Mobs : An Interdisciplinary Inquiry [1 ed.] 9789004216822, 9789004212459

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Mobs

Presenting the Past Central Issues in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Across the Disciplines General Editor

Nancy van Deusen

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/pthp

Mobs An Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Edited by

Nancy van Deusen Leonard Michael Koff

LEIDEN • BOSTON LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

Cover illustration: Sano di Pietro (1406–1481), San Bernadino Preaching in the Piazza del Campo. Siena, Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana. © 2010. Photo Opera Metropolitana Siena/Scala, Florence. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobs : an interdisciplinary inquiry / edited by Nancy van Deusen, Leonard Michael Koff.    p. cm. -- (Presenting the past, ISSN 1875-2799 ; v. 3)   Includes index.   ISBN 978-90-04-21245-9 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mobs--History. 2. Mobs--Europe--History. I. Van Deusen, Nancy (Nancy Elizabeth) II. Koff, Leonard Michael.   HM871.M63 2012  302.33--dc23 2011034916

ISSN 1875 - 2799 ISBN 978 9004 21245 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 9004 21682 2 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS List of Contributors���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� vii List of Illustrations������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ix Introduction: Mobs����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Canetti’s “Biology” of the Crowd: Contexts and Instances������������������ 9 Leonard Michael Koff The Rage of Heraclitus: Reflections on the Difficult Relationship between the Philosopher and the Masses������������������ 41 Ben Schomakers Armies as Mobs in the Early Middle Ages�������������������������������������������� 63 Bernard S. Bachrach Assembled in the Presence of God: Majestic Perseverance and the Cantus Coronatus�����������������������������������������������������������������79 Nancy van Deusen Nationes and Other Bonding Groups at Late Medieval Central European Universities������������������������������������������������������������������������� 95 Paul W. Knoll Picturing and Promoting New Identities: The Medieval University at Paris and its “Nations”������������������������������������������������ 117 Charlotte Bauer Communities, Crowd-Theory, and Mob-Theory in Late-Fourteenth Century English History Writing and Poetry���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 141 Andrew Galloway Boccaccio’s Mobs: Religious Devotion, Xenophobia, and Fama in Three Decameron Novelle�������������������������������������������������165 Robert W. Hanning

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The Way Many Aspired to the Eloquence of the Few: The Neo-Latin Colloquium��������������������������������������������������������������189 Terence Tunberg Preaching to the Mob: Space, Ideas, and Persuasion in Renaissance Florence������������������������������������������������������������������������� 203 Peter Howard The Signs—and Bells—of Mass Pilgrimage���������������������������������������� 231 Cornelia Oefelein Philip II’s Entry into Zaragoza in 1585: A Theater of Power or Contestation?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 269 Teofilo F. Ruiz The People Submissive, The People Rebellious���������������������������������� 285 Richard Taruskin A Riot, a Harangue, and a (Failed) Uprising: Three Scenes from Nineteenth-Century Operas��������������������������������������������������� 305 David Rosen The Hourglass Figure in Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi [The Betrothed]: Multiplicities in Flux, Spatial Form, and the Milanese Bread Riots of 1628��������������������������������������������� 339 Aino Anna-Maria Paasonen Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Witchcraft and Mob Hysteria in America��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 363 A. Richard Sogliuzzo Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 383

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Bernard S. Bachrach, University of Minnesota Charlotte Bauer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nancy van Deusen, Claremont Graduate University Andrew Galloway, Cornell University Robert W. Hanning, Columbia University Peter Howard, Monash University Paul W. Knoll, University of Southern California Leonard Michael Koff, University of California, Los Angeles Cornelia Oefelein, Berlin Aino Anna-Maria Paasonen, University of California, Los Angeles David Rosen, Cornell University Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles Ben Schomakers, Antwerpen A. Richard Sogliuzzo, University of Texas, Dallas Richard Taruskin, University of Calfornia, Berkeley Terence Tunberg, University of Kentucky

List of Illustrations Charlotte Bauer Figure 1: Replica of the Great Seal for the University of Paris, 1292. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D 8015. Size 70mm. (Author’s photograph).��������������� 130 Figure 2: Seal for Abbey of Lieu-Restaure, 1307. Archives nationales de France, D 8261, Size: 46mm.������������������������������������ 131 Figure 3: Author’s drawing of the Fishmongers of Bruges, 1407. Archives nationales de France, SC/F4757. Size: 53mm.����� 132 Figure 4: Author’s drawing of the water merchants of Paris, 1210. Archives nationales de France, SC/D5582. Size: 45mm.���� 133 Figure 5: Seal of the English Nation at Paris, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8016. Size: 75mm.������������������������������������ 134 Figure 6: Seal for the French Nation at Paris, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8017. Size: 70mm.������������������������������������ 135 Figure 7: Replica of the seal for the Norman Nation, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D8018. Size: 75mm. (Author’s photograph).�������������������� 136 Figure 8: Seal for the Picard Nation, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8019. Size: 70mm.������������������������������������������������������������ 137 Figure 9: Replica of the seal for the Faculty of Theology, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D8020. Size: 65mm. (Author’s photograph).��������������� 138 Figure 10: Notre-Dame Cathedral, north side relief sculpture. (photograph courtesy of Anne D. Hedeman).������������������������������� 139 Figure 11: Replica of the seal for the Faculty of Medicine, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D 8022. Size: 50mm.������������������������������������������������������� 140

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Peter Howard Figure 1: Agnolo degli Erri (fl. 1440s–1497), A Dominican Preaching (c. 1470). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Frieda Schiff Warburg in memory of her husband, Felix M. Warburg. © 2010. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.����������������������������� 223 Figure 2: Sano di Pietro (1406–1481), San Bernadino Preaching in the Piazza del Campo. Siena, Museo dell’Opera Metropolitana. © 2010. Photo Opera Metropolitana Siena/Scala, Florence.������������������������������������������������������������������������ 224 Figure 3: Bartolomeo degli Erri (fl.1460–76), St. Vincent Ferrer (c. 1470). © 2010. Photo Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.������������������������������������������������������������������������� 225 Figure 4: Francesco di Giorgio Martini (c1470), San Bernardino Preaching. Walker Gallery, Liverpool. © 2010. Photo National Museums, Liverpool.������������������������������������������������������������������������� 226 Figure 5: Savonarola Preaching in the Cathedral, Florence. From Savonarola’s Compendio di rivelazioni (1496) © 2010. Photo Württemberg Federal State Library, Stuttgart.�������������������� 227 Figure 6: Pulpit in relation to the ponte, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (position of ponte based on the reconstruction by Marcia Hall).���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 228 Figure 7: Masolino (1383–1440), Peter Preaching to the Crowd. Florence, Santa Maria del Carmine (Brancacci Chapel). © 2010. Photo Scala, Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto - Min. dell’Interno.������������������������������������������������������������������ 229 Cornelia Oefelein Figure 1: Pilgrim badge from Cologne. Motif: Crowned busts of the Three Magi. Gramsow (Uckermark) undated bell (1st half 15th century).������ 249 Figure 2: Pilgrim badge from Sternberg. Motif: Holy Blood–monstrance with miraculous hosts. New find 2006: Preddöhl (Prignitz) bell dated 1515.�������������������� 250



list of illustrationsxi

Figure 3: Pilgrim badges from an unknown Marian shrine (Cologne?) and Königslutter. Motifs: Madonna on throne, above her shoulder on the left a star. Crucifixion above the crowned bust of Lothar of Süpplingenburg. New find 2005: Falkenhagen (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.�������������� 251 Figure 4: Pilgrim badges from Neuss, Nikolausberg, and an unknown St. Christopher shrine (left to right). Motifs: St. Quirinus (left). St. Nicholas (middle), St. Christopher (right). New find 2009: Jeserig (Fläming) bell dated 1479.������������������������ 252 Figure 5: Pilgrim badge from Jakobsberg. Motif: St. James wearing pilgrim’s hat and carrying pilgrim’s staff; above the tip of the staff a scallop shell is visible, to the left of the saint a small figure kneels. New attribution 2005: Falkenhagen (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.�� 253 Figure 6: Pilgrim badge from Wilsnack. Motif: Holy Blood – three miraculous hosts with scenes from the Passion of Christ. New find 2009 (second of two signs); Bertikow (Uckermark) undated bell (15th century).������������������������������������������������������������� 254 Figure 7: Pilgrim badge from Einsiedeln–fragment, left half. Motif: miraculous chapel consecration. New attribution 2005: Wildberg (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) bell dated 1476.����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 255 Figure 8: Pilgrim badge from Aachen—mirror badge. Motif: Lamentation of Christ, in the larger lower field; the presentation of the Virgin’s Shroud in the upper field; in between the small circular frame for the mirror. New identification 2004 (previously published as “Virgin and Child” motif): Barsikow (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) bell dated 1513.����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 256 Figure 9: Pilgrim badge from Cologne—mirror badge. Motif: Adoration of the Magi topped by another Virgin in a small tower, flanked by two circular frames for mirrors. New find 2009: Bornim (Havelland) undated bell (early 15th century).�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 257

