Medieval or Early Modern : The Value of a Traditional Historical Division [1 ed.] 9781443879248, 9781443874519

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Medieval or Early Modern

Medieval or Early Modern The Value of a Traditional Historical Division Edited by

Ronald Hutton

Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional Historical Division Edited by Ronald Hutton This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Ronald Hutton and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7451-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7451-9

CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction Ronald Hutton Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 10 From Medieval to Early Modern: The British Isles in Transition? Steven G. Ellis Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 29 The British Isles in Transition: A View from the Other Side Ronald Hutton Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 42 1492 Revisited Evan T. Jones Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 54 Problems of Periodization: The Mediterranean and Other Maritime Spaces David Abulafia Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 70 Climate Change, Big Data and the Medieval and Early Modern Poul Holm Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 85 In the Beginning was Migration… Borders and Transitions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Martial Staub Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 104 The Medieval Modernity of Cervantes and Shakespeare Fernando Cervantes

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Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 125 “Medieval” and “Renaissance”: The Problem of Events, their Records and their Players Pamela King Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 146 Time and the Image: Art at an Epochal Threshold Peter Dent Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 175 “Renaissance” and “Reformation” Elided: The Deficiencies of “Early Modern” Musicology David Allinson Contributors ............................................................................................. 188

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION RONALD HUTTON

Human beings seem naturally to divide past time into different periods. The inhabitants of long-enduring monarchical states like those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, reckoned those periods in terms of royal dynasties. Some ancient Greeks spoke of a succession of ages, Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron, leading up to the present. Their Hebrew neighbours were conscious that the time of their kings had been qualitatively different from the preceding time of judges, and that both were supposed to have been preceded by the archaic period of Genesis, divided from them by the dramatic collective experiences of the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan. Christians have, naturally enough, divided the whole of the human story into two parts separated by the coming of their Messiah, while Muslims have made a similar partition hinged on the appearance of their prophet. The tendency of historians to cut up their subject into different chronological slices, with identifying labels, is therefore not merely an attempt to separate out their job into manageable portions. It is also simply what our species does, when confronted with the past.1 It should be no surprise, therefore, that European historians have made their own customary division of it, into three: the ancient, the modern and the bit in between, logically called the Middle Ages. Nor should it be any less predictable that, as modernity has progressed, and so lengthened, it has become convenient to many to divide it in turn, speaking of an early modernity which preceded and prepared the world which seems relatively 1 For the specific nature and problems of periodization as used by historians, see William A. Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History’, Journal of World History, iii (1992), 13-53; Lawrence L. Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization (New York, 1996); and Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), pp. 114-40.

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familiar, and recent, to those living today. A final development which is arguably just as natural is that this particular chopping up of time, customary and Eurocentric as it is, should have become questioned by some historians in the past couple of decades. Such a development may be ascribed to a convergence of two different phenomena: the evolution of multi-ethnic, multi-faith societies in Western nations, as part of a broader globalization of human affairs, and the great expansion of professional scholarship carried out within universities in a high-pressure, competitive atmosphere. Together, these processes have induced a major questioning of traditional scholarly assumptions, categories and structures of thought, and periodization has been submitted to such scrutiny along with so much else. This collection of essays is designed to take stock of the current state of opinion with regard to one particular chronological boundary, that between the medieval and early modern periods. It resulted spontaneously from a symposium held at Bristol University in February 2013 by the Medieval and Early Modern Cluster of historians working at that institution, who gathered some distinguished guests to join them in debating the current utility of that division. The success and excitement of the day produced a proposal to publish the proceedings, with contributions from another friend, and the present work is the product of that undertaking. It is designed to contribute to, and stimulate further, the ongoing debate among professionals over the nature of historical periodization, and that of the centuries between 1300 and 1800 in particular. It is also, however, very much aimed at teachers and students in schools and universities, to acquaint them with the issues of that debate as they currently seem to stand, and enable them to form their own judgements. That is why, for example, one contributor can make a definition of the relationship between the thought of Shakespeare and Cervantes with that of the Cartesian and Ockhamite schools which should interest fellow experts, while taking care to explain what Cartesianism, and who William of Ockham, was. The apportioning of time considered in it took place in very different historical contexts, because while the concept of the medieval (and therefore of the modern) has been current for about half a millennium, that of the early modern has been commonly adopted for only about forty years; indeed, it had hardly become fashionable before such divisions of the past were called into question. By definition, the Middle Ages could only be first defined by closing off their terminal boundary, and this exercise represented, like so many traditional labels in history, an advertising campaign which was linked to political abuse. The campaign

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was launched by a group of fifteenth-century Italians, mostly from Florence, who were bent on recovering all that could be located of the knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Using this, they aimed to achieve a rebirth, in French a ‘Renaissance’, of learning and arts. The accompanying boast was that by uniting ancient knowledge with that which had been achieved since, they were producing a uniquely well informed and capable society. This claim automatically divided European history into three periods. With equally automatic effect, the exercise characterized the middle period as inferior to the succeeding one which these writers and artists were seeking to launch and maintain, and perhaps even to the ancient one. This attitude was taken up and greatly enhanced by liberal thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They made the term ‘medieval’ synonymous with ‘backward’, ‘ignorant’, ‘obscurantist’ and ‘bigoted’, and used it as a stick with which to beat conservative forces in their own time. Counter-offensives were launched against them by conservatives, who represented the Middle Ages as a time of religious faith, beautiful architecture and social order. Some radicals also turned the tables, by making the Reformation and Counter-Reformation the true bringers of bigotry and repression and representing the medieval period as a time of social harmony and merriment: in one famous national incarnation, of ‘Merry England’.2 On the whole, it seems to have been the negative connotations which have remained strongest in popular culture, lasting right down to Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Pulp Fiction, in which an American gangster threatens somebody that he will ‘git medieval on your ass’.3 A large part of the problem posed by the traditional periodization into ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ therefore lies not in the division made in itself but in the value judgements that have been attached to it, reflecting the political and cultural tensions of previous centuries. By contrast, the expression ‘early modern’ has made relatively little impact on the popular imagination, and is far more of a scholarly construct. It is also, as said, a 2

George Stuart Gordon, Medium Aevum and the Middle Age (Oxford, 1925); Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford, 1955), 54-63; Nathan. Edelman, The Eye of the Beholder , ed. by Jules Brody (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 58-85; Paolo Delogu, An Introduction to Medieval History, trans. By Matthew Moran (London, 2002); and Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 7-41, all review aspects of the origins and uses of the concept of the Middle Ages, with good bibliographies. 3 I am grateful to my former Bristol colleague, Marcus Bull, for drawing my attention to this cinematic moment, which features in his Thinking Medieval on p. 11.

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recent one. Phil Withington has proved that it was originally coined by a Cambridge don called William Johnson, in 1869, and used again by a scatter of authors, mainly economic historians, in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1976, however, it was still so unfamiliar that, when Keith Thomas put it into the title of a lecture, his chairman, Sir Isaiah Berlin, claimed not to have heard it before. It is significant that Thomas was probably the pre-eminent representative of a new wave of cultural historians, because it was British and North American practitioners of social and cultural history who were to adopt it wholesale, followed by experts in literature and art.4 Hitherto political historians had dated their work according to a particular century, or by national dynasties (such as Tudor or Stuart), while historians of art preferred labels like ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Baroque’, and those of religion spoke of ‘Reformation’ or ‘CounterReformation’. None of these naming strategies was really appropriate for social or economic history, or cultural history which extended beyond elite art or major religious movements. The term ‘early modern’, by contrast, fitted the bill for those subject areas, and after its widespread appearance in them leaked into other areas of writing. It remained, however, largely an Anglo-American phenomenon.5 These chronological divisions succeeded because they provided a convenient shorthand to sum up particular epochs that did seem to possess particular characteristics. ‘The Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ served to label a period of European history dominated by cultural and political attitudes heavily overshadowed by a defunct or transformed Roman Empire; of a Christian Church led by the Pope and based on Latin literacy and a mixture of secular and religious clergy; of a direct knowledge of other parts of the world mostly limited to the further shores of the Mediterranean; of a landed aristocracy centred on the figure of the armoured knight; and of texts handwritten by scribes on parchment and vellum. ‘Early modern’ served to emphasise a succeeding transitional period in Europe between the medieval and truly modern, in which much of the Roman Catholic Church shattered into a complex of reformed Christian denominations, ultimately inducing a more tolerant attitude to differing religious opinion; noble retainers were replaced by professional armies as the military resources of states, supported by bureaucracies and regular taxation; famine and plague were banished from most of the continent; Europeans spread out across most of the globe to trade, conquer 4

Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 1-70, and sources cited there. 5 Notable early appearances were in Lawrence Stone, Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis Keith Wrightson and J. A. Sharpe.

Introduction

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and settle; and a general fear of magic and witchcraft, based on a literal belief in their efficacy, was replaced by an official disbelief in both; and so forth. There was also a pleasing chronological symmetry to the design. The period generally regarded as medieval lasted roughly a thousand years, and was preceded by an ancient one which was only slightly longer: whatever cultural riches archaeologists keep revealing in Europe’s long prehistory, history itself still begins in the continent (at its south-eastern extremity) around 700 BC, as it has always done. By comparison, the modern period is much shorter, at around half a millennium, but in that respect, of course, it has time on its side, and its faster pace of change has done much to make up for its comparative brevity. Much of the utility of the labels depended on a flexibility and adaptability provided by their very lack of precision, coherence and uniformity. Each one swept over a tremendous range of times, places, societies, cultures, economies and mentalities. The boundaries of each depended heavily on the nationality, date and preoccupations of the historians who drew them, and there accordingly could be no general agreement on where they should be drawn. In the years around 1990, the end of the early modern period was located by university courses and textbooks at various points between 1650 and 1830, with more or less equal validity to each according to the criteria applied. As for the opening of the medieval, that was similarly contingent. For the study of Greekspeaking communities on the western coast of Asia Minor, for example, such a boundary is more or less irrelevant: although transformed dramatically in culture, religion and political allegiance as centuries passed, they experienced no really sudden and major fractures in their history between their settlement in the early first millennium BC and their expulsion by the Turks in the 1920s. For the history of Britain, on the other hand, the inception of the Middle Ages is clear and dramatic. In the decade following AD 407, the island passed from a (Roman) world which had a genuine history and easily dated archaeological material into one with virtually no reliable political history at all, and in which archaeological remains have not till now been securely dated within about a century. There it remained for almost two hundred years. In Ireland the onset of the medieval is equally unmistakable, but for precisely the opposite reason: that in exactly the same period in which Britain plunged out of history, the Irish emerged into it. Christianity and literacy arrived amongst them, accompanied by a major and enduring overhaul of social and political structures and overseas relationships. This book is dedicated in part to determining whether the other end of the Middle Ages, as

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Chapter One

traditionally and vaguely defined, throws up such clear, and regionally specific, effects. During the second half of the twentieth century, some academic historians became increasingly uncomfortable with, or irritated by, the customary periodization.6 Its lack of precision, and its blanket coverage of such different kinds of community extending over such long spans of time, in which so much changed, seem to such critics to be unbecoming of a professional discipline. The moral baggage with which it was laden, at least in popular culture, added a further element of inconvenience. Even the newly popular term ‘early modern’, less freighted with popular stereotypes than ‘medieval’, can seem implicitly goal-directed (towards the ‘properly’ modern), and so smuggle in an admiration for progress and for profound change which may deform the manner in which the past is studied. The growing influence of social, economic and cultural history has undermined the fashion for divisions by precise dates, emphasizing as it does that major discontinuities in human affairs, involving multiple aspects of life, do not happen in a single year. Furthermore, the accelerating progress of globalization, and the development of multiethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural societies in the West, have made world history an ever more important genre. The categories of medieval and early modern, based firmly on the European experience, may possess little relevance to that. At the least, historians of the period between 1400 and 1600 need now to ask explicitly how much is revealed, and how much concealed, by the retention of these divisions, and whether there is any real significance in marking a boundary between what is supposed to be medieval, and what is supposed to be (early) modern? If some agree that there is, then they next need to debate when and where such a boundary should be placed, in time and space. This collection provides many of the materials for such a debate, and itself conducts one implicitly, in that the contributors each consider the relevance of the customary periodization to their own interests, preoccupations and disciplinary and sub-disciplinary framework. A pattern, and something of a provisional conclusion, emerge in the course of this process. Steven Ellis and I hope to have demonstrated that it is 6

Most of the works at ns.1 and 2 are relevant here. See also Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 128-36; Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity (New York, 1981); Timothy Reuter, ‘Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?’, Medieval History Journal, 1 (1998), pp. 25-45; and Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Debating the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1998); Randolph Starn, ‘The Early Modern Muddle’, Journal of Early Modern History, vi (2002), pp. 296-307.

Introduction

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possible to consider the same geographical area at the same time (the British Isles in the sixteenth century) with regard to this question, and disagree completely with equal legitimacy on both sides. The difference is a product of distinct preoccupations and perspectives. One of Steven’s many cogent arguments is that a boundary between the medieval and early modern must be located in different nations at different points, and for many it is simply not relevant at all. Evan Jones, however, taking a global viewpoint, concludes that one of the most commonly perceived markers of the onset of the early modern, the eruption of Europeans across the oceans of the world, permanently changed world history in general. His is indeed perhaps the most confident restatement of the customary division. David Abulafia, concerned with the economic history of the Mediterranean and its relationship with other seas, also finds the European age of maritime discovery to make a very significant break with the past; and one which follows other such dividing lines in Mediterranean history which match up fairly well to other traditional boundaries between periods. On the other hand, there are also divisions in his historical narrative which occur within those periods; and it is for readers to determine whether these disrupt the familiar succession of ages after all. Poul Holm, moreover, as a historian of global climate, finds that major climate changes no longer match up to the traditional framework of periods, and calls for the scrapping of that framework within his sub-discipline. However, Martial Staub, dealing with another clearly very topical branch of history, that of migration, thinks – somewhat uneasily – that it might still have relevance to that, being in his elegant formulation ‘comfortable but uncanny’. The issues remain as subjective as the focus shifts to cultural history: and this is the more significant is that the boundary between medieval and modern, early or not, first emerged in this sphere, defined originally, as said, as part of the movement which finally became known in the nineteenth century as the Renaissance. Fernando Cervantes makes a very effective job of attacking the prevailing tendency to view the two greatest authors of the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare and his own namesake Miguel de Cervantes, as precursors of a modern understanding of the world. He demonstrates that in key respects they represented a continuation of definitively medieval attitudes. which lay at the heart of their writing. What readers may care to consider is the still open question of whether the context and application of those attitudes had altered significantly: in other words whether the great trauma of the Reformation, shattering the essential unity of Western Christianity, and the disorientation provided by the discovery of so many new worlds overseas, for which traditional teachings had not made provision, had caused them

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Chapter One

to be used in new ways and for new problems. If the answer to that problem is affirmative, then it may be asked in turn whether the novelty of context is sufficient to mark the changing of an age. Pamela King’s chapter neatly complements Fernando’s by looking at parallel changes in English drama, which according to established tradition ushered in a definitive transition to modernity: ‘benchmarking the renaissance moment’ when the medieval theatrical aesthetic gave way to a more sophisticated one, and Hamlet displaced Herod. Perhaps inevitably, she finds that things were more complex than that, for there was a paradigm shift in aesthetics, linked to a cultural rupture brought about by the Reformation, but both produced far from coherent and monolithic responses. ‘Medieval’ pageants, she shows, could be transformed into a commentary on the early modern condition: but to acknowledge that is to reaffirm the existence of a distinctively early modern condition. Were Fernando’s ‘medieval’ sixteenth-century literary giants likewise making a commentary on a new age? Most readers may agree with Pam that in cultural, as in economic and social history, it is pointless to seek ‘canyons’ opening at particular dates to separate periods, but she still allows for a shift in ‘tectonic plates’ to form epochs. The concept of a ‘renaissance moment’ (with or without a capital ‘R’) is, of course, one derived above all from the history of art, and this discipline is represented in the collection by Peter Dent. He immediately begins by confronting the paradox of his subject: that art history has always carved up the past according to changes in style, but that style itself pertains to a timeless sphere. Add to this the emergence of a global history of art which challenges European periodization, even while that periodization is very much alive in the Western world, and he is clearly facing some very complex issues indeed. He picks his way through them by suggesting that the traditional stylistic time-lines can only be maintained with a narrow spatial focus, but that by using other markers, such as linear perspective or the development of art as a project with its own body of theory and of the artist as a distinct profession, the longaccepted boundary at the end of the medieval still has some validity. To say this, he makes clear, is to suggest a diversity of options, each with its own limitations, and then, in a pair of exciting case studies, he shows how visual images can be used actively to manage time itself. Finally we come to the history of music, and the new discipline of musicology, which has particular significance for the collection in that, as David Allinson shows, it has never embraced the label of ‘early modern’. Instead it has borrowed the older terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ from art history. David adroitly exposes the problems of using those, in the manner in which they

Introduction

9

have been deployed hitherto, and concludes tentatively that in view of these it might actually be useful for the term ‘early modern’ to be adopted for his field because of the new perspectives that it would open. Debates, by their very nature, presuppose differences of opinion, and a range of those are demonstrated here; and yet some kind of coherent conclusion does seem to emerge. The import of this collection is clearly that to retain or impose the traditional distinction between the medieval and early modern in all aspects of the study of history – and even of European history - is out of the question. It should be just as obvious, however, that the distinction retains considerable vigour and utility in some branches of history, and so it is equally futile to suggest that it now be forced into retirement as a general measure. Even within the same sort of history-writing, concerning the same time and the same area, it is possible to find practitioners who find it helpful and others, with equal validity, who do not. Periodization of this sort may increasingly be regarded as a resource, to be used or not according to the area of specialization, subject of study, and indeed personal inclination, of the individual historian. Such a conclusion, whether or not it possesses any intrinsic moral or practical merit, has the virtue of describing a state of affairs which patently already exists.

CHAPTER TWO FROM MEDIEVAL TO EARLY MODERN: THE BRITISH ISLES IN TRANSITION? STEVEN G. ELLIS

The debate about the medieval/early modern divide reflects a perception, I think, that there are particular historical developments in each national historiography – and perhaps by extension in historiography more generally – which may be classified as quintessentially medieval or as characteristically early modern. There is also at least some commonality between the different national historiographies in regard to this perception. It is reflected, for instance, in the large-scale, pan-European collaborative projects which have dominated European history over the past twenty-five years. My earliest experience of these was the European Science Foundation’s 1987 project on ‘The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th-18th Centuries’, which was international and interdisciplinary, with over a hundred scholars from eighteen countries participating, and which ran to 1992.1 The chosen dates reflected a perceived consensus that 13thcentury Europe was everywhere still medieval and that 18th-century Europe had not yet reached modernity; and so the project deliberately grouped together ‘medievalists and early modernists’, as the participating 1 Published as The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th-18th Centuries, eds. Wim Blockmans and Jean-Philippe Genet (European Science Foundation; 7 vols., Oxford, 1997). My contributions were: (with Peter Blickle and Eva Østerberg) ‘The Commons and the State: Representation, Influence and the Legislative Process’ in Peter Blickle (ed.), The Origins of the Modern State in Europe. Vol 5: Representation, Resistance and Community. (Oxford, 1997), pp 115-153; ‘Communalism: comment from a British perspective’ ibid., pp 54-64. French edition: (with Peter Blickle and Eva Østerberg) ‘Les Roturiers et l’État: Représentation, Influence et Procédure Législative’ in Peter Blickle (ed.), Les Origines de l’État Moderne en Europe: Résistance, représentation et communauté (Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, pp 161-214 ; ‘Autonomie des Communautés: commentaire dans une perspective britannique’ ibid., pp 71-84.

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scholars were described,2 with the aim of identifying continuities and disjunctions in the study of the ancien régime. In practice, it was hampered by national differences over language, interpretation and explanation, but it was in this respect a significant advance on another collaborative project in which I was involved at the time, and which eventually produced a slim volume on what were described as Europe’s ‘internal peripheries’.3 This latter project, based on a symposium in Hannover in 1988, generated a lot of papers by historians based in Socialist countries and, as I recall, discussed the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the inevitable triumph of Socialism in 1945; but after the collapse of Socialism, most of these papers were either withdrawn or rewritten.4 My suspicion, therefore, is that attempts during the Cold War to define more precisely what was medieval and what was early modern across Europe would probably have foundered on ideological differences surrounding a categorizing of ‘feudal’ as ‘medieval’, and ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’ as ‘early modern’, with ‘real existing socialism’ still to come. Even so, I do think there is mileage in following this European state formation model concerning the differences between medieval and early modern phases of state formation. I have been struck in particular by the arguments of the Danish scholar, Harald Gustafsson, who argued in 1998 that the modern unitary state did not ‘spring out of the collapse of a feudal system in the late Middle Ages’, but rather that, between the feudal condominium and the modern unitary state, the early modern conglomerate state stood in an intermediate position.5 Looking at what was typical of state formation throughout Europe as a whole does, I think, offer us a perspective on the historical transformation of the British Isles at this time, if we set aside the usual arguments about English exceptionalism. Thus, in a British context, the feudal condominium of the English crown constituted a medieval phase of state formation whereby, alongside the peripheral territories in Wales, Ireland, and the English far north, the 2

‘General Editors’ Preface’ in Peter Blickle (ed.), The Origins of the Modern State in Europe. Vol 5: Representation, Resistance and Community (Oxford, 1997), p. vii. 3 Hans Heinrich Nolte (ed.), Internal peripheries in European History (Göttingen, 1991). 4 The editor’s introduction offers a brief outline of some other papers presented at the symposium but not included in the volume: Nolte (ed.), Internal peripheries, pp 2-3. 5 Harald Gustafsson, ‘The conglomerate state: a perspective on state formation in early modern Europe’ in Scandinavian Journal of History, xxii (2002), pp 189-213 (quotation, p. 189).

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English monarchy also ruled until c.1450 significant territories in France (Normandy, Gascony, Calais) and so faced the associated problems of organizing the defence of these continental territories with their long landed frontiers. Following their loss, however, a new early modern phase of centralization began in the mid-1530s with the Tudor administrative reforms in Ireland, Wales, and the English north, and then the dynastic union with Scotland in 1603. So the resultant early modern British multiple monarchy, with its three kingdoms, was geographically quite distinct from the later medieval Anglo-French empire, with its diverse patchwork of lordships, duchies, towns, and kingdoms, with five or six separate blocs of territory separated by land or sea, and with many marches to patrol and defence. The centre of gravity of the British multiple monarchy was also further north and west, and its territories were much more compact – three centralized kingdoms and several islands but without the military frontiers.6 I think that looking at state formation in the British Isles in terms of a transformation from medieval feudal condominium to early modern multiple monarchy thus gives us a convenient number of pegs on which to hang individual aspects of this transition across a number of fields. Quite apart from the particular pattern of state formation with an emphasis on integration and centralization, we may mention other associated developments which can be seen as inaugurating the early modern period in both Britain and Ireland. In the realm of intellectual ideas, for instance, we think of the Renaissance and humanism. We might also classify as early modern overseas expansion and colonization which was sparked by demographic growth in Europe. Economically, we would probably also include, as a marker of modernity, inflation – the 16th-century European price rise – also fuelled by demographic growth. And in religious terms, the Reformation marked a clear watershed. Based on these markers of modernity, Irish historians have in more recent years generally chosen the year 1534 as the somewhat arbitrary watershed date dividing medieval from early modern; and I wouldn’t disagree.7 The developments surrounding the Kildare rebellion, or the 6

This line of argument is developed in S.G. Ellis, ‘From dual monarchy to multiple kingdoms: unions and the English state, 1422-1607’ in Allan Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart kingdoms in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 2002), pp 37-48. 7 This is a relatively recent development, reflecting a decision by the editors of The New History of Ireland. See Art Cosgrove (ed.), A new history of Ireland. II Medieval Ireland 1169-1534 (Oxford, 1987); T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, and F.J. Byrne (eds.), A new history of Ireland. III Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691

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Revolt of Silken Thomas, can mostly be tied to these traditional markers – the start of the Reformation, increased centralization with the appointment of English-born governors and a small standing garrison in place of the traditional ruling magnate, the use of the printing press, and in the English Pale at least indications of growing population and inflation. But for Gaelic Ireland, we might need to look at a rather later date for the impact of modernity – starting with surrender and regrant from 1541, for instance.8 If at this point I can put on my English historical hat, however, I would say that 1534 is certainly too late as a watershed date. I would want to include as early modern the revival of crown government after the Wars of the Roses, and that would take us back at least into the 1490s (in Ireland we might also look at the governorship of Sir Edward Poynings (1494-95) in that context).9 In England, there might still be some debate about whether the first Tudor king is medieval or early modern, but with Henry VIII we (Oxford, 1976). The Helicon History of Ireland, planned later but published around the same time, was slightly more ambiguous about periodization: Art Cosgrove (ed.), Late medieval Ireland, 1370-1541 (Dublin, 1981); Nicholas Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland 1534-1660 (Dublin, 1987). See also R.W. Dudley Edwards and Mary O’Dowd, Sources for early modern Irish history 15341641 (Cambridge, 1985). Before this, however, a wide range of dates had been suggested: 1495 (A.J. Otway-Ruthven, A history of medieval Ireland (London, 1968)); 1513 (Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland from 1086 to 1513 (2nd ed., London, 1938); James Lydon, Ireland in the later middle ages (Dublin, 1973)); c.1515 (Philip Wilson, The beginning of modern Ireland (London, 1912)); 1494-1541 (James Lydon, The lordship of Ireland in the middle ages (Dublin, 1972)). 8 The standard survey, K.W. Nicholls, Gaelic and gaelicised Ireland in the middle ages (Dublin, 1972; revised ed., Dublin, 2003), extends into the late 16th century. 9 English historians have usually been more cautious about identifying a specific date as the point of transition from medieval to early modern. An exception is M.H. Keen, England in the later middle ages (London, 1973) which concludes with the comment that in political terms 1485 was ‘a useful dividing line’, and that the experience of an adult living ‘under Henry VII was different in quality from that of a man who reached maturity in 1450 or 1460’ (p. 513). A common response has been to sidestep the problem by labelling the period after the dynasty: thus, early modern began in the Tudor period, but precisely when is not spelled out. For other examples of surveys in which the title appears to tie the transition to particular dates, see Bertie Wilkinson, The later middle ages in England 12161485 (London, 1977); J.A.F. Thomson, The transformation of medieval England 1370-1529 (London, 1983); Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (Oxford, 2003); Jacqueline Eales, Women in early modern England, 1500-1700 (London, 1998); Joan Thirsk, Food in early modern England: phases, fads, fashions, 1500-1760 (London, 2007).

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are certainly into early modern, and likewise with the leading figures of his reign – his first chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, for instance, or the humanist Sir Thomas More. Inflation and demographic growth were certainly under way by the 1520s, and the Reformation Parliament first met in 1529. I suppose one way of reconciling these differing chronologies of medieval and early modern is to suggest that, within the developing Tudor monarchy, the impact of those changes which we see as early modern is felt earlier and more consistently in the Tudor core territory of lowland England than in a peripheral region like the English Pale in Ireland. And it is felt even later in Gaelic Ireland which only became part of a Tudor kingdom from the 1540s onwards. Some kind of case could also be made for 1534 as a watershed in the other Tudor frontier region, the English far north. There, too, the traditional ruling magnate, Lord Dacre, was replaced in 1534 and crown government was reorganized in the aftermath of another major rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536-7, which also reflected the impact of the Reformation in the region.10 In the far north, however, the impact of Tudor rule had been more consistently felt – not always to the region’s advantage – from at least 1489 onwards.11 Very evidently, English historiography is more influenced than its Irish counterpart by modernization theory, castigating ‘overmighty subjects’ like the Percy earls of Northumberland as backward and feudal and dismissing the liberties and regalities of the English far north as feudal anachronisms.12 Thus, according to John Guy, the punishment in Star Chamber in 1525 of Thomas Lord Dacre ‘marked the end of the age of the medieval robber baron’. Elsewhere, the disciplining of the border surnames is characterized as a Tudor response ‘to a mediaeval problem’.13 In reality, however, the rule and defence of long landed frontiers remained no less a problem for the allegedly modernizing Tudors than it was for 10

S.G. Ellis, Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state (Oxford, 1995) offers a comparative analysis of the English far north and the English Pale in Ireland and identifies the events of 1534 as marking a crisis in both regions. 11 A.J. Pollard, North-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: lay society, war, and politics 1450-1500 (Oxford, 1990), ch. 15 offers a very positive assessment of Henry Tudor’s interventions. 12 S.G. Ellis, ‘Civilizing Northumberland: representations of Englishness in the Tudor state’ in Journal of Historical Sociology, xii (1999), pp 103-27 offers a critique of the modern literature: see esp. pp 103-8, 121-3. 13 J.A. Guy, The Cardinal’s Court: the impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Hassocks, 1977), p. 123; Ralph Robson, The rise and fall of the English highland clans: Tudor responses to a mediaeval problem (Edinburgh, 1989).

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continental rulers: successive Tudor monarchs manifestly failed in their duty to do justice to and to defend their subjects in these border regions, notwithstanding the depiction of Tudor centralization as modern and progressive. By contrast, for Irish historians Tudor centralization was ‘a bad thing’: it brought about the end of ‘aristocratic home rule’ and the eclipse of ruling magnates like Kildare, although a succession of able earls of Ormond ensured that ‘Butler feudal power’ (so David Edwards describes it) enjoyed an Indian summer in Elizabethan Ireland.14 If we simply use the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ as a kind of shorthand to refer to a range of concepts and developments which are seen as essentially one or the other, then they may well be useful. We need something to describe periods of three or four centuries. But much less helpful is the attempt to look at a relatively short period in terms of a transition from medieval to early modern. It needs to be remembered that the events and developments which are classified in one national historiography as medieval or early modern may find no echo in another. Periodization is not fixed: it varies quite considerably from one national historiography to another.15 In Finland, for instance, the middle ages are thought to have begun around 1150, when Finnish pre-history ended; and in Latvia the middle ages soldiered on until around 1800, when modern history began. So ‘medieval’ is a pretty elastic concept. The concept of ‘early modern’ is even more problematic: many national historiographies simply do not use it. A more common periodization is from medieval history to modern history to contemporary history. Granted, in some countries ‘modern history’ covers the same chronological span as ‘early modern’ (storia moderna in Italy covers 1492 to 1789, for instance, before which there is Renaissance history from c.1350 onwards, and following which there is storia contemporanea): but in other countries ‘modern history’ continues until 1945 when ‘contemporary history’ begins. In some 14 Vincent P. Carey, Surviving the Tudors: the ‘wizard’ earl of Kildare and English rule in Ireland, 1537-1586 (Dublin, 2002); David Edwards, The Ormond lordship in County Kilkenny 1515-1642: the rise and fall of Butler feudal power (Dublin, 2003). ‘Aristocratic home rule’ was the description of Edmund Curtis (History of Medieval Ireland, ch. 15), but the later depiction of this period of rule through local magnates as ‘aristocratic autonomy’ or ‘the Kildare ascendancy’ reflects many of the sentiments. 15 The following comments reflect the work on periodization of CLIOHnet, the European History Network, summarized on the Network’s website (www.clioh.net) in the form of a table (http://www.stm.unipi.it/programmasocrates/cliohnet/clioh/table.htm) and a map (http://www.stm.unipi.it/programmasocrates/cliohnet/clioh/table/map.htm ).

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countries, modern or early modern is associated with the Reformation, and not just in western Europe. The concept of an Early Bourgeois Revolution associated with the Peasants War in Germany in 1525 may have collapsed with communism, but in the reunified Germany the Radical Reformation is still linked in some circles to a Revolution of the Common Man which is distinctly early modern.16 And in some eastern European countries, given that there was no Reformation in Orthodox Christianity, there are some very different periodizations. Over the past seven years, I have co-edited with Czech, German, Greek, Icelandic, and Italian historians seven multi-authored volumes on European history. These included in total well over a hundred essays by scholars from most European countries.17 For two of these volumes,18 where the contributors were mainly British/Irish and German, it proved possible to make meaningful use of the concept of ‘early modern’, because there was broad agreement about what this meant in terms of early-modern state formation. For the other volumes, however, it would have been impossible to organize them by period, in terms of medieval or early modern sections, because of the significant discrepancies in regard to usage and meaning in the different national traditions. It is perhaps also not widely known that even the accepted traditions of historical argument vary quite widely from one historiography to the next. By contrast with British ‘nuts and bolts’, the Germans will define their terms and concepts, while the French will proceed by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis after an 16 Cf. Max Steinmetz, ‘Theses on the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, 1476-1535’ in Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (eds.), The German Peasant War 1525 – new viewpoints (London, 1979), pp 9-18; Peter Blickle, ‘The “Peasant War” as the Revolution of the Common Man – Theses’ ibid., pp 19-22; Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: the German Peasants’ War from a new perspective (Baltimore, 1985); Guenter Vogler, Thomas Muentzer (Berlin, 1989). 17 (co-edited, with Guðmundur Halfdánarson and A.K. Isaacs) Citizenship in historical perspective (Pisa, 2006); (co-edited, with Raingard Eßer) Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1850 (Hannover-Laatzen, 2006); (co-edited, with Lud’a Klusáková) Frontiers and identities: exploring the research area (Pisa, 2006); (co-edited, with Lud’a Klusáková) Imagining frontiers: contesting identities (Pisa, 2007); (co-edited, with Raingard Eßer, J.-F. Berdah and Miloš ěezník) Frontiers, regions and nations in Europe (Pisa, 2009); (co-edited, with Iakovos Michailidis) Regional and Transnational History in Europe (Pisa, 2011); (coedited, with Raingard Eßer) Frontiers and border regions in early modern Europe (Hannover, 2013). 18 S.G. Ellis and Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 15001850 (Hannover-Laatzen, 2006); Raingard Eßer and S.G. Ellis (eds.) Frontiers and border regions in early modern Europe (Hannover, 2013).

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arresting (and often untranslatable) opening section which I call the ‘cappuccino effect’. And until relatively recently, all across eastern Europe the purpose of history writing was chiefly to confirm the lessons of history which saw the inevitable rise to higher forms of society culminating in Socialism. So, all in all, it does not help much at all to talk in terms of a medieval/early modern divide because the boundary between the two varies from one national historiography to the next and is in any case selfreferential. In part, the reason for this is that the different national historiographies generally also incorporate what may be described as a ‘national agenda’, that is, a preoccupation with a range of themes and developments which – viewed teleologically – are seen as fundamental to such themes as the rise of the nation, the development of national identity, or the assembly of the national territory. The periodization of developments into medieval, early modern, and modern is unconsciously tied through the ‘national agenda’ to the various phases in the rise of the nation. Thus, the early modern phase commonly focuses on ‘the emergence of the nation state’. In terms of English history, this is usually interpreted as unifying the state by means of administrative centralization and uniformity, including the building of a state church; but in Ireland the focus is more on building the Catholic nation from the medieval two nations in reaction to English colonialism.19 And as was very apparent in the so-called Revisionist Debate, historians of Ireland are frequently suspicious of new approaches which might seem to cut across the ‘national agenda’.20 One example was the reaction to Ute Lotz-Heumann’s application to Ireland of confessionalization – seen in German historiography as an aspect of early modern state formation – implying changes to periodization and a rejection of traditional claims for early modern Ireland’s unique status in defying the principle of cuius regio eius religio.21 More normally, though, it so happens that what we see as medieval or early modern in England and 19

Cf. John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988); A.G.R. Smith, The emergence of a nation state: the commonwealth of England 1529-1660 (2nd ed., London, 1997); R.D. Edwards, Church and state in Tudor Ireland (Dublin, 1935). 20 See esp., Ciaran Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism 1938-1994 (Dublin, 1994). 21 Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2000); Helga Robinson-Hammerstein, ‘The confessionalisation of Ireland? Assessment of a paradigm’ in Irish Historical Studies, xxxii (2000-01), pp 567-78. See also K.S. Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Irish Reformation in European perspective’ in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, lxxxix (1998), pp 268-309.

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Ireland more or less agree and coincide. But that is because the two countries were either part of the one Tudor state, and so shaped by the same events and developments, or in the case of Gaelic Ireland they were closely influenced by events in that state. It is not because there are quintessentially medieval or early modern developments, or a common periodization throughout Europe, much less elsewhere. In the circumstances, perhaps the best I can do to try and make some sense of this question about how helpful or otherwise I find this division between medieval and early modern is to offer some personal reflections on my research and writing in the context of Irish and British historiography more generally. Surveying the 120+ articles and books I have published since 1976, I see that I have used the description ‘medieval’ or ‘early modern’ in the titles of only nine of them, with some slight preference for ‘medieval’ in regard to articles published in Ireland, and a couple of items which include the description ‘early modern’ which were published in continental Europe.22 Far more commonly, though, I make use of ‘Tudor’ as a chronological descriptor, or I simply supply two dates to indicate the chronological span. That, I think, is pretty revealing of 22

‘Taxation and defence in late medieval Ireland: the survival of scutage’ in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, cvii (1977), pp 5-28; ‘Nationalist historiography and the English and Gaelic worlds in the late middle ages’ in Irish Historical Studies, xxv (1986-87), pp 1-18 [reprinted in Ciarán Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994 (Blackrock, 1994), pp 161-80]; ‘Ionadaíocht i bparlaimint na hÉireann ag deireadh na meán-aoise’ [Representation in the Irish parliament in the late middle ages] in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, xci (1991), sect. C, pp 297-302; ‘Racial discrimination in later medieval Ireland’ in Guðmundur Hálfdanarson (ed.), Racial discrimination and ethnicity in European history (Pisa, 2003), pp 21-32 [translation in modern Greek: ‘Phyletikes diakriseis sten Irlandia ton teleutaion chronon tou Mesaiona’ in Guðmundur Hálfdanarson (ed.), Phyletikes Diakriseis sten Europaïke Historia (Epikentro, 2006), pp 53-76]; ‘Religion and identity in early modern Ireland’ in Ausma CimdiƼa (ed.), Religion and political change in Europe: past and present (Pisa, 2003), pp 57-74; ‘Building the nation: patriotism and national identity in early modern Ireland’ in Robert von Friedeburg (ed.), ‘Patria’ und ‘Patrioten’ vor dem Patriotismus: Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben und die Reckonfigurierung europäische Gemeinwesen im 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden 2005), pp 169-91; ‘A view of the Irish language: language and history in Ireland from the middle ages to the present’ in A.K. Isaacs (ed.), Language and identities in historical perspective (Pisa, 2005), pp 67-78; (with Raingard Esser) ‘Introduction: early modern frontiers in comparative context’ in S.G. Ellis and Raingard Esser (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1850 (HannoverLaatzen, 2006), pp 9-20; (with Raingard Esser (eds.)), Frontier and border regions in early modern Europe (Hannover, 2013).

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my preferences. I am also most comfortable in writing about developments in England and Ireland in the early Tudor period, specifically from 1485 (when early modern is most commonly held to have begun in English historiography) to 1534 (when the middle ages is usually held to have ended in Irish historiography). And in terms of a wider chronological span, I mostly study the 15th and 16th centuries, which is perhaps unusual: university lectureships in Ireland and Britain are usually advertised as later medieval – the two or three centuries to 1500 – or as early modern – the two or three centuries from 1500 onwards. Looking back on things, I can see a number of reasons why my career developed the way it did, straddling this medieval/early modern divide. My initial training was as an English Reformation historian with Chris Haigh. I was also very influenced early on by the work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who was the external examiner for my 1974 MA thesis on the Kildare rebellion, 1534-5.23 Haigh had also been Elton’s student, and my PhD thesis was heavily influenced by Elton’s Tudor revolution in government. Even the title of my book-from-the-thesis, on English government in Ireland, was Eltonian.24 So in that sense, my early work was very much as an English early modernist, reflecting the normal assumptions of the English ‘national agenda’. There was just one small problem: it was on Ireland! And Ireland had its own ‘national agenda’, and this period was, on the whole, classified as medieval. I remember discussing the problem with Geoffrey on one occasion, and his response was that there was no reason why I shouldn’t become a medievalist for the time being. In fact, there were a couple of reasons why this seemed a good idea at the time. One was that I had joined the Galway History Department in 1976. We then had a grand total of five lecturers – including Nicholas Canny (the established Irish early modernist who said I could teach what I liked before the 1560s and Sir Henry Sidney),25 and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (who had an astonishing range from early medieval to mid-17th century, but didn’t much mind if I wanted to teach Anglo-Norman Ireland). At the time, we really didn’t have the library resources for me to research Tudor England and so I continued working on Ireland but moved backwards in terms of my teaching and research interests: almost all my early papers on Irish history cover the period from the 1390s to 1534. 23

‘The Kildare rebellion, 1534’ (unpublished MA thesis, Manchester, 1974). Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland, 1470-1534 (London, 1986). 25 Canny’s first monograph, on the viceroyalties of Sir Henry Sidney, had then just appeared: The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: a pattern established 1565-76 (Hassocks, 1976). 24

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A second reason why I moved backwards concerned both the character of the surviving evidence for one of my early research interests, which was administrative history (inspired by Elton), and also the influence on me of the leading Irish historians who worked on this material. David Quinn was encouraging, but he was largely focused on America by this stage.26 And I also found Jimmy Lydon very approachable and stimulating to talk to: even though I disagreed with his ideas about Anglo-Irish identity, I was very influenced by him in regard to ideas about marcher lordship and frontier society. Later on, when I began to work on the north of England (our library holdings had since improved!), I applied to this region some of the ideas about marcher lordship and society that I got from Lydon and also from Robin Frame.27 Another influence was that no one else seemed interested in what was almost a historiographical ‘black hole’ between the medievalists’ preoccupation with the rise and fall of English lordship in Ireland and the early modernists’ focus on the Tudor conquest. There wasn’t even a decent political narrative of events in Ireland between, say, 1495 (when OtwayRuthven’s History of Medieval Ireland petered out with the passage of Poynings’ Law) and 1534 (when the early modernists became interested).28 Poynings’ Law, passed in the parliament held by Sir Edward Poynings in 1494-95, strengthened considerably the king’s control over the meeting and operation of the Irish parliament by enacting that no parliament was to meet in Ireland unless previously licensed under the great seal of England and that no statute was to be enacted there unless first submitted by the governor and council in Ireland for approval by the king and council in England. In order to understand the events of the early Tudor period, however, I thought it was important to look at the late medieval background. The available documentation is also an odd mix between the kinds of records which Irish medievalists like to use, the Latin 26

Quinn was later persuaded back to write the political narrative for the period 1460-1534 in Art Cosgrove (ed.), A new history of Ireland. II Medieval Ireland 1169-1534 (Oxford, 1987), chs. 21-4. 27 In this context, papers which particularly impressed me included James Lydon, ‘The problem of the frontier in medieval Ireland’ in Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts, xiii (1967), pp 5-55; Robin Frame, ‘Power and society in the lordship of Ireland, 1272-1377’ in Past & Present, no. 76 (Aug. 1977), pp 3-33. 28 D.B. Quinn, ‘Henry VIII and Ireland, 1509-34’ in Irish Historical Studies, xii (1960-61), pp 318-44 offered a reliable account of that topic. Bridging the gap between Otway-Ruthven, A history of medieval Ireland (London, 1968) and the start of Henry VIII’s reign, however, there was only Donough Bryan, The Great Earl of Kildare: Gerald Fitzgerald 1456-1513 (Dublin, 1933) and the opening parts of Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors (3 vols., London, 1885-90).

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court rolls, and those on which the early modernists tend to rely, the State Papers. This in turn raises the question of the kind of records we use as the basis for our historical investigations. In terms of evidence, one of the differences between medieval and early modern is the appearance in the 16th century of new types of evidence and records and also more of them. These records are also much more likely to be in English than in Latin or Anglo-Norman French. The State Papers, Domestic, and the State Papers, Ireland, are seen as a quintessentially early modern type of record associated with the advent of new ideas and new ways of thinking – but in part this was because they were reassembled that way in the 19th century.29 Beginning in Henry VIII’s reign, there are also the regular reports of the new resident ambassadors to the English court, written to advise their masters, the Renaissance princes elsewhere in Europe. I find the reports of the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, particularly useful, even though he is frequently ill-informed about events in the English far north or in Ireland.30 As regards Ireland, there was also a temptation for historians to argue that because there was clearly a reform agenda among the Palesmen in the earliest of the surviving State Papers, Ireland series (SP60), this reform agenda must be new, because it appears in these new State Papers which, indeed, is precisely why the State Papers have survived from then on. But the argument is circular. What we have from 1509 is simply the survival of a different kind of evidence, not a new set of ideas. The same reform agenda, I think, appears in the address of the Irish parliament to King Edward IV in 1474 but it is in a different kind of record.31 By and large, early modernists do not look at 15th-century parliament rolls, but far more parliament rolls survived from the 15th century than from the 16th century.32 And as regards the State Papers, 29

G.R. Elton, England, 1200-1640 (Cambridge, 1969), pp 66-72, 75; R.W. Dudley Edwards and O’Dowd (eds.), Sources for early modern Irish history 1534-1641 (Cambridge, 1985), pp 137-8. 30 Calendar of state papers, etc. relating to negotiations between England and Spain, ed. G.A. Bergenroth et al. (London, 1862-1954); but see also the comments in Elton, England, 1200-1640, p. 74. TNA has a modern transcript of Chapuys’ despatches: PRO31/18/3/1. 31 TNA, C47/10/29 (printed, Donough Bryan, The Great Earl of Kildare: Gerald Fitzgerald 1456-1513 (Dublin, 1933), pp 18-22. 32 Most of the 15th-century parliament rolls survived into modern times and have been edited as H.F. Berry (ed.), Statutes and ordinances, and acts of the parliament of Ireland, King John to Henry V (Dublin, 1907); H.F. Berry (ed.), Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland, reign of King Henry VI (Dublin, 1910); (H.F. Berry (eds.), Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland, first to the twelfth years of the reign of King Edward IV (Dublin, 1914); J.F. Morrissey (ed.), Statute

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similar types of letters do in fact survive for the 15th century, but in nothing like the same numbers.33 In Ireland, too, there are the warrants to the great seal, known as Fiants, from 1521 onwards: most were calendared before their destruction in 1922. These are the Irish equivalents of the English signed bills, and in this case we know that this class of document was not new in the 16th century: the difference is that Fiants survive in some quantity from 1521 onwards but not before. 34 This gap between the medievalists’ preference for court rolls and early modernists’ preoccupation with State Papers also skews the writing of history. There is no doubt that the State Papers are more colourful than the dry formulaic entries of exchequer memoranda rolls, and being in English they are also easier to use – at least, they are for us early modernists, who are less versed in medieval Latin.35 By and large, the traditional court rolls also survive for the 16th century, but in Ireland the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922 has skewed the pattern of record survival: for some types of court roll, more now survives for the 15th century than for the 16th century.36 But as regards the State Papers, the problem is that we are not comparing like with like here. For the most part, the Tudor State Papers rolls of the parliament of Ireland, twelfth and thirteenth to the twenty-first and twenty-second years of the reign of King Edward IV (Dublin, 1939); Philomena Connolly (ed.), Statute rolls of the Irish parliament Richard III-Henry VIII (Dublin, 2002). There were far fewer parliaments after 1494 and they passed less legislation, but the more important statutes passed by 16th-century parliaments were printed in The statutes at large passed in the parliaments held in Ireland, i (Dublin, 1786). The only surviving roll, for the parliament of 1536-7, is published in full in Connolly (ed.), Statute rolls of the Irish parliament Richard III-Henry VIII, pp 147-301. 33 Elton, England, 1200-1640, p. 68. 34 The Irish Fiants of the Tudor sovereigns during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Philip & Mary, and Elizabeth I (4 vols., Dublin, 1994). Cf. Edwards and O’Dowd (eds.), Sources for early modern Irish history, pp 17, 20. 35 Elton, England, 1200-1640, pp 69-70. 36 For instance, J.F. Lydon, ‘A survey of the memoranda rolls of the Irish exchequer, 1294-1509’ in Analecta Hibernica, xxiii (1966), pp 49-134 lists the various surviving extracts and calendars of this series to 1509. Much the most important were the 43 volumes of the Record Commissioners’ calendar (ibid., pp 51, 67-9); but unfortunately, this calendar did not continue beyond 1509. For the attempt to reconstruct the medieval Irish chancery rolls destroyed in 1922, see CIRCLE, a calendar of Irish chancery letters, c.1244-1509 (http://chancery.tcd.ie ). The Victorian calendar of the Tudor rolls from 1509 to 1603 is much less useful: James Morrin (ed.), Calendar of patent and close rolls of chancery in Ireland, Henry VIII to 18th Elizabeth and Elizabeth, 19 year to end of reign (2 vols., Dublin, 1861, 1862). For parliament rolls, see above, note 33.

