Knowledge and the Early Modern City: A History of Entanglements [1 ed.] 1138337714, 9781138337718

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Knowledge and the early modern city: an introduction • Bert De Munck and Antonella Rom
Part I: Knowledge and the staging of the city
1 The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge in the Low Countries, c. 1560–1620 • Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
2 Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg • Hannah Murphy
3 Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia: archaeologising Parisian society in eighteenth-century civic epistemology • Stéphane Van Damme
Part II: Urban agency, science, technology and the making of the city
4 Stench and the city: urban odors and technological innovation in early modern Leiden and Batavia • Marius Buning
5 Cities, long-distance corporations and open air sciences: Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden in the early modern period • Karel Davids
6 Technology transfer, ship design and urban policy inthe age of Nicolaes Witsen • Dániel Margócsy
Part III: Imperial cities, knowledge for empires?
7 André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra: spaces of knowledge and belief during the early modern Iberian Union • Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi
8 Roman urban epistemologies: global space and universal time in the rebuilding of a sixteenth-century city • Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano
9 The library, the city, the empire: de-provincialising Vienna in the early seventeenth century • Paola Molino
Index

Citation preview

KNOWLEDGE AND THE EARLY MODERN CITY

Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed. Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called ‘modern’ knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge. Bert De Munck is full professor in the History Department at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is a member of the Centre for Urban History, Antwerp, and the director of the interdisciplinary Urban Studies Institute and the international Scientific Research Community (WOG) ‘Urban Agency: The Historical Fabrication of the City as an Object of Study’. His publications include Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic: Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300–1800 (2018). Antonella Romano is full professor of history of science and former director of the Centre Alexandre-Koyré at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her publications include the edited volume Rome et la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières (2008) and Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (16e–17e siècles) (2016).

Knowledge Societies in History

The expertise of the history of knowledge is essential in tackling the issues and concerns surrounding present-day global knowledge society. Books in this series historicize and critically engage with the concept of knowledge society, with conceptual and methodological contributions enabling the historian to analyse and compare the origins, formation and development of knowledge societies. The first volumes in the series are the result of a project ‘Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World, 1450–1800’, which received funding through an internationalization grant from NWO (Dutch Science Foundation). The project explores manifestations of knowledge societies, moving away from a teleological model inherent in many discussions of modernity. Series Editors: Sven Dupré, Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, Utrecht University, Netherlands. In this series: Knowledge and the Early Modern City A History of Entanglements Edited by Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Knowledge-Societies-in-History/book-series/KSHIS

KNOWLEDGE AND THE EARLY MODERN CITY A History of Entanglements

Edited by Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Munck, Bert De, 1967- editor. | Romano, Antonella, editor. Title: Knowledge and the early modern city : a history of entanglements / edited by Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Knowledge societies in history | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019012722 (print) | LCCN 2019018341 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429442223 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781138337695 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138337718 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429442223 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: City and town life–Europe–History. | Cities and towns–Europe–History. | Knowledge, Theory of–Europe–History. | Social change–Europe–History. | Europe–Intellectual life. | Europe– Social conditions. Classification: LCC HT131 (ebook) | LCC HT131 .K56 2020 (print) | DDC 307.76094–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012722 ISBN: 978-1-138-33769-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-33771-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44222-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Knowledge and the early modern city: an introduction Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

vii x xiv 1

PART I

Knowledge and the staging of the city

31

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge in the Low Countries, c. 1560–1620 Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

33

2

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg Hannah Murphy

58

3

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia: archaeologising Parisian society in eighteenth-century civic epistemology Stéphane Van Damme

79

1

vi

Contents

PART II

Urban agency, science, technology and the making of the city 4

5

6

99

Stench and the city: urban odors and technological innovation in early modern Leiden and Batavia Marius Buning

101

Cities, long-distance corporations and open air sciences: Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden in the early modern period Karel Davids

126

Technology transfer, ship design and urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen Dániel Margócsy

149

PART III

Imperial cities, knowledge for empires? 7

8

9

171

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra: spaces of knowledge and belief during the early modern Iberian Union Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

173

Roman urban epistemologies: global space and universal time in the rebuilding of a sixteenth-century city Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

197

The library, the city, the empire: de-provincialising Vienna in the early seventeenth century Paola Molino

223

Index

250

FIGURES

Main stage of the landjuweel festival in Antwerp in 1561, designed by Cornelis Floris – woodcut in Spelen van sinne. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 1.2 A ‘Greek’ theatre – woodcut for the prologue of Spelen van sinne. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 1.3 Allegorical representation of Africa – print from the engraved series of ‘The Four Continents’ by Pieter Nagel (?) after Gerard van Groeningen, c. 1571. © Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 1.4 Title page of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) with the allegorical representation of the four continents. © Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. 1.5 The ‘Theatre of Peace’ mounted for the entry ceremony of Archduke Ernest into Antwerp in 1594 – engraving in Bochius, Descriptio. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 1.6 The theatrum anatomicum in Leiden – engraving by Willem van Swanenburgh after Jan Cornelisz. van’t Woud, 1610. © Wikimedia Commons. 2.1 Leaves from Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis showing indices by name, and and a list of makers’ marks. © By permission of the Germanisches 2.2 National Museum – GNM Merkel HS 4° 533 Fols 43r and 46r. 2.3 Nuremberg, designed by Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, View of Nuremberg, in Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik. Nuremberg. Anton Koberger, 1493. © Creative commons. 2.4 Neudörffer’s biography of Peter Flötner. © By permission of the Germanisches National Museum – GNM Merkel HS 4° 533 Fol. 17r. 1.1

37 38

40

42

45

46

59

62 71

viii

Figures

Items discovered during excavations in 1711 constituting Le Pilier des Nautes, remains of a pre-Christian temple (first century CE) on the île de la Cité, on the site of the choir of the Notre Dame de Paris. Engraving from l’Histoire de Paris Vol. 1, designed by Michel Félibien (1666?–1719). © Wikimedia Commons. 4.1 Stadsplattegrond van Leiden, 1611, designed by Jan Pietersz. Dou – colored pen drawing. © Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, PV332, Public Domain. 4.2 ‘Gelegenheyt van eenige sloten buyten deser Stede Leyden gaende van des stadts Cingel tot aende Oude Vliet, Room en Meerburger Wateringen als oock to aende Slaaghsloot ende Zijl’ (drawing of a closure outside Leiden), 1642, designed by Joris Gerstecoren – colored pen drawing. © Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, PV9152.2, Public Domain. 4.3 Map of the castle and city Batavia in the year 1667, anonymous designer – aquarel. © Tropenmuseum/KIT, TM-496–2. 5.1 The Oostindisch Huis, headquarters of the VOC in Amsterdam, by Reinier Vinkeles (1768) – drawing. © Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, collection Atlas Splitgerber, Public Domain. 6.1 The VOC wharves on the Oostenburg island in Amsterdam, 1696, Ludolf Bakhuizen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SB 2764, Public Domain. 6.2 The Admiralty wharves in Amsterdam, 1655–1660, Ludolf Bakhuizen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SB 6405, Public Domain. 6.3 Portrait of Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen. The laudatory epigram presents Witsen as an exemplary citizen of Amsterdam. Pieter Schenk (I). Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-P-OB-9312, Public Domain. 6.4 Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, facing p. 95, Nicolaes Witsen. © Cambridge: Cambridge University Library. 6.5 Czar Peter the Great on board his yacht to visit the ship ‘Petrus and Paulus’ that he had helped build, c. 1698–1708. An imaginary visit of Peter the Great to the ship he had helped build. Abraham Storck (workshop). Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SA 8251, Public Domain. 7.1 Civitates Orbis Terrarum vol. 5, Hogenberg and Braun, c. 1599. © Heidelberg historic literature – VD16 B 7183, https://doi.org/ 10.11588/diglit.16956#0035. 7.2 Front page and drawings in the Livro do chartorio, Avelar, 1598. and © Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Universidade de Coimbra, 7.3 Cartório e Livraria. Col. Pombalina, no. 95. 8.1 Frontispiece Roma sotteranea – Roma sotterranea opera postuma di Antonio Bosio Romano antiquario ecclesiastico singolare de’ suoi tempi. Compita, disposta, & accresciuta dal M.R.P. Giouanni Seuerani da S. Seuerino … Nella quale si tratta de’ sacri cimiterii di Roma, del sito, … Nuouamente visitati, e riconosciuti dal Sig. Ottavio Pico … De’ riti funerali … Publicata 3.1

81

105

107 111

139

150 152

154 158

164

177

182

Figures

8.2 8.3 8.4

8.5

8.6

9.1

9.2

9.3

9.4

dal Commendatore Fr. Carlo Aldobrandino … herede dell’autore … In Roma 1632. © iDAI images Arachne, http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/ item/buchseite/243422. Antonio Tempesta, Map or Pianta di Roma Antica, 1593. © Gallica. Self Portrait with the Colosseum, painting by Maerten van Heemskerck. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, accession number 103. Map detail – Pirro Ligorio, ‘Antiquae Urbis Romae Imago accuratissime ex vetustis monumentis formata’, Roma: Jacopo Rossi, 1561. © Gallica. Portrait of Sixtus V – Etching and engraving, published by Nicolaus van Aelst, c. 1589. © MET New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949. Public Domain. Engraving – Domenico Fontana. Della trasportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabriche di Sisto V. Rome 1590. © Internet Archive Public Domain. Bird’s-eye view of Vienna made by Joseph Daniel von Huber (1769–1773) in which the finished Stadtbefestigung is well visible – Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Katrographische Sammlung, pp. 1–11. © CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 – Creative Commons. A detail of the city plan made in 1880 by Albert Camesina, using the older plans of Wolmuet (1547) and Suttinger (1683), and containing information from the 1566 Hofquartierbücher. Nr. 1052 is here: ‘Röm. Kai. Mt. Münzhaus, hinten die Kunstkammer’ – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum, Kar AB 7 A 156. © Austrian National Library. A detail of the city plan made by Bonifaz Wolmuet (1547), including the area of the Minorite Monastery, in which the Imperial Library was located until 1623, and the imperial garden – Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Kartographische Sammlung 236 G. © CC BY-NCND 4.0 – Creative Commons. Zoom of the Minorite Monastery and next to it the Hofburg from the plan made by Daniel Suttinger in 1683 – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum KAR AB 7 A 69. © Austrian National Library.

ix

203 204 204

205

206

211

224

228

229

230

CONTRIBUTORS

Elisa Andretta is chargée de recherche at the CNRS (LARHRA, Lyon, France).

She is the author of Roma Medica. Anatomie d’un système médical au XVIe siècle (2011), as well as several essays on the social and cultural history of medicine and science in early modern Italy and Spain, including ‘Medical culture of “the Spaniards of Italy” in the Renaissance’, in J. Slater et al., eds, Medical Cultures in the Early Modern Spanish Empire (2014), pp. 129–145; ‘Il Vaticano e l’Escorial come “luoghi di medicina” (1560–1600)’, in A. Romano and S. Sebastiani, eds, La forza delle incertezze. Dialoghi storiografici con Jacques Revel (2016), pp. 269–310; and ‘Les médecins du Tibre. La construction d’un savoir sur les fleuves dans la Rome du 16e siècle’, Histoire, Médecine, Santé, 11 (2017), pp. 99–129. Her current research concerns medical practices and natural history in papal Rome and Spanish courts in the sixteenth century. With Antonella Romano (EHESS, Centre Alexandre Koyré) she is in charge of the project Babel Rome. La nature du monde et ses langues dans la Rome du 16e siècle (2017–2021, École française de Rome - CAK-LARHRA). Marius Buning received his PhD in history and civilization from the European

University Institute (2013) with a dissertation on the making of a patent system in the Dutch Republic. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research interests focus on the origins of intellectual property; the relationship between science and technology; how experiment bears upon theory; and the part played by the early modern state in defining these respective fields. Currently, he is working as a DRS Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin.

Contributors

xi

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi received a joint PhD diploma in history from

the École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales (France) and the Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy) in 2015. Currently, he is Newton International Fellow of the British Academy at UCL. His research deals with the construction − and instability − of knowledge in the Iberian world. He mainly focuses on early modern cosmography, astrology, mathematics and instruments, paying attention to the great diversity of actors, intellectual traditions and institutional contexts that participated in the development of knowledge in the imperial framework. He co-edited Entre le ciel et la terre: cosmographie et savoirs à la Renaissance (2017) and has published different articles on related topics. His forthcoming book proposes a reinterpretation of the role of cosmography in the Iberian monarchies. His research has been funded by different grants and postdoctoral programmes (John Carter Brown Library, Labex Hastec-Centre Alexandre Koyré, Max Weber Programme, Villa I Tatti). Karel Davids studied economic and social history at the University of Leiden

(the Netherlands) where he received his PhD in 1986. He was assistant professor in social and political history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and research fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science at the University of Leiden. From 1994 until his retirement in 2018 he held the chair of economic and social history in the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Economics of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). He has published widely on the history of knowledge, the history of technology and maritime history. His books include Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences: China and Europe compared, c.700–1800 (2013) and (co-edited with Bert De Munck) Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities (2014). Dániel Margócsy is university lecturer at the Department of History and Phil-

osophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Trained at Harvard (PhD, 2009), his research focuses on the connected histories of science and trade, the print culture of early modern Europe and the worlds of collecting, natural history and anatomy. He has held fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies and the Descartes Centre for the History and the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. He is the author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (2014) and, with Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (2018). His articles have appeared in Annals of Science, the British Journal for the History of Science, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Netherlands Yearbook of Art History and Social Studies of Science.

xii

Contributors

Paola Molino is assistant professor in early modern history at the University of Padua. Her research concentrates on the history of knowledge in early modern Central Europe, with a focus on libraries. A second line of interest is the history of pre-modern information, along with that of early modern empires. She is also fascinated by synchronic bibliographies in the pre-modern world. Paola is the author of L’Impero di carta. Storia di una biblioteca e di un bibliotecario. Vienna 1575–1608 (2017) and ‘Connected news: Geschriebene Zeitungen and Italian Avvisi in the Fugger collection (1568–1604)’, Media History (2016). Hannah Murphy is a historian of early modern science and medicine, with spe-

cial expertise on the German-speaking lands. She is the author of A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg (2019), and “Common Places and Private Spaces: Libraries, Record-Keeping and Orders of Information in Sixteenth Century Medicine”, Past & Present, 2016. Hannah completed a PhD in early modern history at the University of California, Berkeley, where was a Fulbright Scholar, in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, she was a junior research fellow in Oriel College, Oxford. She is currently based at King’s College London, where she is the senior research fellow on Renaissance skin, a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project. Antonella Romano is full professor of science and former director of the Centre

Alexandre-Koyré at L’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France. As an historian of science, her research concentrates on the history of science and knowledge in the early modern period, the production of knowledge in the context of missionary activities, Europe and the Indies in the sixteenth century, the relationship between the Iberian monarchies and the East, the history of natural history and contemporary historiography on science and knowledge. Relevant publications include the edited volume Rome et la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières (2008); ‘Des sciences et des savoirs en mouvement: réflexions historiographiques et enjeux méthodologiques’, Diaspora. Circulations, migrations, histoire, 23–24 (2014), pp. 66–79; ‘Making the history of early modern science: reflections on a discipline in the age of globalization’, Annales. Histoire Sciences Sociales (English Ed.), 70(2) (2015), pp. 307–334; and Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (16e–17e siècles) (2016). Anne-Laure Van Bruaene is professor of early modern cultural history at Ghent University. She specializes in the urban culture of the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. Her research interests include the history of guilds and confraternities and the social contexts of art, literature and religion. She is the author of Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (2008) and the co-editor of City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600 (2018).

Contributors

xiii

Stéphane Van Damme is professor of history of science at the Department of History and Civilization (EUI). He works on the relationships between early modern sciences and metropolises (mainly Lyon, Paris, London, Edinburgh and New York City). On the topic, he has recently published two books: Métropoles de papiers. Naissance de l’archéologie urbaine à Paris et à Londres (2012) and A toutes voiles vers la vérité. Philosophes au travail (1650–1800) (2014). He is currently working on a project ‘Natures of Metropolis’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is produced in the broader context of the project Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World (1450–1800), resulting from a collaboration between the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (University of Utrecht), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS – KNAW). We thank the initiators and principal investigators of the project Sven Dupré (University of Utrecht and University of Amsterdam) and Wijnand Mijnhardt (University of Utrecht) for giving us the opportunity to start a working group on ‘Knowledge and the City’ and for their intellectual and practical support in the subsequent process. The broader conception of the book and first versions of the chapters were discussed in a series of workshops at the NIAS in the spring of 2016, the conference ‘Materialities of Knowledge in Early Modern Cities’ at the University of Antwerp on 18–19 November 2016, and a workshop in Paris on 24 May 2017 hosted by the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). We sincerely thank the staff of the NIAS, the universities and the Centre Koyré. We are also in debt to all the participants in these workshops for their input and critical reflections, especially Pierre Delsaerdt, Christine Göttler, Koenraad Jonckheere, Guido Marnef, Ada Palmer, Michael Tworek, Simona Valeriani, Arjan Van Dixhoorn and Filip Van Roosbroeck. The presentations and discussions at these workshops have improved this book considerably. Special thanks are due to Lissa Roberts, who acted as a keynote speaker and discussant in our workshop at the NIAS on 25 May 2016, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Stéphane Van Damme, our keynote speakers at the Antwerp congress. Also, the dialogue with the work group leaders of the other working

Acknowledgements

xv

groups of the broader project, viz. Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Inger Leemans and Thijs Weststeijn, has been very valuable and important. Last but not least, we are grateful to Sandra McElroy for her accurate proofreading and for Els Minne for her meticulous work in preparing the manuscript for publication. Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano 1 February 2019

KNOWLEDGE AND THE EARLY MODERN CITY An introduction Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Introduction In history and the broader social sciences alike, it is generally accepted that knowledge production is to a large degree an urban phenomenon.1 While a range of historians, sociologists and economists propound that cities accommodate the creative classes and that urban spaces make us ‘richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier’,2 the origin of the modern knowledge society would have to be sought for in large, early modern cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris and, in particular, London.3 The conceptual framework for such approaches is related to the idea that societies, in linear views of social development, are naturally driven towards innovation and modernisation, while the first step of humankind towards ‘civilisation’ would have been the foundation of cities in the Sumerian period.4 In present-day research such views translate into a range of explanations in which cities have an impact on knowledge-related practices. Economists, economic geographers and economic historians, for instance, tend to attribute innovation to economies of scale and agglomeration. While firms and institutions cluster in towns because of the absence of transportation costs and the proximity of customers and suppliers of goods and services, innovation would moreover result from knowledge spillovers and cultural crossbreeding.5 For their part, historians of science and historians of technology, still divided into two distinct corporations, have often looked at the institutional context in which innovation and progress would have been embedded, the first focusing on the impact thereof on intellectual achievements and ‘scientists’, the second paying attention to mechanical improvements and ‘engineers’.6 From learning on the shop floor in the context of guilds, to medical and art academies to learned societies and universities, all important institutions were, from the late medieval period on, particularly located in an urban environment.7

2

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Current debates, however, distance themselves from the idea of progress and aim at elaborating more critically on the category of innovation.8 Historians of science and knowledge qualify the idea that the production of knowledge is necessarily grounded in a specific mind or institution. It is often stressed now that scientific and technological ‘innovations’ emerge in networks and result from the circulation of knowledge in both abstract and embodied form.9 Moreover, under the influence of Koyrean, Kuhnian and Foucauldian intellectual ideas from the 1960s, the very concepts used to refer to knowledge and innovation have been deconstructed and unpacked. Under the influence of historians as well as anthropologists and sociologists of science, science is no longer seen as resulting from the cerebral thinking of a limited set of intellectuals, but rather emerging from networks involving such different actors as instrument makers, surgeons, mathematicians, engineers, alchemists and merchants, gardeners and collectors.10 While this explains the broadening of our analytical lens from science to knowledge and the blurring of the boundaries between the history of science and the history of technology,11 innovation is now seen as a more complex hybrid and contingent process too. For instance, it is shown to have taken place in networks of wandering journeymen, or else in such places as the workshop or the market place, where people from different venues met.12 Conceptually, knowledge is considered to have been embodied in either human minds and hands or in such ‘immutable mobiles’ as products, prints, books, plans, schemes, etcetera, which circulate through time and space while containing a body of knowledge.13 The knowledge concerned can then be appropriated by other actors and adapted to local circumstances. In this vein, other scales, environments and contexts have attracted attention, but this is not to say that cities can simply be put forward as a relevant ‘actor’. Neither knowledge nor a city can be reified or be seen as ‘bounded’ entities. Urban historians currently refrain from reducing cities to a political body or community (as in a communitarian political perspective) or to the ‘absence of distance’ (as an economist would be tempted to do). Nor can a city be reduced to either a set of institutions or a spatial and material reality. Many attempts to provide a complex definition of the city and its spatio-temporal life have been made by many types of social scientists.14 Among them, the sociological influence of Science and Technology Studies and Actor–Network Theory15 suggests looking at cities as ‘assemblages’ of human and non-human ‘actants’, including material objects and techniques; human bodies, thought and feelings; institutions, discourses and practices; and – last but not least – knowledge.16 A city does not have an essence or an inner logic but emerges from networks in which human and non-human elements are entangled in an extremely complex, layered and contingent way. The networks in which these people operated were multifaceted and hybrid and they materialised on different scales – from very local and place-bound to global.17 In them, knowledge would have been produced rather than found, a process which combined different types of

Knowledge and the early modern city

3

practices, which in turn were predicated on different types of instruments and other immutable mobiles involved.18 In a word, in the urban context as well, knowledge is to be seen as ‘fabricated’ and as emerging from networks of human and non-human actants. Taken together, these de-essentialising approaches are an invitation to seriously question the connection between knowledge formation and the urban context. Yet they do not necessarily disqualify the role of the urban context in knowledge formation. First, changes with respect to technological knowledge had an obvious impact on how a city was built and how its infrastructures were designed and constructed. Vice versa, specific urban problems or challenges might have prompted the development of specific solutions in an urban context. Second, the city as an assemblage and the contexts, networks, institutions and infrastructures from which knowledge emerges might partly overlap. Not coincidentally, historians of science have addressed cities as centres of accumulation and exchange, in which knowledge in both immaterial and embodied form clustered and was exchanged.19 Third, knowledge and the city might be intimately entangled owing to their mutual need for justification. The alleged superiority of certain forms of knowledge is often legitimised with reference to the context in which it is formed and used. This context can range from a certain institution (a university, an academy, a guild, etcetera) to the European or Western context as a whole, but the city as well is relevant here. After all, urban actors themselves will often refer to the city as a superior context when it comes to the justification of innovation and knowledge formation. This is true, nowadays, for urban policy makers, urban geographers and political scientists and the like, but it also applies to urban actors in the past such as guild-based artisans.20 The key question then is which knowledge is embodied by which (urban) actors/actants, and how and why. How is the urban implicated in the definition and certification of knowledge? This volume will directly address the relationship between the city or the urban space and knowledge production. It will do so for the early modern period for two reasons in particular. First, the early modern period is still seen as pre-eminent in the development of modern sciences and what could be called a ‘knowledge society’. Second, cities as well transformed drastically in this period, especially in Europe, as they expanded in demographic and economic terms while simultaneously becoming encapsulated in the overarching bureaucratic and institutional structures of emergent states. The entanglement of both transformations is all the more complex as European cities were increasingly caught up in regional and global networks of trade and exchange, including the exchange of goods and objects in which knowledge was embedded.21 Our volume sets out to tackle this complexity head on, so as to analyse some of the mechanisms with which certain types of knowledge and knowledge formation became historically entangled with the city and the urban context. Related to that, we will try to identify some of the implications of this entanglement and the transformations to which it was subjected.

4

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

The broader question we tackle is how the urban milieu impacted upon the production and nature of knowledge, and vice versa? Why exactly (if at all) was knowledge production an urban phenomenon or why did it become perceived and justified as such? This question can be broken down into several subquestions, ranging from the circulation of knowledge and the impact of specific actors and institutions upon it, to the epistemological implications of the entanglement between knowledge and the urban, or civic, space.22 The breadth of these questions was addressed in a series of workshops at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) in the spring of 2016, the conference ‘Materialities of Knowledge in Early Modern Cities’ at the University of Antwerp on 18–19 November 2016 and a workshop in Paris on 24 May 2017, hosted by the Centre Alexandre-Koyré at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). The broader context of our undertaking is the project ‘Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World (1450–1800)’, launched jointly by the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (University of Utrecht), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the NIAS (KNAW), with Sven Dupré (University of Utrecht and University of Amsterdam) and Wijnand Mijnhardt (University of Utrecht) acting as principal investigators. This broader project sets out to examine the historical roots of what is now called ‘knowledge society’, but it does so not only by zeroing in on the early modern period, but also by identifying key areas which enable us to better understand the development of knowledge and the broader historical context. The role of this book in the broader project will be further specified in the next two sections, in which we will spell out more comprehensively some of the transformations knowledge and the city were subjected to in the early modern period. Subsequently, we will summarise and frame the main findings of the contributions to our volume and link them to the broader debates and transformations.

Knowledge in the early modern period Among historians of science, there is not much need to justify the choice of the early modern period. Notwithstanding all the debunking of teleological and Eurocentric views, the early modern period is still broadly considered to have been the breeding ground for the modern experimental sciences which in the nineteenth century crystallised into the natural science disciplines that we recognise today. The challenge is to add to our knowledge about the related developments while avoiding presentist views and the trap of modernity narratives about the genealogy of modern science or the so-called ‘scientific revolution’.23 The crucial transformation relating to science in the early modern period, often summarised as the emergence of an experimental and observational approach to nature, was connected to a broad range of other transformations, such as the changing use of knowledge in governance, the growing importance of books, the emergence of

Knowledge and the early modern city

5

new instruments, related changes in the use of the senses and so on and so forth.24 Among other things, the invention of book printing and moveable type, next to a range of transformations in instrument-making, is still seen as key. Printing presses have played an ever more important role in the dissemination and accumulation of knowledge. Indeed, it might be argued that the accumulation of knowledge as we have known it from the early modern period on was unthinkable without them.25 Most historians of science wouldn’t deny that the printing press has had a massive impact on the nature of knowledge in general and the increasing importance of abstract, codified and disembodied knowledge in particular. A great deal of them might still maintain that our very way of thinking and reasoning has been profoundly marked by it. In the most outspoken ideas on the topic, the printing press is said to have significantly attributed to nothing less than the primacy of visual perspectivism, abstract thinking, analytical reasoning and interiorised individualism, although post-modern criticism has been active in outlining the Eurocentric dimension of printing and writing as the unique possible expression of abstraction.26 In the context of this book, it would be tempting to add here that the printing industry was mostly an urban phenomenon, as book history has demonstrated as early as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s seminal contribution.27 Yet it doesn’t automatically follow that the impact of book printing on science and knowledge formation should be attributed to its urban nature. The book printing industry was itself a phenomenon embedded in economic and intellectual networks stretching far beyond individual cities and even regions.28 This is all the more important as recent views have shifted attention away from books and in the direction of practices. As argued above, historians of science, technology and knowledge generally focus now on the multiplicity of agency, on hybrid networks and on historically contingent practices. This has challenged our view of knowledge formation in the early modern period in several ways. Crucially, it has shown that historians cannot confine themselves to analysing books and other printed matter connected to a single author. Among other things, recent research has shown that knowledge as codified in books should be connected to (1) practices in which the human body is implicated and (2) processes of circulation in which books are one ‘immutable mobile’ among many. First, the importance of the body in general and the hands specifically has been fundamentally rethought, partly building on the ideas of Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944) and his emphasis on artistic and artisanal approaches to nature and reality.29 According to Zilsel early forms of capitalism created the conditions in which academically trained natural philosophers interacted with artists and what he called ‘superior craftsmen’. In a similar spirit and in the same teleological vein, economic historians currently connect the merging of academic knowledge and shop-floor practices to the so-called ‘great divergence’ and the ‘European miracle’.30 In recent views, it is stressed that the practices and insights of natural philosophers and bottom-up experimentation by artisans on the shop floor

6

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

eventually converged in the eighteenth century, unleashing a process of endless knowledge accumulation and ‘creative destruction’ explaining ‘the great divergence’.31 Yet most historians of knowledge and science now refrain from such teleological approaches and concentrate rather on the historical complexity and the multi-layered character in specific timeframes and contexts. For instance, they examine how exactly the relationship between theoretical knowledge and embodied or implicit knowledge transformed and how this was related to the material, political and religious context.32 Or else, they point to the contradiction between, on the one hand, the entanglement of different forms of knowledge on the shop floor and in laboratories, and, on the other, the fact that a clear distinction between invenit and fecit or between science and technology (or applied sciences) materialised nevertheless.33 What remains intact as a key idea is that artists specialised in observing and representing reality and that artisans constantly experimented with natural material in a never-ending process of trial and error. Given the focus on practices and interaction between different actor groups, this leads to the idea that artistic and artisanal practices fed into the broader field of knowledge production – including into those practices which are generally considered to have been crucial in the emergence of experimental sciences. This is certainly not limited to grinding lenses of telescopes or microscopes or making such instruments as air-pumps. At times artisans were even seen as epistemological models of sorts, because they had the perspicacity and discernment to distinguish the regular from the particular, or as an âme réglée (orderly soul) at work.34 Yet this was also not unconnected to political, ideological and religious issues, as Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler have recently argued.35 It would still be anachronistic to cast these dimensions aside.36 Moreover, other interactions, in totally different contexts, mattered as well. For instance, the dynamic flow of research dedicated to early modern aristocratic societies and their connection with knowledge production has largely demonstrated the part played by ‘courtiers’ in such processes, the court being the social place par excellence where artists, philosophers, botanists, craftsmen, poets and physicians intermingled.37 Second, attention is increasingly paid to circulation and the changes related to the structure, composition, scope and materiality of networks. In the context of Anglophone debates around the ‘knowledge economy’ and the importance of useful knowledge therein, the economic edge of north-west Europe from about the mid-eighteenth century on has often been ascribed to prior cultural and scientific developments, which were assumed to have trickled down to artisanal ateliers and manufactories, where they were appropriated and adapted to economic processes.38 This often implied a transfer of knowledge and technologies of knowledge from the top down or from Europe to the rest of the world in processes of dissemination from centre to periphery.39 This is no longer valid either. Among other things, the framework of imperial history has been a prosperous field where the history of science and technology had

Knowledge and the early modern city

7

a chance to rethink the overly simplistic diffusionist model.40 The practices of collecting, gathering, displaying or transforming nature, meaning both naturalia and artificialia, in relation to ‘discoveries’ of new lands and territories, have been included in the new research agendas, opening space for new questions, such as: how did ‘science in the field’ come to deeply affect knowledge produced in Europe? What was the ‘European’ part of the transformations related to such contacts? What is clear is that historians of science have rightfully pointed to the importance of continental or overseas trade routes, and to the agents involved in them. Their focus on interactions has made clear that circulation is not a oneway process, but that processes of appropriation, adaptation and translation, in Europe as well as in non-European places, have to be taken into account. This is key to prevent essentialism and to fully appreciate the role of not only different knowledge carriers but also the local epistemological conditions and dynamics in the development and articulation of knowledge.41 This is what urges historians and social scientists to zero in, above all, on practices.42 While a focus on practices prevents one from distinguishing the production and the application of knowledge, it permits a consideration of the historical configuration in all its dimensions, including the spatial, material, institutional, political and cultural dimension, to name but a few. As to the present volume, it is an invitation to take into account the urban space, albeit not as something objective and reified, but rather as an ‘assemblage’ or an ‘agencement’ itself.43 The definition of what is urban will itself be at stake in this analysis.44 From such a perspective, this volume is also an attempt to go one step further in the fruitful dialogue which started two decades ago between history of science and urban history.45 By critically investigating cities as sites of knowledge it contributes to the quest for the spatial dimension of knowledge production, as suggested by the investigation of European, and more recently non-European, capital cities.46 It aims to challenge implicit geographies of knowledge production by investigating unexpected cities.47 It also invites a strengthening of the relevance of urban nodes in shaping the routes of knowledge, in relation to the broad set of work dedicated to the scales of analysis, where the focus on cities, and more specifically world or global cities, has opened up new perspectives about the multi-scalar approaches to urban space.48 The recent accumulation of studies in these areas has proven to be very enriching, stimulating the dialogue between urban history on the one hand, and the history of science, technology, knowledge and the environment on the other. Among other things, cross-over studies have focused on the emergence of so-called science-cities and techno-cities, the representation of science and technology in the city, the relationship between technological developments and the urban economy (including the related institutions), creative urban milieus (with the networks and organisations involved), the complex interaction between the city and the environment (ranging from urban solutions for environmental problems to the ‘production of nature’ in the city), and so on.49 However, the early modern period has been largely ignored, while the stakes

8

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

are arguably higher for this period. Even more than in the contemporary period, the boundaries between nature and culture, and between elite and vernacular knowledge were open to negotiation, while the very essence of knowledge was at stake. Moreover, the relative autonomy of cities brings the question of urban agency to a head, the more so because the importance of the social and public character of scientific practices increased.

The early modern city and its implication in knowledge formation When looking at the early modern period from the perspective of our presentday knowledge economies, there is an inherent risk of presenting the outcome of history as natural, resulting either from increasingly efficient institutions and practices or from increasingly ‘objective’ and ‘reliable’ scientific approaches. As shown above, historians of science, technology and knowledge have gone to great lengths to qualify and criticise such triumphalist ideas about the advent of modern science and a rational approach to knowledge.50 However, the idea that knowledge is never neutral and does not unfold naturally as a matter of course has not been directly connected to the question of ‘urban agency’ to date – which is not only unfortunate because in urban history and urban studies it is still generally accepted that knowledge production is to a large degree an urban phenomenon, but also, more broadly, because narratives of modernity have pervaded urban history to the core too. The idea that cities accommodate the so-called ‘creative classes’ and that urban spaces are, not least in the early modern period, conducive to innovation is still implied in the most recent handbooks on urban history.51 The early history of these ideas is worth exploring in itself, as this would shed light on when and how exactly we have come to perceive the entanglement between knowledge and the city as a powerful one. In this regard, the early modern period is crucial, precisely because, coinciding with European phases of urbanisation, the question of the city took a central place in reflexions about politics and philosophy, or such issues as urban management and medicine, culture and geopolitics. This becomes clear when looking at the revival of the ancient model of city praises during the Renaissance period, one example of which is Erasmus, heralded and followed by many other humanists through discourses, poems, treatises.52 What is remarkable about this praise is that the excellence of cities is often connected to the excellence of the people associated with them. At the turn of the fifteenth century, the humanist Leonardo Bruni wrote in his famous eulogy on Renaissance Florence that ‘the Florentines are in such harmony with this very noble and outstanding city that it seems they could never have lived anywhere else. Nor could the city, so skilfully created, have had any other kind of inhabitants’.53 The idea underlying this quote is that human excellence is tied to the urban context, which is still present in Giovanni Botero’s late sixteenth-century A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificence

Knowledge and the early modern city

9

and Greatness of Cities (1585), in which cities are rendered as testimony of the greatness of humans: cities are like little worlds constructed by man within the great world created by God, and just as the contemplation of Nature leads to recognition of the greatness of God, in the same way the study of cities affords a special sign of man’s excellence, which in turn redounds to the glory of God, whose creature he is.54 This connection between cities and human excellence is of course not to be taken for granted, but is rather to be seen as a power-laden fabrication of certain urban actor groups which justify their own dominance with reference to the context in which they work and live – for instance by linking the quality of their products to the praised quality of the city in which they are manufactured.55 This makes it all the more important to look carefully at how early modern cities transformed, perhaps especially at the level of representation and imagination.56 As a material and technical reality early modern cities did not transform drastically. Such metropolises as London, Naples and Paris of course expanded considerably in demographic terms from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century. And in terms of physical lay-out, construction styles and architecture there is no denying the well-known transformations described by art historians and historians of architecture and construction – if only because wooden houses were from the seventeenth century on gradually replaced by stone constructions. However, transformations in the social, cultural and political sphere were arguably more important, at least with regard to the themes addressed in this book. In history of science, it is often assumed that knowledge production moved from cloisters and universities to the civic forum in the early modern period.57 Simultaneously, however, it is to be noted that cities lost a great deal of their autonomy in the late medieval and early modern period. In the fifteenth century already the famous Italian city states turned into metropolises of dominant territorial states, while the cities in France and England were further incorporated in the expanding central states.58 From the sixteenth century onwards, this fate also awaited the cities in more politically fragmented regions like the North Sea area and the Rhine region. Paradoxically perhaps, the largest and most impressive cities were often those that were more thoroughly entangled with the emergent and expanding states. This is because these cities were often those that had turned into the state’s metropolises, as was the case with London and Paris, among others.59 This entanglement complicates the identification of the role of the city in knowledge formation, partly because the key institutions involved were often royal. This is notoriously the case with the Royal Society of London, established in 1660. Other institutions too were situated within the city walls while not necessarily acting for the benefit of the city or being governed by actors identifying with the city, although the function of ‘capital’ may have

10

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

provided some cities with local as well as regional and trans-regional goals.60 This was arguably the case with most cloisters as well as universities, where the part played by the institutions of the city and that corresponding to larger powers has constantly been conflictual.61 So an examination of urban institutions does not provide straightforward answers to the question of urban agency either. In addition to the political and institutional transformations, the representation of the city also changed, and this is even more directly connected to transformations in knowledge production. As is famously epitomised by G. Braun and F. Hogenberg’s Städte der Welt, city views and maps, whether or not gathered in highly expressive and expensive atlases, increasingly conquered the intellectual and political world, as well as ordinary people. While often originating in military and political purposes, they betray a trend in which the cities were increasingly represented in a realistic way.62 This too, however, turns out to be a paradoxical phenomenon in terms of urban agency. More allegorical and emblematic representations of the city were eventually complemented not only by realistic city views, but also by abstract plans in which the city was rendered in a geometric way. Following the geographer Stuart Elden, this was influenced not only by technological transformations but also by epistemological ones. The emergence of maps and more abstracted city views would have been connected to the more mathematical and mechanical intellectual traditions taking shape simultaneously.63 With specific reference to notions of geometry as developed by Descartes, Elden argues that cities are thus made more measurable and governable. The sixteenth century is highly interested in the search for the ideal city from a complementary philosophical perspective. By the same token, cities may have become more open and networked.64 In his preface to Ortelius’ Theatrum orbis terrarum, the famous sixteenth-century Antwerp printer Christoffel Plantijn had already developed the idea that foreigners from the four parts of the world bring into the city their spirit and their strength, and thus transform the city into a cornucopia of plenty, of ‘knowledge, and goods’.65 The urban cannot in any case be isolated from other political, ideological and cultural analytical frameworks. This is for instance implied by debates about the role of religion. In line with Max Weber’s idea on modernity, the focus has often been on Western Protestant Europe, exemplified by England and the Dutch Republic, as illustrated by the seminal book R.K. Merton dedicated to science, technology and society in seventeenth-century London.66 Catholic Europe, i.e. southern Europe and the Mediterranean area, as well as northern and eastern Europe, were often seen as backward or conservative, and hardly received any attention. This has changed recently, with, for instance, new work explicitly addressing the modernity of such regions and cities as the southern Netherlands and Rome, but most work on Catholic regions remains to be done.67 Other scales are obviously even more important when tackling Eurocentric views. Non-European regions still lag behind in terms of empirical research, but the past decades have been crucial in the reframing of the spatial agenda of early modern history of science through the investigation of science

Knowledge and the early modern city

11

in non-European contexts. This tradition has its roots in J. Needham’s monumental history of science in China,68 which still has no equivalent for other regions like India, Japan or Mesoamerica.69 This recent work can be built upon when looking at the impact of ‘encounters’, and long-distance networks.70 While here too the focus has mostly been on European networks – a notable exception being the Indo-Persian networks which developed before the European ones in the Indian Ocean from the fourteenth century on71 – they nevertheless invite the inclusion of processes of appropriation and multidirectional exchange. The imperial dynamics, including spatial expansion (within as well as outside Europe) are part and parcel of the process that helped destabilise the concept of science itself. This is of major importance in a volume on the relationship between knowledge and the city because it brings the focus on networks to a head and also invites a further decentralisation of the city. While cities could be seen as the pre-eminent places where global knowledge is produced, the relevant networks responsible for this usually stretch beyond and across cities. We should therefore be wary about the appropriate scale and unit of analysis. Recent historiographical debates, concentrating for instance on the Atlantic, or the global scale, are still in danger of creating new boundaries, new blind spots and false ‘new topics’ – such as ‘Iberian science’ – although they substitute previous nationally oriented boundaries.72 This can perhaps be avoided through a systematic ‘jeu d’échelle’, i.e. making the question of scale part of the analysis.73 Our volume is therefore conceived as one in which different scales and different ‘regimes of spatiality’ are gathered and in which due attention is paid to the entanglement of various spatialities.74 This is entirely in line with recent views on the spatiality of cities, which are now also largely seen as emerging from a broad range of networks operating at different scalar levels. Our book will therefore present case studies with the use of very different analytical lenses. While most chapters focus on one specific city (Antwerp, Coimbra, Paris, Rome, Vienna), some chapters compare European and nonEuropean cities (Buning) or address long-distance networks (Davids). The chapters addressing one city in particular include other scalar levels with a focus on social and intellectual networks (Andretta and Romano, Carrió, Molino, Murphy, Van Damme), the circulation of concepts (Carrió, Van Bruaene) and of objects (Andretta and Romano, Molino, Van Damme). Moreover, more important than the analytical level or scale of analysis is our conceptual approach. Our book proceeds from the idea that neither the city nor the definition of modern forms of knowledge are to be taken for granted. As shown above, we start instead from the observation that both the city and knowledge are complex, composite and multi-layered realities in which human (cultural, institutional, discursive, etcetera) and non-human (material, technological) elements are moreover deeply entangled.

12

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Knowledge and the city Our book presents case studies which examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how they changed in a period in which the nature and conception of both knowledge and the city transformed drastically. At the most basic level, the contributions to this book analyse what role urban institutions, urban actors and urban spaces played in the production of knowledge and the changing nature as well as the changing definitions, justifications and certifications of philosophy, science, technology, skills or art. Rather than starting from a strict definition of knowledge or these related fields, we look at how the production and conceptualisation worked in practice and together. Each case discusses the current historiography as it has been presented above, and the still shared assumption that cities, or urban environments have a positive impact on the production of knowledge. We aim to go beyond such perspectives by avoiding a normative framework of success and failure and by addressing the complex, layered and power-laden practices and configurations from an actor and network perspective. Whether the focus is on a specific actor or institution, or rather on a network, we concentrate on the historicity and historical contingency of the processes involved. Moreover, we have deliberately refrained from distinguishing explananda from explanantia, and from pinpointing whether either something urban impacted upon knowledge production or, vice versa, knowledge transformation had an impact on the city or an urban actor or institution. Instead, our nine carefully selected case studies examine the co-emergence and co-production of, on the one hand, certain forms of knowledge and, on the other, the city as a social, political, institutional and imagined reality. In the background loom rather basic questions like whether cities produced specific types of knowledge because of specific ‘needs’ or ‘trump cards’ or because cities were more likely to host a cross-over between economic and intellectual milieus and between natural philosophy/science and technology. However, we urged our authors to go beyond simple causal schemes with the help of an in-depth approach.

Knowledge and the staging of the city The contributions by Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Hannah Murphy and Stéphane Van Damme aim to answer these questions by putting the emphasis on the performative dimension of the meaning of the city, the shaping of its image as consensual and the different types of knowledge mobilised by different actors in such processes. Each focusing on a specific European region – the Netherlands, Germany and France – and analysing different periods, they discuss the materiality and visual dimension of the entanglement between knowledge and the city. Van Bruaene looks at the interaction between, on the one hand, local and vernacular types of knowledge as cultivated by the rhetoricians, and, on the other, international types of knowledge. She does so through the lens of the theatrum metaphor, which, as she shows, transformed the rederijker drama and

Knowledge and the early modern city

13

public festivals in sixteenth-century Antwerp. This, in turn, had an impact on the visual representation and organisation of knowledge in books and print, bearing witness to the profound entanglement between intellectual concepts, urban public culture and the formation and representation of knowledge. These intellectual as well as civic practices of urban middling groups had an impact on the codification and standardisation of knowledge in books, in a period in which conceptions of knowledge transformed drastically. As the circulation of the theatrum metaphor played a crucial role, this cannot simply be attributed to something called ‘urban agency’. The urban acted rather like a catalyst of sorts. Murphy points to a similar entanglement between knowledge and the practices of urban middling groups. She proceeds from a 1547 account of the lives of 79 of Nuremberg’s most eminent artisans, written by the local calligrapher and mathematician Johann Neudörffer. This text was later built upon to boast the city’s artistic greatness during the Renaissance as embodied by Dürer, but as Murphy shows, Neudörffer’s ambitions were very different from the nineteenth-century eulogies of individual artistic ingenuity. Instead of individual excellence, he emphasised collaboration and communal craftsmanship and concentrated on the material environment in which artisanal practices took place (ranging from instruments to buildings and fortification) – ultimately rendering artisanal practice a basis for civic identity. In Neudörffer’s frame of reference, artisans were not only key economic and political actors, but central in the making of a civic epistemology too. Using the list as a method, which was common in artisanal manuals, Neudörffer merged a literary convention of record-keeping with key elements of artisanal practice, revealing the interpenetration of knowledge, skills and intellectual habits among urban artisans. Ultimately, Murphy thus brings to the fore a city in which the communal and the civic are deeply entangled with artisanal epistemology. On the one hand, artisanal practices as shaped by the urban spatial and social context are shown to have had an impact on the way knowledge and expertise were conceived; on the other hand, Murphy transcends the view of Pamela Smith and Pamela Long and others, who argued in favour of artisanal practices in the transformation of the natural sciences, by pointing out that artisanal knowledge also had a profound impact on the way the city was understood and shaped. Murphy thus goes well beyond the traditional interpretative reading of the text and also takes into account the material making of it. In this way, she is able to show that epistemology as well as artisanal practices were very much determined by personal and emotional relations, as well as place – i.e. the urban context. Nor is Van Damme’s view any less intriguing. Dealing with a totally different urban and intellectual context (eighteenth-century Paris) Van Damme examines the tensions and relationships between, on the one hand, a political question (the nature of the ‘people’) and, on the other, the scientific practices and epistemologies at stake in examining the past. He proceeds from the idea that antiquarian knowledge can be seen as a laboratory enabling us to look at the interplay between knowledge evolutions and power relations playing out at the

14

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

urban level while also involving the central level and religious actors. Concentrating on a broad range of eighteenth-century actors involved in antiquarian activity, he argues that these actor groups looked at the origins of Paris through fundamentally different lenses, as a result of which the Antique Parisii were seen as either merchants (urban power), Roman administrators (the royal power) or Druids (religious power). Beyond that, Van Damme points to the epistemological implications, showing that a key social tension was maintained between, on the one hand, a wish to objectify and visualise, and, on the other, the need to conceal the social reality. Both the power games and the epistemological compromise were facilitated by the indeterminacy of the object involved, i.e. the fact that the ‘antiquities of Paris’ enabled multiple, also conflicting, interpretations. The joint influence of this indeterminacy and the different interests at stake could for instance result in a shift from a juridical interpretation to a territorial one, which had in turn an impact on the development of historical mapping. Again, therefore, the entanglement turns out to be a very complex one, involving different types of actors and intellectual frames of reference, and a range of immutable mobiles also take part in the ‘agencement’.

Urban agency, science, technology and the making of the city In three studies focusing on the Dutch area, the contributions by Marius Buning, Karel Davids and Dániel Margócsy, the core issue is the development and articulation of political and multi-scalar projects, the actors and agents involved, their location in precise cities and the development of specific bodies of knowledge, as different as shipbuilding, long-distance trade or engineering. This is surely the case in the chapter of Margócsy, who focuses on Nicolaes Witsen, a mayor of Amsterdam in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic who could pre-eminently be seen as an actor prone to acting for the benefit of the city. However, as Margócsy shows, Witsen’s role in knowledge formation was very much influenced by extra-urban factors, including material and moral ones. The author of the first Dutch encyclopaedia of shipbuilding (Aeloude- en hedendaegsche scheepsbouw en bestier, 1671), Witsen was well aware of the importance of the broader context in which the Dutch shipbuilders had to compete. Trade was a key element because Dutch cities could only flourish when their citizens could work with the best material, which had to be procured from distant corners of the world. Cities may nevertheless have had an impact because the urban environment bred specific problems begging for specific technological solutions. This is the approach of Buning, who concentrates on a phenomenon which can be seen as typical for cities, viz. smell, which in the early modern urban context is often related to polluted water – not least in the case studies upon which Buning focuses (Leiden in the Dutch Republic, and Batavia, the Dutch Republic’s colonial stronghold in the East Indies). Buning’s contribution shows that experts preoccupied with a typically urban problem did come up with innovative

Knowledge and the early modern city

15

solutions indeed, but they did so in different ways, depending on the cultural and political context. Among other things, different power relations and, related to that, the availability of a cheap work force in Batavia brought about a different attitude towards the introduction of new technologies. While the problem of smell and infected water led to capital investments and technological innovation in Leiden, a chain gang was used to address the same problem in Batavia. Buning moreover stresses that the political context not only affected technological and infrastructural transformations, but that the latter alternatively constituted the political too. It granted authority to certain actors and disqualified others, for instance those behind stinking industries. This too differed according to the context. In Leiden political authorities needed to balance the power of different actor groups, which eventually strengthened the institutional power of a higher authority, whereas in Batavia the local population could be simply disregarded. Last but not least, the role of the urban, or ‘urban agency’, is also very much relativised in the contribution by Davids, who concentrates on long-distance corporations, particularly the Dutch East-India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) and the missionary networks of the Society of Jesus. With an eye on so-called ‘open air’ knowledge such as botany, surveying, mapmaking and linguistics, which notoriously travelled from overseas areas to European metropolises, Davids shows that the agency is very much to be situated in these networks rather than in the city. While local urban actors such as printer-publishers helped to attract knowledge to the cities and transform them into knowledge hubs, these long-distance corporations helped to expand and diversify the knowledge flows or to preserve them after the city had lost its main appeal. While Antwerp lost its position as a hub in the open-air sciences after 1585, a religious long-distance corporation, namely the Society of Jesus, helped the city to preserve its position as a centre of distribution in mapmaking and linguistics. In Amsterdam and Leiden, the key long-distance corporations from the early seventeenth century on were trading companies like the VOC and the West-India Company (WIC), although they were less decisive in terms of knowledge formation. These networks as well clearly operated according to their own logic, rather than an urban logic or in the interests of the city, yet urban particularities did play a role too. While seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Leiden provided support to public institutions such as libraries, botanical gardens or institutions of higher learning, Antwerp did not. Davids attributes this to the different political position of the economic elite, which were less represented in the government of sixteenth-century Antwerp relative to seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Leiden. The three cases make clear that the urban context did not even have an unambiguous impact on a pre-existing piece of knowledge or technology once it arrived in a certain city. On the one hand, travelling technologies were not necessarily adapted to the local circumstances, as is clear in the Batavian case. On the other hand, factors unrelated to the urban played a role

16

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

too. While stench appears to have had a certain agency in Buning’s case, it only had so in a context in which the miasma theory, which stressed the role of air quality in the spread of disease, prevailed. Rather than urban agency, this exemplifies the impact of cultural factors far beyond the urban horizon. This is also the case in the chapter by Margócsy, in which the moral qualities of the Dutch shipbuilders were key. While Witsen’s book ensured that readers understood why the Dutch were superior shipbuilders, the broader background was one in which technical skill and technological success were inseparable from moral qualities. Technical knowledge without the moral qualities of the Dutch workforce would not lead to a successful adoption of the technical knowledge according to Witsen.

Imperial cities, knowledge for empires? All this suggests that the issue of urban agency cannot be reduced to an either– or question. This is even more clear in the contributions by Leonardo Cataldi, Paola Molino, and Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano, in which the role of urban actors and institutions, and the knowledge they produce, is investigated with respect to the framework of three distinct imperial contexts: the Portuguese empire and Coimbra; the Holy Roman Empire and Vienna; and the Catholic empires, the Church and Rome. In the three cases, the focus is on the stratification and entanglement of means and goals, among different urban actors, to contribute to the production of knowledge within and beyond the scale of the city itself. Carrió concentrates on a key actor, namely André de Avelar (1546?–1623), who was professor of mathematics at the University of Coimbra during the Iberian union period (1580–1640). Yet de Avalar’s intellectual activities are shown to have been deeply contingent not only on the scientific state of the art of the time, but also on the needs and power of a Catholic empire which set out to conquer and convert parts of the new world and Asia. Cataldi clearly shows that the pedagogical and scientific programme at Coimbra university and such institutions as the Society of Jesus were partly determined by both practical needs related to oversees discoveries and the need to spread the knowledge of Christian civilisation. Among other things an increased integration between practical and theoretical knowledge as advocated by humanists such as Juan Luis Vivès was related to this. From this perspective, the empire had a profound effect not only on the knowledge produced in institutions situated in the urban space, but also – through the spatial embedding of such institutions as the university and its library and archive – on urban space itself. This of course does not mean that this can be reduced to a simple top-down process. Processes of knowledge formation were also related to the book market and to the specificities of the cultural background and networks of key figures such as André de Avalar (including the impact of the Inquisition on the latter). While these networks too surpassed the local urban level, the urban context is also not a passive container

Knowledge and the early modern city

17

of knowledge produced elsewhere. Addressing de Avalar’s activities from the perspective of the social history of science as well as the history of urban spaces and urban communities and networks, Carrió ultimately reveals the profound entanglement between the Iberian empires, knowledge production and social dynamics as they crystallised in urban space. As argued above, urban agency is even more difficult to identify in large metropoles. This is already the case in late Renaissance Vienna, the case study of Paola Molino. Examining the relationship between the imperial court and the urban environment with a focus on one specific ‘place of knowledge’, namely the imperial library in the making, she is able to lay bare a range of confessional, political and spatial tensions. Although situated in the city and in urban space, and thus partly a ‘civic institution’, the imperial library was clearly also a courtly institution and subject to transformations on that political level. The two most important librarians – the Dutch Hugo Blotius and his successor Sebastian Tengnagel – were imperial servants and an integral part of the imperial socio-cultural milieu. Their networks mattered a great deal, up to and including for the content of the literature and manuscripts collected. Specifically, the presence of the Turcica collection and oriental manuscripts can be ascribed to their networks and interests. It had consequences in terms of a possible (epistemological) base for a specialised place of ‘orientalism’. Moreover, the political choices of the emperors had a direct impact on the nature of the library. When Rudolf II moved the imperial court to Prague in 1583 (after the death of Maximilian II), Blotius was forced to reorient his network. Something similar happened when Archduke Matthias took over as emperor in 1612 and the imperial court gradually moved back to Vienna. Even in the case of the imperial library in Vienna, the urban context did eventually matter. Yet the impact of the city or the urban context is to be examined in its interaction with other networks – in this case the imperial one. Geopolitical factors and choices made at the imperial level were entangled with the urban in myriad ways. For starters, they had an impact on the specific location of the library, which was first situated in a peripheral area and in an unsuitable space – partly because it had to endure passers-by not interested in the library. This even had epistemological consequences, as it affected the way the works were listed in an inventory (in response to the theft of books and manuscripts). When the imperial court moved to Prague after the death of Emperor Maximilian II (1576), the connection with the urban context was reinforced, as Blotius strengthened his relations with the urban environment (through marriages and otherwise), opened the doors of the library to members of the local religious orders and catalogued with an eye to the use of the library by members of the Austrian nobility. In this regard, the knowledge produced in the library may nevertheless have mirrored many of the urban tensions as well, as argued by Molino. Andretta and Romano focus on Rome in the very last years of the sixteenth century, a period corresponding to the reformulation of the universal destiny of

18

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

the city made by the Pope while claiming the global spiritual role of the capital of Catholicism, against the Protestant European states as well as the Spanish Empire. It aims to discuss the epistemological added value of knowledge when produced in/by the city. The chapter looks for the foundation of an urban epistemology characterised by a relationship to time nourished by an ability to encompass all parts of the known world. The case study under scrutiny is that of the relocation of an obelisk at the time of Sixtus V, in 1585. The removal is understood to be at the crossroads of the mobilisation of different types of knowledge, technical, architectural, naturalist, philological, linguistic and theological. The working hypothesis is that the specific social configuration of the city allows for the enrolment of such a broad range of competences and their possible coordination into a two-fold political and urbanistic project. The chapter analyses how such an enterprise contributed to the redefinition of Rome’s centrality in the contemporary world, as it could help to connect in a coherent way the oriental past of Rome to its global present.

The early modern world shaped through urban knowledge? Jointly, these chapters clearly confirm that the city cannot be seen as a bounded actor or a cluster of human actors and institutionalised networks of scientists. The wide range of hitherto neglected actors, places and practices emerging in the separate chapters – including artisans and artists, rhetoricians, antiquarians and civil servants, archaeological objects, pageants, libraries, theatres, etcetera – do not represent or embody the city; nor is their agency attached to the city in a straightforward way. They are, however, to be understood in their complex interaction with the city. Tackling the different possible configurations and hierarchies in which they cluster and interact, it can be argued that knowledge was not invented by a specific group of predictable ‘doers’ or ‘inventors’, but emerged from a range of practices which are simultaneously place-bound and to be situated in broader networks – the latter being networks of people (whether or not institutionalised) or circulating objects such as books and archaeological objects. As a result, the idea of the ‘agency of the urban’ is rightfully replaced with, among others, such concepts as ‘circulation’, ‘network’ and the city as a ‘trading zone’, which enable us to connect knowledge formation to social environments extended and displayed at different scales, and power relations beyond such obvious actors as natural philosophers and policy makers.75 Of course, this doesn’t mean that the urban didn’t matter. It rather implies that the urban, or even a specific urban actor, or institution or place, can never be isolated as a factor, but should always be looked at in its interaction with other (f)actors. If looked at in this way, a focus on the entanglement between knowledge and the city can also shed new light on long-term transformations. One of these transformations relates to the issue of openness versus secrecy. Traditional scholarship has often sketched a long-term evolution in which knowledge became ever more public at the expense of practices in which

Knowledge and the early modern city

19

knowledge was anxiously kept secret, as would have been the case in guilds. This view has been qualified in recent research, with Pamela Long for instance pointing to the fact that the guilds’ regulations fostered the codification of knowledge, and economic historians like Karel Davids and Marco Belfanti interpreting them as a type of collective patent.76 This is not the last word on the openness versus secrecy issue, however, if only because current approaches are still partly teleological. Some of the contributions to our book suggest that we need to further transcend the openness versus secrecy dichotomy. Margócsy convincingly shows that addressing Witsen’s publication through the lens of secrecy versus openness would be far too simplistic. An open publication – and by extension book printing – was not antithetical to secrecy, as both were to some extent needed in a commercial context. A book on shipbuilding could not reveal all the knowledge needed to build a ship, as hunches, educated guesses and tacit knowledge continued to be important. Witsen himself did not believe that his encyclopaedia would ensure effective technology transfer. In his case, the circulation of knowledge may have been instrumental in a strategy to ensure Amsterdam’s central role in the circulation of commodities, with the publication ensuring authority in a certain knowledge field. Van Bruaene’s contribution also touches upon this dichotomy and likewise qualifies it. Showing that the metaphor of the theatrum and its underlying pedagogical ideals had an impact beyond the sixteenth century, she reveals long-term transformations in the interaction between public and private. Yet rather than a shift to a more public use of the theatrum concept, she points at the development of commercial (private) theatre with the help of the concept. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the religious wars and the separation of the Netherlands politicised the connection between the public stage and the book. The notion of the theatre migrated from the public sphere to books and finally to the commercial sphere – with the establishment of the first commercial playhouse in the Low Countries (the Nederduytsche Academie) in 1617. This ‘modern’ institution is thus situated in a network in which epistemological transformations played their part. This is also the case in Molino’s chapter, which tackled the question whether the library was an urban or a courtly institution – yet another anachronistic set of categories. Rather than reproducing the difference between the two categories, her research shows that a pre-existing tension between urban and courtly influences was gradually surpassed, as the library shifted from a more urban and courtly one to a truly scholarly institution. After the mid-seventeenth century the collection of the imperial library, which was now three times larger than in 1575, was made public in a proper location, and received more suitable catalogues and descriptions. While these spaces were now more closely tied to the court, the special set-up enabled the library to become more separated and to be organised as an independent scientific institution. What is fascinating about this episode is that the entanglement between the urban space (and its constraints) and the growth of a project as politically crucial as the ‘universal library’ of

20

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Vienna was contingent on the issue of distance and the problem of the location of the library (in a very precise urban environment) in the broader context of the empire. Some of the library’s users, not least the emperor himself, are not present in this urban space in which the library is located, which further complicates the question of ‘urban epistemology’. In conclusion, we as editors of the volume would like to stress the very last element related to our collective attempt to challenge teleological approaches related to the understanding of what a city is and how it produces knowledge: namely the long-term perspective. Even though all the chapters deal with the early modern period, ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, thus highlighting different moments of the history of European urban developments, none of them makes long-term claims. They rather confirm that the history of knowledge formation is in no way to be seen as one in which a modern knowledge society inexorably emerges. Put briefly, they stress historical contingency rather than linearity. What a focus on the city highlights in particular is that the relationship between knowledge and the city is ongoing – on both a practical level and the level of imagination and justification. In this vein, our decision to work through cases is of course not a coincidence.

Notes 1 About the category of knowledge production, Gibbons et al., The New Production; Pestre, ‘La production’. 2 Cf. Florida, Cities; Glaeser, Triumph. 3 See e.g., Lepetit and Hoock, La ville; O’Brien et al., Urban Achievement; Hall, Cities; Hietala and Clark, ‘Creative Cities’. 4 Bairoch, De Jéricho. 5 See, among others, Malmberg and Maskell, ‘Towards an Explanation’; Porter, ‘Location’; Brenner, Local Industrial Clusters. 6 E.g., Rossi, The Birth; Bowler and Morus, Making. Locating innovative potential in institutions is also a trend in economic history. See e.g., Epstein and Prak, Guilds. 7 For historians of science, the historiographical category of ‘scientific revolution’ has played a crucial role in the sketching of the research agenda inherited from positivism. 8 Among others, Jarrige, Techno-critiques; Pestre, Le gouvernement. 9 Cf. Hilaire-Pérez and Verna, ‘Dissemination’; Raj, Relocating. Also Davids and De Munck, Innovation; Brevaglieri and Romano, ‘Produzione di saperi’; Romano, ‘Des sciences’. 10 See e.g., Smith and Findlen, Merchants; Harkness, The Jewel House; Cook, Matters. 11 Romano, ‘Making’; Van Damme, Histoire des sciences; See also Guesnerie and Hartog, Des sciences. 12 E.g., Verna et al., Artisans; Reith, ‘Circulation’; Stewart, ‘The Laboratory’. There is also a vast literature in the sub-field of history of medicine. 13 For this concept, see Latour, Science, Ch. 6. 14 About the stratification of time and spaces, see Roncayolo, ‘Les strates’. 15 For an introduction, see Latour, Reassembling. A critical philosophical assessment is Harman, Prince. 16 Cf. Graham and Marvin, Splintering; Amin and Thrift, Cities; Farías and Bender, Urban Assemblages.

Knowledge and the early modern city

21

17 For the importance of long-distance networks see, among others, McLeod and Rehbock, Nature; Schiebinger and Swan, Botany; Bleichmar et al., Science; Kontler et al., Negotiating Knowledge; Slater, López-Terrada and Pardo-Tomás, Medical Cultures. 18 For the importance of instruments, see the classic study of Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan; Bourguet, Licoppe, Sibum, Instruments; Safier, Measuring. 19 Roberts, Local encounters; Roberts, Centres and Cycles; Van Damme, Métropoles; Romano, Rome. 20 E.g., De Munck, ‘The Agency’; and De Munck, ‘Artisans’. 21 Günergun and Raina, Science; Margócsy, Commercial; Aram and Yun-Casalilla, Global Goods; Cook, Smith and Meyers, Ways of Making. 22 About space and history of science, Ophir and Shapin, ‘The Place’; Shapin, ‘Placing’; Livingston, Putting; Besse, ‘Le lieu’. 23 About presentism as a ‘regime of historicity’: Hartog, Regimes. About the scientific revolution: Koyré, From Closed World; Redondi, ‘Science’; Redondi, Alexandre Koyré; Shapin, The Scientific Revolution; Cohen, The Scientific Revolution. 24 See e.g., Mukerji, Impossible Engineering; Roberts, ‘Death’. 25 Eisenstein, The Printing Press. 26 Ong, Orality. Also: Goody, The Logic and The Interface; Jacob, Des Alexandries. On natural history, an expanded production: Ogilvie, The Science of Describing; Egmond, Eye for Detail; Bleichmar, Visual Voyages. 27 Febvre and Martin, L’apparition; Martin, Livre. 28 Rasterhoff, Painting. 29 Zilsel, ‘The Social Origins’. 30 The term ‘great divergence’ is coined by Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. Recent views in Rosenthal and Bin Wong, Before and beyond; Parthasarathi, Why Europe. 31 Mokyr, The Gifts; O’Brien, ‘The Needham’. The former term is from Joseph Schumpeter. 32 E.g., Poovey, A History; Ash, Power; Schmidt, Making; Dear, Roberts and Schaffer, The Mindful Hand; Klein and Spary, Materials. 33 Cf. Smith, The Body, Ch. 6; De Munck, ‘Corpses’. 34 Gauvin, ‘Artisans’. 35 Dupré and Göttler, ‘Introduction’. 36 As also argued in Dear, Roberts and Schaffer, The Mindful Hand. 37 Biagioli, Galileo; Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge. 38 Jacob, Scientific Culture; Allan, The British. 39 Basalla, ‘The Spread’. 40 Among the first and now seminal attempts, Needham, Science and Civilization. See also the other volumes of this series, and: Needham, The Great Tritation. 41 See e.g., Burghartz, Burkart and Göttler, Sites. 42 Some background in Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny, The Practice Turn. 43 De Munck, ‘Disassembling’. 44 Among the many inspiring works in social sciences dealing with the definition of the city, de Certeau, The Practice. 45 Dierig, Lachmund and Mendelsohn, Science. See also Hochadel and Nieto-Galan, Barcelona; Hochadel and Nieto-Galan, Urban Histories. 46 On European capital cities, Roche and Charle, Capitales; Charle, Capitales; Boutier, Marin and Romano, Naples. On other cities: Blake, Shahjahanabad; Mansel, Constantinople; Blake, Half the World; Chocano Mena, La fortaleza docta; Jayyusi et al., The City; Bennison and Gascoigne, Cities; Naquin, Peking. 47 A special issue of the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine edited by Romano and Van Damme presented non-European case studies, Beijing or Calcutta, to confront and put into perspective work dedicated to Venice, Antwerp or Amsterdam, and to tackle our ingrained concepts as they emerge from the European intellectual tradition

22

48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

(see the English translation of the introduction Romano and Van Damme, ‘Science’; also: Romano, Rome). Brockey, Portuguese Colonial Cities; Hall, Secondary Cities; Blusse, Visible Cities; Broeze, Brides. Some overviews: Heβler, ‘Technopoles’; Brantz, ‘The Natural Space’; Davids and De Munck, ‘Innovation’; Soens et al., Urbanizing Nature. Starting with the first criticisms of the traditional categories which shaped history of science, such as rationality, objectivity, universality. Depending on the various social sciences and regions, many important contributions have shaped a more complex analytical framework. See e.g., Hacking, The Social Construction; Shapin, A Social History; Daston and Galison, Objectivity. Clark, European Cities and Clark, The Oxford Handbook. See for example, his poem in praise of Sélestat in 1514, published in Basel, 1515: Erasmus, Encomium Celestadii. For another example, see: Pii secundi pontificis max. Commentarii (but corresponding to the reality of the previous century and more precisely the years 1458–1463, the pontificate of Pio II, name chosen by the major humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, when he became pope). For an overview of city descriptions as a new written genre, see Füssel, ‘Natura sola magistra’. Bruni, ‘Panegyric’, p. 136 (also cited in De Munck and Bellavitis, ‘The Urban Imaginary’, p. 52). Botero, A Treatise. De Munck and Bellavitis, ‘The Urban Imaginary’. See also: Van Damme and De Munck, ‘Cities of a Lesser God’. Labrot, L’image; Ruggiero, The Renaissance. Bowler and Morus, Making, Ch. 14. The historiography related to Italy is still very focused on the different cities and their transformations. Clark, European Cities. Harvey, The Urbanization and Paris; Van Damme, Métropoles de papier. About Rome and the faculty of medicine, see Andretta, Roma medica; about the constant conflicts between the representatives of the Spanish crown, the city and the religious orders about the university of Mexico (first university funded in the New World in 1552), see Chocano Mena, La fortaleza docta; González y González, Estudios y estudiantes; González y González, Hidalgo and Álvarez Sánchez, Del aula a la ciudad. In Italy for instance, see the room of the maps at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, offering an innovative set of urban views, including the various cities of the Grand Duchy: Pacetti, The Hall; Gregg, City Views. Also: Gambi and Pinelli, La Galleria. Elden, ‘Missing the Point’, ‘How Should We’ and The Birth. Davis, ‘The Sacred’; Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Ch. 8. See the text in the French edition, where the reference to all the social categories interested in the city of Antwerp for the variety of opportunities it provides highlight the new attention paid to the urban phenomenon: kings, princes, nobles, merchants, artisans, peasants, as well as the most important scientists … For the English edition see The Theatre, 1587. In this edition there is no translation of Plantijn’s text. About Ortelius: Besse, Les grandeurs, pp. 261–377. Merton, ‘Science, technology’. Dupré, et al., Embattled Territory; Romano, Rome. Needham, Science and Civilisation. An important exception, Rashed, Encyclopedia. Schaffer, ‘Ceremonies’. Lombard, Le carrefour; Gipouloux, La Méditerranée; Flores, Unwanted Neighbours; Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires.

Knowledge and the early modern city

23

72 Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Iberian Science’. 73 Revel, Jeux d’échelles and ‘Multiple narratives’. 74 See the special issue on ‘Global Histories of Science’ in Isis, 2010/1, Volume 1; Romano ‘Making’; Schaffer, ‘Ceremonies’. 75 For the latter concept, see Galison, ‘Computer Simulations’ and Image and Logic. 76 Vermeir and Margócsy, ‘States’; Belfanti, ‘Guilds’; Davids, ‘Openness’.

References Allan, Robert. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Amin, Ash and Thrift, Nigel. Cities: Re-Imagining the Urban. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Andretta, Elisa. Roma medica: anatomie d’un système medical au XVIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2011. Aram, Bethany and Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé eds. Global Goods and the Spanish Empire (1492–1824): Circulation, Resistance and Diversity. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ash, Eric H. Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Bairoch, Paul. De Jéricho à Mexico: villes et économie dans l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard-Arcades, 1985. Basalla, George. ‘The Spread of Western Science.’ Science 156 (1967): 611–622. Belfanti, Carlo M. ‘Guilds, Patents and the Circulation of Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age.’ Technology and Culture 45/3 (2004): 569–589. Bennison, Amira K. and Gascoigne, Alison L. eds. Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society. London: Routledge, 2007. Besse, Jean-Marc. Les grandeurs de la terre. Aspects du savoir géographique au seizième siècle. Lyon: ENS Editions, 2003. Besse, Jean-Marc. ‘Le lieu en histoire des sciences. Hypothèses pour une approche spatiale du savoir géographique au XVIe siècle.’ Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome (MEFRIM) 116/2 (2004): 401–422. Biagioli, Mario. Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Biedermann, Zoltán. (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Blake, Stephen. Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Blake, Stephen. Half the World: The Social Architecture of Safavid Isfahan, 1590–1722. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Bleichmar, Daniela; De Vos, Paula; Huffine, Kristin and Sheehan, Kevin eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (1500–1800). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Blusse, Leonard. Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Botero, Giovanni. A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificence and Greatness of Cities [1588]. Ed. Ballerini, Luigi and Ciavolella, Massimo, transl. Symcox, Geoffrey. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

24

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Bourguet, Marie Noëlle; Licoppe, Christian and Sibum, H. Otto eds. Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2002. Boutier, Jean; Marin, Brigitte and Romano, Antonella eds. Naples, Rome, Florence. Une histoire comparée des milieux intellectuels italiens (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). Rome: École Française de Rome, 2005. Bowler, Peter J. and Morus, Iwan Rhys. Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Brantz, Dorothee. ‘The Natural Space of Modernity: A Transatlantic Perspective on (Urban) Environmental History.’ In Lehmkuhl, Ursula and Wellenreuther, Hermann eds. The Historian’s Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007, pp. 195–225. Brenner, Thomas. Local Industrial Clusters: Existence, Emergence and Evolution. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Brevaglieri, Sabina and Romano, Antonella. ‘Produzione di saperi. Costruzione di spazi.’ Dossier thématique de Quaderni storici 1 (2013): 3–20. Brockey, Liam ed. Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Broeze, Frank. Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989. Bruni, Leonardo. ‘Panegyric of the City of Florence.’ Transl. Kohl, B. G. In Kohl, Benjamin G. and Witt, Ronald G. eds. The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978, pp. 135–178. Burghartz, Susanna; Burkart, Lucas and Göttler, Christine eds. Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. ‘Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?’ Perspectives on Science 12/1 (2004): 86–124. Charle, Christophe ed. Capitales européennes et attraction culturelle XVIIIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2004. Chocano Mena, Magdalena. La fortaleza docta. Elite letrada y dominación social en México colonial (siglos XVI-XVII). Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 1999. Clark, Peter. European Cities and Towns, 400–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clark, Peter ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cohen, Floris H. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Cohen, Floris H. ed. ‘Focus: Global Histories of Science.’ Isis 1/1 (2010): 95–158. Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Cook, Harold J.; Smith, Pamela H. and Meyers, Amy R.W. eds. Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Daston, Lorraine J. and Galison, Peter. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Davids, Karel. ‘Openness or Secrecy? Industrial Espionage in the Dutch Republic.’ Journal of European Economic History 24 (1995): 344–347. Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014.

Knowledge and the early modern city

25

Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert. ‘Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities: An Introduction.’ In Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 1–33. Davis, Natalie Zemon. ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon.’ Past and Present 90 (February 1981): 40–70. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Transl. Rendall, Steven. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984 (1st ed., Paris, 1980). De Munck, Bert. ‘Corpses, Live Models, and Nature: Assessing Skills and Knowledge before the Industrial Revolution (case: Antwerp).’ Technology and Culture 51/2 (2010): 332–356. De Munck, Bert. ‘The Agency of Branding and the Location of Value: Hallmarks and Monograms in Early Modern Tableware Industries.’ Business History 54/7 (2012): 1–22. De Munck, Bert. ‘Artisans, Products and Gifts: Rethinking the History of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe.’ Past & Present 224 (August 2014): 39–74. De Munck, Bert. ‘Disassembling the City: A Historical and an Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities.’ Journal of Urban History 43/5 (2017): 811–829. De Munck, Bert and Bellavitis, Anna. ‘The Urban Imaginary as a Social and Economic Factor: Renaissance Cities and the Fabrication of Quality, Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries.’ In Van Damme, Ilja; De Munck, Bert and Miles, Andrew eds. Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 45–64. Dear, Peter; Roberts, Lissa and Schaffer, Simon eds. The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization. Amsterdam: Edita KNAW, 2007. Dierig, Sven; Lachmund, Jens and Mendelsohn, J. Andrew eds. Science and the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dupré, Sven; De Munck, Bert; Thomas, Werner and Vanpaemel, Geert eds. Embattled Territory: The Circulation of Knowledge in the Spanish Netherlands. Ghent: Academia Press, 2015. Dupré, Sven and Göttler, Christine. ‘Introduction: Hidden Artifices.’ In Dupré, Sven and Göttler, Christine eds. Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–16. Egmond, Florike. Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500–1630. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Eisenstein, Elisabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (2 vols. ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Elden, Stuart. ‘Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30/1 (2005): 8–19. Elden, Stuart. ‘How Should We Do the History of Territory?’ Territory, Politics, Governance 1/1 (2009): 5–20. Elden, Stuart. The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Epstein, Stephan R. and Prak, Maarten eds. Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Erasmus, Desiderius. Encomium Celestadii (Reedijk poem 98). Basel, 1515. Farías, Ignacio and Bender, Thomas eds. Urban Assemblages: How Actor–Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean. L’apparition du livre. Paris: Les Éditions Albin Miche, 1958 and 1971.

