad and the Monk: The Making of the Christian Bahira Legend,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 34 (2008): 169–214.

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Muhammad’s status as a heretic who had dared to establish a new superstitio or false creed, inimical to Christian doctrine. This colored how the individual details of his biography were presented. For example, in many medieval biographies, the monk Sergius or Bahira played an important part in the young Muhammad’s life not because he helped the penniless youth arrange an incestuous marriage to his adoptive mother (for in these versions, the widow Khadiga, Muhammad’s first wife, was in no way connected to his childhood household), nor was his role to abet the boy’s later sexual conquests; rather, the monk appears in medieval accounts as a spiritual guide who introduces the young Muhammad to a bastardized miscellany of Jewish and Christian heresies that will form the core of his new religion. Likewise, in the medieval cycle of material, Muhammad tells the clever story explaining away his epileptic fits not to save his marriage, and so his access to his wife’s wealth, but to enhance his status as a religious visionary, to reinforce his claims to spiritual authority, and to command the attention and obedience of his followers. Finally, in the medieval versions, there is far less emphasis on Muhammad’s political and military machinations, military strikes on Damascus and Persia, negotiations with Heraclius, or subsequent “lawgiving and legislation.” Instead, there are longer accounts of other tricks and stunts that Muhammad devised to induce credulous Arabs to believe in him, as well as salacious accounts of the content of his spurious and seductive “law.” In short, twelfth-century Christian writers conceived of Muhammad as a theological villain, a heretic, a corrupter of doctrine, a deceiver of souls; and this is what the details of his life were used to illustrate.

The Humanist Muhammad

The medieval polemical biography of Muhammad had already been revised by humanist historians of Islam writing in the fifteenth century. Leto was not the first scholar of the new learning to try his hand at a pen portrait of the Prophet. In the 1430s, the Milanese humanist Andrea Biglia included an account of Muhammad’s career in his Commentaries on the Decline of the Faith in the East, a monumental history of Eastern Christendom from Constantine to the present day.19 Biglia’s Muhammad shares many of the medieval biographer’s characteristics: humble origins, magnetic charisma, and wily stratagems that seduce his fellow men and command their allegiance. But unlike the twelfth-century 19

Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2008), 169–86.

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figure, Biglia’s Muhammad is a strikingly secular leader. He is above all a cunning politician, who uses the promise of rewards in this world and the next to attract men to his standard. Biglia describes Muhammad as a bandit prince who induced his Arab followers to join him on raids for plunder, amassing wealth and territory until at last he was able openly to challenge Byzantine power. When he did so, his military campaigns were spectacularly successful. Less interested in delineating the dangers or errors of Muhammad’s law, Biglia focused on Muhammad as a political figure. This may be because Biglia’s real interest in writing his history was not the question of the crusade or even Christian history in the general sense. A friend and admirer of Leonardo Bruni, Biglia was interested instead in the story of Rome: how Roman authority had failed in the East and how the survivors had coped in the aftermath of its decline and fall. In his narrative, Muhammad’s seductive brilliance serves mainly to point out the shambling inefficiency of the Byzantine emperors of the seventh century, while the spread of his doctrine is interpreted as a symptom of the moral decline of the Byzantine population. Later readers of Biglia like Flavio Biondo and Francesco Filelfo picked up on this humanist portrait of Muhammad as a brilliant bandit prince, formidable warlord, charismatic speechifier, and thorn in the side of Byzantium, and developed it even further in their histories and crusade orations. In texts written mostly in the aftermath of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Biondo and Filelfo further elaborated Muhammad’s character in a way that made him seem a historical antetype of Osman, founder of the Ottoman dynasty, and another formidable warlord who had eaten away at the Byzantine hinterland while its hapless emperors seemed not to notice.20 Thus their Muhammad, like their Osman, was a political rather than religious figure, a character important for what he revealed about the course of secular political history at a crucial moment in the transition from the ancient to the modern world. Leto’s Maometh has much in common with the Muhammad of Biglia, Biondo, and Filelfo. In fact, the most striking thing about Leto’s Vita, even compared with his humanist predecessors’ works, is its complete lack of theological polemic. Though the story he tells is a familiar one, the way Leto puts it, a reader might never guess that Muhammad was a religious leader at all, that he preached to his followers, composed a sacred text, or held forth on the nature of God and what he calls his creatures to do. Leto certainly does not try to communicate the content of Muhammad’s doctrine nor even to argue against it as the medieval chroniclers do. And yet, despite its neglect of theology, Leto’s 20

Ibid., 186–97.

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biography is still far more hostile and even maliciously comic than that of earlier humanists. Biglia and Biondo had presented Muhammad as a formidable strategist and tactician, one who prudently seized his political moment and whose enterprise and charisma put the faltering Roman Empire to shame. Leto’s Muhammad is something at once worse and rather less than this. Hardly a hero or even an antihero, he is a huckster and a hustler, a handsome boy who used looks and sex appeal to seduce first foster parents, then neighborhood women, and finally the entire Arab nation, not out of religious zeal or even demented self-delusion but rather out of sheer lust for power, the pleasure of manipulating others to his will. Why should Leto’s Muhammad present this way? Could this mocking, salacious biography owe more to the scornful tradition of medieval polemic than first appears? It seems hard to square such an interpretation with Leto’s own apparent lack of concern for the question of contemporary Islam. Since he was neither a theological apologist nor a crusade propagandist, why set his sights on Muhammad at all? At this point, it is worth returning to the point I made at the start, to wit, that this is a text that never was. Leto never wrote a standalone tract on the life of Muhammad. What Heinrich Petri published in 1533 was in fact an extract from Leto’s far longer Compendium of Roman History. Indeed, the text Petri published in 1533 was not just the life of Muhammad (despite the title Petri gave it) but, rather, the full text of Leto’s life of Heraclius, in which the life of Muhammad was embedded as an extended digression.21

Muhammad and Rome

It is only in the context of Leto’s Compendium that we can understand the peculiar complexion of his Muhammad. The Compendium treats the history of the late Roman Empire, from the death of Gordian ii in 238 ce to the end of the Heraclian dynasty in the late seventh century. It is divided into two books, the first derived quite closely from the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, which Leto follows all the way to the end of that text with the death of Numerianus in 284. 21

On Leto’s Compendium, first printed in Venice in 1499, see Zabughin, Giulio Pomponio Leto, 2:223–38; Francesca Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium di Pomponio Leto dedicato a Francesco Borgia,” in Principato ecclesiastico e riuso dei classici, ed. D. Canfora, M. Chiabò, and M. de Nichilo (Rome: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Direzione generale per gli archivi, 2002), 321–54; Niutta, “Fortune e sfortune del Romanae historiae compendium di Pomponio Leto. Con notizie su alcuni codici,” in Modigliani et al., Pomponio Leto tra identità locale e cultura internazionale, 137–60.

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The second book of the Compendium, based on Leto’s own researches into other Late Antique sources, covers imperial reigns from Diocletian to the first deposition of Justinian ii (i.e., 284–695).22 The life of Muhammad appears close to the end of this second book, inserted into the life of Heraclius. Like the Historia Augusta from which he borrowed so much of his material, Leto’s Compendium is essentially a work of imperial biography. He himself, in a letter to his onetime pupil Marcantonio Sabellico, referred to the work as his “Caesars.”23 The Historia Augusta is unique among Roman imperial histories in presenting the lives not just of the emperors, but also of their heirs, imperial colleagues, and rivals for the throne. There are no lives of non-Roman rulers in the Historia Augusta, so as Leto embarked on a continuation of that text he had no exact precedent for inserting a digression on an Arab “legislator” like Muhammad, but the expansive nature of the source text surely suited Leto’s own digressive sensibilities. Indeed, in the second book of the Compendium, as Leto carries on after the Historia Augusta gives out, his attention wanders even further from the core project of imperial biography. Here we find short excurses on a variety of topics including the size of the Roman Empire under Diocletian (it was at this moment, Leto declares, that the imperium reached its greatest extent); a description of Diocletian’s triumphs; and a history of the very institution of the triumph, which Leto traces back to the Etruscans and the early days of the Roman Republic.24 Later, there are brief remarks on the religious duties of Roman generals and transcriptions of inscriptions found in Rome recording the triumphs accorded to various commanders;25 later still is inserted a short essay on the division of the Roman Empire between east and west;26 and last, just before the book’s close, the digression on the life of Muhammad.27 Without reading too much into these digressions and excurses, certainly one important theme can be identified: the inexorable decline of Rome from the third century on.28 The empire reached its greatest size under Diocletian, 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

Leto calls him Justin ii, though Lovito, L’Opera e i tempi di Pomponio Leto, maintains that he really meant Justin ii, who died in 574, and that he tacked on the life of Muhammad as a much later postscript. On humanist appropriations of the Historia Augusta: J.P. Callu and O. Desbordes, “Le ‘Quattrocento’ de l’Histoire Auguste,” Revue d’histoire des textes 19 (1989): 253–75. Pomponio Leto, Romanae historiae compendium ab interitu Gordiani iunioris usque ad Iustinum iii (Venice: Bernardinus de Vitalibus, 23 April 1499), il00024000, sigs. d3r–e1v. Ibid., sigs. e1v–e4r. Ibid., sig. g4r–v. Ibid., sigs. o3r–o4r. Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium,” 353.

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who was also the most victorious and successful general in its history. But there were already signs of corruption in the body politic: certain aspects of Diocletian’s triumphs seemed almost Oriental in their ostentation and in their elevation of the emperor to godlike status, a departure from the sober traditions of archaic protocol. The division of the empire between east and west further contributed to its Orientalization, and therefore to its decline. And this decline found its lowest point in the Heraclian dynasty, with which Leto’s Compendium concludes. Indeed, in Leto’s telling, while the rise of Muhammad was the worst of the family’s (and empire’s) many seventh-century misfortunes, it was by no means the only one. The digressive character of the original Historia Augusta, along with Leto’s tendency to use those digressions to underscore a theme of imperial decline, helps to account for the presence of Muhammad in the Compendium. Another key factor is the Historia Augusta’s peculiar historiographical tone. The work (which is attributed to six obscure Late Antique writers, and probably written by none of them) has long been a subject of scholarly curiosity; each imperial life is packed with gossipy detail, so salacious in parts that later scholars have wondered whether the whole should be read as satire and not serious history.29 In his second book, even after the material from the Historia Augusta has run out, Leto continues in this sensational vein, including prurient details of imperial decadence and bad behavior wherever possible. His Heraclius starts out well, winning battles over the Persians and bringing home the True Cross to Constantinople in a lavish triumph. But late in life he becomes corrupt, first falling into the Monothelite heresy, then entering into an incestuous marriage with his niece, and finally developing a grotesque medical condition, a permanent erection that renders him incapable of urinating unless directly up into his own face.30 It’s from this last complaint that he eventually dies an agonizing 29

30

Arnaldo Momigliano, “An Unsolved Problem of Historical Forgery: The Scriptores Historiae Augustae,” in his Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 143–80; John F. Matthews, “Historia Augusta,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, 3rd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 713–14. bcp, 147: “Ferunt hydropisi occubuisse. Alii scribunt novo cladis genere, testium folliculo sursum verso, simul cum virile membro et semper tento adeo ut quoties meieret, nisi tabula umbilico admota prohibente, vultum lotio sparsisset.” These gruesome details, which Leto derived from Zonaras (Ioanis Zonarae Epitomae historiarum, ed. M. Pinder and T. Büttner-Wobst, 3 vols. [Bonn, 1841–97], 3:215–16 = 14.17.24–27), can be traced back to the Chronicon of George Hamartolos (Patrologiae cursus completus, series graecolatina, ed. J.P. Migne, 161 vols. [Paris, 1857–66], 110, col. 836) and the twenty-seventh chapter of the Short History of Nikephoros the Patriarch (ed. Cyril Mango [Washington, dc:

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death. Heraclius’s heirs fare no better. Constantinus iii is poisoned by his stepmother, Martina (Heraclius’s niece and therefore Constantinus’s own cousin). She seizes the throne for her twelve-year-old son Heraclonas, but the Senate quickly deposes them both, cutting out the mother’s tongue and slicing off her young son’s nose. Rapacious Constans ii visits Rome only to strip the precious metal coating off the dome of the Pantheon, an insult that the antiquarian Leto especially deplores;31 later he is murdered in his bath. Justinian ii, the last Heraclian, is deposed by one of his generals. He too has his nose slit and dies in disgrace. Few of these imperial figures had good reputations to begin with, but it is worth pointing out that Heraclius, at least, was a figure whom medieval tradition had revered. The twelfth-century historian William of Tyre describes Heraclius as a kind of proto-crusader leading Christian armies into battle against the infidel foe.32 The thirteenth-century Golden Legend follows this line, presenting Heraclius as a holy warrior who defeats the pagan armies of Persia and restores the True Cross to Jerusalem with pious humility, prefiguring Frankish campaigns to recover the same sacred spaces some five centuries ­later.33 This is how Heraclius is depicted in contemporary Italian iconography of the True Cross, from Agnolo Gaddi’s fourteenth-century frescoes in Santa Croce in Florence to Piero della Francesca’s True Cross cycle in San Francesco in Arezzo, completed just after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, to Antoniazzo Romano’s apse fresco in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, completed at almost exactly the same moment that Leto composed his text.34

31 32 33

34

Dumbarton Oaks, 1990], 77). Most Byzantine historians described Heraclius’s ailment as divine retribution for his incestuous marriage to his niece, Martina. See Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 289–90. For a possible diagnosis: J. Lascaratos et al., “The First Case of Epispadias: An Unknown Disease of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (610–641 a.d.),” British Journal of Urology 76 (1995): 380–83. Though Leto’s sources describe these tiles as bronze, he calls them silver. William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R.B.C. Huygens, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 1:1–2; Kaegi, Heraclius, 3–4. Jacopus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 554–59; Stephan Borgehammar, “Heraclius Learns Humility: Two Early Latin Accounts Composed for the Celebration of Exaltatio Crucis,” Millenium: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr. 6 (2009): 145–201; Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden: Brill, 2004). The fresco at Santa Croce was completed between 1492 and 1495: Francesca Cappelletti, “L’affresco nel catino absidale di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme a Roma,” Storia dell’Arte 66 (1989): 119–26; Meredith J. Gill, “Antoniazzo Romano and the Recovery of Jerusalem in

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Leto engineers a total transformation. He draws his information from Paul the Deacon and the eleventh-century Byzantine Compendium of Johannes Zonaras, but selects only the details that show Heraclius in a negative light.35 He plays down Heraclius’s victories over the Persians, for instance, and records his repatriation of the True Cross to Jerusalem as little more than a curious variation in the usual order of an imperial triumph.36 Leto seems more concerned to present both the emperor and his posterity as emblems of decadence and decline. Leto’s Muhammad, then, can be read as a sort of blackly comic counterpoint to this Heraclius, the emperor’s equal in moral and political degeneracy. Incest, disease, poison, and desecration haunt the halls of both princes. Muhammad seduces his stepmother; Heraclius marries his niece. Muhammad falls into epileptic fits that threaten his marriage; Heraclius wrestles with agonizing pains in his privates that have much the same effect. Muhammad sacks Byzantine Damascus, turning its ancient church into a mosque; Heraclius’s heir desecrates the Pantheon by stripping it of its silver roof. Muhammad’s heirs poison him to get their hands on his domains; Heraclius’s own heir, Constantine iii, is poisoned by his stepmother, and two more successors lose their noses. Heraclius and Muhammad together serve up a grotesque tale of decline and fall, the end of empire, the passing of ancient virtue from the world. What is more, unlike previous humanist writers like Biglia and Biondo, who rehearsed the story of Rome’s decline in hopes of inspiring contemporary Italians to reclaim the virtues of their ancient forebears, in Leto’s view the fall of Rome was irreversible. There is no sense that Rome might rise again after this sordid final chapter, no Petrarchan hope for renovation or rebirth. Rather, the Heraclians represent a tragic last act in the drama of the ancient imperium. With the fall of the noseless Justinian ii, Leto’s story (and by implication, the empire itself) arrives at its ignominious end.37

35 36

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Late Fifteenth-Century Rome,” Storia dell’Arte 83 (1995): 28–47. Kaegi, Heraclius, 4, also notes a pair of bronze portrait medals of Heraclius and Constantine dating to the early part of the fifteenth century. For Leto’s sources for this section: Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium,” 348–51. bcp, 147–48. Leto presents Heraclius’s choice to go to war with Persia as one made at the expense of other pressing crises (i.e., the need to recover territory lost to barbarians in North Africa and Europe). Regarding Heraclius’s return of the True Cross to Jerusalem, Leto notes only the ceremony’s divergence from customary triumphal practice: “Dux purpuratus aureo invectus curru, non lauream manu, sed lignum crucis tenens.” bcp, 149. Leto ends with Justinian’s ouster in 695, although he regained the throne in 705 and ruled another six years till his death in 711. Leto offers no real conclusion to the work,

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The Afterlife of Leto’s “Caesars”

Leto’s curious text had an even more curious fortuna.38 In the spring of 1497, Leto sent the manuscript of the Compendium to his friend and former pupil Marcantonio Sabellico in Venice, then employed as the state historian of the Republic. Leto asked Sabellico to correct the text,39 but in his biography of Leto, which he published together with the editio princeps of the Compendium in 1499, Sabellico dutifully says the work was so elegant he changed hardly a word.40 But his regard for the text seems not to have extended to the excursus on Muhammad: Sabellico borrowed much from the Compendium for his own Enneads of world history, published in two volumes in 1498 and 1504, but his treatment of Muhammad in the second volume of that work owes almost nothing to Leto. He seems to have found other, more traditional accounts either more reliable or more compelling.41 Another early manuscript of the Compendium made its way to the Nürnberg humanist Hartmann Schedel, who made a copy for himself in 1497. Schedel’s transcript omits the excursus on Muhammad entirely. It is possible that it was lacking in his source copy, but equally possible that Schedel found it distasteful or simply baffling.42 Leto’s life of Muhammad had greater success in later years.43 The Volterran humanist Raffaele Maffei borrowed a number of details from Leto’s account although he notes that the Heraclian Dynasty produced more emperors—six in total— than any other in Roman history. 38 See Niutta, “Fortune e sfortune,” 155–57; Johann Ramminger, “Pomponio Leto’s Nachleben: A Phantom in Need of Research?” in Modigliani et al., Pomponio Leto tra identità locale e cultura internazionale, 237–50, at 239–41. 39 Marcantonio Sabellico, Opera (Venice, 1502), fol. 46v. 40 Leto, Romanae historiae compendium, sig. p1r-v; Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium,” 321–24. 41 Marcantonio Sabellico, Enneades (Venice, 1504), sigs. eee7r–fff1r. Sabellico tells the story of Muhammad and Heraclius in several discrete sections, interspersed with other narratives of Venetian, Lombard, Frankish, and papal history. Sabellico’s Muhammad is not at all the same as Leto’s: he is raised by his parents and it is they who give him his heretical ideas, e.g., while his Heraclius dies of an unsensational case of dropsy. 42 ms Munich, Bayerische Stadtsbibliothek lat. 528. Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium,” 329–30, suggests that Schedel used an early redaction of the text copied out before Leto added the excursus on Muhammad. ms Glasgow University Library, Hunter 344, also omits the life (ibid., 146–49). The two other complete manuscripts, mss bav lat. 10936 and Boncampagni F.2, both include the excursus, as do all the printed editions. A fifth manuscript (ms Torino, Biblioteca nazionale I.iii.13) contains only the antiquarian excurses from the reign of Diocletian. 43 The Compendium, including the excursus on Muhammad, was reprinted at least twice in Venice and once in Paris in the first decade of the sixteenth century and was also included

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for the entry on Saracens that he included in his encyclopedic Commentaries, published in 1506.44 In 1516, Sabellico’s pupil Giambattista Egnazio drew directly from Leto’s life, sometimes copying word for word, in the excursus on Muhammad he included in his De Caesaribus, his rapid survey of imperial history from the reign of Julius Caesar to the contemporary Holy Roman emperor Maximilian.45 Like Leto, Egnazio intersperses his lives of emperors with excurses: in Egnazio’s case, ethnographical essays on the main threats to their authority at various historical turning points. In his first book, on the ancient empire, for example, he includes digressions on the Parthians and Goths, drawing the book to a close with a separate chapter on Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410.46 Egnazio’s second book covers Roman and Byzantine emperors from 410 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Like Leto, Egnazio folds his digression on the life of Muhammad into his chapter on Heraclius, borrowing much from Leto on both characters.47 At the end of this book, after his chapter on Constantine xi Paleologus, he adds a long excursus on the fall of Constantinople and the origins of the Turks (this last would be excerpted numerous times as a stand-alone essay in later sixteenth-century collections of Turcica, and appears as well in Petri’s 1533 edition of Robert the Monk).48 Egnazio’s third book then traces the history of the western empire from Charlemagne to Maximilian. Egnazio used Leto’s material, but his concept of imperial history was far closer to that of earlier humanists like Biglia and Biondo. He organizes the story of the ancient emperors and their Byzantine successors in such a way that each book concludes with an excursus on a barbarian sack of the capital (first Rome, then Constantinople), in order to inspire their present-day Western heirs to defend their realm against the great barbarian threat of their own day, the Ottoman Turks. Two years later, the German humanist Johannes Cuspinian went Egnazio one better. In his De Caesaribus (composed 1512–22 but not published till 1540), Cuspinian treats the same range of imperial history as Egnazio (Caesar to Maximilian) but rearranges the material in such a way that he surveys

44

45 46 47 48

in Leto’s Opera omnia of 1515. It also appears as an appendix to Erasmus’s 1518 edition of Suetonius: Niutta, “Il Romanae historiae compendium,” 324. Raffaele Maffei, Commentariorum urbanorum libri xxxviii (Rome, 1506), fol. 159v. The excursus on Muhammad is included in a section on the geography of Arabia Triplex. Maffei treats Heraclius separately, in his section on Roman emperors, but does not include Leto’s account of the emperor’s death, preferring instead to say he died of dropsy (ibid., fol. 331v: “periit intercutis morbo”). Giovanni Battista Egnazio, De Caesaribus libri iii a dictatore Caesare ad Constantinum Palaeologum, hinc à Carolo Magno ad Maximilianum Caesarem (Venice, 1516). Ibid., sigs. Ab8r–Bc1r (Parthians), Cd3r–Cd4rv (De captivitate Romae). Ibid., sig. De1r–v. Ibid., sigs. Fg4v–Fg8r.

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the entire history of the emperors from Caesar to Constantine xi Palaeologus, last emperor of Byzantium, without interruption.49 It is only then, after 1453, that he includes an excursus on all of Islamic history, ostensibly intended to explain how Constantinople fell, including essays on the origins of the Turks, the life of Muhammad (drawn from Leto as well as other sources), the lives of the Ottoman sultans, and brief surveys of Ottoman government, military culture, religious practices, and domestic habits, and the geography of the lower Balkans. The excursus, nearly ninety folio pages long, concludes with an exhortation to crusade; Cuspinian then returns to his original theme of imperial biography with a final chapter on the life of Maximilian.50 Cuspinian’s long excursus on matters Islamic has the effect of elevating the significance of Maximilian’s career: here is the historical figure who will solve not only the current geopolitical problem of the Ottoman Turks but also, by extension, the original crisis created by Muhammad some eight centuries before. Cuspinian sets Muhammad and Maximilian against one another as epic rivals across the centuries, the former posing a challenge that only the latter can defeat. And, by concentrating all his facts on Arabs and Turks in one place, Cuspinian can make his digression even more digressive, including passages of an almost ethnographic quality on Ottoman political, military, religious, and social institutions. Cuspinian’s chapters on these topics, which he says he derived from conversations with diplomats and travelers with firsthand experience of Ottoman society, constitute a move away from a purely historical concern with reconstructing the Islamic past toward a more practical as well as a more entertaining perspective on the Islamic present: a shift toward a more anthropological or even journalistic mode of encountering the Ottoman other. And this brings us back to Heinrich Petri’s 1533 edition of Robert the Monk and the question of what Leto’s Life of Muhammad is doing there. Despite Petri’s pious remarks on how reading crusade history could inspire thoughts of modern-day reform, in many ways his miscellany of historical and travel writing is closer in spirit to the anthropological work of Cuspinian than to any of the other historians I have touched on in this essay. Petri’s miscellany is ostensibly a story of infidel challengers to Christian authority (whether the historical 49 50

Johannes Cuspinian, De Caesaribus atque imperatoribus Romanis opus insigne, 2 vols. (Strassburg, 1541). Ibid.: the section on Constantine xi (whom Cuspinian calls “Octavus”) concludes at 2:638 and is followed immediately by chapters “De Turcorum origine” (2:638–42), “De Machometo Saracenorum phylarcho et pseudopropheta” (2:642–49), “De origine Othomannorum” (2:649–96), the several ethnographic and geographical chapters (2.697– 722), crusade exhortations (2:722–23), and last, the life of Maximilian at 2:724–62.

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Muhammad, the primordial Turks, or the Saracens of the First Crusade) and Christian triumph in far-flung places (from Granada to the West Indies to Ethiopia). But Petri likely assembled these texts for another, equally compelling reason, namely their entertainment value. Sixteenth-century readers found the Islamic East both threatening and fascinating, a site of exotic encounters, long distant in time or space or both, that were every bit as fascinating as the stories retailed by New World explorers or exotic emissaries from Oriental courts. Leto’s Muhammad, sensational, grotesque, and entertaining as he was, well suited this shift in perspective from the polemical to the picaresque.51

51

Nevertheless, as Johann Ramminger points out, Leto’s Muhammad was also invoked in the 1584 Rituale Sanctorum Romanum in a section on the conversion of the infidels: Ramminger, “Pomponio Leto’s Nachleben,” 241.

chapter 14

Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding Arnoud Visser*

Introduction: “Ego non sum candidus lector, nec tu candidus scriptor”

Martin Luther was not a benevolent reader of Erasmus, as can be seen by his handwritten notes in the margins of his personal copy of the Annotations on the New Testament.1 Even when he was reading about cheerfully singing angels (Luke 2:13–14) Luther’s mood easily soured. The irritation, in this case, was prompted not so much by what Erasmus had to say about the angelic choir and its message to the frightened shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem. “Glory to God in the highest,” reads the Vulgate version, “and on earth peace to men of goodwill.” Erasmus offered thoughtful reflections on the meaning of “goodwill” (εὐδοκία) and suggested correcting the punctuation to emphasize that both peace and goodwill were gifts from God, rather than human responses.2 Luther duly summarized the humanist’s comment, but what irritated him was Erasmus’s playful tone. At the end of his comment on goodwill Erasmus called on the benevolence of his “kind reader” to agree with him that his explanation * I am grateful to Hans Trapman for critical comments and to James Gibbons for correcting the English. All remaining errors are my own. 1 The volume consists of two parts: Novum Testamentum, ex Erasmi Roterodami recognitione… (Basel: J. Froben, 1527), hereafter cited as Luther’s nt i, and Des. Erasmi Roterodami in Novum Testamentum annotationes… (Basel: J. Froben, 1527), hereafter cited as Luther’s nt ii. The copy is kept in the University Library of Groningen, shelf mark hs 494. The book is fully accessible online on Annotated Books Online, at http://abo.annotatedbooksonline .com/#binding-52-1. Luther’s marginalia have been published in D. Martin Luther’s Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, hereafter cited as wa, vol. 60 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1980), 193–228. Alongside the introduction in wa, C.P. Hofstede de Groot’s extensive description of the marginalia is still useful: “Luther in seiner Studierstube (Über ein Handexemplar Luthers von Erasmus’ Neuem Testament),” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 56 (1884): 325–59. See also J. Kingma, De Groningse Luther-Bijbel: Tentoonstelling rond Luthers exemplaar van Erasmus’ Nieuwe Testament, Basel 1527 (Groningen: Universiteitbibliotheek & Universiteitsmuseum, 1983). 2 Luther’s nt ii, 155–56; see also the modern critical edition of the work, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami…, 6:5, ed. P.F. Hovingh (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000), 476–80. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_015

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Figure 14.1 Luther’s nt ii, 156: Luther describes himself as “not a kind reader,” in an irritated response to Erasmus. Photo reprinted with permission of Groningen University Library

sufficed. For such cheeky politeness Luther had little patience: “I am not a kind reader,” he added in Latin in the margin, “and you are not a kind writer” (see fig. 14.1).3 Luther’s well-known antipathy to Erasmus is evident throughout the margins of this copy. Instead of practicing the principle of charity and striving to discern the most convincing meaning, he frequently read Erasmus’s work against the grain, or with downright hostility. The marginalia vividly show which particular Erasmian arguments triggered Luther’s ire.4 Ink marks on 3 Luther’s nt ii, 156: “Ego non sum Candidus Lector, Nec tu candidus scriptor.” 4 For Luther’s criticism of Erasmus, see also Cornelis Augustijn, “Erasmus und seine Theologie: Hatte Luther recht?” in Augustijn, Erasmus der Humanist als Theologe und Kirchenreformer (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 293–310.

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pages opposite to those with heated notes reveal how Luther on some occasions closed the book without even waiting for the ink to dry.5 Yet apart from documenting animosity, this annotated copy of the New Testament is also interesting from another perspective. It shows the reformer’s remarkable ambivalence about reading Erasmus’s work, ranging from genuine interest in understanding the text to explicit ill will and misinterpretation. This ambivalence can illuminate an important issue raised by religious reading practices: the implications of reverence for textual understanding. In what ways, we may wonder, does respect affect the scholarly interpretations of texts, and especially those texts regarded as sacred? This essay will explore this larger issue through the lens of Luther’s marginalia in Erasmus’s Annotations. It will consider in particular the role of humor in this regard, analyzing Luther’s criticism of what he perceived as Erasmus’s malicious mockery. It will argue that humor served as a pretext for Luther to read between the lines, enabling him in particular to project into the text his suspicions of Erasmus’s skepticism and unbelief. This essay is meant to contribute to a richer understanding of early modern reading practices by exploring the impact of religious reverence on the interpretation of texts. Marginal annotations offer unique evidence in this regard, a matter that has increasingly been taken into account in modern scholarship. In the past three decades, historians of reading have delineated a wide variety of reading styles among the literate of early modern Europe.6 The readers of 5 E.g., Luther’s nt ii, 138, note to Mark 15:44: “Das dich, du Bube. Sic non esset mortuus”; and 157, note to Luke 2:23: “Du bube.” In both cases the closing of the book left ink traces on the facing pages. First pointed out by Hofstede de Groot, “Luther in seiner Studierstube,” 339, 341. 6 The literature in this field is vast; a few key examples are, in chronological order: Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111 (1982): 65–83; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78; Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourtheenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994); Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102–24; James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandlebrote (New Castle, de: Oak Knoll, 2005),

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the past clearly did not always behave as modern historians might expect them to. The same texts could be read in different and in unpredictable ways, ranging in scope and intensity as well as in the forms in which the act of reading took place (silent or aloud, alone or in company). Although the text as well as the medium determined reading to some extent, individual readers had considerable freedom in handling their books. They could decide to put their reading to different uses. For religious literature these uses would appear to be more focused. While religious reading practices have received relatively less attention than other modes of reading, recent studies of biblical reading practices have confirmed the central role of devotion. Marks of users show how early modern Bibles were treasured as sacred objects, preserved within families for generations, but were also read with great intensity.7 And yet, while devotion was pervasive, there were also other uses: scholarly forms of attention, memory practices (marking ownership and familial identity), polemical notes. The protracted religious conflicts in the wake of the Reformation had rendered many parts of the Bible contested, prompting some readers to express their respect for the biblical text via hostile jibes at opponents. Combining these contexts, Martin Luther’s annotated Bible is a unique object: it shows us the biblical scholar and the outspoken reformer, the pious believer and the irascible polemicist. Since Luther’s life is so well documented, moreover, the book can be situated precisely within his religious and intellectual development. Luther’s copy of the 1527 edition probably became part of his library in 1528, the year indicated in one of the medallion portraits on the German blindtooled binding (see fig. 14.2).8 So when Luther acquired the book, he was in his mid-forties. It was six years since he had completed a translation of the New Testament into German (1522), in close collaboration with a small group of learned colleagues: Philip Melanchthon, Johann Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Fred Schurink and Jennifer Richards, “The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010): 345–61. 7 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 71–86 (for Bible reading) and 87–109 (on devotional reading practices); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79. 8 wa 60:193.

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Title page of Luther’s copy of Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament (Basel: J. Froben, 1527), with notes in several hands, none of them Luther’s. Photo reprinted with permission of Groningen University Library

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Matthäus Aurogallus, and Caspar Cruciger—his Sanhedrin of experts, as he called them.9 For this project he had made extensive use of the 1519 edition of Erasmus’s New Testament (his copy of which is not preserved). Still more recent was his clash with Erasmus over the issue of human free will, which had begun with Erasmus’s De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (1524), prompting Luther’s response, De servo arbitrio (1525), and Erasmus’s extensive reply, Hyperaspistes i–ii (1526–27). Luther probably used his copy of Erasmus’s New Testament over a longer stretch of time. His more than two hundred handwritten annotations should thus be placed in the context of Luther’s activities in the late 1520s and 1530s. After Luther’s death in 1546 the book became a kind of relic for the learned. Its provenance history, as documented on the flyleaves, shows that the book was treasured as an intimate document of Luther’s devotion to the Bible. His sons gave the book to the Reformed East Frisian nobleman Unico Manninga (1529–88), who was enrolled as a student at Wittenberg in 1548–49. Manninga made a respectful note on the paste-down endpaper, dated 1550.10 The next owner was Christophorus van Ewsum (1523–83), a learned nobleman and book collector with Anabaptist sympathies, who gave it to the Groningen humanist Regnerus Praedinius in 1555, as the latter noted on the same page of the book.11 Praedinius used the book for his own biblical studies. He enriched the margins of many pages with extensive comments, written in his characteristic angular hand. He also dared to enter into discussion with Luther, frequently countering Luther’s more aggressive remarks with polite rebukes and defenses of Erasmus.12 9

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See Johann Mathesius, Predigten… über die Historien von des ehrwürdigen, in Gott seligen, theuren Manns Gottes, Doktor Martin Luthers Anfang, Lehre, Leben Und Sterben…, ed. Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Berlin: In der Maurerschen Buchhandlung, 1817), 57. See note on paste-down endpaper at the end of the copy: “Unico Manningha anno salutis 1550. Hunc librum a filiis D. Mart. Lutheri Wittenbergae dono datum accepi, quem Lutherus (piae memoriae) propria manu conscripsit.” Note by Praedinius on paste-down endpaper at the end of the copy: “Ab Uncone vero Manningha iam in patriam reverso postquam accepisset D. Christophorus ab Eusum, mihi porro dono dedit. 1555. Reg[nerus] Praed[inius].” For Praedinius, see also Folkert Postma, “Regnerus Praedinius (1510–1559), seine Schule und sein Einfluss,” in Wessel Gansfort (1419–1489) and Northern Humanism, ed. F. Akkerman, G.C. Huisman, and A.J. Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 291–324. wa 60:194 points out that many of Praedinius’s comments are reprinted literally in Joannes Acronius’s edition of Praedinius’s Opera omnia (Basel: J. Oporinus, 1563). See also J.J. Diest Lorgion, Verhandeling over Regnerus Praedinius (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1862), 94–96.

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It is unclear who owned the copy after Praedinius. We can say with certainty that it was acquired in 1666 by the minister and biblical scholar Salomon van Til (1643–1713), later professor of theology at the University of Leiden. After van Til’s death Albert Alberthoma, at that time a minister in Leiden, bought the book. As indicated in a note on one of the flyleaves of the book, Alberthoma bequeathed it to the library of the university of his hometown, Groningen, where it has remained ever since.

“Man můß mit der feder da sein”: How Luther Annotated

Luther was ambivalent about theological reading. He thought that commentaries in particular, although they were a helpful instrument for spreading the faith, could easily become a burden. Their sheer volume might prevent people from reading the Bible itself. So when asked if he would permit his collected works to be published, he roundly rejected the idea: I will never agree to such a plan of yours. I would rather have all my books be lost and only the Holy Bible be read. Otherwise we will rely on writing and let the Bible go. [Johannes] Brenz wrote such a big commentary on twelve chapters of Luke that it disgusts the reader to look into it. The same is true of [my] commentary on Galatians. I wonder who encourages this mania for writing! Who wants to buy such stout tomes? And if they are bought, who will read them? And if they are read, who will be edified by them?13 Especially the last criterion, edification, was key to Luther. The value of reading depended on the quality of what was read, as he explained in a preface to Wenzeslaus Link’s 1543 edition of the Old Testament. Those who complained 13

wa, Tischreden 4, no. 4025 (29 Sept 1538): “Ego nunquam consentiam in hoc vestrum cogitatum; mallem omnes meos libros perire et tantum sacram bibliam legi. Wir werden mit solcher weiss auff das schreiben geratten und die biblia lassen faren. Nam et Brentius super 12 capita Lucae tantum commentarium fecit, ut pigeat lectorem inspicere. Talis quoque est commentarius in Galathas. Miror, quis illos tantos efficiat rhetores! Quis vult tanta volumina emere? Etiamsi emat, quis legat? Etiamsi legantur, quis aedificatur ex illis?” English trans. cited by Timothy F. Lull, “Luther’s Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39–61, at 40; trans. from Luther’s Works, vol. 54 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 311 (slightly adapted).

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that there were too many books for them all to be read were right, he argued, recalling the warning in Ecclesiastes against the “making of many books” (Eccles. 12:12). But this caution was applied to unworthy books, a category that included his own works. The authors of such books did not illuminate scripture and praise God’s name, but instead promoted “their own names,” in order to “come for sale on the market and become famous.” Luther compared these books to the not-yet-ripe fruit that falls from the trees and serves as food for the pigs. Of good books, however, “there have never been too many.” Reading the Bible, therefore, is always conducive to religious learning; indeed, it is a sacred task.14 And such reading should be more than the mere absorption of text. Like other educationists of his time Luther emphasized the importance of writing while reading: “One should have the quill at hand and note down what struck one in particular while reading, so that one can mark and retain it” (see fig. 14.3).15 So what can Luther’s copy of Erasmus’s commentary tell us about his own reading practices? First, the traces of use indicate that he continued to take an active interest in Erasmus’s work even after his acrimonious clash with the humanist in the mid-1520s. It has been clear that particularly the 1519 edition of Erasmus’s commentary was an important source for Luther’s biblical scholarship, including his translation of the New Testament in 1521–22.16 This copy shows that Luther kept track of the later edition of Erasmus’s work despite his strong antipathy toward the author and ambivalent feelings about his 14

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wa 54:3: “Das aber etlich sagen, wiewol auch Salomon selbs sagt, Eccl. am letsten: [12:12] des buecher schreibens ist zuvil, wer kan sy all lesen? Jst recht und wol geredt, soll aber verstanden werden von meinen und meins gleichen unzeyttigen buechern, die eyntweders noch nitt gnůg gelert und erfaren seind oder nit den nammen des Herren (wie Mose), sunder jhren eygnen nammen preisen woellen, nitt dahin sehen, wie die Kirch jhrer leer gebessert oder die schrifft verklaeret werde, sundern wie sy da moegen auff dem marckt feyl stehn unnd gerhuempt werden. Welchen es zuletst geht wie dem unzeyttigen obs, welches unter den beümen die sew fressen, ehe es halb reiff wirt, wie wir dise dreissig jar seer vil buecher gesehen, deren doch keins mehr inn gedaechtniß oder vorhanden ist. Der gůten buecher aber ist noch nie keyn mal zuvil gewesen und [Joh. 5:39] noch nit.” “Nun kan sollich forschen und lesen nit gschehen, man můß mit der feder da sein und auffzeychnen, was jm under dem lesen und studieren sunderlich eyngeben ist, das ers mercken und behalten künde.” Albert Rabil, Jr., Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 1993), 160–61. For Erasmus’s influence on Luther’s biblical exegesis, see also Cornelis Augustijn, “Erasmus von Rotterdam im Galaterkommentar Luthers von 1519,” Luther-Jahrbuch 49 (1982): 115–32; Johannes Kunze, Erasmus und Luther: der Einfluss des Erasmus auf die Kommentierung des Galaterbriefes und der Psalmen durch Luther, 1519–1521 (Münster: lit, 2000).

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Luther’s nt ii, 430: a pointing finger drawn by Luther to mark a passage in Erasmus’s comment to 1 Corinthians 7 about the need for parental consent in marriage. Photo reprinted with permission of Groningen University Library

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approach. A later reflection on the work, dating from 1540, captures these mixed feelings well. “Nowadays almost everyone knows Greek,” Luther remarked when asked for his opinion of Erasmus’s Annotations. “At first it was a good book, although he is often devious in it.”17 As for the scope of his reading, the copy provides a somewhat puzzling picture. Luther annotated his book very unevenly. Striking is the near absence of notes to the text of the New Testament. Only three pages in this part are annotated, all regarding Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. The majority of Luther’s notes appear in Erasmus’s commentary in the second part. Here, Luther made annotations on ninety pages in total, in Latin, German, and, occasionally, Greek or Hebrew.18 The books that Luther annotated substantially are Luke (twelve pages), John (nine pages), the Acts of the Apostles (eight pages), Corinthians (thirteen pages), Timothy (four pages), Hebrews (three pages), and, most heavily, Ephesians, which is densely annotated on twenty pages. Excluding nonverbal marks, such as underlining and vertical lines or accolades in the margins, the distribution of notes reveals two interesting features. First, there is a remarkable absence of notes in areas that one might have expected Luther to read with particular interest. Thus, we find only two minor notes in the margins of Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the Table Talk we see Luther using Erasmus’s comment to John 20:28, about Christ being called God only once, as an example of how the humanist had become corrupted by pagan influences in Italy.19 In his copy, however, there are no traces of reading at this place. Even more surprising is the complete lack of notes in Galatians, on which Luther lectured extensively in 1531 (having done so previously in 1516–17), an undertaking that resulted in the publication of his substantial second commentary in 1535. Similarly, the Table Talk indicates that Luther read Erasmus’s prefaces to the biblical books in the 1530s, and that he responded vehemently to some of them. “Erasmus’s preface to the letter to the Romans,” Luther remarked early in 1533, “shocks a Christian’s body and soul.”20 Another anecdote recounts how in April 1536 Luther lay ill in bed and spent “practically all day reading Erasmus’s prefaces,” which made him “very upset.” “However slippery this snake is,” he 17 18 19 20

wa, Tischreden 4, no. 5120: “Es konnen nun schier alle Grekisch. Erstlich was es ein gutt buch, wie woll er offt drinnen durch den zaun sticht.” These calculations are based on the identification of Luther’s annotations in wa 60:201–27. wa,Tischreden 3, no. 3795. wa, Tischreden 1, no. 500: “Praefatio Erasmi in epistolam ad Romanos geht eim christen durch leyb und leben”.

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declared, “we and our church will condemn him and his writings.”21 Yet despite this indication of Luther’s systematic reading of the prefaces, the margins in this copy remain empty in these places. Since we know that note taking was common practice in studious forms of reading, as, indeed, we just saw reflected in Luther’s own recommendation, the lack of notes in these parts of the book is intriguing.22 Perhaps Luther made notes separately, on single sheets or in a notebook. Or possibly he did not use this copy when studying these biblical books, preferring another instead, such as that of the 1519 edition.23 Or he may simply not have made annotations when reading these parts of the 1527 edition. Unfortunately, we have little information about Luther’s reading habits that could shed new light on this matter.24 His library was dispersed after his death. So far only a few of his books have been identified, including some with marginal annotations in his hand.25 21

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Anton Lauterbach and Johannes Aurifaber (ed.), Colloquia oder Tischreden Doctor[is] Martini Lutheri… (Frankfurt am Main: n.p., 1568), fol. 293v: “Am ersten tage Aprilis des 36. Jars, da der Doctor kranck lag, brachte er schier den ganzen Tag zu mit lesen, die Vorreden des Erasmi ubers newe Testament, ward darüber hefftig bewegt, und sprach: Wiewol diese Schlange schlipfferig ist, dass man sie nicht wol ergreiffen noch fassen kan, doch wollen wir und unsere Kirche in mit seinen Schrifften und Büchern verdammen.” See also Hofstede de Groot, “Luther in seiner Studierstube,” 335, whose reference to Walch’s edition of Luther’s collected works is erroneous. I could not find this anecdote in wa. On the prominence of annotating see Ann Blair, “The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe,” Intellectual History Review 20 (2010): 303–16. For Luther’s use of the 1519 edition, see the text at n. 16 above. In 1730 Johann Justus von Einem published a series of manuscript notes supposedly made by Luther in a copy of the 1516 edition of Erasmus’s Annotations: Duo D. Martini Lutheri fragmenta philologico-­ exegetica… (Helmstedt: P.D. Schnorrius, 1730). On the basis of the nature of the notes, however, the wa editors do not recognize Luther’s authorship. The copy itself has dis­ appeared. See wa 60:199–200. Holger Flachmann, Martin Luther und das Buch (Tübingen: Mohr, 1996), 30–35. Seminal is the study of Ernst Thiele, “Die Originalhandschriften Luthers,” in Lutherstudien zur 4. Jahrhundertfeier der Reformation (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1917), 233–60, with a list of extant books from Luther’s library at 259–60. For more recent findings, see Oswald Bayer, “Unbekannte Texte des frühen Luther aus dem Besitz des Wittenberger Studenten Johannes Geiling,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 82 (1971): 229–59; Ulrich Bubenheimer “Unbekannte Luthertexte. Analecta aus der Erforschung der Handschrift im gedruckten Buch,” Luther Jahrbuch 57 (1990): 220–41; and Richard Charteris, “Newly Identified Music Editions from the Private Library of Martin Luther,” In Monte Artium 6 (2013): 41–95. Since the completion of the Weimarer Ausgabe, new evidence has been published. For Luther’s notes to Jerome’s collected works (the 1516 edition of Erasmus) see Martin Brecht and Christian Peters, eds., Annotierungen zu den Werken des Hieronymus (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000). Jun Matsuura has collected Luther’s notes from

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The second interesting characteristic is that most of Luther’s annotations are evaluative. Although Luther suggested to his readers that they annotate for purposes of memorization, in his own case many notes serve as a means of voicing his own opinion, or even of letting off steam. A few of these express appreciation for Erasmus’s comments. For instance, when Erasmus criticizes some contemporary practices in the context of Jesus’s criticism of hypocritical Pharisees (Matt. 23:5), pointing at the trade in devotional relics, such as Mary’s milk and pieces of the cross, Luther noted, “correct.”26 In a comment on the word episcopatum (Acts 1:20), Erasmus mentions that a Jew had told him that in Hebrew it could also mean “an especially beloved wife,” distinctive not “because of the children she gave, but for her character.” “Oh yes,” Luther wrote next to it.27 But such expressions of assent are far less frequent than Luther’s voicing of displeasure. Indeed, much of his note taking shows a distinctively grumpy reader. In general, his adversarial notes vary from simple denials (“no,” “not at all”)28 and cynical jibes (“Hilfft dich nicht” [It does not help you])29 to emotional swearing (“Du bist ein bube” [You’re a scoundrel] or “Das dich der ritt schut” [May fever shake you through]; see fig. 14.4).30 A more detailed look at these negative comments will reveal that Luther sometimes took offense at Erasmus’s philological approach, but that he was particularly allergic to what he regarded as Erasmus’s disingenuousness.

“Das dich Gott straffe, Satan”: What Made Luther Angry?

Erasmus often irritated Luther, whose annoyance with the humanist can be  divided into three general and interrelated categories: impatience with his days at the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt: Erfurter Annotationen 1509–1510/11, Archiv zur Weimarer Ausgabe der Werke Martin Luthers, vol. 9 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009). 26 Luther’s nt ii, 88. Similar examples on 528 (to Eph. 1:2) and 529 (Eph. 1:3). 27 Erasmus’s comment to Acts 1:20 (“For it is written in the book of Psalms: Let their habitation become desolate, and let there be none to dwell therein. And his bishopric let another take.”); Luther’s nt ii, 263: “Ach ia.” According to Hofstede de Groot, “Luther in seiner Studierstube,” 334, 344, Luther’s comment expresses his recognition as a husband. But it could also signal Luther’s recognition of the possible sense of the word in this context. 28 E.g., Luther’s nt ii, 90, 153, 157, 164, 429, 528. 29 Ibid.,, 213. 30 For Luther’s use of the term Bube, see ibid., 138, 157, 213, and 594. For “Das dich der Ritt schutt,” see ibid., 228.

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Luther’s nt ii, 213: Luther directly expressing his anger to Erasmus in his comment to John 1:6: “Du bist ein bube,” followed by a note (in red in the original) by the later owner of the copy, Regnerus Praedinius, who comes to Erasmus’s rescue: “Why, I beg, on the basis of this passage?” Photo reprinted with permission of Groningen University Library

­ hilological details, suspicions of skepticism, and resentment at humorous or p playful phrasing. Luther frequently regarded Erasmus’s philological care, his concern with grammar, manuscripts, and semantics, as excessive. At best, it was a waste of time, but frequently it led to a lack of respect for theological authorities. Erasmus devoted a comment, for example, to the pronoun “my” in the rendering of Christ’s words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). In some Greek manuscripts, the first “my” was lacking, while the

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Aramaic word eloi was clearly repeated. Erasmus’s observation made Luther impatient: “What use is such rubbish?” he wrote in prickly letters in the margin.31 Elsewhere, he simply noted, “not necessary,” rendering an entire note about textual variants irrelevant with an accolade.32 And when Erasmus corrects a reading of Jerome for grammatical reasons (“I ask you not to be weakened by my tribulations on your behalf; for this is your glory”), Luther again regarded this as an unnecessary philological triviality, commenting: “for such is your stupidity, as it is, you are wasting much time.”33 What prompted Luther’s irritation was not only the supposed myopia of a philological perspective. He believed that Erasmus’s textual approach showed too little respect for the subject, whether it be the apostles or the Church Fathers. Thus when Erasmus points out that Augustine has overlooked a passage in which Christ is called the “son of man” (Matt. 8:20), Luther reproached him directly: “you have no respect.”34 Similarly, when Erasmus signals a stylistic error in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Luther’s angrily noted what he thought Erasmus had really meant to say about the apostle: “That is: such a barbarian ass does not say or do anything right.” “He seems to have laughed at such phrasings,” Luther continued, “in Italy with his intellectual friends.”35 Apart from sensing humanist arrogance underneath Erasmus’s textual criticism, Luther was especially concerned about its skeptical implications. Erasmus’s approach undermined the stability of theological interpretations and threatened to replace religious concerns with purely historical or grammatical considerations. “Make it all uncertain,” he bitingly threw at Erasmus, for example, when the humanist uses Greek manuscripts to cast doubt at the correctness of an observation by Jerome, followed slightly later by “Let nothing be good,” when Erasmus comments on the connotation of individual words used in the Vulgate.36 When Erasmus drew theological implications from his historical perspective on the text, Luther was shocked. Erasmus’s suggestion that some pagans may also in some way have hoped for salvation, “even though 31 Ibid., 138: “Was darffs solchs gewessch?”. 32 Ibid., 534, to Eph. 2:5. 33 Luther’s nt ii, 539, to Eph. 3:13: “Quae est stultitia tua (quae ut est), horas male perdis, etc.” 34 Luther’s nt ii, 39, to Matt. 8:20: “du bist nicht from.” 35 Luther’s nt ii, 540, to Eph. 4:1: “idest: Nihil recte dicit, nec facit tam barbarus asinus. In Italia cum suis Eruditis videtur risisse tales formas dicendi.” 36 Luther’s nt ii, 539, to Eph. 3:14: “Machs alles ungewis”; and 540, to Eph. 4:2: “Las nichts gut sein.”

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they did not yet know Christ,” prompted a sharp curse: “May God punish you, Satan.”37 Specific notes triggered Luther’s irritation, but this does not mean that the text was solely responsible for this effect. Luther’s reading was clearly guided by extratextual forces. His suspicions of skepticism, for example, were so firmly implanted in his mind that the smallest suggestion was enough for him to see his worst worries confirmed. In this way Luther repeatedly read skeptical tendencies into the text. When, for example, at the end of Ephesians (6:24), Erasmus comments that Ambrose did not read “amen” here and it is impossible to reconstruct what he did read, Luther took this as a deliberate attempt at undermining the argument of the text. “And, consequently, we do not know what it is,” he cynically decoded Erasmus’s note, “and thus we do not know what we read.”38 Luther was convinced that Erasmus’s skepticism was evidence of an unbeliever’s mind. For Luther, the humanist’s critical investigation of the text revealed that he did not actually believe in what the Bible had to say. Such hidden beliefs made Erasmus a dangerous author—indeed, “Christ’s top enemy in a thousand years.”39 This frame of reference is clearly visible in Luther’s response to Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament. When Erasmus points out two possible meanings of a Greek verbal form (πληρουμένων as passive or middle voice), Luther regarded this as yet another covert attempt to destabilize scripture: “And therefore one should not believe anything of Paul and the entire Gospel,” he noted. “What else does Epicurus say, who does not know Christ, indeed, who considers it a fairy tale.”40 Luther’s suspicions did not only tease out what he thought to be Erasmus’s hidden meaning; in some cases they also led to his disregarding what Erasmus actually wrote. When, for instance, regarding the first letter to the Corinthians Erasmus doubts whether the church can ever be free of errors, Luther sniffed out the unbeliever. “Erasmus is a skeptic,” he noted, “and he doubts always and about anything.”41 In fact, however, in the same passage Erasmus also defends 37 Luther’s nt ii, 531, to Eph. 1:13: “Das dich Gott straffe, Satan.” 38 Luther’s nt ii, 552: “Et per consequens nescimus, quid sit, ergo nescimus, quid legamus.” 39 wa, Tischreden 1, no. 837: “Hoc relinquo post me testamentum et vos eius rei voco testes, quod Erasmum habeam pro summo hoste Christi, qualis in mille annis non fuit.” 40 Luther’s nt ii, 533, to Eph. 1:23: “Ideo nihil est credendum Paulo et toti Evangelio. Quid Epicurus aliud diceret, qui Christum nescit, imo pro fabula habet.” 41 Luther’s nt ii, 423, to an extensive comment on 1 Cor. 7:39: “Erasmus scepticus est et dubitat semper et in omnibus.” Erasmus had commented: “Nullus, opinor, ecclesiam Christi, quae constat hominum consortio, sic omni prorsus errore liberat, ut nihil ignoret. Satis est hactenus vacare errore, ut religionis ac fidei summa constet.”

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a stable core of faith, concluding that it “suffices to be free of error to such an extent that the sum of religion and faith stands firm.” In such cases, Luther’s interpretations were not really based on Erasmus’s text, but rather on his own suspicions, which he managed to read into Erasmus’s argument. To understand how this mechanism of misinterpretation worked, we have to look into Luther’s interpretation of humor.

“Lache dich nicht zu tod”: Luther’s Allergy to Erasmian Humor

Of all the characteristics of Erasmus, Luther found his humor particularly telling. This was not because he was averse to laughter himself.42 Erasmus’s humor, however, was of a different, rather malicious, kind: satirical, mocking, irreverent. In line with a long tradition of moral reservations about humor, Luther regarded it as an act of hostility that betrayed Erasmus’s sense of superiority.43 And Luther drew clear lines between which forms of humor were acceptable and which were not. “God has given us apples, pears and nuts, our wives, to play with,” his friends heard him say in 1532, “but he does not allow Himself and His greatness to be mocked.”44 Especially irksome was Erasmus’s elusive irony, which Luther regarded as a devious strategy of the humanist to communicate hidden thoughts without stating them openly. Luther famously called Erasmus “an eel” who could not be grasped “except by Christ.”45 After the clash over free will, which cemented Luther’s mistrust of the humanist, he became convinced that Erasmus was almost never frank or serious: When I would cut open Erasmus’s heart, I would only find mouths laughing about the trinity, the sacrament, etc. It is just laughter for him. He does not believe that God is something higher than man; he cannot reason in higher ways than he can understand.46 42 43 44 45 46

See Eric W. Gritsch, “Luther on Humor,” Lutheran Quarterly 18 (2004): 373–86. On the superiority theory of humor see John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 4–9. wa, Tischreden 3, no. 3186a: “Gott hatt uns zugeben zu spielen mit epffelin und byrn und nussen, unsern weibern, aber mit yhm und seiner majestet lest er nicht scherzen.” wa, Tischreden 1, no. 131 “Erasmus est anguilla. Niemand kan yhn ergreiffen denn Christus allein. Est vir duplex.” Ibid., no. 484: “Wenn ich Erasmus hertz solt auffschneyden, so wolt ich eitel lachende meuler finden de trinitate, sacramento etc. Es ist eitel gelechter mit yhm. Non cogitat,

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For Luther, then, Erasmus’s humor was a highly subversive, almost demonic, trait with potentially dangerous rhetorical impact. It was especially risky because Erasmus did not communicate openly. Luther was therefore inclined to point out the hidden intentions embedded within Erasmus’s words. In this way humor became a key component of Luther’s hermeneutic of Erasmus. It enabled him to identify dangerous messages lurking behind Erasmus’s texts. Humor justified, in other words, reading between the lines. For example, Luther suspected mockery behind the modesty that Erasmus had expressed at times in his comments about the biblical Greek original. When Erasmus in Ephesians changed the wording for stylistic reasons (1:19–20, exercuit instead of operatus est, to avoid repetition from operationem in the previous line), he apologetically added that he provided his translation “not in the way we wanted, but, as they say, in the way we could.”47 Luther found this outrageous: “Are you making fun of God in this way? O, you most Epicurean man!”48 To modern readers Erasmus’s comment may not seem particularly ironic. What apparently irritated Luther most were the disingenuously modest words with which Erasmus presented his alternative. Luther saw only a direct intervention in the biblical text made for purely stylistic reasons. It confirmed his image of Erasmus as a new Momus, the ancient god of satire, who “ridicules and plays with everything, the entire faith and Christ.” To this end, Erasmus was “thinking up ambiguous and equivocal words day and night, so that his books can even be read by a Turk.”49 Similarly, Luther considered Erasmus’s philological scrutiny a sign of mockery. When Paul quotes from the Psalms in Ephesians 4:8, Erasmus points out that the apostle changed one word, which Luther in turn regarded as a satirical, destructive analysis of the sacred text. “Laugh,” he wrote in the margin. To the printed marginal comment, “Paul has changed something from the Hebrew wording,” he added what he thought Erasmus implied: “and therefore he is unreliable.”50 As in the previous case, this is not an evident example of willful irreverence, but rather an instance that Luther associated with typically das Gott ettwas hoher ist denn ein mensch, das er nit konne hoher reden, denn er verstehn kan…” 47 Erasmus’s concern was with Paul’s repetition “κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν… Ἥν ἐνήργησεν…” His side remark refers to a proverb included in his Adagia, no. 743 “Ut possumus, quando ut volumus non licet.” 48 Luther’s nt ii, 533: “Sic rides Deum? O Epicurissime.” 49 wa,Tischreden 1, no. 811: “Erasmus momus. Erasmus verus est momus. Omnia ridet ac ludit, totam religionem ac Christum, atque ut hoc melius praestet, dies noctesque excogitat vocabula amphibola et ambigua, ut eius libri etiam a Turca legi possint.” 50 Luther’s nt ii, 541: “Ride”; “ergo fallax est.”

Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding

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Erasmian play. In Luther’s eyes, however, Erasmus was never really serious in his textual analysis: “if he can joke about just one letter, he will do so.”51 Even though Luther may have spotted more Erasmian smiles than was necessary, he did have a point, of course. Erasmus’s irony is palpable in various other places. His humanist opinion of traditional theologians shines through, for example, when he justifies a comment on a Greek word by arguing that it will help those theologians without knowledge of the language not to go “beyond the olives,” that is, not to go too far.52 By rendering the proverbial expression in Greek, however, he makes it exclusive and tongue-in-cheeck. Luther cynically noted: “Laugh, please.”53 Similarly, Erasmus is clearly ironic when reporting how he noticed that “the enormous mercy” of the pope extends even to those in purgatory. Erasmus continues his implicit criticism by expressing the wish that the papal clemency extended also to the innocent, living believers who are tormented by the fear of divine judgment. Yet this pastoral point was lost on Luther. He saw the oblique reference to indulgences as yet another sign of a jester, and responded with a grim “Don’t laugh yourself to death.”54

Conclusion: How to Catch an Eel

It will be clear, by now, that Luther’s copy of Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament offers ample evidence of Luther’s reading practices, including skillful ways of reading between the lines, and indeed, in some cases, of misreading. Luther’s manuscript comments show how his own reverence for the Bible as a sacred text made him unwilling to consider some of Erasmus’s philological points. It also shows the extent to which his views of Erasmus’s intellectual style guided his interpretation. Catching the slippery eel required tenacious reading. While Luther’s conception of Erasmus’s irony helped him to uncover what he believed to be the true message, it also legitimized the reading of new meanings into the text. Luther’s aggressive criticism suggests that he frequently 51

wa, Tischreden 5, no. 5535: “Erasmus, der ist ein gesell! wenn der nur kann ein buchstaben cavillirn, so thut ers.” 52 Erasmus on Eph. 1:13, p. 532: “Haec adduximus, ut intelligat lector, me non abs re Graecum obsignandi verbum annotasse, neu qui philosophari volet in divinis literis, Graecae literaturae expers ἔξω τῶν ἐλαιῶν, quod dici solet, currat.” For the expression, see also Erasmus’s Adage 1110, “Extra oleas.” 53 Luther’s nt ii, 532, on Erasmus’s comment to Eph. 1:13: “Ride q[uae]so.” 54 Luther’s nt ii, 431, to 1 Cor. 7:39: “Lache dich nicht zu tod.”

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used his copy of Erasmus’s work as an intellectual punching bag, as it were, a bookish substitute for his old antagonist, which allowed him to prove his own points about Erasmus. In the sixteenth century other readers had already realized that Luther was inclined to read his suspicions against the humanist into the text, as becomes clear from some notes on the same pages by that later, learned owner of the copy, Regnerus Praedinius. When Luther attacked Erasmus, Praedinius often came to his rescue, repeatedly pointing out that Luther’s reading was unsubstantiated. Thus, when Luther accused Erasmus of considering the biblical text to be a fairy tale, Praedinius soberly corrected him: “Erasmus never disdained the reliability of the Scriptures.”55 Interestingly, Praedinius was even able to place the critical notes in a positive perspective. He saw Luther’s own admission that he was “not a benevolent reader” as a helpful clue. The margins reveal Luther as a very attentive, sharp, and knowledgeable reader, Praedinius argued, who was “extremely keen on criticizing and contradicting.” So from this perspective, it was actually a “great compliment” that Luther did not raise more objections. Praedinius believed that Luther’s notes and his silences provided a fair idea of what he thought of the work, as he had annotated “for himself, not for others.”56 Luther would probably have resented this argument, but Praedinius rightly sensed that with all his aggressive criticism, Luther was still powerfully drawn to Erasmus’s biblical scholarship. 55 Luther’s nt ii, 533, to Eph. 1:23. 56 Praedinius in Luther’s nt ii, 156, above Luther’s comment “Ego non sum Candidus Lector, Nec tu candidus scriptor”: “Magna laus Erasmi et praeclarum istius operis testimonium, quod in hoc non plura is annotarit, qui ultro se fatetur non candidum esse lectorem quique ex merginibus insuper cognoscitur usus esse in perlegendo summa et attentione et ingenio et doctrina summaque cupiditate repraehendendi et confutandi. Sunt quidem non omnia, quae repraehenduntur parvi momenti, sed intelliguntur aliquando ex ipsis locis, qui insimulantur, non tam coargui ipsorum merito, quam eo animo lectoris, quem suum in legendo fuisse profitetur. Quia tamen sibi non aliis annotavit, scio in notandis omittendisque plerumque valuisse, quod animus tulit, quando impulit et quousque.” For Praedinius’s notoriously complicated Latin style, see Fokke Akkerman, “The Early Reformation in Groningen: On Two Latin Disputations,” in Northern Humanism in European Context, 1469–1625: From the “Adwert Academy” to Ubbo Emmius, ed. Akkerman, A.J. Vanderjagt, and A.H. van der Laan (Leiden: Brill, 1999), esp. 23–32.

chapter 15

When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek during and after the Council of Trent Scott Mandelbrote In or around 1599, Thomas James (ca. 1573–1629) studied an unfamiliar Latin Bible, probably in the shop of the stationer John Norton in Saint Paul’s Churchyard in London. He read the preface, which was ascribed to Pope Sixtus v: and viewed it well, considering the singular care that was taken in the mending of it; the supreame Authoritie whereby it was done; the Parties imployed in the dooing of it; the Chiefe Pastor of the Church, sole Iudge of all controuersies; his assistance of a Colledge of Cardinalls; helpe of the best Learned men that could be gotten throughout all Europe; of rare Manuscripts; the best printed Copies; vse of Originals and Fathers; correction of it both before & after the printing; imployment of Correcters and Compositors for the same purpose. Lastly, the approprobation of it by the Church, and in the Church to be read, forbidding all other Bibles, how little soeuer swaruing from this, to be read; commaunding them, whether printed or written, to bee made away: or at the least, to be made of none effect, and not to bee accounted of in respect of this.1 James may already have been acting for Sir Thomas Bodley, who in February 1598 had taken it upon himself to restore the library of Oxford University. Certainly, he lost no time in comparing this new Bible to an earlier printed copy of the Vulgate, “which it was my chance to buy of a Souldier, that was at 1 Thomas James, A Treatise of the Corrvption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers (London, 1611), 27–28. Cf. Biblia sacra vulgatae editionis ab Concilii Tridentini praescriptum emendata et a Sixto v p.m. recognita et approbata (Rome, 1590); T.H. Darlow and H.F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 2 vols. (London: bfbs, 1903–11),[hereafter cited as dm], no. 6181. See also Paul Maria Baumgarten, Die Vulgata Sixtina von 1590 und ihre Einführungsbulle (Münster: Aschendorff, 1911). For the identification of Norton, see G.W. Wheeler, ed., Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 4–5; for the location of the shop, see Peter W.M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990), 53–54. The copy viewed by James is probably now shelf mark Bib. Lat. 1590 c. 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_016

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the sacking of Cales, whose bootie was books.” James rapidly noticed the differences in the two texts, moving on to compare them with another Bible, printed in 1593 at Rome under the authority of Clement viii and edited by Roberto Bellarmino: I found, by a diligent comparing of both Bibles, that the two Popes did notoriously differ amongst themselues; not onelie in the number of the verses, but in the bodie of the Text, and in the Praefaces & Bulls themselues. I should hardly haue beleeued so much, vnlesse I had seene it with mine eyes…2 Following this discovery, James immediately began exploiting such apparent disagreement over the text of the Latin Bible for the purposes of Protestant polemic: “for what talke is there of peace, or hope of amendement, as long as the two Popes, the Holy Fathers of the Church, are at as great enmitie…one Pope against another; Sixtus against Clement, Clement against Sixtus, disputing, writing & fighting about the… Bible.”3 In a book that he published in 1600, James drew attention to the discrepancies between the Sixtine and Clementine editions of the Vulgate and to their differences from earlier editions of the Bible sanctioned by the Catholic Church, from rabbinic tradition, and from the consensus of the underlying Greek and Hebrew sources of the text.4 He was far from being the first to notice the problems about which he now gloated: 2 James, Treatise, 228–29. The Bibles used for comparison were dm 6129, printed at Louvain in 1547, endorsed by the Faculty of Theology there, and edited by Johannes Henten on the basis of the work of Robert Estienne, and the quarto editio of dm 6184 (the so-called SixtoClementine Bible, originally published in an edition of five hundred copies in folio in 1592). James’s text states that the Louvain Bible came from Calais, but the context makes clear that it was in fact spoil from the Jesuit library at Cadiz. The Earl of Essex sacked Cadiz in July 1596, and his ships also carried off the library of Fernão de Mascarenhas from Faro. See Wheeler, Letters of Bodley to James, 4–5, where Essex is identified as the donor of Bodley’s own copy of the Sixto-Clementine Bible (1592, now shelf mark Bib. Lat. 1592 c. 1, Bodleian Library); K.M. Pogson, “A Grand Inquisitor and His Library,” Bodleian Quarterly Record 3 (1920–22): 239–44; P.S. Allen, “Books Brought from Spain in 1596,” English Historical Review 31 (1916): 606–10; Paul Maria Baumgarten, Neue Kunde von alten Bibeln (Rome: For the author, 1922), 316–22. A later revision of the Louvain Bible (Antwerp, 1583) had in fact been used as the copy-text for the work that James was examining: see mss Vat. Lat. 12959–60, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City. 3 James, Treatise, 31. 4 Thomas James, Bellvm papale, sive concordia discors Sixti Qvinti, et Clementis Octavi, circa Hieronymianam editionem (London, 1600), sig. C3v.

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although the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate had been advertised at the Frankfurt Fair in autumn 1593, there had been a concerted attempt by the Roman authorities to buy back copies and to suppress the book.5 Reports later circulated that the Huguenot scholar and polemicist Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) had been offered a hundred gold pieces for his own copy, which he declined to sell. As a consequence of such activity, both Catholic and Reformed scholars who lived north of the Alps remarked on the book’s rarity by the mid-seventeenth century.6 The story told by James has already caught the attention of Anthony Grafton, who characteristically noted its significance for the history of proof correction.7 James, indeed, followed up Sixtus’s own account of the care with which his edition of the Vulgate was being prepared with information derived from the work of the Augustinian friar Angelo Rocca (1545–1620). Rocca, who was himself extensively involved in the preparation of the reformed text of the Vulgate, explained how he had traveled backward and forward from the Vatican to the papal villa on the Quirinal in the summer of 1589, carrying with him proofs for personal correction by Sixtus v.8 For present purposes, however, the value of this story lies neither with the difficulties that confronted sixteenthcentury publishers in producing an accurate printed text nor with the apparent difficulty of obtaining key publications of the Catholic Reformation in late sixteenth-century England. Instead, the interest shown by James in the unintended consequences of the single-minded activity of Sixtus v in putting the resources of the library and printing presses of the Vatican to work in the production of new editions of the Bible (and in using the same scholars to edit and 5 Baumgarten, Neue Kunde, 272–90; Xavier-Marie Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible SixtoClémentine (Paris: Beauchesne, 1911). 6 According to the Jesuit Otto van Zijl (1588–1656), who taught at the Colleges of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Roermond, and Ghent, in a letter from Louvain dated 27 June 1653, which is bound in the copy held at Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, Leuven, shelf mark P.22.053.2/FO bijb 1590. See also the comments made by Thomas Barlow (1608/9–91) in his copy, which were accompanied by Barlow’s own inventory of discrepancies with earlier editions of the Vulgate and with those published after 1592, now at The Queen’s College, Oxford, shelf mark 73 F.1. 7 Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 107. 8 Angelo Rocca, Bibliotheca apostolica vaticana (Rome, 1591), 228–29, 424; cf. James, Treatise, 33–34; Fridolin Amman, Die Vulgata Sixtina von 1590 (Freiburg: Herder, 1912), 57–60. Further details may be gleaned from Rocca’s annotated copy of his own book, and from his copy of the 1590 Vulgate (which was used as the copy-text in printing the SixtoClementine edition of 1592): ms 611 and shelf mark B. 18. 3, respectively, Biblioteca Angelica, Rome.

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censor biblical texts) calls to mind the end of a process that had begun much earlier in the century.9 The real target of James’s polemic was the attitude of the Catholic Church to the authenticity and authority of the Vulgate (the late fourth-century revision of the Latin translation of the Bible carried out largely by Saint Jerome) and its relationship to other forms of scripture. That attitude was itself the product of the early deliberations of the Council of Trent (in particular during the discussions leading up to the fourth session of 8 Apr. 1546), where the positions taken by Protestants in favor of vernacular translations based on other ancient sources had come under consideration. In place of the sole authority of scripture to determine matters of religion, the council reaffirmed the importance of the church in establishing tradition. The biblical canon was therefore established on a more inclusive basis than that accepted by many Protestants, in particular incorporating many Old Testament texts not found in the Hebrew Bible. Rather than insisting on the perspicacity of the biblical text, the council established the need for it to be interpreted through the consensus of the Fathers (a position that was restated after the council in 1564 in the profession of faith promulgated by Pius iv). It affirmed the authority of the Vulgate as a medium for the Bible’s transmission to the church. Instead of allowing the use of contemporary translations (whether in Latin or the vernacular), which should be subject to censorship, the council decided to specify the primacy for public use of the Vulgate, whose revision was to be considered in order to clarify the text and prevent the abuse of scripture.10 These were not straightforward decisions, especially given the long-established practice of biblical translation within Italy itself.11 An unresolved consequence, reflected in the publications of the late 1580s and early 1590s, was doubt about the 9 10

11

Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 79. Canones et decreta Sacrosancti Oecvmenici et Generalis Concilii Tridentini (Rome, 1564), xx–xxiii; Hubert Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 2nd ed., 4 vols. in 5 (Freiburg: Herder, 1951–75), 2:54–82; Guy Bedouelle, “La Réforme catholique,” in Le Temps des Réformes et la Bible, ed. Bedouelle and Bernard Roussel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), 327–68; Jared Wicks, “Catholic Old Testament Interpretation in the Reformation and Early Confessional Eras,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 2, From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Sæbø, Michael Fishbane, and Jean Louis Ska, sj (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 617–48; Edmund F. Sutcliffe, sj, “The Council of Trent on the Authentia of the Vulgate,” Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1948): 35–42; G.-M. Vosté, op, “La Volgata al Concilio di Trento,” Biblica 27 (1946): 301–19. Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), esp. 75–109.

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status of existing editions of the Vulgate and a continuing need to undertake the work of revision. Given that the biblical canon endorsed at Trent included many Old Testament texts found originally in the Greek translation known as the Septuagint (after the seventy translators who were supposed to have worked miraculously on its composition in Alexandria in the third century bce), it might seem unsurprising that there should be contemporaneous pressure to complete work on an edition of that version. This had also been discussed as early as 1546 as a means to improve understanding of the Vulgate, and continued to be raised thereafter.12 Indeed, an edition of the Greek Old Testament, prepared by the prefect of the Vatican Library, Cardinal Antonio Carafa (1538–91), with the aid of a team of scholars who worked largely during the pontificate of Gregory xiii, appeared in 1587 with the authority of Sixtus v from the Roman press of Francesco Zanetti.13 Bearing in mind the possible usefulness of a new edition of the Septuagint for missionary activity among Greek-speaking Christians, as well as for the revision of the Vulgate, Gregory xiii instructed Carafa on 2 March 1578 to put in course the emendation of the Septuagint. Carafa soon brought together a suitable commission of coworkers to collate manuscripts and prepare the text, with attention to the comments made on it by the writers of the early church.14 Work initially proceeded quickly, and the editors had reached the end of Job and were entering into the Psalms before the end of November 1580.15 The chosen printer, Francesco Zanetti, descended from a Venetian dynasty with long experience as both scribes and printers of books in Greek. He had 12

13

14

15

See Godofredus Buschbell, ed., Concilii Tridentini epistularum, pars prima (Freiburg: Herder, 1916), 446–47, 467–69, 470–72, 506–7, 519–21; cf. Vincenzio Laureo to Guglielmo Sirleto, 20 Nov. 1560, and Girolamo Seripando to Sirleto [from Trent], 6 Nov. and 24 Nov. 1561, ms Vat. Lat. 6189, fols. 64, 77–78, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. dm 4647; printing was completed in the preceding year. A declaration of the intentions of Sixtus v in promoting the edition, which is included in the prefatory material, is dated 8 Oct. 1586. The title page bears the printed date “1586,” normally corrected by pen to 1587, but the book received a privilege only on 9 May 1587. See also Antonella Lumini, ed., La Bibbia: Edizioni del xvi secolo (Florence: Olschki, 2000), 110–11. On the progress of this edition, see F. Amann, “Die römische Septuagintarevision im 16. Jahrhundert,” Biblische Zeitschrift 12 (1914): 116–24. For Gregory xiii’s role in the development of a missionary strategy involving linguistic training and publication, see Karl Hoffmann, Ursprung und Anfangstätigkeit des ersten päpstlichen Missionsinstituts (Münster: Aschendorff, 1923); Petrus Wilhelmus van Boxel, Rabbijnenbijbel en Contrareformatie (Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1983); Bernard Heyberger, Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Rome: École française, 1994), 232–36. Fulvio Orsini to Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, 26 Nov. 1580, ms D 423 inf., no. 149, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

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access to types based on the fine and clear Grecs du Roy. The earliest of the Grecs du Roy were cut by Claude Garamont in Paris in the 1540s. They were modeled on the calligraphy of Angelos Vergikios, a Cretan scribe active at the French royal court. The type used by Zanetti, however, seems to have been cut by Pierre Haultin (d. 1587/8), and was in use by Cristoforo Zanetti in Venice as early as 1562.16 Francesco Zanetti was well known to the papal authorities, since he served as a Greek scribe in the Vatican Library and undertook publications on their behalf. He was also involved at this time with papal plans for printing in the languages of the Christian Orient, which eventually benefited from the presence in Rome of Robert Granjon, who cut both Greek and exotic sorts for the Stamperia Vaticana.17 By the end of October 1582, it was agreed that Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600) would oversee Zanetti’s work in printing the Septuagint. Orsini, however, soon concluded that it would be necessary for his collaborators to return to the library to check their work.18 Progress on the preparation of the second half of the Old Testament thus proved slower, but printing was expected to be completed in October 1586. At the end of November, Orsini reported that he had his work cut out for him in correcting the printed text.19 The copy-text chosen for the Roman Septuagint, into which the editors introduced changes based on the manuscripts they had consulted and the corrections they recommended, was the edition of the Bible in Greek that had 16

17

18

19

Evro Layton, The Sixteenth Century Greek Book in Italy (Venice: Library of the Hellenic Institute, 1994), 33–41, 47, 526–28; Hendrik D.L. Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 2:383–425, esp. 404–7 for Haultin’s small pica Greek and English-bodied Greek types. Zanetti lacked a sufficiently large Greek display font for the first line of the title page, which was eventually set up in Roman, with the letter “V” inverted to form a capital lambda, and with capital pi and capital theta formed respectively from two letters “I” joined in at the top in manuscript and a letter “O” with a manuscript line through its center. ms Vat. Lat. 6792, fol. 331, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; Anna Gaspari, “Francesco Zanetti stampatore, copista e instaurator di manoscritti greci,” in Τοξότης. Studies for Stefano Parenti, ed. Daniel Galadza, Nina Glibetić, and Gabriel Radle (Grottaferrata: Monastero esarchico, 2010), 155–75; Vervliet, Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance, 2:427–82; Robert J. Wilkinson, “Syriac Studies in Rome in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 6 (2012): 55–74; Rocca, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 78–172. Orsini to Pinelli, 31 Oct. 1582, ms D 423 inf., no. 224, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Orsini to Guglielmo Sirleto, n.d., but probably 1583, ms Reg. Lat. 2023, fol. 393r–v, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Orsini to Pinelli, 6 Sept. and 29 Nov. 1586, respectively, ms D 422 inf., nos. 184 and 188, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; see also n. 13 above.

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been published by Andrea Torresani at the press founded by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1518.20 Inevitably, the choice of copy-text helped to direct the readings that were printed, regardless of decisions that had been made about the manuscript tradition. Similarly, the zeal to correct presumed typographical errors (for example, in the printing of breathings or the accentuation of Greek) itself led to the introduction of many false or invented readings.21 The published Roman Septuagint contained at least as many errors of editors, compositors, and correctors as the Vulgate edition that appeared a few years later. In addition to a printed list of mistakes that is sometimes present, surviving copies often display extensive signs of manuscript correction, carried out in the printing shop after the sheets had been run off from the press. Changes were especially frequent in the apparatus provided for the text, which attempted to present some variant manuscript readings and, in particular, to outline the relationship between the Septuagint version as printed and the alternative second-century traditions of translation of the Greek text of the Old Testament (attributed, variously, to Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion).22 These different and competing versions lay at the origins of Christian editorial work on the Old Testament, and had made up the various columns of the Hexapla, compiled by Origen in third-century Caesarea.23 Reference to such traditions and to the editorial practices and sigla of Origen, as well as to other Oriental versions (in Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic) derived from the Greek, was 20 dm 4594; ms Vat. Gr. 1239–40, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. 21 Alfred Rahlfs, “Die Abhängigkeit der sixtinischen Septuaginta-Ausgabe von der aldinischen,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 33 (1913): 30–46. On the problems of casting and setting type with accents and breathings and the solutions found by Aldus, see Nicolas Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script and Type in the Fifteenth Century (Sandy Hook, ct: Chiswick Book Shop, 1985), 76–90. 22 See, for example, the manuscript corrections in the copy at Biblioteca Angelica, shelf mark B.17.3, which was presented by Carafa to Rocca. The presentation copy at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, shelf mark Membr. I 6, which was printed on vellum, is bound with a list of errata (absent from many other copies). This is printed on paper, which is itself suggestive of the haste with which correction was undertaken. These corrections (which particularly relate to the Psalter) were also set out by Antonio Possevino, Apparatus sacer, 3 vols (Venice, 1603–1606), 1: 383–84. In some copies (for example, Cambridge University Library, shelf mark Adv. a. 19.3, Cambridge University Library), there are marginal corrections to the text which appear to have been made with type rather than pen and ink. 23 On the composition of the Hexapla, see Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2006), 86–132; cf. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia ecclesiastica 6.16 (a convenient translation of this passage is to be found in J. Stevenson, ed., A New Eusebius [London: spck, 1957], 210–11).

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therefore thought to underpin any proper apparatus to the Septuagint text. This was the inspiration for the annotations prepared for the Roman edition by Pierre Morin (1531–1608), whereas his collaborator, Antonio Agelli (1532–1608), was largely responsible for the initial comparison of surviving Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament with the Hebrew text and citations by the Greek Fathers.24 A further reason for both confusion and delay was provided by the fact that a parallel Latin translation of the Septuagint, with an apparatus that included patristic citations as well as reference to the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, was in preparation at the same time. Edited by Flaminio Nobili (1532–90), and building on the efforts of Pedro Chacon (1526–81) and Orsini to collate early Latin citations with the Greek manuscript tradition, this translation represented an attempt to reconstruct a Latin version (the “Vetus latina”) that predated the Vulgate.25 The editors adduced passages quoted by the Fathers to justify choices of words that departed from the Vulgate. They believed that, taken together, the Septuagint and patristic usage revealed the text honored by the practice of the church, before Jerome had improved it through the composition of his own, more elegant version.26 Many of the scholars who had worked on the preparation of the two Roman editions of the Septuagint were involved in the commission that undertook the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate during the 1580s. They included Morin, Agelli, and Nobili, as well as Laelio Landio and Bartolomé Valverde.27 Their work built on a series of collaborative endeavors in scholarship of which the most striking 24

Morin’s preparatory materials may be found at Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Rome, mss R. 2–5. A complete copy of the corrections that he made to the printed edition is at Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ms D 474/6 inf. See also Pierre Morin, Opuscula et epistolae, ed. Jacques Quétif (Paris, 1675), 303–12, 357–59, and the marginal notes made by Morin in his copy of the third volume (the Prophets) of the Septuagint edition (based largely on the Aldine text) that had been published at Strasbourg between 1524 and 1526 [dm 4602], now at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, shelfmark Stamp. Barb. A. vii. 5. For Orsini’s difficulties in combining Agelli’s text with Morin’s commentary, see ms Reg. Lat. 2023, fol. 393r–v, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. 25 See Pierre de Nolhac, La Bibliothèque de Fulvio Orsini (Paris, 1887), 50–52. 26 Vetus Testamentvm secvndum lxx Latine redditvm (Rome, 1588) [dm 6179], sig. *3r–5v. Cf. Sacra Biblia ad lxx. interpretvm fidem diligentissime tralata (Basel, 1526), in which the unnamed translator often made choices of words that were closer to those of the Vulgate and that also reflected his principal source, the interlinear Latin translation provided by Juan de Vergara, Hernán Núñez de Guzmán, and Diego López de Zúñiga for the Septuagint version as printed in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514–17). 27 Morin, Opuscula et epistolae, 368.

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were the Complutensian Polyglot (published at Alcalá, 1514–17), the Louvain edition of the Vulgate, and the Antwerp Polyglot (published between 1569 and 1572).28 To a considerable extent, indeed, the efforts of the Roman editors and printers were both overtaken and superseded by those of Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1525–98) and Christophe Plantin (ca. 1520–89) as editor and publisher in Antwerp. Both men were conscious of the potential competition and of the opportunities provided by the delays in Rome, but, as Montano commented: “more is done here [in Antwerp] than in a year in Rome.” They, and the scholars who had assisted them, were also keen to contribute to the ongoing work of revisions.29 Similarly, the efforts to establish the relationship between the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek text of Psalms, which preoccupied Plantin’s collaborator, Willem Damaszoon van der Lindt (1525–88), bishop of Roermond, drew on work that had been undertaken by Roman scholars, notably Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–85).30 One of the main issues at stake in such discussions was the question of the extent to which the surviving text of the Septuagint, as far as it could be established, represented the text that had been available to past editors. This was one of the tasks that confronted Morin, in particular, in the annotations that he prepared for the Roman edition of the Septuagint. Sirleto had taken a leading hand in the long editorial process of the revision of the Vulgate. He investigated the history of previous editions and the manuscripts they had used; he oversaw the provision of Greek manuscripts for the Vatican Septuagint edition; and he assisted Willem Canter with the compilation of the list of variant readings of the Greek Psalms for inclusion in the Antwerp Polyglot.31 As cardinal librarian of the Vatican, Sirleto presided over a 28 29

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dm 1412, 6129, and 1422, respectively; see also n. 2 above. Montano to Philip ii, 9 May 1570, in Coleccion de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vol. 41 (Madrid, 1862), 171–79, at 178–79: “y en un mes se hace aquí mas que en Roma en un año”; see also, for example, Plantin to Gregory xiii, 9 Oct. 1574, ms Reg. Lat. 2023, fols. 273–76, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. See Baldomero Macías Rosendo, ed., La Biblia políglota de Amberes en la correspondencia de Benito Arias Montano (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 1998), 388–455; cf. Willem Damaszoon van der Lindt, Psalterivm Davidicvm vetvs (Antwerp, 1568). See, for example, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: ms Vat. Lat. 6189, esp. fol. 152; ms Vat. Lat. 6219; ms Reg. Lat. 2023, fols. 329, 385–88; dm 1422. On Canter, see Theodor William Dunkelgrün, “The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Confluence of Textual Traditions in the Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573)” (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2012), esp. 272–76. For Sirleto, see Georg Denzler, Kardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–1585). Leben und Werk (Munich: Hueber, 1964); Irena Backus and Benoît Gain, “Le Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–1585), sa bibliothèque et ses traductions de Saint Basile,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Moyen-Âge, Temps modernes 98 (1986): 889–955.

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highly skilled scholarly community for the transcription and editing of manuscripts (whether in Latin, Greek, or Oriental languages) of the late sixteenth century, which outshone even the resources of the Spanish Royal Library at the Escorial.32 It was thanks to Sirleto and his contemporaries that the status of Codex Vaticanus (which had been clumsily restored in the fifteenth century) as the oldest known near-complete manuscript of the Greek Old Testament was firmly established for the first time. Nevertheless, there remained uncertainty about its date (thought by Sirleto to be ninth century) compared to the antiquity of surviving manuscripts of the Vulgate and the Fathers.33 The prefatory material to the Roman Septuagint, written by Carafa and by Orsini, explained how the editors had made comparisons with “the best copies in the most famous libraries in Italy.” As Carafa explained, through the efforts above all of Sirleto, lists of variant readings had been sent to the Vatican, scrutinized, and compared to Codex Vaticanus, such that “we understood…that the Vatican copy was not only older but also better than all others, and in particular that it approximated most closely, if not throughout then certainly for the most part, to the Septuagint translation that we were looking for.”34 The special inspiration of the Septuagint had long been a theme of interest to Sirleto, who was 32

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Santo Lucà, “Guglielmo Sirleto e la Vaticana,” in La Biblioteca Vaticana tra Riforma Cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590), ed. Massimo Ceresa (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012), 145–88; Anthony Grafton, “The Vatican and Its Library,” in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, ed. Grafton (Washington, dc: Library of Congress, 1993), 3–45; cf. Gregorio de Andres, osa, El cretense Nicolas de la Torre. Copista griego de Felipe ii (Madrid: Benzal, 1969). ms Vat. Gr. 1209, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, now dated to the fourth century, and identifiable in Vatican catalogs from 1481: Robert Devreesse, Les Fonds grec de la Bibliothèque Vaticane des origines à Paul v (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1965), 82; Stephen Pisano, “L’histoire du Codex Vaticanus B pendant quatre siècles. Les notes inédites du cardinal Mercati,” in Le manuscrit B de la Bible (Vaticanus graecus 1209), ed. Patrick Andrist (Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2009), 105–18; T.C. Skeat, “The Codex Vaticanus in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 35 (1984): 454–65. For Sirleto’s views on Codex Vaticanus, see esp. ms Vat. Lat. 6219, fols. 68–69, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; Denzler, Kardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, 128, 132. Earlier editors, including Erasmus, had not fully understood its significance for either the Old or New Testament: see Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1983), 134–35. dm 4647, sig. a2r–v: “…in celebrioribus Italiae bibliothecis optima quaeque exemplaria perquirerentur…intelleximus cùm ex ipsa collatione, tum è sacrorum veterum scriptorum consensione, Vaticanum codicem non solum vetustate, verum etiam bonitate caeteris anteire; quodque caput est, ad ipsam, quam quaerebamus, Septuaginta interpretationem, si non toto libro, maiori certè ex parte, quàm proximè accedere.”

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aware of patristic debate on the subject, and of the history of the various translations to which Origen had referred.35 Orsini picked up these themes in the preface to the published edition, where he set out the miraculous history of the translation of the Septuagint by seventy Jewish translators, who knew Greek and were “filled by the Holy Spirit.” He explained the problems of the transmission and corruption of the text, which even Origen had not fully been able to correct, but claimed that it was now restored to “pristine splendor,” since Codex Vaticanus “was better than all the others.” Indeed, according to Orsini, who was willing to go considerably beyond the hesitations of Sirleto, “as far as may be conjectured from the shape of the letters…it seems that Codex Vaticanus was written twelve hundred years ago, that is, before the time of St Jerome.”36 Collations of important manuscripts from elsewhere in Italy and from Spain were similarly procured under Sirleto’s supervision for the revision of the Vulgate. These included the readings of the oldest surviving and near-complete manuscript of the Vulgate, Codex Amiatinus (named after the Tuscan monastery that housed it), as well as many other codices.37 Again, in this context, the 35 36

37

See, for example, ms Vat. Lat. 6219, fols. 61–69, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. dm 4647, sigs. a3r–4v: “… Spiritu santo plenos…in pristinum splendorem restituenda curaret…intellectum est, eu[m] codicem omnium, qui extant, longè optimum esse… Codex is, quantu[m] ex forma characterum conijci potest…ante millesimum ducentesimum annum, hoc est, ante tempora B. Hieronymi, & non infra, scriptus videtur.” In addition to Codex Vaticanus, the editors of the 1587 Septuagint are known to have used mss Vat. Gr. 1241–42, 1244, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (collations made from manuscripts in the Laurentian Library in Florence), and ms Gr. Z. 1, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice. They also used a manuscript provided by Carafa (“from Magna Graecia,” according to Orsini), probably ms Vat. Gr. 1252, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. See Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 181–82; E.B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London: Hambledon, 1983), 206–8; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace and Elpidio Mioni, Cento codici Bessarionei (Venice: Libreria vecchia del Sansovino, 1968), 29. Orsini is identified as the author of the preface by Nolhac, Bibliothèque de Fulvio Orsini, 50. For similar statements by Sirleto himself, see ms Vat. Lat. 6219, fols. 68–69, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Bartolomé Valverde also endorsed the value of Codex Vaticanus, writing to Sirleto on 1 Oct. 1583: ms Vat. Lat. 6195, fols. 280–81, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. We now know that Codex Amiatinus (now ms Amiat. 1, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence), long thought to be an Italian production, was written at Wearmouth-Jarrow at the end of the seventh century: see H.J. White, “The Codex Amiatinus and Its Birthplace,” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica 2 (1890): 273–308; see also Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon, 2001), 33–34; Patrick McGurk, “The Oldest Manuscripts of the Latin Bible,” in The Early Medieval Bible, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–23.

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readings of Codex Vaticanus retained a significant role, since Sirleto made comparisons between the Latin tradition and the Greek, as well as with the Bible in Hebrew or Aramaic (for which he used the text of the Complutensian Polyglot). This made the failure to accompany the Roman Septuagint with an edition of the Greek New Testament, for which Codex Vaticanus was an important witness, particularly surprising.38 Much of what we now know about the process of composition of the Roman Septuagint and the Sixtine Vulgate derives from the pioneering labors of Catholic scholars who were at work a hundred years ago. The immediate context for their work was the debate over modernism and the activity of the papal biblical commission in the early years of the twentieth century. That debate came to a head in 1907–8, in the condemnation of a series of propositions associated with modernism by the Holy Office, the promulgation of the papal encyclical Pascendi, and the excommunication of the Parisian scholar Alfred Loisy.39 It followed, however, on a long period during which teachers at Catholic universities in Germany and in France and in the Roman colleges weighed the impact of new forms of historical criticism on the understanding of the composition and editing of the Bible. For some, the conclusions to be drawn were a radical endorsement of what was called “higher criticism,” but most preferred to temper the fruits of reason with awareness of the content and meaning of traditional texts. Even if they did not defend biblical inerrancy, they felt it important to take a stand on the “divine character and content” of the Old as well as the New Testament. Accordingly, they identified inspiration with what the Holy Spirit wished to teach, which was communicated through the hands of human authors who happened incidentally to be writing within a particular historical context. A significant proponent of this approach was Hildebrand Höpfl (1872–1934), a Benedictine who made his profession at the Emmaus monastery in Prague, and was later a member of the community at Grüssau and professor of exegesis at the Collegio San Anselmo in Rome.40 This 38 39

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See Morin, Opuscula et epistolae, 343–45. See James T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 221–32; François Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine. La science catholique des Évangiles et l’histoire au xxe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006), 41–76. Hildebrand Höpfl, Die höhere Bibelkritik, 2nd ed. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1905); Höpfl, Das Buch der Bücher (Freiburg: Herder, 1904); see also Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration, 121–229; Robert D. Priest, The Gospel According to Renan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 204–11. On the context for Höpfl’s religious life, see Brigitte Lob, Albert Schmitt o.s.b. Abt in Grüssau und Wimpfen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 26–27; Inge Steinsträsser, Wanderer zwischen den politischen Mächten. Pater Nikolaus von Lutterotti o.s.b. (1892–1955) und die Abtei Grüssau in Niederschlesien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009).

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argument was formulated in response to the perceived threats to papal authority stemming from secularist, nationalist, and often republican politics, as well as from within the confines of the academy or of confessional scholarship. Höpfl’s publications brought together biblical criticism, pastoral theology, and innovative study of the church’s previous efforts to deal with Protestant attitudes to the Bible during the sixteenth century. They rediscovered the history of the church’s commitment to ideas of inspiration, and its much earlier abandonment of biblical inerrancy and flirtation with textual, if not higher, criticism. In a number of writings, Höpfl established the importance of Sirleto and the Vatican Library in reframing debate about the text of the New Testament, in reply to Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla.41 Through this work, he set out an account of Sirleto’s engagement with biblical manuscripts, beginning with the collations that he procured through his patron and predecessor at the Vatican Library, Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–55), at Trent.42 Such activity underpinned the later editorial work carried out in the Vatican collections, and established the significance of Codex Vaticanus that later scholars confirmed. Moreover, it did so in the context of readings of the Greek Old Testament, as well as those of the New. Through a sequence of letters between Sirleto and Cervini, the principles that would drive the later Roman fascination with the Septuagint as a basis for the correction of the Vulgate were established. First Sirleto claimed that the Septuagint translation was much closer to the tradition of the church than the surviving Hebrew text. Then he responded to Cervini’s request to discover the attitude of the Fathers to the Septuagint, with reference particularly to Augustine’s endorsement of that translation, and to identify the extensive citation of the Septuagint by the writers of the New Testament. Finally, he introduced the account provided in the so-called Letter of Aristeas, to which he gave credence as providing “the whole history of the Septuagint,” and which demonstrated both the inspired origins of the text and that it had been a translation of the entire Old Testament.43 Much of the patristic testimony to the 41

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Hildebrand Höpfl, Kardinal Wilhelm Sirlets Annotationen zum Neuen Tesstament (Freiburg: Herder, 1908); Höpfl, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sixto-Klementinischen Vulgata (Freiburg: Herder, 1913). On Cervini’s collections of Greek manuscripts and Sirleto’s use of them, see Giovanni Mercati, Per la storia dei manoscritti greci (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1935), 181–202; Robert Devreesse, “Les manuscrits grecs de Cervini,” Scriptorium 22 (1968): 250–70. See Buschbell, Concilii Tridentini epistularum, 934–38 (esp. Sirleto to Cervini, 20 Feb. 1546; Cervini to Sirleto, 27 Feb. 1546; Sirleto to Cervini, 10, 18 (“tutta l’historia deli lxx”), 24, and 31 Mar. 1546). The Letter of Aristeas purported to be an eyewitness account of events at

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value of the Septuagint compiled by Sirleto was copied on the flyleaves of a remarkable volume identified by Höpfl among the books of Aquiles Estaço (1524–81), a Portuguese humanist and editor of both classical and patristic works, who was active at the papal court, and associated with Chacon and Orsini.44 That book is one of two surviving in libraries in Rome that provide extraordinary evidence of the way in which Sirleto and his associates formed their view of the Greek text of the Bible, in dialogue with the most important manuscripts that they had identified. Höpfl discovered both of these books and traced their importance for Sirleto’s thinking, albeit in a confusing manner.45 Their interest here is threefold: first, they provide further evidence for the working methods of the editors of the Septuagint and the Vulgate, bringing the period of activity back from the 1580s to the 1540s and 1550s; second, they show the use of printed books not only in the preparation of a copy-text for a printer, but also as the medium for the communal collation of manuscript evidence from a variety of physically distant sources; finally, they indicate the subsequent circulation of such material among a group of interested scholars. As such, these volumes demonstrate where and how manuscripts might meet in

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the court of Ptolemy ii Philadelphus in Alexandria. As Sirleto knew, it had been translated into Latin by Mattia Palmieri (1423–83) and circulated with a dedication to Pope Paul ii (1464–71). Palmieri’s work was published as early as 1468 and frequently reprinted (Cervini himself owned and annotated a copy). See Alberto Vaccari, Scritti di erudizione e di filologia, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1952–58), 1:1–23. Sirleto probably knew the original Greek text through a manuscript (ms Ott. Gr. 32, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) that later belonged to Giovanni Angelo d’Altemps, who acquired many of Cervini’s books (see Santo Lucà, “La silloge manoscritta greca di Guglielmo Sirleto, un primo saggio di riconstruzione,” Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae 19 [2012]: 317–55, at 338), and would also have been aware of mss Vat. Gr. 383 and 747 (the former appeared in an inventory of the Vatican Library prepared in 1548; the latter was identified by Jean Matal in a list of 1545): see Devreesse, Le Fonds grec, 362, 385. Shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, Biblioteca Vallicelliana; the volume is recorded in the inventory of Estaço’s books: ms P. 186, fol. 21r, Biblioteca Vallicelliana. See also Maria Teresa Rosa Corsini, ed., I Libri di Achille Stazio alle origini della Biblioteca Vallicelliana (Rome: Edizioni de Luca, 1995); A. Moreira de Sá, Manuscritos e obras impressas de Aquiles Estaço, offprint from Arquivo de Bibliografia portuguesa (Coimbra, 1958); Belmiro Fernandes Pereira, ed., As Orações de Obediência de Aquiles Estaço (Coimbra: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 1991), esp. 20–32. Cf. shelf mark 71.2.F9, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Rome; Höpfl, Kardinal Wilhelm Sirlets Annotationen, esp. 36–50 (but with significant errors in its citations and descriptions); Höpfl, Beiträge, 49–55. On shortcomings in Höpfl’s account, see Giovanni Mercati, “Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen,” Theologische Revue 8, no. 2 (1909): 60–63.

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order to promote the correction of the biblical text in the mid-sixteenth century. The two books are both copies of Johann Herwagen’s edition of the Greek Bible (Septuagint and New Testament), published at Basel in March 1545. This carried a preface by Philip Melanchthon, which was normally suppressed in copies sold in Catholic Europe, where the book nevertheless circulated widely.46 Its text was based on the Aldine edition of the Septuagint and on the fifth edition of Erasmus’s New Testament (1535). Identifications made by Estaço, who had access to a wide range of Sirleto’s working materials, permit the reconstruction of the process of annotation, and the attribution of the work involved.47 First, at Trent itself in 1546, Codex Bezae (a manuscript of the Greek and Latin Gospels and Acts dating from about 400, located from the mid-ninth century until 1562 at the monastery of Saint Irenaeus at Lyon) was made available by Guillaume Duprat, bishop of Clermont. Readings taken from it by Gentian Hervet (1499–1584) were copied into the New Testament of Herwagen’s edition of the Bible.48 Having received these in Rome, Sirleto later began the process of collating them with the testimony of the Greek Fathers: Estaço subsequently reported the “marvelous consensus” between the manuscript and biblical citations in the works of Saint Ambrose of Milan (337–97), which encouraged Sirleto to suspect that the codex might in fact have been written by Saint Irenaeus (d. ca. 202) himself.49 In the summer of 1552, Sirleto sent the collations to Cervini, who was then resident in Gubbio.50 By February 1554, one of Cervini’s clients, Niccolò Maiorano (ca. 1491–ca. 1585), had begun work on 46

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dm 4614; Frank Hieronymus, ed., Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen (Basel: Universitätsbibliothek, 1992), 612–14. Both copies under consideration lack the preface and display attempts at censoring the printer’s name; for examples with the explicit approbation of a censor, see shelf mark E1–a77 (dated 1561), Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos; shelf mark s.r. 496, Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, fol. 3v and pp. 888, 982, Biblioteca Vallicelliana. Cf. ms A. 1/2, Biblioteca Vallicelliana (a copy of the Complutensian Polyglot’s edition of the New Testament, extensively annotated by Estaço from the collections of Sirleto, Orsini, and others). Shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, p. 982, Biblioteca Vallicelliana,; see also Frederick H. Scrivener, ed., Bezae Codex Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1864), viii; D.C. Parker, Codex Bezae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 283: the manuscript is now ms Nn.2.41, Cambridge University Library. Shelf mark 71.2.F9, Biblioteca nazionale centrale; these collations are not present in full in shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, which reports some of Sirleto’s findings, e.g. p. 982: “Mirus autem consensus Ambrosii…cu[m] codice Lugdunensi. Liber Lugdunensis…scriptus, Cardinalis Sirletus Irenaei fuisse putat.” Sirleto to Cervini, 12 May 1546, ms Vat. Lat. 6177, fol. 74.

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the Septuagint text of Codex Vaticanus.51 Readings from that manuscript were entered alongside those of Codex Bezae in the New Testament and throughout the Old Testament by one of the scribes in the Vatican Library, probably the Cretan Emmanuel Provataris.52 He was working, in turn, with collations that had been prepared by Sirleto and Basilio Zanchi (1501–58), probably in response to Cervini’s queries in 1546. The collations of the Septuagint noted when the text differed from the Hebrew as given in the Complutensian Polyglot, as well as from patristic quotations.53 These two annotated books indicate the extent of collaborative consideration of the texts of both Old and New Testaments while the Council of Trent was meeting. They draw attention again to the fact that the editorial activities of the late 1570s and 1580s often revisited work that had already been performed in Sirleto’s circle, but that had been stillborn in the failures of the various commissions for the revision of the Vulgate that had met before then. Moreover, the value of these works lived on after the events that formed them, as they continued to circulate among scholars. A further copy, which explicitly replicates the annotations to be found in both Sirleto’s and Estaço’s volumes and again records the readings of Codex Vaticanus, is now located in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.54 Frustratingly, its provenance is unclear. Nevertheless, there is something appropriate about its current home, since the founder of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), was both interested in and critical of the credulity that Sirleto, Morin, and others had expressed with regard to the Letter of Aristeas and the relative authority of the Septuagint.55 By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholic critics had begun to be more circumspect in their confidence in the power of manuscripts to tip the scales 51

Masius to Latino Latini, 25 Feb. 1554, in Briefe von Andreas Masius und seinen Freunden 1538 bis 1573, ed. Max Lossen (Leipzig: Dürr, 1886), 153; cf. shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, p. 888, Biblioteca Vallicelliana. Sirleto was paid for six years’ work in correcting the New Testament, according to the decrees of the Council of Trent on 14 Jan. 1554; see Léon Dorez, “Le Registre des dépenses de la Bibliothèque vaticane de 1548 à 1555,” in Fasciculus Ioanni Willis Clark dicatus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 142–85, at 182–83. 52 Shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, p. 982, Biblioteca Vallicelliana; see also Paul Canart, “Les manuscrits copiés par Emmanuel Provataris (1546–1570 environ),” in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 6 (Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964), 173–287. 53 Shelf mark S. Borr. P. ii. 8, fol. 3v, Biblioteca Vallicelliana. These annotations differ slightly from those in shelf mark 71.2.F9, Biblioteca nazionale centrale. 54 Shelf mark S.R. 496, Biblioteca Ambrosiana. 55 See ms R. 181 inf. (8), Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

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of debate with their Protestant opponents. In large part, that was because of the conclusions reached by Bellarmino, as he wrestled with the problem of the publication and subsequent correction of the Vulgate during the 1580s and 1590s. In correspondence with Sirleto, and reflecting on the experience of editors in Louvain and Antwerp as well as in Rome, Bellarmino saw the need to draw up clear rules for deciding between one reading and another, in the process recognizing in particular that Jerome had based his own translation on the Hebrew text, rather than on the Septuagint, about which he had in fact expressed reservations.56 Tradition, in this context, might tell one as much as or even more than collation. At much the same time, Joseph Scaliger (1540– 1609) concluded that the Letter of Aristeas represented a fiction and determined that the Septuagint was a poor translation made by Hellenistic Jews who had not properly understood the biblical text. The Latin version, newly prepared at Rome, was dismissed by Scaliger as being even more unreliable. Protestant scholars in the 1590s sought out the products of the Roman press not because of the manuscript evidence that they collated but in order to pour scorn on the confusion of their editing.57 In many ways, this confessionalization of scholarship represented a defeat for contemporary practices of learning rather than a victory for particular new insights or methods of understanding. When Catholic scholars three hundred years later picked over the bones of what had happened in the sixteenth century, they therefore sought to rescue the intentions rather than the conclusions of Cervini, Sirleto, and their collaborators, and to accommodate them to their own views of the value of the biblical text.

56 57

Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible Sixto-Clémentine, esp. 40–41 and the various documents printed at 104–29. Scaliger to Gilbert Seguin, ca. 11 Nov. 1590–June 1593, in The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 2:132–37; cf. the enthusiasm of Isaac Casaubon about obtaining a copy of the Roman Septuagint: Casaubon to Jacques Bongars, 5 May 1596, in Epistolae, ed. Theodore Janssonius ab Almeloveen (Rotterdam, 1709), 588–89. In the copy that belonged to him, Scaliger made extensive revisions to the published apparatus, frequently basing his corrections on the biblical commentaries of Procopius of Gaza (and thus concentrating on the Octateuch, the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, and on Isaiah): see shelfmark Adv. a. 19.3, Cambridge University Library. The neglect of Procopius by the Roman editors was noted even by enthusiasts for the accuracy of their work, see Louis Ellies du Pin, A Compleat History of the Canon and Writers, of the Books of the Old and New Testament, 2 vols (London, 1699–1700), 1: 189.

chapter 16

Theology and the Conditions of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Discernment of Spirits Stuart Clark The “worlds made by words” depicted throughout Anthony Grafton’s work are, first and foremost, communities: learned Europeans brought “public worlds into existence” through shared research, common rules and disciplines, institutionalized debate, and international systems of communication. The conditions that “enable us to know certain things—and prevent us from knowing others” are essentially social.1 But there is a stricter nominalism present too. Historia, astrologia, scientia, magia also make the things they name, by organizing their contents (their “particulars”), their methods of study, and their relationships with each other. In kabbalah, things are made by numbers; in alchemy, by symbols. Across Grafton’s interests and publications one may therefore detect a concern for a kind of historical epistemology—for the complex dynamics of how “knowledges” themselves are formed, relate to each other, command assent (or not), constitute objects of study and belief, and so on. His two career-long enthusiasms,chronology and philology, deal with the very units of time and meaning from which vast swathes of early modern learning were constructed. The idea that theologia might be seen in the same terms may seem implausible. It was scarcely a subject of choice among the citizens of the early modern Republic of Letters—the community of scholars to which Grafton has devoted the most attention—even among the churchmen. Yet one of its specialisms in Catholic tradition, the “discernment of spirits,” certainly reads like an exercise in knowledge formation in both the epistemological and the social sense. Ostensibly, it was narrowly focused on the authenticity of a particular group of spiritual experiences—visions, revelations, raptures, ecstasies, dreams, and the like. But such mental events could readily stand for human cognition as a whole. Their very intractability, as well as the wider ambiguities of spiritus, therefore raised issues about the knowability of things that were more generally debated and had much broader implications. At the same time, and despite its 1 Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1–8 and passim.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_017

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own shaky epistemological foundations, the theologians saw discernment as a touchstone (a “Lydian stone”) of identification and truth. The narratives that concerned them most, like the apparitions of the Old and New Testaments, or the temptations of the desert Fathers and the medieval saints, became dramatic parables about perception and its interpretation. And the beings that populated their pages—angels and demons, saints and sinners, male and, especially, female religious—took on the identities and roles (and imagery) made for them by the demands not just of morality or propaganda but also of epistemology. Discernment ideally performed created its own community of Christian believers, both imagined in the pages of texts and in images and realized in the conduct of the faithful and their spiritual advisers. But essentially it was concerned with intelligibility—with the enablement “to know certain things.” Though grounded in theological categories, it needs to be understood in these much wider terms.



This is not to deny the direct connections between the theology of discernment and the most advanced textual scholarship of the Catholic Reformation, notably in the area of church history. Tony Grafton himself has recently shown how unwise it is to distinguish between the early modern historiography of religions and churches and the new history writing of the Renaissance humanists, as if technical innovation and critical sophistication belonged wholly to the latter. On the contrary, church history both appealed to humanist scholars and antiquarians and also came to afford its own opportunities for experimentation and collaborative intellectual work, thereby inspiring “some of the most innovative historical thinkers of the early modern period.”2 Among the most striking examples of ecclesiastical scholarship organized as “a collective humanistic venture” was the Acta sanctorum, initiated by Heribert Rosweyde and Jean Bolland (both theologus), which began to appear in 1643.3 In a sense, this whole gigantic exercise was a form of discretio—“textual discernment,” as it has been called—rooted (for Bolland at least) in a fusion of historical assessment of the actuality of events and theological interpretation of their spiritual

2 Anthony Grafton, “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–26, at 14; cf. Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 98–113. 3 Grafton, “Church History,” 20.

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origins and meaning.4 Here, authoritative technical accounts of the discernment of spirits took their place in the footnotes to the lives alongside the other critical apparatus, as they did, for example, in Evagrius of Antioch’s Latin translation of Saint Athanasius’s life of the desert hermit Saint Anthony, where citations occur to works like Saint Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and Martin Delrio’s Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex.5 Later in the history of discernment theology the compliment was returned. The eighteenth-century Bavarian theologian and philosopher Eusebius Amort, who compiled a collection of “secure rules” distilled from all the standard discernment texts, which was published in Augsburg in 1744, included in it extracts from the lives in the Acta sanctorum to show how the criteria for the successful discernment of private revelations and visions actually worked.6 Significantly, Amort was able to find support for some of his rules in the principles for measuring certainty in arguments laid down in what he termed the “Ars Critica,” an allusion to Jean Leclerc’s famous guide to advanced textual criticism, Ars critica, published in Amsterdam in 1697.7 The name of Delrio too allows us to set the discernment of spirits in a wider scholarly context, thanks to Jan Machielsen’s fine new study of the Jesuit intellectual. Delrio has long been seen simply as a theorist of the witch trials, on account of some passages on witchcraft in his Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex—a book that, Machielsen rightly argues, has been allowed to “eclipse” its author. But reading all the writings and considering all the interests of any socalled demonologist invariably complicates things. Once we look, in particular, at Delrio’s studies in Senecan tragedy and a correspondence linking him intimately to the wider world of letters, he emerges as a thoroughgoing late humanist, immersed in all the current debates about textual criticism and interpretation and anxious to position himself in relation to other key figures in contemporary scholarship—men like Joseph Scaliger and Justus Lipsius. The Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex may be a work of Catholic orthodoxy directed at heretics, 4 Jan Machielsen, “Heretical Saints and Textual Discernment: The Polemical Origins of the Acta Sanctorum (1643–1940),” in Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period, ed. Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 103–41. 5 Acta Sanctorum, 2 vols. (Antwerp: Joannes Meursius, 1643), 2: 128–29 (vita of St. Anthony, 17 Jan.). 6 Eusebius Amort, De revelationibus, visionibus et apparitionibus privatis regulae tutae (Augsburg: Martin Veith, 1744), pt. 1, 253–57, for extracts from the entries for Saints Veronica of Binasco (13 Jan.), Margaret of Cortona (22 Feb.), Frances of Rome (9 Mar.), and Anne (26 July); see also pt. 2, 32–39, for further use of the Acta, and pt. 2, 10, for use of Rosweyde’s edition of Vitae patrum (Antwerp: Plantin, 1615). 7 Amort, De revelationibus, pt. 1, 259, 279 (Amort gives no precise citation).

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but its underpinnings are forms of textual scholarship, both philological and historical, in vogue (and vigorous contention) across the Republic of Letters. Important for the moment, however, is the fact that, among a multitude of topics other than witchcraft, the book also offered guidance on the discernment of spirits (as well as making use of saints’ lives in a way that seems to have inspired Rosweyde) and was widely cited in the later literature on the subject. There was clearly no fundamental incompatibility between this particular genre of traditional theology and the academic and intellectual environment of someone who promoted himself as an exemplar of learning in the Catholic humanist mode.8 If tradition was reinforced in the intellectual culture of Catholicism after the Council of Trent this was not necessarily in negative or reactionary terms. Indeed, it led inevitably to creative intervention in the church’s historical record in the form of scholarly activity, especially textual criticism, interpretation, refurbishment, and dissemination. This makes it easier to view the theological campaign against empty visions and false revelations as something beyond merely the dogmatic denunciation and eradication of error in particular religious experiences—as something that might qualify as a genuine engagement with the conditions of knowledge in all their variability and uncertainty.



In many ways, the intellectual characteristics of the theology of discernment were obviously very different from those that prevailed across the Republic of Letters. It remained a scholastic rather than a humanistic enterprise, rooted in the exegesis of giants of the canon like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Jean Gerson. Its scholarship was primarily that of commentary, synthesis, codification, and rule gathering, not linguistic, textual, or bibliographical erudition. It was also, as one would expect, profoundly conservative in spirit, showing none of the interest in novel specialisms, ideas, and arguments evident elsewhere. When in 1734–38 Prospero Lambertini (later Benedict xiv) published a guide to canonization that Simon Ditchfield has called “unrivalled today for its scope and depth,” the section in it on discernment was still employing Aristotelian categories to account for the workings of the human faculties, 8 Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2 and passim; Martin Delrio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Mainz: Petrus Henningius, 1617), 498–528 (bk. 4, q. 3: “How is prophecy or divine revelation to be distinguished from divination or diabolical revelation?”), cf. 225–71 (bk. 2, q. 26: “Is it possible for the power of demons to make the souls or spirits of the dead appear to the living?”).

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a century after René Descartes had denounced them as the product of “blind impulse” and the mental habits of childhood.9 The idea of a cosmopolitan community of scholars, virtual or otherwise, sharing across faiths and borders in the research, free exchange, and open publication of intellectual goods, and regulated by canons of conduct appropriate to men of letters, was unlikely to appeal to writers of texts designed for confessors, inquisitors, and canonizers. Nevertheless, in one crucial respect the theologians of the Catholic Reformation were attempting something that paralleled—albeit in the service of clerical authority and confessional orthodoxy—the knowledge making of their more humanistic contemporaries. Although by 1600 discernment was already four centuries old as a religious preoccupation and two as the subject of specialist texts, they still felt the need to reiterate its significance and develop its principles. They do seem, in particular, to have had a fundamental interest in knowledge itself—in what it meant to know something. The discerning of spirits was one of the graces gratis datae (the seventh) discussed in 1 Corinthians 12 and so, strictly speaking, beyond the realm of human learning altogether. It was a charism emanating directly from the Holy Spirit that infused its recipients with a supernatural, incorrigible, and definitionally unmediated ability— “without a person thinking about it,” as one expert put it.10 But besides making it the preserve of the very few, this left academic theology with little or nothing to do. Discernment theologians therefore had first to argue for the very existence of their subject. As one of them, the Cistercian Cardinal Giovanni Bona, put it: For this reason another way of discerning spirits is to be sought that is more common and easier to do, and that is, by means of art and doctrine, to examine surely the origins and effects of movements [of the soul] and consider also the rules prescribed by the Holy Spirit in the holy scriptures and those which have been handed down by the holy fathers inspired by God and by other doctors taught by their experience. Although this discretio does not belong directly and immediately to the freely given grace, 9

10

Prospero Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione, 4 vols. (Bologna: n.p., 1734–38), 3:678–764 (bk. 3, Chaps. 48–53); Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5; René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:27, 57, 295–96. Cardinal Francesco Lorenzo Brancati di Lauria (in his commentary on Duns Scotus), quoted by Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione, 3:679.

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it can nevertheless be reconciled to it, insofar as those precepts are used that the very wisest men, imbued with a spirit of truth besides their knowledge (scientia) and natural judgment, and an equity in weighing spirits by supernatural principles, have left behind in their studies.11 For the purposes of theological knowledge and writing, then, discernment was made possible by applying the rules of an art, learned, according to Lambertini, “by human industry and toil” and subject to human prudence.12 But it is not only how discernment was to be known itself that is important here; it is also what it was supposed to be knowledge of. The “origins and effects” of movements of the soul might not seem very promising as a field of learning, but once we realize what this comprised then the range and complexity of the subject become evident. Consider the theologians’ essential question: given that the inspiration for any thought or deed could be divine (or angelic), demonic, or merely human, what, in any particular case of doubtful religious authenticity or value, could individuals know about either themselves or someone else, regarding the origins, truth, and moral character of the experience? Answering this question meant exploring some broad and, in the context of the time, intellectually demanding issues. Most obviously, there was the problem of agency. The precise characteristics of the three “spirits” to be tested—inspirational in a literal sense through the link between spiritus and the Latin verb spirare—and what exactly could be expected of them was itself a major form of inquiry. Only natural determinants like the operation of the heavens were excluded, theologians being unlikely to warrant them. How mental life and human conduct could be acted on by the many agents that were on the list led to analysis of all the human faculties, notably the understanding and will, and of the operations of the inner and outer senses and the role of the affections and passions. The particular experiences to which all this knowledge was applied were specialist topics in their own right: revelations, visions, apparitions, dreams, ecstasies and raptures, and prophecies. But since apportioning these both to agents and to ontological categories was so difficult, discernment theology also became a kind of applied natural philosophy, obliged to decide between the causation of natural, preternatural, and supernatural effects. Something similar happened with the social aspects of discernment. It could be exercised both by the individuals who had these experiences and by others who observed them and tried to judge their credibility. But the 11

Giovanni Bona, De discretio spirituum, in Opera omnia (Antwerp: Jan Jacobsz. Schipper [vidua], 1677), 228. 12 Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione, 679.

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theologians knew that this was not just an intellectual skill but related also to conduct and customs—what Bona called “mores.” Reliable human judgment was made possible (or impossible) partly by a person’s social attributes and the type of community to which he or she belonged, and this led inevitably to discussion of the individual and communal qualities that ideally should accompany it. Naturally, not all these matters were treated in equal depth in every text. But they were all required components of the exercise considered as a whole, and were frequently subject to very dense treatments indeed. Discernment was, in effect, an amalgam of what were taken to be currently valid forms of, not just theological, but also philosophical, psychological, medical, social, historical, and moral knowledge. Additionally, both its difference in kind from discernment by grace and the sheer difficulty of some of these constituent topics made human discernment intellectually reflexive. It was not merely fully aware of its precariousness compared to the Pauline grace and the perfect exemplification of that grace in the lives of so many saints; its very definition as not something meant that selfscrutiny about the kind of knowledge it could claim to be was intrinsic to it. As Cardinal Bona, again, remarked: If discretio is done by means of learning, through rules and conjectures prudently applied, and even with all the circumstances accurately weighed, since the signs and precepts it depends on are no more than probable, it can be plainly concluded from this that the judgment is always made with fear and uncertainty.13 These are reservations about the practice’s own viability that seem particularly well suited to an age of skepticism and probabilism in the making of knowledge. Bona’s conclusion was that it could only ever afford “a kind of moral certainty (moralis quaedam certitudo)” that was never free from doubt, but this was precisely the kind of certainty that appealed to many, perhaps more innovative, seventeenth-century intellectuals, especially philosophers. As in other areas of post-Tridentine scholarship—but in this case by necessity—the defense of orthodoxy did not mean either the absence of interpretation or isolation from wider currents of thought.14 13 Bona, De discretio spirituum, 235. 14 For important arguments about the emergence of probabilism and moral certainty within late medieval scholasticism, linked to “long-known difficulties of distinguishing divine from demonic inspirations,” see Rudolf Schüssler, “Jean Gerson, Moral Certainty and the Renaissance of Ancient Scepticism,” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 445–62, at

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In effect, Bona was conceding that the movements of the soul could not successfully investigate themselves, a thought with a particular intellectual resonance in the wake of Michel de Montaigne. Discernment’s most telling form of reflexivity was the making of objects of knowledge out of the very processes by which knowledge itself was acquired. The reliability of revelatory visions with a religious content was interesting enough as a substantive epistemological issue. But the intellectual culture of early modern Europe was thoroughly ocularcentric and made the visual faculty a paradigm of knowing in general, in line with (among many other authorities) Aquinas’s remark that the word “sight” was “originally applied to the act of the sense of sight, and then, as this sense is the noblest and most trustworthy of the senses, was extended in common speech to all knowledge obtained through the other senses… [and] through the intellect.”15 By the mid-seventeenth century the problems of visual cognition were setting some major philosophical agendas, notably those of Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. Irrespective of their religious significance— considerable though that was—the epistemology of visions could therefore represent knowledge issues of a very broad kind.



The idea that from its initial revival in the late twelfth century onward, discernment was, fundamentally, both an epistemological and an interpretive exercise has been familiar since Nancy Caciola’s pioneering work on the subject and her more recent collaboration with Moshe Sluhovsky.16 So too has Caciola’s suggestion that this makes it “an excellent point of entry into a broader set of questions concerning social and religious epistemology” and the “politics of

15 16

446; and, more generally, Schüssler, Moral im Zweifel, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Mentis, 2003–6), vol. 1, Die scholastische Theorie des Entscheidens unter moralischer Unsicherheit. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt. 1, q. 67, art. 1, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. A.C. Pegis, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1945), 1:629. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2003), passim, esp. 1–27, 79–125; Caciola and Moshe Sluhovsky, “Spiritual Physiologies: The Discernment of Spirits in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Preternature 1 (2012): 1–48. Sluhovsky’s Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007) is less overtly concerned with these features, but they are implicit throughout his discussion; and see esp. 1–3, 169–205. See also Fernando Vidal, “Miracles, Science, and Testimony in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making,” Science in Context 20 (2007): 481–508; Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 564–70.

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knowledge production.”17 Both authors have now argued that, as discernment’s institionalized skepticism made it resort increasingly to the naturalizing languages of medicine and physiology, so its concern with verification and the testing of evidence became more and more relevant to experimental knowledge making in general. Although entirely religious in motivation, it was, in effect, a form of scientific inquiry that turned a specific set of experiences and events into epistemic objects and, like so many other early modern enquiries, thereby sought “to categorize the sensory world with greater regularity and accuracy.”18 This striking claim on behalf of theology’s long-term contribution to knowledge production is accompanied, however, by a qualification. Caciola and Sluhovsky also argue that discernment theory more or less stood still after Gerson had established it as a coherent realm of theological inquiry at the outset of the fifteenth century. This was its “apogee,” and thereafter, despite much elaboration and systematization, it remained backward-looking and derivative, without significant change or improvement, as if “the final word already had been said.” As a genre, discernment texts stagnated, adding little to the  Gersonian model and developing only in their levels of generality and abstraction.19 Where, then, does this leave the voluminous body of writing on discernment between Gerson and Lambertini, and, in particular, the considerable contribution to the genre inspired by the Catholic Reformation? Caciola and Sluhovsky attribute this to a broadening of the discussion occasioned by the new prominence of exorcism, both as diagnosis and as clerical practice, and by an escalation in the long campaign to regulate female spirituality.20 With these must obviously be linked the fresh determination after Trent, and particularly during the papacy of Urban viii, to scrutinize the whole question of miracles in religious life and to reform not just the writing of hagiography but the making of saints itself. But there is another possible answer—an intensification of theological attention to the very subject that made discernment so necessary in the first place: demonology. Demons were not merely alternative agents in the causation of religious experiences. Thanks to Saint Paul’s remark about “angels of light” (2 Cor. 11:13–14) and to centuries of ever-more-elaborate commentary on what this meant, they were allowed the extraordinary freedom to create false versions of religious experiences (of every kind) that were indistinguishable from the true ones—“putting false things,” as one favourite source,

17 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 3. 18 Caciola and Sluhovsky, “Spiritual Physiologies,” 38. 19 Ibid., 15, 18–19; cf. 26, 35. 20 Ibid., 20–33; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, passim.

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Saint Cyprian, laconically put it, “under an appearance of truth.”21 This, in essence, was what made discernment of spirits an exercise in interpretative epistemology, but also—as Caciola, again, has so effectively shown—one that was vitiated from the start by radical ambiguity.22 Any magnifying of the threat of demonic deception, therefore, was likely to produce a corresponding upsurge in attempts to provide an epistemological answer. The renewed significance of demonology among Catholic intellectuals from the late sixteenth century onward has often been remarked on, most recently by Irena Backus and Jan Machielsen.23 What has not been sufficiently noticed, however, is the appearance of more and more elaborate accounts of how completely demons could subvert human perception and cognition, understood in the Aristotelian terms that still prevailed in European intellectual circles. Theologians (and natural philosophers) had long puzzled over the question why, if demons and their magician allies exercised only natural agency (a theological given), they nevertheless seemed capable of causing nonnatural events, notable miracles (a theological taboo). Two of the principal sources of medieval theological opinion, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, offered an answer: the suspect events were not genuine but, in line with Pauline doctrine, true only in appearance, the devil having the power to cause all the required perceptions in actors and spectators through his control over the human sensorium.24 By the end of the fifteenth century, commentators on Peter Lombard like Aegidius Colonna, Saint Bonaventure, and Gabriel Biel had all explored more exactly what this meant in terms of the received Aristotelian “chain of cognition.”25 This explained the propagation of sensible species in the field of 21

“On the Unity of the Church,” s. 2, in The Treatises of S. Caecilius Cyprian, A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, vol. 3 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1839), 133. 22 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 1, 31–34, 75–76, 214–15. 23 Irena Backus, “Connaître le diable: évolution du savoir relatif au diable d’Augustine à Martin del Rio,” in La Mesure du savoir: études sur l’appréciation et l’évaluation des savoirs, ed. Pascale Hummel and Frédéric Gabriel (Paris: Philologicum, ca. 2007), 50–54; Machielsen, Martin Delrio, passim, esp. 207–93. 24 Peter Lombard, Petri Lombardi…sententiarum libri iiii, ed. Jean Aleaume, 3rd ed. (Leuven: Bartholomaeus Gravius, 1557), 160 (bk. 2, dist. 8, para. E: “Whether demons enter substantially into the bodies of men, and penetrate their minds?”); Aquinas, Summa theologica, in Basic Writings, 1:1029 (pt. 1, q. 111, art. 4: “Whether an angel can affect the human senses?”). Another answer, of course, was to say that the events were natural after all, when considered by experts, since what counted as natural causation was relative to what was known about the natural world. 25 Aegidius Colonna, In secundum librum sententiarum quaestiones nunc denuo excusae industria…pars prima, ed. Angelo Rocca (Venice: Franciscus Zilettus, 1581), 388–90; Saint  Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum, in Opera omnia, ed. A.C.  Peltier, 15 vols. (Paris: L. Vivès, 1864–71), 2:449–52; Gabriel Biel, Inventarium seu

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visual (and other) objects, their transmission to the external organs of sense through an appropriate medium, and their internal reception and reorganization by the mental faculties of “common sense,” memory, and especially imagination (phantasia) located in the chambers of the brain—this last stage (we should note) achieved by the flowings and reflowings of animal “spirits.” The commentators even took the trouble to pose the many objections an Aristotelian might make to the whole idea of demonic contamination of these cognitive processes and answered each in turn. The most influential early sixteenth-century commentator on Aquinas, Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, gave further traction and authority to the notion, and by the 1590s it was being explored in more and more detail and with greater-than-ever insistence.26 Now intricate accounts were offered of the many specific ways interference could occur in the triadic relationship between object, medium, and sense organ. The capacity of demons to enter the internal faculties of the sensible soul and, in particular, to control completely the movement of mental images was also subject to complicated analysis. There are examples in the foremost Aquinas commentators of the age, Luis de Molina and Gregorius de Valentia, and in the writings of scholars of huge subsequent influence across the Catholic world, like Martin Delrio and Petrus Thyraeus.27 Into the new century, Raphael de la Torre, the Salamanca theologian, and Adam Tanner, the Jesuit who taught theology at the universities of Munich, Ingolstadt, Dillingen, Prague, and Vienna, provide further typical instances, while the book on canonization of Angelo Rocca, bishop of Tagasti, illustrates (briefly) how the newly emphasized demonology of the senses impinged on the all-important matter of the making of saints.28

26

27

28

r­ epertorium…super quattuor libros sententiarum (Lyon: Johannes Cleyn, 1514), sigs. eeiii v–eeiiii r (all commentaries on the section of bk. 2, dist. 8, of the Sentences, with variant subdivisions, where demonic sensory delusions are discussed). Tommaso de Vio Gaetano (Cardinal Cajetan), Summa sacrae theologiae…in tres…partes… divisa…commentariis illustrata, 4 vols. (Lyon: Jacobus Giunta [haeredes], 1562), 3:343–52, esp. 344–46; this work dates from 1507–22. Luis de Molina, Commentaria in primam divi Thomae partem, in duos tomos divisa (Lyon: Joannis Baptistae Buysson, 1593), 692–94; Gregorius de Valentia, Commentariorum theologicorum tomi quatuor, 4 vols. (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1591–97), vol. 1, cols. 1043–49, vol. 3, cols. 1972–76; Delrio, Disquisitionum magicarum, 119–21, 207–17; Petrus Thyraeus, Divinarum Novi Testamenti, sive Christi…apparitionum libri tres (Cologne: Maternus Cholinus, 1603), 219–23, esp. 221; Petrus Thyraeus, De apparitionibus spirituum tractatus duo (Cologne: Maternus Cholinus, 1600), 21, 26. Raphael de la Torre, De vitiis oppositis religioni…tomus secundus (Salamanca: Franciscus de Cea Tesa, 1612), 136–46; Adam Tanner, De potentia loco motiva angelorum, in Diversi

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These are only some prominent instances of what had evidently become a central feature of Catholic theorizing on the making—in this case, the unmaking— of knowledge. The context is not, except perhaps in the case of Thyraeus, specifically that of the discernment of spirits. It is the more general subject of scholastic demonology. But commentary on Aquinas, where most of the arguments were articulated, was fundamental to Catholic Reformation scholarship, with regard both to published theology and to what was taught in university courses across Europe. This is precisely where we should expect to find the organizing intellectual principles of reformed Catholicism. The essential components of the demonology may not have been new, but they were being articulated with novel force and urgency, as if freshly relevant to a whole range of currently sensitive spiritual issues. And when we do find them inserted into works that were definitely discernment treatises by genre, as in the very full and striking discussion—of each of the senses in turn—in a work of 1634, the Tratado del examen de las revelaciones verdaderas y falsas, y de los raptos by the Valencian priest Jéronimo de Planes, we realize that there is absolutely nothing like them in Gerson or the other early exponents of the subject.29 Discernment theology was having to respond, not in general terms but in detail, to a newly articulated set of intellectual challenges, challenges, moreover, that seem to resonate with anxieties about certainty in knowledge beyond the world of late scholasticism. In the terms permitted to it by received cognitive theory, the demonology of the senses explained with complete success and great thoroughness how demons could create false forms of knowing that were indistinguishable in all epistemological respects from their true equivalents. This was demolition of the theory from within, since the veridicality of appearances was precisely what Aristotelianism was supposed to secure. The profound, not to mention paradoxical, consequences for discernment as an epistemological exercise are obvious. Indeed, such were the skeptical implications of Planes’s circumstantial account of demonic delusion that it stands comparison with that other, much more famous, “demon hypothesis” of the 1630s, the one found in the first of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. The late literature of

29

tractatus de potestate ecclesiastica coercendi daemones… De potentia ac viribus daemonum (Cologne: Constantin Munich, 1629), 88–90 (originally in his Disputatio de Angelis, 1617); Angelo Rocca, De canonizatione sanctorum commentarius (Rome: Guillelmus Facciottus, 1601), 22–23. Jerónimo de Planes, Tratado del examen de las revelaciones verdaderas, y falsas, y de los raptos (Valencia: Juan Chrysostomo Garriz [vidua], 1634), 207r–10v (sight), 213r–14r (hearing), 218r–19r (smell), 221v–22v (touch), 226v–28r (taste). Planes follows with a discussion of demonic delusion of the inner senses.

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discernment might even be seen as the theological equivalent of a Cartesian exercise, an attempt to rescue the conditions of knowledge from the demonological impasse in which they were increasingly trapped. The allegory for this escape route was the search for the “Lydian stone.”



The 1630s was a busy decade for theories of knowledge, especially if we include the intellectual preparations that Thomas Hobbes was making for The elements of law natural and politic, completed in 1640. In Naples in 1638, the distinguished Italian theologian Domenico Gravina published a two-volume contribution to the developing genre of monographs on discretio spirituum that also qualifies as an account of the conditions of knowledge. Its title was Ad discernendas veras a falsis visionibus et revelationibus ΒΑΣΑΝΙΤΗΣ, hoc est lapis Lydius, and it was dedicated—ironically to us, given his reputation—to the cardinal-nephew of Urban viii, Antonio Barberini. Gravina was a prominent Dominican, serving as vicar-general of the order, and he also held office in the archbishopric of Naples and taught theology, first at the College of Saint Thomas in Rome and after at the university in Naples. His other publications were also theological or church polemical, and he was an ardent enough Thomist (and educator) to produce one of the Catholic Reformation’s more improbable texts, a summary of Aquinas’s entire Summa theologica in rhyming Latin verse.30 The “Lydian stone” (basanite, used by jewelers and metalworkers to test the purity of gold and silver) was adopted figuratively throughout Renaissance writing to signify any supposedly conclusive test of genuineness or authenticity. Gravina, like the other theologians who emblematized the subject in this way, hoped that discernment could be equally reliable as a touchstone of true knowledge. His title page depicts some of the themes he is about to consider (“De divina revelatio,” “De prophetia,” “De ecstase et raptu”) striking his heart in revelatory rays from heaven, with a Host perched in its monstrance on the open pages of the book the reader is about to begin and a putto holding up a placard containing verses 20 and 22 from 1 Thessalonians 5 (“Prophetias nolite spernere…ab omni specie mala abstinete vos”). In the proem to part 1 of the work Gravina says that what he is offering is “like the Lydian stone, examining 30

Domenico Gravina, Totius summae theologicae S. Thomae Aquinatis compendium rhytmicum (Naples: Scipio Bonini, 1625); for a sample, see the six-line stanza comprising the demonology (discussed above) in pt. 1, q. 111, “The Action of the Angels on Man” (pp. 47–48).

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what is a false vision and revelation.”31 He concedes the inevitability of falseness itself not just in terms drawn from scriptural and patristic authority but by citing Seneca’s De constantia sapientis (On the constancy of the wise man). Identifying the truth in revelations is to be a twofold intellectual task comprising, first, the act of testing (“probatio”—in accordance with the intervening verse 21 in 1 Thess. 5: “Omnia autem probate quod bonum est tenete”), and second, the making of a distinction (“discrimen”—in accordance with 2 Cor. 11 and, as later becomes apparent, another Senecan text, Epistles 120). What did it mean, then, to discern these particular objects of knowledge? Gravina devotes nearly nine hundred pages to the question, divided between answers of a “theoretical” and “practical” kind. For the confessors and inquisitors to whom the book is addressed to consider any specific case, they needed first to grasp the place of revelations in the sacred past, the “motions” they gave rise to in the human soul, and their role in the contemporary church: by necessity, any revelatory moment had historical, psychological, and institutional constituents. Gravina surveys the last of these only briefly (pt. 1, bk. 4) and in predictable terms—the approved benefits to the faith and to individuals, the relationship between private revelation and public orthodoxy, notably sainthood, and so on. Church history, by contrast, receives extensive treatment (pt. 1, bk. 1), reflecting its salience in contemporary religious debate and the challenge posed by the historiography of the Protestant “Magdeburg Centuries” (1559–74). Gravina compiles a chronological survey of authentic revelations and visions, starting with Adam and proceeding, age by age and century by century, down to Andreas de Avellini, beatified by Urban viii, who in 1604 saw a vision of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. He repeatedly denounces the views of the “Centuriatores” concerning the veracity of individual episodes and then counters these with a matching survey, also by century, of all the heresies and errors occasioned by revelations and visions that had indeed turned out to be false. This second narrative takes us from Simon Magus in Acts 8 to the “illuminists” and “enthusiasts” of Gravina’s own time. Historical example and divine purpose were obviously persuasive arguments for the reality of (“an res sit?”) and reasons for (“propter quid sit?”) true visions in the age of the Catholic Reformation. They already established powerful grounds for would-be discerners to find them intelligible. But what they were (“quid sit et quotuplex sit?”) was movements of the soul, and the form they took (“qualis sit?”) was itself a kind of “knowing” (agnitio), and it is these questions 31

Domenico Gravina, Ad discernendas veras a falsis visionibus et revelationibus ΒΑΣΑΝΙΤΗΣ, hoc est lapis Lydius, 2 vols. (Naples: Scipio Bonini, 1638), vol. 1, pt. 1, 5; cf. Francisco Maria Filomarino, Tractatus de divinis revelationibus (Naples: Hyacinthus Passari, 1675), 129.

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that command most of Gravina’s theoretical attention (pt. 1, bks. 2 and 3).32 He adopts an Augustinian typology, found throughout the theological literature, whereby religious visions were mapped onto a threefold division of ordinary human visual cognition into “corporeal,” “imaginative” (or “spiritual”), and “intellectual” forms. He also takes for granted the late-scholastic/Aristo­telian account of the process of visual cognition itself as a natural transmission of sensible forms called species, which (under optimum conditions) carry true copies (or “similitudes”) of objects in the visual field into the ventricles of the brain, where they are replicated intact as images of the world. Together, these two frameworks enable Gravina to analyze the mental conditions under which a religious vision could be both experienced and understood, whether as a physical apparition to the eyes, a phantasma to the waking or dreaming imagination, or—best of all—an image-less intuition of the rational soul. At the same time, the essential character of a true vision as revelatory wisdom necessitates full discussion of allied forms of religious knowing, especially prophecy. In the end, no feature of the cognitive capacities of the sensible and rational souls or what happens to them when divinely infused is left unconsidered. Interposed between the theoretical and practical halves of Gravina’s work is the subject that, implicitly even if not explicitly, was pivotal to any discussion of discernment—demonology (pt. 1, bk. 5). Much anticipated in earlier sections, demons are now directly blamed for most deceiving visions and dreams experienced privately (disease and other natural causes are also partly responsible) and for all suspect forms of public revelation or prophecy: oracles, divination, auguries, omens, and the like. But to these general attributions, Gravina adds the more specific threat to any account of visionary experiences as “motions” of human cognition—the recently magnified arguments about demonic actions being either real but natural or unreal deceptions of the senses known as praestigia: Those that are not really done but simulated by illusion are called “praestigious,” for when the demon is not able in truth to bring about real effects, he reverts to praestigious actions and delusions of the senses. First, by a kind of agility and dexterity, like the jugglers do. Second, by using certain natural things like fumigation, so that those entering some dwelling seem to see men with asses’ heads and the like. [And] in tricking the senses, whenever he employs existing things and alters them by 32

The “peripatetic” questions are inserted in Gravina’s headings and introductions; see Ad discernendas veras a falsis visionibus, vol. 1, pt. 1, 6. The reference to “agnitio” is at vol. 1, pt. 1, bk. 3, 1 (sep. pagination).

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changing colors or forms or size. Third, he darkens or alters the medium, so that the object cannot be seen. Fourth, he strikes the eyes so that they can see nothing, or by a different substitution removes the object so that it sends forth no species: and in the same way he can alter the other organs of sense. Fifth, he is likewise able to summon the images and imprinted species from the interior to the exterior senses, so that all these are experienced (habeantur) as if present.33 Interestingly, Gravina’s next remarks are about witchcraft, a subject that owed much of its remaining theological appeal to the fact that it shared its epistemology and, consequently, its most intractable issues with discernment— notably the difficulty of establishing the authenticity of what those involved in it actually experienced. Armed with all this information about what in principle a true or bad vision should be, a director of souls, an inquisitor, or maybe a promotor fidei in canonization cases (as Lambertini was for a while) could embark on an assessment of the credibility of any specific case. At this point, discernment became a matter of asking what enabled individuals and communities to know that they had undergone or witnessed a true or false visionary experience and had interpreted it correctly. Human understanding of these matters, however rooted in theological doctrine, had as its inescapable constituents the personal and communal characteristics (also inflected theologically, of course) that helped to make the “motions” of the soul of any individual what they were. Gravina distinguishes three ways for “coming to know [visions], by practical criteria” (practica criteria, vel media ad ea noscenda)—by person, by content, and by circumstance—and these divisions provide the framework for part 2 of his treatise. Again, the treatment is uneven; he scarcely considers circumstantiis revelatorum (and maybe does not need to), devotes more attention to obiecto revelationum, and spends most time on “the person to whom a revelation is said to be made.” This is the list of questions to be asked of that person: As far as nature is concerned, we can consider the person both according to their sex, that is whether the person…is male or female, and according to their condition (complexio), that is, if [the revelation] arises internally, whether they have strong or weak vision (visus), or the powerful imagination of a melancholic temperament, and if it is truly external, whether they are of cheerful or sad manner (conversatio). And whether they are 33

Ibid., vol. 1, pt. 1, bk. 5, 90–91; cf. the more elaborate discussion at vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 1, 21–23.

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sound in the head or frenetic or raving mad, and regarding their inclination, whether they are disposed to vices or to virtues and to studying. As far as customs (mores) and position (status) are concerned, we may inquire whether they are possessed of good habits. Secondly, which studies and offices delight them, and especially whether they pursue useful or useless and wicked arts. Thirdly, by which teachers they are, or were, instructed and directed, and whose company they take pleasure in. Fourthly, if they are lovers of truth or delight in lies. Fifthly, whether they are rich or poor etc. Sixthly, whether they are virgin, or married, or widowed. As far as the last question is concerned, we may examine firstly whether such a person is adorned with the Theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity, and these are joined by other Christian virtues, especially humility. Secondly, whether they are of secular or religious status. Thirdly, whether they are beginners in the perfection of life and learning, or veteran soldiers and well experienced. Fourthly, whether their life matches such freely given gifts, especially in the embracing of mortifications and the enduring of persecutions, and whether these gifts preceded these or were subsequent to them. Fifthly, whether these gifts were wished for, requested, pursued, and publicized. Sixthly, whether those undergoing these divine things were ever deceived before.34 “Criteria” like these may seem clumsy and imprecise, but Gravina tells us exactly how to categorize them—as well as making virtually every one of them the subject of a chapter. The first group (labeled “Physice”) covers everything about revelatory visions that could be discussed in natural philosophical and, ultimately, physiological terms, and it draws on the still-widespread assumption that things like gender, cognition, mental states, the passions, manner, and inclination were causally based functions of the organic soul and, as such, fundamentally at risk from demonic interference. The second group, which Gravina called “Ethice, vel Politice,” focuses on the nonorganic functions of the intellective soul—understanding and will. Here, the idea is that judgments (and decisions) about visions depended on “intellectual virtues” that pertained to particular behaviors, employments, studies, teachers, associates, and variables of wealth and marital status. The last group were theological (“Theologice”) and dealt with what kind of Christian might be expected or trusted to receive the supernatural gift of a true vision and avoid the natural or demonic contaminants of a false one. 34

Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 1, 9–10; the whole passage is expressed in the feminine gender.

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The aim of Gravina’s entire, complicated analysis, in both its “theoretical” and its “practical” applications, is not infallibility in knowledge but something far more interesting—knowledge known under a multitude of conditions; or, at least, as many of them as might occur to a seventeenth-century Catholic theologian. He clearly shares Bona’s view that only “moral certainty” is possible in such matters, where exceptions and contingencies are unavoidable. He even concedes—more dangerously, perhaps, than he intends or Catholic Reformation thinking could openly tolerate—that “often, indeed, truth cannot be distinguished from verisimilitude” (saepe etiam ex verisimilitudine veritas discerni nequeat).35 Even so, it is hard to think of many other contexts in early modern writing where all the components of knowledge specified in Gravina’s vast book were brought systematically together to account for the intelligibility of a particular phenomenon. 35

Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, Praeludium, 8. On other tensions between certainty and uncertainty in the scholarship of the Catholic Reformation—and even, in the case of the doctrine of equivocation, what it meant to say “I know”—see Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), passim, esp. 10–39. Cf. Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 261–321, esp. 291 on discernment’s fear of demonic deception as “the underside of certainty.”

chapter 17

John Selden in Germany: Religion and Natural Law from Boecler to Buddeus (1665–1695)* Martin Mulsow John Selden generated a response in Germany that eludes easy comprehension.1 On the one hand, not only De Diis Syris but also De jure naturali and the Uxor ebraica, as well as De successionibus in bona defuncti and De successione in Pontificatum, were all reprinted in Germany—often repeatedly and in considerable print runs. This fact indicates great interest in the works of the English jurist, legal historian, and historian of religion. On the other hand, one seeks in vain for those scholars who were genuinely receptive to the idiosyncratic link Selden forged between natural law and the rabbinic tradition. To the degree that Selden’s work was not simply treated as a monolithic stone to be quarried as it suited one’s own individual purposes, he seems to have been rather the source of a powerful impulse that was then channeled in different directions more amenable to the specific German situation.2 The literature reveals clearly that the key period in the reception of Selden in Germany was the 1660s, but the attention given to him remained considerable in the following decades. i

The Constellation Boineburg-Boecler: From a Rabbinic to a Christian Natural Law

The starting point for an inquiry into the German reception is provided by the circumstance that an edition of De jure naturali was produced by Johann Heinrich * The chapter has been translated from German by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg. 1 On Selden see David Sandler Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1988); Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gerald J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See the review of Toomer’s magisterial book by Anthony Grafton in Huntington Library Quarterly 74, no. 3 (2011): 505–13. On the reception of Selden’s work in Germany, see Sergio Caruso, La miglior legge di regno. Consuetudine, diritto naturale e contratto nel pensiero e nell’epoca di John Selden (1584–1654), 2 vols. (Milan, 2001), 908–13. These few pages deal only with Pufendorf, Prasch, Leibniz, and Barbeyrac. 2 On post–Thirty Years War Germany in general see Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_018

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Boecler in Strasbourg in 1665, twenty-five years after the first edition and eleven years after Selden’s death.3 Boecler was professor of history at the University of Strasbourg and one of the leading historians, political scholars, and commentators upon Hugo Grotius in Germany. His edition can be seen as the culmination of an intense effort undertaken by German readers of Grotius to come to terms with Selden. These readers of Grotius formed something akin to a “constellation”: a network of interacting theoreticians interested in finding an adequate form of  natural law.4 (Figure 17.1) Foremost among them was Johann Christian von Boineburg, who as the first minister for the archbishop and elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn had a decisive role in shaping the foreign policy of the Electorate of Mainz.5 He was, however, also a scholar of high standing in Europe who had discovered and promoted the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Boineburg had converted to Catholicism and was an advocate of restoring the religious unity of Germany.6 He also ensured that his friend Boecler was appointed to the Council of the Electorate of Mainz. Both corresponded frequently with Hermann Conring in Helmstedt; with Conring’s student Samuel Rachel, professor in Kiel; with Caspar Ziegler, professor for canonical law in Wittenberg; and with Johann Joachim Zentgraf, Boecler’s theological colleague in Strasbourg.7 3 John Selden, De jure naturali et gentium (Strasbourg: G.A. Dolphopff & J.E. Zetzner, 1665). On Boecler (1611–72) see Fiametta Palladini, Un nemico di Samuel Pufendorf: Johann Heinrich Boecler, Jus Commune 24 (1997): 133–52; Wilhelm Kühlmann, Geschichte als Gegenwart. Formen der politischen Reflexion im deutschen“Tacitismus” des 17. Jahrhunderts, in Kühlmann and Walter E. Schäfer, Literatur im Elsaß von Fischart bis Moscherosch (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 41–60; Wolfgang Weber, Prudentia Gubernatoria. Studien zur Herrschaftslehre in der deutschen politischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 232–267. Boecler belonged to the group of sixty French and non-French scholars who received a royal pension from Louis xiv. 4 On the reception of Grotius: Hans-Peter Schneider, Justitia Universalis. Quellenstudien zur Geschichte des “christlichen Naturrechts” bei Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 122–58; Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, vol. 1, Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft, 1600–1800 (Munich: Beck, 1988), 195ff. On the notion of “constellation”: Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm, eds., Konstellationsforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 5 On Boineburg (1622–72), see Kathrin Paasch, Die Bibliothek des Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–1672): ein Beitrag zur Bibliotheksgeschichte des Polyhistorismus (Berlin: Logos, 2005). 6 Ricarda Matheus, “Zwischen Rom und Mainz. Konversionsagenten und soziale Netze in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Gesellschaftliche Umbrüche und religiöse Netzwerke. Analysen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Daniel Bauerfeld and Lukas Clemens (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 227–52. 7 Albrecht von Arnswaldt, De Vicariatus controversia. Beiträge Hermann Conrings in der Diskussion um die Reichsverfassung des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004),

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Figure 17.1  A list of commentators on Grotius that Boineburg has noted on the flyleaf of Boecler’s commentary on Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (Strasbourg, 1663) ub Erfurt 03—R. 8° 01543bk [01]

The contours of this constellation are revealed in a letter Boineburg wrote to Samuel Rachel. “When I think of Selden,” Rachel remembered, “then Johann Christian von Boineburg also comes to mind. When he wrote to me about various other matters he also let me know that it would be desirable for someone to follow Selden and write an account of natural law ‘juxta disciplinam Christianorum.’”8 This letter can probably be dated to the late 1660s. Boineburg, Boecler, who was eleven years older, and Conring, who was sixteen years older, 32–70; Johann Joachim Zentgrav, De Origine, Veritate et immutabili Rectitudine Juris Naturalis secundum disciplinam Christianorum (Strasbourg, 1678). 8 Samuel Rachel, De Jure Naturae at Gentium Dissertationes (Kiel, 1676), diss. 1, Sec. 101, p. 99: “Seldeni dum memini, simul Ilustrissimi Domini Joannis Christiani, Liberi Baroris de Boineburg recordor…. Itaque cum pro sua insigni humanitate variis aliis de rebus ad me scriberet, tum etiam mihi aliquoties significavit, se desiderare, qui ad imitationem Seldeni de Jure Naturae juxta disciplinam Christianorum commentaretur.” See Schneider, Justitia Universalis, 220.

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had already begun to consider what use Selden’s theories might have in the context of the German discussion of natural law. Boineburg had encouraged Rachel to write an account of natural law “juxta disciplinam Christianorum,” in contrast to the “juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum” that Selden had produced. This implied a double shift in the focus. Selden had emulated Grotius9 and embedded natural law in a “Philosophia perennis” according to which the knowledge of the natural laws had spread from ancient Israel to other nations. Now the German admirers of Grotius were keen to use Selden by emulating his theory and adapting it to the specifics of the Lutheran situation. They took on Selden’s critique of Grotius, stating that natural law had to be understood as laws issued by God. But they could not sympathize with Selden’s Hebraism and desired instead a Christian natural law. There were precedents for this in Germany. Philipp Melanchthon had already sketched a “theonomic natural law” in which the Decalogue was to be seen as natural law.10 Melanchthon set up the intellectual framework that then shaped both the reception of Grotius and that of Selden. The case of Rachel demonstrates nicely how he read Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis as an elaboration of Cicero’s De officiis, which in turn was read by him within the context of Melanchthon’s Christian humanism.11 But how did Boineburg read Selden? That is revealed by his personal copy of De jure naturali, which is now in the library of the University of Erfurt. Boineburg was an active reader whose engagement with the text is indicated by the numerous markings. What it meant for him to work through a book can be seen in his copy of Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis. Each page is littered with underlined passages and marginal summaries. Selden’s De jure naturali was by contrast not of such crucial importance for Boineburg. He gave his first copy to the Jesuit College in Cologne after he received from the elector Karl Ludwig in 1654 a copy of the folio edition from the 1640s.12 Nevertheless, he gave Selden’s work a cursory reading—focusing almost exclusively upon the fundamental 9 10

See Boecler in his preface to his edition of De Jure Naturali. Merio Scattola, Das Naturrecht vor dem Naturrecht. Zur Geschichte des “ius naturae” im 16. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999); Horst Dreitzel, “Von Melanchthon zu Pufendorf: Versuch über Typen und Entwicklung der philosophischen Ethik im protestantischen Deutschland zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung,” in Spätrenaissance-Philosophie in Deutschland, 1570–1650. Entwürfe zwischen Humanismus und Konfessionalisierung, okkulten Traditionen und Schulmetaphysik, ed. Martin Mulsow (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), 321–98, esp. 360–69. 11 Dreitzel, “Von Melanchthon zu Pufendorf,” 383, on Samuel Rachel, In universam Aristotelis philosophiam moralem introductio (Helmstedt, 1660). 12 Paasch, Die Bibliothek des Johann Christian von Boineburg, 83–84.

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book 1—and with the characteristic fast, indeed hasty, pencil jottings present in most of his annotated books. Some chapters betray a more intensive reading, containing numerous passages underlined with ink. When we examine which passages attracted Boineburg’s close attention, two tendencies in his reading become apparent. The first emphasizes the universality of the natural law reconstructed by Selden and results from Boineburg’s concept of true “catholicity.” Thus, he wrote a nota bene in the margin of page 29 when he encountered Selden’s emphatic claim that he was describing a genuine and simple moral and legal philosophy that precedes all division into sects. And he added the comment: “Philosophia Juris Aeternis et oicomenici et catholici officii et pragmatices moralis et simplicis prud[entia]” (the philosophy of eternal law, of ecumenical as well as catholic duty, and the expertise of simple and moral acting.13 (Figure 17.2) That was precisely what interested Boineburg: the justification of this doctrine that transcended the division between the sects and was in this ecumenical sense “catholic.”14 That fitted in with his effort to bring about a union of churches and parties in a Germany left fragmented after the Thirty Years War.15 A little later Boineburg also appended a nota bene to the words “gentes seu Populi omnes.”16 The second tendency in Boineburg’s reading is more specific, namely, his keen interest in the nature of obligation, of “obligatio.”17 This problem is fundamental to every theory of natural law: what is the nature of the obligation that the fundamental laws impose upon us? From where does the obligation derive its specific force even when there is no coercive power to ensure the law’s application? John Selden had spoken in this context of a natural obligation, a “naturalis obligatio.” Natural obligation is according to traditional Roman law 13 Selden, De jure naturali (London, 1640) ub Erfurt 03—R. 4° 01455g, p. 29. 14 Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), 189–96. 15 On the back flyleaf of his copy of Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1632), ub Erfurt 03—R. 8° 01543bk (01), Boineburg had written the note: “De usu pio Christianarum justifica…fidei in catholica ac orthodoxa sanctoris communione, si quando conscientia…luctu…affectiones et calamitates in nos virumpunt ac ingluunt” (unless this note is by the former owner, Johann Georg Egrer from Dresden, who gave him the book in 1641). Boineburg annotated the work intensely. 16 Selden, De jure naturali, ub Erfurt 03—R. 8° 00221ac, p. 78 17 Compare Gerald Hartung, “Gesetz und Obligation. Die Spätscholastische Gesetzes­ theologie und ihr Einfluß auf die Naturrechtsdebatte der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Die Ordnung der Praxis: Neue Studien zur spanischen Spätscholastik, ed. Frank Grunert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 381–402; Hartung, Die Naturrechtsdebatte. Geschichte der Obligatio vom 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Alber, 1998).

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Figure 17.2  Boineburg’s underlinings and comments on Selden’s De jure naturali (London, 1640). ub Erfurt 03—R. 4° 01455g

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not enforceable and provides no grounds for prosecution. According to Selden, however, whose thinking was inspired by the suggestions contained in late Spanish scholasticism, the “obligatio naturalis” had the deeper meaning of a “nexum conscientiae” that linked it to the divine legal dictates and that was not enforceable in civil law. The German commentators on Grotius seized on this, motivated by their inability to accept Grotius’s thesis that natural law could also stake a claim for validity without recourse to a divine lawgiver. This thesis appeared to them to be not Christian enough and also not convincing. For this reason they gave the natural obligation vis-à-vis God foundational significance for a set of teachings that posited a necessary link between natural law and natural religion. Boecler had pointed out in 1664 in his commentary on Grotius that even Thomas Hobbes did not dispute the compulsion on conscience affected by natural law—he simply excluded the rule of God from his construction of the state of nature.18 In a commentary that appeared two years later, Ziegler criticized Grotius on the grounds that a human action directed toward the good and toward an obligation to observe moral conduct was only conceivable by positing a divine ruler who exercised his power through the pangs of conscience.19 Even Samuel von Pufendorf would later adopt the concept of natural obligation, although he was more interested in its effects than its origins.20 When compared to Selden, the meaning assigned to natural obligation received a more exalted status in the thoughts entertained by the commentators on Grotius. While for Selden, natural and civil law stood side by side, the natural obligation was for Boecler, Ziegler, and Boineburg the foundational precondition for the capacity of humans to enter into all further relations based upon obligation. This is also reflected in the passages underlined and the comments made by Boineburg in his copy of Selden’s De jure naturali. He underlined on page 85, shortly before the end of Chapter 6 in book 1, a longer passage in which Selden argues that one cannot found natural law upon a “consensus gentium” because customs and traditions are too disparate: If there is no other reason for an obligation beyond the mutual respect and the constitution [of peoples], what prevents the early law from 18 19 20

Johann Heinrich Boecler, In Hugonis Grotii Juris Belli ac Pacis ad Illustrissimum Baronem Boineburgium Commentatio (Strasbourg, 1664). Caspar Ziegler, In Hugonis Grotii de Jure Belli ac Pacis libros, quibus Naturae et Gentium jus explicavit, Notae et Animadversiones subitariae (Wittenberg, 1666). Samuel Pufendorf, Elementorum jurisprudentiae universalis libri duo (Lund 1672). See Hartung, “Gesetz und Obligation,” 399.

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a­ bjuring the role it plays? Such causes as demands for satisfaction or reprisals, declarations of war, or other intervening events change, as we know, in the course of time.21 Boineburg might have recalled at this conjuncture his own experiences with clashing traditions shaped and conditioned by different religious denominations. The historically contingent tradition should yield to a singular universal law that was binding for all. On page 105 in book 1.8 he underlined Selden’s statement that the “operative effect of binding law is natural insofar it is added to the natural within Scripture.”22 Another contemporary reader, Johann Conrad Arnoldi, a professor in Giessen, read the passage in 1.4 of De jure naturali in which Selden introduces the “obligatio,” specifying that it is normally guaranteed by the threat of punishment,23 and was prompted to ask a question: “Does this mean that love of virtue is insufficient to impose obligations?”24 With this question a tension becomes manifest between concepts of law and an ethics of “charitas ordinata,” a rational love. This tension is typical for the German scene in the late seventeenth century, and its presence can be felt in the discussions about “obligatio.”25 ii

Noachide Law and the Early History of Humanity

The questions of natural law are not treated in a purely systematic framework. The debate in German is characterized not least by linking Selden’s reconstruction 21 Selden, De jure naturali, ub Erfurt 03—R. 8° 00221ac, p. 85. Just before the end of 1.6, where “obligatio” is mentioned, Boineburg notes: “Si alia obligationis causa non reperiatur praeter ipsarum observationem mutuam seu constitutionem, quid vetat quo minus ex consensus in diversam sive observationem sive constitutionem initio, jus qualecunque illud pristinum interveniens esse desinat. Quemadmodum clarigationis seu represaliarum, belli denunciandi, alia juris Faecialis ac bellici capita Gentibus quas novimus Intervenientia, mutata pro seculorum varietate scimus.” 22 Ibid., p. 105: “… Causa Efficiens Juris Obligativi tam quantum Naturale est quam quantum Naturali in sacris literis adjectum.” 23 Selden, De jure naturali, copy owned by Martin Mulsow, p. 47: “Neque sane Juris Obligatio sine Poenae alicujus violationi imminentis ratione (qua contineri nemo non videt, pro vario scilicet rerum ac personarum genere, Liberationem, Remissionem, Novationem, Acceptilationem, & si quae cetera, sive perimunt, sive differunt poenae irrigationem, non praestanti seu violanti alias debitam) mortalibus magis potest fingi, quam in Relatis paternitas sine filio.” 24 Ibid., marginal note: “quasi! ergo nemo virtutis amore suae satisfaciet obligari?”. 25 Compare Werner Schneiders, Naturrecht und Liebesethik. Zur Geschichte der praktischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf Christian Thomasius (Hildesheim: Olms, 1971).

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of  Noachide natural law to a theory about the history of humanity.26 If this natural law is also the earliest form of law, then how was it embedded into the social structures of earlier societies? Already in 1660 the Wittenberg polyhistor Georg Kaspar Kirchmaier had posed the question pertaining to the factual nature of politics, state, and law in the period before Noah.27 The thesis contained in the Pre-Adamite theory of Isaac La Peyrère had been circulating for a number of years within intellectual discourse: that there were humans prior to Adam in an epoch “sub natura,” and thus political states and forms of government had already emerged in this epoch.28 Kirchmaier was a scholar with extremely diverse interests extending from the science of mining and chemistry, through the fields of zoology, history, and the study of Jewish, German, and Roman antiquities, to civil law, theology, and rhetoric. His inclination to pose such speculative questions derived from his general curiosity about the nature of earliest primitive times. According to Kirchmaier there was no form of political rule before the ­deluge—rather, God exercised power directly over his human subjects.29 Like his Wittenberg colleague Ziegler, Kirchmaier argued against the tendency to make exaggerated claims about an innate sociability in the nature of humanity. In the case of Ziegler, this argument was directed against Grotius. In the case of Kirchmaier, the argument served the confrontation with political Aristotelianism and its predisposition to find forms of social organization in the earliest stages of history.30 The natural law bestowed by God still awaited its fixation in written form and served as the only norm for human conduct. 26

Klaus Müller, Tora für die Völker. Die noachidischen Gebote und Ansätze zu ihrer Rezeption im Christentum (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1998). 27 Georg Kaspar Kirchmaier, De imperio antediluvianorum (Wittenberg, 1660). See Sicco Lehmann-Brauns, “Die Sintflut als Zäsur der politischen Institutionengeschichte,” in Sintflut und Gedächtnis, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2006), 265– 87. In Wittenberg, there had been scholars who approached Selden from their philological approach. See esp. Johann Ernst Gerhard (praes.)/Johann Vogelhaupt (resp), Ritus foederum gentis Ebreae (Wittenberg: Fincel, 1650). 28 Isaac La Peyrère, Praeadamitae (Amsterdam, 1655). See Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987); Andreas Pietsch, Isaac La Peyrère. Bibelkritik, Philosemitismus und Patronage in der Gelehrtenrepublik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Martin Mulsow, “Vor Adam. Ideengeschichte jenseits der Eurozentrik,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte (2015), issue 1, pp. 47–66. 29 Kirchmaier, De imperio antediluvianorum, Sec. 12. 30 Lehmann-Brauns, Die Sintflut als Zäsur, 278. On political Aristotelianism, see Horst Dreitzel, Politischer Aristotelismus und Absoluter Staat. Die “Politica” des Henning Arnisaeus (Wiesbaden, 1970); about theories on the early stages of humanity, see Helmut Zedelmaier, Der Anfang der Geschichte. Studien zur Ursprungsdebatte im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Meiner, 2003).

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Therefore the intervention of God was repeatedly necessary to enforce these norms. When Kirchmaier imagined antediluvian forms of social interaction, he happily projected Caesar’s report of the Celts and Tacitus’s description of the Germanic peoples onto the contemporaries of Cain and Abel. In this situation, the concept of theocracy that Grotius, Petrus Cunaeus, and others had invoked as the Jewish form of government from Moses to the kings was applied by Kirchmaier to describe the antediluvian epoch.31 In this manner, theocracy became the direct rule of God not only over the Jews, but over all peoples. “Kirchmaier enlarged the historical field of application for the concept of theocracy backwards into the antediluvian epoch so that it took on the character  of an experiment God conducted upon postlapsarian humanity in its entirety.”32 And with that Selden entered onto the playing field and offered in De jure naturali a model according to which God instructed all of humanity in the observance of law. Boineburg underlined the historical references in his copy: “Henocho et Noacho qui jure vixerunt Naturali.”33 According to Selden, before the deluge a direct illumination channeled through the “intellectus agens” made it possible for some people to discern the laws of God.34 This borrowing derived from Neoplatonic Aristotelianism and then mediated through the Aristotelianism and Averroism of medieval Arabic and Jewish scholars is unique in Selden and was also occasionally criticized in the reception of his thought. In Germany this point could rather endear him to the late humanist reader who in any case was inclined to view Selden’s universalism through the lens of a “Platonizing” Philosophia perennis as represented by Agostino Steuco or Athanasius Kircher. A passage from Daniel Georg Morhof, the scholar of historia literaria at Rostock and later Kiel, can claim to be symptomatic in this regard.35 In 1661 young Morhof wrote Theologia gentium politica, following the model provided by Gerhard Johannes Vossius and by Boecler in his De auspicio regio.36 In his small tract Morhof uses Selden at a

31

Petrus Cunaeus, De republica Hebraeorum libri iii (Leiden, 1617); see Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jonathan R. Ziskind, “Petrus Cunaeus on Theocracy, Jubilee and the Latifundia,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 68, no. 4 (Apr. 1978): 235–54. 32 Lehmann-Brauns, Die Sintflut als Zäsur, 284. 33 Selden, De jure naturali, 1.8, ub Erfurt 03—R. 8° 00221ac, p. 104. 34 Ibid., 1.9; see Toomer, John Selden, 503–4. 35 Françoise Waquet (ed.), Mapping the World of Learning: The “Polyhistor” of Daniel Georg Morhof (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). 36 Gerard Joannes Vossius, De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana, sive de ortu et progressu idololatriae (Amsterdam, 1641; complete, Amsterdam, 1668); Johann Heinrich Boecler, De auspicio regio liber singularis (Strasbourg, 1645).

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point when his attention turns to the possibility of inspiration and access to the Divine: These views have remained alive among the Arabs and Jews and what has been famously bequeathed to them by the Divine has been collected by the incomparable John Selden in his book about the natural law of the Hebrews…. He derived from this the philosophy of all philosophies of all peoples, even those of the barbaric [meaning that of the Hebrews], from whence the secrets of the entire wisdom have spread.37 That the oldest philosophers, just like the old legal scholars, understood themselves as the servants of God entitled Selden, as he saw it, to understand natural law as divine law, and Morhof saw in this a way to defend conceptions of the “Divine” in politics. iii

De Diis Syris and Oriental Studies in Leipzig

The debate about natural law by no means provided the only context in which Selden’s books were read and discussed in Germany. Another context of prime importance had to do with the connection between the history of religion and apologetics. The early history of religion as it was practiced in the seventeenth century stood under the auspices of a reconstruction of pagan “idolatry.”38 To this end it was necessary to describe the Canaanite or Egyptian gods known from the Bible or from testimony provided by other sources. It was also necessary to explain how the worship of those animal or stellar gods had arisen. Selden wrote De Diis Syris, a work inspired by Scaliger and of pioneering importance in particular because of the way it applied Oriental scholarship to a framework mapped out by Maimonides.39 Selden’s book had a decisive influence 37

38

39

Daniel Georg Morhof, Theolgia gentium politica (Rostock, 1661), 116ff. See Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund. Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680–1720 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002), 187–88. See Jonathan Sheehan, “The Altars of the Idols: Religion, Sacrifice, and the Early Modern Polity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 648–74; Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010). Martin Mulsow, “Idolatriekrik und vergleichende Religionsgeschichte im 17. Jahrhundert,” special issue, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3, ed. Jan Assmann and Guy Stroumsa (2001): 1–24; Mulsow, “Antiquarianism and Idolatry: The ‘Historia’ of Religions in the Seventeenth Century,” in Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna

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on Vossius’s De theologia gentili. Following in the footsteps of Vossius and stimulated by the publication of a translation of Maimonides’s De idololatria, an early form of comparative religious scholarship emerged that was embraced by many scholars in Germany, but first and foremost by theologians.40 From Elias Schede’s De diis germanis of 1648 to Johann Saubert’s De sacrificiis veterum of 1661—all drew from Selden’s De Diis Syris and also from the Marmora arundeliana, and in not a few cases these works were indebted to Selden for providing the model for their own disquisitions.41 There is, however, one work in which the link to Selden is especially direct. This work is the Additamenta, which Andreas Beyer attached as an appendix to Selden’s work on the Syrian gods upon its reprint in 1668 in Leipzig. The story of the Leipzig edition of De Diis Syris begins with a resourceful book dealer, Lorenz Sigmund Körner. He noticed in 1661 that the theologian Beyer, a friend of his, had supplemented his copy of De Diis Syris with detailed indexes.42 Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005), 181–210; Peter N. Miller, “Taking Paganism Seriously: Anthropology and Antiquarianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Histories of Religion,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 183– 209; Toomer, John Selden, 211–56. On Scaliger as a model for Selden, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 1993). 40 See Ralph Häfner, Götter im Exil. Frühneuzeitliches Dichtungsverständnis im Spannungsfeld christlicher Apologetik und philologischer Kritik (ca. 1590–1736) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003); Martin Mulsow, “Idolatry and Science: Against Nature Worship from Boyle to Rüdiger, 1680–1720,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 697–711; Asaph Ben-Tov, “Pagan Gods in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century German Universities: A Sketch,” in Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd, ed. Asaph Ben-Tov, Yaakov Deutsch, and Tamar Herig (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 153–78. 41 Elias Schede, De Diis Germanis, sive Veteri Germanorum, Gallorum, Britannorum, Vandalorum religione, syngrammata quatuor (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1648); Johann Saubert, De sacrificiis veterum (Jena: Birckner, 1659). On Saubert see Martin Mulsow, “Tempel, Münzen und der Transfer von Bildern: Zur Rolle der numismatischen Illustration im religionsgeschichtlichen Antiquarianismus,” in Architektur- und Ornamentgraphik der Frühen Neuzeit: Migrationsprozesse in Europa, ed. Sabine Frommel and Eckhard Leuschner (Rome: Campisano, 2014), 295–312. For the reception of Selden, especially in Jena, see, e.g., Johannes Hoffmann, Deorum Gentilium Praecipuorum Origines… (Jena: Bauhofer, 1674), Chap. 1; Christoph Cellarius, Sciagraphia philologiae sacrae (Jena: Bielcke, 1678), 44. 42 See Beyer’s preface to his Additamenta, in John Selden, De Diis Syris syntagmata ii: Adversaria nempe de Numinibus commentitiis in veteri instrumento memoratis; Accedunt ferè quae sunt reliqua Syrorum, Prisca porrò Arabum, Aegyptiorum, Persarum, Afrorum, Europaeorum item Theologia, subinde illustratur (Leipzig: Körner, 1672). On Beyer, see Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1750), 1065–66.

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Beyer (1636–1716) was at the time in his midtwenties. He had completed his studies and would later become deputy headmaster of the gymnasium school in Freiberg in Saxony and the chief preacher at the local church of Saint Nicolai. In 1667 he wrote a small antiquarian work concerning the Israelite coin, the shekel, Siclus sacer et regius.43 Beyer obviously belonged to the generation of theology students in Leipzig who read old Oriental texts derived from different traditions and composed in different languages and who were influenced by such scholarly enterprises as Brian Walton’s London polyglot Bible or the works of Vossius and John Marsham.44 Leipzig began to emerge as a center for interest in these developments. Johann Adam Scherzer, for example, published his Trifolium orientale in 1663 with commentaries from Isaac Abrabanel, Solomon Jarchi, and Maimonides before Johann Benedikt Carpzov became the first holder of a chair for Oriental studies and before the reputations of August Pfeiffer and Andreas Acoluthus marked the great flowering of Oriental studies in Leipzig.45 Lorenz Körner saw how Beyer’s notes on Selden accumulated in a process that was entirely in keeping with the way many contemporaries commissioned the binders to insert blank pages into copies of books that interested them, which they then filled with learned annotations.46 Körner encouraged Beyer to continue doing this. He then took the copy and printed the annotations as an appendix to the new edition of De Diis Syris.47 The Additamenta, which almost are as voluminous as Selden’s actual text, can therefore be regarded as a monument to the reception of Selden in Oriental studies in Germany and primarily in Leipzig. The additions brought Selden’s research up to date by supplying insights from the intervening period. And these insights were substantial and reflected the explosion of activity that since 1617 had animated religious research and the knowledge of ancient languages. It is therefore no surprise that Körner’s edition was reissued in 1672 and that the Amsterdam edition of 1680 also included Beyer’s annotations.48 43 44

Andreas Beyer, Siclus sacer et regius (Leipzig, 1667). Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57),” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 463–82. 45 Die Erleuchtung der Welt. Sachsen und der Beginn der modernen Wissenschaften (Dresden: Sandstein-Verlag, 2009), esp. 202–9 (Boris Liebrenz, „Orientalistik“); Ibid., 127–39; Johann Adam Scherzer, Trifolium orientale: continens Commentarios R. Abarbenelis… (Leipzig: Bauer, 1663). 46 See Martin Mulsow, “Mikrogramme des Orients,” in Mulsow, Prekäres Wissen. Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 367–98. 47 See Beyer’s preface to the Additamenta. 48 Selden, De Diis Syris syntagmata ii (Amsterdam: Lucas Byster, 1680).

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Johann Christoph Becmann between Natural Law and the Talmud

As we have already seen, Selden’s attempt to integrate the Jewish rabbinic tradition into the investigation of natural law failed to find much resonance in the wider debate. From the very beginning German scholars deflected the movement created by his idea of a natural law bequeathed by God in the direction of a disciplina Christianorum. But there were other trends in the theology of the seventeenth century. Increasingly scholars were receptive to consulting Talmudic studies and rabbinic commentaries for the exegesis of biblical texts.49 This trend had originated with Johann Gerhard, Johann Michael Dilherr, Salomon Glassius, Johann Hülsemann, and others on the Lutheran side, and with Johannes Buxtorf, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, and Johann Heinrich Heidegger in the Reformed camp. Beyer was influenced by this development. The trend developed such vitality that it bore fruit in 1697–99 in the form of a new edition of the entire Babylonian Talmud.50 The work appeared in Frankfurt an der Oder, edited by the professor of theology Johann Christoph Becmann along with Michael Gottschalk. Becmann had studied as a Calvinist in the Netherlands, and in 1663 in Amsterdam he had received lessons in rabbinics from Jacob Abendana.51 He was thus predisposed to publish Jewish texts. Moreover, Becmann numbers among those who had grappled with Hobbes’s political philosophy and thus paved the way for the Early Enlightenment in Germany.52 Before his appointment as a theologian he had a long career behind him as a historian and political philosopher, a connection that may have served as a conduit for the reception 49

50

51 52

See Johann Anselm Steiger, “Die Rezeption der rabbinischen Tradition im Luthertum (Johann Gerhard, Salomo Glassius u.a.) und im Theologiestudium des 17. Jahrhunderts. Mit einer Edition des universitären Studienplanes von Glassius und einer Bibliographie der von ihm konzipierten Studentenbibliothek,” in Das Berliner Modell der Mittleren Deutschen Literatur. Beiträge zur Tagung Kloster Zinna 29.9.–01.10.1997 (= Chloe 33), ed. Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, Jörg Jungmayr, and Knut Kiesant (Amsterdam, 2000), 191–252. See Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Individual Treatises Printed from 1700 to 1750 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 179ff. In general, see also Anthony Grafton, “The Jewish Book in Christian Europe: Material Texts and Religious Encounters,” in Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity, ed. Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2014), 96–114. See Jöcher, Lexicon, 1:904–5. Johann Christoph Becmann, Meditationes politicae xxiv (Frankfurt an der Oder: Becmann, 1679). See Horst Dreitzel, “Hobbes-Rezeptionen. Zur politischen Philosophie der frühen Aufklärung in Deutschland,” in Strukturen der deutschen Frühaufklärung, 1680–1720, ed. Hans-Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 263–307.

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of Selden. And indeed it was Becmann who in 1673 prepared the new edition of Uxor ebraica that was printed by Jeremias Schrey and graced with a remarkably short foreword—half a page—by Becmann.53 This also provided the occasion for new editions of De successionibus ad Leges Ebraeorum in Bona functorum and De successione in Pontificatum.54 In this form a significant corpus of expertise on rabbinic law was once more made available. Why? And why in Frankfurt an der Oder? The reasons behind this development might be similar to those behind the edition of the Talmud carried out from 1697 to 1699. Becmann, who on 1 June 1673 was invested with the printing privileges of the university press, appears “to have become aware not only that there were local customers for Hebrew books among the theologians but also that not too far away from Frankfurt an der Oder one could tap into a much larger Jewish market in Poland.”55 The Jewish communities in Poland had faced hostile conditions since the middle of the seventeenth century as a result of rebellions among the Cossacks and the Swedish-Polish war. As a result a massive wave of westward immigration was under way. In 1671 ten Austrian Jewish families had been granted permission from the elector Friedrich Wilhelm to settle in Frankfurt. In 1678 the first Jewish students were admitted to the university. Therefore the new editions of Selden’s works, along with the printing of Hebrew works, can be seen as a response to a new settlement policy and as an attempt to access a market that lay in Poland and central eastern Europe. If this is correct, then Selden’s works on rabbinic law took on an additional character as sources of assistance for educated Jews. In 1695, shortly before the edition of the Talmud, Becmann oversaw a new edition of Selden’s De jure naturali, published by Schrey. In 1712 it was reissued by Zimmermann in Wittenberg.56 But did Becmann in his own works of political, legal, and historical scholarship adopt Selden as his guide? I do not see any evidence of this. Neither his Meditationes politicae of 1679 nor his historical and political dissertations ­contain any references to Selden or rabbinic traditions. In this area Becmann 53 54

55

56

John Selden, Uxor ebraica (Frankfurt an der Oder: Schrey, 1673; repr., 1695, Wittenberg, 1712). John Selden, De successionibus ad Leges Ebraeorum in Bona functorum (Frankfurt an der Oder: Schrey, 1673); Selden, De successione in Pontificatum (Frankfurt an der Oder: Schrey, 1673). Reimund Leicht, “Daniel Ernst Jablonski und die Drucklegungen des Babylonischen Talmud in Frankfurt/Oder und Berlin,” in Daniel Ernst Jablonski. Religion, Wissenschaft und Politik um 1700, ed. Joachim Bahlcke and Werner Korthaase (Stuttgart, 2008), 491–516, esp. 499. John Selden, De jure naturali (Frankfurt an der Oder: Schrey, 1695).

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takes Hobbesian self-preservation as his point of departure and using it as a primary category attempts to develop a theory of society.57 v

The Young Johann Franz Budde

While in the case of Becmann interest in the Talmud and in devising theories of natural law were kept separate, with different audiences and contexts, Halle was the site of a merger of these two fields. A new university was founded there in 1694 in which natural law in the style of Pufendorf was a leading discipline from the beginning. Christian Thomasius, Samuel Stryck, and others ensured that these teachings took on canonical status at the university.58 It seemed at first that there was no place for Selden. But Thomasius and Stryck’s young colleague Johann Franz Budde developed a special interest in the Hebrew-Jewish tradition at the beginning of his career—a stage that has hardly been examined in the existing historiography.59 This interest culminated in 1702 in his Introductio ad historiam philosophiae Ebraeorum, but it had already begun during his study in Jena, at the latest in 1689–92, and continued then in his short stint at the Coburg Gymnasium.60 In the foreword to his translation of Isaac Abrabanel’s Dissertatio de principatu Abimelechi (an excerpt from Abrabanel’s Bible commentary Perush al nevi’im rishonim), which was densely annotated and graced with “observations,” Budde says clearly that it is a source of joy “to beckon onto the stage a Jew,” admittedly no superstitious conjurer of mysteries or apologist of a perfidious cult but rather an expert at the arts of politics.61 57 Dreitzel, Hobbes-Rezeptionen; Merio Scattola, Della virtu alla scienza. La fondazione e la trasformazione della disciplina politica nell’età moderna (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003), 454–61; Becmann, Meditationes politicae; Becmann, Dissertationum academicarum…volume unum (Frankfurt an der Oder: Schrey and Meyer, 1684). 58 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Detlef Döring, Pufendorf-Studien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992); Tim Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 59 On Buddeus, see Arnold F. Stolzenburg, Die Theologie des Jo. Franc. Buddeus und des Chr. Matth. Pfaff. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung in Deutschland (Berlin: Trowitzsch, 1927); Friederike Nüssel, Bund und Versöhnung. Zur Begründung der Dogmatik bei Johann Franz Buddeus. Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). 60 Johann Franz Budde, Introductio ad historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum. Accedit Dissertatio De Haeresi Valentiniana (Halle, 1702). 61 Prudentiae civilis rabbinicae specimen sive R. Isaaci Abarbanelis Dissertatio De Principatu Abimelechi observationibus illustrate (Jena, 1693), fols. A2v ff.: “Hebraeum in scenam prodire jubeo….” On the printing of Abrabanel in Germany, see Marvin J. Heller, “A Tale of

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It  was unusual for a Hebrew political work from the fifteenth century to be placed in the context of contemporary political theories, but it made sense as an extension of the debate revolving around the respublica hebraeorum.62 Budde undauntedly pursued the program. Appointed in 1693, at the age of twenty-six, as a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Halle (in the year before its official founding), Budde wrote small treatises such as Pineas Zelotes sive De Iure Zelotarum In Gente Hebraea and De eo, quod abominabilis Deo est, ceu charactere legis moralis, both in 1694.63 He attempted to unite his Hebrew interests with the responsibility for teaching the natural law of Grotius and Pufendorf in Halle. This automatically exposed him to currents that carried him to John Selden, the authority in these matters. Admittedly, he did not explicitly state his connection to Selden, but rather continued to quote mainly Grotius. But the influence of Selden is easily recognizable simply in the choice of a case such as that of the zealot Pinheas (or Pinchas), who killed the Israelite Simri and his Midianite lover and thus received the approbation of God. Grotius had mentioned the problem briefly, but it was Selden who first treated the case extensively in three works, De jure naturali, De successione in Pontificatum, and De Synedriis.64 Budde’s treatise is pitched to explain why in the case of Pinheas, murder is approved even though this contradicts the prohibition imposed by the natural law on killing. Budde does not evade the issue by arguing that this occurred in a state of nature preceding state institutions. He also criticizes Grotius’s use of the case to illustrate the way in which, in response to conditions at such an early stage of history, deterrence motivated punishment. Rather, what Budde emphasizes, in line with Pufendorf, is the decisive nature of the way human action is embedded and contextualized within the relationships of power in a society. Whoever rules can also ordain the granting to private individuals of a special right to kill.65 But normally this  will not occur, and one can see, according to Budde, that it is usually Two Cities: Leipzig, Hamburg, and Don Isaac Abrabanel,” in Heller, Further Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 153–68. On Abrabanel (1437–1508), see Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman & Philosopher, 5th ed., rev. and updated (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1998). 62 Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment. 63 Johann Franz Budde, Pineas Zelotes sive De Iure Zelotarum In Gente Hebraea (Halle, 1694); Budde, De eo, quod abominabilis Deo est, ceu charactere legis moralis (Halle, 1694). 64 On the biblical Pinheas see Martin Hengel, Die Zeloten, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 153– 81. See also Toomer, John Selden, 529–30.; Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi, 112–34. 65 Budde, Pineas Zelotes, fol. D1r: “Praeterea, utut imperans, hoc ius puniendi privatis concedere possit, satius tamen est, si non concedatur….”

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acknowledged that it would have been better not to introduce such a right. In support of this he makes reference to a number of cautious statements in the rabbinic literature. In view of riots initiated by religious fanatics, which had recurred in more recent history,66 a state is well advised to prohibit such killing. In this instance, Budde follows the tendency in the thought of Selden, who also implicitly distanced himself from the Jus Zelotarum. Even if Christ in Budde’s view applied the Jus Zelotarum in the expulsion of the money changers from the Temple, this right was to be conceded to him because as God he already possessed potestas absoluta over all humans. Those who genuinely embraced the rights of zealots were the Pharisees, the enemies of Christ. In a word: whoever lives in a republic in which violent actions are forbidden by public authority is genuinely guilty if zealous fervor ends in injury being inflicted upon someone. Neither good intentions nor behavior undertaken in the heat of the moment would exculpate the person.67 Even if Jesuits such as Leonardus Lessius, Hurtado, Luis de Molina, Juan Caramuel, or Stephanus Baunius tended to conceive of exceptions on the basis of casuistic moral teachings, religious violence remained inadmissible. Budde refers at this point to a certain Ludovicus Montaltius—none other than Blaise Pascal, who had excoriated casuistry in his Lettres provinciales.68 This indicates that when it came to denominational disputes the treatise contained a pointed edge: the law sanctioned by the state applied rigorously, and any notion of casuistic dilution was shunned; the law of the state did not suspend biblical law but rather regulated and tamed it. In De eo, quod abominabilis Deo est, Budde deals chiefly with the view of the moral law developed by the doctores Hebraeorum—Maimonides first and foremost among them.69 Whatever is disgraceful or abhorrent to God, Budde 66

On fol. D1v Budde refers to France and cites de Thou: the beginning of bk. 40 and bk. 45 of his Historia sui temporis (1st full ed. 1620). 67 Budde, Pineas Zelotes, fol. D2r: “Ast vero, si quis in republica vivat, in qua tale quid publica auctoritate permissum non est, nefas erit summumque scelus, zeli cuiusdam obtentu saevire in alium. Nec vero aut bona intentio, aut vehementior, quo abreptus est, affectus, a crimine aut poena illum immunem praestabit.” 68 Ibid., Budde refers to epist. 7. pp. 183ff. On Pascal’s book see Gérard Ferreyrolles, Les Provinciales de Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984); Pierre Cariou, Pascal et la casuistique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); Olivier Jouslin, La campagne des Provinciales de Pascal: étude d’un dialogue polémique (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2007). On casuistry, see as well Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 69 Budde, De eo, 4.

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argues, is forbidden in the strictest sense. This touches upon a domain of law directly linked to the divine lawgiver. As in the case of the Jus Zelotarum, once more the question arises of the relation of this Jewish—or biblical—tradition to the precepts of natural law. Budde points to the Hebrew expression for abhorrent, ‫תוצבה‬, and recalls the passages from Exodus that describe how the Egyptian concepts and rites were discarded. John Spencer had interpreted Maimonides’s reading of the ceremonial laws as an inversion of Egyptian precepts.70 How could this finding be related to the insight into a natural religion that Grotius ascribes to all peoples in De jure belli ac pacis in book 2, Chapter 20, paragraph 45? Grotius argues plausibly that as seen by some cultures, such as that of the Jews, idolaters deserve to die. Admittedly, he qualifies this statement: punishment is meted out only to the ringleaders and only if they are guilty of further crimes. But Budde is not convinced by these moderating arguments, and in this matter he returns to the critique of Grotius formulated by Caspar Ziegler, whom he possibly had met during his studies in Wittenberg.71 Budde’s connection to Ziegler then allows a fine line to be drawn back to the circle around Boecler, where the relationship between natural law and religion was first discussed. Budde’s Pineas Zelotes had leveled the objection at Grotius that one could not dismiss the Jewish right to kill an idolater as a remnant from law as it was understood and practiced before the state arose. Rather, one had to approach the problem from the question of power. Budde once more followed Ziegler’s criticism of Grotius’s “appetitus societatis” and “dictamen recte rationis” in giving new impulses to the discussion. Ziegler had insisted, in a way entirely consonant with Selden, that the “ius naturale” did not emerge from human nature but was rather a matter of “imperium divinum.”72 In God resided an eternal commandment and a natural law that preceded every action directed by human will and whose validity implied that God could not desire anything contradicting this law. 70

John Spencer, De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, et eorum rationibus (Cambridge, 1685); on Spencer, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dimitri Levitin, “John Spencer’s De Legibus Hebraeorum (1683–85) and ‘Enlightened’ Sacred History: A New Interpretation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013): 49–92. 71 Budde, De eo, 15. See Ziegler, In Hugonis Grotii de Jure Belli ac Pacis. 72 Schneider, Justitia Universalis, 146; Friedrich Vollhardt, “Die Grundregel des Naturrechts. Definitionen und Konzepte in der Unterrichts- und Kommentarliteratur der deutschen Aufklärung,” in Aufklärung als praktische Philosophie. Werner Schneiders zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Frank Grunert and Friedrich Vollhardt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 129–47.

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All this brought Budde closer to the fundamental characteristics of Selden’s thought. Christian Thomasius, Budde’s colleague in Halle, did not share Budde’s interest in Selden even if he valued Ziegler’s critique of Grotius. He sided with Pufendorf, who indeed had adopted Selden’s concept of a natural obligation underscored by a universally valid law that in turn allowed the inference of a divine lawgiver.73 But Pufendorf took Selden to task for failing to examine whether the commandments of the Hebrews were consonant with human nature and whether the views expressed by the rabbis accorded with sound reason.74 To this effect, Thomasius had claimed in the Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae from 1688, a work devoted to extricating law from theology, that Selden’s theory was not part of natural law but also not really part of divine law because he presented only the rabbinic tradition. According to Thomasius (and also according to Ziegler), it was necessary to consult the Bible directly.75 In the dissertation Budde wrote in his early years in Halle, one can see him grappling with these problems. While Pufendorf opined that Selden had failed to examine whether the commands of the Hebrews were necessarily in agreement with human nature, Budde extracted from this objection, along with Ziegler’s critique of Grotius, the outline for a program of inquiry. This project set itself the goal of examining to what degree those cases in the Bible that explicitly invoked the imperium divinum were consonant with a natural law dictated by reason. It was motivated by a desire first to defend the rigor of biblical law against Catholic casuistry and second to embed this law in reasoning that was also practiced in other cultures. It was a similar situation in the case of De eo, quod abominabilis Deo est. Laws such as those prohibiting idolatry, magic, pederasty, concubinage, and adultery had, according to Budde, an immediate relevance for morality. But those laws that did not fall within the narrowly circumscribed domain of Noachide laws—laws such as prohibitions against eating certain animals, ­marrying a woman if she had been with another man since the dissolution of 73

Samuel Pufendorf, Elementorum jurisprudentiae universalis libri ii (Cambridge: Hayes, 1672), bk. 1, def. 12, Sec. 17. See Hartung, Gesetz und Obligation, 399. See also Pufendorf’s letter to Boineburg from 13 Jan. 1663, where he criticizes Selden: “Sane vel hac potissimum ratione Seldenus motus videtur, ut non de jure naturae in universum tractaret, sed duntaxat de eo, quod apud Ebreos pro tali habebatur; et ut obligationem eius juris ab expresse Dei mandato derivaret.” Pufendorf, Briefwechsel, ed. Detlef Döring, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 27. 74 Pufendorf, Specimen controversiarum circa ius naturale ipsi nuper notarum (Uppsala, 1677). See Albrecht, Eklektik, 191. 75 Christian Thomasius, Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Halle and Leipzig, 1688). See Albrecht, Eklektik, 192.

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her last marriage, or swapping male and female clothes—all these apparently “positive” laws are to found in part among other peoples and also contain an element of natural law. Budde is adamant in his opposition to those voices that seek to dismiss the laws of the Jewish tradition as purely ceremonial laws with no moral relevance. “I deduce from all that has been cited that it is difficult to adduce a document from the Bible that would prove that these expressions of abhorrence are directed at sins that represent simply a transgression of the Jewish laws and not a violation of morality.”76 The case in Budde’s mind is quite the opposite. He can now assert “that therefore their force [the force of these expressions] resides in our recognizing that when someone is subjected to a crime, a moral law is violated unless it is proved with fully evident reasons that this crime is not against the original law of the Jewish people.”77 This Jewish expression of aversion, of abhorrence, solves for Budde precisely the problem of obligation that had so troubled the theoreticians of natural law. It attests to the moral relevance of transgressions; it is the trace of the imperium divinum. While Grotius sought to reduce the relationship between natural law and religion to a minimal form of rational religion, Budde, his feet firmly planted on the solid ground of Lutheran tradition but also staying true to the spirit of hebraica veritas, defended the continued relevance of Jewish law.78 With this Budde departed from the line taken by his colleagues in Halle and opened the door for Selden’s interpretation of natural law. The year 1695 saw Zeitler publish a new edition of the textbook in which Philipp Reinhard Vitriarius dealt with natural law and took his cues from Grotius. Budde contributed two small pieces to the appendix that can also be read as supplementing Vitriarius: a Historia juris naturalis of over thirty pages and a Synopsis juris naturalis et gentium juxta disciplina ebraeorum that was just short of a hundred pages.79 This synopsis of Selden’s work highlighted what had been emphasized in his case studies—supplementing and correcting Grotius’s minimal alliance of religion and law.80 It is entirely consistent with this end that his synopsis 76 Budde, De eo, Sec. 37. 77 Ibid. 78 See ibid., Sec. 32: “Locutio autem universalis minime, ut Hugo Grotius censet (cap v § 14), ad praecipua saltem capita restringi debet, nisi summa ut restringamus nos cogat necessitas.” On the hebraica veritas, see Allison Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulsen (eds.), Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 79 Johann Franz Budde, Historia juris naturalis and Synopsis juris naturalis et gentium juxta disciplina ebraeorum, both in Ph. Reinhard Vitriarius, Institutiones Juris Naturae et Gentium (Halle: Zeitler, 1695). 80 See Budde’s preface to the Synopsis juris naturalis in Vitriarius, Institutiones Juris Naturae et Gentium, 3 (separate pagination): Selden has given an eminent survey of the natural

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takes as its point of departure book 2, which describes the concrete application of Jewish natural law, while Boineburg limited his reception to the foundations contained in book 1 of De jure naturali. In his notes, Budde places Selden’s theories in the context of more recent research in Hebrew studies and relates them first and foremost to John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, but also to Vossius, Marsham, Pufendorf, Grotius, Ziegler, and others. He thus does something similar to what Beyer had done with De Diis Syris, providing Selden’s De jure naturali with a new sheen that restored its relevance and placing it within the context of contemporary research. Budde’s relationship to Selden emerges in full clarity in  the context of his small history of natural law. His thoughts turn to Selden when this account examines the relationship of natural law to specific traditions: For this reason the natural laws are cloaked and encased by the mantle of so-called positive laws, and even if they are obfuscated and obliterated by the ignorance of the lawgiver they are distributed and dispersed throughout all communities. At the same time civil and natural laws are admittedly jumbled together to such a degree that one would despair when faced with the task of separating them. This was rightly recognized by— who else—John Selden, the immortal glory of Britannia.81 Samuel Rachel provided the lead that Budde followed at this point because Rachel had seen and clarified this complex relation in his commentary to Cicero’s De officiis. Natural law and positive law cannot really be separated; but owing to the authority of the biblical tradition, the “mantle” of moral laws that can be found there is particularly relevant, admittedly always with a comparative glance at the traditions of other peoples.82 Despite Budde’s best efforts his views did not establish themselves in Germany. How could it come to pass that Selden, who so avidly saw himself as a universalist, was marginalized by Pufendorf and Thomasius as a “hebraizing” particularist? The reason lies in the general tendency among adherents of the Early Enlightenment to destroy in the light of their historical skepticism the notion of a philosophia perennis that emerged from the biblical tradition. The thesis of diffusion that—perhaps issuing forth from Scaliger—lay at the law of the Jews; even his digressions are of vital importance; especially with respect to his language skills the book is simply fundamental. 81 Budde, Historia juris naturalis, 7. 82 Samuel Rachel, Prolegomena, In M. Tullii Ciceronis de Officiis Libros tres, quibus natura honesti, aliaque ad Jus Natura, in Cicero, De officiis libri iii (Frankfurt and Kiel, 1668).

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root of the concepts of religious and human history devised by thinkers from Selden to Pierre Daniel Huet83 was progressively eroded in the 1680s and 1690s by historical criticism and empirical theories of knowledge that no longer accepted innate ideas. This meant that Adam was no longer endowed with the complete knowledge of humanity and that the Hebrews were not the perfect people but represented only a particular tradition.84 The project that had ­fascinated Morhof, namely, finding traces of the divine in the early wisdom tradition, had now become unthinkable. In particular, Thomasius’s student Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling departed from the early Budde by no longer using Spencer to prop up Selden’s fundamental idea. Rather, he used Spencer destructively to undermine the primacy of the Hebrew tradition, since the Mosaic ceremonial laws arose in a process of annulling and transforming the mainly Egyptian cults and were as a result historical derivatives. By this reasoning the Hebrews were no longer the people entrusted with the original wisdom. Gundling’s early philosophical and historical work Historia philosophiae moralis of 1706 is, in the context of Germany and the even broader context of Europe, unprecedented in its single-minded fixation on critiquing the myths of origins. In this work, Gundling combined historical-philological analysis with the anti-apriority of Locke and its repercussions, as evinced in Jean Leclerc’s commentary on Genesis as well as the religious comparative studies of John Spencer.85 On this basis he even finally convinced Thomasius to no longer see the Mosaic criminal laws as juridically binding and to abandon his earlier conception of a lex divina positiva universalis.86 The process of detachment from the binding character of biblical laws was slow and took several decades. Selden’s idea, to locate within Noachide laws a form of natural law that was universally valid for all humans, not just for Jews and Christians, but directly received from God, could no longer really claim any relevance in ­eighteenth-century Germany. 83

84

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86

See Martin Mulsow, “The Seventeenth-Century Confronts the Gods: Bishop Huet, Moses, and the Pagans,” in Knowledge of Religion as Profanation, ed. Mulsow and Asaph Ben-Tov (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming); Häfner, Götter im Exil. See Martin Mulsow, “Gundling versus Buddeus: Competing Models for the History of Philosophy,” in History and the Disciplines. The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, ny: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 103–25. Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling, Historia philosophiae moralis (Halle, 1706). See Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund, 315–30. See also Zedelmaier, Der Anfang der Geschichte, 77–95. Hinrich Rüping, Die Naturrechtslehre des Christian Thomasius und ihre Fortbildung in der Thomasius-Schule (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1968), 58.

chapter 18

“Crouch for Employment”: Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot Bruce Janacek On 17 November 1681, a procession wound its way through London as processions had for many years on this day, the anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.1 This procession began where most did, outside the city walls to the east, in Whitechapel. It entered the city through Aldgate, wove between the Royal Exchange and the Poultry, passed by Saint Paul’s Cathedral, exited the City walls through Ludgate, and then turned north to Smithfield, a place of notorious memory, for it was here that many Protestants had been martyred in the flames under Mary’s reign.2 A young man on horseback led the procession, portraying Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey—the London justice of the peace who had been murdered three years before by suspected Jesuit assassins who had never been brought to justice.3 The figure of Godfrey was spattered with blood, a napkin had been twisted around his neck, and he hung his head to one side, as if dead.4 Godfrey had been a prominent local official, a prosperous wood and coal merchant, and a magistrate on the Westminster and Middlesex commission of the peace, earning a reputation of pursuing justice with a strong sense of duty.5 The worst fears of his friends and supporters were realized on 17 October 1678 when Godfrey’s body was discovered lying face down in a ditch, five days after he had 1 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177–84. 2 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles ii (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 103. “…thence to Smithfield, the old place of Popish Cruelty, (where so many scores of holy Martyrs sealed the Truth of the Gospel with their blood)….” The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 15–18 Nov. 1681, no. 60v. 3 Harris, London Crowds. 4 The Procession: Or, The Burning of the Pope In Effigie, In Smithfield-Rounds, On the 17th of November 1681. Being Queen Elizabeth’s Birth-day. Describing The several Pageants, and rare Devices of the Pope, Cardinals, Jusuits, Friers, and many others. As likewise a Pageant of several Effigies in a Pillory drawn by Horses upon a Sledge. Several painted Pieces, and Fire-works, &c. Far exceeding whatever has been exposed in this nature. With the signification of the several Hierogliphicks (London, 1681), 2. 5 “Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_019

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been reported missing. He had been run through with a sword, but his face and body were also badly bruised and his neck indicated the bruising associated with strangulation. His disappearance and death occurred only weeks after taking a deposition in investigation of widespread rumors that papal agents were slipping unnoticed and blending into London’s crowded, polyglot population, bent on assassinating Charles ii and his key advisers in order to bring Charles’s Catholic brother James to the throne, immediately returning England into Rome’s welcoming arms.6 Thus the fury in this procession was fired in the white-hot crucible known then as it is now as the Popish Plot.7 So while it was indeed a celebration of the queen of glorious memory, this procession intended to send a menacing message to those who dreamed of returning England to the Catholic fold and, as it had done in past years, hopefully incite and anger the crowds about Godfrey’s unsolved murder. However, dramatizing the death of Sir Godfrey was only one of many layers of meaning in this procession. One record we have of this particular procession, in its very typical, very long title, promised its readers that it included “the signification of the several Hierogliphicks.” Hieroglyphics indeed, for this procession employed images that from our distant vantage point surely do appear to be as mysterious as ancient Egyptian ideographs. However, the significance of the images portrayed and displayed by the anonymous designers and producers of this pageant were very clear to those who crowded along those narrow streets and watched the menacing, deliberately horrifying procession pass. While there had been processions on this day before, in addition to the usual mockery of popes, cardinals, and the lot of Roman Catholic hierarchy, this particular procession deliberately and powerfully employed the animal kingdom in its polemic. This procession clarified the power of animals—literally and figuratively—even in seventeenth-century London’s teeming, filthy, urban confines. Knowledge of the animal kingdom was widespread. Domesticated animals provided sustenance while preserved wild creatures provided wonder and fascination for those fortunate enough to visit, for example, Elias Ashmole’s curiosity cabinet. Of course, the instincts and behavior of animals had served to 6 For an examination of the credibility of the accusations and rumors of the Popish Plot, see Rachel Weil, “‘If I did say so, I lyed’: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 189–209, esp. 189–94. 7 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles ii and His Kingdoms (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 137–39.

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provide moral lessons to early modern readers, as the hundreds of editions of Aesop’s Fables that were issued from London’s printing presses attest. Yet at the same time frightened, impassioned Protestants did whatever they could to fuel the rumors of the Popish Plot, and some made clever use of negative characteristics of animals—particularly amphibians and dogs—to make the ruthless conspiratorial intentions of Catholics evident to all. Particular animals were often associated with characteristics that were deemed highly appropriate for Protestant polemic. This procession and other treatises and broadsheets that responded to the Popish Plot suggest that rhetorical knowledge of the animal kingdom was widespread and used with considerable effect. Alexandra Walsham has deftly and profoundly altered our understanding of how sites and locations of the landscape actually became “agents of change” in response to the Reformation.8 While knowledge of the animal kingdom retained its long-standing representative meanings, it too could be altered, redrawn, and redefined to meet particular polemical goals.9 The cultural and social effects and understandings of processions and animals have received sophisticated attention. Edward Muir and David Cressy have taught us to consider the language and significance of public events such as commemorative processions.10 Mary Fissell, Robert Darnton, and others argue that “categories of animals can function as a means through which a particular social group articulates its sense of itself,” while Keith Thomas contends that animals “inhabited the same moral universe” as their human companions.11 Animals served precisely that purpose. This essay suggests that at least in moments in the midst of the Popish Plot, the animal kingdom became a ­rhetorical 8 9

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Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. Erica Fudge has led a vanguard of studies on animals in the early modern period. Inter alia, see her Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2006). Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1981); Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Cressy, Bonfires and Bells; Cressy, “Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 359–74. Mary Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 2; Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue SaintSeverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 75–104; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 99.

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implement to make a political and, ineluctably in seventeenth-century England, an inherently religious statement. In Shakespeare’s Henry v, as England and France are beginning their grim preparation for the next phase of the Hundred Years War, the chorus remarks of the young monarch, “and at his heels / (Leash’d in, like hounds) should famine, sword, and / fire / Crouch for employment.”12 We will see that while hounds were indeed used for religious and political employment, they were just one of several species that could be unleashed to defend what was believed to be the established and immutable order of God and monarchy.



The political tension before and after Godfrey’s murder had ebbed and flowed as events dictated, and surely one purpose of the procession—which would draw thousands—was to incite popular unrest. The Popish Plot had a frightening international as well as domestic context. With the French monarchy eroding the position of Huguenots and Charles ii’s early education in France, the influence of French officials and Catholic culture on the Restoration court seemed only to toss bundles of bone-dry tinder onto the flames of popish conspiracy and the menacing threat of Catholic assassins among the English faithful. Church doors and tavern walls were papered with broadsides of the latest outrages committed against Protestants in France.13 Therefore, upon the day celebrating the late queen’s coronation, a message was to be sent to the threatening conspirators delivered in the form of a procession. Riding behind Godfrey was an effigy of “a monstrous Animal” that was turned around facing the horse’s backside, “making Observations upon the Horse-tail”14—a very traditional early modern portrayal of a world turned 12 13

14

William Shakespeare, The Life of Henry v 1.1.6–8. See, for example, A True and Faithful Narrative Of The late Barbarous Cruelties an hard usages, exercised by the French against Protestants At Rochel (London, 1681); The King of France His New Order To His Subjects professing the Protestant Religion at Charenton: Forbidding them to use several Expressions, contained in their Publick Prayers, and Confession of Faith: And commanding them to redress divers other pretended Grievances (London, 1681); A Letter from Rochel in France, To Mr Demeuare, one of the French Ministers at the French Church in the Savoy; shewing the Intolerable Persecutions that are there exercised against them (London: Printed for R. Bentley, 1681); The Horrible Persecution Of The French Protestants In the Province of Poitou (London, 1681); The Deplorable State And Condition Of the Poor French Protestants Commiserated, And humbly Represented to all Princes and People Of the True Reformed Church; With Reasons for a Protestant League (London, 1681). The Procession, 2.

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upside down.15 The anonymous author called this animal “an amphibious Creature made up of Ribaldry, having a Paper pinn’d upon his Sleeve, to be the better known when he comes neer Sam’s Coffee-house, inscribed, I am an Observator.”16 However cryptic this description might appear to us, we will see presently that it was quite clear to the intended audience—and the intended target. Following the amphibian was the papal secretary carrying “a bundle of Popish Catechisms under his right Arm.”17 After these figures followed six friars, four bishops, “several Cardinals in Red Hats, Rowls of paper, [holding] pretended Bulls, Pardons, and Indulgences.” Effigies of others in pillories and of course the Devil, dressed as one of the pope’s privy counselors, would periodically beat the pope and grab his nose with a pair of “Pincers.” This last figure, the pope, was clothed in papal regalia, his robes “being Crimson-silk, Laced with Tinsel, and Lined with Ermyns.” Streamers of white silk snapped and fluttered in the wind from the corners of his canopy, and on them were “written in Bloody Characters, Murther, Treason, Massacres, Assassination, Adultery, Subornation, Perjury, &c.” Banners on the seats before him announced the pope’s many titles, “Babilon the Mother of Harlots” among them. Finally, between the legs of the pope lay “a large Spannel-dog, with a Fiddle between his fore-feet; and most affirm, before he was Hanged, he was called by the wellknown name of Touzer.”18 Another contemporary broadsheet, The Impartial Protestant Mercury, reported “His Holiness having in his Lap, a fine fawning Spaniel, called Towzer, with an Observator in his Mouth, a Pen in his Ear, a Fiddle by his side, and Broom at his Tail, &c.”19 When the procession reached Smithfields a large bonfire was waiting for the effigies to “be Sacrificed up to Moloc” (a Caananite idol to whom, according to the book of Leviticus, children were sacrificed as burnt offerings).20 The description closed with the following bald-faced threat: “…let me admonish his Holiness to keep on the other side 15

The classic study is Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, esp. “The Reasons of Misrule” and “Women on Top” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–151; see also Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 93–104; as well as Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., Le Charivari (Paris: École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1981). 16 The Procession, 2. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 2–3. 19 The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 15–18 Nov. 1681, no. 60v. For a more expansive discussion of such processions, including this one, see Sheila Williams, “The Pope Burning Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (Jan.–June 1958): 104–18, esp. 109–10. 20 See Lev. 18:21, 20:2–5.

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the Herring-pool, lest if he fall into the hands of those that burnt him in Effigies, they serve him the same sauce, and turn it into a real Tragedy.”21 In the midst of the color and mockery and menace of the procession there were at least two species from the animal kingdom that contributed to this message, an amphibian and a dog, both of which held deep and largely negative associations for seventeenth-century viewers of this procession. For early modern sensibilities, amphibians posed problems: belonging completely neither to land nor to water, belonging nowhere and everywhere, amphibians were believed to lack integrity. At least one observer of the fauna of the world had argued that two kinds of amphibians, notably crocodiles and frogs, betrayed “Romish” sensibilities. In 1612 Wolfgang Franz, a Wittenberg professor, published his Historia animalium sacra, a volume that considered the histories of such wild animals as elephants, camels, lions, bears, tigers, leopards, elk, even unicorns, as well as domesticated creatures such as goats, oxen, donkeys, swine, sheep, dogs, and cats. Although many of the entries described what was known of these creatures on the basis of ancient sources and the occasional eyewitness, some served another purpose. A few, such as dogs, horses, donkeys, and, in our case, crocodiles and frogs, spoke specifically to current Protestant perceptions of the Roman Catholic Church or to the proper, model sensibilities of a good and pious Protestant Christian. Franz’s study was translated into English in 1670 under the new title The History of Brutes; or A Description of Living Creatures. It was here that seventeenthcentury English readers might learn that a crocodile “is an amphibious creature, as are many others besides; which are fit emblemes of the Popish Priests.” Crocodiles in particular and amphibians in general “may resemble those men who are of all Religions; when they are among Priests, they will seem to be Priests; if in wicked and prophane company, they will be so to [sic]; if in religious company, they will be religious…”22 Frogs were even more problematic to the Lutheran professor. Appearing both as a plague to the Egyptians in Exodus and in John of Patmos’s Revelation, frogs spoke powerfully in Protestant polemic.23 When Franz read Revelations 21 22 23

The Procession, 4. Wolfgang Franz, The History of Brutes (London, 1670), 226. For example, depending on the edition and translation of Aesop’s fable “Frogs and Jupiter,” frogs could be understood to be citizens at liberty, common people, vulgar people, or restive citizens in search of a king. See Mark Kishlansky, “Turning Frogs into Princes: Aesop’s Fables and the Political Culture of Early Modern England,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 338–60, esp. 348–55.

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16:13, “And I saw three unclean spirits like Frogs come out of the mouth of the Dragon,” he understood that passage to mean that heretics poured out of the mouth of Satan. He wrote that in earlier days these heretics were monks but now they were Jesuits “who, by all their reasonings and disputations, do only endeavour to maintain the Popes [sic] Supremacy.…”24 Franz explained that if one judged the frog by its noise alone, one would conclude that it was “some large beast.”25 So it was with Jesuits and their arguments: individuals hear their arguments, compare them to scripture, and conclude they are “unanswerable.”26 The truth was that these Jesuit arguments were “like the croaking of Frogs, intending only to weary out their adversaries by the multitude of their arguments, but not to convince them by the force of them; and all to no other end, but to establish the Papal Chair.”27 A frog set upon a golden stool will leap into the mud, just as a Jesuit if brought to scripture will leap into “Philosophical arguments, and creep to the authority of the Fathers, where they think themselves secure.”28 The amphibian symbolized Jesuits drawn to the authority of the church rather than to the sacred scriptures.29 Associating priests with animals had precedent. In 1676, two years before the flames of the Popish Plot had been lit, another procession celebrated Elizabeth’s coronation of 17 November in which an effigy of the pope was immolated. A description of that event reminded readers that the pope they had just burned was burned in effigy—unlike Catholics who actually burned Protestants: …those barbarous usages are too much forgot by some, and excus’d and minc’d by others, who would fain represent Popery as a very Innocent toothless thing, yet we know full well, that a Tiger is still a Tiger though in a Cage, and that a Jesuite may seem a Saint in the Streets, but trace him to his Seminary, he is a Fox, and in the Inquisition a Lyon Rampant….30 Tigers, foxes, and lions, two fierce, exotic predators as well as the familiarly cunning fox, were unambiguously menacing images and messages for early modern Londoners. 24 Franz, History of Brutes, 239. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 239–40. 27 Ibid., 240. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 The Pope Burnt to Ashes: Or Defiance to Rome (London, 1676), 4.

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In 1627 Henry Ainsworth had published his Annotations on the Five Books of Moses. Like Franz’s, Ainsworth’s volume was a learned treatise, one in which he announced that Hebrew words would be compared with and explained by their Greek and Chaldean counterparts. When he arrived at Exodus 8:6, Ainsworth made it clear that “Frogs are loathsome and troublesome creatures, and by Gods law uncleane, and abominable….”31 Therefore, for Pharaoh to be plagued by such creatures was eminently appropriate. Of course, if these meanings were confined solely to learned treatises, it is hard to imagine how such rhetorical imagery could possibly have been effective. However, the significance of frogs reached early modern Londoners in numerous places, most notably in the Bible.32 Exodus 8 told its readers of the plague of frogs that Moses summoned against the pharaoh who held the Israelites in slavery.33 Given that these processions were deliberately intended to incite and enrage massive crowds, not the learned elite, the architects and designers of the processions surely relied on images that spoke to the populace. Yet as multilayered as this amphibious effigy was, it had an even more specific message. Recall that our anonymous narrator told us that the creature was sitting backward on the horse, “making Observations upon the Horse-tail.” The narrator also recorded that a paper pinned to the sleeve of the creature that would be more recognizable near Sam’s Coffee House stated, “I am an Observator.” These were well-known references to the newspaper founded by Sir Roger L’Estrange in April 1681. L’Estrange was Charles ii’s court “Surveyor” or chief censor. For Whigs, L’Estrange was one of the most reviled figures of Charles ii’s court, and while this elaborate amphibian figure mocked the Roman Catholic Church generally, it ridiculed L’Estrange specifically. When L’Estrange was not using his powers as surveyor to search printing houses and zealously prosecuting politically menacing booksellers, printers, and authors, he was known to socialize with one group who did support his principles and his actions, the clergy of the Church of England, at Sam’s Coffee House.34 Thus, 31 32

33 34

Henry Ainsworth, Annotations Upon The Five Bookes Of Moses (London, 1627), 24. There may be few intellectual landscapes more forbidding than literacy in the early modern period. However, there is evidence that suggests that Restoration England was a quite biblically literate society. As R.A. Houston succinctly observes, “Calvinist children read from the Bible, Lutherans read about the Bible.” See his Literacy in Early Modern Europe (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), 67. See also David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 29. Exod. 8:5–6. “Sir Roger L’Estrange,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 33:493.

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this elusive conspirator, having slithered into no less a place than the Restoration court, would of course be portrayed as an amphibian. If all this was not enough, there was still the matter of the dog. Just to be clear, the dog was dead, having been hanged as the criminal they accused it of being sometime before the procession. Mary Fissell has argued that the early modern English treated their vermin much as they treated their criminals, for instance building elaborate snares to hang thieving foxes.35 Such seems to have been the case with this poor spaniel.36 However, the dog’s carcass was more than a grim reminder of the indiscriminant, violent cruelties in early modern London. It too possessed layers of meaning to contemporaries. While not bearing quite the negative connotations of crocodiles and frogs, dogs too posed problems for contemporary religious sensibilities. Seventeenth-century English readers knew their Bible rather well, and surely some if not many viewers knew that the few times dogs appeared in the scriptures, those appearances were most unflattering (“And the Philistine said to David, Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?”).37 A body left to the dogs was the curse of the despised and the damned (“And of Jezebel also spake the Lord, saying, ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.’”).38 When humans failed in their duties, they failed in the ways dogs failed (“His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough….”).39 In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus compared heathens to dogs (“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs….”).40 He compared those 35 36

37 38 39 40

Fissell, “Imagining Vermin,” 2. In a fascinating study, Helen Pierce has studied the correlating images of Sir Roger L’Estrange and dogs, but there is a minor conflict between the present study and Pierce’s. Citing The Protestant Observer, “for though the Mock-Towzer be burnt, there is a RealTowzer that may chance to bite um by the shins,” Pierce suggests the Towzer was a wooden effigy. However, The Procession describes a spaniel, “and most affirm, before he was hanged.” The “Mock-Towzer” identified in The Protestant Observer was a dead spaniel, which portrayed the “Real-Towzer.” It was quite likely the carcass of the dog that was burned, not a wooden effigy. Cf. The Protestant Observer, or Democritus Flens, in a Dialogue, no. 3, 26 Nov. 1681; and Helen Pierce, “The Devil’s Bloodhound: Roger L’Estrange Caricatured,” in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 237–54, esp. 248. 1 Sam. 17:43 kjv. See also 2 Sam. 3:8, 9:8; Deut. 23:18; Prov. 26:11. 1 Kings 21:23 kjv. See also 1 Kings 21:24 and 2 Kings 9:10. Isa. 56:10–11 kjv. Matt. 7:6 kjv.

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unworthy of his grace to dogs (“But he answered and said, ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs’”).41 Such lessons in humiliation were well remembered. In George Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole World, we learn that when Tamberlaine took the great Turk Bajazet prisoner, Bajazet was “forced to feed as a Dogge under his table.”42 Dogs did not fare better in the sacred epistles. The author of the letter to the Philippians warned his readers, “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.”43 In one of the last lines of Revelation, when the new heaven and new earth have been envisioned, readers are warned, “For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whoever loveth and maketh a lie.”44 Such comparisons were not uncommon in the seventeenth century. An individual with the modest name of John Smith wrote a treatise that he immodestly titled, A True and Perfect Narrative of the Inhumane Practices (occasioned by the Damnable Positions) of Jesuites and Papists, Towards Protestants at Home and Abroad (1680). Describing Irish Catholic priests who had killed Protestants, Smith explained, “The Priests in the late Irish Rebellion were wont to tell the people that it was the most commendable thing they could do here upon earth, to destroy the Protestants, for they were worse than Dogs….”45 Smith gave no explanation why the priest claimed that Protestants were worse than dogs, but clearly, the canine comparison was unfavorable. Smith merely proceeded to explain that priests saw Protestants as “Devills” and reasoned that in killing Protestants, they had spared them time in purgatory. Yet his claim suggests that the priest saw killing Protestants as killing a menace—a menace worse than a threatening dog—as an act of profound consequence to his personal salvation and redemption. Returning to Franz’s History of Brutes we learn that while dogs possessed aspects of character that a pious Christian should possess, for him, the greatest problem dogs presented was that they greatly resembled heathens—surely in part an allusion to Jesus’s comparison. To begin, for Franz, dogs had no conception of marital fidelity: “Dogs will couple with any strange Bitch.” That dogs bark at strangers and that a mad dog will attack its own master was further 41 42 43 44 45

Matt. 15:26–7 kjv. George Abbot, A Briefe Description Of The World (London, 1636). Phil. 3:2 kjv. Rev. 22:15 kjv. John Smith, A True and Perfect Narrative of the Inhumane Practices (occasioned by the Damnable Positions) of Jesuites and Papists, Towards Protestants at Home and Abroad. (London, 1680), 14.

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evidence of their heathenish ways: lacking any sense of divine light, they bark at their Christian neighbors. Dogs had “a beastly nature,” eating what is not fit for humans. He observed that dogs “will devour their own vomit.”46 So it was with heathens: even though their many poets had taught them virtues, they soon returned to their “former wicked life.”47 While the carcass of this particular dog surely carried with it these more general considerations, like the amphibian, it too was a coded message to and about Sir Roger L’Estrange. “Touzer” was not just a well-known name for a dog (though it was that) but also the nickname ascribed to L’Estrange by his political opponents. Earlier in the same year, 1681, a broadside appeared that attacked Charles ii’s recent dissolution of Parliament. It ridiculed L’Estrange, portraying him as a small hound with a fiddle tied to his tail (L’Estrange, reputed to be an accomplished violist, performed in chamber groups and therefore was often caricatured with a viola) with the caption, “Forty one,” clearly a reference to England’s Civil War that began in 1641.48 Depicted as the spaniel Touzer, L’Estrange was mocked for his fetching and retrieving of Charles ii’s increasingly “popish” sentiments and decisions.49 Lacking commitment to the true Church of England and seemingly at ease with its drift into the arms of Rome, L’Estrange, to his opponents, was Charles ii’s obedient lapdog. The lapdog completes the nuanced animal vocabulary this procession invoked. Charles ii was widely known to be fond of dogs, and a broadside echoed his canine affection and invoked L’Estrange’s penchant for referring to the Civil War as a kind of threat or menace: “This barks and yelps nothing but Forty-One. / A cunning Cur to think to drown our fears / Of future dangers with forgotten Years.”50 But those years were not forgotten and appear to have been remembered without fear. By placing a recently dispatched spaniel between the legs of a papal effigy, the celebrants presented a grim reminder of what had happened to one king who overstepped his boundaries and the possibility, however remote, of a future regicide. The dog was hanged because this procession intended to terrify and warn of future terrors. Edward Muir argues that Venetian political processions, in part, 46 Franz, History of Brutes, 179. 47 Ibid. 48 The Time-Servers: Or, A Touch Of The Times. Being a Dialogue between Tory, Towzer, and Tantivee, At the News of the Dissoultion of the Late Worthy Parliament at Oxford (London, 1681). 49 See Ronald Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 52. 50 The Time-Servers.

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Figure 18.1

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Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms.

“renewed social bonds by reviving patriotism, and reidentified a despised enemy against whom the populace could unite.”51 Such appears to have been true of early modern England as well, and animals, both real and imagined, played a crucial part in the message this procession intended to convey. While it was not a procession, a 1680 broadsheet portrayed animals as Catholic conspirators and terrorists: Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms. Figure 18.1 The narrative is in doggerel verse, but what distinguishes this particular broadsheet is the woodcut that accompanies it. Dominating the top third of the broadsheet, the woodcut portrays the pope mounted on a horse, commanding a pack of eleven hounds to attack a lamb that is protected from the canine onslaught by a circle of fire. The pope has his minions with him, one riding an elephant, another riding an ass, while two others ride a bristling hog. While the kindly illustrator and/or poet explained some of the symbolic images of this hunt vividly, some were left unexplained. First, it is quite likely significant that there are eleven hounds trying to attack the lamb. Eleven is one short of twelve, a significant number in Christian doctrine. There were twelve tribes in Israel. Twelve is particularly important in the heavenly Jerusalem described in Revelation: The high wall possesses twelve gates and twelve angels 51 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 213.

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are at the gates, while on the gates the twelve tribes of Israel are inscribed. The city itself has twelve foundations and on each foundation are the names of the twelve apostles.52 There were twelve disciples, but what is revealing is not the individual apostles, whose names differ depending on the book in the New Testament in which the list appears, but rather that they are always twelve. As G.B. Caird and L.D. Hurst explain so elegantly, “It was not who they were that matters, but their twelveness.”53 Caird and Hurst note that when Paul mistakenly describes Jesus as having appeared to “the Twelve” after his crucifixion, he was not quite accurate: one was dead. Yet even before a successor to Judas was selected, they remained “the Twelve” because they were symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus explicitly correlated his twelve disciples with the twelve tribes of Israel.54 For all of these reasons, the number twelve suggests completeness, fulfillment. A woodcut portraying eleven attacking beagles was a telling detail of how Catholic doctrine—as menacing as it was—clearly fell short. Beyond the significance of their numbers, each beagle is identified by name: Ambition, Ignorance, Idolatry, Hypocracy [sic], Adultery, Murder, Self-Interest, Treachery, Mine, and Thine are ten sins that early modern Christians were continually being told to avoid. This pack of beagles, identified as “The AntiChristian Crew,” runs pell-mell toward a lamb unsurprisingly identified as “christian.” Jesus came to be known by the Christian Fathers as the lamb of God; Christians were taught to be shepherded by Jesus, and were often told that to be Christ-like, one must be like a lamb. The beagle that seems to be leading the pack is not so much a sin as a sinner. This hound we met earlier as a dispatched spaniel, but this beagle’s name, “Strange,” is less elusive, and, predictably perhaps, the dog is discussed on its own, not in verse but in a less veiled polemic: Reader, There’s a Strange Cur got among the Anti-Christian Crew, he is without his Formalities, or Badge of his Order; but his Name and Fireball, represents him to be the Provincial (i.e. the Chief) of the Jesuits here in London when they burn’d it; he and another Cur, called Gifford, managed that Fire, hiring and paying those carrying it on from house to house, &c. But being out of his Orderly habit, and with a Pen, he may pass for a 52 53 54

See Rev. 21:12–14 kjv. G.B. Caird, completed and ed. L.D. Hurst, New Testament Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 382. Ibid., 382–83.

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Lay-brother who prints, sells, writes or speaks against the Kings Evidence, and for the Popish Faction.55 This brief polemic was dense with contemporary references early modern readers would have recognized immediately. The “Strange Cur,” as he is called in the narrative, or “Strange,” as the beagle is identified in the woodcut, is clearly a reference to Sir Roger L’Estrange. Portraying L’Estrange as a spaniel or a beagle possessed connotations beyond the fact that he was Charles ii’s lapdog. For in seventeenth-century London, informers and searchers were known as spaniels or beagles and L’Estrange himself was known at the time as “the Devills Bloudhound.”56 Yet the polemic against L’Estrange did not end there. One of the more curious and tantalizing references on the broadsheet itself and in the caption for L’Estrange is to the Great Fire of London in 1666. Underneath the title of the broadsheet, printed in a smaller font, are the statements, “1. London’s dreadful Fire:” and “2. Godfreys cruel Murder Considered.” Accusations that Catholics had set the fire deliberately were common in the years following the conflagration.57 Whigs had long believed that L’Estrange became a Catholic in the 1650s and had worked for the Holy See as an undercover agent, secretly belonging to an order (presumably Jesuit) but at the time “out of his Orderly habit.”58 The other name in the accusation, “another Cur, called Gifford,” is almost certainly a reference to Maurice Gifford. On 4 May 1679 the House of Commons issued a proclamation offering a fifty-pound reward for the apprehension of Gifford, “a Popish priest,” who, along with other priests identified in the proclamation, “conspired to set on fire the city of London and its suburbs and have procured divers houses therein at sundry times to be set on fire, and are fled from justice….”59 To those who believed that L’Estrange was a Catholic double agent, working in concert with a terror cell of Catholic priests, it would naturally follow that L’Estrange would be involved in a Catholic conspiracy to incinerate London. Again, when we recall that L’Estrange was portrayed both as an amphibian, a creature without integrity, 55 56 57

58 59

Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms (London: Printed when the Papists were there rampant, 1680). Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 155. See S.J. Michael F. Suarez, “A Crisis in English Public Life: The Popish Plot, Naboth’s Vineyard (1679) and Mock-Biblical Satire’s Exemplary Redress,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 548n.47; Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 651–52. “Roger L’Estrange,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1679–1680, 135–36.

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and as a spaniel, an informer or searcher, such conspiratorial images were appropriate. The most inexplicable image is the sin of pride riding an elephant. The accompanying verse proclaims, Lofty Pride doth puff and pant, Riding upon an Elephant, With outward Pomp adorned: Exalted to a high degree, They trample on the bended knee, Humility is scorned.60 Elephants were not unknown to seventeenth-century Londoners. Five years earlier, in 1675, an elephant had survived the voyage from India and had arrived in London to great fanfare. A broadsheet trumpeting its arrival saw nothing but gentleness, humility, even religious devotion in the great beast. (The author explained that upon arriving at a new destination, elephants will not disembark from the ship unless their master gives them his oath that they will return. Their fear is based upon the fact that although massive, elephants are subject to numerous maladies, whereupon they will “lie upon their backs, and casting up Herbs towards Heaven, as if they had procured and set the Earth to pray for them.”61 In addition to their piety, elephants “take delight in love and glory: Nay, more then [sic] all this, they embrace goodness, honesty, prudence, and equity, rare qualities to be found in men…”).62 Such commendable qualities of elephants were evidently common attributions. Franz devoted the first chapter of his History of Brutes to elephants and echoed these and many other plaudits for the great beasts—identifying pride neither when he referred to Hannibal’s use of elephants nor when speaking of elephants themselves. Further, there are no references to elephants in the Bible, so that too provides no assistance. Perhaps the author associated pride with Hannibal’s failed effort to use elephants successfully against the Romans. Beyond that tentative suggestion, the appositeness of this prideful elephant remains unclear. Perhaps the most menacing figure portrayed in the woodcut is the pope, riding a powerful steed, blowing his trumpet, and in complete command of his forces of sin and evil. His papal tiara has three tiers, each one identified with a 60 61

Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms. A Full and True Relation of the Elephant That is brought over into England from the Indies, and Landed at London, August 3d. 1675 (London, 1675). 62 Ibid.

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sin: Avarice, Pride, and Lust. The two who ride atop the hog are identified as Doeg and Nabal, both of whom are figures in the Hebrew Bible. Doeg was the overseer of Saul’s flocks. An Edomite, therefore a foreigner to the Israelites, Doeg was willing to do whatever he could to win Saul’s favor and did so by executing eighty-five priests when no Israelite was willing to do that for Saul.63 If Doeg represented callous opportunism, Nabal represented foolish ingratitude. We are told that David’s army had protected Nabal’s shepherds and property, yet when David asked for provisions from Nabal to feed his army, Nabal refused. Nabal escaped David’s vengeful fury because Abigail, Nabal’s wife, pleaded for David to be merciful, only to have Nabal die of an illness just ten days after David acquiesced.64 To seventeenth-century Christians there was probably something quite appropriate in having Doeg and Nabal ride a hog: When the verse told its readers, “Doeg, Nabal scold and chide, / Upon a grunting Hog they ride, / Inrol’d among the Swineheards,”65 perhaps their greed and foolishness seemed appropriate atop their porcine conveyance. In the midst of this chaotic action, lurking in the corner are two exotic figures, one of which is waving a curved sword. The verse names nefarious figures, all from the East; Achitophel, Goliath, Judas, Mark Antony, and Caesar are all tossed out to the reader, but it is probably an unidentified “Scithian” who is pictured. Animals alone, it seems, might not be menacing enough. Although the poem ends with the confident statement that “The Lord of Hosts intends to reign,” make no mistake: this woodcut was meant to unnerve any Protestant who thought the threat of a Catholic invasion was the stuff of legend and baseless fear. For if the woodcut and the accompanying verse were insufficient, these lines near the end of the poem articulated the threat to Protestants that Catholics posed: All these Beagles in their Chace Hunt the Lamb from place to place, With Hollowing and hooting, O’re the Downs they dance the Hay, The Protestant is now their pray [sic], This Dove can find no footing. The prayer that closes the poem pleads for divine protection: 63 64 65

1 Sam. 22:17–22. 1 Sam. 25:2–39. Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms.

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Arise, Great Michael, in thy Power, Pull down proud Babels lofty Tower, Thy Love is Heav’nly Nectar, Thy little Lambs do bleat for Thee. Draw thy bright Sword to set us free, Who art our Lord Protector. Terrified by the rumors and innuendo of the Popish Plot, Protestants were “little Lambs,” entirely vulnerable to papal terror without God’s assistance. That was certainly why the illustrator ensured that no one doubted what the final outcome would be, for high above the hunt shines the eye of God and from one of its beams comes the phrase, “Video, Rideo, peribis, &c.” (I see and having enclosed I laugh…) Not every effort to employ animals to make a polemical point during the Popish Plot was derogatory. In John Smith’s 1680 treatise that outlined the crimes Jesuits had committed against Protestants, he cautioned against behaving toward Catholics as they behaved toward Protestants. He wrote that those who had demonstrated themselves to be “cruel, revengeful, treacherous, bloudthirsty, merciless souls” might rightly expect to be treated in the same way by their enemies, “and that God should have no manner of Pity or Compassion for those that can be so savage, and indeed, worse than feral, towards their poor Brethren; for Beasts are not for destroying their own kind; no, they improve their sence [sic] better, than such men do their Reason.”66 Quite unexpectedly Smith challenged his readers that since “we are obliged to give our lives for our Brethren, how then can it be allowed that we should kill them?”67 Instead, he urged restraint in responding to Catholic crimes committed against Protestants, inspired surely by the Pauline letter he referred to but inspired also by the beasts he had mentioned earlier, who also did not destroy their own kind. Alas, such sentiments were the exception. Even before Godfrey’s mysterious death, animals were employed to express Protestant fury at the Catholic Church and especially the pope—at times, at least, with horrifying consequences. In a letter to his brother, Charles Hatton wrote in 1677 that on the previous Saturday there were “mighty bonfires” in the city celebrating Elizabeth’s coronation. The celebration included “ye burning of a most costly pope…his belly filled full of live catts who squawled most hideously as soone as

66 Smith, True and Perfect Narrative, 22. 67 Ibid.

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they felt the fire; the common saying all ye while, it wase ye language of ye Pope and ye Divel in a dialogue betwixt them.”68 Recent scholarship in literary history has argued that early modern society was rife with images, representations, and symbolic language, as well as symbols themselves.69 Yet the conclusions of this essay suggest a further step: the early modern world was actually animated by creatures that lived closely, indeed, quite intimately, within early modern society—even within London itself. Whether it was the elaborate, multilayered polemic that the enemies of popery mustered in 1681 or an elephant arriving with all the pomp imaginable in Restoration London, the fauna of the natural world was a powerful rhetorical weapon to employ against those who would dare to suggest that England return to the shackles of papal authority. While the immutable qualities of the natural world, particularly animals and the anthropomorphic qualities associated with them, made animals useful creatures to appropriate for specific political ends, at the same time those same qualities could become as malleable as contemporaries needed them to be to suit their particular polemical needs. For this reason, the animal kingdom was a particularly deep rhetorical reservoir from which to draw. The ubiquitous presence of animals in early modern society and culture made them more than a source of sustenance. To early modern sensibilities animals were vehicles that could warn, menace, mock, serve as political foils or as objects of pity. Knowledge of the animal kingdom was part of the language, the rhetoric, the vocabulary of Restoration political and religious tensions, and if we ignore it we also ignore a widely appreciated and polemically potent knowledge that, crouched for employment, could be unleashed with powerful, unsettling, and, at times, terrifying effect. 68 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 177. 69 See Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles i (New York: Cambridge University Press); Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

chapter 19

Lutheran Islamophiles in Eighteenth-century Germany Alastair Hamilton* Islamophilia in the early modern period has generally been regarded as the prerogative of radical critics of the existing churches. For such an idea there is abundant support. We have only to think of men like Henri de Boulainvilliers,1 John Toland,2 or even Edward Gibbon3 to see a spectrum of individuals looked on as freethinkers, libertines, and deists, with all the sinister associations that the terms implied in the minds of the orthodox.4 Hardly any of these defenders of a faith traditionally regarded as the main enemy of Christianity were Arabists or had been anywhere near the Arab world, and they depended for their documentation on sources discovered and edited by teachers of Arabic at the European universities. The attitudes of the academic Arabists were usually far more conservative than those of the Islamophiles. Jacobus Golius in Leiden, moderately anti-Islamic, did his best to propagate Protestantism in the Arabicspeaking world.5 Others were committed to the defense of their own churches. Edward Pococke was the highly respectable Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford and an ardent champion of the English Church.6 Johann Heinrich Hottinger was deeply committed to the cause of the Reformed Church in both * My special thanks are due to Jan Loop for his invaluable comments on a draft of this essay. 1 Stefano Brogi, Il cerchio dell’universo: Libertinismo, spinozismo e filosofia della natura in Boulainvilliers (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 111–36. 2 Justin Champion, “‘I remember a Mahometan story of Ahmed Ben Edris’: Freethinking Uses of Islam from Stubbe to Toland,” Al-Qantara 31 (2010): 443–80. 3 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 85–98. 4 Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings (London: Grey Seal, 1996); Alastair Hamilton, “Western Attitudes to Islam in the Enlightenment,” Middle Eastern Lectures 3 (1999): 69–85; Martin Mulsow, “Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship,” Al-Qantara 31 (2010): 549–86. 5 W.M.C. Juynboll, Zeventiende-eeuwsche Beoefenaars van het Arabisch in Nederland (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1931), 171–73. See also Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands: A Short History in Portraits, 1580–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 47. 6 G.J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 160–62. For Pococke’s religious commitment see Toomer, “Edward Pococke’s Arabic Translation of Grotius, De Veritate,” Grotiana 33 (2012): 88–105.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_020

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Heidelberg and his native Zurich.7 Few defenders of the Church of England were as keen as Humphrey Prideaux, the future dean of Norwich.8 Lodovico Marracci had been confessor to Pope Innocent xi and was a treasured member both of the Congregation of the Index and of the missionary organization De propaganda fide in Rome.9 Despite the Catholicism of his youth, followed by his Cartesianism, there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the conversion to Anglicanism of Jean Gagnier, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Oxford,10 just as we have every reason to accept the true piety of Simon Ockley, Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, vicar of Swavesey, and chaplain to Robert Harlay.11 Adriaan Reland, professor of Arabic at Utrecht, was indeed a Cartesian, but he never infringed the principles of a university known for the rigor of its Reformed orthodoxy.12 So there appears to have been a deep dichotomy between the academic Arabists who published Arabic sources and the “freethinkers” who put these sources to their own uses. Yet this is not true for the whole of Europe, as we can see in the case of Germany. There, in the eighteenth century, Islamophilia was evenly spread across all the intellectual categories that scholars have devised, from the different shades of orthodox Lutheranism to the conservative, moderate, and radical Enlightenment. By the early eighteenth century German Lutherans could boast of a long involvement with Islam. The first translation of the Koran to be published in the West, the medieval Latin version of Robert of Ketton edited by Theodor Bibliander and first issued in Basel in 1543, had introductory texts by Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, and Luther had played an important part in compiling the volume.13 The Ottoman advance to the frontiers of the Holy 7

Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18–19, 35–41. 8 P.M. Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 50–51; Hugh de Quehen, “‘Prideaux, Humphrey,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45:341–42. 9 Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, “Ludovico Marracci: la vita e l’opera,” in Il Corano: traduzioni, traduttori e lettori in Italia, ed. M. Borrmans et al. (Milan: itl, 2000), 9–29. 10 Michael J. Franklin, “Gagnier, John,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 21: 260–61. 11 Holt, Studies, 54–55; Holt, “Ockley, Simon,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 41:428–30. 12 Alastair Hamilton, “Arabists and Cartesians at Utrecht,” in Leven na Descartes. Zeven opstellen over ideeëngeschiedenis in Nederland in de tweede helft van de zeventiende eeuw, ed. Paul Hoftijzer and Theo Verbeek (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2005), 97–105. 13 Hartmut Bobzin, Der Koran im Zeitalter der Reformation. Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Arabistik und Islamkunde in Europa (Beirut: Steiner; Stuttgart: Verlag Stuttgart, 1995), 13–275.