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are not providing a factual record of the operation of English government like the chancery rolls, the inquisitions, or the treasurers’ accounts. Rather, they are developing an argument, and Tudor practice in this regard was to throw as much mud as possible in the hope that some would stick. So it is very easy to paint a wholly misleading picture of life in the early Tudor borderlands simply by rummaging around among the State Papers for evidence to fit a preconceived theory – a theory frequently suggested by ‘the national agenda’. It also needs to be remembered that when in Tudor English it says that something was ‘in manner’ waste, or dead, or empty, the introduction of the words ‘in manner’ represent a very substantial qualification on what follows. In some respects, therefore, the attempt to document the transition from medieval to early modern by splicing together these two types of evidence so as to construct a grand narrative has had some unfortunate consequences. A telling example is the notion of English decline in Ireland and the origins of the Tudor conquest. Viewed from a medieval vantage point in the mid-14th century, an account of later medieval Ireland organized around a grand narrative of the rise and fall of English lordship seems an obvious choice.37 In this context, the start of the Tudor conquest in 1534 not only marks the end of the middle ages, it also signals the belated English response to the gradual disintegration of English lordship in later medieval Ireland. Likewise, from an early-modern vantage point in the early 17th century, 1534 looks equally convincing as a watershed because, quite clearly, the Kildare rebellion sparked a major reorganization of English government in Ireland, and early modernists – not inclined to look too closely at these medieval Latin court rolls – were happy to accept the verdict of medievalists that until 1534 English lordship remained in steep decline. But this consensus was actually based on very flimsy foundations, and it also constituted a kind of tunnel vision which ignored important perspectives suggested by the work of early Tudor specialists in England. Even ignoring the remarkably sudden transition of the English of Ireland in 1534 from Anglo-Irish to Old English,38 some awkward 37

The best succinct narrative is James Lydon, The lordship of Ireland in the middle ages (2nd ed., Dublin, 2003), but the approach is a commonplace. 38 Art Cosgrove (ed.), A new history of Ireland. II Medieval Ireland 1169-1534 (Oxford, 1987) chose to label as ‘Anglo-Irish’ the medieval settlers who normally described themselves as ‘English’. The same community are described as ‘Old English’ in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, and F.J. Byrne (eds.), A new history of Ireland. III Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691 (Oxford, 1976), with the result that individual nobles and gentry who appear in both volumes appear to undergo a change of nationality in 1534.

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questions remain. I will offer two examples here. The first relates to the English Pale, first so described during the governorship of Sir Edward Poynings in 1494-95 on the analogy of the English Pale at Calais, where Poynings had previously been governor, the first known reference to which is 1493. There was such a preoccupation with charting the origins of the Pale as a product of medieval English decline that obvious questions – such as what the term actually meant – went unanswered: thus, one chapter in The New History of Ireland, volume 2 is entitled ‘The emergence of the Pale, 1399-1447’.39 Yet contemporary English accounts usually offered a tripartite division of medieval Ireland, into ‘the land of war’ occupied by ‘the wild Irish’ or ‘Irish enemies’; the marches; and ‘the land of peace’ inhabited by ‘loyal English lieges’. By the 1420s, ‘the land of peace’ was also described as ‘the maghery’ (transliteration of machaire, Gaelic for ‘a plain’ or ‘level ground’) or ‘the four obedient shires’ (the four counties surrounding Dublin). The English terminology is important: it describes an island divided between two nations by a typical medieval march, that is, a fluid and shifting border region with a more militarized population protected by a system of castles, towerhouses, and fortified bridges, and defence in depth. It was supported by an official vocabulary which included a developed rhetoric of difference so as to highlight the distinction between subjects and aliens, English and Irish, and civility and savagery. But the concept of an ‘English Pale’ is a very different concept. For a start, the name was ‘the English Pale’, not ‘the Pale’: the adjective is important. It constituted a value judgment by Poynings and his troops on the region’s English character. It also implies a precisely delineated area, like the defensive fortifications of early Tudor Calais, not the kind of defence in depth implied by a medieval march. So what we have here, then, is not a continuation of medieval decline but the creation of a continuous defended frontier dividing two nations, and with similar characteristics to the Anglo-Scottish frontier.40 This brings us to the question of the medieval frontier. In Ireland, frontiers were of course ‘a bad thing’. They were an ‘unusable past’, since 39

Cosgrove (ed.), New history of Ireland. II, ch. 18. These points are developed in S.G. Ellis, ‘An English gentleman and his community: Sir William Darcy of Platten’ in Vincent P. Carey and Ute LotzHeumann (ed.), Taking Sides? Colonial and confessional mentalités in early modern Ireland. Essays in honour of Karl S. Bottigheimer (Dublin, 2003), pp 22-5; idem, ‘Region and frontier in the English state: Co. Meath and the English Pale, 1460-1542’ in Helge Vidar Holm, Sissel Lægreid, and Torgeir Skorgen, (eds.), The Borders of Europe: Hegemony, Aesthetics, and Border Poetics (Aarhus, 2012), pp 49-54, 66-7. 40

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they seemed to provide an undesirable historical precedent for partition and the political frontier established between the two new Irish states after 1920. And in terms of the ‘national agenda’, frontiers were firmly fixed in the middle ages among those obstacles to the rise of the nation, the definition of the national territory, and the emergence of the nation-state which were yet to be overcome in early modern times. In the circumstances, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the creation and development of the English Pale, which constituted a new Tudor frontier, has attracted comparatively little attention. In so far as this early Tudor frontier is addressed in Irish historiography, it is usually in terms of two groups of Irish, the Anglo-Irish and the Gaelic Irish, interacting across a dissolving frontier – a Zusammenwachsgrenze [a frontier of convergence], as German geographers call it, not a Trennungsgrenze [a frontier of separation]. Interestingly, the tendency in recent British historiography is likewise to marginalize to some degree the importance of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as a Trennungsgrenze, but in an Anglo-Scottish context there is a clearer distinction between English and Scottish subjects and between England and Scotland.41 In regard to definitions of what we should now call citizenship, therefore, ius soli – the acquisition of citizenship by right of the soil, through birth within the state, south of the border line – was paramount in an Anglo-Scottish context, whereas in medieval Ireland where there was no border line ius sanguinis – the acquisition of citizenship by right of blood, from parents – was more important.42 But here is the problem. The Tudor drive from the 1530s towards centralization raised the question of how to deal with the large nonEnglish populations of peripheral territories like Ireland and Wales which were now more closely integrated into the Tudor state. Hitherto, and generally throughout the English territories, concepts of citizenship (who was a free subject of the English crown) had been closely tied to concepts of Englishness: someone who was the king’s freeborn subject was ipso facto an Englishman, with specific rights – to sue and plead personally in the king’s courts; to trade freely as an Englishman, enjoying preferential customs rates; and to inherit, buy, own and sell land in the English territories. The problem first arose in Wales, with the creation in 1536 of 41 Ellis, ‘Region and frontier in the English state’, pp 49-50; idem, ‘Ireland’s “lost” English region: the English Pale in early Tudor times’ in Raingard Esser and S.G. Ellis (eds.), Frontier and border regions in early modern Europe (Hannover, 2013), pp 59-67. 42 Cf. S.G. Ellis, ‘Citizenship in the English state in Renaissance times’ in S.G. Ellis, G. Halfdánarson, and A.K. Isaacs (ed.), Citizenship in historical perspective (Pisa, 2006), pp 85-95 for this and the next paragraph.

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the kingdom of England and Wales, whereby many ‘mere Welsh’ now secured the rights of Englishmen: it then recurred in Ireland from 1541 with the so-called ‘surrender and regrant’ strategy, the process whereby Irish chiefs were induced to surrender their lands, receiving in return a regrant with common-law title from the crown. Eventually, as we know, the concept of citizenship was detached from the concept of nationality, so that by Elizabeth’s reign the crown had Irish subjects – subjects of this new Tudor kingdom of Ireland, with the same rights and privileges as English subjects. But the initial solution to this problem was quite different (and this is where the transition from medieval to early modern in the Irish grand narrative breaks down): it was simply to extend the existing medieval practice whereby a ‘wild Irishman’ could purchase a ‘charter of English liberty and freedom from Irish servitude’. Those are the terms and that was the consequence: freedom and Englishness were inextricably mixed. And this in turn explains the medieval legislation which had aimed to ensure that the English of Ireland who were legally English also remained English by culture. Further, in 1541 the O’Byrnes undertook to renounce ‘the manners, usages, and habits of foresters and wild Irish’ and petitioned to be ‘accepted and reputed as Englishmen and the king’s lieges’; and likewise O’Rourke agreed to pay a fine of 100 marks ‘for the pardon and liberty now granted to him of becoming a liege and true Englishman’.43 In other words, those Irish who underwent surrender and regrant did not only thereby become the king’s subjects, as opposed to aliens, they also became Englishmen: they were now English and free. And this in turn explains the radical programme of Anglicization which was part and parcel of surrender and regrant, but which in other circumstances would have seemed redundant. Which other European prince attempted to impose the cultural norms of his core territory on his subjects in peripheral regions? And as Tudor rule was consolidated in the English marches, those rebels and disobedient subjects, such as the Harrolds and Lawlesses, who had degenerated from English civility (again, the terminology is very important) were simply admitted to the king’s courts as Englishmen: their legal identity as the king’s English subjects had remained unimpaired.44

43

S.G. Ellis, ‘Building the kingdom: Tudor integration and Ireland’ in Ronald G. Asch, Birgit Emich, and Jens-Ivo Engels (eds.) Integration, Legitimation, Korruption: Politische Patronage in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, Frankfurt am Main, 2011), pp 49-60 (quotations, p. 54). 44 Christopher Maginn, ‘The English marcher lineages in south Dublin in the later middle ages’ in Irish Historical Studies, xxxiv (2004), pp 135-6.

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Of course, if your focus is simply medieval Ireland, without bothering about the wider English context or what came after in early modern Ireland, the anachronistic distinction between Anglo-Irish subjects and English subjects might well appear permissible. But it is in fact a serious distortion which renders Tudor policy towards Ireland unintelligible. The same can be said of the alleged process of ‘gaelicization’ as a consequence of English decline. It needs to be said that the word is unhistorical and was not used in medieval times: it is a modern construct with a political agenda. It is also one-sided, in that the concurrent pressures towards ‘anglicization’ are glossed over: in a frontier society, acculturation is necessarily a two-way process. What happened to those anglicizing pressures which created the Ireland of today? It is also misleading, in that those Anglo-Irishmen who became ‘gaelicized’ did not thereby forfeit the rights and duties of Englishmen.45 And finally, it is inaccurate, in that no matter how gaelicized these Anglo-Irish became, they remained Gaill (‘foreigners’) as far as Gaelic sources were concerned. They were never accepted as Gaedhil (‘natives’). The normal term in English political vocabulary to describe those English who abandoned their culture was ‘degeneracy’. That term was used of the king’s subjects in Wales and the English far north as well; but it was, by contrast, perfectly possible for an Irishman like Edmond Sexton to be ‘sworn English’, as the phrase was, and to rise to become sewer of the chamber at the court of Henry VIII.46 All in all, therefore, the practice of dividing Irish and British history up into distinct medieval and early modern periods, with the watershed fixed in early Tudor times, and particular groups of historians deployed to teach and research either medieval or early modern, is in my view distinctly unhelpful. It tends to obscure some of the continuities between the 15th and 16th centuries. In the case of Ireland it has also fostered terminological differences which are historiographical rather than historical. The decision to label the 15th century as predominantly medieval and the 16th century as mainly early modern adds nothing to our understanding of these centuries. It is also confusing to historians of other national traditions who would not necessarily know what ‘medieval’ or ‘early modern’ might mean in an Irish or British context and might assume it means something it does not. 45

Maginn, ‘English marcher lineages’, pp 135-6. S.G. Ellis, ‘Defending English ground: the Tudor frontiers in history and historiography’ in idem et Raingard Eßer (eds.), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1850 (Hannover-Laatzen, 2006), pp 89-93. For Sexton, see Colm Lennon, An Irish prisoner of conscience of the Tudor era: Archbishop Richard Creagh of Armagh, 1523-86 (Dublin, 2000), pp 19, 25, 27-8, 29, 30, 37; L. & P. Hen. VIII, vii, nos. 1068 (5), 1144. 46

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Finally, I note that, chronologically, periodization varies quite markedly from country to country across Europe, and also that some national historiographies do not use the term ‘early modern’ anyway. Thus, I think that, with the increasing globalization of history, and also this new emphasis on comparative history, the retention of this conventional division between medieval and early modern will increasingly become either meaningless or unsustainable, or both.

CHAPTER THREE THE BRITISH ISLES IN TRANSITION: A VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE RONALD HUTTON

Steven Ellis, a colleague for whom I have a great admiration and a friend for whom I have a great affection, has presented a characteristically cogent and well-written case for considering a distinction between the medieval and early modern periods to be unhelpful when attempting to understand the Tudor age. I am now going to attempt to argue a case which takes an opposite view, when considering the same geographical area in the same period, under the same rulers; and yet in doing so to uphold the validity of Steven’s points. We are in complete agreement that the utility of that chronological boundary can be given different weighting according to the part of the European and Mediterranean world with which a particular historian is dealing. We are also in accord that there is no need to load different periods of human activity with the kind of moral baggage that former generations of authors have brought to the writing of history. What I am going to suggest is that it is possible for two specialists to draw completely different conclusions from an overview of the same span of time, in the same region, with an equal legitimacy. The difference is purely one of perspective, and of the specific issues with which each of us is concerned. There does seem to be a consensus among current historians, although one which is largely instinctual and innate, and so seldom articulated, argued or interrogated, that the Europe of 1600 was massively qualitatively different from that of 1450, to an extent that no equivalent period had produced since the fall of Rome. This consensus does not necessarily extend to an agreement that the precise terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ should be applied to establish a boundary which defines and characterizes those changes; but it does accept the changes themselves as profoundly important and marking an immense shift in culture, identity and context with knock-on effects for all aspects of European life. In

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particular, by conversation and casual references rather than a series of clearly argued cases, three developments above all tend to emerge as characterizing and provoking this shift. The first is the European discovery of the Americas and of Siberia, and of sea routes across the Pacific and around Africa to Asia. This completely altered Europe’s perception of the world and its relations with other parts of it. It commenced the process by which Europeans came to dominate the globe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and transformed the economic, political and military position of the continent. It also made a profound and enduring alteration to European culture, by forcing it to reckon with a large number of peoples, customs and beliefs which were completely unfamiliar, and so broke for ever the mental boundaries and basic assumptions within which it had traditionally been constructed. The second great development was the linked process of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, by which a hitherto largely united Latin Christianity divided permanently into a renewed Roman Catholicism with an unprecedented global reach, and a set of different forms of Protestant Christianity, which also planted major colonies or won converts in other hemispheres. This new and heterogeneous religious world was initially characterized by an escalation of tension, conflict and persecution, but ultimately enforced a reconsideration of the role of religion within state and society, leading to greater tolerance, mass education, ideological pluralism and secularism. The third major development was the invention and widespread adoption of printing, provoking increasing literacy, altering the nature of mass culture, accelerating the pace and level of public debate, and enabling a much greater retention of knowledge. Before the development of the press, a proportion of the famous literary works produced by most generations of Europeans since history began had been permanently lost; after it, none of those leading works have disappeared altogether. The importance of all of these three phenomena is therefore obvious in producing a sense of decisive change between periods, and all can justly be regarded as marking important aspects of the transition from the medieval to the early modern. The problem for my present purposes is that none of them fulfil that role very well with regard to the particular case of the British Isles. The English did indeed stake a claim to North America at the end of the fifteenth century, as a result of the voyages of discovery which commenced with that of John Cabot in 1497. This was, however, more or less forgotten for almost a hundred years, and English overseas colonies and transoceanic trade did not become firmly established until the seventeenth century, by which time most writers would consider that the

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Middle Ages were long gone. To Scotland and Ireland the great European era of global exploration and discovery was barely relevant at all. Printing did indeed spread very rapidly across Europe in the mid fifteenth century, but the only city in the British Isles to develop anything like an industry in it was London. Arguably, even there it only began to make a real impact on popular culture from the 1640s onward. The Reformation, on the other hand, produced seismic effects across the whole archipelago, but in England and Wales these only began in the 1530s and they did not really affect the Scots and Irish very deeply until the second half of the sixteenth century. So, either we have to conclude that these three great motors of historical change are indeed the creators of modernity, but that modernity just began later in Britain and Ireland than many other parts of Europe; or else we have to try to define the end of the medieval in these islands by other means. It would appear self-evident that the second of those choices is the one that has traditionally been made, because nobody seems to have dated the end of the Middle Ages in these islands after 1550. It is, indeed, counter-intuitive to do so, for three combined reasons. First, in all three kingdoms of the British Isles, things do look different in 1600 from what they did in 1500, to an extent which could not be said of any century since, at the latest, the twelfth. Second, the differences are almost all of a kind that lead into further major developments, which in turn help to define the modern era, and third, they clearly commenced in the early sixteenth century rather than the later. Intuition, however, tends to take over from argument in explaining why this should be so, and the decisive point of the change is chosen more or less arbitrarily by different historians. In my own youth, English school and university courses tended to put the end of the Middle Ages in the years 1450 or 1485. Both dates were of course celebrated for their political significance, marking in the former case the beginning of the collapse of the medieval English monarchy into the Wars of the Roses, and in the latter case the conventional end of those wars and so the beginning of that monarchy’s final recovery from them. Whether that recovery signalled a new form of monarchy or not, and how medieval or modern such a new monarchy might have been, were questions that experts had been debating for over a hundred years. As pupils and students we were invited to study this very debate, usually with the assurance, right at the start, that there was no real answer to it. Courses concerned with the economic and social history of early modern England naturally had less concern with political developments, and so chose vaguer dates (sometimes explicitly softened by the prefix ‘circa’), but 1450 and 1500 were still the favourites, making a pretty good match with

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the political framework. Rather less understandable was the matching tendency of courses and textbooks on Irish and Scottish history apparently to end the Middle Ages (or to commence the process by which they ended) somewhere in the late fifteenth century. It is by no means apparent that Scottish government, society and economic affairs were very different in 1550 from what they had been in 1450, or that any of the first seven Kings of Scots drawn from the House of Stewart, who reigned between 1371 and 1542, were trying to rule in radically different ways. Nor is it any more self-evident that Irish society and politics were greatly changed in 1530 from what they had been in 1430. In practical terms it must have counted much less to most inhabitants of Ireland that they were ruled in theory by a Tudor rather than by a Plantagenet, than that they continued to be governed, for most of the three decades on either side of the dynastic division, by a Fitzgerald. In large part, recent historians of Scotland and Ireland have dealt with the problem simply by dispensing with it. In the single year 2007, Steven Ellis and Christopher Maginn published a survey textbook on the British Isles between 1450 and 1660, Sean Connolly brought out one on Ireland from 1460 and 1630 and Jane Dawson issued one on Scotland from 1488 to 1587.1 All of the dates chosen were political in significance, relating to changes of government or of monarch. All of the books concerned dealt with periods of dramatic change which straddled the conventional division between medieval and early modern, and none bothered to mark it explicitly. Instead, all used the term ‘medieval’ in their early chapters, and then ceased to employ it, gradually and almost imperceptibly, in the course of their narratives. There has been no equivalent recent cluster of textbooks from historians of England, but those publishing since 1995 have adopted much the same tactic. Miri Rubin, producing a textbook on the late medieval English, ended it in 1485 without feeling a need to justify the fact.2 Susan Brigden, bringing one out on Tudor England, assumed from the beginning that since her period was Tudor it could not be medieval.3 John Guy, in his own textbook on the same period and subject, took a very similar approach.4 More promising, for a moment, seemed Richard Britnell, who entitled his survey of English history from

1

, Steven Ellis and Christopher Maginn (eds.), The Making of the British Isles (Harlow, 2007); Sean Connolly, Contested Island (Oxford, 2007); Jane E. Dawson, Scotland Reformed (Edinburgh, 2007). 2 The Hollow Crown (London, 2005). 3 New Worlds, Lost Worlds (Harmondsworth, 2000). 4 Tudor England (2nd edition, Oxford, 1990).

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1471 to 1529, The Closing of the Middle Ages?5 That question mark promised much, but he never really used it, declaring instead that the period concerned should be studied in its own right, and that the concept of a medieval to early modern progression was not relevant to it, without really interrogating the concept of such a progression. The textbook author who tackled the problem most directly was Tony Pollard, in Late Medieval England, published in the year 2000.6 His prescribed finishing date was 1485, and he chose to challenge it, insisting that medieval England itself did not in fact end in that year. He went on to state that it was, however, clearly over by 1603, and identified humanist scholarship and the Reformation as the two main forces which ended it. He did not, however, attempt to put any actual dates on those, representing them simply and vaguely as sixteenth-century phenomena. Most of the previous generations had dealt with the problem by ignoring it, which for much of the time seemed to imply that there was no problem at all. The great exception was Sir Geoffrey Elton, who had found precisely an opposite solution to the one subsequently proposed by Pollard. This was to suggest that the medieval system of English government, which had been based on personal rule by the monarch, was transformed into a national, bureaucratic and parliamentary system in the 1530s, by the ministry of Thomas Cromwell. Such a contention formed, indeed, the ‘Elton Thesis’ of Tudor history par excellence, which was restated and developed by Sir Geoffrey in a series of books between the 1950s and the 1970s.7 It is now generally discarded by his successors with specific reference to the 1530s,8 but the wider point that it made, that the Middle Ages could have ended in a particular decade of the sixteenth century – has not been systematically debated in the same way. We thus have three different explicit solutions offered to the problem of where to end the Middle Ages in England: Steven Ellis’s, that the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ should themselves be discarded; Tony Pollard’s, that the Middle Ages fade away imperceptibly somewhere in Tudor period; and Sir Geoffrey Elton’s, that it is possible to identify a particular short span of years as the one in which the critical transition was achieved. None

5

Published at Oxford in 1997. In London. 7 Starting with The Rtudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953), and ending with England under the Tudors (3rd edition, London, 1991). 8 See especially Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (ed.), Revolution Reassessed (Oxford, 1986); and the special issue of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7th series 7 (1997), entitled The Eltonian Legacy. 6

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of them have anything approaching a consensual status among historians currently working on the British Isles between 1400 and 1600. What is abundantly clear is that personally and institutionally, rather than intellectually, there is indeed a firm periodization of English political history which separates the medieval from the early modern, and that the reign of Henry VII falls into the centre of it. There is very little overlap in personnel or support mechanisms (societies, institutes, seminars and journals) between historians who work on the century before 1485 and those who work on the century after 1509. This is largely because they are trained in different kinds of source material. Scholars expert in the preceding period are used to chronicles, administrative rolls and legal documents: classic medieval sources. Those who specialize in the succeeding one are concerned with state papers, diplomatic despatches and files of political correspondence: classic early modern sources. Something, therefore, did shift in the bread and butter materials of scholars, at least, and it happened in the early Tudor period. I would therefore argue, prima facie, both that it is worth interrogating the traditional use of periodization for the centuries in the history of the British Isles between 1400 and 1600, and that a fresh use may found for the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’; and would do so for two reasons, both of which should by now be emerging as self-evident. The first is that in practice my profession is in fact divided into historians focusing on what have conventionally been termed the Middle Ages in the British Isles and those preoccupied with what is now called the early modern period. This division is underpinned not merely by sets of different institutional structures and social networks, but by different skill sets, developed to cope with different kinds of text. The second is that the terms ‘medieval’ and – to a slightly lesser extent – ‘early modern’ are in practice used constantly and largely unconsciously by both groups of historians, without much discussion of the wisdom of doing so or of what exactly is being described. There is a very high probability that, should it simply become fashionable to drop the terms, then they will survive as ghosts, defining lingering and residual categories of institutional and professional division, and of ways of thought, which will be the more enduring and insidious for the fact that there is no longer a common form of labelling for them which can be questioned. Steven Ellis and I have in common a dissatisfaction with such a situation, and indeed it would be entirely possible, and logical, to suggest as he does that a more radical reformation of thought be carried out amongst our colleagues, which would not merely extirpate the traditional terminology but attempt also to root out those categories of organisation of material and

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of thought that such a terminology has produced. I am now going to explain in detail why I do not think myself that it is necessary.9 Three major points need to be made as a starting point for such an exercise. The first is that humanism does not seem to be as important in the transition between the medieval and early modern in the British Isles, as historians such as Tony Pollard have suggested that it was. This is despite the facts that it was the intellectual movement which originally, in its Italian homeland, invented the whole concept of the Middle Ages; and that it can seem quite significant in the development of early Tudor culture, and perhaps of early modern English intellectual history in general. It is only when a longer and broader view is taken, that problems arise when trying to make its role pivotal in the transition under discussion here. The activity which defined humanism as a European movement, again, derived from its Italian origins, was the close study of ancient texts – and especially the rediscovery of Greek works – to revitalize and inform contemporary knowledge and speculation. This pursuit certainly proved fundamental to other major cultural changes, above all the Reformation, but in itself it does not seem to have had the wide impact on Britain that it clearly had on Italy. Moreover, Sir John Fortescue in the md fifteenth century and Sir Edward Coke in the early seventeenth, discussed the English monarchy in much the same terms and with much the same conclusions with regard to its basic principles and mode of functioning.10 This is despite the fact that the former is generally regarded as essentially medieval and the latter as essentially early modern. Parallel to this continuity in political and constitutional thought is another: that the sermons of royal court preachers and university dons in the England of the late fourteenth century already show that interest in the values of Roman republican citizenship, filtered through the experience of the Italian city states, which was to surface intermittently among English intellectuals for the next four hundred years.11 In this early period, as in most of those which followed, it was easily made compatible with responsive and responsible monarchy – what Patrick Collinson famously called ‘the monarchical republic’ with specific reference to Elizabethan England - but 9

Most of the information about the history of the early modern British Isles given below may be found in any textbook on the period: if newcomers would like a succinct overview, they are welcome to my own Short History of Britain 14851660 (London, 2011). 10 Fortescue’s most famous work is On the Laws and Governance of England, Coke’s is The Institutes of the Laws of England. 11 See especially those of Thomas Brinton, Robert Rypon, Philip Repton and Richard Fleming.

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in moments of political tension centred on unpopular monarchs and royal governments, it could readily be transformed into a language of criticism and principled opposition.12 The second major point to be made here is that there is a clear end-date to the Middle Ages in European social and economic history, because the period between circa 1480 and circa 1650 is a well-defined one in those kinds of history, all over the Continent. It was characterized by a rising human population, which produced or was joined by a severe inflation in prices. Together, these two phenomena had a pronounced knock-on effect on economic and social structures, producing subsistence crises when harvests failed or markets collapsed; an intensification of poverty; a growing polarization of local societies between a rich few and a poorer many; and a general stimulus to innovation in agriculture, marketing and industry, and to productivity in general. What is less easy to demonstrate is that these changes were more dramatic than those ushered in by the onset of the Black Death in the 1340s, which had precipitated the preceding, and conventionally the late medieval, period of European social and economic history. This had been defined by a dramatic decline in population, producing a relatively high demand for labour and reducing pressure on land and jobs. These developments in turn generated higher standards of living for ordinary people, provoked the disintegration of high medieval feudalism, and stimulated trade and industry to meet the surplus incomes being earned by more people. At the same time it drove down the value of land, and so of rents, and encouraged agricultural recession. All these important developments are traditionally and comfortably comprehended by historians in the category of the medieval, and it is hard to argue that the transition to different economic circumstances around 1480 represented a greater fracture with the past. Economic developments and social developments which are economically-related, therefore, should not rank high in an analysis of why and when the Middle Ages ended. The last major point needed to commence the making of my case is that I agree that what most historians regard as the shift from the medieval to the early modern occurred later in Ireland and Scotland than in England. Indeed, I think that it occurred there directly as a result of political developments in England; and it is now at last time to justify that contention. Although many conventional history courses taught in schools and universities in the England of my youth started the early modern period in 1450, as mentioned earlier, none of them seemed seriously to 12

For a revisiting of this idea, with further reflections by Patrick Collinson himself, see John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007).

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mean that it did. All that they signified was that the collapse of the English kingdom into civil war in the 1450s somehow commenced the processes which were to bring an end to the English Middle Ages. It is actually quite hard to see that even this is true, because the state as restored under the Yorkist kings showed signs of archaism rather than of modernity, such as a heavy reliance on great nobles to counsel the king and run the provinces; the withdrawal of the state treasury from a formal department of government into the royal household; and a revived literary cult of King Arthur. The battle of Bosworth in 1485 did make a big difference, but not quite in the way that its traditional status as a chronological milestone would suggest. The people whom it affected most dramatically were the Welsh, who occupied in the late medieval English state the symbolic space to be filled by the Irish in the early modern one. In other words, they were the conquered people with a Celtic culture and identity, existing awkwardly within the English kingdom as a subservient group who bitterly resented their position. Just as the Irish were to be in the sixteenth century, they had been overcome piecemeal in a series of larger and larger wars. Just like the Irish in the seventeenth century, they ruptured decades of apparent assimilation with a huge rebellion, in the Welsh case that of Owain Glyndwr, which provoked even more savage repression. They were saddled with legal handicaps as severe as those later imposed upon Irish Catholics, though the basis for their persecution was ethnic and not religious. What rescued Wales was that in 1485 Henry Tudor played there the part in which James Stuart failed in Ireland in 1690: however reluctantly, he took the Welsh into partnership in a bid to win his bid for the English throne, and that bid succeeded. As a result, he removed the legal disabilities imposed upon them, and allowed them both to operate on theoretically equal terms with the English within Wales itself and to seek fortunes in England, and indeed at his own court. The most enduringly successful of those who did, of course, were the Sesylt family, who became Anglicized as the Cecils and provided the leading ministers for both Elizabeth 1 and James 1 (though some might award still greater glory to the Williams family of Swansea, who, having changed their name to Cromwell, provided the Lord Protector of a united realm of the British Isles in the mid seventeenth century). Anglo-Welsh antipathy vanished almost overnight as a potent political force. The year 1485 therefore really was a major turning point in the history of Wales: what is still not apparent is that even there it could be said to have ended the Middle Ages. This is because one consequence of the liberation of the Welsh from English oppression was a final great flowering of medieval Welsh literary culture,

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represented by the native bards, and of the traditional religion and society which were bound up with it. In England, there need be no doubt whatsoever that Henry VII was a new kind of king. He remains the only one who has come to the throne both with no legal title to it and with no brothers or sons to secure his claim with an apparent succession through a blood line. He was also very unusual in his disinclination to command armies in person, to make foreign conquests, or to rely on his subjects to cover his expenses. He displayed a completely new determination to reduce the size, formal status and wealth of the English nobility, halving the number that held the titles of earl, marquis or duke. He was probably unique in bringing to the making and retention of money the same obsessive attention which other monarchs brought to military glory, using fines to terrorize the nobility or punish rebels, preferring to gain a pension rather than territory from the French, and devoting loving personal attention to the royal financial accounts. He also operated within a European context which was changing dramatically from that which had obtained hitherto in the fifteenth century, in which the traditional rivalry between France and Burgundy, over northern France, was being replaced by a new one between France and Spain, over Italy. It was during his reign, also, that the acquisition of American colonies became a vital part of Spanish foreign policy, changing the economic axis of Europe as well as its place in the world. It was then also that humanist scholarship arrived in England, and with it the artistic styles of the Italian Renaissance: in a powerful piece of symbolism, the man who designed Henry’s tomb was the one who, as an apprentice, had permanently broken Michelangelo’s nose. Abroad, at least, Henry was starting to operate in what looks like a recognisably early modern European scene. None of this, however, makes his reign the decisive chronological turning-point in England, let alone in the British Isles. His style of kingship was neither medieval nor early modern: it was simply unique, and rejected by all the monarchs who followed him as alien, and perhaps as a failure. He may have operated in a changing European scene, but he did not reflect it, as his wars were with France and Scotland, like those of any late medieval English king, while he sought allies in Spain and the Holy Roman Empire exactly as such a ruler would have done. One Italian artist to design his tomb does not balance the large quantity of late medieval Gothic architecture which he built, not least around the tomb itself in the shape of the glorious chapel which bears his name. Most significant of all is the fact that when his son Henry VIII succeeded, and rejected his father’s methods of ruling, he self-consciously went back to

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medieval basics, his public role models being King Arthur and Henry V.13 He was mad about jousting, renewed the Hundred Years’ War with France, allied with Popes and emperors, stuck in a great churchman, Cardinal Wolsey, as his leading minister, and pumped up the higher nobility again, especially those like the Courtneys, Greys and de la Poles who were related to former royalty. None the less, the turning point to early modernity in Britain and Ireland did, I think take place in his reign, and the dividing line comes in 1525, when three things happened. The first was the battle of Pavia, in Italy, at which Richard de la Pole, titular earl of Suffolk, was killed fighting for the French. He was the last in a constant succession of pretenders to the English throne who had emerged since 1460 and been supported by foreign powers. With his death, and not before, the Wars of the Roses could be said finally to have ended, and thus the whole series of disputes over the Plantagenet royal descent stretching back to the end of the fourteenth century. A new era in British dynastic history was beginning, in which the problem was not a superfluity of ambitious royal cousins but the lack of a secure succession to the existing ruler. Despite the absence of sustained dynastic rivalry for most of the period, between 1525 and 1725 only one reign out of fourteen (that of James VI and 1) was to end in the uncontroversial and long-arranged passage of a British throne to a child, grandchild or sibling of the previous monarch which had been the medieval norm. Another casualty of Pavia was the French king himself, who was taken prisoner, and this prompted Henry VIII to launch a new war on France, in which he claimed back the medieval French territories of the English Crown. The result was a complete humiliation, in which he failed to find any foreign support for his claim, and his attempts to raise emergency war taxation provoked such resistance that they had to be cancelled. The war had to be called off, and this disaster marked a permanent turning point in English foreign policy, being the last point at which an attempt was made to recover the lost lands, and in particular Normandy and Gascony. It was the definitive end of the Hundred Years’ War, though this chronology makes that more of a Two Hundred Years’ War, and – beyond that – of the constant involvement of England in French affairs and French provinces which had commenced with the Norman Conquest. Another great theme of medieval English history had been concluded. Henceforth Henry 13

He had his own portrait painted in the seat of King Arthur on the round table then supposed to have been Arthur’s at Winchester Castle: it is still there. He possibly commissioned a new life of Henry V in time for his first French war, and certainly read or heard it, as he imitated some of its episodes.

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switched to a new objective, of trying to strengthen the English grip on the opposite shore of the Channel, which was also to have a long history. It was not abandoned until the reign of Charles II, when Dunkirk was sold to the French and the claim to Dutch islands off the mouth of the Rhine abandoned. The most significant development of 1525 was the one least noticed at the time: that it seems to have been then that Henry began to cast around seriously for an alternative means of securing the royal succession, his wife having failed to provide a male heir. Within two years this led to his decision to seek a papal annulment of his marriage, and within a decade to the royal takeover of the English Church. The removal of the religious houses in the remainder of the 1530s erased a major component of the medieval world, as did the abolition of pilgrimage and saints’ shrines. The loss of books involved in the destruction of the monastic and friary libraries was clearly considerable, and though nobody has yet published a systematic study of it, there is a probability that the majority of the texts of medieval England perished in the process; something that would itself draw a line under an age.14 The passage of the reforming legislation gave the English Parliament a new authority in religious affairs, and indeed in general, which was to persist despite some later royal efforts to deny it. The security problems produced by the Henrician Reformation produced new policies towards Wales and Ireland. Between 1536 and 1541 Wales was brought completely into the English system of government, even while local administration and religious reform were left to its native ruling class. This resulted in the Welsh becoming some of the most committed Protestants in Britain, with an abiding loyalty to the English Crown. It also precipitated the Anglicization of their gentry and so the rapid and complete demise of medieval Welsh bardic culture. In Ireland the new policies brought down the Fitzgeralds for good and inaugurated the long period of rule by English deputies. With it came the establishment of the Kingdom of Ireland, as something inherently attached to the English Crown, and a drive to Anglicize the whole population, initially by surrender and regrant of lands and then by more coercive and intrusive policies. The stage was set for all the modern problems of AngloIrish relations. For me the reign of Mary Tudor is the test case for my theory: to prove whether an absence of Protestantism created a revival of medieval forms. The answer is that it didn’t, for the Catholicism reestablished by Mary lacked many of the characteristic features of late medieval piety and bears a close resemblance to the Continental Counter14

My own recent colleague at Bristol, James Clark, is working on such a study.

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Reformation. The other Henrician policies were still pursued with vigour, especially the assimilation of Wales and Ireland. It was Mary, after all, who sent the Earl of Sussex, the most prominent early advocate of an aggressive new Irish policy, to govern in Dublin. None the less, Protestantism does matter crucially to the final aspect of the end of the medieval in these islands, Anglo-Scottish relations. The two Elizabethan English interventions to secure Protestant domination of Scotland, in 1560 and 1573, ended the medieval rivalry between the two nations. It inaugurated instead an unbroken history of co-operation between at least many of the Scots and of the English, leading to the Union of Crowns in 1603 and of nations in 1707, to the Anglicization of Scottish literature, and to the isolation and destruction of the Gaelic hinterland of Scotland. For all of these reasons, I suggest that both Tony Pollard and Sir Geoffrey Elton were correct. It is entirely justified to take the Pollard line and call the end of medieval in England (which I stretch to the whole archipelago) a process extending across the sixteenth century. I would, however, narrow the process to the years 1525 to 1560. Elton was, however, correct that the 1530s were pivotal, though my reasons for thinking them so are not quite the same as those behind his ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’. It may be noted also, that the Reformation is the one point at which the general, Europe-wide, sense of what forces ended the Middle Ages harmonizes with the ideas of both Pollard and Elton, and with my own. If 1450 or 1485 were taken as traditional dividing lines by English historians because the process of modernization could be regarded as commencing with events those years, I would redraw the line to 1525 for a similar reason. I would do so, however, with much tighter definition. In doing so, of course, I am making a number of key theoretical statements. One is that contingency and personality are often decisive in history, and that political initiatives can bound major periods in the history of states more readily than economic, social or cultural developments. I therefore define the end of the Middle Ages in these islands as the product of an alteration in the English realm, which then had knock-on effects on all the other peoples and nations in the archipelago. I do so, however, with a repetition of my opening salutation to Steven Ellis: that by making this argument, I seek not to refute his, but to demonstrate that it is possible to offer an alternative solution to the same problem, simply by adopting a different perspective upon it.

CHAPTER FOUR 1492 REVISITED EVAN T. JONES

The discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.1

When Adam Smith wrote these words, he was not making a new point: the notion that Columbus’ discovery of 1492 and Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India six years later were epochal events had a long history. As early as 1552, Francisco López de Gómara had declared in a letter to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, that ‘The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it) is the discovery of the Indies.’2 The difference is that while Gómara’s statement could be dismissed as hyperbole in the 1550s, the position was something of a commonplace by 1776.3 For by that time the trade and colonies of Asia and the Americas had grown from small beginnings to become central concerns of Europe’s great powers. During the conference various contributors noted the significance of the voyages of the 1490s, or at least of the trade and settlement that resulted from them. Ronald Hutton, for instance, cited Europe’s expansion 1

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). I would like to thank my colleague, Margaret Condon, for reading and commenting on an early draft of this chapter. 2 Francisco López de Gómara, Primera y segunda parte de la Historia General de las Indias con todo el descubrimiento y cosas notables que han acaecido dende que se ganaron hasta el año de 1551. Con la conquista de México de la Nueva España (Zaragoza, 1552), introduction. 3 J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (CUP, 1970), ch. 1; Guillaume Thomas Raynal, L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Amsterdam, 4 vols., 1770), vol. 1, 1-2.

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as one of the three key developments that marked Europe in 1600 as being different from that of 1450.4 Similarly, Steven Ellis nodded to the establishment of extra-European trade and colonies as one of the factors that have been associated with ‘inaugurating the early modern period in both Britain and Ireland.’5 Nevertheless, when I attended the sessions as a delegate, rather than as a contributor, I was struck by how little such matters were discussed. As an historian of fifteenth-seventeenth century maritime history, the association between European expansion and the ‘early modern’ seemed obvious to me. Listening to the papers was a reminder that others did not feel the same. Moreover, mulling later over why the topic was little debated, I became struck by how few historians, particularly in Britain, have felt the 1490s voyages to be anything like as important as Smith declared. This was why I decided to offer a chapter for this book, which first provides some historiographical reflections on why British scholars have rarely ascribed the import to the events that Smith lent them; before making a case for why the discovery expeditions of the 1490s represent appropriate markers for the start of the early modern period. When Smith commented on the voyages of Columbus and de Gama, it was as a philosopher and political economist of the Scottish Enlightenment, rather than as a British historian. His concerns were with how and why economies developed on a global level, rather than with the particular development of his own realm. In consequence, he was more interested in, and more willing to recognise the significance of, events that did not concern his country directly. British historians, by contrast, tended to concentrate on events that related to their island, or more commonly, their particular nation within it. On the other hand, while one should never underestimate the power of parochialism for shaping historical discourse, a lack of interest in the doings of foreigners is not the only reason many later historians took less note of the voyages than Smith. Other forces were also at work, which relate to the way the discipline of history and the ‘science’ of economics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, and perhaps most obviously, it may be observed that when History became established as a formal academic discipline during the nineteenth century, the over-riding focus of the subject’s practitioners was ‘high’ politics and the development of institutions and the nation state. Those who wrote history, at least in Britain, tended to be gentlemen, writing for gentlemen and, later, teaching gentlemen. And for such 4

Ronald Hutton, ‘The British Isles in transition: a view from the other side’, p.*2*. Stephen Ellis ‘From medieval to early modern: the British Isles in transition’, p. *4*.

5

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scholars the historical development of trade or industry was of no more interest than the operations of a modern shipping line or textile factory.6 This did not mean that the prosperity generated by the country’s merchandise and manufacture was not valued. It was just that, in the words of Henry Hallam, the great constitutional historian of the early nineteenth century, England’s prosperity, which he regarded as ‘the most beautiful phænomenon in the history of mankind’ was a consequence of the country’s laws, ‘from which through various means, the characteristic independence and industriousness of our nation have been derived.’7 For such scholars, constitutional developments were the key to understanding historical change in general and to explaining, in particular, how Britain had become the world’s richest nation. Politics was thus privileged in causal explanations of historical change, which meant, in turn, that attempts to periodize history tended to be based on changes in the ruling order. While political history was already well established in the early nineteenth century, its dominance grew as the century progressed. In part this was driven by the opening up, cataloguing and calendaring of state archives across Europe, which made it possible for historians to use official sources to chart the development of government, administration and foreign relations. Beyond this, the professionalization of the discipline and, in particular, the establishment of degree courses in ‘modern’ history during the later nineteenth century, encouraged a focus on political matters, in part because the subject was promoted by the likes of Professor John Seeley, Regius Professor at Cambridge, as a ‘school of statesmanship’ for those seeking a career in politics or the civil service.8 The result of this subject concentration was that, by the 1880s, it was possible for his contemporary, Edward Freeman, later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, to pronounce blithely that ‘history is past politics and politics present history’.9 6

D. C. Coleman, History and the Economic Past: An Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History in Britain, (Oxford, 1987), pp. 33-36; N. B. Harte (ed.), The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures, 1893-1970 (Abingdon, 1971), xi-xxxix. The sections below that deal with the development of economic history draw heavily on these two works. 7 H. Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (3 vols., 1818) II, p. 127. 8 J. R. Seeley, ‘The teaching of politics: an inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge’ in Lectures and Essays, (Macmillan and Co., 1870), pp. 290-317. 9 I. Hesketh, ‘History is past politics, and politics present history’: who said it?’ Notes and Queries, 61:1 (2014), pp.105-8.

