Interpreting Early Modern Europe [1 ed.] 1138799009, 9781138799004

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Introduction: Interpreting early modern Europe
History and historiography
Making use of Interpreting Early Modern Europe
Bibliography
1. Medieval and modern
How the early moderns defined historical periods
Defining ‘medieval’
Defining ‘early modern’
Sudden change or gradual transition?
What may not have changed?
Where to place the emphasis?
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 1.1: On Luther’s apocalyptic expectations
Appendix 1.2: On the character of early modern monarchies
Appendix 1.3: On medieval religious culture
2. Identities and encounters
Ethnographic sources: possibilities and problems
Modes of analysis
Conclusion
Note
Bibliography
Appendix
Appendix 2.1
3. Gender and social structures
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 3.1: Disorderly women
Appendix 3.2: Patriarchal equilibrium
Appendix 3.3: Mixed marriages
4. Renaissance
Gender and family
Anthropology of the Renaissance
Religion
Toward a global economy
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 4.1
Appendix 4.2
Appendix 4.3
5. Reformations
Framing the subject
Accounting for origins
Making sense of experience
Measuring outcomes
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 5.1
Appendix 5.2
Appendix 5.3
6. Media and communication
‘In the midst of things’: media and meaning
The three Rs
A good education: books and the renaissance
The european ‘printing revolution’ in a global perspective
Printers, books and readers
The media and religious change
The power of what we see– and hear– at adistance
Censorship and the public sphere
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 6.1
Appendix 6.2
Appendix 6.3
7. Material cultures
Introduction
From the material renaissance to the industrious revolution: multiplying the number of consumer revolutions
The social and spatial dynamics of consumer changes
Connecting the local and global
Cultural perspectives
The material turn
Epilogue
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 7.1
Appendix 7.2
Appendix 7.3
8. The state
Introduction
Early modern polities
The new language of state
The state as asocial fact
Exclusion and inclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 8.1
Appendix 8.2
Appendix 8.3
9. War and the military revolution
Introduction
The military revolution
The military revolution in historical context
Appraising the military revolution
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 9.1
Appendix 9.2
Appendix 9.3
10. Expansion, space, and people
The traditional storyline
Challenges
Methods and theories
Spaces
People
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 10.1
Appendix 10.2
11. Commerce and industry
Introduction
Big ideas from the 1970s and 1980s
Quantitative methodologies for the early modern period
Widening horizons and the expansion of trade
Industry and the Industrial Revolution
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 11.1
Appendix 11.2
Appendix 11.3
12. Science and reason
The history of science and the philosophy of science
The Whig interpretation of the history of science
Externalism and internalism, and beyond
Continuity or revolution?
Feminist historiography and women in science
Religion, science, and secularisation
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendices 12.1 a–b: The Difference between the History andPhilosophy of Science
Appendices 12.2 a–b. Whig Interpretation of History
Appendices 12.3 a–b. Continuity or Revolution?
13. Popular cultures and witchcraft
How to be popular
Community and gender
Enchanted versus disenchanted
Chronology: origins and effects
Knowing witches and witchcraft
Scepticism, science and the supernatural
Afuture for witches and popular culture
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 13.1
Appendix 13.2
Appendix 13.3
14. Political thought
Introduction
Liberalism and the pathologies of the modern state
Civic humanism
Reason of state
Absolutism and constitutionalism
Modern natural law and representation
Conclusion and new directions: early modern or post-modern?
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 14.1
Appendix 14.2
Appendix 14.3
Appendix 14.4
15. Enlightenment struggles
Introduction
The answer to aquestion
Enlightenment and totalitarianism
The contemporary liberal case
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 15.1: Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State
Appendix 15.2: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Appendix 15.3: Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters
16. French Revolution
The first modern revolution
Origins of the French Revolution
The end to privilege
The terror and revolutionary violence
Gender in the French Revolution
Legacy of the French Revolution
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 16.1: The Night of 4 August 1789
Appendix 16.2: Revolutionary Violence
Appendix 16.3: Legacy of the French Revolution
17. Turns and perspectives
Introduction
New perspectives and paradigms
Writing history now
The state of the discipline
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix 17.1
Appendix 17.2
Appendix 17.3
Index

Citation preview

Interpreting Early Modern Europe

Interpreting Early Modern Europe is a comprehensive collection of essays on the historiography of the early modern period (circa 1450–1800). Concerned with the principles, priorities, theories, and narratives behind the writing of early modern history, the book places particular emphasis on developments in recent scholarship. Each chapter, written by a prominent historian caught up in the debates, is devoted to the varieties of interpretation relating to a specific theme considered integral to understanding the age, providing readers with a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at how historians have worked, and still work, within these fields. At one level the emphasis is historiographical, with the essays engaged in a direct dialogue with the influential theories, methods, assumptions, and conclusions in each of the fields. At another level the contributions emphasise the historical dimensions of interpretation, providing readers with surveys of the component parts that make up the modern narratives. Supported by extensive bibliographies, primary materials, and appendices with extracts from key secondary debates, Interpreting Early Modern Europe provides a systematic exploration of how historians have shaped the study of the early modern past. It is essential reading for students of the period. C. Scott Dixon is Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. His previous books include Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (2010), Contesting the Reformation (2012), and The Church in the Early Modern Age (2016). Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick, UK. His publications include Drinking Matters (2007), Imperial Villages: Cultures of Political Freedom in the German Lands c. 1300–1800 (2019) and the edited collection The European World 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (3rd edn, 2018).

Interpreting Early Modern Europe Edited by C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-79900-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-79901-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32457-4 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors

Introduction: Interpreting early modern Europe

vii x 1

C. SCOTT DIXON AND BEAT KÜMIN

1 Medieval and modern

18

EUAN CAMERON

2 Identities and encounters

49

CHARLES H. PARKER

3 Gender and social structures

72

MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS

4 Renaissance

96

EDWARD MUIR

5 Reformations

121

C. SCOTT DIXON

6 Media and communication

150

MARK GREENGRASS

7 Material cultures

183

BRUNO BLONDÉ AND WOUTER RYCKBOSCH

8 The state JAMES B. COLLINS

215

vi

Contents

9 War and the military revolution

244

CHRISTOPHER STORRS

10 Expansion, space, and people

268

DAGMAR FREIST

11 Commerce and industry

298

MAARTEN PRAK

12 Science and reason

329

JOHN HENRY

13 Popular cultures and witchcraft

356

KATHRYN A. EDWARDS

14 Political thought

388

NOAH DAUBER

15 Enlightenment struggles

417

DORINDA OUTRAM

16 French Revolution

443

PAUL HANSON

17 Turns and perspectives

471

BEAT KÜMIN

Index

491

Illustrations

The authors and editors would like to thank the copyright holders of illustrations featured in this book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain necessary permissions. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Figures 1.1 Fourteenth-century carving of the Nine Worthies in the town hall of Cologne. Picture by Elke Wetzig (Elya) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=1159570 3.1 Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait (c. 1630). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 3.2 Urs Graf, ‘Two Mercenaries and a Woman’ (1524), woodcut. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 4.1 Benvenuto Cellini, Salt Cellar (1540–1543). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria/Bridgeman Images 4.2 Leon Battista Alberti, Façade of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy (c. 1458–70). Photo © Raffaello Bencini/Bridgeman Images 5.1 Procession in Piazza San Marco, by Gentile Bellini, 1496, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy, Europe. Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo 6.1 Distribution of Jesuit Establishments in Europe, taken from Mark Greengrass, The European Reformation c. 1500–1618 (London: Longman, 1998), 196. Courtesy of the author 6.2 Geographical Spread of Erasmus’ Correspondents in the Period 1517–1524, taken from Robert Mandrou, Des humanistes aux hommes de science: XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), cartes (unpaginated). Reproduced with permission 6.3 Inside a print shop. Woodblock illustration from Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia (Leipzig 1634), p. x. Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden; http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id273679848/10

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Illustrations

6.4 Book production in Europe, data reworked from Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,’ Journal of Economic History 69 (2/2009) 417 and 421 6.5 ‘Finch his Alphabet, or A Godly direction fit to be perused of each true Christian’ (c. 1635), catalogued in the English Broadsheet Ballad Archives (EBBA): ID36321. © The Society of Antiquaries of London, Broadsides Cab Lib g; reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London 6.6 Ottavio Codogno’s scheme of European postal routes (1608). Taken from Schobesberger et al., ‘European Postal Networks’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 30. Reproduced with the editors’ permission 7.1 Trencher and bowl, painted by Nicola da Urbino (1533–38). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 7.2 Jean-Etienne Liotard, Dutch Girl at Breakfast (c. 1756). © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 8.1 Jan Matejko, Adoption of the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791 (oil on canvas, 1891) The Royal Castle in Warsaw – Museum, inv. no. ZKW/1105, phot. Andrzej Ring, Lech Sandzewicz. Reproduced with permission 8.2 ‘Brazilian ball’ (French School, pen & ink and w/c on paper, 16th century) 9.1 View of Gibraltar, taken by an officer of Admiral Sir George Rooke’s fleet on 21 July 1704 (OS): https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Gibraltar_1704.jpg. Public domain/PD-US 9.2 Contemporary etching of troop disposition at the beginning of the Battle of Breitenfeld from Oluf Hanson, ‘Praelii inter Sereniss: Suecor: Regem et Saxoniae Electorem: nec non Catholicae Ligae Generalem Com: a Ilty, VII Septemb: anni MDCXXXI prope Lipsiam comissi’ (1631). Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown University Library 10.1 Handwritten spreadsheet taken from Compte general de La traitte Des Captifs Du Vaipeau [sic] Labraham [General Account of the trade of captives (slaves) of the ship L’Abraham, 1743]. TNA, HCA 32/97/1. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK 10.2 Sail-cloth postbag with unopened letters carried on the ship Zenobia sailing from Bordeaux to New York and taken in 1812 by British privateers. TNA, HCA 32/1769/854. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK 10.3 Inventory of the Negroes and Stock on Mesopotamia Estate taken on 11 September 1756 before James Dunn and John Rickets,

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14.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 17.1

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Esq. TNA, HCA 30/259. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK Skeleton from a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY Fourth Scheme of the Muscles, from Andreas Vesalius (1555), De humani corporis fabrica [On the structure of the human body], Basel: Johannes Oporinus. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certaine Witch named Alse Gooderidge of Stapen Hill, who was arraigned and conuicted at Darbie at the Aβises there (1597). Lambeth Palace Library, London, UK/Bridgeman Images Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Private Collection/Bridgeman Images Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath (1789). Carnavalet Museum, France. Courtesy of Alamy Images Before and After the Night of 4 August 1789: Peasant Carrying Nobility and Clergy. Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo Before and After the Night of 4 August 1789: Nobility and Clergy carrying a Peasant. Collection PJ/Alamy Stock Photo Jan Steen, Celebrating the Birth (oil on canvas, 87.7 x 107 cm, 1664). © The Wallace Collection, London. Reproduced with permission Albrecht Dürer, Christus in der Vorhölle (woodcut 39 x 28 cm, c. 1510). Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg, Graphische Sammlung, Gr 24/65. Reproduced with permission

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Tables 8.1 Excerpt of three sample parishes in the district of Vézelay (January 1696). Source: Sébastien Le Prestre [Marshal Vauban], ‘Geographic description of the fiscal district of Vézelay’ (De Boislisle 1881, 846–47) 11.1a Sectoral shares in GDP and labour-force in England and Britain (from 1700), 1522–1801 11.1b Sectoral shares in GDP and labour-force in Holland (1510) and the Netherlands (1807) 11.2 GDP/capita in Europe, 1500–1800 (in 1990 dollars) 11.3 Estimated output of wrought iron in Europe (in 1,000 tonnes)

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Contributors

Bruno Blondé is Professor of History at the University of Antwerp. His prevous books include Een economie met verschillende snelheden: ongelijkheden in de opbouw en de ontwikkeling van het Brabantse stedelijke netwerk (ca. 1750–ca. 1790) (1999) and (as a co-editor) City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600 (2018). Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and a member of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His books include The European Reformation (2nd edn. 2012) Waldenses (2000), Interpreting Christian History (2005) and Enchanted Europe (2010). Recent edited volumes include the third volume of The New Cambridge History of the Bible, covering 1450–1750 (2016), and volume 6 of the Annotated Luther, entitled The Interpretation of Scripture (2017). James B. Collins is Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. His most recent publication is La monarchie républicaine. État et société dans la France moderne (2016); his two-volume examination of the relationship among the practice, rhetoric, and theory of politics in France, 1356–1560 and 1561–1651, should be out in 2020. Noah Dauber is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. He is the author of State and Commonwealth (2016). He is currently working on a book on Hobbes’s ethics. C. Scott Dixon is Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. His previous books include Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517– 1740 (2010), Contesting the Reformation (2012), and The Church in the Early Modern Age (2016). He is currently working on a study of the early modern German forest. Kathryn A. Edwards is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Her publications include Leonarde’s Ghost: Popular Piety and “The Appearance of a Spirit” in 1628 (2008) and Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe (2015) as well as the forthcoming Living with Ghosts: The Dead in

List of Contributors

xi

European Society from the Black Death to the Enlightenment and the edited Brill Companion to the Devil and Demons. Dagmar Freist is professor of early modern history at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She is director of the long term digitization and research project prize papers. In her research she focuses on global microhistory, practices of religious coexistence and conflict, public sphere, and state building. Her recent books include Glaube Liebe Zwietracht. Religiös-konfessionell gemischte Ehen in der Frühen Neuzeit (2017) and she co-edited Connecting Worlds and People. Early modern diasporas (2017). Mark Greengrass is Emeritus Professor of Early-Modern History at the University of Sheffield and Associate of the Centre Roland Mousnier (UMR 8596), Université de Paris-Sorbonne. His recent publications include Christendom Destroyed. Penguin History of Europe Vol. V (2014) and (with Thierry Rentet and Stéphane Gal), Être Lieutenant Général en 1572. La correspondance de Bertrand de Simiane de Gordes (2016). Paul Hanson is Professor of History at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN, USA. His most recent book is Contesting the French Revolution (2009). He is currently at work on a book comparing the Terror in the French Revolution to the Cultural Revolution in China. John Henry is professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His publications include The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (3rd edn, 2008); A Short History of Scientific Thought (2012); and Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England (2012). Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick, UK. Publications include Drinking Matters (2007), Imperial Villages: Cultures of Political Freedom in the German Lands c. 1300–1800 (2019) and the edited collection The European World 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (3rd edn, 2018). Edward Muir is the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981), Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy (1993, 1998), and The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (2007). Dorinda Outram is Clark Professor Emerita of History at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty and Power in Early Modern Germany (2019) and several other books on the history of science, the Enlightenment and the history of women and gender. Charles H. Parker is Professor of History at Saint Louis University. His publications include Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (2010); Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden

Age (2008) and The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (1998). Maarten Prak is Professor of Economic and Social History at Utrecht University. He has published extensively on urban history and more specifically on urban crafts, including (ed. with S.R. Epstein) Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (2008), and (ed. with Patrick Wallis) Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe (2020). His latest monograph is Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000–1789 (2018). Wouter Ryckbosch is Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. He specializes in the medieval and early modern history of the Low Countries, and has published on issues of social and economic inequality and consumption during the late medieval and early modern period. Christopher Storrs is Reader in History at the University of Dundee. His previous books are War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (1999), The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665–1700 (2006), The Spanish Resurgence 1713–1748 (2016), and the edited collection, The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2009) Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, editor of the Journal of Global History, and the author or editor of thirty books and more than 100 articles or book chapters that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean.

Introduction Interpreting early modern Europe C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin

History and historiography On 10 December 1513, the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a letter to Francesco Vettori, Florence’s ambassador to Rome, describing how he passed the hours while in exile at his farm. According to Machiavelli, after spending his days catching birds with his bare hands, conversing with the woodsmen, and playing criccha and backgammon with the locals, he would return home in the evening to his study where, as he described it: In the entryway I take off my daytime clothing, covered with mud and dirt, and I put on garments that are royal, and suitable for a court. Changed into suitable clothes, I step into the ancient courts of ancient men. Received lovingly by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine, for which I was born. There I am unashamed to talk with them and ask them the reasons for their actions, and they, with their humanity, answer me. (Celenza 2015, 59) For Machiavelli, communing with the past required the historian to adopt a persona. In his case it was that of an ambassador or courtier dressed in garments ‘that are royal, and suitable for a court’, thus matching his intention to write a study of power and politics, which would eventually appear as The Prince. Few modern historians would reflect on their relationship with the past in such personal terms as this, and few change clothes before entering their studies, but even today all scholars who sit down to engage with history and shape it for a readership adopt a persona of some kind. Behind every work of history, no matter how dense in fact and figures and seemingly innocent of any intention other than to recreate the past ‘as it really was’, there is an author who has made explicit choices about what sort of historian he or she wants to be, and that requires decisions about what company to keep, which facts to convey, what type of audience to reach, what voice to use, and what sort of story to tell. This does not mean that history belongs to the genre of fiction. Works of history can account for the past by way of different narratives, just as libraries can provide scholars with source materials by way of different indexing

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systems. But it does mean that history books have a purpose and, as a consequence, have been shaped in a particular way (compare Gaddis 2004; Stern 1973). The objective of Interpreting Early Modern Europe is to examine the different ways in which historians have shaped the study of the early modern period (circa 1450–1800). It is a book concerned with the principles, priorities, theories, and narratives behind the writing of early modern history, which is to say its historiography. Each chapter, written by a leading scholar in the field, is devoted to the varieties of interpretation relating to a specific theme or phenomenon considered integral to understanding the age. The selection process was primarily based on two criteria: first, the extent to which the chapter topics represent critical historical developments of the early modern period; and second, related to this, the degree to which these developments have become the subjects of sustained historiographical reflection, and indeed to the point where ongoing debate has given rise to contrasting schools of interpretation. Necessarily, similar sorts of questions can be asked of different phenomena, and all the topics in this collection are bound up in the same historical framework, so there are instances when the analyses intersect and overlap. But each of the chapter themes has enough critical mass of historical and historiographical substance to stand on its own as an important field of early modern history, central to the understanding of the age as a whole. The purpose of the collection is to provide readers with a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at how historians have worked, and still work, within these fields. Roughly speaking, the chapters have approached the subject from two perspectives, both of which shed light on how scholars shape their depictions of the past. At one level the emphasis is historiographical, which is to say that the essays are engaged in a direct dialogue with the influential theories, methods, assumptions, and conclusions in each of the fields. Although the contributors were free to criticise and speculate, the focus of the analysis has been placed on the existing debates and disagreements. These essays are not manifestos of an idealised historiographical future; they are critically engaged studies of past practice, predominantly the recent past, the purpose being to help students, scholars, and interested readers make sense of the books and articles they read. At another level the contributions work as analytical tools for understanding the component parts of modern narratives, and this requires an emphasis on the historical dimensions of interpretation. All narratives are the sum of their parts, and authors generally try to include the parts they consider the most significant in relation to the arguments they want to make. This too is a matter of choice, of course, but some aspects of the past are viewed as so important they have emerged as the basic building blocks of the narrative, foundational supports. By surveying the main historical developments and then referring the reader to the supporting literature, the essays demonstrate how history is constructed, piece by piece (compare Collins and Taylor 2006). The subject of these essays is thus the historiography of early modern Europe. Historiography is an English loan-word, of mixed French and Latin provenance

Introduction

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(historiographie, historiographia), and its meaning has changed through the years. It first appears in the English language in the sixteenth century to denote the general reading or writing of history. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 still defined it in this way: ‘The art or employment of an historian’. Over the last two centuries, however, it has taken on the more specialised meaning of the study of the writing of history as an academic discipline, which includes its style, methods, hermeneutics, disciplinary boundaries, philosophies of interpretation, and authorial aims, and that is primarily how it is understood in this book. In essence, historiography is concerned with the three central aspects of the historical enterprise: scope, method, and purpose. These three aspects, as Donald R. Kelley explains, are at the heart of all western engagement with the past: The question of scope involves subject matter, chronology, geography, and historical evidence, that is, materials remembered and orally or scribally transmitted which historians judge to be worthy of note or heuristically useful. The question of method involves the means of gathering this information, making sense of it, and rendering it into written form to transmit to a reading public. The question of purpose involves the utility claimed for the study of history and what later came to be called the philosophy of history. Each of these matters may be projected on a small or a large scale – local or global, specialized or general, long or short term – but every historian has some sense of the horizons within which historical inquiry is carried on, the materials it employs, the form in which it is cast, and the end it has in view. (Kelley 1998, 7) The chapters in this book will consider all three aspects of historical scholarship as they have been applied to the study of the early modern period, though there is a marked accent on the final issue of purpose or philosophy. Of particular importance in this collection are the different theories or approaches adopted by historians in recent years in order to make sense of the early modern past. Historiography has its own long narrative of development, a ‘history of histories’ as one survey has put it (Barrow 2007). Before starting into the chapter surveys of the recent historiography of early modern Europe, it is worth providing a brief overview of some of the formative stages of this ‘history of histories’ over the longer term to give a sense of how historical writing has changed through the years and how modes of interpretation have shaped the reading of the past. Like many things in the world of ideas, the origins of historical scholarship in Europe can be traced back to Greek and Roman Antiquity. In the works of thinkers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus, Livy, and Tacitus, all of whom lived between the fifth century BCE and the second century CE, history emerged as an independent discipline with its own interpretative framework and its own unique role in relation to other disciplines such as poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. Broadly speaking, the purpose of history was to recount the rise and fall of kingdoms (including the ‘relations and causes’, as Tacitus put it), to shed light on human nature as reflected through great men, to serve as a guide against misfortune, and

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to work as a moral compass for social and political relations, which was summed up in the famous adage attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus that history is ‘philosophy teaching by example’ (Kelley and Smith 2012, 81–7). Representative of this moral mode of interpretation was the work of Titus Livius, better known in English as Livy, whose monumental history of the foundation of Rome and the fathers and families of empire recounted the deeds of the great figures of the past while conveying moral lessons to the reader by way of exampla of good and bad conduct, sentiment in speeches, and the outcome of ethical choices, all imparting proper notions of justice, moderation, courage, charity, and virtue. Given the importance of Greek and Roman scholarship to later ages and the ambition and quality of these early works, the classical paradigm continued to shape European historiography well into the modern age, as did the works themselves. More than a thousand years after the death of Tacitus the Renaissance scholar Petrarch was still posing the question ‘what else, then, is all history if not the praise of Rome?’ and writing in a style that set out to emulate the ancients (Witt 2003, 281; see the essays in Marincola 2007, 2011). Despite the ongoing influence and authority of the classical writers, medieval historians were able to establish new genres, the most important being the mode of Christian history based on the sacral or providential reading of the past. Here too the foundations had been put in place by Antiquity, and above all through the works of Eusebius and Augustine, and historical figures were still held up as moral exemplars, though they were more likely to be saints and martyrs than kings. But salvation history had a different story to tell. In place of the controlling hand of power, politics, persona, and fortune, the Christian histories in the providential mould viewed the past from the perspective of Scripture, which meant that history only made sense – in fact, only had meaning – when understood as the gradual unfolding of the ‘grand design of God’. Indeed, time itself was qualified by the course of revelation, formalised by monastic scholars like the Venerable Bede by measuring the passage of time with the designate Anno Domini (‘in the year of our lord’). Given both the higher purpose of history and the inscrutability of the divine will, there was a tendency in this mode to be less fixated with the truth-value of the details or the personal witness of the author and more concerned with a deeper meaning beyond the immediate acts of interpretation. As R. G. Collinwood remarked, ‘in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God’s and not man’s, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man’s actions in order to detect the plan of God …’ (Collinwood 1994, 55). Medieval scholars wrote in other genres as well. This was the age of massive compilations of historical data, the historical summa, as well as the genealogies, chronicles, and res gestae of the emerging dynastic, national, and urban traditions (Deliyannis 2003; Foot and Robinson 2012). But the main mode of interpretation in the medieval period was the providential reading of the past. The early modern period marked an important phase in the study of the European past, so much so that modern scholars speak in terms of a ‘historiographical

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revolution’ (Popkin 2016, 47–67). The period inherited the two dominant strands of interpretation discussed above, namely the moralism of classical writers and the providentialism of the medievalists. However, in step with the hermeneutical insights made by the Renaissance humanists and the critical readings of Christian history ventured by the evangelical reformers, historians began to ask different questions of the source materials and challenge traditional interpretations of the past. Admittedly, they still worked in the shadow of the ancients: Machiavelli, for instance, was deeply influenced by Livy and Tacitus, while the reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus reworked the medieval providential scheme to write his Lutheran history of Christianity (Dickens and Tonkin 1985; Ferguson 1948). But with the Renaissance and the Reformation came a more rigorous hermeneutical approach to historical sources. This was the stage when, as Anthony Grafton has remarked, history emerged ‘as a comprehensive discipline that ranged across space and time, and as a critical discipline based on the distinction between primary and secondary sources’ (Grafton 2007, 33). Historical testimony had to have dates that collated with other sources, technical and linguistic characteristics appropriate to the author and the age, a clear and present internal consistency, and viable horizons of expectation. The modern assumption that historians have the skills to assess the relative ‘truth value’ of a source and that the proper writing of history requires the observance of a set of ‘scientific’ laws of interpretation to assure objectivity can be traced back to the age of the Renaissance. Whether through brilliant individual acts of hermeneutical detective work, such as Lorenzo Valla’s exposure in 1439–40 of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, vernacular works of history devoted to a specific period and place, based on verifiable sources, and concerned with secular (predominantly human) causation, such as the histories of Florence by Francesco Guicciardini and Leonardo Bruni, chorographical and antiquarian works capturing the specific characteristics of given regions and preserving the quickly evaporating past, or new synthetic and systematic guides to interpretation, such as Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566), the study of the past was transformed (see the essays in Rabasa, Sato, Tortarolo and Woolf 2012; Sweet 2004). This historiographical revolution gained pace during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment as scholars refined the hermeneutical insights of the Renaissance and imposed new interpretations on the past. History, like many disciplines at the time, entered into the realm of philosophy. Weighed down on the one side by a mixture of ‘dogmatic assertion, skeptical cynicism, cosmic despair, aggressive optimism, energetic inquiry, and introspective spiritualism’, while buoyed up on the other by an unwavering trust in the power of reason and the new scientific laws of interpretation, Enlightenment thinkers used the study of history as a laboratory for diagnosing the ailments of civilisation and prescribing the cures (Reill 1975, 9). The watchword of the day was ‘impartiality’, by which was meant history free of any trace of author bias or the distortions of religious or political background. The ideal Enlightenment historian was a closeted érudit with no distorting passion, faith, or prejudice who was willing to forgo human pleasures in the quest for historical truth. This search

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required the specialised tools of interpretation developed by the Renaissance humanists, and indeed Enlightenment thinkers were even more determined to turn the art of history (ars historica) into a science. Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie (1751–72), for instance, included entries on chronology, periodisation, hermeneutics, and methodology, while Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary of 1697 (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique) systematically exposed errors in previous historical writings. And in most serious works of this period, despite the philosophes’ dislike of the formality, pedantry, and the ‘empty, sterile science of facts and dates’ (to quote Voltaire), it was during the Age of Enlightenment that the footnote established itself as an essential support for any impartial interpretation of the past (Blix 2009, 28–47; Grafton 1997, 94–121). Historical plausibility, the first stage on the quest for historical truth, had to be borne out by the appropriate academic proofs (primary sources, secondary works, auxiliary arguments), and these were collated, categorised, and critically assessed in finepoint print at the bottom or the end of the text. Despite this emphasis on objectivity, the moral dimension remained. Most Enlightenment philosophes, Bayle and Voltaire included, thought that history was valuable because it could teach by example. What was new in the Enlightenment, however, was the widespread conviction that a proper reading of the past (by which was meant a philosophical reading of the past) could go beyond sermonising and expose the deeper patterns and cycles of history to reveal the laws of human development, much as Enlightenment studies of geological strata were newly exposing the laws governing the composition of the earth (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob 1994, 52–90). The masterpiece in this vein was Giambattista Vico’s New Science (Scienza Nuova, 1725), a work that traced humanity through its various historical stages, divided its history into periods and epochs, identified the patterns and cycles, and spoke of universal laws, yet never lost sight of the need for impartiality and the proper study of the sources. As Vico insisted: ‘Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat’ (Kelley 1998, 227). Similar in sentiment, though more ambitious in its effort to unite philosophy with the details of history, was Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). Gibbon’s classic multi-volume study of the rise and fall of the Empire had all the traits admired by Enlightenment thinkers. Deeply informed by classical learning and based on fact-finding erudition and devotion to the historical truth, it was also tempered by a more modern spirit of irony and scepticism, which Gibbon often displayed in his meticulously crafted footnotes. Moreover, for all its exacting scholarship, the Decline and Fall was also an extensive philosophical reflection on the reasons for the end of empire. From the failure of rule (Rome’s increasing ‘immoderate greatness’) to the corrupting efforts of foreign influence (the so-called ‘clouds of barbarism’), Gibbon’s work identified the specific causes of the Empire’s decline and fall within the framework of universal history (Pocock 1999; on Enlightenment historiography in general, see the articles in Bourgault and Sparlin 2013).

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Building on this flowering of the scientific method during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, history as an academic discipline underwent its formative period in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Incipient modernity brought the establishment of dedicated chairs (e.g. the Regius Professorships in Modern History at Oxford and Cambridge in 1724), new university foundations, and intensified theoretical reflection. The ‘historical method’ developed by Prussian practitioners like Johan Gustav Droysen centred on the identification of suitable questions and requisite materials, the critical analysis of all primary sources with regard to authenticity and plausibility, the coherent interpretation of contexts, intentions, contents, and audiences as well as the adequate formulation and dissemination of the resulting insights (Assis 2014). Moreover, the study of history was now invested with a reinvigorated public purpose, as the past became an important component in the upbuilding of the modern state. This union of the European past with the political present formed part of a wider philosophical outlook, latterly termed historicism (and represented by seminal figures like the German historian Leopold von Ranke), which conceived of ‘all political order as historically developed and grown’ and, in some more radical manifestations, even assumed the operation of ‘predetermined laws towards a particular end’ (Berger 2001, 28–9). Coinciding with the consolidation of the European states, the essential goal of the public history of the nineteenth century was to chart the origins and ultimate realisation of the political nation. The chief objects of investigation, as a consequence, were the ‘great men’ involved in the process (whether monarchs, ministers, or inspired leaders), the famous wars and battles where the blood of the nation had been shed, and the historical traces of the spirit of its people, which were usually assumed to be embodied in its political constitution and associated ideas (Gooch 1952; Stuchtey and Wende 2000). Political history remained the prevailing form of historical writing well into the second-half of the twentieth century. Even today, as historians work to break through the barriers of nationalism and piece together the foundations for a global approach to the past, the nation-state remains the favoured ‘spatial container’ for historical narrative and ‘evolutionary nationalist historicism remains … the dominant form of historical understanding across much of the world’ (Bayly 2012, 13). Within the academy, however, its dominance has long since given way to a diversification of approaches. After the Second World War, social and – a little later – gender relations became prominent priorities of scholarly investigation. Inspired by period movements like the anti-establishment protests of 1968 and successive waves of feminism, but also ideological impulses from Marxism and postcolonial theory, ordinary people, women, marginal groups and extra-European societies attracted growing attention. Seminal studies recovered the ‘moral economy of the crowd’ in eighteenth-century England, asked whether women also had a Renaissance, traced the worldviews of Italian millers, and identified how subordinate groups helped to shape the historical process. Rather than ‘great men’, high politics and military campaigns, socioeconomic overviews of the time addressed issues like the stratification of the

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peasantry, demographic differences between northern and southern parts of the Continent and the ways in which proto-industry transformed early modern livelihoods. Many of these questions required numerical substantiation and thus the use of quantitative methods (Howell and Prevenier 2001; Iggers 2005; Tosh 2015). Alongside the turn towards the social dimension, historians experimented with ‘grand theory’ and varying scales of investigation. In this regard, the French Annales school and Italian microstoria represented the two extremes. For the former, the ultimate goal of the historian was to write the ‘total history’ of a region and its people. In order to do this, it was necessary to draw on the methods and the expertise of different disciplines, from anthropology and sociology to geography and economics. It also required the historian to have a good ear for the background noise of the past, by which is meant the deeper, longerterm factors that shape human destiny (such as environmental or biological changes) as well as the unconscious or the habitual aspects of culture (Burke 2015). In contrast to the ‘total history’ of the Annales approach, micro-history (microstoria) zoomed in on the material and mental worlds of small-scale communities or individuals, the purpose being to use the particular to shed light on the general. The timescales are much more narrow and the historical settings more modest, often just villages or even the thought-worlds of specific men and women, and the source-base tends to limit the range of questions that might be asked, but micro-history also aims at capturing broader truths about the past by way of the close study of the unique. And it is just as willing to borrow from other disciplines. Terms like ‘discourse analysis’ (Michel Foucault), ‘habitus’ (Pierre Bourdieu) and ‘thick description’ (Clifford Geertz) became further buzzwords in ever-more sophisticated quests to master the complexity of the past. The last few decades, finally, have seen the meteoric rise of ‘cultural history’. In contrast to an eponymous movement around 1900, its adherents – who, at times, seem to include nearly everyone active in the field – no longer restrict themselves to the study of high art or allegedly shared group/national characteristics, but ‘representations’ in the broadest sense of the term. What is of primary interest to cultural historians now is the way in which past societies saw themselves, reflected the world at the time and attempted to articulate their thoughts, perceptions and emotions in oral exchange, print and other media. Any picture emerging from such approaches will inevitably be differentiated, amorphous and tentative, making it much more difficult to come to uniform and ‘definite’ conclusions, a trend welcomed by some but also viewed with apprehension by many others (Burke 2008). Indeed, at present cultural history has such a broad remit it tends to blur the boundaries between the historiographical schools discussed above. As two scholars have recently remarked: There is of course a certain irony that since the 1970s and 1980s, social history’s tenure as queen of the historical sciences which was supposed to last for decades, indeed in some circles was supposed to mark a definitive epistemic and moral shift that would fundamentally reorient the discipline

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and the world, has been cut tragically short by the rise of The New Cultural History. Such is the rapidity with which the wheel of historiographical fortune now revolves. And there is, of course, a sense in which we are all cultural historians now. (Lake and Pincus 2012) In contrast to the increasing sense of direction, authority and professionalism which characterised history-writers from Machiavelli to Ranke, therefore, the latest developments have made their successors rather less confident. How much can we actually find out about pre-modern societies? Are our methods still fit for purpose? Is there anything left we all agree on? An ever-growing plurality of approaches has expanded horizons dramatically, both conceptually as well as spatially. As the last chapter in this collection examines in more detail, present-day historians operate in an environment altered by a succession of challenges, spearheaded by the linguistic turn and the postmodern erosion of once-unquestioned notions like historical ‘truth’, and numerous subsequent demands for reorientation (Jenkins 1997; Novick 1988). Overall, at least in the editors’ judgement, the academy has emerged bruised but resilient: more conscious of its limitations, more tolerant of alternative pathways, more cautious about general conclusions, but otherwise in remarkably rude health. All of the subjects and themes discussed in Interpreting Early Modern Europe bear traces of this long tradition of historiographical debate. As contexts have evolved, values and priorities have shifted, and the methods, techniques, and language associated with the study of the past have taken on new forms, historians have changed their approach and started to research and write about familiar things in new ways. Occasionally this has resulted in the emergence of new subfields of research, topics that did not occupy or interest previous generations. At other times it has meant that well-worn subjects have been viewed in different ways, cut up into novel parts or approached from new perspectives. And sometimes it has resulted in the confirmation of established views, continued support for an interpretation of the past that has assumed the status of a historical truth. The practice of history requires scholars to make choices of this kind, even before they sit down to write. On this note, it seems appropriate to return to the selection process behind this collection, which was itself a historiographical exercise. As mentioned above, the working principle has been the notion of a ‘critical mass of historical and historiographical substance’, by which is meant those subjects and related debates that tend to dominate the general discourse at present. Readers who pick up a modern survey of early modern history can expect to come across discussions about the topics analysed in this volume, and in fact the book was conceived with this encounter in mind. That does not mean, however, that the topics in this volume are in substance the most important or that they will always remain the notional components of the early modern narrative. Another collection of this kind could well have chapters on environment, medicine, migration, technology, animal studies or other topics in

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place of religion, war, or the state (see the discussions in Rublack 2012). In the editors’ opinion, however, the chapter themes in Interpreting Early Modern Europe reflect key historiographical fields at present. But we recognise the existence of valid alternatives and the likelihood of future reassessments. Indeed, history’s tendency to change over time is what these essays are about.

Making use of Interpreting Early Modern Europe Before turning to the content of Interpreting Early Modern Europe and how the reader might make use of it, a few words about the historical context are required in order to set the stage for the analyses, in particular with reference to the categories of place and time. To begin with place: all of the contributions are studies in the historiography of early modern Europe, but the referent to Europe is not as straightforward as it seems. The early modern age was precisely the period when, as the Renaissance historian John Hale put it, the word Europe first became part of common linguistic usage … the continent itself was given a securely map-based frame of reference, a set of images that established its identity in pictoral terms, and a triumphalist ideology that overrode its internal contradictions. (Hale 1994, 3) Admittedly, medieval thinkers had a vague notion of a unique people and a coextensive landmass conjured by the designate Europa, which was partly defined by myth and history, partly by geography and politics, and primarily by the shared religion of Roman Catholicism. In essence, Europa meant the same thing as Christendom. In the early modern period, however, this came to an end (Greengrass 2014). All sense of unity and uniqueness was suddenly faced with the division of Latin Christianity caused by the Reformations. In addition, there was growing uncertainty about geographical, historical and cultural knowledge brought on by the discovery of the New World and intensified exchange with Asia and Africa. And finally, due to the revolutionary advances in mapmaking, there was a much better-informed understanding of the dimensions of Europe and how the whole sat in relation to the parts. The contributions will range over this evolving landscape of Europe, some taking in the early period when notions of the Continent evolved in synch with, and in relation to, expanding awareness of the globe, while others at the tail-end of the period have to balance traditional notions of Europe and European against the rising influence of nationalism and the nation-state. The other variable is time: while primarily focused on the years between circa 1450 and 1800, the essays transgress into earlier and later periods. This reflects the general difficulty of demarcating ‘early modernity’, a relatively recent, twentieth-century addition to the canon of historical periods and one

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beginning and ending at different chronological points depending on the specific field and region of enquiry (Starn 2002). This diversity is borne out by the source materials our authors use to support their interpretations, ranging from fifteenth-century material culture to political thought of the late 1700s. Some might be classed as ‘typically’ early modern, such as those relating to confessional strife, voyages of exploration, printed broadsheets, early statistics, or emerging state bureaucracies, while others involve quasi-universal genres such as letters or works of art. The resulting conclusions are as heterogeneous as the primary material, yet a few general tendencies can be identified. While structural elements – like confessionalised Churches, state authorities, and technological frameworks – receive due attention, the role of individual agency is repeatedly emphasised, particularly when the topics allow for the exploration of mindsets and motives. Throughout, contributors reject monocausal explanations for historical change, pointing to the constant negotiation of historical processes and the influence of numerous (and usually heavily contested) factors. Most of the authors, furthermore, opt for qualitative approaches to their subject matter, though there are also chapters that exemplify the merits of quantitative analysis. There is little trace of explicit ideological affiliation, in contrast to what might be expected of a similar volume produced one or two generations ago. The essays in this collection can be read in a number of different ways. On one level they are surveys of the recent historiography in the specialist fields, ordered around themes and arguments and divided into subtitled sections. Each chapter is thus a review of the history, the historiography, and the associated literature, which is cited in the body of the text in brackets (with names, dates, and pages when necessary) and included with full details in the bibliographies. Each chapter is self-contained and predominantly concerned with the specialist historiography, though on occasion the analyses take in general themes or touch on topics mentioned in other chapters, in which case the discussions are crossreferenced in the text (e.g.: cf. Chapter 4: Renaissance). As a supplement and a helpmeet to the analytical surveys, the authors have also provided extracts from a selection of the secondary works discussed in their overviews. Appearing at the end of the chapters in appendices and signposted in the body of the text (e.g.: see Appendix 4.1), these secondary extracts offer a first-hand encounter with some of the important works and give a sense of how historians in different fields have formulated and presented their ideas. Finally, throughout the chapters, space has been made for the inclusion of primary materials and these are signposted as well (e.g.: Excerpt 4.1, Figure 4.1). Such textual and visual records provide the authors with the opportunity to relate the problems of interpretation back to the sources while allowing the reader to weigh the arguments against the evidence and to get a feel for the voices of the period. The volume opens with Euan Cameron’s Chapter 1, ‘Medieval and modern’, which is an exploration of the early modern period and its relation to the medieval age. Part of the essay is thus concerned with the problematic of historical divisions, how to separate one period from another. However, Cameron extends

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the discussion to take in the broader questions of historical change across the period, which is rich in examples of revolutionary transitions, from new geographies and cosmologies, transformations of rule and the military, innovations in communication and economic relations, to reformations of philosophy and religion. Cameron argues that the processes of change ‘were incremental and gradual: their “turning points” can be located at different moments for different questions in different places’. In Chapter 2, ‘Identities and encounters’, Charles H. Parker examines the consequences of the cross-cultural contacts brought on by the period of European expansion, which created whole new dynamics of cultural exchange between Europe and the globe and altered the course of world history. Early modern accounts of this history, as Parker illustrates, present historians with problems of interpretation, not just due to the truth-value of the sources but also the tendency of contemporaries to look for the familiar and thereby ‘flatten perceptions of difference’. Recent ethnographical research, however, has allowed scholars to realise ‘that sustained contact with people around the world reshaped European attitudes about the world and their place in it’. Next, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks demonstrates how engagement with ‘Gender and social structures’ is fundamental to understanding the age. As she remarks in Chapter 3: ‘Every political, intellectual, religious, economic, social, and even military change had an impact on the actions and roles of men and women, and, conversely, a culture’s gender structures influenced every other structure or development’. Given its importance as a ‘totalising concept’, it necessarily intersects with many other disciplines, approaches and historiographical traditions surveyed in the chapter, which also emphasises the period’s own ‘culturally constructed and historically changing nature of sexuality as well as gender’. In Chapter 4, Edward Muir explores recent work on the Renaissance. Perhaps more so than in any other field in early modern history, Renaissance scholars work in the shadow of a powerful historiographical tradition, one that viewed it as the onset of modernity: namely, liberal, secular, rational, and individualistic. Modern interpreters, however, tend to avoid this search for an ‘irreducible identity’ and examine specific aspects on their own terms, from life-cycle stages to humanism and global trade. In place of notions of a Renaissance ‘man’ or a Renaissance ‘mind’, there is now a recognition of diversity, inconsistency, and asymmetry. As Muir observes with a view to the national traditions, ‘there were many Renaissances, each with a distinct periodisation and a distinctive definition’. Similar views are expressed by C. Scott Dixon in Chapter 5, ‘Reformations’. The emergence of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations was one of the most important developments of the period. In place of the universalism of medieval Roman Catholicism, Europe was suddenly faced with the realities of religious division, which were deeply rooted in social, political, and cultural relations. ‘Reformation’ thus takes in more than just religion, and here too scholars have turned away from monolithic narratives to the study of asymmetries. As Dixon notes, these days research ‘is more likely to maintain a discreet distance

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to the grand theories of the previous century and speak more modestly of subtle shifts, unintended outcomes, and synergies of thought and conduct’. Synergies are also a theme in Chapter 6, ‘Media and communication’. Assessing the impact of a new technology like print is challenging, not only due to the problems of interpretation (levels of literacy, contexts of understanding, the nature of authorship), but also because the books, pamphlets and broadsheets themselves were complex creations, ‘their production the result of a less visible telegraphy of correspondents and manuscript circulation’. In addition to the debates associated with the print revolution, Mark Greengrass also explores issues relating to technology and production, reader interaction and public opinion, the complexity of Europe’s communication dynamics, and the rise of the public sphere, ‘in which the media, old and new, could be instrumentalised by different actors and players to their own ends, to bring about change but also to maintain the status quo’. In Chapter 7, ‘Material cultures’, Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch turn to a relatively new field in which ‘things’ are studied in their own right rather than as an addendum to theories such as industrialisation, urbanisation, commercialisation, or modernisation. Scholars now recognise the importance of ‘early modern material culture as a locus of change and dynamism’, shedding light not only on the broader economic transformations but also deep social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional shifts. As the authors remark, ‘if materiality really has agency, then we need to take seriously the challenge to continue questioning where, when and how things mattered in the shaping of lives of early modern people across the globe’. A classic concern of early modern studies is surveyed by James B. Collins in Chapter 8, ‘The state’. Over the course of the period the state became, as Collins puts it, ‘an abstract concept with a permanent physical reality’. On the one hand this was due to the development of the functional components of rule, e.g. the reform of the military, the rise of officialdom, the extension of bureaucracy, the systematisation of law-making, and the creation of public debt. On the other it reflected the emergence of new languages and ideologies that transformed the meaning and purpose of government. As Collins remarks, ‘where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writings focused almost exclusively on the state’s role in protection, eighteenth-century authors turned to the state’s obligations to improve the lives of its inhabitants, even to see to their “happiness”’. Closely related debates feature in Chapter 9, ‘War and the military revolution’. As Christopher Storrs demonstrates, an understanding of the military developments taken in by the military revolution theses is fundamental to an understanding of the age, ‘not just because of the centrality of war to the early modern experience but because of its claims about the broader development of state and society in early modern Europe; and – perhaps more important still – the suggestion of reasons for the global triumph of Europe’. From its first inception in the twentieth century to the present day, the ‘military revolution’ theory has been the subject of historiographical debates and reassessments,

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illustrating the importance of a specialist theme for the history of the period as a whole. In Chapter 10, ‘Expansion, space and people’, Dagmar Freist contrasts traditional storylines of discovery and empire-building with more recent scholarly priorities. While approaches drawn from literary and cultural studies contribute ‘to a new sensibility of the discursive construction of the social, otherness and power relations’, the latest historical research reminds us of ‘the harsh social and political everyday realities of migration, coercion and subjection, and the importance of social agency and empowerment’. Drawing on a current research project, the author illustrates the fluidity of spatial constellations, overseas micro-networks and individual experiences associated with period features such as slavery and the global exchange of goods. In Chapter 11, ‘Commerce and industry’, Maarten Prak surveys challenges to ‘master narratives’ in the field, paying special attention to aspects of quantitative methodology and substantiation. As Prak explains, given the nature of early modern sources, scholars have to take care when projecting statistical models for the period, but this should not prevent them from asking big questions (rather, as he writes, ‘numbers should be read as a provocation’). Indeed, while recent scholarship has provided new insights about the relative importance of trade and industry for the early modern economy, Prak concludes: ‘The search for better quantitative indicators has produced some remarkable results, but is on-going’. As outlined by John Henry in Chapter 12, ‘Science and reason’, in the study of the scientific revolution, there have often been tensions between philosophical approaches and theory-free methodologies focusing on the ‘contingent and various ways’ science was actually practised. Both aim to avoid anachronism and teleology, and the new sociology of scientific knowledge often blurs the distinctions, but big questions relating to the formation of knowledge, the nature of intellectual revolutions, and the meaning of modernisation remain contested. All of this has led to ‘a greater awareness that what we write our histories about are not fixed and unchanging things, but are changing all the time, and our histories ought to recognise these changes, and properly account for them, as they give an account of them’. A similar mixture of ‘durability and fluidity’ emerges from Kathryn A. Edwards’ Chapter 13, ‘Popular cultures and witchcraft’. Both have been the subject of long-term theoretical debates, not least because they intersect with so many other aspects of early modern life, indeed to the point that the end result is often a ‘study of disequilibrium, differentiation, and dynamism as much as it is about binding and strengthening communities’. Equally it is argued here that both reveal much about deep historiographical assumptions. As the author notes with reference to witchcraft trials, ‘accounting for their decline in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forces scholars to confront profound questions about what constitutes cultural change and how such change can be measured – or if it is even valuable or productive to do so’.

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In Chapter 14, ‘Political thought’, Noah Dauber traces changes in the historiographies concerned with the state, sovereignty, and political rights. While earlier works tended to focus on ‘historical actors’ self-understanding’, with an emphasis on the concerns of a liberal society, recent research has shifted the focus to more varied themes such as republicanism, consensus politics, legitimate resistance, and individual rights. Present trends suggest a move towards transnational and international norms, but ‘the continued significance and persistence of the modern state means that it still looms inevitably on the horizon, and the history of early modern political thought, despite our ambivalence, seems destined to be in dialogue with modern history for some time to come’. Ideologies are equally prominent in Chapter 15, ‘Enlightenment struggles’. From the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, there has always been something of an ‘interpretive overload’ as scholars have searched for the Enlightenment’s meaning in an effort to ‘assess its impact on the world in which they lived’. This has often turned history ‘into a gloss on current trends and problems’, with associated moral judgements. Dorinda Outram explores this dialogue at three major ‘hinge-periods’: the Enlightenment itself, the decades preceding the twentieth-century dictatorships, and the present day. At each stage, often contradictory interpretations reflected the historians’ values: ‘Ultimately, the historiography of the Enlightenment is a testament to its enduring capacity to generate fundamental questions about power and historical practice, as well as at the same time, its inability to generate first-order answers to these problems’. The final historical topic is addressed by Paul Hanson in Chapter 16, ‘French revolution’. Due to the conventional view of the French Revolution as the boundary between the early modern and modern periods, questions about periodisation and transformation loom large. But there is also ‘ample historical controversy’ on the Revolution itself. Hanson cuts through the complexity by grouping the analysis around five main concerns: the issue of origins, the typology of the revolution, the role and nature of violence, the place of women, and the consequences. The chapter provides a sense of the rich historiographical tradition and its tendency to change through time. As Hanson notes, ‘we write new histories of the French Revolution because each generation asks new questions, and in that process we can hope, at least, that our understanding will deepen and broaden’. Chapter 17 returns to the survey of historiographical trends found earlier in this introduction. In ‘Turns and perspectives’, Beat Kümin offers a preliminary assessment of the rise of the ‘new’ cultural history over the last two to three generations, both in terms of responses to postmodern challenges and the ways in which members of the academy go about their business today. In his view, most respond ‘to the ever-growing range of conceptual prompts by asking fresh questions, expanding the source base, refining approaches, enhancing methodological transparency and engaging in more sustained reflection of their researching, interpreting and writing’. In conclusion, the editors hope that the collection will be able to serve a variety of purposes. It has been conceived as a gateway to the historiography of an entire

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period, but individual contributions can provide starting-points for engagements with specific themes. Whether for private study, use in the classroom, exam revision or as a tool to frame independent research, Interpreting Early Modern Europe seeks to convey something of the dynamics and excitement of this lively field.

Bibliography Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, and Jacob, Margaret (1994). Telling the Truth about History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Assis, Arthur Alfaix (2014). What is History for? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography. London: Berghahn Books. Barrow, John (2007). A History of Histories. Epochs, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane. Bayly, Christopher (2012). History and World History. In: Ulinka Rublack, ed. A Concise Companion to History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–25. Berger, Stefan (2001). Stefan Berger Responds to Ulrich Muhlack. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London XXIII, 21–33. Blix, Göran (2009). From Paris to Pompei: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bourgault, Sophie and Sparlin, Robert (2013). A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography. Leiden: Brill. Burke, Peter (1997). Varieties of Cultural History. Oxford: Polity Press. Burke, Peter (2008). What is Cultural History? 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burke, Peter (2015). The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014. 2nd edn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Celenza, Christopher (2015). Machiavelli. A Portrait. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, James B. and Taylor, Karen L. (2006). Early Modern Europe. Issues and Interpretations. Oxford: Blackwell. Collinwood, R. G. (1994). The Idea of History: Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deliyannis, Deborah Masukopf (2003). Historiography in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill. Dickens, Arthur G. and Tonkin, John M. (1985). The Reformation in Historical Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ferguson, Wallace K. (1948). The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Foot, Sarah and Robinson, Chase F., eds. (2012). The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume II: 400–1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaddis, John L. (2004). The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gooch, George P. (1952). History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. London: Longman and Green. Grafton, Antony (1997). The Footnote. A Curious History. London: Faber and Faber. Grafton, Antony (2007). What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greengrass, Mark (2014). Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648. London: Penguin. Hale, John (1994). The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. London: Fontana Press.

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Howell, Martha and Prevenier, Walter (2001). From Reliable Sources. An Introduction to Historical Methods. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Iggers, Georg G. (2005). Historiography on the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to Postmodern Challenge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan. Jenkins, Keith, ed. (1997). The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge. Kelley, Donald R. (1998). Faces of History. Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kelley, Donald R. and Smith, Bonnie G. (2012). Historians. In: Ulinka Rublack, ed. A Concise Companion to History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 81–104. Lake, Peter and Pincus, Steven (2012). The Strange and Frequent Death of Political History. History Working Papers Project (online at: www.historyworkingpapers.org/? page_id=305) Marincola, John, ed. (2007). A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography. 2 Vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Marincola, John, ed. (2011). Greek and Roman Historiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novick, Peter (1988). The Noble Dream. The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, John G. A. (1999). Barbarism and Religion Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737–1764. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, Jeremy (2016). From Herodotus to H-Net: the Story of Historiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabasa, Jose, Sato, Masayuka, Tortarolo, Eduardo and Woolf, Daniel, eds. (2012). The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume III: 1400–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reill, Peter Hanns (1975). The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rublack, Ulinka, ed. (2012). A Concise Companion to History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starn, Randolph (2002). The Early Modern Muddle. Journal of Early Modern History 6, 296–307. Stern, Fritz (1973). The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present. New York: Random House. Stuchtey, Benedikt and Wende, Peter, eds. (2000). British and German Historiography 1750–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweet, Rosemary (2004). Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon and London. Tosh, John (2015). The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History. 6th edn. London: Routledge. Witt, Ronald G. (2003). ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill.

1

Medieval and modern Euan Cameron

The frontiers between epochs of human history, even within one continent and in one reasonably continuous cultural space, are notoriously hard to pin down, and very easy to criticise or to argue away. Yet history cannot function without periodisation. The exercise of historical analysis and synthesis requires that one discern, discover, and to some degree ‘invent’, the meaningful movements, phases, and landmark processes that make human history intelligible. The expression ‘early modern’ as applied to the history of Europe (usually understood to stretch from c. 1500 to c. 1800) is one of those useful and questionable constructions. The term, and its German equivalent Frühneuzeit, came into normal use from the 1950s and 1960s onwards (for more detail see Withington 2010). It entered currency among social and linguistic historians, as a more neutral term than the ‘Renaissance and Reformation’ label that had been most widely used up to that point. It defined a period of time, rather than assigning all of European history to one or other of a supposedly hegemonic set of ‘movements’. Among its more distinguished early users were G. N. Clark, J. H. Hexter, Norman F. Cantor, and the historian of science A. C. Crombie (Clark 1957; Crombie 1959; Hexter 1961; Cantor and Werthman 1967). Yet the phrase ‘early modern’ raises conceptual problems of its own. It is as though we were defining this period in history both with reference to the Middle Ages and to the period that followed it. ‘Early Modern’ Europe is tending towards ‘modernity’, but has not got there yet. The shackles of the medieval world have been discarded, but the full freedom of modernity has not been attained. While most present-day historians who use the term will by no means share these Whiggish assumptions, it is important to be aware of the potential that our labels have to insinuate ideas into our history, even ideas that we do not consciously intend or embrace.

How the early moderns defined historical periods Historians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe had their own ideas about how to divide history into periods. Their systems of historical time are largely forgotten today except by specialists; yet they form an important corrective to any tendency we might feel to assume that our schemes of periodisation

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are self-evident. Some historians such as Hartmann Schedel (1493) and Sebastian Franck (1531) still divided world history into the seven ages of the world first identified from Scripture by Augustine of Hippo (d. 429). Into the sixteenth century, many Christian historians borrowed their sense of periods of time from the Babylonian Talmud, where two tractates divided the world’s time into three: the first two thousand years without the law, the second two thousand the time of the law of Moses, and the final epoch the time of the Messiah (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a–b; see www.halakhah.com/pdf/ nezikin/Sanhedrin.pdf; and as cited in Carion 1550, sig. *viv –viir). Some religious visionaries remained attracted by another threefold system, the one associated with Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) who divided world history into the three ages of the Father, the Son, and the incoming Age of the Spirit. Some of the most widely used textbooks of history, including that of Johannes Sleidan, arranged ancient history according to the system of four ‘great monarchies’, traditionally construed out of the second and seventh chapters of the biblical book of Daniel (Sleidanus 1557). Since the last of these ‘monarchies’ was mostly agreed to have been the Roman Empire, German historians since Otto of Freising in the mid-twelfth century had postulated that the Roman Empire was ‘transferred’ to the Franks and then to the Germans – as even Martin Luther agreed. Luther also supposed that the end of the world was relatively near, certainly within a century or so. One of the curious ironies of the ‘early modern’ was that many of its sharpest minds were apocalyptists, who believed themselves to be living in the last age of the world (Millenarianism and Messianism 2001). The idea that they were ‘early’ anything, let alone ‘early modern’, would have seemed absurd to people who held these views: they were living in the latter days of the created order (see Appendix 1.1). In one significant area – perhaps only one – the historians of the Reformation era anticipated and maybe contributed to their successors’ sense of the flow of time. Protestant historians of Christianity believed that the centuries of the world could be divided up into phases, depending on how remote they had become from the pristine inspiration of the early Church. In the centuries since Pentecost the Church had progressively deviated from its apostolic roots, in consecutive phases, some thought, of 500 or maybe of 300 years, until a dramatic transformation, usually assigned to around the year 1500, had revealed the Gospel once again and confounded the power of Antichrist (Cameron 2019). The putative ‘rediscovery’ of the Scriptures and the Gospel in the Reformation amounted, in the eyes of those who lived through it, to a major transformative moment in history. Yet once again, the reformers did not suppose that their epiphany moment was destined to lead to something beyond itself, such as freedom of conscience, the secular state, or the secularisation of society as a whole. They believed that it represented the rediscovery of something very ancient, and that it prepared the way for the end of history.

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Excerpt 1.1: Melanchthon’s funeral oration for Luther (1546) Bryan, William Jennings and Halsey, Francis W., eds. (1906). The World’s Famous Orations. 10 vols. New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, vol. VII. GOD has always preserved a proportion of His servants upon the earth, and now, through Martin Luther, a more splendid period of light and truth has appeared. Solon, Themistocles, Scipio, Augustus, and others, who either established or ruled over mighty empires, were indeed truly great men, but far, far inferior to our illustrious leaders, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul, Augustine, and Luther, and it becomes us to study this distinction. What, then, are those great and important things which Luther has disclosed to our view, and which render his life so remarkable; for many are exclaiming against him as a disturber of the Church and a promoter of inexplicable controversies? Luther explained the true and important doctrine of penitence, which was involved in the profoundest darkness. He showed in what it consists and where refuge and consolation could be obtained under a sense of divine displeasure. He illustrated the statements of Paul respecting justification by faith, and showed the distinction between the law and the Gospel, civil and spiritual justification. He pointed out the true principle of prayer, and exterminated that heathenish absurdity from the Church that God was not to be invoked if the mind entertained the least doubt upon an academic question. He admonished men to pray, in the exercise of faith and a good conscience, to the only Mediator and Son of God, who is seated at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us, and not to images or deceased saints according to the shocking practise of the ignorant multitude. He also pointed out other services acceptable to God, was singularly exemplary himself in all the duties of life, and separated the puerilities of human rites and ceremonies – which prevent instead of promoting genuine worship – from those services which are essential to obedience.… The removal of such a character from among us, of one who was endowed with the greatest intellectual capacity, well instructed and long experienced in the knowledge of Christian truth, adorned with numerous excellences and with virtues of the most heroic cast, chosen by divine Providence to reform the Church of God, and cherishing for all of us a truly paternal affection, – the removal, I say, of such a man demands and justifies our tears. We resemble orphans bereft of an excellent and

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faithful father; but, while it is necessary to submit to the will of Heaven, let us not permit the memory of his virtues and his good offices to perish. He was an important instrument, in the hands of God, of public utility; let us diligently study the truth he taught, imitating in our humble situations his fear of God, his faith, the intensity of his devotions, the integrity of his ministerial character, his purity, his careful avoidance of seditious counsel, his ardent thirst of knowledge. And as we frequently meditate upon the pious examples of those illustrious guides of the Church, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and Paul, whose histories are transmitted to us, so let us frequently reflect upon the doctrine and course of life which distinguished our departed friend. [vol. VII, 44–49]

Defining ‘medieval’ The term and the idea of a ‘medieval’ period in human history derive from the laments and the criticisms of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian humanists. It is claimed that Petrarch, visiting Rome in 1341, was so moved by the sight of the ruins of the great metropolis that he abandoned the idea of writing biographies of famous men throughout known history; the ‘barbarians’ who came after the fall of Rome were of no interest (Mommsen 1942). In the hands of Italian historians of the fifteenth century such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, there developed the idea of a ‘middle time’ between the decline of ancient Roman culture and the rebirth, or resurgence, which several of them detected in their own age (McLaughlin 1988; Ianziti 2012, 310). Initially, the early humanists characterised the ‘middle time’ specifically either by the decline of republican values, or (more typically) by the decline of literary elegance in Latin. They blamed this decline on, among other things, the loss of many of the works of the great forensic orator and essayist Cicero until their rediscovery in the early fifteenth century. Some referred to the post-antique age as one of ‘darkness’, meaning not that it was unknown, but that it was uncultured. By the time of late seventeenth-century textbook historians such as Georgius Hornius and Christoph Cellarius, the idea of a division of history into ancient, medieval and modern had become established: the latter of these incorporated the scheme into the titles and volume divisions of his work (Hornius 1666, 183; Lukacs 1968, 15; Cellarius 1702) (see Excerpt 1.2).

Excerpt 1.2: Cellarius’s preface on the divisions of the book Cellarius, Christophorus (1716). Historia universalis breviter ac perspicue exposita in antiquam et medii aevi ac novam divisa, cum notis perpetuis. 5th edition. Jena: J. Bielkius, ‘Proemium’.

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Euan Cameron This history is divided into three parts. Of those the first is that of ancient affairs, from the beginning of empires to the times of Constantine the Great: this part embraces precisely those memorable things which pagan rulers, entirely estranged from heavenly things, carried out in the world. Then the next part contains the affairs of twelve centuries, for as long as the city of Constantine [Constantinople] was under Christian authority, and for a little after that, explaining the various destinies of both the East and the West. In the third part the last two centuries are explained more fully than was originally intended, because these latest ages are more rich in events than the ones before, and provide us with many memorable things to write about; knowledge of these things is especially necessary both for the conventions of political wisdom as it is now practiced, and also for ecclesiastical affairs, because of the Reformation of sacred things. Neither does the history of literature and learning go unmentioned in these books: especially that part which explains the decline of literature and its suppression over a long enough period; then at last, with the coming of a more fortunate age, its restoration and promotion. This is so that one may recognize by whom something was just barely preserved amongst the barbarians; and who those great heroes were, who denounced barbarity and restored to good letters their former splendor. It seemed good to give you this prior advice and preface about our three books. You then, kind reader, use them to good effect, look generously on us, and farewell. [20–4]

It is therefore somewhat ironic that the term ‘medieval’ has come to be embraced and universally used by scholars who admire and study the thousandyear period from c. 500 to c. 1500 for its own sake and on its own terms. Since 1932 a scholarly journal entitled Medium Aevum has been published by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. It has become conventional to divide the medieval period into three broadly defined epochs: the early Middle Ages, usually reckoned from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to c. 1000; the High Middle Ages, from c. 1000 to c. 1250; and the Later Middle Ages, from c. 1250 to c. 1500. The turning-point of c. 1250 for the ‘Later’ Middle Ages has been debated, but is based on the death of the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen in that year, followed shortly by a long interregnum in the Empire; and by the beginnings of fragmentation in the thought-world of late medieval scholasticism around this time (Hale, Highfield, and Smalley 1965). The idea of calling this whole era, or even just the earlier part of it, the ‘dark ages’ is now something of a historical fossil, though still deserving of serious rebuttal (Nelson 2007). The continuing use of the term ‘medieval’ as a guild label and as a universally recognised (if not always

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welcome) qualifier for a period of European history tells us that it must be thought to mean something. The task is to attempt to define some of what that meaning includes. It is vital, in what follows, to appreciate that medieval Europe was in no way static over a thousand years. Generalising about this expanse of time always means describing peoples and cultures on the move. Some would argue that the divisions between early and later medieval history are at least as important as the distinctions between medieval and early modern (Southern 1995–1997). In terms of Europe’s political structures, the medieval period can be bookended, if so desired, somewhat neatly between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when Odoacer deposed Romulus ‘Augustulus’ of Rome in 476, to the fall of the Eastern Empire, when the Ottoman Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and defeated Constantine XI Palaiologos in battle. In the East, the political, administrative and cultural traditions of East Rome, later to be known as the Byzantine Empire, persisted throughout the period, despite being whittled away by invaders from the East and, notoriously, being despoiled by the Fourth Crusaders in the early thirteenth century. While historians rightly acknowledge the importance of the Eastern Empire, whose culture was for much of the early Middle Ages more productive and sophisticated than that of the West (Bury 1924–1936, vol IV; Herrin 2008), most of the characterisation of the ‘Middle Ages’ has in practice been drawn from events in Western, Latin Europe. In the West, the prevailing political conditions after the fall of Rome were diffuse, at times even chaotic, as different ethnic groups from the East and the North vied for control of fragments of Western Europe. Yet within the varied and shifting political environment two political ideas arose to dominate the High Middle Ages. First, the bishopric of Rome gradually aspired to the status of a western patriarch to rival, or even to claim authority over, the patriarchates of the East. From the eighth century a forged text circulated which claimed to report the gift by the emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester II of the regalia of the Empire, and of ill-defined but considerable lands, the supposed foundations of what became the Papal States (Valla 1922, 10–19). While the status and credibility of the papacy would wax and wane over time, the idea of the papacy as a monarchy of more than merely spiritual or ecclesiastical significance would establish itself. In the hands of especially assertive popes (Gregory VII, Innocent III, Boniface VIII) the papacy aspired to more than imperial authority, and indeed claimed to depose and replace emperors (Morris 1989). Alongside and often in antagonism against this imperial papacy, there arose various manifestations of a revived imperial principle. Later ages would date the revival (or ‘translation’ as medieval historians would refer to it) of the Roman Empire from the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800, and the further ‘translations’ of the empire to the German dynasties of the Ottonians, the Salians, and the Hohenstaufen. The Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling, barely governable entity which included not only much of present-day Germany, Switzerland and Austria but also the Low Countries, Eastern France and parts of Italy, became something of a symbol of medieval western political culture. It was an ideal that was never quite realised;

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it spoke of an aspiration to universality, at a time when nearly all politics rested on face-to-face relationships (Vollrath 1996). The apogee of these two forms of aspirational monarchy, papacy and empire, has traditionally defined the High Middle Ages; their decline in prestige and influence in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were traditionally read as the decline of medieval culture itself (Bury 1924–1936, vol VII: Decline of Empire and Papacy). The nature of the bonds between one medieval person and another were, as just observed, traditionally understood as face-to-face and personal (but see discussion in Reynolds 2001, 20–34). Another characteristic that has traditionally been seen to define the Middle Ages was the bonds established, at all levels of society, by the giving of service as a means to acquire land, position, stability and honour. Unfree or semi-free labourers worked their lords’ lands in return for receiving access to land for their own needs. Those lords held land from their sovereigns, in what were traditionally termed ‘fiefs’, though the actual scope of this model of ‘classic’ feudalism has been powerfully questioned, especially for the early Middle Ages (Reynolds 2001). To discharge their military obligations to those sovereigns, they assigned landed estates to semi-professional soldiers, medieval ‘knights’, who lived off the land (and the agricultural majority of the population) in exchange for so many days’ service by land and sea. In principle all these transactions were conducted without money, though it is doubtful how far, if ever, medieval society entirely dispensed with cash rents and wages. As the medieval economies developed, above all in northern and central Italy, social and political structures came into being which bore little if any relationship with the military power systems of the mostly rural north. The city-states and communal culture of Italy offered the best counter-example of medieval collectivism – and one of the best arguments for not overstating the difference between Middle Ages and Renaissance (Jones 1997). And yet, medieval economic life, theoretically and statistically dominated by the agrarian economy and subsistence agriculture, had always been complex. AngloSaxon hoards attest a thriving long-distance trade in luxuries, as do the travels of lavish manuscripts. Self-governing communes grew up, not only in Italy but also in various places in the Holy Roman Empire, whose political structures allowed cities to acquire quasi-independent status as immediate subjects of the Kaiser. In practice this generated clusters of free or partly free towns in south Germany, the Low Countries, north Germany and the Baltic coast (home to the Hanseatic League) and wherever German peoples pushed east into East-Central Europe and established towns as islands of German-speaking culture (Moeller 1972; Kümin 2013). As trades and craft guilds acquired corporate existence, they metamorphosed into associations with political, cultural, artistic and religious purposes, regulating but also supporting the lives of the members and their host communities. Above all – in the traditional historiography – the Middle Ages were an age of committed faith, a faith expressed in infinitely variable ways, from the astonishing philosophical complexity of scholastic theology to the intuitive and organic devotion that blended into magic and superstition. The survival of Christian culture in the declining years of the Western Empire was not a given,

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though the conversion of some of the Germanic peoples to Christianity (albeit in an Arian form) before their entry into the West surely helped. Enclaves of Christian culture in the ancient monasteries and the episcopal cities kept both the faith and classical Latinate culture alive, when they were surrounded by only partly Christianised rural society, and by Gothic, Frankish or Lombard lordships whose relationship to the Church could be tenuous (Ghosh 2016). In the High Middle Ages, as the waves of migrations ceased to disrupt, and the local organisation of churches into parishes became more stable and uniform, Christianity evolved into something more than just a creation of cities and monasteries. The latter of course continued to develop, undergoing successive ‘reforms’ which progressively adjusted their relationship to the lay community. The last great wave of monastic reforms, which produced the friars in the early thirteenth century, created orders devoted to the service of a wider public through exemplary instruction, preaching and education (Brooke 1975). From the high Middle Ages onwards, an important shift in the theology of the Church’s most sacred ministries or ‘sacraments’, and of the priesthood and Church themselves, transformed the legal, fiscal, and social dimensions of religion. If an ordained priest held the authority of baptising someone into the Christian faith, of absolving someone from deadly sin, or of offering propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead, then such a person deserved (it was argued) to be set apart from the rest of Christian society in a range of ways. He became entitled to special treatment in respect of the law, of taxation, of the expectations of service to the community. In turn, this legal separateness made the traditional cooperation and interdependence of lay power and clerical authority more problematic. If clergy were such a superior order of beings, then only clergy should decide their own appointments and promotions. This extreme and unabashed clericalism defined medieval religious culture at national and also at local levels (Ehler and Morrall 1967, 29–39). It would be one of the earliest casualties of the Reformation in Protestant territories. Nevertheless, the religious culture of medieval Europe remained an organic, evolving thing. No single person or single set of decrees defined its essence. Many of its core doctrines were defined more by custom and precedent than by constructive decrees. Local variations persisted across provinces and regions. Its unity consisted not in forced uniformity, but an unselfconscious belief that the way things were was the only way that they were meant to be. That helps to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that the Christianity of the medieval West comprised sophisticated theologies, elaborate and beautiful rituals, extreme asceticism and mystical devotion, and a grass-roots culture that believed in the embedded power of holy words, things, people, places and times (Klaniczay 1990; Flint 1991). At the level of the minimally educated majority (who will in practice have known rather a lot, at least by contemporary standards, about the stories of Scripture and Church) ‘sacral power’ was an infinitely malleable and negotiable resource, able to help and protect them in this world as well as in the next. The arts, ideas, philosophy and literature of the medieval era largely, though with exceptions, shared this same organic quality. In the middle of the twelfth

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century two key texts, Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences in theology and Gratian of Bologna’s Decretum in Church law, embodied broadly similar intellectual approaches. Texts were sifted and sorted down to a granular level of ‘sentences’ or short extracts; inconsistencies between them could be sorted out by logic. Each of these textbooks then received nearly infinite commentary and exposition from successive teachers through the rest of the medieval period. This was the great age of ‘subtlety’, of resolving contradictions by making fine distinctions. The approach proved enormously fecund in disagreements, and led to the rise of competing schools of thought, most notably among philosophical realists and nominalists. Yet there was astonishing consistency in the admiration expressed for logical method, and the belief that the one truth could be reached by applying that method (Colish 1997, parts VI and VII). In a similar manner religious belief and lore formed the heart of the creative arts, painting, sculpture, music and the rest. Here again the growth was organic. No rigid line divided scriptural stories from semi-apocryphal legends such as the life of St Anne, the mother of Mary, or of the holy kindred. The decorative arts of the ‘Gothic’, though always more cultivated in northern Europe than in Italy, developed in a natural, evolutionary way from one generation to the next and according to local conditions and preferences. Alongside religious art there developed the artistic expressions of knightly culture, of ‘chivalry’, in the decorative arts and in imaginative literature. This medieval lore tended to efface historical distance. The greatest and most noble military leaders of the past were celebrated in literature and art as the ‘nine worthies’ or neuf preux, combining

Figure 1.1 This fourteenth-century carving at Cologne’s town hall is an early representation of the Nine Worthies. From left to right we find, first, the three Christians: Charlemagne, King Arthur and Godfrey of Bouillon; second, the three pagans: Julius Caesar, Hector and Alexander the Great; and, third, the three Jews: David with a sceptre, Joshua, and Judas Maccabeus. Picture by Elke Wetzig (Elya) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=1159570

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classical, biblical and medieval history into three sets of three paragons. All were typically depicted in the then current military costume (see Figure 1.1).

Defining ‘early modern’ To identify the timespan barely scratches the surface of the processes which help to define what it means to speak of ‘early modern’ Europe. Historians of the middle and late twentieth century detected a whole series of ‘revolutions’ in this period: in the economy, in politics, in warfare, in the natural sciences, and of course in the massively contentious issue of religious faith, and its attendant expression in social and political life. In many respects historians of the early modern have tended to emphasise transformations and new departures; medievalists who have looked at the early modern have tended to see continuities, or at least to emphasise that anything new built on foundations that had been laid over centuries of far from static evolutionary growth (see e.g. Harriss 1963, criticizing G. R. Elton’s ‘revolution’ thesis outlined below). The term ‘early modern’ remains mostly a European – and above all a Western European – concept, though some interesting work has been done to compare and contrast equivalent stages in other world cultures (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998). The controversies over revolution versus evolution appear most marked in the area of politics and the arts of government. There is no doubt that the sixteenth century witnessed a massive expansion in the quantity and detail of records being kept by government bodies. In part this was a technological shift: the use of paper rather than parchment greatly reduced the cost of keeping detailed and often repetitive or formulaic records; printing (available from the third quarter of the fifteenth century onwards) allowed, among other things, the low-cost duplication and promulgation of government edicts. However, there was more to the process of change than technology. Governments relied increasingly on professional drafters and keepers of documents (‘secretaries of state’) whose influence extended to more than mere writing or keeping of records. Across Europe, increasing numbers of administrators were chosen neither from the landed nobility nor from the higher clergy. The amount of government work done around various council tables seemed to increase greatly, from the crowns of Spain and England to the Roman papacy (cf. Chapter 8: The state). Putatively, this was also an age in which monarchies gained in prestige, and maybe also in the uniformity and cohesiveness of their rule, at the expense of traditional devolved regional and noble centres of power. Arguments can be and are made on both sides of this question. On one hand, there certainly developed a new style in the self-projection of rulers. Courts became far more splendid, and in a sense more public (Dickens 1977; Cuerva and Koller 2017). Grand ceremonial entries of sovereigns into their cities provided occasions for ostentatious display and cultural one-upmanship (Mulryne, Aliverti, and Testaverde 2015; cf. Figure 8.2 depicting Henri II’s entry into Rouen). Royal titles grew in elaborateness and pomp. Traditional sources of resistance to or mitigation of

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royal power could be ruthlessly suppressed, as Francis I of France humiliated his professional lawyer class (Knecht 1982). On the other hand, historians have argued that much of this show of ‘Renaissance monarchy’ was just that: show. The monarchies of Western Europe were almost without exception composite entities assembled from a range of different territories over time, which jealously guarded their traditional privileges, immunities and distinctive traditions. Neither France nor Spain were remotely uniform in terms of law, taxation or administrative proximity to the sovereign. The territories of Emperor Charles V formed a chaotic and ungovernable mass of diversity (Elliott 1992) (see Appendix 1.2). Ironically, the sixteenth-century monarchy that most nearly achieved some level of geopolitical unity was England, but that state of affairs was largely due to the work of the last Anglo-Saxon monarchs before 1066; and England lacked, until c. 1700, a regular annual tax base on which the monarch could rely. Massive increases in the cost and complexity of warfare marked the early modern era. Many of these changes were foreshadowed in the fifteenth century, especially in Italy; but their impact became clearest in the following century. The increasing use of artillery prompted developments in fortification: walls became thicker and more ingeniously crafted to thwart assaults. Wars tended to feature either prolonged sieges, which exhausted resources and manpower within a few months unless a breakthrough was achieved (as in the siege and sack of Rome in 1527); or alternatively staged battles of huge masses of infantry wielding pikes, which required enormous discipline and led to the rise of semipermanent professional infantry captains. These changes did not immediately eliminate the role of the armed knight. Armed cavalry fought with lances at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Henri II, king of France, died in 1559 from a bizarre accident while jousting at the tournament held to celebrate the conclusion of peace between France and Spain at the end of the Italian Wars. The shift away from medieval chivalry took a very long time to process. However, the size of armies vastly increased, as did the number of expensive munitions they dragged along, and of course their costs. While navies were used essentially for the transport of land armies in 1500, by the end of the period ocean-going warships formed a costly new branch of government spending. These costs encouraged rapacity in rulers, ruthlessness in levying taxes (especially from the poorest classes) and greatly increased borrowing (from the wealthier people who had money to lend) (cf. Chapter 9: War and the military revolution). The greatest political transformation wrought by the early modern era concerned religion, and the political and social structures set up around it (cf. Chapter 5: Reformations). The Reformation involved the effective rulers of each more or less self-sufficient political entity, whether that was a nation-state, a principality or noble estate, or a self-governing town or city, in making a choice about its creed. This made lay governments the patrons of the establishment of their churches, even in those lands which remained Roman Catholic. However, in 1500 that religious upheaval was still very much in the unforeseen future. There was already evident in western Christianity a subtle, rather elitist

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move away from some of the emphases of late medieval theology and piety. Learned scholars (‘Christian humanists’) influenced by the study of classical texts, especially the works of ancient Stoic ethics, refused to accept a medieval religious culture which seemed to offer a hundred ways to substitute for virtue rather than seeking to instil it. They expressed dismay at the intellectual overelaboration into which they believed theology had lapsed. They looked with disdain on a monastic culture apparently preoccupied with the rival minutiae of habits, fasts, and liturgical acts. Most of all they ridiculed a ‘superstitious’ vulgar piety that imagined that the holiness of saints or their remains could be used for profane or material advantage. Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1467–1536) embodied this set of values in highly accessible, beautifully written and often amusing texts, such as his Praise of Folly (Erasmus 2015). However, he wrote only in Latin (though others would translate his works into other languages), so the immediate impact of his work reached mostly an elite group. Moreover, Erasmus, while a propagandist for the rediscovery of ‘good letters’, remained in many respects a critical but native citizen of late medieval religious life. He disliked his monastery experience and despised the late scholastic theology that he tried to learn; but felt no better at home in a world where monasteries were abolished and the fundamentals of medieval Christianity were torn up by the roots. The humanist movement might of itself have transformed medieval Christianity or at least presented a potent alternative to it; but as events turned out, a different challenge, born of both scholastic theology and Renaissance religious culture, overwhelmed the earlier movement and swept many (especially) of its younger adherents away with it. At its heart the Reformation made a startling claim about Christian doctrine and therefore about life and worship. The reformers, broadly following Martin Luther but in their own accents and styles, reasoned that God did not intend to purify people from sin in order, eventually, to accept them as redeemed and saved; rather, God accepted people in their still impure state, gave them undeserved grace for Christ’s sake, and began in life the slow process of regeneration that would only be complete in a future existence. Consequently all the anxious efforts that people made, apart from specific directions in Scripture, to improve their spiritual condition through vows, ascetic exercises, and self-denial, were not only a waste of time but an offence to Jesus Christ. Few would deny that the Reformation marked a unique and massive transformation in the life of the Christian West in those communities and territories where it was received and implemented (Cameron 2012). There do arise, however, a host of questions: how truly new were the ideas that sparked off this change? How widely or precisely were these ideas shared among the leading reformers? What was the causal relationship between the ideas and the political and social dimensions of the process? How were the messages communicated, and how accurately were they transmitted? What role was played by different mechanisms of transmission (verbal, printed, graphic) in the circulation of ideas? All these questions have provoked many interventions and diverse historical

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theories (see e.g. Eisenstein 2002; Pettegree 2005). Meanwhile, the Reformation had a decisive impact even on those regions where it was rejected. ‘Early Modern Catholicism’ has become, after years of semantic struggle, the favoured term to describe a distinct form of Roman Catholicism (O’Malley 2000; Comerford and Pabel 2001). It emerged from the sixteenth century with doctrine and practice far more precisely defined than before. It exhibited a missional sense which carried its preachers to the limits of the known world in the Americas and Asia. While its adherents still believed it to be the only fully valid form of Christian commitment, it knew that it had to win hearts, minds and souls constantly through argument and example. The early modern period generated a new meaning for the term ‘conscience’ and the phrase ‘freedom of conscience’. In the medieval period ‘conscience’ referred to that fallible insight by which individuals discerned their moral obligations, which needed to be formed by pastoral guidance through sacramental confession. In the early modern it acquired a secondary meaning: it came to denote the sense of being irresistibly called to one or another of the faithtraditions or confessions that were now options for the medieval Christian. The medieval principle that disobeying one’s conscience was a sin now implied, in the views of some believers, that conforming to a faith that one did not share was morally wrong. In the fullness of time (and as is explained below, that process took a long time) the call of conscience was recognised as so strong, that the idea of persecuting the citizen of a state because they held a faith different from that of the ruler came to be theologically as well as ethically unacceptable (Braun and Vallance 2004). Applying the term ‘early modern’ to intellectual culture and scholarship, one forms an even stronger impression of a gradual transition across the entire period, rather than an abrupt shift around 1500. The literary scholars of fifteenth-century Italy who invented the term ‘medieval’ also believed themselves to be living in an age of the rebirth or rediscovery of classical literary values and style (see Excerpt 1.3). Over time the term ‘Renaissance’ has been massively expanded to denote both a period and movements not just in literature but in the fine arts, philosophy and much else (cf. Chapter 4: Renaissance). Identifying what makes early modern intellectual culture distinctive therefore poses a challenge. One clear turning-point should be identified: from the early Renaissance onwards a new approach emerged towards the integrity and wholeness of a text. Rather than excerpting pithy extracts, early modern scholars sought to restore the full scope of an author’s purpose and argument. With the advent of printing both as a technology and as a business, editors and publishers began to produce the first ‘critical editions’. These were annotated and interpreted versions of the complete text of a book or of an entire author’s works. In the case of classical, and in due course also biblical literature, this exercise entailed restoring as far as possible the correct original version of the text from the disorder and error introduced by centuries of copying. The ‘critical Renaissance’ was not the most exciting phase of early modern scholarship, but it has left a long shadow, and many of its techniques remain valid (Grafton 1994).

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Another long process associated with this epoch was the gradual transition from the use of Latin in the West, as the idiom of religion, scholarship, and formal international correspondence, to the use and elaboration of vernacular languages to express ideas in high culture. Like so much else, this journey is generally reckoned to have begun in Italy with Petrarch and Dante. Some of the energy behind the increasing sophistication of the vernacular came, in Protestant countries, from the new translations of the Bible and the temper of theological debate. Reaching the Latin-reading minority was not enough, and was not even the primary point. Yet even in countries where the Reformation failed to capture the majority, as in France and even more in Spain, elegant and literate satires based on formerly lower-order works of literature, such as those by Rabelais or Cervantes, raised themselves to the status of intelligent cultural commentary, and in due course became classics (Rabelais 1970; Cervantes Saavedra 2005).

Excerpt 1.3: Gargantua’s letter to his son, while a student at Paris. Rabelais, François (1900). Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteaux, ed. Charles Whibley. 3 vols. London: D. Nutt. But although my deceased father of happy memory Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and Political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire: neverthelesse, as thou mayest well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of good masters such as thou hast had; for that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Gothes, who had, whereever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodnesse been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such amendment and increase of the knowledge, that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first forme of the little Grammar-school-boyes: I say, I, who in my youthful dayes was, (and that justly) reputed the most learned of that age; which I do not speak in vain boasting, although I might lawfully do it in writing unto thee, in verification whereof thou hast the authority of Marcus Tullius in his book of old age, and the sentence of Plutarch, in the book intituled, how a man may praise himself without envie: but to give thee an emulous encouragement to strive yet further. Now is it that the mindes of men are qualified with all of discipline, and the old sciences revived, which for many ages were extinct: now it is, that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored, viz. Greek

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Euan Cameron (without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a scholar) Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldaean and Latine. Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant, and so correct, that better cannot be imagined, although it was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical suggestion on the other side was the invention of Ordnance. All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries: and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is: nor must any adventure hence forward to come in publick, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva: I see robbers, hangmen, free-booters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now, then the Doctors and Preachers were in my time. [Vol. I, 229–30]

One has, of course, not finished with the ‘revolutions’ of the early modern. In areas which could broadly be called discovery, whether in natural philosophy or in geography and exploration, the motif of ‘restoration of ancient wisdom’ proved largely inappropriate. Early modern Europeans learned things which their ancient forebears had apparently not dreamed of, sometimes in explicit refutation of those authors formerly regarded as authoritative, such as Ptolemy or Galen. The most famous and most spectacular – but also quite gradual – of these achievements lay in explaining planetary motion. The frustratingly erratic course of the planets across the sky confronted astronomers (who were often also astrologers) with the inadequacies and accumulated inaccuracies of Ptolemy and their ancient sources. The effects of the early modern transformation in views of the cosmos were so dramatic that it is easy to overlook just how long it took to be perfected, and to gain general acceptance. Copernicus’s hypothesis that the sun should be computed to be in the centre of the solar system took decades to be published, and the details were mathematically incorrect, as Tycho Brahe’s observations showed. Johannes Kepler, around 1600, adopted elliptical planetary motion because nothing else would fit Brahe’s observations. Galileo Galilei presented observational evidence for smaller bodies orbiting larger ones. Isaac Newton, nearly two centuries after Copernicus, established the mathematical and physical principles which accounted for planetary orbital speeds and distances. And meanwhile scholars puzzled over how to understand Joshua 10:12–13, where the sun stood still at Joshua’s request. A similarly long process of intellectual adjustment accompanied the other major transition that marks off the early modern, the European encounter with lands and peoples previously unknown (to Europeans) in the Americas and elsewhere, and the beginnings of regular global voyaging (cf. Chapter 10: Expansion, space and people). The European Middle Ages had been well aware of the existence of Asia and Africa, though much of what medieval people believed

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about those regions was legendary (Mandeville 2001). Columbus’s miscalculation of the distance taken to reach Asia from the West derived from an erroneous calculation of the circumference of the world which was widely current in Aristotelian thought in the Middle Ages (though more accurate figures had been available in Antiquity). Long after it was obvious that the Americas were not part of Asia, there remained a range of cognitive challenges: where had these peoples come from? Were they part of the descendants of Noah? How was one to explain their religious and political customs? Were the people of distant lands all fully human, or were there non-human prodigies among them? The learning processes required by the ‘discoveries’ lasted nearly throughout the early modern period, and did not always shift in the direction of greater empathy or respect for the discovered peoples (Pagden 1982, 1993). Most disturbingly of all, notwithstanding the intellectual effort expended on discerning the humanity of the native peoples of the Americas, which led to the conclusion endorsed by the papacy that they were fully human and should not be enslaved, the impact on the actual treatment of colonised peoples was pitifully small. There was little or no challenge to, and barely any discussion of, the early modern practice of the capture, enslavement and transportation to the Caribbean and Americas of thousands of people from West Africa (Eltis 2000; Wheat 2016). The European economy underwent structural shifts and transitions, at least in the eyes of many recent historians. During the Middle Ages the primary drivers of economic growth and recession had been the largely uncontrollable factors of weather, population growth, and the supply and demand for agricultural land. Those factors remained critical through the early modern, until agricultural advances in the eighteenth century enhanced crop yields, and subsequent medical advances reduced infant and perinatal mortality. However, other factors were added to the economic equation in the sixteenth century. Prices rose in a structural way across the continent, for reasons that are still somewhat controversial. The strongest probable explanation is that, despite endemic plague, the population increased and added extra demand for resources, reversing the post-plague depression that had kept population low and demand for land slack since the mid-fourteenth century. However, other factors played an indeterminate role. After centuries in which Europe had had a balance of payments deficit with Asia, exchanging precious metals for spices, silks and other luxuries, Europeans suddenly discovered new reserves of silver within Europe itself, especially in the Eastern parts of the Empire. Then, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Spanish empire in the Americas began to import into Europe significant amounts of gold and silver: first the plunder of the indigenous empires, then the products of new silver mines. Both these new sources of bullion may have fed a measure of currency inflation, though there are many uncertain factors at play, including how much of the precious metal entered circulation as coin. Added to that may have been a measure of credit inflation, generated by the increasing sophistication of bills of exchange and the increase in long-distance trade (Burke 1972; Musgrave 1999). Manufacturing in parts of northern Europe changed its configuration, as increasing amounts of basic textile work were farmed out to small-scale

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workers in the countryside operating outside the guild systems. In the past this dichotomy was read rather crudely, as a binary opposition between archaic, restricted zero-sum practices sustained by medieval guild manufacturing, versus new, proto-capitalistic expansive disruption and increase in productivity. More recently historians have tended to treat the relationship between these two forms of production with greater subtlety. Old and new practices could coordinate and collaborate as well as compete, especially as the multiple processes for making cloth grew more complex (cf. Chapter 11: Commerce and industry). What seems clear is that in the early modern period, the market for consumer goods, and the number of physical items, from clothes to furniture, that modestly wealthy people had in their homes grew substantially. Relatively few household items from the sixteenth century – apart from books – circulate openly in the second-hand market to this day. Household items from the eighteenth century remain massively abundant in Europe and North America.

Sudden change or gradual transition? The brief summaries above have already opened up the challenge that some of the transitions from medieval to early modern were relatively sudden and abrupt, and many others were extremely gradual and made up of many slow steps. Some processes happened fairly quickly, but their implications were worked out over a longer period. The discovery of printing offers a case in point. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz devised the system of printing, by squeezing paper or parchment on to an inked forme of assembled pieces of metal type for each character, within a relatively few years in the 1450s. The technical proficiency of the first 42-line Bible remains astonishing. By the 1460s–1470s the technology spread quickly: printing houses sprang up in Italy and the Empire, though most of them went bankrupt fairly quickly, including the enterprise of Gutenberg himself (Pettegree 2010). However, in the short term – for some fifty years or so – the press reproduced traditional formats of books in appearance and design similar to manuscript books. Even such obvious devices as title pages, showing the author and content for a purchaser, took decades to become standard. Early printed books were sold unbound, for a binder to fold and assemble to the purchaser’s specification. The rise of a volume market in compact and affordable books depended on the vision and commercial initiative of entrepreneurs and – in at least one case – an entrepreneurial author. Classical literature, especially in Greek, was reduced to modest portable octavo format by the Venetian Aldo Manuzio (Aldus Manutius) at the end of the fifteenth century, in one of the great brand-defining exercises of the age (Lowry 1979). Aldus’s style, and that of his family of successors, would find many imitators. The two great religious authors of the sixteenth century both exercised considerable control over the appearance of their work. Erasmus of Rotterdam worked increasingly with Johannes Froben of Basel; Martin Luther worked with Melchior Lotter and Hans Lufft to create

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a distinctive and recognisable look for his books (Pettegree 2015; Price 2017). Over the course of time distinguished printer-publishers, such as Blaeu in the Netherlands or Baskerville in England, would make incremental improvements to the appearance of books. Similarly, the religious changes of the early sixteenth century happened in about as dramatic and unexpected a fashion as could be imagined. In 1517–1518 the dispute over indulgences appeared to be (and was seen by some) as merely a technical disagreement between preachers of rival religious orders. Yet by 1530, distinct confessional alliances were being formed in northern Germany, southern Germany and parts of the Swiss Confederation. These structures of confessional allegiance presupposed that, for the foreseeable future, distinct faith communities – distinct Churches, in effect – were a fact of life for the future. And yet, a much longer narrative was playing out, unforeseen by nearly all the early participants and not even desired by most of them. The initial expectation of all the ‘magisterial’ reformers was that a properly reformed Church should serve and consist of all the Christians within a coherent political entity, whether that was a city, or a province, or a nation. Moreover, it is probable that many if not most religious leaders believed that either the ‘true’ confession would be victorious, or that the Second Coming of Christ would vindicate the truth in the relatively near future. What was not envisaged was the indefinite extension of the coexistence of rival faiths. Meanwhile a minority of believers, those associated with the gathered movements known as ‘Anabaptist’ or ‘radical’ in various forms, eschewed the idea of participating in the state altogether in order to keep the community religiously pure. Over centuries, European religion conceded, rather than aspired to, what became the definitive solution by c. 1800–1850: that individual people could join or not join a church as they felt called to do so; that multiple faiths could coexist on equal terms within the same polity; and that state law should protect that freedom of choice (Kaplan 2007). Other processes of change, even within Europe, were incremental and gradual: their ‘turning points’ can be located at different moments for different questions in different places. One of the most crucial changes in European philosophy consisted in the replacement of Aristotle as the single, supreme authority on the philosophy of being. Elements in the Italian Renaissance advocated for the value of Plato, and his late antique successors, over Aristotle; however, far more energy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was devoted to recovering the text of Aristotle and translating his works into contemporary Latin direct from the Greek. Only in the mid-seventeenth century, and then mostly in northern Europe, did the ascendancy of Aristotle give way to a free-for-all of innovative and experimental methods for understanding reality (Garber 1997). For many kinds of philosophy, from metaphysics to cosmology to political thought, the seventeenth century can be argued to have been fully as important a time of transition as the sixteenth, if not more so (cf. Chapter 14: Political thought). Change in social customs and mores may be expected to be among the slowest of cultural phenomena to change, and at very varying speeds across social classes and geographical locations. Historians have identified the early modern

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as a period of gradual refinement in manners, customs, and social discipline. To some extent this was an impression created by early modern governments, which became progressively better able to count, know, and control their people; and by religious cultures, which increasingly fused ‘Christianisation’ with ‘civilised’ behaviour. With better keeping of records it became possible to implement the moral rules – already articulated in medieval ethics – which mandated monogamous relationships within marriage and called for the postponement of marriage until the partners had resources to support it. Illegitimacy rates, only able to be calculated after sixteenth century developments in record keeping, reached historic lows in the mid-seventeenth century in many places. More insubstantially but just as importantly, bourgeois societies found ways to resolve conflict and defuse tension without the threat of violence or disorder: concepts of honour became less focused on force. The so-called ‘civilizing process’ would gradually lead to a Europe in which weapons were no longer worn in public save by uniformed forces (Elias 1994; Burke, Harrison, and Slack 2000). One should also distinguish between processes that involved human intention and design and those which took their human participants by surprise. The processes of change in the economy and in politics were, by and large, the unplanned products of innumerable short-term decisions based on expediency rather than principle. While there was a flourishing discourse of ‘reason of state’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the language of political rule and obedience bore little relation to the actual balance of power. Dynastic accident, mortality and rulers’ decision to marry (or not) determined the creation of ‘Spain’ out of Aragon and Castile rather than Castile and Portugal; the creation of the unmanageable composite of Charles V and I’s empire in Germany, Italy, Iberia and the Americas; the eventual combining of the crowns of England and Scotland; and the unstable fates of the crowns of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary. The most destructive continental war of the early 1700s was provoked by the death without heirs of the severely disabled Carlos II of Spain.

What may not have changed? It is also important to acknowledge historical questions, themes or issues where the transition from medieval to early modern demonstrates no clear changes, or is so much less significant than other earlier or later transformations that we should not even try to assign meaning to it. Family history is one such area. A long-standing, though now much questioned historical theory interpreted the pre-modern period in European history, from the settled Middle Ages through to the late eighteenth century, as an age of patriarchal and economically determined family structures. In this view, the pre-modern family was primarily an economic unit where children were valued as sources of free labour. Their individuality was not recognised, and neither was ‘childhood’ regarded as a distinct stage of life. The ‘companionate family’ characterised by a small nuclear household with close emotional bonds was a creation of the middle-class culture of

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the late eighteenth century (Ariès 1965; Stone 1977). Many if not all details of this view are now discredited: abundant primary sources have radically revised our understanding of the emotional life of early modern people. However, one cannot assume that the emergence of a greater body of literature about family relations, ranging from Leon Battista Alberti’s writings on family life (unpublished in his own time) and Erasmus’s widely read Colloquies on education and child-rearing, actually tells us that anything changed in how families lived their lives around 1500. Demographers, whose data can expose large-scale trends on such questions as age at first marriage, family size, and illegitimacy rates, depend on sources which only come into being in sufficient quantity from the middle of the sixteenth century (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Similar questions need to be raised on the issue of gender. Because of the greater availability of written evidence (outside the specialised area of religious communities, where it existed before) the early modern period has been a fruitful one in the writing of histories of masculinities and femininities. Successive waves of feminist historiography have vastly increased the attention given to, and the available knowledge of, women’s experiences in the pre-modern (Roper 1989; Wiesner 2008) (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). A fruitful debate has arisen over how the destinies and experiences of women diverged with the Reformation, as religious opportunities for women narrowed in Protestant countries (but with enhanced respect for clergy spouses and for lay people in general) and diversified in Catholicism (subject to the increased pressure for the cloistering of nuns). Yet for those men and women who did not have religious vocations or did not belong to the clergy class, it is hard to discern how the end of the medieval period could be seen as a major, let alone a decisive transition in gender roles and relations. A similarly problematic area, of great interest to historians, would be attitudes and beliefs among the less educated majority of people regarding such questions as illness, the weather, and the power of symbols and rituals over such things. A proliferation of texts of pastoral advice and theological analysis from the midfourteenth century greatly increased historians’ knowledge of what ordinary people were supposed to believe, and how the religious elites responded to their beliefs and practices (Bailey 2013). In the Reformation, Protestant theologians refocused the rhetorical critique of ‘superstition’ on to the rituals and practices positively embraced and defended by medieval Catholic theologians, rather than those practices that were already suspect (Cameron 2010). However, this change in theological strategies tells us little about any shifts in popular beliefs themselves. The beliefs of the less educated never existed in sealed compartments, excluded from the reflections of preachers and pastors; there was a constant exchange, in which the customs and practices of educated and less educated alike varied across a wide spectrum and responded to each other’s taletelling (Scribner 1988). However, it is hard to detect significant, world-changing shifts in such beliefs until c. 1800, when the world of literature started to regard beliefs in magic, spells, ghosts and the like as a quaint residue of the past rather than a living risk.

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One major exception needs to be registered here. The early modern period, or the first two centuries of it, was largely coterminous with the legal persecution of witches in Europe (cf. Chapter 13: Popular cultures and witchcraft). The theory of witches, a bizarre assemblage of motifs from folklore and the legends of inquisitors into heresy, entered the historical record in the first half of the fifteenth century. Its most notorious textbook, the Malleus Maleficarum, appeared in print in the mid-1480s and was reprinted over and over again until the 1660s (Institoris 2006). However, the greatest volume of trials for this largely imaginary crime took place between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. The last trials took place in the mid-eighteenth century (Roper 2004; Levack 2006). During this period many ordinary people were persuaded that they, their children, their animals or their crops were suffering from the consequences of hostile sorcery. A smaller number of people may have believed themselves to have the supernatural power to inflict harm on their neighbours by ill-willed thoughts (Briggs 1996). What was new in the ‘early modern’ was the legally established dogma that such people, ‘witches’, had assembled by supernatural means in remote places, where they submitted themselves to a devil who had appeared to them in visible form, and to whom they owed their supposed ability to cause harm. The more that scholars have studied the witchbeliefs of individual local communities, the more varied in character, and the farther removed from the theories of demonologists, such beliefs have appeared. It must now be an open question whether the assumptions at the heart of the supernatural universe of late medieval people changed in any clearly discernible way, at least before the onset of industrialisation and urbanisation. In a slightly different way, the changes to the theory and practice of medicine in the early modern period, while hugely significant at an intellectual and literary level, appear to have made only modest, if any, inroads into the basic facts of disease and mortality. The humoral system of medical theory, derived from the school of Galen and widely taught in the Middle Ages, persisted well into the early modern, along with the dangerous and pointless medical practices of bleeding and purging. Serious and substantial debates into the cause of plague occurred, with the eventual outcome that the one effective remedy, that of isolating and quarantining the affected districts, began to be more widely practised. Anatomy and physiology began to be better understood, thanks to the groundbreaking illustrative work of the anatomist Andreas Vesalius. However, medical services were available only to limited sectors of the population, and it is an open question how far medicine actually prolonged life or reduced suffering, for those who could obtain it, right through the early modern period (cf. Chapter 12: Science and reason).

Where to place the emphasis? Historians tend to divide into camps, or tendencies, according to whether they seek to identify major changes at key points in history, or whether they prefer to question, critique or knock down the claims made for such major changes. To

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some extent the choice is a matter of subject and field. Social historians have tended to talk about ‘the past’ in general terms: they locate this loosely defined period from the beginning of viable records of society and culture to the major changes linked to industrialisation and urbanisation. Demographers and historians of macroeconomic conditions, such as the Annales school of French social historical writing after the Second World War, envisaged history moving on a glacial scale determined by geography and climate as much as by specific human choices (Braudel 1972–1973, 1982–1985, 2001). Occasionally institutional historians discern truly radical shifts in administration and government and build whole schemes of interpretation around them, only to have those knocked down by their colleagues. A generation ago G. R. Elton’s theory of a major shift in governmental practice in 1530s England acquired, for a few years, almost the status of orthodoxy (Elton 1953). He claimed that in this brief period, under the influence of a uniquely powerful bureaucrat-politician Thomas Cromwell, England took a great leap forward into collective committeebased government. Elton’s argument suffered a fairly decisive rebuttal in the 1960s and 1970s, largely from medievalists who successfully demonstrated unrecognised continuities from medieval to early modern government. A larger point, however, not always heeded by Anglocentric historians, has greater staying power: over time, even governments that aspired to absolute rule (such as Spain or the Papal States) found it expedient to govern by committee, with the aid of professional record-keepers (Lovett 1986; Mayer 2013). In the case of the Reformation, the fault-lines of controversy are many and various. Generations of past historians have sought to detect in the ‘pre-reform’ movements of the later Middle Ages the instincts and impulses that would later be exploited by the Protestant movement. These arguments often depended on ideologically driven partisanship. Protestant historians who discovered ‘forerunners’ among the pre-reformers hoped to demonstrate a need for what the sixteenthcentury reformers later provided (Ullmann 1863–1877). Catholic scholars tried to prove the opposite: there was so much energy behind the improvement of the later medieval Church, they claimed, that Luther’s campaign was ill-founded, based on misconceptions of what Catholicism really meant, and unnecessary (Janssen 1905–1910, Denifle 1913–1916). Among more recent scholars the confessional partisanship has diminished but has not entirely disappeared. That is especially true among historians who defend the old religious order in England and deplore the (admittedly) cynical and manipulative policies of its reforming rulers (Duffy 2005; but compare Hamm 2004) (see Appendix 1.3). Theological historians, as Steven Ozment remarked years ago, tend to be nomads who pursue ideas across millennia and explore them as largely compatible phenomena, whenever they are discussed. Socio-economic historians of Reformation movements have tended to focus on one small area over a relatively compact period of time, leaving the larger, long-range questions to others (Ozment 1975, 1–2). On another level, there are many historians who prefer to dilute the single, decisive impact of ‘the Reformation’ by stressing its plural, diverse, and therefore more spread-out quality. They draw attention to important differences between

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the German and the Swiss reformers, and note the shaky boundary that separates some early ‘magisterial’ reformers, such as Zwingli, from the so-called ‘radical’ preachers who would go on to abandon the idea of the state-church altogether (Lindberg 2010; Eire 2016). For the early 1520s the distinction between those movements, especially in Switzerland and south Germany, which would eventually become established churches on one hand, and the so-called ‘radical’ movements on the other, could be drawn at the level of pure theology but not so easily in terms of social or cultural aspects. That is, the early ‘radicals’ and some of the inchoate voluntary movements that became the ‘civic Reformations’ looked extremely similar in terms of their political behaviour. It seems likely that the cultural shifts associated with the Reformation brought a new kind of interactive political movement into being, which would be continually reinvented across the early modern and modern eras (Te Brake 1998). If one takes an approach to religion focused on social and governmental questions, there is much to be said in favour of stressing the analogies and similarities between the state-building and state-enhancing practices of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches in parts of Germany (Schilling 1992). A school of religious history has long struggled over the dividing lines to be drawn within the Reformation era itself, from the early, disruptive and creative years to the more structured, controlling age of the ‘confessional orthodox’, that lasted from c. 1560 to at least the late seventeenth century. Some historians like to speak of ‘long reformations’ or ‘long centuries’ on the justifiable basis that it takes a long time for major changes to work out their consequences, and to demonstrate that they have, indeed, the staying power to become determining historical processes. It is fitting to close this essay where it began, with the historical vision of the early modern people themselves. Despite the traumas of the Reformation century, scholars in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries largely continued to believe that the history of the world could be written from Hebrew Scripture, reading forward from creation. The most scrupulous scholarly minds of that period puzzled over precisely how to calculate the course of time from the creation to the incarnation, and from the incarnation to the consummation of history in the end-times. Not all were preoccupied with the end of the world, even if a secular philosopher (and physician) such as Thomas Browne in the mid-seventeenth century could be convinced that it was ‘too late to be ambitious’ (Browne 1658, 73). By the early 1700s learned adepts such as William Whiston and Isaac Newton were struggling over the same puzzles of biblical chronology as their predecessors among the Protestant reformers, or indeed as chronological pioneers such as Julius Africanus, Eusebius of Caesarea, or Bede of Jarrow. By the later eighteenth century, however, the timeline proposed (for example) by Joseph Priestley would read time backwards from creation to the years Before Christ. This means of counting, though used and proposed by Isaac Newton, would gradually open European minds to the possibility that time stretched back to vast distances of the past, retrievably only by geologists. In the light of geological time, or even in the light of the many millennia that the human species took to evolve to the point where we could generate written

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records, it becomes far harder for us than for sixteenth-century people to believe that the transitions between one period and another in the corner of one of the world’s land-masses have such an enduring importance. Yet they do: for we still live largely within the structures and according to the legacies that those ages bequeathed to western society and culture.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Alberti, Leon Battista (1969). The Family in Renaissance Florence. Trans. Renee Neu Watkins. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Browne, Thomas (1658). Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk. London: Brome. Carion, Johannes (1550). The Thre Bokes of Cronicles, Whyche Iohn Carion (A Man Syngularly Well Sene in the Mathematycall Sciences) Gathered Wyth Great Diligence … London: S. Mierdman for Gwalter Lynne. Cellarius, Christophorus (1702). Historia universalis breviter ac perspicue exposita in antiquam et medii aevi ac novam divisa, cum notis perpetuis. Jena: J. Bielkius. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (2005). Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman; introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Ecco. Erasmus, Desiderius (1997). The Colloquies of Erasmus. In: Craig R. Thompson, Ed. and trans. by, The Collected Works of Erasmus, Vols. 39–40. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. ——— (2015). Praise of Folly. Trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson; with a new foreword by Anthony Grafton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Franck, Sebastian (1531). Chronica, Zeÿtbuch vnd geschÿcht bibel von anbegyn biss inn diss gegenwertig M.D.xxxi. jar. Strassburg: Beck. Hornius, Georgius (1666). Arca Noae, sive, Historia imperiorum et regnorum a condito orbe ad nostra tempora. Leiden and Rotterdam: Officina Hackiana. Institoris, Heinrich (2006). Malleus Maleficarum. Ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandeville, John (2001). The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text. Ed. Tamarah Kohanski. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Rabelais, François (1970). Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux. London: Fraser Press. Schedel, Hartmann (1493). Liber Chronicarum. Nuremberg: Anton Koberger. Sleidanus, Joannes (1557). De quatuor summis imperiis libri tres, In gratiam iuventutis confecti … Strasbourg: Rihel. Valla, Lorenzo (1922). The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine. Ed. and trans. Christopher B. Coleman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

(B) Secondary literature Ariès, Philippe (1965). Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage Books.

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Bailey, Michael David (2013). Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Braudel, Fernand (1972–1973). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. London: Collins. ——— (1982–1985). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row. ——— (2001). Memory and the Mediterranean. Ed. Roselyne de Ayala and Paule Braudel, and trans. Siân Reynolds. New York: Knopf. Braun, Harald E. and Vallance, Edward, eds. (2004). Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Briggs, Robin (1996). Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: HarperCollins. Brooke, Rosalind B. (1975). The Coming of the Friars. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Burke, Peter, ed. (1972). Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe; Essays from Annales. New York: Harper & Row. Burke, Peter, Harrison, Brian and Slack, Paul, eds. (2000). Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bury, John B. and others, eds. (1924–1936). The Cambridge Medieval History, 8 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Euan (2010). Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (2012). The European Reformation, 2nd edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (2019). How Early Modern Church Historians Defined Periods in History. In: Kirsten Poole and Owen Williams, eds., The Periodization of Early Modern England: Histories of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming. Cantor, Norman F. and Werthman, Michael S. (1967). The Structure of European History: Studies and Interpretations, 6 vols. New York: T.Y. Crowell Co., vol 3: Early Modern Europe, 1450–1650. Clark, George N. (1957). Early Modern Europe from about 1450 to about 1720. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Colish, Marcia L. (1997). Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Comerford, Kathleen M. and Pabel, Hilmar M., eds. (2001). Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crombie, Alistair C. (1959). Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, vol. 2: Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, XIII–XVII Centuries. Cuerva, Rubén González and Koller, Alexander, eds. (2017). A Europe of Courts, A Europe of Factions: Political Groups at Early Modern Centres of Power (1550–1700). Leiden: Brill. Denifle, Heinrich (1913–1916). Luther et le Luthéranisme: étude faite d’après les sources. Trans. J. Paquier, 4 vols., 2nd edn. Paris: A. Picard. Dickens, Arthur G., ed. (1977). The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage and Royalty 1400–1800. London: Thames & Hudson. Duffy, Eamon (2005). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England C.1400–C.1580, 2nd edn. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Ehler, Sidney Z. and Morrall, John B., eds. (1967). Church and State through the Centuries: A Collection of Historic Documents with Commentaries. New York: Biblo and Tannen.

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Eire, Carlos M. N. (2016). Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Schluchter, Wolfgang (1998). Paths to Early Modernities: A Comparative View. Daedalus, Vol. 127, No. 3: Early Modernities, 1–18. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (2002). An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited. Forum with response by Adrian Johns and Rejoinder by Elizabeth Eisenstein. American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (February), 87–105, 106–125, and 126–128. Elias, Norbert (1994). The Civilizing Process. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, J. H. (1992). A Europe of Composite Monarchies. Past & Present, No. 137, 48–71. Eltis, David (2000). The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elton, Geoffrey R. (1953). The Tudor Revolution in Government; Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flint, Valerie I. J. (1991). The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garber, Daniel, ed. (1997). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, Shami (2016). Writing the Barbarian Past: Studies in Early Medieval Historical Narrative. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Grafton, Anthony (1994). Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press. Hale, John R., Highfield, John R. L. and Smalley, Beryl, eds. (1965). Europe in the Late Middle Ages. London: Faber and Faber. Hamm, Berndt (2004). The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm. Ed. Robert J. Bast. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Harriss, Gerald L. (1963). Medieval Government and Statecraft. Past & Present, No. 25 (July), 8–39. Herrin, Judith (2008). Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hexter, Jack H. (1961). Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row. Ianziti, Gary (2012). Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Janssen, Johannes (1905–1910). History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages. Trans. M.A. Mitchell and A. M. Christie, 16 vols. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., Ltd. Jones, Philip (1997). The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. Kaplan, Benjamin J. (2007). Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Klaniczay, Gábor (1990). The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe. Trans. Susan Singerman and ed. Karen Margolis. Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell. Knecht, R. J. (1982). Francis I. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kümin, Beat A. (2013). The Communal Age in Western Europe, C.1100–1800: Towns, Villages and Parishes in Pre-Modern Society. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Levack, Brian P. (2006). The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. Harlow and New York: Pearson Longman. Lindberg, Carter (2010). The European Reformations, 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lovett, A. W. (1986). Early Habsburg Spain, 1517–1598. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lowry, Martin (1979). The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Blackwell. Lukacs, John (1968). Historical Consciousness: Or, the Remembered Past. New York: Harper & Row. Mayer, Thomas F. (2013). The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. McLaughlin, Martin L. (1988). Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and quattrocento. Renaissance Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2: A Tribute to Denys Hay (October), 131–142. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture (2001). 4 vols, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 173–176. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Moeller, Bernd (1972). Imperial Cities and the Reformation; Three Essays. Ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Mommsen, Theodore E. (1942). Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’. Speculum, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April), 226–242. Morris, Colin (1989). The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mulryne, James R., Aliverti, Maria Ines and Testaverde, Anna-Maria, eds. (2015). Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power. Farnham, UK and Burlington: Ashgate. Musgrave, Peter (1999). The Early Modern European Economy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Nelson, Janet L. (2007). The Dark Ages. History Workshop Journal, 63 (Spring), 191–201. Oberman, Heiko A. (1994). Martin Luther: Forerunner of the Reformation. In: Andrew C. Gow, trans., The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 23–52. O’Malley, John W. (2000). Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ozment, Steven E. (1975). The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pagden, Anthony (1982). The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1993). European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pettegree, Andrew (2005). Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2010). The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——— (2015). Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin. Price, David H. (2017). Hans Holbein the Younger and Reformation Bible Production. Church History, Vol. 86, No. 4 (December), 998–1040. Reynolds, Susan (2001). Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Roper, Lyndal (1989). The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (2004). Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schilling, Heinz (1992). Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555–1620. In: idem, Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 205–247. Scribner, Robert W. (1988). Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London: Hambledon Press. Southern, R. W. (1995–1997). Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Stone, Lawrence (1977). The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Te Brake, Wayne (1998). Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ullmann, Carl (1863–1877). Reformers before the Reformation: Principally in Germany and the Netherlands, trans. Robert Menzies, 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Vollrath, Hanna (1996). Ideal and Reality in Twelfth-Century Germany. In: Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath, eds., England and Germany in the High Middle Ages. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 93–104. Wheat, David (2016). Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Wiesner, Merry E. (2008). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Withington, Philip (2010). Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wrigley, Edward A. and Schofield, Roger S. (1981). The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction. London: Edward Arnold.

Appendices

Appendix 1.1: On Luther’s apocalyptic expectations Oberman, Heiko A. (1994). Martin Luther: Forerunner of the Reformation. In: The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications. Trans. A. C. Gow. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 23–52. No one else will ever again intervene to correct the situation, no other reformer will ever come other than Christ himself, at the Last Judgment. During the intervening period before the reform, the godless will make great gains: ‘In the meanwhile the godless make constant advances from bad to worse, until the end.’ The majority of the Church, especially its leadership … has already been led into Babylonian captivity. To Luther, it is certain that everything foretold in this psalm about the End time is happening today … and in fact some of it has already happened. So this question becomes more and more germane: what office, what mission remains for Luther? The answer is, the office of the ‘pre-reformation’ interpreter of Scripture, charged with the mission of giving voice once again, far beyond the walls of the lecture hall, to the call of the prophet – a call that had been drowned out, denounced, even accused of heresy. The children of God will be able to escape the clutches of Satan only if they are prepared by this voice for the tricks of the Antichrist, and thus firmly grounded in the Gospel of justification. Since the Antichrist also usurps worldly power, those who confess Christ openly are in the danger of their life. … No human being will be able to offer the evangelist protection at the time of the Antichrist, ‘except God alone’. This evangelista is Luther, called in his capacity as a Doctor of Holy Writ to proclaim ‘the spirit of the prophet’. He considers himself to have been entrusted with the double job of arming the elect with Scripture against being led astray, and of begging God to intervene and, at the close of the ‘history of salvation’, to end the (human) ‘history of damnation’: thus

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he prays ‘Arise, O Lord!’ The Pope would soon beg God with these very words to step in against the Reformation.… The only transformation that will occur before Judgment Day is Satan’s rapidly advancing triumphal march. His worldly radiance and his power guarantee that ‘the entire globe will slide into obedience to the Antichrist’. Far from wanting to achieve a ‘reformation’, the evangelist Luther knows that by proclaiming the Word of God, he is accelerating the satanic rape and enslavement of the world: ‘It is not our job to hold it back.’ [31–33]

Appendix 1.2: On the character of early modern monarchies Elliott, J. H. (1992). A Europe of Composite Monarchies. Past & Present, No. 137, 48–71. If sixteenth-century Europe was a Europe of composite states, coexisting with a myriad of smaller territorial and jurisdictional units jealously guarding their independent status, its history needs to be assessed from this standpoint rather than from that of the society of unitary nation states that it was later to become. It is easy enough to assume that the composite state of the early modern period was no more than a necessary but rather unsatisfactory way-station on the road that led to unitary statehood; but it should not automatically be taken for granted that at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this was already the destined end of the road. The creation in medieval western Europe of a number of large political units – France, England, Castile – which had succeeded in building up and maintaining a relatively strong administrative apparatus, and had at once drawn strength from, and fostered, some sense of collective identity, certainly pointed strongly in a unitary direction. But dynastic ambition, deriving from the deeply-rooted European sense of family and patrimony, cut across unitary tendencies and constantly threatened, through the continuing pursuit of new territorial acquisitions, to dilute the internal cohesion that was so laboriously being achieved. For monarchs concerned with aggrandizement, the creation of composite states looked a natural and easy way forward. New territorial acquisitions meant enhanced prestige and potentially valuable new sources of wealth. They were all the more to be prized if they possessed the additional advantages of contiguity and what was known as ‘conformity’. James VI and I would use the argument of contiguity to strengthen the case for the union of the crowns of England and Scotland. It was also considered easier to make the new union stick where there were marked similarities in ‘language, customs and institutions’, as Machiavelli observed in the third chapter of The Prince. Francesco Guicciardini made the same point when he spoke of the conformità which made the newly conquered kingdom of Navarre such a fine acquisition for Ferdinand the Catholic. Yet contiguity and conformity did not necessarily of themselves lead on to integral union. Spanish Navarre remained in many respects a kingdom apart, and saw no major transformation of its traditional laws, institutions and customs before 1841. [51–2]

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Appendix 1.3: On medieval religious culture Duffy, Eamon (2005). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580, 2nd edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it. Within the liturgy birth, copulation and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested and sanctioned. In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives. For the late medieval laity, the liturgy functioned at a variety of levels, offering spectacle, instruction, and a communal context for the affective piety which sought even in the formalized action of the Mass and its attendant ceremonies a stimulus to individual devotion. Ecclesiastical law and the vigilance of bishop, archdeacon and parson sought to ensure as a minimum regular and sober attendance at matins, Mass and evensong on Sundays and feasts, and annual confession and communion at Easter. But the laity expected and gave far more in the way of involvement with the action and symbolism of the liturgy than those minimum requirements suggest. It is widely recognized, for example, that the liturgy’s ritual structures provided a means for ordering and perhaps also of negotiating social relations. The etiquette of liturgical precedence in the late Middle Ages reflected deep-seated anxieties about order and influence within the ‘secular’ reality of the community. Mervyn James has written eloquently of the way in which the Corpus Christi procession in late medieval communities ‘became the point of reference in relation to which the structure of precedence and authority in the town is made visually present’. This was the ‘social miracle’, the sacramental embodiment of social reality. But it was often, perhaps always, a precarious and difficult process, an attempt to tame and contain disorder, or to impose the hegemony of particular groups, rather than the straightforward expression of the inner harmonies of a community at peace with itself.… Mere participation in ceremony, therefore, was no infallible indicator of either individual piety or social harmony. As the village or urban community’s most usual gathering-place, the church and the ceremonies conducted there certainly had many functions not envisaged by the rubrics. Young men went to church to survey the young women, and a neighbor attempted the seduction of Margery Kempe as they both went to evensong on the patronal festival of their parish church … [11–12]

2

Identities and encounters Charles H. Parker

In the first half of the 1400s a number of momentous incidents converged that altered the course of world history, leading to worldwide flows of people, commodities, capital, and information in the early modern period.1 Three unrelated events portended the profound changes that would occur over the next three hundred years. In 1405, the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timurlane (1336–1405) died on his quest to subjugate China, fragmenting the nomadic dynasties that had dominated Eurasia for centuries. In 1415, King João (John) I of Portugal (1357–1433) attacked the Moroccan port city of Ceuta, and after learning of great riches, Portuguese mariners navigated the coastline of Africa for eighty years until it led them into the Indian Ocean and pushed the Spanish into the Americas. In 1453, the sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481) captured and sacked Constantinople, which destroyed the Byzantine Empire and made the Ottoman Turks the major power in the eastern Mediterranean (Parker 2010). These and other events inaugurated an unprecedented period of empire building in the early modern world, which ultimately created the conditions for globalisation in modern times. The Ottomans managed a sprawling empire from Azerbaijan to northern Africa; the Mughals brought most of India under their control, the Safavids absorbed Iran; the Ming and (later) Qing dynasties pushed Chinese dominion across Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet; the Romanov family incorporated Siberia and northern Asia under Russian rule. And, a cluster of European states led initially by Portugal established large territorial colonies in the Americas and smaller, commercially based outposts in Africa and Asia. These empires generated global processes of interaction from long-distance trade, to large-scale migration, religious proselytisation, biological exchange, intellectual diffusion, and technology transfer. The movement of peoples, goods, and ideas around the world produced multifaceted cross-cultural encounters that sharpened sensitivity to national, ethnic, and religious identities (Bentley 1996, 767–70). Scholars use ‘crosscultural encounter’ as a convenient shorthand to refer to a wide range of activity; but do not be misled by the bland neutrality of the terminology. In many circumstances, which usually involved commercial transactions, parties did engage in peaceful forms of negotiating, partnering, and communicating. Yet, all too often egregious forms of violence prevailed, exemplified in the Atlantic

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slave trade and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. Whether violent or not, these encounters entangled individuals from disparate regions of the world in far greater numbers than ever before. It is not surprising that in these diverse contacts, people remarked at length on the glaring differences in the ‘other’, yet also described the uncanny similarities they noticed. The act of observing others necessarily entailed rethinking one’s own culture, tradition, and ethnicity. These encounters and the negotiation of identity they engendered are on vivid display in the bulky body of travel writing in the early modern period by Turks, Arabs, Persians, Indians (from South Asia), Africans, and others as well. Since this volume focuses on Europe, this essay will highlight the very large and diverse number of travellers from the western end of Eurasia and the sources they produced as they interacted with new peoples and places. Whether colonialists, traders, company officers, sailors, missionaries, adventurers, or simply armchair voyagers, Europeans wrote about the places they visited (and imagined) and the peoples they experienced. Travellers wrote for many different purposes and audiences. To cite just a few, the navigator Jan Huijgen van Linschoten published Itinerario (1596) to detail sea routes and locations; the missionary José de Acosta authored The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590) to aid in the conversion of native Americans; and Sir Anthony Sherley drafted Travels into Persia (1613) to advertise his prowess as a diplomat (Sherley 1974; Acosta SJ 2002; Linschoten 2010). The description of peoples and customs by an outside observer, known as ethnography, has formed an important source for historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars to analyse how Europeans and peoples around the world engaged with one another. Interpretations have changed considerably since the 1970s and 1980s. Before then, readers of travel literature tended to regard European accounts of societies as relatively reliable ethnographic information, which nevertheless had to be filtered through the prejudices of the writer. Around the 1970s as many former colonial territories asserted their political independence, scholars started raising serious questions about the reliability of descriptions of non-European societies. Then in 1978 Edward Said, a literature scholar, published Orientalism, a highly influential critique of European representations of Asian societies. He argued that western depictions constructed stereotypes of inherent backwardness and stagnancy and imposed them on ‘the East’, which justified imperial exploitation (Said 1978, 1–6). While Said primarily had in mind western imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars of the early modern period began looking at the previous period of European expansion through an orientalist lens. The application of orientalism to the early modern period has not held up very well because of the cultural, economic, and military power of Asian empires. Nevertheless, historians have utilised many analytical tools derived from an orientalist outlook and debated the value and meaning of ethnographic accounts in understanding encounters and identities (McJannet and Andrea 2011).

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These deliberations illustrate two broad trends in early modern European historiography that this essay will discuss in some detail. First, debates over difference and otherness in ethnographic materials point to the distinct approaches scholars take in dealing with these sources. And second, this research has emphasised that engagements with unfamiliar societies played a large role in how Europeans came to reexamine their own identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ethnographic sources: possibilities and problems The genre of writing about experiences in foreign environments came into full bloom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A certain administrative necessity dictated that explorers, colonialists, missionaries, and other travellers report to authorities back home. Yet in the years following the voyages of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and Vasco Da Gama (d. 1524), many European travellers displayed a keen self-consciousness in writing about their ordeals and the wonders they encountered. Itinerant European authors not only possessed preconceived notions about unfamiliar lands and peoples, but they also inherited models for writing ethnographic descriptions of them from travel accounts in the Middle Ages and renewed engagement with the ethnographic literature of the Greco-Roman world during the Renaissance. A surprising number of Europeans had travelled overland into regions of Asia in the 1200s and 1300s. The Mongols under the leadership of Chinggis Khan had directly conquered or exercised indirect authority over vast regions of Eurasia. Mongol expansion ushered in a period of relative security and stability, known as the Pax Mongolica, so European merchants, missionaries, and ambassadors travelled across parts of Asia. Many of them wrote stories about their journeys. The most famous traveller was the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1254–1324) who, along with his father and uncle, ventured through Asia all the way to China, where he arrived probably in 1275. He served in the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, for almost twenty years. After his return to Venice in 1295, the fascinating account of his experiences soon became published as The Travels of Marco Polo. It spread widely across Europe, fuelling much speculation about the exotic riches of the East (Larner 1999, 41–3). Equally influential were largely fictitious tales of an unknown author compiled in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville in 1360. It contained fantastic stories of dog-faced cannibals, hermaphrodites, and fabulous riches that attracted a wide readership (Higgins 1997, vii–viii; Frisch 2004, 42–58). Outside of popular literature enjoyed by all through oral storytelling and readings, standard works from the classical period of Greece and Rome that described peoples in Asia and northern Europe underwent a revival in the Renaissance from the 1300s through the 1500s. Humanists, intellectuals devoted to the study of Latin and Greek literature from the classical period (500 BCE–400 CE), became quite taken with the ethnography of ancient peoples and their relationship to contemporary populations outside of Europe.