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Roman Empire, the threat to Vienna before 1683, and the many border skirmishes that followed led to a constant awareness of the proximity of Islam and the need to understand it. From the early seventeenth century on one Lutheran Arabist after another would try his hand at translating a part of the Koran.14 Yet, despite their interest in it, the Germans contributed little to the progressive discovery of Islam that can be perceived elsewhere in Europe. Certainly there were travelers, such as Adam Olearius, who had visited the Islamic world, recorded their impressions, and, like Christian Ravius, brought back manuscripts, but the Germans could hardly compete with the English, the Dutch, and the French in supplying and editing material that led to the demolition of the traditional anti-Islamic myths and an increase in the information about a religion practiced in such a large part of the world. One of the texts on Islam most frequently consulted in Germany was the relatively brief section in the younger Friedrich Spanheim’s Chronologia sacra of 1683.15 Although the author was prepared to attribute certain virtues to the Prophet Muhammad, and although he referred to the most recent and bestinformed sources, such as Edward Pococke, he perpetuated the legends and prejudices of the Middle Ages. The Prophet is presented as the “Oriental Antichrist,” a seditious impostor and voluptuary who produced a work full of heresies and fables. The legends of the dove trained to pick seeds out of the Prophet’s ear and the bull trained to kneel before him with the Koran attached to its horns were given full credence.16 Despite the receding fear of Islam after the Austro-Polish victory over the Ottoman forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683,17 Spanheim was quoted in Germany well into the eighteenth century and is given as a source in the first German translation of the Koran to have been made directly from the Arabic, David Friedrich Megerlin’s Die türkische Bibel of 1772.18 Yet, by then, Spanheim’s See also Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologies (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 67–210. 14 Alastair Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator for the Quran: A Late Seventeenth-Century Quest,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. Hamilton, Maurits H. van den Boogert, and Bart Westerweel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 197–221. 15 Friedrich Spanheim, Opera, quatenus complectuntur Geographiam, Chronologiam, et Historiam Sacram atque ecclesiasticam utriusque temporis (Leiden: Cornelius Boutestein et al., 1701), vol. 1, cols. 1206–18. 16 For a survey of the legends see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oneworld, 1995), 30–31, 60. 17 Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1955), 94. 18 David Friedrich Megerlin, Die türkische Bibel, oder des Korans allererste teutsche Uebersetzung (Frankfurt am Main: Joahnn Gottlieb Garbe, 1772), 31–32.

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presentation of Islam was already regarded in more enlightened circles as an anachronism. Attitudes were changing with astonishing speed. Gottfried Arnold presents an early example of this transformation. His Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie of 1699–1700 was an indictment of the Christian church for its decline, which had already begun, he asserted, at the end of the second century and had accelerated ever since. The rise of Islam suited Arnold’s purpose. The Prophet, he maintained, owed much of his success, as well as a number of his ideas, to the repugnant behavior of the Christians of his time, to whom, with admirable magnanimity, he exhibited a tolerance that later Christians would have done well to emulate.19 A number of Muhammad’s teachings, moreover, were reminiscent of the natural religion that Arnold so admired and of which the first Christian communities were an example. Arnold’s radicalism, his conciliatory view of Baruch Spinoza, and his attacks on the visible churches meant that his work was frowned upon in orthodox circles.20 Thus Johann Lorenz Mosheim firmly rejected the skepticism expressed not only by Arnold toward Byzantine sources in reconstructing the early history of Islam but also by Simon Ockley in his Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Aegypt, by the Saracens of 1708.21 In his Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae Novi Testamenti, which first appeared in 1726, Mosheim could see no reason to prefer the Arabs to the Byzantines—both, he said, were equally

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Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie, Vom Anfang des Neuen Testaments biß auff das Jahr Christi 1688 (Frankfurt am Main: Thomas Fritsch, 1700), 1:268–70. Writing about the hostility to Islam of the Byzantine sources he says (268): “Zu solcher feindschafft mag diese bewogen heben / weill Muhammed in seinem Alkoran nicht selten der Christen verderbnüß und gottloses wesen / item, ihre unreinigkeit, aberglauben und abgötterey beschreibet. Worinnen er den ihnen nicht unrecht thu t/ da ihre eigene historien ein gleiches bezeugen/ und die schrecklichen ärgernüsse gestehen / welche die Namenchristen diesen und andern völckern mit ihren greueln geben.” Commending the Prophet’s admiration for Christ, Arnold observes (270): “Da er nun also von Christo viel gehalten / und ihm etwas übermenschliches und Göttliches zugeschrieben / so wait sich nemlich sein begriff erstrecket / so ist desto eher noch zu verwundern / weil die Christen selber in ihrer lehre ungewiß / verfallen und unrein waren / daß er gleichwol noch so viel erkant / und nicht durch das ärgerliche leben derselben ganz zugestossen worden.” For Arnold’s treatment of Islam and his view of it as a natural religion see E. Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold: die Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit. Studien zur Historiographie und zur Mystik (Meerane: E.R. Herzog, 1923), 96–98. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 636. Simon Ockley, Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Aegypt, by the Saracens (London: Printed for R. Knaplock et al., 1708), ix–xi.

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prejudiced—and his tone became increasingly anti-Islamic in later editions of his work.22 We encounter a slightly different approach in the Historia critica philosophiae by Johann Jakob Brucker, which appeared in five volumes between 1742 and 1744. Brucker had studied at the University of Jena, where he had been taught Eastern languages by Johann Andreas Danz, one of the many German Arabists to have published a Latin translation of suras of the Koran.23 It must have been mainly to Danz that Brucker owed his interest in Arabic culture, even if, influenced by Daniel Georg Morhof, and consequently with a foot in “the world of the polyhistors,”24 he may also have been affected by the brief bibliographical section on Arabic studies in Morhof’s Polyhistor of 1707.25 The Historia critica was widely acknowledged as a work of originality and importance, the first history of philosophy written with a broad vision of the development of the discipline. In his survey of the “philosophia Saracenorum” in the third volume Brucker provides a reappraisal of the Arab philosophers and scientists, drawing on Pococke as well as on sources such as Leo Africanus, Hottinger, Reland, and Thomas Erpenius’s edition of the Arab Christian historian al-Makīn. Yet Brucker can hardly be regarded as an apologist for Islam. The rise of Arab philosophy, he argues, happened in spite of the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran. Philosophy, altogether unknown to the early Arabs or to the Prophet and his followers, was introduced by the Christians and came into its own in Islamic circles only under the Abassids in Baghdad. This was at a time when the rise of numerous Islamic sects stimulated a philosophical approach to the Koranic precepts that enabled them to differentiate themselves from one another. The result was a veritable flowering of philosophy and theology. The Christians could justly admire it, and many of the ideas produced were fully compatible with Christianity. In contrast to Pierre Bayle, Brucker claims that Averroes never denied the immortality of the soul.26 Having always attributed 22

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Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae Novi Testamenti (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Ex Officina Viduae Ioannis Meyeri, 1726), 384–90. The rejection is expressed in even stronger terms in later editions. Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator,” 204–5. Anthony Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,” Central European History 18 (1985): 31–47. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor, literarius, philosophicus et practicus, 4th ed. (Lübeck: Petrus Boeckmann, 1747), 769–71. Jacob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig: Impensis Haered. Weidemanni et Reichii, 1766), 3:112; J.I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 616.

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a great elegance to Arabic poetry, he ends with a list of Arabic proverbs and sayings (drawn partly from the Paroles remarquables, les bons mots, et les maximes des orientaux published by Antoine Galland in 1694), and even adds that the Muslims knew a morality that surpassed in its sobriety and beauty much that had been produced by the scholastic philosophers of the West.27 The work was written when Brucker was still serving as Lutheran pastor at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Kaufbeuren. In 1744 he returned to his birthplace, Augsburg, where he died in 1770. Brucker’s circle of friends and correspondents was wide. Besides colleagues such as Mosheim, it included some of the major figures of the European Enlightenment—Johann Christoph Gottsched, Johann Georg Zimmermann, Christoph August Heumann, Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze, Ludovico Muratori, and Giovanni Lami.28 Despite his readiness to consort with Catholics in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg, Brucker himself, as he proved by the strict observance of his parochial duties and his refusal to abandon them for an academic career, was devoted to the Church of Luther.29 Almost twenty years after Brucker’s statements we have a far more extreme defense of Islam, reminiscent in its radicalism of Arnold but possibly also influenced by Brucker. The author was Johann Salomo Semler. He had matriculated at the University of Halle in 1743 and had started to study Arabic but was disappointed by his teachers.30 The man to whom he was closest and by whom he was most influenced was the professor of theology Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten, one of the most admired theologians at the university. It was probably under the influence of Baumgarten, himself a moderate conservative, that Semler first developed a critical attitude toward the Lutheran Church, but, as long as Baumgarten lived, he was cautious in his expression of 27 Brucker, Historia critica, 3:240: “Has ex multis aliis rosas tibi Lector, ex hoc rosario apponere placuit, ut appareat Muhamedanis quoque moralis doctrinae praestantiam non fuisse denegatam, nec tam barbaram Arabum sub Mohammedismo gentem fuisse, ut animum sapientiae moralis praeceptis non excoluerit. Quae tantum abest, ut non pulcherrima multa praeceperit, ut fatendum sit, plus in hoc rosario esse, quod philosophiam sobriam spiret, quam in mille ethicis libellis philosophorum Scholasticorum, vepreta nobis et spinas, non rosaria, exhibentium.” 28 Christine Lüdke, “‘Ich bitte mir Euer Hochedelgebohren Gedancken aus!’ Beiträge zur Erschließung und Analyse von Jakob Bruckers Korrespondenz” (PhD thesis, Universität Augsburg, 2008), 103–61. 29 Etienne François, “Bruckers Stellung in der Augsburger Konfessionsgeschichte,” in Jacob Brucker (1696–1770). Philosoph und Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Theo Stammen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 99–109. 30 Johann Salomo Semler, Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst abgefaßt (Halle: n.p., 1781), 1:86–88.

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it.31 In 1752, with Baumgarten’s support, Semler was appointed professor of theology in Halle. Baumgarten died in 1757 and Semler succeeded him as director of the theological seminary. One of Baumgarten’s unfinished projects was the translation into German of the vast Universal History, from the earliest account of time, which appeared in sixty-five volumes between 1747 and 1768. Its contributors included George Sale, the translator of the Koran, who was responsible for the volume on the Prophet Muhammad, Islam, and Arab history. Semler took over the editorship of this volume, which came out in German in 1759, and provided a long preface. It was here that he first published his views on Islam.32 Like Ockley and Arnold he was highly critical of the use of Byzantine sources by historians and applauded the greater availability and use of Arabic ones.33 But with even greater fervor he deplored the standard Western approach to Islam. What right had the Church of Rome to cast aspersions on the Prophet Muhammad when it was itself so prone to fraudulence and fanaticism?34 In the following year Semler went considerably further. Friedrich Eberhard Boysen’s Kritische Erleuterungen des Grundtextes der heiligen Schriften Altes Testaments appeared in ten parts in Halle between 1760 and 1764. That book, based on the principles of Boysen’s teacher at Halle, the professor of theology Christian Benedikt Michaelis, applied Arabic in order to elucidate some of the more obscure Hebrew terms in the Old Testament. This was a popular approach among contemporary Orientalists, even though it would be derided by Johann Jacob Reiske. Semler wrote a preface for the work. Just as Baumgarten had 31 32 33

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G. Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler. Studien zu Leben und Werk der Hallenser Aufklärungs­ theologen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 4–6, 13, 16–18, 23–24, 32–37, 92–95, 116–18, 136–41. Giovanni Bonacina, Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. I wahhâbiti in prospettiva europea 1772– 1830 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2011), 10–11. Johann Salomo Semler, “Vorrede,” Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie der Neueren Zeiten die in England durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten ausgefertiget worden. Erster Teil (Halle: Gebauer, 1759), 7. Ibid., 8–9: “…so sehr wir auf die sichtbaren Lustigkeiten des Muhammed ungehalten seyn können, so sehr verdienet es der arglistige römische Hof eben von den Zeiten an; und wenn wir über die vielen ernstlichen und fanatischen Anhänger und feierliche Vertheidiger dieser angeblichen Gesandten Gottes betrübt seyn können, so müssen wir gewis einen eben so grossen Haß wider die Möncherey und diese feierlichen Verfechter der römischen Einrichtungen und Bestimmungen der Religion fassen und behalten. Je gewisser wir voraussetzen und behaupten, daß das vernünftige Nachdenken durchaus der wahren Religion wesentlich sey, und nimmermehr davon getrennet werden dürfe: desto gewisser sind wir von solchen christlichen Coranen sicher, als die abendländischen Derwische und Sophi ehedem in so reichen Anzahl, als ie in Orient, mit schelmischer Andacht den armen fast unvernünftigen Christen zu bereitet haben.”

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approved of Boysen’s plan shortly before his death, so Semler expressed his full support of the idea of explaining Hebrew words in the Old Testament through equivalent terms in Arabic. The words, after all, had a common linguistic root, and the system of comparison had been used to good effect by the rabbis.35 But it was on Islam that Semler dwelled at greatest length. Even if, as he admitted, the Koran contained grave errors in references to biblical, Christian, and Jewish matters—Semler regarded this as evidence of the lack of an Arabic translation of the scriptures at the time36—he was extraordinarily enthusiastic about the rise of Islam. He regarded Islam as a providential gift of God to the Christians. For it was owing to the scientific and philosophical translations into Arabic of the Greeks and the scientific works produced by the Arabs and the Persians that the world could emerge from a state of total darkness, the influence of the Church Fathers and the Vulgate could be combated, and the Bible could be appreciated for its moral message. Because of the translation of these works into Latin and their introduction into Europe, scholasticism could break away from the stranglehold of the Church. Semler saw a fruit of this development in the freedom Christians enjoyed in Islamic lands, where there was no threat of an inquisition or other forms of ecclesiastical oppression.37 35 36 37

Friedrich Eberhard Boysen, Kritische Erleuterungen des Grundtextes der heiligen Schriften Altes Testaments, 10 vols. (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1760–64), vol. 1, sigs. a8v–b1r, b3r. Ibid., sig. b2r–v. Ibid., sigs. b4v–b6r. “Ich will nur noch diese algemeine Betrachtung kurz anzeigen: daß die Christen überhaupt die weise göttliche Vorsehungen zu erkennen haben, welche bey der grossen Ausbreitungen der mohammedanischen Religion zugleich den Wachstum und Vortheil der Christlichen so sehr befordert hat. Zu eben den Zeiten lag die ganze morgenund abendländische Christenheit in den tiefsten Finsternissen; die infamesten Betrügereien und cyklopischen Maasregeln, wie sie Melanchthon oft nent, herrscheten unter den bekanten Namen, der Mirakel, der heiligen Reliquien, der Erscheinungen aus dem Fegefeuer, der klösterlichen Volkommenheit, der Offenbarung durch Engel und Heilige. Alle diese Schändlichkeiten und Dumheiten wurden gleichwol zu dem Inhalt der Bibel gerechnet, und so lange die Vulgate herrschete, und das uneingeschränkte Ansehen der sogenanten Väter: war es unmöglich, den Ungrund dieser Fantaseien und egyptischen Knechtschaft frey einzusehen, und mit dem innern und moralischen Theil der heiligen Schrift wirklich heilsamlich bekant zu werden. Die Juden lagen in eben so dicker Finsternis; ihre rabbinischen Aussprüche, und die Vätersazungen der lateinischen Kirche zumal, hatten einerley Zweck und Grund. Unter der mohammedanischen Oberherrschaft geraten die alten griechischen nützlichen Bücher den Arabern in die Hände; man macht arabische Uebersetzungen von astronomischen, metaphysischen, historischen Schriften; der Verstand bekomt hiervon einen Gegenstand, wodurch er sich aus dem gemeinen Abergaluben heraus arbeitet… Die sogenanten passagia und heilgen Kriege machen, daß die Christen eine ziemliche Kentnis der arabischen Sprache bekommen; sie bringen viele arabische Bücher

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The main purpose of Semler’s praise of Islam was to criticize the medieval Church of Rome. His dislike of dogmatic constrictions soon extended to Lutheranism, as his views on religion and the Bible became more extreme. As early as 1761, when he was appointed prorector of the university, he was suspected of Socinianism and Arianism.38 But for all the suspicions that weighed against him, especially on account of his bold treatment of the Bible, Semler remained devoted to the tradition of Melanchthon; he had no time for deism and always retained his belief in Revelation. Even if he is generally regarded as having deviated from orthodox Lutheranism in the 1760s and 1770s, well before his death in 1791 he reverted to an orthodoxy that became ever more rigid.39 The extent to which a positive approach to Islam was shared in Germany was apparent with the publication, in 1772, of Megerlin’s Die türkische Bibel, oder des Korans allererste teutsche Uebersetzung aus der Arabischen Urschrift.40 Quite mit zurück, welche ebenfals ihren Verstand nach und nach beschäftigen, und viel Aberglauben aus der Arzeneigelartheit, Naturkentnis, vertreiben helfen. Die FranciskanerMißionarien, und einzelne Reisenden tragen manches bey zur weitern Erhaltung dieser Erkentnis; und die lateinischen Uebersetzungen arabischer philosophischen Schriften geben den fleissigen Scholastikern die Gelegenheit, anstatt der Fegfeuernachrichten, die Vernunft zu Rathe zu ziehen, die Aussprüche der heiligen Väter nach allen Seiten zu drehen, und damit den Weg zu banen, zu völliger Beyseitsetzung dieses so schädlichen Ansehens einzeler grossen und kleinen Päbste. Wäre dieser Zusammenhang nicht vom Orient her enstanden, so würden wir noch unter dem eisernen Joch der monarchischen Decrete, Bullen und Breven seufzen müssen. Ich gebe nur ganz schwache Züge von diesem wundervollen System der göttlichen weisen Regierung, wodurch wir nun den grossen Vortheil einsehen, den die ganze Christenheit davon hat oder haben kan, daß Gott es zugelassen hat, daß die Mohammedaner das sogenante heilige Land unter ihrer Herrschaft haben, und zugleich über so viel tausend morgenländische Christen herrschen, welche wirklich sich viel besser auch leiblich befinden, als andre Christen unter dem Joch gottloser Pfaffen, atheistischer Buben, und heuchlerischer Köpfe gewesen: welches Joch nicht nur eine viel härtere leibliche Knechtschaft zugleich auflegte, und Millionen Christen verbrant, gesäkt, geköpft, und sonst barbarisch hingerichtet hat, da die Christen unter den Mohammedanern ruhig und zufrieden leben dürfen; sondern auch, welches viel unglückseliger ist, über den Gebrauch unserer leiblichen Sinnen und unsers Verstandes tyrannisiret hat.” 38 Semler, Lebensbeschreibung, 1:250. 39 For a survey of Semler’s life and thought, with an excellent discussion of his relationship with orthodox Lutheranism, see Roberto Bordoli, L’Illuminsmo di Dio: alle origini della mentalità liberale. Religione teologica filosofica e storia in Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791). Contributo per lo studio delle fonti teologiche, cartesiane e spinoziane dell’Aufklärung (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 12–37. 40 Alastair Hamilton, “‘To rescue the honour of the Germans’: Qur’an Translations by Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Protestants,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 77 (2014).

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apart from the deficiencies of the translation and the infelicity of the style, Megerlin’s presentation of the text, heavily dependent on Spanheim, echoed the conservative hostility of earlier ages. The more enlightened reviewers were consequently merciless. Johann Jacob Reiske’s pupil Johann Bernard Köhler, who was then teaching Oriental languages at Göttingen, demolished the translation in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliographie of 1772.41 Fiercer still was the brief review by the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen of the same year.42 And it is Goethe who, totally ignorant of Arabic, best exemplifies the approach to Islam that was becoming increasingly fashionable. He himself, disappointed by Christianity, saw the Prophet Muhammad as the only acceptable religious leader and Islam as the ideal monotheistic natural religion. Using the existing translations from the Arabic, he thus turned into German various suras of the Koran and started to write a play about the Prophet.43 Megerlin’s translation, with its attacks on Muhammad and Islam in his introduction, angered Goethe. He dismissed it as a “miserable product,” hoping that, one day, a German could produce a proper translation. The man who would attempt to do so was Friedrich Eberhard Boysen, the author of the Kritische Erleuterungen for which Semler had provided a preface. The combination of Semler and Boysen may seem surprising, since Boysen never appears to have shared Semler’s increasingly critical attitude to the Lutheran Church.44 Like Semler, Boysen, who was slightly older, had reacted against Pietism, but while Semler would always retain a sympathetic interest in mysticism, Boysen rejected it with horror. At the University of Halle Boysen had been taught by many of the same teachers as Semler, and they both admired Baumgarten. But, judging from Boysen’s autobiography, his Eigene Lebensbeschreibung published in 1795, five years before his death, Boysen would for his entire life remain loyal to a traditional Lutheranism—from the time when he was appointed conrector of the town school of Seehausen, through the period he spent as a preacher in Magdeburg, to the last forty years of his life in Quedlinburg, where he acted as first court preacher to the princess-abbess Sophia Albertina of Sweden, Konsistorialrat, and inspector of 41 42

43 44

Johann Bernhard Köhler, “Der türkische Bibel…,” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 17 (1772): 426–37. Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, 22 Dec. 1772, 811: “Diese elende Produktion wird kürzer abgefertigt. Wir wünschten, daß einmal eine andere unter morgenländischem Himmel von einem Deutschen verfertigt würde, der mit allem Dichter- und Prophetengefühl in seinem Zelte den Koran läse, und Ahndungsgeist genug hätte, das Ganze zu umfassen. Dann was ist auch jetzo Sale für uns?” K. Mommsen, Goethe und der Islam (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2001), 31–80. For a comparison between Semler and Boysen see Bordoli, L’Illuminismo di Dio, 15.

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grammar schools.45 He was strongly opposed to the Enlightened philosopher Christian Thomasius because of his militant anti-Aristotelianism.46 He expressed his abhorrence of Socinianism and his disapproval of thinkers such as John Locke, Johan Crell, and Johann Jakob Wettstein.47 But there was another side to Boysen. He admired Immanuel Kant and even acknowledged the “scharfsichtige” Spinoza.48 We have already discussed Semler’s preface to Boysen’s Kritische Erleuterungen. One of Boysen’s very closest friends, who helped him with his translation of the Koran, was the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim; their correspondence, Briefe vom Herrn Boysen an Herrn Gleim, was published in 1772. And Gleim was a friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Peter Uz, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Johann Gottfried Herder. Boysen was also open to discussion with men who were far from sharing his own views—freethinkers, Catholics, and Jews. He conversed frequently with the leaders of the large Jewish community in his birthplace, Halberstadt, and maintained a courteous exchange of views with Moses Mendelssohn.49 Carl Friedrich Bahrdt may not have been entirely unjustified when he cast slight doubts on Boysen’s orthodoxy in 1781.50 It was in Quedlinburg that Boysen completed his translation of the Koran. The first edition, Der Koran, oder Das Gesetz für die Muselmänner, durch Mohammed den Sohn Abdall, appeared in Halle in 1773, and a second edition, Der Koran, oder Das Gesetz für die Moslemer durch Muhammed den Sohn Abdall, came out two years later. In his preface to the first edition he dwelled 45 46

Hamilton “‘To rescue the honour.’” Friedrich Eberhard Boysen, Eigene Lebensbeschreibung (Quedlinburg: Friedrich Joseph Ernst, 1795), 1:50. 47 Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Exegetische Einleitung in den Brief Pauli an die Römer, ed. F.E. Boysen (Blankenburg and Quedlinburg, 1771), sigs. c2v.–c3r. 48 Boysen, Eigene Lebensbeschreibung, 1:56. In view of the strong opposition to Spinoza in orthodox Lutheran circles Boysen’s words are of special interest. He is discussing the grammatical approach to the Bible associated with Jacob Alting and Johann Andreas Danz (59–60): “Diese Kunst aber, welche die Stelle der Logik vertreten kann, rührt nicht, wie man insgemein glaubt, von dem Hersteller der Grammatik, Altingen, oder seinem Ausleger, dem Danz, her, sondern sie ist die Erfindung des scharfsichtigen Spinoza, in dessen nachgelassenen, nun mit Recht geschätzen, Werken sie enthalten ist. Vielen die mit mir von diesem denkwürdigen Philosophen und seinem noch nicht ganz aufgewickelten Lehrbegriff geredet haben, ist diese Anekdote ganz unbekannt gewesen.” 49 Ibid., 2:170. 50 [Carl Friederich Bahrdt], Kirchen- und Ketzer-Almanach aufs Jahr 1781 ([Sulechów]: Häresiopel, Im Verlag der Ekklesia pressa, 1781), 33: “In Absicht auf Orthodoxie ist er weder kalt noch warm.”

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at length on the poetic qualities of the Koran, regretting his own inability to translate it into verse as it deserved. In the preface to the second edition, on the other hand, he presented an eloquent defense of Islam. He condemned the distortion to which it had been subjected by the crusaders, dominated by fanaticism and religious hatred;51 by the Italian translator of the Koran Lodovico Marracci, blinded by prejudice;52 by the Prophet’s biographer Humphrey Prideaux, the victim of error and preconception;53 and even by the overenthusiastic Henri de Boulainvilliers, “a eulogist rather than a biographer.”54 He was a little more indulgent toward Jean Gagnier, but deplored the mistakes in his Arabic.55 In Boysen’s eyes, the Prophet, even if not always free of error, combined the roles of the hero and the preacher.56 Combating idolatry, he took the best elements in Judaism and Christianity57 51

Friedrich Eberhard Boysen, Der Koran, oder Das Gesetz für die Moslemer durch Muhammed den Sohn Abdall. Nebst einigen feyerlichen koranishcen Gebeten, unmittelbar aus dem Arabischen übersetzt (Halle: J.J. Gebauers Witwe und Joh. Jac. Gebauer, 1775), 17: “Die meisten Nachrichten von diesem Reformator [sc. Muhammed], sind durch die Kreuzzüge nach Europa gekommen. Wen aber hat Fanatismus und Religionshas mehr beherrscht, als die elenden Kreuzfahrer?” 52 Ibid., 13: “Am feuerigsten hat Maraccius sie [sc. die muhammedische Religion] angegriffen, aber oft von der Nacht der Vorurtheile bedeckt, wo nicht gar auf das Geheis unchristlicher Leidenschaften.” 53 Ibid.: “Von diesem Maraccius und von dem Prideaux, der Muhammeds Leben, auf eine elende Art beschrieben hat, rühren die meisten irrigen Meynungen, und Vorurtheile her, die wider den lesenswürdigen Koran, und seinen erhabenen Verfasser ausgestreut, und beynahe von der ganzen Welt aufgenommen worden sind.” 54 Ibid., 17: “Boulainvilliers ist mehr Lobredner als Biograph, und seine ganze Vorstellungsart ist hämisch.” 55 Ibid.: “Jean Gagnier Leben des Muhammeds…ware unter den Neuern noch das erträglichste, obgleich viele Stellen der arabischen Scribenten von ihm unrichtig verstanden, und falsch übersetzt worden sind.” 56 Ibid., 22–23: “Wollt aber Muhammed eine Monarchie in Arabien wagen, so mußte er eine neue Religion wagen, er muste Held und Prediger zugleich seyn, in der einen Hand mußt er ein göttliches Buch, und in der andern ein Schwerd führen, weil fast immer in Arabien die weltliche Gewalt mit der geistlichen verbunden gewesen ist. Er muste Offenbahrungen vorgeben, um seiner Lehre die nöthige Autorität zu verschaffen, und er muste mehr Sittenlehre als Glaubenlehre verkündigen, weil der gröste Theil der Menschen, der von der Natur der Glaubenslehren, nicht die rechten Begriffe hat, mehr von jenen, als von diesen gelenkt wird.” 57 Ibid., 23: “Muhammed wagte eine neue Religion. Aber seine Absicht war nicht, die alten Religionen völlig auszurotten, sondern er wollte von jeder dasjenige annehmen, was nach seiner Meynung das Beste war, und synkretistisch wollt er aus den verschiednen Lehrbegriffen, die in Arabien bekannt waren, ein neues Lehrgebäude zusemmenschmelzen.”

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and introduced a “philosophical religion” into Arabia.58 He also produced the Koran, a work of singular magnificence.59 Boysen’s views were hardly shared by all his fellow Orientalists. Both Johann Friedrich Hirt, professor of theology at Jena,60 and Johann David Michaelis, professor at Göttingen,61 reviewed Boysen’s Koran in their Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek and disagreed with his respect for Islam. One of Boysen’s great regrets, he said repeatedly, was that he had been unable to translate the Koran into verse. Gleim and others had urged him to do so, but he had to admit defeat.62 Yet by the time his translation appeared Goethe himself was, as we saw, trying to provide a more poetic rendering of the Koran, and more and more thinkers were placing it in the category of Oriental poetry that was the object of growing admiration. A further impulse was provided by the appearance in 1783 of the French translation by ClaudeEtienne Savary, who not only lamented the failure of his predecessors to capture the poetic qualities of the text but also provided one of the more enthusiastic reappraisals of the Prophet Muhammad and his teaching.63 In fact, Savary hardly lived up to his promises, and his translation was criticized even more bitterly than earlier ones, but his advice fell on eager ears in the German-speaking world, as we see in the case of Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti. Augusti, who was born in Eschenberga in 1771, attended the University of Jena, where he was himself appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy in 58

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61 62 63

Ibid., 35: “Der Prophet wollte eine philosophische Religion einführen, und es war ihm mehr darum zu thun, seine Parthey durch kurze sinnreiche Aussprüche, und durch kühne Vergleichungen zu entzücken, als ihren Verstand durch scharfe Schlüsse und strenge Beweise zu überzeugen.” Ibid., 36: “Bey allen den Irrthümern aber, die der ausschweifende Wiz des Verfassers erzeugt hat, ist der Koran doch ein vortrefliches Buch, nicht allein in Absicht auf den prächtigen, auf den hinreissenden Ausdruck, den der begeisterte Araber gebraucht hat, sondern auch in Absicht auf keinen geringen Theil der Sachen…” Johann Friedrich Hirt, “Der Koran…,” in Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek, ed. Hirt, vol. 6 (Jena: Felix Fickelsherr, 1774), 341–53, esp. 343–44: “daß er sich von dem Mohammed einen etwas übertriebenen und allzugünstigen Begriff gemacht, und diesen verkehrten Mann zu vortheilhaft geschildert habe.” Johann David Michaelis, “Der Koran…,” in Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek, ed. Michaelis, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Johann Gottlieb Garbe, 1775), 30–98, esp. 34–35. Jan Loop, “Divine Poetry? Early Modern European Orientalists on the Beauty of the Koran,” Church History and Religious Culture 89 (2009): 455–88, esp. 474–75. Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 145–48, 150–54.

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1800 and full professor of Oriental languages in 1803.64 After receiving a doctorate in theology at Rinteln in 1808 he was nominated professor of theology first at Breslau and then, in 1819, at Bonn. By that time he was widely acknowledged not only as a theologian and a biblical scholar, but also as a founder of Christian archaeology.65 An admirer of Johann Jakob Griesbach and his pupil Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette,66 a follower of Herder, Augusti championed free enquiry into the Bible67—a position that aroused the resentment of his more conservative colleagues—but he remained loyal to what he regarded as the basic principles of orthodox Lutheranism, and it was in their name that he performed his archaeological research.68 He was thus appointed at the University of Bonn by Karl von Altenstein, the Prussian minister for church affairs and education, who, as Nicholas Hope suggests, nominated only “stalwart Lutherans.”69 Augusti’s translation of passages from the Koran, Der kleine Koran oder Uebersetzung der wichtigsten und lehrreichsten Stücke des Koran’s mit kurzen Anmerkungen, seems to have been compiled in Gotha and was published in 1798. It was dedicated to one of Augusti’s closest friends, the classical scholar and theologian Johann Georg Christian Höpfner, known for his work on Euripides and Aristophanes. Besides theology, Höpfner had studied classical philology and Oriental languages at Leipzig. Together with Augusti he edited the Exegetische Handbuch des alten Testaments, and they shared the same rational approach to the scriptures. Although Augusti said that he might, one day, produce an extensive history of Islam together with a critique of the Koran, Der kleine Koran was not the fruit of an enduring interest in Islam or Arab culture.70 64

Stefan Heidemann, “Zwischen Theologie und Philologie: Der Paradigmenwechsel in der Jenaer Orientalistik 1770 bis 1850,” Der Islam 6 (2007): 140–84, esp. 151. 65 Martin Teubner, “Johann Augusti,” in Personenlexikon zur Christlichen Archäologie. Forscher und Persönlichkeiten vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, ed. S. Heid and M. Dennert, vol. 1 (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2012), 98–99. 66 Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti, Grundriss einer historisch-kritischen Einleitung in’s Alte Testament (Leipzig: Dyk’schen Buchhandlung, 1827), vi–vii, xi, xxxii. 67 Ibid., ix: “Ich halte historisch-kritische Untersuchungen über den biblischen Kanon, selbst wenn sie noch so frey und rücksichtslos angestellt werden, nicht nur für erlaubt, sondern sogar für so nothwendig, dass mir ohne sie die vollkommene Durchbildung eines künftigen Religions-Lehrers nicht vollendet werden zu können scheinet.” 68 Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti, Beiträge zur christlichen Kunst-Geschichte und Liturgik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Dyk’sche Buchhandlung, 1841–46),1:vii. 69 Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700 to 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 340. 70 J.C.W. Augusti, Der kleine Koran oder Uebersetzung der wichtigsten und lehrreichsten Stücke des Koran’s mit kurzen Anmerkungen, (Weissenfels and Leipzig: F. Severin und Komp., 1798), 11: “Vielleicht bin ich einmal im, Stande eine ausführliche Geschichte des

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In his preface he stated that his object was both to contribute to the knowledge of Islam and to provide “the friends of antiquity, particularly of eastern poetry,” with “entertaining reading.” “In this beautiful garden…there is the undetected scent of various beautiful flowers.”71 His presentation, like those of Boysen and Savary, was decidedly sympathetic to the Prophet Muhammad and to his faith. Not only did he never call the Prophet an impostor, but he accused Marracci, and even Reland and Sale, of endeavoring to find evidence of imposture in the Koran. The Prophet, he claimed, revived the religion of the patriarchs.72 For his biographical account of Muhammad in his introduction he drew almost entirely on Jean Gagnier’s edition of Abū ’l-Fidāʼ rather than on Gagnier’s own biography of the Prophet. His notes to the text are not only full of approving remarks73 but also emphasize points of community with the New Testament.74 By the early nineteenth century, however, few German Koran translators praised Islam in the enthusiastic terms we encounter in Semler, Boysen, and Augusti. The fate of Boysen’s translation gives us an idea of the altering attitudes. Boysen’s Koran was reissued in 1828, heavily revised by the professor of

71

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Muhamedanismus, nebst einer Kritik des Islam, ein Werk, das, meines Bedünkens, Bedürfniß ist, zu liefern.” Ibid., 5–6: “theils, eine genauere Kenntniß der muhamedanischen Religion, besonders bey solchen Lesern zu befördern, denen diese Kenntniß entweder ganz mangelt, oder die sie nur unvollständig und nicht aus der Quelle selbst schöpften; theils, den Freunden des Alterthums, besonders der morgenländischen Poesie, eine Schrift zur unterhaltenden Lektüre in die Hand zu geben. Denn es düftet in diesem schönen Garten unbemerkt noch manche schöne Blume, so wie überhaupt die Ueberreste der arabischen Dichtkunst noch so manches schöne Gedicht enthalten…” Ibid., 50: “Muhamed, dieß muß vor allen Dingen bemerkt werden, will nicht als der Stifter einer neuen Religion angesehen seyn. Er ist nur Wiederhersteller der alten patriarchalischen Religion. Diese in ihrer ursprünglichen Reinheit wieder herzustellen, war sein Zweck.” Augusti returns to this theme in his commentary on the first sura, 66. In his note to 2:107, which can be translated as “such of Our revelations as We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring one better or the like thereof,” Augusti (ibid., 93), who, in contrast to modern translations, assumes that the reference is to verses in the Koran, writes, “Die Ausleger haben bestimmt angegeben, was im Koran abgeschafft sey d.h. was nicht mehr auf die spätern Zeiten passe, was temporell, local, occasional sey. Wäre doch das auch bey der jüdischen und christlichen Offenbarungskunde immer geschehen!” In his note to 2:114, “Allah will judge betwen them on the Day of Resurrection concerning that wherein they differ,” Augusti comments (96), “Ein schòner Gedanke: Allah wird am Weltgerichte den Unterschied der Religionen ausgleichen, wird entscheiden, welches das Wahr oder das Falsche in der Religion sey.” In his note to 2:178, “Righteous is he who…giveth his wealth, for love of Him, to kinsfolk and to orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask,” Augusti comments (114); “Die ganze Stelle ist übrigens in Rücksicht ihres Inhalts eine der trefflichsten des Korans,” and he compares it to the Epistle of James 1:27.

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Oriental languages at Halle, Samuel Friedrich Günther Wahl. Wahl’s revisions included the corrections of a number of mistranslations and mistranscriptions (especially in the notes), but Wahl also replaced Boysen’s preface by one of his own. It was as violent in its opposition to Islam as Boysen’s had been extreme in its praise. In his description of the Prophet as a malignant impostor, Wahl returned unashamedly to the anti-Islamicism of the Middle Ages.75 Although Wahl was dismissed with contempt by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer in a review of current Koran translations,76 the strong dislike 75

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Samuel Friedrich Wahl, ed., Der Koran oder das Gesetz der Moslemen durch Muhammed den Sohn Abdallahs. Auf den Grund der vormaligen Verdeutschung F.E. Boysen’s…(Halle: Gebauer, 1828), lxxiii–lxxiv: “Wer in seiner ganzen Lebensgeschichte und Handlungsweise, in dem Geist und Inhalt seines Korans, und in allem dem, was sowohl in dieser Einleitung als in den Anmerkungen zur Uebersetzung ans Licht gerückt ist, den Wollüstling, den dreisten Kühnling, den leichtsinnigen eigennützigen stolzen und hoffärtigen, ruhmsüchtigen, dünkelhaften und anmaaßenden Menschen, den schlauen und listigen Heuchler, Schleicher und scheinheiligen Gleißner, den spitzfindigen Schwätzer, Lügner und Gaukler, den wenigstens im männlichen Alter seit seinem Auftritt als Religionsstifter bloß verstellten, absichtlichen Schwärmer, Mystiker, Fanatiker, den herrschbegierigen und eroberungsssüchtigen, verschlagenen und verschmitzten, arglistigen, die Religion nur zum Deckmantel benutzenden und mißbrauchenden, gegen andre Glaubensbekenner nur scheinbar duldsamen Betrieger, den grausamen und rachgierigen Machtgebiether, und in vielen seiner Aussprüche und Handlungen unverschämten Bösewicht verkennen kann; und es sich versagt, das thörigte, auf Stellen im Koran und Aussprüche und Sagen in der Sunna gestützte Gewäsch aller moslemischen Andächtler von ihres Propheten leiblichen und geistlichen hohen Vorzügen vor allen Menschenkindern, und von dem unendlichen Werthe seiner Religion und Gesetzgebung zu verlachen, dem fehlt es an Durchschauung, oder er ist nicht redlich gesinnt, und es schlägt in seinem Busen ein verkehrtes Herz.” Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, “Orientalische Literatur,” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 53 (Mar. 1841), cols. 417–22; 54 (Mar. 1841), cols. 429–32. At the beginning of his review, col. 417, he writes: “Wir können uns Glück wünschen, dass namentlich die Arbeit des Letztgenannten [sc. Weil] kein Maasstab für die deutsche Uebersetzungskunst und Sprachgelehrsamkeit unserer Zeit ist. Denn eben unsere Zeit, mit ihren neuen Mustern und Gesetzen in Kunst und Wissenschaft, war spurlos an Wahl vorübergegangen. Für ihn hatte kein Voss den Homer übersetzt und der Sprache Spannkraft gegeben: ihm war sie, auch für den Koran, noch immer der alte, gemächliche Hausrock, unter dem sich Alles in breite Formlosigkeit verlor; für ihn hatte kein de Sacy eine arabische Sprachlehre geschrieben: ihm galten noch die Ueberlieferungen der quodlibetarischen Grammatik und Exegese aus Michaelis und Eichhorns Schule. Daher liess er die Wasserfluthen, in welche Boysen den Kern des Korans verschwemmt hatte, in ihrer ganzen Ausdehnung fortbestehen, ja vermehrte sie noch durch eigenen Zuguss; daher behielt er die von jenem überkommenen Missverständnisse getreulich bei, fügte noch andere hinzu, und meisterte

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that Wahl expressed for Islam was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Germany.77 Certainly the number of scholars such as Fleischer, one of the German pupils of Sylvestre de Sacy in Paris, who approached Islam with an ever-greater objectivity as well as an ever-greater competence, was growing. There was also an increasing familiarity with the Islamic world and culture, and more Arabic texts were becoming available in the West than ever before.78 And so the sort of enthusiasm we encounter in the eighteenth century, expressed by men who had no direct experience of the Islamic world and a limited knowledge of Islamic culture, seems, at least in Germany, to have diminished.79 mit dem schlechtesten Erfolge seine gelehrten Vorgänger, deren wirkliche Schwächen durch das Studium der mohammedanischen Koranerklärer zu entdecken er eben so wenig wie Boysen vermochte…” 77 See the interesting discussion in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, dc: German Historical Institute; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25–27, 151–52, 189, 343–44, 357–60. 78 Rudi Paret, The Study of Arabic and Islam at German Universities: German Orientalists since Theodor Nöldeke (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1968), 8–18; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 150–57, 185–88. 79 Marchand, German Orientalism, 321.

chapter 20

The Sacrificing King: Ancients, Moderns, and the Politics of Religion Jonathan Sheehan Extreme times encourage despair about our ability to manage collective problems. In the wake of the Holocaust and as the Cold War settled in, the Israeli political theorist Jacob Talmon was gloomy about the future. His 1960 book, Political Messianism—a quest for the roots of totalitarianism in the world of European Romanticism—ended with a deep sigh. While the stakes are becoming truly cosmic, the sustenance once given by religious certainties and consolations, and the self-assurance provided in the past by the firm settings of tradition, habit and custom are less and less help. The challenge to be free and the duty to make choices grow more awe-inspiring as man finds less relief in his lonely torment.1 We have lost the taste for religion, in Talmon’s view, but not the hunger that religion satisfied. We have lost the object of faith, but not the lack that this faith remedied. This is the modern condition and it is, he wanted to teach us, a dangerous one. For the loss of religion, its “firm settings,” frees us neither from our abiding need for faith nor from the “lonely torment” that religion soothed. Indeed, it only intensifies these, and in the frantic effort to relieve their pain, human beings bow down before substitute gods. Jacobins, Leninists, Nazis: the worst modern political ideologies all make their sacrifices at secular altars, whether worshipping History, the Future, the Proletariat, the Race, or the State. Religion without religion, so to speak, makes monsters of us all. At the time of his writing, Talmon was not alone in his worries. Midtwentieth-century defenders of a certain liberal tradition—Talmon, Eric Voegelin, Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Maritain, Leszek Kolakowski, and many, many others—discovered in their ideological enemies, whether Communist or Fascist, forms of secular spirituality, political religions in which Christian transcendence had been wrenched world-ward, with sickening effects. “Do not immanentize the eschaton,” went one famous formulation of this, made immortal in American conservative political circles by a young reader of Eric 1 Jacob Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), 518.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_021

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Voegelin, William F. Buckley. Substitute gods are violent gods, all blood and no mercy. The 1950s and 1960s were not just home to stories of substitution like these, needless to say. Their complement, the sublimation stories that predicted the inevitability of religion’s disappearance, were routinely touted by a generation or more of Euro-American social and human scientists. Peter Berger’s 1967 Sacred Canopy—which spoke of secularization as a total process of religious sublimation from political, sociological, and cultural life, and finally from consciousness itself—is just one important example.2 Others abound, in both liberal and Marxist traditions, which together saw on the horizon a coming time of celebration, of the end of the idols and their replacement by something better, or at least more modern. However divergent in normative and political terms, both substitution and sublimation stories shared a commitment to the view that religion is something that transcends any particular moment of its historical appearance. His goal in his book, Talmon wrote, was to show how “faith is an identifiable factor in shaping human urges, attitudes and actions,” that is, a thing with a force of its own.3 In the substitution story, this thing supposedly remains, but improperly oriented. In the sublimation story, this thing supposedly vanishes, its force diffused by reason or capital or social differentiation. Let’s call what these stories share, then, a substantialist view of religion. This substantialist view of religion entered the philosophical register for the first time in the late eighteenth century. It was a great ultramontanist, a Catholic conservative, a despiser of the Jacobins, Joseph de Maistre, who made it more or less respectable. As he put it in 1797: Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon… Whether one laughs at religious ideas or venerates them does not matter; true or false, they nevertheless form the unique basis of all durable institutions. Religion surrounds us on all sides; everything speaks its language to us… It animates, vivifies, perpetuates, and infuses our legislation… It has formed the great European family.4

2 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Random House, 1967), 107–08. 3 Talmon, Political Messianism, 17. 4 Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1974), 80, 82n.5.

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Put in simpler terms, we could say that, for de Maistre, all human institutions, especially political ones, are sacred things (and substantially so). This discovery was made at just the moment when, in his view, religion was most under threat, when revolutionaries sought to dig religion out of French soil, and replace it with something newer and shinier. That this new and shiny thing would turn out to be the blade of a guillotine was, for de Maistre, no surprise. For as he put it later on, “whenever the true God is not known…man will always sacrifice men and often eat them,” not from the absence of the religious urge, but from its displacement toward substitute gods.5 Absent the truths of Christianity, human sacrifice­—however abominable—is the highest ethical act a people can commit. The revolutionaries sacrificed their king, but even the blood of that innocent lamb, Louis xvi, could not satisfy our universal human need for atonement. The therapy for this mistake is to admit the irreducibility of the sacred, to see the sacrality of the state, and to give it a properly religious, that is, a Christian form. This story was powerful, not least because it imagined Christianity, now renamed “religion,” as something essentially distinct from the lifeworld. This was religion universal rather than particular. Doctrinal and denominational specificities disappeared, and in their absence, religion converted itself into a transcendent force animating human endeavor. Whether this story is theological, anthropological, or political is difficult to say, since all of these things are, in this view, essentially the same thing. If political institutions are necessarily sacred institutions, then efforts to secularize them will unwittingly reinstall (perverse) forms of sacrality at their center. Secularization is not only an act of bad faith, but also a version of demon worship. Timeless stories like these would not be so troublesome if they were confined only to the pages of idiosyncratic Catholics writing in the wake of revolution. But as Talmon and the others show, this combination of theology, anthropology, and politics is a potent one. Over time, these stories have become integral parts of social science treatments of religion, and especially among those concerned with religion, politics, and law. Recent writers about the state, sovereignty, sacrality, and sacrifice (Giorgio Agamben, Eric Santner, and Paul Kahn, to name just a few) keep the de Maistrian tradition alive. Here then is a task for a historian, not just to wonder about the truth of such stories, but also to see their formation in time. “Clearly and fully grasped, history is useful for least one thing: that one might know how even the greatest and highest spirits of our human race are unaware how accidentally their eyes 5 Joseph de Maistre, “Elucidation on Sacrifices,” in St. Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Governance of Providence, trans. and ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 371.

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have assumed the form through which they see,” wrote the great Roman historian Barthold Niebuhr in 1821.6 As it turns out, it was in the era of Niebuhr and after that our eyes began to see, in politics and law, the timelessness of religion. But this was an accident, in Niebuhr’s terms, albeit a historically significant one. This essay will explore this accident via an artificial juxtaposition of two eras of historical interpretation: first, an era elevated in intellectual significance by the intense creativity of Anthony Grafton, a late Renaissance era when disciplines were unformed, and when humanist practices of scholarship were put into the service of the most heterogeneous intellectual projects; and second, the era of Niebuhr—which is largely our own era too—when the human science disciplines were given their modern conceptual rigor. In the spirit of Grafton, I believe the former can help to startle the latter out of its accidental forms. For at the very dawn of our modern age, we can find a far richer vocabulary for approaching questions of religion, sacrality, kingship, and politics than that of de Maistre. To show this, I turn our attention on a curious bit of antiquarian lore (one well known to Niebuhr), the so-called rex sacrificulus or rex sacrorum of the ancient Roman Republic, and its afterlives in early modern Christian Europe. By comparing its function from the humanist past to the modern present, the sacrificing king helps us to see how things might have been otherwise, and how we might ameliorate some of the despair that has shaped scholarship on religion from de Maistre to Talmon and beyond. For Christians, the original sacrificing king was Christ. It is one of his three offices, after all: prophet, priest, and king. Every early modern Christian who went to church and saw a crucifix would see these last two offices combined, the broken Christ performing his act of self-sacrifice and Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum carved above his thorny crown. The long relationship between this sacred kingship and the real imperium of European sovereigns as it developed from the medieval period onward, however, was never a simple one. As Ernst Kantorowicz long ago showed, secular kingship drew both on sacred resources— the king seen as a God-man, divine and human at the same time—and on much more profane ones, especially the resources of law that became so dynamic after the twelfth century. Even Christ’s kingship hardly remained “sacred” in any naive way. It too was a tense blend of the divine and the mundane, the religious and the legal. Early moderns knew this as well as Kantorowicz.7 6 Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten über Barthold Georg Niebuhr, aus Briefen desselben und aus Erinnerungen seiner nächsten Freunde (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1838), 2:480. 7 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. chap 4.

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Take, for example, the great antiquarian scholar and political theorist, the reviver of political Stoicism, Justus Lipsius. In 1593, the world as Lipsius knew it was in tatters. After thirty years of bloodshed, the wars of religion in France had left the state weak. In England, the recent defeat of the Spanish Armada was cause for jubilation among Elizabethan Protestants, but had done little to settle confessional tensions there or on the Continent. The Holy Roman Empire was comparatively peaceful, though ongoing war with the Ottomans, the renewed Catholic evangelism of the post-Tridentine church, and the amazing successes of Calvinism among the princely powers of the empire kept people guessing about the future of the European religious landscape. And in Lipsius’s native Flanders, the Spanish Duke of Alba had recently finished a bloody pacification campaign against Protestant rebels, though the Dutch revolt showed little signs of ending. In that tumultuous year, Lipsius—who had recently moved from the Calvinist university in Leiden to the Catholic one in Leuven—confirmed his readmission to the faith of his fathers with a learned treatise on the crucifix, on this simultaneous sign of Christ’s humiliation and elevation.8 The work was not explicitly theological in character. As Lipsius wrote in 1583, he viewed theology as elephants are said to view water: they delight in it, but “do not enter it boldly, since they do not know how to swim.”9 His approach in De cruce was therefore more oblique. After antiquarian discussion of the varieties of crucifixions in the ancient world and of the people subjected to this terrible punishment, Lipsius addressed a classic theological question—why was Christ crucified?—in his own idiosyncratic way. He did not ask, for example, whether Christ was crucified to atone for mankind’s sins, or to prepare his victorious triumph over death. Rather, Lipsius formulated the question like this: what crime was Christ supposed to have committed for which he was crucified? Some, he noted, might say blasphemy, but the manner of death indicated otherwise, for under Roman law, the blasphemer was stoned, not crucified. Thus, Lipsius wrote, I would respond that our innocent lamb was condemned as if in the name of sedition and a pretense of royal authority. Clearly by Roman law, the authors of sedition or tumult, in accordance to their status, either are 8 On the genesis of the treatise, see Jeanine de Landtsheer, “Justus Lipsius’s De Cruce and the Reception of the Fathers,” Neulateinishes Jahrbuch 2 (2000): 99–124. 9 Lipsius to Cornelius Prunius, quoted in Harro Höpfl, “History and Exemplarity in the Work of Lipsius,” in (Un)masking the Realities of Power: Justus Lipsius and the Dynamics of Political Writing in Early Modern Europe, ed. Erik de Bom et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 54.

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subject to the cross, or thrown to the beasts. And indeed he was accused of this before Pilate, as Luke plainly writes: “We found this man subverting our nation, and forbidding that tribute be rendered to Caesar, and saying that he himself Christ is the King.” Pilate believed it, and he didn’t believe it (credidit nec credidit Pilatus); and nevertheless, he [Pilate] had the title and the cause of His death inscribed, Rex Iudaeorum.10 The Roman legal source was the jurist Paul, whose sentiments were repeated in the Roman law Digest, from which Lipsius concluded that Christ was found guilty of lese majesty, an offense against the majesty of the state. The claim to the name Rex iudaeorum would not have been merely a bit of Jewish gossip reported to the skeptical Pilate but, as Lipsius reports it, a serious legal offense, a usurpation of rightful Roman authority. And so it was that, believe it or not, Pilate inscribed this sentence on the cross. In Lipsius’s account the entire Crucifixion took on an interesting cast, as neither a soteriological event nor a spasm of ignorant violence, but instead the performance of an understandable legal spectacle. The words of Christ’s accusation—as the gospels of Mark and Matthew put it—were carved above his head, and to make this clearer, Lipsius stepped beyond the Gospels here, crediting the proper legal authority (Pilate) for this act. Even the crown of thorns precisely registered the nature of the crime, a crown of punishment for a crown illegitimately assumed. And so here, in an aside in Lipsius’s text, we see something intriguing. By putting Christ’s death into a richly legal setting, that religious office of Christ, sovereign of the kingdom of heaven and self-sacrificing king, suddenly takes on a more quotidian cast. When we look at a crucifix through Lipsius’s eyes, we are asked to consider both Christ’s religious supremacy and his political and legal subordination to Roman rule. Claims to kingship, Lipsius reminded his readers, are not made in a vacuum, but in a specific context. 10

“An non verius ac simplicius, totum illud iudicium, etsi iudicii dissimile, Romanis moribus legibusque directum? Mihi videatur. & respondeam damnatum innoxium nostrum agnum, quasi Seditionis nomine & Regni affectati. Certe Romana lege, auctores seditionis aut tumultus, pro qualitatis dignitate, aut in Crucem tolluntur, aut bestiis obiiciuntur. Quod autem sic etiam apud Pilatum accusatus, Lucas clare: Hunc invenimus subvertentem gentem nostram, & prohibentem tributa dare Caesari, & dicentem se Christum regem esse. Credidit, nec credidit Pilatus: & Titulum tamen caussamque mortis inscripsit, Rex Iudaeorum.” Justus Lipsius, De cruce libri tres ad sacram profanamque historiam utiles, 2nd ed. (Antwerp: Plantin, 1595), 45–46. The Roman law source is the Digest 48.19.38, “Auctores seditionis et tumultus populo concitato pro qualitate dignitatis aut in furcam tolluntur aut bestiis obiciuntur aut in insulam deportantur.”

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Now this context gets even more interesting if we notice that, when Christ called himself king, this act of lese majesty was not an offense against any politically sovereign monarch. There was no king in Judea anymore, and what is more, the kings had long been driven out of Rome. Indeed, the very name of king was, as the English lawyer and historian John Hayward commented at nearly the same time, “hatefull” to a people who remembered the Tarquins and their crimes.11 When Christ called himself king, the only king that still remained in Rome, as Lipsius well knew, was a peculiar king indeed, one that had endured well into the republican era and, even after its lapse, was revived by the Emperor Augustus in the decades before the birth of Christ. This was the rex sacrorum, sometimes called the rex sacrificulus—the sacrificing king. This was a curious and rather obscure institution—a recent handbook of Roman religion mentions it only in passing, and its duties in the Roman state seem to have been relatively minor.12 This did not stop early moderns from investing substantial interest in it, not least because it featured prominently in the stories about the origins of the Roman Republic recounted in ancient canonical sources. As one of the most learned early modern historians of Rome, Lipsius was intimately familiar with all of these. Dionysius of Halicar­ nassus, for example, would have told him how the founder of the Roman Republic, Lucius Brutus, “appointed a king of sacred rites, exercising this single function, the superintendence of the sacrifices, and no other.” Livy added how Brutus and others made this king “subordinate to the pontifex, lest the office, in conjunction with the title, might somehow prove an obstacle to liberty.” And Plutarch remarked how the Romans “put up with royalty only to please their gods,” linking the rex sacrorum to the Roman holiday of the Regifugium, celebrated on 24 February to commemorate the flight of the Tarquins from Rome. From these, and the lengthier descriptions given by each, a few common points emerge. First, that there were kings in Rome before the Republic; that these kings performed sacrifices and other sacred rites; that when these kings were expelled, the new Roman state established an officer, the rex sacrorum, whose duty was the performance of these rites. And, also, that this officer was the sole bearer of the name rex in republican Rome and, even later, in the imperial Roman world. When Christ called himself king, then, there was already a

11 12

John Hayward, A Reporte of a Discourse Concerning Supreme Power in Affaires of Religion (London: f.k., 1606), 20. See, e.g., Christopher Smith, “The Religion of Archaic Rome,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rupke (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 39–40.

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priest-king in Rome, albeit a fossil from a more ancient form of political organization.13 At this point, let’s pause for a moment and glance forward to more recent times. However obscure it might have been, the rex sacrorum has had a very interesting interpretive afterlife in the era after Niebuhr. It is an afterlife that is suggestive of some difficulties we have inherited in approaching politically challenging questions of sacrifice and religion, kingship and sovereignty. It is also an afterlife that, as the early moderns will make clear later in the essay, was only one possibility among many, and is probably now best abandoned. The “new paths” to antiquity of the nineteenth century, to paraphrase Arnaldo Momigliano, included both the new historical sciences pioneered by Niebuhr and a host of new disciplines given formal structures in that era. Comparative jurisprudence, the sociology of law, historical anthropology, comparative religions: all of these new fields, in one way or another, put the ancient world to work for the modern one in novel ways. The rex sacrorum was one vehicle for this work, an ancient exemplar made to speak on the most upto-date questions.14 Take, as an example, the thoughts of the great nineteenth-century British historian of ancient law, Henry Sumner Maine, a man who knew his Niebuhr.15 The preface to his Ancient Law (1861) announced its ambition to “indicate some of the earliest ideas of mankind, as they are reflected in Ancient Law, and to point out the relation of these ideas to modern thought.” The very earliest of these ideas was divine or heroic kingship, in which law has the status of divine gift rather than formal code. Key witness to this early idea, and witness to the erosion of sacrality in ancient kingship, was the rex sacrorum, a “mere formal hierophant,” as Maine put it, whose institution signaled the evacuation of a space for secular political and legal life. For this secular space to grow, humanity had to shrug off that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind, of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of 13

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Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2.4.74, p. 499; Livy, Ab urbe condita (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1.2.2, p. 221; Frank Cole, trans., The Roman Questions of Plutarch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), question 63, p. 147. Arnaldo Momigliano, “New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century,” in A.D. Momigliano: Studies in Modern Scholarship, ed. G.W. Bowersock and T.J. Cornell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 223–85. On Maine, see Nick O’brien, “‘Something older than law itself’: Sir Henry Maine, Niebuhr, and ‘the path not chosen,’” Journal of Legal History 26, no. 3 (Dec. 2005): 229–51.

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life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief meet us on all sides. … The independence of law was produced by a sacrificial shift, from “men, grouped together to offer common sacrifices,” to the monarch charged to perform them himself, and finally to a “juristical oligarchy” whose members become the “depositaries and administrators of law.” In this shift to the rex sacrorum, Maine discovered the incipient “severance of law from morality, and of religion from law,” that ultimately culminated in that triumph of legal autonomy, the Roman Code. The rex sacrorum served the Romans as a legal fiction, cloaking, on the one hand, the shift in the source of law’s power from the priesthood to the jurists and, on the other, the shift from status law to contract (usually seen as Maine’s central contribution to the history of jurisprudence, in fact). Soothing fears of change, it thus aided in the birth of an autonomous and secular legal order.16 Maine’s arguments mirrored those of his near contemporary, the other great nineteenth-century German historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, for whom the rex sacrorum likewise illuminated the nature of the transition between monarchical and republican Roman legal forms. “The later republican constitution will be nothing more than a modification of this monarchy, still in many respects appearing or shining through” later legal institutions. But only two institutions really clearly marked the transition, the rex sacrorum and the socalled interrex (a transitional authority under both the kings and the Republic)— in these alone could Mommsen find clear carryover from one constitution to the other. That said, the rex sacrorum showed not just the fact of political transformation, but also the most fundamental nature of this change. The selection of the rex sacrorum by the pontifex, rather than by popular election, for example, supported the “supposition that in the magistracy, the people’s vote was first introduced when, with the abolition of the monarchy, magistracy and priesthood separated themselves.” The prohibition of the spectio—the right to view the auspices cast by the augurs—to the rex sacrorum showed that this was a right possessed by ancient kings, but then appropriated by later republican magistrates. The rex sacrorum’s freedom from legal liability indicated the freedom of the former kings from judgment. And so on. Mommsen’s analysis is rich and interesting, but his central point is similar to Maine’s, namely, that the rex sacrorum facilitated the “perhaps most penetrating, and persistent, of all the 16

Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861; London: J. Murray, 1920), ix, 9, 5, 7, 10, 14. For the necessity of these fictions, see 30–31.

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innovations then introduced,” the “secularization of sovereignty (Oberamt), which with the appearance of the republic was completed.”17 For both Maine and Mommsen, then, the rex sacrorum offered witness of the gradual precipitation from ancient kingship of two different organizations of life, religious on the one hand, and legal-political on the other. This was both a historical and a normative argument: proper political and legal relations depended on the separation of these incommensurate things. The transformation from ancien regime to modern republic, whether in ancient Rome or in modern England and Germany, entailed first a diminution of priestly power, its disaggregation from the mechanisms of civilian life, and finally its supersession by more purely political institutions of election, bureaucracy, and governance. This Roman story could be pointed, however, in other directions as well. In fact, the very idea of “sacred kingship”—as taken up with increasing enthusiasm over the first half of the twentieth century by pioneers of the new field of comparative religion—actually seems to have grown (at least in part) out of this figure of the rex sacrorum. James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which ballooned from two to twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915, took shape around a mysterious priest king, the rex nemorensis who defended his life and his crown at the shrine of Diana in the woodland lake of Nemi. When the Cambridge classicist Arthur Cook reviewed the second edition in 1902, he insisted that this rex nemorensis was a mere analogue of the rex sacrorum, the “religious successor of one who had been also a temporal king.”18 In response to Cook’s criticism, Frazer gave a series of lectures in early 1905 on the topic of “sacred kingship,” in which he insisted that sacrality generally attached to the person of the king, with kings assumed to be “descendants of the gods.”19 In his third edition of the Golden Bough (1911), Frazer then added a new, early chapter on “Priestly Kings,” which alluded to the rex sacrorum and argued that ancient kings were revered “not merely as priests… but as themselves gods,” able to bestow sacred blessings, and that it is partly via the primal sacrality of the kingship that “idea of a man-god is reached.”20 The Christian overtones in Frazer aside, this topic of sacred kingship would have a momentous history in comparative religion (also in political theory, as it happens) that we cannot explore in depth here. Just to pick one moment, 17 18 19 20

Theodor Mommsen, Römische Staatsrecht (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1877), 2.1:2, 7, 9, 13, 12. Arthur Bernard Cook, “The Golden Bough and the Rex Nemorensis,” Classical Review 16, no. 7 (Oct. 1902): 380. James Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (London: Macmillan, 1905), 28, 31. For his discussion of the “King of the Sacred Rites,” see 203, 258, 264. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911), 1:50, 51.

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however, we can look at the Indologist and comparatist Georges Dumézil, who opened his 1939 book Mitra Varuna—his groundbreaking work on the bipartite nature of Indo-European sovereignty that gave kingship an essentially sacred element by proving, as it were, that sovereignty is always a fusion of a “magician-king” and a “priest”—with a discussion of the rex sacrorum: Even as late as the Republican era, the hierarchy of Roman priests was headed by the rex sacrorum and the flamen dialis [the high priest of Jupiter], who were not two independent priests but a priestly couple. This also must have been so in the very early state when the Roman rex was at the height of his power. … [T]he rex…had concentrated in his own person what was later split between the essence of the regnum and that of the flamonium.21 Dumézil’s point, in a nutshell, is that the “essence of the regnum,” even after it was split formally into political and religious offices, still retained the sacred power inseparable from sovereignty more generally. And this idea of sacrality as a power made possible the consequent idea, that such power might be inherent in kingship or sovereignty generally. After Dumézil, the sacrality of monarchy became a commonplace of comparative religion. The 1955 Rome meeting of the International Association of the History of Religions had “sacral kingship” as its organizing theme, for example, and the published proceedings of the conference amply testify to the power this concept has held in the discipline.22 As a modern figure of thought, the rex sacrorum thus points in two very different ways: both toward a normative notion that politics and law are properly autonomous only when they shed their sacred and sacrificial nature and toward a notion that political sovereignty, at least, never sheds this sacred and sacrificial nature. Both directions share, however, that commitment to the idea that religion or sacrality is a certain kind of thing—enduring or diminishing—with some stipulated coherence or integrity beyond any particular form of its expression. As I argued above, this substantialist argument is a quintessentially modern one, and the simplifications it entails are 21 Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 21–22. On Dumézil and Frazer, see A.D. Momigliano, “Introduction to a Discussion of Dumézil,” in Bowersock and Cornell, A.D. Momigliano, pp. 291–92. 22 The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme of the viiith International Congress for the History of Religion, Rome 1955 (Leiden: Brill, 1959).

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especially jarring when compared with the complex heuristic roles this rex sacrorum played in an era when, no less than today, religious politics were on everyone’s mind. So, back to the age of Lipsius, a moment when historical exempla like the rex sacrorum were far less likely to be employed in superhuman civilizational stories like those above, and far more likely to be employed “as tools designed to serve human interests and to lend support to the virtue of prudence,” as Mikael Hörqvist has remarked. The exemplum was a kind of “intermediary” between universal principles and “the practical and messy world of political affairs.”23 In his time, Lipsius would have seen the sacrificing king do the work of exemplification in at least three or four contemporary lines of analysis. First, in Machiavelli, whose work Lipsius knew well and who in his posthumously published 1531 Discourses on Livy argued that, for someone hoping to reform an “antiquated state,” “at least the shadow of its ancient modes” should be retained. Thus the rex sacrorum: Since an annual sacrifice was offered in Rome that could not be done except by the king in person, and since the Romans wished the people not to have to desire anything ancient because of the absence of the kings, they created…the sacrificing king…by this way, the people came to be satisfied with the sacrifice and never to have cause, for lack of it, to desire the return of kings.24 As exemplum, the sacrificing king tells Machiavelli neither about secular emancipation nor about the religious foundations of secular institutions. Rather, it serves to condense some basic truths about the psychology of political transformation. Men “are moved more by things that appear than by things that are,” he remarked, and as shrewd psychologists, the Roman republicans realized that, more than the Tarquins themselves, it was the memory of the Tarquins that posed a real political challenge to the new state.25 Even more threatening was the memory of Numa Pompilius—the second king of Rome, who (according to Plutarch) softened the “fierce and warlike tempers” of the ancient Romans with “sacrifices, processions, and religious dances”—which 23

Mikael Hörnqvist, “Exempla, Prudence, and Casuistry in Renaissance Political Discourse,” in De Bom et al., (Un)masking the Realities of Power, 36–37. 24 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.25, pp. 60–61. 25 Ibid.

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needed management by this new state.26 The first rule of monarchy, Lipsius would later write in his 1589 Six Books on Politics, is that it is “fleeting and unsteady.”27 And Machiavelli could not have agreed more. Politicians forget the fragility of political order at their peril, the Italian implied, and the rex sacrorum hedged against disorder by keeping as many of the old ways as possible. Another version of the sacrificing king Lipsius would have found in his contemporaries’ fascination with regalian rights, the legal and political rights specific to kings. This was a rich area of research in the later sixteenth century, at a moment when theories of sovereignty and monarchical prerogative grew lush across Europe, nourished by new territorial states and ripened by the heat of religious controversy. As in so many things at this time, ancient precedent was seen as potentially binding, and the richest ancient legal culture was Rome. The same sources that gave early moderns the rex sacrorum—Dionysius and Plutarch—also gave them a glimpse of what they deemed to be the original regalian rights, those of the founder Romulus, then Numa Pompilius, and all the later archaic kings of Rome. Lipsius himself began lecturing and publishing on these leges regiae as early as 1576; he republished these laws in 1589 to complement his Six Books on Politics.28 There he identified the third and fourth regalian laws, “to prevent all-night sacrificial vigils” and “to be the defender of the sacrifices [sacrorum] and protector of the laws.”29 It was exactly from these regalian laws that French legal historians like François Baudouin in the 1550s and Anne Robert in the 1590s derived the rex sacrorum. The Romulan law that “the power over all sacred things [or sacrifices] lies under the King” created such a powerful desire to “conserve the dignity of the sacred orders,” the Parisian parliamentarian Robert remarked, that the Romans, “however much the name of the king was detestable to them, nevertheless on account of the sacrifices, created a king that they called the rex sacrificulus.”30 For Robert, 26 Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:331. On this story, see also Mark Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (Dec. 2004): 863–96. 27 Lipsius, Six Books, bk. 4, chap. 6, p. 411. 28 Lipsius, Leges regiae et leges x. virales (Antwerp: Plantin, 1576). On Lipsius lecturing, see Sir John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 2:303. 29 “iii. Nocturna sacrificia, pervigiliaque amoventor; iv. Rex sacrorum praeses, legum custos esto.” Lipsius, Leges regiae et leges x. virales (Antwerp: Moretum, 1601), *2r. The first passage is a reference to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.19. 30 “Quin & ad tuendam sacri ordinis dignitatem Romani etiam post eiectos Reges, quantumvis Regium nomen invisum eis foret, propter sacra tamen regem creabant, qui dicebatur

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the rex sacrificulus bore not metaphysical information about the nature of the state, but specifically historical information about the origins and limits of kingly power. The king was a defender of the sacred not out of some analogy to Christ’s offices as priest and king, let alone his anointment with some charismatic force, but out of custom and duty. This, recall, was written in 1596 in France, homeland of the Rex Christianissimus, a few short years after the bloody death of the last Valois king and on the eve of an epic act of politicoreligious compromise. Third, Lipsius would have heard the stories of the sacrificing king that percolated through the antiquarian scholarship on ancient religions so popular in his day. What had interested poets like Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century became a general scholarly preoccupation as Reformation religious controversy increasingly drove interest in ancient forms of piety and heterodoxy. The Italian mythographer Lilio Gregorio Gyraldi’s 1548 De deis gentium varia & multiplex Historia ended its final book, “On Sacrifices,” with a nod to these controversies; after discussing the horrors of human sacrifice, Gyraldi remarked how “we offer our thanks to Christ, who, having liberated us from these foul and savage sacrifices, instituted the saving sacrifice of the Eucharist.”31 Five years into the Council of Trent, Eucharistic sacrifice was no neutral idea— it was rather the issue that divided Catholics and Protestants. Gyraldi (perhaps wisely) did not confront these controversies directly, but his analysis of the plural cultures of ancient sacrifice could not help but bear on the fights then tearing Europe apart. And so it was in a discussion of the institution of the priesthood and specifically the pontifex maximus (not insignificant points of disagreement in Catholic-Protestant controversy!) that the rex sacrificulus made his appearance. [The pontifex maximus] held all the sacred rites that were prescribed and assigned: the victims, the times, at which temples divine rituals were performed, and indeed all the rest of the sacrifices [sacra] both public and private. … Indeed, the pontifex maximus was judge and defender against the contumacies of the private magistrates… The rex sacrorum, also called the rex sacrificulus, was instituted by the Romans…when the kings

31

Rex sacrificulus.” Anne Robert, Rerum iudicatarum libri iiii (Paris: Robert Fouet, 1611), bk. 3, 1r. This book went through at least seven editions: 1596, 1597, 1599, 1602, 1604, 1611, 1620. On Anne Robert, see Marie Houllemare, “Un avocat parisien entre art oratoire et promotion de soi (fin xvie siècle),” Revue Historique 306, no. 2 (Apr. 2004): 283–302. Lilio Gregorio Gyraldo, De deis gentium varia & multiplex Historia, Libris sive Syntagmatibus xvii comprehensa (Basel: Johann Oporinus, 1548), 531.

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were driven out of Rome…for certain sacrifices that would be fitting to be celebrated by a king. This king was nevertheless subject to the pontifex maximus.32 All of this was more or less true, but one cannot help feeling that the stress here—on regalian sacrifices as subordinate to the pontifex, and on the pontifex as a judge of magisterial power—hinted at contemporary debates. And indeed, the hint was made explicit at the end of the century in the gigantic Ecclesiastical Annals, written by the hammer of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and defender-in-chief of Catholic antiquity, the cardinal Cesare Baronio. The third volume of this work appeared in 1592, the year before Lipsius published De cruce, and it folded the rex sacrificulus into the genealogy of Catholic sacred institutions. It was Constantine, Baronio argued, who insisted that the “true priests of the Christian religion, to whom he had bowed his head,” have all the dignities of those luminaries of the Roman sacred world, “the Rex sacrorum, who customarily stood vigil over all in the feasts; and…the Pontifex Maximus, judge of all human and divine things.”33 For this reason, even today, Baronio remarked, some of the customs of the Roman pontiffs echo those of their ancient pagan predecessors, including clothing themselves in purple and donning ornate golden headwear. Here was controversy pure and simple—as his Protestant critic Philippe de Mornay immediately saw. From the “sinke” of ancient paganism, de Mornay scornfully remarked in his 1612 Mystery of Iniquity, Baronio “raketh…all those priviledges of idoll Priests and Pontifes, to settle them upon the Christians. … [H]ow much are we beholding to Baronius, who presenteth unto us their Pope, attyred from top to toe, in habit of a Pagan?”34 This brief tour of the unruly decades between 1589 and 1610 shows just how creative were the early modern languages of analysis brought to bear on religious and political questions. We began with Lipsius on the cross, and we saw 32

33 34

“hic sacra omnia exscripta habebat, & obsignata: hostias, dies, ad quae templa res divina esset facienda, caetera denique sacra tum publica tum privata… Erat quidem Pont. Max. iudex ac vindex contumaciae privatorum magistratuum… Rex sacrorum, qui & Rex sacrificulus dictus est, a Romanis institutus, Iunio Bruto et M. Valerio primis Coss. cum Roma reges exacti fuissent, ut Plu. in Quaestionibus tradit, propter sacra quaedam, quae per regem tantummodo celebrari decebat. Rex tamen iste Pont. Maximo subiectus erat.” Ibid., 458. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici (Cologne: Sumptibus Ioannis Gymnici & Antonii Hierati, 1609), 3:280. Philip Mornay, The Mysterie of Iniquitie: That is to say, the Historie of the Papacie, trans. Samson Lennard (London: Adam Islip, 1612), 24. Thanks to Ethan Guagliardo for this reference.

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him first address a question—that is, what was the reason for Christ’s ­crucifixion?—with a deep theological history. Medieval and patristic answers would have varied widely, from the obviously soteriological (he died for our sins) to the more whimsical (the cross serving as the muscipula diaboli, the Devil’s mousetrap, tricking Satan into killing the one upright man, and thus breaking his dominion over humanity). But Lipsius shifted the terms of the question. It was not that he replaced theological with legal analysis, but that his addition of the legal dimension subtly changed how one might view the punishment of Christ. Even if you believe Christ is the savior of mankind, last sacrifice and king of heaven, his sovereignty simply looks different if you also consider him as a criminal suffering the severity of the law enforced. Lipsius asks us to see Christ as a political and legal figure, not just a religious one. Even the original sacrificing king is not a wholly sacred figure, in this view. Moreover, kingship itself looks different if it is put into the specific political framework of ancient Rome, or if ideas about it are drawn from exemplary moments of the past rather than from overarching theories about sacrality and sovereignty. Doubtless the early moderns knew far less about the ancient world than do modern scholars of comparative religion. But in part because they were parochial in their view of the past (interested above all in Greece, Rome, and the ancient Mediterranean, and most committed to some notion of scriptural truth), their anthropologies were less grandiose in scope, more attuned to historical particulars than to conceptual schemata. Rome, in this context, offered early moderns plural versions of how political and religious authority might be organized. Machiavelli’s account of civil religion—as essentially a transitional form of political pacification—was one important possibility, but certainly not the only one. When Robert used Romulus to produce a genealogy of regalian rights, he suggested that kings have a customary right over public sacrifices, which presumably played well in a French context where the lack of ability to control religious uniformity was seen, by late sixteenth-century royalists, as the chief cause of the troubles. But he also suggested that any given state need neither draw its power from this customary right nor even assume any of the sacrality of the king for its own political legitimacy (the Roman Republic did neither, for example). Beyond the customary complications that historians enjoy, knowing about these plural and competing early modern models for thinking about religion and politics—all generated at a time when these issues were no less pressing than they are today in many places!—could have at least two important consequences for anyone interested in these sorts of questions. The first consequence would be for the history of political thought, and more specifically, for stories we tell about the emergence of a modern secular politics

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usually founded in early modern figures like Hugo Grotius, James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and so on. Grotius, for one, was well aware of this rex sacrorum, for it played a key role in one of the last treatises he wrote before embarking on his monumental On the Laws of War and Peace (1625). In this treatise, entitled The Authority of the Supreme Powers in Matters of Religion and written in 1617 on the eve of his imprisonment (though published only in 1647), Grotius was eager to preserve the authority of the state over matters religious. To make this claim, he distinguished between the exercise of authority and the functions of various offices in a state. “The authority possessed by the supreme power…extends not only to secular [profana], but also to religious matters,” he remarked, but this authority should confuse us about the different functions that people exercise.35 So, for example, “up to a point, it is natural that the same man is king and priest,” since kings may serve many functions (he mentions physician, philosopher, astronomer, poet, and general), and, he goes on, “no function is more excellent…than that of priest.”36 Historically speaking, Grotius argues, many people have seen kings in their functional role as priests, charged in particular with performing the sacrifices: Since these early times the most ancient peoples appear to have had the same rules of sacrifice…in Homer…heroes, that is rulers, do sacrifice. Diodorus relates that among the Ethiopians the kings were priests, Plutarchus tells this about the Egyptians, Herodotus about the Spartans, Plato about the Athenians and most of the Greek cities. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Livy inform us that the Romans imitated this custom, and that is why, when kingship was abolished, the “rex sacrorum remained.”37 For Grotius, then, the rex sacrorum showed that kingship and priesthood had a connection essentially functional in nature, owing to the excellence of the ends that priesthood serves, but not a connection along the axis of authority. Calibrating the two—function and authority—was not always easy, he acknowledged. Roman Catholics and apologists for papal authority were not the only ones lured into confusion. Among the ancient Israelites, Grotius noted, the priests also mixed the two with tragic results. “If nobody but the king himself had carried out the chief sacrifices,” he maintained, “their minds would certainly have been much more enchanted and fixed upon the grandeur of the 35 36 37

Hugo Grotius, De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, trans. Harm Jan van Dam (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 157. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 189–91.

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priest.” But since they denied the king sacrifices, they first set the priesthood in opposition to the king, and finally “gave the leadership to the priesthood… which soon developed into kingship, or rather tyranny.”38 The sacrificing king, by contrast, kept a religious function, even as political authority remained intact in the hands of Roman consuls. To be clear, Grotius was not differentiating between profane and religious things in a substantialist way; his was the language of final causes. The king had a “certain spiritual power,” Grotius insisted in one place; if man’s law breaks God’s command, he said at another, “the sacred and the profane converge because man cannot be obliged to obey man rather than God.”39 We might understand this text as an imperfect effort to police the line between priest and king. But it would be a mistake to do so. The rex sacrorum as a figure of thought, for Grotius and other early moderns, was one piece of a sophisticated effort to distinguish within a conceptual field that included duties, functions, offices, legitimacy, and authority, a field with a vocabulary far more variegated than the simplicities of sacred and secular. This complexity was not limited to absolutist writers like Grotius. Republicans were similarly nuanced. For the English revolutionary James Harrington, the author of the eccentric and violently anti-Hobbist Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and a man who knew his Machiavelli, the rex sacrorum was again a useful figure for imagining proper relations between religious and temporal authorities. The Jews, the Spartans, the Athenians, and the Romans: all held that “religion…was governed by the kings, who were also high priests, and officiated at the sacrifice.”40 But the latter two both disaggregated this kingly function at the moment of their republic’s constitution. The archon basileus—high priest among the Athenians, and discussed in Aristotle—and the rex sacrificulus were equivalent solutions to the competition between priests and politicians over the power of sacrifice.41 This was not, as the historian Mark Goldie has shown, evidence that Harrington subscribed to some avant la lettre “distinction between the civil and the religious.” Harrington was committed less to distinction than to assimilation.42 He insisted on the “undifferentiated identity 38 39 40 41

42

Ibid., 193. Ibid., 203, 227. James Harrington, The Common-Wealth of Oceanea (London: J. Streater, 1656), 221. Harrington confused the two terms, in fact, as J.G.A. Pocock pointed out in his introduction to Harrington: Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 307n. Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 198. For Aristotle on the archon, see Politics, 6.1322b.

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of civil liberty and Christian liberty,” linking Roman political life to the ancient Israelite commonwealth.43 This assimilative project bears neatly on the rex sacrificulus. The force of the Roman example Harrington applied not merely to the clergy, but to anyone administering religion in a civil capacity. One key target was the university, whose governance over scriptural matters was long a fact in Protestant countries. Universities, Harrington argued, blessed England “with greater victories and trophies against the purple hosts…of Romish hierarchy than any nation,” but still had no legitimate right to administer religion. They were, instead, like the priesthood, an institution with a restricted aim, creating a laboratory for the ministry. The rex sacrificulus was similarly restricted. A member of Rome’s ecclesiastical triumvirate, it jostled with the pontifex maximus and the flamines, all “ordained or elected by the people.”44 These institutions together served as “universal proof” that “ecclesiastical governance [is] necessarily distinct from civil power.”45 And yet the image Harrington used to describe their relationship was not that (later) famous wall of separation, but rather one of union. “There is greater light than the sun, but it doth not extinguish the sun,” as he wrote, and so the sun of ecclesiastical governance should shine inside that of civil power.46 His interest was not on “separation,” but on the juxtaposition of competencies. The second and larger point brings us back to de Maistre and the substantialist view of religion. De Maistre’s hyperbolic universalism is shared, as I see it, by all those who insist on using an institution like the rex sacrorum to unmask the deep structure of things (whether this is anthropological, political, or theological makes no difference in my view). The contrast between this and the more quotidian approaches of a Lipsius or a Grotius is instructive. Substantialist arguments about religion’s disappearance or persistence, sovereignty’s sacrality or secularity, were unthinkable in the early modern period and, more to the point, ill served a world where sacrality, authority, sacrifice, law, and religion could not simply be cleaved asunder but needed subtle and careful attention. Where de Maistre and other modern virtuosi of the human and divine sciences look for first principles, these early moderns pursued their politico-theological studies with a contingent and variable analytical palette, in which scripture and history, law and doctrine, Romans and Greeks, Jews and Gentiles all made their complex contributions. This was not exceptional—in fact, this was how politics, law, and (not least) theology were done in the early 43 Harrington, Oceanea, 211. 44 Ibid., 221. 45 Ibid., 222. 46 Ibid., 221.

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modern period, when the boundaries between analytical languages were ill formed, before Christianity or sacrality more generally became a kind of integral substance whose absence or presence might be lamented or celebrated. Now it is possible, I suppose, that de Maistre offers the only way for moderns to view religion, that we literally cannot conceive any other way in which religion might relate to politics. But I hope that he doesn’t. And in the name of this hope, I’ve told a deliberately ungenealogical story, a story that tries to loosen the connection between the early modern age of religious and political violence and our own contemporary one. This earlier period has other lessons to teach us, I believe, than those embodied in the substitution and sublimation stories with which I began this essay. Before religion became a kind of substance, figures like that of the “sacrificing king” offered powerful tools for imagining relationships of power and authority, the competencies of religious claims, and the links between them. They were also invitations to polemic, to argument, and to critique. Between the pragmatics of a Machiavelli and the legal antiquarianism of a Robert, between the Catholic apologetics of Baronio and the Protestant ones of de Mornay, battles raged about the histories and norms of politics, law, and religion. Rather than imagining religion either as a foundation of political institutions or as something that must be overcome for these to stand on their own feet, the early modern rex sacrorum kept politics, law, and religion simultaneously in play. For an age, like ours, more certain of where the line between sacred and secular things should lie, this might seem like confusion. But from where I stand this restless pluralism allowed the early moderns, unlike us, to make the problems of religion and politics intensely visible, and thus open both of them to probing analysis. It strikes me that we might learn something from their example, and every time that we hear how the state is really a sacred thing or how we should treat it as such, every time we hear how our commitments are just substitutes for religious yearning or how authentic living demands liberation from these claims of faith, we might ask: what would Lipsius say?

Part 4 Cultures of Collecting



chapter 21

Privatbibliotheken antiker Christen Roland Kany 1

Büchersammeln und Bücherkauf bei Heiden und Christen

Um die Wende vom zweiten zum dritten Jahrhundert veröffentlichte Athenaeus von Naukratis, paganer Vertreter der Zweiten Sophistik, die Bankettgelehrten. Zu Beginn dieses fiktiven mehrtägigen Gastmahls führt er die Personen ein. Der vornehme Römer P. Livius Larensis, der tatsächlich unter Mark Aurel Pontifex minor war, hatte demnach Experten verschiedener Fachgebiete eingeladen, um sie zu zitatenreichen Reden zu veranlassen. Athenaeus stellt Larensis als idealen Gebildeten der Zeit dar: bestens vertraut mit der gesamten altrömisch-lateinischen Überlieferung, Kenner und Besitzer auch griechischer Bücher, so daß seine Bibliothek die Sammlungen der berühmtesten Bibliophilen der Antike übertroffen habe.1 Dieser bilinguale Buchsammler entsprach einem spezifischen Leitbild der Zeit. Privatleute mit beachtlicher Bibliothek gab es jedoch seit Jahrhunderten. So stellen etwa zahlreiche antike Anekdoten Plato als Sammler von Büchern dar, deren Autoren er bewunderte – für Texte der Pythagoräer, die auf dem Büchermarkt selten waren, soll er schwindelerregende Preise gezahlt haben.2 Gelehrte und Literaten waren stets auf der Suche nach wichtigen und mitunter schwer erhältlichen Büchern, die sie teils in den mehr oder minder „öffentlichen“ Bibliotheken fanden, teils innerhalb von Netzwerken bei Freunden und Verwandten entliehen, teils im Buchhandel erwarben. Die Grenze zwischen privater und öffentlicher Bibliothek ist in der Antike fließend: Manche wegen ihrer Größe „öffentlich“ erscheinende Bibliothek der Antike war die persönliche Bibliothek ihres (kaiserlichen, bischöflichen oder monastischen) Stifters; wer sie benutzen durfte, wissen wir zumeist nicht. Umgekehrt wurden aus privaten Bibliotheken sehr häufig Bücher verliehen, so daß auch diese Buchbestände eine Öffentlichkeit erlangten. Wer die ersten christlichen Buchbesitzer und Buchsammler waren, wie und wo sie ihre Bibliotheken einrichteten, liegt im Dunkel der Geschichte. Das 1 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.2 b–3 b (Epitome des ansonsten verlorenen ersten Buches). 2 Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae 3.17.1–6 und andere Testimonien, in Alice Swift Riginos, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 164–79.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_022

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Neue Testament enthält einen Brief, in dem der Apostel Paulus den Timotheus bittet, ihm den Mantel, den er in Troas gelassen habe, „und die Bücher, besonders die Pergamente (tas membranas)“ mitzubringen.3 Wäre der Brief echt, so hätten wir hier ein in die fünfziger Jahre des ersten Jahrhunderts reichendes Zeugnis über die Bibliothek des Paulus, die demnach sowohl Papyrus- wie Pergamentbücher umfaßt hätte. Man würde vermuten, daß sie Teile der jüdischen Bibel enthielten. Doch der Brief ist pseudepigraph und vielleicht erst im zweiten Jahrhundert fingiert worden. Eben dieses zweite Jahrhundert ist es auch, in dem einzelne literarische Zeugnisse, vor allem aber Papyrusfunde erstmals Rückschlüsse auf Besitzer christlicher Bücher zu ziehen erlauben.4 Allerdings ist niemals eine christliche Villa dei papiri entdeckt worden wie jene beim Vesuvausbruch 79 ad verschüttete Villa eines höchstwahrscheinlich paganen Eigentümers in Herculaneum, in deren Bibliotheksmagazin tief unter der erstarrten Lava die Ausgräber 1752 bis 1754 teils noch die Regale vorfanden, auf denen Hunderte verkohlter Papyrusrollen lagerten. Dieser Fund blieb auch für die paganen Bibliotheken singulär. Keine vergleichbare, als Ensemble von Gebäude und umfassenden (wenn auch sehr schwer beschädigten) Beständen erhalten gebliebene antike Privatbibliothek ist bis heute entdeckt worden.5 Der Blick in Privatbibliotheken antiker Christen ist darum nur über Indizien und Imagination möglich. Neben vereinzelten literarischen Zeugnissen erlauben Ausgrabungsbe­ funde eine gewisse Vorstellung von Größe, Lage und Bestandsreichtum von Bibliotheken in antiken Privathäusern der Wohlhabenden.6 Das eigentliche Bibliotheksmagazin konnte ein kleiner Raum von zehn oder weniger Quadratmetern sein, der typischerweise an Cubicula, eine Porticus oder ein Peristyl grenzte. Dort fanden stille Lektüre, literarisches Gespräch oder Lesung

3 2 Timotheus 4.13. 4 Als Bestandsaufnahmen sind trotz der verschiedenen Internet-Datenbanken (Leuven Database of Ancient Books usw.) immer noch nützlich: Joseph van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus littéraires juifs et chrétiens (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1976); Eric G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); zur Auswertung u.a. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995); Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artefacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 2006). 5 So Volker Michael Strocka, „Römische Bibliotheken,“ Gymnasium 88 (1981): 298–329, 298. Zu Herculaneum vgl. zusammenfassend: David Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles: J.P. Getty Museum, 2005). 6 Vgl. Wolfram Hoepfner, „Bibliotheken in Wohnhäusern und Palästen,“ in Antike Bibliotheken, hg. von Wolfram Hoepfner (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2002), 86–96.

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im festlich-großen Kreise statt. Das dürfte bei Christen der Antike nicht anders als bei ihren paganen Zeitgenossen so gewesen sein. Und doch bestand zeitweise ein charakteristischer Unterschied im physischen Erscheinungsbild der Bibliotheken. Denn aus bis heute nicht abschließend geklärten Gründen setzten die Christen schon seit dem zweiten Jahrhundert weit überdurchschnittlich stark auf das Medium des Codex statt der Buchrolle.7 Machen Codices im Gesamtbestand erhaltener Bücher (oder Buchfragmente) des zweiten Jahrhunderts etwa 5% aus, Rollen dagegen 74%, so nehmen die Codices im Bestand christlicher Bücher des gleichen Zeitraumes bereits etwa 71% ein. Im dritten Jahrhundert steigt der Anteil der Codices im Gesamtbestand auf rund 21%, der Anteil innerhalb christlicher Bücher liegt bei etwa 67%. Bis zum sechsten Jahrhundert wird dann die Rolle generell zur Ausnahme, 95% des Gesamtbestandes wie des christlichen Bestandes sind nun Codices.8 Während Rollen nur auf einer Seite beschrieben wurden, bringen Codices durch die doppelseitige Beschriftung bei gleichem Material (Papyrus oder Pergament) weit mehr Text unter. Billiger dürften Codices nicht gewesen sein, da sie einen Einband benötigen.9 Die erhaltenen Manuskripte seit dem zweiten Jahrhundert scheinen keine Hinweise auf eine soziale und ökonomische Inferiorität der Christen zu liefern – es gibt einfache wie kostbare Handschriften. Viele christliche Codices genügen hohen ästhetischen Ansprüchen, sind breitrandig und sorgfältig, mitunter zweispaltig geschrieben.10 Nichts spricht für die Annahme, christliche Privatbibliotheken seien kleiner oder billiger als pagane gewesen. Bücher dürften oft in Buchhandlungen erworben worden sein. In der zweiten Hälfte des zweiten Jahrhunderts erzählen beispielsweise der pagane Buntschriftsteller Aulus Gellius und der Mediziner Galen vom Stöbern und Diskutieren in Buchhandlungen im Vicus Sandaliarius in Rom.11 Ursprünglich nach dem Schusterhandwerk benannt, war die Gegend in der prosperierenden frühen Kaiserzeit zum Buchhändlerviertel geworden.12 Es ist denkbar, daß in 7 8 9 10 11 12

Klassisch: Colin H. Roberts und T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983). Ich folge den Diagrammen von Martin Wallraff, Kodex und Kanon. Das Buch im frühen Christentum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 14–15. Horst Blanck, Das Buch in der Antike (München: C.H. Beck, 1992), 100–01. Vgl. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artefacts; und Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex. Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae 18.4.1; Galen, De praenotione 4; De libris propriis, pro­oemium. Vgl. F. Coarelli, „Vicus Sandaliarius,“ in Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae, hg. Eva Margareta Steinby, Bd. 5 (Rom: Quasar, 1999), 189. Zu diesem Viertel und anderen Buchhandlungen vgl. Tönnes Kleberg, Buchhandel und Verlagswesen in der Antike (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 41–47; Peter White, „Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome,“ in

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der Atmosphäre solcher Buchhandelszentren, wo ungezwungener Austausch mit zufällig Anwesenden üblich war, Galen oder auch Fronto, der ehemalige Lehrer Mark Aurels, manche Kenntnisse über Christen erlangten, die sie später in kritischer Absicht einsetzten.13 Denn man darf annehmen, daß auch Christen auf der Suche nach paganen philosophischen und christlichen Texten in die Buchhandlungen kamen und fündig werden konnten: Intellektuelle wie der in Rom als christlicher Philosoph lehrende Justin oder die bald als unorthodoxe Christen geltenden Valentinianer und Markioniten. Die Buchhandlungen könnten für geistig interessierte Christen des zweiten Jahrhunderts um so wichtiger gewesen sein, wenn man von der Hypothese ausgeht, daß zu dieser Zeit die kaiserlichen oder städtischen Bibliotheken noch nicht systematisch christliche Bücher sammelten und die frühesten christlichen Gemeindebibliotheken vermutlich primär die für den Gottesdienst und den Katechumenenunterricht notwendigen Bücher besaßen, weniger dagegen theologische Fachliteratur. Erst als der wohl christliche, vielleicht dem Judentum entstammende Gelehrte Julius Africanus „in Rom bei den Thermen Alexanders“ um 227 die „schöne Bibliothek im Pantheon“ für Kaiser Alexander Severus einrichten durfte,14 kann man mit höherer Wahrschein­ lichkeit von der Präsenz christlicher Bücher zumindest in dieser kaiserlichen Bibliothek ausgehen. Als ein halbes Jahrhundert zuvor, zu Galens Zeiten, der spätere Bischof Irenäus als Presbyter und Abgesandter der Christengemeinde von Lyon um 177 zu einem Besuch nach Rom kam,15 könnte er dort somit vielleicht weniger in einer öffentlichen Bibliothek und auch weniger in einer christlichen Gemeindebibliothek denn vielmehr in einer Buchhandlung beispielsweise Justins Widerlegung des Markion erworben haben, aus der er wenige Jahre später in seinem Werk gegen die Häresien zitiert.16 Auszuschlie­ ßen ist nicht einmal, daß er die seltene Schrift Justins in einer Buchhand­­ lung in Lyon ent­deckte.17 Denn der umfangreiche Büchermarkt des zweiten Jahrhunderts funktionierte kosmopolitisch, auch für das christliche Schrift­ tum.18 Das Werk des Irenäus gegen die Häresien war schon kurze Zeit Ancient Literacies. The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, hg. von William A. Johnson und Holt N. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 268–87. 13 Galen über Christen: De pulsuum differentiis 2.4; ib. 3.3; De republica Fragment 1 Walzer; Fronto über Christen bei Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.6, 31.2. 14 P. Oxy. 412, Z. 52–54 (Julius Africanus, Kestoi, Frg. F 10 Wallraff). 15 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.4.1–2. 16 Irenäus von Lyon, Adversus haereses 4.6.2. 17 Plinius d.J. erwähnt Buchhandlungen in Lyon einige Jahrzehnte zuvor (Epistula 9.11). 18 Kleberg, Buchhandel, 44.

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nach seiner Abfassung in der mittelgroßen Stadt Oxyrhynchus dreihundert Kilometer südlich von Alexandrien zu haben.19 Abgesehen von diversen wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Veränderungen blühte der Buchmarkt auch später noch.20 Consentius, ein theologisch interessierter Christ von den Balearen, berichtet 419 dem Augustinus brieflich, zwölf Jahre zuvor habe er dessen Confessiones und sehr viele andere Bücher erworben, mehr aus Besitzfreude denn aus Interesse an Belehrung, aber nunmehr habe er mit der Lektüre begonnen.21 Gleichwohl dürften je nach Ort, Zeit und Person in ganz verschiedenem Maße der Buchhandel oder aber persönliche Bezie­ hungen der primäre Weg zum Bucherwerb gewesen sein. Augustinus erinnert sich in den Confessiones, wie er als Dreißigjähriger nach den Begegnungen mit Ambrosius in inneren Aufruhr versetzt wurde, aber nicht recht wußte, wo er die Wahrheit finden konnte, nach der er suchte: „Wo finden wir genau die Codices? Woher und wann erwerben wir sie?“22 Bald fand er insbesondere in der Pauluslektüre, was er suchte.23 In der berühmten Gartenszene ist es ein Codex apostoli, also ein typisch antiker, nur die Paulusbriefe enthaltender Band, den Augustinus als Antwort auf das wundersame tolle lege aufs Geratewohl aufschlägt, um die zuerst ins Auge springende Stelle auf sich zu beziehen.24 Man möchte fast meinen, die große Wende im Leben Augustins habe darauf beruht, daß er das richtige Buch zur richtigen Zeit verfügbar hatte. Während Kleinstädte und Dörfer von reisenden Buchhändlern versorgt wurden, die auch Hausbesuche machten,25 blieben ganze Buchhändlerviertel bis ans Ende der Antike den Metropolen vorbehalten. Der Politiker, Theologe und Schriftsteller Zacharias läßt in den zwanziger Jahren des sechsten Jahrhunderts seinen Dialog über das Leben des Bischofs Severus von Antiochien mit der Erzählung eines Freundes beginnen, der bei den Buchhändlern in der Königsstraße (Basileios stoa) in Konstantinopel eine Kampfschrift gegen Severus gefunden hatte.26 Wenige Jahrzehnte später berichtet der Historiker Agathias mit Bezug auf dieselbe Straße von einem zeitlosen Phänomen, das auch Galen schon enerviert hatte: Wer beim Streifzug durch die Buchhand­ lungen Pech hatte, wurde von einem Schwadroneur ungefragt mit Gerede 19 Davon zeugt P. Oxy. 405 (Adversus haereses 3.9), Fragment einer schönen Buchrolle um 200. 20 Kleberg, Buchhandel. 21 Consentius, Aug. epistula 12.1 Divjak. 22 Augustinus, Confessiones 6.11.18. 23 Ebd. 7.21.27. 24 Ebd. 8.12.29–30. 25 Vgl. Papyrus Petaus 30 des 2. Jahrhunderts: Ursula Hagedorn et al., Hg., Das Archiv des Petaus (P. Petaus) (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969), 156–57. 26 Zacharias, Vita Severi 1–2 (nur in syrischer Übersetzung erhalten, pp. 7–8 Kugener).

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belästigt, in diesem Falle mit Geschwätz über unverstandene, damals heiß diskutierte theologische Themen.27 Die antiken Buchhandlungen waren zudem Orte des Betruges: Hatte sich mit dem Verkauf gefälschter, angeblich seltener Werke prominenter paganer Autoren viel Geld verdienen lassen, vor allem seit die großen Bibliotheken in Alexandrien und Pergamon die Preise für Rares in die Höhe trieben,28 scheinen die christlichen Fälschungen zwar eher aus theologisch-intellektuellen Motiven entstanden zu sein, ähnlich manchen Fälschungen bei Orphikern, Pythagore­ ern und im hellenistischen Judentum.29 Gleichwohl werden die christlichen Pseudepigraphen und Fälschungen auf dem Buchmarkt angeboten worden sein. Doch selbst bei authentischen Werken gab es Möglichkeiten zum Betrug, etwa bei der Preisgestaltung. Da für den Preis von Büchern u.a. die Zeilenzahl maßgeblich war, wurden zu hohe Zeilenzahlen angegeben und die Bücher überteuert verkauft. Eine wohl auf die Mitte des vierten Jahrhunderts zurückgehende und im römischen Afrika verfaßte Liste der biblischen Bücher und der Schriften des nordafrikanischen Kirchenvaters Cyprian gibt jeweils die Zahl der Zeilen (à 16 Silben) für die einzelnen Texte an, und zwar mit der Begründung, in Rom würden die korrekten Zeilenzahlen aus Geldgier gerne verschwiegen.30 Getäuscht wurde seit alters auch beim antiquarischen Buchhandel. So kamen gestohlene Bücher auf den Markt: Gelasius, ein Mönch im Palästina des fünften Jahrhunderts, besaß eine kostbare Pergamentbibel im Wert von achtzehn Solidi; ein Besucher stahl sie und fand rasch in der Stadt einen Kaufinteressenten dafür, der seinerseits nicht seriös verhandelte, bis am Ende die Bibel wieder zu Gelasius zurück gelangte.31 Vielleicht wurde sogar Hieronymus von einem Antiquar be­trogen, denn man kann sich fragen, ob der Kirchenvater zu Recht vor Freude die Schätze des Krösus zu besitzen meinte, weil er den Kommentar des Origenes zu den zwölf Propheten in der eigenhändigen Abschrift des Märtyrers Pamphilus von Cäsarea zu besitzen glaubte.32 Ehrlichkeit lag wohl häufiger bei den Käufern als bei den Verkäufern. Augustinus erzählt das Exempel eines Bekannten, der 27 Agathias, Historiae 2.29.1–30.1. 28 Galen, In Hippocratis de natura hominis commentarium 1.44; 2 prol.; Olympiodorus, Prolegomena (p. 13 Busse). 29 Anthony Grafton, Fälscher und Kritiker. Der Betrug in der Wissenschaft (deutsche Übersetzung, Berlin: Wagenbach, 1991), 13–23. 30 Edition und Kommentar: Theodor Mommsen, „Zur lateinischen Stichometrie,“ in Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1909), 283–97. 31 Apophthegmata patrum, Abbas Gelasius 1. 32 Hieronymus, De viris illustribus 75. Das Problem war alt: Der Grammatiker Fidus Optatus etwa ließ sich im anderen Buchhändlerviertel Roms, der Sigillaria, einst für viel Geld das zweite Buch der Aeneis als Vergils eigenes Exemplar aufschwatzen (Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae 2.3.5).

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einen weit unter dem eigentlichen Wert angebotenen Codex dem ahnungslosen Buchhändler freiwillig zum gerechtfertigten Preis abgekauft hatte.33 Neue Bücher waren je nach Ausstattung mehr oder minder teuer,34 aber für Angehörige zumindest der gebildeten Schicht nicht unerschwinglich. Nach Diokletians Höchstpreisedikt vom Jahre 301, das einen exakten Einblick in die Preisrelationen erlaubt, erhielt ein Schreiber für hundert Zeilen (à sechzehn Silben) bester Qualität den gleichen Lohn von 25 Denaren wie ein Landarbeiter für einen Tag, und der Pergamentmacher durfte für einen Quaternio (sechzehn Seiten eines Codex) guten Pergaments vierzig Denare verlangen.35 Der kleine Traktat De unitate ecclesiae Cyprians beispielsweise hätte demnach in bester Schriftqualität 187,5 Denare für den Schreiber36 und vielleicht noch einmal ähnlich viel für den Pergamentmacher, sein Material und den Buchbinder gekostet, alles in allem maximal drei- bis vierhundert Denare; ein Grammatiklehrer, der monatlich pro Schüler zweihundert Denare verlangen durfte,37 kam bei zwanzig Schülern auf ein Monatseinkommen von viertausend Denaren und hätte sich den Traktat sogar in der Luxusversion gut leisten können. Selbst von Studenten, natürlich zumeist aus den wohlhabenden Schichten stammend, wurde bereits ein gewisser Buchbesitz erwartet: Libanius, der große Rhetoriklehrer vieler Christen und Nicht-Christen des vierten Jahrhunderts, fand es selbstverständlich, daß seine Studenten genug Geld für die erforderlichen Bücher zur Verfügung hatten.38 2

Auf Büchersuche in gelehrten christlichen Netzwerken

Während die meisten lesekundigen Menschen der Antike Bücher selbst ab­ schrieben oder bei Buchhändlern erwarben, nutzten gut vernetzte 33 Augustinus, De trinitate 13.3.6. 34 Das folgende nach Eligius Dekkers, „Des prix et du commerce des livres à l’époque patristique,“ Sacris Erudiri 21 (1989–90): 99–115; Sigrid Mratschek, „Codices vestri nos sumus. Bücherkult und Bücherpreise in der christlichen Spätantike,“ in Hortus litterarum antiquarum, Festschrift für Hans Armin Gärtner zum 70. Geburtstag, hg. von Andreas Haltenhoff und Fritz-Heiner Mutschler (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000), 369–80. 35 Diocletiani et aliorum de pretiis rerum venalium 7.1a (operarius rusticus pastus), 7.39 (scriptor in scriptura optima) und 7.38 (membranarius in quaternione pedali pergameni vel crocati) (pp. 118–21 Lauffer). 36 Das Indiculum der Cyprianschriften (ed. Mommsen, wie Anm. 30) gibt den Umfang der Schrift mit 750 Zeilen an (700 nach der St. Gallener Handschrift). 37 Diocletiani et aliorum de pretiis rerum venalium 7.70 (pp. 124–25 Lauffer). 38 Libanius, Epistula 428 Foerster; vgl. Oratio 35.12. Vgl. A.F. Norman, „The Book Trade in Fourth-Century Antioch,“ Journal of Hellenic Studies 80 (1960): 122–26.

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Angehörige der Bildungsschicht darüber hinaus in außerordentlich hohem Maße ihre persönlichen Kontakte, um Bücher für ihren spezielleren Bedarf ausfindig zu machen und abschreiben zu lassen. Irenäus beteuert zu Beginn seines Werkes gegen die (vor allem gnostischen) Häresien, zufällig sei er auf Schriften von Valentinianern gestoßen und habe sich, nachdem er auch persönlich mit diesen Gnostikern zusammengetroffen sei, zu einer Widerlegung entschieden.39 Mag er also anfangs eher ohne Absicht solche Schriften entdeckt haben, so spricht er am Ende des ersten Buches davon, er habe sich auch die Schriften einer weiteren gnostischen Gruppe beschafft.40 Hier gibt er also seine systematische Suche nach Schriften zu erkennen, die er möglicherweise teils über Buchhändler, teils über persönliche Kontakte betrieb. Große Mühe wandte auch Origenes auf die Beschaffung der hebräischen Bibel und ihrer verschiedenen griechischen Übersetzungen auf: Die „fünfte“ Übersetzung der Psalmen sei „in Nicopolis bei Actium“ gefunden worden, die sechste „zusammen mit anderen hebräischen und griechischen Büchern in einem Fass bei Jericho,“ wie er notierte.41 Hieronymus mühte sich ebenso, für seine Übersetzung und Kommentierung der Bibel die notwendigen Bücher zu erlangen. In seinem mit Paula und deren Töchtern 386 gegründeten Kloster in Bethlehem befaßte er sich ausgiebig mit der hebräischen Bibel, wofür er sicher auch entsprechende Manuskripte sammelte.42 Paula und ihre Töchter lernten so gut Hebräisch, daß sie die Psalmen im Original sangen – das werden sie nicht auf der Basis geliehener Bücher getan haben.43 Hieronymus klagt, welch gewaltiger Kosten- und Müheaufwand erforderlich sei, um Exemplare der zum Übersetzen aus dem Hebräischen erforderlichen Bücher zu erlangen.44 Angeblich auf der Reise in die chalkidische Wüste an der Ostgrenze Syriens bittet Hieronymus den lateinischen Mönch Florentinus in Jerusalem um die Zusendung von Büchern und legt eine ganze Wunschliste bei. Florentinus solle bei Rufin den Hoheliedkommentar des Reticius zum Abschreiben entleihen. Zudem habe ihn der greise Paulus von Concordia (unweit von Aquileia) brieflich 39 40 41

Irenäus von Lyon, Adversus haereses 1. Prol. 2. Ebd. 1.31.2. Nach 5.30.1 verglich Irenäus auch diverse Handschriften der Apokalypse. Aus den Prolegomena zu Psalmenkatenen, Text bei Eduard Schwartz, „Zur Geschichte der Hexapla,“ in Schwartz, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 5 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), 183–91, 187– 88. Die zweite Bemerkung hat Eingang gefunden in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.16.3. Vgl. Anthony Grafton und Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2006), 205–06. 42 Edmund F. Sutcliffe, „St Jerome’s Hebrew Manuscripts,“ Biblica 29 (1948): 195–204. 43 Hieronymus, Epistula 39.1, 108.26. 44 Hieronymus, Prologus in librum Ezrae.

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darum gebeten, Rufin daran zu erinnern, daß dieser noch eine Tertullianhand­ schrift des Paulus entliehen habe und sie baldmöglichst zurückgeben solle. Hieronymus erbittet zudem zwei Werke des Hilarius, die er selbst einst in Trier für Rufinus abgeschrieben habe. Als Gegenleistung bietet Hieronymus seinem Briefpartner an, Bücher nach Wunsch in Abschrift zuzusenden – Schreiber stünden bereit.45 Ob der Brief nun wirklich aus der Wüste oder auf einem komfortablen Landgut geschrieben wurde oder gar später von Hieronymus erfunden wurde, er gibt doch einen typischen Einblick in den reichsweiten Bücherverkehr der christlichen Gelehrtenschicht. Ähnliche Briefe und Nachrichten lassen sich in großer Zahl in bezug auf Hieronymus, Marcella, Paula, Rufinus, Paulinus von Nola und seine Gattin, Augustinus, Sulpicius Severus, Melania die Jüngere, Eugippius und viele andere finden.46 Da rät Hieronymus aus Bethlehem einem potentiellen Leser, wenn ihm noch Werke des Hieronymus fehlten, könne er sie von Marcella entleihen, die in Rom auf dem Aventin wohne, oder auch von Domnio, jenem Freund des Hieronymus in Rom, dem dieser seine lateinische Übersetzung des hebräischen Esrabuches gewidmet hatte.47 Bei genau diesem Domnio wiederum machte dessen Verwandter Paulinus von Nola ein Exemplar der Chronik des Eusebius ausfindig, vermutlich in der Übersetzung des Hieronymus, wonach ihn Augustins Freund Alypius gefragt hatte. Paulinus ließ eine Kopie auf eigene Kosten anfertigen, und zwar als Gegengabe für fünf Bände mit Augustinus­ werken, die wiederum Alypius dem Paulinus zugesandt hatte.48 Paulinus und seine Frau Therasia waren von den fünf Bänden so angetan, daß sie zweimal aus Italien an Augustinus schrieben und um mehr Werke baten.49 Augustinus dankt um 395 Paulinus und legt ihm den Briefüberbringer, Romanianus, seinen wohlhabenden Freund und Gönner seit Jugendtagen, wärmstens ans Herz. 45 Hieronymus, Epistula 5.2. Die Wüstenepisode ist von Hieronymus wohl stark übertrieben bis fingiert worden, vgl. Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis. Prosopographische und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 85–98. 46 Vgl. dazu besonders Mratschek, „Codices vestri nos sumus“; dies., Der Briefwechsel des Paulinus von Nola. Kommunikation und soziale Kontakte zwischen christlichen Intellektuellen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); dies., „Zirkulierende Biblio­ theken: Medien der Wissensvermittlung und christliche Netzwerke bei Paulinus von Nola,“ in L’étude des correspondances dans le monde romain, hg. von Janine Desmulliez, Christine Hoët-van Cauwenberghe und Jean-Christophe Jolivet (Lille: Université Charles de Gaulle, 2010), 325–50 (in letzterem Aufsatz finden sich viele Stellen, die ich in diesem Absatz zitiere). 47 Hieronymus, Epistula 47.3. 48 Paulinus von Nola, Epistula 3.3. 49 Ebd., Epistulae 5 und 6.

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Augustinus empfiehlt, Abschriften seiner Werke könne Paulinus von ebendiesem Romanianus erhalten, der sie alle besitze.50 Später rät Augustinus einem Manichäer zur Lektüre seines Werkes De libero arbitrio, das in der Bibliothek des Paulinus in Nola zu finden sei.51 Und auch für seine eigene Biblio­ thek bestellte Augustinus Werke des Ambrosius bei Paulinus, weil er wußte, daß dieser sie besaß.52 Generell setzte Augustinus für die Publikation seiner eigenen Werke und für die Komplettierung seiner eigenen Bibliothek eher auf das Netzwerk persönlicher Beziehungen denn auf Buchhändler.53 Das hatte allerdings auch seine Risiken: Werke von Augustinus und manchen anderen Theologen gelangten an die Öffentlichkeit, bevor die Verfasser sie für vollendet hielten.54 Nach dem Tod des Augustinus führten andere den Bücheraustausch fort. Augustins Freund Possidius verfaßte eine Biographie des Bischofs samt thematisch geordnetem Schriftenverzeichnis und rät: „Der Leser, der die Wahrheit Gottes mehr liebt als zeitliche Reichtümer, möge sich nach Lektüre des Katalogs aussuchen, was er zu lesen und kennenzulernen wünscht, und davon ein Exemplar zum Abschreiben von der Bibliothek der Kirche von Hippo, wo sich vermutlich verbesserte Exemplare befinden, erbitten.“55 Man mag in all dem Austausch auch ein Mittel der Konstruktion sozialer Identität sehen, doch scheinen die Menschen den Aufwand der Büchersuche und des persönlichen Leihverkehrs primär aus lebhaftem Interesse für die Inhalte der Bücher betrieben zu haben. Offenbar pflegten nicht nur die berühmten Gelehrten den privaten Austausch von Büchern. In einem Papyrusbrief aus dem frühen vierten Jahrhundert bittet der männliche oder weibliche Absender seine „Herrin Schwester,“ das (vierte?) Esrabuch als Gegenleistung zur ihr geliehenen „kleinen Genesis“ (dem sogenannten Jubiläenbuch) auszuleihen.56 In der verfeinerten christlichen Gelehrtenkultur der sehr späten Antike kann aus dem 50 Augustinus, Epistula 27.4. 51 Augustinus, Contra Secundinum 11. 52 Augustinus, Epistula 31.8. 53 Jürgen Scheele, „Buch und Bibliothek bei Augustinus,“ Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 12 (1978): 14–114, 73. 54 Vgl. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1.1.1–2; Origenes laut Hieronymus, Epistula 57.2–3; Augustinus, Retractationes 1.5.1; Augustinus, Epistula 174; Sulpicius Severus, Epistula 3 usw. 55 Possidius, Vita Augustini 18.10 Bastiaensen (Übersetzung Wilhelm Geerlings). 56 Vgl. Thomas J. Kraus, „The Lending of Books in the Fourth Century c.e. P. Oxy. lxiii 4365—A Letter on Papyrus and the Reciprocal Lending of Literature Having Become Apocryphal,“ in Kraus, Ad Fontes: Original Manuscripts and Their Significance for Studying Early Christianity—Selected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 185–206.

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Leihen und Rückfordern ein nicht immer ernstes Spiel werden. Prokop von Gaza, der um 530 verstorbene Rhetor, Epistolograph und Bibelausleger, wird einmal zur Rückgabe eines geliehenen Buches gemahnt und weist das Ersuchen mit dem zeitlos beliebten Argument ab, das fragliche Buch nie bei sich gehabt zu haben, ja er bricht in die Klage darüber aus, wie nützlich ihm das Buch gewesen wäre, hätte man es ihm ausgeliehen.57 Prokops Kollege an der Hochschule, Aeneas von Gaza bemüht sich mit kunstvollen Argumenten, einen gewissen Johannes zur Rückgabe eines Buches zu drängen: Bücher seien ihm das wertvollste überhaupt, wichtiger als alles, was ein Krösus bieten könnte, wichtiger als Gärtnern oder Jagen.58 3

Die Bücher der christlichen Durchschnittsleser

Welche Bücher befanden sich im privaten Besitz antiker Christen? Ich stelle die Frage zuerst in bezug auf lesekundige Christen generell und komme erst später auf die wissenschaftlich tätigen Theologen und Mönche zu sprechen. Wenngleich die Überlieferung von Papyri Zufällen zu verdanken ist und das Ausmaß ihrer Berücksichtigung in modernen Publikationen besonderen Vorlieben unterliegt, kann man doch zumindest für Ägypten sagen, daß neu­ testamentliche Texte dort ungefähr so häufig wie der im antiken Schulunterricht gelesene Euripides auf Papyri überliefert zu sein scheinen, öfter als Platotexte und viel öfter als Aristotelestexte oder antike Romane.59 Stücke aus der Septuaginta, der im antiken Judentum entstandenen griechischen Übersetzung und Ergänzung der hebräischen Bibel, sind noch etwas häufiger, besonders Psalmen; allerdings ist hier oft nicht sicher entscheidbar, ob die Manuskripte Eigentum von Juden oder Christen waren. Der Häufigkeit von Texten in Papyri 57 58 59

Prokop von Gaza, Epistula 63. Aeneas von Gaza, Epistula 1. Aktuelle Statistiken lassen sich unter Auswertung der Leuven Database of Ancient Books ermitteln. Für die bloßen Relationen genügen mir die Angaben aus Roger A. Pack, The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt, 2. Aufl. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965) und die Papyrusliste in der zeitgleichen 22. Auflage des Novum Testamentum Graece von Nestle und Aland (Stuttgart: Bibelanstalt, 1963): Damals waren rund 75 Papyri mit neutestamentlichem Text bekannt und rund 77 Papyri mit Euripidestext, 467 mit Iliastext, 41 mit Platontext, 8 mit Aristotelestext, von den Romanen des Achilleus Tatius, Chariton, Longos, Heliodor und Xenophon von Ephesus nur die beiden ersten in insgesamt 7 Papyrusfragmenten. Daß im Jahr 2015 nunmehr 128 griechische Papyri des Neuen Testaments bekannt sind, steht für den generellen Zuwachs an edierten Papyri.

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nach zu schließen (die aus Beständen zumeist privater, aber mitunter auch klösterlicher, gemeindlicher oder öffentlicher Bibliotheken stammen können), besaßen lesekundige Christen in erster Linie Texte des Alten und Neuen Testaments.60 Vollständige Bibeln mit allen und genau den heute als kanonisch geltenden Texten waren in privaten Bibliotheken oder kleineren Gemeindebüchereien in der Regel nicht vorhanden.61 Menschen der Antike besaßen beispielsweise einen Psalmen-Codex oder ein Evangelium in flexiblem Umschlag oder einen Codex mit vier Evangelien oder einen Pauluscodex. Am 17. Juli 180 verhört der Proconsul Saturninus im nordafrikanischen Scilium mehrere Christen und fragt, was sie in ihrer capsa tragen; sie antworten: Libri et epistulae Pauli viri iusti.62 Abercius, wahrscheinlich ein Christ, vielleicht sogar Bischof in Phrygien, läßt zu Lebzeiten um 200 seine Grabinschrift anfertigen, in der er von seinen Reisen jenseits des Euphrats berichtet, wo er überall Glaubensgenossen gefunden habe und stets den Paulus dabei gehabt habe – gemeint ist sehr wahrscheinlich ein Paulus-Codex.63 Man kann auch mit regionalen Spezifika beim Buchbesitz rechnen: Theodoret, der 423 Bischof von Cyrus in Syrien wurde, berichtet, er habe dafür gesorgt, daß zuerst zweihundert vorhandene Exemplare der Tatian (dem Syrer) zugeschriebenen Evangelienharmonie beseitigt wurden und stattdessen die vier kanonischen Evangelien in Gebrauch kamen.64 Der berühmte um 546 von Bischof Victor von Capua in Auftrag gegebene lateinische Bibelcodex, den später der heilige Bonifatius besessen und glossiert zu haben scheint, beginnt mit der lateinischen Version von Tatians Diatessaron statt der vier Evangelien und läßt die Paulusbriefe, Apostelge­ schichte, katholische Briefe und Apokalypse folgen.65

60 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artefacts, stellt in seiner Tabelle erhaltener Textzeugen des zweiten und dritten Jahrhunderts 90 Nummern aus der Septuaginta, 85 aus dem Neuen Testament, 19 neutestamentliche Apokryphen und 50 sonstige christliche Texte zusammen. 61 Vgl. Christoph Markschies, Kaiserzeitliche christliche Theologie und ihre Institutionen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 298–331. 62 Passio sanctorum Scilitanorum 12 Ruggiero. 63 Text und Kommentar z.B. bei Eckhard Wirbelauer, „Aberkios, der Schüler des reinen Hirten, im Römischen Reich des 2. Jahrhunderts,“ Historia 51 (2002): 359–82. 64 Theodoret, Haereticarum fabularum compendium 1.20. 65 Fulda, Codex Bonifatianus 1 (olim A.b.2), vgl. Marc-Aeilko Aris, „‚Der Trost der Bücher‘. Bonifatius und seine Bibliothek,“ in Bonifatius. Vom angelsächsischen Missionar zum Apostel der Deutschen, hg. von Michael Imhof und Gregor K. Stasch (Petersberg: Imhof Verlag, 2004), 95–110, 101–04.

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Angesichts der oben schon erwähnten Preise von Büchern scheint es mir durch­aus möglich, daß sich der eine oder andere biblische Text nicht nur bei Reichen, sondern auch bei Christen geringeren Wohlstandes befand. Wäre Buchbesitz nur Sache der Oberschicht gewesen, wie oft behauptet wird, so wären die vielen Ratschläge antiker Kirchenmänner zur privaten Bibellektüre nicht zu begreifen.66 Johannes Chrysostomus läßt ein mittelmäßiges Einkom­ men nicht als Grund dafür gelten, keine heiligen Bücher zu kaufen: Wenn jeder Handwerker das notwendige Werkzeug für seine Arbeit besitzt, dann solle jedermann das Handwerkszeug für das Wichtigste im Leben überhaupt erst recht erwerben, nämlich biblische Texte zur steten häuslichen Lektüre.67 Für wirklich arme Lesekundige war mitunter ebenfalls gesorgt: Pamphilus von Cäsarea, der 310 als Märtyrer starb, soll „viele Codices“ mit biblischen Texten auf Vorrat besessen haben, um sie an Bedürftige zu verschenken.68 Eine syrische Kirchenordnung des dritten Jahrhunderts empfiehlt den Wohlhabenden, in Mußestunden ihre Glaubensgenossen zu besuchen und über die Heilige Schrift zu belehren, zu Hause aber das Gesetz, das Buch der Könige, die Propheten und das Evangelium zu lesen und alle „Bücher der Heiden“ zu meiden.69 Man wird hier an biblische Texte in den eigenen privaten Bibliotheken denken. In der großen Christenverfolgung unter Kaiser Diokletian wird 303 verfügt, die Kirchengebäude niederzureißen und die versteckten Schriften dem Feuer zu übergeben.70 Nach dem erhaltenen Protokoll einer solchen Bücherkonfiskation von 303 begibt sich Felix, curator der Kolonie Cirta in Nordafrika, in das Gebäude, in dem die Christen sich zu versammeln pflegen, und trifft dort den Bischof Paulus, der vor leeren Bücherschränken behauptet, die Bücher befänden sich bei den lectores, deren Namen er nicht verrät.71 Doch die Kommission besucht einen Christen nach dem anderen und sammelt beim ersten vier, beim nächsten fünf, bei einem fünf große und zwei kleine Codices ein, und so fort. Man wird annehmen müssen, daß viele Bücher nicht nur aus Gemeinde-, sondern auch aus Privatbibliotheken von Christen den Bücherverbrennungen unter Diokletian zum Opfer fielen.72 Allerdings 66

Vgl. Adolf Harnack, Über den privaten Gebrauch der heiligen Schriften in der Alten Kirche (Leipzig: J.H. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1912). 67 Johannes Chrysostomus, In Johannem homilia 11.1. 68 Nach Eusebs Zeugnis, zitiert von Hieronymus, Contra Rufinum 1.9. 69 Didascalia apostolorum 2 (p. 17 Vööbus, syrischer Text). 70 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2.4. 71 Gesta apud Zenophilum (p. 186 Ziwsa in Appendix i seiner Optatus-Ausgabe). 72 So die Acta purgationis Felicis (p. 198 Ziwsa in Appendix ii seiner Optatus-Ausgabe): Von den Christen sei verlangt worden, ut sacrificarent aut quascumque scripturas haberent, incendio traderent.

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blieb offensichtlich vieles von der Verbrennung verschont.73 Im späten vierten Jahrhundert zeigt der Bischof Optatus von Mileve Verständnis für diejenigen, die aus Furcht Bücher ausgeliefert hatten, denn so wie das Zerbrechen der ursprünglichen Gesetzestafeln durch Mose letztlich nicht der Verbreitung der Tora geschadet habe, so seien die Bibliotheken längst wieder voller Bücher, nichts fehle der Kirche, die Hände aller seien voll mit Büchern: manus omnium codicibus plenae sunt.74 Welche Bücher außer den biblischen die antiken christlichen Privatbiblio­ theken generell enthielten, läßt sich nur tentativ bestimmen. Die meisten erhaltenen Papyri stammen aus Ägypten, doch Christen in Kleinasien oder Italien können andere Lektürevorlieben gehabt haben. Im engeren Sinne wissenschaftlich-theologische Werke dürften selten im Besitz normaler Gläubiger gewesen sein. Unter den 246 Nummern an erhaltenen Papyri und Pergamen­thandschriften aus dem zweiten und dritten Jahrhundert, die Hurtado christlicher Herkunft zuschreibt, befinden sich gerade einmal acht identifizierbare Handschriften mit solchen Inhalten (3,25%).75 Ein vergleichbares Resultat erbringt die Liste aller bis 1976 bekannter 1201 griechischer Papyri jüdischen oder christlichen Inhalts, die Joseph van Haelst vorlegte: 323 davon enthalten alttestamentlichen Texte, 244 neutestamentliche Texte, 53 Apokryphen, 344 liturgische Texte (Gebete usw.) und nur 81 „patristische Texte,“ von denen wiederum nur rund 30 identifizierbar und wissenschaftlich-theologischer Natur sind (2,5%).76 Rückschlüsse auf die Bücherbestände konkreter Personen werden vielleicht in Zukunft gelegentlich möglich sein, wenn die Fundorte paganer, jüdischer und christlicher Papyri insbesondere Ägyptens genauer berücksichtigt werden als zu einer Zeit, da Philologen die Papyri als bloße Textzeugen zur Erstellung kritischer Editionen wahrnahmen. Roger S. Bagnall formuliert beispielsweise gute Argumente dafür, daß ein Pachtvertrag, zwei Homerfragmente, ein Fragment über die Entstehung der Tyrannis in Sikyon bei Korinth und ein Blatt aus einer Buchrolle des achtzehnten Kestos des Julius Africanus, das auf der Rückseite mit einer Kopie des auf 276 datierten Testaments eines Hermogenes beschriftet ist, alle zum Besitz derselben Familie in Oxyrhynchus gehören.77 73

Vgl. Carl Wendel, „Bibliothek,“ in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, Bd. 2 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1954), 231–74, 248. 74 Optatus von Mileve, Contra Donatistas 7.1.31. 75 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artefacts, 210–29, 224–27: Fragmente aus Irenäus, Origenes, Julius Africanus, Origenes, Theonas. 76 van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus littéraires juifs et chrétiens. 77 Roger S. Bagnall, „An Owner of Literary Papyri,“ Classical Philology 87 (1992): 137–40. Vgl. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2009). Zum Kestoi-Fragment vgl. oben Anm. 14.

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Daraus ist nicht zwangsläufig, aber doch vielleicht auf eine christliche Privatbibliothek und deren Zusammensetzung zu schließen. Kein zweifelsfrei vollständiger Katalog einer antiken christlichen Privatbibliothek ist erhalten geblieben. Es gibt allerdings griechische und koptische Papyri und Ostraka, die Bücherlisten enthalten, darunter auch rund zwei Dutzend mit christlichen Büchern.78 Meistens ist der Zweck und Kontext unbekannt, es könnte sich z. B. teils um Wunschlisten79 oder Dublettenkataloge handeln, einige sind Listen übersandter Bücher oder Inventare von Beständen, deren Beschaffenheit und Zusammenhang jedoch teils nicht klar ist. Die meisten dieser überwiegend erst aus dem vierten bis achten Jahrhundert stammenden Listen mit Titeln in ein- bis zweistelliger Zahl lassen sich daher nicht ohne weiteres als Indiz für die Berechnung der Größe und Bestände antiker Gemeinde-, Kloster- und Privatbibliotheken auswerten. Wohl aber bestätigen die Listen im Großen und Ganzen den papyrologischen Befund: Im Mittelpunkt stehen wieder biblische Bücher (am häufigsten Psalmen, Evangelien und Paulus), wenige „apokryphe“ Texte, viele liturgische und martyrologische Bücher, und nur in wenigen Fällen patristische Fachliteratur von Origenes, Didymus dem Blinden, Basilius von Caesarea, Severus von Antiochien usw. Auffällig ist, daß in diesen fast durchweg ägyptischen Listen, die christliche Buchtitel enthalten, so gut wie keine paganen Texte aufgeführt sind. Gleiches muß jedoch nicht für alle Regionen des Reiches gelten, der Zufall der klimatisch bedingten Erhaltung von Papyri Ägyptens mag hier manches verzerren. 4

Die Bibliotheken der christlichen Theologen und Mönche

Welche Bücher besaßen die christlichen Theologen und Mönche der Antike? Seit der Mitte des zweiten Jahrhunderts gab es die ersten christlichen Intellektuellen, Männer wie Justin und Valentin in Rom, Tertullian im nordafrikanischen lateinischen Raum und Clemens von Alexandrien im griechischägyptischen Raum. Sie alle beziehen sich in ihren erhaltenen Texten auf 78

79

Die griechischen Buchlisten auf Papyrus sind ediert und kommentiert von Rosa Otranto, Antiche liste di libri su papiro (Rom: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2000), die christlichen allerdings summarischer in der Appendix, pp. 121–44; vgl. zu solchen Listen auch George W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries. Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 39–86. Eine Liste und tabellarische Teilauswertung von 24 griechischen, lateinischen und koptischen christlichen Bücher­ katalogen bietet Markschies, Kaiserzeitliche christliche Theologie und ihre Institutionen, 385–93. Daß es solche gab, belegt Epistula 5 des Hieronymus.

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pagane, jüdische und christliche Schriften. Von den Anfängen bis in die Spätantike lasen griechischsprachige Christen zumeist nur griechische Werke, lateinischsprachige Christen dagegen interessierten sich für griechische und lateinische Texte. Die anspielungsreichen Texte etwa von Tertullian oder Clemens haben schon öfters moderne Gelehrte die Frage nach deren Bibliotheken stellen lassen.80 Solche Untersuchungen können lange Kataloge der Texte umfassen, welche diese Autoren aus erster Hand kannten. Damit darf man eine gewisse Vorstellung verbinden, wie das Profil ihrer Privatbibliotheken beschaffen gewesen sein könnte – aber ob sie die betreffenden Bücher selber besaßen oder aus Gemeindebüchereien, städtischen Bibliotheken oder von Freunden entliehen, ist zumeist unbekannt, wenn es nicht zufällig in Schriften oder Briefen erwähnt wird. Komplett erhalten und individuell zuschreibbar ist wohl keine Privat­ bibliothek eines christlichen Theologen der Antike. Allerdings gibt es gute Argumente dafür, daß die dreizehn Codices mit koptischen Übersetzungen überwiegend gnostischer Texte aus Nag Hammadi, die Chester Beatty Codices alt- und neutestamentlicher Texte und die zahlreichen Rollen und Codices paganer, biblischer, apokrypher und sonstiger christlicher Literatur, die Martin Bodmer aus Ägypten brachte, wohl im Raum Dishna bzw. Diospolis Mikra in 10 bis 20 km Entfernung voneinander gefunden wurden und in einer Beziehung zu dem von Pachomius in der ersten Hälfte des vierten Jahrhunderts gegründeten und zuletzt bewohnten Kloster bei Faw Qibli stehen könnten, dem antiken Pboou / Pabau.81 Es wird erwogen, ob es sich um Buchbesitz der Pachomianer handelt, oder um Verkaufsprodukte aus pachomianischen Skriptorien, oder um Bestände nichtmonastischer Privatbibliotheken. Wie dem auch sei, es kann sich um privaten Buchbesitz gehandelt haben, denn erhaltene Testamente zeigen, daß Mönche gewisse Bücher als Privatbesitz behalten und darüber testamentarisch verfügen konnten.82 Zu den Funden um Dishna gehören auch pagane Bestände, darunter Menander und Thukydides, ein Fragment aus dem Liebesroman des Achilles Tatius und sogar lateinische Cicero-Texte und zwei griechisch-lateinische Lexika. 80

81

82

Vgl. etwa Adolf von Harnack, „Tertullians Bibliothek christlicher Schriften“ [1894], in von Harnack, Kleine Schriften zur Alten Kirche, mit einem Vorwort von Jürgen Dummer, Bd. 2 (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat, 1980), 227–58; Robert M. Ogilvie, The Library of Lactantius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Eine Übersicht bietet Bastiaan Van Elderen, „Early Christian Libraries,“ in The Bible as a Book: The Manuscript Tradition, hg. von John L. Sharpe iii und Kimberly Van Kampen (London: British Library, 1998), 45–59. Clemens Scholten, „Die Nag Hammadi-Texte als Buchbesitz der Pachomianer,“ Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 31 (1988): 144–72, 157.

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Klar zuzuordnen sind dagegen die reichen griechischen und koptischen Papyrus- und Ostraka-Funde des um 600 gegründeten Epiphaniusklosters in der ägyptischen Thebais. Darunter befinden sich Teile des Briefwechsels von Epiphanius, zudem nur wenige pagane Texte (Literatur zu Schulzwecken), wohl aber viele biblische, liturgische, patristisch-homiletische und der Klosterverwaltung dienende Schriften.83 Hochbedeutend war die Bibliothek des „Weißen Klosters“ westlich von Sohag, das unter Abt Schenute (†466) das Zentrum der koptischen Literatur überhaupt bildete und dessen persönliche Bibliothek umfaßte.84 Unmittelbar in monastischen oder aristokratisch-privaten Buchbesitz des sechsten und siebten Jahrhunderts führen auch manche Codices, die in Klöstern wie Bobbio oder Corbie verwahrt wurden. Die früher einmal verbrei­ tete Vermutung, gerade hochbedeutende Codices paganer Literatur, die in Bobbio aufbewahrt wurden, seien aus Cassiodors Besitz dorthin gekommen, war wohl nicht gut begründet.85 Das 613 von Columban gegründete Kloster Bobbio scheint vielmehr zahlreiche Handschriften aus dem Besitz des untergehenden alten Adels aus Italien, Nordafrika und Spanien erhalten zu haben: „Ein großer Teil kam wohl als Makulatur aus aufgelassenen Bibliotheken, und diese, darunter die Klassiker, Häretiker und Apokryphes, Gotisches, Grie­ chisches und Hebräisches, wurde im Kloster zu Palimpsesten verwendet oder, wie es scheint, zu demselben Zweck an das eng verbundene Luxeuil abgegeben.“86 Was wissen wir über die Bibliothekbestände großer Theologen? Der junge, übereifrige Origenes soll, nachdem er die Tätigkeit als Grammatiklehrer aufgegeben und sich ganz auf die Theologie konzentriert hatte, seine Sammlung paganer Bücher gegen eine sehr bescheidene, aber offenbar lebenslange 83

84

85

86

Das Material samt Beschreibung bei H.E. Winlock, W.E. Crum, und H.G. Evelyn White, The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes, 2 Bde. (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1926). Eine Auswertung der auf Bücher und Bibliothek bezogenen dortigen Funde bietet Scholten, „Die Nag Hammadi-Texte,“ 154–55. Die Geschichte der syrischen Kloster­ bibliothek im Wadi Natrun ist nachantik und daher nicht mehr mein Thema. Vgl. Tito Orlandi, „The Library of the Monastery of Saint Shenute at Atripe,“ in Perspectives on Panopolis: An Egyptian Town from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest, hg. von Arno Egberts et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 211–19. Widerlegung durch Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17–20, in einem instruktiven Überblick „Vanished Libraries of Classical Antiquity“ (5–30), der auch die christliche Antike umfaßt. Bernhard Bischoff, Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters, 4. Auflage (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2009), 250 und 241–63 Überblick über das Erhaltene aus dieser Übergangszeit.

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Leibrente von vier Obolen eingetauscht haben.87 Das läßt auf ihren beträchtlichen Wert und Umfang schließen, schon bevor Origenes einen Mäzen in Ambrosius fand. Es gibt keinen Grund für die Annahme, seit dem Verkauf habe Origenes alle paganen Bücher anderswo entleihen müssen. Er wird seinen Verkauf, wie manche andere Tat jugendlichen Überschwanges, später bedauert und seine paganen Buchbestände wieder aufgefüllt haben. Jedenfalls ist auch der reife Origenes, der bedeutendste Theologe des vorkonstantinischen Christentums, philosophisch sehr gut informiert, und auch der enzyklopädische Studienbetrieb, den er an seiner Privathochschule in Caesarea betrieb,88 ist ohne eine hervorragende Bibliothek mit paganen Beständen undenkbar. Wenn es die Christentumskritik des Celsus erfordert, kann Origenes wie nebenher einen Exkurs zur ethnographischen Literatur über das Judentum aus dem Ärmel schütteln.89 Origenes hatte nicht nur pagane und christliche Texte in seiner Biblio­ thek. So verfügte er über eine umfangreiche Sammlung der Werke des mittelplatonisch-stoischen jüdischen Schriftauslegers Philo, auf der wohl erhebliche Teile der Überlieferung heute noch erhaltener Werke Philos fußen.90 Das vielleicht außergewöhnlichste Buchprojekt der christlichen Antike, die Hexapla des Origenes, in der die gesamte hebräische Bibel Wort für Wort samt Lautschrift der korrekten Aussprache und vier- bis sechsspaltig synoptisch daneben angeordneten griechischen Übersetzungen dargeboten wurde, hätte nach der Berechnung von Anthony Grafton und Megan Williams 38 Codices à 800 Seiten benötigt und 150.000 Denare gekostet.91 Es handelte sich um ein hoch innovatives und genial konzipiertes Großprojekt, das einen neuartigen Gebrauch von den Möglichkeiten der Codexform machte.92 Dafür war ein Mitarbeiterstab erforderlich, und tatsächlich wurde dem Origenes von seinem reichen Mäzen Ambrosius ein Schreibbüro zur Verfügung gestellt: je sieben Schnellschreiber, Reinschreiber und Kalligraphinnen.93 Vielleicht gab es nur das eine vollständige Urexemplar, gleichwohl waren über Pamphilus, Eusebius, Hieronymus und andere die Nachwirkungen für die Septuaginta-Überlieferung und für syrische und lateinische Übersetzungen des Alten Testaments enorm. 87 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.3.9. 88 Darüber unterrichtet die Gregor dem Wundertäter zugeschriebene Oratio panegyrica ad Origenem. 89 Origenes, Contra Celsum 1.14–18. 90 David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 16–31. 91 Grafton und Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, 106–07, 322–23. 92 Ebd., 86–132, 315–29. 93 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.23.2.

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Origenes selbst hat die Wissensspeicher seiner Bibliothek nicht allein in seinen wissenschaftlichen exegetischen Werken verwendet,94 sondern sogar in Homilien darauf zurückgegriffen. Er predigte „mit der Bibel in der Hand, die Bibel im Kopf,“ wie Pierre Nautin schrieb.95 Dabei benutzte er offensichtlich von ihm selbst annotierte Codices und verwies beispielsweise auf Unterschiede der Übersetzungen aus dem Hebräischen.96 Die von Origenes mit Mitteln des Ambrosius angelegte Sammlung paganer, jüdischer und christlicher Bücher dürfte die bedeutendste Privatbibliothek eines antiken Christen gewesen sein. Sie wurde in ihrer überragenden Bedeutung für die Etablierung einer christlichen Wissenschaft früh erkannt, so daß sich sogar über theologische Differenzen hinweg eine Tradition ihrer Weiterpflege, Ergänzung oder Benutzung in Cäsarea bis ins vierte Jahrhundert hielt. So wurden Bände der Sammlung des Origenes in der Mitte des vierten Jahrhunderts im Auftrag des Bischofs Euzoius von Cäsarea in Pergamentcodices übertragen.97 Die Bibliothek des Origenes mag jedoch trotz zeitweiser Zugänglichkeit für Interessierte immer in Privatbesitz gewesen sein und darum mit der Zeit verschwunden sein.98 Eusebius, vor 264/265 geboren, um 339/340 gestorben, Bischof von Cäsarea, hatte teils durch Reisen, teils durch die Bibliothek des Origenes, teils vielleicht durch seine eigene oder andere in Cäsarea verfügbare Bibliotheken ein beeindruckend breites Spektrum von Texten zur Verfügung, wie seinen Werken zu entnehmen ist. Andrew Carreker kommt nach genauer Auswertung auf eine Zahl zwischen 288 und 400 Werken, die Eusebius in Cäsarea zur Verfügung hatte: sehr viele philosophische, historische, jüdische und christliche Titel, alles in allem in einem außergewöhnlichen Ausmaß.99 Als legitimer Sachwalter der Wissenschaftsgesinnung des Origenes erwies er sich durch seine Erfindung 94

Vgl. Bernhard Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe, 2 Bde. (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, 1987). 95 Pierre Nautin, „Introduction,“ in Origène, Homélies sur Jérémie, Bd. 1 (Paris: Cerf, 1976), 11–91, 112–23 mit vielen Belegstellen. 96 So z.B. Origenes, Homiliae in Jeremiam 16.3.2, 16.5.17–18, 19.13.4–5. 97 Das Kolophon des Wiener Philo-Codex aus dem elften Jahrhundert (theol. gr. 29) gibt die Subscriptio einer früheren Vorlage des Manuskripts wieder, wonach Euzoius das Exemplar auf Pergament habe herstellen lassen. Abbildung bei Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature, 21–22. Hieronymus schreibt, Euzoius habe als Bischof von Caesarea sehr große Mühe darauf verwandt, die schon stark beschädigte Bibliothek des Origenes und des Pamphilus auf Pergament(codices) instandzusetzen (De viris illustribus 113). 98 Marco Frenschkowski, „Studien zur Bibliothek von Cäsarea,“ in New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and Their World, hg. von Thomas J. Kraus und Tobias Nicklas (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 53–104. 99 Andrew Carreker, The Library of Eusebius at Caesarea (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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neuer Techniken des wissenschaftlichen Gebrauches der Gestalt des Codex. Anthony Grafton betitelt seine Darstellung der Neuerungen des Eusebius treffend „A Christian Impresario of the Codex.“100 Eusebius erdachte sich Techniken der tabellarischen Darstellung und Veranschaulichung der Syn­ chronie in den Chronologien von Völkern, die nach antiken Maßstäben teils als barbarisch gegolten hatten, und er relativierte damit die vermeintliche griechisch-römische Superiorität.101 Eusebius fand Mittel des Aufzeigens von Parallelstellen der Evangelien. Seine Kirchengeschichte, die erste überhaupt, verzichtete bewußt auf den Duktus einer durchgängig selbstformulierten Erzählung und stellte stattdessen lange Zitate aus Büchern und Aktenstücken zusammen: Geschichtsschreibung aus dem Geist der Bibliothek.102 Darum erwähnt Eusebius seine Reisen zu den Bibliotheken anderer Sammler, darunter die nach 212 von Bischof Alexander von Jerusalem dort angelegte Bibliothek, worin er viel Material für seine kirchengeschichtlichen Forschungen fand,103 und die als ursprünglich private Sammlung den Anfang der christlichen Jerusalemer Bibliotheken darstellen dürfte.104 Daß auch weniger bedeutende Theologen wichtige Bibliotheken besitzen konnten, mag das folgende Beispiel zeigen. Als 361 der Kappadokier Georg, der in Alexandrien unter Kaiser Constantius ii. als homöischer Gegenbischof zu Athanasius installiert worden war, vom heidnischen Pöbel gelyncht wurde, schrieb Kaiser Julian zwei Briefe an hohe Beamte mit der streng formulierten Anordnung, die bei den Ausschreitungen verschwundene Bibliothek des Theologen lückenlos aufzuspüren und zu ihm nach Antiochien transportieren zu lassen. Darunter befänden sich nämlich „viele philosophische Werke, viele rhetorische Schriften und auch viele Arbeiten über die Lehre der gottlosen Galiläer,“ d.h. der Christen; er kenne viele der Bücher aus Georgs Bibliothek, denn in jungen Jahren seien sie ihm von Georg selbst zum Abschreiben geliehen worden.105 Der pubertierende Julian hatte in den 340er Jahren sechs Exilsjahre auf der abgelegenen kaiserlichen Domäne Macellum in Kappadokien verbringen müssen, wo ihm, wie er sich später erinnerte, die Philosophie das 100 Grafton und Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, 178–232, 337–52. 101 Ebd., 234–35. 102 Vgl. Arnaldo Momigliano, „Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century a.d.,“ in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, hg. Momigliano (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 79–99. 103 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.20.1. 104 Albert Ehrhardt, „Die griechische Patriarchal-Bibliothek von Jerusalem. Ein Beitrag zur griechischen Palaeographie,“ Römische Quartalschrift 5 (1891): 217–65, 329–84; 6 (1892): 339–65. 105 Julian, Epistulae 106 und 107 Bidez-Cumont.

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geistige Überleben ermöglicht habe – Philosophie, die er offensichtlich aus Georgs Privatbibliothek kennenlernte.106 Johannes Chrysostomus behauptet später sogar, die Überlegenheit der Kirche über die paganen Philosophen und Rhetoren zeige sich gerade darin, daß es Christen gewesen seien, die viele von deren sonst vergessenen Texten aufbewahrt hätten.107 Eine andere bedeutende Bibliothek muß sich Hieronymus aufgebaut haben. Er erzählt Paulas Tochter Eustochium: „Ich machte mich auf nach Jerusalem, um ein Gott geweihtes Leben zu führen. Die Bibliothek aber, welche ich mir in Rom mit großer Mühe und viel Arbeit erworben hatte, glaubte ich nicht entbehren zu können. Ich fastete also, während ich den Tullius las.“ Nachdem er zuerst Plautus gelesen und danach die Sprache der alttestamentlichen Propheten hart und abstoßend gefunden habe, sei er im Traum vor den Richterstuhl (wohl Gottes) gezerrt worden. Auf sein Bekenntnis, Christ zu sein, habe er die Antwort erhalten: „Du lügst, du bist ein Ciceronianer, aber kein Christ.“ Im Traum habe er geschworen: „Herr, wenn ich je wieder weltliche Handschriften besitze oder aus ihnen lese, dann will ich dich verleugnet haben.“ Danach habe er sich mit einem Eifer den göttlichen Schriften zugewandt, wie er ihn bei der Beschäftigung mit profanen nie gekannt habe.108 Das alles ist freilich in pädagogischer Absicht gesprochen. Hieronymus bleibt ein Leben lang Leser und sicher auch Besitzer zahlreicher paganer Werke, Ciceros zumal. Ein ebenso schlechtes Gewissen hat er, weil er fast alle Werke des Origenes besaß: „Ich habe seine Bücher gesammelt, ich bekenne es; und genau aus dem Grund folge ich seinen Irrtümern nicht, weil ich alles kenne, was er geschrieben hat. …Und wenn im Lesen ein Vergehen liegt, so gestehe ich es (und die alexandrinischen Papyri leerten meine Geldbörse!).“109 Auch Augustins Bibliothek ist nach dem Urteil eines großen Kenners „eine der bedeutendsten Büchersammlungen des christlichen Altertums gewesen.“110 Laut seinem Freund und Biographen Possidius befanden sich alle noch verfügbaren Schriften Augustins, Mitschriften seiner Predigten und Briefe in ihr.111 Augustinus habe angeordnet, die Kirchenbibliothek und alle Codices sorgfältig für die Nachwelt zu bewahren, und er habe eine wohlgeordnete Kirche hinterlassen, mit 106 Julian, Epistula ad Athenienses 271b–272a. Vgl. Klaus Rosen, Julian. Kaiser, Gott und Christenhasser (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006), 83–85. 107 Johannes Chrysostomus, In sanctum Babylam contra Iulianum 2. 108 Hieronymus, Epistula 22.30. Übersetzung von Ludwig Schade. 109 Ebd., Epistula 84.3. 110 Berthold Altaner, „Die Bibliothek Augustins,“ in Altaner, Kleine patristische Schriften (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967), 174–78. 111 Possidius, Vita Augustini 18.9–10 Bastiaensen.

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Männer- und Frauenklöstern, und mit deren Bibliotheken auch seine eigenen Bücher, Predigten und diejenigen anderer Heiliger.112 Was sich in seiner eigenen Bibliothek außer den eigenen Arbeiten befand, können wir nur aus seinen Werken erschließen. Demnach müssen sich darin große Teile des christlichen lateinischen Schrifttums wie auch viele Werke der griechischen Patristik, vor allem solche, die in lateinischer Übersetzung vorlagen, befunden haben, und nicht zuletzt mindestens Teile von griechischen Bibelausgaben.113 Augustinus benötigte und benutzte seine Bibliothek beim theologischen Nachdenken ebenso wie im kir­ chenpolitischen Kampf. Als Vertreter der donatistischen Kirche behaupteten, ihr Namensgeber Donatus von Karthago habe an der Synode von Serdika um 343 teilgenommen, verwies er auf sein eigenes Exemplar, worin zwar ein Donatus genannt war, aber ohne Ortsangabe – es handle sich um einen anderen Bischof gleichen Namens.114 Aber auch viele lateinische klassische Werke eines Cicero, Vergil, Varro und Sallust standen in Augustins Bibliothek, dazu Ciceros lateinische Übersetzung von Platos Timaeus und eine lateinische Ausgabe von Schriften des Plotin und des Porphyrius.115 Alle diese Texte waren es, die Augustinus seine spezielle Synthese von paganer Bildung und christlicher Theologie ermöglichte, mit der er zum bedeutendsten Theologen der lateinischen Christenheit wurde. Viele andere Bibliotheken wären noch zu erwähnen und auf ihre Bestände zu befragen. Da wären etwa die spätantiken Bibliotheken gallischer Villen zu untersuchen, in denen die traditionelle Gliederung römischer Bibliotheken in eine griechische und eine lateinische Abteilung um christliche Bücher erweitert war116 und man sich darin gefiel, vor den Regalen mit Augustinus-Codices neben Varro, Horaz neben Prudentius darüber zu diskutieren, ob Rufin besser Origenes übersetzt habe als Apuleius den Plato oder Cicero den Demosthenes.117 Man könnte die Bibliotheken der spätantiken römischen Päpste und ihrer Familien untersuchen, besonders diejenige von Agapet und Gregor dem Großen.118 112 Ebd. 31.6–8 Bastiaensen. Das postume Schicksal der Bibliothek ist ungewiß; vielleicht kamen die Bücher nach Verhandlungen zwischen Kaiser Valentinian iii. und Geiserich um 450 nach Rom, so die Vermutung von Jean-Paul Bouhot, „La transmission d’Hippone à Rome des oeuvres de saint Augustin,“ in Du copiste au collectionneur, hg. von Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda und Jean-François Genest (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 23–33. 113 Nachweise in Altaner, Kleine patristische Schriften. 114 Augustinus, Contra Cresconium 3.34.38. 115 Vgl. Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 2 Bde. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967). 116 Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistula 4.11.6: triplex bybliotheca…, Romana, Attica, Christiana. 117 Ebd., Epistula 2.9.4–5. Diese Übersetzungen von Apuleius und Cicero sind nicht erhalten. 118 Henri-Irénée Marrou, „Autour de la bibliothèque du Pape Agapit,“ Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 48 (1931): 124–69; Sabine Grebe, „Die Bibliothek Agapets im Vergleich mit

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Man hätte auf die ausführliche Schilderung einer idealen Klosterbibliothek durch Cassiodor einzugehen, der seine eigene Aristokratenbibliothek nach 540 zur Bibliothek von Vivarium ausbaute und ein breites Spektrum christlicher und profaner Literatur berücksichtigte, ohne indessen die Weite Augustins zu erreichen.119 Man könnte auf die Bibliothek Isidors von Sevilla eingehen, deren Abteilungen durch selbstverfaßte tituli bezeichnet wurden.120 Man könnte ähnliches auch für die griechische Welt untersuchen, die bisher weniger auf dieses Thema hin erforscht zu sein scheint. Aber ich breche ab, um einen anderen, letzten Aspekt zu skizzieren. 5

Vom Luxus der Bücher

Das antike Christentum hat ein ambivalentes Verhältnis zu Schönheit und Reichtum, was sich in seinem Verhältnis zu Büchern spiegelt. Der Extremfall ist das Wüstenmönchtum. In Teilen der Eremitenbewegung des vierten und fünften Jahrhunderts wird von den christlichen Asketen erwartet, daß sie sich sogar ihrer Bücher entledigen. Die Urszene des ägyptischen Mönchtums ist laut Vita Antonii der Moment, in dem der heilige Antonius eine Kirche betritt, in der gerade aus dem Evangelium der Satz vorgelesen wird: „Wenn du vollkommen werden willst, geh, verkauf deinen Besitz und gib das Geld den Armen.“121 Antonius folgt der Weisung und hört den gottesdienstlichen Bibellesungen fortan so aufmerksam an, daß ihm nichts entfällt und „das Gedächtnis an die Stelle der Bücher“ tritt.122 Auch die Sammlung von Aussprüchen der frühen Mönche liegt teils auf dieser Linie: Der Mönch Theodorus aus Pherme besitzt den Apophthegmata patrum zufolge drei gute Bücher, aus denen er und andere Mönche viel Nutzen ziehen, doch rät ihm der weise Abbas Macarius: „Du handelst zwar gut, doch besser als alles ist Armut.“ Daraufhin verkauft Theodorus die Bücher und gibt das Geld den Armen.123

ausgewählten Bibliotheken der Zeit der alten Kirche und des Frühmittelalters,“ Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 25 (1991): 15–60. 119 Cassiodorus, Institutiones, mit instruktivem Index auctorum in der Edition von R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). 120 Vgl. Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique, Bd. 2 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1959), 738–44. 121 Evangelium nach Matthäus 19.21, bei (Pseudo-?) Athanasius, Vita Antonii 2.3. 122 Ebd. 3.7. 123 Apophthegmata patrum, Theodorus von Pherme 1. Eine Sammlung ähnlicher Stellen bietet Scholten, „Die Nag Hammadi-Texte,“ 149 Anm. 36.

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In der Vita Hilarionis, die Hieronymus als lateinisches Pendant zur Vita Antonii verfaßt, ist der Buchverzicht dagegen ambivalenter: Der Mönch Hilarion bietet zweimal seinen codex evangeliorum, seinen einzigen Besitz außer der Kleidung, als Bezahlung für eine Schiffsreise an, aber aufgrund mi­rakulöser Umstände verzichtet der Schiffseigner freiwillig darauf: Es ist offenbar Gottes Wille, daß der Codex Eigentum des Mönches bleibt.124 Spätestens in dem vor allem durch Pachomius (ca. 292–ca. 346) geprägten Übergang vom Eremitentum zur ägyptischen Klosterkultur, rücken Buchbesitz und Skriptorium ins Zentrum mancher Formen von Mönchtum.125 Die wohl auf Pachomius selbst zurückgehende Klosterregel enthält bereits Vorschriften für den Umgang mit den Büchern der Klosterbibliothek.126 Mehr noch: Der anfänglichen Ablehnung des Buches folgt eine Beschäftigung mit dem schönen Buch, teils allerdings zu Erwerbszwecken. Palladius zählt um 420 auf, welche handwerklichen Tätigkeiten die Mönche in den Pachomianer-Klöstern betrieben, darunter die Kalligraphie.127 Auch sein Lehrer Evagrius Ponticus (†399) habe sich seinen Lebensunterhalt als Wüsteneremit mit der Schreib­ kunst verdient128 – offenbar stellte er Luxusausgaben her. Mancher Mönch besaß selbst Produkte solcher Schreibkunst. Nach einer Version der Vita des Pachomius warnt dieser die Brüder davor, gutes Essen, schöne Kleidung oder ein äußerlich schönes Buch hochzuschätzen.129 Der wohl in der Mitte des fünften Jahrhunderts in Palästina lebende Mönch Gelasius besaß die bereits erwähnte wertvolle und schöne Bibel, die ihm gestohlen wurde.130 Der Redaktor der Apophthegmata patrum beeilt sich mitzuteilen, daß Gelasius das Buch in der Kirche stets offen ausgelegt habe, damit die Brüder es jederzeit lesen konnten. Dies mag zutreffen, soll aber wohl gleichzeitig dem Verdacht wehren, der Mönch habe sich am puren Besitz des Buches gefreut und dessen Schönheit für sich behalten. Buchbesitz aus Freude am Schönen oder am Luxus gibt es in der christlichen Gesellschaft verstärkt seit dem Konstantinischen Zeitalter. Die christliche Kritik daran lautet ähnlich wie bei paganen Intellektuellen. Auch diese hatten 124 Hieronymus, Vita Hilarionis 25 (Bastiaensen). 125 Zu den technischen Vorgängen monastischer Bücherproduktion anhand der Papyri: Chrysi Kotsifou, „Books and Book Production in the Monastic Communities of Byzantine Egypt,“ in The Early Christian Book, hg. von William E. Klingshirn und Linda Safran (Washington, dc: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 48–66. 126 Pachomius, Praecepta 25, 82, 100–01. 127 Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 32.12. Weitere Stellen bei Scholten, „Die Nag Hammadi-Texte.“ 128 Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 38.10. 129 Vita (prima) Pachomi 63 Halkin. 130 Vgl. oben Anm. 31.

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über Buchsammler gespottet, die den mühsamen Weg vom Besitz eines Buches zu seiner geistigen Aneignung nicht beschreiten. So tadelt Seneca die Ungebildeten, die Bücher non in studium, sed in spectaculum erwarben und als Ausstattung für ihr Speisezimmer verwendeten.131 Lukian widmet dem Typus des ungelehrten Büchernarren einen satirischen Essay.132 Ähnliches setzt sich bei Christen fort. Caesarius von Arles empfiehlt, die Sammlung seiner Predigten oft zu lesen und anderen zur Lektüre zu geben: „Ein gut eingebundenes und stattliches Buch, das nicht gelesen wird, macht die Seele nicht stattlich; jenes aber, das ständig gelesen wird, und durch das häufige Hin- und Herwenden von außen nicht mehr schön sein kann, macht die Seele innerlich schön.“133 Unter Umständen konnte der ästhetische Splendor einer Rolle oder eines Codex als verdächtiges Mittel der Seelenfängerei erscheinen, wenn Text oder Bild im Häresieverdacht stand. Bekannt waren etwa die Manichäer für ihre kalligraphischen und teils illustrierten Manuskripte.134 Augustinus, der neun Jahre lang selbst dieser Religion angehört hatte, kritisiert, die so großartigen und teuren Codices seien, am Wahrheitswert gemessen, wertlos.135 Doch auch wenn Christen sich rühmen, die Bibel in einer Prachtausgabe mit goldenen Buchstaben zu besitzen, hält Johannes Chrysostomus ihnen in seiner Zeit als Prediger in Antiochien (386–97) vor, daß sie die Heilige Schrift lieber ins eigene Herz schreiben sollten.136 Als Hieronymus die Weltchronik des Eusebius in einer bearbeiteten lateinischen Version publiziert, rät er im Vorwort, die von ihm eingeführte Unterscheidung bestimmter Bestandteile mittels Tintenfarben beizubehalten, um so die Tabellen übersichtlicher zu machen und Abschrei­ befehler zu verhindern; doch warnt Hieronymus eigens davor, in unvernünftigem Vergnügen die Mehrfarbigkeit als bloße Augenweide zu betrachten, statt ihren vernünftigen Sinn zu erfassen.137 Hieronymus äußert sich brieflich irri­ tiert über Christen, die Bücher aus mit Purpur getränktem Pergament und Goldbuchstaben benutzen, deren Einbände mit Edelsteinen eingekleidet werden, während draußen vor der Tür der unbekleidete Christus dahin 131 Seneca, De tranquillitate animi 9.5. 132 Lucian, Adversus indoctum et libros multos ementem. 133 Caesarius von Arles, Humilis suggestio sive salubris ammonitio (sermo 2). 134 Überblick bei Christoph Markschies, „Gnostische und andere Bilderbücher in der Antike,“ in Markschies, Gnosis und Christentum (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2009), 113–59; 154–59. 135 Augustinus, Contra Faustum 13.6. 136 Johannes Chrysostomus, Homiliae in Joannem 32.3. Vgl. Isidor von Pelusium, Epistula 1.127. 137 Hieronymus, Chronicon, epistula (p. 5 Helm3). Zu Joseph Scaligers Studien anhand u.a. des mehrfarbigen Codex Freherianus der Chronik vgl. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 514–36.

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siecht.138 In dem Brief an Laeta über die Erziehung von deren Tochter rät Hieronymus im Jahre 400, letztere solle sich am Text der heiligen Schriften erfreuen, weniger an den bunten Illustrationen auf Goldgrund.139 Aus der Spätantike haben sich Fragmente solcher herrlicher illustrierter Purpurcodices mit Gold- und Silberschrift erhalten, so die Wiener Genesis, die Cotton-Genesis und das Evangeliar von Rossano.140 Isidor von Sevilla erwähnt in seiner Enzyklopädie aus dem ersten Drittel des siebten Jahrhunderts unter den möglichen Färbungen des Pergaments für Bücher auch die purpurne, auf der Gold- und Silbertinte in Buchstaben glänzt.141 Er gebraucht fast dieselben Worte wie Hieronymus, enthält sich aber jeglicher Kritik am Luxus solcher Handschriften: Zeugnis einer Zeit, in der das Christentum seine Skepsis gegenüber der Kultur des Schönen vermindert hatte. Mehrere Fragmente illustrierter Handschriften seit dem ausgehenden fünften Jahrhundert zeugen von der hohen Qualität damaliger Buchkunst, darunter die eben erwähnten Bibelhandschriften, die Quedlinburger Itala der Königsbücher, die Ilias Ambrosiana oder der Vergilius Vaticanus.142 Diese Codices enthalten narrative Illustrationen. Früher meinte man, solche Bilder stünden unmittelbar in älteren Traditionen der Wandmalerei oder postulierter hellenistischer Illustrations­ zyklen. In Wahrheit sind sie wohl eher Ausdruck eines Experimen­tierens mit einer neuen Form der Kunst, die erst mit der Durchsetzung des Pergamentcodex gegenüber der Rolle möglich geworden war.143 Ob der spätantike Kult um den schönen Pergamentcodex spezifische Hintergründe in der Religion des fleischgewordenen Wortes hat, mag hier offen bleiben.144 Das wohl erste in der griechischen Literatur erwähnte Pergamentbuch mit Goldbuchstaben ist eine hebräische Bibelrolle. Nach der fiktiven Erzählung des wohl im ersten vorchristlichen Jahrhundert verfaßten Aristeasbriefes wurde sie dem bibliophilen König Ptolemaeus ii. Philadelphus von einer jüdischen Delegation aus Jerusalem nach Alexandrien mitgebracht und berührte diesen tief.145 138 Hieronymus, Epistula 20.32. 139 Ebd., Epistula 107.12. 140 Vgl. Courtney M. Booker, „The Codex Purpureus and Its Role as an Imago Regis in Late Antiquity,“ Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 8 (1997): 441–77. 141 Isidor von Sevilla, Etymologiae 6.12.5. 142 Reiner Sörries, Christlich-antike Buchmalerei im Überblick, 2 Bde. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1993); Barbara Zimmermann, „Illustration,“ in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, Bd. 17 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1996), 953–94. 143 Barbara Zimmermann, Die Wiener Genesis im Rahmen der antiken Buchmalerei. Ikonographie, Illustrationsverfahren und Aussageintention (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 1–53. 144 Vgl. John Lowden, „The Word Made Visible: The Exterior of the Early Christian Book as Visual Argument,“ in Klingshirn und Safran, The Early Christian Book, 13–47. 145 Pseudo-Aristeas, Epistula 10.176–78 Pelletier (vgl. Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae 12.11.89–91).

chapter 22

An Imagined Library in the Italian Renaissance: the Presence of Greek in Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria Christopher S. Celenza Vos exemplaria Graeca/nocturna uersate manu, uersate diurna. “Turn the pages of Greek books day and night.” In his dialogue On Literary Polish, Angelo Decembrio employs a variation on these lines from Horace’s Ars poetica to open a section focusing on Greek texts.1 This dialogue, which Decembrio wrote, piecemeal, in the 1450s and 1460s, is set dramatically at the court of Prince Leonello D’Este of Ferrara, which is to say in the 1440s.2 Throughout its seven books many matters come under discussion, from individual lexical points, orthography, and the nature and function of various well-known monuments, to the physical appearance of manuscript books, and literature and literary texts of all sorts, just to scratch the surface. This dialogue reveals many things for modern readers, among them where the fifteenth century stood with respect to matters Hellenic. The work as a whole is designed to foreground what Decembrio terms literary politia (“polish,” he takes care to tell his readers), a quality that all learned figures should aspire to possess. Decembrio’s dedicatory preface, to Pope Pius ii, claims a lot for the work. In it he tells Pope Pius that the book “has been modeled on Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, or rather on Quintilian’s Institutions, and the very same advantage that comes from dividing it up into parts and books has been preserved. Indeed, here the book treats no less of oratorical and poetic skill.”3 Decembrio probably claims too much here, but his description of the contents of On Literary Polish, immediately following, is on target: 1 Angelo Decembrio, De politia litteraria, ed. N. Witten (Munich: Saur, 2002), 1.8.1: “Cum autem in poetis supra praecipuam Horatii mentionem expresserimus, recordemur ab eodem nobis sapienter praecipi ‘exemplaria Graeca / nocturna versanda manu, versanda diurna.’” The citation is Horace, Ars poetica, lines 268–69. 2 For literature on the dialogue, see C.S. Celenza, “Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara: Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria, 1.10,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 43–98, at 44n.2, to which one should add B. Curran, A. Grafton, and A. Decembrio, “A Fifteenth-Century Site Report on the Vatican Obelisk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 234–48. 3 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.1.5: “Cuius futuram seriem ut brevibus intelligas, seu ad opus A. Gellii Noctium atticarum seu potius ad Quintiliani Institutionem oratoriam formatus

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_023

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to begin, we go through all of the beautifications and tools necessary for libraries as well as all the books that the most learned deem necessary to know. Then, we move to the proper meanings of words as well as noting the mistakes made in that respect. Thereafter, we go to the diverse and distinguished meanings of the same words, using individual sounds: what is the place of homonyms, how one variously puts together orations in a civic and historical style, and finally the exact and proper techniques for diphthongs and spelling.4 The dialogue travels a route from book to book into ever-more-specific philological territory, ending, in the final book, with an alphabetical lexicon of Latin words and expressions. The first book, however, is quite lively and broad. Decembrio begins by establishing what he means by “polish.” His usage comes from the Latin verb polire, “to polish,” and it should be understood as the “cultivation of elegance.”5 The dialogue has a number of interlocutors, but early on Decembrio foregrounds two, the educator Guarino da Verona, “who speaks,” Decembrio writes, “in the capacity of a teacher, as indeed he was accustomed to do,” and the prince, Leonello D’Este, whose “preeminence, great-souled nature, and excellent cleverness and abundance in discussion” Decembrio singles out.6 “Polish,” the reader is meant to understand, has as much to do with doctrine as it does with conduct and personal exemplarity. The discussion turns, after these preliminaries, to how one goes about furnishing a “polished” library: one should not bring hot coals into the library if the room has no vent; it is appropriate to have certain instruments in the library, like a horoscopium, an instrument used to cast nativities; “it is also seemly,” Decembrio writes, “to have honorable paintings and sculptures that bring to est partium et librorum opportunitate eadem fere servata. Nam et hic non minus de oratorio poeticoque tractatur artificio.” 4 Ibid.: “In primis enim de omni bibliothecarum seu librorum omnium ornatu instrumentoque, qui apud doctissimos magis necessarii cognitu recensetur, de vocabulorum proprietatibus et improprietatibus advertendis, porro de eorundem variis egregiisque per singulas voces significationibus, quod est homonymorum officium, de conficiendis diversim civili et historico stilo orationibus, de diphthongorum orthographiaeque necessaria ratione.” 5 Ibid., 1.1.1, 1.2.1–4. 6 Ibid., 1.2.2: “In quo genere et alios hac tempestate scriptores audio volumina componere, et nos pariter hisce voluminibus Veronensem nostrum eadem in facultate praeceptoria copiose dissertantem, ut assolebat, inducemus. At enim praeter id tametsi laboriosum edocendi genus nos pro Leonelli principis excellentia, magnanamite, et eximia quadam in disputando subtilitate et copia, altiora politioraque materiae nostrae fundamenta perquirimus…”

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mind gods and heroes”; and finally, the library should be clean and treated with care: “there will be no spiderwebs under the shelves, nor even any ink smudges, nor will you leave behind any rank and inappropriate remainders of candles and nighttime lamplight work.”7 Scribes who are both learned and experienced ought to be charged with copying the books destined for the polished library. And it is appropriate, Prince Leonello says, for books to be fitted out attractively, covered in “purple, silk, pearls, and gold, for the beauty of books does induce them to be read more, in the same way that fitting armaments make a soldier more spirited,” even as it is also true that rare books should be prized and included, dusty and anciently written though they may be.8 As the interlocutors move on to the genres of books that should be included in a proper library, ranging through Latin poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral and natural philosophy, the character of the dialogue emerges ever more clearly. The traditional tastes of Latinate humanism mingle with an exaggerated sense of Latinity’s importance and the possible “reach” of a notionally universal, and classicizing, Latin, a dream that was ending at the time Decembrio was writing, as Poggio Bracciolini and others assiduously gathered the evidence that ancient Roman Latin had been a natural rather than an artificial language. As Poggio wrote in a polemic with Lorenzo Valla, proper Latin usage was contained “only in the books of the ancients.”9 While Poggio and 7 Ibid., 1.3.5: “Intra bibliothecam insuper horoscopium aut sphaeram cosmicam citharamque habere non dedecet, si ea quandoque delecteris, quae, nisi cum volumus, nihil instrepit, honestas quoque picturas caesurasve, quae vel deorum vel heroum memoriam repraesentent. Ideoque saepenumero cernere est quibusdam iucundissimam imaginem esse Hieronymi describentibus in eremo, per quam in bibliothecis solitudinem atque silentium et studendi scribendique sedulitatem opportunam advertimus. Aliis et aliorum effigies, denique ut quaedam signa sunt electissima apud Iuvenalem Euphranoris aut Polycleti, dulcia venientibus spectacula. Igitur omne perpolitum, pavimentum, parietem, contignationem, diligentique ordine locatum intra bibliothecam conspiciatur, adeo ne sub pluteis quidem aranearum telas, immo ne pigmentorum etiam liturationes, candelarum ac nocturnarum lucubrationum, quae ‘Vulcanalia’ idem Plinius appellat, vestigia olida ineptaque interdiu reliqueris.” For horoscopium see Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae 4.3. 8 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.3.7–8: “Sunt enim qui libros purpura, serico, margaritas, auroque vestiant. Nam librorum pulchritudo ad legendum plerosque magis invitat, uti decora militem armamenta animosiorem efficient…” 9 Poggio Bracciolini, Oratio, in Poggio Bracciolini, Opera Omnia, 4 vols., ed. R. Fubini (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964–69), 1:205: “Latine enim loquendi usus semper fuit magister, qui solum autorum priscorum libris et scriptis continentur.” On the fifteenth-century debate over the Latin language, see C.S. Celenza, “End Game: Humanist Latin in the Late Fifteenth Century,” in Latinitas Perennis ii: Appropriation and Latin Literature, ed. Y. Maes, J. Papy, and W. Verbaal (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 201–42. For the vitality of the vernacular in the fifteenth century see the

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other humanist leaders investigated these matters, Decembrio’s roughly contemporary work offers insight instead into what we might call everyday humanism, in this case replete with the kinds of prejudices and sometimes disingenuous argumentation that has in some quarters given Italian humanism a bad name. For example, when the interlocutors come to discuss vernacular literature and its possible place in the library, the prince dismisses such works as the sorts of things that, “from time to time and on winter nights, we discuss with our wives and children.”10 And he even goes so far as to denigrate vernacular translations of classical texts, saying that their translators are turning “good Latin authors into bad vernacular ones.” He goes still further, condemning other unnamed princes who have commissioned such translations. Although they might benefit in some small way from the vulgarized wisdom of the ancients, their minds, nevertheless, “should be compared to those of the commoners, since both are characterized by the vulgar tongue.”11 Decembrio writes all of this even as a leading figure like the recently deceased Leonardo Bruni had made every effort to have a number of his own Latin works translated into the vernacular and had written affecting Tuscan Lives of Dante and Petrarch, for the benefit of his fellow citizens.12 As the interlocutors arrive at their discussion of Greek texts, similar qualities to those already outlined become evident. Decembrio begins, using Prince Leonello as a mouthpiece, by engaging in a little score settling with his estranged brother Pier Candido Decembrio, who had published a text in which

remarkable series of essays edited by Andrea Rizzi and Eva del Soldato in I Tatti Studies 16 (2013), 231–363, including contributions from Brian Jeffrey Maxson, Blake Wilson, Elizabeth W. Mellyn, Eugenio Refini, and the two editors. 10 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.6.1: “…menti subiecit eos nunc libros memorare, quos apud uxores et liberos nostros nonnunquam hybernis noctibus exponamus.” 11 Ibid.: “Sunt qui putent in quotidiano colloquio plebei quoque sermonis auctorum consuetudinem plurimum gratiae et eloquentiae conferre. Unde visi sunt nostrorum quidam, praesertimque melioris, veterum libros in patrium transferre sermonem, principum etiam auctoritate deducti, qui sibi transferendos mandaverunt. Sed cuiusmodi demum laboris sui mercedem interpretes accepturi? Nempe ut a sapientioribus accusentur ex Latinis bonis vulgares non bonos reddidisse. Quod si ad principiantium mores et ingenia eiusmodi opera conferre censeant, ut historiarum potissime, non diffitemur. Sed cum vulgaris linguae sint, aeque talium animos principiantium et plebeiorum conferendos ego censeo, quod untrunque genus litterarum eruditione careat…” 12 See J. Hankins, “Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni,” in Humanism and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. C.S. Celenza and K. Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 11–29.

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he compared Virgil, somewhat unfavorably, to Homer.13 It is at this point in On Literary Polish that the discussion of Greek texts really begins. Overall, though Greek literature is valued in itself, its main purpose, for Decembrio, is to serve as a reflection on Latinate culture. Homer comes first, unsurprisingly. Of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Iliad is nobler, since in the Odyssey “neither war, nor armies, nor the character of rulers are described.”14 Hymns and the Battle of Frogs and Mice (minor works traditionally attributed to Homer) come under discussion, each of which serves to open a window onto modern life: Homer’s hymns are related to Gioviano Pontano’s poetry, Decembrio suggests, and Carlo Marsuppini translated the Battle of Frogs and Mice.15 More important for Decembrio is the issue of how and to what extent Virgil used the Homeric legacy in fashioning his own epic, the Aeneid. The short answer is that Virgil did everything correctly, with just measure, even as he “creatively imitated” other Greek authors as well; Decembrio takes care to have Leonello use the verb aemulari here, suffused as that verb often was for Renaissance Latin writers with the notion that one needed to imitate, but then try to surpass, the model.16 Leonello says: “Therefore, I should like to term 13 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.2–3. He and his brother had a falling-out over an inheritance matter; see D. Friggè, “Redazione e tradizione della ‘Politia litteraria’ di Angelo Decembrio,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 37 (1994): 27–65, at 46–56; P. Viti, “Decembrio, Angelo,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 33 (Roma: Ist. della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), 483–88; Viti, “Decembrio, Pier Candido,” in ibid., 498–503; and Witten, “Einführung,” in Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 7–130, at 17–26. 14 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.4: “Eius opera duo sunt maiora aequaliumque librorum viginti quattuor ad grammatum numerationem: Ilias de Troianorum excidio, magnificentior, et Odysssea de Ulyssis erroribus, donec in patriam remigraret, stili eiusdem, sed materiae Paulo depressioris, ubi non bella, non exercitus, non imperatorum mores describuntur ut in Iliade.” 15 Ibid.: “Fuere et eius ingenii iuvenilis opera minora, praecipue hymni deorum seu divinae laudationes, quemadmodum aetate nostra Pontanus pentametrice Divorum Laudes cecinit, itemque Batrachomyomachia, iocosum opus, ut poetae iunioris et a iuvene quondam Carolo Aretino heroice translatum.” For Marsuppini and Homer, see A. Rocco, Carlo Marsuppini, traduttore d’Omero: La prima traduzione umanistica dell’Iliade primo e nono libro (Padua: Il poligrafo, 2000). 16 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.4: “Quanquam Vergilius praeter Homerum in Aeneide plures etiam, et Graecorum et Latinorum, scriptores sit aemulatus (non omnia ab Homero furto subrepta, ut ille falso criminatur), sed Apollonium praecipue in Didonis amoribus, quae una Vergilii pars praestantissima existimatur.” On imitatio and aemulatio see G.W. Pigman iii, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1–32.

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Homer the vastest of seas, from which people fish out diverse arguments for their fictional creations.”17 The Homer-Virgil comparison ends by contrasting the two poets’ relative prolixity. Virgil did not consider it necessary to list every little thing that might have happened behind closed doors or that was said in public. Homer did—but he was Greek, and it is in their character to speak with great abundance, to add to accounts of the deeds of heroes the pickled fish and soup of their wives, or to expound on the dinner parties of the gods and with whom they went to bed. Virgil, on the other hand, chose to point out only those things that were most beautiful to see, impressive to hear, and worthy of relating, things that were no less suited to depicting reality…18 Again, appropriateness and measure characterize the poet, even as those qualities represent what is most important in any polished person: “It is just as bees are to flowers. While they might indeed fly around all the flowers, they still don’t take nectar-bearing dew from them all—only from the choicest.”19 Generic categorization comes next, with “Apollonius, Pindar, Eurypides, Sophocles, Hesiod, Theocritus, the comic Aristophanes, and Aesop’s fables” in the genre of poetry, though Decembrio notes that Aesop’s fables are handed down in prose. Among historians Plutarch, Herodotus, and Thucydides are included. There are the letter collections of “Libanius, Synesius, Phalaris, and Climachus.” As to philosophy, only Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon are necessary, along with Diogenes Laertius’s Lives.20 The mention of Diogenes Laertius leads to a discussion of translation and to one of the many brief instances in this dialogue, like gleaming gems embossed on a fading tapestry, where it most comes alive. The reason? We hear news of the mid-fifteenth century and come to understand what was valuable to contemporary intellectuals. Translation into Latin stood out enough for its usefulness that Decembrio features names of translators and translation projects of 17 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.5: “Quem ergo mare vastissimum potius dixerim, unde figmentorum varias rationes exciperent.” 18 Ibid., 1.8.6: “Ita non de omnibus quae vel privatim fiunt seu publice dicuntur, poeta noster recensendum excogitavit (ut Homerus Graecorum more dicendi copiosissimus, qui mulierum etiam salsamenta et pultes in heroum gesta contulerit conviviaque deorum et dormitiones cum eorum cubilibus exposuerit), sed ut quaeque pulcherrima visu, magnifica auditu, dignissima relatu forent nec minus ad naturam accomodata demonstravit…” 19 Ibid.: “sicut in floribus apes: quos licet omnes circumvolant, non ab omnibus tamen, sed electissimis nectareos rores excipiunt.” 20 Ibid., 1.8.7.

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which he has heard, using as always Prince Leonello D’Este as a spokesman. Poggio Bracciolini’s translation of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus earns mention, as does Ambrogio Traversari’s translation of Laertius. Both of those instances, too, demonstrate that Decembrio considered the patron of the translation worth mentioning as much as the translator. In the first instance, that of Poggio, King Alfonso is named (“my father-in-law,” Leonello hastens to add), and in the second, that of Traversari, Cosimo de’ Medici.21 Leonello knows that Plato’s Republic was translated “by Uberto Decembrio, the father of our Angelo here”; and, in a perfect exemplification of the way translation could lead to creation, Leonello goes on to mention that Uberto Decembrio “published four books on the Republic in honor of the current Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti.”22 More news, again from Leonello, who says, I hear that in the realm of history Lorenzo Valla is now translating Herodotus and Thucydides, authors whom (whether we have them in Latin or Greek) we should consider among the most outstanding of the Greeks. I also hear that other Latins are translating other Greek authors, like the cosmographer Ptolemy and other ancient Greeks who wrote on arithmetic and astronomy.23

21

Ibid., 1.8.8: “Quanquam et haec a nostris magna ex parte Latine transcripta sentio, praecipueque Paediam Cyri a Poggio pro socero meo rege Alphonso ipsumque Laertium pro insigni cive Florentino Cosmo, Medicorum familiae, a monacho Ambrosio translatum.” On Greek-to-Latin translation, see T. Kircher, “Wrestling with Ulysses: Humanist Translations of Homeric Epic around 1440,” in Neo-Latin and the Humanities: Essays in Honour of Charles E. Fantazzi, ed. L. Deitz, T. Kircher, and J. Reid, Essays and Studies 32 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014), 61–91; S.U. Baldassarri, Umanesimo e traduzione da Petrarca a Manetti (Cassimo: Dimore, 2003); and P. Botley, Latin Translation in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 22 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.8: “Sic in eloquentiae genere Demosthenis et Lisiae Platonisque orationes, quod miror, et epistolae Latinae factae sunt praeter eius decem summi philosophi De Re Publica libros, ut abs te Veronense saepe audivi, per Ubertum Decembrium translatos, huius Angeli nostri genitorem, qui primus Mediolanensium aetate nostra Graecas litteras dicitur ex praeceptore Chrysolora didicisse, idem etiam De Re Publica ex se libros quattuor ad praesentem Insubrium ducem Philippum mariam edidisse.” On Uberto, see J. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1:103–17. 23 Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.8: “Sic in historia transferri nunc audio Herodotum atque Thucydidem a Laurentio Valla (quod seu Latinos seu Graecos habuerimus, inter Graecos tamen auctores uti praestantes recipiamus), alios rursum ab aliis Latinis Graecos

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And Leonello’s final statement on Greek is no less noteworthy: Indeed, after Constantinople was devastated by the barbarous infidels and its ruler, a great man, was slaughtered, and the ruler’s brother had fled with those of his people who were left, it is scarcely believable how many of our own have almost gone Greek! […multi nostrorum paene Graeci effecti sint]. It is as if they’d been educated in Attica or Achaia. They have acquired this ability by carefully studying Greek books. And so our compatriots will immediately distort anything most noteworthy that they find in Greek authors! Enough, then, about the Greeks.24 These last two statements by Leonello are worth singling out for at least three reasons: first, there is Decembrio’s propensity here, as elsewhere, to include contemporary news in a work having ostensibly permanent value. Second, and not unconnected, a sense of unreality, or rather of fictionalized synchrony, pervades his discussion, since neither of these cases—that of the translation projects of Nicholas v, in which Valla’s translations of Herodotus and Thucydides played a role, and that of the fall of Constantinople—was likely to have been known to the real Prince Leonello D’Este. Leonello’s death date of October 1450 might have allowed him to hear murmurings of the translation projects of Nicholas v (pope from 6 March 1447–1455), though Valla did not arrive at the papal court until 1448. But the 1453 fall of Constantinople was still years away when Leonello was alive. He is presented in the dialogue as if he were eternally at his acme, the perfect spokesman and interlocutor, uniting eloquence, wisdom, and wit and serving as the exemplification of “polish.”25

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auctores ut Ptolomeum cosmographum, itemque in arithmetica et astronomia alios Graecorum veteres.” Ibid., 1.8.9: “Nam posteaquam vastata a barbaris infidelibus Constantini civitate caesoque eius imperatore, optimo viro, despotis frater Romam cum gentis eius reliquis confugisset, vix credibile est quam multi nostrorum pene Graeci effecti sint, quasi in Attica vel Achaia consueti, facultatemque compererint Graeca volumina pertractandi. Ita quicquid in auctoribus Graecis optimum nostris apparuerit, e vestigio distorquebitur. Ergo de Graecis satis.” On Greek learning in the Italian Renaissance see F. Ciccolella, Donati Graeci: Learning Greek in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2008); and P. Botley, Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396–1529 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2010). On Leonello (1407–50, r. 1441–50), see W.L. Gundersheimer, Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1973), 92–126; A. Frizzi, Memorie per la storia di Ferrara, 4 vols. (Ferrara: Servado, 1850), 3:489–508; G. Pardi, Leonello d’Este, Marchese di Ferrara (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1904); G. Bertoni, La biblioteca estense e la cultura ferrarese ai tempi del Duca Ercole i (1471–1505) (Torino: Loescher, 1903),

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Leonello’s last two points concerning matters Hellenic come into relief for a third reason, itself worthy of more extended discussion, which can begin with a question: was there Hellenism in the Italian Renaissance? His wrap-up— “Enough then about the Greeks” (Ergo de Graecis satis)—the relatively small place Greek authors occupy in the “polished” library, and the points about the value of Latin translation are, together, enough to answer the question, at least on the surface: no.26 But as is often the case, surfaces can be deceptive. Decembrio mentions Valla’s translation of Herodotus’s Histories. One phrase in that monumental work that Valla would have come across concerns the word hellenikon, “Greekness,” which Herodotus locates in “common bloodlines, common language, altars to the gods and sacrifices shared in common, and common mores and habits.”27 The word “Hellenism” (hellenismos) was first used later by Theophrastus; and ancient uses concentrated mostly on shared language.28 More modern times, however, saw the word “Hellenism” take on more weight (as Arnaldo Momigliano, Luciano Canfora, James Porter, and others have noticed), after the publication of Johann Gustav Droysen’s History of Hellenism (Geschichte des Hellenismus), a multivolume work published from 1836 to 1843.29 There Droysen united a German Romantic appreciation of the ancient Greeks (an appreciation alive since the era of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Joachim Winckelmann) with a political perspective focused on cosmopolitanism. For Droysen, the Hellenistic period (which he basically equated with “Hellenism”) constituted the time from Alexander the Great’s conquests to the takeoff of the Roman Empire, and it represented a transition in the ancient world when (as James Porter has put it)

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7–11, 95–113; Bertoni, Guarino da Verona fra letterati e cortegiani a Ferrara (1429–1460) (Geneva: Olschki, 1921); D. Fava, La biblioteca estense nel suo sviluppo storico (Modena: Vincenzi e Cavalotti, 1925), 23–40; G. Barotti, Memorie istoriche di letterati ferraresi, 3 vols. (Ferrara: Rinaldi, 1792), 1:27–44; E. Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1992), 402–31. For a general statement on this point, see C.S. Celenza, “Hellenism in the Renaissance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, and P. Vasunia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 150–65. Herodotus 8.144.2, cited in J.I. Porter, “Hellenism and Modernity,” in Boys-Stones, Graziosi, and Vasunia, Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, 7. Ibid., 8. J.G. Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus, ed. E. Bayer, 3 vols. (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998); L. Canfora, Ellenismo (Rome: Laterza, 1987); Canfora, “Ideologies of Hellenism,” in BoysStones, Graziosi, and Vasunia, Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, 173–79; A. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, ed. G.W. Bowersock and T. Cornell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Porter, “Hellenism and Modernity.”

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“polis-based citizenship gave way to cosmopolitanism”; when, in other words, certain ideals with roots in classical, fifth-century bce Athens underwent a cultural translation, becoming universal in the ancient Mediterranean world.30 For Droysen, these ideals included “democracy, enlightenment, [and] the doctrine of critique,” and they lay at the foundations, too, of what was best in Roman history.31 The kinds of cultural priorities that animated Droysen and that, indeed, represented the roots of post-Enlightenment German education were not present in fifteenth-century Italy. That Renaissance remained primarily Latinate, as an “everyday” humanist like Decembrio illustrates, even if that century is also studded with luminaries, from Bruni to Poliziano, whose achievements make clear that Greek scholarship could be carried out at a high level. Yet in a subtler way, the senses of cultural translation alive in “Hellenism,” especially Roman Hellenism, were present in fifteenth-century Italy. The simultaneous attraction to and fear of what was different, new, and seductive in Greek culture runs through ancient Roman literature. Here, again, is Horace, this time in his Epistle to Augustus: “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis/intulit agresti Latio” (Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium).32 This verse (and a half) can be paired with the famous speech of Anchises to Aeneas in the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: Others will hammer out bronzes that breathe in more lifelike and gentler ways, I suspect, create truer expressions of life out of marble, make better speeches, or plot, with the sweep of their compass, the heaven’s movements, predict the ascent of the sky’s constellations. Well, let them! You, who are Roman, recall how to govern mankind with your power. These will be your special “Arts”: the enforcement of peace as habit, mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men.33 Virgil’s epic of “transitivity,” as Thomas Greene put it, included numerous episodes that called “attention to their Greek provenience and specifically to their Homeric provenience,” something that Decembrio himself noticed when he 30 Porter, “Hellenism and Modernity,” 10. 31 Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus, 3:9; Porter, “Hellenism and Modernity,” 10. 32 Horace, Epistles 2.1, trans. H.R. Fairclough; cited in A. Barchiesi, “Roman Perspectives on the Greeks,” in Boys-Stones, Graziosi, and Vasunia, Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, 98–113, at 103. 33 Virgil, Aeneid 6.847–53, trans. Ahl, cited in Barchiesi, “Roman Perspectives,” 105.

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wrote that “it is clear enough that our Virgil did take certain images from the Iliad and the Odyssey, as if from original patterns. Such cases include the praises of Augustus, the way Virgil tells of Aeneas’s wanderings in a winding fashion, and the way he plots out the Trojans’ war with Turnus.”34 But in that famous passage from the Aeneid, set in the underworld, Anchises makes it clear to Aeneas where precisely the Roman genius is to lie: in the arts of power, an ideal that, in its blending together of rusticity, masculinity, and brevity, underlay much of Latinity’s appeal, not only for ancient Romans but also for fifteenth-century Italians. It is an ideal that Decembrio tries to exemplify in the character of Prince Leonello. Returning to the Horatian quotation, “Turn the pages of Greek books day and night,” one can say that, for Decembrio, Greek texts served as only a small part of the “polished” library. Decembrio stands out now for his straightforward acceptance of an idealized Roman virtus, his proclivity toward an exclusive if undefined classicizing Latinity, and his limited vision of the place of Hellenic material. In this instance at least, he, and his idealized interlocutors, can serve as representatives of the fifteenth century’s majority tendency. 34

T.M. Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1982), 66, cited in Barchiesi, “Roman Perspectives,” 100; Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1.8.5: “Ex Iliade igitur et Odyssea satis liquet Maronem nostrum veluti exemplaribusque exempla sumpsisse, quibus de Augusti laudibus insinuando Aeneae errores bellumque Troianorum cum Turno meditaretur.”

chapter 23

A New World of Books: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina William H. Sherman I came to the Biblioteca Colombina (like so many other aspects of Renaissance culture) through the peculiar medium of John Dee. In some ways, this is entirely appropriate: as one of Elizabethan England's greatest book collectors, and one of its most active advisers on navigational and imperial affairs, Dee was perhaps uniquely well positioned to appreciate the universal library assembled by Christopher Columbus's second son Hernando (or Ferdinand), in which the acquisition and annotation of books was closely bound up with the exploration and conquest of new worlds. Indeed, as my own research on Renaissance libraries began to shift from a narrow focus on Dee to a much more general survey of people, places, and practices, my rediscovery of Dee's copy of Hernando's infamous life of his famous father, the History…of the Life & Deeds of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, seemed almost providential. As I explained in my chapter on this volume in my study of Renaissance marginalia, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, the annotations document Dee’s attempts to come to terms with both the imperial legacy of the father and the bibliographical legacy of the son. And yet in other ways, this angle of approach was unfortunate: a training in the literature and culture of Renaissance England has left me ill equipped to map the wider world of the Renaissance library in general and the Spanish scene in particular. Most Anglophone book historians know next to nothing about Hernando and his remarkable collection; and it is rarely mentioned (much less studied) in our standard histories of libraries, collections, and information science. The scale of our collective amnesia becomes immediately apparent when we remember that Hernando's library contained more than fifteen thousand books and more than three thousand prints by the time of his death in 1539—making it roughly four times as large as the collection created by Dee in the second half of the sixteenth century. And it's not just the size of the Biblioteca Colombina that gives it such an important place in history: the methods by which it was acquired, organized, and mobilized give it a strong claim to being the birthplace of modern bibliography. In 2004–5, the British Museum published a cd-rom and companion study of Hernando’s print collection, and their editor, Mark McDonald, claimed that “The classification systems that

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_024

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Ferdinand devised to catalogue and access his collections are unique and predate any other systematic attempt to organise a collection…”1 And Hernando’s will contains so much detail about the creation and perpetuation of his library that one scholar has gone so far as to call it the first modern treatise on library economy.2 Much of the library survives, more or less intact, in the Institución Colombina next door to the cathedral in Seville—just steps from the lavish tombs of Columbus and his son.3 Hernando himself drafted the design for the elaborate inscription on his own monument, and it is preserved in the original draft of his will dated 3 July 1539. The middle section suggests that Hernando wanted to be remembered, above all, for two things: first, for being the son of Columbus, whose coat of arms he featured proudly, with its bold motto “a castilla y a leon mundo nuevo dio colon” (To the Kingdom of Castile and Leon, Columbus gave a New World); and second, for giving his countrymen unparalleled access to the new world of print. The four open books he hung around the escutcheon represented not the individual volumes in the library but rather the set of astonishingly detailed catalogs he created to make them useful, providing the period's most comprehensive guide (as the labels indicate) to its “Authors,” “Subjects,” “Epitomes,” and “Materials.” Hernando was born in Córdoba during the summer of 1488. Christopher Columbus lived with but never married Hernando’s mother, a shadowy figure named Beatriz Enriquez. Fortunately, the admiral later filed the necessary papers for Hernando’s legitimation (allowing him to inherit a great deal of money). In 1502, at the age of thirteen, Hernando joined his father for the last of his four voyages to the West Indies (where they spent more than two years exploring the Caribbean islands and the Central American coast). But 1 Mark P. McDonald, The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539), 2 vols. with CD-Rom (London: British Museum, 2004); McDonald, Ferdinand Columbus: Renaissance Collector (London: British Museum, 2005), 14. Cf. the essays by McDonald and David Landau in Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750, ed. Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick (Aldershot: Ashgate, in association with The Burlington Magazine, 2003). 2 Klaus Wagner, La biblioteca colombina en tiempos de Hernando Colón (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1992); cf. José Fernández Sánchez, Historia de la bibliografía en España (Madrid: Ministerio Cultura, 1983). 3 In celebration of the Columbian quincentenary of 1992, the Institución Colombina embarked on a comprehensive catalog of the library: see T. Marín Martínez, J.M. Ruiz Asencio, and K. Wagner, Catálogo concordado de la Biblioteca de Hernando Colón (Seville: Institución Colombina, 1993–). But the untimely death of Wagner and the loss of funding meant that the project reached only the first few letters of the alphabet.

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Hernando left the maritime world to his older brother Diego, who would become the second admiral of the Indies and spend most of his life governing the region from his base in the Dominican Republic. After an unsuccessful bid for a voyage of circumnavigation in 1511, Hernando’s professional life kept him in Europe, where he joined the diplomatic retinues of the Spanish royal family and the Hapsburg emperors. This position took him on regular missions abroad, and he used these trips to buy the latest books from the leading centers of printing. In almost all of the books that survive from his library today, he scrupulously recorded the circumstances of his purchase at the end of the volume. A typical inscription can be found on the last page of a book he bought late in his life, a medieval French romance called Guillaume de Palerme, printed in Paris and purchased in Lyon in August 1535: Hernando recorded both the price he paid for the book (24 dineros) and the current exchange rate (it took 570 copper dineros to equal 1 gold ducado).4 Such notes not only introduce us to Hernando's meticulous archival habits but also have allowed scholars to track his physical movements with unusual precision. Where Columbus made four voyages in search of new lands, in fact, his son would make four voyages in search of new books.5 His first trip took him around Italy between September 1512 and July 1516, giving him an opportunity to buy books in Rome and Florence. His second trip was shorter but far more ambitious, and it began in the summer of 1520, when Charles V sailed to the Low Countries to be crowned emperor. We do not know if Hernando accompanied him for all or part of his journey, but he was certainly buying books in Brussels and Ghent in July and August. In November he was in Mainz, and in Worms in January to February of 1521. From there he went to Strasbourg and Basel. During March, April, and May he made his way across northern Italy, stopping at Milan, Genoa, Pavia, Cremona, and Ferrara, finally arriving at Venice, where he stayed until October. Then he went north via Padua, Treviso, and Trent. We can trace his progress from December 1521 to June 1522 through Nürnberg, Wurzburg, Frankfurt, Mainz, Cologne, Leuven, and Bruges to England, where he visited Southampton and London before finally returning to Seville. This trip was particularly noteworthy because so much of it took him 4 Reproduced in Mercedes Delgado Pérez, Hernando Colón: decurso histórico de un hombre y su biblioteca (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, Innovación, Educación y Universidades, 2004), 51. The volume itself is class mark Sign. topogr. 1-2-16. 5 The trips have been carefully reconstructed by Klaus Wagner: see his “El itinerario de Hernando Colón según sus anotaciones: Datos para la biografía del bibliófilo sevillano,” Archivo Hispalense 203 (1984): 81–99.

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through Protestant territories, and—somewhat surprisingly for a devoutly Catholic emissary—his library would eventually contain more than five hundred works by 175 Protestant authors. Up until 1526, he had been storing his books in the house of his aunt; but that year he settled permanently in Seville and moved his library and household into a new complex in a prime location at the bend of the Guadalquivir River, just outside the gate to the city known as the Puerta de Goles. There was a large garden that ran down to the river and reportedly contained some five thousand trees—roughly a thousand fewer than the number of books in his library at this date. Even more impressive is the fact that in the remaining thirteen years of his life he would acquire nearly ten thousand more books. In 1530 he returned to Italy, stopping in Bologna and Venice in the winter and spring, Perugia and Rome in the summer, and Cesena, Modena, Piacenza, and Genoa in the fall. He spent 1531 traveling through northern Italy to Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries before returning to Spain in December. His fourth and final trip (from July 1535 to May 1536) was evidently his first and only visit to neighboring France, where he acquired most of the French books in his library. But Hernando’s four shopping sprees cannot account for the huge numbers of books he was acquiring in the 1520s and 1530s. Exploiting his courtly and commercial contacts, Hernando created a network of booksellers, bankers, merchants, and seamen to send the newest titles to Seville. In his will, he described the workings of the system he set in motion: First, since all types of books printed in the Christian World are brought by book dealers to one of six cities, to wit, Rome, Venice, Nürnberg, Antwerp, Paris, and Lyon…therefore, I say that, by intercession of merchants who dwell here in Seville, contact must be made with some important banker in Lyon and with whom the sum of 100 ducados [should] be deposited. He, then, must write his correspondents in the other five cities and tell them to contract with a well-known book dealer… for the delivery in the month of April of a quantity of books to the value of 12 ducados at the market price among the book dealers, the books being the latest published and not reeditions.…every six years or so…the trustee should send one of the catalogers of the library by sea to Naples, so that there he may, from shop to shop and from book to book, see if there is anything not in the library and acquire it, writing in the back of each piece, as I have done, the name of the book dealers contacted, the place, date, and cost of acquisition.…I say that those between Naples and Florence should be brought together in Rome, from where they should be

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delivered to the agent in Cadiz. From Florence he will go to Bologna and repeat the process…, then to Modena and Arezzo, to Parma and to Valencia, to Pavia and to Milan.…From Milan he will go to Lodi and from Lodi to Cremona and from Cremona to Mantua and from Mantua to Venice and from Venice to Padua and from Padua to Treviso: the books from all these cities will be gathered in Venice, as it is easy to ship the books by the river or the canals that link most of these cities with Venice, where they can be entrusted to an agent…who [can] send them in… some…vessel destined for Cadiz.6 During his life, Hernando was obsessed with theft, and in his will he described a novel arrangement for keeping the books in place without resorting to chains: I have the hope, should our Lord allow me life and opportunity, to build a [large room with] great cases up against the walls…with the books arranged in them…each with its title and number. And, six feet from the wall…will run all around a grille, so that whoever enters the room cannot touch the books. On the interior of this grille, facing toward the books, will be a shelf at a level similar to that found in bookshops, on which all the books on a subject will be placed [when needed. On the exterior of the grille, toward the middle of the room, there will be a bench a foot from the grille where visitors to the library can sit… In front of them there will be bars through which they can put their hands to turn the pages]… he who is charged to keep the library will place the requested book on the shelf [behind the grille] and return it to its place when the reader is finished.7 Hernando acknowledged that some readers would complain about the inconvenience of these arrangements, but he explained that since he was creating what was in effect the first deposit or copyright library, sureness of preservation was more important than ease of access. No grilles or bars were installed by the custodians of the cathedral library, where Hernando's collection ended up, and over the next few centuries many of the books would be sold or stolen, so that only a few thousand survive today. 6 José Hernández Díaz and Antonio Muro Orejón, eds., El testamento de Don Hernando Colón y otros documentos para su biografía (Seville: Instituto Hispano-Cubano de Historia de America, 1941), 156–57. I am grateful to Timothy D. Crowley for his generous assistance with this and other Spanish texts. 7 Ibid., 148–49.

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Among them, however, are almost all of the crucial volumes collectively known as the repertorios, the bibliographical reference books that served as the guides to Hernando’s book and print collections, and that were so central to his methods and goals as a collector that he had them engraved in brass alongside his coat of arms on his tomb. At the head of the list sits the most detailed register of the contents of the library, compiled more or less in order of acquisition.8 It is known as “Register B” and is simply described as the “Numbered Index of the Books.” But it is far more than this. The level of bibliographical description is extremely unusual for this period, and Hernando and his team developed an elaborate system of symbols and abbreviations to facilitate their work. There were more than a hundred such symbols, and Hernando's early librarian Juan Perez devoted the better part of a book to explaining how they worked. Among the abbreviations, for instance, we find several that indicate how fully a subject was treated: a “b” (for brebiter) meant “briefly,” a “d” meant “diffuse,” and “p t” (for “per totum”) was reserved only for complete coverage. A “P” indicated that there was a prologue, an “E” an epistle, and “Ep” an epigram. There were other symbols for describing the size or format of books (indicating large paper, folio, quarto, and octavo), and still others for recording the number of sheets or pages and the layout of the text (including the number of columns and the presence/location of chapter summaries, tables of contents, or indexes). There were symbols for distinguishing between verse and prose, for describing the quality of the handwriting (in the case of manuscripts), for indicating imperfections and even stains. Perez suggested that these marks were useful not only for users of the library but for the librarians themselves: the descriptions would allow them to quickly determine whether new editions of existing texts contained materials beyond what they already had, and the descriptions would also help them to avoid deception by booksellers (who, he says, were always trying to pass off old editions as new ones). The chief index of the library was called “Register B” because the original “Register A” was devoted to a closed category whose title sounds like a novel by Umberto Eco—La Memorial de los Libros Naufragados, or “The Memorial of Books Lost in Shipwrecks.” This list of nearly two thousand books, mostly acquired in 1520 or 1521, was prepared before they were shipped from Italy back to Spain, as detailed invoices in the event of damage or loss during the voyage (which is, of course, exactly what happened). 8 The fullest description of the repertorios is T. Marín Martínez, Memoria de las obras y libros de Hernando Colón del Bachiller Juan Pérez (Madrid: Cátedra de Paleografía y Diplomática, 1970).

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There is a separate Relacion de dibujos y pinturas, which describes 3,204 prints, paintings, and other images, all organized by a hierarchical system of subjects. And since these detailed descriptions in the registers or relations were in numerical rather than alphabetical order, Hernando began to create three other guides to help people find their way more quickly to specific books or topics. The General Alphabetical Index simply listed names of authors, titles of works, and incipits; the Alphabetical Index of Authors and Works gave only the briefest of listings by name and title; and the Alphabetical Index of Authors by Subject was, as the title suggests, a concise list of subject headings with the names of relevant authors. The second class of catalog is the one that required most work from Hernando and his assistants. There were three separate books of abstracts. The first was called the Book of Epitomes, and it provided brief summaries of the contents of each volume. The second was called the Book of Materials, and it compiled extracts from the books capturing their principal points in more or less random order. This grew into a Book of Propositions, where the most important extracts were entered more systematically in alphabetical order. And there was one other resource that belongs in this section, but it was lost when the library moved to the cathedral, and there’s nothing at all to show from it. Perez called it the “Annotations,” and described it as a collection of cataloging notes on slips of paper for the first ten thousand volumes, like a modern card file but held together with string.9 Finally, there were two other reference works that do not fit into any particular category but are closely related both to each other and to Hernando’s master plan for mapping the world of knowledge. The first is his Cosmographical Index of Spain. It was an ambitious project started in 1517 and steadily compiled as his emissaries made their itineraries around the kingdom; but it was brought to a halt in 1523 by an edict from the crown (which was always uneasy about the geographical expansion of the ever-more-powerful Columbus family, which could be seen as serving their own financial interests rather than the political interests of the state). The incomplete text was not published until the early twentieth century, and Hernando’s most recent biographer has called it the first geographical dictionary of Spain. 9 For such methods see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2011). And for more on the use of paper slips within Renaissance reference materials, see John Considine, “Cutting and Pasting Slips: Early Modern Compilation and Information Management,” in The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading, ed. Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45:3 (September 2015), 487–504.

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Around the same time, Hernando began compiling another dictionary of a more traditional kind, one devoted to difficult Latin words. A note at the beginning records, with characteristic precision, that the volume was started in “Segovia, on Monday the 6th of September 1518 at 8 in the morning.” It is an alphabetical list of Latin words with translations, in some cases with phonetic or morphological commentary and citations from relevant works. It may be difficult to get a clear sense of how this powerful bibliographical machinery worked in practice from this rapid overview; so before I close with some general considerations about the kind of library Hernando created, I’d like to take a closer look at what he did with a single volume. If we walk along the shelves of the library today, with their rows of uniform vellum bindings, we will eventually come to an edition of Seneca’s ten tragedies, published in Venice on 29 October 1510.10 Hernando was interested in Seneca not only because of his status in the canon of classical literature, but also because he evidently came (like Hernando himself) from Córdoba. Hernando read the volume very actively and covered many of its pages with learned annotations— including the title page, where he entered a long set of surprisingly technical notes about the meter used by Seneca in his poetry. On the front flyleaves of the book he carefully summarized first the life of Seneca and then the plot of each of the volume’s ten plays. His summary covered the first page of the first play, Hercules Furens, continuing around the outside of the page and even between the lines of Seneca’s text. And at the bottom of the book’s last page (as was his custom), he recorded the details of his purchase and the circumstances of his reading: This book cost 4 reales and 2 for the binding, in Valladolid in March, 1518.…Saturday the 6th of March, 1518, I began to read this book and to enter the notes in the index in Valladolid and, distracted by many jobs and journeys I was not able to finish until Saturday the 8th of July, 1520, in Brussels…Wednesday January 19, 1524, between 12 and 1 I returned one more time to enter the additional annotations that have two little virgules and the underlined words… Here he noted that the book is to be found in the register as number 478; and the relevant entry in Register B provides us with details of the author, title, commentaries, apologias, and epistles, along with the format, the date and place of publication, and the date, place, and price of his purchase. Finally, there are long entries for Seneca’s plays—and the accompanying commentaries of 10

Class mark Sign.: 1.4.19. See the Catálogo de la Biblioteca, item 478 (fol. 95).

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Marmita and Gaietanus—in both the Book of Epitomes and the Book of Propositions. You can see why Juan Perez was not just paying lip service when he praised his master’s investment of time and money in study (both to “realize his [own] talents” and to “facilitate [access to all] the sciences” by others). Hernando’s energies as a collector, organizer, and user of books certainly put him in a class of his own. But his purposes were far from purely personal, and his goal (as Mark McDonald put it) was not “meaningless accumulation” but “meaningful access” to all available knowledge on every conceivable subject. As he approached his death he began to imagine that his library could form the foundation for a state institution—the first national center in Spain where all of the best books could be gathered and preserved, and where a team of salaried scholar-librarians could continue the work he had begun of arranging and abstracting them. On 20 November 1536, he sent to Emperor Charles v a proposal for the conservation and continuation of his library: …that there should be in the kingdom a certain place where all books of every branch of knowledge which treat of the Christian world and even outside of it should be collected, something…which up to the present no prince has been known to have ordered to be done.…that there may be information about such authors in all parts he, with the officials and persons of letters whom he has with him, may reduce to alphabetical order all the authors who have written [texts]. [Also] to make another book of the general sciences divided by titles, that is, theology, common law, and civil law…[And] that there may be more knowledge of what these books treat, other books are to be made in which the sum and substance of what is contained in each book will be put down as the digest of such a book, so that whoever reads this digest may know whether it satisfies his need of hunting for it and reading all of it or whether the digest is sufficient, as it is impossible to read the multitude of books written in each branch of knowledge. So [that] in time the library will come to possess all the books that can be obtained, and all that is written can be reduced to alphabetical order in other books as stated above to the end that each [visitor] may be easily instructed in what he wishes to know.11 Once again, the crown saw to it that Hernando’s ambitions would not be fulfilled.

11

Juan Guillén, Historia de las Bibliotecas Capitular y Colombina (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2004), 153.

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This plan for mastering the world of knowledge was, however, revived by Charles V’s son Philip, who would build Spain’s first royal library in his palace at San Lorenzo de Escorial near Madrid, between 1563 and 1584. A recent study and catalog of Philip’s acquisitions in the years leading up to the creation of the Escorial depicts its creator as once again under the spell of the “Universal Library” first made possible and then (increasingly) impossible by the advent of printing.12 Philip did not need to create his own catalogs, as Hernando had: in 1545 he could buy Conrad Gessner’s massive list of authors and titles, the Bibliotheca universalis printed that year. The pace of Philip’s acquisitions picked up dramatically in 1545, and it no doubt did so under the direct influence of Gessner’s catalog. Once it was installed in the Escorial, Philip’s library became, in effect, the National Library, and the Colombina began its steady slide into obscurity. If we visit the library in the Escorial today, our eyes are instantly drawn upward to the brightly colored paintings on the ceiling, designed by the Italian painter Pellegrino Tibaldi around a scheme featuring the seven liberal arts and the nine muses.13 But if we lower our eyes to the shelves that run along the outer wall, we find an echo of the Columbus family’s legacy. In designing the bookshelves, the palace’s architect, Juan de Herrera, completely encased the books in exotic wood that came from the New World first encountered and claimed for the Spanish kings by Christopher Columbus. While Hernando chose a very different path from that pursued by his father, he set out to extend his father’s worldly legacy. The modern edition of the memoir by Hernando's librarian Juan Perez concludes by drawing out this parallel: if his father, at his death in 1506, had left the geographic knowledge of the world doubled or in the process of being so, it was his son, to an infinitely greater extent, [who] recomposed and augmented the field of human learning and its bibliographic manifestations through the books he so ardently collected and particularly through the Repertorios on which he laboured so obsessively.14 12

13 14

Gregorio de Andrés, La Real Biblioteca de El Escorial (Madrid: Aldus, 1970). He was here following the lead of Hernando, whose collecting habits look very different from those of the great fifteenth-century bibliophiles: well over 90 percent of the books he acquired were printed rather than handwritten, making him the first major collector to take full and systematic advantage of the new opportunities for library building created by the printing press. Carmen Gardia-Frias Checa, La pintura mural y de caballete en la biblioteca del real monasterio de El Escorial (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 1991). Hernando Colon, Abecedarium B y Supplementum, ed. Tomás Marín Martínez (Madrid: Cabildo de la Catedral de Sevilla, 1992), 21.

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And this is exactly how Hernando himself hoped to be remembered. At the bottom of the memorial he designed for his tomb, just below his father’s coat of arms and his four exemplary catalogs, he wrote an eight-line Latin elegy that paired his father's global travels with his own travails in time and space, reviving the ancient dream of a universal library through the new medium of the printed book: Behold, what use is it to have sweated through the whole world and to have traveled thrice through my father’s new world,…to have esteemed less my comfort and wealth so that I could make accessible to you the divinities of the Castalian spring and at the same time the riches offered by Ptolemy [Soter, creator of the mythical library of Alexandria], if hurrying past this stone with at least a slight murmur you don’t say farewell to my father and me?15 15

I am grateful to G.W. Pigman iii for his sensitive translation of Hernando’s Latin poem.

chapter 24

The Rediscovered Third Volume of Conrad Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” Urs B. Leu For a number of years insiders have known of the existence of several plant drawings with handwritten annotations by Conrad Gessner held by the Tartu University Library in Estonia. But nobody knew exactly how many of these illustrations had belonged to his personal collection, and which parts of the three Tartu volumes with plant illustrations and scattered manuscript notes by Gessner had something to do with Gessner and Zurich.1 Did all three volumes belong to Gessner or were they composed later? A research trip helped to solve the questions. Since 1555, at the very latest, Gessner had planned to publish a history of plants, but in a briefer and crisper format than that of the Historia animalium.2 He was convinced that his work would be better than the wellknown herbal written by Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66) from Tübingen.3 Throughout his life he was eager to get good pictures and descriptions of as many plants as possible. His correspondence is full of passages in which he begs his colleagues and friends to send him pictures, dried plants, seeds, fruits, roots, and other valuable things for his collection. Ten years before he died, he already possessed a huge collection of around a thousand plant drawings.4 Gessner was the first or one of the first scholars who tried to figure out a

1 2

3 4

The librarian of the Tartu University Library in Estonia, Mare Rand, and Mare Ermel (Head of the Manuscript Department) were aware of the treasure discussed in this essay and invited me to analyze their relevant holdings in September 2013. I thank both of them for their kind collaboration and hospitality. Mare Rand will publish a separate description of this find in the Festschrift for the Baltic scholar Arvo Tering, edited by Hanspeter Marti. The results I publish here are my own research. The three volumes have the call numbers ms 55 (with 147 leaves), 56 (49 leaves), and 57 (45 leaves). Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in SixteenthCentury Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 141. Gessner to Adolph Occo (4 Dec. 1565), in Conrad Gessner, Epistolarum medicinalium…libri iii (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer d. J., 1577), fols. 55v–58r. Gessner to Kentmann (16 Mar. 1558), in Conrad Gessner, Epistolarum medicinalium…liber quartus (Wittenberg: Simon Gronenberg, 1582), fols. A3v–4r.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_025

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systematic order of the plants, based on morphological studies of the flowers, fruits, and roots.5 He therefore attached great importance to the fact that these elements were depicted with absolute accuracy. His amazing collection of plant drawings, preserved in the university libraries of Erlangen and Tartu, shows that he received quite a lot of plant pictures from friends and colleagues and that he added, in his own hand, morphological details on a very high artistic level. Mostly he used one sheet of paper per plant. He recorded the donor, the location, and the habitat of the plant and gave occasional advice to the carver of the woodcuts for publication. The paintings were variously made by himself, by a painter working for him, by the donor, or by unknown persons and artists. Gessner also tried to obtain drawings of the fruits, flowers, blossoms, seeds, and roots of every plant. He wrote on 24 April 1564 to Theodor Zwinger in Basel that it would be easier to identify a single plant if one had all these details, adding that one could avoid long and complicated descriptions if one had good images instead.6 A couple of months later he mentioned in a letter to Adolph Occo, of 18 November 1564, that he tries to recognize a relationship between the plants according to the form of their seeds.7 So every sheet of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” represents something like a “philological” locus, and the whole three-volume compendium can be compared with a botanical loci collection. Within this context the recently rediscovered third volume is of great interest and value, because it gives a further insight into how he worked. By contrast with the Historia animalium, for which we have five printed volumes but only a few records of Gessner’s work on them before publication, for the “Historia plantarum” only the preliminary studies have survived. Gessner wrote on the first page of the first volume of the Tartu volumes (ms 55): “Icones stirpium Io. Kentmanni quas Con. Gesnero communicavit, ad eius exemplar depictus.” Below he added some short annotations on single leaves, as for example on leaf 76, noting that the painter had made a mistake there. On folio 76 Gessner described the painter’s fault in some detail, pointing out that the colors were not correctly chosen and that the whole drawing was too rough and bulky. This note makes it clear that Gessner did not depict these plants himself—or at least not only himself—and that he engaged other artists.8 On leaf 146, the last page of the

5 Heinrich Zoller, “Conrad Gessner als Botaniker,” in Conrad Gessner 1516–1565, Universalgelehrter, Naturforscher, Arzt, ed. Hans Fischer et al. (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1965), 57–63. 6 Gessner, Epistolarum medicinalium…libri iii, fols. 107v–8r. 7 Ibid., fols. 65r–66v. 8 Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 145–47.

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volume with a plant drawing, Gessner wrote: “HACTENUS Ex libro Io. Kentmanni.” He indicated thus that the whole volume was copied from a collection of paintings sent by the German physician Johannes Kentmann from Torgau to Gessner. That volume must be the codex that Gessner sent back to Kentmann on 16 March 1555, together with a letter beginning with the following wording: “Remitto tibi, optime Kentmanne, librum tuum illum pulcherrimum, quo stirpium et animalium icones permultas et raras diligenter complexus es: ac pro hoc beneficio gratias tibi immortales habeo.” (I send back to you, excellent Kentmann, this your most beautiful book, in which you have diligently gathered very many and rare images of plants and animals: and for this help I am eternally grateful to you.)9 That Codex Kentmanus is still extant and belongs to the holdings of the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar.10 A comparison of the drawings from the Codex Kentmanus and the Tartu Codex confirms this analysis.11 Gessner and his collaborators did not copy the whole volume, but evidently only the plants, which were particularly interesting for Gessner. He compared the pictures with other materials and added morphological studies for a deeper understanding of the specimens and their relationship to other plants (Figures 24.1 and 24.2). He sometimes refers in his handwritten annotations to the other two volumes of his plant drawings, which are today preserved in the University Library in Erlangen. So he wrote, for example, on leaf 1 (verso) of the Tartu Codex, about the picture of a palm tree, that he possessed another illustration of this tree in “G 155b,” which means “Gesneri historia plantarum, fol. 155v,” in Erlangen. On leaf 7 (verso) of the Tartu Codex he mentions that he owns a better painting of this Chrysanthemon in “alio libro 194 a das ander [= the other],” which corresponds with the second volume, folio 194r, of the “Historia plantarum” preserved in Erlangen.12 These cross-references demonstrate that the two Erlangen volumes of the “Historia plantarum” and the third volume of his plant drawings in Tartu belong together. That third volume was later mentioned by the botanist Casimir Christoph

9 Gessner, Epistolarum medicinalium…liber quartus, fol. A3v. 10 Call number Fol 323, Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar. See also Sachiko Kusukawa, “Image, Text and Observatio: The Codex Kentmanus,” Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 445–75. 11 The Codex Kentmanus is published on the internet: http://ora-web.swkk.de/digimo _online/digimo.entry?source=digimo.Digitalisat_anzeigen&a_id=1025. 12 See the facsimile edition, Heinrich Zoller et al., ed., Conradi Gesneri historia plantarum… (Dietikon: Urs Graf, 1972–80), 1:54, 76–77.

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Figure 24.1

On the right the cedar in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” (ms 55, fol. 41r, Tartu University Library,) and on the left the original drawing by Johannes Kentmann (Fol 323, fol. 51v, Codex Kentmanus, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar). The similarity of the pictures is clear. Typically, Gessner added more information and pictures to each plant drawing, so every sheet of his “Historia plantarum” became a part of a botanical loci collection.

Schmiedel (1718–91) from Nürnberg.13 In the middle of the eighteenth century the botanical Nachlass of Gessner was preserved in Nürnberg, together with the Tartu Codex, but the latter was sold to the physician Johann Georg Schneider from Hof before it came into the possession of Tartu University Library, one of the most important German-Baltic universities of the nineteenth century.14 The connection between Gessner’s copy of the Codex Kentmanus (ms 55) and the other two Tartu codices with plant drawings of the early modern period (call numbers ms 56 and 57) is not clear. Both of them contain paintings with handwritten notes by Gessner—the former on two,15 the latter on nine sheets.16 An illustration on leaf 18 of the codex ms 57 is dated from the year 13 14 15 16

Casimir Christoph Schmiedel, ed., Conradi Gesneri Opera botanica, pars prima (Nürnberg: Johann Joseph Fleischmann, 1751), liii. Malle Salupere, Tartu (Dorpat), Eine tausendjährige junge Kulturstadt (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2005). ms 56, fols. 2, 34. ms 57, fols. 4, 5, 14, 23, 25, 27, 41, 61, 70.

The third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum”

Figure 24.2

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On the right the tulip in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” (ms 55, fol. 3r, Tartu University Library) and on the left the original drawing by Johannes Kentmann (Fol 323, fol. 16v, Codex Kentmanus, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar).

1590, and shows that this collection was composed after Gessner’s death and may have little to do with the polymath from Zurich. It is true that the eleven pictures mentioned belonged to his inheritance and came after his death to Nürnberg, along with all his botanical papers and drawings, but they were bound together with other illustrations by other scholars. As is clear from the letter written by Gessner to Kentmann on 16 March 1555, the Codex Kentmanus contained drawings not only of plants, but also of animals; and indeed the Kentmann-Codex of the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar consists of seven parts. The full title is “Plantarum atque animantium nunquam hactenus impressarum imagines, partim in Italia, partim in aliis regionibus collectae, et ad vivum expressae…a Ioanne Kentmanno Medico 1549.” The subtitles for the single parts are • Herbarum fruticum, arborum nondum ab aliquo depictarum centuria prima • Herbarum fruticum, arborum nondum ab aliquo depictarum centuria secunda 1549

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• Animantium imagines, scilicet quadrupedum et avium, ad vivum expressae, a Ioanne Kentmano D. Medico 1557 • Animalium aquatilium in mari et dulcibus aquis degentium, Icones ad vivum expressae, a Ioanne Kentmano Medico 1549 • Icones stirpium impressae a Theophilo Kentmano Medico 1583 • Botanatomia, sive Rhizotomia plantarum partes singulas exacte depingens, ad intelligendum Dioscoridem necessaria, sive Anatomia stirpium botanicos terminus declarans 1583 • Locus et tempus quibus plantae nostris regionibus familiares verius proveniunt, ac summe vigent, in gratiam pharmacopoerum et herbilegae…1583 The last three titles were written or composed by Kentmann’s son Theophilus (1552–1610). This list makes clear that in 1555 Gessner saw only the drawings of plants and of aquatic animals assembled in 1549. From the collection of the more than 200 plant drawings (centuria prima et secunda) he and the artists involved copied only 142 illustrations; the rest seem not to have been of interest to Gessnser, perhaps because he already owned enough pictures of those species. Gessner arranged the images in the Tartu Codex in a different sequence than they have in the Codex Kentmanus, perhaps according to his new ideas of a botanical system of his devising about which we know very little—which he described as based on the forms of seeds.17 Gessner placed at the top of the leaves of the Tartu Codex an abbreviated reference to the Codex Kentmanus; for example, in the case of the tulip, K. I. 16, meaning Codex Kentmanus, Centuria prima, leaf 16 (see Fig. 24.2). Of special interest are several plant drawings of Ranunculus thora (described by Dioscorides as Aconitum) on leaves 96v and 97r of the Tartu Codex. The specimen of leaf 96v is a copy from the Codex Kentmanus (fol. 55r), but in both codices the plant shows no flowers (in the Codex Kentmanus the flowers were added later). In the Tartu Codex Gessner wrote beside the plant that the flower could be seen in his work on night-shining plants.18 A drawing with a small bloom sent by his pupil Alexander Peyer from Schaffhausen served as a model.19 Leaf 97r of the Tartu Codex features much better pictures of Ranunculus thora, which were published posthumously in 1577 (Figure  24.3).20 The bigger of 17 18 19 20

Gessner to Occo, 18 Nov. 1564, in Gessner, Epistolarum medicinalium…libri iii, fols. 65r–66v. Conrad Gessner, De raris et admirandis herbis, quae sive quod noctu luceant, sive alias ob causas, Lunariae nominantur (Zurich: Andreas und Jakob Gessner, 1555), 39. Peyer’s original drawing is kept in the first volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” in the University Library in Erlangen. See Zoller et al., Conradi Gesneri historia plantarum, 1:20. Conrad Gessner, De aconito primo Dioscoridis…(Zurich: Christoph Froschauer d. J., 1577), fol. 4r.

The third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum”

Figure 24.3

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On the left Ranunculus thora ( formerly Aconitum) in the third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” (ms 55, fol. 97r, Tartu University Library) and on the right the publication from 1577 (Conrad Gessner, De aconito primo Dioscoridis…) Zurich: Christoph Froschauer d. J., 1577, fol. 4r

the two drawings was sent to Gessner by the physician Aloysius Quadri from Monte Generoso in the canton of Ticino, the smaller by the pharmacist Caspar Collin (1520–61) from Valais. These drawings are very interesting because they document the dispute—which lasted more than two decades—on the identification of Aconitum mentioned by Dioscorides and the increasing knowledge about this plant, but even today it is not absolutely clear, which plant was described by the greek physician.21 As we have seen, Gessner arranged his plant studies on single sheets into book form in three volumes, in preparation for publication: Pictures were essential for Gessner throughout the course of his study and investigation of plants over space and time. His drawings and annotations helped him to create an object of study from a variety of 21

This dispute is extensively described in Candice Delisle, “The Letter: Private Text or Public Place? The Mattioli-Gesner Controversy about the aconitum primum,” Gesnerus 61 (2004): 161–76; and Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 162–77.

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sources.…The sheets of drawings functioned as slips of commonplaces that were the basis of compiling a book. Indeed, Gessner’s drawings were “bookish” also in the sense that their annotations pointed to other printed books as references or questions to be answered. Books thus shaped the way in which he organized his knowledge of plants in his drawings, even before their publication.22 Apart from these paintings common to the picture collections of Gessner and Kentmann, the two scholars pursued the same goal. Both studied the three kingdoms of nature because they were convinced that the study of the Creation leads, according to the Epistle to the Romans 1:19–20, to the knowledge and adoration of the Creator.23 This recently rediscovered third volume of Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” adds significantly to our knowledge of Gessner’s botanical studies and deserves further investigation, in particular to shed light on the principles that Gessner devised to bring order into the regnum plantarum.

22 Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 160–61. 23 Johannes Kentmann, Animantium imagines scilicet quadrupedum et avium…(1557), fol. 139v (call number Fol 323), Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar; Conrad Gessner, Icones animalium…(Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1560), fol. Aiir–v.

chapter 25

Suchen und Finden vor Google: Zur Metadatenproduktion im 16. Jahrhundert Helmut Zedelmaier Wenn wir heute alle dauernd von „vernetzt“, „Vernetzung“ oder „Netzwerken“ reden, ist das natürlich ein Effekt des globalen Netzes, jener „smarten neuen Welt“, über die Evgeny Morozov jüngst sein Unbehagen geäußert hat. Sein Buch mit der smarten Titelmetapher „To Save Everything, Click Here“ ist eine Art Ideologiekritik des Internetzentrismus und technischen Solutionismus der bekannten Monopolisten aus dem Silicon Valley.1 Ihr „Traum von fehlerloser Kommunikation“ und umfassender Weltverbesserung qua Technik berufe sich gerne auf historische Vorbilder (vor allem: die Aufklärung), markiere aber die analoge und digitale Welt als eine revolutionäre Differenz.2 Der Versuch, das „gesamte Weltwissen“ zu speichern, kritisiert Morozov, beginne aber nicht erst mit Google.3 Voraussetzungslos erscheint die neue digitale Welt ihren enthusiastischen Verfechtern im Blick auf technische Funktionalitäten und die dadurch gegebenen Möglichkeiten, die Weltgesellschaft von Grund aus und umfassend neu zu gestalten. Die Kritik historischer Blindheit ist bei Morozov nur ein Nebenaspekt. Andere graben tiefer. Jüngst hat der Historiker Valentin Gröbner ein polemisches Büchlein publiziert, in dem die „Wissenschaftssprache digital“ als „Zukunft von gestern“ vorgeführt wird.4 Die „Erzählung vom gelobten Land Digitalien“, führt Gröbner aus, habe eine lange Vorgeschichte, etwa in der prophetischen „Vision eines unendlich großen Kosmos von geordnetem Wissen“; aber auch ganz praktisch hätten „digitale Kommunikationskanäle mit ihren Suchmaschinen, Metakatalogen und Volltext-Suchfunktionen“ eine „Menge analoge Vorläufer“.5 1 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013); deutsche Übersetzung: Evgeny Morozov, Smarte Neue Welt. Digitale Technik und die Freiheit des Menschen, trans. Henning Dedekind und Ursel Schäfer (München: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2013). 2 Morozov, Smarte Neue Welt, 41, 150–52, 252, 581. 3 Ibid., 70–113, 589–92. 4 Valentin Groebner, Wissenschaftssprache digital – Die Zukunft von gestern (Konstanz: University Press, 2014). 5 Ibid., 49, 53, 95.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_026

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Die eindrucksvollste historische Relativierung digitaler Wissenswelten hat Anthony Grafton vorgelegt, gewohnt unverwechselbar in ihrer Mischung aus analytischer Präzision und stilistischer Eleganz. „Codex in Crisis“ heißt die im  Jahr 2008 erschienene Bestandsaufnahme, in der sich bereits damals in einem Nebensatz die nüchterne Bemerkung findet, dass die neuen Techniken maschineller Suche in unübersehbar großen Mengen wissenschaftlicher ­ Daten auf exakt denselben mathematischen Instrumenten beruhten, die von der nsa zur Auswertung von Telefongesprächen und E-Mails benutzt würden.6 Wenn Grafton die Bücherakquirierung für die antike Bibliothek von Alexandria mit Googles Methoden zum Aufbau einer digitalen Weltbibliothek vergleicht, in den „Chronici canones“ des Kirchenvaters Eusebius „the world’s first set of hot links“ erkennt oder die gegenwärtige Vermischung von Kommerz und Kultur im World Wide Web in den neuen Zeitschriften-Medien um 1900 ­vorgebildet sieht, mag das heutigen digitalen Text- und Bildingenieuren weit hergeholt erscheinen.7 Doch eröffnet die digitale Technik tatsächlich jene ­vollständig neue, jene grenzenlose Wissenswelt, wie sie viele so euphorisch verkünden? Grafton stellt diese Sicht mit starken Argumenten in Frage. Gewiss: Nie war eine so große Zahl an Daten für so viele Menschen zugäng­ lich wie heute, auch über die Vergangenheit; und noch nie war es offensicht­ lich so einfach, mit raffinierten Suchmaschinen darauf zuzugreifen. Doch ist es  nicht gerade die unüberschaubare Fülle an Informationen, die im Netz zirkuliert, ihre grenzenlose Manipulierbarkeit und Geschichtslosigkeit, welche die Geschichte zu ersticken droht? „Too much to know“ – so klagten bereits vormoderne Gelehrte. Ann Blair hat darüber ein wunderbares Buch geschrieben.8 Es ist die Präzision, mit der das Triebwerk gelehrter Wissensverwaltung erkundet wird, die ihr Buch von nicht wenigen anderen unterscheidet, die mit reißerischen Titeln auf Aktualität spekulieren, jedoch nur einfach gestrickte Übertragungen der gegenwärtigen Wissenswelt auf die Vergangenheit anbieten. Blairs besonderes Interesse gilt frühneuzeitlichen Katalogen, Wörterbüchern, Bibliographien und Enzyklo­ pädien. Sie nennt sie „reference books“, „books about books“;9 und fragt danach, wie, also mit Hilfe welcher Techniken und Methoden, solche Werke gemacht wurden, wie sie funktionierten, wie Leser in ihnen navigieren konnten, auch: 6 Hier benutzt in Anthony Grafton, “Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes,” in Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 310. 7 Ibid., 293, 294 (mit Verweis auf James O’Donnell), 318–20. 8 Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010). 9 Ibid., 1–10.

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wie das kommerziell erfolgreiche Genre der „books about books“ zirkulierte und was deren Produzenten motivierte, diese Bücher herzustellen. Mit Blairs Buch schaut man frühneuzeitlichen Gelehrten gleichsam bei der Arbeit zu: beim Exzerpieren, häufig betrieben mit der Hilfe von anonym gebliebenen Assistenten (und: Assistentinnen), bei der Herstellung alphabetischer Register, beim Eintragen und Einkleben der gesammelten Infor­ mationen in Exzerptbücher oder bei der Vorbereitung zum Druck der voluminösen Werke. „Books about books“: die Bezeichnung verweist auf die praktische Funktion der „reference books“. Sie lieferten Metadaten für das Bücherwissen, ermög­ lichten die Suche nach Informationen, erschlossen das, was von Interesse war und was von Gelehrten gebraucht wurde. Um die Metadatenproduktion in der Frühen Neuzeit geht es auch in diesem Beitrag. Drei prominente Beispiele aus dem 16. Jahrhundert liefern das Material für die folgenden Überlegungen. ‚Metadaten‘—das ist natürlich kein frühneuzeitlicher Begriff. Gegenwärtig ist häufig davon die Rede. Metadaten sind Daten über Daten. Sie dienen der Identifizierung von Informationen, für bestimmte Zwecke, mit Hilfe unterschiedlicher Methoden und Instrumente. Generell gilt: Metadaten enthalten Informationen, die es ermöglichen, gespeicherte Informationsressourcen so zu verwalten, dass die Suche nach ihnen gelingt. In dieser allgemeinen Hinsicht hat die Metadatenproduktion eine lange Geschichte, die mit der Geschichte des Sammelns, Ordnens und Speicherns von Informationen verbunden ist. Bereits in der Antike erschließen Kataloge Bibliotheken, bereits im Mittelalter verzeichnen Register die aus einer Kanzlei auslaufenden Urkunden, verweisen Register auf die in einem Buch behandelten Gegenstände. Auch Inhaltsverzeichnisse, Kapitelüberschriften und Seitenzahlen lassen sich als Metadaten verstehen, auch so unscheinbare Dinge wie Absätze und Kur­ sivierungen, die Texte aufteilen, gliedern und strukturieren, sie für die Lektüre aufschließen—analog der gegenwärtigen Auszeichnung von Metadaten in html-Dokumenten. Die Geschichte der Metadaten fügt sich nicht den geläufigen Medien­ revolutionen. Buchregister gab es lange vor dem Buchdruck, die noch heute gültigen Identifikationsmerkmale für Bücher, also Autor, Titel, Verlag, Ort und Jahr, setzten sich erst Jahrzehnte nach der Erfindung des Buchdrucks mit beweglichen Lettern durch. Unübersehbar ist allerdings, dass der Bedarf an Metadaten seit dem 16. Jahrhundert enorm gestiegen ist. Nachverfolgen lässt sich das in unterschiedlichen Feldern. Buchregister dehnen sich stark aus, manche umgreifen bald mehrere hundert Seiten, und sie entwickeln differenzierte Formen; Vergleichbares ließe sich an der Katalogproduktion in Bibliotheken des 16. Jahrhunderts verdeutlichen, auch an der kirchlichen und politischen Verwaltungspraxis.

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Buchregister, Bibliothekskataloge oder Register für politische und kirchliche Verwaltungen identifizieren umgrenzte Informationen an einem bestimm­ ten physischen Ort. Seit dem 16. Jahrhundert entwickeln sich aber auch neue Formen der Identifikation, die nicht mehr nur Texte und Objekte erschließen, die an bestimmten Orten versammelt sind, die vielmehr an unterschiedlichen Orten zerstreut sind und nur ‚virtuell‘ einen Zusammenhang ergeben.10 Ich komme damit zu meinem ersten Fall. Conrad Gessners „Bibliotheca universalis“, 1545 und 1548 in zwei mächtigen Folianten gedruckt, ist ein solch neues Metadatensystem, ein Suchinstrument, das über die Welt des Wissens infor­ miert, ohne dieses Wissen selbst zu repräsentieren.11 Die Metadaten haben sich mit Gessners „Bibliotheca universalis“ gleichsam verselbständigt. Schauen wir uns das Werk etwas genauer an: Aus welchen Ressourcen setzt es sich zusammen, wie funktioniert es bei der Suche nach Informationen? Gessner selbst bezeichnet seine „Bibliotheca“ als ,index‘ und bezieht das Werk damit auf jenes Instrument, das die Vormoderne vor allem nutzte, um Informationen so zu strukturieren, damit sie aufgefunden werden konnten.12 Noch moderne Suchmaschinen sind „indexbasiert“. Die relevanten Dokumente werden erfasst und einem Index zugeordnet, der die Datenstruktur und damit die Suchanfrage organisiert. Wörtlich übersetzt bedeutet „index“ „Anzeiger“. In Zedlers „Universal-Lexicon“ heißt es: „Index, wird der Zeige-Finger genennet“.13 Solche Zeigefinger zeichneten Leser in mittelalterliche Manuskripte und noch in frühneuzeitliche Drucke, um dadurch bestimmte Textstellen („loci“) hervorzuheben.14 10

Zum Unterschied dieser neuen virtuellen Suchsysteme zu älteren und zeitgenössischen Enzyklopädien Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta: Das Problem der Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau, 1992), 59–64. 11 Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca Vniuersalis, siue Catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus, in tribus linguis, Latina, Græca et Hebraica: Extantium et non extantium, ueterum et recentiorum in hunc usque diem, doctorum et indoctorum, publicatorum et in Bibliothecis latentium…(Zürich: Froschauer, 1545); Conrad Gessner, Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium…libri xxi (Zürich: Froschauer, 1548). 12 Gessner, Bibliotheca Vniuersalis, *Fol. 3v; zu Gessners Indextechnik im Kontext Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis, 99–107; Paul Nelles, “Reading and Memory in the Universal Library: Conrad Gessner and the Renaissance Book,” in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, ed. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2009), 147–69; Blair, Too Much to Know, 212–25. 13 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste…, vol. 14 (Halle: Zedler, 1735), 635. 14 Beispiele unter http://dbs.hab.de/Polydorusvergilius/portal-texte/text_10.htm, accessed 20 July 2014.