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Although not everyone accepted the views of Seeley and Freeman, constitutional history remained the chief area of study in established British university history departments until the late twentieth century. Moreover, since schools also concentrated on political history, the general public typically accepted, without much thought, that history was political history. And once that step was made, they were also primed to accept periodization propounded by such historians. This explains why, when I was at school, there was no discussion about when the Middle Ages ended: it occurred on 22 August 1485, with the death Richard III and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty. The concentration on the development of the nation state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ensured that, if historians paid attention to the voyages of the ‘Age of Discovery’, it was not for the reasons that Adam Smith would have recognised. As a great proponent of the importance of free markets and competition, Smith thought the voyages of Columbus and de Gama were significant because they set the conditions for a great expansion in the range and scale of commercial interactions. The voyages led to the establishment of global markets that enabled economies of scale, regional specialisation and market integration, which Smith regarded as central drivers of economic growth. By contrast, those who studied the early discovery voyages over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to do so from a political perspective: representing them as great national endeavours and / or as essential precursors to the establishment of Europe’s empires. This made the 1490s expeditions symbols of pride to the Spanish and Portuguese, who lauded their explorers as the pioneers of their nations’ Golden Ages. By contrast, the inhabitants of the United States of America made Columbus into a key figure in their country’s history because it was possible to represent him as a rational, liberal and independent hero who turned his back on a hidebound and superstitious Old World before going west to find a new one.10 By this reading, Columbus could be portrayed as America’s first pioneer: possessed of many of the virtues of the nascent Republic. For their part the British too could potentially tell a story about oceanic expeditions in the 1490s, based around the discovery of North America by John Cabot and his Bristol associates. What is telling, however, is that, while Cabot did not go entirely unrecognised, these early voyages did not 10

C. L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer became an American Hero (Univ. Press New England, 1992); T. Schlereth, 'Columbia, Columbus and Columbianism', Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 937-968; John P. Larner, 'North American Hero? Christopher Columbus 1702-2002, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 137 (1993), 46-63

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become a fundamental part of England’s national story. The main reason for this was that the expeditions did not lead directly either to the establishment of English settlement in America, or even to an economic activity that benefited the country in the short term. This was not because the voyages did not have significant consequences: for they led to the rapid development of a major fishery off Newfoundland and provided the basis for further exploration and settlement of the eastern seaboard of North America. The ‘problem’ was that between 1508 and the 1570s these ventures were led by the French, Portuguese and Spanish.11 The result was that British historians tended to represent the early Bristol voyages as a ‘false dawn’, or an early failed enterprise, in accounts concerned with the genesis of Empire. Instead, these scholars tended to focus on the activities of the country’s late sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers and adventurers. The birth of the British Empire was thus associated with men like Drake and Raleigh, with their exploits, rather than Cabot’s, being woven into national histories. Those working in the field of political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did thus not ignore the discovery voyages of the 1490s, with the Spanish and Portuguese certainly praising Columbus and de Gama. On the other hand, the narratives woven around both these expeditions and many later voyages were what Alfred Crosby has defined as ‘bardic histories’, in that they tended to concentrate on individual heroism, hardship and endeavour, pursued in the national interest.12 These were accounts designed to appeal to school children and the general public, often with the explicit aim of inspiring patriotic pride. As such, they had value. However, British constitutional scholars, whose work was steeped in primary source analysis of official papers and records, could well see that England’s attempts to expand its maritime interests beyond Europe were of only minor interest to the Crown or Parliament during the Tudor period. As a result, established historians were little interested in the English voyages and even less interested in the voyages of other nations, concentrating instead on their ‘great narrative’: the attainment of the constitutional settlement on which British pre-eminence was supposedly founded.

11

G. T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577-1660 (Toronto, 1969); E. T. Jones, ‘Bristol and Newfoundland, 1490-1570’, in I. Bulgin (ed.), Cabot and His World Symposium: June 1997 (Newfoundland Historical Society, 1999), 7381. 12 A. W. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange and their Historians (American Historical Association, 1987), pp. 1-4.

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If it is understandable that British historians did not regard the voyages of the 1490s as of central import, it might be expected that the country’s economists and economic historians would have paid more heed to them. After all, the expeditions were largely about trade and the exploitation of economic resources. There are a number of reasons why this did not happen. First, while most nineteenth-century economists revered Adam Smith as the founder of their discipline, they had little time for his historicism, or, indeed, for the past at all. To men like David Ricardo, James Mill and John McCulloch, economics was a science, which had more in common with the natural sciences than the humanities.13 Economics thus became abstracted and largely divorced from the study of the past, which was only worth referring to when neo-classical economists wished to caricature the negative impact of former efforts to control markets. Smith’s attempts to understand the economic present by reference to its past was thus replaced by a set of codified laws about the way economies operated, which had little time for the past in any form. This did not mean that Smith’s nineteenth century followers would have disagreed with his belief that the 1490s voyages were significant events. It is just that to the economists the past was largely irrelevant. All that mattered was that the insights of their discipline could be used to shape the future, in particular by demonstrating the benefits of free trade. With British political historians showing little concern in the voyages of the 1490s and economists no interest in the past at all, the final group who might have been expected to recognise the import of the voyages were the economic historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the above discussion, it is unsurprising that British economic history was slow to develop in in the century after the publication of The Wealth of Nations. Indeed, that the subject developed at all was largely a consequence of the country’s relative economic decline from the 1870s.14 Recognition that other nations, such as Germany and the USA, were surpassing Great Britain in the adoption and development of new technologies, combined with a rising angst about the impact of industrialisation at home, led to a new interest in the economic and social past. Arnold Toynbee was the first great disciple of this movement, with his famous lectures on what he first defined as the ‘Industrial

13

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London, 1817); James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821); John Ramsay McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy, with a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Science (London, 1825). 14 Harte, Study of Economic History, xv-xvii.

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Revolution’.15 Toynbee was followed by a growing band of British scholars who felt that constitutional historians were ignoring those aspects of the past that were, for them, the true drivers of historical change. It was not that these men were Marxist; Christian Socialism was more prevalent among them. However, like Karl Marx, they regarded economic factors as the most important drivers of historical change.16 From the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century, economic history grew stronger in Britain: its heyday lying in the three decades after 1945, when the State was most convinced in the ability of the social sciences to understand and address the concerns of a rapidly changing world. However, while some of the subject’s most noted practitioners were medievalists, the chief focus of the discipline throughout this period remained the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. To most British economic historians, this was their ‘great story’ to be told, analysed and explained. So, just as political historians concentrated on the establishment of the British constitution, the economic historians focused on the transformation of their country, and later the world, through industrialisation. For such writers, events before the eighteenth century were largely irrelevant. And even though economic historians of earlier periods did not necessarily agree, their analyses more often focused on domestic manufacture, agriculture, regional trade, urbanisation and commercialisation as drivers of economic growth, rather than the creation of a world market after the 1490s. Most agreed with Patrick O’Brien that, at least before the eighteenth century, world trade was simply too small to have acted as a major driver for economic growth in Europe.17 Beyond this, a tendency to downplay the importance of markets also became apparent in the work of Marxist historians, or those who were at least influenced by Marxist analysis, with its emphasis on ownership and control of the means of production as factors shaping economies. These approaches range from the work of British social historians such as Eric Hobsbawn and E. P. Thompson, the annales school of Ferdinand Braudel, to the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein.18 Given these 15

A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1884). R. H. Tawney (ed.), Studies in Economic History: Collected Papers of George Unwin (London, 1927), pp. lxvi. 17 Patrick O’Brien, ‘European economic development: the contribution of the periphery’, Economic History Review, XXXV (1982), 1-18. 18 Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (1962); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963); Ferdinand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle 16

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developments, it is perhaps understandable that British economic historians have shown little interest in the voyages of the 1490s. From their perspective they are, at best, events that sowed the seed for changes that would not come to fruition until at least the eighteenth century. By this reading, Adam Smith might have been correct about the central importance of the 1490s voyages to developments in his own lifetime, but his analysis was incorrect if applied to the period before c.1700 or after c.1800. To most British political historians then, the discovery voyages of the 1490s were sideshows, to the economic historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the voyages were not primary drivers of their country’s growth, while to economists the voyages were irrelevant because they concerned the past, while their discipline was about shaping the future. Smith’s proposition has thus been accepted by few in the United Kingdom since his time. In the face of two centuries of relative indifference, why then do I feel that it is worth making the case for the central importance of the discovery voyages once more? Why do I believe that they are the most appropriate markers for the birth of the early modern world? Returning again to Adam Smith and the reasons he viewed the 1490s expeditions as important, it may be pointed out that, while it may have taken centuries for the world to develop a fully globalized economy, the creation of a global trade network, for the first time in history, occurred within a few decades of the voyages and was predicated on them. For these expeditions led to the direct integration of Europe’s maritime world with that of Asia and the incorporation of the Americas into a global economy, with connections to the Old World by both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Today, Columbus is more famous than de Gama and his legacy more apparent. However, in 1500 it was the Cape voyage that caused more of a stir in Europe, with its potential to replace the millennia-old trade routes between the Orient and Europe, via the Arabian Peninsula or the centralAsian Silk Road.19 Such fears were not baseless, for having reached India in 1499, Portuguese fleets and influence spread with remarkable rapidity through the Indian Ocean and China Sea. By 1507 the Portuguese had (1967); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974). 19 E. Dursteler, ‘Reverberations of the voyages of discovery in Venice, ca. 1501: The Trevisan Manuscript in the Library of Congress’, Mediterranean Studies, 9 (2001), 43-64.

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established strategic bases in East Africa and started to trade with India. By 1515 they had captured or acquired a number of key ports around the Indian Ocean, including Malacca, at the entrance to the China Sea. In 1517 a Portuguese fleet visited Canton and, while the Iberians were forcefully rebuffed by the Chinese in 1521, they subsequently established trading networks throughout the region, culminating in the establishment of a mission in Japan in 1548.20 In just fifty years the Portuguese created a maritime trading network that linked all parts of the European and Asiatic worlds. In the event this did not result in the sudden collapse of the traditional routes between Europe and Asia, because the cost of maintaining the Portuguese networks proved high. Nevertheless, in the first half of the sixteenth century Portugal did succeed in creating the most extensive maritime trading network in history: all of which depended on de Gama’s initial success. If Iberian activity to the east was astounding, that in the New World and the Pacific was even more so. While some Europeans had visited the peripheries of north east America before Columbus, there is no evidence that contact between Europe and the Americas had been more than occasional and sporadic. This changed with the 1490s voyages to the Americas by the various explorers backed by Spain, Portugal and England. In the two decades after 1492, the Spanish established permanent settlement in the Caribbean, the Portuguese a colony in Brazil while, to the north, a major fishery was established off Newfoundland. In the following decades, however, it was the Spanish who were to be the real winners. By 1519 they had established Panama City on the Pacific Ocean, Cortes had begun the two-year campaign that would lead to the overthrow of the Aztec Empire in Mexico and Magellan had set sail for what was to be the first circumnavigation of the world. All this was followed, just a decade later, by Pizzaro’s expedition into the heart of the Inca Empire, which resulted in the empire’s overthrow and the institution of Spanish hegemony over large parts of South America.21 By mid-century the Spanish had taken control of the most profitable and civilized parts of the Americas and had begun to produce the vast quantities of silver that would make their country rich, with major implications for the power and influence of Spain in sixteenth century Europe. Moreover, while most of the bullion was sent back to Spain directly, some began to be dispatched 20 B. W. Diffie and G. D Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 14151580 (Minneapolis, 1978); M. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Expansion, 14001668 (Abingdon, 2004). 21 H. Thomas, Conquest, Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York, 1993); J. Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York, 1970).

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westwards across the Pacific to buy Asiatic goods that were then shipped to Europe via the Cape route. Meanwhile, both Spain and Portugal had begun to develop plantation agriculture in the Americas, based on slaves imported from Africa. In so doing, they set up a form of economic exploitation that would form the basis for much of the economy of the Americas for the next three hundred years. In the process sub-Saharan Africa became much more integrated into the world economy and was deeply affected by the growth of the Atlantic Economy. For the export of textiles, iron and guns from Europe fostered the development of slaving states in Africa, which prospered by raiding ever deeper into the continent to seize people who could be sold to the European merchants for export to the Americas.22 Long before the European colonisation of the Africa in the nineteenth century, the continent thus experienced its own version of the early modern. In just fifty years the Old World and the New were brought together and oceanic trade routes created that encircled the globe. Centuries would elapse before world trade formed a major part of the global economy. Yet, when it comes to defining the difference between the medieval period and the early modern one, the 1490s voyages and the subsequent rapid creation of a global trading network predicated on them still stand out. For in a few years networks were established and approaches to trade were created that persisted until Adam Smith’s time and beyond. To the Scot, after all, this was not the ‘early modern period’, it was the age of the mercantile system, characterised by the domination of long-distance trade by national monopoly companies. This was what he regarded as being distinctive about his age and, as he recognised, the system dated back to the 1490s, when Spain and Portugal tried to divide up the extra-European world between them, while at the same time maintaining strict controls over who, even within their own countries, was allowed to trade with it. If such developments are accepted as important, some historians would argue that they are less significant than other changes that resulted from the contact made in 1492. Since the publication of Arnold Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, environmental and demographic historians have explored the impact of biological exchange between the Old World and the New after 1492.23 In his seminal work Crosby argued that Spain’s success in colonising the Americas was largely a result of the devastating diseases they inadvertently brought with them when they crossed the 22

J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (CUP, 1998); P. E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (3rd edition, Cambridge 2011). 23 A. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (1972).

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Atlantic. Diseases such as Plague, Smallpox, Malaria and Measles had a catastrophic impact on the native American peoples, who had no natural resistance to them. The result was to reduce the population of the Americas by between eighty and ninety-five per cent over the course of the sixteenth century.24 If this is treated as a single demographic crisis, it would certainly be the most devastating one in human history. As significant in the longer term, was the introduction of Old World plants and animals, including wheat, horses, cattle, sheep, chickens and pigs. These radically changed the landscape, ecology and economic potential of the New World in a process Crosby later termed ‘ecological imperialism’.25 In truth, it was virtually terraforming, in that it resulted in much of the native fauna and flora of new worlds being supplanted by those of the Old World. In return, besides silver, the Spanish and Portuguese brought back new plant stuffs. These included consumables, such as tobacco, chilli, tomatoes and cocoa, which would revolutionise culinary and consumption practices from Europe to East Asia. More importantly, they brought back a range of staple crops that would transform agriculture across the Old World. These staples included maize, potato, sweet potato, manioc (cassava) and many of the beans consumed today – including soya, kidney, string and haricot. The important thing to understand about these crops is that they were not just alternatives to the wheat, barley, oats, rice and millet of the Old World. The New World crops had different nutritional properties, thrived in different soils, had different growing cycles and varying levels of pest / weather resistance. Maize, for example, could be grown in conditions that were too dry for rice but too wet for wheat. Potatoes, sweet potatoes and manioc, meanwhile, all being tubers, which were almost unknown in the Old World, could be cultivated successfully in very different conditions to grains. This allowed them to be grown productively in soils and climatic conditions not suitable to the Old World staples. In time, the introduction of these crops led to the New World staples becoming dominant in many parts of the Old World. Potatoes, for instance, became the chief crop in large parts of northern Europe, while maize and manioc became so embedded in Africa that their American origins was all but forgotten. The result was that by the end of the twentieth century New World crops, particularly potatoes and maize, accounted for about half of the World’s 24

Estimates vary markedly, largely because of the difficulty of establishing the pre-Columbian population of the Americas: D. Henige, Numbers from Nowhere. The American Indian Contact Population Debate (1998). 25 A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900 (CUP, 1986)

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staple food production. Considering such developments Crosby argued that the introduction of New World crops had an even greater demographic impact than the introduction of Old World diseases to the Americas. For had the Americas not been discovered, the population expansion of the planet in the second half of the millennium could not have been anything like as great it was. Billions of people who have lived since 1492 would thus not have even been born had the Americas not been discovered. Accounts that stress the importance of new products may sound dangerously like technological determinism, which ascribes historical change to invention or innovation. The fallacy of this approach is that it treats the development of new technologies as an independent variable. In reality, inventions and innovations occur typically in response to a need, or a new set of conditions. Rising labour costs, for example, may drive manufacturers to develop technologies that reduce labour inputs.26 The advent of new crops like potatoes and maize are different because, while their adoption and spread was certainly conditioned by local factors, in many cases the new crops allowed much more to be produced from a given area of land. The impact of such new crops, like the introduction of new pathogenic microbes, can thus be considered an independent variable to a greater extent than a new technology. This was particularly true, when new forms of flora or fauna went native, with results that were not expected, intended or even desired by either the indigenous or the incoming human population. It was for this reason, above all then, that I would argue that 1492 defines the start of the Early Modern. For it was then that the Old and New were brought together and both were changed fundamentally in consequence.

26

R. H. Hilton and P. H. Sawyer, ‘Technological determinism: the stirrup and the plough’, Past and Present, 24 (1963); D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed. Open University, 1999).

CHAPTER FIVE PROBLEMS OF PERIODIZATION: THE MEDITERRANEAN AND OTHER MARITIME SPACES DAVID ABULAFIA

Maritime history is now much in vogue. Its attraction lies in what most historians insist on calling its ‘transnational’ character – ‘transnational’ being a term that makes rather little sense the further back one goes in time, before the emergence of the nation-state. However, the idea that studying maritime spaces will enable one to break free from the national histories, extolling the achievements of particular peoples and dynasties, that for long dominated writing about the past, is very worthwhile. The concern of the more traditional maritime historian may well be the intricacies of navigational techniques, ship construction and naval tactics that dominate the pages of The Mariner’s Mirror and other excellent journals of maritime history. However, the emphasis has shifted away from these more technical aspects of maritime history towards an understanding of the subject as the history of inter-connections across open spaces, with a strong emphasis on trade but also on cultural interactions, often the by-product of that trade. The fascination of maritime history is thus seen to lie in the relationship between physically distant places that might have had a more intimate relationship with one another than places that lay close together but interacted weakly, as a result of physical, political or religious barriers. Thus medieval Genoa developed trading links with the Levant, North Africa and Spain more rapidly than it did with southern Germany, which came into close contact with the great trading city only at the end of the Middle Ages.1

1 M. Veronesi, Oberdeutsche Kaufleute in Genua, 1350-1490: Institutionen, Strategien, Kollektive (Stuttgart, 2014).

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Needless to say, maritime histories differ in scale, and the explosion of writing about the history of seas amply reflects this. Leaving off the map totally enclosed seas such as the Caspian, questions arise about the interaction between large and small seas – the relationship between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic is an important theme in early modern economic history, while the rise of the German Hansa can only be understood in the setting of both the Baltic and the North Sea, to which access was gained through the narrow waters of the Sound that divides Helsingør (Elsinore) from Helsingborg on what is now the Swedish side of the straits. Even so, these two seas have a common history in many respects, and the medieval economic historian Roberto Lopez termed them, rather confusingly, ‘the Northern Mediterranean’; here they will be called ‘the Mediterranean of the North’.2 Mediterraneans of one sort and another, middle seas surrounded by a ring of lands or islands, have been the subject of intense discussion, with the South China Sea attracting particular attention as another ‘Mediterranean’.3 Moving up the scale, oceans too have become the favoured spaces for historians intent on going ‘transnational’; Atlantic history has become as big an industry as Mediterranean history – and as ill-defined a one, despite the efforts of distinguished scholars such as David Armitage.4 Once again one can query whether the term ‘transnational’ is applicable; and the interest in these vaster seas reflects a move towards global history in an age of globalization, with, at the centre of enquiry, the question when a global economy began to function. This question, which has great relevance to any discussion of periodization, also raises the difficult problem of how one relates the history of what happened on the surface of the sea, as it was criss-crossed by travellers aboard ships, or what happened on its islands and in ports around the sea-shore, to what was happening inland. ‘Mediterranean history’, partly thanks to the pioneering work of Fernand Braudel, has extended its ambitions some way inland, leaving behind a puzzle where 2

R. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1976). 3 D. Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W.V. Harris (Oxford, 2005), pp. 64-93; Wang Gungwu, ‘A Two-Ocean Mediterranean’, in Anthony Reid and the study of the Southeast Asian Past, ed. G. Wade and L. Tana (Singapore, 2012), pp. 68-84. 4 D. Armitage, ‘Three concepts of Atlantic history’, in The British Atlantic World, ed. D. Armitage and M. Braddick (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 11-27, 250-4; B. Bailyn, Atlantic History: concept and contours (Cambridge MA, 2005), and much subsequent literature.

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the subject begins and ends – after all, Braudel was not afraid of including Krakow and Madeira in his enlarged ‘Mediterranean’.5 His interest in the Sahara is easier to defend, because, seen from the perspective of the type of maritime history that is being described here, the great deserts of the world fulfil many of the criteria of seas: they are large open spaces containing both uninhabitable areas and islands (oases), and their outer edges enjoy contact through long-distance trade with very different cultures on the opposite ‘shore’. So, if we are thinking about periodization, one crucial question is whether the transformations that took place in, say, sub-Saharan West Africa around 1450 were in some respects in harmony with those taking place in the Maghrib, with which Black Africa enjoyed close cultural and commercial contact. And then the question enlarges still further into one about the relationship between what was happening in the commercial centres of the Maghrib and the trading cities of western Europe, such as Barcelona, Valencia and Genoa, that traded intensively with North Africa. Put very simply, the question becomes: ‘was there a global Middle Ages?’ And following on from that, was there a global early modern period? And this takes us to the core of the debate about the history of the Mediterranean and other seas: should their history be written comparatively, so that the study side by side of (say) Florence and Damascus is used to shed light on similarities and differences in their political, social and economic structure, or should it be written as a history of connections, effected, in this case, by Italian merchants carrying Florentine cloth to medieval Syria as part of the great Levant trade of the late Middle Ages? Of course, the answer is that both approaches have their virtues, but it will be suggested that an emphasis on connections reveals much more about the dynamics of the maritime world.6 These, then, are warnings about the difficulties inherent in writing a coherent history of any sea. The periodization that will be set out here for the Mediterranean needs to be set alongside other periodizations for other seas to which it was linked. Indeed, from about 1500 onwards the links between the Mediterranean and the two oceans on either side may have had a transformative effect on the Mediterranean itself – something that will be investigated further later in this essay. First, however, it makes sense to consider the wider periodization of the Mediterranean, because, at least in antiquity, there existed clear breaks, periods of convulsion that saw 5

F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, transl. Siân Reynolds (2 vols., London, 1972-3). 6 Work in progress by Patrick Lantschner compares social revolts in western European and Islamic cities during the late Middle Ages, looking at areas as diverse as Flanders, Italy, Syria and Morocco.

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the collapse of an old order and the slow emergence of new societies partly rooted in memories of much older ones, but with distinct characters of their own. Did anything similar happen in the late Middle Ages? One of the fundamental arguments of my book The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean is that there have been five distinct periods of Mediterranean history, culminating in the contemporary globalized world in which, in significant respects, the Mediterranean has ceased to exist.7 If we go very far back in time to the Bronze Age, taking a stance around 1500 BC, we observe a Mediterranean whose main areas of close interaction were confined to its eastern waters, particularly off Egypt, the Levant, Crete, Cyprus, Asia Minor and, increasingly, mainland Greece, with occasional forays by ambitious or enterprising merchants into the waters off Sicily and even beyond there. Sardinia enjoyed a surprisingly lively degree of contact with Mediterranean Spain and Italy and even with Atlantic societies, though its role in the networks around Crete and Cyprus was very limited – here I beg to differ from the magisterial account of the early Mediterranean by Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, a book that fails to prove that there was a high degree of economic integration right across the Mediterranean in the second millennium BC.8 Still, the flourishing commercial world around Minoan Crete achieved an impressive standard of living, at least in princely palaces (everyone cites the flushing lavatories at Knossos and on Santorini). How rapidly this world disintegrated has been much debated, but the factors that have been cited include the great volcanic eruption that destroyed Santorini, invasions by Sea Peoples of uncertain origin endowed with more effective weapons, the spread of plague, political strife symbolized by the Trojan War, and – as is now inevitable in any historical discussion – climate change.9 Certainly the collapse was traumatic enough to leave its mark in the great works of literature of the next period, the Bible and the Homeric epics. An integrated Mediterranean only came into existence in the second phase, with the opening of trade routes that linked the Levant to Spain and even to the Atlantic; this was the work of the Phoenicians, closely 7

D. Abulafia, The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean (London and New York, 2011); the updated Penguin edition (2014) takes further the argument that in many respects the Mediterranean has ceased to function as coherent unit. 8 C. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: a history of the Mediterranean from the beginning to the emergence of the classical world (London, 2013). 9 R. Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: changes in warfare and the catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton NJ, 1993); E. Cline, 1177 B.C.: the year civilization collapsed (Princeton NJ, 2104).

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followed by Greek and Etruscan merchants, the latter very active in southern France, the former also present in southern Italy and Sicily (where they established many thriving towns) and in North Africa. This was where the Phoenicians founded their most famous colony, Carthage, whose own commercial network soon extended across the western Mediterranean. But integration was compromised by rivalry, and it was only with the arrival of Roman naval power that the entire Mediterranean fell under a single political authority, greatly facilitating the movement of goods and people: piracy was suppressed, and vast amounts of grain were shipped from Egypt and Tunisia to Rome and later Constantinople. Mare Nostrum was not just a common market but a space across which cultures and religions flowed, with the wind blowing mainly from the east as Hellenistic culture spread into Italy and beyond, and as Middle Eastern religions, including not just Judaism and Christianity but Mithraism and the worship of the Egyptian god Sarapis became fashionable far from the lands in which these religions originated. It hardly needs to be said that, after several hundred years of relative peace (interrupted, to be sure, by civil wars among the hundreds of contenders for the imperial crown) this world disintegrated, once again under pressure from all sorts of factors, whose relative weight is still much discussed: barbarian invasions; plague; climate change – we can dismiss some of the more fantastic explanations such as ‘lack of manliness’.10 Having said this, one should of course nod in the direction of those highly respected historians who would rather speak of continuity, and emphasize The Inheritance of Rome, to cite the title of one of Chris Wickham’s many impressive books.11 But nothing can contradict the evidence that the standard of living in Italy and other highly urbanised areas of the western Mediterranean plummeted, and that towns were evacuated as Germanic invaders created new societies, based on less advanced technologies, in lands over which Rome had ruled for half a millennium or more. The effects of invasion and urban collapse were generally less severe in the eastern Mediterranean, though plague may have wreaked greater damage since the area was dotted with towns; the degree of continuity there is nicely represented by the claims of the Byzantine Empire to be nothing other than the continuing Roman Empire, ruled from its new

10

B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005), p. 32. 11 C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: a history of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London, 2009).

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capital at Nea Rhomê or Constantinople.12 Yet, from a Mediterranean perspective, the degree of continuity in the east does not cancel out the sense that the Mediterranean was experiencing a collapse comparable to that it experienced when the Bronze Age civilizations disintegrated. This is because, from the perspective of the type of maritime history that has been outlined earlier in this essay, the Mediterranean had ceased to function as a single integrated space. Vandal pirates now raided Sicily, Sardinia and Greece with impunity from the bases they established in Tunisia around AD 400.13 The provision of free grain to the citizens of Rome came to an end. Journeys between Spain or Gaul and the eastern Mediterranean became increasingly rare. This is not the place to pose the question whether a decisive break between east and west was delayed until the rise of Islam in the seventh century or even the arrival of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth, although both these dates are surely far too late. The rise of Islam did not result in the restoration of an integrated Mediterranean on the Roman model; the Muslims never mastered the whole of the Mediterranean, for the waters off southern France as well as the Byzantine East escaped their dominion. Piracy was stimulated into new life by the competition between Muslim navies and Christian shipping, and it was further accentuated by rivalries among both Muslims and Christians, as the Muslim world fragmented into rival caliphates, in Spain, Egypt and the Middle East. This fragmentation also provided the golden opportunity for merchants from Genoa, Pisa and Venice, eventually joined by those of Barcelona, to challenge Muslim navies and to forge new trade networks linking western Europe to the east; this process formed part of a wider ‘commercial revolution’ in western Europe that saw the rise of towns in Italy, southern France, Flanders and the Rhineland, many of which became centres of cloth-production famed for their textiles as far away as Cairo and Damascus. This commercial world did not undergo the sort of collapse that occurred at the end of the Bronze Age or after the Roman Empire began to disintegrate. In those two cases we can talk of civilizations coming to an end, or at least being radically transformed, and of an intermediate ‘Dark Age’, during which trans-Mediterranean contact withered (not that the term ‘Dark Age’ has any favour among early medieval historians nowadays). In the case of the late medieval Mediterranean the collapse, around 1350, was very sudden indeed; and it was followed by a long 12

A. Cameron, ‘Thinking with Byzantium’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new series, vol. 21 (2011), pp. 39-57. 13 H. Castritius, Die Vandalen: Etappen einer Spurensuche (Stuttgart, 2007); A. Merrills and R. Miles, The Vandals (Oxford, 2010).

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period of adjustment during which the economy emerged strengthened rather than weakened, and during which new developments beyond the Mediterranean transformed the relationship between the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. Before analyzing this transformation, however, it makes sense to address another approach to this period that takes rather little interest in the idea of a sudden collapse in the middle of the fourteenth century: that of the Marxist historians who debated with great earnestness the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ that they observed, or thought they should be able to observe, around the same time in western and possibly eastern Europe. The major difficulty was always bound to be the definition of the terms ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’, and indeed the term ‘bourgeois’ that was married to the concept of capitalism. One theorist, Paul Sweezy, wished to intrude a transitional period of post-feudal pre-capitalism between the feudal and the capitalist worlds. He argued forceful that towns constituted the ‘solvent’ that transformed the predominantly rural society of late medieval western Europe into a new type of society.14 He and his colleagues, including Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobbs and Eric Hobsbawm, were not greatly concerned with the Mediterranean, and preferred to downplay the role of trade, especially long-distance trade, in explaining economic and social change. The same was true of ancient historians, and Moses Finley’s insistence on the primacy of gift exchange (derived from his reading of anthropologists such as Karl Polanyi) had a great impact on the way that debates about trade in late antiquity and at the end of the Middle Ages should be perceived, even beyond the rather closed world of Marxist theological debates. But the problem with Dobbs, Sweezy et al. was precisely that their starting-point was the assumptions of Karl Marx about the evolution of society, and in reality they showed greater interest in attempting to fit the late Middle Ages into Marx’s theories than they did in the hard evidence that historians with lighter ideological baggage were producing. In particular, the Marxist historians laid much less emphasis on the impact of the Black Death than the evidence warranted. In one study, far from the Mediterranean, R.E.F. Smith denied that population collapse had set Russian peasants on the move to better lands and kinder masters, when the evidence he helpfully printed at the end of his book showed the exact 14 R. Hilton, P. Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978); cf. S.R. Epstein, ‘Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the transition from feudalism to capitalism’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, ed. C. Dyer and C. Wickham (Cambridge, 2007), also published as a Working Paper by LSE (2006), and in Past and Present, no. 195, suppl. 2 (2007), pp. 248-67.

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opposite.15 Yet the most elementary understanding of economics would lead to the conclusion that the loss of maybe half of the population of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, as well as the Middle East and western Europe, would have dramatic effects on prices, production, trade, the labour market, cultivation of the soil and diet.16 The balance of urban and rural population shifted decisively as villages were abandoned and peasants migrated to the cities, which recovered their population relatively quickly in some cases; lords of rural estates found themselves deprived of manpower and were forced to other sources of income than agriculture, such as pastoralism (as in southern Italy and Spain). But continuing assaults of plague over the next 150 years meant that demographic recovery was long delayed; as will be seen, the expansion of the slave trade to include black African captives was in part a response to this. Signs of population recovery are visible in late fifteenth-century Sicily and southern Italy, and more generally the impact of plague was reduced as outbreaks became more localised and immunity built up among the population. On the positive side, if anything can be called positive about the Black Death, the coming of plague reduced the intense pressure on food resources that had generated famines, and great profits for grain merchants, in the decades before the pestilence arrived. In the realms of commerce, as evidence from both the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean of the North (i.e. the Baltic/North Sea complex) reveals, opportunities were seized to exploit increasing local specialization, and trade routes between areas with distinctive products flourished, often across quite short distances. The Hanseatic merchants benefited from increased demand for herrings from a smaller population with more cash in hand, one that was able to extend the range of its diet upwards into high protein foodstuffs. The grain trade in the Mediterranean still had a strong future, as the towns, with all their new immigrants working hard at the production of textiles, leather goods, metalware and so on, still needed to be fed. But these workers could now afford eggs and chickens, whose price had been high before the Black Death and remained high afterwards, since what had once been a costly treat had now become the favoured diet of the upwardly mobile.17 Within the Mediterranean new centres of trade took off – or rather, second-rank places were catapulted to the front and some of the older 15

R.E.F. Smith, The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry (Cambridge, 1968). On the scale of mortality, see O. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346-1353: the complete history (Woodbridge, 2004). 17 C. de la Roncière, Prix et salaries à Florence (1280-1380) (Rome and Paris, 1982). 16

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centres of trade lost their primacy. There is some debate about the economic health of the lands of the Crown of Aragon in this period, with an older school of historians insisting that Barcelona, and by extension Aragon-Catalonia, suffered badly from internal strife in the fifteenth century; but this view has been successfully challenged by archival research that shows how lively the trade of the city was during much of the century and a half after the arrival of the Black Death.18 Among new centres, Dubrovnik, or Ragusa, stands out. It had flourished to some extent under the tutelage of Venice and other powers, but once it was able to determine its own destiny, after Venice lost control of Dalmatia (during the Black Death), it established for itself a special role as a bridgehead between the Balkan landmass and the sea; its patricians wisely paid tribute to the Ottoman Turks from the middle of the fifteenth century, though before that the Ragusans took great trouble to regulate their relations with sometimes antagonistic Slav princes in the interior.19 Another example of a very successful commercial centre is Valencia, which in some respects took over the role of Barcelona as commercial capital of the Catalan trading world, partly because the city fathers were more open to the presence of alien merchants, who arrived not just from Italy but from Germany and Flanders.20 The city played a significant role in the expanding slave trade that was bringing captives from Atlantic waters on Portuguese ships, as far as Lisbon; many of these slaves were destined for domestic work in Mediterranean households, but the general upsurge in slave trading also reflects the shortfall in manpower in the age

18

Classic negative views in: J. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1714 (London, 1963), pp. 24, 30-31; P. Vilar, ‘Le déclin catalan au bas Moyen Âge’, Estudios de Historia moderna, vol. 6 (1956-9), pp. 1-68; J. Vicens Vives, An economic history of Spain (Princeton NJ, 1969), with relevant sections republished in R. Highfield, ed., Spain in the fifteenth century 1369-1516 (London, 1972), pp. 31-57, 248-75; a mixed view in C. Carrère, Barcelone: centre économique à l’époque des difficultés, 1380-1462 (2 vols., Paris and The Hague, 1967). Contrast M. del Treppo, I mercanti catalani e l’espansione della Corona d’Aragona nel secolo XV (Naples, 1972); D. Pifarré Torres, El comerç internacional de Barcelona i el mar del Nord (Bruges) al final del segle XIV (Barcelona and Montserrat, 2002); M. Soldani, Uomini d’affari e mercanti toscani nella Barcellona del Quattrocento (Barcelona, 2010). 19 B. Krekiü, Dubrovnik (Raguse) et le Levant au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1961); R. Harris, Dubrovnik: a history (London, 2003). 20 València: mercat medieval, ed. A. Furió (Valencia, 1985); J. Guiral-Hadjiïossif, Valence, port méditerranéen au XVe siècle (1410-1525), (Paris, 1986); Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 398-404.

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of plague.21 The bleak picture of Sicily and southern Italy painted in the older literature has been vigorously challenged by the late Stephan Epstein and by Eleni Sakellariou, in their studies of the internal trade of the two kingdoms of Sicily.22 In the Mediterranean of the North, the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were in many respects the golden age of the Hansa.23 It is not, then, easy from a Mediterranean perspective to see the aftermath of the Black Death as a period of economic depression, as used to be argued, but it does make sense to see it as a period of crisis followed by recovery; and in that recovery we observe not the restoration of the old order, which had been under severe economic strain in the early fourteenth century, but the restructuring of society, which had been turned topsy-turvy by the calamity of the Black Death.24 Whether the same can be said of the Islamic ends of the Mediterranean is a more difficult problem: some Muslim states, notably Granada in southern Spain, benefited enormously from expanding European demand for its sugar, silk, dried fruits and ceramics. Granada fits very well into the picture of increased demand for fine goods in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But its exceptional position as the last Muslim state on Iberian soil, a state, moreover, whose financial affairs were dominated by the Genoese, the Florentines and the Catalans, suggests that this little kingdom should be bracketed with Valencia and Sicily (also sugar producers) rather than with, say, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt.25 The 21

D. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in FifteenthCentury Valencia (Ithaca NY, 2009); A. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1440-1550 (Cambridge, 1988). 22 S.R. Epstein, An Island for Itself: economic development and social change in late medieval Sicily (Cambridge, 1992); E. Sakellariou, Southern Italy in the late Middle Ages: demographic, institutional and economic change in the kingdom of Naples, c.1440-c.1530 (Leiden, 2012). 23 P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1964). 24 James Belich’s Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University, delivered in 2014 and being prepared for the press, set out many of the arguments for a positive reading of the post-Black Death economy in Europe and the Mediterranean. 25 A. Fábregas Garcia, Producción y comercio de azúcar en le Mediterráneo medieval: el ejemplo del reino de Granada (Granada, 2000); J. Heers, ‘Le royaume de Grenade et la politique marchande de Gênes en Occident (XVe siècle)’, Le Moyen Âge, vol. 63 (1957), p. 109, repr. in J. Heers, Société et économie à Gênes (XIVe-XVe siècles) (London, 1979), essay VII; F. Melis, ‘Málaga nel sistema economico del XIV e XV secolo’, Economia e Storia, vol. 3, (1956), pp. 19-59, 139-63, reprinted in: F. Melis, Mercaderes italianos en España (investigaciones sobre su correspondencia y su contabilidad) (Seville, 1976), pp. 3-65; R. Salicrù i Lluch, ‘The Catalano-Aragonese commercial presence in the

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expansion of corsair activity out of the North African ports from the late fourteenth century onwards (if it is not an optical illusion created by ever richer source material) suggests that the ports of the Maghrib adopted an increasingly predatory role, exploiting through piracy the trade of those Christian neighbours who were unwilling to pay a massive fee for the right to trade, and raiding the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean in search of captives who would be enslaved or ransomed for profit. Generally, though, the end of the Middle Ages has been characterized as a period of industrial decline in the Levant which, in the studies of Eliyahu Ashtor, became increasingly dependent on large amounts of western textiles that were dumped in Middle Eastern markets.26 That said, the balance of payments favoured the Islamic world now, as it had done before the plague, with western silver flowing eastwards and, by 1400, signs (disputed by some historians) of a bullion famine in the west.27 There is no reason to doubt that the western Islamic world suffered just as badly from the plague as did Europe, although the further east one goes the less evidence there is of its presence: China and Japan appear to have escaped it. If we take the years around 1350 as the beginning of a new phase in Mediterranean history, and more generally in the history of Europe, North Africa and western Asia, the question remains whether other factors than plague were transforming the Mediterranean around this time. Mention has been made already of links to the Atlantic; regular traffic between Italy or Mediterranean Spain and Flanders and England can be traced back to around 1280, when political conditions in the Straits of Gibraltar permitted the Genoese and the Catalans (of Majorca) to edge their way through the difficult currents of the straits bound for the English Channel. Regular voyages took time to be established, and the same was true of traffic heading from Barcelona or Majorca down the coast of Morocco.28 By the time of the Black Death the Canaries had been reached, and they gradually became a significant source of supply of slaves, even though the largest island, Tenerife, was only conquered in 1496, at the hands of the Castilian conquistador Alonso de Lugo. In the fifteenth century, with the opening of sugar factories in Madeira and then the Canaries, the Atlantic islands sultanate of Granada during the reign of Alfonso the Magnanimous’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 27 (2001), pp. 289-312. 26 E. Ashtor, Levant Trade in the later Middle Ages (Princeton NJ, 1984). 27 J. Day, ‘The great bullion famine of the fifteenth century’, Past and Present, no. 79 (1978) pp. 3-45. 28 D. Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: the Catalan kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 188-215; A. Ortega Villoslada, El Reino de Mallorca y el Mundo atlántico: evolución político-mercantil (1230-1349) (Madrid, 2008).

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became increasingly important sources of sugar, outclassing Sicily, Granada and Valencia in production; moreover, they were much better placed to service the markets of northern Europe (a visitor to the Cathedral Museum in Funchal can still see the paintings that were sometimes sent in payment for Madeiran sugar).29 From one perspective, the Mediterranean had been enlarged; until the discovery of the Atlantic sea-routes to the Americas and to the Indies the Atlantic islands were part of a network dominated by not just the Portuguese but by the Genoese, who provided vital investment in the equipment needed for sugar production. And Portugal, while it is not a Mediterranean country (much as it may wish to be classed as one), sent its own ships into the Mediterranean and interfered in the affairs of Morocco, capturing Ceuta, attacking Tangier and seeking to control the Straits of Gibraltar in competition not just with Muslim powers but with its Christian Iberian rivals, the Castilians.30 From the 1460’s onwards, ambitious voyages as far as Elmina, in West Africa, in search of gold and slaves, and the establishment of large sugar plantations on the island of São Tomé, as well as holding-points there and in the Cape Verde islands for slaves, enlarged the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’ massively, but these bases serviced European and Mediterranean demand for gold, sugar and slaves.31 The ‘Atlanticization’ of Mediterranean history began before 1492, then – indeed the Phoenicians, and others before them, had made use of the Straits of Gibraltar many centuries earlier. What importance should we attach to the discovery of the Americas in this attempt to distinguish the medieval from the early modern Mediterranean? Obviously the maritime history of the world was dramatically altered by the creation of sailing links between Europe and the Americas and also between Africa and the Americas. The Atlantic before 1492 is quite simply a different space, one 29

D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus (New Haven CT, 2008), pp. 33-101; D. Abulafia, ‘Sugar in Spain’, European Review, vol. 16 (2008), pp 191-210; M. Ouerfelli, Le Sucre: production, commercialisation et usages dans la Méditerranée médiévale (Leiden, 2007). 30 F. Themudo Barata, Navegação, Comércio e Relações políticas: os portugueses no Mediterrâneo Ocidental (1385-1466) (Lisbon, 1998); J. Heers, ‘L’expansion maritime portugaise à la fin du Moyen-Âge: la Méditerranée’, Actas do III Colóquio internacional de estudios luso-brasileiros , vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1960), pp. 138-47; also P. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: a life (New Haven 2000). 31 D. Abulafia, ‘Dal Mediterraneo all’Atlantico, dall’Europa all’America: il mondo delle isole atlantiche e la visualizzazione dell’Atlantico’, in Vespucci, Firenze e le Americhe, ed. G. Pinto, L. Rombai and C. Tripodi (Biblioteca Storica Toscana, vol. 71, Florence, 2014), pp. 19-42.

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that no one, except some Vikings and occasional wandering ships from Bristol (maybe) crossed, without recognizing what they had encountered at the other end. Nor, indeed, was it at all obvious to the early European explorers of the Americas that they had discovered two continents separate from the rest of the world, rather than yet more Canary Islands somewhat further out in the sea (this is not the place to consider whether Amerigo Vespucci himself had the insight to understand what had been found).32 In reality, it took a few decades for the resources of the Americas to be exploited: Columbus never managed to create successful sugar plantations in Hispaniola, and Brazil became an important source of sugar only from the 1540’s, after several decades during which the poor-quality sugar of São Tomé had been dumped in European markets; here we can see the beginnings of the triangular trade that brought African slaves across the Atlantic to South America and sugar across the Atlantic to Europe. Increasingly, though, the impact of the Americas on the Mediterranean world acquired a different character, as the Spanish Crown became dependent on advances from Genoese bankers against the silver that started to be mined in Peru. The Genoese flourished as the financiers of the Habsburgs, alongside German banking firms. Recent research on the Genoese presence in southern Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has shown that Genoa acquired a commanding position in the economy of the Spanish kingdom of Naples; the relationship of the Genoese with the Habsburg court extended beyond the counting-houses of Seville.33 Theirs was now a much larger maritime world than it ever had been, one that encompassed the Atlantic as well as the Mediterranean, even if later attempts to set up an East India Company petered out. Moreover, the Catalans were also present in the Atlantic, which was not quite the Genoese-cum-Castilian lake that has been supposed; recent research reveals that they were active in the sugar industry of the Canaries and in the slave trade, and remained a significant force well into the sixteenth century.34

32

Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 105-14, 177-9. C. Dauverd, Imperial Ambition in the early modern Mediterranean; Genoese merchants and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge, 2015); cf. R. Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: the Genoese in Seville and the opening of the New World (Ithaca NY, 1966). 34 I. Armenteros Martínez, Cataluña en la Era de las Navegaciones: la participación catalana en la primera economia atlántica (c.1470-1540) (Barcelona and Lleida, 2012). 33

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This leaves out of account developments in the Indian Ocean. This is an altogether more difficult area to bring into the argument. It is not really clear that the vigorous trade of so-called Roman merchants (generally Egyptian Greeks) in the Indian Ocean, recorded from around the time of Augustus, faltered seriously while the Mediterranean was experiencing the convulsions that saw the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west. Alexandria remained the hinge linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, the emporium where the spices of the east could be obtained by merchants from all the trading cities of the Mediterranean.35 One of the principal Red Sea ports, Bereniké, was to all intents out of action from the late second to the fourth century, but other centres of trade remained active, and there is an overall sense of continuity, even though the location of markets changed: for a time the Persian Gulf became a more important route of entry into the Islamic world than the Red Sea; Indonesia emerged as a major source of spices in the early Middle Ages, with the rise of the trading network of ĝri Vijaya; ports in what is now Vietnam flourished and then faded around the fifth and sixth centuries AD, sending spices towards both the Indian Ocean and China; and Song China began to trade actively by the eleventh century, after decades during which China had looked inwards, with effects on traffic much further afield.36 When China was open to foreign trade, more spices reached its coast than were passed across the Indian Ocean towards the Red Sea, Alexandria and the Mediterranean. Historians of the Indian Ocean speak of ‘the Silk Road of the sea’, and the contrast between the maritime silk route and the famous Silk Road across the vast expanse of Asia is an important one.37 The astonishing amounts of Chinese porcelain carried by ship into the Indian Ocean bear witness to the much greater volume of goods carried westwards along the maritime silk route than overland. In particular, they shed doubt on the enthusiastic claim of Janet Abu-Lughod that the revival of the silk route under Mongol authority in the mid-thirteenth century created the first global network of trade, excluding, of course, the New

35

R. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade: from pots to pepper (London, 2008); S. Sidebotham, Bereniké and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2011); R. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient lands of Arabia, India, and China (London, 2010). 36 O.W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: a study of the origins of ĝrƯvijaya (Ithaca NY, 1967); Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: the early history of trade in the South China Sea (Singapore, 1998); D. Heng, Sino-Malay trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century (Athens OH, 2009). 37 J. Miksiü, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea 1300-1800 (Singapore, 2014).

