Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean 9781782384205

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION Sabean’s Swabians: A Study of Kith and Kin
PART I Kinship
CHAPTER 1 “As a Brother Should Be” Siblings, Kinship, and Community in Carolingian Europe
CHAPTER 2 The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage in Nineteenth-Century France
CHAPTER 3 “Married to the Bottle” Drunk Husbands and Wives in Wilhelmine Germany
CHAPTER 4 A Home for Mothers in Vienna: Community and Crisis
CHAPTER 5 Of Queens and Kinship: Politics and Legacies in the Colonial Pacific
CHAPTER 6 The Making of a Japanese Rural Christian Community: Conversion through Family Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan
PART II Community
CHAPTER 7 Divination and Community in Early Modern Thuringia
CHAPTER 8 Paracelsus: Greed, Self, and Community
CHAPTER 9 From Heretics to Hypocrites: Anti-Pietist Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century
CHAPTER 10 Finding Orthodoxy in the Baltic: Conservative Russia and the Baltic Region in the Nineteenth Century
CHAPTER 11 Women, Railways, and Respectability in Colonial India
CHAPTER 12 Adventures in Terrorism: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky and the Literary Lives of the Russian Revolutionary Community (1860s–80s)
CHAPTER 13 Power in Truth Telling: Jewish Testimonial Strategies before the Shoah
PART III Self
CHAPTER 14 For the Love of Geometry: The Rise of Euclidism in the Early Modern World, 1450–1850
CHAPTER 15 A Private Repulsion toward Public Women in the Letters of Caspar von Voght and Germaine de Staël
CHAPTER 16 Honor and the Policing of Intra-Jewish Disputes in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Germany
CHAPTER 17 You Are What You Reform? Class, Consumption, and Identity in Victorian Britain
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DAVID WARREN SABEAN’S PUBLISHED WORKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX

Citation preview

KINSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND SELF

SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association

Series editor: David M. Luebke, University of Oregon

Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composition of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology.

Volume 1 The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered Edited by Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Warren Sabean Volume 2 Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s Edited by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire Volume 3 Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany Edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean Volume 4 Walls, Borders, Boundaries Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe Edited by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward Volume 5 After The History of Sexuality German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog

Volume 6 Becoming East German Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler Edited by Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port Volume 7 Beyond Alterity German Encounters with Modern East Asia Edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock Volume 8 Mixed Matches Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment Edited by David Luebke and Mary Lindemann Volume 9 Kinship, Community, and Self Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean Edited by Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven

Kinship, Community, and Self Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean

12 Edited by JASON COY, BENJAMIN MARSCHKE, JARED POLEY, and CLAUDIA VERHOEVEN

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinship, community, and self : essays in honor of David Warren Sabean / edited by Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven. pages cm. -- (Spektrum : publications of the German Studies Association ; volume 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-419-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-420-5 (ebook) 1. Kinship--Europe--History. 2. Kinship--History. 3. Families--Europe--History. 4. Families--History. 5. Community life--Europe--History. 6. Community life--History. 7. Self--Social aspects--Europe--History. 8. Self--Social aspects--History. 9. Europe--Social life and customs. 10. Manners and customs--History. I. Coy, Jason Philip, 1970- II. Marschke, Benjamin. III. Poley, Jared, 1970- IV. Verhoeven, Claudia, 1972- V. Sabean, David Warren. GN575.K55 2014 306.83--dc23 2014038695

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-419-9 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-420-5 ebook

We should be wary of historical accounts which ascribe custom and immemorial usage as explanations for the existence of institutions and social practices. In any case, too often a particular institution is itself either new or changed beyond recognition by the very fact of alterations in its context. And the images of modern and traditional are the idioms of political contention, not value-free descriptions of historical processes. —David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870

1 CONTENTS 2

Preface

Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven

Introduction. Sabean’s Swabians: A Study of Kith and Kin Thomas A. Brady Jr.

xi

1

Part I. Kinship Chapter 1.  “As a Brother Should Be”: Siblings, Kinship, and Community in Carolingian Europe Dana M. Polanichka

23

Chapter 2.  The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage in Nineteenth-Century France Andrea Mansker

37

Chapter 3.  “Married to the Bottle”: Drunk Husbands and Wives in Wilhelmine Germany Kevin D. Goldberg

49

Chapter 4.  A Home for Mothers in Vienna: Community and Crisis Britta McEwen Chapter 5.  Of Queens and Kinship: Politics and Legacies in the Colonial Pacific Matt K. Matsuda Chapter 6.  The Making of a Japanese Rural Christian Community: Conversion through Family Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan Emily Anderson

61

73

85

Part II.  Community Chapter 7.  Divination and Community in Early Modern Thuringia Jason Coy

99

viii  1  Contents

Chapter 8. Paracelsus: Greed, Self, and Community Jared Poley Chapter 9. From Heretics to Hypocrites: Anti-Pietist Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century Benjamin Marschke Chapter 10. Finding Orthodoxy in the Baltic: Conservative Russia and the Baltic Region in the Nineteenth Century Daniel C. Ryan Chapter 11. Women, Railways, and Respectability in Colonial India Ritika Prasad Chapter 12. Adventures in Terrorism: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky and the Literary Lives of the Russian Revolutionary Community (1860s–80s) Claudia Verhoeven Chapter 13. Power in Truth Telling: Jewish Testimonial Strategies before the Shoah Alexandra Garbarini

111

122

132 145

157

170

Part III. Self Chapter 14. For the Love of Geometry: The Rise of Euclidism in the Early Modern World, 1450–1850 Michael J. Sauter

185

Chapter 15. A Private Repulsion toward Public Women in the Letters of Caspar von Voght and Germaine de Staël Tamara Zwick

202

Chapter 16. Honor and the Policing of Intra-Jewish Disputes in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Germany Ann E. Goldberg

216

Chapter 17. You Are What You Reform? Class, Consumption, and Identity in Victorian Britain Amy Woodson-Boulton

230

Conclusion  Mary Lindemann and David M. Luebke

245

Contents  1  ix 

Bibliography of David Warren Sabean’s Published Works

251

Bibliography

255

Notes on Contributors

277

Index

283

1 PREFACE 2 JASON COY, BENJAMIN MARSCHKE, JARED POLEY, AND CLAUDIA VERHOEVEN

T

he present collection of essays was compiled in honor of David Warren Sabean’s seventy-fifth birthday. Sabean served as an advisor or coadvisor to each of the contributors, and the essays bear evidence of his influence in clear ways. The volume—despite the wide range of topics that are explored in its pages—is organized around three themes that have joined the diverse strands of Sabean’s own work: kinship, community, and self. These phenomena form the framework within which we live our lives, and investigating their contours allows us to see anew the historical contingency and mutability of our most basic relations. The essays demonstrate that these categories—far from being natural or even ahistorical—are not only deeply connected to the process of change, but also form the ideological lodestars by which people have oriented themselves in time. This edited volume grew out of our experiences in Sabean’s graduate seminars and our work with him on our dissertations, and they reflect our continuing commitment as scholars to the example of historical craftsmanship that he placed before us. As he helped mold us as historians—sometimes with scathing criticism—Sabean never lost sight of our humanity. If it seemed at times that the peasants were more real to him than we were, that was surely done for theatrical effect. Participating in his rigorous approach and commitment to the production and dissemination of historical knowledge meant walking the knife’s edge of terror and excitement. Sabean’s graduate seminars were intricately crafted expressions of his meticulous approach to teaching. The topics ranged across both theme and period, and they were diabolically calibrated to discipline, to inform, and to inspire. Sabean taught us how to study the history of kinship and family in seminars like “International Families in Europe and Beyond since the Late Middle Ages” (taught 2005–6) and “Oedipus Readings: Explorations in the History of the Self in the West” (2000). These courses, oriented around the study of kinship and its meanings, asked us to consider how family constitution and dynamics provide a form of deep structure to historical change. Community was a second

xii  1  Preface

strand of his teaching, one that was never far from Sabean’s larger attempts to introduce us to the coordinates of historical experience, and one that was probably most central to the sequence of seminars that Sabean taught between 1996 and 2010 on religion: “Religion in German Culture Since the Renaissance” (1996–97), “Sacred and Profane in European History since 1500” (2001), “Religious Conversion in Europe and in Comparative Perspective: 1450–Present” (2003–4), and “Conversions” (2009–10). In seminars on the “Production of the Self in the West” (1994), “Identity and Subjectivity as Historical Categories” (1995–96), and “Introduction to the Study of Ego-Documents” (1998), we learned to probe the historicity of the self in theory and practice. While these themes of kinship, community, and self were certainly present in Sabean’s teaching, they each were worked out much more fully in his own research, once again indicating the fruitful synergies that may exist when an active research agenda is combined with a healthy graduate program. Thomas A. Brady Jr. explains in his introduction to this volume that while Sabean’s first work was a type of intellectual history, he really developed a reputation for fusing the methods and intellectual models provided by social, cultural, and intellectual history. This methodological syncretism is what has defined Sabean’s approach to scholarship. Sabean has a well-deserved reputation for his analysis of the historical contours of kinship, which he was probing as early as 1970.1 His fascination with kinship networks, cousin marriage, endo- and exomagous marriage structures, inheritance, consanguinity, incest, affinity, and so on has become a centerpiece of his intellectual work. For Sabean, kinship exists everywhere—in the law, in religion, in the household, in the court, in politics, in the bedroom; it is found in practices, contained in ideas, expressed not only in texts, but also in material culture. Where others might only have seen a set of weird practices exhibited in the source material, Sabean saw patterns and relationships that changed subtly but dramatically over long spans of time. Sabean’s view of kinship—with its strange blend of permanence and mutability—is the product of methodological rigor, deep archival research, years of reading and thinking, and, perhaps most important, a vigorous and creative approach not only to sources but also to topics of study more generally. His was a lived example of history as a habit of mind, showing us the importance of seeing details as clues to the working out of larger processes that remain barely seen in their glacial movement. The energy that Sabean dedicated to his study of kinship has carried him through a lifetime of research and writing. Indeed, after publishing the monumental Kinship in Neckarhausen in 1998, he went on to coedit another four volumes on the subject.2 While kinship was clearly one of the things that energized Sabean’s imagination and stirred a Stakhanovite level of work out of him, it has been his

Preface  1  xiii 

thoughts on how to write the history of a community that have perhaps generated the lion’s share of his fame. When Power in the Blood was published in 1984, the profession suddenly had another model for how to use a combined social and cultural history to peer into the dynamics of a community in the past, thus illuminating through case study (or, as some demand, microhistory) larger processes that would be impossible to isolate in more expansive settings.3 In Power in the Blood, Sabean argues that “[w]hat makes community possible is the fact that it involves a series of mediated relationships” before going on to suggest that the real question is “to what degree a community is a community; in what way a collectivity such as a village or a neighborhood is bound together through mediated relationships involving aid, conflict, aggression, and sharing.”4 This leads him to the important insight that “community .  .  . was constructed, changed with time, and can only be grasped as historical process because those elements through which relations were constructed, whether ‘real’ or symbolic resources, were constantly in movement.”5 Here was a way of thinking about the past that could bridge generations of graduate students. Those interested in social history had any number of voices to recover, edges to peel back, and things to count, while the cultural historians could suss out the discursive constructions of meanings and symbols in the creation, disruption, or maintenance of community. Sabean—in uniting these two approaches to producing knowledge about the past—gave his students (and the profession at large) an example of how to study relations and meanings in flux. Even the most bizarre episodes in the past—a bull buried at the village crossroads in a communal ritual that no one seemed to have witnessed—generate all sorts of possibilities for studying social relations and the meanings that people infused into them. Attention to complexity and detail, because nothing is ever simple, is the hallmark of Sabean’s method, and this indicates his embrace of historical anthropology as a way to understand the symbolic structures present in past societies. The historical analysis of kinship—the structure of family and household and their subsequent embedding in politics, culture, law, religion, and so on—has been one track of Sabean’s work. The study of community—social relations and the meanings that they help constitute, when it is not the other way around—is another. What remains is an attempt to come to terms with the historical subject her- or himself. The historical production of the “self ” has been the third direction of Sabean’s scholarship. He broached the topic in Power in the Blood, writing not only about a “notion of the self,” but also noting its historical contours and describing the various mechanisms that people have developed for producing a self “constituted by [one’s] position within a matrix of relations.”6 This line of thinking found further elaboration in an essay published in 1996 titled “Production of the Self during the Age of

xiv  1  Preface

Confessionalism,” in which Sabean examined the ways that theology informed the generation or absence of a “memory core” that allowed a person to speak the word “I” in different registers at different times, and with different political and social effects.7 The realization that the “I” is up for grabs and that others produce us as much as we might produce ourselves was a scary and controversial thought that generated endless debates among us when we were trying to come to terms with the meaning of such a claim in our own lives. Sabean’s scholarship helped us see how three different meaning-making machines—kinship, community, and self—have grown, proliferated, and developed over long spans of time. Each works differently; each helps constitute the other; but together they provide the nexus within which we live, and have lived. One of the most impressive aspects of Sabean’s scholarship and teaching has been the wide range of periods, topics, methods, and theories that he has mastered and imparted to his students. If nothing else, his example spurred us to think critically about big ideas, big spans of time, and across big comparative frameworks. His students, as this volume demonstrates, have taken his approach to heart. Only a scholar like Sabean, who is equally at home in baroque theology, postmodern anthropology, and network theory, could supervise students whose research interests span the medieval to the twentieth century; from Japan and India to the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia; from hard-core social science to what approximates comparative literature. The diversity of approaches, methods, and research topics on display in this volume should not be read as incoherent, since Sabean’s great gift to his students was his demand that we should ask the biggest of questions while investigating the smallest of details. His refusal to conform to intellectual boundaries has cleared a path to liberation from the confines imposed by the academy for his students (and those many colleagues who wish they had been his students). Following the logic of Sabean’s own interests, the present volume is divided into three sections. We begin with his colleague Thomas A. Brady Jr.’s overview of Sabean’s contributions to the field, and we then take up the social and cultural history of kinship, investigating topics ranging from siblings and marriage to motherhood and political and religious authority. The volume then turns to the theme of community, considering the construction of social and cultural norms as well as the way that communities could be defined through religion and politics, gender, and common experience. The third section of the volume centers on the history of the self, and contributors examine topics connected to the self in space, the self in text, and the attributes of honor and class as ways people could define or reinforce the self. The volume concludes with Mary Lindemann and David M. Luebke’s assessment of David Warren Sabean’s career and their interrogation of how he has trained his students.

Preface  1  xv 

Notes The editors would like to acknowledge not only the contributors to this volume but also Ann Przyzycki DeVita and Adam Capitanio for their editorial work and Marion Berghahn for her support. We are also grateful to the editorial board of the Spektrum series, series editor David M. Luebke, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, suggestions, and criticisms. Richard Balas, Margaret Edling, Jessica Stollenmaier, and Megan Valentine also have our gratitude for their assistance in compiling the bibliography. We also wish to celebrate Ruth Sabean for sharing David with us. 1. David Warren Sabean, “Household Formation and Geographical Mobility: A Family Register Study for a Württemberg Village 1760–1900,” Annales de Demographie Historique (1970): 275–94. 2. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900) (New York, 2011); Christopher H. Johnson et al., eds., Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences Since the Middle Ages (New York, 2011); Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean, eds., Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900 (New York, 2011); Christopher H. Johnson et al., eds., Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present (New York, 2013). 3. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984). 4. Ibid., 28–29. 5. Ibid., 29. 6. Ibid., 31, 48–49. 7. David Warren Sabean, “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central European History 29, no. 1 (March 1996), 1–18.

INTRODUCTION

12

Sabean’s Swabians A Study of Kith and Kin THOMAS A. BRADY JR.

I

n 1964 the Archive for Reformation History published an article on the theology of Moïse Amyraut (1596–1664), a French Protestant theologian best known for his expansion of John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.1 Like other theologians, Amyraut had tried to overcome the evident contradiction between God’s promise of universal salvation and the actual restriction of salvation to those whom God himself has elected. Any reader of the Archive in the mid-1960s could have marked this study’s neophyte author as a very promising specialist in the theology and doctrine of Reformed Protestantism’s golden age. In 1970 the Annales de démographie historique published an article by the same young American author. Gone was the problem of rationalism and predestination in the late French Reformation, its place taken by a historical sociology of one small village in the southwest German state of Württemberg during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 What had happened? Had the intellectually ambitious student of historical theology fled into an intellectual rustication? Not at all, for in fact the author had launched the broad-reaching, intensely documented, and chronologically extensive project that would establish, over the next two decades, his reputation as one of the most inventive pioneers of European social history between the end of the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. This young fellow bore the name of David Warren Sabean. This essay follows Sabean through two phases of building his huge, manystranded exploration of German and European social history from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century. The first part deals with the rural history of southwestern German lands before, in, and after the great German Peasants’ War of 1525; the second examines some features of Sabean’s two

2  1  Thomas A. Brady Jr.

dense volumes about the Württemberg village of Neckarhausen.3 The third part examines a collection of his studies on language, religion, and culture.4 The closing comments will offer some thoughts about the impact of Sabean’s scholarship. Children of the 1960s: The Coming of Social History Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! —William Wordsworth

It would seem to strain credibility, perhaps, to see in the 1960s a spirit comparable to what Wordsworth celebrated in 1805. Yet emotions of exaltation, determination, and hope that then sprang forth gripped the imaginations of young historians in many countries as signs of a coming, blessed breakthrough into a new understanding of history. The watchword of this spirit was “social history”; its concept was an understanding of historical change in terms of associations of mutuality and conflict among classes, communities, and individuals; and its keys were new techniques of social analysis pioneered by the French and the new anthropology then burgeoning in Britain. Who then did not look forward with lambent expectation to the next issues of the Annales ESC and Past and Present? Behind and above these currents stood a late flowering of classical Marxism, then being released by a presentiment of the Cold War’s end. A special freedom in thinking about postmedieval European history bloomed in the United States. Many Americans did accept, of course, European history as their own, notably when it took the form of “Western civilization,” a concept then strongly rooted in the curricula of schools, colleges, and universities. But American culture also nourished a well-established disdain for civilization in general. Consider the final lines of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The new spirit nonetheless clothed itself in European ideas about society and culture, which the European refugee scholars strove to nurture in the new land that many of them conceived as a lost fragment of Europe. By far the strongest effect on the discipline of history was exercised by those who had completed their training and even held professorships in prewar Germany, many of whom rebuilt their German contacts after 1945.5 Their efforts were compounded by scholars of the German-born, American-trained “second generation.”6 By the early 1960s German-centered problems and narratives were attracting American-born graduate students, not a few of whom had little or no

Introduction  1  3 

familial connection to Germany, German culture, or German America. Sabean was one such recruit.7 In several tributes he has movingly described his debts and offered fervent thanks to George L. Mosse (1918–99), his principal teacher at the University of Wisconsin and a German refugee of the second generation.8 Similar to Sabean, Mosse had begun with a non-German subject, a dissertation on English constitutional history in the Reformation era, to which he added a brief general text on the Reformation and a book on English Puritan casuistry.9 Then, gripped by the tragic history of his native land—and Europe as a civilization—Mosse plunged into modern Germany, armed with the belief that the German/European road to nationalism and fascism had begun with the post-Reformation sacralization of politics. “While my historical research has concentrated upon various modern belief systems,” Mosse reflected in 2000 on his own evolution, “it would undoubtedly be correct to see here a continuity between my work on the Reformation and that on more recent history.”10 He had been able to bring his familiarity with (Protestant) Christian theology and religious practices “to bear upon the secularization of modern and contemporary politics. It was not such a big step from Christian belief systems, especially in the baroque period, to modern civic religions such as nationalism in its various forms.”11 Sabean, too, in his fledgling study of the French Calvinist Amyraut, began with early modern Protestant theology, but, as an American child of the 1960s, when “to be young was very heaven,” his turn took him not to his Madison mentor’s path—German intellectual history in the tragic vein—but to a lifelong engagement with the common people, their ways of life, and their prospects for a life of self-reliance, security, and freedom. Few other subjects could have taken him so far so rapidly from Mosse’s vision of a perennial struggle between “the unbridled idealism” of Christian ethics and “the total acceptance of what the sixteenth century called ‘Machiavellism.’”12 In his PhD dissertation, by contrast, Sabean pried into an event that had no standing in the textbooks of the time: the German Peasants’ War of 1525. In 1850 Friedrich Engels (1820–95) had fashioned the Peasants’ War’s claim—against the claims for Martin Luther—to be the dawn of the Germans’ struggle for a free and democratic future. While the Peasants’ War did become a convenient marker in German Social Democratic circles for their claim to represent the German future, in fact the most important scholarly investigation of the Peasants’ War came from the hands of Günther Franz (1902–92), a racial nationalist and member of the SS.13 Shortly after war’s end, however, the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949 inspired a new interest in the events of 1525 and gave them a place in the new republic’s genealogy. “The thema probandum of German historical research and teaching,” wrote the Marxist scholar Alfred Meusel (1896–1960) in 1952,

4  1  Thomas A. Brady Jr.

must be the struggle for German unification. We have to show that at all turning points of German history—at the time of the Reformation and  the great German Peasants’ War, at the time of the Wars of Liberation, in the Revolution of ’48, in the November Revolution of 1918, . . . during the following years, and again, now after [our] liberation from fascism by the Soviet Army—there existed a serious democratic force which fought for a united Germany in the form of a peace-loving, democratic, and sovereign national state.14

By the early 1970s this resuscitated version of Engels’s idea came to dominate the now faded, mostly Marxist interpretations of the German Peasants’ War. The theme nonetheless began at this time to attract fresh attention, as historians in the two German states began to look forward to 1975 and the 450th anniversary of the Peasants’ War. In 1972, three years before the anniversary, Sabean’s PhD dissertation appeared in a German version from the Stuttgart publishing house of Gustav Fischer.15 In retrospect, two things are truly notable about the book. First, Sabean’s first book appeared in German translation, a shrewd strategy, for at this time there was little interest among Americans in the social history of the German lands before the eighteenth century. Second, his foreword thanks a very wide circle of German archivists and established specialists in premodern German history.16 Those he thanks include the moderately rehabilitated Günther Franz, then still the reigning expert on the German Peasants’ War, and also the young Peter Blickle, who in 1977 would mark the jubilee with the most penetrating modern analysis of the causes, course, and consequences of what he called “the Revolution of 1525.”17 However they judged it, historians had recovered this event and its political potential for German history, and so it would remain until the fall of the GDR in 1989. Sabean’s book on the Peasants’ War appeared well before the jubilee. How new was his approach? Perhaps his most important methodological innovation was to ignore the “national” context in favor of the peasants themselves. He tested his ideas on a few small villages in southern Upper Swabia, a region of mixed farming and orchard economies whose inhabitants lived in dispersed hamlets half the average size of the compact villages in the neighboring region to the north. Choosing his units according to the survival of documentation, Sabean constructed a quantitatively based model of the movements of crop prices, rents, and wages from 1458 to 1531 and mapped the result onto the known course, goals, and outcomes of the Peasants’ War. The resulting picture is compatible with none of the older narratives of the Peasants’ War: not with Engels’s Marxist vision of an incipient social revolution; not with Günther Franz’s agrarian understanding; and not with any view of the insurrection as a nation-building event. Its two main causes, Sabean

Introduction  1  5 

discovered, were a demography of “rapid and steady growth of population” and an ecology of parcelization of farms into ever-smaller units, which meant that soon the area of cultivation “could no longer be extended.”18 Well before 1525, a steady stream of young men were leaving the farms of their childhood to work for others or seek employment as mercenary soldiers. No less than 40 percent of the small farmers produced enough surplus to benefit from the sole source of profit, a steady rise in grain prices. Under such conditions, the only possible leaders for a supralocal movement for communal rights were the richer lease holders, whose desire to secure greater regional autonomy and improved economic status animate the grievance documents of 1525. Two aspects of Sabean’s engagement with the Peasants’ War merit special attention, because they frame his ambivalent attitude toward Marxist historiography. First, there is the relationship of the Peasants’ War to the early Protestant Reformation. Unlike the Marxists, Sabean did not consider religion a mask or a fraud. “An attempt to separate the religious from the secular aspects would be artificial,” he writes, “for the two were intertwined.” The only way to define the religious aspect’s significance for the revolution is to ask “how it contributed to the expansion and security of the social order.” The politically and socially conscious peasants wanted “not to revolutionize religion but to cement the changes in their social relationships by giving them religious sanction.”19 Had the movement’s goals as defined by the grievance lists been achieved, such a victory would have confirmed the nobles’ position as the most important political force in southern Upper Swabia and, by extension, the other main zones of the Peasants’ War. The movement as a whole, Sabean judges, “arose from the interests of the richer peasants alone,” and it was directed “not only against the lords but also the day-laborers.”20 Thus, it is clear the Peasants’ War had little to do with the issues simultaneously framed by Martin Luther. A second important aspect of Sabean’s book is his critique of the classic Marxist view, which at this time was being revived in the GDR. This view insisted on the national character and goals of the rebels, who “strove for a classless society and a unitary state” by initiating a struggle “between material productive forces and the customary relations of production.” Sabean, on the contrary, declares that “our analysis contends that nationalism was not an important factor, and the peasants did not strive for unity even among themselves. . . . The peasants wanted local control of local affairs,” and “they were not inspired by the ideal of a classless society.”21 The way to an explanation of the German Peasants’ War thus lies “in the direction of accepting the complexity and great differences among relations in the various regions, and yet to seek an understanding of the general forces hidden behind them that led to such various consequences.”22 What astonishes the present-day reader of Sabean’s Landbesitz is his partnering of a very close attention to local conditions of farming with a vision of

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the relations between agricultural production and farmers’ fates across a wide range of European regions. The farmers, he holds, could not be reduced to an epiphenomenal role in the genesis of states that were bourgeois, capitalist, and national. The farmers in their concrete, local collectivities were actors, even agents, of history. The stories of their lives should not be buried in a history in which their own goals and convictions had no significant place. In this first book, the young David Warren Sabean, then in his thirties, reveals the remarkable bundle of capabilities one finds chockablock in his mature works. He earned his “sweat equity” in the Swabian archives; he read the British anthropologists on social group formation; he mastered French efforts to build a new model of quantitatively based social history; he mined the splendid local studies of the German institutionalists; and he listened to the Italians about the fledgling method of what they call “microhistory.” From his own country, by contrast, the young Sabean could fetch little help, for there German history still rode in carriages drawn by the state builders of the nineteenth century, Germans expelled from the Weimar Republic, and the slaughtered millions of the twentieth century. Yet help was on the way. Sabean’s dissertation threw down the gauntlet to all those who saw the early modern era as a pause in Europe’s social evolution, a time whose common people seem only a bit more significant than their livestock. Tales Told in Small Places Where There Was Power in the Blood There I met an old man Who wouldn’t say his prayers; I took him by the left leg, And threw him down the stairs. —English nursery rhyme

If I had to select a single guiding belief of David Warren Sabean’s work, my choice would be this: we may gaze over the lives of women and men as tiny pieces of vast narratives, but all those lives were lived locally and at specific times. Place counts, and so do memory and belief, worship and work, enmity and friendship, and love and death. Sabean is not a materialist, one of those for whom matter is the only substance, and reality is identical with the actually occurring states of energy and matter. For this great collector and analyst of countable things, quantitative data alone cannot supply the meaning of history, but, where retrievable, they supply an essential check on opinion, fantasy, and outright lies about the past. It was thus essential to his progress that before he published the Neckarhausen books, huge volumes in which he presents data found in the archives and pens them like a hog farmer who sorts his beasts, Sabean published Power in the Blood. Its publication,

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twelve years after Landbesitz and six years before the first of the Neckarhausen volumes, created something of a sensation. Was this volume truly written by the man who had abandoned Calvinist historical theology for the stink of Swabian farmsteads, by the man who, seemingly inspired by the high-flying French social historians, counted things? Indeed it was. Power in the Blood affirms two enduring characteristics of Sabean’s oeuvre. First, its stories, grubbed from the archives, of little folk in little places affirm the author’s belief in the full and distinct humanity of ordinary people. Second, his interweaving of their actions and emotions affirms the importance of their collective lives in the narratives of Central Europe and, potentially, the lives of other peoples in and outside that great region. Taken as a whole, Europe’s archival riches overwhelmingly record the actions and the thinking of the elites, clerical and lay, bourgeois and noble, and they give “the impression that the vast mass of the rural population remained silent witness to the progress of time.”23 The sparse sources for peasant culture nonetheless “implicate in one way or another those people who to some extent exercised domination over the peasant.”24 The two great issues for the would-be excavator of popular culture must therefore be (1) the “entanglement of peasant views in sources deriving from various levels of authority,” and (2) the “nature of the evidence as anecdote.”25 If we are to crack the shell of the lords’ minds and actions, therefore, we must learn how to read the relationships of domination with a new eye, to read through them into minds/ emotions and actions of people who resisted domination rather than imposed it. At this very point, the archive, if properly interrogated, can yield both sides of the social forces that supplied history’s motive power. Armed with this perspective, Sabean demonstrates how the common people’s silences can be converted into voices and actions. They are the voices and actions not of revolutions—transregional, regional, or even local—but of individuals who refuse to do all that others expect of them. Yet, while the grounds of refusal may be individual, their reasons are collective and communal. Sabean picks for Power in the Blood a bouquet of tales he arrays chronologically. In first place stands the late sixteenth-century story of Leonhart Seitz of Holzheim. This Reformation tale from the 1580s reveals, Sabean tells us, “the use of religious institutions for buttressing the lines of political authority.”26 Seitz refused to participate in the village community’s most important ritual act, the partaking of Communion, and he stubbornly persisted in this refusal despite “massive and many-sided” pressure to join his fellows in the sacrament.27 Down upon Leonhart came the correcting wrath of the local pastor, the magistrates, and almost all the fellows in his community, all of them bent on disciplining him as “stubborn, blasphemous, asocial.”28 Worse, those who condemned refusals to partake of the Sacrament—there are other, similar cases—placed them “on the same plane as anabaptism and magic, suggesting an

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association with heresy or superstition, both directly subversive of the public cult.”29 Then, too, the ordeal of condemnation “demanded more than just external compliance,” and Sabean, ruminating on the role of Christian (i.e., Lutheran) theology in this culture of correction, wonders “to what degree peasants were able to resist such massive inroads into their consciousness.”30 The entire framework of lordship (Herrschaft) and religion comes into play, though “massive resistance can seldom take place here, partly because numerous people are implicated in complex ways in the institutions and partly because the terms of resistance are not clear either to the dominating or to the dominated themselves.”31 Some openly persistent resisters became separatists who “were soon cut out of the body politic,” though far more usual was “the acceptance of the ritual and an uneasy tension maintained as the population restyled it to fit their needs.”32 On this point Power in the Blood reveals Sabean to have been a trailblazer of studies on popular religion’s engagement with the regimes of coercion that now go under the name of “confessionalization.” The story of Leonhart of Holzheim reminded Sabean of the English nursery rhyme quoted above, about the old man who refused to say his prayers and, for his recalcitrance, was taken by the left leg and thrown down the stairs. Sabean’s keen eye for the meanings of seemingly odd, anecdotal stories, through which the barely literate or even illiterate come to have a voice, is displayed in this tale and the five others that fill the chapters of this marvelous book. Their stars include: a peasant prophet who appears in 1648 with a message to the Duke of Württemberg from an angel; a thirteen-year-old girl who spreads the rumor that she is a witch; a “probably paranoid” pastor who around 1700 exposes the problematic relationship of spiritual to temporal power; a pastor’s death, perhaps a murder, the investigation of which raises “problems of kinship and conscience”; and, from around 1800, a village that sacrifices a bull in an attempt to end a cattle epidemic. What Sabean extracts from these tales is sometimes astonishing, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes sad, but he never exploits them by forcing general meanings on particular sources. He freely recognizes that these masses of old records contain mysteries neither we nor our successors will ever fully understand, much less explain. The Riches of Neckarhausen: Property, Production, and Family At the outset of an investigation, it is not so much the intellectual faculty for making formulas and definitions that leads the way, but rather it is the eyes and hands attempting to get the feel of the actual presence of the subject matter. —V. N. Vološinov and M. Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language33

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Why would anyone spend years researching and writing about the history of one German village? A local schoolmaster or pastor might do that, but a foreigner, a historian who is neither German nor European? Sabean has nonetheless spent a large portion of his scholarly life working in records about the village of Neckarhausen. This village lies in the duchy of Württemberg’s Neckar River Valley, the most densely populated region of what is now Germany. Here reigned partible inheritance, “which redistributed family property in each generation by according equal amounts of land and other assets to all the children” and created “a classic land of small peasant agriculture, characterized by ever more intensive use of the soil as succeeding generations worked ever smaller plots of land.”34 Sabean’s Neckarhausen consumed much of his time in the 1970s, when he worked for long periods at Göttingen’s Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in the company of a remarkable community of social historians of early modern and modern Germany. As he gradually shifted his focus from peasant insurrections to property and kinship in villages, he poured forth an astonishing stream of publications in English, German, and—occasionally—French and Italian. They concerned and even helped to create agendas for the flowering of the study of everyday life, kinship, and power relations in rural Europe. Later, in the 1990s, Sabean added new topics, such as bourgeois family relations and the modern concept of the self—a sector of his scholarship with which this introductory essay does not deal. It is nevertheless a notable feature of Sabean’s work that he rarely abandoned a subject he had opened or helped to open, so that a full list of his publications creates the impression of a methodological jack-of-all-trades, a pioneer analyst of social data, and a cosmopolitan explorer of sociological and anthropological concepts all rolled into one. No simple summary of the Neckarhausen project can supply more than a glimpse of its mammoth proportions. The two volumes are built upon sources of unparalleled mass (selected from three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand pages), which document an enormous number (around four thousand) of interrelated families over a very long span of time (from 1700 to 1870). Sabean’s analysis of these sources draws from a superb command of the literatures of historical sociology, historical anthropology, and European social history of the late early modern and modern eras. Taking the two volumes together, the work has no rival in any language, as Sabean himself has no rival as a social historian of rural life in Europe between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, the crucial age of transition to the capitalist era. Sabean’s method is neither simple comparison, as used by historians and anthropologists to establish uniqueness or particularity, nor is it a search for typicality, “a particular narrative of development—such as modernization—[or] the affirmation of an abstract notion of lawful behavior.”35 Much of his reasoning, to be sure, does focus interest on the particular, the concrete, the local, or

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the individual—historicism. Yet he warns his readers that “what distinguishes this study from historicism is that it does not make individualism a starting point. For him the local is interesting not for its unique aspects precisely because it offers a locus for observing relations” that recur in many places.36 If we center our vision “on how consciousness is formed in social intercourse, on dialogical processes of value, and ideological construction, then . . . this brings us to the study of the quotidian, the everyday, which . . . does not at all imply a return to individuality.” Relationships, not uniqueness, form the basic stuff of Sabean’s style of history. The first volume on Neckarhausen, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870, is about “the ways in which property and production in a particular locality shaped and were shaped by the family.”37 The idea of a reciprocity between property and production, on the one hand, and family, on the other, is one of Sabean’s most powerful creations. It sets him off from classical Marxism, by which his work is in some other respects markedly influenced. The Marxist historians focus on ownership, writes Sabean, and “the issues they raise concerning class and class consciousness have less to do with social reproduction than with the interplay of broad groups, chiefly ‘class,’ “positioned against each other according to their access to the means of reproduction.” In Sabean’s view, by contrast, “all social transactions take place within a field of rights, duties, claims, and obligations which taken together comprise the system of property holding.”38 This means, of course, that the forces of production and the relations of production cannot be disaggregated, for the dialectic between them drives social change by way of the operation of ownership and inheritance. Sabean’s central argument attacks the assumption that what appear to be modern developments, notably the shift from collective to individual ownership, must produce a transforming regime of individualism. Neckarhausen’s lively market in land, he argues, was “not inimical to a coordinated and highly structured system of family alliances,” and “precisely where the rules of property appear most ‘modern,’ the accompanying institutions of kinship and community run counter to expectations.” While Sabean’s story, which is set in the great era of capitalist expansion, finds the rural people ever more deeply engaged in market-related activities, they, unlike the industrial sector’s workers, remained landowners. Indeed, production in Neckarhausen involved “organization of the sexual division of labor, labor migration, inter-household exchanges of labor and equipment, and specialization for new market opportunities.” These changes, however, and here his narrative runs directly against the long-dominant story, did not atomize rural families, but instead strengthened them by shifting the guardianship of wealth from an ever more adult, male, and

Introduction  1  11 

mobile workforce to the kin, neighbors, and spouses. The new, intensified agricultural techniques, especially the progressive fractionalization of land ownership, “completely revolutionized the sexual division of labor.”39 In fine, Sabean concludes that, contrary to much of the writing on capitalism and agriculture, the growth of capitalistic practices made the family not weaker but stronger. “The closer one looks,” he writes, “the more kinship and family appear to be the operative structures in which values are formed and meaningful action takes place.”40 In the German lands, at least, the strengthening of states pressed in a similar direction, so that “it would be hard to specify any aspect of familial relations in Germany in the early modern period which was not shaped in the crucible of state power.” All through the eighteenth century, that power was driven by traditional, early modern, fiscal motives, not by issues of productivity.41 And the villagers accommodated themselves to this program of state operation by accepting new, official rules in the place of traditional, customary ones. In this first volume, four themes unfold in sixteen chapters: social and economic change, sources, and concepts; relationships between husbands and wives; relationships between generations; and kinship and the transfer of property. The large picture they support contradicts both the classical liberal and the neoliberal narratives of capitalism, guided by the idea of the Enlightenment modernizing the common people and liberating them from lives of backwardness, ignorance, and poverty. It is more accurate to say, Sabean writes, that, rather than being sequentially ordered—contract supersedes kinship— “kinship and contract were . . . simultaneously synchronized within the context of men and women contending about management, work, and expenditure, neighbors competing in land, labor, and commodity markets, and families exploited and disciplined by officials, creditors, and village oligarchs.”42 So much for the dogma of capitalism, progress, and individualism on the land! Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870, thus reveals that the magic glue that made the agrarian social order both strong and flexible was kinship—chiefly endogamy and cousin marriage. Long held by anthropologists and developmental biologists to have been a primitive survival tactic, kinship was in fact as important to the modern era as it had been to the deeper past. Kinship, Sabean concludes, was not a dependent variable [of class] but an active factor in constructing classbased networks and providing essential class experience. . . . The new class constellation arose in the context of an increasing differentiation between public and private spheres of activity. Kinship (private) and class (public) worked reciprocally or dialectically against each other.43

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The discovery of kinship as the mother lode of social relations is the principal finding of Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. How kinship worked is the central theme of the second volume, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870, which examines how the dynamic potential of rural society depended not on the relationships of persons to the land but of relationships to one another through the land. This volume presents a superexhaustive study of one large Württemberg village, whose rural population moved from an older pattern of social relations, based on clientage, to a new regime based on consanguineal marriage, that is, marriage among kin and especially among blood-related kin. This finding answers the question with which Sabean began the entire project: did economic modernization (the coming of capitalist, market-oriented economy) change the patterns of rural social relations and, if so, in what ways? He concludes that capitalism did transform rural social relations, but not by promoting rapid individualism and social atomization. Rather, what emerged was a dominance of ever more densely bound kin groups that were, in effect, tiny communities of fortune. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the process peaked in the decades between 1880 and 1920, precisely the era when comparable changes occurred in other European societies. This finding radically challenges German historiography’s blasting unison about the country’s backwardness and its departure from the Western path of development. To explain how rural Germany kept in step, Sabean calls upon what must, at first glance, seem an unlikely force—rural women. In his narrative, the liberation of women’s labor is the pièce de résistance of the entire project.44 Perhaps the most exciting finding of the Neckarhausen project is Sabean’s discovery and verification of this truth, which lay hidden behind the bourgeois dogma of public versus private spheres. He accomplished this by exploiting electronic technology to process massive amounts of data from the mountains of documents about life in his chosen village. Aided by his computers, Sabean reassembled his four thousand families from some hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. From them he discovered that between 1700 and 1870 women were empowered by their families’ growing need to manage kinship relations. “The rise and fall of consanguinity,” he writes, correlated closely with the formation of class, its integration during the central and later decades of the nineteenth century, and the breaking up of coordinated class milieus in the twentieth. Kinship responded to formal exigencies and utilized classic and inventive principles of exchange. But the work and the political effort fell during the nineteenth century largely on the shoulders of women.45

These startling words close Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870, and with it Sabean’s Neckarhausen project.

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A Historian for Many Seasons Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Will the brilliantly provocative picture Sabean has erected among the farmsteads of rural Württemberg prove out in the hands of his successors? His promotion of rural women into the vanguard of modernization will certainly provoke those who insist on the backwardness of the early modern German lands as a chief cause of Germany’s twentieth-century woes. Sabean’s narrative is supported, however, by another contemporary historiographical tendency— the rehabilitation of the Holy Roman Empire. Was that ancient, venerable polity in fact a weight around a German protonation, (which was or should have been) anxious to compete as a unified national state with France and Britain? Some eighteenth-century writers thought the Holy Roman Empire already comparable to those states. One of them was the Württemberg jurist Friedrich Carl von Moser (1723–98), who wrote in 1765 that “we are a people with name and speech under one common ruler, under laws of a single kind, and bound to a great, common interest in liberty.” He was paying tribute—deserved or undeserved—to the hardened political dispersal of the Holy Roman Empire.46 So did Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), who said of the Empire’s confessional arrangement, “The papal influence on the State is no less benevolent than that of the Protestant Church.”47 The era of the French Revolution, however, raised new doubts, especially among German Protestants. “The Holy Roman Empire, lads, / How can it possibly hold together?”48 sang Frosch, a Leipzig student, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Faust, and soon the defunct Empire became an object of unbelieving scorn.49 To impartial foreigners these judgments could be extreme. In 1860 James Bryce (1838–1922), a Belfast man, wrote that the Empire was “above all description or explanation; not that it is impossible to discover the beliefs which created and sustained it, but that the power of those beliefs cannot be adequately apprehended by men whose minds have been differently trained, and whose imaginations are fired by different ideals.”50 He predicted that in time the reigning incomprehension would diminish. “Something more succeeding generations will know, who will judge the Middle Ages more fairly than we,

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still living in the midst of a reaction against all that is mediaeval, can hope to do, and to whom it will be given to see and understand new forms of political life, whose nature we cannot so much as conjecture.”51 Bryce was right, though it took a long time to vindicate his view. By the late twentieth century the older judgments on the Empire began to yield to more positive evaluations.52 One reason was that the early modern Empire began to be studied with less partisanship and greater care. Another was that the old views did not fit the known history. Surely the most penetrating query was registered by the American sociologist Charles Tilly (1929–2008), who very sensibly asked “why the fragmented Holy Roman Empire lasted so long in the midst of consolidating, bellicose monarchies. Why didn’t it disappear into the maws of large, powerful states?”53 Still, the idea of the Empire as an archaic, politically sinister ideal could still appeal to historians who sought for politically acceptable explanations. One prominent modernist located “the origin of what distinguishes German history from the history of the great western European nations” in “the memory of the greatness of the German Middle Ages” and “the earthly reflection of eternity and the ultimate basis of the Germans’ mission.”54 Are we to believe that such national dreaming inspired the farmers and farmwives of Neckarhausen? The connection is not entirely foolish, for the central aim of Sabean’s Neckarhausen project is to refute arguments for a sharp discontinuity between the timeless agrarian-based societies of premodern/ early modern times and their modernizing descendants and successors. One does not have to hold that Sabean’s Swabians were “typical” of the rural populations of the pre-Napoleonic German lands to see them as familiar and interesting people, whose lives have valuable things to tell us about the social evolution of their own lands and others. After three decades of labor, Sabean looked back on the Neckarhausen project. At the beginning, he wrote, “I set out to look at a relatively simple question arising from the widely held view among social scientists that modernization had fundamentally altered the structure of the family in Western civilization and that each social epoch was characterized by a dominant form of familial relations.”55 Over the course of this work, he admitted, the social historians had largely abandoned what had still been, at his outset, “the basic weapons of the social historians’ armament,” most importantly the concepts of class and kinship.56 Their replacement by “identity” and “selfhood,” he confesses, “has left me with the quixotic task of breaking a social-historical lance on the windmills of subjectivity.”57 Unlike himself, they believed in a gradual erosion of the strong kinship orders of earlier times, a process that “had allowed individuals and families to free themselves from traditional ties and enter into rationally calculated entrepreneurial activities or . . . to take up the opportunity to sell their labor

Introduction  1  15 

in a free-wage market.”58 In this story, the rise of the West and the growth of capitalism form a single process, and, in the versions that today seem to sprout like weeds, they purport to reveal the future of the world. The Neckarhausen project revealed to Sabean that the distribution of property in history could not be explained without understanding kinship, “and the same is true of the structure of households, the division of labor, and the deployment of authority.”59 He also discovered that “a thoroughgoing analysis of kinship could help rehabilitate [the concept of ] class” and thereby recover an essential principle of the modern narrative and dismantle a long list of false revolutions constructed to explain historical change.60 Sabean’s contribution to this leveling project began with his assertion of the nonrevolutionary character of the German Peasants’ War. His attitude largely agreed with those of the historians who in the late 1970s and 1980s were arguing for early modern Europe’s captivity to its past. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (1929–) of Paris declared the centuries between 1400 and 1700 to have been an era of “motionless history,” when the countryside had more in common with the medieval than with the modern era;61 in 1979 William J. Bouwsma (1923–2004) of Berkeley declared the death of the Renaissance as the dawn of modern individualism;62 and some years later Heinz Schilling (1942–) announced that “we have lost the Reformation.”63 By the 1990s, Europe before the mid-twentieth century seemed in danger of becoming just “one damn thing after another.”64 Sabean’s work shares, it is true, this age’s strong feeling of a continuity between medieval and nineteenth-century Europe. Yet he is no pessimist, and his stake in the past works most intensely for the sake of the future. There is something of Ernst Bloch in his respect for contemporary historical thinking as a kind of anticipatory utopianism. But he never brings this to the fore. Sabean the passionate and tireless worker of documents and cruncher of data does not soar into theory, and he does not succumb to a relentless belief in statistical demonstrations. Rather, he seeks the past’s meaning in the local relationships his Swabian farmers built with their fellows. This is not narrowing, given the cosmopolitan character of his scholarship, and his vision marks his reading, his writing, his citations, his collaborations, and his organization of projects. Sabean is quite aware that if his vision of a history both progressive and comprehensible is to flourish, it must do so on a cosmopolitan, postnational basis. No one in his generation has supplied more energy to this cause. One prominent element in this fate of our picture of the early modern past is the loss of Marxism since, say, the 1960s. By 1989 historical materialism, the one vision of history that insisted on historical change as both necessary and intelligible, stood on the brink of collapse. Still, its liberation from a world bent on coerced development has also opened a way to regeneration and renewal. At many places in Sabean’s work, the heritage of Marxism is perceptible. Its

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presence does not signal an appropriation of classical Marxism in the vein of, say, Engels or Marx, not to mention Lenin. Nor does he lean on the classical “law of development,” which taught that history is a necessary succession of distinctly different class societies. For many Marxist writers of Sabean’s generation, of course, the discarding of this doctrine signified a rejection of economism and materialism, which has made possible new intersections between, for example, class theory and religion. Among the signs of this turn one thinks of the disciples of Louis Althusser (1918–90) and even of Althusser himself, of whom it has been written that “the legacy of the Roman Catholic Church is well known in Louis Althusser’s personal and intellectual life.”65 No one can say in what direction, if any, such convergences might lead, but there is a possible clue in Sabean’s recognition of religion as one legitimate strand in the intellectual and emotional ties that bind individuals together by helping them relate to one another. His concept of the self in this sense is not something reason has liberated from the irrationalities of the past. Rather, it is a social creation dependent on the individual’s acknowledgment of other selves who are sometimes in community with and sometimes separated from—or even in conflict with—one’s self. In traditional accounts of Western history, the formation of self-consciousness was usually associated with the rise of Protestant religion and its special capacity for interiority. This signature makes its mark in Sabean’s work in his search for “the production of the self.”66 There is no reason in principle, however, to deny the practical forms of religion—liturgy, sacraments, and other rituals—their roles in the maintenance of the community that is essential to the success of the self. This affirmation not only greatly expands the possible interactions between self and community; it also calls for a revision of Karl Marx’s oft-quoted statement about the burden of history. Does “the tradition of all dead generations” merely weigh “like a nightmare on the brain of the living”?67 Must peoples forget their histories and abandon their traditions in order to become free? David Warren Sabean tells us that his Swabians were communities of peoples who could not afford to forget. Nor can we. Notes My thanks go to Katherine G. Brady, whose sharp editorial eye markedly improved this text. 1. David Warren Sabean, “The Theological Rationalism of Moïse Amyraut,” Archive for Reformation History/Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 55 (1964): 204–16. 2. David Warren Sabean, “Household Formation and Geographical Mobility: A Family Register Study for a Württemberg Village 1760–1900,” Annales de démographie historique (1970): 275–94.

Introduction  1  17 

3. David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), cited as Neckarhausen I; David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998), cited as Neckarhausen II. 4. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984). 5. Gerhard A. Ritter, ed., German Refugee Historians and Friedrich Meinecke: Letters and Documents, 1910–1977, trans. Alex Skinner, Studies in Central European Histories 49 (Leiden, 2010). 6. See Catherine Epstein, “The Second Generation: Historians of Modern Germany in Postwar America,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 51 (Fall 2012): 55–63. 7. I was another. I describe some of my experiences in Thomas A. Brady Jr., “Leonard Krieger, Leopold von Ranke, and the Meaning of History,” Sixteenth Century Journal 40 (2009): 41–44. 8. See especially David W. Sabean, “George Mosse and The Holy Pretence,” in What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice (Madison, WI, 2004), 15–24. 9. These volumes appeared in 1950, 1953, and 1957, respectively. 10. Sabean, “George Mosse and The Holy Pretence,” 18–19, quoting George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, WI, 2000), 178. 11. Ibid. 12. George Mosse, The Holy Pretense: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford, 1957), 322. 13. Laurenz Müller, Diktatur und Revolution: Reformation and Bauernkrieg in der Geschichtsschreihung des “Dritten Reiches” und der DDR, Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte 50 (Stuttgart, 2004), summarized in his “Revolutionary Moment: Interpreting the Peasants’ War in the Third Reich and in the German Democratic Republic,” trans. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Central European History 40 (2007): 1–26. 14. Alfred Meusel, “Die wissenschaftliche Auffassung der deutschen Geschichte,” 405, here  taken from the English of Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1985), 48. For the state of  the question at that time, see Jan Herman Brinks, Die DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft auf dem Weg zur deutschen Einheit: Luther, Friedrich II und Bismarck als Paradigmen politischen Wandels, Campus Forschung 685 (Frankfurt and New York, 1992), 132–39; also helpful may be the brief treatment in Thomas A. Brady Jr., “1525 and All That: The German Peasants’ War in Modern Memory,” in Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art, ed. Melissa Etzler and Priscilla Layne (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2010), 1–13. 15. David W. Sabean, Landbesitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabend des Bauernkrieges (Stuttgart, 1972). It appeared as volume 26 in the prestigious series Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte. 16. Sabean, Landbesitz, 1. 17. Peter Blickle, Die Revolution von 1525 (Munich, 1977), now in its fourth edition (2004); English version published as The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Thomas A. Brady Jr. (Baltimore, 1985). Blickle’s latest interpretation is Der Bauernkrieg: Die Revolution des Gemeinen Mannes (Munich, 2011). 18. Sabean, Landbesitz, 114.

18  1  Thomas A. Brady Jr.

19. Ibid., 116. 20. Ibid., 118. 21. Ibid., 119. 22. Ibid., 120. 23. Sabean, Power in the Blood, 2. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 58–59, and from there, too, the remaining quotes in this paragraph. 27. According to a Lutheran rite. Almost all of Sabean’s writings on German social history are set among (Lutheran) Protestants. The one exception deals with Catholicism entirely at second hand, that is, from the historiography. It has little or nothing to say about comparative religious history and is obviously prompted by the “religion and violence” literature. See David Warren Sabean, “Reading Sixteenth Century Religious Violence: The Historiography of St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” in Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 215 (Göttingen, 2006), 109–23. From today’s perspective, Sabean’s silence about Catholic villagers seems odd in an oeuvre devoted heavily to Central Europe, the most important zone of plural religion in post-Reformation Europe. 28. Sabean, Power in the Blood, 59. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Sabean, Neckarhausen I, xxv. 34. Ibid., 1–2. 35. Ibid., 11–12. 36. Ibid., 12. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 17. 39. Ibid., 21. 40. Ibid., 24. 41. Ibid., 26. 42. Ibid., 432. 43. Ibid., 449–50. 44. The next-to-last chapter (22) bears the title “Kinship and Class Formation,” and the final chapter that of “Kinship and Gender.” 45. Sabean, Neckarhausen II, 509–10. 46. Friedrich Carl von Moser, Von dem Deutschen Nationalgeist, ed. Horst Denzer (Selb, 1766), 5. 47. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Werke Schriften I-II, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich, 1970–79), 410. 48. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 7 (Frankfurt, 1985), 90, ll. 2090–91. 49. See James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), 145. 50. James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, rev. ed. (New York, n.d. [1864]), 388.

Introduction  1  19 

51. Ibid., 388. 52. The latest and largest treatment is Joachim Whaley’s Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2012). See also Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation: Vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (Munich, 2006). Fundamental to this new turn in the German literature is Stollberg-Rilinger’s superb monograph, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reichs (Munich, 2008), which argues that in the eighteenth century the Holy Roman Empire’s old political culture was losing its power of attraction. 53. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 1990–1992 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 65. See especially Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Warren Sabean, eds., The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association 1 (New York and Oxford, 2010). 54. Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols. (Munich, 2000), 1:554. This large study has also appeared in English under the title Germany: The Long Road West, 2 vols., trans. Alexander J. Sager (New York, 2006–7). Winkler’s interpretation of modern German history is usefully and critically examined by Anselm DoeringManteuffel, “Eine politische Nationalgeschichte für die Berliner Republik: Überlegungen zu Heinrich August Winklers ‘Der lange Weg nach Westen,’” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 446–62. 55. Sabean, Neckarhausen II, 2–3. 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1 (1977): 115–36. 62. William J. Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1–15; see also his The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT, 2000). 63. See my critiques in Thomas A. Brady Jr., “‘We Have Lost the Reformation’: Heinz Schilling and the Rise of the Confessionalization Thesis,” in Wege der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Stefan Ehrenpreis et al. (Berlin, 2007), 33–56; and Thomas A. Brady Jr., “Lost Reformations? From World-Historical Event to One Process among Many,” in Alteuropa—Vormoderne—Neue Zeit: Epochen und Dynamiken der europäischen Geschichte (1200–1800), ed. Christian Jaser, Ute LotzHeumann, and Matthias Pohlig (Berlin, 2012), 95–110. 64. A saying attributed to Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) about life, not history, here quoted from Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes VII–X, abridged by D. C. Somervell (Oxford, 1957), chap. XI, “Law and Freedom in History.” 65. Roland Boer, “Althusser, Myth & Genesis 1–3,” Journal of Philosophy & Scripture 1 (2004): 1. See also Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Leiden, 2009), 107–62, a chapter entitled “The Ecclesiastical Eloquence of Louis Althusser.” 66. David W. Sabean, “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central European History 29 (1996): 1–18. 67. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, 1937), 15.

PART I

12 Kinship

CHAPTER 1

12

“As a Brother Should Be” Siblings, Kinship, and Community in Carolingian Europe DANA M. POLANICHKA

I

n 800 ce, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor.1 The event bestowed papal blessing on a Roman-Frankish union long in the making and highlighted the expansive and expanding dominion of Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards (r. 768–814). But what Charlemagne built during his reign fragmented after his death. He had ruled largely alone (after his brother died three years into their dual reign) and left one heir, Louis the Pious (r. 814–40).2 At Charlemagne’s death, however, Louis already had three sons: Lothar I (b. 795), Pippin I (b. 797), and Louis the German (b. 806). Following Frankish practice, Louis promised the imperial throne and patrimony to his firstborn, Lothar,3 and assured Pippin and the younger Louis of their own titles and regna (realms or regions over which early medieval kings ruled).4 Events soon threatened the realm’s apparent peace. In October 818, Irmengard, wife of Louis the Pious, passed away. Louis quickly remarried, and in 823, his empress Judith gave birth to Charles the Bald. With his realm already divided among his first three sons, Louis appealed to them on behalf of their new half brother.5 Lothar consented to granting Charles “whatever part of the kingdom he wishe[d]” and swore to serve as Charles’s protector.6 Lothar regretted this before long and, with his brothers Pippin and Louis the German, rebelled. Twice, in April 830 and in June 833, the three removed their father from the throne, putting him and Charles in captivity.7 Twice, Louis the Pious reasserted his power, but his continued pleas with his sons to remember their commitments to him and one another fell on deaf ears. By 838, the younger Louis was in rebellion, and the elder Louis’s death in 840 provoked civil war between Lothar, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald (the fourth brother, Pippin, had died in 838). Peace only returned in 843 with the Treaty of Verdun.

24  1  Dana M. Polanichka

Our most detailed report of the civil wars comes from Nithard, an eyewitness to the events and member of Charles the Bald’s circle who drafted the Histories at Charles’s behest.8 The importance of kinship to the situation and text is obvious: Stuart Airlie, discussing Nithard’s Histories, called the Carolingian family the “central institution of the empire,” and he and Janet Nelson emphasized the correlation between the peace of the realm and that of the royal family.9 Those brief remarks aside, there has been no substantial exploration of familial bonds in the text. Yet, the extensive work and teaching of David Warren Sabean reminds us of the necessity of exploring kinship in premodern societies to best understand those worlds. Approaching Nithard’s Histories through the lens of kinship emphasizes the central role of familial ties and obligations, spiritual kinship, intergenerational conflict, and gender dynamics in the text, and ultimately uncovers the familial relationships, values, and rituals that were fundamental to the success and peace of the Carolingian world. This essay, thus inspired by Sabean’s research on kinship and his sustained mentoring, considers what the tension that often surfaced during Frankish royal succession—a critical moment of property exchange—reveals about the early medieval family. After introducing Nithard and his text, I explore ninth-century aristocratic kinship, particularly vertical (father-son) and horizontal (sibling) relations and the use of supplemental ties.10 Broadening scope, the article then considers how Frankish notions of family were central to Nithard’s conception of the larger Frankish community. I argue that fraternal disobedience and filial discord were expected as much as obedience and harmony were hoped for, and the realm’s peace ultimately rested upon a more dependable obligation: mercy.11 In ninth-century Francia, clementia proved to be more than a Christian value: in such tumultuous times, the coupling of forgiveness and mercy became a constant constituent of the empire—a familial, political ritual that provided the sole means of achieving peace and preserving the realm. Ultimately, as Nithard’s Histories reveals, forgiveness formed the core of Frankish communities. Nithard and His Text Nithard’s Histories presents a hybrid text. Book one, a Carolingian “house history,” contains a biography of Charlemagne and an overview of Louis the Pious’s reign.12 Books two through four suggest the work of a (biased) war reporter embedded within an army, following unfolding political events.13 The Histories is distinctive as both the sole record for myriad events and an account written by a secular author, courtier, and soldier.14 Scholars have long recognized the text’s importance as a detailed timeline of the civil wars and thorough sketch of aristocratic life. Beyond portraying

Siblings, Kinship, and Community  1  25 

nobility, knighthood, and masculinity, Nithard emphasizes the importance of the public good, formulates his conception of the res publica and justice, depicts bad rulership, reveals dissension among Charles’s camp, and acknowledges the threat of Lothar’s imperial title.15 Moreover, the text’s darkening tone and growing critique of Nithard’s patron, Charles the Bald, reveal the author’s mounting dissatisfaction with his lord, and with Nithard’s own loss of property and prestige.16 Meanwhile, throughout the text, Nithard divulges a deeper private history, attempting to reestablish his and his parents’ legitimacy.17 Nithard’s family ties had placed him in a privileged, yet precarious, position. He was born before 800 ce to Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha and Angilbert, the abbot of St. Riquier. While Nithard discloses his parents’ and brother’s identities, he never mentions the scandal clouding his conception.18 Carolingian biographies attest that Bertha and her sisters cultivated lovers outside marriage. Charlemagne ignored such indiscretions, but Louis the Pious, upon his ascension, exiled his sisters.19 Nithard, however, spent all but the last two years of his life at court. During Charlemagne’s reign, Bertha and Nithard lived there;20 after Bertha’s exile, Nithard remained at court throughout his uncle’s rule.21 Eventually, he transitioned to Charles the Bald’s court, serving as a soldier and ambassador, and possibly drafting the Strasbourg Oaths, sworn promises of support and loyalty made between Louis the German and Charles the Bald in February 842.22 As Nithard recorded the conflict between kin, he did so from the eye of a long-brewing Carolingian storm. Filial Bonds and (Dis)Obedience At the heart of the civil wars lay the obligations between Carolingian fathers and sons, and between brothers. In his Histories, Nithard illustrates vertical (father-son) and horizontal (sibling) relationships. Through his discussion of these familial links, Nithard demonstrates the contradictory expectations and unfulfilled obligations in filial and fraternal bonds that by the 820s had laid the groundwork for the wars. Frankish custom, bolstered by Judeo-Christian tradition and augmented by the generational transfer of rulership within royal families, placed certain obligations upon fathers and sons.23 A father’s primary duty was providing an inheritance: Louis the Pious owed his sons portions of his empire and accompanying titles and honors. Despite flirtations with primogeniture, the Carolingians practiced partible inheritance, divvying up land and titles among sons.24 Such hereditary customs created fertile ground for clashes, and Emperor Louis landed in an untenable position in the 820s: having already divided his realm, he now was obliged by tradition (and his wife’s insistence) to provide for a

26  1  Dana M. Polanichka

fourth son.25 Securing an inheritance for Charles resulted in the diminishment of Louis’s other sons’ inheritances, and Nithard voices the father’s troubles: “Once Charles was born, Louis, having divided the entire empire among his other sons, did not know what to do for Charles. Anxious about this, the father implored his other sons on behalf of this son.”26 Louis’s petitions to his sons suggest that a father’s power over land division depended in part on their agreement.27 Nithard says little about the necessity for sons’ assent, but recounts how Charles later reminded Lothar of his assent.28 Such land transfer also involved more than human interaction: the gifting of royal land from Frankish father to son occurred under divine authority.29 When Lothar, Louis the German, Pippin, or Charles received land, it was from their earthly and heavenly fathers.30 In return, sons owed their fathers fidelity, respect, and obedience.31 Louis the Pious’s sons’ mutual obligations to their father represent a common device in the pursuit of fraternal peace. For example, after Louis’s death, Lothar quickly assured Charles of his benevolence, invoking feelings of friendship “as their father had established.”32 As Charles the Bald’s position weakened, he reminded Lothar of the latter’s promises to their father, entreating him “to preserve what their father had arranged between them” and allow Charles to claim “without conflict that which his father had given him.”33 Another set of messengers implored Lothar “not to break up the kingdom that God and their father granted him.”34 When Louis the German and Charles allied against their eldest brother, they reminded him “what their father had arranged between them”35 and requested that he “concede to each what rightly belonged to him according to the expressed will of father and brother.”36 Their frequent refrains remind one another, and Nithard’s readers, that death did not dissolve filial obligations.37 Even so, a father’s control over his sons appears limited, whether during his life or after death: sons’ obligations to their fathers are rendered visible more often when father-son reciprocity was breached than fulfilled.38 Nithard describes Lothar’s rebellion against his father as a “great crime of the son against the empire” that deserved revenge.39 If the significance of filial bonds did not prevent the Frankish royal family from rupturing them, recognition of those bonds’ significance did proscribe Carolingian responses to those ruptures. Lothar, remorseful after his first rebellion, fell upon his knees before his father and an assembly, admitting he had “sinned before God and you [Louis the Pious].”40 Likewise, after the second rebellion, shame and regret overwhelmed Pippin and Louis the German for having “twice deprived their father of his office.”41 No matter how often Carolingian sons resisted their fathers, the possibility of reconciliation remained, since fathers were expected to be pious, mild, and forgiving of sons’ transgressions.42 Twice his sons rebelled, removed him from the throne, and imprisoned him—twice Louis forgave them. Louis “generously” received a repentant Pippin, thanking him for his aid and allowing his

Siblings, Kinship, and Community  1  27 

return to his court at Aquitaine.43 The return of the younger Louis to his father prompted the elder to receive him “joyfully.”44 When Lothar and his father reunited, Louis kissed his son and “thanked God for his reconciliation with his estranged son.”45 Such examples of forgiveness led to the charge that the emperor’s “fault” was that he was too merciful.46 But, as we shall see, clemency extended to the next generation, and despite all the neglected obligations and forgotten promises, mercy again proved dependable. Fraternal Bonds and (Not Exactly) Brotherly Love In the 840s, family conflicts shifted from primarily vertical to horizontal, as the passing of Louis the Pious in 840 left his three sons struggling among themselves to rule the Carolingian realm. Accordingly, fraternal relations, both positive and negative, garner the greatest attention in the Histories. Nithard opens book one by acknowledging the persecutions that Charles the Bald’s brother Lothar inflicted upon Charles.47 Then, throughout his sketch of Louis the Pious, Nithard emphasizes royal siblings: describing how Louis exiled his sisters and made his brothers table companions before forcing them to be tonsured; revealing how Lothar called upon his brothers to restore order; detailing Louis’s reconciliation of the brothers (that is, his sons); and concluding with Louis’s brothers burying him.48 After laying this foundation, Nithard fully explores fraternal relationships. Brotherly love, or fraternitas, emerges in Nithard’s text as a central FrancoChristian value to which the men repeatedly appealed.49 Charles the Bald petitioned his brothers by emphasizing their brotherly bonds. He reminded Lothar that they were brothers50 and offered to ally with him, provided the latter be “a loyal friend as, on account of justice, a brother should be to a brother.”51 Charles and Louis the German stressed to Lothar that they were brothers,52 and Lothar replied that he “wished to seek the common good for themselves and for the people, as is proper among brothers and between Christian people.”53 When Nithard extols the virtues of Charles and the younger Louis, their greatest quality is their “sacred and venerable peace.”54 If the obligation of fraternitas was widely acknowledged, it was not often followed. The severity of Lothar’s transgression against his brothers emerges when Nithard writes that Lothar’s “worst” action was attacking his brother as an enemy.55 The author further underlines the importance of fraternal support when describing the long-term implications of discord. The Franks, “fearing they might have left a disgraceful memory to their descendants, if a brother failed to help a brother, . . . chose to endure all injuries and even, if necessary, death, rather than lose their renowned invincibility.”56 Honor across generations required that men adhere to brotherly love—but God’s favor did as well.