26

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Flores, Jorge. Unwanted Neighbours: The Mughals, the Portuguese, and Their Frontier Zones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Florida, Richard L. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge, 2004. Füssel, Stephan. ‘Natura sola magistra. Der Wandel der Stadtikonografie in der frühen Neuzeit.’ In Braun, Georg and Hogenberg, Franz Städte der Welt. Cologne: Taschen, 2008, pp. 8–44. Galison, Peter. ‘Computer Simulations and the Trading Zone.’ In Galison, Peter and Stump, David J. eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 118–157. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gambi, Lucio and Pinelli, Antonio eds. La Galleria della Carte geografiche in Vaticano: Mirabilia Italiae. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1994. Gauvin, Jean-François. ‘Artisans, Machines, and Descartes’s Organon.’ History of Science 44 (2006): 187–216. Gibbons, Michael; Limoges, Camille; Nowotny, Helga; Schwartzman, Simon; Scott, Peter and Trow, Martin. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London and New Delhi: Sage, 1994. Gipouloux, François. La Méditerranée asiatique, villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon et en Asie du Sud-Est, XVIe–XXIe siècle. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2009. Glaeser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (reprint). New York: Penguin Putnam, 2012. González y González, Enrique ed. Estudios y estudiantes de filosofía. De la Facultad de Artes a la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (1551–1929). Hecho and Mexico: IISUE, 2008. González y González, Enrique; Hidalgo, Mónica and and Álvarez Sánchez, Adriana eds. Del aula a la ciudad. Estudios sobre la universidad y la sociedad en el México virreinal. Hecho & Mexico: IISUE, 2009. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Goody, Jack. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge, 2001. Gregg, Ryan E. City Views in the Habsburg and Medici Courts: Depictions of Rhetoric and Rule in the Sixteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Guesnerie, Roger and Hartog, François eds. Des sciences et des techniques, un débat. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1998. Günergun, Feza and Raina, Dhruv eds. Science between Europe and Asia: Historical Studies on the Transmission, Adoption and Adaptation of Knowledge. Dordrecht and New York: Springer, 2011. Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hall, Kenneth ed. Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008. Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009.

Knowledge and the early modern city

27

Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Harvey, David. The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2003. Heβler, Martina. ‘Technopoles and Metropolises: Science, Technology and the City. A Literature Overview.’ In Hård, Mikael and Misa, Thomas J. eds. The Urban Machine: Recent Literature on European Cities in the 20th Century. A ‘Tensions of Europe’ electronic publication (July 2003), pp. 57–82. Hietala, Marjatta and Clark, Peter. ‘Creative Cities.’ In Clark, Peter ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 720–736. Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane and Verna, Catherine. ‘Dissemination of Technical Knowledge.’ Technology and Culture 47/3 (2006): 536–566. Hochadel, Oliver and Nieto-Galan, Augustí eds. Urban Histories of Science. London: Routledge, 2017. Hochadel, Oliver and Nieto-Galan, Augustí. Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Jacob, Christian. Des Alexandries (2 vols). Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale De France, 2001/2003. Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jarrige, François. Techno-critiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. Jayyusi, Salma K.; Holod, Renata; Petruccioli, Attilio and Raymond, André eds. The City in the Islamic World (2 vols). Leiden: Brill, 2008. Klein, Ursula and Spary, Emma C. eds. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Kontler, László; Romano, Antonella; Sebastiani, Silvia and Török, Borbála Zsuzsanna eds. Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Koyré, Alexandre. From Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Labrot, Gérard. L’image de Rome. Une arme pour la Contre-Réforme (1534–1677). Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1987. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lawrence, Susan C. Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in EighteenthCentury London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lepetit, Bernard and Hoock, Jochen eds. La ville et l’innovation. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1987. Livingston, David N. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lombard, Denys. Le carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale (3 vols). Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1990. Malmberg, Anders and Maskell, Peter. ‘Towards an Explanation of Regional Specialization and Industry Agglomeration.’ European Planning Studies 5/1 (1997): 25–41. Mansel, Philip. Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

28

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Margócsy, Dániel. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Martin, Henri-Jean. Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au 17e siècle (1598–1701) (2 vols). Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969. McLeod, Roy and Rehbock, Philip F. eds. Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988. Merton, Robert K. ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.’ Osiris 4/2 (1938): 360–632. Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Mukerji, Chandra. Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Naquin, Susan. Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 1: Introductory Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. Needham, Joseph. The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. O’Brien, Patrick K. ‘The Needham Question Updated: A Historiographical Survey and Elaboration.’ History of Technology 29 (2009): 7–28. O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and van der Wee, Herman eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge, 2002. Ophir, Adi and Shapin, Steven. ‘The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey.’ Science in Context 4/1 (1991): 3–21. Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum orbis terrarum (French ed.). Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1587. Ortelius, Abraham. The Theatre of the Whole World (English ed.). London: John Norton and John Bill, 1606. Pacetti, Paola ed. The Hall of Geographical Maps in Palazzo Vecchio: Caprice and Invention of Duke Cosimo. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2014. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pestre, Dominique. ‘La production des savoirs entre académies et marché. Une relecture historique du livre: The New Production of Knowledge, édité par M. Gibbons.’ Revue d’économie industrielle 79/1 (1997): 163–174. Pestre, Dominique ed. Le gouvernement des technosciences. Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. Pii secundi pontificis max. Commentarii rerum memorabilium, quae temporibus suis contigerunt, a r.d. Ioanne Gobellino vicario Bonnen. iamdiu compositi, & a r.p.d. Francisco Bandino Picolomineo archiepiscopo Senensi ex vetusto originali recogniti. Quibus hac editione accedunt Jacobi Picolominei cardinalis Papiensis …. Rome, 1584. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Knowledge and the early modern city

29

Porter, Michael E. ‘Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy.’ Economic Development Quarterly 14 (2000): 15–34. Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Rashed, Roshdi. Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science (3 vols). London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Rasterhoff, Claartje. Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries: The Fabric of Creativity in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1800. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Redondi, Pietro ed. ‘Science: The Renaissance of a History.’ History and Technology. An International Journal 4/1–4 (1987): 1–153. Redondi, Pietro ed. Alexandre Koyré. De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents (1922–1962) (new ed.). Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2016. Reith, Reinhold. ‘Circulation of Skilled Labour in Late Medieval and Early Modern Central Europe.’ In Epstein, Stephan and Prak, Maarten eds. Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy (1400–1800). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 114–142. Revel, Jacques ed. Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996. Revel, Jacques. ‘Multiple Narratives: Scale and Discontinuity in History.’ In Jobs, Sebastian and Lüdtke, Alf eds. Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2010, pp. 49–61. Roberts, Lissa. ‘Death of the Sensuous Chemist.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 503–529. Roberts, Lissa ed. Local Encounters and the Global Circulation of Knowledge, 1750–1850. Special issue of Itinerario, 2009. Roberts, Lissa. Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and around the Netherlands during the Early Modern Period. Special issue of History of Science, 2014. Roche, Daniel and Charle, Christophe ed. Capitales culturelles,capitales symboliques. Paris et les expériences européennes, XVIIIe–XXe siècles. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002. Romano, Antonella ed. Rome et la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008. Romano, Antonella. ‘Des sciences et des savoirs en mouvement: réflexions historiographiques et enjeux méthodologiques.’ Diaspora. Circulations, Migrations, Histoire 23–24 (2014): 66–79. Romano, Antonella. ‘Making the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Age of Globalization.’ Annales. Histoire Sciences Sociales (English ed.) 70/2 (2015): 307–334. Romano, Antonella and Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th Century).’ Itinerario. European Journal of Overseas History 33/1 (2009): 79–95. Roncayolo, Marcel. ‘Les strates de la ville. Pratiques sociales et paysages.’ In Roncayolo, Marcel ed. Lectures de villes, formes et temps. Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 2002, pp. 181–189. Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, Roy. Before and beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Rossi, Paolo. The Birth of Modern Science. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. Ruggiero, Guido. The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Safier, Neil. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

30

Bert De Munck and Antonella Romano

Schaffer, Simon J. ‘Ceremonies of Measurement: Rethinking the World History of Science.’ Annales. Histoire Sciences Sociales (English ed.) 70/2 (2015): 335–360. Schatzki, Theodore R.; Knorr Cetina, Karin and von Savigny, Eike eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Schiebinger, Londa and Swan, Claudia eds. Botany in Colonial Connection. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Schmidt, Benjamin ed. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, Texts, 1400–1800. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1996. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Shapin, Steven. ‘Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1998): 5–12. Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Slater, John; López-Terrada, Maríaluz and Pardo-Tomás, José eds. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Smith, Pamela H. and Findlen, Paula. Merchants and Marvels. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Soens, Tim; Schott, Dieter; Toyka-Seid, Michael and De Munck, Bert eds. Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature since 1500. New York: Routledge, 2018. Stewart, Larry. ‘The Laboratory, the Workshop, and the Theatre of Experiment.’ In Blondel, Christine and Bensuade-Vincent, Bernadette eds. Sciences and Spectacle in European Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, pp. 11–24. Van Damme, Ilja and De Munck, Bert. ‘Cities of a Lesser God: Opening the Black Box of Creative Cities and Their Agency.’ In Van Damme, Ilja; De Munck, Bert and Miles, Andrew eds. Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 3–22. Van Damme, Stéphane. Métropoles de papier. Naissance de l’archéologie urbaine à Paris et à Londres. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012. Van Damme, Stéphane ed. Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Volume 1: De la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Le Seuil, 2015. Vermeir, Koen and Margócsy, Dániel. ‘States of Secrecy: An Introduction.’ British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2001): 153–164. Verna, Catherine; Sallman, Line; Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane and Coquery, Natacha eds. Artisans, industrie. Nouvelles révolutions du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Paris: ENS Editions, 2004. Zilsel, Edgar. The Social Origins of Modern Science. Ed. Raven, D.; Krohn, W. and Cohen, Robert S. Dordrecht: Springer, 2003.

PART I

Knowledge and the staging of the city

1 THE THEATRUM AS AN URBAN SITE OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, C. 1560–1620 Anne-Laure Van Bruaene1

Introduction Around 1550, Europe rediscovered the theatre – or rather, to be more precise, the idea of the theatre. In the Prologue of the edition of the plays of the Antwerp landjuweel festival in 1561, it was described as A beautiful construction … built in Athens, which was called Theatrum in Greek. It had the form of half a circle or ring. Inside, in the middle, it was round and narrow. At the top it became gradually broader and wider, with stairs going upwards. It was very high, delightful and skilfully crafted, in order that the burghers and inhabitants of the aforementioned city, while seated, would have adequate places to watch the plays appropriately, hear them perfectly, and understand them completely.2 From this moment onward the theatre was everywhere: in books about classical architecture and about ancient ruins inside and outside Italy, but also in books about almost everything else: from geography, history, ethnography, ethics, botany, machines, warfare to calligraphy, women, heretics and demons. As numerous studies have shown, the theatrum was a metaphor that fitted well with humanists’ desire to transmit knowledge in a comprehensive and ordered manner: as in a Greek or Roman theatre, the spectator in the early modern theatre of knowledge could see and comprehend perfectly what was being presented before his eyes. Hence, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, hundreds of books appeared (both in Latin and in the vernacular) which had theatrum or a derivative in their title. Famous examples are Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro (art of memory, Florence 1550), Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae (general knowledge, Basel 1565),

34

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (geography, Antwerp 1570) and Jean Bodin’s Universae Naturae Theatrum (natural philosophy, Lyon 1596).3 Humanists used other notions too – such as museum or encyclopaedia – to express their epistemological ideal of knowing everything about the world and presenting it in a structured and engaging manner.4 However, few scholars have paid attention to the fact that, in contrast to these other concepts, the theatrum also implied a claim about the civic value of knowledge.5 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century museum, for example, was a semi-private space meant for collecting that was created for princes and rich merchants.6 The theatrum, on the other hand, derived its meaning from the Greek and Roman theatres that had been open infrastructures where all layers of society participated in drama festivals that celebrated the civic community.7 When we move from the realm of intellectual thought to that of social practice, we can see an interesting paradox: while in early modern Europe the theatrum metaphor gained in popularity, the performance of drama lost its civic nature in many regions. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and parallel with the rediscovery of the ancient theatre, European urban drama changed significantly, on both the material and social levels. From the late medieval period until well into the sixteenth century, most plays were staged outside. They took place in the public sphere of towns, for example on market places, before the town hall or on graveyards. Common occasions were market days, political celebrations and religious feast days. Especially during religious processions, a considerable part of the population was involved in the staging of tableaux vivants and other spectacles.8 However, around 1600 mainstream drama moved inside in many regions, into playhouses that were especially built for this purpose alone. These new playhouses were called theatres, as the early examples of The Theater (London 1576) and the Teatro Olimpico (Vincenza 1585) explicitly show. Yet, in their effort to materially embody the classical heritage, Renaissance theatres created their own social dynamics between actors, spectators and the urban environment. The audience was now expected to pay an entrance fee, and acting was increasingly seen as a profession instead of a devotional practice or an edifying pastime.9 While early modern theatre halls were indeed urban infrastructures, in most European regions Renaissance theatre was less preoccupied with civic community building than ancient theatre or medieval drama. In Renaissance Europe, the idea of the theatre preceded the built theatre. This is suggestive of the strength of the theatrum metaphor in particular, and of the influence of humanist conceptions of knowledge in general. Yet, most scholars seem to dismiss the possibility that the older civic drama played a role in these cultural transformations.10 I contend that, during the period before the introduction of built theatres in the Low Countries, there was a direct relationship between urban drama and public festival on the one hand, and the wider, international idea of the theatre, on the other. This led to a civic conception of knowledge that was rooted in the public sphere, but which also

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

35

found its expression through books and prints. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, most plays in the Low Countries were staged by the chambers of rhetoric (rederijkerskamers), amateur guilds devoted to drama and poetry. A majority of their membership belonged to the urban middling groups, but in the larger cities, the scene was dominated by a cultural elite comprising visual artists and other highly skilled artisans. Many rederijker performances were public events that were sponsored by the city, often upon the occasion of religious processions or peace celebrations.11 In the second half of the sixteenth century, in large cities like Antwerp, the tableaux vivants of the rederijkers, which traditionally presented biblical, classical or mythological subject matters, were transformed into emblematic representations of various types of knowledge. As I will argue, this evolution took place in direct connection with developments in commercial book production in Antwerp and other major urban centres. In this period, the media of drama and book shared many characteristics since they both combined recognizable spatial arrangements (stages and frames) that emphasized the special status of knowledge, with an essentially visual rhetoric (using posing actors or pictorial representations) in order to convey their didactic message.12 In what follows, I focus on these transformations in the large urban centres of the Low Countries by discussing the period between the 1561 landjuweel festival – a large rederijker competition – in Antwerp and the 1617 opening of the Nederduytsche Academie in Amsterdam. First, I argue that the landjuweel festival not only documents the early preoccupation of the rederijkers with the idea of the theatre, but also the introduction of new representational modes in Netherlandish civic drama, namely the so-called ‘(poetical) points’, which had much in common with the equally new genre of the printed emblem. These innovations were also visible in the context of contemporary Antwerp processions or ommegangen, which gave rise to specific subgenres in the print business. Second, I demonstrate that around the same time the public performance of drama became heavily politicized as a result of the political and religious instability that eventually led to the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648). I maintain that precisely in the early years of the Dutch Revolt, the influence of the public stage on the commercial book page was considerable. Authors from the Low Countries wrote or composed a great many theatrum books. The most prominent of these authors was Abraham Ortelius, whose Theatrum Orbis Terrarum can be seen as the very first modern world atlas. Ortelius’s wide intellectual circle consisted of a number of poets, artists, humanists and polemicists, among others Jan van der Noot, Lucas d’Heere, Hans Vredeman de Vries, Richard Verstegan, Jodocus Hondius and Zacharias Heyns, who also authored theatrum books (including series of prints and manuscripts). Some of these men were directly involved in rederijker performances or the staging of public ceremonies. Finally, I contend that the didactic ideal of knowledge transfer embodied by these men continued to have a fundamental influence on urban cultural and intellectual developments in both the Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, although there was a growing tendency towards the commodification of theatre and entertainment.

36

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

The theatrum first appeared as a material construct in 1594 in both North and South (with the theatrum anatomicum in Leiden as the best known example), but it would take until 1617 before the Nederduytsche Academie opened in Amsterdam. This was not only a public school, but it was also the first commercial playhouse in the Low Countries.

The landjuweel festival in Antwerp In 1561, the Antwerp landjuweel festival, a competition between the chambers of rhetoric of the towns of the Duchy of Brabant, was staged in open air, at various places throughout the city. The main stage, designed in antique style by the architect-sculptor Cornelis Floris, was built in wood against the backdrop of the new city hall, which was still under construction (Figure 1.1).13 The prologue of the edition of the landjuweel plays, issued by the royal typographer Willem Silvius in 1562, discusses the ancient theatre in some detail. The author (probably playwright Willem van Haecht) reflects on the material qualities of the theatrum – referring to the layout and dimensions of both the Greek and Roman theatre – and also praises its social function. The prologue underlines how the spectator in the ancient theatre could see, hear and comprehend the staged plays perfectly (see citation at the beginning of this essay). This was an audience experience that was probably very different from the practice of contemporary rederijker drama. The text is accompanied by a woodcut of what is called a Greek theatrum, but which in fact was the Colosseum (Figure 1.2). The same woodcut – in this case representing a Roman theatre – had been used in a 1555 edition of a Dutch version of a comedy (Andria) by Terence, translated by the celebrated Antwerp rederijker Cornelis van Ghistele.14 This woodcut was inspired by the etchings of Roman ruins designed by Hieronymus Cock, an influential print designer and publisher, in 1551.15 For the organizers (which included Van Haecht, Cock and Floris)16 of the 1561 festival, the interest for the theatrum, a word not yet commonly used for their own literary practice,17 showcased their knowledge and appreciation of the classics, but also disseminated their message that drama needed to be both materially and socially embedded into the urban fabric. More generally, the landjuweel, with its central question ‘What awakens man most to the arts’ (‘Wat den mensch aldermeest tot conste verwect’), was a celebration of the idea that knowledge, in the sense of the seven liberal arts, needed to be accessible to all young male citizens, including those who did not know Latin or Greek. In many plays, the competing rederijkers pleaded for comprehensive education of the young and for greater access to knowledge for middle-class men.18 This concern for education in the liberal arts was not new. It was deeply engrained in rederijker culture.19 In 1561, most morality plays systematically treated the seven liberal arts, although – unsurprisingly – they gave precedence to the art of rhetoric. They staged female allegorical personifications of the arts, a representational mode stemming from the Middle Ages,

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

37

Main stage of the landjuweel festival in Antwerp in 1561, designed by Cornelis Floris – woodcut in Spelen van sinne. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

FIGURE 1.1

which was also popular in contemporary prints.20 A novel dramatic form in the landjuweel was the ‘poetical point’ (poëtijckelijcke punt). Close to the place of its temporary lodgings (often inns), and therefore open to the general public, each chamber of rhetoric had to present a tableau vivant with a classical subject matter. A poet stood before the fixed stage – called a ‘theatre’ in one specific case –, recited verses and directed members of the audience to meaningful elements in the tableau.21 While tableaux vivants were omnipresent in earlier rederijker drama, and while the instructing poet followed the tradition of the medieval indiciaire, the ‘poetical points’ also had much in common with the new genre of the emblem, which concisely presented moral or religious truths through a combination of image and text.22 In 1554 the Antwerp rederijker Frans Fraet had translated (and published) Guillaume de la Perrière’s Le theatre des bons engins (1539) as Tpalays der gheleerder ingienen, the first Dutch-language emblem book.23 The 1562 edition of the landjuweel plays contains some elaborate woodcuts

38

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

FIGURE 1.2 A ‘Greek’ theatre – woodcut for the prologue of Spelen van sinne. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

depicting the ‘poetical points’, which suggests that the new genre was able to attract a wider book-buying audience.

The Antwerp ommegangen and the role of print In Antwerp, the zest for renewal of both form and content of traditional drama transcended the landjuweel festival. Since the fourteenth century, Antwerp held three annual citywide religious processions (ommegangen) that combined a cortege of the established corporations with wagon plays representing religious and secular themes, from the lives of saints to the mythical giant Druoon Antigoon.24 In the late 1550s, the rederijkers started designing more complex allegorical plays staged on successive wagons. Between 1559 and 1566, Hans de Laet, city printer and rederijker, printed small booklets that were intended as explanatory programmes for the audience. These new wagon plays were called ‘points’ (poincten). They all presented secular, ethical subject matters.25 In 1564, for example, the series of wagons was completely devoted to Antwerp’s commercial ideology.26 One of the new wagons in the procession for the Circumcision of Christ was called the ‘Theatre of the World’ (Theater der Werelt). This wagon play presented four empresses, namely ‘Christianity’ (Christen Rijcke), ‘Turkey’ (Turckijen), ‘the land of the Moors’ (Mooren landt) and ‘the New Indies’ (Nieu Indien). When the wagon rode out a second time in the Our Lady Procession of that same year, the empresses were named Europe, Asia, Africa and America.27 This novel mode of representing the four continents allegorically as a hierarchically ordered group of female personifications (from

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

39

highly civilized to uncivilized) was a simple but potent way of teaching new geographical knowledge.28 The advantage of the wagon play as a medium was that it could be used to imprint a coherent message about the order of the continents and about the benefices of global commerce in the minds of a large urban audience. It is remarkable that the organizers used the theatrum metaphor for a wagon play instead of the more obvious triumphus.29 However, the notion of the ‘Theatre of the World’ clearly supported a world-view that was both imperialist and civic.30 The very same wagon play could also be rearranged to convey a political warning: in 1566, only days before violent iconoclasm broke out in Antwerp, the ‘Theatre of the World’ was shown again in the Our Lady Procession. This time, however, the printed description alerted the audience that ‘the four parts of the world, because of the present time, are completely entangled and in disarray’.31 The fact that the organizers of the Antwerp ommegangen used printed – but non-illustrated – booklets to instruct the urban public about the meaning of the wagon plays shows a notable shift towards mixed media, as well as an appeal to both the sensory and cognitive capabilities of the audience. The following years saw the development of a curious subgenre in the lucrative print business: series of engraved allegorical prints that were directly inspired by the Antwerp ommegangen and their printed textual descriptions.32 In 1571 a processional series designed by Gerard van Groeningen was published, which consists of four plates depicting Europe, Asia, Africa and America (Figure 1.3). They were represented with attributes very similar to the ones listed for the 1564 wagon play.33 The engraved processional series, of high artistic quality, were destined for an international market of print collectors and connoisseurs.34 Most of these prints were conceived as decontextualized moral exempla. They did not refer directly to Antwerp in text or image. Yet, the combination of allegorical figures and wagon stages with the suggestion of motion is a clear allusion to contemporary processional drama.35 It is worth noticing that, in the wake of iconoclasm (1566) and after the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt (1568), religious processions in Antwerp and elsewhere in the Low Countries were downsized, and performing plays often became forbidden.36 When, from the 1570s onward, Calvinists seized power in various cities, local processions were completely banned.37 Consciously or not, this turned the engraved series from artistic objects, moral reflections and sources of knowledge into political statements.

Theatrum books in the Low Countries On the eve of the Dutch Revolt, the first theatrum books appeared in the Low Countries. In 1565, Christoffel Plantijn reprinted Pierre Boaistuau’s Théâtre du monde (1558), a very popular and soon to be classic elaboration of the theatrum mundi metaphor, which reflected on the miseries and follies of human life.38 The first example written by a Netherlandish author was Jan van der Noot’s Le Théâtre auquel sont exposés et monstrés les inconvéniens et misères qui suivent les mondains et vicieux. It was printed in London in 1568 and was soon followed by

40

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Allegorical representation of Africa – print from the engraved series of ‘The Four Continents’ by Pieter Nagel (?) after Gerard van Groeningen, c. 1571. © Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

FIGURE 1.3

a series of Dutch, English and German versions.39 The noble Van der Noot, famed as the first full-blown Renaissance poet writing in Dutch, was a former alderman of Antwerp who had fled to London in the wake of a failed Calvinist coup in 1567.40 Le Théâtre was dedicated to the lovers of the Word of God, of poetry and of painting. It contained anti-Catholic prose, poetry and a considerable number of etchings by Marcus Gheeraerts, a Calvinist artist from Bruges. Gheeraerts had illustrated and edited the first Dutch fable book (De warachtige fabulen der dieren) in 1567, but now also lived in exile in London.41 Both Van der Noot and Gheeraerts belonged to the avant-gardist milieu that strived to renew both the form and content of the Netherlandish arts by experimenting with genres and media.42 Gheeraerts’s De warachtige fabulen incorporated elements of the popular genre of the emblem book.43 Significantly enough, the Dutch version of Van der Noot’s Le Théâtre was titled Het theatre oft toon-neel (1568), combining theatre, which was derived from Latin, with a spin on the Dutch word taneel or tonneel (stage).44 ‘Tonen’ means ‘to show’; so the inherent demonstrative and didactic aspects of traditional drama were connected to humanist notions about the ancient theatre and mobilized for literary experiment and religious polemics.45

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

41

Both Van der Noot and Gheeraerts belonged to the same milieu as Abraham Ortelius, who stood at the centre of a broad network of humanists and artists. This group believed in the close observation of the material world and a visual rhetoric as a means to present knowledge.46 This close collaboration between humanists and artists in the Low Countries also extended to the rederijkers. In the case of De warachtige fabulen, the verse texts were provided by Bruges’ most prominent rederijker: Eduard de Dene.47 In fact, many professional artists were themselves active as amateur rederijkers, or at the very least integrated themes from rederijker drama in their work. The influence of the rederijkers on the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for example, has been discussed extensively.48 Therefore, it is useful to see the Netherlandish theatrum books as paper collections of ‘points’: allegorical or emblematic visual representations of moral truths or knowledge about the world. The genre of the toog or tableau vivant had always been at the centre of rederijker drama, but, as I have argued above, the introduction of the ‘(poetical) points’ in the 1560s led, at least in Antwerp, to the reinvention of the rederijker representations in processions or during public ceremonies.49 The theatrum books and prints from the Low Countries all presented knowledge in a similar way: as didactic images with conspicuous architectural frames, cartouches, allegorical figures and/or observing bystanders. The influence of public festival on the representational mode of books is especially striking in the case of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570).50 The title page of Ortelius’s Theatrum shows an antique portico (Figure 1.4), directly reminiscent of the temporary stages erected for the joyous entry of Charles V and Philip II into Antwerp in 1549, and of the main stage of the landjuweel in 1561.51 The architectural models of the sixteenth-century Italian theorist Sebastiano Serlio, whose work was available in the Low Countries through a Dutch translation (1539) by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, provided a common source of inspiration.52 In Antwerp, the Serlian architecture, inspired by classical antiquity, was used in various media, like theatre, public spectacle and painting, as a rhetorical device to frame knowledge spatially and communicate its special status to the public.53 Thus, Ortelius firmly embedded his monumental atlas in Antwerp’s civic and artistic context. The title page bears another striking reference to Antwerp’s public festival: its allegorical representation of the four continents, with Europe presiding over Asia, Africa and America, in a set-up very similar to the wagon play performed in the Antwerp ommegangen of the years 1564 to 1566, significantly named the ‘Theatre of the World’.54 Furthermore, from a wider, epistemological point of view, scrolling through the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum resembled the processional experience, with a succession of didactic cartographic images (ordered from region to region and from general to specific) passing before one’s eyes.55 When the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was published, the Antwerp processions had already been seriously downsized, which made its message about the civic fundament of global knowledge all the more pressing.56

42

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

FIGURE 1.4 Title page of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) with the allegorical representation of the four continents. © Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Between public stage and book page Neither Ortelius nor Van der Noot were directly involved in staging ceremonies or drama. Van der Noot was definitely inspired by older examples of theatrum mundi texts, such as Pierre Boaistuau’s Théâtre du monde, while Ortelius had an

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

43

international network. However, both fostered close ties with artists who were active as rederijkers. The examples of Lucas d’Heere and Hans Vredeman can clarify this. D’Heere was a painter, tapestry designer and rederijker from Ghent, who went to London in exile after the iconoclast riots in 1566.57 He had close ties with both Van der Noot and Ortelius.58 In the late 1570s, D’Heere compiled a manuscript with drawings by himself, and probably also by Joris Hoefnagel, which offered a historical and geographical overview of costumes. The manuscript was titled Theatre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre.59 D’Heere’s Theatre can be seen as the counterpart of Ortelius’s Theatrum. Both used a logical sequence of visual images to present new knowledge about the world, in the developing disciplines of ethnography and geography respectively. D’Heere depicted his dressed figures (often copied from other sources) as posing actors and used almost no text whatsoever. He arranged his overview of contemporary dress according to the continents: first Europe, then Asia and Africa, and, finally, America. The latter was represented by a drawing from life of an Eskimo (dated 1576).60 For D’Heere, the theatrum metaphor had a very tangible meaning. At the time of the composition of the Theatre, he already had ample experience with the staging of festival, including a chapter of the Golden Fleece in Ghent in 1559. He would go on to become the uncontested festival designer in Calvinist Ghent (1577–1584).61 Hans Vredeman de Vries’s profile was very similar. He was a prolific artist and designer, and a rederijker as well, first in Mechelen, then in Antwerp. As an artist, he had contributed to the joyous entry of 1549 and to the Antwerp ommegangen.62 Between 1577 and 1585, he became the leading festival builder in Calvinist Antwerp, a position parallel to that of D’Heere in Ghent.63 In 1577, Peeter Baltens (who had been involved in the organization of the 1561 landjuweel) published Theatrum Vitae Humanae, a moralizing print series designed by Vredeman.64 The title was probably inspired by Theodor Zwinger’s influential eponymous work (1565), but the analogy Vredeman made between the six ages of man and the classical orders of columns was highly original and in line with his wider oeuvre of invented architectural landscapes.65 Christopher Heuer has argued that Vredeman’s complete work has a theatre-like quality. He also has suggested a connection between Vredeman’s utopian paintings and engravings and endeavours of Antwerp’s urban authorities to control civic space.66 In fact, when in the late 1570s Lucas d’Heere and Hans Vredeman de Vries compiled their ‘theatres’, rederijker drama had come under severe pressure. After the 1561 landjuweel the central authorities became more and more reluctant to allow the organization of large-scale competitions. Especially after the outburst of iconoclasm in 1566, in many cities the public activities of the rederijkers were limited and their representations in religious processions banned or downsized. The membership numbers of the chambers of rhetoric dwindled.67 The public rederijker stage had become a contested space. Influential artists such as D’Heere and Vredeman de Vries tried to overcome this tension by creating stages of their

44

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

own, in manuscripts or in printed form. Detached from a recognizable urban context and set in empty or utopian spaces, their ‘theatres’ still embraced the pedagogical ideals of both humanists and rederijkers. They communicated knowledge in a visually attractive, sequentially ordered and intellectually accessible manner. At the same time, the optimistic and inclusive ambitions of the organizers of the 1561 landjuweel seemed forfeited. Both artists would become highly involved in the politics of the Calvinist regimes of Ghent and Antwerp, reclaiming the public stage and substituting religious polemics for the ethical didactics of the 1560s.68

The theatrum as a material construct After the war had led to a permanent rupture in the Low Countries between the re-Catholicized South and the Calvinist North, the theatrum metaphor inevitably remained politically charged. It was no coincidence that, in 1598, Emanuel van Meteren, Abraham Ortelius’s cousin and the first historiographer of the Dutch Revolt, branded the Netherlands as ‘a theatre of the world’s most bloody tragedies’ (‘een theatre van’s werelts bloedighe tragedien’).69 In some cases, the idea of the theatre directly served as political and religious propaganda. In 1587 in Antwerp, the English Catholic exile Richard Verstegan published the Theatrum crudelitatem haereticorum nostri temporis, an illustrated and highly partial account of the persecution of Catholics since the reign of Henry VIII (at the same time also published in French as the Theatre des cruautez des hereticques de nostre temps).70 In addition to this, the theatrum also remained a powerful concept for the visual representation of diverse specimens of knowledge. In 1594, Jodocus Hondius, a cartographer who had emigrated with his family from Ghent to Amsterdam, published the Theatrum artis scribendi, with 42 plates presenting various writing styles. The book was a practical manual for the scribes of businessmen and diplomats.71 At around the same time, the theatrum first appeared as a material construct (but not yet as a playhouse) in the urban space of the Low Countries. For the entry ceremony of the new governor-general Archduke Ernest of Austria in Antwerp in 1594, a temporary ‘Theatre of Peace’ (inspired by earlier Italian and French examples) was built. On its seats were young women in allegorical disguise, impersonating virtues, arts, industries and the muses (Figure 1.5).72 Antwerp’s city secretary Joannes Bochius, who had also written the explanatory verses for Verstegan’s Theatrum crudelitatem, conceived the program and composed the Latin festival book.73 Bochius devised an even more spectacular ‘Theatre of Peace’ for the joyous entry of Archdukes Albert and Isabella into Antwerp in 1599. This ‘Theatre’ was a conical structure, where on the visible side, covered with red cloth, personifications of war and its miseries were seated. When the Archdukes passed by, the ‘Theatre of Peace’ turned to reveal the other side with various allegorical personifications of peace, resting on bright

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

45

The ‘Theatre of Peace’ mounted for the entry ceremony of Archduke Ernest into Antwerp in 1594 – engraving in Bochius, Descriptio. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

FIGURE 1.5

green cloth.74 Despite their profound grounding in humanist learning, the political message of these wooden theatres must have been plainly obvious. In Bochius’s ‘Theatres of Peace’ the roles of actors and spectators were reversed: the mostly female figurants sat on wooden benches, while the observer was supposed to stand in front of the structure, as in the memory theatre Giulio Camillo had conceived at the court of Francis I.75 The first ‘theatre’ in the Low Countries more faithfully inspired by the ancient (Roman) model was the theatrum anatomicum in Leiden built in 1594. It was constructed in a former convent church, and was the first permanent anatomical theatre north of the Alps (Figure 1.6). Following the example of Padua (1584), as well as the instructions from older anatomical treatises, the theatrum anatomicum consisted of a central dissection table surrounded by seven gradually ascending galleries. The theatrum anatomicum did not only welcome medical students. The general public could also watch the dissections after paying an entrance fee.76 The differences in function and structure between the ephemeral ‘Theatres of Peace’ in Antwerp and the permanent theatrum anatomicum in Leiden may suggest a deep divide between the Catholic festival culture of the Habsburg Netherlands and the burgeoning scientific spirit of the Dutch Republic. Yet, significantly, the theatrum anatomicum also incorporated elements from festive culture.77 Skeletons of humans and animals were mounted on the top, carrying flags with moralizing Latin expressions such as ‘memento mori’ or ‘pulvis et umbra

46

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

The theatrum anatomicum in Leiden – engraving by Willem van Swanenburgh after Jan Cornelisz. van’t Woud, 1610. © Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 1.6

sumus’.78 These tableaux morts had much in common with the tableaux vivants in religious processions and joyous entries, in which actors often displayed banderols with classical or biblical quotes. Catholic processions were of course unthinkable in Calvinist Holland, but in 1594, stadtholder Maurits van Nassau was welcomed in Amsterdam with an entry ceremony modelled after Habsburg tradition, including tableaux vivants with Latin inscriptions.79

From the rederijker stage to the Nederduytsche Academie The influence of rederijker culture was substantial in the young Dutch Republic.80 While during the first decades of the Dutch Revolt, political unrest put a severe toll on the chambers of rhetoric in the Habsburg Netherlands, rederijkers, who emigrated to the North, created a considerable number of new chambers, especially in the 1590s. In Amsterdam, Gouda, Haarlem and Leiden immigrants instituted ‘Flemish’ and ‘Brabantine’ chambers of rhetoric.81 A notable example is Zacharias Heyns, son of Peter Heyns, a schoolmaster and rederijker in Antwerp, who had provided the

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

47

introductory verses for the Dutch translation of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, published in 1571 as Theatre, oft Toonneel des Aertbodems.82 Zacharias Heyns became the apprentice of Jan Moretus, Christoffel Plantijn’s son-in-law, and father and son were both part of Ortelius’s circle.83 Eventually, Zacharias Heyns migrated to Amsterdam where he set up a bookshop and was involved in the foundation of the Brabantine chamber of rhetoric The White Lavender (1598).84 In 1601 Heyns published Dracht-Thoneel, a costume book dedicated to the board of The White Lavender. It referred directly to his fellows’ need for theatre costumes.85 The costume books of Lucas d’Heere and Zacharias Heyns partly used the same sources, but the DrachtThoneel clearly had a more practical intention. At the same time – since the book included a range of monsters and strange animals – it also seems to have been targeted for a wider audience. A more expensive publication by Heyns was the festival book of a rederijker competition in Haarlem in 1606, edited in 1607 as the Const-Thoonende Iuweel and including fold-out engravings of the pageants.86 The title implied that rederijkers had to ‘show’, and therefore teach, the arts. The pedagogical mission of these migrant-rederijkers was even clearer in Den Nederduytschen Helicon (1610). This book was the result of an initiative by Karel van Mander – painter, pupil of Lucas d’Heere and first biographer of the Netherlandish artists – and was dedicated to the mathematician Simon Stevin. Like many of the other contributors, both Van Mander and Stevin were born in Flanders. Den Nederduytschen Helicon was presented as a ‘lusttoneel’ – a theatre of entertainment – that contained many instructive poems, songs and plays.87 After 1610, both in the northern and southern Low Countries, the public role of the rederijkers gradually declined.88 Chambers of rhetoric were less and less expected to stage plays in the urban public sphere, because of tightening Calvinist and Catholic censorship regulations and of new notions of decorum among rederijkers themselves.89 As a result, an increasing number of chambers of rhetoric opted for performances behind closed doors. To finance these stagings, but also to keep unwanted spectators out and fund charities, in the Dutch Republic, chambers started charging entrance fees. Actors – usually young men – were hired. These developments were first visible in Amsterdam from about 1610, but the earliest surviving example of a formal agreement about the distribution of income from performances between town and rederijkers is one from Delft (1614).90 The Habsburg Netherlands showed a similar trend, be it at a slower pace. In the early seventeenth century, many chambers of rhetoric turned into closed and more exclusive societies.91 In Antwerp, young members, called ‘personagien’, who were more and more treated as hired actors, staged plays in the chambers’ private rooms.92 Entrance fees were asked only from the 1640s onwards.93 The dialectics between the civic ideal of knowledge engrained in rederijker culture and a growing commodification of entertainment, are most striking in the case of the short-lived Nederduytsche Academie (1617–1622) in Amsterdam. In 1617 the city’s leading playwrights, including P.C. Hooft, G. A. Bredero and Samuel Coster, decided to leave The Sweet Briar, their

48

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

chamber of rhetoric, and found an academy that was to be housed in a new wooden building at the Keizersgracht. The physician Coster would provide financial support. His ambitious plan was to create a school for education in the vernacular of the seven liberal arts (both the trivium and the quadrivium) as a counterpart to Leiden’s Latin university.94 In Dutch literary history, the Nederduytsche Academie has been framed as a modern institution – both in an intellectual and artistic sense – that consciously aimed at a rupture with the out-dated rederijkers. Yet, there can be no denying that the desire to offer the broad middle classes humanist education in the vernacular was already a central part of the 1561 landjuweel festival in Antwerp. What was effectively new was that the Nederduytsche Academie was a profitable enterprise (transferring part of its income to the civic orphanage).95 In a sense, this led to a further rapprochement between the rederijker stage and the knowledge transmitted via books and prints. After all, the latter were also produced for the market, namely – depending on the type of publication – middle-class or elite buyers.96 It is not clear whether the actors of the Nederduytsche Academie were remunerated, but spectators paid admission fees to attend the public lectures or watch the plays. In fact, after a year (and due to much opposition from the Calvinist consistories), the Nederduytsche Academie ceased its lectures and continued as a commercial play-hall run by the civic orphanage.97 This did not prove to be a great success either. Nevertheless, in 1637, Jacob van Campen built the first full-blown theatre in the Low Countries, on the same site at the Keizersgracht. This playhouse, which could harbour a thousand spectators, was called the Schouwburg – a purified Dutch form of the Latin theatrum.98

Conclusion When around 1550 new humanist ideas about the representation of knowledge developed in Europe, in the Low Countries, these found fertile ground within an existing urban tradition of didactic drama and public festival. The notion of the theatrum in particular, referring to the classical ideal of the civic theatre aimed at the moral education of all layers of society, became a focal point for a dialogue between vernacular and international conceptions of knowledge. Particularly in the commercial metropolis of Antwerp the theatrum metaphor transformed traditional rederijker drama and public festival. In their turn, these also influenced the representation of knowledge in books and prints in an important way. There were intersections at various levels. First, the networks of leading rederijkers and festival builders strongly overlapped with those of the producers of new knowledge in the fields of, among others, geography and ethnography. While Abraham Ortelius was the key figure in this milieu, men such as Lucas d’Heere, Hans Vredeman de Vries or Zacharias Heyns, who were active as both rederijkers and artists or publishers, represented the close interaction between art, literature and the production of knowledge. Second, the didactics of both drama

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

49

and book revolved around a visual rhetoric. Knowledge was presented visually in tableaux vivants or emblems, using antique architectural frames to underline its special status. Hierarchically ordered allegorical personifications connected older dramatic forms with new humanist ideas. These ‘points’ conceived by rederijkers and humanists were easy to grasp by a general civic audience, for example, when geographical knowledge was presented in a simple and moralizing manner. The Dutch Revolt politicized this connection between the public stage and the book, as becomes clear through the lives of Lucas d’Heere and Hans Vredeman de Vries, who both became political polemicists. Yet, eventually, the metaphor of the theatrum and its underlying pedagogical ideals did not lose their appeal in both the Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, both Antwerp and Amsterdam further developed as centres of book production. Theatrum books continued to be written, both with didactic and polemical purposes. In the 1590s the theatrum appeared for the first time as a material construct, in a double way: as a temporary festive device in Antwerp and as a permanent anatomical theatre in Leiden. While the function of these two instances was obviously different, there were still many similarities. After all, both types of theatres borrowed from older Italian examples and from the Low Countries’ own festive traditions. A couple of decades later, the Nederduytsche Academie (1617) in Amsterdam developed the idea, already central at the landjuweel festival in Antwerp in 1561, that knowledge of the seven liberal arts had to be accessible to young male citizens. In this sense, the way was gradually paved for an urban commercial theatre infrastructure that reflected international trends, but at the same time incorporated a vibrant tradition of civic drama. Between 1560 and 1620, in the Low Countries, the theatrum metaphor not only expressed the desire to revive classical pedagogics but also embodied a strong belief that knowledge needed to be built and expanded upon a civic fundament.

Notes 1 This essay is the result of my residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar in the spring of 2016, where I was part of the Descartes Theme Group ‘Knowledge and the City, ca. 1450–ca. 1800’. I am grateful to my colleagues for the fruitful and pleasant discussions. 2 ‘Totten goetvvillighen Leser … zoo heeftmen tot Athenen een schoone Fabrike ghebout/dwelck aldaer in Griecsscer talen Theatrum werdt ghenoemt/hebbende die forme van eenen haluen circule oft rinck wesende binnen int middel ront ende enghe/bouen allenskens breeder ende wijder met trappen opwaerts gaende/zeer hooch/heerlijck ende constich ghetimmert/op dat die borghers ende inwoenders der voorghenoemder stadt bequame plaetse zouden hebben om die Spelen sittende bescheelijck tesiene/perfectelijck te hooren ende volcomelijck te verstaen.’ In Spelen van sinne, [prologue].

50

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

3 General discussions in Bernheimer, ‘Theatrum Mundi’; Blair, The Theater of Nature, esp. pp. 153–179; Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book; Van Delft, ‘L’idée de théâtre’; West, Theatres and Encyclopedias; Dolza and Vérin, ‘Figurer la mécanique’; Weber, ‘Theatrum Mundi’; Friedrich, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Wissenstheater’. See also Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit, accessed 31.10.2017, www.theatra.de. 4 West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 1–2. 5 West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 47; Friedrich, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Wissenstheater’, 326. 6 Findlen, ‘The Museum’; Meadow and Robertson, The First Treatise, 1–37. 7 Rehm, ‘Festivals and Audiences’; Beacham, ‘Playing Places’. 8 See the classic James, ‘Ritual, Drama and Social Body’. 9 Surgers, Scénographies du théâtre occidental, 96–99 and 120–123; Amelang, ‘Comparing the Commercial Theaters’. 10 Most explicitly in West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 43: ‘The “theatre” of early modern Europe, however, was not equated with the various kinds of performance that had been in more or less continuous practice since antiquity. Such playing – the usual English word for these performance practices – had little in common with the connotations of the word theatrum, known to readers and speakers of Latin as a device that had been lost since the fall of Rome.’ 11 Van Bruaene, ‘A wonderfull tryumfe’; Van Bruaene, Om beters wille; Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten. 12 See the discussion of Netherlandish public festival in Meadow, ‘Met geschikter ordenen’. 13 Vandommele, Als in een spiegel, 27–50. 14 Rijckaert, De Antwerpse spelen, 1: 220. 15 Heuer, ‘Hieronymus Cock’s Aesthetic of Collapse’; Heuer, The City Rehearsed, 81. 16 Cockx-Indestege and Waterschoot, Uyt Ionsten Versaemt, 35–36 and 81. 17 Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 99–100. 18 Vandommele, Als in een spiegel, 137–200. 19 Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, 129–159. 20 Vandommele, Als in een spiegel, 210–213. 21 Vandommele, Als in een spiegel, 72. 22 Small, ‘When Indiciaires meet Rederijkers’. The literature on emblems is vast, for a recent synthesis see Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe. 23 Landwehr, Emblem and Fable Books, 169; Vandommele, Als in een spiegel, 71–80. 24 Cartwright, ‘Forms and Their Uses’. 25 Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts’, 89–110 and 142–193 (with transcriptions of the printed ordinances). 26 Kint, ‘The Ideology of Commerce’, 213–222. 27 Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts’, 153, 233–241, 395–396 and 399–400. 28 McGrath, ‘Humanism’, 51–52. 29 McGowan, ‘The Renaissance Triumph’. 30 Van Dixhoorn, ‘The Values of Antwerp’. 31 ‘Die vier deelen des Weerelts, duer den Tijt present/Syn nu heel verwert, ende vol turbatien’; Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts’, 403; Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots, 140. 32 Williams and Jacquot, ‘Ommegangs anversois’; Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts’, passim. 33 Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts’, 233–241. 34 Parshall, ‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge’. 35 Ashley and Hüsken, Moving Subjects. 36 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, 174. 37 Thøfner, A Common Art, 96–102. 38 Boaistuau, Le theatre du monde; Blair, The Theater of Nature, 167.

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

51

39 Van der Noot, Het Bosken en Het Theatre; Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts, 75–85; Bostoen, Dichterschap en koopmanschap, 59–65; Waterschoot, ‘An Author’s Strategy’ argues that the Dutch version was published first, shortly before the French version. 40 Marnef, Antwerpen, 137, 257 and 269. 41 Geirnaert and Smith, ‘Tussen fabel en embleem’. 42 Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts, 75–85; Town, ‘A fête at Bermondsey’. 43 Geirnaert and Smith, ‘Tussen fabel en embleem’, 24. 44 Van der Noot, Het theatre. 45 See the lemma ‘tooneel’ in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, accessed 31.10.2017, http://gtb.inl.nl. This dictionary gives 1588 as the first reference for the variation ‘toonneel’. See also Van Delft, ‘L’idée de théâtre’, 1353; West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 46–47; Friedrich, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Wissenstheater’, 301. 46 Meganck, Erudite Eyes, esp. Ch. 4. 47 Geirnaert and Smith, ‘Tussen fabel en embleem’. 48 Ramakers, ‘Bruegel en de rederijkers’. 49 See the lemma ‘punt’ (B.7) in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, accessed 31.10.2017, http://gtb.inl.nl. For the togen, see Ramakers, Spelen en figuren. 50 Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre, 273–286. 51 Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 192; Ziegler, ‘En-Gendering the World’, 130; Neumann, ‘Imagining European Community’, 430. 52 De Jonge, ‘Les éditions du traité de Serlio’. 53 Meadow, ‘Aertsen’s Christ’; Meadow, ‘Met geschikter ordenen’. 54 Although Elizabeth McGrath refers to Ortelius’s title page and the 1564 wagon play, she does not draw a direct connection between them; McGrath, ‘Humanism’. More generally on the title-page of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, see Waterschoot, ‘The Title-Page’ (with an edition of the accompanying texts) and the titles cited in footnote 51. 55 Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre, 307–308; Peters, ‘Printing Ritual’. 56 See also the introduction in the Dutch edition by Peter Heyns; Waterschoot, ‘The Title-Page’, 46 and 49. 57 Waterschoot, ‘Leven en betekenis van Lucas d’Heere’; Van Dam, ‘Lucas d’Heere als schilder in Engeland’. 58 Bostoen, Dichterschap en koopmanschap, 57–61; Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 107–127. 59 A facsimile edition in D’Heere, Het kostuumboek. A discussion of the manuscript in Derolez, ‘Aantekeningen’; Conrads, ‘Het Theatre van Lucas d’Heere’. 60 Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 121–124. 61 Waterschoot, ‘Leven en betekenis van Lucas d’Heere’; Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin’. 62 Borggrefe, Fusenig and Uppenkamp, Tussen stadspaleizen en luchtkastelen. 63 Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin’, 268–274. 64 Cockx-Indestege and Waterschoot, Uyt Ionsten Versaemt, 81–82. 65 Uppenkamp, ‘Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae’; Baum, ‘Hans Vredeman de Vries’. 66 Heuer, The City Rehearsed, 18–19 and 87. 67 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, 115–171 and 191–192. 68 Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin’. 69 Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 146. 70 Arblaster, Antwerp and the World, 41–45. 71 Croiset van Uchelen, ‘Jodocus Hondius’s Theatrum artis scribendi’. 72 Bernheimer, ‘Theatrum Mundi’, 242. 73 Bochius, Descriptio; Arblaster, Antwerp and the World, 41; Thøfner, A Common Art, 180–193. 74 Thøfner, A Common Art, 206–222.

52

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

75 Bernheimer, ‘Theatrum Mundi’, 225–231. On the memory theatre, see the classic Yates, The Art of Memory. 76 Rupp, ‘Matters of Life and Death’; Huisman, The Finger of God, 17–42; Huisman, ‘Het anatomisch theater’. 77 On the festive setting of anatomy theatres, see Ferrari, ‘Public Anatomy Lessons’. 78 Huisman, The Finger of God, 39–41. 79 Spies, ‘19 augustus 1594’. 80 See in particular Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten. 81 Briels, ‘Reyn genuecht’. 82 Waterschoot, ‘The Title-Page’, 46–47. 83 Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 210. 84 Meeus, ‘Zacharias Heyns’. 85 Heyns, Dracht-Thoneel. 86 Meeus, ‘Zacharias Heyns’, 394; Ramakers, ‘De “Const” getoond’. 87 Thijs, De hoefslag van Pegasus; Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, 190–191 and 276–279. 88 On contemporary rederijker culture, see also Ramakers, Op de Hollandse Parnas. 89 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, 183–188. 90 Hummelen, Amsterdams toneel, 80–83; Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, 224–226. 91 Van Bruaene, ‘De contouren’. 92 Ramakers, ‘Sophonisba’s Dress’. 93 De Paepe, ‘Inrichting en gebruik’; Goossens and Van Dijck, ‘Rederijkerskamers’. 94 Hummelen, Amsterdams toneel, 84–85; Smits-Veldt, ‘De “Nederduytsche Academie”’; Smits-Veldt, ‘The First Dutch Academy’. 95 Hummelen, Amsterdams toneel, 85. 96 Parshall, ‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge’. 97 Hummelen, Amsterdam toneel, 86–92; Smits-Veldt, ‘9 maart 1613’; Porteman and Smits-Veldt, Een nieuw vaderland, 235–244. 98 Hummelen, ‘1637’; Porteman and Smits-Veldt, Een nieuw vaderland, 375–379.

References Amelang, David J. ‘Comparing the Commercial Theaters of Early Modern London and Madrid.’ Renaissance Quarterly 71 (2018): 610–644. Arblaster, Paul. Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004. Arnade, Peter. Beggars, Iconoclasts and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Ashley, Kathleen and Hüsken, Wim eds. Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Baum, Constanze. ‘Hans Vredeman de Vries: Theatrum vitae humanae.’ In Roßbach, Nikola and Stäcker, Thomas eds. Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne. Die Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit. Repertorium. Accessed 31.10.2017, http://diglib.hab. de/edoc/ed000162/start.htm. Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2011. Beacham, Richard. ‘Playing Places: The Temporary and the Permanent.’ In McDonald, Marianne and Walton, J. Michael eds. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 202–226. Bernheimer, Richard. ‘Theatrum Mundi.’ The Art Bulletin 38/4 (1956): 225–247. Besse, Jean-Marc. Les grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance. Lyon: ENS Editions, 2003. Blair, Ann. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

53

Boaistuau, Pierre. Le theatre du monde, ou il est faict un ample discours des miseres humaines. Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1565. Bochius, Joannes. Descriptio publicae gratulationis, spectaculorum et ludorum, in adventu Sereniss. principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae. Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1595. Borggrefe, Heiner; Fusenig, Thomas and Uppenkamp, Barbara eds. Tussen stadspaleizen en luchtkastelen. Hans Vredeman de Vries en de Renaissance. Ghent: Ludion, 2002. Bostoen, Karel. Dichterschap en koopmanschap in de zestiende eeuw: omtrent de dichters Guillaume de Poetou en Jan vander Noot. Deventer: Sub Rosa, 1987. Briels, J.G.C.A. ‘Reyn genuecht. Zuidnederlandse kamers van rhetorica in NoordNederland 1585–1630.’ Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis 57/1–2 (1974): 3–89. Cartwright, John. ‘Forms and Their Uses: The Antwerp Ommegangen, 1550–1700.’ In Twycross, Meg ed. Festive Drama. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1996, 119–131. Cockx-Indestege, Elly and Waterschoot, Werner eds. Uyt Ionsten Versaemt. Het Landjuweel van 1561 te Antwerpen. Brussels: Royal Library Belgium, 1994. Conrads, Marian. ‘Het Theatre van Lucas d’Heere. Een kostuumhistorisch onderzoek.’ PhD dissertation, Utrecht University, 2006. Croiset van Uchelen, Ton. ‘Jodocus Hondius’s Theatrum artis scribendi examined anew.’ Quaerendo 34/1–2 (2004): 53–86. D’Heere, Lucas. Het kostuumboek van Lucas d’Heere. Ghent: VIAT, 2004. Daly, Peter M. The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. De Jonge, Krista. ‘Les éditions du traité de Serlio par Pieter Coecke van Aelst.’ In Deswarte-Rosa, Sylvie ed. Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon. Architecture et imprimerie. Lyon: Mémoire Active, 2004, 263–274. De Paepe, Timothy. ‘Inrichting en gebruik van het Antwerpse rederijkerstoneel tussen 1619 en 1664. Een virtuele reconstructie.’ De Zeventiende Eeuw 22/2 (2006): 316–332. Derolez, Albert. ‘Aantekeningen omtrent structuur, datering en betekenis van het kostuumboek van Lucas d’Heere (Gent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, hs. 2466).’ Handelingen van het XXIXe Vlaams Filologencongres, 16–18 April 1973 (1973): 261–271. Dolza, Luisa and Vérin, Hélène. ‘Figurer la mécanique: l’énigme des théâtres de machines de la Renaissance.’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51/2 (2004): 7–37. Ferrari, Giovanna. ‘Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna.’ Past and Present 117 (1987): 50–106. Findlen, Paula. ‘The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy.’ Journal of the History of Collections 1/1 (1989): 59–78. Friedrich, Markus. ‘Frühneuzeitliche Wissenstheater. Textcorpus und Wissensbegriff.’ In Grunert, Frank and Syndikus, Anette Richard eds. Wissensspeicher in der Frühen Neuzeit. Formen und Funktionen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, 297–327. Geirnaert, Dirk and Smith, Paul J. ‘Tussen fabel en embleem: De warachtige fabulen der dieren (1567).’ Literatuur 9 (1992): 22–33. Goossens, Katrien and Van Dijck, Maarten F. ‘Rederijkerskamers tussen oude en nieuwe theatercultuur. De Antwerpse rederijkerskamer De Violieren en de opkomst van een commerciële cultuur (1619–1762).’ Stadsgeschiedenis 7/1 (2012): 22–41. Heuer, Christopher P. ‘Hieronymus Cock’s Aesthetic of Collapse.’ Oxford Art Journal 32/3 (2009): 287–408. Heuer, Christopher P. The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.

54

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Heyns, Zacharias. Dracht-Thoneel [1601]. Ed. Van Leuvensteijn, J.A. and Meeus, Hubert. Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, 1989. Huisman, Tim. The Finger of God: Anatomical Practice in 17th-Century Leiden. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2009. Huisman, Tim. ‘Het anatomisch theater. Een Romeinse arena in vestzakformaat.’ Geschiedenis magazine 45/2 (2010): 44–49. Hummelen, W.M.H. Amsterdams toneel in het begin van de Gouden Eeuw. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. Hummelen, W.M.H. ‘1637. Jacob van Campen bouwt de Amsterdamse Schouwburg. Inrichting en gebruik van het toneel bij de rederijkers en in de Schouwburg.’ In Erenstein, R.L. ed. Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996, 192–203. James, Mervyn. ‘Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town.’ Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29. Kint, An M. ‘The Ideology of Commerce: Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century.’ In Stabel, Peter ed. International Trade in the Low Countries (14th–16th Centuries): Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure. Leuven: Garant, 2000, 213–222. Landwehr, John. Emblem and Fable Books Printed in the Low Countries. Utrecht: Hes Publishers, 1988. Marnef, Guido. Antwerpen in de tijd van de Reformatie. Ondergronds protestantisme in een handelsmetropool. Antwerp: Meulenhoff-Kritak, 1996. McGowan, Margaret. ‘The Renaissance Triumph and Its Classical Heritage.’ In Mulryne, James Ronald and Goldring, Elizabeth eds. Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 26–47. McGrath, Elizabeth. ‘Humanism, Allegorical Invention, and the Personification of the Continents.’ In Vlieghe, Hans; Balis, Arnout and Van de Velde, Carl eds. Concept, Design and Execution in Flemish Painting (1550–1700). Turnhout: Brepols, 2000, 43–71. Meadow, Mark A. ‘Aertsen’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary: Serlio’s Architecture and the Meaning of Location.’ In Koopmans, Jelle; Meadow, Mark A.; Meerhoff, Kees and Spies, Marijke eds. Rhetoric-Rhétoriqueurs-Rederijkers. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1995, 175–196. Meadow, Mark A. ‘“Met geschikter ordenen”: The Rhetoric of Place in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp Blijde Incompst.’ The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 57 (1999): 1–11. Meadow, Mark A. and Robertson, Bruce eds. The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones 1565. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013. Meeus, Hubert. ‘Zacharias Heyns, Sometime Apprentice to Moretus, Becomes the First Merchant/Publisher in Amsterdam.’ Quaerendo 38 (2008): 381–397. Meganck, Tine Luk. Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). Leiden: Brill, 2017. Neumann, Elisabeth. ‘Imagining European Community on the Title Page of Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570).’ Word & Image 25/4 (2009): 427–442. Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Antwerp: Gillis I Coppens van Diest, 1570. Parshall, Peter. ‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe.’ Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2/3 (1994): 7–36. Peters, Emily J. ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts (The whole course of the world). Printed Processions and the Theater of Identity in Antwerp during the Dutch Revolt.’ PhD dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara, 2005.

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

55

Peters, Emily J. ‘Printing Ritual: The Performance of Community in Christoffel Plantijn’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys … d’Anjou.’ Renaissance Quarterly 61/2 (2008): 370–413. Porteman, Karel and Smits-Veldt, Mieke B. Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1560–1700. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2009. Ramakers, B.A.M. ‘Bruegel en de rederijkers. Schilderkunst en literatuur in de zestiende eeuw.’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1996a): 81–105. Ramakers, B.A.M. Spelen en figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996b. Ramakers, B.A.M. ‘De “Const” getoond. De beeldtaal van de Haarlemse rederijkerswedstrijd van 1606.’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998): 128–183. Ramakers, B.A.M., ed. Op de Hollandse Parnas. De Vlaardingse rederijkerswedstrijd van 1616. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 2006. Ramakers, B.A.M. ‘Sophonisba’s Dress: Costume, Tragedy and Value on the Antwerp Stage (c. 1615–1630).’ Netherlandish Yearbook for History of Art 24 (2014): 299–346. Rehm, Rush. ‘Festivals and Audiences in Athens and Rome.’ In McDonald, Marianne and Walton, J. Michael eds. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 184–201. Rijckaert, Ruud, ed. De Antwerpse spelen van 1561 naar de editie Silvius (Antwerpen 1562) uitgegeven met inleiding, annotaties en register (2 vols). Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 2011. Rupp, Jan C.C. ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Social and Cultural Conditions of the Rise of Anatomical Theatres, with Special Reference to Seventeenth-Century Holland.’ History of Science 28/3 (1990): 263–287. Small, Graeme. ‘When Indiciaires meet Rederijkers: A Contribution to the History of the Burgundian Theatre State.’ In Oosterman, Johan ed. Stad van koopmanschap en vrede. Literaire cultuur in Brugge op de grens van middeleeuwen en rederijkerstijd. Leuven: Peeters, 2005, 130–162. Smits-Veldt, Mieke B. ‘De “Nederduytsche Academie” van Samuel Coster: de eerste Nederlandse Volksuniversiteit (1617–1622).’ Literatuur. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Letterkunde 84/1 (1984): 58–64. Smits-Veldt, Mieke B. ‘9 maart 1613. P.C. Hooft vraagt in een brief aan de Amsterdamse schepen dr. Jan ten Grotenhuys om hulp van de stadsregering bij de reorganisatie van de rederijkerskamer De Eglentier. Reilen en zeilen der rederijkerskamers te Amsterdam begin zeventiende eeuw.’ In Erenstein, R.L. ed. Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996a, 156–161. Smits-Veldt, Mieke B. ‘The First Dutch Academy of Dr. Samuel Coster. Humanist Ideals in Dutch Attire (1617–1622).’ In Garber, Klaus; Wismann, Heinz and Siebers, Winfried eds. Europäische Sozietätsbewegung und demokratische Tradition. Die europäischen Akademien der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Frührenaissance und Spätaufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996b, 853–878. Spelen van sinne vol scoone moralisacien, uutleggingen en bediedenissen op alle loeflijcke consten waer inne men claerlijck ghelijck in eenen spieghel, Figuerlijck, Poetelijck ende Retorijckelijck mach aenschouwen hoe nootsakelijck ende dienstelijck die selve consten allen menschen zijn. Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1562. Spies, Marijke. ‘19 augustus 1594. Stadhouder Maurits wordt in Amsterdam verwelkomd met een tableau vivant dat Davids overwinning op Goliath uitbeeldt. De functie van tableaux vivants bij openbare festiviteiten.’ In Erenstein, R.L. ed. Een theatergeschiedenis

56

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996, 148–155. Stone Peters, Julie. Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Surgers, Anne. Scénographies du théâtre occidental. Paris: Armand Collin, 2007. Thijs, Boukje. De hoefslag van Pegasus. Een cultuurhistorisch onderzoek naar Den Nederduytschen Helicon (1610). Hilversum: Verloren, 2004. Thøfner, Margit. A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt. Zwolle: Waanders, 2008. Town, Edward. ‘“A fête at Bermondsey”: an English landscape by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder.’ The Burlington Magazine 157 (2015): 309–317. Uppenkamp, Barbara. ‘Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae: A Stoic World Theater.’ Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (2002):142–167. Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure. ‘De contouren van een nieuw cultuurmodel. Rederijkers in Vlaanderen en Brabant in de zeventiende eeuw.’ Handelingen der Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis 58 (2005): 221–237. Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure. ‘“A wonderfull tryumfe, for the wynning of a pryse.” Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650.’ Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 374–405. Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure. ‘Spectacle and Spin for a Spurned Prince: Civic Strategies in the Entry Ceremonies of the Duke of Anjou in Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent (1582).’ Journal of Early Modern History 11/4–5 (2007): 278–283. Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure. Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Van Dam, Frederica. ‘Lucas d’Heere als schilder in Engeland.’ In Van Dam, Frederica and Waterschoot, Werner eds. Lucas d’Heere, Tableau Poetique. Verzen van een Vlaamse migrant-kunstenaar voor de entourage van de Seymours op Wolf Hall. Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 2016, 3–88. Van Delft, Louis. ‘L’idée de théâtre (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle).’ Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 101/5 (2001): 1349–1365. Van der Noot, Jan. Het theatre oft toon-neel: waer in ter eender de ongelucken en elenden die den werelts gesinden ende boosen mensen toecomen …. London: John Daye, 1568. Van der Noot, Jan. Het Bosken en Het Theatre. Ed. W.A.P. Smit and W. Vermeer. Amsterdam: Stichting Onze Oude Letteren, 1953. Van Dixhoorn, Arjan. Lustige geesten. Rederijkers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden (1480–1650). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Van Dixhoorn, Arjan. ‘The Values of Antwerp and the Prosperity of Belgica: Political Economy in Guicciardini’s Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567).’ Netherlandish Yearbook for History of Art 24 (2014): 77–106. Van Dorsten, J.A. The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance. Leiden: Oxford University Press, 1970. Vandommele, Jeroen. Als in een spiegel. Vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561. Hilversum: Verloren, 2011. Waterschoot, Werner. ‘Leven en betekenis van Lucas d’Heere.’ Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (1974): 16–126. Waterschoot, Werner. ‘The Title-Page of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. A Comment.’ Quaerendo 9 (1979): 43–68. Waterschoot, Werner. ‘An Author’s Strategy: Jan van der Noot’s Het Theatre.’ In Westerweel, Bart ed. Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Field of the Emblem. Leiden: Brill, 1997, 35–47.

The theatrum as an urban site of knowledge

57

Weber, Christian. ‘Theatrum Mundi. Zur Konjunktur der Theatrum-Metapher im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert als Ort der Wissenskompilation und zu ihrer literarischen Umsetzung im Grossen Welttheater.’ In Schock, Flemming; Bauer, Oswald and Koller, Ariane eds. Ordnung und Repräsentation von Wissen. Dimensionen der Theatrum-Metapher in der frühen Neuzeit. Hannover: metaphorik.de, 2008, 341–369. West, William N. Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Williams, Sheila and Jacquot, Jean. ‘Ommegangs anversois du temps de Bruegel et de Van Heemskerck.’ In Jacquot, Jean ed. Les fêtes de la Rénaissance II. Fêtes et cérémonies au temps de Charles Quint. Paris: CNRS, 1960, 359–388. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Ziegler, Georgiana. ‘En-Gendering the World: The Politics and Theatricality of Ortelius’s Titlepage.’ In Szőnyi, György E. ed. European Iconography, East and West. Leiden: Brill, 1996, 127–145.

2 ARTISANAL ‘HISTORIES’ IN EARLY MODERN NUREMBERG Hannah Murphy

Introduction In 1547, the Nuremberg calligrapher and mathematician Johann Neudörffer wrote an account of the lives of seventy-nine of the city’s most eminent artisans, and sent them to the merchant Georg Römer.1 His text was never published, but almost immediately manuscript copies began to pass from family to family, becoming well known in the close-knit environs of Nuremberg (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).2 In the seventeenth century, another calligrapher, Andreas Gulden, purported to ‘finish’ the text, adding fifty-nine additional biographies of artisans who had populated the city since Neudörffer died. The resulting compilation was used as the basis for published accounts of artists’ lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including well-known encyclopedias by Joachim von Sandrart and Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr.3 It was eventually published as Nachrichten von Künstlern und Werkleuten by Georg Karl Wolfgang Lochner in 1875.4 Lochner considered the original copy to have been lost; today a 1547 autograph copy can be found in the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg, not only surviving but recently digitized.5 While historians continue to refer to the text in Lochner’s words as ‘Johan Neudörffer’s Nachrichten’ (Johann Neudörffer’s News or Accounts), in his own words, Neudörffer referred to his manuscript as something more humble – ‘ein schriftlich Verzeichniss’, or a written list. Writing in the context of the nineteenth century, Lochner was concerned to emphasize one main agenda: the preeminent status of Nuremberg in the Renaissance. He did this by means of framing the text in a tradition first established by Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 Lives of the Famous Artists. Vasari’s project, which traced the rebirth (rinascita) of art from the ruins of Rome all the way to its culmination with Michelangelo, positioned Florence at the center of

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

59

Leaves from Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis showing indices by name, and a list of makers’ marks. © By permission of the Germanisches National Museum – GNM Merkel HS 4° 533 Fols 43r and 46r. FIGURES 2.1 AND 2.2

Renaissance ingenuity.6 Lochner boasted to his readers that Neudörffer produced his biographies three years before Vasari, that he knew Albrecht Dürer well and could thus chronicle true artistic greatness from personal experience. By logical progression, Nuremberg, rather than Florence had seen the real birth, not simply of Renaissance art, but of art history as well. But Neudörffer’s text shared few of Vasari’s grandiose ambitions. Although he was certainly concerned to illuminate Nuremberg as a site of artisanal display, Neudörffer made few direct comparisons with other cities or countries. In characterizing Nuremberg’s artisans, Neudörffer emphasized collaboration and communal workmanship over any individual artist, or associated concept of individual artistic greatness. Most importantly, rather than establishing a grand teleology in the mode of Vasari, Neudörffer explained to Römer that his list was a personal document, taking account of his intimate knowledge of the city, the works of his artisanal contemporaries and their movement within it. Rather than comparing the city outwards, with Florence, or with other imperial cities, he

60

Hannah Murphy

FIGURES 2.1 AND 2.2

(Continued)

burrowed down instead, exploring it from its smallest objects (locks, keys, compasses) to its outer walls, monuments and buildings. In so doing, his text traced a process of constant, material change, demonstrating the mutability and material processes that wrote and overwrote the physical environs of the city. Neudörffer’s text functioned as a claim to a particular kind of civic identity based not on political prominence or economic importance, but on artisanal practice. Artisans, Neudörffer suggested, were the central makers of civic epistemology. In recent years Pamela Long, Pamela Smith and many others, have argued for the centrality of practitioners and practice to scientific knowledge, i.e. practitioners with bodily, hands-on experience of crafts, gained by empirical practice, rather than through theory, in workshop environments, rather than universities. By means of this process of knowing, early modern artisans, they suggest, had a specific relationship with knowledge itself.7 Artisanal knowledge was material and mutable, and this lent itself to a worldview which prioritized questions of change. ‘How’ was more important than ‘what’ for knowledge of the natural world.8 The point of this knowledge, as historians have generally examined it,

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

61

was aimed at understanding the natural world; but it had profound implications for understanding the man-made world of the city as well. The Verzeichnis is an especially valuable source for those interested in artisanal epistemologies, and the role of such epistemologies in shaping the city. For Neudörffer, these ways of thinking took shape in the thick description he provided of artisans, their processes and collaborations, and the materials they produced. But they similarly implicated the way he constructed his text and how he understood it to function. This chapter examines Neudörffer’s treatment of artisans as central to the city and his text as revelatory of artisanal processes within the city. Its title made this clear. As Figures 2.1 and 2.2 suggest, so too did the prominence of lists within the text. In its self-description as a list, the Verzeichnis made an overt claim to the same qualities of knowledge as the artisans and their craft. As the simplest literary unit, the list was common across how-to books, or manuals written by artisans about their craft. How-to books were the characteristic genre central to artisanal skill, and lists were the foundational unit on which they were built. Lists specified ingredients, but they often stood in for method as well, since one of the characteristics of early modern how-to recipes was that the method was often implied rather than explicitly detailed. In such works lists had a double function. As ‘epistemic units’ artisanal lists were constitutive of components as well as of making. The list was thus designed both to facilitate reproduction and shape imitation. Borrowing the list and casting it as the central organizing feature for his text demonstrated the way in which the Verzeichnis’s contents overlapped with its material qualities (form, genre, written text). It suggests the way in which Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis positioned itself as the grounds for contemplating making, meaning and the city itself.9 For Neudörffer, the how and what of the city were interlinked: Nuremberg was as material and mutable as the knowledge which made it.

Nuremberg’s artisans in historical narratives To place Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis in perspective, two pieces of information are necessary: first the preeminence of Nuremberg as a city of the arts; second, the relative instability of historical genre. In recent years, new attention has been paid to the way in which cities attracted, facilitated and benefited from technological innovation and creativity in the early modern period.10 Conventional wisdom and more recent historiography continue to suggest that technological or artistic prominence and economic or political importance go hand in hand. Medieval Nuremberg conformed well to this pattern. A center of European commerce, at the heart of twelve trade routes, and politically preeminent within the Holy Roman Empire, the connection between the fame of the city and the fame of its artisans had become a late-medieval commonplace, remarked on by commentators from Pope Pius II to Conrad Celtis.11

62

Hannah Murphy

But by the turn of the sixteenth century, global developments in trade and commerce, as well as political developments within the Holy Roman Empire were providing increasing competition from other cities. In 1525, Nuremberg adopted Lutheran reforms. The turn to Protestantism cost Nuremberg her relationship with the Emperor and damaged trade links with many of Europe’s Catholic cities. In the latter half of the century, religious wars drained the city’s coffers and the toll taken by the Thirty Years War solidified the financial damage.12 In the seventeenth century Nuremberg’s importance in European terms declined. Unlike Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Lisbon or even Plymouth, the city had no maritime access, no colonies and no point of reference for a sudden influx of exotic, foreign goods.13 However; rather than declining, Nuremberg’s artistic reputation increased, even as the city’s political and economic fortunes declined. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Andrea Bubenik and others have traced the way in which latesixteenth and seventeenth-century Nuremberg patricians capitalized on Albrecht Dürer’s legacy to gain cultural leverage in the broader context of the Holy Roman Empire and position the city as historically important in terms of its contribution to its cultural past.14 Nuremberg thus offers a counterpoint to the subjects of many recent studies and indeed to many of the case studies in this volume. In the broader context of the global knowledge society, its success relied on its status as a local city, defined by exceptionality (see Figure 2.3).

Nuremberg, designed by Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, View of Nuremberg, in Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik. Nuremberg. Anton Koberger, 1493. © Creative commons.