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World.38 A global network, linked by sea-routes, existed long before that time. The arrival of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498, and the subsequent creation of the exceptionally long trade route that linked Portugal to India via the Cape of Good Hope, did not result in the cessation of the Red Sea spice trade, and perhaps had as much effect on the Atlantic economy (with the Cape Verde islands and the Azores as the key supply stations) as it did on that of the Indian Ocean. We might point to the capture of Melaka by Affonso de Albuquerque in 1511 as a key moment in the transformation of Indian Ocean trade; yet this would leave out of account the important role Melaka had played throughout much of the fifteenth century as a link between the trade networks of the Indian Ocean and those of the South China Sea (partly thanks to its Chinese colony, visited by the famous Admiral Zheng He during his ambitious series of Ming voyages that reached as far as Aden and East Africa).39 Moreover, Melaka was itself a substitute for Singapore (or Temasek) which, as recent excavations have shown, was an important entrepôt for trade coming through the Straits of Malacca throughout the fourteenth century.40 It is true that as Portuguese, and later Dutch, trade in the Indian Ocean developed, the Mediterranean was marginalized. At the same time, it remained a desirable target for trade between north European cities and states and Turkey, as the large settlement of European merchants at seventeenth-century øzmir reveals. Baltic rye, carried by Dutch ships, was popular in seventeenth-century Italy. Right up to the early nineteenth century, Danes, Swedes and even North American ships were keen to trade with difficult partners in the Barbary States of North Africa.41 And, needless to say, the markets of Egyptian and Syrian cities continued to be stocked with the produce of the Indian Ocean and beyond, even if Alexandria lost its commanding position for a while. Finally, returning to the Mediterranean, it is important to bear in mind the political changes that make the late medieval Mediterranean look very different from earlier centuries. The rapid expansion of Ottoman power following the arrival of the first Turkish settlers in Europe, at Gallipoli in 38 J. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the world system AD 1250-1350 (New York, 1989). 39 E. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the early Ming Dynasty, 14051433 (New York, 2007); L. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: the Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-33 (New York, 1994). 40 Miksiü, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 145-352. 41 Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 452-69, 524-41.

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1346, transformed not just the south-east European landmass but the sea itself. After 1570 only Venetian Crete remained free from Ottoman rule within the eastern Mediterranean; and even Crete had by the time of its capture by the Turks become well integrated into the trading networks of the Ottoman Mediterranean. It has been seen how the Ragusans deftly played the role of intermediaries between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Mediterranean, and the effects are visible in the simple fact that, numerically, they possessed the largest fleet in the Mediterranean by the start of the seventeenth century, while the Venetians looked much more to their landed interests in north-eastern Italy. This divided Mediterranean, shared between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, looked very different to the sea over which Italian and Catalan merchants had sailed with confidence in earlier centuries. At the start of the sixteenth century, the world had become much bigger and the Mediterranean correspondingly smaller. Taking all these developments together, we can conclude that the period from 1347, when the Black Death entered the Mediterranean, to about 1540 saw the recreation of the Mediterranean no longer as a Middle Sea between Europe, Asia and Africa, but as a Middle Sea between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.



CHAPTER SIX CLIMATE CHANGE, BIG DATA AND THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN POUL HOLM

Periods – what are they good for? Historians use periodisation to order an endless progression of events. In that sense we use the medieval/early modern divide as one among many convenient labels to parse our dates. Indeed, if that were the only use of the framework it would be a straightforward tool, which hardly merited much thought. However, the concept of the medieval and early modern period (MedEM) is far from an innocent shorthand. Historians use the MedEM to establish mental and institutional boundaries. Students are usually taught a curriculum based on the MedEM and as a consequence professional training tends to perpetuate the mental framework. Medieval historians venture into the sixteenth century at their peril and early modernists risk their good names as amateurs when they look for medieval origins or parallels. Period specialisation segregates the academic job market for historians as if we were by definition primarily interested in centuries rather than themes or problems. Confusingly, the medieval and early modern periods are by no means clearly defined. As signifiers historians use intellectual events (such as Gutenberg’s introduction of print (1455) or the 1513 publication of Macchiavelli’s The Prince), political events (such as the 1453 fall of Constantinople and the end of the Hundred Years War, the 1485 Battle of Bosworth, the 1545 Council of Trent, and indeed the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia), or Protestant reformations (1517 Germany, 1527 Sweden, 1536 Denmark, etc.). Clearly the MedEM is a European concept even if we go with the 1492 fall of Granada and voyage of Columbus, still very much a Eurocentric marker. So in terms of precision anytime AD 1550 +/100 years is not wide of the mark, although by preference most historians



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would probably go with the fifteenth century as the last of the medieval centuries. There are of course many ways to bring order to time. Famously, Ferdnand Braudel proposed to study time as moving in structures, conjunctures and events. 1 However, periodisation is not just about ordering of time, it is also about bringing some sense of cohesion to a given period of time, and Braudel’s Mediterranean may be said to suffer from a lack of integration across the different scales. Braudel’s structures, the mountains, plains and waters of the Mediterranean hardly changed (or so it seemed at least at the time when Braudel wrote). It becomes difficult then to see how factors of geology and climate might influence human societies. While Braudel’s work is rightly held to be one of the most beautiful masterpieces crafted by any historian, the interpretation hinges really on a more traditional analysis of trade patterns and politics – as Mediterranean trade supremacy gave way to Atlantic shipways in the Early Modern period. Nevertheless, Braudel’s challenge to historians has endured. Is it possible to write a history that truly connects movements at the glacial scale with the frantic lives of humans? This is the question that triggers my considerations of the longue durée, periodization and how we deal with the MedEM.

Climate change – useful periodisation? Scholars pursuing long-term phenomena are likely to resent the MedEM divide as an unnecessary roadblock. Environmental history is one such approach; a rapidly growing field that happily straddles the perceived divide of the medieval and the early modern periods in its search for longterm trends rather than the history of events. For students of human interaction with the natural world there seems to be little merit in periodisation dictated by political, religious, or ideological developments: their importance as period identifiers must be demonstrated rather than taken as granted in the framing of research. If the traditional MedEM signifiers may be of little relevance to environmental historians, climatic change may be a likely candidate to recalibrate the divide between medieval and early modern times. Some environmental historians use the so-called Little Ice Age of very cold winters and poor harvests as a major explanatory factor for societal



1 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Fontana/Collins: London, 1975).



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change. Geoffrey Parker’s book Global Crisis is the most recent and ambitious in a succession of titles to pursue the impact of climate change across the globe.2 Indeed, Parker in his afterword points to Braudel’s work as a major inspiration. The advantages of using climate change as a periodization tool are obvious: it is a globalizing factor which at one stroke enables historians to rise to the increasing demand for “global history”; and it is topical by responding to present-day concerns. Climate change may, however, be a deceptively simple concept, and I shall raise a few questions. First, when was the Little Ice Age and indeed its corollary the Medieval Warm Period? Dating has proven no more straightforward than most historical periodisation – and for historians who work at the human rather than geological scale an error range of a century does matter. Second, how solid is the evidence for historical climate change? Third, what is the research agenda that opens up if indeed we accept climate change as a major force in human history? Fourth, if environmental history develops in a dialogue with the natural sciences, are we as historians equipped by training and disposition to fully engage?

When were the MWP/LIA? Climatologists rely on indirect, objective and subjective evidence for inference about temperature, wind, and other climatic events before the invention of instruments such as the barometer and thermometer. Treerings and Greenlandic ice cores are well-known proxy data and in addition a wide range of archaeological and documentary evidence may inform us of past climate. Subjective observations such as observations of snow and harvest failures by monastic scribes have been systematized to enable long time series of weather patterns. In the field of climatology historians and archaeologists are able to contribute data such as evidence of glacier change derived from historical maps and physical landscapes; tree-ring data originally used for dating are used as important proxy-data for seasonal variability; and indeed weather observations as noted for example in daily ship log book entries provide direct if subjective interpretation of weather phenomena in the age before instruments.3

 2

G. Parker (2013), Global Crisis. War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013). For earlier works see e.g. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: a History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971); B. M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (Basic Books. 2001); 3 P. Dobrovolný, A. Moberg, R. Brázdil, C. Pfister, R. Glaser, R. Wilson, A. van Engelen, D. Limanówka, A. Kiss, M. Halícková, J. Macková, D. Riemann, J.



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Research in the 1970s and 1980s established the notions of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age but opinions remained divided about the actual extent of the phenomena, the peaks and troughs of the MWP/LIA. The fault lines may be summarily sketched as follows. One position held that medieval warm temperatures reached levels similar to the late twentieth century and maintained that the LIA was very cold, while another position held that past variability was less then present extremes and that the temperature rise of recent decades is unmatched by estimates of past climate. While the disagreement was one of pure academic merit, the debate illuminated present and future implications of past climate variability and contemporary politics and news media seized on possible implications. 4 The first position was often taken to be an argument in favour of considerable long-term variability determined by non-human (solar radiation) factors, while the second position highlighted the impact of recent human-induced change. The empirical questions were obviously matters to be settled by academic research but the political implications tended to obfuscate the debate for a decade. The question of the geographical extent of the phenomena had similar wide-ranging implications. If the LIA were predominantly a European phenomenon, clearly its importance for the interpretation of global climate would be less.

How solid is the evidence? In view of the contested nature of climate science, historians may have been loath to take on board the implications of historical climate change. There may now be less justification for such reticence. The IPCC 2013 report on the geophysics of climate seems to have settled the major contested problems to the satisfaction of the vast majority of scientists on both sides of the issue. Overall, global temperatures in the last 1400 years are now estimated to have varied between +/-0.5 0C relative to mean temperatures in the period 1880-1980. Significantly, the LIA is recognized to have been a global phenomenon. Cooler temperatures prevailed in Europe through the LIA, and in other parts of the globe “more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed

 Luterbacher, R. Böhm, Monthly, seasonal and annual temperature reconstructions for Central Europe derived from documentary evidence and instrumental records since AD 1500. Climatic Change 101, 2010: 69-107. 4 A leading voice in the debate has recently published his critical reflections in M. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Dispatches from the Front Lines (Columbia University Press, 2012).



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in arid Centrral Asia and the t South Ameerican monsooon region”. Th he LIA is now charactterised by exttensive expan nsions of mouuntain glacierrs in both the Northernn and Southeern Hemispheeres. The LIA A is estimated d to have begun with a downturn of o mean temp peratures arouund 1450, and d reduced temperatures lasted throuugh a four hun ndred year peeriod till the middle m of the nineteennth century. The T MWA, now also calledd the Medieval Climate Anomaly, iss less clearly defined d within n a broad braccket 900-1400 0 with the warmest perriod, c950-1250, seeing tem mperatures inn some region ns as high as in the laate 20th centtury, albeit with w greater rregional and seasonal variation.5 T The recent warrming trend iss also clearly eestablished bu ut may be left aside foor the concernns of this papeer. So climatee variability in n the last thousand yeears is now clearly establish hed and the fi field is moving g away it seems from political contrroversy.

Fig. 1. Recoonstructed globbal annual tem mperatures duriing the last 1600 years (Source IPCC C 2013 Figure 5.7(c). 5 The two o main proxy-baased series PS0 04bore and Ma08eivf aree in broad agreeement on MWA A and LIA trajecctories.

Can we be certain of o these findiings or will ffuture researcch upend results? Prevvious researchh found that data quality annd quantity beffore 1600 and especiaally before A.D. 1000 rem mained an isssue. 6 The IPC CC report expresses thhe authors’ leevel of confid dence in findiings from verry low to

 5

Climate C Change 2013. The Physicall Science Bassis. Working Group I. Contribution to the Fifth Assessment A Rep port of the Inteergovernmentall Panel on Climate Channge (Cambridgee University Preess, 2013) 14577. 6 M. Mann ett al. (2008), Prroxy-based reconstructions off hemispheric and a global surface temperature variatioons over the past p two millennnia. Proceedin ngs of the America 105(36 6): 13252National Acaademy of Sciences of the Uniited States of A 13257.



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very high, and the report states high confidence in its findings of temperature variation for the MWP and LIA (p77). Clearly more research will add higher resolution to the general picture but it seems unreasonable to expect that the overall pattern will change much. In other words, climate history has moved into a sphere of relatively stable knowledge and historians should therefore consider such information as just as relevant to the longue durée as other physical phenomena. While the overall pattern may be stable, lots of questions remain open. The causes of climate change are one such area where climatological research is still in its infancy. Volcanic eruptions of sulfur-rich loads are now widely believed to be a major cause of pre-modern climate change, and indeed may have triggered sudden significant cooling around 12751300 and again around 1430-1455, the latter possibly sustained through the LIA by consequent sea-ice/ocean feedback.7 However, the impact of volcanic activity on climate and indeed human society remains very much a field for future research.

A research agenda for climate across the MedEM What are the implications for medieval and early modern research of the phenomenon of climate change? In other words, to which degree may we assume that climate change will have impacted human society and events? And should we reconsider the MedEM as a consequence? One of the historians to have drawn radical conclusions for his own approach is Geoffrey Parker. Renowned for his scholarship of the military revolution of Europe of the early modern age, in 1998 Parker made a bold decision to research the General Crisis of the seventeenth century as a global phenomenon examining in a Braudelian fashion “long-term factors (climate above all), medium-run changes (economic fluctuations and so on) and ‘events’ […] the book would offer explanations of why such synchronic developments occur with so little warning and why they end.”8 In doing so he rebutted the statement by the pioneer of climate history Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who believed that “human consequences of climate seem to be slight, perhaps negligible” and stated that it would be “absurd” to explain French social unrest by “adverse meteorological conditions of the 1640s”.

 7

G. H. Miller et al. (2012), Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks. Geophysical Research Letters 39:2, L02708, doi:10.1029/2011GL050168. 8 Parker, op. cit., 705.



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Parker believes that “the sources now available […] allow historians to integrate climate change with political, economic and social change with unprecedented precision” (p xix). However, he warns against determinism and points to human foresight and adaptive strategies to survive adverse conditions. Indeed, in his massive tome full of depressing failures and social and political disasters his chapter on Japan points to one society that overcame the challenge of seventeenth century climate. The global reach of Parker’s analysis is buttressed by the consensus of climate scientists that the Little Ice Age did impact the Eurasian and American continents. While population data is far from complete he ventures the hypothesis that one third of the world’s population was lost in the seventeenth century. If his demographic data is upheld by future research the seventeenth century seems to be a watershed in human history on a par with the Black Death, assumed to have taken a toll of one third of the Eurasian population, more so in the west than in the east.9 Parker does not discuss the implications of his study for our understanding of preceding centuries but there seems to be obvious implications. Figure 1 clearly puts the end of MWP back into the twelfth century. Historians of the late medieval agrarian crisis have of course assembled data on harvest failures, indicating the Black Death was preceded by difficult years that increased pressures on food supplies. In this perspective there would be a lot of sense in trying to improve our understanding of climate events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the wider context of ideas and beliefs it is striking that the years of societal stress and famine through the LIA saw fundamental changes in cosmology and social imaginaries. Climate change happened at a time when we may identify a breakthrough of individual expression, doubt and inquiry in Europe. Obviously, it would not make sense to look for direct causation and indeed similar responses did not occur in other continents, although they were affected by climate change. It may be fruitful, however, to look for long-term responses to climate events in a far more structured way than is usually pursued. Such a methodology would need to go beyond a straightforward narrative chronology. Magisterial as it is, Parker’s narrative does depend on narrative thrust rather than a strict hypothesis-driven analysis. The question of methodology is pertinent for any future dialogue with climate science. Historians and natural scientists often perceive such dialogue to be difficult simply for the fact that unambiguous quantitative

 9

G. C. Kohn, Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present (Infobase Publishing, 2007) 31-3.



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data are most often unavailable. However, such pessimism fails to recognize that both types of academic pursuit grow not from the evidence base but from qualitative modeling. Historians as much as scientists begin from a research question and seek whatever evidence may illuminate the question. As the historians of the late medieval agrarian crisis John Hatcher and Mark Bailey have shown the use of models in medieval history should encourage such dialogue. In their study of interpretative frameworks of the crisis of the late medieval age they argued for the need for a modelling approach to get a grip on complex historical phenomena. Their advice was not to seek the ultimate explanation for everything but rather to ask questions within a bounded rationality that allow for a best judgement.10 An encouraging example of the use of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ data to illuminate climate and social history is the study of Irish monastic annals by the historical geographer Francis M. Ludlow. He distilled from the annals a database of 1200 years of annual – quite subjective – weather observations, tabularised by him according to an ordinal scale (icy/warm winter, wet/dry season, poor harvest/abundant harvest etc.). This information correlates well with independent data such as Greenland ice cores and volcanic eruptions and as a first step amplifies our knowledge of past weather. 11 More importantly, preliminary analysis reveals striking patterns of social response to weather events such as crop failure and harsh winters in the shape of increased unrest and violence in the following year. Studies such as this are likely to test bold syntheses across millennia such as Steven Pinker’s brilliant study of the long history of violence.12 The importance of long time series is evident. Co-variation of data on a temporal scale is very likely to be purely coincidental so very long-term data series are important for the robustness of any observation that rests on observation of movements. The Irish annals may be unusually suited to such study as they have been generated and preserved in a single welldefined format that remained largely unchanged for an unusually long period. However, long series of formalised information are abundantly available in many countries and may provide exciting opportunities for

 10

J. Hatcher & M. Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. Oxford U.P. 2001. F. Ludlow, A. R. Stine, P. Leahy, E. Murphy, P. Mayewski, D. Taylor, J. Killen, M. Baillie, M. Hennessy and G. Kiely, G. Medieval Irish Chronicles Reveal Persistent Volcanic Forcing of Severe Winter Cold Events, 431-1649 CE, Environmental Research Letters, 8:2, (2013) L024035, doi:10.1088/17489326/8/2/024035. 12 S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 11



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macro-analysis. It seems likely therefore that in the future historians will run routinely climate data against demographic, economic, social and indeed cultural data.13

The MedEM Fish Revolution One such candidate field is the history of primary production that is so obviously related to climate. Parker makes no reference to the implications of climate change for the major new industry that developed in the MedEM period, that of the North Atlantic fisheries. Cabot’s discovery of the NW Atlantic Grand Banks in 1497 had fundamental geopolitical implications. In the next century marine products were among the first foodstuffs to be thoroughly exposed to globalising processes. Seasonal voyages across the Atlantic turned into permanent settlements and the NW Atlantic became the main supplier of European fish markets and newer markets further afield in North America.14 These developments effectively made up a ‘fish revolution’ that was a prism of environmental and societal change in the Atlantic world. The Fish Revolution occurred in conjunction with dramatic changes for coastal settlements on both sides of the Atlantic and was of strategic importance to major European powers in seventeenth century realignments of economic power and politics. British, Irish and Scandinavian fisheries settlements declined or disappeared; 15 and in Iceland and the Faeroes fisheries gradually lost purchasing power and wool became the dominant trade of the islands.16 Across the Atlantic, in

 13

For further potential see C. Pfister, The vulnerability of past societies to climatic variation: a new focus for Historical Climatology in the 21st Century. Climatic Change101:1 (2010), 281-310. 14 P. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland plantation in the seventeenth century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 15 Holm, P., Starkey, D. J., & Thór, J. T. (eds.), The North Atlantic fisheries, 11001976: national perspectives on a common resource. (Studia Atlantica 1) (Esbjerg: Fiskeri- og Søfartsmuseet, 1996); D. J. Starkey, C. Reid & N. Ashcroft (eds.), England's Sea Fisheries. The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England & Wales since c.1300 (London, Chatham Press, 2000); H. Fox, The evolution of the fishing village: Landscape and society along the South Devon coast, 1086-1550. Oxford: Leopard's Head Press, 2001; S. M. Flavin, The Development of AngloIrish Trade in the Sixteenth Century (unpubl. MA thesis, Univ. Bristol, 2004); M. Rorke, The Scottish herring trade, 1470-1600, Scottish Historical Review 84 (2005), 149-65. 16 B. Stoklund, From centre to periphery: main lines of North Atlantic cultural development from medieval to modern times. Ethnologia Europaea 22 (1992), 5165



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Newfoundland and the coasts south to the Gulf of Maine, however, seasonal settlements turned into permanent settlement as thousands of people were attracted to the fisheries. Only highly competitive Dutch herring fisheries remained a strong Old World supplier, if also declining by the late seventeenth century. The Fish Revolution developed contrary to the sharp price inflation of other foodstuffs in the early modern period.17 Fish shifted from being a high-priced resource in limited supply to being a low-priced resource in abundant supply. At the same time some inshore European waters recorded repeated catch failures in the seventeenth century. The issue is to which degree was the Fish Revolution caused by climate change or by economic responses to new opportunities? A satisfactory interpretation of the Fish Revolution must assess the long-term importance of American supplies and of climate change for the transformation of North Atlantic waterscapes. In order to do so we will need to assess abiotic and biotic as well as human variables. While most of these factors would have been considered unknowable 10 or 15 years ago, the breakthroughs in marine environmental history and historical ecology have moved them into the field of the knowable. 18 Our knowledge of abiotic factors such as temperature, wind and currents have increased tremendously, while biotic primary production and target fish abundance and distribution can now be mapped, visualized and analysed in tandem with social, cultural, political and economic variables. On the human side, there is a long tradition of research and recent renewed interest in factors such as settlement, demography, capital, labour and technology. Recent interest in consumption history has sparked research into social and cultural food preferences and the factors of politics, strategy and subsidies. However, much still remains obscure in the absence of published quantitative data19 as well as of comparative qualitative study. In short, there is a potential in this field for breakthroughs in our understanding of North Atlantic supply, demand, culture and politics.



17 Nedkvitne, A. (1988), “Mens Bønderne seilte og Jægterne for”. Nordnorsk og vestnorsk kystøkonomi 1500-1730 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1988). 18 K. Schwerdtner-Máñez, P. Holm, L. Blight, M. Coll, A. MacDiarmid, H. Ojaveer, B. Poulsen, M. Tull, The future of the oceans past: Towards a global marine historical research initiative. PLoS One 9:7, 2014, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101466. 19 J.J. Wubs-Mrozewicz, Fish, Stock and Barrel. Changes in the Stockfish Trade in Northern Europe c.1360-1560. In: L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (ed.) Beyond the Catch. Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009) 187-208.



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Future research across the MedEM is likely to answer questions like (1) what were the natural and economic causes of the fish revolution, (2) how did marginal societies adapt to changes in international trade and consumption patterns around the North Atlantic, and (3) how did consumers, investors, and politics in the major European countries perceive and respond to the fish revolution? Knowing and establishing the answers will help us understand the role of environment and climate change in the past, how markets impacted marginal communities, and how humans perceived long-term change.

Methodological implications The preceding argument rests on the assumption that mass data are or will become available. Many, perhaps most, medievalists and early modernists hold that the fragmentary nature of preserved evidence will for ever occlude our understanding of the past to a degree that sets us apart from the modern historian. The same point is of course often used to distinguish medieval from early modern times. I am optimistic. Methodologically, I believe we are only at the threshold of reaping the benefits of the revolution of Big Data, which has happened in the last few years. The Australian physicist Michael Nielsen argues that all sciences are facing the second scientific revolution after Copernicus: ”We are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. The internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world.”20 I agree that the second scientific revolution caused by digital technologies is only now working its way into how we practice the humanities. IT and especially the Internet has accelerated and fundamentally changed the way in which cognition takes place and these changes will only accelerate. The humanities are still overwhelmingly conceived and practiced as analogue sciences and the full benefits of the digital revolution are still ahead of us. Archives hold an ocean of human knowledge, which is still locked in parchment and paper formats despite rapidly increasing digitization projects. However, digitisation is only the very first step into new procedures of inquiry, which will enable us to ask questions that would have been considered impossible at more than a speculative level only a decade ago. With access to millions of original documents and other



20 Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.



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material evidence MedEM historians are faced with the challenges and opportunities of Big Data. Large corporations harness Big Data information systems to understand customer needs and preferences, and increasingly Big Data such as are generated by social media, sensors, and cameras are used to monitor human behaviour, communication and perception. Leaving ethical and democratic concerns aside, the interesting development is the ability to mine and utilize enormous heterogeneous data sets. In the age of Big Data information managers are not asking for homogenous information but for any kind of information however informal and disjointed the sources. This development is of real importance to our ability to handle and interpret the vast amounts of information of the past. The first sense of how Big Data inquiries will change humanities research probably came with the launch of n-gram21 search capabilities for millions of books digitized by Google. The algorithm enables us to reveal patterns of word use in printed books of several major languages. The findings, such as the relative use of the word pairs ‘medieval history’ and ‘early modern history’ (Figure 2), need further scrutiny before we deduce anything from them but the important thing is that this crude tool is certainly only the very first baby step. The Digging Into Data Challenge originated in 2009 in a joint UK-US-Canadian funding initiative. This and similar schemes in other nations have enabled a host of new data projects that build on existing digitised collections to enable research inquiries. One such example is the Mapping the Republic of Letters, a product of Stanford Literary Lab. The project makes possible spatial analysis of “intellectual correspondence networks” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by using metadata about date, author, place of origin, and recipient. An example of a large-scale multinational collaborative effort is The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database while the Sound Toll Records project is an example of opening up one national long-run series of customs records to international research. A sense of where such efforts may go is provided by the recent state-of-the-art historical Geographical Information System Trading Consequences, which enables historically traded volumes of commodities to be filtered by geographical location; this project is based on millions of already digitised nineteenth-century British Empire documents and allows for both macro visualisation of trading patterns and delving right down into the scan of the original document.

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J-B. Michel, Y. K. Shen, A. P. Aiden, A. Veres, M. K. Gray, W. Brockman, The Google Books Team, J. P. Pickett, D. Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P. Norvig, J. Orwant, S. Pinker, M. A. Nowak, and E. L. Aiden. ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’. Science 331, 176-182.



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Figure 2. N-gram viewer: the occurrence of word ppairs ‘medievall history’, ‘mediaeval hiistory’, and ‘eaarly modern hisstory’, 1880-20000 in the Goog gle corpus of English-lannguage books.



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It seems likely that digital tools in the future will enable us to search and organize information across platforms of medieval and early modern texts. Clearly, a sensible use of such tools will rely on historians to understand the provenance of documents and institutional circumstances. But it does seem likely that coming decades will see vast improvements in our ability to buttress qualitative as well as quantitative research by new research tools. The task is no longer just for the individual researcher to read as much as possible and remember as much as possible using index cards, notes and dog-ears. Future humanities research is ex ante digital humanities, and the task is to develop and master as many digital technologies and search strategies as possible.22 On top of digital challenges comes the need to develop environmental literacy for historians. The gulf between the natural and human sciences may be less one of epistemology23 and more one of language, presentation and preference for numbers. However, even if both sides are committed to seeking evidence and truth (albeit unstable and transient) collaboration is hampered by a host of institutional, methodological and funding issues.24 The second scientific revolution may empower future historians to pursue research questions that we who have been trained for an analogue world can only dream of. But in order to enable such pursuit future students need to be trained in radically new ways. The change will need to come not just on the side of the humanities but as much on the side of the natural sciences who will need to understand the importance of human perception, motivation and agency. It is a tall order indeed.

Conclusion The ‘Medieval’ and the ‘Modern’ are mind traps for historians. Apart from being blunt dating tools the concepts signify little on the global scale and lead us to compartmentalise history according to national preferences. However, the simple dichotomy of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ implied by the labels is very powerful so we are unlikely to give up using them – and indeed we have the tripartite addition of Antiquity to back them up. So

 22

P. Holm, A. Jarrick, D. Scott, Humanities World Report 2015 (London, Palgrave 2014). 23 See e.g. J. Faye, After Postmodernism. A Naturalistic Reconstruction of the Humanities (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 24 P. Holm, M. Goodsite, S. Cloetingh, B. Vanheusden, K. Yusoff, M. Agnoletti, M. BedĜich, D. Lang, R. Leemans, J. O. Moeller, M. P. Buendia, W. Pohl, A. Sors and R. Zondervan, Collaboration between the Natural, Social and Human Sciences in Global Change Studies. Environmental Science and Policy, 28 (2013), 25–35.



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rather than fight their use we should use them with a health warning “no metamorphosis intended”. We should look for connections and continuities across medieval and modern times and avoid the use of the concepts as mental stumbling blocks. The late medieval to early modern period was a time of relatively adverse climate around the globe. Particularly bad times occurred in the mid-fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contemporaries were not equipped to realize climate change, although some did note unusual weather events and deplored that marginal lands had to be given up. Historians will only be able to reveal how human lives were impacted by studying change in the long perspective of several generations – through medieval and early modern times. In the 21st century we are acutely aware of changes – and perhaps sometimes misinterpret freak weather as climate change. But no matter how precise predictions may turn out to be we do know that the first people who will live into the twenty-second century have been born and will live to tell the veracity of projections by 2100. This is also a generation that will have at its fingertips computing powers vastly superior to anything that has gone before. Perhaps they will finally do away with the mind trap of the Middle and Modern Ages.



CHAPTER SEVEN IN THE BEGINNING WAS MIGRATION… BORDERS AND TRANSITIONS IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE MARTIAL STAUB

In the beginning were the Druids – thus goes German history as retold by the Court historian of the Bavarian dukes, Johannes Thurmair (14771534), more commonly known by his humanist pseudonym, Aventinus (the Latinised form of his birth place Abensberg in Lower Bavaria).1 In his Annales ducum Boiariae (the Annals of the Dukes of Bavaria) of 1521, Aventinus claimed that the Druids, upon being expelled from Gaul by the emperor Tiberius, crossed the Rhine and settled in the woodlands of Germany.2 While the educated would have understood the allusion to the woods as a marker of the barbarian nature of the Druids,3 Aventinus took no chance when addressing the German public in the vernacular in his Bavarian Chronicle. The Druids, he stated, practised human sacrifices.4 Yet, there was much more to this Dark Age than the lack of any civilised form of behaviour. For Aventinus, the Druids had profoundly perverted Germany as had, indeed, their distant heirs, the Mendicant friars. Whilst Franciscans, Dominicans and other friars merely accused each other of ritual murder (as opposed to practising it), they had unequivocally turned their back on the 1

Gerald Strauss, Historian in an Age of Crisis: The Life and Work of Johannes Aventinus, 1477-1534 (Cambridge, MA, 1963). 2 Aventinus, Annales ducum Boiariae II, 7, Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. II, 1, ed. Sigmund Riezler (Munich, 1881), p 170. 3 On the eventual rehabilitation of the woods by the German humanists, cf. Margit Stadlober, Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils (Vienna, 2006), pp 149ff. 4 Id., Bayerische Chronik I, 26, in: Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. IV, 1, ed. Matthias von Lexer (Munich, 1882), pp 104ff.

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ideal of monasticism, as encapsulated in the very word for monk, when they left the woods and mixed with the urban population.5 By claiming to be true to their origins, the Mendicants thus abused the credulity of the city-dwellers. Moreover, as if the deceit associated with their wandering lifestyle was not enough, the friars had learnt from the Druids how to exert tyranny. Indeed, according to Aventinus, they had imported the ecclesiastical ban to Germany.6 This accusation would without doubt have deeply resonated with the public in the immediate aftermath of the Edict of Worms of 25 May 1521 that had placed Martin Luther and his followers under an imperial ban for heresy. Yet it also deeply echoed the ongoing controversy between the Dominican friar Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert who had argued for the confiscation of the Talmud, and the scholar of Hebrew and Greek Johann Reuchlin who opposed this measure on behalf of his fellow humanists.7 As the readers of Aventinus could thus not fail to infer, the influence of these and possibly other migrants, far from being positive, was indeed thoroughly negative. They perverted the country that hosted them by being deceitful and by, ultimately, threatening its freedom. Aventinus’ treatment of Bavarian and German history stood in stark contrast to the transcultural narratives that had been en vogue for centuries across medieval Europe.8 Yet, in a subtle and intriguing way, it also marked a departure from the account of the indigenous origins of the German people recently developed by Aventinus’ teacher and the first ever German poet laureate, Conrad Celtis, in the wake of the reception of Tacitus’ ‘rediscovered’ Germania.9 Aventinus still sought the origins of German civilisation outside Germany. While he followed Tacitus by tracing the Bavarian rulers back to Tuisco, the eponymous ancestor of the

5

Ibid., p 107. Ibid., p 106. 7 Erika Rummel, The Case Against Johann Reuchlin: Social and Religious Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Toronto, 2002). 8 Cf. Caspar Hirschi, “Konzepte von Fortschritt und Niedergang im Humanismus am Beispiel der ‘translatio imperii‘ und der ‘translatio studii’“, in: Die Idee von Fortschritt und Zerfall im Europa der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Christoph Strosetzki and Sebastian Neumeister (Heidelberg, 2008), pp 37-55, pp 37ff. 9 Dieter Mertens, “Die Instrumentalisierung der ‘Germania‘ des Tacitus durch die deutschen Humanisten“, in: Zur Geschichte der Gleichung ‘germanisch – deutsch‘: Sprache und Namen, Geschichte und Institutionen, ed. Heinrich Beck et al. (Berlin, 2004), pp 37- 101, pp 81ff. 6

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Germans,10 he saw him as an offspring of Noah. More importantly than Aventinus’ return to that which was effectively a medieval narrative, was his contention that Tuisco had invented the Greek alphabet, no less.11 For, Tacitus had hinted at the existence of Greek inscriptions in Germany, yet he had refused to speculate about their origin.12 Celtis was pleased to oblige and linked these inscriptions to those refugee Druids of whom Aventinus thought so badly,13 but whom Celtis and, to a certain extent, his correspondent the Abbot Trithemius admired as proper philosophers and the true preceptors of the German people.14 Aventinus’ biblical and medieval détour (Tuisco as Noah’s offspring) most obviously enabled him to eschew his teacher’s account while keeping to the translatio studii between the Ancients and Renaissance Germany which was at the core of humanist culture. In doing so, he was, as it would seem, driven by a strong motivation to paint migrants in negative traits drawn from the virulent anti-Mendicant polemics of his age. The Annals of the Dukes of Bavaria and the Bavarian Chronicle, as well as in the unfinished Germania illustrata of the late Aventinus, grew hugely influential in the following centuries among antiquarians with an interest in druidism.15 Whereas Aventinus’ account has eventually been dismissed for its fictitious nature, the nexus between migration and identity deserves further attention. Indeed, it is worth remembering that Aventinus wrote in the context of the rise of the nation-state and European 10

This genealogy was established by the Berosus-forgery of Annius of Viterbo (d.1502), whose influence can be traced back to the impact of the reception of Tacitus’ Germania among the German humanists. Ibid., pp 85ff. 11 Aventinus, Deutsche Chronik, in: Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. I, 1 (Munich, 1880), pp 351ff. Cf. 12 Publius Cornelius Tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum 3, 2. 13 Conrad Celtis, Oda III, 28, Oden/Epoden/Jahrhundertlied: Libri Odarum quattuor, cum Epodo et Saeculari Carmine (1513), ed. Eckart Schäfer (2nd ed., Tübingen, 2012), pp 285ff. Cf. Gernot Michael Müller, Die “Germania generalis" des Conrad Celtis (Tübingen, 2001), pp 418ff. See also Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2005), pp 355ff. 14 Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity and Renaissance Myth (Johns Hopkins, 1971), pp 169ff; Noel L. Brann, “Conrad Celtis and the ‘Druid’ Abbot Trithemius: An Inquiry into Patriotic Humanism”, Renaissance and Reformation XV (1979), pp 16-28, p 18; Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Arts (Chicago, 2008), pp 1ff; Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven, 2009), pp 50f. 15 T. D. Kendrick, Druids: A Study in Keltic (sic!) Prehistory (New York, 1927), pp 17f.

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expansion, both of which the humanists have more often than not actively supported.16 In many ways, these developments are still with us today. While the world in which we live is no longer dominated by Europe, globalisation is reminiscent of the integration of world economy, society and culture that went hand in hand with European colonisation. But it also represents a radical challenge for the nation-state. There is ample evidence, however, that the nation-state, rather than becoming increasingly obsolete, has adapted to our global and post-colonial environment. Recent studies on migration have both stressed this development17 and drawn attention to the impact of that which has been coined ‘methodological nationalism’ on scholarship on the question18. With migration being seen through the national lens and the nation-state still policing it, the current situation resembles in more than one way the situation of the Renaissance of which it is, despite all the significant changes that took place in the meantime, to a large extent a continuation. One possible difference between Aventinus and his contemporaries and our time should not go unnoticed, though. While the nation-state is an essential factor to be considered when approaching twenty-first-century migration, it is less clear that migration is, conversely, central to the understanding of the present nation-state. Critics of ‘methodological nationalism’ have drawn attention to the former aspect while evidence for the latter is sketchier. It is not so in the case of the late Middle Ages and early modernity if Aventinus’ account is anything to go by. Indeed, his humanist background and his appointment as a Court historian both suggest that Aventinus took an active role in linking the nation-state to migration and that the negative perception of migration that he promoted was influential among the educated elites of his time. Whether this perspective still informs the imagination of nations and state policies in the 21st century is not the object of this chapter. The emphasis is, rather, on a couple of historical questions arising from the above point. We have first to ask ourselves what impact the centrality of imagined migration for the rising nation-state might have had on existing 16

Indeed, the refugee Druids would eventually influence the discussion about the origins of the Frankish/French aristocracy via Beatus Rhenanus and Jean Bodin and, thus, have a momentous impact on French and European historiography and politics as late as in the 19th century. Cf. Claude Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation: La France entre Rome et les Germains (2nd ed., Perrin, 2006), pp 47ff. 17 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (Routledge, 2009), pp 85ff. 18 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences”, in: Global Networks II (2002), pp 301-334.

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migration in the Renaissance. This chapter will show that, while established patterns of migration hardly changed during the period, their perception was increasingly affected by some early form of ‘methodological nationalism’. While this conclusion will reinforce previous observations based on Aventinus’ work, it also raises an interesting question regarding the humanists’ perception of history and, more particularly, the divide for which they are responsible between the ‘Middle Ages’ and their own time. For, the discrepancy between real and perceived migration may have supported or even promoted the idea that the Middle Ages should, and had indeed come to, pass, which the humanists bequeathed upon us. If this was the case, as this chapter will secondly try to demonstrate, Aventinus’ migrant Druids would still in an intriguing way be amongst us today. Migration was very much a reality of the age. As a leading historian of migration has observed, “the medieval and early modern periods, once said to be characterised by peasants bound to the soil, were in fact times of high mobility”.19 Evidence suggests that all categories of people were involved in migration – admittedly to various degrees, yet with remarkable continuity. Indeed, three longue durée patterns of geographical mobility can be distinguished in Europe between the central Middle Ages and the beginning of industrialisation.20 First, the ruling and administrative elites did not seldom move over long distances for training, marriage and exerting power. While the increased centralisation of the Church and the rise of the territorial state had a noticeable effect on the latter and, through the foundation of new universities, on education, aristocratic and bureaucratic mobility remained a pattern for most of the period. Second, as already mentioned, peasants showed a great degree of mobility throughout the period with mobilityadverse policies and economics at local level somehow balanced by mobility-friendly political and economic incentives, be it to cities or new settlements within Europe and, increasingly, beyond. Third, while mobility was an essential characteristic of urban societies, merchants grew more sedentary during the period while artisans became more itinerant. Whereas changes occurred within these general patterns, the overall structure of migration was unchanged. Against this background of continuous migration and relatively stable patterns of geographical mobility, historians have observed shifting 19

Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002), p 59. 20 Ibid., ch 3.

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perceptions of migrants and real migration among contemporaries.21 Historians of poverty, poverty relief and attitudes to poverty, in particular, have noted how late medieval and early modern legislation across Europe became concerned with the ‘underserving’ poor, whose lifestyle was associated with mobility, real or imagined.22 While the Church had since the 12th century discriminated between people who were morally worthy of assistance and those who were not, this distinction was mostly related to or deduced from the exercise of professions that were deemed illicit under canon law.23 Some of these trades, most famously prostitution and usury, were strongly associated with some form of itinerancy; yet, initially, mobility was not the main concern in this regard. Things changed in the late medieval and early modern periods when the poor became increasingly seen as a social, political and cultural threat. Interestingly, these multiform anxieties crystallised around the supposed mobility of the poor, which extended to all kinds of boundary-transgression, whether real24 or imagined25. Indeed, by the same token that morally reprehensible behaviour became related to fluidity,26 migration was seen as a moral hazard. The anti-Mendicant polemics which Aventinus echoed in his work played an important role in this regard.27 Thus, the Druids imagined by the Bavarian Court historian must have felt very real, indeed, to his readers. The Druids refuged amid the misty and mythical woodlands of Germany and the more tangible Mendicant friars mentioned by Aventinus did not only resonate with the poverty ‘discourse’ of the Renaissance, however. They furthermore triggered religious connotations which are worth exploring in the light of contemporary perceptions of migration. It is important to recall, in this context, that religious migration was a constant reality of the late medieval and early modern periods and that it cut across 21

On perceptions, see also Harald Kleinschmidt, People on the Move: Attitudes toward and Perceptions of Migration in Medieval and Modern Europe (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003). 22 Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994). 23 Brian Tierney, “The Decretists and the ‘Deserving Poor’”, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History I (1959), pp 360-373. 24 Jütte, Poverty, pp 191ff. 25 Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006), pp 3ff. 26 Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 27 Christopher Ocker, “’Rechte Arme’ und ‘Bettler Orden’: Eine neue Sicht der Armut und die Delegitimierung der Bettelmönche“, in: Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch, 1400-1600, ed. Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (Göttingen, 1999), pp 129-157.

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all social categories and cult denominations.28 Alongside Jewish and Muslim migrations, important movements took place within Christianity for religious motives. It suffices to mention the migration of Albigensian and Waldensian communities to Northern Italy and Central Europe following their persecution in the South of France in the 13th century, the emigrant Hussites of the 15th century and their distant relatives the Bohemian Brethren who were forced into emigration to Saxony (Herrnhut), Berlin and further afield in Eastern Europe and eventually settled in Northern America, as did many other sectarian groups from the continent and the British Isles following conformist religious settlements in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the Huguenots, the largest and allegedly most influential group of religious refugees in early modern Europe, who left France following waves of religious persecution that would lead to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Indeed, even members of the majority groups participated in religious migration. While the part of the latter in religious migration had diminished since the end of the Crusades in the 13th century, the signification of missions in Europe and beyond during the late medieval and early modern periods cannot be overestimated. As a continuous and wide phenomenon, religious migration fitted the general pattern of migration of the time. While historians have focused on the minority status of religious migrants,29 it is worth remembering that European societies were no more homogeneous in the Renaissance than they are now30 and that large-scale migration has in the long term been favoured by the state31. As historians have found out, the attitudes of the home and host communities towards religious migrants could vary between tolerant or intolerant places, or religiously homogeneous or pluralist societies, yet it remains true that religious migration was at best

28 Hoerder, Cultures, ch 4. See also: Heinz Schilling, “Migration and Minorities”, in: id., Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism (University Press of New England, 2008), pp 33-64. 29 Heiko A. Oberman, “Europa afflicta: The Reformation of the Refugees”, in: Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte LXXXIII (1992), pp 91-111. See also: Exile and Religious Identity, 1500-1800, ed. Jesse Spohnholz and Gary K. Waite (London, 2014). 30 Hoerder, Cultures, pp 117ff. 31 Borders, in particular, facilitate regular back and forth movement and exchange. Cf. Vertovec, Transnationalism, p 89.

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tolerated.32 Indeed, it was not until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that the ius emigrandi was enshrined in international law.33 Why was religious migration treated differently from other forms of migration? Historiography has pointed to the eminent role of the state in this process.34 Yet the picture remains strangely blurry, unless, that is, we pay attention to the growing tendency during the centuries under consideration to link religious migration to ethnicity. Ethnic distinctions have been common in European history, and the medieval and early modern periods are no exception to this.35 Daniel Defoe could famously defend the Dutch-born king William III and ridicule John Tutchin, the author of poem The Foreigner, in his satire The TrueBorn Englishman of 1701 by writing:36 “These are the heroes that despise the Dutch, And rail at new-come foreigners so much; Forgetting that themselves are all derived From the most scoundrel race that ever lived; A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones Who ransack'd kingdoms, and dispeopled towns; The Pict and painted Briton, treach'rous Scot, By hunger, theft, and rapine, hither brought; Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes, Whose red-hair'd offspring everywhere remains; Who, join'd with Norman French, compound the breed From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.”

32

Anton Schindling, “Andersgläubige Nachbarn: Mehrkonfessionalität und Parität in Territorien und Städten des Reichs“, in: 1648: Krieg und Frieden in Europa, vol. I: Politik, Religion, Recht und Gesellschaft (Münster, 1998), pp 465-473. 33 Georg May, “Zum ius emigrandi am Beginn des Konfessionellen Zeitalters“, in: Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht CLV (1986), pp 29–125. 34 Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Migration and Social Change: The Case of the Dutch Refugees of the Sixteenth-Century”, in: Entrepreneurship and the Transformation of the Economy, 10th-20th Centuries: Essays in Honour of Herman van der Wee, ed. Paul Klep and Eddy van Cauwenberghe (Leuven, 1994), pp 321333. 35 Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity”, in: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies XXXI (2001), pp 1-37. 36 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Satires, ed. P. N. Furbank and R. W. Owens (Penguin, 1997). On the intellectual and political context of Defoe’s popular satire, cf. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford, 2001), ch 7.

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Strikingly, Defoe’s irony about ethnicity rested on his allusion to the importance of migration, the awareness of which he seems to have shared with his audience.37 Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that religious migration was often acceptable in the guise of ethnicity. Much has been written about racial perceptions of the Jews38 and the equation of the Muslims with the Turks in the medieval and early modern periods.39 Yet this phenomenon was, once again, not limited to nonChristian groups. Christopher Highley has recently shown how exiled English Catholics “wrote the nation” between the mid-16th century and the early 17th century by describing themselves as Englishmen against the Protestants at home and other groups of Catholic exiles from the British Isles.40 Yet this Catholic appropriation of Englishness was also, and perhaps foremost, a response to the anti-recusancy laws of the Elizabethan era that defined them as foreigners. In a context in which women were an important target of anti-Catholic polemics and politics, the fact that all four Stuart kings had Catholic wives of continental extraction could only contribute to ethnicising English Catholicism. Peter Lake has shown how this mechanism worked by looking at the Puritan Thomas Scott who published a notorious pamphlet entitled Vox populi against the so-called Spanish match, or proposed marriage between Charles and the infant Maria Anna of Spain in 1620.41 Links between religious migration and ethnicity were common in Renaissance Europe. Interestingly enough, they were not limited to protonational contexts like England, but they could also be found in multiethnic Christian surroundings.42 That this was not inevitable is best shown by comparing Europe to the Ottoman Empire, which offered a very different picture. There, the ruling international and pluri-confessional 37

Daniel Statt, “Defoe and Immigration”, in: Eighteenth-Century Studies XXIV (1991), pp 293-313. 38 Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London, 1995). 39 Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505 (Oxford, 2013). 40 Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008). 41 Peter Lake, “Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match”, in: Historical Journal XXV (1982), pp 805-825. 42 See, for instance: Minna Rozen, “Strangers in a Strange Land: The Extraterritorial Status of Jews in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in: Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership, ed. Aron Rodrigue (Bloomington, 1992), pp 126-136.