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Figure 10: Pilgrim badge from Blomberg. Motif: monstrance with miraculous hosts falling into well. New find 2007: Rohlsdorf (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.������������������� 258 Figure 11: Pilgrim badge from Königslutter Motif: Crucifixion in upper section; in lower field, King Lothar of Süpplingenburg holding scepter and orb; the imperial coat of arms with eagle. New find 2009: Groß Kreutz (Havelland) bell dated 1409.���������� 259 Figure 12: Pilgrim badge from Cologne. Motif: Adoration of the Magi—Virgin seated right. New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 260 Figure 13: Pilgrim badge from Cologne. Motif: Adoration of the Magi—Virgin seated left. New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 261 Figure 14: Pilgrim badge from Gottsbüren. Motif: Holy Blood—Crucifixion. New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 262 Figure 15: Pilgrim badge from Niedermünster. Motif: camel carrying miraculous jeweled cross. New find 2005: Nackel (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) undated bell (2nd half 15th century).�������������������������������������������������������������� 263 Figure 16: Pilgrim badge from Niedermünster. Motif: camel carrying miraculous jeweled cross. New find 2005: Nackel (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) undated bell (2nd half 15th century).�������������������������������������������������������������� 264 Figure 17: Bell tower.������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 265 Figure 18: Bell tower abyss.������������������������������������������������������������������� 266 Figure 19: Pilgrim badge from Canterbury. Motif: Thomas Becket’s flight. New find 2006: Preddöhl (Prignitz) bell dated 1515.�������������������� 267



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Figure 20: Pilgrim badge from St.-Josse-sur-Mer. Motif: St. Jodocus. New find 2009: Dedelow (Uckermark) undated bell (1st half 15th century).���������������������������������������������������������������������� 268 David Rosen Example 1: Verdi: Nabucodonosor, Part 3, No. 11, Coro e Profezia, mm. 86–97.���������������������������������������������321, 322, 323 Example 2: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 2, Scène, mm. 12–22 from the end.������������������������������������������������������ 324 Example 3: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 1–19.�������������������������������������������� 325, 326 Example 4: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 20–44.����������������������������������������� 327, 328 Example 5: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 63–91.����������������������������������������� 329, 330 Example 6: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 92–131.��� 331, 332, 333, 334, 335 Example 7: Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 132–158.�����������������������������336, 337, 338

Introduction Mobs As a topic, mobs has resonances in a remarkable number of dimensions, as this collection of essays demonstrates: mobs are a species of crowds as well as communities; they can function with or against the law, speak with one voice, be infused with a common purpose, although maintain themselves as “fluidly transformable categories,” as Andrew Galloway puts it. The idea of mob in its widest sense, from antiquity to Elias Canetti, addressed in the first essay in this collection, provides a context for the essays here, all of which speak to the nature of mobs in various and sometimes surprising contexts. As Leonard Koff explains, crowds, which include mobs, are defined by four ontological attributes  (growth, equality, density, and direction). Crowds exist before they have ideological content: to exist is their first intention. Moreover, crowds can exist as opposed pairs of crowd types (open and closed, rhythmic and stagnating, slow and quick, visible and invisible), and reveal five types of emotional content that produce five types of behavioral crowds (baiting, flight, prohibition, reversal, and feast), depending on which type of emotion predominates. Baiting crowds, for example, are formed with reference to a quickly attainable goal; flight crowds are created by a threat; feast crowds are joyous collectives where there is overabundance “in a limited space and everyone near can partake of it.” The question of crowds for Canetti is complex indeed. There can even be eternal crowds. Canetti describes, for example, the heavenly multitude “ranged in great circles … around the throne of their Lord, like courtiers turned toward their king. Head pressed close to head, their bliss is grounded on their nearness to him. … The hopes and desires of men cling to them, [and] when they fade, faith weakens.” Although such a crowd “dies away slowly, fresh hosts come to take the place of the faded.” Canetti here brings together Pseudo-Dionysius’ hierarchies of angels and Cassiodorus’ invisible ecclesia, the subject of Nancy van Deusen’s essay. Koff explores, too, contemporary extensions of the crowd experience: the notion of “dense masses,” as well as the idea of networked

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communities (as an “answer to the problem of power”), and the idea of swarm  intelligence, implicit hordes, and even molecular sociability. Koff also raises the extremely serious question of the moral context of a crowd: is it to be held accountable for what it does under its own influence—or under no apparent influence at all? What is the moral and legal responsibility of the crowd; that is, should it be judged according to conventional legal, social, and political standards? A crowd may dissolve, quite literally, into thin air. Koff reminds us that “crowds offer a unique philosophical experience: we see in them the existence of an abstraction to which we would ascribe responsibility, even consciousness, and this seems to require a body of law that would enfold them within our social system.” As a case study, Koff examines the role of the leader with respect to “his people,” using Moses and the emerging people of Israel. Ben Schomakers then teases out the complex relationship between the philosopher—the person of reflection—and the nameless, faceless masses, a relationship that foreshadows the artist-philistine dichotomy implicit in the nineteenth-century concept of genius. For Schomakers, Heraclitus’ honed disdain for the masses makes him the archetype of the “mob-hater,” not only because he is the first Greek philosopher to turn his aversion of the masses into a philosophical theme, “but also because the dynamics of his attitude towards them seems to encapsulate emblematically what is possibly the defining aspect of this attitude”: the relationship between the philosopher’s “insight” and the “blindness of the masses.” In raising the question of a valid definition of the “mob phenomenon,” Bernard Bachrach examines the ways a disciplined organization becomes, or does not become, a mob. Is an army, for example, “a mob waiting to escape”? Sometimes it is, even on the battlefield. Bachrach’s examples are drawn from Roman and early medieval military behavior and, in this context, he examines Roman and medieval ideas of military training—the value and effectiveness of command and control— and the destructive nature of a marching army, a dangerously real mobile body. The “body invisible,” extended beyond temporal measure, and the Christian’s presence before God, always in company with the great crowd of believers, is the topic of Nancy van Deusen’s essay. Medieval sequence-writers found a variety of ways to express the concept of “mobs for the mind” imagined as “the great throng of believers at the end of time,” a concept that not only closes the sequence as a medieval



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liturgical genre, but grants it identity and focus. The medieval sequence is a liturgical / musical category for which “gathering together into one group,” with one preoccupation, one unified motive, is pivotal—the sequence is the cantus coronatus of the Mass liturgy. If there can be eternal mobs, there can also be functional ones. Paul Knoll examines the foundation and crowd-like qualities of the nationes within medieval German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish universities. “Looking at the natio,” he explains, as either an “externally influential corporate entity” or an “association of common origins” helps us understand “the role the nationes played in the universities of central and east central Europe.” The natio “became one of the institutional elements that bound individuals within the academic community together,” although, as Knoll cautions, “not the only one.” According to him, the mention of “nations” in medieval documents, especially in foundation charters, does not guarantee that “nations” as identifiable groups took active roles within university life and the university’s organizational structure. Throughout the fifteenth-century history of the German universities, for example, “nations as administrative and governing units are, with the partial and important exception of Leipzig, conspicuous by their absence.” In the case of the Polish nationes during this same period, however, national consciousness that rested on Polish as a language of intellectual, cultural, and written and oral communication began to take shape. Charlotte Bauer provides a companion piece to Knoll’s, treating group identity at the emerging University of Paris. Beginning with Jacques de Vitry’s view of diverse foreign groups gathered at that university, Bauer asks what impact these “nations” had on the structure of the University of Paris. According to her, they constituted clearly selfidentifying corporate communities, both within the university and without. Groups such as the nationes differentiated those at the university from the citizens of Paris, an example of a medieval phenomenon observed in the present in “town and gown” disputes. Moreover, the boundaries that distinguished specific groups within the emerging University of Paris, which can be seen on seals that identify the corporate identity of the university’s nationes, also presented an ever more clearly-defined conceptualization of the professional intellectual— those trained similarly whose common training and careers were in some sense regulated by themselves as a peer group. For Andrew Galloway, the period in English history from the Good Parliament (1376) to the end of Richard II’s reign (1399) is