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Lothar’s sins against his brothers and neglect of appropriate brotherly behavior exacted “divine vengeance”: an ad hoc council called by Louis the German and Charles explained their victory as due to God’s partiality.57 Nithard’s Histories demonstrates how acutely at odds vertical and horizontal bonds could be. Among the Carolingians, patrilineal lineage was of utmost importance, as book one demonstrates in mapping the royal bloodline from Charlemagne to Charles the Bald. But while vertical relationships provided access to power, land, and governance, horizontal relationships—here, fraternal ones—possessed the ability to secure, limit, or interrupt access. Nithard, detailing the ad hoc council’s evaluation of Lothar, lists how he not only drove out his father, incited oath-breaking, and neglected promises, but also tried to disinherit his brothers.58 Fortunately, forgiveness between siblings is just as frequent as friction in Nithard’s Histories. Louis the Pious had repeatedly forgiven his sons, and now his sons offered forgiveness—or at least the opportunity for forgiveness—to one another throughout the civil wars. When Lothar eventually realized “he had sinned against God and his brothers” and sued for peace, his brothers received him with mercy and forgiveness.59 Godparentage, Promises, and Oaths The loyalty expected from male family members was strengthened by godparentage, pleas, promises, and oaths—or rather, the disloyalty expected from sons and brothers was partially mitigated by these other, complementary bonds. Louis the Pious employed multiple means to bolster his sons’ loyalty and accord. The emperor first attempted to strengthen the bonds between Lothar and Charles and ensure his youngest son’s protection through a spiritual, churchsanctioned relationship: Louis named Lothar Charles’s godfather. Godparentage created a vertical bond between Lothar and Charles the Bald,60 as the former became spiritual father to the latter, now his spiritual son.61 Although the Church intended godparenthood for educational purposes, godparents were often chosen to forge social, economic, and political bonds.62 Louis the Pious selected Lothar as Charles’s godfather to ensure not his spiritual education, but his protection.63 Lothar, more than brotherly love, now owed Charles all that was expected by a son from his father: protection and material support (i.e., Charles’s rightful share of honores as bequeathed by Louis the Pious). Charles, in turn, owed Lothar respect and honor.64 Aware of these obligations, when Lothar attempted to convince Charles of his amity, he claimed he was “friendly toward him, as . . . was proper for one to feel toward a godchild.”65 In return, Charles reminded Lothar that the latter was his brother and godparent.66

Siblings, Kinship, and Community  1  29 

Louis the Pious not only forged mutual obligations between his sons, but also created a coparenting relationship between himself as natural father and Lothar as spiritual father.67 Louis’s appeals to Lothar on behalf of Charles should be considered in this light. The emperor had further reason to seek Lothar’s consent in redividing the inheritance: as Charles’s spiritual father and Louis’s coparent, Lothar was responsible for securing Charles’s inheritance. Thus, Louis, in appealing to Lothar, did not invert the vertical relationship between father and son, but rather employed their horizontal relationship as coparents.68 If these multilayered obligations gave Louis hope for fraternitas among his sons, he still persistently sought his sons’ promises of loyalty, mutual protection, and peace.69 The emperor brought Louis the German and Pippin back to him by pledging land increases and receiving promises of fidelity.70 Also, the father repeatedly implored the brothers to love and protect one another, insisting he most desired his sons’ mutual love and protection.71 Overall, Nithard’s text implies that Louis the Pious found promises and oaths necessary to maintain peace—that he deemed filial and fraternal ties to be insufficient. The need for oaths becomes more explicit when Nithard describes the Strasbourg Oaths. In February 842, Louis the German and Charles the Bald allied against Lothar. The two men recognized the importance of brotherhood as a central Franco-Christian value that potentially had the power to guarantee peace. Yet, they could not avoid the past impotence of fraternitas in preventing civil war, and in fact they acknowledged how their history of fraternal conflict now led their own men to question the strength of their bonds: “we believe you doubt that our faith is constant and our brotherly love, strong.”72 To assure their followers of their alliance, they swore oaths of fidelity to one another before their men in each other’s languages: Louis, whose men conversed in Old High German, spoke his oath in Old French; Charles, a French speaker, delivered his promises in German. Their oaths committed each to treating his brother “with regard to aid and everything else as a man should rightfully treat his brother.”73 These words recognized that blood ties alone could not ensure peace, but perhaps oaths could buttress the brotherly bond created by nature and expected by God. Beyond words, Louis and Charles demonstrated their fraternitas through ritual: they “took their meals together almost constantly, and whatever valuables they possessed, each gave freely to the other in friendship. In the same house, they ate and slept. They dealt similarly with public as well as private affairs. Neither asked anything of the other, but what he considered useful and agreeable to him.”74 Louis and Charles not only verbally articulated, but also performed repeatedly, their brotherhood in their men’s presence. In fact, the Strasbourg Oaths created a more solid and lasting peace due to their thorough involvement of the brothers’ Frankish followers. Introducing

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the oaths, each brother addressed his followers, promising to release his men from obligation if he himself should violate this oath. Then the men, on both sides, swore oaths that committed them to helping to preserve the peace by restraining their respective lord from attacking his brother and refusing to give their lord aid in any attack upon his brother. This newly formed web of obligations fashioned potential concord by making these Franks’ obligations to others dependent on peace. Nithard’s text had, until now, demonstrated how men’s oaths to their lords committed them to violence whenever a Carolingian attacked his brother. Likewise, it showed how individual Franks could agitate for their leader to assault his brother pursuant to their own interests.75 The Strasbourg Oaths made Franks’ commitment to their leaders dependent upon the observation of fraternitas. The “culture of obligation” that had allowed for warring transformed into one intended to maintain peace.76 Kinship and Community Despite the Strasbourg Oaths, the realm’s peace still depended on filial relations: Lothar still opposed Louis and Charles; reconciliation between all three remained the only hope for peace. Thus, as Nithard’s text makes clear, the Carolingian royal family—particularly the dynamic ties between fathers, sons, and brothers—stood at the center of the Frankish political world. Filial or fraternal peace affected the realm’s peace, while filial or fraternal violence ignited war. As Nithard illustrates, Frankish nobles were tied more closely to an individual ruler than to a particular ethnic group, abstract polity, or even their own siblings. Disputes between Carolingian royal brothers could place Frankish noblemen at odds with their own siblings, sometimes with tragic results. At the Battle of Fontenoy in June 841, for example, it even led to (unnamed) brothers killing brothers among the Frankish population.77 The inextricably intertwined concepts of family and political realm and even ethnic group are apparent in the varied modern translations of Nithard’s text. When, for example, Nithard laments his shame in “genere nostro,” does he refer to “my people,” “our family,” or “our dynasty”?78 The Histories blurs distinctions between the Carolingian family and the Frankish realm, between familial relationships and political ones, precisely because such clear delineations did not exist for Nithard or his contemporaries. A family history of the rights and obligations expected of filial and fraternal bonds was a political history.79 Writing of family, the Frankish kingdom, and that intricate Carolingian mixture of both, Nithard presents contumacy and discord. Frankish Christians placed a high value on obedience to paternal authority and fraternitas, partly because the peace of the realm depended upon them. Yet these values

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are most often articulated in the absence of Carolingians’ adherence to them. The lasting impression is that filial disobedience and fraternal dissonance are expected as much as their inverses are—perhaps more so (hence the need to repeatedly remind contemporaries of fraternitas). If, however, Nithard and his contemporaries could not expect their lords to behave with deference toward their fathers, or to act with friendship toward their brothers, they could count on clemency. The Histories emphasizes forgiveness and mercy as integral to the ideal Frank, as expectations of clemency encompassed all members of the Carolingian family and thus of the realm. Nithard reveals the extent of familial mercy in a passage in book three, telling the story of Charles the Bald’s sister Hildegard. For reasons not disclosed, Hildegard took one of Charles’s men prisoner.80 Charles restrained his own men, who wished to respond aggressively, and he instead acted with compassion, provoking her submission. Charles forgave Hildegard, speaking to her “gently” and promising her “all the kindness a brother owes a sister.”81 To be sure, the inclusion of this narrative is puzzling. It is the sole textual evidence of Hildegard’s rebellion, and its content disrupts the text’s coherence. The Histories prioritizes male relationships and masculine activity, with very few nods toward female figures or their involvement in the events.82 Yet here, Nithard sets aside the main account to assign substantial narrative space to a woman. Personal motivations partially explain Nithard’s decision to highlight Hildegard’s story: as Alex Cilley and I have argued elsewhere, the Histories bears the mark of a man whose own mother received poor treatment at her brother’s hands, and this story, by comparing Charles’s forgiveness of Hildegard to Louis the Pious’s exile of his sister (Nithard’s mother, Bertha), aids Nithard in reestablishing his parents’ legitimacy and honor.83 Yet, this anecdote simultaneously fits into the Histories well, presenting another tale of sibling disobedience followed by a reassertion of proper family relations. Due to their blood ties, Hildegard owed Charles loyalty and deference. When she ignored those obligations, her brother responded with clemency. Then, reconciling, Hildegard reasserted her allegiance through oath. As a whole, the incident reveals that sisters could become involved in familial discord in a way not dissimilar to their male relatives,84 demonstrating that the fides and obligations required by familial bonds and oaths crossed gender lines.85 Ultimately, Nithard indulges in this tangent to demonstrate that clemency proved central to Frankish familial and political relationships and to Nithard’s conception of realm and family—so much so that it transcended gender divisions. Filial obligations and fraternal love may have been repeatedly discarded amid assertions of their centrality to the Carolingian world, but mercy persisted as the core value and fundamental political/familial ritual upon which all else depended. Peace only came when a father forgave his son, when a man

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accepted the apology of his brother, or when a brother pardoned his sister. Thus, for all the faults of Louis the Pious—and surely Nithard could name a few—his merciful nature was not one of them. For the author of the Histories, forgiveness was essential to the well-being of the Frankish family and realm. Therefore, if we now understand the early ninth-century Carolingian world as a “political community governed by the consciousness of having sinned and by its search for strategies of atonement,”86 we must also see at its core a family persistently dominated by the recognition of having sinned against their fathers and brothers, by the willingness to ask forgiveness, and by the commitment to offering mercy and accepting opponents back into the community. Notes 1. I am grateful to Alex Cilley for thinking through Nithard’s Histories with me; Patrick Geary, Lisa Lebduska, Nancy Kendrick, and Hyun Kim for commenting on early drafts; and the volume’s editors for their careful reading of the nearly final draft. Their questions, comments, and suggestions have strengthened this essay immeasurably. A great debt of gratitude is owed to David Warren Sabean for playing such a pivotal role in my formation as a historian. 2. Charlemagne’s and Louis’s kingdoms were divided, with sons managing portions. Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2011), 382–84. Preoccupation with a unified Carolingian empire is modern. Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge, 2009), 26–27. 3. Ordinatio Imperii, MGH Capit. I (Hanover, 1883), 270–73. 4. Pippin received Aquitaine; Louis the German, Bavaria. Nithard, Historiarum Libri IV, ed. Philippe Lauer, in Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux, rev. Sopie Glansdorff (Paris, 2012), bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 8 (hereafter Nithard, Historiae). Translations of the Latin are mine, unless specified as from Bernard W. Scholz, Carolingian Chronicles (Ann Arbor, MI, 1970). 5. The term “half sibling” was not employed in the ninth century. I use it for clarity’s sake. 6. “ut portionem regni quam vellet eidem.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 3, pp. 8–11. On Louis’s five proposals for imperial division, see Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, Carolingian World, 382. 7. On the events of 833 and their historical memory, see Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia, 2009). 8. Nithard, Historiae, preface to bk. 1, p. 2. 9. Stuart Airlie, “The World, the Text and the Carolingian: Royal, Aristocratic and Masculine Identities in Nithard’s Histories,” in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. Peter Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2007), 67; Janet L. Nelson, “The Search for Peace in a Time of War: The Carolingian Brüderkrieg, 840–843,” in Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen, 1996), 104; Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and

Siblings, Kinship, and Community  1  33 

Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge, 1990); Reinhard Schneider, Brüdergemeine und Schwurfreundschaft: Der Auflösungsprozeß des Karlingerreiches im Spiegel der caritas-Terminologie in den Verträgen der karlingischen Teilkönige des 9. Jahrhunderts, Historische Studien 388 (Lübeck, 1964). 10. For nonfamilial bonds, see Meg Leja, “The Making of Men, Not Masters: Right Order and Lay Masculinity according to Dhuoda and Nithard,” Comitatus 39 (2008): 1–40, esp. 8–10. On medieval kinship, see Bernhard Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Newark, 2000), esp. 15–45. 11. Carolingian familial forgiveness should be read in conjunction with de Jong, Penitential State. 12. Nithard, Historiae, preface to bk. 1, pp. 2–4; Airlie, “The World,” 61. 13. Airlie, “The World,” 55. 14. Karl Leyser, “Three Historians: (a) Nithard and his Rulers,” in Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter, 2 vols. (London, 1994), 1:19; Airlie, “The World,” 52–54. 15. Janet L. Nelson, “Nobility in the Ninth Century,” in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Woodbridge, UK, 2000), 43–51; Janet L. Nelson, “Ninth-Century Knighthood: The Evidence of Nithard,” in The Frankish World, 750–900 (London, 1996), 75–87; Leja, “Making of Men”; Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2012); Leyser, “Three Historians”; Janet L. Nelson, “History-writing at the Courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald,” in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter (Vienna, 1994), 435–42; Philippe Depreux, “Nithard et la Res Publica: Un regard critique sur le règne de Louis le Pieux,” Médiévales 22–23 (1992): 149–61; Hans Patze, “Iustitia bei Nithard,” in Festschrift für Hermann Heimpel zum 70. Geburtstag am 19. September 1971, 3 vols. (Göttingen, 1972), 3:147–65; Janet L. Nelson, “The Intellectual in Politics: Context, Content and Authorship in the Capitulary of Coulaines, November 843,” in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, ed. Lesley M. Smith and Benedicta Ward (London, 1992), 1–14; Elina Screen, “The Importance of the Emperor: Lothar I and the Frankish Civil War, 840–843,” Early Medieval Europe 12 (2003): 25–51. 16. Janet L. Nelson, “Public Histories and Private History in the Work of Nithard,” Speculum 60 (1985): 251–93; Nelson, “History-writing,” 435–42. 17. Dana M. Polanichka and Alex Cilley, “A Very Personal History of Nithard: Family and Honour in the Carolingian World,” in Early Medieval Europe 22. No. 2 (2014: 171–200). 18. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 4, chap. 5, p. 150. 19. Einhard, Vita Karoli, chap. 19, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 25 (Hanover, 1911), 25; Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, chap. 21, ed. and tr. E. Tremp, MGH SRG 64 (Hanover, 1995), 348. Matthew Innes, “Charlemagne’s Will: Piety, Politics and the Imperial Succession,” The English Historical Review 112 (1997): 845. On Nithard’s response to his mother’s exile, his ill will toward Louis the Pious, and his understanding of the gendered nature of fraternitas (and whether sisters were included in horizontal obligations), see Polanichka and Cilley, “A Very Personal History.” 20. On Bertha at court, see Astronomus, Vita Hludowici, chap. 21, p. 348; Janet L. Nelson, “Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?,” in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (New York, 1993), 43–61.

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21. On the problems posed to Carolingian kings by male relatives, see Innes, “Charlemagne’s Will,” 846; Anton Scharer, “Charlemagne’s Daughters,” in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter et al. (Surrey, UK, 2009), 281–82. 22. Nelson, “Intellectual in Politics,” 5. 23. Judeo-Christian writings and teachings emphasized paternal authority, a son’s obedience to parents, and brotherhood, while condemning patricide and fratricide through, for example, the Ten Commandments and the story of Cain and Abel. These values were accordingly passed on to and held by Franco-Christian society. Nelson, “Search for Peace,” 87–114, esp. 98. 24. Nelson, “Search for Peace,” 92–95. 25. Patze, “Iustitia,” 148; Elizabeth Ward, “Caesar’s Wife: The Career of the Empress Judith, 819–829,” in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1990), 205–27. 26. “Karolo quidem nato, quoniam omne imperium inter reliquos filios pater diviserat, quid huic faceret ignorabat; cumque anxius pater pro filio filios rogaret.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 3, pp. 8–9. 27. Nithard, Historiae, bk 1, chap. 3, pp 8–10; Leja, “Making of Men,” 7, 10. 28. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 3, p. 102. 29. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 6, pp. 30–31. 30. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 3, p. 52; bk. 2, chap. 8, p. 74. 31. Hrabanus Maurus, MGH Epistolae V, Karolini aevi III (Berlin, 1899), 416–20; Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils, ed. Pierre Riché (Paris, 1975), bk. 3, chap. 1–3, pp. 134–49. 32. “sicuti pater statuerat.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 46. On fraternitas, see Régine Le Jan, Famille et Pouvoir dans le Monde Franc (VIIe–Xe siècle): Essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995), esp. 77–81. 33. “ad Lodharium direxit, mandans ac deprecans ut . . . servet quę inter illos pater statuerat; . . . haberet sua sibi et quod illi pater suo consensu concesserat absque conflictu illum habere permittat.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 48. 34. “illi mandaveret replicans necnon et pro Deo deprecatus est ne, suos sibi subtrahens, regnum quod Deus paterque suo consensu illi dederat amplius dissipet.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 3, p. 52. 35. “per quos quae pater inter illos statuerat.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 9, pp. 78–79; bk. 3, chap. 3, pp. 102–3. 36. “cederet cuique quod patris fratrisque consensu juste debebatur.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 9, p. 78, trans. Scholz, Chronicles, 151. 37. Children owed their deceased parents prayers. Le Jan, Famille, 35–57, esp. 35–36. 38. On the sons’ disobedience, see Leja, “Making of Men,” 10; Booker, Past Convictions, 27–28. 39. “tantum facinus a filio in imperium commissum vindicaturus perrexit.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 26. 40. “Novi me coram Deo et te, domine pater, deliquisse.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 36. 41. “Occurrebat insuper etiam filiis verecundia et penitudo quod patrem bis honore privaverant.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 20. 42. “ut pius ac clemens pater.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 36.

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43. “benigne.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 22. 44. “gratanter.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 22. 45. “gratias Deo pro filio quem aversum reconciliaverat egit.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 36. 46. Astronomus, Vita Hludowici, prologue, p. 284, who turned it into a virtue. Booker, Past Convictions, 35; de Jong, Penitential State, 86–88. 47. Nithard, Historiae, preface to bk. 1, p. 2. 48. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 2, pp. 6–8; bk. 1, chap. 3, p. 12; bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 38; bk. 1, chap. 8, p. 42. Louis the Pious “cleverly made use of the fraternal rivalry”: de Jong, Penitential State, 2, 46. 49. “fraterno amore.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 46; bk. 3, chap. 5, p. 112. 50. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 48; bk. 3, chap. 3, p. 102. 51. “consentiunt, ut deinceps Lodharius Karolo ita fidus amicus sit, sicut frater per justiciam fratri esse debet.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 56. 52. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 10, p. 82. 53. “praeter quod commune profectum tam illorum quam et universę plebis, sicut justiciam inter fraters et populum Christi oportebat, quęrere volebat.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 10, p. 84. 54. “sancta ac veneranda concordia.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 6, p. 120. 55. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 8, p. 72; Nelson, “Search for Peace,” 99. 56. “verumtamen, quanquam se haec ita haberent, timentes ne forte, si ab auxilio fratris frater deficeret, posteris suis indignam memoriam reliquissent, quod quidem ne facerent, elegerunt omni penuriae, etiam, si oporteret, morti potius subire quam nomen invictum amittere.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 10, p. 80. 57. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 4, chap. 1, p. 128. 58. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 4, chap. 1, p. 128. 59. “dicentes quod Lodharius cognovisset se in Deum et illos deliquisse.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 4, chap. 3, p. 136. 60. Lothar and Charles’s relationship was never strictly horizontal: the eldest son always claimed priority, and younger brothers owed elder ones deference. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 5, pp. 112–14; bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 48. 61. Joseph H. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 5, 165; Jussen, Spiritual Kinship; Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 195–204. 62. Lynch, Godparents, 15–16, 74–75, 163, 175, 287, 321–24. 63. Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), 76–77; Lynch, Godparents, 173–74, 181–87. 64. Lynch, Godparents, 187. 65. “sicut erga filiolum ex baptismate oportebat, benivolum esse.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 46. 66. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 48; bk. 3, chap. 3, p. 102; Jussen, Spiritual Kinship, 232–38. 67. Lynch, Godparents, 5, 195–200, 285; Jussen, Spiritual Kinship, 214–16; David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998), 23ff. 68. In opposition to Leja, “Making of Men,” 7, 10. 69. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 6, pp. 28–35. 70. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 3, pp. 14–17.

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71. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 38. 72. “quoniam vos de nostra stabili fide ac firma fraternitate dubitare credimus.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 5, p. 114. 73. “si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift”; “so haldih tesan minan bruodher, soso man mit rehtu sinan bruher scal.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 5, pp. 114–17, trans. Scholz, Chronicles, 162. 74. “Nam convivia erant illis poene assidua et, quodcumque precium habebant, hoc alter alteri perhumane dabat. Una domus erat illis convivii et una somnii; tractabant tam pari consensu communia quam et privata; non quicquam aliud quilibet horum ab altero petebat, nisi quod utile ac congruum illi esse censebat.” Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 6, p. 120. 75. Nelson, “Search for Peace,” 97. 76. Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, xxvi. 77. On kinship versus Königsnähe, see David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long-Term Development,” in Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900), ed. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu (New York, 2007), 4. 78. Scholz, Chronicles, 155; Lauer’s translation in Nithard, Historiae, 89; Nelson, “Search for Peace,” 97. 79. Depreux, “Res Publica”; Patze, “Iustitia”; Screen, “Importance of the Emperor.” “Imperium” should be understood as “imperial rule”: de Jong, Penitential State, 27. 80. Nithard, Historiae, bk. 3, chap. 4, pp. 106–11. 81. “multisque verbis blande illam allocutus omnem benignitatem quam frater sorori debet.” Nithard, Historiae bk. 3, chap. 4, p. 108. 82. When Nithard discusses women, he focuses on consanguineal relations, not affinal ties. 83. Polanichka and Cilley, “A Very Personal History.” In fact, it is unclear if Louis the Pious ever “forgave” his sister(s) for past indiscretions because they were exiled. 84. Nelson, “Public Histories,” 270; Nelson, “Women at the Court of Charlemagne,” 57. 85. Airlie, “The World,” 52–54, 65. Judith takes an oath: Nithard, Historiae, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 22. 86. De Jong, Penitential State, 6.

CHAPTER 2

12

The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage in Nineteenth-Century France ANDREA MANSKER

I

n an 1836 issue of the satirical newspaper Le Charivari, lithographer Honoré Daumier published an image in his popular series of Robert Macaire caricatures, this one depicting the iconic con man as a “matrimonial agent.”1 Daumier featured Macaire in Le Charivari between 1836 and 1838 in a variety of contemporary urban settings and situations, most of them focused on commercial society and its seemingly unregulated expansion into additional realms of life under the July Monarchy. A conceited and overblown character belonging to the entrepreneurial middle classes, Macaire often appeared as an unscrupulous agent d’affaires (business agent) who played on the credulity of his victims to swindle them out of their hard-earned savings. The Macaire archetype reflected anxieties associated with the emerging market economy under the rule of “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe. Louis-Philippe’s regime facilitated new businesses and credit networks in the interests of a broadened franchise that included wealthy bankers and industrialists.2 Daumier’s satire of the Parisian marriage broker represents uncertainty in 1830s France regarding the rise and legitimacy of the agent d’affaires, a figure whose dubious commercial activities often bordered on criminality. Though very little scholarly work exists on matrimonial agents in nineteenth-century France,3 Dominique Kalifa has studied the business agent more generally, tracing the rise of this vocation and its significance for the development of the private police. Kalifa argues that agents gained a negative public reputation in the first half of the century largely as a result of their affiliation with the infamous private detective Vidocq, who opened a “universal” information agency in Paris in 1832. Vidocq’s

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investigations into private family affairs opened him to accusations by the state of violating legal and moral norms. In two notorious trials in 1837 and 1843, prosecutors accused him of unlawfully exercising the public functions of the police.4 While the marriage brokers operating in France in this era faced similar criticisms, their profession followed its own trajectory. Several facets of their history suggest that they cannot be conflated with business agents. Despite Daumier’s negative representation of matrimonial agents, their public, legal, and judicial reputation was fairly positive in the first half of the century, as a series of celebrated court rulings and juridical debates in the 1840s and 1850s suggest. Finding that brokers performed a “public utility” in the context of a perceived marriage crisis, civil courts of the July Monarchy and Second Republic expressed sympathy for this novel profession.5 Their judgments helped legitimize the matrimonial agent around the same time that the agent d’affaires was coming under increased suspicion. This essay considers how lawyers and magistrates seized the controversy over brokers to present a new juridical vision of marriage as an acceptably commercial contract. Legal professionals argued that the agent’s business acumen, far from debasing the “sacred” institution of matrimony, helped create trouble-free matches based on love and compatibility. Judicial commentators justified their support for the negotiator by highlighting the difficulties middle-class individuals faced finding spouses in a landscape of anonymity and social dislocation caused by rapid urbanization and laissez-faire capitalism. The courts constructed their own narratives on marriage and its intermediaries to counter the charges of egotism and money calculation often leveled at the agent d’affaires. I borrow from David Warren Sabean’s groundbreaking work on the personal, social, and legal dimensions of marriage and kinship networks to explore marital status as a category of analysis in courtroom debates of modern France.6 Legal experts and popular observers considered professional marriage brokerage to be a new phenomenon practiced in French cities in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 Jurists treated it accordingly as a matter worthy of legal debate from 1830, when a well-known Parisian matrimonial agent sued his client for breach of contract after successfully arranging a marriage for him.8 The ruling of the civil tribunal of the Seine in favor of this broker was followed by a series of positive judgments in French courts that attempted to legalize the marriage negotiator’s contract. In 1843, the civil court of Bourgoin agreed with the Seine tribunal’s precedent, recognizing that “subscribed banknotes to compensate an intermediary for his attention, work and efforts in helping to conclude an advantageous marriage for the subscriber had a perfectly licit cause.”9 The appeals court of Toulouse affirmed the legality of matrimonial agents’ commercial contracts several times, once as late as 1853.10 In 1851, the civil court of Saint-Girons affirmed an earlier decision by the tribunal of the Mans

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that not only declared the broker’s contract licit, but asserted that the object of such conventions “is not at all contrary to morality and public order, which must, on the contrary, protect all stipulations which strive to facilitate marriages.”11 Though French courts made some negative rulings on marriage brokerage in the first half of the century, the majority of judgments acknowledged the validity of the agent’s contract, and even its utility for “morality and public order.” Magistrates struggled to address the practice of professional marriage negotiation in the absence of any direct reference to matrimonial agents in the Civil Code of 1804. By default, judges applied the code’s articles on commercial contracts to marriage brokerage, deeming it a legitimate practice.12 These rulings in favor of marriage negotiators should be viewed partly in the context of increasing judicial activism during the July Monarchy. Rachel Fuchs has noted that beginning in the 1840s, magistrates took the lead in interpreting the Civil Code in more flexible ways. Fuchs highlights judges’ willingness to entertain seduction suits brought by women who had been abandoned by their lovers. She demonstrates how magistrates used these women’s claims for damages to bypass article 340 of the Civil Code, which denied paternity suits.13 Judges’ positive rulings on the commercial contracts of marriage brokers can be seen as another example of their elastic approach to the Civil Code in the 1840s. As many legal experts pointed out in the case of these written agreements, nothing in the code forbade them. Magistrates were also aware that their rulings were increasingly subject to an audience that reached beyond the courtroom, a fact that may have led some to adopt more independent positions. The period witnessed a growing public appetite for published legal briefs, accounts of trials and judicial decisions, and juridical commentary.14 The sovereignty of opinion that judges enjoyed on the question of professional marriage negotiation was stymied by a negative ruling in 1855 by France’s supreme court, the Cour de Cassation. In a surprising reversal of legal thought on marriage brokerage that had developed in the first half of the century, the Cour de Cassation ruled that such contracts were “void [nulle] as having an illicit cause that is contrary to morality [bonnes moeurs].”15 The Cour de Cassation’s deliberations encapsulated French judicial debates for and against marriage negotiators that had appeared prior to 1855 and presented the most coherent rationale for denying the validity of the agent’s contract. Because the 1855 decision elucidates the key accusations that critics made against brokers in the first half of the century, it is necessary to briefly examine this ruling. The case before the Cour de Cassation originated with a lawsuit brought to the civil tribunal of Niort by a self-styled négociant named André-Constant Foubert. Foubert demanded payment of six thousand francs from his client, Paul-René Fleury, a former notary living in Villeneuve-la-Comtesse, in fulfillment of a contract the two had concluded. Fleury had hired Foubert in 1847

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to help him negotiate a marriage to the widow Marchand d’Azuré. Because Fleury’s lawyer charged that the contract was invalid based on its threat to public order, the case quickly became one of many litmus tests of the legality of the profession of marriage brokerage in France.16 Although the Civil Code required contracts to which both parties freely agreed to be executed, article 1133 provided an exception that allowed magistrates to declare agreements “illicit” when they judged them to be “contrary to morality and public order.”17 Unhappy with the decisions of the two initial courts that heard his case, Foubert appealed to the Cour de Cassation, which rendered its judgment in support of the preceding rulings.18 Foubert was undoubtedly surprised by these negative judgments declaring the illegitimacy of his contract given the positive view that French courts had taken toward such legal engagements since 1830. Furthermore, the most prominent lawyers of the Paris Bar Association tenaciously fought against the ruling of the court of Poitiers in 1853, which had rendered the appeals judgment against Foubert.19 The Cour de Cassation judgment can be explained partly as a result of political and social contingencies in midcentury France, particularly the widespread desire for order following the February Revolution and the tumultuous events culminating in the June Days of 1848. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the appeal to images of the nuclear family as the stable and moral foundation of the state became attractive to political factions beyond conservatives, impacting multiple judicial and parliamentary debates in these years. Republicans, monarchists, and Bonapartists all tended to agree that the domestic authority of the family should be reiterated as the “surest guarantee of good order in society.”20 This meant, in part, protecting marriage from intrusions of commerce and from corruption by external forces. The Cour de Cassation upheld the idea that in order to maintain “the sanctity of marriage,” it was necessary to protect it from the sullying effects of the marketplace, where it could become “the object of a shameful industry and traffic [trafic honteux].”21 The courts of Niort and Poitiers agreed with Fleury’s defense that because the object of the broker’s contract was marriage, “the most important link in life,” and also most vital to “the conservation of the social order, the prosperity of families and to morality,” the court could not accept that the intermediary “sold” marriages as if they were an ordinary commodity.22 This charge that the agent was not simply selling his services involved in the negotiation, but was actually a “salesman of marriages,” was based on the particular way brokers devised their contracts in the 1840s.23 The typical matrimonial agent promised to grant his “attention” (soins) and his “efforts” (démarches) to negotiate the marriage of two specific individuals named in the contract. The broker set a fee for his services but stipulated that this fee would only be collected if the marriage in question was contracted.24 The agent’s salary was thus not only

The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage  1  41 

“subordinated to the success” of the marriage, but was “proportionate to the importance of advantages that marriage will procure.”25 Fleury’s defense thereby insisted that what was being sold was nothing less than the consent of one or both of the potential spouses. The Cour de Cassation judges believed that this aspect of the broker’s contract harmed morality and public order. As the court asserted in its ruling, In our system of legislation, marriage is an irrevocable engagement that concerns the most elevated interests of the family and society; it serves as their essential base. Therefore, the consent of spouses who unite or of parents who have authority over them must be free, well-informed, and consequently liberated from every foreign and self-interested influence that might act on the will of one or the other.26

The vision of marriage put forth by opponents of matrimonial agents was one in which both spouses were at perfect liberty to choose their partners and could not be pressured to marry someone against their will. This was partly based on the Civil Code’s understanding of marriage as a civil contract rather than as a sacrament defined by canon law. But regardless of the revolutionaries’ transformation of matrimony into a more liberal institution, both secular and church authorities in the nineteenth century believed that marriage required that all parties involved be able to proffer their free and unrestrained agreement.27 For this reason, the Cour de Cassation accepted the conclusion of Fleury’s lawyer: “Marriage is a contract apart, sui generis, principally religious.”28 The prohibition against divorce in France between 1816 and 1884 lent particular weight to the argument that marriage was not only a civil contract, but also a moral bond that had to be treated with reverence due to its indissoluble nature. Although this understanding of marriage as based on individual consent was heavily idealized given the prevalence of arranged marriages for the middle and upper classes throughout most of the century, it cast suspicion onto the professionalism and motives of the broker.29 Critics of matrimonial negotiators charged that the agent, motivated by profit rather than by the well-being or suitability of the individuals involved, might do anything necessary to conclude the particular match requested by his client.30 The incentive of money might lead the broker to manipulate the decision of the potential spouse and his or her family or to exaggerate the qualities of his client while hiding the person’s faults. As the Poitiers court argued, the negotiator may even go so far as to “fight against a preferred rival through calumnies” or use intimidation. Detractors thereby assumed that the profit motive would naturally lead intermediaries to commit criminal acts such as willful misrepresentation (dol) or blackmail.31 Such charges evoked the popular image of marriage brokers as self-interested hucksters who preyed on the susceptibilities of naive fiancés and their families

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to earn a fee. The Cour de Cassation sought both to protect marriage from the marketplace by claiming it was a unique contract and to cast doubt on the motives of the matchmaker, the individual who made the negotiation of marriages his business specialty. Matrimonial agents and their judicial backers began constructing their defense to such accusations in the first half of the century. To the charge that brokers speculated on marriages in a manner analogous to gamblers placing bets on the stock market, jurists asked whether, in the current state of things, marriage was an institution free from commerciality. By questioning the status of marriage as a contract separate from normal business transactions, they attempted to rehabilitate the agent’s reputation and grant him a useful social function. In 1850, Henri-Charles-Napoléon de Foy, one of the most famous marriage brokers in the first half of the century, called on a number of leading lawyers to render their opinions on whether such contracts were legitimate. Foy had operated a successful agency in Paris since 1825, and he won several landmark court cases he initiated against his clients from 1830 for failure of payment. Having just triumphed in a celebrated trial against a negligent client in 1850, Foy sought to publicize his victories and to demonstrate the wide range of juridical support for his profession. In response to Foy’s request for informed legal opinion, former president of the Paris Bar Association, Auguste Marie, argued that although personal suitability should play the largest role in determining marriages, financial interests were not and never had been absent from such contracts: However secondary it is, this role [material interests] exists. Property, like the indissolubility of the conjugal link, is a basis of the family. In this realm, one must make wise, prudent, and especially legitimate stipulations. For [these stipulations], the intervention of an intermediary is completely necessary, moral even, since tact scarcely allows such subjects to be treated directly between the interested parties.32

Marie and others pointed out that the sentimental and religious ideal of marriage as exempt from monetary concerns was a fiction having little basis in reality. In fact, families and individual spouses had long maneuvered to make the most financially beneficial matches possible, using marriage as a means of building property holdings and elevating a family’s prestige. This interpretation, as Marie and others recognized, was perfectly consistent with the Civil Code, which, above all, sought to promote the interests of legitimate families and to protect their assets from inheritance claims by illegitimate children.33 Marie suggested that the agent, acting as an impartial third party, had an important function to play in these negotiations, since property agreements were so crucial to the couple’s future.

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Many jurists agreed with Marie, and by highlighting the aspects of marriage that belonged to the commercial realm, they suggested that material and moral considerations were already so integrally connected in French unions as to make the argument of Fleury’s defense irrelevant. Eugène Paignon, a lawyer at the Cour de Cassation who published a report in favor of Foubert in 1853, argued that the marriage contract as currently framed in France made this focus on property quite clear: “Never cast your eyes on this contract, you who want to keep some illusions about the saintly poetry of marriage.” Among the mundane calculations couples would find there, Paignon revealed, were “precautions to separate the past of the two spouses,” along with “multiple anxieties, anticipated ruptures, survivor’s benefits, death of your close relatives, and even your own.” According to Paignon, marriage had evolved with the times. The old understanding of this convention as detached from the marketplace was no longer applicable in the nineteenth century, because “positivism constitutes the basis of marriage.”34 Paignon and others sought to dispel the myth of the unique character of matrimony by insisting that it was a civil contract like any other. This categorization did not, however, as lawyers emphasized, change the nature of marriage or unduly debase its lofty character. Well-known legal expert Jean-Baptiste Duvergier argued that matrimonial negotiation should be recognized as an honorable commercial enterprise. He suggested that allowing the broker to charge a fee for his services did not degrade marriages: “It only makes them pass from the pure and elevated realm of affectionate sentiments and benevolent relations into the less noble but honest [honnête] domain of interested transactions.”35 Such comments speak to the tension between the ideal of matrimony as a pure, disinterested union and the reality of individual and familial commercial interests that necessarily came into play before a match could be seriously contemplated. Statements by lawyers suggest that they were attempting to overcome the notion of the corrupt marketplace and to grant a certain sense of legitimacy to the business enterprise of the matrimonial agency. Jurists suggested that not only was there nothing dishonorable about the agent collecting a fee for matchmaking, but that, in fact, professional intermediaries were better suited than family members or friends to facilitate unions. As Marie and others implied, the delicate financial interests involved in marriage negotiations made the broker’s expert mediation imperative. The agent provided an indispensable service by handling private matters in a disinterested and discrete fashion, and, most importantly, by independently verifying the fortunes of the potential spouses. Such tact and investigative skills were not guaranteed by the informal matchmaker, who might be an inept negotiator or have personal interests that led him or her to advocate unsuitable matches.36 In 1854, just one year prior to the Cour de Cassation ruling, the Ordre des Avocats held a conference on the question of whether the marriage broker’s contract was

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licit. At the meeting, the most prominent lawyers in the capital voted in the affirmative by a large majority.37 Participants at the conference agreed with many of the points made by the young lawyer Alexandre Sorel in his speech in favor of the marriage negotiator. Sorel asserted that agents created better matches than families could by means of their careful and methodical approach. Their professionalism made the chance of the union succeeding much more likely and, he stressed, even offered more liberty to the future spouses: I say to partisans of the negative perspective: I indicate a person to you. You have as much time as you like to gather information about her and her family. I do not prevent you from paying what one calls la cour [courtship] to her, and I do not intend to do it for you in any fashion. Study the character of the young woman; stay one month, six months, a year or longer if necessary to do this examination. And afterward, you will marry or you will not marry. I do not intend to exercise any influence over your will. And if you contract this union after this lapse of time, you will no doubt be better enlightened than the three-quarters of people who meet a person they have never seen in a salon one night, and who marry her three weeks later.38

Sorel suggested that agents not only promised a more rational arrangement than did the current customs in society, but they acted in the best interests of the eligible spouses themselves. Families, he implied by means of contrast, were often driven by personal or financial motives to arrange hasty and discordant matches. Unlike informal matchmakers, Sorel insisted, the broker took seriously the dictum that the individual consent of each party was needed. The intermediary presented a well-researched set of choices to his clients, which allowed them to wisely navigate the complex matrimonial marketplace. By using his investigative services to screen potential candidates, the agent helped individuals avoid disappointments that could occur if they pursued untenable matches. Thus, the broker offered rational consumer choices to clients, analogous to the expanded options increasingly available to them in the marketplace. In this way, the agent sought to commodify a function previously practiced informally by family members or friends. At the same time, by liberating the couple from pesky squabbles over money, the professional matchmaker allowed his clients to explore their personal compatibility. As Foubert’s lawyer insisted, “The intermediary has no other goal than allowing the parties to avoid what can be annoying in debates relative to pecuniary interests; and his intervention, far from damaging marriage, conserves its purity.”39 By removing financial concerns from the equation, the broker facilitated matches based on an idealized version of love, as opposed to the arranged marriages often favored by upper-class families. Sorel had also highlighted this possibility of hassle-free unions based on mutual affinity. Not

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only were these unions desirable to the individual spouses, but advocates argued that they also created legitimate families and thereby bolstered the social order. In a report delivered at the 1854 lawyers’ conference, Legal Counsel at the Cour de Cassation Issaïe Boissieux stated, “In the particular case of the appeal, the object of the contract is marriage. You wonder, messieurs, how the act which constitutes the family, the act that is the object of the legislator’s predilections, could be illicit?”40 Many agreed with Boissieux’s assessment, which suggested that the negotiator performed an essential function in the context of a perceived marriage crisis. His report echoed the 1851 judgment of the Saint-Girons court cited earlier, which asserted that the state must “protect all stipulations which strive to facilitate marriages.”41 This argument was designed to counter the criticism that linked the marriage negotiator to the shady agent d’affaires. Jurists claimed that whereas business agents might engage in fraud in their commercial dealings, matrimonial agents were not brokering illicit financial contracts, but marriage, the building block of society. Beginning in the early 1850s the courts elaborated a new juridical narrative of the marriage broker as the savior of the French family. The need for improved national marriage statistics, many commentators stressed, was particularly acute in the first half of the nineteenth century. Probroker jurists asserted that the context of urbanization and industrialization affecting major cities made intermediaries’ services vital. Foy’s lawyer, Antoine Gilbert Claveau, presented this idea as early as 1830 on behalf of his client, arguing, “The matrimonial agencies are one of the needs of the big capital cities where individuals collide, [where they] press up against one another without seeing each other and without meeting.”42 This sentiment was reinforced by Victor Alexis Désiré Dalloz, a distinguished jurist who published definitive collections of French court decisions throughout the century. In his 1846 Répertoire, under a section on matrimonial agents, he suggested that “[i]n the presence of the type of isolation in which many families live within the big cities, and given the difficulty of knowing one another or of establishing some relations between persons who could be perfectly compatible, how necessary would these agencies be!”43 Jurists thereby emphasized that the rapid growth of urban centers in the 1830s had created a sense of loneliness and anonymity for many individuals as former social and familial networks broke down. Yet these statements did not imply concern for the marital plight of the growing body of migrants who swelled the population of cities like Paris. Rather, lawyers such as Paignon highlighted the dilemma of the busy middle-class man who found himself alone due to the demands of his profession and his lack of social connections. He cited the “professor who devotes himself to education, who is busy day and night without cease,” and the head of a big factory, “weighed down in details and vigilant work.” Given the factory owner’s lack of free time, Paignon asked, “how do you expect him to inquire

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about a companion, search for one, and procure one?”44 Sorel even advocated a democratization of the social spaces of courtship, suggesting that aristocrats exercised a monopoly on balls, salons, and other social arenas where young, well-bred women were presented. As he lamented, If this young man is in a privileged position, like most of you, if his family is what one calls well-situated [bien posée] in society, nothing will be easier for him than to find a woman who suits him. But if he is alone, without parents, without friends, or if, in the circle of his parents and friends, he meets no one who can give him the name of the young woman of whom he dreams as his companion, must he renounce marriage?45

Thus, the negotiator’s proponents emphasized that, rather than posing a threat to public order, the agent performed a necessary service to society by building legitimate, middle-class families. All parties involved assumed that the typical client of marriage brokers was the affluent professional man, precisely the social milieu that benefited from the July Monarchy’s business incentives. The agent’s supporters posited a marriage crisis affecting an expanded social network of bourgeois bachelors. Although census records indicate several dips in national marriage rates between 1846 and 1850, due largely to the economic recession and outbreaks of cholera, the extent to which this impacted the wealthy middle classes is difficult to discern.46 Nonetheless, the perception that singleness afflicted the bourgeoisie helps account for the enthusiasm that many judges and lawyers expressed for the “useful” services of marriage brokers in this period. Jurists presented a narrative about the agents that highlighted their ability to facilitate numerous legal unions and to create effortless matches based on personal compatibility. Such marriages, they emphasized, might not otherwise come to fruition if left to the socially deficient networks of increasingly isolated individuals in urban centers. Though negotiators and their judicial supporters promised idealized matches based on love, they simultaneously promoted the concept of marriage as a commercial contract. Ultimately, brokers offered their clients a commodified version of matrimony that was available only to those couples whose wealth allowed them to separate the economic and domestic realms of their lives. Notes 1. Honoré Daumier, “Robert-Macaire agent matrimonial,” Le Charivari, 4 December 1836. 2. Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (Chicago, 1982), 85–91; Amy Wiese Forbes, The Satiric Decade: Satire and the Rise of Republicanism in France, 1830–1840 (Plymouth, UK, 2010), 85–98. 3. The only recent work on matrimonial agents is a legal thesis by Philippe Viudes, which focuses on the post-1855 period: “Le Courtage matrimonial en France du XIXème

The Legal Pitfalls of Marriage Brokerage  1  47 

siècle à la première moitié du XXème siècle” (PhD diss., Université de Bordeaux I, 1994). 4. Dominique Kalifa, Naissance de la police privée: Détectives et agences de recherches en France, 1832 à 1942 (Paris, 2000), 29–47. 5. Eugène Paignon, ed., Cour de Cassation, Mémoire ampliatif pour le sieur Foubert, . . . demandeur en cassation d’un arrêt rendu par la Cour impériale de Poitiers, le 25 mars 1853, contre le sieur Fleury . . . défendeur éventuel (Paris, 1853), 3–4. 6. David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1991); David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long-Term Development,” in Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Developments (1300–1900), ed. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu (New York, 2007), 1–32. 7. See, e.g., Pierre-Antoine Berryer in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents relatifs à la profession matrimoniale: Conférence de l’ordre des avocats, présidence de M. Berryer: Séances de jeudis 12 et 19 janvier 1854 (Paris, 1854), 5–6. 8. For the Tribunal civil de la Seine judgment of 6 January 1830, see Gazette des tribunaux, 7 January 1830. 9. Arrêt du Tribunal civil de Bourgoin (Isère) of 10 July 1843, summarized in Journal du palais: Recueil le plus ancien et le plus complet de la jurisprudence (Paris, 1855), 1:567–68. 10. Journal du palais, 1:568. 11. Tribunal civil de Saint-Girons ruling of 2 June 1851, summarized in Journal du palais, 1:568. For Tribunal civil du Mans ruling of 28 August 1850, see Cour d’appel d’Angers, Recueil de consultations et d’autorités sur la question de légalité de l’industrie de M. de Foy (Paris, 1850), 11–12. 12. P. Huet, “Le Courtage matrimonial (étude critique de la jurisprudence)” (PhD diss., Université de Paris, Faculté de droit, 1910), 53–67. 13. Rachel Fuchs, Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (Baltimore, 2008), 59–70. 14. Fuchs, Contested Paternity, 59–61. 15. Cour de Cassation (Civ.) ruling of 1 May 1855, Journal du palais, 1:564. 16. Report by Issaïe Boissieux, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 4; Paignon, Mémoire ampliatif, 1–2. 17. Summary by Pierre-Antoine Berryer, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 7. 18. Report by Boissieux, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 4. 19. See footnote 1 in Cour impériale de Poitiers ruling of 9 March 1853, Journal du palais, 1:246–47. 20. Jean Demolombe, cited in Jean-Louis Halpérin, Histoire du droit privé français depuis 1804 (Paris, 1996), 82–83; Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore, 2000), 84; William Fortescue, “Divorce Debated and Deferred: The French Debate on Divorce and the Failure of the Crémieux Divorce Bill in 1848,” French History 7, no. 2 (1993): 147–62. 21. Cour de Cassation ruling, 1 May 1855, Journal du palais, 1:565. 22. Poitiers ruling of 9 March 1853, summarized in Journal du palais, 1:568–69. 23. Summary by Berryer, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 8. 24. See sample contract of Foy’s in Jugement du Tribunal civil du Mans, et arrêt de la Cour d’appel d’Angers, confirmant et sanctionnant le principe et la légalité de la profession de M. de Foy, patenté exclusivement pour la négociation des mariages (Paris, 1851), 5–6.

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25. Cour de Cassation ruling, 1 May 1855, Journal du palais, 1:565. 26. Cour de Cassation ruling, 1 May 1855, Journal du palais, 1:571. 27. Fuchs, Contested Paternity, 18. 28. Report by Léon-Léonard Laborie, Journal du palais, 1:565. 29. Adeline Daumard, “Affaire, amour, affection: Le mariage dans la société bourgeoise au XIXe siècle,” Romantisme, no. 68 (1990): 34–36. 30. Summary by Berryer, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 8. 31. Report by Laborie, Journal du palais, 1:566–67. 32. Auguste Marie opinion, in Cour d’appel d’Angers, Recueil, 25. 33. Fuchs, Contested Paternity, 47–48. 34. Paignon, Mémoire ampliatif, 6–7. 35. Jean-Baptiste Duvergier opinion, in Cour d’appel d’Angers, Recueil, 22–23. 36. See, e.g., Henri de Vatimesnil’s refutation of the idea that the broker is motivated by selfish interests in Cour d’appel d’Angers, Recueil, 20–21. 37. Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 2. 38. Speech by Alexandre Sorel, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 11–12. 39. Journal du palais, 1:565. 40. Report by Boissieux, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 8. 41. Tribunal civil de Saint-Girons ruling of 2 June 1851, summarized in Journal du palais, 1:568. 42. Gazette des tribunaux, 7 January 1830. 43. Victor Alexis Désiré Dalloz, Répertoire méthodique et alphabétique de législation, de doctrine et de jurisprudence en matière de droit civil, commercial, criminel, administratif, de droit des gens et de droit public (Paris, 1846), 3:381. 44. Paignon, Mémoire ampliatif, 8. 45. Speech by Sorel, in Ordre des avocats (Paris), Documents, 7. 46. Wesley Camp, Marriage and the Family in France Since the Revolution (New York, 1961), 23–24, 148–49 (figure 1).

CHAPTER 3

12

“Married to the Bottle” Drunk Husbands and Wives in Wilhelmine Germany KEVIN D. GOLDBERG

D

avid Warren Sabean’s two volumes on Neckarhausen are of course wellknown. Their contribution to various historiographies—early modern Germany, the family, Alltagsgeschichte—has been well documented here as elsewhere. Both volumes bring readers closer to history “as it actually was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen), in a way that is more “real” than the great German positivist Leopold von Ranke probably intended. To be sure, Sabean’s requisitioning of postmortem inventories of agricultural implements and his recounting of the ubiquitous village gossip reveal as much or more about the early modern past than can diplomatic treaties and battle strategies. But what may be most striking about this “history from below” approach in the Neckarhausen volumes is its capturing of the unseen, unspoken, and unseemly aspects of family life. Tucked away somewhat inconspicuously in Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 is a short section on what Sabean calls “patterns of drinking.”1 Though not core to his argument, Sabean reveals here something crucial for all historians of early modern Germany; that is, alcohol was so much a part of daily life that historians ignore its effects only at their own peril. Church files, farmers’ inventories, village protocols, and tavern records all revealed the ubiquity of alcohol in rural Württemberg. But what seemed to really alert Sabean was the way in which alcohol entered marital discourse, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the period between 1820 and 1849, over 40 percent of wives’ complaints against their husbands mentioned the consumption of alcohol, up from 25 percent in the years 1730 to 1759. Though it remains unclear whether consumption increased around 1800 or the tolerance level among wives for their husbands’ alcoholic indulgence simply

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decreased, there can be no doubt that alcohol left an indelible mark on marriage and the family in early modern Europe. Marriages in the Protestant and Catholic German lands were consecrated with drinks. As B. Ann Tlusty points out in her study of early modern drink culture, the consumption of wine by participants and witnesses took special ritualized form at marriages, symbolizing economic as well as physical union, and therefore had the character of a commercial contract. The “contract drink,” so revered by anthropologists, carried special weight for German husbands and wives, as, according to Tlusty, “drinks passed around the tables at weddings united the witnesses to the contract in communal consumption, and the special toast of Ansing wine to the bride and groom as they were taken to bed symbolized both the legal and the physical consummation of the marriage.”2 Needless to say, alcohol was often the great facilitator of progeny. However, alcohol wrecked marriages as well. In early modern Germany, the tavern and an orderly household were often in direct opposition to one another.3 Rituals of masculine honor associated with drinking infringed upon husbands’ responsibilities in the home, as women frequently reminded them. Threatened by financial or social ruin, wives imposed limits on their husbands’ alcohol consumption by making appeals to state authority. Marital bliss, however, depended upon the fair play of both partners, and women were certainly not immune from the negative effects of alcohol. “To house properly” (wohl zu hausen) in the early modern sense required the prioritization of household over inebriation for both husband and wife—an achievement easier said than done, especially in the face of maintaining masculine honor and the day-to-day exertions required of women.4 The remainder of this essay will explore issues of family and alcohol in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically how the consumption of alcohol affected marital relations in imperial Germany (1871–1918) and how the sobriety of the family was seen as necessary for a healthy nation. Though the “dual revolution” of the long nineteenth century is widely recognized as having left indelible marks across all facets of society, the concomitant revolution in the dynamics of the European family should not be overlooked by careful historians.5 The period from 1850 to 1918 remains unparalleled in its surfeit of social questions, with the issue of marriage among the more significant. Critics of social decay argued that ruinous marriages—especially marriages destroyed by alcohol—could sap national strength. Simultaneous nineteenth-century disputes in matters of religion, class, and gender all touched upon the “marriage question,” generating vigorous public debate about the place of husbands and wives in the new Germany. The jurist Gottlieb Planck, a prominent member of the parliamentary commission charged with formulating the German Civil Code, regarded marriage as a

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“moral and legal order independent of the wills of the two spouses.”6 Other commentators, including the prominent Social Democrat August Bebel, adamantly defended the modern woman’s right to indulge her affections and to “enter a matrimonial bond taking nothing into consideration besides her own inclination.”7 The embittered conflict between state and church over the “marriage question,” as well as the “romantic” and “sexual” revolutions which historians have begun to describe in detail, all disclose the centrality of marriage and the family in nineteenth-century politics and culture.8 Another public debate centered on the increasing consumption of alcohol in the wake of industrialization and urbanization. European and American temperance movements, peaking around 1900, managed to successfully roll broader questions of class, labor, and the family into their antialcohol discourse. Even in Germany, where temperance groups had far less success than their peer groups in Scandinavia, England, and the United States, teetotalers still managed to reach both the parliament and pub floor. As we will see, the relatively fractured temperance movement in German-speaking Europe leaned hard on family issues to further its core agenda. Alcohol, they argued, was bad for individual, familial, and social bodies. A short word on sources is in order. The bulk of the material used here comes from the excellent Alcohol and Addiction Studies collection at Brown University, one of the largest and most important collections of alcohol-related material in the world. Of special relevance are the foreign-language pamphlets collected by the Anti-Saloon League, a turn-of-the-century American temperance group known as much for its impassioned anti-German rhetoric as its dispassionate sobriety. Though a more balanced examination of alcohol and the family in imperial Germany requires a more robust source base, nowhere else is this crucial nexus of marriage and the bottle so thoroughly on display as in the temperance literature. The dissemination of the “alcohol question” in the nineteenth century was tied to the deep-seated changes brought about by large-scale political, social, and economic transformations. Within these transformations were what temperance historian James S. Roberts has identified as “the emergence of an urban-industrial social order, the consolidation of modern nation states with increasingly democratic forms of government, and the rise to social, economic and political prominence of the middle classes.”9 To these we might add the increasing availability of distilled alcohol through simpler and cheaper production processes and shifts in consumer behavior prompting more leisure consumption and recreation. The temperance movement—and with it the discourse featuring drinking husbands and wives—was created by men concerned about the fragility of the social order in a period of turbulent change.10 Though often assumed to

52  1  Kevin D. Goldberg

have Protestant and middle-class roots, the stimulus for temperance was not everywhere the same, and there were important regional, confessional, and political distinctions.11 The pace at which the temperance movement developed was as astounding as the pace of industrialization, which it seemed to shadow. By 1846, there were already over twelve hundred temperance associations in the German Confederation with approximately six hundred thousand adult male members.12 This first phase of the temperance movement culminated in a draft of the so-called Trunksuchtgesetz (Law on Alcoholism) that was almost ratified during the fourth legislative period of the Reichstag, 1877–81, a session ripe with many social questions but only few legislative answers.13 Somewhat similar to England’s Inebriate Act passed in 1898, the proposed Law on Alcoholism might be seen as the “public virtue” component of concurrent welfare legislation then being debated in the Reichstag. Some opponents rejected the bill on the grounds that alcoholism was only a social problem, thus not necessitating action by the state, while others may have been merely protecting the interests of the alcohol trades.14 Regardless, neither of the bill’s two main features, draconian punishments for repeated public drunkenness and the commissioning of additional charges against any criminal deemed under the influence of alcohol, were passed, though proponents certainly did not give up their fight.15 However, with the failure of the existing temperance movement to garner sufficient political power, the post-1881 movement fought even harder on the backs of public issues, especially the physical and social health of the German nation and the lurking dangers that unchecked alcoholism presented. By the 1880s, alcoholism was treated increasingly as a disease that could infect both the individual and the social body, and its defining features were generally described both through the narrative of experience and with the help of medical language. Wilhelm Bode, a leader of the temperance movement, described an alcoholic as somebody who might be found in the gutter a few times per week, beats his wife and children, and suffers from tremors (delirium tremens). The road to recovery was equally social, medical, and spiritual. The alcoholic, in addition to seeking medical help, should surround himself with sober friends, leave sweets around the home to satisfy pangs, and, above all else, find God.16 In fact, alcoholism was the social disease par excellence of the late nineteenth century. Criminal research explicitly tied criminality to alcoholism, suggesting not only the social origins of the disease but also drink’s potential to endanger civil society. In Zurich, for example, alcohol was blamed for the surge in crime between 1886 and 1900.17 Just as David Warren Sabean demonstrated for the early modern period, alcohol was still a major factor in later cases of domestic abuse (Hausfriedensbruch). Based on data from 1876, more than half of these

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cases were said to involve known drinkers.18 The surge in alcohol consumption is also revealed through national expenditures. According to Professor Fraenkel at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg spending on alcohol (3.3 billion marks) outpaced spending on meat (2.25 billion marks) and bread (1.7 billion marks) for the year 1901.19 Average annual spending on the military was only about 871 million marks around the turn of the century.20 Advocates of the labor and temperance movements were quick to point to alcohol to explain social decay and the inequities within the imperial German social strata. In speeches delivered in Winterthur and Bern, Switzerland, in 1895, Hermann Blocher tied the enormous increases in German alcohol consumption during the past decade to the sordidness of conditions in large factories and the thoroughly industrialized workforce. Blocher identified the city of Munich, already known for its alcoholic excesses, as providing abundant visible evidence of social decay.21 But alcohol was cited as the “most social of questions” by labor advocates and employers alike.22 The reactionary Baron Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg notoriously intervened in the private lives of employees at his commercial enterprises, including challenging the prevailing pub culture among wage laborers. However, it was often the labor movement’s leaders who recognized the overlapping goals of the Arbeiterfrage (labor question) and the Alkoholfrage (alcohol question). The awful conditions of working in dusty, poorly ventilated rooms or over blazing fires on exceedingly hot days drove workers to the pub to quench their thirst. Although, to be sure, the local pub not only offered respite from the daily grind at work, but also from the troubles brewing at home.23 Hans Meyer, author of Für und wider den Alkohol (For and Against Alcohol), was hardly alone in suggesting that unchecked alcohol consumption posed a grave threat to the family of the drinker. Mistreated wives and children forced into beggary, thievery, and prostitution were only some of the likely outcomes of alcoholism, according to Meyer. In fact, it was the offspring of alcoholics who increasingly received the most attention among teetotalers. Though Meyer used the example of Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1889 fictional drama Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise) to show the potential for degeneration that could afflict the families of heavy drinkers, the problem was always more real than fiction.24 Influenced by the increasing importance of scientific evidence in the field of heredity and behavior, doctors across Europe eagerly began to study the transfer of physical traits from parents to their children. Dr. Demme’s twelve-year observation of twenty working-class families, ten of them “normal” (normal lebende) and ten “drinking” (Trinkerfamilien), was frequently cited by the temperance movement for its rather shocking results. Twenty-five of the fifty-seven children of “drinking” families died within the first few months of life; among

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the survivors, six were mentally retarded (Idioten), one suffered from St. Vitus Dance, leading to retardation, five were epileptic, five remained uncommonly short (zwerghaft zurückgeblieben), and five were born with various defects, including cleft lip and clubfoot. Only ten of the fifty-seven children reached adulthood without serious mental or physical debilitation. On the other hand, of the sixty-one children born into “normal” families, only five died within the first few months, four suffered from nervous disorders, and two were born with physical defects. Fifty of the sixty-one “normal” children reached adulthood without complication.25 Demme’s study was one among many that tried to demonstrate the enormous dangers of alcohol for the reproduction of the family, and with it, the nation. The well-known militarization of German society affected a number of seemingly unrelated discourses, including that of the abstinence advocates. Temperance groups warned of the dangers associated with not only hard-drinking soldiers but also with the longer-term weakening of Germany through immoderate consumption. National deterioration, according to this narrative, would happen over the course of generations. “As the Bible points out,” wrote one dry pamphleteer, “the sins of fathers afflict their progeny. The offspring of ‘notorious drinkers’ [notorischen Trinker] will be born weak and crippled before dying an early death. Children of moderately addicted drinkers will live on but not without bearing the cross of their inherited physical and character weaknesses.”26 Even the hard-drinking Kaiser Wilhelm II criticized the military’s excessive drinking, “that old heirloom of the Germans,” in an address to cadets at the dedication of the new naval academy at Mürwik by Flensburg.27 Mirroring the naval race itself, the kaiser’s pleading for sobriety among the cadets was infused with a sense of “catching up” to the English, in this case with the number of English sailors who were members of various temperance outfits. The linking of alcoholism and national strength in biological and social research gave rise to a number of works associating heavy drinking and degeneration. Racial science—perhaps the international symbol of German history in this period—was very concerned with the question of alcohol and its deteriorating physical and social effects for families. In his 1891 Macrobiotics and Alcohol, Julius Kollman argued for a causal link between alcohol consumption and the divergent life expectancies of Frankfurt’s Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Frankfurt’s Jews, according to Kollman’s data, lived on average to the age of forty-eight, while the city’s non-Jewish population lived on average to thirty-six.28 In spite of the fact that Kollman attributed the disparity to the false presumption that Jews abstained from alcohol, the connection between alcohol and death was readily accepted by most.29 For the “German” race to thrive, alcohol consumption had to be curtailed.

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Another ostensibly related effect of immoderate consumption was the decreasing ability for mothers to nurse their newborn children. Gustav von Bunge, a well-known chemist at the University of Basel and descendant of a prominent Baltic-German family, took the lead in addressing the nursing problem. Bunge’s findings were based on 1,629 returned surveys detailing the drinking patterns of families with mothers or newborns unable to nurse. The results, for Bunge, “offered a deep look into the course of degeneration.” According to the data, mothers who were themselves the children of hard-drinking fathers were more likely to not have success in nursing their newborns. The ability to nurse, according to Bunge, could very well be lost for all coming generations. In addition, this failure was not an isolated event, as the inability to nurse was often paired with other symptoms of degeneration, especially resistances to disease of all sorts, including tuberculosis, neuropathy, and various tooth ailments. Newborn children would continue to be undernourished generation after generation, leading ultimately to the demise of the family.30 Such a clear focus on alcohol’s consequences for the family forced reformers to take seriously the fact that women were just as prone to alcoholism as men were. Besides, it was generally thought that a mother’s alcoholism was more communicable to offspring than a father’s alcoholism.31 In 1889, a sanatorium was founded in Bonn for middle-class women afflicted with the disease. Similar institutions— but more inclusive of women across the social spectrum—were opened shortly thereafter in Borsdorf by Leipzig and Weixdorf by Dresden. These women-only sanatoriums recognized that the fate of the German family was closely bound to the physical and mental health of wives and mothers. It was common for a resident “housemother” to model appropriate behavior to her sick “fledglings” (Pflegling) in addition to providing instruction in the essential womanly virtues of cooking, tailoring, sewing, and handicrafts. Nevertheless, the best cure for alcoholic women, according to many within the temperance movement, remained an abstinent family (including a sober staff of servants).32 Women also played a unique role in the fight against alcoholic excess. In an 1898 speech marking the opening of an alcohol-free restaurant in Basel, Gustav von Bunge charged women with setting a positive example for their husbands and sons.33 Nature has given women the hearts of mothers, the courage to sacrifice, and the capacity for devotion, according to Bunge. On behalf of the women who suffered while loved ones fell prey to alcoholism, it was their responsibility to unite in defense against drinking. Bunge called on German women to go on the offensive against alcoholism, just as their American and British sisters had begun to do. For Bunge, the future of Germany was contingent upon winning this battle. However, Bunge’s hopes were clouded by apprehension over the consequences of losing the battle against alcoholism, a defeat that could cost the German nation its future.

Figure 1. This Stammbaum (family tree) of a drinker from Aschaffenburg shows the generational deterioration caused by alcoholism. The caption reads: “Heredity. Not only the drinker is harmed, but the progeny also suffer in the worst way.” Source: W. Miethke, Skizzen zur Alkoholfrage (Bremen, 1907), 7.

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Drunk Husbands and Wives  1  57 

By 1900, the temperance discourse was dominated by these fears of national degeneration, embodied by the image of the alcohol-induced corrosion of the German family (see figure 1). The common refrain “Protect our youth from alcohol” (Schutz der Jugend vor dem Alkohol) gave expression to this obvious paranoia about Germany’s future.34 After 1900, the temperance movement continued to stress the delicate nature of German youth in the battle against alcohol. The senior civil servant (Regierungsrat) Quensel demanded that parents “give no wine to their children, not a drop of beer, nor any brandy. Why? Because alcohol of any sort, even in small quantities, can only bring shame to children.”35 Alcohol was particularly dangerous for school-age children, making them tired, inattentive, and languid. Increasingly, the infection of children with alcoholism was seen to be biologically inherited and transmittable to future generations through corrupted genes rather than through social behavior, as was the dominant discourse from the 1860s to the 1880s. According to a 1911 temperance publication: Newborns enter a world of alcoholism. They are greeted by clinking glasses. A baby’s first taste of alcohol is in the milk of his mother or nurse. It is through such motherly love—her fondness for “Fürstlichem Köstritzer Schwarzbier”— that he is first poisoned. The parents’ consumption of alcohol weakens the reproductive cells long before the newborn enters the world.36

“The most loathsome criminal,” according to Gustav von Bunge, “is the one who would poison the reproductive cells.”37 Nevertheless, the social causes of alcoholism remained an important part of the discussion. With festivals, pubs, and celebrations, all ineffaceable parts of imperial German culture, the teetotaler expressed little surprise that a child might grow up with more interest in beer than in studies. It was no wonder, according to one teetotaler, why the following stanza remained so popular: Die Väter haben’s uns gelehrt, Wie man die vollen Humpen leert,— In die Kneipen laufen Und sein Geld versaufen, Ist ein hoher, herrlicher Beruf!38

Our fathers have taught us fast, How one empties a big, full glass,— Running to the pubs And spending money on frothy suds, Is an esteemed, glorious calling!

At a time when reproductive science was increasingly putting families under the microscope, critics of alcohol never once imagined that its ill effects were limited to biology. The characteristic traits of an alcoholic, they argued, were communicable through any number of channels, including the cumulative effects of industrialization or the social pressures of student life, bourgeois mobility, and, not least, marriage.

58  1  Kevin D. Goldberg

Drinking patterns among husbands and wives in imperial Germany were inextricably wrapped up with broader social developments and, not to be overlooked, important changes in the production and selling of alcohol. According to one critic, bottled beer had given women “the right” to poison themselves in the home, already their privileged space.39 While the temperance movement in Germany, the United States, and beyond has justifiably been criticized for its exaggerations and prudish admonitions, many commentators agreed that the family’s plight against alcohol was serious enough to warrant careful attention. Sabean’s astute observation that marital disputes over alcohol were part of the frustrations generated by the historical imbalance between the work of men and women (with the work required of women being far more taxing on body and mind) was still accurate for the period after 1900.40 However, the massive societal changes brought about by the industrialization, politicization, and unification of Germany within an increasingly nationalistic Europe meant that the problems associated with drinking were no longer limited to the pub, guild, or place of dwelling. The evidence for marital unrest—and with it the potential for broader societal disruption—lies in the temperance movement’s concern for national degeneration, and its identification of familial drinking as both source and symptom of this decline. Husbands and wives were not only responsible for the well-being of their families, but now also the sustainability of the German Empire. Notes 1. David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1991), 174–79. 2. B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville, VA, and London, 2001), 111–13. 3. Lyndal Roper sees excessive drinking as a constituent part of the money and labor disputes entering into the “marital disharmony” of early modern Bavarians. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), 171–85. A. Lynn Martin’s work on alcohol in early modern England, Italy, and France casts a similar picture, but with a somewhat different result. While Martin identifies the double standards that expected women to retain chastity and sobriety vis-à-vis male libidinousness and alcoholic excessiveness, he is also cognizant of the fact that the consumption of alcohol was a significant factor in the cohesiveness and “jollification” of marital life. A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2001), 118. 4. Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 115–46. 5. On the “dual revolution” (French and Industrial Revolutions), see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London, 2010), first published 1962 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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6. Cited in Josef Ehmer, “Marriage,” in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century 1789– 1913, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002), 282–86. 7. August Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (n.p., 1879). Cited in Ehmer, “Marriage,” 286–87. 8. Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975). Recent studies have been careful not to suggest a wholesale capitulation of practicality to love. As David Warren Sabean notes in relation to nineteenth-century marriages, “[t]he healthy social body was one where the veins through which capital and blood flowed were the same.” David Warren Sabean, “Kinship and Class Dynamics in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900), ed. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu (New York and Oxford, 2007), 302. For German Jews, many seemingly free marriages were actually covered-up arranged pairings by parents. According to Marion A. Kaplan, we must talk about love “within bounds” when discussing pre-1900 marriages. Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Identity, and the Family in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991), 108–16. 9. James S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Boston, 1984), 2. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 26–32. 12. Ibid., 27. These statistics include the Kirchspielvereine (Parish Associations). 13. All translations by author unless otherwise specified. 14. On the battle to legislate against drunkenness, see Karl Hiller, Soll die Trunksucht als solche strafrechtlich verfolgt werden? (Berlin, 1891). 15. Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class, 52–54. 16. Wilhelm Bode, Die Heilung der Trunksucht: Eine Belehrung für Trinker und deren Angehörige (Bremerhaven, 1890). 17. Otto Lang, Alkoholgenuss und Verbrechen (Bremerhaven and Leipzig, 1892). 18. Max von Gruber and Emil Kraepelin, eds., Verkleinert Abdrücke der 10 Wandtafeln zur Alkoholfrage (Berlin, 1907), table 9. 19. W. Miethke, Skizzen zur Alkoholfrage (Bremen, 1907), 18. 20. Ibid., 30. 21. Hermann Blocher, Die Alkoholfrage in ihrem Verhältnis zur Arbeiterfrage (Basel, 1895). This publication is a transcript of speeches delivered 24 March 1895 in Winterthur and 8 May 1895 in Bern. 22. Oscar Priester, Wie ich abstinent ward: Ein Bekenntnis, eine Erkenntnis, ein Mahnruf zur sozialsten aller Fragen (Dresden, 1902). 23. H. Herkner, Alkoholismus und Arbeiterfrage (Berlin, 1906), 6. 24. Hans Meyer, Für und wider den Alkohol (Marburg, 1895). Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise was a scathing critique of alcoholism and its deleterious effects on family life, including heredity. James Joyce’s translation remains the standard English-language version. Gerhart Hauptmann, Joyce and Hauptmann: Before Sunrise, ed. Jill Perkins (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1978). 25. Cited in Meyer, Für und wider den Alkohol, 9ff. 26. Matthaei, Die Erhöhung der Kriegstüchtigkeit eines Heeres durch Enthaltung vom Alkohol (Dresden, 1901), 12.

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27. R. Ponickau, Kaiser Wilhelms Stellung zum Alkohol (Leipzig, 1913). Kaiser Wilhlem II’s famous Mürwik address is reprinted on a loose pamphlet included in Brown University’s copy of the Ponickau book. On the military’s alcohol policies, see also Hans Schmidt, Das Kronprinzen-Telegramm (Hamburg, 1926). 28. Julius Kollman, Makrobiotik und Alkohol (Bremerhaven, 1891). 29. On the consumption of alcohol by German Jews, see Sander L. Gilman, “The Problem with Purim: Jews and Alcohol in the Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 50, no. 1 (2005): 215–31. 30. Gustav von Bunge, Die zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen: Die Ursachen dieser Unfähigkeit, die Mittel zur Verhütung (Munich, 1903), 29ff. 31. Rudolf Neubert and Martin Vogel, eds., Deutsches Hygiene-Museum: Leben und Gesundheit (Dresden, 1907), 56. 32. Die deutschen Heilanstalten für Alkoholkranke im Jahre 1903 (Presented at the 9th International Congress against Alcoholism) (Bremen, 1903). 33. “Die Mitwirkung der Frauen im Kampfe wider den Alkohol,” Rede, gehalten am 11. März 1898 auf dem von den Frauen Basels veranstalteten Bazar zum Zweck der Gründung eines alkoholfreien Restaurants, von Prof. G. Von Bunge (Basel: Verlag d. Schriftstelle des Alkoholgegnerbundes). 34. Rudolf Neubert and Martin Vogel, eds., Deutsches Hygiene-Museum: Leben und Gesundheit (Dresden, 1907), 54. 35. Gerhard Burk, Die Erziehung unserer Jugend zu alkoholfreier Kultur und Lebensanschauung: Aus der Quelle des Mimir: Schriften zur Förderung gesunder deutscher Kultur (Reutlingen, 1911), 17–18. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 27ff. 39. Matthaei, Die Schädlichkeit mässigen Alkoholgenusses (Leipzig, 1900), 17ff. 40. Sabean, Property, 178.

CHAPTER 4

12

A Home for Mothers in Vienna Community and Crisis BRITTA MCEWEN

I

n May 1906 the Austrian League for the Protection of Mothers (Österreichischer Bund für Mutterschutz, ÖBfM) was formed by a committee of doctors, philosophers, and feminists. Like its sister association in Berlin, it was a progressive, bourgeois organization committed to social change in the lives of women. Unlike the Berlin organization, however, the ÖBfM was almost entirely devoted to the cause of unmarried mothers. Vienna had exhibited a high illegitimacy rate in the nineteenth century, combined with a similarly high infant mortality rate. Unlike other bourgeois or religious charities who addressed this problem by focusing on asylum for illegitimate children, the ÖBfM quickly organized a home for single mothers in a working-class district of Vienna, thus offering them a community of doctors, social workers, and fellow mothers to support them as they bore and nursed their young. The personal crisis of an unplanned pregnancy was read by the ÖBfM as a social crisis in values, with women as victims of social inequity and a sexual double standard. Its support of unmarried mothers was intended to rile both religious and bourgeois sentiments, and it openly blamed both the Catholic Church and “the capitalistic world order” for punishing women and children.1 Motherhood, previously constructed as a private familial role, was expanded to a political act by the ÖBfM. Its home for mothers, which was active for more than twenty-five years, reworked previous notions of polite charity by and for women by actively contesting the sexual system that punished pregnancy out of wedlock. This essay will reconstruct how the ÖBfM created, served, and justified this new community. It is inspired by David Warren Sabean’s work on the family and kinship, as well as his constant concern for the self-understanding and presentation of historical actors, which in this case has been extended to institutional history.