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élite used a lingua nullius, Ottoman Turkish, which had no ethnic or religious connotation.43 By contrast, European securitisation obliterated any form of migration that could not be linked to ethnicity. It is important to remember, in this regard, that religious migration was and remains specific in one particular respect. At first, religious migration eschews assimilation, whether it is driven by the migrants’ resistance to forced or even violent assimilation by their society of origin44 or by their intention to convert their host society. Assimilation theory is assumedly quite recent, going back to the early work of the Chicago School of sociology around Park and Burgess in the 1920s.45 Yet the two main assumptions that underlie assimilation or, for that matter, integration and incorporation, i.e. “a single majority culture and a one-way process during which immigrants changed their language and cultural characteristics to become more like the dominant group in the host country”,46 can be found much earlier. Recent research has thus drawn attention to the importance of assimilation in the complex relations between Catholic majority and Jewish and Muslim minorities in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Spain. While they have stressed the ambiguities of assimilation in this context and suggested a reassessment of the main tenets of assimilation theory,47 scholars have also reasserted the specifics of religious identity in this context and, with reference to the expulsion of the Jewish population in 1492 and the formally converted Muslims or so-called ‘Moriscos’ between 1609 and 1614, the original character of religious migration. The religious migration of the Jews who refused conversion and of the Moriscos whose sincerity as Catholic converts was viewed with increasing suspicion took place against a background of racialised religious stereotypes that informed Spanish politics. Indeed, the legal insistence on the ‘purity of blood’, the concomitant biological insistence on genealogy 43

Hoerder, Cultures, pp 114ff. This may be the product of the process of “diasporization”, as stated by Khachig Tölölyan, “The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies”, in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East XXVII (2007), pp 647-655. 45 Cf. Peter Kivisto, “What is the Canonical Theory of Assimilation? Robert E. Park and His Predecessors”, in: Journal of the History of Behavorial Sciences XL (2004), pp 149-163. 46 Mary G. Powers, s.v. “Assimilation, Integration, and Incorporation”, in: Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration, ed. Immanuel Ness (Blackwell, 2013). 47 David Nirenberg, “Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, and Converts in Medieval Spain”, in: Common Knowledge IX (2003), pp 137-155. 44

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and the projection of images of hybridity on converted Jews and Muslims all concurred in naturalising the difference between the religious minorities or recent converts to Christianity and the groups that were keen to stigmatise them or, at least, to put them at a social, cultural or political distance.48 Eventually, the whole of Spanish and, by extension, Iberian society became engulfed in a process of naturalisation of distinctions, well beyond religious differentiation. The state-sponsored Spanish inquisition played a well-known role in the naturalisation of religious differences. Yet state action did not limit itself to naturalising religious differences. While the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain at the beginning of the 17th century followed internal resettlement and enslavement at the hands of the royal power for the sake of forcing assimilation,49 it also marked an internationalisation of the religious question that departed from previous approaches and initiatives in this context. The Moriscos were now seen or, since Spanish involvement in European conflicts had eventually receded and the country’s competition with the Ottoman Empire for the control of the Mediterranean abated, they were rather presented as a threat to God and the king through the suggestion of their alliance with the French Huguenots and, above all, their equation with the Turks.50 The expulsion of the Spanish Moriscos took place against the background of the recent ethnicisation of the religion of their ancestors to which they were deemed to have remained loyal. Moreover, by ethnicising religious difference, be it real or fictive, the authorities and those who supported them laid down the very conditions for the expulsion of the Moriscos. This policy and the approach that informed it radically departed from established patterns of thinking and acting,51 such as an established tradition of migratory policies during the Reconquista52 and, from 1492, in 48

Id., “Was There Race Before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain”, in: The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam EliavFeldon et al. (Cambridge, 2009), pp 232-264. 49 Aurelia Martín Casares, “The Royal Decree (Philip II, 1573) on Slavery of Morisco Men, Women and Children and Its Consequences”, in: World Journal of Islamic History and Civilization III (2013), pp 150-162. 50 Isabelle Poutrin, Convertir les Musulmans, Espagne, 1491-1609 (PUF, 2012). See also: Lucette Valensi, Ces étrangers familiers: Musulmans en Europe (XVIeXVIIIe siècles) (Payot, 2012). 51 From the perspective of Morisco and gender history, cf. Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, 2005). 52 Matthias Maser, s.v. “Reconquista”, in: Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration.

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the context of the colonies53 or the recourse to banishment in order to prevent interaction between religious minorities and the majority invoked in the expulsion of ‘heretics’ and Jews across medieval Europe54. Indeed, they did so much so that it provoked a fierce opposition on part of influential social, cultural and political circles within the Spanish Crowns.55 While naturalisation may in many cases have anticipated assimilation, as historians of late medieval and early modern Spain have suggested, the example of the Iberian peninsula foremost stresses the growing role of ethnic considerations and ethnic policies in issues of identity and mobility. Religious migration was state-sponsored when it ceased to be merely religious, as the case of the Moriscos of Spain shows. Unless ethnicised, it was at best tolerated. Indeed, religious migration as such constituted the biggest challenge for ethnic considerations and ethnic policies of the kind increasingly promoted by the state and those who supported it. That the latter resorted to an early variant of ‘methodological nationalism’ when faced with religious migration or simply its imagination, as in Aventinus’ case, should hardly be surprising in these conditions. The terms in which Johann Gottfried Herder introduced his famed defence of German literature more than two centuries after Aventinus were all but reminiscent of the Bavarian Court historian’s polemics against the ancient Druids and Mendicant friars. The “monks and the hordes of Frankish priests”, the young Herder wrote in his Fragments on the Recent German Literature of 1766-1767, had conjunctly corrupted the German people by imposing false doctrines and a rotten language upon them.56 This double corruption amounted to a form of tyranny, according to Herder, to which the Reformation put an end by giving shape to thought and religion, law and moral (da alles eine neue Bildung bekam: Denkart und Religion, Gesetze und Sitten). 53

Ida Altman, s.v. “Spanish America, Early Modern Migration 16th-18th Century”, ibid. 54 For a recent reassessment of the expulsion of Jews across medieval Europe, cf. Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2007), pp 116ff. 55 Trevor J. Dadson, “Official Rhetoric Versus Local Reality: Propaganda and the Expulsion of the Moriscos”, in: Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain, ed. Richard J. Pym (Boydell, 2006), pp 1-24; Grace Magnier, Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos: Visions of Christianity and Kingship (Leiden, 2010). 56 Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, Vol. I: Frühe Schriften 1764 – 1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt, 1985), pp 394-407.

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German language and literature were essential to this process of reformation, to Bildung, as Herder put it. For, native language was thought and, as such, it shaped human association, from family to the nation or Volk.57 Herder therefore abhorred the migration of peoples and ideas with a passion that Aventinus would not have understood or, for the latter, even agreed upon as a humanist who was attached to the translatio studii.58 At the same time, however, Herder’s nationalism was not adverse to the cosmopolitanism of the age of Enlightenment. On the contrary, for Herder, the nations of the world concurred in an ideal of Bildung to which they each contributed in an individual and specific way.59 Essential to this interpretation was Herder’s confidence that the Reformation had overcome migration or, at least, decisively limited its impact on the progress of human societies towards the achievement of Humanität, i.e. “reason and equity in all conditions and all occupations of human beings”, through Bildung.60 The instrument of such transition, though, was the state for which Herder made a significant, if often overlooked place in his analysis. Nowhere was the importance that Herder attached to the role of the state more obvious than in his treatment of the Jews. For the Jews were, on the one hand, given their specific culture, a proper nation among many, as Herder stated in a radical departure from religious history in his journal, Adrastea, published between 1801 and 1804.61 Yet, on the other hand, they were, as the late Herder put it, an alien nation, an “Asian Volk foreign to our part of the world” (ein unserem Weltteil fremdes asiatisches Volk) for the reason that they were “bound to what they acknowledge is the irrevocable law given to them in a distant place”. Therefore, not only did the Jews not have a state of their own, but they outright refused to submit themselves to the discipline of a state.62 Using an analogy that had entered 57

Jürgen Trabant, “Herder and Language”, in: A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Rochester, NY, 2009), pp 117-139, pp 119ff. 58 Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge, 2011), p 9. 59 Trabant, “Herder and Language”, p 122. 60 Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, transl. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968), pp 79-118. 61 Id., Werke, Vol. X: Adrastea (Auswahl), ed. Günter Arnold (Frankfurt, 2000), pp 629ff. 62 Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation of the Jews, from Herder and Semmler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden, 2009), pp 56ff.

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the German language in the age of humanism63 which he was first to apply to the Jews,64 Herder compared them to “a parasitic plant upon the stems of other nations” (eine parasitische Pflanze auf den Stämmen anderer Nationen) in his Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind, his famous Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit of 17841791.65 While Herder regretted that they had been abused for want of a state in ages past and hoped that the modern state would treat them more favourably, he thought that their fate ultimately depended on the judgement that the state passed on their usefulness. “To what degree [the] law [of the Jews] and the way of thinking and living can be accommodated by our states”, Herder concluded in Adrastea, “is no longer a religious dispute… rather a simple question of state” (eine einfache Staatsfrage). He added, “’how many of these foreign people – who under their foreign constitution, foreign ways of thinking and living, and who engage in no other business – how many are unnecessary, useful or harmful for this state and for no other? How does one regard and use them?’ This is the problem”.66 The state, for Herder, defined the Jewish question and the terms of the response to it. Moreover, it was able to do so because it had placed itself in a position to set the criteria of migration. This was, as the changing place of the Jews in Europe showed, the main difference Herder saw between his time and the Middle Ages. For such action would hardly have made any sense before the re-formation of faith and nation. Indeed, Herder was keen to equate the Barbarian Middle Ages with unbridled Judaism.67 Only a barbaric constitution, he claimed, could prevent the Jews from living according to European law and contribute to the state’s well-being “or render the Jews abilities harmful”. The fate of the Jews had thus come to exemplify the difference between a present that resulted from the

63

Heinrich Euticus, a friend of Celtis and the Nuremberg humanists, published a cycle of 24 satirical portraits of courtiers whom he compared to parasites. Cf. Franz Josef Worstbrock, s.v. “Euticus, Henricus”, in: Deutscher Humanismus, 1480-1520: Verfasserlexikon, ed. id. (Berlin, 2008), Vol. I, cc 804-808. 64 Heiko Stullich, “Parasiten, eine Begriffsgeschichte”, in: Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte II (2013), pp 21-29, p 29. 65 Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, Vol. VI: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt, 1989), p 702. 66 Cf. Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1992), p 103. 67 Ibid., pp 98ff.

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‘formation’ of sedentary nation-states and a foregone past in which no state had reined in migration. The Jews would continue to suffer from the opposition between nationstate and migration established by Aventinus and Jewish emancipation as promoted by Herder would prove very ambivalent. Yet the historical dimension of Herder’s work became fully apparent in the mature Hegel’s philosophy.68 Jewish ‘parasitism’69 now amounted to the Jew’s ‘isolation’ from world history, that is: “the progress of the consciousness of freedom” (der Fortschritt im Bewußtsein der Freiheit) as Hegel famously put it in the introduction of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History that he delivered in the 1820s at the University of Berlin. Indeed, the Jews had been left dispersed, stranded outside history by the progress of the world spirit embodied in the nation-state.70 Hegel obviously elaborated on St Augustine’s theology of the witness-people according to which the Jews witness to God’s salvation by the Scriptures and to Christian truth by their dispersion.71 Yet his philosophy of history ultimately departed from Augustine’s typological interpretation, leaving the Jews as ‘ghosts’ or ‘fossils’ of times past.72 While Hegel used analogies from different origins – religion, on the one hand, and natural history, on the other - the thrust of his argument was unequivocal. The time of Jewish migration and, with it, the relevance of migration tout court had been superseded and definitively relegated to a distant past. 68

On Herder’s significance for the historical interpretation of Judaism against the background of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, cf. Hans Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber (Tübingen, 1967), pp 23f. 69 This analogy is already present in the young Hegel’s work. Cf. Hegels theologische Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek in Berlin, ed. Herman (sic!) Nohl (Tübingen, 1907), pp 256ff. 70 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, Vol. XIX: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michels (Frankfurt, 1979), pp 405ff. 71 Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Basingstoke, 1995), pp 28ff. 72 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, Vol. III: Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michels (Frankfurt, 1986), p 256; id., Werke, Vol. VII: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt, 1986), p 508; id., Werke, Vol. XII: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1986), pp 96ff., etc. Cf. Rose, German Question, pp. 112f. See also Shlomo Avineri, “The Fossil and the Phoenix: Hegel and Krochmal on the Jewish Geist”, in: History and System: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Albany, NY, 1984), pp 47-63.

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A momentous shift had occurred in perceptions of migration which had, of late, become a mere object of history instead of being seen, as it had long been, as one of its active principles. Goethe, who claimed that his first encounter with Herder had changed his life,73 uncovered the origins of this tidal change. As a Neptunist geologist who followed his teacher Abraham Werner’s contention that the earth had been formed by receding oceans and not by volcanic fire as the Plutonist geologists argued against Werner, Goethe did not only collect fossils, but he firmly established a relationship between them and the strata in which they were discovered.74 Goethe thus laid the paleontological groundwork for Hegel’s comparison between the Jews and fossils. Yet Goethe’s influence ran much deeper than even his impressive work on geology suggests. No enemy himself of scientific metaphors, Goethe famously gave the title of a chemical reaction to one of his novels, the Elective Affinities or Wahlverwandtschaften in the original German. This work, which was seen by Walter Benjamin as the embodiment of the critical role played by literature in mankind’s emancipation from myth against Friedrich Gundolf’s mythological reading of Goethe,75 also marked a noticeable shift in the contemporary understanding of the remembered past, as has more recently been demonstrated.76 The rearrangement of the graveyard according to aesthetic criteria by Charlotte, one of the novel’s main protagonists, illustrates that the care for personal feeling was about to replace the ancestral care for the dead. Having been deprived of the possibility of relating to the place in which their relatives rested, people were merely left with illusions of the past. These were the ‘ghosts’ to

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Martin Bollacher, Der junge Goethe und Spinoza: Studien zur Geschichte des Spinozismus in der Epoche des Sturms und Drangs (Tübingen, 1969), p 149. 74 Wolf von Engelhardt, Goethe im Gespräch mit der Erde: Landschaft, Gesteine, Mineralien und Erdgeschichte in seinem Leben und Werk (Weimar, 2003, pp 232ff. 75 Friedrich Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin, 1920); Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1922)“, in: id., Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. I/1 (Frankfurt, 1980), pp 123–201. Cf. Andreas Greiert, Erlösung der Geschichte vom Darstellenden: Grundlagen des Geschichtsdenkens bei Walter Benjamin, 1915-1925 (Munich, 2011), pp 122ff. 76 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten”, in: Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Leuven, 1983), pp 19-77, pp 22ff; Michael Borgolte, „Stiftungen des Mittelalters in rechts- und sozialhistorischer Sicht“, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte CV, Kanonistische Abteilung LXXIV (1988), pp 71-94, pp 88ff.

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which Hegel was alluding while he confined Jewish history and European migration to an unrecoverable past. The caesura that Goethe captured so incisively was less an end, however, than it was a beginning. Indeed, by a remarkable extension of the notion of ਥʌȠȤȒ that meant ‘suspension’ in classical Greek, ‘epoch’ came to define for Goethe the period of time following an event of which he assumed that it was shaped by its very beginning, not unlike today.77 Thus Goethe saw, as he later recalled, in the Battle of Valmy which resulted in the victory of the French conscription army over the Austro-Prussian-led coalition forces on 20 September 1792 the dawn of a new era while he addressed the defeated Saxon mercenary contingent with the famous words: “From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say that you were present at its birth”.78 It is in Faust, though, that we find the boldest expression of Goethe’s metonymical understanding of ‘epoch’: “’Tis writ, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ I pause, to wonder what is here inferred. The Word I cannot set supremely high: A new translation I will try. I read, if by the spirit I am taught, This sense: ‘In the beginning was the Thought.’ This opening I need to weigh again, Or sense may suffer from a hasty pen. Does Thought create, and work, and rule the hour? ’Twere best: ‘In the beginning was the Power.’ Yet, while the pen is urged with willing fingers, A sense of doubt and hesitancy lingers. The spirit comes to guide me in my need, I write, ‘In the beginning was the Deed.’”79

Im Anfang war die Tat, translates Faust on returning from his walk in town on Easter morning. While the verse “In the beginning was the Deed” seems to refer to the eight day, the day of the Resurrection, Faust’s own deed is at stake, as becomes evident from the epiphany of the devil. Indeed, in the “Prologue in Heaven” the Lord had called on Mephistopheles to visit the scholar with the words: 77 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp 458ff. 78 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Campaign in France”, in: Miscellaneous Travels of J. W. Goethe, transl. L. Dora Schmitz (London, 1882), p 118. 79 Id., Faust, Part I, transl. Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, 1949), p 71.

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No Pelagian misinterpretation of the deed is possible in these circumstances as man may not redeem himself. Yet sin is no longer the main danger either.81 Instead, his salvation is threatened by the trap of tranquillity and the shallowness of orthodoxy.82 While there is no doubt that Goethe voices a concern that is at the heart of the emphasis that the philosophy of the Enlightenment placed on autonomy, his choice to critically reflect on the myth of Faust unearths an ambivalence deeply rooted in the Renaissance origins of the story. Indeed, the fascination of Renaissance authors for life of Johannes Faust, the protagonist of the sixteenth-century German Faustbuch and of Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, of which the Abbot Trithemius had already warned in the sternest of terms,83 can only be understood against the background of the witch-craze of the age. As scholars have recently demonstrated, while sorcery was condemnable in the eyes of secular and ecclesiastical justice for the use of maleficia, witchcraft amounted to nothing short of apostasy.84 In his influential treatise Formicarius of 1437-1438, Johannes Nider had clearly stated that the witches’ power rested on a hidden pact with the devil, a feature that is famously at the core of the Faustian myth.85 Nider, his precursor Nicholas 80

Ibid., p 29. Goethe’s Pelagianism, an accusation he faced in his lifetime, remains a vexed issue among specialists of literature, theology and philosophy of the Enlightenment, as does his view on Christianity. 82 This position reflects Goethe’s siding with Spinozism to which he had been introduced by Herder and his contempt for Pietism. Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 17501790 (Oxford, 2011), pp 698f. 83 Cf. Philip Mason Palmer and Robert Pattison More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition: From Simon Magus to Lessing (New York, 1936), pp 83ff. 84 Michael D. Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages”, in: Speculum LXXVI (2001), pp 960-990. For a critical reflection on Weberian rationality in this context and on the Protestant assumptions behind the notion of “disenchantment” (not least in Keith Thomas’s work), cf. id., “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early Modern Witchcraft Literature”, in: American Historical Review CXI (2006), pp 383-404. 85 Id., Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Penn State University Press, 2003). 81

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Eymeric and the authors of the Malleus maleficarum or Hammer of the Witches, Heinrich Kramer, also known as Institoris, and, perhaps, Jacob Sprenger, all of them Dominican friars and with the exception of the Catalan Eymeric all from Southern Germany, merely responded, it would seem, to anxieties in ecclesiastical and increasingly secular circles about the agency of people such as peasants, craftsmen and women.86 These were, indeed, the non-privileged categories that these circles sought to deprive of their little power by laying it to the feet of the Church and state bureaucracies which they served. Aventinus might have been a staunch opponent of the Mendicant friars. Yet he and his fellow humanists shared in their unease about nonauthorised agency which they perceived as a threat to the power of the bureaucracy with whom they identified, be it as fervent guardians of orthodoxy or zealous gatekeepers of their nation. As Goethe’s critical insight into late medieval and early modern politics suggests, borders and transitions may ultimately have resulted from anxieties of agency mirroring the rise of the state, among which migrations loomed very large. Yet the ghosts of the Druids who found refuge in the woodlands of Germany according to Aventinus may, after all, not have gone away. It seems as though they would come back to haunt us despite the best efforts of the likes of Aventinus, Herder, Hegel and their many followers to ban them. As a great piece of reflexion on history and our modern condition reminds us, however, if we don’t want to be condemned to overcome exile time and again in the vain search for some ‘lost home’, we only have the choice to overcome the repressed.87 Are we yet ready to give up the comfortable, albeit uncanny divide between the medieval and early modern periods? Indeed, in the beginning was migration.

86 On early modern demonology, cf. Gerhild Scholz Williams, “Demonologies”, in: The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford, 2013), pp 69-83. 87 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, transl. Katherine Jones (New York, 1939). Cf. Alon Confino, “Freud, Moses and Modern Nationhood”, in: New Perspectives on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, ed. Ruth Ginsburg et al. (Tübingen, 2006), pp 165-176, p 169.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE MEDIEVAL MODERNITY OF CERVANTES AND SHAKESPEARE1 FERNANDO CERVANTES

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) and William Shakespeare (15641616) are often mentioned in the context of the emergence of a recognisably ‘modern’ understanding of the world. Take the subtitle of one of Harold Bloom’s studies of Shakespeare, ‘The Invention of the Human’, or Lionel Trilling’s provocative observation that just as it has been said that ‘all philosophy is a footnote to Plato’ it can also be said that ‘all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.’2 As striking as they are memorable, such views endow both our authors with a certain timelessness that can be as much a hurdle as a help to historical understanding. My aim in this essay is to try to redress this imbalance by highlighting some coincidences in the lives and writings of these two remarkable authors while taking care to place them in their broad historical context. I shall attempt to determine whether the frequent deployment of their work as a meaningful watershed between the medieval and the early-modern periods can be justified. As befits what is primarily an historical exercise, I begin with a date: 23 April, 1616. It was, of course, the feast of St George. It was also the 1

Earlier versions of this essay were read at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, and at the Thomas More Institute, London. For these invitations I wish to thank Anthony Pagden and Andrew Hegarty respectively. I also thank Gavin D’Costa, Paul Murray O.P., and Brendan Smith for their comments at the time. Ronald Hutton made very helpful comments to the version I sent to him for consideration in this collection. 2 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (New York, 1998); Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1950), p. 209. Trilling’s comment is echoed by Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (London, 1988).

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date when both Cervantes and Shakespeare happened to die. I have underlined the word ‘date’ because, in 1616, 23 April was not the same day in Spain as it was in England. Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, a year which lost ten days by the papal decree that the day after 5 October should become 16 October. England did not comply with this change, so Cervantes in fact died ten days before Shakespeare. All the same, the fact that the date is recorded in both cases as 23 April, 1616, remains a remarkable coincidence. It is one, moreover, that is likely to have interested and amused both our writers in rather similar ways. Was it more important to die on the same day or on the same date? We can readily imagine what Cervantes might have made of such an apparently baffling question in the light of what he made of Don Quixote’s alleged origins: Some say that he was called Quijada or Quesada; concerning this, there is some discrepancy among the authors who have written on the topic, although through some credible conjectures we can infer that he was called Quejana. This doesn’t really matter much as far as our story is concerned, so long as in the telling of it one is careful not to stray in the slightest detail from the truth.3

This passage has a pointed significance. In the first half of it Cervantes is playfully poking fun at pedants; but in the last sentence there is a sharp change of register that forcefully underlines the fundamental importance of truth. We might well ask ourselves exactly what kind of truth Cervantes had in mind. After all, he has just told us that among the experts – the ones who should know better – some say one thing and others say another; then he concludes that it really makes no difference so long as the truth is not in the least compromised. Was he serious? Modern readers naturally tend to doubt it. Truth is not at all a straightforward concept in modern thought; so if Cervantes was poking fun at it, then that seems clear proof that he was poking fun at the medieval understanding of truth; that he was, in other words, squarely in the middle of that clear watershed between the medieval and the early modern that has become such a commonplace in modern historiography. After all, was not chivalry itself the butt of his exquisite satire? 3

Don Quixote, I, i. Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. The original reads: ‘Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en eso hay alguna diferencia en los autores que de este caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento: basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad’.

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This is a tempting outlook, but it also presents a rather skewed picture of the concept of truth that Cervantes was presenting in a perfectly serious register. And it seems to me that Shakespeare would have had no problems understanding the seriousness of Cervantes’s joke. Take, for example, Berowne’s memorable complaint about the programme of study imposed by the King in Love’s Labour’s Lost: All delights are vain, but that most vain Which, with pain purchas’d, doth inherit pain: As painfully to pore upon a book To seek the light of truth, while truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.4

‘Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile’ is an exquisite play on four different senses of the word ‘light’. In pedestrian English the sentence might be rendered thus: ‘the mind, seeking knowledge, diverts the eye’s attention from the object that it gazes upon’. The message is plain: words are no match for things; theories that are not rooted in reality lead to blindness; art is vain where nature is supreme. Shakespeare here shows the same impatience with pedantic learning as Cervantes, and he bursts the bubble of illusion with the use of exactly the same technique, one that had been made popular in the writings of Erasmus, the keen reader of Lucian, who understood that the best remedy against pedantry was to hale it into the light of wit to be drenched by humour and laughter. As we shall see, however, the butt of the satire was emphatically not the notion of truth, especially as it had developed in the medieval philosophical tradition. Before moving on to that important tradition, let us imagine for a moment the fun that our two authors might have had musing over the significance of 23 April, 1616, in some hypothetical afterlife. One can almost hear Cervantes saying: ‘Some say it is the date and some say it is the day: concerning this, there is some discrepancy among those who have written on the subject ...’. For his part, Shakespeare would no doubt remember the fun that he poked at the Puritan faction in parliament, which prevented England from complying with the international agreement on the Gregorian calendar, when, in The Taming of the Shrew, he had Petruchio command Kate to call the sun the moon. Coming in the wake of Petruchio’s words as he announces the wedding, ‘Here she stands’ – a 4

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I. i. 72-79.

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clear echo of Luther’s alleged remark to the emperor Charles V – the scene is a clear satire against the intransigence of Protestant England on this issue.5 It is worthy of Voltaire’s famous remark that the English ‘preferred their calendar to disagree with the sun than to agree with the pope’.6 Now, as far as the date is concerned there is no doubt that both authors would have agreed that the significant fact, the truth of the matter, was that they both died on 23 April, 1616. If they had died on the same day this would not have been the case, and their respective deaths would not have shared in the profound ritual associations and liturgical symbolism of the feast of St George, the patron saint of England, the patron saint of Don Quixote’s beloved Aragon and Catalonia, the patron saint of lovers and idealists, a dragon slayer, a martyr, a canonised saint of the church who, probably, did not even exist – although we can almost hear Cervantes saying that ‘through some credible conjectures we can infer …’. The fortuitous replay of the thin boundaries between illusion and reality, so close to the heart of both authors, is too delicious. But the fact remains that as far as the truth that concerned them – the truth that is rooted in a reality that can only be known through contingent social relations and human experience – it was much more important to die on the same date than on the same day. The shared sense of humour that emerges from these coincidences cannot be adequately appreciated without some reference to a shared vision of the world. It is true that we know very little about the lives of Cervantes and Shakespeare, and this makes any daring comparison risky. Nevertheless, the little that we do know often actually sharpens the significance of the coincidences. Both authors, for instance, seem to have spent their childhood in the provinces and in the midst of families with some aspirations to nobility but whose fortunes had declined; both, also, are likely to have attended fairly comparable schools which would have put them in close contact with the early Jesuits. It has often been noted that the Jesuits arrived in Córdoba in the same year as the young Cervantes, setting up their first school there in 1553. Years later, Cervantes was to praise Jesuit education in the mouth of Berganza, the loquacious dog of one of his most popular exemplary stories: I noticed how they scolded them with tenderness, chastised them with mercy, encouraged them with examples, motivated them with prizes, and endured them with sanity; and, finally, they painted in their minds an 5 6

The Taming of the Shrew, IV.5. 1-27. Quoted in D. E. Duncan, The Calendar (London, 1999), p. 307.

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By an intriguing coincidence, Stratford Grammar School, which Shakespeare most probably attended in the 1560s and 70s, also had strong Jesuit associations. Thomas Jenkins, who would have been Shakespeare’s principal teacher, had been closely associated with Edmund Campion at St John’s College, Oxford, and the headmaster, John Cottom, had a Jesuit brother who was arraigned together with Campion and martyred in 1582.8 Shakespeare never, of course, praised the Jesuits openly, but there are unmistakable coded messages throughout his work that suggest a likely association with them. Take one of the most intractable of his characters: Edgar disguised as Poor Tom in King Lear. His nonsensical ravings, his grotesque treatment of Gloucester, his unpredictable actions, all of which seem so completely at odds with his grave soliloquies, repeatedly confound critics. Yet Poor Tom’s ravings are all carefully punctuated by domestic prayers recommended by Jesuits to the recusant community: he uses many of the phrases that Samuel Harsnertt attributed to the Jesuits Weston, Campion and Persons; his various privations as a wandering beggar are reminiscent of Robert Southwell’s portrayal of imprisoned Jesuits; and the episode of the attempted suicide of Gloucester uses the kind of intense visualisation to conjure up the Dover cliff that the founder of the Society, St Ignatius of Loyola, had recommended in his Spiritual Exercises, complete with the image of the soul poised between a good and an evil spirit.9 Of course, too much can, and has, been made of these coded messages. Recent attempts to reassess Shakespeare as a closet Catholic in close collaboration with the recusant community and the underground Jesuit mission do not carry much conviction. As A. D. Nuttall has explained, Shakespeare always writes as if the Reformation never actually happened. What we find is neither ‘the missionary Catholicism of a Campion’ nor 7 Novelas Ejemplares, ed. J. B. Avalle-Arce, 3 vols (Madrid, 1987), iii, p. 264: ‘Consideraba cómo los reñían con suavidad, los castigaban con misericordia, los animaban con ejemplos, los incitaban con premios y los sobrellevaban con cordura, y, finalmente, cómo les pintaban la fealdad y horror de los vicios y les dibujaban la hermosura de las virtudes, para que, aborrecidos ellos y amadas ellas, consiguiesen el fin para que fueron criados.’ 8 Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: the Biography (London, 2005), pp. 60-61. 9 King Lear IV. The Jesuit resonances are eloquently explored by Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (London, 2005), p. 209.

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any ‘strenuous evasiveness’ but ‘something else.’10 But this is exactly the point: the kind of religion that Shakespeare and Cervantes were most likely to have been put in touch with by the early Jesuits was, precisely, ‘something else’. This suggestion might surprise, especially if we forget that the common image we have inherited of the Jesuits, the paradigm champions of the Counter-Reformation, is grossly misleading when trying to assess their early achievements. During the formative years of our two authors, the Jesuits were uniformly committed to the need to displace what they referred to as the ‘barbarous’ style of late-medieval scholasticism with the good rhetorical style of Classical antiquity. They saw the turgid language of the schools as placing uncomfortable hurdles between intellectual speculation and moral action. It deprived ‘eloquence’ of its raison d’être, which was to persuade, to lead from the intellectual assent that comes from the acceptance of the truth to a willing application of the same truth, not merely to human understanding but also to human experience and moral action. One of St Ignatius’s close friends and collaborators, Father Jerome Nadal, once defined what the Jesuits called their ‘way of proceeding’ as ‘acting in the Spirit, from the heart, practically.’ By this he meant that, while everything should be referred to God, human feelings, emotions and passions had to be brought to bear on one’s actions in order to avoid acting ‘merely speculatively.’ Even after he recommended the study of St Thomas Aquinas, he expressed reservations about his dry and ‘prolix’ style. 11 All this suggests that the respect that that the early Jesuits had for the teachings of Aquinas had much more to do with their perceived usefulness for clarifying issues of doctrine – what St Ignatius referred to as their ‘utility for our times’ – than with any clear predilection. It did nothing to minimise the early Jesuits’ commitment to the movement of humanistic reform, which had so virulently criticised the depraved morals and vices of corrupt and ignorant ecclesiastics. In 1557, for example, in the middle of the deliberations of the Council of Trent, the Jesuit Diego Laínez stood in front of a lay audience in Rome and said quite candidly: ‘I am not a Lutheran, but I believe that we have given occasion for this trouble by our pomp, sensuality, avarice ... and by usurping for ourselves the goods of the church.’12 If this was true of the one Catholic religious order that had specifically taken up the mission of opposing Protestantism, how much more true would it have been of the average educated person in Spain and 10

Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven and London, 2007), p. 20. See John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass, 1993), pp. 252-3. 12 Ibid, p. 257. 11

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in England? After all, both countries had been exposed to the criticisms of the humanists for at least half a century, to the extent that much of Cervantes’s and Shakespeare’s social criticism – and even their wellknown, sharply anti-clerical satires – sink their roots in an established tradition which their likely contact with the Jesuits would have done little to minimise. This evidence serves to highlight the difficulties that historians inevitably encounter when trying to draw a clear line of demarcation between the medieval and the early modern periods. To emphasise this is in no way meant as an attempt to deny that the traditional image of the Jesuits as the quintessential Counter-Reformation religious order is perfectly justified, but as a mere reminder to the reader that the suggestion that Cervantes and Shakespeare were influenced by the Jesuits is no clear grist to the mill of those who want to draw that particular dividing line. Indeed, the closer we get to the intentions of St Ignatius himself, the more difficult it is to draw that line. For it was St Ignatius’s avowed intention to imitate the spirit of St Francis and St Dominic, and his original plan for the Society was to send a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land with a view to recovering the Sacred Places for Christendom in an unashamedly medieval spirit.13 There is a further, early coincidence of interests that a possible Jesuit connection might help to elucidate. It is well known that the theatre was something that the Jesuits excelled at. Now, both Cervantes and Shakespeare were completely enthralled by the theatre from a very young age. It is true that this interest is likely to have thrived anyway. In both Spain and England, the second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a marked growth in literacy among a rapidly growing urban population and a growing taste for elaborate display and rhetoric. The vibrant intellectual life of both countries created highly competitive markets for new plays that must have proved enormously tempting to anyone not attracted to the church or the legal or medical professions. That neither of our authors ever expressed the slightest regret at not having gone to University might indicate that they made up their minds about becoming playwrights at an early stage. Nevertheless, contact with the Jesuits would have made them particularly receptive to the older medieval tradition of morality plays that were still popular in the sixteenth century, particularly in rural areas, and which the Jesuit plays consciously drew upon. As Stephen Greenblatt has observed, ‘these plays had little or no interest in psychological 13 José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Ignacio de Loyola, solo y a pie (Salamanca, 1997), pp. 88-130.

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particularity or social texture’ but they nonetheless had ‘the canniness of folk wisdom along with a strong current of subversive humour.’ Additionally, their peculiar ‘blend of high-mindedness and exuberant theatrical energy’ would have appealed to a very wide range of people.14 It was almost certainly through this tradition that Cervantes and Shakespeare became convinced that the spectacle of human destiny is vastly more compelling when it is bound up with ordinary and mundane human experience than with allegories or generalised abstractions. They both saw that the boundaries between the tragic and the comic were perhaps much more porous than their predecessors had thought. It was, of course, Erich Auerbach who first noticed this shift in the work of Shakespeare. He saw it as a triumphant culmination of what he called ‘the Platonic anticipation or demand’ that the ideal poet should be a master of both comedy and tragedy, as Socrates had made clear to Agathon and Aristophanes at the end of the Symposium. Auerbach’s thesis is that such an ideal ‘could mature only by way of the Christian-medieval conception of man’ but would be realised ‘only after that conception had been transcended.’ Shakespeare’s achievement, in other words, is still, according to Auerbach, ‘rooted in popular tradition’, above all in ‘the cosmic drama of the story of Christ.’ What Auerbach calls ‘the creatural view of man’, something which he describes as ‘the loose construction with its numerous accessory actions and characters, and the mixture of the sublime with the low’, could in the last analysis only come from the medieval Christian theatre, ‘in which all these things were necessary and essential.’15 It is from this tradition that Cervantes and Shakespeare most likely derived their conviction that the best kind of writing needed two dimensions: on the one hand, a transcending vision, which modern readers will tend to associate with the middle ages; on the other, a solid, ordinary, contingent earthiness which seems comparatively ‘modern’. This conviction became almost second nature to them. It provided the best foundation for their remarkable ability to absorb words from the widest possible range of experiences and pursuits and to transform them into the most memorable and intimate of registers. They could both plunge into unfamiliar worlds and make themselves almost immediately at home in them, quickly mastering the new complexities. Everything they encountered, even tangentially and in passing, seems to have stayed with them and remained 14

Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (London, 2004), p. 32. 15 Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton 1953), pp. 330, 323 (my emphasis).

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readily available throughout their writing careers. Fragments of conversation, royal proclamations, learned sermons, anecdotes overheard in roads or in taverns, insults exchanged by muleteers, shepherds, fishwives or innkeepers, a few pages that they could only have glanced at idly at a bookseller’s shop, or, as Cervantes once wrote, found in a scrap of paper in the street16 – all was somehow stored away in their memory. It is no coincidence that what most excited Shakespeare in London was what most attracted Cervantes in Seville and Madrid: that which seemed most sinister and, from a provincial perspective, disturbing – the demimonde of shoemakers, shopkeepers, watermen, pimps and petty criminals. When they were in a tavern or an inn and they encountered a drunken bore or a salacious prostitute, both writers saw them through the lens of characters they had read in fiction but they readily adjusted those images by means of the actual persons standing before them. To read an exemplary novel like Rinconete y Cortadillo is almost an olfactory experience – as if we had been privileged to walk into one of those wonderfully realistic early Sevillian paintings by Velázquez, such as The Old Woman Frying Eggs or The Water Seller. And, similarly, in every Shakespearean tavern we can almost smell the beer and sack in the midst of Shakespeare’s undisguised fascination with the whole business: the amiable nonsense, the general indifference to decorum, the forced forgetfulness of worldly anxieties, all of which he depicted without the slightest moralising hint. These were undoubtedly places of disease, vice and disorder, but they also satisfied quite basic human needs, bringing together men and women, aristocrats and commoners, the learned and the ignorant, the young and the old, in a fellowship rarely found elsewhere in the highly stratified societies of early modern Spain and England. What is striking in both authors is the way in which this extraordinary inability to show the slightest sign of boredom at the small talk and foolish trivia of the demimonde never seems to have distracted them from a deep interest in that other aspect of great literature: the transcending vision. What it is significant, however, is that neither of our authors keeps the two aspects going in parallel; there is in fact no discernible tension between them. It is precisely in the ordinary, in the contingent earthiness of their characters that transcendence is most successfully achieved. Don Quixote’s greatest, noblest, most convincing moments are his most 16 Don Quixote, I.9: ‘… and since I have a great compulsion to read, even the scraps of paper in the streets, I picked up a script moved by this my natural inclination’. The original reads: ‘ … y como yo soy aficionado a leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles, llevado desta mi natural inclinación, tomé un cartapacio …’

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pedestrian ones, like the advice he gives Sancho about cutting his nails and controlling his belching just before he goes off to govern his island,17 or the candid way in which he tells the Duke, who has just tricked him into believing this, that it is wonderful how the poor and the afflicted come to him, rather than to the houses of letrados, or of village sacristans; nor do they go to the gentleman who has never ventured outside the boundaries of his place of birth, nor to the lazy courtier who will sooner look for news to refer to and to recount than to great deeds that others can recount and write about. For the remedy of distress and the relief of poverty, the protection of maidens and the consolation of widows, are in no kind of person more readily to be found than in knights errant; and for being one such I give infinite thanks to heaven.18

This is the same spirit in which King Lear utters those unforgettable words, ‘ay, every inch a king’,19 from the depth of his insanity and humiliation; yet his royalty seems only the greater and more indestructible in the process. Or take Brutus in Julius Caesar, a character whose Stoicism renders him pathologically inclined to detachment; yet, as Nuttall observes, this is not the detachment of the ‘Olympian observer’ but that of the ‘frightened fugitive’. Shakespeare saw this with serene clarity and at the same time, without any hint of irony, still called Brutus ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.20 Or think of Coriolanus, psychically undernourished by his mother, a figure of pathos if ever there was one, to whom Shakespeare nevertheless grants the instant of final anagnorisis in that exceptionally powerful scene just after Volumnia has shattered him outside the walls of Rome.21 It is rather like the moment when, in Richard 17

Don Quixote, II. 43. Don Quixote II. 36: ‘las casas de los letrados, ni a la de los sacristanes de las aldeas, ni al caballero que nunca ha acertado a salir de los términos de su lugar, ni al perezoso cortesano que antes busca nuevas para referirlas y contarlas que procura hacer obras y hazañas para que otros las cuenten y las escriban: el remedio de las cuitas, el socorro de las necesidades, el amparo de las doncellas, el consuelo de las viudas, en ninguna suerte de personas se halla mejor que en los caballeros andantes, y de serlo yo doy infinitas gracias al cielo’. 19 King Lear, IV.6. 20 Shakespeare the Thinker, p. 184. 21 Coriolanus V. 3. As Nuttall points out (Shakespeare the Thinker, pp. 298-99), it is significant that Shakespeare inserted the unusual instruction, ‘After holding Volumnia by the hands in silence’, just before the unforgettable lines, ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done? Behold, the heavens do / ope, / The gods look down, and this unnatural scene / They laugh at …’ 18

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II, the King realises that he has not in fact become ‘nothing’ after being deposed.22 It was not just the famous or the great that merited this Shakespearean ability to maintain sympathy with pathos, humiliation and even mediocrity. Shakespeare did it again and again, even with the most appalling characters: Bertram at the end of All’s Well that Ends Well, Bessanio in The Merchant of Venice, Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, Angelo in Measure for Measure. A similar trait is not unknown in Cervantes: in La Fuerza de la Sangre, for instance, he recounts the brutal story of Rodolfo’s rape of Leocadia. Years after the incident, Rodolfo’s father takes pity on a little boy who has been badly wounded by a cart in the street. The boy happens to be the issue of the brutal rape, and Cervantes leads the story to the reunion and subsequent happy marriage of the boy’s parents. Of particular significance is Cervantes’s description of Leocadia, as Rodolfo sees her for the first time since the rape: ‘as if it were heavenly thing that had there miraculously appeared’.23 Rodolfo’s reaction is a common target for modern critics who see this novel as one of Cervantes’s weaker efforts. ‘If only half this beauty were possessed by the woman my mother has chosen for me to marry, I would consider myself the happiest man in the world. Heavens! What is this I see? Is it perchance a human angel that I look upon?’24 Not, admittedly, very memorable lines! Yet, what is of particular interest in the allusion to Leocadia as a quasisupernatural force is that it has the power of ennobling Rodolfo, with whom Leocadia also falls deeply in love. It is immediately reminiscent of Dante’s Beatrice in her role as the voice of Christian wisdom who rescues the poet from his previous sensuality and servitude. And this is just one instance in a host of examples where Cervantes emphasises the power and dignity of human sexuality by being surprisingly lax with the sins of the flesh, even when these were of the most depraved and despicable kind. For understandable reasons, modern critics tend to focus their attention elsewhere, refusing to believe that it is possible for Leocadia to love Rodolfo. They do the same with many of Shakespeare’s characters. How

22

Richard II, V. 5: ‘ … whate’er I am, / Nor I, nor any man that but man is, / with nothing shall be pleas’d till he be eased / with being nothing.’ 23 Novelas Ejemplares, ii, p. 166: ‘como si fuera una cosa del cielo que allí milagrosamente se había aparecido.’ 24 Ibid., p. 167: ‘Si la mitad de esta hermosura tuviera la que mi madre me tiene escogida por esposa, tuviérame yo por el más dichoso hombre del mundo. ¡Válame Dios! ¡Qué es esto que veo! ¿Es por ventura un ángel humano el que estoy mirando?’

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can Hero love Claudio, for instance; or Helena, Bertram; or Portia, Bassanio? Can Shakespeare really have believed that? That these are weak and unconvincing moments, however, seems like too easy a way out of the difficulty. The fact is that both Shakespeare and Cervantes did it often, and they did it so consistently that they must have been doing it on purpose. Shakespeare comes closest to providing a way out of the difficulty in The Merchant of Venice, when Portia explains to Shylock that love has absolutely nothing to do with what people deserve. Love goes with mercy, and the whole point of mercy is that it removes humans from the sphere of compulsion, throwing them at the deep end of the moral freedom of love. Mercy, she says, ‘is twice blest, / It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.’25 And yet, amazingly, Portia’s words, which must be among the most powerful ever penned in defence of the absolute transcendence of love, fail to persuade Shylock. If any transcendence is achieved, it comes through, once again, in the contradictions and limitations of humanity. Even salvation and redemption are moved away from a supernatural frame of reference. When Hermione’s statue moves in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, Paulina’s expression, ‘Dear life redeems you’, is charged with all the supernatural power of the death and resurrection of Christ; yet it is not God but a warm living body that has made redemption possible. Providence might well exist, but when it works it does so through human agency – and characteristically through human agency at its weakest and meanest. It is here that the real novelty and originality of Cervantes and Shakespeare is often located. The drama of Christ, which was the point of confluence in the medieval tradition, fades into the background, leaving the door open for an autonomous human tragedy. As Auerbach puts it, this is no longer Dante’s world. Shakespeare’s oeuvre ‘has a specific human action as its centre, derives its unity from that centre … and … finds its order within itself.’26 Even philosophical judgements seem to grow ‘directly out of the speaker’s immediate situation’ and remain ‘connected with it’. Auerbach illustrates this very aptly by recalling the moment when Macbeth is told about his wife’s death, and the news ‘plunges him into sombre brooding.’27 They are rightly famous lines: To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; 25

The Merchant of Venice, IV. 1, 183-4. Mimesis, p. 323. 27 Ibid.,pp. 325-26. 26

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And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. ... Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.28

Auerbach comments that the passage is full of ‘hopelessness, heaviness, and despair; yet it is heavy with humanity and wisdom too. Macbeth has become heavy with a self-acquired wisdom which has arisen for him from his own destiny.’ From a deep interiority ‘he has grown ripe for knowledge and death.’ Yet again, ‘it is from the grotesque and ridiculous’, from the contingent reality of human folly and madness, that this final ripeness arises,29 that we can know Macbeth as the man he was intended to be, just as Don Quixote’s descent into heaviness and despair, after finding out that only Sancho has the power to disenchant Dulcinea, gradually leads him to grow ripe for sanity and death. Just like Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Don Quixote attains his final completion, his final ‘ripeness’, in the contingent here and now, heavy with destiny. In order to transcend reality, in other words, both Cervantes and Shakespeare opted to embrace reality, even in its most trivial and insignificant aspects, and in a myriad of mixtures, combinations and refractions. It is natural that this seeming radical novelty in the work of Cervantes and Shakespeare should attract the attention of modern critics, leading them to place our two authors at the centre of the intellectual revolution that opened the path to modernity and the radical interiority that is so central to the modern, individual conscience. How can we explain their otherwise quite inexplicable privacy? Where, for example, are their personal letters? Why is it that, from these supremely eloquent and passionate men, there have been found no love letters, not even to their wives, no signs of shared joy or grief, no words of advice, not even any financial transactions? Why have scholars, ferreting for centuries, failed to unearth the books they must have owned – or rather, why did they choose not to write their name on them, unlike many of their contemporaries? Why, in the prodigious body of their writings, is there no direct access to their thoughts about anything? Why is everything they wrote – even their poetry – couched in a way that enables them to hide their innermost

28 29

Macbeth, V, 5, 19-28. Mimesis, p. 326 (my emphasis).