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Buchregister erschließen die inneren Informationen eines Buches. Mit Gessners „Bibliotheca universalis“ verselbständigt sich die Funktion ‚Suche‘. Der erste Band verzeichnet Informationen zu Autoren und ihren Büchern, alphabetisch geordnet nach den Namen der Autoren. Doch die Einträge verweisen nicht auf Informationen im Buch, sondern auf externe Information­s­ quellen. Zu den einzelnen Autoren finden sich Nachrichten über deren Leben und Werk, Angaben zu Handschriften und Editionen, Inhaltsreferate, Kapitelüberschriften, Textauszüge (besonders aus Vorworten) und Urteile über die dokumentierten Werke. Insgesamt verzeichnet die „Bibliotheca universalis“ annähernd 3.000 Autoren mit ca. 10.000 Werken.15 Manchmal beschränkt sich der Eintrag auf eine Zeile, manchmal erstreckt er sich über mehrere Folioseiten. Nicht alle Gesichtspunkte sind gleichmäßig und syste­ matisch bei jedem Autor bzw. Werk berücksichtigt. Gessner stellte einfach die Metadaten zusammen, für deren Erhebung er zwei verschiedene Praktiken nutzte: erstens Auswertung von Bibliotheks-, Buchhandels-und Schriftsteller­ katalogen; zweitens Auswertung der Bücher selbst, also Autopsie. Wichtig ist Gessner, dass die Informationen hinsichtlich ihrer Quellengrundlage möglichst exakt und transparent sind. Deshalb finden sich jeweils entsprechende Vermerke, wenn es sich um Informationen aus zweiter Hand handelt. Die Quelle, der er die Information entnahm, ist im Eintrag verzeichnet, als Kurztitel oder Sigle, welche auf eine Belegliste im Vorspann der „Bibliotheca universalis“ verweisen. Enthält der Eintrag exakte Informationen wie Druckort und -jahr oder Anzahl der Blätter ohne weitere Hinweise, zeigt das an, dass die Angaben auf Autopsie gründen. Hingegen verweisen einschränkende Bemerkungen wie „ich habe gehört“ („audio“) darauf, dass die Informationen nicht gesichert sind.16 Gessners „index“ verweist auf die externe Welt gelehrten Wissens. Als virtuelle Bibliothek informiert er über mögliche Lektüren. Im Unterschied zu realen Bibliothekskatalogen, die begrenzte Buchbestände repräsentieren, sind die verzeichneten Werke nicht an einem konkreten Ort vereint; und anders als Buchhandelskataloge registriert die „Bibliotheca universalis“ nicht einen Ausschnitt bestimmter Bücher, sondern möglichst deren Gesamtheit, zumin­ dest der gelehrten Bücher, denn Gessner verzeichnet nur solche Werke, die in Hebräisch, Griechisch und Latein verfasst sind. Der genauen Angabe der Quellen seiner Informationen misst er deshalb so großen Wert bei, weil

15 Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis, 22; Nelles (“Reading and Memory,” 150) geht von 5.000 Autoren und 25.000 Werktiteln aus. 16 Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis, 22–27.

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Metadaten Bücher möglichst exakt identifizieren sollen, damit die Suche mit Hilfe der angegebenen Adressen erfolgreich sein kann. 1548 publizierte Gessner einen weiteren Band der „Bibliotheca universalis“, die sogenannten „Pandectae“. Die „Pandectae“ sind nicht alphabetisch, sondern systematisch geordnet. Während im ersten Teil nur nach Autoren gesucht werden kann, ermöglichen die „Pandectae“ die Suche nach Sachen. Diese Suche regiert nicht das formale Alphabet, sondern die akademische Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens. Von der Kombination der damals drei „oberen“ Universitätsfakultäten (Theologie, Jurisprudenz, Medizin) mit der humanistisch erweiterten artistischen Fakultät ist das Ordnungsprinzip der „Pandectae“ mit ihren 19 Wissensfächern deutlich geprägt, sieht man davon ab, dass das Werk ein Buch über die „artes mechanicae“ (damals nicht Teil des universitären Curriculums) enthält, Theologie und Medizin hingegen, obwohl angekündigt, fehlen.17 Jedes Wissensfach wird durch Schlagworte („tituli“) weiter aufgegliedert, die zentrale Kategorien oder Namen von literarischen Gattungen des jeweiligen Wissensfachs repräsentieren. Listen solcher Schlagworte sind der Darstellung der Wissensfächer vorangestellt. Ihnen zugeordnet finden sich Einträge, die Gessner „loci communes“ nennt. Der Nutzer der „Pandectae“ ordnet also seine Fragestellung zuerst dem dazu passenden Wissensfach zu, dann einem dem Wissensfach vorangestellten Schlagwort. Trifft er auf einen Eintrag („locus communis“), der seiner Frage korrespondiert, findet er diesem zugeordnet einen oder auch mehrere Autorennamen, oft mit Verweisen auf bestimmte Kapitel ihrer Werke. Diese Belege kann er im ersten Teil der „Bibliotheca universalis“ nachschlagen und erhält so das dort verzeichnete Informationsmaterial sowie Adressen, die es ermöglichen, die gesuchten Texte zu finden. Gessner dachte an eine möglichst umfassende Aufschlüsselung der im ersten Teil der „Bibliotheca universalis“ verzeichneten Texte nach den in ihnen behan­delten Themen und Gegenständen.18 Dieses Material wollte er dem Katego­riennetz der „Pandectae“ zuordnen, damit den Nutzern eine möglichst große Vielfalt an Gesichtspunkten zu ihren Fragestellungen zur Verfügung steht. Allein die Menge der Werke, die der erste Teil der „Bibliotheca ­universalis“ erfasst, lässt den utopischen Anspruch seines Projekts deutlich werden, unmöglich zu bewerkstelligen von einem einzelnen Gelehrten in überschaubarer Zeit. Gessner behalf sich deshalb mit einer Methode, die der 17

Ibid., 54–59; die „Pandectae“ entstanden unter enormem Zeitdruck (vgl. Gessner, Pandectarum, *Fols. 3v–4r); zur Theologie erschien 1549 ein eigenständiger Band: Conrad Gessner, Partitiones theologicae, pandectarum liber ultimus (Zürich: Froschauer, 1549). 18 Gessner, Pandectarum, *Fol. 3r.

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Komposition enzyklopädischer Literatur seit ihren Anfängen in der Spätantike zugrunde lag, von ihm aber auf neue, indexbasierte Weise umgesetzt wurde. Er wertete vor allem Enzyklopädien aus Antike, Mittelalter und Humanismus aus, woraus sich etwa 37.000 „loci communes“ ergaben. Das auf die Ordnungskategorien verteilte Material der „Pandectae“ ist also nur selten mit bestimmten Werktiteln identisch. Das zeigen bereits die den Stichworten jeweils zugeordneten Autorennamen, die auf Artikel des ersten Teils der „Bibliotheca universalis“ verweisen. Sie sind überwiegend mit Zahlen versehen, die sich auf bestimmte Bücher oder Kapitel eines Werks beziehen, in denen das Thema behandelt wird. Die Belegangaben aber nennen überwiegend enzyklopädische Literatur. Am gründlichsten hat Gessner die „Lectiones ­antiquae“ des italienischen Humanisten Caelius Rhodiginus ausgeschöpft, an antiken Werken vor allem die „Naturalis historia“ von Plinius, an mittelalterlichen u.a. Vincenz von Beauvais.19 Der Vergleich der in den „Pandectae“ aufgelisteten Themen und Stichwörter mit ihren Quellen zeigt Gessners Arbeitsweise. Er wertete die „indices“ enzy­ klopädischer Literatur aus und verteilte die so gewonnenen Einträge als „loci communes“ auf die Schlagworte der einzelnen Wissensfächer. Der Nutzer konnte sich dadurch im Feld des gelehrten Wissens orientieren: Seinen Fragen korrespondierte ein Netz von Fachbegriffen; die ihnen zugeordneten „loci communes“ verwiesen ihn auf Stellen der gelehrten Überlieferung, die mögliche Antworten auf seine Fragen anboten. Die Notwendigkeit seines Suchin­ struments begründet Gessner mit der angewachsenen Buchproduktion. Die „Bibliotheca universalis“ soll es ermöglichen, in der unüberschaubaren Fülle gelehrter Überlieferung das Brauchbare zu finden. Was aber brauchbar ist, entscheidet der Nutzer selbst; er muss die Suche nur in Gang setzen und ausführen. Da sein Suchinstrument auf die Bücher selbst verweist, in denen sich Antworten auf die gestellten Fragen finden, ist Gessner Programmatiker einer nutzerfreundlichen Bibliotheksorganisation. Denn wenn die Bücher selbst nicht auffindbar sind, läuft das Suchsystem, mag es auch noch so gut organi­ siert sein, ins Leere; es fehlt, um es modern auszudrücken, der „link“. Nach Gessner sollen deshalb Bibliotheken als öffentliche, nicht als private Bibliotheken aufgebaut werden, die gelehrten Nutzer (er denkt nur an diese) frei über die darin versammelten Schätze verfügen.20 In dieser Hinsicht ist Gessner ein Vertreter des „open access“ avant la lettre, den die Möglichkeit, sein Suchsystem mit einer Volltextsuche zu verknüpfen, gewiss begeistert hätte. Die durch den Buchdruck geschaffenen Bedingungen der Buchproduktion 19 Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis, 93–99 (auch zum Folgenden). 20 Gessner, Bibliotheca Vniuersalis, *Fol. 3r.

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allerdings hat der Züricher Gelehrte kritisch gesehen. Im Vorwort der „Bibliotheca universalis“ schreibt er, die Druckkunst scheine zur Erhaltung der Bücher wie geschaffen, doch man veröffentliche jetzt viele Lappalien und unnütze Schriften—unter Vernachlässigung besserer Werken.21 Es sei deshalb notwendig, die verwirrende und schädliche Vielzahl der Bücher einzuschränken. Die Entscheidung darüber, wie diese ungezügelte Lust planlosen Schreibens gestoppt werden könne, solle aber, meint Gessner bescheiden, Gelehrteren, geeignete Maßnahmen den Königen und Fürsten überlassen bleiben.22 Über die außer Kontrolle geratene Veröffentlichungswut—ich komme zu meinem zweiten Fall—beklagten sich auch katholische Gelehrte.23 Das Mittel, das die sich beschleunigende Wissensproduktion steuern sollte, waren ebenfalls Metadaten. Mit Hilfe von „indices“ sollte die unkontrolliert wuchernde Bücherwelt diszipliniert werden. Die „indices“, die von Institutionen der katholischen Kirche gedruckt wurden, beherrscht aber ein anderes Prinzip als Gessners „index“. Gessner ging mit dem Problem, dass ein auf Universalität angelegtes Verweissystem der ständig wachsenden Buchproduktion permanent hinterherhinkt, pragmatisch um. Er setzte auf die Vorläufigkeit und Unabgeschlossenheit des Verweisens, traf keine Auswahl, verzeichnete le­diglich Identifikationsmerkmale. Die Arbeit mit den Büchern selbst und das Urteil über sie überließ er den Lesern, denen zu diesem Zweck pragmatische Techniken und Methoden an die Hand gegeben wurden.24 Dagegen sollten die „indices“ der katholischen Kirche als Instrumente einer umfassenden Kulturreform funktionieren, der Normierung des Wissens, der Unterscheidung von richtig und falsch dienen. Das aber setzt prüfende, urteilende Lektüre voraus. An ihrem Anspruch, den Gesamtbestand der Bücher den Normen des 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., *Fols. 3v–4r. 23 Vgl. etwa Sixtus Senensis, Bibliotheca sancta ex praecipuis catholicae ecclesiae auctoribus Collecta (Venedig: Franciscius, 1566), 3–4; der folgende Abschnitt gründet auf den Ergebnissen einer früheren Untersuchung über die Praktiken der katholischen Zensur: Helmut Zedelmaier, „Das katholische Projekt einer Reinigung der Bücher,“ in Autorität der Form—Autorisierungen—Institutionelle Autorität, ed. Wulf Oesterreicher et al. (Münster: lit, 2003), 187–203. 24 Dies gilt zumindest im Blick auf das Projekt „Bibliotheca universalis“; anders verhält es sich im Fall von Gessners Textbuchkommentar zu „De Anima“; dazu Anja-Silvia Goeing, “Storing to Know; Konrad Gessner’s De Anima and the Relationship between Textbooks and Citation Collections in Sixteenth-Century Europe”, in Collector’s Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded. Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen—Wie Sammler entscheiden, ed. Goeing et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 209–42.

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katholischen Glaubens zu unterwerfen, scheiterte die katholische Kirche, bei allem bürokratischen Aufwand. Um mit der Überprüfung der gedruckten Bücher nachzukommen, wäre ein langdauernder Stillstand der Buchproduktion notwendig, stellte schon früh resigniert ein Mitarbeiter der römischen Bücherzensur fest.25 Letztlich hätte nur das Verbot des Mediums Buchdruck die praktischen Voraussetzungen geschaffen, die Überprüfung aller Bücher zu ermöglichen. Ab den 40er Jahren des 16. Jahrhunderts begannen Institutionen der katholischen Kirche, zunächst an den Universitäten Löwen und Paris, dann in Rom durch die Mitarbeiter der römischen Inquisition und Indexkongregation, sich mit Hilfe von „indices“ als Autoritätsinstanz zu behaupten und diejenigen Bücher zu verzeichnen, die bei Strafe der Exkommunikation verboten ­waren.26 Dabei stellte sich bald heraus, dass ihnen die Ressourcen für ihren Arbeitsauftrag fehlten. Man konnte nicht auf neuere Kataloge katholischer Gelehrter über den Buchbestand zurückgreifen und musste darum den Verweissystemen der Gegner, die bekämpft werden sollten, vertrauen. Für die Orientierung über den Gesamtbestand der Bücher diente Gessners „Bibliotheca universalis“ (und die Werke seiner Fortsetzer) als Quelle, für Neuerscheinungen erfüllten diese Aufgabe vor allem die Frankfurter Meßkataloge. Die „Indices librorum ­prohibitorum“ des 16. Jahrhunderts sind zu wesentlichen Teilen Kompilationen von Metadaten protestantischer „indices“.27 Beeindruckend ist jedoch das an Kriterien der Transparenz und Effektivität der Benutzung orientierte Ordnungskalkül. Die „Indices librorum prohibitorum“ sind streng alphabetisch aufgebaut, jeder Buchstabe ist jeweils in drei Abteilungen („Klassen“) gegliedert. Die Autoren der ersten Klasse enthalten bloße Namenslisten: das sind die sogenannten „Häresiarchen“, von denen alle Bücher verboten waren. Die zweite Klasse listet unter den Namen der Autoren einzelne verbotene Bücher auf, die dritte Klasse Titel anonym publizierter verbotener Bücher. 25

26

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Vgl. Edoardo Tortarolo, „Zensur als Institution und Praxis im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit. Ein Überblick,“ in Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Zedelmaier und Martin Mulsow (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 282. Vgl. Jesús Martínez De Bujanda, ed., Index des livres interdits, xi vol. (Sherbrooke: Ed. de l’Univ. de Sherbrooke u.a., 1984–2002); als Überblick: Jesús Martínez De Bujanda, „Die verschiedenen Epochen des Index (1550–1615),“ in Inquisition, Index, Zensur: Wissens­ kulturen der Neuzeit im Widerstreit, ed. Hubert Wolf (Paderborn u.a.: Schöningh, 2001), 215–28. Franz Heinrich Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchen- und Literaturgeschichte, 2 vol. (Bonn: Cohen, 1884–85), vol. 1, u.a. 7, 218–19, 224–27, 268, 305, 474; Alberto Moreni, „La Bibliotheca universalis di Konrad Gesner e gli Indici dei libri proibiti,“ La Bibliofilia 88 (1986): 131–50.

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Der zweiten und dritten Klasse wurden überwiegend Metadaten aus protestantischen Vorlagen zugeordnet. Oft wurden einfach die Namen von Verfassern und die Titel von Büchern erfasst, die in protestantischen Verlagen erschienen waren. Gemessen am Willen zur umfassenden Revision aller Bücher, dienten die „Indices librorum prohibitorum“ allerdings nur als vorläufige Orientierungen, um die aktuellen Gefahren durch ketzerische Bücher zu bannen. Weiterhin galt das Prinzip umfassender Prüfung und Reinigung durch die dafür einge­ richteten Behörden mit ihren theologischen Gutachtern. Darauf verweisen viele Titeleinträge in den „Indices librorum prohibitorum“, die oft den Zusatz „donec corrigatur“ enthalten, die also nur verboten waren, solange sie nicht gereinigt, d.h. purgiert worden waren. Das Ziel war also umfassende Prüfung. Doch die Revisionsarbeit ging schleppend voran. Gedruckt wurden nur einzelne Fragmente: die „Indices expurgatorii“. Sie waren, zumindest teilweise, nicht mehr bloße Kompilation, sondern Produkte stupender, penibler Textarbeit, die eigentlichen Instrumente, mit deren Hilfe der Kanon autoritativen Wissens gesichert werden sollte. Doch lediglich zwei „Indices expurgatorii“ wurden außerhalb Spaniens und Portugals gedruckt: in Antwerpen 1571 und in Rom 1607. Nur die spanische Inquisition entwickelte eine Kontinuität in der Überprüfung der Bücher, besaß genügend bürokratische Effizienz und klar ­verteilte Instanzenzüge. Daran mangelte es der römischen Indexkongregation. Ihre Arbeit verpuffte in Interessenskonflikten und immer neuen Revisionen bereits ausgearbeiteter Expurgationsvorschriften.28 Die Durchsetzung des universell gültigen autoritativen Maßstabs zur Rei­ nigung der Bücher scheiterte an der Komplexität der Entscheidungsinstanzen. Doch produzierte die Arbeit an der Autoritätssicherung exakte Identifikation. Die gedruckten „Indices expurgatorii“ zeichnet eine bestechende Präzision der Metadaten aus. Mit alphabetischen „indices universales“ und internen Verweisnetzen ausgestattet, identifizieren sie die Ausgaben, die expurgiert werden sollen, mit exakten Angaben zu Autor, Titel, Erscheinungsort und Erscheinungsjahr, oft auch zum Verleger. Es folgen genaue Hinweise zur Position der Stellen, die getilgt, verbessert oder durch andere Formulierungen ersetzt werden sollen. Die Tilgungen betreffen einzelne Worte, Sätze, Absätze und ganze Seiten. Auch zu tilgende Worte und Satzteile in Inhaltsverzeichnissen, gedruckten Randglossen und alphabetischen Registern werden penibel vermerkt. Zudem verweisen die „Indices expurgatorii“ durch die Verwendung von

28

Vgl. Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bücher, 1:423–29, 549–59; De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, 7:89–102, 409–555, 711–834.

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Folio- und Seitenangaben auf bestimmte Ausgaben, beschränkten sich also nicht auf die übliche Praxis des bloßen Verweisens auf Buch und Kapitel. Die „Libri expurgatorii“ waren Instrumente des Vollzugs; sie folgten der Logik unmissverständlicher Befehle. Doch unterminierte die Präzision den Willen, die Welt der Bücher mit Hilfe der „Indices“ zu beherrschen. Katholische „Indices“ waren den pragmatischen Katalogen der protestantischen Gegen­ spieler wie Gessner mit ihren enormen Datenmassen hoffnungslos unterlegen. Über eine kleine Zahl von Expurgationsvorschriften ist das katholische Projekt einer Reinigung der Bücher nicht hinausgekommen. So umfasst etwa der römische „Index expurgatorius“ von 1607 Expurgationsvorschriften zu nur 50 Büchern. Die „Indices expurgatorii“ sollten wie Buchregister funktionieren, die das interne Buchwissen immer feiner erschließen. Doch sie waren keine Buchregister, sondern Verweise auf die externe Welt der Bücher, damit Produkte des Mediums Buchdruck, die von dessen Veröffentlichungs-Logik erfasst wurden. Zwar durfte der Antwerpener „Index expurgatorius“ von 1571 nur im Geheimen weitergegeben werden. Doch er wie auch andere „Indices expurgatorii“ wurden schnell von protestantischen Verlegern nachgedruckt, mit hämischen Vorreden protestantischer Gelehrter. So wurde das Instrument des Kampfes gegen Ketzer seinerseits zum Instrument der Bloßstellung des katholischen Gegners, der sich dadurch wiederum gezwungen sah, die nachgedruckten „Indices expurgatorii“ auf den „Index librorum prohibitorum“ zu setzen.29 Die universale Durchsetzung einer Reinigung aller Bücher scheiterte an der schieren Masse des zu bearbeitenden Materials sowie an der Schnelligkeit, mit der das Medium Buchdruck die wachsende Nachfrage nach Lesestoff befriedigte. Das Ziel der umfassenden Reinigung der Bücher war also weitgehend erfolglos. Doch verfeinerte der Wille, einzelne Stellen in Büchern exakt zu identifizieren, die Verfahren im Umgang mit Bücherwissen. In dieser Hinsicht konnte Paul Saenger den ersten, im Jahr 1571 in Antwerpen gedruckten „Index expurgatorius“ als Ursprung des modernen Belegsystems wissenschaftlicher Nachweise identifizieren.30 Wirkung erzielte also weniger das ideologische Programm, als vielmehr die durch die Arbeit an ihm entwickelten Verfahrenstechniken. Ich komme zum dritten Fall, zu einem weiteren Suchsystem, das entwickelt wurde, um den viel beschworenen „information overload“ zu beherrschen:

29 30

Vgl. Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bücher, 1:424, 551–60, 2:42, 50–52. Paul Saenger, “Benito Arias Montano and the Evolving Notion of Locus in SixteenthCentury Printed Books,” Word & Image 17 (2001): 137.

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Theodor Zwingers „Theatrum vitae humanae“.31 Dessen „indices“ bestechen durch die Raffinesse des Verweisens auf die internen Wissensschätze seines Werks. Zwinger favorisierte die innere Erschließung, nicht, wie Gessner und die katholischen „indices“, das Verweisen auf externe, virtuelle Bücherwelten. Andererseits empfiehlt er sein Werk als ein international und kooperativ zu betreibendes Unternehmen, in das nach Art von Wikipedia jeder Gelehrte sein gesammeltes Wissen einspeisen soll. Zwingers Buch-Theater wurde 1565 erstmals gedruckt und entwickelte sich im Laufe seiner bis ins frühe 18. Jahrhundert reichenden Editionsgeschichte zur wohl umfangreichsten vormodernen europäischen Wissenssammlung, die je ein einzelner Mensch zusammenstellte. Die Erstausgabe umfasst annähernd 1.500 Seiten, die letzte zu Zwingers Lebzeiten publizierte Ausgabe von 1586 bereits 4.500 Seiten, eine Umarbeitung des Werks durch Lorenz Beyerlinck aus dem Jahr 1707 weit über 8.000 Seiten.32 Das „Theatrum“ setzt sich aus unzähligen Texteinträgen kleineren und größeren Umfangs—aus „Text-Snippets“ unterschiedlicher Provenienz— zusammen. Im Vorwort bezeichnet Zwinger sein Werk als „Zeughaus für Geschichten“ („Historiarum promptuarium“), in das „alles, was man liest und hört“ („omnia ea quae leguntur et audiuntur“), eingelagert und bei Bedarf wieder hervorgeholt werden könne.33 Welche Materialien sind in Zwingers feingliedrige Informationsarchitektur auf welche Weise eingefügt, wie können sie von den Nutzern des „Theatrums“ identifiziert werden? Alphabetische Ordnungen wie die des ersten Bands der „Bibliotheca universalis“ setzen, um aufschlussreich zu werden, eine Fragestellung voraus, damit die Suche in Gang kommen kann. Zwingers „Theatrum“ bietet verschiedene Möglichkeiten, um auf die darin versammelten Informationen zuzugreifen. Eine grafische Tabelle stellt einleitend die Ordnung der (in der Erstausgabe) insgesamt 19 Wissensfächer („libri“) einprägsam vor Augen. Die darin behandelten Themen stehen als Stichworte an den Endpunkten der dichotomischen Auffächerung. Die grafische Tabelle instruiert den Leser über die formale Gesamtstruktur des „Theatrums“. Eine exakte Lokalisierung der einzelnen Wissensfächer im Gesamtwerk ist auf diesem Weg allerdings nicht möglich. 31

32 33

Die folgenden Ausführungen zu Zwinger sind eine stark gekürzte und überarbeitete Fassung von: Helmut Zedelmaier, „Navigieren im Textuniversum. Theodor Zwingers Theatrum vitae humanae“ in Dimensionen der Theatrum-Metapher in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ordnung und Repräsentation von Wissen/Dimensions of the Theatrum-Metaphor. Order and Representation of Knowledge, ed. Flemming Schock et al. (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2008), 113–35 (= metaphorik.de 14/2008). Vgl. Blair, Too Much to Know, 197. Theodor Zwinger, Theatrum vitae humanae (Basel: Oporinus und Froben, 1565), 16.

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Welche Fragestellungen den Wissensfächern zugrunde liegen, erläutert eine „Series Titulorum“. Sie schließt an die grafische Tabelle an und weist die behandelten Gesichtspunkte („tituli“) in der Abfolge nach, in der sie im „Theatrum“ vorkommen, ermöglicht also Aufschlüsse über die innere Werkstruktur. Die in der Erstausgabe 21 Seiten umfassende Liste ist eine Art feingliedriges Inhaltsverzeichnis. Haupttitel, Titel und Untertitel sind durch unterschiedliche Schrifttypen markiert. Insgesamt verzeichnet die Titelserie annähernd 2.200 Einträge. Den verzeichneten Einträgen sind Seitenzahlen zugeordnet, mit deren Hilfe die einschlägigen Themen exakt lokalisiert werden können. Der Nutzer des „Theatrums“ kann auf die behandelten Themen aber auch sozusagen von außen zugreifen. Dies ermöglicht eine alphabetisch geordnete Titelliste am Ende des Werks. Über diesen Index, der in der Erstausgabe, drei­ spaltig gesetzt, 20 Seiten umfasst, lassen sich die behandelten Themen alphabetisch mit Seitenverweisen identifizieren. Ab der Ausgabe von 1571 gibt es schließlich einen weiteren äußeren Zugang: den alphabetischen „Index exemplorum“. Er erschließt die einzelnen Texteinträge. Auf welche Weise dieser „Index“ sowie ein (ab der Ausgabe 1586) inserierter „Catalogus auctorum“ funktionieren, welche Lemmata also in diesen beiden „Indices“ stehen, ergibt sich erst aus der Analyse der Texteinträge und der Art ihrer Präsentation. Was erwartet also den Nutzer, der sich für ein spezielles Thema interessiert, wie auch immer er es identifiziert oder lokalisiert haben mag? Schauen wir kurz in das Buch über die Geschichte („De historia“).34 Es ist Teil des Abschnitts über die praktische Philosophie. „De historia“ umgreift in der Ausgabe 1586 15 Seiten. Das ist im Rahmen der 112 Bücher dieser Ausgabe mit ihren 4.500 Seiten ein eher kleiner Abschnitt. Er beginnt mit allgemeinen Ausführungen zum Begriff. Zwinger erläutert hier seinen weit gefassten Historia-Begriff als ­fachübergreifendes, auf Sinneserkenntnis gegründetes Datensystem.35 Der Abschnitt selbst behandelt aber nur die engere Historie („historia per se“). Der Vorspann dient der logischen Verknüpfung des allgemeinen mit dem speziellen Historia-Begriff in Form dichotomischer Begriffsdifferenzierungen, die im Anschluss daran im üblichen tabellarischen Aufriss entsprechend visuali­ siert werden.36 Erst danach beginnt das Historia-Buch. Es handelt in einzelnen Abschnitten über die Erfinder der Geschichtsschreibung, Kirchenhistoriker, 34

In der Ausgabe 1586: Theodor Zwinger, Theatrum humanae vitae (Basel: Episcopius, 1586), 1579–94. 35 Ibid., 1579; dazu Arno Seifert, Cognitio historica. Die Geschichte als Namengeberin der frühneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976), 79–88. 36 Zwinger, Theatrum humanae vitae (1586), 1582.

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Universalhistoriker, Partikularhistoriker, Biographen, Verfasser von Exem­ pelsammlungen, über den Nutzen der Geschichte und historische Praktiken, das Studium und die Pflege der Geschichte sowie über die Leidenschaft für die Geschichte, schließlich auch über deren Vernachlässigung.37 Fünf der Themenblöcke sind nicht weiter aufgefächert. Nach der Überschrift folgen, zweispaltig gesetzt, Texteinträge unterschiedlicher Länge. Die übrigen Blöcke sind weiter untergliedert. Die Partikularhistoriker etwa werden nach den von ihnen behandelten Spezialgeschichten unterschieden, beginnend mit den Historikern der Juden und endend mit denen der Neuen Welt. Andere Themenblöcke sind mehrfach untergliedert. So werden die Biographen aufgeteilt in Verfasser von allgemeinen Lebensbeschreibungen und in solche, die nur über Männer oder nur über Frauen schrieben. Welche Informationen findet der Nutzer in den Themenblöcken zur Geschichte? Oft sind es kurze Einträge von nur wenigen Zeilen, meist biobib­ liographische Angaben zu Werken von Historikern: Name und Herkunft, Titel bzw. Kurzcharakteristik des Werks, Lebenszeit und Belegangabe. Die Einträge folgen dem Muster biobibliographischer Notationen, wie es Johannes Trithemius in seinem 1494 gedruckten Katalog von Kirchenschriftstellern und Conrad Gessner, den Zwinger im Vorwort als seinen Lehrer bezeichnet, in der „Bibliotheca universalis“ entwickelt hatten.38 Es gibt aber auch Einträge, die über solche biobibliographische Sachinformationen hinausgehen, etwa unterschiedliche Quellenüberlieferungen zu speziellen historischen Fragestellungen abwägen.39 In einer dritten Art von Einträgen werden schließlich knapp einzelne historische Handlungszusammenhänge zu bestimmten Themen referiert.40 Zwingers Wissenstheater verarbeitet unterschiedliche Informationen, nicht nur, wie es seine Begrifflichkeit nahelegt, historische Beispiele (­ „exempla“). Bei allen Einträgen im „Theatrum“ handelt es sich um Ausschnitte aus Texten, also um Exzerpte, teils im identischen Wortlaut der Vorlage, teils leicht, manch­mal auch stark bearbeitet, wie Ann Blair gezeigt hat.41 Zwinger zitiert vor allem Kompilationsliteratur unterschiedlicher Art und Provenienz, aus 37 Ibid., 1583–94. 38 Zwinger, Theatrum vitae humanae (1565), 14. 39 So im Eintrag über die „Inventores historiae“, vgl. Zwinger, Theatrum humanae vitae (1586), 1583. 40 So im Eintrag „Historiae studium, amor, cultus“, vgl. ibid., 1593. 41 Ann Blair, “Historia in Zwinger’s Theatrum humanae vitae,” in Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005), 269–96.

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Antike, Mittelalter und Humanismus. Er belegt aber auch Fachliteratur. Ein Autorenkatalog („Catalogus Auctorum“), einer der beiden genannten zusätz­ lichen „indices“ der Ausgabe 1586, listet alphabetisch nach Vornamen, teilweise zusätzlich nach Familiennamen jene Verfasser auf, aus deren Werken, so Zwingers Erläuterung, die meisten „exempla“ geschöpft worden seien. Die keineswegs vollständige Liste umfasst annähernd 450 Lemmata. Hier wie auch im Fall der Belegangaben in den Einträgen selbst finden sich teilweise nur Werktitel und Verfassernamen, nicht immer mit Stellenangaben. Manchmal werden auch mehrere Belege angeführt. Etwa fünf Prozent der Einträge bleiben ohne jeden Beleg.42 Offenbar handelt es sich in diesen Fällen nicht um Textexzerpte, sondern um Erfahrungswissen Zwingers. Einzelne Einträge umgreifen nur zwei Zeilen, im Durchschnitt beträgt ihr Umfang zehn bis 15 Zeilen. Es gibt aber auch Artikel von 40 Zeilen und seltener solche von mehr als einer Spalte Umfang. In allen Einträgen findet man einen Begriff, der in Versalien gesetzt ist, öfters auch zwei oder mehrere auf diese Art ausgezeichnete Begriffe. Gewöhnlich handelt es sich um Personennamen, teilweise auch um Völker-, Städte- und Ländernamen; auch Namen von Institutionen, von Titeln oder sozialen Stellungen sind entsprechend markiert, seltener abstrakte Begriffe. Diese in Versalien gesetzten Begriffe dienen als Marker, als Stichworte, die die Einträge identifizieren. Sie fungieren als Metadaten, denn aus ihnen sind die Lemmata des alphabetischen „Index exemplorum“ zusammengesetzt, der die Einträge des Werks seit der Ausgabe 1571 aufschließt.43 Welchem Prinzip folgt die Ordnung der Einträge in einem Themenblock des „Theatrums“? Bei einigen Abschnitten erübrigt sich die Frage, denn sie besitzen nur einen einzigen Eintrag. Gewöhnlich stößt man aber auf mehrere, ­manchmal auf bis zu 50 ‚Treffer‘. Auf den ersten Blick scheint ihrer Abfolge, wie bei den Treffern der Suchmaschine Google, keine bestimmte Ordnung zugrunde zu liegen, jedenfalls keine formale, etwa alphabetische Ordnung. Schaut man genauer hin, zeigt sich ein komplexes Ineinandergreifen von unterschiedlichen Kriterien: Sachverhalte der biblischen Geschichte stehen oft, doch nicht immer, vor solchen aus der profanen Geschichte. Eine Rolle spielen auch Kriterien der Chronologie. Einige Titel listen überhaupt keine Einträge auf. Teils finden sich hier Verweise auf Einträge, die unter anderen Titeln verbucht sind—das „Theatrum“ besitzt also auch eine interne Verweisstruktur—, teils handelt es sich tatsächlich um Leerstellen. Das verweist auf die heuristische Funktion sowie auf den Projektcharakter von Zwingers Wissenstheater, das, 42 43

Ibid., 277. Ibid., 281.

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wie viele Wissensapparate der Frühen Neuzeit, auf künftige Vervollständigung hin angelegt war. In dieser Hinsicht handelt es sich um ein „work in progress“, wie das auch die langgedehnte Geschichte der Werkausgaben bestätigt. In späteren Editionen sind, wie wiederum Ann Blair gezeigt hat, Leerstellen der Erstausgabe aufgefüllt, Einträge verbessert und um neue Belege erweitert sowie auch zusätzliche Informationen verzeichnet, aber auch Einträge getilgt. Auch neue Systemstellen und Titel wurden eingebaut, Titel verschoben, getilgt und weiter ausdifferenziert.44 Zwinger verstand sein „Theatrum“ als ein Projekt zum Nutzen der Wissenschaft. Auch das verbindet das Werk mit anderen frühneuzeitlichen Wissensapparaten. Ein eindringlicher Appell im Vorwort verdeutlicht es: „Bitten möchte ich alle Doktoren und Gelehrten, welche die gelehrte Welt mit ihren Studien vorantreiben wollen, dass sie, wenn sie irgendwelche verborgenen Schätze an Beispielen oder Sentenzen besitzen, diese doch der Allgemeinheit zur Verfügung stellen und im Interesse des gesamten Erdkreises ihre Mühe auf die Vollendung dieses Theaterbaus verwenden mögen“.45 Die Utopie einer universal angelegten Informationsressource, in die alle Gelehrten fortwährend ihr Wissen einspeisen, ist keineswegs auf Beispiele („exempla“) und Sentenzen („dicta“) beschränkt. Beide Begriffe stehen bei Zwinger für Exzerpte unterschiedlicher Art und Provenienz, die aus Texten zu ziehen sind, aber auch Erfahrungen fixieren, die nicht durch Texte vermittelt sind. In eben diesem Sinn ist das „Theatrum“, wie Zwinger eingangs schreibt, ein „Historiarum promptuarium“, in das „alles, was man liest und hört“, eingelagert und bei Bedarf wieder hervorgeholt werden kann. In der antiken und mittelalterlichen Tradition ging es um die moralische Qualifizierung der „exempla“. Zwinger dagegen will Erfahrungswissen exakt verorten. Mit Hilfe eines feingliedrigen Metadatensystems können Informationen zu gegebener Zeit und bei Bedarf wieder aufgerufen werden. Bedarf und Zeit aber sind dem Nutzer anheimgestellt, abhängig von seinen Fragen und Interessen. Zwingers Wissenstheater verarbeitet vielfältige Ressourcen und stellt verschiedene Instrumente zur Verfügung, um in seinem Textuniversum navigieren und gesuchte Informationen finden zu können; wie mit diesen Informationen umzugehen ist, schreibt er nicht vor.46 Unser Theater, erklärt er selbst den Unterschied zum wirklichen Theater, ist kein flüchtiges Spiel; es stellt die Erfahrungen der Welt, von Anbeginn bis in unsere

44 Ibid., 282–83. 45 Zwinger, Theatrum vitae humanae (1565), 29 (eigene Übersetzung). 46 Dazu Blair, “Historia,” 286–87.

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Zeit, vor Augen, erfahrbar nicht nur für diejenigen, die gerade anwesend sind, vielmehr zum Nutzen und zur Vervollkommnung der Nachkommen.47 Moderne Suchmaschinen wie Google und Internetplattformen wie Wikipedia funktionieren technisch gewiss anders als ihre buchgestützten Gegenstücke in der Frühen Neuzeit. Die alten Indices waren selbst wieder in oder als Bücher gebunden, während digitale Suchmaschinen erst trainiert werden müssen, um wirklich brauchbar zu indizieren. Ihr Vorteil besteht in der automatischen Aktualisierung all dessen, was im selben technischen Format erfasst werden kann. Doch ungeachtet aller technischen Unterschiede: Bereits vormoderne Suchinstrumente ermöglichten raffinierte Zugänge zur Welt des Wissens, ohne mühseliges Konsultieren vieler Bücher. „Indices“ verweisen, schrieb Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts der Barockdichter Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, „gleichsam mit dem Finger“ darauf, „wo eines oder das ander zu finden“, da doch „keiner die Zeit hat / alle und jede Bücher zu durchlesen“.48 Wenn das Nutzer gegenwärtiger Suchmaschinen nicht anders sehen, dann verweist das auf eine interessante Gemeinsamkeit von frühneuzeitlicher analoger und gegenwärtiger digitaler Kultur. Die indexgestützte Wissensverarbeitung ist mit selektiven, nichtlinearen Lektürepraktiken verbunden, die nicht erst die Gegenwart, sondern bereits die frühneuzeitliche Wissensverarbeitung kennzeichnet. Auch die voluminösen Folianten der Frühen Neuzeit wurden vor allem über ihre Indices gelesen, also keineswegs, zumindest gewöhnlich, von Anfang bis Ende. Darauf verweisen die oft gewaltigen Register solcher Werke, etwa auch zu frühneuzeitlichen Romanen. Ab dem 18. Jahrhundert stieg die Druckproduktion stark an. Die Metadaten wurden verstärkt in (seitdem vermehrt gedruckt publizierte) Bibliothekskataloge ausgelagert, die nicht mehr die Texte selber indizieren, vielmehr die Bücher, in denen sie zu finden sind—immer verbunden mit dem Bemühen, Schlagwörter hinzuzufügen, damit ein Rest an sachlicher Orientierung erhalten bleibt. In Verbindung damit nehmen Umfang und Differenzierung der Buchregister stark ab. Gelegentlich finden sich explizite zeitgenössische Hinweise über die Gründe. So heißt es bei einem Autor aus der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, er habe auf ein Register verzichtet, weil in dem Buch nicht „hier und da“ nachgeschlagen, vielmehr „alles in gehöriger

47 48

Vgl. Zwinger, Theatrum vitae humanae (1565), 18–19. Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Delitiae Philosophicae et Mathematicae. Der Philosophischen und Mathematischen Erquickstunden Dritter Teil (Neudruck der Ausgabe Nürnberg 1653), ed. Jörg Jochen Berns (Frankfurt a.M.: Keip, 1990), 57.

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Ordnung“ durchgelesen werden solle.49 Die Digitalisierung wiederum, die bekanntlich zuerst die Bibliothekskataloge erfasste und dann zunehmend die Texte selbst, zeigt Daten und Metadaten gemischt an, verweist also in dieser Hinsicht auf die frühneuzeitliche Lektürepraxis zurück, wo Metadaten gewöhnlich nicht in eigenen Nachweissystemen ausgelagert, sondern vielmehr in den Büchern selbst unmittelbar lektürerelevant waren. Eigentlich gilt ja die extensive Lektüre als Kennzeichen einer im 18. Jahrhundert einsetzenden modernen „Leserevolution“, die gerne von einer vormodernen intensiven „Wiederholungslektüre“ abgesetzt wird.50 Der vorstehende Befund relativiert diese gängige historische Sichtweise im Blick auf die Praktiken gelehrter Lektüre in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ja man könnte, ausgehend von den Ergebnissen dieser Untersuchungen, umgekehrt zur vorherrschend vertretenen Sicht fragen: War nicht die Zeit zwischen dem 18. und 20. Jahrhundert hinsichtlich der Lektürepraktiken nur eine Zwischenphase? Eine so große Fragestellung überschreitet unsere kursorischen Überlegungen zur Metadatenproduktion in der Frühen Neuzeit. Sie genauer zu verfolgen, wäre aber vielleicht aufschlussreich für ein besseres Verständnis nicht nur vergangener, sondern auch gegenwärtiger Wissensproduktionen.51

49

Martin Schmeizel, Versuch zu einer Historie der Gelehrheit…(Jena: Peter Fickelscherrn, 1728), Vorrede (unpag.). 50 Das bis heute wirksame und oft wiederholte Grundmodell geht zurück auf Rolf Engelsing, „Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das statistische Ausmaß und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre“, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1970): ­945–1002; dass die Buch- und Lesegeschichte in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu differenzierteren Einsichten gelangt ist, verdankt sie ganz wesentlich Anthony Graftons wunderbaren Studien, von denen hier nur eine angeführt sei: Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 51 Wichtige Hinweise zu diesem Beitrag steuerten Anja-Silvia Goeing (Northumbria University) und Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Universität Leipzig) bei, denen dafür an dieser Stelle herzlich gedankt sei.

chapter 26

The Vatican Library Alphabets, Luca Orfei, and Graphic Media in Sistine Rome Paul Nelles* Upon completion in 1590, the new quarters for the Vatican Library in the Cortile del Belvedere were among the largest and most lavishly decorated library rooms in Europe. Intended to serve as a bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy, the new library was part of the vast cultural program of Pope Sixtus v. Executed under the oversight of the artists Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra, four pictorial cycles meet the gaze of readers in the massive central room, now known as the salone sistino: the great libraries of antiquity are depicted on the south wall; scenes from the ecumenical councils of the church run opposite; portraits of the “inventors of letters” are located on the pillars in the middle of the room; and Sixtus’s campaign of urban and architectural renewal in Rome is celebrated on the ceiling in a cycle depicting the opere of the ambitious CounterReformation pope. In addition to these scenes in the salone sistino, the cycle of frescoes continues in the adjacent sala dei scrittori with depictions of the book arts (papermaking, printing, and so on) and in the nearby bibliotheca secreta with portraits of the Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers.1 The frescoes are busy and full of movement. Books are present everywhere. Pamphilus is portrayed copying codices in the library at Caesarea while Eusebius studiously prepares his Ecclesiastical History. The censure of Arius at the First Council of Nicaea is accompanied by a burning pyre of condemned writings. We witness texts being dictated, copied, and read. Books are carried off ships, carted in baskets, poised on lecterns, stacked high in cupboards. The * I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in researching this essay. I also thank Ann Blair and Johannes Wolfart for discussion and comments, and Antonio Ricci for assistance with materials at the Newberry Library, Chicago. 1 On the artistic production of the frescoes, see Alessandro Zuccari, I pittori di Sisto v (Rome: Palombi, 1992), 47–101; Zuccari, “Il cantiere pittorico della biblioteca sistina: i cicli di affresche e alcuni progetti grafici,” in Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (3 vols.), vol. 2, La Biblioteca Vaticana tra riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590), ed. Massimo Ceresa (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012), 379–417; Zuccari, “Una Babele pittorica ben composta. Gli affreschi sistini della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” in La Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ed. Ambrogio M. Piazzoni et al. (Milan: Jaca Book, 2012), 266–307.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_027

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iconography of the library frescoes was based on a preliminary sketch drawn up by the longtime custos of the library, Federico Ranaldi, in late 1587 or early 1588. The selection and disposition of the final decorative program was the work of Silvio Antoniano, with input from other members of the circle of cultural advisers around Sixtus v such as Pietro Galesini and Angelo Rocca. It was a well-researched, erudite program firmly rooted in textual sources. The learning behind the frescoes was no secret. It was documented at length by Rocca in his description of the library, De Bibliotheca Vaticana, published in 1591. Of all the fresco cycles, that featuring the inventors of letters offers the most resistance to interpretation. It is certainly the most static. On each face of the six square pillars that span the center of the salone sistino is a full-length portrait of a biblical, mythical, or historical figure to whom the invention or discovery of letters is attributed (Table.  26.1). The images on the pillars are anchored by portraits of Adam on the east wall and Christ (“alpha et omega”) on the west wall. Beneath each portrait a Latin inscription explains the significance of the subject, as with the other fresco cycles. Above, either a complete alphabet or a grouping of letters is depicted within a cartouche. The cartouches have alternating red and blue backgrounds, while the letters are rendered in brilliant gold. The overall impression of the lettering is that of the gold-leaf capitals set against richly colored backgrounds found in some illuminated manuscripts. There are a number of contexts in which to locate the alphabet cycle.2 The “inventors-of-letters” topos has deep roots in the Western encyclopedic tradition. It appears in the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville and in the Renaissance was taken up by Polydore Vergil in his popular De inventoribus rerum (1499). Half of the figures depicted in the frescoes were mentioned by Vergil.3 Classical and patristic sources furnished additional subjects bearing on letters in the ancient world, while the cycle is rounded out with a series of later Christian “inventors.” The result is a veritable Babel of languages: Samaritan, Hebrew, Syriac, “Egyptian,” “Phoenician,” Greek, Etruscan, Latin, 2 The most comprehensive studies of the iconography of the frescoes are now Dalma Frascarelli, “Immagini e parole. Il programma iconografico degli affreschi sistini della Vaticana,” in Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2:333–77; and Frascarelli, “Gli affreschi sistini: il programma iconografico,” in Piazzoni et al., Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 178–265 (see esp. 206–9 for the topographical plan of the frescoes). See also Angela Böck, “Gli affreschi sistini della sala di lettura della Biblioteca Vaticana,” in Sisto v, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992), 2:693–716; Alphonse Dupront, “Art et contre-réforme: les fresques de la bibliothèque de Sixte-Quint,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 48 (1931): 282–307; Angelo Rocca, De Bibliotheca Vaticana (Rome: Typographia Vaticana, 1591). 3 Isidore, Etymologiae 1.3–6. On Polydore Vergil, see Bock, “Gli affreschi sistini,” 703.

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Table 26.1 Table of inventors and letters, salone sistino, Vatican Library, and corresponding plate number in Luca Orfei, De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus (Rome: ca. 1589).

East wall 1.

Adam

[Samaritan]

Plate 2

2.

Abraham

Plate 4

3. 4. 5.

Sons of Seth Ezra Moses

“Syriac and Chaldean” [Syriac estrangela] [Samaritan] Hebrew “Ancient Hebrew” [Samaritan]

Mercury Isis Memnon “Egyptian Hercules”

“Egyptian” [1] “Egyptian” [2] “Egyptian” [1] “Phrygian letters” [Syriac estrangela]

Plate 11 Plate 9 Plate 17 Plate 4

Phoenix Cecrops Linus Cadmus

“Phoenician” [Syriac serto] Greek Greek Greek

Plate 16 Plate 20 Plate 12 (11) Plate 12 (11)

Pythagoras Palamedes Simonides Epicharmus

Greek Greek Greek Greek

Plate 13 Plate 14 Plate 14 Plate 13

First pillar

Plate 19 (17) Plate 5 Plate 3

Second pillar 6. 7. 8. 9.

Third pillar 10. 11. 12. 13. Fourth pillar 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Table 26.1 Table of inventors and letters, salone sistino, Vatican Library, and corresponding plate number in Luca Orfei, De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus (Rome: ca. 1589). (cont.)

Fifth pillar 18. 19. 20. 21.

Evander Nicostrata Demaratus Claudius

Latin Latin Etruscan Latin

Plate 7 Plate 6 Plate 18 (16) Plate 8

Chrysostom Ulfilas Cyril Jerome

Armenian Gothic Cyrillic Glagolitic

Plate 21 Plate 10 (9) Plate 22 Plate 23

Christ

Greek

Plate 1

Sixth pillar 22. 23. 24. 25. West wall 26.

Second plate numbers in parentheses refer to the renumbered plates in the Newberry Library copy of the De caracterum inventoribus reproduced in the ­illustrative matter.

Armenian, Gothic, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic lettering systems are all depicted. The frescoes thus engage with a lively Renaissance discussion of the origins of letters and writing.4 And from the Hebrew alphabets of Adam, the sons of Seth, Moses, and Ezra the Scribe to the missionary alphabets attributed to Jerome, Ulfilas, John Chrysostom, and Cyril, the frescoes document the ­philological preoccupations of scholars in sixteenth-century Rome deeply concerned with questions of scriptural transmission and translation. The sequence also references the polyglot ambitions of the new Typographia 4 Daniel Droixhe, La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800) (Geneva: Droz, 1978); Droixhe, Souvenirs de Babel. La reconstruction de l’histoire des langues de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Brussels: Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique, 2007); Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe: nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480– 1580) (Paris: Champion, 1992); Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2011), 95–97.

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Vaticana. The press had been founded by Sixtus v for the publication of authentic and “purified” editions of church texts based on Vatican manuscripts. The plan was to equip the press with a multilingual editorial team to prepare editions of scripture in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Other works of church teachings would be disseminated in a variety of “barbarian” languages.5 Domenico Basa, the printer who headed the new press, possessed an enviable array of exotic type fonts: Hebrew, Syriac, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Armenian.6 The inventors-of-letters cycle thus intersects in meaningful ways with significant strands of Renaissance intellectual and cultural life. Nonetheless, the representational value of the alphabets themselves has been curiously neglected. No fewer than thirteen distinct writing systems—most real, others imagined— appear on the pillars. This essay suggests that the alphabets operate on a measurably different level of signification from other cycles in the salone sistino. The real subject of the cycle, likely what was meant to be most admired by visitors to the library, is not the story of “inventors” told by the portraits, but the variety and virtuosity of graphic form exhibited by the alphabetic characters on the pillars. The alphabets testify to an intense preoccupation with writing and letterform in sixteenth-century Rome. Two new, unstudied sources reveal a complex network of relationships that link the Vatican alphabets to contemporary Roman scribal culture, a lively print tradition of calligraphic display alphabets, and the monumental public lettering campaign undertaken by Sixtus v. The first source is the De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus ex picturis Bibliothecae Vaticanae liber of Lucas Orfei. It consists of a sequence of twentythree engraved plates depicting the letters and captions of the entire alphabet cycle. It is undated but was most likely issued in 1589 during the final stages of completion of the library frescoes. Orfei was a scribe in the Sistine Chapel and was responsible for the design and lettering of more than fifty epigraphic 5 See the bull of foundation for the Vatican press (Eam semper) of 27 Apr. 1587, in Bullarum diplomatum et privilegiorum Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum, 25 vols. (Torino: Seb. Franco and Henrico Dalmazzo, 1857–72), 8:841; and the bull of foundation of the Congregation “pro typographia Vaticana” (Immensa Aeterni Dei) of 22 Jan. 1588, in ibid., 8:996. On the Vatican press see now Valentino Romani, “Tipografie papali: la Tipografia Vaticana,” in Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 2:261–79. The work of Pierre Petitmengin remains inspirational; see his “À propos des éditions patristiques de la Contre-Réforme: le ‘Saint Augustin’ de la Typographie Vaticane,” Recherches Augustiniennes 4 (1966): 199–251. 6 See Henrik D.L. Vervliet, Cyrillic and Oriental Typography in Rome at the End of the Sixteenth Century: An Inquiry into the Later Work of Robert Granjon (1578–90) (Berkeley, ca: Poltroon, 1981). For the general context, see Alberto Tinto, “Per una storia della tipografia orientale a Roma nell’età della Controriforma. Contributi,” Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia 16 (1973): 280–303; Tinto, La Tipografia medicea orientale (Lucca: Fazzi, 1987).

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monuments in Rome during the pontificate of Sixtus v.7 He produced an engraved album of his inscriptional Roman capitals, the Alfabeto delle maiuscole antiche romane (ca. 1586), and publicized his epigraphic oeuvre with a volume of engraved inscriptions, the Varie inscrittioni, in 1589. Orfei’s De caracterum inventoribus is of singular importance, as in it Orfei identifies himself as auctor and scriptor of the library alphabets. Orfei and De caracterum inventoribus have been noticeably absent from discussion of the alphabet cycle, and indeed the De caracterum inventoribus remains entirely unstudied. The second source is an engraved calligraphic specimen sheet featuring a number of exotic alphabets issued by Nicolas van Aelst in 1587, entitled Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime. It almost certainly served as the inspiration for the alphabet cycle. We shall examine the specimen sheet first. The Essemplare is a large (368 mm x 465 mm) broadsheet copperplate engraving divided into three columns, each column containing five rectangular compartments. An ornamental border frames the entire print (Fig. 26.1).8 The top left box contains a dedication by Van Aelst dated 31 May 1587 to the Cardinal of Verona, Agostino Valier. The name of the engraver, Martin van Buyten, appears in the lower right corner of the border. The remaining fourteen compartments each contain a brief phrase of a few lines, each in a different 7 Lucas Orfei, De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus ex picturis Bibliothecae Vaticanae liber (Rome: n.p. [1589]), hereafter cited as De caracterum inventoribus. On Orfei, see James Mosley, “Trajan Revived,” Alphabet 1 (1964): 17–48; Stanley Morison, Calligraphy, 1535–1885 (Milan: La Bibliofila, 1962), 21–27; Morison, Early Italian Writing-Books: Renaissance to Baroque, ed. Nicolas Barker (Verona: Edizioni Valdonega; London: British Library, 1990), 130–33; Emanuele Casamassima, Trattati di scrittura del Cinquecento italiano (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1966), 77–78; A.S. Osley, Luminario: An Introduction to the Italian Writing-Books of the Sixteenth and Seven­ teenth Centuries (Nieuwkoop: Miland, 1972), 107–110; Armando Petrucci, “Potere, spazi urbani, scritture esposte: proposte ed esempi,” in Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’état moderne (Rome: École française de Rome, 1985), 85–97 (esp. 94–96); Petrucci, “Pouvoir de l’écriture, pouvoir sur l’écriture dans la Renaissance italienne,” Annales. e.s.c. 43 (1988): 823–47 (esp. 841–42); Petrucci, Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34–39. See also Petrucci, “Introduzione: le maiuscole romane di Luca Orfei fra tardo manierismo e barocco,” in Alfabeto delle maiuscole antiche romane di Luca Orfei, ed. Petrucci (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1986), vii—xx. 8 Two copies are known to me: Biblioteca Angelica, Rome [C.2.11/49]; British Museum, London, 1869, 0410.2472. See A.F. Johnson, “A Catalogue of Italian Writing-Books of the Sixteenth Century,” Signature 10 (1950): 22–48, at 45. Fernanda Ascarelli, Le cinquecentine Romane: censimento delle edizioni romane del xvi secolo possedute dalle biblioteche di Roma (Milan: Etimar, 1972), 295, describes a copy in the Biblioteca Alessandrina, Rome, with the address of the seventeenth-century print publisher Giovanni Battista de Rossi, who evidently later acquired the plate.

LUCA ORFEI AND THE VATICAN LIBRARY ALPHABETS

Figure 26.1

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Simone Verovio, Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime (Rome: Nicolas van Aelst, 1587). Photo courtesy British Museum

language and written in a distinct script. A specimen alphabet in the manner common to sixteenth-century calligraphy manuals follows. The Dutch calligrapher Simone Verovio is credited with the chancery cursive rendered in Italian in one of the compartments (“Simone Verovio scrisse”), and Verovio was presumably responsible for the other handwriting specimens as well. Engraved calligraphic specimen broadsides were rare in sixteenth-century Italy. Though handwritten broadsides had been used by late medieval writing masters to advertise their services, the only other calligraphic specimen broadsides engraved in Italy known to me are from this same period, one of which is also the work of Verovio.9 To make sense of the Essemplare, we need to return to the 9 See British Museum, London, 1869,0410.2469 and 1869,0410.2470 (both dated 1598, the first bearing Verovio’s subscription). On the first see Johnson, “Catalogue,” 45. On late medieval hand-written specimen sheets see Carl Wehmer, “Die Schreibmeisterblätter des späten Mittelalters,” in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1946), vol. 6, 147–61; S.H. Steinberg, “A Hand-List of Specimens of Medieval WritingMasters,” The Library, 4th ser., 23 (1942–43): 24–35; Stanley Morison, Selected Essays on

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preliminary sketch for the library frescoes drawn up by the Vatican Library custos, Federico Ranaldi. The sketch consists of a long, loosely organized list of themes and subjects, only some of which were incorporated into the final decorative scheme. In a section devoted to letters, books, and “amatori di libri” we find mention of alphabets and the inventors of letters: “Gli inventori delle prime lettere con la diversità degli alfabeti, che si trovano tutti stampati in un foglio” (“The inventors of the first letters with the diversity of alphabets, which are all found printed in a [single] sheet”) (my italics).10 It is evident that in regard to alphabets Ranaldi had a very specific model in mind. From “tutti stampati in un foglio,” it might be thought that he was referring to a typographic specimen sheet, though early type specimen sheets are rare, and sample alphabets were by no means standard in surviving sixteenth-century examples. Printers who possessed exotic fonts appear not to have used the broadsheet format, and ­normally displayed printed passages of set text rather than alphabets. This is the case of the exotic type possessed by Domenico Basa, head of the Vatican press. Robert Granjon, the designer of the type, issued single-sheet specimens of his Armenian (1579), Syriac (1580), Cyrillic (1582), and Arabic (1583) type, all displaying passages of set text.11 By “tutti stampati in un foglio” it would seem that Ranaldi meant the Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime. Script rather than language is the true subject of the Essemplare. It was likely intended to serve as a supplement to Verovio’s 1587 engraved calligraphic manual, Il primo libro delli Essempi, also produced by the Van Aelst–Van Buyten team. Like the Essemplare, the work is dedicated to Valier and dated 31 May.12

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the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print, ed. David McKitterick, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1: 8–11. Federico Ranaldi, “Minuta dal programma riguardante l’affresco del salone sistino,” published in Vittorio Frajese, Il popolo Fanciullo: Silvio Antoniano e il sistema disciplinare della controriforma (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1987), 128. For an overview and further bibliography, see John A. Lane, Early Type Specimens in the Plantin-Moretus Museum (New Castle, de: Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2004). See also John Dreyfus, ed., Type Specimen Facsimiles, 2 vols. (London: Bodley Head, 1963–72). Plantin issued his Index sive specimen characterum of 1567 in booklet form; of non-Latin type, he exhibited Greek and Hebrew but not his Syriac. His folio specimen booklet of 1585 included his Syriac type, but again, not in alphabet form. See Dreyfus, Type Specimen Facsimiles, vol. 2, nos. 16–17. On Granjon and Basa see Vervliet, Cyrillic and Oriental Typography. See also Eva Hanebutt-Benz, “Type Specimens of Oriental Scripts from European Type Foundries,” in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution, ed. Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper (Westhofen: Skulima, 2002), 13–32. Simone Verovio, Il primo libro delli Essempi di Simone Verovio (Rome: Van Aelst/Van Buyten, 1587). See Johnson, “Catalogue,” 45; Christopher Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the “Privilegio” in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 289.

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Standing in a long line of sixteenth-century calligraphy manuals, Il primo libro contains thirty-eight copperplate engravings displaying a variety of styles of chancery cursive.13 In the Essemplare three compartments display different forms of chancery cursive. The other compartments were intended to demonstrate Verovio’s range and skill as a calligrapher. In this, Verovio echoed currents of sixteenth-century calligraphic printing. The calligraphy manuals of earlier writing masters such as Giovanni Antonio Tagliente and Giovanni Battista Palatino had included a broad range of scripts. Specimens of administrative and secretarial (cancelleresca, cancelleresca formata, bollata), book (rotunda, antica tonda), and mercantile scripts were normally displayed. With the decline of the mercantile hand in Italy and the rise to dominance of the rapid chancery cursive popularized by Giovanni Francesco Cresci, by the last quarter of the century Italian calligraphy manuals displayed a much more restricted range of hands. Works such as Marcello Scalzini’s Il Secretario (Venice, 1581), like Verovio’s Il primo libro, displayed chancery cursive almost exclusively. The Essemplare represents a return of sorts to the tradition of midcentury calligraphic specimen alphabets. The examples of German, Flemish, and English hands are each furnished in a distinct vernacular mercantile script. Polish is offered in rotunda, French in lettera francese (in the form of gothic cursive popularized as civilité type by Robert Granjon). Latin is rendered in Roman inscriptional capitals. Greek and Hebrew alphabets are also featured. In this, the Essemplare follows in the path of earlier writing masters such as Ugo da Carpi, Tagliente, and Palatino, all of whom had displayed examples of both alphabets. These were not intended as models for imitation, but were rather meant to demonstrate the calligrapher’s virtuosity. Tagliente’s popular La vera arte delo excellente scrivere (issued in more than thirty editions between 1524 and 1568) offered a highly stylized “hebraico formato” in a series of woodblock prints displaying examples of interlaced, decorative, and knotted (“a groppi”) capitals, an intensely pointed gothic “lettera francescha,” a Chaldean alphabet, and a rendition of the Arabic alphabet he claimed was used by “persi, harabi, aphricani, turchi, e tartari.”14 In light of the Vatican Library frescoes, what is truly striking about the Essemplare di xiiii lingue is the remaining four exotic alphabets: Glagolitic (“Dalmatica Schiavona”), Armenian, ancient Egyptian (“Egittiaca antica”), and Indian. How these might have been considered “lingue principalissime” is 13 14

On sixteenth-century Italian calligraphy manuals, see Johnson, “Catalogue”; Casamassima, Trattati di scrittura; Osley, Lumanario; Morison, Early Italian Writing-Books. See Giovanantonio Tagliente, Lo presente libro insegna la vera arte delo excellente scrivere de diverse varie sorti de litere ([Venice], 1524; facsimile, Nieuwkoop: Miland, 1971). For ­editions, see Johnson, “Catalogue,” 26–30.

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anyone’s guess. Yet here too it is possible to find precedent in sixteenth-century calligraphy manuals. Palatino had ventured even further than Tagliente in the display of exotic letters, offering a smorgasbord of woodblock prints of real and imagined alphabets: ancient Hebrew (“alphabetum Hebraicum ante Esdram”), Chaldean, “ancient Chaldean,” Arabic, Egyptian, Indian, Syrian, Saracen, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic. The exotic alphabets first appeared in the 1545 edition of Palatino’s manual, and were perhaps intended to whet the antiquarian appetite of Cardinal Ridolfo Pio da Carpi, to whom Palatino dedicated the work. The alphabets appeared in a string of editions between 1545 and 1578.15 Though Verovio did not follow Palatino’s models, it can be no coincidence that Egyptian, Indian, and Glagolitic are all displayed in the Essemplare. Nor in turn can it be coincidence that many of the same alphabets feature both in the Essemplare and in the Vatican Library frescoes. While the Essemplare did not furnish graphic models for the Vatican alphabets, it was evidently Verovio’s engraved calligraphic specimen sheet that inspired the cycle. The Essemplare firmly locates the Vatican alphabets within the context of Renaissance writing books. Rome, together with Venice, was the leading center of calligraphic printing in sixteenth-century Italy.16 There were good reasons for this. First and foremost was the looming presence of the papal curia, where the chancery script, which rose to a position of dominance over the course of the sixteenth century, was first developed. The curia, together with institutions such as the Vatican Library and the Sistine Chapel, required a stable of scribes and copyists with mastery of a range of administrative and book hands. Two authors of calligraphic manuals printed in Rome, Ferdinando Ruano and Cresci himself, had served as scriptors in the Vatican Library. Cresci, whose Essemplare di piu sorti lettere (1560) and Il perfetto scrittore (1570) were enormously influential, was also a scribe to the Sistine Chapel.17 Luca Orfei emerged from within this milieu. He is the most obscure figure among those involved in the sprawling cultural program of Sixtus v. He had studied under Cresci, who mentioned Orfei approvingly in two of his publications.18 Orfei, like Cresci a scriptor in the Sistine Chapel, was an accomplished 15

Giovanni Battista Palatino, Libro…nel qual s’insegna à scrivere ogni sorte lettera antica e moderna (Rome: Blado, 1545), G1r–7v. See also Palatino, Compendio del gran volume de l’arte del bene et leggiadramente scrivere tutte le sorti di lettere et caratteri (Venice: Rampazetto, 1578). 16 Casamassima, Trattati di scrittura, 62; Witcombe, Copyright, 285–91. 17 James Wardrop, “The Vatican Scriptors: Documents for Ruano and Cresci,” Signature (1948): 3–28; James Mosley, “Giovan Francesco Cresci and the Baroque Letter in Rome,” Typography Papers 6 (2005): 115–55, at 117–19. 18 Both were polemical tracts. Cresci, Avertimenti…intorno li errori, et false opinioni commesse nella professione dello scrivere (Venice: Pietro Dehachino, 1579), cited by Mosley,

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copyist and calligrapher. Chapel records first list him as a scribe of polyphony in 1580. He was evidently also a singer of some talent, as in 1588–89 he was made a member of the chapel choir. Of the dated chapel manuscripts attributed to Orfei, the earliest was produced in 1582, the latest in 1599. In all, eleven manuscripts copied either in whole or in part by Orfei have been identified, exhibiting a variety of rotunda, antica tonda, and chancery cursive hands.19 In his signed music manuscripts Orfei employed a Latinized form of his name (“Lucas Horpheus eiusdem Cappellae Scriptor scribebat”). In De caracterum inventoribus and the Varie inscrittioni he used a number of different forms: Lucas a Fano s.d.n. Cappellae Scrip[tor], Luca da Fano Scrittore, Luca Horfeo, Lucas Fanensis, or Lucas a Fano Romanus scriptor. In the 1586 manuscript dedication to Sixtus v of his Alfabeto delle maiuscule antiche romane he identified himself as “Palatii Apostolici Scriptor,” a vague and possibly pretentious reference to his position as chapel scribe. His date of birth is unknown, but he evidently hailed from Fano in the Marche, a fact of which he was rather incessantly proud. He died in 1608. The De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus ex picturis Bibliothecae Vaticanae liber is composed of an engraved title page and twenty-three numbered plates exhibiting the letters and accompanying inscriptions of the alphabet cycle (Fig. 26.2). Three prints in the series combine letters from two faces of a single pillar. All twenty-six letter sequences and inscriptions found in the salone sistino are reproduced.20 Like many sixteenth-century calligraphy books, it is a rare work; there are five known copies.21 Most copies take the

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20

21

“Cresci,” 107; Cresci, L’idea con le circonstanze naturali…per voler legittimamente posseder l’Arte maggiore, e minore dello scrivere (Milan: Gio. Angelo Nava, 1622), 28v, cited by Mosley, “Cresci,” 119. It is sometimes suggested that Orfei was a scriptor in the Vatican Library, likely as a result of Cresci’s claim that “M. Gio. Luigi Mercato, e M. Luca Orfei da Fano, scrittori de’ libri di Capella del Papa, e della Libraria Apostolica,” were among his many students. There is evidence of only Mercato as library scriptor; see Wardrop, “The Vatican Scriptors,” 21–22; Jeanne Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane de Sixte iv à Pie xi (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1973), 105, 291. For Orfei and the Sistine Chapel, see Richard Sherr, “Capsule Singer Biographies: Singers in the Papal Chapel in the Reigns of Popes Julius ii to Sixtus v (1503–1590),” http://sophia .smith.edu/~rsherr/orfei.htm, with documents on Orfei’s appointment as singer; Josephus M. Llorens, Capellae Sixtinae Codices musicis notis instructi sive manu scripti sive praelo excussi (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1960). The prints are numbered in what can only be described as a haphazard order (see Table. 26.1). The plates vary slightly in size, but most are quadrangular, measuring between 134 and 135 mm long, and between 124 and 128 mm high. National Art Library (nal), London; Universitätsbibliothek, Basel; Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Strasbourg; and two copies at the Newberry Library, Chicago. The first Newberry copy lacks the ninth and fourteenth print of the numbered sequence, and

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Figure 26.2

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus (Rome, ca. 1589), title page engraving. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

form of an oblong quarto album,22 which under Cresci’s influence had become the dominant format for calligraphic printing.23 Neither an engraver nor a publisher is identified on any of the plates, though an address is provided on the title page: “Romae in vico Parionis sub signo lupi.”24 There is no dedication, and no date of publication is evident.

the ninth and subsequent plates have been renumbered. Both the second Newberry copy and the nal copy lack the title page. The nal does, however, possess a separate copy of the title page engraving. 22 The sheets in the first Newberry copy are 213 mm long by 155 mm high. Other copies are of a similar size. The prints in the nal copy have been cut along the plate mark and pasted in a rather cramped manner (two prints per page) into an album. 23 Casamassima, Trattati di scrittura, 76; Osley, Luminario, 69. 24 The isolated title page engraving in the nal copy represents a later state of the plate in which the address has been erased and that of Giovanni Battista de’ Rossi, an early seventeenth-century print publisher, inserted. De’ Rossi evidently acquired the plates and reissued the work under his own name: “Romae Gio Batt Rossi in Piazza Navona.”

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In short, very little is known about the circumstances in which De caracterum inventoribus was produced. The same is true of Orfei’s other engraved print collections, the Alfabeto delle maiuscole antiche romane and the Varie inscrittioni. A little more of the general context emerges when the three collections are considered together. The Alfabeto consists of a title page engraving and twenty-three numbered plates that display models of Orfei’s Roman capitals. It is similarly rare, existing in four known copies.25 The Varie inscrittioni is the lengthiest of Orfei’s publications, consisting of ninety-four numbered plates in most copies.26 Copies are slightly more abundant.27 Like De caracterum inventoribus, neither of these works betrays an engraver or publisher. The Alfabeto bears the same vague address as De caracterum inventoribus: “all’insegna del Luppo in Parione.” Most copies of the Varie inscrittioni lack even an address, though copies at Salamanca and Wrocław provide the same address in the via Parione in the heart of Rome’s printing quarter. They evidently represent a later state of the title page plate, as both copies contain an additional six numbered plates.28 There are additional signs of close association between the three publications. Most notably, the Varie inscrittioni reproduces inscriptions derived from the fresco cycles in the Vatican Library devoted to the libraries of antiquity and the ecumenical councils of the church. Also included are the texts of the massive stone epigraphic monuments that Orfei designed describing the library’s purpose and regulations. Several copies of the Varie inscrittioni include prints from De caracterum inventoribus, while the copy in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome also contains a complete set of the engraved capitals from the Alfabeto.29 The National Art Library copy of the De caracterum inventoribus, meanwhile, contains two prints from the Varie inscrittioni.30 25

26

27 28 29 30

Morison knew only the copies at the Newberry Library (reprinted by Petrucci), and the copy (described in Morison, Calligraphy, 52) now at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (lacking the title page). An additional copy exists in the British Library, London, for some reason unknown to Morison. Plates of the Alfabeto are also present in the copy of the Varie Inscrittioni located in the Biblioteca Angelica, Rome. See Morison, Calligraphy, who itemizes 94 numbered plates. Casamassima, Trattati, 93– 94, describes the copy in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, with 97 numbered plates. Copies at Dolnośląska Biblioteka, Wrocław (XVI/11818), and the Biblioteca General Histórica, Universidad di Salamanca (BG/75778), contain 100 numbered plates. I have located eight copies in addition to the five known to Morison, Caligraphy, 56. Varie inscrittioni, Biblioteca General Histórica, BG/75778: “In Roma all’insegna del Lupo in Parione.” See also Dolnośląska Biblioteka, XVI/11818. nal, 86.L.6; All Souls College Library, Oxford, hhh.16.5; Biblioteca Angelica, kk.11.47. nal, 86.S.41.

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On the title page of the Varie inscrittioni Orfei assumed full ownership of the design of the inscriptions—“da Luca Horfei da Fano Scrittore dissegnate in Pietra.” Of the engraving process he states only that he “had them engraved in copper” (“et dal medesimo fatte intagliare in Rame”), suggesting that he may have contracted with an engraver directly to produce the plates. We can cautiously assume the same of the Alfabeto and De caracterum inventoribus.31 Orfei identifies himself as “auctor” of De caracterum inventoribus on the title page. Following the conventions of calligraphic publishing, in doing so he asserted a proprietary role over the writing specimens found inside the work. In the manner of the signed specimen alphabets found in calligraphy manuals, all but two prints inside the work bear some form of Orfei’s ­subscription: “Lucas Scribeb[at],” “Lucas fanensis scribebat Romae,” and so on. Orfei must have seemed the natural choice for the design of the alphabets. He had already published his Alfabeto, and when work on the decoration of the library began in 1588 many of the epigraphic monuments he had designed for Sixtus v were already in place. Indeed, several are reproduced in the frescoes depicting the opere of Sixtus v on the library ceiling. While Orfei was responsible for the disposition and letter design of the monuments, the textual composition of the inscriptions is generally attributed to Silvio Antoniano, who as we know was responsible for the final arrangement of the library ­frescoes.32 Antoniano enjoyed a reputation as a highly skilled Latinist, and it was likely he who supplied Orfei with model alphabets for the frescoes. A ­miscellaneous volume of grammatical works that once belonged to Antoniano, now in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome, includes Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic grammars. The volume also contains specimen sheets of the Syriac, Arabic, and Cyrillic type cut by Robert Granjon, used by Domenico Basa and the Vatican press.33 Orfei’s design of the library alphabets thus continued an  established and proved partnership. Certainly for the Latin alphabet 31 32

33

On the fluid nature of sixteenth-century print publishing see Michael Bury, The Print in Italy, 1550–1620 (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 9–11. See Cesare d’Onofrio, Gli obelischi di Roma: storia e urbanistica di una città dall’età antica al xx secolo (Rome: Romana Società, 1992), 184, 252–53; Petrucci, Public Lettering, 37. In the case of the Lateran obelisk, the inscriptions were dictated by Silvio Antoniano, designed by Orfei, and cut by Matteo Castello da Melide. Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Rome, Inc. 284–285/11 (Syriac specimen), /12 (Armenian), /14 (Arabic), /16 (Cyrillic). The Syriac and Cyrillic type specimens in the volume are reproduced in Vervliet, Cyrillic and Oriental Typography, 19, 47. Antoniano’s possession mark is found on the bottom of the first leaf of the first volume in the miscellany: “Card[ina]lis Antoniani.” The volume is not recorded in the inventory of Antoniano’s library published by Elisabetta Patrizi, “Del congiungere le gemme de’ gentili con la sapientia de’ christiani”: La biblioteca del card. Silvio Antoniano tra studia humanitatis e cultura ecclesiastica (Florence: Olschki, 2011).

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Orfei  employed models based on his inscriptional lettering (Fig.  26.3). The ­explanatory inscriptions of the entire salone sistino are also lettered in his Roman majuscule.34 And as we shall see, some letterforms employed in other alphabets were derived from Orfei’s Roman capitals. The Vatican Library alphabets occupy a cultural space defined by an aesthetic of graphic form. Orfei’s dedication to Sixtus v in the Varie inscrittioni appeals directly to this aesthetic:

Figure 26.3

34

Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 6, partial Latin alphabet, “Nicostrata Carmenta inventor of Latin letters.” The Latin sequence in the library served to showcase the Roman majuscule Orfei designed for the epigraphic monuments of Sixtus v. Many of the characteristic features of Orfei’s majuscule receive emphasis in this rendering: an exaggerated slenderness of thin strokes, sharply defined line variation, and tapered serifs. The accompanying inscription displays Orfei’s cancelleresca antica. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

See the insightful remarks by Petrucci in Alfabeto, xiv, and Public Lettering, 38, to which the present essay is very much indebted.

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Having by the special grace of your Beatitude designed with ancient Roman letters in various sizes and layouts the noble inscriptions cut in marble on obelisks, aqueducts, and many other magnificent buildings erected by Your Holiness, I wished to have these engraved in copper and published, since artists and gentlemen take pleasure in them, some for the gracefulness of the ancient character and its proportions, and the layout of the lines, others for the liveliness and learning of the conceits.35 It is not only epigraphic lettering displayed in the Varie inscrittioni. In addition to the Sistine inscriptions rendered in Orfei’s Roman majuscule, Orfei exhibited a number of other scripts in describing the setting and location of the monuments. In the plates devoted to the library fresco inscriptions he abandoned entirely the Roman majuscule in which they appear on the library walls. He explained that the plates displaying the inscriptions found “in varii luoghi per la libraria Vaticana” were offered to aficionados of “cancellaresco carattere corsivo.” The same format was followed in De caracterum inventoribus to r­ ender the inscriptions accompanying the alphabets. De caracterum inventoribus amplifies the broader graphic field in which the library alphabets operate. Orfei displayed two versions of chancery cursive. The first was in the rapid style of Cresci’s cancellaresca corrente, with a pronounced slant, a majority of letters truly joined, and single, abbreviated strokes employed for letters such as “e,” “r,” and “h” (Fig. 26.4). The stem and bow in letters such as “p” and “b” are unclosed. The script also employs the bulbous, tear-dropped heads (testeggiata) on ascenders popularized by Cresci and pronounced flourishes on descenders and capitals. The second form of chancery cursive is a less rapid version, closely resembling Cresci’s cancellaresca alquanto corrente (Fig. 26.5). It employs both full and abbreviated forms of letters such as “r” and “e,” and a closed “o.” The letter “h” is formed with either a stem and arm or (not represented in Figure  26.5) a single inflected stroke. Capitals are rounded rather than angular, and are created with less flourish than the cancellaresca corrente. Orfei also offered examples of his book hands. It is here that he exhibited both his graphic range and his allegiance to Cresci. Cresci had rejected the 35

Varie inscrittioni, plate  2, trans. revised from Morison, Early Italian Writing-Books, 131: “Havendo io Padre Beat[issi]mo per singolar gratia di V[ost]ra Beat[itudin]e disegnate con lettere antiche Romane, di varia grandezza, et con diversi compartimenti le nobili Inscrittioni, scolpite in marmo, sopra gli obilischi, Aquedotto, et tant altri magnifici edificii di V[ostra] S[anti]tà ho voluto farle intagliare in Rame, et publicarle, acciò i virtuosi, et gentilli ingegni prendano diletto, alcuni della vaghezza del carattere antico, et delle sue proportioni, et del componimento dei versi, altri de concetti spirituosi, et ben dotti.”

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Figure 26.4

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 10, Gothic alphabet, “Bishop Ulfilas invents the letters of the Goths.” Elements of Orfei’s Roman majuscule are clearly visible in the rendering of some of the Gothic letters. The Latin inscription is rendered in Orfei’s chancery cursive script, employing the clubbed ascenders (testeggiata) popularized by Giovanni Francesco Cresci. The source for the Gothic letters is Teseo Ambrogio, Introductio ad Chaldaicam linguam (Pavia, 1539), 206v. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

proliferation of decorative and obscure scripts found in manuals such as Palatino’s, which he found vain and lacking art. He had called for a narrow canon of scripts “che sono in uso”: chancery, antica tonda, Roman majuscules, bollatica, Francese (gothic cursive), mercantile, and rotunda (or lettera ecclesiastica).36 In both the Varie inscrittioni and De caracterum inventoribus Orfei produced v­ ersions of antica tonda, rotunda, and a rendition of the book 36

Giovanni Francesco Cresci, Il perfetto scrittore (Rome: “in casa del proprio autore,” 1570; repr., Nieuwkoop: Miland, 1972), *2v, E2v.

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Figure 26.5

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 11, Greek alphabet, upper: “Cadmus brother of Phoenix brought sixteen letters to Greece”; lower: “Linus of Thebes inventor of Greek letters.” The Greek majuscules are directly modeled on Orfei’s inscriptional Roman capitals. The Latin inscriptions display a less rapid cursive, what Cresci called cancellaresca alquanto corrente. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

italic that Cresci had called cancellaresca antica. At one point in the Varie inscrittioni Orfei used these scripts to display the text of Sistine inscriptions not of his own design. He explained that “though initially they were not designed by my hand, I nonetheless wished to avail myself of them to express various letterforms.”37 These include inscriptions for the Monte della Pietà and Trevi Fountain, both r­ en­dered in antica tonda, and the Collegio Bolognese, 37 Orfei, Varie inscrittioni, plate 68: “Le seguenti Inscrittioni che seguono…se bene da principio non furono disegnate di mia mano, nondimeno io ho voluto valermene per esprimere con esse varie forme di lettere, et dare insieme a voi giuditiosi lettori questo gusto di più, con i nobili concetti di esse.”

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Figure 26.6

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 17, Samaritan alphabet, “The sons of Seth inscribed the science of the heavens on two columns.” The source for the Samaritan alphabet is Guillaume Postel, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio ac legendi modus longe facilimus (Paris: D. Lescuier, 1538), C4v. Orfei’s Roman majuscule served as a model in rendering several letters. The Latin inscription displays Orfei’s antica tonda script. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

displayed in cancellaresca antica. Most impressively, he used tonda to render the original Augustan-era inscription on the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, to which he cheekily added his subscription: “Lucas Scrib[ebat].”38 In De caracterum inventoribus Orfei accorded pride of place to antica tonda, used to render the inscriptions related to the Semitic alphabets on the east wall and the first pillar (Fig. 26.6). Cresci had considered antica tonda the “queen of all the other letters.” He argued that of all scripts it is the most demanding, 38

Ibid., plates 69–71, 23. See also plates 96 (antica tonda) and 60, 70, 97–99 (cancellaresca antica).

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Figure 26.7

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 9, Egyptian alphabet, “Queen Isis inventor of Egyptian letters.” The source for the alphabet is Giovanni Battista Palatino, Compendio del gran volume de l’arte del bene et leggiadramente scrivere tutte le sorti di lettere et caratteri (Venice: Rampazetto, 1578), G3v. The alphabet is rendered in a hybrid script of Orfei’s invention. An antica tonda “h,” a Roman majuscule “Q,” and a rotunda “y” are all clearly visible. Other letters combine stroke styles. The Latin inscription displays Orfei’s rotunda script. Photo courtesy All Souls College Library

requiring the most art and an understanding of the Roman majuscule from which its body was derived.39 The inscriptions accompanying the four plates of Egyptian alphabets all display examples of Orfei’s rotunda. This is the most impressive of the scripts shown in De caracterum inventoribus. Orfei exhibited a controlled use of flourish and employed decorated capitals (Fig. 26.7). It was evidently the hand in which he took most pride as scribe to the Sistine Chapel. Examples of his rotunda are also featured in several prints of inscriptions from 39 Cresci, Il perfetto scrittore, F3v.

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the conciliar cycle in the Varie inscrittioni. The inscriptions printed from the Second Council of Lyon also display three different forms of music notation and two lines of Greek chant.40 A version of Cresci’s cancelleresca antica is employed on five plates of De caracterum inventoribus.41 Cresci claimed to have recently discovered (“nuovamente ritrovata”) the script, which he described as combining the elongated letterform of cancelleresca and the body of antica tonda. He stated that it required both the theoretical knowledge and well-practiced hand demanded by Roman majuscule and the delicate touch required of tonda. Though it resembles a book italic, Cresci firmly denied any resemblance to the italics of Aldus or Gryphus.42 The script is very lightly sloped and as in antica tonda employs a long “s” in initial and medial positions and a short “s” in final positions. There are pronounced flicked serifs on minims such as “r” and “u,” while ascenders lack the bulbous head found in Orfei’s chancery cursive (Figs. 26.3 and 26.8). De caracterum inventoribus was intended to demonstrate Orfei’s range and skill as a professional scribe. The real virtuosity of the work, of course, lies in its reproduction of the alphabets on the Vatican Library pillars. As we have seen, there was an established tradition of displaying exotic alphabets in sixteenthcentury calligraphic printing. While Cresci had attacked Palatino for indulging in “lettere vane” (targeting Palatino’s catalog of obscure, largely invented, mercantile hands and his elaborately decorated capitals), Cresci nonetheless promised that those who mastered his own canon of approved scripts would be capable of forming any other letter, including Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean. Moreover, they would do so in a better and clearer hand than those born to it.43 Orfei rose to the challenge. We can now turn to consider the alphabets themselves. Latin letters are rendered in the Roman majuscule of Orfei’s inscriptional lettering. Though ostensibly based on ancient examples, as Armando Petrucci has shown Orfei’s capitals in reality blended elements of the first-century “Trajan” letter favored by Cresci with more modern epigraphic models dating from the late fifteenth century.44 As with Cresci, the geometric form espoused 40 Orfei, Varie inscrittioni, plate 88. 41 Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plates 1, 6, 8, 16 ,and 18: inscriptions for Christ (Greek), Nicostrata (Latin), Claudius (Latin), Phoenix (Phoenician), and Demaratus (Etruscan). 42 Cresci, Il perfetto scrittore, E2r. 43 Ibid., *4r: “perche vengono a fare anco la mano atta ad imitare ogni sorte di lettera ò sia Greca, Ebraica, Caldea…e le scriverà molto meglio e piu nette…che coloro stessi delle medesime nationi.” On the polemic between Cresci and Palatino, see Casamassima, Trattati di scrittura, 67; Osley, Luminario, 70, 78. 44 Petrucci, Public lettering, 37–38; on Orfei’s majuscule, see also Mosley, “Trajan Revived,” 24–26.

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Lucas Orfei, De caracterum inventoribus, plate 16, Etruscan alphabet, “Demaratus of Corinth author of Etruscan letters.” The source for the alphabet is Ambrogio, Introductio ad Chaldaicam linguam, 206r. Orfei’s Roman majuscule provided the model for many letters. The Latin inscription displays Orfei’s book italic, what Cresci called cancelleresca antica. Photo courtesy Newberry Library

by earlier Renaissance advocates of the Roman letter has been replaced with a more fluid orientation. In the engraved plates of De caracterum inventoribus many of the characteristic features of Orfei’s majuscule receive emphasis. Line variation is more defined. Thinner strokes have been given an exaggerated slenderness, emphasizing the elongated form of the letters. Serifs are not simply curved, but taper in an almost undulating manner (Fig.  26.3). Orfei’s Latin inscrip­tional letters also served as the model for his Greek alphabet, rendered in a majuscule that in many instances replicates his Roman letter. It too, in other words, is of Orfei’s “invention” (Fig. 26.5). The Hebrew alphabet is rendered in almost entirely uninflected strokes of uniform width. A handful of letters employ flat serifs, but most strokes have a slightly indefinite, rounded

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termination. Line variation, where present, would appear to be influenced by Latin calligraphic traditions: a thinning in the bowl of rounded strokes, and angular, narrow transverse strokes. For the exotic alphabets, the question of sources and models is more pressing. Let us consider first the alphabet displayed above the portraits of Adam, the sons of Seth, and Moses. The alphabet itself is not identified in any of the accompanying inscriptions. Angelo Rocca in De Bibliotheca Vaticana simply identified the letters as “Alphabetum Hebraicum antiquius.”45 Palatino had displayed an “Alphabetum Hebraicum ante Esdram,” an imaginary alphabet modeled on the celestial alphabets of Renaissance cabbalistic writings. The notion of “ancient Hebrew” was itself derived from Jerome’s account of the creation of the modern Hebrew alphabet by Ezra in order to culturally differentiate Jews from Samaritans.46 While Palatino likely provided the topos for the “ancient Hebrew” alphabet, the alphabet figured in the frescoes is in fact Samaritan (Fig. 26.6). The appearance of Samaritan in the frescoes has passed without comment.47 Orfei’s source for the alphabet, likely provided by Antoniano, was Guillaume Postel’s Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum (1538), one of the first works of Renaissance comparative philology. Postel had reproduced an “Alphabetum Hebraicum antiquum, nunc Samaritanorum,” in a woodblock print.48 He published two different scripts. The first was derived from a coin. 45 Rocca, De Bibliotheca Vaticana, 79, 88. 46 See Jerome, “Prologus in Libro Regem,” in Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983), 364: “Viginti et duas esse litteras apud Hebraeos, Syrorum quoque et Chaldeorum lingua testatur, quae hebraeae magna ex parte confinis est; nam et ipsi viginti duo elementa habent eodem sono, sed diversis caracteribus. Samaritani etiam Pentateuchum Mosi totidem litteris scriptitant, figuris tantum et apicibus discrepantes. Certumque est Ezram scribam legisque doctorem post captam Hierosolymam et instaurationem templi sub Zorobabel alias litteras repperisse, quibus nunc utimur, cum ad illud usque tempus idem Samaritanorum et Hebraeorum caracteres fuerint.” 47 This is largely because Angelo Rocca, the accepted authority on the frescoes, makes no mention of Samaritan when discussing the alphabets associated with Adam, the sons of Seth, and Moses. In his discussion of Ezra he acknowledges that Ezra established new characters upon the return to Jerusalem. He states that Jews and Samaritans had previously used the same characters and, following Jerome, that it was these letters that later became known as Samaritan. He also follows Jerome in arguing that Ezra created the Hebrew alphabet in order to distance the Jews from the “schismatic” Samaritans. See Rocca, De Bibliotheca Vaticana, 89, 93. 48 Guillaume Postel, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio ac legendi modus longe facilimus (Paris: D. Lescuier, 1538), C4v. See Philippe de Robert, “La naissance des études samaritaines en Europe aux xvi et xvii siècles,” in Études

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Postel called the script “typographica,” no doubt in reference to the metal casting process involved and clearly thought of it as a form of public, inscriptional lettering on the Roman model. He reproduced the coin upon which the alphabet was based, though many of the letters were interpolated or invented owing to lacunae in the lettering.49 Postel pointed out that the Samaritan inscription on the obverse of the coin (which he transliterated as Ierusalaim halzedossah) meant “sacred Jerusalem.” He reasoned that given Samaritan hostility to Jerusalem because of the schism between Samaritans and Jews, the inscription was of Jewish rather than Samaritan provenance. The coin thus offered material proof that Samaritans and Jews had once used the same written alphabet and that Samaritan was the original Hebrew script.50 The second alphabet, the Samaritan majuscule followed by Orfei, Postel identified as a handwritten script (“chirographica”).51 The fresco cycle thus offered an empirical solution to the problem of linguistic origins. As with his Greek alphabet, Orfei’s Samaritan script was indebted to his Roman majuscule. Several letters recall Orfei’s Latin letterforms: aleph (“F”), he (reverse “E”), het (tilted “H”), yod (“N”), sade (tilted reverse “E”), quph (“P”), res (reverse “P”), and sin (“W”) (Fig. 26.6). The Chaldean alphabet that appears above the portrait of Abraham was borrowed from another work of Renaissance linguistics, Teseo Ambrogio’s Intro­ ductio ad Chaldaicam linguam, printed in Pavia in 1539.52 While Ambrogio’s survey of ancient lettering systems is celebrated as marking the first use of samaritaines. Pentateuque et Targum: exégèse et philologie, chroniques, ed. Jean-Pierre Rothschild and Guy Dominique Sixdenier (Leuven: Peeters, 1988), 15–26; Alan D. Crown, Samaritan Scribes and Manuscripts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 270–75; Robert J.  Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 95–135. 49 See Crown, Samaritan Scribes and Manuscripts, 274. The coin was also discussed and reproduced, together with a slightly different rendering of the Samaritan alphabet, by the Jewish scholar Azariah de’ Rossi, Me’or Enayim (Mantua: Giacomo Rufinelli, 1573–75). See Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Joanna Weinberg (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2001), 666–68; Joanna Weinberg, “Azariah de’ Rossi and Septuagint Traditions,” Italia 5 (1985): 7–35. 50 Postel, Linguarum duodecim characteribus, C3v–4r. 51 Postel later printed a different version of the Samaritan alphabet in a large foldout table in De Foenicum literis, seu de prisco Latinae & Graecae linguae charactere, eiusque antiquissima origine et usu (Paris: Martin Le Jeune, 1552). The alphabet was collected during travels to the Levant in 1549–50, when Postel visited a Samaritan community near Jerusalem. Despite the availability of this updated version of the alphabet, it is clear that Orfei followed the letterforms published by Postel in 1538. 52 Teseo Ambrogio, Introductio ad Chaldaicam linguam (Pavia, 1539), 9r: “Chaldaeorum literae, qui Syriam incolunt, quae etiam syriacae dicuntur.” On Ambrogio, see Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah, 11–27.

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Syriac serto type, the Introductio also displayed the Syriac estrangela script in a woodblock print.53 Though serto would have been the more familiar version of Syriac in sixteenth-century Rome (Domenico Basa possessed serto type), for some reason the decision was made to display estrangela in the fresco cycle. Orfei offered a free rendering of Ambrogio’s model. Non-Syriac letters are substituted in several instances, while other letters appear out of sequence. Another curiosity is the alphabet’s acquisition of a twenty-third letter. Ambrogio also furnished models for the Gothic (Fig.  26.4) and Etruscan (Fig.  26.8) alphabets in the fresco cycle.54 Here again Orfei introduced elements of his Roman majuscule. This is most noticeable in the form of several Etruscan letters, which follow Orfei’s inscriptional “N” (reversed), “I”, “R” (reversed), “T” (upside down), “Z”, and “H.” The occurrence of “Egyptian” in the library frescoes comes as no surprise. The wisdom of the ancient Egyptians was a Renaissance commonplace, while Renaissance interest in hieroglyphics was arguably at its peak in the 1580s. Sixtus himself had an enormous interest in obelisks, and his efforts to erect no fewer than four obelisks in Rome during his brief pontificate are well known.55 Nonetheless, the “Egyptian” shown on the library pillars is not hieroglyphic, but alphabetic. Before we confront the Egyptian alphabets directly, we can consider the ideas of Michele Mercati, the figure in Sistine Rome who had thought longest and hardest about Egyptian writing. Mercati was personal physician to Sixtus v and oversaw the Vatican collection of stones and fossils.56 Tasked by the pope with amassing whatever could be known about obelisks, Mercati published his findings in De gli obelischi di Roma, issued in 1589 by Domenico Basa. Though Mercati’s treatise appeared after the frescoes had been planned and executed, his views were no doubt well known among the small circle of cultural advisers around Sixtus. Mercati sought to understand the function, if not the full meaning, of hieroglyphs. He argued that Egyptian priests had developed the system of allegorical figures to preserve hard-won sacred and scientific knowledge. Behind his ideas about hieroglyphs lies careful argument about the spread of writing in the ancient world. Mercati knew from classical and patristic sources that the Egyptians had used 53

See J.F. Coakley, The Typography of Syriac: A Historical Catalogue of Printing Types, 1537– 1958 (New Castle, de: Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2006), 27–30. 54 Ambrogio, Introductio, 206r (Estrucan), 206v (Gothic). 55 See Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2009). 56 On Mercati, see Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen: Gec Gad, 1961), 84–85; Brian A. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 281–82; Curran et al., Obelisk, 154–58.

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two other writing systems, demotic and hieratic, though models of neither were known to the Renaissance. If hieroglyphs were to be fathomed, he reasoned, it was necessary to consider the nature of all three types of writing. Mercati offered a subtle exposition of the function of Egyptian letterform. Demotic, he explained, was similar to Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic. It used letters to form words, had a similar number of characters joined in a similar fashion, and was written right to left. The demotic script was known by all and widely used for trade, commerce, and law. In short, he wrote, the Egyptians possessed “the true and perfect manner of writing with letters” prior to the develop­ ment of hieroglyphs.57 Hieratic, he argued, was the script used by the Egyptian priestly caste, the hierogrammatisti, to record sacred knowledge. He clearly thought of hieratic as a kind of formal book hand. It followed the demotic alphabet “but with more formed letters, not commonly used by the people in cursive writing, although it could be read easily by everyone.” Though legible, the meaning of hieratic was obscured through the interposition of mysterious words whose real meaning was concealed and by the constant use of allegory.58 Hieroglyphs in turn extended the allegorical system of hieratic into a different medium, using images rather than letters. It had been developed not because of any technical shortcomings of demotic but in order to reserve civil, religious, and scientific knowledge for ruling élites. The new form of writing was meant to prevent learning from falling into the hands of the vulgar (albeit literate) masses, where it might be contaminated and corrupted.59 Hieroglyphs thus differed formally from hieratic and structurally from mere picture writing. Three distinct Egyptian writing systems are represented in the library frescoes. The alphabets attributed to Mercury and Memnon are the same; they are derived from the “Indian” alphabet of Palatino, but change the order of its letters. The alphabet of Isis is from the same source, a version of Palatino’s “Egyptian.” Both scripts would appear to be of Palatino’s invention.60 Here too Orfei turned to his Roman majuscule for several letters, including a “Q” with his characteristic swooping, elongated tail. The overall design of the script, however, is a hybrid of Orfei’s invention, employing elements of antica tonda, 57 58

Michele Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1589), 82, 101–8. Ibid., 108: “Habbiamo detto che delle due maniere di scrivere usate da gli Egitti, la prima era simile all’Hebrea, che con un certo numero di lettere componeva le parole… Era usata ancora questa maniera di scrivere da i sacerdoti, nelle cose sacre: ma con lettere più formate, non usate communemente dal popolo nella scrittura corsiva, e quantunque si potesse leggere agevolmente da ciascuno; nondemeno non era perciò inteso il senso, il quale da i sacerdoti era occultato in due modi.” 59 Ibid., 101–2. 60 Palatino, Compendio del gran volume, G3v–4r.

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rotunda, and Roman majuscule (Fig. 26.7). The third alphabet, the Phrygian letters discovered by Hercules, turns out to be the same Syriac estrangela alphabet, in mixed order, displayed above Abraham. It is possible that this was intended to suggest that writing had migrated to Egypt with Abraham, but as we shall see it might simply reflect Mercati’s views of the more or less arbitrary mutation of letterform in the ancient world. Nor does this mark the final appearance of Syriac in the frescoes. The Phoenician alphabet was also rendered in Syriac, though in a version of the serto script. Here again, Orfei reverted to his Roman majuscule to render aleph (“I”) and pé (a reversed “R” lying on its stem). The decision to display Phoenician using Syriac was no doubt based on the story told by Diodorus Siculus that the Phoenicians, rather than being the first to invent letters, had rather borrowed them from the Syrians, changing their form and shape into other characters.61 The interplay of similarity and difference in the lettering systems displayed in the Vatican frescoes is perplexing, but far from capricious. Arguably Mercati’s views on the spread of writing in antiquity underpin the entire cycle. Mercati surveyed the confused and conflicting testimony on the origin of writing, which was variously attributed to the Egyptians, to the Phoenicians, to the Assyrians or Chaldeans, or to Moses or Abraham. He admitted that there was no mention of writing in scripture before Moses. He was nonetheless able to pair Plutarch’s account of Queen Semiramis of Babylon’s wish to have an epitaph inscribed on her tomb with evidence from Eusebius that Semiramis had reigned during the life of Abraham. This demonstrated that writing was known among the Chaldeans at the time of Abraham. Mercati also related Josephus’s account of the astrological learning recorded by the sons of Seth on two pillars, one of wood, the other of stone. On Mercati’s telling, the pillars are significant not because they served as a mechanism for the transmission of astrological knowledge, but because they furnish evidence that writing was widely used by “our first fathers.” Mercati argued that it was unthinkable that God, who had bestowed upon Adam both the gift of language and knowledge of the names of all things in creation, had not also imparted letters to Adam so that this knowledge could be conveyed to his successors. He reasoned that Adam, the sons of Seth (Adam’s grandsons), and Noah had all used letters, as had Abraham, who, Mercati pointed out, was only fifty-seven years old when Noah died.62 Mercati the physician and antiquarian, like Orfei the calligrapher, viewed writing through the lens of graphic convention. He sought to demystify ancient writing. It was reasonable to assume, he argued, that having survived the flood 61 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5.74. 62 Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma, 92–93.

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letters quickly spread to various neighboring peoples in Syria, Assyria, Arabia, and Egypt. Human things do not remain in the same state, he observed, but undergo constant change. Writing was no different. Letters gradually varied in form in such a way that when disseminated among different peoples the same letters eventually acquired notable differences. Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, and Egyptian letters differed, yet at the same time preserved a certain similarity.63 Writing traveled easily through the ancient world; alphabets lived and died. The Greeks had borrowed letters from the Phoenicians, the Romans from the Greeks.64 In the Vatican frescoes Orfei rendered specimen alphabets for the explanatory framework developed by Mercati. To knowing insiders the display of Samaritan offered a concrete, historical solution to the problem of early Hebrew script. The playfulness with which Syriac was wielded added graphic nuance to Renaissance understanding of the transmission of writing. Not only was Syriac estrangela the script of Abraham but, as we have seen, it also furnished the “Phrygian” letters written by the “Egyptian Hercules” while serto provided a model for the Phoenician alphabet. The Vatican Library alphabet cycle is about script rather than language. It is rooted in the tradition of calligraphic display alphabets exemplifed by the Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime which inspired the cycle, and two of its invented exotic alphabets were derived from Palatino’s best-selling calligraphic manual. Orfei’s display of antica tonda, rotunda, cancelleresca antiqua, and chancery cursive scripts in De caracterum inventoribus further illuminates the prism of heightened graphic awareness through which the Vatican alphabets were viewed in sixteenth-century Rome. The account of ancient writing related by the frescoes tells a story of the transmission and adaptation of letterform across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The repeated appearance of Orfei’s Latin ­majuscules—reversed, tilted, upside down—in the alphabet cycle provided graphic testimony of the migration of letterform across languages and through time. In Orfei’s hand, the inscriptional majuscule of Sistine Rome assumed an eternal character whose material traces could be located in the letters of Adam, Abraham, and Moses and of the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Etruscans.

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Ibid., 93–94: “così può essere accaduto, che una sorte di lettere disseminata appresso diversi popoli, fosse variata in modo, che in successo di tempo si potesse conoscere notabile differenza, tra le lettere hebree, caldee, arabe, e egittie: nientedimanco per la vicinità che hanno insieme questi paesi, fù conservata tra queste lettere più simiglianza, che tra le altre dei più lontani paesi.” Ibid., 94–95.

chapter 27

On the Production and Dissemination of a Hebrew Best Seller: Pinḥas Hurwitz and His Mysticalscientific Encyclopedia, Sefer Ha-Brit David Ruderman* The Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Brit) was one of the most popular Hebrew books read by modern Jews, reflected in its forty editions spanning two centuries, including three Yiddish and six Ladino translations. Part scientific encyclopedia, part manual of mystical ascent, and part plea to Jews to embrace a universal ethics, the work was widely influential in an era of radical change and internal debate for Jews as well as for others. The amazing popularity of the author, the eastern European Jew Pinḥas Hurwitz (1765–1821), stemmed from his kabbalistic pedigree. He offered his readers an exciting compendium of scientific knowledge they could read in their holy language under the pretext that its acquisition fulfilled their highest spiritual goals.1 The book was also successful because of the marketing skills of its author. Hurwitz worked on it assiduously for many years, at one point temporarily losing his eyesight, so he claimed, because of his intense reading. When he finally published his large tome, he invested considerable energy in familiarizing himself with the technology of print as well as the intricacies of the market in Hebrew books. In this brief essay, I would like to focus especially on these two aspects of Hurwitz’s project: his unique instructions to the printers and readers of his publication and his remarkable salesmanship. Hurwitz first published his book in Brno, 1797, at the printing house of Joseph Karl Neumanns and Joseph Rossmann. Because of a vow he made to himself in trying to recover from illness, he chose not to fully disclose his identity as the author, although there are several hints in the text to reveal his name to the discerning reader. Why Hurwitz published the book in Brno, a seedbed for heretical groups, especially the Frankists, is not known; nor is the identity of the two * For Tony Grafton, humanist, polymath, generous colleague, and inspiring mentor to so many scholars, young and old. Among Tony’s manifold accomplishments is his enthusiastic support to scholars in Hebrew and Jewish studies worldwide. 1 For a broader study of this author and his book, see my A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinḥas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_028

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publishers. The work was published in two parts: the first primarily but not exclusively focuses on natural philosophy while the second deals with spiritual and moral issues. More confusing are two pages enthusiastically approving the work published in German and Yiddish by the well-known Prague censor Karl Fischer, dated 21 January 1799. Were these pages appended and then printed after the book had circulated for almost two years previously without the permission of a censor? Seven haskamot (approbations) of rabbis from eastern Europe and the Low Countries that Hurwitz had solicited follow. All of them strongly endorse the book and offer stern warnings not to publish it without the permission of the author. At the end of the second part, a list of mistakes is included, followed by a brief homily of Beer Oppenheim of Pressburg, Hungary, one of Hurwitz’s wealthy supporters, which was removed from all subsequent editions. Karl Fischer maintained cordial and professional relations with the rabbis of Prague and was well known as a promoter of the Hebrew book in his city. His role in the dissemination of Jewish culture in Prague stemmed from a deep commitment to humanity as a whole. In this vein, he wrote a Hebrew letter to Rabbi Elazar Fleckeles, one of Prague’s major rabbis, in 1812: “I said: ‘Anyone who speaks the truth, likes justice, and follows the path of the sincere, whether he be Jew, Christian, Greek or Muslim, is eminent and worthy of love [hu ḥashuv ve-ra’ui le-ahavah].’” He undoubtedly appreciated Hurwitz’s similar sentiment articulated in a long section of his work on loving humanity.2 It is unclear how Hurwitz went about securing Fischer’s glowing endorsement. Whether he actually met him before the publication of the book is unknown, but less than two months after Fischer had written his approbation, Hurwitz addressed a letter to him, on 4 March 1799. The letter is fascinating for several reasons but most significantly because it was penned in German, a language Hurwitz had claimed he had never learned, so that he had been obliged to work with a translator in gathering materials for his book. The letter found in the Karl Fischer archives in Prague may have been a German translation of a Hebrew original (Fischer both read and wrote in Hebrew), or alternatively, it could have been translated into German on behalf of Hurwitz by an associate. There also remains the possibility that Hurwitz wrote in German in the first place.3 2 On Fischer, see Iveta Cermanová, “Karl Fischer (1757–1844): The Life and Intellectual World of a Hebrew Censor,” Judaica Bohemiae 42 (2006): 125–78; 43 (2007–8): 5–63. The quote is found at 42:177. On Fleckeles and his relationship to Karl Fischer, see also Michael Silber, “Fleckeles, Elazar ben David,” in The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www .yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Fleckeles_Elazar_ben_David. Hurwitz’s chapter on loving humanity is discussed extensively in Chap. 5 of my aforementioned book. 3 Professor Michael Silber made the discovery of this letter and I thank him for sharing it with me. Karl Fischer Archives, Epistolae rabbinorum aliorumque Hebraeorum ab. A. 5549 (1789) usque 5594 (1836) ad me Carolum Fischer etc. Národní knihovna čr (National Library of the

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Hurwitz opens the letter by thanking Fischer for his recent authorization of the publication of Sefer ha-Brit and promising him a personal copy of the book to be delivered to him by his associate, a Polish Jew. He mentions that he previously spoke to him in person, indicating that he had visited Prague. He writes now from Brno, explaining that he crossed the border into Moravia, leaving five copies of his book with a good friend from Fuerth to be sold on commission. The friend sold the lot in Pilsen (ninety kilometers west of Prague) and in Prague for a relatively cheap price. Hurwitz had learned from his agent in Prague that all copies had been sold there, and he needed to ask his publisher in Brno to print more copies. He asks Fischer to inquire about the availability of the book in the Prague area so that he can properly supply more books as needed. Despite the humble manner in which Hurwitz addressed Fischer, it seems rather presumptuous on his part to be asking the censor of his book to assist him in marketing it. But that appears to be what Hurwitz was requesting.4 The letter reveals an actual network of agents working for Hurwitz to sell his book—a Polish Jew, a friend from Fuerth, and even potentially the vaunted Hebrew censor of Prague! This is substantiated even further by a notice at the end of the first edition of the book, printed on the very last page: This book is made available for purchase in the city of Brno through R. Asher Garkach[?]; in Vienna through the noble R. David Leib Fered; in Pressburg through R. Beer Oppenheim; in Oven through the head of the rabbinical court; in Cracow through the author; in Prague through the noble R. Zelig Meliẓ; in Breslavia through the sons of the late R. Michael Czech Republic), Prague: Call No. xviii.F.11, fols. 265a–66b. Subsequently, Dr. Iveta Cermanová informed me that she had already examined the letter and added the following details from Fischer’s Tagebuch: On the ninth of March Fischer received Hurwitz’s letter dated 4 Mar., and he answered it on 12 Mar. (bringing the letter to the post office on 14 Mar.) and subsequently filed it (ad acta). The full reference is Karl Fischer, Tagebuch über die Amtsgeschäfte im hebräischen Fache für die Jahre 1788–1805 und 1806–1824, Národní knihovna čr, ms, Call No. ix.A.17.a–b, 9 Mar. 1799, 12 Mar. 1799, and 14 Mar. 1799. On the last page of the German letter, a Hebrew phrase is added: “le-yad Morenu ha-rav Eliyahu baal meḥaber Sefer ha-Brit” (By the hand of our teacher the rabbi Elijah the author of Sefer ha-Brit). This would seem to confirm the authenticity of the letter, although it is strange that Hurwitz’s first name, Pinḥas, is left off. I am indebted to Dr. Cermanová for all of these details. 4 “Daher bitte ich demüthigst, mir die Gewogenheit zu erzeigen, Sie möchten die Gnade haben, und Erkundigung bei den dortigen jüdischen Bücher Händlern einzuholen, ob sie wirklich welche hatten, oder noch haben, und von wann sie solche bekommen haben, und die Nachricht schriftlich an die am Ende stehende Adresse zu verabfolgen. Ich will wieder mit Leib und Seele wenn Sie es verlangen gern zu Diensten seyn.”

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Mas; in Lemberg, through R. Naḥman Reise; in Lublin through R. Fischel and R. Ziskindish; and in Nicolsburg through the noble rabbi Beer Herzilish.5 Most of the names of Hurwitz’s agents are unknown to me, but Hurwitz mentions Naḥman Reise and Beer Oppenheim in the introductions of his work as friends and material supporters of him and his project. The others were obviously close associates as well, some rabbis, and all willing to facilitate the selling of the book. At the time, Hurwitz indicates that he is in Cracow and can handle the sales of his book in this city. This would indicate his whereabouts around and after 1797; he perhaps had taken up residence in Cracow and only left when marketing his book. Taken together with the letter to Karl Fischer, this paragraph gives the impression that from the very beginning, Hurwitz did everything in his power to sell his book and worked with a wide range of agents from Prague to Cracow and Lublin, from Brno to Nicolsburg and Breslavia. To this evidence, we might add the interesting remark presented in a lengthy review of Sefer ha-Brit in the Hebrew journal Ha-Me’asef, published in 1809 but written much earlier, soon after the first edition of the book appeared. The reviewer first describes Hurwitz as someone he has met and then adds that “this man…traveled for the last ten years by way of our city and other cities in Germany and in other countries selling the fruit of his vision [his book].” If the review was written soon after 1797, then this might refer to Hurwitz’s wanderings long before the book was actually published. The reviewer then adds in a footnote a less complimentary observation: For this our heart grieves, over the abasement of the sages and writers of our faith because of our many sins. For the wealthy donors who also love and buy new books do not request them from booksellers but seek them directly from the authors themselves so that the latter go begging from door to door like peddlers bringing the first fruits of their thoughts to everyone’s house. Subsequently, the number of book dealers has decreased and the dishonor of the Torah and learning has increased. It is also an embarrassment for us in the eyes of other nations who very much honor their own scholars.6

5 Sefer ha-Brit (Brno, 1797), last page, following the list of errors. 6 The review is discussed at greater length in my aforementioned Best-Selling Hebrew Book, Chap. 6.

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Was the reviewer referring to Hurwitz himself, his intimate contacts with the rich and powerful, and the way he had aggressively marketed his book as substantiated by the letter to Fischer and the list of his agents? It indeed might suggest a less than subtle note of disparagement over Hurwitz’s conscientious and coordinated efforts to promote his book. Hurwitz’s amazing success, despite the sniping comment of this reviewer, was a source of enormous pride to him. He had not only written a good book, so he understood; he had learned how to conquer the market! Thus he wrote in a tone of enormous satisfaction at the opening of his second introduction to the newly revised version of his book, first published in 1806–7 in Zolkiew: Blessed O Lord, God of Israel, from this world until the next, who has supported my soul to compose this composition and to publish it for the first time in Brno in the state of Moravia in 1797. God allowed the beauty of the work to be seen by the eyes of all the dispersed of Judah and it quickly spread throughout the entire world and was accepted with great honor in all places. Through God’s desire, it appeared as far away as Mount Paran [see Deut. 33:2; this name was often used interchangeably with Mount Sinai] in Moslem lands while its light [spread] on the wings of the earth and the islands of the sea so that it acquired fame in all countries. I then published two thousand copies that circulated around the world. Besides Poland, Hungary, Germany, Holland, and England, it reached as far as France, Italy, the land of Uẓ [see Job 1:1; an unidentifiable biblical land perhaps in southwest Jordan or southern Arabia], Damascus, and Aram [a biblical designation for the present region of central Syria], Algeria and Barberry, and Jerusalem.…7 Hurwitz soon decided to republish the book in a highly enlarged edition, since the first edition had already become scarce. But in the interim, he learned the shocking news that the book had already been published by Joseph Rossmann in Brno, one of his original publishers, without his permission and with the seven rabbinic approbations omitted. 7 Pinḥas Hurwitz, Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-Sefarim, 1989–90), 17. All subsequent references are to this edition. There is no critical edition of the expanded version of Hurwitz’s book; this edition for the time being appears to be the most accurate and accessible. A more recent edition has just appeared with the same title (Bnei Brak: Hen Le-Dodi Publishing House, 2014), compiled by Isaac Lachs. This is not a critical edition either, but the diligent editor has added a new introduction, punctuation, extensive notes, tables, and commentary.

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You the truthful ones should judge these people and not show favor in judgment: the gentile from the city of Brno with whom I originally published my Sefer ha-Brit in 1797 and his two Jewish advisers who worked with him in his craft. It is obvious that the gentile can do nothing and can certainly not publish a Hebrew book without the advice of these two Jews. Since he cannot read or understand the holy language and is ill equipped to decide on this matter, he naturally would ask them regarding [the propriety] of publishing any book. He would ask them their advice whether to publish this book or not and their advice would be heeded. These three people thus sinned in publishing the first part of the book without my knowledge soon after I had left to sell my book. I was impoverished, overcome with fear on my way while they defied all the prohibitions of the seven supervisors of the community, the great rabbis who had written and signed their names on Sefer ha-Brit in the city of Brno ordering that the book not be published for a period of fifteen years from the time the book had first been published…. More than the damage they inflicted on me, they inflicted on the entire Jewish community since they stole the heart of every Jew in writing at the end: “This ends the words of the book.” When in reality they had only published half the book, that is the first part alone…but even in this part they made omissions in several places…and in one place I counted fifteen consecutive lines that they had left out.8 Hurwitz complains as well about the quality of the paper, the small print, the missing haskamot, and the dishonesty in claiming to produce a complete book that is incomplete. He blames not only the publisher but also the Jewish proofreader, who should have refused to allow the “gentile” to publish and sell to Jews so damaged and so illicit a book. In the light of this bitter experience, Hurwitz pledges to produce a new edition of his book, this time with his name proudly displayed in Hebrew and in the vernacular. He warns future book publishers and readers not to consider his book worthy unless it is complete, without any page omitted. He thus turns to issuing a set of “covenants” specifically demanding how his book should be published, formatted, printed, and read. The text is a precious document in the

8 Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem, 18–19. Hurwitz explicitly states here that the publisher of the 1801 pirated edition published only the first part. But there appear to be copies of this edition with two parts, not one. Perhaps there were two separate versions published by Rossmann.

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history of Hebrew printing and deserves to be cited in full.9 It demonstrates the extent to which Hurwitz had not only acquired the business instinct to sell his book but also mastered the intricacies of publishing, proofreading, printing— that is, the basic knowledge available to one who actually spent time in printing books. Hurwitz’s twelve covenants, which he expects his future readers and publishers to follow conscientiously, offer a remarkable glimpse into the workings of an early modern printshop. In the absence of an actual portrait, Hurwitz impresses the reader with a mental image of the book industry of his day and what ultimately is required to produce a well-crafted book by a professional printer. He also reveals a deeper insight into what the author expected of his readers, that is, how he hoped they would read his book from cover to cover. In the end, Hurwitz was as demanding of the publisher, printer, proofreader, and reader as he was of himself. Hurwitz begins this section by rescinding a previous ban he had declared on the printing of the book in his first edition, announcing that from 1809 and subsequently, the book may be published by anyone without restriction. This permission is offered with the proviso that any new edition will be based on the new revised version. By this he apparently means the one recently published in Zolkiew, 1806–7, edited by Abraham Judah Meir Hapfer. He also insists that the letters be attractive and readable, that the paper be of durable quality, that the letters be large or midsize but not too small, and that the book be published in its entirety. He then makes the following request: The end of the first part [of the book] should be published on the same page with the beginning of the second part. The end of part one should conclude in the first column and the second part should begin on the second column of the same page so that they will be united and not separated. One part should not be separated from the other nor should the first part from either the second or the second from the first. There is no part that can stand on its own as in the case of the parts of other books. Each part of this book is not like the others since I carefully preserved the order of God’s redemption in it and it is connected from the beginning of the first part until the end of the second; every discourse is fastened to the preceding one and to the one next to it, and similarly each chapter. And thus all the words of the second part are dependent and rest on the words of the first part and without part one, enlightened wise men will 9 The entire text is translated in my Best-Selling Hebrew Book, app. 2. The Hebrew text is found in Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem, 21–23.

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not comprehend anything. The first part is only an introduction to the second part and it alone represents a gate to the house. A person who possesses only the first part is a gatekeeper not a house owner. So in what way is it possible to divide this book? Therefore [the two parts] will be attached together on one page and the connection will be strong so that they will be stitched together as a permanent possession in order that the people will stand in a perfect covenant.10 To this unusual request, he adds that the publisher should not allow an index to be published in the book. He justifies this request on two grounds: first, because the different topics in the book are scattered throughout and not concentrated in any one place. The assumption that the first part deals exclusively with human wisdom while the second with the divine is also misconstrued: “Words of Torah and fear of Heaven” can also be found in the first part, while “human wisdom” is also in the second. His point is that the reader cannot read his book partially or haphazardly; it must be read from cover to cover without skipping anything. The subjects of the book are literally bound together as a unified whole that cannot be appreciated without this comprehensive examination of the entire work. While Hurwitz has a second reason for insisting on this kind of reading, he claims it is a secret and will not divulge it. Hurwitz’s unusual request seems to belie his earlier claim, at the beginning of this same introduction to Sefer ha-Brit, “that all the wise men of Ashkenaz and the scholars of Berlin called this book an encyclopedia, that is, a book that gathers together all disciplines and all natural, mathematical, and divine wisdom and anything that comes to the mind of a human being that he wishes to know… Almost everything is to be found in this book.”11 But an encyclopedia, at least as one understands the term in a modern sense, implies by its very nature a casual, sporadic, or partial reading to quickly gain information on a specific topic isolated conveniently from all the rest. Clearly, this is not what Hurwitz meant by an encyclopedia. His claim that one column cannot be separated from another, that both parts of his book constitute an uninterrupted whole, and that an index would defeat the purpose of this continuous reading suggests that he did not mean to describe this modern form of encyclopedia but something entirely different. In contrast to what the “scholars of Berlin” might have conceived in the tradition of Diderot and Voltaire and the encyclopedia project of the Enlightenment, Hurwitz had in mind a composition more reminiscent of the medieval or early modern encyclopedia, a kind of spiritual 10 11

Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem, 21. Ibid., 18.

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journey or ascent where the reader would be carried to a higher state of religious consciousness by the continuous reading the composition required of him. This seems to be the meaning of his words “since I carefully preserved the order of God’s redemption in it,” implying that his alleged commentary on the prophetic handbook of Ḥayyim Vital was also messianic at its core. By mysteriously concealing his second reason for justifying the continuous reading of his book, Hurwitz also betrays the esoteric nature of the composition and the reason behind his specific instructions on how anyone should approach the work. It should be perused neither casually nor sporadically but with only the aspiration to be illumined and transformed by it.12 Hurwitz’s remaining six covenants deal with specifics of book production, known only by someone who had worked in or at least frequented the printing shop. He requests that the book be printed in quarto, but he is willing to consider octavo as well. He will not accept the printing of abbreviations in his book under any circumstances, and he even presents his demand in the form of a religious injunction: “Any member of the Jewish community who…will remove any abbreviations that are already in this book and will sacrifice perfect ‘burnt offerings’ by making all the words complete in the book of the covenant, will certainly know that God will pay his reward and the work of his hands will be desired.”13 He is equally insistent that the final letters of words not be dropped off at the end of a line: “One is forbidden in this book to draw a meaningless horizontal line [kav tohu] above the word indicating that the last letter is missing as is the custom in other books.” He singles out the “Setzer [compositor, typesetter] who attaches all the letters to the words so that all of them will be perfect. It is occasionally his custom to remove at will the last letter of the last word to make the work easier so as not to spoil the line but to align it a second time in an appropriate manner.” But Hurwitz will have none of this practice, since it “destroys and soils the holy books, the divine words of eternal life, because in the heart of every Jew is the love of perfection.” The Setzer should also make the ends of lines perfectly straight, since “it is often the custom of the typesetter who does as he pleases to fill out an empty space at the end of a line with an additional letter to straighten the line, filling the empty space with a letter that will begin the next line below it.” Playing on the Hebrew word davek (meaning both “to cling” and “to typeset”), Hurwitz dramatically writes:

12 13

I am indebted to Professor Rita Copland for helping me clarify this point. Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem, 22.

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And you who cling to the Lord your God, I swear to you if your hearts are aroused to add even one abbreviation or to leave off the last letter of a word in this book and to put in its place a line above to indicate the missing letter or to fill the empty space at the end of a line with a letter that begins the next line, please be careful with such things in this book.14 Hurwitz next addresses the matter of pulling the lever to press the type on the paper, a craft called pressen zieher. Having witnessed the process, he laments the “pressers and pushers most of whom are slothful and will not press with full human strength [so as to make a good, solid impression on the paper with ink equally uniform across the sheet]. Subsequently the letters are not properly absorbed with ink on the book, especially if the paper is fit for writing called Schreibpapier.” Thus the letters are not easily recognizable because they are filled with bright white spots. What results are what Hurwitz calls refa’im (literally, “ghosts”) or weak impressions on the paper. Consequently, the printer should carefully supervise his pressers, and he should order them to press hard with a strong hand so that the paper can fully absorb the letters on the wooden board of the press. Hurwitz concludes his twelve covenants with a plea to the proofreaders to concentrate when reading their texts so as to avoid wandering thoughts and to refrain from speaking to others while performing their important work. He closes with a final admonition: As long as I am living on this earth, no one should make a shortened version of this book or a section of it. He should never produce a single discourse or part of it to stand alone. One who shortens it will shorten his life and one who divides it will divide his years [of life]. The most important point is that it should be proofread very well. It would appear that by the time Hurwitz wrote these lines, which were included in the new introduction to his expanded edition of Sefer ha-Brit, he had returned to Cracow for the remainder of his life. In the edition of the book published in Zolkiew in 1806–7, a notice appears at the end that the book can be acquired from the author, who currently resides in Cracow. His gravestone records that he died in that city in 1821.15 There remains one more postscript to add to the details regarding the publication of Sefer ha-Brit. In 1889, Joseph Fischer, a well-known printer of Hebrew 14 15

Ibid., 22–23. See Ḥayyim Friedberg, Luḥot Zikkaron (Drohobycz, 1897), 66–67.

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books, published a new edition of Emanuel Ḥai Riki’s introduction to Lurianic kabbalah called Mishnat Ḥasidim, together with a commentary by Pinḥas Hurwitz called Ta’am Eẓo. That Hurwitz had always been interested in Lurianic kabbalah and especially its Italian commentators is evident from perusing the pages of Sefer ha-Brit.16 There Hurwitz mentioned several other books he had written, including this particular composition.17 Now, sixty-eight years after his death, he was honored with another publication produced in the city where he had spent most of his life.18 Fischer announced at the opening of the book that he bought this manuscript together with another Hurwitz composition called Miẓvot Tovim from a woman named Shifra Eichhorn. The next page contains three rabbinic haskamot written by David Halberstamm, Solomon Halberstamm, and Akiva Karnitser. Karnitser appears to have been the moving force behind these approbations, along with another rabbi, Abraham Linzig, who prepared the manuscript for publication.19 The text then offers a short introduction penned by Hurwitz himself. Here he returns to the conditions he expects any publisher to follow when printing his book. He insists on large letters in Rashi script and not small ones. He recalls that one printer printed the Sefer ha-Brit in small letters, with which he expresses his strong displeasure. To the reader of his second introduction to Sefer ha-Brit, his insistence that the book be published on good paper with no abbreviations is quite familiar. In addition, he requests that his commentary appear alongside the Riki text and that there be published a list of errors at the 16

17

18

19

See, for example, his citations in Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto (435), Joseph Ergas (45, 340, 498, 504), Yosef Delmedigo (47, 299, 314), Sar Shalom Basilea (70–71), Abraham Herrera (141, 143), and Emanuel Ḥai Riki (340, 400). See ibid., 164, 287, and 300, where he refers to his unpublished works Sefer Miẓvot Tovim, on the mystical meaning of the commandments; Sefer Matmonei Mistarim, on the five secrets in the Book of Daniel; and Beit ha-Yoẓer, a commentary on Sefer Yeẓirah. His reference to Ta’am Eẓo is on 400. He also wrote a short unpublished commentary on one of the works of the thirteenth-century prophetic kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Emanuel Ḥai Riki, Sefer Mishnat Ḥasidim with the commentary Ta’am Eẓo of Pinḥas Hurwitz (Cracow, 1889). I refer below to the material at the beginning of the book from 2 on. Joseph Fischer is briefly mentioned by Kenneth Moss in his essay on printing and publishing after 1800 in the Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www .yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Printing_and_Publishing/Printing_and_Publishing _after_1800. Mordechai Zalkin, in Krako-Kaz’imyez’-Krakov: Meḥkarim be-Toldot Yehudei Krakov, ed. Elhanan Reiner (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv Press, 2001), 135, 140–41, 147–48, briefly mentions Solomon. See also Majer Balaban, Toldot ha-Yehudim bi-Krakov uve-Kaz’imyez’, 1304–1868, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 2002), 2:916.

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end of the book. He concludes with his justification for writing a commentary on Riki’s work in a statement reminiscent of his earlier justification for Sefer ha-Brit as a mere commentary to Ḥayyim Vital’s Sha’arei Kedushah. Given the enormous interest in Luria in the author’s day, and the importance of Riki’s work as a summary of this kabbalist’s approach, there is a need, he argues, for a simple commentary to unpack this dense work and to make it accessible to a larger audience. But unlike Hurwitz’s more popular work, which simply used Vital’s work as a pretext for exploring the natural world and more, this later work does not stray far from explicating Riki’s handbook. It is exclusively a kabbalistic commentary, no more. In a manner Hurwitz might have praised had he been alive, Fischer closes this section with his sense of satisfaction that he has succeeded in publishing a useful work for beginners that the author had so wanted to see in print. He turns to the potential readers of the book, especially in Cracow, where Hurwitz had lived, asking them to purchase the book, to allow the publisher to recover his initial investment and then to be in a position to publish the other Hurrwitz manuscript in his possession. Unfortunately, Fischer’s hopes were not realized; this was the only time another book of Hurwitz would be published. Despite the continual editions and sales of Sefer ha-Brit, no other book by Hurwitz could command a large reading audience. In the end, his fame rested solely and exclusively on the uniquely constructed encyclopedia that he called The Book of the Covenant.

chapter 28

For the Birds: Collecting, Art, and Natural History in Saxony Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann* The Saxon electoral Kunstkammer in Dresden was one of many sites where what are now considered “art” and “science” intersected during the early mod­ ern period. Like other similar collections, that in Dresden was regarded as a microcosm of the greater world: it contained artifacts as well as objects found in or taken from nature.1 The artificial was also directly combined with the natural in Kunstkammer objects such as cups made out of shells mounted in gold or silver. Established by Elector August in 1560, the Dresden Kunstkammer was moreover not only one of the first of its kind, but also one of the first spe­ cifically to be called by this name.2 It is also important in the history of collect­ ing for having inspired Gabriel Kaldemarckt in 1587 to present Elector Christian i with one of the first essays on the formation of the type.3 The Dresden Kunstkam­ mer enjoyed an exceptionally long history, surviving for a century even after the ideal of a universal collection had been diluted with the establishment in * This essay originated as a lecture given as a Festrede at a ceremony for the award of an honor­ ary doctorate at the Technische Universität Dresden, May 2011, and then was delivered in revised and expanded form at a symposium, Das Wissen der Kunst und die Kunst des Wissens, in the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz,” Winterthur, 18 Oct. 2013. I have thought it appropriate to use it to honor a long-time colleague, with whom I have co-taught related material, and hope to do so again in the future. In particular this essay recalls that my Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1993) was published because of Tony’s encouragement. 1 See most extensively for this subject Andreas Grote, ed., Macrocosmos in Microcosmo. Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450–1800, Berliner Schriften zur Museums­ kunde 10 (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1994). 2 For the origins of the Dresden Kunstkammer see most recently Dirk Syndram, “‘Diese dinge sind warlich wohl wirdig das sie in derselben lustkammer kommen.’ Kurfürst August, die Kunstkammer und das Entstehen der Dresdner Sammlungen,” in Dresden und Ambras. Kunstkammerschätze der Renaissance, ed. Sabine Haag (Innsbruck: Schloss Ambras, 2012), 31–41. 3 See most recently Matthias Dammig, “Gabriel Kaltemarckts Bedencken, wie eine kunst-­ cammer aufzu richten seyn mochte von 1587 mit einer Einleitung,” in Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Geschichte einer Sammlung, ed. Dirk Syndram and Martina Minning, (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, 2012), 46–61.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_029

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the early eighteenth century of the Grünes Gewölbe, the Kupfer­stichkabinett, the Gemäldegalerie, and other specialized collections.4 Unusually extensive archival information including inventories from 1587, 1595, 1610, 1619, 1640, 1732, and 1741 enable its history to be traced until its final dissolution in 1832. The Kunstkammer inventories have recently been published together with a large volume of essays; along with numerous other publications on collecting in Dresden, many exhibitions, and the continuing restoration and reopening of parts of the Dresden Schloss (and also the Zwinger), where the collections were originally housed, they have thus attracted a good deal of attention.5 Yet several important aspects of art and collecting in Saxony relating to natural history remain comparatively neglected. The Dresden Kunstkammer continues to be regarded as a distinctive “collection of sophisticated technol­ ogy,” in which mining, alchemy, and astrology are also emphasized.6 This inter­ pretation is based on quantitative analysis of the earliest inventory, that of 1587, which lists over seven thousand tools, scientific instruments, and watches, amounting to about 80 percent of the total number of objects contained in the collection at that time.7 This view also coincides with an emphasis on the importance of mining and manufacture in the history of Saxony. This interpretation may, however, be questioned. It is not clear if a quantitative approach is entirely justifiable, because much of the assessment of a collection’s 4 For an interpretation of this process see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “A Gesamtkunstwerk in the Unmaking? The Kunstkammer and the Age of the Bel Composto,” in Struggle for Synthesis; A Obra de Arte Total nos Séculos xvii e xviii/The Total Work of Art in the 17th and 18th Centuries, vol. 2, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral and David Booth (Lisbon: Instituto Portugués do Património Arquitectonico, 1999), 389–99. 5 See the works cited in nn. 2 and 4. The inventories are published in Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden, ed. Dirk Syndram and Martina Minning, 4 vol. (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, 2010–2012). More than twenty-five exhibitions with catalogs have been devoted to the Dresden collections in the past two decades, and countless more separate publications have appeared on them. 6 See Dirk Syndram, “Princely Diversion and Courtly Display: The Kunstkammer and Dresden’s Renaissance Collections,” in Princely Splendor. The Dresden Court, 1580–1620 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, 2005), 54–69, esp. 55. This approach also is characteristic of a majority of essays in Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Geschichte einer Sammlung. 7 Joachim Menzhausen, “Kurfürst Augusts Kunstkammer. Eine Analyse des Inventars von 1587,” Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden 17 (1985): 26, reprinted in Neues Archiv für Sächsische Geschichte 66 (1995):147–56, also as “Elector Augustus’s Kunstkammer. An Analysis of the Inventory of 1587,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 69–75.

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character depends on emphases, impressions, and that often intangible crite­ rion, quality. The opinion of one important informed contemporary does not coincide, for example, with what seems to be the prevailing consensus. Philipp Hainhofer, collector, diplomat, and dealer, most famous for the creation of sev­ eral examples of a Kunstschrank, a Kunstkammer in parvo, visited the Dresden Kunstkammer both in 1617 and in 1629.8 Yet he gives us a much different pic­ ture of a variegated ensemble in which naturalia, “Indian” artifacts, sculpture, paintings, and particularly works made from ivory and cut stone are as note­ worthy as clocks, automata, and measuring devices.9 Several recent studies have illuminated the bases on which Hainhofer may have formed his opinion. Scholars have now noted the presence of ethno­ graphic materials and of minerals, fossils, and zoological specimens in the Saxon collections.10 A comprehensive overview of the Dresden graphic collec­ tions has also shown that they contained a wide variety of materials, which among other things evinced an interest in natural history.11 In this light, the interpretation of the Saxon collections is ripe for revision. This essay presents some particular cases of avian imagery that argue for reconsidering the impor­ tance of natural history in art and science in Saxony from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in relation to the Dresden Kunstkammer. The story may even begin before the Kunstkammer was established, with two well-known portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder painted circa 1500. Renowned as a portraitist, promoter of Reformation imagery (and simultane­ ously servant of its antagonists), and painter of mythologies, and for his con­ nections with humanists, Cranach executed a double portrait of Johannes Cuspinian and his betrothed, Anna Putsch, probably as a marriage gift in 1502. Cuspinian was a learned humanist, poet laureate, and doctor of medicine who 8

9

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For Hainhofer’s collections and his creation of Kunstschranken see most comprehensively Christoph Emmendörffer and Christof Trepesch, ed., Wunderwelt. Der Pommersche Kunst­ schrank (Augsburg: Maximilanmuseum; Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014). Hainhofer’s account is recorded in Des Augsburger Patriciers Philipp Hainhofer Reisen nach Innsbruck und Dresden, ed. Oskar Doering, Quellenschriften zur Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik 10 (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1901), 157–79. Sven Dupré and Michael Korey, “Optical Objects in the Dresden ‘Kunstkammer’: Lucas Brunn and the Courtly Display of Knowledge,” in European Collections of Scientific Instruments, 1550–1750, ed. Giorgio Strano, Stephen Johnston, Mara Miniati, and Allison Morrison-Low (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 61–85. Christien Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett. Zur Frühgeschichte des Graphiksammelns in Dresden (1560–1738) (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010); pp. 102–23 deal with natural history. The present author discovered independently the natural historical material.

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at the time of the portraits belonged to the entourage of Emperor Maximilian i in Vienna. Many of the details in the paintings have thus been read as contain­ ing humanist astrological allegories. According to the most complete, learned interpretation the painting is “full of symbols, though without compromise to naturalism”; but details that it correctly identifies, like a falcon and swan shown fighting in the sky, are not more closely examined.12 However the terms “naturalism” and “nature painting” may be defined, these details may be related to the sorts of observation and illustration found in natural history. Cranach’s depictions of birds fighting while in flight may be compared directly to a tradition of illustration represented by the thirteenthcentury Falcon Book of Emperor Frederick ii Hohenstaufen, properly called The Art of Hunting with Birds. The emperor’s essay on birds is perhaps the most important illustrated work of natural history of the Middle Ages, a famous manuscript now best known from a copy made in 1258–66. The book may even be compared for its motivation and accomplishment to the first vivisection, which was carried out during Frederick’s reign by the medical faculty at Salerno, a university located within his domains that for centuries remained a center for medical science. Its text draws from several ancient Greek and ear­ lier Arabic texts on the science of hunting with birds. Most important, its approach follows the emperor’s motto “reliable certainty does not come from hearsay”; this attitude toward visual observation and empiricism is also expressed by the motto “to show those things that are as they are.”13 An impulse to approximate reality as closely as possible to what is seen informs the representation of birds in Frederick’s Falcon Book. It includes remarkable depictions of birds attacking other birds, revealing close attention to and direct knowledge of nature; the illustrations to the original manuscript were probably even more acute. In any instance, similar details in Cranach’s 12

See the full entry by Dieter Koepplin with bibliography in Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice, Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” Winterthur: Complete Catalogue (Basel: Schwabe, 2005), no. 6, pp. 127–33, with the quotation taken from 130. 13 See Das Falkenbuch Friedrichs ii.: cod. Pal. lat. 1071 der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with a commentary by Dorothea Walz und Carl Arnold Willemsen (Graz: Akademische Drucku. Verlagsanstalt, 2000). See further Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite Über die Kunst mit Vögeln zu jagen. Kommentar zur lateinischen und deutschen Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970) (Frederick’s motto is quoted [in Latin] on p. 4); and most recently Maomun Fansa and Carsten Ritzau, ed., Von der Kunst mit Vögeln zu jagen: das Falkenbuch Friedrichs ii.: Kulturgeschichte und Ornithologie: Begleitband zur Sonderausstellung “Kaiser Friedrich ii. (1194–1250). Welt und Kultur des Mittelmeerraums” im Landesmuseum für Natur und Mensch Oldenburg (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008), esp. for the study of nature on ­51–61, and for sources on 239–43.

For the Birds

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painting may be compared to such images of birds fighting. Later paintings by Cranach and his contemporaries may also be compared to aspects of Frederick’s book in their close attention to the appearance of birds. In this regard Cranach’s painting may be related to a continuing tradition of representation of birds that can be associated with natural history, considered as a forerunner of orni­ thology, the scientific study of birds.14 Cranach’s early portrait pair provides an appropriate preamble to this essay because it leads to further considerations of art and natural history in the rep­ resentation of birds (and animals) in the Saxon collections. Within two years of the completion of the portraits of Cuspinian and his betrothed, Cranach entered into the service of the court of the Duke of Saxony; he was to serve both the Albertine and the Ernestine branches of the Wettin dynasty for the rest of his life. Cranach’s work as a portraitist and painter of religious and other subjects for the Wettins and other patrons has been well studied. But the con­ tinuing involvement of the Cranach workshop and its Saxon followers in the study of naturalia, while occasionally noted, has not yet received its due.15 Cranach and his workshop executed studies of birds and animals for the Dresden court of the Albertine dukes as well as for its Ernestine antagonists in Wittenberg and Weimar. Among many other studies, he (and his assistants) made several closely observed depictions of dead birds, as well as of deer and other animals. Astounding bird studies by Cranach include images of two dead wax­ wings executed circa 1530 (Fig. 28.1), and of four partridges of circa 1532.16 Although these studies were used in mythological paintings, they are highly elaborated, and were retained in the Saxon collections, where they were bound into books as separate items and gathered with other depictions of birds and animals. This suggests that both initially and later they served functions beyond that of being preparatory studies. Cranach’s gouaches and drawings are just a few of many images of birds, animals, and plants that have long belonged to the Dresden collections. Several 14 15

16

See Fansa and Ritzau, Von der Kunst mit Vögeln zu jagen. Werner Schade, “Zum Werk der Cranach i. Tierzeichnungen für die Werkstatt,” Jahrbuch der Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (1961/1962): 29–49, seems to be the only inde­ pendent study of the subject; Schade has also called attention to such images by illustrat­ ing many in the popular Lucas Cranach der Ältere Zeichnungen (Leipzig: Insel, 1972), and in other publications. See Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Dürer und die Tier- und Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance (Munich: Prestel, 1985), 50–51. Despite the huge amount of literature on Cranach pub­ lished since 1985 (over 450 articles, catalogs, and books are listed in the kubikat catalog of German research institutes), no specialized study has subsequently been devoted to the subject.

486

Figure 28.1

Kaufmann

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Two Dead Bohemian Waxwings, around 1530. Drawing, 34.6 x 20.3 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, C 2179

For the Birds

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score volumes of nature studies are still present in the Dresden Kupferstichkabi­ nett; many of these studies are still (or were originally) attached to or drawn on pages bound in books.17 Some of the bird studies have been identified as by individual court artists (e.g., Zacharias Wehme). They have also been treated as forerunners of still life, and have related to natural historical purposes.18 Cranach’s work in this category is therefore extremely suggestive: it represents the conjunction of the study of birds in art with “scientific” interest. This asso­ ciation persisted in Saxony through the eighteenth century. Toward the end of this story in the early eighteenth century Johann Friedrich Böttger reinvented European porcelain in Meissen under pressure from the Saxon court. His discovery resulted from another combination of scientific interests with artistic ones, because alchemical processes were employed to produce an important and lasting form of European art. Porcelain thus also relates to the socioeconomic history of Saxony, where, as suggested, mining and other forms of manufacture have long been important and reflected in or connected to art.19 Some of the most striking creations made in porcelain indicate that aspects of natural history were indeed expressed in artistic production. From 1731 Johann Joachim Kaendler and other artists created a menagerie of animals and birds for the Japanese Palace of Augustus the Strong, including ceramic versions of such specimens as the arara, an “exotic” bird from Brazil.20 (See Fig. 28.2) In their combi­ nation of acute observation of nature with an interest in exotic (and ordinary) 17 Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 102ff., is the first author to call attention to this material, some of which the present author had noted independently, e.g., in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 18 See, for example, the study by the late sixteenth-century Dresden court artist Zacharias Wehme and its presentation in Das Stilleben und sein Gegenstand (Dresden: Albertinum, 1983), p. 169, no. 178, ill. 1 (entry by Werner Schade); see further Koreny, Albrecht Dürer, 110–11 (with color illustration). Koreny, passim, refers to drawings in Dresden. See more recently for the Cranach tradition Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 102–6. 19 See for the relation of art to mining in Saxony Der Silberne Boden: Kunst und Bergbau in Sachsen, ed. Manfred Bachmann, Harald Marx, and Eberhard Wächtler (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; Leipzig: Editions Leipzig, 1990). 20 See Samuel Wittwer, Die Galerie der Meissener Tiere: die Menagerie August des Starken für das Japanische Palais in Dresden (Munich: Hirmer, 2004), who discusses interest in naturalia as a background to their creation and mentions sources in natural history illustra­ tions. For the arara see Wittwer, passim, and also Ulrich Pietsch, Die figürliche Meißner Porzellanplastik von Gottlieb Kirchner und Johann Joachim Kaendler (Munich: Hirmer, 2000), 136–38.

488

Figure 28.2

Kaufmann

Johann Joachim Kändler (1706–75), Meissen porcelain manufacturer, Blue Macaw (Arara), 1731. Porcelain, 82 cm high. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BK-17496

For the Birds

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birds and animals they were also not the first such artistic creations to appear in Saxony. Such interests not only had long been present in the work of Cranach, but also had appeared in other artistic activities and collecting in Dresden. While the Kunstkammer inventories do not mention flora, fauna, and other exotica as frequently as they do technical or astronomical instruments and books, exotic animals, birds, and human beings were also long-standing inter­ ests of Saxon artists and scientists. They left many traces in the Dresden collec­ tions: a recent publication has in fact called attention to the Saxon collections of natural history, as seen in the form of stuffed creatures and skeletons.21 Drawings, books, paintings, and sculpture in the Dresden collections provide much more evidence for this interest in naturalia and exotica.22 The earliest Kunstkammer inventory of the Dresden collections, compiled in 1587, may be reconsidered with these ideas in mind. This inventory mentions paintings of animals, described as being in der Gemach near the Bibliothek. They are classified as “Gemalte Darstellungen von Hirschen, Wildschwein, Rehen und Hirschköpfen.”23 Gouaches by Cranach of deer suggest the kind of image probably described. They may be related to the study of natural history, as it was conceived at the time, when the depiction of animals and plants rep­ resented one of the early stages in this study.24 The categorization of objects displayed along with these paintings directly suggests such a connection with natural history, since the list includes impressions and casts of hoofs and other animal parts.25 This means that creatures were to be characterized both by their outward appearance and by their most conspicuous features, represented by impressions of such features as their feet and horns. A visual equivalent to this approach is demonstrated in the way that drawings of birds and animals made by the same artist record both the creatures and their claws or antlers, exemplified by studies by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. (Figure 28.3) Similar draw­ ings of antlers also existed in the Dresden collections.26 21

See Clara Stefen, “Zur Geschichte der zoologischen Sammlung und ihrer Bedeutung,” in Syndram and Minning, Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden, 282–91. 22 See Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett. 23 Syndram and Minning, Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Das Inventar von 1587, fol. 268v. 24 See Brian W. Oglivie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 25 Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Das Inventar von 1587, fol. 270r–v; later inventories indicate many more such examples. 26 Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 109–10, notes some passages in the inventories, but does not precisely identify related images or elaborate on their signifi­ cance for natural history.

490

Figure 28.3

Kaufmann

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93), Study of a Claw (Cod. Min. 42 fol. 23r, 1563, Sammlung von Handschriften und alten Drucken, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna).

For the Birds

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Arcimboldo is noteworthy here, because paintings by him were present in the Dresden Kunstkammer from a very early date. A version of Winter signed by the artist and dated 1573 bears the arms of Meissen, the symbol of the Duke of Saxony as elector in his role as imperial swordbearer. (Fig. 28.4) This belongs to a series of four seasons given by Emperor Maximilian ii to the elector in 1574.27 The use of the swords of Meissen on this painting is significant, because the Dresden branch of the family had at that time only recently acquired the elec­ toral dignity. Two such pictures of seasons are vaguely mentioned in the 1587 inventory, and an entire series of the four seasons in the form of composite heads containing items that pertain to each is more clearly identifiable in the 1610 inventory. Hainhofer also mentions the Seasons, and also Schnackenköpfe of a cook and a steward that correspond to paintings of composite heads by Arcimboldo that bore the Saxon arms.28 Sets of the four seasons and of the four elements are indicated in later inventories of the Dresden collections. Arcimboldo’s composites of carefully observed fruits, flowers, and trees, combined into pictures of heads, have been regarded as emblematic of the combination of nature and art seen in the Kunstkammers of central Europe.29 Significantly, a group of independent nature studies related to the sources of the components of the paintings of Earth from the series of four elements by Arcimboldo may also be found in the Dresden Kupferstichkabinett. These must have come to Dresden in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Arcimboldo’s watercolors of animals are found among the many volumes of nature studies now deposited in the Kupferstichkabinett and in the Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek. His drawings include depictions of creatures that would have been regarded as exotic in Europe, such as the red-flanked duiker from Africa, and (Fig. 28.5) the coati from South America. Beyond serving as studies for his paintings, these sheets served a further purpose. What might 27

See Ulrike Weinhold, “Die Habsburger und die frühe Dresdner Kunstkammer,” in Syndram and Minning, Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden, 62–76, using many of the present author’s publications. 28 Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers, 174. 29 See most fully for these paintings and the circumstances of their origins Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Arcimboldo and the Elector of Saxony,” in Scambio culturale con il nemico religioso. Italia e Sassonia attorno 1600, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Rome: Sylvana, 2007), 27–36. Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 111–13, tried to identify three additional paintings by Arcimboldo present in the Dresden collection, but descrip­ tions of composite heads of animals and flowers may just refer to those already identified; the description of a painting of five heads that when inverted shows another five heads does not in fact correspond to the known versions of Arcimboldo’s reversible heads. For this subject, and more on Arcimboldo’s work, see Kaufmann, Arcimboldo.

492

Figure 28.4

Kaufmann

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93), Winter, 1573. Oil on canvas, 76 x 63.6 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, r.f. 1964–33. Photo: Bridgeman Images

be called their “scientific” use is also demonstrable. Other versions of these images were used for illustrations in natural history publications. Both Arcim­ boldo’s duiker and his mountain coati appear in woodcuts, along with illustra­ tions after several other drawings by him, in publications by one of the most famous natural historians of the time, the Bolognese scholar Ulisse Aldovrandi. The illustrations in this particular book are based on slightly later versions by

For the Birds

Figure 28.5

493

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93) (with later additions), Coati, 1577. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Ca 213/70

Arcimboldo that are still in collections of Aldrovandi preserved in the University Library, Bologna.30 Arcimboldo’s Dresden drawings are said to come from the Kunstkammer.31 It is possible that they, or sheets like them, were also contained in what Hainhofer calls the Bibliotheca. There he mentions having seen “ain schön mit wasserfarben gemahltes thierbuch, von allerleÿ grosen vnd thieren auf Regal papir vnd fein gebunden.” Hainhofer says this book was located in the musaeo Historico: this indicates that the library was divided according to theological, poetic, and philosophical and historical books; this division is extremely sug­ gestive, because it implies that the book was related to history, to be understood here as meaning natural history.32 A problem to be resolved is to determine how these and many other similar drawings, which are not clearly indicated in 30

For the identification and treatment of Arcimboldo’s drawings in context see Kaufmann, Arcimboldo. 31 This information was imparted to me orally, but I was not able to see and confirm the catalog card that reports that the volume in which they were are found came from the Kunstkammer (reported in Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 102n.238). 32 Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers, 181.

494

Kaufmann

the Kunstkammer inventories, arrived in the Kupferstichkabinett. The identifi­ cation, provenance, and use in Dresden of many such nature studies merit further study, for which earlier inventories of the electoral libraries will doubt­ less provide clues.33 Interest in naturalia seems to have increased in Dresden during the course of the seventeenth century, notably during the reign of Johann Georg i (1611–56). Although the 1619 Dresden Kunstkammer inventory does not give much clear indication of this interest, a description of the Kunstkammer written in the same year by David Otto Schürer suggests that visitors paid notice to the natu­ ral specimens. Schürer’s description records an elephant tusk, a giant bone, antlers, and a bat located in the first room, where a statue of Daniel identifiable with one made by Giovanni Maria Nosseni was also present.34 By 1629 depic­ tions of animals as well as actual specimens were still attracting visitors’ atten­ tion. As suggested, in his account of his visit to Dresden in that year, Hainhofer specifically mentioned seeing in the Kunstkammer “allerleiy gecontraftetterte thier, wilde schwein, hirschn, Adler, fischagten….” These pictures were now located “im vorgemach,” where they may have served as an introduction to the next room, called the ersten Gemach, the first room mentioned by Schürer, where Hainhofer saw “mancherleij nautralia, raritetn.”35 Several more folios in the 1640 inventory list these kinds of objects, indicating that by the date of its compilation the number of naturalia recorded as being in the Dresden collec­ tion had increased significantly.36 There is further evidence from the mid-­ seventeenth century that suggests that “exotic” living animals were also being kept in Dresden.37 In 1641, a year after the compilation of the inventory, Zacharias Wagner returned to his birthplace for a brief visit. Wagner had one of the most extraordinary careers of any person born in Saxony, indeed in Europe, dur­ ing the sixteenth or seventeenth century. He was born in Dresden in 1614, but by the time he was twenty years old he had left for Amsterdam, where 33 Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 107, offers a number of hypothe­ ses for their transference, but she does not come to a definite conclusion. There are many loose ends. 34 See “Beschreibung der Dresdner Kunstkammer von Mag. David Otto Schürer, Dresden 1619 (1627),” published as an appendix to Dirk Syndram, “Die Anfänge der Dresdner Kunstkammer,” in Syndram and Minning, Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Geschichte einer Sammlung, 39. 35 Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers, 157. 36 Die kurfürstlich-sächsische Kunstkammer in Dresden. Das Inventar von 1640, fols. 513r–519v, 270r. 37 Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 109.

For the Birds

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he entered the service of the famous cartographer Jacob Blaeu. In 1634 Wagner joined the Dutch West India Company and sailed to Brazil. Jan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, governor-general of the colony of New Holland (Dutch Brazil) from 1637 to 1644, raised Wagner to the rank of quartermas­ ter. After he returned to Europe in 1641, Wagner enlisted in the Dutch East India Company. He worked in Batavia, the modern city of Jakarta, where he served as a company scrivener. In the early 1650s he was sent on various embassies to China, and then became Opperhofd (director) of the Dutch Factory (trading post) on Deshima in Nagasaki harbor in Japan. In this role he had to travel to Edo, modern Tokyo, to pay homage on the annual visit required to the shogun. There he witnessed (and depicted) the great Tokyo fire of 1657. In 1662 Wagner went to South Africa, where he became the sec­ ond governor of the Dutch Cape Colony that was centered in Cape Town. He died in Amsterdam in 1668.38 Wagner’s life history is told in what amounts to an autobiography, a copy of which is found in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden.39 Another manuscript compendium of great interest for the theme of this essay precedes Wagner’s account of his life. This book contains 110 images depicting fruits, plants, sea creatures, birds, and animals, mostly of “exotic” ori­ gin. (Fig. 28.6) On its title page Wagner called the volume a Thierbuch. Beside his official activities for the Dutch West and East India companies, Wagner was also a competent artist. As such he depicted the fire of Tokyo, as mentioned. The Thierbuch provides a broad sampling of his draftsmanship, as it contains depictions of flora, fauna, and exotic peoples. On the same or facing pages in the book Wagner also wrote extensive commentaries. He says that he compiled his Thierbuch to record and comment accurately on the curiosities that he had seen in Brazil.40 Most of the images of plants, animals, and birds are, however, copies of paintings and oil sketches made by the other artists and scientists who had joined Jan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen in Brazil. For the most part they rely on well-known oil paintings by the Dutch (properly Groningen) artist Albert 38

39

40

For Wagner’s biography, see Sybille Pfaff, Zacharias Wagner (1614–1668) (Hassfurt: 2001); and further O. H Spohr, Zacharias Wagner: Second Commander of the Cape (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1957). Wagner’s autobiography properly speaking is his Kurtze Beschreibung der 35. Jährigen Reisen und Berichtungen, accessible in English translation with notes in Dutch Brazil, vol. 2, The “Thierbuch” and “Autobiography” of Zacharias Wagener (Rio de Janeiro: Editora, 1997), 222ff. Wagner’s book is reprinted in facsimile with translation in Dutch Brazil.

496

Kaufmann

Figure 28.6

Zacharias Wagner (1614–68), Arara from the Thierbuch. Drawing, 21.4 x 35.6 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Ca 226a/34

Eckhout (1607–65/66), which are now in the National Museum in Copenhagen, where they arrived originally as a gift from Jan Maurits to the king of Denmark.41 Wagner’s images also depended upon studies made by Eckhout, other artists, and the Saxon scientist Georg Marcgraf contained in albums now in the Jagellonian University Library in Cracow. They come from the collections in Berlin, where they had initially arrived as gifts from Jan Maurits to the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm i of Brandenburg.42 While many of Wagner’s images may be copies, he also made several original drawings, including unique depictions of a slave market and slave dance that are valuable views of 41

42

Thomas Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, Ein niederländischer Maler und sein Gönner Moritz der Brasilianer (Copenhagen: Eynar Munksgaard, 1938), 100ff, first noticed this connection. See most recently Dante Martins Teixeira, “O ‘Thierbuch’ de Zacharias Wagener de Dresden (1614–1668) e os Óleos de Albert Eckhout/The ‘Thierbuch’ of Zacharias Wagener of Dresden (1614–1668) and the Oil Paintings of Albert Eckhout,” in Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil/Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil, 1644–2002 (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 2002), 167–85. This collection of manuscripts is published in facsimile in four volumes with a separate commentary volume as Brasil Holland/Dutch Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora, 1995); their provenance is discussed in the commentary, 83–88.

For the Birds

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life in seventeenth-century Brazil.43 Commentaries on the sheets also provide important information on the fauna and flora of Dutch Brazil. Wagner’s book also elucidates the work of his countryman Georg Marcgraf. Marcgraf was born in Liebstadt near Dresden in 1610, and died probably in 1648. The title of Marcgraf’s book, Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, published in the year of his death, reveals an approach to natural history similar to Wagner’s. Marcgraf’s definition of natural history includes the study of indigenous peo­ ples together with plants, animals, and birds, parallel to the way they were treated in many Kunstkammers.44 The parallel interests of these two Saxons in Brazil and their role in natural history seem to be more than coincidental. They may reflect the existence of a continuing current of interest in Dresden. Evidence suggests that Wagner’s Thierbuch came to Dresden and was left there in 1641, the year Wagner returned home; he may well have intended it as a gift or potential sale to the electoral collections, to which it has subsequently belonged. In any case the arrival in Dresden of the painter Albert Eckhout himself may be understood against this background. Eckhout was born in Groningen, and worked in Amersfoort and Amsterdam before going to Brazil. In Brazil he made the large paintings of indigenous peoples, Africans, fruits, and fauna that have gained him ever-growing fame.45 His depictions of people in Brazil are now in Copenhagen, where, as mentioned, they came as gifts from Jan Maurits and have been well studied. But his career subsequent to his Brazilian sojourn has been comparatively ignored. Eckhout returned from Brazil to Holland circa 1644. After a decade of rela­ tive obscurity in his homeland he entered Saxon service in 1653 and then resided in Dresden for a decade. He left Dresden in 1663, and died not long afterward, in 1665/66, in his birthplace, Groningen.

43 44

45

See Teixeira, “Thierbuch,” 197, 199. Georg Marcgraf and Wilhelm Piso, Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1648), etc. For Marcgraf see P.J.P. Whitehead, “Georg Marcgraf and Brazilian Zoology,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, 1604–1679; A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil; Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of His Death, ed. E. van den Boogaart (The Hague: Jan Maurits Stichting, 1979), 425–71; Rebecca Parker Brienen, “From Brazil to Europe: The Zoological Drawings of Albert Eckhout and Georg Marcgraf,” in Early Modern Zoology, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 273–314. For Eckhout’s Brazilian works see recently Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil; Quentin Buvelot, ed., Albert Eckhout. Een Hollandse Kunstenaar in Brazilië (The Hague: Waanders, 2004); Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

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Kaufmann

Jan Maurits, “the Brazilian,” was the person who sent Eckhout to the future elector Johann Georg ii, at the time Kurprinz of Saxony. Eckhout was proba­ bly sent to Dresden for many of the same reasons that Jan Maurits gave Eckhout’s paintings to the king of Denmark, namely, because Maurits proba­ bly thought that Eckhout’s Brazilian works would be of interest to the ruler, and help him gain favor with a foreign (and Protestant) power. In his letter of recommendation of 2 March 1653 to Johann Georg, Maurits describes Eckhout as follows: …der Maler, welcher mit mir in Brasilien gewesen, resolvert hat, edl undertänig aufzuwarten…Hab ihn auch befohlen, alles was er noch von Indien unter sich hat, mit zu bringen. (The painter who has been with me in Brazil has resolved to attend upon your Highness… I have ordered him to bring with him everything that he still has with him from the Indies.)46 Hence he mentions specifically the connection with Brazil, and moreover that Eckhout has been ordered to bring with him to Saxony works done while there. It remains unclear what exactly Eckhout brought from Brazil to Dresden, much as it is uncertain what he accomplished during his decade of Saxon ser­ vice. The terms of Eckhout’s employment state that he was supposed to serve the Saxon elector by painting portraits, history paintings, landscapes—whatever the ruler required.47 Yet no direct evidence demonstrates that he executed any such works. Nevertheless, many paintings exist that suggest that Eckhout’s ventures in natural history had an impact in Saxony, and that the artist himself may even have painted works similar to those he did of Brazilian themes while he was working for the Saxon court. There is firm proof that his Brazilian heritage as revealed in nature paintings resonated in Saxony. Eckhout may be associated with images of exotic people and depictions of birds and fauna found (and formerly located) in Saxony. The clearest echoes of Eckhout’s work appear in eighty paintings of birds of Brazilian origins still to be seen in situ near Dresden. These are panel paintings set into the ceiling of the main salon on the second floor, or piano nobile, in Lusthaus Hoflössnitz in Radebeul, located approximately nine kilometers northwest of Dresden. Elector Johann Georg ii had the building constructed during the later

46 47

Printed in Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, 56. Ibid., 57.

For the Birds

Figure 28.7

499

Interior of salon with ceiling paintings by Albert Eckhout (attributed), Lust- und Berghaus, Hoflössnitz, Radebeul, Germany, mid-seventeenth century. Photo © Hoflössnitz Foundation

1650s.48 (Fig. 28.7) Lusthaus Hoflössnitz served originally as a retreat and hunt­ ing lodge; it is now the Dresden Weinbaumuseum. Although the attribution of the bird paintings remains to be determined with certainty, they are clearly based on studies made in Brazil by Eckhout and other artists who were there with Jan Maurits. Several paintings depict rare and exotic birds, including the arara. (Fig. 28.8) And Eckhout was contacted by Jan Maurits in 1655 while he was in Dresden apparently to execute copies after his Brazilian works.49 The bird paintings belong to what in a seventeenth-century sense may have been regarded as an encyclopedic accumulation of depictions of animals and allegories of the arts. The interior of the Schloss at Radebeul thus recalls the decoration of other princely residences of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­ turies that had universal themes. It may be compared to the painted and carved 48

49

The fullest recent account of the Schloss and the paintings therein is provided in Heinrich Magirius, ed., 600 Jahre Hoflössnitz (Dresden: Sandstein, 2001), where the question of attri­ bution is also discussed. See Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, 59.

500

Kaufmann

Figure 28.8 Attributed to Albert Eckhout (1610–66), Arara, detail of the ceiling paintings in the salon of the Lust- und Berghaus, Hoflössnitz, Radebeul, Germany, m ­ id-seventeenth century. Photo © Hoflössnitz Foundation

decoration of the interior of the Lusthaus that stood until the Seven Years’ War on the Jungfernbastei in Dresden, in which Hainhofer also saw parts of the Dresden collections on display.50 The decoration presents the macrocosmmicrocosm parallel that was a governing principle inherent in the Kunstkammer.51 Another series of seventeenth-century paintings once adorned the walls of Schloss Pretzsch an der Elbe. They were subsequently removed from there and displayed in the Hohenzollern Schloss Schwedt an der Oder, where they may have been destroyed when the Schloss was set on fire in 1945. These paintings showed what may be called exotic peoples from around the world, including Asia. Some of the pictures were clearly based on Eckhout’s Brazilian images of indigenous peoples, and others rely on his studies of fruits. Still others seem related to these sources, and especially to Eckhout’s Brazilian paintings, in the visual conventions they use to show Asian peoples.52 A copy of a Brazilian image used to be in Berlin; one of an East Asian market now belongs to the Rijksmuseum 50 Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers, 216–18. 51 See first Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio: Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf ii,” Art Journal 38 (1978): 22–28; repr. in Grasping the World, ed. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 526–37. The argument about decoration has been frequently repeated. 52 See Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, 105ff.

For the Birds

501

in Amsterdam.53 This suggests that more than one version of these compositions once existed; we may recall that Jan Maurits seems to have been soliciting cop­ ies. To judge from photographs, neither the pictures formerly in Schwedt nor the copy in the Rijksmuseum have the quality of paintings by Eckhout himself, however. Regardless of who painted them, they nevertheless demonstrate that Eckhout’s inventions had an impact in Saxony. More than that, they also offer evidence for the existence of a strong local current of interest in exotica: they show fruits, birds, and exotic peoples, including Asians and Africans. The seventeenth-century concerns with exotica and naturalia exemplified by these paintings may be compared to Arcimboldo’s drawings and paintings and the milieus in which they were collected. Both Arcimboldo’s and Eckhout’s images seem to have been treated similarly in Dresden. A lower strip with an imaginary landscape has been added to the original compositions of paintings of birds often attributed to Eckhout on the Schloss Hoflössnitz ceiling. Similarly, while Arcimboldo’s studies of animals found in earlier versions (Vienna, Österrei­ chische Nationalbibliothek) were drawn with only cast shadows added to them and were painted on a neutral background, a colored wedge suggesting land to give the impression that the animals are found in a landscape has been painted below creatures on several pages in Dresden. In both cases the additions are prob­ ably datable to the mid-seventeenth century. At the very least they attest to the interest in these earlier studies shown by artists in s­ eventeenth-century Saxony, and their direct and close involvement with these earlier naturalistic images. Wagner and the seventeenth-century tradition of nature studies may be connected to the world of Arcimboldo in yet another way. The artistic origins of Wagner remain obscure. He appears in Amsterdam working for the cartog­ rapher Blaeu, but how did he come to gain employment there? How did he acquire training in the depiction of animals and birds that gave him even suf­ ficient competence to copy with some ability the nature studies that appear in his Thierbuch? The answer may perhaps be sought further in the circumstances of his early life: one of the witnesses at his baptism in 1614 was Hans Fasold.54 This man was most likely the Dresden court artist Johan Fasold, who is now primarily known as a draftsman. The document for the employment of Fasold refers moreover to his preparation of “Contractfectur und ander Mahlwergk,” which may be read as meaning portraits and other paintings.55 Hainhofer records 53 54 55

Ibid.; Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600–1950 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 183–84, cat. 89. See Pfaff, Zacharias Wagner, for documentation on Wagner. For works by Fasold see Werner Schade, Dresdener Zeichnungen, 1550 bis 1650. Inventionen sächsischer Künstler in europäischen Sammlungen (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, 1969), 37–43.

502

Figure 28.9

Kaufmann

Attributed to Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn (1576–1612), copy after Giuseppe Arcimboldo (?), Falcon. Cod. Min. 130, vol. 2, fol. 8, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

For the Birds

503

that Fasold was commissioned by Elector Johan Georg i and the electress to make contributions to his Stammbuch.56 He was installed as court painter and Contrafector: Contrafectur may mean portraiture, but it also has the more gen­ eral connotation that one is to work nach dem Leben, nach der Natur.57 Fasold is also known to have made many paintings of hunting and game.58 Could this mean that Wagner, who was later to represent naturalia, was trained by Fasold in working from nature? Fasold may also have been connected to the imperial court at which Arcimboldo worked for twenty-five years.59 Could Fasold and Wagner even have known about the work of Arcimboldo, whose nature studies were avail­ able in Dresden and had gained renewed interest in the period circa 1600, when they were being copied by other artists at the imperial court in Prague? This is precisely the time when Fasold probably would have been in contact with Prague and when the Arcimboldo drawings may have come to Dresden.60 Among such nature studies copied from Arcimboldo is one of a falcon from the Americas, which has been copied with many other birds and animals, probably by Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, a court artist of Emperor Rudolf ii; it was made at the latest in 1609.61 (Fig. 28.9) While these and many other questions must be left open, it is to be hoped that, however briefly, this essay has pointed to aspects of art and collecting in 56

See Doering, Des Augsburger Patriciers, 288. For Hainhofer’s Stammbücher see Gerhard Seibold, “Die Stammbücher Philipp Hainhofers,” in Emmendörffer and Trepesch, Wunderwelt, 140–50; and further ibid., 188–201, cat. no. 10. 57 For Contrafactur see Peter Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16 (1993): 554–79. 58 Basic biographical information on Fasold is dependent on Ernst Sigismund, q.v. in Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 11, ed. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker (repr., Leipzig: Seemann, 1999), 282–83. 59 See Werner Schade, “Dresden und Prag um 1600,” in Prag um 1600, Beiträge zur Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs ii (Freren: Luca, 1988), 261–66; and most recently Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 231–36. Schade, 265, points out connections between Michael Treuding, who (Dresdner Zeichner, 37) he assumes was Fasold’s teacher, and Prague. Henrich Geissler, Zeichnung in Deutschland. Deutsche Zeichner 1540–1640 (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1980), 2:104, asserts that Fasold had direct contact with Prague before 1597. 60 See Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett, 115–16, for the hypothesis that the Arcimboldo drawings came to Dresden at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 61 See Le Bestiaire de Rodolphe ii: cod. min. 129 et 130 de la Bibliothèque nationale d’Autriche, ed. Herbert Haupt et al. (Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1990), for attempted identification of the artists, dating, and full-scale facsimile of the volume.

504

Kaufmann

Dresden (and Saxony) that may be related to the study of nature as reflected in the creation of paintings and drawings. It has sought to outline a web of asso­ ciations that suggests the existence of a continuing current of interest, perhaps even a tradition, of representation of naturalia in Saxony and its development in relation to the electoral collections. Consideration of the role of nature stud­ ies and their impact in Saxony suggests that there is much more still to be learned, discovered, identified, and interpreted regarding the importance of natural history in Dresden. Dresden deserves more attention not only in the broader context of the history of relations between art and science, but specifi­ cally for the study of natural history. In conclusion, it may be remarked that the relative prior neglect of this subject may suggest something important about the historiography of art and of science. The twentieth century can now be seen as one in which great breakthroughs were made in technology, astronomy, physics, and optics. It seems appropriate that historians of science and of the relation of science to art would have written much about the manifestations of technology, astron­ omy, and optics in art. More recently, however, the life sciences (neurology, neurophysiology, molecular biology, genetic research, etc.) have become major focuses for scientific research and technical development. Where pre­ viously astronomy and especially optics engaged scholarship, it does not seem coincidental that contemporary scholars pay much more attention to the forerunners of other subjects, to the manifestations of what became ornithol­ ogy and ­zoology.62 This shift may also help us to see the Dresden collections in a new light.

62

See, e.g., Ogilvie, The Science of Describing; David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

For the Sake of Learning volume 2

Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions Editor M. Feingold (California Institute of Technology)

VOLUME 18/2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/slci



For the Sake of Learning Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton volume 2

Edited by

Ann Blair Anja-Silvia Goeing

LEIDEN | BOSTON

 Cover illustration: Jaede, “Die Bibliothek,” in Carl Friedrich Lauckhard, ed.: Die Welt in Bildern. Orbis pictus. Bilderbuch zur Anschauung und Belehrung, 3rd revised edition with more than 600 colored illustrations (Leipzig: E.J. Günther, n.d. [1872]), vol. 2, plate xxii, 2. Courtesy of a private library in Switzerland. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blair, Ann, 1961- editor of compilation. | Goeing, Anja-Silvia, editor of compilation. | Grafton, Anthony, honouree. Title: For the sake of learning : essays in honor of Anthony Grafton / edited by Ann Blair, Anja-Silvia Goeing. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions, ISSN 2352-1325 ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005113 (print) | LCCN 2016016478 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004263307 (set, hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004316928 (Vol. 1) | ISBN 9789004316942 (Vol. 2) | ISBN 9789004263314 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Learning and scholarship--History. | Intellectual life--History. | Historiography--History. | Learning and scholarship--Europe--History. | Europe--Intellectual life. | Historiography--Europe--History. Classification: LCC AZ231 .F67 2016 (print) | LCC AZ231 (ebook) | DDC 001.209--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005113 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2352-1325 isbn 978-90-04-26330-7 (hardback, set) isbn 978-90-04-31692-8 (hardback, vol. 1) isbn 978-90-04-31694-2 (hardback, vol. 2) isbn 978-90-04-26331-4 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.



To the memory of Lisa Jardine (1944–2015)







Contents Editors’ Preface XV List of Figures and Tables XIX Notes on Contributors XXIV Anthony Grafton: A Short Biography to 2015 XXXVII Ann Blair and Nicholas Popper Anthony Grafton: A Bibliography to 2015 LI C. Philipp E. Nothaft

Volume 1 Part 1 Scaliger and Casaubon 1 Confidentiality and Publicity in Early Modern Epistolography: Scaliger and Casaubon 3 Dirk van Miert 2 Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon 21 Nicholas Hardy 3 Chronology and Hebraism in the World of Joseph Scaliger: The Case of Arnaud de Pontac (Arnaldus Pontacus) 39 Joanna Weinberg 4 Joseph Scaliger in England 55 Mordechai Feingold 5 What Does an Oriental Scholar Look Like? Some Portraits of Joseph Scaliger and Other Sixteenth-century Oriental Scholars: A Selection 73 Kasper van Ommen 6 Joseph Scaliger’s Treatise De apocryphis Bibliorum (ca. 1591) 91 Henk Jan de Jonge

viii

Contents Contents

Part 2 Knowledge Communities 7

Streetwalking and the Sources of Citizen Culture 107 James S. Amelang

8

Baudouin Ronsse as Writer of Medical Letters 123 Nancy Siraisi

9

Performing Humanism: The Andreini Family and the Republic of Letters in Counter-Reformation Italy 140 Sarah Gwyneth Ross

10

A Spanner and His Works: Books, Letters, and Scholarly Communication Networks in Early Modern Europe 157 Daniel Stolzenberg

11

Managing Cardinals’ Households for Dummies 173 Laurie Nussdorfer

12

Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning 195 Richard Serjeantson

Part 3 Scholarship and Religion 13

Pomponio Leto’s Life of Muhammad 215 Margaret Meserve

14

Erasmus, Luther, and the Margins of Biblical Misunderstanding 232 Arnoud Visser

15

When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek during and after the Council of Trent 251 Scott Mandelbrote

16

Theology and the Conditions of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Discernment of Spirits 268 Stuart Clark

Contents

17

John Selden in Germany: Religion and Natural Law from Boecler to Buddeus (1665–1695) 286 Martin Mulsow

18

“Crouch for Employment”: Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot 309 Bruce Janacek

19

Lutheran Islamophiles in Eighteenth-century Germany 327 Alastair Hamilton

20 The Sacrificing King: Ancients, Moderns, and the Politics of Religion 344 Jonathan Sheehan

Part 4 Cultures of Collecting 21

Privatbibliotheken antiker Christen 367 Roland Kany

22

An Imagined Library in the Italian Renaissance: The Presence of Greek in Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria 393 Christopher S. Celenza

23

A New World of Books: Hernando Colón and the Biblioteca Colombina 404 William H. Sherman

24 The Rediscovered Third Volume of Conrad Gessner’s “Historia plantarum” 415 Urs B. Leu 25 Suchen und Finden vor Google: Zur Metadatenproduktion im 16. Jahrhundert 423 Helmut Zedelmaier 26 The Vatican Library Alphabets, Luca Orfei, and Graphic Media in Sistine Rome 441 Paul Nelles

ix

x 27

Contents Contents

On the Production and Dissemination of a Hebrew Best Seller: Pinḥas Hurwitz and His Mystical-scientific Encyclopedia, Sefer Ha-Brit 469 David Ruderman

28 For the Birds: Collecting, Art, and Natural History in Saxony 481 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Volume 2 Part 5 Learned Practices 29 Visualisierungen mittels Tabellen 507 Paul Michel 30 Paduan Extracurricular Rhetoric, 1488–1491 542 Anja-Silvia Goeing 31

Cardano’s Malicious Horoscope and Gaurico’s Morbid Horoscope of Regiomontanus 561 N.M. Swerdlow

32 Lingua Adamica and Speculative Philology: Philo to Reuchlin 572 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann 33 Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559–1651 581 Peter Stallybrass 34 Campanella and the Disciplines from Obscurity to Concealment 602 Kristine Louise Haugen 35 Spirits in the Laboratory: Some Helmontian Collaborators of Robert Boyle 621 William R. Newman 36 Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais 641 Arthur Kiron

Contents

xi

Part 6 Approaches to Antiquity 37

King Arthur’s Merry Adventure in the Vale of Viterbo 661 Ingrid D. Rowland

38 Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies: Humanist Hermeneutics and the Language of Relics 675 Hester Schadee 39 Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius 692 James Hankins 40 The Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in Renaissance Scholarship: From Annius of Viterbo to Johannes Boemus 711 C. Philipp E. Nothaft 41

Imagining Marcus Aurelius in the Renaissance: Forgery, Fiction, and History in the Creation of the Imperial Ideal 729 Thomas Dandelet

42 Marcus Aurelius and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-century Antwerp 744 Jill Kraye 43 Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, Politicians: Sources and Uses of Early Modern Jesuit Natural Theology 761 Brian W. Ogilvie 44 Henry Savile Reads His Euclid 780 Robert Goulding 45 Natur und Zeit: Antike Motive im Umfeld von Rousseaus Emile 798 Jürgen Oelkers 46 The Whig Interpretation of Homer: F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in England 821 Diane Greco Josefowicz

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Contents

Part 7 Uses of Historiography 47 Quae vires verbo quod est “classicum” aliis locis aliisque temporibus subiectae sint quantumque sint eius sensus temporum diuturnitate mutati 845 Salvatore Settis 48 History and Antiquity at French Pilgrim Shrines: Three Pyrenean Examples 854 Virginia Reinburg 49 Inventing the Middle Ages: An Early Modern Forger Hiding in Plain Sight 871 Paula Findlen 50 Goethe and the End of Antiquarianism 897 Peter N. Miller 51

Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist 917 Suzanne Marchand

52 The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung 933 Glenn W. Most 53 Authenticity, Autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 955 Lorraine Daston 54 Time Offline and On 974 Daniel Rosenberg

Epilogue 55

“Studied for Action” Revisited 999 Lisa Jardine

56 The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition 1018 Jacob Soll Index 1033

Part 5 Learned Practices



chapter 29

Visualisierungen mittels Tabellen* Paul Michel 1 Einleitung Die logische Basis von Tabellen und davon abgeleiteten Formen besteht (im Gegensatz zu Bäumen, Flussdiagrammen, Mind Maps, Netzen) in der Korrelation von Elementen aus verschiedenen Mengen. Korrelationen von Elementen verschiedener Mengen bilden einen großen Teil unserer Wissensbestände. Diesen Typ des Wissens gab es schon früh (z.B. Zuordnungen von Göttern zu Planeten); mit der Mathematisierung der Naturwissenschaft und dann besonders mit dem Interesse für Demographie und Statistik wuchsen diese Wissensbestände an – und auch das Bedürfnis nach einer Visualisierung. Ich gehe nicht vom äußeren Erscheinungsbild aus, sondern von der sachimmanenten Logik, von der sich jenes ableiten lässt. Ich differenziere nach folgenden Kriterien und beanspruche, damit alle Gestaltungsformen beschreiben zu können: • Kategorien, die in den Mengen vorkommen (Kap. 1.2) • Anzahl der miteinander korrelierten Mengen (vgl. Kap. 2.5) • Graphische Gestaltung und Ausgestaltung (Kap. 2–4) 1.1 Terminologie Auf der gedanklichen Ebene sprechen wir (nicht im streng mathematischen Sinn) von: (Daten-)Mengen – Elementen – korrelieren, Relationen zwischen den einzelnen Elementen – die Gesamtheit dieser Relationen („Thema“). Auf der darstellerischen Ebene verwenden wir folgende Termini (für eine idealtypische Tabelle): * Der Jubilar hat 2010 (zusammen mit Daniel Rosenberg) das großartige Buch Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline verfasst, das den Visualisierungen von Zeit und Geschichte gewidmet ist. Ich hoffe, er interessiere sich für diese wissenschaftshistorischen Fußnoten; dafür ist er ja auch ein Spezialist. – Die Studie ist hervorgegangen aus dem in Arbeit befindlichen Projekt „Visualisierung von Wissen“, das von einigen privaten Stiftungen getragen wird. – Daniel Candinas hat den ganzen Text mehrmals kritisch gesichtet und intensiv mit mir durchgearbeitet, wofür ich ihm sehr herzlich danke. Stehen gebliebene Fehler gehen auf mein Konto.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_030

508

Michel

Bei Parallel-Tabellen (vgl. Kap. 2.2) stehen in den Spaltentiteln die Namen für die Mengen; in den Zellen stehen die (auf gleicher Zeilenhöhe miteinander korrelierten) Elemente dieser Mengen. Bei Kreuz-Tabellen wird die oberste Zeile Randzeile genannt; sie enthält die Namen für die Elemente der einen Menge. Die äußerste Spalte (in unserem Schriftsystem links) wird Randspalte genannt; sie enthält die Namen für die Elemente der anderen. Die Kreuzung von Randzeile und Randspalte ist idealerweise durch eine Diagonale von links oben nach rechts unten in zwei Dreiecke unterteilt; in diesen stehen die Namen der beiden Mengen. In den Feld-Zellen stehen die Namen der Elemente der dritten Menge, die mit Paaren aus den beiden andern korreliert sind. Der Name dieser Menge wird in einem typographisch abgesetzten Teil oder im Text-Umfeld genannt. Einen Spezialfall stellen die Binär-Tabellen dar, vgl. Kap. 2.2. 1.2 Kategorien Die in einer Tabelle verwendeten Kategorien können von verschiedener Art sein: (aa) Es handelt sich um qualitativ verschiedene Entitäten, Begriffe oder Aussagen (beispielsweise Bevölkerungsgruppen nach den herkömmlichen Religionen – Staaten – die 12 Sternzeichen – Fleckenmittel…); (ab) es handelt es sich um quantifizierbare Größen (z.B. Höhe über Meer – Zeit, die jemand braucht – Ertrag eines Kartoffelfeldes – Geldmenge – …). Dann besteht der Eintrag in einer zur entsprechenden Menge gehörenden Zelle aus einem numerischen Wert (visualisiert als Punkt in einem Koordinatensystem; vgl. Kap. 3.2). (ba) Es handelt sich um Entitäten, bei denen die Reihenfolge beliebig ist (z.B. die Art des Gewebes bei den Fleckmitteln); (bb) es handelt sich um Entitäten, die man der Benutzbarkeit halber nicht durcheinanderbringen sollte (z.B. Stationen einer Bahnlinie, die Abfolge der Messdaten bei einer Fieberkurve). (Vgl. Abbildung 29.1.) 1.3 Verschiedene Visualisierungs-Techniken Relationen lassen sich in verschiedener Weise darstellen. Ich unterscheide drei Techniken der Visualisierung und ordne sie nach Abstraktionsgrad: (a) gleichsam die Nullstufe: Daten sind auf Fragebögen aufgeschrieben oder mittels Karteikarten erfasst oder elektronisch gespeichert, aber noch ungeordnet; (b) als rein typographisch realisierte Tabellen (vgl. Kapitel 2);

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

509

Abbildung 29.1 Beispiel für die Kategorien (aa)/(ba): „Fleckmittel“ (Der Volks-Brockhaus. Deutsches Sach- und Sprachwörterbuch für Schule und Haus. 9., verbesserte Auflage [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1941], s.v.)

(c) mittels geometrischer Formen (vgl. Kapitel 3) (d) mit mimetischen Bildern angereichert oder in solche umgesetzt (vgl. Kapitel 4). Wir fragen jedes Mal: Welchen kognitiven Mehrwert erbringt die besondere graphische Darstellung? 1.4 Lektüretechnik Die Lektüre einer typographisch realisierten Kreuz-Tabelle geschieht so: Bekannt ist ein Element der in den Spalten dargestellten Menge (ich weiß, was für eine Art Stoff ich beschmutzt habe) und ein Element der in den Zeilen dargestellten Menge (ich weiß, womit); gesucht ist das Element in der damit korrelierten Zelle (das Fleckmittel). Also: Wenn Seide und wenn Gras, dann Benzin. Freilich gibt es auch Fälle, wo das Gesuchte in der Rand-Zeile oder Spalte angeordnet ist. Das Lesen von Tabellen muss(te) gelernt werden. 1707 bekam der Benutzer der „Vergleichung der Gewichte/aller fürnehmsten Handels=Plätze in Europa“ eine ausführliche Gebrauchsanleitung: „Vermittelst dieser Tabelle kan man

510

Michel

leichtlich den Unterschied des Gewichts einer Stadt oder Landes gegeneinander finden. Zum Exempel, man verlanget zu wissen/wie viel 100. lb Hamburger zu Amsterdam oder zu Londen thun/so siehet man nur zu lincker Hand/wo 100. lb Hamburger voranstehen/und fähret mit gleicher Linie fort/ biß man oben Amsterdam und ferner Londen bemerckt/und finde bey dem ersten 98. by andern 107. als das eigentliche Facit….“ Paul Jacob Marperger (1656–1730), Die Neu-Eröffnete Kauffmans-Börse/ Worin Eine vollkommene Connoisance aller zu der Handlung dienenden Sachen und Merckwürdigkeiten/Auch Curieusen und Reisenden Anleitung gegeben wird/was sie davon zu ihrem Vortheil auff Reisen zu bemercken (Hamburg: Schiller, 1704), Tabelle „Resolvierung der Müntzen…“. 2

Varianten von typographischen Tabellen

Von der Datenmenge zur typographischen tabellarischen Darstellung Wir gehen aus von einem Beispiel. Die Menge N seien die Flotten einzelner Nationen; die Menge G sei die Größe der Flotte (Anzahl Schiffe); die Menge W die Anzahl erlegter Wale in einem bestimmten Jahr. Statt mehrere Male die Relation zu formulieren: „Die 129 Schiffe umfassende Flotte Hollands fing 1255 Wale“; „Die 14 Schiffe umfassende Flotte Bremens fing 96 Wale“; usw., kann man die Sätze exakt untereinander schreiben und dabei die redundanten Elemente (hier „Vessels“, „took“, „Whales“) weglassen. (Idealerweise würden die Mengen N, W, G in Spaltentiteln genannt und die Tabelle bekäme den Titel „Walfangquoten“.) (Vgl. Abbildung 29.2.) Tabellen stellen hinsichtlich der Medien Text und Bild Zwitterwesen dar: Sie enthalten an der Oberfläche keine (für das Medium Text typische) Syntagmata; die Anordnung der Wissenselemente geschieht graphisch, der Bild-Anteil beschränkt sich indessen auf die Anordnung der Daten auf der Fläche des Papiers. Und diese Anordnung hat ihre Vorteile: Im Gegensatz zur logischen Basis (wo die Elemente der Mengen ungeordnet bleiben können) zwingt eine typographische Tabelle, die Daten in einer

2.1

Abbildung 29.2 Cyclopædia Or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences […], by E. Chambers [London, 1728], Artikel „Fishery“, p. 43. Digitalisat: http:// uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/ HistSciTech/Cyclopaedia.

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

511

Reihenfolge darzustellen. Die Reihenfolge richtet sich nach dem (antizipierten) Erkenntnisinteresse des Lesers. So ist die Tabelle der Walfang­quoten nicht alphabetisch nach Ländern, sondern nach der Anzahl der erlegten Wale angeordnet; es interessiert offenbar eine Rangliste. 2.2 Parallel-Tabelle, Kreuz-Tabelle, Binär-Tabelle Parallel-Tabellen findet man beispielsweise in Kalendern, wo aufgelistet werden: der Wochentag – das Datum (evtl. unterschieden nach dem julianischen/ gregorianischen Kalender) – der Gedächtnistag des Heiligen (nach katholischem/ reformiertem Brauch) – die Sonnenscheindauer – das Tierkreiszeichen, in dem der Mond steht – die Mondphase – und es lassen sich weitere Spalten denken wie z.B. die Feiertage anderer Religionen usw. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.3.) Kreuz-Tabelle: In der Astrologie möchte Gregor Reisch aufzeigen, welche Konstellation von Tierkreiszeichen im Zodiak (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer etc.) und Gestirnen (Saturnus, Iupiter, Mars, Sol etc.) welches Körperorgan (Pectus, Ventrem, Caput, Femora, Pedes, Crura, Hume­ ros etc.; [wegen des Verbs im Akkusativ]) dominiert. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.4.) Mit Parallel-Tabellen können beliebig viele Mengen miteinander verglichen werden; die Anzahl der Spalten ist beliebig. – Kreuz-Tabellen sind als kompakte Darstellung praktisch, wenn allen denkbaren Paaren von Elementen zweier Mengen genau ein Element einer dritten Menge zugeordnet werden kann (vgl. ferner Kap. 2.5). Einen Spezialfall von Kreuztabellen stellen die Binärtabellen (auch BitmapTabellen) dar. Logisch handelt es sich um zweistellige Relationen, wobei jene, welche die Relation ausmachen, durch einen binären Wert (z.B. +/– oder wahr/

Abbildung 29.3 Der Hinkende Bott auf das Jahr 1832 [Bern: Stämpfli; Ausschnitt aus dem Monat August].

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ABBILDUNG 29.4 Gregor Reisch, Aepitoma Omnis Phylosophiae, Alias Margarita Phylosophica, Tractans de omni genere scibili [Straßburg: Grüninger, 1504], Liber vii, Tract. ii, unpaginiert.

falsch, gefüllt / leere Zelle) markiert sind. Die Feldwerte sind hier also nur Kreu­ zungsmarken, nicht Elemente einer dritten Menge. Beispiel siehe Abbildung 29.5: Zugehörigkeit von Ländern zu Institutionen.

513

Andorra Kosovo Kroatien Liechtenstein Luxemburg Malta Rumänien Schweden USA Weißrussland

+ + + + + + + + +

+ + + +

Schengenraum

Eurozone 18

Europarat

Nato

OSZE

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

+

+

+ + + + + +

+ + + + + +

+ +

Abbildung 29.5 Eine Darstellung als Venn-Diagramm (Philippe Rekacewicz, Atlas der Globalisierung [Berlin: Le Monde Diplomatique, 2009], S. 36). Vereinfachende Graphik des Verfassers; Stand 2014.

2.3 Platzsparende Vereinfachung Beim Einmaleins kann man sich das Ausdrucken einer Hälfte der Tabelle sparen, weil die Multiplikation kommutativ ist (19 × 6 = 6 × 19). Die in Kalendern immer wieder abgedruckten Tabellen sind deshalb dreieckförmig. Abgesehen von der Ersparnis an Lettern wird die Sache auch übersichtlicher. (Vgl. Abbildungen 29.6 und 29.7.) Die Möglichkeit der Vereinfachung liegt darin begründet, dass es sich um einen Spezialfall handelt: Dargestellt werden Relationen innerhalb einer einzigen Menge.

Abbildung 29.6 Ältere, redundante 1 x 1-Tabelle (Raffaele Maffei, Commentariorvm Vrbanorum Raphaelis Volaterrani [Basileae: Frobenius, Hervagius et Episcopius, 1530], fol. 411r).

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Abbildung 29.7  „Einmal-Eins“ aus einem Kalender (Der Hinkende Bott auf das Jahr 1832 [Bern: Stämpfli]).

2.4 Tabellen in Kreisform Gelegentlich kann es sinnvoll sein, Anfang und Ende der Tabelle zu einem Kreis zusammenzufügen, namentlich wenn die in den Spalten abgebildeten Mengen in der Realität einen Strahlenkranz bilden (z.B. bei der Windrose, vgl. Kap. 3.4) oder wenn sie sich natürlicherweise wiederholen (z.B. im Jahresablauf). – Mitunter wird mit der Kreis-Darstellung auch bloß suggeriert, man habe alle Kategorien erfasst, es gebe keine weiteren Spalten mehr. Im Beispiel werden in Parallele gesetzt: die 12 Monate – die abendländischen Tierkreiszeichen (in Form ihrer Pictogramme) – die ägyptischen Tierkreis­ zeichen („Häuser“) – die ägyptischen Bilder – die abendländischen Chiffren. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.8.) 2.5 Anzahl Mengen in Kreuz-Tabellen Lassen sich auch mehr als drei Mengen in einer Kreuz-Tabelle visualisieren? Dies führt an die Grenzen der typographischen Darstellungstechnik. Bei Zinstabellen z.B. sind folgende Mengen im Spiel: (1) das Startkapital; (2) der Kurs in %; (3) die Laufzeit; (4) der aufgelaufene Betrag (die „Interessen“). Eine

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

515

Abbildung 29.8 Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die PHYSICA SACRA, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in Heil. Schrifft vorkommenden natürlichen Sachen, deutlich erklärt und bewährt…[Augspurg und Ulm: Ch.I.Wagner, 1731–35]; Tafel CCCCXCV zu 2 Kön. 23,5 mit Verweis auf Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

Kreuz-Tabelle kann aber nur schwer vier Mengen gleichzeitig darstellen. So hat beispielsweise Diethelm Hintermeister um 1840 ein ganzes Buch zusammenstellen müssen, bei dem jede Seite einer Laufzeit gewidmet ist (z.B. 179 Tage), wobei dort die aufgelaufenen Zinsen nach Zinssatz (in den Spalten: 3% – 3½% – 4% – 4¼% – 4½% – 5%) und Anfangs-Kapital (in 43 Zeilen von 20’000 bis 1 Franken) tabellarisch dargestellt werden. (Diethelm Hintermeister, Zinstabellen aus 1 bis 20’000 Franken Capital durch alle Tage des Jahres mit einer Zeitberechnungstafel, auf welcher die zwischen zwei Terminen liegende Zahl von Tagen sogleich gefunden wird [Zürich: Locher, o.J.])

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Sg Pl

m der die f

die

indef ein

– die

die n

def

eine –

das

ein –

Abbildung 29.9 Artikelformen des Deutschen; Graphik von Daniel Candinas.

Wenn man sich das Buch als Raum imaginiert, so ist es als ganzes eine Tabelle. Etwas einfacher einsehbar ist das am folgenden Beispiel (wo die Buchseiten den drei überschichteten Ebenen entsprechen): die (1) Artikelformen des Deutschen in Abhängigkeit von (2) Definitheit, (3) Numerus und (4) Genus. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.9.) Eine andere Möglichkeit besteht in der Herstellung einer Volvelle (vgl. Kap. 2.6., zweiter Fall). Auch die Animation mittels edv ist eine Hilfe. Ein Meister dieser Technik ist Hans Rosling, vgl. die beweglichen Bubble Charts in dessen „Gapminder“ (http://www.gapminder.org). 2.6 Volvellen Volvellen (wahrscheinlich ein Kunstwort aus lat. volvere ›drehen‹ und tabella) sind Tabellen mit beweglichen Teilen.1 Einfachere, auf Parallel-Tabellen beruhende Volvellen tun nichts anderes als den Blick zu lenken, indem sie das nicht Interessierende ausblenden und das Interessierende durch ausgestanzte Löcher im Karton prominent ­ sichtbar machen. Die entsprechend eingerichtete Tabelle lässt sich hinter einem ­ausgestanzten Karton drehen, und man sieht beispielsweise jeweils den Namen eines Vogels, ein Bild von ihm, Größe, Brutzeit (Monate), ob die Art gefährdet ist. Intelligentere Volvellen helfen, die Korrelationen von mehr als drei Mengen zu visualisieren. Beispiel: Belichtungsmesser. Die Belichtungszeit beim konventionellen Fotoapparat (Silberchlorid) wird bestimmt durch (1) die Filmemp­ findlichkeit (Scheiner bzw. din bzw. asa); (2) den gemessenen Lichtwert; dann ergeben sich verschiedene Kombinationen von (3) Blende und (4) Verschlusszeit. (Vgl. Tabelle 29.1.) In Tabellenform ist für jede Filmempfindlichkeit eine eigene Tabelle nötig. Die Größe, von welcher der Photograph ausgeht, steht in der Randspalte (im Beispiel die Blendenöffnung, „aperture priority“; praktisch für den Fall, wo 1 Der Verlag Kratschmer in Frankfurt/M. stellt seit 1956 bis heute „Computer aus Pappe“ her.

517

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen Tabelle 29.1 Tabelle von Belichtungszeiten; Graphik des Verfassers

Blende 5,6 Blende 8 Blende 11

Empfindlichkeit 100 ASA Lichtwert 12 Lichtwert 11 Zeit 1/60 sec Zeit 1/125 sec Zeit 1/30 sec Zeit 1/60 sec Zeit 1/15 sec Zeit 1/30 sec

Lichtwert 13 Zeit 1/250 sec Zeit 1/125 sec Zeit 1/60 sec

Abbildung 29.10 Links: Set von Tabellen des Belichtungsmessers ombrux von Gossen (1933 oder etwas später) – Rechts: Volvelle des General Electric Exposure Meter (ca. 1946). Aufnahme des Verfassers.

man die Schärfentiefe beeinflussen will). Praktisch wäre zusätzlich je eine Tabelle, die in der Randspalte die Verschlusszeit zeigte („shutter priority“; für den Fall der Sportaufnahmen). Aber dann müsste der Photograph ein doppelt so großes Paket mit Tabellen mit sich herumschleppen. Die Volvelle vereinigt dies alles. Man stellt die Filmempfindlichkeit (die ja für die Länge eines Films gleich bleibt) auf der Volvelle ein; für die aktuelle Aufnahme richtet man einen Pfeil der Volvelle auf den gemessenen Lichtwert; jetzt kann kann man auf einen Blick alle Kombinationen von Blende/Versch­lusszeit ablesen. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.10.) In der Astronomie spielen Volvellen eine Rolle, z.B. in den Werken von Petrus Apianus (Instrument Buch durch Petrum Apianum erst von new beschriben, … Ingolstadii An. M.D.xxxiii) oder Joh. Sacrobosco (Iohannis de Sacro Busto libellus de sphaera… 1568).

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Umsetzung in geometrische Formen

Wenn es sich bei einer der Mengen um eine quantifizierbare Größe (vgl. 1.2 (ab)) handelt, lassen sich die numerischen Werte in geometrische (Längen, Winkel, Bubbles) transformieren. Der Verlust an Genauigkeit wird wettgemacht durch andere Vorzüge. Diese Graphiken sind heutzutage allgegenwärtig. (Programme wie Microsoft Excel oder iWork Numbers generieren solche Graphiken aus Tabellen per Mausklick.) 3.1 Balken- / Säulengraphik (Bar Graph) Der Balken reicht vom Nullpunkt2 bis zum Ort auf einer gedachten (oder mitgedruckten) Zahlachse, welcher der Zahl in der Zelle entspricht. Der ­kognitive Vorteil basiert darauf, dass wir Distanzunterschiede gut abschätzen können. Ein einfaches Beispiel einer Balkengraphik ist die Darstellung des Kaffekon­ sums nach Ländern. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.11.) Beispiel: Alterspyramide. Die Balken liegen horizontal. Das (1) Alter (von unten nach oben abgetragen) wird der (2) Anzahl der Lebenden (Balkenlänge) gegenübergestellt. Eine dritte Kategorie, der Geschlechterunterschied, kann hier recht einfach durch Position von zwei Graphiken Rücken-an-Rücken beigegeben werden. Als zusätzlich kognitiver Vorteil springt hier heraus: Die Visualisierungen haben charakteristische Formen. Bevölkerungen mit vielen jungen Menschen haben Pyramidenform; überalterte Bevölkerungen – die Metapher wirkt etwas peinlich – haben Urnenform. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.12.) Exkurs: Der Text zur Graphik zu 1930 erklärt die Einkerbung bei den etwa 10-Jährigen so: „Hier fehlen die 3 ½ Mill. Kinder, die infolge des Weltkrieges ungeboren blieben“. Die Altersstrukturen von 1960 und 2000 sind selbstverständlich Extrapolationen (übrigens, wenn man mit den tatsächlich eingetretenen Bevölkerungsbewegungen vergleicht, recht gute!). Als Zukunftsprognose heisst es (S. 22): Damit tritt der deutsche Volkskörper infolge des Geburtenrückgangs in die Stufe einer fortschreitenden Überalterung. Aus der ehemal. Pyrami­ denform bildet sich, falls es gelingen sollte, den Geburtenrückgang zum

2 Ohne die Daten zu fälschen, kann man Balkengraphiken so darstellen, dass sie den Betrachter irreführen. Man zeigt zu diesem Zweck nur die obersten Teile, so dass der Unterschied zwischen zwei Balken (z.B. Zunahme der Kriminalität innerhalb eines Jahres) groß erscheint, obwohl er minimal erschiene, wenn man sie vom Nullpunkt aus ganz zeigte.

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

519

Abbildung 29.11 Der kleine Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in einem Band [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1926], 344.

Abbildung 29.12 Der Große Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in zwanzig Bänden, 15. Auflage, Ergänzungsband [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1935], s.v. „Altersaufbau“.

Stillstand zu bringen, die Glockenform einer stationären Bevölkerung heraus, wie sie etwa der A[ltersaufbau] des franz. Volkes aufweist; falls aber der Geburtenrückgang weiter fortschreiten sollte, würde der A. die Urnenform, d. i. die Form eines schrumpfenden und überalterten Volks­ körpers annehmen.

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Verwiesen wird auf „Burgdörfer, Volk ohne Jugend, 3. Aufl. 1935“. Zum Rasse­theoretiker F. Burgdörfer (1890–1967) gibt es einen Artikel in der deutschen Wikipedia. Er „prognostizierte als Folge der Rationalisierung des Geschlechts­lebens, dass sich infolge des Zweikindersystems automatisch eine bis zur Selbstvernichtung gehende Ausmerzung des qualitativ hochwertigen, kulturtragenden Volksteils komme, während andererseits die unteren Volksschichten sich noch ‘proletarisch’ vermehrten. Weiterhin sah er bezüglich der Länder im Osten des Deutschen Reiches sich einen Bevölkerungsüberdruck in Polen aufbauen, so dass es zu einem biopolitischen Grenzkampf komme.“ Die Abfolge der vier Diagramme unterstellt ganz deutlich: Zur Erhaltung und Vermehrung der Volkskraft sei die Gebärleistung anzuheben. Allerdings muss man einräumen, dass Überlegungen zum Überalterungs­ problem auch in nicht-nationalsozialistischen Ländern angestellt wurden. 1939 liest man in der Schweiz: Die erschütternde Statistik des Altersaufbaus unserer Bevölkerung mahnt zur Umkehr. Aus der normalen Pyramidenform, deren breites Fundament noch zur Jahrhundertwende [1900] die Kinder bildeten, wird durch Vergreisung in den nächsten 20 Jahren die wackelige Birnenform. Ein Volk ohne Kinder aber ist dem Untergang geweiht. Quelle: Eines Volkes Sein und Schaffen, Die Schweizerische Landesaus­ stellung 1939 in Zürich, hg. Gottlieb Duttweiler, o.O., o.J. [1939], Seite 47 mit 2 Diagrammen zu 1900 und 1960. Eine eigene Form stellen diejenigen Balkendiagramme dar, bei denen die Balken nicht proportional zur Menge dargestellt werden, sondern gemäß der prozentualen Verteilung. Hier sind alle Balken gleich lang (100%), aber die Binnengliederung ist jeweils anders. Auf diese Weise können Veränderungen der mengenmäßigen Anteile gut visualisiert werden. (Vgl. Kuchendiagramme in Kap. 3.3) Im Beispiel erkennt man auf einen Blick, wie im Lauf von hundert Jahren die Zahl der reichen Fabrikanten zunimmt, während diejenige der weniger Vermögenden abnimmt. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.13.) Eine frühe Umsetzung von Zahlenangaben in Linien entsprechender Länge findet sich im Artikel zur Höhe der Berge im Conversations-Hand-Lexikon, 1831. Hier werden die Maßangaben der Berghöhen, die August Heinrich Christian Gelpke, Allgemeine Darstellung der Oberflächen der Weltkörper unseres Son­nengebietes, Leipzig 1811 entnommen sind, ganz schlicht graphisch in Längen umgesetzt, was ja naheliegt. So ergibt sich eine Art Säulengraphik. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.14.)

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521

Abbildung 29.13 Hans Conrad Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel der Stadt St. Gallen von den Anfängen bis 1520 [St.Gallen, 1959–60], 2:65.

Die Anregung von Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt, den Vergleich der Bergeshöhen durch eine phantasierte Zusammenstellung ihrer naturalistischen Ansichten darzustellen, hat Schule gemacht.3 Damit sind wir aber be­reits in Kap. 4. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.15.) 3.2 Fieberkurventyp und Koordinatensystem Nehmen wir eine Parallel-Tabelle, die zwei quantifizierbare Größen (vgl. 1.2 (ab)) miteinander korreliert, z.B. den Börsenkurs einer Aktie mit der Zeit. Die Randspalte und Randzeile bestehen hier je aus einer Skala, und das Analogon zu den Zellen sind Messpunkte. Diese Punkte lassen sich miteinander verbinden, so dass sich eine Kurve ergibt. Der Arzt sieht mit einem Blick, ob das Fieber steigt oder fällt. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.16.) 3 Die Geschichte dieser Visualisierung ist vorzüglich dargestellt worden von Margrit Wyder, „Höhen der alten und neuen Welt – Goethes Beitrag zum Genre der vergleichenden Höhendarstellung“, Cartographica Helvetica 39 (2009): S. 11–26. – Margrit Wyder: „Vom Brocken zum Himalaja. Goethes ‘Höhen der alten und neuen Welt’ und ihre Wirkungen“, Goethe-Jahrbuch 121 (2004): S. 141–64.

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Abbildung 29.14 Conversations-Hand-Lexikon. Ein Hülfswörterbuch für diejenigen, welche über die beim Lesen sowohl, als in mündlichen Unterhaltungen vorkommenden mannigfachen Gegenstände näher unterrichtet seyn wollen [Reutlingen: Mäcken, 1831], zum Stichwort „Höhe“ [S. 297].

Man muss unterscheiden den Fall (a), wo diese Kurve nur einen (wie bei der Fieberkurve oder Börsenkursen zeitlichen) Verlauf von einzelnen Messdaten darstellen will; hier macht die Kurve nur den Verlauf deutlich; zwischen den verbundenen Punkten liegende Werte entsprechen weder festgestellten noch interpolierten Daten. Und den Fall (b), wo es sich um eine ­naturwissenschaftlich begründete Funktion handelt (z.B. beim Verhältnis zwischen Fall-Höhe und Fall-Zeit). 3.3 Kuchendiagramm (Pie Chart) Kuchengraphiken können zweispaltige Parallel-Tabellen visualisieren, deren eine Kategorie eine quantifizierbare Größe (z.B. Anzahl von Personen, vgl. 1.2 (ab)) darstellt, deren andere qualitativ verschiedene Entitäten (z.B. Personen­gruppe (a)). Die Werte müssen zu diesem Zweck in % umgerechnet

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Abbildung 29.15 Petit Larousse Illustré. Nouveau Dictionnaire Encyclopédique, publié sous la direction de Claude Augé; cent trente-sixième édition [Paris, 1917], s.v. „Hauteurs“ [S. 461].

werden, wenn der Kuchen geschlossen und damit mit anderen vergleichbar sein soll. Kognitiver Vorteil der Visualisierung: Wir können Winkel gut abschätzen (vgl. den Unterschied zwischen einer digitalen und einer analogen Uhr). Beispiel: Verteilung der prozentualen Anteile der in bestimmten Berufs­grup­pen Beschäftigten. Um den Vergleich von verschiedenen Ländern darzustellen, werden mehrere Kuchendiagramme einander gegenübergestellt. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.17.)

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Abbildung 29.16 Fieberkurve (Dr. Hoppeler’s Hausarzt. Ein treuer Freund der Familie in gesunden und kranken Tagen [Luzern/Meiringen/Leipzig: W. LoeptehenKlein, 1923], 17).

Abbildung 29.17 Knaurs Konversations-Lexikon [Berlin: Knaur, 1934], s.v. „Bevölkerung“ [Spalte 150].

525

Visualisierungen Mittels Tabellen

3.4 Spinnennetz- oder Radar-Graphik (Spider Graph) Man kann die eine Menge (qualitativ verschiedene Entitäten, vgl. 1.2 (aa)) wie Speichen bei einem Fahrrad anordnen; die andere Menge (quantifizierbare Größen (ab)) wird auf diesen Speichen radial abgetragen. Die entstehenden Punkte kann man miteinander verbinden, so dass ein Stern entsteht. Dieser hat je nach Daten eine individuelle, schnell erkennbare Gestalt. Erfundenes Beispiel: (1) Speisen an einer Party (Grilladen, Fisch, Likör Bier, Wein, Kuchen, Eis) gemessen nach (2) Präferenzgrad und unterschieden nach (3) Damen und Herren. Der geneigte Leser möge die Phantasie walten lassen. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.18.) Heutzutage – gerade in der Schweiz, wo der Stimmbürger aus mehreren ­verschiedenen politischen Parteien auswählen muss – geschieht das Ranking mittels solcher Spinnennetzgraphiken. Berücksichtigt werden Kategorien wie Anwesenheit im Rat, Abstimmungsverhalten bei Fragen zu Bildung und Forschung, Ausländerpolitik, Umweltschutz. Die prozentualen Werte werden auf den Radien abgetragen. Diese sind so ausgerichtet, dass bei (im Sinne der üblichen Metaphorik) „rechtslastigen“ Parteien das Profil rechts ausgebogen erscheint. Die Forschungsstelle „sotomo“ an der Universität Zürich stellt solche politische Spinnenprofile seit 2003 regelmäßig ins World Wide Web (http:// sotomo.geo.unizh.ch). Grilladen 50

45 40 35

Eis

Fisch

30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Kuchen

Likör

Wein

Bier

Abbildung 29.18 Spinnennetz-Graphik; Graphik des Verfassers

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Abbildung 29.19 Meyers Großes KonversationsLexikon. Ein Nachschlagewerk des ­allgemeinen Wissens, 6., gänzlich neubearbeitete u. vermehrte Auflage. 20 Bde. [Leipzig/Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1902–8], Band 4 (1908), Artikel „Diagramm“.

Im folgenden Beispiel wird die Verteilung des Windes auf die einzelnen Himmelsrichtungen dargestellt. Die Windfahne wurde bei täglich dreimaliger Beobachtung während eines Monats in folgenden Stellungen gesehen: Nord 3 mal, Ost 8 mal, Süd 16 mal, West 7 mal, Nordost 8 mal usw. (Im Gegensatz zu den eben erwähnten Beispielen von Spinnenetzgraphik, wo die Speichen be­ liebig angeordnet werden können, folgen sie hier einer natürlichen Ordnung.) (Vgl. Abbildung 29.19.) 3.5 Chernoff-Faces Die Darstellungstechnik für die Korrelation vieler Mengen wurde erfunden von Herman Chernoff, ursprünglich für eine paläozoologische Statistik. Die statistischen Größen werden hier statt in Längen wie bei der Balken- oder Winkeln wie bei der Kuchengraphik in stilisierten Gesichtszügen (Größe des Kinns, des Gesichtsschädels, Mundstellung, Winkel der Augenbrauen usw.) abgebildet. Die in Gesichtform dargestellten Daten können schnell erfasst werden. Die Ursache liegt in der beim Menschen meist gut ausgeprägten Fähigkeit, winzige Details und Unterschiede in den Gesichtszügen (Mimik) zu erkennen. Bei 24 Kuchengraphiken sind Ähnlichkeiten nur schwer auszu­ machen, bei 24 Gesichtern hingegen leicht. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.20.) Es handelt sich ursprünglich nicht um das Hineintragen von mimetischen Bildern; die „faces“ sind rein synthetisch. Ein zusätzlicher, emotionaler Wert

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Abbildung 29.20 Herman Chernoff, „The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically“, Journal of the American Statistical Association 68, no. 342 [1973]: 361–68s.

mag hinzu kommen, insofern wir Gesichtszügen Qualitäten zuordnen. So kann der Statistiker beispielsweise absichtlich „Wohlstand“ als lächelnden Mund, „Arbeitslosenquote“ als heruntergezogene Augenbrauen, „Kriminalität“ als breites (brutales) Kinn, „Bildungsstand“ als hochgewölbte Stirn visualisieren. 3.6 Überlagerung von geometrisch realisierten Tabellen Die Balkengraphik lässt sich dergestalt erweitern, dass man mehrere BalkenReihen hintereinanderstellt und die Graphik so gestaltet, als sehe man die Balken dreidimensional in axonometrischer Perspektive oder wie aus einem über Wolkenkratzer fliegenden Helikopter (deshalb wird die Darstellung auch „Manhattan chart“ genannt). Beispiel siehe Tabelle  29.2 und Abbildung 29.21: (1  =  Zellen  =  Turmhöhe) Anzahl der eingesehenen Codices in (2 = Rand-Zeile) Bibliotheken (3 = RandSpalte) über die Jahre. Beispiel für eine andere Gestaltung: Es soll (1) das Maß der Arbeitslosigkeit in % (2) im Laufe der Jahre (3) in verschiedenen Ländern dargestellt werden. Um den Vergleich der Länder einzubringen, werden mehrere Tabellen vom Fieberkurven-Typ einander überlagert, wie wenn pro Land eine Transparentfolie gezeichnet worden wäre. Im Druck wird das so realisiert, dass die Verschieden­heit der Linien (ausgezogen, doppelt, gestrichelt, als Punkte usw.) zur Unterscheidung dient. So kommt man an die Grenzen dessen, was man im Printmedium schwarz/weiß darstellen kann. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.22.)

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Tabelle 29.2 Anzahl der Bibliotheks-Benutzungen als typographische Tabelle; fiktiv; Graphik des Verfassers

Zentralbibliothek Zürich British Library Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana

1970

1980

1990

2000

34 44 30

33 45 35

18 38 55

12 19 71

Abbildung 29.21 Anzahl der Bibliotheks-Benutzungen als Manhattan Chart; Graphik des Verfassers.

Abbildung 29.22 Der kleine Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in einem Band. Mit über 6000 Abbildungen [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1926], s.v. „Arbeitslosigkeit“ [S. 30].

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4

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Beizug von mimetischen Elementen

4.1 Mnemotechnische Hilfen Statt in Legenden sprachlich auszudrücken, was für eine Größe dargestellt wird, kann man dies auch in einer Graphik tun. Beispiel: Melothesie-Männchen. Hier sind beide in Beziehung gesetzten Größen qualitativ von einander abgesetzt (vgl. 1.2 (aa)): Je nachdem, in welchem (1) Tierkreiszeichen der Mond steht, ist eine (2) Körperregion (3) mehr oder weniger zum Aderlass geeignet. Entsprechend werden die zwölf Phasen des Tierkreises einzelnen Gliedern und Organen des menschlichen Körpers zugeordnet und festgelegt, an welchen Stellen und in welchem Zeitraum Blut entnommen werden kann, ohne dabei den Patienten zu gefährden. Es liegt also eine Tabelle zugrunde, in der Zeile die Körperregionen, in der Spalte die Zodiakzeichen, in der Zelle die Angabe, ob Aderlass geraten sei: guot, ­m ittel oder boes. Die Sternkreiszeichen sind als Kreis dargestellt; die Linien von dort

Abbildung 29.23 [Regiomontanus], Temporal, Deß weytberümpten M. Johan Künigspergers natürlicher Kunst der Astronomey kurtzer Begriff, von Natürlichem eynfluß der Gestirn, Planeten, unnd Zeichen, etc. [Franckfurt: Han [1534]]. – Nach: Heinz Artur Strauß, Der astrologische Gedanke in der deutschen Vergangenheit [München/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1926], Abb. 81.

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verweisen auf die Körperregionen, die an einem Mannequin mimetisch dargestellt werden (Beispiel: Mond im Sternbild der Zwillinge – Aderlass an den Schultern – bös). (Vgl. Abbildung 29.23.) Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts kommt in der Statistik eine Darstellungs­ methode auf, bei der die quantitativen Daten (vgl. 1.2 (ab)) in die Größen von mimetischen Bildern umgesetzt werden, die dann proportional nebeneinander gestellt werden, was einen unrealistischen Eindruck ergibt, aber Eindruck macht. Beispiel für mimetisch umgesetzte Balkengraphik: Anzahl Berufstätige in Sparten. Die Daten werden tabellarisch numerisch genannt und in den Größen der durch Kleidung und Attribut charakterisierten Figuren visualisiert. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.24.) Otto Neurath4 mochte solche Darstellungen nicht, weil sie dem Betrachter – wegen der Umsetzung linearer Größen in Flächen oder gar Volumen – keine

Abbildung 29.24 Schweizer Pestalozzi Schülerinnenkalender [1924], „Womit die Schweizer ihr Brot verdienen“ [S. 179]. 4 Otto Neurath, „Das Sachbild“, Die Form 5, Heft 2 (1930): S. 29–35, in Neurath, Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften, hrsg. von Rudolf Haller und Robin Kinross (Wien: Hölder-PichlerTempsky, 1991); vgl. die Gegenüberstellung der „Mengenbilder“ zum Thema „Eheschließungen in Deutschland“, S. 156.

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gute Abschätzung der Größenverhältnisse gestatten. Stattdessen visualisiert er mittels Aneinanderreihung gleich aussehender stilisierter Figuren, deren Aussehen die Kategorie angibt, z.B. Religionszugehörigkeit oder Berufsgruppe von Menschen; Lebendige/Tote; Produkttyp usw. Das nächste Beispiel – eine Kuchengraphik, welche die vom „Winterhilfswerk“ aufgebrachten Mittel nach Sachgruppen zeigt – ist eine Mischform: die Spaltenäquivalente sind hier redundant in beiden Medien Sprache und Bild ausgedrückt. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.25.) Vergleich der Eisenbahnlängen. Wenn man als Maßstab wählt, wie viel Mal die Schienen um den Erdball reichen würden, kann man die Schienen imaginär um die Weltkugel herumwickeln; so lässt sich das Verhältnis zwischen den Längen optisch bequem abschätzen, gleich wie bei einer Balkengraphik. Die herumdampfenden Eisenbahnen sind Zutat ohne Erkenntniswert. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.26.) Beispiel: Religionen der Erde. Statt durch geometrische Größen wie Balken oder Kreissegmente sind in der folgenden Visualisierung die statistischen

Abbildung 29.25 Große Herder. Nachschlagewerk für Wissen und Leben. 4. Auflage von Herders Konversationslexikon, Band 12 [Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1935], s.v. „Winterhilfswerk“ [S. 1166].

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Abbildung 29.26 Der Große Brockhaus. Handbuch des Wissens in zwanzig Bänden, 15. Auflage, Ergänzungsband [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1935], s.v. „Eisenbahn“.

Angaben durch Figuren repräsentiert. Statt verschieden lange Balken zeichnet der Graphiker verschieden lange Reihen von Figuren. Jede Figur ist gleich groß und sieht gleich aus und stellt (in diesem Beispiel) 100 Millionen Menschen dar. Die Gewandung der Figuren (bei den Christen sind typische Priesterkleider wiedergegeben; Metonymie) oder ein Symbol (der Davidsstern) erinnert an die gemeinte Religion. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.27.) 4.2 Choropleth-Karten Choropleth-Karten (Etymologie: griech. χώρα (chora) = Raum, Gebiet + πλῆθος (plethos) = Menschenmenge) basieren auf der Zuordnung von (1) statistischen Daten zu (2) geographischen Regionen; bei (1) handelt es sich um qualitativ verschiedene Entitäten, bei (2) um quantifizierbare Größen.5 Dazu werden die

5 Als Erfinder gilt Pierre Charles François Dupin (1784–1873) mit seiner „Carte figurative de l’instruction populaire de la France“ (1826).

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Abbildung 29.27 Die Welt von A bis Z. Ein Lexikon für die Jugend, für Schule und Haus [Wien: Österr. Bundesverlag [u.a.], 1953], 473.

Gebiete auf einer Landkarte (das ist hier das mimetische Element) im Verhältnis zur statistischen Verteilung des thematischen Objektes (Grad der Umwelt­ vers­chmutzung, Bevölkerungsdichte, Sterblichkeit, Konfession der Einwohner, Durchschnittseinkommen, Mietpreise usw.) graphisch ausgezeichnet, d.h. verschieden intensiv schraffiert oder eingefärbt oder mit Pictogrammen versehen. Als Beispiel dient der Geburtenüberschuss in Frankreich nach Departementen. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.28.) Eine ähnlich aussehende Darstellung ist die Zuordnung von emotionalen und intellektuellen Veranlagungen und Fähigkeiten zu Schädelregionen (beides qualitative Entitäten vgl. 1.2 (aa)), die auf der Phrenologie von Joseph Gall (1758–1828) beruht. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.29.)

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Abbildung 29.28 Émile Levasseur, La population française. Histoire de la population avant 1789 et démographie de la France comparée à celle des autres nations au 19e siècle précédée d’une introduction sur la statistique [Paris: A. Rousseau, 1889–1892], Fig. 166.

4.3 Anamorphosen Der Erfinder der anamorphotischen Landkarten ist Erwin Raisz (General Cartography, New York 1938). Statt als Verteilungsindikator die Gebiete auf Landkarten unterschiedlich dicht zu schraffieren oder einzufärben, werden die geographischen Gebiete entsprechend den statistischen Daten (Bevölkerungs­ zuwachs, Wasserverbrauch, Umweltverschmutzung usw.) verzerrt, d.h. ausgedehnt oder verkleinert. Das funktioniert natürlich nur, wenn man beim Betrachter voraussetzen kann, dass er die üblichen Umrisse der Kontinente und Länder kennt. Hie und da wird auch eine „normale“ Karte klein beigegeben, auf der die

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Abbildung 29.29 Legende: 1 Fortpflanzungs- oder Geschlechtstrieb – 2 Kinderliebe – 3 Bildungs- und Erziehungsfähigkeit – 4 Ortssinn – 5 Personensinn – 6 Farbensinn – 7 Tonsinn – 13 Raufsinn – 21 Tiefsinn usw (Walter Möller, Angewandte Menschenkenntnis. Einführung in die Handschriften-, Gesichtsausdrucks- und Schädelkunde, [1916], 4. Auflage Berlin/Oranienburg: Möller, [1927], 151ff.).

Länder gleich eingefärbt sind. (Dazu muss eine flächengetreue Projektion gewählt werden, z.B. die Mollweide-Projektion.) Eine Gruppe findiger Geographen und Computer-Programmierer der Uni­ versitäten Michigan und Sheffield hat 2004 bis 2006 den „Worldmapper“ erstellt (http://www.worldmapper.org/atozindex.html).6 Die Karte „Refined Petroleum Imports“ beispielsweise korreliert (1) Nation mit (2) den jährlichen Ausgaben in $ pro Kopf. Durch die Anamorphose-Technik wird die Inselgruppe Japans größer als der afrikanischen Kontinent; Europa – darin insbesondere Luxem­burg und die Schweiz (am 10. Platz mit 253 $ pro Einwohner) – wird riesig; die Russische Föderation (die eigene Ölvorräte verbrennt) ist verschwindend klein. Auf diese Weise werden Missverhältnisse schlagartig klar. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.30.) 6 Freundliche Hinweise von Thomas Germann (Zentralbibliothek Zürich) und Christian Noetzli.

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Abbildung 29.30 Skizzenhafte Umzeichnung des im Original mehrfarbigen Bilds durch den Verfasser aus: Daniel Dorling, Mark Newmann, Anna Barford, Der schlaue Planet. So haben Sie die Welt noch nie gesehen (München: Süddt. Zeitung, 2008 [english: The Atlas of the Real World [London: Thames & Hudson, 2008]), Karte 106 (im Web Nr. 66).

Abbildung 29.31 Wilder Penfield und Edwin Boldrey, „Somatic Motor and Sensory Representation in the Cerebral Cortex of Man as Studied by Electrical Stimulation“, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 60 (1937): 389–443. (Erstpublikation). — Diese Graphik hier aus https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Cortical_homunculus (Lizenz CC-BY-SA).

Der „Sensory Homunculus“ funktioniert visualisierungstechnisch gleich: Der Neurochirurg Wilder G. Penfield (1891–1976) setzte gewisse corticale Regionen im Gehirn in Relation zu den sensorischen/motorischen Fähigkeiten der davon innervierten Körperteile. Je größer die an der Wahrnehmung des Körpers bzw. an der Muskelsteuerung beteiligte Hirnregion ist, um so größer wird der jeweilige Körperteil abgebildet. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.31.)

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4.4 Allegorie Allegorien basieren auf einer Zuordnung von qualitativ unterschiedlichen Elementen (vgl. 1.2 (aa)). Die Zuordnung ist nicht in der Natur vorgegeben (oder als natürlich geglaubt), sondern artifiziell hergestellt. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.32.) Die Allegorie lässt sich als Parallel-Tabelle aufschreiben; in der einen Spalte die Elemente der Logik, in der anderen die Elemente der allegorischen Umsetzung: (Vgl. Tabelle 29.3.) Alle Elemente aus dem Weltausschnitt der Jagd stehen über die Auflistung hinaus in einem syntagmatischen Zusammenhang: „die Jägerin erlegt – ohne über Steine zu stolpern – mit dem Bogen den Hasen“ usw. Dadurch ergibt sich eine zusätzliche Aussage und ein mnemotechnischer Effekt.

Abbildung 29.32 Gregor Reisch, Aepitoma Omnis Phylosophiae, Alias Margarita Phylosophica, Tractans de omni genere scibili [Straßburg: Grüninger, 1504], Liber ii: de principiis logice, Tractatus primus.

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Tabelle 29.3 Allegorie als Paralleltabelle; Graphik des Verfassers.

Sachbereich = Logik

Bildbereich = Jagd

Logica sonus, vox argumenta syllogismus quaestio praedicabilia & praedicamenta fallaciae veritas/falsitas problema usw.

Jägerin Hifthorn der das Horn haltende Arm Waidmesser Bogen Beine am Boden liegende Steine schöner/hässlicher Jagdhund gejagtes Wild (Hase) usw.

5

Das Kognitive Surplus

Gehen wir aus von den Flexions-Paradigmen in der Grammatik. Bis etwa um 1500 lernten die Lateinschüler Wort-Reihen auswendig: ‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, … amabo, abmabis, … amor, amaris, amatur, …’ Dann erschienen Bücher mit Paradigmentabellen. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.33.)

Abbildung 29.33 Compendium octo partium orationis [Basel: Michael Furter [um 1495]], unpaginiert [Zentralbibliothek Zürich]. – Die Abbreviatur 9 ist als „us“ zu lesen.

Ein „akustischer Typ“ kommt mit der ersten Methode gut zurecht, ein „optischer Typ“ mit der zweiten. Das heißt: Man muss bei der Beurteilung des Mehrwerts anthropologische, psychologische Faktoren in Rechnung stellen. Freilich müsste man das empirisch besser untersuchen. Findehilfe Weil Tabellen die Daten in einer Ordnung darstellen, helfen sie beim Auffinden von Information. In einem ausgeschütteten Haufen von Karteikarten habe ich

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Mühe einen Buchtitel zu finden; die Ablage in Schubladen (auch das sind Tabellen!) – alphabetisch geordnet nach Autornamen oder systematisch nach dem Dewey-System – hilft. Jedes bewusst angestrebte Erkenntnisinteresse basiert auf bereits Gewusstem und einer Frage (Aristoteles, Analytica posteriora i, 1  =  71a). Kreuz-Tabellen ordnen das Gewusste in der Randspalte und in der Randzeile an; das Gesuchte findet sich in den Zellen. Die Tabelle kann je nach Interesse anders organisiert werden. Beispiel: Zinstabellen. Je nachdem steht ein anderes Wissen im Vordergrund. Wenn der Benutzer die Bank wechseln will, kennt er deren besseren Zinssatz und interessiert sich für den damit möglichen Gewinn; wenn er das geborgte Kapital auf einen bestimmten Termin zurückzahlen muss, kennt er die Laufzeit und erfragt die bis dann aufgelaufene Summe. Abschätzen von Quantitäten Die meisten Menschen sind besser beim Abschätzen von Flächen/Längen/ Winkeln als beim Abschätzen von reinen Zahlenrelationen. Geometrische Darstellungen (bar graphs, pie charts; vgl. Kap. 3.1 und 3.3) helfen hier. Es fragt sich, für welche Fälle Balkendiagramme und für welche Kuchendia­ gramme besser geeignet sind. Wenn es darum geht, kleine Unterschiede abzu­ schätzen, ist das Balkendiagramm überlegen. Erahnen von Zusammenhängen Kurvenverlauf in Koordinatensystemen oder die Färbungsintensität in Choropleth-­Karten erlaubt ein vorwissenschaftliches Aufstellen von Hypothesen über kausale oder rein statistische Zusammenhänge. Mnemotechnik Wir alle sind beim Memorieren von großen Datenmengen überfordert. Tabellen leisten Reduktion von Komplexität. Und sie schaffen Ordnung: Gleiches wird zu Gleichem gestellt. Grundsätzlich können wir alles Strukturierte besser behalten als amorphe Haufen. Manche Tabelle lassen Analogien zwischen den Zellen erkennen (klassisches Beispiel: das Paradigma „sumus/simus/essemus/ fuerimus/ – mus“ für die 1. Plural). Für mimetische Beigaben kommt dazu: Wir können uns Daten besser merken, wenn sie mit (möglichst passenden) Bildern korreliert sind. Heuristik beim Erstellen Wer eine Tabelle zeichnet, setzt sich unter Zwang, alle Zellen auszufüllen („the matrix abhors the vacuum“); wenn eines leer bleibt, fragt der Ersteller der Tabelle, warum. Dann muss er genauer recherchieren. – Zur Qualität einer

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Tabelle gehört es, dass bei leeren Feldern angegeben wird, ob es sich um eine Messlücke oder den Wert null handelt. Suggestive Kraft Im folgenden Beispiel ist gut zu erkennen, dass die mimetischen Zugabe eine konnotative Zusatzfunktion bekommen kann. Die zunehmende Verstädterung wird hier als Vordringen des mimetisch gezeichneten Teil-Balkens veranschaulicht. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.34.) Die Darstellung kann auch zur Karikatur ausarten. Um den Unterschied der Größe der Reichsschulden 1878 im Vergleich mit 1908 zu erkennen, hätte die Abbildung zweier verschieden großer Geldsäcke genügt. Dass der Sack von 1908 seinen Träger „belastet“, ist Zugabe. (Vgl. Abbildung 29.35.) 6

Geschichte und Anwendungsgebiete von Tabellen

Seit wann und in welchen Sachgebieten hat man Wissen tabellarisch darge­ stellt? Um das darzustellen, wäre ein Buch im Umfang von Cartographies of

Abbildung 29.34 Knaurs Konversations-Lexikon [Berlin: Knaur, 1934], s.v. „Bevölkerung“.

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Abbildung 29.35 Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, 6. Auflage, Band 22 [= JahresSupplement 1909/10] [Leipzig/Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1910], zum Artikel „statistische Darstellungsmethoden ii“.

Time nötig. – Stichwortartig zu nennen sind: die Astronomie; Kalender (s. oben); gleichzeitige historische Ereignisse; Umrechnung von Maßen, Gewichten, Währungen; Stundenpläne; Fahrpläne; Paradigmata in der Grammatik; Zins­ re­ chnung; Bevölkerungsstatistik in der Kameralwissenschaft/Demoskopie; Gegenü­berstellung von Messdaten in der Physik u.a.m. Eine Skizze dieses Kapitels erscheint aus Platzgründen auf www.enzyklopaedie .ch/dokumente/tabellen.html.

chapter 30

Paduan Extracurricular Rhetoric, 1488–1491* Anja-Silvia Goeing 1 Introduction This article is about a hitherto little-known manuscript, ms lat. 86, kept in the University Library of Geneva in Switzerland. It contains four major treatises together with some smaller texts. Among the treatises are Franciscus Niger’s (1452–ca. 1523) work on the art of letter writing and Peter of Ravenna’s (ca. 1448–1508) treatise Phoenix on the art of memory. One student, Wolfgang Portus, a graduate in civil and canonical law at the University of Padua, transcribed the manuscript almost entirely. Portus dated his work. We know therefore that the transcription was accomplished between October 1488 and 1491. What is the significance of this manuscript in the context of Paduan rhetoric and law studies? I am assuming that it presents an extracurricular course attached to both faculties, because the authors, some of the addressees of integrated letters and orations, and also the transcriber belonged either to the Faculty of Artes liberales or to the Faculty of Law, or to both. The addressee of many of the letters and orations, Jacobus Geroldus, was, for example, rector of the Faculty of Law in 1487. This research also ties the manuscript to the regional aspects of humanism at the University of Padua in order to find out whether this apparent communication between the faculties was reflected in the regular curriculum at all. I assume that lawyers in the complicated Venetian government might have felt the need for extra diplomatic skills, enhanced with eloquent quotes from antiquity, to communicate efficiently with patricians, and literate and illiterate urban and rural citizens. A course that would integrate the parts of this manuscript by teaching skills in letter writing, oration, politics, and memorization would have been highly desirable. At the time of Portus’s transcription, both Niger and Peter were teachers in Padua.1 Printed copies of Niger’s ars epistolandi containing the text of * This article is based on my master’s dissertation for the MSt in Medieval Studies at Oxford University, 2009. 1 See Giovanni Mercati, “Pescennio Francesco Negro Veneto,” in Mercati, Ultimi contributi alla storia degli umanisti, vol. 2, Studi e testi, 9 (Rome, 1939), 24–109, at 52–58; Jacobus Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini (Padua: Manfré, 1757), 54–55 (for Peter). For further biographical information see the literature in n. 13.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_031

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this manuscript were published during his lifetime, and had an afterlife almost as long as the treatise of Peter of Ravenna. About thirty-two versions of his ars epistolandi were published from 1488 (Venice) to 1598 (Venice)2—about s­ eventy-five years after Niger’s death. The books spread very quickly throughout Europe and were printed not only in Venice. The printing shops included Paris (1493, ca. 1500),3 Deventer (1494),4 and Augsburg (1499).5 The dated and signed Genevan manuscript is not the only manuscript containing Niger’s ars epistolandi. There are a total of five, kept today in Augsburg, Ghent, Geneva, and Saint Petersburg (two copies).6 But the Genevan manuscript is the only one that links elements of rhetoric and law and that is directly connected to the Paduan academy. It may even have been used in instruction. 2 Franciscus Niger, Opusculum epistolarum familiarum et artis eorundem scribendi, maxime in generibus uiginti (Venice: Liechtenstem, 1488); Niger, De conscribendis epistolis tractatio. Libanii sophistae eiusdem generis libellus è Graeco in Latinum conuersus. Omnia denuò, ad fidem castigatissimorum exemplarium, quam diligentissimè restituita (Venice: Altobellum Salicatium ad Fortitudinis, 1598). The latter was the last edition in the sixteenth century according to EDIT16: Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle bibliotheche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche, Rome, http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/ehome.htm, accessed 17 July 2014. For a list of the thirty-two different editions, see the website that accompanies this essay, http://arsepistolandi.wordpress.com. 3 Franciscus Niger, Epistole Francisci Nigri (Paris: Baligault, ca. 1500). Information is from French Books before 1601, Now in the British Museum (New York: Norman Ross, 2002), reel 69. Franciscus Niger, Modus epistolandi (Paris: Baligault, 1493). Information is from Alan Coates et al., A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1875, no. N-111. 4 Franciscus Niger, Modus epistolandi (Deventer: Jacob de Breda, 1494). 5 Franciscus Niger, Ars Epistolandi ([Augsburg], 1499), http://daten.digitale-sammlungen. de/~db/0002/bsb00021840/images, accessed 17 July 2014. 6 Augsburg (Germany), Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 4° Cod. adl. 28: Franciscus Niger, orationes, ca. 1500, from Paul Oscar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: Accedunt Alia Itinera: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renais­ sance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 3 (Alia Itinera 1), eds. of 1955, 1958, and 1962 (London: Warburg Institute; Leiden: Brill, 1983), http://www.itergateway.org/“italicum”/ record.cfm?idx=40, accessed 17 July 2014; Ghent (Belgium), Centrale Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, ms 112, fols. 3–42, from Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vol. 3, http://www .itergateway.org/“italicum”/record.cfm?idx=36, accessed 17 July 2014. Saint Petersburg, Public Library, *139 and *192, from Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vol. 5 (Alia Itinera 3 and Italy 3) Sweden to Yugoslavia, Utopia [and] Supplement to Italy (A–F) (London: Warburg Institute; Leiden: Brill, 1990), http://www.itergateway.org/“italicum”/record.cfm?idx=52, accessed 17 July 2014.

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The University Library of Geneva did not acquire the manuscript until 1605–6, and it is therefore of rather obscure provenance.7 It is possible that the scholar Francis Portus, a native of Crete, brought it with him to Geneva. Born in 1511, Portus studied at Padua and moved to Geneva for religious reasons in 1561. Soon after his arrival he was employed by Theodore Beza as a Greek teacher at the Genevan Academy, and he stayed there until his death in 1581. Early sources tell us that, as an orphan, Portus was sent to school in Padua by a relative, but it is unknown whether this relative provided him with the appropriate textbooks.8 In spite of this rather speculative provenance, the manuscript is of great significance not only because it is one of the few surviving manuscripts containing Franciscus Niger’s ars epistolandi and Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix, but also because it is so closely connected to the classes in Padua. The Genevan transcript is highly suitable for research work on Paduan lectures in rhetoric. The manuscript presents Niger’s art of letter writing with other pieces on rhetoric, ranging from grammar to the art of memory. Rhetoric had a long tradition at the University of Padua, being one of the forerunners to early humanist approaches to a renovation of the disciplines. Gasparino Barzizza was a famous Paduan teacher of rhetoric until 1422, when Vittorino da Feltre succeeded him.9 Here rhetoric was not only a discipline of the artes liberales that was commonly studied first, before the student went on to study law, theology, or medicine; it was studied even after students took their law degrees, as I hope to show. Research on the Genevan manuscript provides a picture of the knowledge and values a young adult was expected to strive for at a Latin school and 7 See inventory by Bernard Gagnebin, “Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Genève,” Genava—Genève, n.s., 2 (1954): 73–125, at no 9. 8 Charles Borgeaud, Histoire de l’université de Genève: L’Académie de Calvin 1559–1798, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1900), 75–76; Charles Knight: The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (n.p., ca. 1841), 447–48. More about Portus: Maria Papanicolaou, “Autografi non noti di Francesco ed Emilio Porto,” in Atti del vi Congresso nazionale dell’Associazione italiana di studi bizantini, Rassegna della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Catania, ns. 57 (Catania: Università di Catania, 2004), 585–632. 9 General information on humanistic rhetorics in the Italian universities can be found in Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 199–228. More information on Barzizza: R.G.G. Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza: With Special Reference to His Place in Paduan Humanism, Texts and Dissertations, 10 (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979); and Giliola Barbero, L’Orthographia di Gasparino Barzizza (Messina: Centro interdepartimentale di studi umanistici, 2008). For Vittorino da Feltre see Anja-Silvia Goeing, Summus Mathematicus et Omnis Humanitatis Pater, Archimedes (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).

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­ niversity in the early Renaissance. I will examine the secondary literature to u identify the main figures—authors, teachers, and transcribers—connected to the manuscript. Then I will identify distinctive aspects of Paduan rhetorical training by placing it in the context of studies of rhetoric texts used in Italian universities around 1490. Third, I will connect these findings to studies on the origins of legal humanism and the textual interdependence of rhetoric and law in the work of Guillaume Budé and Andreas Alciatus. Section 3 will then provide a description of the manuscript, including an overview of its individual sections and a detailed comparison with the printed editions to find out how manuscripts and prints were related. I want to conclude by exploring the connection between rhetoric and law at Padua that is illustrated by this particular document. For more information on the manuscript and its content, I have put an analysis of parts of the content on the accompanying website http://arsepistolandi.wordpress.com. 2

Secondary Literature on the Research Questions

2.1 Additional Information about the Manuscript Jean Senebier was the first to describe Geneva, ms lat. 86, but he did so only briefly in a manuscript catalog compiled in 1779.10 Bernard Gagnebin improved on this work by finding notes about the provenance of the manuscript. According to Gagnebin’s research, library rector Laurent bought the manuscript in 1605 or 160611—that is, about 115 years after its production. In his work on Swiss Petrarch codices of 1965,12 Ottavio Besomi identified the letters the manuscript includes by Petrarch and Lombardo a Serico. Furthermore, his article provides valuable Italian bibliographic information about the two main authors of the manuscript: Franciscus Pescennius Niger and Peter Franciscus of Ravenna, also known as Pietro Francesco Tommasi or Tommai.13 In Besomi’s 10 11

12 13

Jean Senebier, Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits conservés dans la Bibliothèque de la ville et république de Genève (Geneva, 1779), 223–24. Gagnebin, “Le cabinet des manuscripts de la Bibliothèque de Genève,” no. 9: reference to the Archives de la Bibliothèque, Registre B1: Fo I. Livres achetés par le Recteur Laurent (1605 or 1606). Ottavio Besomi‚ “Codici Petrarcheschi in Svizzera,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 8 (1965): 369–429, at 404–7n.22. Ibid., 404–5n.3. His reference to Paolo Sambin, “Lazzaro e Giovanni Francesco Beolco, Nonno e Padre del Ruzante,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 7 (1964): 149n.3, is most important for an entire Italian bibliography on Petrus Tommasi up to 1964. A bibliographical

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opinion, the transcriber Wolfgang Portus might have recorded a series of orations included in this manuscript while listening to Niger’s declamations. Niger seems to have been known for his impromptu lectures, and the orations transcribed here cannot be found elsewhere.14 Working at the same time as Besomi, Paul Oscar Kristeller,15 collecting material independently for his Iter Italicum, provided the best description of the manuscript thus far. He identified encomium letters in the middle of the manuscript that previous researchers had not mentioned in detail. His description is therefore the first complete abstract of the different parts of the manuscript. However, both Kristeller and Besomi failed to mention the Ghent manuscript, which was bought in 1484, four years before the date of the Genevan manuscript.16 The Ghent manuscript contains one section about Niger’s art of letter writing similar to the Genevan manuscript, and includes an introductory letter to Jacobus Geroldus. Further comparison would require a look at the manuscript at the Ghent library. If the date of purchase is correct, then we must assume that Niger composed the art of letter writing before 1484 and not in the period between 1486 and 1488, as modern secondary literature would have us believe.17 None of the descriptions have attempted to resolve questions apart from the dating of the manuscript. They are also silent about the contexts of the two sections that were available in print. Two works have been written so far on the subject of Niger’s art of letter writing, a scholarly article and a notice in a book. Pietro Verrua (1920) treats the above-mentioned 1488 volume by Franciscus Niger in its setting at the University of Padua,18 and later, Thomas Beebee addresses Niger’s art of letter writing in his book Epistolary Fiction, 1500–1850, in order to show that some of the letter examples used by Niger to explain his categories were invented letters from antiquity, mostly reformulated from

summary up to now is given by Annalisa Belloni, Professori Giuristi a Padova nel secolo xv: profili bio-bibliografici e cattedre, Ius Communis, Sonderhefte, 28 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986), 300–02. A summary of Besomi’s notes is found in Katalog der datierten Handschriften in der Schweiz in lateinischer Schrift vom Anfang des Mittelalters bis 1550, ed. Max Burckhardt, Pascal Ladner, and Martin Steinmann (Dietikon-Zürich: Graf, 1977–91), vol. 2, pt. 1, arranged by Beat Matthias von Scarpatetti, p. 149, no. 409. 14 Besomi, “Codici Petrarcheschi,” 404n.4. 15 Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vol. 5, http://www.itergateway.org/“italicum” accessed 17 July 2014, online library entry no. 1539: Switzerland, Genève, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire. 16 Mercati mentions the Ghent manuscript as of 1484: Mercati, “Ultimi contributi,” 58n.3. 17 Besomi, “Codici Petrarcheschi,” 404. 18 Pietro Verrua, “L’Università di Padova circa il 1488 nell’Opusculum Scribendi epistolas di Francesco Negri,” Atti e memorie dell Reale Accademia di Padova, n.s., 36 (1920): 183–214.