FIGURE 2.3

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

63

The creation of the connection between Dürer and Nuremberg took on almost mythic qualities, but in doing so it obscured the many contributions of the artisans who worked alongside Dürer. Similarly, the active promotion of certain kinds of historical scholarship by patricians – humanist encomia, civic chronicles and other forms of early modern history – maps, crests and insignia – means that other concepts of Nuremberg’s time and space have been overlooked. In both senses, Neudörffer’s text functions as a corrective. It opens out Nuremberg’s sense of artisanal community, but it also opens a window onto a far less formal and more fluid set of ideas about space and time.15 Efforts to grasp time, manipulate it, situate it and understand it brought projects and artists alike to the city of Nuremberg, as Alexander Marr and Richard Kremer have shown in different ways in recent work on the mathematician and cartographer Johann Stabius (1450–1520), (who, by commissioning designs for inscriptions for the Stabius-Dürer World Map, gave Neudörffer his first big break).16 Maximilian I’s unprecedented dynastic mythmaking might be cited here as a prime example of the way in which these novel forms of participatory memory making unfolded alongside and sometimes in conjunction with traditionally ‘learned’ forms of scholarship. In projects such as Weisskunig, Maximilian built on tournament books etc., while pioneering works of print such as the Triumphal Arch (1515) and the Triumphal Procession (1517) brought artisans and technologies together to explore new ways of communicating and representing time and space.17 As these very different attempts to fix time through instruments and artisanal works might begin to suggest, literary explorations of time in the sense of ‘history’ were also unstable in the sixteenth century. While an early modern tradition of placing cities in a biblical teleology dominated the printed literature of the period, there were abundant, various types of history-making in cities that instead emphasized the local. As far back as the fourteenth century, for example, particular institutions in Nuremberg had demonstrated a tendency to memorialize artisans. Today, the examples of the Mendelshausbuch are well known.18 But tournament books and festival books, Gedenkbücher and even civic tax lists, all centered on the characters and quality of artisanal skills.19 Often thought of as the characteristic genre of early modern history, chronicles were equally shaped by the changing cultures of history and memory. Whereas narrative text in different chronicles might now appear to be their main component, early modern visuals, tables and other forms of organization were also and equally vehicles of early modern history, breaking down and reorganizing time in various different models.20 Over the course of the sixteenth century, these moved from the late-medieval preapproved division of time into a less fixed set of temporal representations of the site of memory, from the point of view of the author.21 It is in this context that Neudörffer’s text should be examined, because by adopting its particular format, Neudörffer brought together a new literary

64

Hannah Murphy

culture of record-keeping, with a vital and fluid set of artisanal practices. As a ‘written list’, the Verzeichnis lacked a traditional sense of narrative, but this should not be taken to mean that it lacked order. Although Umberto Eco has suggested an almost ahistorical impulse for listing, evident in its utilization by figures as diverse as Andy Warhol and Homer,22 it is significant that the list, in its definitive sense, was itself an early modern innovation, linguistically shifting from a meaning of bordering, to encompass a meaning of cataloguing, ‘a row or series of names, figures, words or the like’.23 Verzeichnis, the vernacular German term used by Neudörffer, is etymologically distinct from the Old English and French liste, but its trajectory is similar.24 Its coincidence with other knowledge practices designed at interrogating the fixed boundaries of time and space is thus particularly noteworthy. Early modern literature abounded with lists.25 The collection of people in the form of housebooks, tax lists and eventually theaters of standing was a commonplace civic activity.26 As a method of classification, the qualities of list-making were thus always tied to historically specific statements of identity.27 Neudörffer structured his text according to affective, personal, empirical and textual conventions. By recovering these structures, both within the text and among its artisanal subjects, we can bring to the fore a different kind of city: material, exemplary and prone to change, rather than exceptional, historical and fixed around the figure of Dürer.

Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis Although we cannot establish its veracity as the ‘original’ source, the attributed autograph copy of Neudörffer’s text in the German National Museum bears witness to the manuscript materiality of his gift to Römer. The seventy-nine biographies unfold over fifty-three leaves. Neudörffer used both sides of the page.28 The hand, a rough current-cursive was relatively standard to the middle of the sixteenth century, and remains consistent throughout. The Verzeichnis was written in the vernacular and accompanied by two indices, one of names, the other of makers’ marks. They hint at the complex readability of the text, foreshadowing the intricacy of its structure, the overlapping nature of its subjects, and the diverse entry points its readers could take. With the exception of the makers’ marks, the content is completely un-illustrated and devoid of ornamental features (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3). Susanne Meurer has argued that ‘because the text was penned by a calligrapher how it was written would have been inseparable from what was written in the eyes of Neudörffer’s contemporaries’.29 As this might suggest, the subject of his work was a community that Neudörffer was at once part of and not. He modestly stated that he himself lacked the ‘kunstlich verstandnis’ (artistic understanding) of his artisanal subjects.30 But his account to Römer placed himself spatially among the objects his subjects created. Unlike other contemporary accounts, Neudörffer’s work relied for the most part on first-

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

65

hand observation, detailing the objects he himself had seen and the impressions he himself had gathered. As a sixteenth-century ethnographic account of a cluster of practitioners, Neudörffer thus offers the historian a ‘thick description’ of the way in which artisans’ practices, civic context and material epistemologies were filtered, processed and understood by nearcontemporaries.31 Neudörffer’s first entry, on Hans Behaim the elder, ‘stonemason on the Peunt’, provides a template for Neudörffer’s interests and for the kind of character they conjured. Behaim’s contribution to the city was ‘universally respected’. Nuremberg’s armory (converted from the Kornhaus) was cut from stone so strong that wagons could enter through tunnels in the ground. Behaim had also decorated the inside of the Ratshaus with ornamented snails. Recounting all the great deeds that earned him merit and attention here and elsewhere would make the list too long.32 Beginning with stonemasons, as he termed them, Neudörffer’s entry on Behaim thus paid attention to both practical feats (such as the cavernous tunnels from the armory), and equally to smaller ornamentation that took his fancy. Decoration was important to Neudörffer, who commented on Behaim the younger’s snakes, on the copper clocks provided by Sebastian Lindenast,33 on bells for the tower of St. Lorenz. Sebald Beck made two stone columns near the brass lattices in the Rathaussaal.34 Burckhard made the new organ in St Sebald’s (dating from 1474).35 Neudörffer’s precision with regards to such local details linked many of these figures together and clarified the overall structure of the text around his own interests, preferences and personal observation. There were two ordering impulses visible in the progression of Neudörffer’s biographies, an external ordering impulse of materials and a more subtle inner logic, derived from skills. The external framework can be summed up by an approximate progression of ‘plaster to paper’. That is, from the artisans who designed and oversaw the appearance and construction of buildings, Neudörffer progressed to those who ornamented their façade, through an ever-moreminiature progression of the makers of statues, doors, locks, until he reached instruments and began to build back out. Stonemasons, coppersmiths, armorers and plate-makers, metalworkers, painters, goldsmiths, glassworkers, cabinetmakers (Schreiner), organ-makers, weight-makers, printers, calligraphers and paper-makers. While this progression of trade identities might appear almost random, Neudörffer essentially followed a kind of civic walkabout, from Nuremberg’s buildings to their façades; to the ornamentation, bells and clocks which adorned them; to their contents, the tools made to facilitate them, like the lockmakers, and the tools which enabled people to use them, like the compassmakers and weight-makers and measurers. Overall, the epistemic order of Neudörffer’s text was dictated neither by civic standing nor by common logic, but by the material artifacts on which artisans worked, and the author’s own interests in them. Thus, while he mentioned well-known works that had left the city, he paid far more attention to

66

Hannah Murphy

the works he had seen himself. His favorite of all the works, for example, was Hans Beuerlein’s fresco on the wall of the Prediger Kloster im Kreuz, from 1493.36 The latter provides an insight into the durability and ubiquity of pre-Reformation art in post-Reformation preferences, since Beuerlein is one of the few artists from the fifteenth century that Neudörffer records, but it also demonstrates how individual preferences and affective responses to visual imagery could form, endure and persevere through changes in communal fashions.37 Neudörffer’s interests in writing informed his appreciation of the mechanical and material arts he sought to chronicle. This is evident in his biographies of Alexius Birbaum, famed for the art of song, but who also ‘wrote many Kirchenbücher’ and had a high understanding of Latin.38 Neudörffer reckoned the paper-maker Endres Volckamer as the finest master of the art in his day.39 He lists other calligraphers, such as Hanns Maslitzer, ‘Rechenmeister’, and ‘ein zierlicher Schrieber’.40 The series of biographies ends with paper artists, by which is meant not actual painters (whom Neudörffer describes primarily in terms of their use of oil paint) but literally the makers of paper and the arts of writing: Hanns Grabner, Endres Volckamer and Hans Sachs. That Neudörffer’s idea of the value of paper arts had at least some social currency can be demonstrated by the fact that of all the works Neudörffer mentioned, the most costly was undertaken by the illuminator Nikolaus Glockendon, whose mass book for the Bishop of Mainz was worth 500 fl.41 Among the many other artisans Neudörffer chronicled, the skills he lingered longest on were mathematical and calligraphic. We have already seen that Neudörffer was particularly interested in decoration, both large-scale and detailed; but throughout this focus, he trained his attention on movement, and questions of scale. His entry on Hieronymus Formschneider, for example, singled out Formschneider’s ability to scale up and down calligraphic lettering, without new models from Neudörffer himself.42 As we have already seen, unlike Vasari, Neudörffer’s text was largely absent of consideration of artistic character, and certainly absent any ideas of unique genius or artistic spirit. Rather than the ‘artist’ himself, Neudörffer was interested in technique. Where possible, he was specific in his descriptions. He was particularly admiring of Hanns Ehemann, the oculist. Neudörffer called the making of glasses ‘a new Erfindung (invention)’ and he got his first pair at sixteen years old. Not only was he effusive in his praise of the product, but to the best of his ability he attempted to describe the process (ground down Venetian glass, burned the glass on one side, and widened it with fire until it was like paper, and made crystalline glasses from it).43 Expressions of trade identities, such as the Book of Trades by Neudörffer’s contemporaries, Jost Ammann and Hans Sachs, are often seen as projects of differentiation – expressions attempting to catalogue and thus fix or codify specific identities around practices, materials or skills.44 By contrast, Neudörffer offered a far more mutable picture of shared skill in his biographies, and seemed more

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

67

concerned to demonstrate the interpenetration of skills and techniques among clusters of artisans, as well as the way in which practical collaboration on specific materials drew different artisans together. The nature of this characterized the important inner schema to the Verzeichnis, one driven internally by the artisans themselves. This followed family. This logic was especially important because in explaining the agency of artisans and their role in the city, it draws attention to the familial, brotherly, corporative and communal aspects of self-organization which guided artisanal action. Neudörffer’s artisans (indeed, they were his friends and family too) married into each other’s families, drank together and even lived together. Neudörffer often describes personal connections between him and his subjects. Johann Petreius, the printer with whom Neudörffer worked on Walter Ryff’s translation of Vitruvius, was his brother in law, ‘mein Schwestermann’.45 The goldsmith Jacob Hoffmann was his ‘friend and brother’, a connection that Lochner attributes to the relationship between Hoffmann and Neudörffer’s second wife, Katherina.46 As this makes clear, women were often the mediators in such relationships. Hans Frey ‘gave his daughter to Albrecht Dürer’.47 The daughter of Neudörffer’s teacher, the modist Caspar Schmidt, was married to the son of Veit Stoss, and Schmidt would serve as Stoss’s executor when he died in 1533.48 These social ties were not simply functional; the women Neudörffer mentioned could play discerning roles. Wolf Weisskopf’s widow took Meister Conrad, Stadtschreiner ‘der ist um nichts weniger in allen Dingen kunstreich als ihr voriger Hauswirt war’. Of particular note might be Georg Glockendon’s unnamed daughter, who was trained with his twelve sons and surpassed them all.49 Neudörffer’s interest in family formed part of the logic of his text and the craft practices it sought to document. This can be seen in the relationship between the activities and skills of fathers and sons. Familial relationships mapped onto diversifying sets of skills, as with the Vischers, where Peter Vischer the younger became a poet, or Hanns Gerla a lute-maker; whose son made not just lutes, but also violins (a development, Neudörffer thought, going back to questions of scale, because different ‘sizes and proportions’ were needed).50 Mapping family onto the progression of artisanal skill allowed Neudörffer to suggest a genealogy and lineage for skill and craft, as well as their practitioners. Neudörffer was sensitive to the importance of the household as both an artisanal and civic space. The illuminist Hanns Springinklee lived in Albrecht Dürer’s house.51 Writing about the coppersmith Sebastian Lindenast, Neudörffer remarked that he, and Peter Vischer, and Adam Kraft had ‘indeed grown up with each other, and were like brothers, and in their adulthood spent all the festivals with each other, just the same as when they were young’.52 Neudörffer was keen to trace ties that were neither simply practical nor local, but emotional, affective and ultimately intellectual, and he was quick to include himself in this network of associations. He remarked, for example, on his own friendship with the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (who shared an entry with his brother

68

Hannah Murphy

Albrecht).53 The goldsmith Jacob Hoffmann was his ‘friend and brother’.54 The illuminist Nikolaus Glockendon was his ‘dear friend’.55 Like the progression of craft knowledge through familial developments, these links were not simply ‘contextual’ in a glib sense: they had real impact on the process and material outcome of shared artisanal work. In one commission for the king of Poland, the goldsmith Melchior Bayre made the altar, Peter Flötner made the wooden sculptures and figures, but Pancraz Labwolf gilded them with brass, over which silver plate was eventually fixed.56 More local and more humble projects also required cooperation. In 1544, Wolf Weisskopf made the ‘Gehause’ for the new organ in St. Lorenz. Andreas Heinlein – ‘fast der eresten einer so die kleinen Uhrlein in die Bisam Koepf zu machen erfunden’ – and with the help of Hannsen Werners, Pfarrer zu St. Johannis, ‘die Theorie planetarum mit 16. Pfd. Gewicht in Gang gebracht nahmen sie es doch beide aus des Bulmans Tafel und Raedern, die sie stets (Wie ich das selbst gesehen hab) vor ihnen hatten. Solche moessene Tafel hab ich geschrieben und geaetzt’. Overall, Neudörffer’s biographies suggest an interpenetration of knowledge, skills and intellectual habits, in which almost all artifacts relied on an overlapping group of artisans and artisanal skills. This was a point he made explicit in the case of Peter Flötner (c.1490–1546), his collaborator on the Commemorative Medal of 1538, and most famous today for the 1541 Triumphal Arch for Charles V.57 The woodcut is well known. The material Arch was designed by Georg Penz, and constructed out of wood and canvas. It was strung across the Burgstrasse between the Rathaus and the castle. Like Maximilian’s paper monument, copies of the Triumphal Arch were subsequently printed. Peter Flötner produced the woodcut and made minor changes to the secorations of the lintels, jambs and bases.58 Neudörffer himself provided the lettering. Flötner’s most famous project therefore relied on several key collaborators and provided a literal interpolation into the city of their combined technical skills. Hieronymus Formschneider cut the woodblocks for the Ehrenpforte.59 As the example of Flötner shows, the fusion of the practical and personal with the epistemological and the material brought together the two ordering impulses of Neudörffer’s text, i.e. the order via materials and the order via people. In a very simple sense, Neudörffer’s list radically debunks the idea that Dürer was to credit with Nuremberg’s artisanal community, or indeed, that any single artist or artisan could be credited in such a manner. For Neudörffer, artisanal materials were fundamentally the outcome of collaboration. This raises a second, more historiographical insight, in which the significance of his text rests in its dissection of that community and the way in which it provides an account of how artisanal epistemology actually worked in a communal setting, outside the workshop or laboratory space. Neudörffer’s account makes it clinically clear that not only the social context of artisanal practice relied on personal circumstances, place and emotional relations, but that epistemology and ultimately the material products and processes of such artisans did too.

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

69

This insight demonstrates the self-reflective qualities of writing and the paper crafts for Neudörffer. If the material products of artisans reveal their ideas of making, how might the product of his writing, in this case, the Verzeichnis, reveal material processes of making? How might we think about text itself as a vehicle for practice?

Languages of making Artistic and artisanal vocabulary has recently been a subject of some historical attention, but the approach of word histories, and equally of conceptual histories, still remains tied to language found predominantly in printed texts – credited with authorial intention and imbued with exigent semantic meaning.60 That was not the kind of language at play in Neudörffer’s manuscript. Although Neudörffer was clearly familiar with learned vocabulary and humanist tropes, the lexicon he employed in his vernacular manuscript was more attuned to the workshop than to either humanist discourse or the new languages of scientific or artistic display, cabinets of curiosity etc.61 Neudörffer’s text thus provides a Germanlanguage lexicon for inventiveness and skill, which positions it at the forefront of both vernacular endeavor and artisanal labor. Neudörffer’s text reflected a capacious understanding of art/craft (Kunst) in which acquired expertise – practice, repetition and skill – and inherent character came together. The term Kunstlich verständnis, for example, with which Neudörffer credited all his subjects, and modestly professed himself without, brought together two conceptually related but etymologically distinct approaches to reason: Kunst, on the one hand, and Verstand on the other. Much ink has been spilled on the semantic capacity of Kunst, but in most senses it remained both conceptually and etymologically linked to knowledge and understanding gained through experience and process. Verstand on the other hand, referred more commonly to a set of inborn cognitive faculties.62 By linking the two, Neudörffer expanded the cognitive and conceptual claims of artisanal reason, bringing together both the reasons behind a particular way of thinking and the product of it. This reflected the most basic but also most ambitious claim at the heart of his text. Artisans with knowledge of materials acquired through graft and material process also had knowledge of the material and artificial world – its nature certainly, but also its time and space, its inherently artisanal mutability. The particular word choices made by Neudörffer with reference to individuals make this more specific. Neudörffer often praised artisans for their technical skills. Adam Kraft, for example, could use his left hand as well as his right, while Rohren Cunz was so skilled at piping water and pressure that his name entered into the popular lexicon.63 In Neudörffer’s text artisans were experienced (erfahren), discerning (gehörig), able (geschickt) or inventive (erfindung in Kunst). In focusing on the qualities of the maker, Neudörffer often remarked on the way in which practical know-how or experience informed skill in the absence of books or learning. Writing about another lock-maker, Jacob Pullmann,

70

Hannah Murphy

Neudörffer observed that although he was not skilled or practiced in reading and writing, he had become learned and artful in astronomy.64 He praised Hans Beuerlein for understanding physiognomy,65 the goldsmith Georg Penz for his experience (erfahren) with perspective, and Augustin Hirschvogel who was well versed in music, as well as circles and perspective. There was always an element of special merit for possessing skills that one might not think necessary. So Sebald Beck, was not just a cabinetmaker (kunstlicher Schreiner) but also ‘a good draftsman, stonemason and architect’ – ‘no one was as skilled as he in the arts of Perspective’; while Georg Fella was an organ-maker, whose facility for piping water was cause for greater repute – ‘die Positiv und Regallen mit lieblichen und Posaunenstimmen zu machen’.66 Facility with design and making were also closely linked, as for example with Hanns Behaim the younger, stonemason, who constructed the water tower, but also designed it himself.67 Intriguingly, Neudörffer’s verbal language was often one of becoming (gewesen, erfahren). This was tied far more to vernacular invocations of making, artisanal training and mimetic pedagogies than to the lexicon of scholarship. Artisanal language depended on conversation, not only in the workshop, as Pamela Smith has described, but also in the sense of the reception of objects, processes and the ephemeral community who fashioned them.68 The intersection between vernacular language, written correspondence and Neudörffer’s subjects – artifacts, techniques, form, shape and material process – conjure up a dynamic through which the outcome, the text itself, should be interpreted. The specificity of Neudörffer’s language provides not only an insight into the specificity of the community with which he was preoccupied; it also suggests a closer relationship between the Verzeichnis and the objects and processes it detailed. As we shall see in the following section, the form and shape of Verzeichnis, its list, its series of biographies and its purpose in describing them, borrowed from the kinds of print genres, processes and products of the artisans themselves. In doing so, it spoke both to material processes and to the way Neudörffer saw the material products that changed the city.

Making and exemplarity: history by ‘design’ In his entry on Peter Flötner (1485–1546), Neudörffer described the artist as a prolific ‘designer’, whose primary focus was to furnish ‘histories’ (Historien), designs upon which goldsmiths could subsequently cast.69 As the example of Figure 2.4 attests, today Flotner is well known as a pioneer of ‘ornamental prints’ or ‘object engravings’ which artisans and collectors could copy, or commission to be copied.70 These could come in many shapes and represent a wide variety of objects, from beds, to scabbards, to cups.71 Exemplarity in the form of such ‘histories’ was an integral vehicle for the expression of complex ideas and designs for materials; in his Verzeichnis, Neudörffer linked it to the representation of people as well.

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

71

Neudörffer’s biography of Peter Flötner. © By permission of the Germanisches National Museum – GNM Merkel HS 4° 533 Fol. 17r.

FIGURE 2.4

Neudörffer was intimately acquainted with this kind of work. Not only did he collaborate with Flötner on the Triumphal Arch, but the print techniques used by Flötner as the medium and vehicle for his work, were essentially the same techniques used by Neudörffer to communicate the process of his craft of calligraphy.72 We have already seen that Neudörffer was careful with and attentive to both the intricacies of making and the use of language. His use of the term Historien must thus be taken seriously. It linked a particular method of demonstration to collaborative, artisanal work, but it also explained how he saw his own collective biographies functioning. Much like the material models or graphic designs that he helped artists produce, and cited approvingly, Neudörffer’s biographies functioned themselves as literary Historien, written models or exemplars offering a pro forma for observation and imitation. Just as the what and the how had parity for Neudörffer in productive processes, they had parity in his work. Rather than thinking about the Verzeichnis as predominantly a text, with secondary features that evoked material making – we can think about it as a design, represented in text, but retaining

72

Hannah Murphy

the materiality of image, object, artifact, process and technique. Like the material forms of history-making to which Neudörffer was so attentive – the arches, the images, the sculptures – his own collective biography can be seen as an artisanal effort to capture process in design. In this sense, rather than reflecting the history of artisans, in the sense of chronology or a consecutively unfolding past, the how of Neudörffer’s text demonstrated their ‘histories’ in the artisanal sense of models, designs or examples. This involved a different relationship to time. Exemplarity collapses linear temporality, invoking the immanency of making, rather than the consecutive chronology of narrative.73 Writing about time in the Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Woods have generalized: ‘art, with its multiple temporalities offered a picture of a meaningful cosmos woven together by invisible threads, of an order hidden behind the mere illusory sequence of lived moments’.74 We have already seen that Neudörffer’s text attempted to convey a far more mutable kind of history than the narrative preserved in chronicles. The Verzeichnis was a list of things as well as of people, and more specifically, in its collaborations, its replacements and its minutiae, it was a list where one thing was constantly written over the next. Like the object engravings or ornament books of the Renaissance, the list format of Neudörffer’s text invoked a visual way of processing material and a literary attempt to interrogate artisanal exemplarity. The hybrid nature of the list reveals the way in which it sought to make connections with the material world. Verzeichnis could be read forward or backward, with multiple indices providing different throughlines, from makers’ marks, to alphabets, to the circular structure of the text itself. Its list-like format made this explicit. The bleeding of one biography into another through commonly invoked people, places and things mirrored the mutability of the artisanal process itself. Just as artisanal process drew on the preoccupation with something being of two states at once, Neudörffer’s artisanal ‘histories’ made the past and the future immanent. Its contents and its form (its what and its how) offer insights into the kind of mutability that enhanced and vivified material life in the city and that offset its multiple and collapsible temporalities and spaces.

Burying artisanal epistemologies When we think about a history of artisanal epistemology and its role in the creation of the historical sense of the city, we are thinking about a paradox. Solidifying particular interventions in history means imputing a fixed notion of temporality at odds with the shifting, mutability of sixteenth-century artisanal epistemology and its mutable concepts of time. In the early sixteenth century Nuremberg’s eminence was fixed to artisans and artisanal inventions. But as the century progressed, changes within technologies of print and information, and modes of history writing began to elide their work. Only years after his death, Nuremberg was beginning to historicize its exceptionality around the figure of Albrecht Dürer.75 In 1606, Johannes Imhoff published

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

73

Theatrum Virtutis. Imhoff sought to bring together in print the kind of performative humanism that Scheurl, his grandfather’s acquaintance, had practiced, with the artisanal imagination Pirckheimer had so admired in Dürer. To this end, the massive sculptural and artistic projects of the arch and the chariot were reimagined in portable, possessive, paper form. From artisanal projects enabled by patrician patronage, they became patrician property. This process continued as the fortunes of Dürer rose, and patrician families balanced their declining commercial fortunes by selling off Dürer memorabilia into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.76 The valorization of Dürer was the most obvious component of this program, but Nuremberg’s sixteenth-century artisans were more generally flattened by new art-historical ideas about individuality and artistic creativity. Karel von Mander’s 1604 Schilderboek is often cited as the beginning of the German response to Vasari, but as Elizabeth Petcu has recently shown, German-speaking cities reacted to his ideas of canon and creativity swiftly at a local level. While their endeavors concentrated on rectifying injustices to local artists, or promoting local works; they largely accepted the terms in which Vasari’s framing of art was made. This was no less true in Nuremberg, where seventeenth-century attempts to create local encyclopedia of ‘great’ men edited out the vast majority of makers. Paul Freher, Georg Andreas Will and Doppelmayr are all examples of authors who attributed works to Dürer alone on which his contemporaries also collaborated. Their emphasis on reputation abroad elevated precisely the artisanal products of least interest to Neudörffer. The artisanal idea of an exemplary city provoking innovation had given way to the historical idea of an exceptional city tied to commemoration.

Notes 1 Linke and Sauer, Zierlich Schreiben; Doede, Schön Schreiben; Kapr, Johann Neudörffer, d. Ä. 2 Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg (Hereafter Stadt BN) Nor. H. 408. 3 von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie; Doppelmayr, Historische Nachricht. 4 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters. 5 GNM, Handschrift, Merkel HS 4° 533 URI: http://dlib.gnm.de/item/HsMer kel533/15. The text remains unusually standard across the large number of copies and for this reason Lochner’s transcription is for the most part a very faithful representative. In quotations that follow I provide the Lochner transcription where I consider it accurate. The notes draw attention to any deviations between Lochner and the GNM source material. 6 Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori; Cast, The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari. 7 Smith, The Body of the Artisan; Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences. 8 Smith, The Body of the Artisan. 9 Goody, ‘The Recipe, the Prescription and the Experiment’; von Contzen, ‘Unnatural Narratology and Premodern Narrative’; von Contzen, ‘Grenzfälle des Erzählens’. 10 Davids and De Munck eds., Innovation and Creativity; Clark, European Cities and Towns; Clark, The Oxford Handbook of Cities.

74

Hannah Murphy

11 Brockmann, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, 16; Groos, ‘The City a Community and Space’; Werminghoff, Conrad Celtis und sein Buch. 12 Reicke, Geschichte der Reichsstadt Nürnberg; Pfeiffer ed. Nürnberg – Geschichte einer europäischen Stadt; Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. 13 Raj, Relocating Modern Science; Romano, Impressions de Chine. 14 Smith, ‘Nuremberg and the Topographies of Expectation’; Bubenik, Reframing Albrecht Dürer. 15 Pollman, Memory in Early Modern Europe; Champion, The Fullness of Time. 16 Marr, ‘Ingenuity in Nuremberg’; Kremer, ‘Playing with Geometrical Tools’; Karr Schmidt and Wouk, Prints in Translation. 17 Silver, Marketing Maximilian; Brisman, ‘Relay and Delay’. 18 Schultheiss, ‘Das Hausbuch des Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderhauses’. 19 Kirchhoff, Gedächtnis in Nürnberger Texten. 20 Levelt, Jan Van Naaldwijk’s Chronicles of Holland. 21 Cohen, Transformations of Time and Temporality. 22 Eco, The Infinity of Lists, 26–27 and 356–357. 23 Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com/. 24 Deutsches Wörterbuch. http://dwb.uni-trier.de/de/. 25 Considine, Dictionaries and Curiosity. 26 Gregory, ‘The Tabulation of England’; Hacking, The Taming of Chance. 27 Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; de Goede, Leander and Sullivan, ‘Introduction: The Politics of the List’. 28 GNM Merkel HS 4° 533 Fols 1r–53r. 29 Meurer, ‘Johann Neudörffer’s Nachrichten’, 62. Meurer may not have had access to the manuscript evidence when making this claim (the GNM copy of Neudörffer’s Verzeichnis was digitized a year after her article appeared) and she provides no comparative printed or manuscript calligraphy text. The consistency of the MS copies of the Verzeichnis make its function as a calligraphy manual even more unlikely – especially given the ubiquity of copies of Neudörffer’s other calligraphic works. Meurer likely also did not have access to Neudörffer’s other manuscripts, which provide a point of reference for whether the Verzeichnis was unique in this regard (it was not). 30 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters. 31 Geertz, ‘Thick Description’. 32 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 3. 33 Ibidem, 37. 34 Ibidem, 157. 35 Ibidem, 161. 36 Ibidem, 130. 37 Smith, ‘The Pictorial Language of German Art’. 38 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 183. 39 Ibidem, 186. 40 Ibidem, 159. 41 Cashion, ‘The Art of Nikolas Glockendon’. 42 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 155. 43 Ibidem, 178. 44 Sachs, Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden. For the concept of Ständebuch see Kunze, ‘Das deutsche Ständebuch’. 45 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 177. 46 Ibidem, vii. 47 Ibidem, 117. 48 Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors, 233, note 15. 49 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 141. 50 Ibidem, 162: ‘Gross und Proportion’.

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

75

51 Ibidem, 144. 52 Ibidem, 37: ‘Gleich mit einander aufgewachsen und wie Bruder gewesen sein, sind auch alle Feiertag in ihrem Alter zusammen gangen, sich nit anders als waeren sie Lehrjungen, mit einander geuebet, welche Uebung und ihr Aufreissung noch zu weisen ist, sind auch allemal, ohne eigenes Essen und Trincken, freundlich und bruederlich von einander geschieden’. 53 Ibidem, 126: ‘diese bede Brüder meine Grefreunde sind’. 54 Ibidem, 127. 55 Ibidem, 143. 56 Ibidem, 125: ‘[Melchior Bayr] machet dem König in Polen eine ganz silberne Altartafel, die wog viel Mark. Zu solcher Tafel machet Peter Flötner die Patron und Figuren von Holz, aber Pancraz Labenwolf goss dieselben hölzernen Patronen von Messing, über diese messingene Tafeln wurden die silbernen Platten eingesenkt und getrieben’. 57 On Flötner see Dienst, Der Kosmos des Peter Flötner. On the Triumphal Arch see Groos, ‘The City as Text’. 58 Smith, Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 56–57. 59 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 156: ‘Ich Hanns Neudorffer macht ihm eine Prob von Fracturschriften, die schnitt er in Holz, und darnach in staehlerne Punzen, und veraendert dieselbige Schrift in mancherlei Groess’. 60 Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe; Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe. 61 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 116. 62 Marr et al, Logodaedalus. 63 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 19–20: ‘im Wasserleiten und Steigen fast beruhmt gewest, das bei den Nürnbergen so gemein Sprichwort von wegen seiner Kunst ist entstanden, dass man noch sagt: Du kannst erheben und legen wie der Röhren Cunz’. 64 Ibidem, 65–66: ‘ob er gleich Schreibens und Lesens nicht geuebt gewest, ist er doch in der Astronomie fast kuenstlich und gelehrt gewest’. 65 Ibidem, 130. 66 Ibidem, 10. 67 Ibidem, 6. 68 Smith, ‘In a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop’. 69 Lochner, Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters, 115: ‘Seine Lust aber in täglicher Arbeit war in weissen Stein zu schneiden, das waren aber nichts anders dann Historien, den Goldschmiden zum Treiben und Giessen, damit sie ihre Arbeit bekleideten, geordnet’. 70 Das Kunstbuch des Peter Flötner; Stielau, ‘Intent and Independence’; Viljoen, ‘The Airs of Early Modern Ornament Prints’. 71 Goddard, The World in Miniature. 72 Byrne, Renaissance Ornament Prints and Drawings. 73 Harvey, Labyrinths of Exemplarity, 209–218. 74 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9. 75 Smith, ‘Nuremberg and the Topographies of Expectation’. 76 Bubenik, Reframing Albrecht Dürer.

Bibliography of unpublished sources Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg (Hereafter Stadt BN) Nor. H. 408. GNM, Handschrift, Merkel HS 4° 533 URI: http://dlib.gnm.de/item/HsMerkel533/15

76

Hannah Murphy

References Baxandall, Michael. The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Brisman, Shira. ‘Relay and Delay: Dürer’s Triumphal Chariots in the Era of the Post’. Art History 39 (2016): 436–465. Brockmann, Stephen. Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital. New York: Camden House, 2006. Bubenik, Andrea. Reframing Albrecht Dürer: The Appropriation of Art, 1528–1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Byrne, Janet. Renaissance Ornament Prints and Drawings. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981. Cashion, Debra Taylor. ‘The Art of Nikolas Glockendon: Imitation and Originality in the Art of Renaissance Germany’. Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 2 (2010) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2010.2.1.2. Cast, David J. The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari. London: Routledge, 2014. Champion, Matthew. The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Clark, Peter. European Cities and Towns, 400–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clark, Peter ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cohen, Simona. Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Considine, John. Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Das Kunstbuch des Peter Flötner Zeichners Bildhauers und Formschneiders von Nuernberg …. Berlin: Schuster, 1882. Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. De Goede, Marieke; Leander, Anna and Sullivan, Gavin. ‘Introduction: The Politics of the List’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016): 3–13. Dienst, Barbara. Der Kosmos des Peter Flötner. Eine Bildweldt der Renaissance in Deutschland. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002. Doede, Werne. Schön Schreiben, eine Kunst: Johann Neudörffer und seine Schule im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1957. Doppelmayr, Johann Gabriel. Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern welche fast von dreyen Seculis her durch ihre Schriften und Kunst-Bemühungen die Mathematie und mehreste Künste in Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Peter Conrad Monaths, 1730. Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. London: Maclehose, 2009. Geertz, Clifford. ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’. In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3–30. Goddard, Stephen H. ed. The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German Little Masters, 1500–1550. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988. Goody, Jack. ‘The Recipe, the Prescription and the Experiment’. In Goody, Jack ed. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 129–145. Gregory, Stephan. ‘The Tabulation of England: How the Social World was Brought in Rows and Columns’. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 14 (2013): 305–325.

Artisanal ‘histories’ in early modern Nuremberg

77

Groos, Arthur. ‘The City as Text: The Entry of Charles V into Nuremberg (1541)’. In Poag, James F. and Baldwin, Claire eds. The Construction of Textual Authority in German Literature of the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014a, pp. 135–156. Groos, Arthur. ‘The City as Community and Space: Nuremberg Stadtlob, 1447–1530’. In Stock, Markus and Vöhringer, Nicola eds. Spatial Practices: Medieval/Modern. Göttingen: V&R, 2014b, pp. 187–206. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Harvey, Irene E. Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Kapr, Albert ed. Johann Neudörffer, d. Ä., der grosse Schreibmeister der deutschen Renaissance. Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1956. Karr Schmidt, Suzanne and Wouk, Edward H. Prints in Translation, 1450–1750. London: Routledge, 2017. Kenny, Neil. Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories. Wolfenbüttler Forschungen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998. Kirchhoff, Matthias. Gedächtnis in Nürnberger Texten des 15. Jahrhunderts, Gedenkbücher, Brüderbücher, Städtgeholb, Chroniken. Nuremberg: Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchivs Nürnberg, Band 68, 2009. Kremer, Richard L. ‘Playing with Geometrical Tools: Johannes Stabius’s Astrolabium imperatorium (1515) and Its Successors’. Centaurus 58 (2016): 104–134. Kunze, Horst. ‘Das deutsche Ständebuch im 16 u. 17 Jh’. In Kunze, Horst ed. Bibliothekswissenschaft in Berlin. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999, pp. 47–59. Levelt, Sjoerd. Jan Van Naaldwijk’s Chronicles of Holland: Continuity and Transformation in the Historical Tradition of Holland during the Early Sixteenth Century. Hilversum: Uitgeverij, 2011. Linke, Oliver and Sauer, Christine. Zierlich Schreiben. Der Schreibmeister Johann Neudörffer d. Ä und seine Nachfolger in Nürnberg. Munich: Typographische Gesellschaft München, 2007. Lochner, Georg Wolfgang. Des Johann Neudörfer Schreib-und Rechenmeisters zu Nürnberg Nachrichten von Künstlern und Werkleuten daselbst aus dem Jahre 1547. Vienna: Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Vol. 10, 1875. Long, Pamela O. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600. Oregon: Oregon State University Press, 2011. Marr, Alexander. ‘Ingenuity in Nuremberg: Dürer and Stabius’s Instrument Prints’. The Art Bulletin 100/3 (2018): 48–79. Marr, Alexander; Garrod, Raphaële; Marcaida, José Ramón and Oosterhoff, Richard J. eds. Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. McEwan, Indra Kagis. ‘Midsummer Moderns; the Foundation of the Paris Observatory, 21 June 1667’. In Delbecke, Maarten and Schraven, Minou eds. Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 333–362. Meurer, Susanne. ‘Johann Neudörffer’s Nachrichten (1547): Calligraphy and Historiography in Early Modern Nuremberg’. In Smith, Jeffrey Chipps ed. Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 61–82. Nagel, Alexander and Wood, Christopher S. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Pfeiffer, Gerhard ed. Nürnberg - Geschichte einer europäischen Stadt. Munich: Beck, 1971. Pollman, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

78

Hannah Murphy

Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reicke, Emil. Geschichte der Reichsstadt Nürnberg: von dem ersten urkundlichen Nachweis ihres Bestehens bis zu ihrem Uebergang an das Königreich Bayern. Bayern, 1806. Romano, Antonella. Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (16e–17e s.). Paris: Fayard, 2016. Sachs, Hans. Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, hoher und nidriger, geistlicher und weltlicher, aller Künsten, Handwercken und Händeln. Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1568. Scholar, Richard. The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Schultheiss, Werner. ‘Das Hausbuch des Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderhauses zu Nürnberg von 1388/1425 bis 1549’. MVGN 54 (1966): 94–108. Silver, Larry. Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 1500–1618. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. ‘The Pictorial Language of German Art, 1400–1650’. In Reinhart, Max ed. Early Modern German Literature, 1350–1700. Rochester: Camden House History of German Literature, 2007, pp. 549–592. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. ‘Nuremberg and the Topographies of Expectation’. Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1 (2009). www.northernrenaissance.org/information/how-to-cite-us/. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Smith, Pamela H. ‘In a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop’. In Roberts, Lissa; Schaffer, Simon and Dear, Peter eds. The Mindful Hand. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007, pp. 33–57. Stielau, Allison. ‘Intent and Independence: Late Fifteenth-Century Object Engravings’. In Smith, Jeffrey Chipps ed. Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 21–42. Strauss, Gerald. Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’più eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550. Viljoen, Madeleine. ‘The Airs of Early Modern Ornament Prints’. Oxford Art Journal 37 (2014): 117–133. Von Contzen, Eva. ‘Grenzfälle des Erzählens: Die Liste als einfache Form’. In Koschorke, Albrecht ed. Komplexität und Einfachheit: Villa-Vigoni Symposion 2015. Stuttgart: JB Metzler Verlag, 2017a, pp. 221–239. Von Contzen, Eva. ‘Unnatural Narratology and Premodern Narratives: Historicizing a Form’. Journal of Literary Semantics 46/1 (2017b): 1–23. Von Sandrart, Joachim. L’Academia Todesca. della Architectura, Scultura & Pittura: Oder Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste. Bd. 1,1. Nürnberg, 1675. Werminghoff, Albert. Conrad Celtis und sein Buch über Nürnberg. Freiburg im Breisgau: Julius Boltze, 1921.

3 BOATMEN, DRUIDS AND PARISII IN LUTETIA Archaeologising Parisian society in eighteenth-century civic epistemology Stéphane Van Damme1

Introduction: archaeologising civic epistemology The eighteenth century witnessed the continuous development of antiquarian work on Paris. Interest was maintained by lawyers, the Maurist monks, architects, antiquarians, engineers and the municipal elites. The enthusiasm for antiquarian knowledge was driven by three factors: it had become epistemologically important because the revolution in diplomatics had fostered a desire to distinguish fake documents from authentic evidence of the ancient origins of Paris; it also had ethnographic importance, since the writings of the antiquarians were linked to discussions concerning the religion of the ancients; lastly it had political importance with the assertion of the political and legal autonomy of Paris. The notion of civic epistemology coined by the social scientist Sheila Jasanoff to describe the ways ‘in which publics expect the state’s expertise, knowledge, and reasoning to be produced, tested, and put to use in decision making’ needs to be translated in this early modern urban context.2 In this chapter, we will argue that antiquarian expertise at the interface of philology, legal studies and religious studies was not anecdotal but helped to secure the new divide between the royal administration, the Parisian archbishop and municipal institutions. These tensions were reflected in the history of the origins of city shared by the competition between merchants (urban power), Roman administration (the royal power) and the Druids (religious power). To what extent did these new historical scholarships involve the inclusion of questions relating to Parisians in eighteenth-century archaeological and historical discussions? Antiquarian interests are reflected in the first two chapters of Le Peuple de Paris3 on knowledge relating to the city and Daniel Roche had earlier invited us to take the field of antiquarian knowledge seriously in his chapter on ‘Academies and History’ in Les Républicains des lettres.4 Following his work,

80

Stéphane Van Damme

antiquarian culture ceased to appear as an anecdotal or peripheral element of history or urban history. Studies by many authors, including Alain Schnapp in France and Rosemary Sweet in Great Britain, have added depth to this trend and shown the importance of relocating antiquarian practices within a history of science and knowledge.5 Even in intellectual history, John Robertson recently showed that discussions on sacred history were grounded in detailed consideration of the civil society of the ancients.6 Lastly, the shifting of investigations towards a material history of science and a new history of erudition and empirical knowledge have encouraged historians to consider the objects and savant practices that informed the new knowledge of the people of Paris.7 The re-evaluation of the Parisii in the eighteenth century was underpinned by a drive towards objectification and revelation that was common to many fields of social observation, but which remains ambiguous. As Déborah Cohen observes, ‘In the eighteenth century on the other hand, the term “people” was not understood as a political abstraction referring to a space with shifting social contours, but as the name of a group of beings, the name of a nature’.8 The Parisii were no more central to antiquarian studies than the Parisians at a time when savant practices were, however, linked to a strategy of visualisation. It is this paradox, this tension (between archaeological visibility and social invisibility) that we propose to investigate. Through different verbs of action, this chapter will follow the many different ways of legitimising civic epistemic issues through the past.

Inventing an urban relic of Parisians In this first section, I will explain the role played by archaeological findings in the shaping of Parisian identity, which involves not only antiquarians like Charles Baudelot de Dairval or the Maurist Dom Félibien but also Parisian elites and magistrates as sponsors. The discovery in 1711 of inscriptions on blocks of stone in the choir of Notre-Dame gave the Republic of Letters an opportunity to develop a wide range of interpretations (Figure 3.1). There were many stages to the process by which this discovery became the basis and centre of gravity for a new grand narrative of the origins of Paris. First, also in 1711, Charles Césare Baudelot de Dairval of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres published a Description des bas-reliefs anciens and for several decades arguments over their meaning continued among European antiquarians,9 from Leibniz to Dom Félibien in his Dissertation sur les antiquités celtiques of 1725. The Pillar of the Boatmen dates to the reign of the Emperor Tiberius in the first century CE and is the most ancient example of Gallo-Roman remains in Paris. It bears Latin and Gaulish inscriptions and portrays the Roman gods Jupiter, Tarvos Trigaranos and Vulcan and Gallic divinities such as Cernunnos. The merchants who controlled navigation on the Seine (the Boatmen), who were members of the Civitas of the Parisii, are thought to have presented these

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

81

FIGURE 3.1 Items discovered during excavations in 1711 constituting Le Pilier des Nautes, remains of a pre-Christian temple (first century CE) on the île de la Cité, on the site of the choir of the Notre Dame de Paris. Engraving from l’Histoire de Paris Vol. 1, designed by Michel Félibien (1666?–1719). © Wikimedia Commons.

stones to the emperor as gifts. The Pillar of the Boatmen turned into a catalyst of an epistemological debate around the nature of antiquarian work. Should it involve the study of material evidence or not? As we know, following the revolution in diplomatics led by the Maurists, questions had been raised concerning the authenticity of documents and the trustworthiness of ancient textual

82

Stéphane Van Damme

traditions. In his Description des bas-reliefs anciens Baudelot de Dairval describes the conditions of archaeological discovery: Attention of the Academy regarding what is discovered. Purpose of this Dissertation. Memoir by Sieur Hauberat on the discovery of the Stones. Although this Academy does not confine its activities to a particular study, the quest for Antiquities remains its near favourite aim. This should not lead it to neglect opportunities to consider the Phenomena, so to speak, which appear in this kind of literature. So the ancient Monuments that have just been discovered in the Cathedral of Paris are far too relevant for us not to examine them here, and not to seek to say what we should think of them. All of Paris has been to see them, but I do not know whether they are as well known as they could be. Be that as it may, among the great number of their viewers perhaps there will be one who would like to have the pleasure of explaining them. Our Company is not jealous of the works of others. On the contrary it sees it as a duty to subscribe to them, and to advocate their study when they are worthy. But would this Academy be forgiven if a Foreigner should inform it concerning Bas reliefs being unearthed before its very eyes, and should publish something before it? So I have taken the trouble to describe them and made it my duty to add a few thoughts. The obligation to speak in this Assembly had led me to choose a subject in a different style, although of the same kind. But I figured that what I would offer on these Antiquities would be of more interest to public curiosity. A certain Antiquity of that land that I am honoured to call my own, which is involved in all this, touched me too strongly for me not to commit myself. The veneration, may I say, that they inspired in me and the particular satisfaction that they made me feel carried me along. Lastly, I was unable to deny myself the pleasure of talking about them, even though I lack the time to offer a more brilliant and researched discussion.10 Several elements can be noted in this description. First, Baudelot strives to give legitimacy to the authority of the Academy. It is the Academy that can compare the object with texts and images to reveal the meaning of what he calls a ‘phenomenon’. Second, for Baudelot the significance of the event extends beyond the academic context; it is a discovery that deserves public attention. He uses the description given by the king’s architect Hauberat: Having excavated about six feet, we found an old wall almost three feet thick. It was built merely of very hard rubble; (4) but it had fused with the mortar to such an extent that it was very hard to demolish with large iron wedges and heavy clubs. We had removed scarcely two feet from the top when, precisely beside it and aligned in parallel, we found another

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

83

older wall around two and a half feet thick. The substance and building of this wall were far less solid than those of the other. This new obstacle to our works nevertheless required us to remove it. I therefore had one or two rows of heavy rubble removed, under which we discovered the Stones in question. They were set back by about eight or nine inches on either side. The first wall I talked about had no foundations below their depth. It rested in part on top and the rest on a kind of clay. Where the older wall was concerned, it had deeper foundations. However, I had some stones lifted that were under the Bas reliefs and nothing more of the kind was found. The stones from beneath are very hard, unlike those of the Monuments which are from St. Leu, and consequently fairly soft. Here, Monsieur, is all I can tell you of the particularities that you wished to know.11 His interpretation is presented as ideas on the obscure origins of the city (represented by a reference to Childeric): We have seen from the account of M. Hauberat that our Monuments were found under an old wall that passed across their width at a little more than half the Choir. My conjecture is that this Wall is one of those of the ancient Church of Paris, the building of which was begun by Childebert I around the time, or even the year before the Episcopate of St. Germain de Paris.12 This booklet is part of a re-evaluation of both excavation as a practice and of monuments in the early eighteenth century. The monuments defended by the Maurist abbot Bernard de Montfaucon were now a key element in a chain of proof. Alongside texts by the ancient authors, the antiquarians worked on the archives of monasteries, churches, royal and Parisian institutions and also on epigraphy. We know that the lawyer Henri Sauval used unpublished sources for his Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, posthumously published in 1724. The 1720s were remarkable for two reasons: they were the time of a great debate in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres to eradicate historical Pyrrohnism, a form of radical scepticism, in which Nicolas Fréret was involved.13 It was also the decade of several major publications, including Sauval’s history and the Histoire de Paris by Félibien and Dom Lobineau, which presents all the historical evidence relating to the history of Paris. The aim was to use discoveries in the archives to radically revise the narrative of the origins of municipal power. The Benedictine congregation of Saint-Maur was supported by Trudaine, Prevost of the Merchants, who gave Dom Félibien and Dom Lobineau access to the Archives of the Hôtel de Ville: We are starting to perceive the false nature of many opinions on the nature and antiquity of the Hotel de Ville de Paris, with our first reading

84

Stéphane Van Damme

of some ancient titles that we had the opportunity to see in the archives of the Hotel-de-Ville, working on a small book that was published in 1717. The late M. Trudaine, then Prevost of Merchants, was struck as we were, and this magistrate – whose memory will always be dear to good citizens – asked us to shed light on points which he regarded as important for the history of the city of Paris, on which Dom Félibien was then working … He obligingly offered to procure for us the communication of all the archives that might offer us illumination, and he wanted those of the city to be opened to us and for us to be able to make extracts from all the ancient titles that we might need.14 Dom Félibien, who received the status of historiographer to the city, emphasised the degree to which this discovery launched an international controversy, and shows the difficulties of untangling the different interpretations, often based on visual depictions (such as engravings). The ‘plate of Celtic antiquities found in Notre-Dame in 1711’ that accompanies Félibien’s dissertation appears as a scientific representation of the archaeological stones, as attested by the presence of various elements of different kinds, including the city seal, the inscriptions and two ‘scales’, one of which is for the diagonals, which can be used to gauge the size of the blocks. The details on each face of the stones are identified using a system of figures and letters. The overall presentation of the blocks is based on symmetry and alternate representations of surface and volume, but does not suggest that the whole would form a single column; the idea of a pillar is not yet present. Louis-François-Joseph de La Barre also took a theatrical approach to evidence in his Description de la ville de Paris. Tirée des pièces justificatives de l’histoire de Paris in 1735. In his treatise on historical origins of 1744 Dom Jacques Martin sought to ground his method in comparison: This book has as its sole merit being short and drawing on the purest sources of History. I have taken care to offer nothing based on prejudice or on stretches of the imagination. I also flatter myself that the attentive reader will be convinced that I advance only that for which I have authority or which is based on a certainty derived from a comparison of all that the ancients have said concerning our antiquities. This route, which is the only one to be followed in discovering the truth and yet which few moderns have followed, has prevented me from concurring with most of our best Writers.15 For Martin, the first requirement was to rectify the mistakes of the Greek and Latin authors: Notably some of these anecdotes correct the Greek and Roman histories in a great number of essential points: some others re-establish the chronology, which is extremely muddled in the writings of almost all the

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

85

Authors: some others cast all possible light on the Geography of the Ancients: others settle the interpretation of many passages by Greek and Latin historians, which had never been understood.16 He develops his method in his monumental Histoire des Gaules, published in inquarto format in 1752 and 1754.17 With the Recueil d’antiquités by the Comte de Caylus published in 1756, we move from the genre of the academic dissertation to that of a collection, compendium or description of the objects. Caylus’s description shows the importance of debate as a means of reception. The appearance and validation of the ‘antiquities of Paris’ depended on the possibility of generating interpretation and debate. The complexity of the object and its decoding rendered any obvious explanations hard to find and gave rise to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Preferring a return to the monument ‘in itself’, Caylus offered a critique of the tradition and shifted the antiquarian debate from philology to visual and material representation.

Finding the origins of the political community If the discovery of the pillar prompted the recognition of the greatness of merchants and their longevity, it also opened an intense and controversial interpretation. The epistemological revolution in knowledge about Paris linked savant practice to a justification of the city magistrature. According to Jacques Lelong and his Bibliothèque historique de la France published in 1766, it was on the ‘order’ of Bignon, Prevost of the Merchants, that Dom Michel Félibien began work on his monumental four-volume Histoire de Paris in 1712.18 In this work Dom Félibien gives a special place to the archaeological discovery of the Pillar of the Boatmen, first publishing the dissertation on the origins of the Hôtel de Ville in which he refutes the thesis advanced by Nicolas de La Mare in his Traité de police that the corps de ville was invented under Philippe Augustus. He also proposed explaining the archaeological discovery of 1711, Dissertation ou observation sur les restes d’un ancien monuments trouvez dans le choeur de l’église Notre Dame de Paris. Félibien argues for a political reading of the inscriptions. The idea is to portray the Boatmen as distant ancestors of the municipal authorities, Félibien’s book being presented as a commission from the corps de ville.19 The presence of monuments dedicated to the emperor necessarily had a corporative aspect and encouraged the antiquarians to compare them to the examples from the Rhone valley and Lyon. However, in the same volume Dom Félibien published the Dissertation sur l’origine de l’hôtel de ville. According to Lelong this dissertation was written by Pierre Leroy and had been previously published in 1722. The first volume appeared as a collection of dissertations by different authors. The dissertation critiqued the idea that the Boatmen were the ancestors of the merchants’ corps and that,

86

Stéphane Van Damme

the Boatmen, regarded simply as boatmen, could have been ‘charged with a municipal function’, since magistratures that were so important were certainly not attached by right to the status of patrons of boatmen, nor to the merchant corps.20 In the third part, describing his Dissertation sur l’origine de l’hôtel de ville, Félibien says, In which is refuted the opinion of the author of the treatise on the police, on the origin of trade by water and its privileges in Paris, and where it is shown that this trade and its privileges were the essence of the municipal corps of this city long before the period in which they were said to have been established.21 Later, Félibien qualified his judgement of La Mare: A single author, that of the Traité de la Police, too informed to slip into any of the opinions of others, knew better than all of them the essential nature of the ancient administration that we are discussing. What might we not expect of his vast erudition, always underpinned by exquisite discernment, had he taken the trouble to discuss this matter! But apparently believing it too distant from his subject, he did not go into it in enough detail. Indeed he so clearly neglected it that, aside from defining the bounds of this primitive administration far too narrowly, he even believed that it had not begun until twenty years after the period that we reject.22 In the part devoted specifically to the history of the city of Paris, Félibien adopts an archaeological perspective: ‘The City of Paris has always been seen as one of the most ancient cities of the Gauls; and it is principally to its great antiquity that we must attribute the obscurity of its origins’.23 So the name of the city came first from the Parisians: This city of Lutetia was the principle city of the peoples that Caesar called the Parisians; for before the Gauls were divided into provinces, as they were under the Romans, they were divided into different peoples or small states, which formed so many different cities. These cities or countries contained a certain extent of lands and one or more towns, which were places of particular assemblies, where each people appointed a general council that was held every year for the affairs of the Gaulish nation. The priests and nobility alone had the right to sit in these assemblies and the people, destined to till the soil, were treated as slaves and had no authority. Among the towns of each city, there was one that was seen as the capital of each state or country, and one such was Lutetia, principal city of

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

87

the Parisians, from where came the name of Paris, when it became usual to give towns the name of the peoples whose capitals they had been.24 We can clearly see here the way that the political and civic dimension is grounded in an urban civilisation, in contradiction to the idea of an opposition between Romanitas and Gaulish pastoral culture. The city’s history was thus initially autochthonous, and then ‘subjugated by the Romans around 704 from the foundation of Rome’. It then became the ‘centre of the Gauls’, to the detriment of Chartres.25 According to Félibien, subjugation by Rome came as a surprise, the Romans were not expected to exert ‘absolute dominance’.26 The Parisians are portrayed as resistance fighters who set fire to the city and took on the Roman general Labienus rather than surrender. Félibien concludes: Of all the pagan antiquities found in Paris, not one has so far proved more instructive or more curious on this point than the ancient inscriptions and bas-reliefs discovered in the cathedral church in March 1711. These precious remains, which we have described in our conjectures, teach us that near the island’s eastern point, which was not far from the port, the community of boatmen, or those who presided over trade on the River Seine throughout the territory of Paris, erected a public monument, whether temple, pyramid or altar, in honour of Jupiter. And the time of this is certain from the inscription, which states that it was under Tiberius Caesar, who died after a reign of twenty-three years, in the year 37 of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.27 The aim was to go beyond the anti-Parisian prejudice of the authors to ‘clarify the reader’s imagination’.28 So throughout the entire eighteenth century, antiquarian research on Paris was partly framed by this archaeology of municipal power, demonstrating the ancient origins of the Hôtel-de-Ville.29 The controversial tone of Félibien’s book is due to the fact that Félibien was the first to receive the title of historiographer to the city of Paris. Both he and Jean Lebeuf remained fascinated by the diocese of Paris,30 which threatened problems for the city in the 1740s, when the Coutume de Paris was being more vigorously defended. A growth in the numbers of published books produced contributions from many historians of variable competence and status. The development of historical studies on the antiquities of Paris ascribed to a new set of writings and pamphlets on the defence of Parisian privileges. Beyond the individuals concerned, the City corporation of Paris sought to stimulate and control its historiographic output. In 1738 Langlois had published his Traité des droits, privilèges et fonctions des conseillers du roi, notaires, gardes notes et gardes scel de sa Majesté au Châtelet de Paris, followed by the Principes généraux de la coutume de Paris in 1740. The Benedictine Louis-François-Joseph de La Barre published a five-volume Histoire (abrégée) de la ville de Paris, avec les privilèges accordés aux bourgeois de Paris in 1735 in a portable duodecimo format. In 1739, Sieur Coste

88

Stéphane Van Damme

de Toulouse published a new Projet d’histoire de la ville de Paris. In the same year the parliamentary lawyer Poncet de la Grave published an Abbrégé chronologique de l’histoire de la ville de Paris. The creation of the city library in 1759 led to a renegotiation of the scope and role of the city historiographer in 1761 as a tool for the defence of the city’s privileges against the religious authorities.31 In 1762 another quarrel broke out between the city historiographer Pierre Bouquet and Antoine Terrasson, who had just published a book on the location of the Hôtel de Soissons. In an anonymous pamphlet, Mémoire historique et critique sur la topographie de Paris, Pierre Bouquet criticised Terrasson for upholding the property rights of the Archbishop of Paris against those of the City. In August 1784, on the occasion of the building of the new Palais de Justice, another rectangular stone – a ‘cippus’ – revived the controversy by affirming the importance of the municipal authority under the Roman Empire. Attention paid to the nature of the stone and to the river was a means of asserting the importance of water-borne trade and establishing the pre-eminence of the corps de ville. These ideas can be found in a report by the Académie celtique written by Johanneau in 1807,32 and later from the pen of Jacques-Antoine Dulaure in the 1820s. In his Histoire physique, civile et morale, supported by ‘physical statistics’, Dulaure begins his narrative by recalling the origins of the ‘Parisian nation’:33 Located on the Seine, an easily navigable river, into which flow other tributaries such as the Yonne, Marne and Oise, Lutetia seems well placed and serves as a central point for navigation in part of Gaul. Thus around the end of the 4th century we see that on the Seine at Andresy there was a fleet of boats under the control of a prefect resident in Paris and that, when the Franks succeeded the Romans, a corporation of boatmen long continued in this city, known as the Mercatores acquae parisiaci, the merchants by water, of the fraternity of merchants by water, etc.34 As we can see, this political reading was well established and had been adopted. This tacit adoption can be seen as a way of shifting the controversy from the juridical terrain to one of geographical privilege. The location, the natural site appeared at the same time in the writings of architects as a superior argument in favour of the right of metropolises to expand spatially. The archaeological debates unfolded the pursuit of origins for the political body of the Merchant corporation and a defence of territory will give a strong importance to historical mapping.

Idolatrous Gauls: ethnologising the Parisii The religious interpretation as opposed to the political one has an ethnographic dimension. Baudelot de Dairval’s Description had earlier emphasised a religious and Gaulish reading of the monument:

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

89

Unearthed stones. Altars of the Gauls. Ancient Greek letters and similar Roman letters. Inscription explained. The Stones that have been brought up are five in number laden with sculptures. There are three of which, unfortunately, only half has been found and another that is only a fragment of a Statue, but in good taste. Most of those who have seen them at first did not know what to think of them. As I was there at the time, I could not help showing that they had served as Altars for the neighbouring inhabitants, the idolatrous Gauls of the canton.35 For Bernard de Montfaucon, in Chapter IV of Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures of 1719,36 the stones had a primarily religious meaning.37 After Baudelot de Dairval, it was no coincidence that the stones attracted the attention of religious savants, from the Jesuit Father Daniel, who published a description of them in Mémoires de Trévoux in 1717, to the Maurists Dom Jacques Martin (1684–1751) and Dom Félibien.38 The latter also celebrated their Gaulish and Celtic aspect in his Dissertation sur les antiquités celtiques of 1725. But emphasis on a religious interpretation did not require authors to speak of religion alone (even if the Gaulish religion was always referred to as idolatry) but enabled them to offer ethnographic readings. Many antiquarian writers of the time were fascinated by the religious origins of ancient peoples. In Paris in 1739 the antiquarian Dom Martin published his Explication de divers monuments singuliers, qui ont rapport à la religion des plus anciens peuples. A Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, Martin dedicated his book to Messieurs of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, ‘arbiter of literary merit and restorer of time, interpreter of ancient monuments’. Martin spoke on Maffei’s behalf, introduced him to France when he made a trip to Paris in 1737, and published his collection Les Antiquités choisies des Gaules on the locations of the tombs of the Gaulish magistrates. The book takes a comparative approach, successively examining the religious funerary rituals of the Romans, Greeks, Gauls, Egyptians and also those of the cult of the god Mithras (in Persia). It considers the funerary practices of the early Christians and places the bas-reliefs of the Pillar of the Boatmen in that context: The Church where the Sarcophagus I have just discussed can still be seen confirms what I said elsewhere, that the genius of the Christians of the first centuries was to place and sometimes to bury Idols in Churches to serve as a trophy for Religion. France alone provides several proofs of this truth. These include the bas-reliefs found in 1711 in the Cathedral of Paris, the famous Idol of St. Germain des Prés, the Ferrabo of the Church of St. Etienne in Lyon, the Hercules of the Cathedral of Strasbourg, and a great many other Monuments that need not be listed. This pious custom inspired St Augustine with fine words: The faithful, he said, treat Pagan Temples, Idols and sacred Woods no less well than their persons. Just as

90

Stéphane Van Damme

they do not exterminate the latter, but convert and change them, so they do not destroy or demolish the former, but consecrate them to Jesus Christ.39 Moreover in his Explication Dom Martin devotes an entire section to the ‘Druids of the Gauls’ through the study of marbles and figures. The Druids were also described at length in his Eclaircissements published in 1744, which studies their customs in Chapter II, paragraph X.40 Here Dom Martin also talks about the social place and role of Gaulish women, who served as ‘judges and advisers’ (paragraph XII). Beyond the Roman occupation and the continuity of the corporation of merchants, the emphasis on the Gaulish religion implied a more ethnographic approach and anticipated Lenoir’s teaching on the Druids at the Athénée de Paris in the 1820s. As specialists have often noted, the role of Druids extended beyond the religious sphere. They formed a body of experts, judges and intellectuals (philosophers).41 A comparison with the Chinese mandarins would be instructive here. As we know since the work of François Hartog, for eighteenth-century thinkers Antiquity served as a laboratory, a mirror to use in thinking about the history of the present.42 The antiquarians projected the figure of the eighteenthcentury philosophe onto the Druids, but often in more clerical form. They were first described as priests:43 The modern Author saw the Druids as Hyperboreans. The former did not constitute a nation like the latter, they were simply the most distinguished element of their nation. Consequently they were judges in all the disputes of their nation.44 In addition to their religious role, the role of the Druids in juridical and moral matters was noted. The fairness of the Druids came ‘from the Gaulish Ladies’: For everyone should know that in times immemorial, as a reward for the wise conduct of the strong women that they were, to stifle an internal war of long duration, the Gauls set up a Sovereign Court consisting of respectable Matrons, which passed final judgement on individual cases, despotically regulated the nation’s interests and decided when war or peace was to be made.45 We know that this marker of civilisation was also to be found in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Druids were taking over. The Druid was described by Dom Martin as an old sage: indeed the age of the Druids was proverbial, like that of the Hyperboreans.46 Their power resided in their position outside society, in the forests: the Druids sought retirement only to engage in contemplation, to make advances in Astronomy, Astrology, Medicine, Jurisprudence, Politics, Theology and the other Sciences that were their profession, and to train disciples who would do them honour.47

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

91

Clearly in the portrait of the Druid we can see the reflection of the Maurist. The parallel was not simply sociological and functional, but also theological: ‘Indeed nothing brought them more fame in antiquity than the dogma of the immortality of the soul, which was the foundation of their Religion and their Philosophy’.48 Unlike the wayward the sceptics and libertines, the ‘Druids openly taught that the soul is immortal, and of all the Philosophers of Antiquity they explained the most clearly and with the least ambiguity this important point of the true Religion’.49 Once again, antiquarian knowledge was a site of the defence of clerical intellectual power. Here again, it is not so much the people of Paris but its representatives, its mouthpieces, that are analysed.

Locating the Parisii: the rise of the historical mapping of Lutetia After the political and religious interpretation of Lutetia remains, antiquarians put the stress on the necessity to develop visual materials and proofs as well. This section will explore how ethnicisation and cartography thus joined forces to give material existence to the Gauls. As in many other fields, the new knowledge of the Parisians of Antiquity involved the use of historical maps. In the first chapter of Le Peuple de Paris, Daniel Roche recalls the importance of the rise of map publishing, its links to the spatial expansion of the population of Paris and also to visual history.50 So we should note that historical maps were indeed present in general geographical and historical atlases. Examination of the catalogues of Léon Vallée and Jean Boutier on the Plans of Paris enables us to grasp the details of this development.51 Illustrious precedents had undoubtedly been seen before the eighteenth century, for example Sebastian Münster, who included a plate on Lutetia in his Cosmographie universelle.52 Other Renaissance authors preferred the genre of choreographies or ‘city portraits’, such as those made by Gueroult in 1552, ‘city theatres’ of the kind known in Italy and those by Joan Blaeu53 in the Spanish Netherlands or by Jean Leclerc.54 The term ‘collection of geographical maps’ was used in the seventeenth century by Nicolas de Fer. In 1692 Fer published the plan of Paris drawn by Rochefort de Jouvin in 1676, in which he included the former walls.55 In the first volume of his Traité de la police, printed in 1705, Nicolas de La Mare published eight plans of Paris at different periods, starting with the Gallo-Roman period. La Mare’s maps are unusual in being truly historical, accompanied by a ‘historical’ description and, crucially, in locating characteristic elements of the period. They were based on ancient sources (Caesar, Strabo). According to Jean Boutier, ‘For his historical plans Nicolas de La Mare gathered information based primarily on the examination of printed texts’.56 La Mare’s series of maps relayed and accompanied the epistemological debate on sources. They introduce a practice in the form of a series of successive plans converging on a glorious present. The aim is to convey ideas about history, rather than give detailed topographical readings. These plates, though regarded as unreliable, had a great impact on the public because they established a grand

92

Stéphane Van Damme

narrative of the city that concurred with the history of the city provided by Dom Lobineau. In the first town maps, pastoral and agricultural activities of the Gaulish can be seen to the south of the city, where there is a visible division of the land into parcels and contrasted with the urban civilisation embodied by the city at the centre. In placing the Île de la Cité at the centre, the maps offer a range of scales that reaffirm the primacy of the city as both crossroads and capital. At the start of the eighteenth century historical cartography provided a discourse of order. La Mare’s first map showing Lutetia before the arrival of the Romans indicates the presence of huts on the Île de la Cité and a temple to Isis or Ceres. The caption reads: ‘This small city, which the Gauls named Lutetia, was the capital of the province of the Parisians, one of 64 that formed the State of the Gauls’. This map shows the pastoral life of the Gauls and the rural aspect of Paris before the arrival of an urban civilisation. At the same time, the depiction of roads emphasises Lutetia’s role as a crossroads. La Mare thus shifted the historical cursor to before the mediaeval creation of the city (which is depicted in plates 3 and 4 showing the city of Grégoire de Tours and then of Philippe Augustus), and crucially before the arrival of the Romans. Historical discussions (entitled ‘description’) contained in cartouches located bottom left provide a narrative context for the maps. We shall say no more about the importance of these cartouches. As Jean-Marc Besse observes: The cartouche is primarily a decorative element, an ornament, which belongs to the fields of architecture, sculpture and engraving … But the cartouche is also a container, something like a frame, in any case having an empty interior space in which something is placed, for example a title, motto, inscription or crest. As a hollow space, it surrounds a centre in which are expressed in textual form the contents of a map, the things that the reader should expect to find on it.57 In 1769, in his Géographe parisien Le Sage published a series of chronological maps.58 Dedicated to Sartine, lieutenant-general of police, the book is an inoctavo guide to Paris by quarter (with a table of street names) for each of which there is a plan. These are preceded by a historical description of the city’s origins and an account of its phases of expansion (pp. 17–50).59 The place of the police and security is directly linked to the growth of Paris through descriptions of guardhouses, pump warehouses and water carts, street cleaning and lighting (boues et lanternes) (pp. 51–67). In the late eighteenth century Jalliot, who was very critical of La Mare’s technique, reused this approach in his Recherches critiques, historiques et topographiques de Paris: I had planned to provide a brief account of the various phases of growth of Paris, with successive plans on which I would have drawn the streets with the names they bore, and the various sacred and profane monuments that existed at the time and have not survived.60

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

93

In 1774–1778 Moithey, who presents himself as geographer engineer to the king and professor of mathematics, made a historical plan of Paris that maps its urban growth. He had already done the same with Orléans, Reims and Lyon.61 The representation of the successive city walls from the time of Philippe Augustus to the nineteenth century gradually became a visual depiction of urban growth, whereas for La Mare and his epigones, it was a gradual zoom in, the changes of scale of the city inside a fixed frame that rendered concrete the filling up of the urban space, with inserts showing the area around Paris and contrasting with the city inside the walls in the centre of the plan. The cartographers also adopted the topographies of guides and travel narratives, focusing their vision of the city on the monuments and royal residences that were tourist sites in the eighteenth century. They reflect a representation of power. Here again we find what Daniel Roche described as the major shift from the picturesque to a more mathematical representation, the expression of a territorialisation, an urban policy that overturned ‘the relations between wealth and space, population and growth’.62 The other striking element in this historical cartography is the interplay of scales. This is particularly true of the Recueil d’antiquités published by the Comte de Caylus in 1756. In leaving philological debates behind, Caylus adopted twin approaches, opting for a monumental and material history and basing his work on techniques of precise recording: ‘Before discussing the Monuments themselves, I should mark by letters on the Plan of Paris and on the Map of its surroundings, the places where they were discovered’.63 In contrast to the approximations of Germain Brice in his Description de Paris of 1696, which ‘is not shown to scale’, Caylus wrote of the Palais des Thermes: ‘Through a Plan and elevations, which I had made with the greatest precision, I have sought to put the Reader in a position to judge the ancient magnificence of the entire Building, through that presented by this room’.64 The most salient aspect of this collection is the composition of places, a geography of antiquities, hence the use of maps. According to Alain Schnapp, For Caylus, exploration of the past required an ever greater horizon of comparison, of which this Collection is the means. Montfaucon wanted to illustrate Antiquity, to turn it into a set of images; Caylus understands illustration as a complement to the material analysis of the object.65 On the materiality of the Palais and the aqueduct Caylus notes, It can thus be assumed that they were built at the same time, and for the same purpose. Not only were the stones taken from the same Quarry, and by the same device, but the brick foundations, laid flat in the Masonry, show more or less the same spacing and certainly the same arrangement.66

94

Stéphane Van Damme

Conclusion In conclusion, what should we retain from this exploration of antiquarian knowledge in terms of civic epistemology? What does it teach us about the people of Paris? From philological research to historic cartography to archaeological excavations, the curiosity generated by the intellectual, juridical, religious and political elites was part of an attempt to give concrete, material reality to the new relationship between the authorities and territory of Paris in the Age of Enlightenment. But Antiquity also offered these savant elites a particular way of talking about the people and offered a very elitist and often clerical vision of the Parisians of Antiquity. In this the antiquarian knowledge of Paris illustrates what the historian of archaeology Bruce Trigger has called the ‘impasses of antiquarianism’, marked at once by an obsession with texts and thus dependency on written sources, and by a religious straitjacket that prevented them imagining an ancient past unconnected to religion.67 Antiquarian knowledge thus appears as a laboratory in which we can identify ‘a system of social perceptions which, through a play of mirrors, questions the reconstructed reality of the historian’.68 At the end of this visit to the different sites working on antiquarian knowledge of Paris, we are obliged to note that the drive for philological, semantic, archaeological and cartographic knowledge did not favour a better understanding of the people of Paris in the eighteenth century. The ancient people remained an abstraction and the detour through antiquarian knowledge brought only a ‘form of invisibilisation of plebeian realities’.69 Despite the proliferation of images and maps on different scales, the aim, as Déborah Cohen so precisely puts it, was to ‘know, so as not to know’.70

Notes 1 A shorter and earlier version of this article was published in French, in Bastien, Le Peuple de Paris. 2 Jasanoff, Designs on Nature. 3 Roche, Le Peuple de Paris. 4 Roche, Les Républicains des lettres. 5 Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past; Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination; Sweet, Antiquaries; Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley; Pearce, Visions of Antiquity; Cook, ‘The Discovery of British Antiquity’. 6 Robertson, ‘Sacred History and Political Thought’. 7 Pimentel, ‘Stars and Stones’. 8 Cohen, La Nature du peuple, 15. 9 Baudelot de Dairval, Description des bas-reliefs anciens, 2–5. 10 Ibidem, 1–3. 11 Ibidem, 4. 12 Ibidem, 5. 13 Matytsin, The Spectre of Skepticism, 233–264. 14 Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, I: ij. 15 Martin, Éclaircissemens historiques sur les origines celtiques et gauloises, preface, ij. 16 Ibidem, viij. 17 Martin, Histoire des Gaules. 18 Lelong, Bibliothèque historique de la France, III: no. 34530.

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

95

19 ‘Monsieur the Prevost of the Merchants & Messieurs the Echevins having some time ago formed the intention of commissioning a new History of the City of Paris, here is in general how it is proposed to support their zeal for the honour of the country’, Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, 2. 20 Le Roy, Dissertation sur l’origine de l’hôtel de ville de Paris, In Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, I: LXXXIII. 21 Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, I: unpaginated summary. 22 Ibidem, ij. 23 Ibidem, 11. 24 Ibidem, 12. 25 Ibidem. 26 Ibidem. 27 Ibidem, 14. 28 Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités, II: 370. 29 ‘Sommaires des paragraphes de la dissertation sur l’origine de l’hostel de Ville de Paris. Première partie: où l’on réfute l’institution prétendue des magistrats municipaux de la ville de Paris, attribué à Philippe-Auguste’, Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, I. 30 See the funerary oration of 1760 by Abbé Lebeuf, Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions, 372–382. 31 Ibidem, 6. 32 Johanneau, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, I: 151–179. 33 Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, I: Ch. 1, 15, 27, 29. 34 Dulaure, Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris, 2nd ed., 96. 35 Baudelot de Dairval, Description des bas-reliefs anciens, 8. 36 Montfaucon, ‘Les Antiquités expliquées par les figures’, 61–76. 37 Van Damme, ‘Digging Authority’. 38 Martin, Éclaircissemens historiques sur les origines celtiques et gauloises; Martin, Explication de divers monumens singuliers. 39 Martin, Explication de divers monumens singuliers, 307–308. 40 Ibidem, 61–64. 41 Droixhe, L’Etymon des Dieux, 270–271. 42 Hartog, Évidences de l’histoire. 43 Martin, Éclaircissemens historiques sur les origines celtiques et gauloises, 63. 44 Ibidem, 66. 45 Ibidem, 66–67. 46 Ibidem, 73. 47 Ibidem, 70. 48 Ibidem, 76. 49 Ibidem, 76–77. 50 Roche, Le Peuple de Paris, 22. 51 Vallée, Catalogue des plans de Paris; Boutier, Les Plans de Paris. 52 Boutier, Les Plans de Paris, 80. 53 Blaeu, Theatrum civitatum et admirandorum italiae; Blaeu, Novum ac magnum theatrum urbium; Blaeu, Théâtre des villes des Pays-Bas espagnols. 54 Leclerc, Recueil de cartes géographiques. 55 Jouvin de Rochefort, Plan de la ville de Paris. 56 Boutier, Les Plans de Paris, 197. 57 Besse, ‘Cartographie et grandeurs de la Terre’, 168. 58 Le Sage, Le Géographe parisien. See Boutier, Les Plans de Paris, 315–318. 59 On Lutetia see Le Sage, Le Géographe parisien, 10–17. 60 Jalliot, Recherches critiques, I: XVIII. 61 Boutier, Les Plans de Paris, 324–325. 62 Roche, Le Peuple de Paris, 22.