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thoughts?30 It would tempting to dwell on such questions and to convince ourselves that Cervantes and Shakespeare were aware of the subversive qualities of their message and of the dangers of expressing them too candidly – that they were, in other words, conscious that they had broken with the medieval tradition and that there was something to worry about in this. A more careful reading soon makes it clear that they were much more comfortable with the medieval tradition than these assumptions would seem to suggest. In Shakespeare the Thinker, A. D. Nuttall notes that modern commentators repeatedly get Shakespeare wrong. On the question of perception, for instance, he writes: ‘It is one thing to say that the eye cannot see itself but by reflection or that Narcissus can never gaze directly at his own beauty and another to say that there is no such thing as a truly intrinsic quality – that the question, “But what is it like, in itself”, is a doomed, unanswerable question.’31 Nuttall is right, of course. Shakespeare could never have thought like that. Nor could Cervantes who, as we have seen, began his great masterpiece by emphasising that in the telling of it the writer will not stray in the slightest detail from the truth (having just put the readers on their guard about the difficulty of getting at the truth). This is exactly the same idea behind Hippolyta’s reply to Theseus, just after Theseus’s eloquent diatribe about the imagination. Hippolyta’s words are nowhere near as eloquent or as memorable as Theseus’s, but they hit the nail squarely on the head. She simply says: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images And grows to something of great constancy.32

What she means by this could be put thus: ‘something tells me that these things, however, fanciful they might seem to you, my dear Theseus, are, somehow, true’. The key word is ‘constancy’, meaning consistency or coherence. We know that something is true, not just if different witnesses give separate accounts that cohere, but also if our own personal experience – our critical common sense, our sociability – tells us that they do. For Hippolyta, truth is not a Platonic entity or ‘Form’, for it can only exist in relation to our perception of reality. We cannot know truth but through the 30

I have closely followed Greenblatt’s evocative lines in Will in the World, pp. 173-4. 31 Shakespeare the Thinker, p. 213. 32 A Midsummer’s Night Dream, V, 1, 23-26.

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senses, just as we cannot have an identity without it being nourished and, indeed, constituted by relationship: ‘Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo’, as Mercutio aptly puts it.33 It is in the analysis he offers for these revealing observations that Nuttall’s otherwise admirable study loses its edge. The idea that Shakespeare belongs to us and is part of our world is pushed to its limits. Nuttall suggests that Shakespeare seems close to the ‘structuralist intuition that context is not posterior to identity but on the contrary [that it] confers identity’, or that the clear conviction that good and evil are meaningful demonstrates that Shakespeare ‘rejected nihilism’ without going ‘as far as transcendentalism’. If there is any transcendence in Shakespeare, Nuttall continues, it is always a ‘this-worldly’ type of transcendence, one that effects ‘a profound transformation of Platonism, fusing it with the physical.’34 Too often, whenever modern critics find something in Shakespeare or Cervantes that either agrees with them or anticipates subsequent philosophical fads, they are only too willing to stretch their alleged philosophical originality beyond recognition. In the two examples given above, it seems to me much more obvious that they have deep medieval roots. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer, to mention but the most obvious examples, were all of them perfectly aware that context is not posterior to identity; they had all very convincingly already ‘effected’ a ‘profound transformation of Platonism by fusing it with the physical.’ In the process, however, they were not looking forward to Nietzsche or Wittgenstein but drawing on a very fertile medieval philosophical heritage. By ignoring this, modern readers repeatedly miss the medieval metaphysical tradition35 at the heart of the writings of Cervantes and Shakespeare. They both had a marked interest in the intuition of being – not the modern understandings of being, but the peculiarly medieval intuition of being as the only meaningful answer to the most radical of all questions: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Both seem perfectly aware that before we can know anything we are already aware 33

Romeo and Juliet, II, 4. Shakespeare the Thinker, pp. 213, 330. 35 Nowadays it would be more accurate to use the word ‘ontological’. However, since the word was coined in the seventeenth century in a way that radically obscured the medieval understanding of being, I have opted to stick to ‘metaphysical’. The classic study of this problem is Etienne Gilson, L’être et l’essence (Paris, 1948), to which this section and what follows is heavily indebted. See also, by the same author, God and Philosophy (New Haven and London, 1940), especially pp. 38-73. 34

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that what we are trying to know, before anything else, already is, it has being. It is precisely this that gave the ‘nothing’ that Richard II feared so much, as well as Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’ in King Lear, or Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’, the vertiginous metaphysical potency that is so alien to modern thought. It is not just pre-Cartesian, in the sense that it does not in any way foreshadow the enormously influential epistemological principle of the seventeenth-century French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1600), who posited that the mind needs to rid itself of all preconceptions in order to arrive at ‘clear and distinct ideas’;36 it seems even pre-Ockhamist, in the sense that it does not seem to take into account the rejection of universals proposed by the fourteenth-century English Franciscan, William of Ockham, who posited that all knowledge of things is necessarily dependent upon the mind’s naming of those things.37A brief account of how this strangely neglected tradition, as it developed in the medieval period, will help to highlight the dangers of attempting to draw too sharp a dividing line between the medieval and the early modern periods. As is well known, Plato and Aristotle had taught that the ultimate explanation for everything that is could not rest with any given element of reality. Since any such being was constantly being generated, it could never attain to the fullness of being. The ultimate explanation, therefore, had to rest with something that truly had being precisely because it was

36 Historians of philosophy usually agree that Descartes, ‘more than any other figure of the seventeenth century … marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world’; cf. R. M. Eaton, ed., Descartes Selections (New York, 1927), p. v. Descartes’s method for arriving at ‘clear and distinct ideas’, which he defined as ‘simple natures’ endowed with a definitive ‘essence’ and wholly independent of the minds in which they dwell, was developed in his Discours de la méthode, first published in 1637. 37 According to Ockham a ‘universal’ is always a singular and, therefore, an actually existing ‘thing’. It follows that signs, although real in themselves, are actually ‘things’ and therefore their ‘signification’ is nothing real in itself. So, too, the concepts that the human mind forms are empirically observable as psychological data, but their ‘signification’ cannot be ascribed any intrinsic reality. This is the basis of what became known as ‘Ockham’s razor’, the stipulation that beings should not be multiplied without necessity or, put more explicitly, that to account for the existence of an empirically given thing should never be done by imagining another thing beyond it, whose existence cannot be verified; cf. Quaestiones quodlibetales, V, q. 12; V, q. 13; I, q. 10; IV, q. 2.

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not generated.38 This notion had some affinity with the Judeo-Christian understanding of God, but it had also many fundamental differences that are often overlooked. The most important of these is that whereas Plato and Aristotle had spoken of that which is, the Hebrews had followed Moses’s memorable encounter with God in the burning bush by calling Yahweh He Who is. By placing a ‘somebody who is’ in the place of the Greek supreme cause of all ‘that which is’, the Hebrew tradition had established existence as the supreme attribute of God, and, consequently, as the deepest level of reality. From the moment that these two essentially different traditions came into contact, Christian philosophy began to use a Greek philosophical technique to express a Jewish religious intuition that was as profound and far-reaching in its implications as it was neat and simple in its expression. In the process, it is not surprising that Christian philosophers began to find Greek metaphysics unsatisfactory. In the thought of Plato, for example, – especially as it was transmitted through the writings of Plotinus, who was one of the most important influences on St Augustine – the first god was the Intellect, followed by the supreme Soul who was the second god, followed by all the other gods, including human souls. The difference of nature between the One and the multiple was therefore a mere difference of degree. Human souls belonged in the same class as the Intellect and the supreme Soul: they were in fact gods, begotten by the One and inferior to the One only in proportion to their various degrees of multiplicity.39 In sharp contrast, Christian philosophers would develop an understanding of being based on the far-reaching revolution that Yahweh’s words to Moses had initiated. A ‘Pure Act’, not of essence but of existence, necessarily had to be conceived as all that which it is possible to be: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be subtracted from it. Indeed, nothing could share in its being without at once becoming that very being.40 From this is followed that, since it could hardly be denied that everywhere there were beings which were emphatically not God, it was 38

See, for example, Plato, Parmenides, 133d-134c; Republic, VI, 509b; Sophist, 255b-c; Timaeus 27d, 51, 52; Phaedo 80b; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, ș, 6, 1048ª 38-104b 4; Z, I, 1028ª 13, 1028b 2-8; ī, 2 1003b. 39 Plotinus, Enneads, V, ii, 1; iii, 12, 13, 15, 17; vi, 4, 7, 17. 40 The classic and most influential exposition is St Augustine’s famous quid enim est, nisi quia tu est?, addressed to God in the Confessions XI, 5, 7. It is the very reverse of Plotinus. Indeed, had Augustine been addressing Plato’s ‘One’ rather than the Yahweh of Exodus he would have had to ask, ‘What is, if not because you are not?’ rather than the question above, which means ‘What is, if not because you are?’

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imperative to affirm the existence of beings which were radically different from God in the sense that they might never have existed and may still cease to exist. This is one of the most revolutionary developments in medieval philosophy. It is often overlooked, but it is central to Shakespeare’s understanding of being and of his disturbing deployment of the concept of nothingness. It seems to derive from the teachings of the thirteenth-century Dominican St Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274). In his interpretation of Aristotle, Aquinas took the Greek philosopher’s notion of the self-thinking Thought while emphatically associating it with Moses’s ‘He Who is’. Thus, in his attempt to answer the question, ‘What is it to be?’ Aquinas distinguished between the meaning of ‘being’ (ens) and the meaning of ‘to be’ (esse): the first designates some substance; the second designates an act.41 This seemingly simple distinction was in fact of momentous originality, for it went beyond the level of essence to reach the deeper level of existence. In the process it also highlighted the natural order followed by human reason in the very act of knowing: it first conceives a certain being; it then defines its essence; and finally it affirms its existence by means of a judgement.42 In such an understanding of the world, existence is the original energy from which every being emanates; consequently, there can be no other cause for the existence of such a world than a God who is supremely existential. 41

Thomas Aquinas, Quaetiones Disputatae de Veritate, q. 27, a 1, ad. 8m; see also his Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima, art 6, ad 9m. 42 As Aquinas puts it: ‘Since a thing includes both its quiddity and its existence [esse, ‘to be’], truth is more grounded on the existence [esse] of the thing than on its quiddity … so that the concordance [adaequatio] in which truth consists is achieved by a kind of assimilation of the intellect to the existence [esse] of the thing, through the very operation whereby it accepts it such as it is’; cf. Scripta super libros Sententiarum, I, d. 19, q. 5, a. 1., solutio. Elsewhere, Aquinas explains that, through ‘abstraction’, the human mind can conceive ‘apart’ what is really ‘one’ by taking parts out of their wholes in a provisional way; through ‘judgement’, on the other hand, the mind cannot separate what is ‘one’ in reality without defeating its purpose, for its function is to reintegrate those parts into their wholes. As he put it with staggering succinctness: prima quidem operatio respicit ipsam naturam rei … secunda operatio respicit ipsum esse rei, implying that ‘abstract knowledge’ bears upon ‘essence’ while ‘judgement’ bears upon ‘existence’. Crucially, however, he emphasises that both operations are equally required for knowledge; their distinction in no way amounts to a separation. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘judgement’ cannot, for Aquinas, be separated in the mind for the very same reason that ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ cannot be separated in reality; cf. Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate q. 5, art. 3.

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This might seem like too long a digression from our topic. But the shift in the metaphysical intuition of being from the realm of essence to the realm of existence is in fact at the heart of the outlook of our two authors. It was not merely that the doctrine was firmly rooted in scripture – after all, it was not until the Bible had taught Christian philosophers that ‘to be’ was the proper name of God that they began to attempt to reach, beyond essences, the existence which is at their very root. More fundamentally, the doctrine had made it plain that the only possible explanation for the existence of finite and contingent beings was that they had been given their being freely by God, not as participants in his own absolute, total and unique existence, but as partial and finite imitations of it. This mysterious act, whereby something that of itself has no being is nevertheless given its being freely by God, is what the Christian tradition refers to as ‘Creation’, a notion that has been dismissed so often in modern thought that it is difficult to appreciate its logical consequences at the beginning of the early modern period. By the mere act of existing, all created things were believed to participate analogically in the very being of God; in other words, the law of their activity was inscribed in their very essence. Thus, the natural law was related to the divine law in the same way as contingent, created beings were related to the supremely existential Being. Through the act of creation, therefore, God had affirmed himself as the author, not only of the physical laws that nature follows blindly, but also of the moral and social laws that human beings, by virtue of their freedom, are bound to follow if they are to flourish.43 This was the basis of the principle that the eternal law was written in the human heart; it was equally at the basis of the conviction that there was a fundamental concordance between the divine and the human, or, as St Thomas famously put it, that ‘grace does not destroy nature but perfects it’.44 It is true that, to many, the moral law had been divinely revealed to the people of Israel and, as such, it was completely inaccessible to those who had not been instructed in it. But this was by no means the prevalent view in the middle ages. That the law had been divinely revealed was incontestable, but this merely put plainly before all human beings anything that they had refused to read in their conscience. In other words, what God had revealed to Israel when he deemed it necessary in time, he had already inscribed in the human conscience in the very act of creation. If reason and conscience

43

Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei, III, 3, 4, 10, 16; Summa Theologiae I, 7, 2; I, 15, 2; I, 19, 2. 44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 1, 8 ad 2.

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were no match for divine revelation, they were nonetheless sure guides to discern the natural law as a reflection of the divine law.45 This tradition seems much more helpful in elucidating that fusion of transcendence and contingency which we have detected at the heart of Cervantes and Shakespeare than the more common but grossly misleading attempts to associate their work with some kind of conscious break between the medieval and the early modern. Both our authors seem to have preserved an emphatically medieval understanding of the concept of being. Whether this was done consciously or not is beside the point. Their works, rather, point to the resilience of a medieval (and, as we have seen, pre-Ockhamist) philosophical tradition that understood being as leading to transcendence precisely by fusing with the physical. In this context, those difficult or ‘weak’ moments that seem to confound the critics readily fall into place. Our scepticism about them is the result of seeing our two authors as conscious precursors of modernity, as possessors of the kind of ‘interiority’ that would lead to the development of the primacy of the individual conscience. But they were in fact nothing of the sort. Their insistence that human beings can attain to the truth in their earthiness, in the contingent foundations of their being, does not mean that they were trying to identify the human conscience with a subjective self-awareness. Quite the reverse: they would have seen no contradiction between the individual subjective experience and the claims of an objective morality. This is because they both saw truth as the intermediate concept that held the two together. Conscience did not mean that the subject could have the final word against the claims of tradition. Rather, conscience signified the perceptible presence of the voice of truth in the subject. Shakespeare puts this very concept with particular poignancy in the mouth of Edgar towards the end of King Lear, as he urges a profoundly despondent Gloucester to carry on: ‘What, in ill thoughts again?’ he tells him. ‘Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all. Come on.’46 The phrase ‘Ripeness is all’ is as puzzling as it is loaded with significance. Its true meaning is only revealed when we recognise that there is nothing subjective about it. There are two levels at play that need to be carefully distinguished. The first we might call ‘metaphysical’47, a level where truth is not imposed on the subject by an extraneous force but is understood as a constitutive element of human rationality. What Edgar is telling Gloucester is that he can never see himself as the owner of his 45

Ibid., I, 2, 113, 10. Aquinas here draws on St Augustine, De Trinitate, xiv, 8. V.ii, 10-12. 47 Modern philosophers would prefer ‘ontological’, but see footnote 35 above. 46

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‘self’. In fact, nothing belongs less to him than his ‘self’. Gloucester’s ‘self’, like all human ‘selves’, is in fact precisely the place where transcendence is most profoundly needed – the place where all human characters are touched by truth – the truth from which Cervantes insisted we should not stray in the lightest detail – which was the ultimate origin and goal, and which alone could lead to ‘ripeness’. The second is a more practical level. This is the level where the attention of modern audiences seems to focus, and for good reason. Not only do Shakespeare and Cervantes never moralise, they both agree that at this level, at the level of action, conscience obligates, even if it is mistaken. When their characters become convinced that they must act in a certain way, that conviction is morally binding at the moment of the action. But neither of our authors ever separated this level of conscience from the ‘metaphysical’ level. The problem with those who followed a mistaken conviction – like Shakespeare’s Iago or Cervantes’s Jealous Extremaduran – was not the act itself, but the way in which they had allowed themselves to arrive at such radically mistaken convictions by trampling down the metaphysical level, the voice of their being. It was, in other words, the neglect of being (in both the senses of ens and esse) that dulled humanity to the voice of truth; it was the neglect of this notion of being that prevented characters from ‘ripening’. Seen in the light of this tradition, the enduring, universal quality of the remarkable work of Cervantes and Shakespeare – that which has persistently attracted generations of readers for four centuries – seems inextricably bound with what is most medieval about it. What moves us in their work is indeed enduring and universal. The reason for this, however, is not that it looks forward to the modern but that it is firmly rooted in its time. It was, of course, a time of transition; but like all times of transition it tended to look back as much, if not more, as it looked forward. For too long we have lingered in the forward-looking aspect of their work, but the time seems now ‘ripe’ to attempt to correct this skewed perception.

CHAPTER NINE “MEDIEVAL” AND “RENAISSANCE”: THE PROBLEM OF EVENTS, THEIR RECORDS AND THEIR PLAYERS PAMELA KING

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

This is Hamlet’s well-known set of instructions to the travelling players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 3:2, lines 1-14.The “real” Hamlet was a legendary medieval Norse prince, an aristocratic patron of performers, who lived around 1200 and whose story Shakespeare borrowed from Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, but through a thoroughly early-modernised version printed in Paris in 1514, translated into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570, and from that into English in 1608 as The Hystorie of Hamblet.1 Just as Shakespeare is, then, writing about a medieval prince but taking his material from an impeccably contemporary source, his Hamlet is here ventriloquizing the finer theatrical aesthetic of Shakespeare’s own renaissance English contemporaries, of the author himself. The speech works by flattering the audience by its apparent assumption that they, as 1

Amanda Mabillard, ‘Shakespeare's Sources for Hamlet’, Shakespeare Online http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sources/hamletsources.html (20 Aug. 2000) accessed 17 May, 2014.

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early seventeenth-century London theatre habitués, can share a joke with the play’s protagonist about crude and outdated modes of performance. It is all very (early) modern. It is all too easy to find in the detail of the speech, then, data concerning the expectations of the sophisticated playgoers of the renaissance London playhouse, as opposed to those of the audience of the very “medieval” mystery plays and their legendary ranting tyrant, Herod, and thereby to diagnose the shift in theatrical aesthetic from the medieval to the Renaissance. Furthermore, Pierre Bourdieu, in his sole quotation from the dramatist, as Richard Wilson points out, reads this speech as benchmarking the renaissance moment, as it enacts Shakespeare's "strategy to exchange the economic capital earned in the public playhouse for the cultural capital awarded by the princely patron". Hamlet is the model princely patron. Bourdieu defines the Renaissance as the period in which art asserted its autonomy, its "cultural capital". He uses Hamlet's speech, however to illustrate how the process "for a long time remained ambiguous", as patronage continued to act as midwife to an autonomous aesthetic.2 Few would argue that the terms "medieval" and "renaissance" have no meaning as category distinctions in art, but ambiguities and overlaps will be the subject of this essay in exploring the application of those distinctions to individual cases. The case studies below are drawn from English dramatic literature and its record in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This focus offers peculiar conundrums because of the slippage between known but ephemeral and occasional events, and their textual traces and recorded histories. We will also reconsider how plays construct and perform individual identities ("characters"), conventionally a central determinant by which the cultural shift from "medieval" to "renaissance" is understood. How did Shakespeare know about Herod? Perhaps everyone knew about Herod. Certainly well before the earliest recorded performances of the Chester or York cycles of mystery plays, Chaucer relies on his readers’ knowledge of the character when he casts the ludicrously inappropriately effete Absolon in the role in The Miller’s Tale. Possibly Chaucer and his immediate audience were familiar with a ranting Herod played by the clerks of Clerkenwell in their biblical plays.3 After all, Herod even ranted 2

Richard Wilson, ‘The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu’, in Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, eds Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester, 2003), pp. 56-57. 3 For Chaucer’s likely witnessing of the Clerkenwell plays see further in Pamela M. King, ‘”He pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye”?’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. XXXII (2001), pp. 212-28.

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in Latin at the French in the surviving play from the Fleury Playbook, almost exactly contemporary with Saxo Grammaticus. On the other hand, Shakespeare as a young man in Stratford could have been present in the audience to see the celebrated Herod in the Coventry Corpus Christi play. In the text of the Nativity Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors, fortuitously preserved in an early nineteenthcentury copy by the Coventry antiquarian, Thomas Sharp,4 the stage direction reads, “Here Herod rages in the pageant and in the street also”5. This direction is usually invoked as evidence of how pageant-wagon staging worked. What is also does, however, is to suggest that “raging” was an expected virtuoso performance by the time this particular Coventry pageant was written. We happen to know exactly when this was: the Shearmen and Taylors commissioned an updated version of their text, for reasons more material than aesthetic, in 1534, from Robert Croo, who also rewrote the Weavers’ pageant and the Drapers’ Doomsday (in which he played God). Versions of the Coventry plays were rewritten well into the mid-sixteenth century and continued in performance in the face of Puritan opposition right up until the 1590s. Robert Croo is no William Shakespeare, but the difference between their dramatic output may be attributed at least as much to market forces, and relative opportunity or lack thereof to assert autonomous “cultural capital”, as to paradigm shift. Yet to claim that there was no paradigm shift in the English literary or theatrical aesthetic would be perverse. The problem is not whether there was a shift in aesthetic, it is the attempt to pin it to dates and particularities. Granted the existentialism of a Hamlet, a Lear, of a Faustus, speaks of a different perception of the human condition from that of late medieval theological certainty. These characters conform to what James Simpson summarises as “a flexible, divided, and therefore ‘fashionable’ self”.6 A focus on complex interiority is not, however, the prerogative of postHumanist dramatic characters; turning fourteenth-century vernacular theology into dramatic character can generate a similar effect. Arguably, 4

Thomas Sharp, Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries anciently performed at Coventry with a new foreword by A.C. Cawley, (first published Coventry 1825, republished Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1973). Sharp’s own annotated copy, which includes contemporary reviews of the work reflecting perceptions of ‘medieval’ drama at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is preserved as London MS B.L. Additional 43645. 5 Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (eds), The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), p.105. 6 James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume II, 1350-1547 (Oxford, 2002), p.125.

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therefore, if one looks to likely audience reception of distinct dramatic moments, rather than to authorial construction of larger dramaturgical trajectories, there is little to distinguish qualitatively some moments in fifteenth-century “medieval” drama from, for example, the closing moments of Marlowe’s Faustus, in which the protagonist considers as time runs out whether or not to repent. An obvious example of biblically determined internal conflict is reproduced in the York play of the Agony in the Garden (written down c. 1469), in which the theological conflict between Christ’s human and divine natures is embodied as one man’s dilemma:7 Jesus The nowys that me neghed hase it nedis not to neuen, For all wate yoe full wele what wayes I haue wente. Instore me and strenghe with a stille steuen, I pray the interly thou take entent Thou menske my manhed with mode. My flessh is full dredand for drede, For my jorneys of my manhed I swete now both watir and bloode. Thes Jewes hase mente in ther mynde full of malice And pretende me to take withouten any trespasse. But fadir, as thou wate wele, I mente neuere amys, In worde nor in werk I neuer worthy was. Als thou arte bote of all bale and belder of blisse And all helpe and hele in thy hande hase, Thou mensk thy manhede, thou mendar of mysse, And if it possible be this payne myght I ouerpasse. And fadir, if thou se it may noght, Be it worthely wrought Euen at thyne awne will, Euermore both myldely and still, With worschippe allway be it wroght. Vnto my discipillis will I go agayne, Kyndely to comforte tham that kacchid are in care. What, are yoe fallen on slepe now euerilkone And the passioun of me in mynde hase no more? What, wille yoe leue me thus lightly and latte me allone In sorowe and in sighyng that sattillis full sore? To whome may I meue me and make nowe my mone? I wolde that yoe wakened, and your will wore. 7

Richard Beadle (ed.), The York Plays, Volume I The Text, edited by Richard Beadle, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series 23 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 236-37.

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Do Petir sitte vppe nowe, late se, Thou arte strongly stedde in this stoure. Might thou noght the space of an owre Haue wakid nowe mildely with me? (lines 43-76)

In the scene of the Annunciation in the N-town Mary Play, another mid-fifteenth-century dramatic response to vernacular theology, the audience is invited to empathise with the Virgin Mary’s dumb-struck response to the news brought by an impatient angel, through a matter of pure dramatic timing, as the stage direction reads,8 Here þe aungel makyth a lytyl restynge and Mary beholdyth hym, and þe aungel seyth… Mary, come of and haste the… (line 1324)

That both characters in these examples, unlike Marlowe’s Faustus, will assimilate the will of God is never in question, but because these are plays, performed in real time by real material bodies, the audience is nonetheless treated to the frisson derived from an illusion of access to another will, that of the very “medieval” conflicted individual. The position is further muddied by the attempt to distinguish between the impact of Reformation thought on imaginative explorations of the human condition, as opposed to the florescence of pre-Christian texts and of Italian Humanist thought. Indeed it may be thought that the two movements are neither collaborative, nor even parallel, but represent oppositional paradigm shifts. Just as we have become accustomed to Anne Hudson’s description of the Wycliffite movement in the late fourteenth century as the “premature Reformation”,9 perhaps we should attend to James Sharpe’s description of post-Reformation England as “a limited Renaissance”.10 The English Reformation curtailed the ecclesiastical patronage which was so important on the continent: it could be argued that, given the iconoclasm of the reign of Edward VI and the early years of Elizabeth, the Reformation’s contribution to English visual and plastic art was a negative one.

8

Peter Meredith (ed.), The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript (Exeter, 1997). Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). 10 J.A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: a Social History 1550-1760 (London, 1997), p.296. 9

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When we add the at best ambivalent intervention of Reformation thought and its enactments into the mix, the Chester mystery plays, known only from manuscript sources which post-date the end of their annual production, present us with an interesting case study. Such was their local popularity that someone wrote new “banns” for them after the Reformation which may be summarised most succinctly as a trailer which doubles as an exercise in back-covering. These banns begin by attributing the plays’ authorship to Ranulf Higden (c.1280-1364), who was a monk of St Werberg’s Abbey in Chester. Famous for his Polychronicon, Higden also wrote, or in modern terms largely plagiarised, a number of pastoral works. Amongst them is the Speculum curatorum which belongs squarely within the movement for pastoral renewal, and leans on similar handbooks, especially the Summa confessorum of John of Freiburg, but also William of Pagula’s Oculis Sacerdotis and the Manipulis curatorum of Henry of Ghent.11 The Speculum, commonly dated to 1340,12 deals with the articles of the faith, the ten commandments, vows, tithes, the Lord’s prayer, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, the beatitudes, the virtues, the vices and their remedies, and the sacraments. A side-effect of the thoroughgoing evangelical approach that characterised all Higden’s pastoral output was to set him up as a Protestant before his time.13 The banns go on to lionise Higden, as “this Moncke” wrote in English, careless of the risk of being burnt at the stake. The contents of the cycle, thus defended in general terms, are then itemised as is usual in prefatory banns, before the author adds a rider that the audience must remember that the plays come from a different era: .

11

The text is commented on in detail in G.R. Owst, ‘Sortilegium in English Homiletic Literature of the Fourteenth Century’, in J.C. Davies (ed.), Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson (London, 1957), pp. 272-303, and in an unpublished PhD thesis, Leonard Boyle ‘William of Pagula’ (Oxford, 1956). 12 W.A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955), p.203. In the surviving manuscript of the Speculum, Durham Cathedral MS B iv 36, there is a two-column index on f3r contemporary with the manuscript's compilation, which itemises the full pastoral agenda covered by the MS. 13 See further Pamela M. King, ‘Playing Pentecost: Transformations and Texts’, in Philip Butterworth, Pamela King, Meg Twycross (eds), Essays on Medieval English Drama in Honour of David Mills: Medieval English Theatre, XXIX (2008), pp. 60-74.

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The sume of this storye Lordes & ladies all I haue breifelye reapeated & how the muste be played Of one thinge warne you now I shall That not possible it is these matters to be contryued In such sorte and cunninge & by suche players of price As at this daye good players & fine wittes, coulde deuise ffor then shoulde all those persones that as godes doe playe In Clowdes com downe with voice and not be seene ffor noe man can proportion that godhead I saye To the shape of mans face. nose and eyne But sethence the face gilte doth disfigure the man yat deme A Clowdye coueringe of the man. a Voyce onlye to heare And not god in shape or person to appeare By Craftes men and meane men these Pageanntes are played And to Commons & Contrymen accustomablye before If better men and finer heades now come what can be sayde But of common and contrye players take yow the storye And if anye disdayne then open is the doore That lett hime in to heare, packe awaye at his pleasure Oure playeinge is not to get fame or treasure...14

The generation of the Chester manuscripts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries opens another area of difficulty because of an inscrutability of motive. There is the possibility that their copying was the result of the new enthusiasm for antiquarianism, and arguably antiquarianism is a fundamentally renaissance impulse, but its motives when they are unrecorded lead the modern scholar into speculation about whether these texts are early modern – or simply old fashioned. Again James Simpson, in his analysis of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, has given us a simple binary distinction between “medieval” and “renaissance” as, respectively, “the genealogical and the analogical”. In brief, “the medieval narrative generates it power by ‘carrying on’ a single tradition, while the ‘Renaissance’ text claims its authority by virtue of ‘being like’ a different tradition”.15 He later elaborates this distinction in his study of the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Early of Surrey, by nailing with great clarity a particularly renaissance impulse towards genealogical endeavour which is important to us here. The renaissance “predicament” is “on the one hand the product of a mobile, divided, and self-fashioning voice, and, on the other, its voice is acutely conscious of history as needing, if unlikely to 14

Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire including Chester (Toronto, 2007), 2 vols, vol.I, p.340. 15 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 73.

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achieve, resurrection”. This consciousness is then attributed to “courtly environments of a threatening kind” and to “an intervening period of loss”.16 “Loss” in terms of English religious drama, in company with other manifestations of group and individual identity associated with devotional practices, may be directly attributed to the trauma of Reformation iconoclasm. Individuals, families, and communities may be observed reacting to the consequent rupture in senses of identity precisely, and not at all paradoxically, by undertaking antiquarian projects, not only to assert continuity with the past as a single tradition, but to recuperate that past and fold it into a new world order. The job of relating cultural rupture occasioned by the Reformation to the growth of scholarly antiquarianism has been comprehensively undertaken in Phillip Lindley’s monograph which deals not with the communal cultural property that is the mystery play cycle, but with familial property, the medieval church monuments destroyed between the Dissolution of the monasteries and the Restoration of the monarchy.17 Lindley unpicks the relationship between the invention of tradition, the nature of Tudor historical understanding, first hand observations of lost monuments, and modern attempts at reconstruction. The author observes, for example, that, “antiquarianism in England and Wales, from the midsixteenth century onwards, was often - indeed usually – focused on the middle ages, a point which has been generally neglected in the general assumption that antiquarian interests in Roman Britain were always predominant at this time… Medieval subjects, and medieval objects… not Roman Britain, were the major interests of post-Reformation scholarship in England.” He goes on to evidence that the “desire to record, to ensure the preservation of memory, in the face of the mutability, even of tomb monuments, was a key feature both of medieval and post-Reformation antiquarianism”, and further that “the nature of Protestantism precluded a belief that the active involvement of the living could ameliorate the conditions of the deceased. For post-Reformation writers, family, local, county or national loyalties effectively replaced the monk’s relationship to his house or order.” This may be summarised as “the sense of separation and loss which is so palpable in the writing of Tudor antiquaries”.18 16

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp.124-25. Phillip Lindley, Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England (Donington, 2007). The following summary of Lindley’s argument draws on the present author’s review of the monograph, published in The Ricardian, XIX (2009), pp. 155-57. 18 Lindley, Tomb Destruction, pp.53-54, 61. 17

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Lindley also warns that events, however apparently driven by broad ideological shifts, provoked far from coherent or monolithic responses. Social and material opportunism was balanced by those who, like the Mowbrays and the Howards, pleaded for their ancestral foundations, while the monastic clergy lacked any advocacy to rescue their memorials. He includes a roll-call of lost treasures, alongside a tale of the trade in cheap tomb parts and recut heraldry, of simple pillage and re-use. The singling out of John Leland as “unquestionably the most important figure amongst the first generation of Tudor antiquaries”,19 but, like Thomas Churchyard and John Stow, credulous in his defence of legendary history, is perhaps a useful parallel example to the difficulties we have with the attributing the preservation of any aesthetic production from the Middle Ages to either a pure “medieval” or “renaissance” impulse. As the book proceeds to consider the Civil War period, Lindley points to how Spelman, Hatton, Shirley, Dering, D’Ewes, and Dugdale, though differing in religious and political opinion, were connected through a common sense of gathering crisis, and through networks like the Society of Antiquaries. The superficially inscrutable generation and survival of such late manuscripts of the Chester plays may perhaps be set alongside his account of Robert Cotton who died “partly as a result of grief at being parted from his books”.20 The material quiddity of all the monuments considered in the study, set alongside what is known, and not known, of those that were lost, stands above all as an exemplary illustration of the dangers of constructing a narrative of epoch-change on the basis of random survivals. It also reminds us of the changing use and meaning of medieval artefacts, and of the vulnerability to appropriation of any aesthetic output. Change and appropriation are major factors in any consideration of the notoriously problematic Towneley play manuscript, a case even more complex than the admittedly inscrutable manuscripts from Chester. It is now established on codicological grounds that the Towneley Manuscript, whatever its provenance, dates from the mid-sixteenth century. The manuscript’s latest editor, Garrett Epp makes plain: “The Towneley Plays, of course, resemble the Creation to Doomsday cycles of Chester and York in their basic ordering, and are still thought by many to be a biblical cycle performed in medieval Wakefield” but “this confident statement is guilty of multiple sins both of commission, including notable misrepresentation of the York connection, and of omission — not mentioning the highly unusual lack of a Nativity play, for example, or of representation of the 19 20

Lindley, Tomb Destruction, p. 66. Lindley, Tomb Destruction, p. 95.

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Eucharist, crucial to the very concept of the Corpus Christi feast and play alike”.21 Epp goes on to acknowledge the ground-breaking work of Barbara Palmer in demonstrating that, firstly, Wakefield did not have the civic structure to sustain a mystery play cycle (unlike, for example, Doncaster).22 Palmer also exposed the production records associated with Wakefield as forgeries. At the time of writing, the jury is still out, but many now regard those references to Wakefield that can be validated as possibly referring more to the place of origin of the scribe than to the home of the plays.23 Elsewhere I have demonstrated that the pageants at the end of the collection offer particular evidence for a late date, and renaissance sensibility.24 In the Last Judgment pageant the devils led by Tutivillus, are all associated with language, and, in particular, with lying, and with the discourses of theology and law. The performance, or non-performance, of the Works of Corporal Mercy, the byword for the division of the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25, is extended in this ambitious expansion of the York “Doomsday” into a burlesque attack on a social sphere in which the uses and abuses of language have particular resonance. Speech has rhetorical power over the world, and that world is full of material goods for which the sinner develops material desire that cannot be supressed. I connect this very verbal understanding of sin not only with the visual imaginary deriving from the long apocryphal tradition, but with the growing tide of censorship in the early sixteenth century that not only presaged Reformation theology, but was a product of a moral panic induced by the tsunami of words that attended the embedding of printing in early Tudor culture. The voices that emanate from Hell in the plays, and the prominence of Tutivillus, collector of idle gossip and dropped syllables, point to a cultural moment which places a particular emphasis on demonology. It is no coincidence that the printing industry early developed a tradition that there was a special devil who haunted print shops, mischievously inverting type and misspelling words. This devil was 21 Garrett Epp, ‘Re-editing Towneley’, in Pamela King, Susan Niebrzydowski and Diana Wyatt (eds), The Yearbook of English Studies XLIII: Early English Drama, (2013), pp. 87-104. 22 Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Corpus Christi “Cycles” in Yorkshire: The Surviving Records’, Comparative Drama, XXVII (1993), pp. 218–31, 228. 23 A volume of essays on the Towneley manuscript which will address a number of these issues is currently being edited by Meg Twycross for publication in 2015. 24 ‘Finis huius: the Final Pageants in the Towneley Plays’, in the forthcoming collection of essays on the Towneley manuscript currently being edited by Meg Twycross, as above.

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called Tutivillus, and it is because of him that the printer’s apprentice, scapegoat for all such errors, came to be known as “the printer’s devil”.25 The Second Shepherds’ Play, or Secunda Pastorum, within this problematic manuscript is, however, probably the most problematic of plays. Often studied on its own, because it is self-referential to a degree that makes this successful, the play has become perhaps the most studied of all “medieval” English plays. The two shepherds’ plays in the manuscript, setting aside any of the internal properties of either, mostly serve to reinforce the view that the Towneley manuscript represents no cycle at all. Epp confidently asserts that “there was no performance of this text as a whole — neither in Wakefield, nor anywhere else — until this past century”.26 And so we are left with a manuscript that contains a number of well-rehearsed anomalies, as well as some of the most celebrated single pageants from the repertoire of English biblical drama. Discussion of both the problems and the qualities of the collection tend to focus on the spectral dramatist known as the “Wakefield Master”. He is held to have been responsible for the pageant of Noah, the two shepherds’ plays, Herod the Great, and the Buffeting as well as the revision of a number of other pageants in the collection.27 If the characteristics of this playwright-reviser’s dramatic imagination can be crudely summarised, we would probably note that in each pageant an interpretative analogy takes over and overreaches the status of the episode as part of the putative cycle’s continuum. For example in the Mactatio Abel, he plays with the correlation between Cain’s plight and that of the contemporary outlaw. In both shepherds’ plays he again politicises his characters within contemporary society. In the Secunda Pastorum this leads to a double plot in which Mak the sheep-stealer and his slatternly wife Gill stand as both ante- and anti-types for Joseph and Mary, parents of the true Lamb of God. As part of the plot, Mak conjures the shepherds asleep with astrological mumbo jumbo in order to steal their lamb; in another of the Master’s pageants, the Processus Noe cum Filiis, not only the Flood, but the Noahs’ legendary intra-familiar strife, are attributed to disruption in the heavens. In all cases the pageants have achieved modern acclaim, precisely because they are not part of an even, cyclic, continuum, but stand as autonomous 25 Margaret Jennings, ‘The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology: Texts and Studies, LXXIV (1977), p. 34. 26 Epp, ‘Re-editing Towneley’. 27 Peter Meredith, ‘The Towneley Pageants’ in Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge, 2008), pp.152-82, gives an excellent summary of scholarship surrounding the Wakefield Master.

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dramatic artefacts. Notably Suzanne Westfall suggested some time ago that, for all the above reasons, the Secunda Pastorum was written for performance by the boys of the chapel of a great northern household at Christmas time, from where it made its way inscrutably into the compilation that is this manuscript.28 The pressure has now shifted from demonstrating that the Master’s pageants are “good” to suggesting that they are late, that they are playlets that take as their model the pageants in a civic cycle then turn them into a different, more dramatically sophisticated phenomenon. They are, arguably, “medieval” in their generic inspiration, but “renaissance” in their execution.29 A case can be made for “medieval” pageants transformed into a commentary on the early modern condition yet retaining so many of their original reference points as to defy allocation to anything other than an increasingly overladen cusp between the “medieval” and “renaissance”. The position is further complicated by the peculiar concentration of Catholic survivalism in North West England, where the Towneleys, along with a number of other aristocratic families, held, and hold, to the old faith. If this manuscript, as opposed to all the pageants in it, emanates from one of the great Roman Catholic houses on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border as it seems to, it poses the same problem we faced with the Chester manuscripts. Should we read its pageants as products of nostalgia, or, with choirboys piping the social complaints of the shepherds against “gentlery men”, as satirical, or even a parody of medieval Corpus Christi playing? The finely minced distinction here again involves an excursion into speculative intentionalism, which we do well to recall has been challenged as fallacious in (post) modern aesthetics. Probably the most famous “parody” of medieval theatre takes us back to Shakespeare and to the “tragical mirth” of Pyramus and Thisbe, as performed by the “rude mechnicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Parodic it may be, but there is more than one way of reading its message. What happens towards the end of the play, is that the space of the purposebuilt renaissance playhouse is occupied by a troupe of players who violate its codes, and self-censor mimesis and the transformational power of the theatre out of existence. They on the one hand deny verisimilitude as both dangerous and impossible:

28

Suzanne R. Westfall, Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford, 1990), p.51. 29 The same may be said for what is misrepresented as Scotland’s only ‘medieval’ play, Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, which, such is its individual complexity, cannot be included here.

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In this same interlude it doth befall, That I, one Snout by name, present a wall…(V, i, 1998)

On the other hand they insist that moonshine can be represented only by moonshine. In contrast to this, Theseus offers a different, Shakespearean, agenda: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A habitation and a name. (V, i, 1842)

Two readings are available: either Pyramus and Thisbe is Shakespeare’s patronising parody of the naivete of “medieval” drama, or it is a parody of what print and Protestant anti-theatricalism was doing to the transformational properties of all theatre and, by extension, the theatre of the Mass. That Shakespeare was brought up in a Roman Catholic household is now beyond dispute, though whether he is the William Shakeschaft who turns up as a Jesuit trainee in the same Lancashire milieu from which the Towneley manuscript may have emanated, at a period that coincides with his “lost” years, is more contentious.30 Putting the play in context with the other late, or “problem” plays, particularly The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale, it is perfectly possible to read the scene not only as a burlesque enactment of Hamlet’s proscriptions to his players, but also as a defence of the transformative potential in human action, an action savagely supressed in the rituals of the Church then mistrusted and ultimately also supressed in the Puritan anathematising of theatre. Shakespeare connects the two overtly when he has Prospero in the epilogue to The Tempest suggest that real magic lies not in his hands as devisor of Miranda’s wedding masque, nor in the hands of the theatre company, but of the audience whose applause can release the players from the world of illusion back into everyday reality. The parallel between Prospero, Shakespeare, and God the Creator has been noticed before.31 The analogy has lent itself to theories of 30

See for example, Mary A. Blackstone, ‘Lancashire, Shakespeare and the Construction of Cultural Neighbourhoods in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (eds), Region, Religion and Patronage (Manchester, 2003), pp. 186-204. 31 See for example Steven Marx, ‘Progeny: Prospero's Books, Genesis and The Tempest’, Renaissance Forum I (1996).

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Renaissance “self-fashioning”, the freedom with which the newly aware early modern individual can be observed self-consciously authoring, and authorizing him – and it usually is him – self.32 Paradoxically however, the speech also has connotations of an opposite, and older, understanding of the self, as an impotent speaker seeks relief from an “ending” of “despair” through the mediating active forces of “prayer”, “mercy”, and “indulgence”. The will for refashioning may lie with the individual, but the power to effect transformation is here both external to the individual and providential: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint; now, ‘tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon’d of the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please: now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. (V, i, 2404)

This is, of course, renaissance, rather than medieval, Catholicism, but it foregrounds the fact that in the English post-Reformation context, any genuflection to the transformational properties of a higher power is invoked in contra-distinction to the individual autonomy that characterises early modernity. But renaissance culture was nothing if not eclectic, in its assimilation of old and new ideas, and also, and particularly, in its http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v1no1/marx.htm, unpaginated – passim, accessed 31 August, 2014. 32 See, classically, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1983), passim, and, for a useful summary of the pendulum’s swing against new historicism, see Martin Coyle, ‘Attacking the Culthistoricists’, Renaissance Forum I (1996).

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accommodation of ideological polemic. Early Protestantism, by contrast, is a doctrine of constraint. Its dependence on text led to a close policing of that text and of interpretation. So in considering the transition from “medieval” to “renaissance” in English texts, we are constantly confronted by the paradox that print and Protestantism emancipated access to text but precisely sought to close down the renaissance impulse to liberate that text from patronage and censure. If modernity, including early modernity, according to Bourdieu, establishes the arts as an autonomous field in which contestation is fundamental to the aesthetic, that project is held up in northern Europe by the Protestant Reformation which blocked that liberation in part because of the association of the transformative power of art with the proscribed doctrine of transubstantiation. It was, indeed, easier for renaissance ideas to be imported unapologetically from Italy in the comparatively less theologically paranoid years between the “premature” reformation triggered by Wyclif, and the Henrican Reformation. It is, therefore, both unsurprising, but strikingly surprising, to encounter in 1497 Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, the audaciously early and unassailable example of a renaissance play in English with which we shall finish. The play has always been well-placed within epoch-preoccupied narratives, as it claims a number of celebrated firsts.33 It is the first fulllength secular play in English, the first to deploy a double plot structure of the “above stairs and below stairs” type common in Shakespearean comedy, and the first to have a female protagonist. Its patina of newness, which is not quite the same thing, derives from its source in Giovane Buonacorso de Montemagno’s humanist Latin treatise, De Vero Nobilitate, translated into English around 1460 by John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester and printed by Caxton in 1481.34 The plot in which the low born but virtuous Gayus Flaminius wins a rhetorical battle with the high born Publius Cornelius for the hand of Lucres seems to have chimed well with circumstances of the play’s first performance. Henry Medwall came to London, where the play was indisputably performed, in the train of Cardinal John Morton and therefore as part of the collection of new men assembled by Henry VII in the Tudor court circle. Medwall and his older brother John were the sons of a well-to-do Southwark cloth-trader, and were educated at St Saviour’s, Southwark and Eton College. With his brother established in the family business, Henry had gone on to study Arts, then Civil Law at King’s College Cambridge, where he came to the 33 34

Alan H. Nelson (ed.) The Plays of Henry Medwall (Cambridge, 1980). Nelson (ed.), Medwall, p.2.