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Cicero’s speeches.19 However, although we know that the English teacher Robert Whittington (ca. 1480–ca. 1553) published parts of Niger’s grammar in London20 and that Erasmus mentioned Niger’s work in a negative sense,21 these facts do not explain the omnipresence of Niger’s writings in European classrooms in the first third of the sixteenth century and in the Venetian presses even up to 1600. Turning to the other major author in the Genevan manuscript, Peter of Ravenna, we find that Frances Yates22 and Paolo Rossi23 mention his art of memory as a Ciceronian memory tool that spread widely during the sixteenth century, despite also being criticized. Many of Peter’s contemporaries at the university praised this little work effusively, as is reported in the official records of the University of Padua from 1491 transcribed by Jacopo Facciolati in his Fasti Gymnasii Patavini.24 In the sixteenth century, Peter’s art of memory not only had the good fortune to be printed in full, but was also translated into French and English.25 Paolo Rossi finds evidence of its usage continuing into the seventeenth century, here for occult practices.26 Its relation to the discipline of canonical law, in which Peter held a professorship at Padua from circa 1473 to 1498,27 remains unclear. Authors, Teachers, and Transcribers Included in the Manuscript: A Paduan Set Text for Teaching? Aside from the well-known classical authors such as Cicero, Quintilian, and Livy cited by Franciscus Niger in his art of letter writing, and aside from the

2.2

19

Thomas Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–26. 20 Nicholas Orme, “Whittington, Robert (c.1480–553?),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/29331, accessed 17 July 2014; Robert Whittington and Franciscus Niger, [Fleuron] Roberti Whittintoni…Secunda grammaticæ pars de syllabarum quantitate, accentu, & uarijs metrorum generibus, nu[per]rime recensita (London, 1529). 21 Beebee, Epistolary Fiction, 26. 22 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1st ed. 1966; London: Pimlico, 2008), 119–221. 23 Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language (London: Continuum, 2006), 20–23. 24 Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 55. 25 Petrus Tommai [Peter of Ravenna], The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix. A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences, Grammaryens, Rethoryciens, Dialectyke, Legystes, Phylosophres and Theologiens, trans. from French by Robert Coplande (London: Wyliyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]). 26 Rossi, Logic, 82. 27 Belloni, Professori Giuristi, 300–02.

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famous letters by Petrarch and Lombardo a Serico, nine names deserve our attention. Wolfgang Portus’s name and northern handwriting suggest German or Austrian origins. Fortunately, he signed his name and indicated the date of the transcription in many places in the manuscript. His name, transcribed as Wolfgang or Vulcanus Portner from Ratisbona in Germany, that is, Regensburg, can be found in the exam lists of the University of Padua.28 He was listed in 1484 as a witness at an exam, being a student of both civil and canonical law.29 On 28 June 1488, he finished his own exam graduation in both subjects.30 He finished his studies at Padua five months before—on 3 October 1488— he started with the text transcriptions. Thus, he did not use these transcriptions for his own studies. The life and work of Franciscus Niger, author of the first large section of the manuscript concerning letter writing, have been researched mainly by Giovanni Mercati. Mercati’s findings help to provide greater insight not only into the probable connections between Niger and the history of the University of Padua, but also into the combined study of law and rhetoric that we assume took place outside the regular curriculum there. Mercati uses Niger’s autobiography hidden in his work Cosmodystica or De mundi infelicitate, a manuscript kept in the Vatican library,31 to give an overview of Niger’s life. According to his own account, Niger was born on 17 April 1452 in Venice. He studied in his home city and then, when he was seventeen, enrolled at the University of Padua. There he focused on the artes liberales in all their diversity, from history and poetics to geography and mathematics. In 1476, he graduated with a degree in law. In his treatises on the art of letter writing he calls himself a doctor, a title for which no other proof exists. After becoming a priest in 1478, he gave public and private lessons at a variety of institutions. He resided primarily in Padua but also spent time in Hungary and at the papal court in Rome. His works consist mainly of orations, but also include two textbooks, one on Latin grammar, published in 1480 in Venice, and the other on the art of letter writing, published in Venice in 1488. We cannot be sure what he taught, but from the surviving 28

29 30 31

Elda Martellozzo Forin, Acta graduum academicorum/Gymnasii Patavini: Ab anno 1471 ad annum 1500, 2 vols. (Padova: Antenore, 2001), 1718: Portner Volfgangus (Vulcanus, Wgangus) de Ratispona (Ratispana) de Alemania d. Leonardi sco[lar] i[uris] civ[ilis] no. 894 [anno 1484]; lic[entiatus] u[triusque] i[uris] no. 1256 [examination day: 28 June 1488]; 1303 [testimony of a doctoral exam on 22 Dec. 1488]. (Information in brackets: A.-S.G). Ibid., no. 894. Ibid., no. 1256. Mercati, “Pescennio Francesco Negro Veneto,” 24.

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records and textbooks it seems to have been mostly rhetoric and grammar. Twentieth-century assessments of his works vacillate between statements about its mediocrity and expressions of astonishment at the perspicacity, openness, and originality of his approaches to the classical texts that constitute the foundations of humanism.32 Jacobus Geroldus is the addressee of a letter Niger wrote that must be seen as a precursor to the treatise on the art of letter writing and that introduces methods of studying at a university. In the Ghent version of the manuscript, presumably written before 1484, the Austrian Geroldus of Knittelfeld from Styria is referred to as a “moderator” of the Paduan Gymnasium, a word used to signify a schoolmaster or teacher of student freshmen. He earned a doctorate in the arts. Facciolati lists him as rector33 in 1487, and a comparison with the Acta Graduum Academicorum shows him in his office as rector universitas iuridium as an examiner from June 1487 to June 1488. From these exam entries, it is clear that Geroldus was a rector of the Faculty of Law rather than the Faculty of Arts. In the year of his rectorate, he submitted himself to the doctoral examination in civil law. Niger’s and Peter of Ravenna’s graduation orations for the same Jacobus Geroldus in the middle part of the manuscript celebrate this new doctorate in ius civilis. The orations for his graduation connect the parts of the manuscript dealing with rhetoric and the law, since he belonged now to both faculties, arts and law. At that time Peter of Ravenna was a professor of law in Padua and known for his work on the art of memory, Phoenix, which was published in 1491, the same year as the transcription of this particular part of the manuscript. Born in Ravenna, he studied at Padua and was teaching there from 1473. In 1474, he may have already become professor of canonical law.34 He went abroad at the beginning of the sixteenth century and served as a law professor in Greifswald in 1498, at Wittenberg (some read Württemberg)35 in 1502, and, finally, in Cologne in 1506. He died after a controversy with his Cologne colleagues of the theological faculty at Mainz in 1508.36 In Wittenberg, he published as a textbook a huge corpus in folio format on the teaching of ius civilis.37 Because of 32 Ibid., 1. 33 Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 16. 34 Belloni, Professori Giuristi, 300–01. 35 Ibid., 300. Friedrich iii of Saxony, who is mentioned in Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 55, was building up his university at Wittenberg, not in Württemberg. 36 Belloni, Professori Giuristi, 301. 37 Petrus Tommai [Peter of Ravenna], Compendium pulcherrimum iuriscanonici (Wittenberg, 1504, 1506).

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his professorial position in law, his textbook on mnemotechnics strongly suggests a link between law and rhetoric based on the principles of rhetoric in antiquity. Cicero and Quintilian, and even the often-used Rhetorica ad Herennium, included mnemotechnics in their preparations for oratory.38 Less important writers or addressees of the letters included in the manuscript are Nicolaus Crucigerus, Regina Cecilia Cassandra (who might have something to do with the Venetian orator Cassandra Fidelis), and several unknown individuals, including Antonius Plebanus, Marcus Picardus, and Hieronymus Buticellus.39 At the time this manuscript was written, Nicolaus Crucigerus was a rich Paduan man of letters who is mentioned in Bernardo Morsolin’s biography of Zaccaria Ferreri,40 a bishop who spent his early years studying law in Padua. Cassandra Fidelis was allowed in 1487 to receive an oration according to the traditions of the university by Rector Jacobus Geroldus, as is explicitly stated in Facciolati’s transcription of the Fasti Gymnasii Patavini.41 The poems by Antonius Plebanus, Marcus Picardus, and Hieronymus Buticellus are addressed to Peter of Ravenna and printed in his Phoenix.42 Hieronymus Buticellus became a professor of law in 1504 and is therefore mentioned in the Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, where he is praised for his trustworthiness as opposed to his intellect.43 These last few names, starting with Nicolaus Crucigerus, were identified by Paul Oscar Kristeller in his work Iter Italicum. The names are almost illegible because this section of the manuscript was written in a cursive hand and in a hurry, perhaps by a person other than the transcriber of the other parts. Because of the sloppy handwriting, it is possible that this part of the manuscript was not transcribed from another piece of writing, but orally transmitted, maybe even dictated. The biographies of the people involved in this manuscript offer valuable insight into the link between rhetoric and law: in addition to Peter of Ravenna, who served as a professor of law, and Niger himself, who was a graduate of law 38 39 40

See Rossi, Logic, 3–20. See Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 63, 71. See Bernardo Morsolin, Zaccaria Ferreri: episodio biographico del secolo decimosesto (G.  Burato, 1877), digitized 12 July 2006 (Harvard University), http://www.archive.org/ details/zaccariaferreri00morsgoog, accessed 17 May 2014. 41 Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 16: “concessum est Cassandrae Fideli Venetae ejus consanguineae, quae litterarum studiis Patavii operam dabat, ut de ejus laudibus orationem haberet, pro illorum temporum more.” 42 Petrus Tommai [Peter of Ravenna], Phoenix seu artificiosa memoria domini Petri Ravennatis memoriae magistri (Venice: Bernardinus de Choris de Cremona, 1491), 4r–v. 43 Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 73.

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but was linked in a freelance position to the arts faculty and published works on grammar and rhetoric, the transcriber, Wolfgang Portus, was, as noted earlier, a law student and later graduate. Only Jacobus Geroldus thus was part of the arts faculty, and even he was personally linked to the Faculty of Law, as its rector in 1487–88 and as doctor from May 1488. Probably these many personal links between the faculties were not a coincidence. Portus transcribed texts that were useful to him, not as a student, as we have seen, but as a jurist. He either sought out the texts deliberately on his own—maybe as useful tools for his career in jurisprudence—or transcribed an existing extended coursework either as a teacher or as an advanced scholar. Knowledge about lecture lists or the names of other rhetoric professors apart from Geroldus and their works is very hard to come by. The most important reason for this is that, with the exception of the jurists, the professors’ names are not recorded in the Fasti Gymnasii Patavini. In order to classify the Geneva manuscript, it would be most enlightening to learn more about the time and person of Jacobus Geroldus and the lectures at the arts faculty. His name occurs in many places in the manuscript, and we know that he was rector shortly before the manuscript was transcribed. He therefore represents, alongside Peter of Ravenna, the most immediate biographical connection between the subjects of this manuscript and the practice of teaching at the university. Does this manuscript perhaps reflect parts of Geroldus’s own lectures at the university, designed to help prepare artes graduates for law school? Or was it the other way around, designed to help lawyers with their daily diplomatic missions in the Republic of Venice? 2.3 Regional Aspects of Paduan Rhetoric Training To understand the manuscript in the Paduan context of rhetorical training, we must first consider the institutional and intellectual setting. In terms of the institutional framework of training in rhetoric in fifteenth-century Padua, it is important to bear in mind that studies in the liberal arts were integrated into a single faculty together with medicine and theology, independent of the Faculty of Law.44 The structure was similar to that of the University of Bologna.45 With its two faculties (called “universities”)—liberal arts, including theology and medicine, on the one hand and law on the other—it differs strikingly from the faculty structure of the University of Paris, with four independent faculties, which countries in northern Europe tended to emulate.46 Unfortunately, Facciolati was not 44 45 46

Ibid.: implicated by the structure of this book. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1895), 2:17. Ibid., 1:324, 546.

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able to reconstruct the names of the fifteenth-century grammar, mathematics, and rhetoric teachers because of gaps in the documents. Teachers of physics, ethics, law, and medicine—and even the names of the rectors of the liberal arts faculty and the Faculty of Law—are mentioned in Facciolati’s report on the archival documents. The names have survived from these lists of a few teachers who were promoted in one of the other fields of teaching. They include Jacobus Geroldus, who was appointed rector of the liberal arts faculty in 1487–88, shortly before Wolfgang Portus started work on his transcription, as already mentioned.47 In his book Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603, Jonathan Woolfson makes clear that law had its affiliated network of an “English nation,” while the Faculty of Medicine and the Liberal Arts did not.48 This gap between the faculties made it much more likely that the subject of medicine would follow humanistic approaches used primarily by the liberal arts,49 and would explain why the Faculty of Law might not have used them. In spite of this institutional gap, the manuscript addresses rhetoric and law at the same time. According to the research of Paul F. Grendler, summarized in The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (2004),50 the study of rhetoric in universities was not as advanced at Padua as in the few elite humanist schools that were distributed across Italy, such as the school of Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua; Paduan rhetoric was even not as advanced as in many Italian grammar schools. Grendler attributes this to better working conditions for humanist elementary teachers in those times.51 At universities, manuals for letter writing were compiled from Ciceronian guides to oratory, especially the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s De inventione, and read alongside ancient letter collections. The manuals were still connected in the fifteenth century to the medieval traditions of pattern collections that were active in notarial offices. The most advanced examples of the new textbooks were Erasmus of Rotterdam’s manuals on letter writing and on the profusion of styles printed in 1511 and 1512.52 In later editions, the student would 47 Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini, 16. 48 Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 10; see also Rashdall, The Universities, 2:19, concerning the University of Medicine and Art at Padua (not the Jurists, who formed their own university): “This university was divided into seven Nations of which only one was Ultramontane.” 49 See Nancy G. Siraisi, “Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2004): 191–211, at 194. 50 Grendler, The Universities, 199–248. 51 Ibid., 208–9. 52 Used: Desiderius Erasmus, D. Erasmi Roterodami De Duplici Copia Rerum ac Verborum: Commentarij Duo (1st ed. 1512; Strassbourg: Schuerer, 1513).

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buy a collection of manuals adapted for university use, as exemplified by the work of Agostino Dati, Liber De Dictamine et Modo Orandi, printed in 1518 together with commentaries and other style guides.53 The Venetian jurist, polymath, and poet Franciscus Niger represented a humanist advancement in the Paduan context because he was, by his own account, a humanist working with the new methods drawn from Cicero. The Link between Rhetoric and Law Studies and the Origins of “Legal Humanism” In analyzing European law Helmut Coing describes the University of Padua as a rising key player in the fifteenth century, based on the rules set up in Bologna in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.54 Outside of the university curriculum, however, there was a great amount of development within the Paduan and Venetian community. In his book Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, Donald R. Kelley55 introduces the term “legal humanism” to a broad audience interested in history. He describes the growing importance of humanist exegesis in the work of Lorenzo Valla that formed the basis of legal and institutional history in later times.56 Key figures in this process were Valla himself, who historicized and grammaticized law in the mid-fifteenth century,57 and Guillaume Budé and Andrea Alciato in the first half of the sixteenth century, who brought these philological methods to the study of law within the university.58 From the perspective of law studies, therefore, Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae, written in 1440, was a landmark work of humanist exegesis.59 Valla was to lose his position as law professor at the University of Pavia because he refused to graduate a student on the grounds that the candidate was not 2.4

53

An example compiled by the erudite Parisian printer Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Agostino Dati et al., Augustini Dathi, …Opusculum in elegantiarum precepta, cum Jodoci Clichtovei, … et Jodoci Badii Ascensii commentariis….Francisci Nigri Elegantie regularum elucidatio. Magistratuum Romanorum nominum declaratio…. [Cum tractatu Georgii de Valla de ratione scribendi] (Limoges: Beron, 1518). 54 Helmut Coing, Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1973), 79–80. 55 Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press 1970). 56 Ibid., 88. 57 Ibid., 19–52. 58 Ibid., 92–97. 59 Laurentius Valla, Laurentii Vallæ…de Romani sermonis elegantia liber primus (-sextus) ([Rome]: A. Pannartz, 1475).

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sufficiently skilled in eloquence.60 On other occasions, he claimed that the most important issue in the field of law was to look carefully at the original ancient text and to avoid the misinterpretations of later times. His grammatical view of the amendment of texts had followers who criticized law texts. They did not, however, give guidance to advance law studies. This began much later with the advice of the jurist Andrea Alciatus (1492–1550). In the period between Valla and Alciatus, the effects within the region of the Veneto of this continual friction between the university disciplines of law and rhetoric are generally too little studied. The Genevan manuscript helps our understanding of regional differences in the process that linked rhetoric and law studies in this time, because it is closer to the atmosphere in the classroom than any work that was coming from the printing shops without annotations or personal notices in it. The observations here made leave room for more general inquiries. Peter Denley makes quite clear in his doctoral thesis on the University of Siena61 that documents are sparse from this time concerning events at Siena. Only a few lecture transcripts have survived, and Denley refrains from drawing any general conclusions from them. He does, however, draw conclusions from books that were printed later but stemmed originally from this period. One of his sources for law studies is the work of the law professor Giovanni Battista Caccialupi,62 who wrote a manual on the methods of studying law that was printed in the sixteenth century. The equivalent at Padua was a textbook written by the law professor Giovanni Giacomo Can.63 Individual lecture transcripts tend to hold greater weight than manuals among historians today,64 because they are closer to the actual act of teaching. Fundamental studies are required to shed light on specifics, especially studies that contain detailed information and are so clear as to be usable for references and comparisons. The Genevan manuscript examined here can, to a certain degree, serve as one of these case studies. 60 Grendler, The Universities, 110–11. 61 Peter Denley, “The University of Siena, 1357–1557” (thesis, Oxford, 1981), 186. See also Peter Denley, Commune and Studio in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (Bologna: clueb, 2006), 127. 62 Giovanni Battista Caccialupi, Antonio de Nebrija, and Héritiers de Jacques Giunta, Vocabularium vtriusque iuris: …Accessit praeterea Lexicon iuris ciuilis, in quo varij & insignes errores Accursij notantur (Lugduni: Apud haeredes Iacobi Iuntae, 1559). 63 See Belloni, Professori Giuristi, 61–62. 64 See Anthony T. Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “Humanism and the School of Guarino: A Problem of Evaluation,” Past and Present 96 (1982): 51–80, at 54–55.

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The Manuscripts and the Printed Editions: A Comparison

3.1 Codicological and Paleographical Description The manuscript ms lat. 86 is written in a northern hand (distinguishable by the use of a late textualis rather than a humanist cursive) and contains 271 folios. The format of the volume is octavo. Page numbers were added in later times. A table of contents on the title page was also added later. The text is written on both sides of the page, recto and verso. Most of the pages have carved lines. A smaller number do not have these lines, but there is no pattern from which to draw a conclusion concerning the separation of texts. Paul Oscar Kristeller attributes the whole text to one scribe, except for one poem (fol. 192v). The scribe must have been trained before he wrote this, because the appearance of the script is very clear and balanced. The treatises contain title rubricatures and leave space for initial letters, suggesting that they have been copied from a text and not written from dictation. 3.2 Manuscript Sections Kristeller’s table of manuscript sections of ms lat. 86, taken from his Iter Italicum,65 is updated and copied on the website that accompanies this essay, http://arsepistolandi.wordpress.com. There are three different types of separation created in the manuscript. The first type stems from blank pages between the end of one text and the beginning of the following text, as on the folios 91v–92v, 116r–19v, 156r–v, 242r–43v, and 271r. The second manner of separation stems from four dated signatures of the transcriber, Wolfgang Portus, at the end of texts. The dates mark the transcription as having been done in four time periods, while the second time period appears to lie before the first: 91r (23 Oct. 1488), 172v (8 [sic] Oct. 1488), 241v (20 Jan. 1489), 271v (1491). Finally, the third type of separation stems from the texts and their structure themselves: There are four entire treatises included, two by Franciscus Niger, one by Marcus Tullius Cicero, and one by Peter of Ravenna. The other texts are letters, orations, and poems in three different places. The first treatise is the art of letter writing by Franciscus Niger, preceded by introductory letters, one of them to Jacobus Geroldus. The transcription is dated (fol. 91r) 23 Oct. 1488 and bears the name of the place where it was executed: Padua. Between Niger’s art of letter writing and the second treatise, his treatise on oratory for civil law dedicated to the emperor Sigismundus at Vienna, there are six orations and 65 Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vol. 5 (Alia Itinera 3 and Italy 3): Sweden to Yugoslavia, Utopia [and] Supplement to Italy (A–F). http://www.itergateway.org/“italicum”, Library entry no. 1539: Switzerland, Genève, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire.

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poems celebrating the graduation of Jacobus Geroldus in Padua, written by Franciscus Niger (four) and Peter of Ravenna (one or two). This bundle bears no date, but is separated by blank pages on either side. The third treatise starts on fol. 193r and ends fifty pages later, on fol. 243v. It is Cicero’s short dialogue on rhetoric, Partitiones oratoriae. The transcription is dated 20 January 1489. Between Niger’s and Cicero’s treatises on oratory there are orations and poems by contemporary Paduans, where identifiable, preceded by two famous medieval letters, those of Francesco Petrarca and Lombardo a Serico. These two letters are the ones that conclude with a date two weeks earlier than the transcription of the first treatise. The fourth treatise is Peter of Ravenna’s work on the art of memory (fols. 244r–71v), dated 1491. While the first three dated pieces could be linked together in a coherent sequence, since the dates are very closely connected, the last treatise stands alone. Almost two years separate the transcription of Cicero’s work and that of Peter of Ravenna’s treatise. This fact rules out the possibility that the manuscript represents a course curriculum in its entirety and suggests a separation of the largely rhetorical from the largely legal sections of this manuscript. The next section of this essay will cast doubt on such a separation: the comparison of our manuscript with printed versions of its individual parts demonstrates that some of the orations by unknown contemporaries were used by Peter of Ravenna as precursory letters for his printed version of the Phoenix. 3.3 Comparison with the Printed Editions This comparison relies on the known printed or handwritten copies of parts of this manuscript kept in various European libraries and reveals whether the transcriptions have additions, missing parts, or different spellings compared to the counterparts. On the basis of the results, we will consider whether parts of the manuscript that may seem disparate in fact belonged together. As in the Genevan manuscript, Niger’s work is preceded by his letter to Jacobus Geroldus in the manuscript of Ghent, dated before 1484, and in all printed versions, starting in 1488. Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix is preceded by many orations and poems in the printed editions starting in 1491, among them the writings of Antonius Plebanus, Marcus Picardus, and Hieronymus Buticellus. These are in the manuscript but in completely different places, thus suggesting a different date of transcription.66 A closer look at the printed copies, which are nearly as old as the original, can reveal whether the comparable parts of the manuscript were transcribed in their entirety. While the unprinted work on oratory by Niger seems to be unfinished, because it ends in an open clause (fol. 155v), both printed works are 66

Besomi, “Codici Petrarcheschi,” 404–5.

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complete. The content of the first comparable work, the art of letter writing, remains the same in all copies, even though the title changes considerably during the years and places of print. (see http://arsepistolandi.wordpress.com). The orthography varies so widely between manuscript and print that there must have been more than one copy from which the text was derived: ae or oe in the printed version is e in the manuscript, and different abbreviation signs are used throughout the text. Since we have no other evidence, we must therefore assume that another personal copy of the original manuscript, rather than the printed edition, could also have formed the basis of the Genevan manuscript. The second comparable work, the Phoenix, adds the first sentences of each paragraph to the printed version. The manuscript version includes two to six circles on almost each page for memory places to be filled in by the student. This student has not filled in any of them. At the end, the circles even have little titles. They bear the names of chess figures, Rex albus and Rex niger, Regina alba and Regina nigra, and so on (fol. 269r, see fig. 30.1). The suggestion is the same as with the other text: this is a copy probably from a master copy differing from the printed text. 4 Conclusion Was this manuscript adaptable to rhetoric or law studies at Padua at all? We are better informed about the proceedings in law studies at Padua than we are about those in rhetoric studies for the simple reason that the names of rhetoric teachers in Padua are not researchable because the documents are missing. Annalisa Belloni gives an acute account of law studies in the fifteenth century from the archival documents in her book Professori giuristi a Padova nel secolo xv: Profili bio-bibliografici e cattedre (1986).67 Her profile is based on the lists of professors, whom she records alphabetically with their works. In the first part of this work, dealing with teaching,68 she quotes from the statutes of law teaching at Padua as of 1331 and 1445–63.69 She also reveals important aspects of studying law at Padua from various sources, including the only manual written for this purpose at Padua. It was written by Giovanni Giacomo Can, who taught canonical law from 1451 to 1494.70 Later, she reconstructs the lecture series 67

Annalisa Belloni, Professori Giuristi a Padova Nel Secolo xv: Profili Bio-Bibliografici e Cattedre. Studien zur Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte: Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanck-Instituts für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986). 68 Belloni, Professori Giuristi, 43–106. 69 Ibid., 52–60. 70 Ibid., 61–62.

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Figure 30.1

Goeing

Bibliothèque de Genève, ms lat. 86, fol. 269r: Peter of Ravenna, Phoenix, chess pieces. Courtesy of Bibliothèque de Genève

Paduan Extracurricular Rhetoric, 1488–1491

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from the rotuli.71 From her timetables we can gather that there were four different lecture series each day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Two of them—one morning and one afternoon lecture—were in canonical law and the remaining two in civil law. Each lecture was given by two professors, including both extraordinary and ordinary professors, who competed with each other at the same time. Eight professors were needed for this organization. Some professors, like Can himself, grew very old in the same position; others worked only briefly in Padua. The statutes prescribed the lectured texts and how they were supposed to be read, one chapter after the other without skipping any chapter (statutes of 1331). According to Belloni, no part of the Genevan manuscript would be included in law studies. It is possible, though, that professors were allowed to talk about their own commentaries and manuals on the side, or even in extracurricular courses, as Gasparino Barzizza was allowed to do around 1420 for rhetoric.72 This would have given a certain freedom to Peter of Ravenna, who between circa 1474 and 1498 gave the afternoon lecture on canonical law, to speak about his art of memory on the side. Owing to the rigid lecture curricula we can rule out that Cicero’s or Niger’s texts were taught in law studies. Students interested in them would have had to get their sources from other places. If there were a link between law and rhetoric, it would have been created by the arts faculty or the personal choices of professors in their discussions outside the official curriculum, traceable in their oeuvres, or recorded by students like Wolfgang Portus. The manuscript might therefore reflect an extracurricular matter or a personal choice of the transcriber guided by his university surroundings. With the knowledge and the skills from the humanities to write elegantly and to address letters correctly, the lawyer would have a politically useful tool for his career in later life at the Venetian state, for which the University of Padua provided candidates, as explicitly is stated in the governmental rules73 and as is traceable in daily practice.74



71 Ibid., 63–106. 72 Mercer, The Teaching of Barzizza, 42: “The voluntary lectures.” 73 Rashdall, The Universities, 21: “Venetian subjects were forbidden to study elsewhere than at Padua, and eventually a period of study there was required as a qualification for the exercise of public functions at Venice.” 74 Edward Muir, “Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano, Johns Hopkins paperbacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 137–68, at 145–57. See also, as a next stage, Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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The main conclusion that can be drawn from this particular manuscript is the trace of interdependence between rhetoric and law in extracurricular studies at the University of Padua. The manuscript, the teachers, the student transcriber, and the authors of the letters show this. No legal content is explicitly mentioned, but it includes instruction in preparatory skills to develop the eloquence of a politician, diplomat, or lawyer, including the use of the arts of memory, and humanist pattern letters that could be adapted to a variety of situations and purposes. The manuscript therefore seems to represent a certain Paduan style of rhetoric teaching that is different from that of Siena and other universities in Italy and Europe, because it leads to daily practice in the Venetian Republic. Secondly, we learn that manuscript transmission in the university context continued to be important even after the invention of printing. Although the distribution of knowledge generated at this time was marked by a shift from manuscript to printed textbook production, and both Niger’s and Peter’s works count numerous printed editions, Wolfgang Portus’s compiled textbook suggests angles and corners of research overlooked by a research purely into printed copies. Thirdly, the research provides insights into texts used for teaching rhetoric in fifteenth-century Italy. Niger was an average author of manuals, not on a par with Erasmus but still important and often published. Peter of Ravenna’s treatise on the art of memory continued to be published as well, even in the vernacular. The question of usage would be the next important question to raise in both cases, because it would reveal which preferences of learning were linked to which specific social groups or cultural and individual tastes.

chapter 31

Cardano’s Malicious Horoscope and Gaurico’s Morbid Horoscope of Regiomontanus N.M. Swerdlow There are various versions of Regiomontanus’s horoscope, for 1436 June 6, 4:40 pm, of which the most interesting is one published by Girolamo Cardano in Liber de exemplis centum geniturarum (1547) as No. 89. Cardano explains, in No.  67, that he received it from Georg Joachim Rheticus, an educated gentleman no little skilled in mathematics, among several genitures of rather illustrious men, which he had with him and offered me of his own accord when he came to Italy from Germany. This was fortunate, as in a previous collection of sixty-seven horoscopes (1543), Cardano had mistakenly applied to Regiomontanus a horoscope, No. 66, for 1423 May 30, 3:05 pm, earlier by thirteen years and actually for Georg Peurbach. In the later collection the same horoscope, still No. 66, appears for Peurbach, called Germanus maximus, with a single correction and nearly the same judgment. “Geniture” means nativity horoscope, so Rheticus gave Cardano computed horoscopes in standard form, many of which, of famous men, were then collected and passed around. A similar horoscope for 1436 June 6, 4:40 pm in Luca Gaurico’s Tractatus Astrologicus (1552) is probably closer to the original, although its brief judgment is less interesting. A horoscope nearly identical to Gaurico’s appears in Munich Clm 10667 (No. 59), and a similar one, that may be closer still to the original, in Munich Clm 27003, f. 25r, although all have errors. (A second horoscope for Regiomontanus, on f. 25v, for the date 1440 February 21, 10:11 pm, is said by Zinner to be for King Ladislaus ii of Bohemia.) Finally, Erasmus Reinhold, in his Oration on Regiomontanus (1549), describes nearly the same horoscope as Clm 27003, f. 25r, with locations only by zodiacal sign. Reinhold notes that his oration is based in part on an oration by Johann Schoener, who edited for publication a number of Regiomontanus’s works. Zinner suggests that Schoener is the source of the date 1436 June 6, 4:40 pm given by Reinhold, and his locations may also come from Schoener. When and by whom, if not Schoener, the horoscope was originally computed is unknown.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_032

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Swerdlow

Figure 31.1 Cardano’s horoscope of Regiomontanus with equal houses of 30° measured from the horoscopus.

Our first concern is Cardano’s horoscope, shown in Figure  31.1. It contains notable errors for the moon and Mars, upon which his judgment depends, and also for Jupiter; the correct locations from the Tabulae resolutae, explained below, are shown in brackets. The twelve houses are taken as 30° each, a rather crude practice Cardano follows in this collection, beginning from the ascendant or horoscopus at  15°. Thus, the second house begins at  15°, the seventh, the descendant, at  15°, and the tenth at  15° is not the midheaven, the intersection of the ecliptic and the meridian, which is given separately as the cor coeli at  1°. All Cardano may have done with what he received from Rheticus was adapt it to equal houses without further checking, which is typical as his horoscopes are frequently wretched; but Gaurico did no better, and more often than not, horoscopes are defective in one way or another. The longitudes in Cardano’s horoscope, recomputed from the Tabulae resolutae, a derivative of the Alfonsine Tables used commonly in central Europe, and from modern theory are as follows:

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Horoscopes of Regiomontanus Planet

Horoscope

Tab. res.

Modern

Sun Moon Saturn Jupiter Mars Venus Mercury Asc. node

 24;16°  18;54  26; 0  10;21  21;16  25; 1    6; 1  14;37

 24;16°  22;21  26; 1  10;21  21;17  27; 1   6; 6  14;37

  24;10°   22;22   25;  7   11;38  22; 4  26;53    5;14  14;38

We have used a version of the Tabulae resolutae published by Johann Schoener in 1536 for the meridian of Nürnberg, 0;30°  =  0;2h east of Königsberg in Franconia. Note that in computing from tables, even if there are no errors, results may differ by a few minutes from interpolation and rounding in the steps of the computation. The latitude of Königsberg is about 50°, and the time of sunset for the sun at  24° is 8:04 pm. The calendar date 6 June is confirmed by the agreement of the moon in the Tabulae resolutae, not in the horoscope, with the modern computation, although the difference of only 0;1° is fortuitous. The time specified as hora 4. mi. 40. aequatis (4;40 hours “equated”), also in Clm 27003, mentioned in no other horoscope in Cardano’s collection, appears to mean, not equal as distinct from seasonal hours, but that the “equation of days”, the equation of time, has been applied, which would affect only the longitude of the moon, for the sun at  24° by about –0;10°; but since the error for the moon is so large, this cannot be verified. In any case, the time 4;40h after noon is confirmed by the difference in right ascension Δα of the midheaven at  1° and the sun at  24;16°, Δα  =  153;3° – 83;45°  =  69;18°  =  4;37h ≈  4;40h. Since 4;40h  =  70°, the midheaven was originally computed from αM  =  83;45°  +  70°  =  153;45°, and rounding λM  =  151;44°  ≈   1°, for which αM  =  153;3°. Then, using the oblique ascension table for latitude 50° from Regiomontanus’s Tabulae directionum, the oblique ascension of the horoscopus ρH = 153;3° + 90° = 243;3°, and the longitude λH = 225;2° ≈  15°. Hence, the horoscope was computed for the stated time, which is not always true, and originally it was computed quite accurately before copying errors, of which there are four, all in common with Gaurico. One is small, Venus by –2°. Then Jupiter by +30°, one sign, has been displaced from the eleventh to the twelfth house, and Mars by –30°, one sign, displaced from the ninth to the eighth house, although for both the sign, not indicated, may originally have been c­ orrect and

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only the displacement of the house in error in an earlier copy of the horoscope. The largest error is the moon by fully +86;33°, nearly three signs, from Pisces to Gemini, probably in part a copying error but also computational, displacing it from the fifth to the eighth house. (The computation of the correct longitude,  22;21°, with the Tabulae resolutae is shown in the Appendix. The incorrect longitude,  18;54°, is confirmed by the distance of the Lot of Fortune from the horoscopus in Clm 27003 and Clm 10667, –5;22°, from +354;38°, the elongation of the moon from the sun. The implied latitude of the moon at  18;54° is –2;49° when at  22;21° it is +3;57° and the correct latitude is +4;11°.) Reinhold has the same errors in sign for Mars and the moon although Jupiter is in Virgo, as also in Munich Clm 27003, where it is correctly in the eleventh house, evidence that it is closer to the original. These errors can serve as cautionary for the evaluation of horoscopes at any period. Now for the notorious judgment, to which we have added some explanations in parentheses: Although here Mercury is in its domicile (Gemini) and in trine aspect (four signs) to the domicile of Jupiter (Pisces), and is near the eye of Taurus (α Tau at  1;41°), and the head (of the dragon, the ascending node) is also exactly in the degree of the ascendant, yet these cannot adequately account for the quantity of works, industry, and genius of so great a man, nor can the quartile aspect (three signs) of Saturn with the sun and Mars signify that. Rather, Mars, the sun, and the moon in the eighth house, in quartile aspect to Saturn, should have denied (him) life. But this is portentous (monstrosa, ill-omened), as also in other natures something portentous comes to light. Or perhaps the moon’s being almost exactly in the direction with (the stars of) the belt of Orion ( 14;21°, 16;21°, 17;11°) brings this about, so that such studious activity and genius appear; the other things depend upon revolutions (of years). But why do we wonder at this since Regiomontanus attributed to himself many things from the labors of others? The Tabulae directionum actually belong in great part to the Italian Giovanni Bianchini; there are in my possession more extensive (tables of Bianchini), which it is clear Regiomontanus saw when he discusses aspects. The Epitome belongs to a certain Milanese (who wrote it) even before Peurbach, the teacher of Regiomontanus, was born; the entire devising of the Book on spherical triangles belongs to a Spanish Jew. Ephemerides were devised before he was born, for I had an ephemeris for the year 1412. The judgment makes three points: (1) There is little in the horoscope to account for, or even indicate, Regiomontanus’s productivity and genius. (2) The presence of Mars, the sun, and the moon in the eighth house, of death, in quartile

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aspect to Saturn, should have made him stillborn or not survive infancy; note  that this depends upon the errors in the longitudes of Mars and the moon, which correctly would not be in the eighth house or in quartile aspect to Saturn. (3) He plagiarized all of his most celebrated works: the Tabulae directionum from the Italian Bianchini, the Epitome of the Almagest from some unnamed Milanese, another Italian, the spherical part of De triangulis omnimodis from a Spanish Jew, and his Ephemerides are not the earliest. In fact, although Bianchini’s Tabulae primi mobilis with their instructions have many of the same applications as the Tabulae directionum, the tables are not the same. The predecessor of the Epitome is probably the Almagestum parvum containing Books 1–6, an anonymous work of the mid-twelfth to early thirteenth century, given various incorrect attributions, used by Peurbach in Books 1–6 of the Epitome and of which there is a manuscript in Regiomontanus’s hand. Some, but not that much, of the spherical trigonometry in De triangulis, and the spherical astronomy in the Epitome, was based upon the Correction of the Almagest by Jābir ibn Aflaḥ, who was from Seville but was not a Jew, although his work was translated into Hebrew. There are ephemerides in manuscript as early as the thirteenth century, so Cardano’s ephemeris from 1412 is hardly the earliest. Although all that is true here is that Regiomontanus was not the first to produce works of this kind, Cardano’s intended conclusion is that he was neither productive nor of genius after all, worse, that he was a plagiarist. Such exposure of the dead through their horoscopes, astrological character assassination, was not uncommon, for there seemed to be some delight in cutting the great down to size in this most scientific way, against which there was no defense. We have computed the longitudes of Aldebaran and the three stars in Orion’s belt by adding the Alfonsine precession from Era Alfonso to June 1436, +1;53°, to their longitudes in the Alfonsine Tables. Since the latitudes of the stars in the belt are about 25° south, very far from the moon—in its erroneous longitude Gemini 18;54° when it was actually in Pisces—the suggestion that the moon’s being close to their direction accounts for his genius may appear unlikely. But not so since in other horoscopes, stars close to the equator, as the belt of Orion, are taken as significant, which offers many possibilities for judgments. And in the following anonymous, undated horoscope (No. 90)—in fact for 17 June 1487 at 5:13 am—for “a certain very great physician”, for whom there are various indications of “immense riches”, the belt of Orion signifies “studious activity and perseverance”, although no planet is near its longitude, around the beginning of the twelfth house, which has just risen. In De supplemento almanach 19, Cardano says that one for whom the belt of Orion rises will be very learned and studious, and gives as an example his father, Fazio Cardano, but in Regiomontanus’s horoscope the belt is around the beginning of the

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Figure 31.2 Gaurico’s horoscope of Regiomontanus with houses ­computed by Regiomontanus’s “rational” method.

eighth house and thus close to setting, and correctly the moon is in the fifth house, far below the horizon. Whatever this may mean, the judgment is nothing if not a sly exercise in ironic nastiness. Although it is of secondary interest, there is reason, or at least curiosity, in considering Gaurico’s horoscope and judgment. The horoscope, for which Gaurico may or may not be responsible, is shown in Figure 31.2. It contains all the errors in the locations of the planets of Cardano’s horoscope, and in addition, the ascending and descending nodes are advanced by one house, probably originally a transcription error; the correct locations are shown in brackets. Because of the different computation of the houses, Saturn is in the fourth instead of the fifth house; the other planets are in the same houses in both. The houses are computed by Regiomontanus’s “rational” method—circles of

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­ osition, through the intersections of the meridian and horizon, the north and p south points of the horizon, divide the equator into twelve equal arcs, of 30°, counted to the east from the eastern horizon, and the ecliptic into unequal arcs, the twelve houses—and, curiously, using tables for a latitude of 48°. The midheaven λM  =   1°, the cor coeli in Cardano’s, with right ascension αM = 153;3°, the oblique ascension of the horoscopus, ρH = 153;3° + 90° = 243;3°, and using the oblique ascension table for 48°, λH =  16;4°. The right ascension of the midheaven in hours αMh = 153;3°/15°/h = 10;12h, from which, comparing the horoscope’s houses 10–3 with standard tables, including Gaurico’s own, of the rational method for latitudes 48° and 51°: αMh 10;12h Horoscope Tables 48° Tables 51°

10  1° 1 1

11  3° 3 3

12  26° 25 25

1  16;4° 16 15

2  12° 11 9

3  17° 18 18

Even with the differences of 1°, whatever their origin, this shows that the houses are computed by the rational method for 48°, excluding any other method and latitude, although tables for 49½° do have 3 at 17°. Houses 4–9 follow from adding to each 6 signs = 180°. The judgment is as follows, again with additions for clarification, including quotations of the text, in parentheses: He met his death in the City of Rome (in Urbe Romulea) from a fatal fever, or an epidemic, in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit for Foreigners (Xenodochio Sancti Spiritus), in the 51st year of his age together with 5  months 12 days or thereabout (vel circiter), from the direction of the horoscopus to the quartile of Saturn (ad tetragonum Saturni), which also Mars, the Lord of the Geniture (horoscopi Ecodespotes), surrounded by the luminaries (the sun and moon) in the eighth house (epycataphora) seems to foretell. He was very eminent in astronomy and astrology inasmuch as he published many books and the Epitome of the Almagest of Ptolemy, in a Latin style by no means barbarous. Judgments of horoscopes frequently concentrate upon the age and conditions of the death of the subject, as do many of Gaurico’s, including this one. The “Hospital of the Holy Spirit for Foreigners” is the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome near the Vatican, which, following a fire in 1471, had been restored by Sixtus iv for the Jubilee in 1475, the year Regiomontanus returned to Rome.

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The age at which Regiomontanus died, or was supposed to die, is determined by the direction from the significator, the horoscopus at  16;4°, to the promissor, here the quartile aspect to Saturn at  26° – 90° =  26°, a maleficent aspect to a maleficent planet, which is surely very bad, and the death, although not the age, is also foretold by Mars surrounded by the luminaries in the eighth house, of death, thus depending upon the same errors for Mars and the moon as in Cardano’s horoscope. Since the horoscopus is in the horizon, the direction is the difference in oblique ascension Δρ between  16;4° and  26°. As noted earlier, for finding the horoscopus, the latitude of the horoscope is taken as 48°, so that using the oblique ascension table for 48°, ρ ( 16;4°) = 243;3°, ρ ( 26°) = 294;25°, and the difference Δρ = 294;25° – 243;3° = 51;22°. This just misses the 51st year, 5 months, 12 days. The standard rule is that 1° is one year, 0;5° is one month, 0;1° is 6d 2h (=365d/60). Taking 51° as the 51st completed year, the fraction 0;22° = 4 · 0;5° + 2 · 0;1° corresponds to 4 months 12 days 4 hours, a difference of –1 month. Since the calculation is so trivial, perhaps 5 months should be emended to 4 months. (There is also the question of whether the 51st year is to be understood as completed or current, which would be 50 years plus the months and days.) In any case, since Gaurico knows that Regiomontanus died in Rome, and possibly also at the age of forty, in June or July of 1476, it is difficult to understand the purpose of a direction for the length of life that is so obviously incorrect. Or perhaps he doesn’t know. There are some lessons to be learned from the horoscopes of Regiomontanus evaluated here. Far be it from me to raise questions about Cardano and Gaurico, about the quality of their work, but their carelessness, indeed, negligence becomes obvious as soon as their work is checked, which means recomputing the horoscopes they received and failed to check themselves. And this applies not only to these horoscopes, which, because of their errors turn out to be nonsense, but to many others, and not only to Cardano and Gaurico, among the most eminent and prolific astrologers of their age, cultivated Italians not rude Germans, “lacking books and distant from the concourse of learned men,” as Regiomontanus put it, but even more so to many others, Italians and Germans alike, who present themselves as expert in astronomy and astrology but turn out to be of very limited competence. For just as they publish horoscopes they have never checked, out of the many hundreds they must have seen, they publish tables for astronomical and astrological applications they have never checked— meaning internally, not empirically, which would be far too difficult—but have copied, as Gaurico, an indefatigable editor, does incessantly, and treatises on astronomy and astrology they also copied, in content even if not word for word. As Regiomontanus wrote in his criticism of contemporary astronomy sent to Giovanni Bianchini in 1464, “I cannot but wonder at the indolence of common astronomers of our age, who, just as credulous women, receive as something

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divine and immutable whatever they come upon in books either of tables or their canons, for they believe in writers and make no effort to find the truth.” And nothing had changed in the following century. One can well understand the disdain in which they and their kind were held by those few who were competent, by Regiomontanus in the fifteenth century, by Tycho in the late sixteenth, by Kepler in the early seventeenth. All one has to do is check their work. Appendix Since the longitude of the moon in the horoscope has such a large error, of nearly three signs, we show the calculation of the correct longitude, of the ascending node, and of the latitude from the Tabulae resolutae for 1436 June 6, 4:40 pm in Nürnberg, from which Königsberg in Franconia hardly differs. And because computing the position of the moon requires the mean longitude of the sun, we also show the computation of the longitude of the sun, which is correct in the horoscope. The notation is as follows: λ true longitude, λ̄ mean Table 31.1 Computation of the sun and moon for 1436 June 6, 4:40 PM with the Tabulae resolutae.

Time

Sun λs

Moon λm

Moon κ

Moon ν

1428 7y May 6d 4h 40m λ� s λA κ� c3 λ� s c3 λs λs

288;48,14° 359;18,44 149;49, 6 5;54,50 0; 9,52 0; 1;32 84; 2,25 −90;34,30 353;27,55 +0;14, 1 84; 2,25 +0;14, 1 84;16,26  24;16°

226;41,16° 198;51,53 202;48,43 79; 3,30 2;11,46 0;21,58 349;59, 6 −84; 2,25 265;56,41 171;53,22 + 2;54,20 1; 0 349;59, 6 + 2;21,47 352;20,53   22;21°

155;59,13° 274; 6,38 185;52,42 78;23,24 2;10,39 0;21,47 336;54,23 −ν + 2;54,20 339;48,43 −ν + 1;34,24 ν + 0;47,23 ν + 2;21,47 λm ν ω β

−351;39,17° −135;21, 4 −218; 2,57 −0;19  4 −0; 0,32 −0; 0, 5 −135;22,59 360 −135;23 224;37 14;37° 352;21 −224;37 127;44 +3;57° N

λ� m λ� s η� 2η� c3 c4 λ� m c λm λm

κ� c3 κ c6 c4 · c5 c

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longitude, κ true anomaly, κ̄ mean anomaly, η̄ mean elongation, ν ascending node, ω argument of latitude from ascending node, β latitude; subscripts: s sun, m moon, A apogee of sun; corrections c are designated by column numbers: c3 equation of center, c4 proportional minutes for distances between syzygy and quadrature, c5 addition to equation for least distance at quadrature, c6 equation for greatest distance at syzygy. All units of time are completed, e.g., 1428 = noon 31 Dec. 1428 = noon 0 Jan. 1429. References Cardano’s original, mistaken horoscope for Regiomontanus for 1423, actually for Peurbach, is No. 66 in Geniturae lxvii insignes casibus et fortuna, cum expositione, in his Libelli duo (Nürnberg, 1543). The correct horoscope for 1436 is No. 89 in De exemplis centum geniturarum, in his Libelli quinque (Nürnberg, 1547), reprinted in his Opera, Tomus V (Lyons, 1663). His De supplemento almanach is in his Libelli duo, Libelli quinque, and Opera, Tomus V. Gaurico’s horoscope is in his Tractatus astrologicus (Venice, 1552), f. 62v, reprinted in his Opera, Tomus ii (Basel, 1575). There are many editions of Regiomontanus’s Tabulae directionum, beginning with Augsburg, 1490. We have used an edition  with supplements and additional tables, (mostly?) copied from other sources,  by Gaurico (Venice, 1524). Standard tables of houses according to Regiomontanus’s “rational” method can be found in ephemerides and other publications beginning in the 1480’s. Gaurico’s, which as far as I know do not differ from the standard tables, are in his edition of the Tabulae directionum in part, and complete in his Ephemerides, 1534–1551 (Venice, 1533), copied from Johannes Stoeffler’s Ephemerides, 1532–1551 (Tübingen, 1531), and in his Opera, Tomus ii. The edition of the Tabulae resolutae we have used was edited by Johann Schoener (Nürnberg, 1536). Reinhold’s Oratio de Johanne Regiomontano mathematico (Wittenberg, 1549), has been translated from the reprint in Corpus reformatorum 11.817–26 by C.F. Salazar in Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. S. Kusukawa (Cambridge, 1999), 236–47. The pertinent modern literature on these subjects, as far as I know it, can be listed briefly: A. Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, ma, 1999). A. Grafton, “Geniture collections, origins and uses of a genre,” in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge, 2000), 49–68. J.-P. Boudet, “Manipuler le ciel: note sur les horoscopes d’Alexandre vi et de Jules ii établis par Luca Gaurico,” in La Fortuna dei Borgia, ed. O. Capitani et al. (Rome, 2005), 225–34. N. Popper, “The English Polydaedali: How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor

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London,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (2005), 351–81. Both of the preceding concern Gaurico’s Tractatus Astrologicus. E. Zinner, Leben und Werken des Joh. Müller von Königsberg genannt Regiomontanus, Zweite Auflage (Osnabrück, 1968); English trans. by E. Brown (Amsterdam, 1990). For explanation of the sorts of computations here, it is necessary to consult the original sources. And thanks to David Juste for sending me the horoscopes in Munich Clm 10667 and 27003 and for helpful comments on this rather strange paper.

chapter 32

Lingua Adamica and Speculative Philology: Philo to Reuchlin* Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann

Introduction: The Origin of Language and the Shift of Credibility

The Adamic language seems to be, at first glance, a very strange and merely academic subject.1 However, one has to consider that the idea of the divine origin of language was the common theory in the Western tradition from the first century ce until the first half of the eighteenth century. So, for seventeen hundred years, the theory of the Adamic language was a remarkably stable view of the notion of language, of its origin and potential. Yet, from 1740–50 onward, the question of how languages had emerged was discussed anew. The discussions of the genealogy of language led into a set of complicated arguments. Especially the question whether logic, which is evidently dependent on language and syntax, has a temporal index provoked unsolvable paradoxes. It is obvious that the question whether there was a time when logic was not valid does not make any sense. Sensualist explanations of the origin of languages may perhaps have been capable of explaining the origin and etymology of single words, but they were unable to deliver a plausible account of how syntax and logic emerged. That is why in 1766, just at the apex of the discussions about the natural origin of language, the Berlin pastor Johann Peter Süßmilch (who was, by the way, the inventor of demographic statistics before Thomas Malthus) wrote a booklet entitled Essay of a proof, that the first language had its origin not from mankind, but from the creator.2 His argument was exactly this: there is no plausible argument that can explain how logic could develop naturally. And, indeed, the discussion on the origin of languages ended without a result:

* English translation aided by Millay Hyatt and Andrew Johnston. 1 The Language of Adam/Die Sprache Adams, ed. Allison P. Coudert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999). Philologically and philosophically that book (including my own essay there) does not really meet its subject. 2 Johann Peter Süßmilch, Versuch eines Beweises, daß die erste Sprache ihren Ursprung nicht vom Menschen, sondern allein vom Schöpfer erhalten habe (Berlin: Buchladen der Realschule, 1766; repr., Cologne: Themen, 1998).

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in 1832, the Société Linguistique in Paris declared in its statutes that in the society no discussion of the origin of language was allowed. Any discussion of the subject of the lingua Adamica inevitably leads to further, even more intriguing questions: How is it possible that philosophical and theological truths lose their believability? In what way are they true? Is it plausible to say that Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy or G.W.F. Hegel’s objective idealism or Ludwig’s Wittgenstein’s theory of Sprachspiele (language games) is true? Or is it more convenient to say that they are plausible? But what can that mean? Plausibility does not mean anything more than meeting with approval. Is approval sufficient for the claim of philosophical truth, which arguments had in the past? The question that is most intriguing within the subject of the Adamic language can thus be phrased: how does the idea of the divine origin of language achieve and lose its credibility? Here I present the first part of this history of truth claims: the rise of concessions to the truth in the philosophies from Philo to Johann Reuchlin. i

Philo’s Cosmic and Earthy Adam

Few books have been provided with so many commentaries as the book of Genesis. I think it is by far the most discussed book in the world. The reason for this astonishing fact is possibly that Genesis contains an account of the coming into being of the world, of humans, of the beginning of human wisdom and of the origin of evil. All this is told in a brief, concise story, without any philosophical pretensions. Yet no other story has provoked so many philosophical interpretations. One of them is the subject of this essay, namely, the idea of the Adamic language—if such a discussion can be classified as philosophical at all; or is it merely a vain speculation? The book of Genesis has two accounts of human creation. The first is: “‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:26–27). The second account contains Adam’s creation out of dust and Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib: “Then the Lord God formed a man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). “So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he formed into a woman and brought her to the man. The man said,

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‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’” (Gen. 2:21–23).3 In between stands the passage concerning the lingua Adamica, Genesis 2:18–20: And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to the cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help to meet for him. Philo of Alexandria conceived the first and, moreover, very long-lasting interpretation of these passages. In his commentary on the book of Genesis he interprets Adam in a twofold way: The Adam created in God’s image is identified with the Platonic cosmic man, the androgynous macro-cosmos who is the archetype of the World. The spiritual Adam, “he that was after the image was an idea or type or seal, an object of thought, incorporeal, neither male nor female, by nature incorruptible.”4 In opposition to this pure, spiritual, supraindividual, androgynous Adam, the individual Adam is composed of soul and body. His body has been created, though Philo does not say from where. The Adam who was made from dust and whose wife was formed from his rib is composed of bodily and spiritual parts. This bodily Adam is the one who fell into sin. His soul, however, partakes of the eternal Father and Ruler of all: “For that which He breathed in was nothing else than a Divine breath that migrated hither from that blissful and happy existence for the benefit of our race, to that end that, even if it is mortal in respect of its visible part, it may be in respect of the part which is invisible be rendered immortal.”5 The earthly Adam is created by the hand of God. As this immediate creation, he is “a born ruler and master”6 of all beings, and, before his fall, he named all things, thanks to divine grace. In the process of naming, Adam had insight into the inner essence of things. His names denote the signatures of the things, and indicate the archetypes of 3 “Man,” “woman”: Hebr., ish, isha; Vulgate: vir, virago. 4 Philo, De creatione mundi/On the Creation, in Philo, Works, trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Withaker (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1929), 1:134. 5 Ibid., 135. 6 Ibid., 83.

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creation before they were called into extra-mental existence. Their power can be evoked again by the Adamic names. For the native reasoning power of the soul being still unalloyed, and no infirmity or disease or evil affection having intruded itself, he received the impressions made by bodies and objects in their sheer reality, and the titles he gave were fully apposite, for right well did he divine the character of the creatures he was describing, with the result that their natures were apprehended as soon as their names were uttered.7 ii

Reuchlin: De Arte Cabalistica

Not until the nineteenth century was Philo accepted as part of the Jewish tradition. Instead, from Saint Jerome onward, he was counted among the Fathers of the Church, because Philo taught a Logos theology that was close to the Gospel of Saint John and to the spirituality of Saint Paul. He was part of the Christian tradition, before the Hamburg philologist Johann Albert Fabricius destroyed the pious myth.8 a Logos Theology For the early modern era it was Reuchlin who renewed the Church Fathers’ theories and made the idea of the Adamic language a key concept of the Christian kabbalah. Reuchlin shared Giovanni Pico’s conviction that no art “makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabala.” The divinity of Christ includes the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, and his resurrection.9 To prove this idea Reuchlin used the topos of the wonderworking word, verbum mirificum: an intertwinement of Logos theology, magic of the word, and Christological prophecy. All this he merged in the Ars Cabalistica; and this Christian kabbalah had the aim of reconstructing the paradisiacal Adamic language lost with the Fall.

7 Ibid., 150. 8 Johann Albert Fabricius, De Platonismo Philonis Judaei (1693), repr. in Fabricius, Opusculorum Historico-Critico-Literariorum Sylloge (Hamburg, 1738), 147–60. 9 “Nulla est scientia, quae nos magis certificet de divinitate Christi, quam Magia et Cabala.” Johannes Reuchlin, Gutachten über das jüdische Schrifttum, ed. and trans. Antonie Leinz-v. Dessauer, Pforzheimer Reuchlinschriften 2 (Konstanz: Thorbecke, 1965), 75. The quotation is from Pico’s Apologia.

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The real wonderworking word was the divine Word, which created the world from nothing. The wonderworking word encompassed two elements: the first was the essence of all things, which were preconceived in the divine mind (the divine Sophia); the other was the force to make these ideas of the divine Sophia extra-mentally real (fiat, vehementia essendi). The Adamic language revealed insight into the divine Sophia, that is, into the essential concepts of the things, and Adam’s command over the things was the shadow of God’s might to call the things from mental into extra-mental, material existence. God’s primordial intellect and the might of his Word were united in the divine Logos in which Adam participated when he was granted the right to name God’s creatures. This is how—according to Philo of Alexandria—the prologue to the Gospel of Saint John could and should be read. Obviously, the prologue begins as an allusion to the “Bereshit bara Elohim” (In the beginning God created) of the book of Genesis. The beginning in Saint John’s gospel is analogous: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. The same was in the beginning with God.” For Christians this text could in the first instance be read only as a hint at the Holy Trinity: Christ is God’s Word, by which God becomes aware and cognizant of himself; and this reciprocity was considered as constituting Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the “Word” was intertwined with the inner-Trinitarian concept of the Deity. Secondly, the Word’s power became obvious in the creation of the world through the Word: “All things were made by Him (i.e., the Word); and without Him was not anything made that was made.” On the one hand, this verse shows the process of the Creation through the Word—and this creating Word was communicated to Adam when God revealed to him the names of the animals (Gen 2:19ff.). On the other hand, it is obvious that this Logos is also the inner-Trinitarian one and therefore the Logos of the Father. The prologue to Saint John’s Gospel has a third interpretation of the logos: ὁ λόγος ἐνσαρκóς: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Saint Paul, in the letter to the Philippians, corroborated this interpretation and concentrated the whole process of Logos theology in the name of Jesus: “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name. That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth. And that every tongue should confess, that Jesus Christ is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11). So it was obvious for Christian theologians how the “Word” was intertwined with the divine Trinitarian essence, with the process of conceiving and becoming real of the Creation, with Jesus as the Christ; and Adam participated in this process when God revealed the divine language to him.

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b Kabbalah as Symbolica Receptio: jhswh Reuchlin takes the consequences of the theology of Logos even further; he alludes to Saint Paul’s typology of Christ and Adam10 and quotes Genesis 3:22, where God says: “Ecce, Adam sicut unus ex nobis.” This verse corroborates a typological correspondence between Christ and Adam. For Reuchlin, Adam has therefore both a cosmic and a Christological meaning; and Reuchlin quotes the appropriate passage from the Onkelos, the Aramaic (Chaldaic) paraphrase of the book of Genesis: “Behold, Adam was my only begotten Son, the only one and in eternity from me.”11 In other words, prelapsarian Adam, too, participated in this inner-divine Logos of God. Human paradisiacal knowledge culminated in the Adamic language, with which Adam, the “protoplast,” named the animals (Gen. 2:18–20). “And it was incidentally this singular and astute insight with which the protoplast himself, who already was master of the world, gave a name to each and every thing that presented itself to him.”12 This human insight into the will and knowledge of God was lost with Adam’s fall. With the Fall the analogy between the Christological-cosmic and the earthly Adam takes on a new meaning. Christ, the cosmic Adam, “sicut unus ex nobis,” who was preferred to the angels, now has to be newly revealed by the angels as the coming redeemer to fallen human souls: After this unhappy fall of the race of man, God taught his angels about redemption, “the coming salvation, and through whom it would come.” Of course He only taught them as much as the angels in their status could comprehend. He showed them the presence of the one who would redeem the human race, for man’s salvation was completely predestined. And so he said: “Behold, here is that Adam who has not only existed in essence after you and the world came into existence, but who also was one of us in eternity before all creation and before time began.”13

10 11

12 13

1 Cor. 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, even also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of Kabbalah/De Arte Cabalistica, trans. Martin Goodman and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln, ne: Bison Books, 1993), 70: “Ecce, Adam fuit unigenitus meus sive unicus meus in aeternitate ex me ipso.” Ibid., 66: “Caeterum et hoc ingenii erat videlicet singularis et acerrimi cuique rei protoplastus ipse iam orbis dominus spontaneo positu nomen adderet.” Ibid., 70: “Post miserabilem itaque generis humani casum docuit angelos suos deus de restitutione aliquando futura salutis, per quem nam ventura esset, et quidem docuit non quantum ipse docere, sed quantum capere angelica conditio poterat, in praesentia demonstrans quis esse humanum genus redempturus, tunc enim praedestinata plane fuerat salus hominum, quapropter Ecce inquit hic est ille Adam qui non tantum post

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Restoring the knowledge of the redeemer is part of the divine project of the salvation of mankind after the Fall. This knowledge has its magical focus in the Savior’s name. This name is the core of the Adamic language, it is the divine name in which all wisdom and might was united, it is the aim of all attempts of the Christian kabbalah. It is the participation in the Logos, who is part of the life of the Holy Trinity, who created the Word and who became flesh.14 It is for that reason that the messianic Christological aspect is the dominant theme of Reuchlin’s kabbalah, and he has a key narrative for his access to the core of the Adamic language, the name of Christ. In the terms of his kabbalah, this means that the kabbalah of the name of God is based on the shin in the tetragram, which thereby becomes a pentagram. Reuchlin begins the story of these kabbalistic revelations with the promise of the Messiah, imparted to the fallen Adam by the angel Raziel. This is the key story of his messianic kabbalah.15 And so the angel Raziel was sent to fallen Adam, who was filled with grief, in order to comfort him. The angel said: Do not succumb to excessive pain and grief because under your guidance the human race was plunged into the worst perdition. Original sin will be atoned for like this: from your descendants will be born a just and peaceable man, a man of peace, a hero whose name exists in mercy and in the four letters i.h.u.h. He will extend his hand for the true faith and a sacrifice agreeable to God and

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orbis et uestri ortum essentialiter est, sed etiam ante omnem creationem in aethernitate fuit unus ex nobis antequam tempus fieret.” This intertwinement of Logos speculation, Trinitarian theology, theology of creation, and Christology obviously cannot be accepted by Jews. Rabbinic theology—if there exists a theo“logy”— can only accept the creation by the Word; the rest of Logos speculation is suspicious. The book of Razi’el, which is extant, consists of mystical, cosmological, and magical texts. It has nothing in common with Reuchlin’s account. It includes writings from Merkabah and Hekhalot literature and from the Sefer ha-Razim, as well as a version of the Sefer ha-Malbush. The title and the legend of the book of Razi’el presumably derive from the introduction to the Sefer ha-Razim. According to this legend, the angel Razi’el revealed the secrets (of all ages) to Adam shortly after he was driven out of paradise. In addition to these early writings, the collection also includes literature by the thirteenth-century Hasidim of Ashkenaz, primarily from the Sode Razayya by El‘azar ben Yehuda of Worms, as well as kabbalistic texts on the Sefirot and interpretations of the name of God. The book was first published in 1701, and since owning it was widely believed to keep fire and other dangers away from the home, it was reprinted many times.

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take from the wood of life, and the fruit of that wood will be the salvation of all who hope.16 This is the messianic hope, fulfilled for the Christian in the wood of the cross, but still outstanding for the Jews. The following passage is a proof of Reuchlin’s philology in addition to his speculative kabbalistic abilities. It is a bit complicated; however, it makes clear that kabbalah, too, is philology, and that it is the summit of speculation as well. It is speculative philology. Genesis 4:26 reports that Adam’s clan began calling on God’s name ‫םש‬ (shem) beginning with the birth of Adam’s grandson Enosh. “God” is written as a tetragram (‫ )הוהי‬here. The key words are shem and the tetragram: ‫הוהי םש‬. Reuchlin now highlights the special meaning of the shin in the word Shem, which is spelled shin and mem. He combines notaricon and gematria, the kabbalistic methods of interpretation. (Notaricon means that the letters of a word are read as the beginning letters of other words. Gematria is the interpretation of letters as numbers.)17 According to the notaricon method, the letters ‫ש‬ (shin) and ‫( מ‬mem) of the word ‫( םש‬shem, name) stand for the spelled out letter ‫( ןיש‬shin) and ‫( מתוך‬mitokh, “in the middle”). Thus, following the method of notaricon, Genesis 4:26, ‫הוהי םש‬, can be read: "Shin be in the middle of the tetragram.” So much for the notaricon explanation of the word ‫םש‬. According to gematria, the letter ‫( ש‬shin) has a numerical value of 300. This is also the numerical value of ‫( םימחרב‬be- rachamim, “in mercy”).18 The sound of the prophecy the angel Raziel revealed to Adam was: “A hero whose name exists in mercy and in the four letters i.h.u.h.” So when the shin, ‫ש‬, is introduced into the tetragram you have the solution of the riddle. With the shin in the middle of the tetragram, which means “in mercy,” the tetragram can be pronounced “Jehoshua,” Jesus. So the shin makes the tetragram pronounceable, which means that the shin, the symbol of Jesus Christ, positioned in the middle of the divine name ‫הושהי‬, reveals the divine mercy and grace, because through the 16 Reuchlin, De Arte Cabalistica, 72: “Missus est igitur angelus Raziel ad Adam collapsum et moerore plenum, ut consolaret eum, cui sic dixit. Ne supra modum conficiaris gemitu et molestia quod te duce genus humanum in summa corruit perditionem. Quoniam originale peccatum hoc expiabitur. Nam ex tua propagatione nascetur homo iustus et pacificus, uir heros, cui nomen continebit in miserationibus, etiam quas quatuor litteras i.h.u.h. et ille per rectam fidem et placidam oblationem mittet manum suam, et sumet de ligno uitae, et ejus ligni fructus erit omnium sperantium salus.” 17 The word notarikon derives from the Latin and means shorthand; it is a kabbalistic method of interpretation. 18 In detail: ‫( ב‬ = 2), ‫( ר‬ = 200), ‫( ח‬ = 8), ‫( מ‬ = 40), ‫( י‬ = 10), ‫( מ‬ = 40).

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shin God’s name is pronounceable. The sensus anagogicus thus is: Jesus is the way to the otherwise unpronounceable God. Divine might and wisdom are focused in the name of God, and thus the newly invented pentagram ‫ יהשוה‬is the kernel and center of the magic of the Adamic language; this is the name before which “every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Phil. 2:9–11). Reuchlin was convinced that, here, he had found the key to universal wisdom and magic. So if one tries to find a combination of Adamic language and ­philology—namely, speculative philology—one has it here with Reuchlin; and one has it on a remarkable level. Which truths does Reuchlin tell? What kind of philological proofs does he present? He transfers Philo’s concept of Adamic language into Christian kabbalah. Reuchlin does not simply copy Philo’s interpretation; he has his own much more comprehensive approach to explain Adamic language. His theology of language elevates speculative philology into the only truth that matters, the name of God himself, from which everything else is a derivative, such as the naming of the animals that Adam then performs. Reuchlin is a believer in the truth of the Bible as well as in the truth of the divine ideas directly communicated to human minds. His theological speculations and his philological skills laid the ground for the credibility of kabbalistic exegesis in the early modern era. With his kabbalistic exegesis he set the standards for anagogical interpretations, which underlay the fruitful development of Christian kabbalah for two hundred years. Not until the eighteenth century did a critical philology murder her speculative sister. But that is another story.

chapter 33

Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559–1651 Peter Stallybrass Babylon hath bene alwayes the head of all abhomination, and bicause Babylon is the greatest of all other Cities, it was good reason, that he shoulde be the head: and so much the more, that if Rome woulde so fayne be the head, it must needs be called Babylon, as in Petrarke the Poet is to be séene.1 As Tony Grafton has brilliantly shown, there was in the Renaissance a constant overlap and even identity between correctores and castigatores.2 The need to correct and emend obvious mistakes readily shaded into the desire to rewrite what was stylistically or ideologically offensive. And yet, as Grafton also argues, many perceptive scholars, Catholic and Protestant alike, recognized that to change a text from the past to suit present beliefs was always liable to give ammunition to the enemy, revealing the extent to which the corrector was in fact an insidious corruptor.3 In this essay, I want to give a brief prolegomenon to a larger project on how the Catholic expurgation of books provided an extraordinary impetus both to Protestant bibliography and to a surprising “Protestant” canon, in which Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were as important as Wycliffe and Hus. As Grafton has already shown, the magnum opus of this arsenal of “Protestant” sources was assembled by Matthias Flacius Illyricus in the Catalogus Testium Veritatis, first published in 1556 in Basel, and now better known as the Magdeburg Centuries. In fact, Flacius, Grafton notes, “deserves the honor of having set up the first endowed, full-time research institute in the history of modern Europe.”4 Flacius invokes both the letters and the poems of Petrarch as part of his arsenal: 1 Celio Secondo Curione, Pasquine in a Traunce (London: By William Seres, [1566?]), fol. 61. 2 Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 4–74, esp. 12–13. 3 Ibid., 135–42. See also Grafton’s “Correctores corruptores? Notes on the Social History of Editing,” in Editing Text–Texte Edieren, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 54–76. 4 Anthony Grafton, “Where Was Salomon’s House? Eccelesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Die Europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des

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Epistola uigesima, appellat Papae curiam Babylonem, & meretricem Babyloniam super aquas sedentem, matrem omnium idolatriarum et scortationum, cum qua scortati sunt Principes & reges terrae: asylum haeresium & errorum, &c…. In Italicis suis Rhythmis scribit inter alia sic de Roma: Schola de errori, & templo de haeresia: id est, Schola errorum & templum haereseos.5 As Flacius was well aware, Petrarch was the most virulent critic of the Avignon papacy, attacking it as “l’avara Babilonia” (greedy Babylon), “Babilonia falsa et ria” (false and wicked Babylon), “nido di tradimenti” (“nest of treachery”), “fontana di dolore” (fountain of sorrow), “scola d’errori” (school of errors), “templo d’eresia” (temple of heresy), “putta sfacciata” (shameless whore).6 But the Avignon papacy could, on one reading of Petrarch, be easily enough elided with the existing Roman papacy: had not Petrarch himself declared in Rime 139, “già Roma or Babilonia falsa et ria” (once Rome, now false and wicked Babylon)? Even before the Reformation, the three “Babylonian sonnets” attacking the Avignon papacy (“Fiamma dal Ciel,” “L’avara Babilonia,” and “Fontana di dolore,” sonnets 137–39 in Petrarch’s own numbering, to which was often added a fourth, sonnet 114, “De l’empia Babilonia”) were often written out separately. A humanist manuscript miscellany at Yale University, for instance, compiled in Florence circa 1460–70, includes the three Babylonian sonnets, detached from the rest of the Rime, with a heading in red ink: “Sonetti del Petrarcha contro alla pompa della corte di Roma.” And a Florentine manuscript from the same period quotes the first verses of the three sonnets, with a note attacking the “Babylonian” papal court.7 But it was above all after the Reformation that Petrarch, far from being a prophet of a restored Roman papacy, was transformed into its most virulent critic—a Protestant before his time. Konfessionalismus [The European Republic of Letters in the age of confessionalism], ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 21–38. 5 Mathias Flacius Illyricus, Catalogus Testium Veritatis, qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae (Basel: per Joannem Oporinum, 1566), sig. 2K4–2K4v. 6 All quotes and translations from Petrarch, unless from fifteenth- to seventeenth-century editions, are taken from Robert M. Durling’s translations in Francesco Petrarca, Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s lyric poems: The Rime sparse and other lyrics (Cambridge, ma; London: Harvard University Press, 1976). 7 Humanist Manuscript Miscellany, Florence, ca. 1460–70, Beinecke Library, Yale University, ms 873, fols. 43v–44r; “Babylonian Sonnets” (nos. 136, 137, 138), single paper leaf, Florence, dated Feb. 1467, Spinelli Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, ct, General Manuscripts 109, box 285, folder 5127a.

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Petrarch and the Index

It was in response to such Protestant appropriations of Petrarch that the Roman Inquisition, followed by the Congregation of the Index, implemented at first the expurgation of existing copies of Petrarch’s Rime and then, belatedly and with mixed success, prepublication censorship of the offending poems. The Roman Inquisition had been established in 1542 to prohibit the sale of “erroneous, scandalous, seditious, suspicious and heretical works.” It was followed in 1544 to 1559 by lists of prohibited books that were published in Paris, Louvain, Venice, Milan, Spain, and Portugal. Finally, the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books was promulgated in 1559, and in 1572, the Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books was established in Rome to oversee both prohibition and expurgation.8 Censors examined not only private and institutional collections but also bookshops and printers. In 1606, the Inquisition in Portugal organized a series of raids on bookshops, mainly confiscating “chivalric romances, books of divination [and] books on the secrets of nature.” But they also carried away with them “works by Cervantes (Don Quijote) and Lope de Vega, the Celestina, Orlando Furioso, the Cancioneiro General, Il Cortegiano and a book by Erasmus.”9 The novelty of the Congregation of the Index after its foundation in 1572 lay in the potential and often practical rigor of its procedures. When all his books were confiscated on his arrival in Rome in 1580, Michel de Montaigne was astonished at the level of detail in which they were examined. Montaigne had with him a Book of Hours, which was suspect simply because it was for the use of Paris rather than of Rome. And his history of Switzerland was confiscated. It was written by the Calvinist Josias Simler and translated into French by Innocent Gentillet, a Protestant heretic, a fact that is not mentioned in print but was probably known to the censors. Even more surprising is the level of detail at which two Roman censors read Montaigne’s own copy of the 1580 edition of the Essais. They found, Montaigne tells us, six main objections to his book, including his use of the word “fortune,” his quoting of heretical poets, and his critique of torture. To the six named objections, Montaigne adds that 8 For a good overview of the development of the Index in Italy, see Gigliola Fragnito, introduction and “The Central and Peripheral Organization of Censorship,” in Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Fragnito, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–12, 13–49. See also Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–99. 9 Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 226.

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they also objected to “some other such things” (autres teles choses). The two censors’ reports have recently come to light in the archives of the Congregation of the Index, and they show both a concerted attack on Montaigne’s attitude to suicide and fascinating disagreements between the two censors, the second criticizing the first for failing to understand Montaigne’s “ironia.”10

Censorship as a Material Practice

In the last three decades, there has been an extraordinary explosion of scholarly work on both the Inquisition and the Index that makes extensive use of archival resources as well as of the printed versions of the Index. But with the notable exception of Deirdre Serjeantson’s excellent census of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of Petrarch’s Rime at Cambridge University, there has been surprisingly little attention to what the Italian censors actually accomplished.11 Much recent scholarship emphasizes the “laxness and inefficiency” in enforcing the Index’s prohibitions, a conclusion that is largely supported by anecdotal evidence of book burnings and confiscations.12 10 Godman, The Saint as Censor, 45–48 and appendix, “In librum sermone Gallico impressum Abourdeaus 1580 auctore Michaele de Montaigne,” Documentum 32, 339–42. 11 See Deirdre Serjeantson, “Petrarch and the Early-Modern English Reader: A Case-Study in the Printing and Circulation of the Babylon Sonnets,” the Munby Fellowship Report, Cambridge Bibliographical Society. I am deeply grateful to Serjeantson for sending me a copy of her report and equally for several valuable private communications. For important exceptions to my general criticism, see Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, 1520–1580 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri Editore, 1987); Piet van Boxel, “Cardinal Santoro and the Expurgation of Hebrew Literature,” in The Roman Inquisition, the Index and the Jews: Contexts, Sources and Perspectives, ed. Stephen Wenderhorst (2004), 19–34; van Boxel, “Robert Bellarmine, Christian Hebraist and Censor,” in History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute, ed. Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 251–75; van Boxel “Robert Bellarmine Reads Rashi: Rabbinic Bible Commentaries and the Burning of the Talmud,” in The Hebrew Book on Early Modern Italy, ed. Joseph R. Hacker and Adam Shear (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 121–32; van Boxel, Hebrew Books and Censorship in Sixteenth-century Italy (forthcoming); and Arnoud S.Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), particularly 42–60. I am also indebted to van Boxel and Visser for illuminating conversations and private communications and for images of specific ways of censoring books, including sewing leaves together. 12 Christopher F. Black, The Italian Inquisition (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2009), 166.

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The latter, however, were the result of only one of the three methods of censorship that were undertaken by both the Inquisition and the Index: namely, prohibitio, the total suppression of irredeemably offensive books, authors, and publishers (for which burning was the appropriate response). But the censors had two other, quite different procedures: expurgatio, the purging of offensive passages and words prior to publication from books that could be “corrected” and the expurgation of those passages in existing books; and censura praevia, the examination of a work prior to its publication.13 The prohibitio or total suppression of books was the simplest form of censorship to implement, but its effects have been the hardest to evaluate. Part of the problem is that we have no way of knowing just how many books were burned. But there was never any danger of Petrarch’s works as a whole being “consigned to the flames.” The problem was rather how this most reprinted of Italian poets in the sixteenth century should be rescued both from Protestant appropriations and from the taint of his own “lasciviousness.” The latter was the target of the “cleansed” version of the Rime, published by the Franciscan friar Girolamo Malipiero as Petrarcha Spirituale in 1536. Malipiero transformed the poet’s love for the earthly Laura into love for the divine Virgin, systematically replacing donna with Madonna and worldly amore with heavenly Amore. Malipiero actually argued for the censoring of “lascivious” poets, who should be prosecuted with “zelo universale,” two years before the first local Index was published in Milan in 1538.14 Malpiero’s edition, however, would never displace or even seriously compete with the dozens of Venetian editions of Petrarch’s Rime that continued to be published. For Petrarch’s work, unlike that of Niccolò Macchiavelli and Pietro Aretino, was never prohibited and burned. Nonetheless, material evidence of the expurgation of copies of Petrarch’s Rime is preserved in the thousands of copies that survive in Europe and the United States. I focus here just on Petrarch’s three Babylonian sonnets, which were added to the Roman Index that was printed by Antonio Baldo in 1557. The 1557 Index was never promulgated, however, and it was not until the 1559 Pauline Index that the first serious attempt was made to insure the censoring of existing and future copies of Petrarch. Despite the greater leniency of the 13 Godman, The Saint as Censor, 3. 14 Ugo Rozzo, “Italian Literature on the Index,” in Church Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Gigliola Fragnito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 194–222, at 210–11. Ironically, “during the 1570s certain members of the Congregation of the Index deemed Petrarcha spirituale to be unsuitable for Christian ears because of its abuse of certain terms like fato and fortuna—a sad and humiliating fate for a subtle expurgator like Malipiero” (211).

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1564 Tridentine Index, the same expurgations were enforced on the Rime, as they were again in the draconian Clementine Index of 1594, which added a fourth sonnet, “De l’empia Babilonia,” to the three that were already prohibited.15 But it is astonishing that the Inquisition, later joined by the Congregation of the Index, had far greater success in censoring existing copies, even ones printed in the fifteenth century, than they did in preventing the continued reprinting of the offending poems. Deirdre Serjeantson, in her census of copies at Cambridge University, and I, in my more haphazard census of copies in us libraries, have independently reached the same conclusion: approximately one-third of all the copies that we have seen bear the traces of censorship, although later owners and above all booksellers have frequently tried with some success to remove the censors’ ink and paste-overs. If a third of existing copies of the Rime have been expurgated, then the censors were anything but lax and inefficient. The great majority of editions were printed in Venice, but Venetian publishers marketed their books all over Europe, including to Protestants, for whom the Babylonian sonnets were important testimony. Moreover, the other two major cities for the publishing of Petrarch, Lyon and Basel, took a quite different attitude to censorship. Lyon, although nominally Catholic, had “no university to impose censorship and no permanent secular or ecclesiastical courts to enforce restrictions,”16 while Basel was Protestant and had every reason to publicize rather than to expurgate the Babylonian sonnets.17 In other words, there were large areas of Catholic, as well as Protestant, Europe where there was no need to censor the 15

16 17

See Paul F. Grendler, “The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605,” Journal of Modern History 47, no. 1 (Mar. 1975): 48–65; and, on the unpublished Index of Sixtus v, George L. Hamilton, “An Unknown Edition of the Rime of Petrarch,” Italica 12, no. 2 (June 1935): 91–98: “In the Index of Sixtus v … appears the item: ‘Francisci Petrarchae il sonetto che incomincia Dell’empia Babilonia etc., con tre altri appresso, cioe etc., Fontana di dolore etc., L’avara Babilonia etc.’” (98). William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 127. Nevertheless, Pietro de Sedabonis’s 1582 Basel edition of the Rime omits the Babylonian sonnets, while publishing for the first time reformist commentary of Lodovico Castelvetro, the famous editor and translator of Aristotle’s Poetics. It is possible that Sedabonis was trying to sell his edition to Catholics as well as Protestants, since Castelvetro was expurgated by the Index only in 1596, but it seems more likely to me that Sedabonis was printing Petrarch’s sonnets from a Venetian copy-text that had been censored before publication. On Castelvetro’s reformist sympathies, see Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 147–48.

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Babylonian sonnets. If, say, only 30 percent of Venetian copies were sold outside Italy, then about half of the existing copies sold in Italy were expurgated. This includes not only the thousands of copies of the Rime that were available for purchase after the Index was established but also the tens of thousands of copies that had been printed before 1559. Expurgation was, of course, an attempt to “rescue” books that had pernicious passages from the fate of total prohibition. Yet the scale of the task meant that the combined forces of the Inquisition and the Index could get round to only a small handful of the books that they wished to preserve. Between 1564, when an expurgatory index was first started up, and 1607, when it was first promulgated, only fifty-three works out of many hundreds had received the necessary approved corrections.18 Forty-three years for fifty-three books, or just over one book a year being expurgated. And any book that had not been officially “corrected” was implicitly prohibited. So the distinction between prohibited and expurgated books was honored as much in the breach as in the observance. In this sense, Petrarch is an atypical case: he had the good fortune to be preserved by an effective and well-established decree concerning exactly which parts of his work must be destroyed in order for the rest to be preserved. But how was expurgation actually achieved? The simplest and most rapid method of expurgating an existing book was to cut out the leaves containing offensive passages. When the inquisitors visited the Serviti monastery in Brescia in 1597, the prior noted that they “deleted in many places the books printed in Basel and Cologne and also removed many leaves from numerous books in various places.”19 And one can find many copies of the Rime today in which the Babylonian sonnets have been cut out.20 Indeed, a nineteenth-century 18 19

20

Fragnito, introduction, 5–6. Luigi Balsamo, Bibliography: History of a Tradition, trans. William A. Pettas (Berkeley, ca: Bernard M. Rosenthal, Inc., 1990), 75–76. See also William Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books (New York: Knickerbocker, 1899), on Dominico Irosolimitano’s “Book of Expurgation” of Hebrew books. For an expurgated chapter of the Sefer Ha’ikkarim, Irosolimitano wrote, “it is proper to obliterate the whole chapter, or better still, it should be torn out of the book entire” (81–85, at 85); “That the ink was applied with a fine brush seems apparent from the fact that a single stroke was often sufficient to cover a word to the full height of the letter” (79); “For lengthier passages another method adopted occasionally was the tearing out of entire pages, or the cutting off of a portion of the page, but methods other than the blotting out with ink were rarely used” (79). See, for example, Il Petrarca (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1560), Beinecke Library, 1978 1417; Il Petrarca (Venice: Domenico Nicolini, 1573), Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, ny, Petrarch tiny PQ4476 .B73, copy 3; Il Petrarca (Lyon: Gulielmo Rouillio, 1574), Kroch Library, PQ4476 .B74 tiny copy 2. For earlier copies that have the leaves with the

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bookseller has written into an uncensored 1558 copy of Petrarch: “contains the whole of the Sonnets against the Court of Rome that are so often cut out.”21 While cutting out the Babylonian sonnets was indeed a regular practice by censors, it was far less common than crossing out the offending passages in ink.22 One reason for this was that the censors and above all the booksellers and owners whose books were being expurgated had a clear sense of what was permitted, precisely as an effect of an Index that detailed the passages that were not permitted. In the great majority of editions of Petrarch’s Rime, cutting out the leaves with the Babylonian sonnets entailed also cutting out permitted poems or parts of poems as well—and expurgation was designed to delete only the prohibited passages. In a copy of Petrarch’s 1508 Opera, for instance, from which the leaf with “Fiamma dal Ciel,” “L’avara Babilonia,” and “Fontana di dolore” has been cut out, “De l’empia Babilonia,” added to the Index in 1596, has also been excised, as the bookseller’s note, “f. 55 wanting,” attests. But in excising one offending poem, four other inoffensive poems on the same leaf have been cut out.23 This would indeed have been cause for complaint by the book owner. And it was to avoid such sloppy expurgation that one finds copies in which a leaf that has just two of the Babylonian sonnets has indeed been cut out whereas the third Babylonian sonnet, appearing on a leaf that has other poems that are not prohibited, has been inked over, thus preserving the other poems on the same leaf.24 Babylonian sonnets excised, see Il Petrarca (Venice: Giouan. Griffio, 1554), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, dc, 209– 269q; Rime (Venice: Nelle case delli eredi d’Aldo Romano, è d’Andrea Asolano, 1533), University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, rbc PQ4476 .B33 1533; Il Petrarcha (Venice: Bernardino de Vidali Venetiano, 1528), Huntington Library, San Marino, ca, no. 357019, and Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, *ic P447C 1528(B) (the latter with the leaf containing “De l’empia babilonia” also torn out). 21 Il Petrarca (Lyon: Gulielmo Rouillio, 1558), Folger Shakespeare Library, 209– 259q. 22 Popper similarly notes: “For lengthier passages another method adopted occasionally was the tearing out of entire pages, or the cutting off of a portion of the page, but methods other than the blotting out with ink were rarely used” (Censorship of Hebrew Books, 79), see n.19. 23 Francesco Petrarca, Opera del Preclarissimo Poeta Miser Francesco Petrarcha [Venezia: Bartholomeo de Zani, 1508], Houghton Library, *ic.P447C.1508 (A), “f. 55 wanting.” 24 See Li Sonetti, canzone, triumphi del Petrarcha (Venice: Gregorio de Grigorij, 1519), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc, ic P4468 470r 1519, vol. 1, fol. 92, where the leaf with “Fontana di dolore” and “L’avara Babilonia” (sonnets 107 and 108 in this edition) has been cut out, whereas “Fiamma dal ciel” (sonnet 106 on fol. 91v) has been inked over, because most of the leaf contains permitted texts.

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In fact, the great majority of expurgations were carried out with pen or brush and ink. But the precise methods of such expurgations are extraordinarily variable, ranging from a marginal note that the poems are “prohibited” to the full censorial apparatus. Although there is no absolute way of telling a professional censor from an amateur who makes his or her own “corrections,” let alone exactly when the expurgations were made, I will outline what I believe to be the main differences, while simply asserting that, in my view, the great majority of postpublication expurgations, whether on a manuscript from the 1440s or a printed copy from the 1570s, were done in the sixteenth century in the wake of the Index. At the most limited level, one finds readers simply putting one or two diagonal crosses through one or more of the Babylonian sonnets.25 It is impossible to tell, of course, whether such readers were expurgating their copies under duress or whether they were simply “correcting” them to conform to the church. As Ann Blair has argued, printed errata lists encouraged readers to take pen in hand and make the necessary corrections, and no doubt some conforming readers would have thought of expurgation as continuous with the elimination of other kinds of “errors.”26 Some readers even clearly marked that the poems had been officially prohibited, sometimes even naming the specific Index.27 The great majority of readers’ expurgations, 25

26

27

See, for instance, Il Petraraca [sic] (Venice: P. Gherardo, 1550), Wellesley College, Wellesley, ma, P14b, where only “Fontana di dolore” has been crossed out with a single smear of brown ink. The whole poem is easily readable and none of the other poems are crossed out. And in the ca. 1440 manuscript of the Rime and other poems at Harvard, the three Babylonian sonnets and the first four lines of “De l’empia Babilonia” have been crossed out with the thinnest of “x”s, with no attempt to make them unreadable (Rime; Trionfi, Houghton Library, ms Richardson 43, fols. 56, 71–72). Ann Blair, “Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 21–41. Il Petrarcha (Florence: Li Heredi di Filippo di Giunta, 1522), Hosi Baskin, Cumberland Rare Books, Northampton, ma, with “est prohibitum” beside each poem; I sonetti, le canzoni, et i triomphi di M. Laura in risposta di M. Francesco Petrarcha per le sue rime in uita, et dopo la morte di lei peruenuti alle mani del magnifico M. Stephano Colonna (Venice: A San Luca al segno del Diamante, 1552), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc 858P RxC copy 2, with the marginal inscription “prohibito” beside the Babylonian sonnets; Opera del preclarissimo Poeta misser Francescho Petrarcha (Venice: Augustino de Zanni, 1515), Library Company of Philadelphia, *Six Petr 872.F. (Preston), with “prohibuit index librorum” beside the Babylonian sonnets (I am deeply indebted to Stephen Krewson for drawing my attention to this copy); Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di Messer Francesco Petrarcha (Venice: G. Antonio de Nicolini da Sabio, 1541), Amherst College Library, Amherst, ma, rbr 16 1541 P4, where, although the marginalia have been radically trimmed in rebinding, a reader is

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however, have one thing in common: one can nearly always still read the offending poems, and not merely because of the fading of ink over time but also because of the thinness of the lines that only gesture at erasure.28 By contrast, the censors of the Index and the Inquisition took seriously the business of making the expurgated poems unreadable. One can see the full range of the censor’s arts in a 1549 copy of Petrarch’s Rime at the University of Pennsylvania. The censor’s ink is thick, and he uses a brush rather than a pen to make wavy lines that completely obscure the poems.29 The same kind of wavy line is used to obscure the commentary, but this was done with a pen, using a thinner, brownish ink. In addition, the censor pasted paper over the three Babylonian sonnets, and although the paper was later removed by a bookseller or owner, one can still clearly see the traces of the glue.30 Finally, the leaves with the Babylonian sonnets were closed by pasting a piece of paper round the edges of them. Again, the paper was later removed, but one can still see the glue, and the leaves, which must have been stuck together along the fore edges, were trimmed when opening them up. A point that I would stress is that in the majority of censored copies that I have seen, there have been strenuous attempts by later readers and booksellers to undo the censorship—and indeed, I have never seen a copy of the Rime in which the censor’s pasted-over paper remains intact, whereas I have seen many copies with the telltale marks of the glue.31 Pasting over a text is one of the clearest evidences of professional censorship. In a copy of Erasmus’s edition of Saint Jerome, the censor used a brush

28

29

30

31

clearly referring to the prohibition of the Tridentine Index. For a Venetian copy of the Rime expurgated by a Spanish reader, see Il Petrarcha (Venice: Domenico Giglio [1553]), Wellesley College Library, P838, where all four sonnets are crossed out with the marginal comments, “esta uedado este soneto” (fol. 138v), “este soneto esta vedado” (fol. 174), “este vedado” (fol. 174v), “este esta vedado” (fol. 176). For an interesting exception, see Il Petrarcha ([Venice]: Domenico Giglio [1553]), Huntington Library, for 1553 380596, fols. 174–77, where ink has been poured all over the offending sonnets to obliterate them. Cf. Popper, Censorship of Hebrew Books: “That the ink was [often] applied with a fine brush seems apparent from the fact that a single stroke was often sufficient to cover a word to the full height of the letter” (79), see n.19. Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di M. Francesco Petrarca (Venice: Pietro & Gioanmaria Fratelli de Nicolini da Sabio, ad instanza di M. Giombattista Pederzano, 1549), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc, ic P4468 470r 1549a, fols. 67, 86–87. Wellesley College alone has two copies of the Rime in which paper was pasted over the Babylonian sonnets but was later removed. See Il Petrarca (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari et fratelli, 1554), P1184a, pp. 98, 128, 129; Il Petrarca (Venice: Nicolò Beuilacqua, 1568), P1052, fols. 142v–43v.

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and ink to erase specific lines. But he also pasted paper over longer commentaries by Erasmus.32 Even before the promulgation of the 1559 Index, the use of paste-overs as a method of censorship had been advocated. On 3 August 1555, Cardinal Michele Ghislieri wrote to Giovan Battista Brugnatelli, the auditor to the Venetian nuncio, that a book with a preface by a prohibited author could be sold, but that the preface “should be erased, that is to say, a blank sheet of paper should be glued to it so that it cannot be read.”33 This is, in fact, a rather curious command, since it was always simplest just to cut out offensive prefatory materials. But it was an effective way of dealing with passages larger than a few lines but smaller than a leaf. Nevertheless, speed and ease were not necessarily what inquisitors were after, and it is remarkable how frequently they employed more than one method of censorship, despite the time that it took. To expurgate texts, however, censors had first to find the offensive passages. It is no coincidence that the list of prohibited books was called an “Index.” That is, it was named after the research tool that was increasingly taken for granted in the sixteenth century as a necessary part of scholarly books. For a book to be useful, one needed to be able to find one’s way around in it. So how did inquisitors find their way around in the dozens of different editions of Petrarch that they had to deal with, published all over Europe and stretching back to the 1470s? In fact, it was the indexes of the copies of Petrarch that the Catholic Index found most helpful. Typically, censors simply turned to the index of the book that they were expurgating, and, having found the offending poems and crossed them out, they then often returned to the index to cross out the references.34 32

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St. Jerome, Omnium operum ... tomi (Basel: Ex acuratissima officina Frobeniana, [1516]), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc Folio 231.2 H.1516, vols. 1–5, 9. I have also found many such paste-downs on censored Bibles, theological works, and decretals. Rozzo, “Italian Literature on the Index,” 201. In a 1472 copy of the Rime, although a later reader or bookseller has with some success washed off the wavy lines of a professional censor over the actual poems, all four of the references to the Babylonian sonnets are erased in the index (Canzoniere [Padua: Batholomaeus de Valdezoccho and Martinus de Septem Arboribus, 6 Nov. 1472]), Huntington Library, 104137. In I Sonetti le Canzoni (Venice: Pietro de Sabio, ad instantia di Francesco Rocca e Fratelli, 1549), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc ic P4468 470r 1549, one can clearly see that both the three Babylonian sonnets and the references to them in the index have been erased with brush, pen, and ink by the censor, although again someone later tried to wash off the ink (sigs. F4–F4v, R2–R2v). In the index to a copy from a different 1549 edition, a censor has effectively obscured not only the reference to “L’avara Babilonia” but also an earlier erasure and note (Sonetti Canzoni e Triomphi di M. Francesco Petrarca [Venice: Pietro & Gioanmaria Fratelli de Nicolini da Sabio, ad

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Italian expurgators were primarily concerned with heresy, but the censors did also attend to other matters, including obscenity. In the latter case, however, it is how ineffective the prohibitions were that is most striking. Rule 6 of the Tridentine Index (1564) called for the expurgation of sexually explicit texts and images, while in 1593 the Jesuit Antonio Possevino rebuked printers who used “capital letters showing naked women, and even more shameful things, by way of ornament at the beginning of chapters.” Such images, Possevino wrote, “are turning readers to what is indecent in Christian minds.” Possevino’s warnings were picked up and promulgated by the Clementine Index of 1596 in the Instructio de Impressione Librorum: “The bishops and inquisitors should take care, as by using punishments, that the printers do not include obscene or lewd images in books, including those which are usually printed in the initial capital letters.”35 But I have not seen a single copy of the Rime where such “lascivious” images, often based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, have been erased. In fact, sixteenth-century Petrarchs are full of offending capitals such as depictions of Leda’s rape by Jove in the form of a swan.36

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instanza di M. Giombattista Pederzano, 1549], University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc ic P4468 470r 1549a). More puzzlingly, in a 1558 copy of the Rime, the references to the Babylonian sonnets are underlined and marked up in the index, while the poems themselves, while marked with the “P” of prohibition beside them, are untouched apart from the underlining of the first line of each sonnet (Il Petrarca [Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1558], Folger Shakespeare Library, 243–105q). Most of this paragraph is based on the evidence and quotations of Balsamo, “How to Doctor a Bibliography,” 74. See, for instance, Il Petrarcha (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1545), Amherst College Library, PQ4476.B45; and Il Petrarca (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1558), Houghton Library, Ital 7105.58.5. Nevertheless, despite the infrequency of expurgation of decorative initials, Leda and the swan in particular does seem to have caused considerable concern. In the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1546), rbd gen 92–110, the same woodcut images of Leda and the swan as in the Rime have had the swan scratched out on fols. 3, 102v, 209v, 214, and 218v, although the swan on fol. 259 was missed by the censor. In England, the use of a similar woodcut initial of Leda in the 1572 edition of the Bishops’ Bible, along with other “lascivious” images, caused particular alarm—and the edition has since become known as the “Leda edition” (see Charles Saye, “Initial Letters in Early English Printed Books,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 7 [Oct. 1902–Mar. 1904]: 15–47, at 42). At the same time, it should be acknowledged that initials depicting satyrs and Jove and Ganymede kissing each other continued to appear in Bibles and prayer books well into the seventeenth century. For decorative initials depicting both satyrs and Jove/Ganymede, see, for instance, The Book of Common Prayer (London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1625).

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Certainly, censorship often broke down for the simple reason that there was too much to do and not enough people to do it—even when they agreed about what they should be doing. And in the conflict between the Inquisition and the Index (and within each of those two institutions), it was by no means clear just what should be censored anyway. Nonetheless, as I have noted above, postpublication censorship of Petrarch’s poems was surprisingly effective, judging by the number of surviving copies in which the Babylonian sonnets have been expurgated. At the same time, as I have also been arguing, there were radical differences between the material forms of expurgation carried out by readers, which often served only to draw attention to the offending sonnets, and the serious attempts at erasure by professional censors. The evidence for the postpublication expurgation of the Rime in sixteenthcentury Italy (and to a lesser extent in Spain) is pervasive. But so too is the impressive range of ways in which readers, printers, and booksellers found ways around the censors. In a 1513 copy of the Rime, presumably expurgated some time after the 1559 prohibition, whole gatherings (including ones with the Babylonian sonnets) have been cut out. But someone (a later bookseller?) has used another copy to supply the expurgated passages. And in this new version, a reader has marked up only three poems: the Babylonian sonnets that were meant to be erased.37 In a 1514 copy, the leaf with the Babylonian sonnets has been cut out, but a reader has added the poems in manuscript on a leaf that has been bound back into the book.38 By marking the Babylonian sonnets as prohibited, the Roman Index frequently insured that the three poems got disproportionate attention from early readers.39

Prepublication Censorship of the Rime in Venice

The most interesting example of resistance to censorship, however, came from the Venetian booksellers themselves. As I noted at the beginning, postpublication censorship was in full swing long before the Venetian printers were forced to leave out the Babylonian sonnets before publication. In fact, the Venetian booksellers had been actively resistant to interference from Rome from the 37 38 39

Li sonetti canzone e triumphi [Venice: Bernardino Stagnino, 1513], Huntington Library, 420672. Il Petrarcha (Venice: Aldo Romano, 1514), Amherst College Library, rbr Al 1514 P4. Canzoniere et Triomphi di Messer Francesco Petrarcha (Florence: Philippo di Giunta, 1515), University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc ic P4468 470r 1515; Il Petrarca (Venice: Francesco Marcolini da Forlì, 1539), Folger Shakespeare Library, 175–714q.

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1550s, when they successfully blocked the implementation of the 1555 Index and in 1559 demanded compensation for any books that were burned. And even when they submitted to the confiscation of Protestant books, they refused to give up Italian authors like Macchiavelli and Aretino. They also ignored the 1564 Tridentine Index until a new law was implemented in Venice on 28 June 1569.40 But it was only in 1573, fifteen years after the first Roman Index, that Venetian printers began to produce editions of the Rime that were expurgated in the printing house. Domenico Nicolini published an edition of the Rime in which not only the three Babylonian sonnets had been left out but also the inoffensive “Quanto più disiose l’ali spando” that immediately followed them. Nicolini gave no clue that these four poems were missing, simply renumbering the sequence as if they had never even existed.41 Nicolini was, however, the only Venetian bookseller who, to my knowledge, pursued this strategy of total erasure. He was followed in a general way by Nicolo Misserini, who in 1596 published an edition of the Rime that, in accordance with the Clementine Index, expurgated not only the usual three Babylonian sonnets but also “De l’empia Babilonia.” As in Nicolini’s 1573 edition, Misserini’s sequence has been simply renumbered so as to exclude the offending poems. But Misserini does actually note, if approvingly, the act of censorship: where “De l’empia Babilonia” would have been (sonnet 91 on p. 98), Misserini prints: “Qui manca vn Sonetto, che era scandoloso”; and by the other three sonnets (which would have been sonnets 106, 107, and 108 on p. 123), he prints: “Qui mancano tre Sonetti, leuati dalla Sacra Inquisitione.” For his 1610 and 1624 editions of the Rime, Misserini followed the same format, which was reproduced by his heir in 1638 and by the Guerigli in their 1651 edition.42 In the same year that Nicolini’s edition of the Rime was printed, Giovanni Griffio brought out his edition, “riveduto et corretto.” But his strategy was completely different. For in the act of expurgating the three Babylonian sonnets, he gave them a new prominence. First, although Griffio omitted the offending poems, he printed their numbers (“Sonetto cvi,” “Sonetto cvii,” “Sonetto cviii”), and thus, in contrast to Nicolini, clearly drew attention to the fact that the poems were missing. Second, below the first of the three missing sonnets, 40 41 42

Grendler, “Roman Inquisition,” 53, 54, 57. George L. Hamilton, “An Unknown Edition of the Rime of Petrarch,” Italica 12, no. 2 (June 1935): 91–98, at 96. Il Petrarca (Venice: Nicolò Misserini, 1596); Il Petrarca (Venice: Nicolò Misserini, 1610); Il Petrarca (Venice: Nicolò Misserini, 1624); Il Petrarca (Venice: G.M. Misserini, 1638); Il Petrarca (Venice: li Guerigli, 1651).

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he printed in large italics “Qui mancano tre sonnetti,” thus making explicit that three of the poems were missing. Third, and most significant of all, he left blank spaces after each sonnet in which the poems could be written back in.43 It is quite possible, as George Hamilton has argued, that the blank spaces in Griffio’s 1573 edition show that “the type for printing had already been set up.”44 If that was the case then the three offending sonnets in the galleys were simply replaced with blank slugs. But whatever the reason for the blank space in 1573, it cannot explain the fact that the majority of later Venetian editions are modeled on Griffio’s 1573 edition, leaving blank space for the poems to be added in manuscript.45 Strikingly, two Venetian printers continued to publish editions of the Rime with the Babylonian sonnets even after prepublication censorship had become standard. In 1574, Iacomo Vidali’s Il Petrarcha contained all four offending poems, as did Giovanni Chrieger and Marco Amadoro’s 1579 edition and Giovanni Antonio Bertano’s 1584 edition, although copies of these editions were often censored postpublication.46 But perhaps most interesting of all was the strategy that Pietro Dehuchino devised for his 1580 and 1586 editions of the Rime, in which he simultaneously accepted the necessity for expurgation while blatantly circumventing it. At first, Dehuchino’s editions look no different from the already defiant edition that Griffio had published in 1573. Like Griffio, Dehuchini noted “Qui mancano tre Sonetti”; like Griffio, Dehuchino preserved 43

44 45

46

Popper notes how often expurgation was “rendered useless,” particularly when blank spaces had been left in which Jews wrote the expurgated passages back in (Censorship of Hebrew Books, 80). Hamilton, “Unknown Edition of the Rime,” 96. The Venetian editions that follow Griffio’s 1573 Rime in marking the absence of the Babylonian sonnets (with some version of “Qui mancano tre Sonetti” and blank space in which to write the sonnets back in) include the 1580 and 1586 Dehuchino editions (see below); Il Petrarcha (Venice: Alessandro Griffio, 1581); Il Petrarcha (Venice: Alessandro Griffio, 1582); Il Petrarca (Venice: Giorgio Angelieri, 1585); Il Petrarca (Venice: Giorgio Angelieri, 1586); Il Petrarca (Venice: Marc’Antonio Zaltieri, 1592); Il Petrarca (Venice: Girolamo Porro, 1600); Il Petrarca (Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1600); Il Petrarca (Venice: gli heredi di Domenico Farri, 1607); Il Petrarca (Venice: P. Miloco, 1616). Il Petrarcha (Venice: Iacomo Vidali, 1574), although copies with postpublication censorship include Princeton University Rare Books, Princeton, nj, (Ex) 3134.1574 and Beinecke Library, Variant 1. Imperfect: leaves 356 (2X8) and 396 (3C8) wanting and bein 1997 765: Variant 2. Imperfect: leaf 388 wanting; t.p., first leaf, leaves 413, 419 mutilated; Il Petrarca (Venice: [Giovanni Chrieger and Marco Amadoro], 1579); and Il Petrarca (Venice: Gio. Antonio Bertano, 1584), although University of Pennsylvania Library, rbc ic P4468 470r 1584, has been censored postpublication and Houghton Library, Ital 7105.84* has large black-ink manicules pointing to all four of the Babylonian sonnets.

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the numbers of the missing sonnets; and like Griffio, Dehuchino left enough blank space to add each censored sonnet back in. But then Dehuchino did something else that I have never seen before: he printed the three censored poems on a leaf that was then bound in at the end of the book. That these leaves were not later additions is demonstrated not only by the fact that so many copies survive but also by the note that Dehuchino printed at the end of the leaf that contains the Babylonian sonnets: “Questi tre sonetti anderiano a carte 119” (let these three sonnets go on p. 119)—the very page where one finds “Qui mancano tre Sonetti.”47 So yes, the sonnets are missing where you would expect to find them, but no, they have not really been expurgated at all. Indeed, as in the fifteenth-century Florentine manuscripts that I mentioned above, they have taken on an autonomous life of their own. The irony was not lost on an early reader of the copy of the 1586 edition at Houghton Library, who wrote directly underneath the printed “Qui mancano tre Sonetti” on page 119: “Sono posti in fine dopo la Tavola.” Dehuchino, like the Venetian printers who continued to print the Babylonian sonnets, had powerful supporters against the implementation of the Roman Index. But there may have been an economic impulse as well. If censors or readers wanted to expurgate a copy of this edition, all they had to do was tear out the final leaf, leaving the rest of the book intact, while the copies with the Babylonian sonnets could be marketed to Protestant readers in the North. But it remains an extraordinarily defiant gesture—a gesture that, like the printed note about the missing sonnets and the blank space where one can write or paste them in again, encourages readers both to pay attention to the effects of censorship and also to reverse the process. Whether consciously or not, Dehuchino was following a strategy that Petrarch himself had outlined late in his life when he was compiling the Liber sine nomine, a collection of letters that mounted a sustained attack against the papal court in Avignon. In the preface, Petrarch wrote: unum in locum ideo conieci ne, ut erant sparse, totum epistolarum corpus aspergerent ac veri hostibus odiosum facerent…; si quis autem eradendas abiciendasque censuerit, possit facilius partem unam sine totius operis deformitate convellere. (I have assembled [the Liber sine nomine] 47

For copies of Dehuchino’s 1580 edition that have the Babylonian sonnets printed on a leaf that is bound in after the index, see Il Petrarca (Venice: Pietro Dehuchino, 1580), Houghton Library, Ital 7105.80*; Beinecke Library, Zm P339; and Kroch Library, Petrarch PQ4476 .B80 tiny. For similar copies of the 1586 edition, see Kroch Library, Petrarch PQ4476 .B86a tiny; and Houghton Library, Ital 7105.86.5*.

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in a single collection so that they would not, being scattered as they were, sully the whole body of my correspondence and make it hateful to the enemies of truth… Then, too, if anyone decides that they should be obliterated or suppressed, he can the more easily destroy them as a unit without wrecking the entire collection.)48 Petrarch is, of course, talking about the sacrifice of a whole book to protect the larger project of his works. But we might think of Dehuchino as implementing a miniaturized version of Petrarch’s procedure: in the case of Dehuchino’s Rime, one would only have to tear out a single leaf to save “the entire collection” of poems. However dramatic Dehuchino’s strategy was, we should not underestimate the significance of the other nine editions that simply left blank space where the missing sonnets should have been. In a copy of Giorgio Angelieri’s 1586 edition at Beinecke Library, an early reader has written into the blank space: “Questi Sonetti copiati da sono prohibiti, e li proibi Clemente nel 1596” (These sonnets copied by are prohibited, and [Pope] Clement prohibited them in 1596). The note is immediately followed by manuscript copies of the prohibited poems.49 Indeed, the very existence of the blank space testifies both to the power of the Roman censors eventually to enforce their decrees in Venice and to their relative powerlessness in having the expurgations carried out in the manner that they would have liked. As Piet van Boxel has brilliantly shown, the censors were already fully aware of the danger of allowing the places where a text had been expurgated to remain blank. Jewish editors and their printers had often made use of blank space as a form of self-censorship, deleting explicitly anti-Christian passages. But, as van Boxel notes, “the gaps that they left in the text were nothing but a subversive way of alerting the reader to what had been omitted, thus giving him the possibility of restoring the original text by hand, should he wish to do so.” This is still demonstrable in the present: when van Boxel first gave his paper as a lecture at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, he showed slides of censored passages from David Kimhi’s commentary that had been left blank. Sol Cohen, who was attending, filled the blank spaces in from memory every 48

49

Petrarch’s Book without a Name: A Translation of the Liber sine nomine, ed. and trans. Norman P. Zacour (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973), 27–28. See also Ronald L. Martinez, “The Book without a Name: Petrarch’s Open Secret (Liber sine nomine),” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 291–300, at 292. Il Petrarca (Venice: Giorgio Angelieri, 1586), Beinecke Library, 1978 1416.

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time they appeared. Indeed, the prohibition on anti-Christian texts may well have intensified these short passages: when Cohen learned them, they were always accompanied at the end by a spit of disgust at the Edomites (= Christians), who were now doubly denounced, first by the texts themselves and secondly for the attempts of the “Edomites” to erase the texts. Robert Bellarmine, the leading Counter-Reformation theologian, was well aware of the danger of such blank spaces. Van Boxel notes that “in an undated autograph manuscript, … probably written between 1578 and 1583, Bellarmine strongly counseled that no blank spaces should be left after inadmissible words or expressions had been removed from the text.” He wrote: These spaces contain somehow all the earlier errors, since they remind readers that something was eliminated. The same can be said about incomplete sentences, which remain after the errors are removed. Therefore, if books are to be corrected in a reliable way, one should make sure that no trace of the removed errors remains.50 Bellarmine thus attacks the very strategy that the Venetian printers adopted to deal with the prepublication censorship of Petrarch’s Rime, a strategy that “remind[ed] readers that something was eliminated.” In 1593–94, Sir William Slingsby was touring Italy. In Siena, he purchased a copy of Giorgio Angelieri’s 1586 edition of Il Petrarca. He wrote on its title page: “Sienna Maij 12°: 1593” and “pretio ijs iijd WSlingisbie.” Slingsby’s copy was a fairly typical example of the Rime that had been expurgated prior to publication: “Qui mancano tre Sonetti” was printed where the Babylonian sonnets would have been; the numbers of the missing sonnets were preserved; and there was ample blank space to reverse the censor’s expurgations by writing the sonnets back in again. Which was precisely what Slingsby did, in the neat italic hand that he had been cultivating in Italy in contrast to the more typical secretary-hand scrawl in which, like most English men, he regularly wrote. But in the case of Slingsby, one begins to see just how much could depend upon defying the censors. A year after he had bought his copy of Il Petrarca, Slingsby was in northern Italy on his way back to England, traveling with a group that included an English and two Dutch merchants. In Como, which was under Spanish rule, all four of them were arrested on the justified suspicion

50

The whole of this paragraph is a paraphrase of one of the major arguments in van Boxel’s “Hebrew Books” and in the lecture that he delivered at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies on 2 Oct. 2013. I am also deeply grateful to Sol Cohen, Senior Researcher at the Katz Center, for his illuminating insights.

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that they were all Protestants. The two Dutch merchants pretended that they were from Catholic Antwerp, but they failed to convince their captors and, “such was the terrour of our seuerall vile dongions and base prisons” that they finally confessed to being Dutch. For his part, Slingsby successfully pretended that he was Scottish. He was released from prison but was put under house arrest, from where he wrote to his brother Henry in England on 30 May 1594: By others falts, thoughe not without my owne misfortune I have beene with my hole companye in the castel of Como within the state of Mylan, and under the Spanyerdes, heare is with me Seath Cox his brother [i.e., Seth’s brother] the Merchant, whose letters and writings and bookes of merchandize was the occasion of all our trobles: by them he is discouered for an Inglish man, the other towe being of holand thowghe before the[y] tooke Antwerp for their protection, yett such was the terrour of our seuerall vile dongions and base prisons, as they confessed themselves of Holand, so as they thre are deteyned in streight prison, my selfe stand constantlye to it that I am a Scotish man and a Scoler, and to them a stranger, except for the companye of this viadge, and I haue so mutch preuayled with the Gouernor heare a great Merchese, called Signor Oratio Palauicino, as he him selfe beleueth me, who after he had serched my Budgetts and portemantiwayes, not finding anye thing that might giue cawse of suspition against me, he hayth of his honorable fawour delyuered me of the castell and comitted me to my In with resonable lybertie… [M]y lying in the poasts howse and speciallye this night hayth giuen me greate comoditie to conueie these lettres, without the priuitye of any one: Thus much to sertifie you, of my unfortunate estate, wish me well and hope the best, for I doubt not by the grace of God to be delyuered forth of theare fingers.51 As Montaigne discovered when he entered Rome in 1581, the detection of Protestant heresy began with a search of one’s papers and books. In the case of Slingsby’s party, it was the “letters and writings and bookes of merchandize” belonging to Seth Cox’s brother that were “the occasion of all our trobles.” The governor of Como, Oratio Palavicino, himself searched Slingsby’s “Budgetts and portemantiwayes,” which presumably contained his copy of Il Petrarca. The fact that Palavicino did not find “anye thing that might giue cawse of suspition against me” suggests that Slingsby had not at that point written the expurgated Babylonian sonnets back into his copy. He would have 51

The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby…and Extracts from Family Correspondence and Papers, ed. Rev. Daniel Parsons (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1836), 243–44.

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had difficulty in doing so in Italy anyway unless he could have found an uncensored copy with which to collate his own expurgated copy. In England, by contrast, Slingsby would have found a plethora of versions of the Babylonian sonnets—precisely because they provided ammunition against the papacy. The year after Slingsby was arrested in Milan, the London bookseller William Ponsonby published Two Discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin, vvhich are wanting in the thirde and fourth bookes of his Historie, in all the Italian, Latin, and French coppies heretofore imprinted; which for the worthinesse of the matter they containe, were published in those three languages at Basile 1561. And are now for the same cause doone into English. The title of Ponsonby’s edition is itself an extraordinary bibliographical excursus: this edition of Guicciardini’s history makes available in English what has been prohibited in all the Italian, Latin, and French editions printed in Catholic countries—but was indeed printed in Protestant Basel in 1561. Even more striking is what appears on the verso of the title page of this edition of Guicciardini’s Two Discourses: namely, Petrarch’s three Babylonian sonnets, which, like the third and fourth books of Guicciardini, had been expurgated. In a copy of Guiccardini’s Two Discourses at the Folger Shakespeare Library, an early reader has added the following manuscript note in the margin beside the Babylonian sonnets: The new imprinted Petrarcha hath not theis verses in the Italian, but thei ar in the olde printed booke, wherof I have one, and which Docter Phillip Bisse hath them in his booke.52 Bisse’s “booke,” containing the Babylonian sonnets, is almost certainly his copy of the 1581 Basel edition of Petrarch’s Opera, which he donated to Wadham, where it still resides.53 52

53

Francesco Guicciardini, Two discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin, vvhich are wanting in the thirde and fourth bookes of his Historie, in all the Italian, Latin, and French coppies heretofore imprinted; which for the worthinesse of the matter they containe, were published in those three languages at Basile 1561. And are now for the same cause doone into English (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), Folger Shakespeare Library, stc 12462 copy 2. Bisse, like Thomas James, seems to have had a special interest in undoing the expurgations of Catholic censors. In 1612, James observed that the 1560 Venetian edition of the works of Tostatus Abulensis has been “diligenter expurgata,” but he goes on to note an earlier, unexpurgated edition, most volumes of which “are in that well furnished Library of Master Doctor Bisse at Welles” (James, “Table of the Diuinity Books,” in “The iiii Part. Contemning and condemning of Fathers,” in A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome [London: Printed by H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, 1612], 99–100).

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It was, I believe, the expurgation of Petrarch’s Babylonian sonnets in Italy that radically reshaped Petrarch’s reputation in Protestant Europe and above all in England. Today, literary scholars rightly enough think of Petrarch as the love sonneteer of freezing fires and living death. Yet for all Petrarch’s direct and indirect effect on English poetry, explicit allusions to his love poems are surprisingly rare. In their magisterial Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475–1700: A Compendium of Printed References and Allusions, Jackson Boswell and Gordon Braden trace 375 references to the 366 Rime, an average of about one reference per poem. But in fact, more than a third of all the references (130) are to the four Babylonian sonnets (including “De l’empia Babilonia”). By contrast, the four most popular love poems (sonnets 132 and 134 and the long songs 23 and 105) are referred to a mere 34 times. In other words, if Petrarch was certainly the poet of Laura and love in Renaissance England, he was even more the poet of Babylonian captivity and the Roman Antichrist.

chapter 34

Campanella and the Disciplines from Obscurity to Concealment Kristine Louise Haugen Two enormous facts define Tommaso Campanella’s career. First, he spent twenty-seven years in a Neapolitan prison following a political conspiracy that would have driven the king of Spain from Calabria. But after his release in 1626, Campanella enjoyed an astonishing reversal of fortune, first performing astral magic in Rome with Pope Urban viii, then publishing a long string of works in Paris, where he had arrived on good terms with the king of France.1 Second, Campanella wrote a vast number of books in all fields, the bulk of them while he was imprisoned. Often, his apparent aim was to extirpate Aristotle comprehensively and replace him with a heady new science. But he also composed political tracts, apocalyptic prophecy, poems, and, his most famous work today, a utopia called the City of the Sun, a theocentric and egalitarian republic where there are no prisons.2 Campanella achieved European celebrity, and today distinguished scholars make continuous new discoveries about his biography and writings.3 The force of Campanella’s personality is so implacable that we might forget the obvious. How could he produce this torrent of paper, including relatively 1 On the broader climate of unrest in Naples, see Rosario Villari, Un sogno di libertà. Napoli nel declino di un impero 1585–1648 (Milan: Mondadori, 2012), 27–66. Urban viii: D.P. Walker, Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 206–9. 2 Tommaso Campanella, La città del sole. Testo italiano e testo latino, ed. Norberto Bobbio (Torino: Einaudi, 1941); Campanella, La Città del Sole: Dialogo Poetico/The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 3 Any study of Campanella’s career must be founded on Luigi Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella. La sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, 3 vols. (Naples, 1882), and Fra Tommaso Campanella ne’ Castelli di Napoli, in Roma ed in Parigi, 2 vols. (Naples, 1887); and Luigi Firpo’s Bibliografia degli scritti di Tommaso Campanella (Torino: V. Bona, 1940), in which conjecture must be distinguished carefully from information. For current studies, see the invaluable Germana Ernst, Tommaso Campanella: The Book and the Body of Nature, trans. David L. Marshall (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010); John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1997); and the journal Bruniana & campanelliana, in publication since 1995.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_035

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technical works, while confined to a prison? Like many other early modern prisoners, Campanella had books, paper, and visitors, and he passed his manuscripts outside for circulation and printing.4 Sometimes we know the details of these stories; sometimes only his publications hold the traces. Early in Campanella’s imprisonment, so his cellmate testified in 1606, a woman who was also his lover delivered astrological books and manuscripts on a rope: an ephemerides, an almanac, and “Cardano.”5 The books he composed, like the Sense in Things, the Atheism Defeated, and the Defense of Galileo, were studded with patristic, scholastic, and classical references, most reliably to the great Dominican Aquinas but also to more recondite sources like Marcus Terentius Varro and Hermes Trismegistus.6 Campanella gave lectures in “all sciences” to visitors, and he sent lists of his works to popes and cardinals appealing for his release.7 Above all, Campanella gave books to Gaspar Schoppe and Tobias Adami to be circulated outside the prison; Adami printed a series of these in Frankfurt, confirming Campanella’s international fame.8 Still, there were books and books. Campanella’s prison library can never have resembled the libraries of the monasteries where he spent the 1580s and 1590s as a young Dominican, often in penitential confinement. And during his trials from 1599 to 1602, he was deprived of books altogether, apparently a searing experience. He reported that he wrote at least three works during this time without books: seven books of philosophical poems, 150 political Aphorisms in Italian, and a few pages on earthly kingdoms and the end of the world that he later expanded into the arresting Prophetic Articles.9 This situation held no 4 For two prisoners from England, see Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Kristine Louise Haugen, “Thomas Lydiat’s Scholarship in Prison: Discovery and Disaster in the Seventeenth Century,” Bodleian Library Record 25 (2012): 183–216. 5 Amabile, Congiura, 3:589. 6 Varro and Trismegistus: Campanella, L’Ateismo trionfato, ed. Germana Ernst, 2 vols. (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2004), 1:44, 45. Further: Campanella, Del senso delle cose e della magia, ed. Germana Ernst (Bari: Laterza, 2007); Campanella, De sensu rerum, et magia (Paris, 1637); Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo, ed. Michel-Pierre Lerner, It. trans. Germana Ernst (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2006); Campanella, A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 7 Lectures: Campanella to Francesco Barberini, Rome, 21 Feb. 1627, in Campanella’s Lettere, ed. Germana Ernst (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 293, no. 72. Popes: Lettere, passim. 8 Collected in Campanella’s Opera latine Francofurti impressa annis 1617–1630, ed. Luigi Firpo, 2 vols. (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1975). 9 Campanella, Sintagma dei miei libri e sul corretto metodo di apprendere, ed. Germana Ernst (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2007), 42–46. See Campanella, Aforismi politici, ed. Antimo Cesaro

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romance for Campanella. At the end of his prophetic arguments, he demanded, “Give me books and I will demonstrate everything visibly and cite passages, and I will prove my expositions from Theology. I declare that the proceedings are invalid if I am not given books.”10 Campanella’s earlier writings had been voluminous and digressive, but now, out of necessity, he was fiery, concise, and clear.11 The story told here is a story about Campanella’s ways of speaking. Because he was a seventeenth-century Dominican, that is also a story about his relation to his books. In his earliest works, before the imprisonment in Naples, Campanella was a bibliomaniac who staggered beneath the weight of his citations; as he demolished opponents word by word, he sometimes forgot to say what he thought. But during his long imprisonment, after his time in the bookless dungeon, he discovered two very different styles of argument. First, he learned to speak boldly in his own right, organizing his arguments into small, easy pieces and relegating both opponents and authorities to the margins. We will see this transformation in his works on natural philosophy and poetics before and after his imprisonment. Second, Campanella’s new confidence seems to have carried him a step further for the special purpose of writing about politics. In the texts he published to surround and defend the Latin City of the Sun, his method was concealment, deploying the same techniques of quotation, logic, and debate that had earlier escaped his control. There was a decided purpose. Where his utopia in Latin presented a flagrantly counterfactual world while assimilating it to the surprising model of republican Rome, Campanella’s Latin Politics and political Questions proceeded to the negative case against contemporary reality. The Questions’ misrepresentations of Aristotle, blatant contradictions, reminders of Campanella’s biography, and suspiciously alluring statements of the enemy’s position all point to a consistent and simple attack on the legitimacy of kings and their methods. Decades ago, Leo Strauss spoke of philosophers in repressive societies who obscured indiscreet meanings by these and other

(Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1997), which circulated in manuscript; Campanella, Politica in Aphorismos digesta, in Philosophiae realis libri quatuor (Paris, 1637), 4th pagination, 113–44, earlier published in Realis philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatuor (Frankfurt, 1623), 367–414; Campanella, Articuli prophetales, ed. Germana Ernst (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977); and for the early document, Amabile, Congiura, 3:489–98. 10 Amabile, Congiura, 3:498: “Dentur libri, et omnia demonstrabo ad oculum, et citabo loca, et monstrabo expositiones meas ex Theolog.a—Protestor de nullitate actorum si non dentur libri.” 11 Campanella had books by 1603 or 1604: Amabile, Congiura, 3:589, 2:361.

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techniques, to be excavated laboriously by the most attentive readers.12 And in the nineteenth century, Campanella’s great biographer Luigi Amabile wrote vividly about disguise and attentive reading in the Questions and the City of the Sun.13 If we apply care and circumspection to the Politics and Questions, first published in 1637, they confirm that the corollary to Campanella’s ideal republic was the demolition of kingship and economic inequality, an aggressive line that gives a large new dimension to the important question of his engagement with Niccolò Machiavelli.14 Under these circumstances, Campanella’s lifelong attacks on the political methods of The Prince seem like only the beginning of a far more sweeping program. It might appear outmoded to open Campanella’s seventeenth-century printed books, especially in Latin. For the last four decades, the world has been galvanized by new editions of Campanella’s manuscript writings, led by the brilliant Germana Ernst, discoveries that may have seemed to curtail the interest of his printed publications. These editions have called attention to a younger Campanella, typically writing in Italian rather than Latin, and sometimes saying things crucially different from what we knew before.15 Yet Campanella authorized every printing during his lifetime, and his European celebrity was largely owing to his aggressive use of the press and of Latin; these publications were anything but unintended. It has also been a traditional and highly demanding challenge to explain Campanella’s theology and philosophy in a cohesive way, and above all to determine whether his beliefs changed.16 But 12

On methods of “writing between the lines”: Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24–26, 29–32; also Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 36. 13 Amabile, Congiura, 2:390. 14 For arguments that Campanella was attracted to elements of Machiavelli’s thought, see, e.g., Vittorio Frajese, Profezia e machiavellismo. Il giovane Campanella (Rome: Carocci, 2002); Luca Addante, “Campanella e Machiavelli: indagine su un caso di dissimulazione,” Studi storici 45 (2004): 727–50; and Marta De Conti, “Progetto, modello, e messaggio rivoluzionario. L’opera di Tommaso Campanella tra Utopia e Realismo,” Rivista di scienze della comunicazione e di argomentazione giuridica 5 (2013): 84–102. For views of Campanella as fundamentally anti-Machiavellian, see the further literature cited in Ernst, Tommaso Campanella, 59n.33. 15 For example, Campanella, Articuli prophetales; Monarchie d’Espagne et Monarchie de France, ed. Germana Ernst (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); Campanella, L’Ateismo trionfato; Campanella, Senso delle cose. 16 For discussion: Luca Addante, “Campanella e l’Ateismo trionfato: du paradigme au texte original,” Les Dossiers du Grihl, Les dossiers de Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Libertinage, athéisme, irréligion. Essais et bibliographie, online since 29 Jan. 2008, http://dossiersgrihl.revues. org/2112, accessed 24 July 2014.

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Campanella strove to establish an intellectual career that could not be predicted or pinned down—necessarily, because he aimed to supersede Aristotle’s authority in nearly the entire universe of knowledge.17 This is one reason why a new direction is added when we ask about Campanella’s methods of argument, when we distinguish between the myriad disciplines in which he published, and when we investigate these over time. On the one hand, he was a singular prisoner and prophet; on the other hand, he was an early modern intellectual who shared techniques, methods, and aspirations with many others.

From Bibliomania to Authority: Science and Poetry

One reason why Campanella repeated himself may have been that as time passed he thought he could do better. He certainly did do better. Among the many works he produced before his Neapolitan imprisonment, two stand out because we can see especially easily how they were later transformed. His Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses was printed in 1591; its subject was nature, including the soul, but its singular feature was its crushing masses of quotations seemingly designed to defeat an opponent rather than enlighten readers.18 Campanella aimed to defend the philosophy of Bernardino Telesio against an attack by the Aristotelian Giacomo Antonio Marta, which he did by unraveling Marta’s book word by word and simultaneously canvassing the opinions of philosophers who were wrong, potentially useful, or simply curious. This, of course, was the method of Aristotle or a conventional commentary. But Campanella’s desire to display a broad expertise rarely rose to the level of a claim, while it also competed dangerously with the job of demolishing his adversary. He had not yet seen how to turn his bibliomania into an engine of philosophical destruction.19 The less prepossessing Italian Poetics was also written with books at hand between Campanella’s imprisonments during his vexed career as a young Dominican. He composed this book in 1596 and addressed it to the literary 17

For comparatively wide-ranging discussion of Campanella and Aristotle, see Headley, Tommaso Campanella, 145–79; on natural philosophy, Michel-Pierre Lerner, “Campanella, juge d’Aristote,” in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance, Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 335–57. 18 Campanella, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, ed. Luigi De Franco (Naples: Vivarium, 1992); on its bookishness, Ernst, Tommaso Campanella, 8–9; and Headley, Tommaso Campanella, 18, noting misrepresentations in Campanella’s accounts of his sources. 19 For a penetrating account of Campanella’s approach, see Lerner, “Campanella, juge d’Aristote,” 337–42.

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cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, thus avoiding philosophical controversy and also invading the world of intellectual fashion.20 Campanella began with a visible and simple argument—that poetry must teach morality, an idea undergirded by a theory of “conservation” drawn from Telesio’s science of nature. But his exposition devolved rapidly into a descriptive taxonomy: the qualities of the epic hero, ways to subordinate episodes to the main plot, and more. And Campanella nearly always assembled these lists from the same narrow range of works: Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. On the whole, no strong impression arises that he cracked the spines of any books. So the Italian Poetics shows a moment not of struggle with authorities, but of a seeming belief that prestige was won through naked information. After 1600, when Campanella had entered the Neapolitan prison and later regained access to books, he wrote a series of profoundly different works. Suddenly, he apparently cared whether his audiences believed him—and cared whether his audiences understood. The early modern prison was highly permeable to visitors and a space of sociability in its own right, making it seem likely that Campanella freed himself from his books in order to communicate, not only to express himself. The Atheism Defeated and Apology for Galileo show this new approach, dispatching one subject at a time and showing the connection of each idea to a single great argument.21 The change is seen even more graphically in Campanella’s new book on science and the cosmos, On the Sense of Things and on Magic, finished by 1607, and in a pyrotechnic Latin Poetics printed in Paris in 1638.22 Slowly and clearly, Campanella pressed exactly one point at a time, and he deployed his few quotations only for real support. He also made the revolutionary innovation of dividing his books into short chapters, each devoted to a single claim. Campanella had now become a persuasive force who could go beyond harassing Aristotle’s frontiers and seek to replace him wholesale. Many contemporaries evidently appreciated the subversive science of the Sense of Things, which attributed sensation to trees and stones and castigated 20 Campanella, Poetica, in Opere letterarie, ed. Lina Bolzoni (Torino: Unione tipograficoeditrice torinese, 1977), 335–456. On the composition of these works, Ernst, Tommaso Campanella, 7–8, 40; and further on his associates and books when he composed the first, Campanella, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, 7–9. 21 The Defense of Galileo was composed in 1616; the Ateismo trionfato was sent to Schoppe for printing in 1607 (Amabile, Congiura, 2:400). 22 Campanella, Senso delle cose and Poeticorum liber unus, in Opere letterarie, 457–663. The Senso delle cose was sent to Schoppe for printing in 1607 (Amabile, Congiura, 2:400), and the printed Latin Poetics cites a Jesuit relation published in 1631, showing that the text was at least revised after Campanella’s release: Opere letterarie, 510.

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Aristotle point by point.23 The surprising number of books Campanella could cite makes us remember that he was befriended by local Dominicans and others, accounting for his continuing and possibly rotating supply of books.24 Here, along with short chapters, Campanella was highly economical in citing both authorities and his enemies, who were now Aristotle and Galen. But clearly, with these books in hand, he could have cited very copiously had he chosen to. His newly elegant reasoning implied a creative austerity even under the bibliographic conditions of a prison. While it is hard to know his exact purpose, it seems clear that he was deliberately cultivating a new image of philosophizing with few citations—certainly, his persistent habit was to manage what others saw and thought of him. The effect of his new method was to stress his argumentative brilliance and force while also, perhaps, whispering of a certain deprivation or injustice. The Latin Poetics, composed in prison, quietly rested on the same theories as before, but Campanella’s arguments had changed from a pot of beans to a sumptuous meal. He took leisurely aim at a series of propositions from Aristotle; only after raising suspenseful questions did he introduce his own philosophy as the necessary answer. Now, rather than asserting baldly that the purpose of poetry must be moral teaching, Campanella took the opposite direction, asking: Can pleasure be the purpose of poetry? What is pleasure, a means or an end? Can pleasure be separated from the good? In the crowded universe of Italian poetics, Campanella had fought his way to the level of Francesco Patrizi’s 1586 book, full of aggressive, organized, and passionate argument against Aristotle—with the exception that historical erudition and Greek were never in Campanella’s line, so that in this tournament he relied on his wits alone.25

Beyond Clarity

So in the cases of science and poetry, the experience of prison showed Campanella how to argue with compelling force, largely because he now made himself the master and not the servant of his authorities. But when it came to 23 24

25

For the many surviving manuscripts, Senso delle cose, 1:xxx–xxxi. For Campanella’s friends in Naples, see, e.g., Carlo Longo, op, “Fr. Tommaso Campanella e la Congregazione de Propaganda Fide,” Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 68 (1998): 347–67; and Giorgio Fulco, “Il fascino del recluso e la sirena carceriera: Campanella, Ottavio Sammarco e Napoli in una scheggia inedita di carteggio (dic. 1614),” Bruniana & campanelliana 1 (1995): 33–56. Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Della poetica… La deca disputata (Ferrara, 1586).

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politics, Campanella developed a different voice that revealed itself only through discrepancies, logical faults, and surprises. Clearly, this voice would have been legible to smaller audiences ready to scrutinize his works intensely, either by inclination or on personal advice. There is little evidence about chronology, but we notice that Campanella’s clandestine voice reached its most detailed and systematic realization in his Latin publications. So, for example, the Italian City of the Sun (1607 or before) is simply a strange theocracy whose egalitarian population awaits the end of the world; the Latin City of the Sun (1613 or before) conspicuously resembles the Roman Republic. And if the Italian Aphorisms (1603 or before) seem occasionally designed to cause discomfort, their Latin successor, the Politics (1613 or before), seems designed to cause unrelenting alarm.26 In fact, many or any of Campanella’s expository works might be read with political concealment in mind.27 The case study chosen here is the complete set of Latin political writings published in 1637: the City of the Sun, the Politics expanded from the Italian Aphorisms, and the political Questions. While the Latin City of the Sun and Politics exert their subversive effects more or less in discrete bits, like archipelagoes of surprise, the political Questions resemble billowing clouds of mephitic vapor with their unrelenting discordances, misattributions, and autobiographical allusions. We know they were prepared with deliberation, because Campanella wrote in his account of his works that “we have improved” the Questions “and made them more fit for the press” after they were omitted or withheld from the publication of the City of the Sun in 1623.28 We need not suppose that every contemporary reader was ensnared by Campanella’s indirect devices. Prison had made him a celebrity, and these political publications can be read simply for their aura of spirited intellect and 26

Campanella reported that the Italian Aphorisms were composed without books toward the beginning of his imprisonment: Sintagma, 44. A search of the prisoners’ cells in 1601 turned up only prohibited manuscripts (Amabile, Congiura, 2:231–34), but a fellow prisoner reported that by late 1603 or early 1604 Campanella had various books (n. 11 above). The Italian City of the Sun was sent to Gaspar Schoppe in 1607 (Amabile, Congiura, 2:400); the Philosophia realis, containing the Latin City of the Sun and the Politics, was given to Tobias Adami in person probably in 1612 or 1613. See Luigi Firpo, “Tobia Adami e la fortuna del Campanella in Germania,” in Storia e cultura del Mezzogiorno: studi in memoria di Umberto Caldora (Cosenza: Lerici, 1979), 77–118, esp. 86–87, 92–93. 27 The Spanish Monarchy should certainly be examined; in the 1637 Philosophia realis, the ethical Questions appear to attack kingship under the guise of contesting Machiavelli; the economic Questions should also be examined. 28 Campanella, Sintagma, 48: “sed nunc meliores illos [libros] fecimus ac digniores qui praelo tradantur.”

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subtlety. But passage after passage also shows how readers willing to draft themselves into an attentive inner circle could enter and sustain a different conversation.

The Latin City of the Sun as a Roman Republic

There should be no controversy in pointing out that Campanella’s utopian city counted as a republic according to ancient and early modern political theory: it was neither an absolute kingship nor an aristocracy. For Aristotle, a ”republic” (politeia) was likely the best government in real states, and it mixed oligarchy and democracy, like the Spartans’ constitution. Meanwhile, Machiavelli in the Discorsi specifically compared the early Roman Republic to Sparta, although he thought it contained an element of kingship as well as aristocracy and democracy.29 But in the Italian City of the Sun, sent out of the prison in 1607, Campanella seems to have cared more about his solar priesthood and communitarian life than any organized political theory. The only such thing comes when the traveler asks whether the city is a monarchy, aristocracy, or “republic.” Clearly, the last option means “constitutional government”—for Aristotle, the better form of democracy.30 But the host’s reply does not clarify much, as he explains only the Solarians’ community of goods, which is shared with the guardians in Plato’s antidemocratic Republic. In fact, Campanella in Italian referred to his state in all ways; the word republica appears only seven times in the text, many not even referring to the City of the Sun. However, by the time he wrote his own Latin translation, printed in 1623, Campanella was announcing the republican or antimonarchical credentials of his state in deafening tones. He used the word Respublica more than four times as often as in the Italian, a total of twenty-nine instances.31 This was achieved both by translating words like città, publico, and commune as Respublica and, even more often, by inserting totally new passages about the Solarians’ Respublica. For example, where the Italian City of the Sun said that the Solarian 29 Aristotle, Politics 4.8–10; Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Francesco Bausi, 2 vols. (Rome: Salerno, 2001), 1:26–29 (1.2), a view earlier rejected by Aristotle (Politics 2.6). 30 Campanella, Città del sole (1941), 62. For politeia in the sense of “constitutional government,” the form better than democracy, Aristotle, Politics 3.7. Giving the Italian version to Gaspar Schoppe in 1607: Amabile, Congiura, 2:400. 31 This figure is for both the 1637 and 1623 translations; the inserted and translated passages are the same.

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army was ready to attack “any enemy of reason, for such are not worthy of being human,” in the Latin translation the same army attacks the enemies of “the Republic and Religion,” who are again unworthy of humanity. In other words, the Solarians are not motivated now by a faculty of the mind but violently committed to the right kind of state. More than this, Campanella has ventilated one of his favorite themes: religion (the right religion) is the indispensable foundation for a state (the right state).32 Campanella also pushed the Solarians’ claims beyond abstract models into the fertile historical ground of ancient Rome. A few Roman customs had already appeared in transmuted form in the Italian City of the Sun, like the spolia opima given to the soldier who killed a tyrant in battle, and Roman military triumphs. But when he converted his book into the language of the Romans themselves, Campanella crammed it with terms from the law and government of the Roman Republic. Once again, he both translated from the Italian and inserted completely new passages. Now the City of the Sun has triumvirs, the three priests ranking below the Sun; ubiquitous magistratus (offiziali); a Roman dictator, the priest charged with war; a retributive lex talionis; and even Roman baths that in Italian had been simply “ancient.”33 It seems likely that Campanella had not thought of this republican line when he composed his book in Italian. Rather, the evocations of Rome seem to have come later, a humanist layer of argument and allusion superimposed on a prophetic utopia. Nonetheless, bearing in mind the argument that early modern republicanism often centered on freedom from oppression, and that the Italian City of the Sun already stressed the iniquity of tyrants, at least one decisive consequence followed from giving the Solarians’ city the trappings of ancient Roman political life: however the enigmatic Sun might best be described, he is definitely not a king.34 (We recall that he remains in office until a wiser candidate is found.) So even before Campanella supplemented the Latin City of the Sun with the Politics and Questions, its somewhat improvised Roman story was already intertwined with a suspicion of tyrants and monarchs that places Campanella, however surprisingly, in the mainstream of contemporary political thought. 32 Campanella, Civitas solis, in Philosophia realis (1637), 4th pagination, 156: “Nec abstinent a laedendo hostem Reip. & Religionis, humanitate indignum”; Città del sole (1941), 79. 33 Ibid., 151ff. (triumviri), 147ff. (magistratus), 156 (dictator), 161ff. (lex talionis), 161 (baths); also tribunal, 158. 34 For only one classic argument about republicanism and negative liberty, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. vol. 1.

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Aphorisms from Italian Expertise to Latin Theory

Almost no one to my knowledge has suggested an important connection between the Italian City of the Sun and Italian Aphorisms, which shows yet another element of Campanella’s later strategy in Latin: interrelated works that depend on the reader’s memory and reflection for their full effect.35 The 150 Italian Aphorisms are attractive, easy to read, and sometimes daring. Likely they have been valued precisely because they rely on no one else’s authority, and because we can hear them as a single and direct voice dispensing an expert mix of theory and information in the style of Machiavelli’s Prince. But the Aphorisms contain their share of contradictions, ambiguous words, and repetitions with noteworthy variations.36 One repetition seems especially substantial because it emanated from a prison in Naples, which was of course a Spanish holding. Campanella has raised the subject of colonies, and first the reader is told that an official or ruler who “sends out colonies must be slightly less wise (poco meno savio) than the legislator.” Seemingly to clarify that this is not really an insult to the colonialist, legislators are immediately defined as men on the order of Moses or Muhammad who found empires with new laws and religions. On the other hand, only four aphorisms later, it seems that an insult actually was made, because now Campanella hastens to erase it—unless, of course, he is denying that any modern-day colonialist can ever reach the standard of a Moses: “Whoever establishes new colonies must be as wise as a second legislator.”37 Overtly, the new assertion “as wise” has removed any impression that colonization might be unwise, and retrospectively it may even give the first aphorism a new, innocuous meaning, approximately “hardly less wise.” The king of Spain was the spectacular colonizer of Europe, and Campanella often referred in his other writings to Spain’s dealings with the New World natives. But clearly, the strategy here consisted of raising startling questions that go away as soon as the reader blinks, so that both Neapolitan readers and Campanella could have absolutely denied any subversive intent.

35 36

There is brief discussion in De Conti, “Progetto, modello, e messaggio rivoluzionario,” 91. For ambiguous words, e.g., the requisite qualities for priests in Aforismi, 66 (no. 80): “liberali, ma più in sé avari e verso gli altri prodighi; …verdadieri, ma più presto superstiziosi cioè stretti in ogni puntiglio di verità, che mendaci; fedeli, ma più tenaci che mutabili….” 37 Campanella, Aforismi, 58 (no. 49): “Chi manda colonie, poco meno savio che il legislatore esser deve”; 59 (no. 53): “Dunque chi fa nuove colonie, quanto un secondo legislatore deve esser savio nelle dette cose.”

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To create the Latin Politics, Campanella surrounded the Italian aphorisms with explanation and theory, divided them into sections, sometimes reordered them, and added tranches of new material that can seem either radically beneath his intelligence or deserving of searching attention. In his chapter on religion as the cause of states, Campanella repeated an apocalyptic prediction from an Italian aphorism: all known religions and states would be changed into new forms until at last they reached their natural condition, namely, rule by a priest acting as king along with a senate. At the end, he now added a single sentence: “From whence it is clear that with this end in view the Spanish Monarchy is joining together the world by the consent of God.”38 It is possible that in the clumsiest way he meant to say that the Spanish Empire was destined to preside over a pacified globe. But the kings of Spain were not priests; absorbing another monarchy, like England, would not alter its form; and why should Spain remain unchanged when Campanella had specified that all countries would change government and religion? If Campanella had normal powers of logic, we should consider a meaning congruent with his frequent imaginings of the end of the world: Spain was aggregating earthly kingdoms precisely so that they could be destroyed all at once, in other words, hastening its own immolation. There are also two ways to understand a biblical verse that Campanella inserted in this aphorism in italics, although without citation (Proverbs 28:2): “Because of its sins the earth now has many kings.”39 Benignly, at the end of time there will be only one king; also possibly, kings have been inflicted on the earth like a vicious pestilence, however well deserved. Such aphorisms in the Politics could become the foundation for complicated and elusive anti-monarchical arguments in the Questions, on the side being opposed or on the side ostensibly being advocated by Campanella. The disputation form let him address just the subjects he wanted to, calibrating his tone between respectability, silence, and occasional discordance. This method was poorly suited to explaining what he thought a good state should be, but it left abundant clues about the iniquity of kings, tyrants, and slavery.

Asked and Answered

As a young man, Campanella had struggled to wield the techniques of disputation. Now his competence was clear, and the high regimentation of the form 38

Ibid., 70 (no. 92); Campanella, Politica, 133: “unde videtur Hispanorum Monarchia ad hunc finem congregare Mundum nutu Dei.” 39 Campanella, Politica, 133: “Nam propter peccata terra nunc multi Principes eius….”

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only called attention to his deviations from it. First, in the traditional style, Campanella presented the objectionable, typically antiroyalist, view of his opponent, subdivided into many numbered parts and subparts; then he countered with his own ostensible views, also conscientiously organized and numbered. Yet strange and troubling opinions emerged like sharp rocks out of a stormy surf, both while Campanella’s opponent was speaking and while he was supposed to be defending kings. We can only investigate these conditions by taking seriously our moments of surprise and reflecting on them in detail, just as Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando propped open the mouth of the orc by entering with both his anchor and his boat. Here I present a few passages from the second Question, but all of the Questions that are not direct commentaries on the City of the Sun reward study. Campanella’s second Question purported to attack Aristotle and Machiavelli, but its very title seems calculated to raise discomfort: Whether it follows from Aristotle’s doctrine that all the princes of the world are tyrants, as Machiavelli claims they are, and as Muhammad appointed them to be. Also, whether they are all tyrants correctly speaking. Also, whether according to Aristotle all peoples are slaves and deserve to be treated as slaves. Also, whether this is done rightly and according to nature.40 Campanella, of course, would take the side that these ideas were false. But to attribute them to Aristotle’s Politics was to render them so impossible that no rational interlocutor would advance them. In that work, Aristotle distinguishes sharply between kings and tyrants; and far from speaking of kings’ subjects as slaves, he envisages populations of masters and slaves in every city. So who actually would claim that all kings were tyrants, and why? The question could only be heightened when Campanella laid out the specific position he meant to demolish. The provocative words were in fact a heady blend of Aristotle on natural slavery and Campanella’s own Latin Politics, which, to readers who remembered that work, sharply called in question the idea that Campanella was really on the attack.

40 Campanella, Quaestiones super tertia parte…quae est de politicis, in Philosophia realis (1637), 4th pagination, 87: “Utrum ex doctrina Arist. sequatur, omnes principes mundi esse tyrannos, quemadmodum cupit eos esse Macchiauellus, & Macometus instituit. & an vere tyranni sint omnes. & utrum omnes populi sint serui, & tanquam serui tractari debent secundum Arist. & an hoc sit bene, & secundum naturam.”

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To begin with, it’s obvious that all Princes are tyrants if you believe Aristotle. For it’s obvious from what he says that all mastership (dominium) that’s against nature is tyrannical: but according to Aristotle, all mastership in which the Prince does not excel all his subjects in virtue by as much as the male excels the female, and a father his children, and the soul the body, and humans the beasts, is against nature. But therefore it results that no Prince is tyrannical, because he would excel his Subjects in virtue as much as the soul does the body, and humans the beasts. And so he would need to be of a superior species, and therefore they are all tyrants.41 Manifestly, the logic was slippery: legitimate princes were no tyrants because they belonged to a superior species, but in fact there were no such princes. But misattribution to Aristotle compounded the effect of this vertiginous reversal. In fact, Campanella was taking Aristotle’s infamous doctrine of natural slavery and inflating it into a political proposition, with some help from himself. Aristotle had indeed said in the Politics that some people are suited by nature to be slaves, if they are as inferior to other people as the body is to the soul, as animals are to humans, and as women are to men.42 But Aristotle had been speaking about the household and about classes of people in the city, not about kingship and who is fit to take part in government. Not only was Campanella transmuting the entire subject of natural hierarchy to government; he also inverted every proposition to describe the superhuman superiority of the ruler. And as the reader of the full physical volume recognized, Campanella drew this discussion of the superhuman ruler directly from his own Latin Politics, where its implications were manifestly antimonarchical. There, he said that a good king must excel his subjects as though he belonged to a different species, or were an angel, or Christ; otherwise he rules only by chance—in other words, not by nature.43 As Campanella continued his case about tyrants, he sheltered again under the mask of Aristotle, casually remarked that all kings must use the methods of 41

Ibid., 88: “Primo palam est quidem omnes Principes esse tyrannos si Arist. credas. Nam ex dictis patet, omne dominium contra naturam est tyrannicum: at secundum Arist. omne dominium, in quo Princeps non superat virtute vassallos omnes, quantum mas faeminam, & Pater pueros, & anima corpus, & homo bestias, est contra naturam. ergo tyrannicum constat nullum esse Principem, quia Vassallos superet virtute quantum anima corpus, & homo bestiam. sic enim oporteret superioris esse speciei, ergo omnes sunt tyranni.” 42 Aristotle, Politics 1.5. 43 Campanella, Politica, 118, Sec. 5.

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tyrants, and ostensibly defended censorship and even prison.44 Before he directly quoted Aristotle on the methods of tyrants, Campanella remarked that Aristotle had also recommended these specific devices: The first is to make the Subjects ignorant by prohibiting schools, and books of deep learning, and persecuting wise men with false accusations on charges of impiety and lese majesty.45 Heresy and lese majesty were of course precisely the charges in the trials against Campanella, and we are constantly learning more about the complex censorship of his books.46 While Aristotle had indeed spoken of prohibiting education as a way for a tyrant to quell dissent, all the rest here was redolent of the Counter-Reformation, implicating the papacy as well as Spain in the tyranny of princes. When Campanella turned to demolishing these and other accusations against kings, his first arguments were terse and weak.47 He picked up steam when he reached the tyrannical arts, but his defense was curious. On the one hand, he claimed, such arts were scarcely found in Christian kingdoms. On the other hand, conceding something but still sounding orthodox, he argued that tyrannical arts were justified: “Nor does the fact that some books are prohibited mean that anyone intends to keep the populace ignorant, but rather to guard against heresy and evil morals that are often introduced by such books.”48 On still another hand, he went on, now acknowledging dissent and applying to censors a mildly surprising simile: “The censors of new books bark like dogs who don’t recognize their master in the night; later they know him and lie still.

44

All kings must use tyrannical methods: Campanella, Quaestiones, 88; cf. Aristotle, Politics 5.10. 45 Campanella, Quaestiones, 88, Sec.  6: “prima [via] est facere Vassallos ignorantes prohibendo scholas, & libros altae doctrinae, prosequendo calumniis viros sapientes, quasi impios, & maiestati insidiantes.” Aristotle had described executing potential leaders and banning common meals, education, dinner parties, and gatherings of any kind: Politics 5.11. 46 See Germana Ernst, “Tommaso Campanella fra censura e autocensura. Il caso dell’Atheismus triumphatus,” in Praedicatores, inquisitores. iii, I domenicani e l’inquisizione romana, ed. Carlo Longo (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 2008), 499–525. 47 Campanella, Quaestiones, 93. 48 Ibid., 94, Sec. 6: “Neque quia libros quosdam prohibent, intendunt efficere populum ignorantem: sed cauere ab haeresi, & prauis moribus, qui per tales libros saepe introducuntur.”

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Atheists and Aretinos will complain. Good men love such confinement.”49 The leap from censorship to confinement, indeed prison (custodia), suddenly recalled the longer list of tyrannical persecutions that Campanella had put in Aristotle’s mouth before. With that association in place, the suggestion that virtuous men loved to be imprisoned seemed perceptibly wanting as a defense. Some of Campanella’s arguments emerged, like these, from widely disparate hints that the reader must assemble from remembered episodes of disquiet. At other times, a single intervention was enough, for example at the very end of Question 1, article 1, when Campanella abandoned the form of the disputation completely. Not responding to anything in the adversary’s case, he spontaneously raised the subject whether a king might be removed from his throne for under-performance. Citing history and patristics, Campanella answered yes. Then, apropos of even less, he continued to the subject of regicide, with an addendum on who is our master and who is our peer: Note that it is not permissible for a private person to kill a king who has become a tyrant except by a decree of the Senate, as Nero was condemned. But if someone seizes the throne by force or conspiracy, like Catiline or Oliverotto da Fermo, he can be killed in the act by anyone with great justice. In the text on kingship and mastership we spoke confusedly, [meaning to say] that preeminence is called mastership, and therefore we call our elders masters (dominos), although they are our friends.50 The putative correction at the end was flagrantly provocative, because in fact Campanella had said clearly above that brothers and friends call each one another “masters” simply to show respect, never mentioning elders—in other words, that in daily life our “masters” are our peers. Also relevant to cashiering a king, in the same passage above he had observed that the power of political masters is limited by the laws.51 For the attentive reader, then, what could it mean to remember that our “masters” are our equals in the very next sentence 49

50

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Ibid.: “Reclamant censores librorum nouorum, ut canes non agnoscentes in nocte herum. postea tamen cognito acquiescunt. conqueratur Atheus, & Aretinus. boni enim viri hanc custodiam amant.” Ibid., 75: “Nota quod non licet priuato homini occidere Regem, qui factus est Tyrannus, nisi declaratum a Senatu: damnatumque ut Nero. Sed si quis inuadat regnum vi, aut dolis ut Catilina & Liuerotus, potest in ipsa inuasione a quocunque occidi iustissime. Nos in textu de Regno, & dominio confuse locuti sumus, ut dominium dicit praeeminentiam, unde maiores dominos vocamus, quamuis amicos.” Ibid., 73, Sec.  1: “nec solum vocantur Domini, sicut mutuo fratres, & Amicos Dominos vocamus ob reuerentiam, sed etiam ob potestatem illam licet limitatem lege….”

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after Campanella asked whether it is legitimate to kill our masters? He allowed no certain conclusion to be extracted—on the contrary, he denied the very conclusion to which he was actively drawing attention. But his reader could freely choose to think that Campanella did believe the idea of mastership was a pure convention, making it follow that every kingship was an act of “force or conspiracy” that might merit regicide. Such suggestions, so heavily cloaked in what we would call plausible deniability, seem perhaps designed less to persuade the innocent than to reach silent sympathizers who similarly felt forbidden to speak aloud. Did Campanella’s seventeenth-century readers actually study his books in this way? In an age of Tacitean political philosophies of secret motivation, Neostoic philosophies of political survival, and general theories of political dissimulation, the question is serious.52 The field is open for research.

Which Machiavelli?

A generation ago, when great historians viewed Machiavelli by default as a republican, Campanella’s familiarity with Machiavelli along with his hostility to princes would have been easily explained.53 But today, when fewer than 10 percent of the entries in a Machiavelli bibliography of the last fifteen years deal with republicanism or the Discorsi, the idea needs spelling out.54 Machiavelli was the author of a celebrated work on republics, far from a unique political vision because the republic was a living type of state; his precise relation to earlier Italian theorists of republics is a matter for discussion.55 In other words, the argument that Campanella couched hermetically, and in destructive form, was the stuff of respectable discussion elsewhere in Italy, especially when

52

On dissimulation, Rosario Villari, Elogio della dissimulazione. La lotta politica nel Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1987). 53 Naming only the most groundbreaking contributions, see Skinner, Foundations, 1:157–82; and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1975). 54 On the history, William J. Connell, “Repubblicanesimo e Rinascimento (nella storiografia anglofona del secondo Novecento),” Archivio storico italiano 161 (2003): 343–62; see Alessandro Arienzo, “Per una rassegna bibliografica degli studi machiavelliani (2000– 2014),” online since 22 Nov. 2014, https://unina.academia.edu/AlessandroArienzo, accessed 20 Mar. 2015 . 55 Machiavelli, Discorsi; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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confined to positive debate over the nature and institutions of the republic itself. Campanella had contemporaries. Why, then, did he launch spectacular attacks on Machiavelli throughout his life? No doubt they were well received by his ecclesiastical readers, but we should notice that uniformly these attacks centered on the prescriptions for vile behavior found in The Prince. Some contemporary anti-monarchical readers found a solution to the problem about which kind of state Machiavelli actually supported, a problem that likely does not go away because many scholars today choose not to engage it or assert that his career involves no contradiction. These seventeenth-century readers thought that The Prince, in the guise of a manual of advice, had the true purpose of exposing and indicting the behavior of kings. One was the Protestant Alberico Gentili, who defended Machiavelli as a scourge of tyrants in 1585; another was Campanella’s own associate Gaspar Schoppe, who argued that when people learned about tyrants’ methods, they hated them and refused to subject themselves.56 Conceivably, Campanella himself was measuring his language carefully in phrases such as a typical one we find about dissimulation in the Questions: “Machiavelli gives this law.”57 These may not be violent misreadings of Machiavelli. Campanella himself referred directly to the Discorsi for the argument that the people are more just and hold to treaties better than princes do, adding that they believe the laws they hear every day in the temples. In general, as Leo Strauss noted long ago, Machiavelli praised republics in the Discorsi but never praised kingship in The Prince. Strauss also pointed out that the Discorsi distinguish plainly between kings and tyrants, but The Prince does not, opening to a reader like Campanella the inference that their behavior is hardly different.58 But above all, Campanella’s tireless defense of religion as the foundation of any state, which has often been taken as an indignant reply to The Prince, showed deep agreement with the Machiavelli of the Discorsi. There, Machiavelli declared that the earliest laws of Rome could not have endured without Numa Pompilius, the second king, who established the city’s religion.59 56

Alberico Gentili, De legationibus (London, 1585), 109–10 (3.9); Gaspar Schoppe, Paedia politices (Milan, 1624), 42–44. 57 Campanella, Questions, 88: “hanc legem etiam Machiauellus dat.” 58 Ibid., 92, elaborating on Machiavelli, Discorsi (Discourses), 1.58–59; Strauss, Machiavelli, 25–26. For Strauss’s view, see Harvey C. Mansfield, “Strauss on The Prince,” Review of Politics 75 (2013): 641–65. 59 Machiavelli, Discorsi (Discourses), 1.11–14. For the context, see Mark Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004): 863–96.

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A republican Machiavelli is one whom Campanella could have taken as s­eriously as other contemporaries did. But whether Campanella wrote out of  a  reasoned interpretation of Machiavelli’s works—which seems quite ­possible—or more opportunistically, out of risky and seething political convictions, a vital conclusion is clear. We should not always treat Campanella as a solitary meteor whistling across the seventeenth-century firmament. He shared with others his aspirations, methods, experiments, and passions. Indeed, at precisely the moments when his concerns were joined with others’, he may have been at his most daring and provocative.

chapter 35

Spirits in the Laboratory: Some Helmontian Collaborators of Robert Boyle William R. Newman Introduction It would be natural and obvious to imagine that the term “research” in its modern sense denoting an experimental, scientific endeavor had Baconian roots, given the immense prestige that the famous Lord Chancellor bestowed upon experiment in seventeenth-century England. In reality, however, “research” in the sense of experimental science finds its origin in the work of men who were self-styled followers of the chymist Joan Baptista Van Helmont, a figure far less lauded in the history of experimental science than Bacon.1 Even the most 1 “Research” of course had an older literary sense, as recorded in the online Oxford English Dictionary. The first recorded instances of the English terms “research” and “researcher” in the sense of experimental, scientific research and its practitioners both stem from chymical writers in the 1670s. The two words emerge in an exchange about the analysis of spa waters between William Simpson and Daniel Foote, two followers of the famous Flemish chymical writer Joan Baptista Van Helmont. Foote and Simpson speak respectively of “chymical research” and “chymical researchers,” meaning those who use laboratory-based methods to analyze spa waters. See the online Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “researcher,” accessed 12 May 2015. This oed entry references William Simpson, Hydrological essayes (London: Richard Chiswel, 1670), 120. A consultation of Simpson shows, however, that he is merely quoting (or rather misquoting) the words of another Helmontian chymist, Daniel Foote. Simpson’s source, a letter on spa waters by Foote published in Philosophical Transactions, no. 52, 17 Oct. 1669, 1054, reads as follows: “Whether by Chymical researches it was ever yet or can be found, that such waters as the above-said, ever yielded either a Vinous or an Acid, or any other sort of Spirits, that were either inflammable, or un-flammable, or flying over the helm from the fire.” In his Hydrological essayes Simpson or his printer has replaced “researches” with “researchers.” For Daniel Foote, see Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 22, 60, 171, 260, 274, 381; and Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 149. Foote translated The Talking Deaf-Man (London, 1694), a work by John Conrade Amman, and acted as an amanuensis for Francis Mercurius Van Helmont’s memoirs. His involvement in Helmontian medicine appears inter alia in the manuscripts of George Starkey that he copied, for which see William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_036

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famous Baconian of the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle, drew heavily on the chymical theory and practice of Van Helmont and his English followers.2 And yet the Helmontians’ “searching into nature’s secrets” contrasted radically with Bacon’s public dismissal of supernaturally derived knowledge; in fact, Helmontian research was initially perceived as a religious calling.3 This religious component was not identical with the time-honored topos of the scientist-as-priest because of his abilities in natural theology or even as a servant of mankind. Rather, the Helmontian chymist was a figure with a hot-line to God. He could in some cases have visionary dreams in which he communicated with spirits sent from on high, or his research could benefit from seeming “accidents” that were actually the result of divine and providential planning. In either case God and his minions were never far from the laboratory, a fact that was advertised both by Van Helmont himself and by various followers. The role of the Helmontian researcher as an elite servant of the lord was a significant feature in the annals of seventeenth-century science. Nonetheless, it is a serious mistake to pigeonhole seventeenth-century chymistry as a straightforward “narrative of quests for revelation.”4 A scholarly overemphasis on revealed knowledge not only underestimates the degree to which chymical practitioners were aware of the need for experimental and theoretical labor on their part; it also reduces the complexity of the chymist’s religious sensibilities to a single, often unwarranted focus. Additionally, it overlooks the use of religious motifs in the chymist’s attempt to establish and broadcast his or her Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1994), 272. For William Simpson, see Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), passim. See also Antonio Clericuzio, “Carneades and the Chemists,” in Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79–90. 2 Newman, Gehennical Fire, 53–83, 170–95, and passim; William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 207–314. 3 For Bacon’s public dismissal of dream revelations, see Janine Rivière, “‘Filthy Dreamers and Scurrilous Dreams’: The Politics of Dreams in Seventeenth-Century England,” Proceedings of the University of Queensland History Research Group 12 (2001): 15–22, at 15, 18. As Rivière points out, Bacon’s private views did not mesh squarely with his public pronouncement. 4 These words belong to Brian Vickers, “The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy,” Annals of Science 65 (2008): 127–56, at 136. See my reply to Vickers’s critique, William R. Newman, “Brian Vickers on Alchemy and the Occult: A Response,” Perspectives on Science 17 (2009): 482–506. For a more general response to views like those of Vickers, see Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. W.R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2001), 385–431.

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expertise, a theme that has significance for the modern field of “studies in expertise and experience,” or see.5 I will illustrate these points here by examining four chymists, three of whom were united both by their collaborations undertaken with Robert Boyle and by their strong connections to that most godly outpost of belief, New England: George Starkey, William Avery, and his son Jonathan Avery were medical practitioners and residents of the area around Boston. The fourth, Daniel Coxe, was a physician to several British monarchs who corresponded extensively with Boyle in the 1660s. As I will show, these researchers, all either outright followers of Van Helmont or at least strong sympathizers with the Helmontian reform of medicine and chymistry, held a wide range of opinions about divine interaction in the laboratory, and yet the views of all four can be shown to mesh squarely with those of Van Helmont. Joan Baptista Van Helmont was a member of the Flemish nobility whose familial estate, near Brussels, lay in the Spanish Netherlands. Primarily under the influence of Paracelsians such as Petrus Severinus, but also with the aid of earlier Catholic devotional writers such as Thomas à Kempis and Johannes Tauler, Van Helmont devised what I have elsewhere called an “oneiric epistemology.”6 Applying traditional Neoplatonic elements to faculty psychology, Van Helmont argued in his massive Ortus medicinae that the human mind contains not only a rational faculty but also an intellectual one. The intellectus, unlike the ratio, has a sort of instantaneous apprehension of things. The ratio, to the contrary, works by the subordinate process of step-by-step discursive reasoning. Hence the intellectus mirrors the way in which God’s own mind works, and is the true image of God in man, not the ratio. This kinship is above all apparent during what Van Helmont calls “intellectual visions,” that is, dreams providing intellectual illumination.7 In one dream, for example, Van Helmont finds himself in a royal court where the King, seated on a brilliantly lit throne, is a personification of pure Being itself, in other words God. His footstool is Nature, and the Porter of the hall is Intellect. The Porter silently gives Van Helmont a little book, which the latter at 5 See Eric Ash, “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State,” in “Expertise and the Early Modern State,” special issue, Osiris 25 (2010): 1–24. 6 Newman, Gehennical Fire, 67. 7 In a dream from 1610 Van Helmont sees himself asleep in a dark hall. At his left hand is a vessel containing some liquid. From the flask, Van Helmont tells us, a voice arose. “The voice of the liquor said to me,” he continues, “Don’t you want honors and riches?” Van Helmont then sees a brilliant light pouring through a chink in the wall, which makes him forget the material promise of the flask. Van Helmont, Ortus medicinae (1648), “Imago mentis,” p. 269, no. 13.

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once chews up and swallows. Having eaten the book, Van Helmont finds at once that his head has become transparent, signifying a newfound understanding of the natural world. A spirit from the King’s dais then hands him a flask containing a substance called Ignisaqua—a mixture of fire and water. Van Helmont immediately knows the powers of all simple medicines in the world, and the dream continues for some twelve pages with a laborious recitation of these medical simples. Yet throughout this lesson in pharmaceuticals Van Helmont keeps returning to the Ignisaqua, which is the key to “opening” the latent powers of medicines. As it turns out, Ignisaqua is a synonym for Van Helmont’s famous alkahest, a universal dissolvent that was supposed to reduce any material to its primum ens or first essence—one might almost say its “active ingredient.” This marvelous desideratum, according to Van Helmont, would eventually dissolve any material into water, but if the solvent was removed before such a final dissolution had been reached, it would leave the material in its first essence.8 In Van Helmont’s dream we have an example that might at first seem to conform to the claim that alchemy was a “narrative of quests for revelation,” however unlikely it may be that Van Helmont actually received his twelve densely written pages of recipes while asleep. Yet despite the emphasis on such “intellectual revelations” in Van Helmont’s work, dreams were by no means the only conduit by which God could communicate with the worthy chymist. There were other modes of divine communication that were less direct, and for some practitioners less theologically troubling, as we will see. The most developed account of these is found in a shorter work of Van Helmont’s, his De lithiasi, a treatise on bladder stones that was first published in 1644. Here Van Helmont describes an event that most modern scientists would call a fortunate accident, but that he views as an act of divine intercession. After performing a long series of experiments on urine in order to determine the cause of lithiasis, Van Helmont was forced by family business and the approach of Pentecost to leave his laboratory for two weeks. When he returned, he found that some urine that he had left to putrefy and had then partially distilled had deposited an unsightly stain on an expensive glass vessel. He was infuriated to find that no normal solvents, including powerful acids, could remove the deposit. In frustration, he distilled off the remainder of his putrefied urine out of the stained flask. Amazingly, the freshly distilled urine dissolved the deposit, 8 Ibid., “Potestas medicaminum,” pp. 470–83. For references to Ignisaqua and the alkahest, see esp. p. 471, no. 3, p. 474, no. 24, p. 480, nos. 42–44, and p. 483, no. 66. For desiderata in the seventeenth century more generally (though without reference to Van Helmont), see Vera Keller’s interesting recent article, “Accounting for Invention: Guido Pancirolli’s Lost and Found Things and the Development of Desiderata,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 223–45.

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which led Van Helmont to think that he had discovered a means of safely dissolving bladder stones. For him, the entire episode, including the initial forced absence from his laboratory, was an example of divine Providence: Led thus by the divine will [divino ductus nutu] (which others might think a chance event), I found part of that which I had long been seeking anxiously with much expenditure. Hence I praised God, that he had given understanding to one who was small and poor. For if He had not commanded that I be called away from the work, nor detained me in festivities until the Duelech congealed on the receiver, and if the receiver had not been so clear and precious, indeed, if I had completed the whole operation in one go, then I would have done all in vain. Therefore God has considered the needs of mortals, nor has He spurned the prayers of the lowly.9 Here God did not reveal the secret of curing lithiasis by means of a vision or dream. Instead, he helped the chymist along in a much more subtle way, by providing the seemingly accidental circumstances that led to the discovery. Van Helmont’s two-week removal from the laboratory was part of a divine plan leading to a cure for the stone. In order to capitalize on this godly intervention, however, Van Helmont had to work with his hands and apply his own ingenuity. This is what he means elsewhere, when he says that God sells his secrets “for sweat.” The chymist is not a passive recipient of divine largesse, but an active coworker who is able to act on God’s hints because of his own expert knowledge and labor. We are clearly not in the realm of visionary revelation here at all, but in that of divine Providence, an idea that pervades early modern thought in general, and is by no means restricted to alchemy.

George Starkey and Robert Boyle

Let us now pass from the noble Bruxellian to his most famous English-speaking acolyte in the seventeenth century. I have in mind George Starkey, born in Bermuda in 1628 and educated at Harvard College, who practiced medicine in the Boston area for four years after his graduation and then immigrated to England. Within six months of arriving in London in 1650, Starkey had begun an intimate friendship with a man who would soon become one of the most celebrated writers of the scientific revolution, Robert Boyle. But this was not 9 Van Helmont, De lithiasi, in Opuscula medica inaudita (Amsterdam, 1648), no. 33, p. 29, as quoted in Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 203.

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merely a friendship. A number of Boyle’s manuscripts and work diaries testify to the serious impact that Starkey had on his early development, as scholarship of the last decade and a half has revealed. Indeed, it is now an established fact that Starkey was Boyle’s chymical teacher. One of Boyle’s manuscripts, written in Starkey’s hand, and now part of the Locke collection in the Bodleian, even contains Boyle’s interleaved queries among Starkey’s chymical directions and recipes, clearly reflecting their relationship of pupil to master.10 In addition to these remnants of Starkey among Boyle’s papers, we also have an extensive cache of letters written by the young Harvard graduate to Boyle that have recently been edited from their originals in the Royal Society. These letters are highly detailed and sophisticated accounts of Starkey’s chymical practice, explained in terms of Helmontian theory. But the letters are not just about chemistry in the modern sense. Rather, they contain Van Helmont’s oneiric epistemology, and in a particularly vivid guise. While still in New England, Starkey had already informed his friend Richard Leader that he had had visionary dreams, and word of this had reached the ever-wakeful ear of Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib records an incident where Starkey was guided to a particular passage in a chymical book by a somnial visitor. But this relation is trumped by Starkey’s own account of a dream vision in a letter to Boyle of 26 January 1652. The dream, like that of Van Helmont recounted before, concerns the marvelous substance Ignisaqua, usually known as the alkahest. As in many of Van Helmont’s dreams, Starkey claims to have fallen asleep in his laboratory after a grueling day at the furnace: Behold! I seemed intent on my work, and there appeared a man, entering the laboratory, at whose arrival I was astonished. But he greeted me and said “May God support your labors.” When I heard this, having pulled myself together, since he had mentioned God, I asked who he was, and he responded that he was my Eugenius. I asked whether there were such creatures. He responded that there were…. Finally I asked him what the alchahest of Paracelsus and Van Helmont was, and he responded that they used salt, sulfur, and an alkalized body. And though this response was more obscure than Paracelsus himself, yet with the response an ineffable light entered my mind, so that I fully understood.11 10 11

Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 218. Starkey to Boyle, 26 Jan. 1652, in George Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, ed. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69.

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Starkey’s dream betrays the hallmarks of Van Helmont’s oneiric epistemology, down to the “Eugenius,” or “Good Genius,” who reveals to Starkey the secret of the alkahest. Like the spiritual being who gave Van Helmont an edible book and a flask of Ignisaqua, Starkey’s Good Genius is a tutelary spirit who reveals the fabrication of the marvelous dissolvent. Whatever we may think of the veracity of Starkey’s dream, it is clear that it served to advertise and buttress his identity as a Helmontian chymist. As modern scholars of expertise and experience would say, Starkey was showing that as an expert he was “distinguishable from common practitioners or artisans within a given field.”12 Rather than being a simple artisan like the distillers who hawked strong waters and cordials on the streets of London, Starkey styled himself variously as a “silent explorer of art and nature,” or a “daily searcher into the secrets of Nature,” or finally as one who spent his time in “the studious search of Natures mysteryes.”13 In all of these contexts, Starkey intended to set himself off from mere “laborants” and vendors of exotica. In short, he was a researcher, not a mere technician or salesman. The same language appears in his published works, such as his Helmontian manifesto of 1657, Natures Explication and Helmont’s Vindication, where he addresses his reader as the “studious lover of Truth and sedulous searcher after Natures secrets.”14 Variants of the expression “searcher” into the secrets of nature appear at least nineteen times in Natures Explication, where the term is often coupled with the idea that such chymists form an elite Helmontian brotherhood.15 Moreover, Starkey explicitly links his research to the Donum Dei topos, saying that genuine chymists are the “sons of art,” whom God has chosen as his elect. It is for them, as he says, that he is writing his text, which shall fully and faithfully discover the more secret preparations of Medicinal Arcana’s with their true keys, in which I shall be so candid as to leave nothing undisclosed which a Son of Art may desire, yet so as not to transgress the lawes of Nature, and to prostitute her mysterious and secret operations to the eye of every Reader, but premising studious 12 13

Ash, “Expertise and the Early Modern State,” 8. For the Latin expression “Tacitus Naturae Artisque explorator,” see Starkey to Johann Moriaen, 30 May 1651, in Notebooks and Correspondence, 34; for “daily searchers into the secrets of Nature,” see Starkey, The Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees (London: Giles Calvert, 1655), 16; for “the studious search of Natures mysteryes,” see Starkey to Boyle, ca. April/May 1651, in Notebooks and Correspondence, 20. 14 Starkey, Natures Explication or Helmont’s Vindication (London: Thomas Alsop, 1657), fol. a2r. 15 Ibid., a2r, 7, 27, 39, 54, 55, 57, 74, 88, 91, 154, 212, 216, 223, 239, 243, 295, 295, 313.

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search and diligent inquiry, I shall be a faithfull guide to such as by God are elected hereunto, but to the rest I shall be obscure enough.16 The emphasis, again, is on a “studious search and diligent inquiry” into nature’s secrets. Starkey’s writings will be clear to the hardworking sons of art, whom he elsewhere calls “mental men” in reference to their special connection with the mens or intellectual faculty described by Van Helmont. In order to understand the deeper mysteries or arcana majora of chymistry they must have this intellectual capacity. Yet this alone is not enough. At the same time, their success requires an arduous and ongoing search into nature, carried out in the experimental context of their laboratories. Like Van Helmont, Starkey thought that secrets were bought from God with sweat. In the same letter to Boyle that describes his Helmontian dream, Starkey develops the topos of the researcher as a selfless servant of the Lord who has renounced personal profit for the sake of his fellow men. Experimental research requires “the whole man,” Starkey says, and so he has decided “to be sacrificed to matters chymical.”17 He elaborates on the theme of immolation in a letter sent to Boyle the following week. There he says that he has decided “to sacrifice myself as one for the benefit of many.”18 The remarkable medicines that he is preparing will allow Starkey to heal thousands, he hopes, and his other products of chymical technology will support Boyle in the latter’s philanthropic goals. Thus in his letter of 26 January, Starkey tells Boyle that he can “justly glory” in the discovery of a sulfurous medicine, “with which you will clothe paupers and I [will] heal the desperate among them.”19 As I have argued elsewhere, Starkey was in a financially unstable position. In some measure he was Boyle’s client, since the latter was subsidizing Starkey’s research. Yet Starkey makes clear on numerous occasions that he has no wish to become Boyle’s “operator” or “laborant,” a mere laboratory technician. To the contrary, Starkey viewed himself as the master, and Boyle as the student, an arrangement that receives further verification from Boyle’s own manuscripts.20 But what did Boyle think of Starkey’s Helmontian claim that the chymical “searcher into Nature’s secrets” was a servant of divinity with the ear of the Lord himself? 16 Ibid., 216. 17 Starkey, Notebooks and Correspondence, 78, 67. 18 Ibid., 79. 19 Ibid., 72. 20 Newman, Gehennical Fire, 62–78; Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 208–36.

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Boyle’s views on the issue of supernatural revelation were by no means simple or straightforward. As Michael Hunter has stressed in his recent biography, Boyle was tormented with fears concerning the issue of revealed knowledge.21 In a memorandum dictated to his confidante and casuist Bishop Gilbert Burnet some two years before Boyle’s death, he recounts a number of instances where he was offered such knowledge by visitors. One of these involved an unnamed chymist who had met a priest on his travels in the French countryside. The ecclesiastic was a magician, as it turned out, and he conjured up spirits for the chymist in the shape of angry wolves and beautiful courtesans. The chymist, being a chymist, only wanted to learn the secret of the philosophers’ stone from the girls, which he immediately forgot upon becoming party to it. Later, however, the anonymous chymist himself learned the art of conjuring, and he offered Boyle a chance to witness it. As Burnet relates, he “offer[ed] to satisfy Mr B[oyle] by shewing him in a glasse of water strange representations. but he would not accept of it.”22 Boyle’s reticence to look into the magical vessel of the chymist is mirrored by a later event as well. On this occasion, a gentleman came to Boyle with a professed show stone, as Boyle described it to Burnet, “an Ordinary double convexe glasse and [it] had no angles in it by which tricks might have been put on those who lookt into it.”23 Boyle was seized by a powerful desire to look into the magic glass, but he was able—if just barely—to resist the urge. Burnet puts Boyle’s temptation into unforgettable language: he… had the greatest Curiosity he ever felt in his life[,] tempting him to look into it[,] and said if a Crown had been at his feet it could not have wrought so much on him[:] but he over-came himselfe which he accounted the greatest Victory he had ever over himselfe.24 Nowhere in the Burnet memorandum does Boyle display serious doubt about the reality of the supernatural revelations described there—rather, his doubts focus on the morality of accepting such knowledge. The same scruples emerge in his fragmentary Dialogue on the Converse with Angels aided by the Philosophers’ Stone, a work discovered in manuscript by Hunter and subsequently published 21

Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2009), passim. 22 Michael Hunter, “Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990): 387–410, at 389. 23 Ibid., 391. 24 Ibid.

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by Lawrence Principe. Here, Boyle describes an “angelic” version of the alchemists’ agent of transmutation, the philosophers’ stone, which is supposed to attract angels and lead them to communicate with humans. Boyle’s first concern about this is, as he says, “That there is great danger of and in mistaking an evill spirit for a good one.” His second worry lies in the possibility that even if the revealed knowledge comes from a holy source rather than a demonic one, moral danger can ensue. As Boyle puts it, his anxiety stems from the possibility “That the worshipping of good Angels is forbidden as a piece of Idolatry.”25 One can see then that Boyle’s chief concern with supernatural revelation, at least in his private life, lay in the possibility that it could lead either to communication with evil spirits or to idolatry of good ones. It is important to bear these private views in mind when we turn to Boyle’s public statement about Van Helmont’s oneiric epistemology, in the former’s Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, published in 1663. Here we see Boyle explicitly disavowing the dream revelations claimed by some alchemists while at the same time quietly allowing the possibility of providential intervention in the laboratory: And though I dare not affirm, with some of the Helmontians and Paracelsians, that God discloses to Men the Great Mystery of Chymistry by Good Angels, or by Nocturnal Visions, as he once taught Jacob, to make Lambs and Kids come into the World speckled, and ring-streaked; yet perswaded I am, that the favor of God does (much more than most Men are aware of) vouchsafe to promote some Mens Proficiency in the study of Nature, partly by protecting their attempts from those unlucky Accidents which often make Ingenuous and Industrious endeavors miscarry; and partly by making them dear and acceptable to the Possessors of Secrets, by whose Friendly Communication they may often learn that in a few Moments, which cost the Imparters many a Years toyl and study; and partly too, or rather principally, by directing them to those happy and pregnant Hints, which an ordinary skill and industry may improve, as to do such things, and make such discoveries by virtue of them, as both others, and the person himself, whose knowledge is thus encreased, would scarce have imagin’d to be possible…26

25

Lawrence M. Principe, Aspiring Adept (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1998), 310. 26 Boyle, Usefulnesse of Natural Philosophy, in Michael Hunter and Edward Davis, The Works of Robert Boyle (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), 3:276.

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In the beginning of this passage, Boyle says that he “dare not affirm” that God himself reveals chymical knowledge by dreams, as some of the Helmontians and Paracelsians do. To the uninformed reader this disclaimer might sound as if he is dismissing such somnial revelations as wild fancy.27 But Boyle’s scruples take on a very different light in the context of the private comments that we have already examined, regarding supernaturally revealed knowledge. In a word, his doubts appear to concern the immediate source of the dreams rather than their reality as phenomena. As he put it in his Dialogue on the Converse with Angels, “there is great danger of and in mistaking an evill spirit for a good one.” And even if the source of the dreams should prove to be angelic, it could still lead to unwanted idolatry. Boyle’s main concern, however, is to show that even if God does not visit chymists in their dreams, he encourages them by three other means— preserving them from unfortunate laboratory accidents, making those who have secret knowledge communicate it to them, and providing fortunate chymists with “happy and pregnant Hints.” The last of these three means by which God operates in the laboratory surely contains an echo of Van Helmont’s experiments with urine. Like the noble Bruxellian, Boyle can capitalize on God’s silent intervention in the laboratory because the chymist’s own ingenuity and labor allow him to make the most of the hint. Those chymists whom God has deigned to help—the sons of art, to use Starkey’s term—will buy his secrets with their sweat.

Daniel Coxe

Let us now turn to another of those sons of art, like Starkey an associate of Boyle’s. Daniel Coxe, whose long and happy life extended from 1640 to 1730, was a physician who had attended Jesus College, Cambridge. Fortune smiled upon him early—by 1665 he was a fellow of the Royal Society, by 1671 he had married the daughter of a London alderman, and at some point he became physician-in-ordinary to Charles ii. Most of all, however, Coxe is known to historians for his extraordinary landholdings in the New World. Beginning in the mid-1680s Coxe managed to acquire the proprietary rights to over a million acres in west New Jersey. In 1692 he succeeded in selling his holdings, promptly reinvesting the profits in America. This time, he focused on “Carolana,” the 27

This is, in fact, the position wrongly asserted by Antonio Clericuzio, “Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England,” British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993): 303–34, at 316.

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province “covering the present North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana,” which he was able to acquire in the 1690s.28 Despite his huge holdings in North America, Coxe seems never to have set foot on the continent. Perhaps his medical practice was too lucrative for him to abandon it. At any rate, Coxe wrote a number of letters to Boyle that date from his induction into the Royal Society, eleven of which have survived. The letters are marked by two features, their obsequiousness, striking even in an age of courtly manners, and their incorporation of Helmontian chymistry.29 Coxe’s letter of 6 November 1665 begins by telling Boyle that he has displaced “all the pretty… Hermiones in the world, although the Respect I ow that sweet Sex were an hundred times greater then you were pleased to surmise it.”30 This introductory letter is short, but it is followed by one of 19 January 1666 that begins with Coxe’s promise “to lay aside Courtship,” meaning flattery, apparently at Boyle’s request.31 What follows this assurance is twelve dense pages of Helmontian chymistry varnished over with the glittering shellac of the mechanical philosophy. It is clear that Coxe has a serious understanding of Van Helmont, and equally clear that he is trying to clothe this knowledge in the language of Boyle’s own mechanical hypothesis.32 Coxe devotes the majority of his Helmontian discussion in the 19 January letter to that ubiquitous Helmontian desideratum, the alkahest. Unlike Starkey, Coxe does not claim that the alkahest was revealed to him in a dream. Rather, he reasons out its production by comparing hints and passages strewn hither and yon in Van Helmont’s work— this is a clear example of the alchemical technique known as “dispersion of 28

29

30 31 32

The quotation, and most of the foregoing information on Coxe, comes from Michael Hunter’s entry in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, q.v. accessed 18 July 2014. For more on Coxe’s chymistry, see Antonio Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle: A Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England,” British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993): 303–34; and Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 154–62. Coxe to Boyle, 6 Nov. [1665], in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 2:577. Coxe to Boyle, 19 Jan. 1666, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 3:31. Ibid., 42, where Coxe refers to Boyle’s “Essay on Nitre.” In addition, Coxe states on 32 that the “small parts of bodies” cohere “only by immediate Contact, or Rest,” a possibility suggested rather strongly by Boyle in Certain Physiological Essays, at Hunter and Davis, Works, 2, p. 152. Coxe also repeatedly uses the term “schematism” for a composite corpuscle (e.g., at 36, 39). The term had been borrowed by Boyle from Francis Bacon and incorporated into Boyle’s version of the mechanical philosophy. It appears, for example, in The Sceptical Chymist, at Hunter and Davis, Works, 2, p. 371.

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knowledge,” where recipes or techniques are broken up and distributed over a text rather than being relayed in a single passage. What concerns us, however, is Coxe’s letter of August 1666, where he complains of recent failures in his laboratory work. Here we see the fruits of Boyle’s ruminations about spiritual beings in the laboratory, but fleshed out, it seems, by personal conversations between Coxe and Boyle. Coxe begins the letter by apologizing for the fact that he has not written to Boyle for at least three weeks. He then proceeds to excuse himself on the grounds of spiritual intervention in his laboratory affairs: And here I must necessarily acknowledge that I have met with many interruptions of my designs, Sinister accidents, & unpleasing divertisements frequently forcing mee to deny my selfe the Content of prosecuting Chymistry with my wonted Alacrity, and Industry. But nothing hath proved more injurious to mee then my own carelesseness, Or the mischeivous influences of some malicious Genius; Which often recalls to my mind those discourses wherewith you have sometimes Entertained mee on this Subject, Indeed I then apprehended they were spoken in raillery, But strang Successes, & Unhappy Frustrations both alike improbable, and Unexpected, dispose mee to believe that they were intended as seriously as they are now received.33 These comments might seem opaque to one who had never examined Van Helmont’s De lithiasi or Boyle’s Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, but to us their intent should be quite clear. When Coxe complains of the interference coming from “some malicious Genius,” he is referring to the evil twin of Starkey’s “Eugenius,” in other words a maleficent spirit in the laboratory. Coxe then recalls how Boyle had enlightened him on this subject in personal conversation. Hard as it is to imagine Boyle ever cracking a joke, Coxe had assumed that Boyle’s comments were mere “raillery.” But now he realizes, thanks to “strang Successes, & Unhappy Frustrations both alike improbable, and Unexpected,” that Boyle was in deadly earnest. It is hard to imagine what Coxe could have in mind by the “strang Successes” other than the sort of “happy and pregnant Hints” that Boyle mentioned in Usefuleness as coming upon worthy experimenters from a divine source. It emerges clearly from this letter that Boyle had also told Coxe about less happy events that could also stem from a spiritual source, the inverse of divine intervention. 33

Coxe to Boyle, ca. August 1666, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 3:212.

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Coxe then spells out exactly how maleficent spirits have ruined his experiments. In attempting to make an alkaline solvent involving copper, which Coxe calls “your Venereall Alcalisate Menstruum,” he tried to repurify the product with alcohol, only to regret the result: This work of Supererogation Cost me Dear for being about to place itt in a sand furnace a seemingly materiall Phantasme enervated my arm & dash’d the glasse against a Contiguous solid body the result of which sinister accident was the breaking of the vessell the losse of my liquor & Consequently of my hopes.34 How pleased must Boyle—the man who financed The Devill of Mascon— have been to learn of this spiritual intervention in human affairs! Coxe’s story could almost have made the pages of Joseph Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus, another work that Boyle held in high regard. Yet Boyle may have been less happy to hear Coxe’s subsequent remarks, where the latter passed from the evil spirits populating his own laboratory to supernatural gossips who were informing him about Boyle’s wasting of his time at the house of his sister Mary Rich in Leese. For some time, Coxe had been ardently trying to convince Boyle to become his neighbor in Newington. Clearly worried that Boyle might settle at the estate of his sister Mary instead, Coxe employed his spiritual intelligencers like so many realtors steering a client away from a dangerous neighborhood: Sir, the ill presages wherewith I was molested some days preceeding your departure were not only the Product of a Superstitious groundlesse Fear, or Sollicitous Love, but appears now to [have] been the whispers of some of those Officious Separate Spiritts that daigne to Converse with Inferiour mortalls who foreseeing how many Remoras you were like to meet with at Leez suggested that…you were like to grow old in the Embraces of those fair & vertuous ladies who have so great an ascendant over you.35 Whatever jocularity the modern reader may be tempted to import to this passage is soon undercut by Coxe’s ensuing remarks, where he suggests that Boyle is being detained in Leese by “illegitimate Artifices” and even “Fraud & force,”

34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 213.

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hardly the sorts of imputations to be lightly leveled against Boyle’s own relatives. In Coxe, then, we see another chymist who endorsed the Helmontian view that spiritual beings busied themselves in the success or failure of experimenters in the laboratory. Indeed, Coxe even uses this theme as a lead-in to his discussion of whispered “presages” and spirits that converse with humans, possible allusions to something like Starkey’s and Van Helmont’s dreams.

William and Jonathan Avery

The final two figures whom I will discuss, unlike Coxe, were actual inhabitants of the New World rather than mere possessors in title. William and Jonathan Avery belonged to the circle of chymists who inhabited the Boston area in the generation after George Starkey. William Avery in particular seems to have been quite an able individual, who worked his way up from the status of a farrier in Dedham to that of a medical practitioner of considerable renown in Boston. Indeed, he was in such demand there that Urian Oakes and Increase Mather wrote an introductory letter to Robert Boyle on Avery’s account in October 1679. Their express desire was that Boyle correspond with Avery so that the latter would remain in Massachusetts rather than abandoning the New World to meet the famous English scientist. As Oakes and Mather put it, “other physicians had not had the like successe” as Avery, who was especially adept in “Chymicall operations.”36 Although neither Avery’s enclosed letter nor Boyle’s immediate response are extant, we do have a later letter from Boyle dated 13 March 1680. Boyle assumes a rather haughty tone in this document, thanking Avery coolly for some oil of pennyroyal, which, he tells the Bostonian, is a commonplace in England. Immediately thereafter it becomes clear that Avery’s main reason for contacting Boyle lay in the former’s eager pursuit of the Helmontian alkahest. To his entreaty Boyle replies thus: you much misaddress yourselfe when you would learn of me the preparation of such high Arcana as the Alkahest, which I never in any booke of mine owned my selfe to be a Possessor of, and which I conceive to be so lyable to be misemployed to dangerous purposes, that if I were master of the Alkahest & the way of makeing it, I should thinke my selfe oblig’d not 36

Oakes and Mather to Boyle, 10 Oct. 1679, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 5:163.

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to communicate it to any for whom a long acquaintance had not given me a particular esteeme & friendship[.]37 This is as much as to say—I don’t have the alkahest and if I did I wouldn’t give it to you. But Avery was clearly undeterred by this rebuff. In a letter of November 1682 he repeats his request, saying that it is his “desire to be a comfort to the sick” that makes him seek the alkahest. Putting this in even stronger terms, he invokes a biblical authority for his quest, saying, if your honour could see cause to assist me in this difficult work, I cannot but hope, that the great God would fully recompence such charity, shewn not only to me, but unto the sick—unto many sick ones. Matt. xxv. 43.38 This is not the place to delve into the technicalities of the Averys’ work on the alkahest, evident in three of William’s five remaining letters to Boyle, but two main considerations become immediately clear. First, it is easy to show that despite his earlier hauteur, Boyle was soon closely advising William Avery’s Helmontian experimentation. In a letter of August 1683, for example, Avery refers to the “Matter & Liquors, of which you were pleased to write unto me.”39 He then goes on to describe a process involving multiple distillations of these unspecified materials. It is entirely typical of alchemical correspondence to avoid naming the actual materials used, and equally characteristic that Boyle would have enjoined Avery to adopt this indirect language. Avery continues his enquiry in the same letter as follows, again showing that Boyle has become his adviser: Now, Taking it for granted that the thick Matter is that which your Honour directs to be distilled, I am so bold as to Request that you will bear with mee, if I desire to bee informed 1. What vessels may be used for the performance of the Distillation most suitably, easily, safely? 2. By what marks may the thing be discovered to be Ripe for use?40 Interestingly, Avery’s experiments with this unnamed matter continued for at least two more years, for in a letter of 1 May 1684, he gives Boyle a full report of the success of the process. After digesting and putrefying the material, Avery 37 Boyle to William Avery, 13 Mar. 1680, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 5:192. 38 William Avery to Boyle, 9 Nov. 1682, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 5:353. 39 William Avery to Boyle, August 1683, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 5:420. 40 Ibid.

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distilled two spirits from it in succession, refluxed the second one forty times, and sublimed off a white salt. There was also a “yellow fatty matter” that he putrefied under horse dung, and then repeatedly distilled and refluxed. He terminates this part of his letter by saying, “I am still at uncertainties, and therefore do thus address your honour!” He was waiting for Boyle’s advice on the next step. Perhaps that advice was later given, for according to Jonathan Avery’s letter of March 1688 to Boyle, the English scientist sent a “book & paper” to his father, but the latter had died the previous March, before receiving it. Jonathan therefore picked up the process where his father and Boyle left it off. As he says, In my searches here I have made some progress & the greater thrô your honour’s instructions but [not] to the attaining the end desired, althô to the finding out some good Menstruums & Medicines. The [last] triall according to your honour’s directions was by cohobating the 2nd spirit….41 Jonathan Avery then describes the ongoing experiment that his father had begun under Boyle’s guidance in 1683. It therefore appears that the Averys were carrying out their alkahest experiment for a period of five years under Boyle’s direct guidance. The second interesting feature of the Averys’ letters is their repeated references to the work of George Starkey. As early as his letter of August 1683, William Avery mentions that “Mr Geo: Starkey has a little peece lately published about the Alkahest, but I cannot well understand what he means by the Acidum to be added to the Salt.”42 Avery is referring to Starkey’s posthumous treatise Liquor Alchahest, which had been published in 1675 with a dedication to Boyle by Starkey’s friend and fellow chymist, Jeremiah Astell. More references to Starkey appear in William’s 1684 letter, where he speaks of Starkey’s 1658 book Pyrotechny Asserted as an authoritative text. Finally, Jonathan Avery again entreats Boyle in his one surviving letter to tell him “Wither this acid spirit is not the acidum Doctor Starkey speakes of in the end of his little book entitled the liquor Alchahest,” thus reiterating the bewilderment that his father expressed five years earlier. There is no evidence that the Averys, unlike Starkey, Coxe, or even Boyle, were concerned with the oneiric epistemology of Van Helmont or even with his theory of spirits offering pregnant hints in the laboratory. They seem to 41 42

Jonathan Avery to Boyle, Mar. 1688, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 6:255. William Avery to Boyle, August 1683, in Hunter et al., Correspondence, 5:421.

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have restricted their interest in divine intervention to the more bookish sort represented by the gift of Increase Mather’s Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, sent by William Avery to Boyle in 1684. What is particularly interesting about the Averys is the fact that they were carrying out a long-term experiment for producing the alkahest directed by Boyle some three thousand miles away. It is well known that Boyle engaged remote chymical operators at various locations to carry out his experiments, and it is not unlikely that, in the case of something as sensitive as the alkahest, he would have been happy at the discretion provided by having those experimenters on the other side of the Atlantic. At the same time, however, it is important not to pigeonhole William and Jonathan Avery as mere laboratory technicians. Their skillful decoding of Starkey’s Liquor Alchahest and even of Van Helmont himself—only some of which I have been able to describe here—shows that they were learned experimenters in their own right, who knew how to apply theory to practice. Finally, one should consider the fact that Starkey’s posthumous Liquor Alchahest had been published only a few years before the Averys began their communications with Boyle. Is it not possible that Boyle himself was unable to decode the difficult ruminations of his first chymical teacher, Starkey, who had long since died, and that Boyle was learning from the Averys as they learned from him? Had Boyle, after his initial reticence to discuss the alkahest with William Avery, decided once more to mine the chymical knowledge of the New World in the very colony that had educated Starkey? Whether this was Boyle’s conscious goal or not, the fact remains that the Averys, like Starkey, were suppliers of experimental research and interpretation of the most difficult chymistry of the time, just as Starkey had been. They were feeding Boyle information in a delicate game of give-and-take where the sought-for prize was the alkahest. No mere purveyors of raw materials and exotica from across the sea, the Averys were Helmontian researchers, just as surely as were Starkey’s heirs among the chymists of the Royal Society. Conclusion To conclude, then, we have encountered four collaborators of Robert Boyle, all of whom were heavily influenced by Van Helmont. The seriousness with which these men sought out the greatest of Van Helmont’s arcana majora, the alkahest, cannot he doubted. Each of them was a competent experimenter, and all claimed to see their work as a religious calling. But the range of their commitment to Van Helmont’s oneiric epistemology and his related notion of spiritual activity in the laboratory is striking. Starkey is a fully committed believer in

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dream revelation and has no qualms about its divine source, even if his broadcasting of his status as a son of the art would have done full justice to his twenty-first-century heirs on Madison Avenue. Boyle, on the other hand, does not deny the possibility of revelation, but questions the means of determining its divine—or perhaps demonic—source. And even if it is divine, it may still lead to problems of misplaced adulation and issues of conscience. Yet Boyle has no problem with less direct forms of divine communication in the laboratory, such as “happy and pregnant Hints.” Coxe, for his part, stresses the negative side of spiritual intervention and alludes to the intimations of disembodied spirits rather vaguely as “presages.” How literal he means to be in speaking of “the whispers…of those Officious Separate Spiritts that daigne to Converse with Inferiour mortalls” remains open to interpretation. Finally, the Averys leave all these matters aside and press on in their Helmontian research for the good of their fellow man. I suggest that this wide range of interpretation is in fact characteristic of early modern alchemy and that we forbear from the stereotype of chymistry as a simple “narrative of quests for revelation,” or any other model that overstresses the visionary aspect. Revelations there were, but they were bought with the sweat of research. Beyond revealing the diversity of religious experience integrated into chymistry by Boyle and his collaborators, the results discussed here have implications for the present-day field of “studies in expertise and experience” (see). First, and most obviously, figures like George Starkey were consciously trying to carve out a position for themselves as experts and scientific advisers under the rubric of “daily searchers into the secrets of Nature.” Within five years of Starkey’s death, his heirs in the English Helmontian tradition had converted this locution into “Chymical researchers,” which clearly prefigures the modern use of the term “research” in the sense of scientific investigation. “Expertise” may not have been an early modern actor’s category, but “research” certainly was. Yet there is still more to the story than this. As I argued many years ago in Gehennical Fire, Starkey was committed to a conception of chymical research that pitted his “silent search” into the mysteries of nature against the openly commercial chymistry of Johann Rudolph Glauber.43 The tension between a type of chymical research that focused on discovery and another that had a more frankly mercantile goal suggests something like the modern bifurcations between basic and applied science, between science and engineering, and between pharmacology and pharmacy. The current literature on see needs to be nuanced in order to accommodate these diverse goals, which have proven to be long-lived in the history of science and technology. Finally, and perhaps 43 Newman, Gehennical Fire, 75.

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more controversially, I think that we need to think of religion in early modern chymistry as frequently serving the role of broadcasting expertise. It would be a deeply worthwhile project to compare this advertising role of religion in chymistry with the marketing techniques used by others involved in the quest to establish their expertise in the seventeenth century. It is time to move beyond the stereotype that alchemy’s involvement with religion consisted solely of an emphasis on visionary revelation and to explore the polyvalent interaction of these two realms of human endeavor.

chapter 36

Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais* Arthur Kiron Scrapbooking, or more specifically the practice of cutting and pasting, is an unlikely place to begin a story about salvaging a vital chapter in the history of books, reading, and humanist scholarship. After all, what do hobby lobbies and higher learning have in common? More than one might think. In recent decades, a body of critical literature has challenged assumptions about the impermeable hierarchies of elite and popular cultures.1 These theoretical approaches reconsider the significance of quotidian details and reinterpret mundane activities otherwise presumed to be popular and unworthy of scholarly attention. The debates they have provoked bear upon the subject of how to interpret a “lowbrow” activity like scrapbooking as a scholarly practice. One of the hallmarks of Anthony Grafton’s prodigious scholarship has been his subversive ability to inject popular cultural references and metaphors into his analysis of highly technical scholarly practices. His studies illustrate and exemplify the ability to weave together theory and practice to create artistically crafted, intellectually * The basis for this study, the Sabato Morais Ledger, is housed with the Sabato Morais Papers (arc MS8) at the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. It has been conserved and digitized thanks to a preservation grant award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The Morais Ledger may be viewed online at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/morais. It is cited throughout as SM-LKCAJS, by page number. The item numbers in the online index to the ledger refer to an enumeration based on Marvin Weiner’s handwritten catalog of it, which is the basis for the printed finding aid: The Marvin Weiner Catalogue: An Indexed Inventory of the Sabato Morais Ledger, ed. Gina R. Glasman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library, 2001). See the postscript to this essay for background about the decades of work put into the realization of this project and the critical role Marvin Weiner played in rescuing and cataloging this artifact. My deep thanks to Ann Blair, Piet van Boxel, Peter Stallybrass, Andrew Berns, and Daniel Traister for their critical comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 Most relevant here, particularly for the concept of “practices,” is the work of Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Lawrence W. Levine, High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1988).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_037

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compelling narratives. Without relying on a crutch of theoretical jargon, Grafton has explored anew the “how” of scholarship; namely, how the meaning and the making of texts, a book’s content and its material history, its methods of composition and correction, and its phases of writing, printing, reading, and annotation are all inextricably bound together. Cutting and pasting are among the scholarly practices that appear in Grafton’s work. In the heyday of Victorian scrapbooking in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the content commonly clipped and saved was anything but scholarly. It consisted of a mixed media of printed and manuscript ephemera: newspaper articles and personal memorabilia, such as greeting cards, postcards, trade cards, playbills, tickets, invitations, and letters.2 The handicraft of Victorian scrapbooking emerged in the context of dislocation and alienation produced by industrial capitalism. Scrapbooks, as Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler explain, existed at the cross-roads of print culture and commodity capitalism…. Objects may have originated in the prevailing and impersonal marketplace, but individuals converted the unfamiliar into the familiar by ­cutting up the materials of capitalism and turning them into gifts to themselves. Compilers personalized their clippings and infused them with individual meaning outside the arena of market exchange.3 Scrapbooking, by this reading, is subversive. Cutting and pasting practices transform cheap, disposable content into meaningful memory aids and potential sites of sociability of lasting value. Note, however, that scrapbooks in the Victorian sense in which Mark Twain marketed his product (and scholars of the form have written about it) were not a recognized vehicle for scholarly publication.4 Scholarly cutting and pasting in the early modern period offered 2 On Victorian scrapbooking and the history of scrapbooks in general, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jessica Helfand, Scrapbooks: An American History (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2008); Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). For a pathbreaking study based on Victorian Jewish scrapbooking, see Dianne Ashton, “Crossing Boundaries: The Career of Mary M. Cohen,” American Jewish History 83, no. 2 (1995): 153–76. 3 Tucker, Ott, and Buckler, The Scrapbook in American Life, 18 and 286n.73, offers additional literature on the “conversion of objects from the alienable to the inalienable through social relationships.” 4 Notwithstanding the eventual deposit of a scrapbook in an archive. See Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 220, who argues that “a scrapbook’s acceptance into an archive is essentially an act of publication.”

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a time- and labor-saving method of managing an abundance of meaningful content en route to publication.5 In the nineteenth century, by contrast, popular scrapbooking constituted a salvage project to rescue personally curated gems of meaning from the rising tide of oblivion. Victorian-era scrapbooks, in short, constituted a new tool of resistance in an increasing alienated world. To understand the popularity of Victorian scrapbooks is to recognize how they functioned as open books in a way that is anathema to the personal diary or daybook. Whether meant to serve as a private, confessional act or as a ­memory aid of sorts, the diary, unlike a memoir, is in most cases intended exclusively for an audience of one.6 It is true that some diaries may take the form of scrapbooks; but scrapbooks, per se, are not diaries; they are potential instruments of sociability and are created with the dual purpose of keeping and showing to others.7 Given this understanding, the term “scrapbooking”  employed here—albeit referring to individual acts of compilation and ­composition—encompasses a social practice and function rather than a private act of inscription. Nonetheless, it is worth distinguishing the practice of creating a scrapbook from other types of generative social literary acts, such as authoring, editing, or anthologizing, with a clear purpose of making public the completed work. Scrapbooks are unpublished, unique, materially hybrid, and socially open in character. They anticipate an audience, but not wide distribution. Scrapbooking, in turn, may be an ongoing habit or a lately adopted practice. It combines print and handwritten notation. And scrapbooking also can serve as a mechanism of identity discovery if not formation. Through clipping and compiling, sorting and arranging, pasting and annotating, you learn who you are and what you value by what you choose to include and exclude. The scrapbook practices of Sabato Morais, the Italian-born Jewish cantor (hazan) of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia from 1851 until his death in 1897, confound simplistic dichotomies between elite scholarly practices and popular scrapbooking. His efforts to clip, save, paste, emend, annotate, and preserve his otherwise ephemeral publications document a systematic program of cultural transmission at a time when the rift between traditional forms of learning and academic scholarship was intensifying. The critical, historical study of the Jewish past called 5 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010), 213–29. 6 See Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essay on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), for the view that diaries ultimately are directed outward. 7 Cf. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 15–16.

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Wissenschaft des Judentums aided nineteenth-century movements on both sides of the Atlantic to reform the practice of Judaism’s divinely commanded ritual observances (mitsvot).8 In this latter-day battle between ancients and moderns, Morais was a religious humanist defender of ancient Jewish wisdom against new academic and religious reformers. Morais was born in the Tuscan port city of Livorno (Leghorn), south of Pisa, on 13 April 1823. The first act of “writing with scissors” he experienced in his  life—the cutting into his flesh to inscribe the covenant of Abraham—­ presumably occurred eight days later.9 Sabatino, as he was affectionately called, was the third of nine children, the product of a mixed marriage between a poor butcher named Samuel ben Shabthai (Sabato) Morais, of Portuguese converso descent, and a German-Ashkenazic mother, Buonina (Tovah) Wolf. The religiously devout household in which he was raised fervently embraced the republican revolution against the ancien regime. The creed of Morais’s father, Samuel, was republicanism, the religione di sua vita (religion of his life). At Samuel’s funeral in May of 1862, Salvatore De Benedetti, soon to be professor of Hebrew language and literature at the University of Pisa, recalled the memorable hospitality he enjoyed at the Morais dinner table, where family and friends gathered and “sang in chorus the revolutionary hymns of Berchet [the Milanese republican poet] and the Marseillaise, and cried out with their glasses raised, ‘Long live Italy free and one’ in those years when it was a crime to even think this way.”10 8

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See the foundational work of Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 1994), esp. 303–33; and Michael Meyer, “Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 24, no. 2 (May 2004): 105–19. For a recent survey of the field, see Kerstin von der Krone and Mirjam Thulin, “Wissenschaft in Context: A Research Essay on the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 58 (June 2013): 249–80. My thanks to Guido Guastalla and Gabriela Bedarida for allowing me access to the Livornese Jewish community’s birth records. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Liana Funaro and Barbara Martinelli for reexamining the conflicting documentary evidence on short notice. According to all public accounts, Morais was born on 13 Apr. 1823. However, his civil birth certificate issued in Livorno is dated 15 Apr. 1823; the birth records of the Jewish community of Livorno for 1823 do not provide an exact date. Regrettably, there are no surviving circumcision registers for the year of Morais’s birth. For discussion of discrepancies among Italian Jewish birth and circumcision records and non-Jewish government records, see Emanuele Artom, Il Patto de Abramo. La “milà” nei registry di circoncisori veneziani (Livorno: Salomone Belforte, 2014), 24–25. I am grateful to Asher Salah for alerting me to Artom’s work. Salvatore De Benedetti, “Parole di S.D-B. Lette in nome di lui il 12 Giugno 1862 nell’occasione dei funerali di Samuel Morais, morto il di 27 Maggio 1862,” 2, a printed eulogy located in SM-LKCAJS, box  17, FF27. According to the document, Samuel Morais died on 27 May 1862. De Benedetti was appointed professor at Pisa the same year.

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The formative republican principles of duty, service, and sacrifice (abnegazione) that Morais imbibed in Livorno later would entangle him in numerous controversies in the United States.11 In March of 1837, a progressive coeducational Jewish school was opened in Livorno. Morais, who attended the school, later described how its curriculum included religious and practical subjects meant to prepare a boy to become “a bookkeeper, a mechanic, or a Rabbi”; for “a girl it offers the facilities of gaining accomplishments fitting her for the parlor no less than for the kitchen.”12 Salvatore De Benedetti, who would deliver the eulogy for his father a quarter century later, was his teacher.13 After completing his secondary school education, Morais continued with his religious studies while working as a teacher to help support his family. On Thursday, 27 August 1846 (5 Elul 5606), just days before moving to London to accept a teaching position at the orphan home of the city’s Spanish and Portuguese Congregation at Bevis Marks, Morais received a kind of rabbinical ordination—a teaching certificate (hata’arat hora’ah). Handwritten on vellum in an elegant, Sephardic semi-cursive hand, the document attests in ornate Hebrew and Aramaic prose that Morais has passed his exams with distinction (siman yafeh). It is signed by the city’s chief rabbi, Abraham Baruch Piperno, and two other local authorities.14 11

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For discussion of Morais’s understanding and public articulation of the principle of abnegazione, see Arthur Kiron, “Livornese Traces in American Jewish History,” in Per Elia Benamozegh, ed. Alessandro Guetta (Milan: Edizioni Thálassa De Paz, 2001), 45–66; and Kiron, “Heralds of Duty: The Italian Sephardic Jewish Theological Seminary of Sabato Morais,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 2 (Spring 2015), 206–49. Morais, “The History of the Jewish Congregation of Leghorn,” Menorah Monthly 11, no. 6 (Dec. 1891): 356. De Benedetti’s academic career at Pisa offers one indicator of the kind of broad religious humanist learning to which Morais was exposed in his teens and early twenties. On De Benedetti (1818–91), see Morais Ledger, 444: “Salvatore de Benedetti: Obituary Sketch of an Italian Savant,” which appeared in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, 4 Sept. 1891. An asterisked (i.e., an unnumbered) footnote states that the article was “written in Italian by Raphael Ascoli, of Leghorn, friend of the distinguished dead, and translated for The Jewish Exponent y [sic] S. Morais, pupil of the departed.” De Benedetti is described as a respected scholar known throughout Europe who once published, in the Annual of the Italian Society for the Promotion of Oriental Studies, a translation of legends of an early rabbinic sage (R. Yehoshua ben Levi, third century ce) from Hebrew into Italian employing “the style of the trecentisti.” The spelling “De Benedetti” used here follows that of his signature. See, e.g., Salvatore De Benedetti to Sabato Morais, writing from Torino, 7 Aug. 1850, SM-LKCAJS, box 1, FF7. He spells his first name there without the final “e” in contrast to the published spelling here. See SM-LKCAJS, box 13, FF38.

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Nonetheless, Morais’s ordination “diploma” lacked the imprimatur of a modern theological seminary, such as had been established in Padua in 1829.15 Despite its physically impressive parchment writing surface and formalized content, it more closely resembled the traditional rabbinic practice of a letter of reference or endorsement.16 In fact, Morais never enrolled in a university, and his professional credentials as a minister and teacher, thus, were minimal. Just over forty years later a similar, apparently rushed, effort to accredit Morais took place. On 8 June 1887, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws by the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. This honor was conferred within six months of his becoming the first president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.17 The timing of the conferral of both his “degrees” (the 1846 teaching certificate and the 1887 honorary doctor of laws) suggests behind-the-scenes efforts to equip him with papers to meet public expectations and address anxieties about professional status.18 News of his honorary degree was widely publicized in Jewish newspapers in the United States and in the London Jewish Chronicle.19 In London, Morais was part of an émigré circle of Italian Jews, some originally from Livorno, who kept close company with Giuseppe Mazzini, the charismatic moral voice of the Risorgimento, and with other nationalists living in exile there.20 Before moving to the United States, he gave Mazzini, whose arrest 15

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On the Padua Rabbinical College, see Gustavo Castelbolognesi, “Il centenario del Collegio Rabbinico di Padova,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 2nd ser., 5, no. 5/6 (Sept.—Oct. 1930): 314–322; Maddalena Del Bianco Cotrozzi, “Il Collegio Rabbinico di Padova: la sua istituzione ed il suo influsso sulla cultura ebraica,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 57, no. 3 (1991): 359–380. On the history of rabbinical ordination in Italian Jewish and Sephardic culture, see Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy, trans. Jonathan Chipman (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 29–99. For the German-Jewish context, see Stephen M. Poppel, “The Politics of Religious Leadership: The Rabbinate in 19th-Century Hamburg,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983): 441, who states that the word “ordination” is a misleading translation of semikhah: “The only ordination involved was a ranking in expertise, not the bestowal of any specific apostolic cachet or sacerdotal authority such as is the case in Christianity.” For Morais’s honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of Pennsylvania, see Morais Ledger, 382–383, and see the correspondence in SM-LKCAJS, box 4, FF4. Morais himself objected to titles, even refusing to allow one to be inscribed on his tombstone. See Arthur Kiron, “Dust and Ashes: The Funeral and Forgetting of Sabato Morais,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (1996): 156–188, esp. 177. For clippings of the press coverage, see Morais Ledger, 382–383. On Mazzini’s ties with Italian Jews in London, see Alessandro Levi, “Amici israeliti di Giuseppe Mazzini,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 5 (1931): 587–612. On Morais’s relation

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was sought in Europe, his Italian passport to use to return to the Continent surreptitiously.21 In March of 1851, Morais crossed the Atlantic aboard the steamer Asia to compete for the position of minister (hazan) at Congregation Mivkeh Israel in Philadelphia. His tenure there lasted nearly half a century until his death on Thursday, 11 November 1897. In a published memorial tribute, Cyrus Adler, an influential American Jewish communal leader, characterized Morais as “the representative American Jew to his co-religionists in England, France, Italy, and the Orient.” The New York Times remembered Morais as “the most eminent rabbi in this country…a powerful and aggressive factor in discussions of vast import and interest to millions of people; a deep, incisive, fearless thinker, speaker, and writer.”22 His funeral procession, accompanied by thousands of mourners, was the first mass funeral in American Jewish history.23 The depth and breadth of Morais’s erudition is visible in his published and unpublished writings. He fluently spoke and/or read at least nine languages (Judeo-Livornese [bagitto], Italian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English). His writings are peppered, undoubtedly from memory in many cases, with quotations from or allusions to biblical, classical rabbinic, medieval Sephardic, and Italian humanist sources. He regularly corresponded with learned individuals on both sides of the Atlantic. He also reviewed, and on occasion translated into English, works he considered vital to his pedagogical mission.24 With the rise of the reform movement and the

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with Mazzini, see Morais’s manuscript draft of “A Patriot (Mazzini): Lecture Delivered at the ymha of Phil,” 1876, SM-LKCAJS, box 12, FF11; Henry Samuel Morais, Sabato Morais: A Memoir (originally published in the sixth biennial report of the Jewish Theological Seminar, 1896, reprinted separately as a pamphlet in New York in 1898), 23–24. For corroborating evidence of the account of Morais giving his passport to Mazzini and for a facsimile reproduction of his newly issued 1854 passport, see Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History, 1555–1890: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 2014), 8. For accounts of the Morais-Mazzini passport story, see that of Morais’s son, Henry S. Morais, Sabato Morais: A Memoir, 12–13; Leon Elmaleh (who succeeded Morais as minister at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia), Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of The Reverend Doctor Sabato Morais by the Congregation Mikveh Israel in the City of Philadelphia, Wednesday Evening, April 18, 1923 (Philadelphia: n.p., 1923), 58; Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), 457. American Hebrew, 19 Nov. 1897, 68; New York Times, Saturday, 13 Nov. 1897, 7. Kiron, “Dust and Ashes,” 155–188. For a selection of Morais’s most extensive translations, see Morais Ledger, 12–15 (in five parts), for his translation from Hebrew into English of Maimonides’s Treatise on

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denial of key rabbinic doctrines, he translated and published serially in the weekly press medieval Hebrew poetry and literature to counterbalance and combat opposing views. Only late in life did Morais turn to institution building to defend what he believed; otherwise, throughout his career in the United States as a cantor, teacher, speaker, and writer, he used the pulpit, the school, literary associations, and the press to transmit and inculcate his distinctive Livornese-Sephardic traditions of rabbinic humanist learning. His intellectual life belonged to a nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters.25 Morais’s scrapbook, like his own biography, constitutes a hybrid assemblage of different elements recycled and adapted for new circumstances. The volume’s large and relatively unwieldy dimensions (46 x 32 x 7 cm) correspond more closely to a nineteenth-century business ledger than a scrapbook, whose dimensions were typically smaller. The page layout indicates that the volume was originally designed for double-entry accounting practices.26 Printed beneath the pasted clippings are the vertical columns (there are no horizontal lines) typically found in an accounting book. Clearly, this object is a ledger book converted from its manufactured business purpose for a customized, personal use. The genres represented include reprintings of sermons, public addresses, literary essays, historical sketches, memorial tributes, charitable appeals, reviews, letters to the editor, and translations. In almost all cases, the ledger contains pasted newspaper clippings that have been corrected and/or

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Resurrection; ibid., 39, 41, 42 (in three parts), for Rapoport’s Erekh Milin; ibid., 48–58 (in eleven parts), for his translation from Italian into English of Luzzatto’s Lessons in Moral Theology; ibid., 83–92 (in twelve parts), for his translation from Hebrew into English of Maimonides’s Letter to Yemen; ibid., 95–100, 103–105 (in twelve parts), for his translation from Hebrew into English of Samuel David Luzzatto’s Introduction to the Pentateuch; ibid.,113–121, 123–124 (in twelve parts) for his translation of Luzzatto’s Autobiography; ibid., 126–130 (in seven parts), for his translation from Hebrew into English of Luzzatto’s Oheb Ger: A Hermeneutical-Critical Dissertation of thirty-two Sections, on the Aramaic Paraphrase of Onkelos. See Arthur Kiron, “An Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters?” Jewish History 20 (2006): 171–211; and most recently the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian Jewish epistolary culture by Asher Salah, Le République des Lettres: rabbins, écrivains et médecins juifs en Italie au XVIIIe siècle (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Salah, L’epistolario di Marco Mortara (1815–1894): un rabbino italiano tra riforma e ortodossia (Florence: Giuntina, 2007), esp. 204–218 for transcriptions of Hebrew and Italian correspondence between Mortara, a graduate of the Padua Collegio Rabbinico and chief rabbi of Mantua, and Morais. I am deeply grateful to Arnold Kaplan, an expert collector of American Jewish business history and material culture, for his help identifying the accounting purpose of the Morais Ledger book.

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annotated by hand, as well as printed pamphlets, circulars, and typescripts. It lacks color and illustrations except for a handful of black-and-white sketches in a few newspaper articles (in contrast to Victorian scrapbooks of trade cards and other color-illustrated keepsakes of the period).27 Historically, in its donation to the Annenberg Research Institute in 1992 the book was officially named the “Morais Ledger” (not scrapbook).28 The preference for the term “ledger” rather than “scrapbook” seems to have signified yet a third instance in which an effort was made to elevate (as was the case with his “diplomas”) the otherwise uncredentialed teacher and seminary president. Like his religious vocation, which underwent a process of feminization during the Victorian era against the rise of a culture of scientism,29 the ledger, then, was to be distinguished properly from the feminized cultural status associated with scrapbooks. For our purposes, in light of the size of the volume, its booklike structure, its function both as a repository and as a site of emendation and annotation, and in keeping with its posthumous designation, I call it a “ledger” in this essay. The remaining discussion will focus on the ledger as a material artifact and provide examples that disclose how it was composed and for what purposes. It is not entirely clear, for example, who assembled the ledger in its current form, when it was done, and in what stages. From internal evidence, such as the sequence of pasting and annotation, it seems that Sabato Morais began pasting around 1885, some thirty-five years after he first began clipping (or at least saving) his own publications.30 Pasted into the ledger also are a few clippings 27 28

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For illustrated (black-and-white clippings), see Morais Ledger, 451, 459 (photo-illustrated), 476, 481, 494 (photo-reproduced) 498, and 500. When the volume was donated to the Annenberg Research Institute in 1992, it was officially named the “Sabato Morais Ledger” by the donor, Marvin Weiner. Documentation found in the library records of the Annenberg Research Institute, now at the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. On the feminization of the ministry, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday, 1977; repr., 1998), 80–117; on scientism, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 390–470. See, for example, the annotations by Sabato Morais to the ledger, 23 (clipping dated 25 Nov. 1864), referring to Hebrew Union College (which was established in 1875); ibid., 43, annotation to 27 Feb. 1870, referring to a later page/date (334, ca. 1885) of the ledger; ibid., 59, annotation to 29 Nov. 1872, referring after the fact to the demise of the Jewish Index, which ceased publication in 1873; ibid., 63, annotation to 8 Jan. 1875, referring to Alexander Kohut’s ministry at Congregation Anshe Hesed in New York City, which could not have been earlier than 1885, when Kohut was first appointed.

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written and signed by his son, Henry S. Morais.31 In all cases, the clippings of articles the son authored constitute reports about public lectures orally delivered by the father and summarized in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent (the weekly newspaper that Henry helped to found in 1887 and coedited). In one case, however, we find the son claiming authorship over a part of his father’s work. Beneath one (undated) clipping reporting on a series of Sabbath lectures on postbiblical Jewish history delivered by Sabato Morais appears a handwritten note in the son’s hand stating that these lectures were “in part written by Henry S. Morais.” Further evidence of the hybrid authorship/composition of the ledger comes from the annotations on the pages of the scrapbook itself, adjacent to the clippings. Many of these notations clearly are in Sabato Morais’s hand but not all. The first page of the ledger, for example, contains a handwritten, penciled note in parentheses (“A Sermon Wanting Here”). The handwriting in all likelihood is that of Henry S. Morais, given that the shape of the letter “S” inscribed by the writer follows the shape of the middle initial of Henry’s signature and is distinct from the way in which his father, Sabato, formed his own “S.” This paleographic distinction is confirmed by comparison with firstperson, handwritten marginalia jotted down by Sabato Morais in the ledger as annotations to clippings pasted there. Opening the ledger, the reader finds a heading entitled “Contents.” This table of contents, which is not integral to the ledger’s text block, imparts a bookish paratextual structure to the material object. It is written on a different type or grade of manufactured paper—more recent, less acidic, and printed with lines (fifty horizontal blue lines, with one vertical red line dividing the page in half). These seven leaves are hand numbered on the top right corner of the recto and top left corner of the verso (i.e., fourteen numbered pages). The structure of the table of contents, from left to right, is page number in the left column, a brief description of the article, followed by the date and the name of the newspaper in which the article appeared. Following the table of contents is the ledger text block itself: five hundred pages with printed numerals in black ink on the upper right-hand corner of the recto and upper left-hand corner of the verso of each page (though many of them—e.g., page numerals 1–24 and 495–500—have broken off owing to the high acidic content and overhandling of the paper). The physical composition of the ledger, with its added paratextual table of contents, indicates multiple hands at work at different times in what amounts to a kind of editing practice. 31

See Ledger, 148, 248 (two instances), 304, 305, 307r, 337, 339 (two instances), 341, 345, 346, 474 (two instances), 475, 476, 477.

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The pasted clippings contain multiple handwritten emendations as well as marginal notes in Sabato Morais’s hand. One of the emendations that mark it as a Jewish act of correction has to do with chronology.32 The date of publication printed in Latin characters on one of the clippings, “Tishri 2 5646” (the second day of the Jewish New Year festival of Rosh Hashanah, which would have occurred on 11 Sept. 1885), does not correspond to the common-era date [Friday] 1 October 1886 printed on the clipping.33 The Jewish calendar year begins in the fall season; its start precedes the common-era New Year in January. Clearly, this was a typographical error. It may have been due to carelessness, forgetfulness, or perhaps haste, that is, a rush to print the newspaper before the high holiday commenced (at which point all work would have to cease, given the paper’s reputation for harboring “Orthodox tendencies”). The last digit of the date printed on the clipping, 5646, has been effaced by hand in the Ledger (to indicate that the printed 6 needs to be corrected [i.e., the year needs to be changed from 5646 to 5647]). The typo is seemingly trivial, but the correction, I would suggest, comports with the practice and function of emendation and annotation throughout the ledger, namely, to prepare its contents for future publication. This example is one of many demonstrating that the ledger constitutes a hybrid form of composition, compilation, inscription, printed trace, annotated account, and emended text. It gives every sign of functioning as a kind of printer’s galley in which the “type” is composed of newspaper clippings in need of correction before publication. It is accompanied by instructions and personal explanations from the compiler, supplemented by additional clippings pasted in and annotated by his son. In scope, the Morais Ledger spans almost the entirety of the second half of the nineteenth century (1849–98). It contains a total of 831 ephemeral items, including clippings cut out34 from thirty-three discrete periodicals (more than

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On the scholarly history of calendars and chronology, see the magisterial work by Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983, 1993); and Joanna Weinberg’s annotated translation of and introduction to Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes/Me’or Enyaim (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2001). The subject of keeping time has attracted renewed Jewish scholarly interest in recent years. See, e.g., Joanna Weinberg, “Invention and Convention: Jewish and Christian Critique of the Jewish Fixed Calendar,” Jewish History 14, no. 3 (2000): 317–330; and Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Belknap, 2011). Ledger, 366. There is a distinction to be made between the practices of cutting and tearing, the former requiring a tool and consideration, the latter being more or less spontaneous, less careful,

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half—eighteen—of the titles are of non-Jewish publications).35 Of these items 595 are unrecorded in the selected and annotated bibliography of Morais’s writings published by Moshe Davis in 1947.36 Methodologically, in order to assess these unpublished and printed sources clipped from the popular press, I would suggest that what is important is not the depth (or lack thereof, as is almost always the case) of a particular text but the evidence provided by the subject matter and language enriched by learned allusions. These fragmentary traces, when taken collectively and analyzed systematically, provide substantial documentation of the kind of canon of Jewish texts and traditions Morais transmitted to his Anglophone readers. One nearly lost strand of religious humanism that Morais introduced to his American audience traces back to Livorno and Naples in the figure of Giambattista Vico. Arnaldo Momigliano once cautioned against reading too much into a note in Vico’s autobiography that he formed a friendship with

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and less considered. The straight edges of the clippings in the Morais Ledger show that they were made by scissors or a knife, not by tearing by hand. From the ledger, we know Morais’s publications appeared in the following non-Jewish newspapers and locations: the Boston Evening Traveller, Boston Index, Daily Mercury (Philadelphia), Episcopal Register (Philadelphia), Evening Herald (Philadelphia), Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), Ledger and Transcript (Philadelphia), Mirror and Keystone (Philadephia), North American (Philadelphia), North American and United States Gazette, Penn Monthly (Philadelphia), Philadelphia Inquirer, The Press (Philadelphia), Public Ledger (Philadelphia), Sunday Dispatch (Philadelphia), The Age (Philadelphia), The Day (Philadelphia), The Times (Philadelphia). The Jewish periodicals are the American Hebrew (New York), American Israelite (Cincinnati), Asmonean (New York), [Young Men’s Hebrew] Association Bulletin (Philadelphia), [Young Men’s Hebrew] Association Review (Philadelphia), Hebraica (New York, published as a monthly supplement to the Jewish Messenger), Hebrew Standard (New York), Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), Jewish Index (Philadelphia), Jewish Messenger (New York), Jewish Record (Philadelphia), Jewish Tribune (St. Louis), Menorah Monthly (New York), Mosè Antologia Israelitica (Corfu), Occident and American Jewish Advocate (Philadelphia). Moshe Davis, “Sabato Morais: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of His Writings,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 37 (1947): 55–93. Not every unrecorded item in the ledger was unknown to Davis. Some he may have known but chose not to include. Others, however, such as the large number of anonymously published pieces, or no-longer-extant sources (e.g., the clippings from the Jewish Index), are only known from the ledger. Davis’s decision to focus almost exclusively on the Jewish newspapers in which Morais published obscures the broader distribution and multiple readerships to which his articles circulated. From the ledger, for example, we know that the original printings of Morais’s publications in the non-Jewish press later were reprinted and circulated in the Jewish press.

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Livornese Jews like Joseph Attias in the early eighteenth century.37 Nineteenthcentury Livornese Jewish intellectuals like the printer and kabbalist Eliyahu Benamozegh, as well as Morais’s teacher and friend De Benedetti, were reading, publicly quoting, and otherwise engaged with Vico’s writings. In 1876, Morais translated into English an Italian lecture by De Benedetti about the originality of the Hebrew language and published it in the Jewish Messenger, a New York weekly organ of enlightened observant Jewish opinion.38 The clipping of that publication, pasted into the ledger, contains an asterisked footnote in which Morais identifies for his American readers De Benedetti’s reference to the “Neapolitan genius” as “Gian Batista Vico, a deep thinker of the seventeenth century regarding the common origin of all nations.” Owing to the nature of the clipping, however, which exceeded in length the page upon which it was pasted, the footnote was folded vertically. Over time the seam of the fold weakened and finally tore off. In an act of wishful preservation, this folded note was later tucked underneath the bottom edge of the pasted clipping.39 Easy to overlook, both physically and intellectually, is the fact that this nearly lost footnote is the first trace of Vico in the history of American Jewish letters.40 A different kind of self-conscious transmission—one of personal memory—is recorded in the ledger by Sabato Morais in a handwritten annotation next to a clipping of a sermon he delivered during the American Civil War. Here he writes about an episode in 1864 when he was forbidden by his synagogue’s board of trustees from delivering sermons. They imposed this gag order on him because of his strong support for Abraham Lincoln and the Union 37

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For Vico’s mention of Attias, see The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1995), 173; and Arnaldo Momigliano, “Vico’s Scienza Nuova: Roman Bestioni and Roman Eroi,” History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 9. Jewish Messenger, 16 Apr. 1875; ledger, 74. It is not clear when this happened, but in a penciled note to another clipping (about the Jewish New Year in September of 1881 [5642]), the reader is directed to “see torn off portion for the balance.” See ledger, 175. In the course of the conservation of this ledger, this separate fragment was reattached by a hinge that folds up over the clipping. See ledger, 74, for the clipping of this serialized set of essays about “Italian Hebrew Literature,” published in the Jewish Messenger (New York), between 1 Jan. and 16 Apr. 1875. In the concluding article in the series, Morais translates an essay entitled “Originality of the Hebrew” by Salvatore De Benedetti, which Morais claims was originally delivered by “an old teacher of mine,” the “professor of Oriental Languages in the royal university of Pisa” to his students. For additional discussion of this source, see Kiron, “Livornese Traces in American Jewish History,” 49–52.

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cause, which had antagonized southern sympathizers (“copperheads”) in his congregation. Morais inscribed his memory of the controversy as follows: I very much regret that this discourse is so badly printed that it is scarcely legible. A history is connected with it. Copperheads became so enraged by reason of it that I got a hornet’s next round my ears. Men dressed in brief authority would have stopped my speaking altogether but I appealed to my constituents, and after three months’ silence resumed my free speech as formerly.41 This brief note is pregnant with unnamed historical and literary allusions. The phrase “hornet’s nest,” for example, has multiple historical referents, though it was so widely used at the time that it is unclear if it refers here to anything specific (e.g., the fiercely contested battle at Shiloh two years earlier). The phrase “dressed in brief authority,” however, is a slightly misquoted line from act 2 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.42 In scene 2, Isabella, the sister of a young man (Claudio) sentenced to death on the charge of seduction, pleads with the temporarily installed ruler (Angelo) for her brother’s life by pointing out that only someone “drest in a little brief authority” will enforce strict justice rather than mercy. Morais invokes a woman’s voice—Isabella’s—to convey his own feelings about the unjust and degrading treatment he received from these petty tyrants. To be clear, Morais did not review his Shakespeare before writing this note. Rather, the “high” cultural literary allusion is imbedded in a briefly scribbled annotation. He knew his Shakespeare by heart, just as he might have quoted from memory a Jewish source. Finally, it should not be forgotten that the very act of making this ledger was seemingly at odds with the temperament of its compiler. By his own account, Morais was profoundly shy: “From the earliest years of my life which I can recall I remember myself a shy, easily scared creature, trembling all over at the idea of being brought forward, preferring solitariness to merry company.”43 In the course of his ministry, he routinely deflected attention from his role in multifarious communal activities. At the end of his life, in conveying his burial 41 42

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Ledger, 23. Measure for Measure, act 2, scene 2, lines 117–22: “But man, proud man / Drest in a little brief authority / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured / His glassy essence, like an angry ape / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.” I am deeply grateful to Marc Saperstein for leading me to this allusion. Sabato Morais, “Anniversary of my 45th Year with the Congregation M.I, (’96) [1896],” SM-LKCAJS, box 11, FF3 (manuscript).

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wishes, he confidentially asked that his body be cremated. In the memorial tributes published about him, his self-effacing manner was repeatedly mentioned.44 How do we understand why someone who frequently published anonymously and was known for self-abnegation went to such lengths to document and preserve evidence of his own literary corpus? The most convincing explanation is found in a personal letter Morais wrote to his eldest daughter, Nina, on Sunday, 19 July 1896, the year before his death. He must have composed the letter after sunset because the date coincides with the end of the Ninth of Ab, which in the Jewish calendar memorializes the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Following this day of lamentation, Morais confesses that there has been a period in my life, when my aversion to publishing anything of mine, or about myself, determined me to deal with my writings as with my body, viz, to have them consumed in two layers of quick lime.45 But I reconsidered that thought, for some things which I may have translated from Hebrew or Italian, and something original may be of service to modern Jewish literature. In that case it would be selfish to carry out the original idea. Morais then gives his daughter explicit instructions about what to select from what apparently is an allusion to his ledger: In the large book labelled “Published writings” in the box named “lectures” there may be what a discreet and unbiased reviewer will reproduce in correct and interesting shape. For instance, the “Prolegomena” just given has been favorably received. As soon as I receive a copy of it I will mark corrections which the editor did not rectify, notwithstanding his promise. Sometime ago, I looked over other writings, but you know how difficult it is for me to go searching into mistakes, and clearing whatever is dirty from a literary standpoint. Henry’s [Henry S. Morais] blind partiality might thwart my intention. Possibly, he would let the press bring forth every scrap, which may have pleased at the time, but which might, perhaps, read as valueless in after years. Yourself and Emanuel [Cohen, Morais’s son-in-law] would exercise due discretion, and regarding the Hebrew, you may find some impartial critic. Lectures, unless of a national 44 45

Kiron, “Dust and Ashes,” 179–180. For Morais’s distinction between cremation as elimination by fire and accelerations of natural bodily decomposition, see the ledger, 232.

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or literary tendency, may as well be consigned to oblivion. My predecessor [Isaac Leeser] has left many volumes of sermons. Who reads them? My contemporaries, send broadcast their weekly discourses. They will be short-lived. Let therefore deep consideration guide the printing of anything of mine. If I succeed in having [The Book of] Jeremiah translated it will appear in the next Bible and you may say that the translation was mine. I could not attend the last meeting of the translators on Thursday but it is a question in my mind whether I would submit to have my rendition overhauled by the text revisors [sic]. Time will show.46 In time, Nina completed her father’s translation of Jeremiah for the new Jewish Publication Society of America edition, which ultimately appeared in 1917. The work of posthumously editing Morais’s writings, however, was left unfinished. One volume appeared twenty years later, a selection about Italian Hebrew literature, commemorating the centenary of his birth.47 In the foreword to that volume, Henry Morais confessed his guilt over his inability to fulfill his father’s wishes.48 It was left to two of Morais’s students, Julius H. Greenstone, who edited the collection, and Cyrus Adler, who took on the responsibility of editing the unpublished material and writing his biography, to complete the task. Adler died in 1940. Following his death, the ledger book of Morais’s writings disappeared. Looking back, one can imagine the twenty-seven-year-old first arriving in the United States in 1851, coming from a cultural background unfamiliar to the vast majority of his American coreligionists. To address this vacuum, he cultivated intellectual companionship through his pastoral duties as a congregational rabbi. He began this programmatic effort by teaching young children and their parents. The substance of his teachings was mainly conveyed in person and via the pulpit, the classroom, public speaking, and the popular press. To aid his work, he literally and figuratively translated into English classical Sephardic and Italian Jewish primary sources he believed could serve as a basis for Jewish religious Americanization. Professional scholars were not his target audience. Nor was academic monographic publication his mode of cultural 46 47

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sm to Nina Morais, Philadelphia, 19 July 1896, 1, SM-LKCAJS, box 7, ff 10. Sabato Morais, LL.D., Italian Hebrew Literature, ed. Julius H. Greenstone, with a foreword by Henry S. Morais (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1926). The editorial decision to print the author’s “credential” of doctor of laws is yet another attempt, posthumously, to bolster his standing and honor him in a way that he had rejected. Henry S. Morais, foreword to Italian Hebrew Literature, iii.