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“remarkable for its rich, though often volatile treatment of the power and nature of communities, crowds, and mobs—categories that, although often represented by much smaller numbers of people than the masses of later times, were more fully in flux than perhaps at any later time. For if we distinguish communities from crowds, and both again from mobs, in the first instance as, simply, groups with decreasing moral or legal legitimacy in (some particular) contemporary eyes, then we find unusually unsettled visions of what such groups were, and who belonged in them, in the late fourteenth century. And, particularly, we find an acute importance of this issue in the production of narrative, both historical and literary.” Texts from this period in English history suggest that “the people,” as opposed to the turba, “had a potential for basic moral and legal legitimacy [vox populi vox dei est] that often seems absent from our world.” Galloway notes that the difference between Sallust’s view of the horror turbae and “the typical medieval one, including Walsingham’s [he cites Sallust], is that Sallust sees the entire populace as corrupt. The usual medieval presentation suggests instead that—like the trope of the ‘bad advisors’ who have misled the king or others—a small group is responsible for a larger corruption of the populace.” Galloway concludes with a sober message of uncommon relevance from William Langland, namely that public may be but a veneer for the self-interested greed, ambition, and factionalism of the mob. Galloway regards William Langland as, “in fact, the first sustained contributor not to crowd theory but to mob theory … [thus placing] Piers Plowman in conversation not simply with the fourteenth or seventeenth century, but with our own time, and us.” According to Robert Hanning, whose focus is the mob in Boccaccio’s Decameron, it might seen that Decameron’s novelle, “steeped in household intrigues and replete with tricks played by clever” Italians “on gullible, arrogant, or downright stupid victims, tended not to deal in, or need, groups larger that the male relatives of an errant, or supposedly errant, wife or daughter.” But, as we find out, this was not the case, especially with respect to what Hanning describes as “a Boccaccian urban drama staging paradoxical intersection between religious devotion (more specifically, devotional credulity) and negative attitudes toward foreigners:” those “non-natives pursuing activities as diverse as religious pilgrimage, commercial transactions, and diplomatic negotiations, or simply (like Dante) living in forced exile from their own natal communities.”



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Terence Tunberg’s discontinuous “crowd” is the Latin res publica litterarum, a self-selecting group, having a common written and spoken language. As Tunberg explains, Latin was the working language of academic life, and colloquia trained people for, and offered experience in, what was absolutely essential, namely, dialogue, argumentation, and disputation: “colloquia were written in vast numbers and their authors were from all over Europe”; indeed colloquia continued to be written and published well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all of which indicates the remarkable staying-power and importance of a world-wide communitas of learning and the learned. But Latin as the language of schools, universities, church and, to a certain extent, diplomacy, interacted constantly with vernacular languages and the dynamics of everyday life, an ongoing circumstance that can be recognized and quickly seen to have analogies within our globalized world. What we have here is Latin as an international language employed to relate the common activities of everyday life: how often during the year to take a bath, for example, how one might dress for a special occasion, how to raise money for schooling. Peter Howard begins his essay with the remarkable comment: “the best show” in Renaissance Florence “could be a preacher in his pulpit.” This, he suggests, “may be a claim that challenges and sorely stretches our historical imaginations, if not our credulity, for it is not what comes to mind when we daydream of … the enduring legacy of Renaissance Italy.” Howard investigates the way sermons, heard by “multitudes” gathered around popular preachers in public spaces could “transform” them into an “ordered crowd.” Renaissance culture was “a culture of hearing,” vernacular, not elitist and, as Howard puts it, “the figure of the preacher … provided the moment of convergence” where “both individual and community” could be turned into “something more noble.” This accords “with the overall humanist belief … that urban spaces, especially well-conceived urban spaces, were civilizing: they created people of noble temperament, working together for the common good.” Although “mobs as armies” were impeded by practical considerations such as march-distance, gear, and supplies, as Bernard Bachrach shows (his example is the Hunnic invasion of Gaul in the spring of 451 CE), crowds of medieval pilgrims were not. To the abbey church at Saint-Denis, to Rome, but also to Wilsnack and Düren, they flooded, more than 50,000 people at a time according to some sources. Medieval pilgrimage was, “despite the risks and dangers inherent to travel in

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those times, … for the most part long-distance pilgrimage.” Pilgrims were mobs on the move. There was in fact a remarkable medieval religious mobility, as Cornelia Oefelein shows. Indeed, some pilgrim badges, which were actually cast onto church bells, provide local evidence for a geography of pilgrimage. Although reluctant as traveler, and a king who intensively guarded his private life, Philip II of Spain, as the most powerful ruler of sixteenth-century Europe, nevertheless was obliged for reasons of state to participate in occasional progresses through his kingdom, for example, as well as public processions and festive displays. The marriage of his daughter Catalina to the Duke of Savoy, occasioned, as Teofilo Ruiz explains, a whole series of “moving” events: processions, pageants, and amassed crowds, all of which confirmed “the close relationship that existed (and still exists) between spectacle, the contestation of power, and crowds.” Spectacles were not straightforward events of public display, but rather “a complicated political dance.” Indeed, “processions would have been useless exercises if they would not have taken place in the midst, and performed for the benefit, of local crowds. … the nameless mobs enjoyed the exuberance of the moment and the sheer entertainment of the occasion.” The theme of crowds in opera brings together essays by musi­ cologists Richard Taruskin and David Rosen. In Taruskin’s essay, crowds and operatic production are placed within the historiographical trends of nineteenth-century narratives of Russian history. Musorgsky’s crowd scenes in “Boris Godunov”—there are two of them, one meant to replace the other—reflect changes in Russian historical self-conceptions. As Taruskin states, “I know of no other case in the history of opera in which two versions of an opera so directly polemicize with one another in keeping with contemporaneous debates.” Musorgsky’s first crowd is “a submissive, passive, impotent lot, conscious only of its bodily needs and looking trustingly to their Tsar, heaven’s emissary, for salvation; they are shown in the act of withstanding adversity … with love for the autocracy.” Musorgsky’s second crowd is a popular collective. Although there are hints of such a crowd in Pushkin, Musorgsky fashioned the second crowd as protagonist (differing significantly from “the tramps” that would have had precedence elsewhere) from the historian Kostomarov’s idealization of the peasantry as the “mass of the insulted and injured with whom one can (and the historian does) sympathize.” Moreover, musical composition itself can, as David Rosen shows, exemplify two defining characteristics of mobs: “free-for-alls,” on the



introduction: mobs7

one hand, in which there are purposes and counter-purposes, indeterminate movement and contradictory tendencies, made plain by the composer’s use of counterpoint in which “contrary motion” is of structural importance; and, on the other hand, “single-minded” movement, made clear by unification within choral part-writing, as is the famous chorus, “Va pensiero” in Verdi’s opera, “Nabucco.” Music can sing both aspects of mass behavior—contrasting, contrary motions and trajectories with one purpose, one mind, one heart. Rosen’s “free-for-alls” appear to require no charismatic leader to provide impetus for general mayhem. In the opera, “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for example, Hans Sachs wonders aloud how this “madness” could have developed: “How that happened, God knows. A goblin must have helped: a glow-worm could not find its mate; it set the trouble in motion.” The issue of the place and function—or absence—of a leader, an issue Koff raised with respect to Moses and the Children of Israel, recurs here in a new context. For Manzoni, as Aino Paasonen reveals, leaderless fluidity within space (movement figured as the flow of water), and what Aino Paasonen describes as “images of profusion” define the mob in I promessi sposi, informed as it is by the Milanese Bread Riots of 1628. From a seventeenth-century narrator comes a whole spectrum of voices and opinions, hypotheses concerning and vocabulary describing, the literal and figurative place of the crowd-mob. In Paasonen’s essay, as in other essays in this collection—in Peter Howard’s essay in particular—the crowd is intrinsically related to space and to geographic dimensions that also have symbolic significance. As Bakhtin puts it, “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people.” In I promessi sposi, Manzoni is interested in “immense numbers of people” affected by, and dealing with, historical events without themselves being “key players” in them. In this, Manzoni anticipates Marc Bloch as a historian of the masses. Finally, Richard Sogliuzzo brings the topic of mobs into the twentieth century in his analysis of the reach of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, a political parable, as Sogliuzzo says, “based on one of the most terrifying events” in American history during the early modern period: “A village became an hysterical mob and virtually destroyed itself.” Sogliuzzo’s analysis of Miller’s play reveals a kind of village network, analogous for Miller to the so-called “network of witnesses” to Communist presence in mid-twentieth-century America that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), through its investigations in great part created. Miller equates the kind of