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Beginnings The ÖBfM identified its goals in statutes filed with the city of Vienna in 1906: “The association seeks to guard married and unmarried mothers and their children who are needy and without shelter from economic and moral danger and strives to eliminate the prevailing prejudice against single mothers and their children.”2 The approach of the ÖBfM was twofold: first, it sought to provide a home and economic, legal, and medical support for “poor mothers willing to work [and] who have the earnest desire to raise their children to be healthy and useful people”; second, it proposed a propaganda campaign to support the association and improve the legal situation of unmarried mothers and their children.3 From the beginning, then, the ÖBfM was engaged with both the material and the cultural status of unmarried mothers. Also present in these early directives was the distinct sense that some women were more worthy of assistance than others: a bourgeois preference for certain types of poor mothers that favored hard work and utility to society. However, the ÖBfM represented a break from the other fin de siècle middle-class women’s groups that sought to help mothers and children, in that those groups typically supported the institution of marriage and rejected what might lead to “free love.”4 The ÖBfM’s sister organization in Berlin, under the leadership of Helene Stöcker, had already begun questioning the morality of bourgeois marriage, leaving the Vienna association open to actively aiding women who had failed to marry before becoming pregnant.5 If we step back into the past for a moment, we see that illegitimacy rates in nineteenth-century Vienna were very high indeed: 50.6 percent of the children born in 1867, for example, were born to single mothers. By the time the ÖBfM was founded, those rates had dropped to 29.4 percent, bottoming out at 20.6 percent in 1925.6 In many ways, the ÖBfM styled itself as a “modern” response to old problems. Foundling laws dating from the reign of Joseph II in the late eighteenth century complicated the legal process of giving birth to an illegitimate child in Vienna. Since the Enlightenment, single mothers had been invited to give birth in foundling hospitals and then were required to turn over guardianship of their illegitimate child(ren) to the city.7 In return for the services of the hospital, women agreed to give their bodies over to medical research.8 The staggeringly high mortality rates for mothers and infants that ensued from these practices had begun to drop by the late nineteenth century, but were still remarkable enough to warrant frequent comparisons to Russia, the only European country with higher infant mortality rates.9 When possible, single mothers nursed their children for three months in the foundling hospital. Those children who survived their time there were then sent to foster parents, often in the country, with the understanding that they would eventually be

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used as labor in their new “families.”10 Here they would live and work until they turned sixteen, unless the mother were able to claim them before that date.11 Thus, the chances of an unmarried woman being able to keep her child were very slim in Vienna. The ÖBfM decried the “ripping to pieces” of the natural bond between mother and child inherent in this system.12 The ÖBfM’s opening meeting in 1906 was stormy. Its members were split in their approach to justice for unmarried mothers; some preferred to avoid any deviation from conventional morality.13 In the end, any legal distinction between mothers was rejected, securing equal treatment for unmarried mothers. A medical director was chosen, Dr. Hugo Klein, who had previously worked in a charity maternity ward limited to married women, and who was described as a person who combined the “clear head of a doctor and the warm heart of a social caregiver.”14 In its quest to change social perceptions of its clients, the association put on lectures, exhibits, and even a play designed to thematize the inequity of current attitudes about single motherhood.15 Early petitions to parliament demanded better access to midwives, paid maternity leave, breastfeeding breaks for workers, and subsidies for women who agreed to breast-feed for extended periods of time.16 The ÖBfM also supported other feminist organizations’ legal initiatives to introduce divorce, reduce the sentencing guidelines for mothers found guilty of infanticide, and allow for medical abortion in certain cases.17 These efforts to both educate the general population and serve expecting mothers were offshoots, however, of the ÖBfM’s central aim: providing for unwed mothers by running a home for mothers in the working-class district of Ottakring. Creating a Community The ÖBfM’s home for mothers, the Mutterheim, located at Maderspergerstraße 2, was opened in May 1908. It provided stability for women in their last months of pregnancy and offered them a place to return to (after a hospital delivery) with their infants after birth. There, for a small and potentially waived fee, mother and child received meals and lodging. Mothers were trained to do piecework, so that they might support themselves even after leaving the home. Most of all, they were encouraged to love the very children for whom they would have to give up guardianship soon after leaving the Mutterheim. Teaching a mother to love the “helpless little creature who so grievously wounded [her and her] destiny” was a central goal of the ÖBfM.18 Holding the child in her arms, they promised, would warm her heart and help her to forgive the child its trespasses. This was the first step in normalizing the experience of illegitimate children. The association also promised to offer legal help, write letters

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to parents, relatives, and the father of the child, and arrange guardianship issues, and help the mother stay close to her child even if, as was unfortunately sometimes the case, it was sent “into care” outside of Vienna.19 Who stayed at the Mutterheim? The overwhelming majority of clients were single, Catholic, and in service. Although the largest proportion of them came from lower Austria (where Vienna is located), the home reflected the greater peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, housing women of all faiths from Moravia, Bohemia, Galicia, Croatia, Styria, Salzburg, and elsewhere.20 The ÖBfM published a series of vignettes in their newsletter of 1913 to illustrate the stories of the women who came to stay at the Mutterheim. In each, a mother-to-be in extreme need relied upon the ÖBfM to support her through the late stages of her pregnancy and, in some cases, teach her to love her child. For a girl who wanted to drown herself in the Danube, the ÖBfM gently “made it clear to her the holiness of motherhood and a mother’s care.”21 Likewise, a housekeeper who had been pursued by the son of her employer actually attempted suicide, but afterward was sheltered in the Mutterheim, where she found someone who would speak to the father and elicit a promise to support the mother and child. One woman came from Hungary to give birth in Vienna with the idea of giving the child up completely, but fell in love with her child at the Mutterheim and organized a position for herself as a caregiver so that she could keep her baby by her side. Finally, a Slovenian woman stranded in Vienna without her husband, “helpless in the foreign city, whose language she couldn’t understand,” found succor in the Mutterheim until her husband returned for her and their newborn child.22 Whether or not these stories were true, they represented what the ÖBfM perceived as its target clientele: women facing childbirth alone, with little to no support and deeply conflicted feelings about their coming children. These melodramatic vignettes underscored the ways in which the Mutterheim, by providing material shelter and moral guidance, was able to facilitate the bond between mother and child even in the most extreme circumstances. Just behind the silver lining provided by the Mutterheim lay disaster. Single mothers without support were terribly vulnerable. Their suffering, the association suggested, drove them to become fixated on their “shame,” and thus alienated from the growing life within them. Such alienation could lead to infanticide or abandonment.23 Only the Mutterheim could protect women from society’s scorn and avert the terrible fates that awaited illegitimate children born without support. Behind this oasis for the individual mother in crisis were the men and women of the ÖBfM, whose numbers swelled in the years before and during World War I. Their financial contributions constituted the bulk of the Mutterheim’s budget, and their donations in kind to the home kept the children fed, washed, and clothed. Members might serve in the propaganda committee,

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the legal committee, the finance group, the social group, or in the Mutterheim itself. The executive committee was composed of an honorary president (Dr. Julius Ofner), a president (Dr. Hugo Klein), two vice presidents (Dr. Rosa Feri-Fliegelmann and Hans Nesser), editors (Dr. Heinrich Keller, Leontine Löwenstein, Olga Misar), treasurers (Ernst Adler, Louise Freund, Alice Moller), and a librarian (Dr. Josef Freidjung).24 Beginning in 1911, the community published a newsletter, which appeared six times a year, even throughout the war. In it, members publicized and reviewed presentations, debated petitions, and reported on the legal status of illegitimate children from around the world. In addition, mainstream media outlets like the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press), Kronen-Zeitung (Penny Newspaper), Neues Wiener Tagblatt (New Viennese Daily), and Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker’s Newspaper) published the ÖBfM’s notices for women and information about their lecture series.25 Several members of the executive committee were engaged in public lectures during the prewar years, some to general audiences, and some tailored to women’s and Social Democratic organizations. Others joined the prewar Internationale Vereinigung für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (International Association for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform), which met in Dresden in 1911 and included in its goals “the protection of unmarried mothers and their children from economic and moral endangerment and the amelioration of the prevailing judgments against them.”26 Here, they worked with German reform luminaries like Helene Stöcker and Iwan Bloch to establish and mitigate the conditions of unmarried mothers all over Europe. The highpoint of the ÖBfM came in 1921, when it reached almost three thousand members.27 That year, the Social Democratic city hall of Vienna declared the Mutterheim a “public care facility” and began donating significant amounts of money to the association. These funds were used to enlarge the facilities, buy new washing machines, and create a series of sunny balconies where mothers and children could take the air.28 Over two hundred mothers a year were served in the Mutterheim. By the interwar years, the association offered consultations every weekday, legal advice, and a course on infant care.29 It was integrated into the city’s extensive welfare system and was publicized widely in the mainstream press as well as special guides to public and private aid organizations. Services at the home continued to expand throughout the 1920s, yet the number of women housed there began to fall in 1931, perhaps as a result of shrinking donations. ÖBfM membership declined as well as the Depression deepened and founding members died off.30 Pride remained, however, in the functioning Mutterheim, which the association was still able to support. In a report on the first twenty years of the home, the failure to attract new members was mitigated by the success of the project as a whole: “We have not become

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a mass organization. But thanks to the fidelity of our members we have kept ourselves and above all our Mutterheim above water in the hardest years of the war and the difficult postwar times.”31 Peace was fleeting in Vienna. After the Austrian Civil War of February 1934, the Mutterheim remained open, despite being compromised by its previous association with and financial support from the Social Democratic party, which had ruled Vienna during the First Republic. Now known as the Mutterschutzwerkes, some former members were absorbed into the Fatherland Front’s social programs.32 The organization was finally shut down by the National Socialist government in 1939, although the home continued to be used to shelter mothers and children throughout the war and into the 1950s.33 Representing Motherhood Although the ÖBfM was often critical of both the Catholic Church and the bourgeois order, it freely drew upon both discourses in its appeals to members. Early notices by the ÖBfM cited the protection of motherhood (and by extension, the care of infants) as a “holy duty.”34 Citing the shocking rates of infant mortality and infanticide in Vienna, these calls to service used the language of Catholicism to galvanize readers. The ÖBfM also referred to single mothers as the modern-day “pariahs of our society,” who, like biblical outcasts, suffered due to the ignorance of mainstream culture.35 This language ascribed collective guilt and implied that only collective action could right these wrongs. Feminist Alice Solomon argued as a result that only public support for unmarried mothers would ease their burden, noting that private and religious charities preferred to aid married mothers.36 In many ways, the ÖBfM was dependent on a bourgeois and overwhelmingly Catholic population in Vienna to support itself in the early years. No matter how controversial it perceived itself to be, the association was in its early years ultimately a private, well-to-do charity for poor women. Indeed, true public support for single mothers would come only with the new welfare regime of the Austrian First Republic, which was developed under Dr. Julius Tandler. Healthy children, no matter what their provenance, were at the center of this system, and Tandler was an outspoken critic of any law or custom that penalized illegitimate children. How did care for mothers go from a “holy duty” to a civic welfare benefit? Evidence suggests that it was the experience of the Great War that altered people’s perception of the ÖBfM’s work. Before the war, the ÖBfM described single mothers as especially worthy of aid “in that for her the crown of woman, motherhood, becomes a crown of thorns.”37 Such biblical imagery of martyrdom was common in these years,

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and was used for women of all classes. Yet by 1916, the organization began redirecting its message. “Compassion and humanitarianism,” although proper responses to unwed mothers, were being replaced by cool calculations of interest and public policy.38 Children were needed no matter whose name they bore—their mother’s or father’s—because “the state and the factory won’t ask about it, once they see their uses as adults.”39 The terrible loss of life during the war had rendered irrelevant the provenance of each member of society; rather, it had made every “addition [to the family] wanted.”40 The “murderous” war, combined with the threat of infant mortality rates and a sinking birthrate, led to calls for ever-greater protection for mothers and children, no matter what their legal status.41 Demanding a strong future generation capable of resistance, the ÖBfM conflated politics with biology in order to suggest expanding its Mutterheim, providing for ever-older children and building a maternity hospital that would attract even members of the middle class.42 In February 1930, with a total of over three thousand infants cared for in the Mutterheim, the ÖBfM reflected on the change in valence that “protection of mothers,” as a term and as a goal, entailed. In a report, the association wrote, “When we started, talking about the protection of mothers was in many circles revolutionary. With time it has become something else. It may be that the war has accelerated this development, in that man, the people’s most important form of capital, was destroyed on thousands of battlefields.”43 Even those who insisted that marriage was holy no longer protested, the article continued, when one spoke of the duty of society to protect unmarried mothers and their children. The human being, so frail in the face of mass destruction, had simply become more precious. The article went on to claim that some might call the work of the association “like a drop of water on a hot stone.”44 However, the ÖBfM countered that the children whose lives they had enriched, whose “first steps had been made beautiful,” might make all the difference.45 Were they suggesting that this new generation would play an important role in society, or simply stressing the importance of the first few months of life in the overall well-being of the child? Whatever the intent, this modest claim of 1930 allowed the illegitimate child to speak for the worth of the entire project. By the early 1930s, with the difficult war and postwar years in mind, the ÖBfM began talking about motherhood as a right to be experienced and enjoyed by all women. Melodramatic vignettes about its clientele and their suffering were replaced with charts noting the number of women and children served. In this new attitude they found support from Dr. Hans Paradeiser, who described motherhood as a basic right: Every woman must be given the opportunity to fulfill her maternal functions to a full extent, carrying out [her] pregnancy, delivery, and nursing in the best

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material and moral conditions. Mother and child must be protected during the entire period . . . [and] this protection of mothers must not be held out to certain groups of mothers, but rather must be extended to all women.46

Although he does not mention single mothers by name, Paradeiser, representing city hall’s interests, clearly hinted that the cause of protecting (unmarried) mothers was important to Vienna’s population planning. The former “pariahs of society” had thus become a part of the Social Democratic vision for a healthier Austrian future. Developments in the city welfare system in many ways made this extension of motherhood as a basic right possible. In 1924, the city of Vienna published a guide to youth services that echoed in important ways the initial goals of the ÖBfM: Under the term Protection of Mothers should be understood the totality of measures undertaken by society (via legal and welfare services), for both the married as well as the single mother, that serve the goals of protecting her during the time of pregnancy, delivery, and nursing and preserving the life of her child.47

Interestingly, the only thing missing from this statement when compared to the ÖBfM’s original goals is the language of “worthy” charity. Interwar Vienna’s welfare system was designed to replace charity, and to increase the “quality” of its population through medical and care services that would augment the health of the coming generation.48 It took the problem of illegitimate infant mortality rates very seriously.49 By the early 1930s, Vienna had set up thirty-five mother’s advice centers, a Mutterhilfe program to combat hereditary syphilis, a Central Home for Children to replace the old city orphanages, youth welfare offices in every district of the city, and extensive social services for children of all ages and legal statuses. The youth welfare offices, in particular, were active in helping thousands of women sue for financial support from the fathers of their children.50 During these years, the city organized care and supervision for around twenty-five thousand wards each year, less than a thousand of which were “legitimate” children.51 Furthermore, opportunities for unwed mothers to give birth in city-run hospitals expanded. The city also mandated visits with doctors and social workers for all illegitimate children and foster children.52 Having a child out of wedlock lost some of its shock value in the interwar years. Women seeking partners during this period in personal ads openly described themselves as single mothers.53 Although the stigma of an illegitimate birth was not erased, it was certainly rewritten as one of a number of possible destinies. Conclusions How shall the Mutterheim run by the ÖBfM be remembered? In many ways, it reread the crisis of unwed pregnancy as a social crisis of misplaced values.

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What was more important, the association asked, the sanctity of marriage or the creation and support of new life? This question, whose roots may be found in German-speaking feminist organizations from the fin de siècle, found new weight during World War I. Unprecedented destruction of the male population, combined with increased concern for infant mortality rates, led members to justify their work in new ways that were increasingly consonant with the prevailing political order. The community created to provide for single mothers and illegitimate children understood itself as radical, even “utopian,” in its original aims, yet these aims were effectively appropriated by the city of Vienna’s public welfare system following the war.54 Although the stigma of being single and pregnant failed to disappear (nor did the Catholic Church or worldwide capitalism), the support system for women and children was sufficiently expanded by the 1930s so that the Mutterheim began to become obsolete. Although it continued to shelter families, it no longer did so in the name of social reform. Its radical moment had passed, and members of the original community died off or became enmeshed in the very different politics that dominated Austria in the 1930s. Eventually, the National Socialist powers that ran Vienna would mitigate the scorn for unmarried mothers via a eugenic worldview that valued children for their racial inheritance over their legitimacy. The original founders of the Mutterheim could not have foreseen these events. Their vision lay in a further future: one in which mother and child were part of a community of concern that fostered health without regard to legal status, with the support of the state and the understanding of society. The generous welfare provisions of bland, prosperous Austria today are the lasting legacy of the ÖBfM. Notes 1. “Mutterschutz,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 1, no. 1 (September 1911): 1. 2. “Zweck,” Bund für Mutterschutz Statuten, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. Emphasis mine. 3. “Mittel,” Bund für Mutterschutz Statuten, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. 4. Andrea Czelk, “Frauenrecht und Mutterschutz—Der Bund für Mutterschutz als einzig wahre Interessenvertreutung unehelicher Mütter?,” in Frauenrecht und Rechtsgeschichte: Das Rechtskämpfe der deutschen Frauenbewegung, ed. Stephan Mader, Arne Duncker, and Andrea Czelk (Cologne, 2006), 351–66. 5. For an excellent tour through the issues raised by the Berlin association, see Adele Schreiber, Der Bund für Mutterschaft und seine Gegner (Leipzig, 1909). 6. These numbers were compiled in a social history by Gerlinde Hinterleitner, “Das süsseste, was dem Weibe werden kann, ist die Mütterschaft: Uneheliche Mutterschaft in Wien, 1918–1938” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1989), 6. 7. Verena Pawlowsky, Mutter Ledig—Vater Staat: Das Gebär- und Findelhaus in Wien 1784–1910 (Innsbruck, 2001).

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8. Ingrid Matschinegg, Verena Pawlowsky, and Rosa Zechner, “Mütter im Dienst— Kinder in Kost: Das Wiener Findelhaus, eine Försorgeeinrichtung für ledige Frauen und deren Kinder,” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 5, no. 2 (1994): 63. 9. “Österreichischer Bund für Mutterschutz,” Mutterschutz: Zeitschrift zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik 3 (March 1907): 136. 10. By law, illegitimate children were only related to their mother, not their mother’s family or their father and his family. This was mitigated after the war. See Julius Ofner, “Österreich,” in Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, ed. Adele Schreiber (Munich, 1912), 497. 11. It is unclear how such a claim might be made. If a mother were to marry after giving birth, she might be able to reclaim her child now that a father—biological or not—was available. 12. Marianne Tuma von Waldkampf, “Mutterschutzbestrebungen in Österriech,” Die Neue Generation 7 ( July 1911): 326. 13. Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1992), 112. In this invaluable book, the ÖBfM is discussed under the rubric “The Feminist Fringe.” Likewise, in Gisela Urban’s otherwise exhaustive 1930 history of the Austrian women’s movement and its associations, the ÖBfM receives a scant two sentences. Gisela Urban, “Die Entwicklung der Österreichischen Frauenbewegung im Spiegel der wichtigsten Veriensgründungen,” in Frauenbewegung, Frauenbildung und Frauenarbeit in Österreich, ed. Martha Stephanie Braun et al. (Vienna, 1930), 25–64. 14. Hans Paradeiser, “25 Jahre ‘Bund für Mutterschutz,’” Blätter für das Wohlfahrtswesen 31, no. 289 ( January–February 1932): 8–9. 15. The play was called Bilder der Nacht and ran in 1918; advertisements promised three acts and a “problematic” epilogue by Attilio Bleibtreu. Wienbibliothek 34857 MA9. 16. Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 113. 17. “Vorschläge zur Reform Strafgesetzes,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 1, no. 1 (September 1911): 4. 18. “Neunter Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 5, no. 2 (March 1916): 2. 19. “Zehnter Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 6, no. 2 (April 1917): 2. 20. “Achter Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 4, no. 2 (March 1915): 3. 21. “Sechster Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 2, no. 4 (February 1913): 3. 22. “Sechster Jahresbericht,” 4. 23. “Siebenter Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 3, no. 3 (April 1914): 1. 24. These leaders were in place by 1912 and served for multiple years. Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 1, no. 4 (March 1912): 4. 25. “Fünfter Jahresbericht,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 1, no. 4 (March 1912): 3. 26. Internationale Vereinigung für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, “Aufruf an Männer und Frauen aller Kulturländer” (1911). Accessed via the International Institute of Social History at www.iisg.nl/exhibitions/neomalthusianism/

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nmb151-mutterschutz2php (p. 4). The same call for equal rights for unmarried mothers and their children would be made by the interwar World League for Sexual Reform, headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. 27. Bund für Mutterschutz report for February 1934, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. 28. Paradeiser, “25 Jahre ‘Bund für Mutterschutz,’” 7. 29. As listed in a 1930 poster that also advertised an exhibit organized by the ÖBfM. “Werdende Mütter! Mütter in Not!,” Wienbibliothek 40291 MA9. 30. The association noted the deaths of members in most publications, and blamed the decline in membership on the general loss of this first generation of reformers. See “Bund für Mutterschutz,” in Jugend in Not: Ein Jahrbuch der Fürsorge des Allgemeinen Verbandes freiwillige Jugendfürsorge in Wien (Vienna: Im Selbstverlag des Verbandes, 1924), 68. 31. Bund für Mutterschutz report for 1928, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. 32. Bescheid vom Bundeskanzleramt, May 1935, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. 33. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 2324/1950. 34. See, e.g., the notice in Neues Frauenleben 19 ( January 1907): 11. 35. “Österreichischer Bund für Mutterschutz,” Blätter für das Armenwesen der Stadt Wien 6, no. 61 ( January 1907): 13. 36. Dr. Alice Solomon, “Mutterschutz und Mutterschaftversicherung,” Blätter für das Armenwesen der Stadt Wien 8, no. 86 (February 1909): 22. Solomon balked, though, at the ÖBfM’s argument that all forms of motherhood were equally worthy and honorable, worrying that it sanctioned extramarital sexual intercourse. 37. “Siebenter Jahresbericht,” 1. 38. “Neunter Jahresbericht,” 1. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. “Aufruf,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Bundes für Mutterschutz 5, no. 3 (October 1916): 2. 42. Ibid. The maternity ward imagined did come to pass in the interwar period as a municipal hospital for women that was touted by the Social Democratic city council. 43. Bund für Mutterschutz report for February 1930, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv MAbt 119 A32, 3644/21. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Paradeiser, “25 Jahre ‘Bund für Mutterschutz,’” 6. Emphasis in the original. 47. Viktor Suchanek, Jugendfürsorge in Österreich (Vienna: Österreichischer Schulbücherverlag, 1924), 122. 48. Britta McEwen, “Welfare and Eugenics: Julius Tandler’s Rassenhygienische Vision for Interwar Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 16 (2010): 170–90. 49. Andreas Weigl, Demographischer Wandel und Modernisierung in Wien (Vienna: Pichler Verlag, 2000), 215. 50. “Berufsvormundschaft,” Die Verwaltung der Bundeshauptstadt Wien in der Zeit vom 1. Jänner 1923 bis 31. Dezember 1928 (Volume 2, Part 1), Wiener Stadt-und Landesarchivbibliothek M511 2/1, 636.

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51. “Berufsvormundschaft,” Die Verwaltung der Bundeshauptstadt Wien in der Zeit vom 1. Jänner 1929 bis 31. Dezember 1931 (Volume 1, Part 1), Wiener Stadt-und Landesarchivbibliothek M511 1/1, 636. 52. Andreas Weigl, “The Rise and Fall of the Fürsorgerin (Female Welfare Worker) in Austrian Public Health Policies: Theory and Practice of a Professional Link within a Changing Social and Epidemiological Framework,” in The Transmission of Health Practices, ed. Martin Dinges and Robert Jütte (Vienna, 2011), 123. 53. Hinterleitner, “Das süsseste, was dem Weibe werden kann,” 103. 54. “Mutterschutz,” 1.

CHAPTER 5

12

Of Queens and Kinship Politics and Legacies in the Colonial Pacific MATT K. MATSUDA

H

istories of the Pacific islands, particularly from the nineteenth century, are rich in legacies of kinship and politics. In scholarly ethnography, Rona Tamiko Halualani describes a visit to Hawai‘i’s Iolani Palace, seat of the last Hawaiian monarchs, and notes, “Throughout my childhood, I had fantasized about being the descendant of a famous ruler like Queen Lili’uokalani.”1 The queen had battled for native Hawaiian sovereignty against encroaching foreigners in the late nineteenth century and was overthrown by American business and military interests in 1893. Down the road from Papeete, the Tahitian capital of French Polynesia, the Musée de Tahiti et des Iles hosts a fine collection of oceanic exhibits. In one room hangs a stern and regal portrait of another revered figure, Pomare Vahine V, like Lili’uokalani a monarch and a woman, who had contested French military incursions into her own islands in 1843, but was eventually forced to concede power to colonial forces. Two of the most lasting and unresolved legacies of Pacific debate are tied to the cases noted here: overlapping histories underscoring conflicts over kinbased rulership and male and female power in the nineteenth-century seizures of Tahiti and Hawai‘i from Queens Pomare and Lili’uokalani and the contemporary legacies of these two women, lionized as resisters to foreign imperialism by nativist and nationalist movements. These episodes have become causes célèbres and have organized colonial memories in the Pacific. They are historical embodiments of the ways that—as anthropologist Jeannette Marie Mageo has put it—“people make political and legal claims, and support or dispute hierarchies, through reference to the past.”2 This for her defines a mnemonic “positionality” that defines islander power and authority. Recent works by scholars like Karina Kahananui Green have indicated how cultural politics—perceptual

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schemes from exoticist narrations to divided notions of feminine authority— have been critical in island histories, shaping strongly gendered strategies of both accommodation and appropriation.3 The focus on the two queens is particularly salient here, for their experiences record histories of struggle and remembrance that are deeply implicated in a politics of kinship. David Warren Sabean has frequently pointed out, through meticulous historical reconstruction, ethnological deep readings of symbolic systems and narrative stagings of characters and actors, and the importance of blood and family ties and genealogical alliances in shaping communities. This is particularly salient when underscoring historically where state institutions have presumably fragmented “traditional” ties between kin, descendants, and ancestors. This tension between states and ancestral communities is deeply important in colonial situations, where indigenous connections to the past are erased by imperial narratives. In such cases, lines of descent are not only recognitions of familial continuity, but claims upon survival and authority. As Halualani has put it for the Hawaiian case when describing pi’ikoi (to claim to be of higher status and name than one is): We work hard to assert our genealogical links to Hawaiian royalty: either that of Queen Liliuokalani or King Kamehameha, two of Hawai‘i’s most hailed monarchs . . . specifically, by establishing oneself in the name of a royal blood line, Hawaiians seek to exercise a valuable yet differently positioned indigenous Hawaiian speaking authority, one that is largely denied in the state process of identification and in the courtroom and one that is inexorably linked to a historical memory and without geographic specificity.4

The political histories of both Tahiti and Hawai‘i have been occluded by more than a century of both cultural imaginaries and touristic stereotyping— beaches, pleasures, dusky maidens—stretching back to Louis Antoine de Bougainville, through the mythic exoticism of the tales of the mutiny on the Bounty, through stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Pierre Loti, to the paintings of Paul Gauguin and the picture postcards of the Matson steamship line and the Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau. Reclaiming a “speaking authority” through ancestral ties for islanders remains a process both of historical struggle and restitution to be asserted through direct claims to honored pasts. Although separated by thousands of miles of open ocean from the southern to northern hemispheres, the island groups of Hawai‘i and Tahiti are continuously reimagined as Polynesian kin across overlapping histories. One of the signal moments of a Polynesian cultural “renaissance” came in the 1970s with the reconstruction of an ancient sailing canoe named the Hokule’a, whose creators deliberately chose to sail the “traditional” route from Hawai‘i to Tahiti using only ancient navigational techniques, seeking to demonstrate

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the cultural, linguistic, and heritage ties of the two peoples. Such demonstrations were part of broader attempts by indigenous islanders to reclaim a Pacific-wide heritage, submerged by colonial narratives that had long portrayed distinct island groups as “isolated” and disconnected from the world and each other. In the same decade, and continuing afterward, islander scholars and activists traveled between Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and New Zealand, formed alliances over sovereignty issues and questions of ancestral land claims, studied genealogies, and wrote new histories of island rulers who resisted colonialism, such as Pomare and Lili’uokalani. As the queens faced parallel colonial challenges from the French and the Americans, so those French and American interests also reflected each other across generations. Both the colonized and the colonizers were historically bound together in the Pacific region. In both the Tahitian and Hawaiian cases, nineteenth-century political debates about the future of the islands centered upon increasing Western dominance of trade and expanded military and religious concessions, yet there were some distinctions. While the Hawaiian discussions were centered around how to negotiate with the powerful Kamehameha kings in the first part of the century, during the 1890s the American republic was concerned with whether a representative government (the United States) should respect the sovereignty of a monarchy. In contrast, in 1840s Tahiti, actions took place as a dialogue between monarchs—in this case, Queen Pomare, King Louis-Philippe in France, and Queen Victoria in England. That these debates, over “small” monarchies in the middle of an oceanic world, should have such international resonance was of particular interest to one French diplomat in Hawai‘i, King Kamehameha III’s French finance minister and cabinet secretary Charles Crosnier de Varigny. Diplomats like de Varigny had long imagined the destinies of Hawai‘i and Tahiti to be joined. Speaking of the conquests of King Kamehameha I, who had unified the Hawaiian islands by military campaign, de Varigny called the great ruler [a] new Alexander [who] turned his gaze toward the south and dreamed of hegemony over Tahiti . . . it would have provided a curious spectacle if this barbarous king, surrounded by his war vessels, had audaciously sped them across the Pacific and conquered by sail such a vast distance, braving the storms and calms of the Equator in order to add one more island to his kingdom. 5

Kamehameha I was also remarked upon as “the Napoleon of the Pacific” for his unification conquests in Hawai‘i. Pushing the cross-oceanic project as a “resettlement” initiative to draw Polynesian peoples to populate and provide labor for Hawai‘i, de Varigny pressed his Hawai‘i-Tahiti vision with Kamehameha III, crowing,

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I succeeded in convincing the King. With the map before our eyes, he had followed with me stage by stage the sometimes slow and sometimes rapid pace of this vast migration of peoples. . . . Kamehameha I, his ancestor, had intuitively hit upon this same fact; despite his ignorance in many matters, he possessed the intuition of genius. Conqueror of his enemies and sole Lord of the Hawaiian Archipelago, he had directed his gaze toward Tahiti and the Marquesas.6

Such dynastic conquests never took place—at least not from Hawaiian monarchs under a diplomat’s tutelage. Rather, they came from outlanders, French and American naval commanders, and affronted ruling queens in Papeete and Honolulu. The 1843 seizure of Tahiti from Queen Pomare was not lost on the political classes of the time in Hawai‘i. De Varigny was well aware that what had happened in Tahiti in the 1840s could happen again in Hawai‘i, and he intoned, “The great maritime powers, France, England, and the United States of America, watch Hawai‘i with jealous eyes.”7 The events that would take place in Hawai‘i did not unfold until the 1890s, yet the example of colonial upheaval in 1840s Tahiti was already noted by de Varigny as a cautionary example for any Polynesian ruler. Tahiti was an illustration, for events had happened there recently . . . [that] had great reverberations throughout the Hawaiians islands .  .  . in the eyes of the chiefs, the situation in Tahiti symbolized the ambition of France, and the arbitrary and extreme methods that had, in particular, deprived a small country of its nationality in order to transform it into a colony of a foreign power.8

As de Varigny noted of local American demands for a US protectorate in the 1860s, “The petition recommended annexation by the United States as the sole means of avoiding forcible seizure of the islands by France.” Not only islanders but also sugar planters were anxious in the shadow of historical precedent. Thus, “Hawaiians were now joined with the added fear, on the part of the Americans, of eventual military occupation by a French squadron, as had already occurred in Tahiti.”9 It is well worth nothing that Admiral Du PetitThouars, who annexed the Marquesas Islands and forced Queen Pomare to sign a friendship treaty with France in Tahiti, also used his man-of-war, the Venus, to demand concessions from the Hawaiians for Catholic missionaries in the 1860s, a show of force—according to de Varigny—resonating in “a lively session” that “threatened to degenerate into a web of political complications.” Du Petit-Thouras was succeeded by Commander Laplace, who “framed his demands in the form of an ultimatum, threatening to bombard the [Honolulu] fort in case of refusal. Too weak to resist, the government gave way.”10 Such acts followed a familiar pattern: the same threats of bombardment of Papeete back in 1843, which had compelled Pomare to concede, established a dynamic of ambivalent Polynesian queenship, part monstrous, part helpless.

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The duality came from French and American views of female monarchs and also from a tension in the feminine portrayal of Polynesia, where, after all, Bougainville had set the myth for Europe and the world in the late eighteenth century by reporting on dusky maidens, the daughters of Venus, exercising an exotic genre that has never separated itself from the notion of “island women” of ripe sensuality and easy sexual encounter. As Bougainville famously enthused, “the canoes were filled with women, who in the charm of their features conceded nothing to most European females . . . most of these nymphs were naked, for the men and old women who were with them had taken off the loincloths which they usually wore.” This set the stage for a thousand tales, drawing from his most famous passage of the young girl who “negligently let fall a loincloth that covered her and appeared to all eyes as Venus revealed herself to the Phrygian shepherd. She had the same celestial form.”11 Yet against this empire of sensuality and sexuality, naval captains, church fathers, and planters came up against formidable females of another sort who forced a readjustment of thinking about women and political rule. When Lili’uokalani ran afoul of Americans resisting her attempts to restore a sovereign constitution to the nation of Hawai‘i, the San Francisco Examiner declared her “savage,” “immoral,” “heathenish,” “foul-mouthed,” “dangerous,” and “blood-thirsty,” an extension perhaps of general stereotypes of women as agents of moral corruption, yet one vacated of pleasure and filled with monstrosity. In both Tahiti and Hawai‘i, the queens were not seductive nymphs but defiant authorities to reckon with, heirs to ruling families whose names mark the histories of their respective islands—the Pomares in Tahiti and the Kamehamehas in Hawai‘i. Both came to power in lines that conquered to unify their archipelagoes and became, through the effective imposition of political rule from outside, the “last queens” of their people, and, in Lili’uokalani’s case, the last monarch of the islands. The historical legacies of Pomare and Lili’uokalani are, in part, built upon qualities that might be applied to French and European sovereigns: virtue and queenly values defined by family and kinship networks and the ability to articulate authority and power, derive status as rulers with and against their husband-kings, and ably serve as regents for sons and male offspring. Those legacies have been shaped and reshaped across generations. A sketch by the French exoticist writer and illustrator Pierre Loti portrays Pomare as a tragic, somewhat indolent intriguer of romance and local affairs. Loti described the queen as a woman with an “old, wrinkled, brown, square, hard face,” filled with grandeur and sorrow at having seen her realm “invaded by civilization, in hopeless confusion, and her beautiful country degenerating into a place of prostitution.” Loti, a French naval officer, only remarks on the invasion by “civilization,” not by the French navy. Others took Pomare’s face as a subject: from the time of her authority in the 1840s, Pomare’s political and royal face was

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read by painters like Charles Giraud, much taken with her determination, depicted in the portraits he created of her authoritative gaze. British critics of the seizure of the islands by Dupetit-Thouars, such as George Baxter, painted a fabulously anguished and romantic portrait of the young queen in half-swoon, beseeching the Almighty for aid and succor as the perfidious French forces gathered outside her window. Examining the images side by side is an exercise in iconographic tension: the solemn dignity of Giraud’s royal sitting and the stern ambiguity of the expression, the melodramatic and allegorical spoliations of Pomare’s imploring, Madonna-like entreaties, draped in almost Renaissance style while cradling her child at the moment of persecution. It would be easy to argue that Baxter’s anti-French sentiments got the better of his religiously fervent imagination while Giraud exercised an almost documentary-like genre portrait. Yet, positing these visions against records kept of meetings between Pomare and both the British and French quite dramatically shows the political savvy and determination of the queen, as well as her ability to present her presumably “feminine” weakness, thus validating the dual portraits. That Pomare had political objectives is clearly evident in her many letters and protestations to the French authorities—from naval officers to King Louis-Philippe—and in appeals to what would later be considered the “international community,” particularly her ties to Victoria in England. Later European notions of Tahiti as a land of sensual pleasures tied to Bougainville’s musings and Paul Gauguin’s paintings of silent, resolutely unspoken Polynesia disguise the vociferous political record. Pomare was little occupied with the formation of such imaginaries, and she immediately protested French incursions with a sophisticated political rhetoric, based upon an inability “to make ourselves respected,” admitting powerlessness, and railing against menaces to “that which we hold most dearly in our hearts—the Protestant faith and our nationality.” Her appeal, especially to Queen Victoria in England, played up a sisterly tie framed by a vision of Christian progress and good governance and defense of “the Love of Jehovah, the love of order, and of industry.”12 She also was not above projecting a bit of familial and perhaps deliberately “feminine” humility, telling the captain of the visiting British warship Talbot that she needed his aid: “I am in your hands and admit to you openly my great weakness . . . I would be like the child who goes to ask the aid of her mother.”13 In her comments to her court and advisers, Pomare wove together political and maternal sentiments in deciding whether to remain away from the capital at Papeete and consider the French actions from the island of Raiatea, ultimately deciding she must stay with her close family. She even imagines that the French governor should think of himself in her place—or rather, “his wife . . . because she is a mother like me.”14

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Pomare played the maternal and familial card as adroitly as she could to gain political advantage with putative protectors. In defying French influence to meet with officials in Papeete she deflected pressure by claiming, “Yes, I would have abandoned my children, and if some misfortune had befallen then, I would have been responsible in the eyes of God.”15 She won over British representatives such as Captain Toup Nicolas, who remonstrated to Dupetit-Thouars, “So unprecedented, I might say so dishonest, a proceeding as coming in a large Frigate to a poor defenseless though independent Sovereign, and that Sovereign a woman . . . must arouse indignation.”16 In letters directly to Dupetit-Thouars, Nicolas used the queen’s physical condition to complain of the admiral’s very un-French behavior by underlining her own pregnancy at the time of the events: “from those of a nation which stands pre-eminent in its chivalric gallantry towards that sex whom we all regard it to be our highest honour to guard from insult, and from wrong . . . these insulting threats were offered, it cannot be forgotten, at a time when the Queen’s accouchement was hourly looked for.”17 Playing out the queen’s status as both monarch and as woman, Nicolas complained of “the great distress of mind, together with offensive conduct of the French Consul towards this unhappy defenseless woman!” “France, Europe, and the World, Sir, will form its opinion of these unexampled proceedings, which you will, I am assured, alike censure and condemn.”18 The queen adroitly presented herself both as an authoritative monarch as well as a “vulnerable” woman in need of protection, engaging the male representative of one empire to defend her against the male aggressor of another in the name of feminine honor and moral propriety. Pomare and, later, Lili’uokalani, found themselves making pleas to powerful men: King Louis-Philippe in France and President Grover Cleveland in the United States. Both women made strong and eloquent pleas defending their sovereignty, expecting redress. As Pomare entreated Louis-Philippe, “I deliberately protest against this harsh measure taken by your Admiral, but I trust to you, expecting your compassion and justice and your kindness to the Sovereign without power, and that you will deliver me.”19 Lili’uokalani, pleading for Hawai‘i, conceded her standing by issuing a formal statement: “I do, under this protest, and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative, and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian islands.”20 In Hawai‘i, the queen was a powerful symbol as she remonstrated for “the right of the Hawaiian people to choose their own form of government.”21 By doing so, she became both literally and symbolically a direct ancestor in the line of sovereign leaders of contemporary Hawaiian politics. As the scholar,

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poet, and activist Haunani-Kay Trask has put it, “The settlers, white and Asian alike, continue to control the politics of Hawai‘i. Native sovereignty continues to be the issue of the day, just as it was during the reign of our beloved Queen Lili’uokalani.”22 The political connection is direct—the queen lost her kingdom to American forces by directly challenging a constitution imposed upon her predecessor by force and by attempting to restore political rule to herself and to the Hawaiian nation. Scholars of Polynesian gender organization like Jocelyn Linnekin have argued that “women figured prominently in adoption and in the transmission of spiritual property,” and that despite sexual and customary separations of male and female along property and taboo lines, “Hawaiian women were ‘sisters’ rather than ‘wives.’”23 As such, familial alliances made sense, and direct appeals—partly around monarchical status, but also around female notions of kinship—could be effective, particularly if articulated in variance to men’s wishes. Karina Kahananui Green has also argued for the prestige of queens in Hawai‘i, especially in the context of imperial struggles where women’s customary attachment to the land (if not “property”) made them more resilient symbols and defenders of local authority. In a succession challenge of 1874 between chiefs, supporters of Queen Emma asserted, “We shall be preserved and blessed through the Queen . . . she will look upon us, and we will eat together, talk together, live together, and walk together with her, and she will always assist the poor and distressed.”24 The resonance of the familial and female logic used by the queens in the preservation of political rule was not simply a metaphorical device; Pomare— and Lili’uokalani decades later—would both look for support from the female authority to whom they felt a literal kinship—Queen Victoria. Part of this affinity was the transnational and transcultural nature of dynastic politics—a privileged coterie of monarchs, here women. Yet both Pomare and Lili’uokalani might have expected more authoritative responses in their defense from Victoria. Pomare in Tahiti had already looked to Victoria, whom she called “My dear friend and sister, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain,” without success. In a March 1843 letter detailing the struggle with the French incursion and the French consul Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, Pomare wrote to Victoria, “This Man will not regard the Laws of my Land, but his own will alone he regards, and his general conduct brings to light his evil character. . . . Dear Friend and Sister, Do make known to the King of the French the proceedings of this Man, that he may be removed.”25 In multiple entreaties, Pomare implored, “Here you have my words to you my friend, my sister, console me in my affliction, in my distress, and in the difficulties with France that my land faces.”26 Victoria did not wish to stir up controversy, being already involved in problems with the entente cordiale and other dynastic dilemmas—the marriage of Queen Isabella

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of Spain and the French invasion of Morocco. In a letter to her Uncle Leopold, Victoria complained, “The only thing almost to mar our happiness is the heavy and threatening cloud which hangs over our relations with France . . . the whole Nation here are very angry . . . the French keep us constantly in hot water.”27 Lili’uokalani also had a direct affinity for the monarch she too called “sister,” having visited Victoria on the occasion of the 1887 jubilee in London. Traveling then as a royal princess to Queen Kapiolani, Lili’uokalani greeted Victoria, then recorded, “the Queen of England again kissed me on the forehead; then she took my hand, as though she had just thought of something which she had been in danger of forgetting, and said, ‘I want to introduce to you my children.’”28 The familial seemed to relate them, and the translation of this kinship and genealogical principle would become the language Lili’uokalani would use decades later when defending her kingdom against the Americans: “When I speak at this time of the Hawaiian people, I refer to the children of the soil, the native inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands and their descendants.”29 As with Hawaiian nationalists of the 1980s and 1990s commemorating in protest the seizure of the kingdom, it was the queen who established the principle of distinguishing “which other individuals have been sent on to assist in this attempt to defraud an aboriginal people of their birthrights, rights dear to the patriotic hearts of even the weakest nation. Lately these aliens have called themselves Hawaiians. They are not and never were Hawaiians.”30 Historian and activist Jonathan Osorio has followed this line: I am a Native Hawaiian, He Kanaka Maoli, oiwi maoli au. This is a simple enough assertion, the meaning of which is as clear as water when it springs from the rock. . . . I hope I have demonstrated a consistent and determined struggle by Native Hawaiians to maintain, for better or worse, their kinship with each other.31

Family—interpreted as community and indigeneity—has rooted contemporary sovereignty movements among Tahitian Maohi and Hawaiians. It is through direct lineage that greater encompassing ties are understood. As Rona Tamiko Halualani puts it, such a practice symbolizes an effort and desire to gain a cultural power and status that are absent from our lives. We strive to actualize a power position that becomes cultural currency only within a larger Hawaiian community, as Western tourism degrades Hawaiian monarchy as a festishized tragic nativism that could never be.32

Many such questions of islanders and outlanders rest at the heart of the appropriations made of the two monarchs, Pomare and Lili’uokalani, and especially of the circumstances and histories they bear.

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As Osorio notes about the lineage ties between past and present, “the contemporary sovereignty movement does not distance itself from the monarchy, though a few of the movement’s supporters advocate a return to monarchy itself. We commemorated the passing of the kingdom as a day of mourning and commitment to the restoration of our nation.”33 Kinship as a form of politics remains key. Scholar-activists like Osorio draw inspiration—and political ties—from genealogies that both literally and figuratively connect contemporary Hawaiians to their forebears in a community across generations of language and history. This community was disrupted—but not broken— by the colonial overthrow of sovereign rulers linked by blood and culture to their own people. This is a point very much emphasized by Halualani, who, in ethnographic research, regularly interviewed diasporic Hawaiians (those not living in the islands themselves), who would share their stories of their family relations to Hawaiian royalty, particularly to King Kamehameha and Queen Lili’uokalani. After thirty or so oral histories, it dawned on me that this was the raw material of identity resignifications. . . . I had done it before. I had claimed to be a close relative of the great Queen Lili’uokalani. I would tell my friends that I was of Hawaiian royalty. Some say there is a book alleged to list every family line related to the Kalakaua [Queen Lili’uokalani’s] dynasty. In high school and college, I told everyone, “My name is in these pages.”34

Halaulani recognized this not just as a prideful claim, but a critical formation of memory, tradition, and identity through genealogy, a “reconnection” through bloodlines. It was a practice to recognize and reassert a dispossessed history. Kinship and lineage questions continue to play into contemporary politics by drawing the long-standing eighteenth-century Bougainvillean narrative of Polynesian sensual encounter and feminine beauty into the nineteenth-century depictions of political women struggling with stark imperialism. These women and their struggles are particularly incarnated in Pomare and Lili’uokalani. For Hawaiians, Halaulani notes that time and history are “resignified not in terms of the past but in context of the present. Speaking of the past, which is always a resignified construction, fulfills a cultural function in response to the present.”35 Personal histories genealogically descended from monarchs activate claims for the right to speak, and for political authority. Pomare in Tahiti, whose historical role and reputation were occluded by literary and artistic tales of the South Seas, was strong-willed and vociferous in defense of her rule and against what she took as poor governance by French administrators like Governor Bonard, whom she excoriated to Commander Lavaud: “His government does not work because he is someone with little concern for the truth, someone choleric who loans his ear to calumnies, lies and to

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people of bad character.”36 Pomare demanded a dual voice, in a statement that resonates for historical narratives in colonial contexts: “my collaboration with governor Bonard is unsatisfying; he does not like me at all, and he does not listen to me either.”37 The claim for recognition has continued in active sovereignty movements claiming historical identity with the lineages of women who ruled, and the politics of family, kinship, and genealogy have shaped twenty-first-century meanings and consequences for the United States, the French Republic, and the peoples of Oceania in struggles for recognition and accommodation. Notes 1. Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, 2002), 148. 2. Jeannette Marie Mageo, ed., Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific (Honolulu, 2001), 5. 3. Karina Kahananui Green, “Colonialism’s Daughters: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Western Perceptions of Hawaiian Women,” in Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific, ed. Paul Spickard, Joanne L. Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright (Honolulu, 2002), chap. 13. 4. Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians, 148, 198. 5. Charles Crosnier de Varigny, Fourteen Years in the Sandwich Islands, 1855–68 (Honolulu, 1981), 28. 6. De Varigny, Fourteen Years in the Sandwich Islands, 28. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Ibid., 53, 148. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Ibid., 52. See also Hawai‘i State Archives, “Treaties and Conventions Concluded between the Hawaiian Kingdom and Other Powers: France 1846, 1858, 1879” (folio 1997); Richard Charlton, Correspondence Relative to the Sandwich Islands (London, 1844). 11. Charlotte Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti (London, 1963), 2. See also Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle, 2006), 71. 12. Archives Musée de Tahiti et des îles, 77.5.22.C, Procés verbal de la réunion que s’est tenue à bord du naivre de guerre anglais Talbot dans la rade de Papeete à Tahiti, 5–6. See also Bertrand de la Roncière, La Reine Pomare: Tahiti et l’Occident, 1812–1877 (Paris, 2003), 94. 13. Archives Musée de Tahiti et des îles, 77.5.22.C, Procés verbal, 5–6. See also de la Roncière, La Reine Pomare, 94. 14. Archives Musée de Tahiti et des îles, 77.5.22.C, Procés verbal, 5–6. 15. De la Roncière, La Reine Pomare, 96. 16. Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti, 131. 17. Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti, 132. 18. Ibid. 19. Hon. L. Hope, “Letter from Queen Pomare to Louis-Philippe, King of the French” (Honolulu, 1844), 12.

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20. Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti, 143; see also J. A. Gillis, The Hawaiian Incident: An Examination of Mr. Cleveland’s Attitude Toward the Revolution of 1893 (Boston, 1897), 50; Hawai‘i State Archives, Govt. Rec. Series 148, Hawai‘i Military Commission, “Proceedings of Military Commission 1895: Trial of Queen Lili’uokalani, Robert Wilcox, 187 Other Defendants.” 21. Lili’uokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Last Queen (Boston, 1898), 324. 22. Haunani Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (Honolulu, 1999); for ties to Hawaiian cosmology and the monarchy, see Hawai‘i State Archives, PP 98 10, “Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition,” trans. “From the original MS preserved exclusively in Her Majesty’s family by Lili’uokalani of Hawai‘i.” 23. Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990), 5. 24. Kahananui Green, “Colonialism’s Daughters,” 244. 25. Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti, 132. 26. De la Roncière, La Reine Pomare, 18. 27. Haldane, Tempest over Tahiti, 154. 28. Lili’uokalani, Hawaii’s Story, 145. 29. Lili’uokalani, Hawaii’s Story, 325. Interestingly, Lili’uokalani happily recognized Victoria as Queen of England and Empress of India and a rightful monarch, while James Blount, who denounced the American seizure of Hawai‘i on behalf of Grover Cleveland, was born in Georgia and had served in the Confederate army—a background displeasing to the American provisional government in Honolulu. For current issues, see Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds., “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” special issue, The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (August 2001). 30. Lili’uokalani, Hawaii’s Story, 325. 31. Jon Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu, 2002), 252. 32. Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians, 198. 33. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 253. 34. Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians, 244. 35. Ibid., 226. 36. De la Roncière, La Reine Pomare, 97. 37. Ibid.

CHAPTER 6

12

The Making of a Japanese Rural Christian Community Conversion through Family Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan EMILY ANDERSON

A

visit to the otherwise sleepy towns of Gunma Prefecture, generally considered a dull region at the northern edge of the Kantō Plains, reveals something remarkable: the presence of Christian churches, most dating from before the beginning of the twentieth century. They are spread throughout the region, from towns in the plains to villages nestled along the dramatic Agatsuma River gorge that wends its way toward the mountainous interior of Japan’s main island. Some of these churches, including the earliest in Annaka, are set apart from their surroundings and stand out with their distinct architecture. The humble church in Haramachi, by contrast, is barely distinguishable from the storefronts that border it on each side along the old main street through the center of town. But each, in their age and longevity, demonstrates the deep roots Christianity has established in this rural prefecture. The conventional explanation for the introduction of Christianity in this region, and the founding of each of these congregations, is the stuff of legend. However, it is my contention that the existing social, economic, and family networks long established in this area are as responsible for the emergence of a vibrant and dynamic rural Christian community as are the chance encounters and coincidences that mark the nearly mythic story usually offered to explain the unique development of Christianity in Gunma. Drawing upon David Warren Sabean’s extensive work on kinship, and responding to his remonstrations that scholars must more carefully examine the complexities and dynamism of rural life, this essay attempts to delve beyond the legend of local hero, Niijima Jō, and locate

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the source of this unexpected community of Christians in the unassuming countryside instead. The Legend and Its Protagonist, Niijima Jō (1843–90) Niijima was a young retainer of Annaka, a small clan allied with the reigning Tokugawa shogunate. In 1864 he fled from Edo (renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration), where he had been working for the lord of his domain, and stowed aboard an American whaler moored off of the northern treaty port of Hakodate. He was compelled to take this drastic step because, he professed later, he wanted to go to America to learn more about Christianity. This act violated two long-standing statutes of the Tokugawa shogunate: leaving Japan and studying Christianity. Both were punishable by death.

“That Double-Bolted Land, Japan” Although Christianity had been introduced by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century and enjoyed a brief period of popularity, the Tokugawa government that came to power at the start of the seventeenth century outlawed it, persecuting followers and driving the few remaining believers underground for the following two centuries.1 During this same period, the Tokugawa shogunate strictly controlled what little contact Japanese had with foreigners. Limited foreign trade continued with the Dutch and the Chinese, but their formal contact with Japan was confined to the small man-made island of Deshima, next to the port of Nagasaki. All Japanese travel abroad was strictly forbidden. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Western powers began to show an interest in imposing a new type of imperialism in Asia through the implementation of unequal treaties, the Tokugawa shogunate found itself woefully ill equipped to fend off these Western intruders. Representatives of several countries attempted to initiate diplomatic relations with Japan, but it was the Americans who finally succeeded with the use of gunboat diplomacy. As Herman Melville predicted in Moby Dick, the whaleboat, and its frequent presence in the waters off of Japan, was indeed what opened up “that doublebolted land, Japan.”2 In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry and his daunting fleet intimidated the Tokugawa shogunate into agreeing to diplomatic relations, and soon after an unequal treaty formally initiated trade between the two nations. This effectively ended Japanese isolation and allowed the entry of Americans and then other foreigners to live and work in designated treaty ports. Yokohama was one of the first treaty ports. Due to its proximity to the shogun’s capital of Edo, it served as a critical contact zone between European and

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American merchants, diplomats, photographers, and a motley array of adventurers and Japanese merchants, students, and others apprehensive yet curious about the new forms of knowledge and technology that were now available. Niijima, as the legend goes, was one of these curious young samurai. When he was lent a book about the United States written in Chinese, he was enraptured by the world it described. He also discovered a Chinese translation of the Bible and, according to his biography, moved by its contents, spontaneously confessed his faith.3 This fortuitous encounter with the literal Word of God drove this young man far from his home, onto a whaler and to New England. Far away from his homeland and forbidden to return by shogunal edict, Niijima was welcomed by wealthy patrons who financed his education at Philips Academy, Amherst College, and Andover Seminary. They also introduced him to members of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who supported his desire to return to his homeland to preach Christianity and nurture a new generation of young Christian leaders who would transform Japan into a civilized and Christian nation.4 Meanwhile, in Japan, following the arrival of the Americans and other Western powers, a combination of internal unrest and the shock of Western intrusion led to the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate. The forces that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate installed the teenage emperor, Mutsuhito, as the new ruler, naming his reign the Meiji era, and began the process of transforming Japan into a modern nation-state. This regime change also ended many of the statutes that had insulated Japan from outside influences for over two hundred years. In 1873, the prohibition against Christian propagation was also lifted. All barriers to his safe return removed, Niijima traveled to Japan in 1874 with five thousand dollars donated by the ABCFM to start a Christian school for boys.5

Conversion from Within: The Prodigal’s Return Before Niijima could start his school, however, he needed to visit his parents. Upon arriving in Yokohama, Niijima rushed to Annaka in what had become Gunma Prefecture to look in on his parents before he continued with his “Godordained” work. The return of this prodigal son also transformed Annaka into one of the birthplaces of Christianity in modern Japan. It took Niijima twelve hours by rickshaw to make the eighty-mile journey from Tokyo. When he arrived, news of his return spread throughout the area, and soon a large group gathered to hear news of his exploits in America. Niijima also preached about Christianity. He even borrowed a local Buddhist temple sanctuary to give sermons, drawing audiences of over one hundred people at a time.6 According to the church’s official history, during the three weeks Niijima spent in Annaka, over thirty locals confessed their belief in Christ; most were

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impoverished samurai who were destitute now that they could no longer count on domainal stipends. Niijima soon continued on to Kyoto, where he established the Dōshisha English School (now Doshisha University), and this small group of believers formed the core of what soon became the Annaka Church. Niijima continued to shepherd his fledgling flock from afar, and when he realized that this nascent congregation required a leader and minister, he sent Ebina Danjō, one of his students, to serve as an evangelist during a summer break. Once Ebina graduated, he was immediately ordained and appointed the first minister of the church. From this church sprang others in rapid succession. By 1886, there were six churches in the prefecture, each one founded, financed, and supported by local believers. None relied on missionary support or foreign finances. The seeds of the Gospel were planted in good soil, and the brash acts of a young man were rewarded in the form of a plentiful harvest, or so the founding narrative of the Annaka church goes. This story, and its neatly defined elements that align so closely with other accounts of conversion, faithful acts of defiance, and risk, evangelism, and harvest, is certainly remarkable. It also reflects the need for such a story in the early decades of Christian evangelism in Japan. It lays claim to the singular power of the written word—and the significance of translation—to convert without even the need for a human intermediary. At the same time, it elevates the United States (and perhaps, significantly, New England) as the source of a deeper religious education and socialization that transformed a young and impressionable young Japanese man into an industrious and dedicated evangelist who was as interested in educating young Japanese men as in converting them. The overwhelming significance attached to Niijima’s brief visit to his hometown nicely combines a gesture of filial piety (first visiting his parents) with the effect one Christian could have on a region. It is, in short, a dramatic and inspiring tale, both for American supporters of foreign missions and for Japan’s early converts. However, were Niijima’s remarkable life and travels the singular source of influence? Is this the one factor that can explain the prevalence of Christianity in this region? Was he even, as claimed, the first one to introduce Christianity to the area? I argue that the region itself demands closer inspection, for it was no accident that Christianity took hold there, when there were other rural areas where this same transformation might have occurred but did not. Plains, Mountain Peaks, and the Mighty Silkworm Gunma, the stage where this drama unfolded, is a landlocked prefecture located in the center of Honshū, the main island of Japan, and might appear off the beaten track. It certainly seemed as though little occurred there: the economy

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was dominated by sericulture (raising silkworms to produce raw silk), farming, and logging, and most of the population was dispersed among isolated mountain hamlets, farming villages, or a handful of towns in the low-lying areas. But during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), when it was known as Kōzuke, this region’s distinct topographical, political, and economic characteristics nurtured unique social and intellectual networks. It served as a crossroads of major highways that connected Edo to the rest of the country. While seemingly marginal, Kōzuke’s relative proximity to Edo, and the large number of highway post towns in it, meant that people—and their wares, knowledge, and education—often passed through while traveling to and from Edo. The large number of hot springs also drew crowds of tourists who bathed in the springs to cure any number of illnesses, from syphilis to skin conditions.7 A disproportionately large number of doctors—attracted to the hot spring towns where “medical tourists” flocked—actively sought out new medical knowledge there, including “Western” medicine, which trickled in through the port of Nagasaki. Local wealthy peasants and merchants also invited itinerant teachers and literati to visit, nurturing an open and curious intellectual atmosphere as well.8 Its distance from the urban center did not condemn the residents to poverty, either. Most residents farmed vegetables and some grains, and they also made charcoal, logged, hunted, and occasionally worked in the hot spring resorts. While the topography, soil, and climate made wet rice cultivation impractical, these same features were ideal for sericulture. Sericulture dominated the local economy, and its importance was reflected in the predominance of Gunma sericulturalists in the development of technical innovations in the Tokugawa period.9 Most households, including those that primarily cultivated grains, raised silkworms or engaged in one of the steps involved in silk production (whether raising the silkworms, reeling raw silk, refining silk, or weaving the thread into cloth) for critical supplemental income. Silkworms required constant attention and were particularly susceptible to fluctuations in temperature and humidity, and all members of the household were expected to assist in the work.10 By the middle of the early modern period, sericulture had developed into a sophisticated and highly specialized commercial industry.11 On the eve of Japan’s forced reentry into a global market and struggle against Western imperial powers, the highly specialized system of silk production created a transregional network of silkworm cultivators, silk reelers, and weavers. The literary and scientific networks overlapped with and most likely reinforced the economic networks as well. The people in this region, characterized by an openness to new knowledge and technological innovation, whose familial relationships were reinforced through trade networks that further encouraged the introduction of new ideas and people, were not quite so conventional or conservative as their location might suggest.

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The Coming of the Missionaries The opening of Japan coincided with an explosive growth in American interest in foreign missions, and Japan’s continued ban on Christianity and recent isolation made it an intriguing destination for many missionaries. The first conversions, hailed by missionaries as evidence of God’s work and divine intervention in otherwise rocky soil, attained the gravitas and grandeur of heroic myth, so much so that untangling myth from biography, and distinguishing the young tentative early believers from the visionary leaders they later became (or to recover the ones conveniently forgotten for failing to become so), is a taxing task. Regardless, the story goes something like this: The first converts to Christianity came from samurai families, and they were exposed to their new faith at schools or medical clinics established by foreign Christians. Most came from domains that had failed to take advantage of the power shifts of the Meiji Restoration. Ambitious but without access to power, these young men eagerly sought out newly arrived foreign teachers for the cultural and symbolic capital that a “Western education” could gain for them. The first generation of converts, therefore, are associated with the schools they attended, where they created surrogate families, which were often later reinforced through intermarriage between families. These converts were also mostly based in the main urban centers of Tokyo-Yokohama to the east or Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe to the west.12 In the shadow of these prominent conversions, Gunma became the site of conversions that resulted from a different set of events and coincidences. The whale may have brought Americans to Japan and served as the impetus for the unequal treaties, but it was the humble silkworm that not only perpetuated foreign interest in trade, but also brought the silk merchants of Gunma in contact with the treaty ports, and, more significantly, the books and ideas available there. And it was the meeting of the Bible and the silkworm (metaphorically speaking) that set the stage for the forging of an unlikely Christian community. The Silkworm and Christianity The forcible opening of treaty ports by the United States in 1859 had direct consequences for the regional economy of Gunma. The many silk producers were drawn into the global economy in the 1860s due to a fortuitous coincidence when pébrine struck and devastated Italian silkworms just as the United States pressured Japan into signing an unequal commercial treaty: overnight, Japanese silk became a lucrative commodity. Japan’s entry into the global market transformed the Gunma economy.13 Gunma’s relative proximity meant that

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the most wealthy and prosperous silk producers—those who had sold silk thread on the commercial domestic market for generations—could travel to Yokohama to broker deals with foreign silk buyers and, in some cases, even establish branch offices in Yokohama to oversee their export trade.14 In other words, Niijima was not the only one who was drawn to the excitement and novelty of the treaty port and all it offered. Yuasa Jirō, the scion of Aritaya, a prominent soy sauce and miso maker in Annaka, frequented Yokohama while Niijima was in New England. In the conventional narrative, Yuasa’s name is second only to Niijima: he not only was among the first group of converts, but he also contributed substantial funds toward the establishment of the Annaka congregation. But Yuasa’s role—and his family’s role—is greater than the narrative of Niijima’s heroic return to his hometown suggests. The Yuasa family, as was typical of the wealthy peasants and successful town merchants, was only nominally of lower status than the samurai in the area.15 In practice, they were community leaders whose influence partly resulted from the significant wealth they amassed from their extensive land holdings and their soy sauce and miso business. By Jirō’s father’s generation, the Yuasas also branched into sericulture, cultivating mulberry trees and specializing in the sale of silkworm eggs to local farmers. And it was silk production, as well as the purchase of supplies for their other businesses, that took Jirō to Yokohama. While there, he studied at Ranshadō, an English school run by Takashima Kaemon, a noted industrialist in Yokohama. The school’s instructors included the Reformed missionaries James and John Ballagh. He also began purchasing books on Western learning printed in Japanese and Chinese, and American illustrated magazines.16 In 1872—that is, a year before the prohibition against Christianity was rescinded—Yuasa Jirō founded a library in Annaka for the local residents. The Binransha, as it was known, consisted of three thousand Japanese-, Chinese-, and English-language volumes, most of which Yuasa had purchased in Tokyo and Yokohama, and was housed in the first floor of a family building used for raising silkworms. Not only did this foster local curiosity about Christianity, but the Binransha was also among the first modern libraries established in Japan.17And so it was through his frequent visits to Yokohama, not Niijima’s prodigal return, that Yuasa first came in contact with Christianity, and that local residents were introduced to other forms of “Western learning.”18 There are slightly contradictory accounts of where Yuasa’s first encounters with missionaries took place, but these stories suggest that Yuasa became acquainted with several missionaries before Niijima’s return. The Reformed missionary Samuel R. Brown met Niijima in Massachusetts when Brown returned to the United States, and Niijima asked Brown to deliver letters to his father back in Japan. According to one account, Yuasa accompanied Niijima’s elderly

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father to the American embassy in Yokohama so that they could meet with Brown.19 According to another version, Brown, his wife, and another missionary, Mary Kidder, while traveling from Tokyo to Niigata, visited Annaka in order to call upon Niijima’s family. This latter version is the one described by Mary Kidder in letters she sent to supporters back in New England, so it is likely to have happened.20 And yet another account claims that two other foreign Christians—the Christian educator Guido Verbeck and the missionary D.C. Greene—visited Annaka in Niijima’s absence.21 All suggest that the seed for Yuasa’s eventual conversion was planted, not solely by Niijima and his heroic return, but also by the combined effects of Yuasa’s interest in the motley and cosmopolitan world of Yokohama, the possibility that he actually came in contact with publications about Christianity while there, and encounters with American missionaries. Does it really matter how Yuasa first learned about Christianity? After all, he himself attributed his conversion to Niijima’s visit, and whatever the original source, it defined his life until his death in 1932. In some sense, though, it does matter, if only because shifting the focus from Niijima and his brief visit to Yuasa’s familiarity with Western merchants in Yokohama also forces into relief how the Yuasa family’s centrality in regional social and economic networks played a significant role in the remarkable propagation of Christianity in Gunma. More broadly, it points to the countryside’s integration into global economic structures, and the flexibility and adaptability of existing networks. After Niijima’s departure, the few Annaka residents drawn to Christianity were left without a minister or evangelist to teach them. It can be argued that it was Yuasa’s perseverance, local influence, and diligence, not Niijima, that ensured the survival of some kind of Christian community in Annaka.22 Between 1874 and 1878, Yuasa and a handful of others labored to maintain some semblance of Christian worship. In addition to studying the Bible, they also held simple Sunday services. All this time, the group appealed to Niijima as well as the Presbyterian and Reformed missionaries to provide them with a minister. Finally, in 1877, Niijima sent one of his students, Ebina Danjō, to evangelize and support the “seekers” in Annaka during Dōshisha’s summer break. Ebina worked closely with Yuasa and the two men kept the Sabbath together; only five or six others regularly joined them.23 Again, Ebina’s evangelistic efforts relied almost entirely on the familial and economic networks established by the Yuasas and other prominent families in the region. In the 1870s, Japan was unified only in theory: regional distinctions in attitude, dress, dialect, and culture had been reinforced by the topographical features that tended to isolate communities from each other and the centuries-long history of interdomainal feuds. Long after, Ebina recalled his first

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visit to Annaka as a bewildering and often frustrating experience of cultural dissonance and mutual unfamiliarity. Most of the people in Annaka had never seen a boat, so when I taught about the fishermen of Galilee they had no idea what I was talking about. Also, not only had they never seen a livestock farmer, they had never heard of one. So when they heard that “Jehovah is the good shepherd,” this did not mean anything to them. Most of the villagers had never even seen a sheep.24

The difficulties did not end there. Ebina, who was born and raised on the southwestern island of Kyushu, spoke a dialect quite distinct from that spoken by people in northern Kantō. According to Ebina, as long as he was calm he had little difficulty communicating, but when he became emotional, as was often the case when he preached, his Kyushu dialect took over, and the residents could not understand him at all. His background also created a barrier: as the son of a Kyushu samurai, he had few experiences in common with the people he was evangelizing. Struggling to find some common ground through which he could preach about Christianity in a way his rural audience could relate, he learned to ask everyone he met as he walked from village to village about their villages, local news and gossip, how they farmed, local customs, their families, and recent weddings and funerals. In short, “I studied how these villagers lived their daily lives [chōson gaku], and made this the foundation of teaching the truth and spirit of Christianity. After I threw myself into this, I was able to preach in a way that many people were able to understand.”25 Ebina’s increased ability to communicate was no doubt partly due to his dedication to finding common ground with the local residents, but it was also because he enjoyed the friendship, patronage, and association of the Yuasa family. Over the previous generations, the Yuasa family had painstakingly developed relationships with individual households and businesses that purchased their soy sauce and miso; Yuasa Jirō’s principal role was to visit customers in person to take their orders.26 The Yuasas also had access to the network of local farmers who purchased silkworm eggs and mulberry leaves from them.27 Jirō and his mother Moyo in particular used these existing networks to increase the number of converts in the area, always evangelizing while visiting customers. They also relied on these relationships to introduce Ebina to people in other towns and villages. On occasion, Yuasa Jirō took Ebina along when he was going to meet with customers to take soy sauce and miso orders and introduced the minister to his customers. He also used his relationships with influential families in local villages to encourage them to organize evangelistic events, convincing them to agree to finance such events by arranging for venues and the cost of lodging and meals for the speaker.28

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Evangelism was a slow process, where initial contact by Ebina was often reinforced by local converts, so that when conversions did occur, they were often the result of the efforts of a network of church members. This pattern can be observed in the conversion story of Tanaka Giichi, a native of Gokanmura in Usui-gun (county), one of the villages near Annaka. Tanaka, who later became a devout Christian and missionary to Japanese immigrant communities in Hawai‘i and California, recalled in his memoir how news reached Gokanmura of Niijima Jō’s triumphal return to Annaka. It was hearing of someone from the same “backwater area” as himself going off to a distant land, making something of himself, and also proclaiming faith in a foreign religion that sparked Tanaka’s interest. One day, Tanaka witnessed Ebina preaching in the countryside: Among the theology students from Dōshisha who came to Annaka every summer to evangelize was an eloquent youth named Ebina who, with his sash wrapped around and around him like the hoop on a soy sauce barrel, preached eloquently with a clear voice; when I heard him I was deeply moved and, upon returning home, I announced, “I want to become a follower [shinja].”29

As significant as this encounter with Ebina was for Tanaka, equally significant were the efforts of Yuasa Moyo, who frequently visited Tanaka’s mother in Gokanmura: This Omoyo-san would visit my village with one of her employees in tow carrying silkworm eggs, and stopped by my home from time to time. Each time, she would little by little share with us how Christianity was a noble [tōtoi] religion. On one occasion, witnessing how her character shined through as she spoke these few words, I felt very grateful. At this time, I thought to myself, I want to become a follower of this Christianity.30

This episode encapsulates the overwhelming significance of existing ties—reinforced and nurtured through the peculiarities of the social and economic stratification of Gunma sericulture—in promoting Christianity. The regular visits, already customary as a result of the rhythms of the local economic structure, allowed Yuasa Moyo gradually and repeatedly to introduce her neighbors to the idea of Christianity. But her ability to persuade her customers drew from her position as the formidable matriarch of Aritaya. Conclusion In March 1878, Niijima and Ebina again traveled to Annaka, this time to formally establish a church. The appointment of an ordained minister offered Annaka Christians the guidance and legitimacy they had been seeking. Once the

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church was founded, however, lay members continued to play a crucial role in nurturing the nascent Christian community. In particular, Yuasa Jirō put the weight of his family’s wealth and influence behind the church, transforming it into one of the most important churches in the Kantō region, despite its location in a town whose significance dwindled with the turn of the twentieth century. Gunma stands out as a remarkable exception to the typical patterns of conversion in late nineteenth-century Japan. The conventional explanation, Niijima’s singular visit, resonated with expectations missionaries and historians of missions held for evangelism’s successes in this newly opened country. However, the founding of the Annaka church can be best attributed to the social and familial networks that emerged from the confluence of the region’s distinct economic structure and intellectual milieu. Had Yuasa Jirō and his family not sought out new intellectual influences, and taken advantage of the economic opportunities made available by the opening of Yokohama, the dramatic establishment of Christian churches in this area could not have occurred. Notes 1. See George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, 1973); Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System (Cambridge, 2007). 2. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale, ed. Charles Feidelson Jr. (New York, 1964), 154. 3. Rev. J. D. Davis, DD, A Maker of New Japan: Rev. Joseph Hardy Neesima (New York, 1894), 4–8. 4. See Phebe Fuller McKeen, A Sketch of the Early Life of Joseph Hardy Neesima (Boston, 1890); Davis, A Maker of New Japan; Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima (Boston and New York, 1891). 5. This account taken from Davis, A Maker of New Japan. 6. Takamichi Hajime, “Annaka kyōkai no sōritsu” [Founding of the Annaka Church], in Annaka kyōkai shi: Sōritsu kara hyakunen made [The history of the Annaka Church: From its founding through the first hundred years] (Tokyo, 1988), 23–24. 7. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth Century Japan (Cambridge, 2005), 71–103. 8. Ibid. 9. Gunma Ken shi hensan iinkai, ed., Gunma Ken shi [Gunma prefectural history], tsūshi hen [historical overview] (Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, 1989), 8:29. 10. For more on Japanese sericultural technology and technique as Japan opened its ports, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 ( January 1992): 101–21. 11. Nishigaki Seiji, Yamamoto Takashi, and Ushiki Yukio, eds., Gunma Ken no rekishi [The history of Gunma Prefecture] (Tokyo, 1997), 195–97. 12. F. G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L.L. Janes and Japan (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan (Berkeley

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and Los Angeles, 1970); Dohi Akio, Nihon purotesutanto kirisutokyō shi [The history of Japanese Protestant Christianity], 5th ed. (Tokyo, 2004). 13. Gunma Ken shi, tsūshi hen, vol. 8, p. 27. 14. Nishigaki, Yamamoto, and Ushiki, Gunma Ken no rekishi, 255–58. 15. Yuasa Saburō, ed., Yuasa Jirō (1932; repr., Tokyo, 1992), 7; Ōta Aoto, Jōshū Annaka Aritaya: Yuasa Jirō to sono jidai [The Aritaya of Joshu: Yuasa Jirō and his age] (Tokyo, 1998), 25. 16. Ōta, Jōshū Annaka Aritaya, 30–31. 17. Gunma Ken shi, tsūshi hen, vol. 9, p. 552. Rental libraries had existed in Japan for several centuries, but Yuasa’s Binransha is distinct in that he did not charge for use of the library. On these earlier rental libraries, see Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu, 2001), 391–97. 18. Ōta, Jōshū Annaka Aritaya, 30. 19. Yuasa, Yuasa Jirō, 21. 20. Ōta, Jōshū Annaka Aritaya, 11–12, 32–33. 21. Morioka Kiyomi, ed., Chihō shōtoshi ni okeru Kirisuto kyōkai no keisei: Jōshū Annaka kyōkai no kōzō bunseki [The formation of Christian churches in regional cities: A structural analysis of the Annaka church of Joshu] (Tokyo, 1959), 12. 22. “Annaka Kirisuto kyōkai rokuji,” reprinted in Gunma Ken shi [Gunma prefectural history], shiryō hen [documents], ed. Gunma Ken shi hensan iinkai (Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, 1983), 22:880. 23. Ibid. 24. Watase Tsuneyoshi, Ebina Danjō sensei (Ryūginsha, 1938), 158. 25. Ibid. 26. Yuasa, Yuasa Jirō, 7. 27. Ōta, Jōshū Annaka Aritaya, 25. 28. Morioka, Jōshū Annaka kyōkai no kōzō bunseki, 16. 29. Tanaka Giichi, Shiren no rutsubo (Keiseisha, 1925), 8. 30. Ibid.