96

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Stéphane Van Damme

Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités, II: 371. Ibidem, 372. Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, 53–63, citation 53. Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités, II: 372–373. Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought, 118–120. Ibidem, 53. Cohen, La Nature du peuple, 22. Ibidem, 22.

References Bastien, Pascal. Le Peuple de Paris. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 2018. Baudelot de Dairval, Charles César. Description des bas-reliefs anciens trouvez depuis peu dans l’Eglise cathedrale de Paris. Paris: Pierre Cot, 1711. Besse, Jean-Marc. ‘Cartographie et grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects de la géographie européenne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle).’ In Van Damme, Stéphane ed. Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Paris: Le Seuil, 2015, Vol. 1, pp. 157–176. Blaeu, Joan. Novum ac magnum theatrum urbium Belgicae regalis ad praesentis temporis faciem expressum. s.l., 1649a. Blaeu, Joan. Théâtre des villes des Pays-Bas espagnols.. s.l., 1649b. Blaeu, Joan. Theatrum civitatum et admirandorum italiae ad aevi veteris et parasentis temporis faciem expressum, a Joanne Blaeu (2 vols). Amsterdam, 1663. Blaeu, Joan. Nouveau théâtre d’Italie ou description exacte de ses villes, palais, églises et les cartes géographiques de toutes les provinces. Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1704. Boutier, Jean. Les Plans de Paris, des origines (1493) à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: BNF, 2003. Boyd Haycock, David. William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in EighteenthCentury England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. Carruthers, William and Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the Modern World.’ History of Science 55/3 (2017): 255–272. Caylus, Anne Claude. Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises (7 vols). Paris: Tilliard, 1756. Cohen, Déborah. La Nature du peuple. Les formes de l’imaginaire social (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles). Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2010. Cook, Jill. ‘The Discovery of British Antiquity.’ In Sloan, Kim and Burnett, Andrew eds. Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003, pp. 178–191. Droixhe, Daniel. L’Etymon des Dieux: mythologie gauloise, archéologie et linguistique à l’âge classique. Geneva: Droz, 2002. Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine. Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris. Paris: Guillaume, 1826. Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine. Histoire de Paris, depuis les premiers temps historiques, par J.-A. Dulaure. Paris: Vanier, 1852. Félibien, Michel. Histoire de la ville de Paris composée par D. Michel Félibien. Ed. Lobineau, Guy-Alexis D. Paris: G. Desprez, 1725. Hartog, François. Évidences de l’histoire, ce que voient les historiens. Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 2005. Jalliot. Recherches critiques, historiques et topographiques de Paris. Paris: Jailliot, 1778. Jasanoff, Sheila. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Johanneau, Eloi. Rapport, mémoires de l’Académie celtique. Paris: Dentu, 1807. Jouvin de Rochefort. Plan de la ville de Paris … avec ses nouvelles rues, places, enceintes et cazernes, levé sur les lieux par M. Jouvin de Rochefort. s.l., 1692.

Boatmen, Druids and Parisii in Lutetia

97

Le Sage. Le Géographe parisien ou le Conducteur chronologique et historique des rues de Paris; Orné des sept plans d’accroissement, de vingt plans détachés, mis en tête de chaque quartier & du plan general enluminé. Paris: Valleyre, veuve Duchesne, Laurent Prault, Desaint et Delalain, 1769. Lebeuf, Jean. Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres avec les mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de cette académie, Vol. 29. Paris: Hypolite Cocheris, 1764. Leclerc, J. Recueil de cartes géographiques de toutes les parties du monde et des costes de la mer avec les vues et profils des villes principales. Paris: Jean Leclerc, s.d. Lelong, Jean. Bibliothèque historique de la France. New edition by Fevret de la Fontenette. Paris: Herissant, 1771. Martin, Jacques. Explication de divers monumens singuliers, qui ont rapport à la religion des plus anciens peuples, avec l’examen de la dernière édition des ouvrages de S. Jérôme et un traité sur l’astrologie judiciaire … par le R. P. Dom ***, religieux bénédictin de la congrégation de S. Maur. Paris: Lambert, 1739. Martin, Jacques. Éclaircissemens historiques sur les origines celtiques et gauloises. Avec les quatre premiers siècles des annales des Gaules, par le R. P. D***. Paris: Durand, 1744. Martin, Jacques. Histoire des Gaules, et des conquêtes des Gaulois, depuis leur origine jusqu’à la fondation de la monarchie françoise. Ouvrage enrichi de monumens antiques & de cartes géographiques. Par … & continué par Dom Jean-François de Brezillac. Paris: Le Breton, 1752–1754. Matytsin, Anton M. The Spectre of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Montfaucon, Bernard. ‘Les Antiquités expliquées par les figures.’ In Choay, Françoise ed. Le patrimoine en questions. Anthologie pour un combat. Paris: Le Seuil, 2009, pp. 61–76. Pearce, Susan ed. Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1707–2007. London: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 2009. Piggott, Stuart. Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Pimentel, Juan. ‘Stars and Stones: Astronomy and Archaeology in the Works of the Mexican Polymath Antonio Leon y Gama, 1735–1802.’ Itinerario. International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global interaction 33/1 (2009): 61–78. Robertson, John. ‘Sacred History and Political Thought: Neapolitan Responses to the Problem of Sociability after Hobbes.’ The Historical Journal 56/1 (2013): 1–29. Roche, Daniel. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Roche, Daniel. Les Républicains des lettres au xviiie siècle. Gens de culture et Lumières. Paris: Fayard, 1989. Roche, Daniel. Le Peuple de Paris (2nd ed.). Paris: Fayard, 1998. Schlanger, Nathan. ‘Series in Progress: Antiquities of Nature, Numismatics and Stone Implements in the Emergence of Prehistoric Archaeology (1776–1891).’ History of Science 48 (2010): 344–369. Schlanger, Nathan. ‘Boucher de Perthes au travail. Industrie et préhistoire au XIXe siècle.’ In Raj, Kipal and Sibum, Otto eds. Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Volume 2: Modernité et globalisation. Paris: Le Seuil, 2015, pp. 267–284. Schnapp, Alain. The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology. London: British Museum Press, 1996. Schnapp, Alain. ‘La méthode Caylus.’ In Aghion, Irène ed. Caylus, mécène du roi: collectionner les antiquités au XVIIIe siècle. Catalogue d’exposition. Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2002, pp. 53–63. Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004.

98

Stéphane Van Damme

Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1996]. Vallée, Léon. Catalogue des plans de Paris et des cartes de l’ïle de France de la généralité de l’archévêché, de la vicomté, de l’université, du grenier à sel et de la cour des aydes de Paris. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1908. Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘Digging Authority: Archaeological Controversies and the Recognition of the Metropolitan Past in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris.’ In Bullard, Paddy and Tadié, Alexis eds. Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016, pp. 55–69. Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘The Pillar of Metropolitan Greatness: The Long Making of an Archaeological Object (1711–2000).’ History of Science 55/3 (2017): 302–335.

PART II

Urban agency, science, technology and the making of the city

4 STENCH AND THE CITY Urban odors and technological innovation in early modern Leiden and Batavia Marius Buning1

Introduction This essay analyzes the importance of urban smellscapes for early modern technological innovation, proceeding from the idea that cities did not only consist of people, impressive buildings, and industry, but also of excrements, public toilets, and air pollution. Ever since the Middle Ages, urban authorities had made attempts to regulate this type of pollution and, as Carlo Cippola and others have shown, this led in some cases to the establishment of a form of public health care.2 Yet attempts to fight urban pollution also led to technological innovation, for instance, because new machinery had to be developed to dredge the city’s canals, or because new mills had to be designed to flush polluted water outside the city limits. Early modern pollution was a problem identified primarily by scent. The aversion of specific smells was related to the idea that the air could be a source of contagion – and of all contagious diseases, the plague was possibly the most intimidating.3 Within the framework of Galenistic theory, based on keeping a balance between the four humors and the elements, the quality of the air was essential in maintaining a good health; foul air was to be kept at a distance, whereas a pleasant smell could protect someone against illness.4 The so-called ‘miasma theory’ focusing on air quality to explain the spread of disease remained dominant until the nineteenth century. Only then, did the awareness rise that the spread of disease might have something to do with microbes.5 Despite the existence of a general theory identifying a medical relation between contagion and stench, the interpretation of specific odors could differ. Stench, in that sense, existed in the nose of the beholder and, as Mary Douglas and others have suggested, the identification of ‘pollution’ was thus, at least in part, a culturally determined fact that encapsulated ideas about political power,

102

Marius Buning

social distinction, and knowledge practices.6 This essay takes this insight as a starting point to unpack the deeper meaning of the smell of water that flowed through early modern urban canals.7 It thus attempts to draw different historiographical traditions together, and to reveal the existing kinship between the early modern period and later developments. The relationship between smell, medical knowledge, and urban development has been a recurrent theme in studies that focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, intrinsic links are identified with the emergence of territorial consciousness and the exercise of (colonial) power.8 For the early modern period, such issues have received a lot less attention. The experience of smell has been dealt with primarily by philosophers and historians of medicine, often in complete independence from questions that relate to urban planning and political power.9 Vice versa, histories of early modern water management and state regulation have had little eye for medicinal concerns.10 The purpose of this essay is to change that. The argument that I will explore is that certain smells were typical for a city; that these smells led to specific reactions by city dwellers and local authorities; and that, along these lines, urban odors played a decisive role in the development of new technologies. I do so by making a comparison between two major Dutch cities: Leiden, an industrial center for textile processing, and Batavia, the Republic’s colonial headquarters in the East Indies. The outline of the text is as follows. First, I deal with the Leiden experience of malodorous water by analyzing a series of plans for the amelioration of water flow in the canals. I embed the Leiden problem of water refreshment in its context, making a short comparison with the situation in a number of other towns. Then, I switch over to Batavia, discussing the various ways in which the biggest Dutch city in the East Indies struggled with the problem of putrid canals. Towards the conclusion, I return to the question of how knowledge, power, stench, and the quest for innovation were interlinked in various location-specific ways.

Sanitizing Leiden The city of Leiden was one of the important industrial centers for textile processing in the early modern period. The city attracted a large number of poor immigrants, and experienced a rapid population growth particularly after the de facto independence of the Dutch Republic in 1581. Around 1574, roughly 12,000 people had lived in the city. By the 1620s their number had reached almost 45,000.11 The unprecedented growth of the population led to immanent housing problems. Likewise, it intensified the necessity of specific demands, such as fire extinguishers, installations to secure sufficient drinking water, and a sewerage system.12 Leiden was known as a smelly city. Like other cities throughout Europe, it mainly suffered from three pollutants, namely, human and animal excrements, carcasses of dead animals, and the pollution coming by specific industries, such

Stench and the city

103

as copper smelting or tanning. Ever since the fourteenth century, the authorities had tried to regulate the nuisance of stench.13 Yet, although one can find many examples of earlier regulations on pollution, the urban authorities did not get directly involved in the employment or production of new technologies to fight pollution.14 This radically changed in the course of the sixteenth century, as can be illustrated by a report tabled by Leiden’s city secretary Jan van Hout, in 1591, with the title On the Means of Taking Away the Decay of the Waters Caused by the Fullers in the City of Leiden.15 Van Hout’s plan was essentially to move the fullers to the outskirts of the city, because of the pollution they produced. The fullers would be relocated to a new industrial area north of the old town that would get its own drainage pipeline, leading polluted water out of the city. The relocation of polluting industries was by no means a value-free operation. It was equally a means for ‘respectable’ citizens to distinguish themselves from the poor. Accordingly, the relocation of the fullers was sustained in the project of Van Hout as follows: That the afore-mentioned part of town [=Rapenburg], currently least inhabited and with few houses, will be made lively and livable, by making the fullers depart to make space for other persons who are highly desired and sought for.16 In Van Hout’s assessment, poverty and stench were intrinsically linked. Gaining control over the causes of environmental degradation formed the basis for his ideas on how to rearrange the city. On the issue of zoning, Van Hout was following a humanist tradition.17 More specifically, Van Hout may have been influenced directly by the ideas of the famous architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who had spoken extensively about hygiene, disease, and zoning in his treatise De Rei Edificatoria (1443–1452, 1485).18 Alberti had linked the problem of pollution to the poor and specific trades, as well as to foreigners and strangers. One of his suggestions had been to divide the city into zones ‘according to the occupation and rank of every one’. Thus, Alberti argued: The charm of a city will be very much enhanced if the various workshops are allocated distinct and well-chosen zones. The silver-smiths, painters, and jewelers should be on the forum, then next to them, spice shops, clothes shops, and, in short, all those that might be thought more respectable. Anything foul or offensive (especially the stinking tanners) should be kept well away in the outskirts to the north, as the wind rarely blows from that direction, and when it does, it gusts so strongly as to clear the smells away, rather than carry them along.19

104

Marius Buning

The Leiden project of Jan van Hout, however, went beyond zoning per se. At the time, it was generally agreed that the dangerous stench coming from canals was mostly caused by stagnant waters. Van Hout’s proposal therefore also included the use of new technologies to make the waters flow. More specifically, he wanted to install a mill recently invented by Simon Franszoon van Merwen, the treasurer of the city, who incidentally was also responsible for a number of maps that accompanied Van Hout’s proposals.20 Van Merwen had obtained a ‘patent’ for his invention of a new water wheel in 1589, which meant that he held the exclusive rights to the commercial exploitation of the technology for a limited number of years (in this case, 15 years, which was not unusual).21 The text of the patent indicated that Van Merwen played a central role in Leiden’s department of Public Works (stadsfabriekambt) and reveals a direct involvement of the authorities in the realization of civil engineering projects: The Court of the City of Leiden has showed the aforementioned States [of Holland] a certain new invention of a water wheel, equipped with a screw on the inside by Mr. Simon Fransz van Merwen, Treasurer extraordinaire of the named city and commissioned to supervise the Public Works department there, which serves [i.e. the invention] to bring up water to great heights, having on the bottom and on the top its center or the disposal point, erected on his own costs in the Leprosy House in Leiden for testing in the ditch there, and operated by three men the water was drained in abundance to the height of 5 or 6½ feet.22 After further tests with Van Merwen’s mill were successfully completed, his invention was implemented as part of Van Hout’s master plan. Another element of that plan was that the authorities would allocate a location outside the city for the construction of fulling mills connected to the new water system. Van Hout had anticipated that: in case no one shall be found who is willing or able to build fulling mills, which is very well possible since fullers are mostly people of little means … then we will need fulling mills that will be rented out on behalf of the city, as so to make a profit of it.23 In 1593, the city council indeed organized an invitation to tender for the construction of the mills. The authorities promised to provide all the stone, wood, tiles, and iron for the construction of the mills to make sure that they would be properly constructed. Yet the creation of a new industrial area did not resolve the problem of the Leiden stench. New complaints came in about pollution as early as 1594, and the city council soon decided that the city plan had to be changed even more drastically. In 1611, time had finally come for an actual enlargement of the city

Stench and the city

105

based on a series of new plans that had been drawn up by the influential land surveyor Jan Pietersz. Dou (1573–1635) (see Figure 4.1).24 As in the earlier case of Van Merwen, Dou worked in the service of the city of Leiden and, as in the project of 1591, new ideas about water management coincided with political and economical interests. On 6 May 1611, the representatives of Leiden lamented in the Assembly of the States of Holland: … that the city, and especially its waters, are ever more infected with a lot of stench and dirt, caused by several dirty trades that have to be carried out in the center of town, and the suppliants do not know any means to ameliorate the situation, except for moving [the trades] outside the city.25 The States of Holland was a provincial governmental apparatus in which the nobility and 18 cities of Holland were represented; it had to approve of the expansion of Leiden’s territory so as to balance competing local interests.26 Discussing Leiden’s request,

FIGURE 4.1 Stadsplattegrond van Leiden, 1611, designed by Jan Pietersz. Dou – colored pen drawing. © Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, PV332, Public Domain.

106

Marius Buning

the States’ representatives quickly came to a common accord that the city should be allowed to expand its borders in an attempt to fight the problem of putrid waters. Behind closed doors, the Leiden city council applauded this decision also in view of the fact that the construction of new houses would increase the number of weavers.27 The expansion would thus further enrich the city, whereas the current housing shortage: … caused many beneficiaries of annuities (rentenaars), merchants, and other folks of quality and means, who might intend to settle in Leiden … to move elsewhere … and many workers in the city are moving out of the city to the countryside, ameliorating it with [the construction of] many houses, so that in time we may fear that the trade [=textile processing] will be pulled in that direction, doing damage to the city.28 Leiden dreaded the loss of power and resolutely opposed the construction of suburbs, which inevitably had resulted in ever higher inner-city housing prices.29 The 1611 expansion did very little to address this problem, however, as the best plots were bought by a small group of speculators, among whom some of the land surveyors who were responsible for the project.30 Moreover, the expansion again did not solve the persistent problems of stench. After seeking advice from several experts, including from the famous engineer Jan Andriaansz Leeghwater (1575–1570), the city decided in 1635 to address the problem by building a couple of sluices.31 In arguing their case in the Assembly of the States of Holland, the authorities this time made a direct link with a recent plague epidemic: The mayors and rulers of Leiden remonstrated that, because of garbage dumps as well as the diking in of several waters [=de Zoetermeer, drained in 1616] … the waters in their city have turned stinky, which according to the judgment of doctors probably contributes to the cause of the ‘hot disease’ [=the plague] in town. They would therefore like to implement the construction of three sluices.32 Medicinal expertise was invoked as a rhetorical strategy to proceed with the construction of sluices; yet, the sluices did not resolve any of the enduring problems. In 1642, the stench had apparently become unbearable again and someone in the milieu of rich cloth merchant and political theorist Pieter de la Court (1618–1685) published a pamphlet arguing strongly in favor of a new expansion of the town.33 The pamphlet addressed three main points: the massive immigration of poor laborers, dilapidation, and the danger of a plague epidemic:34 If we do not enlarge our city, we have to fear for a new plague, which will empty the city of many folks. [A new plague will surely come] because those folks live so closely on top of one another – and in

Stench and the city

107

particular the weavers, combers, and spinners, who all work with oil, piss, and other stinking fat, which has infected the air to such a degree that one can not go through the streets without inhaling the dirty and stinking air. To dwell in their houses is almost entirely impossible.35 On 28 October 1642, the city council came into action. It nominated a committee from its midst that was to decide on the quality of the projects that had been submitted so far, as well as to hold a new design contest to find a solution to the persistent problem of stench.36 Nine entries promptly came in. They were seriously discussed before the committee decided in favor of the project of Arent Van Gravesande (c. 1610–1662), the official surveyor of Leiden, who basically proposed to enlarge the city to fight overpopulation and to install a series of mills on strategic spots throughout the city to make the water circulate (see Figure 4.2).

‘Gelegenheyt van eenige sloten buyten deser Stede Leyden gaende van des stadts Cingel tot aende Oude Vliet, Room en Meerburger Wateringen als oock to aende Slaaghsloot ende Zijl’ (drawing of a closure outside Leiden), 1642, designed by Joris Gerstecoren – colored pen drawing. © Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, PV9152.2, Public Domain.

FIGURE 4.2

108

Marius Buning

On the basis of an open tender, the city built a number of mills for roughly 4300 guilders each.37 The project, moreover, again included the implementation of patented technology. In March 1642, a certain Jacob Meyer had obtained the exclusive rights to exploit an invention that was described as: a very curious way, which had not yet been put to work, with which he could drain or raise still water without the help of wind, horses, humans, or any other creature, against the ordinary course of nature … useful for all cities and places, especially for the City of Leiden, which is filled and troubled by a lot of dirty and smelly water.38 In reality, Meyer had invented a new type of dog mill that was to replace a horse mill in Leiden’s water refreshment scheme. After a series of successful tests with a prototype that Meyer had built in his backyard, the city decided to purchase one mill made after Meyer’s design and to install it in a barn that was also suited for inhabitation. In July 1644, Meyer was appointed to operate his invention.39 At that point, Leiden had just obtained permission from the States of Holland for the new expansion of its borders. The privilege for the enlargement of Leiden again explicitly mentioned how the city and its waters were ‘ever more contaminated and filled with dirt and stench, caused by several dirty trades’ that belonged to the textile trade.40 Those trades had to be moved, yet kept under urban control. Moreover, the extension of the town’s jurisdiction was needed because: the most beautiful and spacious houses of the city have been split up and turned into dilapidated housing, so that people of quality have been forced against their will to leave us and to find more suitable housing in other cities.41 As in 1611, the argument was dominated by a discourse that linked poverty, stench, and a need to expand the city. The case of Leiden thus offers a fine illustration of how the employment of new technologies to fight pollution were intrinsically linked to the social reorganization of the city; the quest for technological innovation also meant to identify obtrusive elements that slowed down what was seen as improvement and progress by the people in power.

Epistemic communities and negotiation arenas Leiden was not the only city in the Republic suffering from smelly canals. Also in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Delft, numerous proposals were made to ameliorate the water circulation by means of new technologies, and it is worthwhile to ask the question to what degree the case of Leiden was indeed representative or unique. Undoubtedly, both the type and the degree of stench were

Stench and the city

109

dependent on local circumstances. The water flow in the canals of The Hague, for example, was mainly dependent on rainwater, as the city was not situated next to a river or open water (and so could not make use of tides and currents).42 The case of Leiden was unique in the sense that the town’s industry entirely focused on the production of textile, whereas Amsterdam had its own problems that could partially be ascribed to the low position of the borough called the Jordaan.43 Despite these differences, there was still a general pattern regarding the problem of water management in large towns – a pattern that directly related to the threat of plague epidemics. Physicians were on this point fairly unanimous. The Dordrecht town physician Johan van Beverwijck (1594–1649), for example, identified the stench of canals in his hometown as having a bad impact on the spread of the plague. Referring to ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, he argued that ‘the stagnant waters … would make stinking damps arise that cause infection in the air’.44 Also the professor of medicine Isbrand van Diemerbroeck (1609–1674) noted the negative impact of malodorous canals in a well-known treatise on the plague, arguing that Leiden, The Hague, Amsterdam, and other cities: … have canals with stagnant water amidst the wide streets. In the summer, these [canals] breathe out such a stench, because of the putrefaction and decay of the water, that visitors, who are not used to the stench, often have to close their nose, when the water is moved with the skippers’ oars and punting poles.45 It was primarily (the fear for) the plague that instigated the implementation of new projects to make the canal water circulate. Remarkable in this regard is how the timing of large-scale work on the canals in Dutch cities coincided. There was equally a remarkable coherence between the implementation of regulations that related to the battle against pollution more generally. The plague thus functioned as a catalyst for uniform action, and cities operated in that respect much less independently than the historiography on the Dutch Republic has sometimes made it appear. On the other hand, the search for a durable solution to the water problem led to conflicts between the cities and other political bodies as well.46 In an argument about the drainage of the Wormermeer, to give one example, the city councilors of Purmerend, who initiated the project, encountered strong opposition from the surrounding towns, who feared that changing the project would have a negative impact on their well-being. On 20 December 1623, the lords of Edam extensively argued their case in the Assembly of the Provincial States: [T]he lords of Edam allege the ruin of their city because of the loss of flow of water, thereby withering its port and [leading to] the standstill of water that would thenceforth become malodorous, have expressively made

110

Marius Buning

objection, demanding that they will not be treated differently in these matters than the other members of the Assembly, and therefore to deny the request [to drain Lake Wormer].47 It was clear that finding a solution for the water problem in the cities could not be found in one city alone; continuous consultation was needed with the water boards and other cities represented in the Provincial Estates.48 Since the cities and other political bodies ultimately abided by the decision taken in the Provincial Estates, water management issues in that way indirectly strengthened the Assembly’s ‘institutional capital’.49 At every level, bargaining was the norm. Different theoretical solutions circulated at all times and the authorities took each of them into serious consideration, as long as a practical solution to the problem of malodorous canals was not yet found. For example, even if most physicians agreed that the movement of water was beneficial for maintaining a healthy city,50 the alchemist Marcus Meyboom tried to convince the Amsterdam city council in the second half of the seventeenth century that the circulation of water was actually a major trigger for the transmission of infectious diseases. Referring extensively to Hippocrates and other ancient authorities, Meyboom argued that rain bins were the real cause of a recent plague epidemic, since these bins poisoned the collected rainwater with led and chalk. Not coincidentally, Meyboom had just obtained a patent from the States of Holland for the commercial exploitation of a new method for water treatment on a chemical basis.51 He offered his method to the Amsterdam city council in 1680 for ‘a certain amount of money’ (sekere summe geldts), insisting, however, that he would keep the details secret until he received some form of recompense.52 Two years later, Meyboom finally managed to conclude an exclusive contract with the Amsterdam authorities. The long wait was probably somewhat of a disappointment for both parties, because when Meyboom finally revealed his method, the project was immediately shelved. The point of bringing in Meyboom’s example is not to provide an overview of failed projects (of which there are many), but to show how various theoretical solutions to a problem were still up for discussion as long as a desired practical outcome was not yet achieved. Different options were reflected upon and weighed, and the final decision for the implementation of a specific project was highly dependent on local circumstances. In order to bring the particularity of this process of negotiation out even more clearly, we now shift over to the other side of the globe, where the Dutch were confronted with similar problems of foul-smelling canals in the settlement of Batavia (present-day Jakarta in the Republic of Indonesia).

Smelling Batavia Batavia was the Dutch Republic’s most important colonial stronghold. The city was built from the ground up in 1619, following a pattern of straight streets and straight

Stench and the city

111

canals (see Figure 4.3). The settlement that would come to serve as a major center of trade in the East was situated at the mouth of the Ciliwung, the ‘Big River’ (Grote Rivier) and protected by a moated fortress against attacks from the sea.53 The colony was protected from inland assaults by 22 bulwarks that were situated roughly 600 meters from the city walls. Within those walls, on a terrain not bigger than 2250 × 1500 meters, a unique society developed that consisted of a local Javanese population,54 ‘free citizens’ (vrijburgers), numerous European adventurers and trade’s people, a large Chinese population, slaves of various backgrounds (who constituted half of the population), and Mardijkers, who were the descendants of freed slaves.55 Batavia may have resembled a Dutch town from an architectural perspective; from an organizational point of view there were many differences. One of those differences was that the Dutch citizenry of Batavia never obtained any rights to representation. Decisions were made exclusively by a governor-general, who sometimes consulted an advisory board called the Council of the Indies. Both the governor-general and his advisory board were controlled from the motherland by the East Indies Company’s board of directors, the Gentlemen XVII. The board of directors occasionally did consider the usefulness of political representation, hoping to make a prolonged stay in the Indies more attractive to future settlers, yet they eventually always decided against it, fearing that the

FIGURE 4.3 Map of the castle and city Batavia in the year 1667, anonymous designer – aquarel. © Tropenmuseum/KIT, TM-496–2.

112

Marius Buning

institutionalization of citizenship would weaken their grip on power.56 In stark contrast to the Republic, decisions on Batavia’s urban water management system were thus ultimately taken exclusively by the governor-general. Batavia was situated in a marshy area, and it seems that the Dutch initially believed they could simply transport their knowledge on water management across the globe. But building straight canals in the tropics was not a good idea, if only because the tropical climate was very different from the climate at home. The tidal range was smaller and rivers did not always flow strongly, which led to continuous problems of siltation. Moreover, the flow of water was hampered by the dirt that came from the sugar plantations in the Ommelanden (the lands surrounding the urban settlement) and the habit of throwing rubbish and muck in the canals.57 Complaints would continue for centuries about the stench coming from ‘the vile dank ditches, dignified by the name of canals’.58 Another factor contributing to the stench in the streets of Batavia was the mudslide that grew on the city’s shores. In 1635, Governor-General Hendrik Brouwer had decided to build two breakwaters, which had the unforeseen consequence that mud began silting up along the coast. Time and time again, the breakwaters had to be extended in order to keep the harbor accessible – and after each extension the silting up increased. The result was, in a word, dramatic. When the city was built in 1619, the castle was still located next to the sea; when the Company imploded in 1795, the castle was situated two kilometers inland. There were continuous complaints about an unbearable stench coming from the mudslide, where countless fish and other animals stayed dead behind at every low tide.59 It did not last long before people started to connect the particular scent of Batavia to the unhealthy living conditions in the city.60 As a mark of social distinction, the upper classes started moving out of the city and away from the sea. A contemporary passer-by noted in 1820, that they did so in order to avoid the: … unhealthy evaporations of the stinking canals, and so the main causes of disease. The wealthy people reside in gardens outside the city, ordering their water from the ‘Blue Mountains’ [=Mount Salak, Mount Gede, and Mount Pnagrango], because it is extraordinarily good there.61 The drift to the countryside only got fully underway in the 1730s, and it remains uncertain if the urban water reservoirs had always been that polluted. Earlier in the seventeenth century, a physician in the service of the East Indies Company had for example not considered water to be the main problem, but the humidity of hot air (singling out, in particular, the warm winds coming from the inland mountains). In a dialogue On the Preservation of Health, and on the Diet Most Suitable in the Indies, Jacobus Bontius (1592–1631) stated:

Stench and the city

113

From what I have said, it must be plain that the rainy season, or summer, is the most unhealthy, as the heat and moisture of the air are deservedly reckoned by naturalists the efficient causes of putrefaction. For unless the morning and evening breezes, which prevail in that season, and the thick and cloudy constitution of the air, protected from the heat, this country would be uninhabitable.62 Bontius’s comments were in line with the Hippocratic tradition. The ancient Greek physician had extensively discussed the importance of warm winds in a chapter on Airs, Waters, and Places ‘to show how different in all respects are Asia and Europe, and why races are dissimilar, showing individual physical characteristics’.63 Hippocrates had insolently ascribed a difference in character to weather conditions; people living in a warm climate were foul, whereas people hardened by a cold climate had a natural tendency to bravery.64 It comes as no surprise that these insights were happily taken up when the European Age of Discovery got fully on its way. The dangers of humid warm air were, for that matter, evident to European observers outside the East Indies as well. The globetrotter Jan Huygen van Linschoten, for example, described an area around the river Darien (in the Caribbean) as being very healthy in the mountains, but dangerous in the valley because of the stinking swamp-like waters.65 Willem Bosman, to give another example, referred in his description of Ghana to the ‘unhealthfulness’ of the country: Some here distinguish betwixt one place and another; and I am somewhat inclined to their Opinion: If they choose those places where the wind blows continually and very fresh, and where the Negroes occasion the least Stench, they are undoubtedly the most healthful: and as such I would prefer Boutry and Zacondee in the first place.66 Back in Batavia, stench was occasionally associated with specific groups of the population too. On 1 October 1633, for example, the authorities decided to have the thatched houses demolished that some inhabitants had built behind their houses. The lodgings were built without governmental consent for ‘families with little means’ (familien van geringe conditien), unwittingly increasing the number of alleyways: Such private slum dwellings and entries are nothing else than rat runs for unruly people, hotbeds of all stench … deforming the appearance and luster of a well situated and regulated city … several places and yards are still empty and uninhabited … people move to the slum dwellings because of the bargain price … the inhabitants in many places are living too confined, on top of each other, in great stench and dirt.67

114

Marius Buning

As had been the case in Leiden, the authorities in Batavia made a direct link between stench, poverty, and a persistent housing shortage. In that sense, the ideology that spread in the East did not differ much from that in the European motherland. What did differ was the way in which the authorities dealt with the problem. Back in the European motherland, the authorities had relied on technical experts who had a good understanding of local circumstances and conditions. One might have expected along those lines that the Dutch would also have made any use of local engineering knowledge to solve the problem of putrefied canals in the East. After all, the Dutch traveler Johan Nieuhof had described the city canals of Nanjing with great admiration, admiring, in the footsteps of Marco Polo and Giovanni Botero, Chinese methods of water management and building canals.68 There are also several records of Western Europeans who were treated by local healers, so there was apparently some confidence in local knowledge when it came to medicinal knowledge.69 But when it came to finding a solution for the stinking canals in Batavia, there is no evidence in the official sources that the Dutch ever relied on the local population as a source of technical expertise (even if the town housed a substantial Chinese population, and despite the extensive trade agreements with other authorities in the region).70 What did happen, is that the Dutch used chained prisoners and ‘MudJavanese’ (modderjavanen) to dredge the canals by hand.71 The use of laborintensive methods was, in a way, in line with ‘local’ traditions in the sense that it was common to dredge by hand in China, because of the abundant availability of cheap labor. Yet the lack of technological development clearly related to specific power structures as well. As Karel Davids pointed out recently, technological development thus ‘not only depended on the presence, or absence, of particular technical know-how’.72 The Dutch authorities in Batavia would never implement machinery on a scale as they had done back in the motherland, nor even look for technical solutions. Instead, they repeatedly issued decrees to keep the castle, their ships, and the city clean and to counter ‘stench, and dirty unhealthy vapors’.73 GovernorGeneral Antony van Diemen (1593–1645), for example, decided in an extensive set of regulations issued on 9 July 1633, not only that Protestant Reformed religion was the only admissible religion within city walls, but also to ‘forbid anyone to make lime kilns, or to burn lime, within the city walls, because of the dirty smoke and stench’.74 In contrast to the situation in the motherland, however, the colonial authorities did not engage with the production of machinery to fight pollution. In fact, the only project related to water management that included a new technology dated from 1704, when Jacob Faes proposed to build a mud mill that had been ‘invented in the motherland’ to clean the mudslide at Batavia’s shores.75 In 1707, it was agreed that the project was a failure and that the mills should be sold.76 By that time, Jacob Faes had been promoted and obtained a seat in the Council of the Indies.

Stench and the city

115

Also when it came to the smell coming from Batavia’s putrid canals, the authorities insisted on regulations to limit the pollution.77 A well-known example in this regard was the 1653 directive to empty lavatories in the canals only before four o’clock in the morning, or after nine o’clock at night. The new rule was justified because many ‘unregulated and dirty’ people: … were throwing their filth and dirt not only in the canals with water, but also in the dry canals on top of the sludge, which not only causes a dirty and oppressive stench on a hot afternoon, but which in time might cause a pestilence disease among the population.78 As had been the case in Leiden, a direct link was made between poverty, stench, and the danger of a plague; yet in the colony, it did not result in any capital investment. The authorities carried out the occasional repair and maintenance work on the canals, but there is no evidence of any large-scale projects to ameliorate the water flow using machinery until the 1740s, when Gustaaf Willem Van Imhoff (1705–1750) became the governor-general of the East Indies. By that time, it had become increasingly difficult to attract enough qualified personnel because of the bad reputation of the colonial city in terms of health. One of Van Imhoff’s projects was therefore to implement a series of sluices to spout the canals; the project was a disaster and the last remains of the sluices were cleared in 1797.79

Conclusion In the historiography on early modern health regimes, relatively little attention has been paid to large-scale infrastructural projects, or to the technological innovations they entailed, especially in comparison to the study of institutions that somehow foreshadowed the emergence of ‘modern’ public health care, which is in turn characterized by the professionalization of medical personnel and the involvement of political authorities in the management of the physical well-being of citizens.80 When infrastructural projects involving new technology are mentioned at all, their political significance is all too easily taken for granted. It is thus forgotten that it was through the materialization of infrastructural projects that a sense of the political was constituted. When unpacking the relationship between urban sensescapes and technological innovation, we see that different reactions were possible in response to the same problem. Comparing Leiden with Batavia has shown that the issue of smell led to serious capital investments and technological innovation in one case, whereas prisoners on the chain were used to address the same issue on the other side of the globe. The simple observation that ‘space’ matters for the accommodation of technology is not new, yet it still serves as an important warning against simplistic accounts of technological determinism; there was nothing

116

Marius Buning

natural about the fact that people living in cities found technical solutions for the problems that they encountered. The paradigms of power worked more subtly. The case study on Leiden has shown how technological innovation went hand in hand with broader transformations in the social organization of a city; getting the town clean was a matter of making the water circulate as well as getting rid of stinking industries. Water management, political power, and medical knowledge were on this point deeply interconnected. Technical experts, physicians, and administrators negotiated their knowledge claims, and in doing so shaped the kind of knowledge that was being produced. Moreover, the different political authorities in the Republic, such as city councils and water boards, had to find a satisfactory balance of power, which in turn strengthened the institutional power of a higher authority in which they were represented. On the other side of the globe, political representation was entirely absent. The absence of any ‘arenas of negotiation’ determined, also in this case, the type of knowledge that was produced whereby the local population was entirely disregarded. Moreover, technological solutions imported from the motherland were never adapted to local circumstances. The problem of Batavia’s putrid canals may have been less pressing in the eyes of the authorities, in terms of scale as well as in terms of budget recourses. Yet the lack of technological development was equally driven by a particular view of mankind supported by contemporary medical theory and an imbalanced view on stewardship. Only when it became difficult to find enough qualified personnel from Europe would the authorities come into action to make the colonial capital slightly more attractive. Only then, would stench become an issue.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this essay have been presented at the workshop ‘Civic Epistemologies’, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris (2017); at the Seminar for Early Modern History, Georg August-University of Göttingen (2018); and at the LMU Workshop ‘History of the Senses’, Historisches Kolleg, Munich (2018). The author is particularly grateful to the organizers and the participants of these workshops for their comments and suggestions. The research was made possible by a fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. 2 Cipolla, Public Health. The literature on this has grown excessively large. For a first overview, see Coomans and Geltner, ‘The History of Public Health’. For the historiography on pre-modern European cities and their environment, see Stöger, ‘Environmental Perspectives’. 3 For a short but useful intellectual history of contagion, see Nutton, ‘The Seeds’. For a delicate analysis of the discrepancy between the theory and practice, see Carmichael, ‘Contagion Theory’. On the plague in the Dutch Republic, see Noordegraaf and Valk, De gave Gods; Dijstelberge and Noordegraaf, Plague and Print in the Netherlands. 4 For that reason, people carried for instance herbs on them, and later started using perfumes. Dugan, History of Perfume; Roodenburg, ‘Smelling Rank and Status’. Gardens were yet another locus for the rich experience of smell, see Rawcliffe, ‘Delectable Sightes’.

Stench and the city

117

5 For the importance of smell in Galenistic theory, see Palmer, ‘In Bad Odour’. 6 Mary Douglas framed dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 36. The study of pollution and cleanliness would therefore expose specific structures in the social constitution of a society. Following Douglas as well as Norbert Elias, Alain Corbin in turn adapted this view specifically to the culture of smell, arguing in the landmark study The Foul and Fragrant (1986) that a major shift had taken place between 1750 and 1880, lowering the threshold of the tolerance for stench in north-western Europe. Corbin devoted, however, only very little attention to the pre-history of this shift and focused almost exclusively on the ‘drama’ played out at the turn of the nineteenth century. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 229. This led to slight distortions in the picture that he presented. For example, as we shall see, stench was banned from city centers because of its association with the poor long before the period that Corbin identified as a major moment of transition. Cf. Corbin, 144. An excellent historiographical overview of the historiography on smell (with a focus on English literature) can be found in Jenner, ‘Follow Your Nose?’. See also Appuhn, ‘Friend or Flood?’; Coudert, ‘Sewers’; Skelton, Sanitation in Urban Britain; Wheeler, ‘Stench’. 7 That is to say, I shall not deal with issues such as sexual purity, religious ideas about polluted foodstuffs, soap production, perfumes, and so on. 8 A somewhat dated but still relevant overview on the politics of water management can be found in Swyngedouw, Kaïka and Castro, ‘Urban Water’. Some of the other works in this field that have inspired me include: Bissell, Urban Design; Drobnick, The Smell Culture Reader; Goubert, The Conquest of Water; Ingold, ‘To Historicize or Naturalize Nature’; Swyngedouw, Social Power; Swyngedouw, Liquid Power; Taylor and Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics’. For the Netherlands, see also Oosthoek, ‘The Stench of Prosperity’; Starkenburg, ‘La santé et salubrité du pays’. 9 Notable exceptions include Coudert, ‘Sewers’; Jenner, ‘The Politics of London Air’; Rinne, The Waters of Rome; Rinne, ‘Urban Ablutions’; Tullett, ‘Grease and Sweat’. 10 Limiting the examples to the Dutch Republic, no mention of health concerns is made in, for instance, Ciriacono, Building on Water; Greefs and ’t Hart, Water Management; Van Cruyningen, ‘Dealing with Drainage’; Zeischka, Minerva in de Polder. 11 Noordam, ‘Demografische Ontwikkelingen’, 43–44. See also Daelemans, ‘Leiden 1581’. 12 Leiden’s water management systems are discussed in Van Oerle, Leiden; Van der Paauw, Verhaal; Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet, 108–118; Taverne, In ’t Land, 177–237. Source material can be found in: SAII 5172, Stukken betreffende de verversing van het grachtwater A (1591–1668) en SAII 5178, Memories omtrent verbetering van de stadswaterverversing (1641–c. 1708). 13 For an overview of these Leiden regulations, see Smit, Leiden met een luchtje. For other Dutch cities, see also Vis, Van ‘vulliscuyl’ tot huisvuilcentrale. For environmental pollution in the Dutch Republic, see Faber, Diederiks and Hart, ‘Urbanisering’. For a historiographical introduction to the theme ‘Dutch cities and environment’, see Van Dam, ‘Frühmoderne Städte’. 14 Cities throughout Europe did encourage the construction of drains et cetera, yet the responsibility ultimately fell to individuals. For example, Nuremberg ‘required homeowners to maintain privies; from 1533 Amsterdam began requiring sinks and drained pipes in the upper story rooms’. Nicholas, Urban Europe, 157. These are regulations ordering something, not the building (i.e. financing through taxes the construction) of durable infrastructures for the common good. 15 Van Hout Rapport beroerende de middelen tot het wechnemen van het bederf der wateren deur die Vollerijen in de stadt Leyden veroorsaect. As reproduced in Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 115–126. See also Van Oerle, Leiden, 328–330. 16 ‘dat men ’t voors. gedeelte v. Stadt, minst bewoont en betimmert zynde, hiermede zal levendich maecken, ende doen bewoonen, en ’t seve doen, mits ’t v trecken v. volders,

118

17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32

Marius Buning

om woonplaetse maecken voor andere p sonen, die Gode danc ten hoochsten gesocht en begeert werden.’ Van Hout, Rapport. As reproduced in Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 118. It is worth noting at this point that Van Hout was not only the city secretary of Leiden, but also a well-respected poet, who stood in close contact with an exclusive group of humanist scholars. On Van Hout’s career as a rederijker, see Koppenol, ‘Jan van Hout’. Pearson, Humanism, 92. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 193. Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 121. Van Merwen later became the first director of the famous Dutch engineering school, the Nederduytsche Mathematique. On the history of patents in the Dutch Republic, see Doorman, Octrooien. ‘Alsoo die van den Gerechte der Stadt Leyden de Staten voorn, hebben doen verthoonen seeckere nieuwe inventie ende maniere van een Schep-Radt, van binnen slex gewys gemaeckt by Mr. Simon Fransz van Merwen, Tresorier extraordinaris der voorsz. Stede ende Gecomm. tot d’opsicht van des Stadts Getimmerte aldaer, dienende om ‘t water met quantiteyt in de hooghte te brengen, ende onder en boven hebbende syn centrum of het afpunt om uyt te loopen, ‘t welck den voorn, van Merwen t’synen koste in het Leproos-Huys tot Leyden voorn, tot een preuve hadde doen opstellen in de Sloote aldaer, ende door werckinge van drie Persoonen ‘t Water in groote menichte ende overvloedigh uyt syn centre doen lossen ter hooghte van 5 of 6 ½ voet.’ Dutch National Archives, States of Holland, 3.01.04.01, inv.nr. 345, fol. 369 [31 May 1589]. ‘indien niemant gevonden en werde van macht of wille, om ter voorsz. plaesten volryen te bouwen, ’t welc mogelicken zal vallen, zo de vollers meest luyden zyn an cleynen v mogen, zo zoude men, alsoo de neringe deser Stede dezelve geensins missen, mer notelicken hebben moeten … volryen, om die van stats weegen ter huyr te laeten gaen, ende zulx de profyten van dien te trecken.’ Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 124. On Dou, see Verburgt, ‘Het leven’. Dou had been apprenticed with Van Merwen. ‘hoe dat syluyden suppl. bemerckten, dat deselve Stadt, en bysonder de wateren vandien van tyde tot tyde meer ende meer worden geïnfecteert, met veele stanck ende vuylichheyt, veroorsaeckt door verscheyden vuyle neeringe die aldaer binnen ende int midden van de selve Stadt mosten worden gedaen, sonder dat sij suppl middel wisten om sulcx te beteren, ten waere sy dselve dede brengen buyten de Stede.’ Van Mieris, Handvesten, 2. For an overview of the various political institutions in the Dutch Republic, see Fruin, Staatsinstellingen. Taverne, In ’t land, 208. At a time when most of the weaving was still done in inhouse workshops, the construction of houses would drive down the price. ‘maer oock daer door veroorsaeckt is dat veel oirbaere rentijers, coopluyden en andere luyden van qualiteyt en middelen, die van sinne souden mogen geweest syn om sich binnen de Stadt Leyden neder te slaan en haere woonplaetse te nemen, door gebreek van bequame huysen naar haere staet en gelegentheyt, genootsaeckt zyn geweest hier vandaen te blyven … dat ook vele andere arbeytsluyden uytte Stadt metter woon vertraeken te platte lande de Dorpen verbeterde met menichte van huysen, daer nae mettertijt, soo te vreesen is, wel die Neeringe derwaerts soude mogen worden getrocken en de Stadt daer door grotelicx vercortet.’ 7 January 1611, Vroedschap door Heeren van Gerecht. As reproduced in Van Oerle, Leiden, 350. Taverne, In ’t land, 205. On this development, see Van Oerle, Leiden, 359. Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet, 109. ‘De burgemeester ende regierders van Leyden geremonstreert hebbende dat door de vuylniskuylen alsmede door ‘t bedijcken van eenige waterkens daerontrent ende ander-sints de wateren binnen haer stadt sijn stinckende geworden, daerdoor nae ‘t oirdel van de doctoiren menschelijckerwijse gesproocken de heete sieckte in haer

Stench and the city

33 34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47

48

49

119

stadt ten dele mede veroirsaeckt, daerinne sij gaerne souden voorsien met ‘t leggen van 3 sluysen.’ Stellingwerff and Schot, Particuliere notulen, 7: 579 (4 October 1635). Taverne, In ’t land, 212. The supposed connection between the plague and the poor was not unique to the Dutch Republic. Also in Italy, there was a deepening conviction from the fifteenth century onwards that plague and poverty were linked treats to the security of the state. Carmichael, Plague and the Poor. See also Pullen, ‘Plagues and Perceptions’. ‘So wy onse stadt niet en vergrooten so hebben wy weder een nieuwe peste te vreessen, die de stat seer van volck sal ontblooten, doordien dat de luyden so nau op malckanderen woonen, voorneemelick de drappiers, kammers ende spinners, die alle de woll met olie, pisz ende ander stinckent vet handlen, ‘t welck de lucht alrede so heeft geïnfecteert, dat gy niet en kunt door hare straeten gaen sonder een vuile en stinckende lucht in te haelen ende in haer huisen te blyven stilstaen is alrede bynae gantsch onmogelick.’ Reproduced in Taverne, In ’t land, 212–213. Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet, 109. Ibidem, 113. The total cost of the project was c. 35,000 florins. ‘een bovenmatig verwonderinge manier, daermede hy een stilstaende water sonder wint, paert, Mensch, ofte eenich creatuyr, can doen losen ofte lopen laten om hooch jegens de ordinaris Natuyr van t’water … dat het bequaem ende seer dienstich is, niet alleen tot gestadich verversingh van water voor alle steden ende plaetsen ende bysonder voor de voornoemde Stadt Leyden, die jaerlycx met veel vuyl ende stinckent water is vervult ende gequelt.’ Doorman, Octrooien, 208–209 (26 March 1642). See also Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 65–74. Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet, 113. ‘hoe de selve Stadt, ende besonder de wateren van dien, van tydt tot tydt meer ende meer werden besmet ende vervult met vuyligheydt ende stanck, veroosaeckt door verscheyden vuyle neeringhen’ (17 March 1644). Van Mieris, Handvesten, 5. ‘de schoonste ende ruimste huisen van de stad te breecken om daer een hoope kleine krotteties van te maecken, also dat de luyden van qualiteit genootsaeckt zijn geweest ons oock met haer leetwesen te verlaeten ende gemackelickere woonplaetsen te soecken in andere steden.’ Ibidem. de Klerk, Bouwen, 83–84. On Amsterdam’s water management, see Abrahamse, ‘De grote uitleg’. ‘dat uyt stil-staende water … grove ende stinckende dampen opkomen/die infectie in de Lucht veroorzaken.’ Van Beverwijck, Bericht, 23. ‘(vooral Leiden, ’s-Gravenhage, Amsterdam en sommige andere) hebben te midden van vele brede straten grachten met stilstaand water. In de zomer ademen die vanwege het bederf en de rotting van het water een dusdanige stank uit, dat het voor voorbijgangers die niet aan de stank gewend zijn, vaak noodzakelijk is om de neus dicht te knijpen, wanneer het water met de riemen van schippers of met vaarbomen wordt bewogen.’ Van Diemerbroeck, Verhandeling, Book I, 59. For examples, see also Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet, 116. ‘maer de heeren van Edam aligerende ‘t verderff van haer stadt door ‘t verlies van de thocht van water, daeromme ‘t verdroogen van haer haven ende stilstant van ‘t water dat alsdan stinckende soude werden, sijn daerom expresselicken gelast ‘tselve te difficulteeren, versoeckende dat sij hierinne niet anders werden getracteert als andere leeden van de vergadringe ende mitsdien de request aff te willen slaen, waermede die van Monickendam haer conformeerden.’ Stellingwerff and Schot, Particuliere notulen, 2: 167. The Water Boards (waterschappen) were charged with regional water management in the Republic. They were powerful independent bodies entitled to levy taxes and to administer justice. Occasionally, they found themselves on the opposite side of the cities. For a conflict between Leiden and the Water Board of Rijnland, see for example Van der Paauw, Verhaal, 30–39. Cf. Fransen, Dijk onder spanning, 390.

120

Marius Buning

50 This is not to say that medicinal doctors agreed that stagnant waters were the cause of diseases, such as the plague. But there was little doubt that they spread the contagium. Cf. Van Diemerbroeck, Verhandeling, 51, 156. 51 Doorman, Octrooien, 300 (September 1679). 52 Amsterdam City Archives, no. 5059, Inv. no. 183. On the project of Meyboom, see also Abrahamse, ‘De grote uitleg’, 318. 53 There has been some discussion on whether the town was built after a design by Simon Stevin, who saw his chance for implementing his ideas about the construction of an ideal city. Compare Van Oers, ‘Stadsplanning’; van den Heuvel, ‘Multilayered Grids’. See also Breuning, Het voormalige Batavia. 54 The Javanese were only allowed to settle within the city walls after 1629, because of an ongoing conflict with neighboring Banten, to be expulsed again in 1656 to adjacent kampongs. 55 On average, 3000 slaves were imported annually into Batavia for various purposes. Blussé, ‘The Story’, 19. 56 Ibidem, 25. 57 Niemeijer, Batavia, 113–24, 136. 58 Addison, Correspondence, 356 (letter from 1813). Also Jakob Haafner, for instance, made mention of the ‘canals, most of which are no more than stinking pools of mud in the dry season’ (grachten, doch de meeste, in het drooge jaargetijde, niet dan stinkende modderpoelen zijn). Haafner, Lotgevallen, 1: 163. 59 Van der Brug, Malaria, 42. 60 Much has been written on the reasons for Batavia’s unhealthiness but a convincing explanation has never been given. A reasoned overview of the historiography can be found in Van der Brug, Malaria, 181–185. 61 ‘ongezonde uitwasemingen der stinkende grachten, en dus eene van de voornaamste oorzaken der ziekten, te vermijden, dat de vermogende lieden hun verblijf in tuinen buiten de stad houden, en het drinkwater van de Blauuwenberg laten komen, dewijl het daar buitengemeen goed is.’ Haafner, Lotgevallen, 1: 138. 62 De Bondt, An Account, 114. Fourth observation. 63 Various, Hippocratic Writings, 159. 64 Ibidem, 148–170. For the original context, see also Nutton, ‘Medical Thoughts’. 65 Hence, living around the Dariende was ‘harmful not because of the nature of the land, but because of the particular place’ (dat also die wooninghe tot Dariene niet van natuere des landts: maer vander sonderlinge plaetsen weghen schadelijcken is). Van Linschoten, Itinerario, 3: 95. Cf. Ruyters, Toortse, 28. 66 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 108. Willem Bosman (1672–?) was a notorious slave trader and the head merchant (opperkoopman) of the Dutch West Indies Company. 67 ‘Alsulcke particuliere sloptjens ende toegangen niet anders en syn als sluypplaetsen voor ongeregelde menschen, nesten van alle stanck; … ’t aensien ende cieraet van een wel gelegen ende geordonneerde stadt’ werden daardoor ‘gedeformeert … daerdoor verscheyden plaetsen ende erven noch ledig ende onhewoont syn, … een jder sich om de cleene cost naer de voorsz sloptjens begevende, … de ingesetene op veele plaetsen in groote stanck eude vuyligheyt al te bekrompen, by ende onder malkanderen syn wonende.’ Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602–1642, 1: 301–302 (1 October 1633). The dwellings had to be demolished within six months on pain of burning the houses ‘publicly in the street’ (publycquelyck op straet) and an arbitral punishment. 68 Nieuhof, Het gezantschap, 101. Cf. Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, 213–215. 69 Hesselink, Genezers op de koloniale markt. 70 I have combed through the Realia 1610–1808, the General Resolutions of Batavia Castle 1613–1810, The Placards of Batavia Castle 1602–1808, the Appendices to General Resolutions 1686–1811, Daily Journals of Batavia Castle 1624–1806, and the

Stench and the city

71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78

79 80

121

Marginalia to the Daily Journals 1659–1807. Sources are available online at: https:// sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id/sources (last visited 6 November 2017). De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1: 197. The practice came to an end in the 1770s. Davids, ‘Hydraulic Experts’, 193. Examples in Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602–1642, 1: 135, 259, 363. Aside from a fish market and excrements, specific mention is made of the lime kilns that spread ‘very intense fogs, stench and dirty, unhealthy air’ (seer sware dampen, stanck ende vuyle, ongesonde lucht). Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1642–1677, 2: 433. ‘Om den vuylen roock ende stancks wille en sal niemant eenighe calckovens mogen maecken ofte branden binnen deser stede muyren, op verbeurte van selve.’ Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602–1642, 1: 566. The ‘Statutes of Batavia’ were collected by Antony van Diemen (1593–1645). ‘mjt ’t Vaderland gevordert na de nieuwe inventie.’ Batavia’s Realia, file 920, fol. 75 (29 January 1704). Batavia’s Realia, file 925, fol. 99. De Haan, Oud Batavia, 1: 191–201. ‘haren dreck ende vuyligheyt, niet alleen inde als noch bewaterde, maer oock inde uytgewaterde, drooge gragten boven op den slick te werpen, ‘t welck niet alleen op den heeten middagh een vuyle ende benauwde stanck is causeerende, maer met ‘er tyt wel een pestilentiale sieckte onder de gemeente zoude veroorsaecken.’ NederlandschIndisch Plakaatboek, 1642–1677, 2: 185. The eventual solution to the challenges of water management in Batavia was to ‘move the city’ inland, razing the walls of Old Batavia. On this process, see Davids, ‘Hydraulic Experts’, 189. Cf. Geltner, ‘Public Health’.

References Abrahamse, Jaap Evert. ‘De grote uitleg van Amsterdam: Stadsontwikkeling in de zeventiende eeuw.’ PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2010. http://dare.uva.nl/search?identi fier=2b6e3e43-c68e-4d79-95d3-b2375865c55f. Addison, George Augustus ed. Original Familiar Correspondence between Residents in India, Including Sketches of Java. Edinburgh: [Ballantyne and Hughes], 1846. Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Appuhn, Karl. ‘Friend or Flood? The Dilemmas of Water Management in Early Modern Venice.’ In Isenberg, A.C. ed. The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006, pp. 79–102. Bissell, William Cunningham. Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Blussé, Léonard. ‘The Story of an Ecological Disaster: The Dutch East India Company and Batavia (1619–1799).’ In Blussé, Léonard ed. Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in Voc Batavia. Dordrecht: Floris, 1986, pp. 15–34. Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts. London: James Knapton, 1705. Breuning, Hubert Albert. Het voormalige Batavia: een Hollandse stedestichting in de tropen. Anno 1619. Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1954. Carmichael, Ann G. ‘Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Fifteenth-Century Milan.’ Renaissance Quarterly 44/2 (1991): 213–256. Carmichael, Ann G. Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

122

Marius Buning

Cipolla, Carlo Maria. Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Ciriacono, Salvatore. Building on Water: Venice, Holland, and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. Coomans, Janna and Geltner, Guy. ‘The History of Public Health in Pre-Industrial Societies: A Bibliography.’ University of Amsterdam, September 10, 2017. Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Coudert, Allison P. ‘Sewers, Cesspools, and Privies: Waste as Reality and Metaphor in Pre-Modern European Cities.’ In Classen, Albrecht ed. Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 713–734. Daelemans, F. ‘Leiden 1581. Een socio-demografisch onderzoek.’ A.A.G. Bijdragen 19 (1975): 137–215. Davids, Karel. ‘Hydraulic Experts and the Challenges of Water in Early Modern Times: European Colonial Cities Compared.’ In Soens, Tim; Schott, Dieter; Toyka-Seid, Michael and De Munck, Bert eds. Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500. New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 179–196. De Bondt, Jakob. An Account of the Diseases, Natural History and Medicines of the East Indies. Translated from the Latin of James Bontius. London: printed for T. Noteman, 1769. De Haan, Frederik. Oud Batavia. Vol. 1. Bandoeng: A.C. Nix, 1935. De Klerk, Arie. Bouwen aan de hofstad. De geschiedenis van het bouwtoezicht in Den Haag 1250–1900, in sociaal en cultureel perspectief. Delft: Delft University Press, 1998. Dijstelberge, Paul and Noordegraaf, Leo. Plague and Print in the Netherlands: A Short-Title Catalogue of Publications in the University Library of Amsterdam. Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1997. Doorman, Gerard. Octrooien voor uitvindingen in de Nederlanden uit de 16e-18e eeuw: Met bespreking van enkele onderwerpen uit de geschiedenis der techniek. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1940. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]. Drobnick, Jim ed. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006. Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Faber, J.A.; Diederiks, H.A. and Hart, S. ‘Urbanisering, industrialisering en milieuaantasting in Nederland in de periode van 1500 tot 1800.’ A.A.G. Bijdragen 18 (1973): 251–271. Fransen, Alfons. Dijk onder spanning: de ecologische, politieke en financiële geschiedenis van de Diemerdijk bij Amsterdam, 1591–1864. Hilversum: Verloren, 2011. Fruin, Robert Jacobus. Geschiedenis der staatsinstellingen in Nederland tot den val der Republiek. Ed. Colenbrander, Herman Theodoor. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980 [1922]. Geltner, G. ‘Public Health and the Pre-Modern City: A Research Agenda.’ History Compass 10/3 (2012): 231–245. Goubert, Jean-Pierre. The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age. Transl. Wilson, A. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Greefs, Hilde and ’t Hart, Marjolein eds. Water Management, Communities, and Environment: The Low Countries in Comparative Perspective, c. 1000–c. 1800. Gent: Academia Press, 2006. Haafner, Jacob. Lotgevallen en vroegere zeereizen van Jacob Haafner. Vol. 1. Ed. Haafner, Christiaan Matthias. Amsterdam: Johannes van der Hey, 1820. Hesselink, Elisabeth Quirine. Genezers op de koloniale markt: Inheemse dokters en vroedvrouwen in Nederlandsch Oost-Indië, 1850–1915. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Stench and the city

123

Hippocratic Writings. Ed. Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1984. Ingold, Alice. ‘To Historicize or Naturalize Nature: Hydraulic Communities and Administrative States in Nineteenth-Century Europe.’ French Historical Studies 32/3 (2009): 385–417. Jenner, Mark. ‘The Politics of London Air John Evelyn’s Fumifugium and the Restoration.’ The Historical Journal 38/3 (1995): 535–551. Jenner, Mark S. ‘Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories.’ The American Historical Review 116/2 (2011): 335–351. Koppenol, Johan. M. ‘Jan van Hout en de Leidse rederijkers.’ In Teksten van het symposium ‘Hart Voor Leiden: Jan van Hout (1542–1609)’. Leiden: s.n., 2010. www.janvanhout.nl/ symposium/sym4_koppenol.pdf. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek. Volume 1: 1602–1642. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek. Volume 2: 1642–1677. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885. Nicholas, David. Urban Europe 1100–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Niemeijer, H.E. Batavia (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Balans, 2012. Nieuhof, Johan. Het gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen keizer van China. Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1665. Noordam, Dirk Jaap. ‘Demografische Ontwikkelingen.’ In Groenveld, Simon and Van Maanen, Rudolf Cornelis Johannes. eds. Leiden: De geschiedenis van een Hollandse Stad 1574–1795. Leiden: Stichting Geschiedschrijving Leiden, 2003, pp. 42–53, 224–226. Noordegraaf, Leo and Valk, Gerrit. De gave Gods: de pest in Holland vanaf de late middeleeuwen. Amsterdam: Bakker, 1996. Nutton, Vivian. ‘The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.’ Medical History 27 (1983): 1–34. Nutton, Vivian. ‘Medical Thoughts on Urban Pollution.’ In Hope, V.H. and Marchall, Eireann eds. Death and Disease in the Ancient City. London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 65–73. Oosthoek, Jan. ‘The Stench of Prosperity: Water Pollution in the Northern Netherlandse, 1850–1980.’ In Bernhardt, Christophe and Massard-Guilbaud, Geneviève eds. The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2002, pp. 179–194. Palmer, Richard. ‘In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century.’ In Bynum, William F.; Porter, Richard and Porter, Roy eds. Medicine and the Five Senses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 51–68. Pearson, Caspar. Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011. Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Ed. Latham, R.E. London: Penguin, 1958. Pullen, Brain. ‘Plagues and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern Italy.’ In Ranger, Terence and Slack, Paul eds. Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 101–124. Rawcliffe, Carole. ‘Delectable Sightes and Fragrant Smelles’: Gardens and Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.’ Garden History 36 (2008): 3–21. Rinne, Katherine Wentworth. The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

124

Marius Buning

Rinne, Katherine Wentworth. ‘Urban Ablutions: Cleansing Counter Reformation Rome.’ In Bradley, Mark and Stow, Kenneth eds. Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in Rome from Antiquity to Modernity. Rome: British School at Rome, 2012, pp. 182–201. Roodenburg, H.W. ‘Smelling Rank and Status.’ In Baer, Ronni and Van Nierop, Henk eds. Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Boston: MFA Publications, 2015, pp. 41–54. Ruyters, Dierick. Toortse der zee-Vaert, om te beseylen de custen geleghen bezuyden den Tropicus Canceri, als Brasylien, Westindien, Guinea, Angola, Etz. Vlissinghen: M.A. vander Nolck, 1623. Skelton, Leona J. Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560–1700. London: Routledge, 2015. Smit, Cor. Leiden met een luchtje: Straten, water, groen en afval in een Hollandse stad, 1200–2000. Leiden: Primavera, 2001. Starkenburg, Esther. ‘La santé et salubrité du pays: Het streven van Lodewijk Napoleon naar een gezonde woonomgeving.’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 56 (2005): 301–322. Steenmeijer, Guido. Tot cieraet ende aensien deser stede: Arent van ’s-Gravesande (ca. 1610–1662), architect en ingenieur. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2005. Stellingwerff, Nicolaas and Schot, Sybrand. Particuliere notulen van de vergaderingen der Staten van Holland, 1620–1640 door Nicolaes Stellingwerff en Schot (7 vols). Ed. Veenedaal-Barth, J. W.; Smit, A. A. and Vree, V. L. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987–2006. Stöger, Georg. ‘Environmental Perspectives on Pre-Modern Cities: Difficulties and Possibilities.’ In Knoll, Martin and Reith, Reinhold eds. An Environmental History of the Early Modern Period: Experiments and Perspectives. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2014, pp. 51–54. Swyngedouw, Erik. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Swyngedouw, Erik. Liquid Power: Water and Contested Modernities in Spain, 1898–2010. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Swyngedouw, Erik; Kaïka, Maria and Castro, Esteban. ‘Urban Water: A Political-Ecology Perspective.’ Built Environment 28/2 (2002): 124–137. Taverne, Eduard Robert Marie. In’t land van belofte: In de nieue stadt: Ideaal en werkelijkheid van de stadsuitleg in de Republiek, 1580–1680. Maarssen: Schwartz, 1978. Taylor, Vanessa and Trentmann, Frank. ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday Life in the Modern City.’ Past & Present 211 (2011): 199–241. Tullett, William. ‘Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture.’ Cultural and Social History 13 (2016): 307–322. Van Beverwijck, Johan. Bericht van de pest. Dordrecht: François Boels, 1636. Van Cruyningen, Piet. ‘Dealing with Drainage: State Regulation of Drainage Projects in the Dutch Republic, France, and England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.’ The Economic History Review 68/2 (2015): 420–440. Van Dam, Petronella Juliëtte Elisabeth Maria. ‘Frühmoderne Städte und Umwelt in den Niederlanden.’ In Schott, Dieter and Toyka-Seid, Michael eds. Die europäische Stadt und ihre Umwelt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008, pp. 83–103. Van den Heuvel, Charles. ‘Multilayered Grids and Dutch Town Planning: Flexibility and Temporality in the Design of Settlements in the Low Countries and Overseas.’ In Lombaerde, Piet and Van den Heuvel, Charles eds. Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid: Town Planning in the Low Countries in International Context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice. 1550–1800. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011, pp. 27–44. Van der Brug, Peter Harmen. Malaria en malaise: de VOC in Batavia in de achttiende eeuw. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1994.

Stench and the city

125

Van der Paauw, Salomon. Verhaal van de middelen tot verversching van het water in de grachten der stad Leyden, gedurende eene reeks van bijna tweehonderd en vijftig jaren: Op last van de Ed. Achtb. Heeren Burgemeester en Wethouders der voornoemde stad, uit de oorspronkelijke bescheiden opgemaakt. Leyden: L. Herdingh en zoon, 1828. Van Diemerbroeck, Ijsbrand. IJsbrand van Diemerbroeck: verhandeling over de pest: ingeleid, vertaald en van aantekeningen voorzien. Ed. Kerkhoff, Antoon. Enschede: University of Twente, 2013. Van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen. Itinerario, Voyage Ofte Schipvaert Naer Oost Ofte Portugaels Indien 1579–1592. Vol. 3. The Hague: Nijhoff, [1934]. Van Mieris, Frans ed. Handvesten, privilegien, octroyen, rechten, en vryheden: midsgaders ordonnantien, resolutien, plakkaaten, verbintenissen, costumen, insturctien en handelingen der stad Leyden. Leiden: A. Kallevier, 1759. Van Oerle, Hugo Anthonius. Leiden binnen en buiten de stadsvesten: De geschiedenis van de stedebouwkundige ontwikkeling binnen het Leidse rechtsgebied tot aan het einde van de gouden eeuw. Leiden: Brill, 1975. Van Oers, Ron. ‘Stadsplanning en het behoud van VOC structuren.’ In Blussé, Léonard and Ooms, Ilonka eds. Kennis en compagnie: De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie en de moderne wetenschap. Amsterdam: Balans, 2002, pp. 21–33. Verburgt, W. ‘Het leven van Jan Pietersz. Dou, als Burger, landmeter, wijnroeier en notaris van Leiden, 1573–1635: Toegelicht uit zijne handschriften en werken.’ Leidsch Jaarboekje 26 (1933): 18–61. Vis, G.N.M. Van ‘vulliscuyl’ tot huisvuilcentrale: Vuilnis en afval en hun verwerking in Alkmaar en omgeving van de middeleeuwen tot heden. Hilversum: Verloren, 1996. Wheeler, Jo. ‘Stench in Sixteenth Century Venice.’ In Cowan, Alexander and Steward, Jill. eds. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 35–36. Zeischka, Siger. Minerva in de polder: Waterstaat en techniek in het hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland 1500–1856. Hilversum: Verloren, 2008.

5 CITIES, LONG-DISTANCE CORPORATIONS AND OPEN AIR SCIENCES Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden in the early modern period Karel Davids Introduction A few years ago, Steven Harris drew attention to the role of ‘long-distance corporations’ as coordinating agents in the drive for gathering and processing knowledge in the early modern period. He described a long-distance corporation as a ‘legally constituted corporation established by the sovereign authority of Crown, Parliament or papacy’, which was empowered to undertake activities in a specific domain in far-flung areas of the globe and which had the jurisdiction to manage its own affairs and make regulations concerning the behaviour of its members. The concept covers both trading companies such as the Dutch East-India Company (VOC) and the West-India Company (WIC), chartered by the States General of the United Provinces in 1602 and 1621, respectively, and religious bodies such as the Society of Jesus, approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. Long-distance corporations, according to Harris, were normally organised in a hierarchical way, ‘with a centralized administrative apparatus and fixed headquarters’. Whatever their differences in purpose and mode of operation, they had in common that they ‘had to recruit and train reliable agents, send them to remote regions to undertake corporate business, and maintain cycles of correspondence that consisted primarily of directives from headquarters and intelligence reports from the field’.1 In the historiography of knowledge, Harold Cook, Paula Findlen, Pamela Smith and others have highlighted the connections between commerce and the acquisition of knowledge, including the role of large overseas trading companies such as the VOC and WIC.2 Recently, quite a lot of research has also been done on long-distance religious organisations such as the Society of Jesus and their involvement in the acquisition and circulation of knowledge.3 In urban history, meanwhile, cities are often portrayed as centres of accumulation of

Long-distance corporations and sciences

127

knowledge and hotbeds of creativity, with towns in the Low Countries such as Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden taking pride of place in the narrative on the early modern period.4 This essay aims to connect these debates in the history of knowledge and the history of cities. It is concerned with the issue of how the activities of longdistance corporations in the field of knowledge were related to urban environments. The key question is how and to what extent the rise and persistence of cities as centres of knowledge accumulation and transmission were shaped by long-distance corporations or by cities themselves. In other words: what was the relationship between the agency of cities and the agency of long-distance corporations in the development of cities as hubs of knowledge? The essay concentrates on knowledge formed in the ‘open air’, such as botany, medicine, surveying, mapmaking, linguistics and administrative sciences, which travelled from extra-metropolitan, overseas areas to cities in the European metropolis. Following Michel Callon, Kapil Raj has called these knowledge practices ‘open air sciences’. Unlike ‘laboratory sciences’ or ‘field sciences’, ‘open air sciences’ ‘necessarily involved negotiations between specialists and other heterogeneous groups in their very making and certification’. Longdistance corporations such as trading companies and missionary societies played a key role in this process.5 In contrast with Raj’s study, however, the focus in this essay is not primarily on what happened in ‘open air sciences’ overseas but on the processing of knowledge in ‘open air sciences’ which arrived via longdistance corporations in the cities of Europe. To answer the central question, this essay adopts a comparative approach. Besides comparing trading companies with religious organisations, it compares processes of knowledge accumulation and transmission in a variety of open air sciences, namely botany, mapmaking and linguistics, and in a number of cities in the Low Countries, namely Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden, over a prolonged period of time in the early modern period.6 These three cities had a number of features in common, but they also showed differences in several respects. While all of them were situated in the Low Countries and all of them were connected to far-flung overseas networks, their mutual relationship changed fundamentally over time. The crucial event was the conquest of Antwerp by the Spanish Army in 1585, which led to a restructuring of the spatial economy in the Low Countries, with Amsterdam and Leiden seeing rapid economic and demographic expansion and Amsterdam replacing Antwerp as the leading hub in world trade. Leiden was not a port city, but it was for a long time the second largest city of the Dutch Republic and a prominent centre of knowledge.7 The analysis will be structured as follows. What needs to be explained is the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden over time. To understand this development, I will examine the impact of long-distance corporations, institutional infrastructures of urban knowledge and knowledge networks, which may emerge from knowledge institutions and/or the agency of urban elites. Knowledge institutions (such as

128

Karel Davids

universities, botanic gardens or public libraries) may, or may not, be supported by long-distance corporations and the agency of urban governments and urban elites. Knowledge from long-distance corporations or from knowledge networks may also find its way to other cities than the three cases examined in this essay (for example, Batavia or Rome). This possibility will be investigated as well. The first section of this essay discusses the rise of Antwerp as a centre of knowledge accumulation and transmission in open air sciences before 1585. The second section analyses changes in the relationship between long-distance corporations, knowledge and the urban environment in Antwerp after the fall of the city in 1585. The third section investigates the role of urban agency, longdistance corporations and knowledge infrastructures in Amsterdam and Leiden, as successors of Antwerp, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fourth section addresses the question of why open air sciences in Dutch cities and long-distance corporations continued to flourish after 1700, even after the agency of cities had significantly diminished. In the conclusion, I will make some observations about the similarities and differences between the cases of Antwerp and Amsterdam and then address the issue of the relationships between urban agency, long-distance corporations and open air sciences at large.