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self-protective lying that occurred in Salem with the lying that occurred among those who testified before the HUAC, “accusing colleagues of being Communists to protect themselves and condemn others.” This returns our discussion of mobs to a question Koff initially raised, namely, the status of contemporary crowds as self-constituting, selfregulating, but largely invisible groups and the possible transformation of the idea of a crowd that the importance of networks invites us to consider: in what sense are those on Twitter, for example, a disembodied collective? The problem remains, however, as Ben Schomakers puts it, of the identifiable, even solitary individual standing against the pressure of the limitless, internally mobile “mob,” despite the sanguine expectations for a global and powerless internet community of participants. The illustration on the cover, Sano di Pietro’s St. Bernardino preaching in the Piazza del Campo, Siena, reveals something of the complexity of imagining “mobs”—of characterizing them—as revealed in the essays here. The illustration catches the people “at rest,” listening close together in positions of prayer that reflect a certain inwardness in public; the people are not yet ideologically charged by their leader, though they may become so. Here is a crowd’s preparatory moment. The illustration complicates the idea of a “mob”—a crowd—in the ordinary sense of that word as an active, moving collection of human beings.

Canetti’s “Biology” of the Crowd: Contexts and Instances Leonard Michael Koff My title should already tell you something about the assumptions explicit in Elias Canetti’s radical understanding of crowds: they are, in his view, living as well as conscious entities. As John McClelland explains, Canetti “is the first crowd theorist to take the mind of the crowd seriously, and to provide it with a content of its own.” For Canetti, “the crowd is not just seen from the outside as something — the crowd spreads ‘like fire’. The crowd itself feels as something.…”1 Canetti argues that as a collection of people the crowd has an existence that is not defined by its ideology—a crowd is a physical reality before it has ideological intent—and, as such, it is best thought of as a being that desires to be born, that resists dying, but that nonetheless may die. Comparing a crowd to a living organism is an example of the most obvious kind of anthropomorphizing, but the analogy helps Canetti put into frames of reference what he has observed about crowds. The analogy, which Canetti works out in monumental theoretical, histori­ cal, and anthropological detail in his book, Crowds and Power,2 is meant to support the argument that crowds are natural human forma­ tions. They are, for Canetti, a mysterious as well as a universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together—five, ten, or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced; nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is determination in their move­ ment which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. 1   J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (London, 1989), p. 304 (italics his). 2   The edition I have used is Crowds and Power [Masse und Macht], trans. Carol Stewart (New York, 1984). Masse und Macht was published in Hamburg, Germany in 1960.

10

leonard michael koff It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it. This goal is the blackest spot where most people are gathered.3

Canetti’s crowd template reveals a crowd’s four essential crowd attributes—growth, equality, density, and direction. These describe all crowds, which include for him mobs as well.4 Canetti’s definition of a crowd elides the distinction we usually make between crowds and mobs, where mob and mobile are, in English usage, variations on each other and where a mob as a “mobile” is regarded as having been incited to move.5 But movement—the lack of a fixed place, which gives to the crowd a socially unstable and, for some, an implicitly amoral if not immoral purpose—is not for Canetti an essential crowd attribute. For him a crowd can become a mob,6 though a crowd can also become other kinds of collectives, including, for example, national collec­ tives—nations in a conceptual, but powerfully informing historical

  Canetti, p. 16.   McClelland, p. 303: “Canetti’s classification of crowds produces [at least] 280 dif­ ferent types of crowds if they are classified according to pure forms and purity of emo­ tional content alone.” There are four ontological attributes of crowds (growth, equality, density, direction); four opposed pairs of crowd types (open and closed crowds [see Canetti, pp. 16–17], rhythmic and stagnating crowds [see pp. 30, 34–39], slow and quick crowds [see pp. 39–41], and visible and invisible crowds [see pp. 42–47]); and five types of emotional content available to crowds (see pp. 48–63), producing five types of behavioral crowds depending on which type of emotion predominates (bait­ ing crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds “created by a refusal” [p. 55], reversal crowds, and feast crowds, where “there is abundance in a limited space and everyone can partake of it” [p. 63]). 5   The first two OED entries for mob, when taken together, catch its salient charac­ teristics: a mob is the “disorderly and riotous part of the population, the roughs, the rabble; the assemblage of the rabble; the tumultuous crowds bent on, or liable to be incited to, acts of lawlessness and outrage.” The first entry is from Verney Mem. (1688) IV.447 [13 Dec], which defines a mob according to the consequences of its behavior: “The Mob carried away the very boards and rafters.” The second links mob with the mobile, that is, with the idea of a mob’s “ungrounding.” See Narcissus Lutrell (1688) Brief Rel. I. 486 [12 Dec]: “This night the mobile were up again.” Mobile is a shortened form of mobile vulgus, the movable or excitable crowd. See Shadwell’s Libertine (1676) v.81 (Don Lopez): “D’hear that noise? the remaining Rogues have rais’d the Mobile, and are coming upon us.” 6   See Canetti, pp. 93–165 on the pack, which shares some characteristics of mobs: “Among the small hordes which roam about as bands of ten or twenty men it is the universal expression of communal excitement” (p. 96). But for Canetti there are varie­ ties of packs and they, like crowds, are not ideological collectives or necessarily destructive in the way a mob—a “mobile”—can be. 3 4



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd11

sense7—or social configurations like a royal court.8 The connection between a crowd and its purpose for Canetti follows from a crowd’s “biological” existence. Moreover, crowds can continue as invisible col­ lectives, as, for example, the “invisible dead,” or a heavenly host,9 or posterity,10 all imagined as existing in “large numbers, unbroken suc­ cession—a kind of density through time —and unity.”11 The first essential attribute of a crowd, for Canetti, is that it “always wants to grow”—it has no “natural boundaries.”12 In its “spontaneous form it is a sensitive thing.” A crowd has an openness that enables it to encompass more and more people which, at the same time, is its dan­ ger to itself. Any “foreboding of threatening disintegration is always alive in the crowd.”13 Thus it seeks, through rapid increase, to avoid disintegration. Where “boundaries have been artificially created … used for the preservation” of the crowd, an “eruption … is always pos­ sible and will in fact happen from time to time.” For Canetti, an eruption defines the moment when the crowd frees itself from artificial bounds and begins to grow again. Within the crowd, whose structure is dynamic, “there is equality.” Indeed, “it is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”14 And this physical sense of equality is, for   See Canetti, pp. 178–79, on the Jews as a national crowd.   See Canetti, pp. 399–400, on an anatomy of the royal court.  9   See Canetti, p. 45, on the heavenly multitude “ranged in great circles … around the throne of their Lord, like courtiers turned toward their king. Head pressed close to head, their bliss is grounded in their nearness to him. He has accepted them forever and, in as much as they will never leave him, they will never be separate from each other. They remain in contemplation of him, and they sing his praises. It is the only thing they still do, and they do it together.” See Nancy van Deusen, “Assembled in the Presence of God: Majestic Perseverance and the Cantus coronatus,” in this volume. 10   See Canetti, p. 46, on the future crowd: “It is precisely when it has become num­ berless that posterity is visible to no-one. It is known that it must increase, first gradu­ ally and then with growing acceleration. Tribes and whole peoples trace their origin back to a common ancestor and the promises claimed to have been given to him show how glorious, and especially how numerous, a progeny he desired; innumerable as the stars in heaven and the sand on the shores of the sea.” 11   Canetti, p. 46. 12   Canetti, p. 29. 13   Canetti, pp. 16–17. 14   Canetti, p. 29.  7  8