PART II

12 Community

CHAPTER 7

12

Divination and Community in Early Modern Thuringia JASON COY

Divination in Early Modern Germany In early modern Germany, people from all ranks of society sought to predict the future and reveal hidden knowledge by consulting fortune-tellers, casting lots, and interpreting omens. Divination was ubiquitous, practiced by learned mages at court, illiterate cunning folk in the countryside, and ordinary individuals using customary forms of fortune-telling in their homes and workshops.1 Since late antiquity, Christian authorities had opposed divination, which they viewed as a dangerous form of pagan diabolism that called God’s omniscience and omnipotence into question.2 These negative attitudes persisted into the Reformation period, and Protestant theologians adopted most of the objections to divination developed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.3 Despite some tolerance for learned forms of magical activity like astrology or alchemy among European elites, most clerical authorities were united in their condemnation of popular forms of divination, which they regarded as foolish superstitions or even as demonic operations.4 Thus, many of the most important Protestant theologians of the Reformation era, including Martin Luther, Johannes Brenz, and Heinrich Bullinger, denounced divination in their writings and sermons. In a 1520 catechism, for example, Martin Luther characterizes a range of popular magical practices as violations of the first commandment, including “crystal-gazing” and “ordering one’s life and work in accordance with lucky days, astrological signs, and the views of fortune-tellers.”5 Later Reformers were even more explicit in linking divination with demonic maleficium, with Johannes Brenz counting “magicians, witches, soothsayers, and others

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who believe their incantations are the cause of good fortune” among those who broke God’s law against idolatry.6 Brenz was not alone in associating divination with witchcraft, and many of the most famous and influential demonological treatises of the period, ranging from the notorious Malleus Maleficarum in the fifteenth century to the encyclopedic Magiologia at the end of the seventeenth, also included exhaustive condemnations of divination. Even Johann Weyer, an early critic of the excesses of the early modern witch hunts, writing in 1563, considered divination to be a form of demonic magic and leveled his ire at professional soothsayers: [M]any magicians, swollen with the spirit of Pytho, profess the art of divination, boasting that when objects are missing, they can show who has stolen them or where they are concealed, and that they can reveal other hidden or even ambiguous matters. Seduced by the fumes of self-esteem, and seeking prestige, these people claim to an occult art and a science of which they are actually ignorant. Or else their own malice compels them to deceive others—whether they actually fulfill their promises by means of their exorcisms, execrations, vows, and ceremonies, or whether, in their greedy desire for fraudulent gains they still boast of a knowledge of divination even when they sometimes learn little or nothing through Satan’s cooperation. In any event, these magicians should not be tolerated, and they should not be allowed to go unpunished (as they are now), because they trust in and rely upon lies and upon the Father of Lies, as though upon a most assured witness.7

For Weyer, diviners were either puffed-up charlatans or greedy swindlers, and if they acquired even a murky glimpse of hidden knowledge, it was only through Satan’s assistance. Eager to defend pathetic old women falsely accused as witches, he showed no sympathy for soothsayers, calling for the authorities to be more diligent in punishing them. Despite the prominence of divination in early modern culture, scholars have long neglected exploring these practices in favor of studying witchcraft. However, there is a growing realization that witchcraft has overshadowed the study of other integral aspects of early modern magic and superstition. For example, in a recent survey, Michael Bailey writes that “the topic of early modern witchcraft and witch hunting has been examined extensively, indeed, far out of proportion to other areas of magic and superstition.”8 In recent years, scholars have begun to move beyond witchcraft, providing fascinating examinations of the theological discourse on superstition, including divination, and shedding new light on the aims and effects of the Reformation.9 Few scholars, however, have explored the place of divination in early modern folk culture or the efforts of secular authorities to prohibit and punish these activities at the village level.10 In Power in the Blood, a seminal book that has inspired a generation of students and scholars, David Warren Sabean used official archival sources to

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uncover subtle traces of village community, popular culture, and power relations at the village level over three centuries. Informed by his approach and inspired by his teaching, I focus in this essay on official efforts to stamp out divination in the Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Gotha during the seventeenth century in order to examine the role of divination in early modern society generally and its place in local villages in particular. The local authorities, seeking to enforce staunch Lutheran piety, eagerly investigated the activities of the region’s fortune-tellers and witch doctors during the early modern period. Considering the mediation inherent in official sources that afford modern scholars a glimpse into village culture, Sabean reminds us that “because we cannot get to the peasant except through the lord, our evidence is often a good starting place for considering the relationships which we want to investigate.”11 From this perspective, the files generated by the disciplinary efforts of the agents of the dukes of Saxe-Gotha show the prominence of divination not only in official disciplinary efforts, but also in village culture during the era. They also illustrate the fascination that early modern Europeans had with divination and how eagerly they sought to gain access to occult knowledge, despite the warnings of their pastors and the punishments of their rulers. Finally, they demonstrate the remarkable resilience of these customs, shedding light on the limits of the disciplinary efforts that accompanied the Reformation and the durability of popular culture. Divination and Discipline in Saxe-Gotha The height of official efforts to prohibit divination in Saxe-Gotha occurred during the reign of Duke Ernst I, known as Ernst the Pious. Taking the throne in 1640, Ernst, ruler of a new principality founded amid the chaos of the Thirty Years’ War, sought to inculcate strict Lutheran morality within the duchy. As he sought to restore order amid the ravages of war, Ernst worked to establish catechism instruction, craft stringent territorial ordinances, and police the behavior of his subjects. As part of these sweeping moral reforms, he also issued a number of ordinances and mandates intended to compel his subjects to abandon divination.12 A series of sermon instructions Ernst issued to the duchy’s clergy, for example, show how central the campaign against divination was in his disciplinary efforts. The instructions charged the duchy’s pastors with delivering blistering sermons against “superstitious practices,” which the mandate warned “are very prevalent in our times,” and told them exactly what to tell their parishioners. Citing the writings of Martin Luther and the Acts of the Apostles, the sermon instructions required pastors to preach about the spiritual perils of divination, warning their congregants to avoid popular folk customs relating to auspicious days, astrological horoscopes, or portentous events. The instructions

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also directed pastors to instill fear in the hearts of their congregants by teaching them that divination was nothing but “devilish idolatry” and as such a damnable violation of God’s first commandment. Finally, they required the local pastorate to remind the duke’s subjects that God orders the magistrate to punish such superstition severely, in an effort to deter them from dabbling in the occult.13 To bolster these sermons and uncover forbidden occult activities, Ernst also relied upon the pious laymen who staffed the local circuit courts (Rügegerichten) to punish their wayward neighbors. The circuit courts, established in every town, village, and rural district in the duchy, met four times a year, judging offenders rumored to have engaged in immoral behaviors. Divination figured prominently among the list of offenses these courts were to look into, and Ernst ordered the circuit court judges to investigate whether “anyone had invoked the devil or practiced divination . . . or sought counsel from a devil conjurer,” meaning a professional fortune-teller.14 The circuit courts were instructed to punish anyone who was found to have engaged in these activities with imprisonment, fines, or hard labor. They were to report particularly serious cases to the consistory for punishment. Duke Ernst buttressed these disciplinary initiatives with a series of ordinances that treated divination as a serious criminal offense. In his comprehensive 1653 territorial ordinance, the cornerstone of his disciplinary campaign, he dealt harshly with divination. Denouncing it as a form of blasphemy, he complained that “many endeavor to perform divination, and others attempt to get advice from soothsayers” and declared his intention to rid his domain of these demonic activities.15 Accordingly, Ernst decreed that those who consorted with the devil in order to divine hidden or future things, that is, itinerant fortunetellers and village cunning folk, were to be beheaded. Concerned with maintaining Christian piety within the duchy, Ernst prohibited his subjects from consulting these professional soothsayers and ordered that anyone who visited such “crystal-gazers and fortune-tellers” risked imprisonment, a fine, or even perpetual banishment from the territory.16 Early modern law enforcement was marked by a tendency to issue harsh penalties but a reluctance to bring them to bear, and the ducal authorities never levied the most serious of these penalties. However, the draconian nature of the duke’s proscription of divination demonstrates his determination to deter his subjects from seeking occult knowledge. While most early modern rulers focused their law enforcement efforts on punishing witchcraft, and rarely pursued practitioners of more benign forms of magical activity, the dukes of Saxe-Gotha not only sought to punish witches but also proved exceptionally diligent in their efforts to root out sorcery and divination. Over the span of three centuries, authorities in the region conducted dozens of investigations into the activities of fortune-tellers and witch doctors, providing a window into their occult practices. These investigations

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generated files on many popular soothsayers operating in the area, including a female fortune-teller working in Wahlwinkel in 1556, the “wise woman of Sundhausen” practicing her trade in Gotha in 1561, a “crystal-seer” working in Streufdorf in 1675, and a popular diviner in Schmalkalden known as the “Chicken Thief,” who was relegated to the workhouse in 1759. Taking a closer look at one of these divination cases, from the summer of 1671, affords us an instructive glimpse into divination practices in early modern Thuringia and the role of these occult activities in village culture. Village Divination: The Wise Man of Ohrdruf This case involved the activities of a wandering fortune-teller and witchfinder operating in the village of Ohrdruf in July 1671. It occurred late in the reign of Duke Ernst, during a time of sustained witch-hunting in the region, as the ducal authorities scoured the towns and villages of the duchy in an attempt to uncover magical activity and witchcraft.17 The incident came to the attention of the ducal officials on 16 July when a villager, Hanns Mertz, wrote a letter to the duke complaining that his neighbor, Hanns Karst, “never went to church and instead of listening to the Sunday sermon, got completely drunk on liquor and beer and profaned the holy day by playing his bagpipes.”18 Mertz also complained that “just about every day, Karst hangs around in front of his house and insults me, calling me a rogue, a murderer, a thief, and even worse things.”19 Finally, Mertz got to the root of the matter, reporting that “Karst has called my wife a witch and my daughter a little witch at least ten times.”20 Mertz ended his letter by imploring the authorities to put a stop to his neighbor’s slander. Three days later, the authorities questioned Hanns Karst, the troublesome neighbor, but once they began to investigate the strife in Ohrdruf, they promptly dropped the issue of slander, along with the rumors of witchcraft. Having discovered that the villagers had been engaging in a variety of forbidden “superstitious activities,” meaning divination, they quickly shifted the focus of their investigation. Ignoring Karst’s quarrels with his neighbors, the duke’s officials asked him instead about his dealings with a mysterious fortune-teller. They asked if “he was willing to confess that he had recently bought bagpipes from a so-called ‘wise man,’ who had warned him that his neighbor’s wife intended to bewitch him.”21 Once Karst admitted that he had in fact consulted with the fortune-teller, the authorities compelled him to divulge as much information about his mysterious associate and his occult activities as he could. Karst testified that the man was a tanner from Holstein, who carried a “planet book” (an astrological treatise that he used to cast horoscopes), and he confirmed that the

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stranger had indeed warned him that his neighbor’s wife planned to harm him with witchcraft.22 He added that everyone in the village had long suspected that Mertz’s wife was a witch, which suggests that like most professional witchfinders, the “wise man” had ascertained and confirmed suspicions the villagers already harbored. Just as Owen Davies discovered in his investigation of the activities of English cunning folk operating as witch-finders, “the process was one of confirmation rather than detection.”23 The next witness that the authorities questioned was Hanns Mertz’s daughter, Ursula, who had been in the Karst house when the “wise man” began telling people’s fortunes. She described the methods used by the soothsayer, testifying that in exchange for a mug of beer he offered to tell her fortune. According to Ursula, in order to ascertain her fate, the mysterious stranger had gazed deeply into her eyes, telling her that she was “born under an unlucky sign and that she was in great danger of dying in a fire.”24 He specified that the threat would be most acute “right after her first marriage and warned her that she should never entrust the fire to her servants, but rather should always tend to it herself.”25 This sort of warning, about a credible, specific threat that was also avoidable (and therefore would not necessarily come to pass), was a stock-in-trade of the fortune-tellers’ art in the early modern period. The last witness, a villager named Martin Aschenbach, was questioned on 7 August and shed light on the fortune-teller’s more sinister activities. Aschenbach testified that he stopped by the Karst house and was surprised to find a crowd of people there clustered around a stranger, who his neighbors identified as a “wise man, who could tell fortunes.”26 According to Aschenbach, Hanns Mertz’s wife, the suspected witch, was among the villagers eager to have their fortunes told by the wise man. He testified that she had held out both of her palms for the soothsayer to read and asked him to divine whether she was a witch or not, likely in an attempt to convince her suspicious neighbors of her innocence. Aschenbach reported that the wise man “didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”27 An hour later, as Mertz’s wife was leaving, the soothsayer had warned his host, Karst, that she was a witch who wanted to “make him crippled and lame with her hexes.”28 This revelation, probably based upon an astute reading of the suspicion and animosity the villagers exhibited toward the suspected witch, brought the simmering feud between the neighbors to a head, sparking the official investigation. Having collected these depositions, however, the authorities let the matter drop a few weeks later, most likely because the quarreling neighbors had reached an out-of-court settlement. Facilitating just such a reconciliation was one possible outcome of the magical detection of witchcraft, although the activities of witch-finders could also elicit formal witchcraft charges, recourse to countermagic, or threats of violence aimed at the suspected witch. In each of these cases, the witch-finder served

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a vital role in dealing with the social tensions engendered by (or expressed through) witchcraft fears.29 While the ducal authorities did not levy any penalties after the Ohrdruf episode, in other cases they punished villagers for daring to consult soothsayers. Caspar Nußmann, for example, a linen weaver from Streufdorf, was punished in August 1679, during the reign of Ernst’s son, Duke Friedrich I (who was not only a committed witch-hunter, but also a devoted alchemist), for consulting two “so-called wise men.” After the theft of a measure of linen, Nußmann had gone across the border into Bavaria to consult a wise man in Gückelhirn in an attempt to find out who had stolen his property. He subsequently met with a second soothsayer, in Westhausen (near Gotha), who used a crystal to find the thieves.30 Thief finding was among the most common services performed by professional seers, operating in a subsistence society where rural people often had trouble safeguarding their property. Cunning folk relied upon a dizzying variety of arcane means to locate lost or stolen goods. Some practiced scrying, which entailed gazing into a crystal or a mirror in an attempt to discern an image of the thief. Others turned to the sieve and shears, turning the implements as the names of suspects were recited and looking for them to move as the culprit was named. Often the mere threat of consulting a soothsayer prompted thieves to secretly return the purloined property in order to avoid magical identification.31 For the authorities in Saxe-Gotha, these seemingly benevolent activities represented dangerous superstition, and the high court sentenced Nußmann, who had admitted to his crimes in a written appeal for leniency, to several days’ imprisonment. Upon his release, they ordered him to publicly confess his sins in church, no doubt an edifying experience for his fellow parishioners, and to pay all the court expenses associated with his case. These cases from seventeenth-century Saxe-Gotha demonstrate the local authorities’ efforts to prohibit occult activities in the duchy and reveal some of the most prominent functions of divination within the shadowy world of early modern folk culture. They also show the appeal of fortune-tellers during the period and how eagerly villagers consulted with these magical practitioners, despite clerical admonishments and the risk of punishment. Like Nußmann and Karst, the villagers and townsfolk of the duchy consulted professional diviners in order to deal with the uncertainties of life and for help when confronted with misfortune. Gazing upon their clients or relying upon occult aids like crystals or astrological charts, early modern cunning folk, foreign and native, itinerant and local, used divination in an attempt to foretell the future, find stolen goods, and identify witches. As these cases illustrate, early modern Germans, occupying a mental universe animated by supernatural forces, malevolent and benign, and living in an era of uncertainty and want, consulted soothsayers in difficult times, seers who sometimes confirmed their darkest fears.

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Divination and Disenchantment Throughout early modern Germany, Protestant clerics and rulers tried to stamp out divination in an effort to purify the true church of practices they viewed as vestiges of Catholic and pagan superstition and to save wavering Christians from the machinations of the devil. The disciplinary tools at their disposal, however, proved unequal to the task. Early modern law enforcement was hampered by a crippling lack of resources and rudimentary surveillance capabilities. When dealing with secret crimes like witchcraft or sorcery, official disciplinary efforts relied almost entirely on the cooperation of the populace, who were required to provide denunciations of their neighbors in order to identify suspects and initiate official investigations. In the case of divination, villagers proved reluctant to bring information about these activities to the courts. Thus, even particularly determined rulers like Ernst and Friedrich, administering a relatively compact duchy, could only uncover the tip of the iceberg, handing down petty punishments to the few unlucky offenders who came before the court for performing divination or consulting with cunning folk and relying upon fiery sermons and draconian laws in an attempt to deter the rest of their subjects from dabbling in the occult. Deeply rooted in early modern culture, and serving an array of useful functions within village society, divination proved remarkably resistant to these efforts. Promising a means to recover stolen property, confirm witchcraft suspicions, and reveal future threats and opportunities, divination remained a valuable means of dealing with misfortune and social conflict. Consequently, owing to the weakness of early modern law enforcement and the enduring popularity of divination, authorities’ attempts to dissuade the rural population from engaging in these magical practices proved futile. The failed efforts of the era’s Protestant authorities to root out these occult practices mark the limits of early modern disciplinary efforts and demonstrate the tenacity of a vibrant folk culture that proved strikingly resilient in the face of official repression. Despite vehement clerical disapproval and the threat of heavy punishment, divination flourished within Saxe-Gotha’s Protestant parishes in the wake of the Reformation. Like villagers and townsfolk throughout Germany, the local populace used a wide array of customary forms of divination, simple means of fortune-telling passed down orally from generation to generation, in their attempts to uncover hidden knowledge and predict the future. They also employed professional fortune-tellers and witch doctors, itinerant seers and local cunning folk who made their living by identifying thieves and witches, diagnosing bewitchment, and telling fortunes. Given their illicit nature, these shadowy practices generally took place in secret and few of those who consulted soothsayers ever appeared in court. As Robin Briggs argues, regarding

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the prevalence of cunning folk in early modern Europe, “their sheer numbers and ubiquitous presence at once sustained the world view they represented and clogged any official attempt at repression.”32 Consequently, like fears of witchcraft, divination in its many forms survived in the rural areas of Europe for centuries after the end of official witch-hunting. It was increasingly ignored by skeptical ecclesiastical and government officials, marginalized by a secularized and urbanized mass culture, and ridiculed by intellectual elites, but it quietly persisted nonetheless.33 Epilogue A final case from the reign of one of Ernst the Pious’s nineteenth-century descendants, Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coberg and Gotha, provides an interesting illustration of the remarkable durability of divination in Germany. The case, dating from the 1840s, involved a recalcitrant cunning man and faith healer from Hallungen named Johann Michael Koch. In May 1840, he was arrested and brought before the ducal court in Nazza for engaging in “superstitious activities” that included several forms of divination. The local authorities charged Koch, a 63-year-old former linen weaver, with employing what they called “criminal fortune-telling arts” after he had performed divination for three women who had traveled about forty kilometers from Tonna to consult him. Arrested by the authorities in Nazza as suspicious persons, the women testified that they had journeyed to see Koch (and risked punishment) owing to his fame throughout the region as a healer and fortune-teller. The authorities proved more skeptical of Koch’s abilities, identifying him as a “known con man,” and dismissing his occult activities as ignorant superstitions, vestiges of a benighted age. The women who had traveled so far to consult with him, however, obviously placed great faith in the old weaver, asking him to provide a range of occult services. One of the women, the wife of a teamster named Keppler, testified that she had traveled to visit Koch after several horses that her husband had purchased had died mysteriously. The couple feared witchcraft and suspected their neighbor, an old widow, of bewitching the horses. Acting as a witch-finder, Koch confirmed her fears and warned her that there were indeed malevolent witches afoot in nineteenth-century Tonna, revealing that the village harbored a coven of forty-three, to be exact: seventeen male and twenty-six female. After agreeing to use countermagic to punish the old widow for her hexes, the soothsayer provided his occult services to the other two women, poor day laborers’ wives, interpreting a dream for one and healing the other.34 Treating him as a troublesome fraud, the authorities sentenced Koch to a two-month jail stint for his

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occult practices, but they were forced to deal with the stubborn old soothsayer frequently during the next decade as he served clients from all over the duchy and as far away as Stollberg (over two hundred kilometers from Nazza). The last we hear of him in the archival record, he was released from jail again in September 1854—now aged seventy-four—having served a six-month sentence for “superstitious activities” that he had performed for a client in Ohrdruf. Eventually, the ducal authorities even diagnosed the pious old man as suffering from a sort of mental illness they described as “mania religiosa,” filing away the striking religious drawings he produced in prison in his criminal file.35 As the remarkable case of Johann Michael Koch shows, Protestant pastors and princes failed to stamp out divination in the wake of the Reformation, and a wide range of occult practices survived in Germany until well into the nineteenth century, although their demonic associations had faded with time. In Thuringian villages, divination proved remarkably durable, and clients from throughout the region sought out cunning folk like Koch. Despite the refined skepticism of the ducal officials and the rational learned opinion of the day, villagers still turned to occult practitioners to deal with personal misfortune and uncertainty. Divination, in the form of dream augury, fortune-telling, and even witch-finding, endured in the rural corners of the region even after the railroad came to Gotha in 1847 and the liberal constitutionalists of the Gotha Party met in the city in 1849. As recent studies of nineteenth-century folk belief have demonstrated, the populations of Europe did not simply give up believing in witchcraft and magic, and acting on their beliefs, just because the laws against witches were removed from the statute books. To assume that they did commits us to the kind of elitism that makes ordinary people the faithful replicas of those who tried to improve them. To ignore the evidence that they did not is also to miss an important ingredient in modern European life and popular culture.36

Indeed, amid the timeless uncertainties of life, divination has even survived into the present day—as a glance at the horoscope page in almost any newspaper shows—the only form of occult activity still widely practiced in the modern West. Notes 1. For a concise introduction to early modern divination, see Edward Bever, “Divination,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, vol. 1, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara, CA, 2006), 285–87. See also Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford, 2010), 63–69. 2. See Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life (Houndmills, UK, 2008), 219–20.

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3. For the prevalence of apocalypticism in the early Lutheran Reformation and the popularity of astrology in Wittenberg among Melanchthon’s associates, see Robin Barnes, Prophesy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Palo Alto, CA, 1988), 146–60. 4. For these clerical condemnations of divination, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 460–84; Stuart Clark, “Witchcraft and Magic in Early Modern Culture,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 4, The Period of the Witch Trials, ed. Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia, 2002), 116–32. See also Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 63–75, 181–210, 254–90. 5. Martin Luther, “A Short Exposition of the Decalogue, the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer (1520),” in Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, vol. 1, ed. Bertram Lee Woolf (London, 1952), 75, quoted in Clark, Thinking with Demons, 490. 6. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 492. 7. Benjamin G. Kohl and H. C. Erik Midelfort, eds. and trans., On Witchcraft: An Abridged Translation of Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (Ashville, NC: 1998), 259–60. Weyer’s reference to Pytho in this passage pertains to the chthonic rites associated with the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece. 8. See Michael Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe (Lanham, MD, 2007), 7. For additional treatment of this point, see also P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Malleus Maleficarum (Manchester, 2007), 10–11; Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 16. 9. It is important to note that before the eighteenth century, an essentially medieval definition of superstition, as “deformed or misdirected worship,” persisted among Protestants and Catholics alike, producing anxiety about the liminal zone of common magical practices—folk healing and formulaic charms—situated between orthodox religious rites and forbidden demonic incantations. See Michael D. Bailey, “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 388–89, 402. See also Clark, Thinking with Demons, 485–87. 10. For notable exceptions, see Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic, an exploration of the practice of folk magic in early modern Württemberg published in 2008, Eva Labouvie, Verbotene Künste: Volksmagie uns ländlicher Aberglaube in den Dorfgemeinschaften des Saarraumes (16.–19. Jahrhunderts) (St. Ingbert, 1992); Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (London, 2003); Johannes Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History (Houndmills, UK, 2012). 11. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), 3. 12. For treatment of the reign of Ernst the Pious and his disciplinary efforts, see Dieter Stievermann, “Ernst der Fromme: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines Landesfürsten in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ernst der Fromme (1601–1675): Staatsmann und Reformer, ed. Roswitha Jacobsen and Hans-Jörg Ruge ( Jena, 2002); Andreas Klinger, Der Gothaer Fürstenstaat: Herrschaft, Konfession und Dynastie unter Herzog Ernst dem Frommen (Husum, 2002); Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, Reformations des Lebens: Die Reformen Herzog Ernst des Frommen von Sachsen-Gotha und ihre Auswirkungen auf Frömmigkeit, Schule und Alltag im ländlichen Raum (1640–1675) (Leipzig, 2002);

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Mary Constance Noll Venables, “In the Shadow of War: The Reign of Ernst the Pious in Seventeenth-Century Saxony” (PhD. diss., Yale University, 2004). 13. Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Gotha (hereafter TSG) Oberkonsitorium Generalia, Loc 29b Kirchli. Discipl. Nr. 4. 14. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Rüge-Ordnung (1646), 275. 15. Fürstliche Sächsische abermals verbesserte Landes-Ordnung / Des Durchläuchstigen / Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herrn / Herrn Ernsten / Hertzogen zu Sachsen / Jülich / Cleve und Bergk / Landgraffen in Thüringen / Marggraffen zu Meissen / . . . (Gotha, 1653), 220–21. 16. Ibid. 17. TSG Justizamt Ohrdruf (vol. 89), Loc B Nr. 11–23: Hanns Karsten wegen Däller wegen Hexerei (1671). For the history of witch-hunting in Saxe-Gotha, see Ronald Füssel, Die Hexenverfolgung in Thüringer Raum (Hamburg, 2003), 266–67, who provides summary statistics. There were 112 witchcraft cases in Saxe-Gotha between 1640 and 1680, during the reigns of Ernst I and his son, Friedrich I, who carried on Ernst’s witch-hunting activities. 18. TSG Justizamt Ohrdruf (vol. 89), Loc B Nr. 11–23. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. Edward Bever records the activities of another “wise man,” Hans Haasen from Württemberg, who “claimed to be an ‘itinerant scholar’ famous for many magical arts like treasure-finding, fortune-telling, and healing of people and animals.” See Bever, Realities of Witchcraft, 189–91. For witch-finding in Württemberg, see also Bever, Realities of Witchcraft, 221–22. 23. See Davies, Popular Magic, 107. 24. TSG Justizamt Ohrdruf (vol. 89), Loc B Nr. 11–23. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. For the ways in which early modern villagers dealt with witchcraft suspicions and magical diagnosis through the courts or unofficial “self-help” like magical charms or violence, see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London, 1996). 30. TSG Geheimes Archiv, EEE XI (13) e, 12–3. 31. For the prevalence of magical activity in response to lost or stolen goods, see Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 39–40. 32. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 174. 33. For a lucid survey of recent scholarship on the impact of cultural, social, religious, and economic change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe on beliefs in witchcraft and folk magic, see Roy Porter, “Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark (Philadephia, 1999), 219–74. 34. TSG Gerichtsampt Nazza, Sec. III A, Loc. 15, Nr. 19c (1840). 35. TSG Gerichtsampt Nazza, Sec. III A, Loc. 15, Nr. 45 (1854). 36. Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark, “Introduction,” in Ankerloo and Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, viii.

CHAPTER 8

12

Paracelsus Greed, Self, and Community JARED POLEY

A

passage from Paracelsus’s Paramirum (written between 1530 and 1534) opens up the problem of how wealth and desire, society and self, sacred and profane, were intertwined in early modern thought: The flesh made out of earth is nature, and is subject to her measure and her justice. But the evil that arises from the flesh does not come from material nature, but springs from the intangible, ethereal body; it is this body which exceeds the measures of nature. . . . Consequently man has a second, immaterial body; it is the ethereal body, which Adam and Eve acquired in Paradise through eating the apple; it was only by acquiring this body that man became completely human, with knowledge of good and evil. Because he has this body, man can eat more than is required by nature, and drink more than he needs to quench his thirst. God in His benevolence has set before our eyes the things that we desire—good wines, fair women, good food, good money. And this is the test: whether we keep ourselves under strict control, or whether we break and exceed the measure of nature.1

We see here how those unfortunate lapses—exceeding nature, losing control, consuming more than you need—arose from the soul that made one human. Paracelsus (1493–1541) defined a type of moral community that depended upon the ability of people to exercise restraint and discipline. God, in this formulation, tested humans by creating situations when the oversatisfaction of desires could be contemplated; the overaccumulator was figured as a sinner. Greed—the point at which desire overwhelms—is best seen as a test from God. Paracelsus embraced the hermetic tradition, the attempt to discern the mystical relationships between things and between people and their social

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connections. It is useful to consider Paracelsus, and Paracelsian thought, as a way into late medieval and Renaissance theories of exchange, economy, and the reality of financial asymmetry. Paracelsus is famous, of course, for having promoted himself as someone who could construct the philosopher’s stone and who was privy to the alchemical secrets that would yield gold. To later generations, Paracelsian fantasies of the creation of gold from lead would represent a road to wealth, one that was denuded of the rich conceptual world of the sixteenth century and fit uncomfortably into nineteenth-century notions of instrumental wealth valuable only for its exchange value.2 Paracelsus, the name adopted by Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was born at Einseidln (near Zurich) the year after Columbus’s first voyage, 1493. His father was a physician, and he arranged an apprenticeship for his son in the Fugger mines at Villach (in Carinthia) after the family moved there around 1500. Before 1510, Paracelsus left home to begin his studies, possibly earning a medical degree at Ferrara, although his later membership in the grain merchant’s guild (and not the surgeon’s guild) suggests that this educational background may have been a fiction. Paracelsus traveled throughout central Europe in the 1510s and 1520s, interrupting his peripatetic lifestyle for a short time in 1527 when he was appointed to the position of “municipal physician” at Basel, only to be chased out of town shortly after because of the controversial nature of his medical, alchemical, and theological teachings. Paracelsus resumed his life on the road after this incident, stopping only when he was summoned to Salzburg in 1541 by the suffragan bishop Ernest of Wittelsbach, but he died soon after arriving at court. Paracelsus worked and wrote amid the political and religious turmoil of the 1520s and 1530s, when the Holy Roman Empire underwent the experience not only of the Reformation but also of the Peasants’ War of 1525. He thus developed his ideas during a time of ferment and freedom that political, intellectual, and religious officials could not completely contain. Paracelsus wrote constantly during his life, but historian of science Allen Debus explains that his texts were mainly published after his death. After 1550 they were in high demand, and by 1600 they had been republished in several editions with commentaries.3 Paracelsus was a significant thinker in the late sixteenth century, and he enjoyed a wide intellectual influence. The physician to the Danish king Peter Severinus embraced Paracelsianism for its blend of Neoplatonism and hermeticism and the opportunity it presented to decode any number of natural signs for evidence of the divine plan.4 Paracelsian thought appealed to other thinkers as well. Robert Fludd applied Paracelsian theories in Protestant England, and Robert Boyle’s great Skeptical Chymist was informed by Paracelsian alchemy. Jean-Baptiste van Helmont spread Paracelsian ideas in France.

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Paracelsus inhabited a world with a lush understanding of human relationships, and he imagined a society in which individuals were connected to one another in ways that could be understood by decoding the esoteric principles governing nature and humans alike. According to Paracelsus, individuals were linked to others in a society, and bodies too were homologues of the heavens. He envisioned the micro and macro to be joined in mutually illustrative ways. As Paracelsus argued in one text: “Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars . . . can also be applied to the firmament of the body.”5 These links between the body and the soul, between the material and immaterial, were important because they allowed careful observers to understand how another person might be placed within social networks and hierarchies. The proliferating homologies between the internal and the external worlds provided rich conduits of information. Greed and desire played special roles in this understanding of the world, because desire was a mechanism by which the inner and outer worlds were brought into relationship with one another. Emotions like greed or desire provided the realm within which homologies were formed, expressed, and then sent out to populate the dual worlds—inner and outer, high and low, micro and macro—of the Renaissance naturalist. Paracelsus expressed this notion in the following way, directly linking the circulation of the cosmos to a set of bodily desires, including the inappropriate extension of desire into greed. As he suggested in his Astronomia Magna (written between 1537 and 1539): The light of nature in man comes from the stars, and his flesh and blood belong to the material elements. Thus two influences operate in man. One is that of the firmamental light, which includes wisdom, art, reason. All these are the children of this father [the stars]. . . . The second influence emanates from matter, and it includes concupiscence, eating, drinking, and everything that relates to the flesh and blood. Therefore one must not ascribe to the stars that which originates in the blood and flesh. For heaven does not endow one with concupiscence and greed. . . . From heaven come only wisdom, art, and reason.6

The preceding passage offers a short analysis of the nature of humans, suggesting a type of dualism—the heavenly and the material—that was expressed as influences on behavior. Good behavior and legitimate actions and thoughts stem from the heavens, while their extension into illegitimacy originated in the base, material world. In another passage, Paracelsus provided a broader understanding of the origins of destructive behavior, again drawing conclusions about the ways that human emotions stemmed from the animal natures of humans. Paracelsus made this claim in his De Fundamento Scientiarum Sapientiaeque by suggesting in the case of sexual desires (and it is important that the financial and sexual were

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linked in his twin condemnation of concupiscence and greed in the previous passage) that: [j]ust as toads and snakes always behave according to their nature, so do men. And just as dogs and cats hate each other, so nations fall into conflicts. All this is rooted in the animal nature. When dogs bark and snap at one another, it is because of envy or greed, because each of them wants to have everything for himself, wants to devour everything himself and begrudges everything to the other; this is the ways of beasts. In this respect, man is the child of dogs. He, too, is burdened with envy and disloyalty, with a violent disposition, and each man grudges the other everything. Just as dogs fight over a bitch, so the courtship of men is doglike in nature. For such behaviour is also found among the beasts, and it is the same among them as among men.7

Desire, in other words, might be the lens through which mystical homologies might be discovered, but the emotion and the behavior were clearly derived from basic, animal life that continued to be expressed atavistically in humans. Greed might be basic, even natural, but the ability to transcend desires was derived from the “firmamental” components of the human soul. If behaviors could be reliable guides to moral conditions or to metaphysical realities, then the networks within which a set of behaviors were expressed became useful fields through which to issue critical claims about power, wealth, and the constitution of the social structure. Paracelsus took up the problem of accumulation in a variety of different texts that examined consumption as a set of behaviors that were based on animal nature. As we saw in the passage that opened this essay, the person who broke the social bond, possessing beyond what was necessary or even possible to consume, had committed not only a crime against society but also a sin against God. Like the “chains of being” that linked the natural and divine worlds, and consistent with a medieval theology that imagined a vertically oriented hierarchy of sins, Paracelsus also arranged behaviors in a pyramid structure. Richard New­ hauser illustrates the ways these sin hierarchies functioned for medieval theologians.8 Newhauser demonstrates that medieval debates about the ordering of sin in these structures was an important method of envisioning the ways that sins were linked together and organized according to certain principles, with one perhaps stemming from another.9 In these formulations, the sin of covetousness was often depicted as a root cause of other sins. Paracelsus followed in this tradition, but included a theory of sin that examined behavior as a social crime as well as a sacred one. Physicians, for instance, were socially bound to practice their trade not for riches, but for the social good. The rich doctor has transgressed certain social boundaries just as much as he has committed a sacred crime. Paracelsus writes in his Der grossenn Wundartzney that “everyone

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can judge why a man has become a physician: not out of love for the patient, which should be the physician’s first virtue, but for the sake of money. Where money is the goal, envy and hatred, pride and conceit, are sure to appear—and may God protect and preserve us all from such temptations!”10 Covetousness of money, in Paracelsus’s system, not only led to other sinful behaviors like envy and pride, but also was implicated in a set of social inauthenticities: quackery. Behaviors like accumulation that could be said to facilitate the individuation of a person within the social body had both sacred and secular ramifications. The dual nature of sin as a sacred transgression and a secular crime was part of the sixteenth-century legal tradition.11 The regulation edicts of the early sixteenth century indicated attempts on the part of early modern authorities to link the histories of sin and the histories of criminality.12 The physician Paracelsus also participated in this intellectual effort, but he was especially interested in considering the role of wealth in this system, writing in Liber de nymphis that “everything has been created to the end that man may not remain idle, but walk in the path of God, that is to say, in His works and not in vice, not in fornication, not in gambling and not in drinking, not in robbing, not in the acquisition of goods, nor in the accumulation of treasures for the worms.”13 With an inverted sin pyramid, Paracelsus here offers a list of social crimes and sins that culminated in perversely useless accumulation. Removing wealth from social circulation through the twin evils of acquisition and accumulation, one fell away from the path of God. If vice could be figured rhetorically as moving down a path from fornication to miserliness, virtue was also of course a topic to consider. Paracelsus dwelled on the meaning of happiness in one passage from De honestis utrisque divitiis, writing that “[h]appiness does not consist in laziness, or sensual pleasure, or riches, or chattering, or gluttony.”14 While this negative definition of happiness includes a critique of the miser, Paracelsus was also careful to link this critique to the value of labor. The passage continues by arguing that in “labour and in sweat must each man use the gifts that God conferred upon him on earth” in a given realm of work.15 Labor was virtuous, its practitioners sure to find happiness in ways that the drunkard, gambler, miser, or glutton were doomed to pass by. Wealth derived from labor was fine, but the overaccumulation of wealth or riches obtained through nefarious means were dangerous indeed. In these aspects of Paracelsus’s thoughts about happiness and sadness, wealth and work, one is able to glimpse the larger contours that perhaps defined the way a community was imagined to work. One of David Warren Sabean’s great insights about early modern communities is centered on the way that social cleavages develop and proliferate. Sabean explains that communities were defined as much by their cohesiveness as they were by their fault lines. The historical analysis of how these social “cleavages,” as Sabean calls them,

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were created and understood by people at the time is of central importance to our view of all sorts of social transformations.16 With Paracelsus we are better able to envision the gravitational pull exerted by wealth and power on social networks bound together through vertically oriented but reciprocal relations of duty and obligation. Considering the way that Paracelsus dealt with the social problem of greed provides a useful way to gauge how greed functioned within larger social networks and webs of power. Within Paracelsus’s writings he envisioned a set of holistic relationships in such a way that social transgressions were also sins. This raises an important question: what type of critique was Paracelsus issuing in these texts? Writing after the Reformation, but also after the crisis of the Peasants’ War of 1525 (which was particularly acute in Swabia and Switzerland, the regions in which Paracelsus lived), he tried to avoid the more radical claims of peasants to justify escape from manorial control (like Luther, he did not advocate rebellion), but he also indicated that the wealthy needed to fulfill their obligations to the poor. In this sense Paracelsus observed the power relations and obligations binding the high and the low within this community, a system of thought indicative of the ways that hierarchies and social contracts were maintained in the sixteenth century. Other sections of Paracelsus’s writings bring a different issue to light: the development of an individuated self, and the ways that wealth played a role in that development of personhood. One way of reading Paracelsus is to consider his work as a set of thought exercises on the ways that equality and difference were generated and perpetuated. Paracelsus addressed this topic in a characteristically roundabout way, opening the discussion with a description of the ways people could obtain salvation. Paracelsus suggested that while we all might be equal in heaven, things were of course much different on earth, and the inequality that was to be witnessed here was entirely inappropriate. Accumulation could be a serious problem: [W]e are entitled to possess it [the earth] all in the same measure, and not in unequal measures. But if a greater share falls to one man than to another, and a lesser to this man than to that man, and thus there is inequality of distributions, the rich man should nevertheless refrain from asserting that he possesses more than the poor man.17

While it might be socially unacceptable to remind people of inequality, the rich should, in Paracelsus’s estimation, work to level social asymmetries: “For if he has more, that much more should he give away, and not eat everything himself, but like the others content himself with an equal share.”18 These attacks on financial inequality and the creation of webs of relations based upon them could even branch out into a critique of social hierarchy determined not as much by birth as by worth: “If you are a knight, of what use to you are your

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golden necklaces and your golden spurs and bridles? If you want to be a knight and champion of blessedness, then be a knight through your generosity and not through the shedding of blood.”19 In many places in Paracelsus’s texts, one finds references to treasure, wealth, and gold. Everything is linked back to purity and to treasure, and because gold is the purest of metals, it stands in as an example of the pure forms to which people aspired. The ability to read signs, and the role that wealth plays as a metaphor for knowledge or heaven, speaks to larger issues about the role of gold as a sign of purity in the Paracelsian tradition. It is well-known that the point of alchemy was to enact a transformation of base metals into elevated ones, to allow gold to mature from primitive ones, moving up the “ladder of nature.” Alchemy, by the time Paracelsus was writing in the early sixteenth century, already had a long history. While examples dating from the fourteenth century proliferate, Paracelsus’s texts from the 1530s and those published posthumously beginning in the 1550s illustrate the tight linkages between social and material transformations: as base metals transformed into gold, the social and cultural connotations of wealth and life also were transformed. When depicting the stages of transformation, Paracelsus initiated his discussion by indicating that the changes were not magical, but were included in larger natural progressions that did not pervert the law of God. As the transformation of base metals like copper, tin, lead, iron, and quicksilver was carried out, alchemists like Paracelsus imagined the transmutation through a language of purity and cleanliness. Matter, Paracelsus explains in his Archidoxis, is not only transformed or transmuted; it is also purified and cleansed “of its filth” as it develops “fresh young energies.”20 Curiously absent from a list of qualities possessed by the most noble matter, gold, is any discussion of value, worth, or financial capability. The gold produced by an alchemical philosopher’s stone might be pure, but it also was not explicitly suggestive of exchange value. Deborah Valenze has written about what she calls the “social life of money” in early modern Britain.21 One of the most important aspects of that text is Valenze’s suggestion that money is never just money, but that it serves as a marker, a cipher, of larger social relations. Valenze’s lesson here bears special importance for an analysis of Paracelsus, for whom money acted as a conduit of exchange, but also as a type of social glue that bound a community together. In one especially provocative section of Paracelsus’s writings, he warns the rich against acquisitiveness and encourages them to charity, writing in the SpitalBuch (1529) that “the rich are bound to the poor as by a chain. . . . You, rich men, learn to know this chain, but if you ever break one link of it, you will not only be breaking the chain, but you yourselves will be cast aside like the broken link.”22 This language of social connectivity, a chain that joins social ranks together into a form of community, was a particularly rich metaphor in light

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of the larger context of Renaissance homologies between large and small. The connectivities that joined the micro and the macro, lead and gold, body and heaven, also linked rich to poor in a mutually constitutive set of reciprocities. These connections were so significant that Paracelsus argued that “[w]ithout the rich, nothing can be accomplished on behalf of the poor.”23 Greed, in such a system, was a social catastrophe not merely for the poor, but also for the wealthy. Paracelsus says to the rich in the Spital-Buch: “Why do you make yourselves free from the poor and deny them your help? Just as by taking a few links from a chain, you would be making it too short, so without the poor, your path will be too short to lead to Heaven, and you will never attain to the goal that lies at the end of the chain.”24 If rich and poor were considered to form a single continuity, then the conditions of the poor could directly affect those in more fortunate circumstances. The Paracelsian system, seeking as it did to read the book of nature in the languages of religion and hidden codes, pictured a common human condition. Rich and poor may have been placed on different rungs in a ladder of society, but acquisitiveness was the social crime that threatened to break the ladder altogether. The great crime of the rich was greed. If greed was not just a sin but also a social crime, generosity and charity were its virtuous cognates. Such a pairing of vice and virtue was a common element of Christian theology, of course, but the Paracelsian explanation of charity is notable for its radicalism. Paracelsus urged the wealthy to dispose of their riches; he advocated a type of gift economy that in the early sixteenth century was already antiutopian in its assumptions about the static nature of economic possibility. The emphasis on pleasurable, carefree gift giving stands as a clear alternative to capitalist exchange. But the language of excess is also significant historically in that it suggests Paracelsus imagined a self that was completely individuated within society. There is the recognition that people possess legitimate desires and demands, and the ability of a person to “self-regulate,” to plan for the future, to save, to understand needs and wants, is included in the suggestion that one has a group of legitimate “pressing needs” and then a set of other possessions that exist to oversatisfy these legitimate wants. The problem is excess, the oversatisfaction of desires, which in a limited economic world, a finite and closed system of exchange—a mercantile worldview that was being fabricated as Paracelsus wrote—meant that when one person oversatisfies his or her desires, he or she also denied someone else. It would seem that there might only be enough to satisfy precisely each individual, never any more. If conditions of excess truly existed, humans would find themselves living in prelapsarian utopia. Paracelsus seems to suggest that when humans left the Garden of Eden, we lost the ability to oversatisfy without hurting someone else. Conversely, potlatch (the “primitive” gift exchange that so vexed Europeans

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in the nineteenth century), the undersatisfaction of your own desires, allows others in the community to exceed the necessary minimum. Wealth, as discussed earlier, placed a person in spiritual danger just as it indicated the commission of a social crime. A cornerstone of late medieval Christian theology, critiques of acquisitiveness as a counter to charity were understood to endanger the afterlife of the wealthy. Based on a reading of Matthew 25:42, which describes the binary separation of the virtuous and the sinners at the Last Judgment, Paracelsus offered his own critique of the greedy rich. Paracelsus argued in De felici liberalitate that the rich were naturally insensitive to those below them: “There are not many rich people endowed by nature with blessed generosity. How many begrudge the poor even food.”25 The solution was a pedagogical one. Take the rich, who “chok[e] with vulgarity, cruelty, and avarice, and [who are] utterly lacking in understanding,” and teach them “generosity.”26 Those who resist this education in social comportment take a serious risk of damnation. As an unstated corollary to the ungenerous, the greed and acquisitiveness demonstrated by the rich not only led first to other sins like sloth and pride, but also linked the social and the spiritual in clear ways. As a person sought to satisfy their needs through labor, Paracelsus imagined that that work would translate into a balanced emotional and spiritual satisfaction that was derived from the experience of labor and not the acquisition of riches. He writes in De honestis utrisque divitiis that “[n]ot in riches does our happiness consist, but in our natural needs. For in our needs there is also love; love does not pursue riches, riches defraud the fellow man.”27 As the individual, the social, and the spiritual were all connected and mutually reinforcing entities, the role of wealth in this system was a perverse one. Wealth that was derived from a type of false labor, the result of a fraud, undermined community and was a spiritual dead end. Paracelsus illustrated this point through a brief discussion of the role of labor, wealth, and divine “blessing.” The role of riches in these social networks and the privileging of poverty allow Paracelsus to link the individual, social, and Christian bodies. While there was little in this formula that appears particularly novel, the continued suggestion that greed—the oversatisfaction of otherwise legitimate needs—could imperil individuals and communities alike indicates the importance of such considerations throughout the sixteenth century. The importance that Paracelsus placed on poverty both to society and to the Christian community provides an important marker of the ways that notions of community derived from the medieval period continued to inform thinkers after the Reformation. The ability of a person to triumph over desire, to reject acquisitiveness and the oversatisfaction of needs, remained integral to social cohesion and to the more important spiritual journey a person might make. The ascetic tradition was obviously quite old by the time Paracelsus wrote in

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the early sixteenth century, but his use of asceticism as a type of social critique of early modern power structures retains some importance. For Paracelsus to credibly claim that wealth was a problem and poverty a virtue, he could no longer rely on traditional images of the ascetic derived from the early medieval period. Richard Newhauser describes the transformation within Christianity from an anchoritic (individually ascetic and hermetical) tradition to one based on cenobitic communities that required members to reject acquisitiveness as they were integrated into the monastic community.28 There is evidence that Paracelsus imagined many different types of communities that could be developed upon the monastic model. Paracelsus argued that the vow of poverty that was a part of many medieval cenobitic communities could also inform the spiritual state of other communities as well, arguing that poverty and wealth were two spiritual conditions; one lead to heaven, the other to damnation. Being poor, and liking it, provided a way to regulate the desires that, if one were to attempt to satisfy them, would place a person in a spiritually dangerous position. The lure of riches was so dangerous, and greed was such a strong emotion, that Paracelsus indicates that desire led to all sorts of other terrible actions. “But he who loves riches sits on a shaky limb; a little breeze comes—and it enters his head to steal, to practice usury, to drive hard bargains, and other such evil practices, all of which serve only to acquire the riches of the devil and not those of God.”29 The solution that Paracelsus offers to the problem of greed and untamed desire is a curious one. He avoids a missionary model that would attempt only to teach the rich how to restrain themselves and proposes a different model instead: teaching the poor to appreciate their own virtues. Paracelsus wrote: Therefore let the doctrine of the blessed life be taught not to those who love riches, for they will not find pleasure in it, but only to those who delight in poverty, in the community of the poor, in a just life, so that no one may surpass his fellow man in the satisfaction of his needs, but that each may suffer with the other, and help, and rejoice and weep with him. For to be merry with the merry and to grieve with the aggrieved is fair and just.30

Indeed, poverty could liberate, freeing a person from political and religious authorities alike. Paracelsus, with his lush interpretations of wealth and charity, avarice and desire, purity and perfectibility, individual and community, gives us an indication of the ways that the burgeoning sciences of body and soul apprehended the problem of financial disparity. The magical, mystical connections that linked individuals together into larger social structures designated the various conduits through which desires flowed. The axes of avarice, more than the perceived moral collapse they were thought to demonstrate, show us something

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important about the early sixteenth century: the range of directions in which covetousness moved. Notes 1. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Székács Jacobi, Bollingen Series 28 (Prin­ ceton, NJ, 1988), 218. 2. See Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, 2007), for a fascinating history of alchemy in the early modern period. 3. Richard Westfall, “Paracelsus, Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von,” in The Galileo Project (n.d.), http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/paracels.html (Accessed 10 January 2014); Paracelsus, Selected Writings, xxxvii–lxxii; Allen George Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 19–21. 4. Debus, Man and Nature, 21. 5. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 40. The passage comes from Paracelsus’s Das Buch von der Gebärung der empfindlichen Dinge durch die Vernunft, written ca. 1520. 6. Ibid., 40–41. 7. Ibid., 34. 8. Richard Newhauser, The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature (New York, 2000), 54. 9. Ibid., 54, 61, 107, 111, 122. 10. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 69. 11. Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 9–52. 12. Ibid., 53–61. 13. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 108–9. 14. Ibid., 115. 15. Ibid. 16. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (New York, 1984), 28–29, 163, 165. 17. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 167–68. 18. Ibid., 168. 19. Ibid., 176. The passage comes from De felici liberalitate. 20. Ibid., 148. 21. Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New York, 2006). 22. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 177. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 176. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 177. 28. Newhauser, Early History of Greed, 47–61. 29. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 178. 30. Ibid.

CHAPTER 9

12

From Heretics to Hypocrites Anti-Pietist Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century BENJAMIN MARSCHKE

T

his essay follows David Warren Sabean’s model of exploring how political power and cultural beliefs and practices were intertwined with each other, and his method of closely investigating how groups delineated, defined, or imagined themselves and how they were delineated, defined, or imagined by others. Scholars of Pietism do not usually consider the opposition to the movement, even though they often define and delineate Pietism in relation to its opponents. This essay traces the rise and fall of Pietism as it was reflected in anti-Pietist rhetoric in the eighteenth century as a means of illustrating the reception of Pietism and the place of Pietism in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Protestant Germany. As a reform movement within Lutheranism, Pietism’s critics regarded it as subversive; after it became widespread and well established, a new group of critics regarded Pietism as falsehearted and corrupt. Specifically, this essay postulates a transition in the opposition to Pietism in the late 1710s and early 1720s, as its critics shifted from making allegations of heterodoxy and even heresy to allegations of hypocrisy. Pietism was initially targeted by the establishment; later, it was targeted as the establishment. This essay seeks to bridge a divided secondary literature. Early anti-Pietism has been closely examined primarily by church historians studying Pietism, and subsequent forms of anti-Pietism have been analyzed mostly by scholars of eighteenth-century literature.1 To trace the changes within anti-Pietism, this essay discusses not only theological and intellectual polemics, but also the official forms of political persecution aimed at Pietists, as well as the forms of resentment against Pietism characteristic of the popular classes. The aforementioned transition in rhetoric in the early eighteenth century was not just a shift in tactics or perspective; it was also the development of a whole new group

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of opponents who used different media and a totally different tone to attack Pietism and Pietists.2 Early on, in the late seventeenth century, people regarded the reform movement coalescing within Lutheranism, which they labeled with the epithet “Pietism,” as radical, heretical, disruptive, and basically dangerous.3 We can see early anti-Pietism among three distinct groups: first, Lutheran theologians; second, state officials; and third, relatively common people. The Lutheran establishment, intent on maintaining the integrity of Lutheran theology and the Lutheran church, persecuted Pietists as heterodox and denounced Pietism as a sect.4 Pietism seemed heterodox because it embraced mysticism and sensuousness, and because it seemed to link activism with salvation (which seemed Catholic). Pietists, with their openness to lay participation in conventicles and their criticisms of the training of clergymen, seemed subversive.5 State officials also denounced and persecuted Pietists, whom they accused of causing disorder.6 Criticisms of the most radical Pietists and persecutions of them followed the same pattern throughout the entire late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; however, our focus here is not on radical Pietists, but rather on “mainstream” Pietists like Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke and their followers. Their relative egalitarianism, willingness to criticize elites, and provocation of unrest were cause for alarm on the part of royal governments, as witnessed by the series of anti-Pietist prohibitions of conventicles across Protestant Germany in the 1680s, 1690s, and the first decade of the eighteenth century.7 Later, Pietists were blamed when students rioted, because it was assumed that the Pietists and their prohibitions had somehow provoked them, and the Pietists were accused of sheltering or even encouraging deserters.8 While it is difficult to gauge popular anti-Pietism, it seems that there was a backlash against Pietism’s uncompromising puritanical tendencies and its mercantilist ambitions among the common people. As has been shown by Terence V. McIntosh’s study of Pietist preachers in central German villages, villagers complained about strict Pietist preachers who tried to clamp down on their fun.9 Townspeople complained about inflexible Pietist preachers who shut down taverns, stamped out theater, and excluded the unrepentant from Communion.10 As the Pietists were more and more successful in acquiring monopolistic privileges for their enterprises, this, too, provoked townspeople to protest. Up to 1720 or so, a broad base of enemies of Pietism regarded it as a new dissident movement that threatened the status quo theologically, socially, politically, and economically. Lutheran clergy attempted to discredit Pietist spirituality, state officials attempted to stamp out Pietist practice, and at the local level, too, the populace protested against the imposition of moral policing and the

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threat of economic competition. However, by about 1720, the status of Pietism changed. The Pietist movement, which had been precarious and peripheral, was increasingly well established and well connected. In doing so, the “mainstream” Pietists increasingly washed their hands of the more radical elements in the movement.11 The Halle Pietists in Prussia, especially, made inroads at the royal court in the 1710s and ultimately won over King Frederick William I (1713–40) in 1719 or 1720. August Hermann Francke thereafter had direct access to the king—something very new for Pietism—and was able to influence him, both directly and through several of the king’s favorites. Francke and the Pietists used this access and influence to steer royal policy and to gain official control over clerical appointments, which they used to employ their protegés, exclude their opponents, and spread their movement further.12 With Pietism’s firm establishment came a very different kind of anti-Pietism. It bears repeating that this was not simply Pietism’s adversaries responding to the change of Pietism’s status, but also the emergence of an entirely new set of adversaries. By the late 1710s or 1720, not only was Halle Pietism well established in Prussia, but also Pietism’s success there lent it legitimacy throughout the Lutheran world, and Pietism became increasingly mainstream, in that Pietist modes of religious practice, behavior, speech, and dress became commonplace. It is no coincidence that the vociferous theological controversies, which had gone back and forth for decades, attacking and defending Pietism, fizzled out at this point.13 Before the establishment of Pietism as mainstream, Pietists had been denounced as dangerous and persecuted as heterodox and subversive, but such anti-Pietist rhetoric essentially stopped by the early 1720s—presumably because it was absurd to try to portray church leaders as dangerously radical, and because the Pietists had enough supporters or sympathizers in high places that doing so would be politically counterproductive.14 Moreover, many of the same Lutheran theologians who had formerly feared Pietism increasingly viewed the Pietists as potential allies in fending off Calvinist proposals for a confessional Protestant union and/or stemming the rising tide of early Enlightenment secular humanism.15 At the same time, “mainstream” Pietists were increasingly willing to cut loose “radicals.” When the radical Pietist Victor Christoph Tuchtfeld came to Berlin in 1719 and preached against any arbitrary authority, including the king, the Pietist leadership promptly washed their hands of him. Moreover, they suppressed attempts to defend Tuchtfeld from within their own ranks.16 Not surprisingly, Tuchtfeld was imprisoned, and he and his friends became outspoken critics of the Pietist establishment.17 Several years later, in Potsdam, the mainstream Pietists did the same to a group of so-called “Tuchtfeldianer.”18 In both instances, siding against radicals seems to have been calculated to make Pietism more palatable to worldly authority, which apparently worked.19

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It was this fantastic success institutionally, both in expanding Francke’s institutions in Halle and in infiltrating the Prussian state, that not only changed the nature of Pietism, but also changed the nature of anti-Pietism. Rather than appearing to be a sect, the Pietists by the 1720s had taken over and/or created various state organs and patronage systems within the Lutheran church apparatus. This control over patronage gave the Pietists the power to appoint and promote their clients to lucrative and influential positions, and of course this meant that they also could—and did—block outsiders from being appointed to the same positions.20 Here, too, we can speak of an inversion of the relationship of Pietism to the establishment. Whereas in the 1670s, 1680s, and 1690s even “mainstream” Pietists had risked their careers to follow their convictions, and even clergymen like Spener and Francke had been hounded from positions by the “establishment,” by the 1720s the Pietists were the “establishment,” and they were in a position to control church patronage. Institutionalized power, I would argue, actually undermined the cohesion, discipline, and charisma of the formerly unofficial (and partly underground) Pietist patronage network. Institutionalized patronage and guaranteed promotion meant that Pietist clients became lackadaisical and undisciplined—as admitted by the Pietist inner circle—because the institutionalization of selection, examination, and supervision was no substitute for the informal personal contacts of the Pietist network.21 Moreover, at court the king openly favored the Pietists and granted them exclusive access. The king’s favor lent them a great deal of influence over royal policy making and an aura of power, at least for a time, and the king’s favor also gave them an entry with the other “greats,” such as high-ranking military officers and court nobles.22 Their opponents began to denounce the Pietists as “Lutheran Jesuits” because of their obvious power at court.23 Widespread acceptance and emulation was a problem for a movement founded on the idea that “the truly pious are hated and persecuted.”24 Formerly, the Pietists had set themselves off from the rest of society with their speech, dress, and behavior. By the 1720s, Pietism “set the tone” for middle- and upperclass society, and Pietism became a Selbstverständlichkeit.25 This kind of acceptance and ubiquity was exactly the opposite of the hostility and persecution that had forged Pietism. In this atmosphere, where material and career incentives were clearly (and officially) established and linked with Pietism, insincere Pietism became common. Pretending to be “awakened” and feigning an ascetic lifestyle became widespread, and “Pietists” who were obviously not practicing what they preached soon stained the entire movement with hypocrisy. Even within Pietism, the leadership criticized relative “newcomers” for their worldly habits and lifestyles. Whereas the elder Francke made it clear to his colleagues in 1719 that he had drunk coffee at court only at the queen’s

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insistence,26 by 1728 the Pietists in Potsdam marveled at how much money their new colleague, Johann Christian Schinmeyer, spent at coffee shops.27 Less than a year later, Schinmeyer, in turn, complained that one of the preceptors under his supervision at the Great Military Orphanage in Potsdam was seen by the children playing cards28—later he claimed that the same preceptor had a “profane and untheological nature,” as evidenced by his “smoking strong tobacco.”29 Ideologically, while the Pietists had readily embraced the rhetoric of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience when they were a persecuted minority group, this position had been more about seeking political cover than about standing on principle. Once they were in power, the Pietists never sought to institutionalize religious tolerance, and, indeed, they were hardly willing to tolerate others.30 Moreover, the Pietists’ apparent need to suppress and banish their opponents seemed to signify an inability to present a convincing argument against them.31 Indeed, it was now the Pietists themselves who were in a position to denounce their enemies as dangerous and persecute their enemies as heretical. The best example of this, and a key moment in the transition of anti-Pietism, came in 1723, when the Pietists denounced Christian Wolff as an atheist and prompted Frederick William I to dismiss and banish him. Wolff ’s banishment was only the opening act in a clean sweep of Wolffian philosophes in Prussia, and all of this was quite public: dozens of polemical tracts were published proand contra-Wolff, and the Pietists came off much the worse for it.32 It is no coincidence that it was the individual most responsible for Wolff ’s banishment, Joachim Lange, the Pietist ideologue and a member of the theology faculty in Halle, who became the focus of anti-Pietism. In this way, the terms of the controversy regarding Pietism had inverted—the Pietists had gone from being the persecuted to being the persecutors. Anti-Pietism after 1720 was markedly different from earlier anti-Pietism. Theological anti-Pietism generally ceased, but criticism of Pietism among aspiring theologians and clergy continued, because of the Pietist establishment’s exclusive patronage system. Disgruntled aspiring clergymen and their patrons, some of them adherents of Pietism, accused the Pietist leadership of monopolizing clerical appointments (which was true). This led to infighting within Pietism, scandalous accusations of misconduct, and ultimately the “purging” of the Pietist network. For example, Friedrich Wilhelm Cleffel, an aspiring Lutheran clergyman, accused the Pietist provost of the army chaplaincy, Lampertus Gedicke, of “exercising a monopoly” over appointments to chaplainships.33 Cleffel was backed by Andreas “der alte” Schmidt, a prominent deacon in Berlin and another member of the Pietist network. Gedicke responded, publicly, that Cleffel was rejected because it was known that “he

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had untheological relations with a certain female person.”34 Ultimately, their accusations embroiled the entire Pietist leadership in Berlin. The scandal provoked a royal inquiry and ultimately resulted in Schmidt’s demotion to the hinterlands.35 The head of the chaplaincy, Gedicke, for his part, was later one of those Pietists who opposed the further institutionalization of Pietism’s stranglehold on Lutheran clerical appointments in Prussia. The son of August Hermann Francke, Gotthilf August Francke, had proposed that all clerical appointments require a testimonial from the theology faculty in Halle.36 Gedicke feared that such inflexible requirements would be counterproductive, both in limiting the Pietists’ selection of clients and in provoking a popular backlash.37 Again, Pietism was no longer a serious subject of theological controversy, but intellectual anti-Pietism continued, from secular/Enlightenment quarters. Pietism’s new opponents, those who defended Wolff, still viewed Pietism as dangerous, but not because it was radical or subversive; rather, because it was well established, hidebound, and corrupt. The ability and willingness, (even eagerness) of the Pietists to use their newfound influence at the Prussian court became a point of criticism, and the Pietist establishment was portrayed as oppressive. State officials, who before 1720 had seen Pietism as inciting disorder and had actively persecuted the movement, increasingly saw it as fostering order. No more edicts against conventicles were issued. However, an old strain of anti-Pietism, the rejection of Pietism as too inflexibly puritanical, became more and more common, especially among elites. Pietists were commonly denounced as Mucker and Kopfhänger (nags and “head hangers”), even at the Prussian court, where in the late 1720s Frederick William I quickly turned against them again. This old aspect of anti-Pietism was also new again: whereas before Pietism’s strait-laced nature was taken at face value, by the late 1720s and 1730s Pietist abstemiousness was increasingly understood to be either ridiculously unsophisticated or wickedly disingenuous. The Pietists’ enemies purposefully baited them by behaving obnoxiously irreverently, and this kind of behavior came not just from rowdy courtiers, but also from Zinzendorf ’s Moravian Brethren.38 At the same time, in the 1720s and 1730s, a new form of anti-Pietism appeared: literary anti-Pietism, that is, negative portrayals of Pietism in works of fiction.39 Literary anti-Pietism—which became ubiquitous in the mid- to late eighteenth century—had been unknown before the 1730s.40 However, in the 1730s in Germany, as the readership of novels and plays was exploding,41 Pietism had become so well established that it was easily parodied: Luise Gottsched’s Die Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke was a hit when it appeared in 1736.42 Presumably contemporaries easily recognized her characters, Herr

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Scheinfromm, Frau Glaubeleichtin, and Herr von Muckersdorff, as well as their hypocrisy, absurdity, and manipulativeness. The original theological opposition to Pietism was no longer an issue—Frau Zanckenheimin is a laughable character, and Gottsched mocks the titles of Pietist polemics, particularly those of Joachim Lange—and Pietist rhetoric was not taken seriously anymore. Gottsched, born in 1713, could hardly imagine a world in which Pietists were persecuted for their earnest beliefs. It would be a great oversimplification to talk about an age of confessionalization or an age of absolutism, but we might consider early anti-Pietism in this context. In the context of confessionalization, Pietism seemed subversive and dangerous to the Lutheran establishment. In the context of absolutist disciplining, Pietism seemed to be disruptive, or at least an indirect cause of disorder, to the establishment. It would be another great simplification to talk about secularization and the rise of a “public” in the eighteenth century, but we might think of the new antiPietism of the 1720s in this context. To those outside the Pietist network, their faction at court and their patronage system seemed monopolistic and corrupt. To those opposed to Pietism, ideologically, Pietism was hardly subversive, but rather had become more oppressive as it had become more established. Finally, after it was firmly established, to its opponents Pietism and its earnest religiosity seemed not only antiquated and hidebound—to a critical eighteenthcentury reading public, Pietism seemed simply ridiculous. Notes Thank you to the panelists and audience of the “Shaping Frontiers—Pietist and AntiPietist Sentiment in the Eighteenth Century” session at the 2012 German Studies Association conference in Milwaukee, where I received very helpful feedback. 1. By “anti-Pietism,” I mean opposition to Pietism on several levels, as does William E. Petig, Literary Antipietism in Germany during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1984). 2. Most of the evidence presented here is regarding Halle Pietism, but some of it concerns Pietism (or anti-Pietism) in general, and we can apply it to Pietism more broadly. 3. Note that this “before” period includes all three of the “phases” of the controversy regarding Pietism as described by Martin Gierl, that is, condemning individuals as heretics, condemning Pietism as a sect, and then condemning Pietism as dangerous spiritual conduct. Martin Gierl, “‘The Triumph of Truth and Innocence’: The Rules and Practice of Theological Polemics,” in Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, ed. Peter Becker and William Clark (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), 56–57. See also Martin Gierl, “Befleckte Empfängnis: Pietistische Hermeneutik, Indifferentismus, Eklektik und die Konsolidierung pietistischer, orthodoxer und frühaufklärischer Ansprüche und Ideen,” in Strukturen der deutschen Frühaufklärung, 1680–1720, ed. Hans Erick Bödeker (Göttingen, 2008), 119–46. 4. Gierl, “The Triumph of Truth and Innocence,” 55.

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5. Martin Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, Band 1: Der Pietismus vom sibzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Brecht (Göttingen, 1993), 440–539; Petig, Literary Antipietism, 13. 6. Gierl, “The Triumph of Truth and Innocence,” 48. 7. Petig, Literary Antipietism, 25. 8. Carl Hinrichs, “Pietismus und Militarismus im alten Preußen,” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 49 (1958): 270–323; reprinted in Preußentum und Pietismus: Der Pietismus in Brandenburg-Preußen als religiös-soziale Reformbewegung, ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Göttingen, 1971), 135–36. 9. See Terence V. McIntosh’s forthcoming study, Disciplining the Parish. 10. Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” 457. See also Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, Francke in Glaucha: Kehrseiten eines Klischees (1692–1704) (Tübingen, 2004); Gudrun Busch, Die Beer-Vockerodt-Kontroverse im Kontext der frühen mitteldeutschen Oper. Oder: Pietistische Opern-Kritik als Zeitzeichen (Tübingen, 2001). 11. A good example of this was the Halle Pietists washing their hands of Christoph Victor Tuchtfeld in 1719; see below. 12. Perhaps the best example of this was their takeover of the Prussian army chaplaincy; see Benjamin Marschke, Absolutely Pietist: Patronage, Factionalism, and State-Building in the Early Eighteenth-Century Prussian Army Chaplaincy (Tübingen, 2005). 13. Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” 510–11. 14. Benjamin Marschke, “Halle Pietism and Politics in Prussia,” in A Companion to German Pietism (1600–1800), ed. Douglas H. Shantz (forthcoming, Leiden, 2014); Petig, Literary Antipietism, 26–27. 15. The two most prominent examples are probably Ernst Salomo Cyprian of Gotha and Valentin Ernst Löscher of Dresden, both of whom vociferously opposed Pietism. 16. Hinrichs, “Pietismus und Militarismus,” 137–44. 17. Hannelore Lehmann, “Das Tuchtfeldsche Soldatenkonventikel in Potsdam 1725/27: Erziehung zum frommen Soldaten oder ‘Verleidung’ des Soldatenstandes?,” in Militär und Religiosität in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Kaiser and Stephan Kroll (Münster, 2004), 277–92. 18. Lehmann, “Das Tuchtfeldsche Soldatenkonventikel.” 19. Marschke, “Halle Pietism and Politics in Prussia.” 20. Marschke, Absolutely Pietist, 158ff. 21. Ibid., 181. 22. Benjamin Marschke, “Experiencing King Frederick William I: Pietist Experiences, Understandings, and Explanations of the Prussian Court, 1713–1740,” in “Aus Gottes Wort und eigener Erfahrung gezeiget”: Erfahrung—Glauben, Erkennen und Gestalten im Pietismus: Beiträge zum III. Internationalen Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2009, ed. Christian Soboth and Udo Sträter (Halle, 2012), 691. 23. Benjamin Marschke, “‘Lutheran Jesuits’: Halle Pietist Communication Networks at the Court of Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia,” Covenant Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2006): 19–38. 24. Hartmut Lehmann, “Grenzüberschreitungen und Grenzziehungen im Pietismus,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 27 (2001): 17. 25. Selbstverständlichkeit means something taken for granted. Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols. (Bonn, 1880–86; repr., Berlin, 1966), 2:499; Peter Schicketanz,

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“Pietismus in Berlin-Brandenburg: Versuch eines Forschungsberichtes,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 13 (1988): 121. 26. “auf der Königin befehl ward ein coffé hergebracht, da ich denn auch eine tasse, wie wol ich mich erst geweigert, trinken muste.” Archiv der Franckesche Stiftungen Hauptarchiv (AFSt/H), file A 173: 54, p. 9. “Aufzeichungen über seinen Besuch i. Wusterhausen bei Friedrich Wilhelm I. i. Spätsommer 1719.” 27. “Ich kann sagen, wir haben uns sehr gewundert, daß so viel Geld in so kurtzen Zeit vergehet word. Alle Tage sind zum wenigsten 2 gl. für Caffe, manch Tach auch 4 gl. angesetzet word.” Schubert, Potsdam, letter to Gotthilf August Francke, Halle, 7 April 1728, AFSt/H, file C 632: 35. 28. “Ja man saget auch, daß Kinder ihn haben sehen in der Karten spielen.” Schinmeyer, Potsdam, letter to Gotthilf August Francke, Halle, 16 March 1729, AFSt/H, file C 674: 6. 29. “seinem profanen und untheologisiche Wesen” and “stark Taback gerauchet.” Schinmeyer, Potsdam, letter to Gotthilf August Francke, Halle, 27 January 1730, AFSt/H, file C 439: 1. 30. Hartmut Lehmann makes this point, to debunk Klaus Deppermann’s claim that Pietism was inherently tolerant. See Lehmann, review of Pietismus und moderne Welt, ed. Kurt Aland, in Pietismus und Neuzeit 2 (1975): 150. 31. Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” 506. 32. Gierl, “The Triumph of Truth and Innocence.” 33. Marschke, Absolutely Pietist, 131–36. 34. “Daß er einen untheologischen Umgang mit einer gewißen Frauens=Person gehabt.” AFSt/H, file D 58, p. 829. See also Marschke, Absolutely Pietist, 133. 35. Marschke, Absolutely Pietist, 134–36. 36. See Marschke, “Halle Pietism and Politics in Prussia”; Thomas Bach, “The Halle Testimonial System: Conflicts and Controversies,” Covenant Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2006): 39–55. 37. Marschke, Absolutely Pietist, 181–82. 38. Paul Peucker pointed this out in his paper at the 2012 German Studies Association conference, “Dancing or Limping? Moravians and Pietism.” 39. Petig, Literary Antipietism, 5. This was different than earlier criticisms of Pietism from literary figures, such as the “Opernstreit” provoked by the Pietist Gottfried Vockerodt in the late 1690s, because his critics attacked Vockerodt directly, rather than portraying him in their literary works. See Gudrun Busch, “Die Beer-Vockerodt-Kontroverse im Kontext der frühen mitteldeutschen Oper. Oder: Pietistische Opern-Kritik als Zeitzeichen,” in Das Echo Halles: Kulturelle Wirkungen des Pietismus, ed. Rainer Lächele (Tübingen, 2001), 131–70; Irmgard Scheitler, “Der Streit um die Mitteldinge: Menschenbild und Musikauffassung bei Gottfried Vockerodt und seinen Gegnern,” in Alter Adam und Neue Kreatur: Pietismus und Anthropologie. Beiträge zum II. Internationalen Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2005, ed. Udo Sträter (Tübingen, 2009), 513–30. 40. Barbara Becker-Cantarino pointed out this ubiquity in her paper at the 2012 German Studies Association conference, “Goethe’s ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele’ as antiPietist Sentiment.” 41. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001).

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42. Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, Die Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke; Oder Die Doctormäßige Frau: In einem Lust Spiele vorgestellet (Rostock, 1736; repr., Stuttgart, 1968). Regarding Gottsched and her play, see Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “‘Wenn ich mündig, und hoffentlich verständig genug seyn werde .  .  . ’: Geschlechterdiskurse in den Lustspielen der Gottschedin,” in Diskurse der Aufklärung: Luise Adelgunde Victorie und Johann Christoph Gottsched, ed. Gabriele Ball, Helga Brandes, and Katherine R. Goodman (Wiesbaden, 2006), 89–106; Bettina Bannasch, “Von Menschen und Meerkatzen: Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottscheds Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 35 (2009): 253–68; Andres Straßberger, “Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched und die Frömmigkeit: Zur ars bene moriendi im Aufklärungszeitalter,” Herbergen der Christenheit: Jahrbuch für deutsche Kirchengeschichte 27 (2003): 99–120.