Antwerp before the fall After the middle of the sixteenth century, Antwerp for a short while became ‘the scientific capital’ of the Habsburg Netherlands.8 The epithet means that Antwerp accommodated some of the most prominent scholars active in the Low Countries and produced a substantial part of the scholarly output in a variety of disciplines, in particular in open air sciences such as botany, mapmaking and linguistics. Antwerp’s share in the European output of publications on botany grew from 5 per cent between 1531 and 1562 to 13 per cent between 1563 and 1600, which made the city the foremost centre of distribution of printed botanical knowledge.9 Among the books published in Antwerp were many of the seminal texts of the day, including ground-breaking works by the ‘great trio of south Netherlandish naturalists’, namely Rembert Dodoens’s Cruijdeboeck, Carolus Clusius’s natural histories of Central Europe and the Iberian Peninsula and the Kruydtboeck by Mathias Lobelius.10 Antwerp printing houses brought out pioneering books on cartographic and geographic methods and on aids and instruments for surveying and navigation by Gemma Frisius and Michiel Coignet and maps and atlases by Coignet, Abraham Ortelius and Cornelis de Jode that synthesised state-of-the-art knowledge about a large part of the globe.11 Between 1568 and 1573, building on the work of generations of humanist scholars in the Low Countries and Spain, printer Christoffel Plantijn published a bible in five languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldean), provided with dictionaries and grammars. At about the same time his proofreader and son-in-law Franciscus Raphelengius started the study of Arabic and began to

Long-distance corporations and sciences

129

compose an Arabic dictionary. He was in no time widely acknowledged as an expert in the language.12 These achievements must have been one of the reasons why the Antwerp city fathers in the nineteenth century had the stairwell of the town hall adorned with the motto: ‘Science and art were always Antwerp’s strength, pride and fame’.13 However, promotion of knowledge was not on the mind of their predecessors who commissioned the construction of the town hall in the 1560s. The imagery of the building was primarily meant to convey to the outside world the power and autonomy of the city. Above all, the statues and reliefs were intended to symbolise the rights of the city and the duties of the sovereign.14 In reality, the Antwerp city government in the sixteenth century did next to nothing to promote the city’s role as a hub of knowledge in the open air sciences. Antwerp’s rise as a centre of accumulation and distribution of scientific knowledge seems partly to have been a consequence of deteriorating conditions elsewhere in the Low Countries rather than of any impulse from the city itself. Geert van Paemel draws attention to the loss of dynamism of Leuven after 1550 and the increasing insecurity in other places in the Habsburg Netherlands as a result of rebellion and war.15 Antwerp itself did not breed many first-rate scholars – Ortelius and Coignet being notable exceptions – and even if it temporarily offered a stimulating environment to talents from elsewhere, such as Dodoens, Clusius and Lobelius, it failed to keep their interest in the long term.16 If Antwerp as a city exerted any agency at all in its rise as a hub of open air sciences after 1550, it was not present at the level of policies or institutions, but in the initiatives of individual members of the urban elite and the enterprise of particular groups of citizens, notably printers and publishers. Pharmacist Pieter van Coudenberghe, city registrar Jan van Hoboken, printer Christoffel Plantijn and other members of the Antwerp elite laid out botanical gardens in their estates in the environs of the city. Gillis Hooftman, a wealthy merchant and ship owner, acted as a maecenas to Ortelius and Coignet.17 A particularly powerful stimulus was the sheer size of the local printing industry. The largest concentration of skills, capital and materials in the printing industry in the Low Countries could be found in Antwerp. This commercial metropolis far outstripped all other cities in the Habsburg Netherlands in its capacity to produce and distribute books. Over 270 printers were active in the city in the sixteenth century. Antwerp printers and publishers were responsible for more than half of the total output of books in the Low Countries before 1540 and almost two-thirds of the output in the Southern Netherlands between 1540 and 1600.18 It was therefore quite natural that the city also became a prime centre for the production of books on botany, cartography and linguistics. And Antwerp printers and publishers actively fostered the accumulation of knowledge. Jan van der Loe stimulated Dodoens to compose the first herbal in Dutch. In about 1570 Christoffel Plantijn brought together a stellar team of philologists to produce his polyglot bible.19

130

Karel Davids

The accumulation of knowledge in the open air sciences in Antwerp was also greatly facilitated by the expansion of commercial and maritime networks centred upon the city, which gathered pace in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Many of the exotic plants cultivated by Antwerp citizens or described in herbals published by Antwerp printers came from seeds and cuttings which seamen and travellers brought to the metropolis on the Scheldt from other parts of the world. The books of Dodoens, Clusius and Lobelius appearing after c. 1550 were part of a collaborative effort involving scholars and collectors in the Low Countries, Spain, the Americas and Central Europe as well as draughtsmen, engravers, woodcarvers and typographers based in Antwerp and Malines.20 Likewise, the maps and atlases published in Antwerp were the product of an ‘impressive cooperation between merchants, cartographers, engravers, painters and printers’. In fact, the collection of maps of shipowner Gillis Hooftman formed the basis of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum.21 However, these networks of information were built and maintained by individuals and trading houses, not by long-distance trading companies or missionary organisations. Long-distance trading corporations as defined by Steven Harris did not exist in Antwerp and long-distance religious organisations were only a minor presence. The Jesuits established a college, called the ‘Huis van Aken’, in 1574, but the Calvinist-dominated government forced them to leave the city a few years later.22 Thanks to its printing industry and the networks of its urban elites, Antwerp thus enjoyed a rapid rise to fame in the open air sciences, but its position did not rest on institutional support from the city government or from long-distance corporations. Its status depended on the condition that the printers remained and the elites did not move.

Antwerp after the fall After its recapture by the Spanish army, Antwerp lost its role as a first-rate European hub in the open air sciences. In mapmaking and botany, seventeenth-century Antwerp was no longer the centre of accumulation and distribution of knowledge it had been before 1585. Yet, the city long continued to serve as a turntable for flows of ‘open air’ knowledge coming from areas outside Europe. Apart from the zeal of the Officina Plantiniana, which under the management of Plantijn’s in-laws, the Moretus family, brought out reprints of works by Ortelius, Dodoens, Lobelius and Clusius until about 1650,23 this was largely due to the activities of a religious longdistance corporation that gained a firm foothold in Antwerp after the return of Spanish rule and was known as the Society of Jesus. Within days of the surrender of the city, the city government – under pressure from the Spanish commander, Alexander Farnese – returned to the Jesuits their residence Hof van Aken, which had been confiscated after their expulsion in 1578. Barely a month later, they reopened their teaching college, which

Long-distance corporations and sciences

131

quickly outgrew the capacity of the old building. In 1607, the Society received a second building on loan from the city fathers, called the Hof van Liere, in exchange for the promise to arrange in due time to teach mathematics, which [was] taught neither in Leuven nor in any other university, yet [was] the basis for many of the arts which were useful in commercial city like this [Antwerp], not merely to the adornment and honour of the city but also to the benefit of those who would like to go into business in Flanders.24 The college was relocated to the new building, while the Hof van Aken henceforth served as a home for those who had made the four vows (professen) and as the headquarters of the Society in Flanders. The mathematics course in the Hof van Liere started in 1617 and continued, with interruptions, until 1681. A boarding school for pupils of the college was added to the complex of buildings in 1630.25 The number of Jesuits soared in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and so did the enrolment in their college. There were 157 Jesuits in Antwerp in 1619, compared to 25 in 1601. The average number of Jesuits staying in the city in the seventeenth century hovered around 125. Every year, an average of between 500 and 600 pupils attended their school. The Society developed close social relations with local elites. First, local elites sent their male offspring en masse to the Jesuit college and merchant families such as Van Hove, Boot, De Smidt and Van der Cruyce lent crucial financial support to the Society in the first years after its return to the city. Moreover, a large number of the novices of the Jesuits in the Duchy of Brabant were recruited from Antwerp. Between 1580 and 1640, Antwerp supplied nearly half of the new entrants. Many of the Antwerp Jesuits were therefore scions of local families, including some of the very families that were the financial pillars of the Society after 1585.26 There were frequent personal contacts between Antwerp Jesuits and the Moretus family as well.27 While the Society of Jesus between 1585 and the early eighteenth century clearly dominated the education of the Antwerp elites, its promised contribution to the development of knowledge in the arts and trades in the city barely materialised. As Meskens, Geert van Paemel and Angelo de Bruycker have pointed out, the mathematics taught by Jesuits in Antwerp was in reality neither accessible to craftsmen (because it was taught in Latin) nor geared to the needs of merchants, although some merchant’s sons did follow the lessons offered at the mathematical college. Except during the tenure of Johannes Ciermans in about 1640, who in his instruction devoted much attention to engineering and the art of war, the emphasis in the Jesuits’ mathematics course was normally not on practical applications.28 The practical mathematical and technical acumen of Jesuit professors and lay brothers (such as master-mason Pieter Huyssens) was primarily brought to bear on the design of their own flagship church in Antwerp, St Carolus

132

Karel Davids

Borromeus, built between 1615 and 1621, which became one of the iconic sights of the city. To realise this project, the Society was again able to attract substantial financial support from rich Antwerp families.29 In their scholarly efforts Jesuits generally seem to have focused primarily on carving out their own niche vis-à-vis the old-established, powerful University of Leuven rather than on making themselves useful in the interests of the city on the Scheldt.30 Their most palpable contribution to knowledge for the benefit of the city was probably Leonardus Lessius’s much-quoted De iustitia et iure (1605), which applied the principles of moral theology expounded by Thomas Aquinas to everyday issues in economic life in a commercial metropolis.31 For the open air sciences, the strong presence of the Jesuits in Antwerp had an undoubted impact because they were not just heavily engaged in education but also deeply involved in overseas networks as a natural result of the Society’s far-flung missionary activities. The Antwerp residences served as a clearinghouse for news from all over the world and often accommodated members of the Jesuit order who were widely travelled and intimately familiar with cultures and societies outside Europe. Pupils of the Jesuit college translated letters from missionaries in China and Japan into Latin, and these were printed by Antwerp publishers Moretus and Verdussen. The first instalment of these letters appeared in 1611.32 The Moretus family also received letters directly from Jesuits in China between c. 1670 and 1690.33 As the China mission developed, Jesuits took numbers of Latin books printed at the Plantin-Moretus firm to the East, while carrying loads of maps and manuscripts from China to their residences in Antwerp. Antwerp in the later seventeenth century thus became a leading centre of accumulation of linguistic and cartographic knowledge on China. Father Martino Martini’s survey of the recent history of China, De Bello Tartarico, was printed at the Officina Plantiniana in 1654. More than 20 editions and translations of Martini’s history appeared before the beginning of the eighteenth century.34 In the summer of that very year, Leiden professor Jacob Golius travelled to Antwerp to have long talks with Martini, learn more about the Chinese script, language, history and geography and see materials from China kept in the Jesuit residence and in a country house of a rich Antwerp lawyer Jacob Edelheer who was connected both to the Jesuits and to the Plantin-Moretus firm.35 On his return to the North, Golius took with him several Chinese books and manuscripts that he had received as a gift from Martini.36 For all its importance as a site of accumulation of knowledge on China, Antwerp did not retain its status as a centre of distribution in the second half of the seventeenth century. When Antwerp printers baulked at the unusual format of the plates needed to produce Martini’s oversize folio maps of China, a fellowJesuit suggested that he call on the Blaeu firm in Amsterdam instead.37 Thus, in 1655, the Novus Atlas Sinensis was published in Amsterdam, not in Antwerp, as part six of Joan Blaeu’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, accompanied by an appendix by Golius. The atlas was based on a large number of Chinese written sources, on the accumulated knowledge of Jesuit missionaries in China and on Martini’s

Long-distance corporations and sciences

133

own observations. Like De Bello Tartarico and the Sinicae historiae decas prima, which Martini published in Munich in 1658, the Atlas was primarily intended to promote support for the China mission, but it also had the effect of stimulating what David Mungello calls ‘proto-sinological interest’ in China at large.38 In the later decades of the seventeenth century, manuscripts brought by Jesuits to Antwerp were seldom printed locally and never again by the Officina Plantiniana. The Plantin-Moretus firm increasingly concentrated on the printing of liturgical books.39 The Jesuits became less dependent on the city; they showed ‘agency’ indeed. The link between the long-distance corporation, open air sciences and the city became very tenuous.

The rise of Amsterdam and Leiden Amsterdam and Leiden succeeded Antwerp as centres in the accumulation and distribution of knowledge in open air sciences from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Before the 1580s, booksellers in Holland looked to printing houses in Antwerp such as the Officina Plantiniana for their supply of titles on botany, cartography or linguistics.40 After that, it was the presses in northern cities that produced vast numbers of publications in these fields of knowledge. Amsterdam and Leiden firms such as Claesz, Blaeu, Hondius, Janssonius, Colom, Cloppenburg, Van Keulen, Raphelengius, Elsevier and Van der Aa rose to become European leaders in the production and marketing of natural histories, catalogues, maps, charts, rutters, atlases, globes, grammars, dictionaries and geographic pictures.41 The hortus of the University of Leiden, founded in 1593, and the hortus botanicus in Amsterdam, established in 1638, reached the top league of botanical gardens in Europe in the seventeenth century.42 Part of the explanation for the ascent of Amsterdam and Leiden as leading centres of accumulation and distribution of knowledge is of course that skilled people and capital moved en masse from Antwerp to the North after the 1580s.43 Christoffel Plantijn himself left Antwerp in 1583 to become a printer at the university in Leiden, taking some of the equipment from his workshop with him. One of the more than 90 titles that he published during his two-year stay in Leiden was the innovative sea atlas of Lucas Jansz Waghenaer from Enkhuizen, Spieghel der Zeevaert. After Plantijn’s return to Antwerp in 1585 his son-in-law Franciscus I Raphelengius, who had fled the city on the Scheldt after its recapture by the Spanish army, bought Christoffel’s properties in Leiden and succeeded him as printer of the academy the following year.44 Shortly afterwards, he received an appointment as professor of Hebrew, too. One of the most momentous achievements of Raphelengius as printer and professor was his role in laying the foundations of Arabic studies at Leiden university.45 The new university also welcomed two other luminaries from the South who had published ground-breaking works on botany at the Officina Plantiniana, namely Rembert Dodoens and Carolus Clusius. Dodoens became professor of medicine in 1582, and Clusius accepted the post of head of the botanical garden a decade later.

134

Karel Davids

Yet, Amsterdam and Leiden did not owe their rise exclusively to the influx of skills and resources from the Southern Netherlands. In mapmaking, Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer was after all not a kind of lone star. Günter Schilder described him as the founding father of a sizeable group of cartographers based in Enkhuizen and Edam, which he dubbed the ‘North Holland school of cartographers’. These cartographers, active between c. 1600 and 1630, produced charts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and South East Asia meant for use by seamen, as well as ornamental maps of Europe intended for decorating merchants’ offices. Some of their output circulated in manuscript, some of it appeared in print at publishing houses in Amsterdam. They borrowed their information from Portuguese and Spanish sources and from accounts of voyages by Dutch seafarers and traders.46 The origin of the early accumulation of skills, knowledge and materials in botany and linguistics in Leiden and Amsterdam was quite varied too. The man who designed the layout of the hortus botanicus and contributed a substantial part of its first set of plants, herbs and seeds was an apothecary from Delft, Dirck Outgertsz. Cluyt. The garden also received some items from Bernardus Paludanus, a famous physician and botanical collector in Enkhuizen whom the governing board of the university had tried in vain to lure to Leiden before making an offer to Clusius.47 The first glossaries of Malay (and a bit of Javanese), which appeared in print in Amsterdam about 1600, were based on data gathered by the crews of Dutch ships visiting the Indonesian archipelago in the 1590s. Merchant Frederik de Houtman from Gouda compiled a dictionary of the Malay and Madagascar languages, plus a brief dialogue guide, during his long captivity in Aceh.48 When Joseph Justus Scaliger arrived as professor in Leiden in 1593, he brought with him from France a large collection of Arabic manuscripts, which he allowed Raphelengius to peruse.49 Geert van Paemel suggested a resemblance between Dutch cities and Antwerp in the sense that in all these cases ‘science was supported by town rulers and had a very practical bent’.50 An important difference, however, was that city governments in Amsterdam and Leiden were much more pro-active in their support of open air sciences than the magistrates of Antwerp. They showed more agency in several ways. The burgomasters of Leiden, who together with representatives of the States of Holland formed the governing board of the university, went to great lengths to attract big names such as Dodoens, Lipsius, Paludanus, Clusius, Raphelengius or Scaliger to their infant institution, offering high salaries and exemptions from teaching duties as well as investing substantial sums in state-ofthe-art facilities such as a hortus botanicus, a library and an anatomical theatre. This expansionary policy was partly made possible by income from confiscated ecclesiastical properties earmarked for use by the university from the early 1580s onwards.51 Due to the generous financial support of the governing board, Jacob Golius was able, after his appointment as professor of Oriental languages in the 1620s, to travel for years in the Levant to expand his linguistic knowledge and skills and to purchase a large number of books and manuscripts for the Leiden library, making it the prime collection in this field in Western Europe. On his

Long-distance corporations and sciences

135

travels in the Middle East, Golius collaborated with local scholars in making ‘astronomical and geodetic measurements and geographic, natural historical and medical observations’.52 The importance of Leiden as a centre of accumulation of linguistic and geographical knowledge was further enhanced in 1690, when the governors succeeded in buying the superb collection of books and manuscripts of the eminent philologist and philosopher Isaac Vossius. A few years later, however, they failed to find the means to acquire the private collection left by Jacob Golius, which included, among other items, a sizeable number of Chinese manuscripts.53 The city fathers of Amsterdam likewise actively promoted the status of their city as a hub of knowledge. Soon after the city had changed over from the Habsburg to the rebel side in 1578, the magistrates founded a municipal library consisting of books and manuscripts from confiscated churches, convents and monasteries, which from the very start was open for perusal by ‘all learned persons and lovers of learning’. By the 1620s, the library contained some 1000 books in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, as well as French, Italian, German and Dutch.54 In 1632, the city government founded an institute of higher learning, the Athenaeum Illustre. Although the aim of the new institute was formally quite modest, namely to enhance the knowledge of history and philosophy of pupils in Amsterdam Latin schools before they entered university while keeping them under parental control, the scholars who were asked to become its first professors were in no doubt about its underlying purpose. Gerard Vossius, who was appointed to the chair of history in 1632, noted in one of his letters: ‘It is … the wish of the city to become more and more famous for its achievements in the field of letters, just as it already excels other cities in wealth’. Both Vossius and his colleague Caspar Barlaeus, who had moved from Antwerp to Holland in 1585, were lured away from their former employer, the University of Leiden, by the offer of ‘princely wages’. After the creation of the Athenaeum, the municipal library was transferred to the building that housed the new institute, the Agnietenkapel, to serve as the Athenaeum library as well.55 Between 1635 and 1686, the faculty of the institute was expanded to include chairs of mathematics and astronomy, law, medicine, theology and Oriental languages. Thus, the curriculum of the Athenaeum at the end of the seventeenth century covered almost the entire range of disciplines taught at a full-blown university, even though the institute, due to the exclusive provincial privilege granted to the University of Leiden, could never acquire the ius promovendi.56 The magistrates of Amsterdam were involved in the development of an urban botanical garden as well. In 1682, burgomaster Joan Huydecoper and councillor Jan Commelin took the initiative to transfer the hortus, founded in 1638 at the behest of the collegium medicum for the benefit of apothecaries and doctors, to a more spacious location on the outer rim of the city. In addition, they engineered a substantial subsidy from the city’s purse for the garden’s design, maintenance and expansion. The new hortus would be both ‘a convenience for doctors and apothecaries and an adornment of the city’. A municipal professorship in

136

Karel Davids

botany was soon created as well.57 And the magistrates of Amsterdam in the later seventeenth century made no secret of their pride in their city’s importance as a hub of wealth and knowledge, as attested by the imagery in the new town hall, finished in the 1650s. In the marble floor in the heart of the building, the Citizens’ Hall, three maps were displayed: one of the Eastern hemisphere, one of the Western hemisphere and one of the Northern sky – as if the rulers of Amsterdam truly were masters of the universe.58 What was the role of long-distance corporations in Amsterdam and Leiden’s rise as centres of open air sciences? Recent literature has focused on trading companies such as the VOC and the WIC rather than on religious organisations. Elisabeth Sutton even argued that maps of Atlantic territories in the first half of the seventeenth century ‘perpetuated and promoted the unity of the state and its integration with modern capitalism’.59 The expansion of long-distance trade under the VOC and the WIC doubtless led to a major increase in the amount and variety of botanic, geographical and linguistic knowledge that travelled from outer-European places to cities in the Dutch Republic. Images, books, notes, artefacts, seeds, herbs and plants collected in Asia, Africa and the Americas found their way to printer’s shops, private collections and holdings in urban public institutions such as libraries and botanical gardens.60 Personal networks between urban elites and directors and officials of the VOC and the WIC formed a significant factor in this process. Without these networks with trading companies, the efforts of governments in Amsterdam and Leiden to promote the status of their cities as knowledge hubs would have had much less effect. However, this accumulation of knowledge in open air sciences in Amsterdam and Leiden was not only driven by commercial impulses, or made possible through the intermediary of long-distance trading companies. Religious organisations also played an important part, especially in the field of linguistics. While the first vocabularies and language guides on Malay appearing in the Netherlands owed much to the work of merchants and seamen, the baton was soon taken over by clergymen. New dictionaries published in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1623, 1650 and 1677 were all compiled by Protestant ministers, based on their in-situ experiences on Java and the Moluccas. Of the two authors of the Vocabularium ofte woort-boeck … in’t Duytsch-Maleysch ende Maleysch-Duytsch of 1623, Kasper Wiltens and Sebastiaan Danckaerts, the former was the founder of the Reformed church on Ambon, while the latter arrived in Bantam in 1616 ‘to get acquainted with the nature of the people and to exercise himself in the Malay language’. After his return to the Netherlands six year later, he not only concerned himself with the publication of ‘various books in Malay’ but also acted as an advisor to the synod in Holland about the organisation of the church in the Indies. A Latin translation of this dictionary appeared in Rome in 1631, produced in the printing shop of the Propaganda Fide.61 The ‘lover of language’ who edited a compilation set of all previous Malay dictionaries, published in Batavia in 1707–1708, was a Protestant minister too: Petrus van der Vorm.62 VOC directors in the Netherlands and VOC officials in Asia supported the

Long-distance corporations and sciences

137

study of Malay, but the ‘forced labour’ of making dictionaries (as Scaliger called it) was performed by Protestant clergymen. And the prime purpose of this drudgery was to spread the Gospel among peoples in South East Asia.63 Missionary ambitions, next to the needs of diplomacy and curiosity about sources on mathematics and sciences, were a vital driving force behind the rise of Arabic studies in Leiden, too.64 For the same reasons, Oriental languages were intermittently taught at the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam. A chair in this subject was finally established in 1686. The decisive factor was the introduction of theology in the curriculum of the Athenaeum, not a demand from the merchant community.65 And the study of Chinese in Leiden, as we have seen, owed much to the contribution of Jesuits based in the Southern Netherlands, who were missionaries in heart and soul.

Cities, long-distance corporations and open air sciences after 1700 Antwerp and the cities in the Northern Netherlands thus differed in the matter of agency. Whereas the city government in Antwerp lacked any agency in its rise as a hub of open air sciences, urban magistrates in Leiden and Amsterdam did pursue policies for the benefit of the advancement of knowledge. In the Dutch Republic, urban governments played a key role in creating and maintaining public institutions that provided a favourable environment for open air sciences to flourish. The support from the city authorities that was missing in Antwerp was manifestly in evidence in Leiden and Amsterdam. Why was there such a difference between these cities? A possible explanation is the extent of separation between political and economic elites. Guido Marnef has drawn attention to the surprising fact that merchants in Antwerp, despite owning the lion’s share of the city’s wealth, were barely represented in the municipal government during the heyday of the city before 1585. Merchants made up only a small minority of the city’s magistrates.66 In Amsterdam and Leiden, by contrast, political and economic elites were for a long time much more intertwined. The distance between these elites did not grow until after 1700. In the eighteenth century, most regents in Amsterdam and Leiden were no longer active entrepreneurs in trade or industry.67 In this respect, the Dutch cities eventually became more like Antwerp before the fall. Yet, the increasing distance between political and economic elites in Dutch cities after 1700 did not undermine the foundation for the flourishing of the open air sciences. Why was there no negative effect? The explanation, I would suggest, lies in the fact that the efflorescence of open air sciences in the Dutch Republic became less dependent on the agency of city governments because public institutions, publishing houses and long-distance trading companies together had meanwhile created a sufficiently stable and congenial infrastructure for the further accumulation and transmission of knowledge. By 1700, these actors had become so well-established and they had generated and supported

138

Karel Davids

such wide-ranging networks for the circulation of knowledge that the agency of urban governments was no longer as critical for the continued flourishing of open air science. Dutch institutions of higher learning were a powerful international magnet by the end of the seventeenth century. The number of foreign students entering Dutch universities between about 1680 and 1730 was higher than ever before or since. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, almost a third of all graduates of Dutch universities came from abroad.68 Among the Dutch universities, Leiden was especially attractive to English-speaking students. Of all the students from the British Isles and North America in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nearly three-quarters took a degree at the university in Leiden.69 One of the consequences of this ‘British wave’ in Leiden was that it created a network of alumni in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic, which supported the role of Leiden as a centre of open air sciences. For example, the first comprehensive overview of the flora in the British American colony Virginia, the Flora Virginica, which was composed by clerk and plantation owner John Clayton, was published by Cornelis Waak in Leiden in 1739/1743 thanks to the efforts of local physician Johan Frederik Gronovius.70 From his student days onwards Gronovius, son of a Leiden professor and a graduate of Leiden university himself, built a large network of correspondents, including many alumni of Leiden, in Britain and the British American colonies. These ‘field workers’ on the other side of the Atlantic provided Gronovius with samples of plants, animals and minerals, while Gronovius dispatched to them copies of books published in the Netherlands and forwarded news about upcoming publications on natural history.71 Unlike the Society of Jesus in Antwerp, moreover, long-distance trading corporations planted deep roots in Dutch cities. The VOC made large fixed investments in Amsterdam in the form of shipyards, offices and warehouses (Figure 5.1). Regents of Amsterdam and Leiden had permanent seats on its board of directors. Thanks to these firm and long-lasting connections between cities and the VOC, a steady stream of information and specimens from overseas relevant for the growth of geographical, botanical or linguistic knowledge found its way to publishers, botanical gardens and institutions of higher learning at home. Pieter van der Aa, Jacob van Meurs, Cornelis de Bruijn and other printing houses in Amsterdam and Leiden capitalised on these flows of information to produce what Benjamin Schmidt has called ‘exotic geography’, which had its heyday in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.72 The Van Keulens in Amsterdam, who held the position of chief hydrographer of the VOC and WIC from 1714 onwards, were the leading publishers in maritime cartography in Europe from the 1690s until the mid-eighteenth century.73 Private individuals could benefit from contacts with the VOC, too. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, registrar Jean Théodore Royer in The Hague managed to bring together a fine collection of objects and manuscripts relating to Chinese culture

Long-distance corporations and sciences

139

The Oostindisch Huis, headquarters of the VOC in Amsterdam, by Reinier Vinkeles (1768) – drawing. © Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, collection Atlas Splitgerber, Public Domain.

FIGURE 5.1

and language thanks to his carefully nurtured connections with VOC employees in China.74 Additionally, centres of knowledge accumulation and transmission in open air sciences arose in VOC-ruled areas in Asia. The traditional view that the Dutch lagged behind in ‘colonial science’ in the eighteenth century applies less to mapmaking, linguistics or botany than to, for example, astronomical research.75 Batavia developed into a hub of cartographic knowledge on Asian waters from the 1620s onwards. A hydrographic office became an integral part of the organisation that managed the Company’s operations in Asia. This office not only served as a depot of charts, but also functioned as a centre of production, reproduction, improvement and distribution of manuscript charts and maps which were used on voyages in Asia and between Asia and Europe.76 The first print shop in the Company’s headquarters in Batavia was set up in the 1660s. A printing press in Colombo started operation in the 1730s.77 Along with publishers in Amsterdam, these printing presses operating under the aegis of the VOC in Asia produced numerous foreign language publications intended for the spread of the Reformed religion among peoples in South East Asia, India and

140

Karel Davids

Ceylon, ranging from grammars and dictionaries to catechisms, prayer books, songbooks and bible translations in Malay, Sinhalese, Tamil and Portuguese.78 The library of the VOC headquarters in Batavia in the eighteenth century included dozens of manuscripts in Malay and other ‘Oriental’ languages. Protestant minister Petrus van der Vorm and several other private individuals in the city owned substantial numbers of books and manuscripts in Asian languages, too.79 The knowledge infrastructure in Batavia was further expanded in 1778 by the foundation of a learned society, the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, which was ‘the first of its kind in Asia’.80 The Society enjoyed the patronage of the High Government of the VOC and included high-ranking Company employees as well as leading members of Batavian society. One of the ways in which the VOC authorities seconded the Bataviaasch Genootschap was by ordering local representatives in all the Company’s establishments in Asia to send information on, for example, natural history to the Society in Batavia. The Company and the Batavia Society also supported botanical research on Java by foreign naturalists (mostly from the school of Linnaeus in Uppsala, Sweden) who visited Asia between the 1770s and the early nineteenth century, and whose collections ended up in different places in Europe.81 In various ways, therefore, long-distance trading corporations played a critical role in sustaining the efflorescence of open air sciences in the Netherlands after 1700.

Conclusion Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leiden were for a shorter or longer period of time leading centres of knowledge accumulation and distribution in the open air sciences in Europe. In all three cities, networks of urban elites along with the capabilities of local printing industries were powerful ‘pull’ factors that made the rise to primacy possible in the first place. Long-distance corporations were also crucially important in all three cases, either for the preservation of the status of a city as a knowledge hub once it had been attained, or for the further growth in the size and diversity of knowledge flows that were attracted to and distributed from the city. However, Antwerp went through a different trajectory than Amsterdam and Leiden in several respects. Antwerp’s position as a hub in the open air sciences after 1585 became much more dependent on a religious long-distance corporation, namely the Society of Jesus, than it had been in the period before the fall, or than Amsterdam and Leiden would be after 1600. Thanks to the networks and institutional infrastructure of the Jesuits, Antwerp continued to play a prominent role in mapmaking and linguistics until the 1650s. Once the Jesuits decided to seek other outlets for their knowledge, the city’s function as a centre of distribution in these fields of expertise came to an end. In Amsterdam and Leiden, networks between urban elites and long-distance trading companies such as the VOC and the WIC were a significant factor in raising the status of

Long-distance corporations and sciences

141

these cities as hubs of knowledge, but they were never as decisive as the contribution of the Jesuits in the case of Antwerp after the fall. Unlike Amsterdam and Leiden, moreover, the Antwerp city government did not provide support to public institutions such as libraries, botanical gardens or institutions of higher learning, which could offer a favourable environment for the flourishing of open air sciences. The explanation is possibly that economic elites were less represented in the government of sixteenth-century Antwerp than among the magistrates of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Leiden. Admittedly, entrepreneurs increasingly disappeared from Dutch urban governments after 1700, but by then an infrastructure of knowledge was well-established and networks between knowledge institutions, long-distance trading corporations and the printing and publishing industry were firmly in place. At a more general level, we can draw the conclusion that we should beware of putting too much emphasis on the role of urban agency in explaining the rise and persistence of cities as hubs of knowledge in open air sciences. The support of city governments was important for the building and maintenance of institutional infrastructures, but it was not the sole relevant factor in the long run. Long-distance corporations played a crucial role in powering and facilitating the circulation of knowledge on botany, geography and linguistics. Knowledge institutions and networks acquired dynamics of their own. Moreover, commercial impulses were not the only motive for the accumulation and distribution of knowledge, least of all in the field of linguistics. Missionary ambitions, whether channelled in long-distance religious organisations or not, turn out to have been a mighty driving force in this process as well.

Notes 1 Harris, ‘Networks’, 356–357, 360–361; Harris, ‘Long-distance Corporations’, 272, 279, 285–280. 2 Cook, Matters of Exchange; Smith and Findlen eds, Merchants and Marvels; Huigen, De Jong and Kolfin eds, The Dutch Trading Companies; Schmidt, ‘Accumulating the World’; Margócsy, Commercial Visions. 3 O’Malley et al. eds, The Jesuits, O’Malley et al. eds, The Jesuits II; Harris, ‘Jesuit Scientific Activity’; Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land; Hertroijs. Hoe kennis van China naar Europa kwam. 4 Hall, Cities in Civilization; O’Brien et al. eds, Urban Achievement; Glaeser, Triumph of the City; Davids and De Munck eds, Innovation and Creativity. 5 Raj, Relocating Modern Science, 14–15. 6 In follow-up studies, it would be interesting to include other hubs of trade in this comparison, such as Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bruges, Lisbon or Seville, cf. Davids, ‘Shifts of Technological Leadership’. 7 See Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market; Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade. 8 Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 287. 9 De Nave, ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline’, 13. 10 The quote is borrowed from Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 34. See also De Nave, ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline’, 13–17; Wille, ‘Botanische werken’. 11 De Nave, ‘Antwerpen’, 21–22, 26–27; Waterschoot, ‘Antwerp’, 238–239; Meskens, Practical Mathematics, 113–117, 139–177.

142

Karel Davids

12 De Nave, ‘Antwerpen’, 19–21; De Nave, ‘Franciscus I Raphelengius’, 533, 535. 13 Studio VR Enter the Virtual World, www.studiovr.pl/spacery_wirtualne/Stadhuis_Ant werpen/. 14 Bevers, Das Rathaus von Antwerpen, 41–92. The original imagery of the interior is unknown, because it was destroyed in the Spanish Fury of 1576, see Bevers, Rathaus, 3; Marnef, ‘Stadhuis’. 15 Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 287, 291, 303. 16 De Nave, ‘Antwerpen’, 18, 21, 28; Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 287–288, 293–294, 297; Meskens, Practical Mathematics, 14–21. 17 De Nave, ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline’, 13–15; Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 297–298. 18 Waterschoot, ‘Antwerp’; Marnef, Antwerpen, 65–67. 19 De Nave, ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline’, 13; De Nave, ‘Antwerpen, centrum van humanisme en wetenschappen’, 20–21. 20 De Nave, ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline’, 14; Wille, ‘Botanische werken’, 34–35; Depauw, ‘Peeter vander Borcht’; Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 51–53; Barrera Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 122–127. 21 Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 294; Meskens, Practical Mathematics, 140, 167. 22 Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 15–16. Other religious orders were present in the city, too, but their numbers were declining, and they were not part of such far-flung networks as the Antwerp Jesuits, cf. Marnef, Antwerpen, 79–81. 23 Meskens, Practical Mathematics, 168–175; Lemli, ‘Officinae Plantinianae’, 58–59. 24 Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 16, 18, 20; De Bruycker, ‘To the Adornment and Honour of the City’, quoted on p. 138 in footnote 8 (my translation). 25 Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 21, 61; De Bruycker, ‘To the Adornment and Honour of the City’, 140–141. 26 Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 18, 21, 51. 27 Golvers, ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China’, 167–168. 28 Meskens, Wiskunde tussen Renaissance en barok, 100, 208; Meskens, Practical Mathematics, 136–137; Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 303; De Bruycker, ‘To the Adornment and Honour of the City’, 138–139, 141–143. 29 Lombaerde ed., Innovation and Experience; Goris, Lof van Antwerpen, 79; Bertels, De Munck and Van Goethem eds, Antwerpen, 33. 30 Cf. De Bruycker, ‘To the Adornment and Honour of the city’, 139; Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 57. 31 Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 59–60. 32 Golvers, ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China’, 168–169; Van Goethem ed., Jezuïeten in Antwerpen, 55. 33 Golvers, ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China’, 159–160. 34 Ibidem, 176–179; Mungello, Curious Land, 110. 35 Duyvendak, ‘Early Chinese Studies in Holland’, 301–303. 36 Ibidem, 313–314. 37 Golvers, ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China’, 179. Actors such as Martini also engaged with actors and corporations in other cities apart from Antwerp and Amsterdam (e.g. Rome). This underscores the point that Jesuits were not dependent on a particular city but really did show ‘agency’. Cf. also Dijkstra and Weststeijn, ‘Constructing Confucius in the Low Countries’, 144–146. 38 Mungello, Curious Land, 108–110, 116–117, 120–124. 39 Golvers, ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China’, 179–181. 40 Van den Oord, ‘Nederlandse boekhandelaren’, 393–395. 41 Hoftijzer, ‘Books and Publishing’, 249–250, 256–259; Van Netten, Koopman in kennis; Schmidt, ‘Accumulating the World’, 129–154. 42 Davids, ‘Amsterdam’, 309–312, 318. 43 See e.g. Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden; Davids, Rise and Decline, 219–226.

Long-distance corporations and sciences

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

143

Langereis, De woordenaar, 341–344. De Nave, ‘Franciscus I Raphelengius’, 524–525. Schilder, ‘De Noordhollandse cartografenschool’, 48–49. Egmond, ‘Een mislukte benoeming’, 61, 63. Van Dijk, ‘De VOC en de kennis’, 67; Werndly, Maleische spraakkunst, 276–278. Juynbol, Zeventiende-eeuwsche beoefenaars, 41, 49–50. Van Paemel, ‘Science for Sale’, 303. See Egmond, ‘Een mislukte benoeming’, 56–58; and Sluijter, Tot ciraet, vermeerderinge ende heerlyckmakinge, 22–25, 64–70, 130–150, 223–230, 237–243. Dijksterhuis, ‘The Mutual Making of Sciences and Humanities’, 79–80. Sluijter, Tot ciraet, vermeerderinge ende heerlyckmakinge, 226; Juynbol, Zeventiendeeeuwsche beoefenaars, 131–134; Duyvendak, ‘Early Chinese Studies in Holland’, 314. Davids, ‘Amsterdam’, 317, 319–320. Davids, ‘Amsterdam’, 318; Heesakkers, ‘Foundation’, 4, 12–14; Van Miert, Illuster onderwijs, 38–40, 287–291. Davids, ‘Amsterdam’, 318; Van Miert, Illuster onderwijs, 38–40. Wijnands, Zevenhuizen and Heniger, Een sieraad voor de stad, 12–13, 27, 31–32, 43–57. Royal Palace Amsterdam, www.paleisamsterdam.nl/en/discover-palace/citizens-hall/; Huisken, Het Koninklijk Paleis, 17, 22–25. Cook, Matters of Exchange; Huigen, De Jong and Kolfin eds, Dutch Trading Companies; Friedrich, Brendecke and Ehrenpreis eds, Transformations of Knowledge, 1. See for example Wijnands, Zevenhuizen and Heniger, Sieraad voor de stad, 40–45; Bergvelt and Kistemaker eds, De wereld binnen handbereik, 39–51, 58, 60–63, 137–140, 154–163. Werndly, Maleische spraakkunst, 284–290. Collectanea Malaica vocabularia; Werndly, Maleische spraakkunst, 289–290. Quoted in Werndly, Maleische spraakkunst, 276. See also Van Dijk, ‘VOC en de kennis’, 65–67 and Joosse, ‘Kerk en zendingsbevel’. Juynbol, Zeventiende-eeuwsche beoefenaars, 51–52, 75–76; Dijksterhuis, ‘Mutual Making of Sciences and Humanities’, 79–81. This also applied to the practice of Arabic in the eighteenth century, see Nat, Studie van de Oostersche talen, Ch. 2. Van Miert, Illuster onderwijs, 170–176. Marnef, Antwerpen, 40. Burke, Venice and Amsterdam, Ch. 9; Prak, Gezeten burgers, 12, 141, 264–265. Frijhoff, La société néerlandaise et ses gradués, 98–99 and annexe 2. Ibidem, 101; Mijers, ‘News from the Republic of Letters’, 39. Davids, ‘The Scholarly Atlantic’, 244–245; Flora Virginicia. Davids, ‘The Scholarly Atlantic’, 224–225, 228–231, 245. Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. Kok, ‘Cartografie van de firma Van Keulen’. Van Campen, De Haagse jurist Jean Théodore Royer. Cf. Van Berkel, ‘Empire without Science?’, 90–92, 94–96; Zuidervaart and Van Gent, ‘A Bare Outpost of Learned European Culture’. Zandvliet, Mapping for Money. Landwehr, VOC, xxi–xxv. Landwehr, VOC, 415–457; Swellengrebel, Leijdeckers voetspoor, 8–20. Groot, Van Batavia naar Weltevreden, 34–37. Boomgaard, ‘For the Common Good’, 155. Groot, Van Batavia naar Weltevreden, 98–99; Boomgaard, ‘For the Common Good’, 140–141, 148–153, 155.

144

Karel Davids

References Barrera Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Bergvelt, Ellinoor and Kistemaker, Renée eds. De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Zwolle: WBooks, 1992. Bertels, Inge; De Munck, Bert and Van Goethem, Herman eds. Antwerpen. Biografie van een stad. Antwerp: De Bezige Bij, 2011. Bevers, Holm. Das Rathaus von Antwerpen (1561–1565). Architektur und Figuren-Program. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1985. Boomgaard, Peter. ‘For the Common Good: Dutch Institutions and Western Scholarship on Indonesia around 1800.’ In Boomgaard, Peter ed. Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760–1830. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 135–164. Burke, Peter. Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Collectanea Malaica vocabularia of Maleische woord-boek sameling. Batavia: Andries Lambert Loderus, 1707–1708. Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Davids, Karel. ‘Shifts of Technological Leadership in Early Modern Europe.’ In Davids, Karel and Lucassen, Jan eds. A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 338–366. Davids, Karel. ‘Amsterdam as a Centre of Learning in the Dutch Golden Age, c.1580–1700.’ In O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and van der Wee, Hermann eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 305–323. Davids, Karel. The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership: Technology, Economy and Culture in the Netherlands. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. Davids, Karel. ‘The Scholarly Atlantic: Circuits of Knowledge between Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Americas in the Eighteenth Century.’ In Oostindie, Gert and Roitman, Jessica V. eds. Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 224–248. Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. De Bruycker, Angelo. ‘“To the Adornment and Honour of the City”: The Mathematics Course of the Flemish Jesuits in the Seventeenth Century.’ BSHM Bulletin 24 (2009): 135–146. De Nave, Francine. ‘Antwerpen, centrum van humanisme en wetenschappen in de 16de eeuw.’ In Cockx-Indestege, Elly and De Nave, Francine eds. Christoffel Plantijn en de exacte wetenschappen in zijn tijd. Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1989a, pp. 15–33. De Nave, Francine. ‘Franciscus I Raphelengius (1539–1597), grondlegger van de Arabische studiën in de Nederlanden.’ In De Schepper, Marcus and De Nave, Francine eds. Ex Officina Plantiniana. Studia in memoriam Christophori Plantini (ca.1520–1589). Antwerp: Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen, 1989b, pp. 523–555. De Nave, Francine. ‘Van hulpwetenschap naar zelfstandige discipline: De botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de 16de eeuw.’ In De botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw–ca.1650). Antwerp: Stad Antwerpen, 1993, pp. 11–18.

Long-distance corporations and sciences

145

Depauw, C. ‘Peeter vander Borcht (1535/40–1608): De kunstenaar als inventor of creator van botanische illustraties?’ In De botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw–ca.1650). Antwerp: Stad Antwerpen, 1993, pp. 47–56. Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan. ‘The Mutual Making of Sciences and Humanities: Willibrord Snellius, Jacob Golius and the Early Modern Entanglement of Mathematics and Philology.’ In Bod, Rens; Maat, Jaap and Weststeijn, Thijs eds. The Making of the Humanities, Volume 2: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 73–92. Dijkstra, Trude and Weststeijn, Thijs. ‘Constructing Confucius in the Low Countries.’ De Zeventiende Eeuw 32 (2016): 137–164. Duyvendak, J.J.L. ‘Early Chinese Studies in Holland.’ T’oung Pao 32 (1936): 292–344. Egmond, Florike. ‘Een mislukte benoeming. Paludanus en de Leidse universiteit.’ In Van Gelder, Roelof; Parmentier, Jan and Roeper, Vibeke eds. Souffrir pour parvenir. De wereld van Jan Huygen van Linschoten. Haarlem: Arcadia, 1998, pp. 51–64. Flora Virginicia exhibens plantas quas V.C. Johannes Clayton in Virginia observavit et collegit, easdem methodo sexuali disposuit, ad genera propria retulit, nominibus specificis insignivit et minus cognitas descripsit Joh. Fred. Gronovius (2 vols). Leiden: Cornelius Haak, 1739–1743. Friedrich, Susanne; Brendecke, Arndt and Ehrenpreis, Stefan eds. Transformations of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Frijhoff, Willem. La société néerlandaise et ses gradués, 1575–1814. Maarssen: APA Holland University Press, 1981. Gelderblom, Oscar. Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630). Hilversum: Verloren, 2000. Glaeser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. London: Penguin Books, 2011. Golvers, Noël. ‘The XVIIth-century Jesuit Mission in China and Its “Antwerp Connections”. I. The Moretus Family (1660–1700).’ In De Schepper, Marcus and De Nave, Francine eds. Ex Officina Plantiniana-Moretorum. Studies over het drukkersgeslacht Moretus. Antwerp: Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen, 1996, pp. 157–188. Goris, J.A. Lof van Antwerpen. Hoe reizigers Antwerpen zagen van de XVde tot XXe eeuw. Brussels: Standaard, 1940. Groot, Hans. Van Batavia naar Weltevreden. Het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1778–1867. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization. New York: Phoenix, 1998. Harris, Steven J. ‘Long-distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge.’ Configurations 6 (1998): 269–304. Harris, Steven J. ‘Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions.’ Isis 96 (2005): 71–79. Harris, Steven J. ‘Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange.’ In Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine eds. The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 341–362. Heesakkers, Chris L. ‘Foundation and Early Development of the Athenaeum Illustre at Amsterdam.’ Lias 9 (1982): 3–18. Hertroijs, Frasie. Hoe kennis van China naar Europa kwam. De rol van jezuïeten en VOCdienaren, circa 1680–1795. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2014. Hoftijzer, Paul. ‘Books and Publishing: Amsterdam.’ In O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and Van der Wee, Herman eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 249–263.

146

Karel Davids

Hsia, Florence C. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Huigen, Siegfried;; De Jong, Jan L. and Kolfin, Elmer eds. The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Huisken, Jacobine E. Het Koninklijk Paleis op de Dam historisch gezien/The Royal Palace on the Dam in a Historical View. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1989. Israel, Jonathan I. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Joosse, L.J. ‘Kerk en zendingsbevel.’ In Schutte, G.J. ed. Het Indisch Sion. De Gereformeerde Kerk onder de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002, pp. 25–42. Juynbol, W.M.C. Zeventiende-eeuwsche beoefenaars van het Arabisch in Nederland. Utrecht: Kemink, 1931. Kok, M. ‘Çartografie van de firma Van Keulen.’ In Van Keulen, E.O.; Mörzer Bruyns, W.F.J. and Spits, E.K. eds. “In de Gekroonde Lootsman”. Het kaarten-, boekuitgevers en instrumentenmakershuis Van Keulen te Amsterdam 1680–1885. Utrecht: HES Uitgevers, 1989, pp. 15–43. Landwehr, John. VOC: A Bibliography of Publications Relating to the Dutch East India Company 1602–1800. Ed. Van der Krogt, Peter. Utrecht: HES Uitgevers, 1991. Langereis, Sandra. De woordenaar. Christoffel Plantijn, ’s werelds grootste drukker en uitgever 1520–1589. Amsterdam: Balans, 2014. Lemli, J. ‘De Officinae Plantinianae te Antwerpen en Leiden en hun botanische edities van 1589 tot 1647.’ In De botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw–ca.1650). Antwerp: Stad Antwerpen, 1993, pp. 57–59. Lesger, Clé. The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries, c.1550–1630. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Lombaerde, Piet ed. Innovation and Experience in the Early Baroque in the Southern Netherlands: The Case of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Margócsy, Dániel. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Marnef, Guido. Antwerpen in de tijd van de Reformatie. Antwerp: Meulenhoff/Kritak, 1996. Marnef, Guido. ‘Een stadhuis voor een autonome stadsrepubliek. De politieke, economische en religieuze context ten tijde van de bouw.’ In Beyen, M.; Schoups, I.; Timmermans, B. and Van Goethem, H. eds. Het stadhuis van Antwerpen. 450 jaar geschiedenis. Antwerp: Pandora Publishers, 2015, pp. 8–29. Meskens, Ad. Wiskunde tussen Renaissance en barok. Aspecten van wiskundebeoefening te Antwerpen 1550–1650. Antwerp: Publicaties SBA/AMVC, 1994. Meskens, Ad. Practical Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis: Mathematical Life in Late 16th Century Antwerp. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Mijers, Esther. ‘News from the Republic of Letters’: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie and the United Provinces, 1650–1750. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Mungello, David E. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985. Nat, J. De studie van de Oostersche talen in Nederland in de 18e en de 19e eeuw. Purmerend: J. Muusses, 1929. O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and Van der Wee, Herman eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Long-distance corporations and sciences

147

O’Malley, John W.; Bailey, Gauvin Alexander; Harris, Steven J. and Kennedy, T. Frank eds. The Jesuits: Culture, Science and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. O’Malley, John W.; Bailey, Gauvin Alexander; Harris, Steven J. and Kennedy, T. Frank eds . The Jesuits II: Culture, Science and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Prak, Maarten. Gezeten burgers. De elite in een Hollandse stad. Leiden 1700–1780. Dieren: Bataafsche Leeuw, 1985. Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Schilder, G.G. ‘De Noordhollandse cartografenschool.’ In Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer van Enckhuysen. De maritieme cartografie in de Nederlanden in de zestiende en het begin van de zeventiende eeuw. Enkhuizen: Vereniging Vrienden van het Zuiderzeemuseum, 1984, pp. 47–72. Schmidt, Benjamin. ‘Accumulating the World: Collecting and Commodifying “Globalism” in Early Modern Europe.’ In Roberts, Lissa ed. Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and around the Netherlands during the Early Modern Period. Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011, pp. 129–154. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Sluijter, Ronald. Tot ciraet, vermeerderinge ende heerlyckmakinge der universiteyt. Bestuur, instellingen, personeel en financiën van de Leidse universiteit, 1572–1812. Hilversum: Verloren, 2004. Smith, Pamela H. and Findlen, Paula eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Swellengrebel, J.L. Leijdeckers voetspoor. Anderhalve eeuw Bijbelvertaling en taalkunde in de Indonesische talen, Vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Van Berkel, Klaas. ‘Empire without Science? The Dutch Scholarly World and Colonial Science around 1800.’ In Boomgaard, Peter ed. Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760–1830. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 89–108. Van Campen, Jan. De Haagse jurist Jean Théodore Royer (1737–1807) en zijn verzameling Chinese voorwerpen. Hilversum: Verloren, 2000. Van den Oord, Kees. ‘Nederlandse boekhandelaren in de grootboeken van de Officina Plantiniana, 1566–1589.’ In De Schepper, Marcus and De Nave, Francine eds. Ex Officina Plantiniana-Moretorum. Studies over het drukkersgeslacht Moretus. Antwerp: Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen, 1996, pp. 391–397. Van Dijk, Cees. ‘De VOC en de kennis van de taal- en volkenkunde van insulair Zuidoost-Azië.’ In Bethlehem, J. and Meijer, A.C. eds. VOC en cultuur. Wetenschappelijke en culturele relaties tussen Europa en Azië ten tijde van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. Amsterdam: Schiphouwer en Brinkman, 1993, pp. 59–76. Van Goethem, Herman ed. Jezuïeten in Antwerpen 1562–2002. Antwerp: UFSIA, 2002. Van Miert, Dirk. Illuster onderwijs. Het Amsterdamse Athenaeum in de Gouden Eeuw, 1632–1704. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2005. Van Netten, Djoeke. Koopman in kennis. De uitgever Willem Jansz. Blaeu in de geleerde wereld (1571–1638). Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2014. Van Paemel, Geert. ‘Science for Sale: The Metropolitan Stimulus for Scientific Achievements in Sixteenth-century Antwerp.’ In O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and

148

Karel Davids

van der Wee, Hermann eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 287–305. Waterschoot, Werner. ‘Antwerp: Books, Publishing and Cultural Production before 1585.’ In O’Brien, Patrick; Keene, Derek; ’t Hart, Marjolein and van der Wee, Hermann eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 233–248. Werndly, Georg Henrik. Maleische spraakkunst, uit de eige schriften der Maleiers opgemaakt. Amsterdam: R. en G. Etstein, 1736. Wijnands, D.O.; Zevenhuizen, E.J.A. and Heniger, J. Een sieraad voor de stad. De Amsterdamse Hortus Botanicus 1638–1993. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994. Wille, H. ‘De botanische werken van R. Dodoens, C. Clusius en M. Lobelius.’ In De botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden. Antwerp: Stad Antwerpen, 1993, pp. 33–38. Zandvliet, Kees. Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and the Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion, 1998. Zuidervaart, Huib J. and Van Gent, Rob H. ‘“A Bare Outpost of Learned European Culture on the Edge of the Jungles of Java”: Johan Maurits Mohr (1716–1775) and the Emergence of Instrumental and Institutional Science in Dutch Colonial Indonesia.’ Isis 95 (2004): 1–33.

6 TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, SHIP DESIGN AND URBAN POLICY IN THE AGE OF NICOLAES WITSEN Dániel Margócsy1

Introduction: technology transfer in the Bible and in the city Read the Holy Scripture as it is written in Genesis 6:13–16 (KJV): And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopherwood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch. And this is how you shall make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. You shall make a window for the ark, and you shall finish it to a cubit from above; and set the door of the ark in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third decks. As the Old Testament reminds us, the construction of ships is a complex enterprise, and the acquisition of the skills necessary for shipbuilding (unless guided by divine inspiration) is not necessarily easy. In the book of Genesis, Noah is expected to build a three-decked ship based on specifications on length, width and height, i.e. the proportions of the ship, and on specifications of material, i.e. gopherwood covered with pitch. According to the Bible, he succeeds in this task, not the least because God has elected him for this task because of his moral qualities. He is ‘a just man and perfect in his generations’. Yet it is also wellknown that Biblical scholars had much difficulty attempting to reconstruct the ark according to the specifications of the text, although several seventeenthcentury Dutch authors claimed that the fluyt, a new type of ship, was built on the model of Noah’s ark.2 Using the terminology of the sociology of science, it

150

Dániel Margócsy

The VOC wharves on the Oostenburg island in Amsterdam, 1696, Ludolf Bakhuizen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SB 2764, Public Domain.

FIGURE 6.1

was questionable whether the tacitly shared knowledge of Noah and God could also be transferred to early modern shipbuilders through the textual, formalized information contained in the Bible.3 In this chapter, I examine how people thought about transferring technologies of shipbuilding in the context of early modern cities. I have started my discussion with the story of Noah to emphasize that, for many early modern writers, the act of shipbuilding had Biblical overtones, and therefore, they put a special emphasis on the moral and religious qualities of shipbuilders. I focus on the Amsterdam burgomaster Nicolaes Witsen, a leading figure of the Dutch metropolis in the late seventeenth-century, and the author of the first shipbuilding encyclopedia in the Netherlands.4 Witsen’s encyclopedia, the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw en bestier, was filled with useful information on how Dutch and foreign ships were constructed in Biblical, Ancient and modern times, based partly on the author’s extensive reading of historical and contemporary sources, and partly on his conversations with expert shipwrights in the city. At first sight, we may mistake the author of such an informative work for a strong promoter for the open circulation of technical knowledge. Yet, if we

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

151

look carefully, this act of publication is not necessarily evidence for Witsen’s support of uncontrolled technology transfer and the open sharing of knowledge. As I argue, Witsen had a sophisticated and politicized understanding of how technologies traveled, and did not believe that his encyclopedia could support effective technology transfer. His publications and actions as a burgomaster reveal the complex interplay of openness and secrecy in the development of early modern knowledge. Secrecy and open publication were not incompatible in the period, and both were needed for the development of commercially viable technologies. As this chapter shows, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cannot simply be characterized as a period of increasing openness.5 Witsen understood the problem of technology transfer in light of the political and moral economy of his day. He supported it when it benefitted cities in the Netherlands, and he opposed it when it provided a clear danger for national security and competitiveness. Importantly, Witsen believed that technology transfer could happen on occasion, but it was very difficult. It could only be achieved when people, material resources, and knowledge were all mobile. This was a rather heavy requirement, as the immobility of any of these three constituents wrecked successful transfer. One could gain financial or honorific profit from the circulation of either element without having to worry that a rivaling city, or state, would successfully build a competing industry. This is why, in his encyclopedia, Witsen was happy to circulate information about shipbuilding. The circulation of this information advertised the skills and techniques of Dutch shipwrights, and the supremacy of Dutch shipbuilding, without endangering the primacy of local industry. The Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheepsbouw did not damage the interests of his native city and country, but rather served to convince potential customers that their best option was to turn to the Dutch, and to help them communicate with shipwrights what kind of ships they wanted to order. The circulation of printed knowledge was only one condition of technology transfer, and it was not a sufficient condition. Shipbuilding was one of the most essential technologies in Europe during the Age of Discoveries, when it became the key tool for transporting goods and humans across the oceans.6 Its importance for national security grew even more in the seventeenth century when many European states began to establish permanent navies.7 It was also big business. The Venetian Arsenale, for instance, employed many thousands of workers, and could only function when adequately supplied with vast amounts of timber from the neighboring lands.8 The Dutch shipbuilding industry, however, was different from the Arsenale, or from British and French navy dockyards. Like the Republic itself, it was not centralized. Ships could be built or repaired by the shipbuilders’ guilds in various Dutch cities, in the shipbuilding region of the Zaanstreek, and at the wharves of the East and West India Companies and the five Admiralties of the Netherlands (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). When put together, these sites employed many thousands of workers, and provided the engine for Dutch maritime power.9 Importantly, the lack of centralization left considerable power in the hands of cities and

152

Dániel Margócsy

FIGURE 6.2 The Admiralty wharves in Amsterdam, 1655–1660, Ludolf Bakhuizen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SB 6405, Public Domain.

guilds in the management of shipbuilding. It also resulted in the emergence of a competitive market and a mobile workforce that could move with relative ease from one wharf to another within the Netherlands, and even beyond. Witsen’s thinking on shipbuilding was shaped by these considerations. For him, shipbuilding was not significantly different from the other trades pursued in the city of Amsterdam. In recent years, economic historians have argued convincingly that technology transfer was crucial for early modern cities. As Stephan R. Epstein has claimed, municipal guilds played a rather important, and not necessarily negative, role in circulating and transmitting technological knowledge throughout Europe.10 And, if we are to use the general framework of Oscar Gelderblom in arguing for the importance of the intra-European competition of late medieval and early modern cities, we have to realize that an important part of this competition was fueled by municipal policies for encouraging the immigration of craftsmen and for limiting the out-migration of skilled workers.11 At the national level, Karel Davids has similarly pointed out that the issue of Dutch technological leadership in the early modern period is intimately tied to the issues of technology transfer.12 This chapter points out that early modern municipal politicians, such as Witsen, also developed complex ideas about technology transfer. Witsen agreed with Epstein, Gelderblom, and Davids that it was an important issue. Yet he conceptualized it in a political framework that emphasized the moral and religious qualities of cities and states. In recent years, Bert De Munck has emphasized that civic identity was a key feature of early modern towns and urban government; and historians of political thought have long argued that, in the wake of Machiavelli, a republican identity was essential for many early modern theories of state.13 For Witsen, the unique character of the Protestant

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

153

citizens of Amsterdam, and of the Dutch Republic, had much explanatory value why other nations could not easily replicate the success of the Netherlands in building ships. As I argue, we can only understand early ideas about modern technology transfer within this context of contemporary thought on the political and moral economy of governance. Conversely, we can only understand seventeenth-century ideas about the governance of cities if we can reconstruct how contemporary political thinkers conceptualized the circulation of people, things, and knowledges.

The urban policies of Nicolaes Witsen Nicolaes Witsen (Figure 6.3) was born in 1641 and died in 1717, during the Russian czar Peter the Great’s second visit to Amsterdam.14 He came from a Dutch merchant family with a strong interest in the Russian trade, and in the government of Amsterdam. One of the richest persons in the Netherlands, upon his death, he left behind goods worth well over a million guilders. As Marion Peters has shown in impressive detail, Witsen was a mercator sapiens, a supporter of the arts and the sciences, a deeply learned scholar, a sufficiently trained, though not masterful, engraver, and a person unable to complete any large-scale scientific project. Witsen was also one of the most important figures of Amsterdam city politics in the period. The metropolis was governed by a collective of four burgomasters, elected annually, and often advised by formerly serving burgomasters, the oud-burgermeesteren, while the role of the city council, the vroedschap, was less important than in other cities.15 Witsen’s father had already served as burgomaster, and he himself was elected 12 times during his lifetime. Witsen believed that burgomasters played an important role in city politics and history, and in his Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw he accentuated the importance of Roman burgomasters (his own Dutch term for consuls) in the development of this industry.16 His experiences in city government clearly shaped his thinking, as his tasks included the supervision of guilds, the protection of city workers, and the controlling of migration into Amsterdam. That said, Witsen also played an important role in state politics, and also served as a governor of the Dutch East India Company. Consequently, this chapter does not argue that only the urban context of Amsterdam determined how Witsen thought about technology transfer. It claims instead that municipal politics added a layer of complexity to the problem of the circulation of knowledge, which is sometimes ignored by historians who focus solely on the state. Witsen is a key figure for Dutch historical discussions on the circulation of knowledge, and on the scientific networks of early modern Europe.17 Yet his role as a politician and a businessman is often neglected by historians, even though he clearly spent the majority of his working day on topics other than his liefhebberij. We often see him complaining about the limited time he has for the world of learning, and for the world of learned correspondence, because of his

154

Dániel Margócsy

Portrait of Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen. The laudatory epigram presents Witsen as an exemplary citizen of Amsterdam. Pieter Schenk (I). Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-P-OB-9312, Public Domain.

FIGURE 6.3

daily affairs.18 This chapter therefore focuses on the intimate relationship between what we would call his scientific work and his day job as a politician.19 As I argue, Witsen had a rather complex understanding of the politics of knowledge and the prospering of cities. He did not simply want to monopolize scientific knowledge by being secretive to keep Amsterdam prosperous. He was ready to circulate information as long as it did not hurt the interest of the city, as long as it could bring benefits to Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, and as

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

155

long as this information did not result in commercially successful technology transfer. Consequently, as this paper will show, his apparent openness in circulating knowledge should not simply be interpreted as the expression of the norm of scholarly openness, but rather as a strategic and political move in a game of ensuring Amsterdam’s central role in the circulation of commodities. Witsen did not write a treatise on technology transfer. Yet it was part of his everyday life, and we can catch him thinking about this topic, and acting upon his thinking, in a variety of contexts: Huguenot refugees, immigrant workers, coffee seeds, maps of Siberia, and, most importantly for our purposes, naval and land architecture. In seventeenth-century Netherlands, for instance, the migration of people was controlled at the city level, and Witsen was part of the group of urban leaders who needed to decide how to handle this matter. Migration became a pressing issue in the early 1680s, even before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Huguenot refugees began to flee France in large numbers, many of them heading in the direction of the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, the city council and the burgomasters carefully considered how to support Protestant refugees with good morals and marketable skills. In the case of skilled workers, especially if they were persecuted for their beliefs, Witsen was ready to welcome them, and even to offer some measured financial support in the hopes of positive returns for the city. In 1682, Witsen was responsible for reporting to the city council on the request of a Clermont silk merchant for reopening his manufacture in Amsterdam.20 The Huguenot Pierre Baille asked the city authorities for workspace, material and financial support to get his business running. Witsen was willing to offer to Baille the use of the Almoners’ Hospital, which was no longer in use. He also offered limited financial support, and emphasized that Baille had to begin with a small-scale enterprise of 40 looms to show the viability of his business before expanding it further to the maximum of 300 looms that the hospital could house.21 In contrast, Witsen refused Baille’s request for raw materials in exchange for supplying finished products, writing that ‘it seems unrealistic to me that the city should furnish the silk and other materials for the work, and to accept the finished materials in exchange for it’.22 City officials had the expertise of determining the moral and technical qualities of workers, but they did not have the expertise to deal with silk. As this anecdote reveals, our burgomaster was willing to hedge his bets on technology transfer to help fellow Protestants and the economy of his city. He believed that manufactures could be relocated if the master and the craftsmen relocated, as well, and if these workers could source the appropriate, high-quality materials required for their work. Yet even then, it was essential that Baille prove the practicability of his plans within a few months, an essential condition for the city to fully support the expansion of his business. Manufactures could potentially be transported from one country to another, but their success was not guaranteed. Witsen’s qualified support for accommodating the requests of religious refugees did not mean that he was an early modern proponent of free markets. He

156

Dániel Margócsy

ardently supported the protectionist requests of the shipbuilders’ guild in Amsterdam throughout the years. During his years of service, the city ordered all local shipowners to have their ships repaired exclusively in Amsterdam.23 Within Amsterdam, only local residents and guild members were allowed to perform ship repairwork, because they were esteemed to be ‘good-willing, industrious and qualified for the job’.24 For Witsen, and his fellow city officials, Amsterdam could only prosper when its industrious and morally upright citizens were protected. Because the guilds of the city trained their workers well, it was not imperative to allow owners to have the choice to have their ships repaired elsewhere. It was much more important that local skilled workers should receive constant and guaranteed employment, and were therefore less inclined to migrate elsewhere in search of jobs. The out-migration of skilled workers was a real danger for Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, as well. In 1629, the Dutch States General went as far as explicitly forbidding the emigration of skilled shipbuilders, although this regulation went almost completely unheeded. Dutch shipbuilders regularly took employment in other countries.25 For seventeenthcentury politicians, such as Witsen, the danger of emigration lay less in the skilled workers’ ability to build up a competing business in another town or country, but rather in the loss of investment in the training of shipbuilders, and the shrinking of a skilled workforce at home. Not only people migrated. Witsen recounted in his correspondence with the Deventer burgomaster Gijsbert Cuper that he played an instrumental role in getting to grow coffee in a greenhouse in Amsterdam, and the transplanted tree brought fruit shortly afterwards. Yet the Amsterdam coffee may not have been the best. As Witsen mentioned, the coffee cultivated in Java, from which the Amsterdam plantings originated, did not have as much strength as the coffee grown in Mocha.26 One could bring coffee from Java to Amsterdam, and artificially create tropical conditions for growing these trees, but there were limitations to the success of such transplantations. Geographical origins and the local environment played a strong role in determining the quality of plants and the commodities made from them, just as the Protestant origins of refugees played a strong role in determining their moral qualities. As these examples suggest, Witsen took a nuanced view on the circulation of people, plants, commodities, and skills. He did believe that local conditions were important for industry, and these could put a break on successful technology transfers and economic production. He believed that the quality of raw materials was tremendously important for producing commodities, and that it was difficult to get these right. He also believed in the importance of a skilled workforce in creating successful cities, and therefore provided incentives for local workers to stay at home, and for refugee merchants to relocate to Amsterdam. Without such a workforce, a city could not become a major player in the global economy. As long as Amsterdam had access to high-quality raw materials and a trained and moral workforce, and other cities lacked these resources, there was little chance for real competition to emerge through the process of

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

157

knowledge transfer. It is from this perspective that one should read Witsen’s Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, and interpret Witsen’s activities in sharing knowledge about shipbuilding with representatives of other countries.

Ship design and the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw Shipbuilding could not be a completely secretive industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth century because certain facts about naval architecture were common knowledge to everyone in the trade. By definition, ships were mobile objects produced by a populous workforce. The wharves could employ hundreds of shipwrights if necessary, and it was difficult to control the knowledge of these skilled workers. Moreover, a diverse and international customer base also had access to at least some facets of naval architecture. Because of their price, ships were frequently purchased by a consortium of owners or, in the case of men-of-war, by the navies of foreign states.27 Dutch shipbuilders, for example, frequently worked for foreign potentates, and the contracts for Louis XIV’s orders survive to this day. And even when a ship was purchased by Dutch merchants, these owners sent it off to visit foreign ports, where they could be inspected, studied, and even requisitioned by the local population. As the Dutch ambassador to St Petersburg reported back to the Netherlands, it was not unheard of that the Russian czar would temporarily order Dutch merchantmen, and Dutch sailors, to help out the Russian navy’s operations.28 If one could reverse engineer the technique of shipbuilding from the examination of the final product, there was no hindrance to other countries’ appropriating the Dutch way of shipbuilding. Yet could one reverse engineer ships from studying them? One could certainly determine, through detailed measurements, their dimensions and design. Witsen himself made use of such inspections of foreign ships in his Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw when discussing the shape of the Royal Charles, which was captured at Medway during the Second Anglo-Dutch war. Yet, in the case of the Royal Charles, Witsen was primarily interested in its decorations and interior architecture, praising the costly, gilt statues of angels and griffins. He briefly mentioned that this ship was made of ‘very heavy wood in the English manner’, but did not discuss its measurements in any significant detail.29 Witsen provided much more detailed measurements when he described ships commonly made by Dutch shipwrights. His most detailed description was that of a pynas, with which he began his discussion of seventeenth-century Dutch naval architecture. He engraved illustrations not only of the whole ship and its cross sections, but also of most ship parts from the keel and the floor timber to decorative elements such as the cymatium and the figureheads (Figure 6.4). Witsen defined every part in his text, constantly referring the readers to the illustrations, and provided measurements of the parts as needed, not forgetting an extensive treatment of the masts and the sails. The Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw also analyzed the architecture of other types of ship, although sometimes in less painstaking

158

Dániel Margócsy

FIGURE 6.4 Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, facing p. 95, Nicolaes Witsen. © Cambridge: Cambridge University Library.

detail. When discussing the fluyt, for instance, Witsen first established its length from stern to stem (130 feet), its width (26 feet 6 inches), and its depth (13 feet 5 inches), then established the height of the deck, and the varying length and depth of the different wales and the filling strakes.30 He also noted the differences between the traditional fluyt, East Indiamen, and Noortsvaarders for the whaling trade, provided a blueprint of the Noortsvaarder that he himself engraved, and also discussed how much timber and other materials were necessary for the building. Witsen’s book offered more details about the dispatch boat, the boeier, and many other ships, extensively listing the measurements of the various parts, and occasionally providing blueprints, as well. For some modern-day readers, Witsen’s descriptions are successful because one can build faithful replica models on their basis, even if with some difficulty.31 One can safely assume that seventeenth-century Dutch shipwrights would also have been able to build a pynas or a fluyt following Witsen. The Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw’s descriptions either copy or closely follow the conventions of contemporary building contracts, which allowed customers and shipwrights to come to an agreement on the specifications of the ship to be built.32 Witsen’s work was therefore the precise opposite of the experimental reports of the early Royal Society, which provided a plethora of detail without actually facilitating the replication of the experiments of a Hooke, a Boyle, or a Newton.33 It did not always provide detailed information, but, within a community of Dutch shipbuilders, it still effectively communicated how to design a good ship. Witsen also aimed to formalize and mathematicize some aspects of naval architecture, establishing some simple rules of proportion for the main dimensions of ships. As he claimed, one could establish ‘sound foundations

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

159

and laws’ about proportion and shape that stayed the same regardless of scale.34 Size did not matter, because larger and smaller ships of the same type shared the same proportions. While Witsen provided measurements for 180-foot-long pynas, one could easily convert his data for smaller ships that were only 175, 170, or even 80 feet long. Arguably, such a mathematical formalization could have increased the promise of easy replicability for Witsen’s contemporaries. Yet it would be rash to argue that the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw created a revolution in naval architecture by offering readers across the globe the chance to build ships in the Dutch manner. First of all, it simply codified and printed the knowledge that any observer in a port town could gather from the careful observation of the ships stationed there. This knowledge must have been fairly widespread even before the publication of Witsen’s book if it was constantly used in discussions and contracts between shipwrights and their customers. The Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw allowed one to participate in such conversations, and to clearly state what type of ship they wanted to build, but not to actually build those vessels. As Witsen made it clear, one needed to have access to the right types of natural resources and to the right kind of skilled workforce to translate such blueprints into material objects. And, as the following section shows, it was only at the shipyards of Amsterdam, and other Dutch cities, where these resources and workforce were actually available.

The best timber for the best people: material and human resources Wood destroys mathematics, or so Witsen thought. As he wrote in the very same paragraph where he announced his desire to establish the laws of ship measurements, it was not always possible in practice ‘to completely apply mathematical measurements because of the many and various bent and curved shapes that one needs to give to timber for a ship’.35 As a result, no two ships would ever look absolutely identical. Yet it was not only the shape of timber that led to deviations from the rules that Witsen had established. The species of the tree used for building ships played an even more essential role in disturbing the formalized rules of shipbuilding. The shape of a ship depended on the quality of the timber, whose nature varied from place to place. In the Netherlands, one used primarily the highly prized Rhenish and Westphalian oak, which was dense and allowed little water in, but pinewood from Norway, Muscovy, and especially Königsberg was considered an acceptable alternative. The Baltic was also important for providing other materials, because one could use hemp only from Riga for the purposes of rigging.36 Other people in other places, however, relied on other types of timber or hemp. The lengthy historical sections of the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw discussed extensively the nature and qualities of the cedar, palm, and other wood that the Hebrews, Egyptians, and other Ancient people used for building, providing dozens and dozens of examples from different time periods. Witsen treated somewhat

160

Dániel Margócsy

less extensively the different types of wood people used in the seventeenth century, but he still paid quite some attention to geographic variety. As he wrote, on the island of Hispaniola, one used timber from the exotic Mapou, Acajou, and Acoma trees, as well as a special kind of oak that shipworms could not bore into; while in England, one used English wood that was strong and did not splinter. ‘The nature of trees takes after the character of the landscape where they grew’, Witsen wrote.37 The particular qualities of local climate, especially its level of humidity, determined the quality of the wood grown there, just as it determined why coffee from Mocha was better than coffee from Java. Timber from wet areas had a low quality, for instance, because its wetness made it an easy target for shipworms. Geography influenced variation within species, as well. The cedars of Lebanon ‘had a different nature than cedars planted elsewhere, and brought forward different fruit’, Witsen wrote, following information gleaned from the first-hand observations of his brother Cornelis.38 The differing qualities of wood, in turn, effected the buoyancy of ships, and the shape they needed to take. Pine was lighter than oak, for instance, which meant that it had a smaller draft and could take more load. Consequently, ships from pine did not have the exact same shape as oak ships. The rule of variation applied to English ships, too. As Witsen wrote, English wood was ‘stronger than the oak found in other regions, which is why we find that the wood of their ships is thinner than those that are made elsewhere’.39 The laws of naval architecture that Witsen established therefore held only for Dutch ships built from the locally available resources. In other ports, where different types of timber were available, somewhat different building methods were necessary to build a good ship. If the quality of wood varied according to place, the quality of humans also did. This was not the direct result of climate, however, but of religious and moral character. As an eminently wet place, the Netherlands may not have been ideal for growing the right kind of timber for ships. Yet Dutch shipwrights were better than people in any other land. As Witsen famously wrote in a much discussed passage of the 1671 edition, omitted from the 1690 edition, If you consider that so many Dutch ships are studied and measured in foreign lands, yet never imitated, it becomes clear that the knowledge of the measures and the manner of the building of our ships is of no service to the foreigners … It is to be wondered that, though all the foreigners at the wharves here in our land adopt a thrifty manner, once they arrive in their own land, they can never imitate it in a similar manner. Nam naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret … From which it follows that, even if a foreigner had all the rules of building in his head, these could not serve him, unless everything were revealed to him through experience, and not even then, unless he saw a chance to make the nature of his people, with whom he needs to work, similar to the thrifty and neat Dutch character, which cannot be done.40

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

161

As Witsen argued, the technically and morally superior nature of Dutch workers ensured that no foreigners could copy their techniques of shipbuilding, except when they were employed at a Dutch shipyard. The rules established in the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, and even first-hand experience, did not help overcome the deficiencies of a non-Dutch workforce. This claim clearly resonates with the guild regulations that Witsen oversaw during his tenure as a burgomaster which, as we have seen, stipulated that only guild members could repair ships in Amsterdam because they were industrious and upright. These arguments established an equation between technical skill and moral character, and explained Dutch technical superiority through the moral superiority of the Dutch people. Witsen’s inspiration may well have come from military history and the Bible. One could interpret the story of Noah, after all, as the perfect just-so story that only the morally upright have the right skills to build ships to survive the Flood, while the rest of sinful humanity drowns. More directly, the second, little-studied half of the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw focused on the organization and management of shipbuilding and the navy, and, for instance, emphasized the importance of regular prayers on board for successful seafarers. Witsen provided copies of naval regulations from the most recent Anglo-Dutch war, whose first article specified the necessity of twice daily common prayers, and then went on to list punishments for disrupting common prayers and taking the Lord’s name in vain.41 While the necessity of such regulations serves as a reminder that, in practice, Dutch seamen did not always behave according to high standards, they also reveal Witsen’s, and the Dutch admiralty’s, strong belief that right religious morals were necessary for naval victories. This second half of Witsen’s book also contained a large number of anecdotes about battles at sea both in Antiquity and in the seventeenth century. Like naval regulations, these stories tended to emphasize how much heroic qualities and uprightness mattered in winning battles. That is how the Spartan king Demaratus explained to Emperor Xerxes why the Persians could never overpower the virtuous and pious Greeks, and that is how Witsen explained the ‘heroic’ victories of the ‘manly Admiral Tromp’ over the Spaniards and the impressive achievements of the Dutch against the ‘powerful empire of England’ in the Anglo-Dutch wars. As he explained, ‘if one wanted to recount the praiseworthy deeds that were done by the Dutch over the seas, there would not be enough place here to tell them all’.42 At one point, Witsen’s explicit jingoism went so far that it backfired politically. As attitudes towards the English changed during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, he was forced to remove the most offending statements about the English from the text, and nowadays two variants of the first edition exist, either including or excising these passages.43 Witsen’s combination of the arguments about the moral superiority of the Dutch people with arguments about the climate-based variation of the value of natural commodities is the perfect recipe for the establishment of colonial trading empires, and for explaining his belief in the impossibility of transferring

162

Dániel Margócsy

Dutch shipbuilding technologies. Amsterdam’s role as the entrepôt of the world depended on the idea that each commodity was best produced in a particular climate and locale, and that trade was necessary to exchange and make available such local commodities across the globe. The success of the Dutch in making Amsterdam an entrepôt could only be explained, in turn, in highly moralizing terms. As a freedom-loving and devoutly Calvinist nation, they were morally and technically better equipped to conduct such a trade than the Muslim merchants of the Indian Ocean, or the Catholic conquistadors of Spain.44 Translating this argument to shipbuilding, Witsen could offer a natural, moral and economic explanation why only the Dutch could benefit from the precepts of his book. His rules applied only to the timber that was available at Dutch shipyards, and his rules could only be followed by the industrious workers that the Netherlands produced. When it came to shipbuilding, technology transfer from Amsterdam to other places was effectively doomed. Witsen’s Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw thus combines arguments familiar from the history of political thought and the history of material culture.45 Technology transfer depended on the particular, and often localized, identity of both peoples and materials. Urban historians and historians of political thought have emphasized the importance of civic and republican ideologies in shaping the emergence of early modern and modern group identities, but do not always realize how a similar rhetoric of identity also shaped people’s approaches to commodities and material resources.46 Similarly, historians of material culture sometimes forget that, in the early modern period, urban and national identities profoundly shaped how people approached the local and exotic objects that trade provided.47 It is only by combining these two historical approaches that we can truly understand what role place and identity played in the circulation of early modern knowledge and technological knowhow.