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transmission. Morais began scrapbooking late in life out of a sense of dutiful service. His hope was to secure unity, meaning, and purpose to heal and overcome personal, communal, and political fracture. Around 1885, when he was in his early sixties, Morais reluctantly committed himself to preserving his most cherished beliefs, through institution building and publishing, to serve a public, communal good. If scrapbooking was taken up to counteract the effects of dislocation and alienation, it also served a positive function, namely, as a way to organize and transmit one’s legacy. The Morais Ledger, like the life story it documents, perhaps is best understood against the grain, not as an intellectual unity but as evidence of hybridity—an unfinished, multifarious opus in need of further editing. As with Measure for Measure, we have an ending, but in neither case is there a fully satisfying conclusion.

Postscript: Biography of an Inanimate Object

In 1947, on the fiftieth anniversary of Morais’s death, Moshe Davis, a Conservative rabbi and a historian of American Jewry, published a selected and annotated bibliography of Morais’s writings.49 In the introduction, Davis writes that he discovered a reference by Cyrus Adler to a “a huge ledger” that Morais kept, “with a carefully written table of contents in which he posted all the newspaper clippings of his sermons and articles, literary or controversial,” but lamented the fact that the ledger was missing. Sometime between Adler’s death and Davis’s publication seven years later, the ledger had disappeared. In the early 1950s, Marvin Weiner, a Philadelphia area businessman and collector of early Americana, was browsing Sam Kleinman’s Schuykill Book Shop in West Philadelphia when he came upon a ledger-sized volume filled with clippings by Sabato Morais. Realizing its significance, Weiner purchased it. Over the course of the next four decades, he assiduously cataloged on index cards and cross-referenced all items in the ledger. On each index card, he identified an individual clipping pasted in the ledger and transcribed any handwritten annotations related to it. He also compared the ledger’s contents with Davis’s bibliography and noted each item Davis had not listed. To supplement his catalog and to provide better access to it, Weiner created a register of the newspapers in the ledger, alphabetized by title and accompanied by the date of each issue from which an article had been clipped. In 1997, he commissioned 49

Davis, “A Selected and Annotated Bibliography.”

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Dr. Leslie DeLauter, then working at the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library, to type his index card catalog into a computer. Typing the Marvin Weiner Catalogue of the Sabato Morais Ledger was a critical step in the digital publication of both. The final steps of editing, proofreading, formatting, and indexing the catalog were undertaken by Gina Glasman, a doctoral student at Columbia University. Glasman reviewed the printed catalog and compared it with the contents of the ledger, established a uniform entry format, and created a name and subject index. Etty Lassman, a research assistant for the fellowship program at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (the successor institution to the Annenberg Research Institute and today known as the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn), completed the project, overseeing the proofreading and layout for the printed finding aid. Weiner ultimately decided to donate his precious find to the Annenberg Institute, and it is now part of the Penn Libraries’ collection of rare Judaica Americana. This study of the Morais Ledger, thus, is built upon nearly a century of previous efforts, happenstance, and generosity, and therefore constitutes in the most meaningful sense a social practice.

Part 6 Approaches to Antiquity



chapter 37

King Arthur’s Merry Adventure in the Vale of Viterbo Ingrid D. Rowland What king could be more English than Arthur? From the chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (and its 1963 animated version by Walt Disney), the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, scores of films, and those glorious send-ups by the Monty Python troupe, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Spamalot, Arthur, as king of the Britons, preserves England from foreign domination with the help of his Knights of the Round Table. Some parts of Arthur’s story are essential: his connection with Merlin the magician, for example, and his fate, which decrees that he and his treacherous nephew (or son) Sir Mordred must slay each other on the Welsh fields of Camlann, and that Arthur’s body, laid out in state in the belly of a sleek Viking ship, must float away to the mysterious realm of Avalon (although Gervase of Tilbury, in the twelfth century, insists that the king was really transported to the heart of Mount Etna).1 The rest of the Arthurian legend, however, has been subjected to incessant alteration, including a surprising tradition, examined here, that connects Arthur with the Italian peninsula. By its very nature, the king’s court in Camelot was always a temporary paradise. Knights sat around the Round Table to confer, or perhaps to recover their strength between battles, but their knightly work took them away from the stronghold. For the ladies, therefore, Camelot must have been a gilded cage, and indeed in every telling of Arthur’s legend its chatelaine, the beauteous and restless Queen Guinevere, betrays her absent husband, either with the young hothead Mordred—this is the earlier version of the tale—or, in the later Middle Ages, with a smooth-talking, swashbuckling French swain named Lancelot. It was Arthur’s long absence from Camelot that left the kingdom open to Mordred’s scheming in the first place. Every surviving version of his legend reports that the king wandered to distant lands, at the very least from southwestern Britain to France, and often to far more exotic climes. According to a fourteenth-century English verse account, Arthur heard the dread news of 1 Arturo Graf, Artù nell’Etna: Miti e leggende (Rome: Loescher, 1893; repr., Rome: Atanór, 1980), 8–11. Gervase makes this statement in his Otia imperialia, cited in full by Graf, Artù nell’Etna.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_038

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Mordred’s duplicitous takeover in the middle of a wild party in the Italian town of Viterbo, so wild that the Knights of the Round Table had been carousing for a good six weeks before the ragged English messenger intercepted them. The author of this poem remains nameless, and his untitled work is known for convenience as the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur. Composed around 1400, at a time when traditional Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse had largely given way in Britain to Italianate rhyme, it provides a cultivated exercise in literary antiquarianism, and perhaps in English literary patriotism, but its geographic range is anything but provincial. In these verses, Arthur and his troops reach Viterbo after battling their way from Lake Como down through Tuscany, facing enemies who come from regions as distant as Damascus. The poet’s language, despite its consciously Anglo-Saxon meter, is, perhaps not surprisingly, steeped in French: Toward Viterbo this valiant aveeres the reines…. In the Vertenonne vale the vines i-monges; There sujournes this soveraign with solace in herte, To…. Revel with rich wine, riotes himselven, This roy with his real men of the Round Table, With mirthes and melody and manykin gamnes; Was never merrier men made on this erthe!2 For this poet’s readers, then, Viterbo, a day’s journey north of Rome, was a plausible place to find both an English king and a wine-soaked revel. The Alliterative Morte d’Arthur thus provides yet another indication, among many, that connections between England and Italy in the late Middle Ages were close and complicated, including connections to King Arthur himself. The Alliterative poet’s local information is certainly accurate when it comes to the menu of this Arthurian revel: he claims that the king and his merry men partook “of Vernage and other wine and venison baken.” Today the white wine known as Vernaccia may come from grapes grown mostly around the Tuscan town of San Gimignano, but a line from Dante provides vivid confirmation that Vernaccia vines were planted around Viterbo in the Middle Ages: the Divine Comedy consigns Pope Martin iv to the gluttons’ zone of Purgatory, where he “shits Bolsena eels and Vernaccia” (Purgatorio 24.24). Viterbese vintners only

2 Alliterative Morte Arthure, lines 3169–75, in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Forster (Kalamazoo, mi: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994).

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began to replace temperamental Vernaccia vines with hardier Trebbiano and Malvasia varietals in the twentieth century.3 Venison is a predictable viand as well, for deer were plentiful in the thick woods covering the slopes of Monte Cimino, the extinct volcano that looms over the city, encouraging generations of cardinals to build hunting lodges in that vicinity.4 Deer are also high-class prey, fit for a cardinal or a king. A little more than a century after the composition of the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur, one of these cardinal huntsmen, Egidio da Viterbo, wrote a wry allegorical poem about the “Caccia Bellissima dell’Amore,” the “Most Beautiful Hunt of Love,” in which a lover compares himself unfavorably with Actaeon, the famous deer hunter of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan myth.5 The writer of the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur might, in fact, be speaking about the charms of Viterbo from personal experience, a point to which we shall return. In the meantime, however, it is important to note that Arthur’s party has its legendary precedents as well, for northern Europeans had been getting drunk on Etruscan wine a millennium before the Round Table’s sojourn in the “Vertennonne vale.” Livy, for example, tells the story of an Etruscan elder named Arruns, who lured a troop of Gauls over the Alps to his native Chiusi in the early fourth century bce by promises of fruit and wine (5.32–34): Rumor has it that [the Gauls], captivated by the sweetness of the fruit and especially of the wine, a new pleasure, crossed over the Alps and took possession of lands that had hitherto been cultivated by the Etruscans; and that Arruns of Clusium had introduced wine to Gaul with the intention of enticing that nation into drunkenness, in his outrage because his wife had been seduced by Lucumo (whose tutor he was), an influential youth, from whom he could not have exacted revenge without calling in outside help. 3 Giancarlo Breccola, Montefiascone e il suo vino (Montefiascone: Tipografia Silvio Pellico, 2009). As an example of present vintages, the excellent Coenobium table wine of the Trappist Sisters of Vitorchiano (near Viterbo) is a mixture of Trebbiano, Malvasia, Verdicchio, and Grechetto (http://www.trappistevitorchiano.it/vita-nel-monastero-lavoro-campagna.asp). My thanks to Anthony Monta for this information, and for the wine. 4 Ingrid D. Rowland, “A Summer Outing in 1510: Religion and Economics in the Papal War with Ferrara,” Viator 18 (1987): 347–59. 5 Egidio da Viterbo, “La Caccia Bellissima dell’ Amore,” cited from Vettor Ravano, Amore di Hieronymo Beniveni Fiorentino, allo Illustrissimo Signor Nicolo da Correggio, Et una Caccia de amore bellissima de Egidio & cinque capituli sopra el Timore, Zelosia, Speranza, Amore, & uno Triompho del Mondo Composti per il conte Matteo Maria Boiardo et Altre Cose Diverse (Venice: Vettor Ravano, 1535), Diiir–v.

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In Montefiascone, just north of Viterbo, a comparable legend has grown up around a medieval tomb slab set into the floor of the Romanesque church of San Flaviano.6 The deceased, in long robes, with a coat of arms and a chalice carved on either side of his head, was once identified by a crude, worn inscription as a certain Iohannes Defuk, supposedly a wine-loving German cardinal bound for Rome in 1111 to meet Holy Roman Emperor Henry v. Locals report that Defuk, a great gourmand, sent his servant Martin ahead to sample the local wines; in taverns where the drinking was good, Martin was to scrawl a message in Latin on the door: “Est,” for which the best translation is the Italian vernacular c’è. In Orvieto, Martin left a graffito: “Est.” In Montefiascone, famous in medieval and early modern times for its sweet Malvasia wine, the ecstatic servant wrote, “Est! Est!! Est!!!” Martin knew his master’s tastes. Cardinal Defuk was so taken with Montefiascone Malmsey that he forgot his duties to Rome and his emperor. Instead, he partied in Montefiascone until death overtook him. Cardinal Defuk’s identity has been debated for centuries. The first accounts of his legend go back to German travelers’ reports from the mid-sixteenth century, and the cardinal has often been identified as Johann Fugger from the famous family of Augsburg bankers. But the Fuggers rose to importance only in the sixteenth century, with family records that extend back no further than the fourteenth. Their coat of arms has nothing to do with Defuk’s rampant lion in pale with three fesses. Furthermore, the worn figure on this tomb slab is certainly wearing a hat, but the headgear does not look like a bishop’s miter. There is no indication that he was an ecclesiastic, let alone a cardinal. Indeed, the most striking feature of the relief is its artfully agitated drapery; most Italian tombstones, from the twelfth century through the sixteenth, show the deceased sleeping calmly, awaiting the Last Judgment with confident faith and unruffled robes. In a recent book, Montefiascone resident Quinto Ficari provides a completely different identity for Johannes Defuk, along with an ingenious explanation for the “Est! Est!! Est!!!” legend, one that will take us back to King Arthur and his wild party in the vale of Viterbo.7 Ficari compares Defuk’s coat of arms with those of an important thirteenth-century Austrian prelate: 6 An exhaustive bibliography is provided by the Montefiascone blog L’Acciarino, http://acciarino .com/bibliografia-della-leggenda-dellest-est-est, accessed 1 Dec. 2014. See also Patrizia Andreasi Bassi, “Dalla rievocazione storica di Montefiascone alla strada dei vini: le comunità locali della Tuscia tra vecchie e nuove linee di promozione del prodotto,” in Memorie del territorio, territorio della memoria, Percorsi di ricerca, ed. Lia Zola (Milan: Angeli, 2009), 53–62. 7 Quinto Ficari, La leggenda di Defuk . . . e il mistero di Federico ii di Svevia (Montefiascone: Quinto Ficari, 2013).

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Philipp von Spanheim, who served as elector of Salzburg from 1247 to 1257, patriarch of Aquileia from 1269 to 1271, Count of Lebenau from 1271 until his death in 1279, and nominal Duke of Carinthia. The chalices carved on either side of the presumed cardinal Defuk’s head, Ficari argues, refer not to the dead man’s love of drink, but to his association with the imperial Staufen or Hohenstaufen family, which had extensive dominions in medieval Italy, including an important fortress on the peak of Montefiascone; Stauf, in archaic German, meant “chalice.” He suggests that the deceased may have been the imperial agent Friedrich von Tanne, who governed Montefiascone until 1197, when he was killed in a citizens’ uprising. When Philipp von Spanheim came down from Salzburg to Viterbo in 1268 to participate in the papal conclave, he may have taken this opportunity to order a proper tombstone for his Hohenstaufen predecessor in nearby Montefiascone, a tombstone that bears his own coat of arms rather than the crest of the von Tanne family, which was or, three lions passant sable (gold, with three striding black lions).8 In the tormented politics of thirteenth-century Italy, both von Tanne and von Spanheim would have been called Ghibellines, named after the Hohenstaufen castle of Waiblingen. This faction was perennially hostile to the Guelphs, who (at least in theory) pledged their first allegiance to the pope. Likewise, their followers in Montefiascone would have belonged to the Ghibelline side, loyal to the emperor and hostile to the papacy; von Tanne’s assassins, on the other hand, may have hoped for papal backing. As the power of the papacy grew over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Montefiascone came entirely under papal, Guelph, control, and it is easy to see how the chalices, symbols of Ghibelline allegiance, might turn into symbols of despicable Germanic gourmandise. The transformation of the denizen of this tomb in Montefiascone from a slain Austrian governor to a hard-drinking Bavarian cardinal named Fugger occurred, according to Ficari, in the mid-sixteenth century. By then the Fugger family had become one of the wealthiest in Europe. In the early sixteenth century, Johann Jakob Fugger “der Reiche” had been shrewd enough to do away with outmoded concepts like Guelph and Ghibelline; he did business both with the pope and with the Holy Roman emperor—not to mention the independent Republic of Venice. Fugger augmented his legendary fortune by selling papal indulgences in Germany, offering the prospect of reduced time in Purgatory for a simple monetary payment. The indulgences themselves were simple pieces of paper; hence the profits from this trade were so lucrative that 8 Ibid.

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in 1506 Fugger could underwrite the construction of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.9 Ten years later, in 1516, he endowed an old age home, the Fuggerei, in his native Augsburg (where it is still in operation, the oldest social housing project in the world).10 In 1517, however, the Protestant Reformation began to encroach on the Fuggers’ empire, and on Italy. In 1527, a band of about twelve thousand mostly German Lutheran mercenaries, hired and then fired by Holy Roman Emperor Charles v (whose election had been financed by the House of Fugger), turned on Rome, subjecting the city to a horrific six-month sack. The raiders themselves had worked for a Catholic Habsburg emperor; in the aftermath of the raid, attitudes toward German speakers in Rome, already tense earlier in the 1520s, became overtly hostile.11 By this time, the old tomb slab in the church at Montefiascone had been worn so smooth that it was supplied, apparently, with a new epitaph, and possibly the figure was re-carved as well (this would explain its active drapery, more in tune with the style of the sixteenth than the thirteenth century). Now the deceased was identified as Defuk, connected with the “Est! Est!! Est!!!” story, and honored with a new ritual: a barrel of wine was emptied over the slab on what was understood to be the cardinal’s birthday, in ostensible accordance with his last wishes. The name Defuk, however, must not have been all that clearly inscribed, and by now it has been rubbed away to illegibility. One old transcription of the epitaph records it as reading Deoc rather than Defuk or Defuc—so perhaps the inscription simply recorded the tomb’s occupant as “Deutsch,” generically German. Defuk and Fugger are not exactly the same name in any case, although the hard German “g” of “Fugger” was often transcribed as “ck” in contemporary documents.12 Furthermore, the Fugger family produced no cardinals in the twelfth century, and so the mysterious Defuk, who is honored by a parade in Montefiascone every 15 August, turns out to be as legendary a foreign visitor to the region as King Arthur, and perhaps, as we shall see, far more legendary than the king of Camelot. The present-day parade in the

9 10 11 12

Mark Häberlein, Die Fugger. Geschichte einer Augsburger Familie (1367–1650) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006), 146. Ibid., 142–64. See Julia H. Gaisser, “The Rise and Fall of Goritz’s Feasts,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 41–57. So, for example, in the Augsburg tax records for 1368: “Fucker advenit.” Theo Sellmann, Jakob Fugger, der König der mitteralterlichen Kaufherren, Paderborn: Salzwasser Verlag, 1909, 7.

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Cardinal Defuk arrives in Montefiascone. Contemporary label for the Est!Est!!Est!!! wine of the Cantina Cooperativa di Montefiascone.

cardinal’s honor, despite its medieval trappings, was invented in the twentieth century.13 The story of Cardinal Defuk, like that of Arruns and the Gauls in the fourth century bc and King Arthur and his Merry Men in the Vale of Vertennon, makes the point, bolstered by millennia of anecdotal evidence, that northern Europeans were extremely fond of the wine they found in the region just north of Rome, and tended to drink this beverage as liberally as if it were beer, eliciting the amusement and disdain of the locals with their drunken antics.14 Like Cardinal Fugger/Defuk/von Tanne, hard-drinking King Arthur turns out to have been a man of multiple identities, and these ultimately bind him closer to Viterbo than Cardinal Defuk is bound to Montefiascone. To begin 13 14

Luigi Cecconi, “Il corteo storico falisco di Montefiascone” (thesis for the laurea, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Rome, Tor Vergata, 2003–4). Ingrid D. Rowland, “Revenge of the Regensburg Humanists,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 307–22.

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with, he may have been an Italian rather than a Briton. A gens Artoria is attested in imperial Rome, and linguists have identified the name Artorius as either Etruscan or Messapian.15 The Artorii even boasted a Roman general, Lucius Artorius Castus, who served in Britain under the reign of Commodus, holding Hadrian’s Wall against invaders and leading an expedition to Gaul before his death in the year 199 or 200. In 1924, medievalist Kemp Malone identified this Artorius as “the only historical character with whom Arthur can with any plausibility be connected”: the two men certainly have things in common . . . (1) their names may be equated without philological difficulty, (2) both were defenders of Britain against barbarian invaders, (3) both led a British army overseas to conquests in Gaul.16 The existence and career of Lucius Artorius Castus are attested by two inscriptions from Dalmatia, leading Malone to conclude that he must have been a native of the region. More recently, however, scholars have attempted to tie L. Artorius Castus to Nola in the Neapolitan hinterland, where other Artorii have been attested in local inscriptions, including the architect of the theater in Pompeii, the freedman M. Artorius Primus.17 Sir Mordred also has his own potentially Italian pedigree; his name was originally given in Latin as Moderatus. Late Antique and early medieval sources have produced no more probable historical source for Arthur than this second-century general. Local English chronicles from the sixth century onward tell how Romano-British chieftains fought to keep the Scandinavian Saxons off the island of Albion, and scholars have speculated that one of these men may have given rise to the Arthurian legend, but none of these early sources (Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Nennius) ever mention a chieftain by name, and none name a king.18 For that we must wait until 1138, when Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his Historia Regum Britanniae, the moment when King Arthur makes 15

16 17

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Artorius is linked to the common Etruscan name Arnth in Thomas Green, Arthuriana: Early Arthurian Tradition and the Origins of the Legend (Louth, uk: Lindes, 2009), 3–46, http://www.arthuriana.co.uk/historicity/arthur.htm, accessed 1 Dec. 1, 2014. Kemp Malone, “Artorius,” Modern Philology 22 (1924–25): 367–74: 373; Linda Malcor, “Lucius Artorius Castus,” Heroic Age 1 (1999), 1–12. Antonio Trinchese, “Artorius—un ufficiale romano fra Campania e Britannia,” in King Arthur: tra storia e leggenda, Da Cimitile a Camelot, ed. Mario de Matteis and Antonio Trinchese (Oberhausen: Athena, 2004), 30–32. See Green, Arthuriana, n. 14.

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his debut on the historical stage.19 In Geoffrey’s telling of the story, Arthur, the Welsh son of King Uther Pendragon, drives the Saxons from British shores before conquering much of northern Europe. When the Roman emperor Lucius Hiberius demands that Britain once again pay tribute, Arthur defies the order and conquers the Romans on a battlefield in Gaul. Military triumph comes, however, at the price of defeat at home; the victor learns that Mordred has married Guinevere and usurped the throne of Camelot. The two slay each other on Camlann Field in Wales and Arthur floats off to Avalon, leaving his kingdom to his cousin Constantine. Some of these historical details must have reappeared in the work of another chronicler, Godfrey of Viterbo, in 1185.20 It is not clear where the well-traveled Godfrey came across a manuscript of the Historia Regum Britanniae, for although he was probably born in Viterbo and certainly died there, he was educated in Germany and traveled widely in the service of Frederick ii, the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman emperor who was known in his day as the stupor mundi. But Godfrey’s version, sadly, survives only in a single sentence of the chapter outline for his partially preserved Pantheon. This brief note records that in the twenty-fifth chapter of Godfrey’s great poetic compendium, Merlin prophesied Arthur’s birth and Arthur fulfilled that prophecy. The Alliterative Morte d’Arthur, unlike Geoffrey, not only pits the king against the Roman emperor Lucius, but also against the pope, bringing the Knights of the Round Table south from Gaul to Viterbo to protest Rome’s insistence on taxing Arthur and his domains: “Here are the kestes,” quod the king, “kaire over the mountes, Mette full monee that ye have mikel yerned, The tax and the tribute of ten score winteres That was teenfully tint in time of our elders; Say to the senatour the citee that yemes That I send him the sum; assay how him likes! But bid them never be so bold, whiles my blood regnes Eft for to brawl them for my brode landes, Ne to ask tribute ne tax by nokin title, But such tresure as this, whiles my time lastes.”.[ 2342–2351]

19 20

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Britonum, 9.1—11.3. Gotefridus Viterbiensis, Memoria Seculorum, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica . . . Scriptorum, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz, vol.22 (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Aulici Hahniani, 1872), 102.

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As the king declares: I give my protection to all the pope landes, My rich pensel of pees my pople to shew. It is a folly to offend our fader under God Other Peter or Paul, tho postles of Rome; If we spare the spiritual we speed but the better; Whiles we have for to speke, spill shall it never! [2410–2415] The imperial, or Ghibelline, political context of this revised version of the tale could not be clearer.21 Other links between Arthur and the imperial cause tie chivalric ideals to the nearly simultaneous Norman invasions of England and Italy. The Cathedral of Otranto, on the east coast of Italy, a Norman foundation of 1088, boasts a glorious twelfth-century mosaic (executed 1163–65) that blends biblical history with local traditions of various European regions, including Norse legends and an Arthurian cycle.22 A generation later, King Richard the Lion-Hearted, en route to the Holy Land and the Third Crusade, stopped in Sicily in 1190, where he fought with the Norman king of Sicily, Tancred Fitz Roger, at Messina; when they finally struck a truce in 1191, one of Richard’s gifts to his former adversary was a sword that he declared to be none other than Arthur’s own Excalibur.23 During this period, because of its proximity to Rome, Viterbo hosted a considerable English community with its own church, San Tommaso di Canterbury.24 This English presence was especially notable during the decades of the thirteenth century (1257–81) in which Viterbo, not Rome, acted as the real seat of the papacy. In 1271, for example, an English lord, Henry of Almain, stopped in Viterbo on the way back from an abortive attempt to go on crusade. He had left Britain in 1269 (leaving his new bride behind) to join his cousin Edward, the future king of England, who had set out for a crusade in the Holy Land in 1268 but was still 21 22 23 24

Mary Hamel, “The Dream of a King: The Alliterative ‘Morte Arthure’ and Dante,” Chaucer Review 14, no. 4 (Spring 1980): 298–312. Grazio Gianfreda, Il mosaico di Otranto, Biblioteca medioevale in immagini (Lecce: Edizione Grifo, 2008). My thanks to Dagmar Frinta for this reference. M.I. Finley, Denis Mack Smith, and Christopher Duggan, A History of Sicily (New York: Viking, 1987), 65. Augusto Ciarrocchi, “Testimonianze del culto di S. Tommaso Becket nella Tuscia meridionale,” Biblioteca e Società (1992): 30–36, also http://www.bibliotecaviterbo.it/rivista/1992 _1–2/Ciarrocchi.pdf, last accessed 1 Apr. 1, 2014.

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tarrying in Palermo. When Henry finally arrived in Sicily, Edward served him with orders to turn back toward France rather than proceed onward to Jerusalem, for the French province of Gascony was threatening to rebel against English rule. Henry opted to return home by traversing Italy overland, together with King Philip iii of France and Charles i of Sicily, stopping in the marvelous Castel del Monte before reaching the papal city of Viterbo. Here the thwarted crusader hoped to obtain the pope’s blessing for his endeavors in France. At thirty-six, Henry was an experienced warrior. At 21, he had been taken hostage at Wallingford by his own uncle, the rebellious baron Simon de Montfort, but he was released shortly after and thus able to take part in the brutal defeat of the Montfort clan the following year, 1265. On 13 March 1271, two surviving Montfort brothers, Guy and Simon, Henry’s cousins, took revenge for the death of their father and elder brother by attacking Almain at mass in the Romanesque church of San Silvestro (fig. 37.2). As Henry clutched the altar, begging for mercy, they struck him dead, just over a century after the similar murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The two assassins were promptly excommunicated.25 Strikingly, the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur seems to recall this event as if it had happened in the days of Camelot, and once again shows the author’s familiarity with the physical setting of Viterbo. The “Pount Tremble” mentioned in the following passage is the Ponte Tremolo, one of several bridges linking the steep bluffs of volcanic stone on which the city was built. (The Ponte Tremolo was destroyed by bombs in World War ii and buried under wartime debris to make the modern Corso Giacomo Matteotti.) Arthur vows revenge for a “vilany” done him in Viterbo: I shall have the avauntward witterly myselven, Til that I have vanquisht the Viscount of Rome, That wrought me at Viterbo a vilany ones, As I past in pilgrimage by the Pount Tremble. He was in Tuskane that time and took of our knightes, Arrest them unrightwisly and ransound them after. I shall him surely ensure that saghtel shall we never Ere we sadly assemble by ourselven ones And dele dintes of deth with our derf wepens! [324–32]

25

Cesare Pinzi: Storia della Città di Viterbo (Rome: Tip. Camera dei Deputati, 1887–89), 7:282–85.

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Figure 37.2

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Church of San Silvestro. Photo: author

In Viterbo’s topography, the Pount Tremble stands just above the Vale of Vertennonne, what is now known as the valley of Faul (fig. 37.3). In the fourteenth century, an English mercenary, Sir John Hawkwood, famously hired himself out as a condottiere for the Republic of Florence.

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The valley of Faul, city wall, and Faul Gate. Photo: author

In many ways, from his principles of conduct to his geographical domains, the hero of the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur has more in common with John Hawkwood than he does with any Arthur who may have stalked the downs of Devonshire almost a millennium earlier, or with Lucius Artorius Castus in the waning second century of the Christian era. Furthermore, one of the bestknown episodes from Arthur’s youth, the drawing of the sword Excalibur from a stone, is an exploit drawn originally from the life of a twelfth-century Tuscan saint, Galgano Guidotti, whose miraculous achievement is still marked by a Romanesque church and a gorgeous ruined monastery in the countryside near Chusdino, outside Siena.26 For the nine centuries that separate the battle of Camlann from the writing of the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur, neither Englishmen in Etruria nor Etruscan 26

Mario Moiraghi, L’enigma di San Galgano—La spada nella roccia tra storia e mito (Milan: Àncora editrice, 2013). For authentication of Galgano’s sword as medieval, see Rory Carroll, “Tuscany’s Excalibur Is the Real Thing, Say Scientists,” Observer (supplement to the Guardian), 16 Sept. 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/16/rorycarroll. theobserver, accessed 1 Dec. 2014.

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wine inside Englishmen were rare phenomena; they were part of the tapestry of life in the Europe that took shape in the wake of the Roman Empire. It seems likely, however, that the king made this appearance in Viterbo for a more pressing purpose than a grailful of that sparkling white liquid so often touted, both then and now, as vino etrusco. For English readers, Arthur’s Italian sojourn and his war with the pope connect him with that time-honored medieval symbol, the translatio imperii, the transferral of ancient Rome’s destiny as the world’s dominant power to other climes and other peoples. But Arthur’s route from Camelot to Rome evokes another translatio imperii: from Rome to the church, for the king and his knights follow the same general path as pilgrims coming from Canterbury to Rome along the great pilgrim road, the Via Francigena, where Viterbo is the last large settlement before Rome itself. The readers of the Alliterative Morte d’Arthur may well have made that pilgrimage, or known someone who did, and remembered well their own revels in the Vale of Vertennonne shortly before reaching the Holy Grail of Rome in a spirit of hung-over penitence.

chapter 38

Ancient Texts and Holy Bodies: Humanist Hermeneutics and the Language of Relics Hester Schadee During the Church Council of Constance (1414–18), the humanist and apostolic scribe Poggio Bracciolini, unemployed since the deposition of Pope John xxiii in 1415, used his newfound leisure to launch a search for ancient manuscripts. Aided by his fellow former curial employees Bartolomeo da Montepulciano and Cencio de’ Rustici, Poggio trawled through monastic and cathedral libraries in France, Germany, and Switzerland.1 His discovery, at Saint Gall, of a trove of ancient texts constitutes an emblematic episode of early Renaissance humanism, recently recounted with dramatic flair by Stephen Greenblatt.2 The item most valued at the time was probably not Lucretius but the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory.3 Poggio’s friend, the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, hailed this find as follows:

1 For Poggio’s life, the standard account remains Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus. Leben und Werke (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914); see also the Poggio entries in Emilio Bigi and Armando Petrucci, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 13 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971); Martin Davies, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1999); and Hester Schadee, Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi, online (Springer, 2014). On Poggio’s stay in Constance and his quest for manuscripts, see Remigio Sabbadini and Eugenio Garin, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli xiv e xv, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), esp. 77–78; and nn. 2 and 3 below. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), reviewed by Anthony Grafton, “The Most Charming Pagan,” New York Review of Books, 8 Dec. 2011. 3 According to Greenblatt, who links Poggio’s discovery of Lucretius to a new, secular, and scientific worldview. On the reception of Lucretius, cf. Enrico Flores, Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio (Naples: Liguori, 1980); Giuseppe Solaro, Lucrezio. Biografie umanistiche (Bari: Dedalo, 2000); pts. 2 and 3 of the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010). For the appreciation of Quintilian, see Michael Winterbottom, “Fifteenth-Century Manu­ scripts of Quintilian,” Classical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1967): 339–69; John Monfasani, “Episodes of Anti-Quintilianism in the Italian Renaissance: Quarrels on the Orator as a Vir Bonus and  Rhetoric as the Scientia Bene Dicendi,” Rhetorica 10 (1992): 119–38; and Joachim

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Quintilian, who used to be maimed and mutilated, will recover all his members through you. I have seen the headings of the books; he is whole, while we used to have only the middle section and that mangled. Oh wondrous treasure! Oh unexpected joy! Shall I see you, Marcus Fabius [Quintilianus], whole and uninjured, and how much will you mean to me now? For I loved you even when you were “cruelly deprived of your mouth, of your mouth and both your hands, and your ears were torn off your temples, and your nose cut off in a shameful wound”; I still loved you for your beauty. Please, Poggio, satisfy this deep desire of mine as quickly as possible, so that if kindness means anything, I may see him before I die.4 The passage is arresting, and not just for the urgency of Bruni’s plea. No less striking is how Bruni describes the manuscript of Quintilian in terms that also, or indeed primarily, apply to bodies, namely “membra” (members), “capita” (headings), and “media pars” (middle). He continues the body metaphor with a quotation from the Aeneid, in which Virgil describes the hacked-up corpse of Deiphobus, encountered by Aeneas in the underworld (“cruelly deprived of your mouth…your hands, your ears,” etc.).5 The theme of this body metaphor is mutilation, yet Bruni’s words also imply an aspect of integrity, and the possibility of reconstruction. For the humanist has no problem directly addressing the Roman orator, and furthermore asks Poggio to ensure that he will see Quintilian whole again. This description of the body of a venerable person who is himself dead, while his mutilated fragments remain, calls to mind the relics of Catholic saints. Indeed, it is not unheard of for humanists to name fragmented ancient texts the “reliquiae” of their authors, for instance Petrarch, who claims that he Classen, “Quintilian and the Revival of Learning in Italy,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 43 (1994): 77–98. 4 “Quintilianus enim prius lacer atque discerptus cuncta membra sua per te recuperabit. Vidi enim capita librorum, totus est, cum vix nobis media pars, et ea ipsa lacera superesset. O lucrum ingens! O insperatum gaudium! Ego te, o Marce Fabi, totum integrumque aspiciam? Et quanti tu michi nunc eris? quem ego quamvis lacerum crudeliter ora, ora manusque ambas, populataque tempora raptis auribus, et truncas inhonesto vulnere nares; tamen propter decorum tuum in deliciis habebam. Oro te Poggi, fac me quam cito huius desiderii compote, ut si quid humanitas impendeat, hunc prius viderim, quam e vita decedam.” Leonardo Bruni, Epistolarum Libri viii, ed. Lorenzo Mehus, intro. James Hankins (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), 4:5; my trans., adapted from Phylis Walter Goodhart Gordan, Two Renaissance Bookhunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus De Niccolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), app. 2. 5 Virgil, Aeneid 6.495–97.

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was encouraged “to seek the [reliquias] of Titus Livy.”6 Naturally, “reliquiae” in classical Latin means the “remains, remainder, rest” of anybody or -thing; equally naturally, no Christian writer could use the word without the religious significance of “relic” reverberating.7 The question is how this resonance should be understood. What precisely are the parallels that invite the description of ancient texts as holy bodies, and what—if anything—do humanists through such metaphors seek to convey, beyond their own wit and literary polish? These are the issues addressed in this essay. Its first section is devoted to aspects of humanist hermeneutics in relation to classical rhetorical theory. The second examines the corporality of codices in parallel to the nature and powers of relics. In the third section, the findings of the first two are revisited as an example of how the mental habits of Christianity may provide a new interpretive framework for humanism’s revival of antiquity.8 i

Rhetorical Theory and Humanist Hermeneutics

In the following pages, “hermeneutics” refers not to the art of exegesis, but more narrowly to how the act of reading is understood in different cultures.9 In order to couch “humanist hermeneutics” in concrete terms, the starting point of our investigation will be humanists’ descriptions of the people, objects, and relationships involved in the reading process. These are, in the cases examined here, the ancient author, his text, its codex, and the humanist reader; in other scenarios these could be expanded to include, for instance, translators, scribes, 6 “ad inquirendas Titi Livii reliquias.” Familiares 3.18. Here and in what follows, Petrarch’s Familiares are cited according to Le Familiare, ed. and trans. Ugo Dotti (2004–9); trans. with minor adaptations taken from Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–85). 7 Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), q.v.; Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), q.v. 8 Humanist epistolaries are among the best sources for the revival of Greco-Roman literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as James Hankins notes in his introduction to Bruni, Epistolarum Libri viii, vii–xxvii, at viii. This essay is based on the complete epistolaries of Bruni (“arguably the most vivid and revealing source for this extraordinary moment”) and Petrarch (whose letter collection is the earliest and among the lengthiest), and selected letters sent by and to Poggio (the most successful bookhunter and Bruni’s correspondent). 9 Guiglielmo Cavallo, Robert Chartier, and Lydia Cochrane, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Oxford: Polity, 1999); for the ancient world see also William Johnson and Holt Parker, Ancient Literacies: Cultures of Reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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and brokers. We begin by examining the first set of relationships, namely, between the author, his text, and the codex in which it was preserved. Humanists very often call the physical form of the text, the codex, by the name of its author. This is not surprising; it is indeed a form of metonymy still used today. Thus Petrarch asks a friend to “send me Hesiod, send me Euripides”; pushing this language a little further, he also writes that “recently, surprising as that may seem, the prince of philosophers, Plato, appeared at my home.”10 Quite frequently, however—and there is no modern equivalent for this practice—the codex is described not just as sharing the name of its author, but rather as being an extension of his person, sharing volition, emotion, and agency. Having copied a manuscript of Cicero, Petrarch informs a friend that “your Cicero gladly returns to you and thanks you in my name. Quite willingly, too, does he remain with me.”11 He urges Boccaccio to “[s]ee if it can be arranged…that all of Homer in Latin may enter this library where he has long dwelt in Greek”— suggesting that Homer, in the form of a codex, has taken up residence in Petrarch’s home.12 When his wish is granted, the humanist remarks that “your Homer, now in Latin, has finally reached me…it has filled me and all those who inhabit my library, be they Greek or Latin, with wonderful joy and delight.”13 These Latin and Greek inhabitants of Petrarch’s library, who rejoice at Homer’s arrival, are of course the other manuscripts in his collection. In this way codices appear a sort of company, with whom one shares one’s house or library. What is more, at times these manuscripts are described as endowed with their authors’ personality, on account of the texts they contain. When Petrarch gives a friend “as companion for the journey Terence, the comedy writer, … that joyful African,” he characterizes Terence as joyful on account of his humorous plays.14 Similarly Poggio, upon losing his Propertius manuscript, 10 11 12

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“Erat michi domi, dictu mirum, ab occasu veniens olim Plato, philosophorum princeps… mitte si vacat Hesiodum, mitte precor Euripidem.” Familiares 18.2. “Cicero tuus volens et meo nomine tibi gratias acturus ad te redit; idem apud me non invitus manet.” Ibid. 18.12. “si me amas, vide, obsecro, an fieri possit ut Homerus integer bibliotece huic, ubi pridem grecus habitat, tandem latinus accedat.” Seniles 3.6. Here and in what follows, Petrarch’s Seniles are cited according to Le Senili, ed. and trans. Ugo Dotti, with Elvira Noto and Felicita Audisio (Torino: Nino Aragno Editore, 2004–10); trans. with minor adaptations taken from Letters of Old Age, trans. A. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). “Homerum tuum iam latinum…ad nos tandem pervenisse meque et omnes seu Grecos seu Latinos qui bibliothecam hanc inhabitant replesse gaudio atque oblectatione mirabili.” Seniles 6.2; cf. Ibid. 16.1. “dato illi vie comite comico Terentio…hoc Afro iocundissimo.” Ibid. 3.6.

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claims—his tongue firmly in his cheek—to “fear that the good poet has migrated, and, since the man was a rascal, did not want to live in a chaste household.”15 But if the text and the codex are physically coterminous, nonetheless they are not the same: the difference is between the contents and the container in which these are held. This distinction underlies Petrarch’s famous account of the time that Cicero attacked him, in the form of a heavy volume of his letters falling off its perch in the library and repeatedly striking his shins. The metaphor of Cicero’s assault is sustained, and clearly used to comical effect, but Petrarch hits a serious note in the final lines: there he concludes that “my beloved Cicero has now wounded my leg as he once did my heart.”16 He thus parallels the damage done by the codex and by the text of Cicero it contains. As physical object, the book has hurt his body; as vessel of Cicero’s text, and carrier of the author’s character, it has also offended Petrarch’s sensibilities and pained him mentally. Humanists do not explain why, how, or in what form the author was present in his text. Yet as Kathy Eden has recently shown, the confluence of ancient rhetorical theory and the revival of the Roman epistolary tradition may offer part of the answer. Greek and Roman rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian advocated the development of an author’s personal literary style. This ideal resurfaced, Eden argues, with Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in 1345, which display, and at times discuss, the orator’s familiar style of writing. These outpourings of Cicero’s most closely held opinions and anxieties broke Petrarch’s heart, as described above, but they nevertheless inspired him to compose his own Letters on Familiar Matters. In these, he dispensed with the rules of the medieval ars dictaminis, a highly formalized template for correspondence, and like Cicero cultivated an intimate style, reflective of his own personality.17 In this way, according to Eden, Petrarch introduced Roman epistolary intimacy into the

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“vereor igitur, ne hic bonus poeta alio migraverit, et cum vir sit lascivus, noluerit habitare in domo casta.” Lettere (vol. 1 ad Nicolaum) 73 [= Tonelli (vol. 1) 3.12] = Gordan, Renaissance Bookhunters, 49. Here and in what follows, Poggio’s letters are cited according to Lettere: Epistolarum familiarum libri, vols. 1–3, ed. Helene Harth (Florence: Olschki, 1984–87); a reference to the numbering of Poggio’s Epistolae, ed. Tommaso Tonelli (Florence: Typis L. Marchini, 1832–1861, reprinted in Omnia Opera, ed. Riccardo Fubini, Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964–69) is included in square brackets. Trans. adapted from Gordan where available, otherwise my own. “Ita dilectus meus Cicero cuius olim cor, nunc tibiam vulneravit.” Familiares 21.10. Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Discovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 6–9.

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early modern world, and with it the notion that the text conveys the person of its author.18 However, individuality and intimacy are not the same things, and as Eden is well aware, the desideratum of a personal style was not limited to familiar prose—neither in the ancient world nor in the Renaissance. When Caesar’s style is called “prope singulare” (almost unique) in Cicero’s De oratore, the reference is not primarily to his familiar letters, but also to his speeches and his prose. Likewise, when Petrarch states that his amanuensis Giovanni Malpaghini should develop a style “suum proprium” (all his own), this applies to the sum of his literary compositions.19 Conversely, it can be argued that style is not the only part of rhetoric through which a “trace of the mind” of the author adheres to his writings.20 Text also preserves aspects of its author’s sensory experience and cognitive processes: in Roman rhetorical theory this is subsumed under the concept of inventio, that is to say, the creative formation of an argument. Such invention, in contrast to our modern use of the word, was held to apply to all genres of literature, be they fiction or nonfiction.21 Exploration of inventio as hallmark of authorial personality need not contradict, but could supplement, the examination of style. On both scores, therefore, the mark of the author’s personality is not necessarily limited to familiar writings—even if it is most easily experienced in firstperson literature, in which the writer addresses the reader explicitly. For this reason, letters have a particular potential for projecting the author’s voice, geographically as well as chronologically: this is why they played a vital role in building and maintaining the Renaissance Republic of Letters.22 Yet Petrarch 18

In an interesting anticipation of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s 1753 dictum that “le style est l’homme même,” in Discours sur le style, in Oeuvres, ed. Stéphane Schmitt with Cédric Crémière, intro. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 421–28, at 427. 19 Cicero, De oratore 3.30; Petrarch, Familiares 23.19; cf. Eden, Renaissance Discovery of Intimacy, esp. 28, 60–61. 20 “The written word and what partakes of it—literature—is the intelligibility of mind transferred to the most alien medium. Nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding of the mind either. In deciphering and interpreting it, a miracle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total contemporaneity (Zugleichsein) and familiarity (Vertrautsein). This is like nothing else that comes down to us from the past.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 163, cited in Eden, Renaissance Discovery of Intimacy, 6. 21 The distinction is anachronistic. Cicero, De inventione, 1.9. 22 Having gotten to know Cicero through his letters, Petrarch famously reciprocated with two familiar letters addressed to the Roman, Familiares 24.3 and 24.4, discussed in ibid. 1.1;

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makes it clear that he ascribes similar powers to other forms of writing, asserting in relation to ancient history and philosophy that “books…speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy.”23 That personal style and intimate connections may also be savored in nonfamiliar writings is borne out by Bruni’s letter to Poggio, quoted above. When Bruni tells Quintilian that, despite the mutilations, “I still loved you for your beauty,” he uses the word “decorum.” This was Cicero’s translation of the Greek to prepon, employed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric to indicate “appropriateness” in all domains of oratory, including style.24 The lexicographical range of “decorum” in Latin is wide, running from “seemliness” to “glory,” yet applied to the Roman orator, the word’s status in rhetorical theory is clearly relevant.25 Bruni thus uses a critical term for assessing rhetorical style as a measure of Quintilian’s person, and in this way also justifies his affection for the Roman. A similar case can be made regarding Poggio’s response, addressed to the humanist Guarino Veronese, in which he calls Quintilian “a brilliant, pure, and elegant fellow.” Even if these adjectives do not quite have the theoretical charge of “decorum” = to prepon, nonetheless they also fit the vocabulary of art appreciation, especially elegans.26 Again, therefore, Quintilian’s person is equated with his prose. Both humanists recognize the Roman writer’s personality by his individual—even if not intimate—style; Bruni’s example shows that, on this ground, he becomes an object of affection, and a partner in conversation.



This brings us to the second set of hermeneutic relations, namely, between the text and its reader. If the author’s person, through his style or otherwise, is present in his text, how precisely may the reader meet him there? In modern Reader Response Theory, this process is a function of the faculties of the reader

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likewise, he himself intended to keep speaking from beyond the grave, as he announced in the last of the Familares, ibid. 24.13. “libri…colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur.” Ibid. 3.18. Namely, pertaining to “logos” (argument), “pathos” (emotion), and—especially important in this context—“ethos” (character). Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.12.6; Cicero, Orator 70; Cicero, De Officiis 1.94, and see discussion in Eden, Renaissance Discovery of Intimacy, esp. 15, 22. Oxford Latin Dictionary, q.v.; Lewis and Short, q.v. “Neque enim dubium est virum splendidum, mundum, elegantem, plenum moribus, plenum facetiis.” Poggio, Lettere (vol. 2) 4.5 [= Tonelli (vol. 1) 1.5]  =  Gordan, Renaissance Bookhunters, app. 3.

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as much as the writer: “nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding of the mind either,” in the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer.27 This notion implies distortion and re-creation, in which both sides play equally active parts. By contrast, humanists did not problematize the reception of the text. Reading was deemed a process not of decoding and reconstruction, but of direct perception, with the perceived object existing independent of the reader’s mind. It was appropriately expressed through the metaphors of vision and hearing: thus Petrarch claims to Livy to “behold you in your books”; and to Cicero to “listen to you speak on many subjects.”28 Notwithstanding this straightforward transmission, there was, however, potential for complication. This bears on a matter of much greater immediacy to humanists than to modern readers, namely, the problem of the imperfect preservation, or inaccessible condition, of the ancient text. Two issues were at stake, to wit, translation and loss. Until 1400, the problem with Greek texts was that the codex could be had, but the text could not be read, or could not be understood. This is appropriately indicated by failings in the metaphors of vision and aurality. Petrarch describes it as follows regarding a manuscript of Homer he has been sent by a Greek friend: “Without [your help in translating], your Homer is silent to me, or rather I am deaf to him. Still I take pleasure in his mere presence and with many sights I embrace him, saying ‘O great man, how willingly would I listen to you! But death has blocked my one ear and detestable distance another’”— incidentally also showing that he delights in Homer’s presence, and physically embraces him in the form of a codex, even when he cannot understand his text.29 Writing to Homer himself, Petrarch laments: “aside from some opening lines of several of your poems, in which I viewed you as one beholds from a distance the uncertain and shimmering look of a desired friend or a glimpse of his streaming hair, nothing of yours had reached me in Latin—in short, I had no hope of seeing you at close quarters.”30 27 28 29

30

See n. 20 above. “Nunc vero qua datur te in libris tuis video, non equidem totum sed quatenus nondum… periisti.” Familiares 24.8. “Audivi multa te dicentem.” Ibid. 24.3. “sine qua Homerus tuus apud me mutus, imo vero ego apud illum surdus sum. Gaudeo tamen vel aspectu solo et sepe illum amplexus ac suspirans dico: ‘O magne vir, quam cupide te audirem! sed aurium mearum alteram mors obstruxit, alteram longinquitas invisa terrarum.’” Ibid. 28.2. “preter enim aliquot tuorum principia librorum, in quibus velut exoptati amici supercilium procul ambiguum et raptim vibrans seu fluctuantis come apicem intuebar, latini nichil obtigerat, nichil denique sperabatur ubi te cominus contemplarer.” Ibid. 24.12. Cf., conversely, Poggio’s hope regarding his translation of Diodorus Siculus, expressed to

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Still more significant, and often ultimately unsolvable, was the second problem, namely, that of the incompleteness, or loss, of the text: the fact that humanists possessed only a small segment of the ancient texts they knew were once available, that many were lost and others transmitted only partially. With this we come to the second section of this essay, for it is in this context that we encounter the issue of the corporality of codices. ii

The Corporality of Codices and the Language of Relics

Missing texts, and texts that are only partially available, are commonly described using the language of bodies. Particularly, humanists describe them as the body of the author, which has been wounded or broken. Petrarch, for instance, mourns the authors whose works have wholly or partly vanished “as though we now mourn our leaders, and not only those who have been killed but those who have been maimed or lost…. [Many] have reached us in such fragmentary and mutilated condition that it would perhaps have been better to have perished.”31 He also recounts seeing “the dismembered limbs of [Quintilian’s] beautiful body [and] my mind was overcome by admiration and grief.”32 And he tells Livy that “I busy myself with these relics of yours.”33 Poggio describes Aulus Gellius as “this outstanding author whom the negligence of man has maimed and almost torn to pieces.”34 And he notes, also about Quintilian, that “he was so maimed, so clipped on all sides…that the shape and character of the man had become unrecognizable.”35 This body metaphor accomplishes at least three things. First of all, it emphasizes the physical nature of the text in the form of the codex, that is to say, the fact that the codex is an actual, corporeal, thing. What is more, this language highlights the problems inherent in physicality, namely, corruption, loss, and

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Guarino Veronese, that “opus tibi placebit, cum non sit ita traductum, ut totus grecus appareat.” Lettere (vol. 3) 3.13 [= Tonelli (vol. 2) 9.5]. “ut velut…duces nostros non extinctos modo sed truncos quoque vel perditos sit lugere. Hoc enim et in aliis multis, sed in tuis maxime oratoriis atque achademicorum et legum libris patimur, qui ita truncati fedatique evaserunt, ut prope melius fuerit periisse.” Familiares 24.4. “Vidi formosi corporis artus effusos; admiratio animum dolorque concussit.” Ibid. 24.7. “In his tam parvis tuis reliquiis exerceor.” Ibid. 24.8. And cf. n. 6 above. “hic egregius auctor quem negligentia hominum laceravit et pene discerpsit sanus atque integer restituetur nobis.” Poggio, Lettere (vol. 2) 9.16 [= Tonelli (vol. 2) 8.27]. “ita laceratur erat, ita circumcisus…ut nulla forma, nullus habitus hominis in eo recognosceretur.” Ibid. (vol. 2) 4.5 [= Tonelli (vol. 1) 1.5] = Gordan, Renaissance Bookhunters, app. 3.

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decay. Just like bodies, which can be mutilated and decay, so texts, as physical objects, can be reduced to fragments, destroyed, or lost. But by choosing the body metaphor, and the language of relics, humanists not only indicate the fact that manuscripts are material and therefore fragile objects: mere physicality could be expressed through any number of other comparisons just as well. Rather—and this is the second point of significance of the body metaphor— this language forms a counterpart to the hermeneutic role of author’s person. If the text harbors the person of the author, and itself must be described as an object with physical flaws, what could be more appropriate than presenting it as the body of the author? The codex, in sum, is the embodiment of the author’s person, whom the humanist reader encounters through his text. The codex is, in fact, the physical prerequisite through which that meeting of minds, that intellectual or spiritual community, takes place. This leads to the third semantic charge of the body metaphor, namely, its affinity with relics. By virtue of being holy body parts, relics had certain characteristics that rendered them relevant to humanist descriptions of text. Relics, theologians had determined, possessed a dual nature, or indeed several dual natures.36 The first duality was that of the whole and the part. Relics were fragments, yet at the same time remained part of a larger whole, because the saints from whose bodies they came were deemed to be fully present in every single one of their particles. The second duality was consequent upon this. Relics were the bodily remains of saints whose souls simultaneously existed in heaven: as such they were the earthbound elements of an entity that also existed in an immaterial form and on a transcendental plane.37 They were therefore material, but vessels of the spiritual. For this reason the corporality, and thereby corruptibility, of relics was not a flaw but a necessity, since it was in this form, and only in this form, that they remained accessible to their worshippers on earth. Clearly, late medieval cultic practice was driven by many other motivations besides theology; and predictably, large chunks of an important saint’s vital parts were preferred over splinters of bone, or the hair and nails of minor holy men and 36

37

On the theology and significance of relics see Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1978); Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Walker Bynum, Resurrection, 256–78; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 239–98, at 253–65.

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women.38 Yet awareness of the relic’s holy status was ubiquitous, as was insistence on its corporality: together, these features of the medieval relic cult indicate a general appreciation of relics’ potential to function as portals. Relics, in short, mediated between the poles of their dual natures: between the whole and the part; the here and now and the transcendental—in that sense they may have been dead, but they were not inert. This, arguably, constitutes the third and most compelling ground for humanists’ application of the body metaphor to ancient manuscripts. For these qualities of relics are mirrored by ancient texts, both in the duality of their nature and regarding the function of transmission this served. We need only recall the distinctions and connections between codex, text, and author; with the immaterial presence of the author preserved in the text, which itself could be accessed through the codex. In other words, codices are the embodiments of the text, in which their authors may be encountered. Codices therefore must be corporeal, since without their very physicality, they would not be able to exist in this world. Consequently they are corruptible, and often in imperfect condition, fragmented and mutilated. Yet only through this flawed medium could the reader arrive at the text, and in the text see or hear its author. This is because the author, just like the Catholic saints, was in an otherwise inaccessible world, albeit in a different one. As Bruni suggests regarding Quintilian, rather than heaven, this is the underworld, home of the dead; perhaps we may equate it with the past. Manuscripts, then, like relics, had the power to transmit; together, text and codex formed a medium that allowed dead authors to speak to the living, and enabled humanist readers to hear the voices of antiquity. And even though fragments of the text were also imprinted with the person of their author, understandably the reader experienced him most fully when his textual corpus was complete. To sum up: our investigation of humanist hermeneutics showed that the author was present in text. We have now seen that the language of bodies occurred when there was a problem with the codex. This language indicates, first, corporality, with the inherent problem of corruption or loss; furthermore, it provides a fitting counterpart to the immaterial, textual presence of the author. Last but not least, it intimates the capacity of this embodiment to transcend time and space, and bring about a meeting of minds between the living and the dead—between humanism’s present and the ancient past.

38

Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), esp. 5–21.

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Christianity as a Humanist Habit of Mind

The parallel between ancient texts and holy relics exemplifies an explanatory framework for the early humanist movement that has not, to my knowledge, been explored in Renaissance scholarship. The agenda of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century humanists tends to be understood as a progressive imitation of antiquity. Yet the ancient world itself offered no model for this type of revival, and in any case the question remains what circumstances prompted, and facilitated, humanists’ identification with the past in this particular form at this particular time.39 The matter discussed here points to the concepts, practices, and discursive traditions of contemporary Christianity as framing the ambitions and expressions of the early humanists. This proposition should not be misconstrued as an argument for any form of syncretism, in which humanists viewed ancient texts or authors as somehow holy. Clearly that is not the case, rather the reverse: humanism arguably brought the superhuman ancients of the medieval imagination, whether demonic or divine, back to human proportions.40 Yet we need not challenge the religious orthodoxy of humanists to suppose that their ambition of making contact with antiquity, of reviving antiquity, was shaped—indeed had to be shaped—by mental habits formed in late medieval Catholic culture.41 If we entertain this possibility, another basis, beyond rhetorical theory, for humanists’ perception of the writer in his text immediately presents itself. For the majority of the late medieval population, religion provided the only contact with the world of books; for the learned, it was still among the most important domains of literacy. Humanist hermeneutics can hardly have been 39

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Cf. Salvatore Settis, “Did the Ancients Have an Antiquity? The Idea of Renaissance in the History of Classical Art,” in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 27–50. Literally in the case of the superhuman sized corpses of Pallas (as recounted by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, discussed in Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1999), 56–57); and Antenor (recovered in the thirteenth century, discussed with bibliography in Carrie Beneš, Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 39–60). Similarly, Virgil with the coming of humanism ceased to be a magician (Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. Edward Benecke, intro. Jan Ziolkowski (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1997), pt. 2); and Petrarch recounts his argument against an old man who deemed Cicero a god in Familiares 24.2. In line with concepts such as the Annales school’s “mentality” and Michel Foucault’s “episteme.”

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immune to influence from religious reading and approaches to holy writings. Few faiths are as logocentric as the Catholic religion; none, probably, so invested in the incarnation of the word. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” the apostle John wrote: an assurance deemed to have been true not only when Christ walked the earth, but ever since, in the form of the Gospel.42 The equation need not be taken merely metaphorically, in the sense of the teachings of Christ collected in the Bible: from the High Middle Ages, the text of the Gospel used during mass was literally understood and treated as the body of Christ. This is perhaps best expressed in the words of the twelfthcentury theologian Isaac of Stella: the true Word of God, made flesh…for us also became the book. The holy Word itself, which the blessed eyes of the apostles saw in the flesh, touched with their hands, is today with us, visible in the letter, touchable in the sacrament. If He withdrew from the flesh, still He remained in the letter…so that the present body, as it were, of the visible Word is the text of the holy Gospel.43 In the liturgy, the practice of kissing the Gospel codex reflects this belief.44 The ubiquity of this notion, whether literal or metaphorical, can be gauged from fifteenth-century images that parallel the book and Jesus’s body. A well-known example is the Virgin and Child before a Fire Screen by the Flemish painter Robert Campin, in which the Christ child and the Bible are arranged as mirror images, resting on identical cloths.45 An Italian example, designed for private devotion among the laity, is a miniature by Taddeo Crivelli, which juxtaposes Christ’s deadly white yet bloodied body with the white parchment and red bindings of a book visible behind him. As this illumination forms part of a

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John 1:14 (King James). “verum Verbum caro factum…etiam nobis liber fit…Ipsum sanctum Vebrum, quod beati oculi apostolorum viderunt in carne, manus tractaverunt, hodie est nobiscum, visibile in littera, in sacramento tractabile. Si autem carne recessit, sed lettera mansit…ut sit quasi visibilis Verbi praesens corpus, sancti Evangelii textus.” Isaac of Stella, Sermones, ed. Anselm Hoste (Paris: Les Éditions des Cerfs, 1967), Sermo 9.6–7, 208–11, trans. my own, cited in Thomas Lentes, “Textus Evangelii. Materialität und Inszenierung des textus in der Liturgie,” in “Textus” im Mittelalter: Komponenten und Situationen des Wortgebrauchs im schriftsemantischen Feld, ed. Ludolf Kuchenbuch and Uta Kleine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 133–48, at 133n.2. Ibid., 137. National Gallery, London (ng 2609), dated ca. 1440.

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Book of Hours, it also functions as visual instruction on how to read the texts contained in that very volume.46 While the Reformation mostly did away with the mystery and ceremonies surrounding Christ’s real presence—in the book as in the host—the concept of the Gospel as his spiritual image endured, and indeed grew in importance. Thus John Calvin urged that Jesus be sought in his Word as in his sacraments, rather than in religious trinkets hawked to the superstitious crowd.47 The Catholic reformer Erasmus held that no Apelles had ever more expertly counterfeited a face or body than the Holy Spirit had fashioned the Gospel as a portrait of Christ’s mind.48 Furthermore, without actual incarnation at stake, the notion of sacred text as image of the mind was not limited to Christ: Erasmus likewise urged the faithful to behold the apostle Paul’s mind in his writings. Much like Calvin, Erasmus juxtaposed relics of the body and the mind when he chastised those who venerate mute and dead ashes and ignore his living image still speaking and breathing, as it were, in his writings…. [You who] worship the bones of Paul preserved in a relic casket, but do not worship the mind of Paul hidden away in his writings…[and who] make much of a piece of his body visible through a glass covering, and you do not marvel at the whole mind of Paul shining through his writings?49 It is only to be expected that this hermeneutic ideal would have crossed over to non-sacred texts. And indeed, we find Petrarch drawing exactly the same 46

Dated ca. 1469. Kurt Barstow, The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Ferrara (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2000), 159, fig.  76, and 158–61 for discussion; cf. Lentes, “Textus Evangelii,” 139–40. 47 “au lieu de chercher Jesus Christ en sa Parolle, en ses Sacraments, et en ses graces spirituelles, le monde, selon sa coustume, s’est amusé à ses robbes, chemises, et drappeaux.” Traité des Reliques, in Jean Calvin, Three French Treatises, ed. Francis Higman (London: Athlone, 1970), 49–97, at 49. 48 Erasmus, Enchiridion, in Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, vol. 5, ed. Jean Leclerc (Leiden: Petrus van der Aa, 1704), 1–66, at 31F–32A. 49 “Si veneraris cinerem mutum & mortuum, & vivam illius imaginem adhuc loquentem, ac tamquam spirantem, quae in illius litteris superest, negligis, nonne praepostera est tua Religio? Adoras ossa Pauli in loculis condita, non adoras mentem Pauli, in scriptis latentem? Magnifacis fragmentum corporis, per vitrum perspicuum, & non miraris totum animum Pauli per litteras perlucentem?” Ibid., 31E–F; trans. taken from Erasmus, Enchiridion: The Handbook of a Christian Soldier, trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 8–134, at 72.

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contrast a century and a half before Erasmus and with regard to an ancient, pagan writer. Disapproving of Giovanni Malpaghini’s prospected visit to the grave of Virgil in Naples he writes that “he will go…to raise, I suppose, from the Mantuan ashes a new Virgil…. But while the books are full of that man’s memory, so he will find the tomb long since emptied of his bones.”50 These conceptual and descriptive parallels make a strong case for Catholic dogma and culture as a source for humanist hermeneutics. Indeed, the influence of Christian habits of mind on the nascent humanist movement is unlikely to have been restricted to hermeneutics. To see how the practices and, underlying those, the ontology and epistemology of Catholicism informed humanists’ revival of the ancient world is the aim of my project Cult of Antiquity: How Christian Habits Shaped Humanism—of which Tony Grafton, with characteristic generosity and enthusiasm, read the earliest outlines and encouraged the subsequent progress. Under this umbrella, I examine the various ways in which late medieval Christian culture framed humanism’s search for contact with the past, be it through meetings of the mind, texts, or objects. Like Tony himself, so his books have been an inspiration for this endeavor, in particular perhaps his Commerce with the Classics and Bring Out Your Dead.51 It is most fitting that this piece, its first written fruit, should be published in Tony’s honor, as a small token of my gratitude.52



We end this chapter where we started, with the matter of texts as authorial bodies, and specifically with the body of Quintilian. In line with the observations about Christianity as a humanist habit of mind, we revisit the notion of the “Renaissance.” By its very name, the Renaissance is defined as an impulse of rebirth; the appellation rinascimento—if not the idea—originated with Giorgio Vasari in the mid-sixteenth century. Previously, other concepts enjoyed equal or greater currency. The dawn of a new era was heralded already by 50 51

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“ut susciret, credo, de cineribus mantuanis novum Virgilium ravennatem. Sed ut illius viri memorie plenos libros, sic vacua pridem ossium busta comperiet.” Seniles 5.5. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001). Earlier versions of this text have been presented at the conferences A Textual Reformation? Catholicism after Trent, Oxford, Sept. 2013; the rsa, New York, Mar. 2014; and Moving Body Parts: Their Transcendence of Time and Space in Pre-Modern Europe, Munich, Apr. 2014. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of all three for their valuable comments.

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Petrarch, and metaphorized as a period of light after darkness.53 Fifteenthcentury authors also used the metaphor of revival: for example, Politian’s epitaph for Giotto states that “I am the one through whom painting, dead, was revived.”54 In Catholic doctrine, the issue of revival, or resurrection, was intimately related to the relics of saints as well as to the bodily remains of ordinary believers.55 Humanity’s fallen state, after all, was supposed to be in the full sense of the word temporary. At the end of time, all men and women would regain their bodies: bones would be clothed with flesh again, and the dead rise from their graves. Among the many questions posed by this scenario were how man’s scattered earthly remains would be gathered and revived, and in what form and substance souls could exist after death but before resurrection. Answers were found in a proliferation of bodies of different degrees of perfection; received opinion on the matter is reflected in the depiction of the souls in paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was held that, while the physical body decayed after death, the soul spent its afterlife in an “aerial body,” neither fully somatic nor wholly spiritual. When the heavens ceased turning, these two parts—matter and form respectively—would rejoin to form the “resurrection body.” This entity would be impervious to change, including decay, since it would constitute a perfect union between the bodily and the spiritual: it would be alive again, and now live forever.56 Revival, perhaps resurrection, was of course also the humanist bookhunter’s ideal for the textual body of the author. Lost texts, lost fragments, must be found, and the body made whole and perfect again. Enough has been said about parallels on the embodied side of the equation, namely, between the tattered manuscripts found in monastic dungeons and described as the body parts of ancient authors and actual bones and dust stored in graves and reliquaries. But it is worth raising the issue of the situation on the disembodied, spiritual side. Should the author’s person, prior to the humanists’ discovery and reconstruction of his textual corpus, be imagined as existing on a par with 53

54 55 56

Discussed in Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 59–67 (Vasari); Theodor Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages,” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–42; and Martin McLaughlin, “Humanist Concepts of the Renaissance and Middle Age in the Tre- and Quattrocento,” Renaissance Studies 2, no. 2 (1998): 131–42. “Ille ego sum per quem pictura extincta revixit,” inscribed (1490) on Benedetto da Maiano’s monument for Giotto in the Duomo in Florence. Walker Bynum, Resurrection, 275; Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity,” 254. Walker Bynum, Resurrection, 298–305; Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); and see n. 37 above.

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the aerial body of the soul? Did ancient writers, akin to the souls in Dante’s heaven, wait to be given a new body, so that their voices would carry beyond the realm of the dead?57 Humanists, in any case, described their rediscovered ancient authors as enjoying a new life, after the flaws of corporality, and of non-corporality, had been overcome. Thus, when Poggio’s Venetian correspondent Francesco Barbaro wrote to congratulate him on his discoveries, he used the language of revival: You…have endowed Tertullian with life, you M. Fabius Quintilian, you Q. Asconius Pedianus, you Lucretius, Silius Italicus, Marcellinus, you Manilius the astronomer, Lucius Septimius, Valerius Flaccus, you the grammarians Caprus, Eutychius, and Probus…. So many illustrious and wise men, who were dead for eternity, you have roused again.58 57 58

Perhaps in parallel to the soul of Virgil in Dante’s Limbo, “Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco” until the encounter with his most diligent reader. Inferno 1.63. “Tu Tertullianum, tu M. Fabium Quintilianum, tu Asconium Pedianum, tu Lucretium, Sylum Italicum, Marcellinum, tu Manilium Astronomum, Lucium Septimium, Valerium Flacchum, tu Caprum Eutychium Probum, grammaticos, tu complures alios…fato functos vitam donastis…[Vos] qui tot illustris ac sapientissimos viros mortuos in perpetuum resuscitastis, quorum ingeniis ac institutis non solum nos, sed etiam posteri benedicere [sic] et honeste vivere poterunt.” Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario, ed. Claudio Griggio (Florence: Olschki, 1991–99), 20; trans. my own, adapted from Gordan, Renaissance Bookhunters, app. 4.

chapter 39

Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius James Hankins Intellectual history is full of key terms that have changed their meanings dramatically over time: words, for instance, like respublica, whose vicissitudes the present writer has recently discussed.1 As these are highly relevant to the subject of this essay, they will need to be summarized here. In ancient Rome respublica meant, essentially, a good or just state that respects constitutional traditions and the free status of its citizens, treating them as equal under the law; its lexical opposite was tyranny, not monarchy. In antiquity it did not, as today, refer to a historical period—between the expulsion of the kings in 509 bce and the Battle of Actium in 31 bce—nor was it used in the official names of states, as it began to be in the Renaissance, for example, in the case of the Republic of Venice. More important, it was only in the Renaissance, thanks in great part to new humanist translations of Aristotle’s constitutional language, that respublica began to be used to specify a particular type of constitution, a non-monarchical constitution. Cicero did not use the word that way. He applied it to all of the “good” constitutions in the standard Greek analysis: kingship, aristocracy, or even popular government. They were said to be good because they resisted corruption, and because those who governed them respected the common good. In this respect respublica was identical with res Romani populi, the interests of the Roman people.2 But a comparison of 1 James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38, no. 4 (2010): 452–82. 2 Examples: Cicero, De republica 3.47: “Nos autem de iniusto rege nihil loquimur nunc, cum de ipsa regali re publica quaerimus. Quare cogitato Romulum aut Pompilium aut Tullum regem: fortasse non tam illius te rei publicae paenitebit.” (We are not talking now about an unjust king, since we are inquiring about a royal respublica. So think about Romulus or Pompilius or King Tullus, and perhaps you won’t be so dissatisfied with that [kind of] respublica.) At ibid. 1.42, Cicero explicitly states that regnum is a status reipublicae, i.e., a constitutional form. See also Augustine, De civitate Dei 2.21, where Augustine paraphrases a speech of Scipio (expressing what is clearly Cicero’s own views) from a now-lost portion of Cicero’s De republica, bk. 1: “Docet deinde quanta sit in disputando definitionis utilitas, atque ex illis suis definitionibus colligit tunc esse rem publicam, id est rem populi, cum bene ac iuste geritur siue ab uno rege siue a paucis optimatibus siue ab uniuerso populo. Cum uero iniustus est rex, quem tyrannum more

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_040

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William of Moerbeke’s translations of Aristotle’s scheme of six constitutions in Politics iii with those of Leonardo Bruni 170 years later illustrates how the word had begun to migrate to new meanings in the Renaissance: Aristotle’s constitutional scheme in Politics iii (1279a), as translated by William of Moerbeke in 12683

One Few Many

Good politiae’

Corrupt Politiae’

regia potestas aristocratia politia

tyrannia oligarchia democratia

Aristotle’s constitutional scheme in Politics iii (1279a), as translated by Leonardo Bruni ca. 14384

Unum Pauci Multi

Rectae rerum publicarum

Transgressiones et labes

regia potestas optimatium gubernatio respublica

tyrannis paucorum potestas popularis status

For Bruni in 1438, respublica meant “regime” (πολιτεία) in the generic, abstract sense and also a virtuous popular regime (πολιτεία for Aristotle), both meanings unexampled in antiquity. The denotation of the term respublica eventually, Graeco appellauit, aut iniusti optimates, quorum consensum dixit esse factionem, aut iniustus ipse populus, cui nomen usitatum non repperit…omnino nullam esse rem publicam.” (He teaches how useful it is to debate definitions, and from his definitions he determines there exists a republic, i.e., the people’s business, when it is carried on well and justly by a single king or by a few optimates or by the people as a whole. When there is an unjust king, whom he calls a tyrant in the Greek manner, or unjust optimates, whose conspiracy he calls a faction, or when the people itself is unjust, for which he can’t find a name in common usage…there is no republic.) Note Cicero/Augustine’s difficulty in finding Latin equivalents for democracy and oligarchy. 3 Aristotle, Politicorum libri octo cum vestusta translatione Guilelmi de Moerbeke, ed. Franz Susemihl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1872), 178–79. 4 Aristotle, Politicorum libri viii, trans. Leonardo Bruni (Strassbourg: Johann Mentelin, 1469), [fol. 118r]. For the date, see James Hankins, “The Dates of Leonardo Bruni’s Later Works (1437–1443),” Studi medievali e umanistici 5–6 (2007–8): 1–40.

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by the end of the fifteenth century, was extended to mean good polyarchic constitutions, that is, any good regime that involved power sharing among the ruling group. Bartolomeo Scala, for instance, distinguishes between an aristocratic and a popular republic,5 and Francesco Patrizi of Siena, the most influential humanist authority on politics, classes oligarchy among the good republican constitutions, an unusual step that reflects the influence of the famous “debate on constitutions” in Herodotus (3.80–82).6 This shows, inter alia, that the polyarchic criterion had begun to eclipse Aristotle’s distinction between sound and corrupt constitutions, at least for some theorists.7 The use of respublica to indicate a polyarchic constitution became particularly convenient in Italy, where the peninsula was divided politically between princely regimes and what we today call “republican” regimes, that is, oligarchies with greater or lesser degrees of popular participation. But the older usage found in Cicero and other ancient authors lived on, and it remained possible to talk about monarchical republics well into the eighteenth century. The history of the word respublica shows how radically a Latin word could change in meaning even in an age determined to model its linguistic usages as closely as possible on antiquity, and above all on Cicero. Yet even more striking are the key terms that have not so much changed in meaning as undergone a complete reversal of their moral polarities. Well-known 5 Bartolomeo Scala, Essays and Dialogues, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2008), 252–54 (6.17): “Three types of constitution are the least subject to criticism. In the first, which is called kingship, a sole ruler governs rightly. In the second, which is called a republic, all who enjoy the rights of citizenship govern. In the third, those whose conduct is best are chosen to rule. This kind of government the Greeks call aristocracy, and we imitate them by using our word for ‘best,’ and call it a republic of optimates [optimatium…rempublicam].” 6 Francesco Patrizi of Siena, De institutione reipublicae libri novem (Paris: Jehan Petit and Galeotto da Parma, 1534), fol. VIIv: “Statum rerumpublicarum (siquidem de rege et tyranno nihil dicere constituimus) triplicem principaliter ponimus. Una namque popularis est, altera in qua optimates agunt, tertia quae in paucos diffunditur.” (We posit three forms of republican regime [as we’ve decided to say nothing of kings or tyrants]. One is popular, the second is that in which the optimates take the lead, and in the third rule is dispersed among the few.) Patrizi specifies on fol. VIIIr that the few are the rich, and that their government is not far from tyranny. Patrizi’s discussion of constitutions here explicitly cites the constitutional debate in Herodotus 3.80–82, where ὀλιγαρχία is treated as a good constitution; Patrizi is the first European political writer to my knowledge to make use of this source, the earliest Greek discussion of constitutional theory. Lorenzo Valla had translated the text into Latin in 1452–56. 7 Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism,” 469; a clear example of this usage is found in Aurelio Lippo Brandolini, Republics and Kingdoms Compared, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), passim.

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examples are words like “curiosity,” “innovation,” “ambition”: words that once, in premodern times, signified morally dubious phenomena but have come more recently to stand for positive qualities. Such changes in moral valence are often signals of what Anthony Appiah describes as “moral revolutions”—relatively sudden changes in ethical attitudes.8 In our own times, moral revolutions in attitudes to women and gay people have led to those rapid linguistic changes and reversals in the terms of moral approval and disapproval with which we are all familiar—though the twentieth century has introduced the noxious practice of trying to coerce such linguistic changes via legal, administrative, and political devices rather than through simple social pressure, as in earlier times. However that may be, the present essay aims to contribute to the history of a word that has both changed dramatically in meaning and reversed its moral polarity: “democracy.” As is well known, the word has undergone a remarkable transformation in moral valence since the end of the eighteenth century.9 A political constitution that was once widely regarded by the learned as rare or impossible—and certainly undesirable—suddenly, within the decade 1789–99, acquired a positive significance, first for the Jacobins, and in due course for many radical friends of the French Revolution. Over the course of the following centuries, the word has come to signify a political system regarded as the default setting of the human race, the form of government standing at the end of history, and the only legitimate form of government. What was an inkhorn term in the medieval and early modern periods became a battle cry in two world wars and is today a word on the lips of reformers in many parts of the world. To grasp just how radical this change was, we will need to sketch out an overview of attitudes to the word “democracy” and the democratic constitution since antiquity.10 The desirability, practical and moral, of democracy was highly contested from the moment of its emergence in late sixth-century 8 9

Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: Norton, 2010). See the classic article of R.R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy,’” Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1953): 203–26. For the clandestine advocates of “democracy” (i.e., radical egalitarians) before the mid-eighteenth century, see Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 249–63. For a comparison of ancient and modern concepts of democracy, see Peter Liddel, “Democracy Ancient and Modern,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 133–48. 10 See Christian Meier, Hans Leo Reimann, and Werner Conze, “Demokratie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politischen-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–97), 1:821–99. See also the article by Wilfried Nippel, “Democracy,” in The

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bce Athens under the reformer Cleisthenes (who used the term ἰσονομία, legal equality, rather than δημοκρατία). Though democracy had many defenders in Athens from the sixth to the fourth century bce, most famously Pericles in the “Funeral Oration” as related by Thucydides, political power in the hands of nonelite citizens was still widely regarded by many, even in the Greek classical age, as dangerous, destabilizing, and pernicious in its moral effects. It was regarded as such, unsurprisingly, by elites in rival regimes such as oligarchies, kingdoms, and tyrannies. But its most important enemies were the philosophers, especially Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and later Polybius.11 For Plato, democracy was a degenerate constitution, one that brought out the worst aspects of human character.12 Aristotle regarded it as a bad constitution in its pure form, but thought that certain democratic institutions like assemblies could be incorporated into his preferred constitution—what he called “polity”—in order to stabilize it. If oligarchic and democratic features could be balanced in this mixed constitution, the main elements in the state could be satisfied and their interests blended. With the help of good laws and virtuous citizens—an aristocratic element— human political organization could reach its optimal state and thus maximize the prospects for happiness.13 Polybius’s ideas were in some respects similar to Aristotle’s.14 Writing in the second century bce, he typologized constitutions following a similar sixfold scheme, agreed that corrupt popular government was bad, and argued that mixed constitutions were superior to their pure types. In his case the mixed constitution included monarchical, oligarchical, and democratic elements, not just oligarchic and democratic ones as in Aristotle’s case.15

11

12 13

14

15

Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2010), 256–59. For the political and philosophical opposition to democracy in Greek antiquity, see Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1994), Chaps. 3 and 4. See esp. bk. 8 of the Republic and Gorgias 515b ff., but antidemocratic sentiment is found scattered throughout Plato’s dialogues. A brilliant recent study in a huge literature is Mogens H. Hansen’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Politics (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), esp. Chap. 1, with further references. On Polybius as a political thinker: David E. Hahm, “Kings and Constitutions,” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 457–76; Hahm, “The Mixed Constitution in Greek Thought,” in Balot, A Companion, 178–98, esp. 190–96. Plato’s mixed constitution, combining monarchy and democracy as opposites (see Laws 3.693d) had few if any followers in the later Western tradition.

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However, Polybian constitutional theory displayed some crucial differences from Aristotelian. First, Polybius introduced the idea of anacyclosis, the idea that there is a natural cycle of constitutional change, or rather degeneration and renewal.16 Polybius’s cycle of constitutional change (6.2–9) Monarchy (brute, pre-civilized one-man rule) →  Kingship (improved monarchy, accepted as just by the people) →  Tyranny (corrupted kingship) →  Aristocracy (good rule by the few) →  Oligarchy (corrupted aristocracy) →  Democracy (good popular rule) →  Ochlocracy (mob rule, bad popular rule) →  Monarchy (which begins the cycle all over again) Polybius believed this pattern was so regular as to have predictive value. Equally crucially, he used the term democratia where Aristotle had used politeia or timokratia, that is, for the uncorrupt popular regime. Polybius’s constitutional scheme in Book 6 of his History of Rome17 Μοναρχία (primitive kingship)

One Few Many

Good

βασιλεία ἀριστοκρατία δημοκρατία

Corrupt

τυραννίς ὀλιγαρχία ὀχλοκρατία

This is the first and only surviving example we have from antiquity of the word δημοκρατία used in a positive sense by a political philosopher (as opposed to a historian or an orator). Polybius specifies that this is “true” democracy, “a community where it is traditional and customary to reverence the gods, to honor 16

17

That Polybius invented this concept is argued by Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius’ Political Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). Polybius 6.3–10.

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our parents, to respect our elders, and to obey the laws, [and where] the will of the greater number prevails.”18 Democrats “set a high value on equality and freedom of speech.”19 To distinguish true democracy from bad, he coined the term ochlocratia, mob rule, rule by lawless people who lack control of their appetites and passions and use government power to coerce others and unjustly take their money. The term ochlocratia is used by Polybius himself only twice, both instances in book 6 of his universal history (6.4.7 and 6.57.9). It remained an extremely rare term. According to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a modern electronic lexicon based on the totality of ancient Greek and a vast number of Byzantine Greek texts as well, the word can be found only twenty-four times, always in obscure late ancient and Byzantine texts.20 As is well known, Polybius was a major influence on Cicero,21 but despite that, pure democracy never became a regime acceptable to the Romans, and the word δημοκρατία itself was never naturalized in Latin the way that many Greek terms—tyrannis, for example—was. It occurs in only a handful of cases in the Church Fathers, usually as a transliteration of an obscure Greek term, and never in a way that shows understanding of the concept of a democratic constitution.22 Romans saw their own state or respublica as having a popular element, but the term δημοκρατία was only used to describe aspects of Roman political institutions by Greeks writing in Greek, like Arrian, Dio Cassius, and Plutarch. All of these authors were hostile to democracy in its pure, direct form; it was regarded by most Hellenistic and later Greeks as a corrupt, failed constitution whose weakness and instability had led to the rapid downfall of Athens as a Greek power. Among the Byzantines, knowledge of the political history of Athens further declined, to the point where the most prominent meaning of the word δημοκρατία in medieval Greek was “a street riot.”23 18 19 20

Polybius 6.4.4–5 (Loeb translation). Ibid. 6.9.4 (Loeb translation). Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature (Irvine, ca: tlg, 2001–, with updates). An exception is an occurrence of the word in Philo’s On the Confusion of Tongues, 23.108, a text that was not known in the Latin West until the mid-sixteenth century; the Greek editio princeps, edited by Adrien Turnèbe, appeared in Paris in 1553. 21 See for example De republica 1.41–43, where Cicero states (through his interlocutor Scipio) that kingship is the best of the “simple” constitutions, though a mixed government containing royal, optimate, and popular elements is the best constitution of all. 22 For example, Jerome’s Interpretatio of the chronicle of Eusebius in Migne, Patrologia latina 29: 6c. For the handful of other occurrences see the Thesaurus linguae latinae, hereafter cited as tll (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–), 5:498 (Servius on Aeneid 1.21) and tll Onomasticon, 3:101 (inscriptions). 23 Roberts, Athens on Trial, 120.

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Active use of the term was not revived until the thirteenth century, when, following the translation of Aristotle’s Politics by William of Moerbeke (see above), the word entered the vocabulary of political Aristotelians in the scholastic tradition, beginning with Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas naturally used the term as Aristotle had, as the name of a corrupt or unjust regime conducted by the many, glossing it as potentatus populi or principatus multitudinis.24 Thomas regarded pure democracy as unjust but shared Aristotle’s view that a democratic element in a mixed constitution could be a useful stabilizing device.25 The word remained for the most part a learned term down to the end of the eighteenth century, and democracy as a constitution continued to be regarded as impractical and undesirable, except perhaps in certain very small communities in Switzerland.26 It was only then that the word began to come back into wider use among the literate classes, to describe radical opponents of monarchical prerogative and aristocratic privilege; a democrat was an ideological enemy of aristocracy. The word also changed in meaning, no longer signifying direct democracy but rather popular sovereignty and representative government. For Maximilien Robespierre, in a famous speech, democracy had become identical with la république.27 After the 1790s both the word and the thing it now denoted continued to be deeply contested, and democracy was not generally accepted in the Western world as a superior, “modern” form of government until the twentieth century.



24

25

26

27

Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum (De regno ad regem Cypri) 1.2: “Si vero iniquum regimen exerceatur per multos, democratia nuncupatur, id est potentatus populi.” Elsewhere, in his commentary on the Ethics (In librum 8, lectio 10), Thomas gives the more correct translation “principatus multitudinis.” Thomas, however, shares Aristotle’s view that democracy is the least bad of the “bad” regimes; see ibid. 1.4. James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chap. 3. On political Aristotelianism, a tradition lasting well into the modern period, see Christoph Horn and Ada NeschkeHentschke, eds., Politischer Aristotelismus: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Politik von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2008). For the interesting though rare cases of democratia and the adjective democraticus used by Catholics as negatives to describe churches with Protestant tendencies in the early Reformation, see René Hoven, Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 154. To the citations there one may add the letter to Erasmus from Conrad Heresbach (1534/36), where the word is used negatively to describe radical Protestants; see Epistularium Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami: Epistulae ad Erasmum datae, ed. P.S. Allen, H.M. Allen, and H.W. Garrod, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–47), 11:157, 160. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy,’” 214–16.

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We are now in a position to appreciate the role played in the history of this word by Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452).28 Cyriac, the merchant-scholar now widely regarded as the father of classical archaeology, came late (aged thirty) to the study of Latin and even later to Greek (aged thirty-seven). He never quite mastered either language, which did not prevent him, sometimes to the amusement of more accomplished humanists, from pouring out diaries, letters, speeches, and other compositions in idiosyncratic versions of both. Cyriac was a great amateur (in the best sense) of the classical world; παλαιόφιλος (lover of antiquity), as he called himself; a tireless traveler; a civic dignitary in the town of Ancona; a protégé of Pope Eugene iv; and a man who met and corresponded with many leading political and cultural figures of his time. Yet, though he had a number of followers in the later fifteenth century who carried on his work of collecting classical inscriptions and drawing the ruins of ancient buildings, he remained for the most part outside the mainstream of humanist activity, marginalized by his lack of a fine educational pedigree and the inelegance of his Latin style.29 The relevant point in the current context, however, is that Cyriac was the one securely identifiable humanist of the fifteenth century, to my knowledge, who used democratia as a legitimate Latin word, and in a positive sense.30 He is the one person who regarded democracy as a practical form of government and indeed praised it as the actual form of government enjoyed by his own 28

29 30

For the literature on Cyriac of Ancona, see the bibliographies in Cyriac of Ancona, Later Travels, ed. and trans. Edward W. Bodnar with Clive Foss (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Cyriac, Life and Early Travels, ed. and trans. Charles Mitchell, Edward W. Bodnar, and Clive Foss (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2015). See, for example, the letter of Poggio to Bruni mocking Cyriac’s learning and eloquence in Cyriac, Life and Early Travels, letter 6. For an exception, see James Hankins, “Leonardo Bruni on the Legitimacy of Constitutions (Oratio in funere Johannis Strozze 19–23),” in Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windshuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti, ed. Christian Thorsten Callisen (Farnham, Surrey, uk: Ashgate, 2014), 73–86. On 80–82, I discuss an anonymous text, possibly an early work of Bruni, where popularis status, said to be the Latin equivalent of the Greek democratia, is treated as the constitutional form of contemporary Florence and is classified as a “legitimate” (as opposed to corrupt) constitution. If the text is by Bruni, it is an early work and Bruni later abandoned both the use of the transliterated word democratia and the meaning assigned to it of “virtuous popular constitution.” For the text, see Hankins, “Unknown and Little-Known Texts of Leonardo Bruni,” Rinascimento, n.s., 38 (1998): 125–61, reprinted with additions in Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003–4), 1:19–62; the text in question is edited on 26–29. I am more doubtful that the work is by Bruni than formerly. To the reservations expressed in ibid., 23–25, one may add that, unusually for Bruni, none of the three mss can be dated to before 1445.

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home town of Ancona, as well as by Florence and (oddly) the town of Recanati near Ancona. The source of Cyriac’s positive use of the word democratia, it seems almost certain, was his knowledge, apparently unique in his time, of book 6 of Polybius. The chief evidence for this is his use of the term ochlocratia in a short work written around 1440 called the Six Constitutions.31 As we have already seen, the word was coined by Polybius and remained extremely rare. No later surviving source but Polybius used the term as part of an exposition of constitutional types, as we find it also used in Cyriac’s Six Constitutions.32 It does not exist in either ancient or medieval Latin.33 One can add too that Cyriac’s list of constitutions used the same Greek terminology and followed the same precise order as was found in Polybius’s discussion of anacyclosis or the constitutional cycle. Polybius’s constitutional scheme in Book 6 of his History of Rome, with the transliterations used by Cyriac of Ancona in his Six Constitutions (ca. 1440)

μοναρχία (monarchia, primitive kingship)

One

βασιλεία regnum ἀριστοκρατία aristocratia δημοκρατία democratia

Few Many

Good

Corrupt

τυραννίς tyrannis ὀλιγαρχία oligarchia ὀχλοκρατία ochlocratia

There are also some other signs in Cyriac’s writings of a Polybian way of thinking about constitutional change that will emerge in due course. This is a surprising discovery. In Arnaldo Momigliano’s classic article of 1974, “Polybius’ Reappearance in Western Europe,” the great émigré scholar claimed 31 Cyriac, Life and Early Travels, app. 4. The Latin text is there edited by James Hankins and Ornella Rossi and translated by Clive Foss and James Hankins. 32 See n. 20. 33 It does not occur in the tll, vol. 9, pt. 2, or in the online Brepols database of medieval Latin dictionaries; nor does it appear in any searchable database of medieval and Latin texts such as that based on J.-P. Migne’s Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, 221 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1844–91), or the online Library of Latin Texts published by Brepols.

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that book 6 of Polybius was recovered only in the early sixteenth century, and first entered the meme-pool of Western thought via Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi.34 Book 6, it should perhaps be explained, constitutes the most important surviving work of Hellenistic political theory and was well known as a key theoretical text during the early modern period, influencing not only Machiavelli, but also thinkers like Francesco Guicciardini, James Harrington, Montesquieu, and the authors of the American Constitution. Its constitutional theory and its account of the Roman constitution and military organization, as well as the explanation it offered for Rome’s imperial success, quickly made it into a canonical treatment of the relationship between constitutional order and imperial power, once it finally began to be published and translated around the middle of the sixteenth century.35 Momigliano found no evidence that any Western scholar before Machiavelli knew of book 6, and the manuscript and early printed evidence seemed to bear him out. Books 1–5, to be sure, the only part of the text to survive in complete form, were known to have been available in Florence as early as 1419, and Leonardo Bruni produced in 1420 what proved to be an immensely popular adaptation of Historiae 1.7–2.34 called the De primo bello punico, intended to fill some of the gaps in Livy’s history.36 When books 1–5 were first properly translated by Niccolò Perotti in 1454, Perotti stated explicitly in his preface for

34

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Originally published in Polybe: neuf exposés suivis de discussions, ed. F.W. Walbank (Vandoeuvres, Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1974), 347–72; repr. in Momigliano’s Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 79–98. For more recent work on Machiavelli and Polybius see M.-R. Guelfucci, “Anciens et Modernes: Machiavel et la lecture Polybienne de l’histoire,” Dialogues d’histoire ancien 34 (2008): 85–104. Momigliano (cit., 87) follows Carlo Dionisotti in stating that the first known reference to bk. 6 occurs in the De urbe Roma of Bernardo Rucellai, which he dates to “before 1505” on the grounds that it is mentioned by Petrus Crinitus, whose death he places in 1505 (correctly 5 July 1507), in the latter author’s De honesta disciplina (4.9). A better ante quem, however, would be 1503–4, when the De honesti disciplina was completed and published; see Roberto Ricciardi, “Del Riccio Baldi, Pietro,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani 38 (Rome: Treccani, 1990), online at http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ricerca/del-ricciobaldi-pietro/Dizionario_Biografico. (However, from internal references it is clear that the composition of the book began in the mid-1490s.) See the “Fortuna” in the article by Jeroen De Keyser, “Polybius,” forthcoming in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 11, ed. Greti Dinkova-Bruun with Julia Haig Gaisser and James Hankins (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies Press). For the manuscripts, see James Hankins, Repertorium Brunianum: A Guide to the Works of Leonardo Bruni, vol. 1 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1997).

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Nicholas v that to his knowledge only books 1–5 had survived.37 Other manuscripts that we can connect with quattrocento humanists, men like Antonio Corbinelli, Francesco Filelfo, and Cardinal Bessarion, also had only the fivebook text.38 Janus Lascaris (1445–1535) translated Polybius 6.3–18, a key passage for the historian’s constitutional theory, at an uncertain date, probably around 1500, but the excerpt survives only in two manuscripts.39 Cyriac, however, judging by his demonstrable use of Polybius, must have had access more than a half century before Lascaris to one of the rather numerous manuscripts, mostly late, containing all or part of the so-called excerpta antiqua, manuscripts in which long passages of book 6 and later books (7–18) were preserved.40 It must have been his special access to Polybius, his lack of interest in scholastic political literature, and his position out of the mainstream of humanist political discourse that led him to commit the linguistic barbarism of treating the transliterated words democratia and democraticus as Latin words—even more disgracefully, using those words in a morally positive sense. For most humanists of the Renaissance, such a usage would surely count as a barbarism in the strict grammatical sense of that word. Leonardo Bruni had attacked the medieval translator of the Politics on precisely this point in his treatise On Correct Translation: What shall I say of the words left in Greek, so numerous as to make the translation seem half in Greek? And yet there has never been anything said in Greek that cannot be said in Latin. Still, I will excuse him a few obscure and strange words if they cannot be translated easily into Latin. But it is certainly a very ignorant thing to leave words in Greek when we have perfectly good Latin equivalents. Why, tell me, do you leave politeia in Greek, when you can and ought to use the Latin words res publica?

37

Quoted from De Keyser, “Polybius”: “Absolvi tandem aliquando delegatum mihi abs te munus, pontifex maxime, conversis in Latinum sermonem quinque libris Polybii, qui soli nobis superstites ex amplissima illius historia remansere…. Verum tamen omnem hanc meam voluptatem atque hoc omne solatium non parum ad extremum conturbavit imperfectio operis, quod ex quadraginta ab illo editis voluminibus vix quinque prima nobis supersunt.” For the twenty-two manuscripts and nine editions of this translation, and for further bibliography, see De Keyser’s discussion. 38 John M. Moore, The Manuscript Tradition of Polybius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 39 De Keyser, “Polybius.” 40 Moore, The Manuscript Tradition, pt. 2.

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Why obtrude in a thousand places the words democratia and oligarchia and aristocratia, and offend the ears of your readers with outlandish and unfamiliar terms, when we have excellent and widely used terms for all of them in Latin?41 Good taste, as humanists understood it, dictated that a writer make use of equivalents in his or her own language before importing an unfamiliar, oddsounding foreign word, especially when there was no ancient authority for doing so. We can see what a stylistic faux pas this was if we look at the other example of Polybian influence known to the present writer from the fifteenth century (also unknown to Momigliano), namely, the appearance of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis in a text from 1490–91. This occurs in book 3 of Aurelio Lippo Brandolini’s dialogue Republics and Kingdoms Compared.42  olybius’s cycle of constitutional change (6.2–9) with Aurelio Lippi P Brandolini’s Latin equivalents Monarchy = unius principatum →  Kingship = rex, regnum →  Tyranny = tyrannis → Aristocracy = optimatum gubernatio → Oligarchy = paucorum potestas → Democracy = “a Graecis politice, a nostris respublica” → Ochlocracy = “a nostris plebeius principatus, a Graecis democratia” → Monarchy Although Polybius is not named as the source of Brandolini’s theory of anacyclosis (which is placed in the mouth of the interlocutor King Mattias Corvinus), it becomes clear that Polybius must have been the source when we compare Brandolini’s cycle with the accounts of constitutional degeneration in Plato and Aristotle:

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Leonardo Bruni, Sulla perfetta traduzione, ed. Paolo Viti (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2004), 120 (cap. 43). 42 Brandolini, Republics and Kingdoms Compared, 238–40 (caps. 85–86). Brandolini also takes his “constitutionalist” explanation for Rome’s ability to subdue Carthage from Polybius 6.51.

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Constitutional degeneration in Plato’s Republic, Book 8 (unidirectional) Aristocracy (the best, philosophical constitution, based on wisdom) →  Timocracy (status based on honor and wealth) →  Oligarchy (status based on wealth alone) →  Democracy (equality and license) →  Tyranny Constitutional degeneration in Aristotle’s Ethics 8.10 and Politics 5 (noncyclical) Kingdom → Tyranny Aristocracy → Oligarchy Timocracy or Polity → Democracy → Tyranny Here we see that Brandolini, despite adopting Polybius’s theory, had the good sense or good taste to use the standard Latin equivalents for Aristotle’s constitutional terminology rather than the unfamiliar Polybian terminology, especially its outlandish use of democratia as the name for a good constitution.



It would be tempting to conclude that Cyriac was open to using democratia in a positive way because he himself had a preference for that kind of constitution. But in fact he was a democrat only in a very limited and idiosyncratic sense. It is true that another little-known work seems to show him as an enthusiastic democrat; but only after a fashion. This work, called Anconitana Illyricaque Laus, was a letter-treatise addressed to an ambassador from Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Marino de’Resti, and dated 18 June 1440; it was designed as an introduction to the text of a treaty between Ancona and Ragusa.43 In it Cyriac praises his native city for its ancient democratic constitution, which has allowed it to flourish unica et alma civium democratica libertate, a citadel of freedom for refugees 43

The text was published by Giuseppe Praga, “Indagini e studi sull’umanesimo in Dalmatia: Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli e Marino de’ Resti,” Archivio storico per la Dalmazia 13 (1932–33): 262–80. A new edition with translation will appear in the third volume of the I Tatti Renaissance Library’s series on Cyriac of Ancona: Travels, 1435–1444.

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from tyranny going back to the Doric Greeks. Thanks to its fostering democratic liberty it has a political life marked by modesty, honor, tranquility, peace, unity, concord, security, and piety. This description echoes, perhaps, Polybius’s description of the citizen virtues present in a “true democracy.”44 Yet Ancona is not a fully sovereign democracy like Athens but enjoys its liberty sub alma Dei vicarii potestate, “beneath the kindly power of the Vicar of God,” that is, the pope. Here libertas comes close to one of its ancient senses, that is, the enjoyment of a specified political privilege.45 It is Ancona’s liberty that makes it a natural sister-city of Ragusa, also distinguished for its liberty. Ragusa, however, enjoys an aristocratic constitution that Cyriac also praises for the great probity, resourcefulness, industry, and virtue of its citizens, as the uniquely honorable and best of the Illyrian polities, flourishing in aristocratic liberty through the brilliant power of its noble and optimate citizens. Hearing this typically inflated praise one might suppose Cyriac to be a kind of minor Leonardo Bruni, praising his city’s regime and its free institutions. In fact Cyriac shows himself (like Biondo Flavio) an opponent of the republican ideology elaborated by Coluccio Salutati and Bruni in Florence, and a critic of the republican narrative of Roman history the two Florentine chancellors had worked out decades before.46 Unlike Bruni, who presents Florence in his political rhetoric as an independent, sovereign state, Cyriac sees the city-states he mentions in a more typically medieval way, as situated juridically beneath the authority of an emperor or a pope. The “democracies” of central Italy— Florence, Ancona, and Recanati—are protected and regulated by the pope. They are all, in a juridical sense, papal states. Monarchy is in principle universal. The supreme example of good monarchical power, defined as just kingship, is the Roman Empire under Caesar and Augustus. Cyriac regards the imperial expansion of Alfonso of Aragon in his own day as sanctioned by the approval of the “best and greatest” pontiff, Eugene iv, “who gives holy commands to all Christians throughout the globe under the order of divine law.”47 44 45

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See above, at nn. 18 and 19. Another possibility is that Cyriac is using libertas in the sense in which Dante uses the word in the De monarchia 1.12.8–10: as a type of autonomy belonging only to those regimes that exist under a just universal monarchy; for Cyriac’s debts to Dante see Hester Schadee, “Caesarea Laus: Ciriaco d’Ancona Praising Caesar to Leonardo Bruni,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 4 (2008): 435–49. For Salutati’s underappreciated contribution to this narrative, see Coluccio Salutati: Political Writings, ed. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2014), esp. text 5: Reply to a Slanderous Detractor of Florence. Cyriac of Ancona, Six Constitutions, in Life and Early Travels, app. 4: “Sed praeclarius hodie Alphonsus inclytus ille Ausoniae rex Tarraconensem Hispaniam, Balearum Sicanorumque insulas Ausoniamque sua praeclarissima regna insigniter propagata gubernat, Eugenio

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In general, Cyriac sees universal monarchy, exemplified by Rome, as the best form of government. His considered view is made clear in his longest work of political theory—if that is not too high a name for it—the lettertreatise in praise of Julius Caesar he addressed to Leonardo Bruni in 1436, a couple of years after his visit to Florence.48 In this treatise, known as the Caesarea Laus, Cyriac defends Julius Caesar against the slurs of Poggio Bracciolini, who had compared the great dictator unfavorably with Scipio Africanus. Here (cap. 17) Cyriac gives us an explicit hierarchy of constitutions. Oligarchy and tyranny are set aside as bad forms of government; ochlocracy is not mentioned. This leaves Polybius’s three “good” forms of government, which in ascending order of dignity are democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. Following the usual argument, monarchy enjoys the most esteem because it most resembles the government of God in heaven. And Roman monarchy was no arbitrary tyranny, dependent on the will of a single man; nor was it absolute monarchy. Caesar’s rule and Augustus’s rule “took care to administer the provinces and kingdoms in accordance with law, decrees of the Senate or by resolutions of the People and the tribunician power.”49 In other words, it was a constitutional monarchy, as that term was understood in the Renaissance and early modern period. So Cyriac, like Polybius, considers democracy a good form of government, to be preserved in city-states with old traditions of democratic freedom. For Cyriac it is good in part because it is an inherently mixed form. It is not mixed in Aristotle’s sense, that is, a mixture of institutional features taken from democracy and oligarchy, but mixed in a somewhat novel sense: that is, it consists of a mixture of a city’s populace (populus) and other free townsmen

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optimo maximoque annuente pontifice, qui sanctius divini iuris ordine Christicolis toto orbe imperat universis.” Edited in Life and Early Travels, letter 4, 197–221. The work was previously edited (with commentary) by Mariarosa Cortesi, “La Caesarea laus di Ciriaco d’Ancona,” in Gli umanesimi medievali: Atti del ii Congresso dell’Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee, Firenze, Certosa di Galluzzo, 11–15 settembre 1993, ed. Claudio Leonardi (Florence: sismel, 1998), 37–65; and independently by James Hankins, “Addenda to Book x of Luiso’s Studi su l’Epistolario di Leonardo Bruni,” in Censimento dei codici dell’ Epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1993– 2004), 2:352–422, at 396–406. On the Caesarea Laus see also Schadee, “Caesarea Laus,” who emphasizes the debts to Dante. Six Constitutions: “Monarchia: princeps unus in orbe bonus, ut Caesar vel Augustus, qui ex lege et Senatus Consulto plebisue scito et tribunicia potestate, magistratibus bonis provincias regnaque per orbem moderare curabant.”

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(municipes),50 who on suitable occasions take the counsel of the Areopagites, which introduces an aristocratic element to the regime: Democracy: A mixed regime of the people (populus) and free townsmen (municipes) in a city-state (civitas), such as we learn the Athenians maintained, although they very often helpfully used to employ the excellent counsel of the Areopagites at suitable moments, just like an aristocratic regime. Today among the Italians, Florence in Tuscany, Ancona in Picenum, and the colony of Recanati seem to maintain this [type of regime]. These indeed are protected and regulated beneath the fostering pontifical power of the vicar of God.51 In any case, in his view, democracies had been sanctioned in recent times by the divine, universal authority of the pope and were therefore good. But they were still, in principle, inferior to aristocracies like those of Venice and Dubrovnik and monarchies like those in Germany, England, France, and the Kingdom of Aragon. We should note that Cyriac’s limited defense of democracy is quite different from that found in the scholastic tradition of political Aristotelianism. The scholastics did not place any value on the pure form labeled democratic, but merely approved the inclusion of some democratic institutions and customs as part of a mixed constitution. Democracy for them was synonymous with mob rule. Cyriac sees a legitimate place for true democracy, with its commitments to equality and free speech, in the overall scheme of things, but equality and free speech are local privileges, justified by the virtue of local populations, rather than universal entitlements or natural rights. In this sense his position is rather similar to that of the scholastic republican

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It is far from clear what Cyriac means by municipes. It is possible that he is thinking of Roman imperial citizenship and thus wishes to distinguish Roman citizens who lived in Rome itself from free citizens of other towns in the empire who enjoyed Roman citizen rights; see Aulus Gellius’s essay on the word in Attic Nights 16.13. More likely he was trying to translate into Latin the Greek word demes or δῆμοι, rural districts in which all citizens of Athens were required to be enrolled. Six Constitutions: “Democratia: populi municipumque mixtum in civitate principatum, ut Athenienses servasse comperimus, quamquam saepenumero perinde ac aristocraticum opportune optimum Areopagitarum consilium habuissent. Hodie vero ex Italis Florentia in Thuscia, in Piceno autem Ancon, et Ricinatum Colonia servare videntur, et hae quidem alma sub pontificia Dei vicaria potestate protectae et moderatae sunt.” Recanati was a colony of the Roman city of Helvia Recina, founded after that city was devastated by the Goths under Radagaisus in 406 ce.

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Tolomeo Fiadoni (better known as Ptolemy of Lucca), in the early fourteenth century.52 Cyriac’s preference for monarchy is in part influenced by the traditions of Christian historiography, which since the time of Eusebius had seen the pax Romana instituted by Augustus as part of a divine plan to open the oecumene to Christian conversion. Caesar’s monarchy was so pleasing to God, says Cyriac, that in the time of Caesar’s son, Augustus, he sent his son, Jesus, to mingle with the human race; and “just as though he held joint command with Caesar over heaven and earth, [Jesus] agreed in a sacred pronouncement that what is Caesar’s should be given to Caesar, and what is God’s, to God.”53 Here we have a position on the relationship between divine and human government very similar to that of Eusebius in his Oration in Praise of Constantine. Yet Cyriac could be a critic of the first Christian emperor as well. We see this in the most historically and politically sophisticated part of the Caesarea Laus, where Cyriac takes on Bruni’s famous argument, stated in book 1 of his History of the Florentine People, that Roman power and culture declined after the fall of the republic, under the emperors and, moreover, directly as a result of their tyrannical rule.54 For Bruni, republican government led to empire and cultural flourishing, while monarchy always threatened to decline into tyranny. Cyriac in response admits that the growth of the Roman Empire was greatest under the consuls—that is, in the period that we moderns anachronistically call “the Roman Republic”—and poses the question why that was the case if monarchy was the best form of government. The problem of the relationship between empire and constitutional form, we should notice, is the central problem raised by Polybius. Cyriac gives in effect two answers, a human and a divine one, which are not fully compatible. The divine or theological answer was that the fall of Rome was the fault not of constitutions, but of the Fates. The divine powers actively willed the fall of Rome, because if there should be any government that could last in perpetuity, there would then be no difference between 52 53

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See James M. Blythe, The Worldview and Thought of Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). Caesarea Laus, cap. 18: “Et sic dum ipse divum pater et hominum homines inter humanatus versaret, sub divi Augusti filio et Caesareo tertio loco principe Tiberio, caesareum hunc ita placuit principatum probare, ut hac et si cum eo caeli terraeque orbis imperium divisum haberet, sanctissimo ore annuit reddendum fore Caesari quae sunt Caesaris et quae Dei sunt Deo, ut haec et vos inter, divis et e praeconibus homo leo bosque sacratissimis testantur litteris.” Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. James Hankins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001–7), 1:49–55 (caps. 37–40).

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the gods and men. The emperor Constantine made things worse by transferring the capital from Rome to Constantinople,55 but the fundamental reason why Rome fell was that all human things are subject to decay. We are not gods, but men. We die; and our governments die too. The body politic is mortal.56 The second reason Cyriac gives to explain why Rome eventually collapsed under the emperors is much more Polybian in tone. Cyriac, in common with the tradition of Christian historiography, argues that Rome was suffering a terrible crisis during the civil wars of the late republic and in fact would have collapsed much more quickly under the rule of the consuls if Caesar had not overturned it and established a monarchy instead.57 In other words, under the consuls in the late republic the natural cycle of constitutions had come to an end in civil war. Caesar’s greatness was to begin the cycle anew, da capo as it were, with the best form of government, monarchy. Caesar himself was the proof that this was happening. Caesar displayed remarkable virtue, divine intelligence, foresight, military skill, and “inexpressible eloquence and mastery of the Latin language” in his literary works. Above all, there was his divine clemency, the royal virtue most needed to compose the quarrels of the age. If he had not been murdered by the ambition and envy of his fellow citizens, he would have adorned the city, enlarged the empire, subdued the Parthians, reformed the laws, built libraries, and patronized literature. His adopted son Augustus later brought all these projects to fulfillment.58 In other words, though Cyriac does not say this explicitly, Caesar was exactly the kind of man Rome needed to renew her constitution and begin her political life cycle anew. Together with that of his son Augustus, his rule was therefore the best model for the revival of Italian greatness that Cyriac, along with all the other humanists of the Renaissance, longed to bring into being. In praising democracy, Cyriac may have been the voice crying in the wilderness, but when it came to the idea of the Renaissance, he was singing in chorus with the angels.

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A view he shared with Bruni; see Patricia Osmond de Martino, “The Idea of Constantinople: A Prolegomenon to Further Study,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 15, no. 2 (1988): 323–36. Caesarea laus, cap. 22. Ibid., cap. 23. Ibid., caps. 24–27.

chapter 40

The Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in Renaissance Scholarship: From Annius of Viterbo to Johannes Boemus C. Philipp E. Nothaft Introduction When Diodorus of Sicily took up the stylus during the middle years of the first century bce to write a whole “library” (Bibliotheke) of universal history in forty books, the gap between gods and men had become a narrow one. In a reality deeply shaped by the past conquests of Alexander the Great and the present wars of Julius Caesar, many had begun to think of historical change as a process bound up with the heroic exploits of powerful and charismatic generals, who covered vast stretches of land, founded and destroyed cities, and created conditions under which inventions, crafts, food crops, and other goods could flow at an unprecedented rate from one end of the known world to the other. Nations and city-states reacted to their dependence on the good will of this new class of Hellenistic kings by showering them with divine honors, which sometimes developed into fully fledged ruler cults. The learned approach to mythology that was most congenial to this dynamic atmosphere of hero ­worship is forever associated with the name of Euhemerus of Messene (fl. 300 bce), for whom even the deities of the old pantheon had once been mere mortals, who received apotheosis on account of their military and political achievements.1 In Diodorus’s Bibliotheke, which is incidentally our most important source for Euhemerus’s life and ideas, this mythographic approach is expanded to include the deification of inventors, lawgivers, and pioneers of the arts and 1 On Euhemerism and its afterlife, see Marek Winiarczyk, The “Sacred History” of Euhemerus of Messene (Berlin: De Gruyer, 2013); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Pantheon, 1953); Arnaldo Momigliano, “Historiography of Religion: Western Perspectives,” in Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 11–30; Arthur B. Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1993), 13–22; Franco de Angelis and Benjamin Garstad, “Euhemerus in Context,” Classical Antiquity 25 (2006): 211–42.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_041

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sciences. Using the real-life campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar as his models, the Sicilian historian reimagined the careers of Egyptian, Greek, and Near Eastern gods and heroes such as Osiris, Semiramis, Dionysus, and Heracles, as extended itineraries of conquest and invention that covered most of the ecumene.2 He complemented this striking vision of early history with an anti-primitivist account of human origins, following a type of narrative that was also espoused by several other writers of his period (e.g. Vitruvius and Lucretius) as well as by some Greek predecessors leading back to Democritus. What these authors had in common was their tendency to bypass popular musings about a primordial Golden Age in favor of what Arthur Ferguson has called the “cave myth”—a slow evolutionary progress from harsh, animalistic beginnings.3 According to the version recounted by Diodorus (1.7.1–8.9),4 living beings first arose as a result of the sun’s heat acting on the primordial mud that had emerged from the water at the time when the elements separated. For the earliest period of their existence, humans were caught up in a beastlike state, marked by endless hardship and misery. Unable to collect food reserves, many perished from hunger and cold during the harsh winters. Eventually, the threat posed by wild animals forced them to unite in tribal groups and form permanent settlements. With necessity (χρεία) as their teacher, they slowly and gradually learned how to prepare for times of paucity, to find hiding places in caves, to use fire, and to invent various arts. Since humans had emerged independently of each other in different geographic regions, there was nothing mysterious about the existence of radically different cultures, languages, and ethnicities. For those who accepted Diodorus’s account, cultural diversity was indeed an outcome to be expected from the most basic facts about mankind’s origins. Given the unorthodox and potentially explosive nature of the material codified in the early books of the Bibliotheke, it may be surprising to find that 2 See now Iris Sulimani, Diodorus’ Mythistory and the Pagan Mission: Historiography and Culture-Heroes in the First Pentad of the Bibliotheke (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Sulimani’s study is part of a recent trend in classical studies of taking Diodorus more seriously as a historian in his own right as opposed to a mere excerptor of previous sources. The key study for this modern reassessment is Kenneth S. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990). On Diodorus’s first book, see now also Charles E. Muntz, “Diodorus Siculus, Egypt, and Rome” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008). 3 Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 3, 62. On the general context, see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). 4 See Anne Burton, Diodorus Siculus, Book i: A Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 44–51, for an account of Diodorus’s sources.

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Diodorus’s afterlife in the Renaissance period has not received nearly the kind of attention from historians of ideas that some of his close contemporaries, such as Lucretius, have enjoyed in recent years.5 While I can hardly rectify this situation in the space of a short essay, I would like to use the remaining pages to sketch an arc of thought that connects Diodorus and his account of early history to three influential names in Renaissance historical and ethnographic writing: Annius of Viterbo, Marcantonio Sabellico, and Johannes Boemus. In doing so, I hope to offer a useful case study on a subject that has played a significant role in Tony Grafton’s endlessly inspiring body of work: the multifarious ways in which the encounter with ancient texts stimulated early modern readers to think up new and unsettling answers to familiar questions.

From Osiris to Noah

Although Greek codices of the first five books of Diodorus’s Bibliotheke had been available in Florence before 1406,6 the real turning point in the work’s Western reception came only when Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) commissioned his secretary Poggio Bracciolini to produce a Latin translation (1449), which was to enjoy a great number of printings, starting with its editio princeps of 1472.7 Among the text’s many attractions was its historicizing and rationalistic treatment of Greek mythology, which indicated how all the various gods and demigods might find their place in early human history, even if the latter was biblically grounded. Diodorus started his journey through the ancient world in 5 An exception would be William J. Connell, “The Eternity of the World and Renaissance Historical Thought,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 1–23, at 13–15, http://escholarship .org/uc/item/3qx3j1nb, who focuses on Diodorus as a source on the eternity of the world. The literature on the reception of Lucretius in the early modern period is particularly rich. See, e.g., Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Allison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ada Palmer, “Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 395–416. 6 Sebastiano Gentile and David Speranzi, “Coluccio Salutati e Manuele Crisolora,” in Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’umanesimo, ed. Concetta Bianca (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 3–48, at 33–34. 7 See the introduction to François Chamoux and Pierre Bertrac, eds., Diodore de Sicile: Bibliothèque Historique, Livre i (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), cxliv–cxlix. In ca. 1487, Poggio’s text was translated into English by John Skelton, The Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus, ed. F.M. Salter and H.L.R. Edwards, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–57).

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Egypt, which was reputed to be the place where humans first emerged from the fertile and muddy banks of the Nile. In explaining the rise of religion in these regions, he distinguished two phases: First came the worship of celestial bodies and the elements, to which men assigned names such as Osiris (sun), Isis (moon), Hephaestus (fire), Zeus (spirit), Athena (air), and Demeter (earth) (1.11–12). In a next step (1.13), these same names were conferred as honorific titles on rulers and persons of outstanding merit, whose campaigns and heroic deeds took up most of books 1–5. One reader of Poggio’s translation who took his fascination with this account particularly far was the Dominican monk Annius of Viterbo (1437–1502), whose counterfeit antiquities left a widely visible mark on how sixteenth-century authors perceived the earliest stages of human history.8 A magister of theology 8 The most comprehensive treatment of Annius and his forgeries is still Walter E. Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1979), which is currently being revised for a future publication. In the meantime, see Stephens, “When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and His Forged Antiquities,” in Studia Humanitatis: Essays in Honor of Salvatore Camporeale, special supplement to mln Italian Issue 119 (2004): 201–23; Stephens, “Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo’s Multiple Persona Disorder,” mln 126 (2011): 689–708; Stephens, “From Berossos to Berosus Chaldaeus: The Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and Their Fortune,” in The World of Berossos, ed. Johannes Haubold, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Robert Rollinger, and John Steele (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 277–89; and the new study by Thomas Lehr, Was nach der Sintflut wirklich geschah: Die Antiquitates des Annius von Viterbo und ihre Rezeption in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012). Another excellent introduction to the material is Anthony Grafton, “Inventions of Tradition and Traditions of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 8–38. Further recent additions to the literature include Giacomo Ferraù, “Riflessioni teoriche e prassi storiografica in Annio da Viterbo,” in Principato ecclesiastico e riuso dei classici: gli umanisti e Alessandro vi, ed. D. Canfora, M. Chiabò, and M. de Nichilo (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2002), 151–93; William Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2005), 23–24, 75–78, 95, 138, 162; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Heilsgeschichtliche Inventionen: Annius von Viterbos ‘Berosus’ und die Geschichte der Sintflut,” in Sintflut und Gedächtnis, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2006), 85–111; Robert J. Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 32–36; David M. Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 43–76; Harald Bollbuck, “Geschichts­ fälschung, Überlieferung historischen Wissens und Antikenrezeption—die Antiq­uitates des Annius von Viterbo,” in Geschichte schreiben: Ein Quellen- und Studienhandbuch zur Historiographie (ca. 1350–1750), ed. Susanne Rau and Birgit Studt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 298–308; Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical

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by training, Annius rose to notoriety during the early 1490s as an expert on Etruscan antiquities, who repeatedly staged the “discovery” of ancient inscriptions and artifacts that happened to elucidate the glorious past of his hometown, Viterbo.9 In his earliest work on Viterbo’s history, Annius still attributed its foundation to Osiris, who was depicted by Diodorus (1.13–21) as one of the most important cultural heroes of the early age.10 In later, more advanced stages of Annius’s antiquarian hoax, Osiris took a backseat to the biblical patriarch Noah, who was now identified with the Italian god Janus and presented as the founder of Etruscan culture. In order to validate this narrative, Annius created not just one source, but an entire corpus of ancient authors, centered on “Berosus the Chaldean,” which were supplemented by his own profuse and learned commentaries. Among the corpus’s main selling points was the way in which it fleshed out the meager depiction of early history offered by the Bible, whose Near Eastern table of nations (Genesis 10) was no longer satisfactory from the viewpoint of a flourishing European proto-nationalism. Berosus and his literary satellites answered contemporary desiderata by providing an elaborate family tree for the descendants of Noah, whose colonization movement and founding of European nations they traced in astonishing detail.11 The first few centuries after the Flood are characterized in Annius’s sources as a heroic Golden Age, during which mankind flourished under the wise and pious rule of Noah and his grandchildren. Although this picture owed much to Diodorus, it left little to no room for the naturalistic depiction of human origins that preceded the mythographical section in the latter’s work. The only one among the “rediscovered” pagan authors to still allude to the philosophical

9

10

11

Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 39–44, 177–83; Popper, “An Ocean of Lies: The Problem of Historical Evidence in the Sixteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74 (2011): 375–400. Amanda Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy and Its Legitimating Potential: Annius of Viterbo, Etruscan Inscriptions, and the Origins of Civilization,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 44 (2000): 57–76. See now also Jacopo Rubini, Annio da Viterbo e il Decretum Desiderii (Viterbo: Edizioni Sette Città, 2012). As proof that Osiris had come as far as Viterbo on his travels, Annius later presented a supposedly hieroglyphic tablet, whose message he “translated” with the help of Diodorus (1.27.5). See Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus,” 166–70; Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy,” 67– 68; Alfred Grimm, “Osiris, König der Etrusker: Giovanni Nanni da Viterbos ‘Tabula Osiriana Aegyptia’ als Beitrag zur Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Exotisch, weisheitlich und uralt: Europäische Konstruktionen Altägyptens, ed. Thomas Glück and Ludwig Morenz (Hamburg: lit, 2007), 81–116. For an English summary of early history according to Annius, see Richard Lynche, An Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe (London: Islip, 1601).

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theory, according to which all life was spontaneously generated from primordial mud, was Cato the Elder, whose work on Italian origins Annius had supposedly found in a volume of collectanea put together by a certain William of Mantua in the early fourteenth century. In this spurious treatise, Cato located the first emergence of humans in a region called “Scythia Saga,” while dating it to the time after the great deluge that preceded the Noachide Golden Age. This made it possible for Annius to connect Cato’s narrative to the version of events depicted in pseudo-Berosus, where Noah and his sons are said to have descended from the ark in “Armenia Saga,” first inhabited by the Scyths. The idea that man emerged from wet soil was thus passed off as a dim reminiscence of humanity’s historical resetting following the biblical Flood.12 Annius of Viterbo’s vision of early history was to exert a pervasive influence on sixteenth-century thought and writing, as can be seen in particular from the many chronographic and chronological works produced during the period. The German humanist Johannes Nauclerus, for instance, prefaced his monumental chronicle of 1516 with a section on historical methodology in which he affirmed that Annius’s rediscovered antiquities were more reliable than established Greek historiography. Using various excerpts from pseudo-Berosus to underscore his points, Nauclerus also emphasized Noah’s role as an inventor and teacher of mankind and pointed out that the cultivation of astronomy and writing went back to the very first human being, Adam.13 Even this latter idea came from Annius, who interspersed his texts and commentaries with repeated allusions to the existence of an Ancient Theology—a unified stream 12 13

See Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitatum variarum volumina xvii (Paris: Badius, 1512), fols. 58r–v, 109r. Johannes Nauclerus, Memorabilium omnis aetatis et omnium gentium chronici commentarii (Tübingen: Anshelm, 1516), fols. 1r–2r, 4r, 6r. A noteworthy illustrated world history heavily indebted to pseudo-Berosus is Valerius Anselm Ryd, Catalogus annorum et principum geminus (Basel: Apian, 1540). Annius’s influence on Nauclerus and other German scholars during the first half of the sixteenth century is discussed in Werner Goez, “Die Anfänge der historischen Methoden-Reflexion in der italienischen Renaissance und ihre Aufnahme in der Geschichtsschreibung des deutschen Humanismus,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 56 (1974): 25–48; Lehr, Sintflut, 160–345; Anthony Grafton and Urs B. Leu, “Chronologia est unica historiae lux: How Glarean Studied and Taught the Chronology of the Ancient World,” in Heinrich Glarean’s Books: The Intellectual World of a SixteenthCentury Musical Humanist, ed. Iain Fenlon and Inga Mai Groote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 248–79, at 272–76. On Annius’s afterlife more generally, see Richard Thomas John, “Fictive Ancient History and National Consciousness in Early Modern Europe: The Influence of Annius of Viterbo’s Antiquitates” (PhD diss., Warburg Institute, 1994).

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of philosophical, scientific, and religious knowledge that went back to the beginning of time.14 In support of these assertions, he referred to a claim made by the Chaldaeans, who had known astronomy and letters for 43,000 years before the monarchy of Alexander. This citation seems to have been a deliberate falsification of a passage in Diodorus (2.31.9), who instead records a time span of 473,000 years. In line with a view that was likewise recorded by Diodorus (1.26), Annius interpreted the 43,000 “years” as standing for lunar months and went on to reduce them to 3,634 solar years (albeit without revealing the details of his arithmetical reasoning). This much-smaller number pointed to a beginning of Chaldaean wisdom around 4000 bce, which was in line with the approximate time of Creation according to the Hebrew Old Testament.15 Astronomy also plays an important role in pseudo-Berosus’s characterization of the knowledge that Noah passed down to his descendants after the great deluge. Thanks to his ability in celestial divination, he had been able to foretell the Flood 78 years in advance.16 In describing the post-diluvial age, Annius rewrote a passage in which Diodorus reported on the achievements of King Uranus (3.56.3–5) in order to drive home the idea that Noah also established a calendar and imparted his astrological and divine knowledge to the priests of Armenia.17 Pseudo-Berosus’s emphasis on Noah’s primeval science was such that the cultural trajectory of human history could in principle only point downward. Not only had humankind shrunken in bodily size since antediluvial times, when giants still roamed the earth, but it had evidently experienced a serious 14

15

16 17

See Walter E. Stephens, “The Etruscans and the Ancient Theology in Annius of Viterbo,” in Umanesimo a Roma nel Quattrocento, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Maristella de Panizza Lorch (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1984), 309–22. For the wider context, see Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia perennis: Historische Umrisse abendländischer Spiritualität in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 646–701; Schmidt-Biggemann, “Traditionskonkurrenzen: Eine Kreditgeschichte offenbarter Ursprungsgeschichten,” in Constructing Tradition, ed. Andreas B. Kilcher (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 343–71. Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitates, fols. 105r, 106v. See also Nicholas Popper, “‘Abraham, Planter of Mathematics’: Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 87–106, at 94–95. On the (Christian) idea that years mentioned in ancient texts are shorter than solar years, see Anthony Grafton, “Tradition and Technique in Historical Chronology,” in Ancient History and the Antiquarian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Michael. H. Crawford and Christopher R. Ligota (London: Warburg Institute, 1995), 15–31, at 26–30. Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitates, fol. 107v. Ibid., fol. 115r.

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decline in the kind of wisdom and piety that had been a hallmark of the halcyon days of Noah-Janus. Who or what had been responsible for this decline and how had sin and depravity been able to reenter the world after the Flood? The first semblance of an answer offered in the Annian corpus revolves around the person of Ham, also known by the name Zoroaster, who practiced black magic and—in allusion to Genesis 9:20–27—is said to have rendered his father, Noah, impotent with a spell. Aside from his role as a sorcerer, Ham is also blamed for the postdiluvial reemergence of a number of sexual vices, such as bestiality, incest, and siblings’ marriage, the latter of which became particularly prevalent in Egypt, to which he had been expelled by his father.18 From his operation base in northern Africa, Ham continued to periodically invade other regions, including Etruria, where he managed to usurp power from King Comerus before being finally ousted by Noah. And yet, while Ham is given the label of corruptor humani generis in Berosus’s account,19 his precise role in leading mankind to perdition is not articulated as clearly as one may think. In particular, it is difficult to discern his influence on the emergence of polytheism, which, in good Euhemeristic fashion, appears to have been mainly fostered by the worship of mankind’s benefactor Noah and his relatives under a multitude of different names. That Ham’s career was merely a temporary aberration in the generally triumphant course of early history is suggested not least by the fact that his own children, among them Osiris, Isis, and the Libyan Hercules, are among Annius’s most eulogized cultural heroes, who helped to rid the world of evil giants.20 Another cause for intellectual and religious decline was clearly needed, and Annius supplied it by pointing to the detrimental influence of Greek culture, which started to be felt about 250 years after the Flood. As part of his general polemic against Graecia mendax, which was meant to protect his counterfeit authors from historical criticism based on authentic historians, Annius claimed that Greek sophistry and shallow verbosity had corrupted the Romans and other nations to the point that they completely forgot about Noah’s wisdom and the splendor of their ancestral history.21 This onslaught against the Greeks was also directed, perhaps even 18 19 20 21

Ibid., fols. 115v–16r. Incest and fornication previously also characterized the life of the giants in the antediluvial city of Enos. See ibid., fol. 106v. Ibid., fol. 119v. On the role of Ham and his family in the Annian narrative, see Whitford, The Curse of Ham, 54–66, 123–31. Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitates, fol. 106r–v: “Nam omnis illa theologia, philosophia et naturalis divinatio et Magia, quas disciplinas teste Beroso eruditissimus Ianus tradidit, et in quibus Thusci, teste Diodoro Siculo in .vi. libro usque ad aetatem suam erant admirabiles toti orbi, equidem susceptis fabulis et disciplina Graecorum corrupta sunt: adeo ut

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primarily, against Diodorus, whose rich and naturalistic tapestry of the deeds of the primordial heroes was supposed to appear as a mere distortion of the true story depicted by Judeo-Christian traditions and Near Eastern sources such as Berosus. The ironic fact of the matter was, of course, that Berosus’s “authentic” account was itself partly concocted from the textual cues found in Diodorus’s Bibliotheke.

Boemus’s Sabellican Alternative

Although Annius of Viterbo made a seductive effort at anchoring the origins of European nations in biblical history, his account of cultural and religious diversity remained jumbled and unclear, leaving room for more compelling explanations. One such explanation was provided by the Venetian historian Marcantonio Coccio, better known by his pen name, Sabellico (1436–1506), who published the first tome of his gargantuan Enneades in 1498. Unfettered by the influence of the Annian forgeries, which were let loose on unsuspecting readers in the summer of that same year,22 Sabellico was nevertheless faced with the same basic challenge of squaring a source on early history as valuable as Diodorus with the general outlines of the Genesis story. Like Annius, he told a story about Ham’s transgression against his father, Noah, which ended with the former’s expulsion into the wilderness. In the Annian version, Ham settled in Egypt, which Diodorus’s account of early history identified as the birthplace of polytheism (1.11–13). Sabellico evidently relied on Diodorus for his assertion that the Egyptians created a multitude of false gods, first by imputing divine characteristics to natural phenomena, later also by worshipping cultural heroes. Yet, instead of accepting the Egyptian claim to being the oldest of all civilizations (1.10), Sabellico was eager to find a way of tying this story back to the Bible. Using Flavius Josephus’s account of the resettlement of the world after the confusion of languages, he argued—against the impious errors of certain Greeks—that

22

omnia fabulosa et erronea Graecanica norint, et nihil de origine, disciplinis, et splendore antiquitatum Italicarum (quod turpe et impium est) nesciant.” See Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus,” 31–33, 110–16; Stephens, “Etruscans,” 315–18; E.N. Tigerstedt, “Ioannes Annius and Graecia Mendax,” in Classical Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, ed. Charles Henderson Jr., 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964), 2:293–310. Sabellico’s later comments on Annius’s “Cato” and “C. Sempronius” show that he was unimpressed by the Dominican’s Antiquitates once he got a chance to read them. See M. Antonius Coccius Sabellicus, Enneades (8.5), in Sabellicus, Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (Basel: Herwagen, 1560), 2:518.

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the ancestors of the Egyptians had come to the banks of the Nile from Arabia, where Ham had originally settled after his expulsion.23 In Sabellico’s version of the story, it was Hamitic Arabia where “this darkness first arose…this ignorance of the highest and true God.” The root cause was the fact that Ham, because he suffered banishment early in life, had received no proper religious instruction from his father and hence could pass on none to his descendants. As these descendants spread out to occupy diverse parts of the world, they were bound to fall into increasing degrees of error and superstition. The situation was aggravated by the fact that “no strip of land was ever mother to more colonists than this particular part of Arabia where Ham settled when he fled his father’s house. Such disaster for humankind did the premature exile of a single person cause!”24 For all its brevity, Sabellico’s account offered an elegant and comprehensible explanation of how false worship and religious error had been able to creep back into the world so soon after the Flood. As such, it was a welcome alternative to the somewhat confusing picture painted in pseudo-Berosus and the Annian commentaries. With this point in mind, we can turn to the chapter called “The true opinion of the theologians concerning the origin of mankind” (De origine hominis opinio theologorum vera), which opens the well-known ethnographic compendium Omnium gentium mores by the German humanist 23

Ibid. (1.1), 1:4: “Neque sunt his diversa quae Graeci scriptores de prima eius gentis religione memorant, nisi quod eorum quidam Aegyptios mortalium vetustissimos prodidere, ignari scilicet profectionis huius, et ob eam rem indigenas fuisse rati, qui ab initio eam terram tenerunt, quum advenae illi haud dubie fuerint, atque ex Arabia ut Hebraicae vetustatis auctor Iosephus scribit, egressi. Id multo verius traditur, quam quod Graecorum quidam non minus inepte quam impie prodiderunt: hominem ibi foetifica tellure ut caetera animalia a principio ortum.” Josephus (Antiquities 1.130–39) counts Egypt among the lands settled by Ham’s descendants, but he nowhere states that they had come from Arabia. 24 Sabellicus, Enneades (1.1), 1:4: “Consedit ille profugus cum uxore et liberis in ea parte Arabiae, quae ab ipsius nomine postea nomen sortita est. Hinc tenebrae illae ortae creduntur, illa summi verique dei ignoratio, quae omneis terras execrandis errorum ambagibus implicuit. Hinc hominem autoris sui prima coepit oblivio. Porroque alienatus multis deinceps seculis fuit in malorum daemonum mancipio. Neque Chamus ullum sacrorum ritum posteris tradidit, nullum enim a patre acceperat. Quae res effecit, ut quum procedente tempore alii post alios ex ea terra velut in colonias missi diversa mundi loca tenuissent (crevit enim supra modum abdicata soboles) in errores inciderit inextricabiles…Nec tenebrae illae rerum tantum ex Aegypto profectae, sed quascumque a principio terras tenerunt a Chamo procreati, verae pietatis ignoratio simul & infanda servitus cepit. Caeterum nulla unquam tellus plurium fuit coloniarum mater, quam Arabiae pars illa, quam Chamus paterna domo profugus insedit. Tantam humano generi cladem intempestivum unius attulit exilium.”

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and cleric Johannes Boemus (ca. 1485–1533/35). A look at the afterlife of Diodorus’s mythistory in Boemus’s little book is particularly interesting for the resounding impact the latter had on sixteenth-century readers: from its first printing in July 1520 to its last in 1620, it went through more than fifty editions and was translated into all the major European vernaculars (French, Italian, Spanish, English, and German).25 Thanks to this successful dissemination, the book became an often-used source of information on the languages, eating habits, clothing, housing, and religion of numerous tribes and peoples, both familiar and exotic—a fact that has earned Johannes Boemus the reputation of an early modern pioneer of anthropology, ethnography, and comparative religious studies.26 That said, the descriptions of cultural variety in Boemus’s compendium were rarely the product of personal experience, fed by extensive traveling, but came from the working desk of a learned excerptor. His express goal was not to produce new knowledge, but to collect ethnographic information from disparate, mostly ancient, sources in one place for convenient use, enabling the reader to embark on an imaginary journey to distant places.27 Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Boemus’s work is the absence of any acknowledgment of the recent explorations made by Spanish and Portuguese seafarers in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, even though reports about their discoveries were a major factor behind the contemporary upsurge in geo- and ethnographic 25

26

27

There was even an unpublished Hebrew translation by Joseph ben Joshua ha-Kohen (1555). See Michael Pollak, “The Ethnic Background of Columbus: Inferences from a Genoese-Jewish Source, 1553–1557,” Revista de Historia de América 80 (1975): 60–107, 147–64. See Erich Schmidt, Deutsche Volkskunde im Zeitalter des Humanismus und der Reformation (Berlin: Ebering, 1904), 60–107, 146–58; Schmidt, “Johannes Böhm aus Aub: Die Entstehung der deutschen Volkskunde aus dem Humanismus,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landes­ geschichte 12 (1939): 94–111; Margaret T. Hodgen, “Johann Boemus (fl. 1500): An Early Anthropologist,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 55 (1953): 284–94; Klaus A. Vogel, “Cultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective: Johannes Boemus on ‘The manners, Laws and Customs of all People’ (1520),” in Shifting Cultures, ed. Henriette Bugge and Joan-Pau Rubiés (Münster: lit, 1995), 17–34; Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 235–38; Diego Pirillo, “Relativismo culturale e ‘armonia del mondo’: l’enciclopedia etnografica di Johannes Boemus,” in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi: per Adriano Prosperi, vol. 2, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marocci, and Stefania Pastore (Pisa: Edizione della Normale, 2011), 67–77. Johannes Boemus, Omnium gentium mores leges et ritus (Augsburg: Grimm & Wirsung, 1520), fols. 5v–6r. The title leaf of this edition reads Repertorium librorum trium Ioannis Boemi De omnium gentium ritibus.

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writing. The encounter with previously unknown tribes and nations, many of whom appeared to be at a very different stage of cultural development from their European “discoverers,” breathed new life into old questions about man’s primeval or “natural” condition and the directedness of history.28 Boemus anticipated this newly emerging trend toward anthropological reflection in the preface to his book, where he offered a peculiar three-tiered account of the fate of humanity since the beginning. In this narrative, a primitive, but happy and tranquil, primordial state is followed by a phase of strife and violence, which eventually segues into a long history of progress and improvement. What is more, Boemus complemented his preface with two further introductory chapters, which dealt with human origins in completely divergent ways: one basically followed the biblical account of early human history, whereas the other presented a materialistic story of the origins of life culled directly from Diodorus Siculus. To the modern observer, the result looks overly disjointed, making it difficult to ward off the impression that Boemus, as Tony Grafton put it, “tried to weave together several largely inconsistent plots.”29 Although Boemus’s portrayal of human origins has been commented on by historians of ideas in a variety of contexts, no one, to my knowledge, has as yet undertaken an in-depth study that would address the preliminary chapters of Omnium gentium mores in their entirety.30 As a result of this neglect, scholars have overlooked the significance of the aforementioned “biblical” chapter, which happens to be a condensed excerpt from the beginning of Marcantonio 28

29 30

John H. Elliott, “The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man,” Proceedings of the British Academy 58 (1972): 101–25; Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo: la nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale; dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2008); Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Ethnography, Philosophy and the Rise of Natural Man 1500–1750,” in Encountering Otherness, ed. Guido Abbatista (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011), 97–127. Anthony Grafton (with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi), New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 1992), 100. The most comprehensive assessment to date is Vogel, “Cultural Variety,” 27–31, 33–34. See further Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 232–35; Hodgen, “Johann Boemus,” 286, 290–91; Gerald Strauss, Sixteenth-Century Germany: Its Topography and Topographers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 148–49; Gliozzi, Adamo, 321–23; Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107; Grafton, New Worlds, 99–101; Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 71–72; Rubiés, “Ethnography,” 114–16.

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Sabellico’s first Ennead, covering the creation of the world and early history of mankind up to the first generations after the Flood. Boemus’s only major modification of Sabellico’s account consists in the insertion of a list of the sons and grandsons of Noah and the geographic regions they colonized, which was lifted from pseudo-Berosus. When it came to explaining “pagan” religions and cults, however, Boemus closely followed his Venetian predecessor in blaming their rise on the migration of Ham and his descendants. In Edward Aston’s English translation, published in 1611, the pertinent passage reads thus (parts not already found in Sabellico are italicized): That short and untimely alienation of the children from their progenitors, (of whose life and manners they had little taste) was cause of all the diversity which insued; for Cham, being constrained to flye with his wife and children, for scorning and deriding his father, seated himselfe in that part of Arabia, which was afterwards called by his name, where hee left no religious ceremonies to his posterity, as having received none from his Father: whereof insued, that, as in tract of time, diverse companies beeing sent out of that coast, to inhabite other countries, and possessing diverse partes of the world, (for the reiected seede did exceedingly increase) many of them fell into inextricable errors, their languages were varyed, and all knowledge and reverence of the true and living God, was utterly forgotten and abolished, in so much as many of them might well bee sayd to live a life so uncivill and so barbarous, as hardly could there any difference bee discerned betwixt them and brute beasts.31 Things were less deplorable in the case of Sem and Japhet, who spent more time in the custody of their parents and stayed together within a single region, without dispersing as widely as the Hamites. These circumstances explained 31

Johannes Boemus, The Manners, Lawes, and Customes of All Nations, trans. Edward Aston (London: Eld, 1611), sig. B2r. Aston’s translation is closer to the original text than that of William Watreman, published as The Fardle of Facions (London: Kingstone and Sutton, 1555; repr., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970). Earlier than both is the English abridgment by William Prat, published as The Discription of the Contrey of Aphrique (London: Powel, 1554; repr., Delmar, ny: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972), which featured all the introductory chapters. A similar summary of the story of Noah’s sons, which was probably taken directly from Sabellico, appears in Sebastian Franck’s mammoth Chronica, Zeytbuch und geschychtbibel von anbegyn biß inn diß gegenwertig M.D.xxxi. jar (Strasbourg: Beck, 1531), which foreshadowed Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia. See Franck, Chronica, fol. 6v. The passage is identified thus in the margins: “Cham hat alle boßheit eingefürt.” Sabellico appears in Franck’s catalog of authors cited (ibid., sig. a6v).

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why knowledge of the one true God could continue among at least one nation, the Hebrews, while the rest of the world sank into idolatry and error. The rest of Boemus’s account essentially repeats the same Diodoran narrative of the emergence of polytheism in Egypt previously used by Sabellico. That Boemus had very mixed feelings about the religious and cultural diversity he thus explained can be seen from the preface, where he designates the Devil himself as the ultimate force behind these processes of diversification. In sowing superstition and false religion, humanity’s “most bitter enemy” had created a situation in which every nation contendeth by strongest arguments to proove that the God which they worship and adore is the true and great God, and that they onely goe the way of eternall happinesse, and all others the by-path that leadeth to perdition. Whilest also every sect indeavoureth to advance and set forth themselves, it insueth that (each one persecuting other with mortall enmity and deadly hatred) it is not onely dangerous to travell into forraine nations, but in a manner utterly bard [barred] and prohibited, which I perswade my selfe is the cause, that the names of bordering nations beeing scarce knowne to their neerest neighbors, whatsoever is either written or reported of them, is now accounted fabulous and untrue.32 Given this pessimistic outlook, one might be inclined to view Boemus as an author who preferred to think of human history as a process of ongoing and irreversible decline. Yet, although he certainly underlined his disdain for the multiplication of religious creeds in the preface, his text also contains elements that suggest a strikingly different vision of historical directedness. Indeed, the beginning of his account encouraged readers to ponder “in what perfection and happinesse we now live at this day, and how simply, rudely, and uncivilly our forefathers lived, from the Creation of the world to the generall 32 Boemus, The Manners, sig. A3v. Cf. Jonathan Sheehan, “Time Elapsed, Time Regained: Anthropology and the Flood,” in Mulsow and Assmann, Sintflut und Gedächtnis, 324–25, who tries to remove a seeming contradiction by claiming that Boemus limited Satan’s activity in the area of religious diversity to the antediluvial period. This is contradicted by the way Boemus links the Devil to the emergence of pagan cults and oracles in ancient Greece and even the rise of Islam, all of which clearly came long after the Flood. Boemus’s book should instead be seen as an example of an early modern tendency to use the Devil as a valid explanation for religious diversity, on the one hand, but to account for his influence in terms of historical and natural processes, on the other. On this point, see Harrison, ‘Religion,’ 101.

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Floud, and for many ages after.”33 Among the sources behind this statement one must probably count Diodorus (1.7–8), whose origins story is repeated almost word-for-word in the chapter entitled “The false opinion of the pagans concerning the origin of mankind” (De origine hominis opinio Ethnicorum falsa).34 Boemus complemented this account with a passage that noted the ancient view, again recorded by Diodorus (3.2), according to which the Ethiopians were the oldest of all people, a notion he subsequently used as a cue to begin his ethnographic journey through the ancient world in Ethiopia.35 At the same time, however, Boemus’s preface modified Diodorus’s anti–­ primitivism in favor of a much more benign vision of early human life, which was evidently influenced by classical depictions of a primordial “Golden Age.” The locus classicus for this vision was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.89–112), a work Boemus attempted to translate into German around the time Omnium gentium mores was published.36 In describing human life at this stage, his emphasis was on the lack of elements that were characteristic of the present. Absent were not only common material features of civilization such as money, trade, and private property, but also murder, theft, and other moral failings. He thus followed a via negativa of describing alternative ways of life that is also familiar from other sixteenth-century texts, including Michel de Montaigne’s Of Cannibals.37 Aside from Ovid, another likely source behind Boemus’s account is Lucretius, whose naturalistic depiction of human origins in De rerum natura, book 5, was in many ways close to the one found in Boemus’s “Diodoran” chapter on the opinions of the pagans. Like Boemus, Lucretius mentioned that the first generations of humans did not till the soil, but lived off what nature provided (5.939–42), dwelled in the woods (5.948–49), and slept on the ground, 33 Boemus, The Manners, sig. Ar. 34 Cf. Boemus, Omnium gentium mores, fol. 7r–v, with Diodorus Siculus, Bibliothecae historicae libri vi, trans. Poggio Bracciolini (Bologna: Azoguidus, 1472), sigs. a4v–5r. 35 An English translation of the very same text, entitled “Of the originall begynnyng of man, after the false opinion of the Ethnike philosophers,” can be found in Thomas Lanquet, An Epitome of Cronicles (London: Berthelet, 1549), fols. 3v–5v. Lanquet expanded on Boemus’s chapter by also dealing with alternative theories, which bestowed the honor of being the first-created people on other nations, namely the Scythians and the Egyptians. This addition was taken en bloc from Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s Philippic History (2.1). 36 Boemus mentions this translation in a letter to Andreas Althammer, dated 8 Dec. 1520. See Johann Arnold Ballenstedt, Andreae Althameri Vita (Wolfenbüttel: Meisner, 1740), 65. 37 See Margaret T. Hodgen, “Montaigne and Shakespeare Again,” Huntington Library Quar­ terly 16 (1952): 23–42; Hodgen, “Johann Boemus,” 288–89; Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 196–201; George Boas, Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), 139–51.

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unafraid of the darkness (5.969–76). One reader who appears to have been aware of these Lucretian traits was Sebastian Münster, who copied most of the preface to Omnium gentium mores into his dedicatory letter to the emperor Charles V, found in the Latin version of his celebrated Cosmographia (1550).38 The only major alteration he made to Boemus’s text was the insertion of two lines from De rerum natura (5.955–56): “Sed nemora atque cavos montis sylvasque colebant,/ et frutices inter condebant squalida membra” (but they dwelled in the woods and forests and mountain caves, and hid their rough bodies in the underwoods).39 Some affinity between Boemus and Lucretius is also detectable in the subsequent passages, which speak about man’s first steps towards civilization. Lucretius narrates how the first rulers founded cities and how mankind started to distribute property according to merit and discovered gold (5.1105–16). The desire for wealth and power led to warfare and strife between the early kings, which in turn made it necessary to establish laws and appoint magistrates (5.1136–50). Boemus similarly avers that the early days of bucolic harmony were followed by a period of violence and unrest, triggered by overpopulation. The resulting insecurity forced people to band together in larger groups, resulting in the emergence of the polis or state: borders were drawn, houses built, magistrates elected, and laws passed. Thus, the initial decline and loss of innocence was compensated by the growth of civilization, resulting in many improvements to the human lot (cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.1211–1457). From this point forward, Boemus turns his story into a nearly triumphalist account of human progress and ingenuity, which heaps ample praise on inventions such as agriculture, viniculture, architecture, landscape gardening, forest clearance, swamp drainage, animal domestication, well drilling, irrigation, river regulation, and navigation, all of which ensure that the earth (as it now is) compared to his former filthinesse and deformitie, may be thought to be an other earth, different from that it was before, and not much unlike that most delectable garden, out of which our 38

See Sebastian Münster, Cosmographiae universalis lib. vi (Basel: Petri, 1552), fols. 2v–5r. A paraphrase of these passages already appeared in Münster’s preface to the German version. See Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia: Beschreibung aller Lender (Basel: Petri, 1544), sigs. a3r–a4v. 39 Münster, Cosmographiae universalis lib. vi, fol. 3r. Other classical templates one might point to are Seneca (Moral Epistles 90), Tibullus (Elegies 1.3.35–52) and Tacitus (Annals 3.26). Tacitus hails the importance of lawgivers such as Minos, Lycurgus, Solon, and Romulus to human progress, as does Boemus in his preface.

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unfortunate founders Adam and Eve were ejected for transgressing divine commandment.40 In his unabashed enthusiasm for technological progress, Boemus may once again have been inspired by his reading of Diodorus, where achievements in agriculture and landscape gardening are repeatedly listed among the reasons for the deification of mythical heroes.41 At the same time, however, it remains unclear how exactly he intended to reconcile the account given in his preface with the biblical story and its emphasis on the “Fall” of man. According to his own testimony, the conditions he described applied “from the Creation of the world to the generall Floud, and for many ages after,” but he made no further discernible effort to signal the points of contact between his own narrative and that of Genesis. In contrast to the Bible, which presents the beginnings of mankind as a family history, Boemus remained strictly impersonal, even “sociological,” in his portrayal. Thus, the preface of Omnium gentium mores leaves barely a trace of the various biblical characters that the book of Genesis connects to specific cultural and technological innovations, with Adam being the first farmer, Abel the first shepherd, Cain the builder of the first city, Noah the first to plant a vineyard, while Cain’s descendants Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-Cain are cast as the inventors of nomadism, musical instruments, and metallurgy (Gen. 3:23; 4:2, 20–22; 9:20). Nor is there any hint in Boemus’s narrative that those who later started to bring culture and technology to the masses acted on God’s command or that the walk toward progress was underscored by divine planning. This sets him apart from authors such as Thomas Wilson, who, in the preface to his Art of Rhetorique (1553), managed to integrate the “cave myth” into an account of humanity’s fate after the Fall, which caused man to degenerate into a primitive, beastlike state, requiring the intervention of God’s “appointed Ministers” to lead humanity back on the path of civilization.42 It is worth emphasizing, however, that the discrepancies between Boemus’s threetiered history of human progress and the Bible are not completely beyond resolution. “The cave myth,” as Ferguson reminds us, could be taken simply as a secular gloss upon a text left sketchy by the Hebrew poet. Take Adam and his progeny out of the context of sacred 40 Boemus, The Manners, sig. A2v. 41 On Diodorus’s concept of progress, see Sulimani, Diodorus’ Mythistory, 304–6; Sacks, Diodorus Siculus, 55–82. 42 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, for the Use of All Such as are Studious of Eloquence (London: Robinson, 1585; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), sig. A7r.

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history, and their situation could be seen as at least parallel to that of the cave and forest dwellers. Both had to make their way by the sweat of their faces.43 The story told in the preface of Omnium gentium mores is thus probably to be viewed as a story “behind” the events of Genesis 1–11. It was not meant to replace the biblical account, but to supplement it in an area of history its author(s) had largely neglected, that is, the general trajectory of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological development of humanity since its beginnings. In order to provide such a supplement, Boemus fused together elements he found in popular classical writings. The myth of the Golden Age and the “cave myth” have in common that they locate the origins of mankind in a time of utter simplicity and lack of civilization. Unlike the Golden Age narrative, however, the anti-primitivism reflected in the works of Diodorus and Lucretius conceives of man’s egress from his original state as a positive development. It is precisely this optimism about human progress that in the end outweighs the Golden Age component in Boemus’s own narrative. His book is thus a fitting reminder of the fact that Renaissance humanism and its veneration of classical literature were not necessarily synonymous with mindless nostalgia or a simple tendency to lionize the past while depreciating the present.44 For all his reliance on ancient models, Boemus would have probably found himself in agreement with the Basel physician Heinrich Pantaleon (1522–95), who, in a dedicatory letter addressed to the emperor Maximilian ii in 1566, found it necessary to admit that “as far as God’s manifold gifts are concerned, we live in a Golden Age, even if the majority of men in their blindness cannot see it, nor can they understand it owing to their mind’s ingratitude and perversity.”45 Reading Diodorus’s history, with its continuous exaltation of progress through human inventiveness, was one way to get rid of such ingratitude. 43 Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 70. See further ibid., 61–83. 44 The questionable case that Renaissance thought was oblivious to theories of progress is made in Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 101–17. 45 Heinrich Pantaleon, Prosopographia herorum atque illustrium virorum totius Germaniae, vol. 3 (Basel: Brylinger, 1566), sig. A3r: “Ergo fateamur necesse est, quo ad Dei varia dona attinet, nos in Aureo saeculo esse, quantumvis maior pars hominum sua caecitate ea nec videat, nec animi ingratitudine & perversitate illa intelligat.” On examples of such optimism in German humanist writing, see Strauss, Sixteenth-Century Germany, 146–49. On the connection between the “cave myth” and progressive optimism, see Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 73–77. On patristic precedents (e.g. Augustine, City of God 22.24), see Boas, Essays, 193–95.

chapter 41

Imagining Marcus Aurelius in the Renaissance: Forgery, Fiction, and History in the Creation of the Imperial Ideal Thomas Dandelet From the earliest phase of the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century, reviving the memory, history, and writings of the Roman emperors was a central preoccupation of humanists who longed for a revival of Roman imperial culture and power. The long biography of Julius Caesar by Petrarch served as a foundation stone of this literary movement, and it was followed by numerous new editions of Caesar’s Commentaries. Figures such as Guarino Guarini championed Caesar as a model for new princes such as his patron Leonello d’Este, to whom he dedicated a new edition of the Commentaries, noting that the young prince was like a new Caesar.1 This was not a position shared by all humanists, as the spirited debate between Guarino and his republican contemporary from Florence Poggio Bracciolini amply demonstrated. While Poggio presented Caesar as a tyrant who destroyed republican liberty and shed the blood of many Romans, Guarino argued that he was one of the greatest military strategists and rulers who ever lived, as demonstrated by his many victories, writings, and the expansion of Roman power. Others, like Coluccio Salutati, took a more measured view of Caesar, acknowledging his virtues as a writer and military leader while criticizing him for shedding Roman blood in the Civil Wars. Whatever the position, these authors and others such as Pius ii, who wrote his own Commentaries following the literary model of Caesar, could not resist focusing their attention on Caesar and his successors as they looked to the ancient Roman Empire for political models and wisdom in their own day. Gaining strength and momentum throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the growing number of new editions of Caesar’s work revealed, this literary rebirth of the Caesars rose to a new height with the immergence of a new Caesar, Charles v, in 1517. Although earlier imperial humanists such as Guarino and Flavio Biondo may have dreamed of the 1 For details on the revival of interest in Caesar and the accompanying debate in the early Renaissance see Thomas Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18–30.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_042

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renewal of Roman imperial power, the enormous political inheritance of Charles v, coupled with the New World conquests in Mexico (1520) and Peru (1535) early in his reign, signaled the arrival of the first European ruler since antiquity, to paraphrase Francesco Guicciardini, who actually joined the name of Caesar with an empire of territory, wealth, and military power equal to or even greater than that of ancient Rome. Not surprisingly, humanists in the service of Charles v readily embraced the tradition of using the history of the ancient emperors and their writings as sources of good counsel for ruling empire. In the case of the first real Caesar of the Renaissance, however, it was not Julius Caesar who served as the major model. Rather, it was Marcus Aurelius as presented by the emperor’s Spanish royal historian, political counselor, and chaplain, Antonio de Guevara, who played this role.2 In 1528, the first edition of Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius was published, followed soon thereafter, in 1529, by his Mirror of Princes. Originally dedicated to Charles v, the two books, often printed together under the single title Golden Book, had the specific purpose of providing political advice for governing the young emperor’s vast states and his personal life. Enjoying almost immediate success, the two books, printed separately or together, were translated into Italian, French, Latin, Dutch, German, and English in the following decades, with over two hundred printings appearing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 They were subsequently two of the most successful examples of 2 For a concise treatment of Guevara’s life, see Mercedes Alcalá-Galán, “Antonio de Guevara,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner, 2000), 99–100. She notes that he was an adviser to Gonzalo de Córdoba during the comunero revolt (1519–21), and his loyalty to Charles v earned him the emperor’s favor and many posts over the rest of his life: in 1521 he was named preacher to the court of Charles v; in 1523 royal chronicler; and shortly thereafter counselor to the emperor. He was sent to Valencia and Granada in 1525 and 1526 to convert the Moriscos, as he was famous for his rhetorical and preaching skills. Charles v nominated him to be bishop of Guadix (Granada) in 1529 and then Mondonedo in 1537. Guevara was often away from his bishoprics, however, because of his other roles. He accompanied Charles v in the Tunis campaign in 1535 and was with him throughout the triumphal journey back through Italy and France that followed. For earlier but more extensive studies see Joseph Jones, Antonio de Guevara (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); René Costes, Antonio de Guevara, Sa Vie, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques, Fascicule x, 1 (Bordeaux: Feret, 1925). 3 Paul Grendler gives this estimate in Schooling in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 300–304. He also notes that twenty-three Venetian teachers stated that they taught the Vita di Marco Aurelio imperator, making it the second most frequently mentioned title in the vernacular curriculum. See also Livia Brunori, Le traduzioni italiane del ‘Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio’ e del ‘Relox de Principes’ di Antonio de Guevara (Imola: Galeati, 1979), 18.

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humanist historical production, judged by their publishing and translation history, written in Spain or any other part of Europe in the sixteenth century. More specifically and accurately, they were two of the most successful works of forgery and fiction of the entire period, since Guevara based his texts largely upon a fictitious history and forged letters by the emperor Marcus Aurelius that he claimed to have found in the Medici library in Florence.4 They are the most famous examples of a Spanish author playing the forgery game that was so common in the Renaissance and that so often focused on the creation of ancient imperial documents such as the Acts of Caesar or the Last Will of Caesar.5 Forgery, as Anthony Grafton has taught us, was common in the world of publishing and Renaissance intellectual production, and even Erasmus

She documents 90 printings of Guevara’s work in Italy between 1542 and 1663. For the standard reference in Spanish see Antonio Palau y Dulcet, Manual del Librero Hispanoamericano, vol. 6 (Barcelona: Libreria Palau, 1953), 441–55. He notes 50 Spanish editions between 1528 and 1698; 33 Italian editions between 1542 and 1663; 15 French editions between 1530 and 1593; 11 Dutch editions between 1565 and 1640; 6 English editions between 1534 and 1566; and 3 German editions between 1607 and 1610. An additional 40 editions of the Relox de principes in various languages prior to 1700 brought the total number of editions published between 1527 and 1700 to roughly 158. 4 Antonio de Guevara, Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio (Seville: Jacob Cromberger, 1528), fol. vi r–v. He called his text the golden book because the knowledge contained within was like the gold discovered in the mines of the Indies. “Porque tanto han de tener los virtuosos descubrirse en su tiempo este libro con sus sentencias: como tienen los principes las minas de oro en sus indias.” This treasure, however, was found in a Florentine mine, namely, the book collection of Cosimo de Medici, according to Guevara. He claimed to have first heard of the text in another book he was reading in Spain, and to have found it so interesting that he began searching for it in many bookstores, talking to many booksellers and wise people, and visiting many realms, until finally he found the book in Florence: “finalmente descubrile en Florencia entre los libros que dexo Cosme de Medicis varon por cierto de buena memoria.” 5 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990). Grafton points out that nostalgia for antiquity led to a “rich production” of forgeries, such as the estimated 10,576 forged inscriptions from the great Corpus Latino and the Last Testament of Caesar. See pp. 26–31 in the Italian version, Falsari e critici (Torino: Einaudi, 1996). Guevara counts among the most successful of the Renaissance forgers who capitalized on the popularity of the imperial theme. This can be explained, in part, by his having what Grafton describes as the crucial ingredients of a good forger: a combination of “imagination and corroboration that results in the creation of a believable text with a believable pedigree,” and an “air of conviction and reality, a sense of authenticity” (p. 50 in the English version). To this I would add one other critical ingredient: the text had to be marketable to a broad audience, something that Guevara’s work clearly achieved.

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indulged in the practice on occasion.6 But Guevara’s work stands out for its publishing success, as attested by the number of editions, translations, and longevity that it enjoyed. The extraordinary dissemination of the text in Spain, other parts of the empire, and Europe also demonstrates the popularity of the political lessons and model of imperial rule contained in the book. As a variation on the earlier Renaissance theme of using the examples and writing of the Roman emperors as political models, it represented a continuation of the imperial humanism of Petrarch, Guarino, Biondo, and others. At the same time, it drew on the Christian mirror-of-princes tradition, including the writings of Erasmus. The final product was a synthesis of imperial humanist and Christian humanist thought that painted the picture of a stoic Roman emperor with many implicit Christian virtues.7 Ironically, Guevara’s text has proved far less popular among modern historians, who have largely excluded any analysis or consideration of Guevara from their own histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish political history. This can largely be attributed to the fact that the strong revival of Romanstyle imperialism his work represents does not fit with the dominant political teleology in Western political thought in the Renaissance. Best represented by Quentin Skinner in his well-known survey Early Modern Political Thought, this view focuses on the rise of republican politics in the Renaissance, the development of absolutism, and the eventual victory of various forms of democratic theory. The rise of empire and imperial theory are conspicuous only for their absence. Part of the difficulty for contemporary historians of political thought in incorporating a work like the Golden Book of Marco Aurelius is that the genre is distant from formal political theory. Instead, it reads as a merging of history with a collection of moral and political lessons gleaned from the central character and many other ancient authorities. More specifically, it is a collection of 6 Ibid., p. 45 (English version). 7 Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara et L’Espagne de Son Temps (Geneva: Droz, 1976). Redondo’s study remains the most extensive analysis of Guevara to date. It combines detailed biographical information with a useful analysis of his major texts. Like so many other works of that generation, it was heavily influenced by the work of Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne (Paris: Droz, 1937), and it focuses on that particular intellectual context. In contrast, this study argues that Guevara is best understood when viewed as building upon the earlier tradition of the Italian imperial humanists and the broader political context of that tradition. His project, while certainly in conversation with Erasmus, should not be seen as first and foremost a part of that tradition. The success of the Golden Book over a period of two centuries can be explained in part by its contrast with Erasmus, whose perceived pacifism and affinity with various Lutheran positions eventually led his works to be placed on the Index.

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ideals, principles, and examples often expressed through letters or speeches that, combined, illuminate an important imperial worldview or political mentality of the reign of Charles v. Guevara has also been shunned as a forger by many scholars of Renaissance humanism presumably because he did not uphold basic scholarly standards. But as an increasing number of Renaissance intellectual historians have emphasized in the past few decades, what is so valuable and important about texts such as Guevara’s is not their actual claims to historical truth, but rather what they reveal about the intellectual preoccupations and tastes of the author by whom, and audience for whom, they were written.8 It is anachronistic to exclude such works from our own historical analysis because they don’t reach the level of scholarly integrity that we demand of historians today. In the case of Guevara, to omit him from the political history of the Spanish Empire, in particular, is to discard one of the most important sources for understanding the political mentalities of the ruling class of that period. Given the work’s popularity throughout Europe, the same point holds true to a lesser extent for Italy, France, and England as well. Beginning to restore and integrate knowledge of Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius as an important example of imperial discourse, an aim of this essay, is thus a critical component of writing a richer and more accurate political history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of deepening our understanding of the role that imperial humanism played in that history.9 This was not a static world, of course, and Guevara’s text provides some stark contrasts with earlier imperial and Christian humanist writings in subject matter, form, and scholarly integrity that reveal much about the different political environment of the early sixteenth century. Unlike previous writers, who wrote for relatively weak princes, and for whom the example of Julius 8 The broadening of Renaissance intellectual history to include works previously on the margins because they did not live up to scholarly standards of historical accuracy is an important development in the field over the past generation. As Anthony Grafton recently underlined in a review article in the London Review of Books of new work on Athansius Kircher, regardless of its claims to truth, the work of Kircher teaches us much about the intellectual and scientific milieu of the seventeenth century, even if it included a great deal of fabrication. So, too, Guevara’s work illuminates an important strain of humanist political thought. 9 The studies of Guevara during the past fifty years have largely been done by scholars of Spanish literature who have sought to “rehabilitate” him, as Redondo remarks at the end of his long study. Redondo, Antonio de Guevara, 697. Unfortunately, historians have failed to take this lead and Guevara has subsequently remained out in the cold, especially in the Anglo-American school of Spanish historians. He is largely absent in the narratives of John H. Elliott, Henry Kamen, Geoffrey Parker, Anthony Pagden, and many others.

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Caesar provided a necessary example of robust military power, Guevara wrote for an already powerful monarch who needed the wisdom to know how to use his power. By Guevara’s own account, he wrote the first version of the Golden Book between 1518 and 1524, that is, at the very beginning of the reign of Charles v, who had formally become ruler of Spain in 1517 and was crowned Holy Roman emperor in 1520. But the first printings came later, in 1528, to be followed by the Mirror of Princes in 1529. By that point, the emperor had established his military credentials. He had put down the communero revolt in Spain in 1521, and his armies in the New World had conquered the Aztec Empire. In Italy, he had scored a number of important victories against Francis I in 1525 and again against a papal-French alliance in 1527. It was in this context of the rising military power of the empire, and the need to control it, that Guevara chose Marcus Aurelius, not Julius Caesar, as his favored imperial model. He needed a Roman emperor who was free of some of the less attractive aspects of Julius Caesar, and especially from the charge of tyranny that was already being thrown at Charles v by his enemies. So, too, the memories of other contemporary Caesars like Julius ii and Cesare Borgia were also fresh in Guevara’s mind, and he was obviously not going to use them as models for Charles v. At the same time, Guevara distinguished himself from the Erasmian tradition in both content and form by choosing a pagan role model as the primary source of political counsel and the primary, as opposed to secondary, source of the text itself. More specifically, Guevara’s Golden Book privileges the voice of Marcus Aurelius as the source for the political counsel that was offered to the emperor. It is the primary counsel in the text, while Guevara offers his gloss as the secondary level. More accurately, it was Guevara’s imagined view of Marcus Aurelius, and his person or voice, that gave authority to the text that his voice alone could not have hoped for. In a shrewd if deceptive literary move, Guevara presented his book as a combination of authentic, but previously unknown, letters of Marcus Aurelius and his own commentaries on related issues. He also added various opinions and texts from numerous other relevant ancient authors, ranging from Plato and Plutarch10 to the authors of the Historia Augustae, available in a newly edited version by Erasmus in 1518. 10

The fifteenth-century Spanish humanist Alfonso de Palencia (1424–92) had translated Plutarch into Castilian, and his text including the biography of Marcus Aurelius was known by Guevara. Palencia is an excellent example of an early humanist bridge between Italy and Spain as someone who lived in Italy between 1447 and 53, knew Leonardo Bruni, and wrote a history of Spain modeled on Livy’s Decades.

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The letters, as Guevara presented them, were translations of a Greek manuscript authored by Marcus Aurelius that he had translated into Latin and then Castilian with some friends. As a source with a reported Florentine provenance, it was a strong example of the reliance of Spanish Renaissance authors on Italian sources, even if they had to forge them, and it underlines the deepening connections, both real and imagined, of Spanish and Italian humanistic culture. It is almost certain that Guevara did not have access to authentic texts by Marcus Aurelius. The first Renaissance editions of Greek manuscripts of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are those of the Codex Palatino edited by Xilandro in Zurich in 1559 (the manuscript is now lost) and the fourteenthcentury manuscript preserved in the Vatican Library to which Guevara had no known access.11 Guevara had critics in his own day who accused him of fabricating the letters of the ancient emperor. His rebuttal, apparently successful if the repeated publication of the book is any measure, was that he was actually indebted to his critics, even if their intentions were not good, because if he had actually written a work of such importance and “gravitas,” drawing only on his own knowledge, the ancient Romans themselves would have erected a statue of him in Rome.12 He went on to rhetorically ask if it was really that difficult to believe in the discovery of an unknown ancient text in an age that had witnessed the discovery of an entire new world.13 In Guevara’s case, at least, one of the consequences of empire was an increase in literary hubris and historical fabrication. With this illustrious, if fake, ancient and contemporary Italian pedigree bolstering its authority, the imaginative forgery produced by Guevara began with a lengthy prologue written to Charles v that served to justify his choice of Marcus Aurelius as imperial model. As one of the most successful and revered 11 12

13

Marco Aurelio, I ricordi, trans. Francesco Cazzamini-Mussi, ed. Carlo Carena (Torino: Einaudi, 2003), xxi. The Vatican manuscript is cited as ms Vat. 1950. Antonio de Guevara, Libro di Marco Aurelio con L’Horologio de Prencipi (Venice: Pietro Ricciardi, 1606), C5v. “Quelli che dicono, come io solo ho composto questa dottrina, mi fanno essere a loro obligato, benche l’intentione, con la quale dicono non sia buona, perche se fuisse cosi in effetto, ch’io havesse per mia scientia scritto tante sententie, et di tanta gravita, gli antichi Romaini mi havrebbono rizzato una statua in Roma.” Ibid. “Vediamo a nostro tempo quello, che non mai habbiamo veduto, vediamo cose non piu udite, et esperimentiamo un nuovo mondo, et poi vogliamo maravigliarci, che hora da nuovo si trovi un libro. Quantunque io habaia trovato M. Aurelio con molta diligentia, et sia stato studioso a tradurlo: non percio `e cosa giusta, ch’io sia lodato da i savi, ne accusato da gli invidiosi.”

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emperors of Rome, Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80) was a perfect choice for a Renaissance audience. An important stoic philosopher, he wrote the Meditations, a text noted for the political ideals of duty and service. At the same time, he was successful on the battlefield. Guevara thus urged Charles v to imitate this “very wise” and “very powerful prince” and to take him as the primary model for ruling his empire. For Guevara, and the many translators who dedicated new edition after new edition to rulers from all over Europe, the example of Marcus Aurelius was eminently worth following: “everything that Marcus Aurelius said and did is worth knowing and necessary to imitate.” More specifically, the young Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain was urged to take Marcus Aurelius as a “father in matters of governance,” as an example for the virtues that marked his personal life, as a “teacher for his learning,” and as a “competitor in his deeds.”14 An essential aspect of imitating Marcus Aurelius was having a clear understanding of the political nature of man himself. In Guevara’s political theory, men had a natural drive toward empire. In this early modern view of the will to power, only man, among all of God’s creation, was never happy with his natural-born state. Rather, he constantly aspired to the state above his own. In this hierarchy, the shepherd wanted to be a laborer, the laborer a citizen, the citizen a gentleman, the gentleman a knight, the knight a lord, the lord a king, and the king an emperor.15 It was the natural order of man, moreover, to be ruled by one, not many. Just as there is only one head to the body, so the mystical body of empire has only 14

15

Antonio de Guevara, Marco Aurelio con el Relox de principes (Seville: Cromberger, 1534) (bnm [Biblioteca Nacional Madrid]). The title page has no author or publication material, but inside the front cover someone has penciled Antonio de Guevara Seville, 1534 (iiir). The text reads: “todo lo que dixo y hizo Marco Aurelio es digno de saberse y necessario de imitar.” And later, on the fifth page of a non-paginated section titled “Prologo sobre la obra,” which followed the “Prologo General”: “Nuestro Marco Aurelio fue philosopho muy sabio y principe muy poderoso; y por esta causa es razon que sea mas creydo que otro porque como principe contara los trabajos; y como philosopho dara los remedios. A este sabio philosopho y noble emperador tome vuestra magestad por ayo en su mocedad; por padre en su governacion; por adalid en sus guerras; por guion en sus jornadas; por amigo en sus trabajos: por exemplo en sus virtudes; por maestro en sus sciencias: por balance en sus desseos: y por competidor en sus hazanas.” From the 1537 edition’s general prologue, fol. ii r. “Los planetas; las estrellas; los cielos; las aguas, la tierra; el huego el ayre los animales; las plantas y los peces; todos todos estan en lo que fueron criados sin se quexar ni ni tener embidia uno de otros: solo el hombre nunca se acaba de quexar: nunca se acaba de hartar: y siempre dessea su estado mudar: porque el pastor querria ser labrador: y el labrador querria ser escudero: y el escudero querria ser rey: y el rey querria ser emperador.”

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one head, the emperor, who is superior to all other parts of the body.16 Guevara claims to rely upon the “great philosopher” Plutarch for this image, who in his book entitled the Doctrine of Princes reportedly wrote: “I would have you know, Trajan, my lord, that you and your empire are a mystical body, comparable to a real live body.”17 Elaborating upon this theme, Guevara’s Plutarch wrote that the eyes of the mystical body were the virtuous and educated men who set the example for the republic; the ears were the vassals who followed the prince’s commands; the tongue was the councilors from whose writings and teachings the prince learned; the hands and arms were the knights who resisted the enemies; the feet were the workers who provided food for the people; the strong bones that supported the body were more wise men; and the neck that connected the head to the body was the love between the king and the kingdom.18 From this supposedly Plutarchan image, Guevara proceeded to offer further commentary on the distinctive characteristics and roles of the emperor as the head of the body. First and foremost, the emperor had a greater authority than all other members and only he had the power to command, while all others had to obey. While there were plenty of examples in history of vassals who also wanted to command and exercise authority, nature showed that there was only one head that had this full power. That is why if a polity wanted to live in peace and be free from tyranny, it allowed itself only one king, who, moreover, received his authority from God alone. Men did not have the power to raise up or make their kings. Only God made kings and subsequently only God had the power to dismiss them.19 We do not need to wait for Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Louis xiv for the theory of the divine right of kings. Guevara’s Roman emperors, past and present, already had it. In the imperial political world constructed by Guevara, it was the king who made laws for the kingdom, not vice versa. It was the king who distributed gifts and benefits to the kingdom. It was the king who decided on matters of war, treaties, and making peace for the kingdom. The power to command applied only to the imperial majesty, while to the republic it was only required that it 16

From the Italian Pietro Ricciardi edition of 1606, fol. 55r. “E perche dipingono il corpo mistico, che è l’Imperio à soggia di houmo vivo, è da sapere come il capo, il quale è superiore à tutte le parti, significa il Prencipe, che commanda à tutti.” 17 Ibid. “Faccioti a sapere o Traiano mio signore che tu et il tuo Imperio siate un corpo mistico, a soggia di un corpo, vivo et vero.” 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., fol. 55v.

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obey this authority.20 At the same time, the ideal emperor truly loved his kingdom and treated his subjects like beloved children, ruling over them with justice and defending them from their enemies.21 Following this general set of precepts, Guevara proceeds to provide many concrete historical examples of both good and bad imperial rule, beginning with Julius Caesar himself, who was described as a very virtuous prince. A broad summary of the early emperors, supposedly voiced often by Marcus Aurelius himself, was that Julius Caesar acquired it by the sword, Augustus was emperor by heredity, Caligula gained it because of his victory in Germany, Nero kept himself on the imperial throne with tyranny, Titus was emperor because he conquered Judea, and Trajan held the empire because he was valorous, and noble, and I remained emperor only with patience; because it is far better to survive the injuries of evil men than to argue in the Academy with the learned.22 In another speech, Guevara’s Marcus Aurelius reflects on how emperors preserve or lose authority. First using negative examples, he argues that Julius Caesar made the mistake of not respecting the ancient ritual of greeting the senators after they had knelt before him with their salutations. He was subsequently killed because of his pretension, above all else. Similarly, although numerous bad emperors were infamous for various vices and atrocities— Tiberius for drunkenness, Caligula for sleeping with his sister, Nero for killing his mother and his teacher, and Domitian for every evil—it was actually their arrogant nature that led them to be killed. In short, they were feared and hated. The successful emperor, on the other hand, was required to be just toward all, to act mildly toward everyone. In this way, through love of his subjects, he would cultivate their obedience and love. So much for Niccolò Machiavelli’s 20

21 22

Ibid., fol. 56r. “Il trovare le guerre, far tregua, et pace, premiare, I buoni, e rafrenare I tiranni, procede dal re al regno, e non all incontro, perche solamente alla maesta Imperatoria s’appartiene di commandare e alla republica di ubdire.” Ibid., fol. 56v. Ibid., fol. 60r, “Marco Aurelio piu volte soleva dire, Giulio Cesare acquist`o l’Imperio con la lancia, Augusto fu Imperatore per heredita’, Caligula lo aquisto’ perche suo pare fu vincitore di Alemagna, Nerone si sostenne in l’Imperio con tirannia. Tito fu Imperatore, perche conquisto’ la Giudea, Traiano ritenne l’Imperio perche era valoroso, et nobile, et io sono riuscito Imperatore solamente con la patientia; perche maggiore eccellentia e’ sossevire le ingiurie de malvaggi houmini, che disputare nelle Academie con I savi.”

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famous contention that it was better to be feared than loved. Guevara’s Marcus Aurelius was the consummate anti-Machiavel.23 How ironic, then, that Guevara’s work was printed in the Italian translation of 1562 with a new fourth book that the Italian translator and editor, Francesco Portonaris, claimed had been sent to him by Guevara himself.24 In this version, itself reprinted many times in Italy, the Italian forger also included a long section that he blatantly plagiarized from Machiavelli. In a section from the forged fourth book of the text entitled “How a prince must govern to acquire reputation,” he presented as Guevara’s own commentary on the subject a long verbatim quote from chapter 21 of The Prince. This was the famous passage on King Ferdinand, the grandfather of Charles v, whom Machiavelli presented as his primary example of the new prince: Nothing causes a prince to be so much esteemed as great enterprises and giving proof of prowess. We have in our own day Ferdinand, King of Aragon, the present King of Spain. He may almost be termed a new prince, because from a weak king he has become for fame and glory the first king of Christendom, and if you regard his actions you will find them all very great and some of them extraordinary. At the beginning of his reign he assailed Granada, and that enterprise was the foundation of his state. At first he did it at his leisure and without fear of being interfered with; he kept the minds of the barons of Castile occupied in this enterprise, so that thinking only of that war they did not think of making innovations, and he thus acquired reputation and power over them without 23

Ibid., fols. 60r–63r. Tiberio “fu infamato d’imbriaco. Caligula giacesse con le sorelle. Neroe ammazzo sua madre et Seneca suo maestro, percio ottenne nome di crudele per sempre in Roma, Domitiano fu notato di ogni malvgita…Tutti questi miseri Imperatori finalmente furono strassinati, gittati ne I pozzi, appiccati, et decapitate. Io vi guiro, Padri Conscritti, che essi non furono ammazzati per quei vitii, ma per che furono di arrogante natura.” And, fol. 62v: “il buon Prencipe deve oservare giustitia con tutti, et conserver dolcemente con ciascuno, o bene aventurata Repub. Nella quale il Prencipe trova obedientia ne i popoli, et essi travano amore nel Prencipe, perche dall’amor nel signore nasce l’obedintia nei soggetti, e dall’obedientia de I vasalli si genera amore nel Prencipe.” 24 Brunori, Le traduzioni italiane, 16–18. Guevara had himself stated in the prologue to a later edition of the Relox that he wanted to produce a fourth book. Playing off this, Portonaris claimed that Guevara had sent him that book. The resulting forgery is a compilation of various works including pieces of Guevara’s Epistolares familiares and parts of Alfonso de Valdés’s Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón. Brunori cites Redondo, Antonio de Guevara, 575–78, for this interpretation and for crediting the original fabrication to Alfonso de Ulloa, who did the same thing with other Spanish texts like the Historia Imperial by Pedro Mexia.

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their being aware of it. He was able with the money of the Church and the people to maintain his armies, and by that long war to lay the foundations of his military power, which afterwards has made him famous. Besides this, to be able to undertake greater enterprises, and always under the pretext of religion, he had recourse to a pious cruelty, driving out the Moors from his kingdom and despoiling them. No more miserable or unusual example can be found. He also attacked Africa under the same pretext, undertook his Italian enterprise, and has lately attacked France; so that he has continually contrived great things, which have kept his subjects’ minds uncertain and astonished, and occupied in watching their results. And these actions have arisen one out of the other, so that they have left no time for them to settle down and act against him.25 While the Italian forger did not explicitly associate Ferdinand with any of the more infamous characteristics of Machiavelli’s prince, he did use all of the examples that Machiavelli had used to illustrate the Spanish king’s political success. These included fooling the aristocracy and using the church for political ends, hardly the virtues found in Guevara’s Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps part of the reason this version of Guevara was so successful after Machiavelli had been put on the Index of Prohibited Books in the mid-sixteenth century was that a reader could have his Machiavelli and deny it too. For 25 Guevara, Marco Aurelio, bk. 4, Chap. 25, fol. 40v. “Ni una cosa fa tanto stimare il Principe, quanto sanno le grandi imprese, & il dar de essempi rari. Ferdinando, Re di Aragona, et di Spagna; si puo chiamare quasi Prencipe nuovo, perche di un Re debole e doventato per fama et per Gloria, il primo Re de I Christiani, et se si consideraranno le attioni sue, le troveremo tutte grandissime, et qualche una straordinaria. Egli nel principio del suo regno assalto Granata, et quella impresa fu il fondamento dello stato suo. In prima ella lo fece otioso, et senza sospetto di esser impeditio, tenne occupati in quella gli animi de’Baroni di Castiglia, i quali pensando a quella guerra, non pensava ad innovare, et egli acquisitava in questo mezzo riputatione, et imperio, sopra di loro, che non se n’accorgevano. Pote nutrire co’denari della Chiesa, et de’ popoli gli esserciti, et fare un fondamento con quella Guerra lunga alla militia sua, la quale di poi l’ha honorato. Oltra di questo per potere intrapendere maggior imprese servandosi sempre dalla religione, si voles ad una pietosa crudelta, cacciando e spogliando, il suo regno di Marrani; ne puo esser questo essempio piu miserabile et piu raro. Assalto sotto questo medesimo mantello l’Africa; fece impresa d’Italia; ha ultimamente assaltato la Francia, et cosi sempre ordito cose grandi, le quali hanno sempre tenute sospesi, et ammirati gli animi de sudditi, et occupati nel fine d’esse sono nate queste sue attioni in modo l’una dall’altra, che non hanno dato mai spatio a gli huomini di poter quietate et operargli contro.” The text translation is taken from Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci, rev. E.R.P. Vincent (New York: Random House, 1950), 81–82.

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Charles v, this association would certainly have been no problem if we are to believe another Italian biographer’s claim that The Prince was the book Charles v used most for political guidance.26 This aspect, among others, may also help explain Guevara’s popularity in Italy, where the early translation and repeated publication of the text was a strong indicator of the rising Spanish political presence and cultural influence in the peninsula. Between 1542 and 1663, the period corresponding to the height of Spanish strength in Italy, various Italian versions of Marcus Aurelius went to print as many as ninety times.27 Because the text was dedicated to and meant as a political primer for Charles v, the ruler of the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples and the duchy of Milan, it is not surprising that Italians wanted to know what kind of political advice and model was being cultivated in the imperial court and later in the court of Philip ii. At the same time, Guevara’s text was more palatable to an Italian audience than it would otherwise have been since it took as its main hero a Roman emperor, even if Guevara claimed that Marcus Aurelius had Spanish origins. As a text that claimed, in part, to be based on newly discovered letters from the emperor himself, Guevara’s work had great resonance with the indigenous imperial Renaissance in Italy begun by Petrarch two centuries earlier. It is revealing, for example, that the Italian translation of Marcus Aurelius from 1562 was dedicated to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, heir and proponent of one of the first imperial Renaissance courts. Ferrara, of course, was also home to the famous equestrian bronze statue of Niccolo d’Este iii, a monument that evoked strong memories of the ancient equestrian monument in Rome to Marcus Aurelius. In this milieu, Guevara’s text, a new literary monument to Marcus Aurelius, was received as a natural part of a broader Italian political and literary Renaissance, and not as part of a Spanish project of cultural or political domination. Similarly, a new edition published in 1584 was dedicated to Gulielmo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, another central patron 26

Pedro Mexia, Le Vite di Tutti Gl’Imperadori da Giulio Cesare insino a Massimiliano, trans. Lodovico Dolce, to which was added by Giralomo Bardi Fiorentino in the 6th ed. the lives of Charles v, Ferdinando i, Massimiliano ii, and Ridolfo (Venice: Olivier Alberti, 1597), 525v. According to the life of Charles v added in the later Italian edition, the emperor was not a great student even though he learned Spanish, German, and French and had some basic Latin. On the books that he did study hard, the author notes: “Pero si dilettava di leggere tre libri solamente li quali esso haveva fatto tradurre in lingua sua propria. L’uno per l’institutione della vita civile, et questo fu il Cortegiano del Conte Baldasar da Castiglione, l’altro per le cose di stato, et questo fu il Principe co’ Discorsi del Machiavello, et il terzo per gli ordini della militia et questo fu la Historia con tutte le altre cose di Polibio.” 27 Brunori, Le traduzioni italiane, 18.

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of the cultivation and dissemination of imperial Renaissance literary and artistic aesthetics in Italy. Marcus Aurelius, in short, was welcomed as a child of the imperial Renaissance in Italy, and its importation to, and translation in, Italy was akin to the return of a foreign-born child of Italian parents. The original manuscript was, after all, supposedly found in a Florentine library. Guevara’s book, in its content and form, was presented as the product of deep literary, historical, and political cross-fertilization between the Spanish and Italian peninsulas both contemporary and ancient. It included not only Guevara’s personal contact with Italy but also the shared history of the two peninsulas that stretched back to the Roman Empire. This was a point that the author himself was careful to cultivate. Besides the invented Spanish lineage of Marcus Aurelius, Guevara underlined other connections between ancient Italy and Spain and most especially the other Spanish emperors of Rome: Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. This was an increasingly common trope among Spanish royal chroniclers who followed Guevara. Writers such as Florian de Ocampo and Ambrosio Morales would elaborate at length on this theme as they created the literary and historical foundations to support the contemporary political reality of a Spanish emperor, or imperial monarch, ruling over much of Italy. Guevara, then, was one of the first and most successful Spanish authors to begin building an imperial literary edifice that mirrored real imperial political power. His success was a literary reflection of the expansion of the imperial humanism of Petrarch, Guarino, and Flavio Biondo that presented the Roman Empire, and its good emperors like Marcus Aurelius, as the apex of political development in the ancient world and as the role models for Renaissance empires and emperors. Moreover, as the contest for global empire spread in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Guevara’s Marcus Aurelius remained a popular source for political reflection and counsel. French and English editions of his work were produced for this purpose, and even after the publication of the first Renaissance edition of the authentic writings of Marcus Aurelius in 1559, the imagined Marcus Aurelius of Guevara and other Italian, French, and English forgers who added their works to his remained far more popular.28 Forgery and fiction clearly paid in the Renaissance. 28

The English translation of 1568 by Thomas North, for example, was a translation out of an earlier French version that also added a new fourth book attributed to Guevara. It had little in common with the Italian version, and the additional twenty chapters it attached were largely advice dedicated to courtiers.

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So, too, did the fact that the Marcus Aurelius of Guevara promoted a view of imperial rule and empire that was tempered by the values of the philosopher. A large and growing body of humanist literature served the cause of advancing the revival of Roman imperial power, but the model of Marcus Aurelius was much to be preferred over other options such as Julius Caesar or Tiberius, to say nothing of Nero or Diocletian. Undoubtedly, the writing and publication history of Guevara’s work is an especially revealing literary microcosm of the Wild West of fabrication, forgery, plagiarism, and scholarship that characterized the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe. Its ultimate goal, however, was to create a more sophisticated model of governance for Renaissance emperors who certainly had need of it.

chapter 42

Marcus Aurelius and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-century Antwerp Jill Kraye Caspar Gevartius (Jan Caspar Gevaerts, 1593–1666) is a little-known Flemish humanist who worked for many years on an edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with accompanying Latin translation and commentary,1 but never managed to publish it.2 The saga of this failed project—with no “output” or “impact,” to use the current academic jargon—might seem an inappropriate topic for an essay in a volume honoring an exceptionally prolific and influential scholar. What makes it relevant, however, to the kind of intellectual and cultural history on which Tony Grafton has stamped his distinctive mark is the vivid picture that it paints of scholarly cooperation in the early modern Republic of Letters, chronicling a network of friends and wellwishers who over several decades lent their intellectual and moral support to Gevartius (admittedly in vain) and who included among their number some of the leading humanists of the seventeenth century, as well as one of its greatest artists. In his own day, Gevartius achieved a certain renown;3 but this was due less to his contributions to scholarship than to his position as town secretary of the 1 Marcel Hoc, Étude sur Jean-Gaspard Gevaerts, philologue et poète (1593–1666) (Brussels: Les Éditions Robert Sand, 1922), 105–11. 2 According to a note in Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, ed. Max Rooses and C. Ruelens, 6 vols. (Antwerp: Veuve de Backer, 1887–1909), 5:200, J.-B. Steenberg, a counselor to the court in Mechelen, was charged with publishing the posthumous manuscript of Gevartius’s Commentarius in M. Aurelii Antonini τῶν εἰς ἑαυτὸν lib. xii, but died before he was able to do so. In another note, ibid., 20, the manuscript is said to be in the Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels; but there is no trace of it in any of the library’s catalogs, and Hoc, Gevaerts, 106, laments “la perte du commentaire de Marc-Aurèle.” Marcus Aurelius does not appear in the list of Gevartius’s manuscripts in MS D’Orville 397, 25–27, Bodleian Library, Oxford; and there is no printed edition of the Meditations in the 1666 auction catalog of Gevartius’s books, preserved in a unique copy in the Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, discussed in Hoc, Gevaerts, 75–83. 3 He is included in the series of “illustrious men” drawn by Anthony Van Dyck, also an Antwerp citizen; see Marie Mauquoy-Hendrickx, L’iconographie d’Antoine van Dyck. Catalogue raisonné, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale Albert i, 1991), 1:28–29, 136.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_043

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city of Antwerp, a job he held for over forty years. Although the post may not sound particularly impressive, Gevartius had some distinguished predecessors. From 1514 to 1532, the job belonged to Pieter Gillis, famously painted, together with Erasmus, in a diptych commissioned in 1517 from Quentin Matsys as a gift for their friend Thomas More, who a year earlier had cast Gillis as a speaker in his Utopia.4 From 1609 until his death in 1612, Philip Rubens, elder brother of the artist Peter Paul and prize pupil of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, served as Antwerp town secretary.5 Although Gevartius gained recognition and respect from his official position, which he took up in 1621, the onerous duties that it imposed on him meant that he was afterward not able to spend much time on scholarly pursuits, as he explained to solicitous friends who urged him to finish his various uncompleted endeavors.6 However valid Gevartius’s excuses may have been, the Dutch humanist Nicolaas Heinsius’s description of him as cunctator summus, “the supreme procrastinator,”7 was more than justified, as we shall see. Before 1621, Gevartius—who had attended a Jesuit school in Antwerp, followed by a stint at the Collegium Trilingue in Leuven—had been an up-andcoming young humanist, seeking to make a name for himself, in the traditional way, by publishing an edition of a classical author in which he challenged the efforts of previous editors and commentators. His 1616 edition of the Roman poet Statius contained liminary verses by Hugo Grotius and Daniel Heinsius, both of whom Gevartius had met while serving as Latin secretary to the French ambassador to the Netherlands. And in his commentary on Statius’s Silvae, Gevartius records the help given to him by the two Dutch scholars. Discussing a vexed phrase, for instance, which the fifteenth-century Italian humanists Domizio Calderini, Angelo Poliziano, and Aulo Giano Parrasio had been unable to explain to Gevartius’s satisfaction, he puts forward an emendation suggested to him by Heinsius, “the apple of our Europe’s eye,” and says: “if Statius did not

4 Marcel A. Nauwelaerts, “Pieter Gillis,” in Contemporaries of Erasmus, ed. Peter Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 99–101; Lorne Campbell et al., “Quentin Matsys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gillis and Thomas More,” Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 716–25. 5 Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1991), 37–41. Peter Paul Rubens’s father-in-law, Jan Brant the Younger, a leading Antwerp patrician with humanist interests, was also town secretary; see Hans Vlieghe, Rubens: Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard xix.2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1987), 58–60 (no. 78). 6 Hoc, Gevaerts, 68, 105n.2. 7 Michael D. Reeve, “Acidalius on Manilius,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 41 (1991): 226–39, at 230.

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write this, he certainly should have.”8 It may have been the unquestioning self-confidence—often, as in this instance, unmerited—with which he habitually defended his own emendations and interpretations that provoked the French classicist Emericus Cruceus to describe Gevartius, some of whose readings he adopted in his own 1618 edition of Statius, as a young man in a hurry who would have done better to follow Horace’s recommendation in Ars poetica 388 to “put the papers away and store them up for nine years” instead of rushing to publish them.9 In his commentary, Gevartius cites manuscript readings, sometimes gleaned secondhand from earlier editors, and also relies on parallel passages from a wide range of classical authors, citing Poliziano on the need for interpreters of ancient poetry to scour the writings not only of grammarians and historians but also of lawyers, physicians, and, above all, philosophers.10 In addition, Gevartius, following the custom of his day, refers to inscriptions, sculptures, and especially coins and medals,11 which were a particular interest of his—he eventually had over two thousand in his personal collection.12 Gevartius employed the same combination of methods in the selection of miscellaneous philological notes, entitled Electorum libri tres, that he wrote in Paris and published there in 1619. For instance, his account of divination ex acuminibus, “from the points of spears,” is supported by a marble relief, in the palazzo of Cardinal Federico Cesi (founder of the Accademia dei Lincei) in Rome, which Gevartius illustrates and claims represents two forms of military divination, since it has an inscription referring to a pullarius, feeder of the 8

Caspar Gevartius, Papinianarum lectionum commentarius, in Statius, Opera omnia, ed. Caspar Gevartius (Leiden: Apud Jacob. Marcum, 1616), 33 (on Silvae 1.1.28: “Et minor in leges iret gener et Cato castris”), at 33: “ut verum fatear, omnino amplector lectionem quam Europae nostrae ocellus, Dan[iel] Heinsius, mihi suggessit: ‘Et minor in leges iret gener et Cato nostras.’ Quid clarius dici potest? Si Statius ita non scripsit, certe ita scripsisse debuit.” See also Hoc, Gevaerts, 88–98. 9 Emericus Cruceus, In P. Papini Statii Sylvas commentarius, in Statius, Opera, cum observationibus ac cum commentariis tam veterum quam recentiorum interpretum, ed. E. Cruceus (Paris: T. Blaise, 1618), 3–4: “Hic accessit Janus Casperius Gevartius, juvenis multae lectionis, et qui superiores Statii scholiastas in discrimen vocare poterat dignitatis, si lectiones illas suas juxta Horatii monitum diutius aliquanto pressisset. Nimirum peccamus plerique hac in parte, et crudos ingenii foetus emittimus, quibus fortasse provectior aetas maturitatem attulisset.” 10 Gevartius, Papinianarum lectionum commentarius, 128 (on Silvae 2.1.23), paraphrases Miscellanea, Chap. 4, in Poliziano, Opera…omnia (Basel: Apud Nicolaum Episcopium, 1553), 229. 11 Gevartius, Papinianarum lectionum commentarius, 37 (on Silvae 1.1.37–38), illustrates two coins belonging to Johannes Sambucus. 12 Hoc, Gevaerts, 113–26.

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sacred chickens, and images of two standards with sharp pointed ends, so that they can be fixed into the ground and the augury read when they are pulled out.13 He misunderstood this divinatory procedure, however, which instead involves interpreting the flashes of light given off by the metal points of spears or javelins owing to atmospheric electricity.14 In another chapter, Gevartius defends the phrase “extra metum,” “free from fear,” in Seneca’s De beneficiis 4.19.4 against the wrongheaded conjectural emendations of both Lipsius and the French humanist Marc-Antoine Muret.15 Elsewhere, however, he rejects Muret’s correct explanation of the phrase “domus recta est,” in Seneca’s Letter 100.1, as meaning “the house is in good order,” and, with his usual lack of selfdoubt, swears that what the Stoic philosopher had actually written was “domus tecta est,” “the house has a roof,” backing up this emendation with parallel passages from the Digest of Justinian and Cicero’s Verrines.16 There is no sign in this work of Gevartius’s later interest in Marcus Aurelius. Several chapters, however, reflect another of his unfulfilled projects: a commentary on the Roman astrological poet Manilius, which was supposedly ready to go to press in 1618 but was never in the end published,17 though various remains of Gevartius’s Manilian studies have been identified.18 Given the small body of philological work that Gevartius managed to publish, not all of it of the highest quality, it is hardly surprising that he has not earned a place in standard works on the history of classical scholarship.19 He 13

Caspar Gevartius, Electorum libri III in quibus plurima veterum scriptorum loca obscura et controversa explicantur, illustrantur et emendantur (Paris: Ex Officina Nivelliana, 1619), 11 (I.2): “Huiusmodi…fuisse ea Auspicia quae ex acuminibus dicebantur, certum est; nec sinit nos ambigere tabula marmorea…quae Romae visitur in aedibus Cardinalis Caesij.” See also Hoc, Gevaerts, 98–101. 14 See Cicero, Della divinazione, ed. Sebastiano Timpanaro (Milan: Garzanti, 1999), 375 (ad 2.36.77). 15 Gevartius, Electorum libri III, 53–54 (II.3). See also Gevartius, Papinianarum lectionum commentarius, 208, where he defends the transmitted reading of Nonius Marcellus, De compendiosa doctrina 56.26, against Lipsius’s emendation (Antiquae lectiones iv.17): “Sed errat vix [sc. vir] maximus…” 16 Gevartius, Electorum libri III, 35–36 (I.10). 17 Hoc, Gevaerts, 11–13. 18 Reeve, “Acidalius.” 19 He is not mentioned in L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); L.D. Reynolds, ed., Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2: From the Revival of Learning to the End of the Eighteenth Century (in Italy, France, England, and the Netherlands) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908); Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical

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does get a brief entry in Ludwig Eckstein’s Nomenclator philologorum of 1871, which states that he died after being struck by lightning; the 1856 article on him in Biographie universelle, on the other hand, repeats a note by J.G. Graevius that Gevartius’s entire family died on the same day from eating poisonous mushrooms.20 The mundane truth is that he died in bed of a leg wound at the age of seventy-two. This fact and much else of interest, including a valuable appendix of documents, can be found in the only monograph devoted to Gevartius, published in 1922 in a series with the telling title “Le déclin de l’humanisme belge.”21 Gevartius has a slightly higher profile in art historical literature on account of his friendship and collaboration with Peter Paul Rubens. The two men probably met in 1619, and they remained close friends until the painter’s death in 1640.22 While in Spain in 1628, Rubens entrusted the education of his elder son, Albert, to Gervartius and, a year later, wrote to thank him for all the favors he had bestowed on the boy, who owed the best part of himself to the good instruction that he had received from Gevartius.23 It was with the help and guidance of Gevartius, a keen numismatist, that Albert, aged only twenty, produced a Latin dissertation on Roman imperial coins. Gevartius included the work by his protégé in a collection of numismatic treatises that he edited and published in 1654.24 Rubens also had close ties with a more celebrated Flemish humanist, Justus Lipsius, the founder of the Neostoic movement. In his painting The Four Philosophers, the devotion of Lipsius, Johannes Woverius, and Philip and Peter Paul Rubens to Stoicism is symbolized by the bust of Seneca in the niche above them, based on a marble piece that Rubens had acquired during his stay in Rome in the early years of the seventeenth century.25 Among the ancient statuary in his studio was a bust of another Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). See, however, F. Vuilleumier Laurens and Pierre Laurens, L’âge de l’inscription: la rhétorique du monument en Europe du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 142n.7, where Gevartius is described as a “grand érudit.” 20 Friedrich August Eckstein, Nomenclator philologorum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1871), 191; Biographie universelle (Michaud) ancienne et moderne…nouvelle édition, vol. 16 (Paris: Chez Madame C. Desplaces, 1856), 574. 21 Hoc, Gevaerts, 62. 22 Ibid., 42–49. 23 Letters of 29 Dec. 1628 and 15 Sept. 1629, in Correspondance de Rubens 5:16, 196–97. 24 Albert Rubens, Regum et imperatorum Romanorum numismata (Antwerp: apud Henricum Aertssens, 1654). 25 Vlieghe, Rubens Portraits, 128–32 (no. 117) and plate  140; Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, 3–13 and frontispiece (color reproduction); for the bust of Seneca, see J. Richard Judson

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which Rubens purchased in 1615 and sold in 1626, along with the rest of his collection, to the Duke of Buckingham.26 As he had done with the Seneca piece, Rubens made artistic use of his bust of Marcus Aurelius, which features prominently in his portrait of Gevartius (Figure  42.1), dating from the early 1620s.27 We know that by 1623 Gevartius had begun working, in his spare time, as he was always careful to point out, on an edition of the emperor’s Meditations.28 The painting looks very realistic—we can even see the ink on Gevartius’s quill and under his fingernails—but the volume in which he is writing his commentary may just have been a studio prop, kept to hand by Rubens for use as an iconographical attribute of a scholar.29 Followers of Neostoicism like Gevartius and Rubens did not regard it merely as a scholarly and literary movement, but also tried to live their lives according to its strict ethical precepts. Yet after the death of his daughter in 1623 and of his first wife, Isabella Brant, in 1626, Rubens began to question the feasibility and desirability of the Stoic doctrine of apatheia, according to which the wise man feels no emotions since these are by nature irrational and, therefore, morally wrong. Writing to Pierre Dupuy in the aftermath of these traumatic personal experiences, Rubens confessed: “I do not pretend ever to have attained the Stoic state of freedom from emotions, nor do I think that human emotions…are inappropriate to a human being.…Strong emotion seems to me the appropriate response to such a loss.”30 When Gevartius’s wife died two years later, Rubens wrote to him from London: “If any consolation is to be looked for from philosophy, then you will find an abundant resource within yourself. and Carl van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title-Pages, vol. 1 (London: Harvey Miller; Philadelphia: Heyden & Son, 1978), 165–66. 26 Marjon van der Meulen, Rubens: Copies after the Antique, ed. Arnout Balis, vol. 2, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard xxiii (London: Harvey Miller, 1994), 144n.64. The bust owned by Rubens has not been identified. 27 Vlieghe, Rubens Portraits, 113–16 (no. 106) and plates 120–22. 28 See Gevartius’s letter of 25 May 1623 to Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, in Correspondance de Rubens, 3:171: “subsecivis horis M. Antonini Imp εἰς ἑαυτόν libb. XII adorno, quibus equidem nihil elegantius in tota antiquitate exstare existimo…” 29 See, e.g., the book in Rubens’s painting of Jan Brant, reproduced in Vlieghe, Rubens Portraits, plates  42 and 44; and in Van Dyck’s drawing of Gevartius, reproduced in Mauquoy-Hendrickx, L’iconographie d’Antoine van Dyck, vol. 2, plate  34, and Hoc, Gevartius, frontispiece. 30 Letter, 13 July 1626, in Correspondance de Rubens, 3:444–45: “io non ho pretentioni d’arrivar giamai alla impassibilitá stoica ne penso d’esser impropria all’huomo alcuna qualità humana congrua al suo ogetto, né tutte le cose di questo mondo esser ugualmente indifferenti.…Et un tal danno mi par degno di gran sentimento…” Translation, with modifications, from Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, 194.

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Figure 42.1

Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Caspar Gevartius (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp).

I commend you to your Marcus Aurelius, from whose rich treasure-house you, as both steward and distributor of supplies, have something to dispense to your friends as well.”31 Stoicism had not worked for Rubens; nonetheless, he hoped that it might bring some relief to his friend’s suffering. And it seems to 31

Letter, 15 Sept. 1629, in Correspondance de Rubens, 5:197: “Nam si qua solatia a philosophia speranda sunt, abunde domi tibi superest unde petas. Ad Antoninum tuum te ablego,

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have done so. In a letter of 1629 to Pierre Dupuy’s brother Jacques, Gevartius refers to the pain caused by his wife’s recent death, but adds: “Let us arm ourselves with patience and conform to the divine will.”32 Six months later, writing again to Jacques Dupuy, he echoes Lipsius’s belief that “in the midst of public calamities, we should bear the death of friends with equanimity.”33 Rubens also had doubts about his capacity to cope with the philological side of Neostoicism. For a painter, he was a pretty good humanist; but, unlike his brother Philip, he was not a trained classical scholar. So, when Gevartius asked him to help out with his Marcus Aurelius edition by examining Greek manuscripts of the Meditations during his travels in Spain on diplomatic and artistic business, he did not really feel up to the job. In a letter to Gevartius of December 1628, Rubens informed his friend that although he had made an effort to find out whether there was anything more in private libraries about “uwen Marcus,” “your Marcus,” than was already known, he had so far discovered nothing new. Rubens dismissed a report, from a man who knew no Greek at all, of two manuscripts in the Escorial, which he predicted would turn out to contain only familiar works. “Whether there is any light to be gained from collating the texts, or it is simply a mass of rubbish,” he told Gevartius, “I am not the one to do the research. For my age and manner of life and my studies draw me in a different direction and, besides, my ruling genius keeps me away from this intimate sanctuary of the Muses.”34 Gevartius evidently was unsatisfied with this reply because a few years later another of his friends was covering the same ground for him. The Jesuit Pierre Lansell wrote to Gevartius from Madrid in 1631, announcing that he had been unable to find anything of Marcus Aurelius in the Escorial but that he would continue to look, urging Gevartius, nevertheless, not to defer his edition, since any variants that might turn up could be added at a later date.35

32 33

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cujus e divite penu, tanquam promuscondus, amicis etiam quod distribuas habes.” Partially translated in Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, 194. Letter, 30 July 1629, in Hoc, Gevaerts, 64: “Cuirassons-nous de patience, et conformonsnous à la volonté divine.” Letter, 25 Jan. 1630, in ibid., 64n.1: “Au milieu des calamitées publiques, supportons d’une âme égale la mort de nos amis,” echoing the title of Lipsius’s De constantia in publicis malis of 1584. Correspondance de Rubens, 5:15: “Si qua lux aut sordium eluvies ex illorum collatione erui possit, non est meum perscrutari, quem tempus et vitae ratio et institutum alio avocant et prae caeteris idiotismus ab intimis istis musarum penetralibus procul arcet.” Translation from Vlieghe, Rubens Portraits, 116n.4. Letter, 25 March 1631, in Hoc, Gevaerts, 183.

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Many other scholarly friends supported Gevartius’s project and gave him assistance of various kinds. In 1627 the French humanist and antiquarian Nicolas Peiresc offered to help with the edition in any way he could, in particular by providing information about medals, drawings, and inscriptions from his own extensive collection of antiquities36—the sort of material that Gevartius had used in his early philological works: the commentary on Statius and the Electa. Peiresc also counseled him to study the reliefs on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome;37 and we know that in 1665, a year before his death, Gevartius was trying to buy a replica of the column that he had seen, fifty years earlier, in the house of the Leiden classicist Petrus Scriverius.38 Peiresc mentioned, as well, a recent Greek-Latin edition of the Meditations, published the year before, 1626, in Lyon, and said that he would send Gevartius a copy if he did not already have one.39 In 1628 the Hamburg humanist Lucas Holstenius, at the time a member of the household of Cardinal Francesco Barberini,40 wrote to Gevartius saying that he had painstakingly searched all the libraries of Rome for manuscripts of Marcus Aurelius but had found only two or three folios of extracts, in a very recent hand, which were scarcely worth the trouble of collating with the full text in Wilhelm Xylander’s edition.41 Holstenius was most likely referring to the editio princeps, published in Zurich in 1558–59 through the efforts of Conrad Gessner, who had got hold of a complete Greek manuscript of the Meditations, now lost, from the Palatine collection in Heidelberg, and arranged for it to be 36

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Letter, 29 Mar. 1627, in ibid., 178: “J’ay esté infiniment aise d’entendre l’entreprinse que vous avez faicte de donner au public les livres de l’emp. Antonin le Philosophe e y contribueray trez volontiers, tout ce que je pourray rencontrer que j’estime pouvoir servir à vostre dessein, espérant de pouvoir avoir quelque chose qui n’y soit possible pas inutile.… Soit pour des Médailles, ou desseins ou inscriptions, dont j’ay de grands recueils.” Ibid.: “je serois bien d’avis que vous ne négligeassiez pas de jetter la veue sur les desseins de la Colonne Antonine de Rome.” Ibid., 109n.4. Ibid., 180: “Je pense que vous aurez veu la dernière edition des livres de vostre M. Aurèle faicte à Lyon par Amedaeus Sallyus l’an 1626, 8°, chez Fr. La Bottière, avec le grec et la version latine è regione.…Si vous ne l’aviez encores veue, je vous en envoyeray un exemplaire.” See H.-W. Stork, ed., Lucas Holstenius (1596–1661): Ein Hamburger Humanist im Rom des Barock. Material zur Geschichte seiner Handschriftenschenkung an die Stadtbibliothek (Husum: Matthiesen, 2008), 20. Letter, 23 Sept. 1628, in Hoc, Gevaerts, 184: “Antoninum Imp. sedulo per omnes Romanas bibliothecas quaesivi, sed nullum eius exemplar repperi, praeter duo aut tria folia ἐκλογών ex eo opere quod Xylandri beneficio integrum habemus…Manus recentissima est, ut vix putem operae precium fore ista cum editis conferri.”

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printed together with a Latin translation by Xylander. On the other hand, he may have meant the second and corrected edition, published in Basel in 1568.42 Holstenius added his voice to the chorus of friends encouraging Gevartius not to delay his plans to edit the Meditations any longer in the vain expectation of finding new manuscript readings. And he, too, mentioned the 1626 Lyon edition “with small corrections appended.”43 This volume was essentially a reprint of the Gessner-Xylander first edition, with some minor changes to the Greek text and Latin translation, now facing each other and divided into numbered chapters, and a few notes added by the editor, Amadeus Saly.44 The following year, 1629, Holstenius sent Gevartius his own copy of the Meditations, probably the 1626 Lyon edition, in which he had entered readings from the few folios of excerpts he now identified as belonging to the Vatican Library—the only manuscript he had so far come across in all the European libraries he had visited—together with a few small corrections and notes that he feared would not live up to Gevartius’s expectations.45 Three years later, in 1632, he was still pleading with Gevartius to complete his edition, assuring him that there was nothing further to hope for from Italian libraries. Several years before, Cruceus had regretted the young Gevartius’s failure to follow Horace’s advice and wait until his work matured before rushing into print;46 now Holstenius warned him that if he kept his work back for the nine years recommended by the poet, he ran the risk of being overtaken by other, more efficient, scholars. In fact, he told Gevartius that he had recently encountered a learned Jesuit who had translated the Meditations into Latin and was looking for additional material in the Vatican Library. Holstenius had tried to put him off by announcing that Gevartius’s splendid edition, translation, and ample commentary were already in press. He was not sure whether this stratagem had worked, but at any rate the Jesuit had stopped hunting for manuscripts. Holstenius, who was rapidly losing patience with Gevartius and may have invented the whole story as a desperate attempt to force him into 42

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. and trans. A.S.L. Farquharson, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944), xxii–xxviii. 43 Hoc, Gevaerts, 184: “Quocirca te moneo hortorque ne inani expectatione diutius edendi consilium differas. Lugdunensem editionem nuperam haud dubito quin videris, et correctiunculas ei subjunctas.” 44 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Farquharson, 1:xliii. 45 Letter, 31 Aug. 1629, in Hoc, Gevaerts, 186–87: “mihi hactenus in tot Europae bibliothecis nihil praeter ἐκλογάς Vaticanas videre licuit: quae vix una vel altera voce ab editis discrepant.” See also his letters of 6 July and 2 Aug. 1630, in ibid., 187. 46 See n. 9 above.

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finishing, concluded the letter by asking him to return his copy of the Meditations.47 By 1636, Holstenius had given up entirely on Gevartius, for he wrote to Ludovic Elzevir, asking him to inform his family’s publishing house of his proposal to edit and translate the Meditations himself.48 As with Gevartius’s plans, however, nothing ever came of this. But Holstenius’s annotated copy of the 1626 Lyon edition survives as part of the D’Orville collection in the Bodleian Library. This volume may well be the one that Holstenius had lent to Gevartius, and in which, during his later career as Cardinal Barberini’s librarian and, then, custode of the Vatican Library, he continued to enter emendations; references to contemporary scholarship, including Justus Lipsius’s treatise on Stoic natural philosophy and Janus Gruter’s collection of inscriptions;49 parallels, not only from Greek and Latin literature, especially Stoic sources such as Epictetus and Seneca,50 but also from the Church Fathers, including Ambrose, Jerome, Cyprian, and Augustine;51 and collations from a printed edition of 1643 and from two manuscripts not mentioned in his letters to Gevartius52—all this, presumably, with an eye to his own edition. Although he never managed to produce that edition, Holstenius kept up with scholarship on the Meditations, as one would expect, given his deep interest in 47

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Letter, 24 Aug. 1632, in Hoc, Gevaerts, 188: “Antoninum tuum docti omnes vehementer desiderant…Quocirca danda erit opera, ne dum tu nonum in annum labores tuos premis, alij te praeveniant…Meum exemplar, ubi mittendi commoditas fuerit, ad me redire facias; nam aegre illo auctore careo cujus lectio impense me delectabat.” Letter, 15 May 1636, in Lucas Holstenius, Epistolae ad diversos, ed. J.F. Boissonade (Paris: In Bibliopolio Graeco-Latino-Germanico, 1817), 267: “Quae de Hieroclis, Ocelli Lucani, Simplicii in Epictetum, Dissertationum Arriani, Paraenesion M. Aurelii Imp. nova editione Graeco-Latina tecum egi, patruis tuis significabis; quibus si consilium hoc probetur, singulos ego auctores diligentissime emendatos, quod quidem tu oculata fide testari poteris, subpeditabo.” MS D’Orville 446, Bodleian Library, Oxford: Marcus Aurelius, De vita sua libri XII…(Lyon: Franciscus de la Bottiere, 1626), 5 (Gruter) and 92 (Lipsius). Ibid., 92, 110, 206–7 (Seneca), 164–65 (Epictetus). Ibid., 62 (Ambrose and Jerome), 63 (Cyprian), 398 (Augustine). Ibid., 202, 206, 272. Holstenius collated the excerpts in plut. 59.44, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and recorded a variant from Vat. Graec. 1950, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, the only surviving complete manuscript of the Meditations, which did not enter the Vatican Library until 1683 but which he could have seen in its previous location, the library of Stefano Gradi in Rome; see Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Farquharson, 1:l–li.

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classical philology and philosophy.53 After his death in 1661, some thirty-three hundred books that he had owned went to the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome. In addition to a copy of an early work by Gevartius, his Electa of 1619, this collection included two mid-seventeenth-century editions of the Meditations.54 The first, described by A.S.L. Farquharson, the leading twentieth-century editor of the treatise, as “slight but estimable” on account of the editor’s extensive knowledge of pagan and Christian literature,55 was the 1643 Greek-Latin edition from which Holstenius recorded variants, which was the work of Meric Casaubon, the English-educated son of the eminent French humanist Isaac Casaubon.56 The second was Thomas Gataker’s magisterial edition, Latin translation, and commentary of 1652.57 Gataker was the most accomplished British Hellenist of his day,58 and his edition was “the single major scholarly achievement” of Cambridge University Press during the entire Civil War and Interregnum period.59 Farquharson speculated that it might have been the publication of Gataker’s insuperable work that led Holstenius to abandon his own plans to edit the Meditations.60 Gevartius may also have known about Gataker’s edition; but if so, 53

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55 56 57

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See Stork, Lucas Holstenius, 164–67, for his funeral monument in S. Maria dell’Anima, the German church in Rome, with a Latin inscription referring to his work on Greek and Latin texts and his expertise in ancient philosophy. Alfredo Serrai, La biblioteca di Lucas Holstenius (Udine: Forum, 2000), 349 (“Gasparij Geuertij electorum libri tres. Parisiis 1619”), 385 (“M. Aurelius Antoninus de vita sua cum Commentario Gatakeri grlat. Cantabrigiae 1652”), 413 (“Antoninus de seipso et ad seipsum Interprete Guil. Xilandro cum Notis M. Casauboni. London 1643”). Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Farquharson, 1:xlv. Marcus Aurelius, De seipso et ad seipsum libri xii…ed. Meric Casaubon, trans. Wilhelm Xylander (London: M. Flesher and R. Mynne, 1643). Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis sive de eis q[u]ae ad se pertinere censebat libri XII, ed. and trans. Thomas Gataker, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Thomas Buck…Academiae Typographus, 1652). For Gataker’s idiosyncratic views on Latin orthography (he always leaves out u after q), see Jill Kraye, “‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’: Marcus Aurelius and His Meditations from Xylander to Diderot,” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and Martin Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), 107–34, at 116. For the praise lavished on Gataker by modern editors, see Jill Kraye, “Philology, Moral Philosophy and Religion in Thomas Gataker’s Edition of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (1652),” in Ethik—Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Modelle der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Eckhard Kessler (Münster: lit, 2007), 293–307, at 293–94. D. McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2004), 1:309. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Farquharson, 1:l.

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it certainly did not deter him, since he was still collecting material for his own edition in 1665, the year before he died.61 Among the duties that, in his position as town secretary of Antwerp, had absorbed his time and prevented him from completing the work was the organization of the city’s cultural events, such as the triumphal entry into Antwerp of Ferdinand, infante of Spain, cardinal archbishop of Toledo, and governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands on 15 May 1635, for which Rubens devised a series of elaborate arches and stages. A month later Gevartius was commissioned by the city of Antwerp to prepare a volume commemorating the Pompa introitus Ferdinandi, with engravings of Rubens’s decorations by Theodoor van Thulden. But, true to form, the “supreme procrastinator” endlessly delayed the publication, so that the book was not printed until seven years later, at the end of 1642. Unfortunately, the dedicatee of the volume, Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, who had been celebrated in the entry as the great hope for Antwerp’s future, had died the year before; so the magistrates, in order to avoid embarrassment, decreed that the dedication should be backdated to 1641.62 Gevartius wrote the Latin inscriptions for the entry and advised Rubens on the iconography for the decorations, which drew heavily on Roman coins (as noted, a particular interest of his). He also came up with the idea for a spectacular portico with statues of twelve Holy Roman emperors, representing the cardinal-infante’s illustrious ancestors.63 It was based on yet another unfinished project of his, an encomiastic history of the Habsburg emperors, the text of which he later inserted into the commemorative volume.64 Interspersed between the emperors in the portico were wooden cutouts of the twelve major

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See text accompanying n. 38 above. John Rupert Martin, The Decorations for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard xvi (London: Phaidon, 1972), 226–27. See also Hoc, Gevaerts, 101–5; Prosper Arents, Pompa introitus Ferdinandi. Bijdrage tot de bibliografie van en over Rubens (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1950), 90–92; Vuilleumier Laurens and Laurens, L’âge de l’inscription, 141–55. 63 Caspar Gevartius, Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi Austriaci Hispaniarum Infantis…in urbem Antverpiam (Antwerp: Joannes Meursius, 1641), plate between 42 and 43: Porticus Caesario-Austriaca. This edition is available online on the British Library’s Renaissance Festival Books website. 64 Martin, Decorations, 107. The work, entitled xii Caesarum Austriacorum vitae et elogia, glorifying the Habsburg emperors from Rudolph i to Ferdinand ii, was modeled in form on Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars.

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Roman gods, the Dii consentes.65 When justifying this conceit in the published volume, Gevartius explained that, although some pagans had been superstitious polytheists, there were quite a few “whose vitals the Titan [sc., Prometheus] formed from finer clay,” and who truly recognized one God, “the Maker and Father of the Universe.”66 This is clearly stated, Gevartius continues, by the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Meditations 7.9, which he cites in Greek, followed by his own Latin translation: “There is one universe composed of all, one god diffused through all, one nature, one law, one reason common to all living beings endowed with reason, one truth, since the perfection of creatures belonging to the same genus and participating in the same reason is one.”67 According to Gevartius, the emperor appears to have had in mind these golden lines of Sophocles: There is assuredly one divinity, one God Who made the heavens and the wide surface of the earth, The blue waters of the sea and the might of the winds.68 And, indeed, Gevartius points out, Athenagoras the philosopher adduces these lines in his Embassy on Behalf of the Christians, addressed to the co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, in the chapter where he rebuts the charge of pagan polytheism.69 A fuller version and interpretation of the verses of Sophocles can be found, Gevartius notes, in the Greek Church Fathers Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Theodoret, and Cyril.70 It seems likely that this entire passage was originally intended for Gevartius’s commentary on the Meditations and that he took the opportunity of inserting it into this volume, just as he did with his Habsburg history. If so, it can give us an insight into the 65 Gevartius, Pompa Introitus, 85, who quotes Ennius, The Annals, ed. Otto Skutsch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 91 (7.240): “Iuno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, Venus; Mars/Mercurius, Iovis, Neptunus, Vulcanus, Apollo.” 66 Gevartius, Pompa Introitus, 86: “Certe inter Gentiles olim non pauci, ‘Quae meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan’ [Juvenal, Satires 14.35], revera unum Deum, …‘Opificem et Patrem huius Universi’, (ut Plato, Timaeus [28C]), agnoverunt.” 67 Ibid.: “Clare id pronuntiat Imp. Caes. M. Aurel. Antoninus Aug. Philosophus lib. vii. τῶν εἰς ἑαυτὸν, sive De sui ipsius Institutione: ‘…Mundus ex omnibus constat unus, et Deus unus per omnia diffusus, una Natura, una Lex, una Ratio, communis omnibus Ratione praeditis animantibus, una Veritas: siquidem et una est Perfectio eorum quae eiusdem sunt generis, et eiusdem participantia Rationis, Animalium.’” 68 See n. 74 below. 69 Athenagoras, Apologia pro Christianis 5.2. 70 Gevartius, Pompa Introitus, 86.

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interpretative strategy he adopted in his commentary. Casaubon and Gataker, who were both Protestant ministers, went out of their way to stress the closeness of Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy to Christian theology, even though they were well aware that Christians had been persecuted during his reign and that, in Meditations 11.3, he had criticized the obstinacy that led them to die for their faith. Casaubon and Gataker got around these awkward and embarrassing facts by noting that no Christians had spoken ill of the emperor or charged him with cruelty and by citing passages from pagan authors such as Epictetus and Pliny the Younger that showed that the willingness of the early Christians to seal their profession through martyrdom was commonly misinterpreted as irrational.71 Gevartius shared the conviction of Casaubon and Gataker that Marcus’s Stoicism was fundamentally compatible with Christianity and therefore assumed without question that the emperor would have taken to heart and absorbed Athenagoras’s eloquent and learned defense of Christianity. The more cynical view of our own times is neatly summed up in the article on Marcus Aurelius in the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, which states: “a number of Christian writers addressed ‘Apologies’ to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, including Athenagoras…, but there is no reason to think that he read them.”72 And while Gevartius did not doubt the authenticity of the lines from Sophocles, since they had been attested by venerable patristic authorities, for modern scholarship it is precisely because these lines are quoted only by Christian authors that they have come under suspicion:73 relegated to the category of “dubious and spurious fragments of Sophocles” in the 1926 edition of Fragments of the Greek Tragedians, they have been demoted even further to “unattributed fragments” in the revised and expanded edition completed in 2004.74 The connection that Gevartius perceived between Meditations 7.9 and the Sophocles quotation in Athenagoras was not apparent to other scholars of the time. Conrad Gessner, who, as noted earlier, was responsible for the editio princeps of the Meditations, also brought out the first edition, with Greek text and 71 72 73

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Kraye, “‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus,’” 110–18. “Marcus Aurelius,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross; 3rd ed., ed. E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1034–35, at 1035. See, e.g., Athenagoras, Supplique au sujet des Chrétiens et Sur la résurrection des morts, ed. and trans. Bernard Pouderon (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), 87n.5: “Fragment attribué à Sophocle…mais sans doute faux; maintes fois cités, mais uniquement chez les Pères.” August Nauck, Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926), 359 (Soph. F. 1025); Richard Kannicht and Bruno Snell, Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, 5 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971–2004), II:170 (Adespota F 618).

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Latin translation, of Athenagoras’s Embassy,75 which was published in Geneva a year earlier, in 1557. In his dedicatory preface, Gessner explains that the work was addressed to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was a supreme philosopher, as is clearly apparent from the twelve books of Meditations in Greek that he now has in his possession.76 Despite this, Gessner does not refer at all to the Meditations in the twenty-five pages of notes he appends to the text.77 Perhaps he had not yet read the treatise, even though he had a copy of it; or it may be that he simply was not struck by any parallels between the Christian apologist and the Roman emperor. As for the two contemporary commentators on the Meditations, Meric Casaubon, in his 1634 English translation of the text, does not say anything about the passage singled out by Gevartius; but this is not significant since his notes, particularly for the later books, are very sparse. The British Library, however, possesses Casaubon’s own copy of the translation, with his copious and dense notes in the margins. Although he still does not annotate the passage, he does carefully bracket it and put next to it an ὡραῖον sign,78 a monogram made up of the letters rho and omega and used by humanists to signify a particularly beautiful or fine phrase. So he was obviously taken with the passage, but we do not how he interpreted it, since there is nothing about it in his more fully annotated 1643 Greek-Latin edition either.79 Thomas Gataker, however, devoted a lengthy comment to the passage, which was crammed, as was his custom, with quotations from Latin and Greek authorities. Unlike Gevartius, he did not regard Marcus’s words as evidence of pagan monotheism, but focused instead on the phrase ἀλήθεια μία, “one truth.” 75 Athenagoras, Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. and trans. William R. Schoedel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), xii. 76 Athenagoras, Apologia pro Christianis ad imperatores Antoninum et Commodum…, ed. and trans. Conrad Gessner (Geneva: Henricus Stephanus, 1557), 80: “Antoninus Imperator, apud quem [Athenagoras] peroravit, summus erat philosophus: quod vel ex libris illis duodecim qui etiam nunc Graece ab eo conscripti περὶ τῶν εἰς ἑαυτὸν apud me extant luculenter apparet.” 77 Ibid., 131–56. 78 Marcus Aurelius, His Meditations Concerning Himself…, trans. Meric Casaubon (London: Flesher and Mynne, 1634) [British Library shelf mark G.16859], 100: “For all things throughout, there is but one and the same order; and through all things, one and the same god, the same substance and the same law. There is one common Reason, and one common Truth, that belongs unto all reasonable creatures, for neither is there save one perfection of all creatures that are of the same kinde, and partakers of the same Reason.” 79 Marcus Aurelius, De seipso et ad seipsum libri xii, ed. Casaubon, trans. Xylander, 141–43 (“In lib. vii”).

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He begins by citing a large number of classical and patristic authors—though not Athenagoras—who had endorsed the notion of the unity of truth; and, as the discussion proceeds, it becomes clear that his aim is to argue forcefully against a position that had been associated with secular Aristotelianism since the late Middle Ages, the so-called doctrine of the double truth, which holds that there can be one truth in philosophy and another in theology.80 For all the depth and breadth of his erudition, Gataker’s interpretation of the passage, like that of Gevartius, tells us more about his own times and concerns than those of Marcus Aurelius. The story of Marcus Aurelius in seventeenth-century Antwerp has, I hope, shed a narrow beam of light on the interactions among various aspects of early modern European culture: philology, philosophy, antiquarianism, theology, art, and festivals. It has also permitted us to observe at close quarters a concrete instance of the transmission and transformation of the classical tradition in the Republic of Letters. And, finally, despite its negative outcome, the episode exemplifies the spirit of scholarly cooperation that Tony Grafton has practiced and promoted throughout his career. 80

Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, 2:263–64: “Frustra igitur sunt q[u]i veritatem aliam Theologicam, aliam Philosophicam esse volunt, q[u]asi alicubi aliq[u]id verum esse possit, q[u]od alibi falsum sit. Q[u]am sententiam absurdam sane et rationi adversam, refutantem et contrariam ei demonstrantem, vide sis Casmannun…[Otho Casmannus, Marinarum quaestionum tractatio philosophica bipartita… (Frankfurt: Ex officina M. Zachariae Palthenii, 1606), 25–28]…De unica interim veritate q[u]am argutantur Scholastici, vide apud Alexandr[um] Halens[em] part. I. q. 15 m. 5 et Thom[am] Aq[uinatem] sum. part. I.q. 16. a. 6.” See also Luca Bianchi, Pour une histoire de la “double vérité” (Paris: Vrin, 2008).

chapter 43

Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, Politicians: Sources and Uses of Early Modern Jesuit Natural Theology* Brian W. Ogilvie [F]or what man, that is endued with reason, will be perswaded, that those thinges, whose making are accompanied with the fulnes of all reason, & in that respect exceedeth the wit of all art and knowledge, should notwithstanding be produced of a meere casual concourse of Atomies without reason, and without art? Since to say thus, were as much to defend, that some one most faire, sumptuous, and stately pallace were not made at all by any artificer with art, but only by a suddaine mingling and meeting together of certaine peeces of stones into this curious and artificiall forme, fallen from some huge rocke of stone, shaken asunder by an Earthquake: or that the Annales of Ennius, or Commentaries of Livy were not composed by any wryter, but by a strange and casuall concourse of letters.1 * For their comments on earlier versions of this chapter, I would like to thank participants at the comers conference Late Humanism and Political Ideology in Northern Europe, 1580– 1620, in July 2007, organized by Aysha Pollnitz and Michael Ullyot; participants in the Radcliffe Institute Exploratory Seminar on the Encyclopedic Impulse in Early Modern Europe in June 2009, organized by Christopher D. Johnson and Thomas Conley; participants and audience at the session Beyond the Argument from Design: Natural Theology in Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Thought that Ann Blair and I organized for the History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Phoenix, az, Nov. 2009, and in particular, Mordechai Feingold for his incisive comment; and the editors of the present volume. 1 Leonardus Lessius, Rawleigh his Ghost; or, A Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh, to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man) entituled, De providentia Numinis, & Animi immortalitate: written against Atheists, and Polititians of these dayes, trans. A.B. ([Saint-Omer?]: [G. Seutin?] Permissu superiorum, 1631), 28–29; Leonardus Lessius, De providentia numinis et animi immortalitate libri duo adversus Atheos & Politicos (Antwerp: Ex Officina Plantiniana, apud Viduam & Filios Io. Moreti, 1613), 21: “Quis rationis compos ea quae summa ratione constant, & artium omnium ingenia superant, sine ratione, sine arte, solo motu, & concursu fortuito atomorum producta existimet? hoc enim perinde est, ac si palatium quoddam pulcherrimum, non ab artifice aliquo summa arte constructum, sed fortuito existisse dicas, terrae motu rupem disturbante, & fragmentis saxorum casu in hanc formam dispositis: aut annales Ennii, vel Livii commentarios non a scriptoribus illis concinnatos, sed fortuito litterarum concursu perfectos.” In quotations from

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_044

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The seventeenth-century reader who encountered these lines out of context might have thought he had fallen into a time warp—a classical time warp. In De natura deorum, Cicero’s character Balbus, the Stoic philosopher, had argued that it was as unlikely that a random coincidence of atoms would make the ornate, beautiful world in which we live as that a giant bag of letters thrown on the ground would produce the Annals of Ennius.2 But how could Cicero have mentioned Livy’s histories, composed well after his death? Of course, the passage does not come from Cicero, but, in its English form, from a peculiar book titled Rawleigh his Ghost; or, A Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh, to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man) entituled, De providentia Numinis, & Animi immortalitate: written against Atheists, and Polititians of these dayes (1631). Lessius’s Latin original had issued from the Plantin press in Antwerp nearly two decades earlier, in 1613. It was popular enough to be reprinted four years later, and to be translated into English; the English translation, with a minor variation on its odd title, was in turn reprinted in 1651.3 The title page of Rawleigh his Ghost bore no printer’s name, and the end matter no colophon; the translator was identified only by the initials A.B. But the brief remark at the bottom of the title page, “Permissu superiorum. M. DC. xxxi,” suggests that the book issued from a Catholic press on the Continent, possibly in Saint-Omer, and was intended to smuggle intellectual contraband into England.4 The title page of the Latin edition made clear what the English translator dared not state: the author was Leonard Lessius “of the Society of Jesus.” And as the passage above implies, Lessius approached his subject, divine Providence, within the framework of natural theology. Although an earlier historiography tended to associate early modern natural theology with Protestantism, more early modern texts, I have modernized the use of u and v, and of i and j, and I have expanded abbreviations. Otherwise, I have retained the original orthography. 2 Cicero, M. Tulli Ciceronis Paradoxa stoicorum: Academicorum reliquiae cum Lucullo, Timaeus, De natura deorum, De divinatione, De fato (Leipzig: in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1908–11), 2.37.93: “Hic ego non mirer esse quemquam qui sibi persuadeat corpora quaedam solida atque individua vi et gravitate ferri mundumque effici ornatissimum et pulcherrimum ex eorum corporum concursione fortuita? hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intellego cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae litterarum vel aureae vel qualeslibet aliquo coiciantur, posse ex is in terram excussis annales Enni ut deinceps legi possint effici; quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna.” 3 oclc WorldCat database, consulted 30 Nov 2014. 4 See Alexandra Walsham, “‘Domme preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past & Present 168 (2000): 81–82.

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recent investigations have revealed that natural theology—or, more precisely, natural theologies—appealed broadly, across confessional divides, in early modern Europe.5 And Lessius was not alone among Jesuits. In the year following his book’s publication, the noted Jesuit theologian and controversalist Robert Bellarmine turned his own hand to natural theology, in a work published in 1615 as De ascensione mentis in Deum per scalas rerum creatarum opusculum, Englished the following year as A Most Learned and Pious Treatise, full of Divine and Humane Philosophy, framing a Ladder, Whereby Our Mindes May Ascend to God, by the Stepps of his Creatures.6 But whereas Lessius’s work was apologetic, directed against “atheists” and “politicians,” Bellarmine’s treatise drew on natural theology in the service of Christian devotion. These two works offer a window into the varied sources and uses of Jesuit natural theology. They reveal how Jesuits drew upon and reshaped a rich pagan and Christian heritage to deepen devotion to God, to shore up a wavering faith—and perhaps, even, to convert an unbeliever. Though Lessius’s apologetic work and Bellarmine’s devotional tract differed in substantial regards, they both drew eclectically on ancient sources, acknowledged or not, to affirm fundamental principles of Christian doctrine and observance. In so doing, they underscored that early modern natural theology was not a Protestant bailiwick; even the staunchest defenders of the church magisterium could see God’s hand in the work of Creation—though it might take pagan sources to show them how.

Natural Theology in the Jesuit Curriculum

The Jesuit motto “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” was reflected in the Jesuit pedagogical standards that were set down in 1599 in the Ratio studiorum Societatis Jesu. The result of nearly six decades of pedagogical development, this document set out the rules for governing and organizing the schools that the Society had taken on, in a spectacular case of mission creep, beginning with Messina

5 For an overview, see Scott Mandelbrote, “Early Modern Natural Theologies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, ed. Russell Re Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75–99. 6 Roberto Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis in Deum per scalas rerum creatarum opusculum (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Viduam & Filios Io. Moreti, 1615); Bellarmino, A Most Learned and Pious Treatise, Full of Divine and Humane Philosophy, Framing a Ladder, Whereby Our Mindes May Ascend to God, by the Stepps of his Creatures (Douai: n.p., 1616).

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in the 1540s.7 The Ratio studiorum is a prescriptive document, so we must beware of reading too much actual practice into it. But as the result of decades of practice and of critical reflection by some of the Society’s best minds, it expresses the stated goals and much of the ideology of Jesuit education.8 The principal goal of that education is knowledge of, and devotion to, God. The rules for the professor of philosophy begin, Since the humanities or natural sciences prepare the intellectual powers for theology and assist in the perfect understanding and practical application of religious truth and by virtue of their content contribute to the attainment of this goal, the teacher whose heart is set on advancing the honor and glory of God, should teach these secular subjects in a spirit which will prepare his students, and especially his Jesuit students, for the study of theology. He should above all lead them to a knowledge of their Creator.9 The first part of this passage treats philosophy as general preparation for theological study, continuing the scholastic tradition in which the arts curriculum was a prerequisite to theology. But the final clause goes further: the professor of philosophy should “rouse” (excitet) his students, especially those in the Society, to a knowledge of God. The source of this knowledge in the philosophy curriculum, in turn, was primarily natural philosophy. The Ratio called for a curriculum that resembled 7 John W. O’Malley, SJ, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1993), 200–42. 8 On Jesuit education, see Allan P. Farrell, The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio studiorum (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1938); Aldo Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986); and Judi Loach, “Revolutionary Pedagogues? How Jesuits Used Education to Change Society,” in The Jesuits ii: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, SJ, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 66–85. 9 Society of Jesus, The Jesuit ratio studiorum of 1599 (Washington, dc: Conference of Majors Superiors of Jesuits, 1970), 40; Society of Jesus, “Ratio atque institutio studiorum S. J.,” in Monumenta Germaniae paedagogica: Schulordnungen und pädagogische Miscellaneen aus den Landen deutscher Zunge, vol. 5, Ratio studiorum et Institutiones scholasticae Soc. J. 2, ed. Karl Kehrbach (Berlin: A. Hofmann & Comp., 1887), 328: “Quoniam artes vel scientiae naturales ingenia disponunt ad Theologiam et ad perfectam cognitionem et usum illius inserviunt, et per se ipsas ad eundem finem juvant, eas, qua diligentia par et, Praeceptor, in omnibus sincere honorem et gloriam Dei quaerendo, ita tractet, ut auditores suos, ac praecipue nostros, ad Theologiam praeparet, maximeque ad cognitionem excitet sui Creatoris.”

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the arts course at the late medieval universities and mendicant studia. The first year was devoted to logic. At its end, the division of the sciences should be discussed. The whole second year, in turn, should be devoted to “the physical sciences,” with lectures on Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, and the first book of On Generation. The Meteorology should be covered in the summer, and the third year should be devoted to the second book of On Generation, On the Soul, and the Metaphysics.10 Logic served as a general preparation, but the bulk of the curriculum was devoted to natural philosophy, with metaphysics as the final subject before moving to systematic theology. While teaching about causation and motion, astronomy, generation and corruption, and the faculties of the soul, the philosophy professor who followed the Ratio’s precepts would also be teaching his students what those subjects reveal about God. To be sure, the Ratio studiorum does not use the term “theologia naturalis,” which appears only in the 1832 revision.11 But it frames philosophical study in terms that contemporaries would have recognized as the central goal of natural theology. The Jesuits were far from alone in postulating such an ascent from Creation to Creator. In various forms, it was a commonplace of medieval and early modern thought, and it had received sharp formulation in the theoretical account of Jean Bodin, who in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) had recommended the study of nature as the best way to ascend from the chaos of human affairs to the knowledge of unchanging divinity.12 But, in principle at least, the Ratio made it an important organizing principle in the Society’s advanced curriculum, and disposed the Society’s teachers to associate the study of nature with natural theology. Bellarmine’s and Lessius’s treatises fit well within this framework.

Robert Bellarmine’s De ascensione mentis ad Deum

Robert Bellarmine turned his hand to natural theology in September 1614, during his annual retreat at the Jesuit novitiate of Sant’Andrea, producing his “little

10 11 12

Society of Jesus, “Ratio…studiorum,” 332–36; Society of Jesus, Jesuit ratio studiorum, 41–42. Society of Jesus, “Ratio…studiorum,” 340. Brian W. Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-theology,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005), 90–93.

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work” published in 1615, De ascensione mentis.13 Bellarmine was best known as a controversialist in the third generation of Protestant-Catholic polemics of the late sixteenth century. Born in 1541 and educated in his native Monte­ pulciano, Bellarmine studied theology first at Rome and then, from 1569, at Leuven. In 1576 he was called to the newly established chair of controversial theology at the Collegio Romano; his lectures there, first published in 1586–89, cemented his reputation as one of the ablest defenders of Catholic doctrine. Yet Bellarmine also had a reputation as a preacher, and he wrote several devotional works, including De ascensione.14 One of the most popular seventeenthcentury works in its genre, De ascensione was reprinted several times and translated into several vernaculars. Bellarmine began his work with the admonition to “seek God,” from whom human beings have been separated by sin and death; contemplation of nature was the best way to do this. Echoing the Ratio studiorum, Bodin, and Renaissance naturalists, Bellarmine claimed that “wee mortall men (as it seemeth) can finde no other Ladder whereby to ascend to God, but by the workes of God.”15 The notion that created things reflect God was a long-standing one in Christian theology, going back to the Cappadocian fathers of the fourth century.16 Alain of Lille expressed this thought in the twelfth century: “Omnis mundi creatura/Quasi liber et pictura/nobis est et speculum.”17 But the nature of that book, picture, or reflection varied. The medieval bestiary tradition, itself rooted in the late antique Physiologus and the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, associated claims about the nature of the created world with the moral 13

James Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine, Saint and Scholar (Westminster, md: Newman, 1961), 382; Arnold A. Witte, The Artful Hermitage: The Palazzetto Farnese as a CounterReformation Diaeta (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2008), 97–98. 14 Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine, and Brodrick’s two-volume biography from which it was condensed, are the best accounts in English of Bellarmine’s life. Historians of science have generally considered him primarily in the context of the Galileo controversy; see, e.g., Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible: Including a Translation of Foscarini’s Letter on the Motion of the Earth (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). 15 Bellarmine, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, sig. [A11]r; Bellarmine, De ascensione mentis, sig. [*8]r: “Scala vero ascensionis in Deum nulla videtur nobis mortalibus patere posse, quam per opera Dei.” Quotations from this work will give the contemporary English translation from A Most Learned and Pious Treatise in the text, and the Latin from De ascensione mentis in the notes. On the ascent in natural history, see Ogilvie, “Natural History.” 16 Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993). 17 Quoted in Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1953), 319.