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the crowd, its condition of self-awareness. According to Canetti, “the most important occurrence within the crowd is” what he calls “the discharge.… This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.”15 It is the moment when, in Canetti’s sense, a crowd knows itself to be a crowd. Moreover, “the crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense.” Indeed, “nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; every­ thing must be the crowd itself,”16 for “only together can men free them­ selves from their burdens of distance; and this is precisely what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. In that density, where there is scarcely any space between people, body pressing against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues.”17 For Canetti, density and the desire to grow are not opposite attrib­ utes because “loving density” is an attribute that characterizes the crowd’s desire to be itself and to defend itself internally. All elements in a crowd that do not want to bond, that do not want to be equal, are regarded as dangers to the crowd’s existence. With respect to the sec­ ond and third attributes of a crowd—that within a crowd there is equality and that the crowd loves density—Canetti notes the following psychosomatic truth: [that] it is only in a crowd that man can become free of … [the] fear of being touched.… The crowd he needs is … [the] crowd, in which body is pressed to body … so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself.… The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds.18

For Canetti, a crowd’s “psychical constitution” (p. 15) is density. Canetti’s fourth crowd attribute follows naturally from the first three. A crowd needs direction, which is not the same thing as having an ideology:   Canetti, p. 17 (italics his).   Canetti, p. 29. 17   Canetti, p. 18 (italics his). 18   Canetti, pp. 15–16. 15 16



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd13 A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd. Its constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal. A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.19

In Canetti’s analysis, the crowd becomes a single body and all that defines the essential nature of an individual defines the ontological configuration of the crowd: like the individual, so like the crowd. Everything of importance, everything with respect to the nature of the crowd entails its effort to keep itself together, to ensure that those within it touch each other and are not touched from without so that a crowd can be, and continue to be, self-creating and impervious. To that end, it will protect itself. In describing the ontological attributes of the crowd, Canetti sees it initially as headless, without a leader, although a crowd can have or produce leaders. Because it is brought into being by the freedom that attends losing the fear of being touched, a crowd’s formation, as well as its will to live (to borrow a phrase), gives it a life of its own. A crowd can, to be sure, come to have a goal, even a virtually unarticulated one, and imaginative writers in the 20th century have thought so, too. But a goal reflects its wish to exist. A goal is not an ideology. I Nathanael West’s description in The Day of the Locust of movie fans, come together by an unspoken desire to attend the opening of a movie at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, is perhaps the locus clas­ sicus of modern descriptions of the crowd. West’s description is given to us through the eyes of Tod Hackett, the novel’s protagonist, whose encounter outside Grauman’s Chinese is with a living being. “[He walked] only a short distance along the narrow lane when he began to get frightened. People shouted, commenting on his hat, his carriage, and his clothing. There was a continuous roar of catcalls, laughter and yells, pierced occasionally by a scream.” That scream, in West’s descrip­ tion, signals physical awakening, as if it were the sound of the crowd’s being born: “[The sound] was usually followed by a sudden movement in the dense mass and part of it would surge forward wherever the   Canetti, p. 29. (italics his).

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police line was weakest. As soon as that part was rammed back, the bulge would pop out somewhere else. The police force would have to be doubled when the stars started to arrive.” For West, the crowd, once alive, becomes a single conscious entity: “At the sight of their heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn ­demoniac. Some little gesture, either too pleasing or too offensive, would start it moving and then nothing but machine guns could stop it. Individually the purpose of its members might simply be to get a souvenir, but collectively it would grab and rend.”20 West here is noting, of course, differences in the behavior of a person and a crowd—a crowd’s behavior is impelled by desire that lets it take on a life of its own so that it is finally not governed by an idea of worship, but by col­ lective behavior not explainable by whatever forethought brought indi­ viduals together. West sees a crowd’s arousal of energy as something Canetti might call a crowd’s ability to bring life back into itself and this explains the effect on those joining it; they become what they always were, for being in a crowd has a loosening and awakening effect. New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He [Tod] could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came.21

Tod doesn’t simply become part of the crowd of movie fans; he is swal­ lowed up by them and appears, when he appears, as if virtually disembodied. The next thing Tod knew, he was torn loose from Homer [whom Tod meets in Hollywood] and sent to his knees by a blow in the back of the head that spun him sideways. The crowd in front of the theatre had charged. He was surrounded by churning legs and feet. He pulled him­ self erect by grabbing a man’s coat, then let himself be carried along

  Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (New York, 1962), pp. 154–55.  West, p. 156.

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canetti’s “biology” of the crowd15 backwards in a long, curving sweep. He saw Homer rise above the mass for a moment, shoved against the sky, his jaw hanging as though he wanted to scream but couldn’t. A hand reached up and caught him by his open mouth and pulled him forward and down.22

Moreover, all Tod’s efforts to free himself, too, are of no avail. Using the eucalyptus tree as a landmark, he tried to work toward it by slipping sideways against the tide, pushing hard when carried away from it and riding the current when it moved toward his objective. He was within only a few feet of the tree when a sudden, driving rush carried him far past it. He struggled desperately for a moment, then gave up and let himself be swept along. He was the spearhead of a flying wedge when it collided with a mass going in the opposite direction. The impact turned him around. As the two forces ground against each other, he was turned again and again, like a grain between millstones. This didn’t stop until he became part of the opposing force. The pressure continued to increase until he thought he must collapse. He was slowly being pushed into the air. Although relief for his cracking ribs could be gotten by continuing to rise, he fought to keep his feet on the ground. Not being able to touch was an even more dreadful sensation than being carried backwards.23

West’s crowd moves as if headless, without a leader articulating its goals, goals not so much known as felt; indeed, its goals are like the movements of the sea itself. West’s crowd suggests that for him the behavior of a collective reflects what biologists now call swarm intelli­ gence, and those part of it come to be reconstituted as a collective whose aim is to remain a collective, as if that state were an end in itself.24  West, p. 161.  West, pp. 161–162. 24   The term swarm intelligence describes collective behavior of decentralized, selforganized agents, like ant colonies, flocks of birds, a school of fish, bacterial growth, interacting locally with one another and with their environment. That local interaction results in complex global behavior. See Peter Miller, “The Genius of Swarms,” National Geographic (July 2007), 129–147, who argues that “a single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are.” See p. 141: “It’s difficult to describe in words, but when the herd [herd of caribou] was on the move, it looked very much like a cloud shadow passing over the landscape, or a mass of dominoes toppling over at the same time and chang­ ing direction.… It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reac­ tion. No cause and effect. It just was.” The make-up of West’s crowd here is not described as a swarm of locusts, though other crowds in West’s novel are. The point is that, for West, the crowd, made up of individuals, behaves with the terrifying singlemindedness of insects close to each other, unimaginable as separate beings, yet still separate, who move and act in unison. The crowd is frightening because one can see how the individuality of each “insect” has been occulted. Indeed, the insects in a 22 23