Conclusion: ideology and reality in Amsterdam and St Petersburg When Witsen wrote his Aeloude en hedendaagschse scheeps-bouw, he relied on a global network of resources to compile his data, gathering information on ships from all time periods and geographical lands. Yet, as we have seen, when Witsen published this volume, he was highly doubtful whether the production of information on paper would prove to be useful knowledge for nations other than the Dutch. In his view, the circulation of information did not translate into the transfer of technologies, and would not endanger Dutch technological leadership. The veil of openness covered up the fact that open knowledge was not useful for anyone but the Dutch. This did not mean that foreigners were not expected to read the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw. Witsen’s book explained in clear terms the reasons why various ships had a different architecture. It helped readers and customers both in the Netherlands and across the world in making value judgments as to what qualified as a well-built ship. These readers could now determine whether

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

163

a ship was well-built or not, and, perhaps, they could also explain to Dutch shipbuilders what type of ship they wanted to order. Witsen may well have decided to include ship contracts in his volume to facilitate communication between customers and shipbuilders, so that foreign customers could determine what details to specify so that their Dutch contractors would be able to construct a complete and perfect ship for their purposes. And, last but not least, the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw could serve as an advertisement for the Dutch shipbuilding trade through explaining why no foreign shipyard could rival them in terms of either quality or price.48 The Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw clearly circulated internationally. As Diederick Wildeman has traced, royalty in England, Sweden, France and Russia ordered copies, and naval professionals such as Samuel Pepys and the French minister of navy also had an exemplar in their libraries.49 Our author even had to adapt the text according to the desires of his customers. When the Swedish admiral Carl Gustaf Wrangel read an unpleasant anecdote about himself in the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, he complained directly to Witsen, who removed the anecdote from all the printed copies still in stock.50 Some foreign readers paid very careful attention to Witsen’s argument about the different proportions of Dutch and English ships. A copy of Witsen’s book in the British Library contains a long, English discussion of the topic in faded ink on its front flyleaves.51 At the same time, not all readers adopted Witsen’s perspective on the difficulties of using encyclopedias and formalized knowledge in technology transfer. Famously, upon finishing the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, Czar Peter the Great wrote a letter to Witsen and asked for more details of the measurements of various types of ships, which the Amsterdam burgomaster refused. For the czar, mathematized laws offered the hope for establishing a powerful Russian navy, while, for Witsen, they were not powerful enough to govern the work of any shipwright throughout the world.52 Peter the Great’s visit to the Netherlands in 1697 can be best interpreted as the moment of missed encounter between these two perspectives on technology transfer.53 Witsen played an important role in facilitating Peter’s entrance to and apprenticeship at the Dutch wharves, probably because he thought that such a visit could not result in technology transfer (Figure 6.5). From the perspective of his Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, the tidbits of knowledge that the czar picked up during his apprenticeship would have been useless when put into practice in Russia, an orthodox country that had no equivalent of the morally upright citizens of Amsterdam. Peter, in contrast, was expecting to finally learn the codified, or codifiable, secrets of shipbuilding from his master, and was utterly disappointed when he realized that Dutch shipwrights built ships relying on hunch, educated guesses, and tacit knowledge. As a result, the Russian czar decided to decamp for England, where formalized ship design was a much better established discipline. In the end, Peter did establish a navy that made a significant contribution to the Russian victory in the Great Northern War. Yet the success of Peter’s navy

164

Dániel Margócsy

FIGURE 6.5 Czar Peter the Great on board his yacht to visit the ship ‘Petrus and Paulus’ that he had helped build, c. 1698–1708. An imaginary visit of Peter the Great to the ship he had helped build. Abraham Storck (workshop). Amsterdam: Amsterdam Museum, inv. SA 8251, Public Domain.

depended upon his success in bringing Dutch and German sailors, shipwrights, and artisans to Russia, and not on the mathematization of naval architecture. As it has been well-documented, Petrine Russia spared no costs in paying foreign artisans to establish their industries in St Petersburg and other cities.54 Yet one wonders what Witsen thought of these efforts. While he certainly provided some protection for the employment of shipwrights in Amsterdam in the form of guild regulations, neither he nor his fellow city politicians made any major effort at preventing the out-migration of skilled artisans from the city. Following the argument of the Aeloude en hedendaegschse scheeps-bouw, they probably thought that these artisans would not be able to train a Russian workforce to establish a shipbuilding industry for the long-term. The Russian navy could survive only as long as there was a continuous influx of morally upright and well-trained Dutchmen. Russia may have won the Great Northern War against Sweden, but it would never become a major competitor to the shipbuilding industry of the Netherlands. We started with the story of Noah’s flood, and we should return there. Maybe the moral of the Biblical story is not that communication between God and Noah was perfect. Instead, we may focus on how, in the Christian world, there has been a long tradition in connecting moral qualities with

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

165

technical skill and technological success. Noah believed in God, and therefore had the right skills to build a ship, and therefore he survived. This analysis of Nicolaes Witsen revealed how city politicians in the Dutch Golden Age relied on such moralizing arguments to explain how global trade and technology transfer worked. Politics, economy, and morals were inseparable in this period, and their confluence guided how the Dutch controlled or decided not to control the flow of information, commodities, and peoples within and outside the boundaries of their cities. To make the correct judgment about the quality of natural resources and the available workforce of a place, one needed to consider the local climate from both an environmental and a religious perspective. These connections between the moral and the political economy survive to this day, as evinced by ongoing arguments about American exceptionalism or about the role of British values and traditions. By tracing the early modern precedents of such problematic claims, we may gain a better understanding why they have such strong currency even today.

Notes 1 Research for this project was conducted during a visiting fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies as part of the Global Knowledge Society project. I would like to thank Bert de Munck for his invitation to his working group, as well as Sven Dupré and Wijnand Mijnhardt. I am grateful to Michael Tworek, Marius Buning, Christine Göttler, Maarten Prak, Roelof van Gelder, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, Jenny Bulstrode, Stephen Clucas, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, William O’Reilly, Melissa Calaresu, and Scott Mandelbrote for discussing the project with me. 2 Sleeswijk Wegener, De Gouden Eeuw van het Fluitschip. For other attempts to reconstruct the ark, see Breidbach and Ghiselin, ‘Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) on Noah’s Ark’. 3 On the difficulties of reconciling the Bible with natural knowledge, see Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature. On tacit knowledge, see Polányi, Personal Knowledge. 4 The two authoritative editions are Witsen, Aeloude en hedendaegsche scheeps-bouw, from 1671, and Witsen, Architectura navalis, 1690. The two editions differ from each other in significant respects, indeed, one could argue that the 1690 edition was never properly published, and there is variation even within the 1671 edition. In this chapter, I rely primarily on the reprint of the 1690 edition, except in cases when a passage is only present or significantly different in the 1671 edition. 5 On these topics, see Vermeir and Margócsy, ‘States of Secrecy’; Margócsy, ‘Advertising Cadavers’; Margócsy, Commercial Visions; Bertucci, ‘Enlightened Secrets’; Leong and Rankin, Secrets and Knowledge; David, ‘Understanding the Emergence of “Open Science” Institutions’; Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. 6 On shipbuilding in the Netherlands, see Unger, Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800; on the navy, see Bruijn, The Dutch Navy; Bender, Dutch Warships. 7 Glete, Navies and Nations. 8 On the arsenalotti, see Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal; on forest management, see Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea. 9 For an estimate of the number of workers, and an excellent analysis of labor management, see Brandon, ‘An Early Modern Factory’.

166

Dániel Margócsy

10 Epstein, ‘Labour Mobility, Journeyman Organisations and Markets in Skilled Labour’; Epstein and Prak, Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy. 11 Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce. 12 See Davids, The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership, which offers many insights on shipbuilding and navigation technologies. For shipbuilding in particular, see Unger, ‘The Technology and Teaching of Shipbuilding’. 13 De Munck, ‘Disassembling the City’; on the concept of the citizen, see Kloek and Tilmans, Burger; on militias as an important part of Dutch city identity, see Prak, ‘Citizens, Soldiers and Civic Militias’; on the republican tradition, see the classic work of Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; for its application to the Netherlands, with a discussion of the fluidity between urban and national identities, see Weststeijn. Commercial Republicanism. 14 On Witsen, see Peeters, De wijze koopman; Wladimiroff, De kaart van een verzwegen vriendschap, and the foundational work of Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen. 15 I would like to thank Maarten Prak for discussing this point. 16 Witsen, Architectura navalis, 76; on several other occasions (pp. 63, 82), Witsen also mentions who was the burgomaster of Rome when a major development happened in shipbuilding, even though he also specifies the year according to modern chronological standards. 17 For some recent work on Witsen in this respect, see Groenewald, ‘To Leibniz, from Dorha’; Van Noord and Weststeijn, ‘The Global Trajectory of Nicolaes Witsen’s Chinese Mirror’. 18 See, for instance, some of his complaints in the letters to Cuper, printed in Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen, II: 290, 295, 303. 19 For a similar approach, see Naarden, ‘Witsen’s Studies of Inner Eurasia’. 20 Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen, II: 29–35. 21 ‘In dit huys soude bequaemlijk drihondert getouwen konnen werden geset, en de reparatie dan te doen soude na raming belopen f 200 dog omdat men van den uytslag des werks niet versekert is, soude ik meynen dat men alleen de wooning voor der meester en plaets voor 40 getouwen behoorde te approprieeren om een proef vant werk te maken.’ Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen, II: 31. 22 ‘Dat de stad de sijde en andere ingredienten tot het work soude fourneeren en daertegen het gemakerte overnemen, dunkt mij inpracticabel te sijn.’ Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen, II: 34. 23 Privilegien, Willekeuren, en Ordonnantien, 1732, 30–31. 24 Ibidem, 47–51. 25 Hart, ‘De Zaanse scheepsbouw in de 17e en 18e eeuw’, 1948. 26 Gebhard, Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen, II: 461. 27 For a large list of ships owned by a consortium of investors, see the S. Hart archives, Stadsarchief Amsterdam. Inv. 883. 28 Nationaal archief The Hague, inv. 1.01.02/7367, f. 301. 29 Witsen, Architectura navalis, 231. 30 Witsen, Architectura navalis, 177–178. The Dutch terms duim and voet varied in length, and they are not the exact equivalent of the modern inch and feet. 31 See, for instance, the highly useful Hoving, Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding, whose English terminology this chapter adopts. 32 See, for instance, Hoving, Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding, Ch. 3. 33 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Schaffer, ‘Glass Works’. 34 Witsen, Architectura navalis, 95. On the formalization and mathematization of shipbuilding, and its limits, see Ferreiro, Ships and Science; Nowacki and Lefèvre, Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture; Schaffer, ‘The Charter’d Thames’. 35 ‘Hoewel echter waar is, dat het niet wel doenlyk is, altydt de wis-konstinge maat ten vollen na te komen, wegens de menighvuldige, en onderscheidelyke kromme en

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54

167

gebogen gestalten, die men de houten aan een Schip geven moet.’ Witsen, Architectura navalis, 94. Witsen, Architectura navalis, 549. ‘De aart der boomen is na de eigenschap des Landtschaps daar zy wassen.’ Witsen, Architectura navalis,199. ‘… zy van anderen aart zyn als de cederen elders geplant, en ook andere vruchten dragen.’ Witsen, Architectura navalis, 200. ‘het is ook sterker als het eiken-hout dat in andere gewesten valt: hier om bevindt men het hout aan hunne Scheepen dunder te zyn, als aan Scheepen die elders mogen gemaakt zyn.’ Witsen, Architectura navalis, 204. ‘Dat de kennis van maet en manier van bouwen onzer schepen, den uytheemschen ondienstigh is, blijkt hier uyt, dewijl szoo menig Hollants schip in vreemde landen is ontleet en na gemeeten, doch nimmer na gevolgt … Te verwonderen is ‘t, dat alle uytlanders, schoon zy op Timmer-werven hier te lant de zuynigheyt bevlijtigen, in haer eygen lant gekomen, nimmer zulks na konnen volgen. Nam naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret … Waer uyt volgt, schoon een vreemdelingh alle de Bouwregelen in zijn hooft hadde, zy hem echter niet dienen konnen, ten ware hem alles in deze landen by ondervindinge wiert getoont, en dan noch niet, ‘t en waer hy kans zag den aer zijns volks, waer mede hy arbeyden moet, den zuynig en zindelijken hollantschen inborst gelijck te maken, ‘t geen niet doenlijk.’ Witsen, Aeloude- en hedendaegsche scheepsbouw, 1671, aen den leser. For a discussion and translation of this passage, see Barbour, ‘Dutch and English Merchant Shipping’. Witsen, Architectura navalis, 453. Ibidem, 571, Xerxes is discussed at p. 432. It should be noted that, throughout the book, Witsen quietly passed over the somewhat inconvenient fact that the Dutch navy was not truly Dutch, as many of its sailors and soldiers came from Germanic and other lands. Wildeman, ‘Variations on Witsen’, 245–246. On the moral ideology of capitalist trade, see Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For the classic revival of this argument in the colonial context, see Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. For a recent example of such a combination, see Burghartz, Burkart and Göttler, Sites of Mediation. For a consideration of this issue, see De Munck and Bellavitis, ‘The Urban Imagery’. For an exception, see De Munck, ‘Artisans, Products and Gifts’. Witsen devoted several pages to providing estimates about the cost of building ships, see, for example, Witsen, Aeloude- en hedendaegsche scheepsbouw, 176. Pepys’s copy survives in the Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge, and contains no annotations in the diarist’s hand. Wildeman, ‘Variations on Witsen’. Witsen, Aeloude- en hedendaegsche scheepsbouw. London: British Library, 533.k.14. This is the only significant annotation that the author has seen in the roughly dozen copies that he has consulted. For an analysis of this episode, and an important discussion of the difference between the circulation of mathematical information and the transfer of shipbuilding technologies, based on archaeological evidence, see Ditta, Auer, and Maarleveld, ‘Albrecht Dürer and Early Modern Merchant Ships’. For the exchange between Witsen and the czar, see Raptschinsky, Peter de Groote in Holland, 114. On Raptschinsky’s plagiarism, see Knoppers, The Visits of Peter the Great, 3. Waegemans, De tsaar van Groot Rusland in de Republiek; Driessen, Tsaar Peter de Grote en zijn Amsterdamse vrienden; Kistemaker et al., Peter de Grote en Holland. For the complexities of managing foreign and Russian workers in the eighteenthcentury, see Werrett, ‘Potemkin and the Panopticon’.

168

Dániel Margócsy

Bibliography of unpublished sources Hart, Simon. ‘De Zaanse scheepsbouw in de 17e en 18e eeuw’, 1948. Stadarchief Amsterdam. Inv. 883/301. Nationaal archief The Hague, inv. 1.01.02/7367, f. 301. Privilegien, Willekeuren, en Ordonnantien voor het Scheeps-timmermans Gild in Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Pieter van den Berge, 1732, 30–31, Stadsarchief Amsterdam inv. 366/1377. Privilegien, Willekeuren, en Ordonnantien voor het Scheeps-timmermans Gild in Amsterdam, 47–51, Stadsarchief Amsterdam inv. 366/1377.

References Appuhn, Karl. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Barbour, Violet. ‘Dutch and English Merchant Shipping in the Seventeenth Century.’ The Economic History Review 2 (1930): 261–290. Bender, James. Dutch Warships in the Age of Sail 1600–1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Barnsley: Seaforth, 2014. Bertucci, Paola. ‘Enlightened Secrets: Silk, Intelligent Travel, and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France.’ Technology and Culture 54 (2013): 820–852. Brandon, Pepijn. ‘An Early Modern Factory between State and Market: Labour and Management at the Amsterdam Naval Shipyard (1660–1796).’ In De Jong, A. and Wubs, B. eds. ERIM Research Seminars Business History Seminar. Rotterdam: Erasmus Research Institute of Management, 2012. Breidbach, Olaf and Ghiselin, Michael T. ‘Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) on Noah’s Ark: Baroque “Intelligent Design” Theory.’ Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences Fourth Series 57 (2006): 991–1002. Bruijn, Jaap R. The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Burghartz, Susanna; Burkart, Lucas and Göttler, Christine eds. Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650. Leiden: Brill, 2016. David, Paul. ‘Understanding the Emergence of “Open Science” Institutions: Functionalist Economics in Historical Context.’ Industrial and Corporate Change 13 (2004): 571–589. Davids, Karel. The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership: Technology, Economy and Culture in the Netherlands, 1350–1800 (2 vols). Leiden: Brill, 2008. Davis, Robert C. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. De Munck, Bert. ‘Artisans, Products and Gifts: Rethinking the History of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe.’ Past & Present 224 (2014): 39–74. De Munck, Bert. ‘Disassembling the City: A Historical and Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities.’ Journal of Urban History 43 (2017): 811–829. De Munck, Bert and Bellavitis, Anna. ‘The Urban Imaginary as a Social and Economic Factor: Renaissance Cities and the Fabrication of Quality, Fifteenth-Seventeenth Centuries.’ In Van Damme, Ilja; De Munck, Bert, and Miles, Andrew eds. Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 45–64.

Urban policy in the age of Nicolaes Witsen

169

Ditta, Massimiliano; Auer, Jens and Maarleveld, Thijs. ‘Albrecht Dürer and Early Modern Merchant Ships: A Reflection on the Spread of Ideas and Transfer of Technology.’ In Beltrame, Carlo ed. Archaeology of Post-Medieval Shipwrecks. Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio, 2014, pp. 83–104. Driessen, Jozien. Tsaar Peter de Grote en zijn Amsterdamse vrienden. Utrecht: Kosmos, 1996. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Epstein, Stephan R. ‘Labour Mobility, Journeyman Organisations and Markets in Skilled Labour in Europe, 14th–18th Centuries.’ In Arnoux, Mathieu and Monnet, Pierre eds. Le technicien dans la cité en Europe occidentale, 1250–1650. Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2004, pp. 251–269. Epstein, Stephan R. and Prak, Maarten eds. Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ferreiro, Larrie D. Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600–1800. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Gebhard, Johan Fredrik Jr. Het leven van Mr. Nicolaes Cornelisz. Witsen (2 vols). Utrecht: Leefland, 1881. Gelderblom, Oscar. Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Glete, Jan. Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860 (2 vols). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Groenewald, Gerald. ‘To Leibniz, from Dorha: A Khoi Prayer in the Republic of Letters.’ Itinerario 28 (2004): 29–48. Hoving, A.J. Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. Jorink, Eric. Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Kistemaker, Renée; Kopaneva, Natalja and Overbeek, Annemiek eds. Peter de Grote en Holland. Culturele en wetenschappelijke betrekkingen tussen Rusland en Nederland ten tijde van tsaar Peter de Grote. Bussum: Thoth, 1996. Kloek, J.J. and Tilmans, K. Burger. Een geschiedenis van het begrip ‘burger’ van de Middeleeuwen tot de 21ste eeuw. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002. Knoppers, Jake V. Th. The Visits of Peter the Great to the United Provinces in 1697–98 and 1716–17 as Seen in Light of the Dutch Sources. MA thesis. Montreal: McGill University, 1969. Leong, Elaine and Rankin, Alisha eds. Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Margócsy, Dániel. ‘Advertising Cadavers in the Republic of Letters: Anatomical Publications in the Early Modern Netherlands.’ British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2010): 187–210. Margócsy, Dániel. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Naarden, Bruno. ‘Witsen’s Studies of Inner Eurasia.’ In Huigen, Siegfried; De Jong, Jan L. and Kolfin, Elmer eds. The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks. Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 211–240. Nowacki, Horst and Lefèvre, Wolfgang eds. Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

170

Dániel Margócsy

Peeters, Marion. De wijze koopman. Het wereldwijde onderzoek van Nicolaes Witsen (1641–1717), burgemeester en VOC-bewindehebber van Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010. Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Polányi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Prak, Maarten. ‘Citizens, Soldiers and Civic Militias in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.’ Past and Present 228 (2015): 93–123. Raptschinsky, Boris. Peter de Groote in Holland in 1697–1698, een historische schets. PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1925. Schaffer, Simon. ‘Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment.’ In Gooding, David; Pinch, Trevor and Schaffer, Simon eds. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 67–104. Schaffer, Simon. ‘“The Charter’d Thames”: Naval Architecture and Experimental Spaces in Georgian Britain.’ In Roberts, Lissa; Schaffer, Simon and Dear, Peter eds. The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization. Amsterdam: KNAW, 2007, pp. 279–305. Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Sleeswijk Wegener, André. De Gouden Eeuw van het Fluitschip. Franeker: Van Wijnen, 2003. Unger, Richard W. Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800: Ships and Guilds. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1978. Unger, Richard W. ‘The Technology and Teaching of Shipbuilding, 1300–1800.’ In Prak, Maarten and Van Zanden, Jan Luiten eds. Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West. Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 161–204. Van Noord, Willemijn and Weststeijn, Thijs. ‘The Global Trajectory of Nicolaes Witsen’s Chinese Mirror.’ The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63 (2015): 324–361. Vermeir, Koen and Margócsy, Dániel. ‘States of Secrecy: An Introduction.’ British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2012): 153–164. Waegemans, Emanuel. De tsaar van Groot Rusland in de Republiek. De tweede reis van Peter de Grote naar Nederland (1716–1717). Groningen: Instituut voor Noord- en Oost-Europese studies, 2013. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1930. Werrett, Simon. ‘Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth Century Russia.’ Journal of Bentham Studies 2 (1999): 1–25. Weststeijn, Arthur. Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Wildeman, Diederick. ‘Variations on Witsen.’ In Hoving, A.J. ed. Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012, pp. 237–249. Witsen, Nicolaes. Aeloude en hedendaegsche scheeps-bouw en bestier. Amsterdam: Commelijn, 1671. Witsen, Nicolaes. Architectura navalis et regimen nauticum. Amsterdam: Pieter and Joan Blaeu, 1690. Wladimiroff, Igor. De kaart van een verzwegen vriendschap. Nicolaes Witsen en Andrew Winius en de Nederlands cartograpfie van Rusland. Groningen: INOS, 2008.

PART III

Imperial cities, knowledge for empires?

7 ANDRÉ DE AVELAR AND THE CITY OF COIMBRA Spaces of knowledge and belief during the early modern Iberian Union Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

Introduction: cities and the early modern empires Although early modern European cities might be considered merely as ‘islands in a rural ocean’,1 the historiography of empires has not overlooked the role that cities played in early modern Europe. Implicitly or explicitly discussing the now overtaken paradigm of a particular European urban path,2 approaches to European history, cities and empires did not escape being framed by long-term narratives on the modern state, secularisation and the birth of capitalism.3 From this point of view, early modern ‘independent’ cities and republican regimes, in opposition to imperial structures, have traditionally been considered as more suitable political contexts for the development of urban economic, intellectual and political dynamics.4 Indeed, these cities have been treated as the propitious locus of new practices of science and innovation that accompanied the latter process. Cultural historian Peter Burke synthesised both perspectives in his comparative works on the republics of merchants, namely Amsterdam and Venice, ‘pro-enterprise cultures’ and ‘islands of innovation’.5 Building upon the idea of a strong opposition between empires and republics and the set of values attributed to the latter in opposition to the former (religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, free market),6 the Spanish Empire – and the argument was often uncritically extended to the Portuguese Empire – has been a kind of paradox, epitomised long time ago in Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter ‘From Seville to Amsterdam: The Failure of Empire’.7 His argument on the failure of the Spanish Empire summarised the shift, from the Catholic south to the Protestant north, in the importance and achievements of European urban centres which, despite the initial advances of Iberian port cities, would come to embody the birth of a modern world. Narratives of the history of science have shaped their own conceptual apparatus, not necessarily relying on (and often disconnected

174

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

from) urban, economic and political history. This general interpretation – broadly sketched here – and its specific geographical focus tends nevertheless to emerge when historians define lines of enquiry at the crossroads of urban analysis and science.8 Historiography on the Iberian empires has previously highlighted – and continues to do so – the importance of cities such as Seville, and to a lesser extent Lisbon, and their Houses of Trade (Casa de la Contratación, Casa da India respectively), where significant developments in nautical and cartographical knowledge and its teaching took place. New research has equally reinforced the attention given to city ports in comparative perspective (Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London),9 some of them now reframed as ‘global cities’.10 Yet, and despite the recent strong appeal for a reintegration of the ‘Iberian space’ into discussions on the historiography of the Portuguese and the Spanish empires,11 addressing ‘the collective dynamics of the socialization of science through [these] places, spaces and networks of sociability’12 remains an approach that deserves further development in the case of the Iberian empires, namely taking into account the connection of different urban contexts and beyond the attention paid to cities as commercial hubs of a maritime empire. By focusing on the Catholic world, largely excluded from the literature, I take as a case study in this chapter the city of Coimbra, during the second half of the sixteenth century and the period of union of the Spanish Crown and the Kingdom of Portugal (1580–1640). I aim to explore the organisation and reorganisation of knowledge and ‘spaces of knowledge’, and the interaction and tension of different institutions and actors in shaping and distinguishing different forms of knowledge and knowledge production. I first tackle some aspects of the complex reorganisation of the city as a consequence of the establishment of the university there in 1537; the chapter then moves on to analyse the different sources related to the personal trajectory and career of André de Avelar, professor of the chair of mathematics at the University of Coimbra, who was brought before the Inquisition accused of practising Judaism in 1620 and again in 1621. During the period examined, the Inquisition, among other institutions and actors, participated in the definition of knowledge and beliefs, as well as in the arbitration of traditions and intellectual communities at the core of spaces and communities in conflict. A known but overlooked actor in the history of the Portuguese Inquisition and that of the university, Avelar continues to be eclipsed by the great importance attributed to Pedro Nunes (1502–1578), who occupied the chair of mathematics at the University of Coimbra before Avelar. I will argue that Avelar’s assimilation into Coimbra’s intellectual communities and networks and his role in them is, nevertheless, key to understanding how knowledge production in early modern Iberia took place in a variety of overlapping and conflicting spaces and communities, which shared some goals even as they fought for resources and ways of understanding knowledge. Through this lens, the chapter considers the configuration and reconfiguration of urban spaces and the social milieu that are crucial to a better understanding of

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

175

the development of knowledge as a social and historical process, deeply rooted in the political, cultural and institutional dynamics in which frontiers between knowledge, religion and communities are always under construction. Although it is not the goal to argue that Coimbra was another ‘global city’, the case study in this chapter thus provides more insight into the multiple layers (from the micro to the macro level) involved in the construction of an empire with a global scope.

Reshaping knowledge, transforming the Coimbra urban landscape: the street of Santa Sofia Situated inland and approximately at the centre of the kingdom along the Mondego River, the vertex of a triangle made by two important southern cities, Lisbon and Evora, Coimbra changed completely with the settlement of the university. Established in the thirteenth century, the first university of the Portuguese kingdom moved to Coimbra in 1537. From a ‘decadent town of around five thousand dwellers’, Coimbra became the seat of a ‘university court’, reaching 12,000 inhabitants within 25 years.13 Completely immersed in the structural and political changes that accompanied the creation of the Padroão – that is, the tutelary role that the Portuguese king had over the Inquisition – Coimbra, together with Lisbon and Evora, was the seat of a Tribunal of the Inquisition (1536). One of the first early modern views of Coimbra, published by Georg Braun in cica 1599, depicts some of the important transformations the city was undergoing in the sixteenth century. Like a palimpsest, Roman ruins are represented in the centre of the hill as a vestige of the city’s remote past; at the same time the legend describes the ongoing construction of the aqueducts, on what remained of a Roman structure, thanks to King Sebastian, shown in the foreground. Geographically split into two parts, the hill and the lowest level next to the river bank, the river prevented the completion of some buildings and forced the relocation of others (i.e. the Collegium predicatores and the Santa Anna monastery). It was in the latter area, nevertheless, that the main urban project launched by João III (1502–1557), one of the main protagonists of Portuguese imperial expansionist projects, found room: the creation of a broad and straight street, Via Sanctae Sophiae or Rua de Santa Sofia. Along the street were student residences and all the colleges offering education for their members, and initially the lay college of arts (Real colégio das artes), where students received an introductory education before joining the university. The name of the street, as Walter Rossa has argued, is rather obvious; the fact that it was given, rather than being adopted following earlier use, underlines the ideological dimension of the urban project.14 The university itself, in turn, was finally relocated to the Paços Reais, up the hill. Shown next to the cathedral in Braun’s view of the city, the university quickly came to occupy a prominent position in the city’s organisation.

176

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

The legend on Braun’s image guides the eye of the observer through a hierarchy of places of knowledge and power. The first to be indicated is, in fact, the royal power and the university (Regia, in qua sunt publicae scholae omnium facultatum). Both are part of a political project already involved in an imperial enterprise. In a letter from João III addressed to the pope in 1546, he asked for authorisation to make it possible for the university to benefit from the incomes and rights of the Santa Cruz Monastery, and clearly stated the importance of the university as a centre for preparing the elites to be sent to ‘parts of India, Goa, Brazil, and other domains and conquered lands’ in order to expand the Faith and ensure the conversion of non-Christians and the secular and spiritual government.15 While this reinforces and fully explains the street name Santa Sofia, it also underlines the complexity of a pedagogical programme that associated different intellectual trends and interests, and which deeply modified the economic, urban and intellectual organisation of the entire city inscribed in an empire with multiple centres of decision-making. By the first half of the sixteenth century, the imperial expansion of the Portuguese Empire is seen as a promising enterprise not only for sailors, noblemen and merchants but also for humanists, who were concerned about the situation of knowledge in Christendom (Figure 7.1). Historiography has tended to emphasise the impenetrability of university teaching, particularly in the Catholic world, and of humanism when facing the challenges of overseas expansion; both were quickly overtaken by emerging actors and new epistemological problems and methodologies. Yet, current research suggests the need for an in-depth exploration of the complex entanglement of interests articulated by the new political imperatives.16 In this vein, we must stress the possible influence of the humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) who saw, in the Portuguese Empire, encouraging perspectives for his educational approaches. In 1531, in his De Disciplinis libri XX, dedicated to King João III (r. 1521–1557), Vives appealed for a transformation of the liberal arts, emphasising the importance of better integration between the theoretical and practical arts. According to him, diligence and practice assist inventiveness in discovering new perspectives as those who sail the waters of the sea.17 The metaphor acquires a specific meaning here. In the preface to his treatise, Vives praises the Portuguese maritime expansion responsible for bringing Christianity to Africa, India and Asia and for discovering new seas, lands and stars.18 The kingdom of Portugal could therefore be the driving force of a two-fold and closely intertwined change: an improvement in Christian scholarship and an expansion and reinforcement of the Catholic faith. Vives’s great interest in the process of knowledge organisation in Portugal was even more evident when, in 1534, he sent a letter from Antwerp to the monarch advising him on the creation of one or two universities.19 The recently created Society of Jesus also understood, like Vives, the important role that Portugal could play in enhancing Christian scholarship, fighting Protestantism and expanding the faith through a pedagogical and expansionist enterprise linked to the Portuguese Empire.20 The Society chose the kingdom as

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

177

FIGURE 7.1 Civitates Orbis Terrarum vol. 5, Hogenberg and Braun, c. 1599. © Heidelberg historic literature – VD16 B 7183, https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16956#0035.

the launch pad for its first missions to convert non-Christian populations in Asia. Francis Xavier arrived in Lisbon in June 1540, leaving one year later for the Asian possessions of the Portuguese Empire. However, Portugal itself was also the object of Jesuit interest; Xavier’s companion, Simão Rodrigues, remained in the kingdom. The Portuguese monarchy was as interested in the Jesuits as these latter were in Portugal, using them to promote scholarship in Asia and the metropole. Even before the pope’s approval of the order, João III wrote to the ambassador in Rome to tell him that he had learned, thanks to the humanist Diogo de Gouveia, of the existence of a group of well-trained clerics disposed to go to India and thought that they would be of great help.21 In Lisbon, the Society of Jesus began to teach courses on ‘letters’ and, around 1553, different knowledge areas (cosmography, astrology, arithmetic) related to the quadrivium at the College of Santo Antão.22 In Coimbra, an inquisitorial trial of some of the humanist founder members of the Collegium of Arts led to a transfer of its control to the Society of Jesus (1555); the College was moved higher up the hill. There, the Jesuits managed to position themselves strategically in a privileged urban position next to the faculties of the university and places of

178

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

power, an endeavour that failed in other places such as Padua and Mexico.23 In 1568, a new structure was built to house the college. In Coimbra, down the hill, the former site of the Jesuit College was used as a new inquisitorial prison. It is quite clear that the teaching of the quadrivium and colleges of arts acquired a new importance in the eyes of different actors. Yet, by the middle of the century, the kind of institutional setting, the target audience and the profile of the ‘teachers’ most suitable for facing the challenge of coping with the many technical and conceptual difficulties of exploring new worlds was still being defined. In this sense, whether following Vives’s advice or not on the ideal place to create a college – outside the urban context if the city was a port or commercial city24 – King João’s decision to relocate the university to Coimbra and to create a college of arts in the street of Santa Sofia clearly raised rather than resolved the question concerning the relationship between learned and non-learned communities, places of knowledge and the different needs of the empire. Barely noticed by the historiography, 1559 seems to be a vital moment in the regulation of an increasing market for students and professors in three key cities of the kingdom, Coimbra, Lisbon and Evora, despite their different urban and social composition. In Coimbra, the new statutes of the university were published. In Lisbon, overseas expansion entailed the development of institutions that combined functions: gathering goods arriving from distant lands, equipping ships sailing from the kingdom and providing nautical training to pilots, the armazéns and the Casa da Índia. Also in 1559, a set of rules (regimentos) organised and regulated the exams on nautical and cartographical knowledge that took place at the Casa.25 Finally, another important Jesuit College in Evora – a flourishing cultural centre chosen by noblemen and humanists – became a new university thanks to a papal bull.26

Urban economy of knowledge: the book, the library and André de Avelar The transformation of the city of Coimbra into a university city changed its social composition and its urban and intellectual landscape, which was integrated into a more complex context following the newly created Iberian Union (1580–1640). By the end of the sixteenth century, the increasing number of different actors involved in publishing and the book market, located in different streets in Coimbra, points to one of the urgent needs of the kingdom. Documents such as A finta para a vinda del rei retrace this new urban economy of knowledge aimed at supplying the material and intellectual needs of the city. The document is the result of an extraordinary tax (asiento) on the inhabitants of Coimbra, preparing for the arrival of King Philippe III. It shows the topography of trades and fortunes which makes certain groups visible or invisible, and it inscribes the organisation of the city of Coimbra in a social and economic hierarchy. Among the visible, it is worth emphasising the considerable contribution of booksellers and printers. Most of the nobles and clerics seem to be excluded,

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

179

even though they provided the bulk of economic capital, including property. As for some members of the university, designated as ‘privileged’, at the request of the rector, their contributions were written down in a different document and they paid anonymously. In line with the growing importance of the student community and the impact of these changes, the library and the archive of the University of Coimbra emerged as a key space of knowledge and of the organisation of the university itself. While the small collection of books belonging to the university did not have a precise place after the move from Lisbon to Coimbra, we know that, in 1544, King João III ordered the building of some library shelves. However, the library faced major challenges in gathering the materials the students needed. Internal documentation of the university confirms this.27 The difficulties encountered in the development of the library are related to the relative dependence of the university community on the European book market.28 Whether or not, in that sense, Portugal is an exception, it is worth noting the impact of the expulsion of Jews, who had run a number of the kingdom’s printing presses, some of which were later relaunched by new entrepreneurs from other kingdoms.29 Pedro Nunes himself, at the time ‘cosmographer to the king’ (Cosmographo do rei), comments in his Tratado da sphera (Lisbon, 1573) that he wrote on the geometry of triangles before the books by Regiomontanus and Geber (Jâbir Ibn Hayyân) on similar issues were sent from Germany to Spain.30 In 1567, in his Libro de Algebra in Arithmetica y geometria (Antwerp), Nunes still quotes the importance of Geber, whose work he used himself. Mentioned as a Moor likely related to the invention of arithmetic, Nunes underlined the importance of his short treatise, written in Arabic and held by some libraries.31 The development of these different academic and intellectual communities enhanced the need to satisfy an increasing internal market, which was itself impacted, in its intellectual orientation and social composition, by new political and religious policies. To this end, some agents and publishing enterprises boosted book circulation during the period. The printer António de Mariz, active during the second half of the sixteenth century, was one of those in charge of supplying the city of Coimbra with books, buying them in Flanders, one of the most dynamic regions of the book market.32 It is also known that the editorial project known as Conimbricenses, launched by the Society of Jesus at the Coimbra College of Arts, was partly achieved through the purchase of books on the Venetian market. Published between 1592 and 1606, in eight volumes, the project’s main purpose was to make the Aristotelian corpus accessible to college students.33 The development of the library and the archive as a physical space with its own administrative organisation at the core of the university encompassed not only dynamics in the circulation of books but also the reorganisation of communities articulating different intellectual spaces in the city. It was the bedel who would have the functions of guarda do cartório and da Livraria (keeper of the archives and of the library), assigned in 1545 to Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (1500–1559),

180

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

bedel of the Faculty of Arts after he returned from the East Indies. The profile of the position was specific, split into two different profiles in the statutes of 1591, the first statutes of the University of Coimbra after the union of the crowns and printed in Coimbra two years later.34 Regarding the library, the person in charge was to be a Latinist and, if possible, to have knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and knowledge of books in order to be able to arrange them and make an inventory.35 In the case of the archivist, it was the quality of being a trusted person, loyal to the university and skilled in reading different scripts, that was highlighted.36 It is in this imperial, intellectual framework and urban reorganisation that we should understand the arrival of André de Avelar in Coimbra, probably during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The new imperial scope of the monarchy opened up avenues for his new Christian family, originally from Lisbon, and for his own career. Of his four brothers and three sisters, Avelar was the only one to follow an academic career. Two of his brothers followed very different paths as they left for the eastern lands of the empire. One died at the siege of Malacca in 1606 and the other in India. Of those who remained in Iberia, we know that one was married to an ‘old Christian’, and that the other was the shield-bearer (escudeiro) of the Duke of Aveiro. Regarding his sisters, we only know who they married (for instance, Fernandes Osorio, working for the financial administration of the kingdom in Madrid) and that one of them became a nun at the Santa Ana Monastery in Lisbon.37 As for the mobility of André de Avelar himself within the monarchy, during the trial he claimed to have left the kingdom only to go to the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid. He grew up in Lisbon and studied arts and theology.38 His return to the kingdom, or at least his presence as the author of a printed book, is evidenced by the publication of his first work in Coimbra, in 1579, by the printing press run by João de Barreira, the greatest entrepreneur in the field, who worked for the king, the university and the Society of Jesus.39 Perhaps taking advantage of his previous contact with the Castilian-language book market, Avelar published a volume entitled Reportorio dos tempos. The book is mainly a translation into Portuguese of the work by Jerónimo de Chaves, the first to occupy the chair of cosmography at the House of Trade in Seville in 1552.40 It is a composite text combining explanations of cosmography, chronography, astrology and nautical knowledge. The choice of the kind of publication was significant. On the one hand, the set of themes addressed in the volume surely helped Avelar to present himself as a specialist on a diversity of topics covered in the quadrivium. On the other, it reflected the importance of emerging figures and places (the chair of cosmography at the House of Trade) that were at the centre of the reorganisation of knowledge as a consequence of imperial expansion. The second way in which Avelar’s life and the imperatives of the empire intersect each other is precisely that of the emphasis given to certain forms of knowledge. In the very particular moment when some members of the Society

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

181

of Jesus actively engaged in the discussion about the status of mathematics as a ‘science’ in the Santa Antão College in Lisbon,41 mathematics was presented as a ‘common good’ for the kingdom in the new university statutes of Coimbra. No doubt echoing the new imperatives of the empire, mathematics was to be taught together with navigation.42 Avelar took advantage of this reform in different ways. First, he applied and obtained, without competition, the position of professor of mathematics at the University of Coimbra in 1592. The only requirement was to be a Master of Arts.43 He immediately published his comments on the Sphere of Sacrobosco (1593) in the workshop of António Barreira, son of João, and dedicated the book to Fernão Mascarenhas, rector of the university (1586–1594) and future inquisitor (1616). Sacrobosco’s treatise had been at the core of the quadrivium teaching since the Middle Ages. As in the case of his former publication, the Reportorio, Avelar integrates new information related to ocean navigation and the New World.44 Again, we cannot avoid highlighting the proximity between this publication pattern and the one followed by Chaves, whose first book was a commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco (1548). With his writing, Avelar not only sought to fulfil his duties as professor of the chair of mathematics, which had integrated navigation as a topic, at least in the programme reform; he also got closer to the production of knowledge based in Lisbon, where the concentration of cosmographers made room for a book market more clearly oriented towards nautical problems. After obtaining the position of professor, Avelar sought, in 1595, the position of librarian, associated with the charge of the proof-reader at the printing press in the new statutes of the university.45 When Avelar presented his request, he argued he had experience with printing and that at the University of Salamanca this position was attached to the chair of mathematics.46 However, the university council decided not to appoint anyone for the time being, because there was still no library.47 Three years later, Avelar was selected for the post of guarda do cartório (archival keeper), without any reference being made to the library.48 However, the manuscript, entitled Livro do chartorio desta Universidade de Coimbra ordenado pello Mestre Andre Davellar, lente das mathematicas e guarda do mesmo chartorio (1598), presents a list of all the books in the library, about 200 titles, drawn up and organised by Avelar.49 Avelar arranged all the administrative documentation of the university, its property, contracts and posts according to a geographical criterion. He also gave information regarding the administrative organisation of the monarchy. Even though the post of librarian and archivist was split into two different positions in the new statutes, we can assume that Avelar managed to put himself in control of the library. At the end of the Livro do chartorio, in alphabetical order by author and, in some cases, book title, he listed the volumes available at the library. Avelar introduced his manuscript as a treatise on the order of the archive, dedicated to the new rector, Afonso Furtado de Mendoça, who had given him the position. After having underlined the chaos that he had found when he arrived at the archive, he explained

182

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

its organisation into boxes (caixões) – containing the documentation of the university’s property in the kingdom – and cupboards (almarios) with all papers related to teaching and students. For each section, Avelar provided a detailed description. During this period of intense activity Avelar wrote pedagogical texts dedicated to supplying material for teaching in a context, as we have already seen, in which the availability of learning materials and textbooks could not be taken for granted. The marginalia depicting different aspects of the representation of the sphere and the movement of the planets in his Livro do chartorio allow us at least to suggest that, during his time arranging papers and books in the library and the archive, he nevertheless found the time to think about his other activities (Figures 7.2 and 7.3).

Front page and drawings in the Livro do chartorio, Avelar, 1598. © Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Universidade de Coimbra, Cartório e Livraria. Col. Pombalina, no. 95.

FIGURES 7.2 AND 7.3

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

FIGURES 7.2 AND 7.3

183

(Continued)

It is around this time that Avelar wrote different manuscripts likely related to his occupations at the chair of mathematics. His Lectiones Matematicae (1595) and his Geografia teorica e pratica (s.d.), written in Latin, are probably notes on the courses he gave. They cover a broad range of subjects on the basis of a definition of mathematics that articulates geometry, astronomy, astrology and geography. He also wrote notes on the Theoricae novae planetarum, by Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461), a fundamental text in academic circles.50 Another group of manuscripts was written in a more precise context, since they are devoted to the study of the consequences of the passage of two comets in 1607 and 1619.51 A sixth manuscript, written in Portuguese and attributed to Avelar, titled Galatas de curiosidades matematicas (s.d.), also focuses on astrological questions and on navigation and the manufacture of instruments.52 We also know that Avelar bought

184

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

instruments (such as an astrolabe) and at least two maps, one of them a world map, at the expense of the university, probably for teaching purposes.53 The articulation of the different issues addressed in his treatises under the umbrella of mathematics can be read both as evidence of their composite character and as a sign of the redefinition of the links between different areas of knowledge during the period under examination. The broad debate is well known; it originated in the context of Italian universities (namely in Padua), and was rooted in the context of a crisis of Aristotelianism and a revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism.54 By the end of the sixteenth century, at the Jesuit College of Lisbon, the discussion revolved around a very precise reinterpretation of Aristotle’s conditions for considering mathematical knowledge as a science.55 The debate took place on the basis not only of printed materials but also of teaching. From this point of view, the references we can grasp reading Avelar’s manuscript for teaching acquire a different dimension, especially considering the complex configuration of the communities articulating or reactivating diverse intellectual traditions in the kingdom. The nature and definition of mathematics are the subject of the foreword to his Lectiones Mathematicae. The position seems to be clear in the introduction of the Galatas where the value of mathematics as a ‘discipline’ is affirmed because, it is said, it is the only knowledge that can be taught by demonstrations, unlike philosophy and logic.56 In all his manuscripts Avelar deploys his knowledge of Arab and Christian authors, medieval and modern, in arithmetic, astrology and astronomy, from Alfarghani to Copernicus, all mixed with a strong presence of Plato and Neoplatonism through Proclus’s comments on Euclid. While this background speaks of Avelar’s own reading, perhaps also of his personal library, it also reflects the stark contrast regarding other references put forward by different communities and places of knowledge. In other words, besides the philosophical question behind the discussion about the status of mathematics, there is a sociological dimension organised, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, in urban spaces differently anchored in the power structures of the monarchy and its urban spaces. If we know that Avelar engaged in correspondence with people belonging to an ‘informal academy’, like Manuel Bocarro Francês about comets, a crucial point addressed against Aristotle by that time,57 it is clear that Aristotle remained a key reference at the university and for the Jesuits from the College of Arts. Whether through the influence of Neoplatonism, based on a revival of Proclus, or through a reinforcement of Aristotle thanks to the work by the Jesuit editorial enterprise of the Conimbricenses, Coimbra emerged as a more polychromatic and problematic arena. Not only from an intellectual point of view, but also from a social and urban perspective shaped by different traditions and communities vying for positions, Coimbra was integrated in the complex balance of power at the core of the Catholic monarchy.

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

185

(De)constructing social urban networks: inquisitorial representations of spaces of knowledge and belief Avelar’s position at the archive and library was a turning point in his career, brought to an end by his imprisonment by the Inquisition. Before becoming librarian, he had already served, for two months during 1594, as almotacé – an administrative position inherited from the Arabic period – whose task was, among other things, to control and tax weights and measures. The new statutes of the university specify their role in the taxation of meat and fish sold in the butcher shops (açougues) of the university.58 After his attachment to the archive, Avelar started taking on other responsibilities: in 1599 he was paid for translating the statutes of the university; in 1603 he obtained a Terçaneria, a third of the stipend attached to the prebend of the Cathedral of Coimbra. The registries of the University of Coimbra record a variety of other activities: he was responsible for taxes related to the management of certain payments from the university until 1613; and, in 1616, he is mentioned as arqueiro, i.e. treasurer. All of this in addition to his teaching duties: in 1612, after 20 years of teaching, he retired,59 only to have his position renewed for another four years. With all these activities, it is perhaps unsurprising that Avelar’s economic situation and position in the administration of the university were good enough to be able to buy two houses sold at auction by the university in 1609. They were in the neighbourhood (freguesia) of São João de Almedina, in the (nameless) street of the (Jesuit) college which leads to the gate of the castle.60 Bound up in a thick social network articulating the different loci of Coimbra, Avelar was equally affected by the religious and political transformations of the period that went beyond the city itself. His name was already spoken of in Rome in 1603. Philip III asked the pope if the papal motu proprio excluding new Christians ‘dignities, canonries and prebendaryships in churches and cathedrals’ would also apply to André de Avelar, member of the Hebrew nação but elected Terçenario by the university. The pope answered no, because the ‘Terçanaria’ was a ‘beneficio simplex’ which does not involve a ‘prebend’.61 The creation of an Inquisition in Portugal progressively changed the social relationships between the different communities of the monarchy.62 Approved in 1536, different tribunals were placed in key cities of the empire (Lisbon, Evora, Coimbra, Goa). It was an instrument for fighting against Christian heretics, mainly, and in the case of the Portuguese Empire, Jews converted to Catholicism (new Christians, conversos or marranos), and converts from Islam (moriscos) or from Hinduism. It is important to underline the profound disruption that the persecution of these different communities introduced into a society of the Ancien Régime, since it gradually disturbed a basic principle: all subjects are, within their own estate, equal.63 In other words, the society of the Ancien Régime was, at one and the same time, unequally hierarchical and equitable.64 The introduction of the idea of purity of (Christian) blood, in order to gain access to different positions (and be a member of society), implied a transversal societal differentiation of its members, from the nobleman to the peasant.

186

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

At an institutional level, the historian López-Salazar Codes has recently demonstrated to what extent the situation of the new Christians in Portugal troubled the relationship between the Crown, the Council of the Portuguese Inquisition and Rome.65 The complaints to the pope of the new Christians who fled Portugal provoked direct interference by the pope who asked for the release of some prisoners or the supervision of some of the trials. The decree of a ‘perdão geral’ (general pardon) in 1605, in exchange for a considerable sum of money paid by the people of the ‘nação’, which erased any crime of heresy prior to that date, opened the doors of the inquisitorial prisons and promised prisoners the return of their confiscated belongings. The decision certainly closed a difficult period, though without reducing the tension between the different communities involved. From 1605 to the 1620s, when Avelar was imprisoned, the situation was reversed. Coimbra was experiencing increasingly deep tensions caused by the implementation of blood purity laws and the persecution of supposed practices of Judaism. These policies particularly affected members of Coimbra cathedral (where the purity of blood measure was finally adopted in 1622) and of the university. It is also related to the inspection at the university carried out by Francisco de Menses, rector-reformer of the university (1618–1624), ex-inquisitor and opponent of António Homem for obtaining the place of canon at the cathedral.66 No institution put more emphasis than the Inquisition on building up an imaginary or factual network of social and intellectual connections, allowing the inquisitors to go from one trial to another. The transcription of the oral trials (re)constructs a representation of urban spaces, public or private, where the ‘actions’ took place. Indeed, answers and questions during the trials build on elements borrowed from intellectual roles, circles of sociability and a material culture familiar to the accused and the inquisitors. In the second lawsuit against Avelar, for instance, Miguel da Fonseca (16 August 1621), notary of the university, is said to have gone to Avelar’s house looking for keys in order to gain access to books in the archive. The inquisitors reported that it was on this occasion that the mathematician, being in the company of his sons and another Master in Arts, alluded to the wave of imprisonment which ‘none of them will escape and that they live all five according to the law of Moises’. According to the inquisitorial documentation, Avelar was one of those, thanks to his skills in astronomy and languages, who knew very well how to determine the day for fasting or who, during clandestine Jewish ceremonies organised in different houses in Coimbra (some of their owners being members of the university), translated prayers from Latin into Portuguese.67 They described very unlikely secret places of prayer where the role of their participants was intertwined with their public role in Coimbra’s society. The painstaking descriptions of these ceremonies and of the spaces where these people met were repeated throughout the trial. They describe barefooted people, without a cape or hat, dressed with remarkable fabrics – some of them described as Dutch or from Asia – in a lighted room with silver or pewter candlesticks, gathered around an altar decorated with a crimson-coloured cloth, on

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

187

which there is a book that is described by its shape, size or because it might be similar to the one that someone saw somewhere else.68 The testimonies’ precise detail concerning the social and material elements of the ceremonies contrasts dramatically with the lack of an accurate description of their content, particularly with regard to the book at the centre of the ceremonies; a few vague references suggested during Avelar’s trial that ‘it may have been the Old Testament’ and it was once mentioned as being the Talmud.69 At the third interrogation session, 25 October 1621, after confessing and describing his participation in these ceremonies, Avelar explained that everything was false and that the inquisitor and the deputy had promised him that, if he would admit to ‘Judaizing’, he would recover his chair of mathematics at the university. After this clear statement, Avelar was accused of having given false testimony. The inquisitors could thus speed up the process and ask him for the most recent information. The tone changed, and the inquisitors provided specific names. According to the documentation, Avelar reportedly spoke at the end of his first imprisonment with Jesuit confessors, especially with Diogo Monteiro, about the false testimony given. It is very likely that Monteiro, having studied Latin, arts and theology in Coimbra, was then sent to the College of Santo Antão in Lisbon. He finished his studies in Evora and returned to the college of Coimbra (1592), which he left when a play he published was banned. The interest of the inquisitors bears directly on him and the answer he gave to the avowals of Avelar: ‘he says that aforementioned fathers told him that since he did not intend to go to Rome he must calm down until another opportunity comes to tell the truth’.70 The inquisitors invoked the figure of the ‘devil’, and a supposedly diabolical influence on Avelar, to reinforce their accusations and to explain away the new attitude of the defendant but any reference to Rome would have opened the question of his possible connections outside the kingdom. A few days later (25 August 1622), during another round of interrogation, the inquisitors asked him if ‘after the “perdão geral” on a certain day he met with people of his “nação” around a certain book, used to pray in a certain language and with a certain person have done certain things all day’.71 Avelar denied this extremely vague description and added abruptly, ‘Even though I went to Venice, I did not do it [participate]’. The inquisitors asked him if he knew that in Venice the celebration of the big Fast-Day is very similar to the ceremony they had previously described. They wanted to know the reason why he said that he was in Venice but that he did not participate. To this Avelar replied that he had heard that the Jews of Venice performed these ceremonies. ‘To whom?’ asked the inquisitors. Father Fray Luis de Sotomaior answered in a concise and precise way. Sotomaior was presumably the Dominican responsible for promoting Catholicism in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the union of Philip II and Maria de Tudor. After a period in the Netherlands and Germany, he returned to Coimbra to teach the Sacred Scripture, a post he lost because of having supported Antonio, a prior of Crato, as a candidate after the death of Sebastião. Only one hint, though

188

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

weak, links him to Avelar. It is this mathematician who, as an archivist, recorded the loan of money that the university made to Sotomaior to print his works. After these two references, the trial advanced towards the condemnation which materialised in a public abjuration and imprisonment.72 While it is difficult as yet to assess the hypothesis that Avelar might have had links with the group of new Christians seeking support for the pope against the aberrations of the Portuguese Inquisition or the Jewish and new Christian community in Venice,73 it is clear that the impact of the wave of arrests reconfigured Coimbra’s intellectual and urban landscape. The houses of the defendants, related to the university, were sold, others destroyed or occupied by members of the university or Inquisition, while the defendants’ libraries circulated among individuals or colleges. That of Avelar was put on sale in the market of Coimbra, where it was bought by a member of the university.74 We cannot document in greater detail what happened to Avelar after the end of the trial. He probably died in prison around 1623. The chair of mathematics at the university was taken over by the Benedictine order and, later on, by members of the Society of Jesus.75 Faced with this brutal reorganisation of spaces and the conflict of these learned and believing cultures, in 1630 a document indicating the price of an oil sale by Damião Gomes seems to reregister Avelar’s role in the city in the form of a street. The administrative record indicates that the oil salesman lived on the street of ‘the mathematician’ or ‘mathematics’, that of the Jesuit College that goes to the gate of the castle where Avelar bought his two houses, today named Rua da matemática (street of mathematics).76

Conclusion As this chapter shows, the process of knowledge-making and the development of different places of knowledge took place in a conflict space articulated by different political and religious logics. The early modern expansion of the Iberian empires radically transformed distant societies not without deeply impacting on cities and actors in the Old World. The importance of cities such as Lisbon or Seville, already underlined by the historiography, cannot overshadow the role played by other places and networks. This chapter points out the links between cities and their importance in the organisation of social networks participating to different degrees and with different aims in the logics of power of the empire. In a triangulation created by the settlement of urban institutions in three key Portuguese cities, with different urban profiles, such as Lisbon, Evora and Coimbra (colleges, universities, tribunals of the Inquisition, libraries, places regulating the circulation of goods, crypto-Jewish ceremonies), knowledge and belief were defined, practised and produced thanks to social dynamics anchored in urban spaces. In the case of the Iberian empires and, namely, during the union of the two crowns, these relationships were articulated on different geographical scales (from the microcosm

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

189

of the city to the global scope of the empire). The transformation of the intellectual and urban landscape in Coimbra responded to a complex negotiation of power relationships at different levels that crystallised in the city itself. The introduction of the Inquisition and the statutes of purity of blood completely changed the rules and unbalanced the relationships between communities of knowledge and belief. These dynamics were articulated from, and shaped by, the settlement of different spaces. From the creation of the street of Santa Sofia to the emergence of a street of mathematics, and through the representation of private and public spaces by the Inquisition, these dynamics found their urban expression. Avelar’s case allows us to explore the complexity of overlapping interests, communities and backgrounds in the making and discussion of knowledge and belief in an urban context. His contribution to the larger discussion about the certitudine mathematicarum deserves more research that takes a social and intellectual approach; his connections within and outside the Portuguese kingdom, his manuscripts and the wide range of documentation regarding his positions at the university account for the importance of rooting the history of science in a larger history of cultures of knowledge and belief of the societies of the Ancien Régime.

Notes 1 The expression is used by Pomian, L’ordre du temps. 2 Weber, The City. Comparative approaches have been very fruitful in challenging this perspective. See, among others, Goody, The Theft of History, esp. Ch. 8; Tracy, City Walls; Yoffee, The Cambridge World History, vol. 3; Burke, ‘Patterns of Urbanization’. 3 J. Goody, The Theft of History, 222. 4 The argument, which articulates discussions on the notion of freedom, urban political and economic organisations, and capitalism, was at the core of large debates on social sciences. F. Braudel’s works strengthened this perspective later on, reframed by the Cambridge School of intellectual history. 5 According to P. Burke, northern Europe and northern Italy republics stressed values such as ‘achievement, competition, toleration, industry, thrift and calculation’ that were in sharp contrast to the Spanish monarchy. Burke, ‘Republic of Merchants’, 22; Burke, Venice and Amsterdam. This point and the notion of ‘island of innovation’ have been highlighted by Herrero Sánchez, Repúblicas y republicanismo, 38. For a discussion on innovation and cities, see Davids and De Munck, Innovation and Creativity. 6 This interpretation has recently been strongly contested in Herrero Sánchez, Repúblicas y republicanismo. 7 Wallerstein argues, among other things, that the Spanish Empire did not properly apply mercantilist policies and self-destructed when it expelled large non-Catholic communities. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I: 193–194. For a recent revision of mercantilism and the Spanish Empire, see Grafe, ‘Polycentric States’. 8 Cook, Matters of Exchange. 9 See, for instance, the international research project ‘La gobernanza de los puertos atlánticos. Siglos XIV–XXI’ and the publications of its outputs by Polónia and Medina, La gobernanza de los puertos atlánticos; Fortea Pérez et al. eds, La ciudad portuaria atlántica en la história. From a different perspective and focus on

190

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

the Portuguese world, see Couto, ‘Fronteras, espacios urbanos y cosmopolitismo en el imperio portugués en Asia’ and Bermejo, ‘Lisbon, New Rome and Emporium’. Batchelor, London: The Selden Map; Jordan-Gschwend and Lowe, The Global City. Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Iberian Science in the Renaissance’; Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature; Portuondo, Secret Science. Romano and Van Damme, ‘Science and World Cities’. Rossa, ‘Primeiro episódio da reinstalação moderna’. Ibidem, 19. Document reproduced by Brandrão, Documentos de D. João III. In this regard, the volume edited by Berbara and Enenkel, Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters offers interesting insights. For a clear statement on the backwardness of the Catholic universities, see, for instance, De Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe, 424: ‘It is, however, a historical fact that, exceptions apart, the Catholic countries – especially Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, Poland and, to a lesser extent, Bavaria and Austria – were more closed societies than the Protestant countries, in their higher education as in other activities’; ibidem, 425: ‘The Iberian countries remained closed and isolated societies until the end of the ancien régime.’ On new perspectives see Gascoigne, ‘A Reappraisal of the Role of the Universities in the Scientific Revolution’; Feingold and Navarro-Brotons, Universities and Science. Vives, De disciplinis libri XX, 348. Ibidem, preface. See Moreira de Sá, Uma carta inédita de Luís Vives. The Jesuit order has been at the core of a renewal of the history of knowledge, missions and empire in recent decades. De Castelnau-L’Estoile, Copete and Maldavsky eds. Missions d’évangélisation et circulation des savoirs. Their role, seen as an exception among religious orders, has been more recently discussed and decentralised. Romano, Impressions de Chine. Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, 26. Leitão, Sphaera Mundi. Donelly, ‘The Jesuit college at Padua’; Grendler, The Jesuits and Italian Universities. About Mexico, Romano, ‘Los jesuitas, la cultura humanista, el Nuevo Mundo’; González-González, ‘De las artes liberales a la facultad de artes’. Vives, De disciplinis libri XX, 551. Teixeira da Mota, Os regimentos do cosmógrafo-mor. Taveira da Fonseca, ‘A Universidade de Évora’. The administrative documentation shows, for instance, that in 1604 the question of equipping the library with books was still in progress, as well as that of equipping it with the necessary shelves and boxes. See Gomes da Rocha Madahil, ‘A Propósito de Livreiros’. For a recent overview of the Coimbra book market and printing press, see Musser, ‘Building up Networks of Knowledge’. Rocha Pinto, ‘A Viagem, memória e espaço’, 136. Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, No quinto centénario da Vita Christi. Os primeiros impressores alemães em Portugal, Lisbonne, Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, 1995. Braga, História da universidade, 813. Some aspects of the importance of Geber’s theories in Nunes’s treatises are explained in Randles and Nunes, ‘Discovery of the Loxodromic Curve’. Nunes, Libro de algebra en artihmetica y geometria. Pinto de Castro, ‘A Livraria da Universidade’, 888. This idea is clearly developed in the Jesuit correspondence Epistolae P. Nadal, t. I, f. I, 559–600. On the Conimbricenses, see Casalini, Aristóteles Em Coimbra; Marinheiro, ‘The Conimbricenses’.

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

191

Estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra, 885. Ibidem, ‘Titulo XLVI, da livreria da Universidade e guarda della’, fol. 62v. Ibidem, ‘Titulo XLV, do Guarda do Cartorio’, fol. 61v. This is what, at least, Avelar said during his first trial. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209, fol. 18–18v. António Baião, in his Episódios Dramáticos Da Inquisição Portuguesa (p. 140), proposes to read ‘rendeiro’ instead of ‘escudeiro’ of the Duke of Aveiro. ANTT, PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209, fol. 18v–19. On the important academic emigration from different Portuguese cities to the University of Salamanca, especially to follow studies on medicine, see Marcos de Dios, Los Portugueses en la universidad. According to Marcos de Dios, between the period of the Crown Union, the University of Salamanca received around 9000 Portuguese students. Anselmo, Bibliografia Das Obras Impressas. For a comparison of both texts, see Botelho, ‘O Reportorio dos tempos’. It is important to emphasise that the Reportorio by Chaves was also printed in Lisbon, 1576, by João de Hespanha. Carolino, ‘João Delgado SJ’. Libro III, titulo VI, Estatutos, 1591, Coimbra, António Barreira, 1593. fol. 75. With respect to the training of his predecessors, including Pedro Nunes, Avelar’s profile does not deviate from the doctors of theology or medicine who previously occupied the chair: Pedro de Sousa Pereira, master of arts and doctor of theology; Frei Nicolau Coelho do Amaral, lecturer of theology at the University of Valladolid; Alvaro Nunes, lecturer of medicine, and Pedro da Cunha. Quoted by Braga, História da Universidade, II: 813. This aspect has been pointed out by Martins, ‘André do Avelar’. See ‘Titulo LI do corrector da impressão’, fol. 67 (sic 69). Mesa da Consciência e Ordens; Registo de Consultas, de 1594 a 1693, fl. 25 et 52. Cited by Braga, Historia da universidade, 817. AUC, Conselhos, t. 12, liv. 3, fols. 92–94. Document reproduced by Lopes de Almeida, ‘Apontamentos para a biografia’, 27. AUC, Registo dos Provisões, t. 2, fol. 303v; Lopes de Almeida, ‘Apontamentos para a biografia’, 28–30. BNP – Universidade de Coimbra, Cartório e Livraria. Col. Pombalina, no. 95. For a transcription of this list, see Braga, História da universidade de Coimbra, II: 250–253. For a recent and general overview on the history of the library, see Amaral, Os Livros Em Sua Ordem. Avelar, In theoricas septem Planetarum Ms. RBME & IV-9. Biblioteca del Escorial. Avelar, Discurso astronomico & astrologico. Ms. 46-VIII-16; Juizo que tirou em Coimbra Andre do Avelar, Ms. 51-VI-2. Bibilioteca da Ajuda. Archivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Manuscritos da Livraria, no. 681. 11/05/1593; 11/02/1595; AUC, FAZENDA. Documents reproduced by Lopes de Almeida, ‘Apontamentos’. Romano, La Contre-Réforme mathématique. Carolino, ‘João Delgado SJ’. ‘… de sortem que as sciencias mathematicas sao as mais sertas entre todas as sciencias, isto he tao claro e evidende que na tem necesside de mais prova E que tambem he tao certo entre os logicos e philosophos que na tem necessidade de outra prova sena o ser logico, e filosopho o objeito (circaquod) das mathematicas he a quantidade continua e discrtreta ….’ Avelar, Galatas. It should be noticed that, the authorship of the preface remains unclear. Carolino, ‘Science, Patronage, and Academies’. For a deep critical revision of Aristotle’s theory on comets and the cosmological theories underpinning his view, the work by Muñoz, Libro del nuevo cometa, is crucial. Estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra, ‘Titulo XXX’, fol. 44v.

192

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

59 This coincides with the first time he is mentioned in the trial of António Gomes, according to information reported by Lopes de Almeida, Apontamentos. I have not been able to confirm this. 60 AUC, IV-1ª E-14-1-21; fl. 131–132r. The documents are reproduced by Lopes de Almeida, Livros, livreiros, impressores, 29–30. 61 The reasoning is somewhat confusing, but the document clearly states that the king can grant the position to Avelar. See Braga, História da universidade, II: 492–493 and Saraiva, Salomon and Sassoon, The Marrano Factory, 120. 62 To quote only some of the most recent titles on this large topic, see Marcocci and Paiva, História da Inquisição Portuguesa; Bethencourt, The Inquisition; Feitler, The Imaginary Synagogue. 63 Saraiva, Salomon and Sassoon, The Marrano Factory, 118. 64 See, in that sense, Levi, ‘Reciprocidad mediterránea’. 65 López-Salazar Codes, Inquisición. 66 Related to this issue, see Rodrigues, ‘A inquisição e o cabido’. See also Magalhães, ‘A Universidade e a inquisição’. 67 See, for instance, PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fols. 53-v; 90; and the passage quoted by Baião, Episódios, 147. 68 See, for instance, PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fol. 23. 69 Ibidem., fols. 38-v; fol. 28. 70 Ibidem, fol. 89. 71 Ibidem, fol. 201. 72 Ibidem, fol. 127. 73 The number of new Christians is so important that Philip III is asked to write to the Duke of Tuscany to forbid their practices. López-Salazar Codes, Inquisición, 126. 74 Baião, ‘A devassa de 1628 à Inquisição coimbrã’. 75 Braga, História da universidade, 824–882. 76 Arquivo Municipal de Coimbra, Vereações, 16330-1635, fol. 23.

Bibliography of unpublished sources Estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra. Confirmados por el Rei Dom Phelippe primeiro deste nome, nosso Senhor: em o anno de 1591. Ed. Pinto de Castro, Aníbal. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra/De Barreira, António, 1593. ‘Titulo XLVI, da livreria da Universidade e guarda della’, fol. 62v. ‘Titulo XLV, do Guarda do Cartório’, fol. 61v. ‘Libro III, titulo VI, Estatutos’. Coimbra: 1591, 1593. fol. 75. ‘Titulo LI do corrector da impressão’, fol. 67 (sic 69). ‘Titulo XXX’, fol. 44v. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209, fol. 18–18v. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209, fols. 18v–19. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fols. 53-v; 90. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fol. 23. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fols. 38-v; fol. 28. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fol. 89. PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fol. 201.

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

193

PT/TT/TSO-IC/025/02209-1, fol. 127. Manuscritos da Livraria, no. 681. Avelar, André. In theoricas septem Planetarum Purbachii et Octavae Spherae eiusdem … Ms. RBME & IV-9. Biblioteca del Escorial. Avelar, André. Discurso astronomico & astrologico do cometa que apareceo por novembro de 1619 em Coimbra. Pello Me. Andre de Avelar lente jubilado em mathematica. Ms. 46-VIII-16. Biblioteca da Ajuda. Avelar, André. Juizo que tirou em Coimbra Andre do Avelar Cathedratico da Cadeira de Mathemattica sobre os effeitos do cometa que apareceo no anno de 1607, Ms. 51VI-2. Bibilioteca da Ajuda. Avelar, André. Galatas. Doutrina da esfera do mundo e dos usos dos dois globos de que usa a astronomia e a geometria …. 1570/1623, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/MSLIV/0681. BNP – Universidade de Coimbra, Cartório e Livraria. Col. Pombalina, no. 95. Arquivo Municipal de Coimbra, Vereações, 1630-1635, fol. 23.

References Alden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal. Its Empire, and Beyond. Volume 1: 1540–1750. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Amaral, Maia. Os Livros Em Sua Ordem: Para a História Da Biblioteca Geral Da Universidade (Antes de 1513–2013). Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2014. Anselmo, António Joaquim. Bibliografia Das Obras Impressas Em Portugal No Século XVI. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1926. Baião, António. Episódios Dramáticos Da Inquisição Portuguesa (2nd ed.). Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1936. Baião, António. ‘A devassa de 1628 à Inquisição coimbrã.’ In Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, Arquivo de história e bibliografia: 1923–1926. Lisbon: Casa da Moeda, 1976, pp. 2–25. Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Batchelor, Robert K. London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Berbara, Maria and Enenkel, Karl eds. Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Bermejo, Saúl Martínez. ‘Lisbon, New Rome and Emporium: Comparing an Early Modern Imperial Capital, 1550–1750.’ Urban History 44/4 (2017): 604–621. Bethencourt, Francisco. The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Botelho Da Costa, Adalgisa. ‘O Reportorio dos tempos de Andre do Avelar e a astrologia em Portugal no século XVI.’ Disertation. University of São Paulo, 2001. Braga, Teófilo. Historia da universidade de Coimbra nas suas relações com a instrucção publica portugueza. Vols. 2 and 4. Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1892–1902. Brandrão, Mário. Documentos de D. João III, Vol. 2. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1938. Burke, Peter. Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth Century Élites. London: Temple Smith, 1974.

194

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

Burke, Peter. ‘Republic of Merchants in Early Modern Europe.’ In Baechler, Jean; Hall, John A. and Mann, Michael eds. Europe and the Rise of Capitalism. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988, pp. 220–233. Burke, Peter. ‘Patterns of Urbanization, 1400 to 1800.’ In Bentley, Jerry; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry eds. The Cambridge World History. Volume. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, Part 1: Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 107–132. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. ‘Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?’ Perspectives on Science 12/1 (2004): 86–124. Carolino, Luís Miguel. ‘João Delgado SJ e a Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum em inícios do século XVII.’ Revista Brasileira de História da Matemática 6 (2006): 17–49. Carolino, Luís Miguel. ‘Science, Patronage, and Academies in Early Seventeenth-Century Portugal: The Scientific Academy of the Nobleman and University Professor Andre de Almada.’ History of Science 54/2 (2016): 107–137. Casalini, Cristiano. Aristóteles Em Coimbra. Cursus Conimbricensis E a Educação No Collegium Artium. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 2015. Cook, Harold John. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Couto, Dejanirah. ‘Fronteras, espacios urbanos y cosmopolitismo en el imperio portugués en Asia: de Ormuz a Malaca (Primera mitad del siglo XVI).’ In Varriale, Gennaro ed. Si fuera cierto? Espías y agentes en la frontera (siglos XVI–XVII). Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2018, pp. 121–142. Davids, Karel and De Munck, Bert eds. Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. De Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte;; Copete, Marie-Lucie; Maldavsky, Aliocha and Zupanov, Ines eds. Missions d’évangélisation et circulation des savoirs. XVIe–XVIII siècle. Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 2011. De Ridder-Symoens, Hilde ed. A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Donelly, John Patrick. ‘The Jesuit College at Padua: Growth, Suppression, Attempts at Restoration: 1552–1606.’ Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 51/1 (1982): 45–79. Feingold, Mordechai and Navarro-Brotons, Victor eds. Universities and Science in the Early Modern Period. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Feitler, Bruno. The Imaginary Synagogue: Anti-Jewish Literature in the Portuguese Early-Modern World (16th–18th centuries). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. Fortea Pérez, José Ignacio; Gelabert González, Juan Eloy; Guimer Á. Ravina, Agustín, et al. eds. La ciudad portuaria atlántica en la história: siglos XVI–XIX. Cantabria: Graficás Calima, 2006. Gascoigne, John. ‘A Reappraisal of the Role of the Universities in the Scientific Revolution.’ In Lindberg, David C. and Westman, Robert S. eds. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 207–260. Gomes da Rocha Madahil, António. ‘A Propósito de Livreiros E Impressores de Coimbra No Século XVI.’ Arquivo Coimbrãoi 6 (1942): 204–219. González-González, E. ‘De las artes liberales a la facultad de artes. El orden de los saberes escolares en el Antiguo Régimen.’ In González-González, Enrique ed. Estudios y estudiantes de filosofia. De la Facultad de Artes a la Facultad de Filosofia y Letras (1551–1929). Mexico: UNAM-El Colegio de Michuacan, 2008, pp. 29–82. Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

André de Avelar and the city of Coimbra

195

Grafe, Regina. ‘Polycentric States: The Spanish Reigns and the “Failures” of Mercantilism.’ In Stern, Philip J. and Wennerlind, Carl eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 241–262. Grendler, Paul. The Jesuits and Italian Universities 1548–1773. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Herrero Sánchez, Manuel ed. Repúblicas y republicanismo en la Europa moderna (siglos XVI–XVIII). Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2017. Jordan-Gschwend, Annemarie and Lowe, KateJ.P. The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015. Leitão, Henrique. Sphaera Mundi: A ciência na aula da esfera. Manuscritos científicos do colégio de Santo Antão nas colecções da BNP, Catálogo. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2008. Levi, Giovanni. ‘Reciprocidad mediterránea.’ Hispania: Revista española de historia 60/204 (2000): 103–126. Lopes de Almeida, Manuel. Livros, livreiros, impressores em documentos da Universidade, 1587–1835. Coimbra: Arquivo de Bibliografia Portuguesa, 1966a. Lopes de Almeida, Manuel. ‘Apontamentos para a biografia de André de Avelar, professor de matemática na Universidade.’ Junta de Investigações do Ultramar 8 (1966b): 5–50. López-Salazar Codes, Ana Isabel. Inquisición portuguesa y monarquía hispánica en tiempos del perdón general de 1605. Lisbon: Colibri, 2010. Magalhães, Joaquim Romero. ‘A Universidade e a inquisição.’ In História da Universidade em Portugal, Vol. 1, Book 2. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra; Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1997, pp. 971–988. Marcocci, Giuseppe and Paiva, José. Pedro. História da Inquisição Portuguesa, 1536–1821. Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros, 2013. Marcos de Dios, Angel. Los Portugueses en la universidad de Salamanca (1580–1640). Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1975. Marinheiro, Cristóvão. ‘The Conimbricenses: The Last Scholastics, the First Moderns or Something in Between? The Impact of Geographical Discoveries on Late 16th-century Jesuit Aristotelianism.’ In Berbara, Maria and Enenkel, Karl eds. Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, pp. 395–424. Martins, Roberto. ‘André do Avelar and the Teaching of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera at the University of Coimbra.’ In Valleriani, Matteo ed. The Authors of the Early Modern Commentaries of Sacrobosco’s De sphaera. Dordrecht: Springer Nature, 2019,forthcoming. Moreira de Sá, Artur. Uma carta inédita de Luís Vives para D. João III. Coimbra: Separata do Arquivo de Bibliografia Portuguesa, 1957. Muñoz, Jerónimo. Libro del nuevo cometa, y del lugar donde se haze[n], y como se vera por las parallaxes quan lexos estan de tierra; y del prognostico deste. Valencia: Pedro de Huete, 1573. Musser, Ricarda. ‘Building up Networks of Knowledge: Printing and Collecting Books in the Age of Humanism in the University City of Coimbra.’ In Berbara, Maria and Enenkel, Karl A.E. eds. Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012, pp. 113–128. Nunes, Pedro. Libro de algebra en artihmetica y geometria. Compuesto por el Doctor Pedro Nunes, cosmographo mayor del rey de Portugal y catedrático jubilado de la cathedra de mathematicas en la universidad de Coimbra. Antwerp: Arnoldo Brickman, 1567. Pinto de Castro, Aníbal. ‘A Livraria da Universidade.’ In História da Univeridade em Portugal. Volume 1, Book 2: 1537–1771. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1997, pp. 883–894.