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They drew from classical accounts to understand the origins of the Ottoman Turks, Persians, Egyptians, and other societies (Rubiés 2017, 282–5). Influenced by these reports and these models of travel writing, European voyagers in the age of exploration and colonialism narrated their observations and did so in varying formats. Some texts took the form of supposedly private writings that, intentionally or not, became public. Columbus kept a journal on his initial journey and gave it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella on his return to Spain in 1493. The original copy was lost, but somehow through channels that scholars have not yet identified, the Dominican Bishop of Zapata (Mexico), Bartolomé de las Casas ended up with a shortened and edited version in the 1530s (Dunn and Kelly 1989, 4–5). Hernan Cortes (1485–1547), the Spanish conquistador responsible for the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521, wrote a series of letters from 1519 to 1526 to Charles I, the Spanish monarch, to justify his insubordinate actions, to trumpet his military prowess, and to cajole his king with the riches of central Mexico. These letters were soon published, spreading Cortes’s image as a skilled and sophisticated commander and publicising the wealth of the newly subjugated lands (Iglesia 1969, 140–52). St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus, urged Jesuit missionaries to write letters, not only to report on success converting souls, but also about such things as ‘how long are the days of summer and of winter … Finally if there are other things that may seem extraordinary, let them be noted … details about animals and plants’ (quoted from Monumenta Ignatiana. Epistolae et Instructiones, V, 329–30 in Correia-Afonso 1969, 14). In 1544, the missionary Francis Xavier (1506–1552) wrote a letter to Loyola from India relating the triumph of the Christian message there. The news from the mission field so heartened Loyola that he circulated it – the first letter from Asia published in Europe – to broadcast the great work of the Jesuits, which he hoped would attract donors to the mission to India (Harris 1999, 212; Ditchfield 2010, 144–9). Jesuit reporting became institutionalised within the order, so that missionaries wrote volumes and the Society made many of them public, though others were kept secret. And people in Europe consumed the published reports. Even Protestants, the mortal religious enemies of the Jesuits, read their writings to learn about places around the world that were otherwise inaccessible to Europeans (see Baldaeus 1703, 580, 640, 657, 662; Charnley 1998, 91). Other Europeans abroad wrote detailed ethnographies of the societies and natural environments with the intent of putting them in print for a broad audience. Catholic and Protestant missionaries attempted to reconcile all the unfamiliar religious observances with the origins and spread of human life in the Old Testament. José de Acosta, in the Natural and Moral History, for example, reflected on contemporary theories that people in the Old Testament had knowledge about the Americas. He noted that some claimed King Solomon dispatched ships to Peru where they obtained large amounts of gold, though Acosta himself was somewhat sceptical (de Acosta 1624, 12–13). Serving in Canada, a later Jesuit, Joseph-François Lafitau compared worship practices among native Americans to illustrate that they shared core concepts that were

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compatible with Christianity (Lafitau 1724, 1, 99–216). Others wrote to circulate knowledge about disease and local remedies for sickness. Jacob Bontius, a Dutch physician in the East Indies (today Indonesia) extolled indigenous plants, such as Lagondi and Chinese Root to aid metabolic functions and alleviate a wide variety of diseases (Cook 2007, 196). Likewise, the Portuguese medical doctor Garcia D’Orta published Dialogues about Simples and Drugs and Medical Matters from India in 1563, based on his 29 years of residing there (Wear 1995, 308–9). Published accounts of lands and peoples also came from the hands of political operators. To promote colonialism in North America, Richard Hakluyt composed The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, presenting natives as eager to work with English settlers (Hakluyt 1589–1600). As is evident from this very small, but representative sample, Europeans sojourning overseas wrote on many diverse topics. Their motives ranged from making profit, to promoting national interest, saving souls, advancing knowledge, and currying favour. For all the value of travel writing and ethnography in exploring encounters and identities, these sources pose difficult interpretive problems that scholars have wrestled with, especially for the last thirty years or so. Historians have always paid attention to authorial bias in ethnographic descriptions, because the discipline of history itself focuses on critically appraising sources. Yet before the 1970s, historians tended to work from the premise that European observations were simply part of a historical process of discovering the wider world. That is, ethnography revealed what Europeans were learning about other societies; thus travellers’ descriptions represented more or less straightforward information on the customs, beliefs, and practices in distant lands. For example, Donald Lach, collaborating with other authors, produced an encyclopaedic multi-volume work, Asia in the Making of Europe, published from the 1960s into the 1990s that treated exhaustively the European acquisition of knowledge about Asia in the early modern period. Lach’s work provides a wealth of detail about what Europeans learned, but left open the vital questions of how writers fashioned accounts to meet their own interests and how the genre of travel writing constrained their stories (Lach 1965, 314–55, 427–93). From this perspective, ethnography represents the accumulation of data about encountered peoples without considering the factors that underlay the portrayals of them (see the critique by Subrahmanyam 2007, 148–9). The motivations of European ethnographers did begin to come under sharp scrutiny beginning in the late 1970s with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, mentioned in the introduction. Said, a literary theorist at Columbia University, launched a harsh indictment of western attitudes about Asian societies in this groundbreaking work. He argued that during the drive for imperial power that began in the late 1700s, European writers and artists constructed images of the East as the antithesis of western society. Art and literature from the period, as well as travel writings, employed sensual images that cast Asian peoples as decadent, despotic, and tradition bound (Said 1978, 162–3, 203, 343). In art, depictions of sexualised bodies of women under the controlling

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gaze of patriarchal figures gestured at the exotic and tyrannical nature of the Middle East and India (Roberts 2000). In literature, mysterious oriental backgrounds and characters filled a wide body of romantic poetry and novels from Petis de la Croix’s Turkish Tales (1707) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (written in 1797) to Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) (Sharafuddin 1994, xxx, 47). These eastern tropes emphasised the inscrutable otherness of peoples and places where Europeans had travelled and resided, often in imperial capacities. According to Said, these motifs did not simply reflect western prejudices, but rather orientalism was ‘an act of power’ that projected dominance onto subservient eastern societies (Said 1978, 5). Said’s critique launched a new means of interpreting literature and art, known as post-colonial literary theory, which sought to identify the use of narrative and image in the maintenance of imperial power (Gandhi 1998, 64–80). The heightened awareness of the underlying colonial impulses in travel and domestic literature about non-Europeans led historians and literary scholars in the ensuing years to search for orientalist themes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though orientalism denotes the Islamic east, scholars also have applied some of its methods and perspectives to European encounters with societies in all other parts of the globe, especially the Americas and Africa. Thus, it is useful to think of orientalism as one ethnographic mode of thought that casts the culture described as alien and subordinate. In addition to the outpouring of travel and ethnographic literature, maps, and visual depictions, Europeans also produced scholarly studies, plays, poems, and other explicitly fictional works about the wider world. Universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, Leiden, and Salamanca, endowed faculty positions devoted to the study of eastern languages and literatures, especially Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Sanskrit, and Chinese (Gunn 2003, 223–50). The westward push of the Ottoman Empire into Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean preoccupied almost countless numbers of religious figures and historical writers (Bisaha 2004, 1–12). Accounts decrying the rising power of the ‘Turk’, along with stories about the rife kidnapping of Christians by pirate crews based along the coast of north Africa, confronted readers and audiences across Europe. The literary scholar Daniel Vitkus has argued that the power and opulence of Ottomans and other Muslims in the Mediterranean provoked a ‘kind of “orientalism” that demonized the Islamic other’ (Vitkus 1999, 209, quote on 218). Similarly, another theorist, Nabil Matar compared the prevalence of the Ottomans in European anxieties in the sixteenth century to that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War (Matar 1998, 14, 19; see also Maclean 2007, 20–22, 56, 245–6). Both scholars demonstrated the influence of Islam among such diverse figures as Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sydney and John Locke (Akbari 2009, 284). The historian Susan Boettcher likewise identified orientalist motifs in the published sermons of the Lutheran pastor Jacob Andreae in the mid-sixteenth century, just after the advance of the sultan Suleiman I into Hungary (Boettcher 2004, 101–2, 105). In these scholarly treatments and others, historians and literature specialists have

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traced embryonic tropes of otherness that reinforced European notions of religious, cultural, and national identity. These and other scholars, however, have also pointed out the important differences in early modern orientalism from its modern, colonial counterpart. The Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing empires far outstripped European countries in political power and economic output. By and large, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England, and France occupied small commercial outposts in Asia until the Industrial Revolution changed the balance of power in the nineteenth century. Thus in terms of writing about the east, Europeans composed accounts from a subordinate position. Consequently, characterisations of Turks, Arabs, Indians, and Chinese tended to be far more equivocal than the patronising depictions in the heyday of colonialism. While condescension and cultural superiority abounded in European ethnography, writers also expanded upon qualities they found admirable, such as the level of religious tolerance in Muslim societies, the sophistication of Asian courts, and the military prowess of Turkish armies. In the Americas, Spanish writers expressed amazement at the highly advanced architecture and urban development of the Aztec and Inca empires. Therefore, scholars who analyse the encounters and identities in early modern ethnographic sources have sifted through the critique generated by orientalism and have rejected the anachronistic applications. Nevertheless, they have attempted to adapt the insights to the different dynamics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Matar 1998, 14, 15; Johnson 2011, 21–70). Historians responding to the critique of orientalist perspectives have elucidated problems in using ethnographic sources to reconstruct encounters in the early modern period. Trying to evaluate the extent to which peoples from very different parts of the world comprehended the values and customs of the other, especially in initial interactions, poses an important challenge for scholars. The influence of Said, as well as other developments in the field of anthropology and history of science, led a number of historians to stress the incommensurability inherent within most encounters. This concept means that peoples from different cultures found one another unintelligible. Underlying the notion of incommensurability is the premise that societies form closed cultural systems that outsiders cannot understand. Accordingly, an essential dissimilarity existed between all peoples in the early modern period. Thus, many historians, along with literary scholars and anthropologists, have searched for the misunderstandings, misperceptions, and mistaken assumptions in European ethnography. Greg Dening, for example, in his study of European engagement with Polynesian societies in the South Pacific, insisted that intruding newcomers always recreate their own meaning and impose it on places and peoples (Dening 1980, 33–4). In a similar vein, the social theorist Tzvetan Todorov contended that the Spanish and Aztecs could not escape their own cultural universe and inevitably misread one another, leading ultimately to the murder of Montezuma and the conquest of the meso-American empire (Todorov 1999, 63–98). These and other works exemplify incommensurability, which the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described as ‘largely impenetrable cultural zones, perfectly coherent

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in and of themselves but largely inaccessible to those who look in from the outside’ (Subrahmanyam 2012, 5). The question of commensurability/incommensurability has important ramifications for historians, as well as anthropologists and literary scholars, who research the interactions of societies in the early modern period. An exchange between Stuart Schwartz, a historian, and Judith Modell (today Schachter), an anthropologist, in 1995 reveals what is at stake for a wide range of scholars and students. The debate originated from a review that Modell wrote criticizing a volume of scholarly essays on encounters, Implicit Understandings, edited by Schwartz (Schwartz 1994) (see Appendix 2.1). The crux of the issue, for the purposes of this essay, is the relationship between ethnography (the source) and the encounter (the historical event). Articulating a view held by many scholars, Modell contended that ethnography creates the encounter. That is, the ethnographic description represents only how the author portrays the encounter and little, if anything at all, about the interaction itself. The only encounter accessible to scholars and students is the one the ethnographer fashioned. Thus, readers of ethnographic literature today cannot hope to get beyond the ethnographer’s value system, prejudices, and agendas (hidden or not) to apprehend the observed. Schwartz countered that such an extreme position renders European descriptions meaningless and casts doubt on what scholars and students can actually know about past societies. He acknowledges that ethnographers narrate the encounter according to their own biases, but maintains that a careful reading of ethnographic sources can produce a genuinely valid historical interpretation. Most scholars recognise that the commensurability/incommensurability of the world views or cultural frames of reference of the different parties lies along a spectrum, dependent on a variety of particular circumstances. Anthony Pagden showed that initially Spanish explorers and imperialists had to apply European concepts to interpret indigenous societies in Mexico and Peru. But over several generations of interactions, Spanish colonialists in the Americas and theologians in Spain developed a more nuanced understanding of Native Americans by comparing ethnographic descriptions from various regions and times (Pagden 1982, 119–45). In many other instances, as traders, missionaries, and empire builders sustained contact with newly encountered societies, all parties developed adapting mechanisms that made the other more familiar. Visual imagery produced by Spanish and Portuguese artists between 1550 and 1650, for example, bore the influence of Mexican, Brazilian, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese art forms. The adoption of techniques and symbols from global areas upon which the Spanish and Portuguese encroached reveals a process of learning and adjusting that diminished incommensurability. Similarly Afghan and South Asian states adapted to British methods of warfare during the course of the 1700s (Subrahmanyam 2012, 24–8). Research in various other points of contact across the early modern world expose the dynamic strategies to understand and adjust to unfamiliar peoples in order to exploit new situations.

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Ethnography formed one of these coping methods. Philip Baldaeus (1632–1671), a Dutch Protestant missionary in South Asia and Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) in the mid-1600s made sense of Hindu traditions by comparing them to the cults and shrines of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Baldaeus (see Excerpt 2.1) and other missionaries believed that Hindu, Buddhist, and local shamanistic worship practices derived from the ancient lineage of peoples that educated European Christians were familiar with in Biblical and classical literature (Vossius 1641; Voetius 1648–1669; Rogerius 1651; Hoornbeeck 1669; Baldaeus 1672). Consequently, ethnography documented an engagement with other societies blending in varying degrees an author’s interpretive viewpoint and a description of an observed society.

Excerpt 2.1: Philip Baldaeus, The Idolatry of the East India Pagans (1703) Baldaeus, Philip (1703), A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, as Also of the Isle of Ceylon. London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 830–901. The Existence of a God or supreme Being is so firmly rooted in the Heart of Mankind, that there is no Nation in the World but what has acknowledged the same. What is alleged to the contrary by some of the Chileses, Tapujars, Brasilians, Madagascarians, as also the inhabitants of Florida, the Caribee Islands, and especially the Cape of Good Hope, must rather be attributed to the want of Knowledge of these Authors, than real Truth. Of this I was sufficiently convinced 1666 when I tarried three Months at the Cape of Good Hope, when I found these Barbarians to perform their Religious Service in the Night time, which I had no opportunity to observe in 1665, when I came that way before. What’s said of Diagoras, Theodorus, Cyrenaicus, Bion, Evemerus, Lucianus, Epicurus, and especially of Protagoras, Abderites and Socrates, and their Denial of the Existence of God, being to be understood only of the Plurality of Gods, which was always rejected by the wiser sort among the Pagans; whence it is that we meet with the Titles of Ens Entium, the Being of all Beings, Ens primum, the first Being, Primus motor & vis motrix, the first moving Cause and Substance, in their Writings. [830] This being laid down as a fundamental rule, we will proceed to give an account of the Idolatry of the Pagans inhabiting the Coast of Malabar and the Indies, on both sides of the Cape Comoryn, viz. at Tutecoryn, Trevanor, Coulang, Calecoulang, Cochin, Cranganor, Calecut, Cananor, as also on the Coast of Coromandel, and the Isle of Ceylon. …

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Historically minded researchers today are turning up an increasing number of encounters that exhibit a great deal of commensurability. A recent study by the historian Kaya Şahin and the literature scholar Julia Schleck points to the ‘commensurable structures, social rules, political ideologies, and personal motivations’ recognised in Muslim empires by Anthony Sherley, an English diplomat in Iran in the early 1600s. They show that Sherley’s Relations of his Travels into Persia drew connections between statecraft and religious traditions among Europeans, Sunni Turks, and Shia Iranians (Şahin and Schleck 2016, 89–99). Likewise, the historian Rudi Matthee has shown that in the 1600s an outpouring of European travellers to the Safavid Empire in Iran utilised particular means of interpreting societies that enabled them to flatten perceptions of difference. Along with other historians, he argues that cross-cultural encounter elicited ‘similarity, convergence, and complementarity rather than stark difference’ (Matthee 2009, 138–40, quote on 140; Marshall 2002, 223). Contemporary perceptions of equivalent structures was a feature of interaction most especially among peoples across Eurasia who had travelled, traded, and battled one another for centuries. The ability of sojourners of all stripes to adjust to different cultures and the parallels that contemporaries perceived between societies pushes back against

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scholarly interpretations that embrace acute incommensurability. Historians focus on change over time and on the ways in which all parties in an encounter exert influence. Thus, theoretical approaches that assume cultures are self-contained structures, inaccessible to outsiders, run counter to the task of historical study.

Modes of analysis The critical focus on ethnographic sources, beginning in the 1970s, coincided with new modes of analysing encounters and identities that have significantly influenced our understanding of early modern history. Three important forms of analysis include ethnohistory, gender, and ethnology. As historians absorbed anthropological methods and perspectives, they have made use of ethnographic descriptions more fully than previously. One approach known as ethnohistory has enabled historians to overcome the problems associated with the one-sided documentation of interactions between Europeans and non-literate societies (for an excellent description of the field from a historian, see Axtell 1982, 3–15). In cases of initial contact in many parts of America, subSaharan Africa, and Oceania, historians face an utter dearth of written sources among native peoples. Combining elements of two disciplines, ethnohistory employs a historian’s attention to development through time with an anthropologist’s concern with cultural analysis at a fixed moment. Ethnohistory borrows from the practice of ‘thick description’ made prominent by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Thick description seeks to contextualise a culture by decoding the symbols, language, and rituals described in ethnographic accounts (Geertz 1973, 3–32). According to James Axtell, a pioneer in ethnohistory, it draws from anthropological concepts about how ethnic groups function in order to help historians piece together ‘the whole culture of an ethnic group’. Axtell further contends that ethnohistory’s most important potential lies in the study of ‘reciprocal relationships between two or more cultures’ along or across a frontier (Axtell 1982, 5–9, quotes on 6). Thus, historians have additional tools to interpret native peoples on their own terms, rather than acceding to the European ethnographer’s bias, which, as we have discussed earlier, was often flagrantly condescending. Ethnohistory has exercised an important influence on the analysis of encounters that resulted from the European missionary campaigns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Soon after Columbus landed off the coast of San Salvador and Vasco Da Gama rowed ashore to Calicut in the 1490s, thousands of missionaries from Catholic religious orders went out to save souls in every area where Spain, Portugal, and France staked out a territorial claim. Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and others crisscrossed the Americas, set up along the coastlines of Africa, India, and penetrated the islands of Southeast Asia. Missionaries also made important, albeit temporary, inroads into Japan and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By virtue of Jesuits and other religious orders, Catholic Christianity became a global religion whose influence remains prevalent around the world today. Protestant proselytisers, much smaller in numbers but equal in dedication, also spread Christianity into regions around

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the globe (Nelson 1980, 72, 85, 198; Salisbury 1986; Mason 2001, 5–27; Strong 2007, 4–8; Parker 2013). The traditional missionary narrative, written by church historians sympathetic to their own denomination, was Eurocentric and triumphalist. Action in this confessional historiography centred on the missionary and his message. Descriptions of Christian heroism, drawn from missionary letters and ethnographic accounts, focused on the evangelistic labour and the degree of success among non-Christian peoples. Since missionaries generally counted and reported the number of converts, historians could quantify the progress of the Christian gospel and make claims about the extent of Christianisation in areas around the world. One church historian, for instance wrote, [h]undreds of missionaries came to the New World and eventually won the large majority of the Indians in the Spanish possessions to an outward acquiescence to the Christian faith … . To be sure, the Christianity so planted did not prove to be so self-propagating as that of Northern and Western Europe. Nor did it succeed in placing the imprint of Jesus so deeply upon the life of the land as had Christianity upon much of Europe. (Latourette 1970, 85) When native peoples did appear in this historiography, they did so largely as passive recipients of Christianity or victims of religious aggression in a coercive colonial context. Church historians sought to assess the authenticity of conversion to Christianity and anchored their judgements in European doctrinal standards. Consequently, the image of native converts suffered by comparison, portrayed as puerile in belief and practice, tainted by their non-Christian cultures. This line of interpretation clings faithfully to the perspectives of missionaries who consistently complained about the intransigent superstition of converts overseas. Relying on close, uncritical readings of missionary ethnographic sources, these narratives represent the superficiality of ‘thin description’. Historical scholarship informed by the perspectives in ethnohistory has focused on a much broader range of missionary encounter. Certainly, large numbers of native Americans, Africans, and Asians did receive baptism and accept Christian teachings, yet scholars now recognise that they did so on their own terms by blending them with their own ways of believing and practising. Catholic missionaries, most notably the Jesuits, even encouraged such intermingling through a conversion strategy of identifying Christianity with certain aspects of indigenous cultures. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) attempted to reconcile Christianity with Confucianism in China, just as his counterpart in India, Robert Nobili (1577–1656), dressed as a Hindu Brahmin and segregated converts into castes. Cases such as these have pushed historians to realise that native peoples and their cultures exerted influence on missionaries. Tracy Neal Leavelle in his study of Jesuit missions in North America noted that conversion in the context of missionary encounters is best

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understood as a ‘plural, dynamic, and flexible concept … that accounts for changes in all participants’ (Leavelle 2011, 8). In her study of the Indians of Totolapan in Mexico, Jennifer Scheper Hughes showed that they attached their own meanings to crucifixes, icons, and images and they crafted their own narratives about the advent of Christian figures into their lands (Hughes 2010, 84–106). Studies on the Philippines and the Kongo show similar patterns. Filipinos mixed traditional and Catholic death rituals and prayed to local spirits and Christian saints. In the Kongo, a young female religious figure, Dona Beatriz, claiming to have a vision of Saint Anthony, led a movement to fuse Christian and African beliefs. She adopted basic Christian tenets, but Africanised them, maintaining that the Kongo was the Holy Land, Christ came from the Kongo, and the early apostles were African (Sweetman 1984, 51–4). Karin Vélez, Sebastian Prange, and Luke Clossey have pointed out that religious interplay also took place between continents, as Christianity went to new lands, then returned to Europe, informed by new perspectives and forms of devotion (Vélez, Prange and Clossey 2012, 353–8). Thus, the preponderant view among current historians who study missionary encounter reflects Hughes’ conclusion that the ‘Christian faith … was not so much forged or coerced but forged in common collective experiences of the sacred’ (Hughes 2010, 85). These revisionist approaches to religious encounter thus blur the dichotomies used to define identity in older confessional scholarship between pagan/Christian, American/European, convert/missionary. Rather, indigenous people and Christians incorporated old myths and new observances in ways that a cleric from a distance, namely Europe, might consider superstitious. But belief and identity coalesced in local communities. Missionaries adapted to and incorporated traditional elements into worship practices and beliefs. Religious belief and practice were in motion. Washing up on the shores of Africa, America, and Asia, Christianity absorbed and was absorbed by myriad groups, who spread it into other cultural zones, and then drifted back to Europe (Vélez, Prange and Clossey 2012, 352). The focus on perceptions of gender norms in overseas interactions has also proven to be an insightful means to investigate profound changes in societies directly affected by sustained engagement. For almost half a century, historians have utilised the lens of gender – the assignment of legal, social, and familial roles based on perceptions of sexual difference – to examine societies and the human relationships in them (for an excellent overview and bibliography see Wiesner-Hanks 2015). Within scholarship on early modern Europe, gender analysis has remained one of the most vibrant areas of recent research, as scholars from many disciplines have investigated the ways in which women and men conformed, transgressed, manipulated, and defied patriarchal structures and norms (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). According to the ideal in pre-modern, Christian Europe, men controlled public and family life while women submitted to male authority. A sizeable majority of Europeans who ventured overseas in the early modern period were male, as were almost all travellers who produced ethnographic material. Regardless of nationality, these men uniformly brought their notions of gender

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roles and hierarchies with them. They soon learned, however, that expectations and practices in many societies differed significantly. Social and economic responsibilities fell along more porous gender lines in Mexico, Peru, and in a large number of North American tribes. In these lands, women often bore the primary duties for agriculture in sedentary societies and for foraging in hunting and in gathering groups. This productive function puzzled Spanish, French, and English colonialists who accounted for it by castigating native men as lazy and effeminate. The exposed hairless bodies of American males confirmed to Spanish and English observers a lack of masculinity, which justified conquest and colonisation to right the defective gendered social order. Colonisation often altered gender roles by pushing indigenous men and enslaved Africans into agriculture and assigning women marginal roles in keeping with European conceits about their work (Amussen and Poska 2012, 343–53). The slave trade decimated populations on the west coast of Africa, as perhaps as many as 16 and 20 million people underwent the horrendous middle passage to the Caribbean and the Americas. African males migrated at far higher rates than women, drastically changing the gender composition in Central Africa, the Bight of Benin, and the Gold Coast. In this void of human capital, women took on increasing responsibilities for agricultural and commercial labour (Manning 1990, 131–3). Yet in other points of encounter, local attitudes simply confounded European plans. Mary Laven, a historian, demonstrated how divergent attitudes about masculinity and sexuality frustrated Jesuit efforts to convert Confucian scholarbureaucrats who wielded tremendous influence at the imperial Chinese court (Laven 2012, 206–12). Confucianists prized family lineage above all else to secure the blessings of their ancestors and to promote the prosperity of the bloodline. The idealisation of celibacy in Catholic Christianity made no sense to Confucians. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci attempted to convince Confucians of the sanctity of celibacy in his missionary treatise The True Lord of Heaven. He failed to make much headway, as Confucians likened Jesuits to eunuchs, who served in many capacities at court, but were reviled by the scholar-bureaucrats. In other missionary settings, such as in the East Indies, the polygamous marriage patterns of Muslims confronted Catholic and Protestant missionaries, seeking to convert individuals and Christianise societies. Historians working on interactions in Southeast Asia and in Spanish America have shown that Europeans actually benefitted in surprising ways from very non-European ways of ordering the social functions of women and men. Though in Europe women did engage in local trade beneath all the prohibitions and restrictions, yet in Southeast Asia, America, and Africa, they were sometimes the primary conduits of commerce. Since males considered trade beneath their dignity, women played leading roles in the commercial networks in the East Indies, Malaysia, and South Asia. For Mexico and Peru, the historians Allyson Poska, Susan Amussen, Inga Clendinnen, and Kimberly Gauderman have established that women’s work also included commercial exchange managing credit markets (Clendennin 1991, 191, 229–30; Gauderman 2003, 71–123; Amussen and Poska 2012, 348–9). Foreign traders coming into the Philippines, East

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Indies, and Malaysia, many of whom were European, recognised the commercial roles women played and sought to gain influence in networks of exchange by cohabitating with or marrying Asian women. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English prospective traders married Balinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipina women, occasionally in temporary unions, to navigate trade and culture in Southeast Asia (Pomeranz and Topik 1999, 6; Gordon 2008, 85–6; Lockard 2010, 228–32). Women also served as important cultural mediators that historians have often overlooked, as gender analysis has taken firmer hold in early modern scholarship. A prominent figure in American Indian Studies, Clara Sue Kidwell has argued that ‘[t]here is an important Indian woman in virtually every major encounter between Europeans and Indians in the New World. As mistresses or wives, they counselled, translated, and guided white men who entered new territory’ (Kidwell 1992, 97–107, quote 97). Some women become visible in European sources. The Mexican interpreter Dona Marina (La Malinche) served as a linguistic guide to Cortes in Mexico (and also bore him a child), the Shoshone navigator Sacagewea assisted Lewis and Clark in exploring the Louisiana Territory, and the Chickahominy girl Pocahontas possibly intervened in relations between her father, a chieftain, and the English colony in Jamestown. Beneath the mythologised stories of Dona Marina, Sacagewea, and Pocahontas stood many other obscure women who enabled Europeans to make their way across new landscapes and among new peoples. In a very different dimension, native women mediated a Christian message that linked European and American audiences. Jodi Bilinkoff, Michelle Molina, and Ulrike Strasser have noted that Catholic priests and missionaries crafted hagiographical texts of saintly Native American women, notably Catherine Tekakwitha and Caterina de San Juan, to foster shared religious values that could link Catholics around the Atlantic world (Bilinkoff 2005; Molina and Strasser 2009). Finally, a third analytical perspective has allowed historians to examine the ways in which global interactions influenced European societies over the course of the early modern period. Thanks to the printing press, the ethnographic accounts of travellers and sojourners of various sorts became available to a wide swath of intellectuals. As theorists read works about Peru, Mexico, the Kongo, India, China, and other areas, they embarked on comparative study of ethnography, which is known (and practised) by modern scholars as ethnology. Historians have utilised early modern ethnology to gauge changing European attitudes toward both peoples around the world and their own identities. One of the pioneering historians in this field of research is Anthony Pagden. He demonstrated that theologians at the University of Salamanca in Spain evolved in their attitudes about native Americans as they compared ethnographic material over the course of the sixteenth century. Initially some of the Salamanca theologians insisted that native peoples were not fully human and thus designated them ‘slaves by nature’, which justified Spanish exploitation. Yet over time, as they read works by Bartolomé de las Casas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bernadino de Sahagún, and others, they came to acknowledge the humanity of

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Americans and the cultural distinctions between their societies (Pagden 1982, 57–108, 146–57). By focusing on early modern ethnological work, modern scholars are realising that sustained contact with people around the world reshaped European attitudes about the world and their place in it. Other historians have identified ethnological perspectives that preceded the age of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Humanists in the Renaissance had focused attention on classical Greek and Roman writers, as well as medieval authors, who had composed accounts about peoples of Asia. European humanists relied on ancient authors and above all the Greek historian Herodotus as a guide to Asian ethnicities, languages, and cultures even before the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century (Rubiés 2000, 83, 338). Though obviously no classical treatments of the Americas existed for European intellectuals, they nevertheless employed classical analogies to try to make sense of American cultures. The historian Sabine MacCormack, for example, showed that Bartolomé de las Casas and Piedro Cieza de León compared the idolatry among Peruvians to pagan rites in the Roman Empire (MacCormack 2006, 632–3). Comparisons between contemporary societies and the ancients were central to Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts to comprehend the religious traditions of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, and shamanists that they were trying to convert (Rubiés 2017, 275–7). Thus, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Renaissance quest to understand the ancient past and its sources blended with the effort by theologians and philosophers to make sense of the new societies Europeans were encountering. The result was the production of large-scale historical works, incorporating the recent ethnographic material, to trace the development of societies around the world down to contemporary times. The Dutch Protestant theologian, Gerhard Vossius, for example, wrote a massive work, Theology of the Gentiles, in which he sought to link the religious beliefs and practices of gentiles (also referred to as pagans and heathens) from his own day back to the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and societies described in the Old Testament (Vossius 1641, 27–35). One leading historian of European ethnology, Joan Pau Rubiés, has astutely noted that this intellectual movement transformed ‘the experience of otherness into a set of narratives’ about societies around the world (Rubiés 2000, 19). Many different scholars have pointed out in a number of significant studies how the ethnographic accounts of societies, customs, and religions during this period of expansion formed the basis for comprehensive reconsiderations about long-held assumptions. Though Europeans had travelled into Asia and North Africa for centuries, the scale and scope of discovery was unprecedented. The large body of ethnographic material from many different regions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia compelled intellectuals at the time to engage with a number of fundamental questions about the world and history. Why did the Americas seem to have no reference in the Bible? Did all humans descend from Adam and Eve? What factors shaped national and ethnic characteristics? How did societies around the world reflect different stages of social development? (Kidd 2006, 19–27). Rubiés has called

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attention to the new philosophical uncertainties, associated with the Enlightenment, that developed from extensive European ethnography. He notes, ‘the unique combination of colonial expansion and intellectual transformation’ in the early modern period facilitated the connections that theorists drew between societies across space and time (Rubiés 2002, 243). The significance of these findings for historians is that the cultural and intellectual movements associated with the emergence of the modern age – Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment – did not simply sprout from European soil. Rather they developed in tandem and in many ways as a response to the engagement with societies around the world.

Conclusion Historians in the last ten to fifteen years have pointed to the far-reaching effects of global encounters on the evolution of European identities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The intellectual crisis spawned by having to contend with a far more complex and diverse world than a traditional Christian world view produced new perspectives. Margaret Jacob, Lynn Hunt, and Wijnand Mijnhardt in a co-authored book have argued that an acceptance of religious diversity in Europe grew out of ethnological preoccupations. They credit Bernard Picart’s and Jean Frederic Bernard’s The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1723) as tipping the scale, though other works were also treating all religions as functionally similar (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010). Further, Jerry Bentley has suggested historians should reconsider the theoretical origins of religious toleration as lying outside the west. These lines of scholarship represent a remarkable about-face in historical perspective. Most writing about European and world history until very recently has assumed a ‘rise of the west’ narrative that proves difficult to abandon (Gran 1996, 1–4). These narratives stress one-sided European dominance, often take ethnographic sources uncritically, and look past the agency of native peoples, especially women. Yet fairly new research, informed by ethnohistory, gender analysis, and ethnology have turned the tables, giving abundant evidence that engagement with the wider world globalised Europe during the early modern period. In overseas environments, local men and women acted as cultural, commercial, and linguistic brokers, enabling missionaries, merchants, and empire builders to adapt to foreign landscapes. Not only did European missionaries convert Americans, Asians, and Africans to Christianity, but English, Dutch, and French men and women became Muslims and adopted native lifestyles in intriguing ways. Thus, the incorporation of global perspectives that these lines of scholarship have pursued has turned interpretations of early modern Europe inside out, making it an increasingly exciting field of study.

Note 1 I am deeply grateful to Julia Schleck, Ulrike Strasser, and Bethany Williamson for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Bibliography (A) Primary sources Acosta SJ, José de (1590). Historia natural y moral de las Indios. Seville: Juan de Leon. Acosta SJ, José de (1624). Historie Naturael en Morael van de Westersche Indien. Amsterdam: Hendrick Laurensz. Acosta SJ, José de (2002). The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. eds. Jane E. Mangen and Walter Mignolo Trans. Frances López-Morillas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baldaeus, Philip (1672). Naukeuringe en waarachtige ontdekking en wederlegginge van de afgoderij der Oost-Indische heydenen. Amsterdam: Janssonius van Wasberge. ——— (1703). A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, as Also of the Isle of Ceylon. London: Awnsham and John Churchill. Correia-Afonso, John SJ (1969). Jesuit Letters and Indian History, 1542–1773. New York: Oxford University Press. Dunn, Oliver and Kelly, James E. Jr. eds. (1989). The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Hakluyt, Richard (1589–1600). Principal Nauigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation. London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, Robert Barker. Hoornbeeck, Johannis (1669). De conversione indorum & gentilium libri duo. Amsterdam: Janssonius van Wasberge. Lafitau, Joseph-François (1724). Moeurs des Savages Ameriquians Comparee des Moeurs Des Premier Temps, 2 Vols. Paris: Saugrain et Charles-Estienne Hocherau. Léry, Jean de (1990). History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America. Trans. Janet Whatley. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Linschoten, Jan Huygen van (1596) Itinerario. Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz. Linschoten, Jan Huygen van(2010). The Voyage of John Huyghen Van Linschoten to the East Indies. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Kircher, Athanasius SJ (1667). China Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Monuments. Amsterdam: Jacob à Meurs. Rogerius, Abraham (1651). Het open-deur tot het verborgen Heydendom. Leiden: Francoys Hackes. Sherley, Antony (1613). Sir Antony Sherley His Relation of His Trauels into Persia. London: Nathaniell Butter and Joseph Bagfet. ——— (1974). Relation of Travels into Persia. Norwood, NJ: W. J. Johnson. Vossius, Gerardus (1641). Theologia Gentili et Physiologia Christiana. Amsterdam: Joh. & Cornelium Blaeu. Voetius, Gisbertus (1648–1669). Selectae Disputationes Theologicae, 5 Vols. Utrecht: J. A. Wormser.

(B) Secondary literature Akbari, Suzanne Conklin (2009). Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Amussen, Susan D. and Poska, Allyson M. (2012). Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of European Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Journal of Global History 7.3 (November), 342–63.

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Axtell, James (1982). The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentley, Jerry H. (1996). Cross Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History. American Historical Review 101.3 (June), 749–70. Bilinkoff, Jodi (2005). Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bisaha, Nancy (2004). Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boettcher, Susan R. (2004). German Orientalism in the Age of Confessional Consolidation: Jacob Andreae’s Thirteen Sermons on the Turk. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 24.2, 101–15. Charnley, Joy (1998). Pierre Bayle: Reader of Travel Literature. Bern: Lang. Clendennin, Inga (1991). The Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Harold (2007). Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dening, Greg (1980). Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. Ditchfield, Simon (2010). What Did Natural History Have to Do with Salvation? José de Acosta SJ (1540–1600) in the Americas. Studies in Church History 46, 144–9. Frisch, Andrea (2004). The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. Gandhi, Leela (1998). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Gauderman, Kimberly (2003). Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Gordon, Stewart (2008). When Asia was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the ‘Riches of the East’. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gran, Peter (1996). Beyond Eurocentricism: A New View of Modern World History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Gunn, Geoffrey C. (2003). First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Harris, Steven J. (1999). Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge. In: John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 212–40. Higgins, Iain Macleod (1997). Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hughes, Jennifer Scheper (2010). Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunt, Lynn, Jacob, Margaret C. and Mijnhardt, Wijnand (2010). The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Iglesia, Ramón (1969). Columbus, Cortés: And Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Johnson, Carina L. (2011). Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidd, Colin (2006). The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidwell, Clara Sue (1992). Indian Women as Cultural Mediators. Ethnohistory 39.2, 97–107. Lach, Donald F. (1965). Asia in the Making of Europe: Century of Discovery, 2 Vols. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Larner, John (1999). Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Latourette, Kenneth Scott (1970) A History of the Expansion of Christianity, Vol. 3, Three Centuries of Advance A.D. 1500- A.D. 1800. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Laven, Mary (2012) Jesuits and eunuchs: Representing Masculinity in late Ming China. History and Anthropology 23, 199–214. Leavelle, Tracy Neal (2011). The Catholic Calumet: Conversions in French and Indian North America: Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lockard, Craig A. (2010). ‘The Sea Common to All’: Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, ca. 1400–1750. The Journal of World History 21.2, 219–47. MacCormack, Sabine (2006). Gods, Demons, and Idols in the Andes. Journal of the History of Ideas 67.4 (October), 632–633. Maclean, Gerald (2007). Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Manning, Patrick (1990). Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, P. J. (2002). Afterword: The Legacies of Two Hundred Years of Contact. In: H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rugby eds., The Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 223–38. Mason, J. C. S. (2001). The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760–1800. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Matar, Nabil (1998). Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthee, Rudi (2009). The Safavids under Western Eyes: Seventeenth-Century European Travelers to Iran. Journal of Early Modern History 13.2, 137–71. McJannet, Linda and Andrea, Bernadette (2011). Introduction: Islamic Worlds in Early Modern English Literature. In: idem. eds., Early Modern England and Atlantic Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–20. Molina, J. Michelle and Strasser, Ulrike (2009). Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity. In: Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf eds., Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 156–79. Nelson, E. Clifford (1980). Lutheranism in North America. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg. Pagden, Anthony (1982). The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Charles H. (2010). Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2013). Converting Souls across Cultural Borders: Dutch Calvinism and Early Modern Missionary Enterprises. Journal of Global History 8.1, 50–71. Pomeranz, Kenneth and Topik, Steven (1999). The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. New York: Routledge.

Poska, Allyson (2016). Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Roberts, Mary(2000). Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubiés, Joan Pau (2002). Travel Writing and Ethnography. In: Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 242–60. ——— (2007). Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——— (2017). Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions. Studies in Church History 53 (June), 272–310. Şahin, Kaya and Schleck, Julia (2016). Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’s Relation of His Trauels (1613) in a Global Context. Renaissance Quarterly 69.1 (Spring), 80–115. Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Salisbury, Neal (1986). Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot. In: Roger L. Nichols ed., The American Indian: Past and Present. New York: Wiley, 73–88. Schwartz, Stuart B. ed. (1994). Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Joan W. (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American Historical Review 91.5 (December), 1053–75. Sharafuddin, Mohammed (1994). Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the East. New York: Tauris. Strong, Rowan (2007). Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2007). Forcing the Doors of Heathendom: Ethnography, Violence, and the Dutch East India Company. In: Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley eds., Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 131–53. ——— (2012). Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sweetman, David (1984). Women Leaders in African History. Exeter, NH: Heinemann. Todorov, Tzvetan (1999). The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Vélez, Karin, Prange, Sebastian R. and Clossey, Luke (2012). Religious Ideas in Motion. In: Douglas Northrup ed., A Companion to World History. London: Wiley, 352–64. Vitkus, Daniel (1999). Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Europe. In: David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto eds., Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other. New York: Macmillan, 207–30. Wear, Andrew (1995). Medicine in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. In: Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter and Andrew Wear eds., The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207–361. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (2015). Gender and Sexuality. In: Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry E. Wiesner Hanks eds., The Cambridge World History, Vol. 6, the Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE: Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133–56.

Appendix

Appendix 2.1 Modell, Judith (1997). Review: From Ethnographies to Encounters: Differences and Others. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27.3, 481–495. … encounters come out of ethnography – understandings of the stranger, the sailor, and the savage. Encounters do not lead to ethnographies, but ethnographies create encounters. My claim involves rethinking the concept of ethnography and understanding what ethnography does. What impact does ethnography have on the changes that Europeans call history? An answer to that question requires examining the unequal power of different kinds of ethnography. Ethnographies are ‘understandings’ of the other. They are also the forms in which those understandings are constructed, presented, revised, and received. The defining feature of an ethnography, then is the process of translating seen into scene, gathering the data ‘out there’, not a managed scripted performance. By that definition, anyone can and everyone does do ethnography – despite the appropriation of the term by anthropology. Hence, ethnographies are the figments of anyone’s imagination, since the act of playing is not limited to those who are disciplined … Past and other operated crucially in human lives, through the medium of ethnography. Both become forces in events when transcribed into the dramatic form called ethnography. [482, 484] Schwartz, Stuart B. (1998). Encounters of another Kind. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28.3, 397–404. … encounters come out of ‘implicit ethnographies,’ preexisting understandings and expectations of self and other that pattern and mold historical encounters –

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on both sides of those meetings. Not only did Europeans have ethnographies; so too did the ‘others.’ … The reality of the meeting and of the subsequent interactions causes both sides to change, refine, and alter their understandings and expectations. Thus, preconceptions and experience ‘create’ encounters, but that is not the end of it. Encounters, or contacts, have a history that is constructed from the observations and experiences of everyone involved, as well as from the relationships of power. There is a dynamic relationship between preconceptions/expectations and experience/observation that takes place on both sides of the encounter. [The] belief that ‘ethnographies create encounters’ is an extreme idealist position … it represents the ‘nobody here but us observers’ school. To deny … that encounters influence the creation of ethnographies is to throw out observation altogether, including about 100 years of anthropological field work. [400, 401]

3

Gender and social structures Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

In the many women’s marches held around the world on 21 January 2017, buttons and T-shirts proclaimed their wearers as ‘intersectional feminists’, a term people now also use to describe themselves on their blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter or Tumblr posts. In doing so, they pick up an idea that originated four decades ago with the Black feminist lesbian activist Combahee River Collective that ‘the major systems of oppression are interlocking’, a concept that in 1989 the legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw termed ‘intersectionality’. In this understanding, the nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialised in terms of and by means of them (Combahee River Collective 1983; Crenshaw 1989; for recent discussions of intersectionality see Signs 2013 and Forum 2016). Before its advent as a political slogan and social identity, intersectionality was both a theoretical perspective and a method, especially among scholars of women and gender, responding to critiques by women of colour that the experiences of white women had been seen as representative of all women. Women’s historians increasingly moved away from talking about the ‘status of women’ in general, and examined differences and hierarchies among women along many lines and the ways these intersected. They thus viewed gender in conjunction with other social structures and identities, as I will in this essay. Before this could happen, however, historians needed to know something about the status of women at all, and ‘gender’ needed to be turned into something other than a term in linguistics. Both of these developments resulted from the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when activists, students, and scholars asserted that women are part of history, and history that does not include women is incomplete. Research and teaching exploded, and by the late 1970s, hundreds of colleges and universities in various parts of the world offered courses in women’s history. In the 1980s, scholars familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and to use the word ‘gender’ to describe these culturally created and often unstable systems. They made a distinction between ‘biological’ sex and ‘socially constructed’ gender, though recognised that the line between the two was often fuzzy.

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Historians interested in gender asserted that it was an appropriate category of analysis when looking at all historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. Every political, intellectual, religious, economic, social, and even military change had an impact on the actions and roles of men and women, and, conversely, a culture’s gender structures influenced every other structure or development. People’s notions of gender shaped not only the way they thought about men and women, but the way they thought about their society in general. Gender was thus a totalising concept, but it overlapped, conflicted, connected, and complicated other categories of difference. As Joan Scott put it in an extremely influential 1986 article: ‘Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott 1986, 1053–75; see also Forum 2008). Thus hierarchies in other realms of life were often expressed in terms of gender, with dominant individuals or groups described in masculine terms and dependent ones in feminine. These ideas in turn affected the way people acted, though explicit and symbolic ideas of gender could also conflict with the way men and women chose or were forced to operate in the world. Historians of early modern Europe were prominent among those who created women’s and gender history. As did historians of all periods, they began by asking what women contributed to the developments traditionally viewed as central, in a search for what Natalie Davis, one of these pioneers, termed ‘women worthies’, though she herself also studied peasants, artisans, adolescents, and the poor, as well as popular rituals through which gender hierarchies were both questioned and maintained (Davis 1975/76, 83–103; see also Bock 1989) (see Appendix 3.1). They asked: How were women involved in the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution? Who were the great women artists/musicians/scientists/rulers? How did women’s work serve capitalist expansion? What was women’s role in political movements such as the English Civil War, the French Revolution, or other revolts? Scholars unearthed new sources to reveal the experiences of women, and used traditional sources in innovative ways (for references and discussion see Wiesner-Hanks 2019). This work began for western Europe and gradually expanded to eastern Europe. These early studies are generally narrative, and may now seem to be undertheorised and either overly celebratory or overly pessimistic in that they often highlight either women’s agency or their oppression. It is important to remember, however, that in the 1970s and 1980s, the simple statements that women did preach, paint, work, compose, protest, and engage in other forms of public activity in the early modern period were quite novel. They were also seen as threatening in many quarters, a situation that continued for decades, as female scholars in Germany, for example, reported that they left publications about women or gender off their curriculum vitae, as they feared these would prevent them from getting jobs. Those of us engaged in research at that point – most of us young and female – all experienced bafflement, if not hostility, from

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archivists, colleagues, and (sometimes) doctoral advisors: ‘But women didn’t work in this city in the sixteenth century!’ ‘Why would you want to study such a minor figure (like Christine de Pizan or Artemisia Gentileschi or Katherine Zell or Olympe de Gouges) when you could work on someone important (like Montaigne or Michelangelo or Calvin or Robespierre)?’ Such challenges came not only from more traditional political or intellectual historians, but also from those in the relatively new field of social history, whose connections with New Left and Marxist politics led them to view class as the only category of analysis worth studying. Along with exploring women’s actions, scholars also investigated what effects the developments of the early modern period had on women, and how the female experience in such developments differed from the male, thus using gender as a category of analysis though sometimes not yet labelling it that way. This line of questioning resulted in the reconsideration of several major historical concepts. Joan Kelly, for example, began with a simple question, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ (Kelly 1978). Her answer of ‘No, at least not during the Renaissance’, led to rethinking the Renaissance, as historians, literary scholars, and art historians attempted to confirm, refute, modify, or nuance her answer (Rose 1985; Ferguson, Quilligan and Vickers 1986). Scholars pointed to the highly gendered nature of the Renaissance’s anthropological vision, when man was to be measure of all things, which they view as one of the roots of the gendered notion of citizenship that developed in the eighteenth century (Hufton 1992; King 1993; Hull 1997). More recent feminist scholarship has moved away from this bleak view somewhat, exploring ways in which a few wealthy urban women boldly claimed the humanist education that was the centre of the Renaissance, and regarded the new learning as liberatory (Robin 2007). Art historians have similarly traced both the restrictions on female artists, who rarely had formal apprenticeships and were excluded from the academies that developed in the period, and the paintings, etchings, prints, and needlework that they made. The works of female artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Judith Leyster (see Figure 3.1) received detailed analyses and major museum exhibits, and their price on the art market has gone up significantly. Kelly’s challenging question also contributed to the broader examination of the whole notion of historical periodisation. If a particular development had little, or indeed a negative, effect on most women, can we still call a period a ‘golden age’, a ‘Renaissance’, or an ‘Enlightenment’? Can we continue to view the seventeenth century, during which thousands of women were burned as witches on the European continent, as the period of ‘the spread of rational thought’ or ‘the rise of science’? Such questions extended beyond the early modern period and to other social hierarchies as well: For example, can the period of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, when tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced from their homelands, still be labelled a period of ‘the expansion of democracy’?

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Figure 3.1 Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait (c. 1630). In this oil painting from what is known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art, Judith Leyster portrays herself at work, painting the type of genre scene of a laughing musician that was popular with well-to-do Dutch urban residents. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Questioning the term ‘Renaissance’ was joined in the 1990s by a questioning of the term ‘early modern’, which had been created in the 1940s in economic history, but by the late 1970s was being used in political and social history as well, and then more broadly in research, publications, and teaching, especially in English- and German-language works. ‘Early modern’ generally became the label of choice for scholarship on women and gender, with learned societies, book series, and as of 2006, a scholarly journal, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Despite its ubiquity, however, historians, social scientists, and literary scholars noted – and continue to do so – that there are problems with this term, as it assumes there is something that can unambiguously be called ‘modernity’, usually set against ‘traditional’ in a teleological linear trajectory in which the driving force was Europe (Goldstone 1998, 249–84; Starn 2002, 296–307). For women’s and gender history it posed additional problems, as the developments that have traditionally marked 1450 or 1500 as the beginning of a new era – the

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European voyages of discovery, the printing press, gunpowder weaponry, the development of nation-states, the expansion of pre-industrial capitalism, the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and the Protestant Reformation – have been told as a story of men, though rarely explicitly so: men in ships, male printers, male merchants and investors, male soldiers and generals, male officials and a very male Luther. Thus ‘early modern’ might be another example of using a periodisation for women’s history drawn rather unreflectively from men’s. One of the most powerful voices arguing that ‘early modern’ has just as many problems as ‘Renaissance’ has been the medieval historian Judith Bennett, who in a number of publications used examples from women’s work experiences and other areas of life to challenge what she terms the ‘assumption of a dramatic change in women’s lives between 1300 and 1700’. She notes that historians who focus on issues other than women are questioning the ‘master narrative of a great transformation’ and asserts that ‘women’s history should ally itself with those who are questioning the master narrative’ because ‘the paradigm of a great divide in women’s history is undermined by many factual anomalies’ (Bennett 1992, 165). Bennett then broadened her focus and called for an emphasis on continuities in women’s history and on what she terms ‘patriarchal equilibrium’ across all periods in many realms of life (Bennett 1997) (see Appendix 3.2). Most historians – myself included – continue to use the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, however, though we are more conscious about our decision, and use them more as short-hand for certain periods than as value labels (Wiesner-Hanks 2008). Bennett’s call to examine continuities along with change developed from her studies of women’s work, an important line of research that began in the 1980s, taking its theoretical underpinnings from the feminist critique of Marxist analysis and explorations of the relations between gender and class hierarchies (see the important article by Hartmann 1979; Seccombe 1992). As had the pioneering study of Alice Clark published in 1919, historians examined the effects of economic change – especially the expansion of commercial capitalism – on women’s work, generally seeing these, as had Clark, as negative, or at best as mixed (Wiesner 1986; Howell 1990; Clark 1992/1919; Sharpe 1996: Chojnacka 2001). Very recently some economic historians have argued that ‘girl power’ – single young women’s wage labour and investments – was essential in the economic growth of northwest Europe and thus in the ‘rise of the West’, and that this offered an example of women shaping their world, what is usually termed ‘agency’ (Moor and van Zanden 2010). Others caution that girl power ‘was not necessarily girl empowerment especially during a period of falling real wages when a longer period in service was required to accumulate the resources needed to set up an independent household upon marriage’, and that a young woman’s work within her own family’s household production unit might also contribute to economic expansion (Shepard 2015a, 13; Humphries and Weisdorf 2015; Dennison and Ogilvie 2014). Research into work has examined continuities along with change, finding that much women’s work remained, as it had been in the Middle Ages, low status, badly paid, and rarely a full-time

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occupation. These qualities continued long after the early modern period, into the industrial and post-industrial economies, which indicates that gender structures may have been more important determinants of work experience than economic systems or production processes across a very long time period. Along with studying the work people were doing, historians have examined the meaning of work, as they came to recognise that their basic categories of analysis when examining work were not value-free and self-evident, but shaped by gender: what early modern (and all) cultures define as ‘work’ is highly gendered, with the same tasks regarded as ‘work’ when done by men regarded as ‘assisting’ or ‘housework’ or even not work at all when done by women, particularly when these are done in the household and do not involve pay (Joyce 1987). Trying to avoid such evaluations and learn what men, women, and children were actually doing, Maria Ågren and a group of Swedish scholars have developed an innovative analytical method, in which they trace work through the verbs used in a wide variety of sources, which allows them to assess more accurately the incidence, character, and division of work in an era when many people did multiple tasks throughout the course of the day (Ågren 2017). The definitions of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ labour were (and are) similarly gendered, with tasks done by women, such as making lace or unweaving silk cocoons, not regarded – or paid – as skilled, though they took as much training and dexterity as similar tasks done by men, such as silver-smithing or glass making. In the early modern economy, women were much less likely than men to have received formal training or an apprenticeship, although surviving apprenticeship contracts indicate that they occasionally were, particularly if learning a trade was combined with being a domestic servant (see Excerpt 3.1).

Excerpt 3.1: Apprenticeship contract from Paris, 1540 Paris, Archives Nationales, Minutier central, Étude XXXIII/25, 10 May 1540. In: Monica Chojnacka and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds. (2002). Ages of Woman, Ages of Man: Sources in European Social History, 1400–1750. Translated by Carol Loats. London: Pearson. Jehan Couderet, compagnon [journeyman] maker of tennis equipment living at Saint Marcel in Paris near the area of the Clos Saint Genevieve, parish Saint Estienne du Mont in Paris, affirms that he has given and placed as a servant, from the first day of this present month and year for the next two years, Jehanne Couderet, his daughter, present, aged nine years or so. [He has placed his daughter] with Guyon Blondeau, of the said profession, living at the Clos de Chardonnet in Paris, here present, taking and retaining the said Jehanne as his servant during the said time. [Blondeau] has promised and promises to supply and deliver to her the things she needs in terms of drink and food, fire, bed, lodging, and light;

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Scholarship over the last several decades has also paid more attention to economic activities that do not involve production, such as trade, property ownership, loaning and borrowing money, and consumption. Alexandra Shepard, for example, analyses the way thousands of men and women across the social spectrum in England described themselves and their property and activities when seeking to prove their creditworthiness and thus social worth (Shepard 2015b; see also Hubbard 2012). Clare Crowston similarly emphasises the importance of credit in the economic and political power structures of Paris, where a fashionable appearance was essential for both men and women seeking to enhance or maintain their reputations (Crowston 2013). Trade in consumer goods has long been studied by economic historians, who have concentrated on issues of supply and organisation. Historians interested in issues of gender put more focus on demand, noting that it was often women who consumed and purchased these new items. Brewing and drinking tea became part of the lives of urban women in some countries, especially England, and even domestic servants bought their own teapots. Servants, and other relatively poor women, chose to spend their income on other ‘frivolous’ consumer goods as well, such as parasols, fans, hats, hand mirrors, and lace. Middle-class women bought more and fancier clothing and home furnishings, paying attention not only to quality and price but also to changing styles, which they learned about through printed works and shop displays. A dramatic increase in the importation of sugar – and its production in tropical colonies – was perhaps the most obvious result of women’s changing tastes, but their demands for certain types of decorative objects, garments, and foodstuffs – feathers, small tea tables, flowers, curtains, lace collars and cuffs, Chinese tea sets, lighter undergarments, sugared cakes – also shaped the development of trade

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both within Europe itself and between Europe and the rest of the world. These newer studies are thus cognisant of both the role of gender and the global context, paying attention to the way in which trade relationships not only formally linked states, but informally linked women and men across vast areas (Brewer and Porter 1993; Pointon 1998; Findlen 2013; Anishanslin 2016). Kelly’s challenge to accepted periodisation and the greater attention paid to consumption are two examples of the way focussing on women and gender has led to new lines of historical investigation, as historians have realised the limitations of simply trying to fit women into historical developments largely derived from the male experience, an approach rather sarcastically described as ‘add women and stir’. Such new areas of research often centre on women’s physiological experience – menstruation, pregnancy, motherhood – and the ways in which women gave meaning to these experiences, and on private or domestic matters, such as friendship networks, family devotional practices, or unpaid household labour. Because so little of this was documented in public sources during the early modern period, this research has required a great amount of archival digging and the use of literary and artistic sources. This emphasis on women’s private and domestic experiences has been challenged by some historians, however, who warn of the dangers of equating women’s history with the history of the family or of accepting without comment a division between public and private in which women are relegated to the private sphere. They see a primary task of early modern historians as the investigation of how divisions between what was considered ‘public’ and what was considered ‘private’ were developed and contested. Some scholars hold that this period is one of the exclusion of women from many areas of public life and power at the very time larger groups of men were given access, though others emphasise that this exclusion was more theoretical than real (Landes 1998; Smith 1998). Along with studies of gender and the economy and considerations of the boundaries between public and private, research into gender and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations has also expanded over the last thirty years. This started as research on women, with scholars examining women active in iconoclastic riots and religious wars, women defending convent life in word and deed, women preaching in the early years of the Protestant Reformation, pastors’ wives creating a new ideal for women, women defying their husbands in the name of their faith, women converting their husbands or other household members, women writing and translating religious literature, women dying as martyrs for their faith (Focal Point 2001). Other work has focused on the ideas of the reformers and the effects of the Reformations on notions of gender, including ideas about masculinity, patterns of sexuality, and the family. This work has emphasised the differences between the ideas and ideals of the reformers, analysed the institutions that were established and ended, highlighted women’s agency and the actions of men supporting and restricting that agency, and discussed the great differences between northern and southern Europe, rural and urban, rich and poor on nearly every issue related to the Reformations. Older

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research tended to take a definite stance on whether the Protestant Reformation was good or bad for women, but this question has generally fallen out of favour, in part because of the stress on difference and diversity – which women? Where? Married or single? Old or young? Urban or rural? Mothers or childless? It has also fallen out of favour as more research explicitly focuses on gender and includes men in its purview, or examines the way social and economic changes that preceded the Reformation, such as the marital pair becoming the basic production and consumption unit in Europe, shaped what are often seen as changes resulting from Reformation ideology (Wunder 1998). After the Reformations, Protestant and Catholic religious authorities worked with rulers and other secular political officials to make people’s behaviour more orderly and ‘moral’. This process, generally termed ‘social discipline’ or ‘the reform of popular culture’, has been studied intensively over the last several decades in many parts of Europe, often with an intersectional approach that notes the way gender and class hierarchies reinforced one another (Focal Point 2003). Scholarship on social discipline recognises the medieval roots of such processes as the restriction of sexuality to marriage, the encouragement of moral discipline and sexual decorum, the glorification of heterosexual married love, and the establishing of institutions for regulating and regularising behaviour, but it also emphasises that all of these processes were strengthened in the sixteenth century and involved church bodies, such as the Inquisition, as well as secular courts and other institutions. The intensification of social discipline brought changes in men’s lives as men. For craft masters, merchants, and other men of the middling ranks, the qualities of an ideal man increasingly centred on their role as heads of household: permanence, honesty, thrift, control of family members and servants. Manhood was linked to marriage, so that men whose class and age would have normally conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not participate to the same level as their married brothers; in Protestant areas, this link between marriage and authority even included the clergy. Unmarried men were viewed as increasingly suspect, for they were also not living up to what society viewed as their proper place in a gendered social order. Some of these men, such as journeymen in Germany and France, recognised that they could never become heads of household, so created alternative concepts of masculinity and masculine honour clearly distinct from the dominant one. They came to view their unmarried, unattached state, which had originally been forced on them by guild masters, as a positive thing, and emphasised their freedom from political duties rather than their lack of political rights. They regarded loyalty to all-male journeymen’s organisations as extremely important, making a ‘true’ man, for them, one who proved his masculinity through drinking and fighting, actions that city councils and other political authorities attempted to control. Such notions of manhood extended to soldiers, especially the many mercenaries who made up the majority of the armies that fought in the dynastic and religious wars of the period (see Figure 3.2). The amplification of social discipline after the Reformation had an even greater impact on women’s lives. Laws regarding such issues as adultery, divorce, ‘lascivious carriage’ (flirting), enclosure of members of religious

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Figure 3.2 Urs Graf, ‘Two Mercenaries and a Woman’ (1524). In this woodcut, Urs Graf highlights the masculinity of the two flamboyantly dressed mercenaries through the position of their short swords, and depicts their constant companion, Death, above, holding an hour-glass. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

orders, interdenominational and interracial marriage were rarely gender neutral. The enforcement of such laws was even more discriminatory, for though undisciplined sexuality and immoral behaviour of both women and men were portrayed from the pulpit or press as a threat to Christian order, it was women’s lack of discipline that was most often punished, particularly when the women were domestic servants, casual labourers, and other women of low status in the social order. Whether they were studying the arts, the economy, religion, or any other realm of life, historians in the 1980s and 1990s were confronted by challenges to their basic approaches and assumptions that are usually labelled the ‘linguistic turn’ or the ‘cultural turn’. These drew on the ideas of literary and linguistic theory – often loosely termed ‘deconstruction’ or ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘postmodernism’ – about the indeterminacy of truth and the power of language.

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Because historical sources always present a biased and partial picture, and historians themselves have particular perspectives and motivations, went this line of argument, to suggest that one can fully determine what happened or why is foolish or misguided (Jenkins 2003; cf. Chapter 17: Turns and perspectives). What historians should do instead is to analyse discourse – the written and visual materials of the past – to determine the way various things are represented in them and their possible meanings. Some theorists argued that discourse determines, rather than simply describes, our world; knowledge is passed down through language, and knowledge is power. This emphasis on the relationship of knowledge to power, and on the power of language, made post-structuralism attractive to feminist scholars in many disciplines, who themselves already emphasised the ways language and other structures of knowledge excluded women. Some historians of gender were thus prominent exponents of the linguistic turn, and many analysed representations of women, men, the body, sexual actions, and related topics in their research, using theories and methods drawn from literature. They asserted that because people’s experiences differed so much based on their class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, ‘women’ and ‘men’ are simply culturally constructed linguistic categories without any intrinsic meaning (Riley 1988; Scott 1988). Gender was performative, some argued, that is, a role that was developed through repetition; it was something one did rather than something one was, an idea that was also applied to sexual orientation, which was seen as completely socially constructed (Greenberg 1990; Butler 2000, 2004). The many cultures around the world that had more than two genders – the most famous of which are Native American two-spirit people – provided evidence for this, and those who thought otherwise were judged naive ‘essentialists’. Even sex might be largely cultural, an idea for which biological research provided support, as no physical indicator of sex difference – external and internal genitalia, chromosomes, hormones – has proven to be a sharp line; rather than a dichotomy, sex is a spectrum (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Valentine 2007). The linguistic turn also elicited harsh responses from other historians, however, including some who focused on women and gender (for the different perspectives in this debate, see: Nicholson 1990). They asserted that it denied women agency in both past and present by positing unchangeable linguistic structures. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history and asserting they were part of history, ‘history’ became just a text and ‘women’ just a historical construct? If gender, sexuality, race, and other categories are simply unstable and changing historical or social constructs, how do we understand the very real oppression that many in the past (and present) experienced, and perhaps use this knowledge to work for change? Advocates of cultural studies argued that the field was politically engaged because it critically examined the dynamics and cultural practices of power. Disagreements were sharp and sometimes personal, but by the 2000s, that debate seemed to have run its course. As Lynn Hunt, a historian of eighteenth-century France and a prominent voice in the cultural turn, has recently

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commented, ‘most historians have simply moved on, incorporating insights from postmodern positions but not feeling obliged to take a stand on its epistemological claims’ (Hunt 2015, 39). Debates about the boundary between gender and sex and the cultural construction of both have tended to rely on biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology for their evidence, but historians and literary scholars have also discovered extensive debates about these boundaries in the Renaissance and early modern period, which can provide material for contemporary discussions. In both learned and popular works, people were fascinated by hermaphrodites, and discussed whether a person could possibly change from one sex to the other (Long 2006; Rothstein 2015). Woodcuts and engravings of ‘manly’ women and ‘womanly’ men were produced by many artists, and people debated whether a woman’s having to do tasks normally associated with men might somehow affect her normal female functions. Both in pamphlets and reported gossip, for example, people in England discussed whether Queen Elizabeth still menstruated and had a normal female anatomy, or whether her being both a virgin and a virago might have shaped her physiology (Levin 1994). The early modern period saw many queens ruling in Europe, not just Elizabeth, which led to a debate about female rule, one that really involved two very modern issues: Can gender be separated from sex? (This issue was conceptualised in the period as whether a queen might be clearly female in her body and sexuality, but still exhibit the masculine qualities regarded as necessary in a ruler because of traits she had inherited or learned.) What is more important, gender or class? (In other words, would a woman’s being born into a ruling family allow her to overcome the limitations of being born female?) As Constance Jordan has pointed out, defenders of female rule clearly separated sex from gender, and even approached an idea of androgyny as a desirable state for the public persona of female monarchs (Jordan 1990). Thus debates about third genders and transgender individuals are not simply a twenty-first century phenomenon. As noted above, early modern sources have also been mined for evidence of the construction and performance of masculinity. The English Civil War, for example, is often portrayed as a battle between Royalist cavaliers in their long hair and fancy silk knee-breeches opposing Puritan parliamentarians with their short hair and sombre clothing, thus clearly involving two conflicting notions of masculinity, though only after scholars became attuned to gender did they notice this was so. Parliamentary criticism of the court was often expressed in overtly gendered and sexualised terminology, with frequent veiled or open references to aristocratic weakness and inability to control the passions. In this instance as well as that of craft masters and journeymen, ideas about masculinity were to some degree class-specific, defined in relation not only to ideas about femininity, but also to notions of manhood developing among other male groups (Roper 1996; Long 2002; Shepard 2003). As Hilda Smith has pointed out, in the early modern period men were invariably viewed as ranked according to social categories, whereas women were often lumped together, viewed as a group united by their sex (Smith 2002).

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Notions of masculinity were also important symbols in early modern political discussions. Queen Elizabeth was not the only ruler to realise that people expected monarchs to be male, and that qualities judged masculine by her peers – physical bravery, stamina, wisdom, duty – should be emphasised whenever a monarch chose to appear or speak in public. The more successful male rulers recognised this as well, and tried to connect themselves whenever possible with qualities and objects judged male, though sometimes with ironic results. Jeffrey Merrick has demonstrated, for example, that French monarchs and their supporters used the image of a beehive under a ‘king bee’ as a model of harmony under royal rule and a community whose existence depended on the health of its monarch; this is why Louis XIV’s Versailles is filled with illustrations of beehives (Merrick 1988, 1993). Even scientists spoke of the beehive in this way, for they regarded nature as the best source of examples for appropriate political structures, which they then termed ‘natural’. When the invention of the microscope made it clear the king bee was a queen, both royal propagandists and scientists tried to downplay her sex as long as possible, embarrassed that nature would provide such a demonstration of ‘unnatural’ female power. By the eighteenth century the sex of the queen bee was no longer ignored, but her role was now described as totally maternal, a symbol of motherhood rather than monarchy. A concern with masculinity, and particularly with demonstrating the autonomy expected of a man, pervades the political writings of Machiavelli, who used ‘effeminate’ to describe the worst kind of ruler (Pitkin 1984). Effeminate in the sixteenth century carried slightly different connotations than it does today, however, for strong heterosexual passion was not a sign of manliness, but could make one ‘effeminate’, that is to say, dominated by as well as similar to a woman. English commentators, for example, described Irish men as effeminate and inferior because they let both their wives and their sexual desires influence their actions. Strong same-sex attachments, on the other hand, were often regarded as a sign of virility, as long as they were accompanied by actions judged honourably masculine, such as effective military leadership, and not accompanied by actions judged feminine, such as emotional outbursts (Howard 1988). Early modern society thus provides strong evidence of the culturally constructed and historically changing nature of sexuality as well as gender, and early modern historians and literary scholars have been active in the development of the history of sexuality as a field of study. Randolph Trumbach, for example, argues that the widely accepted idea that homosexual ‘identity’ did not emerge until the late nineteenth century needs to be modified, for there were certainly men, and perhaps women, in eighteenth-century England who thought of themselves as having a permanent ‘sexual orientation’ toward members of the same sex, though they of course did not use the terms ‘homosexual’ or ‘sexual orientation’, both products of the nineteenth century (Trumbach 1999) (see Excerpt 3.2). Valerie Traub finds that lesbianism may have been an ‘identity’ even earlier, particularly in literature, and Susan Lanser asserts that concerns about female same-sex relations intersected with broader ideas about power, difference, order, and identity (Traub 2002, 2016; Lanser 2014).

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Excerpt 3.2: Police report of a man arrested for sodomy, France 1723 Bibliothèque de Arsenal, Paris, Ms 10,254, 21 October 1723. In: Monica Chojnacka and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds. (2002). Ages of Woman, Ages of Man: Sources in European Social History, 1400–1750. Translated by Jeffrey Merrick. London: Pearson. LEONARD GOBERT, apprentice mason living at the quarries near Charenton, native of Paris, 45 years old, unmarried Said Gobert has been known for many years as an infamous sod[omite] and as a corrupter of young folks, as well as having in the past supplied such to Monsieur the duke de Brancas. For 5 or 6 years he has been living on the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, where he did not have a good reputation, always having with him young folks from around the neighborhood, whom he lured to his place and made sleep with him … And since that time, this infamous man has continued in more or less the same way and in order to hide his cards better bought for life a little house at the quarries that he fixed up as he liked and where he has lived with a young man for four years, as he has stated and also said that he was a carpenter and that he put him up as a good friend … Being this day Monday 21 October in the Luxembourg gardens around six o’clock in the evening, I encountered the said Gobert, who was looking for a good time there in the places where all the infamous men go … [He told me] about a certain Cadeau who was arrested by order of the king by Monsieur Simmonet for the same reason, who went to the Mississippi [i.e., was banished to the French colony of Louisiana as a punishment], with whom he had lived for awhile as man and wife and that he missed him all the time. Said Gobert told me he did not like women at all and that his whole pleasure was to have something to do with good-looking boys and you might say he had been of this inclination all his life. Then said Gobert having suggested to me that we go drink a mug because he did not want to do anything in said garden, because they arrested people every day and that we would be safe in a tavern to amuse ourselves, having left said garden by the gate in the side of the ruie de l’Enfer, said Gobert was arrested by the order of the king by Monsieur Simmonet, who led him to the prison in the Petit Chatelet around eight o’clock in the evening. [63–4]

In the 1990s, a period of intense HIV-AIDS activism, scholars in several different fields who studied sexuality combined elements of gay and lesbian studies with other concepts originating in literary and feminist analysis to develop queer theory. Queer theorists argued that, like gender, sexuality was central to all

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aspects of culture, and called for greater attention to sexuality that was at odds with whatever was defined as ‘normal’ or that blurred categories. Medieval and Renaissance scholars highlighted the ways ‘normal’ differed in the eras that they studied, challenging assumptions that any sexual attitudes and practices are ‘natural’ or unchanging (Goldberg 1994; Blackmore and Hutcheson 1999; Lochrie 2005). In the last decade, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have ‘queered’ – that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyse – the nation, race, religion, time, and other topics along with gender and sexuality. This broadening has led some – including a few of the founders of the field – to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but it continues to be an influential theoretical perspective (Eng, Halberstam, and Esteban Munoz 2005). Questions about identity and the cultural construction of difference that emerged in scholarship on gender and sexuality also emerged among scholars studying colonialism, race, and ethnicity, who developed their own distinct theoretical approaches, including post-colonial theory and critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s field (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Loomba 2015). Not all post-colonial or critical race scholarship has been attuned to gender and sexuality, but much of it has (Minh-Ha 1989; Wing 1997; Bhavnani 2001). Although the complex ways that racial categories and hierarchies were linked to gender hierarchies have been most thoroughly analysed by historians of the later British empire, these intersections have also increasingly been a focus of early modern scholarship (Hendricks and Parker 1994; Hall 1995; Wilson 2002; Loomba and Burton 2007; Palmer 2016). Such scholarship is part of a more general broadening of European history to include the Atlantic world and Europe’s colonial possessions, a ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ turn that has been a major part of history writing since about 2000. Because it marked the beginning of Europe’s colonial enterprise, the early modern period was a time when Europeans were more concerned with ‘racial’ differences than they had been earlier, when they were actively engaged in creating social meanings for racial categories. They drew on polarities of white and black that had existed in western culture since ancient times to develop a racial hierarchy out of earlier ideas about religious and social difference, all of which were conceptualised as ‘blood’. People were regarded as having blood that was noble or common, or blood that was Jewish, Muslim, or Christian – or after the Reformation Protestant or Catholic. Marriages across these groups were often prohibited or regarded as threatening because they involved the mixing of unlike blood, although they still happened (Dursteler 2012; Luebke and Lindemann 2014) (see Appendix 3.3). In early modern Spain, ‘purity of blood’ – having no Jewish or Muslim ancestors – became an obsession, and throughout Europe children born of religiously mixed Christian marriages were often slightly mistrusted, for one never knew whether their Protestant or Catholic blood would ultimately triumph. Blood was also used to describe national boundaries, with those having ‘French blood’ distinguished from those having ‘German blood’, ‘English blood’, or ‘Spanish blood’. Describing differences as blood naturalised them, making them appear as if they were created by God in nature.

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As Europeans developed colonial empires, these notions of blood became a way of conceptualising race as well as religion, class, and nation (Feerick 2010; cf. Chapter 2: Identities and encounters). In some cases, such as Jews or Jewish converts in Spain and the Spanish empire, or Gaelic-speaking Catholic Irish in Ireland, religious and racial differences were linked, with Judaism and Catholicism being viewed as signs of ‘natural’ barbarity and racial inferiority in these areas. This was also initially the case in colonial areas outside Europe, where the spread of Christianity was used as a justification for conquest and enslavement. As indigenous peoples converted, however, religion became less useful as a means of differentiation, and skin colour became more important. With the development of a mestizo society, skin colour could be highly variable, even among family members. In addition, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies racial categories were to some degree arbitrary, with priests and officials granted the power to declare an individual ‘white’ for the purposes of marriage, entering a convent, or becoming a priest, no matter what his or her ancestry (WiesnerHanks 2010; Mangan 2016; Poska 2017). As a number of scholars have noted, European explorers and colonisers described their conquests in sexualised terms, portraying territory and its peoples as feminised, weak, and passive and themselves as virile, powerful, and masculine (Trexler 1995). They also passed laws regulating inter-marriage and other inter-group sexual relations (which would, of course, erase ‘racial’ differences if they became common enough), and increasingly described interracial boundaries as even more ‘natural’ than those of class or religion, making any crossing, particularly a sexual one, unnatural or even demonic. In learned treatises and popular literature, they debated the relationship among hierarchies of race, gender, and class: Was it easier for a white woman or a non-white man to be ‘manly’? If social class could outweigh gender as a determinant of social role for a woman like Queen Elizabeth, could gender outweigh race for a man like Shakespeare’s Othello? Analysing the debates about such questions allows the insights of feminist, post-colonial, and queer theory to be brought together, and still ground research thoroughly in issues that were central in the early modern period. Intersectionality was only given a name in 1989, but discussions of similar issues have been going on for centuries, a point that allows early modern scholars to relieve some of the presentism of contemporary cultural debates. This discussion of scholarly trends may make it appear as if focusing on women or using gender as a category of analysis has swept early modern history, with scholars simply choosing the approach or topic they prefer. This is far from the actual situation. Though investigating gender may seem self-evident to most younger historians and graduate students, there are also many historians who continue to view this as a passing fad – or, as one put it recently, a ‘cancer’ – despite the fact that such judgments become more difficult to maintain as the decades pass. Books that survey early modern history – generally the way students are introduced to the field – vary in their coverage, with some giving whole chapters to gender roles and issues, others including information on women and sexuality

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throughout, and others (particularly those conceptualised as surveys of the Renaissance or Reformation) mentioning only the same queens that surveys of forty years ago would have. But surveys and textbooks are often the last element of a field to change. A better indication of the wider impact of gender studies are articles and books, and here there has been a deluge. We are perhaps not yet at the point in early modern history at which thinking about the impact of gender is as automatic and self-evident (particularly if one is studying a man or men) as thinking about whether one’s subjects of research were English or French, noble or peasant, Protestant or Catholic, but we may be soon.

Bibliography Ågren, Maria ed. (2017). Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amussen, Susan D. and Poska, Allyson M. (2012). Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of European Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Journal of Global History 7.3 (November), 342‒63. Anishanslin, Zara (2016). Portrait of Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bennett, Judith (1992). Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide. In: David Aers ed., Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 147–75. Bennett, Judith (1997). Confronting Continuity. Journal of Women’s History 9, 73–95. Bhavnani, Kumkum (2001). Feminism and ‘Race’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackmore, Josiah and Hutcheson, Gregory S. eds. (1999). Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bock, Gisela (1989). Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate. Gender and History 1, 7–30. Brewer, John and Porter, Roy eds. (1993). Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Chojnacka, Monica (2001). Working Women in Early Modern Venice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, Alice (1992/1919). Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. with an introduction by Amy Louise Eriksson. London: Routledge. Combahee River Collective (1983). The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). In: Barbara Smith ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 264–75. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, 139–66. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Charles Inglis eds. (1995). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press. Crowston, Clare Haru (2013). Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Davis, Natalie (1975/76). Women’s History in Transition: the European Case. Feminist Studies 3.Winter, 83–103. Dennison, Tracy and Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2014). Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth? Journal of Economic History 74.3, 651‒93. Dursteler, Eric R. (2012). Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eng, David L., Halberstam, Judith and Esteban Munoz, Jose (2005). What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now? Social Text 84.85 (October), 1–17. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Feerick, Jean E. (2010). Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ferguson, Margaret, Quilligan, Maureen and Vickers, Nancy eds. (1986). Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Findlen, Paula ed. (2013). Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800. London: Routledge. Focal Point: Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France, Italy, and Spain. (2003). With articles by James R. Farr, Wietse de Boer, and Allyson Poska. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94, 276–319. Focal Point: Women and the Reformaton. (2001). With articles by Lyndal Roper, Heide Wunder and Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 92, 274–320. Forum: Rethinking Key Concepts in Gender History (2016). Gender and History 28.2 (August), 299–366. Forum: Revisiting Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. (2008). With articles by Joanne Meyerowitz, Heidi Tinsman, Maria Bucur, Dyan Elliott, Gail Hershatter, and Wang Zheng, and a response by Joan Scott. American Historical Review 113.5, 1344–1430. Goldberg, Jonathan ed. (1994). Queering the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldstone, Jack A. (1998). The Problem of the ‘Early Modern World’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, 249–84. Gowing, Laura (2012). Gender Relations in Early Modern England. London: Routledge. Greenberg, David (1990). The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hall, Kim F. (1995). Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartmann, Heide (1979). The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union. Capital and Class 8, 1–33. Hendricks, Margo and Parker, Patricia, eds (1994). Women “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge. Hendrix, Scott H. and Karant-Nunn, Susan C., eds. (2008). Masculinity in the Reformation Era. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. Howard, Jean (1988). The Theatre, Cross-dressing and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England. Shakespeare Quarterly 39, 418–440. Howell, Martha C. (1990). Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hubbard, Eleanor (2012). City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hufton, Olwen (1992). Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hull, Isabel (1997). Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Humphries, Jane and Weisdorf, Jacob (2015). The Wages of Women in England, 1260‒1850. Journal of Economic History 75.2, 405‒47. Hunt, Lynn (2015). Writing History in the Global Era. New York: W. W. Norton. Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory. (2013). Signs 38.4 (Summer), 785–1055. Jenkins, Keith (2003). Re-thinking History. London: Routledge. Jordan, Constance (1990). Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joyce, Patrick ed. (1987). The Historical Meanings of Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Joan (1978). Did Women have a Renaissance?. In: Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 137–64. King, Margaret (1993). Women of the Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Landes, Joan (1998). Feminism, the Public and the Private. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lanser, Susan (2014). The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levin, Carole (1994). The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lochrie, Karma (2005). Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Long, Kathleen ed. (2002). High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. Long, Kathleen (2006). Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Loomba, Ania (2015). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Loomba, Ania and Burton, Jonathan, eds. (2007). Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Luebke, David M. and Lindemann, Mary, eds. (2014). Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. New York: Berghahn. Mangan, Jane E. (2016). Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-era Peru and Spain. New York: Oxford University Press. Merrick, Jeffrey (1988). Royal Bees: The Gender Politics of the Beehive in Early Modern Europe. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 18, 7–37. ——— (1993). Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-century French Politics. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 308, 281–303. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. (1989). Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Moor, Tine de and van Zanden, Jan Luiten (2010). Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period. Economic History Review 63.1, 1–33. Nicholson, Linda ed. (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Palmer, Jennifer L. (2016). Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pitkin, Hannah (1984). Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Pointon, Marcia (1998). Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poska, Allyson (2017). Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Riley, Denise (1988). “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Robin, Diana (2007). Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roper, Lyndal (1996). Blood and Codpieces: Masculinity in the Early Modern German Town. In: Lyndal Roper ed. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion, and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 107–24. Rose, Mary Beth ed. (1985). Changing Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Women. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Rothstein, Marian (2015). The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, Joan (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American Historical Review 91.5, 1053–1075. ——— (1988). Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Seccombe, Wally (1992). A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso. Sharpe, Pamela (1996). Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy 1700-1850. New York: St. Martin’s. Shepard, Alexandra (2003). Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2015a). Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy. History Workshop Journal 79. (February) 1–24. ——— (2015b). Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Hilda (1998). Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2002). All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England 1640–1832. College Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Starn, Randolph (2002). The Early Modern Muddle. Journal of Early Modern History 6, 296–307. Traub, Valerie (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2016). Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Trexler, Richard (1995). Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trumbach, Randolph (1999). Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume I: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Valentine, David (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiesner, Merry E. (1986). Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry (2019). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see also the original sources posted on the book’s website: www.cambridge.org/womenandgender.

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——— (2008). Do Women Need the Renaissance? Gender & History 20. (November) 539–57. ——— (2010). Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice. London: Routledge. Wilson, Kathleen (2002). The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge. Wing, A. K. ed (1997). Critical Race Feminism: A Reader. New York: New York University Press. Wunder, Heide (1998). He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Appendices

Appendix 3.1: Disorderly women Davis, Natalie Zemon (1975). Women on Top. In: Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sexual symbolism, of course, is always available to make statements about social experience and to reflect (or conceal) contradictions within it. At the end of the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe, the relation of the wife – of the potentially disorderly woman – to her husband was especially useful for expressing the relation of all subordinates to their superiors, and for two reasons. First, economic relations were still often perceived in the medieval way as a matter of service. Second, the nature of political rule and the newer problem of sovereignty were very much at issue. In the little world of the family, with its conspicuous tension between intimacy and power, the larger matters of political and social order could find ready symbolization … [But] I want to argue that the image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that could operate, first, to widen behavioral options for women within and even outside marriage, and, second, to sanction riot and disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest. Play [in stories, plays, festivals, rituals, and illustrations] with the unruly woman is partly a chance for temporary release from the traditional and stable hierarchy; but it is also part of the conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within society. [127, 131]

Appendix 3.2: Patriarchal equilibrium Bennett, Judith (2007). Patriarchal Equilibrium. In: History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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There can be little doubt that a tale of transformation does not effectively explain fundamental dimensions of women’s past … Instead of being compelled by biological imperatives, female victimization, or an eternal battle between two sexes unmarked by class, race, sexuality, or other factors, the brewsters [female brewers] of late medieval England faced changing circumstances and reacted to them in diverse ways. Their history is one of much change for brewsters but little transformation of women’s work. This immobility was not of their own making, for at every turn, brewsters found themselves unable to respond as effectively as men to new opportunities …. The lives of English brewsters were shaped, in short, by a patriarchal equilibrium. Brewsters faced a host of institutions that worked, at least in part, to subordinate women to men. As a result, changes which undermined the force of patriarchy in one sector were subtly countered by responses in other sectors. The expanding brewing trade of late medieval England posed a real threat to the patriarchal order: women controlled a trade that was suddenly becoming very profitable. Yet this possibility of female advance in the economic sphere was met by strong responses from other patriarchal institutions. Representations of brewsters in poems, plays and other media began to emphasise the filthiness and untrustworthiness of brewsters; civic officers started to worry about how women were a disruptive force in the trade; new regulations sought to proscribe not-married women from the brewing trade so that married men could be supported by it; and the traditional authority of husbands over their wives began to assert itself in new ways. Put more abstractly, what happened is this: an economic change that might have advantaged women was countered effectively by responses rooted in ideology, law, politics, and the family. What was – and remains – particularly confounding about this patriarchal equilibrium was that none of these institutions existed solely to keep women in their place or acted self-consciously in tandem with others to keep women in their place. [77–8]

Appendix 3.3: Mixed marriages Luebke, David M. (2014). Introduction. In: David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann, eds., Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. New York: Berghahn. Marriage never possessed the unity and stability in law, theology or social practice that the modern defenders of marriage assume. Indeed, if there is any constant in the history of marriage, it is variety – the sheer number and diversity of sexual pair-bonds that Western societies have recognized, formally and informally … the Protestant Reformation, far from defining marriage more clearly, superimposed new marital norms on communities that were at best half-ready to accept them … Protestants who divorced and remarried became bigamists to those who did not accept the evangelical doctrines: in their eyes, serial monogamy punctuated by divorce was no less bigamous than concurrent marriage to multiple spouses … Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the

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combined pressures of social stratification, sexual disciplining, and the reform of religion heightened the likelihood that matchmaking across the social divide between noble and non-noble would injure the honor of kin groups on one or both sides, thereby damaging the social capital available to them for subsequent matches …. Princely dynasties resolved the conundrum by crafting a new type of marriage – morganatic marriage (Friedelehe) – which rather like today’s samesex civil unions, conferred some, but not all the rights of full-fledged marriage. [3, 5, 6]

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The interpretive challenge for Renaissance studies began in the nineteenth century, not the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, the age of the Renaissance. Unlike the Enlightenment, no one living during the Renaissance knew about it. An ardent anti-clerical republican, Jules Michelet (1798–1874), popularised the term Renaissance (rebirth), and hence the French word still prevails in the English-speaking world in place of the Italian Rinascimento. A whiff of Michelet’s secular prejudices still lingers over the idea of the Renaissance. During the same period the Swiss Protestant, Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which introduced art and cultural history as a pre-eminent means for understanding the period. Burckhardt’s innovative approach of Kulturgeschichte has been especially attractive because of his evocative portrait of how political illegitimacy produced artistic and intellectual vitality, epitomised by his famous phrase, ‘the state as a work of art’ (1958, 21). The Prussian Georg Voigt (1827–1891) added to the interpretive mix the term ‘humanism’, designating a movement that began with Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch] (1304–1374), who popularised among intellectuals methods of critical philology rooted in classical Antiquity. From this influential trio, none Italian, came a remarkably tenacious paradigm that defined the Renaissance as a period that began in the fourteenth century in Italy in reaction to the alleged clerical domination of the Middle Ages and that was characterised by secularism, artistic and cultural creativity, and humanism (defined as the critical, historical methods of philology). Historians have ever since grappled with the details of this paradigm, showing how inadequate it is in many respects but failing to release its hold on the popular historical imagination and even the intellectual culture outside the world of Renaissance specialists. The Renaissance is in many ways a strange field. It is hard to find any other historical period that is still beholden to the interpretative framework from more than a century and a half ago. Perhaps only the study of late Antiquity has suffered in a similar fashion by the tyranny of a great old book, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is not that historians have failed to add new evidence and new understandings that undermine Burckhardt’s thesis, but it is the case that most attempts to replace Burckhardt with a broad theoretical conception of the Renaissance have fallen short. There remain serious

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scholars who reassert the usefulness of Burckhardt’s vision, such as Richard Strier’s The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011) and Stephen Greenblatt’s admission to being a ‘Burckhardtian’ in response to the criticisms of his The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011). It is telling that both of these distinguished scholars are specialists in the literature of the English Renaissance, not the history of Renaissance Italy. Beyond the small circle of historian specialists who live with Renaissance Italian culture every day, there is a deep-seated cultural need in the English-speaking world to preserve Burckhardt’s liberal secular vision of the Renaissance as the first step to modernity, a modernity that is urban, civilised, progressive, and orderly. There is little room in this classical liberal vision for the turmoil of class revolution, religious terrorism, or sexual exploitation. The most likely recent candidate to replace Burckhardt might be Guido Ruggiero’s The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (2015). Ruggiero’s insistence on replacing Michelet’s French word with the Italian Rinascimento repatriates the Renaissance to the specific historical conditions of Italy. Ruggiero reinvigorates class as a heuristic tool with his conception of the ‘Great Social Divide’, the erosion of which marks the beginning of the Renaissance in the thirteenth century, and its eventual return in the late sixteenth heralds the end of the Renaissance. Thus, the Renaissance was a distinct period of time with a beginning and an end – it was not just the first scene in the ‘Birth of Modernity’, which would supposedly later mature to include all of western Europe. Ruggiero sets the stage for his Renaissance drama, not with Voigt’s evocation of Petrarch’s rediscovery of ancient texts but with Joachim of Fiore’s Apocalyptic prophecy that the world would come to an end in 1260, which marked, in fact, the end of the power of the nobility and the rise of the new class of the Popolo. About 1575, he argues, the Renaissance came to an end with the reassertion of aristocratic power (see Appendix 4.1). For him, the Renaissance was a distinct period of time, lasting about 300 years. Ruggiero’s appreciation for how the Rinascimento ‘feared and rejected the new’ becomes his secondary explanatory model besides the Great Social Divide – how the period had a compulsive need to find the old in the new. Hence, the ‘re-’ words (reform, renewal, rebirth, Renaissance, Rinascimento) are not just terms of convenience for historians but contemporary characteristics of the culture. Although he tends to avoid counter-factual hypotheses, Ruggiero does venture to ask the question why the industrial revolution did not begin in fifteenthcentury Italy rather than as it eventually did in eighteenth-century Scotland and England. He notes that the metalworking technology, entrepreneurial skills, and artisan/scholars were certainly present, especially in the new printing industry. But he concludes that is exactly the point. ‘It may simply have been that printing was one of the few proto-industrial forms that could be contemplated, because, for all its newness, it was so deeply connected to the old that its newness could be largely overlooked’ (2015, 391). The Renaissance always looked backward rather than forward as did the Enlightenment thinkers. As Ruggiero’s approach suggests, there have been some major revisions of the Renaissance

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question since Burckhardt. As in other areas of historical study, no issues have changed views of the Renaissance as much as those derived from gender studies.

Gender and family The starting point for most reappraisals of the place of women in Renaissance society has been Joan Kelly-Godol’s famous essay of 1977, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ Her answer was a firm ‘no’, a feminist denial of Burckhardt’s claim that ‘women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men’ in Renaissance Italy (Burckhardt 1958, 389). Kelly-Godol and other scholars of her generation emphasised the debilitating effects of patriarchy for women. Since then the question has received more nuanced answers as subsequent generations have demonstrated that women had many roles besides those of wife and mother (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). Nuns have garnered a great deal of attention, and as the largest single group of literate women in pre-modern Europe, nuns left ample records of cultural creativity in spiritual literature, music, plays, social welfare, and education. Although many nuns were probably involuntary inmates imprisoned behind cloister walls to save their families the high cost of providing a dowry for an honourable marriage, some managed to create an autonomous women’s society free from the constraints of marriage and family (Laven 2002). In contrast to the celibate nuns, most prominent women intellectuals in Italy and England, as Sarah Gwyneth Ross has shown, had their fathers not the cloisters to thank for their education (Ross 2009). With the aid of the computer, quantitative social historians have uncovered a world of family life unimagined by earlier generations who defined the Renaissance solely in the terms of cultural appropriation of the classics. The masterpiece of the genre, Tuscans and Their Families by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, depicted Tuscany as a society in which women normally married down a social rank if at all, were increasingly unable to live independently from men, and when they did marry did so at about age 18 to a man more than a decade older (1985, 202–31). As a result, women who married spent most of their adult lives as widows, creating an unstable family structure that had profound psychological consequences for all involved, and that fact might help explain the search of an alternative society derived from an idealised past. Hanna Pitkin even interpreted Machiavelli’s disturbing misogynistic search for a strong prince as the psychological consequence of a missing father and a dominant mother (see Excerpt 4.1) (Machiavelli 1979; Pitkin 1984). The family system of the Renaissance especially victimised the young. Young women had few options in life, and the Burckhardtian idea of ‘perfect equality’ between men and women might have only applied to a few princesses. Inheritance laws guaranteed women, at least in theory, a portion of their father’s patrimony as a dowry, but their brothers and husbands exercised the right to benefit from the collective property. Women’s ability to act independently of men varied a great deal from town to town where local inheritance statutes applied.

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Excerpt 4.1: Machiavelli, Niccolo (1979). The Prince. In The Portable Machiavelli. Trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Books. Thinking to myself about whether the times are suitable, at present, to honor a new prince in Italy, and if there is the material that might give a skillful and prudent prince the opportunity to form his own creation that would bring him honor and good to the people of Italy, it seems to me that so many circumstances are favorable to such a new prince that I know of no other time more appropriate. … And even though before now some glimmer of light may have shown itself in a single individual, so that it was possible to believe that God had ordained him for Italy’s redemption nevertheless it was witnessed afterward how at the height of his career he was rejected by Fortune. So now Italy remains without life and awaits the man who can heal her wounds and put an end to the plunder of Lombardy, the ransoms in the Kingdom of Naples and in Tuscany, and who can cure her of those sores which have been festering for so long. Look how she now prays to God to send someone to redeem her from these barbaric cruelties and insolence; see her still ready and willing to follow a banner, provided that there be someone to raise it up. [162–3]

The women of Venice probably had the most financial independence, especially in contrast to their Florentine sisters, a fact that perhaps help explain why there were more female intellectuals there than elsewhere. Young men spent a long apprenticeship in a trade or business, unable to enter the marriage market for decades beyond maturation. With older men monopolising the young brides, young men spent years carousing with prostitutes or engaging in homosexual relationships with younger boys. Renaissance Florence was so renowned for sodomy that ‘Florenzer’ in German meant ‘sodomite’. In the late fifteenth century, about half of all Florentine men by the time they were thirty faced an official investigation for sodomy. In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men – in a city of only 40,000 – were investigated and 3,000 convicted. Michael Rocke has shown how these same-sex acts were not considered deviant but an integral part of a normal masculine identity (1996, 4). Pederasty was considered normal. Moral disapproval and the most severe legal penalties were reserved to consenting adult men, whose erotic lives might hide secret political alliances. Since marriage for men came so late, fathers were elderly, distant figures, if they were still alive, unable to supervise young men, who created their own tough gang culture that made the streets of Renaissance towns dangerous places, especially after dark.

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Anthropology of the Renaissance The intense Renaissance study of humanity might be cast as the anthropology of the period. With his characteristic vivid prose, Burckhardt invoked a liberal anthropology of the individual who in contrast to medieval collective identities first came to consciousness during the Italian Renaissance (see Appendix 4.2). Historians of the Renaissance have long accepted the medievalists’ factual criticisms of this simple argument about the Middle Ages, but more important has been the recasting of this nineteenth-century liberal concept of the individual with one rooted in modern psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The self can no longer be depicted as an irreducible identity, either as something to be discovered as in Burckhardt’s view or something to be fashioned through conscious effort. Under the influence of cultural anthropology and post-modern philosophy, scholars now see the self during the Renaissance as protean and multiple. For Stephen Greenblatt, the Renaissance offered a prevision not of the modern autonomous individual but of the postmodern self, that is personhood unmoored by the possibility of progress as it was in the modern conception of the self and disconnected from institutions of trust, such as the doctrinaire churches, a personhood whipped about by mercurial external powers that eroded a sense of individual coherence (see Appendix 4.3). Ruggiero went so far as to reverse Burckhardt: ‘the Rinascimento discovered what we think of as the state and created the individual as a work of art’ (Ruggiero 2015, 326). John Jeffries Martin argues that the whole question of Renaissance ‘individualism’ is the wrong one to ask. The word, as he put it, was unknown to our ancestors. The only constant in the Renaissance notion of identity was relational: the dynamic between emotions, beliefs, thoughts, on the one hand, and society, culture, and politics, on the other. Martin attempts a classification scheme of the forms of the Renaissance self – the conformist self, prudential self, performative self, porous self, and the new Renaissance form, the sincere self. Martin follows Montaigne in emphasising the ephemeral yet desirable possibility of an integrated self, based on the ‘embodied nature of identity’, one that finds coherence between the internal self, what we might call the private, and the external, the public self. Montaigne imagined the self as a patchwork of shapeless bits, and the human goal was to fit the bits together. He and his most thoughtful contemporaries could not imagine a simple self, some irreducible inner identity, but they did imagine a sincere self – that it was possible for the inner and outer to be consistent and coherent. Emotion, word, and deed could or should present an integrated pattern, and the sincere person would, therefore, be trustworthy – a person whose private and public selves matched up. Sincerity, however, was difficult to achieve. Montaigne noted ‘there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. Consider it a great thing to play the part of one single man’ (Martin 2004, 122). Sincerity would be the achievement of long arduous effort, the life thoroughly examined by bringing together the bodily appetites and the rational faculties of the soul (see Excerpt 4.2). There were, nevertheless, less arduous paths to follow than the goal of complete sincerity. Men and women could conceptualise their identities through art,

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Excerpt 4.2: Montaigne, Michel de (1877). The Essays. Trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt. Project Gutenberg ebook, updated August 8, 2016, n. p. Chapter 17, ‘Of Presumption’. Beauty is a thing of great recommendation in the correspondence amongst men; ’tis the first means of acquiring the favour and good liking of one another, and no man is so barbarous and morose as not to perceive himself in some sort struck with its attraction. The body has a great share in our being, has an eminent place there, and therefore its structure and composition are of very just consideration. They who go about to disunite and separate our two principal parts from one another are to blame; we must, on the contrary, reunite and rejoin them. We must command the soul not to withdraw and entertain itself apart, not to despise and abandon the body (neither can she do it but by some apish counterfeit), but to unite herself close to it, to embrace, cherish, assist, govern, and advise it, and to bring it back and set it into the true way when it wanders; in sum, to espouse and be a husband to it, so that their effects may not appear to be diverse and contrary, but uniform and concurring.

literature, humanist discourse, medical treatises, and how-to books. For those men not born to a public identity, such as nobility, the likely paths to follow were the professions – how Renaissance writers, such as Baldassare Castiglione, Benvenuto Cellini, and Niccolò Machiavelli, among others, tried to codify the rules for becoming a successful courtier, sculptor, or prince. Douglas Biow shows that the secrets of individual professionals – that peculiar combination of personal attributes and technique (arte) – remained a mystery to these writers (Biow 2015, 21–114). The recurring theme in these Renaissance texts was the nescio quid, the ‘I don’t know’ answer to what made a professional successful. To be a professional was to repudiate aristocratic privilege by acquiring a certain arte, but how to sculpt like Cellini was always complex, extremely difficult, and ultimately indescribable, even for Cellini (see Figure 4.1). Language was ever inadequate to the task of describing both the sincere self and the process of professional achievement (Cellini 1998). There was an additional problem. The search for the sincere self or the secrets of a profession had to be pursued in a culture that required dissimulation and social conformity for survival in an age of religious violence and powerful coercive institutions such as the Roman Inquisition or Church courts in Protestant lands. The witty, clever courtier, who was a master of words rather than the sword, created a new way to demonstrate masculinity while masking his vulnerability. The male individual became mysteriously ‘marked by a peculiar striking character’ through

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Figure 4.1 The Salt Cellar represents the epitome of Renaissance artistic ingenuity and professionalism, the product of Cellini’s celebrated skills that could not be imitated or explained even by Cellini himself. Salt Cellar or Saliera, belonging to King Francis I of France depicting the earth and sea united represented by a female earth goddess and a male sea god, 1540–1543 (gold and enamel), Benvenuto Cellini, (1500–1571) / Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images.

his professional actions, his distinctive beard, and his self-performance. By the seventeenth century in Venice, the need to hide became so powerful that aristocrats wore stylised masks at most public events for much of the year. The tensions of late Renaissance society had become so threatening that public identities had to be entirely contrived. Where was the individual in all that artifice? An anthropology of the Renaissance has required more than a shift in understandings of the individual and the self. The broad generalisations about the Renaissance ‘mind’ or Renaissance ‘man’ that once occupied the centre of the field cannot be sustained. Despite the monolithic Latinate and Christian elite culture, men and women, priests and prostitutes, aristocrats and peasants barely lived in the same world and hardly spoke the same languages. The innumerable dialects and tenuous hold of uniform ‘national’ vernaculars – Italian, French, German, English, Spanish – fragmented understanding, and even growing literacy did not

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produce greater cultural uniformity, as Martin Luther found when the German peasants interpreted his careful theology of the freedom of the Christian to serve their own rebellious ends (Luther 1962). Carlo Ginzburg’s now famous study of the cosmology of a heretic miller from Friuli exemplifies how local cultures filtered the understanding of the texts that had been made uniform through mechanical print (Ginzburg 1980). In some respects the more available printed texts were, the greater the controversies about what they meant, simply because interpretive communities became so diverse. In no area was this diversity more obvious than the Renaissance fascination with the uncanny, with ghosts, witches, and magic. The core belief involved what Martin calls ‘the porous self’, the belief that the external forces and beings that suffused the cosmos could possess humans, producing outward symptoms of madness, illnesses, or witchcraft. Although none of these beliefs were new during the Renaissance, it was, nevertheless, the great age for the investigation of the uncanny through astrology, hermeneutic magic, medical theory, and judicial investigations. After all Kepler and Galileo both cast horoscopes, Ficino was obsessed with conjuring daemons, and John Dee explored a new mathematics that moved toward calculus but was designed to be a better form of conjuring (Lee 2015). Two facets of the Renaissance fascination with the uncanny jump out at modern readers as particularly disorienting: (1) the fad for hermeneutic magic and (2) the great witch craze. In 1460 a body of ancient Greek texts, collectively known as the Corpus Hermeticum were brought to Florence and given to Cosimo de’ Medici, the city’s principal citizen. He turned them over to his favourite humanist, Marsilio Ficino, to translate into Latin. The Hermetic texts presented themselves as the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian priest, who anticipated Christianity and who revealed the true theology of all religions that had become corrupted in the course of time. Ficino’s translation and his commentaries on the texts engaged many of Europe’s leading intellectuals for much of the following century until Isaac Casaubon demonstrated in 1614 that the texts dated from the second and third centuries after Christ rather than from Ancient Egypt. Ficino emphasised how the texts provided a blueprint for magical practices, especially astrology, that could cure disease and bring harmony to the world. Renaissance astrology only gradually gave way to the precise science of astronomy, as did alchemy to chemistry, and mathematical conjuring to calculus (cf. Chapter 12: Science and reason). Hermetic magic was largely harmless, an intellectual dead end, but the same cannot be said of the witch craze. Whereas hermetic magic entranced intellectuals as a better way of gaining access to divine powers for the good, the witch craze relied upon the theological doctrine that through their own will witches could employ the powers of the devil to bring harm to others. Between 1450 and 1750 approximately 100,000 people were tried for witchcraft, and about half suffered execution (Levack 2015). Most of the trials took place in German-speaking lands where the religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants were most intense, but there were also significant numbers of prosecutions in Switzerland, France, Scotland, Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania. Italy, the centre of Renaissance

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culture, had a number of prosecutions but hardly any executions. About eighty per cent of those accused were women, and many of the accusations were about fertility – harming babies, causing impotence, destroying crops, and conjuring storms. The persecution of witches declined in the seventeenth century, not because people ceased to believe in the reality of witchcraft but because judges and other professionals began to distrust the alleged evidence of witchcraft practices, especially from testimony extracted by torture or produced by delusions of the alleged witch. The horrors of the witch craze and the human suffering it caused among many thousands of innocents accused of witchcraft contributed to the spread of scepticism in the early modern period (cf. Chapter 13: Popular cultures and witchcraft). Burckhardt had imagined that during the Middle Ages, ‘man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category’ (1958, 143; cf. Appendix 4.2). His conception of the Renaissance individual relied on the contrast with this notion of medieval collectivities. Much of the scholarship about the Renaissance since World War II has, nevertheless, emphasised the continuing power of these collective forms of identity, especially families, corporations such as guilds and towns, and political factions. Even some humanist texts, once seen as the hallmark of the celebration of the individual, have been reinterpreted as an ideology of collective social responsibility. In his highly influential work, Hans Baron argued that after 1402 in Florence there was shift in emphasis from the classicism of the fourteenth century to what he called ‘civic humanism’, which had three distinctive characteristics. First, a new historical interpretation shifted praise from the Roman Empire to the era of the Roman Republic and idealised the republicanism of that earlier period. Second, there was greater respect for the vernacular traditions of Florence rather than accepting the complete superiority of classical Latin. And third, humanists began to promote the Ciceronian virtues of good citizenship and active involvement in the public life of the city (Baron 1966). In Baron’s understanding of humanist ideology, collective engagement was more vital than personal selfreckoning, civic duties more important than even individual salvation: in fact service to society was a means for divine salvation. The anthropological measure was neither just the grand Christian scheme that looked to Heaven or the discovery of the individual self but social and political virtue. Although historians have quibbled about the historical details of Baron’s thesis and whether there was even any ideological content to humanism, the thesis has had a powerful lure because it refocuses attention on the civic and collective nature of Renaissance culture (Baker and Maxson 2015). Whereas Burckhardt had emphasised the illegitimacy of the Renaissance tyrannies, as he called them, the legacy of Baron has been to shift interest to the intellectual significance of republican virtue. The result has been a veritable industry of scholarship on the two largest Renaissance republics, Florence and Venice. Florence was the epitome of a troubled republic whose instability and quiet subversion by the Medici family prompted the systematic investigation of political and constitutional history, especially by Machiavelli. Venice, in contrast, became the model

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of republican stability, a constitutional model for an aristocratic republic that stimulated foreigners from across Europe to admire and imitate its structures (Bouwsma 1984; Najemy 2006). The emphasis on the civic and republican character of the Renaissance in Italy has pushed scholarship far beyond the study of humanist texts and the history of political thought to the sociological investigation of what Richard Trexler called ‘public life’. Public life was most fully manifest in civic rituals, understood as the most vital form of communication in the Renaissance, a period when literacy was still limited. Despite all the emphasis by scholars on the intellectual ancestors of the Renaissance, the genealogy of texts from the classical to the Renaissance was the concern of a tiny Latinate minority. Brian Maxson, for example, has shown that hardly anyone could understand the most public manifestation of humanist oratory, the diplomatic speech. When a visiting ambassador offered an address in carefully crafted humanist Latin, it was more of a ritual performance of honour than an attempt to communicate specific content that most hearers were, in any event, unable to follow (Maxson 2013). Trexler went so far as to reject entirely the idea that political and religious dogmas guided actions. For him ‘a coherent set of ideas is itself a reverential deception’, and thus the vast scholarly enterprise of examining texts for ideas tells us little about what people actually thought and believed (1991, 552). For him ‘premodern urban ritual was an important means of creating, maintaining, and transforming life among populations’ (1991, xxi). Through rituals Trexler identified a veritable revolution in Florentine life as new social groups – youth, women, and workers – entered public life in entirely new ways. In Venice, the constitution of the republic, that is the hierarchy of offices and relationships between the governors and the governed, could not be found in a single body of laws or texts but only in the arrangements of civic processions.

Religion No aspect of Renaissance culture has undergone a more thorough revision than the idea of the neo-pagan, secular, anti-Christian Renaissance. Renaissance public identities were firmly rooted in religious language, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. That is not to suggest there were no intellectual sceptics or tavern doubters, but it is to assert that an alternative to a religious cosmology was inconceivable during the period. The institutional presence of the Church was so extensive in Italy that it was felt everywhere. Italians flooded the Church hierarchy, and Catholic culture saturated Italy. In the process of becoming communes, Italian cities created a sacred geography as a way of generating collective trust in its institutions and officials, and the sacralisation of the cities was so thorough that the line between the sacred and the secular became blurry, so much so that virtually all public institutions, even the civic debt, might take on a sacral character. Bishoprics waterlogged Italy. In 1500 there were 253 bishops on the peninsula, 10 in Sicily, and 18 in Sardinia. In contrast, all of France in 1500 had 131 bishops with a population of 16.4 million compared to Italy’s

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10.5 million. England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had only 67 bishops, but 34 of them were in Ireland. Of all the bishoprics in Catholic Europe, slightly less than half were in Italy (Hay 1977, 10). Bishops come and go, but saints offered a measure of sacral permanence to the cities. The preponderance of Italians in the Church hierarchy resulted in a preponderance of Italian saints. In the eleventh century at the dawn of the age of the communes, saints of Italian origin constituted 20.3 per cent of all Catholic saints. The percentage gradually rose to 69 per cent by the fourteenth century. The level of Italian pre-eminence was especially remarkable in comparison to Spain, Portugal, northern Germany, and the Low Countries, which did not produce a single saint between 1198 and 1431. Did this mean Italians were more saintly than other Catholics? That seems unlikely. What mattered was the capacity and connections to transform a local holy woman or man into a saint through the rigorous canonisation process of the papacy. Since Italians controlled the process they were more likely to be able to get one of their fellow citizens recognised. A measure of the politics of sanctity is provided by the fact that during the Avignon papacy the majority of French saints canonised were from Provence, the region of Avignon. When the papacy returned to Rome most saints canonised came from Italy. Nevertheless, sanctity was not all politics because more than half of all saints venerated locally, whether approved by the papacy or not, were Italian. In other words, the very notion of sanctity had deep cultural roots in Italian soil (Weinstein and Bell 1986). In many respects, we can now talk about a ‘Renaissance’ of Christianity during the period, which means that religious expression for the laity diversified and expanded through altar societies, third-order mendicants, groups of men and especially women (dimesse) who lived as religious persons but without taking vows, charismatic movements such as flagellant companies, and confraternities. Confraternities began to appear in the twelfth century in conjunction with the rise of the communes, and some even had statutes that paralleled those of the communes. In Florence between 1224 and 1300, 20 new confraternities were founded. The Black Death produced many new confraternities as penitents sought solace. By the sixteenth century Florence had more than 75. Encouraged by the mendicants (the Franciscans and Dominicans) who considered the entire city to be their parish, the confraternities allowed spirituality to flower among the laity. In the best cases, they represented a unifying force in the otherwise divided cities, one of the paramount ways of reinforcing civil society. As did the guilds, confraternities in Florence ‘provided members with an education in republican civic procedure and culture. In organizational structure the typical late medieval Florentine confraternity was a miniature commune’ (Weissman 1982, 43–4). Just like the commune, however, confraternities could be a divisive force as well as a unifying one. As lay organisations, they were rivals to the parishes and the power of the clergy to be the exclusive arbiters of access to the sacred, and they competed among themselves for members, prestige, and rankings in civic processions (Muir 1981; Black 1989).

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Religious symbols and emotions completely suffused the civic culture of the Italian cities. Huge sums continued to be spent on cathedrals, baptisteries, private chapels, tombs, and paintings. Most Renaissance art was religious, and the motives of the great Renaissance patrons of the arts glorified God along with the supposedly sovereign individual. Giovanni Rucellai, a rich cloth merchant, commissioned Leon Battista Alberti to design a new façade in the fashionable Renaissance style for the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (see Figure 4.2). Instead of Alberti’s name or the name of the church, the inscription on the top of the new façade records Giovanni, a clear attempt to associate the patron with the beautification of the church. In his zibaldone (memory book) Rucellai, nevertheless, emphasised that his patronage was for the glorification of God as well as to promote the memory of himself. The grandest, most opulent, most selfindulgent private palace in Venice, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, echoes Rucellai’s claim: the engraving on the stone façade reads, ‘Non Nobis Domine’ (Not unto us, but to You O Lord). Among earlier generations of historians the secular Renaissance had become a matter of dogma, but during the 1970s three scholars, in particular, revived Renaissance religious studies – Charles Trinkaus (1995), Richard Trexler

Figure 4.2 The inscription at the top of the façade reads, ‘Giovanni Rucellai, son of Paolo, in the year of salvation 1470’, which gives credit to the patron rather than the artist or even the Madonna to whom the church is dedicated. The niches at the bottom of the façade are in the Gothic style. Alberti’s Renaissance design, which has rounded arches and a rigorous geometry, begins above that level. Façade of Santa Maria Novella, c. 1458–70 (photo), Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) / Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images.

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(1991), and Donald Weinstein (1974). They sought to refashion the intellectual heritage of the Italian Renaissance to provide, in Weinstein’s words, ‘a necessary counterweight to the still dominant impulse of scholars to concentrate upon the individual, private and reflective aspects of religion’. By studying piety solely through the lenses of theologians, clerics, and humanists – that tiny elite – ‘we may find we have created a picture in our own image and likeness’ (1974, 269), echoing the title of Trinkaus’s masterwork. Weinstein laid out the four ‘main aspects’ of civic religion during the Renaissance. First, laicisation, by which he meant ‘the dominant trend toward the replacement of clerics by laymen as educators, transmitters of religious values and culture leaders generally’. Second, the emergence of the young as religious saviours or objects of intense educational concern. Third, secularisation, which implied ‘the transfer of the scene of religious ritual from reserved monastic or ecclesiastical space to public, civic space’ and ‘the religious legitimation of formerly worldly and temporal activities and institutions’ such as family life and urban government. One thing secularization most assuredly does not mean in this context is a decline of Christian faith, a loss of spirituality, or a tendency to assign purely rational or immanentist meanings to human worldly activities and institutions. Quite the contrary, it was the effort to find spiritual meaning in those aspects of human life that had formerly been excluded from the perimeters of the holy, the effort to sanctify the secular. (Weinstein 1974, 269) Fourth was ‘the attribution of holiness … to the city itself’. That aspect, of course, might be seen as peculiarly Italian and an observation that led directly to Augustine Thompson’s Cities of God (2005), but Weinstein meant it more broadly as a manifestation of ‘religious ethnocentrism’ (1974, 265–68). Weinstein’s scholarly insights into the culture of Renaissance Florence, of course, have much broader applications, even more today than in the 1970s when Weberian and Marxist social science could still not see something so vaporous and unquantifiable as human spirituality and manifestations of divine immanence. The humanists who may have found initial inspiration in ancient Latin and Greek turned their philological techniques to analysing the meaning of the sources of Christianity including the Bible itself. Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407–1457) demonstrated how philology could be used to question the meaning and even the authenticity of the crucial Christian texts. Between 1439 and 1440, Valla evaluated at the behest of his patron, Alfonso V of Aragon, King of Naples, the Donation of Constantine, a document that asserts that the Roman Emperor Constantine I donated the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I. In a territorial dispute with Alfonso, Pope Eugene IV, as had some of his predecessors, relied on the document to assert a claim on Alfonso’s kingdom. By showing that the Latin terms in the document would not have been used in the fourth century of Constantine, Valla proved the Donation a forgery from the

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eighth century. Employing similar philological techniques, Valla unmasked other pious frauds and even subjected the Latin of the Vulgate Bible to criticism. His motives, however, did not manifest impiety. In fact, after the death of Pope Eugene he became an apostolic secretary in Rome. Valla’s philology, in fact, bolstered the hold of Christianity on the intellectual life of the period. Building upon Valla, Desiderius Erasmus later retranslated the Greek New Testament into Latin according to the higher standards of the humanists. Others relied on humanist philology to produce the vernacular Bibles of the Reformation era (Erasmus 1964; Valla 2007). The historical case for a secular Renaissance survives but relies on recent scholarship on readings of the Roman poet Lucretius’s poem ‘De rerum natura’, discovered in the fifteenth century, a poem that provides a schema for how the universe works without divine creation, providence, or ethical guidance (Lucretius 2007; Brown 2010). The significance of Lucretius in the Renaissance, however, remains controversial. He was certainly read by and influenced important thinkers, such as Machiavelli, but even Machiavelli was an astute student of the Bible. It was entirely possible during the period to hold seemingly contradictory ideas, to be a sceptic without becoming an atheist. Fra Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) was a Servite friar, the official theologian of the Venetian Republic, an ardent critic of the Roman papacy, a defender of free speech, and an advocate of an ethics based on law rather than Christianity. Changes in religious history came in fits and starts, Christianity remained a matter of intellectual contestation, and it was possible to be a believer and a doubter at the same time. Belief and knowledge of God were aspirations, not accomplishments (Wootton 1983).

Toward a global economy In the past historians analysed the Renaissance economy largely in terms of production, but in recent years there has been a shift toward consumption, especially of luxury goods traded in the global economy (cf. Chapter 11: Commerce and industry). The woollen cloth industry in the pre-modern economy of Renaissance Italy provides the best indicator of economic health because of the numerous linkages with other sectors of the Renaissance economy. An economic linkage, in this case cloth manufacturing, supplied the necessary stimulus for other sectors of the economy. The raw wool for the Florentine cloth manufacturers, for example, came from sheep who grazed in the humid climate of England and Burgundy or on the Iberian peninsula on the rocky soils unsuitable for farming. Numerous villages in northern Europe and Spain supported the shepherds who raised the sheep for the light worsted woollen cloth in which the Florentines specialised. Transportation networks from pastures to cloth-making cities supported carters, sailors, and dock workers. The need for more ships meant more work for a whole range of skilled workers from forest managers who harvested suitable timbers to carpenters who built the ships. Once it arrived in Florence or one of the other cloth-making cities, the raw wool underwent an elaborate transformation that involved twenty-six different

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steps that provided jobs to numerous specialised workers. Each of these separate processes provided linkages that reverberated through the economy supplying bounty in good times and dearth in bad. The woollen cloth industry increased the demand for carts, barrels, spinning wheels, looms, dyes, and alum, the essential chemical used for cleansing impurities and fixing dies. Although guilds could sometimes be hide-bound and resistant to change, recent studies have shown that they were, in fact, quite open to new technologies and responsive to changes in production (Goldthwaite 2009) (cf. Chapter 11: Commerce and industry). By the fifteenth century the Florentines dominated the market for high-quality woollen cloth. They shipped throughout the Mediterranean, to the great city of Constantinople and beyond. A Florentine traveller to sub-Saharan Africa in the fourteenth century even discovered bolts of cloth from his home town in the markets of Timbuktu. By the middle of the sixteenth century, silkcloth production supplanted wool, and Italian silk had surpassed the traditional centres in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean. Textiles were not the only thriving industries in Italy. On the island of Elba miners extracted iron ore that was processed in Pistoia and Voltri. Milan and Brescia specialised in manufacturing armour and weapons. Pistoia began producing hand-guns (Pistoia=pistol) in the 1540s. Carrara quarried marble and Tolfa mined alum. Paper was manufactured in a number of northern and central Italian cities, and the most important new industry after 1450 became printing. Venice was the centre of the printing industry, but by 1480 at least 45 other Italian cities had printing presses. Two industries, in particular, came to be associated with Renaissance culture – the building trades and the production of works of art. Great palaces in the old cities and new town planning (Vicenza, Bergamo, Cremona, Pavia, and Brescia) exploded in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The demand for art, discussed below, provided work for a growing number of craftsmen and artists (Ferraro 2007; Brown 2014, 320–37). Did all this production constitute a ‘Renaissance’ for the Italian economy? In other words, was the Renaissance a time of growing or lessening economic opportunities? Finding the answer to that question has been one of the more controversial historical problems. The period from about 1050 to 1300 was one of undoubted and dramatic demographic and economic growth. After 1300 that growth sputtered as bad weather destroyed crops and famine killed millions. Then the Black Death brought the entire economy to a halt. The question for economic historians has been what happened in the period after that from 1350 to 1650, the very period of the cultural achievements of the Renaissance? Did the economy continue to stagnate, recover, or perhaps grow worse? The older thesis, favoured in the 1950s and 1960s treated the period as a depression. The argument was that the Italian economy failed to recover after the economic collapse of the mid-fourteenth century as merchants abandoned risky trading ventures for more stable investments such as land or even art, which brought the purchaser a certain cultural prestige. As a result, industry stagnated and the economic mentality became retrograde (Fransceschi 2004). More recent scholarship, however, has argued against the depression thesis and found ample evidence of economic

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vitality. Although there was a temporary rupture after the Black Death, which cut the population and reduced trade, the economy recovered by the fifteenth century, and thrived until at least 1620. Manufacturing centres such as Venice and Brescia and the Lombard towns of Milan, Pavia, Cremona, Como, and Lodi produced a wide variety of goods that provided stable employment for the peasant labour force that migrated to the cities to take the place of workers who died in the Black Death. Although it would be an exaggeration to imagine that peasants and urban labourers prospered during the Renaissance, some, such as the skilled artisans of Venice, enjoyed a modicum of wage stability. In many respects, the growing economic integration between the cities and countryside replaced the economic engine of international trade that had dominated in the earlier periods. A stable regional economy supplanted the fickle medieval international one. As the population grew, investment in land and agricultural production became quite lucrative. New irrigation works and the draining of swamps brought new lands under cultivation for rice and maize, the latter a recent addition to the European diet brought from the New World. Vast fields of mulberry trees supplied the silk industry. Whereas in the earlier phases industrial production came from the large cities, by the seventeenth century the most dynamic industries could be found in the rural villages and small towns, and much of the work once reserved for men who were members of guilds now passed to women and children who worked out of their houses (Cipolla 1994; Ferraro 2007; Goldthwaite 2009). If production did increase during the Renaissance, how much was due to rising consumer demand? Modern capitalist economies are driven in large part by consumers’ desires for goods that provide comfort and beauty beyond the basic necessities of life. Was that the case in the Renaissance? Richard Goldthwaite has made the most compelling case for the Italian Renaissance as ‘the first stirring of the urge to consume that was to break out in what is now called the consumer revolution in the eighteenth century and culminate in the consumerism of our own times’ (1993, 8). For him the mark of Renaissance consumerism in Italy was the demand for art, which was unprecedented in the Middle Ages and unparalleled elsewhere. New and refurbished palaces, villas, gardens, and churches employed architects and members of the building trades. Those buildings were fitted out with paintings, sculptures, and furnishings. Italians not only enlarged their world of goods: they invented a seemingly infinite variety of new forms, they refined the skills with which these things were produced, they introduced fashion as a dynamic for continual renewal of demand, and, finally, they initiated the quest for the very definition of art that elevated some of these goods into a higher spiritual realm. (Goldthwaite 1993, 1) The Renaissance not only produced new ideas but new commodities, objects of material culture that became fashionable and highly desirable.

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The demand for works of art had two dimensions. One consisted of objects for religious uses. These included panel paintings and sculptures out of marble or bronze for altars, liturgical vessels (chalices, patens, pyxes, bells, ewers, candlesticks, cruets, ladles, altar cloths), bibles, missals, reliquaries, thrones for bishops and popes, lecterns for preachers, altars for innumerable chapels, priestly garments, sceptres, crosiers, umbrellas, fans, censers, and baptismal fonts. These necessary items of priest craft consumed large sums, and in order to honour God they needed to be made of the finest materials with the highest levels of craftsmanship and art. The single largest source of private construction in Florence, for example, was to build or remodel private chapels in churches and palaces. Although the transepts of churches had been lined with private chapels since the thirteenth century, there was boom in demand for them in the fifteenth. These private chapels constituted a religious good work, but also they added significantly to the prestige of the families that built them. They lined the walls of churches so that a private space for worship and burial became a conspicuously public one for familial display. To finance the rebuilding of Santo Spirito in Florence after 1471, churchwardens relied on the sale of private chapels. The rebellion against the costs of liturgical worship that came with the Protestant Reformation can be understood as a reaction to Renaissance consumption, which placed the burden of financing religious objects and private chapels on the laity. All that art cost a great deal, and it seemed to many people, even in Catholic Italy, that what money could buy had become the measure of piety (Wandel 1989). The second dimension of demand for art came from less pious motives. Among the upper classes in Italy, rural castles and fortified urban palaces complete with defensive towers were outdated by the fifteenth century. The new territorial states created a measure of security unknown since the fall of ancient Rome. Instead of housing built for defence, the patricians, as the wealthy city-dwellers were called, demanded new or refurbished urban palaces that displayed their wealth and prestige. The new palaces in fifteenth-century Florence, for example, were built to make a prominent public statement, no matter, it seemed the cost. Between one-third and one-half of the owner’s entire estate could be in his palace. In contrast to Venetian palaces, which also served as warehouses and places of business, Florentine palaces were used solely as residents for the owner’s conjugal family. In most cases that meant just a couple, their children, and a few servants. Unlike the fortified palaces of the thirteenth century, these were not the homes of an extended family and armed retainers. However, the new palaces of the fifteenth century occupied huge plots of land and were monumental in size and design, complete with façades in the latest Renaissance fashion that proclaimed to all the solidity and good fortune of the small family that inhabited the palace. The ground area of the Strozzi palace begun in 1489 for Filippo Stozzi the Elder is nearly fifty per cent larger than the White House, home of the President of the United States. The Strozzi palace is also almost twice as high but has one fewer floors and many fewer rooms than the White House. The Strozzi

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rooms are tall and hugely proportioned. The family banged around in an immense space, far larger than what one family and a few servants required. In the centre is a large courtyard open to the sky, which creates a completely private outdoor space away from the dirt and noise of the densely crowded streets of Florence. Once they moved in, the Strozzi and others who build similarly vast palaces had to fill them with furniture and appropriate decorations adding to the demand for art. Just filling up the space created a new style of life based upon conspicuous consumption that stimulated the local economy and separated the rich patrician from his humble neighbours (Goldthwaite 1993). The rich Florentines, nevertheless, were highly unusual in fifteenth-century Italy. Even in Venice, the city most comparable to Florence, the great families did not build many new palaces and did not nearly fill their homes with objects of art to the degree of the Florentines. In the broader context of all of northern Italy, the buying habits of the Florentine patricians helped the economy only slightly. Little of their wealth trickled down to anyone other than a few local artisans and artists. In fact, real wages of most Italian urban workers stagnated or declined during the Renaissance at a time when taxes increased and the wealthy grew wealthier. The wealth that financed the demand for luxury goods during the Renaissance did not come from new productive investments or international trade as it had in the thirteenth century but from the gleanings from political offices and corruption, all of which extracted resources from the lower classes. In only a very limited sense, therefore, can the Renaissance be explained as the result of a consumer revolution that benefited the upper classes in a few cities. There was, however, a revolution in business practice. As John Padgett has found, small bankers in Florence invented a new form of business organisation, a kind of holding company that reduced the risks of business and expanded opportunities (Padgett 2001). By the time of the Renaissance, a merchant was a prisoner in his own office tied to his desk. He and his staff, especially the young apprentices, spent day and night writing letters and keeping books. It was not unusual to read about an apprentice complaining that he slept only three hours a night, and even the master merchant might be at his desk long after midnight. The point of all this writing was that trust among businessmen depended on documents. The most important documents were the account books. In fact, in the archives of the business court of Florence, the Mercanzia, by far the largest single collection of such documents are the account books that merchants submitted as evidence in disputes. Account books were just one kind of business innovation of the Italian Renaissance. Insurance policies reduced risk for pirate-infested sea voyages and bandit-ridden trails. A private postal system facilitated the flow of market information and business correspondence. Perhaps the most important new document was the letter of exchange, which allowed a merchant to pay a deposit at a local bank in Florence or Venice and withdraw the money or have someone

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else withdraw it from a distant branch in London or Naples. Like insurance, letters of exchange reduced risk from robbers who could easily seize a bag of coins carried to buy goods, but in addition these letters allowed banks to make profits that evaded the Church’s condemnation of usury, the interest-bearing loan. Merchant bankers created clever ways of avoiding the prohibition. For example, let us say a Florentine merchant wanted to take a business trip to Bruges in the Low Countries. For his expenses on the trip, the merchant deposited a sum of money in a bank in exchange for a letter of credit. All the merchant was going to do, as far as the Church was concerned, was exchange the letter of credit in florins to the groats of Bruges. It was a currency exchange. The merchant was given 60 days to get to Bruges or to send the letter to his agent in Bruges to make the exchange. In the meantime, he used the letter of credit as collateral to buy merchandise to send to Bruges via ship to sell for profit. The bank profited by fixing the exchange rate to its advantage. Everyone profited and no one was a usurer, at least on paper. Thus, the mountains of paper merchants generated had two functions. Documents guaranteed a system of trust among merchants who could verify the value of transactions in account books. And they helped bankers evade usury regulations that might otherwise have compromised the vitality and profitability of the economic system (Goldthwaite 2009). The traditional historiography of the Renaissance had a pronounced parochial quality. Italian historiography was about towns, only occasionally about regions, and seldom about the entire peninsula. With an eye to the heritage of the ancients, especially Greece and Rome, the broader European Renaissance was about France, England, Spain, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and Poland – including some regions that did not yet exist as states. Outside of Florence and Venice (and for brief periods in Poland, the United Provinces, and England), most Renaissance thinkers ignored the ancient republics. The usual Renaissance model for the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, and England was the Roman Empire not the Roman Republic, and the paragon for the monarch was Caesar rather than one of the ancient law-givers such as Lycurgus or Solon (Dandelet 2014). North of the Alps, however, humanists turned to philological projects less devoted to recapturing the thinking of pagan Antiquity than to understanding the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. The Christian Humanists, such as Johannes Reuchlin and Desiderius Erasmus, profoundly reshaped the interpretation of the Bible, northern printers in Basel and Leuven made the scriptures available in vernacular languages for any literate person to read and contemplate, and reformers from Martin Luther to John Calvin utterly reshaped the theology and organisation of the Christian churches. The Renaissance in Spain and France began with an enthusiasm for all things Italian, and because of their strong centralised monarchies, kings and queens shaped taste and patronised the most successful artists and writers, many Italian. The far less centralised Holy Roman Empire, Low Countries, and Poland boasted multiple centres and a diversity of patrons. Nowhere north of the Alps did Renaissance culture take on such a transformative character as in England. In England, the engine of Renaissance culture was less the visual than the dramatic arts – the

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theatres of London and of Shakespeare. Because of the different forms the Renaissance took in these various countries, the dates of the Renaissance differed. In Italy, the glory days of the Renaissance were in the 1400s until about 1530. In France the Renaissance first appeared in the early 1500s, but then waned due to the Wars of Religion late in the century. In England the greatest period of creativity was even later – the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Thus, there were many Renaissances, each with a distinct periodisation and a distinctive definition (cf. Chapter 1: Medieval and modern). Only recently have scholars started to come to terms with the place of Renaissance Europe in the world – the flow of goods from China and South Asia, ideas from Islam, and novelties from the New World. The full measure of the global Renaissance is starting to come into focus (Mack 2001; Brotton 2002; O’Connell and Dursteler 2016, 178–258). The Renaissance in Venice, for example, may have depended more on its connections to the Ottomans than its heritage from ancient Rome or Byzantium. Villa architecture that seemed so neo-Roman to an earlier generation filtered into the Renaissance via Moorish Spain. Polyglot businessmen in the Mediterranean worked in Venetian, Arabic, and Turkish, languages that framed their world more than humanist Latin or Greek. Religious identities, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, were far more permeable than could be imagined from theology or the culture of the clergy. The Renaissance, it now seems, was a period of flourishing global connections of goods, fashions, and ideas, producing a culture that masked its newness by imagining it was reviving the old.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Castiglione, Baldesar (1967). The Book of the Courtier. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin. Cellini, Benvenuto (1998). The Autobiography. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin. Erasmus, Desiderius (1964). The Essential Erasmus. Ed. and trans. John P. Dolan. London: Penguin. Lucretius (2007). The Nature of Things. Trans. Alicia Stallings. London: Penguin. Luther, Martin (1962). Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings. Ed. John Dillenberger. New York: Anchor. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1979). The Portable Machiavelli. Trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. New York: Penguin. Petrarca, Francesco (2005). Petrarch in English. Trans. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. London: Penguin. Renaissance Humanism (2014). Ed. and trans. Margaret L. King. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Trismegistus, Hermes (1992). Hermetica. Ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valla, Lorenzo (2007). On the Donation of Constantine. Trans. G. W. Bowersock. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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(B) Secondary literature Baker, Nicholas Scott and Maxson, Brian, eds. (2015). After Civic Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Baron, Hans (1966). The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Revised ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Biow, Douglas (2015). On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Black, Christopher (1989). Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouwsma, William J. (1984). Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Brotton, Jerry (2002). The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Alison (2010). The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Judith C. (2014). Economies. In: Michael Wyatt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 320–37. Burckhardt, Jacob (1958). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S.G.C. Middlemore. New York: Harper & Row. Caferro, William (2011). Contesting the Renaissance. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Cipolla, Carlo M. (1994). Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Dandelet, Thomas James (2014). The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferraro, Joanne M. (2007). The Manufacture and Movement of Goods. In: John Jeffries Martin, ed., The Renaissance World. New York: Routledge, 87–100. Finucci, Valeria and Schwartz, Regina (1994). Desire in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fransceschi, Franco (2004). The Economy: Work and Wealth. In: John M. Najemy, ed., Italy in the Age of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 124–44. Ginzburg, Carlo (1980). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldthwaite, Richard (1993). Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— (2009). The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——— (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton. Grendler, Paul F. (2006). Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism. In: Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens, eds., Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt. Leiden: Brill, 295–326. Hay, Denys (1977). The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century: The Birkbeck Lectures, 1971. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herlihy, David and Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane (1985). Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Kelly-Gadol, Joan (1977). Did Women Have a Renaissance? In: Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 174–201. Laven, Mary (2002). Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent. London: Viking Penguin. Lee, Alexander (2015). The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty. New York: Anchor Books. Levack, Brian P. (2015). The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. London: Routledge. Mack, Rosamond E. (2001). Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Martin, John Jeffries (2004). Myths of Renaissance Individualism. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Maxson, Brian (2013). The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Muir, Edward (1981). Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Najemy, John M. (2006). A History of Florence, 1200–1575. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Connell, Monique and Dursteler, Eric R. (2016). The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Padgett, John (2001). Organizational Genesis, Identity and Control: The Transformation of Banking in Renaissance Florence. In: James E. Rauch and Alessandra Casella, eds., Networks and Markets. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 211–47. ——— (2011). Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence. Journal of Modern History 83 (March), 1–47. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel (1984). Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Rocke, Michael (1996). Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, Sarah Gwyneth (2009). The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ruggiero, Guido ed. (2002). A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell. ——— (2015). The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, Regina M. (2008). Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strier, Richard (2011). The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Augustine (2005). Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125–1325. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Trexler, Richard C. (1991). Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trinkaus, Charles (1995). In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Wandel, Lee Palmer (1989). The Reform of Images: New Visualizations of the Christian Community in Zurich. Archiv Für Reformationsgeschichte 80, 105–24.