CHAPTER 10

12

Finding Orthodoxy in the Baltic Conservative Russia and the Baltic Region in the Nineteenth Century DANIEL C. RYAN

T

he present essay grew out of research I began as a graduate student at UCLA under David Warren Sabean, who offered two valuable seminars early on in my studies: the first on “The Sacred and the Profane” and the second on “Religious Conversion in Europe and Beyond.” These seminars provided a rigorous and lively intellectual atmosphere as I became interested in the phenomenon of mass conversion to Orthodoxy and its aftermath in the Baltic. This essay represents one aspect of a larger project that is mostly about the interactions between peasants, clergy, and bureaucrats who were caught up in working out the meanings of religious identity and religious change during the mass movement to Orthodoxy. Yet, in this piece I take up people far more foreign to me than peasants, clergy, or bureaucrats: late nineteenth-century conservative intellectuals. Sabean always asked students to read widely across disciplines and to avoid privileging narrow methodological approaches at the expense of other important questions we might ask. In that spirit, I examine here the aftermath of the mass turn to Orthodoxy in terms of the ways that conservative Russian thinkers offered up a reimagining of the Baltic borderlands as Russian and Orthodox in the wake of spontaneous mass religious change. Throughout imperial Russian history, the Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and Kurland) were a predominately Lutheran region, where non-Russian, non-Orthodox elites—Baltic Germans—oversaw administrative, court, and police functions. Prior to the 1840s, they remained weakly integrated with the Russian and Orthodox core of the empire. The three provinces were distinguished by local laws, unique institutions (e.g., provincial noble diets that were responsible for local administration), particular social relations (e.g., landless

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emancipation in the Baltic preceded emancipation in Russia by several decades), and linguistic and cultural differences. The Baltic provinces remained a decidedly non-Russian space above all because Orthodoxy, synonymous with Russianness during the imperial period, had a weak hold in the region. Yet, a surprising episode of mass conversion to Orthodoxy among Baltic peasants during the 1840s opened up new questions about the relationship of the region to the larger Russian Empire that conservative Russian commentators contested with their Baltic German counterparts. Between 1845 and 1848 more than one hundred thousand peasants in Livland province (today southern Estonia and most of Latvia, excepting what in the nineteenth century was Kurland province) accepted Orthodoxy amid a period of agricultural crisis, poor harvests, and harvest failures that had begun at the end of the previous decade. The conversions were encouraged in part by rumors promising various temporal benefits for taking the “tsar’s faith,” including land grants, tax breaks, monetary and in-kind rewards, and exemptions from military conscription.1 By the mid-1860s, another set of rumors circulated to the effect that converts could choose to raise children of mixed marriages in the Lutheran faith, and even that individuals could revert to their former faith—in both respects speculation ran contrary to imperial law, which prevented Orthodox from leaving the fold and parents of mixed marriage from raising their offspring outside the empire’s official faith.2 Perceptions that the conversions were connected to unfounded claims, and that new talk during the 1860s expressed popular ambivalence about the Orthodox faith, gave rise to competing interpretations of the phenomenon. During the mid-1860s, the volatile discussion between competing Russian and German publicists about the place of the Baltic region in the larger empire came to be known as “the Baltic Question” in the contemporary press. It often touched upon competing views of the conversions and their aftermath. Skeptics held that the conversions were based solely upon worldly concerns and they insisted that the so-called reconversion movement of the 1860s proved this fact.3 Yet influential conservative Russian commentators maintained that the mass religious change was in fact authentic and that the apparent aftermath of popular dissatisfaction stemmed from unresolved social issues—religious persecution, endemic poverty, and the arbitrary rule of Baltic Germans—that impeded popular commitment to Orthodoxy.4 The Livonian conversions of the 1840s provided a crucial stimulus for reevaluating the Baltic past, present, and future in terms of Russian Orthodoxy. Pro-Orthodox histories and polemics about the region suggested the urgency of sweeping reforms to reinforce the position of the Orthodox Church. Such commentaries held that Baltic Germans were an alien and hostile presence and marked a sharp break from long-standing autocratic views that held that the

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local elite were loyal subjects and talented state servants.5 After the period of widespread conversions, but especially beginning in the mid-1860s, conservative Russian publicists cast the prevailing Lutheran and German social and political order in the Baltic in a negative light.6 They identified social and political problems associated with “Baltic particularism” as persistent negative facts that undermined popular commitment to Orthodoxy. Conservative commentators depicted the Baltic and its non-Russian, non-Orthodox elite as foreign, estranged, and antithetical to the core of the Russian Empire, while suggesting that the local subject populations had always been organically linked to Russia and Orthodoxy, albeit led astray by centuries of Western Christian and German domination. In that sense, they insisted that the conversions were genuine and that later dissatisfaction stemmed from insufficient state activity—a call for thoroughgoing reform throughout the Baltic region. In fact, the positions put forth by the two camps established that the Russian Empire could be conceived according to two models: a conservative Russian model, where center and periphery were united by a single faith, a single culture, and a single law, and an imperial Russian one, where local institutions, culture, and religion ought to be upheld. In other words, by the 1860s the debate about “the Baltic Question” pitted conservative and Slavophile Russians against German commentators regarding how Russia should be constituted—whether as an empire in which there existed distinct territorial units, or as a more unitary, Orthodox community. Slavophiles and conservatives, in the words of historian Laura Engelstein, “insisted the empire be identified in terms specific to the Russian, defined as Orthodox, core.”7 Regarding the Baltic, conservative and Slavophile commentators very much insisted that the Baltic ought to conform to the Russian model in their discussions of the region during the 1860s and 1870s. The authors discussed in this essay can be described as being conservative or Slavophile. The term Slavophile often seems hazy, in part due to the varieties of thought that existed within the loosely defined movement. Slavophiles, whose origins date to the 1830s, generally looked back to early periods of Russian history before the advent of the Russian Empire and the growth of the modern state. They insisted upon the need to recover Russia’s supposedly authentic roots, antedating the Westernizing reforms of Peter I and his successors, which these thinkers found alien and coercive.8 Slavophiles typically cast Russia’s past and future in terms of an idealized community. Their concept of sobornost’ (conciliarity) denoted a harmonious communal spirit around which Russia had supposedly been organized. The term referred to early church councils and pre-Petrine political bodies such as the Zemskii Sobor’ (Assembly of the Land), which Slavophiles suggested gave all social strata a voice. In a similar way, Slavophiles offered up a romantic view of the narod—the peasantry—whom

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they viewed as the embodiment of genuine Orthodox religiosity and of old Russia’s communal spirit.9 The rural commune appeared to offer representation to all community members, since household heads rightfully participated in communal deliberations. Moreover, the commune appeared egalitarian, since it periodically redistributed lands to households according to size. While some early Slavophiles voiced opposition to the state, important thinkers such as Iurii Fëdorovich Samarin (1819–76) called on it to intervene in the Baltic in substantial ways, above all to protect the interests of the Orthodox Church. In these calls, later Slavophiles received important support from conservative writers such as the journalist Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov (1818–87).10 For the purpose of this essay, Slavophiles and conservatives alike supported close relations between the church and state in the Baltic region, and they insisted that the state should fulfill its obligations to protect and enhance the official church throughout the empire. Both insisted on the need to unite the Baltic with Russia by ridding the region of particular institutions and social practices. The most prominent Russian contributor to the discussion of the Baltic situation was Iurii Samarin, who served the Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg during the latter half of 1845, where he dealt with the question of peasant reforms in the region. Thereafter he was dispatched to Riga from 1846 to 1849, also working for the Ministry of the Interior. His experience as a state servant both in St. Petersburg and in Riga informed his lasting antagonism toward local autonomy. Samarin’s multivolume Okrainy Rosii (Borderlands of Russia), published in 1867–76,11 dealt with both the Baltic region and the (Polish) western borderlands. Okrainy offered a number of pieces regarding the Baltic—journalistic, polemical, and historical. Other prominent conservatives of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Slavophile Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov (1823–86), editor of the journal Den’ (Day),12 the conservative journalist Mikhail Katkov, editor of Moskovskie Vedomosti (Moscow News), and Slavophile historian Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800–75), of Moscow State University, agreed with many of Samarin’s basic propositions about Orthodoxy, the autocracy, and the Russian Empire. An “Orthodox” history of the conversion movement came soon after the popular excitement about the “tsar’s faith” had largely died out, when Iurii Samarin finished his Letters from Riga, a manuscript that circulated among educated circles beginning in 1848.13 Pro-Orthodox histories did not circulate widely until the mid-1860s, when censorship relaxed during the period of openness associated with the Great Reforms, and when other authors articulated similar views about the conversions’ origins and significance to the region and the larger empire. While contemporary German commentators typically prefaced any discussion about the Livonian conversions with some discussion about false worldly hopes, given the rumors about the social and

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economic benefits for accepting the “tsar’s faith,”14 their conservative-minded Russian counterparts tended to play down or ignore false speculation as a factor at all. In fact, Samarin’s many histories of the conversion era challenge the role of rumors as the essential, driving force behind the phenomenon. For example, a history of the conversions published in his Okrainy Rossii attributed to a Latvian priest, Indrik Straumit (but widely assumed to be the pseudonymous work of Samarin himself ),15 suggests: During the forties, something occurred that was completely unexpected for pastors . . . Strange speech went around, and Latvians became closer to Russians, they began to take an interest in their ways, to scrutinize their faith; they began to compare, to believe . . . I noticed that Latvians were apprehensive . . . they found the faith impractical and strict, but they spoke about it with respect.16

Here “Straumit” alludes to rumors, yet denies the prominent role others insisted upon, emphasizing instead Latvians’ favorable attitude toward Russians—an ostensibly positive development. In this explanation, he avoided discussing the content of rumors, while nonetheless characterizing their effect (leading Latvians “to become closer to Russians”) and positing that their supposed respect for Orthodoxy was more noteworthy. Other commentators found evidence of popular “sincerity” in spite of the fact that government policies in the Baltic made conversion more difficult. For example, Samarin saw the numerous controls instituted “to eradicate hopes of worldly benefits” and secret instructions given to the Baltic governor General E. A. Golovin to punish rumormongers as evidence that converts were not insincere.17 Likewise, materials printed in Moscow State University’s journal Chteniia v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossisskikh (Readings of the Imperial Society of History and Russian Antiquities—hereafter, Chteniia) in 1868 suggested that peasants had not converted hastily. For example, documents showed that the measures put into place to guarantee sincerity (testaments prospective converts had to sign disavowing material hopes and a six-month waiting period between expressing the desire to convert and actually converting), to minimize disorder (quotas limiting departures of prospective converts to one in ten villagers), and to dissuade false hopes (proclamations against rumors and threats of punishment against rumormongers).18 Later critics, including Samarin, considered these to be quite extreme measures, especially given that they were instituted by the Orthodox Russian government.19 The existence of rumors connecting Orthodox status to temporal benefits during the 1840s and the advent of the so-called reconversion movement of the 1860s bolstered the stance of the Lutheran elite that peasants had little more than an artificial attachment to Orthodoxy. Yet for conservative Orthodox

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commentators, the legitimacy of the conversions hardly depended upon narrowly religious issues: they readily cited the long history of oppression and class antagonism, supposedly deep popular ambivalence toward the Lutheran faith, and the evident popular attraction to Orthodoxy as factors behind the conversions.20 In short, their position connected social, political, and spiritual concerns together in order to explain the conversions and to justify the need for continued state support for Orthodoxy in the region. Commentators typically attacked the German-speaking elite for retarding the spread of Orthodoxy and obstructing social and political reforms in the region. Russian observers felt that peasants were genuinely attracted to Orthodoxy, a point repeatedly made in publications of the 1860s and 1870s. In a series of documents reprinted in Chteniia in 1868, Actual State Councilor I. Liprand’, who traveled between Riga and Dorpat in October 1845, held that peasants were indeed sincere. Count L. A. Protasov, minister of the interior, dispatched Liprand’ to comment on the state of affairs in the region. In the published document his comments suggest genuine motivation: “It is evident that the orientation of peasants of some parts of Livland province to the acceptance of Orthodoxy is a purely religious attraction and does not entail, up to now, any sort of violation of order, neither social nor private.”21 While such an appraisal may seem to conflate order with sincerity—an unsurprising estimation in an official report—Liprand’ suggested additional peasant motivations were evident as well. Elsewhere, he pointed to moods as an important indicator of the motivation to convert. He wrote, “I myself saw newly converted peasants praying with emotion and even tears. Archpriest [Protoirei] Berezkin [sic] assured me that such reverence is common among converts.”22 Such comments were steeped in assumptions that the Lutheran faith was overly rationalistic, devoid of meaningful ritual, and cold23—a stereotype that recurred frequently in Orthodox commentary about the faith. For example, other publications looked to peasants’ spiritual attraction to Orthodoxy—especially its rituals—as additional evidence of “sincerity.” Samarin points out in his Letters from Riga that during the 1840s it became known that Latvians on the border with Pskov province in the Russian interior had customarily requested that Orthodox priests perform rites before sowing and harvesting and had requested holy water and icons, “which they treated with great respect.” Likewise, Samarin notes that a priest living near Pärnu had informed him that “Latvians” [sic—these would probably have been Estonians] appeared frequently for prayers.24 Samarin insisted that a “spiritual hunger” fueled the conversion movement, yet his and most other histories of the phenomenon relied primarily on showing dissatisfaction with the Lutheran faith and antipathy toward the ruling class rather than any positive predilection toward the Orthodox Church. Indeed, for Samarin, “spiritual hunger” seems to have been less a positive yearning

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for Orthodoxy than a rejection of the German landlords’ faith.25 For example, Samarin suggested that the Lutheran Church lacked the means to connect with its peasant flock: In every church the absence of any organic connection between the clergy and the narod would be a great evil; but in the Protestant [Church], where everything is based upon sermons and on the personal influence of the preacher, where there are neither rituals nor icons, nor symbolic worship, nor legend, he is all the more important, for without him the religious cultivation of the narod will be decidedly impossible.26

Here Samarin implies that the Orthodox faith had more avenues for engaging rural Baltic congregants. In his view, peasants of Russia’s western borderlands had always remained indifferent to the faith of their overlords, whether that faith was Catholicism (former Polish territories) or Lutheranism (the Baltic provinces), yet he clearly points to the importance of ritual and symbol, which he implies are more accessible to the layman than sermons. Along the same lines, the Slavophile writer and historian Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804–60) contrasted the history of Russia with that of the Baltic to show that the former exemplified peaceful and natural assent to political and religious entities, while the latter depended upon coercion. While the Varangians had been invited by the ancient Russians, German rule in the Baltic came without any sort of consent. The Baltic thus featured forcible conversion and centuries of exploitation and class antagonism.27 Pogodin shared this view, referring to Baltic Germans as “uninvited guests.”28 Furthermore, the pseudonymous Latvian Orthodox priest Indrik Straumit held that the Lutheran Church was complicit with the Baltic German social order that exploited peasants. Primarily, he asserted that the Lutheran Church was essentially an institution overseen by landlords who selected pastors and supervised local ecclesiastical administration. He held that virtually every aspect of church practice reinforced the social conditions that German landlords had imposed on peasants. For example, he charged that pastors sustained village-level hierarchies the manor had imposed by separating male and female adolescents according to their familial social status during confirmation study (for example, dividing children of farmhands and farm heads into separate groups). Furthermore, according to Straumit, pastors also reproduced the existing village social hierarchy while presiding over conscription drawings alongside secular authorities, which freed the sons of more prosperous peasant families from the selection process. In the same vein, he pointed to the numerous payments that peasants rendered in order to receive religious services, including confirmation, burial, marriage, and so

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forth.29 Straumit summarized pastors’ activities, writing that they were “least of all preoccupied with religious duties.”30 Baltic Germans were not merely alien to Russia given their separate history: critics charged that they stood apart from Russian interests given their pursuit of local ones. For Samarin, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the monarchy upheld such special interests.31 Again and again, he pointed to rural reforms in Russia’s interior and in the borderlands to the west to show the harmful effects of local advantages that came at the expense of the local Orthodox population. Samarin contrasted the “German” and “Russian” situations, pointing out that peasants in the former had no land and were virtually slaves, while in the latter peasants gave labor in exchange for land. Likewise, Russian landlords performed service to the tsar unconditionally, whereas Baltic German lords sought reaffirmation of their privileges. Thus, according to Samarin, Baltic landlords primarily acted in their own interest.32 For such commentators, Baltic Germans’ pursuit of narrow self-interest over the centuries had cultivated a deep-seated animosity among the peasantry that became fully apparent during the nineteenth century, especially by the 1840s, amid crop failures and grain shortages that the selfish ruling class refused to ameliorate.33 Still, for Samarin and others, the conversions of the 1840s could not be understood as the mere product of the crop failures of the period, but also in the context of long-standing conflicts that had never been properly resolved. By the late 1860s it was widely accepted among Russia’s educated circles that Baltic emancipation had worsened the position of the peasantry.34 Commentators held that Russian peasants (whose freedom was announced in 1861) fared much better under serfdom than did emancipated Baltic peasants who had gained freedom according to legislation promulgated between 1816 and 1819, probably owing to the Slavophile notion that the Russian commune protected individuals. For example, Aksakov alleged that Baltic peasants had fewer rights than Russian serfs.35 When he compared the terms of the 1861 measure to those of the Baltic, he charged that the latter peasants remained landless, subordinated to the manor, and subject to arbitrary power.36 When Katkov compared Baltic and Russian emancipation, he complained that in the Baltic, “peasant land became landlords’ exclusive property,” while Russian emancipation guaranteed peasant landholding.37 Critics pointed to the conversion episode, other instances of ferment and unrest, and the phenomenon of spontaneous peasant petitions to migrate to Russia’s southern provinces, which recurred between the 1830s and the 1860s, as evidence for the need for further reform in the region. According to Katkov, popular migration movements prior to emancipation in Russia’s interior offered especially clear proof of the inadequacy of Baltic reforms. After all, Baltic peasants strove to resettle in Russia’s interior even while serfdom still existed there.38

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While Baltic peasants clamored for resettlement at intervals for several decades, during the 1860s (especially by 1865) the phenomenon took on a more organized form and gained more publicity in educated circles given the expansion of the press and the Russian public’s growing interest in Baltic affairs. During the mid-1860s, thousands of peasants signed petitions requesting permission to resettle in Russia’s interior provinces. These were compiled locally and presented to authorities by smaller deputations who traveled to St. Petersburg. Aksakov remarked that 150 peasants from Livland appeared in the capital in one instance, while noting that smaller groups of a dozen or so had done the same.39 Furthermore, smaller numbers illegally pulled up stakes and headed south without pressing any formal claims at all. Commentators generally cited problems of hunger, insufficient work, and rural poverty as factors stimulating the movement. For example, discussing peasants from Neigof and Lakhtra manors who requested to resettle in Simbirsk (southern European Russia), Aksakov wrote of the supplicants, “they have nothing and have nowhere to live.”40 For Slavophiles, the migration phenomenon was inextricably linked to that of conversion: both occurrences arose from economic misery and social oppression and both possibly signaled the desire to become closer to “Russia”— whether through concrete or symbolic movement. For example, when Katkov spoke of Baltic peasants’ aspirations to migrate to the Crimea during the 1860s, he reminded his readers that the conversions of the 1840s occurred alongside requests for resettlement: “some of our readers may still recall when one hundred thousand Latvians and Estonians went over to Orthodoxy, there occurred a general popular movement . . . of peasants to resettle in Russia.”41 In other words, for Katkov, the movement toward Orthodoxy was tied to aspirations to physically move into Russia. Other authors similarly suggested that immigration and conversion were two sides of the same coin. For example, one commentator in Chteniia concluded his brief history of the conversions (1845–48) by invoking the migration phenomenon of the 1860s: “Three years ago, nearly all the narod of the Baltic wished to resettle to Samara and Saratov provinces [in southern Russia].”42 Obviously, the hundreds of supplicants asking to migrate did not represent any universal desire to migrate. Yet, the author insisted this was the case, just as Samarin and others suggested that conversions would have been far more sweeping had the state intervened to protect (prospective) converts.43 In other words, the argument went that conversion and migration manifested in the same origins and popular aspirations, and that the entire Baltic population wished to convert to Orthodoxy, to be freed from Baltic German authority, and to become Russian.

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When Iurii Samarin argued that the Baltic conversions were “sincere” in his Letters from Riga, he asserted that religious issues could not be separated from secular issues: I remain of the conviction that in essence, at its base, the striving of the narod was religious, free, and prudent. With this I in no way think to deny the existence in it [i.e., the narod] of hope for some kind of change for the better in its worldly existence; but I am convinced that this hope was born not of ill-intentioned, dissolute rumors.44

Even as Samarin and other defenders of Orthodoxy pointed to converts’ religious motivations, they posited that the mass movement could not be understood apart from “social” and “political” matters. When Samarin and like-minded contemporaries confronted evidence of converts’ dissatisfaction, they likewise provided explanations beyond any narrowly “religious” sphere. For such commentators, material life had to be reformed in order for the narod to realize its spiritual potential and for the region to realize its rightful destiny. Discussions about the conversions centered upon discourses of rights, law, and reform as advocates of Orthodoxy sought to defend converts from local authorities and distinct local institutions. In this light, religious freedom was hardly a narrow, personal matter. For example, when Mikhail Pogodin weighed in on the problem of freedom of conscience in the Baltic and the question of allowing converts to revert to Lutheranism, he insisted upon defending the primacy of the Orthodox Church. When he spoke of the status of the Baltic provinces, he insisted that as a part of the Russian Empire, the status of converts “cannot be judged otherwise than according to Russian law,” which implied the defense of Orthodoxy rather than the defense of private conscience.45 In fact, he advocated the construction of churches throughout the Baltic provinces, especially in the provincial capitols of Revel, Riga, and Mitau, as a means of supporting the official church.46 Conservative Russian commentators insisted on the defense of religious hierarchy in the Russian Empire and on subjects’ “right” to practice Orthodoxy. By the 1860s and 1870s Slavophilism and conservatism came to share the common assumption that the state had a positive role to play in the Baltic borderlands, both through a program of reforms and through increased support for the Orthodox Church. Baltic Germans, once considered able, committed state servants and loyal subjects, were increasingly cast as an alien stratum, hostile to Russia and Orthodoxy in the conservative publications of the 1860s and 1870s. In this way, Russian commentators insisted on a model of Russia that fully integrated the Baltic into an imagined Russian and Orthodox community—a vision that rejected the particularism established by centuries of Russian imperial practice. The conservative and Slavophile views of the 1860s

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and 1870s by no means triumphed in their day, yet at the same time, the state rejected long-standing views that the Baltic provided a useful “Western” example that Russia could imitate. Instead, Alexander II embarked upon reforms of communal governments (1866), the abolition of the Baltic viceroyalty (1876), and new municipal institutions (1877).47 While previously the Baltic was seen as an advanced region, possibly worth emulating, by the 1860s it came to be seen as a problem. Still, none of these reforms substantially undermined the position of the nobility, a main goal of Russian commentators. The position that Slavophiles and conservatives advanced following the Livonian conversion episode offered a model that the state did take seriously, but to which it could not fully commit without provoking opposition from the noble class upon which it depended. Notes 1. A. V. Gavrilin, Ocherki istorii Rizhskoi Eparkhi: 19 vek (Riga, 1999); Hans Kruus, Talurahvakäärimine Lõuna-Eestis XIX sajandi 40-ndail aastail (Tartu, 1930); V. Naaber and A. Traat, Talurahva-liikumine Eestis aastail 1845–1848, 2 vols. (Tallinn, 1991); Aleksii II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Pravoslavie v Estonii (Moscow, 1999). 2. Such rumors reached a peak in 1864, when thousands of peasants sought to revert to the Lutheran faith. On the phenomenon of religious dissatisfaction, see Olaf Sild, Eesti kirikulugu; vanimast ajast olevikuni (Tartu, 1938), 217; Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 44, 45, 146; Gavrilin, Ocherki istorii Rizhskoi eparkhii, 233. 3. Adolf von Harless, Geschichtsbilder aus der luterischen Kirche Livlands vom 1845 am (Leipzig, 1869), 42–43. Kruus notes that contemporary Baltic German commentators H. A. von Bock and R. J. Sampson held that economics were not crucial aspects of the unrest. See Kruus, Talurahvakäärimine, 7–10. Pastor H. G. von Jannau’s lengthy journal report on the conversions is pervaded by the notion that peasants had solely material aims, and he campaigned vigorously against the rumors, hoping to disabuse peasants of their false hopes. See von Jannau, Wenne-õigeusu tulekust Lõuna-Eestis, 1845–1846 a., ed. and trans. Han Kruus (Tartu, 1927). For the Baltic German position on “the Baltic Question,” see Carl Schirren, Livländische Antwort an Herrn Juri Samarin (Leipzig, 1869). 4. I. Liprand’, “Raziasnenie donesenii pravitel’stvu o perekhode v 1845 godu latyshei i chukhon livonskikh v pravoslavie,” Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete 3 (1868): 150, 156; Iurii F. Samarin, Sochineniia, 11 vols. (Moscow, 1877–1911), 7:153; M. N. Katkov, Sobranie peredovykh statei Moskovskikh viedomstei, 3 vols. (1897–98), 1:108–9; for a recent analysis that supports the nineteenth-century conservative Russian view, see Gavrilin, Ocherki, 123. 5. Edward C. Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 10–11; Michael Haltzel, “Baltic Particularism and the Beginnings of Russification,” in Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 111–18; Terry Martin, “The German Question in Russia, 1848–1896,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 18, no. 4 (1991): 382–83, 388–90.

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6. Regarding clerical opinion in the 1850s and 1860s, see Ryan, “Religious Conversion and the Problem of Commitment,” Ajalooline Ajakiri, the Estonian Historical Journal, no. 3/4 (2007): 369–92 7. Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2012), 10. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. On later Slavophiles’ views that the state should play a positive role in society, see Edward C. Thaden, “Samarin’s ‘Okrainy Rossii’ and Official Policy in the Baltic Provinces,” Russian Review 33, no. 4 (1974): 405–415; Michael Hughes, “State and Society in the Political Thought of the Moscow Slavophiles,” Studies in East European Thought 52, no. 3 (2000): 159–183; Richard Wortman, “Koshelev, Samarin, and the Fate of Liberal Slavophilism,” Slavic Review 21, no. 2 (1962): 261–279. 11. Iurii F. Samarin, Okrainy Rossii, vols. 1–2 (Prague, 1868), vols. 3–4 (Berlin, 1871– 76); these were republished in his collected works, Sochineniia11 vols. (Moscow: 1877–1911). 12. Den’ became one of the main anti-Baltic publications; see S. G. Isakov, Ostzeiskii vopros v Russkoi pechati 1860-kh godov (Tartu: 1961), 15. 13. Published in Samarin’s Sochineniia, vol. 7. 14. For example, Kruus notes that H. A. von Bock and R. J. Sampson decried the frequency of reforms that begot unrest, as well as the lenient response of the government and Orthodox priests’ irresponsible willingness to engage peasants. See Kruus, Talurahvakäärimine, 7–10. See also von Harless, Geschichtsbilder, 42–43. 15. Iu. A. Samarin, “O zapiskakh Latyshskogo krest’ianina Indrika Straumita i ikh izdatele,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk Latviiskoi SSR 8, no. 229 (1966): 22–28; for the view that Samarin penned the piece attributed to Straumit, see Isakov, Ostzeiskii, 50; Michael R. Haltzel, “The Reaction of the Baltic Germans to Russification during the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1971), 116. 16. Samarin, Sochineniia, 8:231. 17. Ibid., 7:137. 18. See the short historical essay, “Religiozno-Politicheskoe dvizhenie mezhdu Latyshami i Estami Ostzeiskago kraia v 1845 godu,” Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete 4 (1868): 94–95. 19. Thaden, “Samarin’s ‘Okrainy Rossii,’” 410. 20. Samarin, Sochineniia, 7:137, 156–57. 21. Liprand’, “Raziasnenie,” 150. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 156. 24. Samarin, Sochineniia, 7:156–7, 8:231–32. 25. Ibid., 7:154. 26. Ibid., 7:153. 27. Martin, “The German Question,” 379–80. 28. M. P. Pogodin, Ostzeiskii Vopros: Pis ‘mo M.P. Pogodina k Professoru Shirrenu (1869), 3–4. 29. Samarin, Sochineniia, 8: 214–15; Gavrilin, Ocherki, 163. Clergy in Russia’s interior likewise charged emoluments—only in the poorest regions, and in religiously heterogeneous borderlands, did the Orthodox Church forgive these fees. While Orthodox

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Livonian peasants were universally freed from emoluments, this was an exception to a widely accepted practice throughout the empire in order to address converts’ supposed poverty. Similar measures were undertaken to support the Orthodox Church in the western borderlands. See Gregory Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 76–77, 84–87; for statistics on all Orthodox parishes receiving subventions, see the appendices to the published annual reports of the Holy Synod, Vsepoddanieishii otchet ober-prokurora sviatieishago sinoda, for the 1830s and 1840s. 30. Samarin, Sochineniia, 8:211–12. 31. Martin, “The German Question,” 383. 32. Ibid., 379. 33. Isakov points out that the Russian press was highly critical of the 1816–19 and 1849– 56 peasant reforms in the discussions of the 1860s. The agrarian question came under more intense scrutiny at the end of 1865, when the petitions peasants from Fellin, Tartu, and Pärnu districts gave to the tsar the previous year came under discussion. Various unfavorable comparisons of Baltic and Russian peasants ensued. See Isakov, Ostzeiskii, 39–41, 43–44. 34. Ibid., 6, 8, 13–15, 39, 41–42. 35. I. S. Aksakov, Sochineniia, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1880–87), 6:132–33. 36. Ibid., 6: 10. 37. Katkov, Sobranie, 7: 191–92; for cases of evictions, see Juhan Kahk, Murrangulised neljakümnendad (Tallinn, 1978), 39–40. 38. Katkov, Sobranie, 5: 95. 39. Aksakov, Sochineniia, 6: 58. 40. Ibid., 6: 122. 41. Katkov, Sobranie, 5: 94–95. 42. “Religiozno-Politicheskoe dvizhenie,” 91. 43. Thaden, “Samarin’s ‘Okrainy Rossii,’” 409. 44. Samarin, Sochineniia, 7:156–57. 45. Pogodin, Ostzeiskii, 70. 46. Ibid., 107; see also Katkov, Sobranie,5:101. 47. See Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland.

CHAPTER 11

12

Women, Railways, and Respectability in Colonial India RITIKA PRASAD

O

n 15 July 1871 the Koh-i-Núr newspaper published out of Lahore declaimed the increasing “depravity of the women of the Panjab” since the death of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh (1839). It blamed this on the “discontinuance of moral and religious training” among women and the simultaneous spread of railways in the area.1 The Koh-i-Núr’s correlation between a spreading railway network and increasing female depravity was not shared by the imperial official William Muir, who was lieutenant governor of the North-West Provinces between 1868 and 1874. Stressing the “great social benefits” of encouraging Indian women to travel by railway, he argued in an 1869 minute that nothing else would contribute more to “a more civilized and rational treatment of the female sex in India.”2 The question of women traveling by rail framed debates about tradition and modernity in a colonial context. In his effort to modernize colonial India, Muir urged the imperial state to actively facilitate railway travel by Indian women. However, he—like many colonial officials—presumed that this project of modernizing colonial society could only be effected by making railway accommodation compatible with what he understood as traditional “Oriental” norms of female seclusion. He was not alone; various imperial functionaries believed that in India, as in much of the colonial East, respectable women remained invisible outside of immediate kin networks, their seclusion being a direct measure of their respectability. As long as the stringency of seclusion was directly correlated to the social rank of the woman concerned, any woman from a respectable family would shield herself from public visibility. Hence, colonial officials averred that if Indian women were to be encouraged to travel by railway, then the railway itself must be adapted to zanāna/zenana traditions, ensuring that respectable women remain secluded from all except their immediate kin.3

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Consequently, discussions about railway travel by Indian women became preoccupied with how seclusion could be effected during the railway journey. However, the conflicting desires to promote female travel, accommodate female seclusion, and run railways as a commercially profitable venture proved to be difficult to combine. Most railway companies simply found it too expensive to provide affordable secluded accommodation in which women passengers were secluded from all but immediate kin. Thus, tracing the actual history of accommodation provided for female passengers on Indian railways, this essay argues that while the discursive emphasis on seclusion continued unabated, in practice the bulk of female passengers traveled in the fairly “public” female-only carriages provided in the third—or lowest—class of railway travel. Even though only women could travel in these designated carriages, they were deemed inadequate to the rules of seclusion because they separated respectable women from their male kin (deemed protectors), mixed them with their social inferiors, and exposed them to the public gaze.4 Central to this argument is David Warren Sabean’s insistence on practice as an analytic category that is in constant dialogue with all other categories and, equally, his extraordinary ability to teach— especially to students engaged with questions of words and texts—how vital it is to grasp how ideas, narratives, and discourses are manifested in practice, in the everyday lives of people. The History of Effecting Respectability When passenger trains first began running in India in the 1850s, many railway companies chose to reserve a female-only carriage “for Native women” in the third class. This was similar to accommodation for women passengers provided in other parts of the world. Victorian railway companies provided “class differentiated ladies’ compartments” after 1845, and by the 1850s such facilities appeared in the United States in the form of a room attached “to the end of the carriage” that men were “forbidden” to enter.5 In March 1853, the Friend of India suggested that anyone who “intrudes himself into a carriage or compartment reserved for females” on Indian railways be fined a hefty twenty rupees, while the Railway Act (XVIII) of 1854 mandated a fine and forcible removal of any “male persons” intruding into a female-only carriage.6 At this juncture, however, this provision remained at the discretion of individual railways: these penalties applied only “if any special carriage” was provided. In the 1860s, many railways that were providing such female-only carriages decided to abolish them. They argued that these did not serve the needs of colonial society, for Indian women disliked traveling while “separated from their male relatives [and] protectors.”7 Issues of gender and racial separation were

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brought to the fore in 1867 when a European named Samuel Horne perpetrated a “gross outrage” on an Indian woman traveling with a male relative in a regular third-class carriage of the East Indian Railway; to escape her attacker, the woman jumped out of the moving train and died.8 The question of how best to accommodate and protect Indian women during railway travel gained increased urgency as railways continued to spread in colonial India: from a meager 274 miles in 1857, the railway network had increased to 3,597 route miles by 1867.9 Defining Norms of Respectability Early discussions about railway accommodation for female passengers had been fairly preoccupied with accommodating the needs of “ladies of rank.”10 However, by the late 1860s—especially in light of the Samuel Horne incident—the original concern with women in “upper grades of society” was complemented by increasing discussion of how best to accommodate the needs of all Indian women traveling by railway.11 After consulting with Indian elites, railway functionaries and local and provincial administrators concluded that anyone respectable would only allow female family members to travel by train only if railways provided adequately secluded accommodation.12 The female-only carriages or compartments provided in the third class were deemed doubly inadequate on this count: in these, women had to travel not only “entirely separated from their own male relatives” but also were visible to strangers, many of whom were considered social inferiors.13 This view drew much sustenance from an 1866 petition sent to the viceroy by fifteen hundred “Native gentlemen of the highest rank” belonging to the British Indian Association.14 These men refused to countenance the idea that “Native ladies of respectable birth and breeding” would use the general female-only carriages, especially “in such a public place as the Railway line, and so full often of incidents as a railway journey.” However, being the principal organization of a colonial landed aristocracy, the British Indian Association was very particular in emphasizing that these strictures of female seclusion pertained only to highranking women of “birth and breeding.” These elite men believed women of “the lower classes” were “always visible to every one”; hence, they required no special accommodation and could travel in the more public female-only carriages.15 The correlation between social hierarchy and female seclusion presumed by the British Indian Association was broadly congruous with historical assessments of the period, which have stressed that secluded women were “always high-caste or upper class” and pointed out that there were “large areas of India, and of course, other classes where women were far more ‘visible.’”16

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While drawing upon these demands and petitions, colonial officials like Muir chose to argue for a more general correlation between respectability and female seclusion in India. In Muir’s opinion, “respectable men, however poor” would not allow “their women to be herded together away from themselves.”17 He was not the only colonial official to generalize norms of female seclusion across region and social hierarchy. Similar assumptions led to a government circular that suggested that Indian women adopt “the costume commonly worn in Turkey and Egypt where seclusion of their sex is as general as it is in India.”18 The idea of female seclusion as a general practice was also enhanced by official assumptions that in India it was difficult to get “family parties of the lower classes to divide.”19 By suggesting that female-only carriages were unviable for any respectable woman—not only elite ones—officials widened the demographic purview of female seclusion and deemed it not only an arbiter of respectability, but also a potent mechanism of social mobility. Most attention was paid to the tradition of purdah, the practice of female veiling, and the norms of zanāna or zenana, the heavily secluded and restricted female space seen as “the essential space of Indian femininity and a marker of the inherent barbarity of Indian civilization.”20 Despite female seclusion being generalized as a “colonial” rather than an elite norm, the majority of women traveling on Indian railways—including many elite women—had to use those very female-only carriages in the third class that had been designated as inadequate to maintaining female respectability. This was because few Indians could afford to travel in the first or second class, where more stringently secluded accommodation was available. Over 85 to 90 percent of railway passengers traveled in the third class, where the female-only carriage, though already deemed inadequate to the needs of female seclusion, was the only form of seclusion available.21 Respectability in Practice In the 1860s, stringent seclusion was realistically available only to those who could afford to reserve a first-class railway carriage.22 This permitted women to remain secluded without being separated from their male escorts, especially if the carriage had all required conveniences, negating the need to leave it “for any purpose.”23 The chief concern for those who could afford to travel thus was to remain secluded on station platforms and grounds before getting into the train. “[H]aving to walk from their conveyances to the railway carriage on foot,” argued the Urdú Akhbár, prevented “no few respectable women from travelling by railway.”24 Suggestions that more railway companies provide palanquins “to carry Native females from one train to the other” were endorsed by some

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officials, who urged that carriages be constructed so as to allow palanquins to be brought to the train’s door.25 However, such facilities remained limited by region and by railway.26 When provided, such seclusion was available to a statistically miniscule proportion of the population that traveled in the first or second class. As early as 1859, it was third-class traffic that comprised over 90 percent of all passenger traffic; figures for first-class traffic ranged between 0.2 to 1.03 percent of the traveling public, and racial and pecuniary factors made Indians an even smaller proportion of first-class travelers.27 When the issue of women passengers gained particular attention in the late 1860s, most Indian women were either traveling in regular carriages or in female-only carriages in the third class, if these were provided. Most railway vehicles were unsuited to being portioned off into smaller (hence cheaper) compartments, so reserving an entire second- or third-class carriage was a rather expensive option, sometimes costing up to the equivalent of fifty tickets, as on the Madras Railway. Even in Punjab and Oudh (and on the Eastern Bengal Railway), where carriages could be separated into compartments and fares were scaled, the proposition remained expensive. In Punjab, five-eighths of the charge for the whole compartment had to be paid to reserve a first- or secondclass compartment, while reserved accommodation in a second- or third-class carriage in Oudh required the payment of five or eight fares, respectively.28 These “prohibitive” charges, when combined with the 1869 contention that poor men—if they considered themselves respectable—would pay to “travel together as a family,” channeled administrative attention into developing moderately priced “family compartments” intended to accommodate norms of zenana seclusion.29 Planned as composite carriages—with compartments at each end—these were intended for “ordinary travellers” in the third and intermediate (between second and third) classes. Designed like coupes, they were meant to be “absolutely secluded”: “entirely shut off ” from the rest of the carriage, protected by venetian blinds and provided with conveniences.30The possibility of railways actually developing such accommodation was enhanced by the fact that in 1869–70, the government planned to increase its role in constructing and running railway lines. In practice, however, such family accommodation was provided sparingly, even after 1869. Most officials and railway functionaries envisaged such accommodation as being extended only to the second class, which represented between 0.77 and 2.25 percent of passenger traffic.31 Some officials had indeed suggested that such special accommodation be made available in the third class.32 However, these suggestions were not translated substantively into practice. In an 1883 circular, the Government of India found itself coaxing staterun railways—over which it had maximum control—to adapt carriages in the intermediate class (below second class but above third class) to the needs of

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female seclusion, venturing to suggest that other privately owned railway lines might consider such accommodation.33 Some, like the Punjab Northern, did try to provide intermediate-class carriages in which canvas screens allowed “upper-class natives” to travel secluded with their families. However, this still meant that “natives desirous of securing seclusion” would have to be able to afford the intermediate class. Again, this solution had little practical value. Though more accessible than the first and second, in the relevant period, intermediate class traffic hovered between only 2.6 and 3.5 percent of the total passenger traffic.34 Introduced by some railways in the late nineteenth century, it remained limited to specific trains and routes even as late as 1917, when the Railway Board was still urging railways to consider providing an intermediate class on long-distance trains.35 Thus, despite being deemed inadequate to the needs of female respectability in India—serving only to protect women of “the lower orders” from “indiscriminate association with men”—female-only compartments in the third class remained the general form of accommodation practically available.36 That “respectable” women, including those who followed stringent norms of seclusion, continued to travel in them even after 1869 is visible in the anxiety about enforcing respectability. In 1874, the Bengal government was found insisting that female-only compartments be made more “private” to better serve paradanishín, or veiled women, while the Jaridah-i-Rozgar complained of Christian missionary ladies who tried to convert gosha, or secluded women, traveling in femaleonly compartments.37 The press stressed the “serious inconvenience” faced by “respectable Hindu ladies” having to travel “in the same carriage with women of the lower classes, such as sweepers, chamars, and the like,” the aggravation being enhanced because the latter carried “flesh and other nasty things with them.”38 Female privacy was negated, declaimed the Núr-ul-Absár, if “respectable Hindoostanee ladies are made to sit in the same carriages with ayas and women of other low castes.”39 There were also complaints that in these femaleonly carriages, respectable women came into contact with prostitutes, deemed to be a violation of norms of seclusion. No formal mechanism of exclusion was instituted, since it was assumed that there would “of course be no practical difficulty in this country” in the recognition and exclusion of prostitutes from female-only carriages.40 However, the issue continued to be a fraught one. The Allyghur Institute Gazette thus decried as “aggravating” the fact that “some prostitutes” seated themselves in a compartment “occupied by Hindoostanee ladies of a respectable family.”41 More proof that female-only carriages were in general use came from discussions about segregating women passengers traveling in these along distinctions of religion or hierarchies of caste. While some officials like the commissioner of Dacca argued against such differentiation on ideological grounds—stating

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that it would be “unwise in these days of social improvement” to introduce any system that “perpetuate[s] caste prejudices”—most others focused on the logistical and financial unviability of such measures.42 Thus, even though Bombay Presidency’s consulting engineer (for railways) believed that “Borah and other Mahomedan ladies” would welcome segregation since they were “more particular” than Parsi and Hindu ladies, he insisted that paucity of numbers made the demand impossible to accommodate.43 Officials in Oudh and the North-West Provinces emphasized that “the higher castes of Hindoo ladies” were prejudiced against traveling either “with Hindoo ladies of a different caste” or “with Mahomedan ladies” and tried to devise the logistics of such segregation in female-only carriages.44 However, logistical and financial constraints militated against railway administrations being receptive to such segregation. As they had already pointed out, providing such accommodations would only increase the “useless dead load hauled about by trains.”45 Combined with the endemic shortage of rolling stock for third-class passengers, the unprofitability of providing special zenana accommodation or family compartments, particularly in the third class, meant that most railway companies provided a female-only carriage or compartment as the only viable form of accommodation for most of the traveling population.46 That this was true across areas and irrespective of whether they were state-controlled or private was proved by a governmental inquiry in the early 1880s, which included railways ranging from the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi (SP&D), Oudh and Rohilkund (O&R), East Indian (EIR), and Eastern Bengal (EBR), to the Great Indian Peninsular (GIPR), Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian (BBCI), Madras (MR), and South Indian (SIR). As the newspaper Anjuman-i-Hind had insisted, if nothing else was feasible, “at least . . . separate compartments should be reserved for native women, and no male servant of the company should be allowed to enter these compartments.”47 By 1890, theory seems to have caught up with practice. The Railway Act of 1890 mandated female-only compartments in the lowest class on every passenger train as legally required of all railways in British India.48 Despite the official insistence on how railways in India must adapt to “habits of seclusion common in the East,” this solution was not only identical to that provided from the early years of rail travel in India, but also congruous with accommodation for female passengers in other parts of the world.49 That female-only compartments were provided and occupied is shown by demands both to discontinue its use and complaints about its absence. While the Hitavadi suggested in 1905 that the “existing system of setting up entire carriages for the special use of females” be discontinued, Narayan Rao Paranjpay complained in 1906 that the Calcutta and Bombay mails were missing the required female-only third-class carriage.50 Most visibly, however, the wide use of the

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female-only carriage was attested to by the increasing discussions about its security, especially at the turn of the century. Conclusion In the early years of railway travel in India, colonial officials believed that increased railway travel by Indian women would be an effective mechanism for modernizing what they saw as India’s traditional society. They attempted to enforce this modernizing project, however, by trying to traditionalize railway spaces to make them conform with stringent norms of “Oriental” female seclusion. Fundamental to this was to create railway spaces where women traveled only in the company of immediate kin and were secluded from any contact with strangers and social inferiors, not only male but also female. While female seclusion became the semantic frame through which railway travel was adapted to Indian women passengers, a competing logic of profit prevented this narrative of colonial difference from being implemented in the actual practice of railway travel. Thus, despite the discursive emphasis on re-creating zenana accommodation in Indian railways, most Indian women actually traveled in accommodation that was congruous with that provided for women passengers in other parts of the world—usually a female-only reserved compartment or carriage. In a double irony, however, even as the practical details of everyday railway travel remained substantially unaffected by the discursive emphasis on female seclusion, the discursive correlation between seclusion and female respectability maintained its strength. Notes A lengthier version of this chapter was published in South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 1 ( January 2012): 26–46. 1. Koh-i-Núr (Lahore), 15 July 1871, in Selections from vernacular newspapers in the Punjab, North-West Provinces, Oudh, and Central Provinces (henceforth, NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP), National Archives of India, Delhi (NAI) and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi (NMML). 2. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869, in United Provinces Proceedings, Public Works Department (PWD): Railway, July–November 1869, IOR.P/442/61, British Library, London (BL). 3. From “zanān-ī,” Persian adjective, of the women, of the seraglio. 4. Laura Bear documents attempts made by the East Indian Railway in the1870s. See Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York, 2007), 52–62. Bear’s research focuses on Anglo-Indian railway workers and their families in Kharagpur’s East Indian Railway colony, but her emphasis on “sexuality, respectability and empire” and her introductory discussion of an “Indian

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travelling public” foregrounds the anxiety about train travel exposing women “to the public gaze of strangers.” See Lines of the Nation, 12, 47–50. 5. Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester, 2001), 172; D. Lardner, Railway Economy: A Treatise on the New Art of Transport (London, 1850), 401. 6. “Rules for the Rail,” Friend of India, 17 March 1853; Clause VIII of Act XVIII of 1854, reproduced in Clause VIII of Act XVIII of 1854, reproduced in M. Teruvenkatachariar, High Court Decisions of Indian Railway Cases (Trichinopoloy, 1901), 786–93. 7. J. M. H. Shaw-Stewart, Consulting Engineer, Railways (Madras), to Secretary, Government of India (PWD: Railway), 26 June 1869; C. A. Orr, Secretary, Government of Madras (PWD: Railway) to Secretary, Government of India (PWD), 16 July 1869, both appended to Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869. 8. Government of India, PWD (Railway) Proceedings, July 1868, no. 71, (NAI). 9. Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1840 to 1865 (London, 1867), 58– 59; Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1860 to 1869 (London, 1870), 30–31. 10. Government of India, PWD: Railway, Circular no. 22, 29 October 1866, NAI. 11. Note by Major Hovenden, Consulting Engineer, Bengal, 31 August 1869, United Provinces Proceedings (PWD: Railway), July–November 1869, IOR.P/442/61, BL. 12. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869. The first passenger railway train in India ran in April 1853; see Ian Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi, 1995), 18–19. 13. Observations of Governor-General, 10 November 1869, United Provinces Proceedings (PWD: Railway), July–November 1869, IOR.P/442/61, BL. 14. Petition by the British Indian Association, North-West Provinces, to Viceroy and Governor-General of India, Aligarh, 16 October 1866, in Home: Public B, December 1866, nos. 50–51, NAI. 15. Petition by the British Indian Association, 16 October 1866. For details about the association, see A. R. Desai, The Social Background of Indian Nationalism (Delhi, 2005, orig. 1946?), 170–71. Their concern with female seclusion seems analogous to Tanika Sarkar’s analysis of the post-midcentury shift of the Bengali intelligentsia to a gendered cultural revivalism; Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi, 2001; repr., 2003), 7–18. 16. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford, 2003), 66; Janaki Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 11. 17. Observations of Governor-General, 10 November 1869. 18. Circular no. 17 on comfort and convenience of passengers, 23 September 1875, appended to PWD: Railway, nos. 71–85, October 1875, NAI. 19. Government of India circular of May 1868, forwarded to local administrations, in PWD: Railway, no. 71, July 1868, NAI. 20. Sara Suleri, Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), 93; Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana,” 24. 21. Separate statistics are not available for female passengers, but they are available by class of travel: first, second, intermediate, and third. 22. Commissioner of Dacca, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. 23. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869.

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24. Urdú Akhbár (Delhi), 24 September 1870, in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP. 25. Suggested by Shostee Churn Ghosal, and supported by the commissioner of Dacca, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. 26. In areas like Awadh, palanquins were allowed onto railway platforms. Passengers could enter reserved carriages in an isolated part of the station, after which they were attached to the train. 27. In 1859, third-class traffic comprised 90 percent and over of the total traffic. Passenger figures for the three lines operational in 1857 show the extent of third-class traffic: Great Indian Peninsular Railway: 93.8 percent; East Indian Railway: 93.5 percent; and Madras Railway: 95 percent. Julian Danvers (Secretary, Railway Department, India Office), Report to the Secretary of State for India on Railways to the end of the year 1859 (London, 1860). Sample figures for first-class traffic show: 1896, 614,000 of 59,509,000 (1.03 percent); 1897, 485,000 of 150,584,000 (0.32 percent); 1900, 521,000 of 176,308,000 (0.3 percent); 1905, 662,000 of 248,157,000 (0.27 percent); 1910, 778,000 of 371,576,000 (0.21 percent). Danvers, Report to the Secretary of State for India on Railways; Statistical Abstracts relating to British India from 1894–95 to 1903–04 (London, 1905), 138; Statistical Abstracts relating to British India from 1903–04 to 1912–13 (London, 1915), 136; Statistical Abstracts from 1910–11 to 1919–20 (London, 1922), 138. 28. Colonel C. A. Orr, Secretary, Government of Madras (PWD: Railway) to Secretary, Government of India (PWD), 16 July 1869, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. A correspondent for the Oudh Akhbár (Lucknow) of 6 June 1875 (in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP), speaks of the Bombay railway, in which the carriages, “unlike those at the East Indian Railway,” were not divided into separate compartments. The equivalent of six or four tickets (depending on day or night train, respectively) had to be paid to reserve a first-class carriage and the equivalent of twenty tickets had to be paid for to reserve half a second-class carriage. J. M. H. Shaw-Stewart, to Secretary, Government of India, 26 June 1869. 29. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869; Commissioner of Dacca, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. Based on inquiries from the magistrates of Patna and Shahabad “of the feelings and wishes of the Native gentlemen on this subject,” the commissioner stated that these family compartments should be divided again, “so that the men may occupy one portion and the women the other.” See also C. Stephenson, Board of Agency, EIR to Consulting Engineer to Government of Bengal (PWD), 27 August 1869; Memorandum by J. S. Trevor, Consulting Engineer for Railways, Bombay, 20 August 1869; Resolutions by the Government of Bombay (PWD: Railway), 3 September 1869, all enclosures to United Provinces Proceedings (PWD: Railway), July–November 1869, IOR.P/442/61, BL. 30. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869; Commissioner of Dacca, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. 31. Sample figures for second-class traffic: 1896, 3,600,000 of 159,509,000 (2.25 percent); 1900, 2,285,000 of 176,308,000 (1.3 percent); 1904, 2,715,000 of 227,007,000 (1.2 percent); 1908, 3,327,000 of 321,169,000 (1.04 percent); 1912, 3,223,000 of 417,229,000 (0.77 percent). Statistical Abstracts from 1894–95 to 1903–04, 138; Statistical Abstracts from 1903–04 to 1912–13, 136; Statistical Abstracts from 1910–11 to 1919–20, 138. 32. The East Indian Railway put into effect a resolution (149) of 1867 through which third-class carriages were to be fitted for the convenience of purdah ladies, with one

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end of the compartment separated from the rest, next to which was to be another compartment, separated from the rest, “so as to represent reserved accommodation, which should be available in reserve for the hire of five seats in which compartment, or unreserved, by any Native travelling with females.” From C. Stephenson, to Consulting Engineer to the Government of Bengal, 27 August 1869. 33. Railway Circular III, 1 March 1883, in Railway Circulars of 1883 (Calcutta, 1884), NAI. 34. Sample figures for intermediate class traffic: 1896, 5,501,000 of 159,509,000 (3.45 percent); 1900, 5,703,000 of 176,308,000 (3.23 percent); 1904, 7,394,000 of 227,007,000 (3.25 percent); 1908, 10,060,000 of 321,169,000 (3.13 percent); 1912, 10,883,000 of 417,229,000 (2.61 percent). Statistical Abstracts from 1894–95 to 1903– 04, 138; Statistical Abstracts from 1903–04 to 1912–13, 136; Statistical Abstracts from 1910–11 to 1919–20, 138. 35. Quoting agent of Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway, R. J. Kent, Joint Secretary, Government of Bombay (PWD) to Secretary, Railway Board, 20 July 1916, in Railway Board (Traffic A), October 1916, no. 760-T./1–2, NAI. 36. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869. 37. L. C. Abbott, Under Secretary, Government of Bengal to Secretary, Government of India (PWD), 24 July 1874, PWD: Railway, October 1875, nos. 71–85, NAI. Jaridah-i-Rozgar (Royapetta, Madras), 28 May 1892, quoting the Najmul Akbar, in Selections from vernacular newspapers from Madras, NAI and NMML. “Gosha”: (a) “Pgosha  (rel. n. fr.  gosh, q.v.), s.m. Angle;—retirement; privacy; seclusion” ( John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English [London, 1884], 925); and (b) “P s. m. 1. A corner, an angle, a closet, cell, retirement, privacy” ( John Shakespeare, A Dictionary, Hindustani and English, 3rd ed. [London, 1834], 1472). 38. Oudh Akhbár (Lucknow), 6 June 1875, in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP. 39. Núr-ul-Absár (Allahabad), 15 May 1872, in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP. 40. Minute by William Muir, 17 July 1869. 41. Allyghur Institute Gazette (Aligarh), 15 September 1873, in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP. 42. Commissioner of Dacca, quoted in note by Major Hovenden, 31 August 1869. 43. Memorandum by J. S. Trevor, Consulting Engineer for Railways, Bombay, 20 August 1869. 44. Meerut’s commissioner speculated about some “2nd and 3rd class carriages [being] divided into three compartments, one end for Hindoo ladies, the other end for Mahomedan ladies; and the centre for male members.” Quoted in United Provinces Prog. (PWD: Railway), July–November 1869, IOR.P/442/61, BL. 45. Memorandum by J. S. Trevor, 20 August 1869. 46. For a discussion about the tremendous shortage of third-class rolling stock, see Ritika Prasad, “Tracking Modernity: The Experience of Railways in Colonial India, 1853– 1947” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009), chaps. 1–2. 47. Anjuman-i-Hind (Lucknow), 24 February 1877, in NNR: Punjab, NWP, Oudh, and CP. 48. Section 64: “(1) On and after the first day of January, 1891, every railway administration shall, in every train carrying passengers, reserve for the exclusive use of females one compartment (1) at least of the lowest class of carriage forming part of the train; and (2) one such compartment so reserved shall, if the train is to run for a distance

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exceeding fifty miles, be provided with a closet.” Louis P. Russell and Vernon Bayley, eds., Indian Railways Act IX of 1890 (Bombay and London, 1903), 161. 49. Observations of Governor-General, 10 November 1869. 50. Hitavadi (Calcutta), 25 July 1905, in Selections from vernacular newspapers from Bengal, NAI and NMML; Narayan Rao Paranjpay to Manager, East Indian Railway, 17 July 1906, Railway Board (Traffic), January 1908, 103–15, NAI.

CHAPTER 12

12

Adventures in Terrorism Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky and the Literary Lives of the Russian Revolutionary Community (1860s–80s) CLAUDIA VERHOEVEN

T

hey were all crazy and they were all wrong,” David Warren Sabean once said of the people of the past. It was an off-the-cuff remark, flung at graduate students in one of his seminars in the late 1990s, but it captures in a nutshell Sabean’s democratic historical mind and, as such, made a lasting impression. “They were all crazy and they were all wrong” is not an expression of triumphant historicism, but in fact the very opposite: if all the people of the past were crazy and wrong, it stands to reason that all the people of the present are, too. So, besides being honest about the absurdity of history, the phrase contains a lesson in humility for the historian. But then, beyond this, because of its equalizing force across the ages, it also implies an absolute openness toward all things human, the liberating sense that, because we are anyway already crazy and wrong, it is permissible to investigate everything. It is thus something like Sabeanese for the Stoic wisdom compressed in the aphorism by Marcus Aurelius, “Ephemeral all of them, the rememberer as well as the remembered.”1 And so, as far as this essay is concerned, it is all right to laugh a little at those ever-so-serious Russian revolutionaries when it turns out that they were seduced to become terrorists as much by the adventure it promised as by a sense of righteousness, that they read Mary Elizabeth Braddon right alongside Bakunin, and that they probably imagined themselves as the Mohicans of Petersburg or the Captain Nemos of the Russian Empire—as long as we don’t take ourselves too seriously, either, and yet take the trouble to keep going.

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Introduction: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism as Adventure Russian revolutionary terrorism was an adventure.2 The status of this argument in the historiography is paradoxical, for it has both not at all and yet long been recognized. Not at all, because the historiography has generally presented revolutionary terrorists as exceptionally serious and above all selfsacrificing individuals; long, because Russian Marxists explicitly critiqued at least early twentieth-century terrorism as “adventurism.”3 Major literary treatments, meanwhile, either support the saintly image (Tolstoy’s 1906 “Divine and Human,” Andreev’s 1908 The Seven That Were Hanged, and to some extent Chekhov’s 1893 The Story of an Unknown Man), or depict terrorists as adventurist fools and/or madmen (Dostoevsky’s 1873 Demons and Bely’s 1913 Petersburg).4 Revolutionary terrorists’ own writings, however, suggest that for a correct assessment of the Russian revolutionary community it is necessary to take seriously the Marxists’ characterization, albeit stripped of some of its more negative connotations. Adventurism, in other words, should be scaled back to adventure, for it is adventure that captures something that is otherwise almost always forgotten: revolutionary terrorists’ romance with a life of risk and a life on the run. In support of the argument that Russian revolutionary terrorism was an adventure—at least during its original phase in the late 1870s and early 1880s—this essay looks at the life and writings of one particular terrorist and writer: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky (1851–95). The essay will conclude by assessing the implications of the argument for the historiography of the Russian revolutionary movement. Romance with Revolution: The Life of Stepniak-Kravchinsky Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, pseudonym Stepniak, or “man of the steppe,” is probably unfamiliar to most people today, but he was a crucial figure in the history of terrorism, and his writings remain among the most important sources of information about the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement. Dead at forty-four in 1895, Stepniak led a short, adventurous life, and he enjoyed, in the words of Franco Venturi, an “extraordinary revolutionary career.”5 Stepniak was born the son of an army doctor and received a military education, but he came of age during the era of Great Reforms, aka “the sixties” (1855–66), which meant that the atmosphere at the Mikhailovsky Artillery Institute when he was a student there was quite liberal. Young Stepniak was a bookworm—“even when walking from one room to the next, he usually kept reading,” his school friend and fellow revolutionary Leonid Shishko recalled— and for a bookworm there was plenty to find in the institute’s library.6 Its

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shelves held works by Voltaire, Smith, Mill, Proudhon, and Darwin; the best of Russian and foreign literature past and present (e.g., Shakespeare, Schiller, and Hugo, but also Jules Verne, and the great Russian authors did not exclude the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky); as well as a plethora of historical texts such as Heinrich von Sybel’s History of the French Revolution and Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès’s History of the Revolution of 1848, plus the works of Henry Thomas Buckle, François Guizot, Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, and Kuno Fischer.7 Additionally, students at the institute read what all progressive students of the age read in journals like Sovremennik (The Contemporary), Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word), and Delo (The Affair), namely, the radical criticism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitry Pisarev.8 Bookish as he was, however, Stepniak dreamed of action. Among his schoolmates he was known for his revolutionary convictions and his acquaintance with St. Petersburg radicals, and it was Stepniak who formed a first secret circle at the institute, brought its members Bakunin’s revolutionary journal, Narodnoe Delo (The People’s Cause), and lectured to them about the “inevitability” of Russia’s revolutionary future.9 Importantly, based on his belief that the French Revolution had been run by a “very small circle of people,” Stepniak’s revolutionary ideas centered on individual initiative, energy, and heroism; what mattered to him was achieving a “personal revolutionary feat [podvig].”10 It was precisely such ideas that Russian Marxists and Soviet historians would later condemn for their incorrect understanding of the role of the individual in history, slapping onto those who held them labels of “romanticism,” “utopianism,” “voluntarism,” and “individualism” (alongside “adventurism”).11 In his late teens, Stepniak joined what historians see as the most important revolutionary group of the early 1870s, the Chaikovsky Circle, and became a propagandist, a role for which he prepared himself by mimicking the rigorous lifestyle of Rakhmetov, the conspiratorial hero of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, What Is to Be Done?12 Then, to escape the mass arrests with which the autocracy countered the “going to the people” movement, Stepniak left for Western Europe, arriving just in time to participate in uprisings in the Balkans, against the Ottomans, and in Italy, side by side with anarchists Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero. Following Vera Zasulich’s sensational shooting of St. Petersburg governorgeneral Fedor Fedorovich Trepov in early 1878, Stepniak returned to Russia, joined the revolutionary organization Zemlia i Volia (Land and Freedom)— the precursor to the world’s first official terrorist organization, Narodnaia Volia (The People’s Will)—and then assassinated the chief of the gendarmerie and the Third Section in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Vladimirovich Mezentsov. Stepniak committed this act with a real sense of drama—he stabbed his victim in broad daylight with a Caucasian kinzhal (dagger), then made his getaway in a

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carriage drawn by the racing champion Varvar—and it produced a sensation. But the real reason why this assassination matters in terms of the history of terrorism is that, occurring as it did half a year after Zasulich’s shooting, it was Stepniak’s act that serialized political assassination: henceforth, as he explained in a pamphlet entitled “Smert’ za smert’” (A Death for a Death), revolutionaries would pay the autocracy back tit-for-tat for its repressive violence.13 As such, it was with Stepniak’s assassination that revolutionary terrorism as a systematic praxis came into existence. After the assassination, Stepniak left again for Western Europe and, exchanging his sword for a pen, devoted himself to the promotion of the Russian revolutionary cause. His most important work—still crucial for scholars interested in understanding the revolutionary community of the 1860s–80s—is a biography of the revolutionary movement called Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (originally published in Italian as La Rossia Sotterranea: Profili e bozzetti rivoluzionari in 1882).14 It contains a few historical essays, including one on “The Terrorism,” recollections about his comrades, and “revolutionary sketches” about life lived underground. Stepniak also wrote a novel that is equally revealing of revolutionary life though much less well-known: The Career of a Nihilist (originally published in English in 1890).15 The plot of this novel is simple. Andrei, roughly twenty-seven years old and with an enviable revolutionary reputation, is called to return to Russian revolutionary life after three years of boredom and inactivity in Switzerland. Back in Russia, he twice leads a very daring effort to break a group of fellow revolutionaries out of jail, but he fails both times, and consequently his friends are hanged. He then decides to avenge their deaths by assassinating the tsar, but he fails again, is arrested, and then executed. Throughout all this, Andrei falls in love with Tatiana, and Tatiana with Andrei, but ultimately their love is sacrificed for the cause: she sends him off to kill the tsar “like the Circassian maid arming her lover to the battle.”16 In support of its argument, this chapter will principally refer to these two works, but because the nonfiction Underground Russia is quite novelistic, and the fictional Career of a Nihilist is rather autobiographical, the two might well be characterized as Stepniak’s collected memoirs, and the chapter will not distinguish between them very much.17 Adventures Underground: The Writings of Stepniak Based on Stepniak’s writings, it may be surmised that life underground during the 1870s included the following features: letters written in code and invisible ink; signals, ciphers, and disguises; fake passports, bribed guards, and secret border crossings; armies of spies, chase scenes around the streets of the empire’s

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major cities, prison breaks, and, of course, terrorist attacks. These elements gave the revolutionary community a conspicuous existence, an existence lined with a little bit of extra meaning, with meaningfulness, in effect: theirs were lives lived less ordinary, freed from trappings of the prosaic everyday. In The Career of a Nihilist, for example, when Tatiana is given her first assignment—to warn her illegal friends that her father’s apartment has fallen under the suspicion of the police—she beams with excitement and pride because “something valuable had been added” to her life.18 Life underground was more intense, more immediate, less mediated: Andrei attributes revolutionaries’ habit of speaking frankly, especially between the sexes, to the fact that everyone knows there is not much time: illegals, he quips, manage to survive for two years at most. Being initiated into and living this life was an erotically charged experience. In The Career of a Nihilist, Tatiana’s first job as a propagandist is dubbed her “honeymoon.”19 Real revolutionaries in Underground Russia, meanwhile, are described as having “superhuman” or “indomitable energy,” being “full of fire, enthusiasm, and ardour,” and as committing acts that are “daring” and “bold.”20 But nothing makes the appeal of the revolutionary terrorist lifestyle as obvious as Stepniak’s description of Valerian Osinskii (1852–79): “He loved danger. The struggle inflamed him with its feverish excitement. He loved glory. He loved women—and was loved in return.”21 Of course, no self-respecting terrorist—however enthralled by the revolutionary adventure—ever openly identified as an adventurer. True, in the early part of The Career of a Nihilist Andrei is said to be extremely excited to return home, both because he is eager to “place his life in peril for his Russian soil” and because “of old he had been particularly fond of being thrown into entirely new places [and he] felt reviving in him the lust for struggle and for danger.”22 On the other hand, he is also immediately established as not too much of an adventurist: the night before leaving, he takes a solitary walk through the Swiss Alps and is tempted by the “dare-devil spirit within him” to make some dangerous leap across the mountains, but then checks himself: “No, it would not do for him to be careless now.”23 (Later in the novel, however, these mountaineering skills are rather ridiculously said to come in handy when Andrei is outrunning policemen down the staircase of a multistoried apartment building.) Indeed, the narrator consistently casts Andrei in the role of the voice of reason, someone who says, “Caution never does harm,” or who spends an evening calming down a group of “hotheads” who in a fit of rage might have recklessly risked their own lives.24 In general, we learn, the best revolutionaries combine hot and cold, fiery enthusiasm and cool practical judgment. But Stepniak does protest too much—as did all revolutionaries of this era in their writings—and, anyway, in spite of all this reasonableness, the spirit of adventure and romance irrepressibly moves through the lives of these terrorists.

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First, the narrator repeatedly refers to the things that happen to the revolutionary band as “adventures”; whenever something revolutionary is about to happen, “a vague atmosphere of excitement and danger spread all around”; and on several occasions, his main character suddenly throws caution to the wind: “Confound these precautions!” he’ll say.25 Second, the glamour of the underground clearly elevates revolutionary men above the rest: for Tatiana, George—her love interest before Andrei—is “not of the common herd” and has “the halo of a fearless knight.”26 Finally, there is palpable pleasure whenever Stepniak describes revolutionary accoutrements such as “the dagger and loaded revolver [Andrei] always had on him.”27 This revolutionary life exuded serious allure. None of this is to deny that their lives were also heavy and often tragic. Revolutionary terrorists suffered loss of life and freedom, sometimes their own, sometimes loved ones’: Stepniak speaks of the “daily torture of a Russian revolutionist, who, parting with friends or his wife for half an hour, is not sure that he will ever see them again.”28 Revolutionaries also had to spend long periods of time living in “quarantine,” as they called it, meaning they could not go out for walks, or if they did, then not with friends, or not while wearing whatever they wanted (in The Career of a Nihilist, one terrorist has a pair of rose-colored trousers that were too provocative to don outside, but he keeps them on display in his room), etc.29 Still, the experience of terrorism was not quite as desperate as it has sometimes been said to be—or not only, in any case. Writes Stepniak in Underground Russia: All carried daggers in their belts, and loaded revolvers, and were ready in case of a surprise, to defend themselves to the last drop of their blood. But always accustomed to live beneath the sword of Damocles, they at last gave not the slightest heed to it. It was, perhaps, this very danger [that] rendered [their] merriment more unrestrained.30

So, there was also fun: The Career of a Nihilist contains a picnic episode referred to as a “merry gathering” that included activities like jumping over fires and group singing.31 And then of course there was love, and this love was epic; witness Tatiana’s exclamations about Andrei: “Yes, here he was, her beloved, her hero, the most valiant of the valiant, returned from overwhelming perils that he had encountered for the sake of their common cause.”32 The dangers of the terrorist praxis could be devastating to both body and mind, but because these challenges heightened the revolutionaries’ sense of historicity, they also injected their lives with a hyperconscious intensity that made life worth living. Comparing Stepniak’s writings with other revolutionary memoirs written during the same era suggests that his adventurous representations are reflective of his community’s shared sense of reality. To conclude this section, just a

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few examples taken from these memoirs will prove this point. Probably everyone familiar with Russian history knows that the relationship between Andrei Zheliabov and Sophia Perovskaia—members of Narodnaia Volia who were executed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881—was one of the century’s great revolutionary romances. But it is rarely noted that Perovskaia’s earlier relationship with Lev Tikhomirov was “one of the many prison romances” of the 1870s.33 Or that among the members of Narodnaia Volia, Timothy Mikhailov loved Anna Korba, everyone else Vera Figner, and Vera herself, Alexander Kviatkovskii.34 Or that Leon Mirskii shot at General Drentel’n to impress Vivien de Chateaubriand, who had fallen for Stepniak after he had stabbed General Mezentsov, which was in fact also the reason that Fanny Lichkus finally agreed to marry him.35 “If they arrest you, I will run and tell them to arrest me, too!” Olga Liubatovich tells Nikolai Morozov, who then swears that if it is she who is arrested first, he will save her for sure.36 Beyond despair over the politics of the autocracy, romance and adventure, too, were reasons for revolutionaries’ commitment to the terrorist cause. Literary Sources of Adventure The idea that terrorism was an adventure goes unacknowledged in the historiography, which captures the lifestyle of the revolutionary community of the 1860s–80s with terms like “self-sacrifice,” “asceticism,” and “discipline.” This idea of a “pure” revolutionary community is partially based on the writings of the revolutionaries themselves, who, in order to compensate for their political violence, created an image of themselves as incorruptibles.37 Stepniak’s own writings, especially Underground Russia, played a major role in this process. That having been said, these writings, as some of the above examples from Stepniak’s texts have hopefully shown, are not in fact uniform in their representation of revolutionary life; they just tend to be read in a uniform manner. Specifically, they are read through a peculiar understanding of what scholars have long known to have been the ultimate source for revolutionary group identity: Chernyshevsky’s hugely influential What Is to Be Done? It was Chernyshevsky’s novel that first provided the reading public of young radicals with a blueprint for a revolutionary lifestyle. “No novel of Turgenev and no writings of Tolstoy or any other writer have ever had such a wide and deep influence upon Russian youth as Chernyshevsky’s novel had,” wrote Petr Kropotkin.38 For example, by narrating the travails of its heroine, Vera Pavlovna, the novel instructs readers on how to escape arranged marriages, set up cooperative business ventures, love “rationally,” and so forth. Importantly, however, What Is to Be Done? also includes a section that, through the character

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Rakhmetov, explains in precise details how one can become a revolutionary conspirator. Rakhmetov, in order to become what Chernyshevsky calls “an extraordinary man,” sheds his aristocratic heritage as well as his vast riches and adopts a lifestyle that wins him the nickname “the rigorist”: no romantic relations, a very restricted diet, a rigid regime of physical exercise, and only “fundamental” books, because everything else is “a terrible waste of time.”39 This fool for the revolution, Rakhmetov, became a massive inspiration for nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin, who raved that “[u]nder his [Chernyshevsky’s] influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries.”40 Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian populism, likewise noted the influence of the novel on the formation of radicals: “The young Russians who have come on the scene since 1862 [sic] are almost all derived from Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?”41 The mimetic trend, in fact, was so pronounced that Dostoevsky satirized it in Notes from Underground (1864), whose narrator morphs into a modern Don Quixote the more vigorously he attempts to live life according to the revolutionary philosophy spelled out in What Is to Be Done? In terms of the history of revolutionary terrorism, the student circle that produced Russia’s first would-be tsaricide, Dmitry Karakozov, worshipped Chernyshevsky, and its members modeled their lives on his literature.42 After Karakozov’s attempted assassination of Alexander II in 1866, one of the group’s more distant acquaintances quipped, “[The assassin] was probably a lunatic wanting to take up the role of Rakhmetov from the novel What Is to Be Done?”43 Stepniak, too, as already noted above, mimicked Rakhmetov in order to prepare himself for his role as a propagandist. In sum, the idea of a community of revolutionary “rigorists” has its roots in reality, but this reality was itself rooted in literature, as well as in the peculiar propensity of the nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia to live life like literature. Source studies have excavated the inspirations for What Is to Be Done? Thus, Rakhmetov “the rigorist,” it turns out, was modeled on a legendary revolutionary sympathizer by the name of Pavel Bakhmetev, as well as on an Orthodox hagiography entitled The Life of Aleksei, Man of God.44 As I have argued elsewhere, however, it is crucial to note that the other major source for Rakhmetov was the legion of incognito avenger-adventurers that populated early nineteenthcentury literature, proto-Batman types like Prince Rudolph in Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1842–43).45 As such, whenever it is argued that the real-life radicals mimicked Rakhmetov, we should remember that they were not only imitating a revolutionary saint, but also a dandy-aristocrat playing a conspiratorial vigilante—which was probably much more fun. We should remember this when we come across the dubious escapades of the revolutionaries of the 1860s, such as Ishutin’s talk of mysterious “affairs” or secret meetings with “a

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certain someone” or, more famously, Sergei Nechaev faking his own arrest and escape from the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress and Bakunin fabricating the Alliance Révolutionaire Européene and the World Revolutionary Union, replete with a Comité Général and membership cards.46 Such charades gained a bad reputation, especially because they seemed linked to Nechaev’s violence, but it should be acknowledged that there is also an element of play, pleasure, and adventure involved in this phenomenon, and this element was certainly still present when the “season of terror” opened in the late 1870s. Highlighting the adventurous, rather than the rigorist, layer of What Is to Be Done? also matches much better the other books on terrorists’ reading list, which did not include any religious writings (not past childhood, in any case) or, for that matter, very many classics of political theory (not in the late 1870s, in any case). Of course, all mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries always claimed to have read Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev, and it is true that the Chaikovsky Circle was very serious about the hardy fare it distributed as part of its “cause of the book” (knizhnoe delo).47 That having been said, combing the revolutionary record for evidence of reading habits actually uncovers some rather surprising titles in the terrorist library: not Hegel (whose works were literally read to shreds by the classical intelligentsia of the 1840s), Marx (whom few radicals read until the 1880s, even if Stepniak and the Chaikovsky Circle had read Capital), or even Bakunin (more widely read than Hegel and Marx in the 1870s), but rather Sir Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, Mayne Reid, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.48 Terrorists thus read adventure and sensation fiction or, as Stepniak put it in an autobiographical moment, “French novels.”49 At this point, it is still difficult to make more than a tenuous argument about the influence of this fiction, for with but a few exceptions it is not known precisely which novels the terrorists read.50 Mostly, the sources only yield references to authors, so it is at best possible to ascertain, based on publishing histories, which books they could have read.51 Nevertheless, there are at least indications of the ways the terrorists placed this literature over their own lives as an interpretive grid. To give just one example, in Stepniak’s Underground Russia, a terrorist with perfect knowledge of St. Petersburg’s topography as well as its spies is described as “one of Cooper’s Red Skins.”52 Stepniak had thus adopted the nineteenth-century habit of transposing the adventures of the American frontier onto the European urban centers, such as in the elder Alexandre Dumas’s The Mohicans of Paris (1854). In any event, though the historiography suggests that by the 1860s historical adventures had waned in popularity—for example, in the 1860s, Pisarev declared historical novels “one of the most useless and unattractive forms of literature,” and in 1880 Dostoevsky asserted that Sir Walter Scott, whom he loved, had been “completely

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forgotten by us Russians”—revolutionaries, apparently, were still reading such fiction and allowing its adventurous motifs to infuse their own lives.53 This relationship between revolutionary life and its literature probably involved less “rigorism” than is usually supposed, less Imitatio Christi than an extension of child’s play into adulthood. As such, emotionally as well as ethically, the “adventures in terrorism” of the mid- to late nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary community were perhaps less driven by a semisecularized tendency toward self-sacrifice than that they expressed the survival of a romantic(ist) desire to dwell in a reenchanted world. Notes 1. Marcus Aurelius, ed. and trans. by C. R. Haines (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), p. 89. 2. For their helpful comments on this essay, I would like to thank the fellows of the 2012– 13 Society for the Humanities at Cornell and the participants of the “Terrorism and the Literary Imagination” conference held in Uppsala, Sweden, in September 2012. 3. See, e.g., V. I. Lenin, “Revolutionary Adventurism,” Collected Works (Moscow, 1964), 6:186–207; V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1959), 6:377–98. Originally published in Iskra, no. 23 (1 August 1902), and no. 24 (1 September 1902). For a discussion of the “self-sacrificing” terrorists in the historiography, see below. 4. For a discussion of the image of the Russian revolutionary terrorist in these works, see Claudia Verhoeven, “Oh, Times, There Is No Time (But the Time that Remains): The Terrorist in Russian Literature, 1863–1913,” Terrorism and Narrative Practice, ed. Thomas Austenfeld, Dimiter Daphinoff, and Jens Herlth (Münster, 2011), 117–35. 5. See Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (London, 2001), 474. Originally published in 1952 as Il popolismo russo. The most complete biography of Stepniak is Evgeniia Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: Revoliutsioner i pisatel’ (Moscow, 1973). See also T. P. Maevskaia, Slovo i podvig: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo S. M. StepniakaKravchinskogo (Kiev, 1968); James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford, 1970), 29–52; Donald Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: The London Years (Newtonville, Mass., 1987). 6. Leonid Shishko, Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii i kruzhok Chaikovtsev: Iz vospominaniia i zametok starogo narodnika (St. Petersburg, 1906), 5. 7. For information on the Institute’s library, see Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 20–21. 8. For example, Shishko writes that he first began to think about “social questions” after coming across Pisarev’s writings. Shishko, Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii, 4. 9. Ibid., 5–6. 10. Ibid., 8–9 and 11. 11. See, e.g., Lev Trotsky, “The Dress Rehearsal of 1905” and “The Incompatibility of Marxism and Terrorism,” http://www.sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/liqa/liqamcebie. html (accessed 22 October 2012). With respect to Stepniak specifically, see Maevskaia,

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Slovo i podvig, 6, 64, as well as the early twentieth-century memoir by Stepniak’s fellow revolutionary, Lev Deich, S. M. Kravchinskii (Moscow, 1919), 21. 12. Shishko, Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii, 34. 13. S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, “Smert’ za smert’,” Grozovaia tucha Rossii (Moscow, 2001), 13–22. 14. Stepniak’s other historical works include Russia Under the Tzars (1885), The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life and Religion (1888), and King Stork and King Log: A Study of Modern Russia (1896). 15. Stepniak [S. M. Kravchinsky], The Career of a Nihilist (New York, 1899). Stepniak’s other works of fiction include The Little House on the Volga (1890), The New Convert (1894), and Stundist Pavel Rudenko (poshumously published in 1900). 16. Stepniak, The Career of a Nihilist, 211. 17. For some of the literary and cultural conventions of Underground Russia, see Lynn Patyk, “Remembering ‘The Terrorism’: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s Underground Russia,” Slavic Review 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 758–81; on the prototypes of The Career of a Nihilist’s characters and the facts behind its fiction, see Maevskaia, Podvig i slovo, 167–68. 18. Stepniak, The Career of a Nihilist, 90. 19. Ibid., 191. 20. Stepniak [S. M. Kravchinsky], Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (New York, 1883), 42, 55, 96, 33, 41, 39, respectively. 21. Ibid., 81. 22. Stepniak, The Career of a Nihilist, 17. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Ibid., 36. 25. Ibid., 100, 180, 285, 291, 150, respectively. 26. Ibid., 60. 27. Ibid., 71. 28. Ibid., 54. 29. Ibid., 71, 133. 30. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 74. 31. Stepniak, The Career of a Nihilist, 139. 32. Ibid., 283. 33. Lev Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2003), 136. For prison romances, see also The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution. Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky, ed. Alice Stone Blackwell (Boston, 1919), 84. 34. G. S. Kan, “Narodnaia Volia”: Ideologiia i lidery (Moscow, 1997), 80; N. A. Morozov, Povesti moei zhizni: Memuary (Moscow, 1961), 2:193, 229, 246; David Footman, The Alexander Conspiracy: A Life of A. I. Zhelyabov (LaSalle, 1968), 169. 35. See Morozov, Povesti, 2:377, 333. 36. Ibid., 2:337. 37. See, e.g., Vera Figner, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh: Tom pervyi. Zapechatlennyi trud. Chast’ pervaia (Moscow, 1932), 171–72, 251–53. 38. Prince Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature (New York, 1915), 281; Petr Kropotkin, Anarkhiia, ee filosofiia, ee ideal (Moscow, 1999), 548. 39. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael Katz and William Wagner (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 282.