196

Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi

Polónia, Amélia; Rivera Medina and Ana María. La gobernanza de los puertos atlánticos. Siglos XIV–XXI. Políticas y estructuras portuarias. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2016. Pomian, Krzystof. L’ordre du temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Randles, William Graham Lister. ‘Pedro Nunes’ Discovery of the Loxodromic Curve (1537): How Portuguese Sailors in the Early Sixteenth Century, Navigating with Globes, Had Failed to Solve the Difficulties Encountered with the Plane Chart.’ The Journal of Navigation 50/1 (1997): 85–96. Rocha Pinto, João. ‘A Viagem, memória e espaço: a literatura portuguesa de viagens – os primitivos relatos de viagem ao Indico, 1497–1550.’ Cadernos da revista de história económica e social 11–12 (1989). In Alves Dias, João José and the Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro eds. No quinto centenário da Vita Christi. Os primeiros impressores alemães em Portugal. Lisbon: Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, 1995. Rodrigues, Manuel Augusto. ‘A inquisição e o cabido da Sé de Coimbra (1580–1640).’ Separato do Arquivo Coimbrão 27(1979): 5–51. Romano, Antonella. La Contre-Réforme mathématique. Constitution et diffusion d’une culture mathématique jésuite à la Renaissance (1540–1640). Rome: EFR, 1999. Romano, Antonella. ‘Los jesuitas, la cultura humanista, el Nuevo Mundo: reflexiones sobre la apertura del Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo de México.’ In González-González, Enrique ed. Estudios y estudiantes de filosofia. De la Facultad de Artes a la Facultad de Filosofia y Letras (1551–1929). Mexico: UNAM-El Colegio de Michuacan, 2008, pp. 219–258. Romano, Antonella. Impressions de Chine: l’Europe et l’englobement du monde (XVIe–XVIIe siècle). Paris: Fayard, 2016. Romano, Antonella and Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th century).’ Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 79–95. Rossa, Walter. ‘Primeiro episódio da reinstalação moderna da Universidade portuguesa.’ Monumentos 25 (2006): 16–23. Saraiva, José António; Salomon, Herman Prins and Sassoon, Isaac Solomon David. The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians 1536–1765. Leiden: Brill, 2001 [1969]. Taveira da Fonseca, Fernando. ‘A Universidade de Évora (1559–1759).’ In Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Luis E. and Rodríguez, Juan Luis Polo eds. Salamanca y su Universidad en el primer Renacimiento: siglo XV. Salamanque: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2011, pp. 385–418. Teixeira da Mota, Avelino. Os regimentos do cosmógrafo-mor de 1559 e 1592 e as origens do ensino náutico em Portugal. Portugal: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1969. Tracy, James D. ed. City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vives, Juan Luis. De disciplinis libri XX. Preface ed. and transl Riber, Lorenzo. Obras completes, Vol. 2. Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1947–1948. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. Volume 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Weber, Max. The City. New York: Free Press, 1958 [1921]. Yoffee, Norman ed. The Cambridge World History. Volume 3: Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

8 ROMAN URBAN EPISTEMOLOGIES Global space and universal time in the rebuilding of a sixteenth-century city Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

Published for the first time in Rome in 1585, the treatise Delle cause della grandezza delle città by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617)1 highlights one of the major characteristics of the relation between European literati and the city in the early modern period. He describes the relationship as a reflexive one mostly due to urban growth: Since among the works that His Divine Majesty has created beneath the heavens man is the noblest and worthiest, so then among the outward works of man there is no greater than the city; for being by nature sociable and desirous to share his goods, it is in cities that conversations and the mutual exchange of all the things that concern life attain their highest form. Here are manufacturing, crafts, and trade; here is the stage on which justice, strength, liberality, magnificence, and the other virtues are practiced for the common good, and where they shine forth with the greatest glory. In sum, cities are like little worlds constructed by man within the great world created by God, and just as the contemplation of Nature leads to recognition of the greatness of God, in the same way the study of cities affords a special sign of man’s excellence, which in turn redounds to the glory of God, whose creature he is. This has moved me, because of the various travels it has been my lot to undertake over these past years, to investigate the reasons why one city is greater than another. And now that I am ready to entrust my treatise to the printer, I am moved to honour it with the very noble name of your excellence.2 This quote epitomizes a commitment to the entangled developments of urban culture and urbanization. It evidences the power of words in the processes that praise the city and the values it embodies. Anthropocentric, it is based on one predicate – humankind

198

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

is God’s major achievement – which is then converted into a syllogism: cities are humanity’s major achievements. As a result, cities are God’s major achievements. Giovanni Botero’s thoughts about cities must be situated within his broad political project, generally analyzed as the orthodox Catholic interpretation of Machiavelli’s foundation of modern politics and a response to contemporary French political thinkers.3 At the same time, they are deeply rooted in late-1580s Rome. An ex-Jesuit, precettore and then secretario of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, consultore of the Sacred congregation of the Index, he writes as a man of the Roman Curia, as a political actor and thinker who spends his life in the entourage of the major Italian religious and secular princes.4 The treatise illustrates his relationships with the Roman political and intellectual milieux. Dedicated to the powerful gentildonna Cornelia Orsini d’Altemps, it was written while the author was living at her court, in the Altemps Palace standing in the direct alignment of Navona Square. Moreover, his reflection on the city, the definition of greatness he proposes, as well as the use of comparison as an analytical tool make of this work a unique piece in geopolitical reflection and contemporary publishing production.5 We argue that such uniqueness is to be closely connected with Rome and the operations undertaken at the end of the 1580s. At the beginning of this brief treatise, Botero defines the criteria that make a city great: A city is said to be an assembly of people, a congregation drawn together to the end they may thereby the better live at their ease in wealth and plenty. And the greatness of a city is said to be, not the largeness of the site or the circuit of the walls, but the multitude and number of the inhabitants and their power. Now men are drawn together upon sundry causes and occasions thereunto them moving: some by authority, some by force, some by pleasure, and some by profit that proceedeth of it.6 He doesn’t emphasize the physical dimension of the city, but the population and its ‘power’, what in the Italian text he calls ‘possanza’.7 He suggests that greatness is a matter of urban agency. Rome was where he could experience the vitality of a capital city, an example of urbanity staged through not only architecture but also printing, one among the central and new tools that shape greatness. Rome’s greatness8 is quite unconventional: a very limited population, socially strongly structured, combined with a high supranational role; the seat of all the major European powers, either political or spiritual, as well as the place of some of the most important urban courts of the time.9 A polycentric site made up of people from multiple origins, both socially and culturally, Rome’s ‘possanza’ encompasses a multiplicity of command functions in line with its distinct and articulated scales of action: an urban space which controls vaster spaces (provincial, regional, national, continental, imperial …), and encompasses the various scales of the world. Elaborating on Botero’s thoughts, this chapter aims at discussing the epistemological added value of knowledge when produced in and by the city. Botero is inspired by

Roman urban epistemologies

199

a very unique case, Rome, the case we will take into consideration. Using his idea of cities’ greatness, we will focus on urban knowledge production and consider it, in Rome, as the result of a nonetheless unique ‘dispositif’.10 It constitutes the foundation of an urban epistemology characterized by a relationship to time nourished by an ability to encompass all parts of the known world. The case study under scrutiny is that of the relocation of an obelisk at the time of Sixtus V, in 1585. The singularity of Rome in the early modern period and its perception are rooted into a rich and long tradition of research which built on the combination of different historiographical perspectives for which greatness, flourishing during the Renaissance, is most often taken for granted.11 Its religious functions have constantly been highlighted as a central element of both its status as a world capital and the cosmopolitism of its population resulting from it.12 Another famous aspect of its originality lies in the important architectural rebuilding movement which characterizes the different phases of its decaying: as early as the beginning of the twentieth century Rodolfo Lanciani, one of the most renowned archaeologists of the time, quoting the biographer of Pope Martin V (1417–1431), recalls that the pontiff found Rome in such a state of devastation that it could hardly be considered a city fit for human habitation: whole rows of houses abandoned by their tenants; many churches to the ground; streets deserted and buried under heaps of refuse; traces of plague and famine everywhere … and this may explain his decision, by the Bull Et si in cunctarum, published in 1425, to re-establish the office of the ‘magistri viarum’, entrusted with the rebuilding of the city.13 One century later, after the sack of Rome, in 1527, the city had, once again, to reconquer its greatness. This process of ‘reconquest’ was difficult, discontinuous because of the different papal policies, as they went hand in hand with the reshaping and refashioning of the pope’s authority and the papal states’ structures, culminating in a series of reforms leading to the creation of many new institutions, among which the congregations of the Index and that of the Holy Office.14 Other investigations have demonstrated that the centrality of the city at an international level – which contrary to many other states had no military bases – was enhanced by the jubilees, obedience embassies and a stable diplomatic presence, as well as the foreign composition of the central government of the Church, which in turn attracted people, laymen or clerics, from all parts of Europe, and increasingly more often from overseas, in order to staff the Roman bureaucracy.15 With regard to questions related to knowledge production, over the last decade, the intellectual and scientific profile of Rome has been reassessed.16 Thus, in line with Botero’s analysis, more and more works have recently been able to highlight that Rome assembles a large variety of people, attracted by specific institutions, political and religious, who interact at social, political and intellectual levels, capable of engaging in operations of gathering, ordering,

200

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

displaying materials, information, knowledge. To this picture should be added another dimension linked to the articulation of the redefinition of the tasks of Catholicism after the collapse of Christianity with the enlarging of the world to the globe operated by the two major empires in the making in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal. By ensuring their connection, Rome with its urban profile contributed, we argue, to the elaboration of a new system of knowledge at a local level, related to a new order and a new sense of greatness of the world enlarged to the entire globe in these last decades of the sixteenth century, where Rome had to assume a new leading position.17 Roman soil and territory, as well as its print are the two fundamental tools of this process. We consider that the massive development of the Roman urban planning of the period Botero witnessed as he wrote his treatise has its own dynamic. It is part of a collective commitment aimed at rebuilding a multifaceted Roman greatness: first, the capital of the Roman Empire, then the capital of Christianity. The attempt to reinvigorate the city was not new at the time, as it started with the humanistic movement one century earlier, for the sake of restoring the Ancient Rome. The challenge of the last decades of the sixteenth century was to reassess and strengthen the ancient greatness into a Catholic perspective. Which meant to integrate the global scale into the Roman sphere of command, in accordance with the post-Tridentine project of the spiritual conquest of the entire world. Rome’s greatness must illustrate as well as enact a new epistemological framework where both the Ancient and the Unknown worlds are articulated for the Christian God’s sake. There lies the global dimension of Rome, through the close and deep articulation between the resources of its ancient past and the potentials of its global present. This is at the core of our study of a precise moment of the Vatican’s reconfiguration, when, under the patronage of Pope Sixtus V, an Egyptian obelisk was erected at the center of the square. As we will see, this obelisk was bestowed with different meanings due to its materiality, its history, and the multiple references it bore: such a multiplicity of meanings was possible for the specific Roman agency, and could thus be worked out within a cultural program of global scale, where the greatness of the city was made explicit through the unique combination of different branches of knowledge: technology, philology, history, whether natural, civil, or sacred. It is re-enacted thanks to prints and urban celebrations. The study of such a process is based on different sources such as the monument itself, the many treatises that its relocation entailed, and by focusing on those who took part in this process. In the first part of the chapter, we will trace the historical plasticity of the Egyptian-oriental reference provided by the obelisk in relation with Antiquity. In the second part, we will replace the enterprise of relocating the Heliopolis obelisk in St. Peter’s square within the framework of a larger political, cultural, and architectural program undertaken by the pontifical power. We will analyze how such an enterprise contributed to the redefinition of Rome’s centrality in the contemporary world. In the third part, we will connect the set of questions that emerged from the interests in the oriental past of Rome to those of its global present.

Roman urban epistemologies

201

The past of a world capital Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet. Francesco Albertini, Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris Urbis Romae, 1510 Rome’s resurrection, in all its dimensions: urban and social, political and intellectual, asserted and questioned by its actors, has been investigated by historians of art, culture, diplomacy, politics. Although the process started by the end of the fourteenth century, it intensified after the sack of 1527 almost erased the city.18 At that time, the Roman authorities were simultaneously confronted with the collapse of the Christian medieval world in the wake of the Reformation, the ‘discovery’ of a new world by Christian kings competing to evangelize and control simultaneously the East and West ‘Indies’, the many wars in the Italian peninsula occupied by foreign states.19 Rebuilding the city was both a material and spiritual project, and architecture became the visual and material expression as well as support of a political and intellectual ambition: to embed into the traditional claim of Christian universalism in the fields of politics and religion a technical, both human and material, capability that would ensure the leadership of an intellectual and cultural capital. This implied developing tools to reorganize the knowledge about the globe just like the renewed program of the Church was to complete the spiritual reconquest of the world in response to the collapse of Christianity, the expansion of Islam, the encounter with Asian polytheisms in Japan and China, as well as with the savagery of the peoples of the new worlds. The expansion of the world which implied conquering simultaneously the East and the West reframed the specific relation of Rome with its past precisely when it had to reassert its greatness: both the ‘Indies’ were to be conquered. To claim its role as the universal metropolis, Rome could capitalize on this very first legacy, celebrating its past political dimension as the capital of the largest Mediterranean empire of the ancient world, dominating the three then existing continents. The ruins of Rome became the best guarantee of a temporal continuity of the greatness of the site. But its architects could also take advantage of the plasticity of their meaning in the present and its new challenges. Rome resurrected its past into a material and symbolic process which transferred the values of the capital of the Roman Empire to the capital of Catholicism. This is present and explicit in the streets and structure of the sixteenth century’s city, as demonstrated by the various urban transformations initiated by the popes, and the maps of the city printed during that period.20 This focus on Antiquity, omnipresent in the entire European culture and epitomized by the humanist movement, was particularly dynamic in the city where the polycentric court system attracted a dense range of literati and artists, physicians, poets, philosophers, philologists, engineers, or architects.21 Organized in circles and academies directly funded by popes, cardinals, nobles, and ambassadors, they could dig into the ground in search of the legacy of the Ancients. In some

202

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

cases, they combined their archaeological quest with that regarding the Scripture in the same explorations. This was the case for Antonio Bosio (1575–1629), a young Maltese who arrived in Rome in 1587 and found the intellectual infrastructures – at the Jesuit Collegio Romano, and then at the University of La Sapienza, in the faculty of law – as well as the intellectual milieu that enabled him to open this new path in the burgeoning field of ecclesiastical history, conjoining thus the past of the catacombs and the present of theological controversy.22 The result of his enquiry was to be published in his Roma sotteranea (Figure 8.1). The ruins, both visible or buried, are studied and handled in the framework of various urbanistic operations of modernization and, integrated into the new urban landscape, they help highlight the long history of Rome as a capital. Not only are they visually present across the entire city and offer an open air expression of a unique relation with its pagan and Christian origins, but beyond Rome itself, they speak for the entire Roman world. The capital of the Roman Empire has left the remains of the expanded antique world in the Renaissance city, including not only its Greek roots, but also its conquests from both Africa and Asia. In this sense, the legacy of Antiquity, visually inscribed in the urban network and structure mirrors the ‘global’ antique world as it was conquered by the empire, around the Mediterranean. In sum, Rome’s greatness is based on a coherent staging of a discontinuous past incorporated into the present: the deepness of its history and its visual transcriptions promote thus a specific relation to time and suggest an exceptional destiny.23 An interesting element of this construction can be found in the prints celebrating it: in writings, in particular by poets fashioning the ‘voyage to Rome’ as a quest of this lost past; in maps developing the genre of ‘descriptions’, or portraits of the cities in the wake of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published in 1572.24 In the case of Joachim du Bellay, whose Antiquités de Rome (1558) coincide with one of the most relevant pieces of poetry by the French poetic movement of the Pléiade, the presence in Rome and the quest for its greatness takes place at Cardinal du Bellay’s court. During the same years, among the many European artists who traveled to Rome, Maerten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) is not only one of the first specialized in drawing and sketching the past, but he also fashioned himself as such: his self portrait in Rome with the Colosseum in the background (1553) (Figure 8.2) establishes the idea of the quest for and revival of the Ancients still present in the city through their glorious monuments. In the field of cartography and mapmaking, at the end of the century, Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630) offers one of the most elaborated examples of that process, with his 1593 publication (Figure 8.3).25 Before Bosio, other cartographers and mapmakers based in Rome had already started to graphically articulate this time/space dimension of the capital. It was the case for Ugo Pinard in Urbis Romae description (1555),27 included in Antoine Lafrery’s Mirror of Roman Magnificence, Speculum Romanae magnificentiae, 1555,28 Mario Cartaro’s map of the 1570s.29 Within this abundant production, special attention should be paid to the ‘Pianta di Roma antica’ by famous antiquarian and

Roman urban epistemologies

203

FIGURE 8.1 Frontispiece Roma sotteranea – Roma sotterranea opera postuma di Antonio Bosio Romano antiquario ecclesiastico singolare de’ suoi tempi. Compita, disposta, & accresciuta dal M.R.P. Giouanni Seuerani da S. Seuerino … Nella quale si tratta de’ sacri cimiterii di Roma, del sito, … Nuouamente visitati, e riconosciuti dal Sig. Ottavio Pico … De’ riti funerali … Publicata dal Commendatore Fr. Carlo Aldobrandino … herede dell’autore … In Roma 1632. © iDAI images Arachne, http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/buchseite/243422.

architect Pirro Ligorio (1513–1583),30 whose understanding of the city emphasizes the connection between Ancient Rome and the East, epitomized by the idealized vicinity of three monuments: Castel Sant’Angelo, Emperor Hadrian’s mausoleum before being turned into a papal fortress, the ‘Guglia di San Pietro’ (now Vatican obelisk) which stood behind the Basilica before its relocation to the center of the square, and a pyramid (Figure 8.4). His ‘arrangement’ of the space, this artificial

FIGURE 8.2

Antonio Tempesta, Map or Pianta di Roma Antica, 1593. © Gallica.

FIGURE 8.3 Self Portrait with the Colosseum, painting by Maerten van Heemskerck. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, accession number 103.26

Roman urban epistemologies

205

FIGURE 8.4 Map detail – Pirro Ligorio, ‘Antiquae Urbis Romae Imago accuratissime ex vetustis monumentis formata’, Roma: Jacopo Rossi, 1561. © Gallica.

proximity celebrates the Roman Empire appropriation and incorporation – both physical and intellectual – of the East, Egypt in this specific case, but acquires renewed meanings in Rome, the capital of Catholicity. At the crossroads between ancient history and sacred history, Tridentine Rome capitalizes a series of translations and transfers from the East, including the legacy of Judaism as well as that of the Egyptian and Hellenistic polytheisms, to the papal city, and advertises their entrenchment into the urban space. The Roman urban space is where the first global empire took shape, but also the place where apostle Peter died and where the first Christian catacombs embedded the sacred dimension of the place into its soil.

Roman orients: the obelisks Reorganizing the city and making sense of it became the major task of the popes. Their new commitments as heads of Christianity developed first into an intensive re-investment of the pontifical ceremonial as exemplified in the 1485 publication of the Pontificalis Liber of Johannes Burckardt (c. 1445–1506), thus aiming at reordering the power of the pope and staging it in the Curia as well as in the face of the world. Second, the development of an intensive diplomatic activity went hand in hand with the rebuilding of the city and the strengthening of papal patronage, leading to the increasing number of foreign nations residing around the Vatican, mostly on the occasion of accessions to Saint Peter’s throne, and culminating with the obedience embassies.31 The Portuguese one, in 1515,

206

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

when Leo X was elected, became famous for its pomp and the richness of the delegation, composed of about 70 nobles of the kingdom, having brought over presents from the recently conquered parts of Asia. This was epitomized by the presence, in the parade, of Hano, the first Indian elephant who had ever reached Europe, and who had the honor of Raphael’s brushes.32 Likewise, the pope embodies and endorses the cosmopolitan dimension of the city through his intensive building action: the pope is a builder, at a spiritual level as well as at an institutional level, and such functions are fulfilled by his action as an architect. The importance of this function to the pope is polularized and circulated through engraved portraits, printed and sold to a large urban audience (see Figure 8.5). Many of Leo X’s successors, among them Paul III, Gregory XIII,

FIGURE 8.5 Portrait of Sixtus V – Etching and engraving, published by Nicolaus van Aelst, c. 1589. © MET New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949. Public domain.

Roman urban epistemologies

207

and Sixtus V, deploying a host of skilled men of various profiles and competences, keep remolding the urban space according to the image of Rome and its past that they wished to convey. Let us follow the French lawyer and humanist Michel de Montaigne, who visited the Holy City at the beginning of the year 1580. His first description of the pope, in this case Gregory XIII, the embodiment of universality, stresses the following points: He is charitable even to an excess … He has built colleges for the Greeks, the English, the Scotch, the French, the Germans, and the Poles, each of which he has endowed with upwards of ten thousand crowns a year in perpetuity, besides the enormous expense he was at in building them. His object, in founding these, was to recall to the bosom of the church the children of those nations who, corrupted by evil opinions, have wandered from the true faith; and here these children are lodged, fed, clothed, educated, and provided with everything they need, without having to advance one farthing of their own, from first to last.33 For our French visitor, the charitable pope is above all an ardent builder of knowledge institutions hosting children from many foreign nations: Polish, English, Scots, French, Germans, Greeks are directly quoted here, but others could be added, mirroring a fragmented Europe on behalf of which Rome’s ambition is to restore its lost unity and power. Not only could other papal actions be added to Montaigne’s list, but also other decisions such as the various diplomatic attempts to reestablish ties with the Orthodox Church and enlarge the world of Christianity. In the years before Montaigne’s travel, Antonio Possevino had been sent to Moscovia as a papal delegate with the mission to reintegrate the Oriental Church into the Roman one;34 the first efforts to dialog with the Christian communities of the Middle Orient took shape in the same period along the same political line.35 That is why Montaigne becomes acquainted with the Patriarch of Antioch, an Arabian, thoroughly versed in five or six of the Eastern languages, but utterly unacquainted with Greek and most of the other European tongues, with whom [Montaigne] had become very intimate, |who] gave [him] a mixture for [his] stone, with written directions how to use it.36 He also becomes familiar with the Moscovite ambassador, while attending a ‘pontifical reception’. These different Orients are also to be seen in two famous engravings that indissolubly connect Gregory XIII and Sixtus V with their urban achievements. Their portraits, characterized by the physiognomic features meant to outline their personality, are surrounded by their works – both architectural and spiritual. These engraved compositions also strongly orchestrate the privileged relationship between the City of the Popes and the Eastern worlds, different from those of the past, but corresponding to a more accurate interest for the contemporary East.

208

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

In addition to this experience, which provides him with a first glance at the enlarged Roman world, Montaigne’s visit to the Vatican Library37 allows him to win another encounter, with the past world of the Ancients, the New World of America, and the unknown, cf. p. 200, world of Asia. In this ‘site of knowledge’38 actively supported and promoted by popes’ patronage, he moves from the old manuscripts and inscriptions of the Greeks and the Romans, to the few codices from America preserved, to the somehow first exemplars of Chinese books to be ever circulating in Europe.39 His fascination is not due to the fact that he can read or understand what he sees, touches, and smells: the materiality of other forms of literacy is the only element he can access, but this certainly suffices to offer him a concrete sense of the globe, or at least of the enlargement of the world both to the East and the West Indies. Did he visit the ‘Galleria delle Carte Geografiche’, resulting from a sophisticated cartographical project aimed at being deployed in one of the corridors of the Library under the responsibility of Ignazio Danti, a Dominican who also joined the papal commission for the reform of the Julian calendar? We merely know that when Montaigne went to Caprarola, it was to see ‘the palace of Cardinal Farnese, the most famous in Italy’, ‘nothing in this country to be compared with’ and especially one room: ‘a marvel, which has in its vaulted roof the celestial world with all its constellations, and on its walls the terrestrial with all the regions accurately displayed, every detail being richly painted on the wall aforesaid’.40 Some years after Montaigne’s visit to the Vatican, the Library and the knowledge of the ancient, new, and distant worlds contained in its collections were at the center of a restructuring project that occupied the successor of Gregory XIII, Sixtus V and his close entourage, for several years. The Library was given new premises in the heart of the Vatican and the system of knowledge that was being built inside. The Vatican project was nothing more than the miniature of Rome’s renovation, enlargement, and enrichment reiterated, and it echoed some of the operations that took shape at the scale of the city. The same actors were at work in these different projects, as demonstrated by the renovation of the Sistine Hall of the Library that Sixtus V entrusted to the architect Domenico Fontana (1543–1607).41 The complex iconographic program, elaborated by Federico Ranaldi, custodian of the Library, and realized by Giovanni Guerra and Cesare Nebbia, provides other points of view on the relationship between Rome, the papacy, and the world in its double historical and contemporary meaning, but also on the relationship between culture and spirituality. It is organized around ‘writing’: the discovery of the alphabet and its inventors (Adam the very first one, Moses and Hebrew, Mercury leaning against the obelisk on which he inscribed the first hieroglyphs, Hercules the leader of the Muses and protector of the letters, Pythagoras and the book of wisdom, Saint Jerome, and Christ), the Seven Sages, the Sybils, the Muses, and then the popes who distinguished themselves in taking decrees, founding libraries, organizing councils.42 This iconography constitutes a bridge between the libraries of Antiquity and the ecumenical councils which are in turn interspersed with the works and undertakings of Sixtus V, guarantor of

Roman urban epistemologies

209

unity.43 To open the cycle, Fontana represents himself handing over the project of the new library to the pontiff surrounded by his cardinals, and Sixtus V’s ride ‘of Possesso’ symbolized by the presence of three young Indians, who came from the Antipodes to make obedience to the Roman Church, & to prostrate themselves at the feet of the true Vicar of Christ on earth, in the name of their Kings of Japan, who already enlightened by the Spirit of God, had received the Holy Faith, & embraced the Cross.44 Their presence in the cycle of frescoes executed at the end of the 1580s clearly demonstrates the process of the Roman Church’s encompassing the new, Far East, as they refer to the first ‘Japanese embassy’ who reached Rome in 1583. Within this complex iconographic cycle stands out the obelisks, which were relocated in Rome from Egypt thanks to the enormous resources deployed by the Roman emperors. Sixtus V undug them from the city’s ground to install them in the squares that formed the new pivots of the structure of the urbs. This strong signal of the resurrection of the Roman domination over Egypt – in its millenary history – established and proclaimed the strength of the intellectual link between Rome and its pagan past through the role played by Egypt. In the frescoes, Egyptian culture is mentioned for its central role, on the one hand, in the birth and development of writing: it appears in the series of alphabets where Isis Inventrix of Egyptian letters, Mercury Thoyt aegyptius standing in front of an obelisk, and the Egyptian Hercules are depicted. On the other hand, a tribute is paid to the Library of Alexandria, the site of preservation and transmission of ancient knowledge: its presence on the fresco functions as the reference of a long history of libraries conceived as sites of knowledge conservation and reelaboration, whose most sophisticated expression is embodied by the Vatican Library itself, ensuring the continuity of knowledge transmission over two millennia. But it is not only the obelisks in their new location and Christian function that are represented. The Obelisk of St Peter, the first to be the object of the interventions launched by Sixtus V, appears in three distinct frescoes corresponding to three distinct eras: at the entrance of the hall, in the representation of the pontiff’s coronation, it is represented in its original and marginal position, beside the Basilica; in one of the two rooms of the Secret Library, it is shown enclosed in the ‘castle’, the complex technical machine designed and invented to allow its removal; at the center of the hall, the obelisk is now presented restructured and placed in its definitive installation.45 The intersection between these three moments in the circumscribed space of the Sistine Hall represents and celebrates the articulated process of transformation of an Egyptian obelisk into the Vatican’s obelisk, one of the most complex and striking enterprises of the Sistine pontificate that aroused interest among contemporaries, and became an integral part of the reflection on the relationships between contemporary Rome, a millenary past, and now a global present.

210

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

The removal and relocation of the obelisk of Heliopolis, brought to Rome by Caligula and standing for centuries 25 meters from the ancient basilica, into the center of St Peter’s Square took place in 1585. It took five months, required a workforce of more than 1000 people and 700 horses, and cost about 40,000 scudi. Successfully conducted, it set the tone to the relocation, renovation, and consecration of three other obelisks, of Santa Maria Maggiore (1587), San Giovanni in Laterano (1588), Santa Maria del Popolo (1589), which were placed in the center of three of the major Roman places, cornerstones of the Sistine urban renovatio. These undertakings punctuated Sixtus V’s pontificate and were one of the pivots of the pontiff’s propaganda. At the same time, they unleashed a veritable obeliskomania in the city space.46 The small obelisks that lay abandoned in fact began to become the objects of renewed interest and to be erected and placed in the vineyards and gardens of the aristocratic Roman mansion-houses.47 Although abandoned, the obelisks had been in fact part of the urban landscape for centuries. The Obelisk of St Peter, even though difficult to find because it was located in a ‘remote, muddy, and little frequented place’,48 had continued to be an attraction for travelers and medieval pilgrims; the two obelisks at the Circus Maximus were well known and the place where they were buried was conjectured thanks to Roman sources; the spire of St Rocco lying in the middle of the Via di Ripetta was even a problem to viability.49 It was only in the Sistine situation, through the use of the technical, economic, scientific, and cultural resources of the city and the involvement of its powers that these monumental objects were transformed into structural nodes in the construction of Rome, as a millennial and universal center. The extraction, relocation, and erection of the four Sistine obelisks were complex enterprises that involved different types of skilled workforce (architects, engineers, mathematicians, sculptors, master builders, carpenters, stonecutters, workers …), and the collaboration between different political authorities (pontiff, curia, urban authorities), as well as very decisive interventions in urban planning.50 They aroused a great deal of interest in the city and beyond, as they offered an open air spectacle regularly visited by the Roman population and travelers, sparking an intense web of communication, made of notices, chronicles, reports, and visual representations that allowed to follow the evolution even to those who were not present, so that ‘they can from the distance come to see the majesty of the many fabrics’.51 Among the numerous printed works, which differed according to the profiles of the authors, styles, and genres, the engravings and the flysheets that circulated to celebrate the enterprise, two treaties stand out. The first, the Degli obelischi di Roma (Rome 1589), was authored by physician and simplist of Sixtus V, Michele Mercati (1541–1593), collector, founder, and curator of a collection of stones and minerals located in the Belvedere Gallery.52 The second treatise, Della trasportatione dell’obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di nostro signore papa Sisto V (Rome 1590), was written by Domenico Fontana, pontifical architect and main supervisor and coordinator of the enterprise, as well as in charge, at the same time, of the remodeling of the Vatican Library (see the frontispiece in

Roman urban epistemologies

211

FIGURE 8.6 Engraving – Domenico Fontana. Della trasportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabriche di Sisto V. Rome 1590. © Internet Archive. Public Domain.

Figure 8.6). These are two very different works in terms of format and editorial ambitions. More modest is that of Mercati, when that of Fontana is a precious in-folio with high quality engravings. However, both authors are deeply embedded in the Vatican circles. Both treatises are addressed to Sixtus V and at least in Mercati’s case the dedication testifies to a specific commission by the pontiff.53 The two authors are men of trust and members of his close entourage; they share the same editor, Domenico Basa, the Vatican Printer. Another shared feature is the fact that both project the obelisks into a context that exceeds contingency. In his work, Mercati aims to encompass all the knowledge not only about obelisks, but also about Egypt available in and from Rome in the

212

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

1580s, also capitalizing on the effort that other authors before him, such as Pietro degli Angeli called Bargeus (1517–1596), had made after the erection of the obelisk of St Peter.54 Starting from the available resources, he writes a sophisticated work that combines natural history, history, and philology, and which is based on classical authors, the fathers of the Church, contemporary chronicles, but also on the study of material findings of Ancient Egypt scattered in contemporary Rome.55 Fontana very thoroughly details the techniques adopted in the transportation and erection of the obelisk ‘for the benefit of those who had to move stones so heavy, and dangerous to break’ and considers the admirable enterprise as the first of the ‘reported factories’ and ‘heroic aptitudes’ with which Sixtus V would ‘fill the whole world’.56 In their complementarity, the two books allow us to reconstruct the path, as well as the material and intellectual operations that made the obelisks the fulcrums of the Roman urban redevelopment and of the Sistine universalistic program. They also express the greatness of an urban site which allowed the connections between different Roman scientific and professional milieux, whose skills are successfully put at the service of the pontiff and his operation: the prowess and effectiveness of Sistine architecture and engineering, all the economic, material, and intellectual resources of the city constitute a ‘dispositif’ whose meaning is provided by Mercati’s and Fontana’s books. The technical challenge represented by the relocation of these obelisks spoke for the supremacy of the papacy over the East and the world. It was the efforts of many actors that allowed the return to the urban landscape ‘of what constituted Ancient Asia. Far from opposing the extreme Asia of the Moderns, it offered itself as a link between spaces and times’.57

Moving the past, orienting the present By cross-examining them, we would like to briefly articulate the multiple analytical gazes the obelisks offer to those who studied them in the sixteenth century, not only from an architectural and urbanistic perspective, but also as elements for a reflection about natural history, history, and theology. Such a multiplicity of approaches refers to the epistemological tools provided by the site where the analyses took place: in Rome the combination of these four layers was possible. The obelisks are first of all physical objects, enormous blocks of oriental red granite that were rarely to be seen in Rome and that under the auspices of Sixtus V were now on display in the Roman squares. Their materiality is in no way a secondary issue in the treatises of Fontana and Mercati. If the architect is fascinated by the beauty of the material they are made of, knowing their physical characteristics is fundamental for him, especially for the elaboration and implementation of the delicate operations he had to perform: weight and resistance are central notions for removing them and designing the machineries.58 Mercati dedicates three chapters of his treatise to the ‘materia’ and ‘spetie di pietra’ of the obelisks, to its name, to its history, and to the underlying causes for their choice.59 He describes precisely the different qualities of the material of the obelisks through detailed observations, identifies its origin in the

Roman urban epistemologies

213

ancient quarries of Thebaid, a region known to him thanks to the reports ‘of some modern geographers, African John Leo, & others who have been there’;60 he draws a list of the other quarries present in Egypt and elsewhere. Then, he compares the granite of the obelisks with that of other objects and monuments of different sizes present in the Roman space, made by the Egyptians or Romans who imported granite from Egypt. He thus traces the layout of an evocative ‘granitic Rome’ made of other types of stones used in the monumental buildings of Ancient Egypt, the natural history and properties of which he describes in detail. At the same time, in order to strengthen his hypotheses on the identification of materials, he makes comparisons with distant territories on which he had gathered information in Rome. He dismisses Theophrastus’s opinion about the existence of an emerald obelisk, citing the fact that in the recently discovered quarries of New Granada, Kingdom of the New World, where emeralds are quarried in great quantities, and are found there of that greatest greatness, it has never been seen by the ancients, but none of them has ever reached the measure of a single cubit.61 So he suggests that the obelisk described by Theophrastus was rather of green jasper, a stone of which he himself had seen a large sample in the collections of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosme I, which ‘for the relations that we can have in these times, from Eastern, & Western countries, is the greatest, that has been seen so far ever’.62 This shows that the traditional ‘qualities’ that define a natural specimen, in this case the size, are now parameters defined in comparison with others, on the global scale. This interest in obelisks as ‘natural objects’ and in the possibilities they offered to describe other materials used in the Near East should certainly be related to the position and projects of Mercati in the Vatican. In Rome at the beginning of the 1570s to look after the then Pope Pius V, Mercati immediately becomes the custodian of the Vatican Garden, carrying out intense work to make of these gardens the mirror of a vegetable world in expansion through the mobilization of personal and institutional networks. A few years later, during Gregory XIII’s pontificate, he works on the creation of another naturalistic collection, dedicated to stones and minerals: the Vatican Metallotheca, first located in rooms adjacent to the gardens and then transferred to the nerve center of the apostolic space: the Belvedere Gallery. Soon it became one of the tools that made of the Vatican an important place of accumulation and exhibition of the natural world, aiming to compete with other contemporary courts. In parallel to the establishment of the museum, he also works on what, for it would bear the same title as the collection, would have been its catalogue. However, it aimed to be a general treatise on the underground natural world based on the objects that the author could gather in his museum, observe in the Vatican space or in the urban space. This way, he could directly challenge the Protestant world, entering a field of investigation which, in his own words, had long been the prerogative of German naturalists. Describing the

214

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

obelisks in their materiality was for Mercati an operation that directly referred to this broader scientific and political project aimed at celebrating pontifical supremacy and Roman universalism in a peripheral domain. By returning their physical qualities to these stones ‘so marvellous’ for their history and origin, he gave an additional value to their public presence on the main Roman squares, symbolizing the reconquest of the Near East: in the making of his Metallotheca, he was thus winning an important victory for Catholicism in the sophisticated battle against the Protestants. For Mercati, the insertion of obelisks into the natural world through the study of their materiality goes always hand in hand with another operation, that of inscribing them in the cultural world they belong to, an Egyptian world capable to tame nature.63 The main sources for his reconstruction are mostly the Greek and Roman authors (Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, Ammian Marcellin) and the fathers of the Church (Clement of Alexandria). On some of their works, he carried out a meticulous philological work for which the Vatican Library was one of the privileged resource centers. In an attempt to resolve the inconsistencies between the measurements of the Vatican’s obelisk provided by Pliny and those taken by his contemporaries and therefore to understand if it had suffered damage and mutilations – one of the issues that also concerned Fontana – he conducted a sophisticated collation of at least six manuscripts of the Naturales historiae preserved in the Apostolic Library.64 He also used several contemporary authors, and direct testimonies on Egypt, relying on his own different networks of sociability he had developed as a man of the pope.65 At the crossroads between the past preserved in the Vatican Library and the present of his informants, Mercati thus develops a sort of natural and moral history of obelisks, which refers to other contemporary intellectual enterprises that combined descriptions of nature and those of the customs and traditions of the inhabitants who populated it, their cultures and technical and scientific knowledge and their spirituality and devotional practices. The obelisks thus become the leitmotif of a multifaceted and admirable reconstruction of Egypt, which Mercati shared with many of his contemporaries, as shown by the titles of chapters IV–VI (‘The power of those who found the way to do the Obelisks’; ‘The sciences that flourished among the Egyptians inventors of the Obelisks’; ‘Religion according to which the Egyptians made the Obelisks’). Most of the thoughts on Egypt, through its obelisks, lead Mercati’s contemporaries to transfer them toward another, new to some extent, oriental horizon, that of China. In these very same years, the first enthusiastic descriptions, related to their sciences, arts, and modes of governing, reached Rome thanks to other networks centered in Rome, equally Curia-oriented, those of the missionary orders, relying on the routes and infrastructures shaped by the Iberian empires.66 Egypt shared with China another element of interest for these distinct Roman groups: its writing. For Mercati, Fontana, and their contemporaries, hieroglyphic writing represented a challenge and an enigma. They had been an object of interest since the late fifteenth century, and now aroused new attention among members of the entourage of Sixtus V who dedicated themselves to the study of the languages of the Near East, their

Roman urban epistemologies

215

origin, and their history. It is for them and other learned people that Fontana inserts in his book dedicated to the transportation of Saint Peter’s obelisk drawings of the Obelisk of Saint John Lateran, as in that of Saint Mary of the People, of their four facades ‘with the figures of the letters of the Egyptians in great form so that scholars, both present and absent can consider them more comfortably, and retrieve their interpretation, that up to the present is hidden’.67 Here the architect meets the botanist and the physician in a unique quest for knowledge rooted in the Roman soil and shared by many literati. Evidence of this is provided by the criticisms Latino Latini, an expert philologist and a librarian to Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, and then the secretary of Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese, expressed toward Mercati’s book: was it possible or not to decipher them, a point Fontana’s book also points out.68 But beyond the indecipherable nature of these obelisks, by dedicating to the ‘hieroglyphic letters’ the longest chapter of the entire work, Mercati focuses on its origins and characteristics, which are defined from classical and late-ancient sources and thanks to the comparison with other past and present forms of writing. In this context he qualifies hieroglyphs as a complex ‘pictorial writing’ in which the relationship between image and meaning is completely different from what could be found in other populations that also had a pictorial writing but were much less elaborated. Drawing on the relationship between symbol and meaning, he establishes a hierarchy among humanity based on writing, at the top of which were the Judeo-Christian populations and at its lowest point Ethiopians and some inhabitants of the eastern islands, but also the inhabitants of the New World: There are today many people who have no letters or other signs instead of letters they understand themselves, as we have seen in our times almost all over the new world and in many peoples who inhabit the coasts of Africa towards the Cape of Good Hope: discovered by Portuguese navigations. And also found similar peoples in some islands of the Eastern Sea, such as the Socotera, and in many others. And it is to be thought, that they were more in the past … And now, in our times, we have seen the same in the new world among the habitants of Mexico, the major city of New Spain, where it seemed to exhausting to depict entirely the figures, or true because they occupied too much space, they used to represent only the head of many animals to appear, & wanting to demonstrate anything, that for the above figures could not shine, they found another way … as can be seen in the examples extracted from two books of the Vatican Library, arrived from Mexico.69 Here again the elaboration of the new meaning of the obelisks is articulated within the global scale of the knowledge available in Rome, the global scale articulating time (through the ruins and the soil functioning as a museum of the past) and space (through the reordering of all the pieces of the world gathered in the Vatican and its multiples places of knowledge, including the Library, the Metallotheca, the botanical gardens). But what also matters, as Fontana demonstrates, is the

216

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

performative dimension of this articulation, based on engineering as well as prints. Indeed, the book dealing with the transportation of the obelisk establishes the longevity of the performance: the spectacular engravings which accompany the text translate in a visual language the technical decisions and inventions which made the removal of the obelisk possible, while the text emphasizes its political and historical meaning. Fontana’s description offers a harmonious and coordinated vision of all the Roman powers, as it also celebrates the city’s ability to attract the ‘best minds’, compare them, and select them. Second, in his treatise, as in Mercati’s, Sixtus V is defined as the one who created the conditions of possibility for the complex operations required by the situation and the one who managed to mobilize and coordinate the powers and resources of the city for this purpose. Third, Fontana and Mercati through the obelisks build up the supremacy of Sistine Rome based on the present ability to transform them from objects and emblems of idolatrous cults to devotional objects of an authentic Christianity. They, but also other authors who celebrate the targeted relocation of these behemoth monumenti in the Roman space, present the obelisks as ‘spoils of idolatry’ conquered by a triumphant Church. They are therefore powerful symbols of the battle against past and present idolatry that the papacy had undertaken on a global scale through the missionary effort and on the city scale, when Sixtus V decided, precisely at the same time, to restore and Christianize many ancient monuments, and in particular the Trajan Column and the Antonine Column, on top of which were placed the statues of St Peter and St Paul.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

Among his major works, The Reason of State; Relationi universali. Botero, A Treatise, 3–4. Pumain and Gaudin, ‘Systèmes de villes’; Descendre, L’État du monde. Firpo, ‘Botero’. Descendre, ‘Les villes et le monde’, 107–109. Botero, A Treatise, 1. Descendre, ‘Les villes et le monde’, 121–124; Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse. Boltanski and Thévenot, De la justification; Offenstadt et al., Affaires, scandales et grandes causes. Caffiero, Donato and Romano, ‘De la catholicité post-tridentine’. Dodier and Barbot, ‘La force des dispositifs’, 421–448; Lemieux, La sociologie pragmatique, 43–46. The bibliography is particularly abundant, be it in the field of art history and architecture in relation with the presence in the city of the prominent artists, or in intellectual, political, social, and cultural history. Among the ongoing flux of investigation rooted in a rich set of national historiographical traditions (mostly in Italy and the USA), D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism; Stinger, The Renaissance; Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale; Pecchiai, Roma nel Cinquecento; Labrot, L’image de Rome. In art history, Chastel, Le sac; Marciari, Art. About architecture, Connors, Alliance and Enmity; Conforti, La città; Maier, Rome Measured. And let us not forget the crucial contributions by scholars investigating the papal states, Prodi, Il sovrano; Visceglia, Papato. Fiorani and Prosperi, Roma; Cuccio, Roma moderna; Maier, Rome Measured; Boutry and Juila, Pèlerins; Boutier, Marin and Romano, Naples, Rome, Florence.

Roman urban epistemologies

217

13 Lanciani, The Golden Days, 10. Among his major achievements as an archaeologist, we may recall his Forma Urbis Romae, a cartographic synthesis of the history of Rome, as it depicts the city’s diachronic development from ancient to post-classical phases, published in 1901. 14 Prodi, Il Sovrano; Del Re, La Curia romana. A more complete and systematic bibliography in Romano, Rome, 661–718. 15 Visceglia, Papato. 16 The research program ‘Rome et la science moderne’ developed in Romano, Rome, in parallel with other individual works. 17 In line with analyses developed within the last ten years: Romano and Van Damme, ‘Sciences et villes-mondes’; analyses that converge with many other pieces of research dedicated to other cities, as pointed to in the introduction of the volume. With regard to the notion of ‘command center’, we refer here to today’s definitions by geographers. 18 Chastel, Le sac. 19 It is important to outline here that the ‘discovery’ of the new American continent went hand in hand with the systematic exploration of Asia, also largely discovered in the same period. In this sense the far east of Asia was unknown to the Europeans up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when the first regular communications were established by the Portuguese with Japan. De Castro, La découverte du Japon. 20 About the maps, Besse and Dubourg Glatigny, ‘Cartographier Rome’; Maier, Rome. 21 Caffiero, Donato and Romano, ‘De la catholicité post-tridentine’. 22 Ditchfield, ‘Text before Trowel’; Harkness, The Jewell House, whose perspective is shaped from the street. 23 Despite an important line of investigation, this specific relation with the past and history has barely been investigated. 24 Boutier, ‘L’affirmation’; Besse and Dubourg Glatigny, ‘Cartographier’; Besse, ‘The Birth’. 25 Borsi, Roma di Sisto V. 26 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 27 See full map on https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53119597n.item. 28 Parshall, ‘Antonio Lafreri’, 3–28. Maier, Rome Measured. 29 http://data.bnf.fr/15329130/mario_cartaro/. 30 Anon., ‘Ligorio’; Vagenheim, ‘Le Antichità romane’. 31 Visceglia, Papato; Giannini, Papacy. 32 Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant. 33 Montaigne, Works, 301. 34 Mund, ‘La mission’, 407–440. 35 Girard, ‘Entre croisade et politique’, 419–437; Girard, ‘Nihil esse innovandum’, 337–352. 36 Montaigne, Works, 320. 37 Storia della Biblioteca; Lezowski, L’abrégé; Ceresa, La Biblioteca Vaticana; Manfredi, Le Origini. 38 Jacob, Les Lieux de savoir, 21: ‘Les savoirs ‘font lieu’ à travers des institutions qui les enracinent et déterminent leur sphère d’influence, sur le double mode de l’attraction et de la diffusion. Ils peuvent aussi se matérialiser dans un dispositif architectural et mobilier, dans une collection de livres ou d’objets, dans une institution vouée à leur production, à leur archivage ou à leur rayonnement public.’ 39 Rigolot, ‘6 mars 1581’, 281–304. 40 Montaigne, Works, 443. Dubourg Glatigny, Il disegno naturale. 41 Fagiolo and Bonaccorso, Studi sui Fontana; Curcio, Studi. 42 Dupront, ‘Art et Contre-Réforme’, 251–266. 43 Frascarelli ‘Il programma iconografico’; Zuccari, ‘Il cantiere’. 44 Pansa, Della Libraria Vaticana, 39. 45 Zuccari, ‘La Biblioteca Vaticana’, 74.

218

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

46 Among the numerous publications dedicated to the Roman obelisks, D’Onofrio, Gli Obelischi; Curran et al., Obelisk, 103–158; Cipriani, Gli obelischi egizi, 9–75. 47 Mercati, Degli obelischi, 246: ‘Ne molto tempo che il Serenissimo Ferdinando Cardinale de Medici, hora Gran Duca di Toscana ne drizzò uno assai grandetto, n suoi vaghi, & dilettevoli giardini posti nel monte Pincio. Un altro picciolo è stato drizzato poco tempo fa dal Signor Ciriaco Mattei, in una sua vigna posta nel monte Celio, vicina alla Chiesa di S. Maria della Navicella, il quale gli fu donato dal Popolo Romano. Et altri si veggono in altre vigne di Roma, i quali son cominciati a levarsi, poi che la Santità di Nostro Signore ha dato principio alla magnifica opra di drizzare gli Obelischi grandi’. Collins, ‘Obelisks as Artifacts’, 49–68. 48 Fontana, Della trasportatione, 7r. 49 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Congregatio Supra viis, pontibus, fluminus, n. 4, 4v; n. 17, 23v; n. 113, 150r–v. 50 Curran et al., Obelisk, 103–140. 51 Fontana, Della transportatione, 2r. More than 20 books were printed between 1586 and 1590. Among them, Familiaris, 1586. Some of them have been assembled by Pietro Galesinio, Apostolic protonotario, Obeliscus Vaticanus. 52 Cooper, ‘The Museum’; Andretta, ‘Mercati, Michele’. 53 Mercati, 2r: ‘All’hora che d’ordine di Vostra Santità fu con tanta maraviglia di tutta Roma cavato di sotto terra il maggior’Obelisco del Cerchio massimo [ … ], ella si degnò di commandarmi ch’io scrivessi alcuna cosa intorno a gli Obelischi.’ 54 Angeli, Commentario, fasc. 3. 55 Mercati, 6v: ‘Nomi degli autori citati nella presente opera.’ 56 Fontana, 2r. 57 Romano, ‘Les échelles de Rome’, 336. 58 Fontana, 70v and 75r. Fontana, 9r–v: ‘Regola per misurare le guglie quadrate e per sapere il peso loro.’ The period, it is well known, is particularly important for the development of the study, both empirical and theoretical, of motion. In these same years, it is one of the major activities of Galileo, for instance. 59 Mercati: ‘II: Della materia de gli Obelischi & nomi di essa’, 3–8; ‘III: Che gli Obelischi non siano stati fatti da gli antichi di altra spetie di pietra che di granito rosso’, 9–13; Chapitre VIII: ‘Per la qual causa gli obelischi siano stati fatti solamente di granito rosso & non di altra materia’, 65–68. 60 Mercati, 5. 61 Ibidem, 9. 62 Ibidem, 10. 63 Ibidem, 13–14. 64 Ibidem, 180–183. 65 In the years in which the obelisks were the object of interest and debate, there was also, in the entourage of Sixtus V, Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604), who had traveled to Egypt in 1576–1577 and was one among those who published about the obelisk: Discorso, 1586. 66 Romano, Impressions. 67 Fontana, 71v. On the topic, Giehlow, The Humanist Interpretation, 2015; Castelli, I geroglifici; Davies, Reading the Past, 1987; Dieckmann, Hierogliphs, 1970; Iversen, The Myth of Egypt, 1993. 68 Ceresa, ‘Latini’. 69 Mercati, 95–97.

Bibliography of unpublished sources Archivio di Stato di Roma, Congregatio Supra viis, pontibus, fluminus, n. 4, 4v; n. 17, 23v; n. 113, 150r–v.

Roman urban epistemologies

219

References Anon. ‘Ligorio, Pirro’. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 65. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 2005, pp. 109–114. Andretta, Elisa. ‘Mercati, Michele’. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 73. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 2009, pp. 606–611. Angeli, Pietro. Commentario De Obelisco, published in Obeliscus. Vaticanus Sixti 5. pont. opt. max. pietate inuictissimae. Cruci sacer ope. diuina stabilis ad perpetuitatem praeclaris eruditorum virorum litteris laudatus egregie. Rome: B. Grassi, 1587. Bedini, Silvio A. The Pope’s Elephant: An Elephant’s Journey from Deep in India to the Heart of Rome. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Besse, Jean-Marc. ‘The Birth of the Modern Atlas: Rome, Lafreri, Ortelius.’ In Donato, Maria Pia and Kraye, Jill eds. Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750. London: Warburg Institute; Turin: N. Aragno, 2009, pp. 35–57. Besse, Jean-Marc and Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal. ‘Cartographier Rome au XVIe siècle (1544–1599). Décrire et reconstituer.’ In Romano, Antonella ed. Rome et la science moderne. Rome: OpenEdition Books, 2009, pp. 369–414. Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent. De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Borsi, Stefano. Roma di Sisto V. La pianta di Antonio Tempesta 1593. Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1986. Botero, Giovanni. Relationi universali di Giouanni Botero Benese diuise in quattro parti. Vicenza: Eredi di Perin libraro, 1595. Botero, Giovanni. A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency and Greatness of Cities: Divided into three books by Sig. Giovanni Botero in the Italian Tongue, Now Done into English by Robert Peterson. London: T. P[urfoot], 1606. Botero, Giovanni. The Reason of State. Transl. Waley P.J. and Waley, D.P. with notes by D.P. Waley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Botero, Giovanni. On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities. Ed. and transl. Simcox, G. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Botero, Giovanni. De la raison d’État (1589–1598). Ed., transl. and notes Benedittini, Pierre and Descendre, Romain with an Introduction by Descendre, Romain. Paris: Gallimard, 2014a. Botero, Giovanni. Des causes de la grandeur des villes. Ed., transl., notes and postface Descendre, Romain. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2014b. Boutier, Jean. ‘L’affirmation de la cartographie urbaine à grande échelle dans l’Europe de la Renaissance.’ In Iachello, Enrico and Salvemini, Biagio eds. Per un atlante storico del Mezzogiorno e della Sicilia. Omaggio a Bernard Lepetit. Napoli: Liguori, 1998, pp. 107–127. Boutier, Jean; Marin, Brigitte and Romano, Antonella eds. Naples, Rome, Florence: une histoire comparée des milieux intellectuels italiens (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle). Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2005. Boutry, Philippe and Juila, Dominique. Pèlerins et pèlerinages dans l’Europe moderne. Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2000. Caffiero, Marina; Donato, Maria Pia and Romano, Antonella. ‘De la catholicité posttridentine à la République romaine: splendeurs et misères des intellectuels courtisans.’ In Boutier, Jean; Marin, Brigitte and Romano, Antonella eds. Naples, Rome, Florence: une histoire comparée des milieux intellectuels italiens (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle). Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2005, pp. 171–208. Castelli, Patrizia. I geroglifici e il mito dell’Egitto nel Rinascimento. Florence: Edam, 1979.

220

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

Ceresa, Massimo ed. La Biblioteca Vaticana tra riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590). Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vol. 2. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012. Ceresa, Massimo. ‘Latini, Latino.’ In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 64. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2005, pp. 14–16. Chastel, André. Le sac de Rome, 1527: du premier maniérisme à la Contre-Réforme. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Cipriani, Giovanni. Gli obelischi egizi. Politica e cultura nella Roma Barocca. Florence: Olschki, 1993. Collins, Jeffry Laird. ‘Obelisks as Artifacts in Early Modern Rome: Collecting the Ultimate Antiques.’ Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 72 (2001): 49–68. Conforti, Claudia. La città del tardo Rinascimento. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005. Connors, Joseph. Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism. Rome: Bibliotheca Hertziana, 1989. Cooper, Alix. ‘The Museum and the Book: The Metallotheca and the History of an Encyclopaedic Natural History in Early Modern Italy.’ Journal of the History of Collections 7/1 (1995): 1–23. Cuccio, Giorgio. Roma moderna. Storia di Roma 4. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002. Curcio, Giovanna ed. Studi su Domenico Fontana: 1543–1607. Mendrisio: Mendrisio Acad. Press [u.a.], 2011. Curran, Brian; Grafton, Anthony; Long, Pamela and Weiss, Benjamin. Obelisk: A History. Cambridge: Burndy Library, 2009. D’Amico, John. Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. D’Onofrio, Cesare. Gli Obelischi di Roma. Rome: Bulzoni, 1967. Davies, William V. Reading the Past: Egyptian Hieroglyphs. London: British Museum, 1987. De Castro, Xavier. La découverte du Japon par les Européens. Paris: Chandeigne, 2013. Del Re, Niccolò. La Curia romana: lineamenti storico-giuridici. Città del Vaticano: Libreria editrice vaticana, 1998. Delumeau, Jean. Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle. Paris: Boccard, 1959. Descendre, Romain. L’État du monde. Giovanni Botero entre raison d’État et géopolitique. Genève: Droz, 2009. Descendre, Romain. ‘Les villes et le monde. Comparatisme géographique et théorie de la croissance urbaine au début de l’âge moderne.’ In Botero, Giovanni ed. Des causes de la grandeur des villes. Paris: Rue d’Ulms Versions Françaises, 2014, pp. 107–161. Dieckmann, Liselotte. Hieroglyphs: The History of a Literary Symbol. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1970. Ditchfield, Simon. ‘Text before Trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma Sotteranea Revisited.’ Studies in Church History 3 (1997): 343–360. Dodier, Nicolas and Barbot, Janine. ‘La force des dispositifs.’ Annales, HSS 71/2 (2016): 421–448. Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal. Il disegno naturale del mondo: saggio sulla biografia di Egnatio Danti, con edizione del carteggio. Perugia: Aguaplano, 2011. Dupront, Alphonse. ‘Art et Contre-Réforme. Les fresques de la bibliothèque de Sixte Quint.’ In Boutry, Phillipe and Julia, Dominique eds. Genèse des temps modernes. Rome, les Réformes et le Nouveau Monde. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001, pp. 251–266. Fagiolo, Maurizio and Bonaccorso,Giuseppe eds. Studi Sui Fontana. Una dinastia di architetti ticinesi a Roma tra Manierismo e Barocco. Rome: Gangemi editore, 2009.

Roman urban epistemologies

221

Familiaris quaedam epistola e Roma in Hispaniam missa. In qua quid actum sit die XXIX Aprilis, VII Maij, X, & XVII Septembris in translatione Obelisci breviter explicatur. Roma: A. Gardano and F. Coattino, 1586. Fiorani, Luigi and Prosperi, Adriano eds. Storia d’Italia. Annali 16. Roma, la città del papa. Vita civile e religiosa dal Giubileo di Bonifacio VIII al Giubileo di Papa Wojtila. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Firpo, Luigi. ‘Botero, Giovanni.’ In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 13. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 1971, pp. 352–362. Fontana, Domenico. Della transportatione dell’Obelisco Vaticano. Roma: D. Basa, 1590. Frascarelli, Dalma. ‘Il programma iconografico degli affreschi sistini della Vaticana.’ In Ceresa, Massimo ed. La Biblioteca Vaticana tra riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590). Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012, pp. 333–377. Galesinio, Pietro. Obeliscus Vaticanus Sixti V Pont. Opt. Max. pietate invictissimae cruci sacer ope divina. Rome: B. Grassi, 1587. Giannini, Massimo ed. Papacy, Religious Orders, and International Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Rome: Viella, 2013. Giehlow, Karl. The Humanist Interpretation of Hieroglyphs in the Allegorical Studies of the Renaissance: With a Focus on the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I. Transl. R. Raybould. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Girard, Aurélien. ‘Nihil esse innovandum? Maintien des rites orientaux et négociation de l’Union des Églises orientales avec Rome (fin xvie – mi-xviiie s.).’ In Blanchet, MarieHélène and Gabriel, Frédéric eds. Réduire le schisme ? Ecclésiologies et politiques de l’Union entre Orient et Occident, XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Collège de France – CNRS Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2013a, pp. 337–352. Girard, Aurélien. ‘Entre croisade et politique culturelle au Levant: Rome et l’union des chrétiens syriens (première moitié du XVIIe siècle).’ In Visceglia, Maria Antonietta ed. Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna. Rome: Viella, 2013b, pp. 419–437. Harkness, Deborah. The Jewell House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Iversen, Erik. The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Jacob, Christian ed. Les Lieux de savoir. Volume 1: Espaces et communautés. Paris: Albin Michel, 2007. Labrot, Gérard. L’image de Rome. Une arme pour la Contre-Réforme, 1534–1677. Paris: Champvallon, 1987. Lanciani, Rodolfo. The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. Lemieux, Cyrile. La sociologie pragmatique. Paris: La Découverte, 2018. Lezowski, Marie. L’abrégé du monde. Une histoire sociale de la bibliothèque Ambrosienne (v. 1590–v. 1660). Paris: Garnier, 2015. Lincoln, Evelyn. Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Maier, Jessica. Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Manfredi, Antonio ed. Le Origini della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento (1447–1534). Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vol. 1. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2010. Marciari, John. Art of Renaissance Rome: Artists and Patrons in the Eternal City. London: Laurence King Publisher, 2017.

222

Elisa Andretta and Antonella Romano

Mercati, Michele. Degli obelischi di Roma. Rome: D. Basa, 1589. Montaigne, Michel de. Works … Comprising His Essays, Journey into Italy, and Letters, with Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices. Ed. Hazlitt, William. Boston: Houghton, Osgood; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1875–1879. Mund, Stéphane. ‘La mission diplomatique du père Antonio Possevino (S.J.) chez Ivan le Terrible en 1581–1582 et les premiers écrits jésuites sur la Russie moscovite à la fin du XVIe siècle.’ Cahiers du monde russe 45/3–4 (2004): 407–440. Offenstadt, Nicolas; Boltanski, Luc; Claverie, Elisabeth and Van Damme, Stéphane eds. Affaires, scandales et grandes causes. De Socrate à Pinochet. Paris: Editions Stock, 2007. Pansa, Muzio. Della Libraria Vaticana. Rome: G. Martinelli, 1590. Parshall, Peter. ‘Antonio Lafreri’s “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae”.’ Print Quarterly 23/1 (March 2006): 3–28. Pecchiai, Pio. Roma nel Cinquecento. Bologna: Cappelli, 1948. Pigafetta, Filippo. Discorso intorno all’istoria dell’Aguglia e alla ragione del muoverla. Rome: B. Grassi, 1586. Prodi, Paolo. Il sovrano pontefice: un corpo e due anime, la monarchia papale nella prima età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Pumain, Denise and Gaudin, Jean Pierre. ‘Systèmes de villes et pouvoir. L’analyse de Giovanni Botero à l’époque de la Renaissance.’ Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, [online], Epistémologie, Histoire de la Géographie, Didactique, document 227, visited online 14 November 2002. Rigolot, François. ‘6 mars 1581: Montaigne visita la Vaticana.’ In Ceresa, Massimo ed. Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Volume 2: La Biblioteca Vaticana tra Riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590). Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012, pp. 281–304. Romano, Antonella ed. Rome et la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières. Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2008. Romano, Antonella. ‘Les échelles de Rome: une nouvelle grammaire du monde entre l’ancien et l’inconnu à la Renaissance.’ In Romano, Antonella and Sebastiani, Silvia eds. La forza delle incertezze. Dialoghi storiografici con Jacques Revel. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016a, pp. 311–351. Romano, Antonella. Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde, 16e–17e siècle. Fayard: Paris, 2016b. Romano, Antonella and Van Damme, Stéphane. ‘Sciences et villes-mondes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles.’ Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine 55/2 (2008): 7–18. Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Vagenheim, Ginette. ‘Le Antichità romane de Pirro Ligorio et “l’Accademia degli Sdegnati.” Les académies dans l’Europe humaniste. Idéaux et pratiques.’ Travaux d’humanisme et de Renaissance 441 (2008): 99–127. Visceglia, Maria Antonietta ed. La politica internazionale del papato nella prima età moderna. Rome: Viella, 2013. Zuccari, Alessandro. ‘La Biblioteca Vaticana e i pittori sistini.’ In Madonna, Maria Luisa ed. La Roma di Sisto V. Le arti e la cultura. Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1993, pp. 59–76. Zuccari, Alessandro. ‘Il cantiere della Biblioteca Sistina: i cicli di affreschi e alcuni progetti grafici.’ In Ceresa, Massimo ed. La Biblioteca Vaticana tra riforma cattolica, crescita delle collezioni e nuovo edificio (1535–1590). Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2012, pp. 379–417.

9 THE LIBRARY, THE CITY, THE EMPIRE De-provincialising Vienna in the early seventeenth century Paola Molino

Introduction Early modern Vienna was not a city much loved by the Habsburgs, at least until the second half of the seventeenth century when, after the Thirty Years War and the siege by the Ottoman Empire, it became the ‘peripheral centre’ of a confessionally composite empire and the capital city of a Catholic dynasty.1 During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, political and confessional conflicts made the relationship between the city bodies and the territorial princes very complex, as the Lower Austrian Estates were often reluctant to follow centralisation policies, and most of the members of the nobility and the estates converted to the new Protestant confessions in the first half of the sixteenth century.2 They fought to gain ‘neutral’ or free spaces within the city walls in which worship using the Protestant liturgy was allowed and there were schools in which they could educate their children and print shops to publish their works. This question of confession was not only an issue for the higher ranks represented in the estates: a good portion of the citizens of Vienna had embraced the new faith too, and most of the religious institutions in the city were either abandoned or underwent a crisis in the second half of the sixteenth century.3 At the same time, the constant threat from the Ottoman Empire, the undesirable neighbour par excellence, made collaboration between the ruler and the estates vital for the security of the city and its inhabitants. In 1563 the first part of the wide city wall was finished, turning Vienna almost into a fortress and forcing a population of about 25,000 inhabitants into a smaller urban perimeter (Figure 9.1).4 At the time when Emperor Maximilian II took over the city and the empire from his father (1562–1564), confirming Vienna as the choice of capital of the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands and the imperial court, the confessional conflicts, the Ottoman threat and the spatial

224

Paola Molino

Bird’s-eye view of Vienna made by Joseph Daniel von Huber (1769–1773) in which the finished Stadtbefestigung is well visible – Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Katrographische Sammlung, pp. 1–11. © CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 – Creative Commons. FIGURE 9.1

constraints were the three most urgent problems to solve. It was in this context that Maximilian, like other rulers in Europe, attempted to bypass local controversies by emphasising the imperial rather than the civic/local nature of his power.5 His father, Ferdinand I, had already invested energy and money in the reconstruction of the imperial residence, the Hofburg, which in Vienna – unlike elsewhere in Europe – remained in the inner city throughout the early modern period,6 and also in the reorganisation of the imperial bureaucracy, including the Reichshofkanzei (imperial chancellery), the Hofkammer (the imperial Aulic Chamber) and the Hofkriegsrat (war council) within the walls of the city. He also initiated a reorganisation of the university, calling the Jesuits to Vienna, and of the intellectual milieu around the court, attracting distinguished architects and scholars from Italy and the Netherlands, and promoting the study of Oriental languages. Guillaume Postel hold the chair for Oriental languages in Vienna in 1553, and in the same years Zikmund z Púchova embarked on the translation and update of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia in Czech.7 However, as is well known, Maximilian invested the most in the sphere of knowledge, through the construction of a truly inter-confessional court, whose members reorganised some of the most important centres of knowledge in the city, including the imperial botanical garden and the Imperial Library. This much is recognised by the whole of historiography, but it should be added that these institutions were grounded in a city that still had all the problems described above, and that all these issues became factors in the making of knowledge in the city of Vienna between the middle of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century. After the death of Emperor Maximilian II (1576), a further factor emerged under his successor Rudolf II, who decided to move the imperial court to Prague in 1583. Therefore, Vienna, a city that had enjoyed the privileges of being a capital with all the benefits of the presence of a growing court in terms of cultural

The library, the city, the empire

225

vitality, confessional tolerance and consumption, was in a short timespan relegated to the status of archducal city.8 The making of knowledge was strongly influenced by this transfer. When Archduke Matthias took over as emperor in 1612 and the Bohemian situation took a turn for the worse, the imperial court slowly moved back to Vienna, but it was a somewhat different type of court in comparison to that of Maximilian. It was the court of a dynasty that was preparing for a civil war, and that had to take a clearer confessional position. In this context, the city of Vienna was called on to collaborate to create a new imperial ethos. This cultural and intellectual programme was not much pursued under Matthias but more so under his successor, the Catholic Ferdinand II.9 In the following pages, I will attempt to look at the making of knowledge in the city of Vienna by considering, first, the relationship between the court and the city, with all its confessional, political and spatial tensions before and after the transfer of the court to Prague and its return at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In particular, I will try to do this by examining a specific ‘place of knowledge’, the Imperial Library. This institution was set in the very centre of the urban space, and in the knowledge which it produced it mirrored many of the urban tensions more than its ‘imperial’ character. Second, inside this space of knowledge I will focus on the networks established by two librarians in order to gather and order specific kinds of materials: first, literature on the Turcica, and, later, Oriental manuscripts. This shift also represented a change in the nature of the library, from a more urban and courtly one into a truly scholarly institution. The general argument of this article is that by focusing on the interaction between the city and the library at a time of change in the very conception of the empire it is also possible to shed new light on the type of epistemology typical of Vienna beyond the early modern period.

Scattered epistemologies The connection between a cultural institution and the city in which it is situated is obvious from a modern perspective, but problematic for the early modern period. In particular, in the case of libraries we are used to looking at them as civic institutions regardless of what their juridical status might have been in the past or might be in the present, because their architecture is engrained in that of our cities. The massive Imperial Library in Vienna, identified since the 1920s with the Austrian National Library, is not an exception and plays today an active role as a local urban cultural institution. The National Library is a rich repository of manuscripts and old prints for scholars but, more than this, it is a place for learning and thinking for the students of the University of Vienna, a place to read old and new books and newspapers for Viennese citizens, and an internet point for young and foreign users. Of course, the library also has an international status – for instance, in cataloguing and digitalisation projects – that is today important and well advertised. However, this final role is less prominent than the first, the civic one.

226

Paola Molino

Although libraries can be similarly understood as a medium, an institution and the cultural memory of the local community in every historical period,10 for the early modern period we have to somehow reverse the perspective with regard to today. If the library as an idea, as a political project or as a virtual catalogue of thought for the members of a transregional community of scholars is easy to find in the sources, and this is an integral part of narratives and discourses on the re-foundation of court, imperial and confessional libraries starting from the middle of the sixteenth century, the relationship of a collection of books to the city remains in many cases a matter of historical (re-)construction. This means that this relationship was not immediately visible to observers at the time. If we exclude authors of travel writings, the city– library connection is only seldom made in the sources, and when it is made it is often in negative terms, to stress a tension. In other words, from what we can read in documents, libraries were in many cases placed in cities, but they played a peripheral role in the making of civic epistemologies, if these epistemologies are connected with the ‘natural’ role we ascribe to a library nowadays. From another perspective, however, precisely because the connection is not obvious, putting the library back in the city that hosts it unveils a set of original elements in the urban epistemologies of pre-modern societies that might otherwise not be directly visible. In the case of the Imperial Library in Vienna, a closer look at its relationship to the city allows us, in a first instance, to focus on some common features of cultural institutions within a complex geography of knowledge around a city that was a fragile and contested capital of an empire with more than one centre of power (Prague, Innsbruck, Graz, at least). Second, it allows a glimpse into the multiple meanings that a library could have had at the urban level, beyond the function historians have always considered, namely that of being a repository of books to be accessed, read, manipulated, exchanged or annotated by scholars. Philosophers and historians of knowledge and libraries have recently reminded us to treat these practices carefully before the invention of proper reading rooms in the nineteenth century, and to take even more seriously than we have done before suggestions about the influence of spaces in the making of knowledge.11 The first step to be taken in order to understand the role of the Imperial Library in the urban setting of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Vienna is to place it in the context of other places of knowledge in the same city and to try to understand how and if the library interacted with them, or at least shared some common features. Sources directly produced by the curators of these institutions help us very little to identify a possible interaction. As far as libraries at the urban level are concerned, almost all the scholarship mentions a letter written in 1578 by the imperial librarian, the Dutch Hugo Blotius, in which he proposes that the court should join together in a common institution the Imperial Library with the three main ‘public libraries’ of the city, that of the Ducal College, the university library, and that gathered by the bishop of Vienna, Johannes Fabri, a proposal only taken into consideration two centuries later.12 A second, less known, source is a notebook by Blotius’s successor, Sebastian Tengnagel, in which he lists the books in the university library in alphabetical order, probably following a catalogue he had found in the library.13

The library, the city, the empire

227

Beyond these isolated testimonies, establishing an interaction between the different knowledge institutions in the city is complicated by the diverse nature of existing studies, where present.14 For many institutions we are not even well aware of their exact position within the city architecture. For instance, this is the case of an imperial Kunstkammer in the sixteenth century, which has often been searched for by historians of art and architecture who are looking for the origins of the much more magnificent Kunstkammer of Rudolf II in Prague. Historians have wondered whether the material and intellectual origins of this space of knowledge could be found in Vienna, where the imperial court originally came from. This idea is only speculative, because sources such as the testaments of Ferdinand and Maximilian II or accounts by travellers and ambassadors mention paintings and natural and artificial objects preserved somewhere in the imperial capital city, but it is not clear where they were held and whether they were organised according to specific criteria. Letters written by the two emperors at times when they were not in Vienna seem to hint at the existence of such a space. For instance, in 1573 Maximilian communicated to the city of Vienna that it was necessary to rebuild the floor of the Kunstkammer due to serious damage.15 The fact that the request was addressed to the city means that the collection was most probably located in a building outside the imperial palace. This space of knowledge was also mentioned in another crucial source for early modern Vienna, the Hofquartierbücher.16 These are the books containing periodical surveys produced by the office that had to map all the inhabited buildings within the city walls for both taxation and to board members of the court. In the books written for the years 1567, 1583 and 1587 we find a mention of a Münzhof between the Singerstrasse and the Wollzeile, namely in the northern part of the city. This Münzhof was located, according to the same survey, behind a Kunstkammer (Figure 9.2).17 It is hard to say whether this Kunstkammer is the one mentioned by Maximilian (it probably is) and it is even harder to say if this was any kind of central institution in which the emperor had gathered his collections of natural and artificial objects. Travellers and ambassadors visiting the imperial court wrote of seeing collections, not somewhere in the city but in the imperial palace, the Hofburg (to be seen in Figure 9.4). For example, the ambassador of the Republic of Venice, Vincenzo Tron, who was there in June 1574, mentions having seen many beautiful and singular things, namely paintings, clocks and instruments of any kind in the rooms of the palace,18 and the Italian nobleman Ottavio Landi related in a letter to Obersthofkämmerer Adam von Dietrichstein that the Duke of Saxony had seen some of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings, among them a composite head representing the member of the privy council Johannes Ulrich Zasius, in the Hofburg.19 Thus, we should presume that there were at least two collections in Vienna, one in the city and a more private one in the Hofburg. Arcimboldo was active around the Hofburg as royal painter when he was in Vienna. We know, for instance, that he was familiar with the Imperial Library at least until 1582, when, according to a surviving list, he borrowed a group of illustrated books.20

228

Paola Molino

FIGURE 9.2 A detail of the city plan made in 1880 by Albert Camesina, using the older plans of Wolmuet (1547) and Suttinger (1683), and containing information from the 1566 Hofquartierbücher. Nr. 1052 is here: ‘Röm. Kai. Mt. Münzhaus, hinten die Kunstkammer’ – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum, Kar AB 7 A 156. © Austrian National Library.