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Weinstein, Donald (1974). Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence. In: Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion. Leiden: Brill, 265–70. Weinstein, Donald and Bell, Rudolph M. (1986). Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700. Revised ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weissman, Ronald F. E. (1982). Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press. Wootton, David (1983). Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appendices

Appendix 4.1 Ruggiero, Guido (2015). The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. New York: Cambridge University Press. [Joachim of Fiore predicted the world would come to an end in 1260] All this would be only mildly amusing were it not for one troubling fact. After Joachim’s death in 1202, many came to believe that his prophecies were coming true. And, significantly, they seemed to be coming true more clearly in the Italian peninsula, especially in the north, where literally dozens of little city-states in the thirteenth century prospered, struggled, and appeared to many to be on the verge of a new age and world order. In those cities a traditional medieval order, typified by what might be labeled the Great Social Divide – where society seemed to be essentially divided between a hereditary nobility and the rest – had been radically and often violently challenged by new social classes, new social and cultural values, and new wealth. In essence the power of an old nobility had been challenged and, at least in the larger cities, pretty well limited by new groupings of merchant/ banker/artisan powers who usually called themselves the Popolo (the People). … It appears that the power of the nobility and the Great Social Divide won out in the end, along with the more ubiquitous business-as-usual and avoiding unnecessary conflict … . In a much larger historical frame, [Italy became] a more disciplined society politically, socially and internally that increasingly looked more and more like the rest of Europe. And in the process the Rinascimento dissolved into a more general European Renaissance and what would eventually be labeled, rather misleadingly, the Ancient Regime. Thus in the end the Rinascimento really did not end – rather, it seeded a series of new

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beginnings and new histories, perhaps the final irony for an age that feared and rejected the new. And we today are still harvesting its fruits, both sweet and bitter. [3, 573–4]

Appendix 4.2 Burckhardt, Jacob (1958). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G.C. Middlemore. New York: Harper & Row. In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing, above all, to the political circumstances of Italy. [143]

Appendix 4.3 Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact. [256–7]

5

Reformations C. Scott Dixon

Few eras in the history of Latin Christianity experienced as much change as the early modern age. Between the return of the Renaissance papacy to Rome in the fifteenth century and the first soundings of the Great Awakening movement in the early eighteenth, Christianity was fundamentally and irrevocably transformed. Without doubt the most dramatic development of the period was the Protestant Reformation. Profoundly creative and destructive at the same time, the Reformation put an end to the late medieval Catholic synthesis and replaced it with a synthesis of its own, ultimately reshaping the relationship between the believer and the divine. And yet for all of the radical change associated with the rise of the Reformation, it was just one in a series of religious developments, all of which raised questions about the nature of right belief and the authority of the Church (Greengrass 2014; Dixon 2016). Making sense of such a crowded canvas is a difficult task, and it is not helped by the fact that the study of early modern religious history has been divided into so many fields and subfields of research. For many years the subject was dominated by the genre of Church history, which was itself distinguished by two separate approaches: one was concerned with the study of the Church as a historical phenomenon, by which is meant religion’s interaction with the world, the other with historical theology or the history of dogma. Over time these categories began to blur at the edges, and more recently a ‘new environment’ of interpretation has forced scholars to rethink the categories altogether (Bradley and Muller 2016). This new environment itself is based on a long tradition of secular scholarship reaching back to the age of Enlightenment, which considers religious history part of a broader matrix of social factors, ranging from the political and the economic to the intellectual and the cultural. As we will see, historians of early modern religion have developed very refined fields of specialisation and quite distinct historiographical portfolios, and while this has benefited our understanding it has also added to the difficulty of establishing a common discourse. Moreover, to make matters even more complicated, these portfolios are often divided along national, confessional, and linguistic lines. This can lead to closed communities sealed off by language, asymmetrical historiographical developments, and simple bewilderment.

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The following chapter will explore some of the ways in which historians of early modern religion have tried to make sense of the past. The focus will be on recent historiography, primarily on work published since the mid-twentieth century – though it remains mindful of the fact that this scholarship evolved out of, and was deeply influenced by, a long tradition of interpretation, and this will be discussed where space allows. Space has also dictated how long a period can be included in the analysis. Theoretically, a study of early modern religious history could take in developments from the life of Lorenzo Valla (circa 1407–57) to the life of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60), but this would spread the coverage too thinly. The focus is thus more narrow: the central concern of the following analysis is how historians have studied the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century. At times the analysis will reach back to the late-medieval age, just as it will occasionally extend into the seventeenth century, but only when it sheds light on the interpretation of these two phenomena. Readers interested in digging deeper or pursuing other paths can get their bearings from the in-text references, which include both specialist works and broad survey collections (most recently Bamji, Janssen, and Laven 2013; Rublack 2017).

Framing the subject One of the first dilemmas facing any scholar writing a general history of early modern religion is coming up with a suitable title for his or her book. Leaving aside the vastness of the historical landscape mentioned above, there is also the knotty issue of how to isolate any one particular development and relate it to the others. A case in point is the use of the singular or the plural when framing the Protestant Reformation. Not only were there different strands of thought (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist), there were also different social, political, geographical, linguistic, and temporal contexts. What is the core variable in such a mix? The dilemma can be partly overcome by qualifying the nature of Reformation in the title: thus scholars speak of the Lutheran Reformation, the English Reformation, the Radical Reformation and so on. (Without this qualification, the Reformation is generally taken to mean the Protestant Reformation in a generic sense, as it is in this chapter.) Another solution is to use the plural Reformations rather than Reformation in an effort to make room for the diversity, as Carlos Eire does in his recent narrative history Reformations, declaring at the outset that ‘there were multiple Reformations and that none of them can be fully understood in isolation’ (Eire 2016, xvii). Yet another solution is to stretch the meaning of the term Reformation to encompass the broad range of religious developments experienced by Latin Christendom in this period. Diarmaid MacCulloch adopted this approach in his own narrative history by informing the reader that, for the sake of simplicity, his analysis will treat the multiple reformations, including both Protestant and Catholic, under the same shorthand term: namely, The Reformation (MacCulloch 2003, xix).

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The dilemma of labelling has proven particularly problematic in the study of early modern Catholic reform. Unlike the Protestant Reformation, which can be qualified with reference to its ideas or its historical manifestations, early modern Catholic reform, at least in the beginning, was not marked out by sudden religious insights or conscious attempts to break with the past. Consequently, even the task of identifying the subject matter can prove a challenge for historians. Over time two terms have come to dominate the field, Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation, and each one is wrapped up in its own particular set of meanings. Catholic Reform invokes the idea of an ongoing history of indigenous reform at work years before the rise of the Luther Affair. Counter Reformation, in contrast, a term first coined in the late eighteenth century, insinuates that it was a process provoked and shaped by the Reformation and that its central purpose was to eradicate the innovations coming out of Wittenberg, Zurich, and Geneva. Modern historians still use these terms, though more informally than in previous generations, and they have also come to recognise their limitations and have begun to coin new labels to encapsulate the Catholic experience, including Catholic Renewal, Catholic Refashioning, early modern Catholicism, Catholic Confessionalisation, and Confessional Catholicism (Bireley 1999; Hsia 1998; O’Malley 2002). Once an appropriate name has been chosen, there is still the question of place. Framing the area of study can be difficult when dealing with a subject as fluid as belief. In Reformation history, one common way of doing this is to situate religious developments in a political context, the most natural being a princely territory or a nation-state, and treat the process of Protestant reform as part of the national narrative. English readers will be most familiar with this approach through their readings of the Henrician or the Elizabethan reformations, which closely associates the making of the English Church with the Tudor monarchs. Domesticating the Reformation in this way requires the historian to downplay the transnational, multilingual, protean nature of the early movement, thus necessarily distorting and simplifying the story, and yet there is truth in the idea that Protestants couched their religion in terms of the state. Indeed, confessional patriotism of this kind became a commonplace of Protestant culture, which is another reason why historians often use the nation as the framework for studies of religious change. In the Dutch Republic, for instance, the adoption of the Reformed faith was instrumental in fashioning its sense of national identity. Scrutinising the pages of Scripture, Dutch Calvinists were able to find the theological legitimation for their revolt against Spain, the histories of former struggles (such as those of the Israelites) required to explain their own sufferings as a people, and a range of Old Testament figures such as David and Moses to serve as archetypes for the national heroes of their own time (Schama 1987; compare Pollmann 2011). Multiple Reformations of this kind raise the dilemma of chronologies, for they did not all run in the same direction or at the same speed. How do we find a timescale to accommodate the diversity without losing sight of the historical essentials? This issue is made even more complicated by the long-held belief that

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the Renaissance and the Reformation were critical turning points from the medieval to the modern. It was the era of overseas exploration, the onset of print culture, revolutionary thought in science and the arts, the foundations of the nation-state, and the first manifestations of the global economy, all of which had more general knock-on effects that contributed to the making of modernity. Firmly ensconced in this medieval-to-modern axis, both the Renaissance and the Reformation are easy prey for historians who set out to integrate the study of religion into grand theories about the rise of individualism, rationalism, secularism, capitalism, or the theory and practice of toleration. In such a scheme, multiple timescales are at work, but the essential trajectory is the passage from the early modern period to the present age. The primary purpose of dates is to chart the progress of this passage (see the discussion in Gregory 2012). Preconceptions relating to names, places, and timescales thus have implications for how historians have approached the subject, but by far the most prominent category used to frame early modern religious history has been religion itself, by which is meant the tendency to group the various histories of reform around the theological convictions at their core. In the manner of a credal map, areas are shaded according to belief. This approach seems to speak the language of the age, for there is no doubt that religion was fundamental to the early modern perception of the world, both as an intellectual system for making sense of things (codified in the language of the theologians) and as a cultural matrix for providing people with a sense of place and purpose through rites, rituals, and ceremonies (Ryrie 2013). All the mainstream churches of the age realised this, and that is why they were so quick to issue confessions of the faith fixing common standards of orthodoxy and belief. The Lutherans referred to the Confession of Augsburg (1530) and the Book of Concord (1580), for instance, the Reformed to the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Helvetic Confessions (1536, 1566), and the Canons of Dort (1619), Catholics to the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent (1563). Admittedly, defining the proper parameters of practice and belief was nothing new to Christianity, but it became a particular concern of the sixteenth century as a ‘quantum leap in the production of confessions of faith’ enabled the antagonistic forms of Christianity to set out their terms and provide the lines of theological legitimation (Pelikan 2003, 460, 662). Using these confessions as guides to understanding the age, the German historian Ernst Walter Zeeden (1916–2011) coined the phrase ‘formation of confessions’ (Konfessionsbildung in German, often rendered into ‘confessionalism’ in English) as a means of capturing the essential dynamic of the historical process (Zeeden 1985). On the face of it, this seems an ideal way to order early modern religious history. With theology as a heuristic guide, each phase of the reform process is set in relation to broader developments, each step taken by the emerging denominations is carefully chronicled, and all of the essential ideas of the new churches are packaged, published, and captured in time. And it set its stamp on the religious culture at large. As R. Po-chia Hsia has observed, confessionalism took in more than just the formation of abstract religious ideologies; it was the

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deeper logic behind the making of the confessional state in a general sense, reaching into ‘the articulation of belief systems (in “confessional texts”), the recruitment and character of various professional clerical bodies, the constitution and operations of church institutions, and systems of rituals’ (Hsia 1989, 4–5). To get a sense of what this means in historical terms we can look to the duchy of Bavaria. In this Catholic stronghold of south-western Germany, a long line of pious rulers opposed Protestantism in all of its forms, both domestically and on the European stage, while overseeing the defence, consolidation, and rejuvenation of Catholicism in their lands. Important measures designed to help in the upbuilding of confessional consolidation included the publication of Church and school orders, religious mandates, new agendas of Church governance, close cooperation with neighbouring bishops and the implementation of papal decrees, the foundation of schools, monasteries, churches, and chapels, support of the Jesuit order, and a new landscape of Catholic piety, including sites of pilgrimage and collections of relics. The end result, as the Jesuit scholar Matthäus Rader remarked in his work Bavaria Sancta (1615), was a land marked by monuments of cult and religion. Cities, fortresses, marketplaces, districts, villages, fields, forests, mountains, and valleys breathe and show the Catholic and Old Religion in Bavaria. They are all full of sacred buildings, wide cloisters, new theological colleges, magnificent churches, innumerable chapels, relics, columns with depictions of saints, pilgrimage hostels, hospitals, and homes for the elderly and orphans … the entire region is nothing other than religion and appears as a single communal folk church. (Thomas 2010, 104; see also Forster 2007). We should not assume, however, that all confessional histories were quite as neat as this. A case in point is the Lutheran lands of the Holy Roman Empire, which comprised numerous independent and semi-independent polities. Reform took hold at different times, it progressed at different rates, reached to different levels, and it evolved in disparate settings. Some territories, such as Electoral Saxony, the landgraviate of Hesse, the margraviate of Brandenburg-AnsbachKulmbach, or the south-German duchy of Württemberg, experienced what we might term paradigmatic Lutheran reformations, with the state usurping the function and jurisdiction of the bishops, creating a new form of Protestant Church governance, and imposing Wittenberg’s Lutheranism on the land through Church orders, catechisms, mandates, and a steady stream of official publications (on the territorial reformations in Germany see Brady 2009). Other territories, however, did not have this experience of uniformity or continuity. The Upper Palatinate went through numerous phases of reform, moving from Lutheranism to Calvinism in 1563, back to Lutheranism in 1576 only to return to Calvinism in 1583, until it was eventually annexed in 1628 by the duke of Bavaria and forcibly converted to Catholicism. Lutheranism may have remained the ‘principal religious idiom’ at the grassroots level, but given the constantly changing confessional profile of the land its impact remained fairly superficial

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(Johnson 2009, 21). Similar stories can be told about the Mark Brandenburg, Amberg, and Prussia. Only rarely did religious reality correspond in a meaningful way to the public intentions, and this can raise doubts about the descriptive value of broad concepts such as confessionalism.

Accounting for origins Of primary importance for any historian concerned with the intellectual origins of Protestant or Catholic reform is the relationship between the upheavals of the confessional age and Renaissance humanism. It may be true, as Paul Oskar Kristeller once famously proposed, that its ‘broad concern with the study and imitation of classical antiquity’ was not equivalent to a philosophical or a theological mindset, let alone a particular approach to Church reform (Kristeller 1996, 113). Nevertheless, the Renaissance interest in recovering the pure, unfiltered ideas of both the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian tradition using the hermeneutical tools being developed within the fields of a liberal education (studia humanitatis) made fundamental contributions to both Protestant and Catholic cultures. This was particularly the case in much of northern Europe, where the new hermeneutics uniquely combined with an intellectual culture devoted to the study of Scripture and a pious life. To distinguish the heavily charged piety of the northern movement from the more secular spirit in the south, historians tend to refer to it as Christian Humanism (Levi 2002, 71–258; Nauert 1995). So little distinguishes the Christian humanist appeal for a return to the sources (ad fontes) from the later Reformation appeals for a return to true Christianity and a first-hand acquaintance with Scripture (sola Scriptura) that historians have suggested that the evangelical movement was deeply indebted to these humanist forerunners. Admittedly, it was not just a simple passing of the torch. Very few of the humanists in Italy or France ever embraced the Reformation, and even in Germany, where the humanist sodalities quickly rallied round Luther, this initial support was largely based on what one historian has termed a ‘constructive misunderstanding’ (Moeller 1982, 19–40). But in the beginning the affinities were strong. Relating Renaissance humanism to Catholic reform is more straightforward, yet even here there is need to be cautious. Take the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (circa 1466–1536), the greatest humanist of the age. No other scholar at the time did more to recover the source texts of Christianity. Included among his many publications were a translation of the New Testament, numerous Biblical commentaries, and works devoted to the cultivation of the Christian life, all of which made critical contributions to the renewal of Catholicism in the sixteenth century. The 1516 New Testament (or Novum Instrumentum) in particular was a critical foundation for subsequent reform. Erasmus subjected the text to a thoroughly humanist analysis, refining grammar, syntax, and style, rooting out scribal errors and corruptions, and correcting mistakes of translation and restoring the proper idiom, which he did by leafing through ancient texts to find examples of proper usage.

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But Erasmus was also concerned with how people practised the faith, and indeed few other works of the age better exemplify the critical piety of the late-medieval age than his Enchiridion militis Christiani (The Handbook of the Christian Soldier) (1501) (see Excerpt 5.1). In this work, directed at a soldier with a view to converting him to the Christian life, Erasmus called for a turn away from the mere observance of religion to a deeper embrace of Scripture and its teachings. As he advised the soldier: ‘Place Christ before you as the only goal of your life’.

Excerpt 5.1: Enchiridion militis Christiani (1501) Erasmus, Desiderius (1988) Enchiridion militis Christiani in Collected Works of Erasmus. John O’Malley ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1–128. Since faith is the only avenue to Christ, it is fitting that the first rule should be to understand fully what the Scriptures tell us about Christ and his Spirit, and to believe this not only by lip service, not coldly or listlessly or hesitantly, as does the common lot of Christians, but with your whole heart, with the deep and unshaken conviction that there is not one tiniest detail contained therein that does not pertain to your salvation … Do not tell me now that charity consists in being an assiduous churchgoer, prostrating yourself before the statues of the saints, lighting candles, and repeating a certain number of prayers. God has no need of this. This is what Paul calls charity: to edify our neighbour, to consider everyone as members of the same body, to regard everyone as one in Christ, to rejoice in the Lord at your brother’s prosperity as if it were your own and to heal his misfortunes as if they were your own. It is to correct the erring gently, teach the ignorant, lift up the fallen, console the downhearted, aid the struggler, support the needy, in a word, devote all your resources, all your zeal, all your care to this one end, that you benefit as many as you can in Christ. Just as he was not born for himself and did not live for himself or die for himself, but dedicated himself entirely to our needs, so let us devote ourselves to the interests of our brethren, not to our own. [55, 79]

All of this was intended to strengthen Catholicism; and yet, because of Erasmus’ close association with the perceived paganism of Italian humanism – and more to the point, his clear affinities with the sentiments of the early evangelical movement – Catholic reformers tended to hold him at a distance. Later in the century his works would be placed on the Index and his search for a pure Christianity would be likened to the thought of the reformers. Even in Erasmus’s lifetime Cardinal Girolamo Aleandro, one of the men entrusted with implementing Luther’s bull of excommunication, referred to Erasmus as ‘the director of the Lutheran tragedy’ (Rummel 2000, 27).

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Assessing the influence of Renaissance humanism leads naturally to the study of late-medieval religious thought, particularly the scholastic theology of the schools. A range of convictions separated the humanists and scholastics, some very close to the core principles of the faith, but the basic divide was hermeneutical. As Erica Rummel has put it: ‘Generally speaking, humanists supported classical learning, gave weight to stylistic considerations, and emphasized the importance of linguistic skills in biblical studies; scholastics took the opposite view’ (Rummel 1995, 14). Humanists viewed the scholastics as shop-worn exponents of outmoded thought, closed to innovation. Many modern scholars have followed suit, pointing to the sheer confusion of scholastic ideas, the antagonistic styles of dialogue, and the lack of insight and originality. In their view, theology had become a very technical science ordered around combative schools or ‘ways’ (viae), the most prominent being the modern way (via moderna) and the ancient way (via antiqua). Moreover, within this broad division further fragmentation occurred, as theologians would often take sides according to the issue under dispute rather than a particular theory. This was a formula for ever-increasing complexity, incessant infighting, and the ossification of ideas (see the surveys in McGrath 1988, 69–121; Ozment 1980, 22–134). In light of the confusion, some specialists, following in the footsteps of prominent twentieth-century thinkers such as Joseph Lortz and Étienne Gilson, have concluded that the world of scholastic theology had no creative energies left. Others, such as the Dutch historian Heiko Oberman, have seen more light, arguing that the late-medieval age, precisely because it was such an ‘explosive period of fermentation and exploration’, was a profoundly creative phase in the history of theology (see Appendix 5.1 a–b). ***** Questions of change and continuity are particularly suited to the study of ideas, but they also apply to religious reform as whole. It is not just the transformation of thought but the entire fabric of the religious world that needs to be explained. As an example of how historians have approached this problem, we can look to the debates in English Reformation history, where the question of origins has long been at the heart of the research agenda. For many years, scholars worked on the assumption that Protestantism was embraced by a growing mass of the English people during the Tudor reigns. A Reformation occurred in England because the people wanted one. The most influential voice in this vein was A. G. Dickens, who claimed in his work The English Reformation (1964) that by the reign of Edward VI Protestantism had gained ‘an invaluable breathing-space of more than six years, during which it spread and consolidated itself beyond the likelihood of extinction by any machinery available to Tudor governments’ (Dickens 1964, 385). Central to Dickens’ analysis was the premise that the Reformation was welcomed by the English parishioners, who were ready to embrace the vitality of the ‘positive evangel’ and turn their backs on the ‘cloud of minor

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saints, gilded legends and plain myths’ of a moribund English Catholicism. To put it crudely, the Reformation came about because it was more appealing than the existing Church. For those historians occupied with the issue of origins it was not difficult to support this argument with reference to historical evidence decrying the state of late-medieval Catholicism, which was just as easy to find in England as it was in Europe. The Reformation was the consequence of a medieval Catholic Church in a state of decline (see the survey in O’Day 2014). The decadence theory holds as long as scholars accept the dual premise that the Reformation was popular and the medieval Church was in decline. Two decades after the appearance of Dickens’ The English Reformation, however, both of these assumptions were challenged. The first to fall was the conjecture that Protestantism ‘spread and consolidated itself beyond the likelihood of extinction’ by the reign of Edward VI. Histories of Elizabethan Puritanism, surveys of late-century parish belief, and studies of the enduring vitality of English Catholicism argued that English Protestantism was a late-bloomer, very close indeed to the edge of extinction (Collinson 1988; Haigh 1993). The second to fall was the theory that the Catholic Church was in a state of decline, unloved and unwanted by the mass of English parishioners. In his influential work The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Eamon Duffy challenged the decadence theory by demonstrating just how fulfilling, rich, and popular late-medieval religion actually was on the eve of Reformation. According to Duffy, ‘… late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation’ (Duffy 1992, 2). From this perspective, it makes little sense to explain origins by pointing up the shortcomings of the medieval Church or its lack of appeal. Either the reasons reside in a more positive relationship between late-medieval religiosity and the evangelical message or the Reformation was essentially forced upon the land and the English people were in fact reluctant Protestants. A similar problematic of continuity and change is evident in studies of religious politics. Historians have long recognised that both Protestant and Catholic reform were closely bound up in the exercise of power, with religion often serving as a handmaid to the making of the state. Generally speaking, there are two schools of thought on how this relationship came about (though they are not necessarily mutually exclusive). One approach is to reach back to the medieval period and trace the long-term continuities in Church/state relations. Well before the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), for instance, English kings pressed the English Church for more taxation, recruited the clergy for secular tasks, controlled and expropriated church property, nominated the higher clergy, including archbishops, and incrementally curtailed the liberties of the clerical estate. In light of these facts, one historian has termed the late-medieval English Church a monarchical Church, ‘that is to say that, in practice, kings exercised a great deal of control,

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a largely determining control, over the activities of the church’ (Bernard 2012, 17). The same process was evident in medieval Spain, France, and the territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Other historians have argued that there was something unprecedented about the post-Reformation union of Church and state. They concede the medieval synthesis of the secular and the spiritual, but they also claim that the reform programmes brought with them a powerful new mandate to rule that made it possible for the state to usurp many of the functions previously monopolised by the Church, from the supervision of morality via control over education to the upbuilding of proper faith. This process is most evident in the Protestant lands, but even in Catholic nations the reform impulses of mid-century invested the rulers with heightened powers and responsibilities over the Church. In the Spain of Philip II (1527–98), for instance, which had the largest Church in Christendom, the process and pace of the Catholic Reformation was completely overseen by the king and his ministers. In all aspects relating to the exercise of power and control, Philip set the terms. He reserved the right of appointment to higher offices, regulated property and income, presided in person over national councils and synods, and insisted that all provincial councils be in the presence of royal delegates and that all decrees be submitted to the royal council for approval. When the clergy resisted, as they did in his efforts to reorganise the orders, he sent in the troops. By the late sixteenth century, buttressed by the momentum of Tridentine reform, the Spanish king had unprecedented control over a ‘wholly autonomous church’ (Kamen 1993, 76). As a way of demonstrating the relative strengths and weaknesses of the change-versus-continuity arguments we can conclude this section with a brief survey of the rise of the Reformation in Germany. As elsewhere in late-medieval Europe, there is plenty of evidence in the German lands attesting to a widespread dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church. Humanists published critical attacks against the Church and its clergy, charged with the added note of nationalism; scholars spoke openly of the urgent need for institutional reform (reformatio); and commentators at every level of social discourse criticised the malignant influence of the Roman Church, not least the authors of the long lists of grievances (Gravamina nationis germanicae) submitted to the Imperial Diets (Whaley 2012, 1–101; Dickens 1974) (see Excerpt 5.2). At the same time, the political powers in the realm, buoyed by this climate of discontent, continued to absorb the German church into the structures and methods of secular rule. The princes and higher nobility abused their roles as patrons and custodians, filling the offices with family members and clients; city councils usurped the powers of the bishoprics and subjected the churches to urban rule; and even parish communes started to regulate local religious affairs, preparing the ground for the Communal Reformation. All of these factors were at work more than a century before the rise of the Luther Affair: Reformation was the continuation of reformatio (Smith 2008).

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Excerpt 5.2: The Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund (c. 1438) Strauss, Gerald. Ed. and Trans. (1971). Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Written by an anonymous author somewhere in southern Germany in the 1430s, the Reformatio Sigismundi (The Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund) was one of the most influential reform treatises of the age. The core themes of its proposed reform programme (politics, law, coinage, and religion) reflect the general climate of concern, but above all it was a tract concerned with the state of religion in the Empire, an appeal to reduce the perceived power and abuses of the German Church and return the faith to its original purity. Martin Luther would repeat many of its themes in the following century. Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, lend your strength and grace to our endeavor, grant us the wisdom to know and accomplish a true ordering of our spiritual and secular state so that your sacred name and divinity will again be professed everywhere. Your anger is upon us; your wrath has seized us, we are as sheep without a shepherd; without asking your leave we have strayed into the pasture. Obedience is dead. Justice is grievously abused. Nothing stands in its proper order. Therefore God has withdrawn His Grace from us. We ignore His commandments. What he has ordered we do only if it pleases us. We practice obedience without righteousness … The hour will come for all faithful Christians to witness the promulgation of the rightful order. Let everyone join the ranks of the pious who will pledge themselves to observe it. It is plain that the Holy Father, the pope, and all our princes have abandoned the task set to them by God. It may be that God has appointed a man to set things right. Let no one, neither princes nor cities, make excuses for not heeding God’s admonition, for this admonition touches God, our faith, and justice. No one can make excuses for himself before God … Take note how each person in the spiritual estate is to conduct himself … I refer to all prelates and regulars, … pope, bishops, and secular priests. For if the right order were kept in all things, our spiritual affairs would prosper again, all things would be one with God, God’s wrath would be mitigated, our works would be fruitful, and all things would again be for the best.

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Prelates do not relish being reformed, nor do the regular orders, for they are loath to relinquish what they have grasped. But let no one be afraid of the task … If there is to be one shepherd and one flock, we must make a beginning of it. Things have come to their final pass. There must be a new order …[4, 6–7]

Scholars who take issue with this interpretation recognise that the medieval period provided the crucial foundations for the break with Rome, but they do not consider these foundations sufficient in themselves to comprehend the origins of the Reformation. To begin with, as both sides concede, these preconditions had been evident for centuries, and yet there had been no widespread call to separate from the Church until the emergence of Martin Luther. The reason for this was the revolutionary quality of the nature of reform after 1517. The Reformation did not just realise the ambitions of the medieval reformatio movements; it completely transformed the meaning of the word. No prince or city council before the Reformation, for instance, had been able to claim sovereignty over both Church and state in the manner of the rulers of Lutheran Germany (Witte 2002; Estes 2005). Nor did any late-medieval humanist or public commentator reject the Roman Catholic Church in the same terms as the evangelical reformers. Admittedly, it had become commonplace to point up its corruption and its failings, but aside from a handful of heretics, no intellectual before the rise of the Reformation had called for the elimination of the Catholic Church and the establishment (or re-establishment) of another in its place. This evokes the revolutionary quality of the evangelical movement and the theology of the reformers, which, as the Church historian Berndt Hamm has remarked, ultimately caused the collapse of the medieval system (Hamm 2004).

Making sense of experience The study of religious experience has long been a cottage industry of the medievalists, who are often forced to call on quite ingenious techniques in order to squeeze meaning out of relatively sparse and idiosyncratic sources. Early modernists have followed in their footsteps, with the result that we now have a much more complex and nuanced understanding of lived religion than we did even a few generations ago (see the survey in Edwards 2008; cf. Chapter 13: Popular cultures and witchcraft). Roughly speaking, two fields of study or interest have dominated since the second part of the twentieth century. The first field relates to the methods and hermeneutics of research. Instead of recovering religious culture by sifting through texts and isolating core teachings or prevalent intellectual trends in the manner of the study of confessionalism, historians embarked on what has been termed an ‘anthropology of ideas’, by which is meant they started to consider other forms of evidence revealing of collective religious attitudes (i.e. group actions, unspoken assumptions, games, rituals, public symbols) and looked to

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capture beliefs as they were experienced and expressed rather than just codified in texts. In such an approach, to cite the Dutch historian Willem Frijhoff, ‘the object constructed by the history of religion is no longer a well-defined, ecclesiastically ordered world of faith but the sum of the ritual, symbolic, faithoriented actions (some organized and some disorganized) of people both within and outside the churches’ (Frijhoff 2002, 276–7). The second shift relates to the concern with the history of the le menu peuple, the common people, ranging from how they ordered their daily lives to the belief systems they used to make sense of the world. The guiding assumption is that the social reality of the common people conditioned the nature of their faith. To distinguish this sphere of religious experience from that of the Church, scholars tend to speak of it as ‘popular religion’, different in kind from elite or mainstream religion, though not necessarily sealed off from it or antagonistic to its principles. In the words of Robert Scribner, popular religion is best understood as a bricolage of belief, Christian, pagan, and pragmatic, an ‘untidy mixture of heterogeneous responses and practices that is likely to constitute the functional whole of any culture at any time’ (Scribner 2001, 43). By using an anthropology of ideas as a guide to historical practices, the image we now have of late-medieval religion places much greater emphasis on subjective experience than the objective forms of dogma and liturgy. Admittedly, there was a fixed body of doctrine along with some basic precepts that all Christians were required to know, but most knowledge was visual or visceral rather than cognitive, by which is meant it was more about seeing things or doing things than thinking about them. As a consequence, the religious life on the eve of the Reformation was primarily absorbed by pious activities, from the feasts, fasts, and processions in the public sphere to the rites, symbols, and observances inside the church. And this popular religion extended beyond the church as well. It was evident at the higher social levels in the Italian confraternities or the Brethren of the Common life in the Netherlands, for instance, where the laity could mimic the pious lifestyles of the monks and nuns in the search for salvation. It was also evident at the level of the parish as the local faithful looked for additional ways to access the divine, whether that entailed founding new cults of local saints or simply making use of the objects of worship, from the blessed water of the baptismal font to a rolled up scrap of paper with Biblical verse (see the survey in Soergel 2006). Once we move from the study of medieval religiosity to the early Reformation, the modalities begin to change. This is primarily due to the rise of print (cf. Chapter 6: Media and communication). Historians have long noted the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and the printed word, some arguing that this union effected ‘the West’s first large scale media campaign’ (Edwards 1994, 21). In recent years, however, doubt has been cast on the primacy of the book. To start with, scholars argue, books are not a fixed universe of ideas traceable to the minds of their authors. They are the works of many hands, from the author to the press to the booksellers, and they are shaped and reshaped by these ‘domains’ (Johns 1998). Moreover, to take up the arguments of the ‘linguistic turn’ that engaged researchers in the 1980s, in dealing with a subject as subjective as

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religious belief, it is very difficult to determine the relative functions of author and reader in the making of a text, or indeed how ideas were understood once they left the mind of the writer. Luther may have meant something quite specific when he spoke about Christian Freedom, but his lay readers had different ideas. It is this loose fit between words and their meanings that has prompted many scholars to think of the act of ‘reading’ in a broader sense, taking in the visual and aural or indeed any act of mediation between the public and the page. This has led to an active subfield of Reformation studies devoted to the different forms of media used by the early reformers, from images and objects to stage plays and song (see the survey in Pettegree 2005). Downplaying the role of the book makes it easier to establish continuities between traditional Christianity and the rise of the Reformation. Doing this, however, means that scholars have to rely on the expressive potential of other forms and modalities of communication, most of which require a different hermeneutics than the study of the printed word. The historiography of the Catholic Reformation has been particularly inventive in this regard, partly because Catholic reform was not as logocentric (word-based) as Protestant reform, but also because the study of lived religion requires the historian, as it were, to interrupt the subject in the very act of worship, and early modern Catholicism was rich in sacral acts (Muir 1997). Looking closely at the public rituals or rites of passage of Catholicism provides a momentary glimpse into the meanings of religion at various levels of social experience. One particularly rich setting in this respect was the Italian Renaissance city, where religious rituals did not just convey truths relating to personal or communal salvation: they conveyed and confirmed truths relating to the social and political systems as a whole (cf. Chapter 4: Renaissance). At the level of the parish as well, a close study of the rhythms of the religious life or the settings where this worship was enacted can reveal intimate details about personal belief and communal identity. We must remember that each church, to a greater or lesser extent, was pieced together by the people who walked through its portals from one weekend to the next. Altars and altar cloths, vestments and vessels, images and sculptures, chalice and paten, linen cloths and candles – each assembly of liturgical equipage and its surrounds was unique. Deconstructing the details of these intimate settings can reveal much about the religious experiences of the average parishioners (Duffy 2001). And the same holds true for the study of ritual on the bigger stage: looking behind the acts and the objects can often reveal deeper meanings about religion as a whole as well as its relationship to the social and political worlds. Historians working on the cultural semiotics of the Corpus Christi processions, for instance, both in the late-medieval period and the during the age of Counter Reformation, have used this prominent religious event as a cipher for social meaning in a broader sense (Rubin 1991). The complexity of interpretation that comes into play with ritual can be illustrated with reference to a painting by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini (1429–1507). On the face of it, Bellini’s Procession in St Mark’s Square (1496) (see Figure 5.1) seems a straightforward rendering of a historical event. Closer

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Figure 5.1 Procession in Piazza San Marco, by Gentile Bellini, 1496, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy, Europe. Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo

inspection, however, exposes different layers of interpretation. Art historians, for instance, have revealed that Bellini’s choice of focus and imagery, at a time when Venice was suffering political setbacks, was intended to foreground the wealth, glory, and history of the city. It was as much a portrayal of ideals as reality. Thus Saint Mark’s Basilica, at the centre of the frame, testifies to the riches acquired from Byzantium, while the procession speaks of social order and civic corporatism. Even details are significant, such as the lunette at the far left of the basilica, which provides just enough substance for viewers to make out the translation of the bones of Saint Mark to Venice, which was the main foundation myth of the city (Brown 1988). Historians of religious culture, in contrast, might be more interested in the procession and its participants. In this reading the central subjects are the members of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, one of the most prominent confraternities in the city, who are marching through the square in white cappa in honour of their famous relic of the True Cross. The significance of the image is in what it reveals of the intersection of the sacral and the secular and how public worship can contribute to what the foundation charter considered ‘the honor and prestige of messer the doge, and of the city of Venice, and of all the nation, and of every good Christian’ (Glixon 2003, 7). Still other scholars might focus on ritual and liturgy, which in this case would entail exploring the history of the processions in honour of the True Cross or looking closely at the story at the heart of the image, which is the tale of a miracle that occurred in response to the prayers of a Brecian merchant (the man kneeling at the centre point of the composition). Finally, some historians might look beyond the religious aspects altogether and focus on the social complexity. Bellini provides us with a rich cast of characters, from nobles, citizens (cittidani), friars, and beggars to German merchants, Turks, Moors, Greeks in black-rimmed

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hats and members of the Compagnie della Calza, a theatre troupe in the city identified by their colourful hosiery. ***** Mention of nobles, beggars, and merchants takes us to the second approach used by historians to approximate experience: namely, the assumption that the categories of social existence (class, vocation, gender, education, wealth) strongly influence, if not determine, the religious outlook of the individual. This has been a fertile framework for the study of religious experience, for it enables scholars to relate acts of conversion to historical environments. It was a favoured approach of the ideologically minded historians of the early twentieth century, for instance, as it tied religious ideas to social and economic conditions. In the view of a Marxist scholar such as Henri Hauser, the first evangelicals in France tended to be artisans and wager-earners, men and women who saw in the faith a means of overcoming social and political oppression. His contemporary Lucien Febvre, in contrast, looked higher up the social scale, to the merchants, the magistracy, even the officers of the crown, people who had developed ‘a temperament inclined to seek practical solutions’ and who found Reformation teaching compatible with their ‘lively minds’ and independent temperaments (see the discussion in Holt 1995, 30–43). Building on these early insights, Natalie Zemon Davis explored the first evangelicals among the printers of Lyon and concluded that the literate and selfassertive disposition of the men involved in the trade conditioned them to have an interest in ideas that seemed to promise, among other things, novelty, liberty, and self-aggrandisement (Davis 1975) (see Appendix 5.2 a–c). Numerous sociological studies of this kind exist, and indeed far too many to survey in a chapter of this length. Thus in order to give something of the sense of how historians have tied social experience to religious sensibility, this section will conclude with a survey of two contrasting socio-political locations of the early Reformation: the urban commune and the rural parish in Germany and Switzerland. In both instances the focus will be on how social reality conditioned the experience of reform. For much of the late-twentieth century, specialists of the Swiss and German Reformations were occupied with the spread of the evangelical movement in the towns and cities. These settings were so critical for the early movement some historians were willing to label the Reformation an ‘urban event’, and it naturally gave rise to speculation about the reasons for the relationship (Dickens 1974, 182). One explanation proposed that the message appealed to the interests of the urban ruling elite, implying that the social philosophy of evangelical reform had a deep affinity with the existing forms of order and rule. The most influential formulation of this theory was Bernd Moeller’s extended essay Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1982), which emphasised the extent to which the late-medieval urban commune was conceived as the localised form of Universal Christendom, a sacral corporation (corpus Christianum) that bound the salvation of the individual to the salvation of the whole. Conditioned by such a mentality, it was natural to associate the traditional values of urban politics

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(such as concord, unity, justice, love, peace, and the common good) with the values being preached by the evangelical reformers, who spoke of brotherly love, communal peace, and the shared destiny of the local church. Political culture and evangelical theology merged together in a sacral covenant, sealed by the Reformation (Moeller 1982, 41–115). Some historians have objected to Moeller’s ideal of a socially inclusive sacral corporation sanctioned by evangelical thought. Far from being a formula for concord, they argue, the Reformation exacerbated the social tensions already evident in the late-medieval communes. Indeed, in some cities, such as Lübeck, the structure of rule was completely overthrown and a new group of men momentarily assumed power. But even when the process was less dramatic, latent social tensions often rushed to the surface. As Thomas A. Brady revealed in his study of reform in the imperial city of Strasbourg, the spread of the evangelical message exposed the tensions between the social groups, which in this case meant the subject citizenry, the rentier nobles, and the merchant aristocracy. It was only through ‘judicious retrenchment, yielding, and timely conversion from above’ that Strasbourg managed to avoid serious unrest, and it did so by tailoring the Reformation to fit social demand (Brady 1978, 292; compare Close 2009). The sheer complexity of political relations in the German and Swiss cities makes it difficult for historians to speak of models or archetypes of urban reform. Numerous factors conditioned how evangelical reform evolved in the towns and cities of the Empire, each with its own unique constellation of causes and consequences (see the survey in Cameron 1991, 210–63). Unlike the towns and cities, the vast majority of rural parishes did not possess the legal or political legitimacy to make decisions about the introduction of the Reformation. Their lords did this for them. But this did not prevent many of the rural communes in southern Germany and Switzerland from embracing the movement and using the local powers at their disposal to effect reform. In the context of the Swiss and German parishes, the most influential study of these rural developments has been Peter Blickle’s Communal Reformation (1992). According to Blickle, the rural reformation was more than just a side-show to developments in the towns and cities. In Blickle’s opinion, ‘the original, undistorted, unadulterated character of the reformation is its manifestation as a communal reformation’ (Blickle 1992, xiv). When the parishioners first embraced the movement, they did so by privileging certain aspects of evangelical thought and applying them to the realities of socio-political affairs. Fully consistent with the theology of local reform preached from the pulpits, the parishioners demanded the preaching of the gospel, the right to appoint or dismiss the pastor, the right to judge his learning, and the right to manage church funds. Moreover, by abstracting Biblical norms and applying them to social and political relations, they tied this so-called ‘divine law’ directly to parish life, selectively appropriating the gospel message to fit with communal norms. When translated into the traditional language of custom and appeal, as it was during the Peasants War of 1525, the implications could be revolutionary (Stayer 1991).

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Measuring outcomes What was the impact of the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations? How did religious change affect the early modern world? These are big questions, subject to the variables of time, place, and intention. A historian interested in the impact of reform on the religious culture of a Spanish village, for instance, will work within different parameters from a historian interested in the reform of Spanish Catholicism as a whole. Time frames will be tighter, contexts smaller and more strictly defined, historiographical intentions more precise and tailored for a particular setting. In an essay of this length it is not possible to weigh up all of the recent approaches used by historians or pay respect to different settings, but it is feasible to point up some historiographical concerns. The most direct way to assess the issue of impact is to pitch the problematic in terms of a basic polarity between success and failure. This is precisely what Gerald Strauss did with his influential work Luther’s House of Learning (1978), which set out to evaluate the German Reformation using the standards professed by the reformers themselves: namely, their expressed intention to use religious teachings as the means to fashion dispositions in which Christian ideas of right thought and action could take root, and to shape personalities capable of turning young into new men – into the human elements of a Christian society that would live by evangelical principles. (Strauss 1978, 2) In order to evaluate outcomes against intentions, Strauss worked through the documentation generated by the process of reform, most prominently the visitation returns, which provided a unique first-person perspective on the Protestant project. After years of research in the archives, Strauss reached the following conclusion: the Reformation was a failure, or more precisely, ‘a century of Protestantism had brought about little or no change in the common religious conscience and in the ways in which ordinary men and women conducted their lives’ (Strauss 1978, 299; see the discussion in Parker 1992). Strauss’s work prompted responses from historians, some for and some against, but the lasting legacy of his work has been the influence it has had on how scholars conceptualise their approaches to the issue of impact. The very question of success or failure, as Lucien Febvre once noted in another context, is une question mal posée (a misplaced or leading question), for it assumes false standards at the outset and subjects the source materials to preconceived ideas (Febvre 1973/1929, 44–107). In this spirit, subsequent approaches have tended to stress the need to question the truth-value of the source materials, extend the analysis to take in more than just the normative intentions of the leading theologians, explore the more ambiguous consequences of the reform process on the parishioners (many of which were unforeseen by the reformers), and pay more attention to non-textual

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evidence of historical impact, such as ‘actions, allegiances and “inarticulate” convictions’ (Marsh 1999, 215; see the discussion in Dixon 2012, 168–80). These reservations, however, have not dissuaded scholars from asking the big questions relating to impact and intention. On the contrary, for over a generation the legacy of religious reform has been at the centre of the agenda, though now with scholars coming at the question in a different way. Rather than viewing things at the level of the parish they have used the higher perches of Church and state; and rather than just measuring the impact of reform on religious sensibilities they have set out to register impact on the early modern world as whole. Admittedly, projecting a symbiotic relationship between the sacral and the secular is nothing new. By the early twentieth century it had become a core theorem in the works of Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, both of whom postulated essential links between Protestantism and the rise of individualism, capitalism, and the foundation of the nation-state (Dickens and Tonkin 1985, 264–82). In the 1980s, however, this symbiotic relationship was recodified in new ways. More importantly, it was given a name. Following in the footsteps of Troeltsch and Weber, the German historians Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, roughly simultaneously, came up with the theory of confessionalisation, the most influential historiographical paradigm to have shaped the study of early modern religious history in over a generation (Headley, Hillerbrand, and Papalas 2004). Broadly speaking, the idea of confessionalisation holds that religious ideas (or the religious imperative) worked as a ‘heuristic indicator’ for broader patterns of social, cultural, intellectual, and political development. Given the centrality of faith in this age, the theory holds, both in the public and the private spheres, any reform of religion necessarily had a profound and far-reaching effect on the entire matrix of social, cultural, and political relations. In the words of Schilling, religion and politics, state and Church were structurally linked together, so that under the specific conditions of the early modern period the effects that religion and the church had upon society were not separate parts of a larger phenomenon, but rather affected the entire social system and formed the central axis of state and society. (Schilling 1992, 208) (See also the discussion in Lotz-Heumann 2008). Using confessionalisation as a historiographical template, scholars revisited the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and retraced the lines of influence and impact from the top of the hierarchies of Church and state down to the towns and villages, where the normative intentions of the confessional state were put into practice. In hundreds of articles, monographs, and synthetic narratives, researchers pieced together this process, first in the German lands and then, as the theory gained ground, in the rest of Europe. As confessionalisation is modular in design with no indispensable parts, the paradigm could be transplanted from place to place with relative ease. Moreover, as it made such sweeping

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claims, it was not difficult for historians to use the theory as a springboard for more ambitious investigations of the modern condition. Indeed, Schilling has proposed that the ‘late sixteenth-century emergence of confessions was one of the key events in early modernization, because the doctrinal and organizational strengthening of the churches became a powerful prelude to political and social reorganization in the following era’ (Schilling 1996, 642–3). Mindful of the risks of teleology in concepts such as confessionalisation, recent research has shifted the focus to the unintentional outcomes of religious reform, looking for the unforeseen side-effects, the compromises, or the subtle mutations rather than the preconceived end-results. One fruitful avenue in this vein, and one that will serve as a final example in this discussion of impact, has been the study of religious mentalities. All of the reform campaigns of the sixteenth century explicitly set out to change the religious mindset, though they went about it in different ways with different intentions. In Protestant lands, this not only entailed learning new doctrines; it also required the faithful to disavow many long-held late-medieval beliefs, particularly their trust in the power of the sacraments and the sacramentals, which the reformers equated with Catholicism and thus considered error and superstition. This attack on the sacramentalism of the medieval Church is often associated with the Weberian notion of the ‘disenchantment of the world’, itself a component element of modernisation theory, and it assumes the substitution of one set of beliefs with another (see the survey in Walsham 2008). Recent explorations of the effects of reform on parish mentalities, however, would suggest that the dynamic was more complex than a simple model of reform would imply. With reference to the thinking behind the process, for instance, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Protestants throughout the social scale continued to share the same sacramental worldview as their medieval ancestors. Indeed, as Euan Cameron has shown, even the theology at the root of Protestant theories of magic was predicated on medieval Aristotelian conceptions of the cosmos and thus still found a place for manifestations of the supernatural, including medieval staples such as demonic possession and visions (Cameron 2010). But it was at the level of the parish, the domain of lived religion, where the sacramental worldview held on the longest. Against the expectations of the disenchantment model, historians have found plenty of evidence testifying to the perpetuation of medieval beliefs in Protestant lands, including those associated with the sacraments and sacramentals. Parishioners continued to pray to images of the Virgin, conjure the power of blessed water and blessed bells, or use the consecrated host in order to effect magic (Scribner 2001,172–94). This demands a mode of explanation, and two broad trends have prevailed. One approach is to look less for the remnants of medieval Catholicism and more for the signs of new forms of Protestant belief based, essentially, on similar ideas of a sacralised universe that pervaded the medieval mind. In this view, Lutherans and Calvinists had their own enchanted objects, their own forms of magic, and their own providential views of the world. The second approach is

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to pay more attention to the points of contact between the two religious worlds and search for the synergies rather than the silences. In place of a basic successor-failure dichotomy, historians working in this vein project more complex hybrid forms of Protestantism in the parishes, a faith conditioned by acts of dialogue, adaptation, and compromise, and often with clear affinities, in both conduct and belief, to the medieval Catholicism it had avowed to replace (see the survey of literature in Dixon 2012, 181–204) (see Appendix 5.3 a–b).

Conclusion Historiographical trends are not just shaped by the evidence of the sources. A range of influences informs the historian’s mind, from the climate of public opinion to private strategies of institutional advancement, and yet most research fields tend to reach a critical mass of theories at some point, enabling historians to engage in dialogue, debate, and common discourse. In the field of early modern religious history, one of the main areas of interest has been the reform movements of the sixteenth century, both the Protestant and the Catholic variants. Within this area, as we have seen, there are many different specialist avenues of research, and it is often difficult to join up all of the historiographical pathways and project the sense of a general project or indeed an integrated history of early modern religion. At the risk of simplification, however, it is possible to come away with some common threads. Modern studies of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations are presently rethinking the relationship between the historical dynamics being revealed by decades of research and the traditional historiographical categories used to frame and describe them. This rethinking might be directed at something as elemental as a name, a place, or a date, but the purpose is far-reaching, and indeed no less than the reshaping of the narrative. Associated with this is the ongoing engagement with the issue of origins, the conviction that the rise of the reform movements can be explained by making sense of the preconditions, placing the details of the process in the proper context, and sifting through the evidence to hear the ‘real’ voices of the age. Few scholars today would explain the rise of Protestantism with reference to economic or social conditions in the manner of early twentieth-century researchers, but the interest in the causal nexus remains. And so too do the big questions relating to consequences. Specialists are now much more wary of speaking in sweeping terms about change and impact, and it is rare to come across references to the rise of modernity, reason, or the individual without some critical back-talk or a long list of reservations. Recent research related to consequences is much more likely to maintain a discreet distance to the grand theories of the previous century and speak more modestly of subtle shifts, unintended outcomes, and synergies of thought and conduct. But the ambition remains the same, namely to reach an understanding of the nature and the legacy of the Reformations, which were profoundly important for the shaping of early modern Europe and beyond.

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Bibliography (A) Primary sources Englander, David, Norman, Diana, O’Day, Rosemary and Owens, William R. eds. (1990). Culture and Belief in Europe 1450–1600. An Anthology of Sources. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lindberg, Carter (2015). The European Reformations Sourcebook. 2nd edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Shinner, John ed. (1997). Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500. A Reader. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Strauss, Gerald (1971). Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation. Ed. and Trans. Gerald Strauss. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

(B) Secondary literature Bamji, Alexander, Janssen, Geert H. and Laven, Mary, eds. (2013). The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation. London: Routledge. Bernard, G. W. (2012). The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bireley, Robert (1999). The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Blickle, Peter (1992). Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in SixteenthCentury Germany. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. London: Humanities Press [Originally published as Gemeindereformation: Die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985]. Brady, Thomas A. Jr. (1978). Ruling Class, Regime, and Reformation at Strasbourg: 1520–1555. Leiden: Brill. Brady, Thomas A. Jr. (2009). German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradley, James E. and Muller, Richard A. (2016). Church History: An Introduction to Research Methods and Resources. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Brown, Patricia Fortini (1988). Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cameron, Euan (2010). Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (1991). The European Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Close, Christopher W. (2009). The Negotiated Reformation: Imperial Cities and the Politics of Urban Reform, 1525–1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1988). The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Macmillan. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1975). Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dickens, A. G. (1964). The English Reformation. London: Batsford. ——— (1974). The German Nation and Martin Luther. London: Edward Arnold. Dickens, A. G. and Tonkin, John M. (1985). The Reformation in Historical Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dixon, C. Scott (2012). Contesting the Reformation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Dixon, C. Scott (2016). The Church in the Early Modern Age. London: I. B. Tauris. Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England C.1400–C.1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (2001). The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, Mark U. (1994) Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Edwards, Kathryn (2008). Popular Religion. In: David M. Whitford ed. Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 331–54. Eire, Carlos M. N. (2016). Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Estes, James M. (2005). Peace, Order and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon, 1518–1559. Leiden: Brill. Febvre, Lucien (1973/1929). The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly-Put Question? In: Peter Burke ed. A New Kind of History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 44–107. Forster, Marc (2007) Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frijhoff, Willem (2002). Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren. Glixon, Jonathan (2003). Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greengrass, Mark (2014). Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648. London: Penguin Books. Gregory, Brad S. (2012). The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Haigh, Christopher (1993). English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamm, Berndt (2004). The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety. Leiden: Brill. Headley, John M., Hillerbrand, Hans J. and Papalas, Anthony J. eds. (2004) Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700. Aldershot: Ashgate. Holt, Mack (1995). The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia (1989). Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750. London: Routledge. Hsia, R. Po-Chia (1998) The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Johnson, Trevor (2009). Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate. Farnham: Ashgate. Kamen, Henry (1993). Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres. Kristeller, Paul (1996). Humanism. In: Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler eds. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113–37.

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Levi, Anthony (2002). Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lotz-Heumann, Ute (2008). Confessionalization. In: David M. Whitford ed. Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 136–60. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2003). Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Penguin Books. McGrath, Alister E. (1988) Reformation Thought: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Marsh, Christopher (1999). Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Moeller, Bernd (1982). Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays. Trans H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards Jr. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press. [Originally published as Moeller, Bernd (1962) Reichsstadt und Reformation. Gütersloh: Mohn]. Muir, Edward (1997). Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nauert, Charles G. (1995) Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Day, Rosemary (2014). The Debate on the English Reformation. 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. O’Malley, John (2002). Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ozment, Steven (1980). The Age of Reform 1220–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Parker, Geoffrey (1992). Success and Failure during the First Century of Reformation. Past and Present. 139, 43–82. Pettegree, Andrew (2005). Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pelikan, Jarislav (2003). Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pollmann, Judith (2011). Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Miri (1991). Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rublack, Ulinka ed. (2017). The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rummel, Erika (1995). The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2000). The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryrie, Alec (2013). Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schama, Simon (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Collins. Schilling, Heinz (1992). Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Culture. Trans. Stephen Burnett. Leiden: Brill. Schilling, Heinz (1996). Confessional Europe. In: Thomas A. Brady, Heiko Oberman and James D. Tracy eds. Handbook of European History. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 641–70. Scribner, Robert W. (2001) Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Leiden: Brill.

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Smith, Willam Bradford (2008). Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia 1300–1630. Rochester, VT: Rochester University Press. Soergel, Philip M. (2006). Popular Religion. In: Alec Ryrie ed. Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 232–52. Stayer, James M. (1991). The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Strauss, Gerald (1978). Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas, Andrew L. (2010). A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in the Holy Roman Empire, C. 1550–1650. Leiden: Brill. Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (2008). The Reformation and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’. The Historical Journal 51, 497–528. Whaley, Joachim (2012). Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Volume 1, Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1490–1648. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witte, John Jr (2002). Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zeeden, Ernst Walter (1985). Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Appendices

Appendix 5.1 (a) Lortz, Joseph (1968). The Reformation in Germany. Vol. 1. Trans. Ronald Walls. London: Darton, Longman & Todd [Originally published as Die Reformation in Deutschland (1939/40)]. That which in Occam, despite his unworthy sophistries … had been the work of a great intellect, in his disciples lost its inner connection with its foundation, through a submission to orthodoxy (as with [Gabriel] Biel), or else, amongst his incompetent pupils and anonymous masters, lost all serious meaning. Then arose that enormous concern with peripheral things, that pompous freewheeling, that too subtle distinguishing and senseless multiplication of allegedly deep arguments, the exponents of which, amidst the verbiage of endless disputations, took themselves and their new-found would-be profundity too seriously, stubbornly pursuing their favourite adversaries on account of the merest trivialities … From [Juan Luis] Vives we learn how justified was the colossal ridicule of the Epistolae vivorum obscurorum [Letters of Obscure Men] and of Erasmus of much in this fossilised scholastic activity, and the degree in which the scholastics themselves provoked this mockery that was so harmful to the Church. It was a tale of wasted opportunities. [68–9] (b) Oberman, Heiko A. (2003). The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Toward the end of the long fifteenth century, medieval Catholicism does not display any of the characteristics we have come to expect under the tutelage of Etienne Gilson, Joseph Lortz, or for that matter, nineteenth-century Protestant historians. We could not confirm such general epitaphs for the age as

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philosophical skepticism, theological ambiguity, social dissolution, or moral dissipation. On the contrary, late medieval Christian society showed all the signs of the vitality and resourcefulness necessary for effective crisis management … In the course of two centuries – roughly from the deaths of Thomas [Aquinas] and Bonaventura in 1274 to the official establishment of the via moderna, particularly at the new German universities – the implications of this discovery [namely: new ideas about how God stood in relation to his creation] were pursued by an ever-growing number of magisters, variously inspired and challenged by the innovative findings of Scotus and Occam, and including more and more non-Franciscans. Modern scholarship has made significant advances in detailing the various paths by which this discourse came to dominate every known field of knowledge from logic to dialectics to physics and natural philosophy, reaching well into the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine … Once the new paradigm made it possible to shed the ontological cloak that covered experienced reality, reason could submit both to the rule of observation and rise to the objective status conferred by critical distance. [17–18, 26–7]

Appendix 5.2 (a) Hauser, Henri (1899). The French Reformation and the French People in the Sixteenth Century. American Historical Review 4.2 (January), 217–27. It is, indeed, in the situation of this class [working class] that we shall find the cause of its attitude towards the religious innovations … That situation was by no means enviable. The discovery of gold and silver mines, increasing considerably the stock of the precious metals in Europe, had caused a rise in the price of the necessities of life; and the wages of the workmen were far from rising in the same proportion. The guild system, which in the thirteenth century had been the protection of the weak, was tending more and more to become oppressively oligarchical; the management of manufactures became the monopoly of a rich, and in fact, hereditary caste. It was nearly impossible for a simple workman who was not a master’s son nor supplied with capital to rise to the mastership. Conflicts between labor and capital were therefore frequent … The workers’ world was therefore a dissatisfied and turbulent one, eager for novelties, extremely apt to listen to revolutionary preaching. The development of French industries had drawn to France many foreign workmen, Flemish, Italian and especially German, who brought along with them foreign ideas. Moreover, the social agitation, especially in the great and mystical city of Lyons, was oftentimes mixed with religious agitation. [220–21] (b) Febvre, Lucien (1973/1929) The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly-Put Question? In: Peter Burke ed. A New Kind of History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 44–107.

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And the whole of the merchant bourgeoisie, which untiringly engaged in trade over the highways and vast seas of the world … gained from all their changing experiences a very precious sense of the relative … in short, all those who in exercising precise trades and minute techniques developed within themselves a temperament inclined to seek practical solutions or, in the silence of their studies … broadened their mind and heart by entering the school of the ancients, all had equal need of a clear, reasonably human and gently fraternal religion which would serve as their light support. The point is that those men, those bourgeois, using nothing but their own personal effort and their own qualities and talents, had risen into hard-won positions in the front rank, which they felt they owed only to themselves and their personal ‘virtue’, in the Italian meaning of the word, and energy allied to their capabilities, were irritated and offended by anything that smacked of mediation or intercession … It is that very consciousness of their own worth, that pride in being the children of their own works which partly explains the taste for sovereign authority which these men showed, not only in political affairs. [66, 71] (c) Davis, Natalie Zemon (1975) Society and Culture in Early Modern France. London: Duckworth. The Calvinist movement as a whole drew from rich and poor – from Consular families, notable families, and families of the menu peuple – in numbers roughly proportional to their distribution in the population at large. If there is no significant correlation between socioeconomic position and religion in those years, there is one, however, between vocation and religion. Certain occupations are overrepresented in the Protestant movement relative to their distribution in the population. These were métiers in which skills were involved, and often in which there was some novelty – e.g. new technology (as in printing), new claims for prestige (as in painting and jewelry and goldsmith’s work), and even recent arrival in Lyon (as in the manufacture and finishing of silk cloth). In contrast, very few grain merchants, vintners, butchers, bakers, or ropemakers of any status became Protestants [7].

Appendix 5.3 (a) Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Protestant providentialism … was a flexible and permeable conceptual framework within which some older and ostensibly incompatible habits of thought could be absorbed with relative ease. In turn it was assimilated into a broader filament and tissue of beliefs about the intrusion of supernatural forces in the earthly sphere. Notwithstanding the intolerance of Reformed dogma towards rival ideologies like magic and astrology, fate, chance, and fortune, what we have uncovered in tales of God’s judgements and stories of prodigies and

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portents is evidence of a fruitful and enduring synthesis: novel priorities interweave with inherited formulas, orthodox religious tenets blend with proverbial wisdom and indigenous folklore. This reciprocal process was facilitated by the existence of areas of ambiguity within Protestant theology itself: ambiguity about the relationship between human activity and divine will, about the actual mechanisms by which the Lord brought His purposes to pass, about the precise status and proper interpretation of occult phenomena. Around the hazy edges and in the more dimly lit corners of Calvinist doctrine potential contradictions could lie undisturbed and old and new could coexist without too much friction. [328] (b) Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The ritual of repentance [in Protestant Scotland] remained as mimetic as it had been before the Reformation – perhaps even more so, given the number of people involved and the rigorous enforcement of attendance by the audience. But of course there were differences. Communal ‘receiving and absolution’ diminished the sacerdotal element and elevated the laity to the position of authority previously occupied by the clergy. And protestant penance was embedded in sermon: it was a logistic performance, a miming of the words uttered by the minister, the words of the penitential psalms sung around the service, the words prescribed by the session for confession … Ritual elements persisted, adapted to historical context, but still dramatic and weighted with meanings recognisable to their audiences. In the case of repentance, persistence and dynamism taken together served both to underpin the commonality of catholic and protestant concern with sin, separation and reconciliation (with God and community), and to undermine catholic clericalism, the ‘superstition’ of absolution and the theology of good works co-operating with grace. [181]

6

Media and communication Mark Greengrass

‘In the midst of things’: media and meaning The words ‘media’ and ‘communication’ would have been intelligible to anyone living in the periods under discussion here, but not with the meaning we now ascribe to them. What was in the middle (‘media’) had a range of connotations, good and bad. Renaissance artists drew on the newly rediscovered works of Pythagoras to paint the ‘golden mean’, the ‘divine proportion’ which drawings by Leonardo da Vinci illustrated in a book published by Luca Pacioli in Milan in 1496–8. Musicians explored the harmonic equivalents of the golden mean, cosmologists sought to apply those ratios mathematically to the study of the heavens, and moral philosophers advocated a balanced temperament between emotional extremes, which medics interpreted as an equilibrium of the humours in the body. But the ‘middle’ was also associated with scholasticism (the ‘middle’ term in a logical argument, or syllogism), and that had a bad press (Nauert 1969; Kretzmann et al. 1988). So, too, did the ‘Middle Age’, a term that was coined in the seventeenth century but which rested on the notion of a ‘Dark Age’ that Renaissance humanists had used to delineate the decline and neglect of the texts and wisdom of the Ancient world which it was their mission to recover (Burke 1969; McLaughlin 1988). The humanists in question were mostly teachers in schools and universities, and private tutors. Literature and eloquence were passports to jobs in these areas. Being educated to them was also the way that ‘communication’ was mostly conceived in early modern Europe. It was about acquiring the language skills (especially Latin) and techniques of learning for the transfer of an inherited culture from one generation to the next, and not about the democratic exchange of information. Some argued that communication (Latin: communicatio; Greek: epikoinonía) was at the basis of social organisation from the family upwards, sanctified by a communion that was the central Christian ritual. The most evident transformation in media and communication in early modern Europe was the printing press. In 1979, the American historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein 1979). In 750 pages, she argued the case for the rupturing impact of Gutenberg technology (movable-type printing as developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1430s) on the literate élites of early modern Europe. Her approach was

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influenced by the emergence of communication and media studies as an academic field in North America, where twentieth-century technical changes provided the explanatory model for what had gone on in the past (Simonson et al. 2013). The work also reflected the new ‘social history’ that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to focus on the experiences of ordinary people, and which was committed to history ‘from the bottom up’. She emphasised the role of printing in the standardisation, dissemination and preservation of information, and its fundamental impact on the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and what was then known as the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Printing led, she subsequently emphasised, to the ‘unacknowledged revolution’ of print culture, which allowed a wider public to have access to book knowledge than had previously been available to it, which in turn encouraged public knowledge and individual thought (Eisenstein 2002). The focus for the reinterpretation of the role of media and communication in early modern Europe turns upon these claims. Historians now place the ‘printing revolution’ in a broader context. They understand it as nurtured by associated educational and social transformations. They investigate printing as a commercial activity, governed by the rules of its markets and operators, and they nuance its role in the standardisation, dissemination, and preservation of information. They examine the ‘news’ as an outgrowth from various international and local networks – diplomatic channels, postal services, commercial exchange, city networks – which then became embodied in manuscript and printed newspapers as well as embedded in their consequences. They seek to relativise the claims of printing’s ‘revolutionary’ impact by, amongst other things, placing Europe’s experience in a broader global context. They question the primacy of ‘print culture’ by examining it within the contexts of other, enduring, forms of oral and scribal communication. They place the emphasis on the reader rather than the technology, situating that reader in the different environments in which communication, literary and otherwise, took place (Johns 2002).

The three Rs Renaissance humanists used ‘emblems’ to encapsulate things with complex meanings. The term was popularised by Andrea Alciato when he published an encyclopaedia of illustrated epigrams, mottos with accompanying thumbnail engravings in Augsburg in 1531 (Alciato 1531). His initial emblem for Mercury emphasised the moral choices that accompanied the power of reading. It depicted the upper half of a male torso emerging from a pile of stones at the intersection of three roads, the god’s trident pointing towards the middle of the roads, whilst the accompanying epigram emphasised that we are all at life’s crossroads and need the gods to help us make our choices. Other emblematicists followed Renaissance painters in presenting Mercury as the winged messenger of the gods, the familiar way by which the speed and power of reading and writing were to be understood (Bowen 1985). By the 1620s, ‘Mercurius’ was the name commonly ascribed to manuscript and published newsletters carrying the latest information.

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Whether you could read and write was fundamental in early modern Europe. Learning to write was the greater investment of time and effort. Writing-masters and schoolmasters were helped, however, by the printing press, which exploited the market for primers and teach-yourself manuals. Copybooks advised on how to sharpen quills, prepare the ink, rule the paper, and when to lift the pen following which letters. They often also taught simple arithmetic as well, because mathematics and literacy were both increasingly important components in all walks of life, especially in urban Europe (Spufford 1995). The second largest type of books published in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century was technical manuals – treatises on arithmetic, writing, the fabrication of dyes, metalworking, land-surveying, etc. (Chrisman 1982). In sixteenth-century London, the ironmongers’ guild required a signed oath from their apprentices; 72 per cent signed the surviving register from 1520–50, rising to 94 per cent in the second half of the century (Houston 1988). Such statistics need to be placed, however, in a broader profile of early modern literacy, nuancing the assumption that someone signing their name is de facto proof of their ability to read and write. In Hungary, the nobility used seals rather than signatures, which were regarded with suspicion (Tóth 2000). There were different thresholds of literacy, and they reflected in turn different social strata, as Rab Houston found in the case of Golden-Age Spain (Houston 1988) (see Appendix 6.1). Reading skills, on the other hand, were socially more broadly based, and reflected investment by state and Church as well as cultural expectations from the world around. In Geneva, for example, the city government expected its citizens to be able to read its decrees by the end of the seventeenth century, ceasing to employ town-criers to proclaim them through the streets. In parts of Sweden, Scotland, and Catholic Europe, there were apparently high levels of reading ability towards that same date, reflecting the basic schooling offered by the Church and/or the state. But the aggregate evidence masks considerable, often inexplicable, disparities. Why did only 9 per cent of one London parish in the early 1640s choose to sign their name (in an environment where high levels of literacy were the norm) whereas 94 per cent of some parishes in Lincolnshire and Westmorland at the same time did so? Was it the Waldensian traditions of the Alpine valley of Alagna which explain its high literacy in the seventeenth century, as compared with its neighbour, where only the clergy were said to be able to read? Many people’s literacy was acquired informally. The evidence from the Spanish Inquisition suggests that significant numbers learnt to read and write on their own, or from relatives. For sixteenth-century religious reformers, the household cradled the literacy that catechismal classes then cultivated. In his Household Economy Jost Menig (Justus Menius, 1499–1558), the preacher at Eisenach recommended the regular reading of Scripture around the supper table (Menig 1529). Such advice became widespread in the Hausväterliteratur (‘writings on the head of the household’) that became a genre in Lutheran German lands from the mid-sixteenth century. In domestic, as in public environments, reading was not done in private. It accommodated itself to existing sociabilities.

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Reading was out loud; texts were recited – or sung as ballads and chansons. Taverns had printed placards pasted to the walls, and cheap printed chapbooks to hand, for that purpose (Watt 1991). The most relevant component of literacy in early modern Europe was not its extent, but its ‘incidence, or relative availability’, which was multiplied in public environments (Vivo 2007, 122). For historians this is an important reminder that most places where people congregated to relax or to do business, to get justice or to worship God, were ones where print and oral cultures intermingled. Artisan autobiographies (the genre became satirised in seventeenth-century printed novels) were very often written by those who were first-generation literate, and proud of the fact (Spufford 1981). They became the object of suspicion to religious authorities, since home-grown literacy had a habit of leading to home-grown heterodoxy, or worse, as the biographies of the leading lights of the Anabaptists and other groups consigned by the mainstream Protestant Reformation to its ‘radical’ margins tend to confirm (Snyder 1991). It was certainly the story of Domenico Scandella (known as Menocchio), inhabitant of Montereale, a small town in northern Italy in the later sixteenth century, for whom the books he read, when reflected through the medium of his environment, led him to deduce that the world had evolved ‘just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels – and among [them] was God’ (Ginzburg 1992, 5–6). That message led him to be tried by the Venetian Inquisition, found guilty and executed. His story, reconstructed by Carlo Ginzburg, is the startingpoint for a whole genre of cultural history writing (‘micro-history’) about early modern Europe, by which historians try to explore the porosity and interpenetration of the mutually adjacent worlds of print, oral, and scribal culture through the medium of a small-scale but well-documented example. Our knowledge of elementary schools is fragmentary. Petty (petites écoles) back-street (Winkelschulen), pious (founded by the Piarists, a religious order, mostly in Spain and Italy), commercial (abbaco – after commercial arithmetic, in which they specialized), ABC (writing), guild, private, and municipal schools taught basic learning skills, and contemporaries distinguished them from the Latin schools into which they sometimes fed. City notables regarded local educational provision as important to the welfare and standing of their locality, but Venice is one of the few cities where we can document its impact. In 1587, at least 26 per cent of boys between six and fifteen years of age attended schools in the city, and over half of them were in ‘vernacular’ rather than Latin schools (Richardson 1999, 109–11). But what was the ‘vernacular’? Language was a barrier as well as a vehicle for communication in early modern Europe. Determining how many languages were spoken in early modern Europe is not a straightforward exercise, since what is classified as a European language is determined by those which have survived (Burke 2004). A recent estimate puts the figure at somewhere between forty and seventy. Linguistic pluralism was a fact of life. In the Engadine valley in southeastern Switzerland, the Salis family corresponded with one another in five different languages in the later sixteenth century. The sons wrote back from school in

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Latin, but the rest of the family used German, Italian, French and (the women) Romansch (Head 1995). Bilingualism was common, too, on Europe’s margins, in eastern and central Europe, where Hungarian and Slovak, Czech, German, Croat and Italian defined communities. In Lithuania five languages cohabited – Lithuanian, Polish, German, Ruthenian and Latvian. What language people chose to use, and in what context, became statements about who they were and where they belonged. There, as elsewhere, there was a tension between spoken and written languages, as also between a local dialect or language and a different ‘main’ language, which was that used by the state, the law, and the Church. Printing certainly played a powerful role in the standardisation in these ‘main’ languages; but print-correctors, crucial to the process, seem often to have adjusted copy to suit a kind of ‘idealised’ norm of the language whilst allowing room for divergence. In the Scottish Highlands, and in Ireland (beyond the governing heartland known as the Pale) communication was about the imposition of an alien language upon a local one – with print and schools the unwitting allies. Even where that was not the case, linguistic diversity was not an open door to greater communication. On the contrary, there is evidence that those areas where ‘main’ languages were in conflict (parts of the Low Countries, for example) were those where literacy rates tended to be low. Three generalisations about literacy provide the context for the impact of printing. The first is that it was most marked in towns where (despite the challenge of high illiterate immigration) the cultural assumptions were dominated by the literate and their expectations. These oases of high civic literacy linked the urbanised corridor running from London, through the Low Countries and along the Rhine to the cities of northern Italy. They were, not surprisingly, also the centres for Europe’s printing industry and its news circulation. The second is that literacy was concentrated in the hands of men. Only 28 per cent of a sample of women who signed contracts before notaries in Lyon in the 1560s and 1570s could do so with their full name. One man in three could not sign the parish register when he married at Amsterdam in 1630, two out of three brides could not do so. By 1730, those figures had dropped to 24 and 49 per cent respectively (Houston 1988, 144). But (and this is the third generalisation) such upward trends should not be interpreted as an inevitable progression towards literacy. Literacy rates could fall as well as rise. By some estimates, England was more ‘literate’ in 1640 than it would be a hundred years later (Stone 1969). Old people forgot the literacy skills that they once possessed. Becoming literate was a challenge that each generation faced afresh.

A good education: books and the renaissance ‘A good education [bonae litterae] makes men’ wrote Erasmus, the most famous humanist of the early sixteenth century (‘Bonae litterae reddunt homines’ – in Erasmus’ treatise The Complaint of Peace (1517) – Erasmus CWE vol. 25 1986). Humanist educators exaggerated their promotion of virtue, the novelty of their techniques, and their utility. In late medieval Italy, their classroom practices only

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evolved slowly from the scholasticism they held in low esteem (Black 2001). By Erasmus’ day, however, changes were becoming evident, and spreading beyond the Italian peninsula (Grendler 1990). We can trace them through the growing number of ‘Latin schools’ (‘grammar schools’ in the English context) whose adoption of a defined curriculum (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, taught in Latin through classical texts) and the division of the school into classes according to the stage and age of students, became universal. In Catholic Europe, the Jesuit Order, which devoted itself to founding or running such schools after the initial success of its establishment in Messina (founded in 1548), came to define that educational pattern at secondary level (and sometimes beyond, in Jesuitrun universities). The growth in the number of Jesuit schools was extraordinary, as Figure 6.1 demonstrates, making the Order a unique communicative force in early modern Europe.

Figure 6.1 Distribution of Jesuit Establishments in Europe, taken from Mark Greengrass, The European Reformation c. 1500–1618 (London: Longman, 1998), 196. Courtesy of the author.

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But there was an increase generally in the number of university establishments, and in the number of graduates from them, particularly from the lower faculty (of arts), especially in the sixteenth century. Underlying this growth was the desire of students and parents for more education, and the prospect for the reward which came with it. Generations of young men (and it was a male preserve) were familiarised with a range of texts and technologies to serve in the enlarged officialdom of early modern polities, to be the ubiquitous secretaries to its grandees in church and state, to join the ranks of the scribblers, pamphleteers, editors and proof-readers of its print-shops and emerging literary circles, and to occupy the seats, sees and benefices of its judicial and ecclesiastical fabric. They were initiated into the formalities and decorum of writing the letters that were essential to the exercise of power and attraction at a distance (Schneider 2005; Daybell 2012). There was a whole genre of Latin treatises on epistolography that emphasised the letter as the communication of thought and feeling, and especially friendship (L: amicitia), as the essence of humanity (L: humanitas) and containing a fundamental message about being educated to live in a civil society (Fumaroli 1983; Vivès 1989; Poster and Mitchell 2007; Newbold 2007). Letters were crucial to the functioning reality of individuals and institutions in early modern Europe. They were at the heart of its diplomatic, legal and administrative apparatus. They were vital to the acquisition and occupancy of an office, and increasingly important in the running of a domain. Part of the Renaissance project was to equip an élite to their role as letter-writers. Another, crucial part of that project was to provide the tools and technologies to handle the massive increase in scholarly information that, as Ann Blair has recently argued, was a perceived reality in media and communication in early modern Europe (Blair 2010). It resulted from, amongst other things, Europe’s overseas discoveries and colonisation, from the recovery of ancient texts, from the spread of printed books, and from the increase in state authority. Fortunately, imaginative solutions were to hand. Humanist teachers encouraged their students to take notes (as an aid to memory and writing), to keep journals, to annotate the books that they owned, and to file paperwork. They instructed them on keeping their own ‘common-place’ books (registers of quotations) to structure their own reading-habits. Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, c. 1515–72), a teacher of philosophy at the University of Paris, offered his students a reformed Aristotelian logic that was particularly popular in Calvinist Protestant circles. He provided a logical way of disposing information into categories, which his followers turned into dichotomy tables as a way of visually displaying (and memorising) them. Enterprising editors provided printed reference works to chart a way through a bewildering ocean of learning – dictionaries (over 150 had been published in Europe before 1650, often in multiple editions), gazetteers, globes and atlases, travel-guides, bibliographies and encyclopaedias (Considine 2008). Woodcuts and engravings exploited the power of visual media to enhance the utility of these works. Even those for the specialists grew more detailed and useful, whether it was to identify the flora and fauna of the natural world or to record the

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movements of the planets across the heavens. Bibliographies and published sale catalogues were also useful reference works, a way to keep track of works that were out of print, pseudonymous publications, and pirated editions. Biographical dictionaries provided a way of identifying who was who, past and present. But these works were often not as good as they claimed to be. They frequently copied information from one another uncritically. They offered elaborate compendia of knowledge that prioritised the wisdom of the ancient world, as ambitious as they were incomplete or flawed. They were rarely kept up to date. It was difficult to represent ‘knowledge particularity’ without becoming lost in detail, and especially in areas like botany where species developed local variants and went by vernacular names that differed from one region to the next (Ogilvie 2006). Far from acting as systematisers and disseminators of precise new knowledge, Renaissance printed works on natural history tended to act as compendia of an ‘emblematic’ and anthropocentric view of the world which was only abandoned from the midseventeenth century when readers deserted the assumptions on which it relied (Ashworth 1990). The Renaissance also offered published dictionaries of quotations, miscellanies of useful or morally improving sayings. Erasmus’ early runaway success, the Adages (first edition 1500) offered thousands of quotable phrases of wisdom, by turns curious and funny to succeeding generations (Erasmus CWE 7 vols. 1982–2017). His Colloquies (first edition 1518) complemented it with a manual to conversational Latin, which became a staple on bookshop shelves and student reading-lists (Erasmus CWE vols 39–40. 1997). Together, they provided the basic material with which to speak confidently in public, and to impress in polite conversation – the latter being the subject of famous Renaissance treatises, especially Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), which spawned a new genre (Castiglione 2002). These were essential attributes for men who wanted to succeed in early modern Europe, and recent explorations of such subjects emphasise how much print culture went hand in hand with its oral and scribal equivalents. A good education offered an invitation to step into a wider world of civilised learning, a ‘republic of letters’. That phrase (res publica literaria) was used by Erasmus to signal an imagined club of humanists, using Latin as its lingua franca, whose membership was by correspondence. Over 3,000 letters to and from Erasmus have survived, offering a kind of map of the nodal points linking the humanist commonwealth in the early sixteenth century, as Figure 6.2 illustrates. The French historian Robert Mandrou mapped those for the period 1517–1524 and it has often been reproduced, not least because Erasmus was not only a notable exponent of the epistolary art but also because his surviving correspondence is seen as the first tangible sign of an emerging literary commonwealth (Mandrou 1973). Such mapping of intellectual relationships is superficially plausible, and it has spawned other efforts for notable figures in that commonwealth, especially in the seventeenth century. The cartography of Erasmus’ correspondents is a reminder, however, of what it reveals as well as why it is a problematic exercise. Mandrou plotted the 166 correspondents (only seven of whom were

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Figure 6.2 Geographical Spread of Erasmus’ Correspondents in the Period 1517–1524, taken from Robert Mandrou, Des humanistes aux hommes de science: XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), cartes (unpaginated). Reproduced with permission.

women) from those years, and they included the most learned humanists, princes and their advisers, leading printers, important clerics, and the emerging leaders of religious reformation. It reveals a Rhineland hub and a large periphery. That, however, was also a reflection of Erasmus’ preambulations and predelictions (he was in Louvain before 1521, and Basel afterwards). The vast surviving correspondence of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1647), an astronomer, antiquary and savant from Provence, by contrast, reflects his preoccupation with the Mediterranean world and especially the Levant (Hatch 1998; Miller 2015).

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Mandrou chose to count the numbers of Erasmus’ correspondents. The map would look very different if it had been based on the surviving letters to and from each correspondent (which reflect, in turn, the vagaries of survival) and vary from one (the majority – Erasmus already had given up replying to many people) to 157 (his friend Boniface Amerbach). Erasmus already complained that he did not have time to read all the letters he received. By focusing on Erasmus, the prince of Renaissance humanists, the map cannot represent either the range of focus of issues that were discussed, or the important plurality of contacts and communication in the emerging Republic of Letters. The Renaissance printed book was, at its best, a work of scholarship and art. It was often the product of collaboration between humanists and scholarprinters. Models of the latter spanned the sixteenth century: Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, c. 1452–1515) in Venice, Johann Froben (c. 1460–1527) in Basel, Henri Estienne (1528/31–1590) in Paris, and Christopher Plantin (1520–1589) in Antwerp. What we now take for granted in the look of a printed book – its layout and typography, its title-page, its indexes, footnotes, glosses and tables of contents – was the result, making their products usable and saleable (Pettegree 2010). Their editions of classical texts broadened the range of available sources and fine-tuned the philological techniques of textual criticism that went into their preparation. Their publications made it easier to learn more remote languages (ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.). They also made the cross-checking and collation of texts more practicable. Many of the editions printed in the sixteenth century would still be serviceable a century later. Biblical scholarship was exemplary of these broader processes, with humanists producing new Latin translations that proposed different readings from the Latin Vulgate, the text which carried the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, and then increasing numbers of vernacular translations, commentaries, paraphrases and ways to understand the Bible. When the Church chose to represent these as threatening its truth-claims, printing threatened the pillars of the Temple. In time, Protestant theologians and churches would be as preoccupied by the consequences of that challenge because Protestant truth-claims relied centrally upon the Bible. It is not surprising, therefore, that humanist learning was sometimes regarded as opening the door to heresy. These books were sold into a pan-European market that was epitomised by ‘the fair’ i.e. the bi-annual Frankfurt fair. That was where printers and their agents clinched sales, made contacts, and kept abreast of latest trends and developments. Humanist and scholar-printer collaboration is one side of the coin, of which the other is their contentiousness. The correspondence of editors and authors in early modern Europe is replete with accusations of printer greed, corrector carelessness, and ruining the noble art of printing. The first appeals for print censorship came not from governments but from humanists and Church authorities trying to control pirated editions of works from inferior manuscripts. Martin Luther, dependant though he was on printing for the spread of his message, had little respect for printers (see Appendix 6.2). Humanist correspondence reminds us of another reality as well. Printed books were often collaborative

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works, their production the result of a less visible telegraphy of correspondents and manuscript circulation. Sebastian Münster, for example, whose Cosmography was the first printed geographical encyclopaedia, depended on those who furnished him with his information (McLean 2007). That correspondence was vital to the creation of an engaged and literate public, which in turn became important to the anticipation of change in and around the Reformation (Münster 1544). Many works continued to circulate in manuscript (or ‘scribal’) copies because that remained a more convenient, less expensive way of circulating them, less dependent on the economics of print and the constraints of the censor. ‘Scribal publication’ (as Harold Love has taught us to call it (Love 1993)) was not a backward technology, bound to multiplicate errors (the evidence suggests that scribal scholarship did not suffer much from that). It suited the smaller literate worlds in, for example, seventeenth-century New England, to use scribal copying as a principal means of communicating with one another (Hall 2008). Scribal and print publication satisfied different markets. They fed into and off one another, both reflecting an underlying oral culture from which they should not be divorced.

The european ‘printing revolution’ in a global perspective The invention of printing made a huge impression upon contemporaries in early modern Europe. They extolled the speed by which texts could be multiplied and the cheapness of the product. It seemed remarkable that the invention had originated in Germany, considered a cultural backwater in comparison to Italy, and that it depended on ‘base’ skills – letters in an alloy metal and craftsmen who could not always read what they produced. Protestant polemicists and historians like John Foxe (see Excerpt 6.1) sang its praises as the instrument for revealing Divine Truth and credited it to God’s Almighty Providence. According to the English martyrologist John Foxe, printing was God’s instrument for overthrowing Rome and loosening Satan’s grip on the world. Foxe knew printing presses at close hand since he had spent several years as a corrector in the workshop (officina) of an important printer in Basel, Johannes Oporinus. His ‘book of martyrs’ was the result of close collaboration with that of another printer in London, John Day (Evenden and Freeman 2011). Before the end of the sixteenth century, printing had become one of the three triumphant symbols (with gunpowder and the compass) of how Europe had surpassed the ancients and (as Francis Bacon put it) ‘changed the appearance and state of the whole world’ (Bacon 1620, aphorism 123). The literary debate between ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’ laid the foundations for a nineteenth-century view (which is also that of Elizabeth Eisenstein) about the emergence of the modern world and Europe’s pre-eminence within it, in which the ‘divine art’ of printing played a central role. To nuance this picture, we must place the history of early modern printing in Europe in a global setting. The jury is still out on whether the invention of printing in Europe owed anything to a prior knowledge of Chinese and Asian woodblock and movable type printing, which had existed for centuries beforehand, and it may

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Excerpt 6.1: John Foxe on the Invention and Benefit of Printing (1583) Foxe, John (1583). The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe. London; John Day, Book VI, ‘Pertaining to the Last Three Hundred Years from the Loosing out of Satan’. [cf. TAMO – The Acts and Monuments Online: www .johnfoxe.org/index.php] Notwithstanding, what man soever was the instrument, without all doubt God himself was the ordainer and disposer thereof, no otherwise than he was of the gift of tongues, and that for a singular purpose. And well may this gift of printing be resembled to the gift of tongues; for like as God then spake with many tongues, and yet all that would not turn the Jews; so now, when the Holy Ghost speaketh to the adversaries in innumerable sorts of books, yet they will not be converted nor turn to the gospel …. Now to consider to what end and purpose the Lord hath given this gift of printing to the earth, … God, of his secret judgment, seeing time to help his church, hath found a way by this faculty of printing, not only to confound his [the Pope’s] life and conversation … but also to cast down the foundation of his standing, that is, to examine, confute, and detect his doctrine, laws, and institutions, most detestable in such sort, that though his life were never so pure, yet his doctrine, standing as it doth, no man is so blind but he may see, that either the pope is antichrist, or else that antichrist is near cousin to the pope; and all this doth, and will hereafter more and more appear by printing. The reason whereof is this, for that hereby tongues are known, knowledge groweth, judgment increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is seen, the doctors be read, stories be opened, times compared, truth discerned, falsehood detected, and with finger pointed, and all, as I said, through the benefit of printing. Wherefore, I suppose, that either the pope must abolish printing, or he must seek a new world to reign over; for else, as this world standeth, printing doubtless will abolish him. But the pope, and all his college of cardinals, must this understand, that through the light of printing the world beginneth now to have eyes to see and heads to judge; he cannot walk so invisible in a net, but he will be spied.

well be that it happened independently (Barrett 2008). More important is that, during the first century of European printing, there was a comparable expansion and consolidation of printing in China, Japan and East Asia (McDermott and Burke 2015). Woodblock printing disseminated Confucian texts in China that were

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the basis for the examination system in the empire as well as satisfying the market for popular fiction for urban consumers. Books were cheap, plentiful in South Asia, produced from a range of major printing centres, and private libraries were much larger than comparable ones in Europe. Matteo Ricci commented from Beijing around 1600 on ‘the exceeding large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold’ (cited McDermott and Burke 2015, 13). That remained true a century later too, which is when the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest reported back from the Far East: ‘One must notice that in the entire world there is not one nation, not even in Europe, where the use of writing and books is more familiar and even more necessary than in the Chinese nation’ (Golvers 2012–2015, vol. 1, 16). On the other hand, the differences between woodblock printing techniques and Europe’s moveable type printing point to key elements that help to explain what made European printing distinctive (McDermott and Burke 2015). With well over 50,000 Chinese characters, it would have required massive investment in metal alloy to reproduce texts with European techniques, only justifiable on very large print-runs. Even as it was, and with the advantages of a limited character-set, European print-shops were only viable thanks to a highly skilled workforce (apprenticeships in the print-trade typically lasted seven years), organised and managed to ensure that its processes were coordinated to maximise the returns on the capital layout it involved. China, Japanese and Asian woodblock technology, by contrast, allowed those producing the woodblocks to work independently of those doing the printing. Minimal skills were required to produce a woodblock, which was cheap and durable (estimates suggest they could be reused up to 15,000 times). Printshops were spared the complicated layout that moveable-type printing entailed. The paper could be thinner and cheaper, and printing tailored to demand. Woodblock printing was particularly well adapted to producing cheap material for wide distribution, even if the results were not as imposing as a western book. The comparison emphasises how the European printing experience relied on a distinctive linguistic matrix, coupled to a commercial environment that alone sustained it. In 1593, Japanese soldiers seized a printing press in Korea that had been imported from Goa by the Jesuits to print Chinese characters in moveable type and brought it back to Japan to be used by the Tokugawa regime for its official publications. The government could have gone on using it if it had wanted to but, after a while it reverted to woodblock printing, which was quicker and cheaper. A further comparison emphasises the distinctiveness of Europe’s experience. Printing spread quickly in commercialised western Europe, but slowly across the gradient of eastern Europe, where the linguistic matrix was different and the commercial environment less attractive. That gradient was even more noticeable in the colonial context. The first printing press to make its appearance in Mexico was in 1539, in Peru in 1584, in New England in 1638, and there was no printing press in Brazil until 1808. Gutenberg technology was the handmaid to European colonial hegemony, but not one that Europeans exported. Other issues come to the fore when we examine the resistance to printing in the civilised and literate cultures of Eurasia. In the Islamic Middle East, the Ottoman

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Sultan, responding to pressure from Muslim legal scholars and the gilds of scribes who produced the finely calligraphed texts that were highly prized, banned printing in 1485. Although the interdict did not apply to non-Muslims, Arab Christians, Jews, and Armenians, these latter chose not to attract criticism by printing texts other than for their own communities or against one another (Faroqhi 2005, 134–6). So, it was in Europe (and especially Venice) where Arabic printed books were published, their circulation being officially permitted in the Ottoman empire by a Sultan declaration of 1587 (Barbarics-Hermanik 2015). Only in the 1720s did Muslims begin, very tentatively, to produce Arabic-language imprints themselves, independently of Europe. In Muscovy, as in much of eastern Europe, the first printing press arrived late (in the 1550s). But it fell under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church and was stifled by low levels of literacy and lack of support from the Tsar or social élites. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, there was only one major Russian publishing house (Marker 2014). In this broader comparative perspective, Europe’s printing revolution was not the effortless triumph of a new technology but the offspring of a more fragile commercial and cultural ecosystem that gradually acquired a dynamic of its own.

Printers, books and readers What did a printshop look like in early modern Europe? Jérôme Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia (1608) was the first printed manual for print-correctors, and its initial engraving depicts a busy room. A compositor sets type, a corrector checks copy, a storeman stacks paper, a printer and an inker work the press, whilst a workman hooks wet printed sheets onto a rack near the ceiling to dry. In a corner, an author is gesturing excitedly to an editor. Printing was physically demanding, and a girl is entering the room with a jug of beer to quench thirsts. The master-printer in the foreground, doing sums on his fingers, emphasises that it is a highly managed, commercial enterprise (see Figure 6.3). A handpress required a minimum of three people (a compositor, an inker, and a pressman) to produce 1,000–1,250 copies of one side of one sheet of paper per day. The next day those same sheets would be printed on the other side. Those sheets could be cut down to produce that many copies of one quire (eight double-leaves or sixteen pages) in octavo (the size of many modern books). One quire constituted many early modern pamphlets, and they could be printed off in a day. Setting the type for that one sheet necessitated a full day’s work on the part of a skilled compositor using expensive metal type, which had to be available in quantities to spare. Once the type was set, enough copies had to be printed as might be possibly hoped to sell since, after print was completed, the type would be dismantled from the form (the rack in which it was held when in the press) to be returned to the cases, where it was stored until used to set another sheet. To reprint anything required the same investment, in short, as the initial printing. The economic reality of handpress printing was that overproduction was inevitable.

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Figure 6.3 Inside a print shop. Woodblock illustration from Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia (Leipzig 1634), p. x. Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Dresden; http://digital.slub-dresden.de/ id273679848/10

The tendency is to imagine that, in early modern Europe, readers were avidly chasing after books. The reality was the opposite; books chased readers. The impression one has is that many surviving printed books from before 1700 had not been much read by contemporaries. Alongside the trope of the providential printing press went its counterpart: that there were too many books. Luther

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complained that there was an ‘infinite sea’ and ‘ocean’ of them. Foxe wrote of the republic of letters being ‘all but overwhelmed by an infinite multitude of books’ (cited Greengrass 2014, 247). Printers often went bankrupt in a speculative business in which capital was tied up with no guarantee of sufficient returns. Most printers, even the greatest, died heavily in debt. Hardly any of them became rich, let alone ennobled. The business was mostly (England was the exception) geographically widely distributed among many different centres, where there was intense competition between many workshops of different sizes (Febvre and Martin 1976). Over the two centuries from 1500 to 1700, the footprint of European printing changed significantly. In 1520 there were between 250 and 270 printing centres in Europe, mostly in cities, university towns or attached to a princely court. By 1650, those numbers had doubled, but there was an increasing concentration of presses in a limited number of major sites. Paris and Lyon came to dominate French production, Venice published over half the production in Italy, London in England, and, in the Netherlands, Antwerp’s preponderance by 1550 was more than matched by Amsterdam’s in the market of the Dutch Republic a century later. Only the German lands had no dominant centre. The figures for overall production are no more than educated guesses. One should perhaps imagine 150–200 million copies being produced from European presses during the sixteenth century. The comparable figure for the eighteenth century might be not far off a billion (see Figure 6.4). How did printers entice readers to buy printed materials in greater quantities? The innovations in layout and presentation were about making their products attractive. Covers sold books, and illustrated frontispieces were significant – something that could be displayed in the shopfront or pinned up at the market. In some places printers diversified into playing-cards, calendars, and albums. But book markets were fickle, subjected to differing pressures, structured by local conditions, and dependent on the relationships between readers, authors and printers as well as broader economic conditions. Survival depended on being able to adapt to the market quickly and supply it efficiently. It also meant mitigating risks. Some printers chose to share the risks and rewards of speculative ventures. Others tapped into sponsored markets, printing official or subsidised publications, commissioned in advance or under license, and then disseminating them to target audiences (Kirwan and Mullins 2015). ‘Jobbing’ printing kept many printers afloat, and indeed defined the market in some regions like Brittany (Walsby 2010). Prior to the Protestant Reformation, commissions to print indulgences from Church authorities were the juiciest part of the printing market, especially in Germany and Spain, though very few of the products have survived (Swanson 2006). Such commissions were often the result of years of carving out a position for oneself. In Seville, for example, the most important printing site in sixteenth-century Spain, Jacopo Cromberger used his family connections with Germany to establish the business (Griffin 1988). His son, Juan, set up a press in Mexico, the first in the New World, in 1539. Juan’s widow (one of several successful women-printers) secured a royal decree

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a year later granting Cromberger the exclusive monopoly in New Spain for the printing and importing of books. Once that lucrative deal ended, however, the business was ruined, and her son fled from his family and debts in 1559. Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589), perhaps the best-known early modern printer (the Officina Plantiniana, his print-shop, is a museum in Antwerp), had a similar profile. Also an émigré (he was born in France), Plantin began importing and printing books as a side-line to other commercial activities. Like Cromberger, he raised capital from family and friends (and some of his friends were also ‘family’ in the sense that they belonged to the Family of Love, followers of the spiritual path of Hendrik Niclaes). Plantin well understood the basic rules of how to succeed as a printer. He balanced his production between prestige publications and lower-range but steady-sale items, ensuring too that he had small-scale printing jobs to keep his press turning alongside them. But his greatest success was to use his contacts in Rome and Madrid to secure a subsidy (1568) and papal privilege (1572) to print and market (including in the New World) the Polyglot Bible and the new breviary (the liturgy) for use throughout the Catholic Church. Yet rival printers in Cologne took no notice of his privilege and published their own breviaries and, with renewed civil wars in the Netherlands from 1572, Plantin too almost went bankrupt. In his old age, he signed off his letters as ‘from the once-flourishing’ Plantin (Kingdon 1963; Voet 1972). How were printers in touch with their markets? At one extreme, there was the international book fair at Frankfurt. At the other, there were pedlars, working the streets of a city or moving from fair to fair with small print-items for sale, sometimes on a sale-or-return basis for a printer (Myers, Harris and Mandelbrote 2007). In Venice, the street-sellers sang and acted out what they sold around the bridges and public squares of the city (Salzberg 2013). Pedlars were accused of spreading sedition, scandal and heresy – and the charge was not without foundation. Anabaptists acted as pedlars to distribute their pamphlets in Germany and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, one component in their semi-clandestine migrant information networks (Hill 2015). Itinerant book-sellers smuggled Calvinist Psalters into France from Geneva at the beginning of the French Wars of Religion and imported Protestant literature into northern Italy in the later sixteenth century. But, as in the case of English Recusant Catholics, who circulated books and manuscripts from abroad amongst one another, an underground religious network functioned well as a means of communication (Greengrass 2006). Covenanting propaganda was spread abroad in Scotland and England illicitly in 1638 by these means. Between the fairs and the pedlars were the retail booksellers, whose role was probably the most significant, and about whom we know least. They bought what they knew they could sell, cultivating the local literate public that was willing to buy books. The signs are that the size of private libraries increased substantially in this period. A French magistrate in the late fifteenth century might have owned at best 60 books. A century later, Montaigne said his library contained 1,000 items – a large collection for the time. By the early eighteenth

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century, Montesquieu (another French provincial magistrate from South-West France) owned over 3,000 books (Blair 2011). The genre of published advice on ‘how to build a library’ – what books to choose and how to arrange them – made its appearance in the early seventeenth century. That suggests that readers (and the communities to which they belonged) were not the passive recipients

Estimated Production of Printed Books in Europe, 14501800 [in thousands of books] 700,000 600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 1454-1500

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Figure 6.4 Book production in Europe, data reworked from Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,’ Journal of Economic History 69/2 (2009), 417 and 421.

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of messages communicated to them by printers, but rather that they played an active part in the ‘making of the book’ (Johns 2000).

The media and religious change The media were at the heart of the explosive dynamics of religious change in early modern Europe. (Cf. Chapter 5: Reformations) It is impossible to separate books, printed pamphlets, songs, sermons, poems, prayers, tracts, complaints and exhortations from the processes of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s contemporaries were both impressed and shocked by what transpired in its early evangelical years. A force that communicated the truth of God’s word could also be used to spread sedition and scandal, manipulated by those in high places (Pettegree 2006). The media-forces that enabled the Protestant Reformation to divide Christendom were also those which divided Protestants from one another. Although religious themes predominated among the 10,000 pamphlets that are known to have been published in Germany between 1500 and 1530 (the majority appearing in the decade from 1517 to 1527) other subjects also impinged – the war against the Turks, popular uprising, miraculous signs and portents, and usurious interest rates, for example. So, we should not make too big a distinction between the media explosion which occurred in Germany in the first decade of the evangelical Protestant Reformation, and later similar explosions that accompanied political crises in Europe. There were possibly about 3 million pamphlet copies in circulation between 1518 and 1525 in Germany. For a population of perhaps 12 million, that sounds a modest figure, but in relation to those who could read it was impressive. By comparison, in 1642, the year of the outbreak of the English Civil War, it has been suggested that there were about 4 million pamphlet copies published, or about 4 items for each literate person, or four for every five people in the country. In 1650, a year of political crisis in the Dutch Republic, there was something approaching a million published, almost one copy each for every literate Dutchman, or one copy for every two inhabitants (Harms et al. 2013, 17–18). In early modern Europe, press production is an increasingly reliable indicator of political crisis, whether related to religious divisions or not. In any case, we should not take the first decade of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, with its multiple print-centres, its weak censorship, and the triumph of the vernacular, as the sole model for the interaction between media and religious change. The Zurich Reformation, for example, succeeded both locally and (to a degree) further afield without the equivalent of a print culture to support it, although Zwingli’s close relationship to the printer Christoph Froschauer played a key role in the dissemination of the Zurich Bible (Gordon 2002, 334–5). Religious change in Scotland and Scandinavia preceded the establishment of an indigenous publishing industry. The vigour of the Catholic media response to the Protestant Reformation should also not be underestimated, especially when linked to the communicative channels of its religious

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orders like the Franciscans and Jesuits and the pervasiveness of its institutions and the media experience they commanded (Pollmann 2006a). Sorbonnetrained theologians proved themselves to be very capable vernacular polemicists and communicators for the Catholic cause in France in the sixteenth century. François Le Picart, a persuasive Paris preacher in the 1550s, for example, managed to convey an orthodox message in a beguilingly popular way (Taylor 1999). In the long term, what may have been more significant is the role of media and communication as providing a ‘culture of persuasion’ which embedded religious changes in the hearts and minds of ordinary people rather than instigating those changes in the first place (Pettegree 2005). The degree to which the religion of Protestants anchored itself as the religion of a substantial mass of the English population in the generations after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558 was the result not of a media event but of gradual acculturation, in which printed, oral and written culture all played their part, with imaginative efforts to conjoin printing, the teaching of literacy and the inculcation of moral virtue, as illustrated in Figure 6.5. The same may well be true for Catholic revival in the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, albeit within different local cultural spheres.

The Staple of News Ben Jonson’s play of that title, put on the London stage in 1625, was a satire of what we would now call the newspaper and news-agency business, both of which were becoming an acknowledged part of the public scene in his day (Jonson 2002). In Strasbourg, a printer who otherwise specialised in publishing serious academic works, Johann Carolus (Hans Carle), printed twelve issues of a manuscript weekly newsletter, based on syndicated items of news, and then petitioned in 1605 for the right to do so on a regular basis (Weber 2006). Acknowledged as the earliest appearance of a newspaper in Europe, we only have the evidence of his petition to go on that it actually appeared since the earliest surviving copy of his newspaper – the Account of All Distinguished and Memorable News (German: Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien) dates from 1609. Profiting from the ambient international tensions of the period known in Western Europe as the ‘Pax Hispanica’, resulting in due course in the Thirty Years’ War (a conflict which, in its various phases engulfed much of Europe), regularly published syndicated news became a saleable commodity (the ‘staple’ of Jonson’s title). They carried various titles (Mercuries, Corantoes, Gazettes, Tidings, Reports, Relations…) reflecting the international borrowings that were themselves a part of that staple (Pettegree 2014). In 1615, the postmaster in Frankfurt am Main, Johannes von den Birghden (1582–1645) established a newspaper that was posted out regularly to its subscribers, with posters advertising departure times and charges. During the Thirty Years’ War, however, it was Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic, close to the conflict and with a large literate population, which became the newspaper capital of Europe (Weduwen 2017). In London, the first newspapers had already

Figure 6.5 ‘Finch his Alphabet, or A Godly direction fit to be perused of each true Christian.’ An English Broadside offering mnemonic rhymes to help children to learn their alphabet as well as the moral virtues (c. 1635). Catalogued in the English Broadsheet Ballad Archives (EBBA): ID36321. Original in the Society of Antiquaries of London – Broadsides Cab Lib g. Reproduced with permission.

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appeared by the time of Jonson’s play, but they assumed their prominent position when, in 1642 and on the eve of the English Civil War, the Licensing Act was revoked, and the Stationers’ Company disbanded (Raymond 1996). Meanwhile, in France, newspapers remained semi-official in character, whilst in Italy and elsewhere they only made their appearance towards the middle of the seventeenth century. What happened in Strasbourg, however, was not a ‘Gutenberg moment’. The ‘invention of news’ was not technologically determined. It was part of a much slower and longer transformation in Europe’s communication dynamics. To describe it as a ‘communication revolution’ is to emphasise a rupture that did not take place (Behringer 2006). Those dynamics had their roots in the establishment of resident diplomats by European states during the Renaissance, firstly by Italian principalities and then more broadly. Permanent diplomats became the focus for regular news-gathering and its concomitant elements – rumour, intelligence and espionage. Their regular (often weekly) manuscript reports began to fill the shelves of the chanceries in Venice, Rome and elsewhere (where they still survive in impressive bulk from the early sixteenth century onwards), documenting in detail for us how the powers that be in Italy followed what went on north of the Alps, but also (through their listening posts in Crete, Istanbul and Aleppo) in the Ottoman world (Raymond and Moxham 2016). They acquired a recognisable format, with important reports (‘avvisi’) copied around. Versions of them appeared in print too, joining the ranks of pamphlets recounting a newsworthy or sensational event (battles, sieges, but also portents in the sky and monstrous births). The flow of news was made possible by the development of regular mounted courier services, dependant on the provision of relay stations where horses and riders could be changed at regular intervals to ensure the transportation of information day and night (see Appendix 6.3). Letters sent by these services often carried a mark to indicate that they were urgent (‘post-haste’), and couriers were expected to sign and date the times when they received the letters they transported. Wanting to link his geographically disparate Habsburg inheritance, Maximilian I (emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, 1493–1519) utilised the postal experience already acquired by members of the Tassis family in the service of Venice and the Papacy, to establish his own. Franz von Taxis (1459–1517) negotiated contracts in 1505, and then again in 1516, that laid out the speeds of the imperial post service as well as the duties and responsibilities of those who contracted to be postmasters in different cities. Delays, losses and breakdowns in the post were frequent, but the delivery times established in the sixteenth century remained broadly those that would be maintained through to the nineteenth century. The imperial postal service was open for use to all those prepared to pay for it. Other states north of the Alps with similar postal services restricted them notionally to use by those in princely service, but that gradually became a restriction that was honoured in the breach, and then (by the early decades of the seventeenth century) abandoned. Syndicated news was a direct result of the progressive increase in the number of postal stations and the

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opening of postal services to public use. In 1608, Ottavio Codogno, the Milanese deputy postmaster-general, published his guide to the postal services throughout Europe, from which we can sketch a pan-European communication network, as illustrated in Figure 6.6. Its existence had important consequences. Ministers and rulers in the seventeenth century listened to what was in the newspapers, since it was often more up to date that ambassadorial dispatches. But they also became more alert to the possibility that newspapers spread sedition. Postal services linked cities, and Europe’s communication dynamic was essentially based on urban communication entrepôts. Cities and merchants sometimes operated their own messenger services, of which the most striking example was that of Jacob Fugger (1459–1525), the merchant in Augsburg whose resources had successfully bankrolled Charles V’s election to the Empire in 1519. He had agents in principal cities across the European continent, and his successors, Octavian Secundus (1549–1600) and Philipp Eduard (1546–1618) continued the tradition, their collection of around 16,000 newsletters from 1568–1605 (now housed in Vienna and known as the Fuggerzeitungen) (Fugger Newsletters 2015) being an artefact that confirms the reality of Europe’s communications dynamic. For the Fugger were one of the first private users of the Habsburg postal services. Far from being (as was once thought) an instrument for the family’s economic decision-making, based on reports prepared by the family’s agents, it is now evident that the reports were often prepared by ‘intelligencers’, traffickers in information who worked for various clients, and who reported on

Figure 6.6 Ottavio Codogno’s scheme of European postal routes (1608). Taken from Schobesberger et al., ‘European Postal Networks’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 30. Reproduced with the editors’ permission.

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what they regarded as ‘public’ news, from the latest developments in the vortices of Europe’s conflicts, through sensational criminal cases, to court entertainments. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the role of the news-agent was relatively well-defined, with individuals making a living from it. But any expansion in the communication of information meant a corresponding increase in fake news, the magnification of half-truths, and the possibilities that news could be manipulated by the powerful, the influential, or by groups who had interests in making a nuisance of themselves to those in power. So, French Protestants exiled at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) used their dispersed networks to construct an alternative ‘impolite’ version of what it was to be ‘learned’ and ‘informed’ (Goldgar 1995). Accelerated speed and access to communication was not guaranteed to have a positive impact upon knowledge. It took a very long time for Europe to absorb, classify and make sense of what it encountered in the New World (Elliott 1970). Europe’s channels of communication with China and India can also be grossly exaggerated. Major European libraries contained at best only a few hundred volumes relating to China at the beginning of the seventeenth century; it would take another century for that to change. In those books there was a tendency to accentuate the curious, and to assimilate what was easiest to make sense of within the traditional parameters of European understanding. The Jesuits, with their unique access in China and Japan, only selectively revealed what they learnt. The Dutch and English East India Companies similarly treated knowledge about the Far East, especially maritime, as a trade secret. It took a matter of weeks for the news of the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China in 1644 to spread around the Far East. It only became public knowledge in Europe eleven years later, in 1654.

The power of what we see – and hear – at a distance Mechanical reproduction of images and sounds – wood-block images, engravings, maps, medal and coin production, etching, music- and ballad-printing – all significantly changed how they could be represented and projected at a distance. Wood-cuts on the title-pages of Protestant pamphlets presented their content to the unlearned (images had long been regarded as the ‘books of the poor’), helping to transcend the literacy gap. Hymns, vernacular metrical versions of the Psalms, songs and ballads dominated the soundscape of the Reformation, with Catholics adapting them (different words to the same tune) in riposte. They had a mnemonic power, simplifying the message, magnifying its power in a communal setting, and imprinting it in the consciousness (Brown 2005; Pollmann 2006a). There was a debate, however, within Protestantism, about images and music. Zwinglians and others took the Old Testament biblical precepts about the dangers of idolatry to the true faith seriously. There was no such reticence in Counter-Reformed Catholic Christianity. Images were important, as Jesuit missionaries emphasised, in the armoury of persuasion, both within Europe and abroad. Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in 1542 with wood-block prints, paintings and statuettes of the Virgin Mary. Renaissance religious art –

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the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and (later) Rubens and Carracci – travelled the world in engravings and etchings, carefully selected to have an appropriate effect in a particular environment, accommodation to local tastes being encouraged among those missionaries convinced that a gentle approach was the best way of securing converts to Christianity. The impact of European representational art, powerful in Europe, was even more so abroad. ‘This is a living Buddha,’ a Chinese Emperor said when shown an oil painting of the ‘Saviour of the World’ from the Jesuit workshop in Rome in 1601 (Musillo 2016, 18). Visitors to the Jesuit residency in Beijing in 1605 were ‘amazed by the books of images’ they were shown, apparently thinking that they were sculpture-work. Others thought they had a supernatural quality because the eyes of the Virgin or of Christ seemed to follow them as they moved around. ‘By placing an image before people’s eyes,’ said the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, ‘we can explain what we could not perhaps put into words’ (O’Malley and Gauvin 2003).

Censorship and the public sphere Media control was a fact of life in early modern Europe, engaging both state and Church. Freedom of expression was the consequence of the inadequacies of those agencies, and occasionally the result (as in the English Civil War) of their operational breakdown. A long-established liberal-minded historiography has demonised the workings of some of those instruments of censorship, and particularly the workings of the Catholic Inquisition and the ‘Lists of Prohibited Books’ that were issued in the Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century, before being subsumed into the Roman Index (Index librorum prohiborum), first issued by Pope Paul IV in 1559. But the history of the establishment of the Roman Index in parts of the Italian peninsula during the rest of the sixteenth century illustrates the problems of censorship regimes in early modern Europe (Fragnito 2001). The Congregations of the Index and Inquisition in Rome were in competition with local bishops and inquisitors as to who should conduct censorship. Local diocesan and civil authorities were lax or found it difficult to recruit competent censors. University teachers and senior clerics demanded the right to consult suspect texts and, in spheres beyond theology it was difficult to determine what was and was not heresy. Although the Roman Inquisition had established its authority more clearly by the end of the century, its writ was still contested in Venice, and suspect works readily circulated in manuscript or found their way north of the Alps to be published abroad. The famous Galileo Affair, the sequence of events beginning in c. 1610 and culminating with the condemnation of the works of the great astronomer and physicist by the Inquisition in 1633 for his support for heliocentrism, was more complicated than the suppression of scientific truth by religious bigots. Galileo played the game of factions in high places around the Inquisition in Rome and lost. There was some circumstantial evidence, serious enough to worry the inquisitors, that he had expressed views that they equated with irreligion (Wotton 2013). And, although he was silenced in Italy, his works found their way into print in Catholic

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France. Seventeenth-century France is a reminder that censorship in early modern Europe was often self-imposed. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), for example, exercised considerable caution about what he chose to publish in France (his first reaction when he heard about Galileo’s condemnation was to want to burn all his papers) and he endeavoured to keep his whereabouts a secret when he moved to the Netherlands (Watson 2002, ch. 8). Renaissance political and ecclesiastical authorities understood that their authority was as much ‘performative’ as ‘real’ because the former could be projected more broadly by theatrical means such as ceremonial entries, princely marriages, royal ‘progresses’, Te Deum to celebrate victories, court tournaments and festivities (Muir 1981, 1997). Through what the French historian Michèle Fogel has termed ‘ceremonies of information’ simple but powerful messages about the nature of power and obedience could be effectively conveyed. The French monarchy under Louis XIV led the way in showing how media and communications could be used to present absolute authority beyond the court rather than countering critics by a regime of censorship that would only be partially effective (Burke 1992). In the light of the evidence that we have discussed in this chapter, it would be difficult to deny information was exchanged and communicative interaction took place in numerous social spaces that constituted a ‘public sphere’. That was the term used to translate into English what the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas delineated in a famous work, published in 1962, ‘die Öffentlichkeit’ (Habermas 1989). He argued that this public sphere was an imagined space, an equivalent to what had, he supposed, existed in ancient Athenian democracy. Its emergence characterised the structural changes in society and the accompanying conceptual shifts that characterised emerging bourgeois culture in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. The debate stimulated by Habermas’ work has inspired the reinterpretation of the role of media and communication in early modern Europe that we have discussed in this chapter. Early modern historians can readily identify the existence of a public sphere in Europe well before the end of the eighteenth century. As Robert Darnton has said, ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and communication systems have always influenced events’ (Darnton 2000, 1). The public sphere was not part of a structural change but rather different manifestations of an increasingly complex civil society in Europe, in which the media, old and new, could be instrumentalised by different actors and players to their own ends, to bring about change but also to maintain the status quo.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Alciato, Andrea (1531). Emblematum Liber. Augsburg: Heinrich Steyner. Bacon, Francis (1620). Novum Organum. London: John Bill et al.

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Myers, Robin, Harris, Michael and Mandelbrote, Giles, eds. (2007). Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade. London: Oak Knoll Press. Nauert, Charles G. (1969). The Clash of Humanists and Scholastics: An Approach to Pre-Reformation Controversies. The Sixteenth Century Journal 4, 1–18 Newbold, W. Webster (2007). Letter-Writing and Vernacular Literacy in SixteenthCentury England. In: Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, eds., Letter-Writing Manuals and Intruction from Antiquity to the Present. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 127–40. Ogilvie, Brian W. (2006). The Science of Describing. Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. O’Malley, John W. SJ and Gauvin, Alexander Bailey, eds. (2003). The Jesuits and the Arts, 1540–1773. Philadelphia, PA: Saint Joseph’s University Press. Pettegree, Andrew (2005). Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettegree, Andrew (2006). Print and Print Culture. In: Alec Ryrie, ed., Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 169–89. Pettegree, Andrew (2010). The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pettegree, Andrew (2014). The Invention of News. How the World Came to Know about Itself. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pollmann, Judith (2006a). Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence, 1560–1585. Past & Present 190, 83–120. Pollmann, Judith (2006b). “Hey Ho, Let the Cup Go Round!” Singing for Reformation in the Sixteenth Century. In: Heinz Schilling and István György Tóth, eds., Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 294–316. Poster, Carol and Mitchell, Linda C. eds. (2007). Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Raymond, Joad (1996). The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–9. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Raymond, Joad and Moxham, Noah, eds. (2016). News Networks in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill. Richardson, Brian (1999). Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salzberg, Rosa (2013). Print Peddling and Urban Culture in Renaissance Italy. In: Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond and Jeroen Salman, eds., Not Dead Things. The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy and the Low Countries, 1500–1820. Leiden: Brill, 33–51. Schneider, Gary (2005). The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Schobesberger, Nikolaus, Arblaster, Paul, Infelise, Mario, Belo, André, Moxham, Noah, Espejo, Carmen, and Raymond, Joad (2016). European Postal Networks. In: Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 19–63. Simonson, Peter, Peck, Janice, Craig, Robert T. and Jackson, John P. Jr. (2013). The History of Communication History. In: Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig and John P. Jackson, Jr., eds., The Handbook of Communication History. New York and London: Routledge, 13–57.

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Snyder, Arnold (1991). Orality, Literacy, and the Study of Anabaptism, Mennonite Quarterly Review 65, 371–92. Spufford, Margaret (1981). First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers. Social History 4, 407–35. Spufford, Margaret (1995). Literacy, Trade and Religion in the Commercial Centres of Europe. In: Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 229–83. Stone, Laurence (1969). Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900. Past and Present 42 69–139. Swanson, Robert N. ed. (2006). Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits. Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe. Leiden: Brill. Taylor, Larissa Juliet (1999). Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris. François Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation. Leiden: Brill. Tóth, István György (2000). Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Vivo, Filippo de (2007). Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Voet, Léon (1972). The Golden Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the Officina Plantiniana. 2 vols. Amsterdam, Vanghent & Co. Walsby, Malcolm (2010). The Printed Book in Brittany, 1486–1600. Leiden: Brill. Watson, Richard (2002). Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Johannes (2006). Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe. German History 24, 387–412. Weduwen, Arthur der (2017). Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Wotton, David. (2013). Galileo, Watcher of the Skies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

(C) Internet sources Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO]: http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 30 April 2018). English Broadsheet Ballads Archives [EBBA]: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/(accessed 30 April 2018). John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments Online [TAMO]: www.johnfoxe.org/index.php (accessed 30 April 2018). The Fugger Newsletters: An Early Modern Information Medium and Its Indexing: http:// fuggerzeitungen.univie.ac.at/en (accessed 31 March 2018). Renaissance Emblemata (Including an Online Edition of Alciato): www.emblems.arts.gla. ac.uk/alciato/books.php?id=A31a (accessed 28 April 2018)

Appendices

Appendix 6.1 Literacy in early modern Europe: Houston, R. A. (1988). Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Culture & Education 1500–1800. London: Longman. Across the whole of Europe between the Renaissance and the beginning of the nineteenth century, literacy was intimately related to social position. Take the case of Spain between 1580 and 1650. All clergymen could sign their names as could the letrados (qualified bureaucrats), merchant elite and most of the upper nobility, but not the poor hidalgos or lesser nobles. Between one-third and onehalf of artisans, shopkeepers and the better-off farmers could sign. Among employees, the nature of employment and the status of the employer were very important. Servant retainers of noble households were usually literate but humble tavern staff or journeymen were largely illiterate, as were virtually all the day labourers. At the other end of the continent, among the inhabitants of the Palatinate of Cracow (1564–5), 9 per cent of officials and bourgeois were illiterate compared with 22 per cent of the richer nobility and 78 per cent of the taxpaying peasantry. A similar profile existed in later sixteenth-century Languedoc. Urban merchants were almost all literate; two artisans out of every three could sign a lease or bond in full, one in ten farmers, but only three out of every 100 labourers. [131–2]

Appendix 6.2 Luther and his Printers. Cole, Richard G. (1984). Reformation Printers: Unsung Heroes. Sixteenth Century Journal 15, 327–39.

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The resulting avalanche of Luther’s Reformation pamphlets printed by dozens of printers in many places followed Luther’s wishes. Thousands of Reformation pamphlets were printed in a homely format with bold type. Later, Luther was to regret that some of his printers were indeed not only unknown but did inelegant or even poor printing. In another letter to Spalatin [Georg Burckhardt – Spalatin was his pseudonym – was the humanist secretary to Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony], written in 1521, Luther notes how unhappy he is with the printing done by Grünenberg on his treatise On Confession. Luther wrote: ‘It is printed so poorly, so carelessly, and confusedly, to say nothing of bad typefaces and paper. Johann the printer is always the same old Johann and does not improve’. Luther went on to suggest that errant printing compounds confusion in later edition. Bad printing is a sin, said Luther. ‘I shall send nothing more until I have seen that these sordid money-grubbers in printing books, care less for their profits than for the benefit of the reader’. Grünenberg may have been a bad printer but some years later Luther seemed to have forgotten his vexations with him, and in 1532 he stated that Grünenberg was a man of scruples and honestly worried about making too much profit in his printing. Further, ‘Grünenberg,’ said Luther, ‘was a godly man and was blessed.’ [328]

Appendix 6.3 Europe’s Postal Services. Behringer, Wolfgang (2006). Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept. German History 24, 333–74. Measurable progress in the communications system began to occur in about 1500. This is amply proven by all the statistics: the number of postal stations, post offices, postal routes, horses (and, later, coaches) per post horse; the number of officials per post office; the frequency of postal couriers and mail coaches, and their speeds; the numbers and print runs of newspapers, postal route maps and postal schedules; the number of bilateral contracts with governments; the number of kilometres of newly-built and paved roads; and the levels of receipts and rents, which were meticulously recorded in an age of mounting budgetary sophistication. Indeed, an astonishing fact can be noted. Unlike other historico-statistical variables, the number of postal stations shows a unidirectional linear increase from a level of zero in around 1500 right through to the advent of the railway age. Using examples provided by historical geographers, we can date the growth of postal routes very precisely, charting the areas that were opened up and tracing the tangible results … the first shoots of a viable infrastructure in Europe. [343–5]

7

Material cultures Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch

Introduction In 1982 McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb co-authored a seminal volume on the ‘The birth of a consumer society’ (McKendrick 1982). In the ingenious introduction Neil McKendrick optimistically argued how a new consumer model emerged in the eighteenth-century: one that possessed all the essential characteristics of a modern consumer society. The world of goods was rapidly expanding in the eighteenth century, McKendrick argued, and this was propelled by a ‘love triangle’ of affluence, equity and freedom. Clever entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood, who managed to build a huge pottery empire based on the developing of a market for consumer goods among the middling classes of society, could profit from this so-called ‘consumer revolution’: More men and women than ever before in human history enjoyed the experience of acquiring material possessions. Objects which for centuries had been privileged possessions of the rich came, within the space of a few generations, to be within the reach of a larger part of society than ever before, and, for the first time, to be within the legitimate aspirations of almost all of it. Objects which were once acquired as the result of inheritance at best, came to be legitimate pursuit of a whole new class of consumers. (McKendrick 1982, 1) In retrospect, it is not difficult to recognise a late cold-war ideology in this analysis: McKendrick explicitly saw the English consumer revolution as a ‘take off’ towards a society of high mass consumption – which was clearly deemed a superior society (Rostow 1963). It was in eighteenth-century England, McKendrick held, that people first acquired both the means and the (legal and moral) freedom to consume. McKendrick’s revolution metaphor heralded a repositioning of the place of material culture in economic history. Until the 1980s, material culture had been the Cinderella of early modern history. If consumption and material culture were considered by social, economic and political historians at all, it was often as little more than a dependent variable, a reflection of the processes that truly mattered. If anything, material culture was the economy’s handmaiden. For

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instance, the eminent Annales scholar Fernand Braudel had called for greater attention to material culture in 1979, but he saw it as a field determined by the primary structures of everyday life: by the slow-moving forces of geography, demography, lack of growth, and the unchanging customs of the pre-industrial period (Braudel 1992). According to Carlo Cipolla, the feebleness of preindustrial consumption mirrored the profound social inequalities that marked pre-industrial societies: The consumption of the wealthy, even when it had overtones of extravagance, never showed much variety. The economic system and the state of the arts did not offer the consumer the great variety of products and services which characterize industrial societies. Food, clothing, and housing were by far the major items of expenditure of the rich. The difference between the rich and the poor was that the rich spent extravagantly on all three items, while the poor often did not have enough to buy food. (Cipolla 1993, 31) Neil McKendrick fundamentally altered this vision: he, as well as other economic historians began looking for new explanations to account for change, and to their surprise, it was the material culture of early modern Europe that despite its simplicity would soon take up a new, much grander role. Like Cinderella, the servant had now turned princess. Not only was the world of goods in the eighteenth century subject to radical transformations, it also acted as an independent variable, i.e. an autonomous force shaping the course of history. From an empirical perspective, there is perhaps not much in McKendrick’s account that has withstood the test of time and historiographical exploration. Based on extensive studies of probate inventories, many historians of early modern England have questioned McKendrick’s consumer revolution with regard to its chronology, its extent, and the underlying mechanism. Yet, McKendrick sparked research into the world of goods, and increasingly scholars started to recognise not only the depth of the changes in material culture but also its profound cultural, political, economic and social ramifications. Frank Trentmann recently summarised the state of the art by claiming that the northwest of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played a crucial role in the process of ‘how we became a world of consumers’. It was there, Trentmann argued, that ‘a more dynamic, innovative culture of consumption came to take hold in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (Trentmann 2016, 53). Hence, even though McKendrick’s consumer revolution thesis was subjected to empirical revisions, many scholars will agree that early modern Europe became more commercialised, offering more people the opportunity to purchase new things. Hence, the study of consumption and material culture in early modern Europe owes a lot to the ‘consumer revolution’ thesis. Initially, the consumer revolution thesis was intimately connected to the industrial revolution historiography, as if eighteenth-century consumer changes were the necessary pendant, if not the conditio sine qua non, for economic

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growth and industrial modernisation. Ever since, this twin relationship between economic growth and consumer changes has been subjected to revision. This has much to do with the work of scholars such as Nick Crafts and Knick Harley, who downwardly revised the estimates of economic output during the process of industrialisation. In fact, output growth during the industrial revolution had been much less spectacular than had previously been thought (Crafts and Harley 1992). This view implied a greater importance of economic growth before the traditional period of industrialisation – a perspective that was corroborated by evidence on the growth of urbanisation and the rise of the secondary and tertiary sectors in the British economy well before the middle of the eighteenth century (Van Zanden 2002) (cf. Chapter 11: Commerce and industry). This so-called ‘revolt of the early modernists’ had two consequences for the interpretation of early modern material culture: first, it detached the onset of modern economic growth from large-scale, mechanised factory production, and transferred it to the small-scale manufactures of the early modern world; and second, it allowed for a re-assessment of the dynamics of pre-industrial consumer demand in an early modern context that was no longer seen as necessarily stagnant. Within this context, material culture claimed its place as an unlikely protagonist in economic history, even as a ‘grand narrative’ as some authors described it (Berg 2004). Changing political circumstances in the late twentieth century probably played their role in this shift in perspective, as developed economies moved from industrial to post-industrial societies, and consumerism rather than industrial prowess became the prime measure of capitalism’s success towards the end of the Cold War (Brewer 2004). Around the same time, research into pre-modern global connections also proliferated, further strengthening the attention to the circulation and exchange of material goods. How then was the role of material culture in the social and economic history of early modern Europe re-interpreted? Although there had previously been historians who argued for the role of demand in explaining long-term economic growth (Gilboy 1967; Thirsk 1998), by far the most influential contribution to this perspective was made by Jan De Vries. Initially, De Vries derived his arguments for the autonomous role of consumption in the early modern economy not from studying eighteenth-century Britain, as McKendrick had done, but from the evidence on the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Already in 1975 he made a case for re-imagining early modern peasants in Friesland, in the far north of the Netherlands, as being perfectly capable and being inclined towards increased consumption of household goods purchased on the market (De Vries 1975). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he saw evidence of important investments in peasant housing, the gradual introduction of window curtains and mantelpiece cloths, a diversification of tables and chairs, the strong spread of new glass, tin and ceramic table- and kitchenware, as well as the introduction and diffusion of mirrors, clocks and books. Although individually these changes were far from revolutionary, together they reflected a gradual adoption of urban cultural practices that transformed the consumption patterns of the Dutch rural population. Yet, while arguably the Netherlands were a prosperous region in the

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seventeenth century, the many studies that were published on early modern economic growth indicated that in Europe economic growth was the exception rather than the rule (De Vries 1993). Moreover, while the probate inventories showed an increasing variety and comfort, the purchasing power of wage-earners (a growing share of the population) was falling (Roche 1981). In search of an explanation for this ‘material culture paradox’, several historians pointed to the changing nature of material culture. Gradually, a new consumer model originated, one which implied the transition from consumption relying on ‘old luxuries’, art and craftwork with a high intrinsic value, durable and gifted with a potential for resale or recycling, towards a consumer model that focused upon cheaper consumables and accessories, with a lesser durability as well (Blondé 2002; Blondé and Van Damme 2010; Roche 1997). As a result, poorer consumers were capable of buying ever more things, without necessarily growing richer (Fairchilds 1993; McCants 2008a; Ryckbosch 2012). Culturally this process would have been matched by the waning force of an aristocratic consumer culture that valued the old, over consumer behaviour that became drawn to the novel (McCracken 1990). Yet, according to De Vries, this transition does not suffice to explain the gap between stagnating or falling living standards and the multiplication of material riches in households across the social spectrum. Eventually Jan De Vries developed the arguments put forward in his earlier research on the Frisian farmers into a far-reaching ‘industrious revolution’-hypothesis (De Vries 1993, 2008; cf. Sandgruber 1982). This concept relates to the way in which households allocated household resources (time and money) to the market in order to enjoy a higher cash income that could subsequently be spent on the market for consumer goods. People began to work harder and they did so in a much more physically and economically productive manner in order to shop for more, newer and more novel consumer goods. As a result, households became progressively more involved in both production and consumption for the market. As this process of commercialisation boosted economic specialisation and division of labour, it ultimately fostered productivity gains and reduced relative prices for consumer durables. According to De Vries this industrious revolution was rooted in the acceptance of a new type of consumer behaviour, which was now no longer constrained by the religious and public condemnations of all luxury. Instead, the urban and tolerant society of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic brought forth an embrace of a ‘New Luxury’: a diverse range of new consumer goods that were increasingly affordable for the growing middle classes in society, bringing growing levels of comfort and pleasure to their lives. De Vries specifically referred to the growing availability of affordable (cotton) clothing and related apparel, to paintings as well as to novel drinks and condiments such as tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar. Much like the initial ‘consumer revolution’ thesis, the ‘industrious revolution’ hypothesis has been very effective in provoking research into the household organisation of labour, as well as into the role of consumption. According to De

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Vries, the increase in work required for the industrious revolution could be achieved in several ways: people could work longer hours, take fewer days per year off work (for instance by limiting the number of religious holidays), increase their productivity per unit time worked, or engage more family members – mostly women and children – in labour market participation. Some detractors have argued that there is no conclusive evidence showing the growing input of working hours or days during the long eighteenth century to support De Vries’ theory (Clark and Van Der Werf 1998), while others, by contrast, found that the growing number of days worked per year allowed for an increase in luxury consumption, if only for urban, not for rural labourers (Allen and Weisdorf 2011). Studies setting out specifically to test the ‘industrious revolution’ hypothesis have indicated that female labour market participation probably did increase in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, indeed suggesting a growing industriousness of households (Van Nederveen 2007). Yet others remain more sceptical and point out how industriousness perhaps played a larger role as a doctrine invented in seventeenth-century economic and moral discourse, and useful for depressing the price of labour, rather than as an actual practice (Muldrew 2011). Others still support a pessimistic interpretation, in which the perceived industriousness was part and parcel of a survival strategy, while relative price changes can account for the modest increase in the material riches recorded in pre-industrial households even when economic growth lagged behind (Malanima and Pinchera 2012). Disregarding these ongoing debates, what matters most in the context of this contribution is that the historiography of the last few decades has re-interpreted early modern material culture as a locus of change and dynamism, allegedly capable of transforming the economy of Western Europe. And indeed, a wealth of empirical evidence on the domestic possessions owned by early modern households has by now been unearthed from large numbers of probate inventories – a loosely defined source type recording the movable possessions found at the house of recently deceased individuals (cf. Excerpt 11.2, in Chapter 11 below) – and by and large these have shown how the material culture of the home grew more diverse, colourful, luxurious and comfortable for most people from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century (Avery et al. 2015). In recent years this historiography has greatly benefited from a renewed engagement with material objects and artefacts themselves (Gerritsen and Riello 2015). As historians became increasingly interested in the history of quotidian life, it was probably only a matter of time before archaeological and anthropological perspectives on material culture would bring historians to abandon their exclusive pre-occupation with the study of written texts. Turning to museum curators, archaeologists, art historians and anthropologists has significantly broadened the horizon of early modern historians interested in material culture. Among other contributions, this has principally led to a more nuanced and complex interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of objects – focusing not only on sensory experiences, but also on the multi-interpretability of objects throughout their lifespans.

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Despite this obvious merit, studying objects from a historical perspective comes with its own challenges and limitations. Historians and art historians have been forced to consider how representative museum collections are for the study of non-elite material culture and how museum objects can be properly recontextualised. As those issues are now being taken up more explicitly, and a productive dialogue has been established between historians, museum curators, and archaeologists, it can be expected that the more diverse approaches to material culture will continue to emphasise both the surprising richness of the early modern material world, as well as its complex meanings and interpretations.