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In observing the crowd in West, we are witnessing the physical behavior of something real as well as something abstract. Is a crowd responsible for what it does? In what sense does it know what it does? Should it know it, if it doesn’t? Should it be able to be judged by our system of justice that assumes that an entity knows itself? If crowds are alive in West and Canetti’s sense, then these questions lead us directly from social observation to law, social theory, and politics. Indeed, what is the legal status of a crowd as a living entity that can, unlike us (also biological entities), be “uncreated”? A crowd can dissolve so that what­ ever it was no longer exists and only the traces of what it did remain. Crowds are potent, present, and evanescent, though they want to con­ tinue living. Indeed crowds offer a unique philosophical experience: we see in them the existence of an abstraction to which we would ascribe responsibility, even consciousness, and this seems to require a body of law that would enfold them within our social system. West’s crowd in The Day of the Locust is not a specifically politi­ cal  one, though West suggests that it responds to the police and would respond to machine guns. But one could argue that the crowds the entertainment industry brings into being, the crowds that are brought into being by music, for example, are analogues—bourgeois analogues—of the fascist crowds of the 1930s. One might even argue that a rock concert is a fascist-like social configuration. It exhibits a single-mindedness of purpose, a will of its own, as if it were a single entity; indeed psychical connection and communal redemption from the isolation of consciousness is its purpose. One might argue as well that it is ultimately headless just because such a crowd appears to be  impelled by something from inside it, something its leader only swarm are “dehumanized” by something unnamable. The swarm is an abstraction embodied not in the body of any one of its members, but rather a kind of singleminded body of beings that acts like a coherent organism. We should add that accord­ ing to McClelland, p. 294, Canetti’s biology derives not from Darwin but from Pasteur and his understanding of the behavior and danger of microbes. See Canetti, p. 47, on bacilli: “Instead of the souls, they now attack the bodies of men; and to these they can be very dangerous. Only a tiny minority of people have looked into a microscope and really seen them there. But everyone has heard of them and is continually aware of their presence and makes every effort not to come into contact with them.…” See also Canetti, p. 47, on spermatozoa as a crowd: “2000 million of these animalcules set out together on their way. They are equal among themselves and in a state of very great density. They all have the same goal and, except for one, they all perish on the way.” Canetti’s reference to sperm in this context is not parodic. Let me thank here my col­ league and friend, Dr. Lon Engelberg, for continuing discussions of swarm theory, the nature of crowds, and psychoanalytic readings of social life.



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd17

articulates, but does not implant. Such a crowd is attuned to those who speak it—who play its music—rather than speak to it, attuned to those with no capacity for critique, self-direction, or withdrawal. Those who are part of such a crowd, or who become part of it, are swept along in its rhythms, without being able to move against it, without being able to stand against the crowd’s unseen, but always palpable, drive to continue to be. Canetti does describe the destructiveness of the crowd, though for him destructiveness is not a fundamental crowd attribute. Destruc­ tiveness is about the destruction of objects or representations or sym­ bols: the destruction of surfaces. Destructiveness as a behavior points to deeper foundational characteristics. In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries. He wants what is happening to him to happen to oth­ ers too; and he expects it to happen to them. An earthen pot irritates him, for it is all boundaries. The closed doors of a house irritate him. Rites and ceremonies, anything which preserves distances, threaten him and seem unbearable. He fears that, sooner or later, an attempt will be made to coerce the disintegrating crowd back into these pre-existing ves­ sels. To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille.25

Again, a crowd’s destructiveness, for Canetti, reflects its goals, not its nature. Ideology is less important to Canetti than ontology, for a crowd’s behavior is an expression of what it can do as an entity.26   Canetti, p. 20.   The destructiveness of the crowd, which “is often mentioned as its most con­ spicuous quality,” but which is often only “discussed and disapproved of, but never really explained,” is not a fundamental crowd characteristic. It is a derivative of the crowd’s desire for growth and for equality. It is not “the fragility of objects which stim­ ulates the destructive of the crowd,” attracting crowd violence (the crowd is not inher­ ently brutal), but rather the “cracking of glass” — windows panes, mirrors, pictures, crockery — which represents “fresh life.” The crowd breaks windows and doors as obstacles to growth, boundaries; houses are destroyed because the crowd fears it will be shut up again. What the crowd loves to destroy are “representational images,” the symbols of hierarchy, which are “no longer recognized.” In the crowd “the individual feels he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances [the burdens of distance] are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in.… Of all means of destruction the most impressive is fire.… It destroys irrevocably.… A crowd setting fire to something feels irresistible; so long as fire spreads, everything will join in and everything hostile [everything that has perse­ cuted it or that it feels has persecuted it] will be destroyed. After the destruction, the crowd and fire die away” (Canetti, pp. 19–20 [italics his]). 25 26

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Canetti’s understanding of the nature of crowd formation has much in common with Freud’s understanding of the relationship between a drive and its objects,27 although Freud sees very different social conse­ quences arising from the psychosexual nature of human life. In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the crowd comes into being before the aim-inhibition of any of its members, which leaves a crowd open to leaders who can be libidinal objects. This represents, for Freud, an ever-present threat to civilized life. The crowd is, in Freud’s view, a problematic configuration.28 For him the choice of a sexual object happily stands against primitive group feelings—Freud values repression’s social outcome.29 He is not, to be sure, a neutral social 27   See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1975), p. 34: “The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instinct would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.” See also p. 14: “We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.” Canetti grounds his crowd theory on the desire for somatic connection—this is implic­ itly a positive, indeed mobile social aim (people want to touch and to protect those who touch them)—against which leaders who may be, or become, introjections of libidinal aim. This does not imply that leaders work against crowds, though what Canetti calls “reversal crowds” can become, in our ordinary sense, a mob, whose hos­ tility is a reaction to the sting of command, not an attribute of its nature. 28  See McClelland, p. 260: “[Freud’s] social contract comes after the original Sovereign has been deposed, when the frustrations of the attempt to break out from collective to individual psychology have become apparent to the brothers of the primal horde. The brothers can see no other solution to the problem of completing individual wills than to reinstate the father’s authority in a permanent, institutionalized form. For Freud, individuality was only a moment in the history of the species; group psychology is the given, and it is individuality which has to be explained.” 29  See Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachy (New York, 1967), p. 72: “Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, group feeling. The more they are in love, the more completely they suffice for each other. Their rejection of the group’s influence is expressed in the shape of a sense of shame. Feelings of jealousy of the most extreme violence are summoned up in order to protect the choice of a sexual object from being encroached upon by a group tie. It is only when the affectionate, that is, personal, factor of a love relationship gives place entirely to the sensual one, that it is possible for two people to have sexual intercourse in the presence of others or for there to be simultaneous sexual acts in a group, as occurs at an orgy.” See also p. 71: “Those sexual instincts which are inhibited in their aims have a great functional advantage over those which are uninhibited. Since they are not capable of really complete satisfaction, they are especially adapted to create



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd19

theorist, though he has provided Canetti with a context for theorizing the psychosocial effects of somatic closeness. Canetti’s theorizing does not, of course, privilege one social configuration over another, for a crowd is not, for Canetti, implicitly a horde.30 The desire for attach­ ment is natural and positive; indeed the desire to touch and be touched is, for Canetti, longed-for at all stages of what has been called develop­ mental identity.31 People want to touch and to protect those who touch them, and Canetti sees this. He describes this as crystallization, not a social or personal phenomenon that, for him, we outgrow. The idea of crystallization is central to Canetti perhaps because it lets him sidestep arguments that claimed, and for some still claim, that Freudian psychoanalysis is based on shaky physiological foundations.32 Canetti thus describes social formations as the consequence of “crowd crys­ tals”; these are “the small, rigid groups of men, strictly delimited and of great constancy, which serve to precipitate crowds. Their structure is permanent ties; while those instincts which are directly sexual incur a loss of energy each time they are satisfied, and must wait to be renewed by a fresh accumulation of sexual libido, so that meanwhile the object may have been changed. The inhibited instincts are capable of any degree of admixture with the uninhibited; they can be transformed back into them, just as they arose out of them.” 30  For Freud, “a Church and an army” are highly organized, lasting, and artificial groups, for “a certain external force is employed to prevent them from disintegrating and to prevent alterations in their structure.” They are, for Freud, libidinally consti­ tuted though they need “special safeguards” to keep together: “As a rule a person is not consulted, or is given no choice, as to whether he wants to enter such a group; any attempt at leaving it is usually met with persecution or with severe punishment, or has quite definite conditions attached to it” (Group Psychology, p. 25). On ties to the leader in a Church and an army, a transfer of libido from other members of the group to the leader, which is, for Freud, regressive, see p. 27. On panic and fear in such group, see pp. 28–29. See p. 73 on the necessity of women for the creation of stable social unions. That argument seems specious today, as does Freud’s assumption about civilized and pre-civilized human configurations; nonetheless, his insight in the psychosexual con­ struction of human life is foundational. 31  For the essential place of touch in defining identity, see Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability” in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, eds. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London, 2002), esp. pp. 69–70: “Between sentient beings, touch, unlike sight, is quintessentially an interactive sensation in which the moment of touching is indivisible from being touched. There is never a point at which we can fail to reverse the sensation, nor at which we can distinguish clearly between the active and passive mode. Again, unlike sight, touch frustrates hierarchy, and crosses boundaries rather than creates distance. According to developmental psychologists … touch is the primal sense which operates from the foetal stage, is paramount during early infancy and only becomes less accept­ able when, as adults, we accede to an understanding of ourselves as essentially singular, unified and bounded.” 32  See, for example, Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Complete Arc (Cambridge, MA, 1991), esp. pp. 591–627, on psychoanalysis as science.