More generally, this little story of the Kunstkammer highlights two crucial points: one is the variety of sources able to testify to the interaction between the city and the cultural institutions, and, second, the complexity and fragility of the documentation able to show this interaction. The previously mentioned Hofquartierbücher are a good example of this complexity: the dry descriptions of each flat in the city made by the commission members, sometimes resulting from door-to-door visits and sometimes based on books of taxes, on the one hand contain many inaccuracies and, on the other, necessarily have to be read in conjunction with other sources. Some relevant information that historians can trace from this source is, for instance, about neighbourhoods: who lived near whom and what kind of relations existed among these people. As we shall see, there are letters addressed to people living nearby from librarians aiming to enlarge the space for the library or to discuss matters of common interest. The Hofquartierbücher have been fundamental in drawing maps of the city of Vienna in the early modern period, from the one by Bonifaz Wolmuet in 1547 (Figure 9.3)21 to that by Daniel Suttinger, made during the Ottoman occupation

The library, the city, the empire

229

FIGURE 9.3 A detail of the city plan made by Bonifaz Wolmuet (1547), including the area of the Minorite Monastery, in which the Imperial Library was located until 1623, and the imperial garden – Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Kartographische Sammlung 236 G. © CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 – Creative Commons.

of 1683 (Figure 9.4).22 Generally speaking, looking at these maps it is hard to get the impression of a centre of political power, let alone of knowledge. Around the small palace, the Hofburg, almost still a fortress in the late sixteenth century, one could find the imperial garden, the imperial hospital and the library, ‘hidden’ in the rooms of the Franciscan Monastery. Founded between the reigns of Ferdinand and Maximilian, the library hosted in these narrow spaces approximately 10,000 volumes until the very beginning of the seventeenth century, when the two Dutch librarians, Hugo Blotius and Sebastian Tengnagel, attempted a new inventory.23 Of Dutch origins was also Carolus Clusius, the founder of the botanical garden immediately behind the imperial palace. Unlike the library, it was almost abandoned with the court’s move to Prague and the decision taken by Clusius to leave the country for confessional reasons.24 Emperor Maximilian II was very keen on botany and in the 1560s ordered the construction of a new palace (literally called Neugebäude) outside the city at the site where the Ottoman troops under Soliman I had their quarters in 1529. The palace was designed by Italian architects (the chief architect was Jacopo Strada) and was inspired by Renaissance and Oriental architecture.25 Maximilian planned to

230

Paola Molino

FIGURE 9.4 Zoom of the Minorite Monastery and next to it the Hofburg from the plan made by Daniel Suttinger in 1683 – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum KAR AB 7 A 69. © Austrian National Library.

gather together his collections of natural and artificial objects there, and, describing its construction, historian Howard Louthan defines it as the symbol of a new era at the Habsburg court, able to combine at the same time Jacopo Strada’s vision of a universal empire with Maximilian’s political project of a sovereignty which united people across national and religious boundaries.26 However, also in this case the building of the Neugebäude was interrupted by the sudden death of the emperor in 1576 and the move of the court to Prague. Later, its unfinished outline and its architecture held a certain fascination for travellers coming to Vienna, but it never became what it was originally planned to be.27 Within the perimeter of the city centre, other spaces of knowledge were the libraries of larger monasteries and foundations of the city (Schottenstift, Karmeliter, Marienkapelle, the library of the Cathedral School of St Stephan) which were mainly reserved for a scholarly or clerical public, and those connected to the university.28 The University of Vienna had a long history. It was closely connected to that of the territorial princes, who had promoted its foundation in 1365.29 In the reign of Ferdinand I, the university underwent a powerful reform, which partly had the aim of weakening its autonomy and thus reinforcing its relation to the crown. On the other hand, the reform tried to intervene in fields such as the organisation of studies, the discipline of professors and the programmes, in order to limit a decrease in matriculations. Having been one of the best attended in the empire in the fifteenth century, soon after the Reformation, due to a change in the circuits of the peregrinatio academica, the Ottoman occupation and a series of epidemics of plague, the University of Vienna underwent a strong crisis. In 1551, Ferdinand invited the Jesuits to Vienna, not only to foster an

The library, the city, the empire

231

improvement in the quality of teaching but also to stem the spread of Protestant ideas within the communities of students and professors.30 Indeed, the academics were very strongly divided into confessional factions, in particular those in the medical faculty, and somehow the presence of the Jesuits was intended to bring an improvement. However, some conflicts were sharpened, and those over the competences of the Jesuit fathers were new and worsened the situation.31 The period 1550–1623 was a difficult time for the university, and in 1623 the Jesuits absorbed practically the whole Faculty of Arts and the right to graduate students through the Sanctio Pragmatica. The possession of books from the university libraries then became a further source of conflict between the university and the Jesuits. More specifically, when we speak about the university libraries before 1623, we refer to at least two types of institution. The first was the system of libraries around the Ducal college, which was the oldest institution within the university, directly dependent on the Habsburgs.32 It owned a universal collection, meaning an unspecialised book collection, and was connected to a network of independent and private colleges (Bursen and Kodreien), because the statutes of the city of Vienna obliged students of any grade to live separately from the rest of the population supervised by a master, so professors directly linked to the Ducal college also had to live in the college.33 After the Reformation enforced by Ferdinand I, each of these colleges was expected to organise lectures in the lower subjects, such as grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. For this purpose, they started to collect books and create libraries of various sizes (for instance, a catalogue drawn up in 1527 listed 326 titles in the Paulusburse, 475 were listed in the Lilienburse in 1569 and 120 in the Rosenburse, which was apparently a lectern library).34 These were all probably of a certain interest and value if the Jesuits struggled to incorporate them with the annexation of the Faculty of Arts in 1623. Although each faculty had its book collection, the main university library was, indeed, that of the Faculty of Arts, which in 1443 had been merged with that of the Faculty of Medicine in a nova structura. The library had its golden age in this period, when it was reorganised (partly as a lectern library), it was opened at specific hours, and a more restrictive regulation for use and loans was released.35 This period also corresponded to the most successful years in the history of the university, and the library was frequented by graduate students and professors. Some of them, such as the famous mathematician Johannes von Gmunden and humanist Conrad Celtis, decided to leave their own private collections to enrich the stock of the library.36 With the spread of printed books and the growth of the stock, by the beginning of the sixteenth century the library had been moved into a building nearby, which also hosted the university hospital. The fact that the learned bishop of Vienna Johannes Fabri decided before his death in 1541 to instead leave his collection of manuscripts and printed books – which was also enriched by the private collection of the Austrian historian and diplomat Johannes Cuspinianus – to another institution, namely the college of the convent of St. Nicolai in the Singerstrasse, for the public use of poor students, means

232

Paola Molino

that by this time the university library was no longer considered an adequate place.37 The college also hosted a Collegium Trilingue for 12 or 13 students. The collection gathered by Fabri encompassed over 2000 volumes and probably many more than 5000 works ranging from theology to literature and medicine and was at the time the richest private collection in the city.38 Unfortunately, due to the convent’s lack of money, the collection was soon given to the Franciscans, then divided between two colleges, and later simply stored under the roof of the university library, where it was still to be found when the imperial librarian Sebastian Tengnagel inspected it in 1623.39 Starting from the middle of the sixteenth century, another private collection imposed itself as a universal humanistic library in Vienna, that of the Hungarian historian Johannes Sambucus. This was larger in volume and its range of interests and was kept in his house. It was a pole of attraction not so much for students but more for foreigners and members of the European Republic of Letters. As is well known, due to a need for money, shortly before his death Sambucus decided to sell his manuscripts to the Imperial Library, and then his wife sold the prints to the same institution after 1583.40 Similarly, the magnificent collection of objects and manuscripts gathered by the previously mentioned Italian architect Jacopo Strada was an attraction for noblemen from eastern and central Europe and Italy, and, if we believe what he wrote, Emperor Maximilian himself often used to visit Strada in his museum. In this case too, the change of climate after the death of the emperor, including the move of the court to Prague, meant a radical change in the collection’s destiny: Strada lost his influence at court and the means to pursue his intellectual plans, namely to get support to publish his manuscript works. He had to rent out his magnificent house next to the court (in fact, the most magnificent house in late Renaissance Vienna) and rented a smaller flat that he was able to keep warm in winter. Some of his objects and manuscripts arrived in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II in Prague, most probably through the mediation of his son, Ottavio Strada.41

Looking at the library through ‘Viennese glasses’ All the institutions listed above probably interacted somehow, but, as previously mentioned, the traces of these interactions are very scarce. However, they shared some features deriving from their common positions in space and time. Scholars agree on stressing that the institutions of knowledge in Vienna between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries all suffered from intermittent attention from the crown and the city, and a constant lack of money and personnel. Most of the personnel employed in these institutions were forced to also hold other jobs in order to survive in the city context, acting at the same time as librarians, university professors, merchants etc. Scholarship suffered under these poor material conditions and also under the confessional struggles, in particular when the political climate changed with the death of Maximilian II, the move of the imperial court to Prague, and the enforcement of new confessional measures under Archduke Ernst.42

The library, the city, the empire

233

A much-reported event in the history of the city in these years was the socalled ‘milk war’ during the traditional procession for Corpus Domini in 1578. After Rudolf decided to take part in this delicate event (the last time an emperor had done so had been 15 years previously), and he and his brothers had struggled to impose attendance on all the members of the university together with the leading religious and civic bodies, a banal accident provoked much panic. A group of farmers were selling milk, butter and eggs at the corner of one of the main streets, and as the procession passed some onlookers overturned containers of milk. In the tense confessional climate, rumours circulated that armed Protestant soldiers were ready to fight against the imperial troops. Everybody ran away, and the terror among the members of the Italian and Spanish parties supposed to defend the members of the imperial family was so great that it was reported that the papal emissary defecated in his pants.43 Clearly enough, the making of knowledge was influenced by such a climate. However, these kinds of tension are best visible only if historians sharpen the lens of observation and consider the micro-perspective of a single event and institution and the space around it. The space of the Imperial Library was surely limited until the building of the magnificent Prunksaal according to a project designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and completed by his son Joseph Emanuel in 1726. Initially, when the first curator Hugo Blotius started to organise it in 1575, the collection was housed on the first floor of the Minorite Monastery (Figure 9.4, particular), in a room measuring 14 × 6 metres, and only after long and tiring negotiations did he succeed in obtaining two more small rooms for the collections and three further areas to be converted into a flat for the librarians.44 However, librarians only lived next to the library for a short time. Blotius and, after his death, his vice-librarian Sebastian Tengnagel married the same woman, Ursula Ungelter, the daughter of a powerful member of the imperial financial office. In this way, Tengnagel inherited the private goods of his predecessor. Before Ursula, Blotius had strategically married the old widow of Thomas Siebenbürger, the architect who had supervised the renovation work for the library. Barbara Siebenbürger died only a few months after the wedding, leaving him two houses, one of them, in the northern part of the city, had a garden and was subject to the Hofquartierung. To this Ursula had added her own dowry and some fields outside Vienna, in which the family produced wine. The vineyard and the rent assured the librarians a decent life, as their court salary at the time was only 200 gulden a year, the same as that of the court barber.45 After Blotius moved into Barbara’s flat, the apartment next to the library was occupied by the amanuenses, who lived there and wrote catalogues. This practice still remained under the prefecture of Tengnagel. We are mostly informed about the activity of cataloguing in the rooms next to the main library through the letters of the amanuenses and the librarians, and in particular their requests for proper quantities of wood so they would not get so cold that it was impossible for them to pursue their scholarly work.46

234

Paola Molino

The room that hosted the books and manuscripts communicated with the cellars of the only four monks left in the monastery and through a corridor with the court hospital, which had been located in the same area since 1537. Around 1578, the archive of the Aulic Chamber was also moved into a room nearby.47 In the previous years, the church and some rooms had been used by Vienna’s Protestant community for services. The proximity to the Landhaus, the House of the Estates, made it a very good location for the Protestants. The Hofquartierbücher tell us that the governor of the Lower Austrian Estates, Joachim von Schönkirchen, also lived in front of the monastery, and the sources produced by a council for the control of monasteries (Klosterrat) reveal that his deposit of wood for the winter was in a room near the library.48 The friars and the personnel of the hospital, along with members of the Lower Austrian Estates, all played important roles in the first reorganisation of the library. The jurist Wolfgang Püdler, twice rector of the University of Vienna, was for instance, also one of the supervisors of the court hospital, and was charged by the emperor with supporting the librarian in the first reorganisation of the collection. Püdler was, however, also the secretary of the Lower Austrian Estates.49 It was him who told the librarian that the estates, which at that time were putting all their efforts into reaching a proper organisation in order to have their religious rights granted within the city walls, were searching for somebody able to translate their statutes into Latin. Together with the librarian, Püdler developed the proposal of drawing up a ‘Ius consuetudinarium Austriacum’ in which the lack of laws for Austrian cities could be compensated through an integration with regulations of other Italian and German cities. With the excuse of procuring some materials from the library that could be useful for the translation, the librarian Blotius proposed that their marshal, Hans Wilhelm von Roggendorf, should engage in a joint action and rent the entire southern part of the monastery, in this way getting rid of the monks.50 The proposal was a consequence of all the difficulties that the librarian had encountered during his first year of activity next to the Minorites, who used the spaces according to their needs without respect for the value of the books. Not only did they continually pass through the library day and night, but they were known in the city for selling books from the imperial collection when in need of money. Sources produced by the Klosterrat tell us that, due to the Minorites’ constant lack of money, beyond the spaces given to the emperor for the library they had rented out many other parts of the convent to private citizens to live or work in. In short, the convent was a small and varied city within the city, located at its southern border where troops were also lodged, and therefore particularly dangerous.51 What the imperial architect Thomas Siebenbürger reported as a constant ‘hinund wider gehens’52 (coming and going) through the library when he inspected it, had implications for the circulation of books, their organisation and the lives of the library personnel. Books often disappeared, and it was therefore necessary to perform an inventory of the stock as soon as possible. Quite soon, the librarian Blotius drew up a very simple alphabetical shelf

The library, the city, the empire

235

catalogue with the help of Püdler and of a member of the Aulic Chamber, Helfrich Gütt, the university professor of Greek, Georg Tanner and two amanuenses recruited in the city. This catalogue was inaccurate and also did not list all the works included in the volumes but only the volumes themselves.53 It was drawn up by non-professionals and in haste, and yet it remained the main inventory of the library for the next 40 years, and also a valuable census in the centuries to come. In addition, the inventory also helped historians who, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, were trying to reconstruct the architecture and organisation of the late Renaissance court library. The life of the library personnel was influenced by the position of the library at the very centre of such an animated cosmos. The letters written by the librarian and his helpers are full of stories related to the nearby environment. Not only could some amanuenses who were tired of the exhausting work in the library easily escape through the monastery and the southern part of the city walls, but they also participated in the life within and around the monastery, in particular after the librarian moved away and left them alone in the librarians’ flat. On 18 March 1592, the librarian reported to Oberstkämmerer Wolfgang Rumpf that an amanuensis named Christophorus Sborovius had fled from the library at night and been stopped by a group of bandits. Not being able to give them any money, he gave them a receipt saying that the imperial librarian would forward them a certain sum. It was only by luck that the librarian had also stayed out for the night and had avoided the visit of the bandits.54 Another amanuensis named Franciscus Zeidler escaped from the library, even though he was a possible candidate for successor as chief librarian. About him, the nobleman Ursenbech, who lived in front of the library, had reported that he was arrogant and used to insult his daughters from the windows of the library.55 Already known through the work of historian Marcell Sebők is the story of the young female servant of Blotius reporting to him the words of a letter written by one of his helpers in which he complained to his father about the inhuman working conditions in the library.56 This complex cosmos was indeed the library’s first public: they participated in its space and played roles in its organisation or disorganisation, and in its enrichment or deprivation. We know this even though the sources needed to recompose this public are scarce and scattered in different archives. The proximity to the court hospital was not without consequences either. We have mentioned already the Superintendens Püdler, who had helped Blotius to organise the library. He was a famous jurist in the city and threated the collection with a certain self-confidence. According to a list that he sent to the librarian most probably in the 1590s retained almost 40 of the library’s volumes at his house.57 The same Püdler, however, played an important role in the acquisition for the library of a private collection of books left by another doctor in the hospital, Johannes Allegri, who, on his death had left his books in a room near the library. Püdler claimed some of the books for his son, but to decide on

236

Paola Molino

the destiny of the rest he proposed to create a commission made up of Blotius, two booksellers and the doctor at the court hospital, Andreas Dadius. Finally, the collection was purchased by the emperor, but most probably remained in the hospital until the Imperial Library was moved into a larger space in 1623 and could be consulted directly there.58 As noted in the official history of the Imperial Library, Tengnagel, who had experienced all the practical and space-related problems connected to its location inside the monastery, must certainly have felt relieved when he received news that on 19 January 1623 Emperor Ferdinand II had provided that the receipts of the Master of the Kitchen should be moved somewhere else to leave the room that they occupied for the library.59 Already in 1613, shortly after his nomination, Emperor Matthias had tried to organise the transfer of the library into the rooms of another religious institution, the Abbey of the Scots, in a space that had been created to host a book collection in the past.60 The abbot, Augustin Pitterich, was, however, a fervent Catholic, and had been transferred to Vienna by the counter-reformed Bishop Melchior Khlesl in one of the most intransigent moments of the city’s re-Catholisation. He did not formally oppose the move of such a large and also dangerous book collection into his institution, only hinting in a letter at practical and technical problems, such as the only entrance to the library being through the church and the proximity to a Pulvermagazin, with a danger of fire.61 Finally, however, after the members of the Klosterrat had inspected the abbey, he succeeded in diverting the books somewhere else, mainly for functional reasons, but in this way making it clear that the Scots, like the Minorites, did not see any advantage (in fact, only disadvantages) in renting their space to the court institutions.62 Indeed, in 1623 the choice was made to transport the library into the rooms of a building that belonged to the court in the Hofburg complex, a room in which, according to the document cited above, the archive of receipts related to the expenses of the head of the kitchens were preserved. It was thus in this moment that the library made its (not very triumphal) entrance into the imperial palace, in particular into the spaces of the future Camer-Puechhalterai. According to old plans of the city, this was a long narrow building in front of one that once belonged to Freiherr Karl von Harrach that was sold to the court in 1602 for 8000 florins. However, after only seven years these rooms were needed for the imperial Aulic Chamber, and the library was moved into the building recently bought from von Harrach on the other side of the street, in which all the books could finally be displayed and organised in eight rooms. From the archive documents we realise that the rooms had to be re-arranged to suit the needs of a book collection, that the walls were covered with shelves, but that over time shelves were also placed in the middle of the rooms, creating small corridors. The neighbourhood of this new larger location was no easier than the previous one. The librarian Peter Lambeck lamented the proximity of the Ball-Haus and the fact that during the games it was often very noisy, and the balls would fall

The library, the city, the empire

237

into the library through the windows. The rooms behind were far from suitable for preserving and using the books as they were dark and wet, and the dust from the streets entered through the open windows.63 The question of space was of course related to that of the organisation of the library. It had been hard if not impossible for Blotius to catalogue a stock that became larger and larger but for which there was no space either on the few shelves or on the wooden cases on the floor. Furthermore, as I have shown already elsewhere, the absence of the court and the needs of the emperor and his entourage in Prague also changed the nature of the library, from an institution in which books were preserved, stored and catalogued into a collection mainly devoted to loaning. This led to the loss or absence of many volumes from the library, sometimes paralysing the work of cataloguing.64 It is therefore not by chance that the first two operations undertaken by Tengnagel were, first, registering the losses due to this circulation of material to Prague and, once in the new location, dividing the manuscripts from the prints, organising the former by subject and finally producing a shelf catalogue so all the books could actually become accessible, at least in the pages of a catalogue if not directly on the shelves.65 However, it was only under the prefecture of Peter Lambeck that the entire stock of the Imperial Library, now three times larger than in 1575, was finally “made public” by means of a proper location, catalogues and detailed descriptions. Despite this, the impression of a library that was ‘imperial’ in its contents but not in its shape, located at the very borders of Christianity, was still there at the time of Lambeck, when the English traveller Edward Browne visited it and wrote: Among the many notable things in Vienna, the Imperial Library is very remarkable. He who hath seen the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican at Rome, would be much surprised to find such a notable one here, as may compare with them; especially upon the extreme Borders of the Learned part of Europe. The number and nobleness of the Books doth much exceed the receptacle or place which containeth them, as making no fair shew at the entrance, and somewhat wanting light. But as for the number and value of the Books, they are of opinion here that it yieldeth unto none, but rather excelleth any other Library in Europe. There was a place designed for the building of a fit receptacle for them; but, I know not how, a Theatre for Comedies is now built in that place. It is divided into eight Chambers or Rooms, which are so well filled, that many Books are fain to lye upon the Floor; and the Shelves stand so close, that there is but just room to pass between them. The Manuscripts stand distinct from the printed Books, according to their Languages, being divided into six Classes, Theological, Juridical, Medical, Philosophical, Historical, Philological. There can scarce be a more admirable Collection than the Manuscripts in part of the first Chamber, of Hebrew, Syriack, Arabick, Turkish, Armenian, Ǣthiopick and Chinese Books.66

238

Paola Molino

From the Turcica to a truly Orientalium linguarum bibliotheca The quantity of books preserved, so as the variety of topics and languages, had impressed also Hugo Blotius when he had first entered the library almost 100 years before. After his first cursory survey of the library stock in 1575, he decided to devote a first subject catalogue to a topic popular with the members of the Viennese court and the Austrian nobility. In a very short timespan he wrote a bibliography of books and orations in Favour of and Against the Turks, in print or manuscript, written since the conquest of Constantinople.67 The books included in the list were not only those preserved in the library in Vienna but also in his private collection. Other titles were sent as book lists by Ruprecht von Stotzingen, a member of the Viennese court active in Prague, and by Johann Heinrich Herwart, Johann Baptist Haintzel and Achilles Gasser, all from Augsburg. The first two of these were patricians in contact with the librarian; the last one was a physician and scholar, probably asked to participate by the others. Elsewhere I have described the technical and political implications of this catalogue.68 What I would like to stress here is, however, the specific Viennese epistemology that emerges from the catalogue, and the extent to which this epistemology is connected to the librarian’s scholarly network and his position in Vienna. Furthermore, although the position of the librarians in the space did not change significantly from Blotius to Tengnagel, their different scholarly interests and the return of the court to Vienna had impacts on the kind of knowledge about the ‘Orient’ produced by the library. In his description of the library the above-mentioned Edward Browne also noted: They have also a great advantage at Vienna, to acquire good Manuscripts from the Turkish Dominions, for the Emperour is obliged to have a Resident with the Grand Signor wheresoever he moveth or ordereth him to be; even at the last fight of St. Godart, the Emperour’s Resident was in the Turkish Camp. And when I was at Larissa in Thessaly, the Resident Signor di Casa Nova, was inquisitive after Books to be found among the Greeks in Monasteries and other places. And this Emperour, like his Father, will spare no cost toward such Acquiries.69 Generally speaking, the interest of the Habsburgs, from their Viennese outpost, in books, information and the history of the Ottoman Empire had been constant from the middle of the sixteenth century, and, as Browne observes, the gathering of these materials, and in particular of information, was closely related to a physical presence of more or less formal diplomats from the (Austrian) Habsburg Empire, not only in Istanbul but in the Ottoman territories, including the war fronts.70 Furthermore, once they arrived in Istanbul many of them could undertake further scholarly or political missions, which were vital for the gathering of old manuscripts, inscriptions and objects. It is known that one of the first informal

The library, the city, the empire

239

curators of the Imperial Library, Augerius Busbequius, author of collections of Turkish Letters, had lived in the Ottoman Empire in the 1550s as ambassador, there undertaking various scientific missions, including one to Amasya, and finally brought a group of about 240 ‘Greek manuscripts’ (but we know that the group also included Turkish manuscripts) for the Imperial Library when he came back to Vienna in 1562.71 It is, however, less known that the purchase, made most probably through Busbequius, for the Imperial Library of the private collection of a former factor of the Fuggers, Johannes (Hans) Dernschwam (1494–1568), was also related to an interest in the Ottoman Empire. Dernschwam had taken part in Busbequius’s expedition to Amasya and his library contained a significant group of books on Turcica.72 Blotius’s bibliography relied much more on the kind of materials preserved in Dernschwam’s and in the older stock of the Imperial Library than on Busbequius’s Greek and Turkish manuscripts. Indeed, his was a catalogue of Turcica, the vast literature including descriptions of customs, chronicles, political orations and newsletters about the Ottoman Empire, mainly written in European vernacular languages or Latin, and disseminated initially in Germany and Italy and then also in France and England.73 Blotius’s catalogue had a less scholarly scope than a political one and, as stated in the introduction to the catalogue, was to provide the members of the court with a further weapon to defeat the Ottomans.74 Furthermore, the war against the Ottomans together with curiosity towards them was one of the few topics in late sixteenth-century Vienna – and in the empire – around which it was possible to gather a consensus between the Protestant and the Catholic parties. The contacts mobilised by Blotius to compile the bibliography were truly ‘Germans’ in indirect contact with the Ottoman Empire. Augsburg was at the time a bi-confessional city and one of the empire’s centres of information. The choice of these contacts depended on Blotius’s biography, his own networks at the time in which the catalogue was drawn up, his scholarly interests and also the general Viennese courtly context. Hugo Blotius and Sebastian Tengnagel were two important hubs in the central European Republic of Letters. For a short period of time their networks of correspondents overlapped, but after Blotius’s death and the return of the court to Vienna the two networks started to diverge significantly.75 The letters written and received by Blotius during the time in which he wrote the catalogue on the Turcica betray a strong urgency for the stabilisation of his own position within the imperial court during the transition between the death of Maximilian II and the beginning of the reign of Rudolf II. This transition involved a reinforcement of counter-reformation measures and the peripherisation of Vienna with regard to Prague, in particular in the sphere of knowledge production. The catalogue on the Turcica was written in this moment. With this tool, Blotius wanted to emphasise both the ‘centrality’ of the library as an institution in which crucial documents were preserved, and the political advantages that could derive from keeping him (and the library) in Vienna.76 The new emperor, Rudolf II, confirmed Blotius in his position, but the move of the court to Prague meant a radical change in the role that the book

240

Paola Molino

collection could play for the Habsburgs and their entourage and for the European Republic of Letters. The Habsburgs continued to lend books and manuscripts, but the centre of power and knowledge was clearly elsewhere, in Prague and in the circle of Rudolf II, and also the purchases of the most valuable rare books and manuscripts took place there. It is a sign of this fact that in 1603 Tengnagel lamented that in 30 years no single book that had obtained the imperial privilege had reached the Imperial Library, although Ferdinand had stipulated in 1551 that printers within the empire should send three copies of each book with imperial privilege to the court in Vienna.77 On the other hand, in terms of the production of documents, the ‘absence of the court’ triggered an intense written exchange and determined the polemical nature of Blotius’s archive and the topics of his letters to court members and scholars, as he was often forced to defend his choices and describe in detail situations to the members of an absent court but also to scholars scattered throughout Protestant Germany (such as David Chytraeus in Rostock, Reiner Reineccius and Tycho Brahe, to whom he repeated more or less the same topics). In the absence of the court, Blotius strengthened his relations with the urban environment, not only through his marriages, but also through work doing cataloguing for members of the Austrian nobility and by opening the doors of the library to members of the local religious orders. He carefully preserved all the documents testifying to these contacts and they still survive. Blotius died in 1608, but already at the end of the 1590s Sebastian Tengnagel had started to work as his helper and amanuensis in the library. Although, as said, he married Blotius’s wife after his death, his relationship with the city was different, or at least in the preservation of his documents he did not give priority to his Viennese or court networks, and even less importance to the preservation of letters and texts written by himself.78 Instead, his correspondence testifies to a growing interest in lexicography, philology and grammar, mainly in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew, and to a European network in making around this interest.79 Again, his position in Vienna as head of a library in which rare manuscripts had been preserved since the previous century made him a crucial knot in this network.80 Through contacts with local nobility, such as Karl von Liechtenstein and Siegfried Preiner, who hosted at home servants and captives from the Ottoman Empire, he tried to acquire for the library a stable amanuensis for the transcription of Oriental manuscripts. One of these cases, that of the captive 81 İbrāhīm Dervīş, has been already the object of studies. Furthermore, between 1613 and 1617 he sent to the imperial Dragoman in Istanbul Paulus Albanus, lists of Arabic and Turkish books that he was supposed to acquire there.82 This search for manuscripts seems to be related to the intention that Tengnagel had already from his first years in Vienna to transform the Imperial Library into a centre of documentation of Oriental studies in which not only scholars could find rare manuscripts in the original or in copies but also catalogues from other libraries and booksellers.83 The search for editions and catalogues seems to have driven Tengnagel’s first steps towards new correspondents and institutions, opening up new geographical

The library, the city, the empire

241

areas in which Blotius barely had contacts, such as Munich, Heidelberg and Rome. Rome and Munich are particularly interesting because the contacts there were not related to the presence of an important scholar, but to institutions that characterised the type of knowledge circulating through the two cities on a more stable basis. These were the Ducal library in Munich and the Maronite College and the Vatican Library in Rome. Tengnagel sent his first requests for lists of Oriental manuscripts to the first two institutions in February 1605 and March 1606 respectively.84 As soon as August 1607, Tengnagel’s Bavarian network was enriched by the inclusion of the Jesuit Jakob Gretser.85 Rome, which was already important for the presence of the Maronite College, the Polyglot Typography and the Vatican Library, in 1622 absorbed the Biblioteca Palatina from Heidelberg, in this way also becoming a centre for the documentation of the history of Protestant Europe. Later in his career, Tengnagel strengthened his relations with the librarian Lucas Holstenius, with Pietro Della Valle, Jacques Sirmond, and Vincenzo Riccardi.86 From another perspective, the inclusion of Vienna not only in an Oriental but also in a Catholic triangle of knowledge became vital for the dynasty that employed Tengnagel as librarian. After the Battle of the White Mountain, the Habsburgs came back to Vienna and a time of reorganisation of the composite Monarchia Austriaca both within the empire and the European constellation of Catholic powers started. This is not the right place to discuss how radical, new or successful this choice actually was, but it goes without saying that when Tengnagel later in his career addressed his correspondents in Rome and Munich he did it from a different position to that which Blotius could have occupied.87 Although research on this topic is still at a very early stage, we can already advance the hypothesis that the network created by Tengnagel around the library, driven by an interest in Oriental manuscripts, would become organic to the Habsburgs’ new political position. Far beyond Blotius’s localism and affiliation with the German Protestant Republic of Letters, already in Tengnagel’s early network (1604–1614) the thickest lines connect Vienna to Paris, Heidelberg, Munich, Rome and Wittenberg, and claim a new centrality for the re-affirmed capital of the Habsburg Empire. Again, Munich and Rome are particularly interesting. The Habsburgs redesigned their profiles as defenders of the Catholic faith (in competition with the Wittelsbach in Bavaria), as they not only bore the title of Holy Emperors but also occupied a strategic position, as described by many travellers including Browne, on the very borders of Christianity. In this position, they were de facto charged with defending Christianity against the Ottomans. In these same years, Rome reaffirmed its centrality as universal capital of Christianity by opening up to the world with missionaries and diplomats, and also by using the attraction of the institutions of learning within the city related to this universal mission. In this context, and in order to reinforce the position of the Habsburgs and of Vienna as a third pole of Christianity, the question of the Ottomans had to turn from a merely urban or at least regional issue into a truly imperial and universal problem. From this perspective, the different

242

Paola Molino

levels of sophistication between Blotius’s Turcica and Tengnagel’s project of creating an Orientalium linguarum bibliotheca88 in Vienna and in the library seem to be in harmony with the new universal aims of the Habsburgs, making Vienna ready for a new kind of civic epistemology.

Notes 1 On the relation between the city and the crown in the seventeenth century, see Spielmann, The City and the Crown, and more recently on the Habsburg monarchy Mat’a and Winkelbauer, Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740. An urban history of the city in the time considered is Traninger and Vocelka, Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert). 2 On this, see the general study by MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria. Specifically on Vienna at the time of ‘irenicism’, see Louthan, The Quest for Compromise and Fulton, Catholic Belief. 3 Vocelka, ‘Kirchengeschichte’, 321. See also Bibl, ‘Die Organisation des evangelischen Kirchenwesens’. The letters written from Vienna by the Catholic Georg Eder to the Duke of Bavaria in the 1570s and 1580s in Bibl, ‘Die Berichte’, are very helpful. 4 Weigl, ‘Frühneuzeitliches Bevölkerungswachstum’, 110. More generally on the spatial development of Vienna, see the old but still effective Müller, ‘Wiens räumliche Entwicklung’. 5 On the intellectual climate at Maximilian’s court, see Louthan, The Quest for Compromise. On Vienna in the sixteenth century, from a cultural perspective, see Vocelka, ‘Die kulturelle Bedeutung Wiens’. 6 The latest study on this is Macek and Holzschuh-Hofer, Die Wiener Hofburg. 7 Pánek, ‘Eine literarische Übertragung’. 8 Vocelka, ‘Die Stadt und die Herrscher’, 16–23. 9 On this later development, see ibidem, 24–30. 10 Assmann, ‘Auf den Schultern von Riesen’, 10 and 16. See also Schneider, ‘Die Bibliothek als Wissensraum’. 11 Schneider, ‘Die Geburt des Lesesaals’. 12 ÖNB, Cod. 9038, fol. 158r. 13 ÖNB, Cod, 9690, fols 219v and ff. 14 For libraries of secular and religious institutions until the sixteenth century, see Gottlieb, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge, I: 266–443. On collections under Maximilian II see Lhotsky, Die Geschichte der Sammlungen, 157–178. See also DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘From Treasury to Museums’. 15 Lhotsky, Die Geschichte der Sammlungen, 144–146. 16 Wien, Hofkammer- und Finanzarchiv, Alte Hofkammer (later HKA), Hofquartierbücher: Bücher und Protokolle der kaiserlichen Hofquartiermeister, partly edited in Birk, ‘Materialien’, and critically analysed in Spielmann, The City and the Crown, in particular 75–100. 17 Birk, ‘Materialien’, 156. 18 Lietzmann, Das Neugebäude in Wien, 177. 19 Rudolf, ‘Die Kunstbestrebungen Kaiser Maximilians II’, 166. 20 ÖNB, Cod. 9490, fols 190r–193v. 21 Wolmuet, Die fürstlich Stat Wien in Osterreich, 1547. 22 Suttinger, Türkische Belagerung, 1683. 23 Molino, L’Impero di carta, 39–60. 24 On the ‘central European’ experience of Clusius, see van Gelder, Tussen hof en keizerskroon. 25 Lietzmann, Das Neugebäude in Wien, in particular here 105–161. Jansen, Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage, 430–513.

The library, the city, the empire

243

26 Louthan, The Quest for Compromise, 46. 27 See, for instance, Smith, Sir Henry Wotton, I: 246–247. 28 For a survey based on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century catalogues see, Gottlieb, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge, 266–504. 29 Mühlberger, ‘The Old University Quarter’. 30 Mühlberger, ‘Zwischen Reform und Tradition’, 28–33; Mühlberger, ‘Zu den Krisen der Universität Wien’. 31 See the case of Blotius’ appointment as professor of rhetoric in Gastgeber and Molino, ‘Certe Viennae dicere’. 32 Mühlberger, ‘The Old University Quarter’, 23 and ff. 33 Ibidem, 31–37; See also Schrauf, Zur Geschichte der Studentenhäuser. 34 Knieling, ‘Libraries as Repositories of Knowledge’, 113. I thank Friedrich Simader for information regarding these libraries. 35 Ibidem, 112. 36 Pongratz, Geschichte der Universitätsbibliothek, 1–23. 37 The college was also part of the oldest university buildings, see Mühlberger, ‘The Old University Quarter’, 27. 38 Knieling, ‘Libraries as Repositories of Knowledge’, 114, based on recent research by Simader, ‘Materialien’, 272. 39 Pongratz, Geschichte der Universitätsbibliothek, 15. 40 Almási, The Uses of Humanism, 181–182; Gerstinger, Johannes Sambucus als Handschriftensammler, 278–279. The report of a visit to the library is in Edeling, Itinera Saxonicum, Boemicum, Austriacum, p. B2r. 41 Lietzmann, Das Neugebäude in Wien, 136. 42 I discuss these conditions in Molino, L’Impero di carta, 150–162. 43 On the event, see Sturminger, ‘Der Milchkrieg zu Wien’, in particular 617–624; Louthan, The Quest for Compromise, 155–156. 44 For this, see Molino, L’Impero di carta, 61–92. 45 On this see a letter written by Blotius in 1584, now in ÖNB, Cod. 9490, fols 1r–4v, the testament of Barbara Siebenbürger-Blotius, in Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Testamente, no. 66, and the description of the flat in HKA, Hofquartierbuch no. 5, fols 20v–21r. 46 See, for instance, the undated letter of an unknown amanuenses to Sebastian Tengnagel in ÖNB, Cod. 9737q, fol. 36r–36v. 47 Nowotny, Geschichte des Wiener Hofspitals, 94–95. 48 Molino, L’Impero di carta, 78. 49 ÖNB, Hausakten 1/1575-9f/1656, II, 1575. Pauser, ‘Püdler, Wolfgang’. 50 ÖNB, Cod. 7958, fols 30r–v and 37r–38r, published in Chmel, Die Handschriften, II: 210–212. 51 Molino, L’Impero di carta, 77–82. 52 HKA, Niederösterreichische Herrschaftsakten (later NÖHA), W/61/A1, fol. 4r. 53 ÖNB, Cod. 574, ff. Ir and, as an example, fols Vv–VIv. 54 ÖNB, Cod. Ser. Nov. 363, fols 159r–160v, here 159v. 55 ÖNB, Cod. 9386, fols 60r–61v. Maybe Blotius refers here to the Baron Georg Bernhard von Urschenbeck. 56 Sebők, ‘The Benefits of the Republic of Letters’, 32–35. 57 ÖNB, Cod. 9490, fols 181r–182v. 58 HKA, NÖHA W 61/A/1, fol. 27r–v with the library inventory in fols 14r–21v. 59 Buchowiecki, Der Barockbau, 11–12 and Unterkircher, ‘Hugo Blotius’, 134. 60 Buchowiecki, Der Barockbau, Anhang 1, Document 11, 219–220. 61 Ibidem, Anhang 1, Document 12. 62 Ibidem, Anhänge 11–13. 63 Lambeck, Commentariorum … liber primus, 69–70.

244

Paola Molino

64 See ÖNB, Cod. Ser. Nov. 4451, Index sive catalogus, 1597, namely a catalogue of manuscripts in which losses are signed with an ‘O’. 65 I am referring here to the following catalogue books, Cod. 9479, Index in codices graecos; Cod. 9531, Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum latinorum; Cod. 13541, Catalogus omnium librorum. 66 Browne, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany, 90–91. 67 Librorum et orationum de Turcis et contra Turcas scriptarum catalogus. Its drafts are preserved mainly in ÖNB, Cod. 8680*, 8683, 12582 and in other manuscript volumes. 68 On this, see Molino, ‘World Bibliographies’. 69 Browne, An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany, 92. 70 Generally, on the relationship between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire, see Kurz et al., Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie and Fichtner, Terror and Toleration. Particularly on the gathering of news about the Ottomans in the late sixteenth-century German territories, see Dauser, ‘Im Osten nichts Neues?’ 71 On this, see Busbequius, Legationis Turcicae epistolae quatuor, 314. 72 Babinger, Hans Dernschwam’s Tagebuch and Berlász, Die Bibliothek Dernschwam. 73 On this, see Ingram, Writing the Ottomans. 74 ÖNB, Cod. 12582, fols 2r–3r. 75 Based on the letters received. See the last volume of Blotius’ correspondence in ÖNB, Cod. 9737z 14–18 (V) and the first of Tengnagel’s correspondence in Cod. 9737r. Some letters are addressed to both librarians. 76 On this complex moment, see Molino, L’Impero di carta, 119–127. 77 See on this the archival document HKA, Hoffinanzprotokolle, Band 561-R (1603), f. 451r, in www.documenta.rudolphina.org/Regesten/A1603-08-17-15250.xml (5 July 2019). 78 Unterkircher, ‘Hugo Blotius’, 138. The digitalisation and cataloguing of the letters written and received by Tengnagel is now the object of the joint research project The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters: Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library, and Knowledge about the Orient, supported by the Austrian Science Fund (P-30511), and led by Thomas Wallnig. 79 Unterkircher, ‘Hugo Blotius’, 137–139. 80 Hamilton, van den Boogert and Westerweel, The Republic of Letters and the Levant; and generally on this proto-orientalism, see Jones, Learning Arabic. 81 Römer, ‘An Ottoman Copyist’. Jones, Learning Arabic, 74–85. 82 ÖNB, Cod. 8997, fols 52r–53r. 83 Research on this has recently started, see, however, letters written and received by the young in ÖNB, Cod. 9737 q and r. 84 ÖNB, Cod. 9737r, fols 22r–v and 33r–v, the list in ÖNB, Cod. 8997, fols 50r–51r contains a list from the Vatican Library. 85 ÖNB, Cod. 9737r, fols 62r–62v. 86 I thank Chiara Petrolini, post-doctoral research fellow within the project quoted above, who is currently doing research both in Vienna and in the Vatican Secret Archive, for information regarding Tengnagel’s later contacts in Rome. 87 For a discussion on breaks and continuity in the very conception of the composite monarchy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Winkelbauer, ‘Separation and Symbiosis’. 88 The expression is in Lambeck, Commentariorum … liber primus, 58.

Bibliography of unpublished sources Wien, Hofkammer- und Finanzarchiv, Alte Hofkammer. Hoffinanzprotokolle. Band 561-R (1603). Niederösterreichische Herrschaftsakten, W 61/A/1 -Wien Hofbibliothek 1576–1744, fols 1r–49v.

The library, the city, the empire

245

Hofquartierbücher: Bücher und Protokolle der kaiserlichen Hofquartiermeister 5/8 and 10. Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum. Kar AB 7 A 69, Suttinger Daniel, Türkische Belagerung der kayserlichen Haubt- und Residenz Statt Wien in Oesterreich. Dem Allerdurchlauchtigst.-großmächtigst. und unüberwündligsten Fürsten und Herrn Herrn Leopold erwöhlten Römischen Keyser … dediciret, [Ca. 1:2 709] [Wien], 1683. Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Sammlung von Handschriften und alten Drucken. Cod. 574, Kirchenhistorische Sammelhandschrift, fols I–VII. Cod. 7958, Adversaria praecipue epistolarum, libellorum supplicum etc. insertis epistolis Ruperti a Stotzingen, Iosephi Scaligeri etc …. Cod. 8680*, Librorum et orationum de Turcis et contra Turcas scriptarum catalogus. Cod. 8683, Librorum et orationum de Turcis et contra Turcas scriptarum catalogus. Cod. 8997, fols 50r–53r, Index librorum orientalium, quos emendos esse commendat. Cod. 9038, fols 95r–139r, Adversaria libellorum supplicum et epistolarum in rebus privatis bibliothecam imperatoriam concernentibus. Cod. 9386, Commercium epistolicum. Cod. 9479, Index in codices graecos bibliothecae Palatinae Vindobonensis: Fragmentum (Sebastian Tengnagel, c. 1600–1609). Cod. 9490, Epistolae ad varios. Cod. 9531, Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum latinorum Caesareae bibliothecae Vindobonensis (Sebastian Tengnagel, c. 1600–1609). Cod. 9690, Catalogi duo amicorum; Album amicorum et celebrium personarum Hugonis Blotii. Cod. 9737q–r, Commercium litterarum (Sebastian Tengnagel). Cod. 9737z 14–18 (I–V), Collectio epistolarum (Hugo Blotius). Cod. 12582, Librorum et orationum de Turcis et contra Turcas scriptorum catalogus. Cod. 13525, Inventarii bibliothecae S.C. Maiestatis pars posterior (M–Z) (http://data. onb.ac.at/rec/AL00163360) (5 July 2019). Cod. 13541, Catalogus omnium librorum in bibliotheca Caesarea exstantium a. 1609 et 1610. Cod. Ser. Nov. 363, Briefe, Briefentwürfe, Reisetagebuch und Notizen. Cod. Ser. Nov. 4451, Index sive catalogus omnium librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca caesarea Viennensi inventorum anno salutis MDXCVII mense Octobris. Hausakten 1/1575-9f/1656.

Wien, Stadt- und Landesarchiv Kartographische Sammlung 236 G, Bonifaz Wolmuet, Die fürstlich Stat Wien in Osterreich …. Aus Rechter Geometruscher Maß in grundt nidergelegt … Nach der Maur herumb mit den Pasteien Thurnen vnd Gräbn, wie sy dan zum Tail gemacht und noch zumachn von nötn …, 1547, [1:792]. Testamente, no. 66 (Barbara Ungelter-Blotius).

References Almási, Gábor. The Uses of Humanism: Johannes Sambucus (1531–1584), Andreas Dudith (1533–1589), and the Republic of Letters in East Central Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Assmann, Aleida. ‘Auf den Schultern von Riesen.’ In Rachinger, Johanna ed. Schatzkammer des Wissens. 650 Jahre Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 2018, pp. 10–20.

246

Paola Molino

Babinger, Franz ed. Hans Dernschwam’s Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (1553/55) nach der Urschrift im Fugger-Archiv. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923. Berlász, Jenő. Die Bibliothek Dernschwam. Bücherinventar eines Humanisten in Ungarn. Szeged: József Attila Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, 1974. Bibl, Viktor. ‘Die Organisation des evangelischen Kirchenwesens im Erzherzogthum Österreich unter der Enns von der Ertheilung der Religions-Concession bis zu Kaiser Maximilians II. Tode (1568–1576).’ Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 87 (1899): 114–228. Bibl, Viktor. ‘Die Berichte des Reichshofrates Dr. Georg Eder an die Herzoge Albrecht und Wilhelm von Bayern über die Religionskrise in Niederösterreich durch Kaiser Rudolf II. (1579–1587).’ Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich N.F., 8 (1909): 67– 154. Birk, Ernst. ‘Materialien zur Topographic die Stadt Wien in den Jahren 1563 bis 1587.’ Berichte und Mitteilungen des Alterthums Vereins Wien 10 (1866): 81–164. Browne, Edward. An Account of Several Travels through a Great Part of Germany: In Four Journeys: I. From Norwich to Colen. II. From Colen to Vienna, with a Particular Description of that Imperial City. III. From Vienna to Hamburg. IV. From Colen to London; Wherein the Mines, Baths, and other Curiosities of those Parts Are Treated of; Illustrated with Sculpures. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1677. Buchowiecki, Walter. Der Barockbau der ehemaligen Hofbibliothek in Wien, ein Werk J.B. Fischers von Erlach: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Prunksaales der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Vienna: Prachner, 1957. Busbequius, Augerius Gislenius. Legationis Turcicae Epistolae quatuor …. Francofurti: apud Andreae Wecheli, Claud. Marnium & Ioann. Aubrium, 1595. Chmel, Joseph. Die Handschriften der k.k. Hofbibliothek in Wien (2 vols). Vienna: C. Gerold, 1840–1841. DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas. ‘From Treasury to Museum: The Collections of the Austrian Habsburgs.’ In Cardinal, Roger and Elsner, John eds. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, 1994, pp. 137–154. Dauser, Regina. ‘Im Osten nichts Neues? Vernetzte Briefkommunikation über die Türkenkriege in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts.’ In Laubinger, Andres; Gedderth, Brunhilde and Dobrinski, Claudia eds. Text, Bild, Schrift: Vermittlung von Information im Mittelalter. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007, pp. 161–186. Edeling, Joachim. Itinera Saxonicum Boemicum Austriacum Ungaricum, etc. Quae cum praeceptore suo D. Davide Chytraeo, in Austriam vocato confecit. Rostochii: Iohannes Stockelman & Andreas Gutterwitz, 1572. Fichtner, Paula S. Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Fulton, Elaine. Catholic Belief and Survival in Late Sixteenth-Century Vienna: The Case of Georg Eder (1523–1587). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Gastgeber, Christian and Molino, Paola. ‘Certe Viennae dicere idem mihi videtur atque olim Athenis, atque Romae dicere. Der Hobibliothekar Hugo Blotius als Professor der Rhetorik an der Universität Wien zwischen 1576 und 1578.’ In Gastgeber, Christian and Klecker, Elisabeth eds. Neulatein an der Universität Wien. Vienna: Praesens, 2008, pp. 177–230. Gerstinger, Hans. ‘Johannes Sambucus als Handschriftensammler.’ In Festschrift der Nationalbibliothek in Wien. Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1926, pp. 251–400. Gottlieb, Theodor. Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, Band I: Niederösterreich. Vienna: Hozhausen, 1915.

The library, the city, the empire

247

Hamilton, Alastair; Van den Boogert, Maurits H. and Westerweel, Bart. The Republic of Letters and the Levant. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Ingram, Anders. Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jansen, Dirk Jacob. Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at The Imperial Court (2 Vols.). Leiden: Brill, 2019. Jones, Robert John. Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (1505–1624). Unpublished PhD Thesis. London, 1988. Knieling, Nina. ‘Libraries as Repositories of Knowledge for Teaching and Research: A Brief History of the University of Vienna Library Sites since 1365.’ In Rüdiger, Julia and Schweizer, Dieter eds. Sites of Knowledge: The University of Vienna and Its Buildings; a History 1365 – 2015. Vienna: Böhlau, 2015, pp. 111–119. Kurz, Marlene; Scheutz, Martin; Vocelka, Karl and Winkelbauer, Thomas eds. Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie. Vienna: Oldenburg, 2005. Lambeck, Peter. Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensis, liber primus. Vindobonae: Typis Matthaei Cosmerovii, 1665. Lhotsky, Alphons. Die Geschichte der Sammlungen. Horn: Ferdinand Berger, 1941. Lietzmann, Hilda. Das Neugebäude in Wien. Sultan Süleymans Zelt-Kaiser Maximilians II. Lustschloß. Ein Beitrag zur Kunst-und Kulturgeschichte der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Deustcher Kunstverlag, 1987. Louthan, Howard. The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-reformation Vienna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Macek, Bernhard A. and Holzschuh-Hofer, Renate. Die Wiener Hofburg. Die unbekannten Seiten der Kaiserresidenz. Erfurt: Sutton, 2014. MacHardy, Karin. War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social and Cultural Dimensions on Political Interaction, 1521–1622. Basingstoke and NewYork: Macmillan, 2003. Mat’a, Petr and Winkelbauer, Thomas eds. Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740. Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006. Molino, Paola. ‘World Bibliographies: Libraries and the Reorganization of Knowledge in Late Renaissance Europe.’ In Grafton, Anthony and Most, Glenn eds. Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 299–322. Molino, Paola. L’Impero di carta. Storia di una biblioteca e di un bibliotecario. Vienna 1575–1608. Rome: Viella, 2017. Mühlberger, Kurt. ‘Zu den Krisen der Universität Wien im Zeitalter der konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen.’ In Bericht über den achtzehnten österreichischen Historikertag in Linz. Vienna: Verband Österreichischer Geschichtsvereine, 1991, pp. 269–277. Mühlberger, Kurt. ‘Zwischen Reform und Tradition. Die Universität Wien in der Zeit der Renaissance-Humanismus und der Reformation.’ Mitteilungen der österreichischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 15 (1995): 13–42. Mühlberger, Kurt. ‘The Old University Quarter.’ In Rüdiger, Julia and Schweizer, Dieter eds. Sites of Knowledge: The University of Vienna and Its Buidlings; a History 1365 – 2015. Vienna: Böhlau, 2015, pp. 13–42. Müller, Richard. ‘Wiens räumliche Entwicklung.’ In Altertumsverein zu Wien eds. Geschichte der Stadt Wien, Vol. 4. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1911, pp. 283–410. Nowotny, Ernst. Geschichte des Wiener Hofspitals. Mit Beiträgen zur Geschichte der Inkorporierten Herrschaft Wolkersdorf. Vienna: Verein für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich und Wien, 1978.

248

Paola Molino

Pánek, Jaroslav. ‘Eine literarische Übertragung im Dienst der Propaganda: Das Bild Polens in der tschechischen humanistischen Kosmographie und das Problem der Pluralität in Ostmitteleuropa im 16. Jahrhundert.’ In Bahlcke, Joachim; Lambrecht, Karen and Maner, Hans-Christian eds. Konfessionelle Pluralität als Herausforderung: Koexistenz und Konflikt in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Winfried Eberhard zum 65. Geburtstag. Leipzig: Leipziger Univ.-Verl, 2006, pp. 127–138. Pauser, Josef. ‘Püdler, Wolfgang.’ Neue Deutsche Biographie 20 (2001): 761–762. Online version: www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd129238236.html#ndbconten (16 June 2018). Pongratz, Walter. Geschichte der Universitätsbibliothek Wien. Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 1977. Römer, Claudia. ‘An Ottoman Copyist Working for Sebastian Tengnagel, Librarian at the Vienna Hofbibliothek, 1608–1636.’ In Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of CIEPO, Archív orientální, Supplementa VIII. Prague: Oriental Institute, 1998, pp. 330–349. Rudolf, Karl. ‘Die Kunstbestrebungen Kaiser Maximilians II. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Madrid und Wien. Untersuchungen zu den Sammlungen der österreichischen und spanischen Habsburger im 16. Jahrhundert.’ Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 91 (1995): 165–256. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes. ‘Die Geburt des Lesesaals.’ In Felfe, Robert and Wagner, Kirsten eds. Museum, Bibliothek, Stadtraum. Räumliche Wissensordnungen 1600–1900. Berlin: LIT, 2010, pp. 153–171. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes. ‘Die Bibliothek als Wissensraum.’ In Mittelstraß, Jürgen and Rüdiger, Ulrich eds. Die Zukunft der Wissensspeicher. Forschen, Sammeln und Vermitteln im 21. Jahrhundert. Konstanz and Munich: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016, pp. 147–159. Schrauf, Karl. Zur Geschichte der Studentenhäuser an der Wiener Universität während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens. Vienna: published by author, 1895. Sebők, Marcell. ‘The Benefits of the Republic of Letters: Humanist Correspondence Revisited.’ In Visser, Arnoud ed. Search of the Republic of Letters: Intellectual Relations between Hungary and the Netherlands 1500–1800. Wassenaar: Study Centre on the Republic of Letters in the Early Modern Period, NIAS, 1999, pp. 29–35. Simader, Friedrich. ‘Materialien zur Bibliothek des Wiener Bischofs Johannes Fabri.’ In Gastgeber, Christian and Klecker, Elisabeth eds. Iohannes Cuspinianus (1473 – 1529). Ein Wiener Humanist und sein Werk im Kontext. Vienna: Praesens, 2012, pp. 267–286. Smith, Pearsall Logan. Sir Henry Wotton: Life and Letters (2 vols). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Spielmann, Paul. The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court 1600–1740. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993. Sturminger, Walter. ‘Der Milchkrieg zu Wien am Fronleichnamstag 1578.’ Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 58 (1950): 614–624. Traninger, Anita and Vocelka, Karl eds. Wien. Geschichte einer Stadt. Volume 2: Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert). Vienna: Böhlau, 2003. Unterkircher, Franz. ‘Hugo Blotius und seine ersten Nachfolger (1575–1663).’ In Stummvoll, Josef ed. Geschichte der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Vienna: Prachner, 1968, pp. 81–151. Van Gelder, Esther. Tussen hof en keizerskroon. Carolus Clusius en de ontwikkeling van de botanie aan Midden-Europese hoven (1573–15930). Dissertation. Leiden, 2011. Vocelka, Karl. ‘Die kulturelle Bedeutung Wiens im 16. Jahrhundert.’ Wiener Geschichtsblätter 29 (1974): 239–251.

The library, the city, the empire

249

Vocelka, Karl. ‘Die Stadt und die Herrscher.’ In Traninger, Anita and Vocelka, Karl eds. Wien. Geschichte einer Stadt, Vol. II. Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert). Vienna: Böhlau, 2003a, pp. 13–45. Vocelka, Karl. ‘Kirchengeschichte.’ In Traninger, Anita and Vocelka, Karl eds. Wien. Geschichte einer Stadt, Vol. II. Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert). Vienna: Böhlau, 2003b, pp. 311–363. Weigl, Andreas. ‘Frühneuzeitliches Bevölkerungswachstum.’ In Traninger, Anita and Vocelka, Karl eds. Wien. Geschichte einer Stadt, Vol. II. Die frühneuzeitliche Residenz (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert). Vienna: Böhlau, 2003, pp. 109–132. Winkelbauer, Thomas. ‘Separation and Symbiosis: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th Century.’ In Evans, Robert J.W. and Wilson, Peter H. eds. The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806: A European Perspective. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, pp. 167–183.

INDEX

Albert, Archduke of Austria 44–45 Alberti, Leon Battista 103 Albertini, Francesco 201 Allacci, Leone 241 Allegri, Johannes 235–236 Altemps, Cornelia Orsini d’ 198 Ammann, Jost 66 Ammian Marcellin 214 Amsterdam 1, 44, 46–47, 49, 173, 174; book printing 133, 138–140; long-distance corporations 15, 126–148; Nederduytsche Academie 19, 35–36, 46–49; shipbuilding 14, 19, 150–165; urban smells 108, 109, 110, 117n14; wharves 150, 151 Andretta, Elisa 16, 17–18, 197–222 Angeli, Pietro degli 212 Antwerp 1, 10, 13, 15, 22n65, 35, 40–41, 43–49, 174, 179; book printing: 128–130, 132–133, 141; botany 128, 130; landjuweel festival 33, 35, 36–38, 37, 43–44, 48, 49; linguistics 128; long-distance corporations 126–148; map publishing 128, 130, 132; ommegangen 128, 130–39, 41, 43; ‘Theatre of Peace’ 44–45, 45; ‘Theatre of the World’ 39 Aquinas, Thomas 132 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 227 Aristotle 184 Avelar, André de 16–17, 173–196

Baille, Pierre 155 Bakhuizen, Ludolf 150, 152 Baltens, Peeter 43 Barlaeus, Caspar 135 Barreira, António 181 Barreira, João de 180 Basa, Domenico 211 Batavia 14–15, 111, 128, 139–140; book publishing 136; map knowledge 139; map publishing 111, 139; urban odors 101–125 Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen 140 Baudelot de Dairval, Charles César 80, 82, 88–89 Bayre, Melchior 68 Beck, Sebald 65, 70 Behaim the elder, Hans 65 Behaim the younger, Hans 65, 70 Belfanti, Marco 19 Besse, Jean-Marc 92 Beuerlein, Hans 66, 70 Bible, shipbuilding 149–150, 161, 164–165 Birbaum, Alexius 66 Blaeu, Joan 91, 132 Blotius, Hugo 17, 226, 229, 233–236, 237, 238, 239–242 Boaistuau, Pierre 39, 42 Bochius, Joannes 44, 45 Bodin, Jean 34 Bontius, Jacobus 112–113 Borromeo, Cardinal Federico 198 Bosio, Antonio 202, 203

Index

Bosman, Willem 113 Botero, Giovanni 8–9, 197–199, 200 Bouquet, Pierre 88 Boutier, Jean 91 Braun, Georg 10, 175–176, 177 Bredero, Gerbrandus Adrianus 47 Brice, Germain 93 Brouwer, Hendrik 112 Browne, Edward 237, 238 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 41 Bruni, Leonardo 8 Bruycker, Angelo de 131 Bubenik, Andrea 62 Buning, Marius 14–15, 101–125 Burckardt, Johannes 205 Burckhard 65 Burke, Peter 173 Busbequius, Augerius 239 Callon, Michel 127 Camesina, Albert 228 Camillo, Giulio 33, 45 Carrió Cataldi, Leonardo Ariel 16–17, 173–196 Cartaro, Mario 202 Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de 179–180 Caylus, Anne Claude, Comte de 85, 93 Celtis, Conrad 231 Chaves, Jerónimo de 180, 181 Ciermans, Johannes 131 Cippola, Carlo 101 Clayton, John 138 Clusius, Carolus 128, 129, 130, 133, 229 Cluyt, Dirck Outgertsz 134 Cock, Hieronymus 36 Codes, López-Salazar 186 Cohen, Déborah 80, 94 Coignet, Michiel 128, 129 Coimbra 16, 173–196; mathematics 174, 181–189; Santa Sofia, Rua de 175–176, 178, 189 Commelin, Jan 135 Cook, Harold 126 Coste, N. 88 Coster, Samuel 47–48 Cunz, Rohren 69 Cuper, Gijsbert 156 Cuspinianus, Johannes 231 Dadius, Andreas 236 Danckaerts, Sebastiaan 136 Daniel, Gabriel 89 Danti, Ignazio 208

251

Davids, Karel 14, 15, 19, 114, 126–148, 152 de Fer, Nicolas 91 De Munck, Bert 1–30, 152 Delft 47, 108 Della Valle, Pietro 241 Dene, Eduard de 41 Dernschwam, Johannes (Hans) 239 Descartes, René 10 Diodorus Siculus 109, 214 Dodoens, Rembert 128, 129, 130, 133 Doppelmayr, Johann Gabriel 58, 73 Dordrecht 109 Dou, Jan Pietersz. 105, 105 Douglas, Mary 101, 117n6 Dracht-Thoneel 47 du Bellay, Joachim 202 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine 88 Dupré, Sven 6 Dürer, Albrecht 13, 59, 62–63, 64, 67, 68, 72–73 Dutch East-India Company (VOC) 15, 126, 136–137, 138–141, 153; headquarters 139, 140; wharves 150, 151 East Indies Company 111, 112 East-India Company (VOC) see Dutch East-India Company (VOC) Eco, Umberto 64 Edam 109–110 Edelheer, Jacob 132 Ehemann, Hanns 66 Elden, Stuart 10 Epstein, Stephan R. 152 Erasmus, Desiderius 8 Ernest of Austria, Archduke 44, 45 Ernst of Austria, Archduke 232 Evora 175, 178, 187, 188 Fabri, Johannes 226, 231 Faes, Jacob 114 Farnese, Alexander 130 Farnese, Ranuccio, Cardinal 208, 215 Febvre, Lucien 5 Félibien, Michel Dom 80, 83–84, 85–87, 89 Fella, Georg 70 Ferdinand I, Emperor 224, 230–231 Ferdinand II, Emperor 225, 236 Findlen, Paula 126 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard 233 Fischer von Erlach, Joseph Emanuel 233 Florence 58–59 Floris, Cornelis 36, 37

252

Index

Flötner, Peter 68, 70–71, 71 Fonseca, Miguel da 186 Fontana, Domenico 208, 209, 210–211, 211, 212, 214–216 Formschneider, Hieronymus 66, 68 Fraet, Frans 37 Freher, Paul 73 Fréret, Nicolas 83 Frey, Hans 67 Frisius, Gemma 128 Gasser, Achilles 238 Gelderblom, Oscar 152 Gerla, Hanns 67 Gheeraerts, Marcus 40–41 Ghent 43, 44 Glockendon, Georg 67 Glockendon, Nikolaus 66, 68 Golius, Jacob 132, 134–135 Gomes, Damião 188 Göttler, Christine 6 Gouda 46 Gouveia, Diogo de 177 Grabner, Hanns 66 Gregory XIII, Pope 206–207, 213 Gretser, Jakob 241 Gronovius, Johan Frederik 138 Gueroult, Guillaume 91 Guerra, Giovanni 208 Gütt, Helfrich 235 Haarlem 46, 47 The Hague 108–109, 136, 138 Haintzel, Johann Baptist 238 Harris, Steven 126, 130 Hartog, François 90 Hauberat, Sieur 82–83 Heere, Lucas d’ 43–44, 47, 48, 49 Herwart, Johann Heinrich 238 Heuer, Christopher 43 Heyns, Peter 46–47 Heyns, Zacharias 46–47, 48 Hippocrates 110, 113 Hirschvogel, Augustin 70 Hoefnagel, Joris 43 Hof van Aken 130–131 Hof van Liere 131 Hoffmann, Jacob 67, 68 Hofquartierbücher 227, 228–229, 228, 234 Hogenberg, Franz 10, 177 Homem, António 186 Hondius, Jodocus 44 Hooft, Peter Corneliszoon 47 Hooftman, Gillis 129, 130

Houtman, Frederik de 134 Huydecoper, Joan 135 Huyssens, Pieter 131 Imhoff, Johannes 72–73 Isabella, of Austria 44–45 Jalliot, Jean-Baptiste-Michel Renou de Chauvigné dit 92 Jamnitzer, Wenzel 67–68 Jasanoff, Sheila 79 Jesuits: teachings 131; see also Society of Jesus João III, king of Portugal 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 Jode, Cornelis de 128 Johanneau, Eloi 88 Jouvin de Rochefort, Albert 91 Khlesl, Melchior 236 Kraft, Adam 67, 69 Kremer, Richard 63 La Barre, Louis-François-Joseph de 84, 87 la Court, Pieter de 106–107 La Mare, Nicolas de 85, 91–92, 93 la Perrière, Guillaume de 37 Labienus, Titus 87 Labwolf, Pancraz 68 Laet, Hans de 38 Lafrery, Antoine 202 Lambeck, Peter 236–237 Lanciani, Rodolfo 199 Landi, Ottavio 227 Langlois, Simon-François 87 Latini, Latino 215 Le Sage 92 Lebeuf, Jean 87 Leclerc, Jean 91 Leeghwater, Jan Andriaansz 106 Leiden 46, 49, 105, 107; book printing 133, 138–140; longdistance corporations 15, 126–148; theatrum anatomicum 36, 45–46, 46, 49; urban odors 14–15, 101–125 Lelong, Jacques 85 Leo X, Pope 206 Leroy, Pierre 85 Lessius, Leonardus 132 Leuven 129, 131, 132 Ligorio, Pirro 203 Lindenast, Sebastian 65, 67

Index

Lisbon 174, 175, 177, 178–179, 180–181, 184, 187, 188; Casa da ìndia 174, 178; House of Trade 174 Lobelius, Mathias 128, 129, 130 Lobineau, Guy Alexis Dom 83–84, 92 Lomellini, Ignazio 241 London 1, 9, 10, 34, 39–40, 43, 174; Royal Society of London 9 Lutetia: map publishing 91–94; see also Paris Margócsy, Dániel 14, 16, 19, 149–170 Mariz, António de 179 Marnef, Guido 137 Marr, Alexander 63 Martin, Dom Jacques 84–85, 89–90 Martin, Henri-Jean 5 Martin V, Pope 199 Martini, Martino 132–133 Mascarenhas, Fernão 181 Maslitzer, Hanns 66 Matthias, Emperor 17, 225, 236 Maximilian I, Emperor 63 Maximilian II, Emperor 17, 223–224, 227, 229–230, 232 Mendoça, Afonso Furtado de 181 Menses, Francisco de 186 Mercati, Michele 210, 211–214, 215, 216 Merton, Robert K. 10 Meskens, Ad 131 Meurer, Susanne 64 Meyboom, Marcus 110 Meyer, Jacob 108 Minorite Monastery 229, 230, 233 Moithey, Maurille-Antoine 93 Molino, Paola 16, 17, 19–20, 223–249 Montaigne, Michel de 207–208 Monteiro, Diogo 187 Montfaucon, Bernard de 83, 89, 93 Moretus family 130, 131, 132–133 Moretus, Jan 47 Mungello, David 133 Münster, Sebastian 91, 224 Murphy, Hannah 12, 13, 58–78 Nagel, Alexander 72 Nagel, Pieter 40 Naples 9 Nebbia, Cesare 208 Nederduytsche Academie 19, 35–36, 46–49 Needham, Joseph 11 Neudörffer, Johann 13, 58–61, 63–73, 74n29; linguistics 69–70, 71 Nieuhof, Johan 114

253

Noah 149–150, 161, 164–165 Nunes, Pedro 174, 179, 191n43 Nuremberg 13, 58–78, 62 Ortelius, Abraham 10, 34, 35, 41–43, 42, 47, 48, 51n54, 128, 129, 130 Osorio, Fernandes 180 Padua 45, 178, 184 Paludanus, Bernardus 134 Paris 1, 9, 13–14, 79–98; Hotel de Ville de Paris 83–84, 85–87; Notre-Dame 80, 84; Palais des Thermes 93; Roman administration, Paris 79, 87, 88 Paul III, Pope 126, 206 Penz, Georg 68, 70 Pepys, Samuel 163 Petcu, Elizabeth 73 Peter the Great, Czar 163–164, 164 Peters, Marion 153 Petreius, Johann 67 Philip III 178, 185 Philippe Augustus 85, 92, 93 Pinard, Ugo 202 Pitterich, Augustin 236 Pius V, Pope 213 Plantijn, Christoffel 10, 39, 128, 129, 130, 133 Pleydenwurff, Wilhelm 62 Pliny the Elder 214 Poncet de la Grave, Guillaume 88 Postel, Guillaume 224 Prague 17 Preiner, Siegfried 240 Proclus 184 Püdler, Wolfgang 234–236 Pullmann, Jacob 69–70 Raj, Kapil 127 Ranaldi, Federico 208 Raphelengius, Franciscus 128–129, 133, 134 Robertson, John 80 Roche, Daniel 79, 91, 93 Rodrigues, Simão 177 Romano, Antonella 1–30, 197–222 Rome 16, 17–18, 58, 197–216; map 204, 205; map publishing 204, 205; obelisk 18, 199–200, 205–216 Römer, Georg 58, 59, 64 Rossa, Walter 175 Royer, Jean Théodore 138–139 Rudolf II, Emperor 17, 224, 227, 232, 233, 239–240

254

Index

Rumpf, Wolfgang 235 Ryff, Walter 67

Tron, Vincenzo 227 Trudaine, Daniel-Charles 83–84

Sachs, Hans 66 Sacrobosco, Joannes de 181 Sambucus, Johannes 232 Sauval, Henri 83 Sborovius, Christophorus 235 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 134, 137 Schenk, Pieter 154 Schilder, Günter 134 Schmidt, Benjamin 138 Schmidt, Caspar 67 Schnapp, Alain 80, 93 Schouwburg 48 Sebõk, Marcell 235 Serlio, Sebastiano 41 Seville 174, 180, 188; Casa de la Contratación 174, 180; House of Trade 174, 180 Siebenbürger, Barbara 233 Siebenbürger, Thomas 233, 234 Silvius, Willem 36 Sixtus V, Pope 18, 199, 200, 206, 207–212, 214–216 Smith, Jeffrey Chipps 62 Smith, Pamela 13, 60, 70, 126 Society of Jesus 15, 16, 126, 130–133, 137, 140, 184, 188, 224, 230–231; Conimbricenses 179, 184; Portugal 176–178, 179, 180–181, 184 Soliman I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire 229 Sotomaior, Luis de 187–188 Springinklee, Hanns 67 Stabius, Johann 63 States of Holland 105–106, 108, 110, 134 Stevin, Simon 47 Stoss, Veit 67 Strada, Jacopo 229, 232 Strada, Ottavio 232 Suttinger, Daniel 228–229, 230 Sweet, Rosemary 80

Ungelter, Ursula 233 Ursenbech 235

Tanner, Georg 235 Tempesta, Antonio 202 Tengnagel, Sebastian 17, 226, 229, 233, 236, 237, 239–242 Terrasson, Antoine 88 Theophrastus 213 Tiberius, Emperor 80, 87 Trigger, Bruce 94 Triumphal Arch 63, 68, 71

Vallée, Léon 91 van Aelst, Nicolaus 206 van Aelst, Pieter Coecke 41 van Beverwijck, Johan 109 van Bruaene, Anne-Laure 12–13, 19, 33–57 van Campen, Jacob 48 van Coudenberghe, Pieter 129 Van Damme, Stéphane 12, 13–14, 79–98, 217n17 van der Loe, Jan 129 van der Noot, Jan van der 39–41, 42, 43 van der Vorm, Petrus 136, 140 van Diemen, Antony 114 van Diemerbroeck, Isbrand 109 van Ghistele, Cornelis 36 Van Gravesande, Arent 107 van Groeningen, Gerard 39, 40 van Haecht, Willem 36 van Heemskerck, Maerten 202, 204 van Hoboken, Jan 129 van Hout, Jan 103–104, 118n17 Van Imhoff, Gustaaf Willem 114 Van Keulen family 138 van Linschoten, Jan Huygen 113 van Mander, Karel 47 van Merwen, Simon Franszoon 104 van Meteren, Emanuel 44 van Paemel, Geert 129, 131, 134 van Swanenburgh, Willem 46 Vasari, Giorgio 58–59, 73 Vatican 205, 211–212; Garden 213; Library 208–209, 210–211, 214–215; Metallotheca 213–214, 215; obelisk 200, 203–204, 209–213, 211, 214 Vecchietti brothers 241 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagni (VOC) see Dutch East-India Company (VOC) Verstegan, Richard 44 Vienna 16, 17, 19–20, 223–249, 224; bird’s-eye view 224; city plan 228–229, 228, 229, 230; Collegium Trilingue 232; Hofburg 224, 227, 229, 230, 236; Hofquartierung 233; library 224, 225–242, 229; map publishing 228–229, 228, 229, 230; Münzhof 227; Neugebäude 229–230

Index

Vinkeles, Reinier 139 Vischer, Peter 67 Vivès, Juan Luis 16, 176, 178 Volckamer, Endres 66 von Dietrichstein, Adam 227 von Gmunden, Johannes 231 von Harrach, Freiherr Karl 236 von Huber, Joseph Daniel 224 von Liechtenstein, Karl 240 von Mander, Karel 73 von Peurbach, Georg 183 von Puchov, Zikmund 224 von Roggendorf, Hans Wilhelm 234 von Sandrart, Joachim 58 von Schönkirchen, Joachim 234 von Stotzingen, Ruprecht 238 Vossius, Gerard 135 Vossius, Isaac 135 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 43–44, 48, 49 Waak, Cornelis 138 Waghenaer, Lucas Jansz 133, 134 Wallerstein, Immanuel 173, 189n7

Weber, Max 10 Weisskopf, Wolf 67, 68 Werners, Hannsen 68 West-India Company (WIC) 15, 126, 136, 138, 140–141; wharves 151 Wildeman, Diederick 163 Will, Georg Andreas 73 Wiltens, Kasper 136 Witsen, Nicolaes 14, 16, 19, 149–170, 154; views 155–156 Wohlgemut, Michael 62 Wolmuet, Bonifaz 228, 229 Woods, Christopher 72 Wrangel, Carl Gustaf 163 Xavier, Francis 177 Zasius, Johannes Ulrich 227 Zeidler, Franciscus 235 Zilsel, Edgar 5 Zwinger, Theodor 33, 43

255