From the material renaissance to the industrious revolution: multiplying the number of consumer revolutions Two questions dominate this area of study: when and where did this expansion of domestic comfort begin, and which people and places were (not) able to participate in it? The early modern consumer historiography was triggered by questions related to the origins of emerging consumerism in pre-industrial Europe. While the struggle for the cradle of consumerism is hardly an intellectually satisfying exercise, tracing the beginnings of a phenomenon can indeed be helpful in understanding its real nature and causes – as might already be exemplified by the challenge to the English exceptionalism presented in the preceding paragraphs. New empirical research outside of the traditional chronological and geographical scope of the consumer revolution debate has revealed the plurality and dynamism of European consumer transformations well before the eighteenth century. A strong case was made, for instance, in favour of the Renaissance indulgence with material objects, and its effects upon commerce and production in Renaissance society. Lisa Jardine’s high-profile book Worldly Goods largely followed this perspective by presenting the rich material world of the Renaissance as an exponent of Jakob Burckhardt’s notion that Renaissance man was the ‘firstborn among the sons of modern Europe’ (Burckhardt 1945; Jardine 1996) (see Appendix 7.1; cf. Chapter 4: Renaissance). This Burckhardtian thesis was forwarded even more convincingly by Richard Goldthwaite (1985, 1987, 1989). At the heart of Goldthwaite’s reasoning was the finding that over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the house (palazzo or casa), its furnishings and their uses became successively more and more luxurious, varied and extensive. Around 1400, in spite of their external magnificenza, even the grandest palazzi only had rather sparsely decorated and furnished interiors. Over the course of the following two centuries, however, not only clothing but also furniture, paintings and tableware acquired a more important place in everyday and social life. The proliferation of paintings in private ownership is considered to be exemplary of the transformations of material culture writ large. Most importantly, the material renaissance increasingly valued ‘design’ rather than the intrinsic value of things; hence it contributed to a new experience of the very nature of materiality, a transition that shows affinity to the new material culture that allegedly originated in the eighteenth century. However, quite a few of these

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material innovations remained confined to the highest strata of society only. Moreover, material goods continued to function as financial assets, and moral constraints impeded the further growth of consumer markets. Hence, the question remains whether an urban success story ought to be read into this ‘material renaissance’ narrative. In any case, Goldthwaite himself considered the income level in late medieval Italy to be too low and the distribution of wealth far too unequal for any broad consumption of this new material culture (Goldthwaite 1993, 251; see Appendix 7.2). Recent research on medieval Italy has partly qualified this assumption: the middling sort of people also took part in the new material culture that originated in the late Middle Ages (Cavallo 2010; Blondé and Ryckbosch 2015; Hohti 2010). In Goldthwaite’s explanation the Italian nobility played a prominent role in this process. Much earlier than their European peers, they exchanged an essentially aristocratic or feudal model for much more complex and subtle forms of conduct and consumption. Those social models were, like their residences, essentially ‘urban’. Not everyone received this thesis with open arms (Martines 1998). Yet the idea that Renaissance culture took shape also in the many hundreds of thousands of everyday purchases and in the interiors of Italian palazzi has nevertheless been commonly accepted ever since. In her book on Italian interiors Elizabeth Currie even described this as a genuine ‘consumer revolution’ (Currie 2006, 14; see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 This majolica trencher from Italy shows a childbirth scene and was probably part of a larger birth set. The painting depicts a woman pouring water into a bowl, while a man casts a horoscope. In the background stands a curtained bed. Trencher and bowl, painted by Nicola da Urbino (1533–38; cf. AjmarWollheim and Dennis 2006). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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A similar narrative has emerged in the context of the Low Countries. Research into inventories from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges and Antwerp suggested that the consumer changes observed by De Vries in seventeenth-century Holland and Friesland were largely path-dependent upon processes set earlier in the southern Low Countries (Baatsen et al. 2018). Interestingly enough, the Low Countries excelled in product and process innovations that rendered many a renaissance luxury into a more affordable consumer durable for the urban middling sort of people (Baatsen and Blondé 2015). Meanwhile, medieval historians have begun to unearth plenty of evidence from notarial records, inventories, accounts, and debt collections showing that even in medieval times and the sixteenth century revolutions in dress or domestic comfort were not unheard of (Dyer 1989; Kowaleski 2011; Maegraith and Muldrew 2015, 381–2; Smail 2016; see Figure 7.2). These indications of changing material cultures in previous periods raised new problems of interpretation. The central issue is the question whether the growing importance of fashion and domesticity in the late medieval Mediterranean, the Low Countries or England can be meaningfully interpreted as the beginning of a story narrating the rise of Western consumerism, or whether it can only be properly understood in its own terms, as part of a distant and significantly different past (Welch 2017). For instance, in her studies on the material culture of the Italian Renaissance Evelyn Welch explicitly distanced herself from the linear and modernist perspectives (O’Malley and Welch 2007; Welch 2005). Prices were often social constructions, and consumption – although morally sanctioned by authors such as Pontano – was never freed from moral anxieties (Allerston 2007). In a similar vein, Martha Howell characterised the fashion of the late medieval Low Countries as dynamic and commercial, but not as part of a linear transition towards capitalism or consumerism (Howell 2010). Samuel Cohn Jr. has gone even further in problematising the linear interpretations of renaissance consumerism. Based on an examination of Italian wills, he has shown how the Renaissance ‘attachment to things’ could be interpreted as both a sign and a cause of diminished commercialisation after the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century (Cohn 2012). Far from signalling a turn towards economic growth and modernity, the Renaissance obsession with material splendour should then be seen as the cause and consequence of a less vibrant economy than the one preceding it. Moreover, while the modernist historiography focused upon buying and selling for the markets, increasingly scholars also pointed to alternative uses and commercial circuits such as the second hand-market, and exchange strategies such as theft, barter, gifts and inheritance (Allerston 1996; Fontaine 2008; Matchette 2007).

Figure 7.2 This painting is an eighteenth-century tribute to the seventeenthcentury Dutch tradition of interior painting by a Swiss artist. It shows a Dutch girl – the painting of the church refers to the town of Delft – at breakfast, which had by this time become centred around tea and coffee. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Dutch Girl at Breakfast (c. 1756). © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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The social and spatial dynamics of consumer changes Another problem that spurred on new research into the material culture of the early modern home revolved around the question: who participated in the changing world of consumption, and who did not? The traditional image of the spread of consumerism in early modern Europe is largely centrifugal. It is assumed to have started at the top of society, and to have trickled down from there by way of emulation. Moreover, it is generally assumed to have started in the core commercial area of Europe (the urban North Sea region), and to have disseminated gradually from there to more peripheral areas towards the south, east and north. However, more recent literature tends to complicate such generalisations as well. Even though Neil McKendrick originally envisioned the consumer revolution as being ‘unprecedented in the depth to which it penetrated the lower reaches of society’ (1982, 11), the empirical support for this claim remained fairly thin. Inventories rarely offer reliable intimations on this matter since their existence and survival is skewed towards the social middling groups and above. For this reason, most of the earlier students of inventories limited their claims for consumer change to the population above the lower social strata. Lorna Weatherill, for instance, maintained that English consumer change between 1660 and 1760 was limited to the middle groups and above, and thus that no real mass consumption economy came about (Weatherill 1988). On the other hand, John Styles argued that the plebeian working classes did participate in the growing market for new household goods, especially clothing apparel (Styles 2007). Cissie Fairchilds also demonstrated, on the basis of a sample of Parisian inventories, that a true democratisation of new ‘populuxe’ goods did occur among the lower classes. By means of inexpensive imitations of aristocratic luxuries such as fans, umbrellas, or snuff boxes even the Parisian lower class could now participate in the ‘aping of the aristocracy’ (Fairchilds 1993, 230). Likewise, Anne McCants used the inventories of possessions left to the orphans of the Amsterdam burgher orphanage to illustrate the surprisingly widespread consumption of novel, colonial and luxurious commodities (McCants 2008a, 2008b). However, even if such evidence shows the growing participation in a diversifying material and consumer culture by lower social classes, caution is warranted in interpreting this as a sign of improving living standards or growing equity. Even if in the eighteenth century poorer households could enjoy a more comfortable material culture at home, they were almost certainly left far behind by the consumerism of the middle classes (King 1997). In the new material culture of a diverse range of novel commodities, middling and upper classes had ample opportunities to reinforce distinctions in lifestyle across the social spectrum. For instance, Michael Kwass has interpreted the spread of wigs in France as ‘inequality transformed’ – the rise of a new type of social distinction rather than its disappearance (Kwass 2006). Conversely, while it is true that a series of ‘new luxuries’ were accessible to larger groups in society than ever before, the ‘old luxury’ patterns, with their

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heavy emphasis on social positioning lost nothing of its attire in the eighteenth century. The need to keep up with fast fashion changes, the emphasis on ‘taste’, the relative importance of ‘conspicuous consumption’ and the need to continue investing in ‘old luxuries’ with high intrinsic value, all this contributed to the reproduction of social inequalities through material culture, rather than to the blurring of boundaries (Blondé 2009). With regard to the geographic spread of changes in early modern material cultures, the core site of consumer change is now usually located in the city – as opposed to the court. In particular the large cities either in Renaissance Italy or north-western Europe – Amsterdam, London and Paris – are considered as the prime places of dynamism. However, several studies have drawn attention to the fact that many aspects of the consumer revolution, such as the unprecedented spread of new luxury goods among broad layers of society, also occurred in the more peripheral regions of Europe. In the eighteenth-century Scandinavian and Baltic areas for instance, the changes in consumer habits do not appear to have been radically different from those found earlier for Western Europe (Hutchison 2011; Rönnbäck 2010). For relatively peripheral economies such as early modern Ireland and eighteenth-century Portugal, recent research has established how new patterns of ‘luxury’ consumption attained an unprecedented (social) reach during the eighteenth century (Durães 2012; Flavin 2011). Similar observations regarding the rapidly, and sometimes even spectacularly, growing levels of luxury consumption during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been made for the European settlements overseas. A variety of studies, both old and new, has underlined this point for the colonies on the American east coast (southern New England, the Chesapeake Bay area in Virginia, and South Carolina) based on extensive probate inventory data (Carr and Walsh 1988; Main and Main 1988). Furthermore, a new inventory study by Johan Fourie has drawn attention to the remarkably widespread ownership of luxury items and their availability, even to poor consumers in the eighteenth-century South African Cape Colony (Fourie 2013). Perhaps even more noteworthy is the evidence of similarly profound consumer changes in the early modern period outside Europe and its colonial offshoots. Craig Clunas’ work on material culture in Ming China has long served as a warning that European exceptionalism in early modern histories of consumption should not be taken for granted and recent probate inventory work on consumer growth in the early modern Ottoman Empire has yet again strengthened this point (Clunas 1999, 2012; Karababa 2012). Most of the studies on regions outside the core Atlantic economies of Western Europe thus have indicated how the expansion of material culture and changing consumption patterns were closer to those in England or the Low Countries than was implied in the early work on the ‘consumer revolution’. However, if this were to lead to a more cautious understanding of consumer change in a comparative perspective, it is important to note that there are also crucial exceptions to this view. Most notably, based on evidence from the central European Württemberg region, Sheilagh Ogilvie has argued that outside the

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North Atlantic economies, traditional institutions could significantly delay and limit consumer changes – albeit without being able to block them entirely (Ogilvie 2010).

Connecting the local and global However, the unifying narrative on ‘the’ consumer revolution should not obscure the importance of local dynamics and characteristics in consumer cultures. On 12 May 1740, for instance, Jan Teding van Berkhout, born into a prominent family from Delft in Holland, wrote a letter home from Paris. Whilst staying there, Jan had commissioned beautiful summer clothes from one of the most famous Parisian couturiers. Writing to his brother, he admitted that he would probably not be in a position to wear these garments upon his return in Holland because they were ‘too beautiful to dare wearing them in Holland’ (Verhoeven 2009, 271–2). What was fashionable at the court in Paris was likely to be disapproved of in the bourgeois society of the Netherlands, even though Paris functioned as an important fashion maker for the Holland elites in the eighteenth century. In a similar vein, Robert Duplessis has shown how in the material Atlantic metropolitan fashion connected consumers and producers after 1750, while – at the same time – the world of Atlantic textiles, cotton especially, gave rise to a wide diversity in dress codes across time, space and social positions (Duplessis 2016). Given the strength of Europe’s expansion processes during early modern times, and the increasingly global character of many commodities in the early modern home, it is no surprise that the global has played an increasing role in interpreting early modern material culture. One long-standing historiographical field has explored the impact of the expanding material culture within Europe on the wider world. The seminal contribution in this field came not from a historian of early modern Europe, but from an anthropologist of the Caribbean: Sydney Mintz. In his Sweetness and Power he vividly demonstrated the direct interdependency of the Caribbean plantation system and the European consumer, thereby showing how the links between the early modern periphery and core made themselves felt through the global trade in commodities such as sugar – even though they were often obfuscated to contemporary observers (Mintz 1985). Since Mintz, several historians of empire have sought to draw attention to the global consequences of the growing early modern taste for a more luxurious lifestyle: for new foods and medicines, for sugar, tobacco and coffee, for textiles, ivory, and mahogany chairs. The history of the plantation system, empire, colonialism, and global ecological pillage in the eighteenth century is generally seen as having been closely connected to the global commerce that brought about such spectacular gains in European material living standards (Bickham 2008). If critical and pessimistic interpretations of the global consequences of the rise of early modern European consumerism are perhaps the most striking, they present certainly not the only possible narrative. For instance, Harold Cook has credited the relentless

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European search around the globe for goods that could be commodified on the European market as a prime mover in bringing about a more objective and scientific outlook (Cook 2007). Unlike Mintz, other historians who have pursued a global perspective on early modern material cultures have done so not to explore global interdependencies, but rather to draw out global comparisons. Since consumption has been mobilised as an important explanatory factor in European economic development, it stands to reason to ask whether this was a uniquely European phenomenon. This question looms particularly large within the debate on the so-called ‘great divergence’: when did a gap in living standards and economic prowess open up between Europe (and its colonial off-shoots) and the rest of the world, most importantly China and India? Kenneth Pomeranz famously argued that in terms of popular consumption of tea and sugar, and with regard to the riches of domestic material cultures, the difference between Europe and China was less stark in the eighteenth century than is often imagined. Moreover, any substantial differences between England and the Yangzi Delta that do show up – such as the spectacular growth of sugar consumption, or the more rapid changes in fashion and taste in the former – were most likely of only secondary importance, and can be attributed primarily to the role of Britain’s colonies and its engagement in global trade (Pomeranz 2000, esp. ch. 3). Pomeranz’ pioneering efforts to draw out global comparisons of early modern material culture have drawn few followers, largely because of the complexity of undertaking and interpreting such a comparative enterprise. In fact, much of the recent literature on the global history of early modern commodities has rightly sought to establish the plurality of meanings luxury goods could have while being circulated around the globe (Hofmeester and Bernd-Stefan 2016; Main and Main 1988) – thus complicating further any straightforward comparisons of material culture. Nevertheless, regional specialists in Chinese and Indian history have occasionally sought to challenge the claims of European exceptionalism. Craig Clunas did so by exploring Chinese thinking on luxury (Clunas 2004), while Jos Gommans emphasised similarities and connections between early modern India and Europe (Gommans 2015). In recent years, several historians of early modern consumer change have gone even further, by claiming a causal role for global interactions in accounting for European consumerism. Most influentially, scholars such as Maxine Berg and Giorgio Riello have argued for the crucial importance of commodities imported from overseas in the dismantling of traditional strictures on consumption and commerce in early modern Europe (Berg 2004; Riello 2013). In this view, the superior quality and cheaper price of Asian commodities – traditionally destined for the already well-developed consumer societies of Eastern Asia – helped to create a new consumer demand in Europe, followed by a wave of mostly European technological innovations in an attempt to meet it. Marcy Norton has made a similar argument for the cultural transfer of taste from the New World to Europe by the introduction of chocolate and tobacco (Norton 2006). This re-interpretation of consumer change in early

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modern Europe also offers a new perspective on the role of global commerce in the growth of capitalism. In surveying the global origins of European consumerism, Jan De Vries echoed and revised Fernand Braudel’s famous remarks on early modern international trade, by arguing how global trade mattered not because of its volume or its value, but because of the nature of the goods it brought to Europe.

Cultural perspectives In accounting for the material culture changes, economic historians traditionally rely upon income and its distribution, as well as on product and process innovations and relative price changes. Much evidence indeed points towards the key importance played by changing relative prices: relatively speaking it became cheaper to be rich as the early modern period progressed. Recently Kelly and Ó Gráda analysed the prices of stolen watches recorded in the criminal records of the Old Bailey court, and argued how the growth of productivity during the early modern era resulted in cheaper and more affordable watches (Kelly and Ó Gráda 2016). With regard to the consumption of durables, such as tea-wares, furniture and dress, John Styles has also hinted at the possibility that product innovations might have played a larger role in accounting for change than it is often given credit for (Styles 2000). Even though such economic, supply-side explanations might be in the ascendant, most historians looking to explain the changing material world of early modern Europe have put their money on cultural transformations as agents of change. The number of rivalling cultural interpretations of consumer change in early modern Europe can be somewhat overwhelming. Many of these interpretations share an interest in specific social changes – especially in the growing importance of bourgeois values, as opposed to aristocratic ones. For instance, Woodruff D. Smith understands the embrace of consumerism in eighteenthcentury England and America as a transition from a more aristocratic ‘culture of gentility’ towards a new, middle-class ‘culture of respectability’ (Smith 2002). In Daniel Roche’s interpretation of Parisian fashion and everyday life in the eighteenth century, a similar image emerges of how ‘the hierarchical society, encased in the heavy and durable broadcloths and costly silks which were the mark of court elegance and its urban imitators, was succeeded by a more open, less stiff and more frivolous world’ (Roche 1996, 504). This new material culture is often interpreted as having been rooted in a new legitimation and motivation. Traditionally, consumerism was concerned with demarcating social status and position: determining who could consume lavishly, and for whom the consumption of luxuries was out of bounds. Religious prohibitions about the sins of material luxury and traditional beliefs about the material roots of moral decay could always be invoked to condemn luxurious spending, while this was not necessarily perceived to be at odds with the public responsibility of the upper classes to spend liberally (Guerzoni 1999). If needed, such moral norms could even be legally imposed by means of sumptuary

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legislation, as was frequently the case in Europe from the late Middle Ages until the beginning of the eighteenth century (Hunt 1996; Howell 2010; Riello and Rublack 2019; Sekora 1977; see Excerpt 7.1). Several historians have explored how the new, middle-class culture of consumption searched for ways to legitimise the expansion of consumption while avoiding the traditional condemnations of excess, material sin, and moral decay. John Crowley has traced the general growth of ‘comfort’ in the early modern home, as exemplified by better heating, lighting, and seating (Crowley 1999). Arguably comfort not only established itself in a material sense, but also as a cultural category and discourse: as a type of consumption that was so far removed from ostentation and pretention that it could remain exempt from the traditional critiques of luxury. Other cultural categories could similarly serve to negotiate the fine line between sinful luxury aimed at display, and consumer behaviour that signalled restraint and civility while still involving a richer material culture. Vigarello has traced the history of ‘cleanliness’ as such a concept (Vigarello 2008), Berry and Berg have pointed towards ‘politeness’ (Berg 2005; Berry 2002), while Styles and Vickery have emphasised the stress placed on ‘decorum’ in the design and evaluation of domestic interiors (Smith 2002; Styles and Vickery 2006). Traditional ideas about luxury were not only challenged by the emergence of new cultural categories that sought to negotiate its boundaries. They were also contested explicitly by new currents in moral, political and economic thought. Whereas the desire for luxury and the accumulation of material goods was traditionally inhibited by moral and religious restrictions, a growing number of Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century began to take the defence of luxury seriously. The resulting ‘luxury debates’ – as the outpouring of texts on this issue has been dubbed by later historians – have often been interpreted in much the same way as the emergence of modern economic thought on free trade. Much like Adam Smith is seen as the first defender of the principle of ‘free trade’ against misguided mercantilist ideas, so Smith and his precursors have been seen as the first champions of ‘free consumption’ against the conservative critiques of luxury. A central role in this change is usually ascribed to Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). His work and the reaction against it seem to exemplify how the Enlightenment produced radically new, and remarkably ‘modern’ attitudes towards consumption, which were considered almost heretical by most contemporaries. Mandeville was born and educated in Holland, receiving his training as a physician at the Cartesian university of Leiden, before moving to England in the 1690s. There he published several works of political satire, criticising charity schools and the hypocrisy he perceived to be inherent in contemporary moral thinking about public and private virtue. In particular the poem The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705), which was later reprinted and much extended in his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), appears to offer an outspoken justification of luxury. In The Grumbling Hive Mandeville used the example of a hive of bees to describe how prosperity was rooted in

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Excerpt 7.1: Allerston, Patricia (2006). ‘Contrary to the truth and also to the semblance of reality’? Entering a Venetian lying-in chamber (1605). Renaissance Studies 20 (5), 629–39. Statement made by Venetian wool merchant, Vincenzo Zuccato, after he was denounced to the sumptuary authorities for inappropriately furnishing the ‘lyingin’ chamber at his home and receiving female visitors there (1605). Zuccato was responding to an account by a petty government functionary, who along with his men reportedly saw the chamber furnished with silk, figured tapestries which hung from floor to ceiling, engraved and gilded walnut chests decorated with bronze fittings, a gilded iron bedstead furnished with embroidered sheets, and an elaborate yellow damask bed canopy. His rejoinder: The denunciation made on 18 January past, against me, Vincenzo Zuccato, Your Very Excellent Lordship’s humble servant, is not only contrary to the truth, but also to the semblance of reality. Since, on the occasion of my wife’s many childbirths, I have never overstepped the boundaries of modesty and of my limited fortune and social rank, so it is not to be believed that I have acted any differently during this childbirth (which is the last of seven), by doing what it has never suited me to do before. But this is even more the case this year, in which my house has been badly hit by fortune […] But, coming to the denunciation, I say that no women of any kind came to our house that day, except for Madonna Camilla Rubini, my mother-inlaw, nor is it possible to prove otherwise truthfully. As for the decorative furnishings described in that denunciation, I say this is a malicious representation because in my wife’s room there were not, nor have there ever been, tapestries of any sort, but only a few old domestic wall-hangings which do not contain any silk, along with a damask bed hanging, and a pair of tin firedogs faked to look like bronze, with wooden chests and a gilded iron bedstead. But these goods are not forbidden, and they have been used in all my wife’s childbirths as well as during the main annual festivals, to air them as much as anything. On account of these things, while I am certain of being able to swear by the exemplary justice of Your Illustrious Lordships, nevertheless, adding reasoning to reason, I offer also to prove the above. That on the day of January 16 past named in the denunciation, the lower entrance of my house, where the main door is located, was blocked and obstructed by large sacks full of raw wool. These were not only ugly and unpleasant to look at, but also hampered the passage in such a way that a person could hardly get by. And my mother and Madonna Christina, my aunt, widow of Messer Vettor d’Avanzo who are the old ladies of our

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household, went around the house that day in their usual widows’ weeds of twilled wool, and wearing their white aprons, as they usually do all year round to carry out their chores. And on that day there were no boats or gondolas of any kind whatsoever at our wharf or even in our canal, called the Rio della Fontana, because the water was too low …[635–6]

vice, rather than in virtue (see Excerpt 7.2). Greed and the desire for luxury and extravagance drove science and industry. If, on the other hand, the virtues of honesty and temperance were to reign, the hive would become poor and unable to survive. In other words: Mandeville argued that the public virtue of Britain was ultimately, and rightly, based on the rule of private vices, in particular unashamed greed and a love of luxury.

Excerpt 7.2: Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705) Hundert, E. J., ed. (1997). Bernard Mandeville. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 23–36. Mandeville’s poem The Grumbling Hive was originally published in 1705 and later formed the basis from which to build his book The Fable of Bees (1714). In the poem he describes a busy bee-hive – presumably England – which is originally full of (private) vice, yet prosperous and industrious (fragment A). However, the hive longs for virtue, and receives its wish, by having fraud banished (fragment B). The result of such imposed virtue, is the swift decline of the hive (fragment C). A. Thus every Part was full of Vice, [155] Yet the whole Mass a Paradice; Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars They were th’Esteem of Foreigners, And lavish of their Wealth and Lives, The Ballance of all other Hives. [160] Such were the Blessings of that State; Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great; And Vertue, who from Politicks Had learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks, Was, by their happy Influence, [165] Made Friends with Vice: And ever since

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Not Merchants now; but Companies [385] Remove whole Manufacturies. All Arts and Crafts neglected lie; Content the Bane of Industry, Makes ’em admire their homely Store, And neither seek, nor covet more. [390] So few in the vast Hive remain; The Hundredth part they can’t maintain Against th’Insults of numerous Foes; Whom yet they valiantly oppose; Till some well-fenced Retreat is found; [395] And here they die, or stand their Ground, No Hireling in their Armies known; But bravely fighting for their own; Their Courage and Integrity At last were crown’d with Victory. [400] They triumph’d not without their Cost, For many Thousand Bees were lost. Hard’ned with Toils, and Exercise They counted Ease it self a Vice; Which so improv’d their Temperance, [405] That to avoid Extravagance, They flew into a hollow tree, Blest with content and Honesty.

Mandeville’s work became the subject of widespread debate and controversy during the 1720s, as his ideas were seen to imply a cynical rejection of morality. Nevertheless, Adam Smith later drew on Mandeville’s ideas on the division of labour and the importance of individual freedom for the economy – even though he rejected Mandeville’s ideas on the immorality of the market (Muldrew 2013). The interpretation of Mandeville as symptomatic of a sudden rupture in economic thought, which helped to spur the acceptance of luxury in early modern society, has been significantly amended in recent years. Paul Slack, for instance, has shown how the idea that luxury consumption could be beneficial to the state had a longer history in British political thought than is often recognised. Already in the 1670s, philosophers such as John Houghton and Nicholas Barbon celebrated the importance of consumption for national well-being, and associated its expansion with the ‘improvement of the nation’ (Slack 2007). Similar arguments were formulated on the Continent as well, for instance in Germany by Johann Joachim Becher in 1668. Despite being a Cameralist (and thus in favour of mercantilist trade policy), he argued that a high level of consumer spending was the prime mover of economic prosperity, and thus that spending was a public virtue,

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while frugality was a vice (Hutchison 1988, 93). Rather than a sudden change in thinking about luxury, historians now perceive a general evolution towards a growing alignment between the acceptance of luxury and consumption, and the interests of the state and society as a whole (Muldrew 2013). Moreover, the importance of these luxury debates itself has been indirectly called into question. The Dutch Republic is again an interesting case, which has led to deeply contrasting interpretations of Dutch attitudes towards consumption, and of the importance of these attitudes in shaping actual practices. Even though the seventeenth-century Republic has been described as the birthplace of early modern consumerism, there is no indication of vigorous debates on the acceptance of luxury similar to those in eighteenth-century England. The Low Countries might have led the way in the practice of expanding consumption, yet their thinking on the subject was decidedly more ambivalent than Mandeville’s radical defence of luxury consumption in England. In fact, it is quite likely that Bernard Mandeville’s contentious writings in England reacted against the Dutch political philosophy of Republicanism developed by Johan and Pieter De La Court in the 1660s. The De La Court brothers argued that, in a republic, citizens were spontaneously guided by their passion of self-love towards virtuousness and moderation. In the republic of the De La Court’s the private pursuit of individual interests would, through a collective recognition of everyone’s best interests, be spontaneously co-ordinated towards the general interest and prosperity of society. In a monarchy, by contrast, this same self-love resulted not in public virtue, but in public vice – as exemplified by decadence (Hundert 2003). Clearly, Dutch political philosophy in the 1660s remained in favour of frugality and moderation, and highly critical of decadent luxury. Yet at the same time, it rose in defence of individuals’ freedom to pursue their own economic selfinterests as the best guarantee to safeguard the prosperity and virtuousness of the community as a whole. The ambivalence of the Dutch towards the much expanded opportunities for consumption which their remarkable economic growth allowed, has been the subject of two highly contrasting interpretations. On the one hand, Simon Schama has written a much celebrated and influential cultural history of Dutch attitudes towards the expanding material world around them (Schama 1987). According to his view, the deep opposition between the Dutch adherence to Calvinist principles of moderation and frugality, and the enormous riches which their leading position in global trade brought them, sparked a profound unease and insecurity about the possibility of moral decay amid material splendour. Jan De Vries has rejected this reading of seventeenth-century Dutch attitudes towards their material culture, arguing instead that Calvinist morals and political republicanism, such as that of the De La Court brothers, accepted – at least implicitly – the embrace of new forms of moderate luxury consumption (De Vries 2003; see Appendix 7.3). In this perspective, the lack of a luxury debate in the Dutch Republic might signal an earlier and less problematic adoption of new attitudes towards consumption than in England, even though it is less prominently visible in the intellectual debates of the time.

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Perhaps, however, the changing attitudes towards consumption found their predecessor in older Italian ideas, such as the ones expressed by Pontano (Welch 2002). The latter designed an ideological framework in which magnificentia and splendore were morally sanctioned as important virtues. As it turns out, however, the inhabitants of sixteenth-century Venice, to give but one example, maintained complex and ambiguous ideologies in matters of consumption (Allerston 2007). Yet, the very idea that a well-furnished home somehow reflected virtue, is of key importance in understanding the value Italian citizens attached to material culture in making a home and marking the important stepping stones in a life-cycle. An important scholarly contribution of the cultural approach relates to the history of the home and domesticity, which – it is now clear – should not be restricted to the home-maker ideology of nineteenth-century Europe. Historians started to study the early modern home not only as a built environment, but also as a lived space, as well as an ideology constructed in discourse as well as daily practices (Sarti 2002). A splendid example of how the home and domestic practices were shaped through material cultures are the essays written for the V&A exhibition At home in Renaissance Italy (Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis 2006). Rather than reducing consumer patterns to the outcomes of macro-processes, this kind of approach reveals the self-fashioning and multiple identity constructions that are shaped in living patterns. However, even the history of the home could not escape the impact of modernisation narratives. The growing functional specialisation of rooms and their uses is often translated as a growing need for intimacy and the social and gendered division of the inner spaces of urban dwellings (PardailhéGalabrun 1988). A clear aspect of this process was the withdrawal of sleeping activity from the public and frontstage rooms of the house to intimate sleeping chambers. In a similar vein the kitchen evolved from a multifunctional room to a specialised cooking place. While generally speaking such trends can be discerned, again, this evolution was by no means linear and straightforward, as is exemplified by the many ‘grand kitchens’ that developed alongside the small kitchens in the Low Countries, North and South in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Baatsen et al. 2014; Corbeau 1993). Contrary to the Renaissance ideal of the gendered and separate kitchen that was advocated in Italy, in Brabant and Holland growing riches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were translated into the development of prestigious multiple purpose kitchens that served as cooking places, representative rooms, places of conviviality, play and prayer next to the multiple mundane household duties that could be performed in it as well. Perhaps, rather than spatial limits, the need to maximise the energy from heating played a major role in this north-western European exceptionalism. Yet, eventually by the end of the early modern period, kitchens in the most urbanised areas had developed into functionally specific places. Dinner now was mostly served in specialised rooms where portable energy sources helped to keep the meal warm.

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The material turn This emphasis on the opportunities and constraints offered by energy uses brings us to the last major angle that matters in present-day research: the materiality of the material culture. Recent interpretations have no longer deemed the cultural explanations of early modern consumer change entirely satisfactory. One influential strand of criticism has emerged from a reinterpretation of early modern material cultures based on the so-called ‘material turn’. Developments in economic anthropology, archaeology and sociology have urged for a stronger attention to the ability of material objects or the materiality of things to exert historical agency. The result has been a growing tendency to look not only at the (semiotic) meaning of things, but also at the relationship between objects and subjects (Hoskins 2006). The central question has become not what things meant, but what they did in the social, cultural and political sphere. Chandra Mukerji pioneered this perspective in interpreting early modern material culture, and in particular its agency in shaping economic, scientific and political processes during the early modern period. She has argued for instance, that the coming about of a commerce in prints, maps and decorated calicoes during the sixteenth century both reflected and itself diffused a new orientation toward material objects (Mukerji 1983). In the political arena, she has furthermore demonstrated how the material culture of the built environment itself has served as an instrument of domination (Mukerji 2002). Simultaneous developments in other fields of early modern history have brought similar re-evaluations of ‘material’ agency to the fore. Historians of antiquarianism, museums and collecting in the Renaissance have drawn attention to the important role of material possessions and collections in bringing about new modes of knowledge and ways of thinking (Findlen 1994; Miller 2015). Even the history of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which once seemed a particularly lofty branch of intellectual and philosophical history, has increasingly turned towards the material world in search of explanations. In her influential work on The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith has explored the relationship between the craft tradition and the new culture of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe, thus pointing to the often-neglected contribution of vernacular forms of knowledge (Smith 2004). This vernacular epistemology was rooted primarily in the material, natural and corporal world of artisanal (and alchemical) production, again drawing attention to the role of material culture in shaping wider historical processes. The historical focus on material agency has recently found its theoretical justification in the sociological field of ‘Actor-Network Theory’ (ANT), where both value and agency are taken to be located in the interwoven networks (agencements or assemblages) of objects, concepts and actors – rather than in any of its components separately (Latour 1991). Within this perspective, Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘purification’ holds particular promise for reinterpreting early modern changes in consumption. It refers specifically to the

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(imaginary) drawing of a clear line between human agency and natural determinism in the process of modernisation. Influenced by these theories, Bert De Munck re-interpreted the well-established evidence on the declining position of early modern craft guilds and the related changing appreciation of commodities produced by artisans as a reflection of an underlying shift in the relation between subjects and objects. As is generally accepted, the early modern period was characterised by a shift in the epistemic foundation of consumer value, as commodities became less valued for their intrinsic value, and more for their design and modishness (see above). According to Bert De Munck, this process undermined the political and social basis of artisans in early modern society (De Munck 2014). The above examples show how the so-called ‘material turn’ has drawn the attention away from ‘cultural histories of material culture’ towards a consideration of the wider political, economic, social, and intellectual changes brought about by the expanding material world of early modern Europe (Richardson et al. 2017).

Epilogue However impressive the variety in empirical, theoretical and historiographical perspectives sketched above, this essay is highly selective, offering little more than a series of appetisers. Doing justice to the entire field of material culture and consumption studies is simply impossible. In fact the proliferation of consumer and material culture studies has been such, that to a certain extent the consumer historiography suffers from an acute form of obesity and historiographical fragmentation (Trentmann 2012). While some historians listen to the fashion of the day, especially the lure of the ‘material turn’, others are concerned more with the self-fashioning of the early modern women and men through clothing, or prefer to study rituals of conviviality and how these shaped social relations and friendships. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians still try to capture major structural transformations in consumption, production and living standards through long-term changes in material culture. Others, conversely, withdraw from such ‘anachronistic’ exercises by interrogating what things actually meant to people in their specific and often local contexts. The variety of sources no doubt adds to this methodological spectrum. Texts, objects and representations can all be studied, and each source requires its proper technology and methodology – including even the material experimentation that comes with understanding the sewing and knitting of historical costumes for instance. As a result, the present-day historiography on early modern material culture assumes the look of a glamorous, nineteenth-century department store, servicing a broad variety of personal needs and wants of individual historians. However, the popularity of this complex and varied material culture historiography also comes at a major cost: fragmentation and the dis-engagement from bigger debates in

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social, cultural, economic and political history. In the introduction of a recent, and otherwise unsurpassed, collection, The Early Modern Domestic Interior, 1400–1700, the idea of proceeding case study by case study is no longer adopted for purely methodological reasons, but seems to have become a goal in itself (Campbell et al. 2013, 13). Yet, if materiality really has agency, then we need to take seriously the challenge to continue questioning where, when and how things mattered in shaping the lives of early modern people across the globe.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Avery, Victoria, Calaresu, Melissa and Laven, Mary, eds. (2015). Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. London: Philip Wilson. Bruijn, J. R., Gaastra, F. S. and Schöffer, I. (1979), Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/das/ index_html_en (accessed 6 July 2018). Mandeville, Bernard (1705). The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves turn’d Honest. In: E. J. Hundert, ed. (1997). Bernard Mandeville. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 23–36. Pontano, Giovanni (1498). De Splendore. In: Francesco Tateo, ed. (1999). I libri delle virtú sociale. Roma: Bulzoni. Schumpeter, E. B. (1960). English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697–1808. London: Oxford University Press.

(B) Secondary literature Ajmar-Wollheim, M. and Dennis, F. eds. (2006). At Home in Renaissance Italy. London: V&A Publications. Allen, Robert C. and Weisdorf, L. (2011). Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300–1830. The Economic History Review 64 (3), 715–29. Allerston, Patricia (1996). Le marché d’occasion à Venise aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles. In: J. Bottin and N. Pellegrin, eds., Echanges et cultures textiles dans l’Europe préindustrielle. Rijsel: Revue du Nord, 15–29. ——— (2007). Consuming problems: Worldly goods in renaissance venice. In: M. O’Malley and E. Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 11–46. Baatsen, Inneke and Blondé, Bruno (2015). Antwerp and the ‘Material Renaissance’. Exploring the social and economic significance of crystal glass and Majolica in the sixteenth century. In: D. Gaimster, T. Hamling and C. Richardson, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Early Modern Material Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 436–51. Baatsen, Inneke, Blondé, Bruno and De Groot, Julie (2014). The kitchen between representation and everyday experience. The case of sixteenth-century Antwerp. In: Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers and Joanna Woodall, eds. Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp. Leiden: Brill, 162–85.

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Baatsen, Inneke, Blondé, Bruno, De Groot, Julie and Sturtewagen, Isis (2018). At home in the city: The dynamics of material culture. In: Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone and AnneLaure Van Bruaene, eds. City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 192–219. Berg, Maxine (2004). In pursuit of luxury: Global history and British consumer goods in the eighteenth century. Past and Present 182, 85–142. ——— (2005). Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berry, Helen (2002). Polite consumption: Shopping in eighteenth-century England. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12, 375–94. Bickham, Troy (2008). Eating the empire: Intersections of food, cookery and imperialism in eighteenth-century Britain. Past and Present 198, 71–109. Blondé, Bruno (2002). Tableware and changing consumer patterns: Dynamics of material culture in Antwerp, 17th–18th centuries. In: J. Veeckman, ed., Majolica and Glass from Italy to Antwerp and Beyond: The Transfer of Technology in the 16th – early 17th Century. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 295–31. ——— (2009). Conflicting consumption models? The symbolic meaning of possessions and consumption amongst the Antwerp nobility at the end of the eighteenth century. In: idem, ed., Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Preferences in Europe (Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries). Turnhout: Brepols, 61–79. Blondé, Bruno and Ryckbosch, Wouter (2015). In ‘splendid isolation’. A comparative perspective on the historiographies of the ‘material renaissance’ and the ‘consumer revolution’. History of Retailing and Consumption 1 (2), 105–24. Blondé, Bruno and Van Damme, Ilja (2010). Retail growth and consumer changes in a declining urban economy, Antwerp (1650–1750). The Economic History Review 63 (3), 638–63. Braudel, Fernand (1992). The Structures of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brewer, John (2004). The error of our ways: Historians and the birth of consumer Society. Cultures of Consumption (ESRC-AHRB) Working Paper 12. www.consume.bbk.ac.uk (accessed 6 July 2018). Burckhardt, Jacob (1945). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. L. Goldscheider. London: Dover Publications. Campbell, E., Miller, S. R. and Consavari, E. C. (2013). Introduction. Early modern domesticities: Integrating people, spaces, objects. In: idem, eds., The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 1–13. Carr, L. G. and Walsh, L. S. (1988). The standard of living in colonial Chesapeake. William and Mary Quarterly 45, 136–59. Cavallo, S. (2010). The artisan’s casa. In: M. Ajmar-Wollheim and F. Dennis, eds., At Home in the Italian Renaissance. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 66–75. Cipolla, Carlo M. (1993). Before the Industrial Revolution. European Society and Economy, 1000–1700. 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Clark, Gregory and Van Der Werf, Ysbrand (1998). Work in progress? The industrious revolution. The Journal of Economic History 58 (3), 830–43. Clunas, C. (1999). Review essay – Modernity global and local: Consumption and the rise of the West. American Historical Review 104 (5), 1497–511. ——— (2004). Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

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——— (2012). Things in between: Splendour and excess in Ming China. In: Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 47–63. Cohn, Samuel (2012). Renaissance attachment to things: Material culture in last wills and testaments. Economic History Review 65 (3), 984–1004. Cook, Harold J. (2007). Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Corbeau, M. (1993). Pronken en koken. Beeld en realiteit van keukens in het vroegmoderne Hollandse binnenhuis. In: G. Rooijakkers, ed., Mensen en dingen. Betekenissen van materiële cultuur. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse akademie van wetenschappen, 354–79. Crafts, N. F. R. and Harley, C. K. (1992). Output growth and the British industrial revolution: A restatement of the Crafts-Harley view. The Economic History Review 45 (4), 703–30. Crowley, John. (1999). The sensibility of comfort. American Historical Review 104, 749–82. Currie, Elizabeth (2006). Inside the Renaissance House. London: V&A Publishing. De Munck, Bert (2014). Artisans, products and gifts: Rethinking the history of material culture in early modern Europe. Past & Present 224 (1), 39–74. De Vries, Jan (1975). Peasant demand patterns and economic development: Friesland 1550–1750. In: W. N. Parker and E. L. Jones, eds., European Peasants and their Markets. Essays in agrarian economic history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 205–59. ——— (1993). Between purchasing power and the world of goods: Understanding the household economy in early modern Europe. In: J. Brewer and R. Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 85–132. ——— (2003). Luxury in the Dutch golden age in theory and practice. In: Maxine Berg and E. Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century. Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 41–56. ——— (2008). The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duplessis, Robert S. (2016). The Material Atlantic. Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durães, Andreia (2012). The empire within. Histoire & Mesure 27 (2), 165–96. Dyer, Christopher (1989). The consumer and the market in the Late Middle Ages. Economic History Review 42, 305–27. Fairchilds, Cissie (1993). The production and marketing of populuxe goods in eighteenthcentury Paris. In: J. Brewer and R. Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 228–48. Findlen, Paula (1994). Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Flavin, Susan (2011). Consumption and material culture in sixteenth-century Ireland. The Economic History Review 64 (4), 1144–74. Fontaine, Laurence, ed. (2008). Alternative Exchanges. Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. New York: Berghahn Books. Fourie, Johan (2013). The remarkable wealth of the Dutch Cape Colony: Measurements from eighteenth-century probate inventories. The Economic History Review 66 (2), 419–48.

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Gerritsen, Anne and Riello, Giorgio, eds. (2015). Writing Material Culture History. London: Bloomsbury. Gilboy, E. W. (1967). Demand as a factor in the Industrial Revolution. In: R. Hartwell, ed., The Causes of the Industrial Revolution. London: Methuen, 121–38. Goldthwaite, Richard (1985). The renaissance economy: The preconditions for luxury consumption. In: Aspetti della vita economica medievale. Atti del Convegno di Studi nel X Anniversario della morte di Federigo Melis, Firenze-Pisa-Prato, 10–14 marzo 1984. Firenze: Olschki, 659–75. ——— (1987). The empire of things: Consumer demand in renaissance Italy. In: F. W. Kent and P. Simons, eds., Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 153–75. ——— (1989). The economic and social world of Italian Renaissance Maiolica. Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1), 1–32. ——— (1993). Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gommans, Jos (2015). For the home and the body: Dutch and Indian ways of early modern consumption. In: Felicia Gottman, Hanna Hodacs and Chris Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 331–49. Guerzoni, Guido (1999). Liberalitas, magnificentia, splendour. The classic origins of Italian Renaissance lifestyles. History of Political Economy 31 (5), 332–78. Hofmeester, Karin and Grewe, Bernd-Stefan, eds. (2016). Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and Practices, 1600–2000. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hohti, Paula (2010). ‘Conspicuous’ consumption and popular consumers: Material culture and social status in sixteenth-century Siena. Renaissance Studies 24 (5), 654–70. Hoskins, Janet (2006). Agency, biography and objects. In: Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane et al. eds., Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage, 74–84. Howell, Martha C. (2010). Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hundert, E. J. (2003). Mandeville, Rousseau and the political economy of fantasy. In: Maxine Berg and E. Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 29–40. Hunt, Alan (1996). Goverance of the Consuming Passions. A History of Sumptuary Law. New York: St Martin’s Press. Hutchison, Ragnhild (2011). Bites, nibbles, sips and puffs: New exotic goods in Norway in the 18th and the first half of the 19th century. Scandinavian Journal of History 36 (2), 156–85. Hutchison, Terence W. (1988). Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jardine, Lisa (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. London: Norton & Company. Karababa, Eminegül (2012). Investigating early modern Ottoman consumer culture in the light of Bursa probate inventories. Economic History Review 65 (1), 194–219. Kelly, Morgan and Ó Gráda, Cormac (2016). Adam Smith, watch prices, and the Industrial revolution. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131 (4), 1727–52. King, Peter (1997). Pauper inventories and the material lives of the poor in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In: Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe, eds. Chronicling Poverty. The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 155–91.

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Kowaleski, Maryanne (2011). Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kwass, Michael (2006). Big hair: A wig history of consumption in eighteenth-century France. American Historical Review 111 (3), 630–58. Latour, Bruno (1991). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. Maegraith, Janine and Muldrew, Craig (2015). Consumption and material life. In: Hamish Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Vol. 1, 369–97. Main, Gloria and Main, Jackson T. (1988). Economic growth and the standard of living in Southern New England, 1640–1774. The Journal of Economic History 48 (1), 27–46. Malanima, Paolo and Pinchera, Valeria (2012). A puzzling relationship: Consumptions and incomes in Early Modern Europe. Histoire & Mesure 27 (2), 197–222. Martines, Lauro (1998). The Renaissance and the Birth of a Consumer Society. Renaissance Quarterly 51, 30–5. Matchette, Ann (2007). Credit and credibility: Used goods and social relations in sixteenth-century Florence. In: Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 225–41. McCants, Anne (2008a). Exotic goods, popular consumption, and the standard of living: Thinking about globalization in the early modern world. Journal of World History 18 (4), 433–62. ——— (2008b). Poor consumers as global consumers: The diffusion of tea and coffee drinking in the eighteenth century. The Economic History Review 61 (1), 172–200. McCracken, Grant. (1990). Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McKendrick, Neil (1982). The consumer revolution of eighteenth-century England. In: Idem, John Brewer and John H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications, 9–33. Miller, Peter N. (2015). Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mintz, Sidney W. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Mukerji, Chandra (1983). From Graven Images. Patterns of Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (2002). Material practices of domination: Christian humanism, the built environment, and techniques of western power. Theory and Society 31 (1), 1–34. Muldrew, Craig (2011). Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2013). From commonwealth to public opulence: The redefinition of wealth and government in early modern Britain. In: Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter, eds., Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 317–39. Norton, Marcy (2006). Tasting empire: Chocolate and the European internalization of Mesoamerican aesthetics. The American Historical Review 111 (3), 660–91. O’Malley, Michelle and Welch, Evelyn, eds. (2007). The Material Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2010). Consumption, social capital, and the ‘Industrious Revolution’ in early modern Germany. Journal of Economic History 70 (2), 287–325.

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Appendices

Appendix 7.1 Burckhardt, Jacob (1945). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. L. Goldscheider. London: Dover Publications. Outward life, indeed, in the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries, was polished and ennobled as among no other people in the world. A countless number of those small things and great things which combine to make up of what we mean by comfort, we know to have first appeared in Italy. We read in the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and bedroom furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries. We often hear especially of the abundance and beauty of the linen. Much of all this is drawn within the sphere of art. We note with admiration the thousand ways in which art ennobles luxury, not only adorning the massive sideboard or the light-brackets with noble vases, clothing the walls with the moveable splendor of tapestry, and covering the toilet table with nonetheless graceful trifles, but absorbing whole branches of mechanical work – especially carpentry – into its province. [227]

Appendix 7.2 Goldthwaite, Richard (1985). The Renaissance economy: The preconditions for luxury consumption. In: Aspetti della vita economica medievale. Atti del Convegno di Studi nel X Anniversario della morte di Federigo Melis, Firenze-PisaPrato, 10–14 marzo 1984. Firenze: Olschki, 659–75. Although the world has become infinitely more cluttered since the Renaissance, an argument can be made that modern consumer society, with its insatiable consumption setting the pace for the production of more objects and changes in

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style, had its first stirrings, if not its birth, in the habits of spending that possessed the Italians in the Renaissance. [660]

Appendix 7.3 De Vries, Jan (2008). The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In the course of the seventeenth century a New Luxury emerged in a sufficiently developed form to present an alternative to the Old Luxury that had lived in symbiotic tension with the leisure-rich society for many centuries. Rather than being defined by Royal courts, the New Luxury was generated by urban society. Rather than presenting a coherent style and hegemonic cultural message, it consisted of heterogeneous elements. The Old Luxury, striving for grandeur or exquisite refinement, could be emulated only by distinctly inferior adaptations. The New Luxury, striving more for comfort and pleasure, lent itself to multiplication and diffusion. Sensuality and the indulgence of one’s natural instincts characterized the Old Luxury, making it the prerogative of elites sufficiently privileged to claim exemption from the moral strictures to which others remained subject. […] Where can we first observe this innovative consumer behavior? It would be foolish to suppose that this question has a precise and unique answer. But the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic certainly deserves consideration as a society in which new forms of material culture spread broadly through society and transformed the practice and experience of consumption. Here, for the first time on such a scale and on so enduring a basis, we find a society in which the potential to purchase luxuries and novelties extended well beyond a small, traditional elite and where the acquired goods served to fashion material cultures that cannot be understood simply in terms of emulation. [44, 52]

8

The state James B. Collins

Introduction The state occupies so large a place in our practical and conceptual lives that we imagine with difficulty a world without it. Political units have been part of human society for millennia; we regularly refer to ancient kingdoms or medieval monarchies as ‘states’, roughly meaning they had officials charged with governance and supervision of a defined territorial unit. These political units, however, differed both theoretically and practically from the modern sovereign state, which took its juvenile form in Europe around 1600 and matured into adolescence in the eighteenth century. Since the 1970s, scholars have transformed our understanding of the theoretical and practical workings of these states. On the theoretical level, three transformational texts – by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and Marc Fumaroli – laid the groundwork for a new approach (Pocock 1975; Skinner 1978; Fumaroli 1981). The new method sought to place the great theorists – Jean Bodin (1530–96), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), et al. – in the textual and rhetorical context of their times. On the practical level, historians began to look at statebuilding from the bottom-up and from the periphery to the centre (Beik 1985; Braddick 2000). Several decades of such work have now led to a social history of political theory, using the language of politics to bring together theory and practice (Blockmans and Genet 1995–2000). On a theoretical level, political philosophers and politicians – and prior to 1700 most of the key philosophers, like Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine diplomat and official, or Bodin, leader of the French Estates General of 1576, were politicians – sought to make of the state an ‘artificial man’, as Hobbes, himself once private secretary to the chancellor of England, put it. In the eighteenth century, in contrast, writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant had no practical governing experience: we take that division to be normative for political philosophers, but prior to 1700, it was not. On a practical level, early modern states developed several key attributes: standing armies; increasingly professional and larger officialdom; law-making authority; a public debt; international recognition within their boundaries; and, undergirding them all, legitimacy attached to the state itself, not to a monarch.

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For an actual state, the first step in action requires gathering accurate information; the second step requires systematic analysis of that information and formulation of policy; and the third step focuses on implementation of the policies. Early modern states made significant but uneven progress in all three areas. The growing bodies of officials could interfere in daily life – especially in towns – in ways unimaginable to their medieval predecessors. By the eighteenth century, these officials collected sufficient information to make possible the transformation of the relationship of the central government and the people over whom it ruled. By 1750, French state officials generated the ultimate document of state bureaucracy: the memo about how to write memos (Reinhard 1996; Collins 2009). The political debates of early modern times addressed the practical needs of the moment: stability; a need for religious coexistence; and, to elites, preservation of their monopoly on political power. By the eighteenth century, imperial considerations – European and global – played a progressively greater role. Political theorists sought justifications for their practical positions from intellectual antecedents: Judao-Christian tradition; Classical history and philosophy; medieval predecessors, both theological, like Thomas Aquinas, and secular, like the Italian legal glossators. They drew empirical examples from recent historians like Machiavelli (1979) and Francesco Guicciardini (d. 1540) in Italy, Philippe Commynes (d. 1511) in France, and Marcin Kromer (d. 1589) in Poland. Legal scholars put this history to work to analyse, and teach, law within its context. France’s leading practitioner of this method, Jacques Cujas (1522–90), taught a staggering percentage of the royal administrators who spearheaded the French shift from monarchical commonwealth to monarchical state. Four of the important European polities – the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC), and the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft – were confederations. The massive destruction of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) discredited the Empire’s princely system, but the Empire’s institutions, far from being moribund, still provided important functions in the eighteenth century (Wilson 2009; Whaley 2012; Von Friedeburg 2016). Monarchies ranged from the relatively centralised France to the chaotic PLC, whose king had powers severely restricted by coronation pacts and legal precedent. Starting with the first election of a king, carried out by a massed assembly of over 40,000 men in 1573, these agreements gave the Sejm (parliament) the power to approve all new laws (from 1506) and protected the szlachta (noble gentry) from arbitrary arrest (from 1430). Their choice in 1573, Henri of Valois (later Henri III of France), swore to the Henrician Articles, which became mandatory for all later Polish kings. Biannual meetings of the Sejm now had to approve all new taxes and all declarations of war (and peace), and kings had to swear to respect the Warsaw Confederation of 1573, which guaranteed religious toleration, a first for any European state (Roşu 2017). The profoundly different systems that developed in reaction to local needs – a relatively centralised monarchy in France, a divided federation in the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of regional states in Italy – still affect Europe today: German and Italian regional governments have far more power than French ones.

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Early modern polities Sixteenth-century European polities had generally been commonwealths, in which elite groups provided the citizens: those whom Aristotle, in the thenubiquitous definition, said ruled and were ruled in turn. Whether it was the vroedschappen (town councils, largely oligarchic) in the urban Netherlands or the szlachta in Poland-Lithuania, or the French legal and military elites, these men had a strong sense of civic responsibility, blended with a clear sense of their interests, and those of the group whom they represented. In the seventeenth century, many of these polities became monarchical states. Defenders of monarchy touted its stability, but dynastic instability was the rule, not the exception, because direct succession by an adult son was so rare. Charles I (1629–49) was the only adult son of a King of England to inherit the throne between Henry V (1413) and George II (1727); Charles’ subjects executed him in 1649. Weak successions, to a child or a distant relative, helped launch multiple civil wars in the Habsburg lands, Poland, France, and Russia between 1561 and 1648 (Koenigsberger 1987; Wiesner-Hanks 2013). Dynastic divisions among heirs greatly weakened principalities like Saxony and Hesse. Contemporaries fully understood this dynastic instability and sought an alternative to a living monarch as the unifying force of their polity: they found such an entity in the state, an abstract concept with a permanent physical reality. The kingdom’s subjects, often far more than its rulers, fought for its unity (Oestreich 1981; Duindam 2016). Between 1688 and 1748, Europeans fought four major wars – 1688–97; 1701–14; 1733–38; and 1740–48 – over the successions of England, Spain, Poland, and Austria. In Muscovy’s Time of Troubles (1598–1613), palace coups murdered one claimant after another, and Russia had coup d’états in 1741 and 1762. In south-eastern Europe, the Ottoman sultans up through 1603 regularly had their male siblings strangled to avoid civil wars; after that custom stopped, transitions often involved either murder (1622, 1648) or imprisonment (1618, 1623) of the ruling sultan (Goffman 2002). France serves as the prototype of the stable monarchical state, yet no Bourbon king (dynasty 1589–1792) passed the throne to an adult son, and succession fighting broke out in the 1610s and, more seriously, in the late 1640s (the Fronde). The vast PLC – which included much of today’s Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine – had exceptionally weak state institutions and a high degree of local selfgovernance in assemblies known as sejmiki: it was ‘more a cumbersome federation than a unified state’ (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001, 69–70). A combination of aristocratic rivalries and foreign interference turned the eighteenth-century Polish elections into a farce, and rendered the actual government nearly helpless in the face of modernising states like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Those three powers would wipe Poland-Lithuania off the map in three partitions, between 1772 and 1795, a chilling example of what could happen even to ancient polities that failed to develop into a modernising state. When Poland tried to reform by adding state elements, such as a large standing army, in the Sejm of 1788–92, its new Constitution of 3 May 1791 – the first written constitution in

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Figure 8.1 Jan Matejko, Adoption of the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791 (oil on canvas, 1891). Warsaw, Royal Castle / National Museum of Poland.

Europe – Poland’s neighbours, primarily Russia, intervened militarily. Poland provided a stunning example of what might happen to a commonwealth that ignored the necessity of a state (see Figure 8.1).

The new language of state French writers, in part because of the political crisis generated by the Wars of Religion (1562–1629) and by the looming extinction of the Valois dynasty (1328–1589), changed the existing word estat, meaning status, to Estat, with capitalisation, to describe this new entity. Writers such as Louis Le Roy, in his 1576 translation of Aristotle’s Politics, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay in a 1576 pamphlet for the Estates General and in his famous Vindication against Tyrants (1579), had modified the older usage of estat, but glossing Machiavelli’s usage of the term (stato), rulers like Henri III (1574–89) continued to think in personal terms, speaking of mon Estat (my State). Henry’s ministers referred increasingly to l’Estat (the State). Town councils and provincial estates seeking royal action soon shifted their rhetoric, away from the ‘public good’ to the ‘good of the state’ (Holt 2018). This new meaning for ‘state’ soon became standard everywhere in Europe. Jurists simultaneously adopted a new meaning for the old word ‘sovereignty’. Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (French original 1576) defined sovereignty as indivisible, inalienable, and perpetual (with its commonwealth). Bodin further claimed that the ultimate attribute of sovereignty was the ability to make law binding on ‘all in general and each in particular’ (Bodin 1606, Book I, ch. 8). In the

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seventeenth century, European political theorists would apply Bodin’s theories to the ‘state’. The word patrie (fatherland) now attached most frequently to the state, not to a local or national commonwealth. ‘Sovereignty’ took on two distinct meanings: internal, where it focused on ultimate law-making authority; and external, where ‘sovereign state’ came to define the political entities enjoying such powers within recognised boundaries. At the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the emerging group of professional diplomats codified an international system of sovereign ‘states’ – still in place today – built on mutual recognition of internal sovereignty, within recognised international boundaries (Callières 1919). Treaties up through the Peace of Utrecht (1713) typically privileged dynastic interests, even if recognising ‘national’ ones (De Bruin et al. 2015) (see Appendix 8.1). The real rupture arguably came at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), when Louis XV gave up the long-sought dynastic goal of reunion of Flanders to the Crown of France in return for restoration of France’s colonial losses around the globe. The old commonwealths failed for multiple reasons – such as their inability to deal with religious civil war – but one of their key weaknesses was that different elites had such diverse visions of it. Should elites restrain the state from outside, by means of a representative assembly, or from inside, through collaboration with the monarch? Elites made wildly different choices: a fractious federation in Poland-Lithuania, increasingly dominated by magnates; a parliament checking executive power, in England (1689) and the Netherlands; a judicial elite sharing the king’s puissance absolue (independent power) within the government in France. The old unity shattered, in part, because new pressures on political units rendered the old concepts – along with their language (Latin) and rhetoric – seemingly obsolete. The term ‘republic’, which had long meant a legitimate form of government, came increasingly to be an antonym for ‘monarchy’. After Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth’ (1649–60), monarchy was rarely considered a form of ‘republic’ or ‘commonwealth’, as had been standard usage in the sixteenth century (cf. Chapter 14: Political thought). Early modern elected governing bodies, such as town councils, often relied on co-optation. The system usually relied on layers of assemblies, as in many towns, or electoral colleges, as in the constitutions of the United States (1787) and France (1791), to make sure the actual decision makers came from a small elite. Early modern texts, like Mornay’s Vindication or John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1679–89), that set forth arguments for ‘popular’ sovereignty and for a right of resistance to a tyrannical prince, defined citizenship in highly restricted ways, basically limiting it to landowning men. Neither of them supported ‘democracy’ in anything like our contemporary sense, although some voices – like the Englishmen Algernon Sidney, executed for treason in 1683, and Tom Paine, prominent in both the American and French Revolutions – called for genuine democracy, including, in Paine’s case, for women. National electorates remained small until those two revolutions, which also codified exclusions (as we will see below).

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State-centred elites struggled to justify their enhanced control. Governments, in a reciprocal process facilitated by philosophers like Hobbes and Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–94), sought to obfuscate the difference between the earlier terms res publica/république and civitas, which had defined citizen commonwealths (national and urban), and the new state. Where the commonwealth, to them, was a collection of citizens living according to a common law, seeking the common good (a definition they took from Cicero), the state was a collection of people living under the same ruler. Where the commonwealth’s purpose was that common good, achievable – in Ciceronian theory – only through means consonant with reason and justice, the state’s purpose was its own survival, by whatever means necessary (see Excerpt 8.1).

Excerpt 8.1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651). In his opening remarks, Hobbes provides us with the new usage of the term ‘STATE’ and with a theoretical statement about the nature of what we today call political science. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; [ … ] Concerning the first, there is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. [ … ] But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him onely with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himselfe. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration. [online at: www.gutenberg.org]

Confusion about terms like the French puissance absolue – meaning independent, not absolute power – and concepts like Divine Right Theory has long obscured the fundamental shift to a vocabulary of the ‘good of the state’. For theorists such as Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, in his Politics Taken from the Very Words of the Holy Scripture, published posthumously in 1707, the king had to exercise his Divinely sanctioned power by means both rational and just, because the Christian God, by definition, was rational and just, and the king was God’s instrument on Earth (James I & VI 1986; Bossuet 1990). The state

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had no such moral constraints, and as elites saw their government shift its emphasis from monarchy to state, they grew increasingly uncomfortable with expanded central power. In our contemporary world, Europeans have built their post-WWII European order precisely on this commonwealth principle, that reason and justice have their role to play in international affairs, and must exist in balance with the state’s military security. German speakers contrasted the old Ständestaat, based on representation of the orders in a princely commonwealth, and the Rechtstaat, based on law (Recht) generated by the monarch, but also pointing the way to a society based on the individual, rather than groups of various kinds, as the basic unit. Recht (droit in French) contrasts both with statutory law [Gesetz; loi] and with rights, just as the French Revolution’s singular ‘liberty’ contrasts with the plural ‘liberties, rights, franchises, and privileges’ demanded by early modern elites. Political metaphors shifted, too. The favoured metaphor through the late sixteenth century was the body politic, with the king as the head and the various social groups as the ‘members’ of the body. In France and, after 1601, in England, the king as the father of his people became the preferred metaphor, which fitted nicely with the patriarchal system pushed by the legal elites. The metaphorical separation of king and people in the early seventeenth century took place deliberately and formed an important element in the public relations campaigns of early modern states. As monarchies re-conceptualised themselves as empires, the parent–children metaphor fitted perfectly with an emerging imperialist ideology based on paternalism. We associate with later European imperialism the myth of Europeans tutoring non-European ‘races’ who were ‘children’, but this metaphor originally developed inside these states, especially with respect to peasants, who often spoke different languages from the so-called ‘national’ one. The French Revolutionaries understood this distinction: their famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789) clearly separated the rights held by all, those held only by men, and those unique to citizens (see esp. articles 6. 11; Excerpt 8.2).

Excerpt 8.2 Working from a text originally drawn up by the Marquis de Lafayette, with handwritten emendations from Thomas Jefferson, the deputies to the National Constituent Assembly created the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ to be a preamble to their new constitution ( Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen 1789). When the Assembly finally agreed on a text, in June 1791, they left out the Declaration. After beginning with a ringing statement, in article I, that ‘men [humans] are born free and equal in rights’, the deputies proceeded to qualify certain rights as pertaining only to ‘citizens’ [translated by James B. Collins].

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VI. The law is an expression of the will of the community [volonté générale, or general will, a term taken from Rousseau’s Social Contract of 1762]. All citizens have a right to concur, either personally or by their representatives, in its formation. [ … ] XI. The unrestrained communication of thoughts and opinions being one of the most precious rights of man, every citizen may speak, write and publish freely, provided he is responsible for the abuse of this liberty, in cases determined by the law.

Defining citizenship thus became a critical determinant of who would have a political voice. Many women, like Mary Wollstonecraft in England, insisted on rights for women: men like Tom Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet agreed with her, but the clause on universal adult suffrage they proposed for a new French Constitution in spring 1793 never got out of the committee, even though Condorcet was its chair. Many Europeans turned to the vocabulary of the state, as they shifted their rhetoric away from Ciceronian republicanism to the imperial usage of the Roman historian Tacitus (Fumaroli 1981). Out on the seas, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish ships carried imperial banners to the four corners of the Earth (the Dutch, too, played a major role in this European expansion, but prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia the United Provinces of the Netherlands had no legal status in European politics; Seed 1995) (cf. Chapter 2: Identities and encounters). Encounters with other empires – the Ottomans, the Aztecs and Incas, the Chinese, the Safavids, the Moguls – unquestionably affected European conceptions of royal authority, especially with respect to ceremonial practice (see Appendix 8.2.). The royal entry ceremony at Rouen in 1550, for King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, in which 50 naked Brazilian ‘savages’ and 250 bourgeois of Rouen, similarly naked, but bedecked with flowers to resemble the ‘savages’, is arguably the perfect visual metaphor for this shift (see Figure 8.2). Some early modern states became empires, but they made an iconographical transition before such expansion. In Western European tradition, only the Emperor had the right to a closed, imperial crown. Other rulers – James IV in Scotland, Henry VIII in England, Francis I in France – shifted from the open, royal crown, to the closed imperial one. When founding a royal college at Aberdeen, James IV ostentatiously capped it with a stone closed crown. By 1521, the English Tudors had made such an official crown. Political language now began to speak of the king’s ‘empire’ (Ullmann 1979). This imperial vocabulary had two important effects: 1) outside Europe, it justified the creation of overseas empires; and 2) inside Europe, it enabled some rulers, like the King of France or, less successfully, the Habsburgs in Austria and Spain, to expand greatly the royal prerogative. Because Latin terms proved problematic in this new political climate, political theorists overwhelmingly shifted to their vernaculars in the late sixteenth century.

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Figure 8.2 ‘Brazilian ball’ (French School, pen & ink and w/c on paper, 16th century). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/ Brazi lian_ball_for_Henry_II_in_Rouen_October_1_1550.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain/PD-US

The state as a social fact The German sociologist Max Weber (d. 1920) argued that modern state bureaucracies had certain shared characteristics, such as a hierarchical structure based on specialised training, qualifications, and responsibilities, on established rules, and on merit-based promotion. Even today, state bureaucracies do not function entirely in such ways: those with power and/or connections often get exceptions. Such personal interventions were far more common in early modern times, but by the eighteenth century, European state administrations had clear hierarchies, fixed rules, and often specialised training and responsibilities (Weber 1978). Louis XIV’s (r. 1643–1715) government relied on strict rules for promotion from council staff responsible for working documents, to chief provincial administrator (intendant), to senior councillor of State. This self-perpetuating nobility of state followed a trajectory similar to that of graduates of France’s contemporary École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). Just as the modern French state has reserved, by law, many of its top positions for ENA graduates, so, too, early modern states reserved their top positions for men from specific social groups, with shared cultural and educational formation. Whereas many of the governmental administrators of the sixteenth century, from all over Europe, had attended universities like Padua and Bologna, getting a shared foundation in legal studies, in the seventeenth century, such men tended to stay in their home countries. In Catholic Europe, almost all of them got their secondary education from the Jesuits, who often encouraged expansive views of royal prerogative. Catholic rulers from Poland

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across to Spain invariably had Jesuit personal confessors, who could play important roles in forming state policy (Reinhardt 2016). The hybrid early modern proto-bureaucracies developed routine procedures, created printed, standardised forms (such as receipts for paid taxes), established communication networks with their populations, and often acquired highly specific professional competencies and experience. Printing played a major role in every aspect of state development because it allowed the creation of standardised texts of laws and customs. By the 1680s, local French administrators informed their superiors that they had eschewed the use of force to collect overdue taxes, switching to the simple device of a printed form sent via the postal service: they claimed it obtained the same results, at a fraction of the cost. The government insisted, with broad success, that the tens of thousands of royal sergeants and process servers now had to be literate. Governments sponsored official newspapers and gazettes, to provide official narratives of both domestic and foreign events. Just as printing spread new religious ideas, so, too, it made possible new levels of political participation and governmental action. Many printers relied on government contracts for most of their income: the threat of loss of this business – or that of the official church, which also produced large quantities of printed matter – was arguably the most effective form of censorship. The Catholic Church’s role in censorship remained important, but the failure of the papal interdict against Venice in 1606–07 ushered in a new era in state-church relations (De Vivo 2007). Paolo Sarpi, who defended Venice’s resistance to the Pope’s claim of superior authority, developed strong ties with contemporaneous French defenders of secular authority, like Jacques de Thou, Edmond Richer, and the Scot William Barclay (who lived in France). A few years after Sarpi duelled with the Papacy’s main defender, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, French and English authors – including King James I – would take up the cudgels. The Parlement of Paris publicly burned Bellarmino’s 1610 response to Barclay and the French Third Estate tried, and failed, to get Louis XIII to issue a ‘fundamental’ law stating that the Pope had no right to relieve French subjects of their obligation to obey their king. Louis XIV would endorse this principle decades later, in the Four Gallican Articles of 1681, drafted by Bossuet. In the end, the Papacy lost its battle to create an ‘Empire of Souls’ (Tutino 2010). Simply having a large body of officials does not make for a modern state. The Roman Empire had a vast bureaucracy, formidable military, and carried out massive infrastructure projects, some of which survive today, but it lacked a defining characteristic of the modern state: a recognised state debt. European monarchies lacked a state debt well into early modern times: until the Revolution, France maintained a quasi-state debt system hamstrung by the monarch’s ability to reschedule debt through partial bankruptcies, as happened repeatedly, from 1557 until such a debt crisis precipitated the Revolution of 1789. Spain had more than a century of similar partial bankruptcies, beginning also in 1557 (Grenier 2006). In east central Europe, rulers regularly borrowed money from syndicates of so-called Court Jews, whom they threatened with bankruptcy on a regular basis.

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Glückel of Hameln, a Jewish widow merchant tied into this network, reveals to us the general panic among the Jews at the rumours (which proved false) of the financial ruin of the Emperor’s chief Jewish banker, Samuel Oppenheimer: ‘As soon as this intelligence reached Hamburg, all my son’s credit was withdrawn from him’. Unable to obtain credit, Glückel set out for Leipzig, where she learned the Oppenheimers had been released and sent ‘money to honour their bills’: ‘Though the Oppenheimers paid all the expenses we had incurred, in all their lives they cannot repay us for the frights and anxiety we suffered through them’ (Glückel 2012, 146–7). A broad-based system of Public Debt instruments, open to market selling between individuals, took root in Great Britain from 1694, with the founding of the Bank of England to oversee the state’s finances. Parliament, not the king, guaranteed this ‘national debt’, so England avoided high risk premiums. Such a debt is a precondition for any genuine modern state. The French, Spanish, and Austrian monarchies, relying on the shakier credit of the prince, could not do so; they often used intermediaries – town governments, guilds, the Catholic Church, provincial estates – to borrow at lower rates of interest, because those intermediaries offered collective guarantees of repayment. A public debt required new conceptions of the practices of government finance. By 1700, elites everywhere demanded accountability; where monarchs had long guarded ‘the king’s secret’ (i.e. the royal budget), and criminalised revealing it, representative assemblies, in return for grants of tax money, insisted on fiscal transparency. The old systems had relied on practices such as the Florentine dowry fund or sales of offices: France had perhaps 3,000 venal officers in 1525 but more like 40,000 in 1650. Even advanced mercantile economies, like Venice or the Dutch Republic, struggled with effective public debt. The Dutch government had to suspend payment of so-called Generality loans by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, and public debt there shifted to the seven constituent provinces, and their assemblies (Bonney 1995). The creation of central government treasuries – separate from the private treasurer of the prince – marked a similar important shift in the spheres of both practical and theoretical ideas of governance. The slow spread of modern accounting techniques, with double-entry bookkeeping, from Italian cities (late thirteenth century), to the Netherlands (early seventeenth), to England (1660s), and slowly to other states marked another important step toward modernity. The writings of Luca Pacioli (1494) and Domenico Manzoni (1540) provided clear instructions on this essential practice, but the French government, for one, failed to implement it prior to the Revolution (Soll 2009). John Brewer popularised the term ‘fiscal-military state’ to describe the primordial importance of warfare and war-related financial needs in the development of the early modern state. The sociologist and historian Charles Tilly carried the connection from medieval into modern times (Brewer 1988; Tilly 1992; Glete 2001). Whereas rulers relied heavily on mercenaries loyal mainly to unit commanders up through the Thirty Years War, they increasingly turned to ‘national’ armies thereafter. Louis XIV had as many as 340,000 men

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under arms in the 1690s: he reinstated an old militia system to supplement recruiting. Rulers like Louis XIV and Frederick II of Prussia (1740–86) cajoled, or even forced, male nobles to serve in the officer corps. For the soldiers, states like Sweden and Prussia relied on villages or local nobles to carry out forced recruiting, but nearly half of Frederick II’s army were not Prussian conscripts. Russia introduced mandatory registration for a draft lottery in 1719. The French Revolutionaries introduced genuine mass conscription in 1792–93, touching off a civil war in western France (cf. Chapter 9: War and the military revolution). Ways of paying for armies, aside from pillaging, varied widely, in part because states, then as now, had to balance the financial needs of the state against the political power of the wealthiest elites. In France, two groups – the large-scale peasant laboureurs (farmers) and the small-town bourgeoisie – paid the overwhelming share of the direct taxes. In a typical French village, the bottom 50% of the taxpayers contributed about 3% of the direct taxes – the same share of the Federal income tax paid by the bottom 50% of taxpayers in the United States in 2016. The wealthiest members of society – the nobles, clergy, and the bourgeoisie of the large cities – all paid some taxes, but remained substantially under-assessed, even in states like England, where the nobility had no status-based (full or partial) exemption, as was typical on the Continent. States struggled to overcome the tax privileges. The shift to taxes on income – which had no status – rather than land or people, who did – provided some help, but when Louis XVI called the Assembly of Notables of 1787 precisely to deal with status-based exemptions, he set in motion the institutional process that led to the French Revolution. The urban population mainly contributed through indirect taxes: on alcohol, meat, spices, and other foodstuffs, aside from bread, whose price was too politically sensitive, as the innumerable bread riots of early modern times attest. The state also taxed goods in transit, exports and imports, and many types of manufacturing. Prior to the eighteenth century, state regulation of manufacturing was far more apparent than real: almost all such legislation originated with a text created by the guild or merchants themselves, but then ratified by the town council and, in monarchies, issued by the state, to give it greater authority. Again, this practice continues in today’s states, where most regulatory legislation originates within the economic sector in question. The more developed a state’s commercial economy, the more its mixture featured indirect taxes: the Netherlands went to a 60-indirect:40-direct ratio in the early seventeenth century; England and France moved in this direction by the 1660s, but the less-developed commercial areas, like the Habsburg dominions, did not do so until the 1750s. Burgeoning colonial commerce steadily shifted states away from the overwhelming dominance of agriculture, and created an elite whose economic power made them a formidable counter-weight to the old landed elite. The rapid modernisation of small towns in the eighteenth century led to far broader commercialisation of formerly elite products like books or quality household goods. The greater number of transactions increased state revenue (De Vries and van der Woude 1997).

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In much of continental Europe, the state leased the right to collect the indirect taxes, and state monopolies, to a private syndicate, such as France’s General Tax Farm (FG), which employed over 20,000 people, most of them armed guards used to enforce monopolies on salt (the gabelle), tobacco, Indian calico, and other goods. The Tsar of Russia relied on his vodka (25–33% of state revenue) and fur monopolies (Kollman 2017, 326). Other states also had public or quasi-public enterprises, of which the largest was the naval arsenal of Venice, which employed more than 15,000 people and had the most sophisticated production techniques used anywhere in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan had his own naval arsenal, employing more than 3,500 workers at its peak. These large central enterprises, however, should not obscure the importance of regional networks producing field artillery, muskets, ammunition, and gunpowder. States desperately sought sources of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to make gunpowder: the obnoxious intrusiveness of the English Saltpetremen, gathering it in cellars and stables, provided one of the main grievances against the government of Charles I. In France, the pathbreaking chemist Antoine Lavoisier developed methods to double state production of saltpetre and became one of the Farmers General in charge of the tax farm. Parisians, enraged by FG’s new tax wall, demolished its gates on 12–13 July 1789, and then turned on the Bastille. Four years later, the Jacobins sent Lavoisier and his colleagues to the guillotine, a gruesome reminder of the popular distaste for the gabeleurs, a term of opprobrium for all fiscal collectors. Just as the destruction of the tax wall and the storming of the Bastille show us the remarkable connection between state finance and popular politics, so, too, Lavoisier’s death or Isaac Newton’s reform of English currency provide perfect illustrations of the connections among state finance, warfare, and science. Monopoly companies involved with the colonies could be largely independent, as in the Dutch case, or as much about public revenues as commerce, as in the French one. Monopolies helped make large-scale smuggling an international phenomenon: smugglers and pirates became folk heroes, celebrated in songs, pamphlets, novels, and, in time, films, from Captain Blood (1935) to Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) (Kwass 2014). Eighteenth-century states gradually stamped out these large-scale operations, but could do little about the innumerable petty ones because ordinary people proved so resourceful. In France, where the punishment for salt smuggling was a sentence as a galley rower, women, who could not be sent to the galleys, often transported sacks of salt from Brittany, which produced the salt and paid no tax on it, to Anjou and Maine, where state monopoly salt sold for 30x its price at the Breton marshes. Mass trading of human beings encouraged such lawlessness. In the east, Crimean Tatars carried off two million people from modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Russia into slavery in the Ottoman Empire between 1500 and 1700. The commercial route from the Black Sea up through Kiev, L’viv, Zamość, and Kraków involved not simply slaves but a wide variety of goods from Asia and Europe: the towns along this route still have merchants’ houses that once belonged to Venetians, Genoese, Armenians, Jews, Germans, Poles, and others (A Europe of Diasporas, n.d.). State relations along this corridor

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involved the Ottomans, the Poles, the Russians, the Crimean Tatars, and various Balkan principalities, to say nothing of local warlords and bandit chieftains. Cossacks raided into the suburbs of Istanbul. Although the Ottoman Sultan had one of the world’s most powerful militaries, he, like the Kings of Poland and Tsars of Russia, had little control over this ‘Wild Field’, a fitting symbol of the contrast between the theoretical and real power of rulers (Kołodziejczyk 2006). The Atlantic Slave Trade, which reached unprecedented levels in the eighteenth century, encouraged smuggling and ‘illegal’ trade on the west coast of Africa and in the Americas (Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, n.d.). One of the greatest prizes in the War of the Spanish Succession was the asiento, the monopoly right to sell African slaves in the Spanish Empire: a special clause in the Peace of Utrecht (1713) transferred it from a French company to the English, who leased it to the joint-stock South Sea Company (founded in 1711). This company, which traded in government debt, immediately fell afoul of rampant corruption, insider trading, and Ponzi schemes: the South Sea Bubble of 1720, when share prices collapsed, ushered in a genuine system of state finance, and of state regulation of joint-stock companies, in England (Dale 2004). In the eighteenth century, states like England (1717) and France (1726), following the longstanding practice of polities like Venice and Florence, adopted fixed standards for their currencies, rather than treating royal minting rights as a way to make a personal profit (Parsons 2014). The argument over the nature of the coinage – the prince claiming it to be a personal right, representative bodies claiming it belonged to the community as a whole, and that it could not be modified for personal profit of the prince, lest he be a tyrant – had gone on since the 1300s. In east central Europe, rulers leased out minting rights to private firms – Jews played an important role in this business, and their lack of citizenship rights made them particularly vulnerable to arbitrary princely behaviour. Bodin had argued that sole control of the currency was a defining principle of sovereignty: in contemporary Europe, use of the term ‘sovereign debt’ to describe the obligations of a Euro-zone country like Greece obviously violates this principle. Lacking control of its own currency, Greece has no ‘sovereign debt’, just a public one similar to that of one of America’s 50 states. States rested on a three-legged stool of personnel: military, financial, and judicial. Services we associate with the government – education, poor relief, some elements of health care – long lay in the purview of other authorities, above all, in Catholic countries, with the Church. Because early modern governments spent most of their money (50–70%) on war and financial transaction costs related to war, we cannot easily compare their budgetary practices to those of contemporary states that spend so heavily on social programs. Yet, the slow movement toward government social spending began in these centuries: where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writings focused almost exclusively on the state’s role in protection, eighteenth-century authors turned to the state’s obligations to improve the lives of its inhabitants, even to see to their ‘happiness’. That shift marked a decisive turn toward the modern state. States that effectively protected their borders, like France or England, freed up internal spending – for

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example, by town governments – from military costs. Towns could now spend money on improving streets, lighting, water supplies, and even public parks: urban citizens demanded such improvements. Farmers could now invest in safety. Louis XIV may have left his kingdom in a financial mess, but he also left it a place almost completely free of the fear of foreign invasion and, in most cases, of the dread of the destruction that often followed his own soldiers on the march. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the protean state solidified, both in a literal sense – adding far more state employees and responsibilities – and in a theoretical one. States develop interests of their own, both those of the people who actually control the working state and those in the state administration. The proliferation of state administrators created a powerful new interest group; moreover, many of its members lived and worked far from the centre of political power. In the small town of Coutances, in western Normandy, 20% of the adult men had a job tied to the government, because the town held several royal courts (and a bishopric) that served a wide rural region. Officials in the vast steppe lands further east rarely heard from central authorities. Provinces like Lower Austria gradually integrated into the Habsburg composite monarchy and introduced the fiscality of the militarised European monarchies down at the local level (Godsey 2018). Everywhere in Europe, state officials owned a fair share of the monarchy’s debt, so they had a powerful personal incentive to make sure the monarchy remained fiscally viable (Bonney 1995; Glete 2001). Close to the centre, the elite administrators and their families now competed for the rewards handed out by princely rulers. Whether it was the Emperor, resettling noble families in Bohemia in the early seventeenth century or after 1792, or the King of Poland naming a new bishop, or the King of France selecting the new abbot of St-Germain-des-Prés or archbishop of Auch (two of Europe’s richest prizes), for the great aristocrats and nobles involved, the state’s first function was to provide them with wealth and power.

Exclusion and inclusion In early modern Europe, the word ‘police’ meant general administration and governance. In this sphere, governments consolidated many of their earlier, more tenuous rights of action. States like Bavaria had social legislation, such as enforced virginity on poor women and means testing for marriage, that presaged much later state interference in what had long been the domain of the private (Strasser 2004). The so-called Policeyordnungen – general administration statutes – in small German states built on the principles of cameralism, in which a state bureaucracy, in theory acting on behalf of the common good, oversaw progressively greater domains of everyday life (Raeff 1983). Governments at all levels – city, province, kingdom – had long interfered in certain markets – above all grain and bread – but cameralism took this interference to unprecedented levels. The Prussian monarchy created university chairs in cameral science in 1727. This new science of administration sought to collect, classify, analyse, and then act upon information (Walker 1971) (see Appendix 8.3; Excerpt 8.3).

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Excerpt 8.3 Historian Mack Walker, in explaining how ‘Cameralist scholars and working officials’ expanded their recognized jurisdiction over ‘fiscal activity and exploitation of the state’s own properties’ into the realm of the economy through ‘police’ activities, here cites, in his own translation, the leading Cameralist author, J. H. G. von Justi, Grundsätze der Polizeywissenschaft [Basic Principles of Police Science, 1782] (Walker 1971). Police is the foundation of true cameral science; and the police authority must sow if the cameralist is to reap. … Police is concerned to maintain the total wealth and substance of the state’s internal structure and to increase it; but the cameralist is concerned to abstract from out of this total wealth of the state the most accessible part without disadvantage to the whole, for the necessary expenses of government. [161]

Cameralist ideas spread easily to places like Sweden, where Carl Linnaeus would apply its principles to the classification of the natural world, creating a system we still use today. Many of the great advances in knowledge in early modern Europe stemmed directly from the needs of the state: improved European cartography meant seventeenth-century monarchs had the first genuinely accurate maps of their kingdoms and, to a much lesser degree, so-called empires. Statisticians began to develop accurate demographic models, such as actuarial tables, which enabled states to determine interest rates paid on lifetime annuities (cf. Chapter 12: Science and reason). In the nineteenth century, G. W. Hegel, a Prussian university professor, would develop a philosophical system in which the state took on the role of the universal, offering a field of compromise for the conflicting particular interests of the sphere of civil society. This theory of the state, perhaps most fully developed in his Philosophy of Right (1820), has often been contrasted, in modern societies, with the state theory of Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx viewed the state as the repressive apparatus of the ruling class, thus not as a mediator but an enforcer. These conflicting views of the state – one viewing it as a place of compromise and achieving common goals, and the other as a tool in the hands of a specific economic class – still shape twenty-first-century politics, yet they were built on the empirical evidence of early modern states. Early modern states stepped up efforts at control of population movements, often by excluding groups. Until about 1700, they had to guess about something as basic as the number of their inhabitants. Some states, like Russia, followed the old Roman custom of a census of military-aged men; many others had government records of taxpaying heads of households dating back to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, although these usually remained in local

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hands. The baptismal records available to Catholic states – France, from 1667 – enabled officials to make reasonably accurate estimates of total population. Some officials understood the census concept: marshal Vauban carried out a sort of census in the small, poor, rural district of Vézelay in 1696, as part of his overall economic and geographic description of the 54 parishes (see Table 8.1). A genuine census, with detailed information, and the capacity to analyse the data, would have to wait until the nineteenth century. When the data finally came in, states lacked the personnel and systems to evaluate it. Just as in more recent times the Internet came into being for government needs (the US military created it), so, too, did computers owe their origins to the state’s voracious appetite for information and the need to evaluate it (IBM evolved out of a tabulating company set up for the 1890 US census). Lacking full information, states had great difficulty controlling population movement, and early modern societies were far more mobile than we used to believe. Russia paved the way, introducing an internal passport system in 1719, requiring people to carry a document identifying them and their place of legal residence. In practice, village officials, who were often functionally illiterate, accepted blatantly forged documents, or took a bribe. The poll tax, introduced at the same time to facilitate army conscription, generated substantial illegal migration to escape military service (Pintner 1984). Similar systems gradually came into place elsewhere, precursors of the national ID card prevalent in continental Europe.

Table 8.1 Excerpt of three sample parishes in the district of Vézelay (January 1696). Source: Sébastien Le Prestre [Marshal Vauban], ‘Geographic description of the fiscal district of Vézelay’ (De Boislisle 1881, 846–47). Parish

Vézelay

Blannay

Corbigny

All 54

Houses standing Houses in ruins Empty houses Families Married men and widowers Married women and widows Boys over 14 Girls over 12 Boys under 14 Valets Female servants People Clergy Noble families

262 20

50 5

360 7

274 232 248 68 103 205 50 64 1157

47 36 44 14 26 46 1 0 199

375 310 322 66 129 290 33 51 1441

5328 511 248 5665 4725 5032 1411 1543 4523 668 480 22487 205 48

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Exclusion could be political, as well as geographic: women provided the most common target of the former. Given that they were deeply patriarchal societies, women had a remarkably consistent role in running them, even as lawyers across Europe scrambled to find legal excuses to limit the power and authority of women – in politics, in the economy, and even in the marriage market. In the late sixteenth century, women had key roles in polities such as England (Elizabeth I), France (Catherine de Medici), Spain and then the Habsburg Netherlands (Infanta Isabella of Spain). They could reach out to each other, in the name of female solidarity, as Catherine de Medici did, in writing to Elizabeth I on 28 May 1568, on behalf of Catherine’s former daughter-in-law, Mary, Queen of Scots, then in English custody (see Excerpt 8.4).

Excerpt 8.4 Catherine de Medici to Elizabeth I (1568). Catherine de Medici, formerly the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, appeals, on grounds of solidarity among ‘princesses’, to Elizabeth I of England to safeguard a fellow ‘princess’ (De la Ferrière-Percy 1887) [translated by James B. Collins]. And that you remain in the same opinion that you held, which is that princes must succor and aid each other to chastise and punish the subjects who rise up against them, and are rebels to their sovereigns, inasmuch as this touches us all, and that we must embrace the cause and protection of this desolate and afflicted queen, to restore her to her liberty and the authority God gave her, the which in all right and equity belongs to her and no other [ … ] [added in Catherine’s own hand] because it is a cause that touches princes and especially princesses. [143–4]

The modern state, both as a theoretical and a practical construct, built upon misogyny, yet the real power of women – not just monarchs and regents, but educated elite women – meant that they could not simply be ignored. Highly educated, politically savvy, influential women surrounded female rulers. Even under kings, elite women played major political roles because of the importance of informal patronage networks. In the sixteenth century, prior to the rise of a professional class of diplomats, royal women often carried out critical international negotiations, such as the ‘Peace of the Ladies’ (1529) between Spain and France. In the eighteenth century, women like Elizabeth I (1741–62) and Catherine II (1762–96) in Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria (1740–80) long ruled their states. The male hierarchies administering these early modern states regularly sought to control women’s lives, in part because early modern women found successful ways to circumvent traditional patriarchal barriers. In France, starting in the mid-1550s, when Henri II issued a law against clandestine marriages, monarchs progressively restricted women’s right to independent marriage choices, yet

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demographic statistics show that ever-greater numbers of women made such choices for themselves. Women’s greater economic participation gave a boost to early capitalism and increased state revenues, giving governments reasons to ignore their own misogynistic legislation (Collins 2015). Women also carried out many important public duties, such as providing nursing care and delivering babies: by the eighteenth century, public authorities all over Europe – many of them local, not central governments – sponsored training of midwives and even published manuals of sound practice. Schools expanded everywhere: in both Prussia and Austria the state tried, and failed, to introduce universal elementary education. In France, in contrast, rural schools expanded, above all in the regions speaking French (accounting for just around 60% of its territory). Where the village or town was of sufficient size, schools divided the boys and girls, and women taught the latter. Nuns also ran many schools (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). The state could also protect women – it put an end to witchcraft trials, which overwhelmingly targeted women, and sought with considerable success, by the late seventeenth century, to rein in abusive behaviour by soldiers. The French Revolution interrupted and even reversed some of these gains. Fearing women’s political participation, which had helped bring them to power, the Jacobins (in control June 1793–July 1794) arrested women’s political leaders, closed women’s political clubs, banned women from speaking in assemblies, and even executed leaders like Olympe de Gouges (Marie Gouze), author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791). The profoundly misogynistic Code Napoléon of 1804 left nineteenth-century French women with fewer rights than those who had lived under the Ancien Régime. Women’s relationship to the early modern state offers an ideal example of its paradoxical nature. Europeans could find justification for slavery as well as misogyny in the polities of Ancient Greece and Rome – highly useful in places like England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the later United States. Outside of Iberia, which had a population including Africans and mixed raced people (including Amerindian-European), the home countries – England, France, the Netherlands – accommodated very few Africans and often banned slavery on their home soil, but they built a slave trade and economy of staggering dimensions in the eighteenth century (Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, n.d.). Yet, at the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade, in the late eighteenth century, powerful theoretical voices, like Adam Smith, joined practical ones, like Thomas Clarkson, Anthony Benezet, and Tadeusz Kosciusko, in denouncing the folly of slavery, on moral and practical economic grounds. The slave trade, and colonial empires in general, involved enormous state costs, above all for protection. The main economic benefits of slavery went to a relatively small group, and eighteenth-century European states had strident political debates about slavery. Here again we see a paradox: a state built on an increasingly capitalist economy could hardly ignore the free market arguments of Smith that slavery retarded rather than encouraged economic growth. Clarkson revealed to the English public the terrible toll on English sailors taken by the slave trade voyages (Smith 1776;

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Clarkson 1786). The trans-Atlantic anti-slavery movement offered one example of the exchange of ideas across frontiers: Americans like Benezet and Africans like Olaudah Equiano played major roles in the debates that led to the abolition of the legal slave trade and, later, slavery itself. American ideas, especially those of Thomas Jefferson, who personally annotated the first working draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and George Mason (whose Virginia Declaration of Rights provided its model), played significant roles in constitution making in France (June 1791) and Poland (May 1791). Abbé Scipione Piattoli, an advisor to King Stanislaus Poniatowski in Poland even wrote (9 March 1790) to Thomas Jefferson that the powers of Poland’s king in its new Constitution had been specifically modelled on those of the US President in its Constitution (1787) and that the Federalist Papers were ‘known and tasted to the point that one makes use of them in several patriotic writings emitted by all our presses’ (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, v. 16, 214–16). If the slave trades – in the Atlantic and the Black Sea – provided the largest expulsions, other forced mass migrations should not be ignored. Early modern England condemned a remarkably high number of people to death, often for trivial crimes: many condemned criminals obtained commutation of the sentence by means of deportation to a colony. Death penalty statistics in eighteenthcentury England offer a fine example of how states functioned: high rates of hanging at the centre (London), very few hangings at the periphery (Linebaugh 1991). Britain later (1788–1868) deported more than 160,000 people to Australia. Other European empires deported prisoners to colonies, usually with catastrophic results, as in French Guiana. Russia populated Siberia and other sparse regions in part by means of deportations, in some cases with criminals, but Catherine II and Alexander I both expelled Tatars from Crimea. All over Europe, religious conflict led to religious-based dislocation. Medieval kingdoms had often expelled Jews: England (1290), France (1394), and, most famously, Spain (1492), which Nicolas Terpstra has called ‘one of the critical events marking the start of the “Reformation” – no less significant than Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517’ (Terpstra 2015, 2). Many Spanish Jews fled to North Africa, but others to Portugal, thence to the Netherlands and France (after 1550). ‘Portuguese’ Jews played major roles in early colonial ventures in Brazil, in India, and, a bit later, the West Indies. Moved to the Netherlands, they became key players in world trade and participated in the remarkable cultural changes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Baruch Spinoza, descended from a family of ‘Portuguese’ Jews who had fled to Nantes, France and to Rotterdam, would permanently secularise Western philosophy, to the extent that Hegel refused to recognise as a philosopher anyone who rejected Spinoza’s core principles (Bell 2008; Ruderman 2010). In the sixteenth century, Lutheran territories in the Holy Roman Empire expelled or executed substantial Ashkenazic Jewish communities. Many of them fled to Poland-Lithuania, so that cities like Vilnius, Kraków, Lublin, L’viv, and Warsaw would become, in the seventeenth century, the centre of world Jewish life (prior to the First Partition of Poland, in 1772, about two-thirds of the

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world’s Jews lived in the Commonwealth) and would remain so until the Holocaust. Poland’s Jews developed a parallel system of assemblies and administration, the Qahal, so that the King of Poland could negotiate with a Jewish national assembly at the same time that he bargained with Christians in the regular Sejm (Hundert 2004). Poland’s legalisation of religious tolerance in 1573 also covered Jews, but they still suffered mass persecutions, most notably in the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1649), in which tens of thousands of Jews perished. Muslims, too, faced expulsions and forced conversions: half a million Muslims endured forced conversion in Granada in 1492, and mass internal resettlement 80 years later. Between 1609 and 1614, Spain expelled at least 200,000 Moriscos from Valencia. Muslims in east central European polities also faced persecution. Catholic-Protestant conflict (and even internal conflicts within the two larger categories) created further expulsions. Religious conflict led to some judicial murders, but their numbers paled in comparison with the wartime massacres, such as the Catholic sack of Magdeburg in 1631 (c. 20,000 people died), or the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) in France – even the notorious Spanish Inquisition, in comparison, executed only a few hundred people. Catholics fled Protestant countries, like England or English-ruled Ireland; Protestants fled Catholic countries, most famously the French Huguenot community, expelled in 1685 – at least 150,000 emigrated to the Netherlands, Prussia, England, Northern Ireland, and North America. The economic boost they gave these places, and the concomitant decline in the French economy drastically affected state finances: Louis XIV quietly backed away from the expulsions in the mid-1690s, finally listening to advisors like Vauban who had accurately warned him what would happen (Monahan 2014). In the midst of all these exclusions, political systems became more inclusive, in fits and starts. Aristotle had posited three types of government: by one; by the few; by the many. Each type had two versions, legitimate (monarchy, aristocracy, and popular government), and illegitimate (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy). The term democracy became increasingly problematic: some wanted to use it to describe the legitimate form, others, especially defenders of monarchy, used it in its purely pejorative sense. Catholic monarchists, in particular, accused Protestants, especially Calvinists – with their rejection of the traditional religious hierarchy – of wanting to establish political ‘democracies’, in which chaos would naturally ensue. Powerful sixteenth-century trends mitigated in favour of broader political participation, and the dominant elites fought back to retain their monopoly, in every level of government. Across Europe, elites sought to restrict the suffrage in town elections: they wanted to ban men who worked with their hands. Central states eventually supported this initiative, and many of them took advantage of local invitations to interfere on behalf of the elite as a mechanism to establish actual state control of naming local officials. The English Revolution both pushed this democratising trend to the forefront – with calls for greatly expanded, even universal suffrage – and made it even more dangerous to elites. Up to 1775, Europe did not see much progress in democratisation, but the Atlantic Revolutions posed the problem of the state and popular participation in governance in entirely new ways. Ordinary people

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demanded a say, in movements like the 1760s demonstrations in favour of the English radical John Wilkes. Wilkes had close ties with American colonists who would go even further in 1775 (Rudé 1962). Democratising movements sprang up in Geneva (1782) and the Netherlands (1787): outside armies put down both. In 1794, a popular uprising in Warsaw sought to oust the Russians; its leader, Jan Kiliński, was a shoemaker, and his statue in Warsaw reminds us of the entrance of the working people into state politics in the late 1700s.

Conclusion In the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu gave lectures on the ‘state’ at the Collège de France (Foucault 2009; Bourdieu 2014). In the late 1970s, Foucault privileged a narrative of governmentality, in which the central state directed a wide range of interrelated changes in modern life, seeking above all to control movement: of people, goods, and ideas. Such control required, among other things, vast amounts of information and new systems of classification (Soll 2011). Foucault was certainly right that most European states accomplished both, especially in the eighteenth century. A decade later, Bourdieu, in contrast, saw the state as a champ (field), in which conflicting interests contest, not simply for political and economic power, but for intellectual, often ideological dominance as well. Foucault’s paradigm seeks to explain the state’s persistent and increasing interference in individual life, often in ways hidden from immediate view. Bourdieu allows for more agency, but clearly recognises the synergy between the state’s desire to homogenise and control, and society’s own subtle ways of achieving similar ends. Bourdieu particularly emphasised the role of langage, by which he meant not language (langue) per se, such as German or English, but the specialised vocabulary used by the powerful in all domains – perhaps especially in academia – to keep the number of those ‘in the know’ to a limited group. This problem becomes particularly dangerous in moments of significant vocabulary change: in the case of the early modern state, that change took place both in langue – the shift from Latin to vernaculars – and in langage – the educational formation of what Bourdieu calls the ‘nobility of state’. If we think of the modern state as a mosaic, we can see many of the tiles got laid down in early modern times: more professional armies, with elaborate systems of supply and permanent housing; state-mandated rules in many parts of economic life; schools; fire departments; police departments; infrastructure; a census; health legislation. Drip, drip, drip – in a Foucauldian sense, governmentality seeped in slowly, and involved extensive local cooperation: the state may have wanted public health rules for its own purposes, but local communities wanted them, too. People wanted paved, lighted streets: the state had good use for both. These two approaches can help us understand the transformation taking place. Governmentality meant the gathering and analysis of all sorts of information: about people, goods, places, the natural world. Developing ‘experts’ with specialised knowledge meant the creation of professional diplomatic services, of military

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academies, of engineering schools, of public schools (usually a failure), of training schools for midwives. By the second half of the eighteenth century, most decentsized towns had a salaried public health officer (a degreed medical doctor) and a professional engineer, who supervised public works. The Great Fire of London (1666), when one of the three largest cities in Europe burned to the ground, led to new legislation on building materials and encouraged the creation of fire brigades. More slowly, cities developed police departments (in the current sense), which took the place of the old citizen guards. The arguments used to justify these radical interruptions of individual life came, as Foucault points out, from the Christian pastoral tradition – the shepherd tending his flock – but also from the imperial one, justifying one group’s superiority over another. In 1859, John Stuart Mill would write, in On Liberty, that despotism was a legitimate mode of government when ‘the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’ (Mill 1859, 18). Modern scholarship has shown how European empires used this justification in their overseas colonies, but we should not forget that early modern urban elites said exactly the same thing to justify their right to rule over people like Gaelic-speaking Breton peasants, who, as one government official put it in 1675, ‘do not understand French, and scarcely better reason’ (Collins 1994, 269).

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De Vivo, Filippo (2007). Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Vries, Jan and van der Woude, Ad (1997). The First Modern Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duindam, Jeroen (2003). Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2016). Dynasties: A Global History of Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, John H. (1984). Richelieu and Olivares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (2009). Security, Territory, Population. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedrich, Karin (2012). Brandenburg-Prussia, 1466–1806. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fumaroli, Marc (1981). L’âge de l’éloquence. Geneva: Droz. Goffman, Daniel (2002). The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glete, Jan (2001). War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660. London: Routledge. Godsey, William (2018). The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria as a Fiscal-Military State, 1650–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grenier, Jean-Yves, ed. (2006). La dette publique dans l’histoire. Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France [online at: https://books .openedition.org/igpde/1180] Holt, Mack (2018). The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France. Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hundert, Gershon (2004). Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Keohane, Nannerl (1980). Philosophy and the State in France from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Koenigsberger, Hellie (1987, 2014). Early Modern Europe, 1500–1789. London: Routledge. Kollman, Nancy (2017). The Russian Empire, 1450–1801. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz (2006). Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: The Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Oriete Moderno XXV, n. LXXXVI, 1: 149–59. Kwass, Michael (2014). Contraband. Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Linebaugh, Peter (1991). The London Hanged. London: Allen Lane. Lloyd, Howell (1983). The State, France and the Sixteenth Century. London: George Allen & Unwin. Lockhart, Paul (2007). Denmark, 1513–1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lukowski, Jerzy and Zawadzki, Hubert (2001). A Concise History of Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monahan, Gregory (2014). Let God Arise: The War and Rebellion of the Camisards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oestreich, Gerhard (1981). Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Parsons, Jotham (2014). Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture and the State. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pintner, Walter (1984): The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1914, The Russian Review 43, n. 3, 231–59. Pocock, John (1975). The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raeff, Marc (1983). The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia 1600–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reinhard, Wolfgang (1996). Introduction: Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes, and the Growth of State Power. In: idem, ed., Power Elites and State Building in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–18. ——— (1999). Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Munich: C.H. Beck. Reinhardt, Nicole (2016). Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century Spain and France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roşu, Felicia (2017). Elective Monarchy in Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1587. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rudé, George (1962). Wilkes and Liberty, a Society Study of 1763 to 1774. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ruderman, David (2010). Early Modern Jewry. A New Cultural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Seed, Patricia (1995). Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin (1978). Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soll, Jacob (2009). Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History XI, n. 2, 215–38. ——— (2011). The Information Master. Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Stone, Daniel (2001). The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Strasser, Ulrike (2004). State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Terpstra, Nicholas (2015). Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World. An Alternative History of the Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles (1992). Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (n.d.) [online at: www.slavevoyages.org/] Tutino, Stephania (2010). Empire of Souls. Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ullmann, Walter (1979). This Realm of England is an Empire. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, n. 2, 175–203. Von Friedeburg, Robert (2016). Luther’s Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of ‘State’ in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Friedeburg, Robert and Morrill, John eds. (2017). Monarchy Transformed: Princes and Their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Mack (1971). The German Home Towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weber, Max (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Whaley, Joachim (2012). Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry (2013). Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Peter H. (2009). Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Wintroub, Michael (1998). Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550). The Sixteenth Century Journal 29, n. 2, 465–94.

Appendices

Appendix 8.1 Reinhard, Wolfgang (1999). Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Munich: C.H. Beck [translated by James B. Collins] The family played the central role in this [dynastic] system and, as is well known, was in some parts of the world much stronger than the state. In early modern times, it was itself the deliberate subject of politics and not – as it is today – its sullenly tolerated object. [134]

Appendix 8.2 Cosandey, Fanny (2016). Le rang. Préséances et hiérarchie dans la France d’Ancien Régime. Paris: Gallimard [translated by James B. Collins] Both object and instrument of politics, ceremonial was the place par excellence of the representation of power, allowing one to see there, through a complicated apparatus of precedence, of symbols, and of images, the distribution of functions, and beyond that, the sovereign power that presided over the whole. [247]

Appendix 8.3 Walker, Mack (1971). The German Home Towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Cameralist scholars and working officials of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been concerned mostly with the first two [fiscal activity and

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exploitation of the state’s own properties], where their competence was unquestioned; but the incorporation of Police [oversight of society, above all the economy] with that previously more limited sphere of administration meant inclusion of economic practices in detail and outside the state’s own peculiar sphere [ … ] And then Police came to dominate the others. [171]

9

War and the military revolution Christopher Storrs

Introduction War, preparation for it, its conduct and consequences, is one of the most enduring of human activities, and one with some of the most profound consequences for those waging it (and others). Yet, despite its importance, it has often been separated from the mainstream of historical interpretation. Since c. 1960, however, the way historians think about early modern Europe – and more particularly about both warfare and broader political and social development – has been much influenced by the concept of what has been called the ‘Military Revolution’. While the character of the military revolution has been debated, and its very existence called into question, we cannot ignore its importance if we wish to understand the historiography pertaining to early modern Europe of the last generation. The notion of the military revolution was framed in part to accommodate changes associated with the fact that the early modern era was one of almost constant warfare, inside and outside Europe. Within Europe, the so-called Italian Wars (1494–1559) (Mallett and Shaw 2012), which were also in fact fought outside Italy, and formed part of a wider struggle between the Habsburg and Valois dynasties, were succeeded by a period of domestic, civil wars, most notably the French Religious Wars (c. 1562–98) and the so-called Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule, or Eighty Years War (1568–1648). Both meshed with inter-state struggles such as an Anglo-Spanish confrontation and reached a dramatic climax with the Armada sent against Elizabeth I by Philip II of Spain in 1588. At the same time, various European powers were engaged in a wide-ranging struggle in the Mediterranean and in central and eastern Europe with the Ottoman Turkish empire and its North African satellites, a conflict which was by no means concluded by the victory of the Christian alliance at the battle of Lepanto (1571). Thereafter, the first half of the seventeenth century was dominated by the generation-long struggle known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48) which, although largely centred in Germany (or the Holy Roman Empire) cannot easily be distinguished from a number of other contests, including the Franco-Spanish hostilities which opened in 1635 and were not concluded until 1659, and wars in eastern and northern Europe which ended in 1660 (Wilson 2009, 2011).

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Subsequently, a further cycle of wars blew up, fought mainly in western Europe and associated with the ambitions of the French king, Louis XIV: a brief war with Spain (1667–8), Louis’ so-called Dutch War (1672–8), the War of the League of Augsburg or Nine Years War (1688–97), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13/14). These conflicts involved – to a relatively limited degree – the overseas possessions of the European states, while other parts of Europe were by no means exempt from war. Thus the Baltic and surrounding areas was the scene of the Great Northern War (1700–21), in effect a struggle for the Swedish empire built up in previous conflicts (Frost 2000). The eighteenth century, too, was one of frequent wars, including a number of dynastic struggles before mid-century: these included – besides that for the Spanish empire (above) – the War of the Polish Succession (1733–35/38) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). The second half of the eighteenth century was less preoccupied with dynastic wars, but sovereigns still inclined to resort to arms to resolve their differences. Thus, another major conflict was fought, inside and outside Europe, in the Seven Years War (1756–63), while two decades later a domestic quarrel within the British imperial polity escalated into another global struggle, the American War of Independence (1775–83). After 1789 the French Revolution triggered a round of what we know as the Revolutionary and later the Napoleonic Wars. Besides these real or ‘hot’ wars – in fact the foregoing summary omits many other conflicts – the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted an era dominated by constant threats of war, for example the ‘cold war’ of the late 1720s, following the conclusion of the rival alliances of Vienna and Hanover in 1725. Not surprisingly, for many contemporaries, including the Florentine political analyst, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), author of a treatise, The Art of War (1520) which is too often overshadowed by his other political works, war was – and had to be – a key concern of the prince, or sovereign (Machiavelli 2005). It is this importance of war, its changing character, and its demands on state and society which led to the formulation more than half a century ago of the concept or thesis of the ‘Military Revolution’, and to its continued influence. This thesis is important not just because of the centrality of war to the early modern experience but because of its claims about the broader development of state and society in early modern Europe; and – perhaps more importantly still – the suggestion of reasons for the global triumph of Europe (and more broadly of the ‘West’ conceived as not only a geographical sphere but also as an economic, military, political and social culture). That triumph may now seem, at the start of the twenty-first century, more contingent and temporary as power shifts away from Europe and the ‘West’ but the claims made for the ‘Military Revolution’ in this respect are further reason to look more closely at it. The debate, as we shall see, also poses fundamental questions about the relationship between armies – war – and political authority and social stability, and the extent to which one of these two factors – arms or authority and stability – precedes, prepares the way for and underpins the other. Indeed, it is arguable that the original formulation of the concept of the military revolution was a very self-conscious and deliberate attempt

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to re-connect the history of war to the broader history of state and society, since it is all too easy to separate the two and to understand and write the history of war in a rather hermetically sealed way, and as what is sometimes rather disparagingly termed ‘drums and trumpets’ history.

The military revolution The concept of the ‘Military Revolution’, which should not be confused with that which has emerged in the last few decades as ‘Revolutions in Military Affairs’, or RMAs (Knox and Murray 2010), is associated above all with Professor Michael Roberts. He articulated or expounded it first in an inaugural lecture given in Belfast in January 1955 and published a slightly revised form in an essay collection on his research specialism, Swedish history (for good reason, as will appear) (Roberts 1967/1995) (see Appendix 9.1). The essential idea, noted above, was that the one hundred years between 1560 and 1660 saw a general transformation of the nature of warfare – how wars were fought – with profound implications for the states and societies which both waged and experienced war. Indeed, according to Roberts the military revolution underpinned the transition from the medieval to the modern worlds. Roberts identified four sequential components, or revolutions, each of which itself embraced a variety of other changes. The first was a transformation of tactics, i.e. the way battles in particular were fought, made up of a number of distinct developments. Thus the lance (and the feudal knight who wielded it) and other weapons of medieval warfare, including the pike, the crossbow and the longbow gave way to ever more sophisticated firearms. Related to this was the abandonment of the confrontation in action of great masses of pikemen in favour of shallower, linear formations exchanging gun fire across the battlefield. The second key tactical change was in army size. While individual units were getting smaller and formations shallower, with lines spread along a greater front in order to maximise fire power – including by means of the so-called ‘counter-march’, in which one rank of men moved backward after firing, allowing the rank behind to advance and fire a volley – the larger forces, of which those individual units were part, grew in size. One further consequence was an increase in the number of officers who were needed to command and control the ever-larger forces. A third key tactical development was a growing standardisation of weaponry. Thus in 1599, at the suggestion of Prince Maurice of Nassau, all of the Dutch rebel forces against Spain were equipped with similar weapons. Accompanying this greater uniformity of arms was a standardised training in their use, supported by a growing body of printed literature on all aspects of warfare, including training manuals, in part taking advantage of the contemporary printing revolution (see e.g. Williams 1590). For its part, the cavalry was reduced in size and importance relative to the infantry and also fought differently. The massed attack of the heavily armoured lance-carrying knight gave way firstly to the so-called ‘caracole’, in which less heavily armoured men rode up to within shooting distance of the enemy infantry, fired and retired, and subsequently (a return in part to medieval tactics) to

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a charge en masse, sabres in hand, ready for the kill, thus making more effective use again of the combined weight of men and horses. Last, but by no means least, Roberts attached great importance in tactical terms to the development of light, mobile field artillery, as opposed to heavy artillery which was almost impossible to manoeuvre on the battlefield; this ensured that artillery could be deployed in battle (Roberts 1967/1995, 13–15). While the essential or first steps were tactical innovations, these had further consequences. Given the transformation in troop sizes and the fact that armies were increasingly permanent, or standing forces, the tactical revolution triggered a strategic revolution exemplified in the determined pursuit of victory by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years War. Hitherto, for example for the expeditions to France of successive English kings during the Hundred Years War (c. 1340–1453), men had been raised for a single campaign and returned home at its conclusion. Increasingly, however, a core of men were retained in service while the number of men thought necessary and actually maintained grew (Contamine 1986, 165–72). This was particularly evident after 1560. Thus, while Philip II (1556–98) needed just 40,000 men to aspire to hegemonic power in Europe in the late sixteenth century, one hundred years later Louis XIV (1643–1715) maintained perhaps 400,000 men – ten times the forces of the Spanish king – to pursue similar ambitions (but see below on figures). This growth in the size of permanent forces was most evident in but by no means confined to the big states (Roberts 1967/1995, 19–20). Another more general implication of the military revolution thesis was the transformation of strategic thinking, i.e. the overall conduct of war (as opposed to theatre or combat tactics). Monarchs and their ministers were using their larger armies to pursue much more ambitious strategies, often deploying a number of different (and sizeable) forces or armies over much wider geographical areas, as the Swedes did in the Thirty Years War (Roberts 1967/1995, 18–19). Bigger and more permanent forces – the value of the latter enhanced by the presence of veterans with invaluable experience of army life and combat – required a wide array of services; the supply of weapons (and horses for the cavalry), clothes (uniforms), food (including forage for horses), transport, (barracks) accommodation and last but not least pay. All of this necessitated a much more sophisticated level of organisation, both within the ever larger, more permanent armies themselves but also in civil administration. A number of states, including France and England, had introduced an office of Secretary (of State) for War by the later seventeenth century. In turn these larger, more organised armies underpinned state power, cowing rioters and suppressing larger movements of rebellion and resistance, thus contributing to a greater royal authority – absolutism – which for many historians was at its peak between 1660, the terminal date of Roberts’s military revolution, and the outbreak of the French revolution in 1789. The importance of armies in this respect is confirmed rather paradoxically by developments in England; there, James II’s appointment of Catholic officers to his own expanding regular army, in breach of the law, offended those who feared the king might use his enhanced authority and

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power to restore Catholicism, and contributed to his dethronement in the socalled ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 (Miller 2000, 142, 146–7, 196). Most fundamentally, Roberts suggested that armies – and warfare generally – now had a much more obvious and more extensive impact on the state and the rest of society. War always had affected those in its immediate vicinity but that impact was now felt more widely. For one thing, there was the levy of contributions, in effect taxes demanded of local populations by armies, and the billeting of soldiers on local populations by friend and foe. Furthermore, recruiting – and increasingly from the late seventeenth century onwards – conscription of one sort or another (sometimes simply to labour on the defences of a town or even village or castle threatened with siege) removed both the active and the idle, with potentially disruptive consequences particularly in agrarian societies at the crucial times of sowing and harvest. Last, but by no means least, there was the diversion, again often forcible, of wagons and draught animals to carry men and supplies and pull the artillery train. The demands of the new armies finally – and according to Roberts, inevitably – entrenched the power of the state, which now effectively silenced its rivals, above all the great nobles, now increasingly demilitarised, their old fortresses converted into more comfortable, less obviously military country residences. The state was taking on more responsibilities or functions, for example the supply of powder, and developing an appropriate organisational cadre, while it has been suggested that the broad ‘culture’ of the age was increasingly shaped by the new military order and discipline (Oestreich 1982). Monarchs themselves demonstrated this and were more likely to appear, and to be depicted, in uniform in the early eighteenth century than they were in the sixteenth. The spiralling cost of war obliged monarchs to identify ever more sources of financial revenue. This was by no means new, but their demands frequently provoked political crises like the so-called ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century, when a number of states, including France and above all Spain were seriously rocked by domestic disorders which owed a great deal to wartime pressures. Many monarchs emerged victorious, gaining near-absolute powers over Estates and parliaments, as the latter preferred the security provided by expensive royal armies to a precarious undefended liberty (Roberts 1967/1995, 20–9). The new – larger, more permanent – armies were thus royal instruments, paving the way for the national forces of later times. Effective royal or state control of the armed forces was also – arguably – a sign of a state’s modernity. The social changes consequent on the military revolution included opportunities for the non-noble in both the new officer hierarchies and the new administrative cadres which organised and served them, although Roberts also acknowledges that the new standing armies often privileged nobles in the eighteenth century. At the same time, these changes gave birth to modern ‘militarism’ and thus – taking a very long view – prepared the way to ‘the abyss of the twentieth century’ which shaped the lives of Roberts’ generation (Roberts 1967/1995, 29). Several aspects of this argument have been more fully developed by subsequent commentators. Thus Brian Downing has argued that the way different states responded to war and its demands would shape their future political

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development. The responses of France and Prussia, on the one hand, ensured the triumph of absolutism while on the other hand that of Britain ensured a rather different political outcome (Downing 1992). Subsequently, and without suggesting that he was building on Roberts’ original insight, John Brewer has elaborated – on the basis of eighteenth-century Britain – the concept of the ‘fiscal-military state’ in which the demands of large-scale war and above all its funding explain the very distinctive shape and character of the English (after 1707: British) state (Brewer 1989). Subsequent work, which acknowledged Roberts’ influence more or less explicitly, has identified a growing number of such polities (Glete 2002; Storrs 2009). Some of the many smaller states of early modern Europe imitated the greater ones in becoming ‘fiscal-military’ states, but for many the gulf between pretentions and resources was solved by taking subsidies from wealthier powers, including for example Louis XIV, thus contributing to his near hegemony in western Europe after 1660. In this way, the military revolution helped separate the bigger, more powerful states from the smaller, weaker ones, contributing in the long-term to the emergence of a clearer hierarchy and a tail of second and third rank powers, one already apparent by 1700 (McKay and Scott 1983, 203).

The military revolution in historical context Roberts’ concept was primarily associated with two men, whose role helps explain his chronological frame. The first was Prince Maurice of Nassau, the son of William the Silent, prince of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Philip II of Spain until his assassination in 1584. Maurice commanded the Dutch forces in the 1590s. The second and – because he perfected the new tactics for offensive rather than defensive purposes – more important individual was King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who enjoyed brilliant (if short-lived) success in Germany between his intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630 and his death in the battle of Lützen (1632). For Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus (whose biographer he was) perfected, in ‘the second and more important stage of the Military Revolution’, the innovations pioneered by Maurice. The greater use of light, mobile field artillery helps to explain the success of the Swedes in the Thirty Years War, notably at the battle of Breitenfeld (1631), when Gustavus Adolphus, whose Saxon allies fled the field during the conflict, defeated the hitherto all triumphant opposing Catholic armies (Roberts 1967/1995, 16). In sum, Roberts’ military revolution produced armies which by 1660 were bigger, more permanent, more professional and better trained, with important implications for the states and societies which funded and depended on them. This transformation could not fail to have other consequences, contributing to the elaboration of international law and rules about the conduct of war, exemplified by the treatise De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Of War and Peace; Grotius 2012). Far from the battlefield, economic thinking – here, mercantilism – saw war (and the new armies) as a crucial component of economic policy and development. The attractiveness and hence the success of the thesis was founded not least on the

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fact that, as the foregoing suggests, it was simple, integrated, and all-embracing; that it fitted a number of developments into a coherent schema, one which satisfactorily explained the early modern (European) world as it was understood by historians writing in the 1950s and 1960s. It is worth pointing out that, while wishing to re-connect military and broader historical developments in Europe, Roberts emphasised the military – as opposed to the political – inspiration and foundation of the revolution; if it had political consequences these were not what had triggered or initially inspired it. His vision was also firmly tied to Europe. In many respects, this seminal picture was drawn at the expense of the Spanish armies. Both Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus perfected their methods fighting the armies of Catholic Spain and its allies, their linear tactics very different from the massed Spanish tercios. Similarly, the defeat of Spain’s Army of Flanders at the battle of Rocroi (1643), although not mentioned by Roberts himself, is widely regarded as signifying the collapse by 1660 (if not before) of a once dominant Spanish military power, which according to Roberts was backward-looking, conservative and increasingly out of date, outfought and overtaken by the armies of the states which had modernised in accordance with the dictates of the military revolution. In fact, however, Spain’s armies in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were widely admired as the best fighting units in Europe, underpinning a real extension of Spanish dominion, influence and power. The historian Geoffrey Parker, while agreeing with Roberts on various aspects, including the importance of drill and the proliferation of handbooks on the subject, nevertheless has substantially modified Roberts’ original account. Parker drew on his own research into the army of Flanders, which had been sent there by Philip II in 1567 to suppress the incipient Dutch revolt. Relevant to Parker’s case, too, was the fact that in 1634 the (Spanish) Habsburg forces, under the cardinal Infante (brother of Philip IV), on their way from Italy through Germany to Flanders, crushed those of the supposedly more ‘modern’ Swedes at the battle of Nördlingen (Parker 1976/1995, 43). For Parker, who observes very pertinently that any sustained period of war will stimulate innovations of the type identified by Roberts, the military revolution began in the central decades of the fifteenth century but should really be dated – especially when thinking about the growth in the size of armies – c. 1530–1710, rather than 1560–1660. The reason for this different chronology is that, for Parker, the key was not tactical but technological innovation, i.e. the invention of gunpowder. This development immediately rendered all existing (medieval-style) fortresses – tall structures with thin curtain walls which were easily pierced by the new artillery – highly vulnerable and necessitated rethinking military architecture. The response was the development of a new type of fortification, characterised by thick walls which were better able to absorb cannon balls, and one which was much lower, those same walls offering less of a target for the new artillery, and with what were called bastions projecting from the corners and other points along the walls (allowing the defenders to attack the besieging force and in that way to impede or prevent close attack). The new fortresses were also themselves gun platforms.

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Parker’s emphasis on the importance of changes in military technology and architecture and the way this in turn transformed strategic thinking contrasts markedly with Roberts, who largely ignored fortifications. This new type of fortress first appeared in Italy in the fifteenth century, evolving to full maturity c. 1450–1520 (exemplified by the Castel Sant’Angelo constructed by the Pope) and therefore often known as the trace italienne. From Italy the new style spread to the other main theatres of war throughout Europe. By the late seventeenth century any town of consequence in Europe (and indeed beyond, wherever Europeans settled) would possess fortifications of this sort, some of them both extensive and very elaborate (for example those of Turin, capital of the duchy of Savoy in the Po valley in north Italy, and Naarden in the Dutch republic). In addition, they subsequently determined the layout of towns: the demolition, in the nineteenth century, of the defences which had helped protect Vienna against a besieging Turkish army in 1683 produced the very distinctive inner circular road known today as the Ring. Surviving examples of this type of fortification in Britain include Berwick, built c. 1560, and – in the eighteenth century – Fort George, outside Inverness. In consequence, the type of engagement which characterised late medieval warfare – battles such as Crécy and Agincourt – became less common and less decisive by contrast with sieges (although we should be wary of exaggerating their rarity or insignificance). Indeed, for Parker early modern warfare was characterised above all by great sieges, of for example the towns of the rebel provinces during the Dutch revolt against Spain, something which struck the English volunteers in that conflict (as in Excerpt 9.1).

Excerpt 9.1 Williams, Roger (1590). Briefe discourse of Warre. London: Thomas Orwin. Let us not erre in our ancient customes, although our famous kings, Henry the First, Edward the Third and Henry the Eighth were the most worthiest warriors our nation ever had; notwithstanding … had they knowne the terror of Muskets, calivers and pistolls, they would have used the less Bowes, Bills and Speares, as the actions of these famous Kings shews their Captains to be the most expert. Likewise we must confess Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, and Haniball, to be the worthiest and famoust warriers that ever were; notwithstanding, assure your selfe, had they known Artillerie they would never have battered Towns with Rammes, nor have conquered Countries so easily had they bin fortified as Germanie, France and the Low Countries, with others, have bin since their daies. Although the ground of ancient Discipline is the worthiest and the most famous; notwithstanding, by reason of Fortifications, Stratagems, Ingins, arming, with Munition, the discipline is greatly changed, the which we must follow and be directed as it is now. Otherwise we shall repent it too late. [37]

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Many battles were fought either by armies coming to the relief of the besieged and engaging the besiegers, or by besiegers seeking to prevent such relief. These included two decisive battles fought during the War of the Spanish Succession: Blenheim (1704), which halted a Franco-Bavarian army marching to besiege the capital of Britain’s ally, the Austrian Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Vienna, and Turin (1706), when the Spanish and French failed to prevent the relief of that capital of another of Britain’s allies, the duke of Savoy, by an opposing army. The spread of the new type of ever more complex fortification design also contributed to the development of a more elaborate, technical, science of fortification in the succeeding decades and the growing importance of military engineers like the one who did so much to enhance the frontier defences of Louis XIV’s France and to take the fortresses of Louis’ opponents, the French marshal Vauban (Parker 1976/1995, 41–2). Since a successful siege often required a very large besieging force to surround and isolate the targeted town, preventing its supply and relief, armies did therefore grow in size and alter in composition, with a greater proportion of infantry. In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy with 12,000 cavalry, two-thirds of his army, but a generation later Francis I invaded with just 6,000, representing only one-fifth of his army (Parker 1976/1995, 44). Compared to Rogers, Parker took the implications of his thesis into a more global direction. For Parker, Europe’s (more broadly conceived as the West’s) superiority in both the science of fortification and firepower was crucial in, firstly, enabling Europe to survive the Islamic (Ottoman) onslaught on land and at sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the Ottomans twice – 1529, 1683 – reaching and besieging Vienna) and secondly facilitating Europe’s achievement of world primacy by 1800. Only where, as happened for example in Morocco and Japan, a native non-European culture had sufficiently advanced along this same road was that extra-European society able to prevent (or delay until the middle of the nineteenth century in the case of Japan) the ‘triumph of the West’. This for Parker is the real, long-term significance of the military revolution (Parker 1996, 1–5) (see Appendix 9.2). In some other respects, too, Parker disagreed with Roberts. For the former, the army of Flanders, Spain’s premier fighting force, appeared far from backward; on the contrary, it was very progressive, not least in providing all sorts of services – including medical hospitals – for its troops and in organising the supply of thousands of soldiers marching overland from Italy to the Netherlands along what Parker calls the ‘Spanish Road’. In a sense, of course, Parker was simply spelling out in some detail the sort of service Roberts had only alluded to, but the point here is that the example was provided by the supposedly backward Spain. At the same time, while urging the sophistication of Spanish military organisation, Parker also acknowledged that there was sometimes a great gulf between aim and achievement, whose root cause was lack of money, something which Roberts had already noted. Occasionally, this want of funds could create serious operational problems, as mutinies by troops claiming not to have been paid for months and even years paralysed operations (for example at the Sack of Antwerp in 1576), which significantly

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set back the Spanish suppression of the Dutch revolt and produced many other complications (Parker 2004, 157–76). It has been suggested that Parker places too great emphasis on the ‘trace italienne’ as the explanation for the transformation in the scale of warfare in this period, ignoring other factors (Kingra 1993, 431–46). However, Parker also stresses the importance of ‘extrinsic’, non-military factors in the expansion of armies: the growth of Europe’s wealth (thus better able to support war on the new scale) and population (ensuring there were more men available to serve in the larger, more permanent armies), the development of an infrastructure of roads along which armies and all that went with them might march; the elaboration of effective administrative structures, all of which preceded and underpinned rather than – as in Roberts’s original – being a consequence of the military revolution. Parker emphasises, too, the importance of finance and the (Anglo-Dutch) pioneering of credit facilities by and for the state as a solution to this particular challenge (Parker 1976/1995, 48). Unlike Roberts, Parker has continued to develop his thesis. Roberts, influenced by the Swedish experience, focused mainly on armies and warfare on land. However, the war at sea was in fact an important aspect of early modern conflict. After the expiry of the Twelve Years Truce of 1609 in 1621, for example, some in Spain thought that the main war effort against the Dutch should be made at sea. This change of emphasis led to a great increase in spending on the Armada (fleet) of Flanders, although the new strategy ultimately proved unsuccessful, culminating in the Spanish defeat at the Battle of the Downs (1639). The three seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–74) were all fought at sea, while the Nine Years War saw new – though abortive – French attempts at an invasion of England (1690, 1692) following Louis XIV’s construction of an impressive battle fleet since c. 1660. Parker, very understandably, extended his version of the military revolution to embrace the war at sea, with warships seen as floating fortresses in a way Roberts had not (Parker 1996, 82–114; Harding 1999). Some historians go even further in this respect, N.A.M. Rodger arguing that the focus on armies rather than on navies is itself a misapprehension, because navies were a great – or greater – commitment and could have even greater impact (Rodger 2011). This may be going too far, but given their real importance (in terms of cost, resources involved, and function), it is not surprising that navies echo many of the developments noted above regarding armies: individual ships got bigger, witness the evolution of Spanish galleons by the 1520s and – more specifically – the warship Vasa, built for Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s, which almost immediately sank but which has recently been recovered. Navies, too, grew and became more permanent, witness the development of the French fleet from the 1660s (above). With ships becoming floating gun platforms, a new system of classifying or rating based on firepower emerged after the Battle of the Downs. This would determine whether a vessel could be considered a ship of the line, able to take its place in the line of battle, since battles (rather than lesser engagements) were essentially artillery duels between two lines of such vessels, as opposed to the traditional practice of ramming and boarding. This emerges clearly from Hoste’s late seventeenth-century treatise on

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combat at sea (see Excerpt 9.2) and from a contemporary illustration of the English fleet off Gibraltar in 1704 (see Figure 9.1).

Excerpt 9.2 Hoste, Pere (1762). Naval Evolutions [originally published in 1697]. Trans. C. O’Bryen. London: W. Johnston … Of the Line of Battle … In a sea engagement the fleets are drawn up in a line of battle on two parallel lines … The ships of each fleet keep close to the wind on the line they are formed in and are commonly at a cable’s length distant one from the other. … This form was observed for the first time in the battle of the Texel, where the Duke of York defeated the Dutch on the 13th of June 1665. … The English fleet consisted of 100 ships of the line; that of Holland was more numerous. … The two fleets …. ranging themselves in two lines … each extending … about five leagues in length, the English having the advantage of the wind … They cannonaded each other from three o’clock in the morning until eleven, … the terrible roaring of the cannon, wrecks of ships, fall of masts, together with a thick smoke intermixed with flashes of fire from the ships that blew up, heightened the horror of this action beyond the power of imagination … The Dutch, having already lost many … ships and seeing their admiral blow up, put … for the Texel, the duke of York pursuing … he took, burnt and destroyed 22 ships of the line, 20 of which were for 50 to 80 guns … The whole action cost him but one man of war … [8–10] A fleet of any size required vast expenditure on dockyards such as those at Brest, Toulon, Portsmouth and Plymouth. Similarly, ships – and, in the Mediterranean, galleys, powered by men at the oars rather than by the wind – required great numbers of men if they were to sail. Indeed, wherever galleys were used the manpower needs of the latter underpinned the elaboration of penal systems in which an increasing number of offences incurred the penalty of a period of years on the galleys for an increasing range of offences (Storrs 2006, 93–6). But at the same time the cost of what some historians have argued was the most expensive activity or operation undertaken by any state in this period put enormous pressure on the state and, despite the development of structures to provide men, money and supplies, therefore obliged the state to resort to what we might (again) call the private sector, i.e. corsairs and privateers. This is perhaps best exemplified in the case of France, in the Nine Years War (Symcox 1974) and the War of the Spanish Succession, when the activities of Jean Bart and the privateers of Dunkirk (which had been a Spanish/Flemish privateer base attacking French shipping before its cession in 1659) made the Channel and the North Sea very unsafe to enemy shipping (comparable to the operations there of German submarines in World War I). Neutralising the threat posed by

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Figure 9.1 The siege of Gibraltar by a joint Anglo-Dutch naval force, on its way to the Mediterranean to confront the French fleet during the War of the Spanish Succession, demonstrated the role that the contemporary warships, with their many guns, could play. View of Gibraltar taken by an officer of Admiral Sir George Rooke’s fleet on 21 July 1704 (OS): https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Gibraltar_1704.jpg (accessed 22/5/2018). Public domain/ PD-US

Dunkirk thus became a key concern for British ministers during (and after) the War of the Spanish Succession. In fact virtually all states resorted to the use of privateers in this period, including those (like England/Britain) with powerful fighting navies (Bromley and Ryan 1970, 802–4). While privateering was in part a supplement to or substitute for state operations at sea, it also represented an important aspect of what we might think of as unofficial or fringe – but by no means negligible – hostilities, closely related to the phenomenon of piracy. This type of warfare was waged everywhere, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and beyond. In European waters it often revolved around the seizure of people for ransom and/or enslavement; the socalled Barbary corsairs of north Africa were seriously feared by the Christian populations of coastal Italy and Spain, and even on occasion made similar raids on the southern tip of England (Davis 2003).