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attention of John Morton, then Bishop of Ely, as well as the noted Humanist and bibliophile, Oliver Kyng, then archdeacon of Oxford. Following the accession of Henry VII, Morton was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury and Medwall followed him to London, serving most of his career as a notary public. He appears again and again in the record alongside Morton, Kyng and other influential men in the new Tudor court circle whose fortunes dictated his.35 The play betrays perfectly all the major known dimensions of its author’s life. The main plot opens with an eighty-nine line rhetorical tour de force delivered by Lucres’s father, Fulgens, who plays no other significant part in the play. As a sustained example of high-style classical rhetoric, the speech is clearly a connoisseur piece in which the playwright shows off his particular verbal talents to a discerning audience. At the core of the main plot, then, is the long debate between Gayus Flaminius and Publius Cornelius for the hand of Lucres, a showcase humanist courtroom debate with a summing up delivered by the formidable object of their affections. On the other hand there is a sub-plot in which two characters, labelled simply “A” and “B”, volunteer as body servants to the two main suitors and become involved in a parallel competition for the favours of Lucres’s maidservant, Joan. Their rivalry is fought out not with verbal dexterity but in a mock joust described as “farte prike in cule”. It involves each combatant being trussed up in squatting position around two broomsticks arranged cruciform, one passing between calves and thighs, the other running from front to back over the trussed wrists, between the thighs, and sticking out behind. The two combatants then bounce towards each other and try to knock each other over.36 The game clearly parodies the much bloodier cock fights familiar around Southwark where the Medwalls spent their childhoods, and which, on the South Bank of the Thames and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the City or Westminster, was home to the cockpits, brothels, bear-baitings, and later of course, to the Elizabethan playhouses. Such is the theatrical sophistication of the play, that it is patently impossible that it is a “first” in any real sense beyond its chance survival. At Cambridge Medwall would have read from the Arts syllabus of the day authors such as “Priscian, Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero, Ovid and Virgil”. He is known also at least to have attended the evening entertainments the College hosted, and may actually have participated. College records show 35

Nelson (ed.), Medwall, pp. 5-11. See Peter Meredith, ‘”Farte Prike in Cule” and Cock-Fighting’, Medieval English Theatre, VI (1984), pp. 30-39; Alan J. Fletcher, ‘”Farte Pricke in Cule”: a Late Elizabethan Analogue’, Medieval English Theatre,VIII (1986), pp. 132-39. 36

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a mixed diet of visiting minstrels and waits, choristers, organists, and singers, as well as guest actors and plays staged by the fellows themselves. But perhaps the most strikingly sophisticated dimension of the play is its opening. The characters A and B emerge from the audience as commentators who appear to decide to join the play, and become the servants of Gayus Falminius and Publius Cornelius. It is a truism to say that the world of the stage and that of the audience were not as sharply delineated in the theatre before the introduction of the proscenium arch as they were afterwards. Medieval plays acknowledge their audiences. The audience of Mankynde is famously tricked into singing a scatological song and into paying the devil. More soberly, if no less seriously, the audience of the N-town Mary Play is guided in how to receive the enacted account by a character called Contemplacio whose role involves a managed oscillation between the reality of the audience and that of the play world. Philip Butterworth has written extensively about these liminal “characters”.37 Taking a broader view of medieval entertainments in general, particularly occasional events, the order of levels of participation are always far more nuanced than the division into players and audience suggests. What is different about A and B in Fulgens and Lucres, however, is the conspiratorial knowingness with which their orchestrated move from audience to players is conducted. The salient lines are those spoken early by A, who has mistaken B for a player: A: B: A:

Nay, I mok not, wot ye well, For I thought verily by your apparel That ye had bene a player. Nay, never a dell, Than I cry you mercy: I was to blame. Lo, therfor, I say There is so myche nyce aray Amonges these galandis now aday That a man shall not lightly Know a player from a nother man. (lines 48-56)

The lines clearly have their political resonances for the times in which Medwall wrote it. The Tudor court was a dangerous place in which to survive under Henry VII and was to become more so under his son, so that John Skelton, tutor to the young princes Arthur and Henry, forged much of 37

See Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge, 2014), pp.125-39, and previous publications by the same author cited in the same work at p.229, n.77.

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his poetic career out of writing political allegories in which disguise and dissembling play a large part, and Thomas Wyatt’s love lyric beginning “They flee from me that sometime did me seek” illustrates in a more personal way the paranoid atmosphere in a court where the appearance of being of the right party when favours changed so quickly was a matter of simple survival. Medwall’s transparently arch disclaimer for the play’s argument, is later put into the mouth of character B: Ye, goth the world so now a day That a man must say the crow is white. (lines 163-64)

and Why shulde they care? I trow there is no man of the kyn or sede Of either partie, for why they were bore In the cytie of Rome as I sayd before. (lines 177-80)

These characters surely refer to what Simpson quoted above calls “a flexible, divided, and therefore ‘fashionable’ self”. Yet the burden of the satirical comment is not primarily on complex interiority, but on appearance and performance. Susan Crane, writing about the “socially engaged selves” of the Middle Ages, argues convincingly that medieval self-awareness is not confined to those who withdrew from the world through religious conviction:38 I concentrate on performances that supplement verbal and material selfpresentation. By “performances” I mean heightened and deliberately communicative behaviors, public displays that use visual as well as rhetorical resources.

She goes on to place her version of performance study in a direct line from Erving Goffman’s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, resisting “the dichotomizing of self and society”. Crane also thereby brings us back to Bourdieu, and his analysis of the “habitus”, a set of behaviours that with repetition “move from constructed to natural in the understanding of practitioners”, as consciousness is shaped from the outside in. Crane’s thesis is that identity is performed, which powerfully suggests that the chivalric practices that she observes in late medieval literature, and the self-fashioning of “renaissance” courtiers in the courts of the early Tudors, 38

Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PE, 2002), p.3.

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are not significantly different. Medwall’s A and B, whose labels are those given to the performing students in mock court cases, suggest a shared understanding between play and coterie audience that there is no fundamental distinction between social life and performance. Moreover, this is the burden of Medwall’s immediate source, John Tiptoft’s The Declamacion of Noblesse because there the better orator is adjudged to be axiomatically the better man, cum bene dicere non possit nisi bonus. Virtue is a matter of performance. Tiptoft was of course writing out of the chivalric or “medieval” age which is Crane’s focus, but Medwall finds the material readily adaptable to promote the image of the Tudor - renaissance - man. Who constituted the coterie audience for whom Medwall was writing returns us to the question of the relationship of events and their records. We are confronted by a fully-fledged Renaissance play of considerable sophistication which is precociously early for its verified date in an English context, and which also suggests a context and progenitors surviving as shadows and absences only. That Fulgens and Lucres is a piece written for an audience with an understanding of the law and of contemporary court politics is uncontentious. Its division into two parts, and its conclusion with a dance that invites the audience to join in, point further to performance at a household occasion. For years it was assumed that the household was Morton’s and the occasion either Christmas or the entertaining of foreign ambassadors. However in 1993 Olga Horner put forward the argument still largely overlooked that Medwall’s adaptation of Lucres’s role from the passive woman he found in Tiptoft’s book to the commanding presence and adept legal orator in the play, points to the possibility that the play was directed at a great lady, the obvious candidate being Lady Margaret Beaufort, King Henry VII’s mother:39 In the sphere of law and the administration of justice, Lady Margaret’s position was almost certainly unique at that time. It is thought that she held a commission, in essence to act as the king’s deputy, for the hearing of petitions of the king’s poorer subject, and possibly charges of riot, the frequent outcome of unlawful retaining included in the list of Cornelius’s offences. Although no record of her commission has been found, some years after her death a comparison was made by one of her contemporaries between the Council of the North’s commission and the one “that my lady the king’s [Henry VIII] grandam had [which] tried and approved [cases]”. Again by inference, Lady Margaret may have been a Justice of the Peace, a rare office for a woman until this century… 39 Olga Horner, ‘Fulgens and Lucres: an Historical Perspective’, Medieval English Theatre, XV (1993), pp. 49-86, 67.

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The other figure associated with the play is Thomas More who was, in 1497, a page in Morton’s household and may have played B. Indeed among the many “in” jokes which have been detected in the play, the exchange between A and B in which B declares his intention to join in as Cornelius’s servant, prompting A to fear “thou wyll destroy all the play”, to which B retorts “The play began never till now”, is taken to refer to More’s early enthusiasm for the stage, recorded by his son-in-law, William Roper. When engaged in Morton’s household he would “sodeynly sometimes steppe in among the players, and neuer studying for the matter, make a parte of his owne there presently among them, which made the lookers on more sporte then all the plaiers beside”.40 Thomas More is for many the primary apologist of the English Renaissance. James Simpson both perceives, and interrogates More’s audacious proposal that Utopia, as he designs it, is the end of history, and, by extension, of English history. However, as Simpson also points out, this proposal is compromised by the figure of Cardinal Morton, the pragmatic politician who in Utopia listens to Hythlodaeus’ arguments, but who in More’s Richard III is shown seditiously provoking a coup d’état. “Even as Utopia attempts to escape from the violence of history, it betrays a prescient and accurate awareness that violence lies in the future.” More’s panegyric for the coronation of Henry VIII, for all its “unbridled optimism”, is another performance of a self who was to find the limit of the roles he was prepared to fashion himself to in the new world that Henry was to design. The fatal discomfort of his position may be set alongside that of the antiquaries who responded to the radical iconoclasm described by Camden as mingendo in patrios cineres [“pissing on the ashes of the ancestors”]. Notwithstanding More’s later fate, however, it is interesting for our purposes here to observe him as little more than a boy participating in a dramatic entertainment which was already “renaissance” in both its subject matter and structure. This essay began by proposing that the division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is more akin to the movement of tectonic plates than to a canyon that opened on any particular date. In the study of imaginative literature, theatrical performance, and pageantry, the relationship between the sequence of constantly changing ephemeral performances of a text, and the manuscript in which its content was recorded, complicate problems of periodisation. Yet, subjecting the material survivals to the generally-accepted tests, it would be a perverse 40

Nelson (ed.), Plays of Medwall, p. 17, quoting Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock (ed.), William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knighte, EETS 197 (London, 1935), pp. 5, 105.

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reader who did not conclude that the Coventry Cycle, preserved in manuscript is “medieval” in the 1590s, while Medwall’s play, printed by Caxton, is “renaissance” a century earlier. These terms are not an impediment to scholarship in the field, but are understood according to parameters that are not absolutely chronologically determined. But with Medwall’s play a further turn is suggested: Fulgens and Lucres conforms to conventional definitions of a Renaissance text, celebrating the “new” men of the new Tudor dynasty through the medium of a source with an impeccable Humanist pedigree. Yet when the circumstances of that play’s performance are considered, alongside much of its apparent topical commentary, its very medium as a piece of theatre calls to question a number of ingrained distinctions. The performance of the self, it has been argued, and is argued in the play, owes as much to the social performance of chivalry as it does to any new self-fashioning. Furthermore, if we follow Susan Crane to Bourdieu, we must seriously question whether there is such a thing as Renaissance interiority or if it is simply an example of the manner in which the “habitus” shapes the individual consciousness. We may end, therefore, by returning to Lady Margaret Beaufort, born on the 31 May 1443, an individual case whose position on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance gains added piquancy from her gender. Horner suggests that the matter of Medwall’s play would have appealed to her because of its Roman setting and noble theme, not because of evidence of her study of Humanist texts, but because she owned a French manuscript copy of the thoroughly “medieval” romance of Blanchardyn and Eglantine, which she had bought from William Caxton and later sent back to him for translation and printing:41 Caxton thought that her intention was to teach “vertuouse yong nobel gentylmen & wymmen to be stedfaste & constaunt”, through reading “Auncient hystoryes of noble fayttes & valiant actes of armes & warre, whyche have ben achieved in olde tyme of many prynces, lords & knyghtes”.

41 Horner, ‘Fulgens’, p.80. Sadly the news of Olga Horner’s death arrived during the completion of this essay. She was a woman of many parts who came to scholarship comparatively late in her varied life. I dedicate this essay to her memory. She was a meticulous and astute legal and literary historian who should have been given time to write more.

CHAPTER TEN TIME AND THE IMAGE: ART AT AN EPOCHAL THRESHOLD PETER DENT

‘To spatialize time is a faculty shared both by snails and by historians.’1 This observation, conjuring a vision of the landscape of past time glistening with a latticework of scholarly slime trails, opens a short essay by George Kubler, historian of Pre- and Post-Columbian art, on the subject of ‘Style and Representation of Historical Time’ from the 1967 edition of the multimedia journal, Aspen. It was one of three essays published as a set in this context, the other two being ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes and ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ by Susan Sontag.2 Kubler’s status as an historian of ‘visual’ time had been confirmed just five years earlier with The Shape of Time, a short book cast into the well of art history whose influence is still rippling through the subject in significant ways.3 Kubler’s point was that style can be a useful mode of analysis in synchronic snapshots of visual culture, but it is not adequate to the differential and dynamic change of artefacts, at all levels

1

George Kubler, ‘Style and Representation of Historical Time’, Aspen, 5/6 (1967). Available here: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/ . Kubler’s essay was also published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 138.2, 1967, pp. 849-55 2 Kubler was a student of the French cultural historian Henri Focillon. Focillon was himself a significant figure in the history of the medieval/early modern division: Ginevra De Majo, ‘Il dibattito Medioevo-Rinascimento, da Focillon a Chastel’, in Annamaria Ducci, Alice Thomine and Ranieri Varese (eds), Focillon et l’Italie: atti del covegno, Ferrara, 16-17 aprile 2004 (Florence, 2007), pp. 67-108. For a recent assessment of Kubler, see Ulrich Pfisterer, ‘George Kubler (1912-1996)’, in Ulrich Pfisterer (ed.), Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, vol.2: von Panofsky bis Greenberg (Munich, 2008), pp.203-16. 3 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 1962).

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of analysis, through time: ‘style and the flow of happening are antinomies. Style pertains to a timeless sphere; and flow concerns change.’4 This is not an encouraging insight on which to begin a discussion of periodization given that one of art history’s most familiar tools for carving up the past is style. As a device for articulating the epochal shift from the medieval to the early modern world, it has played a profound role in the history of art history itself. The idea starts small, emerging implicitly in Dante’s famous reference to contemporary painters in the Divine Comedy (Purgatorio, XI, 94-96). Giotto surpasses Cimabue just as Dante, the poet of the dolce stil novo, the sweet new style, surpasses those who have gone before. Over the next two centuries this develops by stages into Vasari’s full blown account of the rebirth (rinascita) of art after the darkness of the middle ages. Whatever the place of this epochal turning point in contemporary art history, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists has become one of the subject’s lieux de memoire, a screen onto which various visions of the discipline’s past and future have been projected. A set of stylistic categories have emerged around this rebirth: Romanesque and Gothic for the medieval, Mannerist and Baroque for the Early Modern, and Renaissance (early and high) with a foot in both camps.5 The history of these terms is complex and sometimes obscure.6 They arose in different historical moments under varied circumstances, were only gradually coordinated into a temporal sequence and, as Meyer Schapiro pointed out, they are not even terms of the same type, but a mix of cultural and aesthetic markers.7 Nevertheless, they are still very much in use. The Kunst-Epochen series published in German by Reclam shortly after the 4 ‘The idea of style is best adapted to static situations, in cross-cut or synchronous section. It is an idea unsuited to duration, which is dynamic, because of the changing nature of every class in duration.’ Kubler, ‘Style’. 5 For an introduction to Romanesque and Gothic and the associated historiography, see Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview to the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art’, in Conrad Rudolph (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Art (Chichester, 2006), pp. 1-43, along with other essays in the same volume. The corresponding volume on the other side of the epochal divide, Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow (eds.), A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art (Chichester, 2013) largely avoids directly addressing the issue of periodization by style, but adopts two of these terms for its title to cover the period 1300 to 1750, rather than making use of ‘Early Modern’. 6 See, for example, Erwin Panofsky, ‘What is Baroque?’, in Irving Lavin (ed.), Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA and London, 1995), pp. 17-88. 7 Meyer Schapiro, H.W. Janson and E. H. Gombrich, ‘Criteria of Periodization in the History of European Art’, New Literary History, 1.2 (1970), pp.113-25 (citation at p. 113).

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millennium, for instance, follows the sequence Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque, with an eccentric volume on the fourteenth century nestling between the second and the third. However, the rise of a global art history has amplified the problems of periodization by style to the point of collapse. These problems are most pronounced for the modern era.8 Work on the medieval and early modern world has been only partly sheltered by a narrower geographical focus on the history of European art. Even here, however, calls to ‘reframe’ this period to take into account the visual cultures of Latin America, of Byzantium, or of the Ottoman Empire, for example, are now old by several decades.9 Indeed, within the traditional bounds of the familiar centres, there is now a much greater recognition of the plurality of styles from region to region and city to city, and even the role of supposedly ‘medieval’ styles as innovative markers of the early modern.10 Styles do not emerge universally and all at once. To retain periodization by style in this context is to imagine any movement in space as a movement in time, forwards or backwards in relation to an absolute ‘visual’ chronology. This inevitably prioritises certain locations as progressive centres for an innovative avant-garde and relegates others as conservative peripheries lagging behind the curve. In other words, periodization by style can only be maintained if the spatial focus is kept excessively narrow. Otherwise, we accept Kubler’s argument about the value of style for synchronic analysis and so drain it of all but the shallowest temporal extent. The fact that these familiar terms are unlikely to disappear any time soon for organising the chronological narrative of art history is no consolation and certainly does not get art historians off the hook.11 8

For a short recent statement relevant to the present context, see Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham and London, 2013), pp. 11-22. 9 See in particular Claire Farago (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, New Haven and London, 1995, but more recently: Claire Farago, ‘The Concept of the Renaissance Today: What is at Stake?’, in James Elkins and Robert Williams (eds.), Renaissance Theory, New York and London, 2008), pp. 69-93; Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Rembrandt Duits (eds.), Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe, (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2013); and Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (eds.), The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2013). 10 Ethan Matt Kavaler, ‘Gothic as Renaissance: Ornament, Excess, and Identity, circa 1500’, in Elkins and Williams, Renaissance Theory, pp. 115-57 and Ethan Matt Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470-1540 (New Haven and London, 2012). 11 For a spirited and radical defence of style, see Richard Neer, ‘Connoisseurship and the stakes of style’, Critical Inquiry, 32.1 (2005), pp. 1-26.

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However, there are alternatives to the periodization of art according to style, some of them lying within art history’s boundaries, others borrowed from outside. One of these, for example, might be identified as an element within the envelope of style itself, but its potential significance extends beyond it: linear perspective. It has been argued that this reorganisation of the relationship between viewer and image that crystallises in the first half of the fifteenth century possesses epochal significance in its own right. The process entails the construction of an image in relation to a viewpoint. This image can be conceived of as a projection onto a notional screen between viewer and viewed. As such it figures a reciprocal relationship that determines the appearance of the world while calling forth a beholder in a particular location who is subjected to that view. In the process, the world is framed and experienced as a pictorial surface and the viewer becomes a detached and disembodied eye observing it from a distance. The geometrical understanding of space that guarantees the method creates the impression that this image of the world is rational and objective. Its apparent accommodation of the process of vision naturalizes what is in fact artificial. As such, it might be argued, linear perspective marks one route towards a modern subjectivity. Even when it is absent it remains a paradigm that determines the attitude and expectations of a viewer towards an image and, more radically, towards the world itself.12 12

Of the substantial literature, see: Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Christopher S. Wood (trans.), (New York, 1997); Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, John Goodman (trans.), (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Margaret Iversen, ‘The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan’, Oxford Art Journal, 28.2 (2005), pp.191-202; Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (eds. and trans.), (Cambridge, 2002), pp.57-85. Hans Belting accepts the connection and its significance for the modern subject in Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans.), (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011), p. 13: ‘When perspective turned the gaze into the umpire of art, the world became a picture, as Heidegger would later observe. For the first time, paintings in perspective depicted the gaze that a spectator turned on the world, thereby transforming the world into a view of the world.’ A concise and negative diagnosis of the full implications of the Cartesian world view to which perspective contributes can be found in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, 2004), pp. 21-49. For the problem this poses for medieval subjectivity, see also Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London and Brooklyn, NY, 2002), pp. 4557, and for the difficulty of any chronological narrative structured around subjectivity across this epochal threshold, see David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the

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The demonstration of perspectival construction in practice by Filippo Brunelleschi and in theory by Leon Battista Alberti can also be taken as a significant element within another medieval to early modern transition: the systematization of art as an epistemological project supported by a body of theory supplied by both practitioners and non-practitioners alike.13 There are other elements to this process, such as the rising social status of the maker, who gradually emerges from the offstage anonymity of the workshop into the spotlight of the lone performance, and the corresponding differentiation of the various media of visual culture into arts or crafts according to assertions about their intellectual depth.14 Taken individually, these developments have only a limited claim to epochal significance beyond the history of art, but it makes sense to subsume them beneath another shift of much greater scope: the emergence of the modern idea of art itself as a category distinct from the medieval image.15 This way of dividing medieval from early modern is all the more appealing because it can be coordinated with the wider interpretation of the movement away from the medieval world as a process secularization and ‘disenchantment’.16 In this context, the cult image is steadily displaced by the art work. The image as the timeless mediator of a relationship with divinity gives way to the work of art as the product of a performance of artistry located squarely within time and space. Indeed, it is this shift that permits the history of art as a history of styles. However, just as the wider belief in post-medieval secularisation has been challenged, so the image/art distinction has found its critics. The ‘medieval’ cult image never

Subject’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit, 1992), pp. 177-202. 13 For which, see Robert Williams, ‘Italian Renaissance Art and the Systematicity of Representation’, in Elkins and Williams, Renaissance Theory, pp. 159-84. 14 Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven and London, 2000), and Sefy Hendler, La guerre des arts: le paragone peinture-sculpture en Italie XVe-XVIIe siècle (Rome, 2013). 15 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Edmund Jephcott (trans.), (Chicago and London, 1994). For the significance of this view, see also Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, 1990’, in Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (eds.), The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss (London, 2013), pp.203-15. 16 For a recent overview, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed’, The Historical Journal, 51.2 (2008), pp. 497-528.

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disappeared, it simply occupied a blind spot for art historians whose tools of analysis had been developed to address the category of ‘art’.17 These three ways of articulating the difference between what is medieval and what is early modern in terms of visual form (style), the subject-object relationship (perspective) and the ontological status of the work (image or art) do not exhaust the possibilities but illustrate the diversity of options available from within art history. However, given that visual culture under historical analysis does not occupy the realm of the past in glorious isolation, art historians have often turned to the tools and practices of neighbouring disciplines (such as the fields of economic, religious, and literary history) and adopted the frameworks found there.18On the one hand, for example, it has been argued that surpluses in the late medieval economy gave rise to new levels of conspicuous consumption, stimulating not only an increase in the quantity of commissioned art, but also changes in its quality; and on the other hand, both the humanist and the vernacular movements in late medieval literary culture can be related to corresponding movements in the realm of visual culture.19 Each of the options lightly sketched here has its limitations. Like style, most can claim only a narrow geographical and cultural reach. Identifying any single factor as epochal runs the familiar risk of labelling individuals and groups that fail to adopt it or who actively resist it as falling behind the times. One partial route out of this difficulty is to coordinate them as a loose cohort of factors collectively contributing to widespread change, albeit still within a largely western European frame. In the area of cultural history, to which art history belongs, there is a tendency to gather these various factors under the banner of the Renaissance. This presents its own set of problems. The Renaissance itself, as rebirth, identifies an (Italocentric) cultural movement directed primarily at the legacy of the classical world. It first opens an explicit place for a middle age between antiquity and what is modern, and necessarily constitutes that period as its negative other. It is strictly speaking a process rather than an epoch or period in its 17

See for example Fredrika Jacobs, ‘Rethinking the Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images’, in Elkins and Williams, Renaissance Theory, pp. 95-114 and Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 2013), pp. 23-34. 18 The reader is directed to other contributions in this volume for various possibilities. 19 See, respectively, Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, MD, 1993), and Charles Dempsey, The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture, (Cambridge, MA and London, 2012).

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own right, but in modern scholarship there has been constant slippage between the two.20 As a term, it has a particularly convoluted and rich historiography, in which art history has a substantial disciplinary stake.21 Some hoped that ‘early modern’ would render the idea of a Renaissance redundant but this has not proved to be the case, not least because the French term deployed in the nineteenth century can still be connected to an Italian one ‘rinascita’ that has some purchase within the period itself.22 There are some advantages in retaining the Renaissance and treating it more neutrally as an elastic cover for a range of phenomena. It offers, for example, an alternative orientation within time to that proposed by the early modern, one that looks back not forward. The tension between these two orientations can be productive. It can also stand in as a transitional field between the medieval and the early modern epochs. Cultural historians are generally reluctant to deal in sudden or catastrophic moments of change, preferring processes over events.23 Bundling various trends with different chronological parameters into a long Renaissance with medieval roots and early modern foliage accommodates this inclination. Exactly how this should be done, what should be included and 20

See the excellent exhibition catalogue edited by Hans Christian Hönes, Léa Kuhn, Elizabeth J. Petcu and Susanne Thürigen, Was war Renaissance? Bilder einer Erzählform von Vasari bis Panofsky (Passau, 2013). 21 For an introduction to the current status of the Renaissance within the field, see Elkins and Williams, Renaissance Theory, and the chapter ‘Do we still need a Renaissance?’ in Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham and London, 2013), pp. 23-36. 22 M. L. McLaughlin, ‘Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages in the tre- and quattrocento’, Renaissance Studies, 2.2 (1988), pp. 131-42 and Matteo Burioni, ‘Vasari’s Rinascita: History, Anthropology or Art Criticism’, in Alexander Lee, Pit Péporté and Harry Schnitker (eds.), Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c.1300-c.1550 (Leiden and Boston, 2010), pp.115-27. 23 Within art history and with reference to the period divide in question, witness the debate surrounding the impact of plague following Millard Meiss’ Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the mid-fourteenth century, rev. ed., (Princeton, 1978). See the recent summary in Judith B. Steinhoff, Sienese painting after the Black Death: artistic pluralism, politics, and the new art market (New York, 2007). Skaug draws a parallel between gradualist and catastrophist accounts in geology and palaeontology: Erling S. Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting c.1330-1430 (Oslo, 1994), 2 vols., vol. 1, p.318. See also the discussion in Peter Dent, The Body of Christ in Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Sculpture, Ph.D. thesis, The Courtauld Institute, 2005, pp. 179-212.

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whether some kind of hierarchy is necessary depends largely on methodological temperament. Having sketched out these possibilities, it is not my intention here to add another overview to the extensive literature on all of these topics, and certainly not to expand on what can be said about the Renaissance as a mediating category – however conceived – between what consensus identifies as comfortably medieval or early modern. Instead, I will focus now on the question of time itself and how images constitute a special category through which time can be imagined and encountered. To this end, I will examine first an attempt at periodization that deploys a single work of visual art as part of its methodological framework. The work in question is Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus (fig. 1) as discussed by the German historian of periodization, Reinhart Koselleck. Subsequently, I will turn to one recent attempt by two prominent art historians, Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel, to articulate the division between the epochs in question through a recategorization of images in general according to their manner of ordering temporal relationships in what has been dubbed an ‘anachronic’ fashion. Reinhardt Koselleck was one of the most significant figures in his generation of German post-war historians and widely considered a major contributor to the field of conceptual history in general and to the problem of periodization in particular.24 His work requires a brief introduction in this context before concentrating on his essay ‘Modernity and the Planes of Historicity’ where he makes use of Altdorfer’s painting.25 Koselleck’s 24

On Koselleck, see Niklas Olson, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (New York, 2011). By a happy coincidence, I discovered in writing this essay that Koselleck’s first job after submitting his dissertation was as a lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1954 to 1955. His first published article ‘Bristol, die ‘zweite Stadt’ Englands: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Skizze’, Soziale Welt, 6 (1955), pp. 360-74 sweeps through the period divide under discussion, running from c.1200 through to the nineteenth century. 25 For an overview of Koselleck’s work on time, see Olson, History in the Plural, pp. 203-67; Helge Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), pp. 151-71; John Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History’, History and Theory, 43 (2004), pp. 124-35; and Anders Schinkel, ‘Imagination as a Category of History: An essay concerning Koselleck’s concepts of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont’, History and Theory, 44 (2005), pp. 42-54. For a cautious reception from the early modern perspective, see Peter Burke, ‘The History of the Future, 1350-2000’, in Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth (eds.), The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (London, 2010), pp. ix-xx. For a positive reception by a medievalist, see Jean-Claude

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main interests lie not with the medieval / early modern divide but with the corresponding threshold between the early modern and modern worlds, roughly the period from 1750 through to 1850, for which he developed a special designation – the Sattelzeit – which might be literally translated as ‘saddle time’, but which as a metaphor draws on the topographic idea of the mountain saddle or col as the lowest point between two peaks and therefore often the location of a pass. The passage from early modernity to modernity proper occurs in Koselleck’s view across this Sattelzeit. However, at a more theoretical level, Koselleck’s interests extended to a lifelong engagement with the nature of historical time itself, with periodization considered not only as a retrospective carving up of historical time by the historian but also as an element of how time itself might be perceived by any human actor operating within it. Indeed, one of Koselleck’s long term projects had been the attempt, pursued across a series of essays, to establish the idea of historical time as the essential object of history as a discipline. For Koselleck, historical time can be distinguished from what he called merely natural or chronological time. Historical time concerns the experience of time as it is lived by human agents. This perception of time within history includes not only the nature of the relationship between an historical present and its imagined past or pasts, it also, and crucially for Koselleck, includes the imagined future or futures that condition any experience of the present. In formulating these ideas, Koselleck drew heavily on two philosophers: Heidegger and Gadamar. Heidegger had already called for what we might describe as a phenomenology of historical time, given that time is a necessary element of being, which lives in a dynamic interrelationship between past, present and future. Such a phenomenology would be a description of the experience of time from within, not the construction of an objective view of historical time from without.26 From Gadamer, Koselleck drew the idea of a horizon of expectation. For Gadamar all human beings by virtue of their birth into a particular time and place carry Schmitt, ‘Appropriating the Future’ in J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (eds.), Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 3-17. For a less positive response towards his categorization of the medieval world, see Kathleen Davis, ‘The Sense of an Epoch: Periodization, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Secularization’, in Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (eds.), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages (Durham, NC and London, 2010), pp. 39-69, and Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), pp. 77-102. 26 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.), revised edition, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010, pp. 372-415.

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out interpretative acts within a horizon that is determined by that time and place. The horizon itself can in some respects be likened to a perspectival pictorial construction in so far as it is generated by the particular location of a viewing subject who goes about interpreting within the bounds of the horizon that their existence constitutes (although in Gadamer’s view different horizons can come into contact and, in his words, fuse in a way that ultimately transcends or breaks out of those bounds).27 Out of these influences Koselleck developed a pair of concepts, the space of experience and the horizon of expectation.28 Experience is that part of the past that is decisive in the present in determining or orienting how human beings interpret the world and act within it. Expectations are possible futures projected out of the horizon established by the action of the past within the present, in other words, the horizon established by the space of experience. Koselleck’s contribution here was to take the essentially individual notions of the experience of time and the horizon of expectation and to make them social categories that could be applied far more broadly to social groups. Such groups, societies and – perhaps – whole civilisations might share a common horizon of expectation and a common space of experience – in other words, a common perception of the interrelationship of past, present and future. By extension, such groups, in possession of a coherent orientation within historical time, might also be said to correspond to an epoch or period. Koselleck’s thought is both conceptually complex and not entirely systematic. Such a short summary hardly does it justice. But I would like now in a more open way to pursue some of these themes as they emerge in the first chapter of Futures Past, a collection of interconnected essays published in 1979.29 In translation, the opening essay takes the title ‘Modernity and the Planes of Historicity’, but this is rather different from the German original which means ‘(The) Former Future of Early Modernity’.30 It is in this opening chapter that Koselleck first broaches the

27

Hans-Jorg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (eds. and trans.), revised second edition (London, 2014), pp. 246 and 313-17 in particular. 28 ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Keith Tribe (trans.), (New York, 2004), pp. 255-75. 29 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a.M, 1979). 30 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Vergangene Zukunft der frühen Neuzeit’, in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 17-37. Delivered as a professorial inaugural lecture at the

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idea of periodization, in relation primarily to the early modern period (although with reference to the medieval world, antiquity and modernity) and he does so through the introduction of a painting, Albrecht Altdorfer’s representation of the Battle of Alexander at Issus (fig. 1).31 After setting out the context of this commission for Duke William IV of Bavaria in 1528, he offers a brief description of the depicted event, the battle fought in 333 BC between Alexander and Darius, a battle which Koselleck describes as ‘of world historical significance…[that]…opened the epoch of Hellenism, as we say today’.32 He goes on to note that the painter treats the battle as a history, (observing in passing that a history ‘in that time could mean both image and narrative’), a narrative in which the players literally bear the signs of their fate in the form of banners listing the quantities of casualties on both sides. In other words, Altdorfer presents a battle in all its vivid presence but a battle at the same time that, even as it rages, has already been digested by history. Koselleck then pursues the presence of this anachronism further into the painting. The figures of the Persians seem like the Turks who were besieging Vienna in 1529 as the work was being completed. Alexander the Great and Maximilian I (d.1519), Holy Roman Emperor, in Koselleck’s words ‘merge in an exemplary manner’.33 In his view, ‘the event that Altdorfer captured was for him at once historical and contemporary…the space of historical experience (der historische Erfahrungsraum) enjoys the profundity of generational unity’.34 Or, as he puts it a little more pithily shortly afterwards: ‘The present and the past were enclosed within a common historical plane’.35 At this point, Koselleck introduces what for him is a decisive detail: amongst all the figures in the painting, one has been omitted, the date of the battle. Without the year, the battle is thus ‘not only contemporary; it simultaneously appears to be timeless’.36 Of course, we cannot be absolutely certain that this is true. The panel has been cropped and the banner that floats above the battle repainted. The words that once

University Heidelberg in 1965 and initially published in a festschrift for Carl Schmitt in 1968. See Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 277. 31 For an entry into the scholarship on this painting see the relevant essays in Christoph Wagner and Oliver Jehle eds, Albrecht Altdorfer: Kunst als zweite Natur (Regensberg, 2012). 32 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 9. 33 Koselleck, Futures Past, p.10. 34 Koselleck, Futures Past, p.10. My emphasis. 35 Koselleck, Futures Past, p.10. 36 Koselleck, Futures Past, p.10.

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decorated it, probably in German, have been replaced with a Latin passage instead.37 At this point in the essay, Koselleck leaps forward in time, a move that I will not follow for the moment because he soon returns to the painting at its point of origin, and this time encourages us to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience. Alexander’s victory, marks the transition from the ‘second to the third world empire, a sequence in which the Holy Roman Empire constitutes the fourth and last.’38 It prefigures the ultimate fall of that Empire, the last Empire, and with it the end of the world. In this respect ‘Altdorfer’s image had…an eschatological status’: it is an ‘archetype of the final struggle between Christ and Antichrist’.39 The sun and moon, heaven and earth, participate in this event as one would expect within a divinely ordered cosmos moving towards a pre-ordained conclusion. In this sense, the overarching temporal order governs the representation of the battle and, in so far as this is captured in the painting, it constitutes fundamentally both the space of experience (the past as it operates in the present) and the horizon of expectation shared by the original audience. Now, as mentioned a moment ago, in the midst of this discussion of the painting, Koselleck throws us forward in time to another set of viewers. In fact, the painting appeals to Koselleck as much for its afterlife as for its significance within the world of the early sixteenth century, or indeed its relationship with an imagined antiquity. Altdorfer’s work was one of the many appropriated by Napoleon and taken to Paris where it occupied a privileged position in his own chambers.40 In 1804, Schlegel saw and described the Alexanderschlacht after it had been moved to the Louvre.41 For Koselleck, Schlegel’s reaction to the painting marks out a significant departure from how the work’s original audience would have viewed it. In Schlegel’s words: ‘It represents the victory of Alexander the Great over Darius but not in the manner which imitates antiquity, rather in the manner of the poems of the Middle Ages as the most exalted adventure of chivalry.’42Koselleck reads Schlegel’s comments on the work as 37

See Andreas Prater, ‘“Monumentale Miniatur”: Bemerkungen zur Zeitstrucktur in Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht’, in Wagner and Jehle, Altdorfer,pp. 69-70. 38 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 11 39 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 11. 40 Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 24-25. 41 For Schlegel’s reaction, see Reinhild Janzen, Albrecht Altdorfer: Four Centuries of Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1979), Appendix A: Friedrich Schlegel’s Essay on Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander, pp. 143-44. 42 Janzen, Altdorfer, p. 143.

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indicating that he saw the vision of the past presented in the painting and, indeed, the painting itself as parts of historical reality that were no longer active in these forms in his own present. In Koselleck’s words: ‘Schlegel was able to distinguish the painting from his own time, as well as from that of the Antiquity it strove to represent [...] there was for Schlegel, in the three hundred years separating him from Altdorfer, more time (or perhaps a different mode of time) than appeared to have passed for Altdorfer in the eighteen hundred years or so that lay between the Battle of Issus and his painting. What had happened in these three hundred years that separate our two witnesses, Altdorfer and Schlegel? What new quality had historical time gained that occupies this period from about 1500 to 1800? If we are to answer these questions, this period must be conceived not simply as elapsed time, but rather as a period with its own specific characteristics.43

Koselleck goes on to answer his question by arguing that history becomes increasingly temporalized during this period, until it achieves a level of acceleration typical of modernity: ‘We are thus concerned with the specificity of the so-called frühe Neuzeit—the period in which modernity is formed. We will restrict ourselves to the perspective we possess from the one time future of past generations or, more pithily, from a former future.’44 There is a wonderful moment at the end of the chapter when Koselleck returns to the painting and introduces that second later viewer, Napoleon himself, for whom the imperial resonances were once more potentially active in the present. What the historian writes about Napoleon is laced with irony, but he offers a wonderful image of a former future on the cusp of exerting itself in a present where it has no place: ‘Napoleon was never a man of taste, but the Alexanderschlacht was his favorite painting, and he wanted it in his inner sanctum. Did he sense the way in which the history of the Occident was present in this painting? It is possible. Napoleon saw himself as a parallel to the great Alexander, and more. The power of tradition was so strong that the long-lost, salvationalhistorical task of the Holy Roman Empire shimmered through the supposedly new beginning of the 1789 Revolution.’45 The core of the paper, for which the discussion of Altdorfer’s painting and its viewers forms the frame, is concerned with the mechanisms by which the essentially medieval experience of time is transformed across the early modern period until it reaches the Sattlezeit in the fifty years to 43

Koselleck, Futures Past, p.10. Koselleck, Futures Past, p.11. 45 Koselleck, Futures Past, p.25. 44

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either side of 1800, a moment that constitutes the passage to the accelerated temporalities of modernity. Koselleck identifies five essential steps: the endless deferral of the Apocalypse; the corresponding emergence of ‘an immeasurably extended future’; the loss of an eschatological role for the Holy Roman Empire; the suppression of prophecy and prediction by the absolutist state; and the emergence of the epochal divisions of Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity as the fundamental units of historical time with the present situated firmly and self-consciously as modern.46 However, in the present context, I am less interested in the mechanisms by which this gulf opens between Altdorfer on the one hand and Schlegel on the other. I want to consider instead why Koselleck selects a painting in order make his points, why this painting in particular, and to what extent the image itself is also operating as a metaphor for the shifting temporalisation of historical time that is so important to Koselleck’s ideas of periodization. It is superficially easy to see why Koselleck was attracted to this monumental image. If ever a painting were epochal in meaning and ambition, this is it. Koselleck is by no means alone in positioning this work at an epochal threshold.47 The subject matter itself, of course, is central to this choice. At the heart of the painting is the turning point in the Battle at Issus, Darius routed by Alexander, forced back before the onslaught of the Macedonian king. Alexander chases him, against the familiar left-to-right narrative flow, back into the past.48 It has the clarity of an event that divides with precision one time from another. It is quite clear, however, that Koselleck is not merely interested in the subject matter of the painting nor the immediate context of its commission and audience. The power of a surviving work of art to act upon later audiences is also a key element in unfolding his argument. It allows him to carry a past perspective on the interrelationship between past, present and future forwards into a context where it no longer obtains, or at least no longer carries the same significance. This just so happens to be the world of Schlegel and Napoleon, which is convenient for Koselleck’s definition of the Sattelzeit. In the process of deploying Altdorfer’s painting in this way, however, the image also begins to operate as a kind of metaphor for periodization itself, as it might be seen at any particular point in time. In some senses, this is straightforward. One way of conceptualising the nature of a period 46

Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 15-17. See for example Manfred Wundram, Renaissance (Stuttgart, 2004). 48 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, second edition (London, 2014), p. 24. 47

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is to do so in pictorial terms. A period can be defined as such from without because it possesses, across its temporal extent, certain common characteristics. These characteristics might be understood to constitute a unifying style in the widest sense and it is in this respect that the idea of a portrait of an age or era is possible. In other words, time is spatialized by the historian, as Kubler observed. Indeed, Koselleck’s very idea of the Sattelzeit is itself spatial. It derives, as noted, from the term ‘saddle’ as applied to mountain geography where the saddle is a low point between two peaks, in Koselleck’s sense, a pass. Passage – over the saddle presumably – is imagined as a movement from one spatially unified open plain to another over a boundary of high ground. Altdorfer’s role as a master of the landscape panorama which is on display so clearly in the Battle of Issus is clearly not accidental to this argument even if it remains undeveloped. Perhaps more fundamentally, however, the concept of a painting as the vehicle for this argument about periodization works in relation also to the frame, the surface plane and the viewer. Framing again is straightforward: the common characteristics of an epoch depend as much upon exclusion as inclusion.49 The silent metaphor of the frame simplifies, even hides the complexity of this process (unless of course you are an art historian). In this particular case, where we are dealing with a painting that is repeatedly described as cosmic in scale, the framing concerns the delimitation of a world.50 The organisation of the world within a frame in this respect also concerns its organisation against or through the surface plane of the painting in a manner that would not make sense in the same way for a piece of sculpture.51 For Koselleck this factor is useful in two directions. It implicitly produces a (selective) projection of the past onto the ‘surface’ of the present, where it is offered up to view. At the same time, it constitutes itself, along with the frame, a kind of future horizon for that present as defined by this projected past. In other words the temporal becomes spatial within this process. The manner in which past, present and future essentially coincide within the spatial logic of the image (through the 49

See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Style as Inclusion, Style as Exclusion’, in Caroline Jones and Peter Galison (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York and London, 1998), pp. 27-54. 50 ‘Indeed this is a world, a small world of a few feet; immeasurable, uncountable are the armies which flow against each other from all directions, and the view in the background leads to the infinite. It is the cosmic ocean…’. Schlegel in Janzen, Altdorfer, pp. 143-44. 51 Although a useful thought experiment in relation to the power of the pictorial metaphor might be to substitute sculpture as the metaphor.

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combination of its physical and representational aspects) reinforces Koselleck’s wider argument that in the medieval world past and future are commensurate; it is only in modernity that the relationship between the two is destabilised. In beholding the painting, a sixteenth-century viewer saw not only an image from history, but also a representation of contemporary events and a projection of their future trajectory. Indeed, this final element of the metaphor, the viewer, is crucial in this respect. Although we are in no straightforward sense dealing with the kind of window imagined by Alberti in his construction of perspectival illusion, the organisation of this history within the frame and against the surface plane is done so nevertheless for a viewer who both constitutes its existence – the projected image is seen from somewhere – but who is also to a certain extent, as a subject, constituted by that view. This allows Koselleck to move between Altdorfer, Schlegel, Napoleon and, implicitly, himself and the reader, placing each of us in turn in front of this world view in order to explore its significance from different temporal locations but from the same perspective, particularly in terms of the extent to which these different viewers are absorbed within the image or detached from it.52 In other words, this particular view of the past can be delivered up to different futures. Again, as a metaphor, this conceals some of the complexity that such a thought experiment entails, conceals even the extent to which it is possible. I think there is also one further level to the way in which Koselleck is implicitly making use of painting as a metaphor for his understanding of the transition from medieval, to early modern to modern. As I mentioned earlier, Koselleck was heavily influenced in developing his idea of historical time as the object of study for the historian by the work of Heidegger. I think the same unspoken debt in this case is present here. One of Heidegger’s key attempts at periodization concerns the transition from a Christian world view to a modern world view as an alteration in the relationship between subject and object in which the world is reconceived as a picture.53 To simplify a great deal, knowledge of the object is no 52

Indeed, the modern viewer may be particularly conscious of his or her dislocated ‘perspective’ on the painting because of the novel north-to-south panorama that it presents. This reverses the current cartographic convention of placing north uppermost so that there is a left-to-right, west-to-east correspondence. As a result, the painting initially generates a similar kind of disorientation to that experienced before medieval maps like the Hereford mappa mundi that are centred on Jerusalem and oriented so that east appears at the top. 53 Heidegger, ‘World Picture’, and Jameson, Singular Modernity, pp. 45-57. See note 12 above. For the significance of this as a central characteristic of Western

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longer secured by a higher order represented by divinity. Instead, an object comes to be known only in so far as it is represented to a subject, and that subject only exists in so far as it is the point at which such representations are directed. The metaphor is again pictorial and perspectival. I suspect that Koselleck does not explicitly engage with Heidegger in this essay because he is ultimately seeking to avoid making an argument about individual subjectivity given his emphasis on a collective, societal phenomenology of the past. So in Koselleck’s essay, Altdorfer’s painting, as a way of framing his discussion operates as both a real historical artefact, with a real history of making and reception, and as a metaphor for how we might conceptualise and then distinguish one experience of time in history from another. In several respects, I think he might have pushed his appropriation of the painting to these ends a little further. I would like to suggest two of these possibilities. Firstly, one of Koselleck’s later contentions in relation to the idea of a horizon of expectation is that history might best be understood and written by the defeated, those whose imagined futures, whose horizons of expectation, are never realised because, from their oblique position with respect to the future as it is happens, they are best placed to observe how the past became the present. To stick with the pictorial metaphor, they can see both the painting and its viewer. This last point of course situates Koselleck firmly within his own particular historical world of postwar Germany, particularly in so far as members of the generation of scholars in academia immediately prior to Koselleck had in several significant cases been compromised by their action within a former future imagined by National Socialism.54 In this respect, Altdorfer’s painting is interesting and Koselleck might have turned to another later viewer in order to extract that interest. In the 1950s the artist Oskar Kokoschka wrote an essay, The Eye of Darius, in part about a visit to see Altdorfer’s painting.55 The account of modernity see, for example, Timothy Mitchell, ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), pp. 289-317. 54 One could also note that, in so far as the Third Reich was projected as a new Holy Roman Empire, in imagining its future, the former futures captured in Altdorfer’s image were also once again in play. No doubt, this resonance is deliberate, given that Altdorfer had been promoted in Nazi Germany and that Koselleck mentions in passing Altdorfer’s earlier involvement in the expulsion of the Jews from Regensburg. 55 Oskar Kokoschka, ‘Das Auge des Darius’, Schweizer Monatshefte: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschafts, Kultur, 36.1 (1956-1957), pp. 32-36. A partial translation of the section relating to the Battle at Issus can be found in Janzen, Altdorfer, Appendix B: Oskar Kokoschka: “The Eye of Darius”, pp. 145-48.