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40. Cited in Katz and Wagner’s introduction to Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 32. Scholarship has remained undivided in its agreement with Lenin’s assessment. See Katz and Wagner’s introduction to Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 21; Joseph Frank, “N. G. Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia,” Southern Review 3, no. 1 (1967): 83; Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 51; Avrahm Yarmolinksy, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (New York, 1962), 120. 41. Alexander Herzen, “Bazarov Once More” (1868), in My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 631. 42. See Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 31–35; Joseph Frank, “N. G. Chernyshevsky,” 83; Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Palo Alto, CA, 1988), 29. 43. F. I. Shcherbakova, “Roman N. G. Chernyshevskogo Chto delat’? V vospriiatii radikal’noi molodezhi serediny 60-kh godov XIX v,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 8 (Istoriia), no. 1 (1998): 68, citing GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossisskoi federatsii, State Archive of the Russian Federation) f. 272, op. 1, d. 16, l. 432. 44. See Katz and Wagner’s introduction to Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 28. 45. See Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 53–57. 46. On Ishutin’s “mystification,” see Shcherbakova, “Roman,” 64; On Nechaev, see Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 363, 370, 379. 47. Just one typical example: while a student at the gymnasium, narodovolets Lev Tikhomirov’s favorite author was Pisarev, and he referred to François-Auguste Mignet, Thomas Carlyle, Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky, and Pisarev as “everything that we read and heard.” Lev Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2003), 61, 63. As for the Chaikovsky Circle’s book list, Tikhomirov recalled “countless translations” of Lassalle, Marx, and Louis Blanc, while Shishko’s list includes—in addition to Russian historians like Kostomarov, Shchapov, and Mordovtsev—Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, Nekrasov, Buckle, Mill, Darwin, Spencer, Lavrov, Bervi-Florevsky, Marx, and Blanc. See Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 87; Shishko, Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii, 18. 48. A. Voronskii, Zheliabov (Moscow, 1934), 263; Footman, The Alexander Conspiracy, 27, 205; Stepniak, Underground Russia, 170; Morozov, Povesti, 2:98. 49. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 71. 50. Nikolai Morozov wrote that Bret Harte’s Gold Rush saved him from losing his mind in prison; Morozov, Povesti, 2:98. Narodnaia Volia bomb expert Nikolai Kibalchich, according to a childhood friend, read Gogol and Pushkin, and then moved on, “with absorbing interests,” to Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, then Cervantes and Dickens (Pickwick Club and David Copperfield), and only then to Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and Chernyshevsky; Voronskii, Zheliabov, 262–63. Footman notes that when the flat occupied by Zheliabov and Perovskaia was raided, the police found “three or four books, novels. One was the recent Russian translation of Lost for Love by Miss Braddon”; Footman, The Alexander Conspiracy, 205. 51. Sir Walter Scott’s works appeared in Russian in the 1820s—Ivanhoe (1826), Quentin Durward (1827), Rob Roy (1829), and so forth—and remained in print ever after. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels were also translated starting in the 1820s, and in the mid-1860s Sochineniia Fenimore Kupera (The Works of Fenimore Cooper) was

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published as a multivolume set that included all of his best-known novels, for example, The Last of the Mohicans (1865), Pathfinder (1865), The Pioneers (1865), and The Praire (1866). (Captain) Mayne Reid’s novels were translated during the 1860s and 1870s, and in the late 1860s there appeared a six-volume set under the title New Works by Main Reid, the third volume of which contained the novel The War Trail, rendered into Russian as Amerikanskie partizanyi (American Partisans) (1873). (Francis) Bret Harte, another pioneer novelist, saw two collections of his stories published in the mid-1870s. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels were translated in the 1860s and 1870s, Lost for Love appearing in Russian in 1875. Jules Verne’s works likewise were translated during the 1860s and 1870s, for example, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in 80 Days (1875), and Mysterious Island (1875). 52. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 170. 53. Cited in Mark G. Altshuller, “The Rise and Fall of Walter Scott’s Popularity in Russia,” in The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, ed. Murray Pittock (London and New York, 2006), 223, 230.

CHAPTER 13

12

Power in Truth Telling Jewish Testimonial Strategies before the Shoah ALEXANDRA GARBARINI

I

n Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany, David Warren Sabean offers a mode of reading as much as an interpretation of early modern German peasant culture. “Inside a village,” Sabean instructs, “the way in which relations are perceived and constructed are close to practice, and certain key terms are constantly reiterated. These concepts and terms are what we are looking for. We also want to use villagers’ conceptions to refine our own and to subject them to criticism.”1 With Sabean as our guide, a text becomes a village, alien chatter, articulate expression. The narratives, concepts, and metaphors that in their repetition in the testimonies he analyzes might have appeared trivial or obfuscatory instead pop to attention. Thanks to Sabean’s artistry, they become the keys for opening up peasant understandings of community. And Sabean’s approach to testimonies becomes the inspiration for further explorations, for readings of testimonies produced in other historical contexts with their own concepts and terms very much in need of close analysis. My work on the Holocaust and its antecedents, with its particular focus on Jewish diary writing and related testimonial responses, is far removed from Sabean’s work on kinship and community in early modern Germany. The distance between my area of interest and Sabean’s is also seemingly manifest at the level of the types of human experiences we respectively analyze: the exceptional as distinct from the ordinary, violent ruptures to the everyday versus the constitution, reproduction, and transformation of social and cultural norms. And yet enumerating our differences draws attention away from what I learned from David Warren Sabean, which is what matters most. Sabean taught me how to read sources, and how to enter into conversation with a text. He revealed to me

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what it means to have a deep and abiding respect for the past and for the people who once lived and loved and believed and suffered. His curiosity in coming to understand those people and his openness to learning from them have fundamentally shaped my approach to history. I have tried to understand how people coped with and responded to horrific circumstances in which they became the victims of mass violence, ever mindful of Sabean’s mode of engaging with the “pastness” of the past coupled with his faith that the past can be comprehended if approached with respectful open-mindedness. The testimonies I consider here—narratives produced during and after the wave of pogroms that devastated Ukrainian Jews between the years 1918 and 1921—call for the kind of “strong analytical questions” that Sabean’s work performs and inspires.2 Until recently, these pogrom accounts appear to have provoked tedium more than curiosity on the part of scholars.3 By shifting our expectations about the content and form of pogrom narratives, by relating these narratives to new and different contexts, it becomes possible to gain fresh insight from their oft-repeated concepts and the documentation strategies they constituted. In particular, contemporaries’ repeated insistence on the “unimaginable” horrors of this particular wave of pogroms and the “believable” nature of the evidence they were collecting and publishing present figures of speech to be analyzed rather than literal language to be taken at face value. Indeed, analyzing how Ukrainian pogroms were constructed at the time, as well as the status of the witness and testimony, reveals the emergence of a different understanding of atrocity in this period. The strategies and concepts people employed in responding to the Ukrainian pogroms shed light on interwar European conceptualizations of justice, truth, history, and public opinion more broadly. What is more, those conceptualizations continued to shape the meaning of atrocity for at least a generation and became especially apparent in Jewish responses to the Holocaust. As such, we are reminded that bearing witness to mass atrocities and the horrors of war did not originate with the Shoah and World War II.4 A microhistorical reading of Russian Civil War–era pogrom documentation may even have the potential to alter or suggest a rethinking of the narrative of the Shoah as unimaginable and unprecedented. The Ukrainian pogroms of 1918–21 have been largely eclipsed in popular and scholarly consciousness by the Holocaust. The pogroms of this period changed the meaning of the word for contemporaries and subsequently for historians, for the level of violence and murderousness far exceeded that of previous pogroms. Prior to the Russian Civil War, pogroms had involved large-scale destruction of Jewish property, had resulted in deaths numbering in the tens or hundreds, and had been geographically concentrated in towns or cities.5 By contrast, the death toll from the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918–21 numbered in the tens of thousands, and the overall incidence of pogroms reached upward of

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thirteen hundred in predominantly village settings.6 Indeed, as a result of these incidents, “pogrom” became more closely associated with a “massacre” than with the anti-Jewish disorders of the 1881–1906 period.7 Articles published in French periodicals describing the experiences of Ukrainian Jews sometimes set off the word “pogrom” in quotation marks as a way of indicating the mismatch between the events being described and the general understanding of the word’s meaning from prior historical usage.8 Similarly, a report of the Russian Red Cross in the Kiev region asserted: Before the most recent wave, pogroms typically took the form of the destruction of all Jewish property: houses, furniture, dishes, clothing were all demolished, feathers scattered in the wind. This was accompanied by robbery, rape, assault, sometimes murder and—in rare cases—torture. The current epidemic of pogroms is to be distinguished from the preceding ones, first for its never-ending duration (close to nine consecutive months), then for its absolutely exceptional refinement of cruelty, without speaking of the pillage that has rendered victims absolutely destitute.9

Most historians also place emphasis on the different character of the Civil War–era pogroms in relation to earlier pogroms carried out in the Russian Empire. In his authoritative treatment of the subject, Russian historian Oleg Budnitskii echoes the Red Cross report from 1920, insisting that “[t]he pogroms that occurred during the Civil War were unprecedented in terms of their cruelty and scale.”10 As far-reaching, murderous, and destructive as these pogroms were, what is striking is how much skepticism appears to have greeted news of the pogroms in the West. In 1919, when news first hit, the Western public did not seem willing or able to absorb news of the extent and violence of the atrocities. Indeed, rather than focusing on the history of the pogroms, this article takes as its focus the responses to the pogroms in various guises. What is perhaps most significant are the documentary projects to counter outsiders’ skepticism, which were pursued by Jews in the Ukraine and by those outside the Ukraine who were sympathetic to their suffering. Moreover, in Western Europe and the United States, writers and speakers developed specific rhetorical strategies that they employed in different settings—in the press, at political rallies, in a Parisian courtroom—to construct what they regarded as believable narratives about the pogroms. Documenting these atrocities and using that documentation to increase Western European and American public awareness of Ukrainian Jews’ plight took several forms. First, there were organized documentation efforts. As early as 1918, Kiev’s Jewish community established a commission whose mandate included furnishing juridical, administrative, and financial assistance to victims

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of the pogroms. Toward that end, it collected eyewitness accounts and other documentation about the pogroms, including newspaper clippings, lists of victims’ names, information about Jewish self-defense committees, and the names of persons responsible for carrying out the pogroms in various locales. In 1920 that commission expanded the sweep of its operations, becoming the All-Ukrainian Central Relief Committee for the Victims of the Pogroms, with separate committees responsible for assisting victims in the regions of Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov. After 1921, the Central Relief Committee focused on providing for the care and education of tens of thousands of Jewish orphans left by the pogroms, as well as assisting the many Ukrainian Jews suffering from homelessness, destitution, and physical and psychological ailments as a result of the pogroms. Although the committee was dissolved in 1924, the extensive documentation it amassed became incorporated in the State Archives in Ukraine. A second, independent documentation effort that prominently featured eyewitness testimonies was initiated during the years of the pogroms. This was the work of Elias (Eliyohu) Tcherikower, a self-trained historian and later cofounder of the YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) and head of its historical section.11 During the years of the Ukrainian pogroms, Tcherikower worked with several associates, including the preeminent Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, to collect thousands of pages of eyewitness reports, newspaper clippings, lists of pogrom victims, and official documents from the Ministry of Jewish Affairs under the short-lived Ukrainian nationalist government, the Directory. By 1921, Tcherikower had emigrated to Berlin, carrying his massive collection of papers with him. He formally constituted his trove of documents as the Eastern Jewish Historical Archive (Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv [Ostjuedisches Historisches Archiv]) while living in Berlin. After 1933, Tcherikower lugged the pogrom materials still further west, to Paris, where he and his wife, Riva, resettled. During the war years, the Tcherikowers and the archive reached New York safely.12 It bears mentioning that Tcherikower’s archival activism was a direct influence on Emanuel Ringelblum, the Polish Jewish historian best known for his central role in the creation of the Warsaw ghetto underground archive, Oyneg Shabes, during the Nazi occupation.13 Tcherikower and the Central Relief Committee’s archival efforts reflected their ideas about documentary evidence. Collecting documents was both an end and a means. Creating a repository of evidence reflected their commitment to Jewish historical scholarship. But that repository also served a key function in their broader efforts to assist pogrom victims and to bring those responsible for the pogroms to justice. Toward that end, Tcherikower, Elias Heifets, who was chairman of the Central Relief Committee, and others associated with them put the archives to immediate use. They redacted and published more than a

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dozen volumes of documents and accounts of the pogroms in an effort to gain the attention and sympathy of Western Europeans and Americans. These published document collections came out in two waves. The first, between 1919 and 1923, were published in Yiddish, English, Russian, German, and Polish, in Berlin, Vienna, Vilna, Krakow, Petrograd, London, New York, Washington DC, and Jersey City.14 During this period, Jewish activists and relief workers held out the hope that the Western powers might be able to stop the pogrom wave from continuing by applying pressure on Ukrainian and Russian leaders, to strengthen the rights of the Jewish minority in the newly established states in Eastern Europe, and to send aid in money and in kind for the victims.15 The second wave of documentation publication came in 1926 and 1927. By that time the pogroms had ceased, and Jews’ hopes had been rekindled that those responsible for the pogroms might be brought to justice thanks to the assassination in Paris of the Ukrainian nationalist leader in exile, Simon Petlyura. This sensational act of vigilantism carried out by the Ukrainian Jewish watchmaker-poet-anarchist Shalom Schwartzbard and Schwartzbard’s subsequent trial renewed and widened the French public’s awareness of the Ukrainian pogroms. One noticeable change among these publications that came out following Petlyura’s assassination in relation to the Schwartzbard trial was that now some of the volumes were published in Paris in French.16 Indeed, Tcherikower moved temporarily from Berlin to Paris to become one of the most active members of the legal defense committee for Schwartzbard, and Tcherikower’s archival collection featured prominently in developing Schwartzbard’s defense.17 Victim testimony and historical scholarship now became a way to bring the perpetrators of mass atrocity to justice.18 These published volumes of documents tried to make the pogroms believable. Indeed, the very trope of the “unimaginable,” the “unbelievable,” that we associate with the Holocaust featured repeatedly in writing about the Ukrainian pogroms. One example is the front-page editorial that the leading Jewish weekly from Alsace-Lorraine, La France Juive, ran during the week of the Schwartzbard trial. It appears to have been written by its editor, Lucien Dreyfus.19 And as an aside, as evidence of his continued commitment to bearing witness it seems relevant to note that Dreyfus later recorded a substantial diary during the years of World War II that came to a stop with his deportation to Drancy and then to Auschwitz in the fall of 1943. In Dreyfus’s editorial about “Schwartzbard and the Pogroms,” he first discussed one of the document collections that had recently been published in France. He insisted: This publication warrants the attention of all those who want to know the honest truth [vérité vraie] about the most terrible page of Jewish history. . . . The first information that the terrorized Jews imparted about the violence to which they had fallen prey or which threatened them was, in actuality, exaggerated. Then no

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one believed anything any longer. . . . Only little by little has reliable and terrifying information [informations sûres et terrifiantes] reached France. For years, Jews themselves did not want to believe in the possibility of this news; the story of the crimes was unbelievable [invraisemblable]. Is it possible to believe that events taking place in the twentieth century would exceed in horror the persecutions of the Middle Ages? But the documents were eloquent.20

Dreyfus’s repeated insistence on the reliability of the documents published about the pogroms reflects the general culture of skepticism that had developed about atrocity stories by the end of World War I. It also points to the emergence of a counterstrategy of documentation and publication that sought to convince the “tribunal of world opinion” that unimaginable atrocities had in fact occurred.21 The first step toward rendering justice of any sort consisted in establishing a credible account of the pogroms. But the evidence did not speak for itself. Experts reading documents, not documents on their own, established the truth about these pogroms. This was an antecedent to the postwar, post-Eichmann trial “era of the witness,” so named by Annette Wieviorka. The victims of the Ukrainian pogroms could not speak, either in person or in writing, in an unmediated fashion by dint of having simply “been there.” Their accounts were crucial evidence, but they needed to be vouched for and presented by “experts” recognized as having authority to speak on behalf of the victims.22 One such authority was Victor Basch, a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and vice president of the League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme). Basch spoke at a February 1920 demonstration against the pogroms organized by the League in Paris with six thousand people in attendance. This demonstration was one of several mass protest meetings against the pogroms held in cities worldwide that year, the one in New York allegedly drawing as many as three hundred thousand people. Basch sought to prove from the outset that he had investigated the “alarming matter of the pogroms . . . with the scruple of fairness and rigor.” “And this fairness came easily to me,” he added. After establishing that his audience could trust him to be impartial and well-informed, he vouched for the “atrocious narratives” related by Jewish victims of the pogroms as being “completely accurate.”23 Nevertheless, he then posed the question that he knew that many people had been asking: “If the facts alleged by Jews are accurate, weren’t they exaggerated?” And in his reply, he betrayed the unstable status of victim testimonies when he insisted: Yes, they were certainly exaggerated. It would have been impossible for them not to be, impossible that, in the midst of the mortal terror in which the Jewish population lived for years, the terror would not have increased the catastrophe which, in its forms so numerous and so terrible, had descended upon it. But on the other hand it is certain that the disaster was tremendous.24

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Basch made a case for the fundamental importance of victim testimonies in arguing that the scale of the tragedy was indisputably so enormous that it made no sense to quibble over numbers. At the same time, his defense of such testimonies unwittingly cast doubt upon them. Basch suggested that, almost by definition, victim testimonies could not be objective. Whereas his own investigation was guided by “the scruple of fairness and rigor,” he implied that the conditions that inspired victim testimonies—those of “mortal terror”—could not be expected to give rise to the same kind of truth. This tendency simultaneously to doubt and trust victims’ testimonies was most prominent in the Schwartzbard trial. Schwartzbard’s famous attorney, Henry Torrès, made the experiences of Jewish victims and the question of Simon Petlyura’s responsibility for the pogroms the trial’s central foci, despite the fact that neither was directly relevant to the determination of Schwartzbard’s guilt or innocence.25 Torrès summoned close to eighty witnesses to testify for the defense. The majority of them were called upon in their capacity as “escapees” and eyewitnesses of the pogroms. Yet Torrès ultimately decided not to bring most of the people he had summoned to the witness stand. Only two “escapees” were called to testify at the trial: a young woman who was studying medicine at the time of the pogroms and cared for pogrom victims in Proskuriv and a man who related a horrific story about finding his son’s body, abandoned on the street and partially eaten by dogs, days after one of the pogroms in Kiev.26 Torrès called no additional escapees to testify. Those whom he did examine were overwhelmingly Russian Jewish prominenti, including two wellknown Russian Jewish jurists and Tcherikower.27 Their expertise and professional social standing appeared to grant them the authority to speak in place of the actual eyewitnesses. He contended in his closing argument that he had cut short the proceedings because “I do not want to take advantage of the horror in this trial, any more than I will take advantage of the hundreds and hundreds of photographs that I have here, taken after the pogroms in Zhytomyr, Ovruch, Proskuriv. . . . I will not show them to you, I will not paint a picture of the horrors: you know them.”28 Torrès seemed to regard eyewitness testimony as an example of the law of diminishing returns. Piling on atrocity stories would not gain the jury’s sympathy, he feared, so much as make jurors more suspicious of his defense strategy and, potentially, of victims’ testimonies as a whole.29 The publicity surrounding the Schwartzbard trial meant that the pogroms that had inspired Schwartzbard’s act of vigilante justice became front-page news. When Schwartzbard was acquitted by a Parisian jury, thereby lending support to the argument that his act had been morally justified, Jewish activists on Schwartzbard’s behalf and the newspaper-reading public were left with the impression that eyewitness testimony could further the achievement of justice. Obviously, this was a paradox, because almost none of the eyewitnesses

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were actually put on the stand at the trial. In their stead, those who were expert witnesses spoke on behalf of victims and of the document collections that were published at the time of the trial by Tcherikower and his associates. Thus, the trial could also be seen as reinforcing a strategy that devalued victim testimony in favor of experts who vouched for and interpreted the testimony of the victims. In conclusion, we might return to the question of antecedents and Holocaust-era testimonial practices. The strategies of documentation, publication, and authorized readership that sought to garner European and American public sympathy for the Ukrainian pogroms comprised one set of responses to the slaughter of innocents that emerged in the years around World War I. “Bearing witness” to the pogroms entailed countering people’s sense of disbelief and insisting on the truth of events that seemed to exceed people’s imaginations at the time. Conducting research on these earlier practices and representations can contribute to bridging what historian Alon Confino recently characterized as “the daunting interpretative gap between the anti-Jewish persecution of the prewar years and the subsequent almost unimaginable total extermination.”30 Indeed, if we hope to integrate the study of the Holocaust into Jewish history and European history more broadly, then we ought to examine more carefully continuities and discontinuities from before—in addition to after—Auschwitz. The large-scale production and collection of testimonies about extreme violence and mass murder is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, one substantially amplified in recent decades, but it has roots in the interwar period, when nonstate actors attempted, in the face of inadequate legal frameworks, to bring perpetrators of anti-Jewish atrocities to justice. We need, in other words, to study the antecedents of the unprecedented. Notes 1. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), 28. For an insightful analysis of how microhistorical investigation, in changing the scope of the phenomenon before historians’ eyes, “calls attention to important aspects of human reality not captured by ‘master narratives,’ and . . . reconfigures these narratives rather than reproducing them,” see David Warren Sabean, “Reflections on Microhistory,” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Göttingen, 2006), 284. 2. Sabean, “Reflections on Microhistory,” 283. 3. Recently, scholars have shown renewed interest in pogroms and pogrom documentation, though their interests are different from mine. Articles and books from the past decade focus on one of three areas: ascertaining the facts about who perpetrated the pogroms and why (e.g., Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920, trans. Timothy J. Portice [Philadelphia, 2012]; William W. Hagen, “The

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Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in Lwow, November 1918,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 [2005]: 202–26); interpreting anew Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s poetry on the Kishinev pogrom (e.g., Alan Mintz, ed., “Kishinev in the Twentieth Century,” special issue, Prooftexts 25, nos. 1–2 [Winter/Spring 2005]: 1–164); and cataloguing pogrom documentation projects in order to explain the precursors of Holocaust-era documentation projects (e.g., Laura Jokusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe [Oxford, 2012]). 4. I am certainly not the first to make this claim. See Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2006), esp. chap. 11, 238–45; Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford, 2000); Jokusch, Collect and Record!, chap. 1; David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Palo Alto, CA, 2010), 122–27; David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1984), esp. chap. 6. 5. For example, the pogrom at Kishinev in 1903, which was famously commemorated in Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” left a death toll of fortyseven Jewish victims and four hundred and twenty-four wounded, as well as the destruction of some seven hundred houses and the plunder of six hundred shops. Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge, 1992), 200. For an astute discussion of “pogrom” as a category of mass violence, see David Engel, “What’s in a Pogrom? European Jews in an Age of Violence,” in AntiJewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, ed. Jonathan DekelChen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, 2011), 19–37. 6. Historians have been unable to determine the number of pogrom victims with any precision. Estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. According to Henry Abramson, the “most authoritative study,” published in 1928 by Nakhum Gergel, calculated the number of victims conservatively in the range of thirty thousand. Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 110. 7. Hans Rogger makes this point explicitly: “Pogrom, with its connotation of ethno-religious discord and socioeconomic tensions, was hardly an adequate description for these military actions.” His next sentence switches from the use of “pogrom” to that of “massacre.” Rogger, “Conclusion and Overview,” in Klier and Shlomo, Pogroms, 350. 8. See, for example, the unattributed article entitled “Le ‘pogrom’ de Ieletz” from the Bulletin du Comité de Secours aux Israélites Victimes des Pogromes, no. 3 (1 February 1920): 2. 9. “Extrait du rapport présenté par le Comité de Secours aux victimes des pogromes de la Croix-Rouge russe à Kief,” Bulletin du Comité de Secours aux Israélites Victimes des Pogromes, no. 4 (1 March 1920): 1. My translation. For all translations that follow, unless otherwise noted, they are my own. This French extract of the Red Cross report was likely penned by Elias Heifetz, chair of the All-Ukrainian Central Relief Committee for the Victims of Pogroms, whose work fell under the auspices of the Red Cross. Heifetz’s English-language description of what made these pogroms distinct from previous pogroms is almost identical to this French text. Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York, 1921), 2.

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10. Budnitskii, Russian Jews, 216. The history of the pogroms is extremely complex and contested. Budnitskii’s chapter 6 contains an excellent discussion of the pogroms and the debates they have engendered dating back to the era of the Russian Civil War itself. 11. Cecile Esther Kuznitz, “The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000), 98. 12. On Tcherikower’s biography as well as his conceptions of history, see Joshua M. Karlip, “Between Martyrology and Historiography: Elias Tcherikower and the Making of a Pogrom Historian,” East European Jewish Affairs 38, no. 3 (December 2008): 257–80. On Tcherikower’s work during the 1930s on Di algemeyne entsiklopedye and his eventual migration with other Yiddish scholar-activists to New York, see Barry Tractenberg, “From Edification to Commemoration: Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the Holocaust and the changing mission of Yiddish scholarship,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 3 (November 2006): 289–92. 13. Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, 2007), 148–49, 213. 14. Titles include: Elias Tcherikower, Antisemitizm un pogromen in Ukraine, 1917–1918 (Berlin, 1923); Federation of Ukrainian Jews, The Ukraine Terror and the Jewish Peril (London, 1921); Elijah Gumener, A kapitl Ukraine: tsvey yor in Podolye (Vilna, 1921); S. I. Gusev-Orenburgskii, Kniga o evreiskikho pogromakh na Ukraine v 1919 (Petrograd, 1921); Heifets, Slaughter of the Jews; Elias Heifets, Pogrom geshikhte (1919–1920) (New York, 1921); Information Bureau of the Committee for the Defense of Jews in Poland and Other East European Countries Affiliated with the American Jewish Congress, Evidence of Pogroms in Poland and Ukrainia, Documents, Accounts of Eyewitnesses, Proceedings in Polish Parliament, Local Press Reports, Etc. (New York, 1919); F. S. Krysiak, Z dni grozny w Lwowie, od 1–22 listopada 1918 r.: Kartki z pamietnika; swiadectadwa-dwody-dokumenty; pogrom zydowski we Lwowie w swietle prawdy (Krakow, 1919); A. D. Margolin, Israel Zangwill, Julian Batchinsky, and Mark Vishnitzer, The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine: Authoritative Statements on the Question of Responsibility for Recent Outbreaks against the Jews in Ukraine, Documents, Official Orders, and Other Data Bearing upon the Facts as They Exist Today (Washington DC, 1919); Joseph B. Schechtman and Tcherikower, Pogomy Dobrovol’cheskoi armii na Ukraine, Istoriia pogromnogo dvizheniia na Ukrainie, 1917–1921 (Berlin, 1923); Nahum Stiff, Pogromen in Ukraine di tsayt fun der frayviliger armey (Berlin, 1923); Joseph Tenenbaum, Der Lemberger Judenpogrom (November 1918–Janner1919) (Vienna, 1920); Isaac Unterman, Fun di shhite-shtedt, 1919–1922: Ayndrike, bilder, fakten un materyalen ( Jersey City, NJ, 1925). 15. David Engel, “Being Lawful in a Lawless World: The Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard and the Defense of East European Jews,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006): 85–92; Heifetz, Slaughter of the Jews, 1. 16. Committee of the Jewish Delegations, The Pogroms in the Ukraine under the Ukrainian Governments (1917–1920) (London, 1927); Rachel Feigenberg, A pinkes fun a toyter shtot: Hubrn-Dubove (Warsaw, 1926); Nokhum Gergel, “The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–21,” in Shriftn far Ekonomik un statistik (1928); Bernard Lecache, Ven dos Volk Yisroel shtarbt (Warsaw, 1927), and, in French, Quand Israel meurt (Paris, 1927); Z. S. Ostrovskii, Evreiskie pogromi: 1918–1921 (Moscow, 1926); Max Sadikoff, In yene teg: Zikhroynes vegen der Rusischer revolutsye un di Ukrainer pogromen (New York, 1926); Joseph Schechtman, Ver iz farantvortlikh far di pogromen in Ukrayne loyt naye

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nit farefntlikhte materyaln un dokumentn (Paris, 1927); Mark Shvidler, Jewish Pogroms, 1918–1921 (Moscow, 1926). In the same period Ukrainians who sought to defend the innocence of Petlyura published a competing volume in Paris: Comité commémoratif Simon Petlura, Documents sur les pogromes en Ukraine et l’assassinat de Simon Petlura à Paris (1917–1921–1926) (Paris, 1927). 17. Kuznitz, “The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship,” 121–22. 18. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 148–49, 213; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 175–76. 19. Though the article is unattributed, I am fairly certain that Dreyfus is the author of this piece. Dreyfus typically wrote the front-page editorial for La Tribune Juive, and the style and tone of this article matches that of others he authored on the subject of the Schwartzbard trial and the pogroms. 20. [Lucien Dreyfus], “Schwarzbart et les pogromes,” La Tribune Juive, no. 42 (21 October 1927): 633. 21. For a fascinating discussion of German and French atrocity narratives from World War I and the history of denial that developed alongside them, see John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001). Petlyura’s supporters also employed a host of denial tactics in seeking to exonerate Petlyura of responsibility for the pogroms. Reference to the state of anarchy in Ukraine worked to “contextualize” Jewish suffering during the pogroms. Seen in this context, Jews were but one population group that suffered as a result of the general violence that prevailed in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. Many Ukrainian writers and political figures also justified violence against Jews to a certain extent on the basis of alleged widespread Jewish Bolshevik connections. For example, see Alexandre Choulgine, L’Ukraine et le cauchemar rouge: Les massacres en Ukraine (Paris, 1927), 79, 86–91. 22. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY, 2006). On the issue of how some people come to have “the right to speak about the violent past” and others do not, see Jay Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2010), 6. 23. Victor Basch, “La Tragédie des Pogromes,” Les Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme, no. 7 (5 April 1920), p. 3. The number of attendees at the demonstration is given in a small piece, “Contre les Pogromes,” appearing in the same issue of Les Cahiers on page 8. 24. Basch, “La Tragédie des Pogromes,” pp. 6–7. The language of the motion passed unanimously at this meeting is also striking in this regard: Instruits par des témoignages irrécusables des atrocités (massacres de personnes, pillages des maisons, sacs des villes) qui se commettent contre les juifs, depuis novembre 1918, dans l’Europe orientale; Invitent l’opinion populaire dans tous les pays démocratiques à exiger des gouvernements toutes les mesures nécessaires pour arrêter immédiatement ces horreurs et en empêcher à jamais le retour; Et demandent: Au nom de la justice, des sanctions contre les coupables; Au nom de la pitié, des secours pour les victimes. 25. Indeed, the title of Torrès’s published account of the trial, Le procès des pogromes (The Pogroms Trial), indicates the extent to which he regarded the trial to be principally concerned with the pogroms rather than with the defendant. As Hannah Arendt pointed

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out in her analysis of the Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner’s prosecution strategy was not unlike Torrès’s defense strategy, in which he made the Holocaust—rather than the defendant—the trial’s centerpiece. Though, for Arendt, the one major difference between these two trials was that she believed justice in a larger sense was served by the Schwartzbard trial, and thus that the methods pursued by Schwartzbard and Torrès worked from the standpoint of legality and morality. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 2006), 265–67. Debates within Jewish and Ukrainian circles over the significance of Schwartzbard’s act remain fierce up to the present day. In Jewish memory, Schwartzbard’s story continues to be one of heroic Jewish self-defense in response to anti-Semitic violence; and in Ukrainian memory, Petlyura has long been regarded as a martyr and national hero whose murder by Schwartzbard only confirmed Ukrainian suspicion of Jewish pro-Russian sympathies. On the extent to which Torrès’s representation of the pogroms in the Schwartzbard trial and the subsequent verdict has dominated the writing of the pogroms’ history, see Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 176–78. 26. In different newspapers, slightly different versions of these testimonies are quoted. See, for example, “Le verdict d’acquittement,” La Tribune Juive, no. 44 (4 November 1927): 667–68; Claire Gonon, “La défense et la partie civile ont renoncé à l’audition des témoins restant à entendre,” Le Quotidien, 25 October 1927, p. 2; “Schwartzbard devant les assises; Me Torrès renonce à l’audition des témoins de la défense,” L’Oeuvre, 26 October 1927, pp. 1–2. 27. Thus, Torrès called upon Tcherikower; Moïse Goldstein, the prominent Russian Jewish lawyer and head of the committee in Kiev charged with investigating the pogroms; Henry Sliosberg, an esteemed Petrograd jurist, former president of the Jewish community of Petrograd, and at the time of the pogroms, the president of the Central Relief Committee for pogrom victims; Ruben Grinberg, who was in charge of distributing aid for the French Red Cross to pogrom victims in Ukraine; Leo Motzkin, Zionist leader and executive secretary of the Comité des délégations juives (Committee of Jewish Delegations); and Paul Langevin, professor at the Collège de France and vice president of the League of the Rights of Man. 28. Henry Torrès, Le Procès des Pogromes (Paris, 1928), 23–24. 29. It bears mentioning how rather odd it was that the French public appeared to be staunchly pro-Schwartzbard and convinced of Petlyura’s responsibility for the pogroms. Considering the prevalence of anti-Soviet, anti-Jewish sentiments and the widespread belief that Russian Jews were complicit in Bolshevism, why did this political assassination and the story of the pogroms to which Schwartzbard’s act of vigilante justice and subsequent trial gave rise, fall on such sympathetic ears? 30. Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust,” German History 27, no. 4 (2009): 558.

PART III

12 Self

CHAPTER 14

12

For the Love of Geometry The Rise of Euclidism in the Early Modern World, 1450–1850 MICHAEL J. SAUTER

[Thomas Hobbes] was forty years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ’twas the forty-seventh proposition in the first book. He read the proposition. “By G——+,” said he, “this is impossible!” So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proof; which referred him back to another, which he also read. And so forth, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of the truth. This made him in love with geometry. —John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1696)1

T

he intellectual history of early modern Europe is replete with classical “-isms.” An assortment of scholars have explored the conflicts between the Aristotelianism that emerged dominant—albeit weakened—from the Middle Ages and insurgent systems, such as Epicureanism (also called Atomism), Platonism, Skepticism, and Stoicism, that undermined it.2 Yet, amid the contemporary discussion of the resulting battles, the influence on early modern thought of Euclidism has been overlooked. Rooted primarily in the encounter with the spatial works of Euclid of Alexandria (fl. 300 bce), Euclidism is a culture of projecting and manipulating homogeneous space that flourished between 1450 and 1850. Not all of the spatial texts involved were by Euclid, but the most prominent among them were—and no text saturated the educational system as thoroughly as did the Elements. The republication, beginning in the late fifteenth century, of Euclid’s greatest work made his thought available across the continent, with the result

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that Euclidism crossed every intellectual, religious, linguistic, and disciplinary boundary. For all the clashes between its “-isms,” the early modern world shared a common language of space. Although Euclid enjoys an honored place among historians of mathematics and historians of architecture, intellectual historians have not considered adequately the effects of his spatial thought on intellectual currents in the early modern period.3 Classic intellectual-historical works on the late medieval and Renaissance/Reformation eras barely mention him.4 The situation is just as bleak for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where much of the literature analyzes early modern culture as a precursor to the French Revolution.5 (Works concerned with Thomas Hobbes are exceptions.) A particularly sharp reflection of the neglect is Isabel Knight’s The Geometric Spirit, which covers the career of the philosophe the Abbé de Condillac without mentioning Euclid— an omission made all the more curious by how the title echoes Blaise Pascal’s On the Geometric Spirit (1657–58), a work that applied Euclid’s method of argumentation to theology.6 Knight’s oversight reveals a collective blind spot: historians of thought have not thought about space. Intellectual historians have overlooked Euclid because his arrival caused no fireworks, as did the returns of Stoicism and Epicureanism.7 Who could argue with points, lines, planes, and spheres? This question is obviously rhetorical, but not completely so, because it highlights how we have missed Euclid’s significance precisely because we take his space for granted. In order to understand what implicates us in Euclid’s realm, let us consider the proposition that left Hobbes so smitten. It reads, “In right-angled triangles the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.”8 This is the Pythagorean theorem, which can be written out as, “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides,” or reduced to the equation A2 + B2 = C2. Johannes Kepler was just as smitten as Hobbes. He wrote, “Geometry has two great treasures: one is the theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio [i.e., the golden section]. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.”9 Most readers will have encountered both the Pythagorean theorem and the golden section before finishing their teens, since geometry is essential to our school curriculum. For that reason, no one would question why anyone accepted this theorem—only why someone did not. Against the backdrop of the fierce clashes between Aristotelians and their critics, intellectual historians have largely missed Euclid. Francis Bacon, the sworn enemy of Aristotle and contributor to the rise of Atomism in the seventeenth century, encouraged critics of Aristotelianism to “[h]url calumnies boldly; something always sticks.”10 And the calumnies flew—but not in Euclid’s

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direction. It is, therefore, understandable that historians have concentrated on conflicts rather than commonalities in the early modern period. Moreover, given that founders of the intellectual historical discipline, such as Hans Baron, Ernst Cassirer, Lucien Febvre, Peter Gay, Paul Hazard, Arthur O. Lovejoy, and Paul O. Kristeller, confronted, in the 1930s and 1940s, a world saturated with dehumanizing “-isms,” it made sense to pursue the histories of emancipatory systems.11 Exploring something that no one opposed—namely, space—and weighing its historical significance was not on the agenda. It is, however, surprising that Euclidism did not become a greater issue for intellectual historians via other paths. The rise of method in the seventeenth century, which owes much to Euclid, has been the subject of study, but without inspiring a broader analysis of the Elements’ contribution to it.12 More surprising still is that the “spatial turn” in intellectual history has yielded nothing on Euclid.13 Emerging from the historical-critical work of Michel Foucault, this literature relies heavily on spatial metaphors, such as “web,” “field,” or “site,” in its analysis of texts, while paying little attention to how space was imagined in the early modern period.14 The reason for this oversight is doctrinal. Foucault held that all systems were sources of oppression, and in his desire to complete the unfinished work of freedom he ignored how Euclid’s work had contributed to the categories that he applied so critically to others. To the extent that Foucault took any notice of space in early modern thought, he identified it as an element in broader oppressive currents, including the production of mental clinics and prisons.15 Before space could oppress, however, it had to be imagined, and the construction of early modern space is the subject of this essay. Beginnings For the most part, intellectual historians have assumed rather than explored early modern ways of understanding space.16 If we are to explore its space properly, we must begin by noting that massive intellectual changes were underway in realms outside of spatial thought that, in turn, intensified the interest in the idealized, abstract space that Euclid cultivated. In the early modern period the spaces that Europeans imagined expanded enormously. First, the knowledge of outer space was becoming more prominent and significant as the rise of an astronomical discipline gave Europeans radically new perspectives on the structure and size of the universe. To boil a complicated process down to a pithy phrase: the universe got bigger, while humans no longer occupied its center. Second, the far-flung nature of the early modern European globe—with its colonies, its trade networks, and its foreign wars—made the putting of unseen things into place a general problem. It was one thing to know that Spanish and

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Portuguese explorers had stumbled onto a new world; it was quite another to locate that knowledge within a spatial grid and to put the result into a digestible format in, for example, globes and maps. Euclid’s work undergirded developments in both of these areas. Euclidism began in the realm of texts, with the print publication of Euclid’s Elements. Second only to the Bible in the number of editions published, the Elements is one of the most influential works ever written.17 The history of its rise in the early modern world is complicated. The medieval world already hosted multiple Latin translations of the Elements, some of which had been made from Arabic sources.18 The first early modern versions inaugurated, however, a new textual lineage that became extremely powerful as a counterpoint to the medieval tradition. In 1460, for example, Johannes Müller (aka Regiomontanus) did an incomplete Latin version of the Elements that was based on Greek manuscripts that had been brought to Italy by Byzantine scholars fleeing attacks by Ottoman troops. This translation marked the beginning of a new trend. The use of Byzantine manuscripts in translation highlights a specifically Renaissance trend in the recovery of geometry. The idea was to use “original” texts to get better translations of ancient thought. This inherently dismissive attitude toward medieval translations is nothing new, as scholars had been translating Greek “originals” since the late fourteenth century. More importantly, the notion that new translations were better than older ones is Renaissance propaganda—and we need not accept it. As Renaissance culture developed the ability to read and translate Greek, the resulting works did not start a new tradition, but invigorated ways of thinking that had long been present within European thought. As a result, the textual environment for the Elements remained diverse and complex for centuries. For example, the first printed version of the Elements was a Latin edition of 1482. This translation was not new, however, having been done in the thirteenth century by Johannes Campanus of Novara. Given that medieval Latin editions long prospered alongside newer Renaissance versions, we can say that the Renaissance reinforced old intellectual traditions as much as it produced new ones. Initially, Euclid’s rise proceeded deliberately, as only two other editions of the Elements appeared within the next half century after Regiomontanus’s translation. Even these signaled a pending change, however, as they were based purely on Greek sources. In 1505, Bartolomeo Zamberti published a Latin translation of the Elements, which competed with that of Campanus for the title of most faithful to the original, with adherents of each side criticizing the other.19 (One edition of 1516 dealt with the tension between the two schools by publishing both versions together.) In 1533, however, the next new edition appeared—and it was a publishing event.20 Printed in Basel, this edition was based on Greek sources and, more importantly, was published in Greek, thus making the “original” text

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available to a group of readers that already had other versions to hand. The process of comparison and debate among cognoscenti yielded new editions, as other Greek versions followed in 1536, 1545, 1549, 1550, 1557, and 1564.21 Within a relatively short time, a trickle of texts turned into a flood. This early diffusion of competing versions of the Elements set the stage for Euclidism’s final expansion, as the text moved into Europe’s vernaculars. Over the next fifty years, translations appeared in Italian (1543), German (1555), French (1564), English (1570), and Spanish (1576)—although not all of these were based on Greek sources.22 And with the inception of a vernacular tradition the print environment became more complicated, as new editions appeared in Latin in 1536, 1545, 1557, 1559, and 1566.23 This series was, in turn, punctuated in 1572 with the publication of a definitive Latin edition by the mathematician Federico Commandino. This work was highly respected, because Commandino was both a competent translator and a legitimate mathematician. Meanwhile, the vernacular realm continued to produce new versions, as German editions appeared in 1555 and 1562 and French ones in 1564 and 1598.24 In sum, by 1600 Europe’s intellectual elite had gained wide access to a common fount of spatial thought. Remarkably, the Euclid market never reached saturation, although translations and editions mushroomed. In addition to the Latin versions that appeared regularly, vernacular ones were published in Dutch (1606, 1617, 1695), English (1651, 1660, 1661, 1685), French (1604, 1615, 1639, 1672), German (1610, 1618, 1634, 1651, 1694, 1697), Italian (1613, 1663, 1680, 1690), and Spanish (1637, 1689).25 It is worthwhile to pause over the 1694 German version, which was translated by Anton Ernst Burckhard von Birckenstein. Published in Vienna, it carried the revealing title German-Speaking Euclid, which reflected both the linguistic diversity of the Euclidian literature and the ultimate commonality of its message.26 Moreover, language barriers fell within the publishing process itself, as editions appeared in cities where the vernacular differed from that of the text: a German version appeared in Amsterdam (1634); a Dutch one in Hamburg (1638); and a Spanish edition came out in Brussels (1689).27 The growth in the business of translation reflected Euclid’s massive appeal. His teachings crossed all boundaries, as Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics read him. Catholics and Protestants read him, too, even using each other’s editions. And since some well-respected editions appeared in Latin, such as those by the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius (1574) or the English mathematician Isaac Barrow (1655), Euclid easily crossed even the most rigid linguistic boundaries—at which point he was often retranslated and published again.28 Equally important, the Elements also penetrated schools and universities, where geometry formed generations of students.29 In 1551, the English mathematician Robert Recorde published a workbook that presented Euclid’s

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theorems to students in a more digestible form.30 The pedagogical thrust of Euclidism was also apparent in Conrad Dasypodius’s Latin translation of 1564, whose introduction was expressly directed toward students, explaining how Euclid taught them to think clearly.31 Another example of Euclid’s perceived significance to the acquisition of clear thinking comes from a French translation published in 1683 by the French Jesuit Claude-François Milliet Dechales, which celebrated Euclid’s method of argument: The intention of Euclid in this book is to provide the first principles of geometry and to do it in accord with a method. He begins with definitions and the explication of ordinary terms. He then makes several suppositions. And having proposed maxims which natural reason teaches us, he claims that nothing advances without demonstration but to convince a person who wants to accept nothing beyond that which one is required to accept.32

Moreover, those educated by the Jesuits, a distinguished group that included Voltaire and Denis Diderot, studied Euclidian geometry, too.33 By the eighteenth century, no educated person in Europe could have avoided some study of Euclid. The uniformity and ubiquity of Europe’s Euclidian spatial sense emerged from the qualities of the Elements itself. Regardless of when a translation was done, all versions diffused the same concepts, for example, points, lines, planes, and spheres. For example, the first line of the 1482 version of Campanus’s translation is, “Punctum est cuius pars non est” (A point is that which has no part).34 These exact words appear on the first page of Christopher Clavius’s Latin translation.35 Niccolò Tartaglia’s republication in 1565 of the original Italian translation of 1543 begins, “Il ponto è quello che non ha parte.” Wilhelm Holtzman’s German translation of 1562 hardly differs at all: “Ain Punct oder tipfflin / wirtt das genant / so khain thail hatt.”36 And Rodrigo Zamorano’s Spanish version of 1576 begins, “Punto es, cuya parte es ninguna.”37 Although there were differences in style among the translations, all of them used the same terms and followed the same plan. We can gain a sharper view of Euclidian culture’s conceptual foundations by considering Books 11–13 of the Elements. These begin by discussing parallel planes that are bisected by lines or other planes, before projecting three-dimensional shapes, such as pyramids, cubes, cylinders, and spheres.38 Proposition 17 of Book 12, for example, holds: “Given two spheres about the same center, to inscribe in the greater sphere a polyhedral solid which does not touch the lesser sphere at its surface.”39 With this phrase begins a series of proofs through which Euclid establishes that there are only five polyhedral solids and that each of these can be inscribed within a sphere. (These are also known as the Platonic solids.) Editions that included all the propositions from Book 12 also had a

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version of Proposition 17.40 John Keill’s Euclid’s Elements of Geometry (1723), for example, had, “Let two Spheres be supposed about the same Center A. It is required to describe a solid Polyhedron in the greater Sphere, not touching the Superficies of the lesser Sphere.”41 Keill’s text reveals from another angle how complicated was the great importation of Euclid’s work. It was not translated directly from Greek, but from the Latin edition of Commandino. Nonetheless, this work had all the basic characteristics that I outlined above, including the same opening phrase: “A point is that which has no parts or magnitude.”42 Euclid’s language of space was universal, regardless of the path it took into print. Divisions Although everyone agreed that Euclid was essential reading, the reasons translators and commentators gave for the careful study of his work varied with the time and place. In general, early modern writers offered two justifications for studying geometry. First, some held that reading Euclid built character, because it taught people to separate truth from falsehood. Second, others lauded Euclid’s practical benefits to students. The former justification was limited to the sixteenth century and used most heavily in Protestant regions. Catholics tended to favor the latter. In the Protestant context, the ethical dimension of Euclid reflects the return of Stoicism in the sixteenth century under the guise of Christian Humanism. Christian Humanists were enamored especially of the Roman rhetorician Cicero, whose Stoic concept of duty they applied to religious practice.43 Versions of the Elements published where Christian Humanism prospered—in Protestant cities such as Basel, Leipzig, Strasbourg, and Wittenberg—praised Euclid as a teacher of virtue. In 1536, for example, Philipp Melanchthon, who shaped German Protestant views of education, wrote in the preface to a Latin edition of the Elements: Then together with descriptions of geometry they are especially noble. No one without some knowledge sees enough of this art, which is life demonstrated. No one without it will be a maker of method. . . . There is here great praise of geometry, which did not cling to inadequate and inferior [human] constructions, but flew into heaven and transported human minds, which were stuck in the mud, back up to the heavenly throne.44

The same attitudes appeared in the first English-language edition of the Elements, published in 1570 by Henry Billingsley. In the translator’s preface Billingsley begins with the general proposition that knowledge of the arts and science “teacheth us rules and precepts of vertue, how, in common life amongst

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men, we ought to walke uprightly: what dueties pertaine to ourselves, what pertaine to the government or good order both of an houshold, and also of a citie or common wealth.”45 For Billingsley, studying geometry was an essential aspect of a life well lived. The Stoic backdrop is, however, most obvious in a motto that appears in the frontispiece to Billingsley’s work. It reads virescit vulnere veritas (truth grows strong from a wound), which is probably a gloss on a Stoic motto that was popular in sixteenth-century England, virescit vulnere virtus (virtue grows strong from a wound).46 In Catholic regions, the situation was slightly different, mostly because Catholic thinkers often cultivated Aristotle’s cosmology. The best example is Christopher Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer who taught at the Colegio Romano in Rome and defended Aristotle against competing systems. In this he failed. He succeeded, however, in cultivating Euclidian space and produced one of the most important of all the sixteenth-century translations/commentaries of the Elements.47 Appearing in 1574, this edition was hailed as a triumph and was either republished or cited in other editions as a chief source.48 Unlike in the Protestant cases above, however, Clavius makes no mention of ethics in his introduction. Instead, he emphasized the text’s utility: “Namely in this manner, and in our opinion, Euclid [is presented] without difficulty for students, especially for those, who as beginners, now start the first study of mathematics; [they] will perceive greater enjoyment and utility.”49 The emphasis on mathematics is not accidental, as the Jesuits devoted much energy to this discipline’s improvement, seeing it as a means for sharpening Jesuit minds for the conflict with Protestantism.50 Clavius’s words are also representative, however, of a battle that he waged within the Catholic world against the remnants of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic.51 The trivium was one part of the classical world’s tradition of seven liberal arts. The other part was the quadrivium, which comprised geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Clavius’s goal was to legitimize mathematics against the pretensions of theology, which had based much of its authority within the academy on the tradition of placing the trivium over the quadrivium. Having covered what separates Protestants and Catholics in their reception of Euclid, I turn now to what united them. Clavius’s mention of utility calls attention to what was universal in Euclid’s appeal, the notion that understanding how to project space was useful in daily life. Consider that the English mathematician Robert Recorde justified the study of geometry in his The Pathway to Knowledge (1551) by noting how important geometric skills were to artisans: Carpenters, Karvers, Joyners, and Masons, doe willingly acknowledge that they can worke nothing without reason of Geometrie, in so much that they challenge me as a peculiare science for them. But in that they should do wrong to all other men, seyng everie kynde of men have som benefit by me, not only in building,

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whiche is but other mennes costes, and the arte of Carpenters, Masons, and the other aforesaid, but in their owne private profession, whereof to avoide tediousness I make this rehersall.52

In Brussels the Jesuit Jacob Kresa emphasized geometry’s utility by praising the prince who had studied it under his supervision: “Your Excellency had not reached fifteen years of age, when in geometry he had already studied the Elements, in geography he had explored the gulfs, in astronomy had completed starry courses, in military architecture had penetrated fortifications.”53 The student to whom Kresa refers began with Euclid and then moved to the mastery of a host of spatial disciplines. Both Recorde and Kresa’s texts referred to Euclid from radically different political and cultural contexts, yet they converged on utility as a justification for studying his works. The early modern Euclid had multiple faces, each of which was shaped by the intellectual or political agenda of the translator. In the cases noted above, Protestant Stoicism produced one face, while still another emerged from Catholic Aristotelianism.54 To note this fact constitutes, however, nothing more than wading into the shallow end of the pool. I cannot trace Euclid’s effects any more deeply in the space available, although I note here that Euclidism and Platonism intersected at many points. In order to emphasize the truly fundamental nature of Euclid’s contribution to early modern thought, I offer a list of prominent early modern thinkers who published an edition of the Elements, or wrote on geometry more generally. It includes Nicolaus Copernicus, Peter Ramus, Niccolò Tartaglia, Christopher Clavius, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, Bernard de Fontenelle, Isaac Newton, and Immanuel Kant.55 In the early modern world, Euclid was ubiquitous. Shared Categories Having seen how Euclidism crossed intellectual boundaries, we can consider how the appropriation of his work shifted the soil beneath all of them. Euclidism impelled a reorganization of knowledge structures that yielded a successor to the classical quadrivium that was called mixed mathematics. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, a group of spatial disciplines coalesced under this term and specifically around geometry. By the eighteenth century this new collection of disciplines included astronomy, fortification, geography, gnomonics, horology, hydraulics, optics, surveying, statics, and navigation.56 All of these disciplines were based on the ability to project homogeneous geometric space. Mixed mathematics began as an anti-Aristotelian term. It first appeared in Francis Bacon’s Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), where

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it redefined an older tradition of metaphysics.57 In the Aristotelian tradition, metaphysics was concerned with things that could not be measured or analyzed discretely, pursuing instead what Aristotle considered to be the deeper nature of physical reality. As the philosopher wrote, “We are seeking the principles and causes of things that are, and obviously of things qua being.”58 Bacon, in contrast, made metaphysics entirely about discrete things and divided it into two categories that he called “Pure” and “Mixed Mathematics.” In the “Pure” category he put geometry and arithmetic, since these were theoretical disciplines that underpinned the disciplines in the second category. In “Mixed Mathematics” he placed perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, and engineering, because these were all based on empirical measurement. Bacon’s redefinition of metaphysics opens a window onto geometry’s influence on intellectual structures in early modern Europe. It was generally agreed that geometry was the origin of mathematics, which in turn made it the foundation for all attempts to measure things. As the Englishman John Newton wrote in 1660, “Geometry is the art of measuring well.”59 In addition, works from other disciplines, such as astronomy and what was once called spherology, often stated expressly that knowledge of geometry was a prerequisite for further study in a variety of fields.60 As an example of the cultural effects that this arrangement had, consider this catchy title from a book published in Berlin in 1793: Elements of Astronomy along with Mathematical Geometry, Navigation, Chronology, and Gnomonics.61 By the late eighteenth century, astronomy had become the queen of the measuring disciplines, but without geometry, none of astronomy’s knowledge would have been possible. Mixed mathematics was, ultimately, a product of Euclid’s return. It rose in conjunction with the Elements’ diffusion, especially since editors often used their editions of Euclid to call for intellectual reform of the sort that mixed mathematics represented. The 1570 version of the Elements by Henry Billingsley, for example, contained a preface by the philosopher and occultist John Dee in which the latter called for a radical restructuring, based on mathematics, of what was then called natural philosophy.62 Dee’s call for intellectual reform went unheeded. But by the seventeenth century the growing interest in geometry and mathematics at places such as the University of Oxford augured both institutional and intellectual change. In 1619, Sir Henry Savile, a noted expert in Greek, endowed two historically significant chairs at the university of Oxford: one was the Savilian chair in astronomy; the other was in geometry.63 Savile was so interested in fostering the teaching of geometry that he even wrote the textbook that was to be used in class, since none was available in English at the time. What was going on in Oxford occurred in other parts of Europe, too. Although I began this section with the English Protestant Bacon, it is worthwhile

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to recall that Christopher Clavius did in Rome many of the same things that his Protestant cousins were doing, if in the service of a revivified Aristotelianism.64 It would be difficult to overestimate Clavius’s historical significance. He founded our modern calendar, which was inaugurated in 1582, and published a variety of books on spatial topics.65 In his day he was considered one of Europe’s leading astronomers, and his Aristotelianism also had a profound impact on the French Catholic Marin Mersenne, who not only published his own Latin edition of the Elements but also corresponded with every major scientist of the era, including Thomas Hobbes.66 In this respect, there is no getting around Euclid; he shaped and pervaded every early modern person’s thought. Bacon’s approach to mixed mathematics had many precursors in geometric thought, but his ideas marked only the beginning of a continent-wide shift. As Euclid’s influence spread around Europe, more people commented on geometry’s position in shaping the structures of knowledge. In the eighteenth century, for example, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert defined mixed mathematics as bringing to bear on common experience the ways of mathematical reasoning.67 The concept was also defined in the Encyclopédie (1755), which D’Alembert coedited with Diderot, as follows: “Mathematics is divided into . . . arithmetic, algebra, geometry, astronomy, gnomonics (or the science of sundials), hydrography (or the science of navigation), optics, music, mechanics, astrology, etc.”68 In order to enter into the early modern world’s temple of reason, one had to learn geometry. Conclusion Mixed mathematics began to dissolve in the middle of the nineteenth century, as some of its subdisciplines disappeared and others went their own way. More significantly, in the first half of the nineteenth century non-Euclidian geometries began to emerge, a process that culminated in the lecture “On the Hypotheses, which Underlie Geometry,” which was delivered in 1854 at the University of Göttingen by Bernhard Riemann. Published only after Riemann’s death, this work punctuated a fifty-year period of reflection by European mathematicians on the foundations of geometric thought and established conclusively that higher dimensions in geometry were possible. Riemann and others had undermined the naive belief in Euclidian space, with the result that cutting-edge spatial knowledge rose up from different conceptual foundations.69 Early modern Europe’s love affair with Euclidism was over, but its four centuries of dominance shaped the core of all early modern thought. Ramus, Kepler, Hobbes, Descartes, Newton, and Kant—to name but a few of the greats—all drank from the Euclidian spring and all profited from studying his

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methods of argument. Beginning with the Renaissance recovery of his works, Euclid became nothing less than a secular evangelist of space, as no educated person could escape contact with his Elements. Euclidism dominated and, in turn, transformed early modern European thought. It is thus high time that scholars recover the history of this space. Postscript This essay’s theme would seem to have little to do with David Warren Sabean’s larger interest in kinship and the construction of the self. It is, nonetheless, a product of his teaching and, above all, of one of his favorite admonitions for blearyeyed seminar students: in order to do good history one must read broadly and follow one’s instincts. This essay is offered in gratitude for that very useful lesson. Notes 1. John Aubrey and Richard W. Barber, Brief Lives: A Modern English Version (Woodbridge, UK, 1982), 151–52. 2. Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, Martin Classical Lectures (Cambridge, 1983); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded ed. (Oxford, 2003); Ernst Cassirer, Die platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig, 1932); Wilhelm Dilthey, “Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” in Wilhelm Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften, 14 vols. (Leipzig, 1921), 2:1–89; Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY, 1999). 3. Carl B. Boyer and Uta C. Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 2nd ed. (New York, 1991); Michele Sbacchi, “Euclidism and Theory of Architecture,” Nexus Network Journal 3, no. 2 (2001): 25–38. 4. Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400, Yale Intellectual History of the West (New Haven, CT, 1997); William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT, 2000); Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, CT, 2002); Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT, 1980). 5. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1968); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1968); Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth, UK, 1968); Paul Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIeme siècle: De Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris, 1946); Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européene (1680–1715) (Paris, 1935); David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York, 1994);

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Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 6. Isabel F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment, Yale Historical Publications (New Haven, CT, 1968). 7. On classical Stoicism, see Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols., Studies in the History of Christian Thought (Leiden, 1985). 8. Euclid, Euclid’s Elements: All Thirteen Books Complete in One Volume, trans. Thomas L. Heath (Santa Fe, NM, 2002), 35. 9. Quoted in Boyer and Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 55. 10. In the original Latin: “Audacter calumniare; semper aliquid haeret.” Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, 10 vols., vol. 7 (London, 1826), 384; Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London, 1968), 14–15. 11. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ, 1955); Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, 1964); Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1932); Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne; Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIeme siècle; Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle, la religion de Rabelais, L’Évolution de l’humanité, synthèse collective (Paris, 1947). One may add to this tradition J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975). 12. Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (New York, 1979); Joseph S. Freedman, “The Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c. 1570–c. 1630,” Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1993): 98–152; Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630, Oxford-Warburg Studies (Oxford, 2007); D. Burchell, “The Disciplined Citizen: Thomas Hobbes, Neostoicism and the Critique of Classical Citizenship,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 4 (1999): 506–525. 13. Alan Megill, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (1987): 117–41. 14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge Classics (London, 1970). 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1975); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1988). 16. The classic statement of this approach appears in Foucault, The Order of Things. For a critical commentary on Foucault, see Daniel Brewer, “Lights in Space,” EighteenthCentury Studies 37, no. 2 (2004): 171–86. On Foucault’s effect on historical writing, see Megill, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians.” 17. Vincent Jullien, Philosophie naturelle et géométrie au XVIIe siècle, Sciences, techniques et civilisations du Moyen Age à l’aube des Lumières (Paris, 2006), 257. Boyer and Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 119. 18. John Murdoch, “Euclid: Transmission of the Elements,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, 16 vols. (New York, 1971), 437–59; Marshall

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Clagett, “The Medieval Latin Translations from the Arabic of the Elements of Euclid, with Special Emphasis on the Versions of Adelard of Bath The Medieval Latin Translations from the Arabic of the Elements of Euclid, with Special Emphasis on the Versions of Adelard of Bath,” Isis 44, nos. 1–2 (1953): 16–42; H. L. L. Busard, ed., The First Latin Translation of Euclid’s Elements Commonly Ascribed to Adelard of Bath: Books I–VIII and Books X.36–XV.2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983); Menso Folkerts, The Development of Mathematics in Medieval Europe: The Arabs, Euclid, Regiomontanus, Variorum Collected Studies Series 811 (Aldershot, UK, 2006). 19. Ernst Zinner, Leben und Wirken des Joh. Müller von Königsberg genannt Regiomontanus, ed. Helmut Rosenfeld and Otto Zeller, 2nd ed (Osnabrück, 1968); Folkerts, Mathematics in Medieval Europe; Murdoch, “Euclid: Transmission of the Elements.” 20. Euclid and Proclus, Eukleidou stoicheion bibl. 15. ek ton Theonos synousion.: Eis tou autou to proton, exegematon Proklou bibl. 4. Adiecta præfatiuncula in qua de disciplinis mathematicis nonnihil, trans. Simon Grynäus and Johann Herwagen (Basel, 1533). 21. On the editions, see Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, trans. Thomas Little Heath, 2nd ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York, 1956), 100–3. 22. Euclid, Euclide Megarense philosopho solo introduttore delle scientie mathematice; diligentemente reassettto, et alla integrita ridotto per il degno professore di tal scientie Nicolo Tartalea, brisciano, secondo le due tradottioni e per commune commodo & vtilita di latino in volgar tradotto; con una ampla espositione dello istesso tradottore di nouo aggionta; talmente chiara, che ogni mediocre ingegno, senza la notitia, ouer suffragio di alcun’altra scientia con facilita, sera capace à poterlo intendere., trans. Gabriele Tadino et al. (Venice, 1543). 23. Euclid, Elementa Geometriae Ex Evclide singulari prudentia collecta a Ioanne Vogelin . . . Arithmeticae Practicae per Georgium Peurbachium Mathematicum. Cum praefatione Philippi Melanthonis, ed. Johannes Vögelin (Wittenberg, 1536). 24. Euclid, Das sibend, acht vnd neunt buch, des hoch berümbten Mathematici Euclidis Megarensis, in welchen der operationen vnnd regulen aller gemainer rechnung, vrsach grund vnd fundament, angezaigt wirt zu gefallen allen den / so die Kunst der Rechnung liebhaben / durch Magistrum Johann Scheybl / der löblichen universitet zu Tübingen des Euclidis und Arithmetic Ordinarien / auß dem latein ins teütsch gebracht . . . , trans. Johann Scheubel (Augsburg, 1555); Euclid, Die Sechs Erste Bücher Euclidis, Vom anfang oder grund der Geometrj. Jn welchen der rechte grund, nitt allain der Geometrj (versteh alles kunstlichen / gwisen / und votailigen gebrauchs des Zirkels / Linials oder Richtscheittes und andrer werckzeüge / so zu allerlaj abmessen dienstlich) sonder auch der fürnemsten stuck und vortail der Rechenkunst / furgeschrieben und dargethan ist. / Auß Griechischer sprach in die Teütsch gebracht, aigentlich erklärt, Auch mit verstentlichen Exempeln, gründlichen Figuren / und allerlaj den nutz für augen stellenden Anhängen geziert / Der massenvormals in Teutscher sprach nie gesehen worden . . . Durch Wilhelm Holtzman, genant Xylander / von Augspurg, trans. Guillelmus Xylander (Basel, 1562); Euclid, Les six premiers livres des Eléments d’Euclide, trans. Pierre Forcadel de Béziers (Paris, 1564); Euclid, Les six premiers livres des Élémens d’Euclide, traduicts et commentez par J. Errard, trans. J. Errard (Paris, 1598). 25. Most of the information in this paragraph comes from the very useful overview of translations in Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, trans. Thomas Little Heath, 2nd ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York, 1956), 91–113.

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26. Euclid, Teutsch-Redender Euclides, Oder Acht Bücher Von Denen Anfängen Der MeszKunst: Auff eine neue und gantz leichte Art, Zu Nutzen Allen Generalen, Ingeniern, Natur- und Warheit-Kündigern, Bau-Meistern, Künstlern und Handwerckern / in Teutscher Sprach eingerichtet und bewiesen Durch A. E. B. V. P., trans. Anton Ernst Burckhard von Birckenstein (Vienna, 1694). 27. Euclid, Die sechs ersten Bücher Euclidis, von den Anfängen und fundamenten der Geometriae; Auß Ioann Petersz Dou niderl. andern Ed. verteutscht . . . , trans. Sebastian Curtius (Amsterdam, 1634). 28. Euclid, Euclidis Elementorum, Libri XIV (Rome, 1574); Euclid, Elementorvm Libri XV. breviter demonstrati, Operâ Is. Barrow, Cantabrigensis, trans. Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, 1655). On the reputation of Clavius, see Sabine Rommevaux, Clavius, un clé pour Euclide au XVI siècle (Paris, 2005), 15–17; Frederick A. Homann, SJ, “Christopher Clavius and the Renaissance of Euclidean Geometry,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu Roma 52, no. 4 (1983): 233–46. On Barrow and Clavius, see Mordechai Feingold, ed., Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, 1990), 351. 29. François de Dainville and Marie-Madeleine Compère, L’Éducation des Jésuites: XVIe– XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978), 15–17. 30. Robert Recorde, The Pathway to Knowledge, Containing the First Principles of Geometrie, as They May Moste Aptly Be Applied unto Practise, Bothe for Use of Instrumentes Geometricall, and Astronomicall and Also for Proiection of Plattes in Everye Kinde, and therefore Much Necessary for all Sortes of Men (London, 1551). 31. Euclid, Analyseis Geometricæ sex librorum Euclidis. Primi Et Qvinti Factae À Christiano Herlino: Reliqvae Vnà Cvm Commentariis, & Scholiis perbreuibus in eosdem sex libros Geometricos: à Cunrado Dasypodio. Cvm Indice . . . Pro Schola Argentinensi., ed. Christian Herlin (Strasbourg, 1566). I had access to a subsequent edition. 32. Euclid, Les Elemens D’Euclide, Expliquez D’Une Maniere nouvelle & tres-facile: Avec L’Usage De Chaque Proposition pour toutes les parties des Mathematiques, Par le P. Claude François Millet Dechalles, de la Compagnie de Jesus, trans. Claude-François Milliet Dechales (Paris, 1683), 1. 33. Dainville and Compère, L’Éducation des Jésuites; Romano Gatto, “Christoph Clavius’ ‘Ordo Servandus in Addiscendis Disciplinis Mathematicis’ and the Teaching of Mathematics in Jesuit Colleges at the Beginning of the Modern Era,” Science & Education 15 (2006): 235–58. 34. Euclid, Elementa Geometriae (Venice, 1482), unpaginated. 35. Euclid, Evclidis Elementorvm Libri XV: Acceßit XVI. de Solidorvm Regvlarivm cuiuslibet intra quodlibet comparatione; Omnes perspicuis Demonstrationibvs, accuratisq`ue Scholiis illustrati, ac multarum rerum accessione locupletati, ed. Christoph Clavius, 3rd ed. (Cologne, 1591). 36. Euclid, Euclide megarense acutissimo philosopho, solo introduttore delle scientie mathematice. Diligentemente rassettato, et alla integrita ridotto, per il degno professore di tal scientie Nicolo Tartalea brisciano. Secondo le due tradottioni. Con vna ampla espositione dello istesso tradottore di nuouo aggiunta, trans. Niccolò Tartaglia (Venice, 1565), fol. 4. 37. Euclid, Los seis libros primeros dela Geometria de Evclides. Traduzidos en lengua Española por Rodrigo Çamorano Astrologo y Mathematico, y Cathedratico de Cosmographia por su Magestad en la casa de la Contratacion de Seuilla Dirigidos al jllustre señor Luciano Negron, Canonigo dela sancta yglesia de Seuilla, trans. Rodrigo Zamorano (Seville, 1576), fol. 9.