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Geoffrey Parker’s tweaking of Roberts’ ‘Military Revolution’ twenty years after its first formulation, has partially eclipsed the original concept. Another historian of early modern diplomacy, international relations and warfare who has engaged with it is Jeremy Black, whose own version is very different again from that of Parker. Black sees not one but two military revolutions, the first of which occurred in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (and was thus completed before Roberts’ starting-point) and the second after 1660, i.e. 1660–1760, when it has been suggested ancien régime warfare was at its height (Black 1991; cf. Anderson 1988, 77). Thus, for Black, Roberts’ key period lies between the two military revolutions which actually occurred! This is because Black sees greater tactical innovation in the later period, with most notably the final disappearance of the pike around 1700, the replacement more or less at the same time of the matchlock by the flint-lock musket and the increasing use of and standardisation of both the latter and of the (ring) bayonet. Black also notes the decline in the relative importance of cavalry and points to the fact that armies were more obviously increasing in size – everywhere – after 1660. He further emphasises the importance of developments in navies in this later period. Unlike Roberts, but like Parker, Black has a wide geographical vision, one which embraces the Austro-Ottoman struggle in Hungary and the Balkans in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and which also ensures that he is less inclined than Roberts to see the Thirty Years War as the culmination of the military revolution. In terms of organisational advances, Black highlights key figures in the later period, men like Le Tellier and his son the marquis de Louvois in France, successively Secretary of State for War under Louis XIV (Rowlands 2002). Black further urges the importance of what he calls technique (including, for example, financial acumen and cartography), over mere military technology. This later period was also one in which – for example in the duchy of Savoy and in Bourbon Spain (Storrs 1999, 36–41, 70, 2016, 34–7) – old militias were overhauled, with new and greater burdens being imposed on many subjects in those states. Finally, for Black the military revolution, especially that post-1660, was a consequence not a cause of greater state authority and power – absolutism – with the political thus taking precedence and priority over the military. To further underpin these contentions, he points out that the large armies deployed in the Thirty Years War were often beyond the capacity of their paymaster sovereigns to effectively supply and were in consequence effectively unmanageable, beyond the control of the states they supposedly served (Black 1995). In developing these arguments, and particularly the last, Black is drawing on what has long been apparent, i.e. the extent to which the enormous military effort mounted – particularly in the Thirty Years War – was in effect beyond the organisational capacity and resources of most states, which therefore depended on what we might call the private sector to fill the gap. Exemplary in this respect was the Austrian Habsburg Emperor, who in the early stages of that conflict had relied on his cousin, the king of Spain. However, in the mid-1620s the Emperor sought to raise his own army. Finding this too challenging, the Emperor turned to one of his own noble subjects, Count Wallenstein, who was

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very wealthy (a beneficiary of the redistribution of confiscated Protestant property following the defeat of the Bohemian rebellion at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620), and who became even wealthier and more powerful as a result of raising an army for the Empire. Indeed, Wallenstein ultimately became so powerful that he even seemed to rival the Emperor and was murdered on the order of the latter in 1634 (Wilson 2011, 534–42). But Wallenstein was only one of many so-called ‘military enterprisers’ – a concept coined by Redlich (1964) to describe a group of men which also included Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. It has also been suggested that in the later stages of the Thirty Years War armies, at least those which actually took the field (rather than being tied up in garrisons as so many troops usually were), were dwindling in size because they simply could not be maintained, while there was renewed reliance on cavalry, not least to collect forage over a wide area. In this light, the supposedly more ambitious strategies made possible by larger armies represented in fact little more than commanders acknowledging the harsh reality that they must distribute their forces over as wide an area as possible in order to ensure that they were fed; if they did not do this, their forces would simply disintegrate – in fact strategic ‘stagnation’ (Parrott 1985/1995, 225–51). The demands of the opposing armies in the Thirty Years War has generated further debate, about the impact of that war, particularly in Germany. It was long held that Germany suffered widespread devastation and with it substantial population loss and economic recession, such as to seriously set back long-term economic development. However, over the last generation historians have significantly revised this very negative image of the impact of the conflict. The greatest damage and losses were most evident in those parts of Germany where the war was most intensely fought; other areas escaped more lightly. Nor can we always be sure that economic and demographic downturn was due entirely – or directly rather than indirectly – to the war. As for the longer term, bigger shifts in Europe’s economic fortunes – notably the development of the Atlantic economy – may have been more damaging to Germany’s fortunes than the war. In fact, the long-term consequences of the war may also have been less severe than was once thought, as various German states implemented interventionist policies – broadly described as cameralism – which did much to stimulate economic and population growth after 1648, many of these states recovering remarkably speedily thereafter. Having said that, and acknowledging the less gloomy picture historians have been painting of the condition of Germany during and after the Thirty Years War in recent decades, that conflict cannot be considered as other than a negative experience for most Germans alive at the time, however transitory (Parker 1993, 208–15; Asch 1997, 177–94; Mortimer 2004; Wilson 2011, 779–821). The fact that the demands of war, far from underpinning an ever more active state seeking to take charge of ever more spheres of (military) activity, effectively undermined central authority became apparent in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain. Between 1560 and 1660, as I.A.A. Thompson has shown, having sought responsibility for a whole array of military and naval activities in

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the guise of what was known as administracion, financial reasons forced the crown to abandon these to private contractors, known as asiento. For Thompson, this was just the tip of an iceberg of delegation or devolution to the private sector of what had once been thought of as state activity. By 1660, Spain was a far cry from Roberts’ model and offered a fundamental qualification or objection to Downing’s thesis regarding the threat posed by continuous warfare to constitutional systems (Downing 1992); unable to provide all, the Spanish Habsburgs were obliged to devolve and delegate on a massive scale, effectively abandoning absolutism or rather constructing a new model of a negotiated, constitutional state, one very different to that achieved by England after 1688 (Thompson 1976, 1–8, 274–87, 1995). However, the historian who has most forcefully challenged the thesis in recent years has been David Parrott. Parrott is inclined to deny the existence of both a tactical (Roberts) and a technological (Parker) revolution, insisting on the primacy of logistics and what follows from it. According to Parrott’s powerful counter-thesis (Parrott 2012), Roberts was unduly influenced by a very historically specific late eighteenth-century transformation in the way armies were raised and led and in the way they fought. This ushered in an unusual interlude of ‘state assertion’ (between c. 1760 and c. 1960) in an older and more powerful tradition where the private sector predominated, a system many armies have been returning to in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, partly in response to the advent of the nuclear age and its implications for the now redundant mass armies. Parrott urges the need for greater appreciation of the perceived advantages for hard-pressed states working with the private sector, arguing that the relationship was complimentary rather than antagonistic (Parrott 2012, 1–23) (see Appendix 9.3). Parrott begins, like Roberts, just before 1560, considering the various types of private military forces and organisation available to European states, with special focus on the Swiss and the German Landsknecht infantry. According to Parrott a mid-sixteenth-century crisis faced those states which had traditionally relied on the market for international mercenaries. This crisis had its foundations in the fact that campaigns and wars were getting longer, a process which began in the 1550s and which peaked in the Thirty Years War. Whereas Roberts and Parker (and Black) point to the hand of a strong state (whether before or after), Parrott sees the stretching and straining of state-control as offering an opportunity to the private sector, especially in the guise of the enterpriser, the new seventeenth-century version of the old mercenary-commanders of the sixteenth, but also a wide array of types of public–private partnership in the military sphere. Among those, a ‘middle ground’ – of contractors investing in their units and the infrastructure of the army, but acting in conjunction with state-sanctioned funding and some central administrative oversight – were to prove resilient and to become more widespread. Thus, far from seeing the Thirty Years War as testing to destruction a fundamentally flawed older mechanism for the raising and maintenance of military force, Parrott stresses the strong elements of

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continuity in state/military relations and the deliberate maintenance of systems that drew heavily on private capital, expertise and organisation. Contemporaries found this perfectly easy to accommodate. The War of the Spanish Succession saw the apogee of military enterprise in France. In elaborating his radically different explanation of developments (spread over two phases: 1550–1650 and 1650–1750), Parrott builds on the recent historiographical consensus over the far from absolute state, at least as traditionally depicted (Beik 1985; Henshall 2010). He also engages critically with the view that the old military enterpriser/entrepreneurship disappeared after 1650. Finally, Parrott notes the importance of war as ‘cultural validation’, a supplementary and independent reinforcement of the prevailing form of military organisation in the seventeenth century (Parrott 2016, 307–27).

Appraising the military revolution What can we say of the ‘Military Revolution’ thesis half a century and more after Roberts first articulated it? We must begin by acknowledging that our knowledge and understanding of warfare has advanced enormously since 1956, in very large part in response to the challenges of the original concept. There is general agreement that warfare underwent great changes between c. 1500 and c. 1750, and that armies increased greatly in size. Of course, most numbers are snapshots in time which cannot always be taken at face value. Nevertheless, armies (and navies) grew, and became more permanent and professional, specialised and trained, contributing among other things to a growing distinction between the very few so-called Great Powers and the rest (Lynn 1994, 117–47). However, change did not occur everywhere at the same rate and older ways of war survived, a very different ‘Gaelic warfare’, with its distinctive Highland charge, surviving in the British Isles and north America well into the eighteenth century (Hill 1992, 323–45). More important however is the question whether the label ‘Military Revolution’ is necessary or even appropriate to explain and capture these broad changes. It is perfectly possible to explain the general transformation of warfare and armies in this period differently, John Hale, for example, preferring ‘military reformation’ for sixteenth-century developments (Hale 1985, 46–74). Can we call a development lasting a century or longer a revolution? Historians are perhaps too easily attracted by dramatic labels of this sort, witness their frequent use of the term ‘crisis’. Parker makes some attempt to defend his use of the term (to cover an even longer period, the entire early modern era), but while the term ‘revolution’ captures our attention, we might perhaps be more cautious and less dramatic, preferring military evolution to revolution. In a rather different vein, Clifford Rogers argues that historians have missed the importance of a preceding military revolution, during the Hundred Years War. He suggests an alternative paradigm of change based upon the biological concept of ‘punctuated equilibrium evolution’, i.e. a series of sequential military revolutions, each intended to reverse

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a disequilibrium introduced by the previous one, rather than a single military revolution (Rogers 1993, 57). In fact, as Rogers’ suggestion implies, war is a constant source or trigger of innovations, some relatively small, but all adding up to something bigger. In the spring of 1684, for example, the Spanish viceroy of Naples, in reporting the departure of his galleys to defend Genoa (which was threatened with bombardment from the sea by the French fleet), spoke of the great terror caused throughout Italy by this terrifying new way of waging war (Archivo General 1684). Rogers’ arguments also imply that early modern historians have misunderstood the nature of medieval warfare. Indeed it has been suggested that medieval warfare was characterised as much as later warfare by the sieges which for Parker distinguish the early modern era. As for just how change happens, we should be cautious of privileging foreign – in Roberts’ vision, Dutch and Swedish – models; John Lynn, for one, questions the idea of the French ways of war in the early modern era following or being influenced by what was developing elsewhere (Lynn 1985, 176–91). Warfare certainly changed, but were the changes, linear, sustained, unidirectional? The French army seems to have reached a peak in size during the War of the Spanish Succession, but thereafter declined rather than continued to grow, until a new round of military transformation was triggered by the changes to state and society wrought by the French Revolution (Lynn 1994, 134). The fact that the Austrian army on the other hand did continue to grow in the eighteenth century, doubling between 1741 and 1792, suggests something of the great diversity of experience across Europe (Hochedlinger 2003, 300). There was a growing gulf between the ambitions of princes and what armies could really achieve, such that warfare remained after – as during – the Military Revolution generally indecisive. The Thirty Years War continued despite the Spanish victory at Nördlingen, while the war between France and Spain (which had been going on openly since 1635) did not end after Rocroi but continued until 1659. Similarly, Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim (1704) was decisive in many respects but did not bring the War of the Spanish Succession to a final conclusion, while Peter the Great’s equally decisive success against the Swedes at Poltava (1709) did not end the Great Northern War (Frost 2000, 294–6); other, including non-military factors (the personality of a ruler for example), influenced decisions for and against carrying on the struggle. Real change in this sense, making victory truly decisive, only occurred during the French Revolutionary and – above all – the Napoleonic Wars. Where victory in battle was achieved it was more often the result simply of crude superiority of numbers rather than of anything more sophisticated: at Breitenfeld (1631), for example, 41,000 Swedes and Saxons defeated 31,000 Imperial troops and at Nördlingen, 33,000 Spanish and Imperial troops beat 25,000 Swedes and Protestants (see Figure 9.2). Related to this was the fact that in all ages war proved much more of a challenge than anticipated, putting pressure on the state which the latter could rarely cope with; it has long been apparent that war – especially participation in the Thirty Years War – was a major factor in the so-called ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century (Parker 2012).

Figure 9.2 Contemporary etching of troop disposition at the beginning of the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631), revealing formations and firepower. Oluf Hanson, ‘Praelii inter Sereniss: Suecor: Regem et Saxoniae Electorem: nec non Catholicae Ligae Generalem Com: a Ilty, VII Septemb: anni MDCXXXI prope Lipsiam comissi’ (1631). Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown University Library.

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As for the social consequences of military change, were these as revolutionary as Roberts at least suggests? It is increasingly apparent that the nobility, the traditional warrior class, very successfully met the challenge of military change, witness the way nobles found niches in the expanding officer corps of the expanding armies, often with the support of rulers (Storrs and Scott 1996, 1–41; Rowlands 2002). We need also to recognise that, before we can build elaborate models we need to be clear about what we do and do not know. Indeed, it is increasingly clear just how little we still know about most armies of early modern Europe. New research in respect of different armies suggests sometimes very contradictory patterns of development. In addition, despite the work of Parker and others, a whole range of other services which rendered armies and navies effective has still largely been ignored, including for example the gathering and use of intelligence, military justice, and other aspects of military (and naval) society and culture. We focus on the combatants, but armies were (still) supported (and sometimes impeded) by non-combatants: indeed the many camp followers – wives, children, servants and others – might occasionally exceed the number of combatants (Wilson 1996). In seeking to explore further we have to use much of the source material – especially the quantitative data – with great caution, since so much of it is unreliable in terms of spending on fortifications, numbers of troops and so much more.

Conclusion We know much more now about warfare and the states and their armies than in 1956, and we know much more about what we do not know. As we make further discoveries about the variety of experience and the slow pace of change (or impact of technological and organisational transformations), the idea of a – or the – ‘Military Revolution’ seems at the least too simplistic. To some extent, like so many theories, it has become – rather paradoxically – on the one hand a straitjacket and on the other hand too loose. While it helps explain both the rise of various states in Europe – and not only those of western Europe (Paul 2004) – and of Europe or ‘the West’ more broadly, it may have lost some of its original coherence and explanatory value. In large part because of changes to our understanding of early modern Europe on other fronts – royal authority, public finance – historians are more likely to prefer Parrott’s vision of ‘military devolution’ to Roberts’ original vision of ‘military revolution’. However, while we may have to ditch the concept of the military revolution, we must always remain grateful to Roberts and those who have followed him for re-connecting military history with that of other contemporary political and social developments, and for re-stating its importance as an engine of historical development (Lynn 1991). We must also give thanks to Roberts for articulating an explanatory framework which, by challenging (and provoking) other historians, has resulted in our knowing so much more about – and understanding better – the armies and warfare, the societies and states of early modern Europe.

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Roberts, Michael (1967/1995). The Military Revolution 1560–1660. In: Michael Roberts, ed., Essays in Swedish History. London: Macmillan, 195–225. [reprinted in Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate, 13–35]. Rodger, Nicholas A.M. (2011). From the ‘Military Revolution’ to the ‘Fiscal-Naval State’. Journal of Maritime Research 13.2 (December), 119–28. Rogers, Clifford J. (1993). The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War. Journal of Military History 57.2 (April), 241–78. [reprinted in: idem, ed., The Military Revolution Debate, 55–93]. ——— ed. (1995). The Military Revolution Debate. Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press. Rowlands, Guy (2002). The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV. Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Storrs, Christopher (1999). War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2006). The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— ed. (2009). The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson. Farnham: Ashgate. ——— (2016). The Spanish Resurgence 1713–1748. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Storrs, Christopher and Scott, Hamish M. (1996). The Military Revolution and the European Nobility. War in History 3.1 (January), 1–41. Symcox, Geoffrey (1974). The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697: From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course. Hague: Nijhoff. Thompson, Irving A.A. (1976). War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620. London: Athlone Press. ——— (1995). ‘Money, Money and Yet More Money!’ Finance, the Fiscal State, and the Military Revolution: Spain 1500–1650. In: Clifford J. Rogers, ed.,The Military Revolution Debate. Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 273–98. Wilson, Peter H. (1996). German Women and War, 1500–1800. War in History 3, 127–60. ——— (2009). Prussia as a Fiscal-Military State, 1640–1806. In: Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson. Farnham: Ashgate, 95–124. ——— (2011). The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Appendices

Appendix 9.1 Roberts, Michael (1967). The Military Revolution 1560–1660. In: Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History. London: Macmillan, 195–225 [reprinted in Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate, 13–35] It is a historical commonplace that major revolutions in military techniques have usually been attended with widely ramifying consequences. The coming of the mounted warrior, and of the sword, in the middle of the second millennium BC; the triumph of the heavy cavalryman, consolidated by the adoption of the stirrup, in the sixth century of the Christian era; the scientific revolution in warfare in our own day – these are all recognised as major turning-points in the history of mankind. The period in the history of the art of war with which I shall try to deal … brought changes which may not improperly be called a military revolution; and that revolution … exercised a profound influence upon the future course of European history. It stands like a great divide separating medieval society from the modern world. Yet it is a revolution which has been curiously neglected by historians. The experts in military history have mostly been content to describe what happened, without being overmuch concerned to trace out broader effects; while social historians have not been very apt to believe that the new fashions in tactics, or improvements in weapon-design, were likely to prove of much significance for their purposes. …. Yet purely military developments, of a strictly technical kind, did exert a lasting influence upon society at large. They were the agents and auxiliaries of constitutional and social change; and they bore a main share of responsibility for the coming of that new world which was to be so … unlike the old. The military revolution which fills the century between 1560 and 1660 was in essence … just one more attempt to solve the perennial problem of tactics. [Roberts 1967/1995, 13]

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Appendix 9.2 Parker, Geoffrey (1996). The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recent explanations of this unusual readiness to resort to armed conflict have almost always centred around the idea of a ‘military revolution’ in early modern Europe …. [T]he changes in early modern Europe … not only transformed the conduct of war at home but also decisively accelerated the progress of Europe’s expansion overseas … For in large measure the ‘rise of the West’ depended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former; and it is the argument of this book that the key to the westerners success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed ‘the military revolution’. [1–4]

Appendix 9.3 Parrott, David (2012). The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The aim of this book is to examine the success and transformations of military enterprise – warfare organised … by private contractors in early modern Europe (c. 1500–1700). Military enterprise …. includes extensive delegation of responsibility and authority to include the supply of food, clothes and equipment to troops, and the manufacturing and distribution of munitions and weapons. … Some fundamental aspects of the financing of war were placed in the hands of private military contractors or their agents, who also ensured that their credit and costs were recovered, by force if necessary, even when the army was on the territory of its notional employer. To anyone familiar with the historical debate about early modern military change, it will be significant that the key decades of this ‘military devolution’ lie between c. 1560 and 1660, the same period identified by Michael Roberts … for the chronology of an early modern ‘military revolution’. From its inception … this thesis that military change could be linked to wider processes of political and social transformation has been the key organising principle for analysis and discussion of early modern war and society. Although mercenaries, military enterprise and private contracting are mentioned in many discussions of early modern military revolution, their significance seems rarely to have been fully accepted or appreciated. … A central aim of the present study is to present a much more extensive and forceful case for the significance of military privatisation and to subject the concept of military revolution, indeed the whole case for early modern military discontinuity and change, to scrutiny. [1–2]

10 Expansion, space and people Dagmar Freist

The traditional storyline At first sight, the history of European overseas expansion seems to be familiar enough. Most surveys date the process back to the first exploratory voyages of the fourteenth century towards the Northern Coast of Africa, Canary Islands, and Madeira. These early journeys extended the Mediterranean trading networks into the Atlantic and created the first relatively accurate mappings of the Canary Islands (Fernández-Armesto 1987; Bartlett 1993). However, better known is the story of the Genoa-born merchant, explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus, who set out on 3 August 1492 to seek the western sea passage to India under the sponsorship of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I. Drawing on ancient and medieval cartographers, Columbus misconceived longitude and latitude as well as time and space, and eventually reached the islands of the Bahamas. His contemporary Amerigo Vespucci was fascinated by the new land discovered and quickly grasped that there was a whole new continent to explore. The region was called the ‘West Indies’ at the time, but the continent came to be known as America, derived from the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name. Although they were not the first to set foot on what is today known as the Caribbean islands and the American continent, these expeditions initiated a period of Europe-driven expansion, conquest, slavery and colonisation (Canny and Morgan 2011). The early protagonists Spain and Portugal began to be overtaken by France and the emerging seapowers of the Netherlands and England from the late sixteenth century onwards (Klooster 2011). In addition to political patronage, a key role in this early phase of colonisation was played by joint-stock companies who were granted a trade monopoly by the state (Tracy 1991; Scammel 1992). Like the British East India Company, they often fulfilled multiple roles as commercial transcontinental enterprises, government-backed military instruments, and quasi-governmental powers with farreaching rights to safeguard the interests of the respective European states (Bowen et al. 2012). An early form of capitalism was thus the driving force behind European overseas expansion and modernisation. Coupled with ‘favourable political, institutional and cultural feedbacks and spin-offs connected to ever increasing flows of commodities shipped into European ports from all over

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the world’, expansion, economic growth, the rise of consumer societies, social transformation and democratisation went hand in hand (O’Brien 2010). Due to fortunate circumstances of an advantageous ecology, a unique institutional and cultural heritage from Greek and Roman cultures, as well as the ability to exploit its endowments, Europeans were the driving force behind globalisation, statebuilding, possessive individualism, a restless rationalism and modernisation without parallel worldwide (Bryant 2006, 405). Colonial influence on everyday life in Europe was broad and multisided, however it was perhaps most visible in new consumer possibilities, and the pursuit of European fashions. The import and logistics of colonial goods stimulated technical innovations, new products, marketing strategies and commercial institutions. From the very beginning this process of colonisation had a powerful spiritual and political ally in the Catholic Church. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the first of several papal bulls, which asserted the rights of Spain and Portugal to colonise, convert, and enslave the Americas and its indigenous people as subjects. In the Treaty of Tortesillas (1494), the newly discovered lands outside Europe were divided between Spain and Portugal along a north–south meridian 370 Leagues (970 miles) west of the Cape Verde islands. The lands east of the demarcation were assigned to Portugal, and west of the line to Spain. In 1529, the Treaty of Zaragoza specified the antemeridian to the line of demarcation specified a few decades earlier, thus dividing the other side of the world. Whereas Spain and Portugal observed these treaties fairly well, other European powers, especially Protestant nations after the Reformation, generally ignored them. The first division of the world was accompanied by the establishment of Catholic missions in the Americas and Asia with the explicit aim of conversion (Boxer 1978). The support and legitimation of European expansion by the Church in the name of salvation reassured both governments and individuals, while providing them with a language of justification: colonisation and conversion were necessary for the benefit of the world. In support of this contemporary interpretation, the backwardness and – in religious terms – the pending damnation of nonEuropeans – was constructed in learned treatises, travel accounts and popular print against an image of white European superiority (cf. Chapter 2: Identities and encounters). One of the most striking examples is probably the standard definition and treatment of enslaved men, women and children from the African continent as ‘cargo’ throughout the early modern period (see Figure 10.1). In spite of the violence that empires inflicted and the lasting inequalities they created, the discursive naturalisation of colonialism, exploitation and slavery as a ‘normal’ process of expansion made possible the positive coinage of this historical period as ‘empire building’ (Darwin 2008).

Challenges The above narrative has been challenged for a number of reasons which can be grouped under ‘science politics’ and ‘new methodological and theoretical approaches’ to the history of European expansion in general, and to colonial and

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Figure 10.1 This handwritten spreadsheet lists the number of male and female slaves including children traded against other types of cargo such as whiskey or textiles during the voyage of the French ship L’Abraham along the West coast of Africa. Compte general de La traitte Des Captifs Du Vaipeau [sic] Labraham [General Account of the trade of captives (slaves) of the ship L’Abraham, 1743]. TNA, HCA 32/97/1. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK

empire history in particular. This shift of perspective was as much a radical critique of the marginalisation of non-Western areas and its people in European and North-American academia as it was a plea for new research questions, which found a voice in the formation of postcolonial studies over the past three decades. Scholars have recast the focus of analysis from the success story of empire building to examine the complex social and political power relationships that sustained colonialism, and its underlying narratives. Originally associated with literary and cultural studies (Ashcroft et al. 1995), other academic disciplines like ethnology and anthropology followed suit. What do postcolonial studies stand for? Obviously, as with any theory, there is no simple answer nor a clearly cut definition. However, they share a family resemblance in their rejection of essentialist categories and universalisms. Instead, the focus is on language and discourses, its inherent structures and meanings, power relations, multiplicity, and emancipatory social critique (Bachmann-Medick 2016, Chapter IV). Being less concerned with issues of causal explanations, cultural, sociological and historical approaches are more interested in the genealogy of historically evolving categories and practices (Bhambra 2011, 654). Rather than order,

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hierarchies and systems, poststructuralist theory emphasises ambiguities, multiplicity and subjectivity (Dillet et al. 2013). Its intellectual shift towards emancipatory social critique and ethics, with a special focus on race, gender and class, culminates in critical theory (Roudinesco 2008). Positing that our access to reality is solely through language, scholars study competing discourses in their struggle for hegemony. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the key figures in the emergence of discourse analysis, ‘truth is a discursive construction and different regimes of knowledge determine what is true and false’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 13) (cf. Chapter 17: Turns and perspectives) An important field within postcolonial studies are subaltern studies, which started in 1982, when the historian of modern India, Ranajit Guha, launched an annual series of the same name (Chakrabarty 2000a; Chaturvedi 2012, vii–xiv). Focusing on colonial domination and the fissure between elite and subaltern spheres, taking colonial and postcolonial India as a case in point, representatives aim to deconstruct power relations and to render subaltern groups a voice of their own both as historical subjects and as researchers. In her influential essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has pointed to the difficulties of regaining a voice without reproducing existing power relations and the dominance of western academia (Spivak 2010). However, that does not imply that any form of academic knowledge is per se eurocentric, a thesis put forth by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his well-known Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000b, 5–6). Such a reading, so his critics, is based on a relativistic cultural determinism and the idea of an essentialist cultural difference (Ahuja 2004, 356, 358). Subaltern studies formed the first Indian historiographical school which received a lot of audience response in the West. At the same time there is an intense debate within Indian historiography and beyond about its merits and shortcomings (Chaturvedi 2012). Whereas its focus on history from below and on discourses of domination has been welcomed, subaltern studies have been criticised for their ‘folding back of all history into the single problematic of Western colonial cultural domination’, creating new ‘essentializing categories of “subaltern” and “autonomy” in the sense of assigning to them more or less absolute, fixed, decontextualized meanings and qualities’ (Sarkar 2012, 316, 304). The result is a glossing over of existing and historically identifiable asymmetric power relations, forms of exploitation, and the legacies of colonialism (Young 2001, 1–12). Historians therefore argue for a more nuanced and differentiated analysis of the social in global and colonial contexts by marrying discourse analysis and the study of social practices, in other words, to reinsert agency and the social in our historical analysis. A second important intellectual and scientific orientation which situates the study of European overseas expansion within a wider spatial and academic context is the emergence of African Diaspora Studies in the late twentieth century. Its key concern is to create an awareness and to contribute to our knowledge of African agency and multiple forms of belonging in transnational and global perspectives that cannot be reduced to the Atlantic-American slave trade diasporas. The transatlantic triangular trade operating between the late sixteenth and the

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early nineteenth century moved between 10–12 million men, women and children as slaves from the African continent to work on European-owned plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas (Solow 1991), resulting in the foundation of highly exploitative and racialised societies there (Black 2006). Accounts of African slave diasporas thus tended to oscillate ‘between the three tropes of victimization, vindication, and volition, that is, the racial structures of oppression and their impact, the affirmation of the Africans’ (whether of the diaspora itself or Africans more generally) histories and humanity, and experiential and epistemic assertions of agency’ (Zeleza 2005, 50). It took the Black Consciousness movement since the 1970s and the rise of Black Studies to complement the perception of the African presence in the Atlantic as the site of the repressed (Hall 2003, 243) with studies on African diaspora cultures and identities (Gilroy 1993). However, criticism has been voiced of the ‘analytical tendency to privilege the … Anglophone, indeed the American branch of the African diaspora’ (Zeleza 2005, 36), when others have existed around the world since Roman times (Hamilton 2006). This wider perspective opens up ‘the multiple geographical, economic, philosophical and aesthetic constituents’ of African cultures and identities during the early modern period (Crisman 2000, 17). Until recently, debates between social and cultural historians have been limited to national and European historiographies. The critical reassessment of European overseas expansion and colonialism has been mainly in the hands of scholars from cultural and literary disciplines who set the research agenda, themes, theories and methods. However, historians have urged ‘more historically grounded directions’ in a proliferating field ‘where the material impulses to colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression, have receded from view’ (Parry 2004, 3). Growing numbers have started to engage with the question of how to pay justice to the complexities of doing history in a global context without falling into the traps of historical determinism or postmodern relativism and simplifications. Future studies will need to be sensitive to the foreclosure of possibilities through generalisations or the production of essentialist binary oppositions and more aware of the specific social, cultural and ethnic composition and histories of societies around the world which do not necessarily overlap with political borders in a given time and space.

Methods and theories The study of European overseas expansion set in a global context is probably one of the most vibrant and vastly changing fields of historical research with respect to its thematic scope, theoretical foundation and methodological challenges. It ranges from national historiographies of empire building and the emergence of area studies to comparative histories, concepts of connectedness, and most recently the mapping of global microhistory. National historiographies can be defined as histories of individual European nations, foremost of all former colonial powers such as Spain, Portugal, France,

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the Netherlands, Britain and Denmark, as well as of the states arising out of former colonies. These national histories – studies of empire, histoire coloniale – tend to focus on various aspects of imperial dominion, governance, trading companies, slavery, warfare, resistance and post-colonial state formation and identity building. Despite differences in scope and focus, titles such as History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983) or ‘The Dutch Atlantic Economies’ (De Vries 2005) signify this approach. While helpful to understand the specific nature of early modern empires as political, economic, cultural and social structures, offering men and women opportunities for a new life and exposing them to inequalities and violence, these approaches tend to overlook ‘transnational processes in which histories of diverse places become connected and interdependent’ (Hunt 2014, 59). In a similar vein, there is the misleading tendency of national historiographies to examine specific empires in isolation, creating the impression of ‘a singular, hermetically-sealed worldsystem’ (Potter and Saha 2015, 4). African, Asian and other area studies which were founded in Western/US academia after 1945 under the impression of decolonisation and the Cold War, shared some of the shortcomings of national or empire histories, being distinctively European approaches to the non-Western world, and treating non-European geographical or territorial areas as homogeneous entities. Most area studies operated with the conceptual framework of transformation and modernisation, and they were considered by contemporary advocators to be an educational instrument of the West to overcome its provincialism as well as being of strategical value in a fast-changing world (Hall 1947, 14; Szanton 2008). One reaction to these problems is to take a comparative perspective. Whereas the first studies focused on divergences and convergences within empires, later studies sought to decentre Europe and integrate it within world history. Already in the late 1980s, historians started to address comparative aspects of ‘European transatlantic conquest and colonization’ by studying collective experiences and challenges such as the sea crossing itself, the encounter with indigenous populations on arrival, or the estrangement from the mother countries, which culminated in the emergence of ‘distinctive colonial identities’ in the Atlantic world (Elliott 1987, 4; cf. Elliott 2006). Others focused on comparable systems such as plantations in different colonies of the same region (Burnard and Garrigus 2016) or compared different areas within empires such as British colonies in the Americas and in India (Bowen et al. 2012). Furthermore, there is also a growing number of comparative histories of the maritime world focusing on regions bordering oceans (Vink 2007). These comparative histories have generated a number of methodological questions and historical debates concerning the underlying parameters of comparisons. These concerns are even more pressing when it comes to comparing empires and regions as well as economic, social, cultural and political phenomena around the world. At stake were grand narratives of European exceptionalism since the sixteenth century, and historians started to ask whether the boundaries of empire were the best parameters for comparative analysis. Whereas

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the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty emphasised the ‘infinite incommensurabilities’ around the globe (Chakrabarty 2000b, 254), economic historian and sinologist Kenneth Pomeranz created ‘the great divergence’ model on the basis of his study of global comparisons and connections taking England and the Yangzi Delta as a case in point. He engaged with the old question of how to explain the divergent paths of economic growth that eventually produced a clear divide within the world economy into affluent (north) western and poor eastern and southern nations. Based on Marc Bloch’s methodological advice to ‘carefully specified and reciprocal comparisons of economics with comparable geographical endowments’, Pomeranz found ‘a world of surprising resemblances’ across Eurasia with similar structural, political and intellectual conditions until the eighteenth century that would have facilitated equal economic growth and social transformation (Pomeranz 2000, page 31–68; cf. O’Brien 2010). Although both theses provoked a lot of critical responses, they contributed to a rethinking of the methods and theoretical frameworks of doing history beyond the nation state, as well as to reconsidering the great divides between economic, social and cultural history. Students of early modern Europe started to recognise that the decentering historian does not tell the story of the past from the vantage point of a single part of the world or of powerful elites, but rather widens his or her scope, socially and geographically, and introduces plural voices into the account. (Davis 2011, 190) The focus shifted from political and territorial entities to networks and connectivities which transcend the borders imposed by empires. The term ‘connected history’ goes back to an essay calling for an unearthing of the ‘fragile threats that connected the globe’ (Subrahmanyan 1997, 762). This fostered a whole new range of research priorities: the analysis of transnational trading networks independent of royal or chartered companies (Lamikiz 2010), a rethinking of diasporas and cross-cultural exchange (Trivellato 2009), knowledge transfer and innovation, long distance communication, or family histories across oceans (Rothschild 2011). These show the complex ways in which individuals and groups created global connections, within and across boundaries of empires, pursuing a range of often conflicting aims. A common insight is that ‘empires were rooted in inter-personal relations and exchanges between people of different nationalities and diverse religious affiliations, belonging to various ethnic groups’ (Antunes and Polónia 2016, 8). Entanglements of regions as well as of people across time and space came into sharper view. The ensuing question of how to best analyse human agency within large spatial formations and periods prompted historians to rethink global history from a micro-historical perspective (Berg 2013). Most studies of ‘global microhistory’ in the early modern period focus on the movement of people, i.e. the spatial expansion of social interaction. Their

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common denominator, according to Francesca Trivellato, is to ‘write microhistorically inflected studies of men and women whose lives transcended narrowly bounded geographical, religious, and linguistic areas’ (Trivellato 2011). The micro is therefore seen as an intrinsic part of the macro and vice versa, with many authors arguing that ‘a micro- and biographical scale can best portray the entanglement of cultural traditions’. Having asked ‘How does one write on the scale of individuals from a global perspective?’, one proposed that world historians should experiment with individual life stories (Andrade 2010, 574). Consequently, he interweaves his narrative of the Dutch–Japanese war in the seventeenth century with the stories of a Chinese farmer, two African boys, and a warlord. John-Paul Ghobrial has also favoured a biographical entry point into global history, but argued that ‘we must adopt a more refined approach that more effectively incorporates what we have learned in recent years from scholars working on questions of subjectivity and the history of everyday life’ (Ghobrial 2014, 58). For him, at the heart of global story telling is the importance of local and personal contexts (see Appendix 10.1). These approaches have engaged with another question posed in recent debates: ‘What happens to human identity, subjectivity, agency, and the like when we supersize scale in historical analysis?’ (Aslanian et al. 2013, 1438). The rediscovery of the subject in historical analysis has re-installed the conceptual idea of an autonomous subject shaping the unfolding of history. Consequently, microhistorically inflected global histories tend to focus on individual lives and their rootedness in a specific historical context often describing in much detail agency and the motives behind it. In spite of valuable insights into individual global lives, these approaches often lack an explicit epistemological foundation to address larger questions and fail to provide the analytical tools allowing us to see how multiple connectivities across time and space had a deeper impact on the social fabric of society (De Vito and Gerritsen 2018). Recent studies have thus suggested to turn to social practices and the constitution of global social sites (Freist 2017c). In spite of the growing sensitivity to the complexities of the field, however, it is still notable that the history of many places ‘starts’ with the arrival of European boats, robbing indigenous people of a prior past in the collective memory and text books. So are the ‘historical agenda and categories … still just Western and Eurocentric’ (Davis 2011, 191)? The question is hardly surprising: primary sources usually survive in archives linked to empires and nations. Important steps towards ‘decolonizing indigenous histories’ are being made in projects such as the pioneering global archaeological studies of colonialism in the mid-1990s (Lightfood 1995; Rubertone 2000). The latter strive to demarcate longue durée continuities as well as historical entanglements of indigenous and colonial societies. Apart from attempting to overcome eurocentrism by writing relational histories and rethinking traditional categories, a further key issue facing researchers is how to conceptualise the space of interaction if the nation state can no longer serve as the only appropriate unit.

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Spaces On early modern maps of Europe, shifting boundaries reflect dynamics such as dynastic conflicts, wars of succession, state formation and personal unions. Ireland, for instance, came under English control in the sixteenth century; Austria and Hungary, Saxony and Poland were governed in personal union by the elector of Saxony (1697–1706/1709–1763); the Danish kingdom comprised present-day Norway, Holstein, Greenland and Iceland (and until 1645 parts of western and eastern Sweden and Gotland), while Poland was divided many times throughout its history amongst its neighbours. Throughout our centuries, most of Europe was in permanent warfare, which left behind devastation, religious refugees, migrants and vagabonds, and had repercussions way beyond the Continent (cf. Chapter 9: War and the military revolution). Therefore, one would expect that a world map of the early modern period would show similar changes of boundaries (Bentley et al. 2015). Prior to the fifteenth century powerful non-European empires thrived. The Aztecs and the Inca governed large numbers of diverse populations in the Americas. The empire of Mali controlled much of West Africa and participated in the trade of enslaved Africans and gold for Indian textiles. Further empires emerged in India, China and Japan, while the Ottomans expanded along the southern coasts of the Mediterranean and way into south-east Europe from the fifteenth century. All showed first signs of urbanisation, especially around naval ports, and the growth of profitable trading networks that crossed the Indian Ocean to India, South East Asia and East Africa. Asia was the global commercial hub in the early modern period with wellconnected Hindu, Armenian, Muslim and Jewish traders, the emergence of port-states, and merchant communities in the Indian Ocean (Pearson 2010, 326; Aslanian 2014) trading in Chinese silk and porcelain, Indian cotton textiles and indigo, precious stones, and spices such as pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg. European powers invaded these world regions, established trading posts, forts and factories as well as subjected whole populations to their colonial governance. Broadly speaking, from the fifteenth century Spanish dominion expanded across the Caribbean islands, the southern part of North America, Central America, and the western half of South America, Morocco, the Western Sahara, and what is today Equatorial Guinea, as well as the Spanish East Indies, including what is today the Philippines, Marianas, Carolines, and Guam. Following initial African coastline excursions, the Portuguese established numerous trading posts along the Continent’s west and east coasts, in the Persian Gulf, along the Indian coast, in Ceylon, Malacca (Malaysia), and on the Molucca islands (present-day Indonesia), as well as colonies in Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique. With the overseas expansion of the Netherlands and England from the early seventeenth century, Portugal lost most of its trading posts along the African and Indian coast.

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The Dutch colonial empire was administered and controlled almost exclusively by the Dutch East and West India Companies which exercised farreaching governmental, military and judicial rights. Over the course of the seventeenth century the East India Company conquered the majority of the former Portuguese trading posts along the Indian coast and founded new settlements in Batavia (now Jakarta/Indonesia), North America and the Caribbean. Along the West coast of Africa, Dutch chartered companies took over the Portuguese slaving post of Elmina and they established a Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. From the mid-seventeenth century, Britain and the Netherlands rivalled each other worldwide over the most lucrative trading posts, with numerous wars over a period of 200 years. During this period they started to adopt the system of sugar plantations from Portuguese Brazil which required the import of huge numbers of slaves to the Caribbean and Latin America (Black 2006). In North America, thirteen colonies were established in the seventeenth century, most of them with the original support of chartered companies such as the Virginia company, and populated with migrants from Britain, who, in their majority, had left for religious reasons. These colonies intruded on indigenous populations, and they were under British rule until the American war of Independence (1775–1783). In Asia, rivalry with the Dutch eventually led to a division of economic interests between the spice trade (for the Netherlands), and the textile trade (Britain). Britain gradually acquired pre-eminence in the eighteenth century, with the East India Company subjecting parts of the Indian continent, and Australia and New Zealand falling under British rule. In 1802, the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was added to the British empire. In 1630 France entered the stage as a new player, after preliminary excursions to Newfoundland in the sixteenth century. The first French colonial settlements were established in North America in 1605 with the foundation of Port Royal in Acadia, followed by Quebec in 1608, which became the centre of New France (Canada). French territorial claims in North America further comprised Louisana at the Mississippi River and extensive trading networks along fortified trading posts extending through the Great Lakes into Canada. From the 1630s France established several colonies in the Caribbean, including Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia (Butel 1999, 113f.; Pritchard 2004; Marzagalli 2011); from 1673, similar expansion began on the Indian subcontinent. Like its European counterparts, France participated in the indigenous and transatlantic slave trade, gaining control of Senegal as well as of the island of Gorée, where many slaves were shipped from (Peabody and Grinberg 2007; Rushforth 2012). In the seventeenth century, therefore, European commercial networks and the colonial trade in spices, slaves, sugar, coffee, textiles and precious stones were established along the coasts of the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, competing with, or integrating older, overlapping trading networks within and between the Americas, Africa and South East Asia, and connecting them across the oceans with Europe. The flow of goods was paralleled with the flow of people, who migrated in the wake of colonial powers either as members of

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colonial administration and military, as members of chartered companies, as forced labour, as slaves, or as part of informal and self-organised networks, independent of colonial powers. The recent interest in such networks has started to bring to light the role of women in long-distance trade, low-level local exchange of goods, as economic brokers and as plantation in these early modern global spaces (Raapke 2019; Excerpt 10.1).

Excerpt 10.1 Extracts from an unsigned manuscript letter in French sent from St Pierre, Martinique, to St Eustache, addressed to the writer’s sister or sister-in-law, Marie Rose Patrice ‘Manon’ Ruste de Rezeville, née Emerigon, daughter of Charles Marie Emerigon, Conseiller du roi au conseil souverain de la Martinique [a royal official], and married to Louis François Ruste de Rezeville (30 January 1781). TNA, High Court of Admiralty HCA 30/345 [not numbered]. (Translated from the original French by Annika Raapke) Yesterday was a good day for us, dear Manon, a little fleet from St. Eustache came into our harbour, bringing us many letters from you, and a very long one from M. de Rezeville which gave me much pleasure, his praising me flatters me greatly, since I can fulfil my aims of being useful and agreeable to him; You praise me so much for the condition of the wares that, were I just a bit vain, I might think that I had worked wonders and that it were impossible to find the likes of me anywhere […] We have split the work, Marianne [a business associate] keeps the accounts for calicoes, calico kerchiefs and similar articles, and I for the quincailleries [hardware goods], this makes everything go more smoothly and we share the work that has become too extensive for one person; now everything gets done without our noticing it. I settle the accounts with Alix [a business associate], who only reports to me, and afterwards each of us records those wares we are responsible for in the book. I sold the Fayence to Mr. Arnaud, nothing was broken and everything thought to be very nice, the 9 small English hats are very pretty, I had them take 4 gourdes [local currency] a piece for them, which they find too expensive, I will have to let them go for 3 ½ gourdes. […] Send … me some of the most popular Madras-kerchiefs, which I had asked for in a list some time ago; you thought that not many of them had been sold, but I had counted in some I had ordered, now I am down to about a dozen of them; since they are the last, I will have to let them go for 5 ½ gourdes to get rid of them. I have no more Elixir de Nuit and hardly any Eau de Cologne left. The plain Muslin dresses only go for 21 #, they are very popular […].

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I talked to Alix about the kerchiefs you wanted to give her, she awaits those you ordered to make her choice; with regards to the skirt I would wait and not give her everything at once, if she behaves well I will tell her about it; for the rest it would mean carrying water to the well, for she is very well equipped with skirts of all sorts, it would be an expense for you which would give her no particular pleasure; if you still think it necessary to give her a present write to me in the usual way, no one shall know that I talked to you about it […].

Other previously neglected agents coming into sharper focus are sailors and their trading activities (Blakemore 2016, 777–778). Our increasing knowledge about the flow of goods and people has demonstrated the epistemological limits of national historiographies and empire building, and historians have reconsidered the natural, geographical and political entities of their analysis, treating Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and their borderlands as spaces enabling these multiple crossings, encounters, and interactions. Researchers have, in fact, started to conceptualise the World Oceans as polycentric spaces, connecting their bordering coasts and hinterlands, and facilitating exchange and commerce (Armitage et al. 2018, 1–28). The formation of these larger spaces was the result of the movement of people, things and ideas of diverse origin, which enabled economic, social, cultural and religious interactions. In this sense, the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, has been defined as a hybrid space, middle ground, third space, or what is now termed the ‘broader Atlantic world’ (Putnam 2006, 616) (see Appendix 10.2). The Atlantic as a specific space of interconnectivities and shared characteristics has attracted a lot of research attention since the 2000s with a special focus on people, products and practices on the move (Williams 2009; Coffman et al. 2015; Armitage 2018). In contrast, the Pacific Ocean as a massive geography, a long temporality, and as a space of interaction, was less well researched (Freeman 2010), but it offers multiple vantage points due to its ‘different orientations, standpoints and ontologies of Pacific knowledge’ (Bashford 2018, 69), and is now attracting scholarly attention as one of the ‘most long-lived spaces of historical memory’ (Sivasundaram 2018, 31; cf. Matsuda 2012; Armitage and Bashford 2014). Its various historiographies provoke the question of definition – is it a singular Indian Ocean ‘system’, an integrated space with a shared historical consciousness of its diverse bordering populations in South Asia, China, and the Middle East, or rather a multi-dimensional space in which competing religious, social and political ideas are acted out, a space of disaggregation rather than integration (Sivasundaram 2018, 34–36)? What do oceanic histories offer conceptually for our understanding of European overseas expansion in the context of global history and connectivities? They are often trans-local studies, illuminating the facilitation of commerce and social interaction beyond the nation state or empire for a number of reasons: oceans do ‘not align with any one polity’, they separate continents just as well

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as they connect local port cities and its hinterlands, which in turn encompass many divergent histories and population (Armitage et al. 2018, 4–5), and they defy national characteristics. However, historians disagree on the role of oceans as spaces of connectivities. Whereas many historians have stressed that oceans connect lands, peoples, cultures, and ideas, others have focused instead on disaggregation (Sivasundaram 2018). The recent emergence of oceanic histories, however, is motivated by the aim of engaging what have been vastly separated historiographies … despite their undoubted inter-relation, spatial entanglement and human and non-human connectivity. That distancing has occurred because of the politics of empires, nations, area studies, indigeneity and internationalism. (Armitage et al. 2018, 24). New facets of European overseas expansion become visible when we look beyond imperial history and integrate the dynamics of oceans as places of interaction and separation. This can best be demonstrated when zooming in on a case study like Suriname, which offers a good example of the complex social, ethnic and religious constitution of early modern indigenous, transoceanic and multinational colonial societies. Situated at the east coast of South America as part of the region called Guiana, Suriname was characterised by a religious and ethnic mixture of people of diverse origin, and different legal and social status, including the native groups of the Arawak and Carib, the Maroons, Dutch, English, French and German migrants of different confessional backgrounds including Moravian missionaries from German territories, Denmark and the Swiss Confederation, and Huguenots from France (Carlin 2002; Meel 2015, 131–164). The first European expeditions to the Guianas came from France, the Netherlands, Ireland and England in search of gold, and to establish trading links with the Amerindians. They were probably encouraged by Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), which created the image of a rich Amerindian empire. The first permanent European settlement was established in 1650 by the British in Paramaribo, who ceded their part of Suriname to the Netherlands in 1667 in exchange for New Amsterdam (renamed New York City) (Fatah-Black 2015, 16–40). Throughout the eighteenth century, and until it gained its independence in 1973, Suriname was controlled by the Dutch, apart from a brief period of British rule between 1799 and 1815. The Suriname Society, a private company founded by the City of Amsterdam, the Dutch West Indies Company, and the Van Sommelsdijck merchant family, governed the colony. The Society negotiated the sale of Suriname products to Europe, while marketing metropolitan goods to Suriname, invested in the slave trade, and represented the direct governmental link to the Dutch republic. Members of the colonial administration as well as a large number of merchants, craftsmen and soldiers from various European countries, among them many Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, settled along the coast and along the River

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Suriname and the Commewijne River and displaced the Arawaks and Warao, who had used to live there, further inland. During the eighteenth century the European population grew to about 3,000 people, a third of whom were Jews, whilst the rest was made up of Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans and Moravians (Kellenbenz 1966, 154–155). Among the largest festivals celebrated by the population regardless of religion was the Jewish Purim festival (Ben-Ur 2013). Numerous plantations were set up in Suriname for the purpose of cultivating coffee, cocoa, sugar cane, cotton, and timber (Heijer 2011; Fatah-Black 2014). To supply the workforce, more than 100,000 people were forcibly taken to Suriname by ship from what is now Ghana, Angola, Benin and Togo. These people, who numbered about 50,000 by 1800, had to work as slaves on the c. 452 plantations and in numerous smaller enterprises, amongst them also Moravian businesses. Escaped slaves, known as Maroons, retreated into the back country where they lived side by side with the Amerindian population, developed their own social and political structures and lived their own culture. At the same time they positioned themselves politically and repeatedly attacked the structures of colonial rule (Price 1996). Amongst the better-known Maroon societies in Suriname were the Saramaka or Saramacca, who the Moravians were in contact with through the mission station in the Suriname hinterland at Neu-Bambey, and the Ndyuka (Arends 2002; Smith 2002). Given the mixture of people and backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that both local produce as well as imports came to be traded through the networks of shopkeepers, craftsmen, pharmacists, and European settlers in open challenge to the monopoly of Dutch trade (Klooster and Oostindie 2018). Sephardic Jews, descendants of new Christians who had migrated from Spain to the Ottoman empire, Portugal, and north-western Europe (especially to the rising commercial centres of Amsterdam and Hamburg), eventually left Europe for the Americas, first and foremost Brazil. They were joined by Ashkenazim who had escaped from poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe, and also migrated in second or third generation via Hamburg, Amsterdam and London to the Americas, where they engaged in the cultivation and commerce of sugar. In spite of a latent and powerful anti-Semitism, which prevailed among colonial societies and repeated well-known patterns of early modern European antiSemitism (such as accusations of Sabbath-breaking, because they were ‘trading with Negroes … on the Lord’s Day’), Jews found a refuge from religious persecution especially in English and Dutch settlements (Zacek 2015, 98, 101). The first signs of Jewish life in Suriname can be traced back to 1662, when Jews started to leave Brazil in fear of inquisitorial persecution, and began to settle elsewhere in the Atlantic world. In 1667, Jews in Suriname were allowed the rights of citizenship and the free exercise of their religion, and a few years later the first congregation was formed on a small island of the Suriname river, Savannah. In the early eighteenth century, they built two synagogues for the Sephardic and Ashkenazic congregations and a graveyard. Jews, like their Christian European counterparts, engaged in the slave trade and by 1680, they owned about 30 plantations (Felsenthal and Gottheil 1896, 2–4; Dunn 1972, 60–62; Davis 2009, 271; Seeman 2018; Excerpt 10.2).

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Excerpt 10.2 Manuscript letter in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese from a Sephardic trader in Suriname to his brother in the Muslim port city Sale, Morocco (2 March 1702). TNA, High Court of Admiralty, HCA 30/230. (Translated from the original by Elvira Bronheim) Brother Benjamin, I received your letter of 25/Sept/1701, from which I am happy to know of your [good] health, allowing me to wish you [more good health] if that is your wish. With the present [letter] my wife accompanies me [in wishing you good health]; I had already told you of my new status since I took a wife, a daughter of Antonio Cardozo Baesa who has arrived with his family from Bordeaux, and in turn I hope his divine majesty allows us to live long years and that, in time, I may see you in the same [married condition] with a young woman of your choice. You say that you do not receive letters from me: and you are right; [But] you told me that your business affairs are so advanced that you may have no time to respond to my letters. The way I am treated, I will treat others. I have enough emotions as I see that, even though G.d [God] had favoured me, he has done so with such rigor, as for so many sons and daughters that He had, none [other than me] He had wanting more companionship, going from land to land, until the time of senility; and instead of giving them rest, he left them in want of rest always. But enough said, I do not want to hurt more than I am hurt. One day we will see each other, and I will tell you before anything else that I am very well regarded and that if G.d were to give me children near the time of my death, I’ll say that they may not know evil people [ … ] About the business you mention of the petacas [tobacco tins] 1000 and 500, I’ll tell you what I feel: because of living where you are, and with such amount of money, I don’t think it is profitable. I have been told that the seller wants to move to New York. If he goes to that land, then you can make this business, but let me tell you that he is going to juggle and that he will insist that you move there. Do not buy anything, look what you do; it may not be convenient. What I can truly tell you is that there is money to be made in shipping. Here every day we have ships coming with merchandise and there is loads of trade. And if none of this has effect and you want to come this way know this: whatever I may eat you will eat, and the same with the rest. G.d may let you find a way to assert the best in your eyes {many best wishes in code form} your brother who wishes you the best, and wishes to see you, Mossef Bueno de Mesquy. [Bueno de Mesquita?]

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Moravians, who had set up several missionary stations in Suriname since the mid-eighteenth century, also engaged in local as well as long-distance commercial trade. As one of the first Protestant missions, they had spread across Europe with flourishing communities in the Netherlands (Zeist), in Denmark (Christiansfeld in the Duchy of Schleswig), in England (London), Ireland, Greenland and Sweden (Stockholm) as well as in the Danish West Indies, the British colonies, Dutch Suriname and West and South Africa. The new Moravian ‘world communities’ were tied together by the movement of people, promotion of a strong religious identity, a missionary calling to promote their faith without necessarily including the converts into their tight-knit communities as Moravians, and with the help of a highly organised communication network (Mettele 2009, 124–190; Gillespie 2007; Lempa and Peucker 2010). Because of these translocal and transnational activities, religious networks were both paralleled by and intertwined with economic networks. Moravians were expected to gain their own livelihood in order to be independent of the outer world, and they developed successful economic and financial structures (Hüsgen 2013, 15–16; Carté Engel 2009). These professional networks became increasingly important with the foundation of Moravian settlements outside Europe in order to guarantee the flow of goods, religious objects, raw materials for artisan shops and particular Moravian-style clothes and textiles. In 1795, Moravians in Suriname, for instance, ordered grey, dark blue and dark green fabrics from their brethren in Germany, in order to tailor, wear and sell their specific plain and dark-coloured religious garments locally. One of the brethren also ordered ‘blue scarfes’ from Neudietendorf in the duchy of Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg in Germany, on ‘behalf of our negroes’, who, so he explained to his correspondent, had seen the beautiful dark-blue scarves that had recently been sent from Europe and had asked for the same (Freist 2017b, 99). These informal and self-organised networks were paralleled by those of numerous European traders who tried their luck in the Americas without being a member of any of the chartered Companies. Suriname ‘had a nodal character’ as a place ‘where actors from a range of European and colonial backgrounds came to organize their business’, and this was reflected in an increase of nonDutch shipping (Fatah-Black 2014, 55–56, 64). The mixture of people also left its imprint in languages. Europeans struggled to learn some of the local languages of the Amerindians (Carlin 2002, 11–45), forced laborers from the African continent and Maroons also learned local languages and thus contributed to the emergence of new languages: the Caribbean creole languages emerged due to cultural cross-overs of communication, and were appropriated by different ethnic groups (Davis 2009). One of the Moravians, Catharina Borck, has described the multicultural entanglements she encountered in Suriname in numerous letters to her friends in Christiansfeld. One conveys a vivid picture of the yearly Jewish procession around town to mark the ‘Yammans festival’, the Jewish holiday of Purim, which lasted a week and created a moment of cultural convergence with strong Afro-Creole attributes (Ben-Ur 2013, 32). ‘It always is a very noisy day’, she wrote to brother Peter;

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Dagmar Freist Jewish children dress up and wear masques in front of their faces; they walk up and down the lanes, accompanied by many black people who are either their servants or just onlookers to mark the great joy Yamman had brought. By the way, the shouting and singing especially among the negroes was very widespread, even if they were just pushing a cart or rowing a boat, they must sing, apart from that the poor people do not have much and must be pitied. (Freist 2017a, 74)

People The flow of people like Catharina Borck, a missionary, and of things have been studied predominantly as part of early modern European empire building, as members of well established trans-maritime trading networks, travelling in the wake of colonial administrators or state-owned trading companies, or in their religious roles and communication networks. However, the scale and social profile of migration is only beginning to emerge. Recent studies on ‘global biographies’ have illuminated the lives of numerous men and women who travelled across the world and left personal records (Subrahmanyan 2011; Armstrong and Chmielewski 2013; Fortin and Meuwese 2014; Rediker 2014). Among them are the sixteenth-century Muslim Leo Africanus (Davis 2006), the seventeenthcentury botanist Maria Sibylla Merian who went to Suriname (Davis 1995, 140–202), the Moroccan Jew Samuel Pallache (García-Artenal and Wiegers 1999), the members of the Johnstone family, who lived in Scotland and around the globe (Rothschild 2011), or the late seventeenth-century Elias of Babylon from Iraq who travelled widely across Europe and South America (Ghobrial 2014). Apart from these well documented people there are thousands of snapshots and glimpses of men, women and children on the move, of whom only a few letters or other documents survive (Freist 2017c; Excerpt 10.3).

Excerpt 10.3 A letter written (or dictated) by the servant Elisabeth Sprig, Baltimore, Maryland, to her father Mr John Sprigs White Smith in White Cross Street near Cripple Gate, London. TNA, High Court of Admiralty (HCA) HCA 30/258/2. (Transcription from the original by Dagmar Freist) Honred Father Maryland Sept. 22 1756 My being for ever banished from your sight, will I hope pardon the Boldness I now take of troubling you with these, my long silence has been purely owning to my undutifullness to you, and well knowing I had offended in the highest Degreee, put a tie to my tongue and pen, for fear

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I should be extinct from your good Graces and add further Trouble to you but too well knowing your care and tenderness for me so long as I retained my Duty to you, induced me once again to endeavour if possible, to kindle up that flame again. O Dear Father, believe what I am going to relate the words of truth and sincerity, and Ballance my former bad Conduct is due to my sufferings here, and then I am sure you’ll pitty your Destressed Daughter. What we unfortunat English People suffer here is beyond the probility of you in England to conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery, [ … ] then tied up & whipp’d to that Degree that you’d not serve an animal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even bedrudged way many Neagroes are better used, almost naked no shoes nor stockings to wear, and the comfort after slaving all Duering Masters pleasure, what rest we can get is to rap ourselves up in a blanket and ly upon the ground, this is the deplorable Condition your poor Betty endures, & now I beg if you have any Bowels of Compassion left show it by sending me some Relief, Clothing is the principle thing wanting, which if you should condiscent to, may easely send them to me by any of the Ships bound to Baltimore Town Patapsco River Maryland, & give me leave to conclude in Duty to you & Uncles and Aunts, and Respect to all Friends. Honred Father Your undutiful & Disobedient Child Elisabeth Sprigs Please to direct for me at Mr Rich: Crosses to be left at Mr Luxes Merch. [Merchant] In Baltimore Town Patapsco River Maryland

As we have always suspected, migration in the early modern period was much more global and socially, ethnically and religiously diverse than the traditional conceptualisation of cross-maritime migrant groups of ‘empire-builders’, consisting of office holders, soldiers, big trading companies and Jesuit missionaries to be followed by Protestant missions in the nineteenth century. And a lot more people than was hitherto assumed used the opportunities which presented themselves to express their feelings, experiences and expectations in letters and to convey them to faraway acquaintances, friends and relations. The UK’s National Archives at Kew hold about 160,000 letters as part of the so-called prize papers. They stem from captures which were part of the naval powers’ war strategy during the early modern European overseas expansion. Martial law required that a capture’s lawfulness be established in court – in Great Britain by the High Court of Admiralty (HCA). To this end, the ship’s

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entire cargo was secured as Prize Papers (personal and business correspondence, personal effects, trade goods) at the moment of capture. The letters in transit that survived among the papers and never got delivered, were written or dictated by men, women and children, who had been ‘on the move’ across the oceans between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, as subjects of colonial powers but also as free movers (see Figure 10.2). The letters convey a so far unknown social and gender dimension of the entanglement of the world in the early modern period. In contrast to wellknown correspondences between Europe and other continents, which usually represent established networks over a long period of time – family businesses, religious organisations, professional exchanges (Bannet 2005; Pearsall 2008;

Figure 10.2 Sail-cloth postbag with unopened letters carried on the ship Zenobia sailing from Bordeaux to New York and taken in 1812 by British privateers. TNA, HCA 32/1769/854. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK.

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Dierks 2009) – the prize papers are an unsorted, complex topographical and social cross section of letter-writers who were moving between continents (Van Gelder 2008; Van der Doe et al. 2008–2011; Cullen et al. 2013). The lack of contemporary selection by the historical writers themselves or their successors as well as the absence of any subsequent revision or sorting through by archive personnel has left behind ‘unarchived histories’ (Prize Papers 1652–1815). This enables modern research to access, without obstruction or censorship, early modern social practices, self- and world relations in a directness rarely encountered in other archival contexts. The letters are literally snapshots of the past, they offer uncensored glimpses into another world, and they allow us to see how people interacted across national and religious borders, and how they came to terms with the challenges of the unknown. They also convey unfiltered insights into everyday practices of the slave trade and attitudes of slave owners and others towards enslaved people (Dunn 2014). Furthermore, the documents surviving among the prize papers will enable more research into the scope of agency of enslaved men, women and children (Peabody 2017; see Figure 10.3 and Excerpt 10.4).

Excerpt 10.4 Letter by John Hinloch, Jamaica Westmoreland, sent to [an unnamed recipient in] England in September 1756, together with an inventory of slaves kept at the Mesopotamia Plantation, Jamaica Westmoreland, in the possession of the absentee plantation owner Joseph Foster Barham and his son. The National Archives UK, High Court of Admiralty, HCA 30/259 (Transcription from the original by Dagmar Freist) Upon receipt of yours of the 30s May I had the Negroes a[nd] Stock – Appraised according to your directions, which you have here enclosed [ … ] There are 5 Negroes belonging to M[iste]rs Barham on the Estate/ Man, Ambrose/Woman, Clarissa, a[nd] 3 boys Tom, Dublin a[nd] Luacon, if you can purchase Clarissa a[nd] Tom think it will be your Interest to do it as she is without exception the best working wench on the Estate, Tom is a man boy but Medium being as to his qualities, but he a[nd] Clarissa would chuse not to be separate their being some sort of Relation betwext them, as for Ambrose a[nd] the other two boy his Brothers they are so ill disposed in every shape that the Estate will be no worse for wanting them I forgote to mention that Clarissa is rather on the decline as otherwise I mean as to her age a[nd] therefore id cannot be supposed that she’ll continue so good as she is but for a few years a[nd] of Consequence is the less valuable [ … ]

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Figure 10.3 An inventory of the negroes and stock on Mesopotamia Estate (in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland, Jamaica) belonging to Joseph Foster Barham Esq. taken on 11 September 1756 before James Dunn and John Rickets, Esq. Joseph (1729–89) and his son Joseph Foster-Barham II (1759–1832) were absentee plantation owners who required their bookkeepers to compile regular inventories to keep track of changes in the slave population (Dunn 2014, 6). TNA, HCA 30/259. Crown Copyright courtesy of The National Archives, UK.

These letters were not written to be published, and they therefore allow us to retrace attitudes and thoughts which present something like a subjugated discourse of how to read the world and one’s place in it. Being a social cross section of letter writers including the illiterate who dictated their letters as we can

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tell from the handwritings of hired scribes, the prize papers challenge the thesis put forth by Dierks that it had been the middle class which created empires and itself by writing (Dierks 2009, 2–4, 282). Overall, through the abundance of letters and the variety of their countries, cities and villages of origin, early modern letter writing in its global diversity and polyphony, its spatial extent, its socio-cultural plurality and temporal entanglements as well as its specific historicity becomes apparent. While these letters show us in a so far unprecedented dimension the entanglement of the early modern world within and across continents, complementary documents which survived also bear witness to forms of belonging which cannot be reduced to ‘national identities’. The very first question of the standardised 32 interrogations presented to a ship’s crew in the event of capture in wartime shows that people were expected to have rather complex ways of belonging. It reads: Where were you born and where have you lived for these seven years last Past? Where do you now live and for how long have you lived in that place? To what prince or state, or to whom are you or have you ever been a subject? And of what Cities and Towns have you been admitted a Burgher or freeman, and at what time and in what manner have you been admitted? (Freist 2017c, 539–541)

Conclusion Accounts of overseas European expansion are still framed by a traditional storyline which invokes the role of Christopher Columbus in ‘discovering’ the ‘New World’, of central European colonial powers, empire building, the beginning of consumption, and the slave trade. For many economic historians, overseas European expansion also laid the foundation of the industrial revolution, and is one of several factors for the ensuing great divergence worldwide in prosperity and state building. Although still influential, this traditional storyline has been challenged for both its science policy bias and European centralism, and for its methodological blind spots. An exciting range of new research from literary/cultural studies, ethnography, archaeology, and history all inspired by new methodological and theoretical discussions within what has been coined the cultural turn, has introduced new perspectives and provoked at times fierce debates. Whereas research under the wide umbrella of cultural studies has contributed to a new sensibility of the discursive construction of the social, otherness and power relations, and focused on the narrative structures of texts, historians have reminded us of the harsh social and political everyday realities of migration, coercion and subjection, and the importance of social agency and empowerment. A key outcome of these new approaches and debates is a shift of perspective from the nation state and national historiographies to connectivities and the impact of informal ways of social interaction, economic networks, conflict management, and the scope for social agency. Furthermore, the fluidity of spaces through various forms of interactions and border crossings has been emphasised as central for the understanding

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of European overseas expansion as embedded in a global perspective of the movement of people and things. However, and this might be a challenge for further research, the focus on informal networks, on border crossings, empowerment and agency might run the risk of relativism. European overseas expansion cannot be explained without acknowledging the growing juridification of the social, and of international relations, and of the dynamic of state building and the economy. These processes, however, did not serve as a worldwide model, and they did not replace informal ways of interaction, the informal and the institutional co-existed and they were, to a degree, interdependent and constitutive of each other. The concluding quotation above shows this very well. Whereas state officials were eager to establish a clear ‘national’ identity, in this case, of members of a ship’s crew, the framing of the first question of the interrogation, and the judicial process itself demonstrate that multiple forms of belonging, unambiguousness, and border crossings were possible, and, in fact, anticipated.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Cullen, Louis., Shovlin, John and Truxes, Thomas, eds. (2013). The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lorimer, Joyce ed. (2006). Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana. First edn. London: Routledge. Prize Papers (1652–1815). National Archives London. High Court of Admiralty. (online at ‘Prize Papers Project’: www.prizepapers.de). Raleigh, Sir Walter (1596). The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana; with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa. London: Robert Robinson.

(B) Secondary literature Ahuja, Ravi (2004). Erkenntnisdruck und Denkbarrieren: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme der indischen Arbeitsgeschichte. In: Shalini Randerie, Martin Fuchs and Antje Linkenbach, eds, Konfigurationen der Moderne, Diskurse zu Indien. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 349–66. Andrade, Tonio (2010). A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Gobal Microhistory. Journal of World History 21.4 (December), 573–91. Antunes, Cátia and Polónia, Amélia, eds. (2016). Beyond Empires. Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800. Leiden: Brill. Arends, Jacques (2002). The History of the Suriname Creoles I. A Sociohistorical Survey. In: Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends, eds, Atlas of the Languages in Suriname. Leiden: Brill, 115–29. Armitage, David (2018). The Atlantic Ocean. In: David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds, Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 85–110.

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Appendices

Appendix 10.1 Putnam, Lara (2006). To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World. Journal of Social History 39.3, 615–30. [According to Lara Putnam, links between global history and microhistory emerge particularly in three respects:] firstly, in the significant role played in each by the ‘telling example’ that proves the existence of connections heretofore denied; secondly, in attempts to write prosopographical studies of specific cohorts whose lives crossed the Atlantic stage; thirdly, in Atlantic history’s unspoken reliance on microhistorical methods to establish the spatial frame of reference and geographic unit of individual inquiries. [616]

Appendix 10.2 Burnard, Trevor, ed. (2010). The Idea of Atlantic History. In: Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press (online at: www.oxfordbibliographies.com) [The Atlantic World has] no originary centre and it is not conceived as a world in which Europeans acted and other peoples reacted but instead was a constantly evolving and changing world in which ideas, peoples, and things from disparate areas continually interacted with other ideas, peoples and things in complex ways, initiating diverse and fascinating processes of historical change. [online]

11 Commerce and industry Maarten Prak

Introduction In 1982, economic historian Patrick O’Brien published a paper that is still relevant, even if we must assume that O’Brien would nowadays position himself slightly differently in the debate. In this paper, O’Brien challenged the view that the economic development and success of Western European countries, culminating in industrialisation and the growth of empire of the nineteenth century, were the direct result of the exploitation of non-Europeans during the preceding centuries. Without denying that the relations between world regions had intensified between 1500 and 1800, O’Brien set out to prove that the claim that rents from the exploitation of what was then called the ‘periphery’ had caused this momentous transformation of the balance of economic and political power in the world, was incorrect. That claim, O’Brien argued, ‘foundered on the numbers’ (O’Brien 1982, 16). Figures concerning the composition of international trade and national income demonstrated that the share of trade between the core and the periphery was simply too small to act as a game-changer. O’Brien’s paper is significant for this chapter for two reasons. The first is that it took a position in a debate that has become relevant again in light of the rise of ‘global history’, a new field to which O’Brien himself has made important contributions. His position in 1982 was that exogenous factors were relatively unimportant, compared to endogenous factors, when it comes to explaining the performance of the European economy in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The second significant element was O’Brien’s insistence on taking numbers seriously. By ignoring them, he claimed, other historians had overlooked evidence that was relevant to their argument – evidence that in fact invalidated that argument. In making this point, O’Brien was taking early modern numbers seriously, something that requires a certain leap of faith. These two themes will structure the contents of the chapter that follows. It will look at the early modern European economy asking what its dynamics were, especially in trade and industry. While doing so, the chapter will use numbers wherever possible, but it will also discuss the problems and pitfalls of those numbers.

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Big ideas from the 1970s and 1980s When O’Brien published his paper, he was challenging one of the most important historical master narratives of his time: that trade was the root cause of the emergence of the ‘modern world economy’. This view was firmly embedded in the work of the then dominant French Annales school. Not all of the Annales historians were convinced of this story; actually, some were generally sceptical about the possibilities of any serious economic progress before the Industrial Revolution. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie famously characterised the economy of the early modern era as one of ‘immobility’ (Le Roy Ladurie 1974). He and several of his colleagues wrote books that reaffirmed the pessimistic prediction by English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus in the early nineteenth century that populations tended to outgrow food supplies and were thus eating up any gains in welfare. This so-called neo-Malthusian school still has its supporters today (Hatcher and Bailey 2001, ch. 2; Clark 2007). However, the acknowledged leader of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel, had different ideas. In 1977 he published a small book, really an essay, titled Afterthoughts on Capitalism and Material Civilization. Because his three-volume history of the topic was only published in France two years later, and in English between 1982 and 1984, this was a slightly odd choice of title. The point however, was the same in both: slow changes did occur in all areas of the economies of the Middle Ages and early modern era, but the rise of capitalism was due to international trade, and in this area there was significant change as a result of the so-called discoveries. About the impact of ‘capitalism’ as such, Braudel was somewhat ambiguous (Braudel 1979, vol. 3). He thought it was important enough for a whole volume in his trilogy, but the other two volumes seemed to imply at the same time that for most Europeans, capitalism was a distant rumble rather than experienced on a daily basis. The rise of capitalism had already been explored by an American sociologist who was so heavily influenced by Braudel that he dedicated his own book to him, and would ultimately outbid the master by writing a four-volume history of world capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein’s interpretation was analytically more sophisticated than Braudel’s, because he proposed that the division between rich and poor countries in the modern world was really a division of labour (Wallerstein 1974, 2011). The origin of this division of labour, however, Wallerstein located in the global trade network as it emerged during the sixteenth century and developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In their identification of trade as the root cause of capitalism, Wallerstein and Braudel were united. It was specifically against Wallerstein’s interpretation that O’Brien mounted his attack (O’Brien 1982, 18). In doing so, he cunningly used Braudel’s vision of the pre-modern economy as one dominated by peasants and local markets to underline his own point that inter-continental trade was, perhaps not culturally but at least economically, of marginal importance. When he wrote his paper, O’Brien had not been able to look at Braudel’s latest statements on the subject, which could be read as supporting both positions. Even though Braudel and Wallerstein were popular and much admired around 1980, sceptics were uncomfortable with their focus on trade. Leftist historians complained that their emphasis on exchange ignored the transformation

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in the so-called forces of production (land, labour and capital) that Marx himself had seen as a necessary precondition for the rise of capitalism (Brenner 1977; cf. more recently Bavel 2016). Intuitively, moreover, it seemed difficult to exclude the countryside from any explanation of change in a society where the vast majority of the population worked in agriculture. Rival interpretations therefore emerged that either highlighted changes in agriculture itself (see ‘Introduction’ above), or the emergence of rural industry. In 1972 Franklin Mendels gave a name to those changes in industry by launching the term ‘proto-industry’. Mendels claimed that he had identified a new phenomenon in the early modern countryside that could explain the success of the Industrial Revolution even better than the invention of the steam engine. To be sure, this phenomenon had already been uncovered by Swiss ethnologist Rudolf Braun, but his 1960 dissertation was only available in German and he had failed to come up with the catchy phrase as well. Proto-industry, as both Braun and Mendels described it, was all about the interaction of family formation and agricultural labour markets. Traditionally, their argument ran, rural population growth had been held in check by the limited availability of farms. Children without the prospect of an independent livelihood were forced to remain bachelors. In the seventeenth century, however, a new source of income became available to them: rural weaving and spinning for merchants who exported to distant markets. These merchants found a willing workforce especially in regions with poor soils, where farmers were struggling. The textile workers used their own homes as workshops, were often forced to buy their own tools and even raw materials, but were ultimately depending on the merchants to sell the fruits of their labour. In these textile districts, the brake on marriage was lifted; indeed, it paid to marry early, because wives and children could all make a contribution to the household’s output. Proto-industry spread like wildfire, creating regions where factory production could subsequently take root because they had a trained workforce that could simply be moved out of their homes and into the factory. This theory of proto-industry seemed to make sense of a lot of disparate facts. The study of proto-industry thus became a cottage industry in its own right, producing a substantial literature, a literature that would inevitably complicate what initially looked like an attractively smooth story (cf. Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm 1977).

Quantitative methodologies for the early modern period Braudel’s work was methodologically old-fashioned, but his collaborators – like Pierre Chaunu, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – were pioneers of quantitative history (Burke 1990, 53–64; Carrard 1992, 166–81). Building on pre-WWII initiatives, especially a European project compiling series of prices and wages launched by Ernest Labrousse, these scholars published articles and books full of graphs and numbers, and also added extended appendices with long tables, providing annual information about populations, agricultural output and prices, and wealth distributions. Simultaneously, the movement was catching on in other countries. A typical example is Herman Van der Wee’s famous 1963 study of

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Antwerp’s trade during its sixteenth-century Golden Age. Van der Wee had been trained as a historian and as a social scientist and had done post-doctoral work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, headquarters of the Annales school, and at the London School of Economics. The first volume of his book is entitled ‘statistics’, and consists of almost four hundred pages of tables, preceded by 170 pages of explanation of the sources and the meaning of the numbers. Volume three consists entirely of fifty graphs. However, from those data the author was able to extract, in volume two, with unprecedented precision the interactions of the long-term endogenous price trends known as the ‘secular trend’, and the influx of precious metals from the New World. During the 1970s, American economic historians infused this quantitative type of history with a strong dose of economic theory and methodology. This New Economic History, led by Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel, was more popular in Economics faculties than it was among historians, many of whom have ignored or even condemned this approach as a-historical (Drukker 2006). However, the results of their successors’ work has a direct impact on the subject of this chapter, and we would ignore it at our peril. Much of the New Economic History (NEH) started with the nineteenth century, when the sort of statistical survey data that NEH requires are more or less readily available, thanks to the efforts of Napoleonic bureaucrats and their successors. For the early modern period, these are sadly missing. Any number that you see for this era can be one of three things: a contemporary estimate (likely to be wrong, usually quite substantially so); a detailed reconstruction in one specific location (raising questions about its representativeness); or, finally, an estimate, based on a combination of data of the second type (raising questions about the underlying assumptions of that combination and its elevation to a generalised level). Let us look briefly at an example of each. Perhaps the most famous contemporary estimate is Gregory King’s table of ‘ranks and degrees’, which offers a breakdown of the English population in 1688 into various ranks and occupations, including commerce and industry (Holmes 1977) (see Excerpt 11.1).

Excerpt 11.1 A population size estimate in an attempt to establish England’s National Income in 1696: King, Gregory (1802). Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England [1696]. In George Chalmers, ed., Estimate of the Comparative Strength of England and of the Losses of Her Trade From Every War Since the Revolution. London: J. Stockdale. Whereas the ensuing Treatise depends, chiefly, upon the knowledge of the true number of people in England, and such other circumstances relating thereunto, as have been collected from the assessments on marriages, births and burials, parish registers and other public accounts: We shall,

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first, exhibit the calculation of the number of people, as they appear by the said assessments. 1st, As to the number of people of England In this calculation we shall consider, 1. The number of inhabited houses; 2. The number of people to each house; 3. The number of transitory people, and vagrants. The number of houses in the kingdom, as charged, in the books of the hearth office, at Lady-day 1690, were 1,319,215[.] The kingdom increasing at this time about 9,000 people per annum, as will appear in the ensuing discourse, the increase of houses should be about 2,000 per annum; but, by reason of the present war with France, not much above 1,000 per annum: so that by the year 1695 the increase cannot have been above 6 or 7,000, which makes the present number of houses; that is to say, such as were so charged, in the books of the hearth-office, to be about 1,326,000[.] But, whereas the chimney money being charged on the tenant or inhabitant, the divided houses stand as so many distinct dwellings, in the accounts of the said hearth-office; and whereas the empty houses, smith shops &c. are included in the said account; all which may very well amount to 1 in 36 or 37 (or near 3 per cent.) which, in the whole, may be about 36,000 houses; it follows that the true number of inhabited houses in England is not above 1,290,000[.] Which, however, in a round number, we shall call 1,300,000 And shall thus apportion London and the Bills of Mortality, The other cities and market towns, The villages and hamlets,

105,000 houses 195,000 1,000,000[.] [409–410]

According to King’s estimates, only some 50,000 households were occupied in commerce and another 60,000 in industry. New research has substantially reduced the number in agriculture to 227,000 and pushed up those in commerce and industry to 128,000 and 257,000 respectively (Lindert and Williamson 1982, 388–89). As a result, England is no longer portrayed as primarily an agricultural economy, but rather one where industry was already the largest sector – well before the Industrial Revolution kicked in. This, obviously, fundamentally changes the story of industrialisation.

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Detailed local studies have in many other places helped to obtain much better numbers than we can reasonably expect from contemporaries, who lacked the instruments and reference points to verify their work. Weights and measures, for example, varied widely, not only between countries but also within them, creating all sorts of confusion until, on the Continent at least, Napoleon’s armies and bureaucrats imposed uniformity all around (Allen 2012, 32–34). Local archives do, nonetheless, contain documents that help the historian create those numbers themselves from the raw data. Such raw data include various sorts of registers that record all immigrants, contributors to a loan, or taxable households. A problem is that many such registers contain serial information, whereas the historian also would like to have stock numbers: what percentage of the population was migrant, how many worked in the building industry, and so on? Tax registers often have this advantage that they were created at a certain point in time, rather than as a series. Many such registers, moreover, provide additional details, such as occupations of the heads of households, because this was relevant to the assessors. A very famous example of such a rich source is the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1978). For his study of eighteenth-century Lyon, France’s largest industrial centre at the time, Maurice Garden had the good fortune to find such a source: a fiscal register created just before the Revolution, in 1788 (Garden 1970, pt. II). The date meant he did not have to reckon with the upheavals that would soon engulf the city and the country, but there were other issues related to the use of fiscal sources, such as under-reporting and the mismatch between the tax on a specific item (in this case real estate) and what the historian wants to know (household wealth). Still, Garden was able to establish that among the contributing heads of households, a quarter worked in the famous Lyon silk industry, but they were still outnumbered by the artisans in other branches of industry, who added up to just over a third of the population. Unspecified workers, who may have been active in transport as well as in industry, covered another 13.5 per cent. Merchants and shopkeepers on the other hand, constituted a mere 6 per cent of the households but they were taxed significantly higher than the industrial workforce, suggesting also greater wealth (Garden 1970, 191 tab. 11). In my own study of the world of urban elites in eighteenth-century Holland (Prak 1985), I used probate inventories and tax records to reconstruct the elite’s investment portfolios, as is illustrated in Excerpt 11.2.

Excerpt 11.2 A survey of the possessions of Mr Johan van den Bergh (1664–1755), former burgomaster of the city of Leiden, in the context of other probate inventories. Noordam, Dirk Jaap (1994). Geringde buffels en heren van stand: Het patriciaat van Leiden, 1574–1700. Hilversum: Verloren, 91, table 15 (sources between 1651–99); Prak, Maarten (1985). Gezeten

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Burgers: De Elite in E. Hollandse Stad, Leiden 1700–80. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 276, appendix 4 (sources between 1700–99). On 15 December 1755 a notary in Leiden drew up a list of the estate of Johan van den Bergh, now preserved in the Leiden Municipal Archive, Notarial Archives 2044. During his lifetime, which lasted unusually long, Van den Bergh had been a councilor of his home town, served as alderman and burgomaster and represented Leiden in the States of Holland and in the Council of State. His assets consisted of the following items: • • •

• • •

A house valued at fl. [florins/guilders] 16,800; Four small plots of land, together worth fl. 2,000; A very large number of government bonds, mainly on the province of Holland, with a total value of fl. 145,876, plus another fl. 15,200 administered by the local poor relief institution; Loans to four private individuals, including his son-in-law, as well as to a neighbouring village, to the tune of fl. 26,900; He also owned fl. 7,802 in cash and fl. 19,856 in foreign government bonds, all of them English; His total estate amounted to fl. 223,504, which made him almost twice as wealthy as his average colleague.

One probate inventory can inform us about investment opportunities for the rich in eighteenth-century Holland. A whole series of these sources helps us to identify patterns of investment, as well as changes over time. The table below is the result of a compilation of these data for a total of 101 inventories across 150 years.

Investments of Leiden town councilors, 1650–1800 Percentage distribution and average values (in florins) according to probate inventories and estate tax records. 1651–74

1675–99

1700–19

1720–39

1740–59

1760–79

1780–99

Houses

43.8

25.9

9.6

4.9

5.5

4.3

3.1

Land

14.6

15.7

8.5

10.9

11.4

7.1

7.6

Gov’t bonds

25.5

46.6

53.1

68.1

54.1

54.9

70.4

Private lending

14.5

6.3

14.9

6.1

4.0

4.6

0.8

(Continued )

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(Cont.) 1651–74

1675–99

1700–19

1720–39

1740–59

1760–79

1780–99

East/West India Companies

1.0

4.5

3.0

4.9

0.8

4.0

4.3

Miscellaneous*

1.0

1.0

9.9

5.0

24.1

25.4

13.9

110,183

113,567

124,664

200,357

195,155

27

16

7

15

15

17

14

Average value N=

* includes seignorial rights, commercial investments (never above 6 per cent), and foreign bonds sold on the Amsterdam capital market (rising above 10 per cent from the 1740s).

Probate inventories were made by notaries to help the inheritors with the division of the estate. These documents provide very detailed lists of the contents of the deceased’s house, listing furniture, works of art, as well as underwear, napkins, and so on. On top of that, they provide a description of each item of wealth, allowing historians to gauge the changing size and composition of individual investments. In this case we are dealing with a town whose textile industry experienced a spectacular collapse from the 1670s, reducing in the process the size of Leiden from c. 70,000 around 1670 to c. 35,000 around 1750. Meanwhile, public debt rose spectacularly as a result of a series of wars between the Dutch, and later also the English, and France, starting in 1672 and stretching to 1713. Against this background it is first of all remarkable to see how the average estate increased against the tide of economic downturn. Secondly, we see a shift away from investment in private loans, often to businesses, towards government bonds. Dutch historians are still debating if this was a cause or the effect of the Dutch Republic’s shifting economic fortunes. The third example concerns attempts to use such local data to produce national figures. Lindert and Williamson follow this course in their improvement of Gregory King’s numbers from 1688 (see Appendix 11.1). For their reconstruction of national income for Spain during its centuries of decline, Carlos Álvarez-Nogal and Leandro Prados de la Escosura combined daily wage data series, estimates of the percentage of working people in the population as a whole, another estimate about the number of days worked, and a third estimate of the labour share (as opposed to capital) in the national income. To establish the size of the nonagricultural sector, the authors used data about the percentage of the urban population in the various regions of Spain. Despite significant margins of error, their results are the best reconstruction we currently have of the trends in the Spanish economy (Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2007).

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This latter sort of work is the most speculative, but it has also contributed significantly to the creation of a comprehensive picture of economic developments of the period, at least for several countries, including England, the Netherlands, Italy, and indeed Spain. These reconstructions rely, as in the Spanish case, especially on three elements: urbanisation, wages, and national income. Levels of urbanisation are seen as reflecting levels of economic development in two ways. On the one hand, more town-dwellers implies more people working in trade and industry, which have higher levels of productivity than agriculture. On the other hand, urbanisation provides a stimulus for raising agricultural productivity and assumes that farmers are producing sufficient surplus to feed not only themselves, but also the urban population. Obviously, this is a gross simplification: not all villagers work in agriculture; food does not have to be produced locally but can be imported. Still, these assumptions seem valid on a general level of abstraction. As it happens, reliable lists of urban populations have been collected and published by Jan de Vries in 1984, which support a chronology that is broadly familiar. In the late Middle Ages the European urbanisation league table was headed by Italy, followed by the Low Countries. However, Italian urbanisation stagnated, allowing first the Southern Low Countries to take the lead and during the seventeenth century the Northern Low Countries, by then known as the Dutch Republic. Meanwhile, England was climbing to the top of the table very quickly. De Vries’s figures were culled from numerous local studies, but are limited to towns that between 1500 and 1800 at one point or another held a population of at least 10,000. Sceptics might argue that this leaves out a substantial proportion, and worse, that the percentage of the urban population in smaller towns varied significantly between countries. This method therefore has several measurement problems. The second measurement looks at real wages in industry. For this the building industry is often used, because the records are good, and because building technology was relatively homogeneous throughout Europe. The argument behind this standard is that real wages are a reflection of the levels of productivity in the industry, because in the long run employers have to earn enough from the fruits of their workers’ labour to pay for workers’ wages. They are also a reflection of the levels of productivity in the country more generally, because of competition between employers: very low wages in one sector force down the wages in another because the workers in the poorly paid sector would want to move to the better paid jobs, where over-supply would subsequently allow employers to reduce wages. Robert Allen has compared wage series from the building industries in various European cities, including not only Italian, Dutch and English figures, but also data from Spain, France, Germany and Poland (Allen 2001, 2003). These series are usually reported in local currencies, so they have to be standardised by conversion to the silver equivalent of the currency. Nominal wages can distort the picture so we want to include the cost of living to arrive at so-called real wages. In the past, this was done by looking at grain prices, reflecting the cost of food,

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but Allen has created ‘baskets of goods’ that include a much wider variety of foods, but also fuel, lighting, and linen, and takes account of the quantities that were consumed (Lapeyres index). Allen’s results show that in the first half of the sixteenth century the variations within Europe were relatively small. Three groups could be distinguished nonetheless: Antwerp, Amsterdam and London were the wealthiest towns, followed by several Mediterranean cities. France and Central Europe were the least developed according to this standard. During the early modern period, real wages remained broadly the same in the first group, but declined dramatically in the other two, creating a ‘divergence’ between north-western Europe on one side, and the other regions on the other. To understand the third type of results, and their limitations, we need to have a sense of the procedures that economic historians have been following to arrive at the figures. This type of work employs a standard known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), standing for the total size of a national economy. The latter will depend to some extent on the number of inhabitants; economists therefore prefer to use GDP per capita, which gives us essentially the average annual income of every person in that particular country. For the modern era we can reconstruct GDP with the help of the National Accounting methodology. This looks at inputs and outputs in the three sectors of the economy, i.e. agriculture, industry, and services (trade, but also government), and adds them up to a total figure. There are all sorts of issues – for example: how to measure output of public officials – but given the richness of the available data it has proved possible to do this more or less reliably. Now wind back to the early modern era, where the necessary data are missing. Enter Angus Maddison. Maddison, who died in 2010, was a British economist who, through his work at the OECD, became fascinated by historical National Accounting and the possibilities to uncover long-term patterns of economic growth and divergence. From 1982 Maddison published various series of GDP/capita numbers for individual countries, initially starting around 1800 (Maddison 2003, 2007). Those numbers were regularly updated and refined, but they also became more ambitious in their coverage, ultimately going back to the Roman Empire and taking on board sub-Saharan Africa, where written sources are very scarce before the colonial era. To the untrained eye, Maddison’s numbers all look the same and they are also deceptively precise. How could he know that GDP/capita in Mexico was 755 dollars in 1600? The truth of the matter is that he did not. Many of his numbers are estimates, and in this case even ‘guesstimates’. Basically, what Maddison did was to start from reasonably reliable numbers and then through comparisons work his way backwards. One important benchmark was his use of the World Bank’s minimum income level for anyone to survive on: one dollar a day, or 350–400 dollars a year in 1990. To make his numbers comparable, Maddison used 1990 dollars throughout his tables. The figure for Mexico in 1600 tells us that Maddison had reasons to believe that the average Mexican in 1600 lived substantially above the minimum.

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Nothing of what was said in the previous paragraph will have given the ordinary historian much confidence in the use of numbers. And indeed, even economic historians have raised serious concerns. They have pointed out that, for instance, if we would recalculate the numbers with 2003 dollars, major shifts would occur. They have also pointed out that many of Maddison’s numbers present national averages whereas there were wide regional varieties within countries. And they have, with some justification, complained that Maddison was not very transparent about his sources or about the methods he used to arrive at his numbers (Deng and O’Brien 2017). Before we dismiss them altogether, however, let’s give Maddison’s supporters a chance to make their point. Their main line of defence is that his numbers should be read as a provocation, an invitation to all economic historians to produce more reliable estimates. Maddison’s intuitions were, his supporters also claim, often pointing in the right direction. But more importantly: his provocations have worked. Efforts are underway for Japan, China and India, but for several European countries we now have sophisticated figures that go back well beyond the early modern era, into the High Middle Ages (Zanden and Ma 2017; Inklaar et al. 2018). The most detailed and best-documented of these series was produced for England (from c. 1700 Great Britain) by a group of five scholars headed by Stephen Broadberry (Broadberry et al. 2015, ch. 4) (see Appendix 11.2). More or less simultaneously another series was published by van Zanden and van Leeuwen about Holland and later the Netherlands (Zanden and van Leeuwen 2012). These two publications contain the most reliable figures to date about the contribution of industry and services to the national income and their shares in the workforce (see the percentages in Tables 11.1a and 11.1b; a third study on central and northern Italy lacks sectoral breakdowns: Malanima 2010). What can we learn from these numbers? Unsurprisingly, the share of agriculture declined in England as well as in Holland, although this decline was not as steep as one might have expected. Even by 1800 between a quarter (Netherlands) and a third (Britain) of the workforce in the two most advanced Table 11.1a Sectoral shares in GDP and labour-force in England and Britain (from 1700), 1522–1801

1522 1600 1700 1759 1801

GDP agriculture

Labour agriculture

GDP industry

Labour industry

GDP services

Labour services

40 41 27 30 31

58

39 36 42 35 33

23

22 23 32 35 36

19

39 37 32

34 34 36

Source: (Broadberry et al. 2015, 194–95) (tables 5.01 and 5.02)

27 29 32

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Table 11.1b Sectoral shares in GDP and labour-force in Holland (1510) and the Netherlands (1807)

1510 1807

GDP agriculture

Labour agriculture

GDP industry

Labour industry

GDP services

Labour services

27 18

39 23

35 31

38 42

40 51

22 35

Source: (Zanden and van Leeuwen 2012, 125) (table 3)

economies of Europe was employed in the primary sector. Still, industry and trade together were bigger, at least in terms of GDP, even in the early sixteenth century, demonstrating that both economies were clearly moving away from the traditional reliance on food production. By the early nineteenth century the service sector had become the largest in terms of GDP in the Netherlands, while surprisingly for what was reputedly a late-industrialiser, the industrial workforce was larger than either agriculture or services. In Britain, both GDP and the workforce were divided remarkably equally between the three economic sectors, each claiming about one third of both GDP and the workforce. The new data have revised Maddison’s figures, especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by an order of magnitude of 25 per cent (cf. tables 10.01 and 10.02 in Broadberry et al. 2015, 373, 375). Italy, England and Holland were more affluent than Maddison assumed; only the revised figures for Spain more or less confirm Maddison’s original estimates for this period (see Table 11.2). These revisions reflect the more optimistic interpretation of the European economies before the Industrial Revolution that emerged in recent decades. This general impression is built on a great amount of detailed work that has been done on regional and local developments, as well as on investigations of Table 11.2 GDP/capita in Europe, 1500–1800 (in 1990 dollars)

1500 1570 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800

England UK*

Holland Neth’s**

Italy

Spain

1,114 1,143 1,123 1,110 1,563 1,710 2,080

1,483 1,783 2,372 2,171 2,403 2,440 1,752

1,403 1,337 1,244 1,271 1,350 1,403 1,244

889 990 944 820 880 910 962

Source: (Broadberry et al. 2015, 375–76) (table 10.02) * UK from 1750 ** Netherlands from 1800

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individual branches of the economy. In other words, these numbers are the result of a collaboration between the ‘lumpers’ and the ‘splitters’ as they were memorably distinguished by J.H. Hexter (1979, 242–43).

Widening horizons and the expansion of trade O’Brien’s 1982 article raised a question that is, even 35 years later, still difficult to tackle with reliable figures: was trade with the colonies marginal compared to trade within Europe? (Cf. Chapter 10: Expansion, space and people) We are not even thinking about domestic trade, because that is still more difficult to measure. In most places, ongoing trade statistics date only from the eighteenth century, when states began to keep records of the taxes they imposed on imports and exports. For earlier centuries we mostly have to make do with incidental observations, and of course the inevitable estimates, which use indirect sources of information. These can nonetheless give us a clue as to the value of trade and its geographical features. Ulrich Pfister has analysed the Hamburg harbour records from the eighteenth century (Pfister 2015, 2017). Hamburg was at the time the port for a huge hinterland as far as Saxony, but also a major industrial centre in its own right, boasting over 200 sugar refineries. Between 1733 and 1798 complete records have been preserved for 36 years, allowing us to get a representative picture of Hamburg’s international trade (Weber 2015). Nonetheless, we have to acknowledge that some imports were exempt, notably those from the Dutch Republic, that prices were self-reported by merchants and therefore possibly unreliable, and that commodities were categorised inconsistently by clerks. Nonetheless we can safely say that among imports colonial goods made up almost half of the total value (it had been only a quarter in 1678), and over 70 per cent in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Within Europe, France was Hamburg’s most important trading partner. Hamburg thus constitutes a confirmation of the importance of colonial trade, although we cannot rule out that inclusion of the Dutch trade would alter the balance significantly. For Holland, de Vries and van der Woude provide numbers that underline the precociousness of the Dutch Golden Age (de Vries and van der Woude 1997, 406, table 9.6). Employment estimates suggest that in 1610 Dutch European trade was five times as big as the trade with the New World, Africa and Asia combined: 19,500 versus 4,000 sailors. By 1680 this gap had shrunk to two times: 20,500 versus 10,500. Obviously, the value of the colonial cargoes was on average higher, possibly much higher, than those on European ships, but then again a sailor on a European ship could make many more trips during the time of a single journey to East Asia. As a matter of fact, de Vries and van der Woude have estimated that in the 1650s, from the total value of international trade of the Dutch Republic, 90 per cent came from exchanges within Europe. In the 1770s the absolute value had declined and colonial trade had become more important, but it was still just below a quarter of all Dutch international trade (de Vries and van der Woude 1997, 499, table 10.13). This is

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especially significant because the Dutch Republic was a small country with a large colonial empire and commercial network. The fact that European trade remained dominant in the Dutch Republic underlines how easy it is to overestimate the importance of colonial trade. Still, we cannot rule out the possibility that this colonial trade created a crucial impetus for other economic changes (O’Rourke et al. 2010; Palma 2016). This has indeed been the point of Jan de Vries’ ‘industrious revolution’ thesis (de Vries 2008). As this is discussed at greater length elsewhere in this book we can just sum up his ideas here. (Cf. Chapter 7: Material cultures) On the basis of probate inventories in particular, de Vries argued that patterns of private consumption changed massively, by and large beginning in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Colonial products like sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea were key to this change. They in turn required new industrial products, like pipes for smoking tobacco, and pots and cups for brewing and drinking coffee and tea. None of these could be produced at home; they had to be acquired through the market. To be able to do so, households had to increase their cash incomes, and this could only be achieved by working longer hours and involving women and children as well as the men. The resulting increase in consumption opportunities then encouraged other entrepreneurs to develop new industrial and service products, even agricultural products like cut flowers. The growth of colonial trade was not necessarily at the expense of European trade. Indeed, an absolute expansion of trade during the early modern period has been well documented. In England total output in trade and transport increased fourfold between c. 1500 and c. 1600, fourfold again in the next century, and three times during the eighteenth century. In total the output around 1800 was forty times larger than it had been in 1500 (Broadberry et al. 2015, 164 table 4.07). Because the population had increased only fourfold, this means that trade and transport were growing ten times faster than the population. English trade may have been growing unusually fast, but substantial gains were made almost everywhere. How could this have happened? History textbooks suggest that it was due to the bright ideas of a handful of adventurers, like Magellan and Columbus, but their ‘discoveries’ cannot explain the growth of intra-European trade. Economic historians, moreover, are suspicious of explanations that rely on the acts of a handful of individuals, and want to understand how those ‘discoveries’ caught on. They have offered three alternative explanations: one technological, another organisational, and the third institutional. Ship designs had improved dramatically in the late Middle Ages. This included the use of three masts, and a combination of triangular and square sails in full rigging. In subsequent centuries, additional improvements were made, but more incrementally. As a result, sailing qualities improved and cargo space increased (Unger 2011). Other technological improvements, concerning maps, clocks, sextants and compasses, helped ship crews to better locate themselves, and their destination, in the vast open space of the oceans, allowing them to cut crossing times (Davids 2008, 97–101). A second, and probably more important source of growth in the transport sector was in the various aspects of its organisation (Lucassen and Unger 2011,

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23–29; also Grafe, Neal and Unger 2010). By this we mean the way in which the activities on board and in harbours were set up. On board, for example, ships benefitted from the better knowledge of sea routes. With the thickening web of commercial contacts, ship crews were more likely to sail the same routes on numerous occasions, reducing search time for the best ways of tackling problems of location, avoiding obstacles, and so on. Improved harbour routines reduced the turn-around time. Ports invested in quays and docks, allowing easier access. Porter services were regulated, saving time and money for individual ships (Lucassen 2011). Sailing in convoy, under the protection of one or two fully armed ships, reduced the necessity to arm every individual ship, creating more space for cargo. Whereas there seems to be broad consensus about the contribution of technology and organisation, the institutional explanation has been contentious. There are two issues at stake. One is the impact of institutions on trade: was it positive or negative? The other is the evolution of these institutions: were they basically the same in 1800 as they had been at the end of the Middle Ages? Sheilagh Ogilvie published an important book in 2011 that took up strong positions in both debates. She argued that merchant guilds, which originated in medieval Europe, were still widely active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In earlier work on guilds she had acknowledged that this was less true in the Low Countries and in England, but it was, she argued precisely for this reason that those two regions were able to develop more precociously than, for example, Central Europe (Ogilvie 1997, 412, 420, 436–37, 449, 475). Because – and this was her contribution to the other debate – merchant guilds were generally bad for the development of trade. Their main objective was to create rents, i.e. non-economic income streams from higher prices, procured through the exclusion of newcomers in the markets. In other words, by restricting competition, the members of the merchants guilds created profits for themselves (Ogilvie 2011, ch. 3). To understand this second claim, we have to get a sense of the problems that international merchants faced during our period. These had to do especially with insecurity. Some of the insecurity was inevitable: ships sank and cargoes were lost; winter could set in early and cut off some harbours from the rest of the world; diseases at times wiped out entire crews. But many hazards were man-made. Due to poor communication international merchants had to trust their agents in far-away places. Busy trade routes were interrupted by pirates. Governments could order the confiscation of ‘enemy’ property. The point of commercial institutions was to shield merchants from some of these hazards. According to Avner Greif, who studied commercial institutions in the Mediterranean region during the Middle Ages, merchant guilds were a form of collective action that on the one hand allowed merchants to share risks between members, but also gave them leverage over cheating business partners, competitors and government agents. Basically, Greif argued, international trade would have come to a more or less complete standstill if it had not been for institutions that made risks manageable (Greif 2006, ch. 4).

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Oscar Gelderblom studied commercial institutions in the Low Countries and broadly underwrote Greif’s reasoning, but saw a much bigger role for municipal institutions (Gelderblom 2013). In the Low Countries, many towns were trying to lure merchants to their communities, because of the economic benefits emanating from international trade. One way in which towns could make themselves attractive was to offer protection against risks, as well as institutional mechanisms to settle conflicts. This bundle of institutions, Gelderblom concluded, helped international trade to expand and flourish. But as it did so, markets could increasingly take care of these issues by themselves. He found that in seventeenth-century Amsterdam merchant guilds had become insignificant. Public institutions, as well as the quality of information and the frequency of commercial interactions, had improved to such levels that merchants no longer felt the need for collective action. This looks like a confirmation of Ogilvie’s claim that the Low Countries were exceptionally early with their reliance on governments and markets and that the rest of continental Europe was still working in the traditional groove, with the Hansa and merchant guilds covering international trade. Unfortunately, Ogilvie has muddied the waters of her argument by including as merchant guilds the chartered companies that emerged in the seventeenth century for extraEuropean trade, such as the English and Dutch East India Companies. More than half of the examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in her book relate to such companies, which operated as a single business rather than the consortium of independent merchants of the guilds. Chartered companies were especially active in the Dutch Republic and England, the two countries that Ogilvie identified in earlier work as prospering because of their weak guilds. When we discount these companies, the number of examples she provides of ‘genuine’ merchant guilds from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looks distinctly smaller than the examples from the Middle Ages, suggesting that Gelderblom’s point about the decline of merchant organisations is basically correct. Another institution with a significant impact on international trade was the state. Various states aggressively sought to expand their commercial networks, a policy known as mercantilism. The Dutch in the seventeenth century and the British in the eighteenth are notorious examples ( Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, ch. 4–5; O’Brien 2014). They used their navies to open up new areas for trade, especially outside Europe, subsidised trade ventures, and provided protection on the high seas if they could. States also used import duties to restrict access to their domestic markets for foreign competitors in favour of home-grown businesses, and gave formal permission to pirates to attack enemy shipping. There is a sense that all this made a difference, but how significant the impact of the state really was, is difficult to establish beyond the anecdotal. To sum up: even though the trade between Europe and other continents had become a significant portion of international trade by 1800, our current figures suggest that trade within Europe remained more significant, not only in volume but also in value. The growth of trade was probably more important to the over-all growth of the early modern European economy than either agriculture

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or industry. Progress in the sector was mainly due to greater efficiency in the organisation of trade, rather than technology, although this contributed as well. Overall, European trade relied less on institutions for collective action such as merchant guilds in this period. Governments, on the other hand, remained important actors, as providers of military protection and sponsors of overseas trade companies in particular.

Industry and the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century is the most important watershed in Europe’s economic history since the emergence of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. There is no serious dispute about the fact that the first steam engines for industrial use were developed and installed in England. Why this happened is, however, as fiercely debated now as it was fifty years ago. This debate has been changed by new data and by new perspectives. Perhaps the most important of those new perspectives has been the comparison between developments in China, or Asia more generally, and Europe (more specifically England). This debate has come to be known under the title of the book that launched it: the ‘Great Divergence’. In this book, Kenneth Pomeranz, an American expert of Chinese history, claimed that the most advanced regions of Europe and China were basically on an economic par in 1700, and that the Industrial Revolution was to an important extent the result of colonial exploitation, and of sheer good fortune (Pomeranz 2000, ch. 5–6). England had easily accessible coal reserves, encouraging it to develop the pumping technology to exploit them, whereas China’s coal was difficult to extract, forcing it to rely on other energy sources, forsaking the possibility to develop steam technology. In the context of the book for which this essay is written, it makes sense to disregard the Chinese side of the comparison and focus on Europe. Several issues have been raised from the European side. One is that Pomeranz was too pessimistic about Europe’s level of prosperity (Allen et al. 2011). More fundamentally, perhaps, various authors have claimed that the Industrial Revolution was not a shock that more or less came as a surprise in the decades around 1700, but was rather the tail-end of a long process of economic development that included expanding markets, improved technology and supportive institutions – all more developed on the European side than in China. While this debate has led some scholars to develop an optimistic picture of the trajectory of the European economy (Zanden 2009, ch. 8), others have highlighted its limitations, underlining that many efficient technologies remained under-utilised because of poor institutions, for example (Epstein 2000, ch. 8). Still others have pointed to the unsystematic character of technological development in this period and how innovations were routinely opposed by the powers-that-be (Mokyr 2002, ch. 6). What are we to make of those contradicting opinions: was early modern Europe’s industrial glass half full or half empty? For a long time, the history of the Industrial Revolution was dominated by the emergence of the new steam technology, and how it transformed industry.

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The new quantitative economic history changed that. It tried to look at the overall impact of steam on the transformation of English industry, in much the same way that O’Brien challenged the assumption that Europe’s prosperity was built on the exploitation of the periphery. His verdict that it ‘foundered on the numbers’ applied equally to the Industrial Revolution. In 1976 Nick Crafts demonstrated that in terms of growth, the Industrial Revolution only became a significant factor in the British economy by the middle of the nineteenth century (Crafts 1976; also, 1985; Harley 1982). That verdict has now been generally accepted (Broadberry et al. 2015, 202). Equally importantly, two historians of the Dutch Golden Age pointed out that in the Netherlands substantial growth had already been achieved during the seventeenth century, without the help of steam technology. De Vries and van der Woude (1997, 693) argued that the Netherlands could therefore be labelled the ‘first modern economy’, a prize that had traditionally been awarded to England (see Appendix 11.3). They argued that Holland had all the trappings of a modern economy, including unhampered market exchanges, levels of agricultural productivity that could sustain a significant division of labour, a state supportive of enterprise, and access to complex technologies and institutional arrangements that could sustain a consumer culture. Their critics (e.g. Zanden 2002), however, pointed out that Dutch growth figures never reached ‘modern’ levels of 2 per cent and more, rates that Britain did manage year-on-year from the 1830s, after half a century of 1.5 per cent annual growth (Broadberry et al. 2015, 199 table 5.03). Still, de Vries and van der Woude (1997) have managed to overturn the automatic assumption that serious economic growth was only possible with the invention of the steam engine. Others too have been more willing to embrace the idea that some pre-modern regions experienced significant economic growth well before industrialisation set in, and managed to sustain that growth over longer periods. Renaissance Italy and the late medieval Southern Low Countries have been singled out as examples, besides the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century (Zanden 2001, 84–85; 2009, ch. 8; Persson 2010, ch. 4; see also de Vries 2001). The quantitative history of European industry before the Industrial Revolution is still largely terra incognita. However, the best numbers we have – and these are tentative – seem to confirm the idea that already before the Industrial Revolution major changes were underway. These numbers concern the production of wrought iron in a handful of countries. Comprehensive figures on the textile industry would have been more helpful, because it was by far the most important branch of industry at the time. However, with iron being an intermediate, used by other industries, its trajectory is indicative of what happened in those other branches of industry as well. The numbers in Table 11.3 suggest a clear increase in the per capita output of iron between 1500 and 1800. The presumed role of proto-industry (as outlined above) has been undermined by numerous local studies. In a survey published in 1996, Sheilagh Ogilvie and Markus Cerman listed a range of objections. The demographic dimension of the theory, plausible as it sounded, had not been borne out by

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Table 11.3 Estimated output of wrought iron in Europe (in 1,000 tonnes)

1500 1700 1700 1740–50 1790

Great Britain

Sweden

France

Germany

Europe, kg./capita

1 17 24 27 80

5 7 28 40 50

12 25 140

5 30 50

0.65 1.60 2.00 1.5–1.90 2.20

Source: (Zanden 2001, 83) table 4.5

detailed research. The predicted depression of living standards was found in some places, but in others living standards had risen. Proletarianisation was primarily caused by changes in agriculture, not proto-industry. The transition to factories and mechanisation happened in some proto-industrial regions, but by no means everywhere. This was the crux of the matter: if proto-industry was not the obvious predecessor of industrialisation, what good was the theory then? As a result, the interest in proto-industry has declined markedly, but Jan de Vries has suggested that it might be saved from the dustbin of historical theories by recasting it as part of a broader restructuring of Europe’s economies in the context of the ‘crisis of the seventeenth century’ (Parker 2013). De Vries’ point is that the ruralisation of industry can be understood as a part of the same general process as the internationalisation of trade, or the rise of new consumer goods: something was stirring in these eighteenth-century economies (Gutmann 1988; de Vries 1984, 238–41, 1974, ch. 3; 2009, 191–93). With proto-industry more or less discarded as an explanation for industrialisation, historians have been forced to look again at the steam engine. Where did it come from? Robert Allen (2009) has argued that its invention in England was due to a combination of two unique circumstances: high wages and easy coal. The former made it attractive for industrial entrepreneurs to invest in laboursaving technologies. Coal was crucial for two reasons: steam engines were first developed to drain coal mines, but they also required coal as fuel – and the energy consumption of the early steam engines was notoriously inefficient. However, although wages and coal may have been necessary conditions, it is not obvious that they are also sufficient explanations. After all, the steam engine is a complicated piece of technology. Joel Mokyr and Margaret Jacob have therefore looked for the intellectual origin of the Industrial Revolution and found it in Newtonian science (Jacob 1997; Mokyr 2017, ch. 8). The century preceding the Industrial Revolution was, after all, one of momentous changes and improvements in Western science, which became more systematic and more mathematical, culminating in Newton’s ground-breaking contributions. (cf. Chapter 12: Science and reason). To test its importance, Allen has subjected

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a cohort of 79 ‘important inventors’ to a systematic analysis, showing that about half of all British inventors had ‘Enlightenment connections’ of the sort favoured by Jacob and Mokyr, while for the other half no such connection could be established. Allen’s results also show that the single most numerous social background of these inventors was the world of the crafts, suggesting a connection, not only with science, but equally importantly with practical skills (Allen 2009, ch. 10). These explanations connect the Industrial Revolution to the debate about the role of guilds, and institutions more generally. Traditionally, and starting with the founding father of Economics, Adam Smith himself, guilds were seen as an obstacle to economic progress. This thesis seemed to be confirmed by the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in England (where the economy was least incorporated, or alternatively, guilds had been on the decline from the seventeenth century). Moreover, the Industrial Revolution started in the English countryside, where guilds had always been weak, in contrast to Württemberg, for example, whose merchant guilds imposed a very restrictive regime on a textile industry that failed to produce the sort of breakthrough technology associated with the Industrial Revolution (Ogilvie 1997, 2019). This view has clashed with a more optimistic reading of the guilds’ history. From the 1980s, revisionist historians have argued that these institutions were as a matter of fact much more ‘flexible’ than Smith and his followers had assumed (Epstein and Prak 2008). Indeed, it was argued, this flexibility had allowed them to survive major transformations of the economy since their creation in the thirteenth century. Their demise at the end of the eighteenth century had not been the result of economic development, but of political decisions in the wake of the French Revolution (Haupt 2002). One particular contribution of the guilds to economic development, S.R. Epstein has argued, was their role in the production of human capital, where they helped smooth potential conflicts in the area of apprenticeship. The problem here was one of timing. In the early stages of apprenticeship, it was the apprentice who benefited from the master’s instruction. Later, the master would benefit from the free labour of a by now skilful apprentice. However, the apprentice might be tempted to leave prematurely, negotiate a wage for his labour services, and deprive his former master of his side of the bargain. The role of the guilds, Epstein claimed, was to tie both sides to the agreement, ensure that apprentices were trained properly and that masters would reap the benefits of their educational efforts (Epstein 1998). Quantitative history has contributed to three elements of this debate. First, simple counting of the number of guilds has demonstrated that guilds were compatible with economic growth. The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age, for example, was accompanied by the establishment of an unprecedented number of guilds (De Munck, Lourens and Lucassen 2006). This does not, however, imply that they were also the cause of that growth, because a comparison of guild establishments in the Northern and Southern Low Countries and Italy has demonstrated that there was no strong correlation between the number of guilds and good times or bad times (Laborda-Peman 2017, ch. 1). Secondly, local histories of apprenticeship are making it increasingly clear that the guilds’ role in overseeing

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apprenticeships was not always very strong, and was often supplemented or even taken over by private contracts between masters and apprentices or their parents and guardians (Prak and Wallis 2020). Thirdly, there is now strong evidence that in most towns and cities guilds were accommodating large numbers of immigrants in their ranks. The image of the closed guilds as it emerges from their regulations needs to be revised in view of their actual admission policies. These discriminated against women, but much less against migrants and other groups without previous ties to the guild community (Prak et al. forthcoming). A very influential alternative institutional explanation was provided by Douglass North and various co-authors (North and Weingast 1989; North 1990, 138–40; North, Wallis and Weingast 2009, 213–19). North saw the pre-modern state as ‘predatory’, because it was not held in check by voters and their representatives. Predatory states infringed property rights, for example by levying taxes that hit ordinary people but exempted the rich. In England, this problem had been overcome with the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights (1689), which gave Parliament the final say in financial decisions. This not only made property secure, but also gave investors the confidence to support new technologies and industries. Although North’s ideas about institutions are still influential, very few historians now believe this particular story about the Glorious Revolution. As Gregory Clark has shown, confirming most historians’ intuitions, property rights were reasonably secure in England (and on the Continent) long before the end of the seventeenth century (Clark 1996). If 1689 contributed something significant to the Industrial Revolution, it had to do with the new procedures worked out in Parliament, which benefited infrastructural projects (Bogart 2011). Looming over these debates is the question of the nature of the Industrial Revolution. Whereas fifty years ago it was portrayed as a radical transformation concentrated in the span of a couple of decades, economic historians have extended the whole concept in both directions: a run-in of several centuries, as well as a long consolidation in the wake of the great inventions of the eighteenth century that created the foundations for the industrialised economies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This implies several shifts of emphasis in the study of pre-modern industry. Firstly, from the transformations of the eighteenth century (steam engine, machines, factories) to micro-inventions and improvements of earlier centuries. This research is still in its infancy. Secondly, from technology to science and education more broadly, an area where important progress has been made. And thirdly, a shift from the various branches of industry as such, to the wider institutional environment in which they were operating. In this area strong claims have been put on the table, but the evidence is still haphazard and therefore inconclusive.

Conclusion How has our understanding of trade and industry changed in the 35 years since O’Brien published the paper that launched our investigation? In the 1980s and 1990s the debate was dominated by the quest for the roots of ‘capitalism’.

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Braudel and Wallerstein claimed to have found those roots in the development of global trade from the sixteenth century; Mendels and his followers pinpointed the rise of cottage industry; while Robert Brenner saw agriculture as the key sector (Aston and Philpin 1985). Since the 1990s capitalism has gone out of fashion, and then made a come-back. This has, so far, not led to a new paradigm, however. Instead, the debate has been dominated by attempts to produce more reliable numbers for key dimensions of the early modern economy and has looked for explanations in the institutional framework of that economy. The search for better quantitative indicators has produced some remarkable results, but is ongoing. Many territories of Europe await further investigation, and margins of error in present series suggest that improvements can still be made. However, the even bigger challenge is in the interpretation. If we accept the proposition that at least some European economies had been able to grow significantly before the Industrial Revolution, what set those economies apart from the rest? If institutional explanations are the key, we have to acknowledge their dual character: institutions create agency through coordination mechanisms, and they create incentives through policies that make certain activities attractive. Of course they can also do the exact opposite: suppress agency and discourage activities. An explanation that sets ‘Europe’ as a whole against the rest of the world is not working; there are too many divergences within Europe. It also seems increasingly unlikely that we will be able to identify one single factor that set the ‘successful’ regions apart (Grafe and Prak 2018). Probably, a combination of institutional solutions worked best in an era when states and markets were growing but still relatively ‘thin’.

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Appendices

Appendix 11.1 Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1982). Revising England’s social tables 1688–1812. Explorations in Economic History 19, 385–408. In order to improve our head counts for 1688, one of the present authors [Lindert] analyzed 26 local censuses taken between 1676 and 1705 which give occupations, as well as burial records from 41 parishes covering the period 1685–1714. Using regression analysis, these parish returns were extended to other places, the resulting predictions summed over all of England and Wales. Carefully comparing King with the new estimates and with other independent clues, we can reach a compromise set of ‘best guesses’ [ … ]. For the top of society, our regression-based counts by themselves are insufficient grounds for revising King. They are based on too few titled and skilled persons for sharp estimates. Fortunately, however, we have King’s notations and Holmes’ penetrating critique guide our modification of King’s tables, and these support the hypothesis that King undercounted titled persons and overcounted professionals. Starting with ‘Temporal Lords’, the 40-odd lay holders of Irish and Scottish peerage whose main estates and residences were in England should be added. King’s 12,000 figure for Gentlemen should also be raised to 15,000, based on recent findings of various scholars. Within the professions, Harley challenged King’s figures for the clergy, to which King gave unconvincing replies. We know that there were over 11,000 Church of England parishes in England and Wales as of 1801, and there were probably about 9000 in 1688. Vacancies among these seats were almost surely outweighed by the numbers of higher-ranked Church officials plus dissenting clergy. We have accordingly added 2000 lesser clergymen to King’s figure [ … ]. King also appears to have exaggerated numbers in the Law, Sciences, and

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Liberal Arts, judging from surviving records for London and market towns. We have accordingly scaled these numbers down from 26,000 to a more plausible level of 15,960, implied by accepting his overall total for all titled, professional, and skilled persons. King was literally at sea on commercial classes. Merchants appear in his table only as a mere 10,000 ‘Merchants & Traders by Sea’, and he allowed for only 40,000 shopkeepers and traders. The archives strongly disagree. Guided by regression estimates inflated to national levels, the local archives suggest 26,321 merchants on land and sea and 101,704 shopkeepers and tradesmen, for a total of 128,025 in commerce (plus or minus a wide range of error). Just before his death King virtually agreed with this massive revision, postulating 24,500 merchants and a total of 151,000 persons in all commercial occupations for 1710–1711. Accordingly, we stand by the revisions [ … ]. For the remaining civilian middle and lower classes, King’s estimates and ours clash dramatically. The regression estimates repeat what we have already noted above from direct inspection of raw data: King must have underestimated the industrial and building trades, and overstated the numbers in agriculture, common labor, and poverty. His figure of 60,000 artisans in the Observations has to be one of his shakiest, as his own notes confirm. Was it really 60,000, or his own alternative guesses of 70,000 (p. 270 of Burns Journal) or 100,000 (p. 65 of Burns Journal)? All of his guesses for artisans seem too low to us, and we prefer the regression estimates instead. We shall also abandon his implausibly high estimates for freeholders and farmers in favor of the lower totals suggested by the archives and regression. To square these occupational revisions with King’s plausible number of total families requires a reduction in the residual, the numbers in ‘poverty’. The regression estimates based on local archival data suggest the same revision. Indeed, so do the figures King himself assumed for poor relief expenditures and the numbers receiving that relief. King spread Davenant’s estimated £665,000 in poor rates over anywhere from 900,000 to 1,300,000 recipients of alms. The implied average relief per recipient of less than 13 shillings is at odds with much higher estimates reported in parish lists from London, Warwickshire, and Essex. We infer that King overstated the number of cottagers, paupers, and vagrants, and offer a downward revision [ … ]. [387–390]

Appendix 11.2 Broadberry, Stephen, Campbell, Bruce M.S., Klein, Alexander, Overton, Mark and van Leeuwen, Bas (2015). British Economic Growth 1270–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Estimation of GDP per head for contemporary economies is an intrinsically inexact process; for historical economies, with their less complete and more problematic datasets, precision is even more elusive. That is why here the data, methods and assumptions involved at each step in the estimation process have

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been made explicit. Improvement is certainly possible with more and better production series for a wider cross-section of activities, but that is a task for the future. Although further systematic work in the archives is likely to repay dividends, certain statistical lacunae are bound to endure due to the paucity or absence of relevant historical information. Bridging the documentary discontinuity between the late-medieval and early modern periods will always present a challenge and obtaining direct evidence of many aspects of service-sector activity before 1700 may never be possible. Methodological resourcefulness will always be required if these gaps and discontinuities are to be overcome. Fortunately, the National Accounting approach offers a number of well-established ways of developing proxy measures of activities not directly recorded. Without resort to such measures the current estimates could not have been made. With so many assumption, qualifications and uncertainties, can historical national income estimates ever be convincing? Ultimately, their credibility hinges upon whether or not they can be falsified. That is why every effort has been made to ensure that those advanced here are free from internal contradictions and inconsistencies, especially where the outputs of one sector or subsector comprise the inputs of another. In addition, Part II of this book, ‘Analysing economic growth’, subjects these estimates to a number of tests. One of the most obvious is a comparison with the independent chronology of the returns to labour offered by real wage rates, especially the well-known rate indices of building and agricultural labourers. Real wage rates are often treated as surrogate measures of living standards and GDP per head, although, as Angeles has highlighted, they were also influenced by changes in the factor returns to land and capital as also by the market supply of labour per head (in terms of hours worked per day and days worked per year). Nevertheless, there ought to be some correspondence between real wage rates and real GDP per head; hence any significant divergences between them, such as occurred in the fifteenth and again in the late eighteenth centuries, need to be explicable. Reconciling the somewhat contrasting chronologies of these two measures of economic wellbeing is the subject of Chapter 6. Two further cross-checks considered in Chapters 7 and 8 are whether agriculture and net imports together delivered enough food to feed the populations and whether total estimated national income, when disaggregated, was sufficient to meet the income requirements of all socio-economic groups. [ … ] A final test of the credibility of these estimates of GDP per head for England 1270–1700 and Great Britain 1700–1870 is whether they make sense when compared with those now available for a number of other pre-industrial economies in both Europe and Asia. This helps establish whether they are of the right relative order of magnitude and clarifies when Britain overtook other economies. As Chapter 10 demonstrates, in Western Europe the key comparisons are with Italy, the leading economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and still far ahead of all but the Flemish economy in the early Renaissance, and with Holland, which grew faster and became richer than any other European economy during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [214–15, 217]

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Appendix 11.3 De Vries, Jan and van der Woude, Ad (1997). The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A ‘modern economy’ need not be one with the outward attributes of a twentieth-century industrial economy; rather, it should incorporate the generic features that make those outward signs possible. Foremost among those features are: • • • •

markets, for both commodities and the factors of production (land, labor, and capital), that are reasonably free and pervasive; agricultural productivity adequate to support a complex social and occupational structure that makes possible a far-reaching division of labor; a state which in its policy making and enforcement is attentive to property rights, to freedom of movement and contract, and at the same time is not indifferent to the material conditions of life of most inhabitants; and a level of technology and organization capable of sustained development and of supporting a material culture of sufficient variety to sustain marketoriented consumer behaviour.

[…] Although certain other European polities may have shared all these features for a time, the United Provinces can lay claim to being the first modern economy by virtue of continuity (it has been a modern economy ever since) and by virtue of its leadership in establishing the conditions for economic modernity over much of Europe. It became not only the commercial entrepôt for Europe; it also achieved Europe’s highest overall level of total factor productivity for the better part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That is, it became the first what Angus Maddison calls a ‘lead country’, operating nearest to the technological frontier and doing most to define that frontier, until it was dislodged from that position by Great Britain, by his reckoning, toward the end of the eighteenth century. Britain, in turn, ceded this place at the technological frontier to the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. [693–94]

12 Science and reason John Henry

The history of science and the philosophy of science The shared starting point for the study of the history of science by its practitioners is a conviction that science is so important an aspect of modern civilisation that its omission from, or at best passing mention in, the standard histories should not be allowed to continue. In the earliest beginnings of history of science as a discipline this conviction often went hand in hand with a commitment to a particular philosophical (usually positivistic) view of the nature of science. Even today, many historians of science work in departments of History and Philosophy of Science, there are joint conferences in these two sub-disciplines, and there are journals devoted to both history and philosophy of science. Philosophers of science, broadly speaking, want to make generalised claims about the nature of science, how it works, and how it proceeds; the more generalised the claims the better. Historians, however, want to resist general claims and preconceived theories about what kind of thing science is, and to establish instead the contingent and various ways in which something we might recognise as (or choose to designate as) ‘science’ has occurred in the past. Philosophers of science tend to be essentialist in their attempts to understand science, while historians take pains not to regard science in an essentialist way, but to define science loosely and variously, depending upon their purposes with regard to a specific historical exercise. A major current in academic historiography of science, therefore, has been to reject the (usually) baleful influence of philosophy upon the practice of history, and to try to develop a history which is unaffected by any preconceived theories about the nature of science, and why or how it develops (philosophers have been prone to ‘rational reconstructionism’, ignoring the complex historical realities of scientific change in favour of an account which presents things, often for pedagogical purposes, as the result of supposedly rational inferences). This is in keeping, of course, with the general principle among historians that historical research should be conducted in a theory-free way – to do otherwise is likely to lead to a selective, goal-directed, reading of the evidence. This seems totally obvious to historians, and yet it has caused consternation and confusion among philosophers. The philosopher Larry Laudan, for example, has insisted that:

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But Laudan does not seem to notice here the clear difference between using the interplay of observation and theory in one’s research on the one hand, and ‘engaging theoretical issues’ on the other. It is perfectly possible to refuse to engage with grand theoretical issues, such as the claim that all scientific statements should be in principle falsifiable, or that science is progressive, while at the same time theorising in order to make sense of a specific observation. Seeing that Newton drew an analogy between infinite space and the ‘sensorium’ of God, the historian should speculate on what he meant by that, proceeding in accordance with what it is reasonable and plausible to infer, given the time at which Newton wrote. This is not the same as engaging with a theoretical issue about the nature of science, or indeed, with regard to this example, about how metaphysics might generally interact with science. Similarly, a historian who observes that the early modern period saw the appearance for the first time of scientific societies should try to explain why this was so, and will perhaps offer alternative theories, based on contemporary social and economic factors. But this is not the same as suggesting that the proliferation of early modern societies proves, say, a presumed theory that science is a collaborative activity which can only be done in formally established collectives. So, historians have increasingly tended to reject philosophical theorising about the nature of science. Consider the career trajectory of the highly influential thinker Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) and his reputation amongst historians. As a physicist inveigled into teaching the history of science Kuhn had to come to grips with the Aristotelian background to early modern science, but he found himself baffled at first by Aristotle’s approach. Significantly, he took it to be a Damascene conversion when he realised that Aristotle could only be understood by studying him in the context of the intellectual tradition within which he worked. By the time Kuhn published The Copernican Revolution (1957) he had succeeded in turning himself into a historian (Kuhn 1957). But, given the dominance of philosophy over the history of science at that time, he was soon tempted into making philosophical claims about the nature of science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) he extended what he took to be the main features of the Copernican revolution, and turned them into something approaching general laws of scientific change (Kuhn 1970). From then on, Kuhn was a philosopher of science. Larry Laudan has decried historians of science for failing to pay due homage to Kuhn:

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reading the current scholarly literature of the history of science, one would scarcely be aware of the existence of Kuhn as a theorist of science. I know of no other active discipline which, over the course of almost a generation, has managed so systematically to fail to address the ideas of its most influential theorist. (Laudan 1990, 49) When Laudan called Kuhn the history of science’s ‘most influential theorist’, he was showing his lack of awareness that Kuhn was no longer admired by historians as a historian, even though they acknowledged that his philosophy of science paid more attention to contingent historical factors than the philosophy of ‘rational reconstructionists’ and other philosophers (see Appendix 12.1a–b). As the practice of history of science has developed independently of the philosophy of science in recent decades the result, increasingly, has been to show that all the variegations that might be called science, and all the contingent vicissitudes in the way they develop, are incompatible with philosophical essentialism.