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such that they can be comprehended and taken in at a glance. Their unity is more important than their size. Their role must be familiar; people must know what they are there for. Doubt about their function would render them meaningless.”33 Here Canetti has imported a term from the physical sciences to explain a crowd’s desire to form. Using science in a figurative way to explain the desire for physical proximity must have struck Canetti as less open to immediate misgivings than a sustained reliance on Freud’s psychosexual explanations. II Let me pursue, for the moment, Canetti’s chemical analogy with respect to the life of the crowd, for Canetti’s understanding of crowd formation—crowd crystallization as the engine of social constructs— is close to the French biochemist Jacques Monod’s understanding of the nature of biochemical bonding. Monod argues in Chance and Necessity that there is a propensity—we might call it an urge because all our theorizing is anthropomorphic—for carbon proteins to form sta­ ble and coherent structures and that this biochemical behavior, which appears conscious, is simply inherent in carbon proteins. Monod calls this biochemical phenomenon teleomony: “[It] implies the idea of an oriented, coherent, and constructive activity,” and that “by these stand­ ards proteins must be deemed the essential molecular agents of teleo­ nomic performance in living beings.34 For Monod, “the organism is a self-constituting machine. Its micro­ scopic structure is not imposed upon it by outside forces. It shapes itself autonomously by dint of constructive internal interactions. Although our understanding of the mechanisms of development is still more than imperfect, we are now in a position to state that the con­ structive interactions are microscopic and molecular, and that the molecules involved are essentially if not uniquely proteins.”35 As he explains, “The precise adjustment and high efficiency of this enor­ mous, yet microscopic chemical activity are maintained by a certain class of proteins, the enzymes, playing the role of specific catalysts.”36   Canetti, p. 73.   Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessary: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York, 1972), p. 45 (italics his). 35   Monod, p. 46. 36   Monod, p. 45. 33 34



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd21

These are proteins that “channel the activity of the chemical machine, assure its coherent functioning, and put it together.” All these teleonomic performances rest, in the final analysis, upon the proteins’ so-called “stereospecific” properties, that is to say upon their ability to “recognize” other molecules (including other proteins) by their shape, this shape being determined by their molecular structure. At work here is, quite literally, a microscopic discriminative (if not “cognitive”) faculty. We may say that any teleonomic performance or structure in a living being—whatever it may be—can, in principle at least, be analyzed in terms of stereospecific interactions involving one, several, or a very large number of proteins.37

Note, of course, Monod’s caution and what is implied by it: that the only way we have to explain teleomony is by analogy to established and presumably clear laws of non-ideological behavior: “The logic of bio­ logical regulatory system abides not by Hegelian laws but, like the workings of computers, by the propositional algebra of George Boole.”38 And “it is in the structure of these molecules that one must see the ultimate source of the autonomy, or more precisely, the self-determi­ nation that characterized living beings in their behavior.”39 For Monod, this molecular propensity to form chemical crowds and for a crowd to defend against its potential destruction, suggests to him that human beings and their social institutions are best described according to the social behavior of the carbon compounds. Certain systems of belief, certain theories of stable, ideologically conservative social organization are not, for Monod, simply accidental. They reflect real biochemical truths. Our social structures that work, that guaran­ tee our existence, are, for Monod, the reflection, on a parallel plane of existence, of non-ideological biochemical reactions. One is not the cause of the other; rather one resides in the other so that to understand humans and their institutions one ought to view them together as lower and higher levels of being that look radically different, but that belong and operate in the same structure. Think of being in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and observing the looping levels that reside in this circular structure.40 In a fascinating way, Jacques   Monod, p. 46.   Monod, p. 76. 39   Monod, p. 78. 40   Cf. the idea of “residing in,” see, for example, Robert M. Pirsig: Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York, 1991), esp. p. 154: “Biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns are supported by this pattern of matter but are independent of it. 37 38

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Monod suggests that there appears to be defensive molecular sociabil­ ity at coordinated levels, and apparently without leaders.41 III Because Canetti’s understanding of crowds reflects the political cir­ cumstances of Europe in the 1930s, he understands leadership as dem­ agoguery.42 For him a leader may, for example, suffer what Canetti calls the “anxiety of command” because his or her rise to political power They have rules and laws of their own that are not derivable from the rules or laws of substance.” Moreover, “a primary occupation of every level of evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution. But as the higher level gets more sophis­ ticated it goes off on purposes of its own” (p. 152). See also the example of a novel residing in the computer or in magnetic domains on a disk or a drum or a tape. The novel “is not composed of magnetic domains nor is it possessed by them. It can reside in a notebook but it is not composed of or possessed by the ink and paper. It can reside in the brain of a programmer, but even there it is neither composed of this brain nor possessed by it.… Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chem­ istry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of the computer’s electronics” (pp. 151–152). Pirsig argues for more independence in levels of patterns than Monod does—and indeed Monod is a social conservative who argues that change is the exception and that bonding, the creation of structure, is the rule; I would call Pirsig a metaphysical liberal, but both suggest that biological patterns mir­ ror the behavior of the levels of life patterns that reside in matter. See pp. 145–148 on the dynamic and static behavior of carbon. 41   Primo Levi (see The Periodic Table [New York, 1984]), a chemist by profession, has written about carbon atoms in much the same ways as Monod, ascribing to them a purpose that is at once observable and mysterious. What Levi describes is carbon’s teleomonic behavior as biographic description, as if the behavior of carbon might be talked about as intentional; it is certainly independent of us. “Now our atom [carbon] is … part of a structure, in an architectural sense; it has become related and tied to five companions so identical with it that only the fiction of the story permits me to distin­ guish them. It is a beautiful ring-shaped structure, an almost regular hexagon, which however is subject to complicated exchanges and balances with the water in which it is dissolved; because by now it is dissolved in water … and this, to remain dissolved, is both the obligation and the privilege of all substances that are destined (I was about to say ‘wish’) to change.… It has entered to form part of a molecule of glucose, just to speak plainly: a fate that is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which is intermediary, which pre­ pared it for its first contact with the animal world, but does not authorize it to take on a higher responsibility: that of becoming part of a proteic edifice.” (pp. 228–229). Like Monod, Levi marvels at what he can only call the self-directed behavior of carbon that gives to it an “almost intelligence,” a leaderless propensity, as it were, to do what it does. 42  On Canetti’s response to the Nazi mob wherein his originality lies as a theorist, see McClelland, p. 32: “Canetti knows that no man is immune from the crowd, but he is unwilling to concede that therefore there is no defense against each of us becoming one of history’s butchers, so he takes the obvious way out of crowd theory’s theoretical impasse … by denying that the leaders of crowds are necessary.… On the power rela­ tionships between crowds and leaders, see McClelland, pp. 296–297: “Far from being a source of power, the crowd for Canetti is part of the scope for power, the field of its



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd23

reflects continuing paranoia and a search for control.43 A leader who comes to speak to a crowd—or for it—may come to think that he or she can shape it and move it in directions he or she desires and, in this sense, form it. From the point of view of the crowd, which wants to come into existence quickly and to maintain itself as a unit … slogans [for a leader] are useful and indeed indispensable. The art of a speaker consists in compressing all his aims into slogans. By hammering them home he [believes he] … helps … keep [a crowd] … in existence. He … [believes he] keeps it alive by a comprehensive command from above. Once he [believes he] has achieved this it scarcely matters what he commands. A speaker can insult and threaten an assemblage of people in the most terrible way and they will still love him.…44