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38. Quotes from Euclid’s Elements are taken from a modern edition: Euclid, Euclid’s Elements, 367–481. 39. Ibid., 441. 40. Euclid, Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, From the Latin Translation of Commandine. To Which Is Added, A Treatise of the Nature and Arithmetick of Logarithms; Likewise Another of the Elements of Plain and Spherical Trigonometry; With a Preface, Shewing the Usefulness and Excellency of this Work by Doctor John Keil, F.R.S. and Late Professor of Astronomy in Oxford. Now Done into English, trans. John Keill (London, 1723), 268–69. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 1. 43. Gerhard Oestreich and M. E. H. N. Mout, Antiker Geist und moderner Staat bei Justus Lipsius (1547–1606): Der Neustoizismus als politische Bewegung, Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Göttingen, 1989). 44. Euclid, Elementa Geometriae. 45. Euclid, The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara: Faithfully (now first) translated into the English toung, by H. Billingsley, Citizen of London. Whereunto are annexed certaine Scholies, Annotations, and Inventiones, of the best Mathematiciens, both of time past, and in this our age, trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), unpaginated translator’s preface. 46. Jennifer Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 395–422. 47. Homann, “Christopher Clavius and the Renaissance of Euclidean Geometry”; Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations (Chicago, 1995); Rommevaux, Clavius. 48. Euclid, Evclidis Elementorvm Libri XV: Accessit Liber XVI. De Qvinqve Solidorvm Regularivm inter se comparatione; Ad Exemplaria R.P. Christophori Clauijè Societ. Iesv, & aliorum collati, emendati & aucti, ed. Christoph Clavius (Cologne, 1607). 49. Euclid, Euclidis Elementorum, Libri XIV. 50. On the Jesuits and mathematics, see John L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1981), 95–96. 51. Dear, Discipline and Experience; Rommevaux, Clavius; Homann, “Christopher Clavius and the Renaissance of Euclidean Geometry.” 52. Recorde, The Pathway to Knowledge, unpaginated preface. 53. Euclid, Elementos Geometricos De Evclides, Los Seis Primeros Libros De Los Planos, Y Los Onzeno, Y Dozeno De Los Solidos: Con Algvnos Selectos Theoremas De Archimedes / Traducidos, y explicados por P. Jacobo Kresa de la Compañia de Jesus, Cathedratico de Mathematicas en los Estudios Reales del Colegio Imperial de Madrid; y en interin en la Armada Real en Cadiz, trans. Jacobo Kresa (Brussels, 1689). 54. Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON, 1983). 55. Nicolaus Copernicus, De Lateribvs Et Angvlis Triangulorum, tum planorum rectilineorum, tum Sphæricorum, libellus eruditissimus & utilissimus, cum ad plerasque Prolemæi demonstrationes intelligendas, tum uero ad alia multa, scriptus à Clarissimo & doctissimo uiro D. Nicolao Copernico Toronensi. Additus est Canon semissium subtensarum rectarum linearum in Circulo (Vittembergae, 1542); Euclid, Euclides: Elementa mathematica,

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propositiones et diffinitiones librorum I–XV edidit P. Ramus, trans. Peter Ramus (Paris, 1549); Euclid, Euclide megarense acutissimo philosopho. Pascal’s works were not published in his lifetime. For a collection of his mathematical works, see Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal, vol. 5 (The Hague, 1779). Marin Mersenne, Euclidis elementorum libri, Apollonii Pergae conica, Sereni de sectione (Paris, 1626). Newton’s “Geometria” was never published either. It is available in Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, 8 vols., vol. 7 (Cambridge, 1976), 248–400. Bernard le Bovier Fontenelle, Élémens de la Géometrie de L’Infini (Paris, 1728). 56. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics. 57. Gary I. Brown, “The Evolution of the Term ‘Mixed Mathematics,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 1 (1991): 81. 58. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., vol. 2, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 1619. 59. John Newton, Mathematical Elements, in III Parts, the First, Being a Discourse of Practical Geometry, the Three Parts of Continued Quantity, Lines, Planes, and Solides. The Second, a Description and Use of Coelestial and Terrestrial Globes. The Third, the Delineation of the Globe upon the Plain of any Great Circle, according to the Stereographick, or Circular Projection (London, 1660), 1. 60. M. Cornelius Lindner, Gründliche Anleitung zum nützlichen Gebrauche der Erd- u. Himmels-Kuglen Den Anfängern in Erlernung Der Geographie und Astronomie, zum Besten: Andern Liebhabern aber dieser Edlen Wissenschaften zu weiterer Aufmunterung und Belustigung auf eine leichte Art deutlich ausgefertiget, und mit nöthigen Kupfer-Rissen versehen (Nuremberg, 1726), unpaginated introduction; John Mair, A Brief Survey of the Terraqueous Globe (Edinburgh, 1762), 7–8; Abel Bürja, Lehrbuch der Astronomie, 5 vols., vol. 1 (Berlin, 1794), xxxiii–xxxvii. 61. Georg Simon Klügel, Anfangsgründe der Astronomie nebst der mathematisch Geographie, Schifffahrtskunde, Chronologie und Gnomonik (Berlin and Stettin, 1793). 62. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001). 63. Robert Goulding, “Henry Savile and the Tychonic World System,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 152–79; Katherine Neal, “Mathematics and Empire, Navigation and Exploration: Henry Briggs and the Northwest Passage Voyages of 1631,” Isis 93, no. 3 (2002): 435–53; Barbara J. Shapiro, “The Universities and Science in Seventeenth Century England,” The Journal of British Studies 10, no. 2 (1971): 47–82. 64. James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago, 1995). 65. Christoph Clavius, Christophori Clavii Bambergensis In Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius (Rome, 1585). 66. Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools, Cornell History of Science Series (Ithaca, NY, 1988). 67. Gary I. Brown, Jean D’Alembert, Mixed Mathematics and the Teaching of Mathematics (Normal, IL, 1987). 68. Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert, “Catalogue,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and JeanBaptiste le Rond D’Alembert (Paris: Briasson, 1755). 69. Boyer and Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 572–97.

CHAPTER 15

12

A Private Repulsion toward Public Women in the Letters of Caspar von Voght and Germaine de Staël TAMARA ZWICK

C

aspar von Voght, a prominent figure of Hamburg’s upper bourgeoisie, wrote in 1826 that he had “always had an aversion to women . . . tormented with the desire to have an historical existence.”1 He was speaking here of Germaine de Staël, the Swiss saloniére central to European romanticism. Voght’s sentiments remained constant throughout his life despite the intimate correspondence he had shared with de Staël from 1808 through 1811. Two days before their initial meeting in 1808, Voght had already written more or less the same about de Staël, noting that he felt “a peculiar repulsion toward relationships with famous women.”2 Voght’s remark might appear banal; he was not the first to be offended by de Staël. Rather, it distilled a nineteenth-century sentiment confronting women who chose to enter the public sphere. That sentiment was later fossilized in the twentieth century and concretized by archives and historical practice. Over the past 150 years, a small industry in texts on Voght has flourished in northern Germany. Despite all that has been made of Voght’s life and letters, and his fundamental role in Hamburg’s Enlightenment, a relatively brief correspondence—twenty-eight letters from 1808 to 1811 between Voght and de Staël3—would seem to eclipse all of Voght’s other accomplishments now and even then. Just after his death on 21 March 1839, Karl Sieveking, the son of Voght’s most beloved correspondent, Johanna Sieveking, wrote that despite Voght’s major contributions to agronomy, poor relief, literary culture, and the theater, his relationship with de Staël still overshadowed everything else.4 Otto Kluth made the very same observation in 1945, when he wrote that “[w]ithout

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de Staël, [Voght’s] memory would have only endured in the local history of his city of Hamburg. Thanks to her, it has from then on a mention in the marvelous history of European romanticism.”5 By contrast, the extensive literature on de Staël barely mentions him; generally, he is the refined German suitor and the “enthusiastic German” who enriched her book on Germany. In short, Voght’s fame as an Enlightenment figure comes explicitly from his association with famous women, most especially de Staël.6 Using Voght’s remarks, his correspondence, and three twentieth-century German readings of these texts, I propose a critique of historical analysis.7 Of central importance to my argument is the manner in which historians tend to essentialize abstract concepts such as “public,” “private,” “political,” and “civil society.8 These basic premises lead to the ignoring or misreading of materials, especially personal letters, which were central to bourgeois women’s daily lives.9 More specifically, many archivists and scholars who have collected, read, and written about the letters left by women of the upper bourgeoisie in Germany have assumed, albeit unintentionally, many of the same prejudices of the time in which the letters were written. It is a paradox. Women of this period expressed themselves in ways that remain invisible to those who view the emergence of liberalism in narrow terms as the outgrowth of political debate in the public sphere. Therefore, when historians, themselves products of that very development, look to find what these women have said and done, they focus on their absence from the public sphere, even though women who crossed the threshold into the public sphere—like de Staël—reliably earned the censure of those like Voght. Indeed, David Sabean extended precisely this point to the examination of kin and class in his major work on Neckarhausen from 1998. 10 Consider the following juxtaposition. In 1826, Voght criticized de Staël for devoting herself to a public life. In 1991, in an article about the German family, historian Richard J. Evans lamented that bourgeois women of the nineteenth century rarely “ma[de] a name” for themselves, but rather were confined “to the sidelines” of the private sphere where “male authority ruled supreme.”11 Despite the inverted perspectives of Voght and Evans, I propose that their basic understanding of bourgeois women’s participation in society is essentially the same, in that they share the same appreciation of what it means to be public and, somewhat less explicitly, historical. In short, Evans defines “historical existence” within the boundaries of public participation in representative institutions and political debate, thereby missing women’s immense contributions to maintaining, extending, and, at times, even inventing the bourgeois status of the family. My concern is with the manner in which one constructs the very problem of the historical, the source, and the self. De Staël was utterly disconsolate with Voght, just as she was with society vis-à-vis her public reputation; namely, that she had one. The failure to consider seriously the social pressures that

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precluded a public face for these women merely duplicates nineteenth-century attitudes about what it meant to be historical, thereby perpetuating these attitudes in contemporary scholarship.12 For Voght, the “historical existence” that he so loathed in de Staël referenced public displays of ego. He would have despised the sentiment exclaimed by Olympe de Gouges that if one might “mount the rostrum” and be executed, then too should she be permitted to “mount the rostrum” and speak, just like a man.13 In contradistinction to Voght, what I mean by historical existence is the deliberate exploration of “private life” in the narratives constructed by historians, with the understanding that there is no such thing as “private” or “public” existence, because they are false distinctions used anachronistically by historians. De Staël was already atypical. She was a public figure, a famed literary author, and a quintessential example of a glorified emotionalism, imagination, and sensibility expressed in contradistinction to eighteenth-century classicism and rationalism. She had made the choice to publish, perhaps despite ambivalence or perhaps with only feigned internal turmoil about it. In contrast, her mother, Suzanne Necker, a highly educated salonière,14 kept her writing private in order not to demonstrate the “ego” that propelled men into the public arena. Women’s absence from this arena was a virtue and something for which they would be praised.15 Caspar von Voght’s Letters by Many Remarkable Women in France The son of a wealthy merchant, Voght founded Hamburg’s first literarische Verein (literary association) at fifteen, which he later followed with the first Lesegesellschaft (reading society). He spent his early twenties journeying through various countries in Western Europe, where his father’s extensive contacts made him privy to a wide range of political and economic metropolitan circles. He was similarly well connected within the salons of Hamburg diplomats and wealthy Calvinist merchants. By twenty-eight, he had become the director of the Hamburgische Bühne (Hamburg Theater), “a taboo for a solid member of the traditional Hamburg ruling class.”16 When his father died, he and Georg Sieveking took over Sieveking’s father’s trading company. Together they were among the first to import Baltimore tobacco, Surinam coffee, and African rubber. However, unsatisfied with a businessman’s life, Voght held to the larger ambitions of Gemeinnützigkeit (benefit to the public), and in 1788 he took active part in the founding of Hamburg’s General House for the Poor. The institution had considerable influence on comparable projects in Austria, Prussia, France, Spain, and Italy, and his 1802 treatise, “Report about the Hamburg Poor System,” was translated across

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Europe, including in French, as commissioned by de Staël in 1809.17 Voght’s “ornamented farm” in Flottbeck was a model of modern farming and a center for agricultural innovations. In 1796 he was named Étatsrat in Denmark. In 1802 he was made Reichsfreiherrn by Kaiser Franz II for his reorganization of public assistance in Austria. In 1809 he was offered la bourgeoisie d’honneur by the French. In 1826, at the age of seventy-four, Caspar von Voght—now considered a central figure in the Hamburg Enlightenment18—had his two secretaries and a copyist put his vast set of correspondences and writings in order.19 While doing so, he set aside a selection of French letters to be copied into a book entitled Lettres de plusieurs femmes remarquables en France (Letters by Many Remarkable Women in France).20 Before turning the task over to the copyist, Voght reviewed the letters and affixed to each a brief introduction, or portrait, assessing the nature of his relationship with the said femme remarquable. First among the collection of nineteen sets of letters written to Voght from 1808 to 1820, and occupying the most esteemed place, were the sixteen from de Staël. Caspar von Voght first met Germaine de Staël on 26 August 1808, and he shared letters with her until the autumn of 1811. Of critical interest for Voght, de Staël was writing her book, De l’Allemagne (On Germany), and had just returned from her second trip through Germany. She both invited Voght’s criticism of her work in progress and included a description of his own system of public charity within it.21 When Voght wrote of his aversion to women like de Staël in 1826, about ten years after her death, his phrasing was deliberately broad, as not only a criticism of de Staël, but also of all women who chose to act with ego. (None of the other eighteen French women earned such scorn from him).22 Voght was quite sharply focused on de Staël in his diary entry from 24 August 1808. Two days before their initial contact, he wrote: “Received a direct invitation from the Frau von Staël. I have a peculiar repulsion toward relationships with famous women. I would never have become close with Juliette [Récamier] had she been the goddess of fashion and the times.”23 This same sentiment is reiterated in Voght’s 1826 remark. That is to say, to desire a historical existence is to desire public fame and an existence based on the possession of ego. Or, as one early nineteenth-century bureaucrat remarked: “The best of the genre offered by women has always been those not interested for publication or the wider public but only written for their friends and acquaintances without intending that their letters would ever be put before the eyes of the world.”24 I contend that most historians unintentionally repeat this sentiment in their contemporary analyses. Indeed, Voght’s reluctance long preceded his first contact with de Staël. On 2 May 1808, he wrote about the eventuality of making her acquaintance:

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Frau v. Staël is full of spirit and strength, and she is often unsurpassable in the deep and true expression of feelings but still I do not wish to have an acquaintanceship with her, because that would more or less associate me with her. I would like well to hear her extemporize once a week much in the way that one goes to a concert. Her conversation is supposed to be a constant improvisation.25

Despite de Staël’s profound influence on European literary culture, alongside well-known antagonisms with Rousseau, Napoleon, and others, Voght saw de Staël as an oddity with whom he did not wish his own reputation to be associated. At the very least, he desired no more intimate contact with her beyond that of a passive audience. His specific reference to “improvisation” is worth noting, as it applies to one whose mental strengths must fall in the present, the improvised, the ephemeral, and the conversational. Nevertheless, Voght’s aversion remained consistent. The move from generic aversion to a more specific physical rejection comes with Voght’s commentary in 1808 on Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s painting of de Staël posing as Corinne, the semiautobiographical, emancipated heroine of her 1807 novel:26 “She must be very ugly, because all exaltation which the artist in view and gesture had put in had not made her any prettier. . . . Her hair is black, her look full of fire, everything without femininity.”27Although de Staël may indeed have suffered at the hands of the painter, Voght meant the description to apply as much to her character as to her appearance. The content of his subsequent letter on 26 August attests to this. He wrote that de Staël was not big, not well built, much too fat, had a bad complexion, a misshapen mouth with a protruding lip, and walked without grace. “An Englishman,” he stated, “would remark that there was something brazen and masculine to be found in her entire manner.”28 Voght was not the only one to suggest that de Staël did not act like a woman. Her own father, Jacques Necker, felt similarly: [M]y father could not stand a femme auteur and, since he has seen me writing his portrait just over the past four days, he has already been taken up with worry, and would call me jokingly: “Monsieur de Saint-Écritoire.” He wants to put me on my guard against the weakness of amour-propre.29

Necker and Voght agreed: to be an author and to publish ideas was to act like a man. The Unfortunate Ambition of Germaine de Staël “What hasn’t been said about this famous woman?” began Voght in his portrait reflecting on Germaine de Staël.

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I, who knew the interior of her soul in a way neither her lovers who could not know the object of their passion, nor the woman who loved them too much, nor in a way anyone could at the time appreciate her ardent desire for fame, her unfortunate passion for political influence in a period when the spirit of faction imposed itself on every judgment made about her.30

He continued with comments about her person, her unfortunate ambition, and the society with which she surrounded herself. He claimed that she rarely passed up an opportunity to make a fool of herself and that her weaknesses were known well by others. She sought constantly after fame. Her compulsion disgusted Voght.31 According to Voght’s portrait and his letters to friends in Hamburg, de Staël was well aware of his distaste for her. She knew, for example, that he had not wanted to come to Coppet at all.32 She was offended, Voght writes, that he did not look for her upon his initial arrival in Paris. Consequently, she sent her close friend, Benjamin Constant, and her son to persuade him to come to her estate. He finally came.33 According to Voght, their first meeting was a pleasant dinner. Constant pressed him to stay, but de Staël allowed him to leave, remarking that “it was necessary that [he] have the time to make himself like her.”34 De Staël’s unrequited affections and Voght’s periodic condemnation colored the entirety of their ensuing correspondence, despite the great esteem in which they came to hold one another. Their letters were dominated by a running discourse about various theatrical works and philosophical writings either viewed or read by Voght during his 1806–12 Europareise, or staged and read aloud at her Coppet salon. Nevertheless, de Staël’s constant emotional entreaties to Voght open and close many of her letters to him. She wished he would return to Coppet more often. She begged him to write more often and return her affections in a manner equal to those she held for him. She said he spread his attention too thinly and made no exclusive space for her as she had done for him. Her insistence for his devotion was incessant. She complained often that he did not love her as she did him, or less exclusively.35 In return, Voght seemed at times to trifle quite intentionally with de Staël’s desire for him, even deliberately avoiding her demands and questions, or referring to their common friend, Juliette Récamier, of whom de Staël was plainly jealous, or to his “great love,” Magdalena Pauli. Yet, despite his resistance to de Staël, Voght clearly revered her intellect, her heart, and her writing. Indeed, he wrote that she knew better than anyone how to listen with “extreme clarity and openness to differing opinions.” Voght found de Staël to be “profoundly sensitive . . . with a pure soul drawn only to the grand and the sublime,”36 and yet noted that even this great sensitivity was not beyond

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reproach. Despite her great charm, she was guilty of the “egotism of love,” liking her friends more “for herself than for them.”37 De Staël appeared to have held such affection for Voght, too, and often delivered it with shades of envy. In her first note to Voght, she wrote that he was “goodness itself, and one is always jealous of this goodness, one would like to have it.”38 She expressed desire and jealousy in the letter that followed his: “My heart hurts to have left you. . . . Return in spring, write me, don’t forget me. I appreciate you better perhaps than anyone, that is the reason that you are attracted to me.”39 Again, on 5 December 1808 she wrote before he had even replied:40 “I need a letter from you, but I have not found what I am searching for—the hope for your return here in May.”41 He was “wrong” to refuse her, she insisted, claiming again that “few people have known, like me, that which you are,”42 an assertion repeated throughout the correspondence.43 Then, in a bold, egocentric gesture, de Staël offered to mail Voght her bust. The sculptor, Christian Friedrich Tieck, had just finished it and she offered it with the provision that Voght return to Coppet in the spring. If not, she lamented that his memory of her would be far too faint to be represented by such a fixed form.44 Mere days later, she proposed an even more presumptuous idea; namely, that he take over an estate she owned only a mile from Coppet. Lest her feelings be unclear, she closed her letter with the following: “Once again, this idea came to me, good or bad, to prove to you that I think [of you] and feel for you.”45 On 20 December, Voght finally replied from Paris in a form typical of the first year of their correspondence: false politeness where a more direct response was required. He resisted her entreaties and devolved into a lengthy discussion of other things, concluding: “Lovely proposal. I am grateful,” but since he already owned Flottbeck, such a purchase would be impossible. “In Flottbeck, it’s different . . . [m]y friends take care of everything for me.”46 He went on to detail his internal struggles, including his unrequited love for Magdalena Pauli. And, ten days later, this: “Do not send me your bust, it is your regard and your words that I need.”47 He also reminded de Staël once again of his affections for Juliette Récamier.48 De Staël proclaimed her affection repeatedly and expressed frustration with his aloofness. In a surprising turnaround, Voght wrote his most emotional letter from 12–27 February 1809: “I burn with desire to read your letter on Germany.”49 It is Voght’s lengthiest letter, perhaps not coincidentally written at the time of his bankruptcy that year. De Staël’s replies were jealous, self-deprecating, even humiliating, but her strongest words to him were about writing. What she wrote made her feel “stupid” in comparison to him. Chatting with her would not merit an hour of his concentration. “Write me, because I feel your superiority.”50 In her penultimate

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letter to him, she claimed that Voght was able “to exit from the asylum of [him] self. I am of no value in this regard. . . . I am not at all selbst-ständig.”51 De Staël inhabited a place where, within certain limits, she transcended restrictions and lived outside of prescribed behavior. And yet, such boundaries clearly weighed heavily upon her. Finally, in the spring of 1811, an avis from Napoleon warned that further visits to de Staël would result in Voght’s banishment from France and ended their brief relationship. They never saw nor wrote one another again.52 Reading the Relationship in the Twentieth Century Historian Otto Kluth wrote in 1958 that in 1938 he “discovered” “copies of numerous letters addressed to . . . Voght.”53 The reference was to Voght’s album, Lettres de plusieurs femmes remarquables en France, “discovered” in Altona just before the war. Although the letters to Voght by de Staël had already been published, Kluth’s 1958 article reprinted for the first time Voght’s letters to de Staël. Paul Theodore Hoffmann published de Staël’s letters to Voght in 1938 in the Altonaische Zeitschrift, both in the French originals and in German translations.54 Voght’s own letters to de Staël were in Coppet and remained inaccessible to him. Hoffmann’s rationale for the publication of de Staël’s letters was straightforward: the documents were written to an early pioneer of the German Geistigkeit and offered “a valuable report on the character of the man to whom this deep friendship belonged.”55 De Staël, he wrote, was already wellknown in publications and needed no introduction, but Voght was not. De Staël’s and Voght’s relationship, according to Hoffmann, suffered an “unavoidable breaking-off ” as Voght faced an impossible choice. It is here that one can first detect a trend running through both Hoffmann’s and Kluth’s texts about the correspondence, unimportant exchanges by themselves as histories, but extremely useful in order to illustrate a critical point: that is, the inclination to write about de Staël from Voght’s perspective. Hoffmann wrote about Voght’s dilemma: “With no alternative . . . the situation was about whether he would take upon himself the deep lot of banishment for the sake of Madame de Staël and make the continuation of his great social work completely impossible or . . . carry out further the meaningful task of the reorganization of European Armenwesens.”56 Faced with this choice, Hoffmann thought, Voght elected to end their contact and left for Marseilles. Otto Kluth’s two publications, in 1945 and 1958, offer more complex analyses than Hoffmann’s piece did. Like Hoffmann, Kluth wrote through Voght’s perspective, in this case taking as his own position Voght’s censure of de Staël and her admiration of his calm. Kluth’s 1945 article, “Un ami Allemand de

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Mme. de Staël,” offered a brief biography of Voght’s varied accomplishments. His description of Voght and de Staël’s relationship was quite intimate, despite the fact that he lacked Voght’s letters to de Staël and could therefore only guess at their contents. Nevertheless, he managed to propose an emotional framework for the relationship. Kluth wrote, “Mme. de Staël was 42, Voght 56. By ‘his virtues and knowledge’ he made an impression on her which was sweet and profound and which she kept all her life. With him she could talk. His presence made her well. She demanded his advice and his encouragement.”57 Kluth reinforced his remarks with de Staël’s own words: she felt that Voght “gave the universe order” and “fortified her beliefs.” On one level, this does reflect some of what de Staël actually said and felt about Voght. At the same time, Kluth attributed to Voght a role that simply was not reflected in de Staël’s letters, and it reveals how historians chose to replicate the narratives of well-known male Enlightenment figures rather than incorporate the intellectual tension and critical contributions of female figures. Kluth continued, “Here was Voght, well established in his role as confidant and counselor.”58 Although very capable of enthusiasm, according to Kluth, Voght was a man who pondered, reflected, critiqued, and, “at the same time, who saw the world as it is.”59 Despite de Staël’s jealousy and “overbearing affection,” and especially what he implied was the arrogance of her assertion that she understood Voght best, wrote Kluth, Voght tolerated her.60 Kluth, “the dispassionate historian,” plainly internalized Voght’s critique of de Staël’s arrogance as a quality that was observable in both her letters and her portrait. In 1958, Kluth published on the correspondence a second time. Again, he presented Voght as “the practical man” and “not the utopiste” (an implied reference to de Staël). He heaped praise upon Voght’s poor relief system, despite its having fallen apart by the 1830s, during Voght’s own lifetime.61 About de Staël, he wrote that she drew from Voght a moral force and the support that she needed. Voght admired her genius, wrote Kluth, but found that she lacked wisdom and measure. Furthermore, Voght regretted her need for continuous emotions and implored tranquility.62 Like Hoffmann, Kluth defended Voght’s decision to respect Napoleon’s avis, the ultimatum he issued to pressure Voght to break off contact with de Staël, but his defense was framed in opposition to Mme. Lenormant’s63 criticism of Voght, which claimed that he had “not act[ed] heroically and [had] swooned to the child of despotism.”64 Kluth again represented Voght—his decision was “deceitful,” but he could not risk putting his poor relief work at stake. Striking is the lack of reference to the content of any of Voght’s letters.65 Finally, once again reading de Staël through Voght, Kluth cited the portrait: “She had a religion for the men of a certain age, whom she believed resembled

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[her father].” Kluth added, now in his own voice, that “maybe [Voght] indicated here, subconsciously, the reason for the interest that he inspired from the start in [de Staël].”66 In other words, Kluth’s interest in de Staël, the most significant and reigning intellectual figure of the correspondence, is simply an outgrowth of his real interest in Voght, thereby reproducing the gender politics of the historical profession up to the time and erasing de Staël in any meaningful and enduring manner. One final replication of invisibility is Alfred Aust’s slight coffee-table book from 1972, Mir ward ein schönes Loos: Liebe und Freundschaft im Leben des Reichsfreiherrn Caspar von Voght (A Beautiful Fate Was Mine: Love and Friendship in the Life of Reichsfreiherrn Caspar von Voght). Where Hoffmann’s interest was exclusively to recover a great representative of Hamburg’s Enlightenment, and Kluth’s perhaps likewise, Aust’s book goes furthest in addressing the emotional aspects of de Staël and Voght’s relationship. Aust delves into Voght’s so-called entfernten Kreis, or the men and women with whom he surrounded himself, even though the table of contents makes it clear that the book is shaped entirely by Voght’s female friends.67 Like Hoffmann and Kluth, Aust’s primary interest is Voght, whom he ranks as “one of the most important men of Hamburg.”68 He grants Voght his individualism, but Aust’s text makes my point best; namely, that Voght was a man who lived through and within his circle of female friends. After a few brief remarks about de Staël taken from Voght’s portrait, the majority of Aust’s chapter concerns de Staël’s salon and the many luminaries who visited during Voght’s tenure: August Wilhelm Schlegel, Benjamin Constant, Juliette Récamier, Prince August of Prussia, Friedrich Tieck, Julie von Krüdener, and Zacharias Werner. It is a book not about Voght and his favorite women, but about Voght among them. Aust, like Hoffmann and Kluth, continues the trend. About Napoleon’s avis and the subsequent end of the relationship he writes: “Voght was not shot by the demonic genius of this woman . . . in 10 weeks . . . he had understood the light and shadow of her.”69 Again, Voght earns value through de Staël. Manly Women and Their Reputations In a final return to Voght’s remark about “tortured” women, one might point to a series of ironies. Voght’s aversion to de Staël illustrates that women like her were seen as manly and fundamentally inappropriate to their gender, a point that has already been made by numerous scholars. Indeed, even de Staël herself and her contemporaries were obviously aware of this interpretation of behavior. Furthermore, one might note the consistency of Voght’s attitude; he

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remained unaffected by the substantive content of his correspondence with de Staël. He restated the “peculiar repulsion” he held about female celebrity even more resolutely eighteen years after his initial remarks concerning de Staël: “I have always had an aversion to women tormented with the desire to have an historical existence.”70 Despite his actual relationship with de Staël, the ensuing correspondence, and his reflections long after her death, Voght’s attitude remained unchanged. Voght could not extricate himself despite whatever intellectual accolades he might well have registered about de Staël. Most interesting, however, is this: Voght’s statement is not true. He built his life within a complex society of people, especially women. All sources explicitly and implicitly point to this. His most cherished exchanges were shared with a cohort of female friends in Hamburg, especially Magdalena Pauli and Johanna Sieveking.71 They “took care of everything,” managing both his life and household in Flottbeck. Furthermore, his relationships with de Staël, Récamier, and others among the plusieres femmes remarquables and their related networks clearly allowed him entry into a variety of circles in Paris and elsewhere. More to the point, Voght did not have an aversion to de Staël; rather, he sought her out. He visited her repeatedly and carried on a written correspondence with her. He saved her letters long after her death. He had them copied into his own private edition, and praised them within his lengthy introduction. He claimed he knew her better than her “lovers” ever could, and stated that their friendship remained “the charm of [his] life and [would be] constantly the object of [his] regrets.”72 Caspar von Voght’s “aversion” to Germaine de Staël was a convention of gender. Add in a peculiar inversion: his reputation grew from hers, both at the time and after their lifetimes. And yet, Voght’s biographers assert his force d’âme repeatedly over de Staël’s “troubled heart.” They maintain his aversion to her, and were critical of de Staël’s ego and emotional extremes. In fact, Kluth’s commentary discredits de Staël’s “arrogant” assertion that she knew Voght best without once noting that Voght had said precisely just that of her. Notes 1. Staatsarchiv Hamburg (StHA), 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. From Voght’s handwritten portrait of Germaine de Staël in a personal volume titled Les lettres de plusieures femmes remarquable en France. 2. See Caspar von Voght, Caspar Voght und sein hamburger Freundeskreis: Briefe aus einem tätigen Leben: Teil 3: Reisejournal 1807/1809, ed. Annelise Tecke (Hamburg, 1967), 223. 3. Of the twenty-eight, sixteen were written by de Staël and twelve by Voght. 4. Alfred Aust, “Pädagogische Reflextionen,” Schleswig-Holstein Monatshefte für Heimat und Volkstum 10 (October 1968): 268–27.

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5. Otto Kluth, “Un ami Allemand de Mme. de Staël,” lecture before the Société genevoise d’Études allemandes, Geneva, Alma Mater: Revue universitaire de la Suisse Romande 15 (December 1945): 498. 6. J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (Indianapolis, 1958), 286. See also Abel Stevens, Madame de Staël: A Study of her Life and Times: The First Revolution and the First Empire, 2 vols. (New York, 1881); Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, De l’Allemagne, ed. Hans Mannhart (Karlsruhe, 1962); Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine) Staël and Baron (Auguste Louis) de Staël-Holstein, Ten Years’ Exile; or, Memoirs of that Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness de StaëlHolstein (London, 1821). 7. For a more complex discussion of the broader omission of women from the scholarship on the nineteenth-century German Bürger, please refer to chapter 1 in my forthcoming manuscript, “Writing between the Lines: Women, Kinship, and Bürgertum in Early Nineteenth-Century Hamburg.” On the broader topic of the absence of nuanced work by nineteenth-century German historians on the “private, family- and householdoriented side” of the period, see Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 2 (1997): 271–97. Anne-Charlott Trepp, too, has made keen observations about the nature of German historiography, unlike its French and American counterparts, to this end that still hold relevance. See especially Trepp, “The Emotional Side of Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany (Theory and Example),” Central European History 28 (1995): 127–52; Trepp, Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit: Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum zwischen 1770 und 1840 (Göttingen, 1996). Also critical is Isabel Hull, “Practice in the ‘Private Sphere’: Two Recent Studies of Private Life in Germany, 1770–1840,” Central European History 29, no. 3 (1996): 397–406; Ute Frevert, ed., Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), among others. 8. See Diana Coole, Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism (Sussex, 1988); Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1979); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988); Mary Shanley and Pateman, Feminist Interpretation and Political Theory (Cambridge, 1991); Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, “Converging on History,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History: Essays from the Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 1–24. 9. While letters by women are abundant, their collection has never been systematic. Furthermore, bourgeois women often burned their correspondence out of concerns for modesty. So while the notion that there are no substantial written records by women is false, neither are women’s letters abundant in archives. 10. See David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998), esp. 449–510. Sabean notes that “[t]he conceptual split between private and public, which associates politics (and until recently also history) with the public sphere, has obscured this whole area of intense social activity of women. If the construction of class was central to the political dynamics of the nineteenth century, then this work has to be brought conceptually into the framework of the ‘political’.” Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 491. Marion Kaplan expresses similar ideas in The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity, in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991), 20.

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11. Richard J. Evans, “Family and Class in the Hamburg Grand Bourgeoisie 1815–1914,” in The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (London, 1991), 133. 12. There are notable exceptions, but they are still relatively limited in number and do not dominate the nineteenth-century scholarship. Of central importance is the major work by Rebekka Habermas, Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums: Eine Familiengeschichte, 1750–1850 (Göttingen, 2002). 13. See Olympe de Gouges’s tenth amendment from her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,” in Western Civilization, Volume II: Since 1500, ed. Jackson J. Speilvogel (Belmont, CA, 2009), 582. 14. In 1766, Suzanne Necker founded one of the most important Parisian salons of the Enlightenment. See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 15. Goodman, “Suzanne Necker’s Mélanges: Gender, Writing, and Publicity” in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, eds. (Ithaca, 1995), 213. 16. Kleine Studien über Caspar von Voght, VI G(eorg) H(erman) Sieveking: Selbstbekenntnisse Caspar von Voght, MHG 7 (1902), 394–97. Cited in Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg, 1990), 396. 17. Voght, Tableau historique des progrès de l’Etablissement des Pauvres à Hambourg (Geneva, 1809). 18. See Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte. 19. Kluth, “Un ami Allemand.” 20. StHA Voght 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. Voght’s introductions are mostly brief, with a few exceptions, including de Staël and d’Houdetot. 21. Baroness de Staël-Holstein, On Germany [De l’Allemagne], notes and appendices by O. W. Wight, 2 vols. (New York, 1859), chap. 19, “Of Particular Institutions for Education, and Charitable Establishments,” 132–34. 22. Germaine de Staël was born in 1766 and died on 14 July 1817. 23. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil III, 223. 24. Ernst Brandes, Betrachtungen über das weibliche Geschlecht und dessen Ausbildung in dem geselligen Leben, 3 vols. (Hannover, 1802), as cited by Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 495. 25. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil III, 132. 26. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1750–1842), Portrait de Mme de Staël en Corinne. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. 27. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil III, 148. Emphasis in the original. 28. Ibid., 224. 29. Goodman, “Suzanne Necker’s Mélanges,” 210. 30. StHA Voght, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. 31. Ibid. 32. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil III, 223. 33. StHA Voght, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. 34. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil III, 223. 35. See, e.g., de Staël in Otto Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght (Geneva, 1958), 59.

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36. StHA Voght, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. 37. Ibid. 38. De Staël, in Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 28. 39. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 29. Emphasis mine. 40. This is the first letter that is dated. 41. De Staël, in Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 29. 42. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 29. Emphasis mine. 43. Ibid., 30. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 31. 46. Clearly a reference to Johanna Sieveking, Magdalena Pauli, and Friederike Poel, among others. 47. De Staël, in Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 35. Emphasis mine. 48. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 35. 49. Ibid., 43–48. 50. Ibid., 38. 51. Ibid., 71. 52. Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil 1, 55. 53. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 23. 54. Paul Th. Hoffmann, “Die Briefe der Frau v. Staël an Caspar Voght 1808 bis 1811,” Altonaische Zeitschrift 7 (1938): 23–76. 55. Ibid., 1. 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Kluth, “Un Ami Allemand,” 495. 58. Ibid., 496. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. On poor relief and historical debates in Hamburg, see Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers, Hamburg, 1712–1830 (New York, 1990). 62. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 76. 63. Juliette Récamier’s adopted daughter. 64. Kluth, La Correspondance de Madame de Staël et du Baron Voght, 75. 65. Ibid., 27. 66. Ibid., 76. 67. Aust notes that the entfernten Kreis is part of the inscription on Voght’s grave. Aust, Mir ward ein schönes Loos: Liebe und Freundschaft im Leben des Reichsfreiherrn Caspar von Voght (Hamburg, 1972). 68. Ibid., 7. 69. Ibid., 53. 70. See Voght’s unpaginated portrait of de Staël in StHA, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9. 71. See StHa, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 10a (To Karl Sieveking on Voght’s Last Days, 1838), “Aufzeichnungen Karl Sieveking unmittelbar nach einem Besuch bei seinem, wie es schien, auf den Tod erkrankten väterlichen Freund Caspar von Voght”; see also Voght, Caspar Voght, Teil II, 12. 72. See Voght’s introduction to the correspondence in StHA, 622–1 Familie Voght, VIII 9.

CHAPTER 16

12

Honor and the Policing of Intra-Jewish Disputes in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Germany ANN E. GOLDBERG

F

or centuries, honor served to distinguish and enforce status differences in the hierarchical, corporate world of medieval and early modern Europe. Honor—the kind and degree one possessed, as well as the ability to retain or lose it—was serious business. It was the most important component of an individual’s (and a group’s) symbolic capital, and it translated into all of the important things in life: status, power, marriage, jobs, and more. Germans and Europeans, we know from a large literature, were consequently obsessed with acquiring and defending honor, most dramatically with the duel.1 That obsession, as I have recently written, did not disappear in the nineteenth century, despite the upheavals of industrialization, liberalism, national unification, and mass politics in the Kaiserreich (1871–1918).2 Instead, the preoccupation with honor was simply transferred to the new conditions of modern society, taking the form of a continuous flood of defamation lawsuits. In the process, however, honor and defamation litigation took on new contours. Most notably, marginalized groups like Jews seized upon defamation suits to make new claims for dignity and the right to equal citizenship. Jews did this both as individuals and through an organized defense movement by, among other things, bringing large numbers of defamation suits against anti-Semitic attacks in the press and in daily life. This essay goes back in time to an earlier history of Jews, honor, and defamation lawsuits during a period (1740s–1840s) that saw both the consolidation

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of absolutist monarchy and the erosion of the traditional order as a consequence of the massive upheavals of revolution, war, and early industrialism. For Jews, these changes played out in the movement toward emancipation that gradually transformed their lives from the world of traditional, segregated communities and autonomous institutions to increasing integration into German society, culture, and state. In the area of law, this transformation saw the gradual decline of rabbinical courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their abolition in the nineteenth century, after which they were superseded by secular state courts. The decline of rabbinical legal jurisdiction was, in turn, part of the broader weakening of the corporate legal status and identity of Jewish communities, which, by the mid-nineteenth century, were being replaced by new secular, liberal notions of individual rights. I am interested in the place of honor and its legal defense in the context of these broader developments. There is evidence that for centuries Jews, classified as dishonorable by municipal statutes, still participated in Germany’s honor culture and could even be litigants in defamation lawsuits with Gentiles.3 The outlines of that participation—how and if a Jewish culture of honor interacted with the German state and society, and how the dynamics of this interaction changed over time—are still unknown. This essay is a first attempt to explore these issues by bringing together social history, in the form of a local and micro perspective; cultural history (the honor issue); and the legal history of the defamation lawsuit. I look at three different moments in time, over a century, each structured around a particular defamation lawsuit: 1743–46; 1824; and 1847. Each of the lawsuits were about disputed honor in the Kingdom of Prussia, and all, notably, involved rabbis, the traditional leaders and most esteemed members of Jewish communities. But here the similarities in the cases end, for key elements radically changed over a century the kinds of honor disputes that led to lawsuits, the cultural idioms and social functions of these lawsuits, and the rabbis themselves and their uses (or not) of the courts. All of these things by the 1840s were quite different from what they had been in the 1740s. These changes trace very significant shifts over a century in Jewish-Gentile relations and in the relationship between Jews and the state, developments that reflected and accompanied the long-term emancipation and integration of German Jewry and the transformation of rabbinic authority. For these reasons, the history of honor lawsuits, I believe, sheds new light on some significant structural changes in German-Jewish history. The methods of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), deriving from the work of David Warren Sabean and other leading scholars in the field, have shaped this essay in several important ways.4 I examine the structural changes of Jewish emancipation, first of all, in terms of the power dynamics at the local (micro) level. My understanding of power as mediated by culture (here, honor ideas),

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in turn, derives from the anthropological insights that Alltagsgeschichte brought to the study of history. Yet, this essay does not offer a “deep description”5 of the individual cases. Nor does it provide full general coverage of the topic. The sources (and, needless to say, the space available in this volume) are simply too limited, given that most of the records of defamation lawsuits were destroyed, and those that still exist in the archives provide very limited information. Instead, the essay is an attempt to open up a hitherto unresearched topic ( Jewish defamation lawsuits) and, in so doing, to suggest new, comparative connections in a century-long development within the lives of German Jews. Honor in Intra-Jewish Disputes: Three Case Studies On a Sabbath in the fall of 1743, a verbal fight between Levin Seeligmann and Israel Elckan broke out after services in Berlin’s synagogue. The fight continued into the courtyard and the street and became violent when, according to witnesses, Seeligmann and three of his sons physically assaulted Elckan. The latter was left bleeding and so severely wounded that he was unable to walk. Clearly, insults had been hurled and Elckan’s sense of honor violated (although the content of the insults is unclear). We know this because the subsequent charge brought by the state against the defendants involved verbal defamation. There was also a second charge of physical defamation (Real Injuria), which referred to physical assaults of a dishonoring nature. The interesting aspect of this case is not the honor dispute itself—on that topic the sources are too limited—but rather the subsequent events that prevented the case from ever coming to trial. From the beginning, there were powerful interests within the Jewish community working to protect the accused, Seeligmann and his sons, from prosecution. Their chief tool in this was the Jewry Oath. A trial involving Jews in a Prussian state court at midcentury required all Jewish litigants—plaintiff, defendant, witnesses—to testify under a special oath formula set out in an imperial ordinance of 1538.6 When, however, Hofrath Marggraf began investigating the case, he was immediately apprised in a written petition by the Jewish witnesses in the case that, since the imperial formula did not follow the formula used in their rabbinical court (swearing an oath before the rabbi who recites from Leviticus), it violated Jewish law. On this basis, they requested a postponement of the court hearing. How successful this stalling technique was can be seen in government reports showing the case, a full two years later, still pending and unable to progress to trial. The facts of the case were not at issue; they were very clear. A number of witnesses had in the initial investigation testified to the beating of Elckan. The problem was that the rabbi had proclaimed the invalidity

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of any oaths, as in state court, that did not follow rabbinical law. Moreover, he claimed, it would be a sin against God for a Jew to denounce and litigate against another Jew in a Christian court. No one involved in the case was therefore willing to talk, and it lay languishing in legal limbo. As one official put it, with disgust, this was merely a case “of a pair of Jews hitting each other, which has become extraordinarily protracted [ungemeiner Weitläufigkeit], going on for two years and racking up costs of forty talers.”7 It was no accident that in the mid-eighteenth century a Jewish defamation case in a state court turned into a dispute over oath giving. Since the medieval era, Jews testifying in Christian courts had been subject to special oath formulas in which the oath swearer, with his hand on a Jewish holy text, not only swore to tell the truth, but also had to curse himself with a list of divine punishments should he commit perjury. Some formulas forced the oath giver to stand on a sow’s skin. There is disagreement about the original intent and function of these Jewry Oaths in the Middle Ages—whether they were primarily used to humiliate and segregate Jews or, to the contrary, served the practical purpose of integrating Jews into Christian courts.8 But it is clear that by the eighteenth century, the Jewry Oath had come to be viewed by Jews as a degrading disability, a symbol of Gentile distrust of and prejudice against Jews. Indeed, an intensified mistrust of Jews had circulated in anti-Jewish writings on the Jewry Oath since the late seventeenth century. Some anti-Semitic authors claimed the Talmud sanctioned lying to Christians. Others homed in on the Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur prayer in which all rashly made and unfulfillable personal vows between an individual Jew and God for the coming year were voluntarily renounced. Anti-Jewish writers (incorrectly) took this oath to mean that all Jewish oaths, including those made in business and in court, could be retroactively annulled. At the same time, the Jewry Oath became a cause of Jewish reformers and advocates of Jewish emancipation. State reformers, in turn, now initiated investigations to reform and rationalize the procedure.9 The Seeligmann-Elckan case is illuminating in several ways. First, it shows how intertwined the oath issue was with the internal conflicts and power dynamics of Berlin’s Jewish community. It is perhaps no coincidence that at the time of the case, the community was embroiled in a revolt against its leadership that had prompted a petition to the king denouncing the governing elders and requesting their replacement.10 Months later, the Jewry Oath in the Seeligmann-Elckan dispute became a pretext for judicial inaction by those same powerful interests (the governing elders). The expansion of state legal jurisdiction since the seventeenth century, we know from other sources, opened up, in the form of the state courts, an escape option for Jewish litigants seeking to avoid the rabbinical courts. This development, one assumes, profoundly affected intracommunal dynamics.11 Indeed, this is exactly what Elckan was

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doing when he denounced his attackers to the secular authorities. There was good reason for Elckan to have done so, since the rabbi, the authority who would have adjudicated the case had it come before the rabbinical court, was himself aligned with Elckan’s enemies.12 Those enemies, in turn, were members of the community’s elite. Both sides of the dispute (Seeligmann and Elckan), according to the court papers, held the coveted and privileged status of “protected Jew” (Schutzjude), which conferred residency and other rights. But there were significant status differences between Seeligmann and Elckan. A 1737 census listed the latter as a merely “tolerated” Jew living as an “old” man and a dependent in the household of his son, the owner of a “clothing business” who employed one servant. Seeligmann, by contrast, was the head of his household and financially better off as the owner of a silk shop and employer of two servants.13 More importantly, he occupied a powerful position as a communal “elder” and was a man, according to a government report, of great “standing” and “respect” in the community. Seeligmann, in other words, belonged to the oligarchy governing the community.14 If the state court in theory offered the weaker Elckan a way to circumvent this power structure, the reality on the ground made that tool ultimately useless, because state court proceedings, though jurisdictionally outside communal control, remained deeply embedded in the social fabric of the Jewish community. That fabric—consisting of a small, face-to-face community with an oligarchic political-religious structure—enabled its elite to exercise both formal and informal coercion against threats to its power. 15 Elckan, like the witnesses who refused to testify, was thoroughly intimidated. Although Elckan had initially denounced the Seeligmanns for the assault against his honor, he subsequently reconsidered, deciding to not testify against them. He explained that he did not want to “lose the friendship” of the Seeligmanns. He was also fearful of becoming a social outcast. He worried that, if he testified, the entire community would view him as “godless” and a “betrayer” and would “neither eat nor drink” with him.16 This kind of indirect and informal social coercion had stopped the legal case in its tracks, despite the energy and expense on the part of the state. Indeed, the Seeligmann-Elckan case exemplifies within the history of honor litigation precisely the type of coercive rabbinic authority that would figure in the later struggles of the Haskalah against rabbinic judicial power. The Jewish challenge to oath giving in Gentile court procedure was part of a general resistance to the incursions of the central state into the affairs of Jewish communities. Until they were undermined in the early modern era, Jewish communities were “quasi-governmental bodies” that “regulated both the religious and political-economic life of their members,” including everything from taxation, inheritance, and marriage to legal disputes.17 This situation changed with the rise of the absolutist states, which, in their policies to erect centralized,

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direct control over their subjects, went about enacting laws that systematically weakened or eradicated the medieval patchwork of estate and corporate privileges, including those of Jewish communities.18 Jewish administrative institutions in Prussia such as the rabbinical courts were never formally dismantled in this era because they were too useful to rulers. But beginning in the seventeenth century and intensifying in the eighteenth, the state steadily curtailed the autonomy of rabbinical courts and intervened more and more in communal affairs. Probably the biggest blow to the legal jurisdiction and powers of rabbis came little more than a decade before the Seeligmann-Elckan case in the form of a 1730 royal edict that ended rabbinical rights to excommunicate (the ban, or herem) violators of community norms and laws. This edict severely limited rabbinical courts, taking from them a powerful coercive tool and reducing them to mere “courts of arbitration whose decisions were binding only if the litigants agreed to them.”19 The fact that Prussian officials for decades subsequent to this decree were forced to reiterate the limited powers of rabbis suggests that this law remained limited in actual practice.20 The key figure of opposition to state power in the Seeligmann-Elckan lawsuit was Berlin’s new rabbi, David Fraenkel. A Talmudic scholar best known as the teacher of the great Enlightenment figure Moses Mendelssohn, Fraenkel was a traditionalist and a former rabbi of Dessau, who only months before had assumed in 1743 the post of rabbi in Berlin. Significantly, Seeligmann, the defendant who would find protection in Rabbi Fraenkel’s objections to the Jewry Oath, was one of the elders who petitioned the government for approval of Fraenkel’s election.21 The new rabbi was connected by family to a large number of well-to-do, powerful figures in the community. It is perhaps for this reason (as well as the long-term effort on the part of the state to curtail rabbinical legal jurisdiction) that his letter of appointment stipulated that he “was not to act as judge or give rulings in cases where members of his family . . . were involved.”22 If the Seeligmanns were related to Fraenkel (and the sources are silent on this issue), this would have given him a very direct motive for invoking the oath issue to block the lawsuit. The second notable aspect of the Seeligmann-Elckan lawsuit was the centrality of religion to a legal question of honor. The dispute between state and community took place on both sides within an idiom of religion. In the form of the oath controversy, as noted, religion was the focal point and pretext for a fight on the part of members of the community to shield the powerful Seeligmanns from being brought to justice in state court. Rabbinical prohibitions surrounding the Jewry Oath were in turn the medium for exercising internal communal discipline vis-à-vis the outside Gentile world. The challenge to Prussia’s Jewry Oath put the state in a quandary about how to accommodate Jewish demands—how, in other words, to get the witnesses to testify—while

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balancing its own need to prevent perjury. For, as the magistrate confidently declared, “rabbinical writing” allows that “yearly on Yom Kippur . . . all of [the Jews’] sins committed that year are atoned for . . . and forgiven, including perjury.”23 This quandary over oath giving set off an extensive investigation into Jewish religious custom and law. The presiding magistrate, in his report to the king, surveyed not only Jewish thought, prayer ritual, and Torah practices down to the smallest details of clothing ritual, but also the body’s movements at prayer.24 One can perhaps see here an instance of Foucault’s knowledge-power nexus, by which the extension of state power (here, the integration of Jews into the state court system) involved not only the expansion of the state institutions but also the development of a specialized body of knowledge that constructed its subjects in new ways.25 More broadly, the case suggests the ways in which the macro, structural changes of secularization and rationalization interacted with and were impacted by internal dynamics and disputes at the local level. The processes of secularization and rationalization of law, of course, are well documented in the historiography, as is the topic of the Jewry Oath. The local circumstances, attitudes, reactions, and dynamics within Jewish communities, as Hiram Kümper recently noted for the Jewry Oath, have been, by contrast, much harder to get at and remain much more opaque.26 The configuration of rabbi, state, and community looks quite different in a lawsuit filed in the Mecklenburg town of Alt Strelitz decades later in 1824. The suit was brought by the town’s vice rabbi, Levin Emanuel, and an associate, Ascher Lion, against three members of the community, all “protected Jews”: Levin Isaac, Joseph Isaac Bernheim, and the businessman Michaelis ZenderSanders. Most of the facts and precise details of the case are lost, but we do learn from the ducal municipal court judgment that convicted the defendants that Bernheim allegedly insulted Lion when a dispute beginning in a home spilled out into a public space. During a governing meeting, Bernheim had insulted and dishonored Lion in the “elders’ chamber,” a room used for official business that was usually located in the synagogue. Bernheim, according to the plaintiffs, sought to harm and “prostitute” Lion’s “good name and social standing [Ansehen]” with “dishonoring words.” Zender-Sanders used threats and inappropriate language toward the elder and chief (Vorsteher) Jacob Hallinger.27 The defendants were found guilty and required to make a formal public announcement of the court judgment at synagogue. Both the Seeligmann-Elckan dispute (1740s) and this 1820s case were about communal elites protecting their interests and authority. In the 1740s, this was accomplished by blocking a defamation lawsuit and resisting the secular authorities. The 1820s lawsuit represents a striking contrast. Here a religious leader—the vice rabbi—far from resisting the state authorities, sought out and welcomed the authority of the ducal municipal court in which the case

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was tried. This difference reflected a sea change that had occurred in the intervening decades in the progress of Jewish emancipation and the integration of Jews into German society. These developments were the product of two overlapping forces: the extension of state power into Jewish communities and the movement for emancipation and Enlightenment, the Haskalah, coming from within Jewish society itself. If the state favored the eradication of the traditional corporate autonomy of Jewish communities in order to institute more centralized and direct control over its subjects, Jewish reformers (the maskilim) supported Jewish integration into state institutions in the name of a secular, enlightened worldview that had the potential to emancipate Jews from the oppressive and backward hegemony of rabbis and elders.28 The result was that by the early nineteenth century, cultural and institutional developments had seriously weakened both religious orthodoxy and the institutions of Jewish selfgovernment, especially the rabbinical courts. By the 1820s, the state had won the battle between rabbinical and state court jurisdiction. After a 1792 decree dealt a severe blow in the form of banning those courts from enforcing conformity on their congregants, Prussia’s 1812 emancipation act, which granted Jews civil equality, finally abolished them altogether.29 Meanwhile, the Prussian state in the 1820s was in full reactionary mode against the revolutionary forces unleashed in 1789, pursuing policies to shore up the principles of hierarchy, obedience, and deference to authority. For Jews, this meant a retreat from Jewish emancipation and key antidiscriminatory provisions of the 1812 emancipation act. Prussian autocracy in the 1820s also took the form of state policies that propped up Jewish traditionalists, as in the power structures of rabbis and elders, against the modernizing and reformminded tendencies within Judaism. Honor, long central to the traditional hierarchy and practices of social deference, was crucial to the state’s backlash against democracy. A new alignment between Jewish religious and lay leaders on the one hand and the state on the other was possible and desirable in this context. In the Bernheim-Lion case, this can be seen in the favorable court judgment for the plaintiffs. That judgment also explicitly ruled for plaintiffs in the name of protecting authority and the existing social-political hierarchy in Alt Strelitz’s Jewish community. The accused, the court declared, had committed punishable acts by their “disrespectful behavior toward their superiors” while the latter were engaged in official business, and the court lamented “the harm” done thereby to the “respect due a government body.”30 In the defamation lawsuits of the 1740s and the 1820s, honor functioned in traditional ways as a tool of status and power within a hierarchical society made up of small communities of face-to-face relations. By contrast, by the 1840s, honor began to take on the contours of a quality gained and lost in the modern

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marketplace of ideas found in a newly emergent bourgeois public sphere. And, once again, the transformation of Jewish honor litigation followed broader political and social shifts, as we will see. The change can be seen in a lawsuit tried in a Berlin civil court in 1847, which convicted the editor of a Berlin-based Jewish newspaper, the Volksvertreter des Judenthums, Gustav Liepmannssohn, of defaming the rabbi of Stettin, Dr. Wolf Aloys Meisel (1815–67). Meisel, a “moderate” (conservative) reformer,31 brought the lawsuit after an article in Liepmannssohn’s traditionalist newspaper attacked Meisel for “sowing discord” in an otherwise “peaceful community” and of hypocritically cloaking himself as a conservative, all the while working toward egregious reforms in such areas as the prayer book.32 As editor, and therefore the person legally responsible for the contents of his newspaper, Liepmannssohn was found guilty and sentenced to a fine of twenty talers or fourteen days in jail, payment of all court costs, and the requirement to post a public announcement of the verdict in Berlin and Stettin newspapers. It was legal, of course, in Prussia to publicly critique another person’s intellectual or professional views and work. But the court found in its opinion that the defamatory article had gone beyond the critique of Meisel’s reformist position to being a “personal attack” against him as a rabbi, whose charge of hypocrisy, had it been true, would have caused his “fellow citizens” to view him with “contempt,” thus constituting a significant dishonor.33 In the Liepmannssohn-Meisel suit, we once again see a rabbi using defamation law to enforce his authority. But there are striking ways in which this case departed from the earlier ones. The first has to do with the dispute itself, revolving as it did around a doctrinal conflict between a reformer and a traditionalist. Decades after the first inroads made by the Haskalah, emancipation, and integration, German Jews were divided, split into those supporting and reflecting these modernizing trends and traditionalists and orthodox opposing them. Dr. Meisel was a new social type and a new breed of rabbi in Jewish history who reflected the modernization of Jewish life. Unlike his predecessors, Meisel was university educated, steeped in German culture, and an adherent of Reform Judaism. He embraced a rationalist, Enlightenment-inspired, moralethical interpretation of Judaism, which ignited the denominational splits of the 1840s and beyond between reformers, conservatives, and orthodox. The Liepmannssohn-Meisel lawsuit displayed in miniature the larger doctrinal conflicts characterizing Judaism after 1840.34 After taking up his position as rabbi of Stettin in 1843, Meisel, a moderate reformer associated with what would come to be known as conservatism, began introducing changes to the prayer book, presumably to deemphasize the themes of messianism, the return to Palestine, and Jewish segregation.35 It was apparently these measures that angered traditionalists, led to “quarrels” in the congregation, and subsequently to the published defamatory attacks of the lawsuit.

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The second aspect of the lawsuit that differed from the earlier ones is the dramatically changed context of the 1840s. The new political context of that decade reflected the development of a robust critical public sphere (the arena of the defamatory attack against Meisel) of cafés, journals, masonic lodges, literary societies, and a plethora of other voluntary associations that promoted sociability and critical discussion outside of the state, and thereby challenged the traditional corporate order and the dominance of a unified Jewish communal authority.36 Within Germany’s Jewish communities, this new public was characterized by the founding of newspapers and journals that intensified denominational splits while, as in the reformist Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, appealing to a broad, popular audience with news about religious and secular matters affecting the Jewish community.37 This new public, in turn, was linked to a growing liberal movement in Germany that produced a discourse about individual freedom and rights, demanding reforms of Prussian and German autocracy. Both developments played a role in the outbreak of revolution in 1848, the year after the lawsuit.38 Lastly, the Prussian state had changed its position on Jewish doctrinal disputes. The Prussian government, unlike its counterparts elsewhere in Germany, was hostile to Reform Judaism in the 1820s. Its policy toward Jews was to “encourage conversion” to Christianity and, in the interests of political stability, to oppose any “sectarianism” within Judaism. Instead of supporting the renewal and increased dignity of the rabbinate that accompanied Reform Judaism, and despite the fact that Prussian Jews had been granted civic equality in 1812, Prussia “stood firmly opposed to any modernization of the religious service or elevation of rabbinical status. Its policy dictated that Judaism continue to appear alien and visibly disfavored.”39 The result was that while state policy in southwest Germany tended toward the professionalization and social integration of the rabbinate, encouraging the university education of rabbis and treating them in civic affairs as equal to the Christian clergy, the opposite was true in Prussia. Here, the post-1815 era of reaction in Jewish affairs was marked by hostility toward almost everything that smacked of modernism in Judaism. There were prohibitions against confirmations, the banning of rabbis from dressing “like Christian clergy,” the refusal to set educational and professional standards for the rabbinate, and even, in Königsberg, the making of the use of German in Sabbath sermons illegal.40 With the ascension of Frederick William IV to the crown in 1840, however, a marked thawing of Prussian policy was apparent. While the state still did not actively support Jewish reformers or “give clerical status to the rabbinate . . . it had adopted a policy of toleration.”41 The discourse of the Liepmannssohn-Meisel lawsuit reflects these changes and the dramatic progress of the secularization and acculturation of German Jewry that accompanied them. In the court document, the state referred to

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and treated the litigants not according to a special Jewish status, but according to their class position within German society as members of the bourgeoisie (höheren Bürgertum). While revolving around a religious dispute, the lawsuit’s legal and cultural idiom had become entirely secularized. There was no question about the dispute not belonging in state court. Both Meisel and Liepmannssohn argued on strictly legal grounds, and they displayed a wellinformed familiarity with the law, citing the relevant passages of the legal code. Liepmannssohn, the defendant, while doctrinally resisting reformist and modernizing principles, in fact was steeped in a modern, secular legal discourse that incorporated liberal ideas about citizen rights and freedoms. In a petition to the court, he defended the journalist’s “right” and duty to write the truth: “[I]f, on the one hand, the writer should be authorized to publicize everything and to candidly express his opinion, on the other hand, he ought not to be denied the right to represent matters as he finds them.” And he warned against intensified repression through defamation actions in the courts of what was already a press under state “tutelage” (bevormundet).42 Conclusion The integration of Jews into Germany’s litigious honor culture paralleled the broader history of Jewish emancipation and acculturation. Yet the secularization and acculturation of Jewish honor and defamation litigation did not lead to their gradual disappearance, even though the corporate order in which honor had originated was in the process of being dismantled. For German Jews (and Gentiles), honor remained crucial to an individual’s status and to the way power was exercised well into the twentieth century. The three lawsuits of this essay suggest aspects of the way internal, intra-Jewish disputes—the dynamics at the local level—interacted with the broader historical shifts of Jewish history in the hundred years from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In the early modern era, the development of the absolutist state opened up, in the area of honor and defamation law, the possibility for Jews to challenge the elites of their communities. Attempts on the part of those elites to prevent this turned the Seeligmann-Elckan lawsuit into a political football in the broader power struggle between state and Jewish communal authorities. By the 1820s, a new alignment between the state and Jewish elite had emerged after the battle over communal autonomy and rabbinic jurisdiction had been lost. The 1840s doctrinal disputes in the press and resulting libel litigation reflected a further reshaping of honor and defamation litigation in the circumstances of a newly empowered public sphere and emergent liberalism. After 1871, Jewish honor litigation would once again take a new turn in the context of national

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unification, full Jewish legal emancipation, and an ascendant anti-Semitism. In this new context, Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned libel litigation into a tool to fight anti-Semitic slurs and to assert broader claims for Jewish dignity and civil equality. Honor, which had arisen centuries earlier to demarcate status and power in a hierarchical, corporate order, would become an instrument for the assertion of the rights of modern citizenship.

Notes 1. For early modern Germany, see Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1999); Eileen Crosby, “Claiming Honor: Injury, Honor, and the Legal Process in Saxony, 1650–1730” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2004). On German dueling, see Ute Frevert, Men of Honor (Cambridge, 1995). 2. Ann Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010). 3. Robert Jütte, “Ehre und Ehrverlust im spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Judentum,” in Verletzte Ehre, ed. Klaus Schreiner et al. (Vienna, 1995); Sabine Ullmann, Nachbarschaft und Konkurrenz (Göttingen, 1999). 4. See especially David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984); Hans Medick, “‘Missionaries in the Rowboat’? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History,” in The History of Everyday Life, ed. Alf Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 41–71; David Sabean and Hans Medick, eds., Interest and Emotion (Cambridge, 1988). 5. This term derives from the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). 6. Report of 5 April 1744. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitiz (GStPK), I HA, Rep. 21/206 C3, Fasz. 1. 7. Report of 24 October 1746. GStPK, I HA, Rep. 21/206 C3, Fasz. 1. 8. Joseph Ziegler, “Reflections on the Jewry Oath in the Middle Ages,” in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood, Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford, 1992), 209–20. 9. Hiram Kümper, “Juden vor Gericht im Fürstenstaat der Aufklärung: Die Kontroverse um den Judeneid,” Aschkenas 17, no. 2 (2007): 499–518; Thomas Vornbaum, Der Judeneid im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2006). 10. “Bittschrift der sämtlichen Juden Gemeinden Berlins an den König,” 28 June 1743. In Selma Stern, Der preussische Staat und die Juden, Part 3, Section 2 (Tübingen, 1971), 61. The text of the petition is reproduced in Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, (Berlin, 1871), 71. The elders responded with a request for permission, in October 1743, to announce the excommunication of the (anonymous) author of the petition. 11. Selma Stern, Der preussische Staat und die Juden Part I, Section I1 (Tübingen, 1962), 29–30. 12. The documents do not explicitly state this, but it seems a reasonable interpretation of the rabbi’s behavior. 13. Census of Berlin’s 120 Jewish families, 16 June 1737, reproduced in Stern, ibid. 378, 381. Strangely, however, under the category of “protected Jew,” this census listed Israel

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Wolff, Elckan’s son, under the subcategory “owner,” whereas Seeligmann is listed as “resident” (Incolae). 14. On the powers of Berlin’s leadership, see Mordechai Breuer, “The Early Modern Period,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael Meyer, vol. 1 (New York, 1996), 168. 15. A 1737 government census placed the number of Jewish families in Berlin at 120. Stern, Der preussische Staat, Part 2, Section 2 376ff. 16. Report of March 1746, GStPK, I HA, Rep. 21/206 C3, Fasz. 1. 17. Marion A. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford, 2005), 144. 18. Detailed accounts of this history for Prussia and Berlin can be found in Selma Stern, Der preussische Staat und die Juden (Tübingen, 1962–71); Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin (Berlin, 1871); Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York, 1993). 19. Alan L. Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Perspectives on the Persistence of the Political in Judaism (Lanham, MD, 2000), 29. 20. This is a point made by Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah, 29. 21. “Eingabe,” August 1743, in Stern, Der preussische Staat, Part 3, Section 2 (Tübingen, 1971), 61–62. 22. “Fraenkel, David Ben Naphtali Hirsch,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 7 (2007), 143. 23. Marggraff report to King, 5 April 1744. GStPK, I HA, Rep. 21/206 C3, Fasz. 1. 24. Ibid. 25. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). 26. Kümper, “Juden vor Gericht,” 518. 27. Fürstenberg, 10 February 1825. Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum Archiv (CJA), I, 75 A, Ident—Nr. 8189. 28. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York, 1986), chaps. 3–4, gives an intelligent, conceptually sophisticated overview of these developments. 29. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), 12. 30. This is a loose translation. 10 February 1825, CJA, I, 75 A, Ident—Nr. 8189. 31. M. Kayserling, Dr. W.A. Meisel: Ein Lebens- und Zeitbild (Leipzig, 1891). Meisel’s doctrinal position is confusing, because while in some respects a reformer, he was also associated with the conservatives at a theologian’s conference of 1846. Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, part 1, vol. 2, p. 1228; “Proposed Conferences of Jewish Theologians,” Heshvan 4, no. 8 (November 1846). 32. CJA, I, 75 A Ste 3, Nr. 91 (Ident.—Nr. 8010). 33. Berlin, 29 May 1847, CJA, I, 75 A Ste 3, Nr. 91. In the more repressive environment of the 1820s, the Prussian government had strictly opposed Jewish reformers. By the 1840s, the government was supporting them. “Reform,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–6), 14, 17. 34. “Reform,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–6); Meyer, Response to Modernity. 35. M. Kayserling, Dr. W.A. Meisel, 18. Meisel’s new “Cultus-Ordnung” included “die meisten Piutim sollten, auch am Neujahrs- und Versöhnungstage, nicht mehr gesagt, der Versöhungstag nicht mehr mit ‘Kol Nidre’ eingeleitet werden und ähnliche synagogale Veränderungen mehr.” The reaction by traditionalists: “mit denen alle diejeni-

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gen, welche das herkömmliche aus Gewohnheit lieben, sich nicht leicht befreunden konnten.” 36. The classic work on the bourgeois public sphere is Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 37. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 108. 38. In the Bernheim-Lion case (1820s), as we have seen, the convicted defendant was required to make restitution with a public pronouncement of his guilt in the synagogue. Here, in the world of a broader, literary public sphere, this public statement of guilt fittingly was designated for the newspapers. 39. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 103, 109, 53, 43–44. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. Ibid., 110. 42. Nr. 8010, Liepmannssohn petition for the reduction of his sentence, 15 June 1847: “wenn der Schriftsteller auf der einen Seite befugt sein soll über alles zu erteilen und seine Überzeugung freimütig auszusprechen, so darf ihm auf der anderen Seite aber nicht das Recht versagt sein, die Dinge so darzustellen, wie er sie findet.”