The Whig interpretation of the history of science Another aspect of the early historiography of science which has not been fully excised, in spite of it being generally decried by historians of science, is usually referred to as ‘whiggism’, although some now prefer to use the label ‘presentism’. In this context, Whig history judges the past in terms of the present, and accordingly focuses upon those aspects of the thought and practice of earlier thinkers which seem ‘modern’, or indeed which seem ‘correct’ from the point of view of modern science. Accordingly, the history of science is seen as a chronicle of inexorable progress leading to present science. As Kuhn (eventually) saw, Aristotle’s physics can properly be understood only in its own terms, and ought to be judged with regard to his contemporaries or his predecessors, and not by his failure to anticipate the principle of inertia, or the universal principle of gravitation. For the most part, historians of science do pursue their historical quarries in a suitably historicist way, but they are often still open to the charge that their choice of quarry might be said to be whiggish. There are veritable scholarly ‘industries’ devoted to the study of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; and it is easy to find books on the history of mechanics, atomism, or optics; or on leading institutions of science, such as the Royal Society, or the Académie des Sciences. It is much harder to find books, or even articles, on obscure thinkers, or on unfamiliar areas of study, or on little-known institutions in obscure locations. In some cases it might be said that the neglect is due to the lack of relevant historical resources, but in many cases it just looks like the result of a lingering whiggism. The fact of the matter is that this kind of whiggism – focussing on the big names, institutions, topics – does seem to be built into the history of science. Even the designation ‘history of science’ is whiggish, as is the designation

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‘modern’ or ‘early modern’ (the word ‘science’ in our modern sense, as I have been using it here, to refer to knowledge of, and the study of, the natural world, only acquired something like its current meaning after 1837, when William Whewell coined the word ‘scientist’: Ross 1962). Historians use the term ‘science’ very loosely, expecting that their meaning will become clear enough as they proceed, but there are almost always unspoken assumptions at work that are shaped by what counts today as ‘science’. To some extent then, the historiography of science will always remain whiggish. It has often been noted that when the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield (1900–97), author of a highly critical and cautionary book on The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), turned his hand to the history of science, he produced a highly whiggish account (Butterfield 1949). Butterfield wrote when the history of science was still in the thrall of a positivistic philosophy of science, and he wrote a book of his times. Although the history of science has come a long way away from whiggish assumptions since then, fundamental aspects of modern science still shape the history of science. Some historians of science (no doubt seeking to avoid whiggism) have called for a rejection of so-called ‘Great Man history’. But, the fact is, there were exceptional figures who stood out from the crowd, and biographies (of the great and the not so great, and increasingly including great and not so great women scientists) continue to constitute an important part of the historiography of science (Nye 2006). One final problem with glib dismissals of whiggism is that it is somewhat naïve to suppose that historians could completely escape from their own historical context, with its typical presuppositions and preoccupations, and write about a remote period wie es eigentlich gewesen war, as Leopold von Ranke dreamed. Certainly, the Rankean ambition is something to aspire to, and the more experienced the historian, the better they should be at thinking like an early modern thinker. It behoves the historian, therefore, to try to become a contemporary of the people one is writing about, and to keep current concerns at bay as much as possible, even though some will inevitably and unavoidably creep in. Ultimately, as long as we can distinguish between the absurdly whiggish (such as trying to insist that Newton was never interested in alchemy), and the unavoidably whiggish (such as acknowledging those changes which led scientific theories to where they are now), and as long as we are critically aware of what we are doing, and continue to avoid essentialist accounts, we should get along fine with a bit of whiggism (See Appendix 12.2a–b.)

Externalism and internalism, and beyond Early in the formation of the discipline, whether the historian was an ‘internalist’ or an ‘externalist’ seemed to have real political significance (when, for example, during the cold war conservative historians felt obliged to take a stand against Marxist historians; Shapin 1992). Externalists are those who believe that the historical development of science cannot be properly understood without taking into account factors outside whatever might be

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considered to be exclusively scientific (broadly: social, political, economic, philosophical, and religious factors). The internalist believes that scientific change is simply driven by technical problems within science itself. Although it is no longer considered to be quite so important to wear one badge or the other, it remains the case that there is still a spectrum of work in the history of science, which is recognisably internalist at one end to externalist at the other, and by no means everyone congregates in the middle. The issue now is not so much determined by the historian’s political stance (although those in certain institutional settings might be directed by the micropolitics of their institution), but simply by their personal interests. Some find it much more interesting to discover a technical reason why past thinkers began to accept a new idea (such as the lack of stellar parallax leading Copernicans to believe in infinite space – stars observed from a moving Earth ought to change position in the sky [parallax]; the fact that they did not, implied that the stars must be inconceivably far away, and so led to belief in an infinite universe) than to be told that changing economic factors led to an increasing concern with pragmatic developments (such as a means of determining longitude at sea (see Excerpt 12.1).

Excerpt 12.1 Externalism and Internalism in Nicolas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) The following passages from Nicolas Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), show that some passages demand an ‘internalist’ interpretation (referring to scientific technicalities), while others lend themselves to ‘externalist’ interpretations (pursuing internal references in other sources or in wider cultural attitudes). To understand the first passage the reader needs to know the scholastic theory that is being rejected and to be able to assess whether Copernicus’s argument works. This passage has never been taken up by externalist historians, but the second passage continues to be quoted by historians who wish to claim that scientific innovations were sometimes influenced or inspired by Neoplatonic or perhaps other mystical or magical ways of thinking, represented here by the reference to Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Ancient sage deified by the Ancient Greeks. Internalists dismiss this as merely a rhetorical flourish by Copernicus, while externalists see it as a significant feature of Renaissance thought which enabled Copernicus to place the Sun in the centre of the world system. Copernicus, Nicolas (1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI. Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius. Nor should we listen to certain peripatetics who proposed that the whole body of water is ten times greater than all the land. That is to say, in the transmutation of the elements, any one unit of earth becomes ten units of water, according to their conjecture. They also claim that the earth here

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and there bulges out because it is not of equal weight everywhere on account of its cavities, its centre of gravity being different from its centre of magnitude. But they err through ignorance of the art of geometry, not knowing that the water cannot be even seven times greater and still leave any part of the land dry, unless the earth as a whole vacated the centre of gravity and gave its place to water, as if the water were heavier. For, spheres relate to each other as the cubes of their diameters. Therefore, if seven parts of water were to the eighth part of earth, the earth’s diameter could not be greater than the distance from the centre to the circumference of the waters, so far is the water from being ten times greater […] In the middle of all, however, resides the sun. For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappositely called by some the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by others. Trismegistus calls it a visible god, and Sophocles’ Electra, the all-seeing. Thus indeed, as though sitting on a royal throne, the sun governs the family of heavenly bodies revolving around it. [1v–2r, 9v]

The former divide between externalists and internalists is perhaps now more usually manifested in the distinction between social historians and intellectual historians of science – although the distinction is by no means as starkly drawn. Intellectual historians subscribe to the view that ideas are relatively autonomous sources of information and meaning, which form part of a wider network of ideas and conventions, but as such they constitute a major aspect of the society, or social institutions, of which they are a part. Ideas are social forces – so the intellectual historian is not necessarily an internalist. The social historian of science is closer to the old category of externalist, but is unlikely to be easily pigeon-holed as a Marxist, or a subscriber to any other specific political ideology. Much of current historiography manages to combine the concerns of the social and the intellectual historian: for example, studies of the places in which scientific work takes place; work on what might be called the identity of the natural philosopher; and studies of the exchange of, and subsequently trade in, wonders, curiosities, or just typical specimens. The communication of scientific knowledge, its dissemination, consensus formation, its place in education and wider forms of opinion-formation and consciousness-shaping is another fruitful area of study. The lessons to be learned from the study of material culture have also been prominent in the historiography of science – beginning with studies of scientific instruments and subsequently looking more widely at the material culture of science (see Excerpt 12.2).

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Excerpt 12.2 Externalism, Internalism, and Beyond in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London (1667) These two passages from Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London (1667) indicate the range of possible interests that can be served by studying scientific societies or institutions. The first extract would be of more interest to a social historian, while the second will appeal more to historians who wish to focus on the science done by the society, because it makes claims about the scientific method developed by the Society. Sprat, Thomas (1667). The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry. As for what belongs to the Members themselves, that are to constitute the Society: It is to be noted, that they have freely admitted Men of different Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life. This they were oblig’d to do, or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own Declarations. For they openly profess, not to lay the Foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind … By their naturalizing Men of all Countries, they have laid the beginnings of many great advantages for the future. For by this means, they will be able, to settle a constant Intelligence, throughout all civil Nations; and make the Royal Society the general Banck, and Free-port of the World: A policy, which whether it would hold good, in the Trade of England, I know not: but sure it will in the Philosophy. We are to overcome the mysteries of all the Works of Nature; and not onely to prosecute such as are confin’d to one Kingdom, or beat upon one shore… If I could fetch my materials whence I pleas’d, to fashion the Idea of a perfect Philosopher: he should not be all of one clime, but have the different excellencies of several Countries. First, he should have the Industry, Activity, and Inquisitive humor of the Dutch, French, Scotch, and English, in laying the ground Work, the heap of Experiments: And then he should have added the cold, and circumspect, and wary disposition of the Italians, and Spaniards, in meditating upon them, before he fully brings them into speculation. All this is scarce ever to be found in one single Man: seldom in the same Countrymen: It must then be supply’d, as well as it may, by a Publick Council; wherein the various dispositions of all these Nations, may be blended together. To this purpose, the Royal Society has made no scruple, to receive all inquisitive strangers of all Countries, into its number. […] To the Royal Society it will be at any time almost as acceptable, to be confuted, as to discover: seeing, by this means, they will accomplish their main Design: others will be inflam’d: many more will labour; and so the Truth will be obtain’d between them: which may be as much promoted by the contentions of hands, and eyes; as it is commonly injur’d by those of Tongues. However, that men may not

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hence undervalue their authority, because they themselves are not willing to impose, and to usurp a dominion over their reason; I will tell them, that there is not any one thing, which is now approv’d and practis’d in the World, that is confirm’d by stronger evidence, than this, which the Society requires; except onely the Holy Mysteries of our Religion. In almost all other matters of Belief, of Opinion, or of Science; the assurance, whereby men are guided, is nothing near so firm, as this. And I dare appeal to all sober men; whether, seeing in all Countreys, that are govern’d by Laws, they expect no more, than the consent of two, or three witnesses, in matters of life, and estate; they will not think, they are fairly dealt withall, in what concerns their Knowledg, if they have the concurring Testimonies of threescore or an hundred? [62–5, 100]

The approaches of the social and the intellectual historian are brought together in the sociology of scientific knowledge. The sociologist of knowledge seeks to show how social factors enter into the formation and maintenance not just of scientific institutions, personal identities, practices, and notions of scientific method, but also of scientific ideas and theories. This approach, often called ‘social constructionism’, is now perceived as having been highly influential upon the current practice of historians of science. In a recent survey of the historiography of science, for example, Lynn K. Nyhart has written that ‘historians of science have gradually come to accept a predominantly social constructionist account that views the development of scientific knowledge as depending heavily on particulars of local circumstances, people, epistemes, and politics’ (Nyhart 2016, 8). Interestingly, however, this misses the fact that the influential sociologists of scientific knowledge which she goes on to mention formulated their own views by drawing upon the work already being published by contemporary historians of science. The founding of the principles of the new sociology of scientific knowledge on contemporary historiographical practices can be seen very clearly in one of its seminal papers, Steven Shapin’s ‘History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions’. Shapin illustrates the theoretical precepts of the sociology of scientific knowledge (what he here calls ‘sociological themes’) in this paper by reference to items in an extensive bibliography; but the bibliography consists entirely of previously published work in the history of science. Furthermore, Shapin acknowledges that ‘profound apologies are owed to writers who will be surprised to see their work treated in a sociological context’ (Shapin 1982, 204, 203). Shapin, and others, forged their sociology of scientific knowledge out of the historiographical practices of historians of science before it in turn came to be seen as a useful guide as to how the history of science should be conducted. What makes this version of the sociology of scientific knowledge (known as the ‘strong programme’ of the ‘Edinburgh school’) particularly useful for historians of science is the very fact that its theorising is firmly based on the

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empirical research of historians, and therefore can be safely adopted by other historians. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the claims of other social theorists, whose theories about the nature of science are often no more successful in helping us to understand the historical development of science than the theories of the philosophers.

Continuity or revolution? One of the most dominant assumptions in the historiography of early modern science is the notion of a ‘Scientific Revolution’, a period of rapid change during which all (or nearly all) the features of modern science emerged for the first time, and led to the Enlightenment, and ultimately to the rise of science as a dominant aspect of modern life and civilisation. First recognised by thinkers living in the period which historians call the Enlightenment, and which they evidently saw themselves as continuing, it entered into the history of science with the work of pioneers in the subject, such as Herbert Butterfield (1949) and Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) (1939). For Butterfield the Scientific Revolution was the most significant historical process since the rise of Christianity and reduced ‘the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes’. He even called for a new periodisation of European history to reflect what he took to be ‘the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality’ (Butterfield 1949, viii). The idea was so prominent in the 1950s that Kuhn saw the gradual uptake of Copernican theory to replace geocentric cosmology as a Copernican Revolution (Kuhn 1957). This in turn gave rise to Kuhn’s more general theory of scientific innovation and change, supposedly always taking place by revolutionary shifts, and described in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970). It is certainly possible to generate a long list of innovations which emerged for the first time in the early modern period and which can now be seen to be constitutive of modern science (Applebaum 2005, 1–2). But many scholars have quibbled that the designation ‘revolution’ is inappropriate because it is impossible to set a date on its beginning or its end, and that this period of dramatic change stretched from about 1500 to beyond 1700. More significantly, a number of scholars have argued for an opposing continuity thesis – claiming that the major features of the so-called revolution can be traced back to the medieval period, and show a continuous gradual development from that earlier period, rather than a dramatic emergence after 1500 (Grant 1996) (See Appendix 12.3a–b). Furthermore, the concept of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has also been dismissed as nothing more than a figment developed by the early pioneers in the subject who, as we have seen, were influenced by contemporary positivist philosophical notions about the nature of science, including its supposed capacity for solving the political and moral ills of the later modern world (Cunningham and Williams 1993). A pessimistic view suggests that it is no longer clear that there was any coherent enterprise in the early modern period that can be identified with modern science, or that the transformations in question were as

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explosive and discontinuous as the analogy with political revolution seems to imply. It is hard to disagree with this, but nevertheless, the notion of the Scientific Revolution persists, and shows no real signs of disappearing (Butterfield 1949; Kuhn 1970; Merchant 1980; Grant 1996; Zilsel 2000; Applebaum 2005; Cohen 2015). If there was any historical reality behind the historians’ notion of the Scientific Revolution, it raises the question as to why it happened when and where it did – why in Western Europe, beginning at the end of the Renaissance? Why not in China much earlier, or in the civilisation of Islam during the Middle Ages, both of which seem to have had the potential to develop a successful scientific culture long before Western Europe. This has indeed proved to be an enduring question, repeatedly addressed in the historiography of science. One of the earliest attempts to answer this question was developed by the socialist historian Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944), who saw the rise of science as a consequence of early capitalism. Earlier social barriers between scholars and secular humanists on the one hand, and elite craftsmen on the other, were lowered as a result of the social changes involved in the development of capitalism, and enabled cross-fertilisation between the two groups. Scholars no longer despised and disregarded banausic pursuits, and elite craftsmen were quick to embrace the systematised rational and mathematical knowledge of university men (Zilsel 2000, reprinting works from the 1940s). This gave rise to the so-called ‘Scholar and craftsman thesis’ which, in spite of negative critical scrutiny, continues to flourish. Zilsel’s account was taken up by the socialist historian and sinologist Joseph Needham (1900–95), who saw it as a possible explanation as to why the sciences in China, in spite of being in advance of anything in Europe up to about 1400, did not progress as they had done in Europe (Needham 1969). The ‘Needham Question’ is still being asked, in spite of numerous attempts to answer it. It seems safe to say, however, that the answer lies either in the social and political organisation of knowledge and material production, or in denying that it is apposite to ask why China did not produce something that history suggests is uniquely European (it is, after all, called Western science; Cohen 2015). The danger with attempts to explain why Western science is Western, or rather, with why science began in the early modern West and nowhere else, is that the answer may seem to suggest that Western Europeans are simply cleverer, more rational, or in some other way superior to other peoples. Most recently, H. Floris Cohen has managed to come up with an explanation for the Western origins of the Scientific Revolution which is suitably historically contingent, and does not imply any advantageous factors, such as rationality, held only by Europeans. Cohen’s account depends upon cultural cross-fertilisation, which is held to stimulate creative innovation in the receiving culture. As a result of historical accident, the West benefitted from more episodes of cross-fertilisation than Islam, while China never experienced any cross-fertilisation from another culture. The early modern West thereby gained a critical forward momentum and its science continued to develop (Cohen 2015). Cohen’s is perhaps the best

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explanation so far as to why the Scientific Revolution happened when and where it did, but it is unlikely to remain the last word on the subject.

Feminist historiography and women in science Thanks to the rise of feminist history, and the decline of whiggish assumptions that only those who made a lasting scientific discovery should be studied, increasing attention is now being paid to women’s involvement in, and contributions to, the theory and practice of early modern science. In spite of the multitude of handicaps with which they were forced to cope, women were able to make their presence felt, and to leave significant historical traces. Furthermore, those who were of a sufficiently high social standing that they could write, and in some cases publish, can now be seen to be at least the intellectual equals of contemporary male natural philosophers. Indeed, the early modern period is now being revealed as an age when women could contribute to the development of the sciences, either in their own right, or as invaluable assistants to brothers or husbands (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). It was only in the nineteenth century, when science became increasingly professionalised, that women began to be systematically excluded. A different aspect of the historiography of women in early modern science focuses on women as subjects for the scrutiny and classification of male scientists. This topic provides a prime site for showing how social and cultural norms impinge upon supposedly objective science. The Enlightenment emphasis upon reason as a defining characteristic of mankind, and what makes us moral beings, together with the incipient view that ‘all men are created equal’, meant that a significant majority of male naturalists began to find allegedly scientific reasons for excluding women (and perhaps even more urgently, other races) from the ranks of equal, and equally rational, beings. In so doing, however, they were not really breaking new ground, merely reviving earlier attempts by natural philosophers to support the universally assumed belief in the inferiority of women, and to justify their subjection to men (Schiebinger 1989, 2004). These kinds of studies clearly enrich our understanding of the history of science, and cover the spectrum from social to intellectual history, and exemplify the best methods of the sociology of scientific knowledge. There is, however, a more controversial dimension to recent feminist history of science, which, as with earlier positivist or Whig histories, seeks to make claims about the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. According to this view, science itself is gendered, and it is masculine. This movement in feminist studies seems to have been initiated by the physicist Evelyn Fox Keller, in an essay on ‘Gender and Science’ (1978, now in Keller 1985) which rejected the prevailing assumption that the small number of female personnel in science was due to female choice, and attributed it instead to a supposed masculine culture of science. She went on to claim that this masculinisation of science dated from the Scientific Revolution, and saw the attitudes of Francis Bacon as providing evidence for this (in an essay entitled ‘Baconian Science’, published in 1980, now in Keller 1985). This idea was taken up and presented in a social-

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constructionist historical study by Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980). The Scientific Revolution now appeared as a period when the mechanical philosophy, developed by men, not only replaced an earlier vitalistic and holistic approach to nature in which women played a significant role, but also actively excluded and suppressed women. Once again, Bacon was used to confirm this: These social events [Lancashire witch-trials of 1612] influenced Bacon’s philosophy and literary style. Much of the imagery he used in delineating his new scientific objectives and methods derives from the courtroom, and, because it treats nature as a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions, strongly suggests the interrogations of the witch trials and the mechanical devices used to torture witches. In a relevant passage, Bacon stated that the method by which nature’s secrets might be discovered consisted in investigating the secrets of witchcraft by inquisition, referring to the example of James I … (Merchant 1980, 168) (see Excerpt 12.3 a–b)

Excerpt 12.3 a–b Feminism and science in Francis Bacon The following extracts from two works by Francis Bacon have featured in the claims of feminist historians that Bacon stands representative of a masculine kind of science, and believed that knowledge of nature could only be acquired by torturing nature to learn ‘her’ secrets. Once again, debate partly hinges upon whether such comments can be dismissed as mere rhetoric, mere figures of speech (consider the final sentence of the second passage), or whether they reveal deeply held attitudes to women. a. Bacon, Francis (1605). The Advancement of Learning. London: Henrie Tomes. For it is no more, but by following, and as it were, hounding Nature in her wandrings, to bee able to leade her afterwardes to the same place againe. Neyther am I of opinion in this HISTORY of MARVAILES, that superstitious Narrations of Sorceries, Witchecraftes, Dreames, Diuinations, and the like, where there is an assurance, and cleere euidence of the fact, be altogether excluded. For it is not yet knowne in what cases, and how farre, effectes attributed to superstition, do participate of Naturall causes: and therefore how-soeuer the practise of such things is to bee condemned, yet from the Speculation and consideration of them, light may be taken, not onely for the discerning of the offences, but for the further disclosing of Nature: Neither ought a Man to make scruple of entring into these things for inquisition of truth, as your Maiestie hath shewed in your owne example: who with

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the two cleere eyes of Religion and naturall Philosophy, haue looked deepely and wisely into these shadowes, and yet proued your selfe to be of the Nature of the Sunne, which passeth through pollutions, and it selfe remaines as pure as before. [8v–9r] b. Bacon, Francis (1996). Descriptio globi intellectualis [1612]. In: Graham Rees, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. VI: Philosophical Works, c. 1611–c. 1619. Oxford: Oxford University Press, no. 3. For nature is either free and left to go its own way and unfold itself in its usual course, that is, nature advances by itself without being interfered with or worked on in any way, as in the heavens, animals, plants and the whole order of nature; or again it is quite forced and ripped from its state by the crookedness and arrogance of defiant and rebellious matter, and by the violence of impediments, as in the monsters and heteroclites of nature; or finally it is restrained, moulded, completely transformed and as it were made new by art and human agency, as in artificial things. For in artificial things nature seems as it were made up, and we see bodies in an entirely new guise and a kind of alternative universe of things. Therefore natural history deals with either the liberty of nature, or its errors or bonds. But if anyone gets annoyed because I call the arts the bonds of nature when they ought rather to be considered its liberators and champions in that in some cases they allow nature to achieve its ends by reducing obstacles to order, then I reply that I do not much care for such fancy ideas and pretty words; I intend and mean only that nature, like Proteus, is forced by art to do what would not have been done without it: and it does not matter whether you call this forcing and enchaining, or assisting and perfecting. [101]

This generated controversy among historians of science who defended Bacon against charges that his attitude to nature reflected an exploitative and even brutal attitude to women, and who pointed to vitalistic and even magical aspects of the science produced by leading males in the Scientific Revolution. It also generated controversy amongst feminist intellectuals. Keller and Merchant subscribed to the view that the masculine domination of scientific institutions necessarily resulted in a masculine kind of science – a view of the nature of the world reflecting male values, preoccupations, and so forth. Concomitantly, they believed that women think differently from men, and therefore would produce a different kind of science (remember that, for them, what counts as science is socially constructed). For some feminists, however, the point was not to emphasise supposed innate differences between male and female but to insist that all the apparent differences stem only from the different ways in which women (in patriarchal societies) are socialised. Women could do

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science as well as men, and if left to their own devices their science would turn out to be essentially the same science, not a qualitatively different science (Harding 1986). These opposed views led in turn to the development of standpoint epistemology, and notions of ‘situated knowledge’, which drew attention to the fact that the different ways in which women were socialised could lead to them having specialised knowledge and different perspectives, and therefore to them appearing to think differently from men (Harding 1986; Haraway 1988). The historiography of women and science has some way to go before catching up with the almost exclusively malecentred historiography of the recent past, and continues to be an exciting area of scholarship.

Religion, science, and secularisation The earliest historical studies on the interaction between science and religion in the early modern period were written as part of a late-nineteenth century movement to extricate an increasingly professionalised science from its former domination by religious sensibilities and even church institutions (Weldon 2017). These reinforced contemporary claims by professional scientists, writing during the emergence of Darwinism, that science and religion were inimical and that science can only thrive when it is free to develop without interference from religious authorities. This socalled ‘conflict’ thesis was not seriously countered until 1938 when the sociologist Robert K. Merton published the opening blast in what became the Puritanism and Science thesis (or the Merton thesis), Science, Technology and Society in SeventeenthCentury England (Merton 1970). Merton’s thesis indicated that the warfare thesis was at least over-stated and that science and religion could be mutually supportive. More importantly, however, Merton’s claim that the rise of science in England was directly linked to the rise of Puritanism in English religion gave rise to a historiographical controversy which is still not fully resolved. Merton’s use of the designation ‘Puritan’ remains problematic, and the broader thesis was vigorously opposed by many, but it also found some powerful supporters (Cohen 1990). While controversy continued, alternative religious groupings were proposed as the real reason why England proved a congenial place for scientific development, including so-called ‘Latitudinarian Anglicanism’, or simply a broader Protestantism (Harrison 1998). Recent discussions about the identity of natural philosophy, and how it differs from modern science, have also hinged upon the relationship between science (or natural philosophy) and religion. Seeking to draw an obvious distinction, Andrew Cunningham claimed ‘that Natural Philosophy was an enterprise which was about God; Science by contrast is an enterprise which (virtually by definition) is not about God’ (Cunningham 1988, 384). Skirting around Cunningham’s main point (about historically shifting identities), Edward Grant objected to the first part of this claim, and showed that the whole point of natural philosophy was to explain phenomena in naturalistic terms – to invoke God was to betray the principles of natural philosophy (Grant 2000) (see Excerpt 12.4a–b). Grant was surely correct, but

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Cunningham’s point that natural philosophy should not be seen as equivalent to ‘science’ remains valid.

Excerpt 12.4 a–b Religion and science in Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton Here we see Francis Bacon warning against mingling or confounding ‘Divinitie’ and ‘Philosophie’, and Newton insisting that discourse about God ‘does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy’. Clearly, historical research is required to reconcile, or simply to explain, these opposed views. a. Bacon, Francis (1605). The Advancement of Learning. London: Henrie Tomes. To conclude, therefore, let no man, uppon a weake conceite of sobrietie or an ill-applyed moderation, thinke or maintaine, that a man can search too farre, or be too well studied in the Booke of Gods word, or in the Booke of Gods workes; Divinitie or Philosophie; but rather let men endeavour an endless progresse or proficience in both: only let men beware … that they doe not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together. [6v] b. Newton, Issac (1729). The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Trans. Andrew Motte. London: Benjamin Motte. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, not touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is, we know not. In bodies we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known, either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less then have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion. For we adore him as his servants; and a God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find, suited to different times and places, could arise from nothing but the ideas and

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will of a Being necessarily existing. But by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build. For all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind, by a certain similitude which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy. [391–92]

Cunningham was perhaps guilty of seeing both ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘science’ as easily defined unchanging entities, rather than as evolving notions that might well be seen as overlapping in different ways at different times. This seems to be the import of a recent contribution to debates about the relationship between science and religion, which also takes as its starting point the changing identity of science on the one hand, and of religion on the other. Peter Harrison’s Territories of Science and Religion (2015) emphasises the historiographical lesson that there is no single unchanging relationship between science and religion, but that the grounds of debate keep shifting as both ‘science’ and ‘religion’ evolve in different ways, and as each views the other from a newly developed perspective. The underlying claim about shifting identities, and therefore shifting interrelationships seems unassailable, but controversies are already emerging with regard to specific historical examples used by Harrison. The result of these and other debates over relations between science and religion has been a major historiographical shift from the ‘conflict thesis’ to the ‘complexity thesis’ – again emphasising the complex, and continually shifting, nature of these fundamental approaches to the world and to humankind’s place in the world (Brooke 1991). Important evidence for the historical reality of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ is provided by the immediately succeeding generations of thinkers who saw their own age as an age of Enlightenment, and saw this largely as a consequence of the seventeenthcentury rise of science, and a supposedly concomitant triumph of reason over superstition and the irrational (including religious belief). In fact, scientific naturalism and aprioristic rationalism are at odds with one another and if they are made to cohere they remain continually in tension; one outcome of this during the Enlightenment can be seen in the divergence in the history of philosophy of British empiricism from a more rationalistic Continental philosophy. Meanwhile, Isaac Newton’s alchemy and other occult interests, and his obsessive attempts to reconstruct the true primitive religion of mankind, were quickly buried as Newton was reinvented by French Enlightenment thinkers as the embodiment of the ‘Age of Reason’. Consequently, science has been seen as a major factor in the renewed valorisation of reason in the Enlightenment, and in the supposedly resulting secularisation of Western civilisation. So-called

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‘conjectural histories’, developed by various Enlightenment thinkers (consider Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind of 1795, and Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy published through the 1830s), tended to see religious belief as associated with an earlier stage in human development, replaced by a scientific ethos in the apotheosis of human civilisation. Less ideologically driven studies have revealed that such stories are more myth than history, and that there is little real evidence to see the rise of science as an essential or necessary factor in secularisation (Brooke 1991, 2010). Moral and cultural relativism arising from greater awareness of non-Christian civilisations, Christian pluralism after the Reformation and increased scholarly scrutiny of the Bible resulting in internecine conflicts among the faithful, and an increase in political radicalism, are all factors which have been shown to have been much more crucial. The major historical study of secularisation, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), is not a work in the history of science, and Taylor himself argues against claims that science has displaced religion. Taylor’s account is one in which unworldly religious virtues are replaced by civic virtues, in which what is good is for the benefit of society as a whole, not for the individual’s immortal soul. Those who promote such civic virtues can, of course, appropriate contemporary science to support their view, just as the religiously devout had long used contemporary science to argue for the ‘design’ in nature, and therefore the existence of a designing Creator. Indeed, given the fact that science was used by the faithful to bolster a so-called natural theology, and given the increased authority of post-Newtonian science, their opponents had no choice but to try to show that science, interpreted in an alternative way, could be used to support an atheistic worldview (Henry 2017).

Conclusion As well as these major areas of study which are unique to academic history of science, the historiography of science shares other approaches developed by more generalist historians. These include the history of the book, and the role of print culture, including issues of intellectual property (Eisenstein 1979; Biagioli 2002; Johns 2009). Not unconnected with printing – which allowed standardisation and reliable replication – is the history of scientific illustrations (Hunter 2010). This resulted in dramatic and highly useful developments (compare, for example, Figures 12.1 and 12.2). Interesting work has been done on diagrams in scientific and mathematical works, and other illustrations intended to enable readers to visualise what cannot be adequately expressed in words (Lefèvre, Renn and Schoepflin 2003; Lüthy and Smets 2009); and contributing to the historiography of the identity of scientists, studies have been done of how scientists are displayed in portraiture (Jordanova 2000). Where once externalist historians of science were separated from internalists by political ideology, it is now largely a matter of personal choice, depending upon interests and skills, as to what kind of histories the historian writes. The result is that the historiography of science is richer and more varied that it has

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Figure 12.1 Skeleton from a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript. Before the invention of printing, medical texts were copied out by hand. Although the scribes were trained to produce clear readable script, they were not always good draftsmen, and often produced barely adequate illustrations in their attempts to copy them. It should be noted that there was no attempt to draw from a real specimen, merely to copy the illustration in the manuscript that was being transcribed. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

ever been. This is surely as it should be, and the cumulative result can only provide a fuller understanding of our collective past than could possibly be provided by a more single-minded historiographical approach. One aspect of this fuller understanding is a greater awareness that what we write our histories about are not fixed and unchanging things, but are changing all the time, and our

Figure 12.2 Fourth Scheme of the Muscles, from Andreas Vesalius (1555), De humani corporis fabrica [On the structure of the human body], Basel: Johannes Oporinus. Printing allowed the standardisation of images, and professional illustrators were now employed to provide high-quality images. Moreover, they would work in close collaboration with the anatomist, often drawing directly from the anatomised cadaver. Letters (or numbers) located on the image could be keyed to detailed discussion in the text. Images of this standard, compared to earlier images, are frequently used as evidence for a Scientific Revolution. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

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histories ought to recognise those changes, and properly account for them, as they give an account of them. Now that we are increasingly used to letting a thousand historiographical flowers bloom, rather than fret over whether we are using the best, or the correct, historiography, each of us should just concentrate on recounting as well as we can how it actually happened.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Bacon, Francis (1605). The Advancement of Learning. London: Henrie Tomes. ——— (1612/1996). Descriptio globi intellectualis (1612). In: Graham Rees, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. VI: Philosophical Works, c. 1611–c. 1619. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 95–169. Copernicus, Nicolas (1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI. Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius. Copernicus, Nicholas (1992). On the Revolutions. Trans. and commentary by Edward Rosen. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Newton, Isaac (1729). The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. Andrew Motte. London: Benjamin Motte. Sprat, Thomas (1667). The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry.

(B) Secondary literature Applebaum, Wilbur (2005). The Scientific Revolution and the Foundations of Modern Science. Westport: Greenwood Press. Biagioli, Mario (2002). Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science. London and New York: Routledge. Brooke, John Hedley (1991). Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2010). Science and Secularization. In: Peter Harrison, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103–23. Butterfield, Herbert (1931). The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell. ——— (1949). The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. London: G. Bell. Cohen, H. Floris (2015). The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, I. Bernard, ed. (1990). Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cunningham, Andrew (1988). Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19, 365–89. Cunningham, Andrew and Williams, Perry (1993). De-centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science. British Journal for the History of Science 26, 407–32. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, Edward (1996). The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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——— (2000). God and Natural Philosophy: The Late Middle Ages and Sir Isaac Newton. Early Science and Medicine, 5, 279–298. Hall, A. Rupert (1992). Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 575–599. Harding, Sandra (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harrison, Peter (1998). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2015). The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Henry, John (2017). Atheism. In: Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. Baltimore. MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 333–47. Hunter, Michael, ed. (2010). Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation. London: Routledge. Johns, Adrian (2009). The Nature of the Book. Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Jordanova, Ludmilla (2000). Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits, 1660–2000. London: Reaktion Books. Keller, Evelyn Fox (1985). Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Koyré, Alexandre (1939). Études Galiléennes. Paris: Hermann [translated 1978: Galileo Studies. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press]. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1957). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition with postscript. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Laudan, Larry (1990). The History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. In: R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie and M. J. S. Hodge, eds, Companion to the History of Science. London and New York: Routledge, 47–59. Lefèvre, Wolfgang, Renn, Jürgen and Schoepflin, Urs, eds. (2003). The Power of Images in Early Modern Science. Basel: Birkhäuser. Lüthy, Christoph and Smets, Alexis (2009). Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scientific Imagery. In: Edith Dudley Sylla and William R. Newman, eds, Evidence and Interpretation in Studies on Early Science and Medicine. Leiden: Brill, 398–439. Merchant, Carolyn (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Merton, Robert K. (1970). Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, new edition. New York: H. Fertig. Needham, Joseph (1969). The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. London: Allen & Unwin. Newman, William R. (2016). A Preliminary Reassessment of Newton’s Alchemy. In: R. Iliffe and G. E. Smith, eds, Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 454–84. Nye, Mary Jo (2006). Scientific Biography: History of Science by Another Means? Isis 97, 322–29. Nyhart, Lynn K. (2016). Historiography of the History of Science. In: Bernard Lightman, ed., A Companion to the History of Science. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 7–22.

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Ross, Sydney (1962). Scientist: The Story of a Word. Annals of Science 18, 65–85. Schiebinger, Londa (1989). The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2004). Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shapin, Steven (1982). History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions. History of Science 20, 157–211. ——— (1992). Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate. History of Science 30, 333–69. Taylor, Charles (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weldon, Steven P. (2017). Science and Religion. In: Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 2nd edn. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–19. Zilsel, Edgar (2000). The Social Origins of Modern Science. Eds. D. Raven, W. Krohn, and R. S. Cohen. Dordrecht: Kluwver.

Appendices

Appendices 12.1 a–b: The Difference between the History and Philosophy of Science (12.1a) Kuhn, Thomas S. (1957). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copernicus was not the first to suggest the earth’s motion, and he did not claim to have rediscovered the idea for himself. In his preface he cites most of the ancient authorities who had argued that the earth was in motion. In an earlier manuscript he even refers to Aristarchus, whose sun-centered universe very closely resembles his own. Although he fails, as was customary during the Renaissance, to mention his more immediate predecessors who had believed that the earth was or could be in motion, he must have known some of their work. He may not, for example, have known of Oresme’s contributions, but he had probably at least heard of the very influential treatise in which the fifteenthcentury Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, derived the motion of the earth from the plurality of worlds in an unbounded Neoplatonic universe. The earth’s motion had never been a popular concept, but by the sixteenth century it was scarcely unprecedented. What was unprecedented was the mathematical system that Copernicus built upon the earth’s motion. With the possible exception of Aristarchus, Copernicus was the first to realize that the earth’s motion might solve an existing astronomical problem or indeed a scientific problem of any sort. Even including Aristarchus, he was the first to develop a detailed account of the astronomical consequences of the earth’s motion. Copernicus’ mathematics distinguish him from his predecessors, and it was in part because of the mathematics that his work inaugurated a revolution as theirs had not. [144]

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(12.1 b) Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn with postscript. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. The most obvious examples of scientific revolutions are those famous episodes in scientific development that have often been labeled revolutions before. Therefore, in Sections IX and X, where the nature of scientific revolutions is first directly scrutinized, we shall deal repeatedly with the major turning points in scientific development associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein. More clearly than most other episodes in the history of at least the physical sciences, these display what all scientific revolutions are about. Each of them necessitated the community’s rejection of one timehonored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done. Such changes, together with the controversies that almost always accompany them, are the defining characteristics of scientific revolutions. These characteristics emerge with particular clarity from a study of, say, the Newtonian or the chemical revolution. It is, however, a fundamental thesis of this essay that they can also be retrieved from the study of many other episodes that were not so obviously revolutionary. [6–7]

Appendices 12.2 a–b. Whig Interpretation of History The apologetic nature of the first extract marks it out as whiggish. Rather than accept that Newton was simply interested in alchemy, Hall tries to suggest he was only interested in the ‘genuine knowledge’ which lay hidden in alchemy, a knowledge that was ‘rational, factual and … experimental’. It might be argued that Newman is whiggish in so far as he ‘translates’ early modern terminology into modern chemical terms, but he does so only to help the reader understand what is going on. Although his concern is to show that Newton’s theory of colours (now considered to be one of his greatest achievements) was inspired by his alchemical work, he offers no apologetics, but merely insists that we should not regard Newton’s interest in alchemy as an aberration that needs to be explained. It was clearly a fertile source of inspiration for Newton’s speculations. (12.2 a) Hall, A. Rupert (1992). Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perhaps to write, as my wife and I did thirty years ago, that ‘Newton was not in any admissible sense of the word an alchemist’ was going too far. To call Newton a magician because he applied quantitative chemical experimentation to the study of alchemical writings is going too far in the opposite direction. At

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the most, Newton was an alchemist in the third sense defined above [one who ‘studies the writings of chemists and alchemists … with the object of understanding their meaning and repeating their processes. He may not necessarily be certain that all or any of these writings are truthful and valid’]. If Newton’s researches into the literature of alchemy – where probably no one has gone further – demonstrate again his belief in the tradition of esoteric learning born in Antiquity, disguised in allegory and symbolism, they also illustrate his concomitant belief that the genuine knowledge carried within that tradition under disguise is rational, factual and (so far as Nature is concerned) experimental. There was nothing magical in alchemy as Newton conceived it, no method of acting upon material substance by supernatural powers. We also wrote, thirty years ago, that Newton sought facts in his experimental study of (al)chemy: the correlation between his own experiments and alchemical literature was significant only in so far as it indicated to Newton the direction in which he should pursue the experiments which yielded him facts. One might say that alchemical writings were for Newton only a means to an end – the end being the elucidation of chemical entity and structure. In other words, knowledge, not gain. This still seems to me a correct judgement. [199–200] (12.2 b) Newman, William R. (2016), A Preliminary Reassessment of Newton’s Alchemy. In: R. Iliffe and G. E. Smith, eds. Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 454-484. Boyle’s Certain Physiological Essays, for example, describes an experiment for what he calls the ‘redintegration’ of saltpeter or niter – the chemical that we now refer to as potassium nitrate. ‘Redintegration’ here refers to resynthesis after analysis – the dissolution of saltpeter into its ingredients and the subsequent recombination of those ingredients to arrive once more at saltpeter. In simplest terms, Boyle’s experiment worked by injecting burning charcoal into molten saltpeter, and thus igniting it. This resulted in the release of nitrogen and carbon in combination with oxygen, leaving a non-volatile residue of ‘fixed niter’ that resembled salt of tartar (potassium carbonate – in reality it was potassium carbonate). Knowing that spirit of niter (nitric acid) could be produced by the thermal decomposition of niter, Boyle then added spirit of niter to the tartar-like residue, and acquired a product that resembled the original saltpeter in all its significant properties. He was then able to conclude that niter itself is merely a compound of two very different materials, namely spirit of niter and fixed niter, which we would today call an acid and a base. Boyle would expand on this experiment in his 1666 Origin of Forms and Qualities, where he described additional experiments for the redintegration of amber, turpentine, and stibnite. Let us now pause for a moment and consider chronology. In the same year as Newton’s famous annus mirabilis, 1666, the year in which he later claimed to

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have begun experimenting with prisms, Boyle had published his Origin of Forms and Qualities. The very manuscript in which Newton recorded his first experiments with the resynthesis of white light from the spectral colors – the chymical laboratory notebook CUL Add. Ms. 3975 – also contains extensive notes drawn from Boyle’s Origin of Forms on the redintegration of stibnite and turpentine. Although the order in which this document was composed remains unclear at present, it is at least likely that Newton had read about Boyle’s experiments with chymical redintegration at the time when he composed ‘Of Colours’. Chymical redintegration was a phenomenon that clearly interested the young Newton, and one that he could easily have adapted to his optics from his reading in Boyle’s chymistry. [467]

Appendices 12.3 a–b. Continuity or Revolution? (12.3 a) Grant, Edward (1996), The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It is in the Latin Middle Ages in Western Europe that we must look for answers to questions such as: Why did science as we know it today materialize only in Western society? What made it possible for science to acquire prestige and influence and to become a powerful force in Western Europe by the seventeenth century? The answers to such questions are to be found in certain attitudes and institutions that were generated in Western society from approximately 1175 to 1500. These attitudes and institutions were directed toward learning as a whole and toward science and natural philosophy in particular. Together they coalesce into what may be appropriately called ‘the foundations of modern science.’ They were new to Europe and unique to the world. Because there is nothing to which we can compare this extraordinary process, no one can say whether it was fast or slow. In the first seven chapters of this book, I described the new factors that transformed Western Europe from an intellectual embarrassment to an intellectual powerhouse. I shall now use two distinct approaches to show why, collectively, they formed the foundations of modern science. The first involves considering the contextual changes that created an atmosphere conducive to the establishment of science. Here I shall be concerned with the conditions that made it feasible to pursue science and natural philosophy on a permanent basis and that also made those pursuits laudable activities within Western society. In the second approach I shall examine certain features of medieval science and natural philosophy that were favorable to the development of the Scientific Revolution. [170–71] (12.3 b) Applebaum, Wilbur (2005). The Scientific Revolution and the Foundations of Modern Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. In 1500 natural philosophers … perceived the universe as finite, with the motionless Earth at its center, surrounded by the Moon, Sun, planets, and stars,

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all of which rested on several homocentric spheres rotating uniformly about the Earth. In 1700 the universe was seen as infinite, and the planets, including Earth, revolving in ellipses about the Sun at varying distances with non-uniform motion. In 1500 the universe was thought to be completely full of matter. In the course of the next two centuries most natural philosophers came to accept the existence of spaces devoid of matter. The behavior of moving bodies … also came to be understood in profoundly different ways. Knowledge about the world of living things saw similar substantial changes. Anatomical, physiological, and embryological details and processes unknown to the ancients were discovered. The functions of plants and animals were coming to be seen as based on physical and chemical processes, rather than as governed by vegetative or animal ‘souls’. It was learned that sexual reproduction in animals and humans involved the union of sperm and egg, and that processes analogous to sexual reproduction applied in plants as well. Blood came to be seen as circulating rather than ebbing and flowing in the channels of the body … The inventions of the telescope and microscope enabled further investigation of hitherto unknown worlds. Traditional forms of mathematics were expanded, and new branches of mathematics were developed. Experimentation and the discovery of mathematical laws of nature increasingly became the desired goals of scientific investigation. These profound changes in the conceptions and practices of natural philosophy constituted significant and decisive breaks with long held beliefs that originated in Greek Antiquity and were modified by scholars in medieval Western Europe and the Islamic world. For several centuries students had learned in the universities of Europe about the achievements of the ancients … Those achievements came to be seen as standing in the way of a true knowledge of reality. [1–2]

13 Popular cultures and witchcraft Kathryn A. Edwards

Over the last thirty years work on or related to witchcraft and popular religion has been central to studies of pre-modern European popular culture. To aid those new to this field, there have appeared perceptive historiographical surveys (Barry and Davies 2007; Levack 2006) and thorough encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and handbooks (Durrant and Bailey 2012; Golden 2006; Levack 2013a). The venerable Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe by Brian P. Levack is now in its fourth edition (2015b) and summaries, source books, and textbooks have joined it (Gaskill 2010; Gibson 2017, 2018; Goodare 2016; Hutton 2017; Levack 2015a; Maxwell-Stuart 2011; Ostorero, Bagliani and Tremp 1999; Parish 2015; Rummel and Voltmer 2012). Two new journals also focus on closely related subjects: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (first edition Summer 2006) and Preternature (first edition 2012). Most European countries have at least several research groups devoted to witchcraft and popular culture, and some have developed extensive and valuable websites; among the model sites are those of the Arbeitskreis interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung (AKIH) and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. Robin Briggs has placed several decades of case notes on the Lorraine trials online, a site on Witches in Early Modern England is under development, and German research groups at Trier and Halle provide monographs, conferences, exhibits, and an impressive group of materials at www. historicum.net/themen/hexenforschung/. In this situation it may seem redundant to write yet another survey of the state of witchcraft studies. Yet, as the late Robert Scribner, a pioneer in the analysis of early European popular culture, noted, contemporaries themselves saw magic as embedded in popular culture (see Appendix 13.1). Witchcraft and popular magic thus act in this chapter to focus and clarify current debates in popular culture studies.

How to be popular Coming to a consensus about what ‘popular culture’ means is often one of its most vexing aspects. Some scholars have even questioned whether a history of ‘popular culture’ is possible because of the modern implications attached to ‘popular’ (Scribner 2001). Others have asked if we should substitute terms like

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‘traditional’, ‘common’, or ‘widespread’. Despite these terminological frustrations, most scholars accept that in early modern Europe there existed shared practices and values that can be called popular culture; the challenge frequently comes in tracing the points of cultural convergence and transition. Such points can include geography, gender, social status, age, education, institutions, or other considerations. They can encompass hundreds of miles or a single village and unite or divide these territories. Frequently the study of popular culture thus becomes the study of disequilibrium, differentiation, and dynamism as much as it is about binding and strengthening communities. As such, ‘popular’ does not necessarily mean loved, and it certainly does not mean lesser. Rather, it should be seen as a rough synonym for ‘widely accepted’ or ‘common’, something that many members of a community or group of communities would recognise, share, and be able to assess. Some of the same definitional troubles affect the history of magic and witchcraft, reflecting enduring historical debates and modern epistemological assumptions. The history of witchcraft, and popular beliefs more generally, have frequently been subject to what E.P. Thompson called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (Walsham 2008a, 504). Many of the earliest studies of pre-modern European witchcraft came from those looking to explain the rise of male-dominated western societies (Murray 1921, 1933), argue for the durability of Satan in modern life (Summers 1926), or search for transcendent myths (Frazer 1922). In these interpretations witchcraft is a libel by Christian authorities of ancient religious practices extant during Christianity’s European expansion. E.E. Evans-Pritchard argued that sorcery is a deliberate use of magical ritual to cause harm while witchcraft comes from the witch’s innate power, but this distinction was rarely so clear in medieval and early modern European languages (Hutton 2004, 428; Bever in Levack 2013a, 53). These early twentieth-century scholars also distinguished between magic and religion: magic channelled occult forces in nature for individual and communal benefit, while religion supplicated a higher power for such assistance. Witchcraft was presumed to be innately popular, while religion had greater potential to transcend any lesser cultural forms. Such beliefs about witchcraft have proven extremely hard to revise because of their appeal to modern self-conceptions and the wide distribution of Murray’s and Summers’ publications. Specialists since the 1970s have worked to achieve a more historically accurate synthesis. Among the pioneers challenging Murray, Frazier, and Evans-Pritchard were Norman Cohn, Carlo Ginzburg, and Keith Thomas (Cohn 1975; Ginzburg 1983, 1992; Thomas 1971). These scholars offered influential interpretations of the relationship between witchcraft and popular culture alongside their broader analysis of religion and magic. For Thomas and Cohn, magic and witchcraft were sources of power; they debated over who defined each category’s qualities and who wielded their power. While both authors acknowledged that belief in magic was widespread throughout premodern Europe and local conditions influenced acceptance of magic and accusations of witchcraft, they disagreed over the extent to which elite policy and discourse formed belief in and actions against magic and witchcraft (Barry 1996). Ginzburg pushed the binary

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between elite and popular cultures further. In two influential books, Ginzburg treated heresy and witchcraft as discursive processes where popular and learned cultures interacted and created new beliefs that authorities fought to repress. These revisions inspired a generation of scholars to assess the influence of learned and textual cultures on a, presumably, illiterate or weakly literate popular culture. More recent scholarship has challenged the binary between elite and popular on which these analyses were based. Contemporary research argues that definitions and perceptions of witchcraft were formed through exchange between clergy, judicial officials, and a population that itself had diverse perceptions of witches and other magical practitioners (Barry, Davies and Usborne 2018; Collins 2015; Kallestrup and Toivo 2017). There was no distinct high or low, learned or ignorant culture which imposed its view of witchcraft on pre-modern European society. To make such claims, many witchcraft researchers have moved from studying theological treatises or judicial syntheses to close readings of trial records and embedding witchcraft in its local context. In the process the definition of ‘witch’ has focused more on accused witches’ actions and relationships than ontological status. It has been shown that the existence of people who wielded extraordinary natural and supernatural powers was rarely contested in early modern Europe (Bailey 2006; Edwards 2015). Such individuals played central roles in many of the lifecycle rituals at the heart of popular culture, and some had magical specialties such as countermagic or curing the sick (Dillinger 2012; Gaskill 2000). In this environment ‘witchcraft’ and ‘witch’ essentially became terms used when beneficial practices or practitioners went bad and remained widely accepted both before and after the Reformation (Davies 2003; Waite 2007). Yet such categories were by definition blurred, and actions one individual saw as beneficial magic another might interpret as maleficent witchcraft.

Community and gender Concepts of community and gender are at the heart of premodern identification and prosecution of witches, and of modern analyses of witchcraft. In the process, many scholars of popular culture are indebted to Emile Durkheim who argued for the essentially social nature of religion (Durkheim 1912/1995). For example, Keith Thomas built on Durkheim when he stressed how those accused of witchcraft violated social norms and when he argued that the Protestant Reformation fundamentally changed the spiritual nature of popular culture (Thomas 1971). John Bossy made the connection more explicit when he described the Reformation as triggering a movement from a ‘body of people’ to a ‘body of beliefs’ that redefined the relationship between popular religion and culture (Bossy 1985). Over the last thirty years research on witchcraft has often developed such socio-cultural elements. While they can take many forms, this section will emphasise three: gender, local networks, and family relationships. They demonstrate the extent to which witchcraft formed and was formed by popular culture.

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Given the influence of Margaret Murray on 1960s’ feminism and the strident misogyny of many famous witchcraft treatises, it should not be surprising that understanding the link between witches and womanhood was central to the social study of witchcraft during the 1970s and 1980s, and it remains important in analyses of witchcraft (Levack 2001, vol. 4) (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). Lyndal Roper and Eva Labouvie did pioneering and inspiring archival and analytical work on German sources, compiling trial records, finding patterns in the trials, and providing psychoanalytical explanations for what had often been dismissed as ‘crazy’ or ‘ignorant’ claims (Labouvie 1991; Roper 1994, 2012). They challenged the cliché of the marginal woman witch and demonstrated that most accused women were integrated into their communities, were of the middling classes, and were often married. Poisoning, a classic female crime linked to witchcraft, was not part of a majority of cases, although a few sensational ones and classical motifs gave it disproportionate imaginative force (Mollenauer 2013). While female witchcraft could include elements of sexual fantasy, striking in these studies of woman witches is its variability – of actions, reactions, crimes, and individual personality. Some women seemed resigned to their fate; others denied their guilt, and still others wished that they were witches because then they could act against those who hurt them (Durrant 2007; Lyndal Roper 2004). Scholars have suggested that sometimes women cultivated a reputation as a witch to empower themselves, although recently Edward Bever has claimed that over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the threat of prosecution led women to modify their behaviour and distance their behaviour from witch stereotypes (Bever 2013, 40–63). If this argument is correct, witchcraft prosecution fundamentally altered gender relationships. Recent research continues to stress that witch trials reveal common beliefs about women, their behaviour, and their relationships, but the growing insistence that witch-hunting was not ‘women-hunting’ has led to important work on what might seem an anomalous creature: the male witch. Such research arises from several impulses in popular culture studies. The first is a turn from women’s to gender studies, which emphasises the cultural construction of male and female roles and makes a space for genders outside that traditional binary (Blécourt in Rowlands 2009, 191–213). The second sees witch trials that include male witches as a means of defining ‘masculinity’, especially given the tensions between male authorities and male accused (Kivelson 2013; Labouvie 1990). The third reflects a re-evaluation of witchcraft sources. After hundreds of local studies it has become clear that witchcraft cannot be treated as a purely female crime. Although approximately 80 per cent of those prosecuted for witchcraft in early modern Europe were women, such statistics are deceptive. The numbers varied regionally throughout Europe, with men much more likely to be prosecuted in the Nordic countries whereas women dominated witch trials in the classic ‘heartlands’ of witchcraft studies (Germany, France, Scotland, and parts of Switzerland, England, and the Basque region). Yet there are disruptions even in these patterns. For example, in Normandy close to 75 per cent of those prosecuted were men (Apps and Gow 2003). Alison Rowlands has provided

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particularly clear editions of recent research in this area and analyses of how social status and embeddedness affect accusations and trials of male witches (Rowlands 2009, esp. 1–30). These studies of women and gender also highlight the importance of local, communal cultures. As such, they have inspired a veritable industry of microhistories and local analyses of witchcraft (Mercier 2006; Robisheaux 2009; Rublack 2015), with Germany and Switzerland especially well represented (also see, Behringer 2003; Dillinger 1999; Mercier and Ostorero 2015; Roehrig 2016). These works have questioned the pervasiveness of the demonic in witchcraft accusations, indicating the importance of local stresses and networks over ideas about transcendental demonic conspiracies. This research has shown that, long before people were accused of witchcraft, they were often seen as someone familiar with manipulating natural forces or interacting with spirits. In fact, people in the community may have turned to them for assistance for years – and turned a blind eye to the extent to which these neighbours tapped into occult forces. What transformed such individuals from powerful neighbours to dangerous and corrupt witches was their practice of maleficia (evil deeds). Generally the magic that first brought the witch to authorities was stealing milk from a neighbour’s cow, destroying crops, and causing illness, not meeting with the devil, pledging allegiance to him, or helping to cause the end of the world. Often tensions between neighbours were at the heart of witchcraft accusations, but people were not denounced as witches purely because they were quarrelsome. Other aspects of an individual’s local behaviour and reputation mattered: people who were indebted or drunkards, took poor care of their family, or had disreputable family members were more likely to be accused. Such actions were readily known in premodern European communities because of the proximity in which many people lived and worked. The work of Robin Briggs is a model for understanding local influences on witchcraft and effects of witch prosecutions on local culture. For more than thirty-five years, he has examined one of the hotbeds of early modern witchcraft prosecution: the duchy of Lorraine. In a series of seminal articles and works, Briggs has assessed hundreds of local networks to understand what triggered the transition from ‘the normal style of wary tolerance accorded to suspect witches [to] the periodic surges of more intense hostility’ (Briggs 2007, 371; see Appendix 13.2). In the process he stresses the psychological and imaginative processes in creating witchcraft as well as the centrality of local conflicts, individual tensions, and personal sympathies (Briggs 1998, 2004). He acknowledges such disputes were common in witch trials – preventing a cow from giving milk, demanding excessive rights to grazing land, and providing a cure that, instead, led to a death – but Briggs highlights the inverse of these relationships as well. For Briggs, one of the points that makes witchcraft so fascinating is the light it shows on what may seem to be contradictions: the fact that someone accused of witchcraft also provided remedies for witchcraft, suspected witches lived in their communities for decades, and accused and even convicted witches could have dozens of testimonials to their communal value. Briggs’ work on Lorraine

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exemplifies the value of local witchcraft studies to research on early modern popular culture. As essential and valuable as such case studies are, they can leave readers frustrated over the lack of a larger explanation. After all, witchcraft accusations peaked in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout much of Europe, yet for millennia it had been possible to be accused of being a ‘witch’ or ‘sorcerer’. What then triggered the volume and acceptability of accusations at this time? Several attempts have been made to address this problem while still pointing to the importance of local conditions. H.C. Erik Midelfort has developed Rainer Walz’s concept of ‘magical communication in the village’, a community that he considers innately ‘“agonal,” filled with struggles and hatreds that arose from scarce resources and the requirement to collaborate even with those who might be trying to take advantage of one’ (Midelfort 2011, 24–5). Certain professions, such as millers and herdsmen, were more likely to be suspect in these communities because their professions were both essential and somewhat separate. Johannes Dillinger has built on this theme, linking the concept of the limited good to the rise of witch hunting (Dillinger in Edwards 2015, 120–4). Economic and social thinking in premodern Europe presumed that only limited resources were available. When population increased or neighbours prospered, others would suffer. Communities were thus filled with families and individuals jockeying for limited food, land, and other goods; even if an entire village benefitted, the assumption was that somewhere, likely nearby, another group jealously watched those who prospered. When this attitude was added to the additional strains Europeans faced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fears inspired by magical practices could more readily overwhelm the benefits individuals and communities received. Key aspects of these local circumstances were family relationships, and witchcraft trials bring out the alliances and tensions within families and, at times, the idiosyncratic foundations for both. For example, in Ulinka Rublack’s recent work on Katharina Kepler, Kepler’s daughter apparently champions her mother out of filial responsibility and love, her younger son wavers between supporting and distancing himself, and her elder son, the famous astronomer Johannes, is slow to come to her defence, and when he eventually acts, he does so from concern for personal honour and reputation, distaste for such trials, and family pressure (Rublack 2015). Witchcraft convictions were dangerous because family members would be tainted as having a propensity for witchcraft, a taint that could last for generations. Striking in witch trials are daughters’ attempts to flee such associations and the frequency with which their relatives’ reputation haunts them years later even in a new location. This belief in witchcraft lineages was apparently common in early modern popular cultures, and it made the position of children particularly fraught. While some magistrates were reluctant to credit children’s testimony in witch trials (Rowlands 2003), others found such testimonies compelling, particularly from the seventeenth century (Behringer and Optiz-Belakhal 2016; Rowlands 2016b; Walinski-Kiehl and Roper in Levack 2001). Most frequently children accused female relatives and neighbours of

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behaving like witches and of bringing them to sabbaths as part of their indoctrination to the cult of witches; at times, however, children themselves were accused of practising magic. Although such evidence enjoyed a mixed reception, it apparently inspired some magistrates to institute educational reforms to intervene ‘in allegedly failing families’ (Rowlands 2016b, 46). The concept and treatment of witchcraft families illustrates how aspects of early modern popular culture could be both widespread and idiosyncratic.

Enchanted versus disenchanted One of the most influential debates in early modern popular culture over the last fifteen years has been that over its enchantment or disenchantment. ‘The disenchantment of the world’ first appeared as a phrase in lectures given by the sociologist Max Weber in 1917, although it built on concepts he had developed at least a decade earlier (Weber 1930). Frequently, too, the ideas of theologian Ernst Troeltsch connecting Protestantism and modernisation are subsumed into those of Weber (Troeltsch 1986). Weber argues that Protestantism rejected magic as a means of salvation and saw God as less immediately involved in the daily life of believers and the functioning of creation. Such a world was fundamentally ‘disenchanted’ and would – here Weber mirrors Troeltsch – lead to a more modern, rational system of belief, represented by Protestantism and accounting for the economic and cultural backwardness of those Christian societies who remained ‘enchanted’. As magic left the world, it allowed rational commerce, and an ethics that supported it, to enter (cf. Chapter 1: Medieval and modern). Most modern treatments of the disenchantment thesis disagree with its claims and progressivist assumptions (Saler 2006, 693). Some of the most strident and comprehensive opposition to disenchantment comes from those who research witchcraft, ritual magic, and traditional religion (Bailey 2008b; Cameron 2010). These scholars debate over the meaning and extent of ‘disenchantment’ and the implications of changes in popular and religious culture that arose after Europe’s Reformations. The work of Robert Scribner has particularly influenced a generation of scholars who have demonstrated how Protestantism redefined and how Protestant popular culture manifested the sense of immanence that those living before the Reformation had believed to imbue creation (Scribner 1990, 1993, 1997, 2001). While some have stressed the subtlety of early modern enchantment, others have gone further and agreed with Robin Briggs who argues, ‘We might not implausibly describe this as a superenchanted world, one so full of messages and meanings that its inhabitants might well feel both bewildered and terrified, beset as they supposedly were by invisible forces, whether benign or malign’ (Briggs 2007, 121). In the most recent and convincing reassessment, Alexandra Walsham demonstrates how Protestants resacralised their world after the Reformation, albeit basing this sacralisation on different premises (Walsham 2008a). Echoing points made by scholars of

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witchcraft and popular culture, Walsham insists on the dialogic nature of any changes in common belief and practice after the Reformation. A central albeit often unstated aspect of the disenchantment debate has been the relationship between history and folklore, a subject especially important for scholars of witchcraft and popular culture. The methods by which most early folklore compilations were made and the assumptions until recently underlying folklore as a specialty have made its material tricky for historians to use. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors began gathering stories from people who had connections to the countryside; these authors presumed that stories from rural areas carried the ancient, traditional, and true culture of a ‘people’ that modern life endangered. Research has recently emphasised, however, the extent to which these compilations were the products of an elite, urban, and even academic environment. Frequently, too, even modern compilations treat stories as timeless and make comparisons between events and tales that are centuries apart in search of a deeper cultural subconscious. Such materials are both incredibly rich and incredibly frustrating for historians whose work is, by definition, preoccupied with time. These methodological differences have often led to a separation between historically inspired research on witchcraft and popular culture and that based on folklore. Recent work has tried to bridge this gap. While some scholars have followed a more folkloric and encyclopaedic method in discussing the ‘magical universe’ of pre-modern Europe (Wilson 2000), more have used folklore as a means of understanding material found in trial and other archival records. Scholars such as Wolfgang Behringer, Owen Davies, Lizanne Henderson, Johannes Dillinger, and Darren Oldridge have been inspired to examine regional folklore through their work on witch trials (Behringer 1998; Davies 2003; Dillinger in Kallestrup and Toivo 2017, 127–43; Henderson 2016; Oldridge 2016). In the process they have shown how beliefs about and the treatment of witches connected to ideas about preternatural beings such as fairies, dwarves, and elves; the magical culture of herdsmen and the mountains; and tools that focused natural magical powers, such as the divining rod. Other scholars have stressed the motivation of the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century collectors who saw their work as challenging ‘atheism’ through sheer empiricism (Walsham 2008b). As sources other than trial records and large treatises have gained prominence in studies of early modern popular culture, so have they in analyses of witchcraft. In the process magical figures who were less dangerous than the ‘witch’ have found a place in modern discussions. In both villages and towns throughout premodern Europe people could find specialised practitioners who provided love potions, told fortunes, and helped find lost objects, all through the use of specially harvested herbs, religious language, and secret rituals and preparations (Davies 2003; Dillinger 2012). Often known as ‘cunning-folk’, such individuals took many names and remained active in many European countries well into the twentieth century (Klaniczay and Pócs 2005; Pócs 1999). While their practices could be relatively harmless, their use of magic blurred the line between the passable and the profane. While some cases were prosecuted, in many instances

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cunning-folk seem to have maintained successful, legitimate businesses. It is not clear if this occurred because they skirted the law carefully or because evidentiary standards disallowed much that would lead to their conviction (Seitz 2011; Walker 2005). The existence of demand for cunning-folk suggests that popular culture did not define all magical practitioners as evil (witches) and demonstrates common concerns and behaviours in pre-modern European communities. Inhuman magical beings from popular culture were not so fortunate. Belief in non-human spirits was common through Europe, and in the early modern period they were often associated with evil or, at least, suspect magic in some way. Tales involving diaphanous white ladies, subterranean spirits, and house sprites are found throughout Europe, and their place in popular culture was ambiguous at best (Edwards 2002, 2015). Although some stories stress their willingness to reveal profitable seams of metal or protect a household, humans often had to behave in precise ways to reap these rewards. More often, such spirits either taunted or harmed those who interacted with them. They were also frequently equated with or seen as part of a continuum of beliefs that led to witchcraft. For example, some early modern Scottish accounts link the realm of the fairies with that of witches (Goodare 2013). In the case of familiars, long-standing beliefs about fairies and imps, the magical powers of certain animals, such as toads and cats, and rising fears of diabolism interacted to create a diabolical assistant who also preyed on witches (Henderson 2016; Knutsen 2009). Like many other examples of popular belief, however, such processes were slow and, in some cases, rejected. As Darren Oldridge has recently noted, in ‘popular entertainment’ fairies kept their ‘traditional role as deceptive and untrustworthy spirits’. They did not become demons (Oldridge 2004). Other aspects of popular culture were not as fortunate. Scholars have argued persuasively for the increased fascination with and fear of diabolic activity in premodern Europe. Traditionally obsession with demons has been viewed as an ‘elite’ imposition on popular beliefs about witches, which were seen as more concerned with the witch’s evil deeds and social disruption. While recent research has found that this distinction holds for some regions, in others, such as early modern Valencia, the situation was more complicated. There Moriscos were often cited for using demons in their magical invocations, and it appears that Christians adopted their practice, making demonic invocation a standard part of Valencian sorcery (Knutsen 2009, 79–80). Certainly Reformation sermons and pamphlets emphasised demons’ dramatic interventions (Cameron 2010, 41–9), but so, too, did pre-Reformation sermons and treatises on witches and demons, and they apparently did not inspire widespread belief in a witchdemon conspiracy (Broedel 2003; Institoris 2009). Moreover, traditional attitudes towards demons appear to have endured well after the Reformation in both Protestant and Catholic territories, showing the resiliency and idiosyncrasies of popular culture. While the devil was seen as being able to manifest in many ways in everyday life, among the most dramatic extraordinary episodes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were possession cases. Some possessions were short-term,

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affected only one individual, and achieved only local notoriety; other cases, such as that of Nicole Obry in Laon, became international sensations. Although someone could become possessed without a witch’s spell, the intersection of witchcraft and possession demonstrates the many ways spiritual and social stressors can reveal otherwise obscure aspects of popular culture. In particular, possession cases highlight the difficulties of defining legitimate and illegitimate ‘magic’, even for premodern Europeans, and the importance of cultural scripts in making extraordinary events intelligible. The traditional treatment for the possessed was exorcism, but exactly who could be an exorcist and what an exorcist did was more debated. Well into the sixteenth century non-clergy performed exorcisms; although Catholic authorities generally protested against such activities, often they were unable to prevent them (Behringer 1998). What materials might be used for an exorcism was also contested. Sacramentals were believed to have extraordinary powers, but increasingly Church authorities limited the use laity could make of them. The Reformation further complicated the relationship between possession, magic, and witchcraft. Protestant Reformers commonly accused the medieval Catholic church of practising illegitimate magic instead of true religion, and some laity certainly agreed (Cameron 2010; Scribner 2001). Yet when faced with a case of possession, such ‘magic’ was at times missed, the only recourse for orthodox Protestants being prayer and trust in God. The differences between Protestant and Catholic responses to possession, especially in the dramatic and politicised cases of early modern France (Edwards 2015), have led to contrary claims for the interaction of possession and witchcraft: the availability of exorcism minimised the chances of witch hunts or it enhanced the possibilities for them (Watt 2007, 129). More accepted among scholars of early modern witchcraft and possession is the importance of a ‘cultural script’ guiding such cases (Almond 2004; Ferber 2004). Brian Levack recently summarised the concept: all possessions – not just those that were pretended – should be understood as cultural performances that had meaning for the demoniacs, the ministers, and the audience. In these possessions the demoniacs did not necessarily know they were acting; they simply assumed a role that was available to them in their religious culture. (Levack 2013b, 147–8) The performance reflects common expectations – that is, a popular culture – of possession that guided the behaviour and attitudes of the possessed and those interacting with them. In such performances, the claim of possession by witchcraft provides the possessed with a form of spiritual consolation – and social security – given that those whom witches possessed were often regarded as victims. When experiencing a case of possession, the connection to popular beliefs and networks provides the verisimilitude necessary to understand and endorse them.

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Chronology: origins and effects Traditionally scholarship has seen witch hunting as sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury phenomena. While acknowledging that people like witches had been active and prosecuted for thousands of years in Europe, authors stressed what they saw as an extraordinary rise in accusations and prosecutions beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century. Ignoring the absurd claims of those who, building on the interpretations of Margaret Murray, have described that period as ‘the burning time’ and estimated that nine million witches were burned, reputable scholars argued for 110,000 individuals prosecuted and 60,000 executed as witches in early modern Europe (Roper 1994). Recent research has revised the number of those accused and executed downwards by approximately ten per cent (Levack 2015b), but more significant have been the changes made to the chronology of the early modern witch hunt. Although one of the leading historians of medieval magic, Richard Kieckhefer, prepared a calendar of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century witch trials over forty years ago, it has only been over the last fifteen years that scholars have significantly built on this work (Kieckhefer 1976, 108–47). A series of detailed archival studies have now convincingly demonstrated that many aspects of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch hunts were well developed by ca. 1450 (Mercier and Ostorero 2015; Ostorero 1995; Stokes 2011; Tremp 2008 ). Not only were influential treatises written and disseminated describing the activities and dangers of witches, but they outlined a connection between demons and witchcraft that was rarely present in early medieval trials (Bailey 2008a, 16; Decker 2008, 78).

Excerpt 13.1 Johannes Nider, Formicarius [The Ant Colony, 1435–38]. In: Kors, Alan Charles and Peters, Edward, eds (2001). Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700. 2nd edn. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 156–9. [T]here lived a man named Stadelin, a great witch, who was arrested by the same Lord Peter, the judge of the district. Stadelin had entered a house where a man and wife lived and by his witchcraft killed seven successive infants in her womb. In the same household he killed the fetuses of sheep, so that for seven years no sheep was born to them. When he was asked how this was done, he said that he placed a certain kind of lizard under the threshold of the house and if he removed it fecundity would be restored to them. When anyone tried to look for the serpent and did not find it, this was because it had been reduced to a powder, and the powder was sprinkled on the earth beneath the threshold, and when it was removed, in the same year fertility was restored to all the animals of the household. These confessions were drawn from him by torture and were not spontaneously given. And he was sent to the fire by the same judge … [157]

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The judge asked Stadelin how he was able to cause hailstorms and tempests. The criminal answered that he stood in a field saying certain words and begged the most powerful of all demons to send him a lesser demon to strike whatever Stadelin wished. When the demon arrived, he obeyed, and immediately the storms began, not always in the place designated by Stadelin, but where God permitted this to happen. [159]

Such texts reflect a rising fear of the Devil’s worldly activities that was also found in popular culture and belief (Voltmer in Kallestrup and Toivo 2017; see Excerpt 13.1). While none of these texts challenged the truism that maleficia was at the heart of witchcraft, they emphasised in a new and particularly virulent way the source of inspiration to injure (demonic promptings), the ultimate beneficiary of such harm (the devil), and the witch’s place as a foot soldier in a vast demonic army. Moreover, prosecutions based on maleficium seem to have accelerated, although it is often difficult to gauge quantity given the vagarities of documentary survival. Certainly there exist in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries more accounts of attacks against magical practitioners and of trials that led to multiple accusations (Pfau 2013; Stokes 2011). In addition, witchcraft accusations appear to have become part of late medieval court culture, with prominent noblewomen particularly likely to fall victim (Blécourt in Kallestrup and Toivo 2017; Veenstra 1998). These revelations regarding fifteenth-century attitudes towards and actions against witchcraft reflect patterns in the study of early modern popular culture more generally. They especially emphasise its characteristic mixture of durability and fluidity. As Richard Kieckhefer said about this late medieval pattern, ‘in the fifteenth century there was not a single mythology of witchcraft but multiple mythologies, … in certain places these mythologies remained intact for several decades, preserving their independent contours with remarkable tenacity’ (Kieckhefer 2006, 80). Scholars also stress the ad hoc nature of much information about popular culture; so much depended on individual or local assessments if an event was worth prosecuting or even recording. Then, too, the methods by which a witch trial was conducted affect the traces left from it. As comparative studies of fifteenth-century witchcraft have noted, personal interests and judicial structures influenced the information sought and records kept. The analyst of popular culture must always be aware of the opportunities and pitfalls such material provides. How then to explain the half-century pause between these earlier trials and those that resumed in the middle of the sixteenth century? In the early twentieth century Joseph Hansen, a German archivist and editor of hundreds of witchcraft sources, pointed to the most obvious reason: the Reformation. He and many scholars since have assumed that this religious and political revolution

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distracted both commoners and elites from witchcraft, at least enough that they rarely prosecuted it. Yet leading reformers, such as Martin Luther, stressed that demonic influence was pervasive and the end times were near, concepts that both before and after the Reformation inspired prosecutions, at least large-scale ones. During and after the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics continued to turn to ‘magical’ practices to ensure fertility, good weather, and health, although the tools they used and the logic underlying their actions might differ (Scribner 1990, 2001). Moreover, the rapid production of large treatises about witchcraft, such as Johannes Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (1563), and resumption of witch trials suggest that belief in witches had remained widespread during the first half of the century. Perhaps then scholars should spend less energy searching for the origins of the early modern witch trials and spend more considering the influence of the culture and beliefs underlying witchcraft on Europe’s Reformations? Some witch-hunting patterns endured beyond the fifteenth century, including the connection between heresy and witchcraft. This fusion continued to be applied to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century heretical groups, especially the Anabaptists. Mistrusted, if not actively despised, by Catholics and main Protestant confessions alike, Anabaptists were prosecuted alongside witches in the Netherlands and Holy Roman Empire (Frijhoff in Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frijhoff 1991; Waite 2007). For this connection to be made, however, scholars have argued authorities must have existed who were motivated to prosecute and who controlled a trained and embedded judiciary. As such, the connection between heretical witches and popular culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depends on a broad definition of popular culture where the sense of rising demonic influence becomes the common ideological thread. A durable link between the late medieval and early modern witch trials that more clearly reflects popular culture was the centrality of maleficium (evil deeds). Not only did it manifest in accusations of property damage, personal illness, and general injury in villages and towns, but witches were also perceived to work to undermine social and political authority. This belief was far from new. The late Middle Ages had seen a series of courtly witchcraft accusations and witch trials in England, France, and Italy, where magical activities echoed those found in broader society but had much wider political implications. In the later sixteenth century, the political consequences of witchcraft became more fraught. Over forty years ago H.C. Erik Midelfort argued for a ‘crisis of confidence’ in the early modern German institutions and personnel used to prosecute witches, a crisis that also affected belief in witchcraft (Midelfort 1972, 121–63). Newer research has refined the political aspects of this crisis. Through a series of microstudies, Peter Elmer has persuasively shown that ‘witch-hunting was more likely to arise in communities where religious conflict was endemic and permeated communal relations’, while Malcolm Gaskill has described the effects of poorly trained judges on witch trials (Elmer 2016, 43–4; Gaskill 2008). Alison Rowlands and William Monter have demonstrated how disputes between pastors and magistrates over witch trials curbed the trials themselves or promoted new

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religious orders (Monter 2012; Rowlands 2016a). As with many aspects of popular culture, confessionalisation influenced the politics and perception of witchcraft. Given the durability of witchcraft beliefs throughout Europe, accounting for their decline in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forces scholars to confront profound questions about what constitutes cultural change and how such change can be measured – or if it is even valuable or productive to do so. Traditionally the decline in witch trials was ascribed to the rise of scientific rationalism, increased elite contempt for such patently false beliefs, or magisterial fears of the prosecutorial beast they had unleashed. Each of these ideas has some validity: some evidentiary standards had changed and these changes could make professionals reluctant to prosecute witches; some vociferous elites wrote copiously against the existence of witchcraft and magic in all forms, especially in England; and magistrates and governments tried to shut down witch trials that looked to turn into witch panics, although they were not always successful. Yet such patterns do not require the end of witch prosecutions, and as Edward Bever and Michael D. Bailey have rightly noted, the chronology of such cultural change does not sync (Bailey 2008a; Bever 2009). Nor did witchcraft go away. Not only did individuals claiming to be magical practitioners endure, but accusations of witchcraft continued among the very people who were linked to ‘enlightened’ seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural movements. The debates over ‘atheism’ in late seventeenth-century England are among the best-known manifestations of this pattern, but similar disputes occurred throughout Europe. They inspired compilations of ‘popular’ beliefs that, in turn, further disseminated such examples among a literate audience and those who were exposed to literate culture (which was a wider community than once believed). Recent research has shown that, despite strident condemnations by a coterie of intellectuals, many Europeans continued to accept an enchanted world where powers beyond those regularly experienced remained accessible to a select few. In fact, as H.C. Erik Midelfort argued in a study of the sensational exorcisms led by Johann Joseph Gassner in 1774–76, ‘we have often vastly overestimated the supposed powers of the Hegelian Zeitgeist or the Foucaultian episteme to shape the thoughts or undergird the assumptions of all who happen to be living in the same time and place’ (Midelfort 2005, 25). Witchcraft debates echo many of the patterns he found in the Gassner exorcisms, especially the strong empirical foundation for belief in witchcraft and the difficulty certain cultural communities had in reaching a common frame of reference. Yet those who argue for the durability of belief in witchcraft do not claim that it, or any other aspect of popular culture for that matter, was static. Eschewing arguments for a ‘perennial everyday magic’ (Wilson 2000, 1), scholars such as Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt have analysed ideas about and practices of witchcraft among various social and educational levels from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries (Blécourt in Barry, Davies and Usborne 2018; Blécourt and Davies 2005; Davies 1999, 2003). Although they challenge

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any idea of a sudden cultural break regarding witchcraft, they note three ways perceptions of magical practices and practitioners have changed: (1) ‘the shifting intellectual interpretation of folk magic from being a very real and implicitly satanic offence to being a merely fraudulent and morally reprehensible crime’; (2) ‘the considerable continued intellectual interest regarding diabolic intervention in human affairs’; and (3) ‘the centrality of the written and printed word to the experience of witchcraft and magic’ (Davies and Blécourt 2004, 3–6). Other scholars have come to similar conclusions about the durability of popular cultures of witchcraft and have returned to the importance of local circumstances, personal opinions, and communal negotiations in influencing attitudes (Labouvie in Barry, Davies and Usborne 2018, 155–78).

Knowing witches and witchcraft Analysing how personal and local networks interacted to develop a popular culture of witchcraft has been fundamental to modern witchcraft studies. The role of written material in forming, disseminating, and responding to broader cultural impulses has been an important subset of such work, highlighting the interaction of written and oral cultures and, thereby, complicating the definition of ‘popular culture’. In witchcraft studies the debate over such information has been heated, given the dramatic rise and apparent influence of texts on witchcraft and demons in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At that time legal and clerical authors prepared detailed assessments of demonic influence on magic and redefined lines between legitimate occultism, superstition, and witchcraft. Known as demonologies, the composition of such texts resumed in the middle of the sixteenth century, completing the theoretical diabolisation of the witch and much magic. Demonologies were written in both Latin and the vernaculars and included classical and contemporary materials. Because of this mixture of sources and the limitations of premodern literacy, especially Latin literacy, scholars debate the influence of these texts over popular cultures and of popular cultures on these texts. The most influential interpretation of this demonological literature has come from Stuart Clark. He argues that early modern intellectuals used demonology to analyse many aspects of their world, the eponymous ‘thinking with demons’ of his title (Clark 1997). In particular, Clark traces early modern intellectuals’ use of opposites to understand the structures and significance of history, language, politics, religion, and science. Clark argues that it was inconceivable to think of a world in which goodness, beauty, and divinity (among many other examples) existed without presuming an opposite: evil, ugliness, and demons. As he and other scholars argue, demonology was a true science, inspired by and exploring many of the same areas, at times more profoundly, than sciences that are more familiar to a modern audience (Clark 1997; Machielsen 2015; see Appendix 13.3). Although the extent to which such intellectuals conceived of their world in binaries and inversions has been debated, Clark’s thesis that devils

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were good to think with because they touched on almost every aspect of human experience has been widely accepted. At the heart of such work is epistemology: how humans know what they think they know and how such systems of knowledge allow for cultural and cognitive change. While the terminology may seem elite, epistemology is at the heart of human experience and certainly of popular culture. Throughout their lives humans make judgments about truth and falsehood and decide evidentiary standards for those judgments. In witchcraft and witch trials, people at all levels were engaged in such an assessment. Shared ideas about the validity of various tools and presuppositions allowed witch trials to function smoothly, whatever the verdict. Particularly influential among all classes was the idea that seeing something provided the best information, although vision’s reliability was highly debated (Clark 2007; Scribner 2001, 129–45). When disputes arose about ways of knowing, identification of witches became problematic, witch trials stalled, and communities split over the significance or very existence of maleficent magic. Recent studies have demonstrated that both oral and written cultures established these standards for knowledge; in many cases the two mutually influenced each other. Stressed in such research has been how cheap print echoed and adapted popular culture and served as a bridge between various ways of ascertaining truth. Despite the close connection between such texts and the legal record, at least in sixteenth-century England, scholarship has also begun to stress the ways in which witchcraft pamphlets, broadsheets, and similar documents were commodities. Printers did not produce witchcraft pamphlets as a public service; they printed them to make money. Literature specialists, such as Marion Gibson, provide clear and compelling descriptions of the decision process guiding printers, the ways they gained information about trials, and the techniques they used to market their products (Gibson 1999, 2001). Although it is now widely accepted that elite, educated readers bought much of the ‘cheap’ print, it has also been demonstrated that pamphlets reflected widespread beliefs about witchcraft, gender, communal relationships, and legal rights and responsibilities. Moreover, pamphlet histories were often disseminated repeatedly because printers regularly compiled and reissued anthologies (Kwan 2012, 518). Many witchcraft texts thus need to be seen as appealing to wide audiences with a shared culture. One of the ways pamphlets appealed to buyers was through illustrations. The cover of The most wonderful and true storie … [of] Alse Gooderige (see Figure 13.1) illustrates how such illustrations reflected popular beliefs and could influence public knowledge. Type size and font highlight both the pamphlet’s drama (‘The most wonderfull’) and the key places and people (‘Alse Gooderidge,’ ‘Darbie,’ ‘Thomas Darling,’ ‘Trent’), but the large image grabs a potential buyer’s attention. There three demons torment four presumed witches. They are not just any witches; a tonsure labels one of the witches a monk. If witches were demons’ servants, though, why would demons torture them? As paradoxical as it may seem, this image actually reflects a truism about demons: their

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Figure 13.1 The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certaine Witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapen Hill, who was arraigned and conuicted at Darbie at the Aβises there (1597). Lambeth Palace Library, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

untrustworthiness. Of course, demons delighted in tormenting their servants; after all, the money and food demons gave witches turned to dust. The horror of the image both draws in an audience and provides a moral: demons are untrustworthy. The two stories in the broadsheet also combine titillation and instruction, especially the second and longer story, the possession and exorcism of Thomas Darling. The discerning buyer got two stories and proof of God’s providence. He learned what it took to find, prove, and defeat witchcraft and

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was assured that God supported such knowledge and even demons would recognise such providence. Epistemological and communal tensions were the dramatic meat of these pamphlets, and they played out in witch trials themselves. Most of those who initially brought accusations and testified were from the middling social ranks (artisans, farmers, labourers), but those who tried the cases could come from diverse backgrounds. Frequently scholars have presented judges as educated elites dumbfounded by the ignorance and attitudes of those they questioned. Certainly such situations existed (Krause 2015; Levack 2013b, 179–299), but recent works have stressed the mixed legal training such judges could have, especially in smaller communities (Dillinger 2009). Judges’ enthusiasm for prosecuting accused witches could vary widely as could the legal means at their disposal – and willingness to accept judicial limitations (Rowlands 2003; Sharpe 1999). The writings of the jurist Henri Boguet (d. 1619) represent the ways witchcraft could be assessed and witches tried in regional courts by an enthusiastic judge (see Excerpt 13.2). A well-known lawyer, Boguet served as chief justice of the Saint-Claude abbey in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and was inspired to write his most famous work, Discours exécrable des sorciers (1602), based on his experiences trying witches and widespread reading in demonology. His book was reprinted during his lifetime, and the step-by-step procedures he developed for witch trials became standard judicial and inquisitorial procedure for his region. At the end of the Discours Boguet sketches why witchcraft is a ‘crime apart’ and how that status should affect its prosecution.

Excerpt 13.2 Boguet, Henri, ‘The Manner of Procedure of a Judge in a Case of Witchcraft … to Monsieur Daniel Romanet, Advocate to the See of Salins’ [1603]. In: idem (1971 [1929]). An Examen of Witches. Trans. Montague Summers. New York: Barnes & Noble, 211–38. Article II Witchcraft is a crime apart, both on account of its enormity, and because it is usually committed at night and always secretly. Therefore the trial of this crime must be conducted in an extraordinary manner; and the usual legalities and ordinary procedure cannot be strictly observed. [211–12] Article III I shall always maintain that a person should always be imprisoned on the accusation of even only a single accomplice. For it has been noted that witches who have confessed have as a rule never laid information against any who were not of their brotherhood, or at least were not deeply suspected …[212]

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The same applies when the person is accused by common rumour; for this is almost infallible in the matter of witchcraft. [212] Article XII If the prisoner is accused by his accomplices, they should at once be brought face to face. The reason for this is that there is nothing which so confounds a witch as to see before his eyes one who has been his companion at the Sabbat, even if the accomplice remains constant and loyal to him. Sometimes it has even been found effective to employ a stranger who is not a witch for this confrontation. [215] Article XXII The Judge must avoid torture as much as possible; for, besides the spells for maintaining silence which witches bear about them, they have other charms which prevent them from feeling any pain. This secret is known also to nearly all other criminals, so that to-day torture has become almost without effect … [218–19] Article LXI There are times when the only course is to release the accused from prison. Such is the case when he has been detained for a very long time, and there is not enough evidence to justify either an acquittal or a sentence of death; for there may be evidence of great weight, yet not such as can lead to a conviction … [232–33] Article LXII Now the usual penalty for witches is that they shall be burned, but there is some doubt as to whether they should be burned alive, or whether they should first be strangled … [233] The second seems to be the more reasonable course to take, so that the criminal need not be brought to despair because of the harshness of his punishment … [233]

Boguet shows that judges were well aware of the problems inherent in testimony gained through torture and the importance of local reputation, here described as ‘almost infallible’, at least in trying witchcraft. Elsewhere Boguet stresses the copious classical and contemporary evidence for witchcraft and applies mathematics and physics in assessing if witches can perform certain activities. Boguet absorbs, critiques, reinterprets, and transmits local knowledge, both oral and written, to local and international audiences. Judges gain special status in the process, moderating diverse claims on behalf of the community and assessing the truth of popular culture.

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Scepticism, science and the supernatural Ways of knowing and judging reappear in the debates over the ‘irrationality’ of witchcraft and its replacement by ‘rational’ science (cf. Chapter 12: Science and reason). Well into the 1980s the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment were depicted as ending witch trials; even when scholars challenged such models as too dependent on a small group of intellectuals’ writings, they often replaced them with theories in which the same elites chose to end the trials for social and political reasons. Yet the early modern natural philosophy and demonology that supported the witch trials was ‘to a large degree a science founded on the evidence of experience’, even if rationalist and empiricist philosophers were divided over whether experience was the well-spring of truth or error (Lyndal Roper, 2004, 52). Experience showed people of all educational and social levels that witches existed. How, then, did scepticism find a foothold? Since the beginning of the trials there had been sceptics. Trial records point to craftsmen and farm wives who doubted that witches were involved in their community’s misfortunes, even if they accepted that witches existed. Some sixteenthcentury authors of treatises about witches and demons also ridiculed those who blamed witches for common ills. The two most famous ‘sceptics’ were Reginald Scot (c. 1538–1599) and Johannes Weyer (c. 1515–1588). In his Discoverie of Witchcraft Scot heaped scorn on those who saw witchcraft rather than God’s providence as guiding worldly affairs, while Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum accepted witches’ existence but blamed many convictions on witches serving as scapegoats and suggested that many confessed witches were actually mentally ill (Almond 2014). Yet both works would have an ironic history. Widely disseminated and, in the case of Weyer, translated into several vernaculars, their books were filled with carefully compiled histories gathered to challenge witch trials. The sheer volume of their evidence attracted opponents, however, and Scot’s and Weyer’s works would be used as encyclopaedias of the supernatural for those who advocated for trials and the existence of supernatural beings. By the seventeenth century the opposition to witchcraft had grown more vocal and, seemingly, more widespread. Yet there could be severe consequences for those who built on their contempt for witch trials to challenge the theological foundations for spirits and demons (Cameron 2010, 255–69; Stephens in Levack 2013a). Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) were among a number of European intellectuals who argued that spirits could not cause anything supernatural; only God could because He was, by definition, the only thing ‘above’ his creation, nature. Bekker’s condemnation of witch trials and the philosophy and theology underlying them in The Enchanted World (1690) would cost him his pastorate and eventually his membership in the Dutch Reformed church. In England a growing fear of atheism would lead individuals such as Henry More and Joseph Glanvill to compile tomes documenting all the supernatural manifestations they could find. More and Glanvill, and others like them, were themselves part of an intellectual culture that increasingly gathered eyewitness testimony, corroborated testimony with physical evidence, and noted the

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status, reliability, and mental state of all those providing information. In many ways such individuals were bridges (Elmer in Gaskill 2000; Levack 2013a). They demonstrate that some who are celebrated in other materials as ‘modern’ continued to accept witchcraft’s existence, and as with Weyer and Scot, their collections promoted and contributed to the durability of these ‘popular’ beliefs. Other challenges to witch trials arose from the development of distinct professional cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, particularly in law and medicine. Frequently national studies stress that the main courts of appeal, like the parlement of Paris, stopped approving executions for witches long before regional and local courts did, and such elite courts were staffed with legal lineages whose members held doctorates in law. The new jurisprudence taught at such elite universities did not recognise or question traditional standards of evidence. Rather, interpretations of this phenomena emphasise its effects on ‘the social construction of justice’ and the evidentiary and cognitive requirements for truth (Gaskill 2008; Seitz 2011). For example, in 1701 the prominent German jurist, Christian Thomasius, marshalled the material challenging the traditional legal processes against witchcraft in his De crimine magiae (see Excerpt 13.3).

Excerpt 13.3 Christian Thomasius, Über die Hexenprozesse [On Witch Trials; 1702], In: Kors, Alan Charles and Peters, Edward, eds (2001). Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700, 2nd edition. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 445–8. I hold that since the procedure of the witch trials is inadequate, because jurists have made the pact with the devil the basis of the charge, a thing which is not possible in nature, that one has to proceed cautiously if people are to be convicted of having injured others through witchcraft. There must be many proofs, and the rules of evidence indicated in the Code of Criminal Law are not correct, as has been shown in my disputation. And especially in the case of wonderful and supernaturally induced diseases, great investigation should be made in order to make certain that there are no deceptions involved, even when they are testified to be learned and trustworthy persons and even by doctors of medicine, because learned and trustworthy people can be as easily deceived as any others, if not more so. And I believe that among these stated or supernaturally induced diseases, about which someone has compiled an entire book, most of them have been told about deception and that among a hundred cases there is scarcely one that does not involve some hocus-pocus or some hasty action … Because just as certainly as the fact that two times three is six, it is equally certain that I do not know what I do not know.

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If someone else says, however, this thing has been caused by the devil, even though he does not understand it, I will accept this, if that person will only permit me to remain in my learned ignorance. [447]

Cautious enough not to condemn belief in demons, Thomasius articulated the primary problem facing modern, trained legal officials who were asked to prosecute witches: ‘the rules of evidence indicated in the Code of Criminal Law are not correct’. This was one of his milder statements. In De crimine magiae he ridiculed Catholic and Protestant, German and foreign for their belief in witchcraft (Bever 2009, 277–80; Robisheaux 2009). Despite his reputation and influence, he would be attacked for his position on witchcraft for the rest of his life, a vivid example of the durability and extent of popular culture. The transitions in evidence and analysis the legal profession experienced were also part of medical professionalisation. Early medical analysis of witchcraft frequently linked it to melancholy, with witches as victims of their own disturbed mental state and an excess of black bile. The connection between humours and physical and mental health was widely accepted, and by seeing witches and their victims as possibly melancholic, witchcraft itself could be thought of as a disease (Midelfort 2013; Rider 2017). As part of fact-finding during trials, doctors could be summoned to determine if a death or injury was natural and assess the mental state of the victim or accused (Elmer in Levack 2013a). While some doctors were quite willing to determine that illness had demonic origins (Watt 2007), in other areas they were more reluctant. Jonathan Seitz has proven that, while Venetian doctors continued to share popular ideas about the relationship between the natural and supernatural and about supernatural intervention in the world, their medical training made them increasingly reluctant to proclaim that witchcraft had caused an injury or death. They distinguished between their place as believers and as medical professionals, and their standards for professional knowledge prevented them from giving evidence about witchcraft’s medical effects (Seitz 2011). Medical theories have also often been part of modern witchcraft histories. At their most superficial level modern authors bemoan the ignorance of premodern European medicine, an ignorance that allowed for such suffering. Such medical interpretations of witch hunting and witchcraft have been discredited for the most part by the late twentieth century. Recently, however, the work of Edward Bever has brought modern neuropsychiatry and cognitive science into the analysis of early modern witchcraft. Bever has demonstrated in case studies primarily involving the duchy of Württemberg how psychosocial factors can have physiological consequences much like those described in witch trials (Bever 2013). In Bever’s work he tries to distinguish between conscious and unconscious use of hostility and finds that both aspects were present in premodern trials and both could harm the recipient. While such theories can be quite persuasive, some scholars of early modern popular culture have found them disquieting as they seem to remove volition from individuals and communities, making cultural construction seem almost biochemical.

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The application of psychoanalysis to early modern witchcraft and popular culture has also been controversial but more widely accepted. Scholars such as Robin Briggs and Lyndal Roper have applied transference, splitting, fantasy, and projection to their interpretation of the witch trials (Briggs 1998; Lyndal Roper 1994, 2004, 2012). Such theories have particularly influenced the understanding of gender dynamics (Hodgkin in Barry and Davies 2007, 182–202). In describing how witchcraft is a fantasy, Roper stresses witchcraft’s ‘deep roots in the unconscious’ and the power that ‘the primary material of infantile experience’ gave witchcraft beliefs (Lyndal Roper 2004, 10). Brian Levack has also turned to concepts of fantasy, performance, and ‘the group-mind’ in order to understand possession (Levack 2013b). For such cognitive and emotional processes to have effects they rely on communal cues and values, as well as personal idiosyncrasies. Such psychoanalytical theories assume a popular culture of witchcraft that men and women, adults and children, elite and common recognised and, to some extent, shared.

A future for witches and popular culture Despite extensive research on European witchcraft and popular culture, there remain areas where more work needs to be done. While regions in western and central Europe still lack a thorough analysis of witchcraft records, those areas traditionally seen as peripheral must be better integrated to gain a broader understanding of the intersection between folklore, theology, and communalism in forming the image of the witch and witchcraft. Julian Goodare and his colleagues have spearheaded such work for Scotland, while Gabor Klaniczay and Eva Pócs have brought material on eastern Europe into western historiography. Claude Lecouteux has led a series of French and German scholars introducing Nordic folklore and concepts, such as the double, to more southerly audiences, while research groups in Sweden and Finland place their work explicitly in both a local and European context. As this material becomes more widely known, it may transform our understanding of the relationship between witchcraft and popular culture. Just as our geographical understanding of witch trials is expanding, so, too, is our appreciation of their chronological evolution. The wave of research on late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century witchcraft and demonology has revised how scholars understand the rise of early modern witch hunting, but it has not yet inspired a synthesis in its own right. For England, especially, there has been excellent work on modern witchcraft movements by Owen Davies and Ronald Hutton, but fewer studies have appeared for continental Europe (for an exception see the chapters by Henningsen and Mencej in Barry, Davies and Usborne 2018). Some scholars point to ways historical and anthropological analyses of witchcraft could inform each other (Hutton 2004), but outside of the work of Willem de Blécourt and those inspired by him, there remain regrettably few modern studies on European witchcraft that also reference premodern beliefs and practices. The most complex is, however, the integration of witchcraft and popular culture into modern movements for global history. Wolfgang Behringer has provided the first such synthesis, but it is focused on the modern era (Behringer 2004). Other

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scholars, such as Marion Gibson, have opted for a transatlantic analysis, comparing witchcraft cases from the same time in England and North America (Gibson 2017). Such broad treatments of witchcraft face multiple and, at times, contrasting definitions of witchcraft and extraordinarily diverse cultures. As a preliminary gesture to overcoming such obstacles, Ronald Hutton has suggested five characteristics to examine when deciding if someone is a witch or something is witchcraft (Hutton 2004, 421–23). While these ideas are intriguing, such work remains preliminary with collaborative editions providing the broadest interpretations, reflecting the extensive materials, all-encompassing nature, and personal and local idiosyncrasies facing scholars of witchcraft and popular culture.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Boguet, Henri (1971 [1929]). An Examen of Witches [1603]. Trans. Montague Summers. New York: Barnes & Noble. Institoris, Henricus [Kramer, Heinrich] (2009). The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’. Trans. Christopher S. Mackay. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kors, Alan Charles and Peters, Edward, eds. (2001). Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700. 2nd edn. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Maxwell-Stuart, P.G. (2011). Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages: Documents and Readings. New York: Continuum.

(B) Secondary literature Almond, Philip C. (2004). Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2014). England’s First Demonologist: Reginald Scot and ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’. New York: I.B. Taurus. Apps, Laura and Gow, Andrew C. (2003) Male Witches in Early Modern Europe. New York: Manchester University Press. Bailey, Michael D. (2006). The Meanings of Magic. Magic, Ritual, and Witchraft 1 (Summer), 1–23. ——— (2008a). The Age of Magicians: Periodization in the History of European Magic. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 3 (Summer), 1–28. ——— (2008b). The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature. American Historical Review 111 (April), 383–404. Barry, Jonathan (1996). Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft. In: Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1–48. Barry, Jonathan, and Davies, Owen, eds. (2007). Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barry, Jonathan, Davies, Owen, and Usborne, Cornelie, eds. (2018). Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present: Essays in Honour of Willem de Blécourt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Behringer, Wolfgang (1998). The Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night. Trans. H.C. Erik Midelfort. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ——— (2003). Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe. Trans. J.C. Grayson and David Lederer. New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2004). Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History. London: Polity. Behringer, Wolfgang and Optiz-Belakhal, Claudia, eds. (2016). Hexenkinder – Kinderbanden – Straßenkinder. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte. Bever, Edward (2009). Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40 (Autumn), 263–93. ——— (2013). The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Blécourt, Willem de and Davies, Owen, eds. (2005). Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Europe. New York: Manchester University Press. Bossy, John (1985). Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. New York: Oxford University Press. Briggs, Robin (1998). Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. New York: Penguin. Briggs, Robin (2004). ‘By the Strength of Fancie’: Witchcraft and the Early Modern Imagination. Folklore 115, 259–72. ——— (2007). The Witches of Lorraine. New York: Oxford University Press. Broedel, Hans Peter (2003). The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. New York: Manchester University Press. Cameron, Euan (2010). Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion in Europe, 1250–1750. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, Stuart (1997). Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (2007). Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohn, Norman (1975). Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt. London: Sussex University Press. Collins, David J. ed. (2015). The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Owen (1999). Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951. New York: Manchester University Press. ——— (2003). Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History. New York: Hambledon. Davies, Owen, and Blécourt, Willem de, eds. (2004). Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe. New York: Manchester University Press. Decker, Rainer (2008). Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition. Translated by H.C. Erik Midelfort. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Dillinger, Johannes (1999). Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier. Trans. Laura Stokes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ——— (2009). The Political Aspects of the German Witch Hunts. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4 (Summer), 62–81. ——— (2012). Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Durkheim, Emile (1912/1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Durrant, Jonathan B. (2007). Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany. Boston: Brill. Durrant, Jonathan B., and Bailey, Michael D. (2012). Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft. 2nd edn. New York: Scarecrow Press. Edwards, Kathryn A. ed. (2002). Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. ——— ed. (2015). Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge. Elmer, Peter (2016). Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferber, Sarah (2004). Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France. New York: Routledge. Frazer, James George (1922). The Golden Bough: A Study in Myth and Religion. New York: Macmillan. Gaskill, Malcolm (2000). The Social Meaning of Witchcraft, 1560–1680. In: Ibid. ed. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 33–78. ——— (2008). Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England. Past and Present 198 (February), 33–70. ——— (2010). Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (1999). Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. New York: Routledge. Gibson, Marion (2001). Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. New York: Routledge. ——— (2017). Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft. New York: Routledge. ——— (2018). Witchcraft: the Basics. New York: Routledge. Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke, and Frijhoff, Willem, eds. (1991). Witchcraft in the Netherlands: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. Rotterdam: Universitaire Pers. Ginzburg, Carlo (1983). The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— (1992). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Golden, Richard M., ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Goodare, Julian, ed. (2013). Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2016). The European Witch-Hunt. New York: Routledge. Henderson, Lizanne (2016). Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment: Scotland, 1670–1740. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hutton, Ronald (2004). Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration? The Historical Journal 47 (June), 413–34. ——— (2017). The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kallestrup, Louise Nyholm, and Toivo, Raisa Maria, eds. (2017). Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kieckhefer, Richard (1976). The European Witch Trials: The Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——— (2006). Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (Summer), 79–108. Kivelson, Valerie A. (2013). Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Klaniczay, Gabor, and Pócs, Eva, eds. (2005). Communicating with the Spirits: Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology. Budapest: Central European University Press. Knutsen, Gunnar W. (2009). Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition’s Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478–1700. Turnhout: Brepols. Krause, Virginia (2015). Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kwan, Natalie (2012). Woodcuts and Witches: Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus, 1489–1669. German History 30, 493–527. Labouvie, Eva (1990). Männer im Hexenprozess: Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘männlichen’ Verständnisses von Magie und Hexerei. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 16, 59–78. ——— (1991). Zauberei und Hexenwerk: Ländlicher Hexenglaube in der frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Levack, Brian P., ed. (2001). New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology. 6 vols. New York: Routledge. ——— (2006). Themes of Recent Witchcraft Research. ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 62, 7–31. ——— ed. (2013a). The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (2013b). The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——— ed. (2015a). The Witchcraft Sourcebook. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. ——— (2015b). The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th edn. New York: Routledge. Machielsen, Jan (2015). Martin Delrio: Scholarship and Demonology in the CounterReformation. New York: Oxford University Press. Mercier, Franck (2006). La Vaudiere d’Arras: Une chasse aux sorcières à l’Automne du Moyen Age. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Mercier, Franck, and Ostorero, Martine (2015). L’énigme de la Vauderie de Lyon: enquête sur l’essor de la chasse aux sorcières entre France et Empire (1430–1480). Florence: SISMEL. Midelfort, H.C. Erik (1972). Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——— (2005). Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——— (2011). Witch Craze? Beyond the Legends of Panic. Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 6 (Summer), 11–33. ——— (2013). Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany: A Ship of Fools. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Mollenauer, Lynn (2013). Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Monter, William (2012). The Catholic Salem: How the Devil Destroyed a Saint’s Parish (Mattaincourt, 1627–31). Catholic Historical Review 98 (October), 679–702. Murray, Margaret (1921). The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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——— (1933). The God of the Witches. London: Faber & Faber. Oldridge, Darren (2016). Fairies and the Devil in Early Modern England. The Seventeenth Century 31, 1–15. ——— (1995). ‘Folâtre avec les demons’. Sabbat et chasse aux sorciers à Vevey (1448). Lausanne: University of Lausanne Press. Ostorero, Martine, Bagliani, Agostino Paravinici, and Tremp, Kathrin Utz, eds. (1999). L’imaginaire du sabbat: Edition critique des textes les plus anciens (c. 1430–1440). Lausanne: University of Lausanne Press. Parish, Helen L., ed. (2015). Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Pfau, Aleksandra (2013). Ritualized Violence against Sorcerers in Fifteenth-Century France. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 8 (Summer), 50–71. Pócs, Éva (1999). Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age. Trans. Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb. Budapest: Central European University Press. Purkiss, Diane (1996). The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. New York: Routledge. Rider, Catherine (2017). Religion, Magic and Medicine. In: Mark Jackson, ed., The Routledge History of Disease. New York: Routledge, 54–70. Robisheaux, Thomas (2009). The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Roehrig, Jacques (2016). Procès de sorcellerie aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles dans les terres de l’Est: Alsace, Franche-Comté, Lorraine. Escalquens: Trajectoire. Roper, Jonathan (2004). Charms and Charming in Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roper, Lyndal (1994). Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge. ——— (2004). Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ——— (2012). The Witch in the Western Imagination. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rowlands, Alison (2003). Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652. New York: Manchester University Press. ——— ed. (2009). Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2016a). Father Confessors and Clerical Intervention in Witch-Trials in Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Germany: The Case of Rothenburg, 1692. English Historical Review 131, 1010–42. ——— (2016b). Gender, Ungodly Parents and a Witch Family in Seventeenth-Century Germany. Past and Present 232 (August), 45–86. Rublack, Ulinka (2015). The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother. New York: Oxford University Press. Rummel, Walter, and Voltmer, Rita (2012). Hexen und Hexenverfolgung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Saler, Michael (2006). Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review. American Historical Review 111 (June), 692–716. Scribner, Robert W. (1990). The Impact of the Reformation on Everyday Life. In: Gerhard Jaritz ed. Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit: LebenAlltag-Kultur. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 315–43.

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——— (1993). The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23(3 Winter), 475–94 ——— (1997). Reformation and Desacralisation: From Sacramental World to Moralised Universe. In: R. Po-Chia Hsia and Robert W. Scribner, eds., Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 75–92 ——— (2001). Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Ed. Lyndal Roper. Boston, MA: Brill. Seitz, Jonathan (2011). Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sharpe, James (1999). The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England. New York: Routledge. Stokes, Laura (2011). Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Summers, Montague (1926). The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. London: Kegan Paul & Co. Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century England. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Tremp, Kathrin Utz (2008). Von der Häresie zur Hexerei: Wirkliche und imaginäre Sekten im Spätmittelalter. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Troeltsch, Ernst (1986). Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World. Ed. B.A. Gerrish. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Veenstra, Jan R. (1998). Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France. Boston, MA: Brill. Waite, Gary K. (2007). Eradicating The Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525–1600. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walker, Timothy D. (2005). Doctors, Folk Medicine, and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment. Boston, MA: Brill. Walsham, Alexandra (2008a). The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed. The Historical Journal 51, 497–528. ——— (2008b). Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of Folklore Revisited. In: Steve Smith and Alan Knight, eds., The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 178–206. Watt, Jeffrey R. (2007). The Demons of Carpi: Exorcism, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in a Seventeenth-Century Convent. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 98, 107–33. Weber, Max (1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Wilson, Stephen (2000). The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe. New York: Hambledon.

Appendices

Appendix 13.1 Scribner, Robert W. (2001) Magic and the Formation of Protestant Popular Culture in Germany. In: idem., Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Ed. Lyndal Roper. Boston: Brill, 323–45. It is perhaps advisable at the outset to explain in what ways magic might be taken as a form of ‘popular culture’, especially in the light of the now numerous sceptical voices about the validity and usefulness of the latter term. First, popular magic is undoubtedly a form of cultural practice concerned with mastering the exigencies of material and daily life, and specifically the processes of production and reproduction, the maintenance of physical and spiritual wellbeing, the preservation of property, and the management of social relationships. In the most common form singled out for attack by its critics, this involved blessings, spells or conjurations for the protection of humans and animals, for healing or the prevention of illness, for the security or safe return of lost or stolen property, for safety against dangerous spirits, whether the dead or the diabolical, and for defence against human enmity. Second, it involved an essential moment of cultural formation determined by the creation of the kinds of polarity that have enabled historians to speak meaningfully of ‘popular’ as opposed to ‘official’ or ‘elite’ culture. For its critics, magic was a cultural practice of the ignorant and the simple-minded, of those with too little faith in God or the inability to recognise the proper workings of his creation, and of the disobedient and sinful. Certainly, it crossed social boundaries … If this seems to erode any social meaning in the term ‘popular’, as many critics of the concept of popular culture have observed, it is nonetheless clear from the expositions of both Gwerb and Zimmermann [two Protestant pastors] that they saw it as predominantly, and possibly overwhelmingly, the cultural practice of the lower levels of the society, of

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the rural masses. Where social elites turned to such practices it was nonetheless made clear that this was inappropriate and unbecoming to their status … [M]agic was regarded by both its critics and its practitioners as a form of popular knowledge … It was initially a form of cumulative practical knowledge of ancient standing and recommended by those of proven experience … As a matter of definition, therefore, magic was for these early modern observers undeniably a form of popular cultural practice. [323–5]

Appendix 13.2 Briggs, Robin (2007). The Witches of Lorraine. New York: Oxford University Press. It seems wholly implausible to suggest that witchcraft beliefs were not present everywhere, particularly where there is evidence for many suspects who were never brought before the courts. Meanwhile nothing seems to distinguish the villages concerned from one another, whether it be size, agricultural practices, or social and political structures. In the end hunting for explanations for these nearly infinite local variations, which can also be extended to the gender balance, turns out to be a frustrating and largely fruitless exercise. … If there is a message here, it is probably that for local people there was always a very fine balance between the normal style of wary tolerance accorded to suspected witches and the periodic surges of more intense hostility towards them. In consequence very trivial circumstantial factors were often crucial in determining when and if prosecutions were initiated. One possible explanation for the exceptional case of Saint-Dié would start from the wave of trials in the 1590s, which was surely related to the peculiarly bad weather and poor harvests of these years. Perhaps there were enough of these to take the region above an imperceptible threshold, so that each group of trials created ripples that led to more trials, some of them years later. As the body of potential suspects expanded, often through the mechanism of denunciations by those convicted, so did the resentments and fears linked to these events, while the regular executions and public readings of confessions would have reinforced belief in the dangers to the wider community. Surviving members of families which had already lost individuals to the persecution were at mounting risk of being stigmatized, finding themselves trapped within a self-confirming pattern from which their only real escape was through flight. [371]

Appendix 13.3 Clark, Stuart (1997). Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. When demonology eventually ceased to interest natural philosophers, their rationalism quickly gave it a reputation for standing in the way of reason and

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progress. In the twentieth century this has been compounded by highly influential depictions of ‘the scientific revolution’ as a single, decisive, and modernizing transformation, achieved by heroic discoverers extending the frontiers of truth at the expense of magic and similar errors. The assumption throughout has been that witchcraft beliefs were somehow inimical to the welfare of science … Rescuing intellectuals … from this particular condescension has recently been made easier, however, by fundamental changes in the history and philosophy of science. Plainly, ‘the scientific revolution’ is not what it was. Although ‘revolutionary’ is still defended as the right characterization of the scientific changes of the seventeenth century, virtually nothing survives of the romanticism and triumphalism that once marked historical descriptions of them. Innovation itself is not now regarded as a monopoly of the ‘mechanical philosophy’, and the period in which it occurred has been stretched over time. … A succession of scholars has brought the ‘occult’ studies, together with Neoplatonism and ‘hermeticism’ in general, into the mainstream of early modern scientific development and shown how they remained vital ingredients of advanced thought into the last decades of the seventeenth century. At the same time, siting scientific developments in their social and ideological contexts has shown them to be far more complex, contentious, and, above all, contingent, than previously thought. As a result, simplistic and anachronistic polarities no longer divide natural philosophy from other areas of early modern thought and practice … with which it interacted, or present us from resolving such former paradoxes as Bacon the natural magician, or Newton the alchemist. [156–7]

14 Political thought Noah Dauber

Introduction The history of early modern political thought began as a half-hearted modernist project. The subject is now generally thought of as the specialised branch of historical writing concerned with the conceptual vocabulary within which political institutions, practices, and conflicts are understood (for surveys, see Burns and Goldie 1991; Lloyd, Burgess and Hodson 2007). It originated, however, in the ideological debates between liberals and conservatives in the late-nineteenth century, when the view that such ideas should have their own history took shape in the context of the newly emerging modern historical project. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the liberal historians François Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville had begun to write the history of modern politics as that of the worrying emergence of unitary sovereignty and the centralisation of the state, in both its radically democratic and autocratic forms. At much the same time, the Napoleonic model of emancipation and toleration – of ‘equality before the law’ for members of different faiths – led to a distinction between state and nation, such that individual members of the nation were said to be free to follow their individual consciences in matters of belief. Conservatives came to doubt whether this policy of toleration (and the accompanying understanding of the Church as a voluntary association) was compatible with national unity, and they demanded that the state take action to secure the majority religion. It was this religious question – not the more familiar social question of capital and labour – which led the founders of the history of political thought back to the confessional conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, where they found that the relationship between state and nation had been prefigured in that which lay between the sovereign representative and body politic. To emphasise these continuities, the nineteenth-century liberal historians argued that the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century constituted a single era of ‘modern history’, whose themes, as the introduction to the Cambridge Modern History (Creighton 1902) put it, were ‘the development of nationalities and the growth of individual freedom’. The selection of these themes, or ‘tendencies’, was understood to be a perspective, a ‘judgment’ informed by the concerns of their day (Creighton 1902, 1–5). At the same time, their standards of

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historical writing had – following in the footsteps of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke – come to require the setting of such larger tendencies against the background of historical actors’ self-understanding, such that it became common practice to compare and contrast their intentions with the broader historical processes which were only apparent in hindsight. Such post-Rankean history was to be built on the basis of extensive archival materials and primary sources, necessitating specialists in diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and legal sources, and, increasingly, the occasional pamphlets and philosophical treatises which have since become the canonical sources for the history of political thought. The result was a sophisticated account of the range of contemporary approaches which, with the power of hindsight, could be evaluated for both their analytic power and humanity. This allowed these early historians of political thought, like the historians of the French Revolution, to champion the approaches they found both realistic and humane, while criticising the overly enthusiastic modernisers of their day whom they feared were imitating the worst of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinking in their rush to establish the nineteenth-century state on a firm footing. While the modern state is no longer new, and the fault lines of ideological debate have long since shifted, the study of early modern political thought continues to be heavily influenced by the approach taken in these early years. The extent of this influence on the field has been increasingly appreciated (Brett 2006; Nederman 2009), and this essay aims to explore this legacy further by reviewing the leading interpretations of early modern political thought today in light of these origins. In doing so, it considers the extent to which they are still concerned with the modern politics of state and nation and the twin themes of nineteenth century ‘modern history’ in continuing to emphasise the theory of the sovereign state and its limits.

Liberalism and the pathologies of the modern state The turn to early modern political thought in the last third of the nineteenth century was due to what seemed like a reopening of the questions ‘settled’ during the seventeenth century. In intellectual journals like Lord Acton’s North British Review, the political questions of the day were put into wide ranging historic perspective, and traced to their roots in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The new constitutions of the North German Confederation (1867) and the German Empire (1871), for instance, raised the question of whether the federalism espoused there was superior to the division of Germany’s territory into confessionally unified territorial sovereign principalities at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) (Frantz 1869, 253–55). The declaration of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council (1868–70) likewise summoned up the old debate over the oath of allegiance (1605), and the old question of whether national sovereignty must include the control of religion. Finally, the question of Irish home rule led to a questioning of whether the principle of parliamentary sovereignty fought for in the Civil War had served England well and whether a federalism of the American sort was not more consistent with liberty.

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For Acton (1834–1902), a leading liberal Catholic intellectual, confidant of Gladstone, and Regius Professor of Modern History, early modern political thought was largely the story of intolerance and sectarianism on all sides. In accordance with his Whig faith, nurtured on the works of Macaulay and Burke, he believed freedom required toleration of liberty of conscience, and that this in turn required the ‘division of power’ (Butterfield 1968, 3–5; Acton 1907). Through his study of German unification and Irish home rule, he had come to believe that such liberty was best achieved through the principle of federalism and home rule. He was accordingly critical of Bismarck’s approach to national unity in the Kulturkampf, and was sceptical of what he took to be the sham federalism of the Empire, which he believed to be subject ultimately to the demands of the Prussian military (Hill 2000, 225). For Acton, there were glimmerings of freedom in the early modern period, but only in a few corners, principally among the religious nonconformists of the Civil War period, the Independents and the Socinians, who sought toleration for its own sake (Acton 1907, 52). The story of the period as a whole was one of sectarian insistence on unity, regardless of the cost to conscience. In Acton’s own day, the push for Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council, which he resisted as a lay representative, was indicative of such a threat, and he found only fiercer versions of the tendency in the early modern era. Perhaps overcommitted to the position that a Catholic ‘speak the truth’, his early modern Jesuits are cold-hearted and bloodthirsty, depicted celebrating the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Acton 1907, 124; Hill 2000, 260). But he believed such sectarianism was typical of the age, and even the Whigs of the Revolution of 1688, like Locke and Shaftesbury, Macaulay’s heroes, were guilty of it (Acton 1907, 53). The contribution of early modern political thought to liberty was largely unconscious, in so far as the sectarian assertions of their rights, whatever their motives, led to the division of power which made limited government possible (Acton and Dalberg 1907a, 45). The liberal German law professor, Otto von Gierke (1841–1921), took a similarly dim view of early modern political thought, which he worried was inherently unstable due to its Roman law theory of sovereignty. He had first detected this pathology, as he saw it, in his own day, in the work of the professors of Roman law who were apologists for the Bismarckian constitution of the newly formed German Empire. The legal positivists in this tradition, such as Paul Laband (1838–1918), argued that the source of law in the new Empire was a combination of the federal council of heads of state (Bundesrat) – in which Bismarck’s Prussia was overrepresented – and the parliament (Reichstag). Together, he argued, they acted as the sovereign representative of Germany. The individual states in the Empire retained their personality as states only in so far as they exercised dominion (Herrschaft) over their subjects, and no longer as sovereign states in themselves (Stolleis 2001, 337–38; Caldwell 1997, 28–29). While Gierke was also devoted to a confederation of German states, he believed that those states should have been recognised as ‘real’ political communities with substantive norms of their own.

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At the heart of Gierke’s interpretation of early modern political thought was accordingly an account of how the Roman law theory of the sovereign representative failed – and necessarily so – to meet the conceptual needs of theorising group life. This argument was sustained over his career in one of the masterpieces of the history of political thought, The German Law of Fellowship (Gierke 1868–1913). He explained that the civil and canon lawyers of the Middle Ages had turned to the Lex Regia, the Roman law which explained the transfer of power from the people as a whole (universitas) to the princeps, to explain the origins of civil authority. Since the people as a whole could not actually meet, the universitas was a legal fiction, an artificial or fictitious person (persona ficta) (Gierke 1987, 67–68). This theory of representation was pathological according to Gierke, since it led to the incapacity to simultaneously imagine the ‘real personality’ of both the representative body and the represented body, a problem which occurred most acutely in the theorists of ‘double majesty’ who made little attempt to resolve the issue (Gierke 1934, 54) In general, Gierke maintained that the more that the representative body was given full legal personality, as in Laband’s identification of the Bundesrat and Reichstag as sovereign, the less the represented body, the German nation or nations, in that example, was thought to play a role in government. This theory of representation had already by the medieval period led to ‘diametrically opposite systems’ (Gierke 1987, 43) such that by the sixteenth century, when the theory was revived, ‘[t]hey could only achieve, at the most, a one-sided exaggeration, either of the personality of the People, or of that of the Ruler’ (Gierke 1934, 50). The theory of representation thus led to the explosive politics of early modern Europe which, he believed, divided along theoretical lines between an absolutism which demanded a complete ‘absorption’ of the people into the state, as in Hobbes, and a revolutionary insistence on popular sovereignty, like the Monarchomachs. The solution to this dilemma was for public law to return to a ‘Teutonic’ understanding of the state as organism. Such a state would be a Rechtstaat consisting of the ‘totality of the legal relations’ between social groups without an attempt to unify the nation through a single sovereign representative (Gierke 1987, 24; Runciman 1997, 52–53). Gierke’s analysis was welcomed in England by those who were worried about their own version of positivist unitary sovereignty. First Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and then John Austin (1790–1859) had argued that a sovereign was that ‘definite body’ to which subjects showed a ‘habitual obedience’ in following its laws as commands. While they believed that there were no constitutional checks on such a sovereign, they argued that it was only the belief on the part of the public that it served the general utility which resulted in such habitual obedience (Merriam 1900, chap. viii). Austin also shared with Bentham the idea that the sovereign was by definition free to legislate on any topic without taking into account prior laws, a doctrine which Austin had found in Hobbes, which Bentham called ‘omnicompetence’, and which Dicey had insisted was modelled in both men’s minds on the English parliament (Bentham 1843, 9:160; Austin 1861, 247–8; Dicey 1885, 66). By the 1880s,

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the great Cambridge legal scholar Frederic William Maitland (1850–1906) had come to worry that the embrace of the Austinian omnicompetence of parliament was both unhistorical and threatened to destroy the possibility of the constitutional check of the judiciary on parliament (Maitland 1908, 101, 301). For Maitland, the work of Gierke offered an antidote to this emphasis on law as the product of unitary sovereignty, and in 1900 he translated a section of the third volume (1881), prefaced by a widely influential introduction on the importance of Gierke’s ideas and their relevance for England (Gierke 1987, viii). A student of Maitland’s who was then a lecturer in history at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, John Neville Figgis (1866–1919), shared these concerns about Austinian sovereignty, especially after reading Dicey’s discussion of Benthamism in his Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England (1905), which argued that Benthamite utilitarianism, though meant to foster individual liberty, had in fact led to collectivist (i.e. state socialist) policy (Dicey 1905, lectures VI to IX). In his Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625 (1907), Figgis blended all of this material into an account of early modern political thought which has been told and retold, to the point that it has been condemned by Cary Nederman as ‘the neo-Figgisite orthodoxy’, and has been traced in the work of Francis Oakley, J.H. Burns, and Quentin Skinner (Brett 2006, 138; Nederman 2009, 30). The book begins with the conflict between the Church Councils and the Papacy in the late medieval period, which he portrayed as a choice between the organic view of the state and Austinian omnicompetent sovereignty. The Papacy won and the solidifying of Austinian sovereignty was the dominant trend during the Reformation and the French Wars of Religion, when absolutist theories of sovereignty were developed which included the power to determine the religion for the state as a whole. While he abstracted from the problem of representation, the pathology which resulted was described in thoroughly Gierkean terms: ‘No real social unities are to exist apart from the State; the medieval notion of a communitas communitatum gives way to the civilian doctrine of the omni-competent State set over against a mass of individuals’ (Figgis 1907, 78). The tendency towards unitary sovereignty was served, especially in the theory of the French Politiques, by ‘purely utilitarian argument’, which, as his reading of Dicey had made clear, tended towards ‘the service of the central power’, since ‘the suffering caused by a day of civil war is always greater than that of a year of tyranny’ (Figgis 1907, 134). The countertendency embodied in Conciliarism re-emerged in the wars of religion in a legalist or constitutionalist form, embodying Acton’s division of power through religious competition, as each sect fought for the ‘right to be’ (Figgis 1907, 142, 165–66; Nicholls 1975, 27). This was visible in the activities of the Jesuit and Calvinist Monarchomachs who sought to ground their resistance movements around the legal right to rebel against a tyrant (Figgis 1907, 135). The championing of such rights of group existence in his view thus anticipated the liberal pluralism of the federalism and toleration of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (see Appendix 14.1).

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Civic humanism After World War I, in the midst of the introspection which followed the difficult peace of the Versailles Treaty, German historians began to evaluate the sources of Germany’s strengths and weaknesses. For those who embraced the Weimar Republic, whether enthusiastically or grudgingly, it was the English parliamentary model which had shown itself better suited to modernity. It was thus that the young scholar and supporter of the new republic, Hans Baron (1900–88), was delighted to find evidence while working in the Florentine archives in 1925 that the famed humanistic learning of the Renaissance had been developed in part in the service of active republican government (Weinstein and Zakai 2017, chap. 1) (cf. Chapter 4: Renaissance). The leading interpretation of the Renaissance at the time, that of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), had argued quite the opposite, praising despotism, complaining of the ‘thanklessness of public life’, and arguing, in Baron’s paraphrase, that the ‘true individual could develop only in separation from the state’ (Baron 1988, 171–72). Baron found rather a civic humanism (Bürgerhumanismus), which he developed over his career, and which became widely known through The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955). The crisis of the title was the Milanese-Florentine war of 1401–2, in which, according to Baron, modern secular political thought was born, with each side claiming to be an ‘autonomous state’ for the first time, the Milanese on a monarchic, and the Florentines on a republican, basis (444–5). In this struggle, the Florentine humanists committed themselves to a philosophy of history in which great achievement was only possible ‘in a society which rewarded virtue’, which they found to be the case in the Roman Republic, but not in the Empire (Grafton 1991, 13; Hankins 1995). As Baron wrote, ‘the heart of Florence’s republican freedom now is seen in the free access of every citizen to public offices and honors’ (Baron 1966, 419). He found this view above all in Bruni’s 1428 Panegyric for Florence and in the funeral oration for Nanni Strozzi of the same year (see Excerpt 14.1).

Excerpt 14.1: Leonardo Bruni’s Panegyric for Florence (1428) and Funeral Oration for Nanni Strozzi (1428) Bruni, Leonardo (1428). Oratio in Funere Nannis Strozae Equitis Florentini. In: Estienne Baluze, ed., (1764). Miscellanea, vol. 4. Lucca, 2–7, 3–4. As quoted and translated in Baron, Hans (1966). The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Equal liberty exists for all …; the hope of winning public honors and ascending is the same for all, provided they possess industry and natural gifts and lead a serious- minded and respected way of life; for our commonwealth requires virtus and probitas in its citizens. Whoever has these qualifications is thought to be of sufficiently noble birth to participate in the government of the republic … This, then, is true liberty, this equality in a commonwealth: not to have to fear violence or wrong-doing from anybody, and to enjoy equality among citizens

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before the law and in the participation in public office … But now it is marvellous to see how powerful this access to public office, once it is offered to a free people, proves to be in awakening the talents of the citizens. For where men are given the hope of attaining honor in the state, they take courage and raise themselves to a higher plane; where they are deprived of that hope, they grow idle and lose their strength. Therefore, since such hope and opportunity are held out in our commonwealth, we need not be surprised that talent and industry distinguish themselves in the highest degree. [419]

In the mid-1970s, Baron’s civic humanism played a major role in what would become two of the future landmarks in the field, J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975) and Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). Though these two works tend to be thought of in one breath as stalwarts of the ‘republican’ interpretation of political thought and as representatives of the ‘linguistic turn’ in intellectual history, they are, as both Pocock and Skinner have stressed, very different (Pocock 1985, 2004; Skinner 2008b). While both books include summaries of Baron’s account of the Florentine chancery, Pocock continued to focus on the attitudes towards political action described by Baron, while Skinner applied it to an understanding of the ideological legitimation of state power. Pocock had come to believe, as he would explain later, that ‘for more or less Marxist reasons’, the ‘law-centered’ liberal story of the growth of individual rights had become the dominant paradigm in the history of political thought (Pocock 1985, 47). Baron’s civic humanism offered a complete alternative to both the liberal and Marxist accounts of the history of political thought, thereby capturing more accurately the contemporary understanding of the relationship between property and political participation, and thus offering a more convincing account of the genealogy of democratic selfgovernment (see Appendix 14.2). The Machiavellian Moment, concerned with ‘how the Englishman acquired the means of seeing himself, in Aristotelian, Machiavellian, or Venetian terms, as a classical citizen acting in a republic’, narrated this story in full, tracing it from Renaissance Italy through the English Civil War to the American Revolution (Pocock 1975, 336). Pocock explained that Aristotle’s definition of classical citizenship combined the material and moral independence of one who ‘ruled as head of his oikos or household’ and the mutuality of one ‘who ruled and was ruled as one of a community of equal heads making decisions which were binding on all’ (Pocock 1975, 68). Pocock found echoes of such classical citizenship throughout early modern political thought, above all in Machiavelli’s ideal of the armed citizens of Florence, but also in the writings of those, such as Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington, who were sympathetic to the ideal – common among the ranks of the army of the Commonwealth in the 1650s – that they were a ‘body of free citizen-soldiers’ (Pocock 1975, 381). The theories which advocated classical citizenship adhered to a shared model, the so-called

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‘Machiavellian moment’, which combined the material conditions of economic independence and the bearing of arms with a belief in the efficacy of individual agency in history, what Machiavelli called virtù (Pocock 1975, viii). This model explained not so much the legal basis of sovereignty, which Pocock admitted was better explained in the juridical terminology of the ‘liberal synthesis’, but the ‘personality adequate to participation in self-rule’ (Pocock 1985, 45). The thorough embrace of classical citizenship in the form, for instance, of Harrington’s frequent ‘rotation’ of office, could thus serve as a supplement to the juridical theory of representation such that problems like those of ‘double majesty’, which so bothered Gierke, could be overcome in the 1650s without later ideas of the real personality of the nation or the general will (Pocock 1975, 334–35, 393–95). Though Skinner was also influenced by Baron, he integrated his work on civic humanism into a history of the state in volume one of The Foundations, which was a much more traditional and ‘very non-Pocockian sort of book’, as he would later put it (Skinner 2008b). Unlike Pocock, who had begun to resist the explanations of the great theorists of modernity, Skinner had become interested in Max Weber’s theory of legitimation, which claimed that power was effective only in so far as it was presented in some scheme of legitimation acceptable to the population (Goldie 2006, 7). Unlike Pocock’s work, in which the juridical and the civic humanist languages remained distinct, The Foundations blended the liberal story of Acton and Figgis (Brett 2006, 138; Goldie 2006, 17) with Baron’s civic humanism, arguing that the internal ideal of liberty and the external one of state sovereignty were often combined (Skinner 1978, 1:157–8). This was the case, for instance, in the great jurist Bartolus’ defence of the medieval Italian city states, with which Skinner began his account (12). While unitary sovereignty of any form frightened the nineteenth-century liberals, Skinner argued that its constitutional form and the manner in which it was legitimated mattered. Echoing the choice between autocracy and democracy that had framed the debate since World War I, Skinner wrote that the political theorists of the quattrocento who understood themselves as faced with the problem of faction could choose to praise the despotism of the Signori as a solution, but they could also choose to praise the self-government of the free city states (42). Baron’s civic humanists had chosen the latter and thus provided both legitimation for the state and a solution to the problem of faction in the form of virtue and devotion to the common good: ‘the people must set aside all personal and sectional interests, and learn to equate their own good with the good of their city as a whole’ (44). Pocock knew of Skinner’s approach from his articles on Hobbes (Skinner 1965, 1966), and responded pre-emptively, as it were, in The Machiavellian Moment: ‘virtue, when all is said and done is an ideal of action, not merely of legitimation’ (Pocock 1975, 371). By the mid-1990s, Baron’s original interpretation had been criticised on various fronts for years, and this was much strengthened by Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (2000), edited by James Hankins. Critics of republicanism pointed out that the praise of republican institutions in the works of Leonardo Bruni and Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini were

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only one half of a rhetorical exercise; they were in fact arguing both sides of the proposition, in utramque partem (Grafton 1991, 15). Moreover, it had become clear that the cities described in the civic panegyrics of the humanists were a far cry from the reality of the Italian city states. Bruni, for instance, praised Florence as a classical civitas or polis, said to be immunised from control by the great families through the selection of rulers by lot. Yet, it has been pointed out that Florence really did not resemble a classical city-state, and was rather ‘a congeries of districts and guilds to which most citizens felt their primary loyalties’ (Grafton 1991, 23). The disconnect between these classicising texts and their own reality must have been so striking that scholars have been compelled to explain how the humanists conceived of what they were doing. Anthony Grafton concluded that they were ‘examples of epideictic rhetoric, oratory in praise’, amounting to a sort of ‘propaganda’, except perhaps in the case of Venice (Grafton 1991, 23, 28). Hankins argued that the so-called civic humanists were really ‘professional rhetoricians’, not committed republicans, and that Bruni used his skills for the oligarch Cosimo de Medici (Grafton 1991, 17; Hankins 1995, 325–26). John Najemy argued on the other hand that the civic humanists were actually committed to a cause, though not that of republicanism; they were justifying the emerging oligarchy of the elite members of the major guilds. Bruni’s emphasis on personal virtue and his criticism of ambition amounted to an ‘ethic of dutiful passivity’ which served as a ‘rationalization’ for the submission of the non-elite members of the major guilds to the control of the leading families (Najemy 2000, 81–92). The republican interpretation nevertheless survived this revision, though in somewhat altered form. Skinner fully embraced the revised emphasis on the humanists as rhetoricians, arguing that the qualities of a good rhetorician and a good citizen were wrapped up in the ideal of the vir civilis wherever Roman political culture flourished, from Rome itself up through late seventeenthcentury England (Skinner 1996, chap. 2). In the mid-1990s, Skinner’s approach to republicanism, which combined the classical idea of liberty and the state, was furthered by Markku Peltonen, who showed that republican thinking was to be found throughout Elizabethan and early Stuart political thinking, including among courtiers like Francis Bacon (Peltonen 1995, 36). This reinforced Patrick Collinson’s work on ‘monarchical republicanism’, and, combined with John Guy’s emphasis on counsel in Tudor England, suggested that policy making, at least in this ‘Renaissance Monarchy’ had overtones of classical citizenship, though some have demurred, arguing that such activity had little to do with liberty or self-government (Peltonen 1995, 6; Alford 1998, 20–23; Sommerville 2007, 209–10). Pocock himself remained unconvinced that the counsellor to the prince had really become a citizen (Pocock 1997). This all suggested something of a response to Pocock’s complaint that Skinner’s account of republicanism in The Foundations had ended in the 1530s, thereby failing to take up the challenge of explaining its reappearance in the 1650s (Pocock 1985, 46). In Liberty before Liberalism (1998), Skinner took up this challenge directly, arguing that the propagandists for the Commonwealth, like

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Nedham and Milton, were devoted to a ‘neo-Roman’ theory of liberty which was suspicious of any possibility of dependence or being in the control of others (41). Ruling out such a possibility, even absent the threat of such oppression, led to the embrace of a representative, unitary, ‘free state’ which did not allow checks on the will of the people, such as a royal veto (52). Skinner argued in this manner that they had combined republican liberty with the juridical basis of the state, without resorting to a liberal definition of liberty as property. Pocock was characteristically unsure that this was the case, and detected in the ‘paranoia’ of this theory of liberty as ‘nondomination’ the juridical theories of the ‘radical Whiggism’ of 1688 and 1776, which had formed the backbone of the liberal individualist account (Pocock 2004, 546). Republicanism as an interpretation of early modern political thought thus now refers to two distinct projects: the Pocockian exploration of the growth of consciousness of active citizenship and the Skinnerian study of a Roman political culture committed to the values of independence and a representative form of government.