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lessons taught by the Creator, but these associations did not involve the actual nature of God. Rather, they were another book through which God communicated with his creation; what was reflected in Alain’s mirror was human nature, not God. Bellarmine’s aims were higher: his work drew on nature to lead beyond it. “The soule of man,” he remarked, carrieth such a resemblance with God the maker thereof; that truely I knowe no way more easie for a man to ascend unto the knowledge of God, then from the consideration of his owne soule. And therefore he is unexcusable before God if he knewe not God; since from the knowledge of his owne soule, he may by Gods assistance without difficultie attain thereunto.18 On the one hand, Bellarmine (like other orthodox natural theologians) ­admitted that God must guide the contemplator; on the other hand, as the words cognoscendum and notitiam indicate, that contemplation results in knowledge. Bellarmine’s title is more than a little suggestive of the scala naturae, the “great chain of being” connecting the lowliest stone to the highest creation via insensible steps. The organization of the work reinforces this idea. The first step is man, considered as mundus minor, a microcosm. Bellarmine proceeded to the greater world as a whole, and then broke it down into its component elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Thence he ascended to the sun, moon, and stars. Leaving the corporeal world behind, he moved on to the human soul, then angels, before finally arriving at God himself, considered in terms of his essence, power, theoretical and practical wisdom, mercy, and in the last and highest place, his justice. At each step, Bellarmine’s method was to discuss the qualities or natures of whatever aspect of the natural world is at hand and then to relate them to God. This relation is sometimes that of the inferior to the superior: for example, the great beauty of created things is far less admirable than the beauty of God,

18 Bellarmino, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, 259–60; Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 127: “Porro humana anima tantam habet cum Deo conditore similitudinem, ut plane ignorem, an alia via quis possit facilius ad Deum cognoscendum ascendere, quam ex consideratione propriae animae. Itaque voluit Deus hominem esse inexcusabilem, si notitiam Dei non habeat, cum eam ipsius Dei auxilio comitante ex animae suae cognitione non difficulter haurire possit.”

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though we will not be able to perceive the latter until the world to come.19 In this sense the created world, in its variety, expresses in distributed form the perfection that God possesses as a single being: For God would be knowne to man in some sort by his creatures; and because no creature can truely represent the infinite perfection of the Creator; he hath multiplied the Creatures, and hath given to every one some goodnes & perfection, that therby may be gathered the goodnes and perfection of the Creator, who in one most simple essence includeth infinite perfections.20 Thus by examining the great magnitude and speed of the sun as it sets, one comes to appreciate the vast power of God.21 In other cases, Bellarmine argued by analogy. “The Moone,” he asserted, “hath two properties, which may helpe us to Ascend unto God. First the neerer it commeth to the Sunne, the lighter it is in the higher part next to Heaven, & the darker in the lower part next to Earth.” Just so the human soul that approaches God turns its back on the world.22 The second property is that the sun illuminates the day while the moon’s nighttime illumination varies. In like fashion, “God is as the Moone, and not as the Sunne, in the night of this world,” sometimes bringing consolation, at other times leaving the soul temporarily desolate.23 In this case nature acts not as a demonstration of God’s qualities but rather, figuratively, as a powerful physical illustration of a spiritual truth. 19 Ibid., 34–36. 20 Bellarmino, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, 49; Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 24–25: “Voluit enim Deus ab homine per creaturas suas utcumque cognosci: & quia non poterat ulla creatura infinitam Creatoris perfectionem apte repraesentare, creaturas multiplicavit, & singulis bonitatem & perfectionem aliquam tribuit, ut inde judicium fieret de bonitate & perfectione Creatoris, qui infinitas perfectiones sub unius simplicissimae essentiae perfectione complectitur.” See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, [1936] 1964), 91. 21 Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 113–14. 22 Bellarmino, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, 243; Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 119–20: “Luna duas habet proprietates, quae nobis utiles esse possunt ad ascendendum, & promerendum Deum. Prior est, quod quo magis propinquat ad solem, eo magis illustratur in parte superiore, qua respicit caelum; & obscuratur in parte inferiore, qua respicit terram.” 23 Bellarmino, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, 249–51; Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 122–23: “Deus enim non solem, sed lunam se gerit in huius saeculi nocte.”

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Such analogies are not, strictly speaking, natural theology; rather, they resemble the moral interpretations found in medieval bestiaries.24 In this devotional work Bellarmine felt no need to offer a systematic presentation.

Leonard Lessius’s De providentia numinis

Lessius’s natural theology provides an instructive contrast with Bellarmine’s. Born in 1554 in a small town near Antwerp, Lessius went in 1668 as an arts student to the University of Leuven.25 He began seeking spiritual guidance from the Jesuits at their college in Leuven, where he met Bellarmine in 1569. In 1572, after graduating first in his class, Lessius forswore a secular career, instead entering the Jesuit novitiate. After two years as a novice and seven teaching philosophy at Douai, he was sent to Rome to study theology, with Francisco Suárez, among others. From 1585 through 1600 he taught theology at the Jesuit college in Leuven, but increasingly poor health led him to give up teaching; from 1600 to his death in 1623 he turned his energies to prayer, advising confitents, and writing. During his lifetime Lessius was known as a controversialist on the doctrine of grace, as a defender of papal absolutism, and above all for two works: his Latin treatise on diet and hygiene, the Hygiasticon (1613), including a translation of Luigi Cornaro’s famous work, and his 1605 De justitia et iure caeterisque virtutibus cardinalibus libri quatuor (On justice and law, and the other cardinal virtues). The latter provided, inter alia, a vigorous theological defense of contemporary commercial practices, while the former emerged from Lessius’s attempts to shore up his frail health.26 Like Bellarmine, and around the same time, Lessius turned his hand to natural theology in De providentia numinis. Lessius offered fifteen arguments for the existence of divine Providence, most of them based on natural phenomena, and many echoing Stoic topoi. Lessius cited the general consent of mankind.

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I would like to thank one of the reviewers of this essay for this observation. Unless otherwise noted, biographical facts about Lessius are drawn from Charles van Sull, SJ, Léonard Lessius de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1554–1623 (Leuven: Éditions du Museum Lessianum, 1930). Wim Decock, “Lessius and the Breakdown of the Scholastic Paradigm,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 31, no. 1 (2009): 57–78; Gerald J. Gruman, “A History of Ideas about the Prolongation of Life: The Evolution of Prolongevity Hypotheses to 1800,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 56, no. 9 (1966): 72; Chris Gilleard, “Renaissance Treatises on ‘Successful Ageing’,” Ageing and Society 33, no. 2 (2013): 189–215.

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He pointed to the motion of the heavens; the beauty of things; the relation of parts to the whole; and the purposeful structure of the world, including the heavens, the elements, and the parts of plants and animals. He even rehearsed, in Christian form, Stoic arguments based on predictions and omens and on examples of supernatural vengeance.27 Unlike Bellarmine, Lessius emphasized teleological arguments in order to demonstrate the existence of divine Providence. The orderly motion of the heavens; the interplay of sun, wind, and rain in circulating water from the seas to dry land; the saltiness of the sea; the separation of dry land from water: all of these were created for man: For seing the ranke of things intelligible and endued with Reason, is the highest and most worthy among al things created, it followeth, that man (as being an intelligent and reasonable creature) is of a more eminent nature, degree, and order, then any other thing in the whole world. Therfore man ought to be the end of all things in the world, and they to exist, and be for his use.28 Lessius also found clear evidence of purpose in human, animal, and plant anatomy and psychology (in the Peripatetic sense of the term). The human body and the faculties of the soul are ideally suited to their ends, and they are beyond the power of any human intelligence to create: “For let the wisedome of all men and al Angels meet together, & they are not able to excogitate or invent any thing so wel disposed & directed to its end, and so sorting and agreable to the nature of the thing itselfe, as these things are.”29 The same is true of animals and plants, even down to those little beasts commonly called Insecta. … Al parts or members in them are wonderfully faire, all most exactly framed, and all most perfectly agreing and fitting to 27 Lessius, De providentia numinis; the arguments are summarized in bk. 1, Chap. 2. 28 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 84; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 63: “Homo enim omnium quae in mundo sunt, longe est praestantissimum, eminentioris naturae, eminentioris gradus & ordinis; cum classis intelligentium sit omnium suprema in rebus. Itaque debuit ipse ceterorum esse finis, & cetera ipsius causa existere, ipsique servire.” Quotations from this work will give the contemporary English translation from Rawleigh his ghost in the text, and the Latin from De providentia numinis in the notes. 29 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 101; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 75: “Conveniat omnis sapientia omnium hominum & Angelorum, nihil umquam simile, nihil adeo ordinatum & aptum ad suum finem, & naturae rei ita congruum excogitare poterunt.”

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the functions, for which they were made. Among so many kinds of which small living bodies, there is not one so base and vyle, which is not able to procure an astonishing admiration in whom behold them attentively. Yea by how much the creature is more base and abject, by so much the more the art of divyne Providence shineth in the fabricke and making of it.30 Lessius concluded from this discussion that animals and plants displayed design on two levels: each part was carefully shaped to serve its function, and each function, in turn, was part of a finely tuned whole. The only conclusion possible was that there is a most wyse, and divyne Providence, & that this Providence hath a care in the least things: seing that even in Gnats, Myse, little wormes, and the least hearbes it hath framed innumerable parts, and innumerable instruments to the complete & perfect forme of that little creature or small plant; as also it hath disposed all the functions and ends most agreing to its safety & health.31 Lessius agreed with Pliny, properly Christianized: nature’s God showed his power most in the smallest things. And since the world is made for man, he should come to know its structure, “that by such his knowledge, he may give thanks to his Creatour.” We have been given the world not only to support our life but also as an object of contemplation, “that so from the worke he may know the workeman, & in knowing him, that he may admyre, honour and reverence him, and carefully obey & keepe his lawes.”32 In this passage Lessius

30 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 100; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 82: “Omitto insectorum & vermiculorum diversissimas formas. … Omnia ad miraculum pulchra, omnia suis numeris absoluta, & ad functiones sibi congruentes instructissima. Nihil in his adeo vile, quod non summam admirationem moveat attentius consideranti. Quinimo quo quid est minus & abjectius, eo magis in eius structura divinae providentiae elucet artificium.” 31 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 113–14; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 85: “Haec ratio perspicue convincit divinam providentiam etiam ad minima pertingere, ut quae etiam in minimis, ut in culicibus, in muscis, in vermiculis, in herbulis innumeras particulas & innumera organa ad totius animaliculae vel plantulae completam formam, & omnes functiones saluti ipsius congruentes, disposuit.” 32 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 342–43; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 265: “Ab illo [homine] enim structura mundi debet cognosci, cuius causa factus est, ut hic gratias agat conditori…ut ex opere discat opificem, eiusque potentiam, sapientiam & bonitatem admiretur, laudet, veneretur, & illius legibus obtemperet.”

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takes on an almost devotional tone. But as we will see, there is a threatening undercurrent in his emphasis on obedience to divine law.

Sources for Jesuit Natural Theology

Lessius drew extensively on classical works of natural theology. He quoted Cicero’s De natura deorum and De legibus on the universal agreement among the nations that there is a God.33 Elsewhere, it is apparent that Cicero was a source, though a source that Lessius modified to suit his needs—as with his transformation of Cicero’s reference to Ennius, a reference he took without explicitly acknowledging his source.34 Lessius drew on other Stoic arguments beyond natural theology as well, including predictions, omens, and supernatural vengeance, though he replaced false pagan oracles with true Jewish and Christian prophecy. But Lessius did not limit himself to Stoic texts and natural theology. From Virgil’s Georgics he drew a passage on the diverse beauty of nature. Galen provided him with evidence of the purposeful structure of the human body. Pliny testified to the wondrous variety of shells. Hippocrates noted that the “seminal force” appears to act with intelligence as it forms the body out of its unformed matter. Oppian, Aelian, and Plutarch offered evidence of animals’ industry and cleverness.35 Lessius even cited Epicureans, though mostly to ridicule their absurd doctrines, which they promulgated only because they hated the thought of Providence.36 Most of the time, though, Lessius did not cite his sources. He offered an amusing account of how the hedgehog shakes grapes loose from the vine, then rolls over them to collect them on its spines and take them to its offspring, an account ultimately derived from the Late Antique proto-bestiary, the Physiologus.37 Such remarks, clearly derived from the literary tradition, find themselves among observations on how spiders weave and cats hunt that Lessius might have made himself. A description of chemical salts must have come from a relatively recent manual, while a geographical work would

33 Lessius, De providentia numinis, 11. 34 Ibid., 21–22. 35 Ibid., 57, 67, 80–81, 87–88, 98. 36 Ibid., 22. 37 Ibid., 97; see Physiologus, trans. Michael J. Curley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 24.

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have been his source on conditions in the Canary Islands.38 It is clear that Lessius cast his net widely. Moreover, he invented new teleological arguments, some drawing on his economic interests and experience. The diversity of human faces, for instance, exists to distinguish ourselves from one another, unlike animals, which resemble one another excessively. This allows families to recognize one another, creditors to recognize debtors, and magistrates to identify delinquents. It is “absurd” to argue that the variety of faces is due to chance, because it is so useful in preventing fraud by impersonation and encouraging justice. Moreover, that which usually happens is the result of “Providence, which hath ordained the same,” not chance, which accounts for deviations like men who do resemble one another uncannily. The diversity of voices exists as a check to faces, either in the case of uncanny resemblances or when in the dark.39 Even poverty is a work of Providence, for without it, most men would succumb to the deadly sins of sloth and gluttony.40 Lessius situated these examples, whether drawn from his eclectic sources or observed by himself or his fellow Jesuits, within a framework that may well have been shaped by the Stoicism of book 2 of Cicero’s De natura deorum. This is scarcely surprising; Cicero offered the most systematic ancient presentation of the Stoic argument from design, an argument that had been adapted by Christian theologians in the third and fourth centuries.41 But Lessius did not follow Cicero’s order of presentation, nor did he always choose the same examples. Instead, he amplified significantly on the proofs from the beauty of nature and its purposeful structure, multiplying examples far beyond what Cicero had provided. De natura deorum was a resource, not a model, for De providentia numinis. It is even more difficult to identify the sources of Bellarmine’s devotional natural theology in De ascensione. Bellarmine cited only scriptural and patristic sources, especially Augustine. Nearly every page contains a quotation from the Old or New Testament. Bellarmine situated his scriptural florilegium in the general framework of Peripatetic natural philosophy tinged with Platonism: after 38 Lessius, De providentia numinis, 59, 62. 39 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, 145–49; Lessius, De providentia numinis, 109–12. 40 Lessius, De providentia numinis, 113–14. 41 For an overview, see Jacqueline Lagrée, La religion naturelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991); for a more nuanced view, Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). On the Christianization of natural theology, see Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture.

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considering the human soul, the human body, and the macrocosm as a whole (the point at which universal harmony enters his account), he proceeded from the base element of earth through water, air, and fire and thence to the quintessence of the moon, sun, and stars. At that point he left natural theology behind and entered the realm of metaphysics and systematic theology, proceeding from angels to God’s qualities of mercy, wisdom, omnipotence, and justice, finally arriving at his essence.42 Since Bellarmine composed the work during a summer spiritual retreat, it is not surprising that his natural theology rests primarily on commonplaces illustrated by scripture: his purpose was to inspire his readers, not persuade them. Taken together, Lessius’s and Bellarmine’s natural theologies reveal how an eclectic range of sources—Christian scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, bestiaries, encyclopedias, and several different ancient philosophical  traditions—could all provide material for natural theology. Moreover, Lessius’s lengthy chapters on how the forms of plants and animals related to their purposes, and on the apparent (but illusory) intelligence of animals, including even insects, reveal an attention that goes well beyond his Stoic sources in expatiating on the beauty, variety, and apparent purpose of nature. While Lessius was not a physico-theologian in the late seventeenth-century mold, his De providentia points in that direction, showing how a delight in  nature’s contrivances could find a place even in an austere work of apologetics.43

Philosophical Sects, Atheists, and Politicians

It should not be surprising that Lessius and Bellarmine drew eclectically on a range of Christian and classical sources. They had both been educated within an Aristotelian framework much like that set out in the Ratio studiorum. The Ratio’s philosophical curriculum was explicitly and militantly Peripatetic. The philosophy teacher was warned not to deviate from Aristotle’s doctrine on any important question, unless it was opposed to either the common teachings of

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The steps are figured, though rather oddly as two distinct ladders, on the title page of Roberto Bellarmino, Iacob’s Ladder: Consisting of Fifteene Degrees or Ascents to the Knowledge of God by the Consideration of His Creatures and Attributes, trans. H. I. (London: Printed for Henry Seile, 1638), a later translation of De ascensione mentis. I thank Mordechai Feingold for emphasizing this aspect of Lessius’s work in a comment on an earlier version of this essay.

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the schools or to Christian faith. He was to be cautious in using commentators on Aristotle whose views were opposed to Christianity, especially Averroës. And “he shall not attach himself or his students to any philosophical sect, such as the Averroists, the Alexandrists, and the like, and he should not cloak over their errors or those of similar sects, but should sharply question and minimize their authority because of these errors.”44 While the Stoics were not mentioned by name, they were in ill repute in Jesuit circles. The Jesuit Martin Delrio was deeply interested in Latin tragedy, a staple of Jesuit education, and was instrumental in shaping a Neostoic interpretation of Seneca’s tragedies.45 But Delrio saw the commentator’s task as “to pour into and mingle with [the Stoics’] cups a draught of panacaea, to point out the deadly herbs and draw attention to the scorpion hiding in the leaves.”46 Lessius himself launched a violent attack on the Stoic doctrine of virtue in the second book of De providentia.47 It is thus rather peculiar that one of the most influential modern students of Lessius’s natural theology, Michael Buckley, has insisted on its Stoic character.48 Though Lessius, as a Catholic theologian, diverged from the Stoics in distinguishing between God and the world, nonetheless, “in question, interest, evidence, and argument, Balbus and Lessius are virtually one.”49 In terms of what really matters, Buckley argues, Lessius ignored a millennium and a half of Christian theology, in order to respond to atheists on purely philosophical grounds. And Buckley thinks this was a dreadful mistake: by turning to ­ philosophy, Lessius, Marin Mersenne, and other orthodox Catholics lost the battle with atheism in advance because they set aside the 44

Society of Jesus, Ratio studiorum of 1599, 40; Society of Jesus, “Ratio…studiorum,” 328–30: “Nulli sectae, ut Averroistarum, Alexandraeorum et similium, vel se vel suos addicat; nec Averrois aut Alexandri aut caeterorum errata dissimulet, sed inde acrius deprimat eorum auctoritatem.” 45 On Delrio, see Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the CounterReformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 46 Roland Mayer, “Personata stoa: Neostoicism and Senecan Tragedy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 151–74, at 160. 47 Lessius, De providentia numinis, 265ff. 48 Michael J. Buckley, SJ, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1987), 42–55; Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2004), 30–33. On Buckley’s influence, see, e.g., Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 152–53; and Denis Edwards, “Catholic Perspectives on Natural Theology,” in Manning, Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, 182–84. 49 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 50.

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potent weapons of Christology in favor of feeble, inadequate pagan arms.50 Buckley acknowledges that Lessius cites miracles, including those of Christ, as part of his argument, but that is done “almost in passing,” and within a Stoic framework.51 It is true that Lessius pays little attention to Christ in this work. But that is because his chief emphasis is not on salvation but on its opposite. His goal in De providentia was not to attain Stoic ataraxia, a state of imperturbability in which irrational fear of the gods had been calmed. Rather, his God is a vengeful God. The prospect of divine vengeance appears early in his treatise. In the preface, Lessius claimed that belief in Providence and the soul’s immortality gives “reason to be most anxious, fearfull and sollicitous, least by our wicked life, and Conversation our soule after death may incurre most dreadfull and eternall torments.”52 A proper understanding of Providence gives one the most unStoic result of fear and trembling before the divine majesty. Indeed, just as subjects who deny the authority of an earthly king have committed lese majesty, an atheist who denies God’s sovereignty “is guilty of divine lese majesty” and can expect the appropriate punishment.53 Hence Lessius’s reliance on philosophical arguments. He wished to convince his reader not to be misled by the “atheists” and “politicians” who would deny divine Providence using philosophical arguments; his apologetic aim, therefore, was to meet them on their own turf and demonstrate that, even if they denied Providence because they found it repugnant, their own reason would force them to admit that they were wrong. Only then could they be reconciled with the church and come to a knowledge of Christ. And, rather alarmingly, Lessius claimed that atheism had conquered vast territories. In dedicating De providentia numinis to Franciscus van der Burch, bishop of Ghent, Lessius asserted that the world is infested with many dissensions in religion,

50 Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God, 30–33; see the perceptive critique in James E. Force, “The Origins of Modern Atheism,” review of At the Origins of Modern Atheism, by Michael J. Buckley, Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (1989): 153. 51 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 50. 52 Lessius, Rawleigh his ghost, sig. [*6]v–[*8]v; Lessius, De providentia numinis, sig. [*6]v– [*8]v: “merito convenit nos esse anxios, ne post hanc vitam immortalis anima in graves & immortales poenas incurrat.” 53 Lessius, De providentia numinis, sig. [*8r]: “estque reus laesae Maiestatis divinae.” Lessius developed this theme further in his treatise De perfectionibus moribusque divinis, in Leonardus Lessius, Opuscula varia in unum corpus redacta (Lyon: Sumpt. Hieronymi Delagarde, sub signo Spei, 1651), 43–72.

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but none is greater in number of adherents, in geographical extent, or in the variety of states it infests than the sect of atheists, that is, those who deny the providence of God and the immorality of the soul, or at least doubt them. It flourishes in Japan, China, India, Tartary, and other barbarous lands; it flourishes among the Mahometans, many of whom attribute everything to fate, as Chalcondilas and others write; it flourishes among heretics, many of whom seem to wholly doubt all religion. … Finally it even flourishes among many who call themselves Catholics, and think that they’re better than all the theologians, whose leader these days is Niccolò Machiavelli.54 The global missionary work of Lessius’s order only increased his worries about the progress of atheism.55 And if he did not name any living atheists, he explained, it was because laws against atheism forced them to discretion.

Conclusion: Natural Theology and the Uses of Antiquity

Lessius’s claims about atheism were alarmist. He was an apologist, not a historian or ethnographer of godlessness; it was in his interest to magnify the scope of the problem in order to convey how urgent was the need to oppose it. Both atheists who denied Providence and the “politicians” who would exclude religious concerns from reasons of state posed, in his mind, a serious threat to the Christian polity. This sense of urgency, as well as what I think was a genuine fascination with nature’s marvels, led him to multiply examples from a range

54 Lessius, De providentia numinis, sig. *2r–3r: “sed nulla ex his vel hominum multitudine, vel locorum amplitudine, vel Regnorum & Provinciarum diversitate numerosior, quam secta ἀθεότητος, hoc est, eorum qui Numinis providentiam & animorum immortalitatem tollunt, vel certe de his ambigunt. Viget haec apud Iaponios, Sinas, Indos, Tartaros, aliasque barbaras nationes: viget apud Mahumetanos, quorum plerique omnia fato tribuunt, ut Chalcondilas & alii auctores scribunt: viget & apud haereticos, quorum plurimi de toto Religionis negotio dubutant. … Denique viget enim haec secta inter multos qui Catholici audire volunt, & plus se omnibus Theologis sapere existimant: quorum Dux hoc tempore Nicolaus Macchiavellus.” The translation is mine. Buckley claims that Lessius named no modern atheists at all, but he may not have read this dedication, since it was omitted from both the 1631 English translation and the posthumous Latin editions of De providentia. 55 See Anthony Grafton, “Entrepreneurs of the Soul, Impresarios of Learning: The Jesuits,” in Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 160–75.

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of sources as evidence for what he considered his strongest argument, the harmony between the structures found in nature and the ends that they served. It is difficult to assess Lessius’s influence on this strand of natural theology, a strand that would take on increasing importance in the physico-theology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.56 There are clear similarities between Lessius’s examples and those of John Ray and William Derham. But once the Panglossian principle of seeking design everywhere had been elaborated, examples could be multiplied nearly to infinity. As William Bouwsma observed about Renaissance Stoicism, early modern natural theology was often a set of attitudes, not a clearly defined tradition.57 Still, someone seeking a handy set of arguments in favor of providential design could easily gather them from Lessius. Perhaps this is why the English translation was reprinted during the Interregnum and sold openly, not as a clandestine import from the Continent but, as the title page proclaimed, by “John Holden…at his shop at the Anchor in the New-Exchange.” In its very reliance on philosophical arguments, Lessius’s providential natural theology could easily cross confessional boundaries.58 Lessius reveals one fashion in which ancient sources could be creatively appropriated to serve contemporary needs. He employed pagan and Christian antiquity in the service of Baroque apologetics. But as Bellarmine’s De ascentione shows, natural theology could also be written in a devotional mode. Bellarmine did not wish to prove that God existed and that he was omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent. Rather, he hoped to guide the believer into a deeper knowledge of God by explaining the marks of his presence in the world. While Lessius’s apology had an undercurrent of anxiety that occasionally welled to the surface, Bellarmine confidently addressed fellow seekers. Both offered comfort, but in very different fashions.

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On physico-theology, see inter alia Scott Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context 20, no. 3 (2007): 451–80; and Brian W. Ogilvie, “Insects in John Ray’s Natural History and Natural Theology,” in Zoology in Early Modern Culture: Intersections of Science, Theology, Philology, and Political and Religious Education, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 234–60. William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 22–23. On providentialism in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), though the providentialism she discusses is principally concerned with calamities as signs of divine wrath.

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And while Lessius multiplied examples, Bellarmine set limits on human knowledge. God is the source of all knowledge to which the soul aspires, but the Christian should not desire too much: “[M]y soule seek not after higher things than beseemeth thee.” Granted, echoing Aristotle, “every man doth naturally desire knowledge,” even if carnal sins too often distract the soul from this desire, but only in the life to come will that desire be wholly fulfilled.59 In this world, we should be satisfied with partial knowledge, as long as it points us in the direction of the illumination that will finally come, at least for the elect, from the divine presence. In his spiritual retreat, the aged Italian cardinal urged prayer and patience. Threatened by civil and religious strife, atheism, and perhaps even toleration, the sickly Netherlandish theologian resorted to reason, even pagan reason, as a bulwark. Little did he know what fruit would grow from that tree.

59 Bellarmino, Most Learned and Pious Treatise, 144–45, 146; Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis, 72: “Noli nunc altiora, quam te deceat, quaerere”; 73: “Certe omnis homo naturaliter scire desiderat.”

chapter 44

Henry Savile Reads His Euclid Robert Goulding Henry Savile began his long mathematical career in 1570, at the age of twentyone, with a remarkable series of lectures on Ptolemy’s Almagest. He prefaced these “ordinary lectures” (the text of which is extant in full)1 with a long prologue, in which he surveyed each of the mathematical arts, and traced the history of the discipline from the Garden of Eden to Ptolemy. In his lecture devoted to the art of geometry, Savile revealed to his students the course of his own mathematical development. As a young, philosophically minded student, he told them, he was urged to the study of mathematics by a friend, or perhaps by the internal prompting of his Platonic daemon: I confess that I set about my studies with a delight in the multiplicity of things. For who would not be delighted by so noble, so pleasing, so agreeable a variety of the most pleasant of things? I was greatly moved by the certain and established passages from first principles to intermediate results, and from them to advanced theorems, set out in a straightforward order of progression. It was pleasant to embark on triangles. Investigations of quadrilaterals pleased me greatly. I delighted first to describe circles, and then to unite them with the aforementioned figures. Then, before I had grown tired of circles, the sweet harmony of proportion seized me, in which I should always wish to linger—but I did not wish to die having 1 I am grateful to Mordechai Feingold for the opportunity to present a version of part of this article at the conference Scholarship, Science, and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) and Henry Savile (1549–1622), in July 2014. And I owe a long debt of gratitude to Tony Grafton, who first introduced me to Henry Savile, and, in a conversation outside the Warburg Institute reading room, where I was completing my ma, suggested there could be a PhD thesis lurking in his manuscripts. mss Savile 29, 31, and 32, Bodleian Library, Oxford. ms Savile 30 is entered in the Bodleian catalog as part of Savile’s lectures, but is in fact by his student John Chamber (see below). On the nature of Savile’s lectures, see Robert Goulding, “Testimonia Humanitatis: The Early Lectures of Henry Savile,” in Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Francis AmesLewis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 125–45; Goulding, Defending Hypatia: Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History, Archimedes (New York: Springer, 2010), Chap. 4.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_045

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mastered so little of geometry. And so, not irrationally, I applied myself to irrationals. Why go on? I retired exhausted. I had scarcely made my first acquaintance with stereometry when I bade farewell to geometry.2 The impression Savile gave to his students was one of a solitary learner: perhaps under the guidance of his unnamed “friend,” but nevertheless making his own way through the study of mathematics, with much joy and success, though crowned ultimately with failure. But, as his listeners may have recognized, Savile’s journey was not through the abstract science of mathematics itself, but through a particular book: Euclid’s Elements. He began with the first principles, and the very shape of the Elements: a “straightforward order of progression” from the simple to the more complex. From triangles (bk. 1) and quadrilaterals (2), he moved to circles (3) and the inscription and circumscription of figures within them (4). After studying proportion (5–6), he leaped over the three arithmetical books into the notoriously difficult tenth book on irrational magnitudes, which (according to this account) finally defeated him. Savile continued his account, saying that he now turned his attention to astronomy, or rather, to the book that contained astronomy, Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy, he related, immediately recognized him as a mere beginner in geometry, and sent him away to continue his mathematical education. So Savile resumed his journey through the Elements, mastering the three books on solid geometry, and finding them a sheer delight. He completed his study of threedimensional geometry with the more advanced texts of Archimedes, and Apollonius’s Conics. Now, at last, he might have been able to return to Ptolemy—though he adds that, in fact, certain men to whom he will always be grateful urged him to complete his mathematical education with arithmetic, and with other works of Archimedes, particularly his On the Sphere and the Cylinder. Now, it is certainly possible that Savile was simply giving a factual account of how he learned mathematics. On the other hand, there is something a little odd about his account. Why should Ptolemy’s Almagest have been too difficult 2 ms Savile 29, fol. 11v: “Non nego me rerum multiplicitate delectatum ad discendum descendisse. Quem enim non delectaret tam illustris, tam grata, tam iucunda rerum suavissimarum varietas? Me certe vehementer affecit certas esse et statas vices a primis a media, a mediis ad ultima directo quodam ordine proficiscendi. Iuvit in triangulis pedem ponere. De quadrilateris disceptationes mire placebant. Delectabat iam versasse circulos, iam ad praedicta comparasse. Nondum de circulis defessum excepit suavissimus proportionum concentus, in quibus morari semper vellem nisi mori parum geometer noluissem. Itaque irrationalia non sine ratione attigi. Quid multa? Fatigatus discessi. Stereometriam demum vix a primo limine salutans, geometriae vale dixi.”

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for him when he first turned to it, after his defeat by the tenth book of the Elements? The plane geometry of the first six books should have been sufficient grounding for astronomy. He certainly had no need of the tenth book, nor of the three-dimensional geometry of the last three books—at least, nothing beyond the general ability to visualize in three dimensions. In fact, when he came to write his lectures Savile imagined his recent education as a mathematician, and his journey through the Elements, in the light of two other accounts of mathematical education that were much on his mind: the ideal education that Plato presented in the Republic, and the failed mathematical education (as Savile saw it) of his great rival, Peter Ramus. Savile opened his lecture on geometry by directing his students to the seventh book of the Republic, and reminding them of the important place that geometry held in the education of the guardians, beginning with its military uses.3 Immediately after the passage Savile cited, Plato had Socrates and Glaucon discuss how the education of the guardian must progress from arithmetic to plane geometry and thence to astronomy, the study of “solid bodies in motion.” Scarcely had they begun to consider this last subject, however, when Socrates called Glaucon to a halt: “… you must go back a bit, as we made a wrong choice of subject to put next to geometry. … We proceeded straight from plane geometry to solid bodies in motion without considering solid bodies first on their own. The right thing is to proceed from second dimension to third, which brings us, I suppose, to cubes and other three-dimensional figures.”4 They regretted that this science barely existed, so that Socrates urged “the whole city” to devote itself to the discovery of three-dimensional geometry, as a preparation for astronomy—to which, with that caveat in mind, they now returned. Savile’s recollection of his mathematical education, in other words, mirrored quite precisely the order of study as it was set out in the Republic: from plane geometry, to a false step into astronomy; then the study of threedimensional bodies, before a return to astronomy. Savile presented himself— or perhaps even quite unconsciously imagined himself—as an ideally Platonic student of mathematics, a self-image that fits in perfectly with the high Platonic tone overall of Savile’s lectures on mathematics. Savile’s other model, this time a negative model, was Peter Ramus, the mostly unmentioned presence throughout the Ptolemy lectures. In the French philosopher’s frequently printed and widely read intellectual autobiography, his Oratio de professione sua of 1563, Ramus wrote of his own experience with the Elements, a work that he had often praised in his early writings on logic, but 3 Ibid., fol. 11. 4 Plato, Republic 528A–B.

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apparently had not studied with much care before that point. He recalled that he had worked through the entire Elements, book by book, but had pored over one proposition in the tenth book for hours to no avail, until he developed a cramp in his neck. At that, he threw away his geometrical tools and “burst out in rage against mathematics, because it tortures so cruelly those who love it and are eager for it.”5 Ramus did eventually return to the Elements and master it, but now with the intention of taking the work apart and reassembling it as his own practical Geometry, organized according to his own logical and methodological principles. The parallels to Savile’s account are, once again, quite striking. Both men were defeated by the tenth book, and abandoned the Elements. But while Ramus returned to the work with hostile intent, reengaging with Euclid only in order to overcome him, Savile, with more humility, submitted himself to the discipline of the geometer, and emerged as an accomplished Euclidean and Platonic mathematician—or, at least, so he would have his students believe. Savile was a bookish mathematician. His apprenticeship as a mathematician had consisted in a struggle with books, and with one book, the Elements, above all others. Even his own account of how he read that book was colored by his reading of other journeys through the art of geometry. Astronomy, too, was a matter of careful reading. In these astronomical lectures, Savile said very little about the appearance of the heavens, or about methods of observations. He aimed, instead, to equip his students to read the Almagest, and did so with great sophistication. Euclid was a constant presence throughout Savile’s mathematical life, from these early studies to his establishment of the Savilian Professorship of Geometry a half-century later. Moreover, a particular copy of Euclid’s text was the focus of Savile’s study; into its margins he engrafted his own interpretation of the text, and using that composite text he taught geometry within Merton College. By means of the statutes for his mathematical chairs, Savile tried to retain a central place for the study of the Elements in the mathematical life of Oxford University as a whole. Savile’s professor, as his first task, was to teach the Elements (followed by Apollonius and Archimedes), and to preserve in the communal library a record of his pedagogy.6 And, in fact, his successors in the Savilian Chair through the seventeenth century not only continued his work on the text of Euclid, but very often used his actual copy of Euclid and his marginal 5 Petrus Ramus, Scholae in liberales artes (Basel, 1569), col. 1109: “indignatusque mathematis succensui, quod sui studiosos et amatores tam acerbe cruciarent.” 6 Savile’s statutes are at Strickland Gibson, Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 528–40.

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notes as a starting point for their own researches, copying into their own Euclids, for their own and their successors’ edification, both their own pedagogy and Savile’s. Savile’s style of mathematics, in which philological and calculational skill were inseparable, imparted a definite character to later Oxford mathematics, transmitted in his legacies both of the statutes and of the books he left for his professors’ private library, including his annotated Euclid. The story of that book begins in 1568, two years before he delivered his lectures on Ptolemy, when Savile was a nineteen-year-old ma student. He had, by that point, very likely already attended ordinary lectures on geometry. He had also probably heard astronomical lectures on Johannes de Sacrobosco’s sphere, and had not been impressed by them—the university lectures are a frequent target of criticism in Savile’s own lectures. But he continued to read, far beyond the interest or abilities of most Oxford undergraduates. His first major work was to translate the Almagest, apparently as a kind of baptism by fire into the study of mathematics. He filled three notebooks with his own careful Latin translation of Ptolemy’s text, supplementing the Almagest with translations of the commentaries by Theon and Nicholas Cabasilas.7 Savile finished this vast task with obvious relief. At the end of his translation, he scribbled merry Latin tags: “It’s known to all, I think, how very much I like to drink”; “God bless with his light, the one who this volume did write”; and “It’s done, O may it all be done, and now let’s go and have some fun.”8 Overcoming these carnival urges, Savile was soon busy again, filling the blank pages following the end of the Latin text. Over the next several months, he compiled a list of auctores mathematici, recording biographical and bibliographical information for nearly seven hundred mathematicians of all periods and cultures. Some are authors that were actually in Savile’s library; others were writers whose books he hoped to find.9 And one of the longer entries was devoted to Euclid.10 7

8 9

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mss Savile 26–28, Bodleian Library. From the dates Savile wrote at various places in the translation, it seems that the whole translation, of the Almagest and its commentaries, was written in the last three months of 1568. All found on the flyleaf of ms Savile 28, in Savile’s hand: “omnibus est notum quod multum diligo potum”; “adsit ei lumen qui scripsit tale volumen”; “explicit, expliceat, ludere scriptor eat.” Savile completed the Almagest translation by the end of 1568, so he must have begun the auctores mathematici after that, since they follow on immediately from the end of the translation. He drew on his bibliographical researches frequently in the 1570 lectures. Thus the auctores mathematici must have been compiled between Jan. 1569 and 10 Oct. 1570, the date of the first Ptolemy lecture. ms Savile 28, fol. *8. (That is, on fol. 8 of the auctores mathematici, which Savile has marked with a new series of folio numbers, starting with fol. *1 on fol. 29 of the physical volume).

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Savile wrote his entry for Euclid drawing almost entirely on Conrad Gesner’s 1545 Bibliotheca universalis, a convenient compendium of the ancient sources, such as they were, on the life of Euclid, supplemented with information from Ramus’s 1567 Prooemium mathematicum for news of more recent work on Euclid. He also had read the prefatory material to the Latin translation by Bartolomeo Zamberti, and to the editio princeps of the Greek text of Euclid and of Proclus’s commentary on the first book by Simon Grynaeus.11 From these various sources, he picked up the mishmash of facts and pseudo-facts about the geometer that circulated through the sixteenth century. For example, most Renaissance scholars assumed that the author of the Elements was to be identified with a contemporary of Plato, the Socratic philosopher Euclid of Megara, who lived more than a century earlier—a misconception encouraged by the misleading Vita Euclidis prepended to Zamberti’s edition of Euclid. Gesner was no exception, simply conflating Euclid the geometer with Euclid of Megara. In his lectures, Savile at first repeated the conventional account he had recorded in his notes, before hesitantly suggesting that conventional wisdom might be incorrect, and that Euclid in fact lived much later than most of his contemporaries believed.12 At about the same time that he was puzzling out the identity of Euclid, Savile was also studying Euclid’s text with great care, together with Proclus’s commentary on the first book (which also provided an introduction to the history and philosophy of mathematics). His copy of these books is extant in the Bodleian Library, in the 1533 editio princeps, covered on almost every page with his annotations; this is the very book through which he made his journey to mathematical expertise.13 Examining the annotations, one comes away impressed by Savile’s erudition, but also confirmed in the assessment of Savile 11 Euclid, Euclidis Megarensis philosophi platonici mathematicarum disciplinarum Janitoris… Elementorum libros xiij habent, ed. and trans. Bartolomeo Zamberti (Venice, 1505); Euclid, Stoicheiôn bibl. 15 ek tôn Theonos Sunousiôn; Eis tou autou to prôton Exegematôn Proklou bibl. 4; Adiecta praefatiuncula in qua de disciplinis mathematicis nonnihil, ed. Simon Grynaeus (Basel, 1533). 12 On the confusion between the two Euclids, and its eventual resolution (in part by Savile, but not without help from Ramus), see Goulding, Defending Hypatia, Chap. 5. 13 Savile W. 9, Bodleian Library, henceforth cited as Savile’s Euclid and Savile’s Proclus; the Euclid and Proclus are paginated separately. There are two principal indications that the volume should be dated to an early period in Savile’s career. First, the nature of some of the notes in many places (particularly the summary notes in the margin of Proclus, and minor textual notes in Euclid) are those of a first-time reader of the text. And secondly, on one subject about which Savile would become passionate in the early 1580s—apparent problems in the Euclidean theory of proportion—there are no notes at all. The contemporaneity with the

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as a bookish mathematician. Here, the text is the thing; there are very few places indeed in which Savile makes a new, properly mathematical observation. Many of his notes on Proclus, in particular, are devoted to repairing the text. Grynaeus’s edition of both Euclid and Proclus—but Proclus in particular— was terrible, sometimes omitting entire pages of the Greek text, almost all of which Savile restored from Francesco Barozzi’s excellent Latin version of the text.14 To give but one of the innumerable examples of this type of annotation, at the top of one page in the Proclus edition, Savile noted a “huge lacuna” in Grynaeus’s text, and referred to three pages of Barozzi’s edition for the missing material. Indeed, there is a very large gap here (nearly four pages in Morrow’s English translation), including (as Savile noted in the margin) Proclus’s commentary on Euclid’s definition of a point.15 In his annotations to Proclus, Savile, for the most part, did little more than summarize and emend the text. He carefully copied into the margins Proclus’s mathematical observations on Euclid, including the geometrical constructions that extended and completed the reasoning of the first book of the Elements. In the section of Proclus’s commentary devoted to the history of mathematics, he wrote very neatly in the margin the names of all the mathematicians Proclus mentioned, and then copied them into his notebook of auctores mathematici.16 He also noted in the margin, again quite faithfully, Proclus’s theory of the mathematical imagination, and clearly grasped both the theory and how it fit into Proclus’s Platonic metaphysics (which he also patiently summarized).17 Like other readers of his time, however, Savile did not seem to be particularly

14

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auctores mathematici can be seen from the lists of mathematicians copied directly from his notes in the margin of Proclus to the auctores (see below). On Grynaeus and Barozzi, see Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, ed. and trans. G.R. Morrow (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1992), lxviii. Neither of the copies of Proclus, In primum Euclydis elementorum librum commentariorum…libri iv, ed. and trans. Francesco Barozzi (Padua, 1560), that are in the Savile collection contain any annotations by Savile. Savile W. 15 (2) is completely blank; Savile W. 17 originally belonged to John Dee, and contains a few of his annotations. Savile’s Proclus, p. 24: “ab illis verbis…ingens est lacuna in hoc codice, trium et amplius capitum; quae vide in latina Barocii versione p. 48 et sequentibus 49 et 50.” When he finds lacunae, Savile never inserts any of the missing Greek of Proclus’s commentary from some other manuscript source; it seems that he had at hand only Grynaeus’s Greek text and Barozzi’s translation. Here he notes only “hic inserenda definitio prima puncti, σημεῖον, οὗ μέρος οὐδέν,” where the Greek is merely a quotation from the Elements itself. The list of names at p. 19 of Savile’s Proclus, for example—“Aegyptii. Phoenices. Thales. Ameristus. Pythagoras…”— reappears exactly on fols. *18–20 of the auctores mathematici. (Savile omitted only those names, such as Archytas, that had already appeared in his list.) Savile’s Proclus, pp. 14–15, for instance.

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struck by Proclus’s theory, and made no further reference to the Platonist’s philosophy of mathematics in his subsequent writings, not even to note its distinction from the prevalent Aristotelian theory of mathematical objects as abstractions.18 There were moments in his reading of Proclus, however, where Savile moved entirely beyond the text, making important connections with his other reading. The most notable occurs alongside a passage where Proclus explained that it was possible to generate uniform linear motion from several other linear motions. Following his source, Geminus, Proclus went on to explain that, while the result of several motions could sometimes give rise to a “mixed” line (like the cylindrical helix), one could also compound similar, simple motions to produce another motion, also simple and similar to its generators. Geminus’s example was that of the diagonal of a square, generated by simple linear motions along perpendicular sides of the square. In the margin, Savile’s mind leapt immediately to a striking counterexample, in which a simple motion was generated from two entirely dissimilar ones: “A straight line is generated out of several motions, but similar ones. [But] see the marvelous generation of a straight line in Copernicus iii.4.” Savile had in mind the so-called Tusi couple, an ingeniously coupled pair of circles by means of which Copernicus was able to introduce a linear movement into the heavens, where only uniform circular motions were permitted.19 But the real value of Proclus to Savile emerges when one examines his annotations to the text of Euclid. Savile’s reading of the first book was mediated through Proclus’s commentary, large extracts from which he copied into the margins of the Elements. There he carried on a conversation among Euclid, Proclus, and the authors Proclus himself cited, occasionally interjecting his own opinion or judgment. Consider, to take one of the richer problems treated in this first book, the problem of parallels. In his final published writings on Euclid, the lectures with which he inaugurated his professorships in 1620, Savile would identify the fifth or “parallel postulate” of the Elements as one of 18

19

For the late recognition of Proclus’s philosophy of mathematics, see Guy Claessens, “Imagination as Self-Knowledge: Kepler on Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements,” Early Science and Medicine 16, no. 3 (2011): 179–99. Even Proclus’s own skilled translator, Francesco Barozzi, “explained” Proclus’s philosophy of mathematics as identical to Aristotle’s. Savile’s Proclus, p. 29: “Recta ex pluribus creata motionibus, ἀλλ’ ὁμοίων. vide mirabilem generationem rectae cap. 4o lib. 3i apud Copernicum.” The passage of Proclus is found at Proclus, Commentary, 86. The Tusi couple indeed occurs at the place Savile noted in Copernicus’s book: Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi (Nuremberg, 1543), fol. 67.

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only two flaws on the body of the Elements. This postulate was (he concluded there) merely the converse of the seventeenth proposition of the first book; it was a theorem, not a first principle, and thus required a demonstration; and he averred that Proclus had, in fact, demonstrated it satisfactorily. Every part of Savile’s conclusions can be found in his annotations to the Elements made a half a century earlier, in conversation with Proclus.20 Above the parallel postulate in his copy of the Elements, Savile related Proclus’s opinion that the tenth and eleventh axioms were not in fact first principles of geometry, but demonstrable theorems. In Savile’s edition of the Elements (as in many medieval and early modern versions) the fourth and fifth postulates actually appeared as the tenth and eleventh axioms; and Savile continued his annotation in order to clarify just which of the axioms in his list were accepted by Proclus, and to make some notes on the distinction between an axiom and a postulate.21 In the margin he explained (again summarizing Proclus) why the parallel postulate could be considered the converse of the seventeenth proposition, and referred to the demonstrations of the fifth postulate 20

21

Henry Savile, Praelectiones tresdecim in principium Elementorum Euclidis Oxonii habitae M.DC.xx (Oxford, 1621), 140. The second flaw concerned the definition of the compounding of ratios, in books 5 and 6 of the Elements. As noted above, Savile became interested in this problem only in the early 1580s, and wrote a treatise on it (an edition of which is forthcoming in a volume of essays devoted to Savile). There are no annotations in his Euclid next to the definitions and propositions he would identify as problematic, or even spurious, in his treatise on the subject—one of the most evident signs that Savile annotated this volume early in his mathematical career. John Wallis revisited Savile and his “two flaws” in his treatise on the parallel postulate (John Wallis, Opera Mathematica, vol. 2 [Oxford, 1699], 665–78); Wallis’s reference to Savile’s “duo naevi” inspired Girolamo Saccheri’s Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus, sive conatus geometricus quo stabiliuntur prima ipsa universae geometriae principia (Milan, 1733), and hence, ultimately, the development of non-Euclidean geometry. On Saccheri’s sources (including Wallis and Savile), see Girolamo Saccheri, Euclide vendicato da ogni neo, ed. and trans. Vincenzo de Risi, vol. 1, Mathematica italiana (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2011), x–xi. Savile’s Euclid, p. 3: “10m et 11m axiomata non sunt, sed demonstrabiles propositiones. Reperiuntur inter αἰτήματα in nonnullis exemplaribus, verum si usquam, hic certe collocanda, ex sententia Gemini. 12m a iunioribus [written under this: ὃ καὶ νῦν τινὲς ὡς ἀξίωμα προσγράφουσι] additur, non ab Euclide numeratum. Proclus.” And, beneath this: “Proclus, [id est], solum agnoscit 1, 2, 3, 8, 9.” The five “axioms” that Proclus recognized are the five “common notions” in the modern text of the Elements. Proclus rejects the “twelfth axiom” (that two straight lines cannot enclose a space) at Commentary, 143–44. Finally, Geminus distinguishes between axioms and postulates by the criterion that axioms assert something, postulates construct something—and on those grounds, Savile is correct that the fourth and fifth postulates are in fact axioms. See ibid., 142.

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by Ptolemy and Proclus himself preserved in Proclus’s Commentary. The fact that the converse of the fifth postulate was itself a theorem was Proclus’s principal reason for excluding it from the first principles: “Is it not ridiculous that theorems whose converses are demonstrable should be ranged among the indemonstrables?”22 In the context of his commentary on the postulate, Proclus actually said little about parallels, or even about the postulate itself. He reserved his most important observations for the series of propositions concerning parallels, starting at proposition 27, and here we also find Savile’s primary annotations on the subject. The first problem Proclus (and Savile) considered was a comparatively minor infelicity in Euclid’s presentation of the first two propositions in the series on parallels. Proposition 27 showed that, when two lines cut a third transversal line, if the alternate angles are equal to each other, then the first two lines are parallel. Proposition 28 did not prove anything new; it merely showed that if the corresponding angles are equal, or if the internal angles equal two right angles, then the lines are parallel because these two conditions can each be shown to be equivalent to the condition in proposition 27. There are, in other words, three possible and equivalent conditions that will lead to the lines being parallel—but Euclid, rather oddly and apparently arbitrarily, divided these conditions over two propositions. Proclus commented on this apparent inelegancy at length. In his opinion, Euclid should have written either one proposition or three, but not two. And, in any case, there were three further syzygies, or combinations of pairs of angles, that Euclid might equally have mentioned. Savile’s notes to 27 and 28 neatly summarized (and quoted verbatim in part) Proclus’s comments on the form of these two propositions.23 Below this observation, however, he suggested a reason to doubt Proclus’s judgment here. There was, he thought, good reason to have two propositions, instead of one: the latter parts of the proposition would have to be proved using the first part of the proposition. 22 Proclus, Commentary, 144. Elements 1.17 states that any two angles of a triangle together are less than two right angles. Or, as Savile’s note explains it, if two straight lines cutting a third line do meet (and form a triangle), then the two angles are less than two right angles; while the fifth postulate states that if the angles are less than two right angles, the two lines meet. (“Nam illic, si concurrant duae rectae, minores erint anguli duo duobus rectis. Hic si minores sunt, concurrent.”) Proclus states that the fifth postulate is the converse of 1.17 in the course of his commentary on 1.29 (Proclus, Commentary, 285). 23 Savile’s Euclid, p. 13, annotation beginning “aut una fuit facienda propositio…” This annotation expands a more cursory annotation at Savile’s Proclus, p. 95, beginning “aut una facienda fuit propositio…”.

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It was not unheard of for Euclid to do this in the Elements, but it was very rare.24 Savile had one further, important observation to make about proposition 28. When Proclus wrote his commentary on this section of the Elements, he had beside him a treatise by Ptolemy entitled That lines produced from angles less than two right angles meet one another, which, as its title suggests, was an attempt to prove Euclid’s fifth postulate.25 This treatise is now lost; but, in his Commentary, Proclus transcribed large parts of it—perhaps even the whole of it. Ptolemy provided alternative proofs of both propositions 28 and 29. The proof of 29 was flawed, as Proclus himself showed. He presented Ptolemy’s alternative proof of 28 without comment; but Savile detected that this proof, too, contained an infelicity. In the margin to Proclus’s commentary, he noted that the proof could not be accepted without an additional lemma, which he supposed might have been found in Ptolemy’s original work.26 If the words underlined in the text show where Savile was dissatisfied, then he correctly recognized that Ptolemy had made a rash assumption: that if the internal angles in proposition 28 equal two right angles, then the lines must meet either nowhere, or on both sides of the transversal. Ptolemy needed to consider also whether they might meet only on one side of the transversal. In other words, Ptolemy had been misled by the appearance of the diagram to expect the lines to be symmetrical; but, as Savile saw, that was an unwarranted assumption. For the proof of these propositions 27 and 28 Euclid did not actually use the parallel postulate, which he introduced only in proposition 29. In that theorem, Euclid showed that if one started with parallel lines given, then all three angle conditions of propositions 27 and 28 would be met. This proposition proves the uniqueness of parallel lines: that there is only one parallel through a given point to a given line, and that parallel can be found by constructing a line so as to satisfy the three angle relationships. In order to establish that fact, Euclid needed to introduce his fifth postulate.27 Proclus saw that this proposition was the converse of the previous two (with all three angle syzygies bundled together), but he did not explicitly state that it implied the uniqueness of parallels (though he may well have realized this). Instead, he devoted most of 24

Savile’s Euclid, p. 13: “est alia ratio longe maior τοῦ μὴ μίαν ποιῆσαι. ne in [duabus] postremis partibus uti cogeretur ope [primae]. utitur tamen non nunquam, sed rarius.” 25 Proclus, Commentary, 285. 26 Savile’s Proclus, p. 95: “Demonstrationem non probo ἀνέυ προσθήκης, quae in Ptolemaei libro forte extabat, a Proclo suppressa.” 27 Jeremy Gray, Ideas of Space: Euclidean, Non-Euclidean, and Relativistic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 34.

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his commentary to presenting proofs of the fifth postulate. First, he recorded the proof of proposition 29 found in Ptolemy’s treatise, which did not use the parallel postulate. If this proof were valid, then the fifth postulate would no longer be a first principle, but a theorem, just as Proclus maintained—and Ptolemy followed his proof of 1.29 with a rapid demonstration of the postulate. But in fact, Proclus, both astutely and honestly, discovered a fallacy in the proof, whereby Ptolemy had inadvertently assumed the very thing he had tried to prove. Proclus then attempted his own proof of the proposition, again without using the parallel postulate; it was an ingenious proof, but as was apparent to the pioneers of non-Euclidean geometry, it too inadvertently assumed the very thing it set out to prove.28 In his annotations to proposition 29, both in Euclid’s text and in Proclus’s commentary, Savile tended merely to affirm Proclus’s own observations. In his notes on Ptolemy’s unsuccessful proof of the postulate, Savile expanded on the problems in Ptolemy’s reasoning, underlining the problematic passages, before entirely concurring with Proclus: “Ptolemy is criticized, and quite appropriately. For this is plainly a fallacy.”29 On the other hand, next to Proclus’s own (and equally fallacious) attempt to prove the postulate, Savile merely noted “Proclus demonstrates the fifth postulate.”30 In these crucial three propositions on parallels, Savile did not go very far beyond Proclus (and, in fact, surpassed him only in adding minor modifications or queries to his account of parallels). For the most part, then, it would be best to characterize Savile as a close and competent reader of the debate on parallels. Sometimes, though, he could come up with something quite new: in the next theorem, he continued to read Proclus and Euclid carefully, while also making an observation of some mathematical sophistication. Proposition 30 states that if one line is parallel to two other lines, then those two lines are parallel to each other. In his commentary, Proclus spent some time pondering why Euclid put the “one line” between the other two lines, since it might have been placed in any relation at all to them. He concluded that there was a pedagogic purpose behind the design of the proof. Euclid thought it would be helpful for us to visualize the situation with one line between the other two. As Proclus put it, we have a “common notion” that if the two outside lines intersect each other, they must also intersect the one between them. In his annotations, Savile picked up on that term “common 28 Proclus, Commentary, 285–92; M.J. Greenberg, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries: Development and History, 3rd ed. (New York: Freeman, 1993), 150–51. 29 Savile’s Proclus, p. 96: “repraehenditur Ptolemaeus, καὶ μάλ’ εἰκότως. Est enim plane paralogismus.” 30 Ibid.: “Demonstrat Proclus 5m postulatum.”

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notion,” and noted that if one were to put this proposition among the axioms, the parallel postulate would be superfluous: it could be derived directly from this axiomatic proposition. Proclus himself had not come to this realization. In fact, Savile seems to have realized a deeper and more general principle than Proclus or later commentators ever articulated: that any proposition proved using the fifth postulate could actually be substituted for the fifth postulate among the principles of geometry.31 I have spent some time examining these notes on parallels, and sifting out the moments where Savile made his own observations, because these particular annotations afford us a glimpse into Savile’s teaching of geometry within Merton College. As Mordechai Feingold has argued at length, it was in the informal relationships between scholars and students, in rooms in colleges, that the real mathematical work was done in early modern Oxford, more so than in the official lecture halls;32 Savile’s Euclid, when placed beside another copy of Euclid belonging to John Chamber, allows us to see that mathematical education in action. John Chamber was very likely already an undergraduate student at Merton College when Savile, a fellow Yorkshireman, began his tenure as a fellow in 1565. In 1568, Chamber took his ba at Merton, and he was very quickly elected a probationary fellow of the college, becoming full fellow in 1571. The early period of his fellowship was devoted to reading for his ma (which he was awarded in 1575), and fulfilling his obligations as an ordinary lecturer—like Savile, in astronomy, lecturing on Ptolemy’s Almagest in 1574. Chamber published the opening lecture, an “astronomiae encomium,” as a preface to his 1601 work A Treatise against Judiciall Astrologie. The remaining lectures are extant in manuscript, in the Bodleian Library, and have long been falsely identified as

31

32

Savile’s Euclid, p. 13: “mediam posuit eam ad quam sunt parallele…[long quotation in Greek from Proclus, explaining why one line was between the other two]… Atque hoc θεωρήμα si κοινὴ ponatur ἔννοια, 5m postulatum nullo negotio demonstrabimus.” (He placed in the middle that line to which they are parallel. … But if this theorem were laid down as a common notion, then we would be able to demonstrate the fifth postulate without any difficulty.) As Jeremy Gray has argued, mathematicians realized quite belatedly—and later than Savile—that the problem of the parallel postulate was not so much one of proving the postulate as given, as of considering the contents of the axiomatic foundations of geometry as a whole. In this brief comment, Savile anticipated the much more mature thoughts on this subject by his successors. See Gray, Ideas of Space, 57. Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematician’s Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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written by Savile himself; they were indeed, for the most part, copied from Savile’s own lectures on Ptolemy.33 Chamber would be closely associated with Savile for much of his subsequent life. Apart from their northern origins and common life as fellows of Merton, Chamber would take up a fellowship at Eton in 1582, where Savile joined him a decade and a half later as provost. There seems to have been a close relationship between the two men.34 Some modern historical works even claim that Savile was Chamber’s student; in reality, the relationship was in the opposite direction, as Chamber’s derivative lectures on Ptolemy suggest.35 The Bodleian Library printed book Savile W. 12 is a copy of Euclid in the edition published by Henri Etienne in Paris, 1516. This was a composite Latin edition combining the medieval version of Campanus of Novara and the new humanistic edition of Bartolomeo Zamberti.36 Chamber’s name, erased by a subsequent owner, can still be made out on the second rear flyleaf. His hand is quite distinctive, and the manuscript annotations match several other letters and manuscript works extant in the Savile collection that were undoubtedly written by Chamber. He has annotated the volume very thoroughly, at least as densely as Savile’s own copy, actually copying almost all of his annotations directly out of Savile’s Euclid and Proclus, often verbatim, as one can ascertain by comparing almost any page of Chamber’s copy with the corresponding page in Savile’s. There can be no doubt about the direction of copying: Chamber combined into single annotations notes of Savile that are not only scattered over the page, but even separated between the editions of Euclid and Proclus. The only significant changes he made to Savile’s notes were to add more direct 33 34

35

36

ms Savile 30, Bodleian Library. For Chamber’s biography, and his joint publishing ventures with Savile, see Adam Mosley, “Chamber, John (1546–1604),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /5044, accessed 22 Aug. 2014. The notion that Chamber taught Savile arose, it seems, in the nineteenth century. In his account of the fellows of Merton College, George [or G.C.] Brodrick claimed that Chamber “was much respected as a scholar, and is said to have instructed Savile in mathematics” (Memorials of Merton College, vol. 9, Oxford Historical Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), 269). He cited Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses as a source, but Wood does not in fact make that claim anywhere in his biographies of Savile, Chamber, or their friends and associates. The claim is repeated recently by, for instance, G.H. Martin and J.R.L. Highfield, A History of Merton College, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 189. They cite Brodrick as their source. Savile W. 12, Bodleian Library: Euclidis Megarensis geometricorum elementorum libri… (Paris, 1516). This copy henceforth referred to as Chamber’s Euclid.

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quotations from the sources. Where Savile paraphrased Proclus in Greek, for example, or worked through a proposition in his own Latin version, Chamber tended to quote the original Greek at length, perhaps because his own copy contained neither the text of Proclus nor the Greek text of Euclid. At first glance, then, Chamber’s Euclid looks simply like a copy of Savile’s annotated Euclid, something that Chamber may have copied out privately for his own use. But a handful of annotations can be used to show that Savile himself was instructing Chamber in geometry, in person, using his own annotated text as a basis for their lessons. There are several places in the first book where Chamber not only copied out Savile’s notes, but marked them with an “S” in a circle, or within parentheses. In his notes on proposition 28, Chamber repeated Savile’s observations (drawn from Proclus) on the division of syzygies of angles between propositions 27 and 28, and then drew attention to Savile’s own opinion on the form of the propositions: Such is Proclus’s opinion. But Savile says that there is a much greater reason for not making them two propositions, and that is so that, in the latter two parts, one is not forced to use the first part, which does not so much accord with the writer of the Elements. He uses [this method] sometimes, but quite rarely.37 It is significant that Chamber picked out Savile’s addition to Proclus’s commentary, and also added a little gloss explaining why Savile thought that Euclid would not combine the cases into a single proposition (“quod στοιχειώτῃ non perinde congruit”). In Chamber’s notes on the same proposition, he also highlighted Savile’s criticism of Ptolemy’s proof of proposition 28—a proof that Proclus had apparently considered quite acceptable: Proclus adds here another proof from Ptolemy, which Savile does not approve without a lemma, which perhaps existed in Ptolemy’s books but was omitted by Proclus. The lemma is needed at these words, “for either they meet in both directions.”38

37

38

Chamber’s Euclid, fol. 15: “Haec Proclus. At (S) ait) esse aliam longe maiorem rationem τοῦ μὴ μίαν ποιῆσαι, sc. ne in duabus postremis partibus uti cogeretur ope primae partis, quod στοιχειώτῃ non perinde congruit. Utitur tamen nonnumquam sed rarius.” Ibid.: “Adfert proclus ex ptolemeo aliam huius demonstrationem, quam non probat (S) ἀνέυ προσθήκης, quae in ptolemaei libro forte extabat a proclo suppressa. προσθήκη desideratur ad illa verba ἤ γὰρ κατ’ ἀμφότερα συμπεσοῦνται.”

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Now, it would perhaps have been possible for Chamber to have identified Savile’s own contributions to the commentary on the Elements in both these places, and to have marked them out in the way that he did. He might also have thought up for himself the important explanatory glosses to both the annotations: in the first explaining why Savile might have doubted Proclus, and in the second identifying the exact place where an addition was required. But it is at least equally likely that Savile not only added these explanations in the course of leading Chamber through the Elements, but also pointed out to him in the first place that these were his own thoughts, and not Proclus’s. A final example suggests even more strongly that Chamber did not read Savile’s Euclid in isolation, but had it taught to him, by Savile. In his note on proposition 30, Chamber wrote: He put in the middle the line to which they are parallel, [long quote from Proclus in Greek, explaining the position of the line]. (Savile: But if this theorem were laid down as a common notion, then we would be able to demonstrate the fifth postulate without any difficulty.)39 By comparing the language of Savile’s and Chamber’s annotations, it is evident that Chamber copied out the note found in his teacher’s copy of Euclid, almost word for word. But there is more to it than that. When Savile made his original observation that proposition 30 could be moved into the first principles, in order to prove the fifth postulate very easily, he did not mark out his own observation in any way from Proclus’s (see Fig. 44.1). Chamber, on the other hand, did note which part of the commentary was Proclus’s, and which was Savile’s own conclusion (see Fig. 44.2). The most reasonable explanation is that Savile was at Chamber’s side as he worked through the annotations, noting his own contributions to the debates over propositions in book 1, and perhaps also steering him back and forth between Proclus’s Commentary and Euclid’s Elements, and between his own layers of commentary to both texts. One last note connects Chamber closely to oral teaching from Savile. On the verso of the title page to his Euclid, Chamber wrote: The proofs are falsely asserted to be Theon’s. It can be conclusively shown that they are Euclid’s by six hundred arguments; for Proclus, who lived before Theon, so completely follows these demonstrations that it is obvious that Euclid not only furnished his theorems with proofs, but that he 39

Ibid., fol. 15v: “Mediam posuit eam ad quam sunt paralleli…(S. atque si hoc theorema ponatur κοινὴ ἔννοια, 5m postulatum nullo negotio demonstrabimus).”

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Figure 44.1

Detail from Savile’s Euclid, p. 13.

furnished them with these proofs. Let them consider Proclus on proposition 18, at the words Ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ γεωμέτρης.40 With these words, Chamber recalled an odd passage found in Savile’s lectures on Ptolemy, in which he attempted to demonstrate the integrity of the Elements, relying on a false, early dating of Proclus that was common in the sixteenth century.41 The last reference to Proclus’s commentary on the eighteenth proposition, however, is not in Savile’s lectures or his other writings, nor in his annotated Euclid or Proclus. One might then reasonably conclude, again, that Chamber was making a record here of Savile’s teaching viva voce; its location on the very first page of his Euclid may reflect Savile’s preliminary remarks on the nature of the book that they had in front of them, in which he reprised the arguments of his recent lectures and added his own latest thoughts on the subject. Euclid was Savile’s first, and lifelong, teacher. Savile made his copy of Euclid his own, by surrounding it with commentary: from Proclus, from other ancient mathematicians, and occasionally from his own insight. So equipped, it was a perfect mathematical and pedagogical text—with only two flaws, which (by the time he delivered his 1619 Praelectiones on Euclid) Savile believed he had eradicated. His tutoring of Chamber was precisely the kind of informal, collegiate instruction that was at the heart of the mathematical life of Elizabethan 40

41

“Demonstrationes falso dictitatas Theonis, esse eas Euclidis argumentis sexcentis pervinci potest, nam Proclus, qui ante Theonis tempora florebat, ita harum demonstrationum vestigiis ubique insistit, ut facile constet Euclidem theoremata demonstrationibus non solum illustrasse, sed his ipsis illustrasse. Consulant Proclum prop. 18 ibi Ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ γεωμέτρης.” These words in Proclus’s text preface a long explanation of Euclid’s proof, where Proclus follows the same steps as Euclid, using an identically labeled diagram. ms Savile 29, fol. 42r–v. On the sixteenth-century belief in an early Proclus (and Savile’s acceptance of it), see Goulding, Defending Hypatia, Chap. 6.

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Henry Savile Reads His Euclid

Figure 44.2 Detail from Chamber’s Euclid, fol. 15v.

Oxford; and at the center of that tutoring was his personalized Elements. He intended, in his statutes, to pass on and institutionalize this method, and he modeled the method for his successors in his Praelectiones, a series of lectures on the first book of the Elements that, to a significant extent, were a public performance of his annotated Euclid and of his other manuscript writings on the Elements. And many of his successors studied his notes, and made an effort to carry out his wishes. The Savilian Professorship, for its first century, retained a focus on Euclid, Apollonius, and Archimedes (even as the professors pursued many other projects as well). Henry Briggs, Edward Bernard, and John Wallis were among the successors to Savile’s chairs of mathematics who were also students of his annotations; and many of his notes, particularly to the minor Euclidean works, were finally published in David Gregory’s monumental Euclid of 1703.42 And that really is a remarkable development that no one could have expected. As a very young man, Savile fell under the spell of Euclid, and over a few months equipped himself, and his copy of Euclid, with a scholarly and pedagogical framework—the influence of which would still be felt nearly a century and a half later.

42

See especially the preface to David Gregory, ed., Euclidis Opera, quae supersunt omnia mathematica (Oxford, 1703). There Gregory summarized many of Savile’s arguments from the Praelectiones on Euclid and Theon, and attested to his debt to Savile’s annotations in his Euclid for establishing his own Greek text (sig. a1v). He made use of Savile’s notes in particular for editing the Optics and Catoptrics (sig. c1v); the footnotes to Gregory’s editions of those texts quote verbatim from annotations in Savile’s copies of the optical works (Savile T. 7 [2], Bodleian Library). The remarkable use that Edward Bernard made of Savile’s annotations in a collection of printed copies of Euclid will be the subject of a future study.

chapter 45

Natur und Zeit: Antike Motive im Umfeld von Rousseaus Emile Jürgen Oelkers 1

Ein Plagiat?

Emile ou de l’éducation erschien im Mai 1762 in vier Bänden. Vier Jahre später klagte der Benediktinermönch und Schriftsteller Jean-Joseph Cajot Rousseau an, seine Leser betrogen zu haben. Das angeblich so einzigartige Buch über die naturgemässe Erziehung sei nichts weiter als ein Plagiat und abgeschrieben habe er vornehmlich bei den antiken Schriftstellern. Die Grundidee des naturgemässen Aufwachsens sei aus Galens Traktat über die Erziehung der Kinder übernommen, die indirekte Methode der Unterweisung stamme von Quintilian oder das Stillen der Säuglinge durch die natürliche Mutter habe schon Plutarch empfohlen.1 Rousseau selbst hat den Plagiatsverdacht vorsorglich bestritten. Im Vorwort zum Emile heisst es, er schreibe nicht über die Ideen eines anderen, sondern nur über seine eigenen.2 Und die richten sich gegen alle falschen Vorstellungen, die sich pädagogische Schriftsteller von Kindern machen; man habe in den tausenden Traktaten über die richtige Erziehung stets nach dem Menschen im Kind (l’homme dans l’enfant) gesucht, statt zu fragen, was das Kind ausmacht, bevor es zum Menschen wird.3 Daran will er gemessen werden, an der Umkehrung der Sichtweise und den damit verbundenen Konsequenzen. Seitdem ist immer wieder auf Rousseaus Vorliebe für die antiken Schrift­ steller verwiesen worden, meistens wohlwollend und – mit zeitlichem Abstand zu Cajot – ohne Plagiatsverdacht.4 Bezüge auf die Antike und ihre Autoritä­ten 1 J.-J. Cajot, Les plagiats de M.J.J.R. de Genève, sur l’éducation (La Haye: Chez Durand, 1766), 21. 2 J.-J. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, éd. B. Gagnebin/M. Raymond, t. 4, Emile. Education— Morale—Botanique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969), 242, abbrev. o.c. 4. 3 Ebd., 241–42. 4 Etwa: D. Leduc-Fayette, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le mythe d’antiquité (Paris: Vrin, 1974); J. Terrasse, De Mentor à Orphée. Essais sur les écrits pédagogiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Québec: Hurtubise, 1992); Y. Touchefeu, L’antiquité et le christianisme dans la pensée de JeanJacques Rousseau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_046

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sind in der Aufklärungsliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts und speziell in Erziehungstraktaten allerdings selbstverständlich und auch Rousseau hat nichts anderes getan, als sich des antiken Fundus zu bedienen. Dabei geht er nicht systematisch vor, sondern greift als Leser des 18. Jahrhunderts bestimmte Aussagen auf, die ihn anziehen und lehnt ab, was ihn abstösst. Die antiken Bezugnahmen im Emile sind nicht versteckt, sondern gewollt und unübersehbar. Das Frontispiz des ersten Bandes der Ausgabe Chez Jean Néaulme (La Haye)5 des Emile ziert ein Zitat aus Senecas Streitschrift De Ira. „Sanabilibus aegrotamus malis ipsaque nos in rectum genitos natura, si emendari velimus, iuvat“.6 „An heilbaren Übeln kranken wir, die Natur selbst hilft uns, die wir zum Richtigen gezeugt sind, wenn wir uns bessern wollen“. Das Zitat ist aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen und kann nur als Motto verstanden werden. Es soll also nicht auf Rousseaus eigenen Zorn hindeuten, sondern drückt den Kern seiner Lehren aus. Der von Rousseau autorisierte Kupferstich links gegenüber dem Frontispiz zeigt die Nymphe Thetis, wie sie ihren jüngsten Sohn Achilles im Fluss Styx tauft und ihn unverwundbar machen will. Der Säugling wird kopfüber in das schnell fliessende Wasser eingetaucht, aber die Mutter muss ihn an der Ferse festhalten, damit er nicht fortgerissen wird und ertrinkt. An der Ferse blieb der Held der Ilias verwundbar, weil die Taufe im Fluss der Unterwelt nicht vollständig für seinen Schutz sorgen konnte. Die Mutter aber hatte keine andere Wahl. So dialektisch versteht Rousseau das Bild jedoch nicht. Die Allegorie der Taufe im wilden Fluss sei „belle et claire“, ein Gegenbild zu dem, was die grausamen Mütter heute ihren Kindern antun. Sie tauchen ihre Kinder ein in Weichlichkeit und bereiten sie vor zum Leiden, und weiter öffnen sie ihre Poren für Krankheiten aller Art, deren Opfer sie werden, wenn sie gross sind.7 Danach folgt im Text ein Schlüsselsatz in der Pädagogik Rousseaus: „Observez la nature, et suivez la route qu’elle vous trace. Elle éxerce continuellement les enfans; elle endurcit leur tempérament par des épreuves de toute espéce; elle leur apprend de bonne heure ce que c’est que peine et douleur“.8

5 Gedruckt in Paris von dem Verleger Nicolas-Bonaventura Duchesne (um 1711–65). 6 Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 1, trans. J.W. Basore (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1928), 194 (De Ira Liber 2/caput 13, 1). 7 o.c. 4, 259. 8 Ebd.

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2 Natur Anders als etwa in Fénelons Traktat über die Erziehung der Mädchen ist das keine Rhetorik.9 Für Rousseau lehrt die Natur tatsächlich das Richtige, die Kinder können also bewahrt werden vor den Übeln der Verweichlichung und der Pein der Moralerziehung. Im Sinne von Platons Menon und entgegen den Sophisten: Tugend kann den Kindern nicht gelehrt und muss daher auch nicht geübt werden.10 Die Natur härtet das Temperament, indem sie die Kinder auf die Probe stellt, und die Natur lehrt, was die Stunde der Mühen oder des Schmerzes ist, ohne dass irgendein Unterricht oder eine absichtsvolle Erziehung stattfinden müssten. Wer die Natur beobachtet, kann ihrem Weg folgen. Er braucht keine künst­ lichen Formen der Unterweisung, die auf die Welt des Kindes weder eingestellt sind noch darauf eingehen können. Und die Natur weist sie nicht nur passiv den Weg der Erziehung, sie erzieht vielmehr auch selbst, durch das Erleben von Krankheiten, das Überstehen von Gefahren, die Erfahrung des Wachstums oder die Stärkung der Kräfte.11 Krankheiten müssen nicht gemieden, sondern erlebt und durchlaufen werden. Der Lauf der Natur zeigt sich im Fieber, jede Abhärtung stärkt die Natur und jede Form von Verweichlichung schwächt sie.12 In diesem Sinne ist die Erziehung robust, und sie hat ein natürliches und kein reflexives Kind vor Augen, wie es von der zeitgenössischen Erziehungsliteratur nahe gelegt wurde.13 Rousseau nimmt auch Abstand von der Literatur der 9

10

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„Il faut se contenter de suivre et d’aider la nature“ (F. Fenelon, Œuvres, t. 1, ed. J. Le Brun [Paris: Gallimard, 1983], 99). Zuvor heisst es deutlich: „Avant que les enfants sachent entièrement parler, on peut les préparer à l’instruction“ (ebd., 96). Der Grund ist freilich ein ganz anderer: Lernen ist für Rousseau nicht Wiedererinnerung (Menon 85c–86c), sondern gebunden an das Vermögen der Lebensalter. Verwendet: Platon, Werke, hrsg. v. G. Eigler, Band 2, Des Sokrates Apologie—Kriton—Euthydemos—Menexenos— Gorgias—Menon, Bearb. v. H. Hofmann, Griechischer Text v. A. Croiset et al., Deutsche Übersetzung v. F. Schleiermacher (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973). o.c. 4, 259–60. Das war aus der Kindermedizin geläufig. Schon 1544 heisst es in Thomas Phairs (1510–60) The Boke of Chyldren über die Behandlung bestimmter Kinderkrankheiten: “The best and most sure helpe in this case is not to meddle wyth any kynde of medicine, but to let nature woork in her operation” (Bowers, Rick, and Thomas Phayer, Thomas Phaer and The Boke of Chyldren (1544). Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 201 (Tempe, az: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 68). Ein Beispiel sind die Conversations d’Emilie, die Louise D’Epinay (1726–83) 1774 als Gegenbuch zu Rousseaus Emile erscheinen liess. Erzogen wird hier durch Unterhaltungen und so durch gemeinsame Reflexion, nicht, wie bei Rousseau, durch die sinnliche

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väterlichen Ratschläge, die im 17. Jahrhundert aufkam14 und die ein Jahrhundert später von einer Flut mütterlicher Ratgeber ergänzt wurde. Der Verdacht der Verweichlichung nährte sich von dort her, es ist mithin kein Zufall, dass die natürliche Erziehung einem Jungen galt, ohne dabei militärischen Drill und soldatische Abhärtung vor Augen zu haben. Beides, Härte und Weichheit im Umgang mit Kindern, widerspricht der Natur. Rousseaus Emile ist seiner ganzen Konstruktion einzigartig und sollte es auch sein, wenngleich viele einzelne Motive aus der Antike oder dem Mittelalter bekannt waren und in einem neuen Rahmen nur umgedeutet wurden. Das gilt auch für die Konsequenz. Von „Erziehung gemäss der Natur“ ist in der zeitgenössischen Literatur an vielen Stellen die Rede, aber niemand hat die Situation so folgerichtig durchgespielt wie Rousseau. Wenn die Natur gut ist, können die Kinder nicht verdorben sein und das muss ohne Ausnahme für alle Kinder gelten. Dieser Schritt ist weitreichend, weil er das Verdikt gegen sündige oder deformierte Kinder aufhebt. In der christlich geprägten medizinischen Literatur des ausgehenden 17. Jahrhunderts werden „enfans perfides&dénaturez“ beschrieben, gegen die keine medizinische Kur etwas ausrichten kann;15 eine natürliche Erziehung kann es für sie nicht geben, weil die Natur verdorben ist. Noch ein Jahrhundert später sind diese Kinder kleine „monstres“, die ihren Eltern Horror bereiten und die besser nie geboren wären.16 Auf der anderen Seite wuchs in der Literatur die Überzeugung, dass eine gute Erziehung die Natur des Kindes verändern kann, wobei der Ausdruck „Natur“ oder „Natur des Kindes“ schon vor Rousseau in der Kindermedizin und in Elternratgebern gebraucht wurde.17 Gemeingut war das aber nicht. Noch Erfassung der Dinge. Bis Ende des 18. Jahrhunderets wurden Les charmes de l’enfance (Jauffret 1793) unter dem Einfluss Rousseaus zu einem beliebten Thema der Ratgeberliteratur in Frankreich, vgl. L.F. Jauffret, Les charmes de l’enfance, et les plaisirs de l’amour maternel, troisième édition (Paris: Chez C.F. Perlet, 1793). 14 Wie Testament ou conseils fidèles d’un bon père à ses enfants (1648) von Philippe Fortin de la Hoguette (1582–1668). Es gibt hunderte solcher Titel. 15 J. Bernier, Essais de Medecine (Paris: Chez Simon Langronne, 1689), 487–88. Jean Bernier (gest. 1698) stammte aus Blois und kam um 1674 nach Paris. Er nannte sich Ratgeber der Witwe von Orleans, blieb aber zeitlebens in Armut. 16 J. Reyre, L’ami des enfants. Rouen: Chez la Veuve de Pierre Dumésnil (1785), 59–60. Der Jesuit Abbé Joseph Reyre (1735–1812) war ein bekannter Autor für Jugendliteratur und Elternratgeber. 17 R. Mercier, L’enfant dans la société du XVIIIe siècle. (Avant l’Emile), thèse complémentaire pour le Doctorat ès-lettres présentée à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Paris (Paris: Université de Paris, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines, 1961).

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1784 sind „nature“ ebenso wie „enfant“ keine eigenständigen Stichwörter in der erweiterten Ausgabe des Dictionnaire historique d’éducation, das der Agronom und Rousseau-Freund Jean-Jacques Fillassier18 1771 in erster Auflage veröffent­ licht hatte und das fast 150 Jahre lang immer wieder aufgelegt wurde.19 Seit dem 16. Jahrhundert ist in Frankreich das Sprichwort „nourriture passe nature“ gebräuchlich. „Nourriture“ ist der ältere Begriff für éducation, sinngemäss lässt sich das Sprichwort also übersetzen mit: „Die Erziehung übertrifft die Natur“, ohne ihr folgen zu müssen. Die Natur ist lediglich die Voraussetzung für die Erziehung, nicht ihre Grundlage und die Erziehung kann die Natur ändern, wenn sie zu ihren Zielen oder Aufgaben nicht passt. Im massgeblichen Dictionnaire portatif de la Langue Françoise von 1786 wird das Sprichwort entsprechend so erläutert: „La bonne éducation peut corriger les défauts d’un mauvais naturel.“20 Der Schriftsteller und Plutarch-Übersetzer Pierre de La Primaudaye21 hat 1577 im ersten Band seiner Reise durch das antike Wissen mit dem Titel Academie Françoise das „ancien Prouerbe“ und seine Herkunft bekannt gemacht,22 nämlich auf den spartanischen Gesetzgeber Lykurg und seine Geschichte von den zwei Hunden verwiesen, die Plutarch erzählt hat23 und die in der französischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts immer wieder auftaucht. Zwei Hunde aus dem gleichen Wurf werden verschieden, wenn ihre Erziehung unterschiedlich ist.24 Und schon für Pierre de La Primaudaye war klar, dass das Gute nicht aus der Natur, sondern aus der Erziehung erwächst.25 Die Formel „La nourriture surmont la Nature“ findet sich in den nächsten beiden Jahrhunderten an vielen Stellen, so etwa in Le theatre moral de la vie 18

Jean-Jacques Fillassier (1745–99) stammte aus einer reichen Familie in Flandern und wurde auch als Agronom bekannt. Nach der Lektüre des Emile wollte er das System der Pädagogik perfektionieren. 19 J.-J. Fillassier, Dictionnaire historique d’éducation (Paris: Chez Méquignon l’aîné, 1784). 20 Dictionnaire portatif de la Langue françoise, extrait du Grand Dictionnaire de Pierre Richelet, par M. de Wailly, tome second (Lyon: Chez Jean-Martie Bruyset Père & Fils, 1784), 313. 21 Pierre de La Primaudaye (1546–1619) stammte aus einer protestantischen Familie in Anjou. 1580 wurde er Kammerherr (gentilhomme de la chambre) beim Herzog von Anjou. 1586 erschien die englische Übersetzung French Academy, die William Shakespeare angeregt hat. 22 P. De La Primaudaye, Academie Françoise (Paris: Chez Guillaume Chaudire, 1581), 54. 23 De liberis educandis 4. 24 Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 1, trans. F. Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1927), 13. 25 Ebd., 53.

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humaine von Marin Le Roy de Gomberville.26 Auch hier wird auf Lykurg und seine Belehrung der Lakedämonier Bezug genommen, wenn es heisst: Non seulement il leur enseigne que la Nature ne fait que l’exterieur de l’homme, & que l’éducation estant veritablement celle qui luy donne l’ame, la connoissance & la vie acheve ce que la Nature a commencé, mais il veut aussi leur faire comprendre que l’instruction peut reformer les desordres de la naissance, & forcer imperieusement les mouvements & les inclinations qu’elle donne.27 Wer er selbst und so selbstständig werden will, wer vorhat, die richtigen Kenntnisse zu erwerben, um tugendhaft zu leben, der braucht Unterweisung, einen Lehrer und die passenden Bücher. Als Grundsatz zählt: „Educatio mores facit“, die Bildung macht die Tugend und nicht die Natur.28 Das geht auf eine Frage von Horaz29 zurück, die zu beantworten lange nicht strittig erscheinen konnte. In einer englischen Übersetzung des Buches von Gomberville mit dem Titel The Doctrines of Morality von 1721 heisst es, dass die Bildung vollendet, was die Natur nur beginnen kann. “Education can reform what she has left imperfect, and absolutely govern and command those inclinations which would undo us, if they were not restrain’d”.30 Wer diese Wahrheit nicht lehrt und einfach der Erfahrung überlässt, sie herauszufinden, zerstört gerade, was die Natur begonnen hat. Das wäre, wie wenn, in Umkehrung der Erzählung von Lykurg, eine Dogge einen Hasen jagen würde oder ein Greyhound hinter dem Fleisch her wäre. Ungezügelt lernen sie, was ihrer Natur gerade entgegensteht, weil die Leitung oder der Gesetzgeber fehlen.31 Rousseau greift diesen Lehrsatz an. Für ihn hat die Erziehung keinen Gesetzgeber und nur dann einen ersten Lehrer, wenn er imstande ist, dem Weg der Natur zu folgen, den nicht die Erziehung selbst weist. Die stoische Lehre der Erziehung und die Lehre von den beiden Naturen bestreitet Rousseau mit einer Theorie, die nicht einfach von der „Natur“, sondern von der Natur des 26

Marin Le Roy de Gomberville (1660–74) war ein bekannter Schriftsteller und seit 1634 März eines der ersten Mitglieder der Académie Française. 27 Marin Le Roy de Gomberville, Le theatre moral de la vie humain (1672), 4. 28 Ebd. 29 Virtutem doctrina paret, naturane donet (Epistula 18/100). 30 The Doctrine of Morality; or, A View of Human Life, written originally in French by Monsieur De Gomberville, trans. into English by T.M. Gibbs (London: Printed for E. Bell and others 1721), 4. 31 Ebd.

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Kindes ausgeht. Erst dann entsteht überhaupt ein Gegensatz zwischen Natur und Bildung. Diesen Gegensatz gibt es nicht im zeitgenössischen Naturrecht und auch nicht in der Medizin, schon gar nicht unter Rückgriff auf Autoren wie Hippokrates und seinen Traktat über die Natur des Menschen, der 1697 in französischer Übersetzung zugänglich war.32 Für Hippokrates ist die ganze Natur, also auch die des Menschen, immer dieselbe, sie bleibt so in allen seinen Äusserungen, der Mensch selber ist aber zusammengesetzt aus verschiedenen Elementen,33 die sich selbst ebenfalls gleich bleiben. Neben der Natur wären das etwa die Meinungen der Menschen, die Lebensalter oder auch die Temperaturen und die verschiedenen Körper­ säfte, die alle und mit Notwendigkeit das Wachstum des Körpers beeinflussen können. Unmöglich dagegen ist, dass die Entwicklung des Menschen sich wie ein einziges Ding fassen lässt.34 Demokrit35 hatte gelehrt, dass die Natur und die Erziehung einander ähnlich seien, weil die Erziehung den Menschen formt und indem sie dies tut, eine neue Natur schafft. Viel mehr Menschen werden tüchtig durch Übung als aufgrund von Naturanlagen und fortgesetzte Mühe wird durch Gewöhnung immer leichter.36 Das ist nur plausibel, wenn „Natur“ und „Erziehung“ unterschieden werden. Rousseau dagegen will beides gleichsetzen, so jedoch, dass die Natur sich entwickelt, also im zeitlichen Ablauf ändert. Nur dann kann sie der Erziehung den Weg weisen. In dem berühmten Brief an Suzanne de Francueil vom 20. April 1751, in dem er die Entscheidung rechtfertigt, seine Kinder in das Pariser Waisenhaus zu geben, entwirft Rousseau eine „rustikale Erziehung“ die abgegrenzt wird von dem, was die Kinder der Reichen an schlechter Erziehung erfahren müssen. Es geht also auch um Gesellschaftskritik oder um die Kritik der falschen sozialen Umwelt, die die Kinder verweichlichen lässt und sie um ihre natürliche Stärke betrügt. Wenn es in meiner Macht stünde, so würde ich sie nicht durch Verweichlichung zu den Krankheiten vorbereiten, welche die Anstren­ gung und die Veränderungen der Luft für diejenigen herbeiführen, die 32

Les Œuvres d’Hippocrate, traduites en François, tome premier (Paris: Par la Compagnie des Libraires, 1697), 259–97. 33 Ebd., 267–68. 34 Ebd., 266. 35 Demokrit, Fragmente zur Ethik, Griechisch-deutsch, Übers. u. komm v. G. Ibscher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2007), 63. 36 Ebd., 65.

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nicht daran gewöhnt worden sind. Sie würden weder tanzen, noch reiten lernen aber sie würden gute, unermüdliche Beine haben. Ich würde weder Schriftsteller, noch Beamte aus ihnen machen: ich würde sie nicht üben, die Feder zu handhaben, sondern den Pflug, die Feile oder den Säbel, Instrumente, welche ein gesundes, arbeitsames, unschuldiges Leben führen lassen, nie zum Übeltun missbraucht werden und dem Rechthandelnden keine Feinde zuziehen. Dazu sind sie bestimmt; durch die bäurische Erziehung, die man ihnen gibt, werden sie glücklicher sein als ihr Vater.37 Das einfache Leben als Bauer ist ein stoisches Motiv, das zeitgenössisch viel diskutiert wurde. Das bekannteste Beispiel ist Johann Caspar Hirzels Die Wirthschaft eines philosophischen Bauern (1761), oder Le Socrate rustique (1762)38 der von Rousseau offenbar gelesen worden ist, allerdings nach der Veröffentlichung des Emile.39 Bei Hirzel40 geht es allerdings um die Übereins­ timmung der Kräfte mit den Aufgaben und um das Wohlergehen der Gesellschaft durch eine „économie rustique“,41 nicht um den Schutz der Natur durch Distanz von der Gesellschaft. Eine wesentliche Einflussquelle für Rousseau ist Plutarch, den er schon als Kind gelesen hat und der im Emile an verschiedenen Stellen zitiert wird, etwa im ersten Buch, wo der Familienvater vom Pädagogen unterschieden wird42 oder im vierten Buch, wo Rousseau auf die bizarren Paradoxien der Stoiker hinweist, so wie Plutarch sie beschrieben hat.43 Rousseau nutzt den Geschichts­ schreiber Plutarch und verarbeitet auch Motive aus seiner Erziehungstheorie, darunter die Idee, dass die natürliche Stärke durch Übung bewahrt und verbessert werden kann44 oder die besonderen Anforderungen an den Lehrer im Unterschied zum Familienvater.45

37

J.-J. Rousseau, Correspondance général, ed. P.-P. Plant/Th. Dufour, t. —1–9 (Paris, 1924–34), 2:143–44, abbr. Correspondance. 38 J.C. Hirzel, Le Socrate Rustique, ou description de la conduite economique et morale d’un paysan philosophe, trad. de J.C. Hirzel, seconde édition (Zürich: Chez Heidegger & Compagnie, 1764). 39 Brief von Rousseau an Hirzel vom 12. Nov. 1764. 40 Hirzel, Le Socrate Rustique, 282. 41 Ebd., 284. 42 o.c. 4, 262–63. 43 Ebd., 618. 44 Plutarch, Moralia, 11. 45 Ebd., 19–21.

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Aber die Theorie insgesamt bleibt ihm insofern fremd, als sie Natur, Vernunft und Gewohnheit als die drei Grundlagen der richtigen Erziehung begreift.46 Rousseau dagegen sieht die Natur als einzige Grundlage, nur sie weist den Weg, was so keine antike Theorie der Erziehung decken würde. Die aktive Natura naturans geht wohl auf Aristoteles zurück, gewinnt jedoch erst in der Medizin des Mittelalters und der Scholastik Einfluss.47 Ihr folgt Rousseau und er entwickelt damit seine eigene, hochgradig paradoxe Pädagogik, in der die Natur als Garant der Kindheit verstanden wird. Berufungen auf Plutarch und seine Lesart der stoischen Erziehung sind in der nachreformatorischen Literatur in Frankreich nichts Ungewöhnliches. Pierre de La Primaudaye etwa merkte an, dass sich der Mensch zwar nur auf die Natur selbst beziehen könne, aber dass erst die Vernunft und die Gewohnheit sie perfektionieren würden. „La nature sans doctrine&nourriture, est vne chose aueugle. La doctrine sans nature, est defectueuse: & l’usage sans les deux premieres, est chose imparfaicte.“48 Antoine le Camus, Chirurg an der Medizinischen Fakultät in Paris, kriti­ sierte die Idee einer von der körperlichen Natur losgelösten, rein spirituellen Moralerziehung und berief sich auf Plutarchs Trias von „nature, raison&usage“.49 „La partie la plus nécessaire dans l’Education c’est la nature. Sans elle tous les soins sont superflus.“50 Aber die Moralerziehung erwächst nicht aus der Natur, sondern verlangt Kenntnisse und benötigt Grundsätze.51 Und auch die Bildung von Gewohnheiten durch Übung darf nicht vernachlässigt werden.52 JeanPierre de Crousaz53 schreibt in den Nouvelles Maximes sur léducation des enfans, dass zur Ausbildung der Tugend die frühe Erziehung ausschlaggebend sei, weil sich einmal ausgebildete Gewohnheiten nur schwer korrigieren lassen. Tugend ist die zweite Natur, die die erste voraussetzt, aber wer Kinder zur Moral erziehen will, kann sich nicht auf die erste Natur verlassen, sondern sie lediglich als Analogie verwenden. Daher wird der Ort der Erziehung oft mit einem Garten verglichen, ohne tatsächlich einer zu sein. „L’Education morale 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ebd., 9. Der arabische Hofarzt Averroes unterschied zwischen natura naturans und natura naturata. De La Primaudaye, Academie Françoise, 52. A. Le Camus, Médecine de l’esprit, tome premier (Paris: Chez Ganeau, 1753), 259–60. Ebd., 260. Ebd., 263. Ebd., 266. J.-P. de Crousaz, Nouvelles maximes sur l’éducation (Amsterdam: Chez L’Honoré & Chatelain, 1718), 4.

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d’un enfant ressemble à la culture des plantes. Celles-ci portent de plus or de moins excellens fruits, à raison des soins que se donne le Jardiner. De même aussi la bonne or mauvaise conduite de l’homme dépend des premieres impressions qu’il a eû pendent sa jeunesse qui, comme la cire, se prêtes à toutes les figures que l’on souhaite lui donner.“54 Die Wachsmetapher geht auf Plato zurück55 und wird 18. Jahrhundert noch viel gebraucht. Das gilt auch für die andere zentrale Metapher der Erziehung, den Garten. Abbé de Saint Pierre schreibt in seinem Projet pour perfectionner l’éducation, alle Welt stimme überein, dass es leicht sei, Menschen gute Gewohnheiten beizubringen, wenn man es zur richtigen Zeit tut, „c’est le temps de l’enfence & de la jeunesse“. Kinder sind wie junge Pflanzen und können leicht gebogen werden. Wenn sie schlechte Gewohnheiten ausbilden, dann nicht weil ihre Kräfte zu stark wären für den Gärtner, sondern weil der nicht genügend Sorgfalt walten lässt oder er es versäumt hat, das Verhalten rechtzeitig zu korrigieren.56 Rousseaus Emile, der meistens als „Roman“ bezeichnet wird, spielt, wie es heisst, à la campagne,57 in einem anonymen Landschaftsgarten oder einer natürlichen Idylle fernab städtischer Dekadenz.58 Der Ort der Handlung wird nicht genauer beschrieben, kann aber erschlossen werden. Rousseau verfasste seine Erziehungstheorie in Montmorency nördlich von Paris. Sein Haus auf dem Hügel Mont Louis de Montmorency grenzte an einen grossen Landschaftsgarten in der Nähe des Schlosses, das sein Gönner, der Herzog von Luxemburg, einer der reichsten Männer Frankreichs,59 bewohnte. Emile ist ein erdachtes Kind, ein „élève imaginaire“,60 an dem das Problem und die Möglichkeiten einer Erziehung gemäss der Natur durchgespielt werden. Die Frage ist, was Erziehung idealerweise oder unter den besten Umständen, nämlich einer ungestörten Umgebung und bei natürlichem 54 55 56

Le Camus, Médecine de l’esprit, 158. Theaitetos 191c–e. Abbé Ch. i. Castel de Saint Pierre, Projet pour perfectionner l’éducation. Avec un discours sur la grandeur & la sainteté des hommes (Paris: Chez Briasson, 1728), 26. 57 o.c. 4, 326. 58 „Les villes sont le gouffre de l’espéce humaine. Au bout de quelques générations les races périssent ou dégénerent; il faut les renouveller, et c’est toujours la campagne qui fournit à ce renouvellement. Envoyez donc vos enfans se renouveller, pour ainsi dire, eux-mêmes, et reprendre au milieu des champs la vigueur qu’on perd dans l’air mal sain des lieux trop peuplés“ (o.c. 4, 277). 59 Charles ii Fréderic François de Montmorency Luxembourg (1702–64) war der zweite Duc de Montmorency und seit 1757 auch Marechal de France. 60 o.c. 4, 264.

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Wachstum, erreichen kann. Die Unterscheidung zwischen der ersten und der zweiten Natur wird aufgegeben, in der Konsequenz entfällt die Notwendigkeit der möglichst frühen Moralerziehung, die Natur selbst lehrt das Richtige, was voraussetzt, dass sie direkt zugänglich ist. Emile hat einen Erzieher, einen, wie es im Text heisst, gouverneur,61 der ihn zum Menschen bilden soll.62 Der Gouverneur ist nicht der antike Gesetzgeber, sondern der moderne Gärtner, der weiss, wie die Natur zu bearbeiten ist. Der Garten ist, als sei er ein hortus conclusus, ausserhalb des sozialen Lebens platziert, ohne wie im Mittelalter durch erotische Erwartungen besetzt zu sein. „La campagne“ ist für Rousseau kein Ort der Erbauung oder der Erholung, wie dies in der zeitgenössischen Gartenliteratur beschrieben wird.63 Es ist ein didaktisches Land, das dem Lernen dient. Meistens wird Rousseau selbst als die Figur des Gouverneurs angesehen, weil er gelegentlich von „meinem Kind“ spricht, aber diese Zuordnung kann sich nicht auf ein biografisches Zeugnis im Text berufen. Genauso wenig ist klar, wer sich hinter dem Namen Emile verbirgt. Die Erziehung des Kindes aber wird zur Herkulesaufgabe und allein deswegen kann jeder Erwachsene in seinem Leben nur ein Kind zum Menschen erziehen,64 was zugleich bedeutet, dass sich das Paradigma der natürlichen Erziehung auf zwei Personen und einen Versuch beschränkt. Diese Konstruktion hat Konsequenzen: Die erste Erziehung, also die Erziehung des Kindes bis zur Pubertät, hat die Überwachung durch eine ständig anwesende, fordernde und kontrollierende Erwachsenenperson zur Voraussetzung, die zudem gleichen Geschlechts ist und für eine „liberté bien réglée“65 zu sorgen hat. Behauptet wird, dass nur in dieser Konstellation — ein pädagogischer Bezug in einer natürlichen Landschaft — so erzogen werden kann, dass die „route de la nature“66 befolgt wird. Gemeint damit ist die natürliche Entwicklung des Kindes. 61 62 63

64 65 66

Ebd., 263. „Un gouverneur! O quelle ame sublime…en vérité, pour faire un homme, il faut être ou pére ou plus qu’homme soi-même“ (o.c. 4, 263). Etwa L. Liger, Amusemens de la Campagne, ou nouvelles ruses innocentes (Paris: Chez Claude Prudhomme, 1734) (erste Ausgabe 1709). Louis Liger (1658–1717) war ein bekannter Agronom und Gartenarchitekt in Frankreich. „On voudroit que le gouverneur eut déjà fait une éducation. C’est trop; un même homme n’en peut faire qu’une“ (o.c. 4, 265). Ebd., 321. Ebd., 290.

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Sie setzt die radikale Befreiung von jeder Form von Gesellschaft voraus, einzig so kann das Kind gemäss der eigenen Stärke wachsen; es wird von Moral und Dekadenz verschont und muss sich vor allem mit niemandem vergleichen. Emile soll in seiner Kindheit einzig in der Abhängigkeit von den Dingen erzogen werden, also unabhängig von sozialer Autorität und so von der Hierarchie des Vergleichs.67 Nur dann, ohne ständigen Vergleich mit anderen, ist das Kind einzigartig. Die Gesellschaft besteht aus Vergleichen, wenn das vermieden werden soll, bleibt nur die Natur übrig. Mit dem Erzieher vergleicht sich Emile nicht. Die „wohl geregelte Freiheit“ im Garten der Natur ist eine Paradoxie, die sich nur durch eine strenge didaktische Kanalisierung auflösen lässt. Die erste falsche Idee, die Emile erreicht, ist der Keim für den Irrtum und das Laster, daher muss auf jeden ersten Schritt des Lernens geachtet werden.68 Emile, anders gesagt, darf nichts falsch machen, und er hat einen „prémier maître“,69 den Gouverneur, der verhindern muss, dass in der Erziehung der Zufall re­giert.70 Das kann aber nur dann der Fall sein, wenn sie der Natur folgt und der Gouverneur weiss, wie der Weg beschaffen ist. Was er tatsächlich in der Erziehung unternimmt, kommt einer rigiden Kontrolle der Umwelt gleich und ist schon vor daher extrem künstlich. Emile lernt nur, was er lernen soll, also macht keine anderen als die für ihn vorgesehen Erfahrungen. Emile ist Waise und hat keine Familie, sein Gouverneur tritt wie ein Tutor auf und nicht wie ein Vater. Die Erziehung ist durchgehend männlich konfiguriert, eine weibliche Person taucht erst zu Beginn des fünften Buches auf. Und die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Tutor ist sokratisch, am Ende einer Lernsequenz bekommt immer der Erwachsene recht. Würde in der Erziehung der Zufall herrschen, dann wären die zeitlichen Erwartungen durchbrochen, die die Anstrengungen der Erziehung mit einer erreichbaren Zukunft verbinden. Auch bei Rousseau kommt die Erziehung an ihr Ziel, aber nur weil Zeitlichkeit ausgeschlossen wird. Zeit wird an Natur gebunden und einzig dann kann die „route de la nature“ verlässlich erscheinen. Rousseaus Natur ist nicht kontingent und so auch keinem zeitlichen Wandel unterworfen. Es ist die wohl geordnete Natur eines Botanikers, der die Entwicklung von Pflanzen beobachtet. 67 68 69 70

Ebd., 311. „Maintenez l’enfant dans la seule dépendance des choses; vous aurez suivi l’ordre de la nature dans le progrès de son éducation“ (ebd.). Ebd., 317. Ebd., 279. Ebd., 324 f.

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3 Zeit Im zweiten Buch des Emile findet sich eine berühmte Bestimmung, die mit der Zeit der Erziehung zu tun hat und die die bisherigen Vorstellungen auf den Kopf stellt. „Oserai-je exposer ici la plus grande, la plus importante, la plus utile régle71 de toute l’éducation? Ce n’est pas de gagner de tems, c’est d’en perdre.“72 Diese Überlegung sei paradox, kommentiert Rousseau, aber sie liegt nahe, wenn man über die Erziehung nachdenkt, und es sei ohnehin besser, Paradoxien zu pflegen als Vorurteile.73 Warum aber soll ausgerechnet die Erziehung paradox gedacht werden? Die „wichtigste“ und „nützlichste Regel“ der Erziehung soll sein, Zeit zu verlieren. Aber das ist alles andere als einsichtig: Erziehung, so würde man meinen, muss ihre Zeit gewinnbringend anlegen, also kann nicht einfach Zeit verlieren oder sie verstreichen lassen. Zeit darf in der Erziehung nicht bloss vergehen, sondern muss genutzt und in diesem Sinne gewonnen oder verdient werden.74 Anders wäre es unmöglich, einen Lernprozess zu organisieren. Auch wer wie der junge Emile in keine Abhängigkeit geraten und so einzig von den Dingen lernen soll, muss dies im zeitlichen Nacheinander tun, und das macht nur Sinn, wenn irgendein Lerngewinn erzielt wird. Am Ende muss man mehr können als am Anfang, und das setzt eine didaktisch genutzte Zeit voraus. Aber in Rousseaus natürlichem Raum der Erziehung gibt es keinen strukturierten Ablauf der Zeit, die für den Fortgang des Lernens Bedeutung hätte. Natürlich sind nur die Jahreszeiten. Es gibt daneben weder Jahre noch Monate oder Wochen, Tage und Stunden. Die Abwesenheit des Kalenders ist ein Strukturmerkmal des Naturzustandes, und der damit verknüpfte Lernraum kennt ebenfalls keine festen Zeiten, ohne die schulischer Unterricht unmöglich wäre. Emile aber lernt auf Anlässe hin und so bezogen auf eine je bestimmte Situation. Die Lernzeit ist immer die Gegenwart des Erlebens und der Unterweisung, zwischen zwei Lerngelegenheiten muss keine Zeit genutzt werden, ausgenommen, dass Emiles Gouverneur sich neue Aufgaben ausdenkt und Anlässe des Lernens überlegt. Dass Zeit für sich genommen vergeht, ist gar nicht vorgesehen. Sie kann weder gewonnen noch verloren werden, die These ergibt nur polemisch Sinn; die nichtnatürliche, die falsche Erziehung ist verlorene Zeit, und zwar deswegen, weil 71 72 73 74

Hier wie durchgehend entsprechen Zeichensetzung und Schriftweise dem Original Rousseaus. o.c. 4, 323. „J’aime mieux être homme à paradoxes qu’homme à préjugés“ (ebd., 323). Gagner ist „gewinnen“ und „verdienen“.

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ständig versucht wird, die Zeit des Lernens nützlich einzusetzen. Aber in der Welt des Kindes, so lässt sich Rousseaus These verstehen, gibt es kein Effizienzprinzip. Der Ertrag ist kein Effekt des Aufwands, die Erziehung wird nicht umso besser, je mehr Mittel eingesetzt werden. Nur wenige Mittel sind überhaupt tauglich, und ihre Güte richtet sich nicht nach einem Zweck. Der Naturzustand, anders gesagt, ist nicht nur frei vom Kalender, sondern auch von der Ökonomie. Erneut ist die Antike ein Bezugspunkt. Die elaborierteste Theorie der Zeit nach Platon entwickelte Augustinus im xi. bis xiii. Buch der Confessiones, also seiner Bekenntnisse, in denen er auch seine Bekehrung zum christlichen Glauben beschreibt. Augustinus wird von Rousseau bei Gelegenheit zitiert, nicht jedoch im Emile, wo auch nicht auf die Erziehungstheorie des Kirchenvaters eingegangen wird. Augustins Pädagogik nimmt vom Problem der Zeit ihren Ausgang und also weder von der Natur noch von der Tugend des Menschen, die unter ein radikales Vergänglichkeitsgebot gestellt werden. Bestimmend für die Theorie ist die Lehre der Gnade angesichts der Omnipräsenz und Untilgbarkeit von Sünde. Die Relation von „Gnade“ und „Sünde“ ist in der gesamten Erziehungsliteratur vor Augustinus nie in dieser Radikalität bestimmt worden, als Problem zweier Welten, die das Ergebnis sind der selbstverschuldeten Vertreibung aus dem Paradies.75 Mit der Vertreibung beginnt die Zeitlichkeit des Menschen, die konzipiert wird als dauerhafte Kontinuierung der Sünde in der Welt des Fleisches und der Selbstliebe, der die Welt Gottes schroff entgegen steht,76 vermittelt einzig durch Gnade, die niemand ausser Gott beeinflussen kann. Auch der Tugendhafteste findet nicht das höchste Gut, das armselige Leben muss verworfen werden, einzig wahre Frömmigkeit ist wahre Tugend.77 Die Zeittheorie ist dafür extrem günstig, weil nämlich „Zeit“ konzipiert wird als punktueller Umschlag von Zukunft in Vergangenheit, ohne die Gegenwart mehr als diesen Augenblick erscheinen zu lassen.78 Die Erfahrung ist daher unausgesetzt kontingent, ohne je zur Ruhe einer dauerhaften Anschauung zu kommen, die Selbstbewusstsein ermöglichen würde. Gott ist die zeitlose

75 76 77 78

Aurelius Augustinus, Vom Gottesstaat (De civitate dei), Buch 11 bis 22, Übers. v. W. Thimme (München, 1978). Ebd., Buch 14. Ebd., Buch 14/4. K. Flasch, Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo. Das xi. Buch der Confessiones. Historischphilosophische Studie. Text – Übersetzung – Kommentar (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993).

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Macht ausserhalb der Erfahrung, diese Macht ist geschützt durch die Zeitlichkeit der anderen Welt, die gleichbedeutend ist mit Vergänglichkeit. Die Unterscheidung von Ewigkeit und Zeit geht wesentlich auf Platon zurück. „Zeit“ ist „ein in Zahlen fortschreitendes ewiges Abbild“ der „in dem Einen verharrenden Ewigkeit.“ Die Ewigkeit ist mit zeitlichen Begriffen nicht zu erfassen. Das war und wird sein sind „gewordene Formen der Zeit,“ die fälschlicherweise auf das „ewige Sein“ übertragen werden.79 Die Zeit kann aufgelöst werden, die Ewigkeit nicht.80 Augustinus nutzt diese Unterscheidung, um zwei Welten voneinander abzugrenzen. Ein weltliches Reich der Märtyrer, das die Donatisten schaffen wollten, wird kategorisch ausgeschlossen.81 Auch der Frömmste ist nie frei von Sünde, und kann es nicht sein. Erklärt wird diese Struktur mythologisch, nämlich mit der Lehre der Erbsünde, die gegen den irischen Mönch Pelagius und seine Anhänger entwickelt wurde.82 Pelagius lehrte in Rom. Er erkannte, dass die augustinische Theorie der göttlichen Gnade dazu führen würde, die christliche Lehre in Manichäismus aufgehen zu lassen. Zwischen zwei schroff getrennten Welten vermittelt nichts als die Gnade, was noch radikaler ist als die Lehren der Manichäer selbst. Sie unterschieden zwischen dem Reich des Lichts und dem Reich der Finsternis. Das Reich der Finsternis breitet sich aus, das Reich des Lichts weicht zurück, aber die Lehre sieht zur Rettung des Lichts vor der sich ausbreitenden Finsternis immerhin noch Auserwählte vor, die bei Augustinus fehlen. Von Gott auserwählt ist nur Jesus Christus, der aber keine Gnade erteilen kann. Augustinus setzte sich durch, Pelagius wurde Anfang 417 aus der Kirche exkommuniziert. Von ihm gibt es bezeichnenderweise kein authentisches

79 Platon, Werke, hrsg. v. G. Eigler, Band 7, Timaios – Kritias – Philebos, Bearb. v. K. Widdra, Griechischer Text v. A. Rivauld/A. Diès; deutsche Übersetzung v. H. Müller/F. Schleiermacher (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), Timaios 37d, e. 80 Ebd., Timaios 38b, c. 81 Augustinus, Brief an Emeritus (405 n. Chr.). 82 Der irische Mönch Pelagius lehrte zwischen 400 und 410 n. Chr. in Rom, vermutlich inauguriert während der Regentschaft des Papstes Anastasius (398–401 n. Chr.). Pelagius’ Schüler Caelestius wurde im Herbst 411 n. Chr. auf der Synode von Karthago verurteilt. Pelagius kommentierte die Theorie der Sünde im Römerbrief (Röm 5, 12–20) gegen die Lehre vom „tradux peccati,“ also gegen die Weitergabe der Sünde Adams durch Fortpflanzung und bis ans Ende der Zeit, vgl. G. de Plinval, Pélage. Ses écrits, sa vie, et ses réformes (Lausanne: Payot, 1943), 121–66. Augustinus‘ erste Schrift (von fünfzehn) gegen die Pelagianer entstand zwischen Oktober 411 und Februar 412 n. Chr. Pelagius wurde 417 von Papst Innozenz i verurteilt und im April 418 aus Rom vertrieben.

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Bild. Sein einflussreichster Anhänger war der Bischof Julianus von Eclanum,83 der die Verdammung von Pelagius ablehnte und die Lehren von Augustinus mit einleuchtenden Argumenten attackierte. Doch auch Julianus musste die Kirche verlassen. 431 verbot das Konzil von Ephesos84 jegliche Form von Pelaganianismus. Das war für die Geschichte der Pädagogik eine entscheidende Weichenstellung. Die Lehre von Augustinus wurde zur grundlegenden Doktrin der christlichen Kirchen und sie greift Rousseau an. Die einzige Kontinuität in der Welt des Fleisches ist die erste Sünde, die als unverändertes Erbe weitergegeben wird, also ausserhalb von Zeit und Geschichte verstanden sein muss. Die Sünde minimiert das Heil, das selbst bei höchster Demut auf radikale Weise ungewiss bleibt. Keine Erziehung vermag den Zustand der Sünde aufzuheben, die „gute Natur“ der Pelagianer bekräftigt einzig den Status der Sündhaftigkeit, sodass Erziehung sich allein auf Demut vor Gott beziehen kann. Anders müsste der Mensch sich selbst vervollkomm­ nen können und wäre so auch für seine Sünden selbst verantwortlich,85 was Sünde von Gnade lösen würde. Damit verbunden ist eine radikale Abwertung des Wissens zugunsten des Glaubens, wie Augustinus in seiner Schrift De Magistro – „Über den Lehrer“ – darlegte. Hier wird die Idee des „inneren Lehrers“86 entwickelt, der nur auf das Wort Gottes zu hören braucht, ohne je eine eigene Lehre zu benötigen. Erziehung ist Empfängnis des Glaubens in der Seele, also weder öffentliche Verkündung von Wahrheit noch dialogische Prüfung des Wissens oder brauchbare Vorbereitung auf das Leben. Niemand soll auf Erden der Lehrer der Menschen genannt werden, weil „der eine Lehrer für alle im Himmel wohnt.“87 Augustinus konzipiert daher eine radikale Variante der Erziehung, die Wirksamkeit letztlich in Gnade verlegt. Erziehung ist keine eigenständige Kraft, und sie kann nichts aus sich heraus bewirken. Rousseau übernimmt die Theorie der beiden entgegengesetzten Welten, negiert die Gnadenlehre und verschiebt die Sünde. Und er bestreitet die Notwendigkeit des Wissens in der ersten Erziehung, die aber mit der guten Natur zur eigenständigen Kraft wird. Genauer: Die Erbsünde wird verzeitlicht 83

84 85 86 87

Julianus von Eclanum (um 386–454–55) wurde 417 Bischof von Eclanum. Als er sich ein Jahr später als einziger der Bischöfe Italiens weigerte, die Verdammung von Pelagius zu unterschrieben, wurde er durch Kaiser Honorius seines Amtes enthoben und musste 321 Italien verlassen. Es war das dritte ökumenische Konzil, das vom 22. Juni bis zum 31. Juli 431 stattfand. Sünde, so Pelagius, ist willentliche Verachtung Gottes, nicht Teil der menschlichen Natur. Aurelius Augustinus, De Magistro, Über den Lehrer, Übers. u. hrsg. B. Mojsisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 11:38, 12:39–40. Ebd., 14:46.

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und zum Merkmal nicht des Menschen, sondern der Gesellschaft. Der Gesellschaftszustand folgt aus dem Naturzustand, der wie das verlorene Paradies verstanden werden muss, wenn die Sünde in die Gesellschaft verlagert wird. Was im zweiten Discours beschrieben wird, soll auch auf die Erziehung zutreffen, nur dass der „Naturzustand“ auf den Ort der Erziehung wie auf das Kind selbst zutreffen soll. Rousseaus Landschaftsgarten wird wie ein spätantikes Paradies88 gedacht; der Satz über die zu verlierende Zeit macht nur Sinn vor dem Hintergrund dieser Konstruktion. Erzählt wird keine fortlaufende Geschichte, die Gewinn und Verlust von Zeit voraussetzen würde, vielmehr geht es um ein Paradigma, mit dem das Prinzip der „natürlichen Erziehung“ demonstriert werden soll. Emile und sein Gouverneur sind daher keine Figuren einer Erzählung mit einer eigenen und sich im Laufe der Zeit ändernden Biographie, sondern beide sind die typologischen Pole des pädagogischen Bezuges.89 Der Landschaftsgarten soll tatsächlich wie das pädagogische Paradies verstanden werden, jedes Paradies aber setzt die Abwesenheit von Zeit voraus. Die Zeit kann daher „verloren“ werden, weil sie gar nicht vorhanden ist und so auch keine Rolle spielen kann. Nur deswegen kann Rousseau postulieren, dass in seiner Erziehung gemäss der Natur der Zufall ausgeschaltet wird. Die Natur folgt der eigenen Zeitlichkeit, die nicht erlebt wird, sondern das Erleben und Lernen bestimmt. Der zeitliche Ablauf im Emile wird geprägt durch das Schema der Erziehungsalter, die Rousseau mit Bezug auf die Histoire naturelle de l‘homme des Comte de Buffon entwickelt.90 Persönliche Zeit oder Voraussicht und Erinnerung gibt es in dem Roman nicht. Auch aus diesem Grunde ist die „natürliche“ Erziehung ganz und gar künstlich. Emile vergisst nichts und behält alles, er hat keine eigene Zeitrech­ nung und kann daher auch nicht gegen die Natur handeln. Daher fehlt jede Form von strategischem Handeln oder Subversion, Emile ist ein Paradigma, kein Kind. Weder er noch sein Gouverneur werden irgendwie näher beschrieben, es sind Figuren in einem abstrakten Spiel, das den Eindruck erwecken soll, es sei ganz und gar konkret. Aber das würde eine Individualität voraussetzen, die im Plot des Emile gerade fehlt. Es handeln keine Personen, 88 89 90

Etwa: Dracontius, De laudibus Dei, 1. Buch/437–53. C. Mall, Emile ou les figures de la fiction (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002). Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (1707–88) war von 1739 an Leiter des Jardin du Roi in Paris. Die ersten drei Bände der Histoire naturelle erschienen 1749, darunter die Histoire de l’homme. Am Ende lagen sechsunddreissig Bände vor, die noch von Supplementen ergänzt wurden. G.L. Leclerc Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle de l’homme et des animaux (Paris: Chez Jean de Bonnot, 1989).

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vielmehr soll an den beiden Figuren der Grundsatz der Theorie demonstriert werden. Der natürlichen Erziehung liegt eine bestimmte, sehr asketische pädagogische Forderung zugrunde, an der die Theorie ausgerichtet wird, nämlich die Stärkung der Kräfte der Natur durch Minimierung der Wünsche bei vollständiger Kontrolle der Lernumwelt. Als Erziehungsalter der Natur genügt die Kindheit genügt sich selbst. Emile lernt nicht zunehmend „mehr,“ sondern nur das, wozu ihn seine spartanische Umwelt anleitet. Erziehung à la campagne impliziert eine Welt ohne soziale Anreize, eine didaktische Welt, die aufgeht in einem Arrangement für das Lernen des Kindes. Institutionen des Wissens wie Bücher und Schulen sind in der ersten Erziehung nicht präsent; das Lernen erfolgt entlang von Anlässen, die vom Gouverneur sorgsam vorbereitet sind und von ihm auch überwacht werden. Der Weg der Erziehung wird auch als geordnetes Nacheinander verstanden. „Entwicklung“ ist für Rousseau aber nicht persönlicher Zuwachs oder Steigerung in irgendeiner Form, das würde der im ersten Discours vertretenen grundlegenden Skepsis gegenüber Axiomen des Fortschritts widersprechen. Entwicklung ist die Abfolge von Altern der Erziehung, die von der Geburt bis zum fünfundzwanzigsten Lebensjahr reichen. Die Lernumwelten sind so angelegt, dass sie jeweils den Anforderungen der Erziehungsalter entsprechen. Emile lernt also nicht gemäss seinen individuellen Bedürfnissen und Fortschritten, sondern gemäss den natürlichen Interessen, die für das jeweilige Erziehungsalter typisch sein sollen und die die Theorie festlegt. Rousseau unterscheidet am Ende der Einleitung des „Manuscrit Favre“ des Emile91 vier Alter der Erziehung.92 Neu ist daran, dass Kindheit und Jugend nicht mit dem traditionellen Schema der Lebensalter erfasst werden, also nicht den Beginn eines Zyklus darstellen, der von der Geburt bis zum Tod reicht. Berühmt sind etwa William Shakespeares sieben Stufen des menschlichen Leben, die im zweiten Akt von As You Like It beschrieben werden.93 Leben wird hier zyklisch gedacht und endet mit der zweiten Infantilität, der des Alters. 91

92

93

Der Genfer Indologe und Mäzen Léopold Favre (1848–1922) berichtete über den Fund, die Echtheit und die Veröffentlichung des Manuskripts: L. Favre, „Le Manuscrit Favre de l’Emile“, in Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, t. 8 (1912), 233–54. „Les âges de l’éducation“ nach P.D. Jimack, La genèse et la rédaction de l’Emile (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, les Delices, 1960). (= Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Th. Besterman, vol. 13), Chap. 7. As You Like It 2. 7.

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Bei Rousseau ist Erziehung auf eine offene Zukunft eingestellt, ohne das Leben mit einem Stadium des Zerfalls enden zu lassen. Der Anfang des Lebens wird vom Ende unabhängig, der Verlauf wird nur bestimmt durch die Erziehung, die allerdings genau festgelegt ist. Der Ablauf der Erziehungsalter ist für die gesamte Konstruktion des Emile grundlegend.94 • • • •

Das Erziehungsalter der Natur dauert bis zum zwölften Lebensjahr, das der Vernunft bis zum fünfzehnten, das der Kraft bis zum zwanzigsten und das der Klugheit bis zum fünfundzwanzigsten.

Die Zeit der Erziehung bezieht sich auf alle vier Alter. Alles, was über die „natürliche Erziehung“ gesagt wird, beschränkt sich also auf das erste Alter der Erziehung, nur hier gelten die Regeln und Maximen des Lernens im „Naturzustand“. Die anderen Alter verlangen eine andere Art der Didaktik, was in der Bezugnahme auf Rousseaus Pädagogik fast immer übersehen worden ist. Seine Pädagogik umfasst eine Spanne von vier Phasen, in denen Verschiedenes geschieht. Gegenüber dem Leben sind die Erziehungsalter geschlossene Grössen, sie können weder länger noch kürzer dauern und sind auch keinem subjektiven Vorbehalt ausgesetzt. Die Einteilung in feste Lebensalter geht auf antike Schriftsteller zurück. Meist wird auf den römischen Polyhistor Marcus Terentius Varro verwiesen, der in den Enzyklopädien des 18. Jahrhunderts noch sehr präsent ist. „Varron divise l’âge de l’homme en cinq partie, qu’il s’appelle infantia, pueritia, adolescentia, juventa, senectas; d’autres y a joutent une sixième partie.“95 Gemeint ist Augustinus, der die Lebensalter auf sechs erhöht hat, um sie mit den sechs Schöpfungstagen und den sechs Weltaltern in Einklang zu bringen.96 Dem folg­te auch Isidor von Sevilla,97 der im elften Buch seiner Etymologiae98 die Lehre der Lebensalter für das christliche Mittelalter verbindlich formulierte. 94 95

96 97

98

o.c. 4, 60. Novitius, seu Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum, tome premier (Paris: Apud Jacobum Rollin Filium, Carolum-Antonium Jombert. Claudium-Joannem-Baptistam Buch & Filium, 1750), 52. Aurelius Augustinus, De Genesi contra Manichaeos. Libri Duo, http://www.augustinus.it/ latino/genesi_dcm/index2.htm, Liber 1, 23, 35–40. Isidor von Sevilla (um 560–636) wurde um 599/601 Erzbischof von Sevilla und übte dieses Amt bis zu seinem Tode aus. Er ist der letzte der lateinischen Kirchenväter, mit dem die christliche Antike beendet wird. Abgeschlossen um 630 n. Chr. Das 11. Buch handelt „vom Menschen‟ und fasst das zeitgenössische Wissen zusammen, darunter auch das pädagogische.

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Bei Isidor werden unterschieden die frühe Kindheit (infantia), die späte Kindheit (pueritia), die Reifung (adolescentia), die Jugend (juventus) sowie die Maturität (gravitas) und schliesslich das Alter (senectus). Die ersten beiden Alter dauern je sieben Jahre, das dritte dauert doppelt so lange, nämlich vierzehn Jahre. Das vierte ist das des Erwachsenen, es ist das stärkste aller Lebensalter, das bis zum fünfzigsten Jahr dauert. Danach folgt der zwanzigjährige Übergang von der Jugend ins Alter, das selbst keinen bestimmten Zeitraum kennt. Die letzten Periode des Alters heisst „senium“.99 Mit den einzelnen Altern sind natürliche Eigenschaften und damit Interessen verbunden, die weder vorher noch nachher erlebt und bearbeitet werden können. Genau dieser Idee folgt auch Rousseau, nur dass er kein Schema der Alter für die gesamte Lebensspanne verwendet. Aber jedes seiner Erziehungsalter muss abgeschlossen sein, bevor das nächste beginnen kann, die Dauer ist immer gleich, „Entwicklung“ wäre so einfach der Ablauf der natürlichen Phasen, ohne dabei Zeit investieren zu müssen oder sparen zu können. Kindheit ist in diesem Sinne Teil der natürlich voranschreitenden Lebensordnung, wobei die Erziehung auf die ersten Phasen eingeschränkt wird. Danach ist der Mensch fertig und kann in die Gesellschaft entlassen werden.100 Die These, dass die Zeit der ersten Erziehung „verloren“ sein will, muss wie gesagt vor dem Hintergrund von Rousseaus literarischer Konstruktion gesehen werden. Der Roman braucht keinen Fortgang der Handlung, der Anfang und das Ende sind durch die Erziehungsalter festgelegt, Abweichungen durch unvorhergesehene Ereignisse sind nicht vorgesehen und zu Verwirrungen des Lesers kommt es nicht. In diesem Sinne ist Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy der extreme Gegenpol zu Rousseaus Emile, in dem der Leser nicht mit überraschenden Verknüpfungen vom geraden Weg des Lesens abgeführt wird. Der Landschaftsgarten soll so gestaltet werden, dass er das natürliche Lernbedürfnis des Kindes (le besoin naturel)101 genau trifft, ohne sie in eine fortschreitende didaktische Reihe zu bringen. Das Lernen wird indirekt angeleitet, so dass Emile nicht merkt, was mit ihm geschieht. Er soll glauben, selbst der „maître“ seiner Erziehung zu sein, während das nur der Gouverneur sein kann, weil nur er den Weg der Natur kennt.102 Aus dem Paradies wird niemand 99

The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. St. A. Barley, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and O. Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11/2, 1–8. 100 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, unterschied zwischen der Kindheit des Menschen, der Pubertät, dem Erwachsensein (l’âge viril), dem Alter und dem Tod. 101 o.c. 4, 312. 102 Ebd., 363.

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vertrieben, es dient gerade der Entwicklung des Kindes und wird am Ende verlassen, wenn das Alter der Natur abgeschlossen ist und das der Vernunft beginnt. Aber die „route de la nature“ verlangt einen hohen Preis, nämlich den der totalen Kontrolle. Dieser Eindruck bestätigt sich, wenn man genauer die Art und Weise betrachtet, wie die Erziehung überwacht wird. Weil ständig Gefahren drohen – für ein Paradies eine sehr paradoxe Annahme – , muss das Kind möglichst lange vor falschen Wegen geschützt werden. Kindheit verlangt ein Mora­ torium und gut geschützte Grenzen, weil sie eine gefährliche Phase des Lernens ist. Die paternale Gestaltung des Lernraums begründet sich nicht mit den Potentialen der Natur, sondern mit den Gefährdungen des Kindes. Deutlich sagt Rousseau: „Le plus dangereux intervalle de la vie humaine est celui de la naissance à l’age de douze ans. C’est le tems ou germent les erreurs et les vices, sans qu’on ait encore aucun instrument pour les détruire; et quand l’instrument vient les racines sont si profondes qu’il n’est plus tems de les arracher“.103 Der Gouverneur ist nicht der antike pater familas, sondern der Kontrolleur der Erziehung, die ohne Familie auskommt. Nicht einmal die Keime von Irrtümern und Lastern dürfen in Emiles Lernraum eindringen. Es muss also dafür gesorgt sein, dass ständig alle Versuchungen abwesend sind. Frei von Irrtümern und Lastern ist nicht einfach die gute, sondern die geschützte und strikt überwachte Natur, in die nichts gelangen kann, was den Weg der Erziehung gefährden würde. Nur so kann das Kind zur Tugend und zur Wahrheit geführt werden, die aus ihm selbst, aus der eigenen Stärke, entstehen müssen. Irrtümer und Laster müssen so lange gemieden werden, wie die gefährliche Zeit der Kindheit andauert. Das „Manuscrit Favre“ stellt die erste Fassung des Emile dar, die bereits die gesamte Komposition enthält. Schon hier finden sich drei wesentliche Vorentscheidungen der späteren Theorie. Erstens: die Schwäche des Menschen entsteht aus dem Missverhältnis zwischen seinen Kräften und seinen Wünschen, nur wer die Wünsche minimiert, erhöht die Kräfte.104 Zweitens: Intelligenz ist keine Frage des Wissens und genauer: keine Frage der Wissensmenge, anders wäre nur intelligent, wer alles weiss, was unmöglich ist.105 Und drittens: Das vorhandene Wissen ist oft falsch, unnütz oder eitel,106 also für die Erziehung im Alter der Natur unbrauchbar.

103 104 105 106

Ebd., 323. Ebd., 165. Ebd., 166–67. Ebd., 167.

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Man lernt nicht einfach, um ständig mehr zu wissen und klüger zu werden, wie die Bildungstheorie seit der Antike unterstellt hat. Eine besondere Provokation der Theorie Rousseaus ist es, dass sie nicht einen steten Zuwachs in der Menge von Kenntnissen annimmt. Erziehung ist keine Funktion der Zeit und die Qualität des Lernens wird nicht umso besser, je länger es dauert, einfach weil es keine Entwicklung abseits dessen gibt, was die Natur vorsieht. Nichts ist vor der Zeit möglich, die die Natur gibt und durch die Erziehung nicht beeinflusst werden kann. Dahinter steht der antike Lehrsatz, dass die Natur keine Sprünge macht. Der Satz Natura non facit saltus stammt sinngemäss aus der eleatischen Naturphilosophie und ist durch Aristoteles autoritativ geworden.107 Im 18. Jahrhundert hat ihn Carl von Linné aufgegriffen, dessen grösster Verehrer Rousseau war. Linné hält in den Philosophica botanica von 1751 axiomatisch fest: „Primum et ultimum hoc in Botanicis desideratum est. Natura non facit saltus“.108 Kinder wären so tatsächlich wie Pflanzen, nämlich reduzierbar auf stetiges Wachstum und geleitet von einem kundigen Gärtner. Rousseaus paternale Erziehung hat zur Folge, dass das Kind tatsächlich nicht weiss, wie ihm geschieht. Der Garant für das Gelingen der ersten Erziehung ist ein langes Moratorium in der einen Welt der Natur, das die andere voraussetzt, die der Gesellschaft. Irrtümer und Laster sind keine Folgen der Erbsünde. Sie entstehen in der menschlichen Gesellschaft, die folglich so­lange gemieden werden muss, wie die gefährliche Zeit der Kindheit andauert. Dies muss mit Blick auch auf die Rezeptionsgeschichte betont werden: Rousseau hält die Kindheit für die gefährlichste Zeit des menschlichen Lebens, sofern Kinder der Gesellschaft ausgesetzt werden und sich nicht gemäss der eigenen Natur entwickeln können. Grundlegend ist eine Linnésche Vorstellung von „Entwicklung“: Würden die Kinder in einem Sprung (tout d’un coup) von der Mutterbrust in das Alter der Vernunft109 gelangen, so wäre die konventionelle Schulbildung ausreichend, die an die Vernunft und die Moral des Kindes appelliert.110 Wer dagegen dem „progrès naturel“ folgen will, muss gänzlich anders vorgehen. Die Kinder dürfen mit ihrer Seele solange gar nichts tun, bis sie alle ihre Vermögen ausgebildet hat.111 Und die Vernunft (la raison) ist dasjenige Vermögen, das die Seele zuletzt ausbildet, weil es zusammengesetzt ist aus allen anderen.112 107 De Incessu animalium 8, 1, 588b, 4ff. 108 Caroli Linnaei Philosophica Botanica, edito quarta, studio Curtii Sprengel (Halle ad Salam: Sumtibus Car. Aug. Kümmel, 1809), 60. 109 L’age de raison: zwischen zwölf und fünfzehn Jahren (o.c. 4, 60). 110 o.c. 4, 323. 111 Ebd. 112 Ebd., 317.

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Daher darf die Erziehung in den ersten zwölf Jahren nicht positiv sein, also weder Vernunft noch Moral vermitteln. Das führt auf ein entscheidendes Theorem in der Pädagogik Rousseaus, die oft missverstandene negative Erziehung. „La prémiére éducation doit donc être purement négative. Elle consiste, non point à enseigner la vertu ni la vérité. Mais à garantir le coeur du vice et l‘esprit de l’erreur“.113 Das Herz muss von der Gesellschaft ebenso unberührt bleiben wie der Geist, erst wenn beide dafür reif sind, können Tugend und Wahrheit erfahren werden. Wenn ihr Erzieher nichts tun und nichts lassen könntet, so Rousseau weiter, wenn ihr euren Zögling gesund und stark bis in das zwölfte Lebensjahr führen könntet, ohne dass er zu unterscheiden wüsste, was rechts oder links ist, so würden sich gleich bei euren ersten Lehren die Augen seines Verstandes der Vernunft öffnen. Ohne Vorurteile, ohne Angewohnheiten hätte er nichts in sich, was der Wirkung eurer Bemühungen zuwider sein könnte. Er würde alsbald unter euren Händen der allerweiseste Mensch werden, und ihr würdet, da ihr mit Nichtstun angefangen habt, die allerbeste Erziehung vollbringen, was einem Wunder gleichkommt.114 Es geht aber nicht um „Wunder“ im Sinne der miracles von Magie und Aberglauben, vielmehr verspricht Rousseau einen anderen wunderbaren Effekt, nämlich „un prodige d’éducation.“115 Wegen dieses Versprechens wird der Emile ein berühmtes Buch und entsteht um Rousseau ein pädagogischer Kult. Voraussetzung dafür ist, die Erziehung von der Moral abzukoppeln und sie ganz auf Natur einzustellen. Nur dann kommen keine Vorurteile in die Seele des Kindes, die das Kind schwach werden lassen, weil es sich dagegen vor der Zeit nicht wehren kann. Aber Natur und Gesellschaft können nur im luftleeren Raum eines Gedankenexperiments getrennt werden oder aufeinander folgen. Tatsächlich sind Kinder keine „natürlichen Menschen“, die in die Gesellschaft erst eingeführt werden müssen. Erziehung ist immer eine soziale Erfahrung, die von Anfang an auf Wechselseitigkeit basiert. Ohne die Verlässlichkeit der Rückwirkung und so die Erfahrung der eigenen Macht könnte kein reales Kind erzogen werden, während Emile nur lernt, was der Erzieher will und veranlasst, ohne je erfolgreich subversiv zu sein.

113 Ebd., 323. 114 Ebd., 323–24. 115 Ebd., 324.

chapter 46

The Whig Interpretation of Homer: F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in England Diane Greco Josefowicz* To the extent that scholars remember Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) at all, it is mainly for his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), in which he applied recognizably modern philological methods to the “Homeric Question,” the longstanding debate about the authorship and composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wolf was not always obscure, however. Thanks to the Oxford classicist Mark Pattison, whose 1865 essay on Wolf introduced the philologist from Halle to a broad audience, Wolf’s Prolegomena eventually became a Victorian intellectual touchstone.1 Yet in Britain the first response to Wolf’s Prolegomena was tepid. The Prolegomena merited no significant notice in British generalinterest literary periodicals upon its publication, and even reactions that might have interested specialists garnered scarcely a mention.2 Nevertheless, the Prolegomena did find a few readers. Their response—consisting of heterogeneous commitments to the value of classical antiquity united with a Whiggish political orientation—provides the focus of this essay.3 Whether positioning the Prolegomena as a threat to traditionalist views, plagiarizing the work while damning it with faint praise, or using it to promote mercantile values that the work itself seemed to discover in classical antiquity, the Prolegomena offered a lens through which Wolf’s first British readers saw harbingers of a larger * For assistance with this essay, I’m grateful to Jed Buchwald, Gwen Kordonowy, Ivan Eubanks, David Shawn, James Pasto, and especially Kristine Haugen. 1 Anthony Grafton, “The Messrs. Casaubon: Isaac Casaubon and Mark Pattison,” in Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 216–30. 2 These responses included claims from C.G. Heyne and J.G. Herder that Wolf had appropriated their ideas. Nor did anyone consider outright rejections of Wolf’s work, such as by J.H. Voss and Melchior Cesarotti. On the initial Continental response to the Prolegomena, see Anthony Grafton, introduction to F.A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans. and ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985), 26–35. To my knowledge, no one has studied the initial reception of Wolf’s work in Britain. 3 On the difficulty of defining “Whigs” and “Whiggery” at this time, see L. Mitchell, The Whig World (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1995), 1–13.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/ 9789004263314_047

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cultural shift, from traditional values to technocratic and materialist ones that they either feared or else dearly hoped to effect more broadly. 1

Wolf and Homer in England

The Prolegomena took up an old question: How was Homer’s text composed and transmitted? By combing extant materials, Wolf used philological methods to show not only that Homer’s apparently singular voice was the illusory effect of centuries’ worth of editorial efforts, but also that there were limits on what anyone could know about Homer, his poetry, and his world, given the scattered and fragmentary state of the textual evidence. The nuances of Wolf’s convoluted argument were lost on his first readers, who seemed unable to distinguish his position from those held by textual critics since the Renaissance. Nevertheless, Wolf’s fuller argument is worth a brief gloss. Rather than claiming, as earlier critics did, that expunging copyists’ errors was sufficient for a good edition, Wolf showed how anomalies of diction, word choice, tone, and punctuation in more recent materials could, at best, only be used as “clues that could enable one to identify the original substrates” of older assemblages that were, themselves, questionable as well.4 Turning, for instance, to Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison’s 1788 publication of tenth-century notes (scholia) to the Iliad that preserved even more ancient commentary on the poem, Wolf claimed that if classicists could understand the Alexandrines’ principles for emendation, they might glimpse whatever material had come down to the Alexandrines in the first place—but that was all.5 The earliest written versions predated these materials by a significant interval, Wolf said, and Homer, if he existed at all, would have composed his poetry even earlier, before the invention of writing. Wolf was not optimistic that this original written text could be recovered, and he was alert to the possibility that this text, even if it were found, would not simply transcribe the poems as they’d been performed.6 Wolf’s initial failure to find an audience may surprise, given the popularity of classical antiquity in contemporary Britain. But the forbidding Prolegomena was a far cry from the typical British modes of encounter with antiquity, from the lyricism of poets like Thomas Gray to the practical romanticism of guides

4 54–55. Wolf preferred “clearly attested ancient sources” to unattributed ones, even those that were often cited or repeated. 5 Ibid., 56–57. 6 Ibid., 69.

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promising travelers meaningful engagement with antiquity on grand tours.7 The Prolegomena stood apart, too, from debates casting Homer as a representative of an essentially English poetic spirit, an idea that exercised William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb.8 Then again, British encounters with antiquity tended to put classical texts to uses quite separate from philology; there was a world of difference between the “professed Pedant” and the “Gentleman of Letters,” between those who valued appreciations of classical texts and those who demanded ever-more-accurate editions.9 While many sought to evoke Homer’s world, few were prepared to untangle the history of emendations to Homeric texts. For that, expertise in textual criticism was needed. By the turn of the century, this kind of scholarship was etiolated in Britain, even as Alexander Pope’s flawed Homer continued to sell out edition after edition.10 Although Wolf’s philological methods would have been familiar 7

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Appreciative responses to antiquity in Britain reflected the public schools’ classical emphasis. See J. Bowen, “Education, Ideology and the Ruling Class: Hellenism and English Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century,” in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, ed. G.W. Clarke and J.C. Eade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and M.L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500– 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). On guidebooks, their writers, and the grand tour, see D. Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On Thomas Gray’s Hellenism, see P. Wilson, “‘High Pindaricks upon stilts’: A Case Study in the Eighteenth-Century Classical Tradition,” in Clarke and Eade, Rediscovering Hellenism. T. Webb, “Homer and the Romantics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. R. Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 290, 306. In 1800, fewer Britons were as proficient in Latin as had been the case a century before; this decline doubtless also contributed to Wolf’s failure to find an audience. K. Haugen, pers. comm. S. Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 12. On the debate over technical scholarship and appreciation, see J.M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1991). K. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011), reprises the theme, focusing on Bentley. Pope’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey ran to eighty-seven editions by 1800; the work proved so influential that it “establishe[d] itself as a poetic lexicon for the nineteenth century.” P. Wilson, “Homer and English Epic,” in Fowler, Cambridge Companion to Homer, 280–81. Older editions by John Lydgate, William Caxton, William Congreve, and especially George Chapman also proved enduring. [See G. Steiner, “Homer in English Translation,” in Fowler, Cambridge Companion to Homer, 363–75; and Steiner, introduction to Homer in English (London: Penguin Books, 1996), xv–xvii.] On the paucity of technical scholarship, see E.G.W. Bill, Education at Christ Church, Oxford, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Clarke, Classical Education in Britain.

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to scholars of sacred texts, classicists found the methods uncongenial to their typically appreciative and ethically oriented approaches to classical texts.11 It is perhaps for this last reason that the few specialists, such as Richard Porson or Peter Elmsley, who were positioned to understand Wolf’s philology tended instead to dismiss it. Pattison faulted Wolf’s contemporaries for trivializing his contribution: “The Wolfian hypothesis has been treated in this country as a mere wanton paradox, the amusement of the vacant hours of a perverse ingenuity.”12 This view repeated that of the historian M. de Sainte-Croix, author of the Mystères du Paganisme (1784) and a biography of Alexander, who in 1798 judged the Prolegomena a mere “paradoxe littéraire”—a condemnation that inserted yet another irony into the Prolegomena’s reception, as Sainte-Croix made his assessment without bothering to read the work.13 2

The “Homeric Question” in Edinburgh

Wolf’s Prolegomena not only decoupled epic poetry from tasteful appreciations, moral considerations, and the romance of the grand tour, but also threatened to separate the Homeric Question from the politics of national “genius”—an issue often framed, especially in Scotland, with reference to Homer as an important example of a genius poet who gave rise to a distinct indigenous literary tradition.14 Intriguingly, one of the few early British responses to Wolf’s Prolegomena brought these issues together. In 1803, over an evening meal, a group of writers forging an independent Scots literary tradition debated questions about relationships between indigenous epic traditions and national identity. To them, textual criticism of Homer slighted the biographical side and, in doing so, threatened to undermine a burgeoning

11

12 13 14

Recent studies of the secularization of the technical scholarly methods formerly limited in application to sacred texts in Britain include Haugen, Richard Bentley; and J.-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the import of Continental classical scholarly methods to Britain in the seventeenth century, again primarily in application to sacred texts, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). M. Pattison, “Friedrich August Wolf,” North British Review (June 1865): 137. W.W. Hyde, “The Centenary of the Death of Friedrich August Wolf,” Open Court 5, no. 4 (1925): 287. See K. Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), particularly pt. 2.

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Scots literary tradition that, though nearly sixty years old by then, was still felt to be precarious. Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century rise to cultural prominence has recently merited significant scholarly attention.15 Thanks to the influence of both the Whig-dominated Edinburgh Review and its rival, the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine, by the early years of the nineteenth century Edinburgh held such “an unprecedented sway in British letters” that an “Edinburgh imprint was worth more than a London.”16 Classical antiquity provided a framework for understanding this redistribution of ideological power between north and south. Known as the “northern Athens,” and in contrast to London’s cruder “Roman” and imperial identity, Edinburgh’s special “dominion over the minds of men,” as one contemporary put it, promised to be “more permanent than even that which Roman arms were able to effect.” But even as Edinburgh garnered comparisons to Periclean Athens, a second, more ambiguous identification threatened. This identification was martial and primitively heroic, “inevitably leading Scottish minds to wander less to the bustling streets of democratic Athens than to the ringing plains of windy Troy.”17 Among Scots who cared about such things, there was an intense wish for a poet who might do for Scotland what they perceived Homer had done for ancient Greece, providing a national identity based on tales of an ancient heroic society with an exquisite poetic culture.18 It was against this backdrop that Wolf’s Prolegomena appeared in an argument at a dinner hosted by the publisher Thomas Norton Longman (1771–1842) at his offices in Paternoster Row. The Scots literary historian David Irving (1778–1860), who was at this time finishing his Lives of the Scottish Poets, a work 15

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See I. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2007); and K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1997). Quoted in I. Duncan, “Edinburgh: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51. This was more than a moment’s enthusiasm. C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), has traced elements of modern Anglo-British identity to the activity of eighteenth-­ century Scots historians. D. Allan, “The Age of Pericles in the Modern Athens: Greek History, Scottish Politics, and the Fading of the Enlightenment,” Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001): 395. Homer’s importance to this tradition should not be underestimated. Of the eighty-seven editions of Homer accounted for in Wilson’s analysis, thirty-four, or nearly half, issued from Scots publishers, mainly in Edinburgh. See Wilson, “Homer and English Epic,” 275n.

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he considered nothing less than the first “literary biography of Scotland,” recounted the dinner in his memoirs.19 According to Irving, Longman’s guests included George Ellis (1753–1818), the author of Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790), which had cemented his reputation for recasting antique poetry into popularly appealing forms; and Walter Scott (1771–1832), an as-yetunknown writer working as a barrister and sheriff in Selkirk.20 Scott had recently collected Lowlands folk ballads for his first major work, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This study evoked, as did many similar works about Scotland’s threatened folkways, “an organic national society, its history rooted in place.”21 These encounters with an antique past sought to reestablish “a lost organic relation between individual subject and national community,” as Ian Duncan has observed.22 Rounding out the group was the poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), a partisan for a Scots literary tradition who harbored ambitions to join the illustrious company Irving described in his Lives. These writers—Irving, Ellis, Campbell, and Scott—were traditionalist in outlook and nostalgic about Scotland’s folk traditions. As a Whig-affiliated progressive,23 Longman, however, was surely aware of the scorn directed against these positions from certain quarters of London’s Whig elite: Lady Rosslyn, for instance, referred to Scott as “the Beast” and hoped he would be hanged.24 It was perhaps for this reason that Longman leavened the evening’s roster with two representatives of fashionable, scientific London. The first, Humphry Davy (1778–1829), was then giving engaging public lectures at the newly established Royal Institution. The second, Thomas Young, likewise employed by the Royal Institution and Ellis’s longtime friend, also had substantial philological

19

A.M. Kinghorn, “Two Scots Literary Historians: David Irving and John Merry Ross,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26, no. 1 (1991): 80n.5. Irving’s recollection, which appears as a long fragment in T. Campbell, The Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, ed. William Beattie (London: Edward Moxon, 1849), 1:432–33, was reprinted in the Quarterly Review and The Gentleman’s Magazine. 20 That Scots literature was so well represented might have reflected Longman’s recent forays into the northern literary market. He had just become the London agent for the Edinburgh Review, the major platform for opponents to Blackwood’s; and he would become Scott’s London publisher of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and Rob Roy (1817). 21 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, xii. 22 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 57. 23 See Mitchell, The Whig World, 11, 181n.16. 24 Ibid., 31.

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interests.25 “Such guests as these,” Irving later wrote, “could not now be assembled at any table in the kingdom.”26 Over dinner, an argument broke out between Campbell and Young over Homeric subjects, which Irving linked to Wolf’s Prolegomena. While Irving did not describe their positions in detail, he noted that while Campbell “was much inclined to dilate on the subject of Homer, and the poems which bear his name,” he was, “on various points…opposed with equal decision and coolness by Dr. Young,” whose “erudition” Irving praised and who “in all probability was familiarly acquainted with” Wolf’s work.27 The argument, which angered Campbell so much that he “quitted the room with a hasty step,” likely stemmed from a deeper divide than one over Homer per se. Campbell, who certainly knew his Greek, would have abhorred Wolf’s claims because of what they implied about the project of establishing an epic tradition in Scotland. Settled in London after avoiding capture by the French, Campbell was the author of a lugubrious romance about the Napoleonic victory at Hohenlinden (1800). “The combat deepens. On, ye brave, / Who rush to glory, or the grave!” is an apposite example of his style. Campbell’s idealized battle was part of the “burgeoning cult of primitive heroism” in Scots letters.28 Decades before, James MacPherson sang a similar tune: “Oscur my son came down; the might in battle descended… There was the clashing of swords; there was the voice of steel. They stuck and they thrust; they digged for death with their swords… Here rest the pursuer and the pursued.”29 This snippet is from MacPherson’s best-known work, a volume of purported translations of an ancient Gaelic saga by Ossian, whom Voltaire dubbed “the Scottish Homer.”30 Ossian was said to be responsible for a body of folk documents collected by MacPherson and published as Fragments of Ancient Poetry. These evocations of Scotland’s landscape, interspersed with heroic battlefield deeds, suggested a lost world belonging to the ancient Scots that could now be apprehended only 25

On Young’s unusual education in mathematics and languages, see, most recently, A. Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Pi, 2006). 26 Irving in Campbell, Life and Letters, 432–33. 27 Ibid. 28 Allan, “The Age of Pericles,” 395. 29 K. Haugen, “Ossian and the Invention of Textual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 2 (1998): 311–12. For the different receptions of Ossian in Scotland and England see D. Moore, “The Reception of Ossian in Europe,” in The Reception of the Ossian in Europe, ed. H. Gaskill (New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004). 30 D.S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s Ossian (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), compared Macpherson’s Ossian materials to his sources and found him reliable; see also Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 220–21.

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through folklore that served to “anthropomorphize the voices of tradition.”31 According to Macpherson, Ossian’s poems, “handed down from race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition,” reached back to “the very infancy of Christianity in Scotland.”32 Ossian’s influence was both broad and enduring. Rumors of inauthenticity did nothing to stanch the work’s popularity, and as late as 1810, one could find echoes of Ossian in works by authors such as John Grieve, an Edinburgh businessman who wrote Lochiel’s Farewell, a lament for the Highlands after Culloden, that “Land of proud hearts and mountains gray, / Where Fingal fought and Ossian sung!”33 Campbell similarly thought to hear the sounds of a lost world in ancient epic, including Homer’s. Anyone, he opined, might glean an epic poem’s meaning from emotional effects produced by the sonority of the words even as they appeared in their modern guises. “Don’t the words carry the meaning to your ear?” he once asked a friend concerning Homer; the friend, however, demurred, since to her the sound, “very fine [as] it is,” nevertheless conveyed “no distinct ideas to my mind.”34 Campbell’s friend might have been more sympathetic to Wolf’s philological orientation, according to which words, if not subject to textual analysis, could only be said to convey the effects of their editorial handling, as they were emended in the long trail of transcribed, translated, and fragmentary documents. To Campbell, this view demoted the Homeric sagas to bloodless exercises in textual criticism, and the ancient poet Homer became merely “a distant voice, speaking from the murky depths of an illiterate—and hence irrecoverable—age.”35 If Wolf was right that Homeric texts were not direct links to antiquity, then it would have seemed that Macpherson’s Fragments could not have captured antique Scottish life either. Yet to stand against this possibility was to stand against Macpherson, Ossian, and the whole idea of an ancient Scots literary tradition. For Wolf, in contrast, the voice that spoke most powerfully across the ages belonged neither to a single remarkable poet nor to a collectivity, but to history. Using philological methods, the historian confronted the jumble of extant texts known as the Homeric corpus, so that “the voices of all periods

31 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 71. 32 James Macpherson, Fragments of ancient poetry (Edinburgh: for G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760), iii–vi, 29. 33 Grieve’s poem may have first appeared in James Hogg’s The Forest Minstrel (1810). 34 In Campbell, Life and Letters, 36–37. 35 S.L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1759–1970 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20.

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joined together bear witness, and history speaks.”36 This position threatened to undermine the ambitions of poets like Campbell who sought to anchor a national identity in the figure of an ancient bard whose effusions could give shape and substance to an entire tradition. 3

The Grenville Homer

One way to think about Wolf, then, was as someone who, by keeping Homer within the purview of scholars, also kept the poet safely distant from nonspecialists (e.g., Pope). Yet, even among specialists, Wolf’s influence was strangely indirect. While they were sensitive to his ideas, they were reluctant to acknowledge his influence. Making sense of the conflict takes us quickly into Regency politics—in this case the rivalry between the aristocratic Thomas Grenville and the upstart Foxite Whigs. In the mid-nineteenth century, Pattison put his finger on the problem. Reflecting on the Grenville Homer, a four-volume deluxe edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1800, Pattison claimed not only that it bore evidence of Wolf’s influence, but also that the editors had intentionally obscured that debt. “Though Wolf’s historical criticism found no favor in the English universities,” Pattison observed, “yet, by some process which we have not traced…nearly all his emendations were adopted in the Oxford Homer (called the Grenville) of 1800, though it was pretended by the editors that they were corrections made from collations of the mss.”37 Nor was Pattison alone in sensing British classicists’ ambivalence about Wolf. In 1834, bibliographers William Thomas Lowndes and Henry G. Bohn recalled that the Italian expatriate poet and translator Ugo Foscolo had observed of the Grenville Homer that although “the editors had done much to deprecate the merits of Wolff [sic], nevertheless they adopted all his readings.”38 To say that Whig bickering over status at times involved classical scholarship would understate the case; in fact, demonstration of a person’s classical learning frequently secured his dominance in disputes about respectability. For Whigs, classical learning conferred protection against threats to identity and status, but in different ways. While knowledge of the classics was merely a 36 Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 209. 37 Pattison, “Friedrich August Wolf,” 138. 38 W.T. a. H.G.B. Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, vol. 2 (London: William Pickering, 1835), 953. On Foscolo, see E.R. Vincent, Ugo Foscolo: An Italian in Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

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guarantor of status for the securely privileged Grenvilles, it was an important consolation against status deprivation for the less socially secure Foxites.39 The Grenville Whigs steered clear of the Foxites, whom they considered prone to social embarrassments; the Foxites, centered on Holland House and the figure of Charles James Fox (1749–1806), were in turn inclined to charge the other group with snobbery.40 So, for instance, when the Cambridge classicist Richard Porson—who enjoyed close ties, mediated by classical scholarship, to the Grenville Whigs—reviewed the Foxite mp Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet (1791), Porson criticized Knight’s idealization of Homer’s language—and, by extension, Homer himself as the single, unified source of that language—as a mistake Knight might have avoided, if only he had more specialist knowledge.41 Not that Knight made himself easy to admire. Knight’s Analytical Essay appeared five years after his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786), which provided sensational ammunition to those opposed to the Whigs for other than strictly political reasons.42 This distaste for the Foxites was not merely literary, either. William Maltby later recalled that Porson went to some lengths to avoid meeting Fox at a Holland House dinner to which they had both been invited, fearing that the other guests “would like to kick [him] down the stairs.”43 Which brings me back to the Grenville Homer: if Fox was socially hopeless, Homer at least could be redeemed, in the form of new critical editions like the Grenville. Yet even this edition was, much like any other edition of Homer’s works, the product of many hands, and—to anticipate the argument I will make in the following section, we see here how values associated with the commodification of texts resulted in peeling back layers of aesthetics to the bare minimum so that they began to coincide with Wolf’s view of the Homeric corpus. The Grenville project centered on a fresh rendition of Homer’s Greek accompanied by commentaries. It was financed by three brothers from the aristocratic Whig Grenville family: the Marquis of Buckingham George NugentTemple-Grenville, the Baron Grenville, and the politician and bibliophile 39 Mitchell, The Whig World, 28–31, 155–56. 40 S. Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Chaps. 4 and 5, describes the central role played by Holland House in Whig circles at this time. 41 R. Porson, Tracts and Miscellaneous Criticisms of the late Richard Porson (London: Payne and Foss, 1815), 113. 42 A. Watson, “The Dark Assassin: Thomas James Matthias’ The Pursuits of Literature,” in  Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. D. Lewes (Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2008), 45. 43 J.S. Watson, The Life of Richard Porson (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), 378–79.

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Thomas Grenville, who also served, along with Porson, Thomas Randolph, and William Cleaver, as editor. The project’s premise was basically appreciative: the idea was to produce a luxury edition (a cheaper folio edition was also produced). But production values alone were not enough to ensure that the Grenville was worth its asking price; some specialist credibility was required as well. Thus Porson, who had been Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge since 1792, contributed a collation—a line-by-line description of the differences between the manuscript copy and the version as it appeared in the latest ­edition—of the Harleian manuscript of the Odyssey. Though only Pattison (and apparently Foscolo) believed that the Grenville Homer owed an unacknowledged debt to Wolf, the critical response to the work does somewhat bear out the claim. The Grenville garnered only one major notice, written by Thomas Kidd, another Grenville Whig, and published in the Critical Review, an Edinburgh publication whose Tory sympathies had been modulated in the 1790s by personnel changes and corresponding shifts in editorial direction.44 In Kidd’s review, both Wolf and Macpherson provided points of reference, but Kidd was careful to subordinate Wolf’s influence to a vision of antiquity friendly to the familiar, basically appreciative approach. Kidd wanted to establish the Grenville Homer as authoritative on grounds that were credible but not undermining of this tradition. In this way, he picked a path between the Scylla of Wolf’s philology, which intrigued but was difficult, and a Charybdis of familiar claims about antiquity, as a world resounding with the effusions of ancient bards, that were coming to seem increasingly questionable. Appearing in three installments, Kidd’s review set the Grenville Homer in the context of current scholarship. Kidd’s first piece, which appeared in January 1803, canvassed the new Homer for departures from editions of corresponding Homeric texts. Wolf’s philological work informed Kidd’s discussion but did not by any means dominate it. Kidd drew on many scholars, including Wolf, and, of course, his friend Porson. Additionally, Kidd’s review included a twenty-five page catalog of the Grenville editors’ major points of overlap with extant texts in the Homeric corpus and recent renditions of them. Wolf is referenced throughout this catalog alongside other scholars, contemporary and historical.45

44 45

See O. Wellens, “The ‘Critical Review’: New Light on Its Last Phase,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 56, no. 3 (1978): 678–94. T. Kidd, unsigned review, “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey [The Grenville Homer],” The Critical Review or, Annals of Literature 38 (June 1803): 125. For instance, Kidd noted that “of the two hundred and sixty-five deviations” from Samuel Clarke’s Iliad, “we found two hundred and forty-one countenanced by the text of Wolfius.”

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Kidd’s argument, which is my concern here, appeared in June 1803.46 Kidd opened this article by explicitly identifying Homeric Greece with primitive Scotland as places where ancient epic poems rendered in writing authoritatively attested to a lost heroic past. If these documents included later emendations, this was of no concern. “In the early ages of Greece, the historian and the bard were united; and the popular ballads of the ἈΟΙΔΟΙ [aoidoi, bards], like those of the scalds of the north countrie, preserved the rudiments of real events embellished by fancy” (p. 121). With this reference to the proto-Germanic skald (poet), Kidd evoked the bardic tradition supposed to have started with Ossian. The conflation was not unusual—Homer and Ossian, as we saw with Campbell earlier, were easy to equate—but it did indicate an impulse to unify textual criticism with bardic traditionalism. Thomas Blackwell, in his An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), similarly argued that Homer’s poetry originated in a primitively idyllic context, a golden age of bardic splendor. Scots primitivists latched onto this view, asserting parallels with Ossian.47 But the fact that this link appeared in the Critical Review is additionally significant. Published out of Edinburgh, the Critical Review was founded by Tobias Smollett, founding editor of the Briton, a publication sponsored by the Earl of Bute, Britain’s first Scots prime minister; and it was in the Briton’s pages that the first debates over Ossian appeared.48 Rather than evaluating what he saw as Wolf’s most problematic position— based on the extant textual evidence, biographical claims about Homer could not be seriously countenanced—Kidd dismissed it as irrelevant. But to do this, he had to recast Wolf’s deepest assertion, that Homer’s text could not be recovered except as a shadow of later interventions , as merely suppositional: “We will not dispute the probability of this matchless minstrel availing himself of preceding models,” he wrote, confusing formal development with editorial work, but Wolf’s position was too conjectural, a “wild supposition” that “the compositions attributed to Homer were made up of the scraps of different rhapsodists of different ages.” Kidd urged readers to resist the temptation to devalue the edition on the basis of Wolf’s claims, as to do so would mean throwing the textual baby out with the app.-crit. bathwater: “True fortitude in understanding consists in not suffering what we know to be disturbed by what we do not know,” Kidd asserted, in stark contrast to Wolf, whose concern with 46 47

The final installment was a six-page list of addenda. T. Webb, English Romantic Hellenism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 12; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 67–127. 48 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 77. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 205–206, hints at Bute’s complex position vis-à-vis George iii.

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aporia was paramount. “The uncertainty of the compilation,” he continued, “is not connected with our inquiries” and, therefore, “cannot affect our conclusions.” In fact, he insisted, “we have the poems of Homer pretty nearly in the same state as they existed in the times of Plato, Sophocles, and Pindar.” Kidd conceded that successive editions may have required emendation but nevertheless insisted that nothing essential could have been lost thereby: “still, we contend, that the intrinsic alterations have been over-rated; and assert, that the poetic glory of the Maeonian bard has burst through the obstacles of time, and rolled down to us with the lustre little abated.”49 Thus while Wolf’s edition of the Iliad (1785) received no less attention than anyone else’s in Kidd’s review, the Prolegomena remained an embarrassment. Although Kidd acknowledged Wolf’s influence as “sedulous,” he devoted more space to evaluating other Homeric scholarship in light of the new Grenville edition, elevating some scholars and denigrating others.50 Was this, perhaps, an instance of the “parlor game” to which Pattison referred? At any rate, the Prolegomena could not be made to fit within this framework. Distaste for Wolf corresponded to a political disposition that ran counter to that of moderate Whigs, whose gripes against the Foxites tended also to anathematize the Scots’ romantic traditionalism (as Lady Rosslyn did).51 But even here the battle lines were not clearly drawn. Unlike his close friend Kidd, Porson—who was nothing if not punctilious in his Grecianism—was unmoved by what he found primitive in Homer.52 4

Flaxman and Wedgwood

As a rule, Whigs looked to antiquity for models of thought and behavior that could, in turn, be used to solve present-day problems. To buttress these identifications, however, they needed objects: busts and bas-reliefs decorated with classical themes filled their interiors, along with fine editions of classical texts.53 By the turn of the century, their demand would ensure the widespread 49 50

Kidd, “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,” 122–23. For instance, Bentley garners special commendations while Kidd refers to G.H. Noehden as “Noodle.” Ibid., 143. 51 Mitchell, The Whig World, 30–31. 52 Porson, Tracts and Miscellaneous Criticisms, 113: “Homer’s poetry, however exalted and embellished by learning and genius, must partake of that rudeness and simplicity which are always incident to the infancy of language and society.” 53 Mitchell, The Whig World, 155. Holland House’s lavish interiors are described in L. Kelly, Holland House: A History of London’s Most Celebrated Salon (London: i.b. Tauris, 2013), 29–32.

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commoditization of antiquity. This mingling of commercial and aesthetic categories underpinned the familiar story of the rise of British neoclassicism as a feature of aspirational taste, or what the Whig mp Lord Spencer called the “aristocratic style,” a phrase that carefully preserved a distinction between aristocratic taste and its debased imitation.54 In this section, I will show how Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric corpus, which moved away from biographical questions about Homer on the one hand and facile appreciative responses on the other, freed readers to have a different encounter with Homer. This new encounter—which separated Homeric poetry more fully than ever before from the usual frameworks, for example, of biography and taste—resonated with changes in the legal and economic structures governing the reproduction of classical texts and images, changes that Whigs themselves played no small role in creating. Artists who produced these representations (like John Flaxman, the focus of this section) could hardly conceive of themselves as the singular geniuses Homer was imagined to be. Rather, they participated in a larger ecology involving copyists, compositors, manufacturers, publishers, distributors, advertisers, promoters—in short, an entire network to support mass production and consumption of objects evocative of classical antiquity. Arguments over authors’ rights and copyright that erupted periodically during the later eighteenth century reflected this shift: what was originality worth if the real value of a work of art inhered less in the original than in the number of copies sold?55 Well-to-do patrons often commissioned editions of classical texts that they could publish to a wider audience while also producing luxurious presentation editions, like the Grenville Homer, for private use and display. These patrons took care to ensure that their projects were completed to high standards, for instance by enlisting eminent classicists, like Porson, to perform editorial and critical tasks. But scholarship was not the whole game; these works were often also profusely illustrated, a quality that added to the perceived luxury value of the edition. Yet, even here, patrons wanted to ensure that the ancient world was represented in ways that spoke to the needs of the moment. According to 54 Mitchell, The Whig World, 28–30. 55 This transition from a literary culture in which authors relied on patrons to one in which they relied on commercial sales was well under way by the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. See T. Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 1 (1992): 1–27; M. Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 51–85; and M. Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17, no. 4 (1984): 425–48.

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Pattison, it was none other than Lord Spencer who first brought Wolf’s Prolegomena to the attention of the illustrator John Flaxman (1755–1826) just as Flaxman was preparing a set of illustrations to accompany yet another new edition of Homer, this one commissioned by Spencer’s wife. Around the same time, Francis Hare-Naylor, a playwright of independent means who was friendly with Fox and related by marriage to Spencer, commissioned Flaxman to illustrate editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, a project that Flaxman would later claim to have been at least partly inspired by his reading of Wolf’s Prolegomena. Both the Spencer and the Hare-Naylor commissions proved troublesome for Flaxman in ways that reflected the shifting views of intellectual property that I have already mentioned. In conversation with the architect Charles R. Cockerell, Flaxman explained how the economic arrangements of these projects tended to degrade both artist and work. During a 1790 Italian sojourn with his young family, Flaxman undertook the Spencer and Hare-Naylor commissions in order to cover expenses. He disliked the work for ordinary reasons; for example, the Dowager Countess Spencer insisted on excessive control over the final product, even demanding changes to the plates. But the payment arrangements galled the most. Those who originally commissioned the works stood to profit handsomely from them, for the copyright was sold as part of the deal, and patrons more than recouped their investments when they sold the plates to publishers who, in turn, retained the right to print as many copies as they saw fit while the work was still under copyright protection. Flaxman, in contrast, was typically paid only once for his sketches. For the 1790s commissions, he received a piecework honorarium of one guinea per sketch.56 Flaxman’s attitude toward Wolf was appreciative. As a working artist who lived of necessity at the border of art and commerce, Flaxman could not fail to appreciate Wolf’s point of view on Homer. It resonated with his own experience of artistic production, as someone whose original work was routed to producers who made multiple copies of it, and who, like previous editors working on editions of Homer, also tended to editorialize along the way. Flaxman, who found Wolf’s arguments “sound and convincing, as I have frequently observed to many of our most distinguished characters in England,” was particularly impressed by Wolf’s contention that, because the Homeric written corpus must have significantly postdated the date of composition of the poems, “alphabetical writing,” as Flaxman put it, could not have been in use at that time. Flaxman, following Wolf, insisted that the invention of writing 56

S. Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair: Patronage, Primitivism and the Art of John Flaxman,” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 871 (1975): 647.

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could have only taken place alongside the flowering of a society’s material culture, particularly the arts of metalworking and engraving—two art forms in which Flaxman, an illustrator, had special interests. These art forms were also, and not coincidentally, crucial to the introduction of money. “It seems besides, that [while] a perfection of arts and manufactures are described in Alcinous’s Palace in the Odyssey, the shield and armour of Achilles is, in other places, absolutely not to be found in countries where money is not yet coined,” Flaxman opined, “and where commerce is not yet established.”57 In general, Flaxman’s images of Greek antiquity were austere, direct, almost crude. He ruthlessly condensed images, eliminating what he saw as unnecessary additions until he had arrived at compositions anchored by dynamic lines. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously characterized Flaxman’s flat, linear style as expressive of “naïveté” (“Naivität”).58 In fact, Flaxman’s style was considered, deliberate—anything but naive. Flaxman strove to reduce his subjects to their visual essence, using the fewest markings required to transmit his intention. In his Minerva Repressing the Fury of Achilles, published in Pope’s Iliad, the seven figures appear on a shallow plane; the only suggestion of depth of field appears in the attenuated shadows beneath Achilles’s feet. Flaxman draws the eye instead to the extravagantly flowing lines of the drapery, which suggest the sword fight that has just been averted (Figure  46.1). The result is a clear representation of the moment’s drama, stripped to an essential tension between passionate action and restriction of that action. Flaxman’s aesthetic coincided with what he perceived, on Wolf’s part, as an attitude toward the Homeric corpus as vulnerable to bowdlerization, to editorializing intrusions that compromised the original text. Just as Wolf searched the extant materials for evidence of later additions that could be pruned, Flaxman’s stripped-down aesthetic reproduced, in visual form, Wolf’s approach to Homer’s text. At the same time, this minimalism made his illustrations relatively easy to reproduce—an important combination in a context where editions of Homer, as we have seen, were repeatedly reprinted.59 57

58 59

All quotations are from Flaxman’s letter, to an unnamed friend of Wolf, dated 29 October 1804, quoted in F.H.W. Körte, Leben und Studien Friedr. Aug. Wolf’s des Philologen (Essen: G.D. Bädeker, 1833), 224–25. Debates about the meaning of Achilles’s shield had a long history; see Levine, The Battle of the Books, 125–31. See J.W. v. Goethe, Über die Flaxmanischen Werke, vol. 47 (1896), 245. On Flaxman’s engravings and predecessors, see D. Irwin, “Flaxman: Italian Journals and Correspondence,” Burlington Magazine 101, no. 675 (1959): 81–85; on Flaxman’s difficulties deriving income from line engravings, see Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair.”

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Figure 46.1  Minerva Repressing the Fury of Achilles, by John Flaxman, (1795), which appeared in Pope’s Iliad. © Trustees of the British Museum

As much as the unrewarding patronage and copyright system upset Flaxman, he was nonetheless generous in allowing his work to be used by others whose sensibilities he shared. Flaxman did not even object when Wolf used his drawings as the basis for illustrating his own edition of the Iliad. In a letter written on 29 October 1804, Flaxman approved of the copies of his illustrations that Wolf had commissioned. “I think them so beautifully executed, that it is only to be regretted,” Flaxman enthused, “that the ingenious Artists [sic] talents had not been employed on better originals.” Wolf had apparently selected Flaxman’s illustrations as models for his illustrator, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.60 Flaxman, flattered by this attention, returned the compliment, saying that “if I 60

The copies of Flaxman’s drawings were among Schnorr’s earliest work, and Lionel Gossman has explored continuities between that early activity and Schnorr’s later involvement with the Nazarene movement. See L. Gossman, “Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A  Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (2003), http://www.19thc-artworldwide .org/autumn03/73-autumn03/autumn03article/273-unwilling-moderns-the-nazarene -painters-of-the-nineteenth-century, accessed 31 May 2015. I’m grateful to Anja-Silvia Goeing for this information.

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had been vain enough to desire, they [his originals] should be published with any copy of the poet, my preference would have been for Wolf’s above all others.”61 Nor were Flaxman’s forays into commercial art limited to illustration. He was also a sought-after producer of bas-reliefs modeled on classical themes. At this time, the use of neoclassical elements in interior decor was becoming widespread among well-to-do British.62 Robert Adam (1728–92) was perhaps the most influential of decorators in this mode, followed by Thomas Hope, who, with the publication of Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807), cemented antiquity’s prominence in designs for Regency homes. Hope had purchased Sir William Hamilton’s collection of ancient vases from Naples, and in Household Furniture he even showed a whole room devoted to displaying urns and vases of this type. Flaxman, who had contact with Hamilton in Italy some years earlier, used Hamilton’s collection as the basis for the neoclassical items he later designed for the Wedgwood Company.63 In 1769, Wedgwood opened a ceramics factory producing decorative objects in an antique style so marked that Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) gave the factory a motto: “The arts of Etruria reborn.” Working with Thomas Bentley, Wedgwood outfitted the place with a library of antiquarian books and engravings as well as plaster casts intended to serve as inspiration for the decorative objects produced at the factory.64 Starting in the mid-1770s, the Etruria Works produced classically inspired buttons, cameos, vases, pots, tiles, and even fireplace surrounds in a matte-finished stoneware known as jasperware. Bentley, who had already commissioned antique reproductions from Flaxman’s father, recommended Flaxman as designer. Flaxman’s Wedgwood jasperware included a fireplace panel, The Apotheosis of Homer (Figure  46.2).65 The design was adapted in 1786 for a vase—an example of the “Etruscan vases” that were then 61

Flaxman, from a letter to an unnamed friend of Wolf, 29 October 1804, reproduced in Körte, Leben und Studien Friedr. Aug. Wolf’s des Philologen, 225. 62 V. Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65–96. 63 On this period in Flaxman’s career, see D. Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755–1826 (London: Studio Vista, 1979), 22–25; and Irwin, “Flaxman,” 216. The political nuances of the connection between Wedgwood and Flaxman would require much more space to explicate fully. Of the two, Wedgwood was the more radical, but his abolitionist views and association with the Lunar Society did not deter prominent Whig politicians, such as Lord Spencer, from efforts to cultivate relationships, including a surprise 1765 visit to the factory. See S. Smiles, Josiah Wedgewood, frs: His Personal History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 80. 64 Irwin, John Flaxman, 18. 65 A photo of one such installation appears in ibid., 22.

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Figure 46.2  John Flaxman’s jasperware chimneypiece, The Apotheosis of Homer, made by Wedgwood, (1786). Courtesy National Museums Liverpool

so much in vogue, and not nearly as expensive as an entire Wedgwood fireplace surround. Competing firms reproduced the designs illegally on their products, such as a medallion by Meissen.66 Wedgwood was so pleased with Flaxman’s results that he sent a plaque of the main portion of the fireplace panel to Hamilton in Naples, who responded appreciatively: “your bas-relief astonishes all the artists here, it is more pure and in a truer antique taste than any of their fine performances though they have so many fine models before them.”67 For Flaxman, the meaning of copying was consistent with Whig attitudes toward emulation. On this view, taste was refined through emulation, particularly of classical works. As a draftsman, Flaxman took “a flexible attitude towards imitation,” freely translating others’ visual material, particularly 66 67

Ibid., 24. Hamilton to Flaxman, from a letter cited in ibid., 23–24.

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classical imagery, into his own idiom.68 He considered such imitation of classical art a “noble emulation” necessary for the formation of good taste. Crucially, the primary criterion of goodness was the absence of embellishment. When Flaxman commended Joseph Francis Nollekens as the only English sculptor before Thomas Banks to have “formed his taste on the antique,” Flaxman suggested that by privileging antiquity in this way, Nollekens “introduced a purer style of art,” a commendation that echoed Hamilton’s of Flaxman decades before.69 Among Nollekens’s most notable works was a much-reproduced bust of none other than Charles James Fox, leader of the Foxite Whigs. Some found Flaxman’s attitude toward imitation a bit too flexible. In his 1796 Diary, painter and Royal Academy fellow Joseph Farington related a ­criticism that John Hoppner had once made of Flaxman’s technique: “‘I cannot draw,’” Farington remembered Hoppner as saying, “‘but I can draw better than Flaxman can, and his thoughts are all borrowed & purloined from a variety of things which He has seen. He has nothing original ab[ou]t him.’”70 Intriguingly, this devaluation of Flaxman set to one side the view, widespread among Whigs, that copies of antique models were valuable emulations intended to help cultivate taste. Hoppner, apparently, was no adherent of this view of the edifying functions of either art or antiquity. Illustrating Homer introduced additional complexity, since there were no images to imitate; rather, the texts had themselves to provide anchors for imagery. Reflecting on the Homeric materials he consulted for his illustrations, Flaxman clung to an idea of multiple, even collective, responsibility for the work of art. His illustrations were correspondingly praised for their fidelity to the extant and multiply modified Homeric text, as it existed in the Alexandrine corpus, which Flaxman had studied in preparation for making his sketches.71 “In short,” Flaxman wrote to Wolf, the Prolegomena strongly enforces the following physical and moral truths: that human excellence in art and science, is the accumulated labor of ages; that which man vainly calls the effort of one genius, is in

68 69 70

71

Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair,” 648. Both quotations are from Flaxman’s remarks on Thomas Banks in J. Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London: J. Murray, 1839), 292. Quoted in Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair,” 648; the original is from J. Farington, The Farington Diary, vol. 1 (New York: G.H. Doran, 1923). See the entry for 12 Jan. 1797 on 184. Hoppner’s punctuation and spelling are as they appear the Doran edition. Emphasis mine. Symmons, “The Spirit of Despair,” 647.

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fact produced by a succession of men, of whom sometimes the first and sometimes the last, swallows up the reputation of all the rest.72 In his 1805 elegy for the sculptor Thomas Banks, Flaxman reprised this theme, explaining that in the arts of design, the works of Michael Angelo [sic] in painting, sculpture and architecture seem more than could possibly be performed during the lives of two or three men, and some of the Greek sculpture which we admire and imitate at this day, seems the accumulated perfection of centuries, rather than the production of individual men.73 This study emerged from the observation that despite Wolf’s mid-century preeminence, his Prolegomena to Homer merited almost no notice during the first years after its initial publication. By contextualizing a handful of Anglophone references to Wolf’s Prolegomena from around the time of its publication, I  have aimed to sketch the horizon against which Wolf’s work initially, and almost totally, failed to appear. The key word here is almost: the work did not disappear but served purposes sufficient to keep itself in view until the Victorian flowering of interest in German scholarship.74 The promotion of Wolf’s ideas in these odd quarters suggests that there was more to the story of the “Homeric Question” in the early nineteenth century. Wolf’s admirers arose from a milieu in which the commodification of virtually everything, especially antiquity, was under way. A distinct irony attends the use of the Homeric corpus as a way to make sense of mercantile values during this transition. As Terry Eagleton has observed, “the birth of aesthetics as an intellectual discourse coincides with the period when cultural production is beginning to suffer the miseries and indignities of commodification.” Not coincidentally, he continues, in a vein that would have unsettled the anxious inheritors of Ossian, “it is just when the artist is being debased to a petty commodity producer that he or she will lay claim to transcendent genius.”75

72 Quoted in Körte, Leben und Studien Friedr. Aug. Wolf’s des Philologen, 225–26. 73 Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture, 272. 74 R. Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 75 T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 64–65.

Part 7 Uses of Historiography



chapter 47

Quae vires verbo quod est “classicum” aliis locis aliisque temporibus subiectae sint quantumque sint eius sensus temporum diuturnitate mutati* Salvatore Settis Post illud quasi historiae divortium et discrimen, quod Imperio Romanorum in Occidentis partibus collapso factum est, subiit pluries pluriesque Europaeorum animos voluntas priscum cultum recuperandi, cujus se heredes esse existima­ bant, quasi antiquitates renasci possent. Verum enimvero “Renascentem” Antiquitatem appellare consuevimus artium litterarumque incrementa, quae in Italia inter xv et xvi post Christum natum saeculum floruerunt; sed si altius repetimus Europae historiam, vide­ mus antiquitatem Romanam, si non redintegratam, at renovatam saepius, quam ut vulgo putetur, esse: verbi gratia, saeculo xiii, regnante Federico ii, xii saeculo sub Federico Aenobarbo, circa annum M sub regibus Othonianis, sae­ culis superioribus in Occidente Carolo Magno imperatore, in Oriente apud Macedones, in Semptemtrionibus apud Northumbros Anglosaxonesque, in Italia apud Langobardos regnante Liutprando. Siquidem Europenses in repetendis antiquitatibus magno amissi cultus desiderio tenebantur, recte dixit Joannes Haroldus Plumb ex imperii Romani clade partum esse “ingens incitamentum ad eruditionem atque doctrinam in Europa tuendas.”1 Item Ernestus Howald, libro Die Kultur der Antike inscripto atque anno mcmxlviii edito, in revirescentis cultus classici vicibus ait se agnoscere * De nomine et notione ‘classici’ eiusque per saecula fortuna saepe cum Antonio Grafton dis­ serui, idque praesertim tunc, cum consilium illius voluminis, quod ipse una mecum et cum Glenno Most sub indice The Classical Tradition edendum curavit, assiduo animo volveremus. Mihi itaque peridoneum visum est brevem hanc symbolam, in qua ipse vestigia nostrorum sermonum suaeque doctrinae fructum a me perceptum facile deprehendet, eidem hac occa­ sione dedicare. Quae quidem lucubratiuncula etiam in primo commentariorum periodico­ rum, qui Mantinea inscribuntur, in lucem edita continetur; quam ut in Latinum converteretur, tum a sodalibus Academiae Vivarii novi, tum a Carolo Lucarini auxilium consiliaque gratis­ simo animo accepi. 1 J.H. Plumb, “From Peking to Rome”, New York Review of Books, 16, no. 3 (Feb. 1971): “The prob­ lem of Rome’s fall, plus the sense of need to recover its intellectual heritage, was one of the greatest stimulants to Europe’s intellectual life.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_048

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rationem quandam rhytmicam, qua Europae historia et cultus in aevum explicantur.2 Quum igitur hi commentarii idcirco edi coepti sint, ut eorum exaudiatur vox, qui in tanto rerum discrimine cupiunt et optant ut humanitas, aetatis “classicae” fundamentis innixa, renascatur, resurgat, revirescat, operae pretium ducimus verbum quod est “classicum” eiusque vim, quamvis obiter, tractare, quale ab antiquis temporibus ad nostram usque aetatem multifariam usurpa­ tum est. Nam verbum quod est “classicum” in linguis Europaeis non modo ad anti­ quitates Graecas Romanasque unice referri potest, sed etiam varios rerum ambitus attingit, qui vix ac ne vix quidem est cum illis antiquitatibus conti­ nens: nonne enim, ut feram exemplum, genus quoddam musices, quod post Romanorum floruit aetatem, “classicum” appellamus? Tamen eodem vocabulo significari solent etiam res, quae ad nationes pertinent a nobis discretas atque cultu sermone moribus diversas: nam classicos etiam vocamus scriptores, qui apud Seres fuerunt, classicas artes praecolumbinas, et ita porro. Arctiore tamen nexu verbum quod est “classicum” cum antiquitate Graeca et Romana obligatum esse videtur tres potissimum ob causas, quae inter se cognatae sunt: i.

nam primores civitatum ad humanitatem cultu Graeco et Romano, de quo praestantiae caperent exemplum, diu apud nos informati sunt; ii. tum vocabulum ipsum quod est “classicum” Latinum est; iii. deinde vetustatis studium, quod proprium est institutionis classicae, e gremio ipso antiquitatis Graecae et Romanae originem ducit. Adiectivum quod est “classicus, a, um”, e nomine “classis” derivatum, initio pro­ prium fuit sermonis politici, oeconomici, castrensis, siquidem primitus a Servio Tullio est adhibitum, quum quinque in classes Populum Romanum distribueret;3 sed verbo classis etiam significari poterat discipulorum grex in 2 H. Howald, “Die Kultur der Antike”, in Erasmus-Bibliotek, ed. W. Rüeggs (Turici: Artemis, 1948). 3 Liv. 1.42–43: “…censum enim instituit, rem saluberrimam tanto futuro imperio, ex quo belli pacisque munia non viritim, ut ante, sed pro habitu pecuniarum fierent; tum classes centuri­ asque et hunc ordinem ex censu discripsit, vel paci decorum vel bello. Ex iis qui centum milium aeris aut maiorem censum haberent octoginta confecit centurias, quadragenas seni­ orum ac iuniorum; prima classis omnes appellati; seniores ad urbis custodiam ut praesto essent, iuvenes ut foris bella gererent; arma his imperata galea, clipeum, ocreae, lorica, omnia ex aere; haec ut tegumenta corporis essent: tela in hostem hastaque et gladius. additae huic classi duae fabrum centuriae quae sine armis stipendia facerent; datum munus ut machinas in bello ferrent. Secunda classis intra centum usque ad quinque et septuaginta milium

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scholis, ut scriptum videmus apud Juvenalem4 vel apud Quintilianum,5 et clas­ sici discipuli ipsi, exempli gratia apud Ennodium, appellabantur.6 Sed primo apud Aulum Gellium, qui praesertim in verborum delectu gram­ maticisque normis servandis strenuus fuit priscae consuetudinis imitator, vocabulum quod est “classicum” alios sensus significare atque explicare coepit. Is enim exoletam vim nominis revocans: “Classici—inquit—dicebantur non omnes, qui in quinque classibus erant, sed primae tantum classis homi­ nes, qui centum et viginti quinque milia aeris ampliusve censi erant” (Noctes Atticae vi, 13). Idem alibi (Noctes Atticae xix, 8, 15) Frontonem inducit hortantem ut quae­ ratur an certa quaedam vocabula “dixerit e cohorte illa dumtaxat antiquiore vel oratorum aliquis vel poetarum, idest classicus adsiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius”. Classicum scilicet apud Gellium nuncupabatur quicquid ad prisca tempora referri poterat. Translata haec ac peculiaris verbi significatio, quam invenimus apud Frontonem et apud Gellium, tamen non pertinet ad auctores ἐγκριθέντας, seu probatos, quorum indices grammatici Graeci scripserunt, sed eorumdem prae­ nuntia haberi quodammodo potest. Nonne enim ea congruit cum Ciceronis enuntiato, opponentis Democrito philosophos quintae classis -velut Cleantem aut Chrysippum (Acad. ii, 73)?7

censum instituta, et ex iis, senioribus iunioribusque, viginti conscriptae centuriae; arma imperata scutum pro clipeo et praeter loricam omnia eadem. tertiae classis [in] quinquaginta milium censum esse voluit; totidem centuriae et hae eodemque discrimine aetatium factae; nec de armis quicquam mutatum, ocreae tantum ademptae. In quarta classe census quinque et viginti milium, totidem centuriae factae, arma mutata: nihil praeter hastam et verutum datum. Quinta classis aucta; centuriae triginta factae; fundas lapidesque missiles hi secum gerebant; [in] his accensi cornicines tubicinesque in duas centurias distributi; undecim mili­ bus haec classis censebatur. Hoc minor census reliquam multitudinem habuit; inde una cen­ turia facta est, immunis militia.” 4 Juv. 7.150–51: “O ferrea pectora Vetti, /cum perimit saeuos classis numerosa tyrannos!” 5 Quint. 1.2.23: “Pueros in classes distribuerant”; v. etiam 1.2.23–24: “ Non inutilem scio serva­ tum esse a praeceptoribus meis morem, qui, cum pueros in classis distribuerant, ordinem dicendi secundum vires ingenii dabant, et ita superiore loco quisque declamabat ut praece­ dere profectu videbatur: huius rei iudicia praebebantur. Ea nobis ingens palma, ducere vero classem multo pulcherrimum”; 10.5.21: “consuetudo classium certis diebus audiendarum”. 6 Ennod. Dict. 9 (Ethica tertia, Scholastica tertia), pl 63 281C: “Ergo classico meo, cui proprium sine fraude servivit ingenium, indices animi mei dictiones attuli; quia sine adulationis suspi­ cione est inter aequales amicitia personas: et tunc fida diligentum sinceritas approbatur, quotiens non venit a potestate quod metuas. Mihi classicus non meretur imperiis, quidquid non imponit obsequio.” 7 Cic. Acad. 2.73: “Qui (philosophi) mihi cum illo collati, quintae classis videntur.”

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Vocabulum autem posterioris Latinitatis temporibus mediaque quae dicitur aetate in usu fuisse non constat, neque ante saeculum quintum et decimum exiens rursus emersit, quum scilicet Philippus Beroaldus, anno mcdxcvi, in Commentariis Quaestionum Tusculanarum eo denuo usus est, et anno md in commentario in Apuleium, locum Gellii aperte memorans, scriptoribus classicis, quibus in exemplum annumerat Livium vel Quintilianum, Fulgentium proletar­ ium opposuit.8 Item e fonte Gelliano vocabulum “classicum” derivatur etiam in Gulielmi Budaei Adnotationes in Pandectarum libros (a. mdviii);9 tum ad designandas litteras Graecas Latinasque manavit apud Matthiam Schurer (a. mdix),10 Beatum Rhenanum (a. mdxii),11 Melanchtonem (a. mdxix),12 Alonsum iii Fonseca, qui cum Erasmo epistularum commercium habuit.13 8

Apuleius cum commento Beroaldi, Venetiis, in aedibus Ioannis Tacuini de Tridino, 1516, p. 55: “…nusquam enim, ut Gellii verbis utar, scriptum invenire est apud auctores idoneos, aut mehercules mulierem dicere aut mecastor virum; tamen Apuleius, inter scriptores non proletarius, sed classicus, morosa illa diligentia haudquaquam observata, non tam inscite quam eleganter foeminam per herculem adiuratam inducit.” 9 Annotationes Guilelmi Budaei Parisiensis secretarii regii in quatuor et viginti pandectarum libros ad Ioannem Deganaium cancellarium Franciae (Lutetiae Parisiorum: apud Jodocum Badium, 1508), 483: “Propterea (ut inquit Festus [cfr. Fest. De verborum significatu, in Glossaria Latina 4 (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1930), p. 162]) classici testes dicebantur, hoc est primae classis homines, quasi primae autoritatis, et idonei veritatis sponsores. Ita meta­ phoricôs Gellius autores classicos appellat, quasi testes idoneos Latinae puritatis, et pri­ mae notae scriptores: quales sunt Cicero, Quintilianus, Livius, Caesar, Plinius, Vergilius, Horatius, Catullus. Contra, Proletarij capite censi dicti sunt.” 10 Polydorii Vergilii urbinatis de inventoribus rerum libri tres. M. Antonii Sabellici de artium inventoribus ad Baffum carmen elegantissimum (Argentoraci [sic]: in officina Matthiae Schurerii Helvetensis, 1509): “Romanę linguę primores et classici scriptores”. V. etiam: Collectanea adagiorum veterum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, Germaniae decoris: ex secunda recognitione… (Argentorati: In officina Matthię Schürerij Helueten, 1510). 11 Epistula die viii Martio a. 1512 data: v. A. Horawitz—K. Hartfelder (ed.), Briefwechsel des beatus Rhenanus (Lipsiae, 1886), n. 25, p. 47: “…classicos illos scriptores, quos Deus, omnium donorum sapientiae largitor, quondam tam praeclara et culta edere afflaverat et diu sepultos rursus saeculo nostro restituit…” 12 Cfr. Melanchthons Briefwechsel, t. 1, ed. R. Wetzel (Stuttgardiae: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991), n. 52, p. 118: “De hac re Plutarchi sententiam, classici videlicet authoris, certum est praelegere scholae nostrae.” Ibi, T. 1, n. 48, p. 114: “Nobis autem consilium videtur e media Graecia deligere optimae notae classicos, qui et ad linguae cultum et ad vitae rationes formandas pertinent.” 13 Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen et H.M. Allen (Oxonii: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 6, ep. 2003, p. 409: “Augustinianarum lucubrationum repurgatio, cui te operam dare audio, prouintia videtur plane te digna. Solus enim is autor ex classicis reliquus videbatur, qui nobis Erasmo obstetricante renasceretur.”

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Deinde verbum quod est “classicum” in litteras Gallicas influxit, auctore Thoma Sebillet (a. mdxlviii), qui in Arte Poetica sua et Joannem de Meun, qui saeculo xiii floruit, et Alanum Chartier, qui fuit saeculo xv, “les bons et classiques poètes françois”, idest bonos classicosque poetas Francos, appellavit;14 postea autem, condita anno mdcxxxv Gallorum Academia, vocabulum late per Gallias patuit ac mox in litteras Anglorum aliarumque nationum recipi est coeptum. Tarde autem ac subsultim recipitur verbum quod est “classicum” in artes effingendi; etenimvero ipse Winckelmannius, qui maxime operam ad artem classicam definiendam contulit, voce klassisch non utitur, nisi raro et incerte; quam invenimus tantum in illius epistolis, ubi de litteris forte tractatur.15 Praeterea illud Volfgangi Goethe, anno mdcccxxix dicentis: “classicum id voco, quod est sanum; romanticum, quod aegrum,”16 verbi significationi ali­ quid adicit ad nostram usque aetatem mansurum, sed jam Fridericus Augustus Wolf, libro cui index Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft anno mdcccvii edito, classicam definierat antiquitatem Graecam et Romanam, ut eam ab Aegyptiorum vel Hebraeorum aliorumque antiquitatibus distingueret.17 Anno vero mcmlviii Ladislaus Tatarkiewicz in consuetudine sermonis quattuor omnino vires verbo quod est classicum subiectas esse asseruit:18 14

15

16

17

18

Th. Sebillet, Art poétique françoys, édition critique avec une introduction et des notes publiée par Félix Gaiffe (Lutetiae Parisiorum: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition— Édouard Cornély et C.ie, éditeurs, 1910), p. 26 [quod opus primum editum est a. 1548, Lutetiae, apud Arnoldum Angelie’]: “Si le voeil-je bien aviser que l’invention, et le jugement compris soubz elle se conferment et enrichissent par la lecture des bons et classiques pöétes françois, comme sont entre les vieux Alain Chartier, et Jan de Meun.” De humanitatis restitutoribus qui inde a saec. xv adiectivo, quod est “classicus”, usi sunt, V.F.J. Worstbrock, Zum ersten Kapitel einer Begriffsgeschichte des Klassichen Die ­humanistische Tradition, in Geistiger Handelsverkehr: komparatistische Aspekte der Goethezeit; für Hendrik Birus zum 16. April 2008, ed. A. Bohnenkamp et M. Martínez (Gottingae: Wallstein, 2008), 431–51. In epistula ad Eckermann data postridie Kal. Apr. a. 1829: “Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das romantische das Kranke”: J.W. Goethe Gedenkausgabe, ed. E. Beutler, vol. 24, Gespräche mit Eckermann [= colloquia cum Eckermann] (Turici: Artemis, 1948), 332. F.A. Wolf, “Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft nach Begriff, Umfang, Zweck und Wert”, in F.A. Wolf-Ph. Buttmann, Museum der Alterthums-wissenschaft (Berolini: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1807), I, 1, p. 16: “…doch vielerlei Ursachen machen hier eine Trennung nothwendig, und erlauben uns nicht, Aegyptier, Hebräer, Perser und andere Nationen des Orients auf Einer Linie mit den Griechen und Römern aufzustellen.” W. Tatarkiewicz, “Les quatre significations du mot ‘classique’”, Revue internationale de philosophie 12 (1958): 5 et seqq.: “Les quatre significations du mot «classique» sont du domaine des sciences humaines. Les deux premières (A et B) peuvent être appliquées aux œuvres scientifiques et sociales; les deux dernières (C et D), seulement aux lettres et aux arts.

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a.

classicum, primae scilicet classis, laudatur aliquid, quod perfectum habe­ tur et absolutum et in exemplum sumendum, ut quod imperfecto vel rudi sit oppositum;19 b. tum classica dicuntur in universum aetates et tempora, quibus floruerunt antiquitates Graecae et Romanae, aut etiam singillatim saeculum, quo litterae et artes in Graecia eo evectae sunt, unde descendere solummodo poterant; quod quidem saeculum, subjungit Tatarkievitius, tam breve est, ut inter tres illos tragoedos Aeschylus nondum sit annumerandus scrip­ toribus classicis, Euripides classicus jam non esse videatur;20 c. deinde classica opera et artificia vocantur, quorum initia ab antiquitate recentiores repetierunt, veterum imitantes exempla.21 d. classica demum ratio quaedam aesthetica appellatur, qua litterati vel artifices in operibus suis concinnitatem, commoditatem, convenientiam sunt consecuti.22 Ad quattuor adjectivi sensus, qui superius explicati sunt, referri possunt alia verba, inter se cognata, velut nomen quod est “classicismus” et adiectivum “neoclassicus, a, um”: etenim his sive litteratorum vel artificum coepta, sive eru­ dita tempora significare solemus, quibus plerumque prisca exempla Graeca et Romana ad imitandum sunt proposita. In sermone autem praeconum nostrae aetatis, qui strenue ad nundinandum suadent, classicae nuncupantur merces satis diuque probatae, quae adhuc a quibusdam quaeruntur, etsi earum facies in formas sunt fictae novas, novi ut “Classique” au sens A dénote une valeur, au sens B, une détermination chronologique, au sens C, c’est un style historique, au sens D, une catégorie esthétique. Au sens C, c’est un terme de l’histoire de l’art, et au sens D, de la théorie générale des arts.” 19 “« Classique » se dit de ce qui est « de première classe », de ce qui est le meilleur dans son genre, parfait, suprême, modèle, reconnu. C’est là la même signification que déjà Aulus Gellius donnait au mot. En ce sens il apprécie l’œuvre appelée classique sans en déterminer le caractère.” 20 “« Classique » se dit comme synonyme de ce qui est antique. Si l’art antique est le seul art parfait, il a le droit au nom classique. … « Classique » se dit de ce qui est ancien et en même temps consacré par l’admiration. … [talis notio] entend par « classique » uniquement l’apologée de l’antiquité, la période de la plus haute perfection des arts et des lettres antiques.” 21 “« Classique » se dit de ce qui, sans être classique, est conforme aux modèles antiques.” 22 “« Classique » se dit des auteurs et des œuvres possédant des qualités telles que l’harmonie, la mesure, l’équilibre, car ce sont celles des classiques anciens…et modernes.” In opere, quod multis post annis scripsit (V. Tatarkiewicz, Storia di sei idee, ed. K. Jaworska, Panormi, Aesthetica, 2011), Tatarkievitius duas alias vires verbo, quod est “classicus”, subiectas descripsit: 1. “classicus” est qui conformatur ad praecepta; 2. “classicus” idem est atque “vulgo acceptus”, “canonicus”, “qui quasi exemplum et norma proponitur”.

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allicerentur emptores: verbi gratia talis MacIntosh Classic, talis Coca-Cola Classic. Praesertim saeculo xx apud alias gentes, aeque atque Europaeas morum antiquitate praeclaras, interpretes notionem verbo quod est classicum subiec­ tam ipsorum sermone apte exprimere sunt conati. Ut feram exemplum, apud Sinas, ut vim vocabuli redderent, duas juncturas usitatas adhibuerunt: gudian inquam (古典), et jingdian (经典) (cfr. Zhu Guangqian, 1935, qui initia capit a Carolo Augustino Sainte-Beuve),23 quarum altera redditur “canon antiquus”, altera “textus antiquus”; nam gu (古) idem valet quod “antiquus” (sive “vetus”),24 dian (典) sibi vult “canonem”, jing vero (经) “textum” (sive “subte­ men”, “tramam”). Huc accedit quod character dian (典), qui per figuras duarum manuum tabellam sustinentium effingitur, nimirum ad scriptionem librosque refertur;25 charactere vero jing (经) etiam libri sacri designantur: nam junctura quae est “Sacra Biblia” in Sinensem vertitur Shengjing (圣经), hoc est “Sacrae litterae”. Itaque quod vi antiquitatis, non auctoris nomine pollet, quodque omnia dirigit ad analogiae normam, non minutius scrutatur et ordinat, id classicum audit apud Seres. Quae denique sit natura quaeve vices verbi “classici”, quale manavit e fonte Europaeo, perpensis atque inter se collatis aliarum gentium moribus, alias declarabitur. Hic tamen oportet consideremus quomodo apud nos, qui plagas occidentis solis incolimus, exstincta renasci per intervalla soleant: non enim praeterita 23

24

25

Commentatiuncula, quae inscribitur Shenme shi “classics” (Quid sibi vult “classics”?), anno mcmxxxv primum edita est; iterum in lucem prodiit in libris, quibus illius Zhu Guangqian opera omnia continentur: Zhu Guangqian quanji (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chuban she, 1993), 8:391–92). Qua in symbola excutitur vis quae apud gentes occidentales voca­ bulo quod est “classicus” subest, mentione sat ampla ex Causeries du Lundi illius SainteBeuve facta, unde loci multi deprompti laudantur. De Zhu Guangqian eiusque operibus, v. M. Sabattini, The Aesthetic Thougth of Zhu Guangqian (Romae: IsMEO, 1984). Character quod est gu (古) constat ex numero decem, qui est shi (十) et ore, quod est kou (口). Significat igitur [id quod] dictum est a decem hominibus, idest quod iam diu praete­ riit (v. Lexicon etymologicum, cui index Shuowen jiezi 说文解字 http://www.zdic. net/z/16/sw/53E4.htm): plerumque in linguas occidentales convertitur “antiquus” sive “vetustus”, aut “classicus”. Dian (典) sibi vult “libros quinque Imperatorum (典,五帝之书也)”, qui iuxta Sinensium traditas historias quinque sint illi Imperatores venerandi, qui iii millennio a. Chr.n. regnaverint. Character constat ex libris (qui supra sunt positi) et fultura sive sustentaculo (quod est infra); tabula qua libri sustinentur eorundem librorum vim atque momentum significat summum. Non omnes vero uno ore consentiunt sub tabula manus effingi, cum alii quasi mensae pedes illis signis effingi interpretentur: v. Shuowen jiezi 说文解字 (http://www.zdic.net/z/15/sw/5178.htm).

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annorum decursu revocata vel restituta in integrum sunt umquam—id quod scilicet fieri nequit—sed ex iis elementa quaedam, non minus audacter quam scienter, frustatim decerpta sunt, modo haec, modo illa, prout saeculum postu­ labat, atque quasi quidam humanitatis cibus, ad quem nati sumus, sumpta, mansa, decocta, in sucum conversa et sanguinem. Neque ideo temere Medio Aevo proponebatur in exemplum illa “ruminatio scripturae”, qua non solum aliquid legendo addiscitur, sed etiam excolitur meditando ingenium ita, ut ars creare et gignere desinat numquam, quemad­ modum est munus -teste Cicerone- ejus maxime proprium.26 Qui Europaei sumus, per repetitas “renascendi” vices oblivionem cum memoria componere assueti, obliviscimur, ut reminiscamur; reminiscimur, ut obliviscamur, illud tenentes, quod est excultae humanitatis fundamentum, non posse nec praesentia conspici, nec futura prospici, nisi respexerimus praeterita. Apud nos ergo inest antiquitati per se auctoritas quaedam, qua monemur arbores, semel excisas, eodem vestigio resurgere (Tac. Hist. ii, 78) latioresque virescere posse.27 Hunc velut historiae monitum reverentes, hos commentarios, quibus insigne Janus bifrons, edere statuerunt qui illud sibi praestituerunt, ut nostro quoque saeculo, novis virescens ramalibus, frondibus vestita novis, denuo humanitatis arbor resurgat. Libri adhibiti Zhu, Guangqian [朱光潜], Shenme shi “classics” [什么是 “classics”] (1935), in Zhu Guangqian quanji [朱光潜文集], Anhui jiaoyu chuban she [安徽教育出版社], Heifei [合肥] 1993, viii, pp. 391–92. T.S. Eliot, What Is Classic? (Londinii: Faber & Faber, 1944). E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bernae: A. Francke AG, 1948). W. Tatarkiewicz, “Les quatre significations du mot ‘classique’”, Revue internationale de philosophie 12 (1958): 5 et seqq. R. Wellek, “The Term and Concept of ‘Classicism’ in Literary History” [1966], in Wellek, Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (Noviportus [New Haven, ct]: Yale University Press, 1970). 26 27

De nat. deor. 2,57: “Zeno igitur…censet…artis maxume proprium esse creare et gignere.” “Recursabant animo vetera omina: cupressus arbor in agris eius conspicua altitudine repente prociderat ac postera die eodem vestigio resurgens procera et latior virebat.”

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H.O. Burger, Begriffsbestimmung der Klassik und des Klassischen (Darmstadii: Wissens­ chaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). F. Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cantabrigiae, ma: Harvard University Press, 1983). S. Rizzo, “Il latino nell’umanesimo”, in Letteratura italiana, ed. A. Asor Rosa, v (Augustae Taurinorum: Einaudi, 1986), 379–408. P.L. Schmidt, “Classici und Klassiker als Begriff und Vorstellung zur Zeit des Beatus Rhenanus”, in Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547). Lecteur et editeur des textes anciennes, ed. J. Hirstein, Actes du colloque International tenu à Strasbourg et à Selestat du 13 au 15 novembre 1998 (Turnholti: Brepols, 2000), 49–60. M. Citroni, “The Concept of the Classical and the Canons of Modern Authors in Roman Literature”, in Classical Pasts. The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. J.A. Porter (Princetoniae [nj]: Princeton University Press, 2006), 205–34. S. Settis, The Future of the “Classical”, A. Cameron interprete (Cantabrigiae Britannorum: Polity, 2006); ed. It.: Futuro del “classico” (Augustae Taurinorum: Einaudi, 2004). M. Citroni, “Gellio 19, 8, 15 e la storia di classicus”, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, no. 58 (2007): 181–205. F.J. Worstbrock, “Zum ersten Kapitel einer Begriffsgeschichte des Klassichen—Die humanitische Tradition”, in Geistiger Handelsverkehr: komparatistische Aspekte der Goethezeit; für Hendrik Birus zum 16. April 2008, ed. A. Bohnenkamp et M. Martínez (Gottingae: Wallstein, 2008), 431–51. S. Settis, “Classical”, in The Classical Tradition, ed. A. Grafton, G. Most, and S. Settis (Cantabrigiae, ma: Belknap, 2010), 205–6.

chapter 48

History and Antiquity at French Pilgrim Shrines: Three Pyrenean Examples Virginia Reinburg A capacious mantle of churches, chapels, and shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary covered the kingdom of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mary was the spiritual patroness and a defining symbol of early modern Catholicism. So it was not surprising that the major Marian shrines of Liesse, Ardilliers, and Le Puy became sites of Catholic and royal identity, rooting the king’s presence in a kingdom of diverse cultures and disputed sovereignties.1 This was not solely a French phenomenon, but one widely shared across Catholic Europe. “There is hardly a city in Christendom where there is not some shrine” honoring the queen of heaven, wrote the Jesuit François Poiré.2 Many Marian shrines were centuries old because, as Poiré noted, “no one can deny that this devotion is very ancient in the church.”3 Publishing was the lifeblood of early modern pilgrim shrines. The seventeenth century was a great age of Marian devotion in print. Poiré’s Triple couronne de la bien-heureuse Vierge Mere de Dieu (1630), Ferry de Locre’s Maria Augusta Virgo Deipara (1608), and Wilhelm Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus (1657–59) were but a few of the influential works published in Latin and the vernacular.4 A wealth of printed ephemera also appeared: prayers, devotional poetry and guides, and pilgrim memorabilia. Many Marian shrines, both large

1 See Bruno Maes, Le roi, la vierge, et la nation: Pèlerinages et identité nationale entre guerre de Cent Ans et Révolution (Paris: Publisud, 2002). See also Maes, Daniel Moulinet, and Catherine Vincent, eds., Jubilé et culte marial: Moyen Âge—époque contemporaine (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2009). 2 François Poiré, La triple couronne de la bien-heureuse Vierge Mere de Dieu (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy, 1630), 724. 3 Ibid., 710. Poiré refers to the veneration of Marian images in this passage, but includes shrines in his discussion. 4 On these works see Dominique Julia, “Sanctuaires et lieux sacrés à l’époque moderne,” in Lieux sacrés, lieux de culte, sanctuaires: Approches terminologiques, méthodologiques, historiques et monographiques, ed. André Vauchez (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 241–95.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_049

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and small, also had books published about them in the seventeenth century.5 The shrine books are all in the vernacular, suggesting a French-reading and educated audience, but not necessarily a learned one. The books are not pilgrim guides in any obvious way, although their authors told stories about the shrines’ miracles and marvels and often included prayers, litanies, and sample vows. Yet the shrine books differ from Marian atlases and theologies on the one hand and pilgrim guides on the other. The authors wrote only sparingly of the Virgin herself. Instead, they immersed their readers in history. They recounted legends and miracle stories, but increasingly they turned to history to build interest in the shrines. Ultimately the authors wanted to convince their readers that the shrines were ancient. In effect, they created old places by means of a text. As we will see, they were less successful at proving the ancient origins of these places than at spreading an aura of antiquity over them. Yet old was in a delicate balance with new. New shrines were built and older ones substantially rebuilt, especially during the period of Catholic resurgence after the religious wars (1562–98). Old shrines and cults were the most valued, but recent miracles and marvels stirred up interest in news from the shrines. Authors routinely noted that they wrote to satisfy “the curious” who wanted to know about shrines and their marvels. Old tangled with new to create the impression that the shrines were both ancient and recently animated with sacred power. The authors of shrine books researched, wrote, and published during a great age of historical scholarship, both secular or “profane” and ecclesiastical or “sacred.” While the authors of shrine books do not rise to the level of erudition displayed by ecclesiastical historians like Cesare Baronio, Antonio Bosio, or Gilbert Génébrard, their books show the tremendous variety of religious uses to which the past was put.6 The shrine books are not precisely histories of the 5 Some of these works are discussed in Nicolas Balzamo, Les miracles dans la France du xvie siècle: Métamorphoses du surnaturel (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014); Balzamo, “Renaissance d’un sanctuaire: Notre-Dame de Verdelais en Guyenne (1620–1624),” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 97 (2011): 81–101; Maes, Le roi, la vierge, et la nation; and Maes, “L’érudition critique de dom Mabillon et les livrets de pèlerinage des mauristes,” in Dom Jean Mabillon, figure majeure de l’Europe des lettres, ed. Jean Leclant, André Vauchez, and Daniel-Odon Hurel (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2010), 77–93. 6 On ecclesiastical history see Simon Ditchfield, “What Was Sacred History? (Mostly Roman) Catholic Uses of the Christian Past after Trent,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine Elliot van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85–92; and Anthony Grafton, “Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe” (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the

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shrines, but their authors cannily used history to breathe life into a Catholic past they feared had been lost. In the pages that follow I take up three books written about two shrines in the central Pyrenees, as examples of how writers put their holy places on the map by portraying them as ancient. Books published about Notre-Dame de Garaison by Pierre Geoffroy (d. 1635) and Étienne Molinier (1580–1647) and about Notre-Dame de Betharram by Pierre de Marca (1594–1662) show that words in print were as important as stones in chapels when it came to creating religious monuments.

Religious Life in the Pyrenees

The varied physical and political landscapes of the Pyrenees set the framework for the books about Garaison and Betharram. The Pyrenees were lands of mountains, forests, rivers, and thermal springs, with economies rooted in pasturage and agriculture, mixed with mining and logging. These were regions of mixed religions and divided sovereignties. Large swathes of the central Pyrenees were the patrimonial lands of the d’Albret family, ruled in some fashion by Queen Jeanne d’Albret (r. 1555–72), and then her son Henri de Navarre (later King Henri iv) and his son Louis xiii. Bigorre (a personal fief of the house of Navarre), where Garaison was located, and the principality of Béarn, the location of Betharram, were majority Catholic regions where scattered Huguenot communities and aristocratic families also lived. Cities and towns in the central Pyrenees suffered waves of iconoclasm, religious violence, and persistent religious debate and political controversy during the religious wars. In 1569–71 Queen Jeanne outlawed Catholicism, decreed the Reformed church the official church of Béarn, and assigned to it all ecclesiastical property.7 Catholicism continued as the established religion in Bigorre and other Pyrenean states, but Huguenot communities worshipped and their armies mobilized nearby. The Catholic League was active throughout the region in the 1590s. Following the Edict of Nantes (1598), and reversing four decades of local religious policy, Henri iv granted Béarn’s Catholics the right to worship in 1599. Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, 2014), online at http://www.nga.gov/­ content/ngaweb/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts.html, accessed 28 Aug. 2014. 7 See Mark Greengrass, “The Calvinist Experiment in Béarn,” in Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, ed. Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 119–42.

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Bigorre and Béarn were gradually absorbed into the French kingdom in 1607 and 1616–20 respectively.8 By then the Huguenot population of the Pyrenees was very small. Yet like Catholics in and near other recently contested lands, Pyrenean Catholic leaders were determined to take control of history as well as territory after the religious wars ended.9 They had been convinced by their outrage over earlier Huguenot successes (especially Queen Jeanne’s rule), grievances sown by wartime trauma, and militant Catholic preachers that the world belonged to the Catholics. Although Huguenots held little territory after 1600, they loomed large in the Catholic imagination as enemies to be expropriated and extinguished from memory.

Recording Marvels: Pierre Geoffroy on Notre-Dame de Garaison

In 1604 Pierre Geoffroy was named curé of the tiny commune of Monléon. Shortly afterward, he set about expanding the nearby shrine named “Garaison,” a name he explained as a Gascon corruption of the French word guérison, or “cure.”10 And early in the building campaign Geoffroy published a book (Figure 48.1). This was the first of many shrine books published across France and francophone Europe in the seventeenth century. Geoffroy’s goal was to “put down a certain number of miracles” about Notre-Dame de Garaison in order “to secure the belief of posterity.”11 To do this he devised an appealing hybrid of myth and history. Geoffroy opened with a prologue discussing how God often chooses humble people and inhospitable, uncultivated places to display his power and mercy. Geoffroy tried to inspire confidence in his book’s method: “Dear Reader…I assure you that I recount nothing I have not seen myself” as superintendent of the chapel, “or that I have not learned from reliable people of irreproachable ­character,” drawn from the depositions of those witnesses in public records.12 8

9

10 11 12

See Christian Desplat, “Louis xiii and the Union of Béarn to France,” in Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern France, ed. Mark Greengrass (New York: E. Arnold, 1991), 68–83. On Catholics in the Pyrenees see Serge Brunet, “De l’Espagnol dedans le ventre!” Les catholiques du Sud-Ouest de la France face à la Réforme, vers 1540–1589 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007); and Brunet, ed., Relation de la mission des Pyrénées (1635–1649): Le jésuite Jean Forcaud face à la montagne (Paris: cths, 2008). Pierre Geoffroy, Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1607), 30. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 27–28.

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Figure 48.1  Engraving from the title page of Pierre Geoffroy, Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1607). Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris

He then described the site and its surrounding landscape of moors, distant rocky mountains, and narrow valleys rising above rushing streams. The many pilgrims who made their way to the chapel followed the road to Garaison’s “beautiful pyramidal spire topped with a cross” as they crossed the austere countryside on crutches, canes, and carts.13 With the picturesque countryside lodged in the reader’s mind’s eye, Geoffroy began his tale: “About a hundred years ago, the first foundations of this chapel were laid, and it is held from father to son that the occasion was as follows.”14 “A little shepherdess” (une petite bergère, une bergerette) guarding her family’s flock of sheep on the desolate moors five kilometers outside Monléon stopped to rest at a fountain. There she was startled by the sudden appearance of the Virgin Mary, who instructed the girl to go and tell her father to inform the Monléon consuls that Mary wished them to build a church at that spot, adjoining the fountain. The girl hurried off to find her father, who dutifully relayed 13 14

Ibid., 31–32. Ibid., 41.

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the Virgin’ message to the consuls. The consuls agreed to build a small chapel only after a miracle and several “marvels” persuaded them and the local clergy that the apparition was genuine. Although the fountain had apparently attracted people seeking cures at its waters before the apparition, Geoffroy reported that the new chapel brought large numbers of pilgrims, donations, and eventually chaplains and a pilgrim hostel. Geoffroy set the origins of the shrine in an undefined past—the shepherdess saw the Virgin Mary “about a hundred years ago.” He cited no dates. He suggested that the story was relayed “from father to son.” He referred to his story’s characters by title, not name (the little shepherdess, the rector of Monléon, the consuls, the pilgrims). From the story of the shepherdess— which he likely heard from inhabitants in the region, rather than texts or archives—Geoffroy created a myth: a story about a past event, retold through the generations, relating sacred truths.15 The myth of the shepherdess, the fountain, and the apparition is redolent of other foundation myths of shrines commonly recounted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 To the myth Geoffroy appended a bit of archival history: a record of the “marvels” or recent news of cures experienced at the shrine. More than half of his book is filled with reports of marvels or miracles from Notre-Dame de Garaison’s very recent history. The first one is emblematic: Guillemette Fourssade, inhabitant of the new city of Riviere, declared that in the year 1604 she had lived for a year in great danger of losing her vision and could see only very little. Nevertheless having made a vow to come to the church of Notre-Dame de Garaison, and having fulfilled her vow, she completely recovered her sight. At her declaration were present 15

16

I follow Wendy Doniger’s definition of myth in The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2: “a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered…” Some of these legends are discussed by Christian Desplat, “Des eaux, des rocs, un culte: Marie dans les Pyrénées occidentales françaises à l’époque moderne,” in Montagnes sacrés d’Europe: Actes du colloque “Religion et montagnes,” Tarbes, 30 mai–2 juin 2002, ed. Serge Brunet, Dominique Julia, and Nicole Lemaître (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005), 121–25; and Sylvie Barnay, “‘La bergère, l’apparition, l’annonce et le signe.’ Genèses des sanctuaires et apparitions de la Vierge: Réflexions de formes et de fonds,” Annali du studi religiosi 3 (2002): 141–54. William A. Christian Jr. discusses similar legends in Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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Antoine Sabatier, with Pierre Geoffroy, the Rector, and Pierre Cizos, priest at Garaison.17 Some of the stories are longer than this first laconic one, but many are recounted in a similarly straightforward way. Summarized or quoted from the shrine’s registers, they are less stories than legal testimony delivered before a notary or chaplain, who wrote it down, along with witnesses identified by name, place of residence, and title or occupation. But some of the tales appear to have been repeated from oral testimony collected in some fashion, rather than a legal deposition, such as this one: In the year 1605, Peronne Taian of Darvé was a chambermaid in Monloing, age ten to twelve years. Wishing to go to Darvé, and passing the Gers River, which was in a great fury because it had rained two days and two nights, while crossing the Gers on a plank, the wind threw her into the water, and when she remembered the glorious Virgin Mary of Garaison, and invoked her aid two or three times, she swam over the water with almost no effort, [a distance of] 400 or 500 paces, and then afterward she exited [the water] with no danger. The girl said that it seemed to her that it was a great pleasure to be on the water.18 Some stories offer a good sense of how news spread about a surprising cure. For example, physicians and surgeons had given up on a man who had been bedridden for three years with an unspecified malady.19 But the man’s teenaged daughter prayed to Notre-Dame de Garaison to cure her father, “which happened immediately.” Geoffroy described the ensuing scene: a week or two later the daughter organized a group of nine girls, each carrying a candle, to accompany her father to the shrine to give thanks to God and the Virgin Mary for his health. Geoffroy added, “At which the more than five hundred people who were in the chapel and nearby were witnesses, among them some who had known the man and seen him ill; all rejoiced and wept with joy to see him cured.”20 Geoffroy generally called these cures and lucky escapes “marvels” rather than miracles, probably in order distinguish marvels or wonders—surprising good fortune, cures, or gifts—from events authenticated as miracles by the 17 Geoffroy, Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason, 55–56. 18 Ibid., 70–71. 19 Ibid., 77–80. 20 Ibid., 79–80.

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archbishop following an official inquiry.21 But post-Tridentine miracle stories closely resemble the much discussed tales of “wonders” and “marvels” so avidly consumed by early modern readers.22 Both miracles and marvels required evidence, and were generally represented as established facts. They were also reported as news stories, complete with specific names, places, and dates, often with an authoritative person’s endorsement added. The combination of a vaguely described past origin and very recent official declarations or stories reported by eyewitnesses lends Geoffroy’s book an unsettled sense of time, and veils the fact that Notre-Dame de Garaison was less than a century old—in other words, not “old” to people of that era. Beyond that, Geoffroy used the legend to suggest a deeper and longer past for the shrine than could reasonably be claimed.23 Yet his citation of recent events also lent an aura of proof to the shrine’s miraculous cures, without actually “proving” them according to standards of the day. Thus a curious quality of time emerges in Geoffroy’s book. The shepherdess’s story happened “about a hundred years ago,” but seems almost timeless, whereas nearly all the reported cures happened within five or six years of the 1607 publication of the book. By evoking a vaguely distant past and then detailing a hyper-specific recent past, Geoffroy created the impression that Garaison was simultaneously both timeless and bound by time. In other words, NotreDame de Garaison collapses time.

“Proof of the Truth of an Ancient Fact”: Étienne Molinier on Notre-Dame de Garaison

The shrine of Notre-Dame de Garaison had not been abandoned or probably even neglected during the religious wars. But Geoffroy put it in print and introduced it into history. Twenty years later Étienne Molinier continued that ­project by publishing Le lys du val de Guaraison (1630, second edition 1646), 21

22 23

On miracles, marvels, and Catholic authorities see Balzamo, Les miracles; Christian, Apparitions; and William B. Taylor, Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011). See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Modern historical sketches of the shrine suggest that the apparition occurred in the 1510s and the chapel was built in the 1540s. See X. Recroix, Les peintures du narthex de la chapelle de Garaison (Pau: L’Imprimerie Marrimpouey Jeune, 1981); and Jean Lacaze, Le sanctuaire de Notre-Dame de Garaison (Bagnères-de-Bigorre: Les Éditions Pyrénéennes, 1990).

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a  longer and more detailed account based on the template Geoffroy established.24 Molinier, a priest from Toulouse, was a committed controversialist, a Grey Penitent, and a member of the militant Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament.25 He was also a chaplain at Garaison for about two years beginning in 1628, and probably worked on his book during that time. But Garaison was on his radar screen before that. In 1618 he published an account of the conversion of a Huguenot mother and daughter who abjured their faith and converted to Catholicism at the shrine, reportedly following a series of debates between a Jesuit and a Reformed minister.26 Molinier created a more explicitly doctrinal framework for Garaison than Geoffroy had, and gave all parts of the story a historical specificity that Geoffroy suggested only intermittently. Molinier’s account of the shepherdess shows this. He gave her a name—Anglese de Sagazan—and specified that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her three times, almost as part of an elaborate ritual negotiation among the Sagazan family, the consuls, local priests, and the Virgin.27 Molinier also wrote that the Virgin performed a miracle—filling a chest in the impoverished Sagazan family’s cottage with bread—to convince Anglese, her family, and her community of the authenticity of the apparition. A crowd of neighbors and kin “went promptly to the home of the girl, the coffer was open, the bread found, the promise verified, the miracle acknowledged, the spectators amazed, the father and mother consoled.”28 The Virgin’ mercy transformed the parents’ tears caused by hunger into tears of joy. The entire community then went to speak to the Monléon consuls, showing them “the evident and manifest miracle.”29 Molinier added color and drama to Geoffroy’s more restrained account of the shepherdess, the shrine’s origin, and the miracles. But he also commented more explicitly than Geoffroy did about how he knew what he knew about Anglese and the Virgin. He went to the place of the events in search of the facts. As he wrote: 24

Étienne Molinier, Le lys du val de Guaraison (Toulouse: R. Colomiez, 1630), and Le lys du val de Guaraison, 2nd ed. (Auch: Arnaud de S. Bonnet, 1646). The 1646 edition added material to the end of the 1630 edition, chiefly miracles and marvels from the years 1630–46. 25 Jean Contrasty, “Le prêtre toulousain Étienne de Molinier,” Revue historique de Toulouse 34 (1949): 5–109. 26 Étienne Molinier, Manifeste de l’abjuration publique de la Religion pretendue Reformée, faicte en la Ste. Chapelle de Nostre Dame de Garaison par Madame et Mademoiselle de Fontrailles (Toulouse: the widow of J. Colomiés, 1618). 27 Molinier, Le lys du val de Guaraison, 2nd ed., 96–108. 28 Ibid., 107. 29 Ibid., 107.

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I spoke to an old Rector of the Diocese of Comminges, the Parish of Baudrac, a half league from Garaison, the Rector was more than a hundred years old, and who was ordained to the priesthood in 1551, who testified to me that the marvel in question happened several years before his birth.30 Here Molinier admitted his deep reliance on oral sources. He corroborated “the common tradition of the land,” probably meaning the local lore repeated by one and all, with reference to the testimony of a reliable person, a local pastor of a venerable old age (and presumably sound memory). Molinier then developed these remarks into a full account of his method, framed as a discussion of how marvels and miracles should be verified. An eyewitness provided the best “proof of the truth of an ancient event” (la preuve de la verité d’un fait ancien) but five other ways of discerning the truth (raisons ordinaires pour la verité) would suffice: “tradition from father to son,” general opinion or popular say (la voix commune), witnesses who lived not long after the event, public writings, and “the effects produced by the event.”31 “Effects produced by the event” would be the evidence provided by the piety and good character of Anglese and her family, plus subsequent miracles at the shrine, all of which would support the authentication of a miracle according to Tridentine doctrine. But the first four “reasons” on Molinier’s list, articulated as ways to verify reports of marvels and miracles, can also be read as an implicit primer on the method of his research into Garaison’s origins and history. He called them “the authentic proofs of an ancient fact”; we might call them written and oral primary sources.32 Molinier combined all written sources into one category. But he separated oral sources into four categories: eyewitness testimony, tradition passed from generation to generation, the word of those who lived in a time close to the events, and common opinion or popular say (la voix commune). Molinier further explained la voix commune at Garaison: “The common say of all the people of these quarters and surrounding areas where the marvel appeared adds no small weight.” No one “knows, says, or testifies” to even a small difference in the story. “Who will dare to doubt the truth of an action to which everyone of the region testifies?”33 If it is not a

30 31 32 33

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 110, with further discussion on 110–27. Ibid., 110–11. Ibid., 112.

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miracle, “it is beyond custom and human inclination” that the story should be reported so consistently.34 In recounting the apparition and miracles, Molinier was very specific, undoubtedly to combat doubt about them, befitting his commitment to antiHuguenot argument and probably also responding to the church’s rules for authenticating miracles. Molinier also rendered the past more uniform than Geoffroy did: almost every person is named, and nearly every event is dated. Thus Molinier’s Le lys du val de Garaison is quite different from Geoffroy’s Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason. Geoffroy created a myth from the bits of the shepherdess’s story circulating in his day, to which he added an archive of recent news about marvels. But unlike Geoffroy, Molinier came close to writing a history of Notre-Dame de Garaison. He made the case for the authenticity of the apparitions and miracles by comparing Catholic doctrine to the historical record at Garaison, which he reconstructed from Geoffroy’s book, the shrine’s registers, and talking to people at the shrine, in Monléon and the surrounding area, and his home city of Toulouse. The religious wars haunt both books. Geoffroy and Molinier erased Huguenots from the landscape of the Pyrenees, though in different ways. Geoffroy simply did not mention them, an extraordinary silence given the region’s history. Fitting his more overt engagement with religious controversy, Molinier filled his book with Huguenots: they spread dangerous heresies, attacked true religion, and became the hapless protagonists in miracle stories. Yet on a more fundamental level, both authors showed how Catholics vanquished Huguenots by presenting the story of Notre-Dame de Garaison as the triumph of Catholic truth in the form of apparitions and miracles, and the advance of Catholic claims to territory in the face of the local presence of Reformed churches.

The Ancient Devotion: Pierre de Marca on Notre-Dame de Betharram

Pierre de Marca made an even bolder case for Catholic seizures of real and imagined territory from the Huguenots in his book on Betharram (Figure 48.2).35 Notre-Dame de Betharram was Notre-Dame de Garaison’s near twin, both by location and history. Betharram was perched on a hillside within easy reach of the monastery of Lestelle, overlooking the rushing waters of the Gave de Pau, 34 35

Ibid., 113. Pierre de Marca, Traité des merveilles operées en la chapelle de Notre Dame du Calvaire de Beth-Aram, 2nd ed. (Betharram: René Lavoir, 1648). The book was first published in 1646, but I have not found a copy of that edition.

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Figure 48.2  Engraving from the title page of Pierre de Marca, Traité des merveilles operées en la chapelle de Notre Dame du Calvaire de Beth-Aram, 2nd ed. (Betharram: René Lavoir, 1648). Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris

in the former principality of Béarn. The two shrines even shared aristocratic patrons and an architect. As Geoffroy and Molinier did for Garaison, Pierre de Marca published a book to make Betharram better known. Marca was a lawyer by training, a jurist, and a client of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin who was

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later rewarded for his service to the French state with the archbishopric of Toulouse and then the bishopric of Paris (receiving his first miter before he was ordained to the priesthood).36 Unlike Geoffroy and even Molinier, Marca was a well-published writer. He authored a huge tome on the history of Béarn, a short tract on the Marian shrine at Montserrat (he had been governor of Catalonia while it was under French rule), and many other works. There is some evidence that he wrote the first edition of his book on Betharram in the 1630s, but it was not published until 1646, in Barcelona. A  second edition appeared two years later at Betharram. Marca’s book on Betharram engages as energetically as Geoffroy’s and Molinier’s with history, but in a different and sharper way, with an acute awareness of how “old” should be distinguished from “new.” Since Marca labored under the burden of the quite recent origin of Betharram—even more recent than Garaison’s murky pre-shrine past—it is instructive to watch him try to prove the shrine’s antiquity. The earliest shrine at Betharram may have dated back to 1500–1520, but certainly no earlier than that.37 Like Garaison’s, its origins were linked to a legend, told as follows. A group of shepherds’ children guarding their flocks were drawn by flashing lights to the top of a hill, where they found an image of the Virgin Mary wedged into a rocky outcropping. Assuming that Mary wished to be honored on that spot, the villagers and monks of Lestelle eventually prevailed upon the bishop of Lescar to allow a small shrine to be built in honor of Notre-Dame de Betharram. The shrine was destroyed in 1569, early in the religious wars, and remained in ruins until the bishop decided to restore it in the 1610s. A chapel and Mont du Calvaire, or replica of Jesus’s stations of the cross at Calvary, were built on the hills overlooking the main chapel during the midseventeenth century. A tiny woodcut representing the Mont du Calvaire appeared on the title page of Marca’s book (48.2). As Geoffroy and Molinier did for Garaison, Marca included the story of the shepherds’ children in his book on Betharram.38 According to “the ancient tradition, which is authentic,” Marca wrote, not only were the children drawn to the Virgin’s image by flashing lights, but the Virgin resisted the Lestelle monks’ efforts to move the image to an oratory by mysteriously returning the image to the site of the original discovery. Marca reported, “the doors [of the oratory]

36

See François Gaquère, Pierre de Marca (1594–1662): Sa vie, ses oeuvres, son gallicanisme (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1932). 37 Here I follow the account in Joël Perrin and Jean-Claude Lasserre, Notre-Dame de Betharram (Pau: Les Amis des Églises Anciennes du Béarn, 1980). 38 Marca, Traité des merveilles, 2nd ed., 27–33.

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being closed, that marvelous Image was once more found on the hill of BethAram,” where the monks then felt obliged to build a chapel. But Marca framed his account of the myth with a preface in which he essentially admitted that the shrine’s origins could be verified only by stories passed down from “our elders,” who heard the tales and saw the gifts left in the chapel by those who had received the Virgin’s graces there: At this chapel there occurred an event similar to what old establishments suffer, whose origin in the histories is almost always uncertain: the oldness that recommends them [to us] also damages them slightly, and they lose the memory of their beginning. Nevertheless it is certain that the holiness of this place was greatly reputed, from the time of our elders, because of the frequent miracles that the grace of God wrought there. Of which the memory is still recent and strongly verified among the neighbors, who saw and learned from their fathers, by means of the wood, the irons, and wax figures of body parts [i.e. ex-votos], and other gifts displayed in that chapel, the signs and testimonies of cures from paralysis and other ailments…although the literal proof of those marvels and the origin of this devotion had been lost and obliterated in the destruction of the chapel, when the new sect attacked the Catholic Religion in this land by force of arms.39 Ever the scholar of history and law, Marca would undoubtedly have preferred textual confirmation of the legend. But “the memory of the beginning” of the “old establishment” had been lost, so he committed to print what fragments of the story remained. Pierre de Marca’s book on Betharram is suffused with his fervent Catholicism, loyalty to the French crown, and love for Béarn. Recent controversies in Béarn gave the book a combative air. Marca harshly criticized the Spaniards, the Huguenots, and especially the queen of Navarre. A strong thread in his book is the contrast between old and new. Huguenots were part of “the new sect” or “new party” following “new opinions” rather than “ancient tradition” and “the ancient Faith” of the Catholic Church.40 The new sect had “buried” the chapel of Betharram, Marca lamented, just as Queen Jeanne had banished “the exercise of Religion.”41 But now, under the leadership of the bishop, chaplains from

39 40 41

Ibid., 27–29. See ibid., 29, 34, 35–37. Ibid., 40.

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Vincent de Paul’s Congregation of the Mission, and prominent aristocratic patrons, “the ancient devotion” was reestablished at Betharram. What was ancient about Betharram? The shrine was no more than a century old, and moreover had been but ruins for half that time. So Marca had to make his case carefully. He claimed centuries of veneration of the Virgin Mary near Betharram, stretching back five hundred or a thousand years (never adding dates, always leaving the past vaguely evoked). Certainly Christians lived from late antiquity in the Pyrenees, Marca wrote, and they had always honored Mary.42 Unfortunately, there were no written records: “It’s very regretful” that nothing “written with ink” remains of the ways in which “the true faith of our fathers” that had never been altered was observed there.43 Records of even the past century were nonexistent. But a hint of the ancient past was preserved in the name “Beth-Aram,” an old Hebrew name signifying “the House of the Sovereign” or “House of Grandeur and Eminence,” as in Joshua 13:27.44 Not only did the name Betharram recall the ancient Israelites’ claims to divinely ordained sovereignty over a place. Marca also pointed out that Hebrew was “the original language of the world,” a sacred tongue bearing with its ancient roots “the right of the firstborn.”45 Devotion to Hebrew as an ancient and sacred language was common among Christian scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, by Marca’s day.46 Marca used these varied ways of evoking antiquity—the Christianization of the Pyrenees, the Hebrew language, references to the ancient Hebrew prophets—together with the constant refrain of “the very ancient origins” of Betharram, to create the impression that NotreDame de Betharram was ancient. A long description of Betharram’s replica of Jesus’s way of the cross at Calvary added to the sense that there must be something indefinably antique about the shrine. Geoffroy and Molinier took pains to document Garaison’s marvels and miracles, and Marca did the same for Betharram. Visitors and pilgrims testified to many cures and other favors received through vows to Notre-Dame de Betharram, which Marca included in the book. Most tales were more marvels or prodigies than miracles. He recounted one from 1622: the priests noticed 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 23–24. Ibid., 33–34. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 18–21. See Irven Resnick, “Lingua Dei, Lingua Hominis: Sacred Language and Medieval Texts,” Viator 21 (1990): 51–74; and Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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that the nearby spring that always ran from the mountain had been reduced to a trickle, and they were hard pressed to collect enough water for their needs.47 Workers tried to clear the channel, but to no avail. But on the eve of the feast of the Assumption, the water began to flow abundantly as it had earlier, which the priests understood as God’s signal that he wished the chapel to be dedicated to the honor of the Virgin Mary. Marca also related an exciting tale that anyone who has visited Betharram—with its rushing waters, high winds, and rapidly changing weather—can appreciate. Following the reestablishment of Catholicism in Béarn under Louis xiii, the bishop of Lescar planted a cross on the mountain of Betharram.48 In 1616, a huge gust of wind overturned the cross and then almost immediately another gust set it aright again. A spectacular halo of light illuminated the upright cross. A crowd of people witnessed all three events from the opposite bank of the Gave de Pau, and so testified in the shrine’s register. As much as he seems to have appreciated a marvelous yarn, Marca’s book is most shaped by his constant recourse to the polarity of old versus new, with “old” signifying all that is true and “new” denoting what is doubtful and uncertain. The Betharram shrine itself might not be very old, but Marca insisted that Catholic veneration of Mary in the Pyrenees was ancient, and therefore took right of precedence over the Huguenots’ newer claims to territory and religious truth. Marca did not lavish attention on the mythic origins of the Betharram shrine as Geoffroy did for Garaison, or try to find ways of authenticating it, as Molinier had for Garaison. Marca offered little precise detail about the history of the shrine before its destruction in 1569. Instead he deflected the reader’s attention to Hebrew, the ancient Jews, and early Christians of Béarn as if to cast a cloudy aura of antiquity over a history that was impressively short. Marca was a clever writer with a commitment to historical study and legal argument. Perhaps he could not bring himself simply to invent a history in the way another writer would, or even more likely, the texts and lore at his disposal were too thin to justify much speculation.49 With his telling silences about certain events, names, and dates, combined with careful documentation of recent 47 Marca, Traité des merveilles, 2nd ed., 107–11. 48 Ibid., 69–82, 93–99. 49 Contrasting examples might be the medieval and early modern invention of apostolic and early Christian origins of Spanish shrines and saints’ cults. See Katherine Elliot van Liere, “The Missionary and the Moorslayer: James the Apostle in Spanish Historiography from Isidore of Seville to Ambrosio de Morales,” Viator 37 (2006): 519–43; and Van Liere, “Renaissance Chroniclers and the Apostolic Origins of Spanish Christianity,” in Van Liere, Ditchfield, and Louthan, Sacred History, 121–44.

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cures and marvels, and his constant harping on the abuses of “the new sect” or “new party,” Marca offered a case for the antiquity of Betharram that was indirect, but nevertheless almost persuasive. Conclusions Publishing saved Notre-Dame de Garaison and Notre-Dame de Betharram from perishing. Between 1607 and 1648, Pierre Geoffroy, Étienne Molinier, and Pierre de Marca wrote two tiny shrines into being by recording their marvels and stories in books published in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Auch, Barcelona, and Betharram. The books helped to attract the patronage of the archbishops and bishops of Auch, Couserans, Lescar, and Oloron, as well as wealthy Catholic noble families. Print also spread news of the shrines beyond the Pyrenees and brought pilgrims from far beyond the reach of word of mouth or “common say.” The path to establishing a successful pilgrim shrine was paved with patronage, but ultimately history was the arbiter of religious truth. The urgency to establish ancient origins for Catholic holy places was acute in frontier regions like the Pyrenees, but it was shared across the early modern Catholic world. Running through the three books by Geoffroy, Molinier, and Marca was a strong undercurrent of arguing against doubt about miracles, holy places, and the ancient origins of Catholic worship. But all three writers braided history together with myth in order to convince readers that the shrines were ancient. Pierre Geoffroy indulged fully in storytelling, and showed less hesitation about his lack of archives and eyewitness testimony than did Molinier or Marca. But they all used history, while not exactly writing histories. A decade ago the American comic and political pundit Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness”: “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist,” he explained. “What you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts.”50 Although I risk glibness by citing Colbert, nevertheless his notion of truthiness captures an essential quality of these three shrine books—with their adroit but insubstantial invocation of history—and perhaps of Catholic controversial tracts as well. History provided the key to proving Catholic claims to truth and territory, and in that world writers sometimes resorted to truthiness when historical documentation eluded them.