CHAPTER 17

12

You Are What You Reform? Class, Consumption, and Identity in Victorian Britain AMY WOODSON-BOULTON

I

n addressing the relationships between self, community, and larger forms of social organization in the modern era, we find a remarkable resource in the work of David Warren Sabean. Sabean presents a model for how historians can ask these kinds of complex questions about social relationships and the generation of meaning, based on a fundamentally historicist approach that finds clues to historical actors’ ideas, relationships, frames of reference, and points of debate through the careful and creative sifting of multiple forms of evidence. His scholarship teaches us never to take meaning or context for granted, and to think about the difference between prescribed and received ideas. Thus, he can, for example, point out how a “thorough examination of the practices associated with the Sacrament of Communion will go a long way toward enriching our understanding of alternative possibilities for constructing the self.”1 He emphasizes both the concept of studying practices (as played out in actual social interactions and as accessible to the historian) and the notion of approaching the idea of the self as constructed, a concept and experience that emerges through multiple forces and moments of power relations between individuals, communities, institutions, and states. In doing so, he turns “the self ” into something that historians can study—as an idea, and in terms of how earlier generations have experienced it—while remaining grounded in careful traditions of archival and closely documented historical research. Furthermore, he points out that ideas about the self, and the experience of the self, emerge out of particular societies, social forms, and relationships; as he wrote in 1996, “Ideas and actions are not divorceable from their imbrication in the production of social relations.”2 His scholarship is finely attuned to the subtle variations in how his

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subjects understood confession, Herrschaft, incest, sin, or kinship: what questions they asked, what language they used, and how these ideas and practices reveal and relate to social relationships and power differentials. Sabean’s work indicates how we, in approaching the question of something called “the self ” in the middle of the nineteenth century, might view consumption as an experience through which people made meaning of themselves and their world, a way to relate the material and the moral.3 Sabean gives us a complex understanding of the self, created within a social matrix and through social and religious practices that sought to mediate both village relations and eternal life. In the nineteenth century, reformers tended to address moral questions by promoting changes in material culture, in consumption, or to the physical environment, but also the reverse; that is, they tended to consider questions of poverty or degraded surroundings through mental and spiritual reform. When viewed in this way, we see more clearly that nineteenth-century reformers articulated their concerns in terms of the effects of various experiences and ideas on the body and the mind. Reform efforts arose out of a common store of deep anxieties over material abundance, inequality, and the possibilities for unbridled or unmediated consumption—for example, of meat, of drink, or of disturbing, immoral, or cruel leisure activities—as well as over the realities of unregulated production. Reformers’ concerns over consumption patterns thus focused on questions of abundance, overuse, cruelty in production, and the increasing possibility of individual choice; these concerns turned into associations and organized efforts dedicated to influencing the consumption of food and drink, and to controlling or eliminating pollution and adulteration. Workers negotiated their individual and collective responses to these middle-class reform efforts and to new economic realities, choosing their own patterns of consumption and modes of affiliation (e.g., unions, political parties, or the cooperative movement).4 At the same time, related anxieties led reformers to connect consumption with conditions of production. Some, often related to the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to bring the user and producer together in a pursuit of beauty, function, and fulfilling labor; others, connected with socialism, began cooperative societies to redefine the relationship between the consumer and the producer.5 Together, these cases show us not only that voluntary affiliation provided a key means for developing individual and class identities in the modern era, but also that such associations tended to revolve around patterns of consumption, forming part of the broader cultural reaction to industrial capitalism, material abundance, and marked social and economic inequality. Recently, scholars have engaged with the question of the individual in modern society in a new way, by recognizing that participation in social reform efforts was in fact closely tied to individual and collective class identity.6 Thus, alongside traditional spiritual questions of the relationships between self, God,

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and eternity, men and women in nineteenth-century Britain viewed questions of identity, self-improvement, and social change through affiliation. The explosion of Victorian reform movements and voluntary societies represented the development of new forms of organization arising in response to new problems, particularly those created by the parallel material abundance and profound inequality of the industrial age. In contrast to older forms of social relations— blood, mutual obligation, even the physical proximity of neighborliness—these new venues by which individuals defined themselves were affiliations of choice, and represented collective responses to the radically new material culture then emerging in industrial, imperial Britain. Indeed, participation in such associations and reform societies was all predicated on consumption as the primary marker of identity, for the middle classes as well as the working classes whom they so often tried to influence. This is not a simple story of how one form of understanding one’s place in the world replaced another—from religious to secular, or from kin to class, or from spirituality to consumption—but a matter of tracing complex currents of affiliation, and of looking at the questions that Victorians asked themselves, as they sought to negotiate—and as their choices defined—the industrial age. To write of “reformers” or “reform movements” can miss the social connections among these individuals, flattening their differences but also losing the social context in which reformers acted on a number of issues at once. While there were individuals who cared about only one issue, the same individuals were more often than not involved in multiple organizations, creating networks of frequently intersecting and interconnected groups and memberships, sometimes including ties of kinship, congregation, business, neighborhood, childhood, and (increasingly) political party. Many of these reformers, particularly in the industrial northwest of England, were inspired by the art and social criticism of John Ruskin.7 For example, Manchester lawyer John Ernest Phythian made a succinct connection between his Methodist minister introducing him to the writings of John Ruskin in 1879 and his subsequent involvement in several groups with which he would develop an enduring affiliation.8 Phythian would go on to be involved in the Ruskin Society, the Manchester Art Museum, the Ancoats Recreation Society, the Royal Manchester Institution, and the Manchester City Art Gallery. All of these, except the Royal Manchester Institution, were founded between 1879 and 1883 (that institution, established in 1823, gave itself to the city in 1883 to become the Manchester City Art Gallery). Phythian worked with a group of many of the same people on these projects, forming a network of like-minded, eager followers of Ruskin’s ideas.9 Ruskin’s own Guild of St. George (founded in 1875) brought many reformers together, in and across a number of cities.10 For example, Ruskin himself mentioned meeting a number of civic leaders in Birmingham at the home of one of his guild members (and city mayor), George Baker, in 1877.11

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Similarly, the antiquarian William Edward Armytage Axon was a member of the Ruskin Society, the Manchester Art Museum, and the Royal Manchester Institution, as well as a leading member of the Vegetarian Society, chief city librarian, and an author and lecturer with the Manchester Literary Club.12 In addition to writing a “bibliographical biography” of Ruskin,13 Axon coedited Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet with Ruskin’s socialist friend Henry Salt, who also published a number of works on nonviolence and vegetarianism.14 Contemporaries noticed these connections; for instance, in his 1898 history of vegetarianism, Charles Forward noted that “[o]ne of the most noticeable features of the Vegetarian movement is the fact that so large a proportion of those who have been associated with it were advocates—and, in many cases, very active advocates—of other moral and social reforms.”15 In Birmingham, several overlapping social, political, and religious networks brought people together to help reform local government, to establish a number of important civic institutions, and to improve the city. Families worked together, notably the Chamberlain family and their in-laws, including the Kendricks. Long-term local and national affiliations began through the National Education League and then the Liberal Party. Membership in church and chapel, particularly among the Congregationalists and Unitarians, served to inspire and connect like-minded reformers, as ministers sermonized on the “Civic Gospel.” Such relations strengthened social bonds and helped to establish an active city government that supported a number of new municipal institutions, including the city art museum, art school, and board schools. Furthermore, the city municipalized the gas and water works and used improvement projects both to clear slums and to establish an ornamental style of architecture as a self-conscious program of beautification.16 As a final example, by the end of the century, as cultural provision became established in government institutions, professional networks also increasingly connected reformers, for instance, when Phythian of Manchester interviewed Birmingham curator and reformer Whitworth Wallis about the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s organization and acquisition policies.17 These examples serve to illustrate a quality of modern society already identified by Thomas Carlyle in his 1829 essay “Signs of the Times”: the emergence in the nineteenth century of a highly organized response to social, cultural, and political problems, through voluntary associations, meetings, and societies, as well as through the state, a response that was about both collective action and individual identity. Carlyle described this shift as one in which any man, or any society of men, [has] a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it.18

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For Carlyle, this “machinery” of voluntary public associations, committees, and organizations—alongside the increasing sophistication of government bodies—exemplified the tragedy of modern society: the diminution of individual greatness, subsumed in collective action and conformity, turning potential heroes into cogs of a great social machine. Carlyle understood the liberal “mechanism” that he analyzed and rejected as essentially materialist: “It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.”19 Resisting the powerful currents of materialism and collective action, Carlyle called for a return to metaphysics, to spirituality, and to a focus on the cultivation of individual rather than social perfection: “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”20 Yet in the last half of the nineteenth century, reform efforts in fact aimed to combine precisely these concerns, the moral and the material, the self and the collective, through a variety of methods. Many reformers made deep, personal, long-term commitments to their causes that changed the course of their lives, even as they believed that their causes (bringing art and culture to the uneducated, promoting vegetarianism, etc.) would improve others (morally and materially) on both an individual and a communal basis. For example, art museums, libraries, and parks were the result of collective, municipal taxation and individual philanthropy, but based their utility on changing visitors one at a time. Other movements, of course, sought to legislate behavior or consumption. Many such efforts attempted to reach the material via the moral or vice versa, using modern styles of organization (e.g., meetings, committees, journals or publications, minutes, advertisements, connections with other organizations) to do so. As intriguingly, what Carlyle identified as antithetical (a mechanical collectivism vs. the cultivation of self ) became part of a new process of identity creation through collective action, voluntary affiliation, and the development of new kinds of communities. People used these organizations to define themselves, to mediate their individual identities in smaller groups brought together through shared ideas, passions, and practices, and to navigate social hierarchies. As J. T. W. Mitchell, president of the Co-operative Association, said in 1892: “If people want to start a new organisation they desire to get associated with existing organisations in order to give them character and position.”21 These overlapping kinship, friendship, voluntary association, congregation, professional, and political networks served as the social context in which individuals negotiated questions of consumption, belonging, and choice. Through these connections, they developed new ways of establishing individual, group, local, national, and eventually imperial identities in the midst of the material abundance and radical social

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change of the industrial age. Furthermore, they opened up new sites and means for expressing (and debating) how to choose what to consume, purchase, ingest, and experience. It was this very act of choice—of the self as essentially mutable, based on what one experienced, consumed, purchased, or wore, on where one lived, on which clubs and associations and church one chose—that critics like Carlyle found so unsettling in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but that gradually became part of the nature of modern society. This liberalism of the mechanical age did not create an organic whole but a series of shifting, overlapping groups and sets of individual actors who framed political, social, and moral questions in terms of choices about their relationship to the material world. Viewed in terms of consumption, such primarily middle-class reform associations focused on several key areas of anxiety, prompting public debate and, frequently, the formation of multiple (and even rival) associations. First, organizations emerged to change people’s patterns of physical ingestion, principally concentrated on food and drink, in terms of the suffering of both the consumer and the consumed. Second, reformers understood beauty, nature, and (elite) culture as an antidote to moral and physical ugliness, considering these forms of mental consumption and leisure as healthy alternatives to “lower” forms of entertainment, and as preventative of “unhealthy” or “immoral” forms of ingestion (i.e., drinking). Finally, reformers were concerned about consumers’ choice of household products (including furnishings, interior decoration, and personal adornment), both because their manufacture often caused suffering and because of the effects that poorly chosen goods could have on the user.22 All of these movements frequently used similar arguments rooted in uneasiness about production and the market, given their increasingly anonymous and even global workings. Reformers responded, on the one hand, to concerns about what one consciously and knowingly ingested (physically or mentally) and its multiple effects on the consumer and the producer. On the other hand, associations arose in response to the fear of what one unconsciously consumed, in polluted air and water or in adulterated or contaminated food and drink.23 The Vegetarian Society, founded in Manchester in 1847, was the first modern association dedicated to the organized promotion of its cause. From its founding, it promoted an approach that emphasized the physical and moral effects of vegetarianism on the consumer rather than on the suffering of the animals consumed. For example, at the inaugural meeting of the Society on 30 September 1847, Joseph Brotherton, MP, combined religious and physical arguments: With regard to the laws of Nature, there was a feeling implanted by the Deity, entirely opposed to the shedding of blood; and . . . it must certainly be considered as a guide to human conduct. Another argument from Nature, was, that

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from the opinions of anatomists, man was frugivorous and granivorous, and not carnivorous, in his formation; as seen by the colon, the intestines and the teeth. Again, the earth teemed with productions for the sustenance of man. And so, from human feeling, Nature, and the anatomy of the body, might the conclusion be drawn that it was wrong to take life to support the body.24

Brotherton foregrounded the issue of animal suffering only in terms of the human viewers’ reactions, as a guide to moral conduct, but the real focus here is on the evidence presented by anatomy. Similarly, in an undated pamphlet inserted into the minute book (1876–84) of the Vegetarian Society, the author “W.S.” used sixteen of his twenty-four points to argue about the vegetarian diet’s effects on physical health, spent seven points providing evidence from the Bible and other sources on the diet’s effects on moral character, and devoted just one point to a discussion of the suffering of the animals themselves: 15.—I am a Vegetarian, because my feelings are shocked by the quivering limbs, the horrid means, and the melancholy whinings of the poor animals, as they receive from the “butcher” those wounds necessary to end their existence; for I believe, that had Infinite Wisdom designed me to use flesh as food, he would not have implanted in my bosom an instinctive abhorrence of such deeds of blood.25

Even this mode of argument did not treat the suffering of animals as itself a reason for adopting a vegetarian diet; again, as in Brotherton’s speech, it was the effect on the observer of that suffering that proved divine injunction or an understanding of humans as naturally vegetarian. By far the majority of W.S.’s arguments were based on the diet’s effects in terms of moral and physical health, long life, beauty, and domestic economy, as well as its suitability to human anatomy.26 These midcentury vegetarians, then, framed their dietary choices in terms of consumption—of what to put into one’s body, and of the effects of these choices on body and mind. In their organized attempts to influence consumption choices—their own and those of others, primarily the working class—middle-class reformers distinguished themselves from the aristocracy “above” and the working classes “below.”27 Class identity thus developed in the process of negotiating the new problems of abundance, choice, and consumption. Vegetarian historian Charles Forward was startlingly honest that the vegetarian movement was in part a reaction to an increased standard of living among the working classes and the corresponding increased consumption of meat. He explained this consumption as resulting from a range of factors connected with the industrial revolution: “the abolition of the Corn Laws, the rapid development of English manufactures helping to augment the wages of the working classes, and to lead them to adopt a more luxurious mode of life.”28 In Forward’s account, most

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people had been vegetarian for most of history, meat being a relative luxury, but improved conditions demanded a vegetarian movement: “prior to the present century the habits of the people did not demand an organized propaganda on behalf of a simple and humane diet.”29 This concern with diet extended also to efforts to curtail entertainments involving animals, such as bear baiting or dog fighting. As Keith Thomas has noted, however, the successful animal welfare work of the nineteenth century notably targeted and successfully limited only working-class cruelties to animals.30 Aristocratic overconsumption, immorality, and cruelty became objects of criticism in art, literature, and the wider culture.31 However, aristocratic blood sports using hunting dogs (a key aspect of rural life in the modern period) were not successfully legislated against until the early twenty-first century.32 Even more than the question of meat consumption, the question of alcohol inspired middle-class reformers to organize societies in the nineteenth century. These groups approached the problem on a number of fronts: through education about the “evils” of drink, by providing both substitute food and drink, particularly tea and cocoa, and by promoting alternative forms of leisure. The question of leisure revolved around the “Sunday opening” movement that sought to offer alternatives to the pub.33 The debates about Sunday opening that took place among Sabbatarians, temperance advocates, and those in favor of “rational recreation” offer another example of the close relationship that reformers saw existing between types of mental, moral, and physical ingestion. As in the example of the Vegetarian Society above, members of associations that aimed to end drinking and to change leisure habits used these affiliations in order to define and address problems of consumption. Participation in such organizations thus justified or confirmed members’ own choices, by attempting to spread these to others, and helped to develop key aspects of individual and class identity. The focus of such efforts was very clearly on directing ingestion: what went into the body, in the form of intoxicating drink, and the mind, in the form of “low” or immoral activities and environments. On the one hand, Sabbatarian organizations like the Lord’s Day Observance Society tried to reduce Sunday trading and restrict all activity to religious observance; their opponents, such as the National Sunday League and the Sunday Society, attempted to open up cultural institutions and redefine “observance” of the Sabbath.34 All sides of this debate were highly organized, addressing questions of morality and even spirituality through questions of public policy and using methods to influence public opinion, in just the ways that Carlyle abhorred: lobbying, educating, publishing, and cajoling, pushing tracts and ideas, and arranging meetings and dinners. Members of such organizations put their questions explicitly in terms of class, as Birmingham town councilor Jesse Collings did when discussing the changing use of leisure among the middle class:

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I would remind these gentlemen that at one time the upper and middle classes of England, the men of the class now sitting in this chamber, were slaves to drinking habits, that they have freed themselves from these habits, not by Acts of Parliament, but by social and educational influences, by better culture and a higher standard of taste; and I am persuaded that the same results will be seen by a similar process among the poor and working classes; and that process will be aided and hastened by such measures [opening the city art museum on Sundays] as we propose to-day.35

This argument neatly combines the various kinds of physical and mental ingestion that were the target of so much middle-class effort. In this telling, the upper classes stopped their pernicious drinking habits through changing habits of mental consumption (“social and educational influences,” “better culture and a higher standard of taste”). As Birmingham museum curator Whitworth Wallis noted about cultural institutions and mental ingestion, “In one case, that of the Free Library, the mind in its wider aspects is appealed to; in the other, that of the Museum, the eye is the organ through which the perception of beauty and proportion is conveyed to the mind.”36 Cultural provision offered opportunities for new kinds of consumption of culture that might ultimately transform how people behaved.37 This understanding of mental consumption carried into reform efforts that attempted to address anxieties about the market, about modern abundance, and about the physical and moral ugliness of industrial capitalist methods of production. The broad Arts and Crafts movement, embodied in multiple related associations, brought together concerns about materialism and mechanism in organized attempts to beautify household goods, interior design, and architecture, with the ultimate goal of transforming industrial labor practices. Such reformers imagined any given product as an index of its maker’s joy or suffering, so that beauty and ugliness were inherent byproducts of the conditions of production. This was the heart of John Ruskin and William Morris’s critiques of industrial capitalism, although ultimately both moved away from only reforming aspects of production and toward a critique of the system as a whole. Once again, we see a connection between modern mechanism, morality, and materialism in these organized responses to new forms of production and consumption, even as they attempted to escape or redefine the nature of modern relations: John Ruskin and his Guild of St. George, William Morris, the museum movement, and design reform efforts, and the cooperative movement’s attempts to change the consumer’s very role in and relationship to the market. John Ruskin’s 1853 essay “The Nature of Gothic” echoed through numerous art and reform movements of the nineteenth and even the twentieth century.38 By redefining beauty as the outcome of joyful labor—and therefore as a condition that described the experience of both the producer and the user—Ruskin

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helped to bring aesthetics and ethics together, and to turn reformers’ attention to consumption as a new approach to changing the effects of industrial capitalism.39 Already in this early essay he offered rules to use consumption as a way to influence production:

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works.40

The example which Ruskin gave for the first of these rules is to avoid purchase of glass beads, as both “utterly unnecessary” and requiring “no design or thought” in their manufacture.41 Later, he helped to institutionalize these ideas in the Guild of St. George, in 1875 suggesting membership oaths that made explicit promises against causing suffering in the pursuit of “gain or pleasure.”42 Craftsman, poet, socialist, novelist, and entrepreneur William Morris built on these ideas in two speeches given as president of the Birmingham Society of Arts, in 1879 and 1880, urging his audience to transform the injustice and brutality of the industrial age by promoting “art made by the people and for the people as a joy to both the maker and the user.”43 He questioned the idea that the highest form of civilization means “conventional comforts” that enslave others by their production. Furthermore, he gave his audience words to live by as part of a wider solution: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”44 These ideas made it into the publications of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, then developing its permanent building and collection. As curator Wallis wrote, visitors must try to learn from the exhibits “to make, if only at first in a small way, our manufactures, candlesticks, coal-boxes, spoons, or whatever it may happen to be, more and more beautiful. It is to our interest (to look at it in its most mercenary sense) to do so, and life will thus become more interesting both to the man who makes the article and to the one who uses it.”45 Middle-class reform efforts thus helped to institutionalize, in both public and private associations, a new relationship between consumption and critiques of industrial production. These groups of middle-class reformers developed responses to industrial capitalist production around the issue of consumption, with a theory that combined ethics and aesthetics. Meanwhile, at least one major working-class response also found a solution in consumption, but one predicated on viewing the consumer as producer and vice versa, in order to redistribute wealth and thus to address a question that Carlyle (tellingly) did not raise in his complaint about the mechanical age, namely, its extreme social inequality (even as

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it produced unprecedented wealth). J. T. W. Mitchell’s 1892 presidential address to that year’s Co-operative Congress was explicit about the cooperative movement’s goals and methods: “My desire is that the profits of all trade, all industry, all distributors, all commerce, all importation, all banking and money dealing, should fall back again into the hands of the whole people.”46 This goal was quite distinct from those of middle-class organizations, as within it lay a real challenge to the class system itself. As Mitchell noted, he was not for the division of private property: “What I want is for co-operators, trade unionists, and all the industrious classes of this and every other country to combine in keeping their own shop, making a good dividend, producing, distributing, and financing, and let all the profits come to those who consume the goods, because they have made them.”47 He was explicit that achieving this goal lay in “making consumption the basis of the growth of all co-operative organization.”48 This included physical and mental consumption: he advocated temperance and religion alongside the cooperative movement as the “three great forces for the improvement of mankind.”49 Next to the many working-class organizations for self-improvement, literacy, education, and religious instruction (e.g., mechanics’ institutes, Sunday schools, temperance “tea parties,” etc.), the cooperative movement also pursued consumption, but with goals that more explicitly sought to use the existing system of production and consumption to redistribute wealth. By using David Warren Sabean’s work as a model for how communities and individuals negotiated social and material relationships, we can better understand how social organization and affiliation arose as solutions around the perceived problems of consumption. Sabean’s work shows us how villagers in the early modern era assigned meaning to their material world, negotiating mysterious natural forces and the often equally mysterious institutions of church and state, encountered in the form of local clergy and officials.50 His research presents an example of how scholars can historicize “the self ” within specific material, social, and ideological contexts. In nineteenth-century Britain, in the midst of tremendous social change under the pressures of industrial capitalism, voluntary associations and reform movements not only provided a new venue for individual and class identity formation, but also helped individuals and classes work out new ways of managing a material culture that had radically shifted into one of great abundance, radical inequality, and real choice. Writing in the first decades of industrialization, Carlyle believed that the new forms of social organization themselves took on a mechanical character as people sought to address the problems created by industrial capitalism. He excoriated these approaches, in which individual heroism became subsumed in collective effort, and which sought materialist solutions to new problems created by overabundance and materialism itself. His work was prescient. By the middle and

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later decades of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of reform movements sought to address moral issues through consumption, and found identity and purpose in such affiliations. This was part of the broader shift to a new political economy, based on an increasingly complex consumer economy, and Carlyle’s critique can help us see these shifts as a collective response to radically new forms of social and economic production. Such responses increasingly (as he despaired) conflated material and moral concerns. Moreover, it is clear that many of these responses were rooted in socioeconomic class: while both working- and middle-class reform organizations emphasized consumption, they did so in very different ways. Middle-class organizations responded to anxieties about the market and about the working class itself; they also developed theories that combined ethics and aesthetics, positing responsible consumption as a means of influencing industrial production. Working-class efforts, above all in the cooperative movement, viewed consumption not as a means of morally influencing the consumer or even in terms of challenging industrial modes of production, but in terms of the redistribution of wealth. Taken together, the evidence presented here points to deep connections between association, consumption, and identity in the industrial age. Notes 1. David Warren Sabean, “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central European History 29, no. 1 (1996): 17. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Deborah Cohen has described the complex process by which the middle class, deeply affected by evangelical Christianity, came to think of “morality and materialism . . . as mutually reinforcing propositions.” Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006), 3. 4. See Peter Bailey, “‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?’ Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12 (1979): 336–53; Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996). I am grateful to Erika Rappaport for the latter reference and for her help thinking through these issues. 5. J. T. W. Mitchell, “The Ideology of Consumption: J.T.W. Mitchell’s Presidential Address at the Co-operative Congress, Rochdale 1892,” appendix 6 in Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 250–58. 6. See, e.g., Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester and New York, 2000). 7. See Tim Hilton, John Ruskin (New Haven, CT, 2002); David Melville Craig, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption (Charlottesville, VA, 2006), esp. 64–66. 8. This comes from a series of “Reminiscences” by Phythian, which now exist as undated manuscripts in the Manchester Central Reference Library Archives. J. E. Phythian, extract from “Reminiscences” [about his interest in Ruskin], n.d. MSS. MCLA M270/9/26/8. In MCLA M270/9/26/1–9, Talks and Writings by J. E. Phythian.

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9. I explore the workings of these reform networks and how they led to the establishment of city art museums in Amy Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Palo Alto, CA, 2012). 10. Hilton discusses the Guild of St. George in Hilton, John Ruskin, 588–91. 11. Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty, 27. See also Hilton, John Ruskin, xix–xx, 639–40; John Ruskin, Letter 80, 16 July 1877, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (New York, 1886), 7:142. 12. An account of a lecture by Thomas Horsfall at the Manchester Literary Club about the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1883, published in The Architect, includes comments by W. E. A. Axon and George Milner. See T. C. Horsfall, “Neglected Pictures,” The Architect, 20 October 1883, p. 236. 13. William Edward Armytage Axon, John Ruskin: A Bibliographical Biography, Reprinted from Vol. V. of the Papers of the Manchester Literary Club (Manchester, 1879). 14. Tristam Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York, 2006), 425. Stuart notes that Salt and Axon’s reprint of Shelley, and Salt’s own writings, were deeply influential on Mohandas Gandhi when he moved to London in 1888. Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution, 423–25. 15. Charles Walter Forward, Fifty Years of Food Reform (London, 1898), 62. 16. Amy Woodson-Boulton, “Temples of Art in Cities of Industry” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 2003), chap. 1; Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty, 21–32. 17. “Report of interview with Mr. Whitworth Wallis at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, April 25, 1894,” presented to the Special Sub-Committee re: Art Directorship, Manchester City Art Gallery Archives, Art Gallery Committee Minutes, vol. 3, 31 May 1894, 194–95. 18. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times (Edinburgh Review, 1829),” in The Modern British Essayists, Vol. V: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays by Thomas Carlyle (Philadelphia, 1852), 189. 19. Ibid., 191. 20. Ibid., 196. Emphasis in the original. See a good discussion of Carlyle’s ideas about reform in Craig, John Ruskin, 209. 21. Mitchell, “The Ideology of Consumption,” in Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 255. 22. There were multiple other movements that dealt with issues of consumption, particularly in terms of physical and visual experience, and that understood beauty and ugliness to have real effects on the body and mind, understood through a theory of assimilation. James A. Schmiechen, “The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism,” American Historical Review 93, no. 2 (1988): 287–317. These concerns about the urban environment, particularly campaigns for clean water and air, were closely tied to fears of the free market and food adulteration and production. On the latter, see Erika Diane Rappaport, “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford, 2006), 125–46. 23. The condition of increasingly anonymous mass markets and the loss of intimacy with what was consumed—the long historical move away from local production and consumption—meant that movements to reform diet were also about particularly modern fears of the unknown origin of the most intimate decisions: what to eat or drink. Advertisers, scientists, and voluntary bodies thus entered a long public debate about

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the ethics of the marketplace, the honesty of sellers, and the conditions of production. Rappaport argues that the debate over green tea in particular shows the rise of a “culture of expertise” in which scientists, government bodies, and Western modes of quality assurance would keep British consumers safe from unsafe practices associated with goods originating outside imperial control. Rappaport, “Packaging China,” 126, 133. 24. Brotherton in Forward, Fifty Years of Food Reform, 23. 25. W.S., “Reasons for being a Vegetarian” (Manchester, n.d.). Undated printed pamphlet found between pages 72–73 of the Minutes of the Vegetarian Society, Manchester Library Archives GB124.G24./1/1/3, Minutes 1876–84. Another undated (and very tiny, just 2” × 3”) pamphlet lists ten principal reasons for the vegetarian diet, none of which relate to the suffering of animals. See “Summary of the Vegetarian System: Vegetarian Messenger Tracts, No. 1.” Manchester Library Archives GB127. M136/3/10/30. This second, smaller pamphlet refers to the Vegetarian Messenger volume 1, published in 1851. 26. W.S., “Reasons for Being a Vegetarian.” 27. On class and animal welfare movements, compare Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1996), 190–95. 28. Forward, Fifty Years of Food Reform, 5. 29. Ibid., 4. Emphasis mine. 30. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 186–87. 31. Consider, among many such possible examples, the Pre-Raphaelite Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s 1862 painting Last Day in the Old Home, or George Eliot’s portrayal of Henleigh Grandcourt’s emotional torment of his spaniel in her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Space does not permit a full discussion of this wider cultural impulse relating to consumer choice and material culture, but there is clearly a tension here between the public, broad middle-class reforming morality and aesthetic that deliberately rejected aristocratic models and the gradual gentrification of the upper middle class, many of whom developed their wealth in industrial production. Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1995). Martineau’s painting is held at Tate Britain (see http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martineauthe-last-day-in-the-old-home-n01500). George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Chicago, 1876; repr., 1889), 114–15. 32. Hunting wild animals with dogs became the quintessential aristocratic pastime in the modern period, becoming highly organized and standardized in the nineteenth century and surviving the decline of country houses in the twentieth century. This particular cruelty was outlawed by the Hunting Act in 2004 (see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/2004/37/contents). 33. This topic has of course received a great deal of attention; see, e.g., Brian Howard Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London, 1971). I have written about the Sunday opening debate in Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty, chap. 2, “The Public House Versus the Public Home: The Debate Over Sunday Opening,” 54–82. 34. The Lord’s Day Observance Society was known at first as the Society for Promoting the Due Observance of the Lord’s Day and was founded by the evangelical Clapham Sect in 1831, under the influence of Sabbatarian Daniel Wilson ( John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday [Manchester, 1980], 34). It was primarily an Anglican movement that sought to achieve a stricter interpretation of the Sabbath through

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legislation restricting Sunday trade. Its opposing organizations followed after the success of the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations of 1851: the National Sunday League was founded in 1854, and the Sunday Society was founded 1875. 35. Jesse Collings, Speech of Mr. Councillor Jesse Collings, in the Birmingham Town Council, on the Resolution to Open the Public Art Gallery, and Free Reference Library, on Sundays (London and Birmingham, UK, 1872), 15. 36. Sir Whitworth Wallis, “The Museum and Art Gallery,” in Birmingham Institutions: Lectures Given at the University, ed. John Muirhead (Birmingham, UK, 1911), 477–78. 37. The idea that culture could change behavior (particularly drinking, and particularly among the working classes) came under a great deal of criticism. See, e.g., “A Word to Art-Maniacs, by a Free Lance,” I, II, and III, published in Liverpool’s Liberal Review, 26 October 1878, p. 5, 2 November 1878, pp. 4–5, and 9 November 1878, p. 5, respectively. 38. John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in John D. Rosenberg, The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections From His Writings (Charlottesville, VA, 1998; orig. 1964), 170–96. 39. See Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” 180. 40. Ibid., 180–81. Emphasis in the original. 41. Ibid., 181. 42. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (Orpington, UK, 1875), 274–75. 43. William Morris, Labour and Pleasure, vs. Labour and Sorrow: Address in Town Hall (Birmingham, UK, 1880), 8, 28. I address these documents and their contexts in greater detail in Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty, esp. 26, 32. 44. Morris, Labour and Pleasure, 28. 45. Whitworth Wallis, Cooper and Co’s Penny Guide to the Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum with a Plan of the Building, and List of Pictures (Birmingham, UK, 1886), 10. 46. Mitchell, “The Ideology of Consumption,” in Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 254. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 253. 49. Ibid., 255. 50. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984).

12

Conclusion MARY LINDEMANN AND DAVID M. LUEBKE

There was a dead bull in a pit That the villagers thought kept them fit Though archives abound with such stories profound To find them takes Sabean’s grit

I

n academe, influence comes in many different forms, none of them exclusive of the others entirely. The rarest of these might be called the professional factory model: scholars who exert influence in a profession by building up seminars or institutes of advanced study, whose graduates go on to populate, even dominate, the fields into which they have been placed. One that comes to mind is the institute founded by Heiko Oberman, one of the foremost historians of late medieval and Reformation-era theology, at the University of Arizona. Oberman and his institute sponsored a huge number of graduate students over the years, who now occupy a disproportionately large number of positions within their field and who continue to set the tone in scholarship on Luther. Another might be called the Socrates model. Less institutionalized than the professional factory, the Socrates model depends for its vitality on some overpowering thesis or methodology that sweeps aside its intellectual competitors and, naturally, attracts large numbers of aspiring young scholars to study at the feet of the Master (or Mistress, as the case may be). The Socratic model and the professional model alike carry with them both the benefits and the hazards of discipleship. On the one hand, disciples slip with relative ease into their mentors’ networks of professional influence and affiliation—a decided boon for young scholars at the start of their careers. Not inevitably, but all too often, the Master/Mistress guides closely the students’ research and uses it to amplify and extend his/her own agendas and methodologies in order to secure evergreater cultural capital within the profession. Disciples, then, often become pawns in the star wars of academe, dependent intellectually and professionally

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on the Master/Mistress’s patronage/matronage. The Doktorkinder often flourish professionally, but must labor against their intellectual debts to develop bold theses or methodologies of their own, for few of them are equal to the Oedipal challenges that such errancy would entail. In modern times Sigmund Freud, ironically, is the archetypal Socrates. And then there are scholars like David Warren Sabean, whose influence lies in a certain intellectual sensibility, or a particular approach to texts, whose generosity is open-ended and demands no obedience except perhaps in the choice of meals. Unlike Freud, say, Sabean’s influence has not been felt primarily in the articulation of some grand theory about the mind or a macrohistorical narrative about the formation of society. Conceptually, his two biggest theses are (1) the proposition that modern concepts of personhood result from the exercise of power, specifically state power, in early modern Europe; and (2) that kinship patterns in the era of industrialization must be understood as strategies for adapting to modern capitalism—hence the peculiar arc of first-cousin marriage in Europe and North America from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Mind you, these are certainly sweeping. However, they are also not on the order of magnitude of the “confessionalization” thesis of Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, or Norbert Elias’s grand thesis on the “civilizing process” in the West.1 Rather, the nature of Sabean’s influence is reflected in both the large number of students he has attracted and the wide variety of interests they have pursued. Thus, and perhaps curiously, his influence may have been greatest where the connective tissue seems thinnest. There are, for instance, in this volume few essays that overlap exactly with Sabean’s primary chronological and geographical interests in early modern Germany. Few historians of early modern Europe would, for example, be willing to take on—and offer inspiration to—an aspiring scholar of the Holocaust, such as Alexandra Garbarini, or a historian of rural Christianity in nineteenth-century Japan, like Emily Anderson. On the surface of things, it seems reasonable to wonder why neophyte historians interested in gender relations in India, such as Ritika Prasad, or the legacies of queens and kinship in the far Pacific, such as Matt Matsuda, were attracted to Sabean. What drew Daniel Ryan, a historian of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy in the Baltic region, to a microhistorian of village life in early modern Germany? Or even, if we stick with the early modern period, how many scholars whose work focused heavily on social structures and cultural practices, such as Sabean has done, would have been found congenial to a historian of science, like Michael Sauter, who writes on astronomy and Euclidean mathematics? And what even about Jared Poley, whose focus on greed admittedly links with community and ideas of self, but concentrates on Paracelsus, a subject of so much work in the history of science and medicine? Poley is, moreover, like

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Matsuda, Benjamin Marschke, Kevin Goldberg, and others in this collection, an excellent example of the longue durée of Sabean’s influence, reaching beyond first books and early career stages and into later professional lives. As these historians’ career trajectories also show, Sabean’s influence is never claustrophobic; none of his students are afraid to strike out on their own, and that is perhaps the most telling quality of his influence. Perhaps the real key to Sabean’s ability to form generations of students lies neither in method, per se, nor in theme, nor in subject. Certainly one can identify all these, and often the authors in this volume explicitly and generously acknowledge their debts. Community, kinship, emotion, family all loom large in several essays represented here and, for that matter, in the longer curricula vitae of these scholars. Like Sabean, many of them have migrated from original interests to different fields, times, and places. Sabean moved from Protestant theology to historical sociology to microhistorical readings of odd and bizarre cases as he tested the “power in the blood.”2 A goodly number of his students have followed a like trajectory, not moving in the same rhythm (although the “places they’ll go” remain, for most, to be seen) or from and to the same posts, but venturing out into their own brave new worlds. Poley’s first book, for instance, was on twentieth-century German politics; he is now investigating sixteenth-century ideas of greed. Ann Goldberg first investigated madness in early nineteenth-century Germany, moved deeper into that century with a study of honor, politics, and law in imperial Germany, and here picks up the thread of microhistory to analyze honor and symbolic capital in Jewish life over two centuries. Jason Coy wrote a book on banishment in early modern Ulm; now he pursues a microhistorical study of magic and disenchantment in early modern German communities. That willingness to cut loose from old moorings and sail out into uncharted waters seems to be one of the characteristics of Sabean’s scholarship that many of his students have assimilated. Of course, there are clear ways in which many of these contributions pay homage to Sabean. Garbarini, for instance, explains that in Power in the Blood, Sabean “offers a mode of reading as much as an interpretation of early modern German peasant culture.” It is not, however, the specificities of Württemberg village life to which her scholarship is indebted; rather, it is Sabean’s “approach to testimonies,” his way of showing us how to read “testimonies produced in other historical contexts with their own concepts and terms” that intrigued her, and so many others. Kevin Goldberg also acknowledges the debt: in treating an old subject, the familial relations of working-class families, he turns to Sabean’s “history from below” in an appreciation and exemplification of how it “[captured] the unseen, unspoken, and unseemly aspects of family life.” Just as prominent here, too, are the ways in which these scholars have taken Sabean’s work on community, kin, honor, self, and family and made them their own,

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plastically shaping and fitting them to their own subjects, locations, and historical moments. One could almost say that every essay in this volume works with these concepts, whether one considers Amy Woodson-Boulton’s investigation of the ways in which class, consumption, and identity interlocked in Victorian Britain; Andrea Mansker’s tracing of the pitfalls of marriage brokerage in nineteenth-century France by sorting out the complex issues of love, compatibility, emotions, and the constraints of material life; Claudia Verhoeven’s search for the meaningfulness of culture in a study addressing the literary lives of Russian revolutionaries; Britta McEwen’s study of the tensions that surrounded unwed mothers in twentieth-century Vienna; Dana Polanichka’s foray into Carolingian times with an investigation of filial and fraternal bodies subsumed under the rubric of fraternitas; or Tamara Zwick’s analysis of the gendering of private and public lives in the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon. If we look at these scholars in a prosopographical way, we indeed find a strong ridge of interpretations and orientations that reveal a Sabeanesque approach, even if no visible hand can be discerned. Sabean’s influence also strongly reveals itself in the large number of historians who never had the opportunity to study with him, but who have benefited both from the intellectual stimulus his books have delivered and the professional largesse he has shown—the authors of this conclusion include themselves in this category. Even though we have not, metaphorically speaking, sat at the feet of the Master, we have benefited enormously from his contributions to historical scholarship. And we are by no means the only beneficiaries. In his brilliant introduction to this volume, Thomas Brady tracks Sabean’s “huge, many-stranded exploration of German and European social history.” One of the thickest threads, and the one that runs proverbially red through Sabean’s work, but also through the essays represented here, is his successful mediation between social and cultural history, his ability to use culture to break the back of social determinism demonstrated in Power in the Blood, but also in the Neckarhausen books, and most explicitly in his introduction, cowritten with a kindred spirit, Hans Medick, to Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship.3 At the same time, Sabean never denies the constraints of the material world (its “thing-ness”), and that amalgam has worked transformative magic on several generations of scholars. The arguments presented in these essays excellently demonstrate how influential, how pervasive, yet subtle and flexible, that insight, that perspective has been. If some contributors lean more to one side than the other, almost all travel that middle road between social/material determinism and cultural expectations. Sabean’s own respect for historical sources and his ability to integrate various forms of historical evidence, to develop interpretations without straitjacketing historical realities, has also carried through to his students, near and far. There are, of course, excellent words to describe this attitude—historical

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empathy, fidelity to the sources, Fingerspitzengefühl—but perhaps Sabean would not be offended if one called it historical “horse sense,” or maybe “street smarts.” For Sabean, as for those whose own work honors his influence, theory is the handmaiden of the sources—of a great number of sources—and not a heavy-handed dictator. In sum, and to rely on another art form (besides history) that is near and dear to David Warren Sabean’s heart, his work is a Gesamtkunstwerk of the historical craft—as melodious, forceful, meaningful, and beautiful as opera. Notes 1. For statements in English of the confessionalization thesis, see Wolfgang Reinhard, “Pressures Toward Confessionalization? Prolegomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age,” in The German Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. C. Scott Dixon (London, 1999), 172–92; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” in The Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. David M. Luebke (London, 1999), 105–28; Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620,” in Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society, ed. Heinz Schilling (Leiden, 1992), 205–45. See also Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York, 1978). 2. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984). 3. David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990) and Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998); Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, “Interest and Emotion in Family and Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology,” in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David W. Sabean (New York, 1984), 9–27.

1 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DAVID WARREN SABEAN’S PUBLISHED WORKS 2

“The Theological Rationalism of Moïse Amyraut.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 55 (1964): 204–16. “Household Formation and Geographical Mobility: A Family Register Study for a Württemberg Village 1760–1900.” Annales de Demographie Historique (1970): 275–94. “Famille et tenure paysanne: Aux origines de la Guerre des Paysans en Allemagne (1525).” Annales ESC (1972): 903–22. Landbesitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabend des Bauernkrieges. Stuttgart, 1972. “Markets, Uprisings and Leadership in Peasant Societies: Western Europe 1381–1789.” Peasant Studies Newsletter 2 (1973): 17–19. “Family and Land Tenure: A Case Study of Conflict in the German Peasants’ War (1525).” In Peasant Studies Newsletter 3 (1974): 1–15. (Reprinted in The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, ed. Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke. London, 1979.) “German Agrarian Institutions at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Peasant Studies (1975): 76–88. (Reprinted in The German Peasant War of 1525, ed. Janos Bak. London, 1976.) “Probleme der deutschen Agrarverfassung zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 4 (1975): 132–50. “Aspects of Kinship Behaviour and Property in Rural Western Europe before 1800.” In Family and Inheritance, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, 96–111. Cambridge, 1976. “Der Bauernkrieg—ein Literaturbericht für das Jahr 1975.” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 24 (1976): 221–31. “The Communal Basis of Pre-1800 Peasant Uprisings in Western Europe.” Comparative Politics 8 (1976): 355–64. (A translation appeared as “Die Dorfgemeinde als Basis der Bauernaufstände in Westeuropa bis zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Europäische Bauernrevolte der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Winfried Schulze. Frankfurt, 1982.) “Verwandtschaft und Familie in einem württembergischen Dorf 1500 bis 1870: Einige methodische Überlegungen.” In Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze, 231–46. Stuttgart, 1976. “Intensivierung der Arbeit und Alltagserfahrung auf dem Lande—Ein Beispiel aus Württemberg.” Sozialwissenschaftliche Information für Unterricht und Studium 6 (1977): 148–52.

252  1  Bibliography of David Warren Sabean

“Small Peasant Agriculture at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century in Germany: Changing Work Patterns.” Peasant Studies 7 (1978): 218–24. With Robert Berdahl, Alf Lüdtke, and Hans Medick. “Il ‘Processo Lavorativo’ nella Storia: Note su un Dibattito.” Quaderni Storici 14 (1979): 191–204. With Hans Medick. “Family and Kinship: Material Interest and Emotion.” Peasant Studies 8 (1979): 139–60. (A reworked version appeared in Italian in Quaderni Storici 45 (1980): 1087–111. This work also appears as the introduction to Interest and Emotion, both in English and in German.) “Communion and Community: The Refusal to Attend the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Württemberg.” In Mentalitäten und Lebensverhältnisse. Beispiele aus der Sozialgeschichte der Neuzeit. Rudolf Vierhaus zum 60. Geburtstag. Herausgegeben von Mitarbeitern und Schülern, 95–107. Göttingen, 1982. With Robert Berdahl et al. Klassen und Kultur: Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven für historische Analyse. Frankfurt, 1982. “Unehelichkeit: Ein Aspekt sozialer Reproduktion kleinbäuerlicher Produzenten: Zu einer Analyse dörflicher Quellen um 1800.” In Klassen und Kultur, 54–76. With Seymour Drescher and Alan Sharlin, eds. Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse. New Brunswick, NJ, 1982. With Seymour Drescher and Alan Sharlin. “George Mosse and Political Symbolism.” In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, 1–18. With Hans Medick. “Neue Themen in der historische-ethnologischen Familienforschung.” Sozialwissenschaftliche Information für Unterricht und Studium 11 (1982): 91–100. “The History of the Family in Africa and Europe: Some Comparative Perspectives.” Journal of African History 24 (1983): 163–71. “La conscience et la peur: Qui a tu, le pasteur.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 51 (March 1984): 39–53. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, 1984. (A German translation has appeared as Das zweischneidige Schwert. Berlin, 1987. A German-language paperback edition was published as Das zweischneidige Schwert. Frankfurt, 1990. Two chapters were translated into Hungarian in Misszionáriusk a Csonakban, ed. Vári András. Budapest, 1988.) With Hans Medick, eds. Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge, 1984. (A German-language edition was published as Emotionen und materielle Interessen. Sozialanthropologische und historische Beiträge zur Familienforschung. Göttingen, 1984.) “Young Bees in an Empty Hive: Relations between Brothers-in-Law in a Swabian Village.” In Interest and Emotion, 171–86. “Der Bedeutung von Kontext, sozialer Logik und Erfahrung.” In Geschichte von unten— Geschichte von innen: Kontroversen um die Alltagsgeschichte, ed. F. J. Brüggemeier and J. Kocka, 52–60. Hagen, 1985. (Also published in German as “Zur Bedeutung von Kontext, sozialer Logik und Erfahrung” Geschichtsdidaktik 11 (February 1986): 21–25.) “Der Bullenopfer.” Journal für Geschichte 1 (1985): 20–25. Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cambridge, 1990. “Exchanging Names in Neckarhausen around 1700.” In Theory, Method, and Practice in Social and Cultural History, ed. Peter Karsten and John Modell, 181–98. New York, 1992.

Bibliography of David Warren Sabean  1  253 

“Social Background to Vetterleswirtschaft: Kinship in Neckarhausen.” In Frühe Neuzeit— Frühe Moderne? Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Übergangsprozessen, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus et al., 113–32. Göttingen, 1992. “Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Question of Incest.” The Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 709–17. “Die Produktion von Sinn beim Konsum der Dinge.” In Fahrrad, Auto, Fernsehschrank: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Alltagsdinge, ed. Wolfgang Ruppert, 37–51. Frankfurt, 1993. “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism.” Central European History 29 (1996): 1–18. “Soziale Distanzierungen: Ritualisierte Gestik in deutscher bürokratischer Prosa der Frühen Neuzeit.” Historische Anthropologie 4 (1996): 216–33. “Allianzen und Listen: Die Geschlechtsvormundschaft im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert.” In Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts: Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ute Gerhard, 460–79. Munich, 1997. “Die Ästhetik der Heiratsallianzen: Klassencodes und endogame Eheschließung im Bürgertum des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Historische Familienforschung: Ergebnisse und Kontroversen, ed. Josef Ehmer, Tamara K. Hareven, and Richard Wall, 157–70. Frankfurt, 1997. Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cambridge, 1998. “Village Court Protocols and Memory.” In Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand, ed. Heinrich R. Schmidt, André Holenstein, and Andreas Würgler, 3–23. Tübingen, 1998. “Peasant Voices and Bureaucratic Texts: Narrative Structure in Early Modern German Protocols.” In Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, ed. Peter Becker and William Clark. Ann Arbor, MI, 2001. “Inzestdiskurse vom Barock bis zur Romantik.” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 13 (2002): 7–28. “Kinship and Prohibited Marriages in Baroque Germany: Divergent Strategies among Jewish and Christian Populations.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 47 (2002): 91–103. “Devolution of Property in Southwest Germany around 1800.” In Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe, ed. Hannes Grandits and Patrick Healy, 115–24. Münster, 2003. “Eine Erzählung von Trollope.” In Geschichte in Geschichten: Ein historisches Lesebuch, ed. Barbara Duden, Karen Hagemann, Regina Schulte, and Ulrike Weckel, 185–91. Frankfurt, 2003. With Claudia Ulbrich. “Personenkonzepte in der frühen Neuzeit.” Etablierte Wissenschaft und feministische Theorie im Dialog, ed. Claudia von Braunmühl, 99–112. Berlin, 2003. “George Mosse and The Holy Pretence.” In What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice, 15–24. Madison, WI, 2004. “Allegemeine Fragen aus lokaler Perspektive: Neckarhausen 1700–1870.” Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte 65 (2006): 97–109. “Reading Sixteenth-Century Religious Violence: The Historiography of St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” In Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner, with Christophe Duhamelle, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit, 109–23. Vandenhoeck, 2006. “Reflections on Microhistory.” In Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, 275–89. Vandenhoeck, 2006.

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Emily Anderson is assistant professor of history at Washington State University. She earned her PhD at UCLA in 2010. Anderson’s monograph, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God, is forthcoming in 2014 from Bloomsbury’s SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. Thomas A. Brady Jr. is Peder Sather Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Ruling Class, Regime, and Reformation at Strasbourg, 1520–1555 (1978); Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550 (1985); Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) and the German Reformation (1995); Community, Politics, and Reformation in Early Modern Europe (1998); and German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400– 1650 (2009). Brady is also editor or coeditor of Itinerarum Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations, Dedicated to Paul Oskar Kristeller on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday; Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation (1996); Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Neuzeit (2001); and The Work of Heiko A. Oberman (2002). Jason Coy earned his doctorate at UCLA in 2001 and is associate professor of history at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany (2008) and coeditor, with Benjamin Marschke and David Warren Sabean, of The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered (2010). He is currently working on a manuscript on divination in early modern Germany. Alexandra Garbarini is associate professor of history and chair of the Program for Jewish Studies at Williams Colleges. She received her PhD in history from UCLA in 2003. She is the author of Numbered Days: Diary Writing and the Holocaust (2006) and the coauthor, with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Avinoam Patt, of Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 2, 1939–1940 (2011). Her current research focuses on European Jewish and non-Jewish responses to mass violence in the decades before the Holocaust.

278  1  Contributors

Ann E. Goldberg is professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She received her PhD from UCLA in 1992. Her research focuses on the social, cultural, and political history of modern Germany. She is the author of Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness (1999) and Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany (2010), winner of the DAAD/GSA prize. Kevin D. Goldberg was a Cogut Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Humanities at Brown University, 2011–13. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA (2010). In addition to publishing recent articles in Food & Foodways and Agricultural History, Goldberg guest edited the fall 2012 special issue of the World History Bulletin on the theme “Commodities in World History.” He is currently completing the manuscript for his first book, The Fermentation of Modern Taste: German Wine from Napoleon to the Great War. Kevin teaches in the department of history and philosophy at Kennesaw State University. Mary Lindemann is professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Miami. She is the author of several works in early modern history: Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830 (1990); Health and Healing in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1996); Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (1999; 2nd ed. 2010); and Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (2006). Her most recent book, The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2015. She is currently working on a new research project tentatively titled “Fractured Lands: Northern Germany in an Age of Unending War, 1627-1721.” David M. Luebke is professor of history at the University of Oregon, and author most notably of His Majesty’s Rebels: Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (1997), as well as many articles on cultures of rural politics and confession in the early modern centuries, most recently “Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation,” Archive of Reformation History 101 (2010). Luebke has also edited several volumes, including The Counter-Reformation: Essential Readings (1999); Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (2012), coedited with Jared Poley, Daniel Ryan, and David Warren Sabean; and Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in the German-Speaking Lands, 1500–1800, coedited with Mary Lindemann (under peer review). He is currently at work on a study of conflict and coexistence among the Christian religions in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, based on an analysis of religious life in twelve “hometowns” in the Westphalian bishopric of Münster between 1553 and 1650. It bears the provisional title “Hometown Religion: Conflict and

Contributors  1  279 

Coexistence among the Christian Religions of Germany, 1553–1650.” Luebke is also series editor of Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association (Berghahn Books) and, with Roger Chickering, series coeditor of Studies in Central European Histories (Brill). Andrea Mansker is associate professor of history at Sewanee: University of the South. Her publications include Sex, Honor, and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France (2011), an essay in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender, edited by Christopher Forth and Elinor Accampo (2009), and articles on honor and feminism in French Historical Studies and Feminist Studies. Her current research focuses on the marriage industry in nineteenth-century France. Benjamin Marschke is professor of history and chair of the History Department at Humboldt State University, in Arcata, California. He holds a PhD in history from UCLA (2003). Marschke has held fellowships from the DAAD, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte. He is the author of Absolutely Pietist: Patronage, Factionalism, and State-Building in the Early Eighteenth-Century Prussian Army Chaplaincy (2005), a coeditor of The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, with Jason Coy and David Warren Sabean (2010), and a coauthor of Experiencing the Thirty Years War, with Hans Medick (2013). He is currently working on a close study of the court and monarchical self-representation of King Frederick William I of Prussia (1713–40). Matt K. Matsuda is professor of history at Rutgers University, where he teaches modern European and Asia-Pacific global comparative histories. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1993 and did advanced study at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris under Pierre Nora. His works include The Memory of the Modern (1996); Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2005); and Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (2012). He is the series editor of Palgrave Studies in Pacific History. Britta McEwen is associate professor of history at Creighton University. She received her doctorate from UCLA in 2003 and is the author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 (2012). McEwen is currently working on a history of unmarried mothers and their children in Vienna, 1880–1930. Dana M. Polanichka is assistant professor of history at Wheaton College (Norton, MA). She received her AB in medieval studies from Dartmouth College (2002) and her PhD in history from UCLA (2009). Her first major research

280  1  Contributors

project focuses on the conception, construction, and function of churches as sacred spaces in eighth- and ninth-century Western Europe. Her research into Carolingian church consecration was published in Viator, and at present she is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “Precious Stones, Living Temples: Sacred Space in Carolingian Churches, 741–877 CE.” Polanichka’s work on Nithard’s Histories emerges from her second research project, an exploration of gender, family, and marriage during the reigns of the Carolingian rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. An article, “The Very Personal History of Nithard: Family and Honor in the Carolingian World,” coauthored with Alex Cilley, was published in the journal Early Medieval Europe. Jared Poley is associate professor of history at Georgia State University. He earned his PhD in 2001. Poley is author of Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (2005) and a coeditor of Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (2012). His current research focuses on the history of greed in Europe and the Atlantic. Ritika Prasad is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She received her doctorate in history from UCLA (2009). Her first book, Railways and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia, 1853–1947 is forthcoming in 2015. Her essay “‘Time-Sense’: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India” was published in Modern Asian Studies, and another essay “Railways, Sanitation and Disease in Colonial India” is forthcoming in Locating the Medical in South Asian History. Daniel C. Ryan, visiting assistant professor at the College of Charleston, received his PhD from UCLA in 2008. He is currently completing a manuscript on religious conversion in imperial Russia’s Baltic region during the nineteenth century. Publications include Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, edited with David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, and David Warren Sabean (2012); “Religious Conversion and the Problem of Commitment in Livland Province, 1850s–1860,” Ajalooline Ajakiri, the Estonian Historical Journal, nos. 3/4 (2007); and “Boundaries and Transgressions: Witchcraft and Community Conflict in Estonia during the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Demons, Spirits, Witches, vol. 3, edited by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (2008). Michael J. Sauter is Profesor-Investigador in the División de Historia at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, AC, in Mexico City. He is the author of Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and Political Reaction in Prussia, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 177 (2009). He is currently working on his second book project, which is entitled “The

Contributors  1  281 

Spatial Reformation: Spatial Sense and the Early Modern Global Imagination, 1350–1850.” Claudia Verhoeven is associate professor of history at Cornell University. She is the author of The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russian, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (2009) and the coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (2015). She is currently working on a comparative history of revolutionary moments in politics and the arts, as well as a political history of the Manson murders. Amy Woodson-Boulton is associate professor and currently chair of the history department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She earned her doctorate from UCLA in 2003. Her work concentrates on cultural reactions to industrialization, particularly the history of art museums, the social role of art, and the changing status of art and nature in modern society. She has published a monograph, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (2012), as well as coediting a volume of essays, Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation (2008). She has published articles in History Compass, The Journal of British Studies, Museums and Society, Victorian Review, and the BRANCH collective (Britain, Representative, and Nineteenth-Century History). She is currently working on a number of article projects about identity, consumption, and reform movements in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, as well as a longer study of the relationship between anthropology and art history in the age of empire. Tamara Zwick is assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida where she runs the Werner von Rosenstiel Fund for the study of German history. Her research engages with a series of interdisciplinary fields, including political and literary theory, social networking, and gender studies. She is completing her first monograph titled Writing between the Lines: Women, Kinship, and Bürgertum in Early Nineteenth-Century Hamburg. Recently, she held fellowships at the Summer Institute for Holocaust Studies and Civilization at Northwestern and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her second book project will reexamine Henry Friedlander’s landmark study about the physically and mentally infirm and the Final Solution against the expansive scholarship on racial cleansing, eugenics, and disability rights published since this critical work.

1 INDEX 2

absolute monarchy, absolutist state, 11, 128, 217, 220, 226 acculturation, 225, 226 adventurism, 158, 159 agent d’affaires, 37, 45 Aksakov, Ivan Sergeevich, 135, 139–140 alchemy, 99, 105, 112, 117 alcohol. See drinking Alkoholfrage, 53 Alltagsgeschichte, 49, 217–218 Althusser, Louis, 16 Amyraut, Moïse, 1, 3 Anti-Saloon League, 51 anti-Semitism, 181, 216, 219, 227 Aristotelianism, 185, 186, 193, 195 Arts and Crafts movement, 231, 238 asceticism, 119, 120, 125, 163 astrology, 99, 101, 103, 105, 195 Atomism, 185 atrocities, 171–177 Aust, Alfred, 211 Austrian Civil War, 66 Austrian League for the Protection of Mothers, 61–69 avarice, 119–120 Bacon, Francis, 186, 193–195 Bailey, Michael, 100 Bakunin, Mikhail, 157, 159, 165 Baltic Germans, 55, 132–133, 138–141 Basch, Victor, 175–176 Basel, 55, 112, 188, 191 Bern, 53, 59 Bertha, 25, 31 Bever, Richard, 108–110 blasphemy, 7, 102 Blickle, Peter, 4 Boissieux, Issaïe, 45

Bouwsma, William, J. 15 Brenz, Johannes, 99–100 Briggs, Robin, 106–107 Britain, 2, 6, 13, 51, 55, 78–80, 117, 147, 151, 230–244, 248 brotherly love, 27–29 Bryce, James, 13–14 Budnitskii, Oleg, 172 Bullinger, Heinrich, 99 Bunge, Gustav von, 55, 57 capitalism, 6, 9–12, 15, 38, 61, 67, 69, 90, 118, 216, 231, 238–240, 245–247 Capital, by Karl Marx, 165 Career of a Nihilist, 160–162 Carlyle, Thomas, 168, 233–235, 237, 239–241 chains of being, 114 Charlemagne, 23–25, 28 Charles the Bald, 23–29, 31 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 159, 163–165 Christian Humanism, 191 Christianity. See theology, Christian; community: Christian citizenship, 216, 224, 226, 227 Civil Code, 39–42, 50 class, 2, 16, 50–51, 67, 76, 137–138, 203, 213, 226, 230–244, 248 classless society, 5 consciousness, 10 identity, 231, 236–237, 240 middle or upper, 37–38, 41, 44–46, 51–52, 55, 62, 67, 125, 147, 231–232, 235, 236–241, 243 political, 76 ruling or noble, 137, 139, 142, 204 versus kinship, 10–12, 14–15, 232

284  1  Index

working or popular or lower, 53, 61, 63, 122, 147–148, 150, 232, 236–238, 240–241, 244, 247 Claveau, Antoine Gilbert, 45 Clavius, Christopher, 189–190, 192–193, 195 Cleffel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 126 coffee, 125–126, 204 colonialism, 75–6 commercial contract, 11, 38–46, 50 society, 37 community, 2, 10, 16, 74, 99, 115–117, 119–120, 134–135, 230, 234, 240, 246–247 ancestral, 74 anchoritic and cenobitic, 120 Christian, 85–86, 90–92, 95, 119 Frankish, 24 Hawaiian, 81–82 intellectual, 9 international, 78 Japanese immigrant, 94 Jewish, 172, 181, 217–226 kinship, family, 12, 81 monastic, 120 moral, 111 Orthodox, 134, 141 political, 32 revolutionary, 158, 160–164, 166 support, 61, 65, 69 village, peasant, 7, 101, 170 Confino, Alon, 177 consistory, 102 consumption, 44, 49–51, 53–55, 57, 58, 60, 111, 114, 230–244, 248 conversion, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 94–95, 132–142, 225 Cooper, James Fenimore, 165 cooperative movements/societies, 163, 231, 238, 240–241 Coppet, Hamburg, 207–209 corporatism, 216–217, 221, 223, 225–227 correspondence, 63, 78–81, 91–92, 103, 135, 137, 140, 160, 195, 202–212 countermagic, 104, 107 Cour de Cassation, 39–43, 45

courtier. See royal court courts (civil, legal, rabbinical, religious), 38–42, 44, 45, 74, 102, 104–107, 132, 172, 217–226 courtship, 44, 46, 114 covetousness, 114–115, 121 Crosnier de Varigny, Charles, 75–76 cunning folk, 99, 102, 104–108. See also fortune-telling defamation, 216–219, 222–224, 226 discourse, 49, 51, 54, 57, 66, 100, 141, 146, 207, 225–226 dream augury, 108 Dresden, 55, 65, 129 Dreyfus, Lucien, 174–175 drinking (alcohol), 49–60, 111, 113, 115, 220, 231, 235, 237–238 Du-Petit Thouars, admiral, 76, 78–9 Duvergier, Jean-Baptiste, 43 Ebina Danjo, 88, 92–94 economics/economy, 11, 16, 46, 50, 51, 62, 65, 90, 112, 118, 123, 135, 140, 178, 231, 234 agricultural, 4 bonds/ties, 28 consumer, 241 domestic, 236 gift, 118 market-oriented, 12, 37 network/circle, 85, 89, 92, 204 political, 220, 241 recession, 46 sericulture, 88–89 status/inequality, 5, 94, 231 structures, 92, 94–95 England. See Britain ego, 38, 204, 205, 208, 212 Engels, Friedrich, 3–4, 16 Enlightenment, 11, 62, 124, 127, 202, 203, 205, 210–211, 221, 223, 224 Epicureanism, 185, 186, 189 equality/inequality, 116, 223, 225, 227, 231–232, 239–240 Ernst I, Duke of Saxe-Gotha, 101–103, 105–107

Index  1  285 

Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coberg and Gotha, 107 Estonia, Estonians, 133, 137, 140 evangelism, 88, 92–94, 95, 241, 243 Evans, Richard J., 203 exchange, 10, 12, 24, 104, 112, 117–118, 139, 209, 212 eyewitness. See witness families/familial, 3, 9–12, 24–28, 38, 61, 63, 67, 69, 70, 78–79, 81, 83, 90–93, 112, 145, 147, 149–151, 152, 154, 203, 213, 221, 247 alliances, 10, 80, 233 Carolingian, 24, 26, 30–32 conflicts, 27, 31 and drinking, 49–58 history, 30 logic, 80 and marriage brokers, 40–46 network, 45, 77, 85, 95 nuclear, 40 property, 9 relations/bonds, 9, 11, 14, 24–25, 30–31, 74, 82, 89, 92 ritual, 24, 31 royal/ruling, 24–26, 30, 77, 82 rural/peasant, 10, 138 structure, 14 femininity, 74, 77, 79, 81–2, 148, 206 female politics, 74, 77–79, 82 fidelity, 26, 29, 66 forgiveness, 24, 26–28, 31–32, 33, 63, 143, 222 fortune-telling, 99, 101–108 Foubert, André-Constant, 39–40, 43–44 Foy, Henri-Charles-Napoléon de, 42, 45 Francke, August Hermann, 123–125, 127 Francke, Gotthilf August, 127 Frankfurt, 54 Franz, Günther, 3–4 fraternitas, 27, 29–31, 33, 248 Friedrich I, Duke of Saxe-Gotha, 105, 106, 110 Frederick William I, King of Prussia, 124, 126, 127 Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, 225

Gedicke, Lampertus, 126–127 gender, 24, 31, 33, 50, 74, 80, 146, 153, 211–212, 246, 248 genealogy, 3, 74–75, 81–83 generosity , 26, 69, 117–119, 246, 247 God’s law, 100, 117 godparent, 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13, 40 gold, 112, 117, 118, 186 golden section, 186 Gotha, 101–103, 105–108, 110, 129 Gottsched, Luise Adelgunde Victorie, 127–128 greed, 100, 111, 113–114, 116, 118–120 Gückelhirn, 105 Halualani, Rona Tamiko, 73–74, 81–82 Hallungen, 107 Haskalah, 220, 223–224 Hawai‘i, 73–82, 94 heredity (Vererbung), 25, 53, 56, 59, 68 Hildegard, 31 Histories, 24–25, 27–28, 30–32 Hobbes, Thomas, 185–186, 193, 195 Hoffman, Paul Theodore, 209–211 Holocaust/Shoah 170–181, 246 Holy Roman Empire, 13–14, 19, 24–26, 32, 112 honor/dishonor, 25, 27, 28, 31, 71, 186, 216–229, 247, 249 commercial enterprise, 43 feminine, 79 masculine, 50 pasts, 74 identity (self, group), 14, 25, 74, 82, 83, 132, 161, 163, 217, 230–244, 248 India, 84, 145–156, 246 idolatry, 100, 102 industrial/industry, 89, 232, 235, 240 capitalism, 231, 238–240 industrialist, 37, 91 production, 239, 241, 243 revolution/industrialization, 45, 51–52, 57–58, 216–217, 236, 240, 246 workforce/labor, 10, 53, 238 inequality. See equality/inequality

286  1  Index

International Association for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, 61, 65 Jews, Judaism, 54, 59, 170–181, 216–229, 247. See also community: Jewish Jewry Oath, 218–219, 221–222 Joseph II of Austria, 62 Judeo-Christian tradition, 25 July Monarchy, 37–39, 46 jurisdiction, 13, 38, 42–43, 45–46, 50, 176, 181, 219–221, 223, 226. See also courts Kahananui Green, Karina, 73–74, 80 Kaiser Wilhelm II, 54 Kamehameha, kings, 74–77, 82 Katkov, Mikhail Nikiforovich, 135, 139–140 Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich, 138 kin/kinship, 8–12, 15, 24, 61, 81–83, 85, 146, 152, 170, 196, 203, 231–232, 234, 246–247 aristocratic, 24 and class, 14 conflict between, 25, 73 and contracts, 11 marriage among, 12 networks, 38, 77, 145 orders, 14 and politics, 73–74, 82 and property, 9, 11, 15 relations, 12 spiritual, 24 in villages, 9 Klein, Hugo, 63, 65 Kluth, Otto, 202, 209–212 Ladurie, Emmanuel LeRoy, 15 Lange, Joachim, 126, 128 Latvia, Latvian, Latvians, 133, 136, 137–138, 140 law(s), 13, 66, 70, 80, 100, 106, 108, 132–134, 141, 217, 221–226, 247 on alcoholism, 52 canon, 41 Corn, 236

defamation, 217, 224, 226 of development, Marxist, 16 enforcement, 102, 106 foundling, 62 of God, 100, 117 Hunting Act, 243 public, 234 Jewish, rabbinical, 218–219, 222 of Nature, 235 lawful behavior, 9 lawsuit, 39, 216–219, 221–226 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 13 letters. See correspondence Lili’uokalani, queen, 73–82 litigation, 216, 219–220, 224, 226–227. See also law Livland, 132–133, 137, 140 Leipzig, 13, 55, 191 Lothar I, 23, 25–30 Loti, Pierre, 74, 77 Louis the German, 23, 25–30, 32 Louis the Pious, 23–33, 35, 36 Louis-Philippe, King of France, 37, 75, 78–79 loyalty/disloyalty, 25, 27–29, 31, 114, 134, 141 Luther, Martin, 3, 5, 99, 101, 116, 245 Lutheranism, 8, 18n27, 101, 109n3, 122–128, 132–134, 136–138, 141, 142n2 Macaire, Robert, 37 Mageo, Jeanette Marie, 73 Malleus Maleficrum, 100 Marie, Auguste, 42 marital status, 38 marriage, 25, 37–48, 49–60, 62, 67, 69, 80, 104, 138, 216, 200, 248 arranged, 163 consanguineal, first-cousin, 11, 12, 246 intermarriage, 90 mixed, 133 Marx, Karl, 13, 16, 165, 168n47 Marxism, 2–5, 10, 13, 15–16, 158–159 masculinity, 25, 31, 50, 206 matchmaker, 42–44

Index  1  287 

matrimonial agents, 37–42, 45, 46 McIntosh, Terence V., 123 Melanchthon, Philipp, 109, 191 memory, 6, 14, 27, 32, 74, 82, 181, 203, 208 Mersenne, Marin, 193, 195 mercy, 24, 27–28, 31–32 Meusel, Alfred, 3–4 Mezentsov, Nikolai Vladimirovich, 159, 163 microhistory, 6, 113, 118, 171, 177, 217 miser, 115 missions/missionaries, 14, 76, 86–88, 90–92, 94–95, 120, 150 mixed mathematics, 193–195 modernity, 9, 11–14, 145, 152, 223–226 money, 38, 41, 44, 57, 58, 65, 111, 115, 117, 126, 174, 240 Moravian Brethern, 127 Morris, William, 238–239 Moser, Friedrich Carl von, 13 Mosse, George L., 3 narod, 134, 138, 140–141 Narodnaia Volia (The People’s Will), 159, 163, 168 Narodnoe Delo (The People’s Cause), 159 National Socialism, Nazism, 66, 69, 173 nature/natural, 29, 55, 111–113, 114, 117–119, 190, 235–236, 240 Nazza, 107–108 network, 11, 114, 126, 128, 212, 232–234, 242 credit, economic, trade, professional, 37, 89, 92–93, 187, 233 kinship, familial, 38, 45, 77, 85, 92, 95, 145 intellectual, 89, 245 patronage, 125 social, 46, 94, 113, 116, 119, 233 Niijima Jo, 85–88, 91–92, 94–95 Nithard, 24–32 oath, oath-breaking, 25, 28–31, 36, 218–222, 239. See also Jewry Oath obedience/disobedience, 24–26, 30–31, 34, 223, 246

obligation, 10, 24–31, 116, 135, 232 Ohrdruf, 103, 105, 108 Ordre des Avocats (Paris), 43 oriental (norms), 145, 152 Orthodox Christianity, 132–144, 164, 246 Osorio, Jonathan, 81–82 Paignon, Eugène, 43, 45 paradise, 111 Peasant’s War (1524–25), 1, 3–5, 112, 116 Pippin, 23, 26, 29 Platonic solids, 190 Pauli, Magdalena, 207, 208, 212 Platonism, Neoplatonism, 112, 185, 193 Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich, 135, 138, 141 pogroms, Ukrainian, 171–177 Pomare Vahine V, queen, 73–83 poor, 62, 66, 80, 107, 116–120, 143, 148, 149, 202, 204, 210, 238 potlatch, 118 poverty, 11, 89, 119–120, 133, 140, 231. See also poor “private life,” 204 public aid organizations, 65–66 cult, 8 debate, 50–51, 126 drunkenness, 52 French, 174, 181 good, 25 opinion, 171 order, 39–41, 46 policy, 67 railway carriages, 146–147 reading, 128, 163, 176 reputation, 37–38, 203 Russian, 140 space, 222 sphere, 11–12, 29, 128, 176, 177, 181, 202–205, 213, 224–226, 229 traveling, 149 utility, 38 virtue, 52 visibility, 145–146 welfare system/charity, 69, 205 Western, 172, 177

288  1  Index

purdah, 148, 154 Pythagorean theorem, 186 rabbis, 217–226 Racial Science, 54 racial, racism, 3, 69, 146, 149 Rakhmetov, 159, 164 Ranke, Leopold von, 49 reconciliation, 26–27, 30–31, 104 Recorde, Robert, 189–190, 192–193 Reformation, 1, 3–5, 7, 15, 99–101, 106, 108, 109, 112, 116, 119, 186, 245 Regiomontanus, 188 religion, 2, 5, 18, 50, 75, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 128, 132–135, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 150, 186, 210, 220–223, 225–226, 232, 234, 235 charities, 61, 66 Christian, 94 civic, 3 and class, 16 education/instruction, 88, 240 fervor, 78 freedom, 141 identity, 132 institutions, 7 law, 222 marriage, 41–42 network, 233 persecution, 133 political-religious structure, 220 popular, 8 practice/observance, 124, 138, 191, 225, 231, 237 Protestantism, 16 sphere, 141 tolerance, 99–100, 126, 130, 220, 225 training, 145 writing, 165 Renaissance, 15, 78, 112, 113, 118, 186, 188, 196 riches, 5, 114–120, 164 respect/disrespect, 15, 26, 28, 75, 78, 136, 137, 145–156, 171, 189, 210, 220, 223, 248 Riemann, Bernhard, 195

romanticism, 2, 51, 77–78, 134, 158–159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 202–203 royal court, 24–25, 27, 78, 99, 112, 124–125, 127–128 Rügegerichten, 102 rumors, 8, 102–1–3, 133, 135–136, 141, 142 Ruskin, John, 232–233, 238–239 Russian Civil War, 171, 179, 180 Russian Empire, 132–144, 157–169, 172 quadrivium, 192–193 Sabbatarian, 237 Sabean, David Warren, 1–19, 24, 38, 49, 52, 58, 61, 74, 85, 100–101, 115, 122, 132, 146, 157, 170–171, 196, 203, 213, 217, 230–231, 240, 245–249 Samarin, Iurii Fëdorovich, 135–141 sanatoriums, women-only, 55 Saxe-Gotha, 101–102, 105–107, 110 Schilling, Heinz, 15, 246 Schinmeyer, Johann Christian, 126 Schmalkalden, 103 Schmidt, Andreas “der Alte,” 126 Schwarzbard, Shalom, 179–180 seclusion, 145–156 secular/secularized, 5, 24, 115, 127, 128, 140, 166, 196, 217, 222–223, 225–226, 232 authorities, 41, 100, 138, 220, 222 courts, 217 crime, 115 culture, 107 humanism, 124 of politics, 3 seer, 103, 105, 106. See also fortune-telling self, the, 9, 16, 196, 203, 230–231, 234–235, 240. See also identity sericulture, 89, 91, 94 sin, 26, 28, 32, 54, 105, 111, 114–116, 118–119, 219, 222, 231 single (unmarried), 46, 61–72 skepticism, 185 Slavophiles, 134–135, 138–142 social class. See class

Index  1  289 

soothsayer, 99–100, 102–108. See also fortune-telling sorcery, 102, 106 Sorel, Alexandre, 44, 46 soul, 111, 113–114, 120, 207 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 123, 125 Stoicism, 185–186, 191, 193 Stollberg, 108 Strasbourg Oath, 25, 29–30 Streufdorf, 103, 105 Stöcker, Helene, 62,65 Sundhausen, 103 superstition, 8, 99–103, 105–108 Swiss, Switzerland, 53, 116, 160, 161, 202 Tahiti, 73–83 Tandler, Julius, 66 Tartaglia, Niccolò, 190, 193 Tcherikower, Elias (Eliyohu), 173–174, 176–177 temperance, 51–58, 237, 240 terror, terrorism, 157–169, 174, 175–176 testify, testimony, testimonial, 103–104, 107, 127, 170–181, 218–221, 247 thief-finding, 105 theology, 112, 186, 192, 228 Calvinist, 7 Christian, 118, 119 faculty, 126, 127 historical, 1, 7 Lutheran, 8, 123, 124 medieval, 114, 119 polemics/controversies, 122, 124, 127–128 Protestant, 3, 94, 99–100, 247 Reformatoin-era, 245 Tilly, Charles, 14 tobacco, 126, 204 tolerance, religious. See under religion Tonna, 107 Torrès, Henri, 176, 180–181 Trask, Hauani-Kay, 80 tradition/traditional, 11, 13, 16, 82, 114, 145 accounts of Western history, 16 Aristotelian, 194

ascetic, 119–120 hermetic, 111, 120 of historical research, 230 inheritance, 25 Judeo-Christian, 25 legal, 115 medieval, 188 of metaphysics, 194 order, 217 Paracelsian, 117 personal ties, 14, 74 purda, 148 rabbi, 221 route, 74 rules, 11 ruling class, 204 seven liberal arts, 192 society, 152 spiritual questions, 231 traditionalists, 223–225, 228 trivium, 192 vernacular, 189 zenana, 145 travel, 75, 81, 86–89, 91–92, 94, 107, 112, 137, 140, 145–155 trivium, 192 Tuchtfeld, Victor Christoph, 124, 129 Underground Russia, 160–163, 165, 167 unequal treaty, 86 utopian/antiutopian, 15, 69, 118, 159 Varangians, 138 vegetarianism, 233–238 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 75, 78, 80–81, 84 Victorian, 146, 230–244, 248 Vienna Central Home for Children, 68 Wahlwinkel, 103 wealth, 10, 37, 46, 87, 89, 91, 95, 111–112, 114–120, 192, 204, 239–241, 243. See also riches Westhausen, 105 Weyer, Johann, 100 What Is to Be Done?, 159, 163–165

290  1  Index

Wieviorka, Annette, 175 Winterthur, 53, 59 wise man/woman, 103–105. See also fortune-telling witches, 8, 99–110. See also sorcery witness, 7, 24, 50, 94, 100, 104, 116, 123, 162, 171, 173–177, 218, 220, 221 Wolff, Christian, 126, 127 women, 36, 58, 61–72, 73, 80, 107, 111, 145–156, 161, 202–215 abandoned, 39 and alcohol, 50, 55, 58 empowerment, 12 “island,” 77 labor/work, 12, 58 old, 100

political, 82–83 presented, 46 rural, 12–13 World War I, 64, 69, 175, 177, 180 World War II, 171, 174 Württemberg, 1–2, 8–9, 12–13, 49, 109, 110, 247 Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), 173 Yuasa Jiro, 91–95 zanana/zenana, 145, 148 Zemlia i Volia (Land and Freedom), 159 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig, Count von, 127 Zurich, 52, 112