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the visit grows out of a discussion of the nature of modernity and the question of epochal differences arises in a number of ways. But what is of interest in this context is what Kokoscha gains out of the encounter. As he casts his eye over the scene and, like many viewers before him, comes to terms with its scale and the world-historical significance of its subject matter, his gaze is slowly but inexorably drawn towards the figure of Darius: ‘It is not easy, even after intensive searching, to find that gem, hardly as big as a pin, which is the face of Darius in the tumult of ten thousand men in flight’.56 But once his eye has found the defeated emperor, Darius speaks to him across the centuries: […] ‘I will not bow down! I cannot perish’. Thus speaks a human look, the look in the eye of Darius, a coloured speck in the middle distance of Altdorfer’s cosmic picture….He knows that he is defeated; and yet, in spite of that, life affirms itself, monotonously and stubbornly…This look of Darius took me unawares, and waked me out of that daydream which others call their everyday life. On a flight through time this look on the face of the vanquished king stopped me and opened my eyes.’57

I can only assume that Koselleck did not know of Kokoschka’s encounter. After all, here is one of his defeated, Darius, and here, through the past of another age, Koskoschka feels that he encounters that former future of Darius’ world. But there is a second element to Kokoschka’s experience. His viewing of the image takes time. It takes time for him to reach Darius, it takes time for him to wade through the confused mass of the battle, through the thick of the event as it is happening. Matteo Burioni has recently written a short essay in this vein: Albrecht Altdorfer’s “Alexanderschlacht”: The First Three Minutes’.58 It focusses especially on the acclimatization of the viewer’s eye to the image and how this relates to the other elements of time, especially the passage of a day within the painting. Others have also noted that this temporal dimension is an important and disturbing factor for any viewer, a factor that extends into the spatial arrangement of the scene as a whole.59 There is no entirely

56

Janzen, Altdorfer, p. 147. Janzen, Altdorfer, p. 148. 58 Matteo Burioni, ‘Albrecht Altdorfers “Alexanderschlachts”: die ersten drei Minuten’, in Sebastian Egenhofer, Inge Hinterwaldner, Christian Spies (eds.), Was ist ein Bild? Antworten in Bildern: Gottfried Boehm zum 70. Geburtstag (Munich and Paderborn, 2012), pp. 265-67. 59 Prater, ‘Monumentale Miniatur’, is particularly good on the various perspectives and spatio-temporal shifts that the beholder must work through during the viewing 57

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settled position within this panorama for the viewer. There is the melee and confusion at the heart of the battle whose detail we are inevitably drawn to and whose chaos we must negotiate in order to disentangle the main actors. There is the safe periphery on whose border we apparently stand, on the brink of the ravine that the ancient sources tell us played a decisive role in Darius’ defeat.60 And there is the impossible soaring perspective as we move into the distance that elevates us to a heavenly view out over the Mediterranean, above Cyprus and towards the distant curvature of the horizon. It has recently been suggested that the ribbons of the unnatural floating tablet are stirred by the breath of God as he moves through heaven and earth, a wonderful image that captures perfectly the juxtaposition of both the eternal and the fleeting moment.61 This is surely the point of this shifting perspective, that it is not simply spatial but also temporal, and the time it takes to work through the shifts is part of the way in which the painting acts on the viewer. At the same time, as we move in and out of these perspectives, the event is temporalized through the written word. First the simple names of the significant actors, Alexander and Darius, among the thousands of nameless soldiers, next the banner texts that sketch their immediate fates and finally the memorial tablet that preserves the event for posterity. By spatializing temporal experience in so many different ways across its composition, the painting offers up a meditation on the significance of time in human affairs. In this respect, the experience of the painting is richer and more complex than it appears in Koselleck’s essay. The difficulty of obtaining a settled viewpoint within this miniature world belies Koselleck’s argument that the painting captures a medieval equilibrium between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation on the eve of early modern dynamism. If anything, this indeterminacy between the chaotic perspective of the present moment and the clarity of the eternal view suggests that such instability is already a subject of the painting. At the same time it confirms the methodological insight of his essay that visual art can offer a sophisticated tool for thinking about time. The painting folds various temporalities together in ways that continue to make it a provocation to further thought about the experience of time in motion at different speeds across more than one level. process. The following observations are indebted to this essay and the shorter piece by Burioni. 60 Burioni observes that this ravine is the ‘absolute protagonist of the painting’ and was more apparent before the image was cropped. Burioni, ‘Albrecht Altdorfers “Alexanderschlachts”’, p. 266. 61 Prater, ‘Monumentale Miniatur’, p. 277.

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Art historians are unlikely to be surprised by this. The interaction between the spatial qualities of visual art and the temporal qualities of verbal art has been a common topos since antiquity. Every ekphrasis or vivid verbal description of a work of art plays productively on the tensions between the two.62 More recently, however, the question of how visual art articulates the experience of time has become a particular concern of art historians dealing with the epochal threshold between the medieval and the early modern world on which Altdorfer’s painting sits. The key figures in this debate are Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel. Across a series of contributions, of individual and joint authorship, they have argued that two fundamental ways of embodying temporality in images come into conflict during the Renaissance as one, typical of the medieval world, cedes some of its prominence to another that will become typical of early modernity.63 The two types, however, are always available. In Wood’s words, ‘the reception of historical artifacts in premodern culture was shaped by a powerful presumption in favour of their mutual substitutability […] Images and buildings were understood not as the products of singular historical performances, but rather as links to an originary reference point.’64 A pure type of such a ‘substitutional’ work might be the Ship of Theseus, the ancient boat-relic repaired and renewed time and again by the Greeks out of new wood and yet still, within this material discontinuity, the same boat through its many identical incarnations.65 The opposite of the substitutional work, in their argument, is the unique and unrepeatable

62

Amongst many studies, see for example Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London, 1992). 63 See Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010); Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, ‘Towards a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, The Art Bulletin, 87.3 (2005), pp.403-15 (published with responses by Charles Dempsey, Michael Cole and Claire Farago and a further reply by the authors); Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, ‘What Counted as an ‘Antiquity’ in the Renaissance?’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), Renaissance Medievalisms (Toronto, 2009), pp. 53-74; and Christopher Wood, Forgery Replica Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago and London, 2008). The latter contains some of the clearest statements of the theory. 64 Wood, Forgery, p. 15. 65 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 8. A good modern alternative is Trigger’s broom from the BBC series Only Fools and Horses (episode: Heroes and Villains). Trigger asserts that he possesses the same broom even though he reveals that it has had seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles. He then ‘performs’ as an authorial figure and produces a photo of himself holding the original broom as if to authenticate this continuity.

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authored work that is tethered to a particular point of origination.66 They term this the performative image and they propose that image use in the European tradition, and perhaps even universally, can be analysed under these two basic categories, substitution and performance.67 For Nagel and Wood, what makes the substitutional object interesting is the fact that its temporal identity is complex. It claims to be older than it looks but not in the sense of being a forgery. The fact of its age, its antiquity, is sustained by its name and its form, but contradicted by the current state of the object itself, the matter out of which it is made: ‘Knowledge that one happened to possess about the particular or local circumstances of an artifact’s fabrication, or its absolute position within a chain [of artifacts], was not allowed to interfere with the referential linkage or the presumption of substitutability.’68 In their words, such objects hesitate: ‘They resist anchoring in time.’69 It also implies that an art historical approach assigning them to a particular period on the basis of their appearance entirely misses the point. It is easier to see what they are getting at by turning to the other category, the performative image. These by contrast are the traditional domain of art historical study. They are generated by an identifiable author at a particular point in time. This authorship is not an irrelevant fact, but central to their meaning. It allows the art historian to fix them to a context that becomes a frame for interpretation. Such works tend to display the visible marks of their precise point of historical origin, both in terms of style (with the individual style nested in the group style, and the group style nested in the period) and in the physical traces of both making and wear and tear that they tend to bear. Given this, such objects cannot be remade in the sense that applies to the substitutional type, because the performative image is neither ritual or collective, but individual and unique. Nagel and Wood use ‘performative’ as a term to emphasize this point of origin, to shift attention firmly towards the ideation of the work in the artist’s mind and its production by their hand. Nagel and Wood’s binary model gets more interesting when they connect these two types explicitly to the question of authority.70 The substitutional image tends to be the vehicle for claims to timeless or abstract authority. Should it be attacked and destroyed, it can simply be remade. It tends to be the focus of communal ritual activity. The 66

Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 13-16. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 16 68 Wood, Forgery, p. 15. 69 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 7. 70 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 7-8 and 14-16 and in multiple ways throughout Wood, Forgery. 67

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performative image is tied to a different conception of authority, one that lies in contingent authorship rooted in the individual, in the moment of performance. Once it is gone, it is gone and with it any authority that it may have communicated. In this respect, it is somewhat like a relic. Both are quite possible to forge, but the unmasking of a forgery leads to the destruction of its power. In fact, the emergence of the forgery as a significant category of visual culture in the Renaissance period is one of the arguments the authors deploy in support of this model.71 It must also be said that Nagel and Wood are not advancing the performative and substitutional modes as stark oppositions.72 Through coexistence of performative and substitional elements and performative and subsitutional readings the art work can refer to multiple temporal moments, extending through the present object to various points in the past or anticipated points of reception in the future, offering up precisely the kind of dynamic orientation between past, present and future that Koselleck sought in Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus. In this respect the argument has at least two interesting implications for periodization in art historical terms. The first the authors state explicitly. To quote them: ‘The power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered nor invented in the Renaissance. What was distinctive about the European Renaissance, so called, was its apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of the artwork, and its recreation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on that instability.’73 In this view, the period lying on the cusp between the medieval and early modern worlds is one in which the relationship between the performative and substitutional models is dynamic and self-reflexive. In Forgery Replica Fiction, Wood argues in more detail that the reproductive technology of prints was the fundamental catalyst in so far as it enabled the wide dissemination of authorial identity while at the same time exposing the concept of replication involved in the substitutional model to full scrutiny.74 There is also a second implication. If traditional art history has evolved in order to cope with the performative model in terms of pursuing at a fundamental level the chronological ordering of works according to increasingly fine judgements of style embedded ultimately in the stylistic evolutions of individual authors, then it is ill-equipped to deal 71

See Wood, Forgery. ‘Substitution and performance are not phases succeeding one another, but rather are two competitive models of creativity that are always in play. One defines and responds to the other.’ Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 16. 73 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 13. 74 Wood, Forgery, pp. 16-17 and 95-107 in particular. 72

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with substitutional works where the fabrication and authorship of any particular instance of the object are irrelevant to its meaning. One of the strengths of this argument is that it reworks, in part, Hans Belting’s distinction between the era of the image and the era of art, without committing to a straightforward division along the medieval-early modern boundary. Belting’s dichotomy itself was, in some respects, a reworking of Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction between cult value and exhibition value.75 In other words, substitutional object, image, and cult value, line up against performative object, art and exhibition value. It is hardly fair to suggest that Nagel and Wood’s book is a substitutional object in its own right.76 Rather, the partial continuity with Belting is a strength, but even they feel compelled at one point, lest there be any confusion, to make following denial: ‘We are not proposing simply that a substitutional model of production gives way, over the course of the fifteenth century, to an authorial model. Such an argument would reproduce a traditional account of Renaissance art as an emancipation of the artist from mindless submission to custom, an account sketched out already by the sixteenth-century historian Giorgio Vasari…’.77

Nagel and Wood can make this claim because, as they see it, the performative model can never exist without the substitutional model.78 In fact, the novelty, the originality, the significance of authorial performance can only be recognised against the background of the shared expectations and values that underpin the logic of substitution. One of the virtues of the approach adopted by both authors is a willingness to pursue this big picture through a wealth of case studies. While it might be quite reasonable to entertain reservations about the overarching theory, which like all big picture ideas before it will inevitably fall short of its ambitions, I think it is still important to take these case studies seriously. It is at the level of these particular examples that explanatory power of the model becomes clear, and one can stand in for all in the present context: Giotto’s memorial from the Cathedral in Florence (fig. 2). The memorial to Giotto goes right to the heart of the problem of substitution, performance, authorship and authority. It consists of an 75

For this see Hamburger, ‘Belting’, p.208. Hamburger, ‘Belting’, pp. 210-11. 77 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 16. 78 See also Wood, Forgery, p. 16: ‘The dialectical interplay between the handmade and the mechanically made image is the basic though usually disguised plotstructure of European art.’ 76

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epigram composed by Angelo Poliziano and a relief tondo sculpted by Benedetto da Maiano.79 The tondo contains a portrait of Giotto at work. The artist’s hand hovers in the process of executing the final touch. This looks at first like a perfect representation of the performative author, the artist alone, not the craftsman in his workshop. But there is almost certainly more at stake here because of Giotto’s status, already secure at this date, as the ideal, original artist-author of the Florentine tradition and that of course makes this a significant image for any art historical attempt to periodise using a model of the Renaissance built on the back of the central Italian experience. Indeed, periodization is built in to the epigram in its opening lines ‘I am he through whom painting, dead, returned to life’. The topos of rebirth is already in place. The monument reinforces Giotto as a performative author in a number of emphatic ways. The epigram is written as if spoken by the artist, heightening the sense of the declarative creative act being performed here and now for the viewer through hand and voice. The opening words of the epigram imitate those of Virgil in versions of the Iliad circulating in this period, versions that prefaced the poem with several spurious lines in which the Roman author declares his authorship - ‘Ille ego sum’ - ‘I am he’. The image on which Giotto is working is clearly a face of Christ, the Veronica, a miraculous image made by the impress of Jesus’s face. On the one hand, in a performative sense, this would suggest that Giotto’s art is being modelled on divine authorship. But this can cut in several directions. Seen from a substitutive perspective, Giotto, the great author, is at work not on an image of his own invention but remaking an established type. Then again, this type is not straightforwardly substitutive because the Veronica itself is strictly speaking a contact relic and that switches the interpretation back towards Giotto’s works as relics of his unique performance. A final layer of complexity is added to the mix by the technique. Giotto is shown working not on a fresco but on a mosaic, fingers poised to insert the final tessera. Mosaic is a technique that comes close to being an ideal form of substitution, an almost anti-authorial medium. Like the planks of the Ship of Theseus, the individual tesserae can be endlessly renewed without the act of renewal interrupting the form or identity of the image. Were Giotto shown holding a brush, the story

79 This discussion of this example is based on Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 123-33 and Alexander Nagel, ‘Authorship and Image-Making in the Monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral’, RES, 53/54 (2008), pp. 143-51. See also the discussion in Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano: A Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance (Turnhout, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 146-50.

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would be all about the artist’s unique touch, the final peformative touch by this particular hand making all the difference. Wood and Nagel make good use of this deceptively simple work, demonstrating just how overdetermined it is once viewed according to their model. In fact, it becomes nothing less than a commentary on substitution and performance as the viewer is led round in circles and encouraged to reflect on the nature of both. As a one off case, there could hardly be a better demonstration of their contention that what was ‘distinctive about the European Renaissance […] was its apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of the artwork, and its re-creation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on that instability.’80 Elsewhere Nagel has understandably described this as ‘a self-reflexive art-historical monument.’81 With that in mind I think the interpretation could be pushed further still in relation to both the epigram and the image. The choice of mosaic at this particular moment in this particular context has significance. Earlier analysis of the monument made a good case for linking the presence of mosaic in the tondo and the idea of revival expressed in the opening lines of the epigram to Lorenzo de’Medici’s active programme of reviving mosaic technique, a technique understood at this point as a lost art of antiquity. Nagel and Wood pursue this idea into an analysis of the contemporary popularity of Byzantine micromosaics, which furnishes them with another temporal loop. In fact, as they also observe, Giotto’s most famous work in the fifteenth century was a mosaic, the Navicella in St Peter’s at Rome which included a deliberately iconic portrayal of Christ. In Gerhard Wolf’s view a celebration of a Florentine artist’s activity in Rome would be an appropriate testament to an important strand in Lorenzo’s cultural diplomacy with the papacy that saw a number of the city’s painters recommended for projects in the Holy City.82 But I think that mosaic also had another topical if less public significance in this case that has not previously been linked to this ‘self-reflexive’ work. In 1489 at precisely the point when the monument was being planned, Poliziano, the author of the epigram, introduced the metaphor of mosaic into the preface of his Miscellanea as a way of justifying and advertising his distinctive and controversial habits of literary composition, an approach that mixed an eclectic range of source materials drawn from the full range of Latin and

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Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 13. Nagel, ‘Authorship’, p.143. 82 Gerhard Wolf, ‘Review of The Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’, The Art Bulletin, 94.1 (2012), pp. 135-41. 81

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vernacular literature in a voice of great stylistic variety.83 In his own words it is ‘a mosaic-like style, dotted, as it were, with different coloured fragments’.84 His supporters and detractors immediately took up the metaphor.85 The idea of a mosaic style was classical in origin, but Poliziano reversed the earlier habit of using it as a negative critical description and deployed it in a positive way to describe his own work. From this point of view, the monument to Giotto can also be understood as an opportunity for Poliziano’s own attempts to assert his status as a performative author through a substitutional medium. Indeed, the way in which the model of performance and substitution opens up a space for this additional layer of interpretation helps to confirm its explanatory power for the period in question. Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus and the Monument to Giotto are no doubt exceptional works in so far as they can accommodate such reflection on the nature of time and, through competing temporal models, the nature of authority. The Battle of Alexander at Issus can sustain Koselleck’s ruminations on periodization and act as a methodological tool in the process because, as Nagel and Wood might argue, a heightened interest in time is built into works produced on the threshold between the medieval and the early modern periods. Not all visual material at this point in history will provide such fertile ground for this sort of reflection. The pair of works discussed here, and others analysed by Nagel and Wood, are exemplary in this respect. One question is whether there are exemplary works of this type in all periods and all places, or whether Nagel and Wood are right to privilege once more the Renaissance as the site of such a productive tension between the models of substitution and performance. A second question is whether this binary model exhausts the possible configurations of the relationship between time and the image. The answers to both questions will require collaborative and comparative work 83

Martin McLaughlin, ‘Poliziano’s Stanze per la giostra: Postmodern Poetics in a Proto-Renaissance Poem’, in Jane Everson and Diego Zancani (eds.), Italy in Crisis: 1494 (Oxford, 2000), p. 144. 84 ‘vermiculata interim dictio, et tessellis pluricoloribus variegata’. Cited in McLaughlin, ‘Poliziano’, p. 144. 85 Giorgio Merula: ‘Likewise, I cannot understand why you defend or want to inflict on us your ‘mosaic-like style’ [‘vermiculatam dictionem’], except that you would have given all men some precious information if you had explained what ‘mosaic-like’ [‘vemiculatam’] means when it is used, I presume, by writers on architecture.’ Francesco Pucci: ‘its style which plays with varied and almost mosaic-like [‘vermiculato’] intertextual allusions, cultivating all the most elegant Latin words, yet always displaying an authentic and even pure Latinity.’ Both quoted in McLaughlin, ‘Poliziano’, p. 144.

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across cultures and periods. Good practice has already been modelled here by Nagel (a scholar of the Italian tradition) and Wood (a scholar of the German tradition). What is clear, however, from Koselleck’s work is that images need not only be considered objects of analysis, but can be deployed as analytical tools in their own right. It could be argued that the spatialization of time in the image may rob the phenomenon of its very essence, but at the same time it lays it out before the eye for analysis so that the historian can crawl at leisure over its many surfaces.

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Fig. 1. Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1528-29, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

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Fig. 2. Benedetto da Maiano and Angelo Poliziano, Monument to Giotto, marble, 1489-90, Duomo, Florence



CHAPTER ELEVEN “RENAISSANCE” AND “REFORMATION” ELIDED: THE DEFICIENCIES OF “EARLY MODERN” MUSICOLOGY1 DAVID ALLINSON

I am delighted to have the chance to participate with historians and art historians in this collection. As the current conductor of the Renaissance Singers of London, and as an editor, historian and performer of ‘early music’, I am preoccupied with the need to connect with audiences in the present while doing honour to the substance and spirit of the sacred and secular vocal music that survives from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (Live performance brings an imperative immediacy to the problems inherent in this mediation!) What may be surprising to many historians is that, as a musicologist, the term ‘early modern’ had entered my consciousness only peripherally. Historians of music rarely use this term to discuss the repertoires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and if they do, it tends to be calculatingly done to signal a distance from mainstream perspectives). I am not afraid to confess that I had to visit the reference library to reassure myself that I knew what ‘early modern’ might denote, and the process has, rightly, caused me to reflect on why musicology (and the record industry) continues overwhelmingly to prefer the labels ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’; what values – be they explicit or unexamined – are invested in such a paradigm of history, and might not the alternative ‘early modern’ serve us equally well, or better?

 1

I wish to record my thanks to Dr Emma Hornby, Reader in Music at Bristol University, for the fruitful conversations that helped me in the preparation of this essay.



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It is not as if musicology’s prevailing periodization is its own: as a late-flowering and somewhat self-conscious discipline, its founding fathers (mostly nineteenth-century and German) hurriedly borrowed the garb of the sister arts – so that, for decades, we hobbled in step with cultural historians working on art history, architecture, philology and literature, affecting not to notice that the labels and methods we were using mapped inadequately onto our materials. In the face of the unsettling properties of music – with its propensity to move the hearer, its non-semantic materials and signs and symbols not generally tied to representations of material reality – how dreadful it might be if someone (a man, inevitably) working on the substance might be drawn to express a subjective response instead of a dryly factual or analytical one. In its race to the Academy, musicology – born in a context which emphasised the ineffable, transcendent power of ‘absolute music’ but which dreaded the feminising or homosexual implications of writing about music as emotion – determined early on that it would be easier to quash this unexamined conflict by erecting a linguistic and methodological firewall between the substance of study and the professionals who sought to critique it. Thus set in positivistic mode, musicology spurned the speculative and concerned itself, above all, with the verifiable – on the one hand, historians and editors working with surviving documents to produce leather-bound complete works of great composers and narrative histories relating their achievements; on the other, theorists and analysts deploying dry terminology and manipulating notational symbols with all the studied detachment of a scientist reporting on the dissection of an unusual specimen. I imagine it will astonish most non-musicologists to learn that the examination of music as sound, performed and heard by people in particular contexts, was not even a sub-discipline of musicology until the discipline was gripped by convulsions during the 1980s that gave birth to the ‘New Musicology’. In the last thirty years or so musicology has been transformed, as the social consciousness of the 1960s generation belatedly infused our discipline with a sense of remorse for its Anglo-Saxon, patriarchal, heterosexual, elitist biases – launching myriad missions to embrace excluded ethnicities, genders, classes and sexualities. As part of the selfexamination, the formalism of our analysis and the positivism of our history have been exposed and interrogated, and histories of music have been (re)populated with performers and listeners – people making music and people hearing it, within re-envisioned soundscapes. Yet none of this has, so far, shifted our reliance on the shorthand orientation afforded by periodization. Nor has there been, to my



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knowledge, serious consideration of using the term ‘early modern’ as an alternative when describing music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – in part, perhaps, because ‘New’ musicologists no longer aspire to be in step with historians of culture and society but tend to look instead to the social sciences for applicable methodologies and ideologies. At the same time, traditionalists remain mostly uninterested in critiquing the basis of their assumptions: where the study of Tudor music and the English Reformation is concerned, for example, scholars have cleaved to the cosy archive while the storm of the ‘New Musicology’ has raged outside, in the hope that, like all fashions, it will pass. So ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’ retain a widespread, if devalued, currency within academia as musical periods – and among musicians, broadcasters and concert-goers – because they are a handy shorthand for all sorts of musical and aesthetic characteristics. Historians of art, architecture or literature may be startled to learn just how late runs the ‘medieval’ period in music. In continental Europe the musical ‘Renaissance’ begins nebulously in the mid fifteenth century; in England it has generally been conflated with the mid sixteenth-century Reformation. 2 For callow musicology the hand-me-down narrative has always caused some discomfort: why is the Renaissance in music so late, compared with the sister arts? Where and when, exactly, does the Renaissance begin? What signifies ‘Renaissance’ music (and what differentiates it from the ‘Medieval’)? With northern Italy the designated crucible of experimentation, where are all the native Italian composers before the mid sixteenth century? Rather than contemplate the disquieting recent notion that ‘Renaissances’ in art and culture might be multivalent –i.e.: occurring in different European centres at different times and with diverse outcomes – musicology has generally preferred to stick tenaciously to the grand narrative of a north Italian Renaissance. In doing so it confronts a problem: for while Italy produced an embarrassment of native talent in literature, architecture, painting and sculpture, the leading lights of music’s Renaissance in Italy came from the drizzle-laden Franco-Flemish flatlands (in current terms: Belgium, the southern part of the Netherlands and the north west corner of France): this was a northern, even ‘Gothic’, Renaissance, at least for the first generation or two. As Reinhard Strohm puts it,

 2

See, for example, F. Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London: Routledge, 1958), which covers English sacred music into the early 16th century and glances, in a closing aside, towards Protestant music.



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These Oltremontani brought their contrapuntal idiom – as dense and closely-worked as rye bread – and leavened it with humanistic ideas and the sunny harmonic directness of Italian secular genres such as the frottola. While their sacred music remained properly sober, the style of the mass and motet transforming slowly over decades, when working in secular genres these same composers frequently betrayed humanistic tendencies, creating expressive and experimental settings of poetry – most importantly, in the new genre of the madrigal. It seems easier to agree where the end of the Renaissance period might be drawn, because a new aesthetic coalesces in northern Italy out of a ferment of humanistic ideas, shifting patronage and new technologies – and was explicitly articulated by contemporary composers and theorists.4 What musicologists call ‘the Baroque’ begins in the years around 1600, but precursors of the new style and aesthetic can be discerened in music of the 1570s, and earlier. Here too, of course, we dissemble to make it seem that there is unanimity, in terms of musical and aesthetic change, for the whole of Europe. Our Italo-centric timeline doesn’t begin to address the ways in which musical styles and genres developed in other countries – such as the ripe, conservative style of sacred polyphony that persisted in ‘peripheral’ Catholic Iberia well into the seventeenth century (and in Spanish Latin America into the eighteenth), or the ways in which the Reformation fractured and remade the music of northern Protestant countries. But it is in locating the start of the Renaissance that musicology runs into real trouble, because processes of stylistic, structural and aesthetic change in music are so gradual. The somewhat forced attempts to locate it in music of the mid fifteenth century only serve to reveal how invested we are in upholding the paradigm. 5 We still live with the influence of

 3

R. Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380-1500 (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1993) Most famously, in the Monteverdi-Artusi controversy, in which Monteverdi’s brother articulated the purposes of the old and new styles – the prima pratica (style of Palestrina) and seconda pratica, the more freely dissonant modern style. 5 See the discussions about the relationship between Brunelleschi’s dome and Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores, which was commissioned for the opening of Florence cathedral in 1436. See Charles Warren (Musical Quarterly 59, 1973, pp.92-105), partially refuted by Craig Wright (Journal of the American Musicological Society 47, 1994, pp.395-441), with a new interpretation by Marvin Trachtenberg (Renaissance Quarterly 54, 2001, pp.740-775) 4



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Burckhardt (1860) on pioneering music historians, who then struggled to make the known facts fit.6 August Ambros, writing in 1868, conceived the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a unified ‘period’; Hugo Riemann wanted the ‘early Renaissance’ to run 1300-1500. Edward Dent saw the Renaissance as marked by the rise of monody, towards 1600. Scholars such as Egon Wellesz (1922) pushed the beginning of the Baroque back to 1540.7 Lewis Lockwood, in the New Grove, diplomatically summarizes where all this contention has brought us: It now seems to be agreed that in music a period marked by substantial unity of outlook and language came into being in the second half of the fifteenth century and that its principles were not definitively displaced until about 1625. It is also agreed that this period can be called the ‘Renaissance’, yet often for no better reason than that it falls within the later phases of the Renaissance in the broad sense; this neutral approach, which is no more than an assertion of chronological coincidence, is tacitly adopted by Reese in his Music in the Renaissance (1954).8

It is, of course, inevitable that music was less influenced by classical Greek and Roman models than, say, sculpture or architecture, since there were no direct models for composers to imitate. What composers did have were Plato and Aristotle’s compelling statements about the ethical power of music. The force of these ideas led thus not to antiquarianism (or slavish imitation) but to experimentation and innovation. Music theorists from the later fifteenth century onwards echo the fashionable trope of artistic and literary commentators, declaring a ‘new art’ – so in the mid fifteenth century, Tinctoris declared that nothing composed more than about forty years ago was worth hearing. Reflecting the intellectual milieu of Naples, he cited Plato on the power of music. A century later, Italian music theorists writing in the 1550s are fully committed to the idea of music as a new art, channeling classical power. But the sounds – and the

 6

Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) Here I am summarizing the survey provided by L. Lockwood, ‘Renaissance’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press)

(accessed 3 January 2015). The interested reader new to the discipline of musicology and its foibles is urged to read N. Cook, Music: A very short introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2000); for the more intrepid, Alastair Williams, Constructing musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) is very helpful. 8 L. Lockwood, ‘Renaissance’, Grove Music Online 7



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compositional techniques used to achieve them – reflect above all, an organic continuity with what came before. My sense is that musicology tends to use its historical labels not in a rigorously ideological sense but rather in a fuzzily connotative spirit. Thus, by ‘Renaissance’ we don’t mean that a classical style or aesthetic was reborn in the mid fifteenth century (if such a thing had even been retrievable – the few fragments of ancient Greek and Roman notation were not known and remain pretty much illegible today), or that music at that time fell under the sway of humanistic ideas (after all, fourteenth-century ‘late Medieval’ composers such as Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut were educated humanists). Instead, in deploying the term Renaissance we invoke or imply a whole set of stylistic and aesthetic signifiers: most importantly, an increasingly sensitive and expressive attitude towards text-setting, so that musical and textual syntax progressively align in order to amplify poetic meaning. We see this aesthetic change most startlingly in the music of Josquin des Prez (d.1521). In his music, older (‘medieval’) structural techniques – embedded ratios and complex canons, long-note cantus firmus scaffolds – are allied with new compositional procedures: pervasive imitation (where musical texture is woven out of melodic fragments that are passed between voices), goal-directed harmony (the bassline below the tenor completing the chords) and moments of clarifying homophony. With Josquin, more than in the music of his immediate predecessors, there is a sudden clarity and feeling in the text-setting, achieved primarily because musical abstraction is disciplined by the structure and syntax of the text. The organizing device of imitation, in particular, allowed composers to manipulate musical parameters (such as degree of melisma or homophony, tessitura and harmonic rhythm) in a much more mercurial and telling manner than had been possible when they were yoked to an overarching (and inaudible) mathematical scheme. This revolutionary expressive power may be likened to the ways in which artists had earlier begun to exploit perspective to make their paintings extend into the real world, and to the sudden recognizable ‘humanness’ of figures in altarpieces and freschi – such as in the Brancacci chapel – where previously there had been representative icons and pictorial archetypes. This is music that breathes with the hearer. Thus, the ‘Renaissance’ in music is a style-critical construct – a convenient shorthand frequently deployed to refer to a period of time but in the next moment standing for a style or an aesthetic. It is a conglomeration of style and ideology. As such, it reflects perfectly musicology’s unreconstructed basis in which, as I have said, music was



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treated principally as an object – an autonomous, self-contained structure. These inherited models – which the New Musicology has undermined but not yet supplanted – mean that we continue to see music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the lens of the 19th century – as an infinitely expressive, ‘pure music’ not linked to petty textual, syntactical or social concerns. This ‘aesthetic of the transcendent’ continues to play out in full force in recordings and concerts of sixteenth-century polyphony, with masses and motets presented to audiences as escapist objects of contemplation, the interweaving voices unsullied by engagement with earthly impediments such as instruments, liturgy or worshippers – or indeed, any trace of the social context or function of the music. Just as the symphony hall concert model has been grafted onto this repertoire, historians and critics have continued to utilise the established ‘great composers and their masterworks’ paradigm, writing histories of style, with individual works judged comparatively within established musico-historical constructs such as periods, schools, national, regional and individual styles. Of course, many of the German-speaking founding fathers of musicology were motivated, consciously or not, by patriotic intentions – they sought the cultural roots of their emerging nation. Similar, but less explicitly articulated, values have often been at play in my own area of special interest, Tudor music – not least in buttressing notions of English exceptionalism, a sense of a unique national spirit and identity. English composers in the sixteenth century were, of course, far removed from the epicentre of our traditional Renaissance narrative-construct, and the destruction of musical sources wrought during the Reformation and Civil War periods is so comprehensive that it is hard to recapture with any certainty either a full picture of pre-Elizabethan repertoire, or of the library collections on which composers might have drawn for inspiration (we have inventories that grieve the heart: litanies of lost music by great native composers, and long-gone volumes of music by named continental composers).9

 9

See, for example, the ‘Extract from a King’s College Inventory (1529), which mentions masses by Cornysh, of which nothing survives, reprinted in F. Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London: Routledge, 1958); also J. Milsom’s work in reconstructing the contents of the Nonsuch library – showing how Flemish, French and Italian music may have reached the hands of Tudor composers in J. Milsom, ‘The Nonsuch Music library’, in C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (eds.), Sundry sorts of music books: essays on the British Library collections (London: The British Library, 1993), 146-82.



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From a historiographical perspective it is fascinating to discern how the great psychological trauma of the Reformation has played out in the ways we talk about English music composed before and after the ‘watershed’ period. On the one hand, the style and aesthetic of early Tudor polyphony written to serve and reflect a range of Catholic devotional beliefs and behaviours – and here I’m thinking of Eton Choirbook antiphons and mass settings by composers such as Ludford, Taverner and Sheppard – has traditionally been characterised as vigorous, insular and conservative in style. Certainly it is true that a lot of ‘medievalisms’ persist into sixteenth-century English music, such as cantus firmus constructions and number symbolism, garlanded with yards of silken melisma – along with a special predilection for consonance (technically ‘imperfect consonances’, viz: thirds and sixths) and an avoidance of ostentatious dissonance. These qualities – of lyricism, a disdain for dramatic ostentation and a resistance to continental fashion – might all be considered characteristic elements of our ‘island nation’ identity. But then so might the balancing sense of brokenness, of nostalgia for something precious that has been lost or fractured, evoked by the picturesque abbey ruins dotted around the country and the vandalised statuary in every English cathedral. In the cultural revolution of the Reformation music suffered grievously – not just in terms of choirbooks flung into the flames and antiphoners turned into greengrocers’ wrapping paper, but also in terms of vanished musical institutions and truncated careers. Yet here, historians traditionally tell us, begins the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth: during that window of peace under the Religious Settlement composers such as Thomas Tallis (and, more ambivalently, William Byrd) laid the foundation of a National Music, untainted by Popery, in new Anglican genres including the Anthem and the vernacular Service.10 It is fascinating to see which sacred music from the sixteenth century has been lauded, promoted and performed and which has languished unpublished, unheard and dismissed in the intervening centuries. Tallis was the outstanding talent of the century, and since his career spanned the Reformation period he cultivated pretty much every genre (vocal, instrumental, Catholic and Protestant), writing sharply different music under successive monarchs As so often, historical and critical writing sheds greatest light on the preoccupations and prejudices of the commentator, and Sue Cole has shown that Tallis’s reception history has

 10

The prefaces of such editions, with titles such as the English Madrigal School (thirty-six volumes edited by E.H. Fellowes, an Anglican clergyman, published between 1913 and 1923), burn with patriotic pride.



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been dynamically shaped by sectarian and nationalistic values, almost to the extent that his reputation has reversed, from hero of the nascent Anglican church to stand as one of the last native masters of Latin-texted music.11 Before Catholic emancipation the Latin-texted music of Tallis was dismissed as barbarous – as if the taint of medieval, scholastic and Catholic values rendered foreign or un-English. This antipathy set it on the far side of the watershed, as ‘other’, beyond our sympathy, and this faintly dismissive attitude converged in an unfortunate way with the formalism of twentieth-century musicology to produce dry, descriptive judgements such as this, by Paul Doe, here describing the early votive antiphon style of Tallis: The enormous phrase-spans, instead of driving purposefully through to the cadence as Taverner liked them to do, usually relax before they reach it. This is not a fault, for Tallis is deliberately creating a static, contemplative structure. The large antiphon was a supremely impersonal musical speech, as spacious and remote as the lofty vaulted chapels that gave it birth.12

The analogy with architecture is a classic trope of positivistic musicology, freezing the music into ‘objective’ mode, safely muted so that its structure can be controlled and analysed without aesthetic distraction. While a valid aesthetic parallel is to be made with contemporary buildings and their furnishings, there is no sense here of engaging with the music as a product of its material, intellectual or devotional context. Only a paragraph earlier, Doe lists five main stylistic developments in English music in the first half of the sixteenth century, all of which concern the manipulation of musical devices such as repetition, sequence, imitation, dissonance. The Whig view of history held sway for a long time in Tudor musicology (as ever, we lagged behind historians, paying insufficient attention to their debates). Tallis’s English-texted anthems and services for the Anglican church chimed deeply with a narrative of a renewed artistic energy at the founding of a modern national identity. Such nationalistic attitudes are given full rein in the Histories of Charles Burney and Sir John Hawkins but echoes continued throughout the twentieth century.13

 11

S. Cole, Thomas Tallis and his music in Victorian England (Boydell, Woodbridge: 2008) 12 P. Doe, Tallis [Oxford Studies of Composers, vol.4] (London: OUP, 1968) 13 C. Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1776-89); ed. F. Mercer (London, 1935/R) and J. Hawkins: A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776)



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It is astonishing to discover, then, that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Tallis’s reputation rested on a handful of pieces, some of which were fakes, penned by Henry Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. To modern ears the small selection of pieces seem achingly drab and functional in comparison with the richness of the longer, more complex Latin-texted pieces. Of course, the music has not changed; we have. The greatest shift in Tallis’s reputation came at the end of the nineteenth century, when a group of predominantly Catholic musicians began to revive the Latin-texted music. For men such as Richard Terry, first musical director of Westminster Catholic cathedral, the Reformation was the end, not the start, of a Golden Age of English music. Tallis stood as one of the last Catholic composers who was forced, mid-career, to struggle with the restrictions of Protestant doctrine, producing anthems and service settings that seemed drastically impoverished in comparison with his Latin music. In the early twentieth century, as Tallis’s longdismissed Latin-texted music began to be published in modern editions and performed, the pedestal on which he had been placed by the Anglican establishment, began to erode. Throught the twentieth century, Tallis’s reputation came to rest instead primarily on his Latin-texted music, which is widely sung in both Protestant and Catholic services. While he is no longer hostage to sectarian dispute in England, musicology has not properly begun to untangle and interrogate the assumptions around the Tallis’s substantial output: what is ‘English’ about his music? Is there any discernible continental influence? What is ‘conservative’ and what is ‘progressive’? There is a consensus that his younger pupil and friend, William Byrd is securely a ‘Renaissance’ composer – a humanist, whose motets are the equal of those by continental masters like Lassus and Palestrina – but Tallis’s reputation seems to have one foot in the medieval: he is Renaissance composer by dint of temporal circumstances, not outlook.14 My suspicion is that Byrd appeals strongly to modern sensibilities: he was a recusant, a rebel, and his life is well documented. Knowing a great deal about him, it is possible to read some of his music autobiographically or even as testimony on behalf of his community’s sufferings. Tallis, on the other hand, is a biographical blank: ‘Tallis is to us today primarily a body of music. We know almost

 14

This tacit judgment is confirmed by a glance at an important collection of sympathetic, contextualised ‘readings’ of fifteenth and sixteenth century motets, fine products of New Musicological thinking: Byrd’s music is the subject of two chapters; no English composers before him are included (D. Pesce, ed., Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, (Oxford: OUP, 1997).



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nothing about his life, even less about his personality, outlook and beliefs; as a human figure he lies essentially beyond our imagination’.15 Of course, that void may be precisely the reason that generations of Englishmen were able to recruit him so effectively to their sectarian causes and their mythmaking. If the periodization of English music in the Tudor period is awkward, then it is almost equally disquieting to consider that the Italian composer who represents the acme of the high Renaissance style, Palestrina, offers us an example of a figure whose music can barely be apprehended through the hubbub thrown up by his adherents and opponents in succeeding centuries – from Catholic clergy debating the reform of sacred music at and after the Council of Trent to the pedagogues who quoted him selectively to inflict an inflexible theory of species counterpoint on schoolboys from the seventeenth century onwards, and on to the adherents of the nineteenth-century Caecilian Movement, which raised the man and his music up as the epitome of purity. In fact, Palestrina’s music was not typical of the period – and that which doesn’t conform to the image (i.e.: most of it: daring double-choir masses, books of madrigals, and so on) is disregarded, unpublished and unperformed. The anti-Romantic Caecilian movement did most damage, perhaps, in fictionalizing the purity of the sound of sixteenth-century Catholic music: it was performed strictly a cappella (that is: with voices only) only in the two choirs of the Papal Chapel, the Cappella Sistina and Cappella Giulia. The music of the Vatican was always atypical. Palestrina as performed there was not the sound of the Renaissance, even in the heart of Italy, but the nineteenth century turned him into what we continue to wish Renaissance music to be. That Baroque music was a simple continuation of the ‘Renaissance’ norm we would recognize easily if we more often heard Palestrina with instrumental doubling and vocal ornamentation. The a cappella purity of Renaissance polyphony – a key modern signifier of the period’s distinctiveness – is an exaggerated creation of nineteenth century Romanticism, transmitted to the world since the mid-twentieth century in recordings made by singers schooled in the Anglican chapels of Oxbridge. The truth is, we desire our Palestrina to embody purity, otherness and transcendence. The Caecilian movement, which has so shaped the contemporary aesthetic of the performance of sixteenth-century vocal polyphony – was partly a reaction to Enlightenment ideas … and surely it



15 J. Milsom, English Polyphonic Style in Transition: A Study of the Sacred Music of Thomas Tallis (diss., U. of Oxford, 1983), 1



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is those which most define the move in other disciplines to a sustainable ‘early modern’ epoch? So we use Renaissance to imply a whole set of stylistic and aesthetic parameters – many of them contradictory, and having their origins in nineteenth century historiography and aesthetics – just as historians use ‘early modern’ to badge themselves as a member of a community with a particular outlook and set of values. Without acknowledging it, we are using the term Renaissance flexibly to connote a period, style and aesthetic, without looking too hard at the deficiencies of that shorthand. If ‘early modern’ is really a code for ‘the beginning of us’ (rather than ‘them’), then perhaps the beginning of what musicologist call the Baroque (c.1600) is our moment of synchronization with history’s ‘early modern’. It is a watershed point, at which several humanist-inspired developments converge, in terms of new secular genres like opera; the dramatic, even psychological, power of monody and madrigal; new methods of organizing tonality and texture; and new kinds of social patronage. It is the historical point when many musicologists might locate the shift to ‘our culture’, when music achieves a relatable, emotionally-intense attitude to the distillation of human experience. Given the loose and sometimes dubious connotations of ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’, might musicology be able to draw upon the term ‘early modern’? I’m not so sure: if ‘early modern’ historians see themselves as rooted in secular Enlightenment values of science and protocapitalism over those of religion and feudalism, then music – particularly art music, which is necessarily an elite, artisan commodity – might be said to prop up precisely the social, political and religious institutions antithetical to modernity for a long time after 1600. In fact, in the modern age, that is what many continue to value most about music: it is an escape from the modern. The ‘otherness’ is an attraction, tainting the music with exoticism, antiquarianism and the thrill of escape. Musicology increasingly (and rightly) hankers after the rich rewards of interdisciplinary discourse but its terminology, and chronological paradigm, makes this awkward. Therefore, preliminary exploration of the deficiencies of our stubbornly persisting habits of periodization – and consideration of whether borrowing just one more term from a parallel discipline might help – may have a consciousness-raising value. It is clear that musicology has always been guilty of ‘forcing’ its labels to encompass styles and ideologies as well as time periods. However tempting it might be to use the term ‘early modern’ for its additional connotations, it seems to me that it is as ideologically loaded as the labels we already employ, without the benefit of being allied temporally to



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changes that swept belatedly through musical styles and genres. Yet we should consider the possibility that it might be useful: framing the music of the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries as ‘early modern’ might usefully unsettle our perspective, allowing us to see composers and works through less familiar economic, social and political lenses – further undermining our traditional hermetic engagement with music’s aesthetic power and forcing us to consider more deeply the dynamic human context in which the music we love was created and consumed.



CONTRIBUTORS

David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University. David Allinson is Director of Music at Canterbury Christ Church University. Fernando Cervantes is Reader in History at Bristol University. Peter Dent is Lecturer in History of Art at Bristol University. Steven G. Ellis is Professor of History and Head of the School of Humanities at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Poul Holm is Professor of Environmental History and Director of the Irish Structured PhD Programme in Digital Arts and Humanities at Trinity College, Dublin. Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at Bristol University. Evan T. Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at Bristol University. Pamela King is Professor of English Language at Glasgow University. Martial Staub is Professor of Medieval History at Sheffield University