50

See Adam Sternbergh, “Stephen Colbert Has America by the Ballots,” New York Magazine, 16 Oct. 2006, http://nymag.com/news/politics/22322/, accessed 12 Apr. 2015.

chapter 49

Inventing the Middle Ages: An Early Modern Forger Hiding in Plain Sight Paula Findlen* For the fake that is a scholar’s work [and] contains some spurious or fictitious matter is no reason to condemn everything else he wrote as false. ludovico antonio muratori1



The subject of this essay lies hidden in one of Anthony Grafton’s footnotes. I did not find my topic there, having come to it long before I realized that it was buried in the back of Forgers and Critics.2 And yet it seems appropriate to rediscover a portion of my own research itinerary snaking its way through the end matter of a Grafton book, in a Graftonian footnote on forgery no less. Perhaps I have now intrigued you—and hopefully Tony is wondering which footnote I have in mind. Turn to page 138, note 5. There you will find a brief mention of the eighteenth-century lawyer, historian, and inveterate forger Alessandro Macchiavelli (1693–1766) and his fantastic project of inventing medieval ­women.3 This essay transforms a passing reference to one minor act * A special note of thanks to Marta Cavazza, who has long said that Alessandro Macchiavelli is deserving of serious study and who already knows that Macchiavelli was meant to be a protagonist of Festschriften for our most jocose historical friends, and to Caroline Bynum, Frederic Clark, and Fiona Griffiths, who have kindly shared and sharpened my appreciation of medieval forgeries. Thanks to audiences at Rutgers, Brown, the Columbia Medieval and Renaissance Seminars, and especially Stanford’s Theoretical Perspectives on the Middle Ages Workshop, and to Ann Blair and Maureen Miller for improving the final version. And of course to Tony for delightfully erudite friendship forged in footnotes. 1 As quoted in Fake? The Art of Deception, ed. Mark Jones with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker (London: British Museum Publications, 1990), 135. 2 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 138n.5. See also Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 Macchiavelli remains virtually unstudied, but see Olivier Bonfait, “Le collectionneur dans la cité: Alessandro Macchiavelli et le collectionisme à Bologne au xviiie siècle,” in Geografia del

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_050

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of ­eighteenth-century forgery into a full-fledged portrait of the early modern forger. It reconstructs Macchiavelli as a flesh-and-blood figure who saw the history of medieval Bologna a productive site for numerous inventions of the past.

The Strange Career of a Settecento Medievalist

By his own admission, Macchiavelli considered the Middle Ages to be a subject of great personal significance. He belonged to a Bolognese family of Florentine origins that arrived in the city in the mid-thirteenth century at the height of its medieval prosperity.4 Macchiavelli proudly noted references in ancient documents to his family’s arrival in the city. The fifteenth-century Dominican preacher Girolamo Borselli dated their flight from Florence to 1259 in his Cronica gestorum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononie, one of the most carefully researched and reliable chronicles of the important events of medieval Bologna.5 Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) selected and edited Borselli’s chronicle for inclusion in his Rerum italicarum scriptores (1723–51). Thus, the arrival of the Macchiavelli family in Bologna became a tiny piece of the vast documentary mosaic of the Italian Middle Ages that was then under construction.6 collezionismo. Italia e Francia tra xvi e xviii secolo, ed. Bonfait (Rome: École française de Rome, 2001), 83–108; Marta Cavazza, “Nuove identità di genere e falsi storici: un progetto di ricerca raccontato a un amico,” in Un bazar di storie. A Giuseppe Olmi nel sessantesimo genetiaco, ed. Claudia Pancino and Renato G. Mazzolini (Trent: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2006), 105–12; Cavazza, “Alessandro Macchiavelli,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 67 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), 24–28; and Paula Findlen, “Listening to the Archives: In Search of the Eighteenth-Century Women of Science,” in Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre, ed. Paola Govoni and Zelda Alice Franceschini (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2014), 98, 103–5. 4 Alfred Hessel, Geschichte der Stadt Bologna von 1116 bis 1280 (Berlin: Ebering, 1910); Massimo Giansante, “L’età comunale a Bologna,” Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per ill Medio Evo 92 (1985–86): 103–222; Rolando Dondarini, Bologna medievale nella storia della città (Bologna: Pàtron, 2000); Renato Zangheri, general ed., Storia di Bologna. vol. 2, Bologna nel Medioevo, ed. Ovidio Capitani (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2007). 5 Frater Hyeronymus de Bursellis [Borselli], Cronica gestorum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononie, ed. Albano Sorbelli, in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Rerum italicarum scriptores, ed. and rev. Giosue Carducci and Vittorio Fiorini (Città di Castello: Casa Editrice S. Lapi, 1929), vol. 23, pt. 2, p. 27: “Multi Florentinorum fugati in bello apud Arbiam timentes, confugierunt Bononiam, eosque inter Macchiavelli, Ranuzzi, etc.” 6 Eric Cochrane, “The Settecento Medievalists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 35–61; Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Naples: Istituto Italiano per

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Macchiavelli’s passion for medieval history—what well-informed contemporaries call his “indiscreet love of Patria cultivated in the most extraordinary fashion”7—did not begin with Muratori. Yet it was inspired by the Modenese librarian’s pioneering efforts to construct a new account of the past based on the critical assessment of surviving evidence. Between the 1720s and 1740s Macchiavelli’s enthusiastic and immersive study of medieval Bologna made him one of the most well-informed historians of the city. He filled his library with books and manuscripts about Bologna, and scoured the archives in search of new documents. He embellished his home with allegorical depictions of the ancient city, medieval paintings and sculptures, and portraits of illustrious ancestors. In his devotional activities he sought to revive the public ceremonial culture of medieval Christianity that had made Bologna a great center of spirituality, while in his political life he deployed his legal training to defend the privileges of the ancient medieval corporations, hoping to encourage a revival of Bologna’s ancient economic prosperity. Finally, he considered himself an archaeologist of things medieval throughout the city, rediscovering and in some instances restoring the physical monuments of this past.8 In short, Macchiavelli sought to inhabit the Middle Ages with every fiber of his very being, treating it as a living legacy to cultivate and bring forth. At a fairly young age he founded the Society for Lovers of Patria (Società dei Filopatri), though it is unclear whether anyone beyond the immediate members of his family was ever allowed to join.9 In December 1722, while completing his law degree at the University of Bologna, Macchiavelli introduced himself to Muratori, hoping to benefit from the senior scholar’s “great learning.” His professor’s warm praise of Muratori’s generosity toward other scholars emboldened the young law student to write Italy’s greatest medievalist, “even though I am indeed an unknown person to you.” Macchiavelli hoped that “the great humanity with which you treat those who display uncommon talent in the good and scientific professions” would gli Studi Storici, 1960); L.A. Muratori storiografo, Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi muratoriani, vol. 2 (Florence: Olschki, 1975); Giovanni Tabacco, “Muratori medievista,” Rivista storica italiana 85 (1973): 200–216. 7 Giovanni Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1781–94), vol. 5 (1786), 95. 8 Bonfait, “Le collectionneur dans la cité,” 84–88, 98–102; Cavazza, “Nuove identità”; Luca Ciancabilla, La fortuna dei primitivi a Bologna nel secolo dei lumi. Il Medioevo del Settecento from erudizione, collezionismo e conservazione (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012), 118–23. 9 Fantuzzi, Notizie, 5:96; Mario Fanti, ed., Notizie e insegne delle Accademie di Bologna (Bologna: Rotary Club, 1983), 53.

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encourage Muratori to offer advice, perhaps even a bit of patronage for an aspiring young medievalist like himself.10 Librarian to the d’Este dukes of Modena, Muratori studied with the Benedictine theologian and medievalist Benedetto Bacchini before becoming the librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1695. Five years later, having fully immersed himself in the bibliographic treasures and projects of this fabled library, the young and scholarly cleric returned to his native city. A request to trace the origins of the d’Este family, including their much-disputed hereditary claim to the coastal territory of Comacchio (which tradition dated to the tenth century), prompted his meandering itinerary through the civic, ecclesiastical, and family archives of many Italian cities. This intellectual journey expanded his horizons beyond the rediscovery of medieval Christianity, the subject of his mentor Bacchini’s most important work, and convinced him of the importance of collecting materials toward a history of civil society in the age of the communes. In 1717 Muratori published the first volume of Delle antichità estensi ed italiane (1717–40); already he had rebelled against the idea that his primary task was to reconstruct one family’s genealogy and defend its ancient privileges.11 Between 1709 and 1714 he conceived of the idea of collecting documents from different archives that would eventually become his Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi (1738–42). By 1720 Muratori defined the Italian Middle Ages as the primary object of his research.12 Those “dark centuries” (secoli obscuri) deserved a richer and more accurate portrait, he observed with growing enthusiasm in his correspondence with other scholars. He compared the secoli di mezzo to Columbus’s America, declaring these one thousand years of largely neglected history “a new world to discover.”13 10

11 12

13

Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Archivio Muratori, hereafter cited as BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 1r (Bologna, 16 Dec. 1722). Thanks to Hannah Marcus for photographing these materials. Roberto Bizzocchi, Genealogie incredibili. Scritti di storia nell’Europa moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995). Aldo Andreoli, Nel mondo di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), esp. 58–61, 258–59, 265–66, 274–75; Bertelli, Erudizione e storia, esp. 174, 257, 276, 362; Anna Burlini Calapaj, “Le Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi. Storia della formazione e della redazione del testo,” in Per formare un’istoria intiera. Testimoni oculari, cronisti locali, custodi di memorie private nel progetto muratoriano, Atti della I giornata di studi muratoriani (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 1–62; Alfredo Cottignoli, “Rerum Italicarum Scriptores di Ludovico Antonio Muratori,” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Dal Cinquecento al Settecento (Torino, 1993), 1015–38. As quoted in Andreoli, Nel mondo, 265. For the phrase secoli di mezzo, see Bertelli, Erudizione e storia, 362.

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The Middle Ages were indeed the historian’s terra incognita, a territory to explore and conquer. In 1722 none of the great works for which Muratori is now known had seen the light of day. This was still a project in the making. He was preparing the inaugural volume of the Rerum italicarum scriptores in order to share some of his best documentary discoveries, many of them generously provided by correspondents in other cities, with a readership eager to know more about the Middle Ages. In short, Macchiavelli’s letter arrived at a propitious moment in the development of Muratori’s plan to reclaim the period between 500 and 1500 as a historical epoch worth knowing, with many valuable lessons to offer the eighteenth-century inhabitants of the Italian states. What exactly did Macchiavelli hope to accomplish with his effusive letter? He was in the midst of completing a book he grandiosely called the “Illustrations of Illustrious, Munificent, and Monumental Medals Regarding My Country of Bologna.” Describing it as “a work full of many difficulties,” he eagerly anticipated that it might earn him widespread acclaim. Macchiavelli hoped that Muratori might read his manuscript and offer advice before its publication, “having understood well how much enlightenment, how many details, in short, how much profit I can obtain from your greatest erudition when, as I hope, you even consider me worthy of your favor and your literary commerce.”14 A preview of this research had already appeared in Macchiavelli’s study of Bologna’s ancient silver coins, De veteri bononino argenti Bononiae. Dissertatio historico-legalis (Bologna, 1721), which he presented to the Senate of Bologna in February 1721. Subsequent readers of his dissertation on the bolognino—a silver currency first created in 1190, followed by the bolognino piccolo in 1236—concluded that Macchiavelli inserted multiple accounts of “various ancient coins that never existed,” but this opinion did not yet prevail in 1722.15 He proposed a far more ambitious study of the entire history of the medieval city through its medals. In December 1723 Macchiavelli informed Muratori that he had received his degree in civil and canon law and begun to teach civil law but confessed that his “Metallic History of Bologna” was still a work in progress.16 14 BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 1r (Bologna, 16 Dec. 1722). 15 Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna, hereafter cited as bcab, Gozz. 248 (Alessandro Macchiavelli, Gl’Accidenti più memorabili dell’Anno del Sig[no]re 1718), c. 7 (Monday, 24 Feb. 1721). For a critique of Macchiavelli’s work on Bolognese coins, see Fantuzzi, Notizie, 5:96. 16 BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 2r (Bologna, 23 Dec. 1723). On Macchiavelli’s examination and degree, see Archivio di Stato, Bologna, hereafter cited as asb, Studio, 135, Libri segreti del

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Rediscovering Bitisia

While Macchiavelli began to assemble an iconographic portrait of his city since antiquity, he took great satisfaction in seeing another project brought to completion regarding an urgent question on many people’s minds in 1722: had women received university degrees and taught in the medieval Studium? Bitisia Gozzadina seu De mulierum doctoratu apologetico legalis-historico dissertatio attempted to resolve this issue, providing readers with copious evidence of almost five centuries of learned women pursuing knowledge and being institutionally recognized for their accomplishments. (See Fig. 49.1.) It made the presence of women in the university seem like an inevitable fact that each generation reaffirmed, while acknowledging its origins in the values and practices of medieval Bolognese society. Macchiavelli did not mention the publication of this book in his correspondence with Muratori. Perhaps he assumed Muratori already knew about it. More likely, he did not want the venerable librarian to dissect the historical research that formed the backbone of the argument in favor of women’s presence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Studium. Compounding the issue, Bitisia Gozzadina was also not work for which the young and ambitious lawyer, in the final year of his own legal studies, could officially claim credit, since it bore his older brother Carlo Antonio’s name. Even at the time, many people suspected that it was primarily Alessandro’s project, or at the very least a collaborative endeavor of the Macchiavelli brothers. Given the role that Alessandro Macchiavelli subsequently played in repeatedly presenting the evidence in favor of Bettisia Gozzadini’s existence (and his persistent habit of publishing aspects of his work under his brothers’ and sister’s names), we must primarily credit him with the authorship of this fascinating example of how the invention of a medieval past nurtured ambitions in the present. Dedicated to Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi, the teenage daughter of a Bolognese nobleman who publicly defended her legal theses at the Spanish College in Bologna on 2 July 1722, Bitisia Gozzadina was a manifesto of eighteenth-century feminism forged in the Bolognese archives.17 It directly addressed the recent Collegio canonico (1706–36), fols. 125r (22 Jan. 1723), 125v (23 Jan. 1723), 126r (12 and 15 Feb. 1723), 126v (18 Feb. 1723); and asb, Studio, 146, Libri segreti del Collegio civile (1695–1727), fols. 217v (22 Jan. 1723), 218r (23 Jan. 1723), 218v–19r (12, 15, and 19 Feb. 1723). On his first university lecture in this non-stipendiary position, see bcab, Gozz. 190 (Macchiavelli, Compendio istorico delle cose più memorevoli sacro-civili occorse in Bologna), c. 30 (18 Nov. 1723). 17 Fantuzzi, Notizie, 5:102. On Delfini Dosi, see Emilio Orioli, “Una cultrice di diritto a Bologna nel xviii secolo,” L’Archiginnasio 6 (1911): 25–31; Lucia Toschi Traversi, “Verso l’inserimento delle donne nel mondo accademico,” in Alma mater studiorum. La presenza femminile dal xviii al xx secolo (Bologna: clueb, 1988), 15–37; Marta Cavazza, “Dottrici e

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Figure 49.1  Macchiavelli’s defense of the female doctorate in the medieval Studium. Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

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controversy about whether a woman could receive a law degree that deeply divided the city. Delfini Dosi’s unsuccessful effort to graduate in law from Bologna in 1722 offered a unique opportunity to reflect on the history and mythology of women graduates because it was, from the start, an explicit attempt to reconstitute the memory of Bologna’s women graduates. The key protagonist was not the sixteen-year-old Delfini Dosi but her father, Alfonso, who sought to realize familial ambitions through the public celebration of his learned daughter. In 1721 Alfonso Delfini Dosi conceived of the idea of his daughter’s degree as an opportunity to increase his standing with his Farnese patrons. His daughter’s twelve conclusions in canon and civil law, presented publicly at the Spanish College in Bologna beneath a portrait of the queen of Spain, Elisabetta Farnese, sought to revive the medieval tradition of distinguished female jurists. (See Fig. 49.2.) Several law professors successfully examined Maria Vittoria in this highly elaborate and costly ceremony, to which her father invited the leading families of Bologna. The culmination of this event should have been a university degree that recalled the glory of the medieval Studium. Instead, it fizzled into an unresolved debate about the absence of evidence for a tradition that had long sustained Bologna’s image of itself as a city of learned and talented women.18 History was very much on the minds of the Bolognese who participated in these events. They celebrated Delfini Dosi’s accomplishments, declaring that “our present times are not inferior to the past.”19 The bishop of Perugia rejoiced “for having a lady of such promise renew in our University the celebrated memories of the famous Bitisia Gozzadini,” while the bishop of Imola, Ulisse Gozzadini, took special pleasure in these efforts to revive “the name and memory” of his ancestor.20 This raises the fundamental question of the treatise produced hastily by Macchiavelli, possibly in collusion with his older brother Carlo Antonio. Who was Bitisia, or as she was more commonly known, Bettisia? What had she done to become the protagonist of the defense of the female doctorate?

18 19 20

lettrici nell’Università di Bologna nel Settecento,” Annali di Storia dell’Università 1 (1997): 109–25; and David Garcia Cueto, “La celebración de la sabiduría. Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi y la presentacíon pública de sus conclusions académicas Bologna (1722),” in Felipe Serrano Estrella et al., Docta Minerva. Homenaje a la profesora Luz de la Ulierte Vázquez (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, Servicio de Publicaciones y Intercambio Scientifico, 2011), 405–14. Caroline Murphy, “In Praise of the Ladies of Bologna: The Image and the Identity of the Sixteenth-Century Bolognese Patriciate,” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 440–54. Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, hereafter cited as bub, ms 279, no. 8, fol. 73r; also bcab, B. 1341, fol. 30r. bcab, B. 1341, fol. 55v (Bishop of Perugia to Alfonso Delfini Dossi, Perugia, 1 Aug. 1722); bub, ms 9L, no. 44 (Ulisse Gozzadini to Carl’Antonio Macchiavelli, 18 Nov. 1722).

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Figure 49.2  Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi presenting her legal theses before Elisabetta Farnese, queen of Spain, at the Spanish College in Bologna (1722). bub, ms 775, courtesy of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna

Bitisia Gozzadina opened with a reproduction of an ancient medal—one of the many pieces of evidence rediscovered by Macchiavelli in the course of his research—representing the medieval jurist Bettisia Gozzadini (1209–61). (See Fig. 49.3.) Descended from a family with deep roots in the city that played a central role in the struggles for power between papal and imperial factions in the thirteenth century, Bettisia studied and taught in the Studium to great acclaim in the very period when the Macchiavelli family first arrived in Bologna. The 1241 medal presented Gozzadini as a modestly garbed, unmarried young woman who might have stepped out of a Giotto fresco capturing daily life in a medieval Italian city at the height of communal rule. She in no way resembled earlier descriptions that portrayed her as having shunned feminine

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Figure 49.3  Portrait of Bettisia Gozzadini, allegedly made in 1241. From Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli, Bitisia Gozzadina seu de Mulierum Doctoratu Apologetico Legalis-Historico Dissertatio (Bologna, 1722). Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

activities “and since the age of twelve, gone around dressed as a man,” declaring herself a disciple of Plato. Instead, this was a portrait of a chaste, modest, and presumably pious woman who “dressed like a widow” when she gave an oration at the funeral of the city’s archbishop, Enrico della Fratta, an event that reputedly took place in March 1241.21 The medal that Macchiavelli reproduced depicted Gozzadini at the height of her academic fame, five years after she allegedly received her doctorate on 3 June 1236. It was a definitive portrait of Bologna’s first woman professor. After repeatedly testing her mettle in private lessons and public disputations with students, the Bologna Studium granted Gozzadini a professorial chair in 1239. Students allegedly flocked in great numbers to hear her lecture. The year her medal was struck her intellectual and moral authority in the city was reputed 21

Cherubino Ghirardacci, Della Historia di Bologna parte prima (Bologna, 1596), 1:159, 163.

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to be so great that she not only spoke on the death of the city’s spiritual leader but also gave an oration in praise of Innocent iv’s decision to create new cardinals, including the archbishop of Bologna, in 1244. Gozzadini’s visible role in the life of her city made her unexpected death on 3 November 1261 a public tragedy. Caught during a violent storm, when raging waters trapped her and six others inside a collapsing building near her residence outside the walls of the city, she perished at the height of her fame. The entire city mourned her passing. “On that day no one taught in the public schools,” one historian recounted, “and she was accompanied by great tears to her tomb.”22 The Bolognese buried Bettisia, their magistra et doctrix, clothed in her doctoral robes and wearing the ring and ermine cape of a university graduate. Her master, the Lombard jurist Odofredus (d. 1265), whose lucid commentaries on Roman law justly earned him fame as a legendary teacher and keen legal mind, reportedly led her funerary procession. Odofredus himself was buried in an elaborate tomb next to the church of San Francesco di Bologna; his tomb is still one of the highly visible monuments testifying to the power and prestige of the professoriate in the medieval Bolognese commune. By contrast, how was Bettisia commemorated? At the end of the sixteenth century local historians claimed that you could still see “the foundations of that house” on the river Idice where nature triumphed over knowledge.23 Reports of a tomb that once existed lacked physical evidence. Gozzadini was indeed in need of a historian prepared to dig through the archives in order to secure her place in the historical record.

Of Forgery, Footnotes, and Feminism

Macchiavelli saw himself as just the man for the job. In response to the questions raised by his fellow lawyers, he decided in July 1722 to find the evidence that was lacking. He was convinced that Gozzadini was the first woman graduate and professor of any subject. Numerous sources spoke of her repeatedly throughout the centuries.24 But where was the concrete proof of her existence and accomplishments? On the eve of Delfini Dosi’s defense at the Spanish College, members of the College of Jurisprudence demanded proof that Gozzadini had graduated, yet nothing that satisfied the emerging criteria for 22

Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi e dell’opere loro stampate e manoscritte (Bologna, 1714), 74; see also Ghirardacci, Della Historia di Bologna, 1:203. 23 Ghirardacci, Della Historia di Bologna, 1:203. 24 Pompeo Scipione Delfi, Cronologia delle famiglie nobili di Bologna (Bologna, 1670), 370.

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historical evidence in the age of Muratori materialized. The university archive had no records that any woman, Gozzadini or otherwise, had ever taken a degree, let alone taught. Francesco Serdonati, one of the Renaissance editors of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women, wrote that records of women graduates and professors “appeared in the public books of the University of Bologna.”25 When scholars entered the archives to verify these claims, however, no documents could be found. Everyone acknowledged that the archival record was fragile and incomplete, so they also examined early publications of these records, where more might have survived. One obvious place to look, for example, was Giovanni Nicolò Pasquali Alidosi’s published list of Bologna’s graduates in civil and canon law between 1000 and 1620; it contained many Gozzadini but no Bettisia.26 The absence of any verifiable documentation establishing a solid precedent convinced the College of Jurisprudence to uphold the legal and scriptural traditions banning women from practicing law and teaching publicly. They refused Delfini Dosi’s request for a degree. Thus, in 1722 the Bolognese jurists were embroiled in a very interesting controversy that Muratori would have appreciated, had they solicited his opinion. Fundamentally, it was a debate about the nature of historical evidence, a subject on which the eighteenth-century Italian scholarly community increasingly had important and interesting things to say. On the one side, the majority of the College of Jurisprudence argued that there was no institutional record of Gozzadini because she had never participated in the life of the medieval Studium. Perhaps she had never existed at all? The absence of evidence rendered her a doubtful precedent indeed. On the other side, historical tradition and public memory held Bologna famous for its women graduates and professors for almost five centuries. These women had been written into histories, including Anton Francesco Ghiselli’s Memorie antiche manoscritte di Bologna, one of the most authoritative and extensive chronicles of the history of Bologna, which he compiled for about fifty years until his death in 1730. Turn the pages of this work to the year 1236. There is a succinct description of Gozzadini’s doctorate with no concern about its authenticity. (See Fig. 49.4.) Many volumes later, Ghiselli insisted that this was not a unique event but part of a tradition of women graduates and professors: “In this Studium not only 25

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Giovanni Boccaccio, Libro di M. Giovanni Boccaccio delle Donne Illustri. Tradotto di Latino in Volgare per M. Giuseppe Betusi, con una giunta fatta dal medesimo d’altre Donne Famose. E un’altra nuova giunta fatta per M. Francesco Serdonati, d’altre Donne Illustri Antiche e Moderne (Florence, 1596), 546. Giovanni Nicolò Pasquali Alidosi, Li dottori bolognesi di legge canonica e civile, dal principio di esso per tutto l’anno di 1619 (Bologna, 1620).

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Figure 49.4  Anton Francesco Ghiselli’s account of Gozzadini’s 1236 degree. bub, ms 770, vol. 2, courtesy of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna

have there been Bolognese doctors but even Bolognese women of celebrated intellect.”27 This seems pretty definitive—and from someone who was alive and well in 1722, digging through the public and private archives to create the definite annals of his city’s history. Why wasn’t Ghiselli’s opinion sufficient to resolve any doubts? How could the historical record lie? The answer lay in part in attitudes toward medieval chronicles as a useful but often unreliable source in the judgment of eighteenth-century historical scholarship. They were full of what Muratori called “dubious facts.”28 Bologna had no surviving chronicles before the fourteenth century, which raised a different problem, namely about the nature of memory itself and the formation of the written record.29 Ghiselli based his Memorie on documents that the most skeptical jurists who questioned Gozzadini’s degree deemed insufficient as a form of proof. They wanted institutional records, not cultural memory. 27 bub, ms 770, xv, c. 392. 28 Bertelli, Erudizione e storia, 55; also Fantuzzi, Notizie, 5:102n.1. 29 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995); Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin, and Duane Osheim, eds., Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).

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Macchiavelli became the dissenting lawyer who argued the brief for the other side, even if the decision was a fait accompli. For some months, he compiled his own evidence in favor of the female doctorate. While researching this question, he began to consider the problem of historical record keeping, particularly when dealing with a complex institution like the university, whose structure and purpose evolved over centuries. Certainly, records had been lost. They also had been badly kept in the early days of the Studium—or never recorded at all. This raised an important question: did the absence of documentation really mean anything? Macchiavelli argued that it could not be decisive when the strength of historical memory mitigated against it. Therefore, Gozzadini was a graduate. Modern historians can now state more clearly what Macchiavelli had begun to understand: since the University of Bologna did not keep records of its professors until 1384 and did not record any of its degrees until the fifteenth century (today the earliest surviving evidence dates from 1480), the history of women in the medieval Studium belonged to the pre-institutional phase of its existence, when buildings, archives, and formal registers of faculty and students did not define its existence. Delfini Dosi’s father lamented that “the great fire of 1300” had destroyed the evidence. Macchiavelli envisioned the steps by which time and fate had emptied out the archive, obliterating official accounts of Gozzadini’s 1236 degree. Nonetheless, memory endured.30 Macchiavelli understood that he could not disprove the college’s finding that no record existed of Gozzadini’s degree. He nonetheless felt that such an argument deliberately ignored the kind of evidence that survived. Instead, his support for the fact of Gozzadini’s degree and professorship rested on the “authority of centuries, traditional wisdom, and common opinion.”31 The future archbishop of Bologna Prospero Lambertini agreed with him, writing that a degree was not an office, for which a public record was absolutely necessary, but an honor, a reward for intellectual virtue that could not be so easily defined and whose memory might live on beyond the archive.32 Claiming a contested historical tradition is a difficult business. Not every history of Bologna mentioned its medieval university women, and Macchiavelli knew this. He contrasted the absence of any discussion of Gozzadini in Carlo Sigonio’s authoritative Historia Bononiensis (1578) with its presence in Ghiselli’s chronicle, arguing that the latter’s Memorie antiche manoscritte di Bologna met 30

bcab, B. 937 (Alfonso Delfini Dosi to unknown, Bologna, 8 July 1722); see also Macchiavelli, Bitisia Gozzadina, 11, 16. 31 Macchiavelli, Bitisia Gozzadina, 10. 32 Ibid., 55.

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the modern criteria of historical research better than the work of any predecessors, including Sigonio. Citing other examples, Macchiavelli argued that cultural memory was often more powerful and authentic than institutional records. One of the most important points of reference in this discussion was the Donation of Constantine, which, since the time of Lorenzo Valla during the philological renaissance of the mid-fifteenth century, had been exposed as an eighth-century forgery masquerading as a fourth-century document giving the Roman Catholic Church temporal powers over the territory formerly occupied by the Roman emperor Constantine.33 Macchiavelli argued passionately and provocatively that the lack of documentation made neither the conversion of Constantine to Christianity nor his investing the papacy with temporal authority any less true. In the absence of a negative fact, he concluded, one had to believe the presumption of truth that led to the fabrication of evidence a posteriori.34 At the same time, Macchiavelli recognized that the only way to resolve the debate about the female doctorate was to provide irrefutable evidence. The crucial document became his most spectacular discovery: an ancient calendar of the medieval Studium, Kalendarium Honorificum Perpetuum Archigymnasii Bononiensis (1280), which provided a wealth of information about the university at its origins. It decisively confirmed Bologna’s tradition of women graduates and professors.35 (See Fig.  49.5.) Even Trotula, the fabled healer and teacher of medicine in Salerno, lacked this kind of institutional authenticity.36 So did Bettisia, since the medieval calendar was a document created by the person who claimed to discover it. The year in which Macchiavelli first decided to write Muratori was crucial to the development of his reputation as a man so invested in his particular version of the history of Bologna that he deliberately forged its past. Describing his work on Bologna’s silver coinage, the famous bolognini first minted in 1190 by the city, the late eighteenth-century biographer Giovanni Fantuzzi remarked that it was full of “various ancient coins that never existed.”37 Macchiavelli’s history of Bologna was a tissue of fabrications, leading contemporaries to 33

Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G.W. Bowersock (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007); Grafton, The Footnote, 73–75; the special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996). 34 Macchiavelli, Bitisia Gozzadina, 10–12. 35 Cavazza, “Dottrici e lettrici.” 36 Monica H. Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 37 Fantuzzi, Notizie, 5:97.

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Figure 49.5  Alessandro Macchiavelli’s calendar for the medieval Studium, with an entry describing Gozzadini’s 1236 degree. bcab, Gozz. 1, courtesy of the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio

wonder at his desire to become “another Annius of Viterbo, making up authors and producing texts and monuments born only of his imagination.”38 His brother Carlo Antonio and, to a lesser degree, his sister, Maria Elisabetta, and younger brother, Collantonio, assisted him in this elaborate invention of the medieval past, replete with two beatified Alessandro Macchiavellis of prior centuries and an illustrious yet entirely fictional relative, Luigi di Leonardo Macchiavelli, whose fifteenth-century hand they simulated in spurious manuscripts, while also attributing authentic documents of the period to him.39 By the time he completed his life’s work, shaping the history of Bologna as a mirror to hold up to the present, Macchiavelli took his place in the genealogy of Italian forgers. This proud tradition began with the anonymous hands that created the Donation of Constantine in the eighth century and reached its humanist apogee in the historical inventions of Annius of Viterbo, the 38 39

Ibid., 96. On Annius, see Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–103. Mario Fanti, Confraternità e città a Bologna nel medioevo e nell’età moderna (Rome: Herder, 2001), 126–30; Mario Fanti and Lorenzo Paolini, eds., Codice diplomatico della Chiesa Bolognese. Documenti autentici e spuri (secoli iv–xii) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2004).

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fifteenth-century Dominican and Master of the Sacred Palace who boldly rewrote and rediscovered unknown facets of ancient history to suit his own purposes. Macchiavelli’s ambitions reflected the further evolution of these practices. He applied himself to new historical questions about the Middle Ages, including the status of women in the past, as such questions became increasingly urgent in the present.40 He became their historian and forger.

What Did Muratori Think?

For two decades Macchiavelli periodically sent letters to Muratori filled with news of his scholarly projects, introductions for students passing through Modena, and fulsome praise for Muratori’s efforts to establish the documentary foundations of the Italian Middle Ages. This was not the correspondence of a close collaborator but a formal acknowledgment of Muratori’s centrality to conversations about historical scholarship in this era. Muratori had longstanding relations with a number of Bolognese scholars, but Macchiavelli was not among them. Not a single letter survives from the d’Este librarian written to Macchiavelli. This conspicuous absence tells us nothing. Muratori’s responses may have disappeared with the dispersal of Macchiavelli’s papers. Nonetheless, other evidence suggests that Muratori was less than enamored with Macchiavelli’s exuberant expression of early modern medievalism. In January 1726 Muratori wrote to another Bolognese correspondent, the polyglot theologian Giambattista Bianconi, responding to the news that Macchiavelli might receive a paid professorship. “So we will now give lawyer Macchiavelli [sic] a lucrative chair for his renowned defense of this university,” he remarked, marveling that Macchiavelli’s recent letter of holiday greetings neglected to mention “his new little work.”41 Intrigued, Muratori wanted a copy of the book while anticipating the worst. He already knew that it was a defense of the Theodosian Privilege, the fifth-century diploma reputed to be the oldest document related to the foundation of the Studium. Shortly before the departure of Bologna’s patron 40

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Maria Gaetana Agnesi et al., The Contest for Knowledge: Debates about Women’s Education in Eighteenth-Century Italy, ed. and trans. Rebecca Messbarger and Paula Findlen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Luciano Guerci, La discussione sulla donna nell’Italia del Settecento (Torino: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1987); Rebecca Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Epistolario, ed. Mattoe Campori (Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1901–11), 6:2606 (Modena, 1 Jan. 1727), responding to BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 5r–v (Bologna, 18 Dec. 1726).

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saint, Saint Petronius, from Constantinople, Emperor Theodosius ii allegedly asked the learned bishop what he wanted for his city. The answer, as described in this document, was territorial expansion and the rights to the Po River (designed to forestall competing claims by the neighboring duchy of Ferrara and Modena), and a writ to found a university because the Bolognese “by nature are the wisest men in the world.” Or so Saint Petronius allegedly said, encouraging the emperor to give his city “a Studium, so that she may be the supporter and mother of those who wish to learn knowledge, goodness, and decorum” (sientia, bontada e boni costumi).42 Current scholarship dates the creation of the Theodosian Privilege to the mid-thirteenth century, not 423 ce. This document emerged in response to Frederick ii’s efforts to persuade his subjects to abandon Bologna’s Studium to study at the newly founded University of Naples (founded 1224). In other words, the Theodosian Privilege countered a decree by a medieval emperor with a powerful territorial presence in Italy that threatened Bologna’s monopoly on learning. It placed a much earlier imperial decree of great antiquity in the hands of the city’s patron saint, who became the subject of a civic cult. In an era in which the university was under threat, there were many reasons to enhance its authority by giving it an ancient pedigree that no other university could claim.43 Long before the eighteenth century, the authenticity of the Theodosian Privilege was under careful scrutiny. The Dominican chronicler Borselli evidently learned a lesson or two from his contemporary Valla, whose celebrated demolition of the alleged Donation of Constantine in 1439–40 became a benchmark for how to critically analyze historical documents.44 In his chronicle, Borselli unceremoniously discarded this document as playing no role in the actual origins of the university, though he acknowledged its significance for the mythological foundations of Bononia docet. A recent publication of the privilege by a Bologna law professor—Ludovico Bolognini, Privilegium 42

Maria Corti, Vita di San Petronio (Bologna, 1962), 5:6–9, as quoted in Antonio Ivan Pini, Città, Chiesa e culti civici in Bologna medievale (Bologna: clueb, 1999), 214; Gina Fasoli and Giovanni Battista Pighi, “Il privilegio Teodosiano. Edizione critica e commento,” Studi e memorie per la storia dell’Università di Bologna, n.s., 2 (1961): 55–94; Fasoli, “Il falso privilegio di Teodosio ii per lo Studio di Bologna,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter, Schriften, 33 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1988) , 627–41; Antonio Ivan Pini, “Federico ii, lo studio di Bologna e il ‘falso Teodosiano,’” in Federico ii e Bologna, ed. Giancarlo Susini, Documenti e studi, 27 (Bologna: Deputazione di storia patria per le province di Romagna, 1996), 27–60. 43 Pini, Città, Chiesa e culti civici, 187–88, 195, 208–11. 44 Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 24.

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Theodosii universitate Bononiae concessum (1491)—drew Borselli’s attention to the manifold problems of this document, including a marble inscription of its crucial words, all of which Bolognini had declared authentic in his critical edition. Borselli marveled that any well-educated man failed to see the “falsity” of the diploma. Surviving copies lacked the standard features of a legal document, let alone an imperial privilege, and were written in a language of a much later era by someone without the level of learning to be in the position to record an emperor’s words for posterity.45 Borselli’s assessment, however, remained forgotten and buried in the archives until Muratori identified his chronicle as worthy of publication, thanks especially to his intensive conversations with Bianconi. It was perhaps one of the reasons why he felt no need to say anything further on the subject in his Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi, other than to condemn it as a false diploma.46 Borselli had already said it well, if obscurely. A number of historians continued to cite the Theodosian Privilege as evidence for the Studium’s great antiquity, but the growing consensus since the publication of Sigonio’s Historia Bononiensis was that the diploma was a medieval forgery. Muratori was well aware of the long-standing debates about the authenticity of the Theodosian Privilege when he heard that Macchiavelli had taken up the cause of defending this ancient diploma. In December 1726 Bianconi warned Muratori that “second-rate people were muttering against you, as if you were the first and only person to attack the antiquity of our Studium. To the contrary, I believe that everyone with any common sense, in Bologna and beyond, shares your opinion.”47 Being firmly in Muratori’s camp, Bianconi did not hesitate to confront the critics. He especially singled out Macchiavelli, offering an unvarnished opinion of his scholarly deficiencies. “I don’t know how good he is at law but his learning is of little value, or anything else.” Macchiavelli’s latest book failed to meet Bianconi’s standards for good scholarly criticism. While the Bolognese jurist argued his position “with citations from an infinite number of authors,” too many of them did not support his findings or proved to be illusory. “He cites names I’ve never heard before,” Bianconi wrote with mounting indignation, including a mysterious professor named Nugno Obnulgo whose ancient oration allegedly confirmed the Theodosian Privilege. “What a disgrace, it’s worthless, and whoever printed it 45 Borselli, Cronica, xxx–xxxi, 9–10. 46 Muratori, Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi (Milan, 1738–42), vol. 3, diss. 34, pp. 21–26. Also discussed in Pini, Città, Chiesa e culti civici, 209. 47 BEstM, Muratori, 55/05, fol. 47r (Giovanni Battista Bianconi to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Bologna, 30 Dec. 1726).

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didn’t bother to edit.” Implicitly contrasting his own approach to history with Macchiavelli’s penchant for forgery and invention, Bianconi reassured Muratori that the project of constructing a well-documented history of Bologna based on its most reliable chronicles continued. “I haven’t lost sight of those Bolognese things, or the archive.”48 Yet he wondered what the d’Este librarian thought of Macchiavelli’s defense of the antiquity of the Bolognese Studium. Curiosity finally compelled Muratori to read the Augustalis Theodosiani diplomatis Apologia pro Archigymnasio (1726). In January 1727, still waiting for a copy, he responded to Bianconi’s description of the scholarly outrages that it perpetrated. “For three hundred years now similar jokes have been sustained, done to us by preceding centuries,” he observed philosophically. It bothered Muratori that Macchiavelli would perpetuate these old habits in an enlightened age. “But that today, in such cultured, erudite, and self-aware times, one wishes to celebrate and defend a privilege that in all parts cries for mercy—and in a city of such good taste as Bologna—seems a bit strange to me.” Muratori hoped that his great affection for Bologna and its historians would not be diminished by this obstinate desire “to oppose the truth.”49 He reminded Bianconi that the documents he planned to publish would reflect honorably on the city and its illustrious medieval history, and asked him to send a copy of the original Theodosian Privilege. Bianconi later observed that the only good thing to have come out of this controversy was a better printed version of the document that “conformed more closely to the original,” with “fewer notes of falsity.”50 Two months later, Muratori still hadn’t received Macchiavelli’s book, but he finally managed to borrow a copy. “I say saw and not read,” he commented acerbically to Bianconi: because I am not ashamed to say that in skimming, it did not seem to me to be worthy of being read. I am amazed that Bologna, so well provisioned with valiant minds and wise and erudite men, recommended the defense of this privilege (that is truly indefensible) by someone hardly capable of helping the cause. I have responded to him that he didn’t persuade me, and I would say this even though this university is the first and most celebrated in all of Italy, but not what he is pretending it should be.51 48 Ibid., fol. 48r–v. 49 Muratori, Epistolario, 6:2606 (Modena, 1 Jan. 1727). 50 BEstM, Muratori, 55/05, fol. 50r (Giovanni Battista Bianconi to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Bologna, 13 Mar. 1727). 51 Muratori, Epistolario, 6:2621 (Modena, 26 Feb. 1727). Italics added for clarity.

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Muratori thanked Bianconi for sending the exact wording of the Theodosian Privilege. He promised to send the index of the latest volume of his Rerum italicarum scriptores as soon as it was ready. Shortly thereafter, Bianconi traveled to San Domenico to compare the diplomatic edition of the Theodosian Privilege with “the one carved in stone…near the entrance to the Sacristy.” His final judgment left little room for doubt: “I can tell you that the more I read it, the more I seem to recognize further some new sign of falsity and supposition; and it makes me wonder even more how anyone can be found who wants to defend it.”52 We do not know whether Muratori ever directly expressed his opinion of Macchiavelli’s latest effort to forge the medieval past. No correspondence between them survives from 1727. However, it takes no leap of faith to imagine that Italy’s greatest medievalist considered Augustalis Theodosiani diplomatis Apologia pro Archigymnasio to be beneath contempt. It violated every principle of Muratori’s patient efforts to sort truth from error, and fact from fiction. He repeatedly reminded readers of his erudite tomes that documents before 1000 were sparse, frequently unreliable, and often forged. In this case, forgeries compounded forgeries. Tucked inside Macchiavelli’s defense of the university’s fifth-century origins was yet another reference to Bettisia Gozzadini, confirming her contributions to the juridical fame of the medieval Studium.53 The idea that the university might promote Macchiavelli on this poor excuse for scholarship scandalized the ducal librarian of Modena. Perhaps Macchiavelli deliberately avoided sending a copy of his defense of the Theodosian Privilege directly to Muratori? Soliciting Muratori’s opinion, as he once hoped to do with his history of Bolognese medals, would not have served his purpose; indeed, it might have jeopardized his construction of himself as an erudite jurist born of the ancient Studium, deserving of further recognition for his tireless devotion to his city’s history. In February 1726 Macchiavelli deposited a copy of his defense of the Theodosian Privilege with the Assunti dello Studio, the Senate body charged with overseeing university affairs. Two months later, he petitioned the Senate for “the stipend of a public lecturer,” citing this book as evidence of his accomplishments.54 In an era of constrained budgets, difficult choices had to be made. In the end, Macchiavelli 52

BEstM, Muratori, 55/05, fol. 52r (Giovanni Battista Bianconi to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Bologna, 27 Mar. 1727). 53 Macchiavelli, Augustalis Theodosiani Diplomatis Apologia pro Archigymnasio ([Bologna], 1726), 75. 54 asb, Studio, 45, Requisiti dei lettori, vol. 16, no. 2 (Alessandro Macchiavelli, 11 Feb. and 27 Apr. 1726).

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received a promotion on paper but without any remuneration until the mid1730s, when he finally entered the ranks of the paid professoriate.55 Muratori must have smiled at the prospect of Macchiavelli becoming a virtual professor, though he was less amused by his Bolognese colleague’s ultimately successful promotion.

Macchiavelli’s Revenge

Our tale of an enlightened forger and his distinguished critic should probably end here. But history is never quite that neat and uncomplicated, a fact that Muratori knew all too well. Like many of his contemporaries, he recognized that Macchiavelli was a talented archival researcher and historiographer. Even if he often chose to pervert the history that he loved by filling it with fabulous inventions, he was nonetheless knowledgeable. In the early 1730s Filippo Argelati, Muratori’s principal editor in Milan, invited Macchiavelli to contribute to one of Muratori’s important historical projects, the publication of the complete works of Sigonio between 1732 and 1737. Muratori’s life of Sigonio prefaced the first volume of the Opera Omnia; Macchiavelli’s edition of the eighteenth-century critical edition of Sigonio’s Historia Bononiensis appeared in the second volume in 1733.56 The early 1730s were a period of fairly regular correspondence between these two eighteenth-century medievalists. In March 1730 Macchiavelli expressed his desire to be admitted to a Modenese academy. Upon hearing that his petition succeeded, he responded to Muratori’s request to send “a compendium of my things, although they are so devoid of merit or any good qualities that if you indeed do not employ it here, to your credit, I will have no name worth inscribing in any kind of book. But since you command, I submit willingly to your judgment….”57 Since Muratori had expressed his opinion of the dubious intent of Macchiavelli’s scholarship quite clearly in 1727, we are left to wonder why he promoted Macchiavelli’s admission to a learned academy in 55

Macchiavelli was still without a stipend in 1734 but mentions having a stipend at least one year before 1738: ibid. (Alessandro Macchiavelli, 22 Dec. 1734 and 18 June 1738). 56 Sigonio, Opera Omnia (Milan, 1732–37), 6 vols. 57 BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 7r (Bologna, 27 Apr. 1730): “Le trasmitto l’accluso compendio delle cose mie, avvegnache sono così sfornito di merito, e di buone qualità, che si Ella appunto n[on] v’applicarà del suo credito, io mi conosco senza nome, ed incapace d’essere scritto in libro veruno. Ma giacchè Ella comanda, io voluntieri mi sommetto al suo arbitrio….”

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his native city only a few years later. No one who knew Macchiavelli considered him to be humble, let alone willing to take seriously anyone’s opinion but his own. Editing Sigonio’s history of Bologna was a plum opportunity for a scholar eager to see his reputation flourish beyond his native city. Macchiavelli enthusiastically set to work, creating a scholarly apparatus designed to showcase his formidable knowledge of the history of his city, which he believed to be far greater than Sigonio’s. He proudly described this publication, “where Macchiavelli inserted the most recondite prerogatives of this patria,” in his 1734 petition for a paid lectureship, citing it as further proof of his growing reputation as the greatest living historian of Bologna.58 We do not know what Muratori thought of this edition. But if his reaction to Macchiavelli’s defense of the Theodosian Privilege is any indication, he must have been appalled to discover that his colleague in Bologna willfully used the scholarly apparatus of a fine Renaissance history to continue to spin out his inventions. There at the bottom of the page, just below the line of Sigonio’s well-crafted history, was a reference to the evidence Macchiavelli assembled in support of Gozzadini’s doctorate, as well as to the book attributed to his brother Carlo Antonio. (See Fig. 49.6.) Thus, in 1733 Macchiavelli reprised his arguments in favor of the female doctorate. He did this to honor Laura Bassi (1711–78), who graduated from the University of Bologna with a philosophy degree in 1732, and shortly thereafter became the first woman we can document as having been offered a professorship in the Studium that invented Gozzadini as part of its myth of origins. Macchiavelli eagerly described this uncommon event in a letter to Muratori that he composed the day after Bassi received her degree. He felt that this much-discussed public ceremony, which involved all the city’s notables and was witnessed by many foreigners, did credit “to the merit of this great female scholar.”59 There were indeed new reasons to care about medieval precedents. As Macchiavelli realized, creating a fact was not sufficient to make it stick. One had to find multiple opportunities to repeatedly reference crucial sources as the basis for a contested conclusion in order to give it a greater appearance of truth. He never attempted to produce a version of the calendar written in a 58 59

asb, Studio, 45, Requisiti dei lettori, vol. 16, no. 2 (Alessandro Macchiavelli, 22 Dec. 1734). BEstM, Muratori, 69/23, fol. 12r (Bologna, 13 May 1732). On Bassi, see most recently Luisa Cifarelli and Raffaella Simili, eds., Laura Bassi. Emblema e primate nella scienza del Settecento (Bologna: Società Italiana di Fisica, 2012); and Marta Cavazza, Paola Govoni, and Tiziana Pironi, eds., Eredi di Laura Bassi. Docenti e ricercatrici in Italia tra età moderna e presente (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2014).

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Figure 49.6  Macchiavelli’s critical edition of Carlo Sigonio’s Historiae Bononiensis (Milan, 1733), with a footnote about Gozzadini’s 1236 degree from his Kalendarium. Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

thirteenth-century hand, though we know that he and his brother tried their hand at some fifteenth-century forgeries. For Macchiavelli, arguing Bettisia Gozzadini into existence became a matter of citation. He continued to cite the sources out of which her life had been fabricated for the rest of his career, furnishing the strongest proofs from the arsenal of spurious documentation he invented. For the rest of his life, contemporaries would marvel at “his gorgeous footnotes to Sigonio” as some of the most imaginative and persistent forgeries they had ever seen.60 At some point after Macchiavelli’s death in 1766, Giovanni Fantuzzi (1718–99), Bologna’s greatest local historian after Ghiselli, examined Macchiavelli’s papers. He came across an unpublished manuscript titled Delle donne bolognesi, dated 1741. It included a biography of Gozzadini, with a bibliography of the work that had restored her to her rightful fame by providing the proofs of her existence. 60

bub, ms 1307, vol. 1, n.p. (Costantino Ruggieri, Esame critic della storia dell’Universita di Bologna dal sig[nor] Arcidiacono Fomagliari, 1748).

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Figure. 49.7  Giovanni Fantuzzi’s marginalia in Macchiavelli’s Delle donne bolognesi (1740). bcab, B. 1331, fol. 8v, courtesy of the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna

Macchiavelli referred readers to his brother Carlo Antonio’s 1722 defense of Gozzadini’s document. He cited his Augustalis Theodosiani diplomatis Apologia pro Archigymnasio (1726), page 75 (no. 144); the 1733 edition of Sigonio’s Historia Bononiensis, book 5, column 251, note 91; and unpublished studies, including his Illustrazioni di ritratti impresi di città di Bologna (presumably the “Metallic History of Bologna” that he long promised Muratori) and his Lessico universale Bolognese where he cross-referenced Gozzadini under “A” (for Archginnasio, in the subcategory of learned Bolognese women) and “G” (for Gozzadini). Finally, he referred readers to the relevant date (3 Nov.) in his recently published Effemeredi sacro-civili perpetue bolognesi (1739), which presented the history of Bologna as a partial necrology of its most interesting citizens.61 Fantuzzi, however, was having none of it and left behind an indelible version of his judgment of the entire enterprise. In the margins of this fascinating encyclopedia of Bolognese women, he offered the opinion that the entire affair was nothing more than a “lively invention of the lawyer Macchiavelli” (invenzione spiritosa dell’Avv[ocat]o Macchiavelli). (See Fig. 49.7.) Instead, Fantuzzi wrote a detailed biography of Laura Bassi, whose life we can copiously document.62 While Fantuzzi rightfully assigned a great deal of blame to Macchiavelli, the latter had not actually invented Gozzadini but rather reinvented her. The credit for the original task belongs to her sixteenth-century biographers. They wrote 61 62

bcab, B. 1331, fol. 8v. Giovanni Fantuzzi, Elogio della dottoressa Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Verati (Bologna, 1778); see Marta Cavazza, “The Biographies of Laura Bassi,” and Findlen, “Listening to the Archives,” in Govoni and Franceschini, Writing about Lives in Science, 67–115.

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her into existence in multiple locations—the local histories of Bologna, late Renaissance additions to Boccaccio, and the commemorative poems, portraiture, and urban chronicles that contributed to the history of Bologna la dotta as a city in which Minerva not only gazed down upon the university but also gave birth to women who resided within it. But it was Macchiavelli who completed her portrait.

chapter 50

Goethe and the End of Antiquarianism Peter N. Miller

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One of my first conversations with Tony Grafton was about antiquarianism, and about Festschriften. I was interested in the afterlife of antiquarianism; he told me about an article by Jacob Bernays showing how seventeenth-century antiquaries answered a nineteenth-century question that was believed by Theodor Mommsen, to whose Festschrift it was a contribution, to preclude any valuable antiquarian answer. This was my introduction to Jacob Bernays, whose marvelous work on Scaliger stood behind Grafton’s own work, and then inspired the way I wrote Peiresc’s Europe.1 Grafton and I have been talking about antiquarianism ever since, though it is of course only one of his many interests.2 One area where we have consistently disagreed has been on the breadth or narrowness of the term “antiquarian.” 1 Jacob Bernays, “Die Gottesfürchtigen bei Juvenal,” in Commentationes philologae in honorem Theodori Mommseni scripserunt amici (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877), 563–69, repr. in Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Jacob Bernays, ed. H. Usener (Berlin: Hertz, 1885), 1:71–80; Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: Hertz, 1855); Anthony Grafton, “Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and Others,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1998), 17–38. Bernays’s brother, Michael, brought to the study of Goethe’s texts the same philological rigor that his brother brought to those of the Greek and Romans. Michael Bernays, Über Kritik und Geschichte des Goetheschen Textes (Berlin: Harrwitz und Gossman, 1866), 6, 8, 79. 2 The conversation in print occurs in History and the Disciplines, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, ny: Rochester University Press, 1997); Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism, ed. H. Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001); Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2004); “Historia”: Empricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005); Sintflut und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assman and Martin Mulsow (Paderborn: Fink, 2006); Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology and Classical Studies in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. Alan G. Stahl (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Library Chronicle, Winter 2008); Europäische Geschichtskulturen um 1700 zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, Politik und Konfession, ed. Thomas Wallnig, Ines Peper, Thomas Stockinger, and Patrick Fiska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_051

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Grafton has always advocated a “narrow” definition, starting with the actor’s ­category—one of his favorite terms. The “narrow” definition is at its core close to the received view of antiquarianism as a phenomenon intimately related to the revival of antiquity, as concentrated on the period up to around 1700, and as most closely related to the study of textual and material remains—especially aesthetic objects. Grafton’s focus on scholarly practices has made philology (classical philology) a context for much of his reflection on antiquity.3 Most recently this has led him to return to the link between the antiquarius and the scribe, tracing it up through Jean Mabillon’s critical work on the material culture of medieval documents.4 It has always seemed to me, though, reading Nicolas Peiresc’s questions about the persistence of ancient languages in Nubia, or ancient weights and measures in Yemen, or the textual practices of the Samaritans, the religious rituals of Benin, or the Greek iconography of late antique Egyptian amulets, that there was something very new and also very familiar about these inquiries. What seemed new was the way in which they went beyond the ancient texts that had survived, sometimes building on clues or hints in them, and sometimes going in directions for which antiquity provided no clue. What seemed familiar was the way in which those seventeenth-century lines of inquiry, looked at from the end of the twentieth century or the beginning of the twenty-first, resembled the work of modern cultural historians. Although wary of parallax, I was also intrigued. If there could be an afterlife of antiquity, could there not also be an afterlife of antiquarianism? Then I came across Arnaldo Momigliano’s casual asides in his 1963 Sather Lectures about how an antiquarian in the twentieth century would be a “cultural historian,” or an “armed sociologist,” or “the director of an institute for art history or anthropology,” all of which seemed to confirm my sense that there was a longue durée to be explored. Grafton and I have not, in fact, talked about the “end” of antiquarianism. Momigliano described the eighteenth century’s neoclassicism as the “age of the antiquaries.” His vision of the decline of antiquarianism is linked to the rise of the cultural sciences in the nineteenth century, and especially in the decades around 1870.5 He imagined that in the twentieth century an antiquarian like Peiresc might have directed an institute for art history or anthropology. Even 3 The seven hundred–odd titles in the bibliography of antiquarianism assembled by Joseph Connors, and once accessible online, reflect this approach. 4 Anthony Grafton, “What Was the Antiquary? The Case of Mabillon” (lecture, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, 18 Apr. 2014). 5 Miller, Momigliano and Antiquarianism.

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within academic history there may be a direct antiquarian legacy, linked more or less closely to the attempt to study the past through artifacts. Grafton’s great synthetic article “From Polyhistor to Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850,” published when he was thirty-three— the kind of magisterial piece that few twice his age would have been prepared to write, let alone been capable of writing—is close to being an attempt to talk about “endings.”6 The article connects the late Renaissance and the modern practices and institutionalizations of philology, and could be a model for exploring the “end” or “transformation” of antiquarianism in the nineteenth century.7 But is there an antiquarian legacy that extends beyond the successor academic disciplines of the nineteenth century?

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears precisely once in Grafton’s article, in the wholly appropriate context of his relationship to the study of the classical world.8 But if we turn our kaleidoscope just a bit, and put Goethe the historical researcher at the center, and the professors on the periphery, we may find some answers to the question of what happened to antiquarianism outside academia. We would not, however, be the first to see Goethe in this light. For Karl Bernhard Stark, the classical archaeologist and author of the still-unsurpassed history of the study of the material past, the Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1880), devoted more pages to Goethe than to any figure other than Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Peiresc gets the next-largest amount of space). He hailed Goethe as someone who never failed to welcome and celebrate an archaeological discovery. Stark saw “style” as the concept at the crossing of Goethe’s varied interests in nature, art, color, plants. While it was well known how Goethe’s scientific ideas derived from his artistic studies, Stark insisted on 6 Anthony Grafton, “Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850,” History of Universities 3 (1983): 159–92. 7 The classic monographic treatment of the subject is Benedetto Bravo, Philologie, histoire, philosophie d’histoire (Hildesheim: Olms, [1968] 1988). We now have James Turner, Philology (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2014). My own exploration of antiquarianism in the nineteenth century is History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2016). 8 “Goethe was still alive to provide an example of how classical ideals could enrich modern culture.” Grafton, “Polyhistor into Philolog,” 170.

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the importance of archaeology for him, noting the way in which the historical part of the Farbenlehre is structured stratigraphically, with the fundamental ancient texts being presented first. Stark noted, also, however, Goethe’s lack of patience with the way antiquarian studies of even the same artifact could not be synthesized.9 Stark, in short, was treating Goethe not as a historian, but as someone who understood the past and for whom inquiry into the past was conducted in ways similar to that into other fields. Can we really consider Goethe as a historian? There may be volumes devoted to Goethe’s “Historical Writings,” but the fact is, as Reinhart Koselleck observed, Goethe was at best an “Untimely” historian. He shared little of the approach to history of contemporaries who thought about it extensively, such as G.W.F. Hegel. It was not so much that the great events of the day passed him by as that he passed them by. Trying to either resolve or explain this “problem”—how could the all-reflective Goethe not be interested in history when living through the great upheavals of the French Revolution and national revival—motivated both Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer. Benjamin’s long essays on Goethe of the 1920s tended to see the problem in terms of political biography (i.e., from a Marxian perspective) while Cassirer’s Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt of 1932 approached the problem at the level of ontology (i.e., Goethe’s relation to Kant). Significantly, however, Cassirer talks of Goethe’s “history of research” and of his focus on “research individuals.” Following on this line, Koselleck himself speaks more often of Goethe as a Forscher or “researcher” than a historian, though without explaining the difference between them.10 We will come back to this later. Goethe grew up not just in Momigliano’s age of antiquaries but even in an antiquarian household. In his autobiography he wrote: We were not without our antiquaries, either…. It was such men above all that my father seems to have taken as his models…. He too, after having built his house, put his various possessions in order; an excellent collection of maps by Schenk and other outstanding geographers of the time, 9 10

Karl Bernhard Stark, Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, Abteilung 1 (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1880; repr., New York: Elibron Classics, 2005), 227–30. Reinhart Koselleck, “Goethes unzeitgemässe Geschichte,” Goethe Jahrbuch 110 (1993): 27– 40, esp. 32–35; Ernst Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932), 21–22; Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1996), 297–360; Benjamin, “Goethe,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999), 161–93.

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those aforementioned regulations and mandates, those portraits, a cabinet of old weapons, a cabinet of remarkable glasses, beakers, and goblets from Venice, natural curiosities, ivory objects, bronzes, and a hundred other things were sorted out and put on display, and whenever there was an auction I made sure to ask him for commissions to increase the stock.11 And this early exposure never really lost its influence. Much, much later, in Der deutsche Gil Blas (1823), he wrote that “The sight of old implements, weapons, harness, seals and sculpture always helps us to feel what life must have looked like in the days when they were made and used.”12 And we know that his home in Weimar burst with collected materials, with gems, and with stones and tools. They were as much his tools for thinking, or prompts for the imagination, as were his books or collection of drawings.13 All those who have commented on “Goethe and history” have emphasized the close connection for him between human and natural antiquities—the early modern logic of the Wunderkammer in action. It was only on Goethe’s Italian trip, and really only in Rome, that antiquities emerged distinctly for him. The Roman antiquities are also beginning to delight me. History, inscriptions, coins, which I formerly neglected, all are thronging up to me. What I experienced in natural history is happening to me again, for the whole history of the world is linked with this city, and I count the day when I entered Rome as my second natal day, a true rebirth.14 Yet even so, Goethe’s Italian experience of the antique went beyond its narrow material culture. Seeing a place that had been continuously occupied and 11 Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner, vol. 4 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1987), 67. 12 Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1936] 1972), 419. 13 The wonderful new presentation of Goethe’s life in his museum in Weimar demonstrates his attention to the material and to collecting, and this is taken up in two splendid exhibtion catalogs: Lebensfluten—Tatenstorum. Der Ausstellung im Goethe-Nationalmuseum, ed. Wolfgang Holler, Gudrun Püschel, and Bettina Weche (Weimar: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, 2012); Kultur des Sinnlichen, ed. Sebastian Böhmer, Christiane Holm, Veronika Spinner, and Thorsten Valk (Weimar: Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Berlin: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2012). 14 Goethe, Italian Journey, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner, vol. 6 of Goethe: The Collected Works, 121.

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transformed over two thousand years and yet preserved not only specific natural and man-made features—“the same soil, the same hill, indeed often the same column and wall”—but also the manners of the people, made him feel like “a participant in the great decisions of fate.”15 Writing to J.G. Herder from Rome in 1786 Goethe proclaimed, “I want to see Rome, that is, the permanent features, and not what changes every ten years.”16 Upon his return to Weimar, Goethe planned a “Cultural morphology” of Italy that would include geology, vegetation, and climate, as well as folk character and lifestyle, economy, and cultural development—in Goethe’s words, “the entire Southern land- and humanscape” (der ganze südliche Landschafts- und Lebenskörper).17 For Goethe, who started out more interested in nature, and who always remained more interested in nature, the exposure to the historical focused his attention on the relationship between the changing and the unchanging, the fast changing and the very slowly changing. But if we probe more deeply into these registers of time we come to another question: what, exactly, is changing here? Like a careful student of nature, when Goethe came upon the Igel Monument, a third-century Roman column in Trier, while on campaign in France, he carefully measured and described. But there was something different about human monuments, according to Goethe. And so when he passed that same monument some time later his account of it changed—not that the object itself was any different, or was of different measure. But its meaning came through its human interpreter, and it was he who had changed over the intervening time.18 Goethe found this same challenge of integrating the different registers of time in accounting for his own life, as well. So, for instance, in describing his “Gretchen” episode, which would eventually find its way into Faust: Part One, he makes a distinction between the visible, material world that can be described and the invisible, immaterial human one within. Religion, mores, law, status, circumstances, custom—all these hold sway only on the surface of municipal life. The streets lined with those fine houses are kept clean, and everyone on them behaves quite decorously; but behind those walls affairs may be in great disorder, and many a smooth exterior is merely a thin layer of plaster over a rotting pile which 15 16 17

Ibid., 101, 107. Quoted in Meinecke, Historism, 403. Angelika Jacobs, Goethe und die Renaissance. Studien zum Konnex von historischem Bewusstein und ästhetischer Identitätskonstruktion (Munich: Fink, 1997), 226. 18 Goethe, From My Life, 621, 688–89.

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can collapse overnight with a more than usually startling effect, since this occurs in the midst of a peaceful situation.19 This desire of Goethe’s to understand from both within and without, both slowand fast-moving change, Cassirer connects to the role played for him by the history of art. What defined creative people was precisely the way in which they made sense of the world through themselves. Writing about creative people, Goethe thought, could help him understand the way in which individuals merged their experience of the external world with that of their own inner worlds. In this, perhaps, his predecessors were Winckelmann and the Comte de Caylus, both of whom envisioned art history as the history of culture. Goethe saw that art history was therefore the field through which one could study the impact and interplay of individuals and their society, the emphasis on the individual perhaps a significant difference from the philosophical historians of the eighteenth century. According to Cassirer, Goethe was the first to create a history of learning told through individuals. He begins to do this with art but then moves to science, and thus from Winckelmann as a figure of his time to theorists of light and color such as Roger Bacon or Johannes Kepler in the Farbenlehre.20 This, in turn, opened up the possibility of studying a broader range of creative types— scholars, for example. And it offered Goethe a way forward, in which his individual voice could be blended in with his research interests. Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, his pioneering volume of 1805, represents the beginning of Goethe’s “history of scholarship” but also models a cultural history very different from those of Voltaire and even Goethe’s close friend Herder. It fills exactly the space between the history of a single creative person and his practices, and a cultural history moving out from the person. If we compare this project to the contemporary encyclopedic history of modern learning produced by Ludwig Wachler, Geschichte der historischen Forschung und Kunst (1812–20), we can discern the exact contours of their subtly different approaches: the one focused on individual achievement and the other oriented toward the bibliographical marking of disciplinary boundaries and the shaping of intellectual genealogies. The book on Winckelmann followed from a conceptual breakthrough that occurred during the preparation of his translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s ­autobiography (1803).21 If his Winckelmann project made him alert to the 19 Ibid., 216. 20 Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, 22. 21 The description of Cellini as representative of his place and time must be the prototype for the later treatment of Winckelmann: “In einer so regsamen Stadt, zu einer so

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importance of letters as evidence, the Cellini made him singularly alert to the importance of detail. He accompanied the biography with a cultural historical appendix that ranged from a discussion of Cellini’s materials to sixteenth-­ century politics to the history of art. In a letter to Friedrich Schiller of 1796, Goethe insisted that biography coincided with an approach to detail that we might be tempted to describe as antiquarian: “A life is nothing, according to my realistic narrative art, without detail,” especially, he continued, for “an artist, whose work, the lasting effects of his existence, is not standing before our eyes.”22 Detail ruled structure.23 Detail was life. This was Goethe’s direct methodological retort to the philosophical histories of Christoph Meiners and J.G. Eichhorn that represented, up to that point, the practice of cultural history.24 Making this attention to individual detail into an architectural principle yielded the novelty and power of the historical section of the Farbenlehre (1813), “Materials toward a History of Color Theory.” This work has long been seen as the apex of Goethe’s historical thinking. What Goethe does is make the sources, in all their richness and refractoriness, fully accessible to the reader. He even calls the book a kind of archive. But he does not simply reprint or list. His voice and presence are always felt as he weaves, introduces, and connects those sources. He fully acknowledges what he is doing, and that it flies in the face of expectations. A succinct presentation would have been desirable, he

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­bedeutenden Zeit, erschien ein Mann, der als Repräsentant seines Jahrhunderts und, vielleicht, als Repräsentant sämtlicher Menschheit gelten dürfte. Solche Naturen können als geistige Flügelmänner angesehen werden, die uns, mit heftigen Äusserungen, dasjenige andeuten, was durchaus, oblgiech oft nur mit schwachen unkenntlichen Zügen, in jeden menschlichen Busen eingeschrieben ist.” Goethe, Anhang zur Lebensbeschreibung des Benvenuto Cellini, Bezüglich auf Sitten, Kunst und Technik, in vol. 7, ed. Norbert Miller and John Neubauer, of Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1991), 489. For more on this see Jacobs, Goethe und die Renaissance, sec. C: “Renaissance-Biographie und Historiographie.” “An einem Leben ist ohnedem weiter nichts, nach meiner realistischen Vorstellungsart, als das Detail, besonders nun gar bei einem Partikulier, wo keine Resultate zu denken sind deren Weite und Breite uns allenfalls imponieren könnten, und bei einem Künstler, dessen Werke, die bleibenden Wirkungen seines Daseins nicht vor unsern Augen stehn.” Goethe to Friedrich Schiller, 4 Feb. 1796, quoted in Norbert Miller and John Neubauer, Anhang: “Benvenuto Cellini: Versäumte Begegnung: Das Italienwerk und die Entdeckung Benvenuto Cellinis,” in Sämtliche Werke, 7:728. “Alle pragmatische biographische Charakteristik muss sich vor dem naiven Detail eines bedeutenden Lebens verkriechen.” Goethe to Johann Heinrich Meyer, 8 Feb. 1796, quoted in ibid., 730. For more on the significance of this point, see Peter N. Miller, “The Problem of Detail,” in Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2015) sec. 8.

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writes, but was impossible. Therefore, he offers only the materials for the future writing of such a history rather than the history itself. This exactly echoed Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning, who identified “unfinished, perfect, and defaced” forms of history writing. The latter, which he called “antiquarian,” consisted in those “remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” The former he termed “Memorials, or Preparatory History,” which included bare narratives of events without explanations or motivations as well as collections of sources “without a perfect continuance or contexture of the thread of the narration.”25 Goethe began where Bacon left off, with the word “materials”—a word that found its way into the very title of the work. “We have had to resign ourselves to providing the materials for such a history rather than the history itself.” The “materials” included translations, excerpts, our views and those of others, indications and hints, an anthology which may not satisfy every expectation but may merit respect for the earnestness and devotion that produced it. In any case it is our hope that such selected yet unsynthesized materials will be all the more acceptable to the thoughtful reader, for he may take pleasure in combining them at will.26 This confidence and even freedom with the sources stands out. But so too does Goethe’s recognition that his approach would be damned for providing both too much and not enough. The original authors, he was certain, would always say it better than any anthologizer or summarizer. Moreover, these latter would inevitably insert something of themselves between the original material and the later readers. Finally, Goethe concluded this presentation by turning from the writer to the reader. “We sought to facilitate his judgment, not to anticipate it.” Supplying the documents was the hard part; with these in hand the “perspicacious reader” could be counted on to “easily make the synthesis.”27 Still, Goethe acknowledged that there were limits to the book-as-archive. He did not include all his excerpts because they would have taken the reader too far away.28 25

The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Robert Leslie Ellis and James Spedding (Freeport, ny: Books for Libraries, [1905] 1970), 82. 26 Goethe, “Theory of Color,” in Scientific Studies, vol. 12, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, in Goethe: The Collected Works, 161. 27 Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, in vol. 10, ed. Peter Schmidt, of Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1989), 475–76. 28 Ibid., 590.

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Goethe’s breakthrough to a historical presentation framed in a personal voice and built through fragments comes to its fullest form in another work of cultural history that immediately followed the revelation of the Farbenlehre. Many have justly celebrated the West-östlicher Divan (1814–19) as extraordinary poetry and as the invention of “World Literature,” the precocious move by the older Goethe into a world of hybrid cultural creativity. But ignored for just as long have been the notes he prepared to help first his listeners, and then, once published, his readers, understand what he was doing. (The first edition did not sell out in a hundred years.) With these Notes “for a better understanding,” as he first put it, we come with Goethe back to our original question about the ends of antiquarianism. The principle behind the volume of notes and essays is the same as in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert: an individual creative force, event, or document can only be grasped by those who understand its context. In the case of Goethe’s Divan poems, the inspiration is Hafiz, the fourteenth-century Persian poet. But to understand Hafiz? To understand the world out of which this poet emerged? That is the task of Goethe’s volume of notes, as if it had been titled Hafiz and His Times. But by comparison with the rather defined vision of both Winckelmann and “his century” of only a decade earlier, the contextualization of Hafiz takes Goethe back to the depths of time (the Hebrew Bible) and forward to the seventeenth century (the Roman traveler Pietro della Valle). Its scope is encyclopedic, but its field of vision is highly focused. As Goethe in the voice of the poet writes in “The Book of Parables,” the tenth of the twelve books of his poetic Divan, “To you, as with the heavens’ stars/Is God’s greatness in little things learned.” This notion, of big things learned from little pieces of evidence, was to have a long career, especially once transformed by Aby Warburg, a consummate reader of Goethe, into his famous observation that “the dear God lies in the details.”29 The basic background to the project can be concisely laid out. In 1813 the Battle of Nations at Leipzig brought to Goethe a sheet of paper with Sura 114 of 29 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, in vol. 11.1.2, ed. Karl Richter with Katharina Mommsen and Petr Ludwig, of Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1998), 108. This work is translated in West–east Divan. The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney (Albany: suny Press, 2010), 142, but I have modified his translation. It is discussed in Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die Arabische Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989), 295. See Sigrid Weigel, Wolfgang Schäffner, and Thomas Macho, eds., ”Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”: Mikrostrukturen des Wissens (Munich: Fink, 2003).

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the Koran in Arabic and Persian. In January 1814 Bashkir soldiers among the Russian troops held Muslim worship in the Protestant school in Weimar, where Goethe could see and hear them. In February 1814 there was an offer of sale to the ducal library of Arabic manuscripts, which gave Goethe unlimited access. Composition began in May 1814, when he was given Joseph von HammerPurgstall’s translation of the Divan of Hafiz and Goethe wrote his first poems. That summer Goethe met Marianne Willemer, the future “Suleika” of the poems. When he returned in October 1814 he intensified his Oriental studies in Weimar and Jena, now broadened to include other Persian, Arab, and Turkish poets. The Divan was announced in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände on 24 February 1816. “The Poet considers himself a traveler. He has just arrived in the Orient. He is passionate about its customs, manners, objects, opinions and the religious sentiments. He even does not repudiate the suspicion of being a Muslim.”30 The work was ready to print in 1816 but the first book was not sent to the printer until December 1817, and the proofs were ready in February 1818. With the illness and death of his wife, the poems and commentary, with its conversationally informal title, For a Better Understanding (Zum besseren Verständnis), did not get published until 1819. In 1827 Goethe produced a fuller edition, which included new poems and a new title for the prose section, Notes and Essays to Improve Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan. Goethe’s Notes reflect the most up-to-date Oriental learning of the day.31 From the perspective of someone immersed in that literature, the Notes read like a “greatest hits” of early modern Oriental studies: themes, names, texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are all found here. As a young man, Goethe had wanted to study with J.D. Michaelis, the great biblical philologist and patron of Oriental learning at Göttingen. Michaelis had been the  intellectual force behind the Danish expedition to Arabia from which only  Carsten Niebuhr would live to publish. Though Goethe followed his father’s wish to study law he remained fascinated by Oriental “places, peoples, natural products and events” and wanted to study them “and in that way make contemporary the olden times.” Michaelis remained the inspiration, and his turn toward travel writers and travel seemed to Goethe just the thing to answer open questions about the age of the prophets and apostles.32 Goethe in 30 Mommsen, Goethe und die Arabische Welt, 157. 31 The works of Katharina Mommsen have clarified most of this terrain: Goethe und die Arabische Welt; Goethe und Diez (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961); Quellenuntersuchungen zu Gedichten der Divan-Epoche (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995); Goethe und der Islam (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2001). 32 From Dichtung und Wahrheit, quoted in Mommsen, Goethe und die Arabische Welt, 26.

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fact purchased the first, 1772, edition of Niebuhr’s Travels in Arabia Felix, and then the successive ones of 1774 and 1778. Goethe’s direct relationship to the world of the Arabs goes back to the beginning of his interest in the Orient. He began reading the Koran in Strasbourg in the winter of 1770–71. We possess, from 1771–72, a series of excerpts from the Koran, divided up by sura. Herder, after Michaelis, was the next and more important prod to the importance of Oriental studies for Goethe. In a long passage in his prize essay of 1778, “Ueber die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten,” Herder had written of the Arabs’ poetic nature. He also raised the issue of the Arabs’ later contribution to European culture, in literature as in sciences and moeurs.33 By 1783, at the latest, Goethe had read Sir William Jones’s translation of the pre-Islamic Moallakat (1774), which followed Michaelis in viewing the pre-Islamic Arabs as a great poetic culture.34 Then there are the contemporary sources that Goethe read but that he did not discuss in the Notes. For example, his diary entry for 9 November 1818 shows him working that night with J.G.L. Kosegarten, who held the chair in Oriental languages at the University of Jena, just down the road from Weimar, using Michaelis’s reworked Arabic grammar that had been published by Thomas Erpenius in 1614.35 We know Goethe used Barthélémy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1696) and also the more philo-Islamic Hadrian Reland’s De religione Mohammedica (1704). Into this mix we need to figure Goethe’s personal attraction to Islam. Its purity appealed to his Spinozism, as did its script, which he tried to learn to write during the “Divan years” when he was already in his mid-sixties. Goethe’s effort to show us how to read Hafiz in context places Goethe in a trajectory of writers on culture bound up with the mainstream of the European Enlightenment, from Montesquieu and Voltaire through David Hume and Edward Gibbon. But of all these, it is Goethe only who focuses his cultural history on the world of Islam. And that is another crucial aspect of this project of his. For while Goethe’s Orient belongs, inevitably, to the long history of contacts between East and West, it is also an astonishing example of Orientalism as meeting place rather than as zone of conflict. Writing to his publisher Cotta in 1815, Goethe explained that he had been working on the Orient in secret. His goal was “to conjugate serenely the Occident and the Orient, the past and present, the Persian and the German, granting that the customs and mentality of 33 Mommsen, Goethe und die Arabische Welt, 34–35. 34 Ibid., 52, 65. 35 Ibid., 139.

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the one affect the other.”36 Only G.W. Leibniz, who described China as an “Oriental Europe,” comes close to Goethe.37 But even Leibniz did not open up his own affective categories to reshaping by the Other as Goethe did. Like the poems, in which Goethe occupied Hafiz in order to reexperience his own life, the erudite inquiry is an effort to find ways of rethinking his own cultural history and possibility through the Eastern categories. In the form Goethe gave them, the Notes represent an attempt to fix in writing the oral culture of those Weimar evenings in which he read the poems and talked through their interpretation with a small circle of auditors. The work exists in this space between formal and informal. The Notes embody the very idea of transmission—both in the history being communicated and in the performance of the history in his own time. The reader is treated as a kind of traveler, and the voyage as one into the imagination. By the end, the concrete and the imaginative are mixed, as are the real experience and the imagined experience. In this sense, the Notes may be closest to the Italian Journey as a model for the mixing of the personal, the erudite, and the imaginative.38 While he several times remarks that scholars and professional erudites should not—not would not, but should not— read the book, Goethe provides his intended general reader with a tremendous amount of detailed, “professional” knowledge. It is, therefore, also a model for communicating across the divide, already visible in his own day, separating professional scholars from the wider, and widening, reading public. The Notes are, then, “history of scholarship” for the general reader. This history focuses on the sources, beginning from the oldest source, the Bible, and continuing with the literature of “Pilgrimages and Crusades.” Goethe then turns to two groups of travel writers, early and late, some known by all, such as Marco Polo, and others only by scholars, such as Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. To one of these latter, the Roman aristocrat Pietro della Valle, Goethe devotes one of the longest notes in the book. He begins by placing him in the context of papal Rome, though he omits the later involvement of della Valle with scholars like Peiresc, or indeed with the publication of the very letters from which Goethe took the substance of this essay.

36

Goethe to Cotta, 16 May 1815, quoted in J.W. Goethe, Tutte le poesie, ed. Roberto Fertonani, vol. 3, Divan Occidentale-Orientale (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1997), 773. 37 For Leibniz on China, see Peter N. Miller and Francois Louis, introduction, in Miller and Louis, Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 8. 38 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 728, 730, 743, 729.

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What seems to have so drawn Goethe to della Valle was his immersion in the cultures of the East. He studied the language, moeurs, and customs of the Turks during his year’s stay in Constantinople. Then after to moving to Cairo and studying Arabs and Arabic, della Valle moved to Persia and into the Persian cultural sphere. His encounter with Shah Abbas provided Goethe with another opportunity to return to the question of the impact of despotism on Persian culture nearly three hundred years after Hafiz, during the Safavid dynasty. Goethe, like della Valle, was full of respect for Abbas’s achievements, yet he still saw him, for everything he represented, as a despot. Goethe had so carefully represented della Valle because “he was the traveler who first and most clearly revealed to me the particularities of the Orient and I believe that I can presume that by this narrative I have given a solid foundation to my Divan.”39 He hoped, also, by doing this, to encourage others to take travel literature seriously as a tool for cultural understanding. And then, as if to signal the importance of this moment, Goethe had recourse to the poem that served as epigram to the Notes, but now slightly (and perfectly) changed. If the poet you would know, to the poet’s country go. In the Orient it’s true what is old is what is new.40 From travelers who taught through the books they wrote, Goethe turned in conclusion to those who taught him personally. Two living figures were crucial. Friedrich von Dietz, who was Goethe’s main teacher, warranted a separate section. It was he who had brought to Goethe a professional’s knowledge of the language and texts of the Arab world. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall had brought Hafiz to Goethe via his edition of 1813. And yet, despite his debt, Goethe had a bone to pick with the publisher of the collection. He wrote that he would have made still more progress if the publishers who worked only for “scholars and specialists, had given a thought also to the profanes and amateurs” and introduced each article with a few words on “the circumstances of the past, people and places,” which would have saved readers like him a great 39

40

“In diesem Sinne hab’ ich Peter della Valle umständlich dargestellt, weil er derjenige Reisende war, durch den mir die Eigenthümlichkeiten des Orients am ersten und klarsten aufgegangen, und meinem Vorurtheil will scheinen daβ ich durch diese Darestellung erst meinem Divan einen eighthümlichen Grund und Boden gewonnen habe.” Ibid., 250. “Wer den Dichter will verstehen/Muβ in Dichters Lande gehen; /Er im Orient such freue/ Daβ das Alte sey das Neue.” Ibid.

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deal of wasted work. But the poetic material satisfied all his desires. He found himself “all of a sudden as if transported into the midst of a familiar world that one could recognize clearly in the detail of the proportions, whereas beforehand one could only but look at the whole as if through banks of shifting fog.” With Hammer’s translation there finally existed a tool for grasping the fundamental model of Persian literature.41 Critical response came early. Goethe had worked intensively with Kosegarten on the translation and it was Kosegarten who was the first to review the book, in 1819.42 He praised the Notes as if from one professional to another. At the same time, he emphasized that the Notes were not a professional scholiast’s commentary. Moreover, he saw the achievement of Goethe in his empathy for Persian poetry, and saw that it helped Goethe get more directly to the origin of this poetry than his colleagues. In particular he arraigned Johann Jakob Reiske and Johann David Michaelis for their mixing of theology and Oriental studies. Kosegarten had studied with Silvestre de Sacy—in fact, the dedicatee of Goethe’s volume of Notes—and represented a new, nontheological generation of Orientalism. Thus, his specific praise of Goethe for treating Persian poetry as the homeland of modern poetry was aimed against the theologians’ praise of the Bible as being just that.43 And maybe here we can find another one of those “ends” we have been seeking: the end of a seventeenth-century style of Oriental studies in which theological questions were never far away. We might say that in the Notes to the Divan Goethe resumed and advanced the themes of many seventeenth-century Oriental studies, but that he did so in a format that was transformed by his own voice. The fragmentary sections, which do follow an order but which are not a connected narrative, the presentation and careful reading of his sources but with a voice used by no scholar before him, the attention to surface detail but always looking for the enduring or common beneath the surface—these were all Goethe’s combinations. This form was his and like none other. With Goethe, antiquarianism takes on a different shape. Attention to detail, to evidence, to the fragment, all continue. There is a keen sense of the past and of memory. But it is transformed into something more personal, made into 41 42 43

Ibid., 255, 266. Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, in Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung vom jahre 1819, vol. 3, September bis December, nos. 287–88 (Halle und Leipzig, Nov. 1819), 585–98. Barbara Stemmrich-Köhler, Zur Funktion der orientalischen Poesie bei Goethe, Herder, Hegel. Exotische Klassik und ästhetische Systematik in den ‘Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans’ Goethes, in Frühschriften Herders und in Hegels Vorlesungen zu Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992 [diss., Bochum, 1990]), 15.

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something that partakes more of questions than of answers. If we wish to look on toward a living legacy that is outside the successor academic disciplinization pointed to by Momigliano, then Goethe can show us what we will become.

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In the “Concluding Reflections on Language and Terminology” (Schlussbe­ trachtungen über Sprache und Terminologie) that ends the first part of the Farbenlehre and leads into the historical second part, Goethe rejected the idea of any ­precision—linguistic, mathematical, or otherwise—that was alien to the object being studied. Yet, since reality itself always had a poetic dimension, it was poetic language that was needed to express these subtler, less visible, aspects of it. Only a language formed by experience could do justice to it, just as only a mind formed by the encounter with the world could hope to speak such a language.44 With this, Goethe turned the practice of the history of scholarship into something whose excellence depended in part on the orientation of the historian doing the writing. Nor was Goethe insisting on the excellence of professional formation as the sine qua non. For him, the importance of language—which, however personal, could still be teachable—connects directly to imagination. Goethe as a creative person and a student of creative people zeroed in as few other historians have on the importance of the imagination for doing empirical scholarship. He insisted on both values. Neither can we deny the high and seemingly creative independent power found in the inner faculties through which the evidence is grasped, collected, ordered, and developed. But how to gather and use empirical evidence, how to develop and apply our powers—this is not so generally recognized or appreciated.45 What Goethe is describing here is research. The genius of the scholar, he seems to suggest, will be similar to the genius of the artist, and the genius of scholarship, that is, research—its ability to discover for us a new world—similar to that of art. In the “Editor’s Confession” that closes the historical book of the 44

Daniel Steuer, “In Defence of Experience: Goethe’s Natural Investigations and Scientific Culture,” in Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 166. 45 Goethe, Scientific Studies, 12.

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Farbenlehre, Goethe writes of his way “from poetry to painting, and from it to nature studies,” as well as his “return trip to art through the physiology of colors and its ethical and aesthetic effect.”46 He represents this journey as typical for his time and as exemplary for “the ‘natural’ creativity of the human spirit.”47 But once imagination is brought into the scholar’s practice we are forced to confront the reality of the scholar’s self as an important research “tool.” We might even feel that Goethe’s interest in the sixteenth century and in the lives of Cellini, Girolamo Cardano, and Michel de Montaigne has to do in each case with the role of the man’s exemplary “self” in his work.48 For the individual scholar invariably pivoted between scholarship and interiority. If the self could function as a cognitive tool, it was also true that scholarship could serve the project of self-knowledge. Goethe framed this in terms of sophrosyne, and the ability to transform any extreme emotion for good or bad into “an image, a poem, and to come to terms with myself by doing this, so that I could both refine my conceptions of external things and myself inwardly in regard to them.”49 Cassirer underlined this in his assessment that Goethe saw the historical sensibility enriched by the poetic and the poetic by the historical. This merger was his particular way of framing the “history of research” (Forschungsgeschichte), a pregnant category.50 Antiquaries may have done research, but of course not all researchers were antiquaries. Goethe certainly was not. But how he did research, never ceasing to view it through the lens of his own existence, shows us one direction late Renaissance antiquarianism could go. His response to the Pyrrhonist challenge to historical evidence, a plotline that was so vital for Momigliano, was not with any of the means deployed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquaries: neither with more evidence, nor with new rules for handling that evidence (i.e., the historische Hilfswissenschaften), but with feeling. Writing to Carl Friedrich Zelter in 1829, he explained, “I have noticed that I hold a thought to be true if it is fruitful for me, fits in with my other thinking, and at the same time carries me forward.”51 46 “[V]on der Poesie zur bildenden Kunst, von diener zu Naturforschung”; “Ruckweg zur Kunst durch die physiologischen Farben und durch die sittliche und aesethtische Wirkung derselben.” Zur Farbenlehre, in vol. 10, ed. Peter Schmidt, of Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1989), 917. 47 “[D]ie ‘natürliche’ Schöpferkraft des menschlichen Geistes.” Quoted in Jacobs, Goethe und die Renaissance, 306. 48 Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 621. 49 Goethe, From My Life, 214. 50 Cassirer, Goethe und die Geschichtliche Welt, 12, 21–22. 51 Meinecke, Historism, 428.

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Cassirer’s idea was that Goethe was producing a history of research—not exactly scholarship, which might be the objective category, but research, which is what individuals pursue, with their own combination of common tools and unique inspiration. Nicholas Boyle has argued that for Goethe this individual dimension was essential to his historical practice. For Goethe, “history” was the “history of knowledge, or cultural history,” and therefore was directly shaped by individuals. An adequate history of knowledge would on some level be structured biographically—which is exactly what Goethe did with Cellini, Winckelmann, the historical part of the Farbenlehre, and Hafiz in the Divan.52 If we now return to Grafton’s account of the movement “from” the early modern polyhistor “to” the modern philologist, it is more and more clear why Goethe does not merit more than a sentence. His whole approach to learning is built on integrating erudition and individuality in almost an opposite direction from that transforming the idiosyncracy of the polyhistor into the disciplined expertise of the professional. The history that interested Goethe, and that he explored, was based on the contributions of individuals. And in the writing of these accounts Goethe did not fall back on traditional history writing. All of these works remain much closer in final form to the research materials that were usually, like an artist’s underdrawings, made invisible by the historian’s written finish. But for Goethe, form and inquiry remain much more closely, personally, and continually connected. This also puts Goethe in an interesting place vis-à-vis Grafton’s account of research in the nineteenth-century German university.53 Grafton outlines a tension between a Humboldtian notion of Bildung squared off against an equally Humboldtian commitment to research. This remains real and as a tension remains unresolved to this day, at least in the American landscape, where even “liberal arts colleges” expect high-level research from their faculties.54 But without Goethe in the mix we lose the ability to see how the doing of scholarship could itself be a creative, and even ethical, activity (Bildung). And though original minds such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin shaped their personae on the model of Goethe’s insistence on a personal and poetic dimension to scientific research, the fact is that neither of them found a way into much of a university career. Rather than seeking the “end” of antiquarianism, 52 53 54

Nicholas Boyle, “Geschichtsschreibung und Autobiographik bei Goethe (1810–1817),” Goethe Jahrbuch 110 (1993): 164–65. Grafton, “Polyhistor into Philolog,” 164–69. Nicholas Lemann, “The Soul of the Research University,” Chronicle Review, 28 Apr. 28, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Soul-of-the-Research/146155, accessed 17 Sept. 2014.

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we should perhaps look for antiquarianism outside academia, or even for the different forms research can take.55

v

Faust can be no stranger to the man who wrote the book on the Renaissance Magus.56 Read carefully, the opening of Faust: Part One is a portrait of the Polyhistor as a Middle-Aged Man. Or maybe as a Disgruntled Academic. He is definitely not on the fast track to Philology. In that sense, like Goethe himself, he’s going off the grid. But when we meet him, he’s still in his office, and he still has students. As a teacher, Faust must work with what he has before him. And so, when his trusty Research Assistant, Wagner, despairs of making much progress on the sources, Faust sits him down and tells him a bit about life. A manuscript—is that the sacred spring That stills one’s thirst for evermore? Refreshment! It’s your own soul that must pour It through you, if it’s to be anything. Like many of us once, the student stumbles at the idea that great scholarship has to come from an internal vision, that it can’t be an inventory of sources alone, however well interpreted. Excuse me, but it’s very pleasant Studying epochs other than the present Entering their spirit, reading what they say. Wagner is here mouthing the set of ideas we know as Historismus, the early nineteenth-century German idea that the past has to be understood in its own 55

56

This is a project I am pursuing with Michael Shanks, the first part of which is a course jointly taught in Fall 2014 called “The Antiquarian Foundations of Modern Design Thinking.” See also Peter N. Miller, “Thinking with Thomas Browne: Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian,” in The World Proposed: Sir Thomas Browne Quatercentenary Essays, ed. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 311– 28; Miller, “To Wake the Dead [review of David Macaulay, The Art of Drawing Architecture],” New Republic, 30 Jan. 2008, 33–38. Anthony Grafton and Moshe Idel, eds., Der Magus. Seine Ursprünge und seine Geschichte in verschiedenen Kulturen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001).

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terms, as much as possible cut off from the present in order to attain “objectivity.” Goethe’s putting this into the student’s mouth as a weak excuse is certainly intended as criticism not only of the student but of the contemporary commonplace as well. In Wagner’s concluding line, however, which is actually Goethe’s punch line, we are already on the way to Walter Benjamin’s devastating presentation of historicism as a sop to our self-love: “And seeing how much wiser we have grown today.” Leaning back, Faust waved off this professionalizing mantra as so much selfdeluding hokum. My friend, the spirit of an earlier time, To us it is a seven-sealed mystery; And what you learned gentleman would call Its spirit, is its image, that is all, Reflected in your own mind’s history.57 Historicism, in fact, was all about the historian. The past, as Hegel himself understood, and as John Keats has rendered it more accessibly to readers ever since in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” could not be regained. It was cut off. The “learned gentlemen” who claimed that by erudition they could recapture the spirit of the past were simply wrong. What we call its spirit was rather what we imagined of it refracted through our own experience. The greater that “mind’s history”—what I think we should call “soul”—the greater the historian. This is Goethe’s message to us, the historians of the future. There can be no higher praise for Anthony Grafton than to say that his mind’s history has changed how all of us see the past.

57 Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 565–80.

chapter 51

Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist Suzanne Marchand This essay is devoted to a great scholar, a devoted teacher, a superb stylist, and an exemplary human being, and for this occasion, I want to do something rather foreign to my usual practice, and that is to write about a scholar who displayed, for his era, an unusual degree of humanity and concern for his students, for the educated public, and for non-Europeans, past and present. Anthony Grafton has devoted many an essay to such early modern beings— Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, and Antonio Cardano come to mind—but he too would probably admit that it is bit more difficult to identify such persons in my disciplinary stomping grounds, namely modern German and Austrian intellectual history. And yet, there have been some, even among the tribe of the recently excoriated “Orientalists,” those men (and a few women) who dedicated their lives to the reading and teaching of Oriental languages and cultural histories. My subject here is one of those men, a now-forgotten German Egyptologist named Georg Ebers, who was not, like Grafton’s usual suspects and like Grafton himself, a great scholar, but who was a beloved and influential teacher, and who also left behind him an important legacy in the form of sentimental but culturally compassionate novels and travelogues. Naturally, Ebers was not a proto-Grafton, and this is not meant to be hagiography. But Ebers, too, cared deeply about portraying the people of the past in their full humanity, and about bringing the past to life. And perhaps it suits us, occasionally, to appreciate the sunnier sides of nineteenth-century culture, the glass half full, as it were, rather than continuously to lambaste our predecessors for not sharing our moral, political, and aesthetic ideals.1 This essay has another aim, and that is to adapt some of the argumentation deployed by Sheldon Pollock in his important essay about “deep Orientalism” in Sanskrit studies, and by Colin Kidd in his excellent book on the formative 1 There are any number of books one can read about the evils of “Orientalism” and the “Orientalists,” beginning with Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See, for example, Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Hamid Tafazoli, Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs: Zur Verwissenschaftlichung und Literarisierung des Persien-Bildes im deutschen Schriftum von der frühen Neuzeit bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_052

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power of the book of Genesis for New World racial thought beginning in about 1600.2 Both do recognize that racial thinking was omnipresent in nineteenthcentury texts—but they also acknowledge that a goodly share of this thinking was embedded in the ancient sources themselves, which could, if read in certain ways, be readily used to characterize people in certain ways. Some of these readers quarreled with or triangulated sources in order to soften or complicate racist readings; others read them to confirm and make more rigid and expansive racist prejudices. It is my conviction that Georg Ebers was a member of this former group, that is to say, one of those who sought to soften prejudments, both ancient and modern. As a Jewish convert to deep Christian belief, a sentimentalist, and a lifelong invalid, Ebers exhibited remarkable powers of empathy, and poured this empathy into his works, gently combating pressures in conventional sources and in his surrounding society to identify exclusively with Greeks and Christians, or to think modern Egyptians backward and corrupt. Nor was this empathy for naught; Ebers’s novels and travelogues proved best sellers, appealing especially, it appears, to female audiences. Ebers’s work and career suggest that even if philology, and for that matter later nineteenthcentury society, was suffused with racial or proto-racist ideas, there were individual scholars and even popularizers who were able to think—and to read—differently. Ebers’s biography is essential for understanding his scholarship. He was born in 1837, finished his habilitation in 1865, and died in 1898, which places him squarely in the high liberal and Graecophile generation of the Gründerzeit. The family had extensive connections with Berlin’s intellectual elite; in the 1820s, G.W.F. Hegel himself came to whist parties at the Ebers’s home, and Wilhelm von Schadow painted a portrait of Ebers’s beautiful mother, Fanny. But Ebers’s parents were Jewish converts to Christianity, and his father (and grandfather) had been highly successful bankers, and owners of a porcelain factory, making Ebers a product of the Besitzbürgertum, rather than the more Graecophilic Bildungsbürgertum. The young Ebers was perhaps also disinclined to fully identify with mid-century, homosocial, aestheticizing, and anticlerical philhellenism by his passionate affection for his mother and his three sisters; his father having died two weeks before his birth, Georg Ebers became Fanny Ebers’s Trostkind, and learned early on to share her Dutch Calvinist 2 Sheldon Pollock, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993): 76–133; Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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piety. Among the closest of family friends were also the Grimm brothers, who lived in the same Berlin apartment house, and Ebers would retain throughout his life a soft spot for German medievalism, and write several novels with medieval settings. After Georg senior’s death, there was sufficient income left over for a more than modest bourgeois lifestyle for the Ebers family, and Georg the younger enjoyed a diverse education, including learning excellent French, and attending a classical Gymnasium, where he studied Latin and Greek. But in his autobiography he remembered best the letters his mother received from her brothers in Japan and Java, employed in the Dutch colonial service; they prompted an inner voice to call him: “‘To distant lands! To the East!’” he wrote, to be a pirate, or a round-the-world traveler.3 Like his contemporaries, Ebers was shaped by the combination of positivist and neo-romantic, ancient and modern cultural frameworks. Just before taking the university entrance exam (Abitur), he composed and performed a “poetic tale” on a subject drawn from Herodotus, an author for whom he felt a close affinity, and whose stories would long inspire his creative projects.4 He was enthralled by Homer, and felt what he called “a drive to the epic,” and began to write his own. This was a historicizing and not a modern poem; the aspiring poet was prevented from applying his pen to the “epic” events of his day, the 1848 revolutions, by his mother’s persistent loyalty to the Hohenzollerns.5 Once the revolutions had passed, however, a more sober and practical Ebers emerged. He now enrolled as a law student at the University of Göttingen, where he found materialistic natural science pervasive; reading Ludwig Feuerbach threatened to destroy his childhood faith. But then he found himself locked out of his lodgings on a cold night, and the next morning became violently ill. At death’s door for some months, he read no more Feuerbach, but turned instead to Arthur Schopenhauer—and to Egypt. He consigned his epic poem to the flames, and decided that his proper métier should be that of Egyptologist.6 Adopting Egyptology as a career was hardly conventional for bourgeois Germans in the 1850s, and in Ebers’s case was made more difficult by the fact that he still could not leave his bed. There was only one chaired professor in 3 Georg Ebers, Die Geschichte meines Lebens: Vom Kind bis zum Manne, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Eduard Hallenberger, 1893), 1–113, quotation at 113. 4 Ibid., 186. 5 Ebers, Mein Erstling: ‘Eine ägyptische Königstochter’ (Leipzig: Adolf Titze, 1894), 186. On 1848, see Geschichte meines Lebens, 116–66. Ebers would later learn to appreciate the sufferings of the Silesian textile workers and the freedoms achieved by the revolutions. 6 Ebers, Geschichte meines Lebens, 421–40.

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the subject in the Germanies at the time, and he—Karl Richard Lepsius— owed his job to the Prussian king, whom he had tutored as a child. The philological faculties at the time remained rather hostile to Orientalist appointments, and most Orientalists remained members of theological faculties. This situation, however, was changing rapidly; Lepsius had just returned from a triumphant three-year trip to Egypt, where he had amassed an enormous collection of objects for the newly built Neues Museum (located behind the Altes Museum, in the Lustgarten on Unter den Linden), and large crowds began to flock to see the artfully, though not very authentically, displayed finds.7 The huge collections of artifacts and papyri purchased or pilfered by European travelers in Egypt in the 1820s–40s now offered scholars more hieroglyphic texts to work with—and the linguistic work of Lepsius and others had begun make this authentic material easier to read and interpret. But most scholarly histories, not to mention popular portrayals, of Egypt still relied on the conventional sources, Herodotus and the Old Testament, plus some later Greek and Roman texts. When Ebers embarked on his Egyptological studies, the field had by no means yet taken on a modern shape—nor was it a “hot” field for aspiring academics.8 Both Lepsius and Jakob Grimm recommended to Ebers that he school himself, first, in Semitic philology, rather than devoting himself exclusively to things Egyptian. Learning only hieroglyphics, Jakob Grimm argued, rather bizarrely, would make him merely suited to be a dragoman.9 Ebers took this advice to heart, and pursed studies of Hebrew, Sanskrit, English, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish, as well as the hieroglyphics. It is telling both of Lepsius’s humanity and of his dearth of other students that he was willing to teach Ebers at his bedside once a week, on Thursdays. Meanwhile, Ebers also read Roman comedies, which convinced him that human behavior and motivations were, over time and space, essentially the same.10 Once finally able to leave his bed, he attended the lectures of J.G. Droysen, Eduard Gerhard, Franz Bopp, August Boeckh, and the traveler Heinrich Barth. But the Egyptians continued to enchant him; they “filled my entire soul with vivid images [Vorstellungsbilder], which inspired me more and more urgently to given them 7

See Dietrich Wildung, Preussen am Nil (Berlin: Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2002), 38–52; and Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996), 47–49, 62–65. 8 See Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88–90, 203–06; also Thomas Gertzen, École de Berlin und “Goldenes Zeitalter” (1882–1914) der Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). 9 Ebers, Geschichte meines Lebens, 441–44. 10 Ibid., 446–47.

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form, the more secure were their outlines and familiar the colors they impressed on me.”11 We may be rather sure, however, that it was Herodotus’s Egypt in particular that continued to inform Ebers’s passions, for the dissertation subject he chose concerned the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, the one whose demise at the hands of the Persian King Cambyses is described in Herodotus (3.7–33). What drew him to this story, he later reminisced, was that it brought together the three world powers of the age, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, juxtaposing the public and private lives of these sometimes friendly, sometimes fighting, peoples. Attempting to follow the model provided by Jakob Burckhardt’s recent Age of Constantine the Great (1853)—by no means a book beloved by garden-variety classicists—Ebers set out to write a history of Egypt’s defeat. But he soon recognized “that it was not yet possible at this time to write a full history [of Egypt] that could stand up to criticism.”12 Discouraged, but unable to let go of the subject, he had a new idea: “…while I was critically investigating how far Herodotus’s tale of the Princess Nitetis, sent to the court of Cambyses, was believable, the people on whom the story turns became more and more real to me, and one day I made the decision to make the Egyptian princess the heroine of a freely developed [frei erfundenen] story.”13 We must follow what Ebers says about the genesis of An Egyptian Princess, his novel of 1864, just a bit further, for his descriptions tell us a great deal not only about his personal commitments, but also about the limits of Egyptology in his day. It is striking that Ebers felt that he had to turn to fiction to really offer an Egyptian equivalent of Burckhardt’s Constantine; there were simply too few “ego documents” from this (or any) period of Egyptian history available to him to bring this world fully to life. But, he later commented, he had interacted with or read about many sorts of people, and believed the foundations of human existence, the motivations for the behavior of our species in every age and everywhere have on the whole remained the same; and the customs, values, and religious and social perspectives of the milieus inhabited by the three advanced cultures to be described, in so far as they diverged from ours, could be easily described.14 He could, therefore, use his imagination to fill in gaps in the historical record, and even if he would have to subtitle the volume “a historical novel,” it would, 11 Ebers, Mein Erstling, 187. 12 Ebers, Geschichte meines Lebens, 505n. 13 Ebers, Mein Erstling, 188. 14 Ibid., 188.

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nonetheless, be educational, not merely entertaining. Accordingly, the novel teemed with footnotes, citing ancient and modern sources on subjects ranging from Persian horticulture to Egyptian reverence for cats. It is striking that at the same time as Leopold von Ranke was being hailed as “the new Thucydides,” and emphasizing the uniqueness of each portion of the past, Ebers was seeking his models in Burckhardt, the ardent anti-Rankean, and in Herodotus, the great—if sometimes unreliable—ethnographer and storyteller, and underlining the psychological similarities between persons. While restoring his health at a spa, Ebers met the publisher Edward Hallenberger, and showed him the manuscript of An Egyptian Princess. Hallenberger, who would become a lifelong friend, and profit handsomely from Ebers’s successes, was charmed, and agreed to print the three-volume book, together with its 572 footnotes. Lepsius, the novel’s scholarly godfather, was less impressed. On being presented with the draft of a sentimental novel that was to be dedicated to him, Lepsius was at first horrified, and remarked: “Oh, please!” (Aber ich bitte Sie!) Eventually he reconciled himself to his student’s frivolity; after his illness, Ebers, Lepsius sighed, had needed “a cup of Lethe water.” “But now,” he instructed, “leave this sort of thing aside and don’t compromise your name as a scholar in future with this sort of extravagance.”15 As Lepsius predicted, other scholars cheerfully set about ridiculing this “extravagance,” and assaulted the footnotes, causing Ebers much irritation, and forcing him to revise them continuously.16 At first the general public paid little attention; only after the novel had been paired with Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) in a review by Carl Frenzel, Ebers recounted, did it find a larger readership. A second edition appeared in 1869; by 1893, the book reached a sixteenth edition, and by 1910, a twenty-first. An English edition was published in New York in 1868, and in London in 1870. By 1894, the novel had been translated into sixteen languages, including Arabic.17 Ebers became professor of Egyptology at the University of Jena in 1868, then moved in 1870 to the University of Leipzig, where he would spend the remainder of his career. Until 15 Ebers, Geschichte meines Lebens, 509. 16 Ebers’s later book Uarda also featured footnotes (364) in its first edition. In subsequent editions and in later novels, Ebers severely reduced the number of references. Most common in his notes are references to traditional Greek sources and works published before the great decipherments of the nineteenth century took effect, like John Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Egyptians (which was, by the way, heavily illustrated), supplementing them occasionally with references to authentically “Oriental” texts such as the great hieratic medical text he himself purchased in Egypt in 1873, now known as the Ebers Papyrus. 17 Ebers, Mein Erstling, 191.

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Princess began to enjoy some success, and until Ebers’s health once again took a turn for the worse, he stuck to Lepsius’s advice, and did not write more novels; but he would never be the strict, positivist linguist that Lepsius fancied himself, and thought a respectable Egyptologist should be. In his introduction to the second edition of An Egyptian Princess, Ebers qualified his psychological universalism a bit, arguing that his readers would probably find it easier to understand the Persians and Greeks, “being by descent related to ourselves,” than to identify with the Egyptians, “whose dwelling place on the fruitful islands won by the Nile from the Desert, completely isolated them from the rest of the world.” He also acknowledged that in revising the original manuscript, he gave greater scope to the Greeks on the advice of Lepsius, who, once he had reconciled himself to the novel’s publication, ­suggested “that a tale confined entirely to Egypt and the Egyptians might become wearisome.” Consequently, Ebers allowed his readers to enter the story through a “Hellenic portico” in the form of the Greek salon hostess Rhodopis (a figure mentioned both by Herodotus and more importantly by Strabo, for whom she is a sort of proto-Cinderella), who is only one of many of Ebers’s images of intellectual women in his novels. We may see shades of subtle Orientalizing at work here; but we must also recognize that Ebers was working from Strabo and especially from Herodotus, who (naturally) tells his stories from a Greek, and sometimes exoticizing perspective.18 Debates continue about the extent to which Herodotus “Orientalized” Egypt,19 and readers will surely find Ebers engaging in similar practices. But it is worth recognizing that Ebers was trying to be fair, as he states in the preface: “It has been my desire that the three nations [Egypt, Persia, Greece] should attract [the reader] equally, and I have therefore not centered the entire interest of the plot in one hero, but have endeavored to exhibit each nation in its individual character, by

18

19

Ebers acknowledges openly that he has followed the “father of history,” though not blindly; he has “never omitted consulting those hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions that have been already deciphered,” and he has drawn on modern principles of psychology. But, he concludes, “In most cases these confirm the statements of Herodotus.” Ebers, Eine ägyptische Konigstöchter: Historischer Roman (Leipzig: Eduard Hallenberger, 1864), 1:xi–xii. Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Tim Rood, “Herodotus and Foreign Lands,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 290–305; Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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means of a fitting representative.”20 The author drew too, he admitted, on individuals of his own acquaintance. His Rhodopis presented many of the traits of his beloved mother, his Nitetis those of his cousin Betty, and his King Amasis the recently deceased Friedrich Wilhelm iv.21 The object, quite clearly, was to update Herodotus for modern consumption, in the interests of bringing a more or less multicultural past to life. When Ebers returned to novel writing in the early 1870s, this semi-ethnographic historicism would define his style. His novels consistently interweave the “races” or nations of the ancient Orient, and the leading characters tend to typify what might be said to be national traits. Importantly, however, the stories continued to be based on historical events, and Ebers devoted himself to giving his characters realistic features, habits, surroundings, and motivations. To ground this realism, he turned, of course, to the ancient sources. In Uarda of 1875, he again depended on Herodotus, as well as on the important medical papyrus Ebers had purchased in Egypt in 1873. In Joshua of 1889, he drew on the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Joshua; for Serapis of 1885, he turned to Rufinus and Eusebius; in Cleopatra of 1894, he drew chiefly from Plutarch. In the case of Joshua, the character of the protagonist is based on the Old Testament’s characterizations, and skeletal plotlines. Serapis commits the historical impossibility of putting Eusebius in Alexandria for the destruction of the Temple, but draws heavily on his teachings, and carefully follows Rufinus’s account of events. And Ebers’s Mark Antony is very much the impulsive, lovesick warrior of Plutarch, and of Shakespeare. But Ebers softens ancient verdicts, especially on his “Oriental” characters. His Cleopatra is less a seductress and sybarite than a wise, patriotic, and passionate ruler, and above all a loving mother.22 Her maids have their own integrity, her courtiers their own interests. Egypt is a nation worth ruling well, and it is one of Cleopatra’s sins that she fails to do so. Serapis—unlike Rufinus—shows considerable sympathy for the pagans, and highlights the cruelty of their treatment at the hands of the power-mad Romans and fanatical Christians. Greek and Egyptian traditions and rituals may constitute superstition in the eyes of the Christians. But these were meaningful for living human beings, and the novel makes destroying them seem harsh, not valiant. Real Christianity, Ebers has Eusebius aver, cannot be found in the “religious partisanship” of “the deluded masses”—like a good liberal, Ebers feared mob fanaticism. Nor, however, could it 20 Ebers, Eine ägyptische Königstochter: Historischer Roman, 1:xi. 21 Ebers, Geschichte meines Lebens, 505. 22 Plutarch mentions her wishing Caesar to bestow her kingdom on her children, but he does not have her turning her ships back at Actium for their sake, as does Ebers.

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be found in the royal and imperial courts, “where power translates the impulse of a disastrous moment into sinister deeds. If you want to know what true and pure Christianity is,” his Eusebius argues, “look into our homes, look at the family life of our fellow-believers.”23 Christianity wins out, here, not because it must, or even because other faiths are false, but because it provides the best moral foundation for individual and family life. Joshua is deliberately told from the Egyptian side, and Ebers makes many alterations and omissions in the biblical story in order to play down the protagonist’s traditional role as holy warrior. Ebers fabricates an early career in the Egyptian army (and an oath to the pharaoh) for the son of Nun, and a highly sympathetic Egyptian lover, Kasana, who sacrifices herself in the hopes of liberating Joshua from slavery in the mines. He uses Kasana, who symbolizes romantic love between mortals (and indeed between Egyptians and Jews), mercy, and tolerance, to provide a proto-Christian, gently critical perspective on the Old Testament, and as a contrast to the self-important prophetess Miriam, who, as a reviewer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine put it, “speaks and acts just as any ill-bred woman nowadays might do who sees herself suddenly deposed from the position of Mrs. Commander-inChief.”24 In general, the novel dispenses with the extensive smiting that goes on in the Old Testament, and the self-righteousness of Christian (and Jewish) portrayals of Joshua’s victories. “The point which strikes me the most in your Joshua,” Ebers’s friend Lawrence Alma Tadema wrote to the author in 1889, “is certainly that vengeance is the most unjust and the lowest of all powers that have been used for moving mankind, and that ‘Liebe’ and ‘Gnade’ are the ‘Erlösung’ of that great question, the happiness of mankind.”25 Today we can certainly identify bias and stereotyping in his novels, and note that Ebers more fully inhabits the hearts of his Greek and perhaps his Jewish characters—though this is made more fully possible by the fact that Greek and Jewish sources offer more explicit detail on the interior lives of the ancient world, again something that relates to our “deep Orientalism” theme. And at least in the religious sphere, Ebers seems to understand his own prejudices— as well as those of his sources, and of his contemporaries—and to be working to counter them, without, however, violating too flagrantly what he sees as the 23 Ebers, Serapis: A Romance (New York: W. S. Gottsberger, 1885), 373. 24 “The Old Saloon: Recent German Fiction,” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 149 (1891): 45–71, at 50. 25 Alma Tadema to Ebers, 31 Dec. 1889, in Ebers Papers (Nachlass), Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Kasten (K.) 11, hereafter cited as bsb, N. Ebers.

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historical record, standards of respectable behavior and bearing, or common sense. Indeed, the novels, as a whole, emphasize the distribution of virtues and vices across all races; there are corrupt and irrational Greeks, there are greedy and bloodthirsty as well as godly Jews; there are disloyal and cruel as well as kind and chaste Egyptians. Rather than ridiculing the religious beliefs of any group, Ebers simply tries to explain them, and positively inflects characters who are loyal to their gods, whatever those gods are. His treatment of his characters suggests a worldview akin to the one Gotthold Ephraim Lessing expressed in Nathan the Wise—though the later novels, in particular, clearly reflect a Christian perspective. Ebers has his good Egyptian pharaoh Amasis ii say, “What has been sung to us in our childhood, and praised as sacred in our youth, lingers on in the heart until the day that sees us embalmed as mummies.”26 This may seem insufficiently multicultural to us, but we might consider how Ebers’s Egyptizing seemed to readers of his day, their impressions formed chiefly by the Old Testament. As one reviewer commented, glossing Ebers’s approach in The Egyptian Princess: One becomes conscious of a certain tenderness for the mummies in the British Museum, and a desire for their acquaintance, after having gazed for a while at this lovely daughter of the Pharaohs. Wasn’t Moses rather prejudiced in the view he took of the Egyptians, and wouldn’t it be well to read Ebers before giving our sympathies so unqualifiedly to the Hebrews in this conflict?27 Ebers seems to have been less aware of prejudices in his day against Africans. In his novels, dark-skinned persons are usually servants or slaves—though the Ethiopian nurse and freedman who appear in Cleopatra are described as both clever and loyal, and play an important role in saving the lives of the beautiful Greek Barine and her husband. Again, it may be that Ebers saw little scope for altering these social relations in his sources, but it is also clear that he did not make a concerted attempt to find an African princess, or a Nubian heroine, to challenge his era’s racist conceptions. Nor did he draw on Islamic traditions for any of his stories, though he knew well, and felt considerable affection for, the Islamic Egypt of his day.28 In these two omissions, we can glimpse the limits of 26 27 28

Eine ägyptische Königstochter, 1:72. H.H. Boyesen, “A Gallery of Ebers’ Heroines,” extracted and reproduced in Ebers, Lorenz Alma Tadema: His Life and Works, trans. Mary J. Safford (New York, 1886), back matter. This is evident in his affectionate treatment of Cairo, and of the khedives, in “Das Alte in Kairo und in der arabischen Cultur seiner Bewohner,” in Deutsche Bücherei 29 (Breslau:

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his nineteenth-century, liberal historiographic empathy; only some histories, for Ebers as for most of his contemporaries, whether painters or novelists, were worthy of being brought to life. Fundamentally, Ebers’s novels are romances—which may explain their especial appeal to the women and young girls of his day. There are plenty of interethnic romances in the novels, just as there surely were in the ancient world, some of which turn out well, and some of which (as in the story of Joshua and Kasana) fail, where they perhaps should have succeeded. More important than racial purity, here, was clearly romantic love, and Ebers usually sees that it triumphs, at least for the minor characters. Where the historical characters are concerned, their failures to establish bourgeois, domestic households are central to their flawed humanity. In Joshua, for example, when the prophetess Miriam, Moses’s sister, oversteps her domestic role and tries to tell her husband, Hur, what to do, she is punished and shamed into silence—a softened version of her punishment (being struck with leprosy) for “gossiping” about Moses’s Cushite wife, in Numbers 12:1–15. Cleopatra features extraordinary, and historically unsupportable, scenes of Cleopatra lavishing love on her children; the fact that she does not love Cesarian more, and Mark Antony less, however, marks her as morally deficient. Friedrich Nietzsche once aptly described Ebers’s female characters as “daughters of Leipzig professors in Egyptian dress.”29 But we should note in passing that this suggests that Ebers (and perhaps his readers) found it plausible that modern European ladies might identify with and learn love lessons from ancient Egyptians. Ebers was certainly a Christian sentimentalist, and a bourgeois romantic, but he also considered himself an artist and art historian of sorts. He developed a very close friendship with the Dutch-British “archaeological” painter Lawrence Alma Tadema, whose early Egyptizing canvases read like Ebers’s novels in paint.30 Both Alma Tadema and Ebers were concerned not only with bringing ancient history to life, but with making it beautiful. In 1881, Alma Tadema pointedly praised Ebers’s Der Kaiser (treating the life of Hadrian) for its empathetic enhancements: “What I like above all is your love for that beautiful civilization which makes you look even at its defects with a kindred eye.

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S. Schottlaender, 1883), and in Ägypten in Bild und Wort: Dargestellt von unseren Ersten Kunstlern, beschrieben von Georg Ebers, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Eduard Hallenberger, 1879–80), both works of a popular character. Nietzsche quoted in R. J. Barrow, Lawrence Alma Tadema (London: Phaidon, 2001), 27. In fact, Ebers would write a short novella based on a painting by Alma Tadema. See Ebers, A Question: The Idyl of a Picture by His Friend Alma Tadema, trans. Mary J. Safford (New York: W. S. Gottsberger, 1881).

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Bravo! Many thanks for myself and my dear friends the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans.”31 While Alma Tadema, after about 1875, devoted himself chiefly to portraying Greek scenes—after all, these sold much better—Ebers wrote and oversaw the composition of a lavish, two-volume artistic tour of Egypt, ancient and modern, for which he solicited contributions from Germany’s leading artists, including Hans Markart and Franz Lenbach, though many of the images were made by lesser talents such as Gustav Richter and Carl Leopold Müller. Ägypten in Bild und Wort is a fascinating and, I have argued, remarkably open-minded treatment of Egypt, ancient and especially modern, containing, for example, a very sympathetic portrayal of the El-Azhar and Islam, written by a young Jewish scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, who had studied with Ebers in Leipzig and would go on to be the leading Arabist of his generation.32 Here, too, the Orient, ancient and modern, is portrayed not as a dirty and backward place. Instead, even what contemporaries would have seen as “defects” were painted in a sympathetic light.33 Again, in the aesthetic realm, Ebers felt he was working against contemporary biases, and impressions left by ancient sources. In numerous places, he protested against what we might call a philhellenist reading of Egyptian art, which contrasted its stiff and static forms with more fluid and lifelike Greek statuary, and derived from this contrast a narrow, joyless Egypt, as compared to an individual-embracing, life-loving Greece. In the introduction to Uarda of 1875, Ebers’s second most popular novel, the author offers an extensive critique of these misreadings: From studying the conventions of Egyptian art—which was strictly regulated by hieratic laws of proportion—we have accustomed ourselves to imagine the inhabitants of the Nile Valley in the time of the Pharoahs as haggard and stiff men whose physiognomies display little in the way of individual distinctions… This is an error; the Egyptians, in spite of their aversion to foreigners and their strong attachment to their native soil, were one of the most intellectual and active peoples of antiquity; and he who wants to represent them as they were and as they lived, and to that 31 32

33

Alma Tadema to Ebers, 3 Jan. 1881, bsb, N. Ebers, K. 11. See Suzanne Marchand, “Race and Religion in the Novels of Georg Ebers,” in Wort, Macht, Stamm: Rassismus und Determinismus in der Philologie, ed. Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013), 217–25. The same could be said for Ebers’s Baedeckers, and other guides. See, e.g., Ebers, Cicerone durch das alte und neue Ägypten: Ein Lese und Handbuch für Freunde des Nillandes, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1879).

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end copies the forms that were preserved in paintings on the walls of the temples and graves, is the accomplice of those priestly corrupters of art who compelled the painters and sculptors of the Pharaonic era to abandon truth to nature in favor of their sacred laws of proportion. He continues: “He who desires to create images of the true lives of the ancient Egyptians, he first has the task of setting them free; that is to say, he must release his vision from the conventional forms that applied only to their art and were altogether foreign to their real life.”34 This brings us closer, perhaps, to Ebers’s view of his own subtle, anti-Orientalizing practice: he was freeing Egypt from both its ancient—priestly—and its modern—Hellenizing— fetters, and allowing its individuals, in their happy moments and in their tragic ones, to speak.35 Ebers thought of himself as a scholar, and cared deeply for his students— who returned his affection.36 He paid tribute to his mentor, Lepsius, honoring him with a hagiographic biography. But he clearly felt closer in spirit to Alma Tadema, who, like Ebers, had realized that “the Egyptians were no nation of prim pedants, but excitable, prone to joyous festal mirth, keen witticism, and passionate grief.”37 He too appreciated the “grandeur and peculiarity” of Egyptian art, Ebers wrote, “and the original, orderly, and profoundly moral civilization of the Egyptian nation, which awed, attracted, and fascinated him. Like all true artists and lovers of art, his eyes were open to the beauty of the works, not only of the architects, but of the sculptures of ancient Egypt…”38 In all of his work, whether classicizing or Egyptizing, Ebers continued, The figures he shows us usually wear the garb of ancient times, yet they are neither old nor new, but purely human, and when he makes the child 34 35

36

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Ebers, “Vorwort zur ersten Auflage,” in Uarda (Stuttgart, 1879), 1:ix–x. Several of Alma Tadema’s canvases fit precisely this mold: his Pastimes in Ancient Egypt (1863) and Egyptian Chess Players (1865) show the Egyptians as not merely dour and severe people, but at play; his Death of the First Born (1872) and Egyptian Widow (1872) portray their sorrow, especially at the demise not of kingdoms, but of family members. Goldziher’s letters to Ebers were quite personal; in one (written in 1889), he describes Ebers as among a small circle of people who have treated him with friendship. After Ebers’s death, Goldziher told his wife that Ebers’s memory lived on “in my heart, where he lives on as a saint.” Goldziher to Ebers, 28 Sept. 1889, and Goldizher to Antoine Ebers, 10 Dec. 1898, bsb, N. Ebers, K. 22. Georg Ebers, Lorenz Alma Tadema: His Life and Works, trans. Mary J. Safford (New York, 1886), 38. Ibid., 36.

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laugh or the widow weep, it is not only a little Roman or a Frank[ish] princess who laughs or mourns, but the careless child or the woman who has lost her husband, as they must have laughed or wept in any age of the world.39 What made Alma Tadema unique, original, and appealing, Ebers argued, was “thorough sympathy with the period to be represented.”40 This made him, in short, a higher sort of historian—the type Ebers himself wished to be. For several decades, Ebers—like Alma Tadema, and the psycho-classicizing Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin—enjoyed enormous popularity. His novels sold well, and reviewers, especially in bourgeois publications, were on the whole enthusiastic, often praising him precisely for not being the sort of dry-as-dust pedantic philologist about whom the school reform movement increasingly complained. His works, wrote one typical reviewer in the Münchener Signale in 1886, “have not created marble images of the ancients, but real humans, who do belong to other millennia, but in whom real life pulses.”41 Say what you will about professors’ novels, wrote another; Ebers has succeeded in breathing life into the dry science of Egyptology, “and forming, with the warming heart of a poet, living humans, where his predecessors in scholarship only saw shadows…”42 The Allgemeine Moden-Zeitung of 1881 noted that the public loved Ebers’s The Kaiser even if the scholars thought it nonscholarly and the critics thought it lacked aesthetic value, and the Volkskirche praised it for being—perhaps unintentionally— a Christian novel.43 The Wiener Tageblatt offered praise for Ebers’s second novel in the course of insulting both scholarly pedants and modern Egyptians: “The German scholar, the prototype of aridity and shyness, stands before us [in Uarda] as a fresh, creative poet, and while in the first novel [An Egyptian Princess], often the scholar kicks in his knees, in Uarda his drive to be educational almost never presses into the foreground.” Ebers’s work, the reviewer continued, raises interest “in the cultural life of a great people, whose shadows in our days only speak for themselves when the fellahin want to rebel out of hunger, or to master them, a minister delivers a box on the ears, and

39 40 41

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 35. Henry Moltan, “Der historische Roman,” Münchener Signale, 30 June 1886, 1–2, in bsb N. Ebers, K. 39. 42 “Sch-r,” review of Ebers, Die Geschichte meines Lebens, Oesterreiches Literaturblatt 3 (1894): 125. 43 Anon., review of Der Kaiser, in Allgemeine Moden-Zeitung 3 (1881), n.p., and anon., “‘Georg Ebers’ ‘Der Kaiser’,” Die Volkskirche, 15 Feb. 1881, 39–40, both in bsb Ebers, K. 39.

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accidentally gets killed.”44 Ebers’s work, the reviewers generally agreed, made the ancient Egyptians (as well as Greeks, Persians, and Jews) accessible, and sympathetic, bringing them closer to his modern European readers, rather than “Orientalizing” and “othering” them. The era in which Ebers’s sympathetic historicism captured the popular imagination was drawing to a close in the years before his death in 1898. Clearly modernist critics as well as school reformers were getting the upper hand, and the Bible stories, too, were beginning to lose their universal familiarity. Naturally, a wide swathe of the middle-class population, not to mention the intelligentsia and the scholarly elite, still knew their Herodotus, their Old Testament, and their Plutarch; but these conventional sources had begun to be overwhelmed by the flood of textual and architectural materials turned up in what I have called “the Second Oriental Renaissance.”45 Alma Tadema and Böcklin continued to be admired, at least down to about 1905, but in the next generation, even those artists who drew on ancient myths and models— Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ivan Meštrović come to mind—now attacked their subjects with a distinctly nonhistoricist fervor. For the new generation, Ebers’s novels themselves began to seem “dry as dust,” and perhaps more important, his characterizations of ancient people began to seem less plausible, and more a figment of his own (Biedermeier) imagination. Already in 1891, a British reviewer was complaining about archaeological romances, which had recently “been haunting us like a perfect Egyptian plague.” This was, the reviewer argued, in large part the fault of Heinrich Schliemann and the other German antiquarians, who were raking up the dust of vanished generations. As a result, Many imaginations took fire, and many hands undertook the gigantic task of attempting to resuscitate a whole defunct world. But the task, although alluring, is also thankless; for if it be difficult to faithfully depict the living men and women we see around us, how much more so is it to invest with a semblance of probability those of whom we in reality know next to nothing?46 This reviewer was right: although new editions of Ebers’s works continued to appear through the 1920s, the gratitude his readers showed for his “bringing 44 45 46

Friedrich Petz, “Keine Dauerleichen!” [review of Uarda], Wiener Tageblatt (n.d.), in bsb, N. Ebers, K. 40. See Marchand, German Orientalism, 157–211. “The Old Saloon,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 45.

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the past to life” in the 1870s and 1880s would be short-lived, and his commitment to writing from the traditional sources would also hamper his ability to fully escape from the “deep Orientalist” presuppositions that informed his work. By the 1930s, he would be all but forgotten. Ebers was surpassed by better writers—including Thomas Mann, whose Egyptizing Joseph series would bear interesting comparison with Ebers’s books—and by better scholars, including a few who were his students (Eduard Meyer, Ignaz Goldziher, Adolf Erman). It would be folly for literary scholars or modern Egyptologists to lavish much time on his work today. But intellectual historians, and those who wish to describe the history of “Orientalism,” would do well to remember him, and to appreciate his subtle efforts to spread a kind of historicizing ecumenicism to his contemporaries, many of whom held much more prejudicial views than did he of the ancient Egyptians (or Persians, or Jews). That Ebers worked so diligently, for decades, to find universal behaviors and particular forms of beauty in the (non-Greek) ancient world should tell us, first, that even in the much-maligned nineteenth century, there were Europeans who did not think the East wholly “other,” and second, that even pervasive “discourses” do not determine the thought and practice of all. Ebers was a respected scholar (though his scholarship did quickly fall behind the cutting edge), and a beloved teacher, as well as a person who was eager to engage, educate, and if possible soften the prejudices of the wider public. Of course he was a man of his times; but—to make a final leap of sympathetic, imaginative reconstruction— I think Tony would have liked him, just the same.

chapter 52

The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung* Glenn W. Most A century ago, one of the most important modes of research in the professional study of Greco-Roman antiquity, as well as in a number of other fields, was a recently developed specialty called by its admirers (back then it had no opponents) Quellenforschung.1 By decomposing the compilatory handbooks produced by the erudition of Late Antiquity into their various sources and establishing the relations of dependence among them, the adepts of this method sought to trace back reports about a variety of aspects of the ancient world—primarily philosophy and history, but also such other fields as religion, law, and sculpture—to their earliest origins. They were convinced that they would thereby place themselves in a position to assess with greater precision the reliability of those reports and would hence be able to make claims of greater validity about those aspects of antiquity. Nowadays, Quellenforschung is not dead, but it seems moribund. It has moved from the fashionable center of classical studies to the swamps at their periphery; it is practiced by relatively few scholars and seems to be ignored, if not held in suspicion or contempt, by most. Yet many of the results experts in this field obtained a century ago or more have continued to provide what has seemed, at least until recently, a solid foundation for studies in a wide variety * An earlier version of this essay was published as “Quellenforschung,” in The Making of the Humanities, ed. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, vol. 3, The Modern Humanities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 207–19. In part it overlaps with my essay “Diogenes Laertius and Nietzsche,” in Diogenes Laertius, ed. James Miller (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 1 By far the most important studies of Quellenforschung as a philological method are Jaap Mansfeld and David T. Runia, Aëtiana: The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, vol. 1, The Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1997), esp. 87–106, 111–20, and vol. 3, Studies in the Doxographical Traditions of Ancient Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 3–31. While their studies are focused especially upon Hermann Diels’s Doxographi Graeci, Mansfeld and Runia have also laid the foundations for study of the wider context of nineteenth-century Quellenforschung and have recognized its origins in earlier theology and its link with manuscript stemmatics. Quellenforschung in (especially German) classical scholarship is of course closely connected with Quellenforschung in (especially German) historiography, on which see esp. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1968; rev. ed. 1983).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_053

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of disciplines within classical scholarship and, beyond it, in related and dependent areas of research, for which classical scholarship seems itself to have functioned not only as a model but also as a source. Why this has been the case deserves analysis and reflection, and not only because of the implications of these developments for these disciplines themselves. Quellenforschung is a very specific technique of philological scholarship that was especially fashionable in Germany (hence its name) and flourished particularly during the latter part of the nineteenth and the earlier part of the twentieth centuries; but it is only one variety of what I call here “source criticism,” the much larger and more diffuse activity of searching for possible sources and evaluating them that has flourished in many places and at many times. Modern Quellenforschung is methodologically a Siamese twin, whose two interdependent halves have rather different characteristics and genealogies. On the one hand, Quellenforschung seeks to break apart the transmitted ancient texts that their authors went to so much trouble to weld together out of the various sources they consulted. Such an analysis, which we may term “deconstructive,” attentively examines the text for any evidence of errors or inconsistencies—self-contradictions, variations in language or style, anachronisms, and so on—which could suggest that different parts might have derived from different sources; yet at the same time it retains a conviction of the great value of that text despite its evident defects (for otherwise investigating it will lead not to analyzing its sources but just to repudiating its authority). Precisely this delicate combination of rational analysis and obstinate faith is a characteristic feature of some religious traditions that are based upon a sacred text; and it was above all in the Hebrew Bible that the Enlightenment found ample opportunity to exercise its skills in this variety of source criticism.2 By careful analysis of textual anomalies3 Baruch Spinoza was able to demonstrate that the Pentateuch could not possibly have been written by Moses, but only by someone else who had lived much later, perhaps Ezra; he thereby in effect replaced the notion of a unified text created all at once in a single act of divine afflatus with the image of a lengthy historical development involving contributions and modifications by human authors from different periods who were pursuing 2 A helpful general survey is provided by Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historischkritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1st ed. 1956; 2nd ed. 1969 [cited here]; 4th ed. 1988). 3 Deut. 31.9; Gen. 12.6; Deut. 3.14; Num. 12.3, 31.4; Deut. 33.1. See Kraus, Geschichte der historischkritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments, 62. Still useful is Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grund seiner Bibelwissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1930).

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different interests. So, too, Spinoza analyzed the book of Daniel into one part (Chaps. 1–7) derived in the Maccabaean period from Chaldaean writings and another part (Chaps. 8–12) written by Daniel himself; he suggested that some later editor must have put these parts together and published them.4 But it was above all Henning Bernhard Witter and Jean Astruc in the early eighteenth century who argued that the Pentateuch is a heterogeneous compilation. Astruc’s analysis of the text into Moses’s three sources—“mémoire A” (which calls God “Elohim”), “mémoire B” (which uses the term “Jehova”), and an additional “mémoire C” (further subdivided into eight rubrics)—was at first dismissed by such scholars as Johann David Michaelis but by the last quarter of the eighteenth century had won acceptance, especially by the Göttingen specialist for the Hebrew Bible, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. It was in turn Eichhorn’s work that went on to serve as a model for Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, in which the discrepancies and anomalies of the transmitted Homeric text were taken as evidence that it had been compiled out of earlier, originally independent songs and had acquired its present form in the course of centuries of transmission and modification.5 Wolf’s authoritative transference of deconstructive source criticism from the founding text of the theologians to that of the philologists ensured that the method of Quellenforschung would become canonical for nineteenth-century German classical scholarship. But this method is only one of the two sources involved: for Quellenforschung tries not just to tear apart existing texts but also to reconstruct lost ones. How can one be sure that some passage in a surviving ancient text B was not invented by that text’s author but was taken over by him from some other, earlier text A? Obviously, matters are simpler if text A is still available to us, so that we can determine by inspection whether the two passages in question are identical.6 But suppose that text A has been lost. The standard technique of philological Quellenforschung involves comparing that surviving passage in one text B with some other similar passage in another surviving text B1 (and with any other similar passages in surviving texts B2, B3, etc., if these are available) and arguing that since (1) the degree of similarity between these passages in B and in B1 (and Bn) 4 Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus 10.19ff. See Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments, 63. 5 See Anthony T. Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel, eds. and trans., F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, 1795 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985), intro. 6 Yet even here uncertainties can arise. What is a sufficient degree of similarity? Are the relative datings of the two texts secure? Might the passage have been introduced from the one text into the other during the course of the latter’s transmission? What is the exact length beyond which textual coincidence cannot reasonably be ascribed to chance?

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is too great to be explained by mere chance and (2) the two surviving texts seem to be independent of one another, in the sense that neither of them was the direct cause of the other, they must consequently both derive from some third text A, earlier than both of them but subsequently lost, which can be reconstructed on the basis of this comparison. This is the “reconstructive,” synthetic method of Quellenforschung, and it explains why so many works of late nineteenth-century German scholarship bear an uncanny visual resemblance to the menus in Chinese restaurants: the page is divided into two (or in some cases three or even more) narrower columns, printed in parallel with one another; and the reader is invited, if not to choose one item from column A and one from column B, then at least to be convinced by the apparent evidence of the similarity of the various columns that there must have been a lost progenitor responsible for both. Here too the source for the technique is to be found in theological scholarship—but this time, the kind that was directed not to the Hebrew Bible but to the Christian New Testament. For the life and teachings of Jesus were reported by not just one, but four, canonical Gospels; and these inevitably were very similar to one another in some regards, rather different in others. Ultima­tely, the Chinese menus of German Quellenforschung go back to the synoptic harmonies of the Gospels: early modern theologians printed the four Gospels in parallel columns, placing reports of the same events next to one another and balancing solitary reports in one or more Gospels by blank spaces in the others. Their intention was surely to prove the miraculous preestablished harmony of the Gospels and to create a divinely sanctioned mega-text in which all the individual reports could come to supplement one another: where two reports agreed, each corroborated the other; where one was silent, divine Providence had ensured that another would speak. But in the course of the eighteenth century, the same printing technique came increasingly to produce quite a different effect upon its readers: differences between the Gospels began to look like discrepancies, and similarities came to seem less the work of divine wisdom than the product of shared earlier human sources. Already in 1761 Johann August Ernesti had asserted in his Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti that the primary purpose of the interpreter of the New Testament, as of any other text, was to determine the original intention of its human author. By the turn of the nineteenth century, various New Testament scholars had begun the hunt for the lost sources of the surviving Gospels—after all, were not their human authors even closer to the holy events they described than any text that has reached us?

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The relationship between theology and classics often remained quite close through the nineteenth century. But because the apparent results of source criticism inevitably raised unsettling questions for dogmatic theology, it was not until toward the end of that century that the historical-critical method could come to dominate biblical studies; and it is only nowadays that most Western academic scholars, at least, are convinced of the historically composite, derivative nature of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. By contrast, Wolf’s transference of the method to the field of ancient pagan literature meant that it could flourish there in a theologically neutral atmosphere: in classical studies Wolf’s treatise was at once hailed as epoch-making and served as a model for numerous other studies. The Homeric epics were the first and most prestigious test case: their analysis into the smaller, earlier songs that were thought to have been their direct sources occupied many of the finest minds of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German classical scholarship. But in the early decades of the nineteenth century this particular variant of source criticism was applied not only to Homer but to many other problems as well: for example, by Karl Otfried Müller7 and Christian Lobeck8 to the analysis of the ancient reports concerning Greek religion, by Barthold Niebuhr to the critique of the ancient legends regarding early Roman history,9 and by Friedrich Welcker to the reconstruction of the history of Sappho’s reputation in antiquity10 and of the lost masterpieces of Athenian tragedy.11 Soon thereafter, Karl Lehrs programmatically adopted and refined Wolf’s method and applied it to the field of ancient scholarship on Greek poetry;12 its application to other subdisciplines of ancient scholarship, such as Greek philosophy or historiography or Roman copies of Greek sculptures, was only the logical next step. Diogenes Laertius provides a convenient case study to help us see the attractions and risks of Quellenforschung, in particular as it was applied to ancient

7 8 9 10 11 12

Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1825). Aglaophamus; sive, De theologiae mysticae Graecorum causis libri tres (Königsberg: Borntraeger, 1829). Römische Geschichte (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1811–12; 2nd ed. 1828–32). Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1816). Die aeschylische Trilogie Prometheus und die Kabirenweihe zu Lemnos, nebst Winken über die Trilogie des Aeschylus überhaupt (Darmstadt: C.W. Leske, 1824). De Aristarchi studiis homericis (Königsberg: Borntraeger, 1833; 2nd ed. 1865).

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Greek philosophy by Valentin Rose13 and his followers in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Like most prose authors of later antiquity, Diogenes composed his treatise on the doctrines and lives of the great Greek philosophers by compiling, selecting, arranging, and revising the works of his predecessors. After all, by Diogenes’s time, many centuries had elapsed since the deaths of most of the philosophers he was discussing; in many cases their original writings were very difficult to understand, and many were no longer in circulation or were hard to come by, and the writings that did circulate under their names were often incomplete, textually corrupt, or even forged; and an enormous scholarly literature on most aspects of the questions posed by this vast and heterogeneous material had already developed. Under these circumstances, it would have been irresponsible, even irrational, for Diogenes to refuse to take advantage of the scholarship of preceding generations; in this regard, his situation is not essentially different from our own. But unlike Diogenes, we, at least in the West, are the uneasy heirs of centuries of the gradual professionalization, improvement, and refinement in historical method: whatever doubts and controversies still mark historical research even now, we can surely agree that nowadays no reputable professional historian, of philosophy or of any other subject, will fail to attempt to obtain access to original sources, nor to evaluate them with regard to their authenticity and reliability as scrupulously as possible, nor to attain as full, as systematic, and as critical an overview of the secondary scholarship as he or she can. Historiography in the ancient world was certainly a less disciplined and consistent activity, and a more amateurish and individualistic one, than in ours. So it is evident from the beginning that it would not be fair to try to measure Diogenes’s work by the standards of modern scholarship. But even within the terms of ancient scholarship, his treatise displays a number of extremely perplexing features. On the level of surface detail, it seems to be rife with incoherences, contradictions, obscurities, and non sequiturs; its style is rough and inconsistent; and it is chock full of quotations of which it is sometimes less than clear quite where they begin and often entirely uncertain where they end. And, more generally, it raises at least three fundamental and still unsolved questions regarding its own character and its author’s—his date, his philosophical orientation, and his intended audience—for which the information provided by various passages seems to be in flagrant contradiction with other 13 Esp. Aristoteles pseudepigraphus (Lipsiae: B.G. Teubner, 1863).

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passages in the same work or with what we think we can know with some degree of confidence from other sources about ancient Greek philosophy. How are such difficulties to be dealt with? Starting in the Renaissance, various strategies were tried out: simply to ignore the problematic implications of the passages in question; to emend each one so as to produce a more acceptable meaning for it, on the theory that such problems arose not in the head of the original author but in the hands of subsequent scribes; or to try to explain them away by developing interpretations for each of them. But none of these strategies has been very successful: ignoring the problems will not make them go away; many of these passages have proved resistant to scholarly emendation; and the exertions required by attempts to explain away the difficulties have often turned out to cost far more than any exegetical profit they could yield. What is more, such piecemeal approaches are always hampered by the fact that they trade in hypotheses invented ad hoc to deal with specific difficulties. Would it not be reasonable to prefer a different kind of approach, one that resolved all such problems at once in one fell, systematic swoop? Precisely this was the young Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea. Suppose the passages that seemed inconsistent with one another or with what we think we know about Diogenes or Greek philosophy were written not by Diogenes himself but by his various sources, and that he then transcribed them into his own work. If we could determine the exact sources Diogenes used for each section of his work, would we not be able to interpret the problematic passages more satisfactorily? And if we could determine which sources Diogenes used, would we not be in a better position to assess the reliability of the information he transmits? By asking these questions, Nietzsche applied to Diogenes Laertius the recently developed and, at the time, extremely fashionable German scholarly method of Quellenforschung; by providing a startling (if specious) answer to them, he launched a brilliant (if brief) academic career. Nietzsche was one of the first to try to resolve such difficulties in Diogenes not one by one but systematically, by developing a single coherent and universal theory of the relations between Diogenes and his sources. His strategy was to explain discrepancies within Diogenes’s single text as the result of differences among Diogenes’s plural sources; its goal was to arrive at a hypothetical but highly detailed narrative of the ways in which Diogenes excerpted, compressed, and compiled all the sources that were available to him, one that would show that the text as we have it was the inevitable result of all these operations.14 14

See esp. Jonathan Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius,” Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986): 16–40; also Carlotta Santini, “Die Methoden der Quellenforschung am Beispiel der Basler Vorlesungen,” Nietzsche Forschung 19 (2012): 269–78.

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In the writings Nietzsche published for a nonprofessional audience there are very few explicit references to Diogenes and they are uniformly positive: Diogenes is held up as a model for a true understanding of at least the spirit (if not the letter) of Greek philosophy, in opposition to the German academic establishment of professional philosophers and classicists who looked down on him but, at least according to Nietzsche, understood far less about the real character of the Greek philosophers than he had. So, most famously, he writes in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” the third of his Untimely Meditations: Who for example will save the history of Greek philosophy once again from the soporific fumes that have been diffused upon it by the learned, but not overwhelmingly scientific—and unfortunately extremely b­ oring— works of Ritter, Brandis, and Zeller? I for one would rather read Laertius Diogenes than Zeller, because in the former there lives at least the spirit of the ancient philosophers, but in the latter neither that spirit nor any other one.15 And in a number of Nietzsche’s crucial passages about the lives and characters of the Greek philosophers, especially the pre-Socratics—for example, “Philosophy in the Age of Tragedy”16 and the section on “The Tyrants of the Spirit” in Human, All Too Human17—Diogenes’s influence upon him is manifest even if Nietzsche does not mention him by name. In general there can be no doubt that Nietzsche’s intense study of Diogenes was crucial in helping him to free himself from the constraints of university philology and philosophy and to develop a new and deeply personal conception of the relation between philosophical speculation and a philosophical way of life, one that was to prove of enormous influence for subsequent generations. 15

16 17

I cite Nietzsche here most often from Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), hereafter cited as ksa, by volume and page number (here ksa 1.417); but also occasionally from Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hans Joachim Mette and Karl Schlechta (Munich: Beck, 1933ff.), hereafter cited as baw, by volume and page number; and from Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967ff.), hereafter cited as kgw, by section, volume, and page number. The passage cited goes on to launch a spirited attack upon the pedantic, merely verbal study of the history of philosophy in the universities, and to claim that the only valid criticism of a philosophy is to see whether one can live according to it. For a similar passage in Nietzsche’s posthumously published notebooks, cf. ksa 7.782. ksa 1.799–872. Human, All Too Human, sec. 261, ksa 2.214–18.

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By contrast, the view of Diogenes to be found in the writings Nietzsche composed as a classical philologist and intended for a readership of classical philologists starts unenthusiastic and ends up extremely negative. The more Nietzsche worked on Diogenes in his early years, the more he came to see him not as a learned and honest authority upon whom we can with safety rely in our efforts to reconstruct the history of ancient Greek philosophy, but instead as a brazen liar, a clumsy thief, and a lazy fool. For example, in a posthumously published manuscript entitled “Laertius Diogenes and His Sources: A Contri­ bution to the History of Ancient Literary Studies,” he writes, What is La. Di. to us? Nobody would waste a word about the lowbrow physiognomy of this writer if he were not by chance the dim-witted watchman who guards treasures without having a clue about their value. He is the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.18 In the years 1866–68, Nietzsche worked intensely on the prize question De Laertii Diogenis fontibus and did extensive research in this connection not only on the sources of Diogenes himself but also on those of imperial, late ancient, and Byzantine scholarship (especially the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda, which presents significant overlaps with Diogenes’s text, but also such other authorities as Apollodorus, Athenaeus, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Hesychius, Eustathius, the Etymologicum Magnum, and Stobaeus) and of various earlier classical and Hellenistic Greek prose authors (Herodotus, Aristotle, the ancient life of Hesiod). Nietzsche’s extensive posthumously printed notes show how many radically different hypotheses he tried out and how gradually and tentatively he developed toward his provisional conclusions;19 yet the three lengthy philological studies he published on the subject in 1869 and 1870 maintain a stance that is clear, dogmatic, and self-assured.20 There he announces the discovery that almost all the information to be found in Diogenes Laertius is derived not from the earliest sources Diogenes names, but from a single intermediate source, the lost Compendium of the Philosophers written by the shadowy figure Diocles of Magnesia (whom Nietzsche assigns to the first century bce but whom more recent scholars tend to date a century earlier). On Nietzsche’s view, Diocles himself had cited many of the earlier sources he used, such as the lost work on homonyms by the 18 baw 5.126. 19 The materials are still available most completely in baw 4–5. 20 See kgw 2.1.75–245.

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­first-century bce author Demetrius of Magnesia, and Diogenes himself had done little more than mechanically, indeed thoughtlessly, transcribe into his own work Diocles’s source references together with his data, remarks on dating, and so on. Aside from the mass of material he lifted from Diocles, according to Nietzsche’s hypothesis, Diogenes had also inserted some individual reports he derived from the works of Favorinus (first half of the second century ce)—Nietzsche at one point had suspected Favorinus himself of having been Diogenes’s sole source for most of his information—and, for the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, as Nietzsche added later, from some further, unidentifiable source. The significant overlaps between the reports in Diogenes and in the Suda were due not to the latter having derived its information from the former, but to the dependence of both texts upon lost common sources. The real reason Diogenes wrote his book, Nietzsche suggested, was to provide an artificial framework that would justify his republishing the wretched epigrams he himself had written about the deaths of the philosophers; these had been a total failure with the public when they had first appeared as part of a collection of his miscellaneous poems, and he was now anxious to find a pretext for republishing them. Nietzsche’s analysis was intended to unmask Diogenes not only as a thief who had stolen all the jewels he passed off to posterity as his own, but also as a writer so stupid that he did not notice that many of the sources he was transcribing made statements about chronology and philosophical orientation that became nonsense when he took them over unchanged into his own work. No doubt partly in order to emphasize both the significance and the brilliance of his own research on Diogenes, Nietzsche exaggerates both Diogenes’s importance and his stupidity. He reaches this conclusion partly by closely analyzing some of the very same problematic passages that had occupied the attention of earlier scholars (and that have continued to bother later ones), partly by uncritically accepting as fundamental methodological principles four suspicions about Diogenes as a writer and as a person: 1.

Somnolence: Over and over again, Nietzsche asserts that Diogenes must have been half-asleep when he excerpted his sources. For example, he writes, “Whence it is proved that Laertius took these words over from Diocles’s book in a sleepy condition”;21 or, “But Laertius once again with his sleepy habit of transcribing went so far that he did not even hesitate to take over these words of Diocles, in which he addresses some particular person, into his own book.”22 Evidently, Diogenes had transcribed so

21 22

kgw 2.1.80. kgw 2.1.89.

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3.

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much that he became quite tired and simply kept on copying things out that were irrelevant or false without even noticing what he was doing. Indolence: Nietzsche prefers to assume fewer sources rather than more sources. He imagines Diogenes to have been a man so lazy that he stayed with one source as long as possible and moved on to another one only when this became imperative. Thus he asks rhetorically, “…ought we to suppose that Laertius has suddenly disdained this same source, which just now he was draining with pleasure and comfort? Ought we to suppose that he took one-third of a coherent doctrine from it, and then all at once leapt away and looked around for other sources of help?”23 Secondhand erudition: The more learning Diogenes displays, the more Nietzsche presumes him to have actually derived it from intermediate sources rather than from his own reading of the sources he names. As he writes, “Concerning literary property he had—just like his brothers in the same period, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and others— either no notion or else a very bad and impure one. With almost all scholars he shared the belief that many quotations demonstrate erudition, with many the belief that it was permitted to copy quotations. It causes him pleasure to provoke astonishment in his readers at his erudition: that is why he strews quotations by the handful and cites the most remote writings from the beginnings of scholarly biography just as uninhibitedly as the handbooks he has lying in front of him.”24 Deliberately misleading references: According to Nietzsche, Diogenes always takes care to mention somewhere the authors he has copied so that he cannot be accused of having suppressed their names altogether. But in order to mislead the reader he takes just as much care to mention them only in passing, for the sake of minor details, and usually so as to disagree with them. As he puts it, “In general we have acquired the certainty that that huge section from §38–167 is derived from a single source, except for quite small and not even sure exceptions. La. has been careful not to say this clearly to us: instead, sly as such compilers are, he occasionally names Diocles in those passages: ‘All the less will someone come up with the idea,’ he may have thought in so doing, ‘that it is to him alone that I owe all this erudition.’ For nothing protects the thief better than a little honesty. If then L. has named Diocles a couple of times in every part of his work, then we will not for a moment be so kind-hearted

baw 4.225. baw 4.219.

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as to believe him that those passages are the only ones that he has stolen from Diocles’s riches.”25 The resulting image of Diogenes is one not only of almost incredible stupidity but also of a dishonesty bordering on moral turpitude. At one point, adopting the tone of the vice squad, Nietzsche writes, “If we are strict, then we must call this a hypocrisy and unreliability on the part of the author and we must keep a close watch on such a character trait.”26 At first Nietzsche’s theory enjoyed some success. His essay won the prize competition (perhaps not least because the prize question was designed with him in mind and apparently no other candidates presented themselves), and it was an important factor in his being offered a professorship at Basel. But within a few years it had started to crumble, and soon it fell apart altogether. In 1880, Ernst Maass (who himself went on to have a distinguished career as a classical scholar) could still discuss it as a hypothesis that scholars had to take seriously even if in the end they had to reject it.27 But one year earlier Hermann Diels, in his epoch-making work on the Greek doxographers, had already dismissed Nietzsche’s whole theory as being even less substantial than a cobweb, and had derided Nietzsche for misunderstanding the grammar of the single sentence that served as a linchpin for his whole argumentation.28 Nietzsche’s theory has been virtually forgotten—or rather, it would have been, had it not been Nietzsche’s theory. Philosophically interested readers of Nietzsche have in general tended to ignore the more technical work in classical philology he wrote as a student and professor; this tendency may have been reinforced not only by the general disciplinary boundaries that since the early nineteenth century have increased the separation of classics from philosophy, but also in particular by the exclusion of Nietzsche, at least until recently, from the canon of scholars deemed acceptable by many professional classicists— and when Nietzsche was finally admitted into that world, it was above all his speculations on Greek religion and on Greek tragedy that commanded the classicists’ attention. But even within the much-smaller world of scholars interested in Diogenes Laertius, Nietzsche’s theory has not found much 25 26 27

28

baw 4.229–30. baw 4.219. Erich Maass, De biographis graecis quaestiones selecta = Philologische Untersuchungen 3, ed. Adolf Kiessling and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880). Hermann Diels, Doxographi graeci (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1879), 78. But cf. Barnes’s careful discussion of this extremely difficult and textually uncertain sentence (7.48), “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius.”

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a­ ttention, let alone acceptance. Nor is this hard to understand. For though his hypothesis cannot really be disproved (and even though it has recently found at least one authoritative, albeit halfhearted, defender),29 it is not only liable to various objections in detail—for example, Nietzsche’s theory about the central importance of Diocles encounters grave difficulties if we date Diocles not, as Nietzsche did, to the first century bce, but instead, as most scholars do now, a century earlier. Worse, it also has a fatal methodological flaw: for to claim that Diogenes merely took over mechanically most of his information from Diocles means that the text that we actually possess, Diogenes’s, is denied any intellectual value and philosophical merit of its own, while these qualities are attributed instead to a different text, Diocles’s, that we do not possess and about which we know almost nothing whatsoever. This means not solving the problems posed by Diogenes, but instead, as they say in America, just kicking the can down the road. In fact, the rise and fall of Nietzsche’s theory about the sources of Diogenes Laertius is merely a small but symptomatic chapter in the larger story of the rise and fall of nineteenth-century Quellenforschung as a whole. The wave of popularity of this particular mode of source criticism, which began at the turn of the nineteenth century and started to crest in the second half of that same century, was already subsiding in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, as noted earlier, few scholars practice the method—though many continue to make use of its results. So we can understand why Nietzsche’s hypothesis has by and large been forgotten except by specialists. But this is regrettable, not because it has a high probability of being correct, but because Nietzsche’s incisive analytic intelligence and his lively and hyperbolic rhetoric help us see more clearly why the Quellenforschung that he practiced could seem so attractive to generations of philologists, even though it could only occasionally achieve really convincing and permanent results. Quellenforschung was not only a specifically nineteenth-century German variant of the age-old scholarly technique of source criticism; it was also a peculiarly philological variant of a much more widespread development in nineteenthcentury culture, the historicization of science. Like historical linguistics, historical geology, evolutionary biology, and a number of other contemporary sciences, Quellenforschung sought to bring order into a disparate and inconsistent mass of data by telling a genealogical narrative about the various steps by which these data had evolved. Post hoc, propter hoc: the hypothesized diachronic, causal relations were thought to guarantee scientific validity even in 29

Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius.”

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the absence of any conclusive corroboratory evidence for the actual existence of the postulated origins and phases of development. Quellenforschung was thus part of a wider cultural movement that sought to translate questions of identity into ones of origin, and we can explain part of its fascination in terms of this larger context. But a seduction more specific to the particular discipline of classical philology is likely also to have played a role in its success among its professional practitioners. Part of what attracted many classicists to Quellenforschung was, I would suggest, precisely what was in fact wrong with Quellenforschung: its evident similarity to the genealogical method of the study of the relations of dependence and affiliation among the manuscripts that transmit an ancient author. This similarity is manifest, but in fact it was misleading, and it necessarily limited the validity of any results this method could obtain. The genealogical method of textual constitution is a modern response to a fundamental problem textual scholars have always faced: what to do when one manuscript contradicts another one in its reading in a certain passage. Already in the Renaissance, some scholars like Politian had recognized that in order to assess the value of a manuscript’s readings it is important to try to determine what other manuscript it was copied from (its “parent”) and with which others it could be associated in order to be classified into a group of manuscripts sharing the same derivation (“families”).30 But it was in eighteenth-century New Testament studies that such a recognition first attained not only philological but also theological urgency, and it is in this field that the implications of such sporadic insights first began to be worked out systematically; thus Johann Albrecht Bengel postulated as early as 1734 what he called a tabula genealogica of all the New Testament manuscripts.31 Throughout the early nineteenth century, German scholars gradually developed a philological technique for establishing such relations, which climaxed in what was called Lachmann’s method, since it was Karl Lachmann’s 1850 edition of Lucretius that made the method famous by reconstructing, on the basis of the errors and contradictions among the surviving manuscripts of the poet, a highly detailed image of the hypothetical archetype that was their source.32 But in the decades preceding that edition much of the conception and terminology was already familiar; for example, Nietzsche’s revered teacher and patron, Friedrich Ritschl, wrote 30 31

32

Cf. in general esp. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Apparatus criticus ad Novum Testamentum, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Cotta, 1763), 18 (first published as an appendix to the text of the Novum Testamentum Graecum [Tübingen: Cotta, 1734]). Cf. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 64–66. Karl Lachmann, ed., Lucretii de rerum natura libri sex (Berlin: George Reimer, 1850).

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in his notebooks in 1837 in Italy that his aim was to produce “a formal genealogical stemma for the derivation and interrelations of all the fathers, sons, brothers, grandsons, and nephews in the great family of Plautus manuscripts.”33 Nietzsche himself, as his scholarly writings demonstrate, was an adept of Lachmann’s method, and in his Basel lectures titled Encyclopedia of the Philological Sciences he explained its importance to his students.34 Lachmann’s method was widely hailed as the technique that permitted German classical philology to establish itself as a reliable scientific enterprise; and there can be little doubt that Quellenforschung derived a great deal of its attraction from its parasitic similarity to that technique—indeed, it seems often unmistakably to have been modeled upon it, if at times perhaps without conscious intent. Like Lachmann’s method, Quellenforschung, too, provide a set of procedures for resolving contradictions and inconsistencies, this time not between the textual readings of various manuscripts, but instead in the informational content supplied within and among various ancient works, and it inquired not into how manuscripts were copied from and related to one another, but instead into how one text copied its information from another (its source) and was related to other texts. Both methods combined an analytic procedure, attentively examining the extant documents for contradictions or discrepancies that could be used as evidence for different lines of derivation, with a synthetic one, hypothesizing shared common ancestors when comparison between two extant documents revealed similarities that were too marked to be ascribable to mere chance. Both methods attempted to harmonize chronologically a synchronic plurality of logically discrepant propositions, by transposing them into a diachronic genealogical narrative in which a number of individually coherent positions could be projected onto the same number of different speakers operating at different moments along the same temporal axis. The most graphic demonstration, as it were, of this similarity of method is provided by the numerous charts (see figs.  1–3) that Nietzsche, at different points in his research and publications, used to illustrate what he took to be the textual relations among the various sources (almost all of them lost) that went to make up the surviving treatise of Diogenes Laertius; for these bear an extraordinary visual similarity to the codicological stemmata with which Lachmann’s successors had sought to demonstrate the genealogical relations among the various manuscripts (almost all of them lost) in the transmission of a surviving work of ancient literature. These illustrations, designed by Nietzsche himself, represent quite different conceptions that he held at various stages of 33 34

Cited by Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 93n.10, from Otto Ribbeck, F.W. Ritschl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1879), 1:201. kgw 2.3.378ff.

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Figure 52.1

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hans Joachim Mette and Karl Schlechta (Munich: Beck, 1933ff.). abbreviated baw, 4.374

his research into the relations between Diogenes Laertius and his sources. Figures 1 and 2 both derive from Nietzsche’s posthumously published notebooks of the period fall 1866 to fall 1867; figure  3 is taken from a scholarly article he published on this subject in 1869. Diogenes’s work is shown in them to derive in part from Diocles, in part from Favorinus; exactly which earlier sources reached Diogenes from which of these two authors, and what interrelationships connected all these texts, are conceived in different ways each time.

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Figure 52.2

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook P 1 (Fall 1866–Fall 1867), p. 113. Cited from baw 4.412

In all of these illustrations, the name placed at the top is the latest in time and denotes the author of a text that still survives, while all the ones placed lower are earlier in time and denote authors of texts that have been mostly or entirely lost; the farther down one reads, the farther back in time one goes, and the movement of causation goes from bottom to top. But is it not somewhat counterintuitive to construct a scheme of derivation in this way? After all, the European reading eye moves down the page from top to bottom, and an illustrative procedure of this sort makes the dynamic of subjective reading contradict the dynamic of objective causation. To be sure, genealogical charts of families sometimes take the form of a tree, with the trunk and roots at the bottom and the latest growths at the top, so that new generations can be added at the highest branches. But beyond this rather vague analogy, there may also be a more strictly professional reason for Nietzsche’s decision to organize his illustrations in this way.

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Figure 52.3

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967ff.). abbreviated kgw, 2.1.138

For consider the striking visual similarity between all of these charts, on the one hand, and another illustration (see fig. 4), from an article Nietzsche published in 1867 on a different subject, the elegies of Theognis, on the other. This last illustration displays the relations of the manuscripts of Theognis in a manner entirely typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical philology: the surviving manuscripts are placed at the bottom; their postulated lost archetype is set at the top. Charts like figure 4 were also used in ordinary life to display the genealogical relations among the members of human families through various generations. But in the field of classics they were the standard form for illustrating the genealogical relations among the members of manuscript families. Familiar to Nietzsche from his schooldays, they had accustomed him, and his peers, to schemata that took the geometric form of an upright triangle, with a single apex at the top and a broad base at the bottom. However, there was an important difference between the affiliations between manuscripts and sources. In the case of Lachmannian manuscript stemmata, what came earliest (the hypothetical archetype) was one, while what came latest (the surviving manuscripts) were many, so that in an upright triangle the apex could represent what was earliest and the base what was latest. But in the case of Quellenforschung what came earliest (the hypothetical sources) were many, but what came latest (the surviving compilation) was

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Figure 52.4

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Nietzsche on the manuscripts of Theognis. kgw 2.1.11.

one. Hence, for his own charts of the postulated intertextual relations discovered by his Quellenforschung, Nietzsche had to choose between two alternatives: if he maintained the intuitively satisfying temporal direction (earliest at the top, latest at the bottom) he had to invert the triangle (base at the top, apex at the bottom); if he maintained the visually familiar upright triangle (apex at the top, base at the bottom) he had to reverse the temporal direction (earliest at the bottom, latest at the top). Unsurprisingly, given the pull of analogy to the familiar stemmata of manuscript relations, he always preferred the second alternative. This analogy also helps to explain Nietzsche’s unquestioning adherence to the four methodological suspicions mentioned earlier. For the author’s alleged somnolence ensures that the relation of derivation from source text to derived text will always be one of purely mechanical, transparent transmission— a necessary premise, for a wakeful, intelligent author might well make some deliberate alteration when transcribing a text, and if he did so it would no longer be possible unequivocally to determine his dependence upon that earlier text. So, too, his indolence ensures that there will be as few sources as possible— another very desirable result, for the difficulty of establishing a stemma increases exponentially with every new potential member that has to be accommodated to it. And the third and fourth suspicions mean that the

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author of the derivative text does not compare reports of earlier sources with one another but instead is dependent upon only a single proximate source for any item of information—a final necessary presupposition, for both Lachmann’s method and Quellenforschung are possible only if one can exclude what codicologists call “contamination,” the comparison of various sources with one another and the derivation of individual bits, bit by bit, from different sources. But if these four suspicions are regulative ideals that permit the construction of a certain kind of scholarly procedure bearing a strong and attractive similarity to Lachmann’s method, at the same time this similarity is perhaps the only thing that speaks in their favor. A moment’s reflection suffices to suggest how implausible these assumptions are. What author could possibly be as sleepy and as lazy as Nietzsche imagined Diogenes to be? Even if that were possible, why should it mean that he used only one main source rather than five or ten? Why should anyone go to the trouble of transcribing so completely some other man’s published and available work, and then publish it as though it were his own? Whom could he hope to fool? Would not anyone who possessed the intelligence and energy required to conceal the evidence for his plagiarism as thoroughly as Nietzsche supposes Diogenes did have preferred to deploy his capabilities in a more constructive and creative way? Might not the later author have had different sources available to him at different stages of his production of his text, or differing versions of the same sources? Might he not have used different methods in dealing with different sources, trusting some more, modifying others, correcting here and conflating there? Does it make sense to assume that any extant author must be purely mechanical and receptive, and that only ones whose works are entirely lost could have been creative and productive? Such questions could be multiplied further with ease, but the point should already be clear: the only reason for making these presuppositions is not that they have been independently, empirically verified beforehand, but rather that it is only if they are admitted as premises that a certain kind of scholarly procedure, one that is attractive for other reasons, can be undertaken. But in consequence the results of Quellenforschung are not so much entirely false, nor certainly entirely true, as rather all too often just arbitrary. Until the sands of Egypt or the monastery libraries of Asia Minor at last yield up manuscripts that provide direct testimony of one of the postulated early sources of transmitted late ancient compilations, we shall never be able to test the results of the reconstructions of modern Quellenforschung; and this has not happened yet nor would any but the most incautious or wealthy wager that it will happen

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anytime soon.35 Nietzsche’s results could not be confirmed; but neither could those of most of his critics. This is no doubt one reason why the impetus toward this line of research gradually petered out, but it is not hard to think of other reasons as well. Where it was possible to attain relatively secure results, these were obtained quite soon; in most other cases the arbitrariness of the procedure and the fragility of the results became inescapably obvious; the sheer quantity of the texts that best lent themselves to this kind of analysis (largely late ancient prose compilations of earlier scholarship) was finite to begin with and became depleted; the effect of Quellenforschung was all too often to make the texts we actually possess seem not more interesting than we had thought beforehand but much less interesting; the interests of many philologists shifted away from causal explanations of diachronic processes toward literary interpretations of synchronic structures; and a wider skepticism set in, particularly after the nineteenth century, concerning the ultimate value of genealogical explanation as a whole, in this as in other fields. In the end, what is perhaps most surprising is that Quellenforschung lasted as long as it did.36 Its survival was assisted by a combination of inertia, corporate solidarity, methodological naïveté, a concentration upon individual results rather than upon general premises, and the seductive paradigm of Lachmann’s method. Whatever results it obtained, its adherence to a set of unquestioned assumptions about how ancient scholars might have worked impeded for a long time detailed and pragmatic research into a much more important and interesting question: namely, how ancient scholars actually did work, and, more generally, how the cultures of authors and readers have differed from period to period in history and from place to place in the world. That the presuppositions of Quellenforschung do not bear close examination and that its results were all too often arbitrary of course does not mean that everything it produced can simply be rejected as false. All serious scholars in a number of 35

36

In the case of manuscript transmission, it has sometimes been thought that later papyri discoveries might definitively confirm or refute Lachmannian reconstructions of the archetype of surviving manuscripts, or conjectural emendations. But this is mistaken. In fact, what papyri supply is nothing more than ancient, usually late ancient variants, witnesses to one of the ancient streams of transmission rather than the true original form of the text: they do not decide the question but offer further evidence that can strengthen or weaken hypotheses arrived at independently. Here the contrast with the situation in textual criticism is instructive. Lachmann’s method has survived despite the doubts expressed about it from various quarters, and it flourishes in our own day, usually formalized and often computerized, among scholars who sometimes describe themselves as Neo-Lachmannians. Evidently, whatever its problems, the original was less problematic than the imitation.

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fields depend upon the results of Quellenforschung and make use of them in their work, with a greater or lesser degree of anxiety. I myself am at present preparing, together with André Laks, a new edition of the early Greek philosophers; and not a day goes by during which I do not employ the results and the techniques of Quellenforschung. Unfortunately, even if much of the work this method produced is likely to have been quite correct, we shall almost certainly never be in a position to tell just which parts, or why. Hence scholars today have little choice but to continue to make use of the Quellenforschung of their predecessors and to continue to try to add to it by their own efforts—but with caution and doubt, and with the painful awareness that they are building not upon solid rock, but upon a swamp.

chapter 53

Authenticity, Autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum* Lorraine Daston i

Introduction: Back to the Stones

In January 1847, twenty-nine-year-old Theodor Mommsen, a recent recipient of a doctorate in Roman law from the University of Kiel who was spending several years on a fellowship in Italy, wrote to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to propose that he be put in charge of the most ambitious and expensive project yet to be undertaken in classical philology, nothing less than a collection of all known Latin inscriptions. Not only were libraries and museums to be ransacked for published inscriptions and manuscripts searched for unpublished ones; a team of doughty young philologists, fresh from the best university seminars, steeped in ancient languages, armed with the latest critical methods, and blessed with robust constitutions, was to be sent out into the remotest provinces of what was once the ancient Roman Empire to inspect the stones themselves. And then there were the squadrons of Berlin gymnasium students to be enlisted for the “mechanical” work of cutting and pasting inscriptions taken from older publications. Moreover, the Prussian government was going to have to negotiate with the new pope for better access to the Vatican collection of inscriptions and manuscripts, for how could a scholar make progress when allowed into the library for a scant ninety days a year, and then only for three hours a day? Nor was Mommsen willing to compromise: if the Berlin Academy was not prepared to do the thing right, it would be better not to begin at all: “Sind bedeutende Geldkräfte und geeignete Individuen nicht zur Disposition, so ist es besser, dasselbe zu vertagen, als es mit halben Mitteln und halbem Zutrauen zu beginnen.”1 It was as if an under-published postdoc * For Tony, with gratitude for his learning and admiration for the sprightliness with which it is worn. 1 Theodor Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung eines Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, gedruckt als Handschrift für die Herren Mitglieder der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: A.W. Schade, 1847), in Acta der wissenschaftlichen Unternehmungen der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, vol. 17, a, Archiv der Berlin-Bradenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (bbaw), paw-ii–viii.96, 27, emphasis in the original.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_054

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had submitted a grant proposal for the Large Hadron Collider, dictating his terms to the most eminent figures in his field and promising success where past projects had tried and failed. When Mommsen sent his Denkschrift to the Berlin Academy, there had already been at least four other attempts to compile a complete collection of all known Latin inscriptions: Janus Gruter, Markus Welser, and Joseph Justus Scaliger’s Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani in corpus absolutissimum redactae cum indicibus xxv (1603; enlarged edition 1707); Scipione Maffei’s Prospectus universalis collectionis Latinarum veterum (1746), supplemented by Lodovico Muratori’s Novus thesaurus veterum inscriptionum (1739–42) and Jean-François Séguier’s unpublished alphabetical catalog; a French project for a “recueil général d’épigraphie latine” initiated by the minister of public instruction and man of letters Abel-François Villemain in 1843; and a Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum begun by the young Danish scholar Olaus Kellermann with the collaboration of the Italian epigrapher Bartolomeo Borghesi and financial support from the Copenhagen and Berlin academies in 1836.2 Mommsen briskly dismissed his predecessors: the Gruter/Scaliger collection was badly outdated; Muratori’s was inadequate and incomplete; Kellermann’s project had ended with his own untimely death from cholera in 1837; the French had yet to publish anything. Most damning of all, the earlier published compilations “keineswegs den Forderungen unsrer Kritik entspricht.”3 It was precisely this Kritik that gave the greenhorn Mommsen the courage (or perhaps the chutzpah) of his conviction that he and his collaborators could bring out a collection of all ancient Latin inscriptions up to the sixth century ce, excluding the Christian (to be entrusted to the Vatican) but including the Etruscan ones, for at least Italy, France, and Germany, and perhaps eventually also Spain, Hungary, and (now that it had been conquered by the French)

2 Wilhelm Larfeld, Handbuch der griechischen Epigraphik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1907), 1:39–53, 92–94; Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Geschichte der Philologie, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, [1921] 1998), 24; Projets et rapports relatifs d’un recueil général d’épigraphie latine ([Paris?]: [Firmin-Didot?], [1843?]), 9–18, 24–25. Otto Jahn, professor at the University of Greifswald, had purchased Kellermann’s Nachlass and submitted a proposal for a Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (cil) involving Mommsen to the Berlin Academy in 1845, reprinted in Adolf Harnack, Geschichte der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900), 2:505–17; see also Theodor Mommsen, Tagebuch der französisch-italienischen Reise 1844/1845, ed. Gerold Walser and Brigitte Walser (Bern: Verlag Herbert Lang, 1976), 167. 3 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 4.

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Algeria—all this in just a few years—that would stand for centuries as a monument to scholarship.4 What was this Kritik that Mommsen brandished like a magic talisman, and how exactly did it bear on the Herculean labor of sifting through all previously recorded Latin inscriptions, weeding out the forgeries and repetitions, consulting with local antiquaries in the remotest Italian villages, and, in the final resort, viewing the stones and bronzes wherever they happened to lie, whether in a Paris museum or on a crumbling Italian ruin, with one’s own eyes? Criticism in early nineteenth-century German classical philology was a word to conjure with—at once a toolbox of methods and an ethos, both instilled in the highly selective philological seminars established first at universities like Göttingen and Berlin and eventually imitated worldwide.5 Criticism, both “higher” and “lower,” was also fast evolving and expanding, especially in the context of the vast research program of Altertumswissenschaft, defined by Friedrich August Wolf as encompassing not just the literature but also the language, culture, arts, sciences, religion, customs, politics, and “National-Charakteren und Denkarten” of the ancient Greeks and Romans.6 Inscriptions had since the Renaissance served philologists as sources for the history of ancient languages and alphabets, but in the hands of Wolf and his students, inscriptions also yielded precious insights into all aspects of life in antiquity; in their eyes, no fragment was below notice. As the prestige of epigraphy climbed, so did the demands of criticism, previously applied mostly to canonical texts in literature and philosophy. Both Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (cil) and August Boeckh’s Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (cig) (begun in 1815, also under the auspices of the Berlin Academy) aimed to create permanent archives for Altertumswissenschaft that would meet the highest standards of criticism. But in the process, the cig and cil ended up transforming Kritik itself. 4 Eventually, after much internal squabbling, the Berlin Academy approved Mommsen’s cil proposal in June 1853 with a budget of six thousand thalers per annum for six years: Harnack, Geschichte, vol. 1.2: 912. The cil project in Berlin is still ongoing: as of 1999, seventeen volumes with some 180,000 inscriptions had been published: Stefan Rebenich, “Die Altertums­ wissenschaften und die Kirchenväterkommission an der Akademie: Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack,” in Die Königlich-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 199–233, at 226. 5 R. Steven Turner, “Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate, 1790–1840,” in Philologie et herméneutique au 19e siècle, ed. M. Bollack and H. Wismann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 450–89; William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 173–79, 219–27. 6 Friedrich August Wolf, Darstellung der Altherthumswissenschaft, nebst einer Auswahl seiner kleinen Schriften, ed. S.F.W. Hoffmann (Leipzig: Lehtold’sche Buchhandlung, 1839), 20.

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ii Authenticity Philological criticism in the first half of the nineteenth century was many things to many people. Wolf defined it as the means to assess “das Alter, die Echtheit und Authentie” of transmitted texts, divided it into “lower” (the investigation of the text’s provenance, transmission, grammar, paleography, and other clues of authenticity) and “higher” (the emendation of corrupted texts through divination), and compared the certainty achieved by both working in tandem to that of the exact sciences.7 Boeckh characteristically derived its meaning from its Greek etymology, from ΚΡΙΝΕΙΝ, “Scheiden und Sondern,” the separation of the gold from the dross in order to recover classical texts in their original purity. The refining fire of criticism purified the critic along with the text, destroying “alle leere Phantasterei, alle Hirngespinnste” and imbuing “Selbstkritik.”8 In his obituary of his friend Otto Jahn, Mommsen equated philological rigor with the sternest Calvinist virtues: “einfach die rücksichtlos ehrlich, im großen wie im kleinen vor keiner Mühe scheuende, keinem Zweifel ausbiegende…Wahrheitsforschung.”9 And the French orientalist Ernest Renan saw in philological critique nothing less than the spirit of the modern age, and warned that “[l]e jour où la philologie périrait, la critique périrait avec elle, la barbarie renaîtrait, la crédulité serait de nouveau maîtresse du monde.”10 Philological critique was a paradoxical compound of fire and ice, mixing nittygritty knowledge of anomalous Greek verb forms and the history of Latin lettering with the near-mystical channeling of Sophocles or Plautus to divine the original wording erased by the depredations of time and daydreaming copyists. The ideal critic was a chimera, fusing technical expertise, romantic inspiration, and the Protestant ethic. What all agreed upon was that the core of critique lay in the determination of the text’s authenticity (and with it, the critic’s own integrity). Lower criticism was propelled by the animus suspicax, poking and prodding every word of a transmitted ancient text for its grammatical accuracy, its semantic aptness, its historical plausibility, its consistency with both genre and individual style, 7 8 9

10

Ibid., 24–25. August Boeckh, Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften, ed. Ernst Bratuschek (Leipzig: E.G. Teubner, 1877), 170–72. Quoted in Stefan Rebenich, “‘Unser Werk lobt keinen Meister’. Theodor Mommsen und die Wissenschaft vom Altertum,” in Theodor Mommsen: Gelehrter, Politiker und Literat, ed. Josef Wieshöfer (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 185–205, at 188. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science, ed. Annie Petit (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, [comp. 1848, publ. 1890] 1995), 114.

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its position in a genealogy of other versions of the same text, and every other detail that might reveal its age and fidelity to the lost original. Once variant readings had been collated and sifted, extant manuscripts arranged in a stemma of probable descent, and the allegedly oldest version scrubbed of its barnacle-like accretions of errors and interpolations, the Ur-text still eluded the critic’s grasp. Lacunae and obscurities persisted; could Aristotle (or Aeschylus or Seneca) really have written something so nonsensical, so unintelligible, so jarringly dissonant with his other known works? Enter the higher criticism, with its princess-and-the-pea sensibility for the individuality of the author and the conventions of the genre, heightened by near-native-speaker mastery of ancient tongues. Prepared by decades of saturation in the Greek and Roman classics, the critic awaited inspiration, like the Pythia poised on her tripod at Delphi. A competent conjecture might mend the torn passage with more or less probability, but a genial emendation carried the intuitive certainty of an epiphany. “In der inrigen Verbindung mit dem hermeneutischen Gefühl,” rhapsodized Boeckh to his students at the University of Berlin, “liegt allein die wirkliche Divinität der Kritik, sie wird dadurch divinatorisch, indem sie vermittelst productiver Einbildungskraft den Mangel der Ueberlieferung ergänzt. Das ist die geniale Kritik, die aus eigener Kraft quillt, nicht aus dem Pergament.”11 Such inituitions followed no laws and required no further proof. Friedrich Ast, Plato expert and professor of classical philology at the Bavarian University of Landshut, was certain that anyone with “eine innere Erkenntniss des Platonischen Genius” would share his doubts about the authenticity of certain letters ascribed to the ancient philosopher. Divination, like genius, could not be taught, in contrast to all the techniques of lower criticism drummed into students in philological seminars. Only long experience and deep immersion in all aspects of the classical Geist could prepare the critic for the experience of inner communion with the lost original text.12 It was that lost original that concentrated all of the critic’s learning and longing, the Holy Grail of criticism, tirelessly sought after and forever unattainable— except in one case. Authentic inscriptions, engraved on stone and bronze more durable than any parchment or papyrus, were the philologists’ sole Ur-texts, ­relics of the culture they yearned to resurrect. Unfortunately, except in rare instances, the ancients had not seen fit to engrave great tragedies or philosophical treatises in stone. The content of most surviving inscriptions was more prosaic and miscellaneous: dedications, proclamations, laws, epitaphs, milestones, 11 Boeckh, Encyklopädie, 174. 12 D. Friedrich Ast, Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (Landshut: Joseph Thomas, 1808), 217–22.

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graffiti.13 But under the spell of Altertumswissenschaft and its attention to all aspects of ancient life, as well as its organic ideology that assumed that the most trivial and homely details partook of the same unified ancient Geist as the most exalted masterpieces, the ugly-duckling inscriptions metamorphosed into swans. Wolf scolded his fellow philologists for their snobbish preference for “das Classische und Schöne”;14 who knew whether an apparently unprepossessing fragment on a banal topic in execrable Latin might not, in conjunction with other evidence, eventually shed light on some more significant feature of Roman life and letters, including the texts of the hallowed canon itself? Always valued for their authenticity and now glamorized as a new source for Altertums­ wissenschaft, inscriptions seemed worthy of heroic investments of time and money, as the cig and cil projects of the Berlin Academy testified. But were the inscriptions in fact authentic? Already in antiquity Herodotus had reported forgeries,15 and since the Renaissance, Latin inscriptions of dubious origins had multiplied. Humanists eager to boost their standing in the Republic of Letters (or supply evidence for a pet historical thesis), local antiquaries desirous of burnishing their towns’ reputations by proof of ancient lineage, craftsmen and art dealers keen to cash in on the market for antiquities— all had motive and opportunity to fake ancient inscriptions. Even those philologists less persuaded than Wolf, Boeckh, and Mommsen of the value of the study of inscriptions acknowledged that epigraphy posed the greatest challenge to criticism. Gottfried Hermann, professor at Leipzig and a ferocious critic of the incursions of Altertumswissenschaft into traditional, languagecentered classical philology, agreed with his arch-foe Boeckh on only one thing: “Inschriften, der schwierigste Gegenstand der Kritik, sind eben der sicherste Probierstein des Kritikers.”16 Inscriptions taxed the skills of the critic for many reasons: weathered and broken stones were hard to read; transcriptions were accordingly often unreliable; texts inscribed by sometimes illiterate

13

Current epigraphy also includes inscriptions carved in gemstones and even carbonized loaves of bread (coins belong to a separate specialty, numismatics): John Bodel, “Epigraphy and the Ancient Historian,” in Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History through Inscriptions, ed. John Bodel (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–56, at 2–4. 14 Wolf, Darstellung, 22. 15 According to Herodotus, the Delphians forged an inscription on a golden bowl donated by Croesus in order to please the Lacedaemonians, who claimed it as their own dedicatory offering to the temple at Delphi: Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), bk. 1, chap. 51, pp. 54–55. 16 Gottfried Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Boeckh’s Behandlung der Griechischen Inschriften (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1826), 24.

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stonecutters contained strange spellings, abbreviations, and ellipses; the subject matter could be arcane and lacking context, especially if the stone had been removed from its original location, either as booty for a museum collection or as recycled building material. But none of these touchstones of critical acumen was as touchy as the status of the stones themselves: were they authentic or not? Inscriptions promised classical philologists what they longed for most: Ur-texts, the thrill of unmediated contact with antiquity. Classical art and later the artifacts unearthed by archaeological excavations exerted something of the same haptic enchantment, but for the linguistically trained philologists of the early nineteenth century, even those who had embraced the broader vistas of Altertumswissenschaft, it was above all texts that quickened the pulse. Proving the authenticity of inscriptions—or rather, weeding out forgeries—therefore became the primary critical preoccupation of both Boeckh and Mommsen, bent on purging the cig and the cil, respectively, of all such contaminations. However, the divergence between the means each deployed measures the distance between critical standards in 1825, when the first fascicule of the cig appeared, and 1847, when Mommsen submitted his proposal for the cil—and also partially explains why Boeckh was among the most intransigent opponents to the cil within the Berlin Academy. iii Autopsia In his Denkschrift to the Berlin Academy, Mommsen emphasized that firsthand inspection of the stones themselves would be essential to the success of the cil: Aber die Bücher reichen nicht aus; es muss, so viel es möglich ist, auf die Originale selbst zurückgegangen werden. Reist man doch nach Florenz und Paris, wenn man den Livius kritisch herausgegeben will; wie sollte nicht der mit einer kritischen Ausgabe sämmtlicher Inschriften Beschäftigte die Einsicht der Steine selbst sich zu verschaffen suchen? Ja er muss es um so mehr thun, weil er sonst einen der Hauptvorzüge, den die Epigraphik vor der andern Literatur voraus hat, die unzweifelhafte, unanfechtbare Sicherheit des Textes muthwillig aufopfern würde.17

17 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 8.

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Because the principle of autopsia had by the latter half of the nineteenth century become axiomatic among epigraphers,18 not least because of the example set by the cil, it requires a bit of background to understand why Mommsen had to argue for its necessity (and why Boeckh and a few of his colleagues in the Berlin Academy balked at this part of Mommsen’s proposal). The analogy with the preparation of a critical edition of a canonical text is telling, for it reveals what Mommsen thought he could take for granted among philologists. Since Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s spectacular discovery of a manuscript of the lost Institutes of Gaius in a Verona library (which he first announced in a letter to the Berlin Academy in 1816),19 travel to major western European libraries (though not to those farther afield, e.g., in the Balkans or the Levant) to consult extant manuscripts as well as published editions could be considered de rigueur. Mommsen’s own fellowship from the Danish crown sent him to France and Italy for such research on manuscripts pertaining to Roman law, almost all of it in libraries. Much of the research Mommsen proposed to undertake for the cil was of this kind. First, all important publications of Latin inscriptions since the Renaissance (including those of local antiquaries) would be read (and cut up by gymnasium students to be reordered for the cil).Then, scholars would be dispatched to unpublished manuscript collections (especially those in the Vatican’s possession) containing further transcriptions. Only then (and only when warranted either by the significance of the inscription or by suspicions aroused by the paper trail) would the intrepid epigrapher be sent out to the field, a time-consuming, strenuous, and sometimes dangerous business that involved bribing farmers, waking up local antiquaries from their siestas, crawling under bridges or trudging through muddy pastures, sleeping in mosquitoinfested inns, and pining for the cool, wet climate of more northern latitudes. Mommsen had gathered personal experience of all three sorts, in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris, in the manuscript collections of Florence and Rome, and in out-of-the-way town museums in Umbria and Tuscany, where he copied all the inscriptions by 6:00 a.m., before the heat of the day stupefied him.20 He knew just how much trouble autopsia could be, even as gauged by the uncomfortable conditions of an Italian library. Criticism was never about the comfort of the critic, but before the ill-starred Kellermann (who was in turn instructed by Borghesi, also acknowledged by Mommsen as his master), none of the projected collections of ancient 18 Larfeld, Handbuch, 1:248–51; Bodel, “Epigraphy,” 51. 19 Excerpts of Niebuhr’s letter are reprinted in Harnack, Geschichte, 2:382–84. 20 Mommsen, Tagebuch, 166 and passim.

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inscriptions seem to have envisioned systematic recourse to autopsia. Instead, these massively learned works depended on access to a first-rate library and the mastery of the erudite techniques of learned empiricism: compilation, collation, excerpting, and indexing of texts on paper, both printed and manuscript.21 Not only the early seventeenth-century collection by Gruter and Scaliger and the eighteenth-century index begun by Séguier but also the 1843 French project for a comprehensive collection were based almost entirely on such techniques. Although the French commission hoped that correspondents might send to Paris transcriptions and perhaps paper squeezes of unpublished inscriptions (e.g., from those areas of northern Africa now under French military control) and counted especially on Borghesi handing over his long-awaited study of inscriptions of Roman consular fasti, its members, almost all members of the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, did not intend to leave the wellstocked libraries of Paris. Their first order of business would be to update and publish Séguier’s alphabetical index and his catalog of published works on epigraphy up to 1773. Their model was “le beau travail d’épigraphie grecque, entrepris, il y a quelques années, chez une nation voisine”22—that is, Boeckh’s cig. In its conception, Boeckh’s collection of ancient Greek inscriptions was to be an entirely library-based affair, supplemented by correspondence with several foreign scholars and collectors. Books unavailable in Berlin were requisitioned from Göttingen’s rich trove in a steady stream of dunning letters from Boeckh to his friend and former student Karl Otfried Müller: Nunmehr vermisse ich nur noch drei Sachen, nehmlich des Carlo Celano della città di Napoli, Norry, Relation de l’expédition d’Egypte, und Clark, the tomb of Alexander… Clarks Buch habe ich vor vielen Jahren auf einer Reise gesehen; es ist eine Inschrift von Tithoren darin; diesse bitte ich mir zu excerpiren…23 When the Historical-Philological Class of the Berlin Academy approved the “Thesaurus Inscriptionum” in 1815, the commission to which it was entrusted expressed the intention of contacting learned societies in Greece in the hopes of 21

22 23

Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010); on the parallels between early modern erudition and empiricism, see Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005). Projets et rapports relatifs d’un recueil général d’épigraphie latine, 1–3. August Boeckh to Karl Otfried Müller, 3 Feb. 1825, in Briefwechsel zwischen August Boeckh und Karl Otfried Mueller (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1883), 164–65.

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receiving transcriptions of unpublished inscriptions, but nothing ever came of this plan. Instead, the commission, or rather (as it turned out) Boeckh, set about gathering all the published inscriptions and submitting them to rigorous critical scrutiny, all of which was originally projected to take only four years, produce one large folio volume, and cost a total of six thousand thalers: “Wie mangelhaft zum Theil die Abschriften waren, wusste man wohl; aber Griechenland lag damals weit, und das Vertrauen zur kritischen Kunst war gross.”24 When Boeckh published the first fascicule of the cig ten years later, such sedentary scholarship was no longer deemed adequate: a withering review by Ulrich Friedrich Kopp, author of Palaeographica critica (1817), took Boeckh to task for not having at least traveled as far as Paris to consult the marble original of one of the transcriptions.25 Boeckh dismissed Kopp as “ein dummer Teufel,” but he anxiously awaited Gottfried Hermann’s review, heralded by an ominous personal letter in which the Leipzig professor apologized in advance to his Berlin colleague for a review sure to displease.26 Hermann’s review broke over Boeckh and the entire German philological community like a storm, unleashing torrents of abuse, much of it personal, on all sides.27 After listing the qualifications required of the critic who tackled Greek inscriptions—neutrality in the face of variant readings, prudence in distinguishing the possible from the impossible, thorough knowledge of the language, sufficient talent to emend persuasively—Hermann proceeded to deny Boeckh every single one of them: “Mit Bedauern müssen wir bekennen, bey Hrn. B., alle diese Eigenschaften nur zu oft, ja fast überall zu vermissen.” Hermann went on to insinuate that Boeckh’s earlier acclaimed work on Pindar had been possible only because others had cleared the way for him; with the cig he stood on his own and exposed.28 With ferocious sarcasm, Hermann dismantled Boeckh’s construals 24 Harnack, Geschichte, vol. 1.2, 667–71. Boeckh’s proposal, with comments by Philipp Karl Buttmann and Barthold Georg Niebuhr, is reprinted in ibid., 2:371–82. Niebuhr’s commentary suggested that the excerpting of books and manuscripts be supplemented by the “Reise eines ausgezeichneten Philologen nach Paris, England, Griechenland (von England zur See dorthin)” (380), but this plan, like that for the division of labor within the commission, came to naught. 25 Larfeld, Handbuch, 1:74. 26 August Boeckh to Karl Otfried Müller, 13 Sept. 1825, and Gottfried Hermann to August Boeckh, 6 Sept. 1825, in Briefwechsel zwischen August Boeckh und Karl Otfried Mueller, 171–74. 27 On the stakes in the controversy, see Glenn W. Most, “One Hundred Years of Fractiousness: Disciplining Polemics in Nineteenth-Century German Scholarship,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 127 (1997): 349–61. 28 Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Boeckh’s Behandlung, 24–25.

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of the inscriptions one by one, ridiculing his Greek grammar, his tin ear for metrics, his long-winded commentaries, his unfounded emendations. Having left barely an inscription standing, Hermann concluded that this was more than enough grounds to query “ob dies Kritik sey, und auf welchen Rang unter der Kritikern Hr. B. Ansprüche machen könne,” and uttered the pious hope that the Berlin Academy would take measures to insure that future fascicles of the cig would be above reproach.29 But nowhere in his tirade did Hermann rebuke Boeckh for neglecting autopsia, for making no effort to view the stones with his own eyes. Although from the standpoint of western Europe Greece was still a remote and dangerous country, riven by a war of independence against the Ottomans in the 1820s, French and British collections held important marbles, as did Italy. Yet amid the mudslinging that followed Hermann’s review, neither the Sprachphilologen (Hermann’s faction) nor the Sachphilologen (Boeckh and other adherents of Altertumswissenschaft) hurled that particular accusation, though they rebuked one another for almost every other philological failing and quite a few personal ones as well. Autopsia was not yet firmly established as a principle of Kritik. This emerges most clearly in the skirmish between Hermann and Boeckh concerning Inscription Number 43, allegedly from the Ionian island of Leucadia (Lefkada) and published by Demetrius Petrizzopulus in 1814, which Boeckh branded a forgery but Hermann insisted was authentic. While Hermann conceded that Petrizzopulus was a shifty witness, he held Boeckh’s grammatical strictures against the inscription to be absurd; Boeckh countered with an appeal to the authority of his Berlin colleagues August Immanuel Bekker and Philipp Karl Buttmann as grammarians and that of the English clergyman Hugh James Rose, who claimed that the Museo Naniano in Venice, to which the inscription had been reportedly sold, knew nothing of it.30 Their criteria were the critic’s expert assessment of semantics and syntax and the historian’s judgment of reliable testimony; neither thought to settle the matter by a trip to Venice or even sending an inquiry to a trusted correspondent in the Veneto. In the assessment of R.H.E. Meier, deputized by Boeckh to refute Hermann’s rejoinder to Boeckh’s reply to Hermann’s review (the adversaries and their allies kept up a ping-pong volley of Kritik and Antikritik for months), all a competent and conscientious editor of inscriptions could do was to collate transcriptions, which were often divergent because of the difficulty of

29 30

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 62, 69, 75; Hugh James Rose, Inscriptione Graecae vetustissime (Cambridge: J. Smith, 1825), vi.

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reading the abraded stones, and apply the usual techniques of grammatical, diplomatic, and historical criticism to select the most probable.31 Contrast Mommsen’s stance on forgeries, a subject that occupied several pages in his short 1847 Denkschrift under the rubric “Kritik der Inschriften.” He began by underscoring the gravity of the problem, especially for Latin as compared to Greek inscriptions: “Was sind die Fälschungen des einen Fourmont gegen die vierzig Bände des Ligorius und die Unzahl geringerer und oft auch obskurer Falsare!”32 He estimated the number of false inscriptions as in the thousands; Kellermann (alerted by Borghesi) suggested that as many as half of the circa sixty thousand known Latin inscriptions might be forgeries.33 Mommsen’s first step was precisely that used by Boeckh and Hermann: trace the suspect inscription back to its original source and apply the usual standards to assess the reliability of the reporter. But since the source of a published inscription was often not given, the next step was to track down the manuscripts of notorious forgers like Ligorio (held by the royal archives of Turin) and simply copy them. Following the example of Gruter, Muratori, and Boeckh, Mommsen proposed that the cil contain a kind of rogues’ gallery, a special section for known forgeries grouped by forger, as a warning to the unwary. Yet when all else failed, there was no alternative but to go back to the stones: In sehr vielen Fällen indes ist aus dem gedruckten oder handschriftlichen Material allein kein fester Boden für die Kritik, die höhere wie die niedere, zu gewinnen… Es ist zum verzweifeln, in einen solchen Wust Ordnung bringen, das Falsche ausscheiden, den Text constituiren zu sollen; man verliert den Muth und entschliesst sich lieber zu beschwerliche Reisen, als länger in dieser Verwirrung umherumzutappen.34 31

R.H.E. Meier, “Analyse der in der Leipz. Lit. Zeit. Nr. 238–41 d.J. enthaltenen Beurtheilung des Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum,” reprinted in Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Boeckh’s Behandlung, 78–180, at 93. 32 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 8. The abbé Michel Fourmont was appointed to the chair for Syriac at the Collège Royal in Paris in 1720 and later traveled to Greece and the Levant; his forgeries were exposed by Boeckh: Conrad Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland, 2 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1883), 2:699. Pirro Ligorio was a sixteenth-century Neapolitan architect and antiquary whose forgeries were gradually exposed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially by Maffei. 33 Olaf Kellermann, “Projet d’une collection complète des inscriptions, latines, présenté en 1836, à l’Académie de Copenhague,” in Projets et rapports relatifs d’un recueil général d’épigraphie latine, 9–18, at 10. 34 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 20–21.

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Even if it were simply (though it was never simple) a matter of reconstructing a text untainted by suspicion of forgery, the critical collation and emendation of transcriptions no longer sufficed; practical experience in reading stones in situ was essential. Autopsia, practiced not just in the library or even the foreign archive but in the field, had entered Kritik. By implication at least, Mommsen’s insistence on the necessity of autopsia in epigraphy was an even more devastating critique of Boeckh’s cig than Hermann’s sharp-fanged review. Despite their clashes over Altertumswissen­ schaft, Boeckh and Hermann implicitly agreed on what was expected of the critic, however much they doubted each other’s competence (Hermann stronger on language, Boeckh on history). Although he eventually recommended firsthand inspection of the original inscription in doubtful cases,35 Boeckh himself never acquired the hands-on experience Mommsen claimed was the sine qua non qualification for the editor of such a definitive corpus. Mommsen, following the example of Borghesi and Kellermann, had changed the rules of the game. Boeckh must have sensed this; he opposed Mommsen’s proposal for the cil to the bitter end, just as the Berlin Academy had opposed Jahn’s earlier proposal (which also involved Mommsen) of 1845, in part on the grounds that there was no point in undertaking so much expensive foreign travel until all the published sources in Germany had been thoroughly examined. Only the resolute support of Karl Lachmann, Friedrich Wilhelm Gerhard, and, above all, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who as chancellor to the Prussian crown forced the academy’s hand by obtaining royal support for Mommsen’s proposal, eventually pushed the cil through the Historical-Philological Class, the majority of whose members still upheld Boeckh’s cig as the paragon of all such critical epigraphic collections.36 iv

Abklatsche

Subsequent generations of classical philologists judged Boeckh harshly for his blindness, literal and figurative, to the necessity of autopsia in epigraphy. This criticism was colored by the rousing success of the cil and Mommsen’s masterful organization of what he himself called Großwissenschaft, the prototype

35 Boeckh, Encyklopädie, 145. 36 Harnack, Geschichte, vol. 1.2, 773–75, 900–13, esp. 912 for Boeckh’s minority objection even in 1853.

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of all Big Science ever since, whether in the humanities or the sciences.37 In contrast to the glacial pace of the cig, more or less left to Boeckh alone, Mommsen’s team of young philologists, many of whom went on to professorships after their apprenticeship at the cil, produced volume after volume at a steady pace. The classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who reorganized the limping cig along more Mommsenian lines after 1902 and who was perhaps not incidentally Mommsen’s son-in-law, summed up the condemnations of later generations: “Vor allem ist Boeckh nie dazu gekommen, für die Steine anzuerkennen, was für die Handschriften im Prinzip feststand, daß man vom Original auszugehen hat.”38 Although Boeckh eventually received transcriptions from Greece sent by the archaeologist Ludwig Ross, he himself never seems to have puzzled out an inscription from the original stone. He clung to the principle of universal criticism applied to the disembodied text even in his later works, and had waspish words for those who, like Maffei, advocated a special kind of criticism for different media. Such a critica lapidaria was nothing but “rohe Sachpedanterei” and unworthy of scientific philology; for criticism, it was a matter of indifference whether the text “auf Stein oder Papier überliefert ist.”39 Yet the turn to autopsia had its own problems, as Mommsen was well aware. Even discounting the trouble and expense of travel to lands without decent roads, much less railways, autopsia was anything but a straightforward matter of open-eyed, open-minded empiricism. Squinting at half-effaced, often fragmentary inscriptions for hours on end under the brazen sun of southern skies could produce strange hallucinations among even the most scrupulous and expert epigraphers.40 Then there were the innumerable errors of stonecutters, who permuted letters, skipped lines, abbreviated wantonly when they ran out of space, and generally seemed to have been part of a conspiracy to strew 37

Theodor Mommsen, “Antwort an Harnack,” delivered 3 July 1890 to the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Mommsen, Reden und Aufsätze, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1905), 208–10; Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Mommsen und Harnack. Die Geburt von Big Science aus den Geisteswissenschaften,” in Theodor Mommsen. Wissenschaft und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Alexander Demandt, Andreas Goltz, and Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 121–41. 38 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Geschichte der Philologie, 54; cf. Bursian, Geschichte, 2:698, who faulted Boeckh for not having taken the trouble at least to travel to west European museums, even if Greece was inaccessible. 39 Boeckh, Encyklopädie, 242. 40 Larfeld, Handbuch, 1:253, describes the case of the French archaeologist Théophile Homolle, who led the excavation at Delphi, where he claimed to have experienced such a hallucination.

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obstacles in the way of future epigraphers. Under field conditions, the danger of projection, of interpreting a chance slash in the stone as a phantom letter stroke that would make a sentence parse or ignoring an inscrutable jumble of letters, loomed so large that some philologists recommended “a stupid but faithful copyist” over an adept41—a claim flatly rejected by epigraphers with field experience, but one so widespread that they felt obliged to refute it as a confusion of ignorance with impartiality.42 No wonder Mommsen seconded Borghesi in the view that one often made fewer errors in collating old transcriptions than in making a new one. Returning to the original stone could clear up earlier misreadings—but at the risk of introducing others.43 The travails of empiricism were never-ending. So were the ennuis of field research. Mommsen had tears in his eyes when he first arrived in Rome, and he made good friends among other young German philologists through the Instituto di correspondenza archeologica (established in Rome in 1829). But he hated the heat, abhorred the snail’s pace at which the Italians worked, chafed at the restricted hours of the Vatican Library and other collections, and dreaded meeting a fate like Kellermann’s.44 After receiving a letter from Jahn in May 1845 concerning the prospects for a cil sponsored by the Berlin Academy, Mommsen, then in Florence, confided to his diary that he would have much preferred a professorship in cool, misty Kiel to four or five more years in Italy: “Lieber mag sich alles zerschlagen, als dass ich das Unternehmen so wie Kellermann anfinge und damit all meine wissenschaftlichen Bestrebungen zu Grabe trüge und mich für ewig in diese hesperische Gefangenschaft verbannte!”45 In his proposal to the Berlin Academy he therefore emphasized that the editing could be done far more quickly and cheaply in Berlin than in Italy and (probably for the first and last time ever in the annals of German-Italian relationships) compared the climate of the former favorably to that of the latter.46 For Mommsen, Italy was not the land where the lemon trees bloomed; it was the land where libraries never lent out their books. 41

[John Percival Postgate], “Textual Criticism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 29 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 26:708–15, at 713; cf. Boeckh, Encyklopädie, 199. 42 Larfeld, Handbuch, 1:2. 43 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 10. 44 Mommsen had particularly choice words for the Jesuit Professor Sarti, charged by the Vatican with preparing an edition of the inscriptions in its collections: “ein gebrechlicher, allem Arbeiten und zumal allem Fertigmachen abgeneigter, obwohl an sich gründlich gelehrter und der Epigraphik wohl kundiger Mann, [der] nie und nimmermehr dieser seiner Verpflichtung auch nur theilweise nachkommen wird…” Ibid., 5. 45 Mommsen, Tagebuch, 167–68. 46 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 29–30.

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What would reconcile his escape across the Alps with his commitment to autopsia—and with the ever-more-stringent demands of criticism as it advanced in all its branches—was the simple but essential technique of the Abklatsch or paper squeeze. The earliest attested use of this method of mechanically reproducing inscriptions was by the sixteenth-century Dutch humanist Stephanus Winandus Pighius, but it seems to have been used only occasionally in the intervening centuries.47 Kellermann had, however, strongly recommended the procedure in his proposal for a cil, and the 1843 French proposal included instructions on how to make such estampages, which had been used extensively by Egyptologists such as Jean-Antoine Letronne and Richard Lepsius.48 The great advantage of the method was that it required little skill, could be used wherever paper and water were available, shipped easily, and produced a haptic negative of the original inscription, complete with every scratch and squiggle. After cleaning the stone, the epigrapher stretched over the inscription a sheet of ordinary paper, moistened it with a sponge dipped in water, banged it firmly to push the wet paper into all the incisions cut into the stone, let the squeeze dry in the sun, and finally rolled it up to be mailed or transported.49 Other methods of making facsimiles such as rubbings and tracings were possible, and eventually photography became affordable and feasible under field conditions. Yet no other method was as portable, as versatile, and as faithful as the humble paper squeeze: it reproduced every detail, even those overlooked at first glance but in hindsight crucial, without the distortions of light and shadow that marred photographs; it allowed careful and repeated study back in Paris or Berlin, where the epigrapher could consult specialist libraries; it could be compared with other inscriptions, both transcribed and squeezed; it lay ready for consultation whenever a question about earlier readings arose or new discoveries solved old puzzles. The squeeze could “not only replace the study of the original but even surpass it” in the opinion of its proponents.50 Squeezes offered autopsia in the comfort of the study, criticism sharpened by the possibility of repeated observation as knowledge of Latin paleography and Roman history advanced—and as ever more original inscriptions were destroyed by weather, war, and the construction of roads, railways, and other modern conveniences. Eventually, the cil would accumulate 47 Larfeld, Handbuch, 1:5–6. 48 Emil Hübner, Über mechanischen Copien von Inschriften (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1881), 18–21. 49 Ibid., 5–10. 50 Ibid., 5.

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some twenty thousand such squeezes, at once the guarantee of and substitute for autopsia. v

Conclusion: The Price of Progress

Both the cig and the cil were launched with the proud confidence that the enormous progress made by criticism in recent decades justified a large investment of time, labor, and money into the preparation of definitive collections of Greek and Latin inscriptions that would serve classical philologists for centuries to come. The future cast a long backward shadow over these undertakings, which were envisioned as monuments of nineteenth-century scholarship, as durable as the marble inscriptions themselves. When Boeckh toyed with the idea of using the introduction of a future volume of the cig to needle Hermann, his Göttingen friends Georg Ludolf Dissen and Karl Otfried Müller, who had up to that point been pouring oil upon the flames of the feud, pleaded for restraint in the name of future readers: “Er [Dissen] bittet, und ich auch, dass Sie doch ja im Corpus selbst nicht zu viel Rücksicht auf H.[ermann] nehmen möchte; in 100 Jahren, wo man das Corpus am meisten brauchen wird, weiss Niemand mehr von diesen Streitschriften.”51 Mommsen regarded the cil as sowing seeds that only future generations of scholars would reap, “weil unsere Früchte…im besten Falle langsam reifen.”52 But the progress in philological criticism that had persuaded Boeckh, Mommsen, and their supporters in the Berlin Academy that the time was ripe for monument building rolled on inexorably, leaving work that only a decade before had seemed avant garde to bring up the rear. Paradoxically, ever-more, ever-accelerating progress eroded rather than bolstered the confidence of the philologists (and even more so that of their colleagues in the natural sciences): would their results survive even a generation?53 Hermann had objected to Boeckh’s habit of interpolating his own emendations into the text of the cig inscriptions instead of marking them in a different color, so that the reader 51 52

53

Karl Otfried Müller to August Boeckh, 2 June 1826, in Briefwechsel zwischen August Boeckh und Karl Otfried Müller, 188. Theodor Mommsen, “Rede zur Vorfeier des Geburtstags des Kaisers,” delivered 18 March 1880 to the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Mommsen, Reden und Aufsätze, 89–103, at 103. Lorraine Daston, “The Historicity of Science,” in Historicization-Historisierung, vol. 5 of Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001): 201–21.

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could distinguish transcription from critical conjecture at a glance, but he had not objected to conjecture and emendation per se. That was the business of the critic—or rather of the critics, who would then proceed to duel over their rival readings in the learned journals, seconded by their allies and students.54 But Mommsen, perhaps with the Hermann-Boeckh furore over the cig in mind, advised the utmost reserve in making any conjectures in the preparation of the cil.55 The intervening twenty years had sharpened philologists’ awareness of how even the most brilliant emendations and conjectures could be upended by new evidence or interpretations. Boeckh’s melancholy verdict toward the end of his career was that out of a hundred conjectures, perhaps only five were true.56 Divination had always been a high-wire act; by the midnineteenth century, even its most daring practitioners knew they were working without a net. A small but telling detail highlights the contrast between the halcyon days when inscriptions seemed to summon up the critic’s highest powers, from lowest to highest Kritik, and the pall of caution that descended upon the German classical philologists by mid-century. When in 1843 the French had proclaimed their intent to create their own corpus of Latin inscriptions, their brochure had included instructions on how to make paper squeezes by Joseph Tastu, who suggested that the imprint could be made more distinct by coloring the hollows of the dried paper with red pencil.57 Some forty years later, Emil Hübner, an epigrapher at the University of Berlin, published a comprehensive guide to making mechanical reproductions of inscriptions. Hübner’s instructions for making squeezes closely resemble those of Tastu, but where they diverge, Hübner is almost always the one less concerned with niceties: Tastu worried about injuring the stones, Hübner countered that “zu zimperlich ängstlichen Klopfen” would ruin the imprint; Tastu recommended a special leather blotter for the pressing, Hübner reassured readers that a plain old handkerchief would do. But when it came to coloring the squeeze, it was Hübner who turned prim: “Der Charakter einer unmittelbar mechanischen Kopie, mit allen Zufälligkeiten und Undeutlichkeiten des Originals, wird aufgehoben, sobald man, wie Tastu empfiehlt, die Schriftzüge des Abdrucks mit Bleistift, Kreide oder Farbe nachzieht.”58 To color the concavities of the squeeze, 54 Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Boeckh’s Behandlung, 21. 55 Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung, 22. 56 Boeckh, Encyklopädie, 175. 57 Joseph Tastu, “Instructions pour l’estampage des inscriptions,” in Projets et rapports relatifs d’un recueil général d’épigraphie latine, 35. 58 Hübner, Über mechanische Copien, 11.

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which had seemed to Tastu an innocent way of rendering the letters more distinct, appeared to Hübner a potential falsification, an incipient conjecture foisted upon the inscription. The reverence for the ancient inscriptions as Ur-texts had been transferred to the mechanical squeeze—and to the sleepingbeauty archive Mommsen’s cil had become, awaiting the future pefection of Kritik.

chapter 54

Time Offline and On Daniel Rosenberg Among the crucial things we learn from Anthony Grafton is the importance of information devices in the age of paper. Thanks in great measure to Tony’s example, our field is now rich in histories of indexes, footnotes, tables, and, in the case of my own collaborative work with him (Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline), charts and diagrams.1 The trick is that even in the analysis of these artifacts, we often remain at some remove. It is one thing to understand a planetary chart from the Renaissance—and even to pass one’s comprehensive examinations on the subject, as Tony did at the University of Chicago—it is another thing to put one to use. So, after our work on Cartographies of Time, I wondered whether chronology charts such as those discussed in the book might be experienced by readers in an interactive digital environment rather than just reproduced in photographs and described. I wondered further how adaptable some of these historical artifacts would be to the specific practical and epistemological dynamics of the digital environment, what the strictures of programming might reveal about the mechanism of the diagrams, and what the direct comparison of physical and virtual versions of the artifacts might reveal about the advantages and limitations of the digital interface. In response to this set of questions, a team at the University of Oregon has been developing digital versions of old chronology tools and games under the rubric Time OnLine. The ones we have completed may be found at Time OnLine, http://pages.uoregon.edu/dbr/time-online. Our first project was Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining all Sorts of Facts and Dates, a chronology game designed by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) during the 1880s and published in 1892. Mark Twain’s Memory Builder barely registers in the Twain canon. In its day, it was not very successful, and from a modern vantage it may be hard to understand what drove Twain’s interest in this resistant subject. On the other hand, this very strangeness is part of what makes the Memory Builder such an interesting place to start thinking about chronology on the one hand and memory on the other. Few of us are surprised by how thoroughly different from ours 1 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_055

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were the memory worlds of Guilio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, and Robert Fludd.2 Yet, traveling back only to the period of Twain, we find ourselves already in forgotten mnemonic territory. This is less apparent if one merely reads Twain, whether the novels and stories, which have maintained a certain cultural currency through regular reading and citation, or even the more miscellaneous writings such as those on the arts of memory and chronology discussed in Cartographies of Time. The alterity of Twain’s world is most apparent when one attempts to engage with the memory tools that Twain innovated and promoted. So that’s where Time OnLine begins.

Old Mnemonics

What was the art of memory for Twain? In the late nineteenth century, the memory arts should already have been long gone. During the eighteenth century, more than a hundred years earlier, philosophers of the Enlightenment valorized the creative faculty of memory in contrast to the rote business of memorization, and this contrast persists to this day. Yet during the Enlighten­ ment and after, in certain pursuits, memorization remained a fundamental technique and concern. In such fields, not least of all historical chronology, the decline of the classical memory arts produced both a need and an opportunity for innovation in mnemonic tools. Ironically, then, it turns out that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proved fertile ground for new and newly packaged memory systems, and, in this, the supposedly moribund field of chronology was very much in the forefront. As late as 1914, Twain’s article on memorizing chronologies, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” could appear in such a popular venue as Harper’s Monthly Magazine.3 Of course, Twain was a recently departed American icon, and Harper’s might well have published his grocery lists to an eager readership. (Now, there’s a Graftonian project!) But Twain’s mnemonic works were no mere ephemera. They captured his humorous but considered reflections on history and historical study, subjects of personal interest that animated, among other works, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the 1880s and the fragmentary Mysterious Stranger that occupied Twain to the end of his life. 2 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 3 Mark Twain, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 130, no. 775 (December 1914): 3–15.

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When it was published, “How to Make Memory Dates Stick” was not new work. Twain drafted the article in 1899, fully fifteen years before, and even then the piece was retrospective. It was, one might say, a memory memoir. In it, Twain recounts his quixotic efforts still two decades earlier to interest his young daughters in the study of chronology. As Twain tells it, Clara and Suzy liked history just fine, but to them, memorizing dates was boring. So Twain set about devising activities and eventually tools to make chronology fun. The best of these were games, first improvised, then formal, resulting eventually in a patent application for a “game apparatus” in 1884 (approved in 1885), and, in 1892, the Memory Builder game itself (fig. 54.1).4 It’s no mystery why Harper’s published Twain’s chronology article: as Tony Grafton and I argued in Cartographies of Time, “How to Make History Dates

Figure 54.1

Mark Twain’s Memory Builder. Complete set including game board with rules on reverse, pamphlet of facts, pin box. Courtesy of The Mark Twain Project, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

4 Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain], Game Apparatus, us Patent 324,525, 18 Aug. 1885; Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates (1892).

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Stick” is vintage Twain, sly and anecdotal in style but tightly analytical in argument. It takes up a topic that hardly seems a good platform for humor and cashes in doubly each time it pulls off a joke. At the same time, Twain’s article takes a stab at an intellectual problem of long standing, which in some ways was gaining new life—how to use visual devices to make historical data memorable. And the article was peppered with the amusing cartoon drawings that Twain made to help remember dates. The kings of England were each associated with words beginning with the first letter of their names. The Henrys were hens; the Stephens, steer; the Williams, whales; and so forth. Twain’s interest in applying memory techniques to the study of chronology was neither new nor strange in his day. The nineteenth century produced many new variations on mnemonic themes. On the one hand, Twain’s contemporaries were aware of a growing body of chronological material to be organized and memorized. On the other hand, the arts of memory were losing cultural prestige. Broadly speaking, innovative reference tools were favored over new mnemonic techniques. Indeed, in the face of the massive new archival collections being published in these same years, the best-trained memory athlete would surely have despaired.5 Yet the new reference works did not close the book on memory tools and games, not by a long shot. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a striking diversity of edifying amusements designed to facilitate the memorization of chronology, including board games, puzzles, and cards. In some instances, these games were adaptations of existing formats plotted in historical time. The linear structure of the race game, for example, was a natural fit for chronology. Chronology race games traced segments of history and sometimes the whole historical pageant from Creation to the present. Other games were still simpler in concept. In 1883, James Larimore of Chicago patented a checkerboard inscribed with dates and other valuable historical information. But other than the inscriptions, the board worked no differently from any other board for chess or checkers.6 The same may be said for Walter Hammet’s chronological playing cards of 1910. Concentration and trivia games such as Uncle Sam’s Game of American History (1851) and Historical

5 The art of memory is still not dead. On present-day memory athletes, see the lively account by Josh Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). On the explosion of published historiographical data in the nineteenth century, see Lorraine Daston, ed., Archiving Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, forthcoming). 6 James W. Larimore, Game-Board, us Patent 278,712, 5 June, 1883.

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Amusement: A New and Entertaining Game on the History of England (1853) addressed history more thoroughly. The association of chronology and memorization is strong in all of these games, even the simplest ones. For Larimore, Hammet, and contemporaries, chronology was the field of memorization par excellence. This same period saw the flourishing of new systems to facilitate the conceptualization of chronological relationships and the memorization of names and dates. There was a great variety to these artifacts. Some borrowed from the eighteenth-century tradition of Joseph Priestley, placing names and dates into a measured rectilinear scheme. Others employed a competing graphic strategy using organic metaphors such as trees and rivers, and stressing genealogical rather than metrical relationships among actors and events. Still others, including the New York Presbyterian minister James Meeker Ludlow in his Concentric Chart of History from 1885, employed moving devices of one sort or another to provide historical references and calculations. Ludlow’s chart looked like a Spanish fan (fig. 54.2). Each leaf, which could be pulled out so that any could sit adjacent to any other, was inscribed with the chronology of a nation. That way one could easily discover what was happening at the same time in any two places in the world. Ludlow’s Concentric Chart is the second artifact produced for Time OnLine. One of the most prominent nineteenth-century chronographic systems is also one of the most alien from a modern perspective; it is the third object to be developed for Time OnLine. The so-called Polish System put chronology into an abstract visual framework, devoid even of written names and dates.7 Devised first in the 1820s by Antoni Jażwiński and refined repeatedly during the nineteenth century, first by the famous Polish general Józef Bem, then by many others. Bem’s version of the system employed a ten-by-ten grid of squares, each subdivided into three-by-three. The larger pattern was used to represent one hundred units of chronological time, most often one hundred years. The internal three-by-three grids were thematic. One sub-square might  epresent battles, another discoveries, another important marriages, and so forth. Students using the charts would fill the squares with colored paints indicating the nations where battles, discoveries, and marriages took place.

7 Antoni Jażwiński, Méthode polonaise appliquée à la chronologie… (Lyon: J.-M. Boursy, 1832); Józef Bem, Méthode mnémonique polonaise perfectionnée à Paris (Paris: Librairie polonaise, 1838). Other versions were offered later by Napoleon Feliks Zaba, Nelson Loverin, John Milton Gregory, and others.

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Figure 54.2

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James M. Ludlow, Ludlow’s Concentric Chart of History (1885). Courtesy of Daniel Rosenberg

The version of the Polish System adapted in Time OnLine comes from the 1850 book The Polish-American System of Chronology by the American transcendentalist and educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.8 To anyone unfamiliar with the system, a filled chart is a bewildering, if beautiful, confetti—or, to take it in another direction, something like a Mondrian interpretation of an ibm punch card (fig. 54.3). Enough educators were convinced by the approach, however, that it spread widely in Europe and the United States under a variety of guises. In France, the system was tried in the schools in the 1830s. In Michigan, in the

8 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, The Polish-American System of Chronology (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1850).

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Figure 54.3

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, The Polish-American System of Chronology, Reproduced, with Some Modifications, from General Bem’s Franco-Polish Method (Boston and New York, 1850). Painted grid. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society

1860s, it was promoted by the superintendent of public instruction, John Milton Gregory, as taking a middle road between tedium and “vagabondizing” in history.9 A physician in Montreal, Nelson Loverin, sold a wooden classroom apparatus mechanizing the functions of the chart.10 Remarkably, Peabody proposed the Polish system of memorization as a remedy for rote learning. She disapproved of history teachers relying on textbooks. She thought that true historical study meant reading primary texts. She wrote,

9 10

John Milton Gregory, The Hand-Book of History and Chronology (Chicago: Adams, Blackmer & Lyon, 1867), v. Nelson Loverin, Loverin’s Historical Centograph and Slate (Montreal: D. Bentley, 1876).

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If I could have my way, no child should ever touch a book at school, on any subject, that was not a work of genius on that subject; and of all things should he not be allowed to think that he was hearing the grand tale of any country’s life, when he was reading a mere almanac.11 The role of the chronological chart was to provide a framework in which the student could weave her or his own historical braid, based on the great books.12 From 1849 to 1852, Peabody traveled the United States selling this idea along with a book, a set of charts, and paints. Her letters from this period convey the fervency of her historiographical mission.13

Mark Twain’s Memory Builder (Alpha)

All of which brings us to Mark Twain. As we can already discern, Twain’s interest in history, charts, and games was hardly idiosyncratic. Like so many contemporaries, Twain was serious about chronology. So when he submitted United States patent application number 145076 on 9 October 1884, for a chronology game echoing the grids of Bem’s system, it should perhaps seem more normal than strange. Twain believed in knowing historical names and dates, but when, in the summer of 1883, he observed his daughters’ governess, “trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads,” he saw a problem. History was interesting, but memorizing history was not—or was not yet, at any rate. For now, Twain wrote, the governess’s hammering was the closest thing to fun the girls were getting: Part of this fun—if you like to call it that—consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard contract. It was all dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn’t

11

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “A Method of Laying the Foundations of History,” District School Journal of the State of New York 12, no. 11 (Mar. 1852): 170. 12 Ibid. 13 Bruce A. Ronda, ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). See also Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.14 For Twain, there was no question of forgoing memorization. He believed that educated people should know their history, and knowing history meant memorizing. The question was how to make memorization tolerable, or, in the best case, fun. Twain’s first stab at it was a game he designed for the outdoors. For this, the roadway to Twain’s house at Quarry Farm was to serve as a gigantic, serpentine timeline. To make it, Twain measured 817 feet of the road for the 817 years of history from the accession of William the Conqueror in 1066 to the present year, 1883. Along the way, measuring feet for years, he planted pegs in the ground to indicate the year in which each British monarchy commenced. By his own account, the time road made for good fun. Twain’s daughters raced the course shouting the names of the English monarchs and chasing apples their father tossed to them. As Twain recalls: When you think of Henry iii, do you see a great long stretch of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it joins on to Edward i, I always see a small pear-bush with its green fruit hanging down. When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady little group of these small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George iii, I see him stretching up the hill, part of him occupied by a flight of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch when he comes into my mind, for he just filled the stretch which went by the summer-house. Victoria’s reign reached almost to my study door on the first little summit; there’s sixteen feet to be added now; I believe that that would carry it to a big pine-tree that was shattered by some lightning one summer when it was trying to hit me.15 Soon Twain was at work on an indoor version of his history game, and the project consumed him. He first worked up rules for play with a cribbage board and a deck of cards; then he began to design his own game boards. He worked at the project intensely in the evenings even as he continued to write and then complete Huckleberry Finn in the daytime. On good days, Twain was sure that he was onto something grand and lucrative. On bad days, and especially after some disagreements with his publisher, he despaired that the game wasn’t working and might never. 14 15

Twain, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” 4–5. Ibid., 6.

Time Offline And On

Figure 54.4

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Samuel L. Clemens. Patent application for game apparatus, submitted 9 October 1884. Granted 18 August 1885. United States National Archives and Records Administration

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For more than a year, Twain tinkered at his chronology game, eventually settling on rules and a layout. He filed for a patent on 9 October 1884 (fig. 54.4). Six months later, his application was sent back for several reasons, including possible infringement upon a ten-year-old patent for a “Game-Board” held by Victor Klobassa of Washington, dc, and because the Patent Office also stated that a game as such could not be patented (fig. 54.5).16 The second objection was easily addressed: Twain changed the name of his invention from “game” to “game apparatus.” As to the first objection, he wrote: A reconsideration is respectfully requested. In the first place Klobassa’s game board is circular and the numbers are produced on radial lines. That is not the case with applicant’s. Applicant has numbers for receiving pins, the reference has not. The Examiner did not, we think, study the patent to Klobassa nor applicant’s drawings closely enough. Klobassa distinctly states that “any numbered balls or dice may be used” and his is evidently a board for a game of chance or luck, more or less a gambling apparatus. Applicant’s game is one in which great skill is required and to play the game perfectly, both skill and knowledge. It is no chance game at all, and can be played only by persons having a thorough knowledge of history. There is not a single feature common to applicant’s game board and the one shown in reference with the exception that both have numbers, and that both are boards, that is all.17 Twain was right: his was no game of chance. Playing required mastery of chronological information. Too much mastery, as it turned out. This was not Twain’s first patent application. In 1871, he received us Patent 121,992 for an adjustable garment strap. In 1873, he received us Patent 140,245 for a self-pasting scrapbook, which is said to have sold more than twenty-five thousand copies and to have earned as much during Twain’s lifetime as any of his literary products.18 Twain revised his application three times before the patent was finally granted. On 18 August 1885, he received us Patent 324,525 for his “Game Apparatus.”

16

17 18

us Patent Office to Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain], 14 Apr. 1885, us National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, md. The Patent Office asked for several more revisions on 19 May, 25 May, and 30 June 1885 before finally granting the patent. Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain] to us Patent Office, 19 May 1885, us National Archives and Records Administration. R. Kent Rasmussen, Critical Companion to Mark Twain (New York: Infobase, 2007), 874.

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Letter from us Patent Office to Samuel L. Clemens regarding “Game Apparatus.” 14 April 1885. United States National Archives and Records Administration

Six years later, Twain and his publisher, Fred J. Hall, set to work on a commercial version. Much as they agreed with one another on the general virtues of the game, Twain and Hall wrestled over details. Twain wanted the game board to be backed with cork, but Hall opted for cardboard. On 5 February 1892, Twain wrote, The game-board is neat and pretty, but it has a fatal defect. Instead of being filled up flush and level, the printed sheet of figures is stretched

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across a hollow, as from side to side of a slate; as a result, any pressure crushes the sheet in, and splits it in various directions. Also the backing is not sufficient to hold up the pins; also the pins must be shoved in by force, whereas they ought to enter without force. It will not be well to send any of these boards out—they will come back to you, sure.19 Twain was so disappointed by the flimsiness of the board that he despaired at having his name associated with the product; nonetheless, in 1892, Mark Twain’s Memory Builder appeared on the market under his name, backed with the cardboard to which he rightly objected. Surviving copies are almost invariably unplayed, as the played versions quickly became useless, just as Twain had predicted. The arc of disappointment is palpable in Twain’s letters. Early in 1891, the prospect of the game still excited him immensely. On 17 February he wrote to Hall with enthusiasm: “Come quickly, and discuss my historical game. It is the important feature now.”20 A week later, Hall had lined up a printer to prepare a dummy board. Exchanges continued with Hall posing questions about the relationship between the game and the patent. And during the ensuing year, the game went from prototype to product. Yet during the same stretch of time, Twain’s enthusiasm largely gave way to frustration, the composition of the board backing being only one problem among others. On 8 March 1892, he wrote: “The fatalest objection of all is that the trade see no promise in the Game. Therefore, my advice is that you put it aside until some indefinite time in the far future—it isn’t worth trouble, now, when you can employ your time more profitably on other things. Besides, I am sorry I put my name to the Game; I wish I hadn’t.”21 In May, Hall was still having trouble finding stores to sell the game, reporting those that did were only willing to take copies on consignment. Twain’s disappointment was all the greater as the game was also a financial venture, and all indications were that it would be a money-loser.22 The game made no money to speak of. That was a letdown, but at least it wasn’t a burden like Twain’s investment in the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetting machine in which his investment incurred heavy losses.

19 20 21 22

Hamlin Lewis Hill, ed., Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers: 1867–1894 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 306. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 270–72, 306–08 (esp. letters 220, 248, 250). Ibid., 272.

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Despite its commercial failure, there was plenty to be proud of in the game. Mark Twain’s Memory Builder is a handsome little set. It includes a game board, a box of pins, and a pamphlet of historical names and dates researched by Twain’s brother, Orion Clemens, called “Facts for Mark Twain’s Memory Builder.” The board is nine by fourteen inches and one-quarter inch thick. On the front is the playing surface; on the back, the instructions. The printed faces are white paper with black ink attached to the cardboard by dark tape folded around each edge. The rules of the published game are simple in concept, though successful play requires a good deal of chronological knowledge and more than a little imagination. Twain’s instructions for play are laced with characteristic humor: “Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and the 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion. It is because they have not had a chance to play this game.” Twain’s game may be played as solitaire, using a reference book for fact checking, or as a competitive game for two or more players who test their knowledge against one another. In essence, play moves by turns as each player names a historical event and guesses its date, which is then checked by an umpire or by a competitor. Different categories of events earn different scores. Naming an accession—when a monarch took the throne or a leader was seated in office—scores ten points; a battle scores five points; a minor event scores one point. The game ends at a predetermined score or after a certain period has elapsed. The player with the most points wins. To give the game a bit more flexibility, Twain included one additional category, miscellaneous facts, which scored one point each. He writes, Miscellaneous Facts are facts which do not depend upon dates for their value. If you know how many bones there are in the human foot (whereas most of us don’t), you can state the number and score one point. Populations, boundaries of countries, length of rivers, specific gravity of various metals, astronomical facts—anything that is worth remembering, is admissible, and you can score for it. If you explain what England understands by it when a member of Parliament “applies for the Chiltern Hundreds,” do it and score a point. Waste no opportunity to tell all you know. The game board of the Memory Builder is a score sheet with one hundred individual boxes representing one hundred years, recalling the mnemonic systems of Jażwiński, Bem, and Peabody. In contrast to Twain’s earlier design, represented in his patent application, in which the game board had a row for each relevant historical year (1066, 1067,

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and so on), in the published game year boxes are simply labeled with the numbers 1 to 100, so that the game may be played for any century. In an eighteenthcentury game, for example, box number 11 would stand for the year 1711. Alternatively, players may agree to allow events from any century, in which case, 11 would stand for 1511, 1611, 1711, and every other year ending in 11, all in the same game. This version of the game is a lot easier to play since it doesn’t require the same density of chronological knowledge, but it sacrifices the narrative coherence so important in the Polish System. Score boxes are subdivided into rows for different event categories: accessions, battles, and minor events, with a separate scoring area at the bottom of the game board reserved for miscellany. A player who correctly dates an event sticks a pin in the game board in the correct year and category and claims the points. Like many educational games, Twain’s doesn’t scream fun. But Twain thought players would enjoy the conversational back and forth, the memory challenge, and just showing off. “This is a game of suggestion,” he wrote. Whenever either player pins a fact, it will be pretty sure to suggest one to the adversary. The accidental mention of Waterloo will turn loose an inundation of French history. The mention of any very conspicuous event in the history of any nation will bring before the vision of the adversaries the minor features of the historical landscape that stretches away from it. Twain imagined that game play would unleash an interesting and profitable stream of history talk. As with other visual chronology systems from the period, the game board served as a space of visual association: a pin planted in box 92, scoring points for Columbus’s arrival in the New World, might very well stimulate an association with the French declaration of war on Austria in 1792, for example. The very fact that the board showed one hundred years at a time was important, too: many mnemonic systems of the period encouraged students to think in terms of centuries. Twain also thought the rules of the history game would be creatively “augmented” by players to produce different kinds of challenges. He suggested one such augmentation himself: at game’s end, award one hundred points to the person who records the highest number of “Minor Events.” This creates a bit of strategic complexity, like recognizing both high and low cards in poker. Twain distinguished between his game and other board games such as Klobassa’s, which challenged neither memory nor understanding. But, if these others erred too far toward conventional chance games, Twain’s game risked going too far in the other direction. If one had few historical facts at one’s disposal,

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the game was impossible to play. If one took no pleasure in exercising one’s faculty of memory, it was impossible to enjoy. These factors, along with the weak physical construction about which Twain complained, conspired to limit the game’s general appeal. By 1892, when Mark Twain’s Memory Builder appeared on the market, Twain was a famous and popular author, and the success of his self-pasting scrapbook demonstrated that a good invention paired with Twain’s name could be a potent commercial combination. Twain’s game did not meet the bar. Difficulties with the Memory Builder didn’t dim Twain’s interest in chronology or memory, though, and in the decade after it was published, he continued to refine his ideas about chronology and memorization. Thus, in 1899, he composed “How to Make History Dates Stick,” as a review of his work to date going all the way back to the outdoor game. In 1899, Twain’s focus was on the power of visual association and of drawing as an aid to memory. He writes, Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything stick—particularly IF YOU MAKE THE PICTURES YOURSELF. Indeed, that is the great point—make the pictures YOURSELF.23 Adapting the principles of the road game, Twain recommended drawing one caricature for each monarch one was trying to memorize, copying it over once for each year in which that monarch ruled, then laying these many images out into a visual timeline. Over the years, Twain continued to devise new memory aids. At one point, he recalls, he was having trouble committing a speech to memory. He came up with the idea of writing a letter representing a major section of his speech on each of his fingertips. The method turned out to have multiple flaws, not the least of which was the public’s reaction. He writes, “To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the matter with my hands.”24 The solution to the fingertip problem was to develop a strong system of visual association and to commit that to memory, so there would be no need to look at one’s fingers. This idea, of course, runs straight back to the Renaissance memory theaters discussed by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, and from 23 24

Twain, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” 3. Ibid., 3–4.

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there to the instructions of Quintilian and Cicero, and from there to Simonides of Ceos, inventor of the method of loci, or so the story goes.25 Once Twain had created a series of visual prompts he remembered his speeches and his “troubles passed away.” He recalled, In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I threw the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I could rewrite it from the pictures.26 Next, Twain turned to the harder subject of chronology, using humorous combinations of verbal and visual play. For the chronology of English kings, he created pictographs based on alliteration: Henry the hen, Stephen the steer, William the whale, and, best of all, Edward the editor, feet tipped up on the chair, pen in hand, malice in the eyes. Of his image for Edward i, Twain writes, That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on a chair, which is the editor’s way; then he can think better. I do not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if I had a model, but I made this one from memory. But it is no particular matter; they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and don’t pay enough. Edward was the first really English king that had yet occupied the throne. The editor in the picture probably looks just as Edward looked when it was first borne in upon him that this was so. His whole attitude expressed gratification and pride mixed with stupefaction and astonishment.27 Of course, Twain was poking fun, but even his jokes were mnemonic devices. Twain wanted readers to see how the image of an editor propped up in a chair might remind them that Edward i was “the first really English king that had yet occupied the throne.” Twain’s Edward ii is another editor, “sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating.”28 25 26 27 28

Thomas M. Walsh and Thomas D. Zlatic, “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” American Literature 53, no. 2 (May 1981): 214–31; Yates, The Art of Memory. Twain, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” 4. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 11.

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The point of making historical pictures, Twain says, is to help us remember, and, to this end, getting it a bit wrong in an interesting way is more useful that watching someone else do it right. This is called inspiration, he says—getting something wrong in a good way. And so it is that he gives us his mangled impression of Edward iii, or “Edward the Critic”: He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast. This one’s arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at first, but I see it now. Somehow he has got his right arm on his left shoulder, and his left arm on his right shoulder, and this shows us the back of his hands in both instances. It makes him lefthanded all around, which is a thing which has never happened before, except perhaps in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born to you: you start in to make some simple little thing, not suspecting that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain in secret, and all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out something astonishing.29 In some ways, Twain’s 1899 reflections represented a new direction for him. From a visual point of view, the Memory Builder was as spartan as one could imagine—a simple grid with circles and numbers. The cartoons of 1899 were raffish and funny. But even in this later reflection, Twain had not given up entirely on the notion of systematically representing dates. There, he tried to improve on the original system. Twain suggested that to remember a monarch’s reign, a student might draw a cartoon of the Edwardthe-Editor variety as many times as there were years in the reign and pin them up in order, switching direction at each point of regime change. This would have the effect of reinforcing the mnemonic through repetition while also creating a spatial analogy of the length of reigns, as if the kings had marched in procession “out of the Ark and down Ararat for exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road.”30 Start with William the Conqueror. Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two inches square, and we will do the twentyone years of the Conqueror’s reign. On each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and term of service. We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same letter; it is 29 30

Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 7.

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the biggest fish that swims, and William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw. By the time you have drawn twenty-one whales and written “William i—1066–1087—twenty-one years” twenty-one times, those details will be your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything but dynamite.31 Twain’s earlier games emphasized abstraction and numbers. The new games were pictorial. They were also creative and playful, fulfilling the promise of good humor somewhat lacking in the published game. When we play Twain’s game today—and really we need to play it if we want to understand it—we are in a position to consider what works and doesn’t work in the design as well as to reflect on the distance between our world of learning and Twain’s. In part, what we notice when we play, particularly if we use the pamphlet of historical facts that Twain included with his game, are the predispositions of the historiography of the period. Europe and North America are massively overrepresented, as are men and political history. One can easily quantify these prejudices simply by categorizing and counting. Elementary school students in the nineteenth-century United States knew more about minor battles in the Thirty Years’ War than they did about recent history in Africa or Asia. (It’s possible that this is still true today, though equally possible that our students know neither. Refer to Twain’s zinger about the Fourth of July, above.) But it’s not just the content of historiography that is foreign to us today, it is also the very notion of what studying history is about. For nineteenth-century teachers and students, history was very importantly about memorizing facts.

Mark Twain’s Memory Builder 2.0

Staying faithful to Twain’s approach while making the game enjoyable and instructive posed challenges different from those of building an online version of a reference tool. Putting it together, the design team negotiated constantly between Twain’s original rules and the needs of the contemporary user. It was hard for the historian in the room to explain to the programmers that the jokes and opacities in Twain’s instructions for the game mattered and couldn’t just be clarified away. 31 Ibid.

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Similarly, it was important in constructing an online version of the game to preserve, so far as possible, the look and feel of the original. We could have designed a new look, but we found that the balance of visual elements in the Twain artifact was delicate. For example, we determined that it was important whenever possible to show the whole game board. For practical purposes, seeing the whole board was not strictly necessary in the way that it would be in chess, for example. Play takes place one box at a time. However, without the whole chart in view, its function as a mnemonic is vastly reduced. The mnemonic mechanism of the Polish System could not function in graphic segments. We determined the same to be true for Twain’s game, though at a lesser level, so we designed an interface that would show the whole game board in every practical scenario. At a later date, we hope to implement a whole-board solution for tablet and phone. We also found the element of “pin dropping” to be important to the play of the game, and we did our best to simulate real-world experience. Here we had the advantage of yet another metaphor from the physical world that had already been thoroughly incorporated in the online interface in applications such as Google Maps. The notion here is that the ritual, the movements, and the shared playable space created by the game matter more than speed or simplicity per se. Our gesture to infuse the online pin drop with real-world feeling was thus more than simply the fulfillment of our obligation to the original object: it was an investment in the ritual dimension of the game play. Some aspects of Twain’s game were entirely intuitive to the programming team, and this was interesting, too. Games follow algorithms parallel to those of computer programs, and they require from their designers a consideration of user interface more multifaceted than do most books. In a sense, the history of games is a prehistory of programming. And the aptness of the metaphor of memory in computing was palpable here. Programming Twain’s game brought the point home. In “How to Make History Dates Stick” Twain emphasized the visual dimension of memory. But even there, as in his very first outdoor game, a significant part of the system was just the doing of it, following conventions, repeating. This was also the case in the published game. There was a visual aspect, the grid reminiscent of Peabody and Bem, but the play was the thing. Computer modeling also made clear how much knowledge of chronology is necessary to really enjoy Twain’s game. Mark Twain’s Memory Builder functions best in a cultural setting in which memorization of historical names and dates is widely practiced. As Twain remarks, one learns names and dates from one’s opponent. The game adds nothing that is not already in the collective knowledge of the players. For modern students, it is a challenge to have a good time playing Mark Twain’s Memory Builder. To play a robust game, you need to

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know a lot of dates. By itself, that’s not a game killer. Any number of difficult trivia games have succeeded over the years. Twain’s game, though, requires in addition a high degree of self-direction. Modern quiz games such as Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy test knowledge but provide all of the questions and answers in a highly structured format. Twain’s game gets everything from the players. For electronic game design, this proved challenging. In our version of Twain’s game, would we emphasize ease for the user at the risk of misrepresenting the difficulty of the original game? This was a highly instructive argument. The software team wanted something playable. The Graftonian in the group held the line, so far as possible, on difficulty. Twain himself knew that a fully open game might be daunting, which is why he asked his brother, Orion, to develop the “Facts for Mark Twain’s Memory Builder” pamphlet. Twain imagined that players might study it, then play the game to test their memories. His intuition was right, but the lukewarm public reception of the game suggests that he didn’t go far enough. His basic rules didn’t offer the guidance that most players need, and unless played with great wit, it is easy to see how a game of Mark Twain’s Memory Builder might devolve into a dull back-and-forth of factual statement, when—that is—it proceeded at all. Of course, even a simple version of the game would allow for elements of strategy: players, for example, might want to exhaust their opponents’ subjects of strength before going too deeply into their own. Moreover, one can imagine many creative augmentations along the lines of Twain’s own suggestions. A successful play might earn a player another turn, while a miss might lose one. There might be ways to steal pins from an opponent or to earn challenge questions to reduce an opponent’s score. Questions could be posed by the umpire for all players to answer. Years could be put out of play once named. In the electronic version of Mark Twain’s Memory Builder, we present Twain’s basic game in something like its original form along with two interactive challenge games that follow from the logic of the “Facts” pamphlet (fig. 54.6). In the basic game, players follow Twain’s rules, which are reproduced in a digital format. Here the program works as an interactive scoring system just like Twain’s board. Players drop pins in the appropriate places. If a play is challenged, the pin may be removed. The system tallies for the players as they go. In the challenge version of the game, the computer interrogates players on historical facts. The first of these incorporates the accession dates cataloged in the “Facts for Mark Twain’s Memory Builder” pamphlet, augmenting them with battles and minor events drawn from contemporary texts, principally those of the noted educators Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Emma Willard. The other challenge game quizzes players on the facts of Twain’s life and times. In building these interactive versions of Twain’s game, we preserved as much of Twain’s design as possible.