Reason of state Though there are differences between their accounts, all the scholars of civic humanism argued that such a view maintained that the state, i.e. the republic or commonwealth, depended for its success on the traditional virtues which make social life possible through the recognition and respect of others. For Baron, this had represented a democratic alternative to the discredited Prussian approach to the formation of the modern state. This latter view had been embodied in Bismarck’s ‘realism’, which held that there was an inevitable, if lamentable, tension between what was politically necessary in the interest of the state and what was morally correct in the ordinary sense. Bismarck’s realism was in turn widely seen as an echo of Machiavelli’s Prince and his alleged followers, those who wrote in the ‘reason of state’ tradition. This term, a ‘highly fashionable catchword’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the subject of much reflection and analysis even then (Dreitzel 2002), but attained its full importance as a modern historiographical concept in Friedrich Meinecke’s Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (1924; which appeared in English as Machiavellism: Meinecke 1957). Meinecke (1862–1954), one of the greatest of twentieth-century German historians, had approved of Bismarck’s rough methods in uniting Germany as a young man, writing in 1894 that ‘[i]t is better to seek salvation via the sewer than to allow oneself to be choked or beaten to death’ (Sterling 1958, 239; Dollinger 1990). By the end of World War I, he had moved firmly leftwards and had come to the realisation that it was not necessarily the pursuit of power as such, especially at any cost, which was the true outcome of a ‘realistic’ analysis. He thus embraced the Weimar Republic as the necessary and correct next step in Germany’s political development: ‘Facing the past, I remain a heartfelt monarchist, and, facing the future, I will become a rational republican (Vernunftrepublikaner)’ (Wehrs 2006, 95).

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In Machiavellism, he argued that Machiavelli was the first to see clearly that politics sometimes required such hard choices, and a cold analysis of ‘empirical necessity’, rather than the ‘supra-empirical necessity’ of the moral law (Meinecke 1957, 38–39). The presentation of this truth in Machiavelli’s The Prince was shocking, and Meinecke found that there were some who ‘fought it wholeheartedly as an evil enemy’ and others ‘who made a great show of fighting it, but at the same time borrowed from it freely’ (50). The latter ‘hypocrites’, which included the ‘Italian theoreticians of statecraft’ from Spanish Italy thought of as the principal authors of Reason of State today, came in for Meinecke’s harshest treatment. The sometime Jesuit and adviser to the Archbishops of Milan, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) was said to understand that the ‘crystal-hard core of all political action’ was ‘the selfish interest of the ruler or State’, but insisted that the national interest could always be harmonised with the interest of the Church. Such a book ‘could therefore serve as a good breviary for those father-confessors who dabbled in politics’ (Meinecke 1957, 68–70). The more empirical the analysis, the better (105, 166–7); and this (as was the case for the Germans after WWI) meant that one had to recognise the limits of power politics, preferring the realism of balance of power to the pretensions of universal monarchy (104, 124, 169). Reason of state was modernising in so far as it made justice a matter of the success of the centralised state rather than the ‘old ideas of legitimacy connected with the corporate State of the Ancien Regime’ (127). Meinecke’s interpretation of these materials remained dominant for decades, but by the late 1960s, it became clear that his account had not properly come to grips with the significance of the use of classical sources, especially Tacitus (Stolleis 1990, 144; Burke 1991). Meinecke had dismissed such references as a distraction from the realistic, empirical approach to politics (Meinecke 1957, 69–70, 166). The German historian Gerhard Oestreich (1910–78) explored the revival of Tacitism and Stoicism through the complex world view of the Flemish professor Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) in his Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (1982). Oestreich argued that Lipsius’ ‘Neostoicism’ was ‘the theory behind the powerful military and administrative structure of the centralized state of the seventeenth century’ (14). More significantly, he argued, contrary to Meinecke, that such modernisation was the fruit of the embrace of classical learning as moral philosophy per se: The pillars of the state – the prince, the bureaucracy, and the army – must be imbued with an ethical sense informed by Roman values; they must be the living embodiment of the Stoic imperatives – performance of duty, selfcontrol, moderation, abstinence and pietas, as well as the courageous morality of Constantia, which gives energy and strength of mind . (72) Such teachings became the basis of the new army trained by Prince Maurice of Orange, whose soldiers were known for their conduct both on and off the field

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(79). This did not lead to unlimited power politics, however, not because of a realist analysis of the balance of power, as Meinecke had suggested, but because Neostoicism taught a moderated patriotism. The Stoic principle of constancy, Oestreich explained, required that ‘[a]s long as a country is alive, one must stand up for it’, but insisted that one must resign oneself to ‘that which cannot be altered’ (23). In his account of Neostoicism, Oestreich described an alternative genealogy of the power politics of the modern state system. In The Counter-Reformation Prince (1990), Robert Bireley returned to the materials that Meinecke had studied, but offered a very different interpretation, namely, that the authors in the reason of state tradition who ‘followed’ Machiavelli were not ‘hypocrites’ but serious critics of Machiavelli, who rather than confronting Machiavelli directly, chose to show that a prince could be even more effective at ‘maintaining’ and ‘augmenting’ the state by adhering to traditional Christian values (25). This reflected the view, common to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, that ‘the full Christian life could be lived amidst secular activity’, and that this was as true for the prince as for any other vocation (27–8). The prince needed to be powerful in an age threatened by popular disorder at home and religious warfare abroad. Such power was to be consolidated on the basis of reputation and on economic and military resources. Reputation required that the prince have virtù – not only in the Machiavellian sense of possessing the daring or willingness to act, which Pocock had seen as the basis of active citizenship – but also in the traditional sense, including the values of justice, liberality, prudence, valour, religion, and temperance (56). The authors of reason of state understood that success in the world at times required acting in accordance with necessity in ways which were contrary to ordinary legal procedure, but not in ways which were contrary to natural law or conscience (226). They believed that ultimately their success lay in God’s providence, and Bireley suggests that their ‘realism’ was tempered by this ‘providentialist pragmatism’ which held that ‘God bestowed victory and success in this world, at least in most cases, on rulers and peoples that served him faithfully and uprightly’ (31).

Absolutism and constitutionalism The liberal account of early modern political thought never disappeared, of course. By the 1930s, Gierke’s and Figgis’ emphases on pluralism and especially the real personality of groups had fallen out of favour with liberals, in part because of all its talk of the Teutonic roots of liberty, and where it survived, became identified with liberalism as was apparent in Sabine’s 1937 textbook on the history of political thought (Tierney 1982, 6; Gunnell 2012, 147; Levy 2012, 27). The liberalism of the 1940s and 50s appeared as a commitment to limited government achieved by fundamental law, legal procedure, and the separation of powers in works like Charles McIlwain’s Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (1940) and Herbert Butterfield’s The Englishman and his History (1944). Though McIlwain’s constitutionalism had grown out of exactly the same milieu as that of Figgis, and his

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study of fundamental law and the separation of powers began as an attempt to understand how the English parliament had become an Austinian sovereign (McIlwain 1910, 355–56), his focus turned during the war to seventeenthcentury attempts ‘to secure a sanction short of force for these legal rights of the subject against the arbitrary will of the prince’ (McIlwain 1940, 95). Butterfield argued that English constitutionalism was born out Englishmen’s paradoxical reverence for the past and willingness to reinvent it when necessary to suit the needs of the moment. These tendencies were embodied in the practice of the common law and the whig interpretation of history, which ‘helped foster our love of precedent, our affection for tradition, our desire for gradualness in change, our adherence to ancient liberties’ (Butterfield 1944, 72). These approaches were developed by Margaret Judson in The Crisis of the Constitution (1949), where she elaborated on McIlwain’s shift from a vague fundamental law to ‘rights’ which limited royal prerogative (Judson 1964, 255), and by J.G.A. Pocock, a student of Butterfield’s, who explored the tie between historical consciousness and fundamental law in The Ancient Constitution (1957). The idea that there was a conflict between constitutionalist fundamental law of this sort and the crown, and thus that there was already a liberal suspicion of centralised authority in the seventeenth century, was revisited starting in the 1970s, when revisionists of Stuart English political history began to question whether there really was such conflict before the Civil War. They argued that what had been described as ‘constitutionalism’ by such scholars was really the ‘consensus’ view of politics at the time which balanced the king’s prerogative, the common law, the king-in-parliament as the legislative power, and parliament as the high court. This view was said to lie between the extremes of a divine right absolutism held by clergy close to the king and religious radicals who advocated legitimate resistance (Burgess 1996, 209–11; see also, Sommerville 1999, 225–26). This debate was introduced to the history of political thought by Glenn Burgess and Johann Sommerville. Though Sommerville avoids the label ‘constitutionalism’, he argues that there was real disagreement between the early Stuart view of absolute or ‘free’ monarchy advocated by James VI and I and his supporters on the one hand and its critics among the common lawyers and in parliament on the other. While there was real disagreement, which would explode as ideology turned into action, in his view absolutism was not the caricatured credo it is sometimes taken to be, and it was not tyranny. ‘All absolutist writers admitted that the king should abide by the laws of God and nature and that he had a duty to promote the public good’ (Sommerville 1996, 180). As Horst Dreitzel has explained, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, an ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ monarch was one who was only bound by natural, divine, and the fundamental laws of the land, and only bound by these in conscience, without any institutional coercive check on his powers. (Dreitzel has further explained that the common identification of the absolute monarch with tyranny is the result of eighteenth-century polemics about despotism, where the ‘free monarch’ without institutional limits was called a despot: Dreitzel 1992, 23). For Burgess, however, such conflict which existed before the immediate outbreak of the war was

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limited to expressions of ‘fringe’ elements in the clergy and a few isolated cases like Robert Filmer and Hobbes, and to claim otherwise is to view the early Stuart period through the ‘parliamentary hermeneutic’ of the Restoration Whigs (Burgess 1996, 212–24). The difference between these interpretations is apparent in their discussions of Sir Edward Coke (1551–1634), who was the most important common lawyer of his day, and a leading public servant until his fall in 1616. He was the Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and the King’s Bench. After falling out of favour, he became a member of the House of Commons in 1621 and played a major role in the Petition of Right in 1628 (Burgess 1996, 174).

Excerpts 14.2 a–d: Edward Coke on Common Law and Statute a. Coke, Edward (1793). The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt.: In English, in Thirteen Parts Complete. Ed. George Wilson. 7 vols. Dublin: Printed for J. Moore. Vol. 1, part 2. For discussion, see Sommerville 1999, 94. If in other kingdoms the laws only seem to govern, but the judges had rather misconstrue law, and do injustice, than displease the King’s humour, whereof the poet speaketh, ad libitum Regis sonuit sententia legis [in the pleasure of the king, lies the law’s meaning] bless God for Queen Elizabeth, whose continual charge to her Justices, agreeable with her ancient laws, is, that no commandment under the great or privy seal, writs or letters, common right be disturbed or delayed. And if any such commandment (upon untrue surmises) should come that the Justices of her laws should not therefore cease to do right in any point: and this agreeth with the ancient law of England, declared by the great charter, and spoken in the person of the King, Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus, aut differemus Justitiam vel Rectum [To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny, or delay what is right or just.] [Magna Carta, chap. 29] [preface] b. Coke, Edward (1797). The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Containing the Exposition of Many Ancient and Other Statutes. London: E. and R. Brooke. For discussion, see (Burgess 1996, 176). The highest and most binding laws are the statutes which are established by Parliament; and by authority of that highest court it is enacted (only to shew their tender care of Magna Charta, and Charta de Foresta) that if any statute be made contrary to the great charter, or the charter of the forest, that shall be holden for none. [preface] c. Johnson, Robert C, and Maija Jansson Cole, eds. (1977). Commons Debates, 1628. Vol. 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. For discussion, see Burgess 1996, 205.

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In all cases, my Lords, where any right or liberty, belongs to the subjects by any positive law, written or unwritten, if there not also be a remedy by law for the enjoying or regaining this right or liberty when it is violated or taken from him, the positive law were most vain and to no purpose. [342] d. Coke, Edward. 1793. The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt.: In English, in Thirteen Parts Complete. Ed. George Wilson. 7 vols. Dublin: Printed for J. Moore. Vol. 4, part 8. For discussion, see Burgess 1996, 187. There are divers customs in London which are against common right, and the rule of the common law, and yet they are allowed in our books, and eo potius, because they have not only the force of a custom, but are also supported and fortified by authority of Parliament. [250]

In Coke’s comments on Magna Carta, Sommerville sees evidence of the theory of the ‘ancient constitution’ in which the ‘subject’s rights were based upon customary not statute law’. Magna Carta, for Coke, was ‘indeed, a statute, but a statute declaring old, not enacting new, law’ (see Excerpt 14.2a). Parliament could not alter the fundamental precepts of the common law through statute (see Excerpt 14.2b), though it did serve as the ‘supreme interpreter’ of the law (Sommerville 1999, 94). By the 1620s, Coke had come to view parliament as the champion of fundamental maxims of the common law, for example, that ‘no subject could ever be imprisoned without cause shown’, or ‘that subjects could not be deprived of their property nor bound by a new law without their consent’ (Sommerville 1999, 90–92). Burgess argued to the contrary that Coke was not a constitutionalist and was not concerned with limited government in the eighteenth-century sense. Rather, he was concerned to preserve a system of ‘private property’ embodied in the common law. It was this system which was Coke’s ‘fundamental law’, and there were no particular principles or precepts which were fundamental in the constitutionalist sense. As long as the governmental system provided legal remedies against private wrongs it could be of unlimited form (see Excerpt 14.2c), including the parliamentary capacity to make unreasonable laws (see Excerpt 14.2d) and an absolute or ‘free’ monarchy with wide ranging discretion (Burgess 1996, chap. 6, esp. 208).

Modern natural law and representation The liberal story that the heart of early modern political thought was fundamental law and individual rights was strengthened by its critics. After the heyday of the interpretation in the 1940s and 50s, the Marxist historian C.B. Macpherson defined the rights-based tradition from Hobbes to Locke as The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), which at once codified the liberal story that

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there were increasingly clearly articulated claims to natural rights to property in the period and condemned this story as overly individualistic. The book was roundly criticised on methodological grounds (Dunn 1974), and eventually, in Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories (1979), the rights tradition was given a different basis altogether. ‘[I]t is very far from clear,’ he wrote, ‘that any sort of liberal political theory can easily be traced back’ to the early modern tradition of rights theorists, including Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes (3). These theorists were rather part of a ‘conservative and authoritarian tradition’ which Tuck traced back to the Middle Ages (3). By the late 1980s, Tuck was writing of the tradition as ‘the “modern” theory of natural law’. He had already drawn on a series of late seventeenth, earlyeighteenth century ‘histories of morality’ in Natural Rights Theories to reconstruct the modern tradition from Grotius to Hobbes (174–7). Further reflection on these histories and their role in Enlightenment thinking led him to revise his view of the tradition, and to come to see these thinkers as responding to the revival of classical scepticism in the sixteenth century. Tuck explained that these Renaissance sceptics, like the sceptics of Antiquity, were not completely without beliefs; they embraced the ‘truth of moral relativism’ and the principles of ataraxia and apatheia, withdrawal from judgment and emotion, in order to preserve themselves from harm (Tuck 1987, 110). The founder of the school of modern natural law, Hugo Grotius, realised that ‘the sceptic could be answered once the full implications of the principle of self-preservation had been thought out’ (110–11). He thus went on to construct a theory of natural law on the basis of a minimal set of natural principles embodying the right to self-preservation. The politics of such a theory, also to be found in Selden, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, was complex, combining a defence of ‘a relatively pluralist intellectual and aesthetic culture against its enemies – notably the Calvinist and Catholic churches’ and a justification of the strong centralised states they believed were required to do so (117–18). Precisely how such rights theories yielded strong centralised states was explored in Philosophy and Government (1993). Tuck explained there that despite their commitment to the principle of self-preservation, these rights theorists did not ground their version of unitary omnicompetent sovereignty in a utilitarian logic. Utilitarianism requires a belief in ‘general utility’, a shared sense of what is beneficial. The modern rights theorists’ engagement with scepticism meant that they believed there would rather be disagreement ‘over what was “profitable and unprofitable”’ (348; see also, Tuck 1979, 2; 1997). It was thus not Austinian ‘habitual obedience’ which underlay the state in their view, but a recognition that such disagreement required a sovereign representative to judge the matter. Post-sceptical political theory thus led to a theory of representation of the sort that Gierke had described. This was above all the case for Hobbes, whose famous formula of authorisation embodied the alienation of private judgment to the sovereign representative (Tuck 1993, 328) (see Excerpt 14.3).

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Excerpt 14.3: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) Hobbes, Thomas (2012). Leviathan. Ed. Noel Malcolm. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. xviii, 2:264. For discussion, see Tuck 1993, 228. A Common-wealth is said to be Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative,) every one, as well he that Voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall authorise all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men. [2:264]

In Gierke’s interpretation, Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign representative had imported all the problems of the Roman theory of corporations into modern politics. Representation in this sense could scarcely be thought to embody the sort of expansive national representation he thought appropriate by the mid-nineteenth century. In the mid-1980s, Pocock made a similar complaint in responding to Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories. Pocock argued that the alienation of individual rights through representation could only explain juridical sovereignty, not account for ‘a personality adequate to participation in self-rule’ which rather required, as we have seen he argued, a revival of classical republicanism (Pocock 1985, 45). While he admitted that Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes may have had a modern concept of representation, it was not adequate in his view to explain representation in the sense usually meant in modern democracies in the twentieth century. In something of a reply to this complaint, Tuck argued in Philosophy and Government that the defenders of parliamentary sovereignty in the ‘English Revolution’ did so out of much the same logic as the modern natural lawyers, namely, the alienation of private judgment (see Appendix 14.3). While Tuck had argued in the past that seventeenth century representative parliamentary sovereignty embodied the principle of omnicompetent sovereignty (in contrast to the constitutionalist fundamental law of the high court of parliament) (Tuck 1982), he now sought to show that it was nevertheless compatible with the sort of democratic reforms that the Levellers were advocating during the English Civil War (Tuck 1993, 247), and that it included elements of democratic thinking in its theoretical premises even in those usually thought of as ‘absolutists’ like Bodin and Hobbes (Tuck 2015). For Tuck, this theory of representation is a natural law theory, because at its root lay the natural right to self-preservation, a claim against others to which none could object without denying the basic facts of human nature. Harro Höpfl has argued forcefully, however, in his study of Jesuit political thought (2004) that this way of thinking about the natural law tradition has overstated the importance of individual

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rights and the accompanying ideas of the state of nature and social contract (246). Jesuit modern natural law thinking was characterised in his view rather by its inherited sense of natural sociability and the naturalness of authority, which were not always imagined in these ‘constitutionalist’ terms. Nevertheless, in positing natural ends to government they simultaneously maintained the notion of the conditional origin of civil authority while assuming the necessity of the subjection of the populace to civil authority (Höpfl 2004, 256–57). In her wide-ranging study of early modern natural law, Changes of State (2011), Annabel Brett continued to explore these themes in the thinking of both Catholic and Protestant natural lawyers. Building on her earlier work (Brett 1997), she explored in detail how early modern thinkers represented their sense of the natural purposes and qualities of humanity in juridical language (rights, liberties, faculties) and how these were understood to align or conflict with the natural and juridical orders of the state and between states. While she has continued to see rights as one important component of how nature is represented in these theories, she shares Höpfl’s view that this does not imply a constitutionalism in the usual sense (Brett 2006). She explains that natural rights (and liberties and faculties) were not so much understood to be claims against the state as reflections of the uniquely human freedom which defined those who have the capacity to live together in a political community, i.e. a community of civil government rather than rule by physical coercion (Brett 2011, 37, 56). Rights were thus believed to describe a ‘zone of permission left over from natural law’ (87), and the preservation of the freedom enshrined in them was understood to be the defining characteristic of civil government. In the context of states, the natural claims which survived despite legislation on a given issue were called ‘rights’ or ‘liberties’ and reflected contemporaries’ views of the ‘limited character of human law’. They were not, however, absolute; they could be overridden in cases where the survival of the state was in question (165). In international waters or unclaimed territory (or wherever a state had failed to legislate), they could be understood to be as much natural ‘faculties’ as rights or liberties (100). Such qualities thus defined not only the potential membership of the group of those capable of living together in a state, but also of the broader community of all humans understood as free beings. The liberties that were to be reserved in this broader international community were understood by some thinkers to amount to what the Roman lawyers had called the ius gentium, the law of nations. As Brett explains, the character of this international community was imagined in wide-ranging and conflicting ways; varying views of the ius gentium allowed early modern thinkers to conceive of an international zone of natural freedom where both economic migration and colonial exploitation could take place (see Appendix 14.4). Living together in a state (respublica), however, was a more intentional and orderly way of being. The imposition of civil authority always required in early modern political theory some moment of ‘pull[ing] away from nature’ (5) in the direction of human decision, though there were a variety of ways of understanding this moment of the erection of order – consent, contract, authorisation. The closer the order was understood to be to nature, the greater its legitimacy, but also the slighter its value vis-a-vis natural society. Some neo-Aristotelian thinkers,

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like Henning Arnisaeus (c. 1575–1636) had seen this clearly, and insisted on the distinction between natural society and political order (69). In the mid-1970s, Horst Dreitzel had described this tradition, in his study of Arnisaeus. Such neo-Aristotelians held that it was the “ordo imperandi et parendi” [order of commanding and obeying] in a society (civitas) of any form and with different ends that constituted the essence of “respublica” and that the criterion of its legitimacy was the fulfillment of a minimum of functions and structural conditions. (Dreitzel 1992, 34)

Figure 14.1 Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), picturing how the body politic composed of individuals is given form through the unity of the sovereign, who wields the sword and crozier, the symbols of the powers of Church and State. (See Hobbes 2012, 1: 128–141) Private Collection / Bridgeman Images.

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Brett argued that Hobbes’s great achievement was to combine a strong version of the naturalness of the origin of political order while preserving its distinct sense of artificiality (160). Thus, while a sovereign is erected to preserve the various natural rights, it is the arrangement of ruling offices which gives the state its unity, such that ‘sovereign power does not exist except as it is held by some man or men, which means that the state does not exist except in the specific form of being a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy’ (Brett 2011, 141). According to this interpretation, the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan is misleading. It is not the head as representative of the people that gives the body unity, reminiscent of the ‘directive’ understanding of potestas’, but its soul, the order of ruling offices which are given sovereign power (Skinner 2008a, 190; Brett 2011, 141). Gierke believed that the notion of the ‘soul’ from the organic theory of society was used ‘to counteract, in some degree, the individualistic premises of the theory’, but in his view, it was applied only to the question of the origin of the political community as a social community rather than to the origins of the sovereign representative, leading him to conclude that ‘the organic theory was never applied to the problem of the “Subject” of sovereign power’ (Gierke 1934, 51–52). In Brett’s account of Hobbes, she has thus stood Gierke on his head; it is the naturalness of our individual rights which gave both civil authority and political community a real basis, while it is the soul – the constitution describing the distribution of offices – which had a fictive quality (see Figure 14.1).

Conclusion and new directions: early modern or post-modern? It should be clear that the field has never strayed far from the concepts, such as representation and legal personality, which preoccupied it from its beginnings. Maitland’s joke at the Sidgwick lecture in Cambridge in 1903 applies almost as well today: If once you become interested in the sort of history that tries to unravel these and similar problems, you will think some other sorts of history rather superficial. Perhaps you will go the length of saying that much the most interesting person that you ever knew was persona ficta. (Nicholls 1975, 161) The interpretations of these concepts have, however, changed considerably, with significant results. Compared to the founders of the field, there is much less interest in weighing the virtues of modernity today. Earlier interpretations of early modern political thought tended, as we have seen, to see in the period the seeds of the pathologies which afflict modern politics, above all, a concentration of power in the sovereign state. For the first generation of scholars, the liberals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, both the popular and princely versions

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of this sovereignty, which they saw as sharply opposed, were threatening. Such judgments continued into the inter-war and post-war period, as the division of the sources into ‘absolutist’ and ‘constitutionalist’ categories came to be portrayed as rival visions of modern politics. Over time, as post-war democratic consolidation settled in, it became rather the question of modernisation as such which took hold of the field. This led eventually, perhaps inevitably, to a reaction, and a new ambivalence about the modern historical project that the founders were so closely associated with. The preoccupation of the field with modernisation has been resisted for decades by Pocock, who has seen it as a betrayal of his methodological principles. ‘Modernity’ is ‘a concept in which I am not much interested’, he has declared recently, and contended that ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ were eighteenth-century concepts poorly suited to the study of early modern political thought (Pocock 2004, 540, 545). Most scholars have not drawn such a firm line, and yet have been sensitive to such concerns. Without quite abandoning modernisation entirely, a number of scholars have recently come to emphasise the themes and perspectives which could be called quintessentially ‘early modern’. These aspects, like the honour culture (Peltonen 2003; Dauber 2016) and the religious background of natural law (Strohm 1996; Brett 2011; Mortimer 2014), distinguish the political thinking of the period from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors, even while they accompany other aspects like the theory of sovereignty which lay the groundwork for them. Even for those who have been relatively more committed to a modernisation story, there has been an increased emphasis on the gradualness of change. Francis Oakley, for instance, long a defender of a constitutionalist interpretation stretching from the conciliarists to the English Civil War, has written more recently that the conciliarists’ ‘aristocratic principle of selection’ was, as John Morrall put it, ‘reminiscent of the theory of ‘virtual’ representation in the pre-1832 British House of Commons’ (Oakley 2003, 235 n. 60, 1996, 99 n. 126, citing Morrall 1958, 128–29). The globalisation and multilateralism of the last decades suggested that perhaps in the era of ‘pooled sovereignty’, it was no longer appropriate to consider the sovereign nation state as the exclusive focus of studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought. As we have seen, Annabel Brett has accordingly begun to show us in Changes of State what a postmodern history of early modern political thought might look like, placing the state into a much broader juridical landscape of international and transnational zones of rights and liberties. Even as the distinctiveness and weakness of the early modern state becomes more apparent, and the history of transnational and international norms and institutions of the period is increasingly told, the continued significance and persistence of the modern state means that it still looms inevitably on the horizon, and the history of early modern political thought, despite our ambivalence, seems destined to be in dialogue with modern history for some time to come.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sarah Mortimer and Isaac Nakhimovsky for their comments on this chapter.

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Appendices

Appendix 14.1 Figgis, John Neville (1907). Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Had the Conciliar movement secured lasting success, the principles which were symbolised by the division of the Council into nations and in the Concordats with which it closed might have become fruitful in the future. As it was, alike in England and abroad, the notion of a single omni-competent social union set over against a mass of individuals became the normal idea of the State. The Communitas Communitatum becomes a mere collection of units; and modern society is at once more individualistic and more socialistic than medieval. Only now, as a result partly of the United States Constitution and partly of other causes, is it beginning to dawn upon men’s minds that we cannot fit the facts into the unitary State, as the true source of all power and the only ground of every right except so far as it is controlled by certain claims of the individual. [51–2]

Appendix 14.2 Pocock, J.G.A. (1971). Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. New York: Atheneum. Civic humanism denotes a style of thought [ … ] in which it is contended that the development of the individual towards self-fulfillment is possible only when the individual acts as a citizen, that is as a conscious and autonomous participant in an autonomous decision-taking political community, the polis or republic. [ … ] [85]

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To lose one’s due share of authority, or to have more than one’s due, amounted to a loss of virtue, and since virtue consisted in a relation between equals its loss was not private but mutual. It might be thought of as coming about either when some became so strong that they could use others as their instruments, or when some became so weak that they could be so used. The republic could persist only if all its citizens were so far autonomous that they could be equally and immediately participant in the pursuit of the universal good. [ … ] [87] [I]t was the civic humanist ideal which provided the point of departure for the concept of alienation. The undistracted, unspecialized man – hunter in the morning and critic in the afternoon – whom Marx and Lenin hoped to restore to his universality is in the long view an Aristotelian citizen, participant in all the value oriented activities of society, and his history is in large part the history of civic humanism. [103]

Appendix 14.3 Tuck, Richard (1993). Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [T]he English rebellion was justified in extremely modern terms. All the key words of the new humanism were present in an astonishingly extensive pamphlet literature – ‘necessity’, salus populi, ‘reason of state’ and, above all, interest. [ … ] [222] The defence of the republican character of the new regime in terms of the interests of its inhabitants required, as we have seen, a distinctive belief in the value of an elective system in which those interests would be represented by the members of Parliament. A mass, non-elective democracy would have run counter to the interests of the people for the familiar Tacitist reasons (which even the Levellers would probably have accepted); but an elective republic could secure the public interest more effectively than a single prince. [253]

Appendix 14.4 Brett, Annabel (2011). Changes of State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vitoria saw the ius gentium [law of nations] as a law neither between individual men, nor between sovereign states, but between all human beings as forming one community [ … .] Vitoria used both natural law and the ius gentium to address the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the Indies. [ … .] Vitoria suggested that if you thought the American Indians were natural slaves [ … .], you would have to think the same of Spanish peasants, many of who ‘are little different from brute animals.’ However, precisely their humanity, their membership in the universal society, equally demands that these Indian commonwealths

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allow ‘travellers’ – and the irony here is very familiar – the right to use their harbours and rivers; the right to any ‘unoccupied’ – more irony – deposits of precious metals; and the right to marry, to settle, and to be given citizenship in their towns and cities. That is, to our modern ears, a quite astonishing degree of permeability of one state by the inhabitants of others. It is no surprise, then, that Vitoria’s ius communicandi or ‘right of inter-communication’ was seen at the time, and has been seen since, simply as a green light to imperialism and colonialism. [13–4]

15 Enlightenment struggles Dorinda Outram

Introduction No period in western history has been as keenly debated as that of the Enlightenment. Since the eighteenth century itself, historians, philosophers, politicians, and literary scholars have tried to find its meaning, and assess its impact on the world in which they lived (Edelstein 2010). As we will see, they have often tried to use the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a way of jumping from historical fact to moral and philosophical imperative, from the realm of Is to the realm of Ought. In doing so, they have stood within longstanding debates about the uses of history, debates which run from the Classical world into our own days. It was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that, for a brief time, historical knowledge was supposed to be ‘objective’, or ‘scientific’. More recently, it has become fashionable once again for the historian to place him or herself inside the text, and turn commentary on the Enlightenment into a gloss on current trends and problems, not to mention burdening their readers with autobiography. Philosophers such as Richard Rorty, and historians such as Anthony Pagden, Jonathan Israel, and Vincenzo Ferrone, for example, have argued that the Enlightenment lies at the foundation of modern secular cosmopolitan liberalism. Yet not all commentators have ever taken on board the Enlightenment’s selfportrait as a campaign for utility, reason, tolerance and progress. As early as the 1790s, the Enlightenment was blamed by conservative commentators, such as Joseph de Maistre, for the violent excesses of the French Revolution and its attack on throne and altar, which, they alleged, had caused the collapse of the Ancien Régime. In 1947, with their Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung), the refugee German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, argued that the Enlightenment had forged the technological, ‘instrumental’, ends-orientated reason which allowed the organisation of man-made mass-death and the ruthless exploitation of nature. This list of negative interpretations could easily be expanded. By themselves, they leave us with a single question: why has the Enlightenment, easily more than any other field of western history, attracted this ‘interpretative overload’?

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Its proximity to two major crises of modernity, the French Revolution which created the modern political individual, and the Holocaust which called into question the very meaning of the terms ‘reason’ and ‘humanity’, may go part way to answering this question. For the nineteenth century, the French Revolution, allegedly caused by the Enlightenment, was the defining issue of its time; for the twentieth century, and arguably for the twenty-first, it was the Holocaust which occupied that role. In the twentieth century, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s powerful argument about Enlightenment terror for at least two decades was dominant, and fed into rising anti-science, anti-colonialist, feminist, and leftwing views in history and philosophy from the 1960s onwards. Dialektik in hand, it was easy then to support the view that the Enlightenment’s allegedly ‘instrumental’, value-free, ends-orientated reason had led not only to the Holocaust, but to the exploitation of nature, and exploitative attitudes towards women and non-European races. Hostile interpretation of the Enlightenment became integrated into the newest and most passionately debated political lines of the post-War and post-imperialist era in the western world. Once more, the Enlightenment bore a load of interpretation very different from that of other historical periods. It was easy enough to find the very words of some Enlightenment thinkers to confirm this point of view, for the Enlightenment itself had not been without internal critique, which again gave hooks for multiple interpretations. The great German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), for example, challenged Enlightenment meliorist views of human history, which he called: The general philosophical, philanthropic tone of our century, which wishes to extend our own ideal of virtue and happiness to each distant nation, to even the remotest age of history … It has taken words for works, Enlightenment for happiness, greater sophistication for virtues, and in this way invented the fiction of the general amelioration of the world. (Herder, quoted in Barnard 1969, 187) Herder believed that in this way the high-minded men of the Enlightenment had justified the dominance of European culture over that of other races. As he wrote: ‘The ferment of generalities which characterize our philosophy, can conceal oppressions and infringements of the freedom of men and countries, of citizens and peoples’ (Ibid., 320). It was difficult, for example, to see how the Enlightenment could have set up a bulwark against the evil of African slavery. Its reiteration of belief in the dignity of man sat oddly with the absence (except in England) of organised opposition to the institution of slavery until the end of the century. Rather than being a unified movement of thought, the Enlightenment was full of contradictions. Ideas were often not carried to their logical conclusions, and practice and theory often swung widely away from each other. Beliefs about the inferiority of women and non-white races, for example, were difficult to fit into Enlightenment generalisations about the dignity of humanity, and human

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rights. This may also go far to explain the ‘interpretative overload’ which we have noted before. All who wished could find in the Enlightenment a hook for their own views, or fulfil their interpretative needs in the construction of a world philosophy or outlook, whether their views of the Enlightenment were positive or not. In recent times, much more emphasis has been placed on the idea of an extra-European Enlightenment; historians have also spent much more time on constructing a gendered Enlightenment. In general, the historical emphasis has switched from the structure and content of Enlightenment thought, the sort of Enlightenment history written by Ernst Cassirer between the 1920s and 1940s, to the study of practices. Ideas have become embodied. The American historian Robert Darnton, for example, began innovative work in the 1960s on the multi-volume Encyclopédie edited by the philosophes Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, often seen as an ‘engine of Enlightenment’. Darnton treated it not as a collection of Enlightenment ideas, but as a physical entity and business venture, looking at prices and distribution, production and labour relations. In his The Business of Enlightenment (1979), he looked at who bought the Encyclopédie, and where they lived, and how its different editions gave different reading experiences for different social groups. The (often contradictory) ideas which it expressed were treated as secondary (Darnton 1979). This was also the time when a movement born in academic literary criticism which came to be known as the New Historicism, began to exert its influence on the study of the Enlightenment. Scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher wanted to get away from the traditional study of the text strictly for itself which was then de rigueur. They founded a new journal, Representations, and put forward the idea that life itself was text. They operated in a new space half-way between history and literature. Influenced as well by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, historians such as Darnton came to look at the society of the past as of course patterned and structured, and yet as also fundamentally strange and different from the present. The scholar’s task was to bring out that strangeness (see Hunt 1989; Veeser 1989). It was no longer to find causal relationships (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, 10). The New Historicism substituted the study of practices for the study of ideas. The ideas of the Enlightenment were deprived of weight. Whereas Horckheimer and Adorno, for example, had seen Enlightenment ideas as directly operating on the world with real, albeit devastating, consequences, the New Historicists saw the ideas as being among the anthropological ‘strangenesses’ characteristic of the past, in other words as quite distanced from the present. It has not been until quite recently that historians of the Enlightenment have once more tried to attach values to Enlightenment ideas and to ask about their impact on the present. The last historiographical moment which should be mentioned here is that of the so-called ‘Radical Enlightenment’, associated with the names of Jonathan Israel and Margaret Jacob. Jacob’s work has long enlarged the canon of those seen as participating in the Enlightenment, to include freemasons, pantheists and alchemists, amongst others, without insisting on the possible links between

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Enlightenment and liberal modernity (Jacob 1981). Jonathan Israel’s monumental studies on the other hand, have taken the search for unorthodoxy even further with their thesis that it was the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) who was the central figure of a ‘radical Enlightenment’, rather than the thinkers of what he calls the ‘moderate Enlightenment’, such as Voltaire, Hume or Kant (Israel 2001, 2006, 2011). Spinoza rejected Descartes’ mind-body split, and argued for the idea that God and Nature were one substance, a heretical, pantheistic idea which posed a threat not only to Christianity, but to the Deistic beliefs held by many in the ‘moderate Enlightenment’ as well. Israel also argues, controversially, that his ‘radical Enlightenment’ lies at the foundation of the modern liberal secular theory of the state. He sees it as refusing religion, tradition, faith and authority (Israel 2011, 7). Israel’s work attracted a storm of criticism, although universally commended for its industry, and its bringing to light of many lesser-known figures. But it was objected that a sharp division of thinkers into ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ glossed over a great deal of complication and paradox in their actual thinking. Also that republicanism, and the undermining of faith, authority and tradition, ‘deemed to fetter the human spirit’, (Israel 2001, 686) were not necessarily part of the liberal tradition. Enough has by now been said to make it clear that the historiography of the Enlightenment is one of unique and challenging density. I have taken the decision therefore to confine discussion to three ‘hinge-periods’: (1) Discussions on the meaning of Enlightenment during the European late eighteenth century; (2) debates over the meaning of Enlightenment forged against the background of the rise of the European dictatorships in the 1930s and 1940s; (3) attempts in the twenty-first century by thinkers such as the historians Jonathan Israel and Anthony Pagden, and the philosopher Richard Rorty, to see the Enlightenment as the origin of modern liberal cosmopolitanism, which is understood as a good thing.

The answer to a question From 1784 onwards, a series of articles appeared in the journal the Berlinische Monatsschrift. They were attempts to answer a question on the meaning of Aufklärung (Enlightenment), which had been asked in a previous article by the Pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner: ‘What is Enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins enlightening! And yet I have never found it answered!’ Zöllner’s contemporaries, however, soon rushed to his aid. Thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn wrote essays which were published in the Monatsschrift, and were closely followed by other thinkers such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Christoph Martin Wieland. Easily the best-known of these articles is that by the great Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It is frequently cited, but few readers get past the

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first pages, and their clarion call ‘Sapere aude!’ (Dare to know!), which Kant proclaims as the motto of the Enlightenment: Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! Is thus the motto of Enlightenment! (Schmidt 1996, 58) Here, Kant states that man should free himself from his self-imposed immaturity. To be enlightened was to learn to use reason without guidance from others. However, later on in the essay, Kant’s argument changes, and he sees unfettered reason, unlimited questioning and defining, as potentially dissolving social, political, and religious order. Reason, rather than being the triumphant motto of the Enlightenment, as it was a few pages earlier, becomes something to be carefully controlled. Kant argues for the use of ‘judges’ to define the use of reason. As Kant cautiously points out: ‘The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about Enlightenment among men; the private use of reason may be quite often narrowly restricted’ (quoted in Schmidt 1996, 59). Kant defined the public sphere as a place where people (he defines his readers as the ‘Leserwelt’, the ‘reading world’) are free to write and speak critically; but in what he calls the ‘private sphere’, people have a duty to restrain the expression of unfettered judgement in order to uphold the ruler and the other powers that be, and thus lessen the likelihood of chaos. As he continues, probably referring to lower social classes: Now, a certain mechanism is necessary in many affairs which are run in the interest of the commonwealth by means of which some members of the commonwealth must conduct themselves passively in order that the government may direct them, through an artificial unanimity, to public ends, or at least restrain them from the destruction of these ends. Here one is certainly not allowed to argue: rather one must obey. (Schmidt 1996, 60) Kant further clarifies his views on the public and the private with the example of the clergyman (see Excerpt 15.1). In making this radical division between public and private, implying that even the pastor was ‘immature’, so long as he remained in his role as pastor, Kant also implied that Enlightenment had no time for the whole moral person in political life, an argument which has cast a long shadow. In this way, Kant tried to side-step the potentially disruptive potential of the Enlightenment, while trying to retain its critical impetus. Even the age’s greatest philosopher saw the Enlightenment as desirable but dangerous. As Kant concludes, it was only with a strong

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Excerpt 15.1: Immanuel Kant on private and public spheres Schmidt, James, ed. (1996). What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Los Angeles, Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press. … a clergyman is bound to lecture to his catechism students and his congregation according to the symbol of the church which he serves; for he has been accepted on this condition. But as a scholar he has the complete freedom, indeed it is his calling, to communicate to the public all his carefully tested and well-intentioned thoughts on the imperfections of that symbol and his proposals for a better arrangement of religious and ecclesiastical affairs. There is in this nothing that could burden his conscience. For what he teaches as a consequence of his office as an agent of his church, he presents as something about which he does not have free reign to teach according to his own discretion, but rather is engaged to expound according to another’s precept and in another’s name. He will say: our church teaches this or that; these are the arguments that it employs. He then draws out all the practical uses for his congregation from rules to which he himself may not subscribe with complete conviction, but to whose exposition he can nevertheless pledge himself, since it is not entirely impossible that truth may lie concealed within them, and, at least, in any case there is nothing in them that is in contradiction with what is intrinsic to religion. For if he believed he found such a contradiction in them he could not in conscience conduct his office; he would have to resign. Thus the use that an appointed teacher makes of his reason before his congregation is merely a private use, because it is only a domestic assembly, no matter how large it is; and in this respect he is not and cannot be free, as a priest, because he conforms to the orders of another. In contrast, as a scholar, who through his writings speaks to his own public, namely the world, the clergyman enjoys, in the public use of his reason, an unrestricted freedom to employ his own reason and to speak in his own person. For that the guardian of the people (in spiritual matters) should be himself immature, is an absurdity that leads to the perpetuation of absurdities. [60–1]

ruler such as his own Frederick II of Prussia, who could create the secure conditions in which a controlled or limited Enlightenment, that it could happen at all. It is instructive to compare Kant’s contribution to the debate triggered by Zöllner with that of the Jewish Aufklärer Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). While Kant’s audience was the Leserwelt, and he discussed the specific cases of preachers and army officers as examples of those subject to authority,

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Mendelssohn instead emphasised the need for another sort of Enlightenment, still concerned with reason, but more conceived of as an education in the use of reason which should spread through society. This was often called Volksaufklärung, or ‘popular philosophy’. Yet Mendelssohn, like Kant, also made distinctions and divisions: ‘Certain truths’, he notes, ‘which are useful to man, as man, can at times be harmful to him as a citizen’ (Schmidt 1996, 5). Both men, with very different agendas, yet worried together about the impact of Enlightenment on society and government. The German Enlightenment concerned itself, as did no other national brand of Enlightenment, with what was called ‘popular philosophy’, but was immediately faced with questions of class and power as it did so. German philosophy of the Enlightenment, often seen as characteristically abstract, in fact always walked a very fine line between the exploration of reason, and the stability of Church and state. Thus, from the very beginning, most Enlightenment thinkers in Germany were unable to take ideas such as ‘reason’ and ‘humanity’ and run with them to their logical conclusion of equality. Reason, after all, was the common possession of all men. From the very beginning, Enlightenment thinkers thus regarded their own agenda in contradictory ways, and ran the free and true instantiation of Enlightenment, against the security of state, religion and society. ‘Man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity’, as Kant put it, was accomplished by careful negotiation between the absolutes of the Enlightenment, and the needs of the polity. It was not a sudden loud cry in favour of ‘Enlightenment’. This was especially so in matters of religion. The fate of the Berlin Aufklärer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) is a case in point. His treatise, the Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God, argued that Revelation could add nothing to that which was already known by human reason. Reinterpreting the Gospels, Reimarus saw Christianity as a failed attempt to revitalise Judaism, and like many other Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and d’Holbach, saw the modern Christian religion as a fraud perpetrated by the priesthood on the people, promising them eternal life in return for patient acceptance of the injustices of life on earth. Enlightenment, religion, and the polity were thus intensely interacting. The death of Frederick II in 1786 only intensified the struggle. The old king, who had ruled since 1740, was personally an unbeliever, who had put in place many measures of religious toleration. He was succeeded by his devout nephew Frederick William II, whose most trusted advisers such as Johann Christoph Woellner, were opponents of the Enlightenment, and convinced of the importance of the Christian religion for the support of monarchy and state alike. Two heavily contested decrees issued by Woellner in 1788 have – perhaps ironically – some echoes of Kant’s essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. The earlier decree, while allowing pastors to believe whatever they wanted in private, yet also forced them to adhere, under pain of dismissal, to the Bible and the orthodox prayer books, in their public preaching and prayers. The second decree set up an administration for the censorship of writings on religion.

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The late-eighteenth-century struggle in Berlin over the relationship of Enlightenment and religion happened at the same time that in France the Revolution of 1789 moved into its opening phases. Humiliating failures in foreign policy, political and social tensions, the bankruptcy of the monarchy, and catastrophic harvests, all pushed France towards a situation where the old political structures could no longer function, and reform could only occur through radical change (cf. Chapter 16: French Revolution). How was the German Aufklärung to respond to this upheaval in an influential neighbouring state? It was not an easy matter to craft a response. As James Schmidt has written: The idea that there is a connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is by now so familiar that it is difficult to imagine how troubling the relation must have seemed in the early 1790s. Because we tend to assume a natural affinity between the Enlightenment and liberal politics, we forget that many Aufklärer were not liberals, that some of the more ardent liberals were by no means well disposed towards the Enlightenment, and that it was by no means assumed that political revolution was a means for advancing the cause of enlightened political reforms. (Schmidt 1996, 12) Kant’s contemporaries wrestled with the problem. One of his followers, Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk (1759–1837), published his essay ‘On the Influence of Enlightenment on Revolutions,’ (‘Über den Einfluss der Aufklärung auf Revolutionen’), in Pharos fur Äonen (1794), ten years after Kant’s previously discussed essay, by which time the French Revolution had moved from an earlier stage of liberal reform, to one where political terror, the abolition of the monarchy, nationalisation of the French Catholic church, the execution of the king, and mobilisation for total war had brought about a profound upheaval in France. This upheaval was not merely political. It brought into question the entire moral and intellectual order. Many were there who blamed the Enlightenment. In his introduction, Tieftrunk restated this idea, commonplace in the 1790s and for long after, and much linked to such conservatives as the Abbé Barruel and Joseph de Maistre, who … have disparaged the religion of the people, and in this way have caused anarchy and a general corruption of morals. They bear the responsibility for all the maladies which provoked and which daily continue to provoke our age’s spirit of rebellion. Enlightenment, it is said, is the source of revolutions. (Schmidt 1996, 217) But Tieftrunk hits back at the accusers of Enlightenment: One seeks to make all the advances of human knowledge suspect, and for this reason one seeks to link the concept of Enlightenment to all kinds of hateful accessory concepts. Today heresy, freethinking, Jacobinism, and the

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rejection of all authority, however respectable, are called Enlightenment. Today, Enlightenment is treason. One must define the concept of Enlightenment precisely and then the question can be posed: to what extent is it responsible for the events of our age? (Ibid.) But whose was the true Enlightenment? It is clear that Tieftrunk’s audience was conceived of as male. Kant’s own many disparaging comments about the capacity of other races and of the whole female sex for rational thought, and hence participation in an Enlightenment conceived of as rationality, are well known. This opened the way for a large question, one just coming to the fore in the 1790s in works such as those by the German Theodor von Hippel, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Status of Women) (1792), the Frenchman Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, ‘Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven’ in Oeuvres complètes de Condorcet (1804), and squarely faced by the English author Mary Wollstonecraft, in her book The Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. How could Enlightenment confront its own ideas of the relationship between gender and rationality? As I have written elsewhere, Wollstonecraft took aim at Rousseau, and pointed out that his ideas of femininity designated women as inferior to and different from men, and did nothing more, as Voltaire had previously noted, than replicate in domestic life the political system based on privilege and arbitrary power, enjoyed by monarchs and aristocrats over their subjects, or slave-owners over their slaves, which those same thinkers were so ready to criticize in other contexts. (Outram 2018, 79) After all ‘Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason?’ (Wollstonecraft 1982, 87). Like Tieftrunk, Wollstonecraft wanted to defend the Enlightenment, but by making its philosophical basis more stable. She pointed out a yet more serious, conceptual, problem. Enlightenment was based on ideals such as ‘reason’ and ‘virtue’, which were alleged to be innate in, or attainable by, all human beings. But rationality was precisely what was denied to women by writers such as Rousseau and Kant, and by many medical writers, while ‘virtue’ was defined for women in an exclusively sexual sense (Outram 2018, 79). As Wollstonecraft points out, such ideas can, however, only lead to a dangerous moral relativism which will also impede the progress of Enlightenment, by ‘giving a sex to morals’ (Wollstonecraft 1982, 121). She drew out the consequences: For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet for the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation but utility, and of that utility, men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience. (Ibid. 103)

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And further: If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea … virtue has only one eternal standard. It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason … Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is but on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue: for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. (Ibid. 86) By pointing this out, Wollstonecraft not only pointed out clearly the moral relativism induced by Enlightenment beliefs about gender, and the difficulty Enlightenment had in finding a ground for morals: she also pointed out that contradiction lay at the heart of the structure of Enlightenment thought (see Excerpt 15.2) (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures).

Excerpt 15.2: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (I792) Wollstonecraft, Mary (1982). A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Miriam Kramnick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments, which he pretends to draw from the indications of nature, still further, and insinuates that truth and fortitude, the corner stones of all human virtue, should be cultivated with certain restrictions, because, with respect with the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour. What nonsense! When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim … Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses’ poetical story; yet, as very few, it is

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presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure. Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God. [36–7]

If women were in fact not rational, Wollstonecraft argued, it would be far preferable to abandon pretence, and exclude them altogether from social life. To say that virtue for some human beings is not founded on rationality and is differently defined from that practised by other human beings, means it cannot grow from God, since God is one, eternal and rational. Without a universal, non-gendered standard of morals and rationality, it would not be possible to sustain the Enlightenment project of emancipation through universal value systems based on reason and virtue, if one half of the human race were held to lack a capacity for either quality. In other words, the way the Enlightenment thought about gender contradicted, undermined, and challenged its claims to legitimacy as a universally applicable project. (Outram 2018, 79–80) This was an important, if not fundamental, perception about the Enlightenment, but one not carried forward by many (male) thinkers and writers who came after Wollstonecraft.

Enlightenment and totalitarianism Discussions over the meaning of Enlightenment were thus forged against the background of the thorough-going, traumatic, violent turmoil of the French

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Revolution, turmoil which rapidly spread to the rest of Europe. Many authors of the late eighteenth-century, and of the Romanticism which succeeded it, were thoroughly hostile to the Enlightenment, in ways which were very similar to those still proposed a hundred years later. Herder (1744–1803) and Novalis (1772–1801) were only two of the leading names to hold this view (Ferrone and Roche 2002, 30 ff.). It was not surprising that the problematic relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution continued to pre-occupy the nineteenth century, and that the Revolution became its defining trauma. In the twentieth century, however, the questions evoked by the Enlightenment dramatically changed, as two World Wars and the Holocaust caused the violent death of millions, and catastrophe to a depth which preceding centuries had not been capable of imagining. It was not surprising that ideas which had previously been seen as basic to the western order began to be questioned. Why did Enlightenmentbased liberalism and humane ideals prove inadequate to stem the tide of Fascism? Why had ideals of a common ‘humanity’ collapsed? During the Second World War itself (1939–1945), the stock answer to these questions among western liberal thinkers and historians such as the eminent American scholar A.O. Lovejoy (1873–1962), founder of the ‘history of ideas’ as an intellectual discipline, was to put the blame on Romanticism, especially German Romanticism, rather than the Enlightenment. In doing so, they made sharp distinctions between these two movements of thought, and did much to give them their separate identities. In holding and disseminating these ideas, Lovejoy was not unique, but was followed by most western thinkers. For our purposes, we will take as a representative the best-selling political theorist and poet, Peter Viereck (1916–2006), whose 1941 book Metapolitics carried German history from the Peace of Westphalia (1648), through to Hitler’s utterances in Mein Kampf, to account for the emergence of Nazi ideology. Lovejoy, Viereck, and many others of their followers, pointed out that the value of ongoing, unending ‘struggle’ as a creative exercise (‘streben’ in German) was central both to Romanticism and to Fascism, and that much of the conceptual underpinning of the violent nationalism which accompanied Fascism particularly in Germany and eastern Europe also came from Romanticism. Lovejoy wrote in 1941, that in this perpetual struggle: The nation or state itself takes on the role of the insatiable Romantic hero … It must ever strive for expansion, external power, and yet more power, not as a regrettably necessary means to some final rationally satisfying goal, but because continuous self-assertion, transcending of boundaries, triumph over opposition, is its vocation … So applied, it eventually destroyed, in many minds, the conception of a universal standard of human conduct, and the sense of a common human destiny … It seemed to lend a new philosophic sanction to that unreflective or animal nationalism which had long been a potent factor in European politics, but which in the Aufklärung had appeared to be on the wane … Finally, when combined with that ‘permanent affective element of human nature’, the collective, mutually

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re-enforcing amour-propre of the group, it was easily transformed into a conviction of the superiority of what is distinctive of its ‘blood’, its Volksgeist, traditions, mores and institutions – and of its right to dominate all lesser breeds. (Lovejoy 1941, 277) The ‘collective’, Lovejoy continues, easily underpins a national state whose members are but instruments to its own vaster ends; in which, therefore, no internal oppositions or disagreements in individual opinion can be permitted; which, however, is itself dedicated to a perpetual struggle for power and self-enlargement, with no fixed goal or terminus, and is animated by an intense and obsessing sense of the differentness of its own folk, of their duty of keeping different and uncorrupted by any alien elements, and by a conviction of the immeasurable value of their supposedly unique characteristics and cultures … there is a certain specific historical connection between the intellectual revolution of the Romantic period and the tragic spectacle of Europe in 1940. (Lovejoy 1941, 278) This was a line of thought converging with that, for example, of the bestselling American social commentator and poet, Peter Viereck, whose book Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler (1941), also saw Romanticism, as well as the music of Wagner, racial ‘science’, and Fuhrer-worship, as at the origins of Nazi ideology. The nineteenth-century rejection of Enlightenment rationalism allowed ideas such as the Volk, the ‘ground’, and the ‘blood’ to burgeon, and to be the justification for attacks on sovereign states whose populations contained significant German minorities. Reason, the watchword of the Enlightenment, was thrown away (Viereck 1941, 1–9). As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: ‘Civilisation means the application of reason to life. Goethe, Schiller, Kant, are reflections of the western mind. The patriot prefers to seek the “life forces”, the irrational impulses, which seem to him more characteristic of the German mind’ (Hitler 1940, 352). Lovejoy and Viereck were not alone in their critique of Romanticism. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1946) the famous German Jewish philosopher of culture who emigrated to the USA in 1933 in order to escape the Nazi regime, described Romanticism as overly ‘historical’, and contrasted it with the Enlightenment: ‘The Romantics love the past for the past’s own sake … everything becomes understandable, justifiable, legitimated, as soon as we can trace it back to its origin’, whereas the Enlightenment, according to Cassirer, looks back to the past to prepare for a better future (Cassirer 1946, 180). The study of history is thus not an end in itself (see Appendix 15.1). Cassirer castigated the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who carried on a successful academic career in the Nazi era, for weakening the

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power of rationality in the face of that of myth: ‘We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myths. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him’ (Cassirer 1946, 291). In his earlier book, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, completed in October 1932, a few months before Hitler’s seizure of power, Cassirer had seen Enlightenment not just as a prop to rationality, but also as a challenge, and a source of courage. He tried to rescue it from the attacks of the romantics, and saw it as encapsulating ‘reason and knowledge’. Sapere aude! should become our watchword too. … [wir müssen] wieder den Mut finden, uns mit ihr zu messen und uns innerlich mit ihr auseinanderzusetzen. Das Jahrhundert, das in Vernunft und Wissenschaft ‘[d]es Menschen allerhöchste Kraft’ gesehen und verehrt hat, kann und darf auch für uns nicht schlechthin vergangen und verloren sein; wir müssen einen Weg finden, es nicht nur in seiner eigenen Gestalt zu sehen, sondern auch die ursprünglichen Kräfte wieder frei zu Machen, die diese Gestalt hervorgebracht und gebildet haben. (Cassirer 1932, 206) … we must again find the courage and daring to measure ourselves against the Enlightenment, and inwardly struggle with it. Our century, which has honored reason and science as the ‘highest strength of man’, cannot and must not lose its way; we must find a way not only to look it in the face, but to set free its original forces. Cassirer died in 1946 in American exile. Within just a few years of the end of the war in Europe in 1945, however, the German philosophers Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), also exiled in the US, created a completely new and influential interpretation of the Enlightenment. Reversing Lovejoy’s and Cassirer’s point of view, they argued that it was Enlightenment, rather than Romanticism, which was the direct forerunner of Fascism. They did so, like Cassirer, by thinking about myth, but did so in completely different ways. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had both been members of the socalled Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, where enquiry into Fascism and other different forms of domination was fearlessly carried on until the School was forced to close, and many of its members, including Horkheimer and Adorno, fled as refugees to the USA. In 1947, just after the close of the Second World War, with Europe in ruins, Japan reeling from the first uses of the atomic bomb, and the scale of the Holocaust becoming clear, they published with the Amsterdam émigré press, Quérido, their joint work, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) (the dialectic mentioned being the intertwining of myth and enlightenment). This work had previously been privately circulated in 1944 in a slightly different form, under the title Philosophical

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Fragments (Philosophische Fragmente). Their question, like Cassirer’s, was ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. This happened, according to the Dialektik, because of the nature of Enlightenment. Enlightenment values were always peculiarly liable to tip over into their opposite (freedom>slavery) for example: The Enlightenment had always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world: the dissociation of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1987, 25; Adorno 1974, 140) Yet Enlightenment ideas often themselves became myths, such as the very idea of ‘liberty’, which became the foundation myth of the new United States. As James Schmidt has written: An explanation for this fatal trajectory of Enlightenment could be found in the intertwining of myth and Enlightenment that lay at the heart of what Horkheimer and Adorno came to call the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’… The goal of enlightenment, as they understood it, was to ‘dispel myths and to overthrow fantasy with knowledge’. Yet, ‘the myths which fell victim to enlightenment were themselves its products’. Enlightenment’s attack on mythology presses forward until even its own normative commitments are themselves denounced as mythical. Reason is now reduced to a strategy of self-preservation which, in the end, ‘boils down to an obstinate compliance as such’, that is ‘indifferent to any political or religious content’. All thought that does anything other than make its peace with existing powers stands condemned as ‘poetry’ or empty ‘metaphysics’. (Schmidt 2004, 159; original quotations from; Horkheimer and Adorno 1987, 21, 25, 30). (See Appendix 15.2) Enlightenment is thus totalitarian in the sense that it abandons the quest for meaning and simply attempts to exert power over nature and the world, often through mathematical and technical means. Enlightenment rationality, Horckheimer and Adorno argued, calibrates ends to means, and expects objectively correct solutions to problems. Yet human beings are not themselves very rational. Rationality might be a goal, but human beings find difficulty in arriving there, particularly when, as was the habit of the Enlightenment, they deprive themselves of non-rational ways to understanding, such as mythology and revelation, by calling them non-rational and hence ‘un-enlightened’. The only way remaining to resolve human differences in an enlightened world is through the use of force and terror. Horkheimer and Adorno thus argued that the Enlightenment had left no legacy which could resist the technologically assured man-made mass death of the Holocaust. In doing so, they

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were echoing arguments made by Hegel, a hundred years before. As Ferrone has pointed out, after Hegel abandoned his early support of the French Revolution: ‘tragic events made it clear that the thoughts produced by the culture of the Enlightenment, in their abstract quality and claim to truth, were destined to become increasingly fantastical and polemical towards all that exists … the Enlightenment’s dialectical movement through history ultimately resulted in the tragedy of the Reign of Terror’ (Ferrone 2015, 18–19). James Schmidt argues that Horkheimer did not need Adorno’s aid to make this argument: The transformation of reason into a mechanism for self-preservation that paradoxically requires individuals to sacrifice themselves to the demands of the collectivity had been a persistent theme in Horkheimer’s work since the end of the 1930s. Taken by itself, this argument would have resulted in a book that repeated the argument that defenders of traditional values had long since marshalled against the Enlightenment: The grand project of freeing mankind from illusion, ultimately culminates in nihilism. What sets Dialectic of Enlightenment apart from arguments such as these was the other half of the chiasmus around which the plot of the book unfolded: ‘Mythology is already Enlightenment’. This was the crucial insight that Horkheimer owed to Adorno. (Schmidt 2004, 159) Yet in spite of the contemporary appositeness of the publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, many of the problems it dealt with had been brewing since the 1930s. Many have seen the Dialectic of Enlightenment as an attempt by Horkheimer and Adorno to renew and revive critical theory in the light of charges that it had failed. Their concerns with human domination were constant, and in this way their interpretation of Enlightenment essentially leads on from the scorn expressed by Herder, who as we have seen, had also viewed Enlightenment as a hypocritical system of power relations. But National Socialism, Stalinism, state capitalism, mass culture, were essentially new forms of domination which had not been explained by ‘traditional’ critical theory. As Horkheimer’s student, the well-known German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, later wrote: ‘Critical theory was developed in Horkheimer’s circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of Fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions’ (Habermas 1987, 116). It is in this longer-term context that we can evaluate this work, as a way of thinking quite different from the literary and historical roots of Lovejoy and Viereck. And far from seeing Enlightenment as a place of daring, dynamic challenge and creativity, as had Ernst Cassirer, they saw it as an aspect of domination which had made possible the rise of National Socialism.

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The contemporary liberal case This struggle over the Enlightenment in the era of Stalinism and National Socialism, deeply torn as it was between positive and negative assessments, has been replaced by attempts to interpret Enlightenment in the light of a contemporary globalised world, and as standing at the origins of modern liberal democracy. To the fore here has been the 2013 book by the historian Anthony Pagden, already well known for his studies of the early modern Iberian world, The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters (2013). Pagden begins with a disclaimer. The book is not supposed to be ‘a political tract, nor a moral homily. It is a work of history … But all history, if it is to be anything more than mere archaeology, must be a reflection of what the present owes to the past’ (Pagden 2013, xiv). However, Pagden’s book can be easily placed in the very long line of commentators who have in fact inserted their own political views and aspirations into accounts of thought in the eighteenth-century. Pagden sees the Enlightenment as creating the new value of ‘sympathy’, which would, with relevance for a global age, link humans together by ‘a passion which offered a minimum psychological principle on which to base a claim to human sociability, both within individual communities, and, what is still more significant for my purposes, across them’ (Pagden 2013, 74). (See Appendix 15.3.) Sympathy not only brings people together, but does so – and this is an important part of Pagden’s argument – without religious belief: Sympathy gives to humankind an identity independent of God, a reason for recognizing all peoples as of equal worth, and of embracing some kind of common good, without endowing them with immortal souls or thinking of them as pale, if identical images of the divine. (Pagden 2013, 77–8) These ideas are represented in Pagden’s account by David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and his 1751 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which also asserted the unity of humanity. Hume, Pagden asserts, citing his influence on Kant and Bentham, ‘remains the single most influential proponent of a secular ethics based upon a “science of man” the Enlightenment ever produced’ (Pagden 2013, 128). Pagden reinforces his case by rightly rejecting the old-fashioned Romantic idea of an a-historical Enlightenment. He interprets, however, Enlightenment history-writing as revealing that the final destiny of the species must be the creation of a universal cosmopolitan civilization. The same goes for writings on trade and commerce, seen as linking people in reciprocal bonds. … It was the practical manifestation of the “sympathy” which had replaced innate sense, ideas and judgement as the one defining feature of all that it was to be human. (Pagden 2013, 151, 219–20)

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Yet this civilisation needs a political form. The eighteenth century also produced powerful, durable concepts like ‘patria’ and ‘nation’, which stood at right angles to the world of cosmopolitan sympathy. As Kant put it, they inhibit ‘the dissemination of general good will’ (Pagden 2013, 249, 268). A world of peacefully competitive commercial states was no answer to the problem of war in a notoriously belligerent century, which was to be followed soon enough by the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Some of the eighteenth-century wars were about empire and trade (ironically, Hume’s ‘le doux commerce’), some about dynastic or territorial objectives. It is no wonder, that in response to the horrors of war, the eighteenth century produced numerous schemes for perpetual peace, Kant’s among them. None of them were adopted, though some, especially Kant’s, have been seen as forerunners to the international bodies of our own day. If the Enlightenment produced a powerful drive towards the cosmopolitan unity of mankind, it certainly did not solve the problems of its instantiation. Pagden argues that we need a state along Kant’s lines, ‘a truly modern state’, looking like a ‘modern liberal democracy’ (Pagden 2013, 301–2). Kant of course had no thought of the political representation for women fundamental to the modern state. This was not only consonant with the opinions of many though not all thinkers of his age, but with his personal and often expressed views on female inferiority. Women, as irrational creatures, are not truly part of the Kantian Enlightenment defined as rationality. Pagden fails to notice this until page 309. As well, no European state until the twentieth century seriously considered including the poor of either gender as political subjects. So the sense in which Kant can actually stand as a model for the twenty-first century ‘modern liberal democracy’, is unclear. Pagden pays a price for his use of Kant as a model. And as we have seen, Kant’s own essay on the meaning of Enlightenment stresses the fundamental conflict between unlimited thought, and political stability. Another major problem faced by Pagden is preserving the Enlightenment from the contamination of the French Revolution: ‘Any direct causal link between the Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the Revolutionary Wars which followed, although apparently obvious, is, however, a spurious one’ (Pagden 2013, 328). This makes about as much sense as the argument that National Socialism had nothing to do with the Weimar Republic. It is an attempt by Pagden to get away from the nineteenth-century conservative idea that Enlightenment and Revolution were in fact tightly and destructively knit together. It is also an attempt to take the reader’s attention away from the importance of the political ideas instantiated by the Revolution itself, whose ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (1789) was as least as foundational to modern liberal democracy as were the ideas of the Enlightenment. Pagden does not wish his Enlightenment to be touched by the violence and traumatic upheaval of the Revolution, which would diminish it as a model for a new cosmopolitan world order founded on ‘sympathy’. Nor therefore does he want to consider the relationship between violence and the manufacture of ideology.

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Pagden’s often violently anti-religious positions also lead him to dubious places. He confronts for example the position of Alistair McIntyre, whose After Virtue (1981) argued that the Enlightenment offered no basis for the grounding of morals. This is clearly unacceptable to Pagden, since it involves seeing serious consequences for his Enlightenment’s (alleged) lack of transcendence. Pagden’s argument against McIntyre, which he links with an argument against communitarianism and post-modernism, is also based on personal, autobiographical grounds, on his own movements in and out of community in the course of the pursuit of his career success in professional life, making him in McIntyre’s eyes, he suspects, ‘a rootless and thus necessarily amoral, cosmopolitan’ (Pagden 2013, 338–9). Nor does Pagden spare us his personal views on modern religion, which he calls (lumping together a universe of diverse religious phenomena) ‘chaotic, chiliastic, intuitive, pathological, and for the most part utterly devoid of any theological content’. Religion, he continues, ‘is most prevalent in those areas which are poor, and whose populations are undereducated’. This spiritual snobbery is no more convincing than is his explanation for the ‘historical failure of Christianity to continue to provide the kind of intellectual, and consequently moral, certainty which it had once done’ (Pagden 2013, 342, 343). Here Pagden’s anti-Christian attitudes lead him away from the historical record, as the period of the Enlightenment which he portrays as the forerunner of unreligious liberal democracy, was in fact a period of massive religious revival (Methodism, Moravianism, Hassidism, the Great Awakening, and Pietism may be mentioned). Pagden’s book, in its historical aspects, is also prisoner to an earlier historiography of the Enlightenment, such as Peter Gay’s 1980s view of it as ‘modern paganism’; he discusses mainly French thinkers (no women), and says little about the social and literary practices which sustained it. Robert Darnton, for example, is absent from the bibliography. Many of Pagden’s ideas have much in common with those of the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007), whom he quotes with approval (Pagden 2013, 344). To borrow some words from Rorty, modern secular liberals should believe, as Pagden does, that ‘Getting rid of our sense of being responsible to something other than, and larger than, our fellow human beings is a good idea’ (Rorty 2002, 20). Pagden’s concern with making community in this world of contingency stems from Rorty’s contention that ‘Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not’ (Rorty 1989, 5). These beliefs about the world have moral consequences. Rorty writes ‘Nothing counts as justification unless by referring to what we already accept, and … there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language …’ (Rorty 1979, 78). In other words, we cannot escape our community, even if that community becomes immoral. It is unclear how Rorty’s philosophy of secular humanism, his ‘New Pragmatism’, can work as a bulwark against a repeat of dictatorship and Holocaust, which historically have overwhelmed the twentieth-century versions of – exactly –

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European liberal democracies. Nor is this a question, present since the 1930s, that Rorty has even recognised as existing for his project. Secular liberal democracy seems singularly unsuited to this role of resistance. Whereas Cassirer saw Enlightenment as a source of Mut (courage), thereby giving at least a possible balance with the Nazi emphasis on Struggle and the Will, Rorty with his New Pragmatism wants to carry forward the Enlightenment’s ‘project’ of demystifying human life. He believed that by ridding humanity of the constricting metaphors of past traditions rooted in religion, superstition and mystification, control and subjugation, would be replaced by relationships based on freedom. He saw open-mindedness as practised in Enlightenment-style tolerant conversation rather than fierce philosophical debates. But this doesn’t give us the answers to questions, born in conflict and opposition, of why dictators should be opposed, or by what means. Rorty abandons the search for universal truth, in favour of what works, of the contingent. This doesn’t answer these questions, or tell us how we get to a secular liberal society which may be defended. Moral identity for him is historically contingent. As some critics have noted, this all adds up to an impossible humanism, impossible because lacking any noncontingent idea of human nature. It also turns aside from a central Enlightenment tenet, that of the belief in reason. Rorty believes that ‘There is no special faculty called reason allowing us to better uncover and represent the truth’ (Rorty 1989, 5). Many of the same criticisms of Rorty’s ideas, may also be made of Pagden’s. If we see Enlightenment as the origin of a western liberal tradition, do these arguments entrench us in a Western status quo, rather than giving us access to the (allegedly) cosmopolitan world described by Pagden? Is a commitment to liberalism itself dogmatic, a form of the cultural ‘guardianship’ mentioned by Kant’s essay? Do both Rorty and Pagden leave us with mere caricatures of religion, for which they (inaccurately) blame the Enlightenment? Is interpreting the Enlightenment merely a project of self-creation for both Pagden and Rorty? In the end Rorty leaves us with ‘hope’, which allegedly survives even when Enlightenment rationalism does not. With hope we are left to extend Enlightenment into the present and future, if that is what we want to do.

Conclusion We might want to say, with Hegel, ‘when all prejudice and superstition has been banished, the question arises: Now what? What is the truth which the Enlightenment has disseminated in place of these prejudices and superstitions?’ (Hegel 1967, 576). This is a question which could be asked of both Pagden and Rorty. Ultimately, the historiography of the Enlightenment is a testament to its enduring capacity to generate fundamental questions about power and historical practice, as well as at the same time, its inability to generate first-order answers to these problems. Interpretation of the Enlightenment, both positive and negative, has been going on since the Enlightenment itself. At no time has it been divorced

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from questions of power, except possibly at the point at which the social practices, rather than the thought, of Enlightenment began to attract the attention of historians a few decades ago. It has been uniquely often chosen by commentators such as Cassirer, Horkheimer, and Adorno, and, on another level, Pagden and Rorty, to bear the burden of prophetic commentary. The reasons for this have already been discussed. Crises of modernity have crowded in since the end of the eighteenth century. They have broken down the barriers between Is and Ought that have pre-occupied professional history since its inception in the eighteenth century. In turn, professional history has been re-shaped, and historians have become more responsive to their new position as public prophet. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault remarked, Kant’s essay ‘An answer to the question, What is Enlightenment?’, marked ‘the discrete entry into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of either’. It was, he added, a question which ‘sought a difference: what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (Quoted in Pagden 2013, 9).

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Schmidt, James, ed. (1996). What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Los Angeles, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1982). A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Miriam Kramnick. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

(B) Secondary literature Adorno, Theodor W. (1974). Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books. Barnard, F.M., ed. (1969). J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn, eds. (1999) Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. Cassirer, Ernst (1946). The Myth of the State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ——— (1932). Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Mohr: Tuebingen. Darnton, Robert (1979). The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Edelstein, Dan (2010). The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press. Ferrone, Vincenzo (2015). The Enlightenment: History of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Ferrone, Vincenzo, and Roche, Daniel (2002). L’Illuminismo nella cultura contemporanea: Storia e storiographia. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Habermas, Jürgen (1987). The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno. In: Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 106–30. Hegel, Georg, and Friedrich, Wilhelm (1967). The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. New York and Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor (1987). Dialektik der Aufklärung. In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Frankfurt: Fischer. Hunt, Lynn, ed. (1989). The New Cultural History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. Israel, Jonathan (2001). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2006). Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2011). A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jacob, Margaret C. (1981). The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: Taylor & Francis. Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1941). The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas. Journal of the History of Ideas (June), 2 (3), 257–78. Outram, Dorinda (2018). The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pagden, Anthony (2013). The Enlightenment: And Why it still Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Richard (2002). The Continuity between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism’. In: Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 19–36. Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schmidt, James (2004). Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann and Schoenberg. In: Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 148–80. Schmidt, James, ed. (1996). What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Los Angeles, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Viereck, Peter (1941). Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. New York: A.A. Knopf. Veeser, H. Aram (1989). The New Historicism. New York and London: Routledge.

Appendices

Appendix 15.1: Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State Cassirer, Ernst (1946) The Myth of the State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press In recent literature, we often meet with the view that Romanticism was the first and most prolific source of the myth of the twentieth century. According to many writers it has produced the concept of the ‘totalitarian state’, and has prepared all the later forms of an aggressive imperialism … [183–4] In the last thirty years, in the period between the First and the Second World Wars, we have not only passed through a severe crisis of our political and social life, we have also been confronted with quite new theoretical problems. We experienced a radical change in the forms of political thought. New questions were raised and new answers were given. Problems that had been unknown to the political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came suddenly to the fore. Perhaps the most important and the most alarming feature in this development of modern political thought is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought. The preponderance of mythical over rational thought in some of our modern political systems is obvious. After a short and violent struggle mythical thought seemed to win a clear and definitive victory. How was this victory possible? How can we account for the new phenomenon that so suddenly appeared on our political horizon and in a sense seemed to reverse all our former ideas of the character of our intellectual and our social life? … The Romantic philosophers and poets were the first who had drunk from the magic cup of myth. They felt refreshed and rejuvenated. From now on they saw all things in a new and transformed shape. … To the true romanticist there could be no sharp difference between myth and reality; just as little as there was any separation between poetry and truth …[3–5]

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Never before had the philosophy of politics played such an important and decisive role … The period of the Enlightenment had lost its interest in these metaphysical speculations … ‘Ideas’ were no longer regarded as ‘abstract ideas’. They were forged into weapons for the great political struggle … How was it that all these great achievements were suddenly called into question – that the nineteenth century began with attacking and openly defying all the philosophical and political ideals of the former generation? There seems to be an easy answer to this question. The French Revolution had ended in the period of the Napoleonic wars. The first enthusiasm was followed by a deep disillusionment and mistrust …[176–9] All the great promises of the French Revolution remained unfulfilled. The political and social order of Europe seemed to be threatened with a complete breakdown … These are the obvious reasons for the complete and rapid change of ideas that we meet in the first decades of the nineteenth century. But it is not enough to describe this reaction as merely political. It has other and deeper causes. The German Romanticists who began the fighting and were the first heralds in the combat against the philosophy of Enlightenment were not primarily interested in political problems … in this field the romantic writers never developed a clear and coherent theory; nor were they consistent in their practical attitude … They never meant to politicize but to ‘poeticize’ the world … Assuredly the romantic poets and philosophers were fervent patriots and many of them were intransigent nationalists. But their nationalism was not of an imperialistic type … The romanticists could never sacrifice the particular and specific forms of cultural life, poetry, art, religion, and history, to the ‘totalitarian’ state ….[184] It is true that this poetical and aesthetic conception was not equal to the task of solving the problems of political life … Even August Wilhelm von Schlegel felt similarly. ‘As long as our national independence, and even the continuance of our German name, is so seriously threatened,’ he wrote in 1806, ‘our poetry might perhaps have to yield entirely to eloquence.’ But only a few romanticists followed this counsel; even in their extreme nationalism they would not disavow or renounce their universal ideals of human culture. [186]

Appendix 15.2: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor (1993). Dialectic of Enlightenment, Trans. John Cumming. Continum: New York In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy. Bacon, the ‘father of experimental

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philosophy’, had defined its motives. He looked down on the masters of tradition, the ‘great reputed authors’ who first ‘believe that others know that which they not; and after themselves know that which they know not. But indeed, facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to answer, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in part of nature; these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things; and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments: and what the posterity and issue of so honorable a match may be, it is not hard to consider …’ Despite his lack of mathematics, Bacon’s view was appropriate to the scientific attitude that prevailed after him. The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men, nor in compliance with the world’s rulers. As with all the ends of bourgeois economy in the factory and on the battlefield, origin is no bar to the dictates of the entrepreneurs: kings, no less directly than businessmen, control technology; it is as democratic as the economic system with which it is bound up. Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work and capital. The ‘many things’, which, according to Bacon, ‘are reserved’, are themselves no more than instrumental: the radio as a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, radio control as a more reliable compass. What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. In face of the present triumph of the factual mentality, even Bacon’s nominalist credo would be suspected of a metaphysical bias and come under the same verdict of vanity that he pronounced on scholastic philosophy. Power and knowledge are synonymous. For Bacon, as for Luther, ‘Knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation’ … . There is to be no mystery-which means, too, no wish to reveal mystery. The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism … on the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning. [3–5]

Appendix 15.3: Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters Pagden, Anthony (2013) The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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It is still far from clear what will finally shape the twenty-first century. But one thing does seem certain: that although the central Enlightenment beliefs in a common humanity, the awareness of belonging to some world larger than the community, family, parish or patria, may still be shakily primitive and incomplete, it is also indubitably a great deal more present in all our lives – whoever ‘we’ might be – than it was even fifty years ago. ‘Global governance’, ‘Constitutional patriotism’, globalization, multiculturalism, are not only topics of debate: they are also, in many parts of the world, realities. Cosmopolitanism, expressed in the firm belief in the possibility of a truly international system of laws, has been the animating principle behind both the League of Nations and the United Nations, and is the main assumption which underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … .Habermas is surely right to believe that we ‘have long since begun the transition from classical international law’ to what Kant saw as a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ and that ‘normatively speaking’ there cannot be ‘any coherent alternative to such a development’. As evidence we have some – admittedly somewhat ramshackle, often ineffective – cosmopolitan institutions, not utterly unlike the kind that Kant had hoped for: the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court … Together with the associated ideal of the ‘dignity of man’, they constitute what Habermas has called a ‘realistic utopia’. … None of this was achieved, and nothing in the future will ever be achieved, by shutting ourselves up in communities, by measuring out our lives by the horizons of what our fathers and our forefathers have set down for us, or by regulating our actions, and our desires, according to the dictates of those who have appointed themselves the representatives on earth of a highly improbable divinity … And in that, we are all, inescapably, the heirs of the architects of the Enlightenment ‘science of man’. For this, then, if for no other reason, the Enlightenment still matters. [349–51]

16 French Revolution Paul Hanson

It has long been customary among European historians to think of the French Revolution as marking the end of the early modern period. Among those historians who work on the French Revolution, like myself, there is a tendency either to be concerned principally with causes and origins, and therefore to look backward into the early modern era, or to be concerned with outcomes and legacy, and therefore to look forward into the late modern era. Very few historians, although there are exceptions, look in both directions, focusing, for example, on the century from 1750 to 1850. The year 1789 marks a dividing point – it is both the end of an era, and the beginning of another. This is, admittedly, an artificial designation. As we have moved away, in recent decades, from national histories or the history of Western Civilisation toward transnational or global history, some have raised the question of why a French or European periodisation of historical time should be applied to other parts of the world. Why should we study African history, or South American history, or World history from a European chronological perspective? But even within a European context, we might question the assertion that 1789 was fundamentally pivotal. In France, to be sure, it marked the end of the Old Regime, although the Bourbon monarchy was ‘restored’ in 1815. But in Prussia, AustriaHungary, and Russia, the old regime survived for another century, at least until the aftermath of World War I, or for some parts of central and eastern Europe, one might argue, until the aftermath of World War II. This suggests the first question for us to consider in this chapter: What made the French Revolution so significant? Why do historians see it as marking a fundamental turning point? To answer that question we will need to look both at causes and at legacy, both of which have been much debated over the years. But we should also consider revolutions that occurred in Europe prior to 1789. Many historians have argued that the French Revolution was the first ‘modern’ revolution. But the English had something that they called ‘The Glorious Revolution’ in 1688, and there was upheaval in the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth century, a rebellion against Spanish rule that is often referred to as the Dutch Revolution. Just on the eve of 1789 there was revolution in Brussels and the Brabant, the beginning of a movement for Belgian independence from Austria. How should we understand these earlier events? Were they similar

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in character to the French Revolution, or somehow fundamentally different in character? Pierre Serna has recently argued that ‘every revolution is a war of independence’. Does this mean that every war of independence is also a revolution? (Serna 2013, 165–82.) When we turn to the French Revolution itself there will be ample historical controversy to examine. More has been written about the French Revolution than perhaps any other historical event, and historians have debated nearly every aspect of the Revolution. I cannot be exhaustive in this relatively short essay, and so would propose to consider five major issues or areas that resonate well with the other chapters in this volume. The first would be origins or causes. Did the Enlightenment lead to the French Revolution? Was it a result of the American Revolution? Was it a bourgeois revolution aimed at ushering in a capitalist economy to replace the feudal system long dominated by the aristocracy? Was it caused by a financial crisis, or by disastrous grain harvests? Or was the French Revolution an accident? All of these arguments have been put forward over the years. Some have been rejected, others have been modified, resulting in a much more nuanced and complicated understanding in recent years of why the French Revolution happened. Momentous dates are abundant in the calendar of the French Revolution, none more important than the night of 4 August 1789, often described as marking ‘the end of feudalism’. But the meaning of this date has been much debated. First, did feudalism as a functioning system still exist in 1789, and if not, then exactly what was abolished by the deputies of the Constituent Assembly? Second, were the deputies carried away by a spirit of generosity and altruism, or were they pushed to take action by the wave of protests and châteaux burnings that summer that have come to be known as the Great Fear? This question speaks to the debate over whether we should see 1789 as a social revolution, or rather as a political revolution. Third, Rafe Blaufarb has argued in a recent book that whatever the deputies meant to abolish on the night of 4 August, the impact of their legislation was not fully realised for perhaps as long as 75 years after the event. This calls for a reassessment of the standard interpretation of this date, but it may well end by inclining us to think of the night of 4 August as more consequential, and more revolutionary, rather than less (Blaufarb 2016). A third topic for discussion will be revolutionary violence and the Terror. There is no question but that the French Revolution was violent – the fall of the Bastille was a violent conflict that ended with a ritual killing, and the assault on the Tuileries palace that toppled the monarchy on 10 August 1792 was an organised military action. But recent work has argued that the politics of the Paris crowd, the sans-culottes as they were known at the time, was not inherently violent, that far from being the bloodthirsty mob so often depicted in nineteenth-century accounts they more often expressed themselves in petitions or peaceful marches through the city. In addition to popular violence, there is the Terror to consider. People tend to think of the Terror as an extension of popular violence, but the two were actually quite different, and the distinction is an

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important one. Beyond that issue, the nature of the Terror itself has long been one of the most contentious debates among historians and students of the Revolution. Was it the product of ideology, a logical, perhaps even inevitable, outcome of Jacobin ideals? Or was it, rather, the product of circumstances, a response to counterrevolutionary opposition within France and the war launched against the revolutionary regimes by most of the monarchies of Europe? These are the two most prominent positions in the longstanding debates about the Terror, but there has been a good deal of recent scholarship on this topic that we will want to consider as well. Over the past thirty years a great deal of work has been done on the topic of gender in the French Revolution, and this body of scholarship will be our fourth area of focus. Some of this work has addressed the role that women played in the politics of the Revolution, ranging from the march to Versailles in October 1789 of the market women of Paris, to women’s participation in political clubs and in the public festivals of the revolutionary decade. Other scholarship has focused more on the impact of revolutionary politics on women’s legal rights and their role in public life. Joan Landes made an early contribution to this field, arguing provocatively that male revolutionaries, following the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, essentially excluded women from the public sphere that was opening up to men in the 1790s, admonishing them that their proper place was in the home, cooking and caring for children (Landes 1988). Other historians, including Olwen Hufton, Suzanne Desan and Dominique Godineau, while acknowledging the limits to female citizenship in this era, have argued that women found ways to make their voices heard and indeed to achieve some modest gains in their legal status and in their position within the family (Desan 2004; Godineau 1998; Hufton 1992). No discussion of the French Revolution can neglect its legacy, and this, too, is a multifaceted topic. For most of us today it seems a distant event, but for a century or more after it ended there were passionate debates between those who admired the ideals of the French revolutionaries and others who decried the violence of the ‘mob’, which for them was the essential attribute of the Revolution. Thirty years after 1789 there was a Bourbon king on the throne of France. So how much had really changed? In our conclusion to this chapter we will consider the views of a number of historians on that question. We might also ask what the legacy of the Revolution was beyond French borders, for there have been revolutionaries in Russia, in China, in Latin America and in Africa who have looked to 1789 for inspiration. Is that still true today, or has the age of revolution finally come to an end? Finally, we must consider the legacy of the French Revolution in the context of its own historiography. If the Marxist paradigm for understanding the Revolution has been laid to rest, has anything emerged to take its place? Can we still speak of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution? The positivist approach to the study of the past, which guided the discipline of history for many years, took as its premise that ‘history’ was something one could find or discover. In our post-modern world of the past thirty years or so, ‘historical truth’ has become a scarce commodity, and

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there are those who lament that relativism has overtaken the field. But history is not static. It changes because we change – we write new histories of the French Revolution because each generation asks new questions, and in that process we can hope, at least, that our understanding will deepen and broaden.

The first modern revolution Perhaps no one in the past generation has thought more about revolution in the European context than Martin Malia, who taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. Malia began his career as a Russianist, and wrote his first book on the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen. Like Herzen himself, Malia shifted west over his life’s work and cast his gaze on the burgeoning revolutionary movements in central European countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, in the process becoming fascinated in the comparative history of revolution. Malia included the upheavals in England during the seventeenth century in his analysis: the English Civil Wars early in the century, culminating with the execution of Charles I, and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. But he saw them as revolutions in the traditional sense of the word, connoting a return to a point of origin (as in planets revolving around the sun) or a restoration. The Glorious Revolution, from this perspective, marked a restoration of the proper relation between the monarch and the governed that had first been established by the Magna Carta (Malia 2006; see also Vincent 2008, 492–512). Recently, historian Steve Pincus has challenged that interpretation, in a book whose title boldly proclaims his thesis: 1688: The First Modern Revolution. As Pincus puts it, Most theorists of revolution have emphasized the creation of social movements with the potential to overthrow the old regime. I argue by contrast that the origins of revolution are to be found in the state modernization that begins within the old regime, a modernizing program that makes the old regime into a modern state. (Pincus 2009, 40) Pincus thus places the state at the centre of his argument, which presents James II as a forward-looking monarch eager to strengthen the English state following the example of Louis XIV in France. But he also points to other characteristics that make 1688, in his view, a true revolution: the violence of 1688 was comparable, he argues, to that of 1789; James II enjoyed more popular support than most historians have allowed; and England by the 1680s was well along the path to becoming a capitalist economy. By the second decade of the eighteenth century it served the interests of Whig politicians to portray 1688 as a restoration of traditional liberties rather than a progressive movement, and by 1793 the violence of the French Revolution had confirmed the British view that their revolution was much to be preferred, and quite different from what was going on across the Channel. This, Pincus argues, is the view that prevailed

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until the appearance of his book (for opposing views, see Black 2010, 486–8; Dillon 2006). The word revolution has also been applied to the Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century, and to the upheaval that began in Brussels in the late 1780s and continued on into the 1790s, becoming inextricably involved in the politics of the French Revolution (Jacob 1992; Parker 1977; Polasky 1987). In both cases, however, one might think of these movements more as wars of independence, directed in the Dutch case against the Spanish Habsburgs and in the Belgian case against the Holy Roman Empire. The earlier Dutch upheaval was also very much a product of the religious conflicts occasioned by the Protestant Reformation. In neither of these cases, moreover, did a new regime emerge that could be characterised as revolutionary. The very meaning of the word ‘revolution’ changed over the latter half of the eighteenth century, culminating with the events of 1789. One factor in this was the American Revolution of 1776, which, though historians today tend to view it as a war of independence more than a revolution, to Europeans at the time seemed like something quite new. The secular ideas of the Enlightenment, accompanied by pointed critiques of both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy, made it conceivable to imagine new forms of government and the possibility of human progress and improvement (Vincent 2008, 503; see also Hobsbawm 1986, 5–46). With the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, revolution came to mean a radical break with the past, as encapsulated by the oftquoted assertion of Rabaut Saint-Etienne that ‘history is not our code’. Before the summer was out, the Bourbon monarchy was being referred to as the Old Regime.

Origins of the French Revolution Many years ago George Taylor argued that the French Revolution was essentially an accident, the result of an avoidable political crisis, rather than a ‘bourgeois revolution’ as the Marxist interpretation argued, the inevitable transition from a feudal economy dominated by the aristocracy to a capitalist economy in which a new class, the bourgeoisie, would control political power (Taylor 1967). Taylor joined a number of other historians, most notably Alfred Cobban in Great Britain and François Furet in France, who assailed what they called the Marxist orthodoxy, which had viewed the French Revolution as a social revolution driven by class conflict (Cobban 1964; Furet 1978, 1981). Revisionist historiography did not present a new paradigm to replace the Marxist interpretation. Nor did Marxist-influenced work disappear from the scene. Albert Soboul, then Chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, offered a spirited response to François Furet, pointedly suggesting by the very title of his book that one must understand the Revolution before one can interpret it (Soboul 1981). Michel Vovelle, Soboul’s successor at the Sorbonne, also continued to work in a Marxist vein, even as he introduced an emphasis on mentalités into his work (Vovelle 1985, 1986, 5 vols.).

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Many other historians, however, have focused their research in recent years on political and cultural factors. Prominent among these, in the United States, have been Keith Baker and Lynn Hunt. Baker, following Furet, has emphasised discourse and ideology in his work on the origins of the Revolution (Baker 1990). Hunt’s work, while influenced by Furet, emphasises the impact of culture on revolutionary politics and does not abandon attention to social factors (Hunt 1984, 1992). They have led the way in fashioning an argument that rather than ushering in a new era of capitalism and bourgeois politics, the French Revolution was most important for introducing democracy in the modern world. The demise of the Marxist interpretation, then, has tended to open up the terrain for an array of new approaches to the study of the Revolution and its origins. There has been renewed interest in recent decades in the impact of the Enlightenment on 1789. James Miller, in an elegant intellectual biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued that the complicated political concepts of the Social Contract were also sketched out, in abbreviated form, in his novels Emile and La Nouvelle Héloise, both of which were enormously popular in the final decades of the Old Regime. Miller credits Rousseau with rehabilitating the idea of democracy, long discredited among European political theorists (Miller 1984). Keith Baker has also reemphasised Enlightenment thought in exploring the origins of the Revolution, although focusing on lesser-known figures such as Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and the abbé Gabriel Bonnot Mably, in whose work Baker sees a virtual ‘script for a French revolution’ (Baker 1990, especially 86–106). The relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution remains a matter of debate, however. Responding to the work of François Furet, who saw in Rousseauist ideas an ideology that would lead inevitably to the Terror, Roger Chartier suggested that rather than the Enlightenment having caused the Revolution, it was the revolutionaries themselves who self-consciously created the Enlightenment as their intellectual precursor (Chartier 1990). Darrin McMahon has challenged both Furet and Chartier, arguing on the one hand that the Enlightenment existed as an intellectual force long before the Revolution occurred – its enemies were in full voice by mid-century – and on the other that this opposition to Enlightenment ideas continued on into the decade of the 1790s, contrary to Furet’s assertion that Jacobin ideology, the heir of Rousseau, created its own mythic enemies as justification for the Terror (McMahon 2001). Historians have also gone in new directions in recent decades, though, broadening our understanding of the cultural origins of the French Revolution. Dale Van Kley, for example, has explored at length the religious origins of the Revolution, paying particular attention to the Jansenist controversy with the French Catholic Church. Beginning with the papal bull Unigenitus (1713) and culminating with an order of the Archbishop of Paris in the 1750s denying them the sacraments, Jansenists found themselves the targets of concerted royal persecution. The response of the Jansenist minority to that persecution focused criticism not only on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (by appealing to the

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conciliar tradition with the church), but also on the sacred character of the monarchy itself. Since many Jansenists were members of the parlement of Paris, they became embroiled in the controversies generated in the 1770s by royal initiatives at administrative reform. In 1789, roughly a quarter of the delegates to the Estates General were drawn from the clergy. Van Kley argues that the Jansenist strain within French Catholicism was not only an essential influence on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790, but on the genesis of French republicanism as well (Van Kley 1996). Historians of the French Revolution have also drawn in recent years on the concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, first introduced in the 1960s by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and on the concept of ‘public opinion’ that Keith Baker and Mona Ozouf have discussed in some of their writings (Baker 1990, 167–99; Habermas 1992; Ozouf 1987, 1988, 1989). Habermas situated the ‘public sphere’ between the state and civil society, arguing that it emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in conjunction with the growth of a new commercial bourgeoisie in Europe. The ‘public sphere’ found expression in a number of institutional settings: masonic lodges, provincial academies, clubs, cafés, salons, and journals. Those who participated in those institutions or fora were generally critical of absolutist monarchy, advocating both increased economic and political liberty and more open, democratic society. While the concept of the ‘public sphere’ is quite abstract and multifaceted, that of ‘public opinion’ is more focused and tangible, if still somewhat vaguely defined. It is also a term that one finds in contemporary usage. Louis XVI himself made reference to public opinion early in his reign, and both Jacques Necker and Charles-Alexandre Calonne appealed to public opinion in their debate over their respective management of royal finances in the 1780s. It was not uncommon in the last decades of the Old Regime for members of the parlement of Paris to publish their remonstrances against royal edicts, implicitly appealing to public opinion, and lawyers quite often published their legal briefs, written in narrative style, to present the cases of their more celebrated clients before the ‘court of public opinion’. Sarah Maza has analysed six such causes célèbres, including the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ in which Marie-Antoinette was implicated. These cases were important, Maza argues, because they bridged the gap between the philosophical and literary concerns of the Enlightenment and the political concerns of the Revolution, on the one hand, and between the private sphere and the public sphere on the other. The reputation of the monarchy was clearly tarnished by the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’, despite the innocence of the queen in the scandal (Maza 1993). Politics became public during the Revolution, publicised to an engaged populace through a burgeoning popular press. While there was no free press under the Old Regime, however, a growing body of work has made clear in recent years that the roots of that development lay in the decades before 1789 and that newspapers published along the borders of France circulated widely within the country (Darnton and Roche 1989; Popkin 1989, 1990; Popkin and Censer

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1987). They may not have been as bold as their revolutionary heirs, nor did they provide a forum for political debate as newspapers would in the 1790s, but they did educate the reading public regarding a range of national and international affairs, and as such constituted an important part of Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ (cf. Chapter 6: Media and communication). What about the non-reading public, however? How does one make the connection between the written word, or words, of the Old Regime, and the political rhetoric and actions of the Revolution? In this regard, François Furet and Keith Baker have both drawn criticism for failing to place the discourse that they analyse in any sort of social context (Linton 2006). One historian who has tried to do precisely that in recent years is Arlette Farge, who in a series of books has guided her readers through the neighbourhood of Paris, describing and analysing the rumours, plots, minor revolts, acts of violence, public threats, and private quarrels that characterised the daily lives of common people over the course of the eighteenth century. She is interested in both public opinion and the public sphere, though less with the bourgeois and aristocrats who filled the assemblies of the early revolution than with the ordinary folk who would storm the Bastille in 1789 (Farge 1991, 1993, 1995; see also Garrioch 2002). While the trend in recent years in work on the origins of the French Revolution has been toward cultural history, economic and social arguments have scarcely been abandoned. Among the most spirited early responses to revisionist downplaying of the social origins of the Revolution came from Colin Jones, who challenged the revisionist view that the French economy was stagnant in the eighteenth century and that the bourgeoisie was either moribund or composed largely of aspiring aristocrats. Jones emphasised the growth in the French commercial economy and the spread of a consumer society, both of which contributed to the emerging ‘public sphere’ of which Habermas wrote (Jones 1998). William Sewell also stresses the role of the bourgeoisie in his book analysing the Abbé Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, the most influential and celebrated pamphlet published on the eve of the French Revolution (see Excerpt 16.1). In Sewell’s words, Sieyès gained his initial fame by expressing in a novel and brilliantly conceived rhetoric the aspirations and resentments of the French bourgeoisie – the diverse class of well-to-do officials, merchants, lawyers, professionals, rentiers, men of letters, and landowners who made up the politicized segment of the Third Estate. (Sewell 1994, 185) While accepting the critique of Furet and others, who rejected the idea of a capitalist bourgeoisie as the driving force of revolution in 1789, Sewell sees the bourgeoisie in broader terms, and insists that there was a social basis to their resentment that prompted them to rebel against the old political order.

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Excerpt 16.1: Abbé Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate? Stewart, J.H. ed. (1951). A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York: Prentice-Hall. The plan of this pamphlet is very simple. We have three questions to ask: 1st. What is the third estate? Everything. 2nd. What has it been heretofore in the political order? Nothing. 3rd. What does it demand? To become something therein. We shall see if the answers are correct. Then we shall examine the measures that have been tried and those which must be taken in order that the third estate may in fact become something. Thus we shall state: 4th. What the ministers have attempted, and what the privileged Classes themselves propose in its favor. 5th. What ought to have been done. 6th. Finally, what remains to be done in order that the third estate may take its rightful place. CHAPTER 1 The Third Estate Is a Complete Nation What are the essentials of national existence and prosperity? Private enterprise and public functions. Private enterprise may be divided into four classes: 1st. Since earth and water furnish the raw material for man’s needs, the first class will comprise all families engaged in agricultural pursuits. 2nd. Between the original sale of materials and their consumption or use, further workmanship more or less manifold, adds to these materials a second value, more or less compounded. Human industry thus succeeds in perfecting the benefits of nature and in increasing the gross produce twofold, tenfold, one hundred fold in value. Such is the work of the second class. 3rd. Between production and consumption, as well as among the different degrees of production, a group of intermediate agents useful to producers as well as to consumers, comes into being; these are the dealers and merchants … .4th. In addition to these three classes of industrious and useful citizens concerned with goods for consumption and use, a society needs many private undertakings and endeavors which are directly useful or agreeable to the individual. This fourth class includes from the most distinguished scientific and liberal professions to the least esteemed domestic services. Such are the labors which sustain society. Who performs them? The third estate. [42–3]

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Timothy Tackett has also reaffirmed a social interpretation of the French Revolution in a recent book examining the deputies elected to the Estates General. Deputies were elected by estate, from the clergy, the nobility and the Third (everyone else). The nobility, Tackett argues, were substantially more wealthy than the delegates of the Third Estate, enjoyed marks of social privilege denied to commoners, and were the products of a strikingly different education than delegates of the Third; indeed, they tended to be considerably less well educated than their bourgeois social inferiors. Fully four-fifths of the noble delegates had had military experience, another trait that marked them apart. As Tackett concludes, ‘the great majority of the deputies of the two orders resided in two very different social and cultural universes’ (Tackett 1996, 306). The factors we have discussed thus far leading to the French Revolution could all be termed long-term causes, but there were a number of short-term factors that contributed to the crisis that culminated in the upheaval of 1789. First among these was the growing royal debt, exacerbated by French aid to the American colonies in their rebellion against the British crown, aid that Jacques Necker had financed through short-term loans. By 1786 the royal deficit was enormous, well over 100 million livres in an annual budget of just under 600 million livres. An inefficient tax system that weighed more heavily on the peasantry than it did on the privileged classes added to the fiscal woes of the monarchy. There were economic problems as well. In 1775, Controller-General Turgot announced reforms introducing free trade in grain. This led to a serious wave of food riots, the so-called Flour wars, forcing the repeal of the reforms and the eventual dismissal of Turgot (Bouton 1993). The incidence of rural unrest remained high over the final two decades of the Old Regime, culminating in the widespread riots and protests of 1788–89, when grain and bread prices reached their highest point of the eighteenth century. Finally, in 1786 the monarchy signed a textile treaty with Great Britain, lowering tariffs on British textiles in exchange for reduced tariffs on French wine sent to Great Britain. A flood of cheaper goods into French markets led to serious unemployment in the textile towns of northern France, adding to the economic discontent on the eve of the Revolution (Walton 2013, 44–56).

The end to privilege One way to conceptualise the momentous impact of 1789 is to think of it as the year that the Old Regime corporate society of privilege gave way to the modern French nation of citizens with rights. This transition principally occurred through two events: the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen on 26 August, a process actually initiated in July, and the abolition of feudalism on the night of 4 August. The deputies elected to the Estates General gathered in Versailles in early May 1789 in the traditional manner. The delegates met separately by order – the First Estate, the clergy; the Second Estate, the nobility; and the Third Estate, everyone else. Under pressure, King Louis XVI had authorised

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a ‘doubling of the Third’, which meant that the commoners had twice as many deputies as the privileged orders. But the inability of the delegates to agree on a method of voting, whether by order or by head, resulted in impasse. The stalemate was broken on 17 June, when a number of liberal clergy and nobles joined the majority of the deputies of the Third Estate to declare a National Assembly (see Figure 16.1). This in itself marked a fundamental shift, so much so that a number of conservative deputies withdrew, on the grounds that their constituents had elected them to an Estates General, not to a National Assembly. In short order a committee began work on a Declaration of Rights. Nearly seventy years ago, Georges Lefebvre suggested that the seventeen points of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen could be read as a pointed critique of the abuses of the Old Regime, rather than as an abstract expression of universal principles (Lefebvre 1947, 209–20). It is easy to support such a reading: Point 9: ‘Every man being presumed innocent until judged guilty …’ can be seen as an indictment of the lettres de cachet, by which the

Figure 16.1 Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789). The swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, on 20 June 1789, is among the most dramatic events of the French Revolution. Having declared their intention to form a National Assembly three days prior, the deputies of the Third Estate found their meeting hall locked and guarded on the morning of 20 June. At the suggestion of Jean-Joseph Mounier, they moved to a nearby indoor tennis court and swore an oath composed by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. This occasion marked the symbolic shift of sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the nation itself. Carnavalet Museum, France. Courtesy of Alamy Images.

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king, or despotic parents, might have someone locked away without formal charge or trial. Point 11: ‘The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights or man’ is a clear attack upon royal and church censorship. Point 13: ‘For maintenance of public authority and for expenses of administration, common taxation is indispensable’ is clearly directed against the inequitable and inefficient tax system of the Old Regime. And Point 15: ‘Society has the right to hold accountable every public agent of the administration’ can be read as an effort to rein in ministerial despotism. The Declaration of Rights is also commonly seen as an assertion of civil liberties, comparable in that regard to the American Bill of Rights and the English Magna Carta, meant to protect individual freedoms from the intrusions of national government. Those rights are generally summarised in Point 2 of the Declaration: ‘The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’. Freedom of expression, of association, or religion are all asserted as inalienable rights. Freedom of religion, however, was expressed ambiguously in Point 10: ‘No one should be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law’. The influence of the Catholic clergy in the National Assembly is evident in this language. The Declaration of Rights can also be seen, however, as a claim to sovereignty. As Lynn Hunt has observed, ‘unlike “petition,” “bill,” or even “charter,” “declaration” could signify the intent to seize sovereignty’. The deputies of the National Assembly, she argues, ‘were not yet ready to explicitly repudiate the sovereignty of their king’, but it is striking that the king is not mentioned either in the Preamble to the Declaration, nor in any of its points. Indeed, Point 3 explicitly asserted that ‘The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation’ (Hunt 2007, 115; see also, Baecque 1988; Gauchet 1989; Hunt 1996; Rials 1988; Van Kley 1994). The constitution committee presented a draft of the Declaration to the National Assembly on 26 August, and after further debate and some amendments it was adopted the following day and presented to the king. Louis XVI initially refused to sign it, doing so only after the women’s march to Versailles on 5–6 October. The Declaration was revised in 1793, when the right of resistance to oppression was given prominent expression, and again in 1795, when that right was essentially removed and the ideal of liberty was given fuller expression than the ideal of equality. Unlike the constitutions produced during the Revolution, however, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen endured, as it has through five separate French republics over the past two centuries. Despite its language of universality, the Declaration of Rights did not initially embrace all French people. Jews, black African slaves, and women were all initially excluded. In January 1790 the National Assembly accorded full rights to the Sephardic Jews of the south-west, and in September 1791 granted full civil and political rights to all of the Jews of France. The National Convention

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abolished slavery in February 1794, but only after the violent slave uprising on Saint-Domingue, the most important of the French Caribbean colonies. SaintDomingue declared its independence in 1804, but Napoleon restored slavery in other French territories and it was not definitively abolished until 1848. Despite the advocacy for women’s political rights by both the Marquis de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, women never gained the vote during the Revolution, nor were they accorded full recognition under the Declaration of Rights. (Condorcet published On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship in 1790, and de Gouges published her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne in 1791.) We will deal more fully with the issue of women in the French Revolution in a later section. The other notable assault on privilege in 1789 came on 4 August. A latenight session of the National Assembly on that date initiated an extraordinary week of debate and legislation, so powerful in its emotion and so symbolically potent that it has come to be known simply as the Night of 4 August. The events of that evening are fairly straightforward. Alarmed by the escalation of peasant unrest in the provinces in the weeks after the fall of the Bastille, a group of liberal noblemen and deputies of the commons (the term ‘Third Estate’ having been discarded) gathered in the Breton club and made plans for a latenight session, in the hope that conservative deputies would not be present. The plan called for the Duc d’Aiguillon, among the largest landowners in France, to begin the session by stepping forward to offer the renunciation of his seigneurial rights in exchange for long-term monetary compensation. Instead, the first to speak was the Viscomte Louis-Marie Noailles, a nearly propertyless nobleman, but the brother-in-law of Lafayette, which presumably counted for something. Aiguillon followed, and in addition to seigneurial rights called for the abolition of all forms of privilege. A virtual parade of nobles and clergy then made their way to the dais: seigneurial dues, venal offices, seigneurial courts, the tithe, all came up for renunciation in a welter of sometimes vague and confusing pronouncements. When the session finally adjourned at two in the morning, the remnants of the feudal regime lay in tatters (see Figures 16.2 and 16.3). It took a full week to sort out exactly what had transpired on the Night of 4 August, to arrive at some semblance of consensus once the full Assembly had reconvened, and to move from principled declarations of self-sacrifice to tangible legislation. Not until 13 August was a decree finally presented to Louis XVI, who for some months refused to sign it, averring that he would not countenance the despoiling of his clergy and his nobility. Historians have debated the motivations of the deputies who acted, and the consequences of their legislation. Michael Fitzsimmons has emphasised the extraordinary mood of generosity and disinterestedness that swept over the deputies that night. For him their motivations were largely altruistic. John Markoff, by contrast, while also drawing heavily on the deputies’ own recollections of the evening, stresses the importance of the rural unrest that swept across much of central France in late July and early August. It was news of the châteaux burnings back home, he argues,

Figures 16.2 and 16.3 Before and After the Night of 4 August 1789: Peasant Carrying the Nobility and Clergy, and Nobility and Clergy Carrying a Peasant. These two images capture the social transformation that occurred on the night of 4 August 1789, when the deputies of the National Assembly, in a rump session, voted to end feudalism and privilege in France. Under the Old Regime, the peasantry not only bore the brunt of royal taxation, but owed an array of payments and duties to their seigneurial lords, a burden about which they complained bitterly in the grievance lists prepared for the convocation of the Estates-General. Prompted in part by riotous protests in the provinces, the so-called Great Fear, liberal nobles joined commoners in a vote that abolished in principle the seigneurial regime, although it would be some years before many of those obligations were definitively ended. Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo, and Collection PJ / Alamy Stock Photo.

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Figures 16.2 and 16.3 (Cont.)

that impelled the deputies to cast their votes (Fitzsimmons 2003; Markoff 1996). (See Appendix 16.1.) It was to be nearly four years until the National Convention definitively abolished all aspects of the seigneurial system and Church tithes. As Markoff has observed, waves of rural insurrection preceded each period of legislative progress on the matter – in March 1790 and August 1792 – and deputies in Paris were even more likely to act if that rural unrest was accompanied by urban insurrection, particularly in Paris (Markoff 1996, 452–4, 510–11). In a very recent book, Rafe Blaufarb has extended this time frame by decades, showing that it

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was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the final disposition of feudal dues and rents associated with the royal domain was finally achieved, through both legislation and litigation. Blaufarb has also extended our understanding of the implications of this event, noting that venal offices, renounced by the deputies on 4 August, were considered a form of property. Moreover, the deputies also dismantled the royal domain in these reforms, thereby separating property from power and rendering the state purely sovereign. In this process, the revolutionaries were both inventing modern property and proposing a new definition of political sovereignty (Blaufarb 2016).

The terror and revolutionary violence Popular violence and the violence of the Terror were the focus of political debate during the revolutionary decade and have been ever since. The excesses of revolutionary violence, it is often said, tarnish irredeemably the noble ideals of revolutionaries. On the other hand, popular uprisings clearly were crucial on 14 July 1789 and again on 10 August 1792 to advancing the revolutionary cause in the face of royal and aristocratic opposition. One’s view of revolutionary violence, then, depends in some measure on one’s view of the revolutionary program itself. It is also important that we distinguish between popular violence and the violence of the Terror. ‘Let us be terrible, to dispense the people from the need to be terrible themselves’ (Hampson 1988, 102). Thus spoke Georges Danton before the National Convention in the spring of 1793, urging the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal so that France might be spared a repeat of the September Massacres of the previous autumn. The deputies were about to institutionalise the people’s justice, the justice of the crowd, by voting for a Revolutionary Tribunal, before which would appear not common criminals, but rather the enemies of the Revolution. As Jean-Clément Martin has argued, however, we should see the Terror not as an extension of popular violence, but rather as the state bringing popular violence under control by institutionalising revolutionary justice (Martin 2006). Popular violence itself was a complex phenomenon. We must make a distinction between political violence, such as the storming of the Bastille, and public vengeance, such as the killing of Louis Bertier de Sauvigny and his father-in-law Joseph Foulon just eight days after the fall of the Bastille. Both men were suspected of manipulating grain supplies, either for their own profit or to worsen the plight of the poor. Having shown no sympathy for the crowd, they now received none. They were beaten to death, decapitated, and their heads paraded through the streets of Paris. Many were horrified by these brutal deaths. But when the deputy Lally-Tollendal condemned the killings before the Assembly at Versailles, Antoine Barnave uttered his famous riposte, ‘Was their blood, then, so pure’? Similar incidents of popular violence occurred throughout France in the first years of the Revolution. Some took the form of large-scale popular protests, as

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with the assault on the Bastille, the popular insurrections that often led to municipal revolutions in provincial towns during the summer of 1789, the Great Fear that swept across central France in July and August 1789, the women’s march to Versailles on 5–6 October 1789, and the assault on the Tuileries palace on 10 August 1792 that brought the fall of the monarchy. There were also many cases similar to the killing of Foulon and Bertier, instances in which the crowd was intent on exacting vengeance, or popular justice, rather than being engaged in political protest. Such was the case in September 1792, when Parisian sansculottes invaded the makeshift prisons of the capital, seized suspected traitors and counterrevolutionaries, conducted summary trials in the streets and courtyards, and ultimately massacred as many as 1,400 of those prisoners. Although the September Massacres soon came to be a subject of bitter political contention, in the immediate aftermath of the killings nearly all deputies defended them as a justified, if regrettable, act of popular justice. This marked a turning point, at once the most massive episode of popular violence in the Revolution and also very nearly the last, at least on such a scale. As this source Excerpt 16.2 suggests, the militant sans-culotte of Paris would have been as likely to attend the evening meeting of his Section assembly as to pick up his pike or his sabre and take to the streets. Recent scholarship has indeed challenged the traditional view of the crowd as a violent force in

Excerpt 16.2: ‘Response to the Impertinent Question, But What is a Sans-culotte?’ (1793, anonymous) Mason, Laura and Rizzo, Tracey, eds. (1999). The French Revolution: A Document Collection. New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. A sans-culotte, sirs, you Rogues? It is a being who always goes about on foot, who has no millions, as you would like to have, no châteaux, no valets to serve him, and who is housed simply with his wife and children, if he has them, on the fourth or fifth floor. He is useful, because he knows how to work a field, how to forge, saw, file, roof, make shoes, and spill his blood to the very last drop for the good of the Republic. And because he works, one is sure not to see his face in the Café de Chartres, nor in the dives where there is conspiring or gaming, nor in the Theater of the Nation when Friend of the Laws is being performed, nor in the Vaudeville Theater at a performance of Chaste Suzanne, nor in the reading rooms where for two sols, which are so precious, they offer Gorsas’s filth along with the Chronicle and the French Patriot. In the evening, he goes to his section, not powdered, perfumed, and outfitted in the hope of attracting the attention of all the citizenesses in the

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stands, but rather to support the good motions with all his energy, and to crush those that come from the abominable faction of the statesmen. For the rest, a sans-culotte always has his saber with the razor’s edge, to cut off the ears of all the malefactors. Sometimes he walks with his pike; but at the first sound of the drum, he can be seen leaving for the Vendée, for the army of the Alps, or for the army of the North …. [197–8]

revolutionary politics. Based on extensive archival research and quantitative analysis, Micah Alpaugh argues that Parisian protesters typically tried to avoid violence. Out of 750 recorded events, only twelve per cent resulted in physical violence of any sort. More often, protesters resorted to peaceful marches, petitions, banquets and mass meetings to get their message across. (Alpaugh 2015, 210). (See Appendix 16.2.) When did the Terror begin? Even on this simple question, there is no consensus among historians. Some would say that it began with the trial and execution of Louis XVI, in January 1793. Others would point to the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety in the spring of that year. And still others would say that it was only in September 1793 that ‘terror became the order of the day’. Recently, Jean-Clément Martin has argued that the National Convention never issued an official decree to that effect, and went further to suggest that we still lack a clear definition of exactly what the Terror was. Few historians would agree with Martin that the Terror was a ‘myth’, but most would agree that our understanding of the Terror was indelibly marked by the indictment levelled against its policies by the Thermidorians, the uneasy coalition of moderate and radical deputies who conspired to topple Robespierre from power (Martin 2006; for the role of the Thermidorians in shaping our understanding see Ozouf 1984). Historical debate about the Terror has long centred on the question of its roots. Was it the product of Jacobin ideology, as François Furet, Keith Baker and Patrice Higonnet have argued; or was it a response to the circumstances in which the young Republic found itself: war against the monarchies of Europe coupled with counterrevolutionary threats within France and a virtual civil war in the western provinces, as the early works of R.R. Palmer and Donald Greer tended to argue? (Baker 1990; Furet 1981; Greer 1935; Higonnet 1998; Palmer 1941; for a succinct overview of the Terror see Gough 1998). The fact that the Jacobins controlled the Committee of Public Safety and the National Convention throughout most of 1793–94 lends credence to the former argument, while the reality of foreign war and counterrevolutionary activity within France during this period is also undeniable. The Committee of Public Safety responded to these challenges with harsh justice: under the Law of Suspects, passed in September 1793, some 70,000

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people were arrested. Our best estimates suggest that 40,000 people were executed during the Terror, but if one includes those who died in the repression of the Vendée rebellion in the west, the death toll mounts considerably higher. Yet, the Revolution claimed its own as well, not just opponents. Many of those who went to the guillotine were deputies in the National Convention or local elected officials (Linton 2103; Tackett 2015). The Committee of Public Safety, composed of twelve deputies, served as the executive branch of government during the Year II. It oversaw the repressive measures of the Terror, principally by sending representatives on mission to borders where foreign conflict raged and to regions of civil war or counterrevolution within France. The Committee also managed the war effort and the provisioning of troops and major cities, those tasks in particular being overseen by Lazare Carnot and Robert Lindet. The representatives on mission best known to us today are those who oversaw harsh repression in the provinces: Jean-Baptiste Carrier ordering the drowning of Vendéan rebels in Nantes; JeanMarie Collot d’Herbois commanding the execution by cannon of federalist rebels in Lyon; or Joseph Fouché aggressively pursuing de-Christianisation in the Nièvre. But the majority, Jean-Pierre Gross has argued, attempted to put Jacobin egalitarian ideals into practice, overseeing poor relief, agrarian reform, and modest efforts toward land redistribution. Gross sees this vision as the forerunner of the twentieth-century social welfare state, one in which fraternity was an essential mediator between liberty and equality (Biard 2002; Gross 1997).

Gender in the French Revolution As noted above, women never secured the right to vote during the French Revolution, nor did they enjoy the same rights of citizenship as men in other respects. But women were politically active, particularly during the first five years of the Revolution. The women’s march to Versailles on 5–6 October 1789 to protest rising bread prices not only led to the relocation of King Louis XVI and his family to the Tuileries palace in Paris, but also played a crucial role in securing the king’s signature on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the decrees abolishing privilege. In March 1791 Pauline Léon presented a petition before the Constituent Assembly signed by more than 300 Parisian women, demanding the right to bear arms so that women might join men in the defence of the nation. Several months later Etta Pallm d’Aelders addressed the same assembly to demand equality both in laws regulating marriage and in education. Manon Roland opposed women’s suffrage on the specific grounds that their education was inadequate to the responsible exercise of citizenship. Women did, however, continue regularly to petition the National Assembly, attended and often participated in the meetings of men’s political clubs, and formed clubs of their own in many French towns and cities, most notably the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in Paris, co-founded in 1793 by Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe.

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The issue of women’s rights in the French Revolution has generated considerable debate over the past two decades (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). Lynn Hunt takes a generally positive view, asserting that, given the historical context, ‘it is more surprising that women’s rights were even discussed in the public arena than that women ultimately did not gain them’. Joan Landes puts forth a more negative perspective, arguing that the revolutionaries by and large adopted the misogynistic attitudes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that the Revolution generally brought a closing off of public space for women. Olwen Hufton might be said to occupy a middle position, stressing the ‘limits of citizenship’ for women during this period. Dominique Godineau, supporting Hunt, observes that while women claimed, or achieved, few rights during the Revolution, ‘they nonetheless demonstrated citizenship …’ and ‘invested the political space that was opened’. Godineau also makes clear that the Declaration of the Rights of Man provided a framework within which women, and some men, would continue to advocate for full rights for women throughout the revolutionary decade (Godineau 1998; Hufton 1992; Hunt 1994; Landes 1988). What gains women did make during the Revolution often came in the context of legislation regarding the family. As Suzanne Desan has argued, the ‘Revolution infused politics into the most intimate relationships and wrenched families away from the patriarchal practices of the Old Regime’ (Desan 2004, 312). Having ended the tyranny of the monarchy, the revolutionaries moved under the Republic to abolish parental tyranny within the family. They did so by lowering the age of majority, by mandating equal inheritance (including even illegitimate children who could prove their father’s paternity), and by abolishing the lettres de cachet, which under the Old Regime had allowed fathers to exercise despotic authority over their children. On the very eve of the declaration of the Republic, the Legislative Assembly legalised divorce by mutual consent, and the law of 4 floréal II (23 April 1794) made even simpler the process of securing a divorce. Proof of six months de facto separation was all that was required. Between 75,000 and 100,000 people underwent divorce from 1792 to 1803, when it was once again outlawed by the Napoleonic Civil Code. The greatest number of divorces occurred in the years 1793–95, as Thermidor brought a conservative backlash against this legislation. When divorce was by mutual consent, often legally ending a marriage that had long since ceased to function, it is difficult or impossible to say who initiated the split. But in those cases of unilateral divorce that are recorded, between 65 and 75 percent were initiated by women (Desan 2004, 312, 96–101). Desan concludes that ‘at every turn, individual family members seized the initiative in remaking their private lives within the cauldron of politics’, and her work challenges the argument made by others, most notably Joan Landes, that the revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins, effectively set women’s rights back a generation or two by excluding women from the politics and the public sphere. ‘The Revolution certainly fostered strong rhetoric urging women toward domestic roles’, Desan agrees, ‘but it also enacted laws giving women new civil rights as individuals, granted them new forms of legal and political access to the

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state, and generated languages and practice for criticizing gender inequities’ (Desan 2004, 312–3). There may have been limits to women’s citizenship during the French Revolution, but this did not keep them from participating in the political fray. Just as the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, by Olympe de Gouges, consistently draws the attention of students of the French Revolution, so does the person of Marie Antoinette continue to fascinate the current generation. New biographies of the queen appear with regularity, but more noteworthy are two studies that focus more critically on the cultural representations of Marie-Antoinette both during her lifetime and over the two centuries since. Chantal Thomas examines the ‘myth’ of Marie-Antoinette that was created by a series of salacious underground pamphlets published in the final years of the Old Regime, and by the scurrilous charges of incest levelled against her at her trial in 1793. Dena Goodman has edited a volume of essays by an array of distinguished scholars who brilliantly explore Marie-Antoinette as a symbol, shedding light in the process on the persistent truth that a powerful woman is threatening, while examining the complicated ways in which gender, politics and sexuality are intertwined (Goodman 2003; Thomas 2001).

Legacy of the French Revolution In a 1989 essay, written for the occasion of the Bicentennial, Robert Darnton proposed the term ‘possibilism’ to evoke the essence of the French Revolution, a ‘sense of boundless possibility’ that was not divorced from the violence of the event, but rooted in it (Darnton 1989). This may be the most important legacy of the French Revolution, the ‘sense of possibility’, not only expressed but realised at the time – a conviction that ordinary people, working together, could rise up and change their world. Out of that conviction, and energy, emerged the inspiring ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’, the assertion of human rights, but also the regime of the Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. The word ‘possibilism’ also captures the reality that many of the aspirations of the French revolutionaries had not been fully realised. In 1815 Louis XVIII ascended the Bourbon throne (for the second time) and ruled France for ten years, in what history records as the Restoration. That the Restoration itself ended in 1830 is evidence that this effort to restore the Old Regime was a failure. Old regimes persisted elsewhere in Europe for another century, until the end of World War I, but the new political ideologies born in the French Revolution – liberalism, conservatism, socialism and even communism – made it clear to most Europeans that their demise was not just a possibility, but a probability. François Furet has argued that very little changed in France during the revolutionary decade (Furet 1981, 24). Challenging that view, Lynn Hunt points out that, even if the French people did not retain their political rights after 1815, they did not forget the experience of participatory politics. The ideal of popular sovereignty, elusive as it continues to be, has been an aspiration for Europeans across the continent ever since 1789 (Hunt 1984, 221). (See Appendix 16.3.)

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In the social realm, the abolition of seigneurial dues and obligations represents another enduring legacy of the French Revolution. As noted above, it would be decades before the dismantling of the feudal regime was completed in France, and while it would take even longer in the lands of the empires of central and eastern Europe, this trend toward private property rights, away from the regime of privilege, represents another way in which the French Revolution marks an end to the early modern era and the beginning of modern Europe.

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(B) Secondary literature Alpaugh, Micah (2015). Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baczko, Bronislaw (1994). The Terror before the Terror? Conditions of Possibility, Logic of Realization. In: Keith Baker ed., The Terror. Oxford: Pergamon, 19–38. Baker, Keith (1990). Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baecque, Antoine de, ed. (1988). L’An I des droits de l’homme. Paris: Presses du CNRS. Biard, Michel (2002). Missionaires de la République. Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Black, Jeremy (2010). Review. The American Historical Review 115.2 (April), 486–488. Blaufarb, Rafe (2016). The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bouton, Cynthia (1993). The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Régime Society. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Chartier, Roger (1990). Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française. Paris: Seuil. Cobban, Alfred (1964). The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darnton, Robert (1989). What was revolutionary about the French Revolution? New York Review of Books (19 January 1789), 3–10. Darnton, Robert, and Roche, Daniel, eds. (1989). Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Desan, Suzanne (2004). The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dillon, Patrick (2006). The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Jonathan Cape. Farge, Arlette (1991). The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution. Trans. Claudia Miéville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1993). Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Trans. Carol Shelton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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——— (1995). Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France. Trans. Rosemary Morris. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fitzsimmons, Michael P. (2003). The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French Revolution. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Furet, François (1978). Penser la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard. ——— (1981). Interpreting the French Revolution. Trans. Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrioch, David (2002). The Making of Revolutionary Paris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gauchet, Marcel (1989). La Révolution des droits de l’homme. Paris: Gallimard. Godineau, Dominique (1988). Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française. Paris: Editions ALINEA. ——— (1998). The Women of Paris and their French Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goodman, Dena, ed. (2003). Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen. New York: Routledge. Gough, Hugh (1998). The Terror in the French Revolution. London: Macmillan Press. Greer, Donald (1935). The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gross, Jean-Pierre (1997). Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1992). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hampson, Norman (1988). Danton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Higonnet, Patrice (1998). Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric (1986). Revolution. In: Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., Revolution in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5–46. Hufton, Olwen (1992). Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hunt, Lynn (1992). The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——— (1994). Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood. In: Keith Baker, ed., The Terror. Oxford: Pergamon, 195–208. ——— (1996). The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston, MA: Bedford Books. ——— (2007). Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton. ——— (1984). Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacob, Margaret (1992). The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jones, Colin (1998). Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change. In: Colin Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies. London: Routledge, 69–118. Landes, Joan B. (1988). Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lefebvre, Georges (1947). The Coming of the French Revolution. Trans. R.R. Palmer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Linton, Marisa (2006). The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. In: Peter R. Campbell, ed., The Origins of the French Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 139–159. ——— (2013). Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malia, Martin (2006). History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World. Terence Emmons, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Markoff, John (1996). The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Martin, Jean-Clément (2006). Violence et Révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national. Paris: Seuil. Maza, Sarah (1993). Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McMahon, Darrin (2001). Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, James (1984). Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ozouf, Mona (1984). War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792-1794). Journal of Modern History 56 (December), 579–97. ——— (1987). L’Opinion publique. In: Keith Baker, ed., The Political Culture of the Old Regime. Oxford: Pergamon, 419–434. ——— (1988). Public Opinion at the End of the Old Regime. Journal of Modern History 60 (September), 1–21. ——— (1989). Public Spirit. In: François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 771–780. Palmer, Robert R. (1941). Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parker, Geoffrey (1977). The Dutch Revolt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pincus, Steve (2009). 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Polasky, Janet (1987). Revolution in Brussels, 1787–1793. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique. Popkin, Jeremy D. (1989). News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s ‘Gazette de Leyde’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— (1990). Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799. Durham: Duke University Press. Popkin, Jeremy D. and Censer, Jack R., eds. (1987). Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rials, Stephane (1988). La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Paris: Hachette. Serna, Pierre (2013). Every Revolution is a War of Independence. In: Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 165–182. Sewell, William H. (1994). A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and ‘What is the Third Estate?’. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Soboul, Albert (1981). Comprendre la Révolution française: problèmes politiques de la Révolution française, 1789–1797. Paris: F. Maspero.

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Tackett, Timothy (1996). Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (2015). The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, George V. (1967). Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution. American Historical Review 72, 469–496. Thomas, Chantal (2001). The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette. Trans. Julie Rose. New York: Zone Books. Van Kley, Dale, ed. (1994). The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Van Kley, Dale (1996). The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vincent, K. Steven (2008). Martin Malia and the European Revolutionary Tradition. European Journal of Political Theory 7.4 (October), 492–512. Vovelle, Michel (1985). La Mentalité révolutionnaire. Paris: Editions Sociales. ——— (1986). La Révolution française. Paris: Messidor, 5 vols. Walton, Charles (2013). The Fall from Eden: The Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution. In: Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 44–56.