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Screen capture from Mark Twain’s Memory Builder 2.0 by Daniel Rosenberg and Interactive Media Group, University of Oregon.

During our own design process, we were repeatedly overcome by mirth that reminded us of Twain’s letters early in the invention process. As it turns out, designing a history game could be more enjoyable than playing one. Over and over, to stay true to the historical character of the game, we had do restrain ourselves from altering the rules, simplifying the interface, or adding features. On occasion, we had to ignore the excellent counsel of our user testing group when it identified a real problem in our game that was also a problem in Twain’s original. In many ways, Mark Twain’s Memory Builder feels close to being a great game. And, like Twain, we were constantly tempted to tweak the rules. But we were also chastened by Twain’s own experience of highs and lows. As he wrote to his publisher on the verge of the game’s publication: If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t. I’ve got the thing at last so it will work, I guess, but I don’t want any more tasks of that kind. When I wrote you, I thought I had it; whereas I was only merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn’t be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago—a thing which nobody had done. I think I’ve got it in pretty fair shape—so I have caveated it.32 32

Mark Twain to Fred J. Hall, 5 Feb. 1892 (letter 248), in Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 306.

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Here, I offer the same caveat: innovate as we may, we are in the end left with Twain’s game itself. And it is just not that easy to play unless you are a real history buff. Mark Twain’s Memory Builder is designed for players who have a lot of chronological information at their fingertips already, though not of the inked variety that earned the lecturer Twain such consternation. With internet search engines on our computers and smart phones, we live in a world of ready reference of a sort that James Ludlow would have envied. By contrast, in important ways, Ludlow, Twain, and their contemporaries still lived in a world of memorization. In a sense, rather than a memory builder, Twain’s game was a memory exerciser. The fun of the game, however much there was, lay in the exercise of that faculty. The successful exercise of memory, Twain believed, would enliven a more general interest in history rather than the reverse, as we might today expect. Mastery of chronology, he wrote, “makes historical volumes intensely interesting reading—it makes you prefer them to novels.”33 Today, Twain’s game challenges us in new ways. Above all, it compels us to recognize that for all of his affable familiarity, Mark Twain comes from another world. Even if he didn’t score his biggest success with his history game, Twain believed in it, and it gave him great pleasure to imagine playing it. Can we feel that way about memorization today?

33

Mark Twain, Manuscript Notes on Mark Twain’s History Game (1883), Samuel L. Clemens Papers, 1796–1984 (6.35 [B.349]), Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, ny.

Epilogue



chapter 55

“Studied for Action” Revisited* Lisa Jardine Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit. (The use of books, not their reading, makes men wise.) Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises1

⸪ A single, distinctive characteristic is responsible for moving Gabriel Harvey, scholar, civilian lawyer, and would-be adviser to nobility, center stage from the sidelines of history: his irrepressible urge to fill any available white space on the pages of his extensive library of printed books with marginal comments on the text as he read. The extent and density of these annotations is unusual, and idiosyncratic.2 Even his contemporaries remarked on it as a particularly striking aspect of his activities as a learned reader. Thomas Nashe made a point of describing his italic handwriting—“a faire capitall Romane hand” (he also reported the value of his library as £200).3 In the satirical university play * The editors are very grateful to John Hare, Nicholas Popper, and Matthew Symonds for their help in bringing this article through the stages of copy-editing and proof correction. 1 “The volumes great, who so doth still peruse, / And dailie turnes, and gazeth on the same, / If that the fruicte thereof, he do not vse, / He reapes but toile, and neuer gaineth fame.” Geoffrey Whitney, A choice of emblemes, and other deuises, for the most parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralized (Leiden: Plantin, 1586), 171. William Sherman uses this emblem to make the general point that reading is not an end in itself but a means to usefulness, in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadel­phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 13–15, where his example of such a use-directed reader is also Harvey. For Harvey’s own version of Whitney’s sentiment see, for example, the annotation along the outer margin of p. 18 of his copy of Lodovico Guiccardini, Detti, et fatti piacevoli et gravi, di diversi principi filosofi, et cortigiani (Venice: Christoforo de’Zanetti, 1571): “It is not bookes that makes the skillfull man, but the knowledg of bookes: & the memorie of knowledg: & the practis of memorie, both in words, & in deeds.” 2 For some comparable annotators see W.H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1995), 80. See more fully, and on early modern marginalia in general, Sherman, Used Books. 3 “His education I will handle next, wherein he…learned to write a fair capital Roman hand… Many a copy-holder or magistral scribe, that holds all his living by setting schoolboys’ copies, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_056

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Pedantius (whose target is Gabriel Harvey as a notable university pedant), the books in his magnificent library are described as being multiply enhanced in value because they are “gilded like gems or stars with marginal annotations.”4 The first scholar of a later generation to draw attention to Harvey’s annotations seems to have been the seventeenth-century antiquarian Thomas Baker (1656–1740), who was, as it happens, a copious annotater of his own books.5 In the nineteenth century the identification of Harvey as friend of Edmund Spenser, and the discovery of a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the margins of Harvey’s copy of Speght’s Chaucer (1598), increased interest in this otherwise unremarkable historical figure.6 Today Harvey is the subject of critical attention almost entirely for the thicket of notes with which he decorated every book he read, in an intensive black ink, in his distinctive, legible italic hand.7 Those who mark the margins of their books are generally silent as to the immediate occasion of these annotations. This makes the project of trying to

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comes short of the like gift.” T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596), cited in H.S. Wilson, “Gabriel Harvey’s Method of Annotating His Books,” Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1948): 348. “Trinity Hall hath borne with him more than that, he being (as one that was Fellow of the same house of his standing informed me) never able to pay his commons, but from time to time borne out in alms amongst the rest of the Fellows, however he tells some of his friends he hath an out-brothership or beadsman’s stipend of ten shillings a year there still coming to him, and a library worth 200 pound.” T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596), in Pedantius: A Latin Comedy Formerly Acted in Trinity College, Cambridge, ed. G.C. Moore Smith (Leuven: A. Uystpruyst, 1905), act 3, scene 4: “Homines omnes quicunque qualescunque sint, interrogat nunc Pedantius, numquid authores omnis generis exactissimos, Graecos, Latinos, veteres, neotericos coemere velint hodie. His cum satis jam superque ad contemplativum usum legendo, scribendo, commentando ornaverim, & activum finem referre” (62). See F. Korsten (ed.), A Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xxxi: “Finally, the often lavish notes and comments Baker used to put into his books deserve some attention. The remark he made in one of the front fly-leaves of Henricus Suso’s Horologium Aeternae Sapientiae that “I am forc’t to put notes upon my old books least they should be thrown away as useless’ need not be taken all too seriously. The annotations, for the greater part biographical and bibliographical, form on the whole a decided enrichment of the books that contain them.” See also G.C. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 216ff. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, vii–xiii. For the long-standing interest in Harvey because of his marginalia see D. McKitterick’s review of V.F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), in Library (1981): 348–53. For Harvey’s distinctive hand see P.J. Croft’s review of Stern in Renaissance English Studies 32 (1981): 443. Both these reviews, it should be noted, caution that for all its good intentions, Stern’s book is unreliable in its detail and does not appear to have benefited from peer review by scholars in the field.

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read below their surface over three hundred years later tantalizingly elusive. But just occasionally the marginal annotater makes explicit, in the traces on the page, an active process of dialoguing around a chosen text with a specific purpose in mind, on a particular occasion. It was such a set of explicit references that first decided Tony Grafton and me to direct our combined attention to Harvey’s marginalia.8 In the margins of his copy of Livy’s Decades, Harvey several times refers to reading sessions with the young Philip Sidney, in which the text was examined in detail, and comparative assessment made with other works of classical history. Opinions voiced by both Sidney and Harvey are recorded in these notes, capturing the faint echo of a conversation with the Livy at its heart: Yet if [the Romans] had relied on that political basis and adapted their curias, laws, offices, customs and other bonds of government to the nature of the Republic and the secret principles of the state, they would undoubtedly have held the Roman state much more securely and strongly. And for this consideration Philip Sidney, the prominent courtier, thanked me generously, and he openly acknowledged that he had never read anything of such importance either in historical or political works. That he had observed far and wide Romans who were too much senatorial in a popularist Republic and ones who were too much popularist in a Senatorial Republic, ones who were not royalist enough in a monarchy, citizens rather than subjects. And that he had no doubts whatsoever that if they had adapted themselves to the constitution of the State, that they would have come out as the strongest nation, the most successful and powerful people in the world. And this was our most important 8 I first encountered Harvey’s marginalia while working on the study of sixteenth-century logic and dialectic in England. This work was published as “Gabriel Harvey: Exemplary Ramist and Pragmatic Humanist,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 70 (1986): 36–48, and subsequently incorporated in A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth and Harvard University Press, 1986). I began working on the Livy while Davis Fellow at Princeton University, studying marginalia documenting Thomas Smith Jr.’s reading Livy with Harvey, “shortly afterwards royal deputy in the Irish Ards,” for “Mastering the Uncouth: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and the English Experience in Ireland,” in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of C.B. Schmitt, ed. J. Henry and S. Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), 68–82, subsequently incorporated in “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (Nov. 1990): 30–78. It was the Sidney references, however, that drew Tony Grafton and me together to write “Studied for Action.”

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observation about these three books. And for the rest I have not changed my opinion since.9 In the case of these annotations in his Livy, Harvey specifies elsewhere in the margins the occasion on which he sat down to read the first three books with Sidney, in 1577: The courtier Philip Sidney and I had privately discussed these three books of Livy, scrutinizing them so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis, just before his embassy to the emperor Rudolf ii. He went to offer him congratulations in the queen’s name just after he had been made emperor. Our consideration was chiefly directed at the forms of states, the conditions of persons, and the qualities of actions. We paid little attention to the annotations of Glareanus and others.10 Here Harvey—who appears to have written these annotations into his Livy copy sometime during the 1590s, possibly transcribing them from an earlier commonplace book, or from slips of paper inserted at appropriate points in the volume11—gives a special piquancy to his annotations and readings, by  attaching them to an occasion on which there was an anticipated goal

9

10

11

“Quod si politico illo fundamento nixi, curias, leges, magistratus, mores, caetera gubernandi, uincula, Reip[ublicae] qualitati, statusq[ue] arcanis conformassent; haud dubie multo certiùs, stabiliusq[ue] rem Romanam tenuissent. Pro qua animaduersione, liberales mihi gratias egit Philippus Sidneius, insignis Aulicus: ingenueq[ue] fatebatur, se nihil tanti momenti uel in historiis, uel in Politicis legisse. Uidere se passim Romanos, in populari Rep[ublica]: nimis Senatorios; in Senatoria nimis populares; in regia non satis regios; ciues potiùs, quàm subditos. Si Reipublicae statui fuissent conformes; minimè se dubitare, quin firmissimam in gentem, populumq[ue] mundi tam foelicissimum euasissent, quàm potentissimum. Quae nostra summa erat horum trium librorum obseruatio. Nec ego deinceps in reliquis mutaui sententiam.” Annotated Books Online, http:// abo.annotatedbooksonline.com/#binding-5-86. I have used Arnoud Visser’s translation. “Hos tres Livii libros, Philippus Sidneius aulicus, et ego intime contuleramus, qua potuimus politica analysi ultro, citroq[ue] excussos: paulo ante suam Legationem ad Imperatorem, Rodolphum ii. Cui profectus est regineo nomine honorifice congratulatum; iam tum creato Imperatori. Summus noster respectus erat ad rerumplicaru[m] species; et personaru[m] conditiones, actionumq[ue] qualitates. De Glareani, alioru[m] q[ue] annotationibus parum curabamus.” abo, http://abo.annotatedbooksonline.com/# binding-5-115 (Grafton and Jardine translation). Evidence survives of this practice of inserting annotations on slips, to be transcribed into the book later, in the case of Desiderius Erasmus.

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(a judicious visit to a Continental Protestant ally, pledging limited support) and a known outcome. But the first marginal note quoted implies more extensive discussion than a simple briefing session for an embassy. It suggests reading over a period of time, and an exchange of ideas over lessons to be learned that will expand both men’s competence as readers, addressing their reading to political reality: Sir Philip Sidney esteemes no general Historie, like Justines abridgment of Trogus: nor anie special Roman historie like Liuie: nor anie particular historie, Roman, or other, like the singular life, & actions of Cesar: whome he values aboue all other, & reputes the greatest actour, that euer the World did afforde. And therefore makes exceeding account Sallust, Velleius, Suetonius in Latin; Plutarch, Dion, Julian in Greek: who as effectually, as briefly display him in his liuelie colours. But of none makes so high reckoning, as of Cesars owne Commentaries, peerles and inualuable works.12 By specifying the occasion for a shared reading of his Livy, Harvey encourages the readers to consider themselves to be eavesdropping on that cultural transaction—an intellectual conversation—via notes directed specifically toward the text. And this encourages us to expand the abbreviated marginal remarks into a considered point of view. The printed page on which Harvey makes reference to the “private discussion” with Sidney (p. 93 of Harvey’s edition) contains Livy’s account of how the aged counselor Scaptius tried to influence the outcome of a dispute about territorial boundaries: When the consuls saw that Scaptius was listened to not only in silence but even with approval, they called gods and men to witness that a monstrous injustice was being perpetrated… Even supposing it were permissible for a judge to look after his own interest, they would certainly never gain by appropriating the disputed territory as much as they would lose by estranging the feelings of their allies through their injustice. The damage done to their good name and credit would be incalculable. Were the envoys to carry back this to their home, was it to go out to the world, was it to reach the ears of their allies and of their enemies?13

12 13

abo http://abo.annotatedbooksonline.com/#binding-5-1037. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0201%3Ab ook%3D3%3Achapter%3D70.

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Down the right-hand margin, in his confident, legible hand, Harvey has made three annotations that directly address this passage: A pragmatic and perhaps adroit testimony of the old man. The senators’ wily, and even pretentious disagreement. The deep secrets of the pragmatic and courtly skills. Emperor Tiberius excelled in this clever and sharp sort.14 Read in isolation these might be merely the lone reader’s passing comment on the passage. “Placed” in the context of a dialogic reading with Sidney, they identify points of value to the intending ambassador. These comments express grudging approval for the wily rhetoric of the old politician, as captured vividly in Livy’s narrative account. But the respect for Scaptius’s rhetorical virtuosity is counterbalanced by the reproachful response from the senators: even if effective, what will be the reputation of such a speech by an ambassador when it is received back home? It seems reasonable to suggest that this was the lesson Harvey and Sidney drew together from this episode. Armed with the knowledge that together Harvey and Sidney explored the Livy in preparation for Sidney’s diplomatic visit to the court of Rudolph ii, these marginal comments may be read as observations on the need to weigh carefully strategic interventions during the embassy for their possible later repercussions (“Were the envoys to carry back [report of this conduct] to their home, was it to go out to the world, was it to reach the ears of their allies and of their enemies?”). In other words, these marginalia do not simply highlight points in the text worth tagging, or commenting on—here we have the residual traces of a “reading relationship” and an exercise undertaken in teaching appropriate ambassadorial conduct. Would that more marginalia were of this clearly purposeful, directed kind. But even with a body of annotated books on the scale of Harvey’s (close to two hundred surviving books identified to date), it turns out that such clear contextualizing is extremely rare. Different occasions (generally unknown and unspecified) may angle marginal interactions distinctively, according to the work in which they are inscribed. Notes in a textbook may focus the key “how-to” points Harvey wishes to retain or emphasize. Then there are the many occasions where maxims, or passages

14

“Pragmaticu[m], et fortasse veteratorium Senis Testimonium.” “Veteratorius, et quid ni hypocriticus patru[m] dissensus. Artium pragmaticarum, et Aulicarum profunda Arcana.” “Tiberius Imp[erator] in hoc sophistico et astuto genere excelluit.”

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extending to whole paragraphs, are copied out of one book into the blank spaces of another—as Harvey transcribes two entire Latin poems with military subjects from Alciato’s Emblems onto early blank pages of his copy of Peter Withorne’s English translation of Machiavelli’s The Arte of Warre. In the end, the most arresting marginal note may give the least help in identifying its function. Some of this difficulty is caused by a further question regarding marginalia in general and Harvey’s in particular: for whom were the marginalia as they have come down to us intended? From the fact that both the appearance and the substance of these notes seem—from Nashe’s precise lampooning of them, indeed, quoting from them, in his pamphlet attacks—to have been common knowledge in the university and court community, we may judge that Harvey’s books were regularly lent to others. Sometimes this is attested to directly by Harvey: several of his books carry the inscription “et amicorum” at the end, indicating that they have been shared with others.15 A draft letter to Arthur Capell in Harvey’s so-called Letter-Book makes Harvey’s habitual book lending with didactic purpose explicit: M. Capel, I dout not I, but you haue ere this sufficiently perusid, or rather thurroughly red ouer thos tragical pamflets of the Queen of Scots: as you did not long ago that pretti elegant treatis of M. Cheek against sedition: and verry lately good part of the Mirrur for Magistrates: three books iwis in mi judgment wurth the reading ouer, and ouer both for the stile, and the matter. Now if your leisure wil seru you (for truly I præsume of your good wil) to run thurrough ani part of M. Ascham (for I suppose you haue canuissid him reasnably wel alreddi) or to hear the report of the furius outragies of Fraunc in Inglish, or to read ouer the Courtier in lattin (whitch I would wish, and wil you to do for sundri causis) or to peruse ani pees of Osorius, Sturmius, or Ramus, or to see ani other book, ether Inglish, or lattin, that I haue, and mai stand you in stead, do but cum your / self, or send on for it, and make your ful Account not to fail of it… There is A freend of mine, that spake vnto me yesterniht for mi book of ye Queen of Scots. If you haue dun withal, I prai you send me it præsently, otherwise he shal for me tarri your leisure. Or if you send it now, assure your self to haue it again at your pleasure. Iterum vale.16 15 16

For example, Alciato, Ad rescripta principum commentarii, de summa trinitate. Stern, Gabriel Harvey, 199. Walter Colman, Transcript from Gabriel Harvey’s Letter-Book, ms Sloane 93, fol. 90b, The British Museum, London. See also: Gabriel Harvey, Letter-Book, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1884), pp. 167–68.

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Too few of these named volumes survive for us to be able to scrutinize their marginalia for signs that Harvey intended friends like Capell to peruse and learn from them. But surely the knowledge that others would read annotations against the text, without their author being present, added to his self-­consciousness as he decorated his margins. A marginal note will sometimes consist of a remark or an idea whose pointed significance seems to be independent of the printed text against which it is written. Again Harvey’s extensive marginalia provide us with a fine example of an arrestingly colorful note in relation to his acquaintance with Sidney; the motive for finding such a note on a particular page is altogether unclear, but it perhaps suggests that here is a strongly felt observation of Harvey’s that he wants to share with other similarly inclined readers/borrowers. Harvey’s copy of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti, et fatti piacevoli et gravi, di diversi principi filosofi, et cortigiani (1571), one of several compilations of pointed and witty observations on life that he owned, is exceptionally heavily annotated, even by his standards.17 For this “revisiting” of Harvey’s marginalia I have paid special attention to this volume, which was not part of our earlier study. There is a striking note in it apparently written not long after Sidney’s death from wounds sustained at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, which plainly has nothing to do with the two men’s shared reading a decade earlier (aside from the fact that we know from those notes that Harvey knew Sidney personally). It is in English (most of the notes in this densely annotated Italian text are in Latin or Italian), and it has a directness the notes just discussed largely lack: I may speake, or do reasonably well: you mie masters, notably well: they, whom I honour, excellently well: quoth modest Astrophil [Sidney] in the Court of his great Mistris. But you, nor they sufficiently well: nor anie liuing absolutely well. So He saide, who esteemed nothing singular, that was not incomparable: & in a noble disposition allwais aimed, & often arriued to a higher degree of perfection. Thowgh bi With such a diligence He tawght the gallant spirits of the world to complement themselues, & to emprooue their uttermost braueries in performing a charg[e] of weightie discourse, or worthie valour. 17

The Guicciardini is bound with another work of facetiae, Lodovico Domenichi, Facetiae, motti, et burle di diversi signori et persone private (Venice: Andrea Muschio, 1572), of which the first three hundred pages are lacking (the first surviving page is 321). Harvey treats these two works as a single volume, annotating consistently across both, and heavily annotating the blank and ornamented pages where the two books join.

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Thowgh bie Roome [Rome], the Ladie of the world, a golden statu was not dedicated unto him, as to the King of Eloquence: yet Vienna of Austria honored Him with the Title of the best Speaker, that euer the Emperour heard, or that Court admired most. And in Netherland shortly after the Valorous Prince of Parma, Generall of the Spanish armie, woondred to see a young gentleman so excelle[n]tly complemented for [w]it, flowing discourse, & ouerflowing valour. Ô the flower of chiualrie, how seriously did he execute the greatest exploits: how vigorously did he essay huge impossibilities. But I am non plussed, when I speak of Netherland. Speak his braue fellowes in the field: sum pithie one of you report his maine caualcade, his dowtie aduentures, & terrible encounters: & ease me of this surcharging burden.18 Harvey’s lines are woven around, across, and down a page of familiar Italian proverbs, so densely that the original is almost obliterated. They break off wherever the printed text gets in the way, to be continued elsewhere on the page (the reader’s eye is guided by a discreet mark at the end of the blocked passage and repeated at its continuation). The intensity of the note is somehow underscored by the need of the reader to pursue it—in search of an ending marked by a bold full stop—across and around the page. And this annotation competes with several other more succinct ones, in differing inks and hands (Harvey varied his handwriting on different occasions), witnessing repeated attention paid to the book, and successive note makings. The text becomes a palimpsest, the holograph eulogy of Sidney almost erasing its printed platitudes: “Chi troppo abbraccia, nulla stringe” (He that embraceth too much, bindeth nothyng); “A qual si voglia dolore, remedia la patienza” (Patience remedieth all kinde of sorrow); “Poco fa, chi a se non gioua” (He doth little, that helpes not him selfe). In this case, no amount of scrutiny has convinced me that we can recover a specific relationship between elegiac outpouring and the text with which it is 18 Guiccardini, Detti, et fatti , 124–25. On the previous opening, in the same ink and hand, are two English notes that seem to refer directly to Nashe’s scurrilous taunting of Harvey as a pedant in Have With You to Saffron Walden: “Scriblers, & Pen-& inkorne-men, that are noboddie withowt their men, & paperbooke. Memorists, & Practitioners the onlie men” (across the top margin of p. 122); “Inkhornists; paper-bookmen; bookmen, termes of scorne” (across top margin of p. 123); in which case the note may be as late as 1596, or later. The crossing-out that I have preserved makes it clear that Harvey is copying out a previously written note—his eye has slipped down a sentence—which could put the original sentiment any time between 1586 and 1596.

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juxtaposed. The context is broadly that of eloquent speech and its pragmatic use. Perhaps that has triggered Harvey’s memory of the supremely silvertongued Sidney (several briefer notes in the Guicciardini allude to this). It might be evidence of Harvey’s own regret that he was unable to match Sidney in fluency and verbal brilliance—something he repeatedly notes in the Detti, et Fatti margins as essential for the man whose goal is a career in diplomacy.19 Here is emotional evidence of Harvey’s continued loyalty to Sidney’s memory and cause, and “Astrophil’s” lasting reputation as an eloquent man of action—buried among the myriad marginalia that cram the pages of the Detti, et Fatti. But here is nothing to help us understand what this passage is doing, on this page, nor why it was written at any particular moment, to what particular end.20 It is twenty-five years since “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy” first examined in detail Harvey’s “directed” reading of Livy with Sir Philip Sidney, and helped put marginalia on the early modern intellectual map. Our essay has been widely emulated, and used since it first appeared as a “license to read” significance into every trace of a reader’s hand, from considered remarks to doodlings and manicules, in the margins of early modern books. There is now general agreement that marginalia do not sit inertly on the page, nor necessarily comment directly on the passage to which they attach, but are prompts beyond the text and its reading to action in public—even state—affairs. In choosing the phrase discitur, ut agatur (studied for action), we placed our emphasis on Harvey’s pragmatic engagement with the text of Livy’s Decades. As we originally observed, Harvey returns repeatedly in his annotations to the idea that books and the skills learned from them (artes) are a means to an active end, not an end in themselves. I return to that theme here, as it runs through his copy of Guicciardini’s Detti, et Fatti. The margins of Harvey’s Guicciardini bristle with injunctions to break off from study and give one’s attention to doing, conveying a clear sense that 19

20

Harvey intimates in passing in his private notes that he failed twice himself when speaking formally in a public arena, once during his proctorship, and once “at Oxford, jn my Acts for my Doctorship.” Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, 107. Even where Harvey names contemporaries in his marginalia, these mentions tend to be too cryptic to give us any real sense of their relationship to his reading career. For example, at the bottom of p. 119 of his copy of Guicciardini’s Detti, et fatti it is impossible to judge the seriousness of the claim of “enmity” when he writes: “Quis putet? sed quibus hodiè inuidetur, Comiti Essexio, Equiti Raleio, alijs quibusdam in Aula gratiosis; Meorum aliquandò miserabuntur etiam inimici.”

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temperamentally Harvey himself finds this almost impossible to do.21 Reading is not simply an accumulation of information, making the reader wiser. It is a prelude to doing, to making something happen. The scholar’s “selling point” as a man of the world, and as suitable to hold a professional post beyond the universities (something Harvey makes it clear he aspires to), depends upon his capacity to convert years of study into pragmatic advice. For example, along the side margin of a page of bons mots in his copy of Detti, et Fatti that stress the need for ample preparation for action (“Un buon consiglio superare vn’esercito”), Harvey writes: It is not bookes, that makes the skillfull man, but the knowledge of bookes: & the memorie of knowledg: & the practis of memorie, both in words, & in deeds. He deserues to be esteemed the most cunning man, that can best negotiate his Lerning, viua voce, & viuo opere.22 At the bottom of the same page, across the double opening: Not authors, but skills: Study preeminent. Not books, but knowledge. Not doctrine, but ability. Not books, but works.23 Along the gutter of the right-hand page (p. 19): I know as much as I can recollect: and I have it always ready for present use. Thinking is worthless, only doing. There is a long way between saying to doing. [Italian]24

21

E.g.: “The Arts are worth nothing, unless insofar as they are pragmatic, and bring together works necessary to life, and most useful in the world of action. Whence all these kinds of pragmatic Arts are to be studied at once for serious use: the remainder of scholastic theory is to be lightly perused, with suave contempt.” “Acts speak: not things to be done” (Nihil valent Artes, nisi quatènus pragmateiai conducere necessarijs vitae operibus, vtilissimìsq[ue] Mundi actionibus. Vnde ipsae pragmateiai cuiusq[ue] Artes, statim discendae ad serium vsum: reliquae scholasticae theoriai, leuiter percurrendae, cum suaui contemptu). “Acta loquantur: non agenda.” 22 Guiccardini, Detti, et fatti, 18, Folger Shakespeare Library, H.a.2/Annotated Books Online. 23 “Non autores, sed artes: Unici studiu[m]. Non Libri, sed scientiae. Non doctrinae, sed facultas. non Libri, sed opera.” 24 “Tantum scio, quantum recordor: et habeo semper paratum ad prasentem vsum. Il pensare non importa, ma il fare. Dal ditto al fatto, vi et un grantratto.”

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Here too, such sentiments are sometimes attached to particular employment possibilities. Harvey quotes John Young, his senior colleague and one-time champion at Cambridge, for whom Spenser worked as secretary when he became bishop of Rochester in 1578. By the sound of it, one of the problems with employing scholars was their excessive zeal for a complete answer to the question set, and their poor understanding of the need for a quick response: Read this again and again: the goal is not to have the desire to write more, but to accomplish more. [Latin] Leaue scribling: quoth Rochester: & now indeed to the purpose. Either you have misled me: or you will make up for your tardiness with gravitas. The discerning man sometimes reaches his judgment late: but never excessively late. [Latin] So that sharp Bishop to miself, & sum other: whome he thowght as sufficiently qualified, as Dr Lewen, Dr Clark, or other fine pragmaticians in ye Sun.25 In hoping to use his university training in the world of policy and politics Harvey is very much a man—a scholar—of his times. The late 1580s and 1590s were the years of competition between the Earl of Essex and the Cecils to recruit academically trained men, as part of an open power struggle to succeed Lord Burghley as senior adviser to Queen Elizabeth: The period when Essex was equipping himself with a fully-fledged secretariat was also precisely the time when he attempted to establish himself as the natural successor to Burghley as Elizabeth’s leading councillor. Above all, Essex sought to buttress his claims to be a budding statesman by cultivating a leading role in diplomacy and the gathering of foreign intelligence. Both of these spheres of activity were inevitably dependent upon prodigious amounts of paperwork. Essex’s political ambitions there­ fore spawned a very pressing need for additional secretarial support in the mid-1590s.26 25

26

“Lege ista saepè, saepiùs: nec opus est plura scripturire, sed plus efficere.” “Aut me decepisti: aut tarditatem compensabis grauitate. Prudens aliquando serò sapit: nunq[uam] nimis serò.” Guiccardini, Detti, et fatti, 118. P.E.J. Hammer, “The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c. 1585–1601,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 30; see also Hammer, “The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville, and the Employment of Scholars,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 167–80.

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The question is, how is this transformation, from reading to doing, brought about? Harvey’s answer is repeated and insistent in the margins of his books: “arte et virtute” (by skill/learning and practical determination). When we first engaged with the idea of “reading for use” as the key to Harvey’s marginalia, in “Studied for Action,” and linked it to specific career opportunities in the 1580s and 1590s, we took as our model the secretaries employed by the Earl of Essex (emulating his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester), in particular Henry Cuffe, formerly professor of Greek at Cambridge. According to a note from Sir Thomas Arundel to Sir Robert Cecil, written after the Essex rebellion, Cuffe’s reading activities are referred to explicitly in the trials following the Essex rebellion, as playing an important part in the policy forming and decision making leading up to it, and Cuffe went to the scaffold on the basis of his involvement:27 This Cuff was sente by my lo: of Essex to reade to my lo: of Southampton in Paris where hee redd Aristotles polyticks to hym wth sutch exposytions as, I doubt, did hym but lyttle good: afterwards hee redd to my lo: of Rutlande.28 The idea that a lone scholar might address his arcane academic training to the cut and thrust of daily political decision making was an attractive one to us, as it evidently was to ambitious men of the period.29 In 1990 we wrote: The note suggest that there was a specific category of employee in a noble household such as Essex’s: the scholar, retained to “read” with his employer and his employer’s associates… Was it to Cuffe’s line in “exposytions” that Essex [subsequently attributed] blame, on the grounds that these had led him to believe that his political activities were santioned by the authority of classical political texts?30 27

On Cuffe’s career see Paul E.J. Hammer, “Cuffe , Henry (1562/3–1601),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Jan. 2008, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6865, accessed 25 Aug. 2014. 28 Ashmolean ms. 1729, fol. 190, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 29 As Hammer puts it: “The most distinctive feature of Essex’s secretariat was the scholarly nature of its members. All of Essex’s secretaries had distinguished academic records. In part, this emphasis upon scholarship must be explained by the example of Essex’s stepfather and mentor, the Earl of Leicester. Leicester himself always employed a conspicuously scholarly group of secretaries.” Hammer, “Uses of Scholarship,” 42. 30 “Studied for Action,” 34.

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Using Harvey’s Livy and its marginalia, we set out to show how a sixteenthcentury scholar could deliver a reading that was “politically aware, that [served] a political purpose, of which the scholar/secretary is apprised, and in which he is actively involved.” Twenty-five years on, when fascinating new documents have come to light concerning Cuffe’s purposeful reading with Essex, a little more needs to be said. In 2012 a bundle of documents in the hand of Henry Howard, who was himself heavily involved in the Essex rebellion, turned up, describing the period leading up to Essex’s fall and execution.31 These documents add significantly to the picture of the scholarly reader Henry Cuffe’s role in the Essex household. He was, Howard makes clear, a troublemaker, a “seditious boutefeu [inciter of quarrels] whose ambition could not be satisfi[ed].” Hired as a scholarly reader in 1595, he soon had extensive influence within the Essex circle, and “his purse [was] never heavier.”32 The theme is familiar from the trial documents (Francis Bacon’s Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert Late Earl of Essex (1601) called Cuffe “a base fellow by birth, but a great scholar, and indeed a notable traitor by the book, being otherwise of a turbulent and mutinous spirit against all superiors”),33 but Howard’s account dramatically sharpens our focus on “reader” Cuffe. During the early months of 1600, Howard recounts, when Essex’s household had been disbanded, and Essex himself was held at the Lord Keeper’s house, Cuffe inveigled himself into Essex’s presence, “using the colour of access to read” (in other words, using “reading” as a pretext for gaining access). His purpose was to foster antagonism between Essex and Cecil, and to convince Essex that only an armed uprising would allow him to achieve preeminence at court. Though the details of his factionalizing need not concern us, Howard paints a picture of a man who meddled constantly and was determined to influence the course of political events:

31

32

33

Linda Levy Peck first correctly identified these in Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James i (London: HarperCollins, 1982). However, Hammer is the first to have given them proper attention. P.E.J. Hammer, ““Like droppes of cold water caste into the flame”: Lord Henry Howard’s Notes on the Fall of the Earl of Essex,” in In Prayse of Writing: Early Modern Manu­ script  Studies, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Steven W. May (London: British Library, 2012), 70–92, at 76. Francis Bacon, “A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earl of Essex and his complices, against Her Majesty and her Kingdoms,” in The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 245–74, at 260.

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Cuff, hauing in his mynde nothing more then a desir to ground so desperat a quarrell between the Secretary [Cecil] & my Lord [Essex] as ther might neuer be any possibilitye of reconsilemente, bicause this Jack Cade had procedid so farr both by opposition and inuectiue against the Secretary as whensoeuer they should faythfully embras he reputid himself absolutlie forlorne.34 Cuffe used all kinds of underhand strategies, including possibly ventriloquizing letters from Essex’s sister Lady Rich to the queen: “som of theas letter[s] Cuffe himself did penne, others he gave enstructions and in all he was spiritus mundy to deceive the trewe prophetes.” This “Jack Cade”—this peasant rebel, as Howard deems him—eventually persuaded the “trusting” Essex to embark on armed revolt. Cuffe may have started his service as a distinguished professor acting as reader and “special adviser” to a leading court figure, but he rapidly became deeply embroiled in the realpolitik that ultimately brought about Essex’s downfall.35 The repeated references in Harvey’s marginal notes to his personal inability to abandon reading and writing for action suggest that when it came down to it, he was no Henry Cuffe. If Nashe’s mischievous remarks have any truth at all to them, Harvey’s scholarly abilities turned out not to be of the kind required by Leicester’s war party: he had a talent neither for extemporizing oratory (for diplomacy) nor for pragmatic politics. In the margins of his copy of Joannes Ramus’s Oikonomia, seu dispositio regularum utriusque iuris in loco communes (Government, or the ordering of the rules of canon and civil law into commonplaces) (1570), which he read closely in 1580 and 1582, Harvey writes, with perhaps a note of bitterness: Common Lerning, & ye name of A good schollar, was neuer so much contemn’d, and abiectid of princes, Pragmaticals, & common Gallants, as nowadayes; jnsomuch that it necessarily concernith, & importith ye lernid either presently to hate yr books; or actually to insinuate, & enforce themselues, by uery special, & singular propertyes of emploiable, & necessary vse, in all affaires, as well priuate, as publique, amounting to any commodity, ether oeconomical, or politique.36 34 35

36

Hammer, “Like droppes,” 78. As Hammer argues, even if Howard’s narrative is in large part designed to exonerate himself from blame, and reconcile himself with Cecil, the detailed account of Cuffe’s direct intervention in Essex’s affairs gives us a much clearer picture of him as an ambitious operator than we had previously. Moore Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, 151. On the title page of Ramus’s work Harvey has written: “Il pensare non jmporta, ma jl fare” (Thinking is worth nothing, only doing).

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Such disillusionment at the lack of regard for learning in court circles can surely only have increased in the last, politically toxic years of Elizabeth’s reign. For all his marginal protestations to the contrary, Gabriel Harvey was a man heavily invested in books, a highly talented reader and processor of booksourced information, and a “scribbler,” committed to putting down on the page the fruits of his book-mediated thoughts. Despite the encouragement of patrons like the bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas Smith, urging him to “leaue scribling” and turn himself “to the purpose,” he evidently proved unsuitable as the kind of secretary Leicester and Essex were recruiting to their service. But perhaps we are missing something. There was one genre to which Harvey was brilliantly qualified to contribute, and which qualified as a work for “use”—the type of book labeled in the period as a storehouse of facetiae or witticisms and bons mots. These are, furthermore, the surviving books among Harvey’s annotated volumes that he annotated most heavily and repeatedly. A book of aphorisms and witty anecdotes overlaid with its owner’s own thoughts and stories, and above all experience, is within a tradition of usefulness with which Harvey was surely more comfortable. Layer upon layer of polyglot concise observations add practical value (in Elizabethan terms) to Harvey’s copies of such handbooks of “advice for life.” And so it is that we find, finally, Harvey’s own lessons added to the already overburdened pages of his Guicciardini. In a darker, more eye-catching ink, in a stronger, more arresting hand, earlier annotations are rendered almost (but not quite) illegible by Harvey’s admonitions to trust only to himself, and to beware the cynical times in which he lives. On page 51 of the Detti, et Fatti, Harvey’s reflections on friendship in public life surround an Italian couplet exhorting: It is excusable to be deceived by one’s friends; But it is reprehensible to let oneself be deceived by one’s enemies.37 Decorating the printed text are his own observations: No man will thank you for the knowledge you impart to him (“It is one of the new fashions: Teach him but halfe that you knowe: & he wilbe twise as good a man, as yourself”); those who call themselves your friends will do so only as long as they need you

37

“Scusabile lo essere ingannato da gli amici; / ma riprensibele, il lasciarsi ingannare da’nimici.”

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(“When they need you, excellent frends: when you need them, Ciphers, or shadowes. No performance but excuses, & words like emptie clowdes. Sum wind: but no effect”); it is a world of empty promises (“scitè. Piu Vento, che Valore: humore di questo mondo”);38 you can count on nobody but yourself (“Quisq[ue] à seipso dependeat: aut seipsu[m] suspendeat” [He that can not liue upon himself, may go hange himself]). A page earlier there are more friendship aphorisms: Manie frends for their owne aduantage, or for a fashion. To do you good at your neede, not a frend in a world. A brother in Law told me in good plaine earnest; when he sawe mee do such, & such things, he would beleeue it. Mie answer was; Bielike you meane to do mee no fauour: & when you ar a Judg, Ile prooue it vnto you. In the meane time Ile rather knowe it miself, then teach it to a frend for his owne aduantage. On the same page Harvey gives the reader what is possibly his last word on the subject. He reminds us that the lack of support for a man from his background trying to make his way among the nobility extends to lack of financial support. Cuffe got rich from “reading”; Harvey evidently did not: It is flatly cum to this point in a prowd, & ingrate world: He that cannot do more shalbe lesse then other. And a base fellow with a little moonie [money], will think himself better man, then you (howsoeuer learned, wise, or valiant) without moonie. The rascalitie of this world. Extraordinary numbers of books annotated by early readers survive in rare books collections worldwide. In recent years—in part as a direct result of Tony Grafton’s and my “Studied for Action”—increasing amounts of attention have been given to these marginal records of reading. But there are, I suggest in conclusion, clear limits on how close attention to texts and their interlocutory marginalia can inform our understanding of the past, just as there are obvious impediments to men of letters converting their knowledge into pragmatic advice to rulers. There is no unified, consistent individual reader’s presence to which access can be gained, nor can we retrieve modes or terms of engagement. So much of what happens in the encounter of an individual reader with a specified text happens off the page that most of 38

“Most apt. More wind than value: the humour of today’s world.”

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what we need to know for a rounded and complete account is no longer available to us. Reading took place in spaces that we cannot fully reconstruct, under visual and aural conditions that we cannot fully know, and to ends that often remain puzzling. It is a matter of not inventing what is between the lines, but of grounding ourselves in the debates to which a given work contributes and judging the likelihood of our annotating reader’s comments reflecting more than his (or more rarely, her) limited understanding of its key ­elements. To a large extent what we discover from marginal annotations is what we knew already, from our conventionally assembled knowledge of sixteenthcentury cultural and political contexts. Only rarely will reading marginalia yield genuinely new understanding of a field of early modern knowledge. Caveat lector. It is also important to concede that within the large body of marginal material collected the major part is today permanently opaque to us. As we try to eavesdrop on the dialogue between annotator and printed page, we are left incomprehending for much of the time, trying to decode comments in areas of knowledge about which we can glean little from surviving published works of the period. One of the tricks of the annotator’s trade is to cross-refer from book to book, citing one work in the margins of another, transcribing whole passages from one onto the flyleaf or end pages of another. There is also the matter of the polyglot nature of the project: our scholarly annotators move effortlessly from Latin to the vernaculars, with some Greek thrown in, and the sleuthing students of marginalia have to do their best to follow. The little that, by following clues like these, we are able to retrieve and add to the story of historical understanding must be set clearly against the backdrop of what is irretrievably lost. This actually includes most of the period’s marginalia—tens of thousands of pages of sixteenth-century writing that have been lost with the books that contained them, or chemically removed from their pages in the days when collectors and librarians wanted only fresh, pristine, unmarked copies. However, marginalia, studied in depth, are an extraordinary resource, providing the history of reading and of the book with that “thick description” so beloved of anthropologists. Excavating and explicating them is a task well worth pursuing, with enormous intellectual rewards.39 39

New technology that responds to the special difficulties of working with marginalia is opening up exciting new prospects for research. Already the present essay has benefited significantly from being able to make use of the Annotated Books Online project (http:// www.annotatedbooksonline.com). In 2014 Earle Havens and I were awarded a substantial grant from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation for a project entitled The Archaeology of

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I close with one final comment on my annotating hero, Gabriel Harvey. In spite of Harvey’s modestly successful career, Thomas Nashe’s print character assassination of him as an arrogant, upstart misfit has tended to be accepted as a true portrait by subsequent scholars. This adds a certain piquancy to any study of his marginal annotations. Harvey’s marginalization (so to speak) in the secondary literature, and his conventional characterization as Spenser’s stupider older colleague and an obnoxious social climber, have to be acknowledged. This in turn means that where Harvey crops up in the secondary literature on Elizabethan culture—and he does so remarkably often—this is his persona. We too were initially tempted to represent Harvey as idiosyncratic and atypical—a bit of a crank, and a more likable version of Nashe’s buffoon. There is nothing buffoonish, however, about the thousands of words preserved in the margins of the surviving books from Harvey’s extensive library. The more seriously they are studied, the richer as sources of understanding of the intellectual life of the times they become. In the end Gabriel Harvey turns out to be rather ordinary, with a particular scholarly skill set that can greatly assist the historian in accessing, and providing a working context for, the works he assiduously studied. What singles him out for posterity is his marginalia. The most unusual thing about him is the survival of such an extraordinary amount of material evidence, so many annotated books in such varied categories, and some draft letters that clarify his reading habits.40 Gabriel Harvey’s methodical reading, rather than Gabriel Harvey the man, deserves to be preserved and acclaimed.

Reading in Early Modern Europe. This new digital humanities research initiative is exploring historical reading practices through the lens of manuscript annotations preserved in early printed books, using specially designed digital software. 40 Although hundreds of volumes from Harvey’s large library have certainly been destroyed—ironically, because of their heavy annotation, in the days when “clean” books were judged more valuable—more continue to appear. Most recently, a “lost” Harvey copy of Castiglione’s The Courtier in the original Italian has resurfaced in University College London Library. See C. Stamatakis, “‘With diligent studie, but sportingly’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Castiglione,” Journal of the Northern Renaissance 5 (2013), http:// www.northernrenaissance.org/with-diligent-studie-but-sportingly-how-gabriel -harvey-read-his-castiglione.

chapter 56

The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition Jacob Soll For anyone who has known or worked with Anthony Grafton at Princeton, he seems like a natural part of its dense and often mysterious ecosystem. From moving in a pack with students, or taking part in sedentary one-on-one reading groups, to leading the field of the history of humanism and knowledge as one of the most calorically successful book predators and productive academic writers in the world, Grafton is an inescapable presence on the landscape. Anyone on an intellectual safari at Princeton can expect to catch a glimpse of the familiar bearded presence, grazing on books and contacts at the entry of the Firestone Library, always ready to talk history or, with insatiable curiosity, to welcome newcomers to the territory and discuss their work. Grafton’s brand of the history of knowledge and humanism now seems a part of the natural order of both Princeton and, indeed, the field of history. Grafton has served as president of the American Historical Association, the crowning recognition of his work by the field. His students and fellow historians of knowledge and humanism have fanned out across the world and populated the environments of surrounding disciplines, working on topics as diverse as books of natural philosophy in the New World, the history of proof, German encyclopedism, humanist political culture, mapmaking, the origins of Enlightenment thought, Spanish art history, humanist law, literary history, Turkish communication networks, Enlightened Bible scholarship, the digital humanities, and the history and politics of academia and libraries. And yet, when an unbearded Anthony Grafton first arrived in Princeton in 1975, his role as a leader of multiple fields was not so obvious. In Princeton in the 1970s and 1980s, early modernists were helping to direct historiographical revolutions. Laurence Stone and Robert Darnton were leading the charge of social and cultural history, while Ted Rabb was looking at the crisis of the seventeenth century, economic history, and state building. Natalie Davis would arrive in 1978, bringing her own historiographical revolution, opening the door to gender and popular microhistory with a strong footing in traditional scholarly methods. Far removed from what seemed the most pressing issues of the sixties and seventies, Anthony Grafton was looking at the working methods of the French Protestant Joseph Scaliger and his philological methods for studying classical scholarship. Grafton’s investigation of a Protestant scholar’s Latin and Greek

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004263314_057

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studies makes an odd contrast with the bubbling world of popular rebellion and voices from below that were the historical mode in 1975. At that time, at least, Grafton appeared to come from the past. Looking back today, we know that he would become a force majeure in history, across numerous fields, from classical studies to the modern history of universities and information studies. In an age focused on the history of popular culture, he would manage to make the history of scholarship pathbreaking and even stylish. What is less known is how he managed this feat. No one has yet truly identified or analyzed Grafton’s methodology and his evolution as a scholar over more than thirty books and hundreds of articles and reviews in both scholarly journals and the international press. That is what I will attempt to do in this chapter. Many influential historians have written about their own methods, while also encouraging debates about them. Anthony Grafton, however, has avoided ­discussing his own methods, focusing more on the traditions that have produced his work. He came from the very particular academic environment of the University of Chicago in the 1960s and early 1970s. While surrounded by political radicalism and protest of Vietnam and police tactics, the humanities at Chicago were grounded in tradition; even at the height of the sixties, there was a consensus there that reexamining them could be innovative. While Grafton participated in protests and was deeply touched by the 1960s (not everyone in his field was), he worked with the classicist Hannah Gray and the Florentine historian Eric Cochrane. Grafton’s exposure to classical studies formed the basis of his fascination with the traditions of scholarship, while study of Italian Enlightenment historiography exposed him to the idea that eighteenth-century philosophy was grounded in humanist tradition, rather than constituting, as many French and English historians saw it, a purely novel phenomenon and a break with the past. At the same time, the field of the history of history was experiencing a rebirth in its own right with Peter Gay’s intellectual genealogy of the Enlightenment at Columbia; Donald Kelley’s fundamental work on humanist historiography and politics at Rochester; Joseph Levine’s work on humanism, literature, and the mad world of the Republic of Letters at Syracuse; and Julian Franklin’s work on the humanist historian Jean Bodin at Columbia. All the while, often in tandem with Kelley, J.G.A. Pocock was tracing massive maps around humanist and medieval tradition, the seventeenth century, and Enlightenment at Johns Hopkins. These forces pointed to the history of tradition. As the young Grafton pursued it, many told him that his work would benefit from meeting a Jewish Italian scholar exile in London, Arnaldo Momigliano (1908–87).

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At one level, to understand the Grafton method is to understand the tradition of humanism and classical scholarship as defined by Momigliano. Momigliano’s mission, as he described it, was to continue ancient traditions of scholarship based on various forms of history and its scientific method of linguistic analysis, philology. Momigliano wrote in his Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley in 1961–62 that “erudite ancient research is the obvious antecedent of so much of our cultural and social history,” and represents “a link” to modern ecclesiastical, psychological, political, and national histories.1 Thus Momigliano’s approach was to study ancient, medieval, and Renaissance methods of history with the idea not only of identifying scholarly tradition, but of continuing it through both the mastery and study of philology. Momigliano would have a defining influence on Grafton. While in London in 1973 to begin work on his dissertation on Scaliger, Grafton met Momigliano, and in various sessions, Momigliano cultivated Grafton’s belief that history was the central pillar of human learning.2 This belief was part of the tradition that went back to antiquity. Not only was history the path to religious enlightenment, its systematization in philology was also the basis of modern science. As Grafton himself describes Momigliano’s method, he believed that, like the humanist philologists who invented modern scholarship, modern historians of tradition had to be classicists.3 Momigliano was studying the history of chronology, and was therefore not just clearly sensitive to periodizations and traditions, but also acutely aware of the decline of Latin teaching in the West that began in earnest in the late 1960s.4 Momigliano introduced Grafton to the sixteenth-century Florentine literary scholar, poet, and philologist Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), who would figure prominently in Grafton’s future work.5 He shared with Grafton not only his sense of tradition, but also the value of a certain style of intensive one-on-one teaching and mentoring. Classical scholarship, in Momigliano’s case—and indeed, in the case of the University of Chicago too—was not only an approach to learning in the Western tradition; it was also a process by which passion and erudition were passed down from scholar to scholar, with the mentor acting as 1 Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2. 2 Anthony Grafton, “Arnaldo Momiglano: A Pupil’s Notes,” American Scholar 60, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 235–41. 3 Anthony Grafton, “Momigliano’s Method and the Warburg Institute: Studies in His Middle Period,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/ucla, 2007), 97–126, at 102. 4 Françoise Waquet, Latin: Or the Empire of Sign (New York: Verso, 2001). 5 Grafton, “Arnaldo Momigliano,” 237.

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a guide through libraries and texts, in the perpetuation of a humanist tradition that Grafton would later study.6 Anyone who has studied with Grafton knows that this particular form of one-on-one close mentoring is central to his vision of how scholarship works. Momigliano’s influence on Grafton’s work on Scaliger was clear. From the beginning, Grafton claimed not to be purely discovering Scaliger’s methods of “classical philology” and “historical chronology,” but to be building on the previous work of Jacob Bernays, a pioneering German Jewish philologist, trained at the University of Bonn’s famed school of classical and Oriental studies. In 1855, Bernays published his intellectual biography of Scaliger, claiming that Scaliger “single handedly changed the traditional, amateurish humanistic method of classical studies into a professional philology like that of nineteenthcentury Germany.”7 Grafton critiqued Bernays, but he also placed himself in the continuum of Bernays’s work—part of a chain of Jewish philologists that stretched from Bernays to Aby Warburg, to Momigliano, and to Grafton himself. Grafton engaged in some mimesis, but mostly set himself a professional goal by understanding their tradition and practicing it. Momigliano saw humanism as an international phenomenon with its roots in Italy. And Grafton, in turn, insisted that Bernays had been blinded by his own German nationalism, casting Scaliger as a superior “northern” humanist, as opposed to inferior southern scholars. Grafton devoted much of his study to illustrating the extent to which Bernays had underestimated Scaliger’s interaction with the Italian tradition of philology, itself part of a rich, interactive, and international world of sixteenth-century erudition. Though the phrase was not yet commonly used by modern scholars, Grafton sought to show Scaliger at work in the international Republic of Letters: the network of scholars bent, in great part, on establishing a historical, textual method of historical philology in order to effectively contextualize and understand ancient texts. Thus Grafton looked backward, placing Scaliger’s practices in a tradition founded in large part by Poliziano. In order to tell Scaliger’s story, he first traced Poliziano’s “reorientation of philology” toward the critical commentary of texts.8 This allowed Grafton to show how Poliziano’s reading practices, rooted in earlier Florentine humanism, were shared and developed by Lorenzo Valla, by Filippo Beroaldo, and then by Dutch and French humanists, from Desiderius 6 Ibid., 239; Anthony Grafton, “Teacher, Text and Pupil in the Renaissance Class-Room: A Case Study from a Parisian College,” History of Universities 1 (1981): 37–70. 7 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Philology, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 1993), 1:2. 8 Ibid., 17.

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Erasmus and Justus Lipsius to Guillaume Budé and Marc-Antoine Muret (to name just a few), forming a line of reading and criticism that stretched from Florence to Scaliger’s workplace, Leiden. By outlining tradition, Grafton was following Momigliano. But the way he did it differed from Momigliano’s sometimes broad, descriptive approaches and focused also on the technical, proto-scientific aspects of Scaliger’s scholarship. This approach was not only a direct product of Grafton’s training with Momigliano, but also based, in part, in the history of Copernican mathematics, or planetary theory, that Grafton studied with Noel Swerdlow as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Swerdlow was, and is, a great practitioner of the history of mathematics, a field that reaches back to the humanist era and since that time has continued to use philological textual criticism as part of its descriptive arsenal. One of the leading founders of the history of mathematics was the German philologist Augustus Boeckh (1785–1867), who believed that philology had to be used to understand all parts of ancient society. A pioneering philologist and classicist, Boeckh pursued a range of interests from Plato and astronomy to the use of historical and mathematical analysis to decipher Athenian state accounting methods.9 Thus for Boeckh and his followers, philology came to mean not only humanist textual analysis but also mathematical analysis with an eye to understanding all levels of ancient culture, including astronomy. Serving as a connection between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Boeckh’s school of classical studies partially branched into the history of mathematics with the work of such figures as Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990), an expert in the history of chronology and ancient astronomy. Fleeing the Nazis, Neugebauer settled at Brown University, where he helped create a famous school of the history of mathematics. He was a living illustration of the world of tradition that fascinated Momigliano—only a few generations separated Neugebauer from eighteenth-century humanist philologists and antiquarians. The philological tradition, in other words, was still going strong. Having worked closely with Neugebauer from the beginning of his career, Noel Swerdlow is an expert in the history of astronomy, focused on time and chronology—in other words, by the mechanics of history.10 An astrophysicist and musicologist before switching to the history of science and philology, Swerdlow has been interested in the role of humanism in the rise of the

9 10

Augustus Boeckh, The Public Economy of Athens (London: John W. Parker, 1842). Noel M. Swerdlow, “Otto E. Neugebauer: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy Memoirs (1998): 1–26.

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mathematical sciences and astronomy.11 While Grafton was studying at Chicago, Swerdlow was engaged in the history of mathematical philology, understanding how Nicolaus Copernicus derived the first draft of his planetary theory.12 Swerdlow was reading Copernicus reading Ptolemy, and for that, he needed to be steeped in the German tradition of mathematical philology of both language and calculations. Swerdlow’s work included the analysis of manuscripts, collations, and emendations, as well as close philological criticism of mathematical references and calculations. Meticulously taking his reader through Copernicus’s calculations and readings, Swerdlow provided a model for Grafton’s analysis of Scaliger’s science of chronology. While there was certainly no difference in the essential methods of Momigiliano and Swerdlow, their objects were different. What Grafton did was to make a very logical leap, using the skills from the history of science and mathematics to fill out the picture of what Scaliger was doing. It was still philology and it was still the history of history—only it showed that the history of history (or of chronology in the case of Scaliger, Copernicus, and so many other humanists) was a mathematical and not only a purely historical question. Grafton’s mixing of methods from the history of history and the history of science is clear in his 1975 article “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline.” In it, Grafton examines how Scaliger came to work on historical chronology using mathematics and history. The article is filled with large quotations, annexes, and analyses of Scaliger’s methods. Using Scaliger’s letters, Grafton looked to show how his De emendatione temporum was “a new kind of text”; not only would it calculate historical events with accuracy, it was also a reference work for the most learned readers.13 The book, he claimed, was not meant to teach, but rather was designed as “an intelligence test.”14 Grafton’s idea was not simply to show that Scaliger was a pioneering philologist and mathematical historian, but also to show the nuts and bolts of how he did it. Grafton examined how Scaliger employed “dozens of tables” more than any other chronologist, and he used close analysis of chunks of texts to 11

12

13 14

Noel M. Swerdlow, “Science and Humanism in the Renaissance: Regiomontanus’s Oration on the Dignity and Utility of the Mathematical Sciences,” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. P. Horwich (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1993), 131–68. Noel M. Swerdlow, “The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory: A  Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 6 (1973): 423–512. Anthony Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History & Theory 14 (1975): 156–85, at 157. Ibid., 161.

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show how Scaliger calculated the twenty-eight-year solar cycle to go beyond pure biblical chronology.15 The same method defined Grafton’s book on Scaliger, in which he not only examined the methods of figures like Poliziano, but also used Scaliger’s textual commentary, emendations, and annotations to show Scaliger’s methods of textual analysis.16 By analyzing how Scaliger collated Catullus, Grafton was showing his subject’s “adherence” to the principles of philology of the Florentine humanist Piero Vettori. Thus he examined how Scaliger used linguistic archaisms and compared text to stone inscriptions to date manuscripts, while also outlining Scaliger’s errors by going through and making emendations himself.17 Through his own textual analysis, Grafton illustrated how Scaliger corrected Manilius’s statement that the longest day on the Nile Delta lasted 14.5 hours.18 Grafton used the tools of the history of science to understand the history of history by closely scrutinizing Scaliger’s calculations. His knowledge of Eudoxus’ work came for the most part, as ours still does, from the quotations, summaries, and criticisms of it found in Hipparchus’ commentary on Aratus. Scaliger had not only read this work with great care, entering conjectural emendations, some of them excellent, in the margins of his copy; he had also excerpted from it the direct quotations from Eudoxus, arranging those that came from the Phaenomena and those that came from the Enoptron (Mirror), in distinct series (Leiden, ms Scal. 22, fols. 19r–20r). From this preparatory study— itself astonishingly precise and painstaking, even for him—he learned that Eudoxus had given not one but two ratios of the longest day to the shortest night: 5 : 3 and 12 : 7. Hipparchus had criticized Eudoxus acidly on this count, pointing out that where the ratio was 5 : 3, the longest day would last about 15 hours, and the latitude would be about 41°, that of the Hellespont—and nowhere near the 36° latitude of Cnidus.19 Grafton’s point was not simply to show Scaliger’s textual corrections and his interest in sources, but also to track the mechanics of Scaliger’s working and thinking process. 15 Ibid., 183. 16 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1: 167. 17 Ibid., 168. 18 Ibid., 204. 19 Ibid.

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Along with mathematical analysis, Grafton used the methods of literary historiography and philology. In the grain of Cochrane and Kelley, he retained the deep textual, analytical method of the history of mathematics, applying it to the history of history. Even in the densely packed pages of Scaliger, Grafton was not content to simply dig through the spiraling helix of references and traditions. First, he insisted on personalizing his studies, using narrative and biography to build rich context for figures like Poliziano and Scaliger. This he did by reading through numerous letters, correspondence, and marginalia. Thus, even a figure as arcane as Scaliger could come alive (too alive for some of Grafton’s reviewers, who noted that Scaliger could be deeply unlikable) and even appear funny.20 Grafton used his philology not simply to ascertain origins, but also to fill out the web of context and relations that constituted the world of scholars like Scaliger. Grafton pursued philology but also the drama of humanism and learning, its social habitus, and the challenges—both social and mental—of doing such difficult, arcane, but ultimately revolutionary work. In the end, he noted, Scaliger felt hopeless about the prospects for his own work, and expected only “calumny and abuse” for it.21 It was the job of the modern historian to unearth the buried significance of Scaliger’s highly technical and even esoteric work. In a world of cat massacres, Menocchio, and Martin Guerre, Scaliger, the disagreeable Leiden University philologist, seems to cut an odd figure. Yet, at closer examination, he has a place in the history of marginal historical voices. In his 1971 attack on traditional intellectual history in the Journal of Modern History, Robert Darnton critiqued Peter Gay’s vision of an Enlightenment based on the philosophies of antiquity and “elite” books.22 Instead, he insisted, the “history of ideas must move out of its armchair phase and into the archives.” The implication was that historians of great books relied on modern editions, and that they did not do archival research, therefore missing the complexities of the social history of the Enlightenment and its ideas.23 Even more, Darnton implied that the history of the Enlightenment would have to be found in popular history, for the Enlightenment, he insisted, had “passed 20

21 22 23

See the reviews of Joseph Scaliger by Cesare Vasoli in the Journal of Modern History 577, no. 4 (Dec. 1985): 714–18, and by Charles G. Nauert in Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 107–09. Joseph Scaliger, 223. Robert Darnton, “In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas,” Journal of Modern History 1 (Mar. 1971): 113–32, at 123. Ibid., 132.

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downward.”24 Yet Darnton ignored the history of science, and therefore major elements of Enlightenment intellectual history, which had never entered an “armchair phase.” Indeed, it was in this history of science and religion that the history of reading was invented, for what was the history of philology—or of the Reformations for that matter—if not a history of elite and popular reading? Historians of humanism and religion knew that the two were intertwined. In any case, from Copernicus to Newton, historians of science had long dug deep in the archives, looking for reading methods. While reviews of Joseph Scaliger were generally glowing, Grafton’s work had its greatest impact outside the worlds of the history of science and philology. The history of the book to which Darnton called attention in 1980s was increasingly focused not just on the history of print and circulation, but also on the history of reading.25 It was impossible to begin the history of the book in the fifteenth century without taking into account the work of humanists as both printers and readers. And, as Carlo Ginzburg had showed in 1980 with The Cheese and the Worms—the story of a sixteenth-century miller who read elite books in a subversive way—and Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre dramatically illustrated in 1983, high humanist printing and scholarship could move downward with radical consequences.26 Growing work in book history showed that reading and writing in the West were, in great part, shaped by the humanist tradition carried out by a scholarly community that had its own centers, margins, and vertical social flows.27 Radical philosophers and historians like Amelot de La Houssaye, Pierre Bayle, and Montesquieu were also aware of descending from this tradition. Thus Grafton’s deep history of reading and philosophy found a place in the post-Marxist world of cultural history. Grafton struck a balance in this way between his 1960s political experiences at Chicago, his belief that philology is potentially intellectually and socially subversive, and his strong attachment to some conservative traditions and institutions—an internal conflict that is still 24 25

26

27

Ibid., 130. Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982); 65–83; Darnton, “First Steps toward a History of Reading,” Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1986): 5–30. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1983). Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1987); Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010).

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unresolved for many scholars. Grafton grappled with that tension, at least to expose it as a central issue, rather than a problem to be solved. Historians of the book, such as Roger Chartier, had defined book history from the vantage point of post-Marxist critical theory that sought to portray traditions as power systems, or as misunderstood or even imaginary series of “discontinuities.” Chartier quoted the French Jesuit theorist Michel de Certeau to pose the major questions of book history, which combined “textual criticism, bibliography, and cultural history…”28 Chartier felt the need to stress the way in which the encounter between “the world of the text” and “the world of the reader”—to use Paul Ricoeur’s terms—operates. To reconstruct this process of the “actualization” of texts in its historical dimensions first requires that we accept the notion that their meanings are dependent upon the forms through which they are received and appropriated by their readers (or hearers).29 Chartier claimed the major interest of book history was to show how print transformed “forms of socialibility,” permitted new thinking, and, most important in the Foucauldian schema, changed “people’s relationship with power.”30 Ironically, he had, by a roundabout way, described the basic practices of philology. He also showed that the very old school of philological intellectual history could be subversive. And this explains, in part, why Grafton’s seemingly conservative work was so appealing at a time in which historians of the book yearned for social transformation and political subversion. Grafton underlined this fact in his collaborative work with Lisa Jardine, in which they studied how Gabriel Harvey read Livy and used his notes on the classical author to form and write his own political thought.31 They made a point on which Chartier would also insist, often citing the great bibliographer D.F. McKenzie: that the forms of texts, and the very process by which texts were written, affected their meaning. Jardine and Grafton insisted that to understand ideas, one had to understand reading (or philology), because writing and the formation of ideas came from it.32 Complementing Darnton’s 28 29 30 31 32

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1994), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (Nov. 1990): 30–78. Ibid., 30.

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techniques for understanding the popular reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the methods of Ginzburg and Chartier, Jardine and Grafton studied an elite reading of the classical historian and political moralist Livy, to show that the context of humanist traditions and communities of reading (and by association annotation and commentary) were essential in understanding political ideas. Thus critical theory and philology found an entente in emphasizing the importance of historical context. Grafton made subtle outreaches to the post-Marxist history of reading and culture. Throughout the 1990s, his work focused on breaking points and contradictions in the philological tradition. His Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (1990) winked at the critics of tradition, showing how scholarship had depended on forgery to forge “vital innovations in the technical methods of scholars” and proto-scientists.33 Forgers used scientific philology to make texts, and critics then used it to unmask them. Thus what appeared to be an unreasonable part of the scholarly tradition was essential to the scientific process. And yet Grafton was not undermining the tradition of philology as an elitist tool of power; instead he was showing how that tradition was messy, un-Whiggish, but, at the same time, institutionalized, and indeed that it had to be so in order to flourish. His imaginative approach showed that science was a complicated process that included charlatans, forgers, madmen, and alchemists. It was this messiness, this “literary deceit,” Grafton insisted, that was central to the “struggle” necessary to produce philology.34 In 1997 Grafton published The Footnote: A Curious History, his most critically acclaimed work, but also his finest balancing act between the idea of subversion and conservative tradition. To make the point that social historians do not ignore the mundane workings of social life, and that intellectual historians had to do the same, The Footnote compared source references to “waste products,” “toilets,” and “sewers.”35 Studying footnotes, Grafton said, revealed “the hidden cracks and forgotten conduits of the modern practice and the millennial traditions of historical scholarship.” Indeed, he had found one of the major practices basic to the sciences—the management of proof on the page—and had given it a social and intellectual history. As it happened, the great pioneers of proof and modern epistemology—the methods of validating knowledge—were not only venerable giants of learning 33 34 35

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5. Ibid., 6. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997), 6.

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like the humanist historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Edward Gibbon, Leopold von Ranke, or Grafton’s early muse Jacob Bernays, but also subversives who played a major role in this narrative of high learning, developing the footnote as a source not simply of proof, but of criticism of all types. To the initiated, Grafton was making a tour of the “sewers” of knowledge. To the historian of science, he was writing the authoritative narrative of the tradition of historical proof in the Western tradition. Going further than he did in Forgers and Critics, Grafton sought to show that proof, that cornerstone of modern rationality, had its origins in the most unexpected of places, where even historians of science had not always dared to tread, but that fit into Momigliano’s, and indeed, Donald Kelley’s, genealogy of the modern historiographical tradition. Most notably, Grafton told the story of Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has stood as the cornerstone of modern history, not as a product of burgeoning modernity, but as that of a scholar steeped in classical and also ecclesiastic learning. To explain how the Christian church undermined the Roman Empire, Gibbon had to dig deep into ecclesiastical history; and ecclesiastical historians—with their obscure Latinized names so treasured and used to such great rhetorical effect by Grafton—led the way. Gibbon would rely on erudite, classical, and ecclesiastical antiquaries, to sift through their catalogs of proofs. Some figures, like Flacius Illyricus, the leading author of the Magdeburg Centuries, would produce massive tomes of source-based history to prove the historical validity of Protestant religious claims. Some Catholics would do the same, but like their polemical Protestant counterparts, would manipulate evidence to make their arguments about eternal life or damnation. As these fights became more intense, ecclesiastical historians like the French ecclesiastical archivist Don Jean Mabillon would develop a science for verifying documents—the ars diplomatica. Gibbon, the father of secularizing and anticlerical history, would rely on these masters of ecclesiastical history for his standards of proof. In its spiral of apparent selfcontradictions, Grafton’s point was almost postmodern. But still, he remained focused on the winding, tangled roots of the history of tradition and scientific evidence. The other protagonist of The Footnote, the French Protestant “father of the Enlightenment” Pierre Bayle, sought to establish footnotes in his Critical Historical Dictionary that contained not proofs but a bibliography of errors. Only through a science of doubt could the truth be established. No Hayden White, Grafton was still, in the depth of his footnotes, whispering back to Herodotus, Poliziano, Scaliger, Copernicus, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Friedrich August Wolf, Gibbon, Ranke, Boeckh, Otto E. Neugebauer, and

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Momigliano. Bayle’s dictionary of scholarly error was a roadmap of “source criticism,” and critical footnotes were the foundation of the discipline of modern learning that would, in its ideal form, culminate in Grafton’s great unapologetic love: the modern university.36 The Footnote succeeded in its mission. It was almost universally hailed as a remarkable feat: making the history of the footnote entertaining. Writing in the New York Times, David McKitterick said of it: “A witty and characteristically erudite book” about a “subject, apparently so trivial in itself and yet potentially so enlivening, offers cause for somewhat uneasy mirth… Not surprisingly, the pages of The Footnote are peppered with human folly.”37 Writing in Civilization, Adam Goodheart noted that Grafton had argued “convincingly that the history of the footnote is also the history of how scholars through the ages have evaluated, organized and presented information… The Footnote vividly evokes what it was like to conduct serious research in an era before Lexis-Nexis, Who’s Who or even daily newspapers.”38 Even the French left-wing newspaper Libération understood Grafton’s feat of intellectual acrobatics, calling it satirically “malicious” in illustrating how “documentary research” was built and defended, even by those who were not always interest in “the truth.”39 Grafton had managed the seemingly impossible: to make the stodgiest of traditions appear alive and entertaining, while, at the same time, to place the footnote—a fundamental tool of classical philology—at the center of the history of knowledge. The history of tradition and even science could be whimsical, and, in the tradition of Erasmus, posed as a history of the absurd. In spite of the appeal of The Footnote to those skeptical of academic learning, it is generally clear that Grafton’s main methodological and intellectual objective was not to use his own vast philological skills to underline the absurdities and self-contradictions of the history of the historical sciences. Grafton was using philology and his own rhetorical prowess to make philology relevant. And that he has managed. This goal remains undiminished. Since then, Grafton has focused more and more on the hard sciences of the history: textual correction, chronology, and ecclesiastic history, subjects dear to Momigliano and Swerdlow. Increasingly he has turned away from the more accessible pyrotechnics of his work in the 1990s to focus again on tracing the 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 224. David McKitterick, “A Book about Footnotes Explores Their Uses for Good and Ill,” New York Times, 7 Dec. 1997. Adam Goodheart, in Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress 4, no. 6 (1998): 82. Jean-Baptiste Morongiu, “Au bas mot. Indice de sérieux la note en bas de page? Une étude malicieuse d’Anthony Grafton,” Libération, 14 May 1998.

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still-forgotten and esoteric traditions of history and philology. In his most recent work on ecclesiastical history, he has expanded on a field that he mentioned in The Footnote as a place where scientific inquiry and innovation happened. Grafton is now using research and philology to highlight the paradox that the modern scientific methods and attitudes toward truth came not only from secular sources, even during the height of the Enlightenment, as Momigliano insisted, but also from religious scholarship. Grafton’s method has brought classical philology to the center of modern historical consciousness, thus achieving Momigliano’s dream, which is no small task in a time when other, seemingly more pressing questions have come to the fore of historiography. Grafton has also trained a generation of historians not just to take note of the traditions of humanism and the history of science, but to learn them as well. By building on Momigliano’s vision, Grafton has protected the ancient species, filling history departments across the world with historians who know philology, where it came from, and what can be done with it, from the absurd and highly technical, to the undeniably grand.

Index Abbas, Shah (1571–1629) 910 Abbot, George (1562–1633) 318 Abel (bibl.) 727 Abendana, Jacob (1630–85) 299 Abercius (ca. 200 ce) 378 Abklatsche 967–961, 970–972 Abrabanel, Isaac (1437–1508) 298 Accademia degli Intenti of Pavia, see Intenti, Accademia degli, of Pavia Accessio/Accessus 50–51 Achilles (myth.) 799 Achilles Tatius of Alexandria (early 2nd ct. ce?) 382 Acoluthus, Andreas (1654–1704) 298 Actaeon (myth.) 663 Acta sanctorum (Rosweyde and Bollard)  269–270 actresses 140, 143 Acts of the Apostles 28, 241, 243, 378 Adam 727 See also Adamic language (Lingua Adamica) astronomy and 716 Boemus and 727 Christological (Reuchlin) 574–580 cosmic Philo of Alexandria and 573–575 Reuchlin and 574–580 the Word and 576 Adam, Robert (1728–92) 838 Adami, don Antonio (1881–1959) 177–179, 181, 186–187, 190–191 Adami, Tobias (1581–1643) 603 Adamic language (Lingua Adamica)  572–580 divine Sophia and 576 Adamo, L’ (G. Andreini) 153 Adams, Sir Thomas (1586–1667/8) 328 Ad discernendas veras a falsis visionibus et revelationibus ΒΑΣΑΝΙΤΗΣ, hoc est lapis Lydius (Gravina) 280 Additamenta (Selden) 297–298 Adler, Cyrus (1863–1940) 647, 656–657 administration (ecclesiastical and political) 425–426

Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon)  197–210, 905 aedicula portraits 76 Aelian (Claudius Aelianus, ca. 175–ca. 235 ce) 772 Aelst, Nicolas van (ca. 1526–1613) 446–448 Aeneas of Gaza (ca. 518) 377 Aeneid (Virgil) 402–403, 676 Aeschylus (ca. 525/524–ca. 456/455 bce) 850 Aesop (ca. 620–564 bce) 311 Africanus, Leo (1494–ca. 1554?) 331 Africanus, Scipio (236–183 bce) 707 Agamben, Giorgio 346 Agelli, Antonio (1532–1608) 258–259 agency 273–274 natural 277 Age of Constantine the Great (Burckhardt)  921 Aggionta (Evitascandalo) 183 Agricola (Tacitus) 206 Aguado, Alonso (active first half of 17th ct.)  112 Ägypten in Bild und Wort (Goldziher) 928 Ainsworth, Henry 316 Alain of Lille (ca. 1128–1202/3) 766–767 Alberthoma, Albert (1687–1758) 238 Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72) 78, 173 alchemy early modern 639–640 revelation and 624–625, 628 Alciatus, Andreas (Andrea Alciato 1492–1550) 545, 553–554 Aldine Press 170 See also Manutius, Aldus (Aldo Manuzio) Aldobrandini, Cardinal Cinzio (1551–1610)  145, 148–149, 607 Aldrovandi (1522–1605), Ulisse 492–493 Alexander the Great (356–323 bce) 209 Alexander vii, Pope (Fabio Chigi 1599–1667)  187 Alfabeto delle maiuscole antiche romane (Orfei) 446, 451, 453–454 Alfonsine Tables 562, 565 Alfonso of Aragon (1073/4–1134) 706

1034 Alidosi, Giovanni Nicolo Pasquali (1570–1627) 882 alkahest, see Epitome of the Almagest of Ptolemy (Regiomontanus); Ignisaqua (Van Helmont’s alkahest) Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliographie (Köhler)  336 Allgemeine Moden-Zeitung 930 Alliterative Morte d’Arthur (unk. au.)  662–663, 669–670 See also Morte d’Arthur (Malory) Viterbo and 671–674 Almagest (Ptolemy) 792 Savile and 780–784 Almagestum parvum (summary of Ptolemy’s Almagest) 565 al-Makīn, Ğirğis (1205–73) 331 Alma Tadema, Lawrence (1836–1912) 925, 929–931 Almeloveen, Theodorus Janssonius ab (1657–1712) 15, 34 alphabets, letterforms, scripts, type specimens 256, 451–452 alphabet cycle 442, 446, 451 Arabic 448–450, 454, 466, 468 Armenian 448, 450 calligraphic 445–447, 449 Chaldean 449–450, 461, 464, 466, 468, 716 chancery cursive 447, 449, 451, 456–457, 461, 468 Cyrillic 448, 450, 454 Egyptian 450, 460, 465–466, 468 Greek 449, 462, 468, 830 Hebrew 444, 449–450, 462–464, 466, 468 Indian 450, 466 Latin 449, 455, 461–462 missionary 444–445 Phoenician 467–468 Phrygian 467–468 Roman majuscule 455–457, 459, 461–462, 464–465, 467 rotunda 449, 451, 457, 460, 467–468 Samaritan 463–464 Saracen 450 Syriac 448, 450, 454 estrangela 465, 467–468 Vatican Library 441–468

Index Altenstein, Karl von Stein zum (1770–1840)  340 Altertumswissenschaft 960–961 defined (Wolf) 957 Althusius, Johannes (ca. 1563–1638) 209–210 Amabile, Luigi (1828–92) 605 Amadoro, Marco (2nd half of 16th ct.) 595 Amasis ii, Pharaoh (reigned 570–526 bce)  924, 926 Ambrogio, Teseo (1469–1540) 464–465 Ambrose, Saint, of Milan (337–97) 246, 265, 574 Amelot de la Houssay, Abraham Nicolas (1634–1706) 1026 American Scholar xli, xlvii Amort, Eusebius (1692–1775) 269 amphibians 311, 313–317, 319, 322 See also animals anacyclosis (Cycle of Constitutional Change, Polybius) 697, 701, 704 Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet (Knight) 830 Ancient Law (Maine) 351–352 Ancient Worlds, Ancient Texts (Grafton, Shelford, and Siraisi) xli Anconitana Illyricaque Laus (Cyriac of Ancona) 705–706 andreia (manliness) 144 Andreini, Antonio (16th ct.) 142 Andreini, Francesco (1548–1624) 140–144, 149–151 Andreini, Giovan Battista (1576/79–1654)  140–142, 149–150, 152–155 Andreini, Isabella (1562–1604) 140–149, 151–155 Puteanus and 145–148 Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626) 30, 208 Angelieri, Giorgio (active 1562–1604) 597 Animadversions on Eusebius (Scaliger) 67 animals 305, 310–326 See also amphibians; bestiary tradition, medieval; dogs; specific species group articulation and 311 Popish Plot and 311–326 Annales (Tacitus) 203 Annales ecclesiastici (Baronius) 21, 25–29 Annius of Viterbo (1437–1502) 76, 713–717, 886 Diodorus of Sicily and 714–719

Index annotations 188, 234, 266, 298 Beyer and 298 Casaubon and 209 Chamber and 793–794 Colón and 411 Dee and 404 Gessner and 415–417, 421–422 Harvey and 999–1017 Luther and 232–250 Morin and 258–259 Perez and 410 Savile and 785–789, 796–797 Annotations on the Five Books of Moses (Ainsworth) 316 Annotations on the New Testament (Erasmus) 232, 241, 248 Anthony, Saint (1195–1231) 269, 389 antica tonda 451, 457–459, 461 Antichrist 386, 391 Oriental 329 Pope as (Casaubon) 23–24 antiquarian/antiquarianism See also antiquity defining 897–898, 905 Grafton and 897–898 Momigliano and 898–899 Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi (Muratori)  874, 889 antiquity 845–870 See also antiquarian/antiquarianism democracy (democratia) and 695, 697 Goethe and 899–916 humanism and 677, 686 natural theology and 777–779 Niger and 546–547 progressive imitation of 686 Prolegomena and 821 respublica and 694 rhetoric in 550 Antoniano, Silvio (1540–1603) 442, 454, 463 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor (86–161 ce) 205–206 Antwerp 432 apatheia (Neostoic definition of) 749 Apelles (4th century bce) 688 Aphorisms (Campanella) 603, 612–613 Italian 609 Apianus, Petrus (1495–1552) 517 Apocalypse, Book of the 378

1035 Apocrypha, see Vulgate Apollodorus (5th ct. bce) 941 Apollonius of Rhodes (active first half of 3rd ct. bce) 398 Apollo’s Lament (G. Andreine) 152 Apologie (Bacon) 205 Apology for Galileo (Campanella) 607 apophthegmata 14 Apotheosis of Homer, The (Flaxman)  838–839 Appiah, Anthony 695 Apuleius (Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, ca. 124–ca. 170) 388, 848 Aquila of Sinope (2nd century) 257–258 Aquinas, Saint Thomas (1225–74) 59, 271, 277, 279, 281, 603 democracy (democratia) 699 Arabic grammars 454 language 55, 83–86, 90, 257, 328–334, 336, 338, 343, 445 Scaliger and 82–83, 85–86, 90 Aragazzi, Bartolomeo, see da Montepulciano, Bartolomeo Aragazzi da Montepulciano, Bartolomeo (active 1411–28) 675 Aramaic (language) 82 Arca Scaligerana (Scaliger’s ornamental bookcase) 77, 82n39 Arche Scaligere (funeral monuments of Scaligeri family) 77 Archimedes (ca. 287–ca. 212 bce) 781 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe (1526/7–93)  488–493, 501–503 Areopagites (Dionysius the Areopagite, 1st century ce) 708 Aretino, Pietro (1492–1556) 585, 594 Argelati, Filippo (1685–1755) 892 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533) 607, 615 Aristeas, Letter of 263, 267, 392 Aristophanes (ca. 446–ca. 386 bce) 398 Aristotelianism, political 708 Aristotle (384–22 bce) 48–49, 377, 398, 608, 696, 941 Campanella and 614–615 Armenian (language) 295, 445, 448 “Armenia Saga” 715 Arnold, Gottfried (1666–1714) 330 Arnoldi, Johann Conrad (1658–1735) 293

1036 Arrian 698 Arruns of Clusium (Etruscan elder) 663 Ars critica (Leclerc) 269 ars dictaminis (medieval correspondence template) 679 ars diplomatica (Mabillon) 1029 ars epistolandi (Niger) 542–544 Ars poetica (Horace) 393, 746 Arte di cucinare (Scappi) 189 Arte of Warre, The (Machiavelli; tr. Withorne) 1005 Arthur, King (legend., late 5th to early 6th century ce) 661–674 See also Castus, Lucius Artorius gens Artoria 668 multiple identities of 667–670 Viterbo and 671–672 wanderings of 661–662 Art of Hunting with Birds, The (Frederick ii)  484–485 Art of Memory, The (Yates) 989 Art of Rhetorique (Wilson) 727 Artorius Primus, Marcus (active in the Augustan period, 27 bce–14 ce) 668 Arundel, Sir Thomas (ca. 1560–1639) 1011 Ascanio (fictitious character) 183 Ashmole, Elias (1617–92) 310 “Asianus” (style of bombastic rhetoric, Quintilian/Cicero) 49 Assunti dello Studio 891–892 Ast, Friedrich (1778–1841) 959 Astell, Jeremiah (active 1663–75) 637 Aston, Edward (active around 1611) 723 Astronomicon (Manilius; ed. Grafton) xxxix astronomy 716 Adam and 716 Annius of Viterbo and 717 Boeckh and 1022 Neugebauer and 1022 Noah and 717 Ratio studiorum et Institutiones scholasticae Soc. J. and 765 Regiomontanus and 567–568 Savile and 781–783, 792 spherical 564–565 Swerdlow and 1022–1023 Astruc, Jean (1684–1766) 935 ataraxia (Stoic imperturbability) 776 Athanasius, Saint (296/8–373) 269 atheism 777

Index Atheism Defeated (Campanella) 603, 607 Athenaeus of Naucratis (end 2nd–beginning 3rd ct. ce) 367, 941, 943 Athenagoras 757–60 Athens, fifth century bce 402 Atlas Marianus (Gumppenberg) 854 Attias, Joseph (1672–1739) 653 Attic Nights (Gellius) 393 attribution 265, 282, 323 Aubrey, John (1626–97) 197 Auctarium (Génébrard) 51 August, Elector (1526–86) 481 Augustalis Theodosiani diplomatis Apologia pro Archigymnasio (Macchiavelli)  890–891, 895 Augusti, Johann Christian Wilhelm (1772–1841) 339–341 Augustine, Saint (Augustine of Hippo) (354–430) 245, 263, 271, 281, 371–372, 375–376, 387–389, 391, 574, 811–813, 816 Augustus, Emperor (63 bce–14 ce)  350, 707, 709–710 Augustus the Strong (1674–1733) 488 Aurelius, Emperor Marcus (121–180 ce)  205–206, 367, 370, 729–760 as imperial model (Guevara) 734–738 Aurogallus, Matthäus (1490–1543) 237 authenticity 958–61 Authority of the Supreme Powers in Matters of Religion, The (Grotius) 360 autopsia 961–967 Kritik and 967 Avalon 661 Avellini, Andreas de, Saint (1561–1608) 281 Averroës (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, 1126–98)  331–332, 775 Avery, Jonathan (late 17th to early 18th ct.)  623, 635–638 Boyle and 637–638 Avery, William (active 1651–87) 623, 635–638 Boyle and 635–637 Starkey and 637–638 Baal-zebub 71 Backus, Irena 277 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 32–33, 69, 120, 195–211, 1012 Casaubon and 207–209

Index Lipsius and 202–204 politics of learning and 196–206, 209–211 Bagnall, Roger S. 380 Bahrdt, Carl Friedrich (1741–92) 337 Bainbridge, John 62 Baker, Thomas (1656–1740) 1000 Balbus (fictional character) 762 Baldo, Antonio (16th ct.) 585 Bancroft, Archbishop Richard (1544–1610)  25 Banks, Thomas (1735–1805) 840–841 Barbaro, Francesco (1390–1454) 170, 691 Barberini, Cardinal Antonio (1607–71)  280 Barberini, Cardinal Francesco (1597–1679)  752 Barberini, Maffeo, see Urban viii Barbini, Matteo 188 Barine (fictitious character) 926 Barlaeus, Caspar (1584–1648) 11 Baronio, Cesare (Caesar 1538–1607) 21–22, 26–32, 37–38, 358, 855 Barozzi, Francesco (1537–1604) 786 Baruch, Book of 92, 94 Barzizza, Gasparino (ca. 1360–ca. 1431)  544, 559 Basa, Domenico (1510–96) 445, 448, 454, 465 Basel Confession 217 Basil, Saint (Basil the Great, 329/330–379)  381 Basileios stoa (Constantinople) 371 Basilikon Doron (James I) 198 Bassi, Laura (1711–78) 893, 895 Battle of Frogs and Mice (Homer; tr. Marsuppini) 397 Baudius, Dominicus (1561–1613) 10 Baudouin, François (1520–73) 356 Baumgarten, Sigmund Jacob (1706–57)  332–333 Baunius, Stephanus (1565–1649) 303 Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706) 331, 1026, 1029–1030 Béarn 856–857, 866–867, 869 Becmann, Johann Christoph (1641–1717)  299–301 Beebee, Thomas 546 Bekker, August Immanuel (1785–1871) 965 Bell, David xlii

1037 Bellarmine, Robert (Roberto 1542–1621) 22, 59, 193, 252, 267, 598, 763, 765–769, 773–774, 778–779 Belloni, Annalisa 557–559 Bellum Christianorum principum (publ. Petri)  215–216 Bem, Józef (1794–1850) 978 Benamozegh, Eliyahu (1822–1900) 653 Benedict xiv, Pope (Prospero Lambertini  1675–1758) 271 Bengel, Johann Albrecht (1687–1752) 946 ben Isaac, Solomon (ca. 832–ca. 932) 43–44 Benivieni, Antonio (d. 1502) 135 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940) 900, 914, 916 Bentley, Thomas 838 Berchet, Giovanni (1783–1851) 644 Berger, Peter 345 Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97) 344 Bernabò, Angelo (1654–1700) 187 Bernard, Edward (1638–97) 797 Bernays, Jacob (1824–81) 94–95, 897, 1021, 1029 Béroalde, Matthieu (1520–76) 63 Beroaldo, Filippo, the Elder (1453–1505)  848, 1021 “Berosus the Chaldean,” 715–717, 720, 723 Bertram, Cornelius (1531–94) 63 Besomi, Ottavio 545–546 Bessarion, Cardinal Basilios (1403–72) 703 bestiary tradition medieval 766–767 proto 772 Bethlehem 374–375 Beyer, Andreas (1636–1716) 297–299, 307 Körner and 298 Beyerlinck, Lorenz (1578–1627) 434 Beza, Theodor (Theodorus) (1519–1605)  4, 51, 64, 66, 544 Bianchini, Giovanni (1410–ca. 1469)  564–565, 568 Bianconi, Giambattista (1698–1781) 887–892 bibles See also Council of Trent; New Testament; Old Testament; specific book, epistle, letter, or version Antwerp Polyglot Bible 259 Clementine Bible 252–253 Complutensian Polyglot Bible 259, 262, 265–266 contemporary translations of 254

1038 bibles. (cont.) Hebrew 906, 935 Hexapla (biblical edition of six versions)  257 Jewish 368 Latin 251–252 See also Vulgate Scaliger and 267 London Polyglot Bible 67, 298 Pentateuch 934–935 Rabbinic Bible (Bomberg) 47 religious learning and 239 Septuagint 377 See also Old Testament; Vulgate Aldine 265 correcting the Vulgate 263–264 Roman 255–260, 256–258, 260, 262 Scaliger and 267 Sixtine 252–253 uses of 237 Venetian 42 vernacular 254 “Vetus latina,” 258 Bibliander, Theodor (1505/9–64) 328 Biblioteca Colombina (Colón) 404–414 La Memorial de los Libros Naufragados (Colón) 409 Relacion de dibujos y pinturas (Colón) 409 repertorios (Colón’s) 409 Bibliotheca universalis (Gessner) 49, 413, 427–430, 434, 785 Bibliotheke (Diodorus of Sicily) 711–728 methodology of 712 Bibliothèque Orientale (d’Herbelot) 908 Bichi, Cardinal Alessandro (1596–1657)  178, 180 Biel, Gabriel (ca. 1420–95) 277 Biglia, Andrea (ca. 1395–1435) 221–222, 227, 229 Biondo, Flavio (1392–1463) 222–223, 227, 229, 706, 729 birds, see Cranach, Lucas, the Elder; Dresden Kunstkammer; Dresden Kupferstichkabinett; Eckhout, Albert (1607–ca. 65) Bisse, Phillip, Bishop (ca. 1666–1721) 600 Bitisia Gozzadina seu De mulierum doctoratu apologetico legalis-historico dissertatio

Index (Alessandro and Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli) 876–879 Blackwell, Thomas (1701–57) 832 Blackwood’s Magazine 825 Blaeu, Jacob (1525–89) 495 Blair, Ann xliv, 424, 436, 438, 589 Bobbio Abbey, Abbazia di San Colombano 383 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75) 357, 581, 882 Böcklin, Arnold (1827–1901) 930–931 Bodin, Jean (1530–96) 198, 765, 1019 Bodley, Sir Thomas (1545–1613) 251 Bodmer, Martin (1899–1971) 382 Boeckh, Augustus (1785–1867) 920, 958–959, 961–965, 966–967, 1022 Grafton and 1029 Mommsen and 961, 967–968, 971–972 Boecler, Johann Heinrich (1611–72)  286–299, 304 Boemus, Johannes (ca. 1485–1533/35)  713, 721–728 Bohn, Henry G. (1796–1884) 829 Boineburg, Johann Christian von (1622–72)  287–293, 306–307 Bolland, Jean (1596–1665) 269–270 Bologna, University of Bolognini, Ludovico (1446–1508) 888–889 Bona, Cardinal Giovanni (1609–74)  272–275, 285 Bonaventure, Saint (1221–74) 277 bonae literae (classical literature) 170 Bonberg, Daniel (d. 1549) 47 Bongars, Jacques (1554–1612) 26, 29 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) 193 Book of the Covenant (Hurwitz), see Sefer Ha-Brit (Hurwitz) Book of the Governour (Elyot) 115 Book on spherical triangles (De triangulis omnimodis, unk. au.) 564 books 69, 158–160, 162, 167, 170–172, 191, 264 See also Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639); codices; epistolography; libraries; maestro di casa; print culture; Sefer Ha-Brit (Hurwitz); specific titles or genres antique collectors of 367 author portraits/biographies in 81–82 burning 379

Index commonplace 121 See also locus communis H. Colón and 403–414 Kircher and 160, 165, 167 L’Estoile’s scrap 112 library 395 Luther and 238–239, 241–242 markets 370 papyrus 368, 377, 380–381, 383, 387 parchment 368, 373, 385, 391–392 politics and 207–209 reference 424 “removed from sight,” 95n1 Scaliger and 64, 77, 80, 82, 85, 92 stolen 372 booksellers 177, 184, 187, 369, 372–374 catalogs of 427 censorship and 593–601 Colón and 407–408 Hurwitz and 471–473 Bopp, Franz (1791–1867) 920 Bordone, Giulio, see Scaliger, Julius Caesar Boreel, Jan (1684–1738) 3 Borghese, Camillo, see Paul V Borghese, Cardinal Scipione (1577–1633) 180 Borghesi, Bartolomeo (1781–1860)  956, 962, 969 Borgia, Cesare (1475/6–1507) 734 Borromeo, Carlo (1538–84) 152 Borromeo, Federico (1564–1631) 265–266 Borselli, Girolamo (1432–97) 872, 888–889 Bosio, Antonio (ca. 1575/6–1629) 855 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne (1627–1704) 737 Boswell, Jackson 600 Bots, Hans 171 Böttger, Johann Friedrich (1682–1719) 488 Boulainvilliers, Henri de (1658–1722) 327, 338 “boundary spanners,” 160, 164 Bouwsma, William 778 Boxel, Piet van 597–598 Boyle, Nicholas 914 Boyle, Robert (1627–91) 163, 169, 621–640, 622 Coxe and 632–635 J. Avery and 637–638 Starkey and 625–631 W. Avery and 635–637 Boym, Michael (ca. 1612–59) 167 Boysen, Friedrich Eberhard (1720–1800)  333, 336–339, 341–342

1039 Braden, Gordon 600 Brandolini, Aurelio Lippo (1454?–97) 704 Brant, Isabella (1591–1626) 749 Breckman, Warren, xlvii Brenz, Johannes (1499–1570) 238 Briefe Description of the Whole World, A (Abbot) 318 Briefe vom Herrn Boysen an Herrn Gleim 337 Briggs, Henry (1561–1630) 797 Brinck, Ernst (1582–1649) 80 Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Grafton), xliii 689 Britannia (Camden) 59 Briton 831–832 Broughton, Hugh (1549–1612) 63–65 Brown, Peter xl, xliv Brucker, Johann Jacob (1696–1770) 331–332 Brugnatelli, Giovan Battista (ca. 1545–91)  591 Bruni, Leonardo (ca. 1370–1444) 48, 222, 396, 675–676, 681, 685, 693, 700n30, 702 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600) 975 Brutus, Lucius 350 Buchanan, George (1506–82) 60 Buckler, Patricia 642 Buckley, Michael 775–776 Buckley, William F. (1925–2008) 345 Buddeus (Johann Franz Budde 1665–95) 301–308 Selden and 302–305, 307 Zieglar and 304 Budé, Guillaume (1467–1540) 545, 553, 848, 1022 Bugenhagen, Johann (1485–1558) 235 Bullough, Geoffrey 202 Buommino, Nevia 153 Burch, Bishop Franciscus van der (1567–1644)  776 Burchioni, Giulio (active: 1593–98) 184 Burckhardt, Jacob (1818–97) xliv, 921 Burgdörfer, Friedrich Wilhelm (1890–1967)  520 Burghley, Lord, see Cecil, William Burke, Martin xlvii Burke, Peter 160 Burnet, Bishop Gilbert (1543–1715) 629 Burton, Robert (1577–1640) 57 Buticellus, Hieronymus (15th ct.) 550, 556 Buttmann, Philipp Karl (1764–1829) 965

1040

Index

Capell, Arthur (1608–49) 1005–1006 Capitolinus, Iulius (fictive character) 206 Cappel, Louis (1585–1658) 71 “Caccia Bellissima dell’Amore” (da Viterbo)  Caprus 681 Carafa, Antonio (1532–91) 255, 260 663 Caccialupi, Giovanni Battista (1420–96) 554 Caramuel, Juan (1606–82) 303 Cardano, Fazio (1444–1524) 565 Caciola, Nancy 275–277 Cardano, Girolamo (1501–76) xli, Cade, Jack (ca. 1420/30–50) 1013 561–571, 913 Caelius Rhodiginus (1469–1525) 429 Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Caesar, Julius (100–44 bce) 209, 229, 707, Renaissance Astrologer (Grafton) xlii 710, 729, 738, 743 Carew, Sir George (ca. 1556–1612)  Caesarea 384–385 208 Caesarea Laus (Cyriac of Ancona) 707, 709 Caesarius, Saint, of Arles (468/470–542) 391 Carleton, Dudley (1573–1632) 27–28, 32, 111, 113 Cain (bibl.) 727 Caird, G. B. (George Bradford Caird 1917–84)  Carlo Emmanuele I, Duke of Savoy (1562–1630) 144–145 321 Carlo iii Gonzaga (1629–65) 154 Cajot, Jean-Joseph (1726–79) 798 Carpi, Ugo da (ca. 1480–between 1520 and Calderini, Domizio (1446–78) 745 1532) 449 calendar 511 Carpzov, Johann Benedikt ii (1639–99) 298 Caligula, Emperor (12–41 ce) 738 Cartographies of Time: A History of the Calis, Richard xlv Timeline (Rosenberg and Grafton) xliv, Calvin, John (1509–64) 688 974–975 Calvisius, Seth (1556–1615) 71 Casaubon, Isaac (1559–1614) 7, 9–12, 15–19, Cambyses, Persian King (d. 522 bce) 921 62, 66, 253 Camden, William (1551–1623) 58, 120 Bacon and 207–209 Camelot (Lerner and Lowe) 661 Catholicism and 23–24, 26 Camillo (fictitious character) 183 Church of England and 24–25 Camillo, Guilio (1480–1544) 975 Grafton and xxxvii–xxxviii Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639)  Pontacus and 39–40 210, 602–620 Sarpi and 21–38 bibliomania of 606–608 Scaliger and 58 concealment strategies of 602–620 Casaubon, Méric (1599–1671) 755 literary output of 602–603 Casi, Federico (1585–1630) 191 sources for 607 Cassander, Georg (1513–66) 131 Campbell, Julie 140, 143 Campbell, Thomas (1777–1844) 826–828, 832 Cassandra, Regina Cecilia, orator (15th ct.)  550 Campin, Robert (1375–1444) 687 Cassiodorus, Senator Flavius Magnus Aurelius Can, Giovanni Giacomo (active 1451–94)  554, 557–559 (ca. 485–ca. 585) 389 Canale, Paolo (16th ct.) 142 Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945) 900 cancellaresca alquanto corrente (Cresci)  Goethe and 903, 913–914 456–457 Cassius Dio, see Dio Cassius cancellaresca antica (Cresci) 458, 461 Castel, Charles-Irénée, abbé de Saint-Pierre Cancioneiro Geral (de Resende) 583 (1658–1743) 807 Canfora, Luciano 401 Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529) 197 Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: Castus, Lucius Artorius (active mid-late 2nd A Global Comparative Approach (Grafton ct. ce or early to mid-3rd ct. ce) 668 and Most) xliv See also Arthur, King Canter, Willem (1542–75) 259 Cataline 617 Buxtorf, Johannes (1564–1629) 299 Buyten, Martin van 447–449

Index cataloging, see Colón, Hernando; Gessner, Conrad; naturalia; Orfei, Luca (Lucas Horpheus); Sefer Ha-Brit (Hurwitz) Catalogus Testium Veritatis (Magdeburg Centuries, Flacius) 581 Catholic Epistles 378 Catholicism 312, 315, 318, 324 See also Christianity; Society of Jesus after the Council of Trent 271 after the Edict of Nantes 856 Biblical editions and 252–254, 262, 265–267 “catholicity” (Boineburg) 290 Church of England and 68 demonology and 277 “discernment of spirits” and 268, 270–272, 276 elites in 29 First Crusade and 216–217 French throne and 6 Gyraldi and 357 Huguenots and 16, 113, 867 James ii and 33 Moors and 217 Protestantism and 131 Reform Church and 856 reformed 253, 269, 272, 279–281 superstitions in 26 Cato the Elder (234–149) 715 Catullus (ca. 84–54 bce) 1024 Cavallo, Sandra 186 “cave myth” (Ferguson) 712 Wilson and 727–728 Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de, Comte (1692–1765) 903 Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563?–1612) 1011–1012 Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–98) 1010 Celestina (de Rojas) 583 Cellini, Benvenuto (1500–71) 903–904 censorship 141, 159, 254, 431 Campanella and 616–617 as a material practice 584–593 regional attitudes towards 586–587 censura praevia (prepublication review) 592 Rime (Petrarch) and 593–601 centrality degree, closeness, and betweenness 164 types of 164–165

1041 Cerrachi family of Pistoia (Dal Gallo) 142 certainty 279 measuring (Amort) 270 moral (mortalis quaedam certitudo)  274, 285 reliable 484 Cervantes, Miguel de (ca. 1547–1616) 583 Cervini, Cardinal Marcello (1501–55)  263, 267 Cervio, Vincenzo (2nd half of 16th ct.) 179 Cesare (fictitious character) 181 Cesi, Cardinal Federico (1500–65) 746–747 Cesi, Prince Federico Angelo (1585–1630)  190–191 Chain of Tradition (ibn Yahya) 43 Chamber, John (active 2nd half of 16th ct.)  792–796 Savile and 792–797 Chamberlain, John (1542–1626) 107–108, 111–114, 121–122 Charlemagne, King (Charles the Great, ca. 742–814) 229 Charles I, King of Naples and Sicily (1226–85) 671 Charles ii, King of England (1630–85)  310, 312, 319, 631 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–58)  200, 412, 666, 726, 729–730, 733–736, 739–741 Chartier, Alain (ca. 1385–between 1430 and 1446) 849 Chartier, Roger 1027 charts, chronology 974 Chasteigner de La Rocheposay, Henri Louis (1577–1612) 6 Chaucer (Speght) 1000 Cheese and the Worms, The (Ginzburg)  1026 Chernoff, Herman (1923–) 526 Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri 382 Chevalier, Pierre (active late 16th ct.) 51 Chigi, Flavio (1631–93) 187 child, childhood 798–820 China Illustrata (Kircher) 167 Chinese 851 Chrieger, Giovanni (active before 1568–84)  595 Christ, Jesus 579 See also God; Logos; miracles as alpha and omega 442

1042 Christ, Jesus (cont.) dual nature of 66 Erasmus and 245–246, 248 as God’s Word 576 as Iesus Nazarenus Res Iudaeorum 347 Jus Zelotarum and 303 as Lamb of God 321 Luther and 245–246, 248 name of (Scaliger) 92 self-sacrifice of 347–349, 359 as son of man 245 three offices of 347 Christian I, Elector of Saxony (1560–91) 481 Christianity 306, 346 See also Catholicism; Church of England; Protestantism Arnold and 330 aspondos polemos 218 Baronius and 32 Casaubon and 32 Ebers and 925 Erasmus and 201 Goethe and 336 Hebrew commentators and 42–51, 54 humanism and 686–691 human sacrifice and 346–347 Islam and 216–218, 220–221, 331–332, 334, 338 Kimhi and 47–48 Lipsius and 348–350, 355–358 logocentricism and 687 moral philosophy and 201 natural law and 286–293 Pontacus and 47–48, 50–51 Ronsse and 131 Sarpi and 23, 26 Scaliger and 92–93 scholarly communication and 158–172 Semler and 334–336 Stoicism and 758 Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Grafton and Williams) xliv, 384 Chronicle (Eusebius), and Pontacus 39, 76 Chronicon (Béroalde) 63–64 Chronographiae libri (Génébrard) 41–42 Chronologia (Pontacus and Génébrard)  52, 54

Index Chronologia sacra (Spanheim) 329 Chrysippus of Soli (ca. 279–ca. 206 bce) 847 Church Fathers 7, 245, 252, 334, 380, 441, 757 Church of England 25, 59, 65, 68, 319, 328 See also Christianity Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 bce) 5, 49, 78, 145, 382, 387–388, 547, 550, 553, 555, 678, 762, 773, 847, 852, 990 Cinqarbres, Jean (ca. 1520–65) 42–44 Cirta (Roman colony in North Africa) 379 citizen –culture 107–122 historian (Stow) 119–120 –scholars 107 citizenship See also Republic of Letters (respublica literaria) polis-based 402 social valence and provenance in 114–115 Città del Sole (Campanella), see City of the Sun (Campanella), Italian City of the Sun (Campanella) 602 Italian (Città del Sole) 210, 609–611 Latin 604, 609 as a Roman Republic 610–611 civil history (Hobbes) 117 Claesz van Swanenburgh, Isaac (1537–1614)  79–80 Clark, Frederic xlv Classical Tradition, The (Grafton, Most, and Settis) xliv “classicum” 845–853 Claudius, Emperor (10 bce–54 ce) 206 Clavius, Christoph (1538–1612) 69, 169 Cleanthes (ca. 330–ca. 230 bce) 847 Cleaver, William (1742–1815) 831 Cleisthenes (ca. 570 bce–after 507 bce)  696 Clemens, Clara and Suzy (daughters of Mark Twain) 976 Clemens, Orion (brother of Mark Twain)  987, 994 Clement, Saint, of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215) 381–382, 757, 943 Clement vii, Pope (Giulio di Giuliano de’Medici 1478–1534) 217 Clement viii, Pope (Ippolito Aldobrandini 1536–1605) 252, 597

Index Clenardus, Nicolaus (Cleynaerts 1495–1542)  87 Cleopatra (Ebers) 924, 926–927 Climachus, Saint John, Abbot (525–605)  398 Cluverius, Philippus (1580–1622) 79 Cobelius (Coebel), Arnoldus (16th ct.) 128 Coccio, see Sabellico (Marcantonio Coccio) Cochrane, Eric xxxvii, 1019, 1025 Cockerell, Charles R. (1788–1863) 835 Coddaeus, Guglielmus (1574–after 1625) 43 codex, codices 369, 392 Amiatinus 261 Bezae 265–266 Codices latini monacenses (Clm) Munich Clm 10667, No. 59 561 Munich Clm 27003 561, 564 corporality of 683–685 defined 678 Kentmanus 417–420 Nag Hammadi 382 Palatino 735 Purpureus Rossanensis (Rossano Gospels) 392 relics and 684 Swiss Petrarch 545 Tartu 417–418, 420 Vaticanus 260–263, 265–266 Vergilius Vaticanus 392 Vienna Genesis 392 Codex in Crisis (Grafton) xlii, 424 cognition 268 chain of (Aristotle) 277–278 demons and 277 visual, see visions Cohen, Dan xlvii Cohen, Emanuel 655–656 Cohen, Nina Morais (1855–1918) 655 Cohen, Sol (1910–88) 597–598 Coing, Helmut (1912–2000) 553 Colbert, Stephen 870 collecting 469–480 See also Boemus, Johannes; Colón, Hernando; Dresden Kunstkammer; Gessner, Conrad; Mommsen, Theodor; Quellenforschung; Scaliger, Joseph; Vatican Library; Wagner, Zacharias; Wunderkammer Amort and 270

1043 Brinck and 80 correspondence networks and 168–170 F. Andreini and 151 I. Andreini and 144–145 Kircher and 160, 165, 167 L’Etoile and 112, 117 Pujades and 117 Ronsse and 125, 127, 133–135, 138–139 Sanudo and 118–119 Selden and 296 College of Cardinals, Sacred 174, 251 Collegio Romano 165, 193 Colombo, Realdo (1516–59) 136 Colomiès, Paul (Colomesius 1638–92)  14–15 Colón, Diego (Columbus 1479/80–1526) 406 Colón, Hernando (Columbus 1488–1539) 404–414 “Colonial Pedants” (Grafton) xlii–xliii Colonna, Aegidius (Giles of Rome 1243–1316) 277 Columbus, Christopher (ca. 1451–1506)  404–405, 413–414 Comerus, King (bibl.) 718 “Comica Gelosa,” see Andreini, Isabella commedia dell’arte 140 Commentaries (Caesar) 729 Commentaries (Maffei) 229 Commentaries (Pius ii) 729 Commentaries on the Decline of the Faith in the East (Biglia) 221–222 Commentary (Proclus) 789–790 Commerce with the Classics (Grafton) 689 Commodus, Emperor (161–192) 205 “common notion” (Proclus, Savile) 788n21, 790–791, 792n31, 795 commonweal 115 commonwealth men 114 Commonwealth of Oceana (Harrington) 361 Compagnia dei Gelosi, see Gelosi, Compagnia dei Compendium (Leto) 215, 223–225, 228 Compendium (Zonaras) 227 Compendium of the Philosophers (Diocles of Magnesia) 941 Concentric Chart of History (Ludlow) 978 Concerning Famous Women (Boccaccio) 882 Confessions (Augustine) 371

1044 confidentiality 3–19 Confutatio fabulae Burdonum (Scaliger) 77 Congregation of Procurators meeting (Rome, 1639) 166 Congregation of the Index 328, 583–584, 586 Conics (Apollonius) 781 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain) 975 Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Aegypt, by the Saracens (Ockley) 330 Conring, Hermann (1606–81) 287–289 conscience, compulsion of (Hobbes) 292 Consentius (active 419 ce) 371 Consent of Scripture (Broughton) 63–64 consilia (letters of medical advice for individual patients) 134–135 Constans ii, Emperor (630–668) 226 Constantine, Emperor (272–337) 358, 669, 710 Constantine xi Paleologus, Emperor (1405–53) 229–230 Constantinus iii, Emperor (d. 411) 226 constitutions 610 See also respublica constitutional cycle, see anacyclosis (Polybius) three types of (Scala) 694n5 Cook, Arthur (1868–1952) 353 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543) 1023 Grafton and 1029 Corbinelli, Antonio (1376/7–1425) 703 Corinth 380 Corinthians, Letters to the 241, 246, 272 Cornaro, Luigi (1464/7–1566) 769 Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (Boeckh) 957, 961–965, 967, 971 “Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum” (Kellermann and Borghesi) 956 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Mommsen)  957, 961–963, 966–967, 971 Correction of the Almagest (Jābir ibn Aflaḥ) 565 correctores and castigatores 37, 57, 257, 581 Corso Giacomo Matteotti 671 Cortesi, Paolo (1465–1510) 175 Corvinus, King Mattias (1443–90) 704 Coryate, Thomas (ca. 1577–1617) 208

Index Cosmodystica or De mundi infelicitate (Niger)  548 Cosmographia (Münster) 726 Cotta (publ.) 908 Cotton Genesis 392 Council of Constance (1414–18) 675 Council of Trent 91n2, 254–267, 357 eucharistic sacrifice and 357 intellectual Catholicism and 271 New Testament and 254, 266 Old Testament and 266 Vulgate and 254 Counter-Reformation 174, 179, 194, 441 See also Andreini, Francesco; Andreini, Giovan Battista; Andreini, Isabella cornerstones of 22 household advice in 173–4, 179 Republic of Letters in 140–156 Cox, Seth (Seath, active 1594) 599 Cox, Virginia 148–149 Coxe, Daniel (1640–1730) 623, 631–635 Boyle and 632–635 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder (1472–1553)  483–489 Cranmer, George (1564–1600) 58–60 Creation, the 717, 763, 765 See also Logos accounts of human, in Genesis 573–575 Adam and 577 Bellarmine and 767 Boemus and 724, 727 Isidore of Seville and 766–767 Sabellico and 723 through the Word 596 Crell, Johan (1590–1633) 337 Cresci, Giovanni Francesco (ca. 1552–early 17th ct.) 449–450, 452, 456–461 Cressy, David 311 Critical Historical Dictionary (Bayle) 1029 Critical Review 831–832 criticism critica lapidaria 968 “higher,” 959 philology and 958–961 Crivelli, Taddeo (d. ca. 1479) 687–688 crocodiles 314, 317 Cronica gestorum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononie (Borselli) 872 Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de (1663–1750) 806

Index Cruceus, Emericus (active around 1620) 746 Cruciger, Caspar (1504–48) 237 Crucigerus, Nicolaus (15th ct.) 550 crusades 670 First 216–217, 220 Third 670 Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88) 69 Cuffe, Henry (1563–1601) 207, 1011–1013, 1015 Cult of Antiquity: How Christian Habits Shaped Humanism (Schadee) 689 Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (Grafton) xlii Cunaeus, Petrus (1586–1638) 295 Cuper, Gisbert (1644–1716) 168 curiosity cabinets 197, 310 See also collecting; Wunderkammer Curran, Brian xliv Cuspinian, Johannes (1473–1529) 229–230, 483–484 Cyprian, Saint (ca. 200–258) 277, 372–373, 574, 754 Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) 700–710 Cyril of Alexandria, Saint (378–444) 757 Cyril the Philosopher, Saint (828–69) 444 Cyrillic (language) 445, 448 Dalechamp, Caleb (active 1622–24) 56–57 Daneau, Lambert (ca. 1535–ca. 1590) 210 Daniel (bibl.) Book of 92, 935 Scaliger’s interpretation of 63–64, 68 Dante (Dante Alighieri 1265–1321)  581, 607 Danz, Johann Andreas (1654–1727) 331 d’Aragona, Cardinal Innico (Iñigo) d’Avalos (1535/6–1600) 180 Darius the Mede (bibl.), as Nabonides 57, 64 Darnton, Robert xl, xliii–xliv, 311, 1018, 1025–1028 data volume (in tables) 510 Dati, Agostino (1420–78) 553 Davis, Moshe (1916–96) 657 Davis, Natalie Zemon xl, xliv, 1018, 1026 Davy, Humphry (1778–1829) 826 de Albin de Valsergues, Jean 41 De Amicitia (Cicero) 78 de’ Angelis, Francesca 143

1045 De apocryphis Bibliorum (Scaliger) 93–104 De Arte Cabalistica (Reuchlin) 575–580 De ascensione mentis … opusculum (Bellarmine) 763, 765–769, 773–774, 778 De augmentis scientiarum (Bacon) 204 De auspicio regio (Boecler) 295 De Benedetti, Salvatore 644–645, 653 De beneficiis (Seneca) 747 De Bibliotheca Vaticana (Rocca) 442, 463 de Boulonois, Esme (1645–81) 87 Decades (Livy) 1001–1004, 1008 De Caesaribus (Cuspinian) 229–230 De Caesaribus (Egnazio) 229 de Cahaignes (Sieur de Verrières), Etienne (1591–?) 85 de Cahaignes, Jacques (1548–1612)  85–86, 89 De caracterum et litterarum inventoribus ex picturis Bibliothecae Vaticanae liber (Orfei) 445–446, 451–454, 456–457 459–462, 468 Decembrio, Angelo (1415–after 1467)  393–403 Decembrio, Pier Candido (1399–1477)  396–397 de Certeau, Michel (1925–86) 1027 Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert Late Earl of Essex (Bacon) 1012 declination, magnetic 166 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) 1029 De constantia sapientis (Seneca) 281 “decorum” 681 De cruce (Lipsius) 348, 358 De deis gentium varia & multiplex Historia (Gyraldi) 357 De diis germanis (Schede) 297 De Diis Syris (Selden) 61, 286, 296–298 Dee, John (1527–1608/9) 404 De emendatione temporum (Scaliger) 56, 62–65, 1023 De eo, quod abominabilis Deo est, ceu charactere legis moralis (Budde)  302–303, 305 deer 663

1046

Index

Delle donne bolognesi (Macchiavelli)  De exortu Maomethis (Leto) 215, 219–220, 894–895 222–223 de Losinga, Bishop Robert (d. 1095) 70 Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Delrio, Martin (1551–1608) 269, 278, 775 Humanism in an Age of Science. 1450–1800 de Lyra, Nicholas (1270–1349) 45, 51 (Grafton) xliii De Magistro (Augustine) 813 Defense of Galileo (Campanella) 603 Defuk, Cardinal Johannes (Iohannes, d. 1113)  De Magnete (Gilbert) 70 de Maistre, Joseph (1753–1821) 345–347, 664–667 361–362 See also Fugger, Johann de’ Medici, Cosimo (1389–1464) 399 de Gheyn ii, Jacques (1565–1629) 79 Dehuchino, Pietro (active 1581–89) 595–597 Demetrius of Magnesia (1st ct. bce) 942 democracy (democratia) De idololatria (Maimonides) 297 Aquinas and 699 De inventione (Cicero) 552 Areopagites and 708 De inventoribus rerum (Polydore Vergil) 442 Aristotle and 696 Deissmann, Gustav Adolf (1866–1937) 17 Bruni and 700n30 de Jonge, Henk Jan xxxviii Catholic use of the term 699n26 De jure belli ac pacis (Grotius) 289, 304 Cleisthenes and 696 De jure naturali (Selden) 286, 300, 302, Cyriac of Ancona and 700–710 306–307 evolution of the meaning of 695–699 Arnoldi and 293 “Funeral Oration” (Pericles) and 696 Boineburg and 289–293 Plato and 696 Kirchmaier and 295 Polybius and 696–698 De justitia et iure caeterisque virtutibus Robespierre and 699 cardinalibus libri quatuor (Cornaro) 769 twentieth century meaning of 699 De Laertii Diogenis fontibus (Nietzsche) 941 Xenophon and 696 de la Forest, Jean (d. 1537) 87 Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 bce) 712, 804, de la Torre, Raphael (d. 1612) 278 847 DeLauter, Leslie 658 de Molina, Luis (1535–1600) 278 De legibus (Cicero) 772 “De l’empia Babilonia” (Petrarch) 586 cap L  demonology 276–280, 282–283 See also witchcraft 594, 600 “demon hypothesis” 279–280 De Lescalle, Joseph, see Scaliger, Joseph de Mornay, Philippe (1549–1623) 358 Delfini Dosi, Count Alfonso 878 Demosthenes (384–322 bce) 48, 388 Delfini Dosi, Maria Vittoria (active 1722)  De natura deorum (Cicero) 762, 772–773 876–878, 881–882 Del governo d’un signore in Roma (Priscianese)  Denkschrift (Mommsen) 956, 961–962, 966 Denley, Peter 554 175 De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (Erasmus)  de Ocampo, Florián (ca. 1499–ca. 1558) 742 237 De officiis (Cicero) 289, 307 De libertate ecclesiastica (Casaubon)  De oratore (Cicero) 680 22, 25–26, 32 De origine hominis opinio theologorum vera De lithiasi (Van Helmont) 624–625, 633 (Sabellico) 720 della Fratta, Archbishop Enrico (in office De politia literaria (Decembrio) 393–403 1213–resigned 1240) 880 De primo bello punico (Bruni) 702 della Rovere, Lavinia, Marchesa del Vasto De propaganda fide 328 (1558–1632) 145 De providentia Numinis (Lessius) 762–763, della Valle, Pietro (1586–1652) 906, 909–910 769–772, 774–775 Delle antichità estensi ed italiane (Muratori)  Der deutsche Gil Blas (Goethe) 901 874 de Real, Jeroni (active 1679) 113

Index De religione Mohammedica (Reland) 908 De republica (Gregoire) 198 De rerum natura (Lucretius) 725–726 de’Resti, Marino (fictive character) 705 Derham, William (1657–1735) 778 Der Kaiser (Ebers) 927–928, 930 Der kleine Koran (Augusti) 340–341 Der Koran, oder Das Gesetz für die Moslemer (Boysen) 337–338 de’ Rustici, Cencio (1380/90–1445) 675 De sacrificiis veterum (Saubert) 297 de Sacrobosco, Johannes (1195–1256) 517, 784 de Sagazan, Anglese (1505–82) 862 de Sainte-Marthe, Scévole (1536–1623) 80 De sapientia veterum (Bacon) 208 Descartes, René (1596–1650) 15, 170, 272, 275 Descepoli Brothers (17th ct.) 187 De servo arbitrio (Luther) 237 d’Este, Alfonso ii, Duke of Ferrara (1533–97)  741 d’Este, Niccolo iii (1383–1441) 741 d'Este, Prince Leonello (1407–50) 393–396, 399–400, 729 De successionibus in bona defuncti (Selden) 286, 300 De supplemento almanach (Cardano) 565 De theologia gentili (Vossius) 297 de Thou, Jacques-Auguste (1553–1617) 5, 11–12, 93–94, 208, 1029 De triangulis omnimodis 565 Detti, et fatti piacevoli et gravi, di diversi principi filosofi, et cortigiani (Guicciardini) 1006, 1008–1010, 1014–1015 Deutsches Reich (National Socialism) 520 de Valentia, Gregorius (1549–1603) 278 De’ Vecchi, Alessandro (active 1593–1630)  188 De veteri bononino argenti Bononiae. Dissertatio historicolegalis (Macchiavelli) 875 Devil, the bloodhound of (L’Estrange) 322 Boemus and 724n32 effigies and 313 mousetrap of (muscipula diaboli) 359 Protestants as (Smith) 318 Devill of Mascon, The 634

1047 de Villoison, Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse (1750/53–1805) 822 de Vio, Cardinal Tommaso Cajetan (1469–1534) 278 De Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht (1780–1849) 340 d’Herbelot, Barthélémy (1625–95) 908 diaeta (diet) 134, 138 diagrams See also tables allegories as 537 anamorphic map 534 bar graph 518–521, 539 Chernoff-faces 526–527 choropleth map 532, 539 fever chart 521–522, 524 Manhattan chart 527–528 Melothesia figure 529 pie chart 522–524, 526, 531, 539 “Sensory Homunculus” (Penfield) 536 spider graph 525 Dialogo del maestro di casa (Evitascandalo)  176–177, 180, 184–186, 191 Dialogue on the Converse with Angels aided by the Philosophers’ Stone (Boyle)  629–630, 631 Diary (Farington) 840 Diatriba de decimis in Lege Dei (Scaliger) 61 Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (Montagu) 72 Dictionnaire historique d’éducation (Fillassier)  802 Dictionnaire portatif de la Langue Françoise  802 Didymus the Blind (ca. 313–398) 381 Die Kultur der Antike (Howald) 845 Diels, Hermann (1848–1922) 944 Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote (Grafton) xli Die türkische Bibel (Megerlin) 329, 335–336 Die Wirthschaft eines philosophischen Bauern (Le Socrate rustique) (Hirzel) 805 Dietz, Heinrich Friedrich von (1751–1817) 910 digital world 423 Dii consentes 757 Dilherr, Johann Michael (1604–69) 299

1048 Dio Cassius (155–236 ce) 698 Diocles of Magnesia (2nd or 1st ct. bce) 941–945 Diocletian (244–311) 224–225, 373, 379, 743 Diodorus of Sicily (active between 60 and 30 bce) 711–728, 725 Diogenes (Diogenes Laertius, 3rd ct. ce) 398, 937–954 See also “Laertius Diogenes and His Sources: A Contribution to the History of Ancient Literary Studies” (Nietzsche) Dionisotti, Carlotta xxxviii Dionysius the Areopagite, see Areopagites Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60 bce–after 7 bc) 350, 356, 712 discernment of spirits 268–285 See also knowledge Discorsi (Machiavelli) 205, 610, 618, 702 Discourse on Method (Descartes) 170 Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (Knight)  830 Discourses on Livy (Machiavelli) 355 discretio (textual discernment) 269 Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Delrio)  269–271 Dissen, Georg Ludolf (1784–1837) 971 Dissertatio de principatu Abimelechi (Abrabanel) 301 Ditchfield, Simon 271 divination 547 emending corrupted texts through  958–959, 972 Gevartius and 74–76, 746 Inquisition and 583 Noah’s celestial 717 divina visione, La (G. Andreine) 152 Divine Comedy (Dante) 662, 690 Divine Weekes (Du Bartas) 56 Doctrine of Princes (Plutarch) 737 Dodoens, Rembert (1517–85) 127, 138 Doeg (the Edomite, bibl.) 324 dogma, Kimhi and 47–48 dogs 311, 314, 317–322 See also animals Dolendo, Bartholomeus Willemsz (ca. 1589–1626) 79–80 domestic management, see maestro di case (household chief of staff) manuals dominance, sexual 143

Index Domitianus (Domitian), Emperor (51–96 ce) 205, 738 Domnius, Saint (3rd ct.) 375 Donation of Constantine (Valla) 885–886, 888 Donatus Magnus, Bishop of Carthage (ca. 355) 388 Donne, John (1572–1631) 56 Don Quijote (Cervantes) 583 Donum Dei topos 627–628 double truth, doctrine of 760 Dousa, Janus (1545–1604) 5 drama feminine emotionalism and 149 humanistic 152, 156 morality and 140, 153–156 pastoral 144–145 Drayton, Michael (1563–1631) 60 Dresden Kunstkammer 481–491, 493–494 collections of 482–483 Dresden Kupferstichkabinett 488 Dresden Weinbaumuseum, see Schloss Hoflössnitz (Radebeul, now Dresden Weinbaumuseum) Droysen, Johann Gustav (1808–84) 401–402, 920 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste (1544–90)  55 Dubois, Siméon 5 Dumézil, Georges (1898–1986) 354 du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe (1549–1623) 16 Duprat, Bishop Guillaume (1507–60) 265 Dupuy, Claude (1545–94) 5, 11–12, 59 Dupuy, Jacques (1591–1656) 751 Dzelzainis, Martin 203 Early Modern Political Thought (Skinner)  732 Earth (Arcimboldo) 491 Ebers, Fanny (b. 1802) 918–919 Ebers, Georg (1837–98) 917–932 Ecclesiastes, Book of 239 Ecclesiastical Annals (Baronio) 358 Ecclesiastical History (Eusebius) 441 Eckhout, Albert (1607–65/66) 496–498 Eckstein, Ludwig (1847–93) 748 économie rustique 805 Edelstein, Dan 163 Eden, Kathy 679–680 Edict of Nantes 856

Index Edinburgh 824–829 Edinburgh Review 825 “Editor’s Confession” (Farbenlehre, Goethe)  912–913 Edomites 598 education 211, 402, 798–820 open future and 815 garden and 807, 809, 814, 817 nature and 800–809, 814–815, 820 purpose of 200–202 reason and 818 stages of life (Lebensalter) 816 time and 810–820 virtue and 800, 803, 806, 808, 818, 820 Edward I King of England (1239–1307) 670 Effemeredi sacro-civili perpetue bolognesi (Macchiavelli) 895 effigies 313 papal 315, 325–326 Egidio da Viterbo (1472–1532) 663 Egnazio, Giambattista (1478–1553) 218, 229 Egypt ancient 377, 380 Diospolis Mikra 382 Pboou / Pabau 382 Sohag, White Monastery 383 Thebais, Epiphanius monastery 383 Egyptian Princess, An (Ebers) 921–923, 926, 930 Egyptology 919–932 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried (1752–1827) 904, 935 Eichhorn, Shifra (19th ct.) 479 Eigene Lebensbeschreibung (Boysen) 336 Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1923–2016) 169 Electorum libri tres (Gevartius) 746, 752, 755 Elegantiae (Valla) 553 Elements (Euclid) 292, 781–797 Chamber and 793–796 Proclus and 786–787, 790 propositions in 5 790–791 17 788–789 18 796 27 789–790, 794 28 789–790, 794 29 790–791 30 791–792, 795 Ramus and 782–783 Savile and 781–783, 785, 878–897

1049 Elements of law natural and politic, The (Hobbes) 280 elephants 314, 320, 323–326 theology and 348 Eliot, John (active around 1593) 55 Elisabetta Farnese, Queen of Spain (1692–1766) 878 Ellis, George (1753–1818) 826 Ellis, Robert (19th ct.) 204 Elyot, Sir Thomas (1490–1546) 115 Elzevir, Ludovic (active in the 1st half of the 17th ct.) 574 Embassy on Behalf of the Christians (Athenagoras) 757–759 Emblems (Alciato) 1005 Emile ou de l’éducation (Rousseau) 798–820 “Le Manuscrit Favre de l’Emile,” 815, 818 encyclopedia, Hurwitz’s mystical-scientific, see Sefer Ha-Brit (Hurwitz) Encyclopedia of the Philological Sciences (Nietzsche) 947 England Casaubon and 25, 27, 58 Sarpi and 27–28, 32 Scaliger and 56, 58–59, 62–63, 69–70 Englands Jubilee (S. Jerome) 57 Enneades (Sabellico) 228, 719, 723 Ennius (ca. 239–ca. 169 bce) 772 Ennodius, Magnus Felix (473/4–521) 847 Enoptron (Eudoxus) 1024 Enosh (bibl.) 579 Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, An (Blackwell) 832 Enriquez, Beatriz (1467–1536) 405 Ephemerides (Casaubon) 207 Ephesians, Letter to the (Paul) 241, 245–246, 248 Epictetus (55–135) 574, 758 Epicureanism 772 epistemology 269, 275–276 defined 1028 historical, and Grafton 268 interpretative 277 Epistle to Augustus (Horace) 402 Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligeræ, et Iul. Cæs. Scaligeri vita (Scaliger) 76 Epistolae medicinales (Manardo) 124 Epistolary Fiction 1500–1850 (Beebee) 546–547

1050 epistolography 158, 170–171 See also books; print culture advantages of 159 controlled circulation and 4–20 destruction and 3–5 Epistles Nunciatory 111 epistles versus letters 17 epistolae familiares 19 epistolae medicinales 125 Kircher and 162–172 posthumous publication and 8–15, 19–20 privacy and 17–18 Renaissance 4–20 self-editing and 10 veiled references and 7 Epitome of the Almagest of Ptolemy (Regiomontanus) 564–565, 567 Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus  1466–1536) 29, 63, 78, 83, 232–250, 583, 591, 688, 848, 1022 humor of 247–249 letter-writing manuals of 552–553 Luther and 232–250 as a new Momus 248 Republic of Letters and 161 Ercole, Michele (1622–84) 187 Eric ii, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1528–84) 127, 134–135, 138 Erlich, Louise xxxix–xl Erman, Adolf (1854–1937) 932 Ernesti, Johann August (1707–81) 936 Ernst, Germana 605 Erpenius, Thomas (1584–1624) 87, 331, 908 Essais (Montaigne) 583 Essayes (Bacon) 203 Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (I. Mather) 638 Essay of a proof, that the first language had its origin not from mankind, but from the creator (Süßmilch) 572 Essemplare di piu sorti lettere (Cresci) 450 Essemplare di xiiii lingue principalissime (van Aelst) 446–450, 468 Essex Affair 207, 1010–1012 Estaco, Aquiles (1524–81) 264–266 estampages 970 Esther, Book of 92 Estienne, Robert I, see Stephanus, Robertus Ethics (Aristotle), and Brandolini 705

Index Ethiopia 217, 360, 725 Ethiopian (language) 82, 257 Etienne, Henri (the elder, Henricus Stephanus 1470–ca. 1520) 793 Etienne, Robert I, see Stephanus, Robertus Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville) 442, 766–767, 816–817 Etymologicum Magnum 941 Euclid (of Alexandria, active 300 bce)  781–797 See also Elements (Euclid) Euclid of Megara (ca. 435–ca. 365 bce) 785 Eudoxus (of Cnidus 408–355 bce) 1024 Eugene (Eugenius) iv, Pope (Gabriele Condulmer 1383–1447) 700, 706 “Eugenius” (“Good Genius”) 627, 633 Euhemerus of Messene (fl. 300 bce)  711–712 Eurypides (480–406 bce) 377, 850 Eusebius (of Caesarea 260/265–339/340) 441, 924–925 Eustathius (of Thessalonica, Archbishop, ca. 1115–95/6) 941 Eustochium, Saint, (ca. 368–ca.419) 387 Eutychius (ca. 512–82) 681 Euzoius, Bishop of Antioch (4th ct.) 385 Evagrius of Antioch (Evagrius Ponticus, ca. 399) 269, 390 evidence, historical 882–896 See also Gozzadini, Bettisia (1209–61); memory “dubious facts” (Muratori) and 883 Evitascandalo, Cesare (active 2nd half of 16th and 1st half of 17th ct.) 176–178, 180–186, 190–191, 193 Ewsum, Christophorus van (1523–83) 237 Excalibur 670 excerpts 425, 436 See also Books, commonplace; Morais; Morais Ledger; scrapbooks Exegetisches Handbuch des alten Testaments (Augusti and Höpfner) 340 exemplum, morale 437–438 Exercitationes (Casaubon) 30–32 Exodus, Book of 304, 924 exorcism 276 exotica, see naturalia expurgatio (purging offensive words and passages) 398, 585 methods of 587–593

Index Eyre, William (late 1570s–1642) 67–68 Ezra, Book of 92, 375–376 Fables (Aesop) 311, 398 Fabricius, Johann Albert (1668–1736) 575 Fabri de Peiresc, see Peiresc Facciolati, Jacopo (1682–1769) 547, 549–552 Facciotti, Pietro Antonio (1st half 17th ct.)  186, 190 faculties, university 428 Fagius, Paulus (1504–49) 87 Falcon Book, see Art of Hunting with Birds, The (Frederick ii) Fall, the (Christian) 578 See also Adam Adamic language (Lingua Adamica) and  574–575 Aristotle and 692 Boemus and 727 “cave myth” (Ferguson) and 727 knowledge of God and 577–578 Fantuzzi, Giovanni (1718–99) 885–886, 894–895 Farbenlehre (Goethe) 903–904, 912–913 Farington, Joseph (1747–1821) 840 Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro (1520–89)  176, 179 Farquharson, A. S. I. 755 Fasold, Hans (Johann Fasold 1570–1619)  501–503 Fasti Gymnasii Patavini (tr. Facciolati) 547, 550–551 Faust: Part One (Goethe) 902–903, 915–916 Faustus and Friends: Magic in Renaissance Germany (Grafton) xlii Favorinus (of Arelate, ca. 80–ca. 160 ce)  942 Favre, Léopold (1848–1922) 815 F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer (Grafton, Most, and Zetzel) xliv Fedeli 140 Feingold, Mordechai 792 feminism, see Bitisia Gozzadina seu De mulierum doctoratu apologetico legalishistorico dissertatio (Alessandro and Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli); Gozzadini, Bettisia (1209–61). Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe- (1651–1715) 800

1051 Ferdinand, Cardinal Infante (1609/10–41)  756 Ferdinand, King of Spain (1452–1516) 739–740 Fered, David Leib (active around 1797) 471 Ferguson, Arthur 712 Fernel, Jean (1497–1558) 129 Ferreri, Bishop Zaccaria (ca. 1479–ca. 1524)  550 Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–72) 919 Fiadoni, Tolomeo, see Ptolemy of Lucca Fiaschini, Fabrizio 152–153 Ficari, Quinto 664–667 Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99) 46 Fidelis, Cassandra (ca. 1465–ca. 1558) 550 Filelfo, Francesco (1398–1481) 222–223, 703 Fillassier, Jean-Jacques (1745–99) 802 “Final Reflections on Language and Terminology” (Schlussbetrachtungen über Sprache und Terminologie, Goethe) 912 Findlen, Paula 162 Fischer, Joseph (active around 1889)  478–480 Fischer, Karl (1757–1844) 470, 472 Fissell, Mary 311, 317 Fitz Roger, Tancred, see Roger, Tancred Fitz Flacius (Matthias Flacius Illyricus/Valerius 1520–75) 195, 581, 681, 1029 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80) 922 Flaxman, John (1755–1826) 834–841 Fleckeles, Rabbi Elazar (1754–1826) 470–471 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht (1801–88)  342 Fletcher, John 163 Flood, the Golden Age and 715 Noah’s premonition of (pseudo-Berosus) 717 Sabellico and 720, 723 sin after 718 Florentinus (4th ct. ce) 374 Florinda (G. Andreini) 152 Fludd, Robert (1574–1637) 975 Fonseca y Acevedo, Alonso (d. 1512) 848 Fontainebleau conference (1600) 16 Footnote, The: A Curious History (Grafton)  1028–1031 For a Better Understanding (Zum besseren Verständnis, Goethe) 907

1052 Forestus, Petrus (1521–97) 132–133 Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Grafton) xl 871, 1028–1029 forgery 602–620, 740, 743, 960 See also Annius of Viterbo Boeckh and 965 Erasmus and 731–2 Grafton and 731, 731n5, 871 Guevara and 731–732, 735, 739n24 Kellermann and 966 Macchiavelli and 871–896 Mommsen and 966–967 Foscolo, Ugo (1778–1827) 829, 831 Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (Kelley) 553 Four Philosophers, The (P. P. Rubens) 748 Fourssade, Guillemette (active around 1604)  859–860 Fox, Charles James (1749–1806) 830 Fragments (I. Andreini) 151 Fragments of Ancient Poetry (Ossian/ MacPherson) 827–828 Fragnito, Gigliola 173, 175 Francueil, Suzanne Dupin de (1751–?) 804 Frankfurt an der Oder 300 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung xli Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen 336 Frankfurter Rundschau xli Franklin, Julian 1019 Franz, Wolfgang (1564–1648) 314–315, 318–319, 323 Frazer, James (1854–1941) 353 Frazier, Alison 52 Frederick ii, Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor (1194–1250) 484, 669, 888 French (language) 55 French Academy 849 Frenzel, Carl (19th ct.) 922 frescoes Gaddi and 226 Romano and 226 Vatican 441–442, 444, 446, 448, 450, 454, 456, 463–468 Friedrich Wilhelm I, Elector of Brandenburg (1620–88) 496–497 Friedrich Wilhelm iv, King (1795–1861) 924 frogs 314–316 From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and

Index Sixteenth-Century Europe (Grafton and Jardine) xliii “From Polyhistor to Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850” (Grafton) 899 Fronto, Marcus Cornelius (ca. 100–late 160s ce) 370, 847 Fuchs, Leonhart (1501–66) 136–137, 415 Fugger, Johann (first tax registered 1367)  664–667 See also Defuk, Cardinal Iohannes Fuggerei 666 Fulgentius, Fabius Planciades (late 5th ct.–early 6th ct.) 848 Fundamenta (Descartes) 15 Fusconio, Antonio (17th ct.?) 188 Fusoritto, Reale, Cavaliere di Narni (16th ct.)  176–177, 179, 187, 190–191 Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002) 682 Gaddi, Agnolo (ca. 1350–96) 226 Gagnebin, Bernard 545 Gagnier, Jean (1670?–1740) 328, 338, 341 Gaietanus, Daniel (1461–1528) 412 Galatians, Letter to 238, 241 Galen (Galenus, Claudius) (129–ca. 200 ce)  369–371, 608, 772, 798 Galesini, Pietro (1520–90) 442 Gall, Joseph (1758–1828) 533 Galland, Antoine (1646–1715) 332 Galle, Philip (ca. 1560–90) 87 Gans, David (1541–1613) 43–44 Garamont, Claude (1510–61) 256 Garkach [?], Asher (active around 1799) 471 Garzoni, Tommaso (1549–89) 155–156 Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655) 166 Gataker, Thomas (1574–1654) 755 Gaurico, Luca (1475–1558) 561–563, 566–568 “rational” method of 567 Gay, Peter (1923–2015) 1019, 1025 Gehennical Fire (Newman) 639 Gelasio (monk, ca. 450) 372, 390 Gellius, Aulus (ca. 125–after 180 ce) 369, 393, 847, 941 Gelosi, Compagnia dei 140, 143, 150 Gelpke, August Heinrich Christian (1769–1842) 520 Gemäldegalerie 482

Index gematria, see interpretation, kabbalistic methods of Geminus of Rhodes (1st ct. bce) 787 Génébrard, Gilbert (1535–97) 40–43, 47, 49, 51–54, 855 Genesis, Book of 579 See also Cotton Genesis Creation in 573–574 Philo of Alexandria and 576 Reuchlin and 577, 579 Geneva, bge, ms lat. 86 542–560 See also rhetoric authors, teachers, and transcribers included in 547–551 codicological description 555 comparison with printed editions  556–557 dating 546 Geneva manuscript 542–547, 551, 554, 556–557 Ghent manuscript 546 information about 545–548 intended audience for, at University of Padua 542 paleographical description 555 sections of 555–556 treatises in 542 versions of 543 Gentili, Alberico (1552–1608) 619 Gentillet, Innocent (1535–88) 583 Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–ca. 1155)  661, 668 Geoffrey of Viterbo (Godfrey of Viterbo, ca. 1120–ca. 1196) 669 Geoffroy, Pierre (d. 1635) 856–861, 870 geometrical forms 509, 518 Geometry (Ramus) 783 Geonim (post-Talmudic rabbis) 53–54 George of Cappadocia (ca. 361 ce)  386–387 Georgics (Virgil) 772 Gerhard, Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard (1795–1867) 920, 967 Gerhard, Johann (1582–1637) 299 German (language) 241 German Reich (National Socialism), see Deutsches Reich Germanus maximus 561 Geroldus von Knittelfeld, Jacobus (15th ct.)  542, 546, 549–552, 556–557

1053 Gerson, Jean (1363–1429) 269, 276, 279 Gersonides (Levi ben Gershon 1288–1344)  42 Gervase of Tilbury (1150–1228) 661 Geschichte der historischen Forschung und Kunst (Wachler) 903 Gessner, Conrad (also Konrad Gesner 1516–65) 49, 413, 415–422, 426–430, 434, 436, 752–753, 785 Gevartius, Caspar (Jan Caspar Gevaerts 1593–1666) 744–760 Holstenius and 753–754 P.P. Rubens and 748–751 Ghibellines, versus Guelfs 665 Ghiselli, Anton Francesco (1670–1730)  882–886 Ghislieri, Cardinal Michele (Pope Pius V 1504–72) 591 Giard, Luce 169 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94) 205, 327, 908, 1029 Gifford, Maurice (1859–1910) 322 Gilbert, William (1544–1603) 70 Gillis, Pieter (1486–1533) 745 Gillot, Jacques (1544–1619) 39–40 Ginzburg, Carlo 1026 Giotto di Bondone (1266/7–1337) 690 Giustiniani, Cardinal Benedetto di San Marcello (1554–1621) 180 Glanvill, Joseph (1636–80) 634 Glasman, Gina 658 Glassius, Salomon (1593–1656) 299 Glauber, Johann Rudolph (1604–70) 639 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig (1719–1803)  337, 339 Glover, Samuel 114 God 227 See also Adam; Christ, Jesus; Creation, the; Logos; theology (theologia), Logos; Word, the attributes of 116 Baal-zebub (fly-god) 71 Boyle and 629–631 creation and 766–769 gifts of 467 knowing true 346 knowledge and 779 through contemplation 767 Meditations (Aurelius) and 757 name of 101n51, 241, 579–580

1054 God (cont.) natural law and 294–296, 299, 304 nature of 222, 247–248, 303–304 redemption and 475, 477 Sophocles and 757 substitute 344–345 Van Helmont and 625 wisdom and 210 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry 309–310, 312, 325 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832)  336, 339, 401, 521, 836 antiquarianism and 899–916 Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt (Cassirer)  900 Golden Age Boemus and 728 Diodorus of Sicily and 715 Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (Guevara) 730–734 Golden Bough (Frazer) 353 Golden Legend (de Voragine) 226 Goldgar, Anne 168 Goldie, Mark 361 Goldziher, Ignaz (1850–1921) 928, 932 Golius, Jacobus (1596–1667) 327 Goltzius, Hendrick (1558–1617) 73–76 Gomberville, Marin le Roy, Sieur du Parc et de (1600–74) 802–803 Gonzaga, Gulielmo, Duke of Mantua (1538–87) 741–742 Goodheart, Adam 1030 Gordian ii (ca. 192–238) 223 Gospels 378, 381 See also individual authors Gottschalk, Michael (2nd half of 17th ct.) 299 Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–66) 332 Gouda 126, 130, 134–135 government See also democracy (democratia); tyranny Aristotle and 610, 692, 694 art of (Bacon) 198–199 constitutional (Campanella) 610–611 Erasmus and 201 forms of Cyriac of Ancona and 707–710 Polybius and 707–708 “Gracious Government” (Bacon) 201–203 kingship and 615

Index La Peyrère and 294 monarchical 613, 692, 706, 710 ochlocratia (Cyriac of Ancona) 707 popular 692, 696 Pujades and 111, 113 Resurrection and 690 Sarpi and 22 Gozzadini, Bettisia (1209–61) 879–896 grace (theol.), original sin and 812–813 Grafton, Anna xl Grafton, Anthony 33, 347, 384, 386, 424, 713, 760 Andreini family and 155 Casaubon and 253 contributions of 196 Cuffe and 207 Flacius and 581 Gevartius and 744 Goethe and 914 history and 916 the “how of scholarship” and 642 “method” of 1018–1031 public valence in private writing and  107, 158 Renaissance correctores and 581 Republic of Letters (respublica literaria) and 33, 141, 268–269 Scaliger and xliii, 54, 63, 76, 91, 125 themes of 107 “worlds made by words” and 268 See also individual titles of Grafton's works Grafton, Eddith Kingstone xxxvi Grafton, Sam xl Grafton, Samuel (Samuel Lipshutz) xxxvi Granjon, Robert (1513–89/90) 256, 448, 454 Gravina, Dominico (1573–1643)  280–285 Gray, Hannah Holborn xxxvii, 1019 Gray, Thomas (1716–71) 822 Gray’s Inn orations (Bacon) 196–197, 200–201, 202, 209 Greaves, John (1602–52) 62 Grecs du Roy (typeface, designed 1541)  255–256 Greek Bible (Herwagen ed.) 265 grammars 454 language 55, 82, 241, 393–403 Greenblatt, Stephen 675

Index Greene, Thomas 402 Greenstone, Julius H. (1873–1955) 656 Gregoire, Pierre (1540–97) 198 Gregory, David (1659/61–1708) 797 Gregory, John (1610–46) 70–72 Gregory, John Milton (1822–98) 979 Gregory I, Pope (Gregory the Great, ca. 540–604) 388 Gregory xiii, Pope (Ugo Boncompagni, 1502–85) 255 Grendler, Paul F. 552 Grenville, William, 1st Baron Grenville (1759–1834) 830 Grenville, Thomas (1755–1846) 829–831 “Gretchen” episode (Goethe) 902 Griesbach, Johann Jacob (1745–1812) 340 Grieve, John (1781–1836) 828 Griffio, Giovanni (ca. 1518–ca. 1576) 594–595 Grimm, Jakob (1785–1863) 920 Grimm Brothers 919 Groebner, Valentin 423 Großwissenschaft (Mommsen) 967–968 Grotius, Hugo (1530–1645) 745 Boeclar and 287 destruction of letters and 3–5 Kirchmaier and 295 letters of 11 natural law and 292, 302, 306 religion and 304, 306 rex sacrificulus (rex sacrorum) and  361–362 Rivetus and 94 Scaliger and 79 secular politics and 360 Selden and 289 Vitriarius and 306 Zieglar and 304–305 Grueber, Johannes (1623–80) 167 Grünes Gewölbe 482 Gruter, Janus (1560–1627) 8, 574, 956, 963, 966 Grynaeus, Simon (1493–1541) 785–786 Gryphus, Petrus (1469–1516) 461 Guarini, Guarino, of Verona (1374–1460) 147, 729–730 Guazzo, Stefano (1530–93) 197 Guerra, Giovanni (1544–1618) 358, 441 Guerre, Martin (1524–60) 1025 Guevara, Antonio de (ca. 1481–1545) 730

1055 Guicciardin, Frances (Francesco Guiccardini 1483–1540) 600, 702, 730 Guicciardini, Lodovico (1521–89) 1006 Guidotti, Saint Galgano (1148–81) 673 Guilandinus (1520–89) 77 Guillaume de Palerme 406 Guinevere, Queen (legend.) 661, 669 Guinter, Johannes (1505–74) 129 Gumppenberg, Wilhelm (1609–75) 854 Gundling, Nikolaus Hieronymus (1671–1729)  308 Gyraldi, Lilio Gregorio (1479–1552) 357 Haddon, Walter (ca. 1515–72) 199 Hadrian, Emperor (76–138 ce) 205–206 Haelst, Joseph van (1893–1969) 380 Hafiz (b. 1326) 906–908 Hagiensis, Daniel (active around 1604) 78 Hainhofer, Philipp (1578–1647) 483, 491, 493–494, 500–503 Halberstamm, David 479 Halberstamm, Solomon (1832–1900) 479 Hallenberger, Edward (1892–1973) 922 Ham (Zoroaster) 718, 723 Sabellico and 719–720 Ha-Me’asef 472 Hamilton, George 595 Hamilton, Sir William (1730–1803) 838–840 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von (1774–1856)  907, 910–911 Hammet, Walter (active around 1910)  977–978 Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (Shark)  899–900 Hanniel, Ignatius (?–1608) 80 Hapfer, Abraham Judah Meir (d. before 1646)  475 Hare-Naylor, Francis (1753–1815) 835 Harlay, Robert (1517–60) 328 Harmonia Evangelica (Meuschius) 8 Harrington, James (1611–77) 360–362, 702 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp (1607–58) 439 Hartlib, Samuel (1600–62) 626 Harvey, Gabriel (ca. 1552–1631) xliii–xliv 205, 999–1017, 1027 Harvey, Richard 65–66 Hatton, Charles 325 Haultin, Pierre (ca. 1510–87) 256 Hausvater tradition 173–174

1056 Hawkwood, Sir John (1320–94) 672–673 Alliterative Morte d’Arthur and 672 Hazlitt, William (1778–1830) 823 Hebraism Scaliger and 39–54 Selden and 289 Hebrew exegesis 40–54 grammars 454 language 3, 52–55, 82, 85, 241, 445, 868 studies 302 Hebrews, Letter to the 241 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831)  573, 900, 918 Heidegger, Johann Heinrich (1633–98) 299 Heinsius, Daniel (1580–1655) 5, 7, 9, 11–12, 77, 745–746 Heinsius, Nicolaas (1620–81) 745 hellenikon (“Greekness”) 401 hellenismos (“Hellenism”) 401–402 Helmont, Joan Batista Van (1580–1644) 621–640 Henderson, Judith 9 Henri, King of Navarre (later King Henri iv of France 1553–1610) 6, 25, 856 Henri iii, King of France (1551–89) 41 Henry of Almain (1235–71) 670–671 Henry V (Shakespeare) 312 Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor (1086–1125)  664 Henry viii, King of England (1491–1557) 200 Heracles (myth.) 712 Heraclius (575–641) 219–220, 225–227, 229 Heraclonas (626–41) 226 Herbertsz, Herman (1540–1607) 130 Hercules (Libyan) 718 Hercules Furens (Seneca) 411 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)  337, 902 Goethe and 903, 908 Hermann, Gottfried (1772–1848) 960, 964–965, 967, 971–972 hermeneutics, humanist 675–691, 686–687 author-text relationship 678–681 defined 677 reader-text relationship 681–683 rhetorical theory and 677–683 Hermogenes, Aurelius, of Oxyrhynchus (2nd half of 3rd ct. ce) 380

Index Herodotus (484–25 bce) 398, 401, 694, 919–924, 931, 941, 960, 1029 Ebers and 920–921, 923–924 Grafton and 1029 Herrera, Antonio de (1549–1625) 184 Herrera, Juan de (1530–97) 413 Herwagen, Johann (1497–1558) 265 Herzilish, Beer (active around 1800) 472 Hesiod (active between 750 and 650 bce)  398, 941 Hesychius (5th or 6th ct. ce) 941 Heumann, Christoph August (1681–1764)  332 Heurnius, Johannes (1543–1601) 129, 130 Heurnius, Otto (active around 1600) 130 Hexapla (biblical edition of six versions), see bibles, Hexapla Hexter, Jack (1910–96) 170 Heydius, Cornelius (active 1557–66) 131 Heylyn, Peter (1599–1662) 57–58, 69 Hiberius, Lucius (legend.) 669 hieroglyphics/hieroglyphs 465–466, 915–916 animal, and Popish Plot 310 Ebers and 920 K. R. Lipsius and 920 Hilarion, Palestinian monk (ca. 291–371)  375, 390 Hintermeister, Diethelm (19th ct.) 515 Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 bce) 772, 804 Hirt, Johann Friedrich (1719–83) 339 Hirzel, Johann Caspar (1725–1803) 805 Historia animalium (Gessner) 415–416 Historia animalium sacra (The History of Brutes; or A Description of Living Creatures, Franz) 314, 318–319, 323 Historia Augusta 206, 224–225, 734 Historia Bononiensis (Sigonio) 884–885, 889, 892, 895 Historia critica philosophiae (Brucker) 331 Historia juris naturalis (Budde) 306 historian (defined by Sidney) 122n 40 Historia philosophiae moralis (Gundling)  308 Historia plantarum (Gessner) 415–422 Historia Regum Britanniae (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 668–669 Historia sui temporis (de Thou) 208 Historical Amusement: A New and Entertaining Game on the History of England 977–978

Index Historie of Tithes (Selden) 61 Histories (Herodotus; tr. Valla) 401 Historismus 915–916 history Goethe and 899–916, 914 imperial 205, 229 universal (Diodorus of Sicily) 711 History…of the Life & Deeds of the Admiral Christopher Columbus 404 History of Hellenism (Geschichte des Hellenismus, Droysen) 401 History of Rome (Polybius) 697 Cyriac of Ancona and 701 History of the Council of Trent (Sarpi) 32 History of the Florentine People (Bruni) 709 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) 62, 275, 280, 292, 360 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874–1929) 931 Holbein the Younger, Hans (1497/98–1543)  83 Holstenius, Lucas (1596–1661) 752–755 Homer (active 8th ct. bce?) 380, 397–398, 919 “Homeric Question” 821 Hondius, Hendrik (1573–1650) 87 Hope, Nicholas 340 Hope, Thomas (1769–1831) 838 Höpfl, Hildebrand (1872–1934) 262–264 Höpfner, Johann Georg Christian (1765–1827)  340 Hoppner, John (1758–1810) 840 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 bce) 6, 153, 388, 393, 402, 803 Hörnqvist, Mikael 355 horoscopes malicious (Cardano) 561–571 morbid (Gaurico) 561–571 Regiomontanus’s 561–570 Horpheus, Lucas, see Orfei, Luca (Lucas Horpheus) Hottinger, Johann Heinrich (1620–67) 299, 327–328, 331 Hout, Jan van (1542–1609) 74 Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope) 838 Howald, Ernst (1887–1967) 845 Howard, Henry (1516/7–47) 1011–1012 “How to Make History Dates Stick” (Twain) 975–977, 989, 993

1057 Hübner, Emil (1834–1901) 972–973 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 982 Huet, Pierre Daniel (1630–1721) 308 Huguenots 867 See also Catholicism, Huguenots and Hülsemann, Johann (1602–61) 299 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche) 940 humanism 140–156 See also Grafton, Anthony Christian 289, 686 everyday 396 imperial 733 Latinate 395 “legal” (Kelley) 553–554 medical (Ronsse) 133, 138–139 Melanchthon’s Christian 289 Momigliano and 351, 401 performing 142, 144, 154 See also Andreini, Isabella Pontacus and 54 rhetoric and 553–554 Ronsse and, see humanism, medical (Ronsse) self-expression and 81–83 Tacitean 202 vernacular 144, 155–156 Humboldt, Alexander von (1769–1859) 521 Hume, David (1711–76) 908 Hunter, Michael 629–630 Hurst, Lincoln D. (1946–2008) 321 Hurtado, Larry W. 303, 380 Hurwitz, Pinḥas (d. 1821) 469–480 “covenants” of 474–478 Hus, Jan (1369–1415) 581 Huygens, Christiaan (1629–95) 163 Hygiasticon (Lessius) 769 Hyperaspistes I–ii (Erasmus) 237 “I am an Observator” 313, 316 ibn Abi Daqn, Yûsuf (Abudacnus, active around 1608) 85 ibn Aflaḥ, Jābir (1100–50) 565 ibn Daud, Abraham (Abraham Levita, ca. 1110–ca. 1180) 43, 52 ibn Ezra, Abraham (1089–1167) 42–44, 46, 52 ibn Yahya, Gedalya (ca. 1526–ca. 1587) 43 ideal, imperial 729–743 idolatry 304 reconstructing pagan 296

1058 Igel Monument 902 Ignisaqua (Van Helmont’s alkahest) 624 dream of Starkey and 626–627 Van Helmont and 623–625 “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Grafton and Weinberg) xliv–xlv Il Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, Castiglione) 583 Iliad (Homer) 397, 403, 799, 821, 833, 836–837 Ambrosian 392 de Villoison and 822 “Illustrations of Illustrious, Munificent, and Monumental Medals Regarding My Country of Bologna” (Macchiavelli) 875 Illustrazioni di ritratti impresi di città di Bologna (Macchiavelli) 895 Illyricus, Matthias Flacius, see Flacius (Matthias Flacius Illyricus) Il novitiato del maestro di casa (Adami) 186 Il perfetto maestro di casa (Liberati) 180 Il Petrarca (publ. Angelieri) 597, 599 Il Petrarcha (publ. Vidali) 595, 598 Il primo libro delli Essempi (van Aelst)  448–449 Il trinciante (Fusoritto) 188 Impartial Protestant Mercury, The 313 imperium divinum 304–306 indices 426–427, 429, 434–5, 437, 439, 591 Catholic 430–433 Clementine 586, 592, 594 Index expurgatorius (Antwerp) 433 Pauline 585 of Prohibited Books censorship methods 584–585 Machiavelli and 740 Petrarch and 583–584 Roman 583, 585, 593–594, 596 Tridentine 586, 594 Rule 6 of 592 In felicem memoriam Elizabethae (Bacon)  208 information concealing 3–7

Index public purpose of privately collected 117–119 Innocent xi, Pope (Benedetto Odescalchi 1611–89) 328 Inquisition 431 Roman 583 Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani in corpus absolutissimum redactae cum indicibus xxv (Scaliger) 956 Institutio Principis Christiani (Erasmus) 200 Institutes (Gaius) 962 Institutes of Oratory (Quintilian) 675 Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti (Ernesti)  936 institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Thomasius) 305 Institutio oratoria (Quintilian) 48, 393 Instructio de Impressione Librorum (Clementine Index), see indices, Clementine intellectus (defined) 623 “intelligencer” (newsmonger) 109–122, 120 See also epistolography Intenti, Accademia degli, of Pavia 145, 148, 150–151, 154 internet platform 439 Introductio ad Chaldaicam linguam (Ambrogio) 464–465 Introductio ad historiam philosophiae Ebraeorum (Budde) 301 inventio (creative formation of an argument)  680 “inventors-of-letters” topos 442–445 See also alphabets Irenaeus, Saint (d. ca. 202) 265, 370, 374 Irving, David (1778–1860) 824–825, 827 Isaac of Stella 687 Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) 389, 392, 442, 816–817 Isis 714, 718 Islam 221, 336, 908 Ebers and 926 Goldziher and 928 Renaissance and 215–231 Islamophobia 220, 327–343 Italian (language) 55 Italian Journey (Goethe) 909 Italicus, Silius 681 Iter Italicum (Kristeller) 546, 550, 555

Index Jażwiński, Antoni (active: first half of 19th ct.) 978 Jabal (bibl.) 727 Jahn, Otto (1813–69) 958 James, Thomas (ca. 1573–1629) 251–254 James I, King of England (1566–1625) 21, 25, 27, 36–37, 198, 206–207, 310 Japhet (bibl.) 723 Jarchi, Solomon (1104–80) 298 See also Rashi Jardine, Lisa xxxviii, xliii–xliv, 207, 1027 Jason of Cyrene (active around 100 bce) 92 Jeanne d’Albret, Queen (r. 1555–72)  856–857, 867 Jeremiah, Book of 92, 656 Jerome, Saint (ca. 347–420) 42–43, 51, 245, 254, 258, 267, 372, 374–375, 384, 387, 391–392, 444, 463, 574 censorship of Erasmus’s copy of 590–591 Jerome, Stephen (chaplain, 17th ct.) 57, 67 Jerusalem 374, 386–387, 392 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus Joel, Book of 51 Johan Georg I, Elector (1585–56) 503 Johann Georg ii, Elector (1613–80) 494, 498–500 John, Gospel of 241, 687 John Chrysostom, Saint (349–407) 379, 387, 391, 444 John xxiii, Antipope (Baldassarre Cossa, ca. 1370–1419) 675 Jonah, Book of 43 Jonas, Justus 235 Jones, Sir William 908 Jonson, Ben 60, 110, 140 “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline” (Grafton) 1023 Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Grafton)  xxxvii–xxxix, 91 Josephus, Titus Flavius (Joseph ben Matityahu 37–ca. 100 ce) 719 Joshua (Ebers) 924–925, 927 Joshua, Book of 924 Journal of the History of Ideas xlvii Jubal (bibl.) 727 Judaism, Hellenistic 98n22 Judith, Book of 5–6, 92–94

1059 Julian the Apostate, Roman Emperor (331/332–363) 386 Julius ii, Pope (Giuliano della Rovere 1443–1513) 734 Julius Africanus, Sextus (Christian historian, ca. 160–ca. 240 ce) 370, 380 Junius, Hadrianus (1511–75) 127–129, 138 Junius the Elder, Franciscus (François du Jon  1545–1602) 7, 13 Justin, Saint (100–165 ce) 370, 381, 757 Justinian ii, Byzantine Emperor 224, 226 Jus Zelotarum 303–304 Juvenal (late 1st and early 2nd ct ce) 847 kabbalah 268 Adamic language and 575 Christian 575, 580 dominant theme of Reuchlin’s 578 interpretation and 579 messianic (Reuchlin) 578 Reuchlin and 578–580 as Symbolica Receptio (jhswh) 577–580 Kaendler, Johann Joachim (1706–75) 488 Kahn, Paul 346 Kaldemarckt, Gabriel (16th ct.) 481 Kalendarium Honorificum Perpetuum Archigymnasii Bononiensis 885 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 337, 573 Kantorowicz, Ernst (1895–1963) 347 Karnitser, Akiva (active end of 19th ct.) 479 Kasana (fictitious character) 925, 927 Keats, John (1795–1821) 916 Keckermann, Bartholomäus (1572–1608) 210 Kellermann, Olaus (1805–37) 956, 962, 969–970 Kelley, Donald R. 553, 1019, 1025 Kentmann, Johannes (1518–74) 417 Kentmann, Theophilus (1552–1610) 420 Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630) 569 Khadiga (ca. 555 or 567–620 ce) 221 Kidd, Colin 917–918 Kidd, Thomas (late 18th ct.) 831–833 Kimhi, David (1160–1235) 42–44, 47–48, 51, 597 kingship See also sacrifice Campanella and 615–618 Cicero and 692 God and (divine right of kings) 737–738 Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum 347–350

1060

Index

Köhler, Johann Bernhard (1742–1802) 336 kingship (cont.) Kolakowski, Leszek (1927–2009) 344–345 primitive (Polybius) 697 Kopp, Ulrich Friedrich (1762–1834) 964 rex sacrificulus (rex sacrorum) 347–363 Koran 328–329, 331 sacred 353–354 early Western translations of 328–331, sacrifice and 350, 355, 358–361 333–342 tyranny and 615–616, 619, 692n2 Goethe and 907 Kircher, Athanasius, sj (1601/2–80) 160–172, Scaliger and 83 295 tr. Boysen 337–338, 341–342 communication strategy of 167–168 tr. Marracci 338 Kirchmaier, Georg Kaspar (1635–1700)  Körner, Lorenz Sigmund (17th ct.) 297–298 294–295 Kosegarten, Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kleinman, Sam (active in the 1950s) 657 (1792–1860) 908, 911 Klimt, Gustav (1862–1918) 931 Koselleck, Reinhart (1923–2006) 900 Klobassa, Victor (active around 1875) 984, Kraye, Jill xxxviii 988 Kristeller, Paul Oscar (1905–99) 546, 550, Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803)  555 337 Kritik 956–957, 965, 972–973 Knight, Richard Payne 830 “Kritik der Inschriften” (Mommsen) 966 knowledge Kritische Erleuterungen des Grundtextes der See also Bacon, Francis; books; Colón, heiligen Schriften Altes Testaments Hernando; discernment of spirits; epis(Boysen) 333, 336–337 tolography; Gessner, Conrad; Hurwitz, Kunstschrank (Kunstkammer in parvo, Pinḥas; “intelligencer” (newsmonger); Hainhofer) 483 learning; Orfei, Luca (Lucas Horpheus); Kupferstichkabinett 482 print culture; Republic of Letters (respublica literaria); street’l-Fidā’, Abū 341 walking (urban walking); visions Labbaeus, Carolus (Charles Labbé de Battista’s polyvalent 153 Monvéron, Charles l’Abbé, 1582–1657)  circulation of (literae) 157 11, 78 civile, components of (Bacon) 197–198 “L’Accesa” (the burning one) 144–149 communication networks and circulation See also Andreini, Isabella, divine of 157–172 Lachmann, Karl (1793–1851) 946–947, 953, conditions of 268–285 967 “dispersion of,” 632–633 Ladislaus ii, King of Bohemia (1131–63)  “great Dictator of,” 60 561 improvement of (de augmentis scientiarum)  “Laertius Diogenes and His Sources: 196 A Contribution to the History of Ancient information exchanges and 159–160 Literary Studies” (Nietzsche) 941–950 institutio principis 201 See also Diogenes (Diogenes Laertius) natural 132, 195–196, 209 La ferza (G. Andreini) 153–154 network 157–158 Laks, André 954 personal information and public 121 Lamb, Charles (1775–1834) 823 polity and (Campanella) 210 Lambertini, Prospero (Pope Benedict production of 440 xiv 1675–1758) 271, 276, 884 Republic of Letters (respublica literaria) Lami, Giovanni (1697–1770) 332 and 170–171 Lancelot, Sir (legend.) 661 stages of, for intelligencer 121 Landriani, Tommaso b. 1586) 198 theater of 437–438 Lange, Johann (1485–1565) 127, 135 theology and 268–285

Index language See also Adamic language (Lingua Adamica); “moral revolutions” (Appiah); specific language origins of divine, natural, and sensualist  572 syntax 572 Lansell, Pierre (17th ct.) 751 Lante della Rovere, Cardinal Marcello (1561–1652) 177 La Peyrère, Isaac (1596–1676) 294 La Primaudaye, Pierre de (1546–1619)  802, 806 Larimore, James 977–978 Lascaris, Janus (1445–1535) 703 Lassman, Etty 658 Last Will of Cesar 731 Latin (language) 5–8, 28, 32, 42–45, 43, 55, 82, 141, 241 Latini, Latino 21, 28–31, 37 Laurent (library rector fl. 1605–06) 545 La vera arte delo excellente scrivere (Tagliente)  449 law binding 293 Christian natural 286–293, 307 theonomic (Malanchthon) 289 universality of 290 divine 23 natural law and 292, 296 moral, and Budde 303–304 morality and 306 natural, see law, Christian natural Noachide 293–296, 305–306 philosophy of eternal 290 “private” (Casaubon) 18–19 rabbinic 300 rhetoric and 542–560 theology and 305 traditional Roman 290–292 Leader, Richard 626 learning 195–211 See also Bacon, Francis; knowledge humanist 195 philosophical projects for 196–197 politics of (Bacon) 199–211 Le Camus, Antoine (1722–72) 806 Le Clerc, Jean (1657–1736) 269, 308 Lectiones antiquae (Rhodiginus) 429

1061 “Le declin de l’humanisme belge,” 748 Leeser, Isaac (1806–68) 656 legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, De (Budde)  307 Lehrs, Karl (1802–78) 937 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716)  163–164, 287, 909 Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley 1533–88)  xliv, 1011, 1013–1014 Le lys du val de Guaraison (Molinier)  861–862, 864 Le theatre moral de la vie humaine (Gomberville) 802–803 Lenbach, Franz (1836–1904) 928 Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Grafton) xlii Lepsius, Karl Richard (Richard Lepsius  1810–84) 920, 922–923, 929, 970 Les merveilles de Nostre Dame de Garason (Geoffrey) 864 Le Socrate rustique (Die Wirthschaft eines philosophischen Bauern) (Hirzel) 805 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81) 337, 926 Lessius, Leonardus (1554–1623) 303, 762–764, 769–772, 774–779 L’Estoile, Pierre de (ca. 1546–1611) 107–108, 111–113, 117–118, 120n38, 121–122 L’Estrange, Sir Roger (1616–1704) 316–317, 319, 322–323 Leto, Pomponio (1428–98) 215–231 Letronne, Jean-Antoine (1787–1848) 970 Letter-Book (Harvey) 1005 Lettere (I. Andreini) 144–145, 154 letterforms, see alphabets, letterforms, scripts, type specimens Letters (Paul) 371, 378 See also individual destinations Letters on Familiar Matters (Petrarch) 679 Letters to Atticus (Cicero) 679 Dubois edition 5 Lettres provinciales (Pascal) 303 Leuven 431 Levine, Joseph (1905–87) 1019, 1025 lex divina positiva universalis (Thomasius)  308 Libanius (ca. 314–ca. 373) 373, 398 Liberati, Francesco (active before 1669)  178–180, 186–188, 191

1062 Liber De Dictamine et Modo Orandi (Dati)  553 Liber de exemplis centum geniturarum (Cardano) 561 Liber sine nomine (Petrarch) 596–597 libraries 196–197 See also Alexandria; Bibliotheke (Diodorus of Sicily); books; codices, Nag Hammadi; Pergamon antique 367–392 Biblioteca Angelica 755 Bibliotheca in Dresden Kunstkammer  493–494 catalogs of 381, 425–426, 439–440 See also cataloging Christian 367–392 deposit (copyright) 408 Harvey’s 999 Luther’s 242 Macchiavelli and 873 monastery 388–389 Nag Hammadi 382 pagan 368 Pergamon 372 “polished” (Decembrio) 394–403 private 367–392 public 370, 429 registers (references) 409–413 Saint Paul’s 368 Tartu University (Estonia) 417–418 “Universal,” 413 Vatican 441–468 Vivarium 389 Life of Demetrius (Plutarch) 17 Life of Jesus Christ (Perionius) 50 Life of Muhammad (Pomponio Leto)  215–231 Lincei, Accademia dei 746 Lindt, Bishop Willem Damaszoon van der (1525–88) 259 Lingelsheim, Georg Michael (ca. 1556–1636)  16 Lingua Adamica, see Adamic language Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum (Postel) 463 Link, Wenzeslaus (1483–1547) 238 Linnaeus, Carl (1707–78) 821 Linzig, Abraham (active end of 19th ct.) 479 Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606) 269, 348–350, 355–359, 574, 745, 747, 1022

Index Bacon and 198, 202–204 Casaubon’s Polybius and 24 Grafton and xxxvii–xxxviii Latini and 30–31 limits of 202–206 Puteanus and 145, 148 Scaliger and 10, 39–40 Liquor Alchahest (Starkey) 637–638 literae, see knowledge, literae literature See also household management, and maestro di casa guides; Scaliger, Joseph classical (bonae literae) 170 didactic 174 Gadamer and 680n20 Greek, and Latinate culture 397, 402 vernacular 396 violating laws of (Casaubon) 16 litterae familiares 18 Lively, Edward (1545–1605) 64 Lives (Diogenes Laertius) 398 Lives of the Apostles (Perionius) 50 Lives of the Patriarchs (Perionius) 50 Lives of the Prophets and Holy Women (Perionius) 50–51 Lives of the Scottish Poets (Irving) 824–825 Livius Larensis, Publius (d. after 192 ce) 367 Livy, Titus (64 or 59 bce–17 ce) 204, 350, 547, 663, 677, 848, 1027–1028 Lobeck, Christian (1781–1860) 937 Lochiel’s Farewell (Grieve) 828 Locke, John (1632–1704) 308, 337 Locre, Ferry de (1571–1614) 854 “locus communis,” 426, 428–429 Logan, James (1674–1751) xliii logic 572, 765 Campanella and 604, 609, 613 Goethe and 901 Ramus and 782–783 Logos 575, 578 See also theology (theologia), Logos Loisy, Alfred (1857–1940) 262 Lombard, Peter (ca. 1096–1160) 277 Lombardo a Serico (d. 1390) 545, 548, 556 London Review of Books xli Long, Pamela xliv Longman, Thomas Norton (1771–1842)  824–825 Lope de Vega, Felix (1562–1635) 583

Index Louis xiii, King of France (1601–43)  856, 869 Louis xiv, King of France (1638–1715) 737 Loverin, Nelson (active 1876) 979 Lowndes, William Thomas (ca. 1798–1843)  829 Loyola, Saint Ignatius (1491–1556) 269 Luchino, Vincenzo (d. 1569/71) 175 Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–after 180 ce)  391 Lucretius (ca. 99–ca. 55 bce) 675, 681, 712, 725 Ludlow, James Meeker (1841–1932) 978–979, 996 Luke, Gospel of 241 Lusthaus on the Jungfernbastei (Dresden)  500 Luther, Martin (1483–1546) 232–250, 328 Erasmus and 232–250 Lutheranism 335 Boysen and 336 German 328 Semler and 336 Luxeuil Abbey 383 Lycurgus of Sparta (ca. 900–800 bce)  802–803 “Lydian stone,” 269, 280–281 Lydiat, Thomas (1572–1646) 58, 60, 68–69 Scaliger and 69, 70n45 Lyon 380 Maass, Ernst (1856–1929) 944 Mabillon, Jean (1632–1707) 898, 1029 Macarius, Abbas (ancient hermit) 389 Maccabees, Books of 92 Macchiavelli, Alessandro (1693–1766)  355–356, 359, 871–896 Bianconi and 889 Muratori and 872–876, 885, 887–893, 893 Sigonio and 892–893 Macchiavelli, Carlo Antonio (Collantonio)  876, 878, 886, 893–895 Macchiavelli, Luigi di Leonardo 886 Macchiavelli, Maria Elisabetta 886 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) 585, 594, 605, 610, 613, 702, 738–739 Campanella and 614, 618–620 Machielsen, Jan 269, 277 MacNeil, Anne 140 MacPherson, James (1736–96) 827

1063 maestro di casa (household chief of staff) manuals 173–193 Maffei, Raffaele (1451–1522) 228–229 Maffei, Scipione (1675–1755) 956, 968 Magdeburg Centuries (Flacius) 1029 Magliabecchi, Antonio (1633–1714) 191 Magnes, sive de arte magnetica (Kircher)  166 Magnetical Philosophy (Gilbert) 70 Maimonides (1135–1204) 43, 296–298, 303–304 Maine, Henry Sumner (1822–88) 351–353 Maiorano, Niccolò (ca. 1491–ca. 1585)  265–266 Malcolm, Noel 162, 164 Malipiero, Girolamo (ca. 1480–ca. 1547) 585 Malone, Kemp (1889–1971) 668 Malory, Thomas (1415/18–1471) 661 Malpaghini, Giovanni (Giovanni da Ravenna, ca. 1346–1417) 680, 689 Maltby, William 830 Malthus, Thomas (1766–1834) 572 Malvasia (wine) 663–664 Manardo, Giovanni (1462–1536) 124 Mandosio, Prospero (1643–1724) 191 manichaeism (theol.) 812 Manilius, Marcus (active 1st ct. ce) xxxix 7, 681, 747, 1024 mankind, origin of See also Creation, the Diodorus of Sicily and 725 Lucretius and 725 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955) 932 Manninga, Unico (1529–88) 237 Manutius, Aldus (Aldo Manuzio, 1449–1515)  170, 257, 461 See also Aldine Press Maometh, see Muhammad (Maometh) Marca, Pierre de (1594–1662) 856, 864–870 Marcella, Saint (325–410) 375 Marcellinus, Ammianus (325/330–after 391 ce)  681 Marcgraf, Georg (1610–ca. 1648) 496–497 marginalia, see annotations Maria Augusta Virgo Deipara (Ferry de Locre)  854 Marino, Filippo 167 Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973) 344 Mark, Gospel of 244, 349 Markart, Hans (1840–84) 928

1064 Marmita, Gellius Bernardinus (1440?–97?)  412 Marmora arundeliana 297 Marperger, Paul Jacob (1656–1730) Marracci, Lodovico (1612–1700) 328, 338 marriage Andreini and 142–144 Heraclius and 225, 227 Muhammad (Maometh) and 219, 221, 227 Noachide prescriptions around 305–306 Marsham, John 298 Marsuppini, Carlo (1399–1453) 397 Marta, Giacomo Antonio (1559–1629) 606 Martial, Marcus Valerius (38/41–102/104)  203–204 Martinelli, Giovanni (active 1580–1600)  176–177, 184 Martini, Martino (1614–61) 167 Martin iv, Pope ( Simon de Brion 1210/1220–85) 662 Marvin Weiner Catalogue 658 Mas, Michael (active around 1800) 471 mastership (dominium) 615 Maestro di casa (Fusoritto) 184, 190 “Materials toward a History of Color Theory” (Goethe) 904–905 Mather, Cotton (1663–1728) xliii Mather, Increase (1689–1723) xliii 635 Mather, Richard (1596–1669) xliii Mather, Samuel (1626–71) xliii Martina (stepmother of Constantinus iii)  226 Matsys, Quentin (1466–1530) 745 Matthew, Gospel of 243, 245, 317, 321 Matthew, Toby (1546–1628) 199 Maurits, Jan, of Nassau-Siegen (1604–79)  495–501 Maximilian I, Emperor (1459–1519) 229, 483 Maximilian ii, Emperor (1527–76) 491, 728 May, John (active 1600) 56 Mazarin, Jules (1602–61) 865–866 Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–72) 646–647 McCrea, Adriana 202 McDonald, Mark 404–405, 412 McKenzie, D. F. 1027 McKitterick, David 1030 McMahon, Madeline xlv Mede, Joseph (1586–1639) 68–69

Index Medici, Leonardo Todeschi (active first half of 17th ct.) 149, 152–153 medicine See also Ronsse, Baudouin Alexian Brothers and monastic 131 Arabo-Latin 137 “instruments of,” 134 diet (diaeta) and 138 maestro di casa manuals and 190 natural, and scripture 132 “paradoxes of,” 137 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) 735, 749 editio princeps of 758 Gataker and 755–756, 758–760 Gessner and 752–753, 758–759 Gevartius and 744, 753 Holstenius and 753–756 M. Casaubon and 755, 758, 759 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes)  279 Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, The; or, The Walks in Paul’s (Middleton) 110 Megerlin, David Fredrich 329, 335–336 Meier, R.H.E. 965 Meiners, Christoph 904 Meissen porcelain 487–488, 839 Melanchthon, Philip (1497–1560) 48, 235, 265, 289, 328, 335, 848 Meliẓ, Zelig (active around 1800) 471 Mémoires-journaux (de l’Estoile) 108 Memorie antiche manoscritte di Bologna (Ghiselli) 882–886 memory See also Phoenix (Peter of Ravenna); Time Online “of the beginning,” 867 Builder game (Twain) 974–977 cultural 883, 885 See also evidence, historical Macchiavelli and 885 Goethe and 911 Gozzadini and 878 historical 884 Mark Twain’s Memory Builder 974–975, 981–989 See also Time Online “Facts for Mark Twain’s Memory Builder” 987, 994 Morais and 653–655

Index nature of 883 Peter of Ravenna and 542, 547, 549, 556–557, 559–560 pictures and 989–990 scrapbooking and 642–643 tools 977–981 Menander (ca. 342–ca. 290 bce) 382 Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–86) 337 Menelaus (myth.) 46 Menocchio (Domenico Scandella 1532–99)  1025 Menon (Plato) 800 Mercati, Giovanni (1866–1957) 548 Mercati, Michele (1541–93) 465–468 Mercator, Gerard (1512–94) 71 Mercerus, Johannes (Jean Mercier 1510–70)  42, 51–52 Megerlin, David Friedrich (1698–1778) 329, 335, 336 Merlin (legend.) 661, 669 Mersenne, Marin (1588–1648) 162–166, 775–776 Merula, Paullus (1558–1607) 79–80 Meštrović, Ivan (1883–1962) 931 metadata 423–440 “Metallic History of Bologna” (Macchiavelli)  875 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 215–231, 592, 725 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 765 Meteorology (Aristotle) 765 Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Bodin) 765 Meun, Jean de (ca. 1240–ca. 1305) 849 Meuschius, Theobaldus (1550–1612) 8, 19 Meyer, Eduard (1855–1930) 932 Michaelis, Christian Benedikt (1680–1764)  333, 339 Michaelis, Johann David (1717–91) 907–908, 911, 935 Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627) 110 Mikrokosmos (Heylyn) 57 Minerva Repressing the Fury of Achilles (Flaxman) 836 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The (Scott)  826 miracles (“marvels”) 132, 277 Notre-Dame de Batharram and  868–869 Notre-Dame de Garaison and 859–864

1065 Miriam (bibl.) 925, 927 Mirror of Princes (Guevara) 730, 734 mirror of princes (tradition) 732 Mirtilla (I. Andreini) 144–145 Miscellanea, seu epistolae medicinales (Ronsse)  124, 127 Misḥnat Ḥasidim (Ḥai) 479 Misserini, Nicolo (1589–1635) 594 Mithobius, Burchard (1501–65) 138 Mithobius, Hector (1532–1607) 138 Mitra Varuna (Dumézil) 354 Miẓvot Tovim 479 mnemotechnics 529–532, 539 Moallakat (Jones, tr.) 908 Molina, Luis de (1535–1600) 303 Molinier, Étienne (1580–1647) 856, 861–864, 870 Momigliano, Arnaldo (1908–87) xxxviii, 351, 401, 652, 701–702, 704, 898, 913 Grafton and 1019–1023, 1029, 1030–1031 Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903) xliv, 352–353, 954–958, 960–963, 966–973 Boeckh and 961, 967–968, 971–972 Momus (god of satire) 248 Monk, Robert the (Robert of Reims, Robert of Saint Rémi, d. 1122) 215, 230–231 Monothelite heresy 225 Montagu, Richard (1577–1641) 72 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92) 275, 583–584, 599, 725, 913 Montaltius, Ludovicus, see Pascal, Blaise Montalto, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti (1571–1623) 176, 179 Montano, Benito Arias (ca. 1525–98) 259 Mont du Calvaire 866 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat 1689–1755) 702, 908, 1026 Montfort, Guy de (1244–88) 671 Montfort, Simon de (ca. 1208–65) 671 Montmorency (Paris) 807 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 661 Morais, Henry S. (1860–1935) 650, 655 Morais, Sabato (”Sabatino,” 1823–97)  641–658 See also “Morais Ledger”; Victorian scrapbooks cultural transmission and 643–644 erudition of 647–648 history of 644–647

1066

Index

Morais, Samuel ben Shabthai (Sabato, d. 1862)  Münster, Sebastian (1488–1552) 42, 87, 90, 726 644 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio (1672–1750)  “Morais Ledger,” 648–652, 657–658 332, 872–875, 887–892, 956, 966, 1029 contents of 650–654 Muret, Marc-Antoine (1526–85) 747, 1022 Morais’s instructions for disposition of  Musaeum Kircherianum 160–161 655–656 Mutio (fictitious character) 177, 181 purpose of 656–657 Mutton, Alice xl Morales, Ambrosio (1513–91) 742 Mystères du Paganisme (Sainte-Croix) 824 “moral revolutions” (Appiah) 695 Mysterious Stranger (Twain) 975 Mordred, Sir (legend.) 661–662, 668–669 Mystery of Iniquity (de Mornay) 358 More, Henry (1614–87) 68–69 “mystical body,” 736–737 More, Thomas (1478–1535) 745 mythology 311 “mores” (customs and conduct) 274, 284 Diodorus of Sicily and 711–713 Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 907 Euhemerus of Messene and 711 Morhof, Daniel Georg (1639–91) 295–296, Nabal (bibl.) 324 308, 331 Nabonides, see Darius the Mede Morin, Pierre (1531–1608) 258–259 Nabopollassar (ca. 658–605 bce) 65 Morozov, Evgeny 423 Nahmanides (1194–1270) 42 morphology, cultural (Goethe) 902 Nanni, Giovanni (Annius of Viterbo, Morsolin, Bernardo (1834–99) 550 ca. 1432–1502) xl Morte d’Arthur (Malory) 661 Nashe, Thomas (1567–ca. 1601) 999, 1013, See also Alliterative Morte d’Arthur 1017 Morton, Thomas (1579–1647) 68 Nathan the Wise (Lessing) 926 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz (1693–1755)  natural history 469–480 330–332 Natural History of Oxford-shire (Plot) 69 Most, Glenn xliv naturalia 483–504 Moyer, Ann xlvii “Naturalis historia” (Pliny) 429 Mueller, Karl Otfried, see Müller, Karl Otfried naturalism 484 Muhammad (Maometh, ca. 570–632)  See also naturalia 329–330, 333 Natural Particulars (Grafton and Augusti and 341 Siraisi) xliv as a bandit prince 221–223 Natures Explication and Helmont’s Vindication biographies of 219–228 (Starkey) 627 humanist 221–223 Nauclerus, Johannes (1425–1510) 715 Leto’s 215–231, 219–220, 222–224, Nautin, Pierre (1914–97) 385 227–228 Nebbia, Cesare (ca. 1536–1622) 358, 441 Medieval 220–221 Neostoicism 749 Boysen and 338–339 Nero, Emperor (37 ce–68 ce) 617, 738, 743 Goethe and 336 networks as “oriental Antichrist” (Spanheim) 329 bookowner/lender 375–377 Muir, Edward 319–320 global 423 Müller, Carl Leopold (1834–92) 928 Neugebauer, Otto (1899–1990) 1022 Müller, Karl Otfried (Mueller, 1797–1840)  Grafton and 1029 937, 963, 971 Neumanns, Joseph Karl (active around 1797)  Müller von Königsberg, Johannes, see Regiomontanus 469 Münchener Signale 930 Neurath, Otto (1882–1945) 530 mundus minor (a microcosm) 767 New Atlantis (Bacon) 211 municipes (Cyriac) 708n50 New Republic xli

Index New Testament 380, 936 Erasmus and 237, 265 Luther’s translation of 239 Scaliger and 63 tabula genealogica of (Bengel) 946 New Yorker xli New York Review of Books xli New York Times xli Nicholas V, Pope (Tommaso Parentucelli 1397–1455) 400, 703, 713 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 190 Nicolini, Domenico (active 1557–1605) 594 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (1776–1831)  346–347, 350, 937, 962 Niebuhr, Carsten (1733–1815) 907–908 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900) 927, 939–948 Niger, Franciscus Pescennius (1452–ca. 1523)  542–551, 553, 555–557, 559–560 Nitetis, Princess (6th ct. bce) 921, 924 Noah (bibl.) 717–719, 727 See also Flood, the Nobili, Flaminio (1532–90) 258–259 Nogarola, Isotta (1418–66) 147 Nollekens, Joseph Francis (1702–48) 840 Nomenclator philologorum (Eckstein) 748 nominalism 268 Norton, John 251 Nosseni, Giovanni Maria (1544–1620) 494 notaricon 579 See interpretation, kabbalistic methods of Notes and Essays to Improve Under­­standing of the West-östlicher Divan (Goethe)  907–912 Novus thesaurus veterum inscriptionum (Muratori) 956 Nugent-Temple-Grenville, George (1st Marquess of Buckingham 1753–1813) 830 Numbers, Book of 924 Numerianus 223 Oakes, Urian (1631–81) 635 Obadiah, Book of 43 Obeliscus Pamphilius (Kircher) 165–166 Obelisk: A History (Curran, Grafton, Long, and Weiss) xliv obelisks 465 obligation (obligatio) 306

1067 Bloineburg and 290–292 natural (obligatio naturalis) 290–293 Obnulgo, Nugno (18th ct.) 889–890 Occo, Adolph (1447–1503) 416 ochlocratia Cyriac of Ancona and 701 Polybius and 698 Ockley, Simon (1678–1720) 328, 330 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats) 916 Odofredus (d. 1265) 881 Odyssey (Homer) 397, 403, 821, 831 Oeconomicus (Xenophon) 190 Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Kircher) 165 Oecolompadius, Johannes (1482–1531) 51 Of Cannibals (Montaigne) 725 “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” (Bacon)  203 Oikonomia, seu dispositio regularum utriusque iuris in loco communes (Ramus) 1013 oikos tradition 174 Oldenburg, Henry (1619–77) 164 Old Testament 238–239, 380, 384 See also bibles, Septuagint; Vulgate Greek 255, 257 Hebrew Bible and 254 Link’s edition of 238 Masoretic 67 Olearius, Adam (1599–1671) 329 Oliverotto da Fermo (ca. 1475–1502) 617 Omnium gentium mores (Boemus) 720–722, 727 Genesis creation story and 728 On Correct Translation (Bruni) 703–704 oneiric epistemology (Van Helmont) 623, 638–639 Boyle and 630 Starkey and 626–627 On Generation (Aristotle) 765 Onkelos (Targum Onkelos, Aramaic (Chaldaic) paraphrase of Genesis) 577 On Literary Polish (Decembrio), see De politia literaria (Decembrio) On the Family (Alberti) 173 On the Heavens (Aristotle) 765 On the Laws of War and Peace (Grotius) 360 On the Sense of Things and on Magic (Campanella) 607–608

1068

Index

Pachomius (ca. 292–ca. 346) 382, 390 On the Soul (Aristotle) 765 On the Sphere and the Cylinder (Archimedes)  Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy 1485–1603 (Woolfson) 552 781 Pagnini, Xantes (1470–1541) 48 Opera (Petrarch) 588, 600 Palaeographica critica (Kopp) 964 Opera Omnia (Macchiavelli) 892 Palatino, Giovanni Battista (ca. 1515–ca. 1575)  Oppenheim, Beer (active around 1800) 470 449–450, 461, 463, 466 Oppian (2nd ct.) 772 Palavicino, Sir Horatio (1540–1600)  Optatus of Milevis, Saint, (fourth ct.) 380 56, 599 Opuscula (Scaliger) 11 Palimpsest 383 Opuscula medica (Ronsse) 130 Pamphilus of Caesarea (2nd half of 3rd Oratio (fictitious character) 177, 181 ct.–309) 372, 379, 384, 441 Oratio de professione sua (Ramus) 782 Pandectae (Gessner) 428–429 Oration in Praise of Constantine (Eusebius)  “Pandini, Cesare,” 176, 181–183 709 “Oration in Praise of the Sciences” (Haddon)  Panegyricus (Pliny the Younger) 198 Pantaleon, Heinrich (1522–95) 728 199 Pantheon (Goeffrey of Viterbo) 669 Oration on Regiomontanus (Reinhold) 561 Pantheon (Rome) 370 “Orations” (Bacon) 196–197 papacy Orfei, Luca (Lucas Horpheus) 441–468, 445 defending the 22–23 Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek (Hirt democracy and (Cyriac of Ancona) and  and Michaelis) 339 706–707 Orientalism, see Oriental studies dispute with Venice 21–22 Oriental studies 82–90 omnipotence of 28 See also Egyptology; Islam Petrarch and Avignon 582 Goethe and 907–912 tyrants and 616 languages 50–52, 73 Paris 431 in Leipzig 296–298 Paroles remarquables, les bons mots, et les Origen (184/5–253/4) 257–258, 372, 374, 381, maximes des orientaux (publ. Galland)  383–385, 387–388 332 original sin 578 Parrasio, Aulo Giano (1470–1522) 745 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 615 Partitiones oratoriae (Cicero) 556 Orsini, Fulvio (1529–1600) 29, 256, 258, Pascal, Blaise (1623–62) 303 260–261 Pascendi (papal encyclical) 262 Ortho-epia Gallica (Eliot) 55 Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Ortus medicinae (Van Helmont) 623 Renaissance and Reformation Europe Osiris (myth.) 712, 714–715, 718 (Grafton) xlii Osman Bey (1258–1326) 222 Pastorius, Francis Daniel (1651–ca. 1720) 107 Ossian (fict. author) 827, 832, 841 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna)  paternity 143 Patrizi, Francesco (1529–97) 608, 694 501 Pattison, Mark (1813–84) 821, 829, 833, 835 ostracon, ostraca 381, 383 “O Tempora, O Mores!” (Owen) 56 Paul, Saint (ca. 5–ca. 67 ce) 276, 374–375, Ott, Katherine 642 381, 575, 576–577 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso 43 bce–17/18 ce)  Paulinus, Saint, of Nola (ca. 354–431)  592 375–376 Owen, John (1616–83) 56, 66 Paul the Deacon (ca. 720s–799 ce) 227 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church  Paul V, Pope (Camillo Borghese 1552–1621)  758 22, 191 Oxyrhynchus 371, 380 pax Romana (Augustus) 709

Index Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer (1804–94)  979–981, 994 pedagogy, see education Pedantius (play acted in Trinity College Cambridge) 1000 Pedianus, Q. Asconius (9 bce–76 ce) 681 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de (1580–1637)  61, 164–165, 171, 752, 898 Peiresc’s Europe (Miller) 897 Pelagius (ca. 360–418) 812–813 Peltonen, Markku 202 Penfield, Wilder G. (1891–1976) 536 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) 117 Pérez, Juan (active early 16th ct.) 409, 413 perfetto scrittore, Il (Cresci) 450 performance 140–156 See also troupes, theatrical Perionius (Joachim Perion 1499–1559) 50–51 Perotti, Niccolò (1429–80) 702 Perspectives (journal) xli Perush al nevi’im rishonim (Abrabanel) 301 Peter of Ravenna (Pietro Francesco Tommasi/ Tommai, ca. 1448–1508) 542–545, 547, 549–551, 555–556, 559–560 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74)  545, 548, 556, 581–601, 676–677, 679–680, 682–683, 688–690, 729 Boccaccio and 678 Cicero and 678–679, 682 Flacius and 581–582 Homer and 678, 682 the Index and 583–584 Livy and 682–683 Quintilian and 683 Terence and 678 Petrarcha Spirituale (Malipiero) 585 Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475–1700: A Compendium of Printed References and Allusions (Boswell and Braden) 600 Petri, Heinrich (1508–79) 215–218, 223, 230–231 Petrizzopulus, Demetrius 965 Petronius, Saint 888 Petrucci, Armando 461 Peyer, Alexander 420 Pfeiffer, August 298 Phaenomena (Eudoxus) 1024 Phalaris (tyrant of Acragas) 398 phantasma 282

1069 Philadelphia Jewish Exponent 650 Philip ii, King of Spain 413, 741 Philip iii, King of France 671 Philip of Macedonia 17 Philippians, Letter to the 576 philology See also Quellenforschung Boeckh and 1022 critical 580 reorientation of (Poliziano) 1021 Reuchlin and 579 speculative 579–580 Wolf and 821–841 Philo of Alexandria (ca. 25 bce–ca. 50 ce)  384, 573–576 philosophers’ stone 629–630 philosophy Christianity and 201 morality and 201 natural 197 Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (Campanella) 606 “Philosophy in the Age of Tragedy” (Nietzsche)  940 Phoenix seu artificiosa memoria domini Petri Ravennatis memoriae magistri (Peter of Ravenna) 542, 544, 549–550, 556–557, 718–719 See also memory Phrygia (Anatolian kingdom) 378 Physics (Aristotle) 765 Physiologus 766–767, 772 Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Garzoni) 155 Picardus, Marcus (active 15th/16th ct.) 550, 556 Pico, Giovanni (1463–94) 575 Piero della Francesca (1415–92) 226 Pighius, Stephanus Winandus (1520–1604)  970 Pindar (ca. 522–ca. 433 bce) 398 Pineas Zelotes sive De Iure Zelotarum In Gente Hebraea (Budde) 302, 304 Pinelli, Giovanni (Gian) Vincenzo (1535–1601)  29, 78 Pio da Carpi, Cardinal Ridolfo (1500–64)  450 Piperno, Rabbi Abraham Baruch (active in the first half of the 19th ct.) 645

1070 Pirke Avoth 71 Pius ii, Pope (Enea Silvio Piccolomini 1405–64) 393, 729 Pius iv, Pope (Giovanni Angelo Medici 1499–1565) 254 Pius V, Pope, see Ghislieri, Cardinal Michele plagiarism 17–18, 176, 743, 952 Plagiariorum syllabus (Almeloveen) 15 Planes, Jéronimo de (active around 1634) 279 Plantin, Christophe (ca. 1520–89) 259 Plato (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 bce)  200, 377, 388, 398, 610, 696, 734, 800, 807, 812 Platonism 773–774 Plautus (254–184 bce) 387 Plebanus, Antonius (15th ct.) 550, 556 Plempius, Vopiscus Fortunatus (1601–71) 15 Pliny the Younger (61–112 ce) 9, 82, 758, 771–772 Plot, Robert (1640–96) 69 Plotinus (204/5–270) 388 Plumb, John Harold (1911–2001) 845 Plutarch (46–120 ce) 350, 355–356, 398, 698, 734, 772, 798, 802, 805–806, 924, 941, 943 Pocock, John Greville Agard 1019 Pococke, Edward (1604–91) 327, 329 Poetics (Campanella) 607, 609 Poggio (Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1459)  395–396, 675–676, 678–679, 681, 707, 713, 729 Poiré, François 854 Pola, Francesco 149 Poliorcetes, Demetrius (ca. 305 bce) 17 Polish-American System of Chronology, The (Peabody) 979–980 Polish System (Jażwiński and Bem)  978–979, 993 Politian (Angelo Ambrogini, Poliziano 1454–94) 946 Politica (Althusius) 209–210 Politica (Lipsius) 198, 203–204 Political Messianism (Talmon) 344 Politices Christiana (Daneau) 210 politics See also Politica (Campanella); Politica (Lipsius); Politics (Aristotle); rex sacrificulus (rex sacrorum) Baronius and 21–38

Index Campanella and 604 commonwealth men and 114 de l'Estoile and 108 “knowledge production” and 275–276 learning and (Bacon) 195–211 Porcar and 116 Pujades and 111, 116 religion and 21–38, 344–363 Ronsse and 123 Scott and 116n26 Politics (Aristotle) 614–615 Brandolini and 705 six constitutions of (William of Moerbeke and Bruni, trs.) 693 William of Moerbeke, tr. 699 Politics or Politica (Campanella) 210, 604–607, 609, 611, 614–615 polity (Aristotle) 696 Poliziano, Angelo (1454–94) xxxviii, 745–746, 1020–1022 Grafton and 1024–1025, 1029 Pollock, Sheldon 917 Polo, Marco (1254–1324) 909 Polybius (200–118 bce) 696–698 Casaubon and 24–25 Cicero and 698 “Polybius’ Reappearance in Western Europe” (Momigliano) 701–702 Polyhistor (Morhof) 331 Poly-Olbion (Drayton) 60 Pompa introitus Ferdinandi (van Thulden)  756 Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) 206 Pompilius, Numa (753–673 bce) 355–356, 619 Ponsevi, Domenico (15th–16th ct?) 199 Ponsonby, William (1772–1815) 600 Pontacus (Arnaud de Pontac 1530?–1605)  39–54 Scaliger and 39–40 Pontano, Giovanni (Giovanni Gioviano 1426–1503) 397 pontifex maximus 357–358, 361 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) 823 Popish Plot 310–312, 315, 325 Porcar, Père Joan (1589–1628) 115–116 porcelain 488, 839, 918 Porphyry of Tyre (234–ca. 305) 388 Porson, Richard (1759–1808) 830–831, 833–834 Porter, James 401

Index Portonaris, Francesco (active 1552–78) 739 portraits aedicula 74, 76 Clenardus 87 donor 82 Renaissance 71, 81–82 Erasmus 78 exchanging 78, 80–81, 86 Fagius 87 Franciscus Junius 14 frontispiece 81–82 Evitascandalo 181–182, 184 Goltzius 74 I. Andreini 149 Jewish exegetes 52 Münster 87, 89 of Orientalist scholars 87–89 Postel 87–89 Reuchlin 87n50 Scaliger 73–76, 78–80, 82–87, 89–90 Vatican Library 441–442 Portus, Francis (1511–81) 544 Portus, Wolfgang (Vulcanus Portner, active late 15th ct.) 542, 546, 548, 551, 555, 559–560 Possevino, Antonio (1533–1611) 592 Possidius, Saint (5th ct. ce) 376, 387 Postel, Guillaume (1510–81) 87–90, 463–464 posturing, filial 146–148 potentatus populi or principatus multitudinis (Aquinas) 699 “Pount Tremble” (Ponte Tremolo) 671–672 power, civil, and scripture 23 Praedinius, Regnerus (1510–59) 237–238, 250 Praelectiones (Savile) 796 “Praise of Knowledge, The” (Bacon) 199 Preuilly, France 5–6 Prideaux, Humphrey (1648–1724) 328, 338 Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) 978 Prima Scaligerana (Vertunien) 94–95 Prince, The (Machiavelli ) 605, 613, 619, 739–740 Prince and the Pauper, The (Twain) 975 Principe, Lawrence 630 print culture 158–159 See also books; knowledge printing press 170, 429 See also print culture Vatican 253

1071 Priscianese, Francesco (16th ct.) 175, 179, 180–181, 183–184, 188 Priuli, Pietro (1669–1728) 22 Privilegium Theodosii universitate Bononiae concessum (Bolognini) 888–889 procession, London (17 November 1681)  309–326 Proclus (Proclus Lycaeus 412–485) 785–792 Chamber and 794 Euclid and 785 Ptolemy and 790–791, 794 Savile and 785–791 Procopius of Gaza (ca. 475–ca. 528) 377 Prodromus Coptus (Kircher) 165 Professori giuristi a Padova nel secolo xv: Profili bio-bibliografici e cattedre (Belloni) 557 prohibitio (suppression of offensive books)  585 Projet pour perfectionner l’éducation (Castel)  807 Prolegomena ad Homerum (Wolf) 821–841, 935 English reception of 822–824 Flaxman and 835 Grenville and 829–831 Kidd and 831–833 Scottish reception of 824–829 Wedgwood and 838–840 Whigs and 829–830, 833–834 Prooemium mathematicum (Ramus) 785 Propertius (Sextus Propertius, 50/45–after 15 bce) 678–679 Prophetic Articles (Campanella) 603 Prospectus universalis collectionis Latinarum veterum (Maffei) 956 Protestantism 6, 18, 42, 312, 315, 318, 324–325 See also Christianity; Popish Plot biblical translations and 254, 267 “canon” of 581 Cassander and 131 Dutch Revolt and 348 Elizabethan 348 Grolius and 327 Gyraldi and 357 Irish Rebellion and 318 Morton and 68 Old Testament and 254 religious tolerance and 130 schools and 210

1072

Index

Rabb, Theodore xl, 1018 Provataris, Emmanuel (active 1546–70)  Rachel, Samuel (Rachelius 1628–91)  265–266 287, 307 Providence, Divine, arguments for (Lessius)  Ragionamenti fantastici (F. Andreini) 151 769–771, 773 Prudentius Clemens, Aurelius (Christian poet Rainolds, John (1549–1607) 58–59, 64 Raisz, Erwin (1893–1963) 534 348–after 405) 388 Rampling, Jenny xlv Psalms, Book of 248, 259, 378, 381 Ptolemy ii Philadelphus (309–246 bce) 392 Ramponi, Virginia (“La Florinda”, 1583–ca. 1630)  140 Ptolemy of Lucca (Tolomeo Fiadoni, Ramus, Joannes (1535–78) 1013 ca. 1236–ca. 1327) 709 Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, ca. 100–ca. 170 Ramus, Petrus (Peter Ramus 1515–72) 59, 782–783 ce) 780, 1023 Ptolemy (Soter, creator of the mythical library Ranaldi, Federico (16th ct.) 442, 448 Randolph, Thomas (1605–35) 831 of Alexandria) 414 Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886) 922, 1029 publication 181, 870 Grafton and 1029 See also books; booksellers; individual authors; individual genres; individual titles Raphelengius, Franciscus (1539–97) 77, 87 public versus private authorial control and  Rashi (Solomon Jarhi, Solomon Shelomo Yizhaki 1040–1105) 43–45, 49, 298 19, 160 ratio (defined) 623 publishing 854–855 Ravesteyn, Dirck de Quade van (1565–1620)  Peurbach, Georg (1423–61) 561, 564–565, 503 570 Ravius, Christian (1613–77) 329 Pufendorf, Samuel von (1632–94) 292, 302, Rawleigh his Ghost (Lessius) 762 307 See De providentia Numinis (Lessius) Selden and 305 Ray, John (1627–1705) 778 Pujades, Jeroni (1568–1635) 108–109, 111–113, Ray, Meredith 140 115–117, 121–122 Raziel (myth.) 578, 579 Purchas, Samuel (1577?–1626) 65 Book of 578n15 Puteanus, Erycius (1574–1646) 144 Reader Response Theory 681–682 I. Andreini and 145–148, 150 reading xiv, xliii–xlv, 47, 53, 79, 232–250, Putsch, Anna (active around 1502) 483 439–440, 477–478, 509–510, 641–642, Putschius, Helias (Elias 1580–1606) 78, 80 677, 682, 780–797, 835, 908, 911, 949, Pyrotechny Asserted (Starkey) 637 999–1017, 1026–1028 See also Harvey, Gabriel; annotations; Quadri, Aloysius (16th ct.) 421 excerpts; scrapbooks “Quanto più disiose l’ali spando” (Petrarch)  reason 594 Aurelius and 759n78 Quedlinburg Itala fragment 392 Bacon and 196 Quellenforschung 933–954 natural 66 See also philology seat of 132–133 defined 934 Querini, Giovanni (Giovanni Querini Reconquista, Spanish, achievements of 217 Stampalia (1799–1869) 151 reconstruction, textual 935–937 Quesnel, François (ca. 1543–1616/19) 89 Recueils (de l’Estoile) 112 Questions (Campanella) 604–605, 609, 611, referencing (systems of) 425, 431, 440 614, 617, 619 Reformation, Catholic, see Catholicism, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus reformed 35–ca. 100 ce) 46, 48–49, 393, 547, 550, regicide, and Campanella 617–618 675–676, 679, 681, 798, 847–848, 990 Regifugium (24 February) 350

Index Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller von Königsberg 1436–76) 529, 561–570 “rational” method of 566–567 Reinhold, Erasmus (1511–53) 561 Reisch, Gregor (ca. 1467–1525) 511 Reise, Naḥman (active around 1800) 472 Reiske, Johann Jacob (1716–74) 333, 336, 911 Reland, Adriaan (Hadrian 1676–1718) 328, 331, 908 relics, sacred artifacts, and superstitions characteristics of 684–685 cult of images, in antiquity 26 French pilgrim (Marian) shrines  854–855, 854–870 Ardilliers 854 Le Puy 854 Notre-Dame de Betharram 856 Notre-Dame de Garaison 856–864 kissing the Gospel codex 687 language of 675–691 Mary’s milk 243 Paul’s bones 688 Paul’s handkerchief 28, 38 Peter’s shadow 26, 38 True Cross 226–227, 243 religion See also Catholicism; Islam; Judaism; Protestantism; scripture apologetics and 296 Arnold and 330 Campanella and 611, 614 Chaldean 92 chemistry and 640 civil 359 comparative 353–354, 359 Erasmus and 246–247 Grotius and 304 history of (Scaliger) 92 loss of (Talmon) 344 natural law and 292–308 politics and 21–38, 210, 344–363 rational 306 rise of (Diodorus of Sicily) 713–714 Ronsse and 130–133 scripture and 254 Selden and 286–308 Semler and 335 substantialist view of 345, 362 wars of 18, 348

1073 “reliquiae” 676–677 Remonstrance 41 Renaissance 845 Campanella and 615 constitutional language (Aristotle) and the 692 constitutional monarchy and the 707 correctores and castigatores in 581 defined (Schadee) 689–690 democracy and 710 personal style in the 680 humanism, see humanism scholarship 686 Diodorus of Sicily and 711–728 Marcus Aurelius and 729 universities and 552 Renan, Ernest (1823–92) 958 republic, three types of (Patrizi) 694n6 Republic (Plato) 200, 610, 705, 782 republicanism 18 Campanella and 611 elite versus popular (Glover) 114 expressions of 116 Republic of Letters (respublica literaria/ litterarum) 20, 148 defined (Grafton) 141 evolution of 161–162, 170 Kircher and 162–172 Scaliger and 81 social networks and 157–158 Republics and Kingdoms Compared (Brandolini) 704 Rerum italicarum scriptores (Muratori) 872, 875 respublica Bruni and 693 Campanella and 610 Cicero and 694 Herodotus and 694 meaning of ancient Roman 692, 698 Cicero and 692 Italian 694 Renaissance 692–695 Patrizi and 694 res Romani populi and 692 Scala and 694 respublica literaria/litterarum, see Republic of Letters (respublica literaria/litterarum)

1074 Reticius, Saint (early 4th ct. ce) 374 Return of Martin Guerre, The (Davis) 1026 Reuchlin, Johannes (1455–1522) 87, 575–580 revelations See also knowledge alchemy and 624 Gravina’s list of authentic 281 identifying truth in 271, 281 intellectual (Van Helmont) 624 supernatural (Boyle) 629–631 Revelations, Book of 314–315 rex iudaeorum, see Christ, Jesus rex nemorensis 353 rex sacrificulus (rex sacrorum) 347–363 Rhenanus, Beatus (1485–1547) 29, 848 Rheticus, Georg Joachim (1514–74) 561–562 rhetoric See also hermeneutics, humanist, rhetorical theory and; Geneva, bge, ms lat 86 ethos, logos, and pathos (Aristotle) 681n24 humanism and 553–554 law and 542–560 Paduan extracurricular (1488–91)  542–560 regional aspects of paduan 551–553 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 681 Rhetorica ad Herennium (attrib. Cicero) 550, 552 Rhodiginus, Caelius, see Caelius Rhodiginus Rhodopis 923–924 Rich, Lady Penelope (1563–1607) 1013 Rich, Mary, Countess of Warwick (17th ct.)  634 Richard the Lion-Hearted, King of England (1175–99) 670 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642) 865–866 Richter, Gustav (1823–84) 928 Riddle on the Quiescent Letters (ibn Ezra) 47 rights, author’s 15–19 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 500 Riki, Emanuel Ḥai (1688–1743) 479–480 Rime (I. Andreini) 145, 148–149, 151, 153 Rime (Petrarch) 583 Babylonian sonnets (nos 137–9) in  581–601, 582 rinascimento, see Renaissance Ritschl, Friedrich (1806–76) 946–947 Rivetus, Andreas (1572–1651) 94–95 Robert, Anne (16th ct.) 356–357

Index Robert of Ketton (1110–60) 328 Robespierre, Maximilien (1758–94) 699 Rocca, Bishop Angelo (1545–1620) 253, 278, 442, 463 Roger, Tancred Fitz (Norman King of Sicily, ca. 1138–94) 670 Roman Catholic Church, see Catholicism Roman Code 352 Roman Empire Cyriac of Ancona and 709 Geneva manuscript 559 Gibbon and 1029 Guevara and 742 Leto and 223–227 monarchical power and 706 Pius ii and 729 as Renaissance model 742 Romanianus of Thagaste (4th ct. ce)  375–376 Romano, Antonella 169 Romano, Antoniazzo (ca. 1430–ca. 1510) 226 Roman Republic 709 Romans, Letter to the (Paul) 241 Rome 168, 370, 372, 381, 387, 431–432 Fall of (Cyriac of Ancona) 709–710 Venice and 21–22 Rome’s Hunting-Match for iii. Kingdoms  320–321 Romulus (myth.) 356 Ronsse, Baudouin (ca. 1525–97) 122–139 content in letters of medical 133–138 miscellaneous 138–139 religious 130–133 Roots (Kimhi) 48 Rose, Hugh James (1795–1838) 965 Rose, Valentin (1798–1873) 938 Rosenberg, Daniel xliv Rosling, Hans 516 Ross, Ludwig (1806–59) 968 Rossano Gospels, see Codex Purpureus Rossanensis (Rossano Gospels) Rossi, Paolo (1923–2012) 547 Rosslyn, Harriet Countess of (d. 1810) 826, 833 Rossmann, Joseph (active around 1800) 469, 473–474 Rosweyde, Heribert (d. 1629) 269, 271 Roth, Heinrich (17th ct.) 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) 798–820, 1028

Index Ruano, Ferdinando (active around 1554) 450 Rubens, Albert (1614–57) 748 Rubens, Peter Paul (1577–1640) 745, 748–751, 756 Lipsius and 748 Rubens, Philip (1574–1611) 745, 751 Rudolph ii, Emperor (1552–1612) 197, 503, 1004 Rufinus of Aquileia (340/345–410) 374–375, 388, 924 Sabatier, Antoine (1742–1817) 860 Sabellico (Marcantonio Coccio 1436–1506)  224, 228, 713, 719, 722–724 Sachphilologen 965 Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek 491 Sacred Canopy (Berger) 345 sacrifice See also kingship, sacrifice and; rex sacrificulus (rex sacrorum) Christ’s self- 347 common 352 effigies and 313 Eucharistic 357 human 346, 357 ideological 344, 346 regalian laws and 356–357 Sadducismus Triumphatus (Glanvill) 634 Saenger, Paul 433 saggia Egiziana, La (G. Andreine) 152 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804–69)  851 Sainte-Croix, M. de 824 Saint Gall 675 Saint-Pierre, abbé de, see Castel, Charles-Irénée Salammbô (Flaubert) 922 Sale, George 333 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus 86–ca. 35 bce) 388 Salmon, John 202 Salutati, Coluccio (1331–1406) 729 Saly, Amadeus 753 San Flaviano, church of 664 Santner, Eric 346 Sanudo, Marin (1466–1536) 118–119, 121–122 Sarpi, Paolo (1552–1623) 118 Casaubon and 21–38

1075 Sassolo da Prato (15th ct.) 147 Saturninus (Roman Empire proconsul, in office 180 ce) 378 Saubert, Johann, the younger (1638–88) 297 Saumaise, Claude (1588–1653) 11, 14 Savary, Claude-Etienne 339 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von (1779–1861) 967 Savile, Henry (1549–1622) 58, 62, 780–797 Proclus and 785–792 Scala, Bartolomeo (1430–97) 694 Scala, Flaminio (1552–1624) 150–151 scala naturae (“great chain of being”) 767 Scaliger, Joseph (Josephus Justus, or Joseph De Lescalle 1540–1609) 4–15, 19, 39–41, 54, 267, 269, 307–308, 956, 963 ancestry of 76–77 concealments strategies of 5–13, 19 Cranmer and 59 criticisms of 58–60, 62, 64 Dalechamp and 56–57 Erasmus and 1024 Eyre and 67–68 Grafton and xxxvii–xxxix, 1018, 1020–1021, 1023–1026, 1029 Gregory and 70–72 Harvey and 65–66 Heylyn and 57–58 homages to 55–62, 68, 70–71 More and 68 as an Orientalist 73–90 Plot and 69–70 Rainolds and 58–59, 64 Savile and 62 Selden and 60–62 Smith and 65 Whitaker and 58 Scaliger, Julius Caesar (Julius Scalliger, Giulio Bordone 1484–1558) 57, 76–77 Scaligerana (I. Vossius) 13–14 Scaliger Hypobolimaeus (Schoppe) 77 Scalzini, Marcello (active 1578) 449 Scappi, Bartolomeo (1500–77) 187–189, 191 Schadow, Wilhelm von (1789–1862) 918 Schede, Elias (1615–41) 297 Schedel, Hartmann (1440–1514) 228 “schematism” (Coxe) 632n32 Schenute, Abbot (d. ca. 466) 383 Scherzer, Johann Adam (1628–83) 298 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob (1672–1732) 515 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805) 904

1076 Schloss Hoflössnitz (Radebeul, now Dresden Weinbaumuseum) 498–501 Schloss Pretzsch an der Elbe 500 Schloss Schwedt an der Oder 500–501 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm xlii Schmiedel, Casimir Christoph (1718–92)  418 Schnackenköpfe (Arcimboldo) 491 Schneider, Johann Georg 418 Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius (1794–1872) 837 Schoener, Johann (1477–1547) 561 Schonaeus, Cornelius (active 1646) 128 Schönborn, Johann Philipp von (1605–73)  287 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) 919 “Schopenhauer as Educator” (Nietzsche)  940 Schoppe, Caspar (Gaspar, Kaspar 1576–1649) 15–17, 19, 77, 603, 619 Schorske, Carl (1915–2015) xl Schrey, Jeremias (1645–99) 300 Schürer, David Otto (1578–1641) 494 Schurer, Mathias (1470–1519) 848 science Colón and 412 historicizing 945–946 natural 195 “politics of” (Bacon) 195–196, 198, 211 science, physical 765 Scilium (town in ancient North Africa) 378 Scott, Thomas (ca. 1580–1626) 116n26 Scott, Walter (1771–1832) 826 Scotus, Duns (1266–1308) 59 scrapbooks, Victorian 641–658 See also “Morais Ledger” content of 642 popular and scholarly 643 sociability and 643 Scriptores Historiae Augustae 206, 223 scripts, see alphabets, letterforms, scripts, type specimens scripture See also religion Augusti and Höpfner and 340 authority of 254 Béroalde and 63 Bona and 272 Broughton and 63–64 Erasmus and 250

Index Luther and 246 religion and 254 Ronsse and 132 Scaliger and 63, 71 Scarpi and 23 Selden and 293 Society of Jesus and 315 Scriverius, Lucas (1589–1637) 752 “Scythia Saga,” 715 search engine 423, 426, 429, 439 Seasons (Arcimboldo) 491 Sébillet, Thomas (1512–89) 849 Second Sophistic 367 Secretario, Il (Scalzini) 449 secularization 345–346 Seder Olam Rabbah 52–53 Seder Olam Zuta 52 Sefer ha-Brit (Hurwitz) 469–480 Sefer haKabbalah (ibn Daud) 52 Sefer haTsahot (ibn Ezra) 46 Séguier, Jean-François 956, 963 Selden, John (1584–1654) 60–62, 286–308 Gregory and 71–72 Scaliger and 296 Sem (bibl.) 723 Semiramis, Queen of Babylon (legend.) 467, 712 Semler, Johann Salomo (1725–91) 332–335 Sempill, Sir James (1566–1625/6) 61 Senebier, Jean 545 Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus 4 bce–65 ce) 59, 270, 281, 391, 411, 574, 747–749, 754, 775, 799 Sense in Things (Campanella) 603 sententiae 14 Sepmaine, La (Du Bartas) 55 Septuagint, see bibles, Septuagint Serapis (Ebers) 924 Serdica, Synod of 388 Serdonati, Francesco (1540–after 1602) 882 Seres (inhabitants of Serica) 846, 851 Sergius (Bahira) 219, 221 serio ludere (serious play) 155 Serjeantson, Deirdre 584, 586 Servius Tullius (575–35 bce) 846 set (diagram) [Menge] 507, 514 Settis, Salvatore xliv Severus, Bishop of Antioch (465–538) 371, 381 Sha’arei Kedushah (Vital) 480

Index Shakespeare, William (ca. 1564–1616) 312, 815 Shark, Karl Bernhard 899–900 Shelford, April xli Shengjing (Chinese: Holy Letters, Bible) 851 Siclus sacer et regius (Beyer) 298 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86) 122n 40 Harvey and 1001–1004, 1006, 1008 Sidonia of Saxony 134 sight, Aquinas and 275 Sigismundus, Emperor (1368–1437) 555 Sigonio, Carlo (1524–84) 884 Silicon Valley 423 Silvae (Statius) 745–746 Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac (Baron 1758–1838) 911 Simler, Josias (1530–76) 583 Simonides of Ceos (556–468 bce) 990 Siraisi, Nancy xli, xliv Sirleto, Guglielmo (1514–85) 259–267 Six Books on Politics (Lipsius) 356 Six Constitutions (Cyriac of Ancona) 701 Six livres de la république (Bodin) 198 Sixtus V, Pope (Felice Peretti di Montalto 1521–90) 251, 253, 255, 441–442, 446, 451, 454, 456, 465 skepticism 274, 307 discernment and 276 Erasmus and 234, 246–247 de l’Estoile and 113 Mosheim and 330 Tacitean humanism and 202 Weyer and 133 Skinner, Quentin 732 slavery, natural (Aristotle) 614–615 Slingsby, Sir William (1563–1634) 598–600 Sluhovsky, Moshe 275–276 Smith, John (active 1680) 318, 325 Smith, Sir Thomas (1513–77) 1014 Smith, Thomas (1638–1710) 33–34 Smollett, Tobias (1721–71) 831–832 sociability, forms of (Chartier) 1027 Société Linguistique 573 Society for Lovers of Patria (Societa dei Filopatri) 873 Society of Jesus (Jesuits) 165–169, 211, 315, 321, 325 See also Catholicism natural theology and 761–779 sources for 772–777

1077 Ratio studiorum Societatis Jesu and  763–765, 774–775 Sophia Albertina, Princess (1753–1829) 336 sophists 800 Sophocles (ca. 497/6–406/5 bce) 398, 758 Soter, see Ptolomy (Claudius Ptolemaeus / Soter) Soupyrgus, Theodorus (active around 1585)  131–132 sources, criticism 934–935 Southwell, Robert (ca. 1561–95) 169 Spamalot (Monty Python) 661 Spanheim, Friedrich (1632–1701) 329–330, 336 Spanheim, Philipp von (1220–79) 665 Spanish (language) 55 Spartianus, Aelius (active ca. 300 ad) 206 species Gessner and 420 imprinted 283 sensible 282–283 propagation of 277–278 symbolic 312, 314 Specimens of the Early English Poets (Ellis)  826 spectio 352 Speght, Thomas (17th ct.) 1000 Spencer, Dowager Countess (late 18th ct.)  835 Spencer, John 304, 308, 1010 Harvey and 1017 Spencer, George John 2nd Earl Spencer (1758–1834) 833–834 Spenser, Edmund (1552/53–99) 1000 Spinola, Cardinal Filippo 180 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict) 330, 360, 934–935 spirits discernment of 268–285 unclean 315 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius Loyola) 269 spiritus 268 Sprachphilologen 965 Sprachspiele (language games, Wittgenstein)  573 Stadium 887–889 Stamperia Vaticana 256 Staple of News, The (Jonson) 110 Starkey, George (1628–65) 623, 639–640 Boyle and 625–631 Statius (45–96 ce) 745, 752

1078 status (position) 284 Stephanus, Henricus (the elder), see Etienne, Henri (the elder) Stephanus, Robertus (Robert i Etienne 1503–59) 42 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68) 817 Steuco, Agostino (1497–1548) 295 still-houses 197 Stobaeus (active 5th ct. ce) 941 Stock of David (Gans) 43–44 Stoicism natural theology and 775–776 Renaissance 778 Stone, Lawrence (1919–99) xl, xliv, 1018 Storey, Tessa 186 Stow, John (1525–1605) 119–120 St. Peter’s Basilica 666 Strabo (64/63 bce–ca. 24 ce) 923 Strauss, Leo (1899–1973) 604–605, 619 Strauss, Richard (1864–1949) 931 streetwalking (urban walking) 109–122 Stryck, Samuel (1640–1710) 301 “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy” (Grafton and Jardine) xliv, 999–1017 Styx (myth.) 799 Suárez, Francisco (1548–1617) 769 successione in Pontificatum, De (Selden) 302 Suda (Byzantine encyclopedia) 941–942 Summa theologica (Aquinas) 280 Survey of London (Stow) 119–120 Susanna, Book of 93–94 Süßmilch, Johann Peter (1707–67) 572 Swanenburgh, Isaac Claesz van (1537–1614) 87 Swerdlow, Noel xxxvii, xliii, 1022–1023, 1030 Sword in the Stone, The (White) 661 Sylvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac (1758–1838)  343 Symmachus, Quintus Aurelius (345–402)  257–258 Synedriis, De (Selden) 302 Synesius 398 Synopsis juris naturalis et gentium juxta disciplina ebraeorum (Budde) 306–307 syntax, see language, syntax Syria 374

Index Syriac (language) 55, 82, 85, 220, 257, 443–445, 448, 454, 464, 466–468 Systema disciplinae politicae (Keckermann)  210 Ta’am Eẓo (Hurwitz) 479 tables 391, 507–541, 851 See also diagrams bar graph 518, 539 bitmap 511 cross 508–509, 511, 514, 540 O-shape 513 parallel 508, 511, 537 Table Talk (James I) 14, 241 Tabulae directionum 564–565 Tabulae primi mobilis (Bianchini) 565 Tabulae resolutae 562, 569 Tacitus, Aelianus (2nd ct. ce) 203–204, 206 Tadema, Lawrence Alma (1836 –1912)  927–928 Tagliente, Giovanni Antonio (1465/70–after 1527) 449 Taian, Peronne (16th–17th ct.) 860 Talmon, Jacob (1916–80) 344–346 Talmud, Babylonian 299–301 Tanner, Adam (1572–1632) 278 Targum (Targumim, Aramaic paraphrase)  42–43 Tasso, Torquato (1544–95) 145, 607 Tastu, Joseph (1787–1849) 972–973 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław (1886–1980)  849–850 Tatian the Assyrian (ca. 120–ca. 180) 378 Tauler, Johannes (1300–61) 623 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste (1605–89) 909 Telesio, Barnardino (1509–88) 210, 606 temporality (theol.) 811 Terminio, Vincenzo (active in second half of 16th ct.) 198 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, ca. 155–ca. 240) 7, 375, 381–382, 691 That lines produced from angles less than two right angles meet one another (Ptolemy)  790 Theatrum vitae humanae (Zwinger)  434–436

Index Theocritus (active in 3rd ct. bce) 398 Theodore of Pelusium, Saint (of Pherme d. ca. 385 ce) 389 Theodoret of Cyrus (Syria) (393–ca. 458/466)  378, 757 Theodosian Privilege 887–891 Theodosius ii, Emperor (401–450) 888 Theodotion (d. ca. 200 ce) 257–258 Theognis, Nietzsche and 950–952 Theologia gentium politica (Morhof)  295–296 Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemeies, A (Harvey) 66 theology (theologia) ancient (Annius of Viterbo) 715–716 anthropology, politics, and 346 conditions of knowledge and 268–285 considerations undermining 245 discernment 269–271, 273, 279 knowledge and 266–285 Lipsius and 348 Logos 576–578 natural antiquity and 777–779 Protestantism and 762–763 Ratio studiorum Societatis Jesu and 763–765, 774–775 Society of Jesus and 761–779 pastoral 263 Rabbinic 578n14 traditional 271 Theophrastus (371–287 bce) 401 Therasia (wife of Paulinus 4th–5th ct. ce)  375 Thesaurus (Scaliger) 39 Thesaurus Linguae Graecae 698 Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language (Pagnini)  48 Thessalonians, Letter to the 280 Thetis (myth.) 799 Thierbuch (Wagner) 495, 497, 501 Thomas, Keith 311 Thomas à Becket (1119–70) 671 Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) 623 Thomasius, Christian (1655–1728) 301, 305, 307–308, 337 Thriverius (Jérémie de Dryvère 1504–54)  123, 137, 139

1079 Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 bce) 382, 398 Thulden, Theodoor van (1606–69) 756 Thyraeus, Petrus (1546–1601) 278–279 Tibaldi, Pellegrino (1527–96) 413 Tiberius, Emperor (42 bce–37 ce) 206, 738, 743 Tibullus (Scaliger’s notes on) 59–60 Til, Salomon van (1643–1713) 238 Timaeus (Plato) 388 time 104n89, 651n32, 717, 902, 974–996 eternity and 812 Time Online 974–975, 992–996 Times Literary Supplement xli timokratia (Artistotle) 697 Timothy First Epistle to 241 Second Epistle to 368 Tischreden (Luther) 14 Titles of Honor (Selden) 60–61 Titus, Emperor (39–81 ce) 738 Tobias (Tobit), Book of 92–94, 101n61 Toland, John (1670–1722) 327 Toomer, Gerald 62 Torresani, Andrea (ca. 1727–60) 257 “Touzer,” 313, 317n36, 319 Tractatus Astrologicus (Gaurico) 561 Tractatus de variis annorum formis (Lydiat)  69 Trajan, Emperor (53–117 ce) 205–206, 737–8, 742 Tramezzino, Michele (active 1539–82) 187 translatio imperii 674 transmission astrological 467 manuscript 953n35 natural 278, 282 scriptural 254, 261, 445 textual 6, 92, 261, 278 Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, The (Grafton and Blair) xliv Tratado del examen de las revelaciones verdaderas y falsas, y de los raptos (de Planes) 279 Travels in Arabia Felix (Niebuhr) 907–908 Traversari, Ambrogio (1386–1439) 399 Treatise against Judiciall Astrologie, A (Chamber) 792 Trebbiano (wine) 663

1080 Trew Law of Free Monarchies (James I) 198 Trifolium orientale (Scherzer) 298 Triple couronne de la bien-heureuse Vierge Mere de Dieu (Poiré) 854 Trismegistus, Hermes (myth.) xl, 603 Trithemius, Johannes (1462–1516) 436 troupes, theatrical, resistance to 140 True and Perfect Narrative of the Inhumane Practices (occasioned by the Damnable Positions) of Jesuites and Papists, Towards Protestants at Home and Abroad, A (J. Smith) 318, 325 True Cross (della Francesca) 226 “truthiness” (Colbert) 870 Tubal-Cain 727 Tucker, Susan 642 Tuscan (language) 142 Tusi couple 787 Twain, Mark (Samuel L. Clemens 1835–1910)  642, 974–975, 981–996 Two Discourses of Master Frances Guicciardin (Ponsonby, publ.) 600 Tycho (Tycho Brahe 1546–1601) 569 type specimens, see alphabets, letterforms, scripts, type specimens tyranny Aristotle and 614–616 Caesar and 729 Campanella and 611, 613, 615–617 Charles V and 734 Machiavelli and 614, 619 Morais and 654 Muhammad and 614 republics and 692n2 “Tyrants of the Spirit, The” (Nietzsche) 940 Tyre, William of (1130–86) 226 Uarda (Ebers) 924, 928–930 “Ueber die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Volker in alten und neuen Zeiten” (Herder) 908 Ulfilas, Bishop (ca. 311–383) 444 Uncle Sam’s Game of American History 977 Universal History, from the earliest account of time (tr. Baumgarten, ed. Semler) 333 Universal-Lexicon (Zedler) 426 Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Grendler) 552

Index Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (Arnold) 330 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche) 940 Uranus, King (myth.) 717 Urban viii, Pope (Maffeo Barberini 1631–85) 23, 191, 276, 281, 602 Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Sherman) 404 Usefulness of Natural Philosophy (Boyle)  630, 633 Ussher, Archbishop James (1581–1656) 66–67 Uther Pendragon, King (legend.) 669 Utopia (More) 745 Uxor ebraica (Selden) 286, 300 Uz, Johann Peter (1720–96) 337 Valentine, Saint (3rd ct.) 381 Valier, Cardinal Agostino (1531–1606)  446–447, 449 Valla, Lorenzo (1407–57) xxxviii, 63, 263, 395, 399–401, 553–554, 1021 Valverde y Gandía, Bartolomé de (ca. 1520–ca. 1592) 258–259 Varie inscrittioni (Orfei) 446, 453–454, 456–457 Varisco, Giovanni (active 1558–90) 187–188 Varro, Marcus Terentius (116–27 bce) 388, 603, 816 Vasari, Giorgio (1511–74) 689 Vatican bibliotheca secreta 441 Library, see libraries, Vatican Press (Typographia Vaticana) 445 sala dei scrittori 441 salone sistino 441–442, 445, 451–452, 456 Sistine (graphic material in) 441–468 “Venatio medica” (Ronsse) 129 Venice interdict on 22 Rome and 21–22 Verardi, Carlo (ca. 1440–ca. 1500) 217 verbum mirificum (wonderworking word)  575–576 Vergikios, Angelos (d. 1569) 256 Vergil, Polydore (ca. 1470–1555) 442 Vernaccia (white wine) 662–663 Veronese, Guarino (Guarino da Verona  1374–1460) 393, 681 Verovio, Simone (before 1575–1607) 447, 449–450

Index Verrua, Pietro 546 Vertunien, François (Sieur de Lavau, ca. 1544–1607) 5, 80, 94–95 Verus, Lucius (130–169 ce) 205–206, 757 Vettori, Piero (1499–1585) 1024 Veyssière de La Croze, Mathurin (1661–1739)  332 Vico, Giambattista (Gian Batista Vico 1668–1744) 652–653 Victor, Bishop, of Capua (sixth ct.) 378 Vicus Sandaliarius (Rome) 369 Vidali, Iacomo (active 1571–76) 595 Villa dei Papiri (Herculaneum) 386 Villemain, Abel-François (1790–1870) 956 Vincent of Beauvais (1190–1264?) 429 Vinta, Belisario (1542–1613) 152 Vinta, Francesco (1506–70) 152 violence 115, 363, 722, 726 religious 303, 856 Viperano, Giovanni Antonio (1555–1610) 199 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 bce) 388, 397–398, 402–403, 607, 676 Virgin and Child before a Fire Screen (Campin)  687 virtue 143–144, 811 Andreini and 148 education and 200–202, 204, 211, 800, 803, 806, 808, 818, 820 intellectual 284 moral 209 theatrical profession and 151–155 theological 284 Visconti, Filippo Maria (1392–1447) 399 visions 275, 283–284 See also cognition Boyle and 630–631 corporeal, imaginative (spiritual), and intellectual 282 Gravina and 282 intellectual (Van Helmont) 623–625 true 281 visualization, techniques of 507–541 Vitae (Pontacus) 43, 52 Vita Euclidis (ed. Zamberti) 785 Vita Hilarionis (Jerome) 390 Vital, Ḥayyim (1542–1620) 476–477, 480 Viterbo as papal seat 670 Vale of 662–663 Vitriarius, Philipp Reinhard (1647–1720) 306

1081 Vitruvius (ca. 80/70 bce–after ca. 15 bce)  712 Vittorino da Feltre (1373/78–1446) 147, 544 Vives, Juan Luis (1493–1540) 59 Voegelin, Eric (1901–85) 344 Volkertsz Coornhert, Dirck (1522–90) 130 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet 1694–1778)  908 volvelle (rotating wheel chart) 516 Voss, Johann Heinrich (1751–1826) 337 Vossius, Gerard Johannes (Gerardus Joannes, 1577–1649) 11, 13, 295, 298 Vossius, Isaac (1618–89) 13 Vrolijk, Arnoud 83 Vulcanius, Bonaventura (1538–1614) 129 Vulgate See also bibles, Septuagint Apocrypha 91n2, 96n3, 251–252, 255, 257–258, 380 Bacon and 204 Clementine 252 Council of Trent and 254 Erasmus and 232, 245 James and 251–254 Louvain 259 reliability of 94 Roman Catholic Church and authenticity of 254 Scaliger and 91–104 Sirleto and 259–261 Sixtine 252–253, 258, 262 Vullietti, Carlo (active 1596–1609) 184, 190 Wachler, Ludwig 903 Wagner, Zacharias (1614–68) 494–497, 501–503 Wahl, Samuel Friedrich Gunther (1760–1834)  341–342 Walker, Daniel Pickering (1914–85) xxxviii Wallis, John 797 Walsham, Alexandra 311 Walton, Brian (1600–61) 67, 298 Waquet, Françoise 171 Warburg, Aby (1866–1929) 906, 914 Wedgwood, Cicely Veronica (1910–97) xliv Wedgwood, Josiah (1730–95) 838–839 Wehme, Zacharias (1550/58–1606) 488 Weil, Rachel xliv Weinberg, Joanna xliv

1082 Weiner, Marvin 657–658 Weiss, Benjamin xliv Welcker, Friedrich (1784–1868) 937 Welser, Marcus (1558–1614) 956 West-östlicher Divan (Goethe) 906–907 Wettstein, Johann Jakob (1693–1754) 337 Weyer, Johann (1515–88) 127, 133 What Was History: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Grafton) xl Whitaker, William (1548–95) 58 White, Hayden 1029 White, Terence Hanbury (1906–64) 661 Whittington, Robert (ca. 1480–ca. 1553) 547 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813) 337 Wieland, Melchior (ca. 1520–89) xliii, 77 Wiener Tageblatt 930 Wikipedia 434, 439 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von (1848–1931) 968 Willard, Emma 994 Willemer, Marianne von (1784–1860) 907 William of Mantua (Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke 1538–87) 715 William of Moerbeke (1215/35–ca. 1286)  693, 699 Williams, Megan xliv, 384 Wilson, Thomas 727 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–68)  401, 849, 899, 903 Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Goethe)  903–904, 906 Winter (Arcimboldo) 491 Winthrop, Adam xliii Winthrop, John (1587/8–1649) xliii Winthrop, Jr., John (1606–76) xliii Winthrop, Waitstill (1641/42–1717) xliii Winwood, Ralph 111 Wissenschaft des Judentums 643–644 witchcraft 270–271, 283 See also demonology Delrio and 270 Gravina and 283 Ronsse and 133–134 witch-caused illness 133–134 Withorne, Peter (1550–63) 1005 Witter, Henning Bernward (1683–1715) 935 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) 573 Wolf, Buonina (Tovah) 644

Index Wolf, Friedrich August (1759–1824) 821–841, 849, 935, 937, 957–958, 960 Grafton and 1029 Kidd and 831–833 Woolfson, Jonathan 552 Word, the 576–577 See also Logos Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) 823 Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Grafton) xliii Worthies of England, The (Stow) 120 Woudt, Johannes Cornelisz van ‘t (ca. 1550–1615) 83, 89 Woverius, Johannes (1576–1636) 748 Wunderkammer 901 See also collecting; curiosity cabinets Wycliffe, John (1320–84) 581 Xenophon (ca. 430–354 bce) 398, 696 Xylander, Wilhelm (1532–76) 735, 752–753 Yates, Frances (1899–1981) xxxviii, 989 Young, John 1010 Young, Patrick (1584–1652) 27 Young, Thomas (1773–1829) 826–827 Zacharias (antique author) 371 Zamberti, Bartolomeo (ca. 1473–after 1543)  785, 793 Zanchi, Basilio (ca. 1501–58) 265–266 Zanetti, Francesco 255–256 Zedler, Johann Heinrich (1706–51) 426 Zelter, Carl Friedrich (1758–1832) 913 Zentgraf, Johann Joachim (1643–1707) 287 Zephaniah, Book of 43 Zetzel, James xliv Zhu, Guangqian (1897–1986) 851 Ziegler, Caspar (1680–1717) 287, 294, 304 Zimmermann, Johann Georg (1728–95) 300, 332 Zinner, Ernst (1886–1970) 561 Ziskindish, Rabbi (active around 1800) 472 zodiac 511, 529 Zwinger, Theodor (1533–88) 416, 436–438