Appendices

Appendix 16.1: The Night of 4 August 1789 Fitzsimmons, Michael P. (2003). The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French Revolution. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press The event that did the most to give the French Revolution its defining character, however, was the meeting of the night of August 4, 1789. Indeed, the triad of values with which the Revolution is associated—liberty, equality, fraternity— was itself indelibly linked to the meeting of that night. The end of privilege meant that there would no longer be any privileged corporations to constrain individuals, giving each the freedom to undertake any activity not specifically prohibited by law. It rendered all equal before the law, as the institutional inequalities of the Old Regime were swept away. And, finally, the eradication of the tissue of privilege dissolved its inherent divisiveness and allowed a new, more fraternal bond—that of being French—to take hold. The new principles that emerged after August 4, 1789, provided the momentum for reconstructing the polity, which was accomplished in just two years and with a remarkably low ratio of bloodshed relative to the degree of change achieved. In spite of the disillusionment or polarization that accompanied the transition, the remade France was an extraordinary outcome, and the transformation accomplished by the National Assembly was perhaps the most thoroughgoing, virtually bloodless revolution in history. [216, 220–21] Markoff, John (1996). The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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The common element in these tales in letters, journals, and memoirs of those who sat in the National Assembly is the sense of menace that hung over them in personal ways—as property holders, as residents of particular locales, as holders of particular positions on public issues. The great work of the Constituent Assembly and their personal fortune, their political future, and their physical security were, for the moment, inseparable and what made them inseparable was the mobilization of ordinary people. [435]

Appendix 16.2: Revolutionary Violence Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: A. Knopf. However much the historian, in a year of celebration, may be tempted to see that violence as an unpleasant ‘aspect’ of the Revolution which ought not to distract from its accomplishments, it would be jejune to do so. From the very beginning—from the summer of 1789—violence was the motor of the Revolution. [859] Martin, Jean-Claude (2006). Violence et Révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national. Paris: Seuil. [Translation mine.] Soon, however, the guillotine, like all the other real or fictional machines conceived during the period, escaped the control of its promoters, under the effect of the passions and the social struggles that were the motor of the French Revolution. [80] Censer, Jack, and Hunt, Lynn (2005). Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd. American Historical Review, 110.1 (February). Popular violence defined the French Revolution. Without the crowds of lowerclass people, there would have been no fall of the Bastille, no overthrow of the monarchy, no arrest of the Girondins, no spectacle of the guillotine. The middle-class deputies who led the French Revolution depended on popular support, which inevitably meant popular violence, but they also feared that violence, felt repulsed by it, and constantly maneuvered to get a handle on it. Popular violence pushed the Revolution forward, but it also threatened to dissolve it altogether in an acid wash of blood, political vengeance, and anarchic disorder. [8–45] Alpaugh, Micah (2015). Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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During the French Revolution, Parisian protesters predominantly sought to effect change from within the system, sometimes deviating into violence only after other means had failed … . The use of violence, by itself, would have been a grossly ineffective strategy: protests had to develop in concurrence with wider public opinion to be effective. [210]

Appendix 16.3: Legacy of the French Revolution Furet, François (1981). Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. The Marxist vulgate of the French Revolution actually turns the world upside down: it makes the revolutionary break a matter of economic and social change, whereas nothing resembled French society under Louis XVI more than French society under Louis-Philippe. [24] Hunt, Lynn (1984). Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thousands of men and even many women gained firsthand experience in the political arena: they talked, read, and listened in new ways; they voted; they joined new organizations; and they marched for their political goals. Revolution became a tradition, and republicanism an enduring option. [221] McPhee, Peter (2006). Living the French Revolution, 1789–1799. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. No French adult alive in 1799 was in any doubt that they had lived through a revolutionary upheaval, willingly or resentfully, and that the society in which they lived was fundamentally different. [202] Darnton, Robert (1989). What was revolutionary about the French Revolution? New York Review of Books (January). Out of the destruction they created a new sense of possibility—not just of writing constitutions nor of legislating liberty and equality, but of living by the most difficult of revolutionary values, the brotherhood of man.

17 Turns and perspectives Beat Kümin

Introduction Whatever we do as historical researchers and writers reflects implicit or explicit choices: the questions considered worthy of investigation, the methods of analysis deemed apposite for particular purposes, concepts adduced to interpret data and the ways in which to present our findings. Alongside, variables such as personal backgrounds, prevalent social norms and access to resources have an influence, explaining why no two studies present identical accounts of the past (Carr 1961). To conclude this volume, it may be helpful to take a step back, look beyond particular themes or periods to consider some recent trends and their repercussions for the interpretation of – not only early modern – European history more generally. This will not be done from the vantage point of a cutting-edge theorist breaking new ground nor an omniscient reviewer familiar with all the intricacies of related debates, but rather the perspective of a practitioner confronted with accelerating calls for reorientation and a – perhaps not uncommon – sense of bewilderment about the proliferation of fresh departures and conflicting expectations. It is an attempt to ‘think aloud’ about an ever-evolving field. This chapter thus focuses on changing paradigms, major conceptual shifts and intellectual fashions, prompted by a widespread impression that the ‘past fifteen years have been among the most intellectually fertile periods in historical thinking and practice’ (‘Introduction’ to Munslow 2013, 3). Writing about the past has of course been reflected and commented upon ever since historiography first emerged as a distinct genre in Antiquity. Classical authors, medieval chroniclers, Renaissance scholars, early modern antiquarians, Enlightenment philosophers, the historicists of the nineteenth century and the protagonists of subsequent ‘grand theories’ have all offered more or less detailed rationales for their chosen ways to approach and explain the past. Some imagined development over time as a recurrent cycle of rise and fall, others as a linear ascent towards a specific endpoint, yet others as a stadial process, in the case of Marxism involving a succession of social formations – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism – each demarcated by a revolutionary transformation (Skinner 1985; Kramer and Maza 2006). Surveying the paradigm shifts in our discipline over the last two centuries, broadly involving moves from ‘political’ via ‘social

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and economic’ towards ‘cultural’ priorities (as sketched in the editorial ‘Introduction’ above), we can perhaps distinguish three broad and overlapping phases with regard to how practitioners felt about their craft and what really mattered: •

•

•

Confident: up to the two World Wars and often beyond, we see historians making sustained efforts to collate primary sources, extract their inherent meanings with recourse to a set of peer-agreed techniques and situate conclusions on causality, agency and evolutions within meta-narratives such as the rise of the nation state, the sequence of social formations, the triumph of reason – pursuing what we might loosely call ‘empiricist’ approaches investing facts and processes with identifiable significance in the historical process; Unsettled: from around the mid-twentieth century, the field became increasingly aware of radical challenges to the idea of one recoverable history on the one hand and the feasibility of objective/detached/disinterested research on the other – a process linked perhaps to a wider ‘fracturing’ of society promoted by the rise of free-market ideologies (Rogers 2011) and related ‘postmodern’ notions of the infinite plurality of idiosyncratic representations rather than the existence of any fixed social norms and direct reflections of the past (Jenkins 1997) (see Appendix 17.1); Reinvigorated: over the last few decades, in parallel with the gradual erosion of commonly accepted universals, theorists have launched numerous conceptual reorientations in the historical sciences, sharing some common features – like their sensitivity to the inescapably mediated quality of any traces from other periods and their preoccupation with symbols/interpretations rather than structures/facts – but staking rivalling claims for explanatory priority; a dynamic now perceived as a series of ‘turns’ (Forum 2012a; BachmannMedick 2016).

Whichever school or line we feel closest to, be it empiricist, postmodernist, turn-ist or any other, given their multiplication the need for sustained questioning of scholarly assumptions and viewpoints is perhaps greater than ever before. At the same time, considering practical constraints, academic conventions and audience expectations, few researchers can apply theoretical directives under ideal ‘lab’ conditions. Most negotiate multiple roles and conflicting interests, leaving limited space for experimentation and encouraging compromises of one sort or another. Growing numbers, furthermore, engage in collaborations with partners from different academic backgrounds or the wider public, where shared outlooks cannot be taken for granted. Very often, it is easier to formulate rather than to implement new agendas (Jenkins 1997, 28). A few of these shall now be examined.

New perspectives and paradigms It is fair to say that early modernists have been at the vanguard of historiographical innovation over the last few decades, perhaps because of the challenge to make

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sense of ‘strange’ period phenomena like witchcraft and – given a source survival which is still very patchy but rich enough to sustain multiple approaches – a propensity towards methodological openness and interdisciplinary exchange. Anthropology, with its expertise in ‘otherness’ – notably customs, identities and gender relations in non-Western societies – played a particularly influential role here. A whole set of pioneering works appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, with the specialised journal Historische Anthropologie following in 1993. Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, explored role inversions – situations in which women appeared ‘on top’ – and rituals – especially shaming practices such as charivari or rough music directed against those who violated social norms – in early modern France (two of the essays in Davis 1975). Spearheading the microstoria movement, striving to illuminate wider period features and mentalities through in-depth examinations of extraordinary individuals or groups, Carlo Ginzburg used inquisition records to reconstruct the spiritual world of a sixteenth-century miller which blended church doctrine with unorthodox elements into an idiosyncratic mixture (Ginzburg 1980; Italian original 1976). For eighteenth-century Paris, in turn, Robert Darnton deciphered underlying meanings of – at first sight bizarre – social conflicts like a cat massacre through ‘thick description’ of all recoverable factors, interpreting the episode as an act of protest by apprentices who resented that they were treated worse than their mistress’s pets (Darnton 1984). In literary studies, where ‘new historicist’ approaches focused on the interconnections between texts and period contexts emerged at around the same time, writers from More to Shakespeare served to demonstrate interactions between personal identities and the social, political and religious conditions of the Renaissance (Greenblatt 1980). From at least the later twentieth century, furthermore, history’s own gravitation towards ‘culture’ – no longer just forms of high art but stretching to all norms, values, perceptions and representations of given societies – entered into a fruitful exchange with a series of turns affecting the Humanities and Social Sciences more broadly. The original and most fundamental example is the ‘linguistic’ turn which drew on theoretical foundations laid by the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure in the early twentieth century. Summarised very crudely, it posits that all phenomena and experiences can only be represented through the medium of language, that signifiers, i.e. the terms we use for an object or phenomenon, lack any inherent connections to things signified and – a point most commonly associated with the early work of French sociologist Michel Foucault – that prevalent discourses are inextricably intertwined with structures of power (Boettcher in Walker 2005). If there is nothing outside language allowing researchers to convey historical information, then audience perceptions are moulded by its grammatical rules, semantic fields and possibilities to compose texts alone. Over forty years ago, the publication of Meta-History by an American historian with particular sensitivity to literary techniques caused a similar stir by arguing that, in order to be understood and ‘make sense’, all presentations of empirical findings ultimately followed a limited range of narrative patterns or genres like comedy or tragedy. Just as with novelists or dramatists,

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In the absence of a neutral or extraneous meta-theory to measure historical accuracy, furthermore, no representation can be deemed more authoritative or compelling than another. Subsequently, theorists from various disciplines have prioritised a succession of other categories alongside – and occasionally ahead of – language. In addition to those explored in a little more detail shortly, examples include emotions (cf. Forum 2010; Rosenwein 2016), materiality (Harvey 2018), performance (Burke 2005), translation – over and above the rendering of texts into different idioms encompassing examinations of any form of cross-cultural exchange (Bachmann-Medick 2016, Chapter V), postcolonial perspectives – not just on the specific twentieth-century process but any challenge to hegemonic tendencies (ibid., Chapter IV) and memory – as ‘an almost obligatory concept for the validation of new modes of historical enquiry’ (Cubitt 2007, 2). All of these, according to a recent survey, represent proper turns rather than merely reorientations, since they involve a conceptual leap through which the respective concern ‘moves from the object level [i.e. the aspect requiring greater attention] to the level of an analytical category [generating new methodological/theoretical tools]’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 189). Let us take a brief look at the cases put forward for the pre-eminence of visual and spatial dimensions. As with e.g. the material and emotional turns, they foreground categories other than language, while explicitly or implicitly responding to its hegemonic claims. Confronted with an explosion of visual imagery in the electronic and digital media, a development which logocentric theories as well as art historical approaches have failed to fully cater for, W. J. T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm were among the first scholars advocating a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic’ turn in the 1990s, although De Saussure and his followers had already engaged with forms of communication using signs and other visual means. This encouraged reflection on what exactly ‘pictures’ are within different academic disciplines and, in demarcation to related terms like ‘images’, how they relate to other media like the spoken/written word, what respective – and typically intertwined – roles are played by creators/disseminators/viewers and how we can move beyond the traditional fixation on works from ‘high’ culture (Curtis 2010; cf. Forum; 2012b). Within history, this sharpened our awareness for methodological challenges, specifically to resist the temptation of interpreting photography or genres such as still lives simply as snapshots of reality. One very helpful conceptual and practical guide highlighted the potential for ‘incidental evidence’ – a tobacco pipe or piece of clothing – as holding valuable clues on bygone eras (‘So far as material culture is concerned, the

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testimony of images seems to be most reliable in the small details’), while advising researchers to approach visual records of any kind as ‘painted opinions’, i.e. as representations in need of critique like any other remnant from the past with which they should be juxtaposed (Burke 2001, 102) (see Appendix 17.2). One of the ensuing ambitions must thus be to stop using visual evidence merely for ‘illustration’ of a site, object or character (‘This is Louis XIV painted in 1700’), but to uncover new levels of insight and argumentation through treating such sources as imaginative constructs informed by numerous influences and contrasting receptions. Within the early modern field, dealing with largely illiterate societies but also the enhanced dissemination opportunities afforded by the media revolution of print, engagement with these questions has been particularly pronounced …[.] Though the Renaissance has long been studied as a high point in the patronage of artists and the flowering of the arts, more recent scholarship has argued that visual materials have for too long been the subject only of aesthetic appreciation, rather than de-coded for what they were: sites of power and its contestation, of negotiations between governments, churches, civic rulers and communities. (Forum 2012b, 574) Inspired by pioneering work on the German Reformation (Scribner 2001), masscirculation genres like woodcuts or ballads and representative objects like coins, medals and clothing have all attracted attention from new perspectives, although it remains notoriously difficult to gauge both creator intentions and the impact of specific works on individuals in the period. One pertinent debate focused on the extent to which Dutch Golden Age works go beyond the depiction of domestic interiors and ‘everyday life’ to transmit the moral, confessional and disciplinarian values of a heavily urbanised and economically advanced society, with a broad consensus that they went very far (De Jongh 1997, 45; Figure 17.1). Further applications have included reconsiderations of whether Renaissance advances in knowledge and artistic techniques bolstered confidence in perceptions of the physical environment or rather a growing distrust of vision as liable to human and even demonic distortions (Clark 2007, 2) and whether Protestant ‘iconoclasts’ really trusted the ‘word’ alone, with new research uncovering a distinctive Lutheran visual culture in particular (Heal 2017). Given that images – from Neolithic cave paintings to present-day selfies – have always been prominent parts of human communication and that their analysis can build on longstanding iconographical/iconological research by scholars like Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Michael Baxandall, however, it might be more appropriate to speak of an accelerating iconic ‘drift’ rather than a sudden turn, albeit one informed by radical new methodologies (Geise et al. 2016, 322–6). A similar point could be made with regard to the significance of space for historical research, an academic discipline traditionally more focused on the variable of time (Kümin and Usborne in Special Issue 2013, 305–18; cf. Stock 2015).

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Figure 17.1 This painting from the Netherlands ostensibly depicts the joyous occasion of the safe delivery of a baby in a seventeenth-century domestic setting. The furnishings fit that of an urban household at the time (Cf. Chapter 7: Material cultures) and the characters represent a plausible gathering of – mostly female – relatives, servants and midwives. Yet symbolic messages subtly cloud the discerning viewer’s impression of this happy family scene: the broken eggs on the floor commonly stand for (sexual) disorder, the object bottom-left invokes the period saying ‘the only warmth in the marriage bed is the warming pan’ and, most dramatically, the long-haired man in the background – possibly a self-portrait of the painter whose signature appears above the door – makes the sign for a cuckold over the infant’s head. Other signals, like the limp sausages hanging in the fireplace, seem equally straightforward but the young woman demanding payment of the ‘father’ and the cloth colour (stark red in the original) linking the newly-born with the maid in the foreground perhaps less so. Jan Steen, Celebrating the Birth (oil on canvas, 87.7 x 107 cm, 1664). © The Wallace Collection, London. Reproduced with permission.

Again, early modernity provides a remarkably fruitful exploratory frame, arguably due to the combination of expanding geographical horizons in the age of discoveries, diverging conceptualisations of the metaphysical sphere by the rivalling confessions (see e.g. the existence, in Catholic theology, of an intermediary

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place between heaven and earth; Figure 17.2) and the emergence of a highly pertinent debate in the Baroque period, pitching the absolute quality of space in Newton’s worldview against the advancement of a relational model by Leibniz (Friedrich 2014). Well before this specific ‘turn’, furthermore, scholars of premodernity started to identify the physical environment as a crucial factor in the study of the past, already in chorographical works of the period itself (Harrison 1968), but most notably in a seminal study of the Mediterranean world under Philip II first published in 1949, which became the flagship work of the French Annales school (Braudel 1973). While methodologically innovative through the integration of long-, medium- and short-term perspectives, one issue with this approach was the potential for structuralist or even essentialist understandings, i.e. that the geography and topography of a region determined the character of the societies and historical processes there. The – unrelated, but roughly contemporary – national-socialist ‘blood and soil’ ideology carried similar implications and may have discredited spatial approaches in German academia for at least a generation after the collapse of the Third Reich. Several decades later, an imaginative interpretation of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, which combined environmental considerations – the threat of the sea – with an analysis of socioeconomic structures, religious mentalities and literary/visual representations, provided an indication of how research on natural and cultural factors might be brought more closely together (Schama 1988). In our days, accelerated globalisation – facilitated by digital communication and mass transport systems capable of eroding the ‘tyranny of distance’ – has surely been an important factor in promoting scholarly engagement with synchronic approaches and the ways in which different parts of the world interact with each other. Reduced to its core, the message of the spatial turn is to move from understandings of space as a container merely framing or – at the other extreme – dictating what happens within towards an interactive conception, where human agents, material environments and atmospheric variables all play constitutive and ever-evolving parts. Seminal impulses came from French philosophy and the formulation, originally in 1974, of an analytical framework to distinguish different kinds of space and grasp its social production (Lefebvre 1991), followed by representatives of postcolonial geography – associated with names like Edmund Soja or Doreen Massey – which rejected Eurocentric traditions and focused on areas/ perspectives previously seen as marginal, approaches with – distinctly political – implications for class relations and the global balance of power. In the German-speaking world, a sociological concept proved particularly influential. According to Martina Löw, space is constituted in two concurrent processes: the physical ordering of people and social goods on the one hand, and the mental synthesis undertaken by individual observers on the other (Löw 2008) (see Appendix 17.3). As yet, historical adaptations tend to take the form of conceptual reflections and essay-length experiments rather than monographic treatments. One example is a series of studies on ‘public places’ such as market squares, town halls and public houses, particularly on the ways in which – as generally accessible stages – they helped to shape human exchange in pre-modern

Figure 17.2 For pre-modern Catholics, the geography of the afterlife was fluid and differentiated. Rather than as neatly divided ‘absolute’ spaces, this world and the next appeared inextricably intertwined, with perceptions shaped by idiosyncratic mixtures of Church doctrine, devotional art encountered in their parishes, spiritual literature and personal imagination. Christ, the son of God, had become incarnate in a real-life Middle Eastern setting, spent over three decades in various parts of the Holy Land but ultimately ascended into heaven. Angels – as messengers – and saints – as intercessors – also linked the earthly and celestial spheres. In the late Middle Ages, purgatory had emerged as a ‘third place’ occupying an unspecified location somewhere in-between, where souls earmarked for salvation underwent cleansing by fire (Le Goff 1984). Furthermore, as evident from this woodcut by a celebrated artist of the northern Renaissance, illustrative of the movement’s interest in human anatomy and the technical innovation of perspective, contemporaries also imagined a kind of ante-hell guarded – as represented here – by demons but not subjected to the suffering of eternal pains. Inspired by an apocryphal rather than officially recognised Biblical source, the Gospel of Nicodemus, Dürer shows Christ descending into the underworld shortly after his crucifixion in order to rescue the souls of Adam and Eve as well as others born before his salvific act could take effect. Yet the presence of children suggests that the picture conflates this with the separate notion of ‘limbo’, yet another ill-defined environment believed to contain the souls of children who had died without the sacrament of baptism and remained excluded from paradise. Albrecht Dürer, Christus in der Vorhölle (woodcut 39 x 28 cm, c. 1510). Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg, Graphische Sammlung, Gr 24/65. Reproduced with permission.

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face-to-face societies (Gerd Schwerhoff in Special Issue 2013, 420–32). Perhaps the closest approximation to a full-scale survey is an investigation of the continuous reconstitution of the Republic of Venice, as revealed through a gradual shift in the perception of boundaries, which were only selectively noted before 1700, but became much more comprehensively defined thereafter. The author links three parallel processes, namely a sharper delineation of territorial borders, a more detailed engagement with the demographic composition of the polity and enhanced efforts to consolidate the Serenissima’s self-representation, underlining how the notion of the Venetian ‘state’ was created by human endeavour rather than historical necessity or any environmental determinism. The period-style blurb of the book provides a suitably Baroque summary of its ambitions, namely to chart the everlasting and never-ending shaping of Venice, as it unfolded since the birth of the city and as it continues to the present day, including an exposition of the fact that states are perennially concerned with their own recreation, always in interaction with external forces; all of this under the heading of a cultural history and with recourse to contemporary discourse. (Landwehr 2007, subtitle) Given that the taxonomy varies greatly between disciplines and authors, a consistently tripartite differentiation between ‘sites’ (pinpointed locations on a geographical grid), ‘places’ (sites like ‘churches’ or ‘towns’ which, through commonly associated components and routinised forms of exchange, have acquired shared meanings) and ‘spaces’ (constellations and relations generated in human minds) might serve to maximise the value added of this analytical category for the historical sciences. Its overall potential remains contested. Some applaud the transcending of constraints associated with the linguistic turn: ‘Not everything can be taken as a mere sign, symbol or text. The world also consists of material and matter and is governed by power relations and spatial politics’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 27). Others discern better possibilities to capture the ‘contemporaneousness of the uncontemporary’, i.e. the heterogeneity of co-existing phenomena at any given moment in time. Quite a few, in contrast, remain sceptical. One voice dismissed the ‘spatial turn’ as mostly metaphorical so far, as failing to mobilise genuinely fresh perspectives informed by material science and critical geography (Leif Jerram in Special Issue 2013, 400–19). As with every new turn, supporters do well to avoid ‘self-exaggeration and hubris’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 271). Charges levelled at other paradigms can easily back-fire if engagement with a plurality of approaches, evaluated on the grounds of specific research questions or source materials, give way to predetermined choices and interpretive orthodoxies.

Writing history now For one of their principal proponents, postmodernist critiques have undermined conventional approaches to such an extent that

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Beat Kümin perhaps we not only do not need – and maybe never have needed – to measure ‘changes’ against always highly selective appropriations of the past, but that such practices are also positively damaging in their restrictive cloyingness. That there is no reason why we cannot now gather the strength to unburden ourselves of the historicised past (and traditional ethics) and construct measurements of radical emancipation from current imaginaries. (Jenkins 2013, 27)

Put another way, in the absence of an authoritative meta-theory – i.e. a set of rules and criteria derived from a ‘neutral’ sphere extraneous to historical discourse – there are no independent yardsticks to gauge the relative ‘plausibility’ of given scholarly accounts, prompting another leading voice to declare: ‘We are free to conceive “history” as we please, just as we are free to make of it what we will’ (White 1973, 433). Such argumentations, extrapolating from the inescapably distorting effects of linguistic expression to the infinity of possible readings, fundamentally challenge historians’ efforts to make meaningful statements and, at least as far as the present writer can see, remain to be rebutted in a theoretically compelling fashion (for a perceptive critique of the poststructuralist dilemma of leaving us with ‘history without cause’, however, see Weinstein 2005). What we have seen are reassertions of established practice on the basis of updated methodological rigour and enhanced transparency regarding sources, assumptions and interpretive choices. In his Defence of History, Robert Evans conceded the highly personal/ contestable quality of ‘evidence’ – what individual scholars decide to prioritise in their analyses and mobilise in support of their arguments – but reaffirmed his belief in the existence of ‘facts’ (‘something that happened in history and can be verified as such through the traces history has left behind’) and the ability of language to convey discernible meaning (‘If it did not describe and inform us about the past, then we would not be able to know that the past had any real existence at all. Hence admitting the existence of the past as extra-textual reality implies recognizing that language can describe things external to itself.’). For Evans, [o]bjective history in the last analysis is history that is researched and written within the limits placed on the historical imagination by the facts of history and the sources which reveal them, and bound by the historian’s desire to produce a true, fair, and adequate account of the subject under consideration. (Evans 2001, 76, 113 and 272) While this is a spirited rather than conclusive line of reasoning, most historians at present seem happy to concur. For a start, the actuality of the past is not at issue, the debates centre around its representation and our ability to capture a separately existing ‘reality’ (Jenkins 1997, 117). Few would dispute that the ambition to gain an idea of events and processes in bygone times remains a legitimate concern, whether prompted by purely personal curiosity/nostalgia

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or the hope to find out something about humanity more generally. Quite apart from questions of truth and interpretation, it seems worthwhile to preserve remnants, study their materiality, decipher possible associations and place them in their wider context. Many scholars derive reassurance from the experience that some representations appear to hold firmer clues than others, say in the case of period maps or sketches guiding archaeologists to excavation sites yielding related finds or the discovery, in an archive, of a fifteenth-century building contract for exactly the style of clearstory which survives in a perpendicular church on the site specified in the document. (Cf. Chapter 2: Identities and encounters, with regard to the possibility of diminished incommensurability as different cultures become more familiar with each other.) Material culture, unstable and evolving as it may be, does provide one tangible link to the past. Another is human descent: family archives and landed estates passed from generation to generation allow us to postulate tighter connections between ancestors and descendants than where people simply share the same name. None of these traces constitutes a straightforward reflection of ‘reality’, but each bolsters the pragmatic assumption that – if it is possible for two contemporaries to overcome the structural obstacles of communication (e.g. by both turning up for a meeting at the agreed place and time) – the same should be feasible for messages transmitted across time. Where separate kinds of remnants convey complementary or mutually reinforcing information, that hope gains plausibility. To take an example from my own research on the Alpine micro-republic of Gersau, the co-existence of a surviving physical structure (the council chamber in the eighteenth-century village hall), a period account of its construction (in a chronicle of 1752, emphasising broad communal involvement), a contemporary volume of government minutes (recording a desire ‘to keep a book in the Rathaus to enter all decisions’) and the survival of a cycle of paintings commissioned for the same site (depicting classical scenes of ‘good government’) seems relatively safe ground to propose that the locals designated a specific place for meetings of officials and representative purposes, although much less so with regard to what drove individuals to serve the polity and which agendas they may have pursued (Kümin 2015). It is probably fair to say that, overall, the theoretical interventions of the last few decades have shaken and re-invigorated rather than uprooted history as an academic discipline. Purists may balk at any attempts to square circles, but most practitioners (including the present writer and the authors featured in this anthology; cf. e.g. Chapter 12: Science and reason) tend to update and expand rather than throw out their personal toolkits. Building on long-standing engagement with terminology, as in the German Begriffsgeschichte, and the contextual dimensions of ideas in the Cambridge School of political thought, discourse analysis – the systematic study of the relationship between language, meaning and power (e.g. with reference to early modern jargons associated with discoveries, religion or science) – represents one method which has reached the scholarly ‘mainstream’ (Landwehr 2008). Given the relative scarcity of self-reflective ‘ego-documents’ from the period, thinking about the canons and jargons available at the time, possible narrative

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strategies, the construction of plausible argumentation and how authors could link elements from different – religious, political, legal – spheres, opens fresh perspectives on early modern texts and the ways in which authors, including those from lower social strata, attempted to gain credence (Boettcher in Walker 2005, 81–2, with reference to Davis 1987). Routine consideration of gender and race alongside class, the integration of European into wider global/postcolonial perspectives and a widening of the social focus beyond elites are other shifts which are here to stay (cf. Chapter 3: Gender and social structures). Bespoke guidance on visual, material and spatial – alongside textual – dimensions is equally welcomed by writers aiming for a more reflective, nuanced and cautious historiographical approach. For what has been fundamentally shattered is the naïve belief in the objective and neutral quality of primary sources, not just literary texts or works of high art, but also administrative records and even incidental evidence like a mason’s receipt tagged on to a page of sixteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts. As products of specific authors, settings and circumstances, all genres and specimens constitute representations with complex and evasive layers of meaning attached (Sangha and Willis 2016). In an intriguing twist, recent conceptual debates have turned the handling of a multiplicity of voices into just as demanding a task as a dearth of period documentation. A second seismic shift is a tendency towards greater professional humility (although there are always exceptions!). More than their predecessors, current historians seem inclined to offer their works as fresh perspectives on particular themes/periods and contributions to an ongoing process of evocation, rather than as the ‘final’ word on a subject. While stopping well short of relativism and striving to accumulate as much substantiation for their findings as possible (one criterium still differentiating scholarship from fiction, even though both share similar narrative techniques), they appear more reticent about claims to tell the truth. At the same time, judgements become more nuanced. The richness of ideas, values, actions and representations associated with cultures of the past renders conventional dichotomies – centre/periphery, Protestant/Catholic, elite/ popular, Old/New World, literate/illiterate – hazardous and reductionist, with notions like negotiation, exchange and hybridity more suitable for the complexity of many situations, especially along boundaries or within contact zones. Perhaps it is a misjudgement of the situation, but these seem widespread attitudes towards history-writing now. There are no systematic overviews to draw upon, but an impressionist assessment of recent outputs suggests that a sizeable majority derives from ‘open-minded’ traditionalists, sensitive to methodological challenges and attuned to new paradigms, but opposed to a position of ‘anything goes’ (Jenkins 1997, 21–4). For Peter Burke, practitioners need certain basic qualifications like powers of perception, an ability to communicate regardless of their theoretical orientation and, above all, the required skills to translate/ mediate between past and present, ideally afresh in every generation, always mindful that interests and methods are shaped by milieu (Burke 2013, 171, 179); requirements which include discipline-specific expertise in palaeography, chronology and

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diplomatics, all prerequisites for pre-modern source critique. There is only so much that can be achieved alone. Demanding tasks benefit from intellectual collaboration and the pooling of research capacity in an exercise of collective reimagination, much like the present volume. Working – as early modernists do – on the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, there is an acute sense of chronological distance, of engaging with mentalities and values very different from our own. Yet despite reservations and uncertainties, most specialists remain confident that – through processes like state formation, the emergence of confessions and expanding geographical horizons, to name but a few – these bygone societies retain connections with the present. Maybe they were similarly mistaken or deluded, but early modern people clearly assumed that there were ways to pass specific messages on to posterity. On the occasion of major building repairs in 1655, illustrating a widespread custom throughout the German lands, the parishioners of Gersau for example deposited a chronicle of village events in a golden ball located on top of their church tower. Aiming for tradition as well as intercession, they envisaged ‘our descendants’ opening the document, taking an interest in population levels (recorded as approximating 550 souls) as well as the state of the times (described as peaceful) and willing to offer prayers for their ancestors’ souls (which the latter promised to reciprocate in heaven). Again, while theoretically no different to any other representation, it seems congenial and justifiable for twenty-first-century historians to invest this source, now preserved in the parish archive, with particular authority on demographic and religious conditions in the 1650s, or at least on how villagers desired them to be remembered (see Excerpts 17.1a–b).

Excerpt 17.1a–b Examples of explicit addresses to posterity in early modern village chronicles a. Tower ball chronicle of the parish republic of Gersau in present-day Switzerland (1655), written by land scribe Anton Nigg: Wiget, Josef, ed. (1984). Die Turmkugel-Dokumente der Pfarrkirche Gersau. Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Schwyz 76, 161–175, no. 1. Should this letter be opened by our successors, may the residents of our land at that time pray for us current inhabitants as well as for all founders and benefactors of this church, with a general Christian prayer, that He will graciously forgive us all our sins and misdeeds. May this land also be graciously preserved in the true Catholic faith and in its ancient God-given liberties, acquired by our ancestors from the old emperors … and honestly preserved since, and may it always be governed in good peace and prosperity, for what discord can do to our land, we have painfully experienced with the highest damage and loss of a precious good.

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b. Tower ball chronicle of Rosdorf in Lower Saxony/Germany (1699). In: Heidrun Dolezel, ed. (1994). Nachrichten aus der Kirchturmkugel 1699–1955. Friedland: Ev.-luth. Kirchengemeinde, 25. So that the dear descendants [may receive] some news and documentation of the present state of government, current conditions in this commune, who promoted the building of this uppermost part of the church tower and which master carried it out, also about what other remarkable things happened around this time, it shall be known that …

The state of the discipline Conceptual turns, of course, are not the only factors influencing the study of the past today. In many ways, historians appear to be riding the crest of a wave. Tens of thousands hold posts and project grants in a wide range of educational and research institutions – with recently established branches such as ‘global’ and ‘public history’ among the most expansive specialisations (Hamilton and Gardner 2017). Leading UK universities admit ever greater numbers of single-/joint-honours students on history-related programmes. The volume of monographs, collections and journals continues to grow, popular demand sustains a flourishing heritage industry, media dons front TV documentaries, while historical novels and films reach mass audiences. Over the last decade, early modern drama series such as ‘The Tudors’, ‘Tales from the Old Bailey’ or ‘Poldark’ figured among the most successful Anglophone TV programmes, while numerous examples of historical fiction – by authors like Philippa Gregory or Robert Harris – reached top positions in the book charts. At the time of writing in 2017–18, early modern studies received further boosts through the quincentenary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, a landmark event attracting official church/state patronage and resulting in numerous new biographies and related initiatives, spanning a wide spectrum from academic conferences to tourist attractions (https://www.luther2017.de/), and commemorations of the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618. The most dramatic transformations, however, relate to the advances of digital technology. Large and ambitious undertakings like the German Monumenta Germaniae Historica or the English Victoria County History series – both started in the 1800s and still awaiting completion – are by no means unprecedented, of course (www.dmgh.de/, www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/). But who would have thought that databases like ‘Early English Books Online’ (https://eebo.chad wyck.com/home) and ‘Deutsche Inschriften Online’ (www.inschriften.net) might one day make all English books printed before 1700 and all pre-1650 German inscriptions accessible from any laptop with an internet connection; which midtwentieth-century medievalist might have envisaged virtual reality apps of the

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monasteries or churches they studied (as those produced by the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at the University of York: www.christianityand culture.org.uk); what would traditional mapmakers have given for access to Geographic Information Systems as well as other Digital Humanities tools (Gardiner and Musto 2015); and how excited would previous generations have been about instant intercontinental exchange requiring nothing but a video conferencing programme? Given the lack of all these facilities, the achievements of past generations must be considered greater still. Yet the situation is not unambiguously rosy. At a time of tight public finances, humanities subjects face increasing demands for legitimisation, while the emergence of ‘rival’ disciplines like cultural studies puts further pressure on student demand in some countries. In 2016, for example, 2,656 history majors enrolled at Swiss universities, down 38 per cent compared to 2004. What is more, the subject is about to disappear from school timetables, as a new national curriculum subsumes it under a broader examination of ‘spaces, periods and societies’ (Federal Office of Statistics figures reported in Schweiz am Wochenende, 20 May 2017). Over in the US, less than a third of undergraduates now major in the Humanities and those progressing to PhD studies, unfazed by the prospect of years of challenging research sustained by precarious teaching positions, face a lack of tenure-track jobs at the end (Grafton 2010); the latter is just as pressing a problem in Italy, France, Germany, the UK and other parts of Europe. With enhanced demands for accountability, periodic research/teaching evaluations and fierce competition for limited funding, furthermore, the time in which scholars chose their topics solely on the grounds of personal preference has long passed. Interdisciplinary orientation, international collaboration, present-day relevance and the potential for ‘impact’ – in the British system, evidence that research is not merely noted by, but actually transformative for the general public – are just some of the objectives they are expected to take into consideration. As for the digital revolution, issues like access, intellectual property and sustainability require careful consideration: will the requisite resources and skills become unaffordable for some; can the respective contributions of researchers and IT experts be neatly disentangled; and is the long-term preservation of data secured? The emergence of ‘public’ competence centres, such as the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield (www.sheffield.ac.uk/hri) or the digitisation centre of the Bavarian State Library in Munich (www.digitalesammlungen.de/) may help to address such concerns. All this suggests that signs of strain and crisis in the otherwise booming history sector should not encourage knee-jerk responses like simplifying curricula, lowering expectations or shortening training. To become a trained humanist, … you have always needed intellectual ability and technical skills, but even more you need conviction and passion and determination. One might say that you need a vocation. … One reason graduate school demands so much time, so much effort, and so much

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Conclusion The linguistic and subsequent turns of the last century continue to have major repercussions for early modern studies today. Some postmodernists have renounced all disciplinary conventions to find fundamentally new ways of treating representations of the past, but most respond to the ever-growing range of conceptual prompts by asking fresh questions, expanding the source base, refining approaches, enhancing methodological transparency and engaging in more sustained reflection of their researching, interpreting and writing. Radical theorists dismiss these as futile attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, i.e. to cling to vain hopes of recovering the real past from a sea of indistinguishable representations, but ‘mainstream’ historians continue to hold that communication – between contemporaries as well as across generations – remains possible, that the past retains links to the present and that, within certain linguistic and media constraints, our knowledge of early modern societies can be enhanced. Language no longer reigns supreme. The material, pictorial and emotional turn have enriched the texture of historical analysis, with fresh room for human agency, e.g. in spatial approaches. At the same time, the digital revolution keeps opening opportunities in terms of quantification and presentation, albeit with at times exaggerated beliefs in the potential of ‘big data’. Ever more diverse and multi-vocal, history-writing has become so fraught with difficulties and imperfections ‘that it is impossible to produce a comprehensive picture; that we can provide only partial truths’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 108). Practitioners are thus well-advised to manage their ambitions and conceive findings as fresh perspectives on moving targets rather than as ultimate pronouncements about the past.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Claudia Stein and the co-editor of this volume for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Bibliography (A) Primary sources Harrison, William (1968). The Description of England. ed. George Edelen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Sangha, Laura, and Willis, Jonathan, eds. (2016). Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources. Abingdon: Routledge

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(B) Secondary literature Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2016). Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Trans. Adam Blauhut. Berlin: De Gruyter. Boettcher, S. R. (2005). The Linguistic Turn. In: Garthine Walker, ed., Writing Early Modern History. London: Hodder Arnold, 71–94. Braudel, Fernand (1973). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Trans. Siân Reynolds. London: Collins. Burke, Peter (2001). Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion. ——— (2005). Performing History: The Importance of Occasions. Rethinking History 9 (1), 35–52. ——— (2013). An Intellectual Self-Portrait or the History of a Historian. In: Alun Munslow ed., Authoring the Past: Writing and Rethinking History. Abingdon: Routledge, 171–82. Carr, E. H. (1961). What is History? London: Macmillan. Clark, Stuart (2007). Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cubitt, Geoffrey (2007). History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Curtis, Neal ed. (2010). The Pictorial Turn. London: Routledge. Darnton, Robert (1984). The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. London: Allen Lane. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1975). Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. London: Duckworth.. ——— (1987). Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Polity. De Jongh, Eddy (1997). Realism and Seeming-Realism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting. In: Wayne E. Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Cambridge: University Press, 11–56. Evans, Richard J. (2001). In Defence of History. New edn. London: Granta. Forum: ‘History of Emotions’ (2010). German History 28 (1), 67–80. Forum: ‘Historiographic “Turns” in Critical Perspective’ (2012a). American Historical Review 117 (3), 698–813. Forum: ‘The Visual Turn in Early Modern German History and Historiography’ (2012b). German History 30 (4), 574–91. Friedrich, Karin, ed. (2014). Die Erschließung des Raumes: Konstruktion, Imagination und Darstellung von Räumen und Grenzen im Barockzeitalter. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Gardiner, Eileen, and Musto, Ronald G. (2015). The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. E-book, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geise, Stephanie, Birkner, Thomas, Arnold, Klaus, Löblich, Maria, and Lobinger, Katharina, eds. (2016). Historische Perspektiven auf den Iconic Turn. Die Entwicklung der öffentlichen visuellen Kommunikation. Cologne: Böhlau. Ginzburg, Carlo (1980). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. London: Routledge. Grafton, Anthony F. (2010). Humanities and Inhumanities. The New Republic (17 February). https://newrepublic.com/article/73209/humanities-and-inhumanities (accessed 6 March 2018) Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Hamilton, Paula, and Gardner, James B., eds. (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Public History. E-book. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, Karen. (2018). History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources. 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge. Heal, Bridget (2017). A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Keith ed. (1997). The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge ——— (2013). After History. In: Alun Munslow, ed., Authoring the Past: Writing and Rethinking History. Abingdon: Routledge, 26–38. Kramer, Lloyd, and Maza, Sarah, eds. (2006). A Companion to Western Historical Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Kümin, Beat (2015). Rural Autonomy and Popular Politics in Imperial Villages. German History 33 (2), 194–213. Lake, Peter, and Pincus, Steven (2012). The Strange Death of Political History. History Working Papers Project. www.historyworkingpapers.org/?page_id=305 Landwehr, Achim (2007). Die Erschaffung Venedigs. Raum, Bevölkerung, Mythos 1570–1750. Paderborn: Schöningh. ——— (2008). Historische Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Le Goff, Jacques (1984). The Birth of Purgatory. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. London: Scolar. Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Löw, Martina (2008). The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces through the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception. European Journal of Social Theory, 11 (1), 25–49. Munslow, Alun, ed. (2013). Authoring the Past: Writing and Rethinking History. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogers, Daniel T. (2011). Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosenwein, Barbara (2016). Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schama, Simon (1988). The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: Fontana. Scribner, R. W. (2001). Religion and Culture in Germany (1400-1800). ed. Lyndal Roper. Leiden: Brill. Skinner, Quentin, ed. (1985). The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Cambridge: University Press. Special Issue (2013). At Home and in the Workplace: Domestic and Occupational Space in Western Europe from the Middle Ages. ed. Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne. History & Theory 52 (3), 305–432. Stock, Paul, ed. (2015). The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Walker, Garthine (2005). Writing Early Modern History. London: Hodder Arnold. Weinstein, Barbara (2005). History without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial Dilemma? International Review for Social History 50 (1), 71–93. White, Hayden (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Appendices

Appendix 17.1 Jenkins, Keith (1997). Introduction. In: idem, ed., The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge, 1–30. [C]oncentrating on only one angle, most [postmodern] critiques of lower case history [i.e. the predominant way of pursuing the subject in academic institutions] seem to concern themselves with the implications of how the historian’s referent – the thing to which historians refer as if it stands outside of representation, there to act as an independent resistance to wayward interpretations – is in fact constituted through the processes of representation. Consequently, it is this dissolution of the referent into representation which, for many lower case historians, signals the dissolution of their history by postmodern means. [17]

Appendix 17.2 Burke, Peter (2001). Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion. Like novelists, painters represent social life by choosing individuals and small groups whom they believe to be typical of a larger whole. The emphasis should fall on the word ‘believe’. In other words, as in the case of portraits of individuals, representations of society tell us about a relationship, the relationship between the maker of the representation and the people portrayed. The relationship may be egalitarian, but it has often in the past been hierarchical [ … ]. The people portrayed may be viewed with more or less distance, in a respectful, satirical, affectionate, comic or contemptuous light. What we see is a painted opinion, a ‘view of society’ in an ideological as well as a visual sense.

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Photographs are no exception to this rule, for as the American critic Alan Trachtenberg argues, ‘A photographer has no need to persuade a viewer to adopt his or her point of view, because the reader has no choice; in the picture we see the world from the angle of the camera’s partial vision, from the position it had at the moment of the release of the shutter.’ Point of view in this literal sense obviously influences – even if it does not determine – point of view in the metaphorical sense. [122]

Appendix 17.3 Löw, Martina (2008). The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces through the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception. European Journal of Social Theory, 11/1, 25–49. In spontaneously imagining a space, one often thinks of doors, walls, windows, shelves, tables, etc. the ordering of which creates spaces. [In brief, we think of] social goods. … But people, too, are integrated into the constitution of spaces … The ordering of two people in relation to each other is also space constitutive, depending on their social relationship. People who are socially more intimate leave less space between them than people who are social strangers. … To bring it to a point, space can be seen as a relational ordering of living beings and social goods. … Two basic processes of space construction are to be distinguished. First, space is constituted by the situating of social goods and people … Spacing means erection, building, or positioning. Examples are the display of wares in a supermarket, the self-positioning of people in relation to other people, the construction of buildings, the surveying of national borders, the networking of computers to form spaces. … Second, the constitution of space also requires synthesis, that is to say, goods and people are connected to form spaces through processes of perception, ideation, or recall. In the day-to-day activity of constituting space, synthesis and spacing are concurrent, since action is always processual. Indeed, building, erecting, or situating, i.e. spacing, are not possible without synthesis, that is to say, without connection to surrounding social goods and people to form spaces. Although urban buildings, for instance, can be linked through movement, this linkage becomes a space only through the perceptual and/or analytical synthesis of the buildings. [34–5]

Index

absolutism 175, 217–8, 223–4, 226, 247–9, 256–8, 391–2, 399–402 academies 74, 237, 331, 449 accommodation, theory of 60–1, 140–1, 148–9; see also synergism Acosta, José de 50, 52 Acton, Lord 389–90, 395 Adam and Eve 427, 478 administration, reform of 39, 216, 223–9, 235, 247, 398, 423; see also bureaucracy Adorno, T. 417–19, 430–2, 437, 440 Afghan 56 Africa(n) 10, 32–3, 49–50, 54, 59–62, 64–5, 110, 193, 228, 233–4, 244, 255, 268–73, 275–7, 283–4, 307, 310, 418, 443, 445, 454 African Diaspora Studies 271–2 Africanus, Julius 40; Leo 284 agency 11, 13–14, 65, 73, 76, 79, 82, 204–6, 236, 271–2, 274–5, 287, 289–90, 319, 341, 395, 472, 486 Agincourt, Battle of (1415) 251 Ågren, M. 77 agriculture 24, 33, 62, 111, 226, 300–2, 306, 308–9 Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of 219 Alagna 152 Alberti, Leon Battista 37, 107 alchemy 103, 204, 332, 344, 352–3, 387, 419 Alciato, Andrea 151 Aleandro, Girolamo 127 Aleppo 171 Alexander the Great 26, 251 Alexander I, of Russia 234 Alexander VI, Pope 269 Alfonso V, King of Aragon 108 Allen, R. 306–7, 316–17 Alpaugh, M. 460, 469

Alps 114, 152, 171, 174, 460, 481 Álvarez-Nogal, C. 305 Amberg 126 Amerbach, Boniface 159 America(s) 10, 30, 32–4, 36, 49–50, 52–6, 59–65, 74, 82, 111, 115, 150–1, 165–6, 173, 193, 195–6, 219, 228, 234–6, 245, 259, 268–74, 276–7, 280–1, 283–4, 289, 299, 301, 310, 314, 379, 389, 394, 415, 419, 428–30, 435, 443–5, 447, 452, 454, 473, 482, 490 American Bill of Rights 454 Americans, native 56, 60–1, 63, 74, 82, 268, 283, 415 Amsterdam 154, 165, 169, 192, 193, 280–1, 305, 307, 313, 430 Amussen, S. 62 Anabaptism 35, 153, 166, 368 anatomy 38, 83, 347, 355, 478 Ancien Régime 233, 256, 398, 417; see also Old Regime Andreae, Jacob 54 angels 153, 478 Anglican 342 Anglo-Saxon 24, 28 Angola 276, 281 Anguissola, Sofonisba 74 animals 9, 38, 52, 248, 285, 341, 355, 364, 366, 385, 415, 428 Anjou 227 Annales School 8, 39, 136, 184, 196, 299, 301, 477 anthropology 8, 50, 55–6, 59, 70–1, 74, 83, 100, 102, 104, 132–3, 187, 194, 204, 270, 378, 419, 473 Anti-Semitism 281 Antichrist 19, 46–7, 161 anticlericalism 130–2, 447

492

Index

antiquarians/antiquaries 5, 114–15, 158, 170, 204, 471 Antiquity 1, 3–6, 21, 25, 27, 29–30, 33–5, 51–2, 57, 64, 96–7, 104–5, 114, 126, 128, 155, 159, 216, 353, 355, 359, 370, 374, 394–6, 398, 403–4, 417, 427, 442, 471, 481 Antwerp 159, 165–6, 190, 252, 301, 307 Applebaum, W. 354 Aquinas, Thomas 147, 216 Arab 32, 50, 54–5, 115, 120, 163 Aragon 36, 108 Aramaic 159 Arawak 280–1 Arbeitskreis interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung, research network 356 archaeology 187–8, 204, 275, 289, 433, 481 Aristarchus 351 architecture 55, 111, 115, 250–1, 442 archives 74, 79, 113, 138, 275, 287, 303, 326, 327, 359, 363, 366–7, 389, 393, 460, 481, 483 aristocracy 83, 97, 101–2, 105, 112–13, 137, 186, 189, 192, 196, 217, 229, 235, 407–8, 425, 444, 447, 450, 458; see also nobility Aristotle 35, 140, 156, 217–18, 235, 330–1, 394, 405 Armada 244, 253 Armenia 163, 227, 276 Armitage, D. 280 Arnisaeus, Henning 406 art history 74, 135, 187–8, 474 Arthur, King 26 arts 25–7, 30, 81, 83, 96, 98, 100, 107, 110–12, 114, 124, 150, 156, 159, 184, 186, 201, 326, 341, 475 Asia(n) 10, 30, 32–3, 49–53, 55–7, 59–65, 115, 120, 160–2, 195, 227, 269, 273, 276–7, 279, 310, 314, 327 astronomy 32 atheism 109, 345, 363, 369, 375 Athens 175 Atlantic 49, 63, 86, 193–4, 228, 233–5, 255, 257, 268, 271–3, 277, 279, 281, 297; see also oceanic history Auch 229 Augsburg 151, 172; Confession of 124; League of 245; see also wars Augustine 4, 19–20 Augustus, Emperor 20 Austin, J. 391–2, 400, 403

Australia 234, 277 Austria(n) 23, 155, 217, 222, 225, 229, 232–3, 245, 252, 256, 260, 276, 443 autobiography 153, 417, 435, 481 autocracy 388, 395 Avignon 106 Azores 155 Aztec 50, 52, 55, 222, 276 Babylon 19, 46, 284; Elias of 284 Bacon, Francis 160, 330, 339–41, 343, 348, 387, 396, 440–1 Bahamas 268 Bailey, M. D. 369 Baker, K. 448–50, 460 balance of power 36, 55, 219–20, 269, 298–9, 310, 398–9, 477 Baldaeus, Philip 57 Bali 63 Balkans 228, 256 ballads 153, 170, 173, 475 Baltic 24, 193, 245 Baltimore 284 banks 113–14, 119, 225, 307; Bank of England 225; World Bank 307 barbarians 21–2, 57, 120 Barbon, N. 201 Barclay, William 224 Barnave, Antoine 458 Baron, H. 104, 393–5, 397 Baroque 477, 479 Barruel, Abbé 424 Bart, Jean 254 Bartolus 395 Basel 34, 114, 158–60 Basque region 359 Bastille 227, 444, 447, 450, 455, 458–9, 469 bastions see fortifications Batavia see Indonesia Bavaria, Duchy/Electorate of 125, 229, 252, 485 Baxandall, M. 475 Bayle, P. 6, 375 bayonet 256 Beatriz, Dona 61 beauty 101, 107, 111, 213, 370 Becher, Joachim 201 Bede, Venerable 4, 40 Behringer, W. 182, 363, 378 Beijing 162, 174 Bekker, Balthasar 375 Belarus 217, 227

Index Belgium 443, 447 Bellarmino, Roberto 224 Bellini, Gentile 134–5 Benezet, Anthony 233–4 Benin 281 Bennet, J. 76, 93–4 Bentham, J. 391–2, 433 Bentley, J. 65 Berg, M. 195, 197 Bergamo 110 Berkeley 446 Berkhout, Jan Teding van 194 Berlin 420, 423–4 Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar 257 Bernard, Jean Frederic 65 Berry, H. 197 Bertier de Sauvigny, Louis 458–9 Berwick 251 Bever, E. 359, 369, 377 Bible 4, 19–20, 25, 29, 31, 34, 40, 46, 60, 64, 108–9, 112, 114, 123, 126–7, 133, 137, 152, 159, 161, 166, 168, 220, 345, 423, 478; Vulgate 109, 159 Bilinkoff, J. 63 Biel, Gabriel 146 Bill of Rights 318, 454 Biondo, F. 21 Biow, D. 101 Bireley, R. 399 Birghden, Johannes von den 169 bishops 23, 48, 52, 105–6, 112, 125, 129–31, 174, 220, 229, 398, 448 Bismarck, Otto von 390, 397 Black, J. 256, 258 Black Consciousness 272 Black Death 106, 110–11 Black Sea 227, 234 Black Studies 272 Blair, A. 156 Blaufarb, R. 444, 457–8 Blenheim, Battle of (1704) 252, 260 Blickle, P. 137 Bloch, M. 274 Blondé, B. 13 blood and soil ideology 477 Bodin, J. 5, 215, 218–19, 228, 404 Boehm, G. 474 Boettcher, S. 54 Boguet, Henri 373–4 Bohemia 36, 155, 229, 257 Bologna 223 Bonaventura 147 Boniface VIII, Pope 23

493

Bontius, Jacob 53 books 19, 21–2, 30, 101, 107, 113–14, 122, 133–4, 150–4, 156–7, 159–68, 173–4, 182, 185, 188–9, 199, 218, 220, 226, 250, 275, 278, 299–302, 312–14, 327, 331–2, 343, 345, 423, 484; production of 33–4, 159–68, 182 162; collection of 34, 166–7, 226; see also printing book trade 34–5, 133–4, 150–68 Borck, Catharina 283–4 Bordeaux 282, 286 borders 3, 8, 15, 40, 79, 83, 86–7, 193, 197–8, 215, 219, 228, 272–4, 276, 279, 287, 289–90, 385, 428, 445, 449, 461, 479, 482, 490 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 220, 224, 237 Bossy, J. 358 botany 157, 284 Botero, Giovanni 398 Bouillon, G. of 26 boundaries see borders Bourbon dynasty 217, 256, 443, 445, 447, 463 Bourdieu, P. 8, 236 bourgeois(ie) 36, 148, 175, 181, 194, 196, 222, 226, 425, 441, 444–5, 447–50, 452; see also class distinctions; middling sort Boyle, R. 353–4 Brabant 203, 443 Brady, Th. A. 137 Brahe, Tycho 32 Brandenburg(-Ansbach-Kulmbach), Margraviate 125 Braudel, F. 39, 184, 196, 299–300, 319, 477 Braun, R. 300 Brazil(ian) 56, 162, 222–3, 234, 273, 276–7, 281 Breitenfeld, Battle of 249, 260–1 Brenner, R. 319 Brescia 110–11 Brest 254 Brethren of the Common Life 133 Brett, A. 405, 407–8, 415 Brewer, J. 183, 225, 249 Briggs, R. 356, 360, 362, 378, 386 Britain 56, 86, 185, 195, 199, 201, 225, 234, 245, 249, 251–2, 255, 259, 268, 273, 277, 280, 283, 285–6, 307–9, 313, 315–17, 326–8, 344, 389, 408, 446–7, 452, 485

494

Index

Brittany 165, 227, 237, 455 Broadberry, S. 308–9, 311, 326–7 Browne, Thomas 40 Bruges 114, 190 Bruni, L. 5, 21, 393, 395–6 Brussels 443, 447 Buddha/Buddhist 57, 64, 174 Burckhardt, J. 96–8, 100, 104, 120, 188, 213, 393 Burckhardtian theory 96, 100–5, 120, 188–8; see also individualism bureaucracy 11, 13, 39, 62, 181, 216, 223–4, 229, 301, 303, 398; see also administration Burgess, G. 400, 402 Burgundy 109 Buringh, E. 167 Burke, Edmund 390 Burke, P. 482, 489 Burnard, T. 297 Burns, J. H. 392 Butterfield, H. 332, 337–8, 399–400 Byzantine/Byzantium 23, 49, 115, 135 Caesar, Julius 26, 114, 251 cafés 449, 459 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre 449 Calvin, J. 74, 114 Cambridge 7, 54, 392 Cambridge School 215–6, 394–7, 481 cameralism see mercantilism Cameron, Euan 11–12, 140 Canada 277 Canary Islands 268 Cantor, N. F. 18 Cape Verde Islands 269 Caribbean 33, 57, 62, 194, 227, 234, 268, 272, 276–7, 283, 414, 455 Carle, Hans 169 Carnot, L. 461 Carolines 276 Carracci, Annibale 174 Carrara 110 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste 461 cartography see maps Casaubon, Isaac 103 Cassirer, E. 419, 429–32, 436–7, 439 Castel Sant’Angelo 251 Castiglione, Baldassare 101, 157 Castile 36, 47 Catherine II, of Russia 232, 234

Catholic Reformation 30, 39, 59–60, 63, 123, 125–6, 130, 139–41, 168–9, 173–4, 269, 399 Catholicism 24–5, 30, 105–9, 155, 166, 223–4, 235, 424, 448–9; medieval 24–5, 128–9, 140–1, 146–7; in Renaissance 105–9, 134–7 Celibacy 62 Cellarius, C. 21–2 Cellini, Benvenuto 101–2 Censer, J. 469 censorship 174–5, 224 Central Europe 24, 307, 312 Cerman, M. 315 Cervantes 31 Ceuta 49 Ceylon see Sri Lanka Chakrabarty, D. 271, 274 chapels see churches charivari 473 Charlemagne, Emperor 23, 26 Charles I, King of England 217, 227, 446 Charles II, King of Spain 36 Charles V and I, Emperor/King of Spain 28, 36, 52, 172 Charles VIII, King of France 252 Chartier, R. 448 Chaunu, P. 300 Chesapeake 193 China/Chinese 49, 51, 53–6, 59–60, 62–3, 78, 115, 160–2, 173–4, 193, 195, 222, 275–6, 279, 308, 314, 338, 445 Chinggis Khan 51 chivalry 26–7 chorography 5, 477 Christian humanism 28–9, 108, 114, 126–8, 154–5 Christendom 10, 122, 130, 136, 168 Christ(ian/-ity) 4–5, 10, 19–20, 22, 24–6, 28–30, 35–6, 40, 46, 48, 52–4, 57, 59–63, 65, 81, 86–7, 98, 102–6, 108–9, 114–15, 121, 124, 126–7, 131, 133–5, 138, 147, 150, 163, 170, 173–4, 216, 220, 235, 237, 244, 255, 266, 281, 337, 345, 357, 362, 364, 399, 420, 423, 435, 461, 478, 483, 485 Christiansfeld 283 Christmas 23 chronicles 4, 124, 331, 459, 471, 474, 481, 483–4 chronology 3, 6, 11, 40, 123, 184, 188, 249–50, 267, 306, 327, 353, 366, 369, 378, 443, 482–3; see also periodisation

Index Churches, Christian/confessional 11, 19–21, 25–6, 35, 39–40, 46, 58, 60, 100–1, 105–6, 114, 121, 123–6, 129–33, 139–40, 146, 152, 154, 159, 163, 165–6, 174, 224–5, 228, 269, 325, 342, 365, 388, 392, 398, 403, 406, 422–3, 447–8, 457, 475, 478; see also Catholicism; Protestantism churches/chapels 25, 28, 107, 111–12, 114, 125, 130, 479, 485 Cicero 21, 32, 104, 220, 222 Cipolla, C. M. 184 cities see urban citizenship 74, 104, 219, 221–2, 281, 394–7, 399, 445, 461–2 city-states 24, 119, 395–6; see also urban civic humanism 104, 393–7, 414–15 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) 449 civil wars 217, 219, 244, 392; Dutch Revolt 244; English 73, 83, 168, 171, 174, 217, 389–90, 394, 400, 404, 408, 446; French 73, 115, 166, 218, 226, 244, 392, 460–1; Netherlands 166; see also wars civilisation 5, 36, 97, 157, 162, 329, 337–8, 345, 396, 429, 434, 443 Clark, A. 76 Clark, G. 318 Clark, G. N. 18 Clark, S. 370, 386 Clarkson, Thomas 233 class distinctions 36–7, 76, 78–80, 87, 97, 112, 136–7, 147–8, 186, 192–3, 196–7, 219–22, 230, 300–5, 326–7, 361, 447–9, 452–8; see also bourgeoisie; nobility classical see Antiquity Clendinnen, I. 62 clergy 25, 27, 37, 80, 106, 115, 129–30, 149, 152, 181, 226, 231, 325, 358, 365, 400–1, 421–2, 449, 452–7 cloth industry 109–11, 194, 305 clubs 157, 233, 445, 449, 455, 461 Clunas, C. 193 Cobban, A. 447 Codogno, Ottavio 172 Cohen, H. Floris 338–9 Cohn, N. 357 Cohn, Samuel Jr 190 Coke, Sir Edward 401–2 Cole, R. G. 181 Collins, J. B. 13 Collinson, P. 396

495

Collinwood, R. G. 4 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie 461 Cologne 26, 166, 278 colonies 49–50, 54–5, 60, 63, 78, 85–7, 162, 192–3, 195, 219, 226–7, 233–4, 237, 269, 271–3, 275–8, 280–1, 283–4, 286, 289, 307, 310–11, 314, 366, 452, 455, 482; see also plantations Columbus, Christopher 33, 51–2, 59, 268, 289, 311 Combahee River Collective 72 commerce 13–14, 34, 49, 55, 62–3, 65, 76, 151, 153, 162–3, 166, 194–6, 188, 190, 192, 194–6, 204, 226–7, 268–9, 276–7, 279, 281, 283, Ch. 11 passim 362, 433–4, 449–50; commercial revolution 190 Commewijne river 281 Committee of Public Safety 460–1 commodities 49, 78, 109, 111, 113, 169, 192, 194–5, 205, 268, 310, 328, 371, 445; see also material culture common good 137, 200, 218, 220, 229, 395, 400, 433 common law 220, 400–2 common people 7, 37–8, 119, 133, 138, 151, 169, 227, 235, 318, 368, 450, 452–3, 463, 469 commonwealth 157, 216–21, 235, 393–4, 396–7, 404, 415, 421 Communal Reformation 130, 137 communalism 104–5, 136–7, 150–74; see also republicanism communes 24, 105–6, 130, 136–7, 484 communication revolution 169–74, 182, 475 communism 463, 471 communitarianism 435 Commynes, Philippe 216 Como 111 Comte, A. 345 conciliarism 392, 408, 414, 449; see also councils Concord, Book of 124 Condorcet, Marquis de (Nicolas Caritat) 222, 345, 425, 455 confessionalisation 124–6, 139–40 confessionalism 124–6 confessions 35, 124–5 confraternities see fraternities Confucianism 60, 62, 64, 161 conscription 226, 231, 248 Constantine, Emperor/Donation of 5, 22–3, 108

496

Index

Constantine XI Palaiologos 23 Constantinople 22–3, 49, 76, 110 Constituent Assembly in France 221, 444, 461, 469; see also National Assembly constitutionalism 399–402 consumer revolution/society 111, 113, 183–4, 186, 188–9, 192–4, 269, 450 consumerism 37, 78, 109–15, 311; origins of 188–91, 269, 315–16; morality of 196–202; theories of 183–8 Cook, H. 194 Copernicus 32, 330, 333–4, 337, 351–2 correspondence 11, 13, 22, 31, 52, 60, 101, 113–14, 146, 153, 156–60, 165–6, 171, 278, 282–9, 401, 450, 469 corruption 6, 85, 103, 113, 126, 132, 228, 360, 424, 429 Corsica 155 Cortes, Hernan 52, 63 Cosandey, F. 242 cosmopolitan 417, 420, 433–6, 442 Couderet, Jehanne 77–8 councils, secular 27, 80, 130, 132, 217–19, 223, 226, 303–4, 335, 390, 396, 481; Church 124, 130, 389–90, 392, 414; see also conciliarism Counter Reformation see Catholic Reformation counter-march 246 counterrevolution 445, 459–61 courtiers 1, 101, 157, 396 Coutances, town of 229 crafts see guilds Crafts, N. 185, 315 Crécy, Battle of (1346) 251 Cremona 110–11 Crenshaw, K. 72, 86 Creole 283 Crete 171 Crimea 227–8, 234 Croatia 154–5 Croix, Petis de la 54 Cromberger, Jacopo 165–6; Juan 165 Crombie, A. C. 18 Cromwell, Oliver 219 Cromwell, Thomas 39 crowds 7, 113, 332, 437, 444, 458–9, 469 Crowley, J. 197 Crowston, C. 78 Crusades 23 Cujas, Jacques 216 Cunningham, A. 342–4 Currie, E. 189

Cusa, Nicholas of 351 Czech 154, 446 D’Aiguillon, Duc 455 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond 419 D’Holbach, Baron (Paul-Henri Thiry) 423 D’Orta, Garcia 53 Da Vinci, Leonardo 150 Damascus 330 Daniel, book of 19 Dante 31 Danton, Georges 458 Darling, Thomas 372 Darnton, R. 175, 419, 435, 463, 470, 473 Darwin, C. 342 Dauber, N. 15 David, Jacques-Louis 453 David, King 26, 123 Davies, O. 363, 369, 378 Davis, N. Z. 73, 93, 136, 148, 274, 473 Day, John 160 De Blécourt, W. 369, 378 De-Christianization 461 De Gouges, Olympe (Mary Gouze) 233, 455 De La Court, Johan and Pieter 202 De Munck, B. 205 De Rezeville, Louis François 278; Marie Rose 278 De Saussure, F. 473–4 De Thou, Jacques 224 De Tocqueville, Alexis 388 decadence theory 129 Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) 221, 234, 434, 452–4, 461–2 Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791) 463 De Vries, J. 185–7, 190, 196, 202, 214, 306, 310–11, 316, 328 debt 13, 105, 165–6, 190, 215, 224–5, 228–9, 305, 360, 452 Dee, John 103 Deism 420 Delft 191, 194 democracy 74, 150, 175, 192, 219, 235–6, 269, 388, 394–5, 397, 404, 407–8, 415, 433–6, 441, 448–9 demography 8, 37, 39, 110, 184, 230, 233, 257, 315, 479, 483; see also population demon(ic) 87, 140, 360, 364, 367–8, 370, 377, 386, 475 Dening, G. 55 Denmark 273, 276, 280, 283

Index Desan, S. 445, 462 Descartes, René 175, 197, 331, 420 despotism 53, 237, 393, 395, 400, 454, 462 devil 38, 46–7, 103, 160–1, 357, 360, 364, 367, 370, 376–7 Diamond Necklace Affair 449 Dicey, A. V. 391–2 Dickens, A. G. 128–30 dictators 15, 420, 435–6, 463 dictionaries 3, 6, 156–7, 356 Diderot, D. 6, 419 digital revolution/technology 474, 477, 484–6 Dillinger, J. 361, 363 Diodorus 3 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4 diplomacy 50, 58, 105, 151, 156, 171, 215, 219, 232, 236, 256, 389; see also international (relations) diplomatics 483 disenchantment, theory of 108, 140–1, 342–5, 362–65, 375–8, 440–1; see also secularisation divine right 219, 400 divorce 94, 160, 436, 462–3 Dort, Canons of 124 Downing, B. 248 Downs, Battle of (1639) 253 drama 97, 371, 459, 473, 484 Dreitzel, H. 400, 406 drink(ing) 77–8, 80, 85, 186, 191, 194, 227, 270, 277, 281, 311, 360, 452 Droysen, J. G. 7 Duffy, E. 48, 129 Durkheim, E. 358 Dunkirk 254–5 Duplessis, R. 194 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe 218 Dürer, Albrecht 478 Dutch (Republic) 53, 57, 63–5, 75, 114, 123, 128, 133, 165, 168–9, 173, 185–7, 191, 202, 214, 216, 222, 225, 227, 244–6, 249–51, 253–5, 260, 273, 275, 277, 280–1, 283, 305–6, 309–11, 313, 315, 317, 328, 335, 375, 443, 447, 475, 477; Golden Age 75, 152, 301, 310, 315, 317, 475, 477; see also Netherlands Dynasticism 217–18

497

early modern(ity) 10–11, 408, 472, 476–7 and passim East India Companies 57, 173, 268, 277, 305, 313 Eastern Europe 54–5, 73, 162–3, 217, 244, 276, 281, 378, 428, 443, 464 economic development 33, 77, 109–15, 185–205, 214, 226–33, 173–4, 298–328, 447, 450; see also commerce; consumerism; trade Edinburgh 336 Edwards, K. 14 education 25, 37, 57, 74, 98, 106, 126, 130, 136, 150–1, 153–7, 165, 197, 223, 228, 232–3, 236, 273, 317–18, 334, 357, 362, 369, 371, 373, 375, 423, 426, 435, 450, 452, 461, 484 Edward III, King of England 251 Edward VI, King of England 128–9 Egypt 52, 64, 103 Einstein, A. 352 Eire, C. 122 Eisenach 152 Eisenstein, E. L. 150–1, 160 Elba 110 Elias, Norbert 36 Elias of Babylon 284 Elizabeth, Queen of England 83, 87, 123, 129, 169, 232, 244, 396, 401 Elliott, J. H. 47 Elmer, P. 368 Elton, G. R. 27, 39 emblems 151 emotions 8, 13, 36–7, 84, 100, 107, 150, 282, 378, 403, 455, 474, 486 empire-building 2, 53–5, 222, 273–7 empiricism 184, 187–8, 192, 205–6, 216, 230, 337, 344, 363, 369, 375, 398, 472–3, 480; see also scientific revolution encyclopaedias 6, 53, 151, 156, 160, 356, 363, 375, 419 Engadine valley 153 Engerman, S. 301 England/English 2–4, 7, 27–8, 35–6, 39, 47–8, 53, 55, 58, 62–3, 65, 73, 75, 78, 83–4, 86, 88, 94, 96–8, 102, 106, 109, 114–15, 122–4, 128–9, 154–5, 160, 165–6, 168–71, 173–5, 183–4, 188, 190, 192–3, 195–7, 199, 202, 215, 217, 219, 221–2, 224–8, 232–6, 247, 249, 251, 253–5, 258, 268, 274, 276, 278, 280–1, 283, 285, 287, 299, 301–2, 304–6, 308–9, 311–18, 325, 327, 335,

498

Index

342, 356, 359, 368–9, 371, 375, 378–9, 389, 391–4, 396–7, 399–402, 404, 408, 414–15, 418, 425, 443, 446, 454, 484 Enlightenment 5–6, 65, 197, 339, 344–5, 417–42, 447–9; and gender 425–7; impact of 422, 427–37; interpretations of 417–27, 433–6; meaning of 420–7; politics of 427–36 entangled history/entanglement 50, 274–5, 280, 283, 286, 289 environment 8–9, 23, 51–2, 65, 121, 136, 151–3, 162, 174, 203–4, 318, 358, 363, 475, 477, 478–9 epistemology 8, 83, 204–5, 272, 275, 279, 336, 342, 357, 369, 371, 373 Epstein, S. R. 317 Equiano, Olaudah 234 Erasmus of Rotterdam 29, 34, 37, 109, 114, 126–7, 146, 154–5, 157–9 esoteric 353 Essex 326 estates 28, 129, 131, 218, 224, 248, 450–3, 455; see also clergy; Estates General; middling sort; nobility; peasants Estates General of France 215, 218, 449, 452–3, 456 Estienne, Henri 159 ethnography/-logy 12, 50–7, 59–61, 63–5, 70–1, 270, 289, 300 Eugene IV, Pope 108 Eurocentric 60, 271, 275, 477 Europe(an) 10; see also Central; Eastern; Northern; Southern Western Europe Eusebius (of Caesarea) 4, 40 Evans, R. 480 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 357 exemplary history 4 exorcism 365, 369, 372 expansion, overseas 32–3, 194–6, 267, 268–97, 310–14; theories of 272–6; networks of 276–84 exploration 32–3, 50–65, 87, 268 experiment(ation) 8, 35, 205, 275, 335, 352–5, 440–1, 472, 477 extra-European areas 7, 252, 313, 419, 473 externalism 332–37 Fairchilds, C. 192 fairies 363–4 families 37, 98–9, 152–3, 187, 361–2, 462 Farge, A. 450 Fascism 428, 430, 432

fashion 35, 111–12, 190, 193–6, 205, 214, 319 Febvre, L. 136, 138, 147 feminist movement 72–3, 339–42, 359; see also gender; women Ferdinand, King of Aragon 47, 52, 268 Ferrone, V. 417, 432 fertility 104, 136, 338, 352, 366, 368, 471 festivities 48, 93, 175, 198, 223, 281, 283, 445 feudalism 24, 189, 246, 444, 447, 458, 464, 471; Abolition/End of Feudalism in France (4 August 1789) 444, 452, 455–6, 464, 468 Ficino, Marsilio 103 Figgis, J. N. 392, 395, 399, 414 Filipino see Philippines Filmer, Robert 401 Finland 378 Fiore, J. of 19, 97, 119 fiscal-military state 225, 249 Fitzsimmons, M. 455, 468 Flacius Illyricus, M. 5 Flanders/Flemish 147, 162, 219, 250, 252–4, 327, 398 Florence/Florentine 1, 5, 99, 103–10, 112–14, 215, 225, 228, 245, 303, 393–4, 396; Catasto 303; Santa Maria Novella 107; Santo Spirito 112 Florida 57 Fogel, M. 175; R. 301 folklore 38, 149, 363, 378 Fontana, Lavinia 74 food 1, 58, 77, 184, 194, 247, 267, 299, 306–7, 309, 327, 361, 372, 452 fortifications 28, 250–2, 262 Foster-Barham, Joseph 287–8; Joseph II 288 Foucault, M. 8, 236–7, 271, 369, 437, 473 Fouché, Joseph 461 Foulon, Joseph 458–9 Fourie, J. 193 Foxe, John 160–1, 165 France/French 2, 8, 15, 23, 28, 31, 39, 47, 55, 59, 62, 65, 73, 80, 82, 84–6, 88, 93, 96–7, 102–3, 105–6, 114–15, 126, 130, 136, 147–8, 154, 157, 165–7, 169, 171, 173–5, 192, 215–29, 231–7, 242, 244–5, 247–9, 251–6, 259–60, 268, 270–2, 277–8, 280, 299, 302–3, 305–7, 310, 316–17, 335, 345, 359, 365, 368, 378, 388–9, 392, 417–18, 424–5, 427,

Index 432, 434–5, 437, 440, Ch. 16 passim, 473, 477, 485 Francis I, King of France 28, 102, 222, 252 Franck, S. 19 Frankfurt a. M. 159, 166, 169, 430 Frankfurt School 417–18, 430–2 Franks 19, 25 fraternity (religious) 106, 133, 135, 461, 463, 468 Frazier, Sir J. G. 357 Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Emperor 22 Frederick II of Prussia 226, 422–3 Frederick the Wise, Saxon Elector 182 Frederick William II of Prussia 423 freemasons 419, 449 French Revolution 73, 219, 221, 226, 233, 245, 260, 388–9, 417–18, 424, 434, 440, 443–70; and Enlightenment 424–5, 434, 448–9; and gender 445, 455, 461–3; and violence 444–5, 458–61, 469–70; interpretations of 443–7; legacy of 445–6, 463–4, 470; origins of 447–52, 460–1; see also revolution Freising, Otto of 19 Freist, D. 14 friaries see religious houses Friesland 185–6, 190 Frijhoff, W. 133 Friuli 103 Froben, Johannes 34, 159 Froschauer, Christoph 168 Fugger, Jacob 172; Octavian Secundus 172; Philipp Eduard 172 Fumaroli, M. 215 Furet, F. 447–8, 450, 460, 463, 470 Gaelic 87, 237, 259 Galen 32, 38 Galilei, Galileo 32, 103, 174–5, 331 Gallagher, C. 419 Gallican Articles 224 Gama, Vasco Da 51, 59 Garden, M. 303 Gaskill, M. 368 Gassner, Johann Joseph 369 Gauderman, K. 62 Gay, P. 435 Geertz, C. 8, 59, 419 Gelderblom, O. 313 gender: analysis of 37, 61–3, Ch. 3 passim98–9, 203–4, 339–42, 358–62, 378, 386, 419, 425–7, 445, 461–3;

499

categories of 81–4, 86, 232–3; see also women; masculinity General Crisis 248, 260, 316 general will 222, 395 Geneva 123, 152, 166, 236 Genoa 227, 260, 268 Gentileschi, Artemisia 74 geocentric 337, 354 Geographic Information Systems 485 geography 3, 8, 10, 12, 32, 35, 39, 105, 122, 158, 160, 165, 171, 182, 184, 188, 193, 231–2, 245, 247, 256, 272–5, 279, 297, 310, 357, 378, 476–9, 483, 485 geometry 107, 334 George II, King of England 217 German(y) 18–19, 23–5, 35–6, 40, 73, 75, 80, 86, 99, 102–3, 106, 124–6, 130–2, 135–9, 147, 152, 154, 160, 165–6, 168–9, 175, 201, 216, 221, 223, 227, 229, 236, 244, 249–51, 254257–8, 385, 389–91, 393, 397–8, 417–18, 423–5, 428–30, 432, 440, 449, 475, 477, 481, 483–5; German Empire (1871) 389; unification 390; see also Holy Roman Empire Gersau 481, 483 Ghana 281 Ghobrial, J.-P. 275 Gibbon, E. 6, 96 Gierke, Otto von 390–2, 395, 399, 403–4, 407 Gilson, E. 128, 146 Gibraltar 254–5 Gibson, M. 371, 379 Ginzburg, C. 103, 153, 357–8, 473 Girondins 469 Gladstone, William E. 390 Glanvill, Joseph 375 globalisation 49, 63–4, 109–15, 194–6, 272–6, 279–80, 477 Glorious Revolution 248, 318, 443, 446–7 Goa 162, 173 Gobert, Leonard 85 God(ess) 4, 20–1, 29, 46–7, 57–8, 86, 99, 102, 107–9, 112, 127, 131, 147–9, 151, 153, 160–1, 168, 170, 182, 200, 220, 229, 232, 282, 330, 334, 342–4, 362, 365, 367, 372–3, 375, 385, 399–401, 420, 423, 427, 433, 478, 483 Godineau, D. 445, 462 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 429 Goldthwaite, R. 111, 188–9, 213–14 Gommans, J. 195

500

Index

Good Hope, Cape of 57, 277 Goodare, J. 378 Gooderidge, Alse 372 Goodman, D. 463 Gorée 277 Gospel see Bible Gothic style 26, 107 Goths 25 Gotland 276 Goubert, P. 300 Gouges, Olympe de 74, 463 governance 27–8, 36, 47, 83, 96, 171, 215, 217, 225, 229, 235, 247–9, 256–8, 313–15, 391–2, 397–407; medieval forms 27–9; methods of 229–36; theories of 215–16, 218–22, 236–7, 389–407; see also state; political thought gradual(ism) 4, 12, 30–2, 34–6, 40, 73, 103, 163, 169, 171, 185–6, 192, 227, 229, 241, 277, 336–7, 400, 408, 472, 479 Graf, Urs 81 Grafton, A. 5, 396, 485–6 Granada 235 Grant, E. 342–3, 354 Gratian of Bologna 26 Great Awakening Movement 121, 435 Great Britain see Britain Great Divergence, theory of 195, 274, 314 Great Fear 444, 456, 459 Great Social Divide 97, 119 Greece/Greek 3–4, 31, 34–5, 51, 57, 64, 103, 108–9, 114–15, 120, 135, 150, 159, 228, 233, 269, 333, 355 Greenblatt, S. 97, 100, 120, 419, 473 Greengrass, M. 13 Greenland 276, 283 Greer, D. 460 Gregory VII, Pope 23 Gregory, P. 484 Greif, A. 312 Gross, Jean-Pierre 461 Gross Domestic Product 305, 307–9, 326–7 Grotius, Hugo 249, 392, 403–4, 414 Grünenberg, Johann 182 Guadeloupe 277 Guam 276 Guha, R. 271 Guiana 234, 280 Guicciardini, F. 5, 47, 216

g(u)ilds 22, 24, 34, 80, 104, 106, 110–11, 147, 152–3, 163, 205, 225–6, 304, 312–14, 317–18, 396 guillotine 227, 461, 469 Guinea 276 Guizot, François 388 gunpowder 76, 160, 227, 250 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden 247, 249–50, 253 Gutenberg, Johannes 34, 150, 162, 171 Guy, J. 396 Habermas, J. 175, 432, 442, 449–50 Habsburg dynasty 171–2, 217, 222, 226, 229, 232, 244, 250, 252, 256, 258, 447 Hakluyt, Richard 53 Hale, J. 10, 259 Hall, R. 352 Hamburg 225, 281, 310 Hameln, Glückel of 225 Hamm, B. 132 Hanibal(l) 251 Hankins, J. 395 Hanover, alliance of 245 Hanseatic League 24 Hansen, J. 367 Hanson, P. 15 Harley, K. 185 Harrington, James 394–5 Harris, R. 484 Harrison, P. 344 Hassidism 435 Hauser, H. 136, 147 heaven 21–2, 62, 104, 131, 150, 157, 333–4, 341, 477–8, 483 Hebrew 32, 40, 114, 159 Hector 26 Hegel, G. W. 230, 234, 432, 436 Heidegger, M. 429 Heidelberg Catechism 124 hell 478; and see devil heliocentric 174, 355 Helvetic Confessions 124 Henderson, L. 363 Henri II, King of France 27–8, 222, 232 Henri III, King of France 216, 218 Henry I, King of England 251 Henry V, King of England 217 Henry VIII, King of England 123, 129, 222, 251 Henry, J. 14 Herder, Johann Gottfried 418, 428, 432

Index heresy 38, 46, 103, 132, 139, 159, 166, 174, 197, 358, 368, 420, 424 heritage 108, 114–15, 269, 484 Herlihy, D. 98 hermaphrodites 51, 83 Herodotus 3, 64 Herzen, A. 446 Hesse, Landgraviate of 125, 217 Hexter, J. H. 18, 310 High Court of Admiralty 285 Higonnet, P. 460 Hindu 57, 60, 64, 276 Hinloch, John 287 Hippel, Theodor von 425 historicism 7, 289, 331, 398–9. 471, 480; see also New Historicism Historische Anthropologie, journal 473 history from below 8, 128–9, 130, 132–5, 137, 140–1, 151, 153, 274–5, 356–62, 458–61 history of ideas 329, 332–7, 388–93, 427–30 Hitler, Adolf 428–30 Hobbes, Thomas 215, 220, 375, 391, 395, 401–4, 406–7 holiness/holy 22, 25–6, 29, 46, 58, 61, 105–6, 108, 125, 131, 161, 220, 336, 449, 478 Hohenstaufen dynasty 22–3 Holland see Dutch Netherlands Holocaust 235, 417–18, 428, 430–1, 435 Holstein 276 Holy Roman Empire 23–4, 114, 125, 130, 155, 171, 216, 234, 244, 252, 368, 447; see also German homosexuality 84, 99 honour 24, 36, 80, 105, 112, 135, 225, 361 408 Höpfl, H. 404 Horkheimer, M. 417–18, 430–2, 437, 440 Hornius, G. 21 Hornschuch, Hieronymus 163–4 Hoste, Pere 253–4 Houghton, J. 201 household goods 34, 185, 188–91, 198–9, 203–4, 303–6, 393–7; see also consumerism; material culture Houston, R. A. 152, 181 Howell, M. 190 Hsia, R. Po-chia 124 Hufton, O. 445, 462 Hughes, J. S. 61 Huguenots 235, 280

501

Huijgen van Linschoten, Jan 50 Humanities 473, 485; Humanities Research Institute 485 humanism 28–9, 96, 104–5, 108–9, 126–7, 130, 154–60, 393–7 Hume, David 420, 433–4 humours 150, 377 Hungarian/Hungary 36, 54, 103, 152, 154–5, 256, 276, 443 Hunt, L. 65, 82, 448, 454, 462–3, 469–70 Hutton, R. 378–9 hybridity 141, 224, 279, 482 Iceland 276 icons/iconoclasm/iconography/iconology 61, 70, 222, 474–5 identities 12, 47, 49–51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 72, 84, 100, 120, 272–3, 334, 342, 344, 428, 473; collective 104; colonial 273; communal 134; European 10; gender 72, 84, 86; human 275, 433; moral 436; multiple 203; personal 336, 473; public 101–2, 105; national 123, 289–90; religious 115, 283, 433; scientific 344–5 ideologies see political thought illustrations 84, 93, 184, 227, 254, 345–7, 371, 475 impartiality 5–6, 369–70, 430–2, 440–1 incommensurability 55–6 Incas 50, 55, 222, 276 Independents 390 Index librorum prohiborum 127, 174 India(n) 49–50, 52–7, 59–60, 63–4, 173, 195, 227, 234, 268, 271, 273–4, 276–7, 279, 305, 308 Indian Ocean 49, 64, 276–7, 279 Indians, American see Americans, native individualism 96–7, 100–5, 120, 139, 202, 394–6, 402–3 Indonesia 53, 276–7 indulgences 35, 165 Industrial Revolution 55, 97, 289, 298–300, 302, 309, 314–19; see also commerce industrious revolution 186–8, 214, 311 information, increase of 156–60 inheritance 5, 51, 83, 98, 149–50, 171, 183, 190, 217, 305, 405, 462 Innocent III, Pope 23 Inquisition (Roman/Spanish/Venetian) 80, 101, 152–3, 174, 235, 340–1, 473 intercession 20, 148, 478, 483

502

Index

international (relations) 15, 31, 111, 113, 151, 166, 169, 196, 215, 219, 221, 227, 232, 249, 256, 258, 280, 290, 298–9, 310, 312–13, 316, 365, 374, 405, 408, 434, 442, 450, 485; and see diplomacy International Court of Justice 442 International Criminal Court 442 inventories 184, 186–7, 190, 192–3, 287–8, 303–5, 311 Inverness 251 Iran 49, 58 Iraq 284 Ireland 84, 87, 106, 154, 193, 235, 325, 276, 280, 283, 335, 389–90; home rule 289–90 Isabella, Queen of Castile 52, 232, 268 Isiah 20 Islam 54, 115, 162, 252, 338, 355 Israel, J. 417, 419, 420 Israel(ites) 123 Istanbul 171, 228 Italy/Italian 1, 7–8, 21, 23–4, 26, 28, 30–1, 34–6, 96–100, 102–3, 105–15, 119–20, 126–7, 133–5, 147–8, 153–5, 160, 165–6, 169, 171, 174, 189–90, 193, 203, 213–14, 216, 225, 244, 250–2, 255, 260, 306, 308–9, 315, 317, 327, 335, 368, 393–6, 398, 473, 485 Jackson, Andrew 74 Jacob, M. 65, 316–17, 420 Jacobins 227, 233, 424, 445, 448, 460–2 James II, King of England 247, 446 James IV, King of Scotland 222 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England 47, 224, 340, 400 James, M. 48 Jamestown 63 Jansenists 448–9 Japan(ese) 56, 59, 161–2, 173, 252, 275–6, 308, 430 Jardine, L. 188 Java 63 Jefferson, Thomas 221, 234 Jenkins, K. 489 Jeremiah 21 Jesuits 52, 59–60, 62, 125, 155, 162, 169, 173–4, 223–4, 285, 390, 392, 398, 404–5 Jews 26, 86–7, 105, 126, 161, 163, 216, 224–5, 227–8, 234–5, 276, 280–1, 283–4, 420, 422, 429, 454 João, King 49

John the Baptist 20–1 Johnson, S. 3, 54 Johnstone family 284 joint stock companies 228, 268–9, 277, 313 Jones, C. 450 Jonson, Ben 169, 171 Jordan, C. 83 Joshua 26, 32 Judas Maccabeus 26 Judson, M. 400 Justi, J. H. G. von 230 Kant, Immanuel 215, 420–3, 425, 29, 433–4, 442 Keller, E. Fox 339, 341 Kelley, D. R. 3 Kelly, M. 196 Kelly-Godol, J. 74, 79, 98 Kempe, Margery 48 Kepler, Johannes 32, 103, 361; Katharina 361 Kew 285 Kidwell, C. S. 63 Kieckhefer, R. 366–7 Kiev 227 Kiliński, Jan 236 King, Gregory 301–2, 305, 325–6 Klaniczay, G. 378 Klapisch-Zuber, C. 98 Kongo 61, 63 Korea 162 Kosciusko, Tadeusz 233 Koyré, A. 337 Kraków 181, 227 Kristeller, P. O. 126 Kromer, Marcin 216 Kublai Khan 51 Kuhn, T. 330–1, 337–8, 351–2 Kümin, B. 15 Kwass, M. 192 L’viv 227, 234 Laband, P. 390 labour relations 24, 76–8, 111, 186–7, 201–2, 226, 278, 299–305, 306–7, 209, 315–17, 327, 419; see also class distinctions; manufacturing Labouvie, E. 359 Labrousse, E. 300 Lach, D. 53 Lacombe, Claire 461 Ladies, Peace of the 232

Index Lafayette, Marquis de 221, 455 Lafitau, Joseph-François 52 laity 25, 28, 32, 37, 48, 106, 108, 112, 133–4, 149, 325, 365, 390 Lally-Tollendal, Deputy 458 Landes, J. 445, 462 Languedoc 181 Lanser, S. 84 Laon 365 Lapeyres index 307 Las Casas, Bartolomé 52, 63–4 Latin 2, 10, 21, 23, 25, 29, 31–2, 35, 51, 102–5, 108–9, 115, 121–2, 150, 153–7, 159, 219–20, 222, 236, 268, 277, 346, 354, 370 Latour, B. 204 Latvia 154 Laudan, L. 329–41 Laven, M. 62 Lavoisier, Antoine 227, 352 law of nations 405, 415 Law of Suspects (1793) 460 Le Picart, François 169 Le Prestre, Sébastien (Marshal Vauban) 231, 235, 252 Le Roy, Louis 218 Le Roy Ladurie, E. 299–300 Le Tellier, Michel 256 Leavelle, T. N. 60 Lecouteux, C. 378 Lefebvre, G. 453 legitimation, theory of 395 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 477 Leiden 54, 197, 303–5 Leipzig 225 Leo III, Pope 23 León, Piedro Cieza de 64 Léon, Pauline 461 Lepanto, Battle of (1571) 244 letters see correspondence lettres de cachet 453, 462 Leuven/Louvain 114, 158 Levack, B. 356, 365, 378 Levant 158 Leyster, Judith 74–5 Liberalism 399, 389–93, 420–1, 436, 463–4 libraries 166–7 limbo 478 Lincolnshire 152 Lindert, P. H. 305, 325 Lindet, R. 461

503

Linguistic Turn 81–3, 133–4, 394–9, 473–4, 479–80 Linguistic diversity 154 Linnaeus, Carl 230 Liotard, Jean-Etienne 191 Lipsius, Justus 398 literacy 13, 31, 59, 98, 102, 105, 114, 136, 150, 152–4, 160, 162–3, 166, 168–9, 173, 181, 224, 231, 288, 358, 369–70, 475, 482 literary evidence/studies 14, 21, 30, 38, 50, 53–6, 74–5, 79, 81, 83–5, 97, 101, 151, 156–7, 160, 270, 272, 289, 340, 417, 419, 432, 435, 449, 473, 477, 482 Lithuania see Poland-Lithuania Livy 3–5 Locke, John 54, 219, 390, 402 Lodi 111 Lombard, P. 26 Lombardy 25, 99, 111 London 114–15, 152, 154, 169–70, 193, 281, 283–4, 307, 326, 335, 402; Great Fire of 237; London School of Economics 301; Royal Society 331, 335 Lorraine 356, 360, 386 Lortz, J. 128, 146 Lotter, Melchior 34 Louis XIII, King of France 224 Louis XIV, King of France 84, 175, 223–6, 229, 235, 245, 247, 249, 256, 446, 475 Louis XV, King of France 219 Louis XVI, King of France 225, 449, 452, 454–5, 460–1 Louis XVIII, King of France 463 Louisiana 63, 85, 277 Love, H. 160 Lovejoy, A. O. 428–30, 432 Löw, M. 477, 490 Low Countries see Netherlands Loyola, St Ignatius 52 Lübeck 137 Lublin 234 Lucretius 109 Luebke, D. M. 94–5 Lufft, Hans 34 Luther, M. 19–20, 29, 34, 39, 46–7, 54, 76, 103, 114, 123, 126–7, 130–2, 134, 138, 159, 164, 168, 181–2, 234, 368, 441, 484; see also Reformation Lützen, Battle of (1632) 249 luxury 24, 33, 109, 113, 186–8, 190, 192–7, 199–202, 213–14; see also consumerism

504

Index

Lycurgus 114 Lynn, J. 260 Lyon(s) 136, 147–8, 154, 165, 303, 461 Mably, Abbé Gabriel Bonnot Macaulay, Th. B. 390 MacCormack, S. 64 MacCulloch, D. 122 Machiavelli, N. 1, 5, 9, 47, 84, 98–9, 101, 104, 109, 215–16, 218, 245, 394–5, 397–9; Machiavellian Moment 394–5, 399 Macpherson, C. B. 402 Maddison, A. 307–9, 328 Madeira 155, 268 Madrid 166 Magdeburg, Sack of 235 Magellan, Ferdinand 311 magic 24, 37, 103, 140, 148, 333, 341, 352–3, 356–8, 360, 362–6, 369–71, 385–7, 439; see also popular culture Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft, journal 356 Magna Carta 401–2, 446, 454 Maine 227 Mainz 34 Maistre, Joseph de 417, 424 Maitland, F. W. 392, 407 Malay(sia) 62–3, 276 maleficium 360, 367, 368–9 Mali 276 Malia, M. 446 Malthus, Thomas Robert 299 Mandeville, Bernard 197, 199, 201–2 Mandeville, Sir John 51 Mandrou, R. 157 manufacturing 11, 33–4, 109–11, 185, 226; see also economic developments; proto-industrialisation manuscripts 13, 24, 34, 151, 159–60, 166–7, 169, 171, 174, 278, 282, 346, 351, 354 Manutius/Manuzio, Aldus 34, 159 Manzoni, Domenico 225 maps 10, 54, 124, 157, 159, 173, 182, 204, 217, 230, 256, 268, 272, 276, 311, 481 Maria Theresa, of Austria 232 Marianas 276 Marina, Dona (La Malinche) 63 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France 449, 463 Markoff, J. 455, 457, 468 Marlborough, Duke of 260

Maroons 280–1, 283 marriage 36–7, 62–3, 76, 80–1, 85–7, 93–5, 98–9, 154, 175, 229, 231–2, 278, 282, 300–1, 359, 461–2, 476 Martin, J. C. 458, 460, 469 Martin, J. J. 100 Martinique 277–8 martyrs 4, 79, 160 Marx, K./Marxism 7, 74, 76, 108, 136, 230, 300, 332, 334, 394, 402, 415, 432, 445, 447–8, 470–1 Mary, Queen of Scots 232 masculine/masculinity 37, 62, 73, 79–81, 83–4, 87, 99, 101, 339–41, 359 Mason, George 234 Massey, D. 477 Matar, N. 54 material culture 11, 13, 111, 183–90, 192–7, 202–5, 214, 311, 328, 334, 385, 395, 474, 476–7, 479, 481, 486 Material Turn 204–6 mathematics 32, 103, 150, 152, 175, 316, 338, 343, 345, 351, 355, 374, 431, 441 Matthee, R. 58 Maurice of Nassau 246, 249–50, 398 Maximilian I, Emperor 171 Maxson, B. 105 Maza, S. 449 McCants, A. 192 McIlwain, C. 399–400 McIntyre, A. 435 McKendrick, N. 183–5, 192 McMahon, D. 448 McPhee, P. 470 media, forms of 8, 13, 94, 133–4, 150–1, 156, 168–9, 174–5, 474–5, 484, 486; see also books medical developments 33, 38, 53, 101, 103, 252, 346–7, 377 Medici dynasty 104; Catherine de 222, 232; Cosimo de 103, 396 medieval see Middle Ages Mediterranean 49, 54, 110, 115, 158, 190, 244, 254–5, 268, 276, 307, 312, 477 Mehmed II, Sultan 23, 49 Meinecke, F. 397 melancholy 377 Melanchthon, P. 20–1 memory 21–2, 31, 107, 156, 169, 275, 279, 310, 474, 484 Mendels, F. 300, 319 Mendelssohn, Moses 420, 422–3 mendicants see religious houses

Index Menig, Jost 152 mentalities 110, 136, 140, 337, 441, 447, 473, 477, 483 mercantilism/cameralism 197, 201, 229–30, 242, 249, 257, 313 mercenaries 80–1, 225, 258, 267; see also warfare Merchant, C. 340–1 Mercury 151 Merian, Maria Sibylla 284 Merrick, J. 84 Merton, R. K. 342 Merton Thesis 342 Messina 155 mestizo 87 metaphysics 35, 330, 344, 431, 440–1, 476, 478 Methodism 435 methodology 6, 14, 16, 205–6, 269, 272–4, 289, 300–1, 307, 327, 363, 403, 408, 473–5, 477, 480, 482, 486 Mexico 52, 56, 61–3, 162, 165, 307 Michelangelo 74, 174 Michelet, J. 96 microhistory 7–8, 102–3, 153, 274–5, 297, 360, 473; see also history from below microscope 355 Middle Ages 4–5, 10–12, 18, 21–30, 32–4, 36–9, 47–8, 51, 64, 76, 80, 86, 93–4, 96, 100, 104, 106, 111, 119, 120–2, 124, 127–30, 132–4, 136–7, 140–1, 146–7, 150, 154, 189–90, 215–16, 225, 234, 246, 250–1, 260, 266, 268, 299, 306, 308, 311–13, 315, 327, 337–8, 354–5, 357, 365–8, 391–2, 395, 403, 414, 471, 478, 484 middle class see middling sort Middle East 54, 162, 279, 478 middling sort 36, 78, 80, 183, 189–90, 192, 196–7, 289, 359, 373, 450, 469; see also bourgeois; class distinctions Midelfort, H. C. Erik 361, 368–9 migration 9, 14, 25, 49, 154, 231, 234, 284–5, 289, 405 Milan 110–11, 150, 172, 393, 398 milieu 399, 482 Military Revolution 13, 28, 225–6, 244–67; see also warfare Mill, J. S. 237 millennialism 19, 46, 97, 119–20, 131–3 Miller, J. 448 Milton, John 397

505

Ming dynasty 49, 173, 193 Mintz, S. 194–5 missionaries 50–2, 56–7, 59–65, 173–4, 269, 280, 283–5 Mississippi 85, 277 Mitchell, W. J. T. 474 Modell, J. 56, 70 modernity 7, 12, 18, 75, 97, 124, 141, 190, 225, 248, 328, 393, 395, 407, 418, 420, 437, 476 Moeller, B. 136 Mokyr, J. 316–17 Molina, M. 63 Monarchomachs 391–2 monarchs see princes monasteries see religious houses Mongolia(n) 49, 51 monopolies 99, 130, 147, 166, 216, 227–8, 235, 268, 281, 387 Montaigne, Michel de 74, 100–1, 166 Monter, W. 368 Montesquieu 167 Montezuma 55 Moors 115, 135 morality 4–8, 15, 30, 36, 38, 50, 52, 80–1, 99, 130, 147, 150–1, 155, 157, 169–70, 183, 187, 189–90, 196–7, 201–3, 214, 221, 233, 337, 339, 345, 370, 372, 394, 397–8, 403, 417, 421, 424–7, 433, 435–6 Moravi(n Church) 280–1, 283, 435 More, Henry 375 More, Sir Thomas 473 Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas 448 Moriscos 235, 364 Morrall, J. 408 Morroco/Moroccan 49, 252, 276, 282, 284 Moses 19, 123, 426 Mounier, Jean-Joseph 453 Mozambique 276 Mughals 49, 55 Muir, E. 12 Mukerji, C. 204 Murray, M. 357, 359, 366 Munich 485; Bavarian State Library 485 Münster, Sebastian 160 Muscovy 163, 217 museums 74, 166, 187–8, 204 music 26, 73, 75, 98, 150, 168, 173, 429, 473 Muslim(s) 54–5, 58, 62, 64–5, 86, 105, 163, 235, 276, 282, 284

506

Index

mystic(ism) 25, 147, 333 myths 10, 61, 63, 129, 135, 221, 345, 357, 367, 430–2, 439–41, 448, 460, 463, 469 Naarden 251 Najemi, J. 396 Nantes 234, 461; Edict of 173 Naples 99, 108, 114, 260 Napoleon(ic) 233, 245, 260, 301, 303, 388, 434, 440, 455, 462–3; Code Napoléon 233, 462 nationalism 7–8, 130, 272–3, 428–30, 440 National Accounting Methodology 307, 327 National Assembly in France 453–6, 461, 468–9; National Convention 454, 457–8, 460–1; and see Constituent Assembly National Socialism 428–9, 432–4, 436, 477 natural law 399, 402–5, 408, 415 Natural Philosophy 32, 147, 334, 339, 342–4, 354–5, 375, 386–7 Navarre 47 navies 28, 227, 253–7, 259, 262, 276, 285, 313 Necker, Jacques 449, 452 Nederman, C. 392 Nedham, Marchamont 394, 397 Needham, J. 338 neighbours 38, 113, 125, 127, 152, 18, 276, 304, 360–1, 424, 450 Neoplatonism 333, 387 Neostoicism 398–9 Netherlands 23–4, 35, 55, 106, 114, 133, 154–5, 165–6, 174–5, 185, 190, 194, 202–3, 216–17, 219, 222, 225–6, 232–6, 251–2, 268, 273, 276–7, 280, 283, 306, 308–9, 312–13, 315, 317, 368, 443, 476; and see Dutch Neudietendorf 283 New Amsterdam see New York New Economic History 301 New England 160, 162, 193 New Historicism 100–2, 419–20, 473 New World see America New York 280, 282, 286 New Zealand 277 newspaper 151, 169, 171–2, 182, 224, 449–50 Newman, W. 353 Newton, Isaac 32, 40, 227, 316, 330–2, 343–5, 352–4, 387, 477

Niclaes, Henrik 166 Nicodemus, Gospel of 478 Nider, Johannes 366 Nièvre 461 Nigg, Anton 483 Ninety-Five Theses 234, 484 Noah 33 Noailles, Louis-Marie 455 Nobili, Robert 60 nobility/nobles 26–8, 86, 88, 95, 97, 101, 119, 130, 135–7, 152, 165, 181, 189, 213, 216, 223, 226, 229, 236, 248, 256, 262, 367, 393, 452–3, 455–6, 458 Nördlingen, Battle of (1634) 250, 260 Normandy 229, 359 North, D. 318 North German Federation 389 North Sea 192, 254 Northern Europe 26, 33, 35, 51, 79, 109, 126, 244 Norton, M. 195 Norway 276 Novalis 428 nunneries see religious houses Nyduka 281 Nyhart, L. K. 336 O’Brien, P. 298–9, 308, 310, 315, 318 Ó Gráda, C. 196 Oakley, F. 392, 408 Oath of Allegiance (1605) 389 Oberman, H. 46, 128, 146 objectivity 5–6; see also impartiality Obry, Nicole 365 oceanic history 279–80 Occam 146–7 Odoacer 23 OECD 307 Oestreich, G. 398–9 Ogilvie, S. 193, 312–13, 315 Old Regime 443, 447–50, 452–4, 456, 462–3, 468; see also Ancien Régime Oldridge, D. 363–4 Oporinus, Johannes 160 Oppenheimer, Samuel 225 orality 8, 51, 151, 153, 157, 160, 169, 173–4, 370–1, 374, 450 ordinary people see common people Oresme 351 Orientalism 50–6 Othello 87

Index Ottomans 23, 49, 52, 54–5, 76, 115, 162–3, 171, 193, 217, 222, 227–8, 244, 252, 256, 276, 281; see also Turks Ottonian dynasty 23 Outram, D. 15 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de 63 Oxford 7, 54 Ozment, S. 39 Ozouf, M. 449 Pacific 55, 277, 279 Pacioli, Luca 150, 225 Padgett, J. 113 Padua 223 pagan(ism) 22, 26, 57, 61, 64, 105, 114, 127, 133, 435 Pagden, A. 56, 63, 417, 420, 433–7, 441–2 Paine, Tom 219, 222 palaces 107, 110–13, 217, 444, 459, 461 palaeography 482 Palatinate, of Kraków 181; Upper 125 Pallache, Samuel 284 Pallm d’Aelders, Etta 461 Palmer, R. R. 460 Panofsky, E. 475 pantheism 419–20 Papal State 23, 39; see also popes Paramaribo 280 Paris 31, 77–8, 85, 156, 165, 169, 192–4, 196, 224, 227, 301, 376, 444–5, 448–50, 457–61, 470, 473; Académie des Sciences 331; Archbishop of 448; Bastille 227, 444, 447, 450, 455, 458–9, 469; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes 301; Parlement of 224, 376, 449; Sorbonne 447; Tuileries palace 444, 459, 461 parish(es) 25, 48, 77, 106, 128–30, 133–4, 136–41, 152, 154, 231, 301, 325–6, 442, 478, 483 Parker, C. 12 Parker, G. 250–3, 256, 258–60, 262 Parliaments 83, 216, 219, 225, 248, 318, 389–93, 400–2, 404, 415; see also Sejm Parrott, David 258–9, 262 Paul, Apostle 20–1, 127 Paul IV, Pope 174 Pavia 110–11; Battle of 28 peasant(ry) 8, 73, 88, 102–3, 111, 181, 185, 221, 226, 237, 299, 415, 452, 455–7; see also rural Peasants’ War, German 137

507

pedlars 166 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 158 Peltonen, M. 396 performance 70, 82–3, 100, 102, 105, 149, 175, 298, 365, 378, 398, 459, 474 periodisation 6, 12, 15, 18, 74, 76, 79, 115, 337, 360, 386, 443, 485; see also chronology; early modernity Persia(n) 50, 52, 54, 58, 64, 276 Peru 52, 56, 62–4, 162 Peter the Great, of Russia 260 petitions 169, 444, 454, 460–1; Petition of Right (1628) 401 Petrarch 4, 21, 31, 96–7 Pfister, U. 310 Philip II, King of Spain 130, 244, 247, 249–50, 477 Philippines 56, 61–2, 63, 276 philology 96, 108–9, 114, 159 philosophy 3–7, 12, 14, 24–6, 30, 32, 35, 40, 64–5, 100, 126, 136, 147, 150, 155–6, 175, 201–2, 204, 215–16, 220, 230, 234, 271–2, 329–34, 337, 339–40, 342–4, 354–5, 375, 386–7, 389, 393, 398, 417–21, 423, 425, 428–30, 432, 435–7, 439–41, 449, 471, 477 Piattoli, Abbé 234 Picart, Bernard 65 Pietism 435 Pincus, S. 9, 446 piracy/pirates 54, 113, 157, 159, 227, 254–5, 286, 312–13 Pistoia 110 Pitkin, H. 98 Pizan, Christine de 74 plantations 272–3, 277, 281–3; see also colonisation Plantin, Christophe 159, 166 plants 52–3, 341, 355 Plato 32, 35, 333, 351, 387 Plumb, J. H. 183 Plutarch 31 Plymouth 254 Pocahontas 63 Pocock, J. G. A. 215, 394–7, 399–400, 404, 408, 414 Pócs, E. 378 Poggio Bracciolini, Gianfrancesco 395 Poland(-Lithuania)/Polish(-Lithuanian Commonwealth) 36, 103, 114, 154–5, 216–19, 223, 227–9, 234–5, 245, 276, 306, 446; Constitution of 1791 217; Partitions 234

508

Index

Policeyordnungen 229 political thought 7–8, 27, 215–16, 218–22, 236–7, 388–94, 397, 399–400, 402, 404, 407–8, 414, 439, 481; see also governance politiques 392 Polo, Marco 51 Poltava, Battle of (1709) 260 Polynesia 55 Pomeranz, K. 195, 274, 314 Pontano 190, 203 popes 125, 161, 166, 224, 269, 335, 389–90, 448; papal infallibility 389–90 popular culture 38, 80, 104, 132–3, 168, 173–4, 356–9, 361–5, 367–71, 374, 377–9, 385; see also history from below popular religion 37, 128–9, 132–7, 140–1 population 33, 105, 111, 230–1, 301–3, 325–6, 483 Port Royal 277 Portsmouth 254 Portugal/Portuguese 36, 49, 55–6, 59, 63–4, 87, 106, 193, 222, 233–4, 268–9, 272, 276–7, 281–2 Poska, A. 63 postal services 171–3, 182 Postcolonial Studies 270–2 posterity 357, 441, 483 Postmodernism 9, 81–3, 100, 271–2, 408, 472, 479–80, 485, 489 power, notions of 7–8, 215–16, 218–23, 226, 228–9, 232–3, 236–7, 242, 245–8, 250, 256, 270–1, 289, 298, 357, 378, 390–2, 395, 397–400, 407, 414, 423, 425, 428–32, 436–7, 439, 441, 447, 458, 460, 473, 475, 477, 479, 481; see also governance; political thought Prados de la Escosura, L. 305 Prak, M. 14 prejudice 5, 50, 54, 56, 96, 436 Preternature, journal 356 prices 33, 74, 78, 147, 162, 186–7, 190, 195–6, 226–7, 300–1, 306, 310, 312, 419, 452, 461 Priestley, Joseph 40 primary sources see sources princes 1, 7, 28, 47, 52, 54, 83–4, 98–9, 101, 114, 123, 130–2, 158–9, 215, 217, 219, 221, 225, 228, 230, 232, 245–9, 260, 268, 289, 396–400, 415, 425, 446, 453 Printing Revolution 13, 27, 29–32, 34–5, 63, 97, 103, 110, 133–4, 151, 160, 163,

224–5, 246, 345–7, 371, 449–50; see also books; media privileges 28, 101, 166, 183, 214, 219, 221, 226, 248, 425, 451–3, 455–6, 461, 464, 468 Prize Papers 286–9 processions 48, 105–6, 133–5, 283 prostitutes 99, 102 Proteus 341 Protestantism 19, 124–41, 152–3, 283, 342, 362; see also Reformation proto-industry 8, 97, 187–8, 300, 315–16 Provence 158 providence 4–5, 20, 58, 109, 140, 148–9, 160, 164, 343, 372–3, 375, 399, 427 Prussia(n) 7, 96, 126, 217, 226, 229–30, 233, 235, 249, 390, 397, 420, 422, 443 psychoanalysis 359, 377–8 psychology 83, 98, 100, 360, 433 Ptolemy 32 public culture 105, 152–3, 174–5, 420–22, 449–50, 462–3, 477–9 public houses 85, 105, 153, 181, 471, 477 public opinion 13, 141, 392, 449–50, 470 Pufendorf, Samuel von 220, 403 purgatory 478 Purim festival 281, 283–4 Puritans 83, 129, 342 Putnam, L. 297 Pythagoras 150 Qing dynasty 49, 55 quantitative history/methods 8, 11, 14, 24, 98, 152, 182, 230, 233–4, 262, 300–1, 310, 315, 317, 319, 327, 352, 359, 460, 485 Quebec 277 Rabelais 31–2 race 72, 82, 86–7, 94, 104, 120, 221, 237, 271–2, 339, 418, 425, 429, 427, 482 Rader, Matthäus 125 Radical Enlightenment 419–20 Raleigh, Sir Walter 280 Ramée, Pierre de la 156 Ramism 156–7 Ranke, L. v. 7, 9, 332, 389 Raphael 174 Rationalism, rise of 269, 344–5, 369–70, 375–9, 386–7, 421–2, 425, 429–32 reading 152–3; see also literacy reason of state 36, 397–9, 415 records see sources

Index Reformation 5, 19, 25, 29–31, 35, 37, 39–40, 79–80, 112, 121–49, 160, 168, 173, 182, 337, 345, 358, 362–3, 365, 367–8, 447, 475; and book 133–4, 168–9, 173–4; definition of 122–3; impact of 138–41, 365; in England 123, 128–9; in France 136; in Germany 125–6, 130–2, 136–7; origins of 39–40, 126–32; and women 79–80; see also Catholic Reformation; Protestantism Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 423 Reinhard, W. 139, 242 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 420 religion, passim: and Enlightenment 423–5, 433–4, 448–9; and magic 357–8; and science 343–46; popular forms 106, 112, 128–9, 132–7, 140–1, 148–9, 365; and state 129–30, 139–40, 219; see also Reformation religious conflict 234–6 religious houses 4, 25, 29, 37, 98, 106, 108–9, 125, 133, 135, 153, 169, 233, 371, 485 Renaissance 1, 5–6, 29–30, 35, 51, 74–6, 96–120, 124, 126–8, 134–5, 154–9, 175, 188–90, 198, 213–14, 393–4; individualism 100–5; interpretation of 96–8; notions of history 1, 4–5, 126–7; political thought of 393–7; religion in 105–9, 135–6; trade 109–15; and women 74, 98–9; see also humanism representation(s) 8, 26, 50, 82, 94, 174, 198, 205, 221, 242, 343, 391–2, 395, 402–4, 407–8, 419, 434, 463, 472–5, 477, 479–83, 486, 489 republicanism 104–5, 202, 219–21, 393–7, 415 resistance 15, 27, 79, 93, 110, 162, 219, 224, 226, 247, 273, 330, 392, 400, 436, 450, 452, 454, 456, 489 Reuchlin, Johannes 114 revolts see resistance revolution(s) 5, 10, 12, 14, 27, 32, 97, 105, 113, 124, 132, 137, 147, 338, 367, 391, 429, 432, 443, 445–7; American 219, 394, 444, 447; Atlantic 235; bourgeois 445, 447; Dutch 443, 447; English 235, 404, 446; French 15, 73, 219, 221, 224–6, 233, 245, 247, 260, 303, 317, 388–9, 417–18, 424, 428, 432, 434, 440, 443–70; Glorious 248, 318, 390, 443, 446; see also communication; consumer; digital; industrial;

509

industrious; printing; military; scientific revolutions Revolutionary Tribunal 458, 460 rhetoric 3, 37, 155, 215, 218–19, 222, 333, 340, 396, 450, 462 Rhine 154, 158 Ricci, M. 60, 62, 162, 174 Richer, Edmond 224 Riello, G. 195 riots see resistance Rise of the West 65, 76, 167, 245, 262, 267, 273, 338, 345 rituals 48, 105, 108, 133–5, 149–50, 356–7, 362, 444, 473 Roberts, M. 246–53, 256, 258–60, 262, 266–7 Robespierre 74, 460 Roche, D. 196 Rocke, M. 99 Rocroi, Battle of (1643) 250, 260 Rodger, N. A. M. 253 Rogers, C. 259 Roland, Manon 461 Romanov dynasty 49 Romantic(ism) 428–30, 433, 439–40 Rome 1, 3–4, 6, 19, 21–3, 27–8, 51, 57, 64, 96, 101, 104, 106, 108–9, 112, 114–15, 121, 126, 130, 132, 160, 166, 171, 174, 222, 224, 230, 233, 269, 272, 307, 390–1, 393, 396–8, 404–5; Roman Law 390–1, 405 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Romanet, Daniel 373 Romanov dynasty 49 Romolus Augustulus, Roman Emperor 23 Rooke, Sir George 255 Roper, L. 359, 361, 378 Rorty, R. 417, 420, 435–7 Rosdorf 284 Ross, S. G. 98 Rotterdam 234 Rouen 222–3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 215, 222, 425–6, 445, 448, 462 Rowlands, A. 368 Royal Society 331, 335 Rubens, Peter Paul 174 Rubiés, J. P. 64 Rublack, U. 361 Rucellai, Giovanni 107 Ruggiero, G. 97, 100, 119 Rummel, E. 128 rumour 171, 225, 374, 450

510

Index

rural 8, 24–5, 48, 79–80, 109, 111–12, 125, 136–9, 185, 187, 226, 229, 231, 233, 248, 289, 300, 302, 304, 306, 316, 357, 361, 363, 368, 386, 452, 455, 457, 481, 483; see also peasant(ry) Russia(n) 49, 163, 217–8, 226–8, 230–2, 234, 236, 432, 443, 445–6 Ryckbosch, W. 13 Sabbat 374 Sabine, J. H. 399 Sacagewea 63 Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg 283 sacramentals 140, 365 sacred see holiness Safavids 49, 58, 222 Sahagún, Bernadino de 63 Sahara 59, 110, 276, 307 Şahin, K. 58 Said, E. 50, 53–5 Saint-Claude, diocese 373 Saint-Dié 386 Saint-Domingue 455 Saint-Etienne, Rabaut 447 saints 4, 20, 26, 29, 52, 61, 63, 106, 125, 127, 129, 133, 135, 173–4, 386, 478 Salamanca 54, 63 Sale, city of 282 Salian dynasty 23 Salis family 153 salons 449 San Juan, C. de 63 sans-culottes 444, 459–60 Sanskrit 54 Saramaka 281 Sardinia 155 Sarpi, Fra Paolo 109, 224 Satan see devil Savannah island 281 Savoy 251–2, 256 Saxony, Electorate of 125, 182, 217, 249, 276, 310 Scandella, Domenico (‘Menocchio’) 153 Scandinavia 168, 193 scepticism 104, 375–8, 403 Schama, S. 202, 469 Schedel, H. 19 Schiller, Friedrich von 429 Schilling, H. 139–40 Schleck, J. 58 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 440 Schmidt, James 424, 431

Scholasticism 22, 24, 29, 128, 146, 150, 155, 333, 441 Schwartz, S. 56, 70–1 scientific rationalism, rise of 369–70, 375–8, 430–2, 440–1; see also impartiality Scientific Revolution 14, 32, 65, 73, 151, 174–5, 204–5, 266, 316–17, 329–55, 375; and gender 339–42; origins of 337–40, 354–5; theories of 337–46, 351–2, 397–9 Scipio 20, 251 Scot, R. 375–6 Scotland/Scottish 36, 47, 97, 103, 106, 149, 152, 154, 166, 168, 222, 224, 232, 284, 325, 335, 356, 359, 364, 378 Scott, J. 72 Scotus 147 Scribner, R. W. 133, 356, 362, 385 Scriptures see Bible sectarianism 390 secularisation 99, 108–9, 342–6, 362–5, 393–4, 432–6; see also modernisation; disenchantment Seitz, J. 377 Sejm 216–17, 235 Selden, John 403–4 self-fashioning 100–5, 120; see also individualism Senegal 277 September Massacres (1792) 459 Serna, P. 444 servants 20, 77–8, 80–1, 112–13, 181, 184, 198, 231, 262, 284, 343, 371–2, 401, 476 Seville 165 Sewell, W. 450 sex(uality) 12, 53, 61–2, 72–3, 79–87, 93–5, 97, 99, 355, 359, 425, 427, 463, 476; see also gender Shaftesbury, Lord 390 Shakespeare, William 54, 87, 115, 473 Shamanism 57, 64 Shapin, S. 336 Sheffield 485 Shepard, A. 78 Sherley, Sir Anthony 50, 58 Siberia 49, 234 Sicily 155 Sidney, Algernon 219 sieges 28, 171, 248, 251–2, 255, 260 Sieyès, Abbé 450–1, 453 Sigismund, Emperor 131

Index sincerity 100, 285, 425 Skinner, Q. 215, 392, 394–7, 407 Slack, P. 201 slaves/slavery 14, 50, 62–3, 200, 227–8, 233–4, 237, 268–73, 277–8, 280–1, 287–9, 415, 418, 425–6, 431, 454–5, 471 Sleidan, J. 19 Slovak 154, 446 Smith, Adam 197, 201, 233, 317 Smith, H. 83 Smith, P. H. 204 Smith,W. D. 196 Soboul, A. 447 Social Constructionism 332–7, 359–60 social history 7–8, 147–8, 136–7, 323–7, 450–2 social sciences 75, 108, 301, 473 Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (*1793) 461 sociology 8, 14, 83, 100, 105, 136, 175, 204, 223, 225, 270, 299, 336, 339, 342, 362, 473, 477 Socrates 57 sodomy 85, 99 Soja, E. 477 Solon 20, 114 Solomon 52 Sommerville, J. 400, 402 Sophocles 334 sources 5–7, 11–12, 14, 27, 32, 37, 50–1, 53, 55–6, 59–60, 63–5, 73, 77, 79, 82–3, 108, 126, 132, 141, 159, 205, 275, 301, 303–4, 307–8, 310, 333–4, 359, 363, 367, 370, 389, 393, 398, 408, 472, 474–5, 480, 482; see also archives South Africa 193, 283 South America 276–7, 280, 284, 443, 445 South Carolina 193 South Sea Bubble/Company 228 Southern Europe 79 sovereign(ty) 28, 107, 148, 215, 219, 228, 242, 245, 388–91, 400, 403–4, 406–8, 415, 429, 458; see also governance; state Soviet Union 54 space, conceptualisation of 276–81, 474–9, 490 Spain/Spanish 27–8, 31, 33, 36, 39, 47, 49–50, 52, 55–6, 59–60, 62–3, 86–7, 102, 106, 109–10, 114–15, 123, 130, 138, 147, 152–3, 165–6, 169, 174, 181, 217, 222, 224–5, 228, 232–5, 244–60, 268–9, 272–3,

511

276, 281–2, 305–6, 309, 335, 398, 415, 443, 447 Spalt/Spalatin, Georg 182 Spinoza, Baruch 234, 420 spirits 61, 360, 364, 375, 385 Spivak, G. C. 271 Sprat, T. 335–6 Sprig, Elisabeth 284–5; John 284–5 Sri Lanka 57, 276 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 235, 390 St Eustache 278 St-Germain-des-Prés 229 St Lucia 277 Stadelin 366–7 Stalin(ism) 432–3 Stanislaus Poniatowski, King of Poland 234 state 27–8, 36, 47, 83, 96, 171, 215–43, 247–9, 256–8, 313–15, 391–2, 397–407; financing of 223–9; foundations of 217–29; ideologies of 218–22, 236–7, 389–93, 394–9, 434, 439–40; relation to Church 129–30, 139–40, 219; and warfare 225–6, 249–62; see also governance statistics see quantitative history Stockholm 283 Stoics 29, 398–9; Neostoicism 398–9 Storrs, C. 13 Strasbourg 137, 152, 169, 171 Strasser, U. 63 Strauss, G. 138 Strier, R. 97 Strozzi family 112–13; Nanni 393–4 Stuart dynasty 396, 400–1 Styles, J. 192, 196–7 Subaltern Studies 271–2 Subrahmanyam, S. 55 sugar 78, 186, 194–5, 277, 281, 310–11 Suleiman I, Sultan 54 Summers, M. 357 supernatural, notions of 38, 103–4, 140, 148–9, 174, 353; see also magic superstition 24, 29, 37, 58, 60–1, 140, 149, 340, 344, 370, 436, 441 Suriname 280–4 Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 356 Sweden/Swedish 77, 152, 226, 230, 245–7, 249–50, 253, 260, 276, 283, 316, 378 Switzerland/Swiss (Confederation) 23, 35, 40, 96, 103, 136–7, 153, 155, 191, 216, 258, 280, 300, 359–60, 483, 485

512

Index

Sydney, Philip 54 Sylvester II, Pope 23 symbol(ism) 23, 37, 48, 56, 59, 73, 84, 93, 107, 132–3, 160, 228, 242, 353, 406, 414, 422, 453, 455, 463, 472, 476, 479 synergism 57–62, 140–1, 148–9 szlachta 216–17 Tacitus 3–5, 222, 398, 415 Tackett, T. 452 Talmud 19 taverns see public houses taxation 25, 28, 113, 226–7, 231, 248, 303, 310, 452, 456 tax farming 227, 452 Taxis, Franz von 171 Taylor, G. 447 Taylor Coleridge, Samuel 54 technology 9, 11, 13, 27, 30, 34, 49, 97, 110, 148, 150–1, 156, 160, 162–3, 171, 195, 205, 250–1, 256, 258, 262, 306, 311–12, 314–18, 328, 342, 417, 431, 441, 484; see also digital/printing revolution Tekakwitha, C. 63 telescope 355 Tennis Court Oath (1789) 453 tercios 250 terminology 49, 83, 352, 357, 371, 395, 481 Terpstra, N. 234 Terror 432, 444–5, 448, 458, 460–1, 463 Texel, Battle of (1673) 254 theatres see drama Themistocles 20 theology 26, 127–8 Thermidor 460, 462 thick description 8, 59, 473 Thirty Years War see War Thomas, C. 463 Thomas, K. 357 Thomasius, Christian 376–7 Thompson, A. 108 Thompson, E. P. 357 Thompson, I. A. A. 257 Thucydides 3 Tibet 49 Tieftrunk, Johann Heinrich 424–5 Tilly, C. 225 Timbuktu 110 Time of Troubles 217 Timurlane 49 tobacco 186, 194–5, 227, 282, 311, 474

Todd, M. 149 Todorov, Tzvetan 55 Togo 281 Tokugawa regime 162 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494) 269 torture 104, 340, 366, 371–2, 374 totalitarian 427, 431, 439–40 Toulon 254 towns see urban town halls 26, 477 trace italienne 251, 253; and see fortifications trade 22, 33, 49–50, 62–3, 78–9, 94, 109–15, 166, 194–6, 237–8, 268, 277–8, 281–2, 283, 286298–328; see also commerce; slaves traitors see treason translatio imperii 23–4 transnational 15, 86, 123, 271, 273–4, 283, 408, 443 Transylvania 103, 155 Traub, V. 84 travel writing 50–3, 54–5 Trent, Council of 124, 130 treason 219, 425, 459 Trentmann, F. 184, 205 Trexler, R. 105, 107 Trinkaus, C. 107 Trismegistus, Hermes 103, 333–4 Trivellato, F. 275 Troeltsch, E. 139, 362 Trumbach, R. 84 truth 4, 5–6, 8–9, 12, 20–1, 26, 32, 35, 57, 81, 123, 134, 138, 159–61, 168, 173–4, 198, 271, 285, 307, 335, 341, 353, 371, 374–6, 387, 390, 398, 403, 420, 422–3, 425–6, 432, 435–6, 439, 445, 463, 481–2, 486 Tuck, R. 403–4, 415 Tudor dynasty 123, 128, 222, 396, 484 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 448, 452 Turin 251–2 Turkestan 49 Turks 49–50, 52, 54–5, 58, 76, 115, 135, 168, 244, 251; see also Ottomans turns (linguistic etc.) 15, 81, 133, 157, 204, 271, 472–4, 477, 479, 486 Tuscany 98–9 Twelve Years Truce (1609) 253 tyranny 54, 96, 104, 218–19, 228, 235, 392, 400, 462, 477

Index Ukraine 217, 227 United Nations 442 United Provinces see Dutch United States (of America) 112, 219, 226, 231, 233–4, 273, 328, 414, 429–31, 448, 485 universe 38, 55, 58, 109, 133, 140, 333–4, 341, 351, 354–5, 363, 435, 452 universitas 391 universities 54, 72, 147, 150, 155, 169, 223, 355, 376, 484–5 urban(isation) 4, 13, 24–8, 35, 38–9, 48, 55, 74–5, 78–80, 97–9, 103–14, 119, 125, 130–2, 134–7, 139, 151–4, 162, 165–6, 171–2, 181, 185–7, 189–93, 196, 203, 214, 216–20, 225–7, 229, 233–5, 237, 248, 251–2, 276, 280, 282–3, 285, 289, 302–7, 313, 318, 326, 363, 368, 396, 416, 444, 452, 457, 459, 461, 475–7, 479; see also city-states Urbino, Nicola da 189 utilitarianism 403–4 Utrecht, Peace of 219, 228 Valencia 235, 364 Valla, L. 5, 108–9, 122 Valois dynasty 216, 218, 244 Van den Bergh, Johan 303–5 Van der Wee, H. 300–1 Van der Woude, A. 310, 315, 328 Van Kley, D. 448–9 Van Leeuwen, B. 308 Van Sommelsdijck family 280 Vatican Council, First 389–90 Vélez, K. 61 venal offices 225, 455, 458 Vendée 460–1 Venice/Venetian 34, 51, 99, 102, 104–5, 107, 109–15, 134–5, 153, 159, 163, 165–6, 171, 174, 198, 203, 224–5, 227–8, 377, 394, 396, 479, 490; Compagnie della Calza 136; Saint Mark’s Basilica 135; Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista 135 Verbiest, Ferdinand 162 vernacular 5, 31, 102, 104, 109, 114, 153, 157, 159, 168–9, 173, 204, 222, 236, 370, 375 Versailles 84, 454, 458; Peace of 393, 445, 452, 454, 458, 459, 461; see also Women’s March Vesalius, Andreas 38, 347 Vespucci, Amerigo 268

513

Vettori, F. 1 Vézelay 231 Vicenza 110 Vickery, A. 197 Vico, G. 6 Vienna 172, 245, 251–2 Viereck, P. 428–9, 432 Vigarello, G. 197 village(s) see peasant(ry) rural village hall 481 Vilnius 234 Virginia 193, 277; Declaration of Rights 234 virtue, virtú 4, 20–1, 29, 104, 148, 154, 169–70, 197, 199, 201–3, 345, 387, 393, 395–7, 399, 407, 415, 418, 425–7, 435 visual culture 173–4, 474–5, 489 Vitoria, Francisco de 415–16 Vitkus, D. 54 Vives, Juan Luis 146 Voigt, G. 96 Voltaire 6, 420, 423, 425 Vossius, Gerhard 64 Vovelle, M. 447 wages 300–1, 306–8 Wagner, Richard 429 Waldensians 152 Wales 106, 325 Walker, M. 230, 242 Wallenstein, Count 256–7 Wallerstein, I. 299, 319 Walsham, A. 148, 362–3 Walz, R. 361 Warao tribe 281 Warburg, A. 475 warfare 13, 28, 225, 244–67; and army size 252; impact of 248–9, 257–8; relation to state 247–9, 256–8; tactical ; changes 246–54, 256–7, 258–9; see also Military Revolution wars 27–8, 56, 225, 227, 273, 276, 399; American Independence 245, 447; Anglo-Dutch 253; Austrian Succession 217, 245; Cold 54, 183, 185, 245, 273, 332; Dutch 245; Eighty Years 244; First World 254, 393, 395, 397–8, 428, 439, 443, 463, 472; Flour 452; French Religious see civil wars; Great Northern 245, 260; Hundred Years 247, 259; Italian 28, 244, 244; League of Augsburg 245; Napoleonic 245, 260,

514

Index

440; Nine Years 253–4; Polish Succession 217, 245; Revolutionary 245, 452, 461; Second World 7, 39, 104, 221, 417, 428, 430, 439, 443, 472; Seven Years 245; Spanish Succession 217, 225, 228, 245, 252, 254–5, 259–60; Thirty Years 169, 216, 225, 240, 244, 247, 249, 256–8, 260, 484; see also civil wars Warsaw 216, 234, 236; Confederation of 1573 216 Warwickshire 326 Weatherill, L. 192 Weber, M. 108, 139–40, 223, 362, 395 Wedgwood pottery 183 Weimar 257; Republic 393, 397, 434 Weinstein, D. 108 Welch, E. 190 West India Companies 277, 305 West Indies see Caribbean Western Europe 23, 27–8, 47, 60, 73, 97, 162, 169, 187, 193, 203, 222, 245, 249, 262, 281, 298, 307, 327, 338, 345–5, 378 Westmorland 152 Westmoreland, Jamaica 287–8 Westphalia, Peace of 219, 222, 389, 428 Weyer, J. 375–6 Whewell, W. 332 Whig(gism) 18, 331–2, 339, 352, 390, 397, 401, 446 White Mountain, Battle of (1620) 257 Whiston, William 40 White, H. 474 widow(er)s 58, 98, 165, 198, 199, 225, 231 Wieland, Christoph Martin 420 Wiesner-Hanks, M. 12 Wilkes, John 236 William the Silent, Prince of Orange 249 Williams, Roger 251

Williamson, J. G. 305, 325 witchcraft 38, 103–4, 233, Ch. 13 passim 340; decline of 375–8; and gender 358–62; persecution of 366–70, 386; theories of 359–62, 370–4 Wittenberg 123, 125 Woellner, Johann Christoph 423 Wollstonecraft, Mary 222, 425–7 Women’s History 37, 61–3, 72–88 women 37, 61–3, 72–95, 98–9, 203–4, 339–42, 358–62, 378, 386, 419, 425–7, 445, 461–3; and Enlightenment 425–7; and marriage 63, 98–9; and power 73, 82–3, 232–3, 455, 461–3; and science 338–42; social roles 62–3, 98–9; and witchcraft 358–62; and work 76–8; see also gender women’s marches 72; to Versailles (5-6 October 1789) 454, 459, 461 workforce 300–5, 308–9 Württemberg, Duchy of 125, 193, 317, 377 Xavier, Francis 52, 173 Yangzi Delta 195, 274 York, Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture 485; Duke of 254 Zamośċ 227 Zanden, J. Luiten van 167, 308 Zaragoza, Treaty of (1529) 269 Zeeden, E. W. 124 Zeist 283 Zell, Katherine 74 Zilsel, E. 338 Zinzendorf, Ludwig von 122 Zöllner, Johann Friedrich 420 Zuccato, Vincenzo 198–9 Zurich 123, 168 Zwingli, Huldrych 40, 122, 168, 173