But a leader may, in a very real sense, oppose the life of a crowd, its desire to locate itself where it will, to center itself on itself, which is its real source of power. For Canetti, a leader neither empowers nor authorizes the crowd and the distinction between empowering and authorizing is crucial in revealing the historical context of Canetti’s theorizing.45 A leader may, to be sure, create from an already existing exercise, and this applies no matter how the power which feeds on the crowd itself originated.… For him, the power which comes from crowds, in the received sense of demagogic power, is only a single case of power feeding on the crowd, and it is by no means the most important one.” The “danger of the crowd” is, for Canetti, not what it does or may do, but its ability to command those inside it and thus while he argues for humankind’s desire “to be a crowd,” he also argues against our ability to withstand its irrepressible presence in the world and in ourselves, partially because our solitude is unbearable (see Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 469–470). See also Ben Schomakers’ essay in this volume. For the descent of George Kien, the solitary scholar of Canetti’s 1935 novel, Auto-da-Fe (New York, 1984) into the “mass in his own soul,” see p. 411: “ ‘Mankind’ has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal. In spite of its age it is the youngest of the beasts, the essential creation of the earth, its goal and its future. We know nothing of it; we live still, supposedly as individuals. Sometimes the masses pour over us, one single flood, one ocean, in which each drop is alive, and each drop wants the same thing. But it soon scatters again, and leaves us once more to be ourselves, poor solitary devils” (p. 11). 43   Canetti’s is not a gendered analysis of leadership or indeed of crowds. His idea of the double crowd (of men and women, of the living and the dead, of friend and foe) speaks to the effect that separate, but equal crowds have on one another. See Canetti pp. 63–73, esp. 63: “Whether the two crowds confront each other as rivals in a game, or as a serious threat to each other, the slight, or simply the powerful image of the second crowd, prevents the disintegration of the first.” 44   Canetti, p. 311. 45  Coming to grips conceptually with the ominous consequences of crowds in Europe before and during the Second World War means, for Canetti, to stand against

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crowd, something Canetti calls “a reversal crowd” that exists, while it exists, to liberate those subject to the “stings of command” they alone cannot hope to rid themselves of alone; those in a reversal crowd who suffer the residual consequences of a leader’s words unite to turn on those whom they see as “the originators of all the commands they have borne so long.”46 A command which threatens death and then does not kill leaves the memory of the threat. Some threats miss their target, but often find it and it is these which are never forgotten; anyone who has fled from a threat, or given in to it, will invariably revenge himself when the moment their ferocity everywhere. On how Canetti breaks with traditional crowd theory, which “had effectively become leadership theory,” see McClelland, p. 297: “Canetti shows us how glaringly Hobbesian” traditional crowd theory is. “Hobbes’s own language can be used without parody to express it: the unity of the thing is in its representer, not in the thing represented; the crowd is its leader and has put the sword into his hand; take the sword away and the crowd returns to the atomistic condition which Hobbes calls the State of Nature.” See p. 302 on Canetti’s important break with Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, NY, 2002). We can recognize in Hitler’s Mein Kampf Le Bon’s theoretical assumptions about the defining place of the leader in the formation of the crowd. Canetti is explicitly responding to the assump­ tions in Mein Kampf about the power of the “perfect crowd-man” (McClelland, p. 273), that is, Hitler’s seamless identification with the crowd that gives it a voice (Hitler’s voice) and that sustains it: Hitler’s “self-description is of a man who is a member of the army, pure and simple; a member of no other group, familyless, therefore having no past of his own, wifeless and friendless, therefore having no libidinal ties outside the group; jobless and penniless, therefore classless, and therefore having no place to go outside the group. His only real experience is the experience of the group as a whole, an experience he shares with millions; he has no intervening loyalties which mediate between the collective experience and his own; his very ordinariness, his impersonal­ ity, means that he has shared the experience of the collectivity to the full, with nothing getting in the way.” 46   Canetti, p. 328. This is not, of course, the behavior of “smart mobs”—self-regulat­ ing, purposive crowds—in Howard Rheingold’s sense (see his Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution [Cambridge, MA, 2002], esp. 157–182.) Rheingold does not directly address the consequences of the lack of proximity, the lack of what is for Canetti the necessary somatic binding that creates crowds as “living beings”—that idea seems unintelligible in the networking world that technology has created and allows to flour­ ish—nor does he speak directly to the role distance plays in the creation of groups, though his work implies that the ease and swiftness with which one can enter and exit social networks whose “sense of freedom granted” allows for the creation of asynchro­ nous connections between people. Rheingold does recognize that leaders and coercion do not keep a smart mob together. There is in Rheingold something of the generousminded social analyst who sees in open networks an implicit configuration that works against the tyranny and ideology of mobs. For Rheingold, the emergence of the smart mob represents the signs of a new historical period, whose salient feature is the redis­ tribution of power’s presence in local and freely organized networks. Power in the sense in which it has been described and seen to be present in history has, for Rheingold, disappeared; the smart mob, which represents networked communities, is the answer to the problem of power.



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd25 comes. The man who threatens is always conscious of this and will do everything he can to make such a reversal impossible.47

Moreover, Canetti argues that “a command spreads horizontally. It may originally strike a single individual from above, but, since others like himself stand near him, he immediately passes it on to them. In his fear he moves closer to them and in a second they are all affected by it. First a few of them start to move, then more, and finally all. The instan­ taneous spread of the same command turns them into a [reversal] crowd and soon they are all in flight together.”48 For Canetti, it is only commands which remain isolated that lead to the formation of stings. The threat contained in such commands cannot be completely dissolved. Anyone who has carried out an order as an individual keeps his original resistance as a sting, a hard crystal of resentment. This he can only get rid of by himself giving the same order to some one else. The string is noth­ ing but the hidden replica of the command he once received and could not immediately pass on. Only in this identical form can he free himself from the command.49

What is fascinating is that Canetti’s anatomy of the crowd begins apo­ litically—the crowd for him is an inevitable phenomenon—and his description of humankind in social collectives follows from that. I would characterize Canetti’s political understanding of a leader’s position in a crowd, which can create different species of crowds, as Virgilian, though Canetti is clearly more fearful of a leader’s charisma than Virgil is.50 Here is Virgil’s description of the salutary appearance   Canetti, p. 308.   Canetti, p. 310. 49   Canetti, pp. 310–11 (italics his). 50   Canetti’s aim in severing the crowd’s ontological dependence on a leader antici­ pates the idea of modern social networks. On the dynamics of collective identities in modern crowd theory, see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, 2005). In Laclau’s vocabulary, networks are partial, constituted by a temporary position, and function with respect to their horizon of purpose which gives to them, as they are constituted by their position, a universality. See Laclau, esp. pp. 117–118: “While social logics consist in rule-following, political logics are related to the institution of the social. Such an institution, however … is not an arbitrary fiat but proceeds out of social demands and is, in that sense, inherent to any process of social change. This change … takes place through the variable articulation of equivalence and difference, and the equivalential moment presupposes the constitution of a global political subject bring­ ing together a plurality of social demands. This in turn involves … the construction of internal frontiers and the identification of an institutionalized ‘other’. Whenever we have this combination of structural moments, whatever the ideological or social 47 48

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of a leader and the implicit faith Virgil extends to a leader’s restorative social power. Just as, all too often some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight, they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion. So the crash of the beakers all fell silent once their Father [Neptune], Gazing over his realm under clear skies, flicks his horses, Giving them free rein, and his eager chariot flies.51

For Virgil, a calmed (“stock-still”) and attentive (“ears alert”) crowd, once “slaves” to destructive passion, is the immediate consequence of the remarkable man, likened to a god.52 This view of leaders as the

contents of the political movement in question, we have populism of one sort or another.” Laclau theorizes the construction of collective identities without respect to the content according to which they act in the world, and he theorizes a non-hegem­ onic theory of crowds that does not assume that the category of “people” is a ground; rather the category is, for him, a horizon and comes to be constituted in non-hegem­ onic ways. See p. 226: “History cannot be conceived therefore as an infinite advance towards an ultimate aim. History is rather a discontinuous succession of hegemonic formations that cannot be ordered by a script transcending their contingent historicity. ‘Peoples’ are real social formations, but they resist inscription into any kind of Hegelian teleology.” See pp. 73–74 on the ways the “people” as a signifier is constituted as a dis­ cursive category and how that category describes real social organization and social change because the “people” become the horizon for collective identities. On the idea of social demands as both requests and claims, see p. 73. 51  Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (London, 2006), 1.174–84. Here is the Latin text (P. Vergili Maronis, Aeneidos 1, Opera [Oxford, 1900], 148–156): ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est seditio saevitque animis ignobile vulgus; iamque faces and saxa volant, furor arma ministrat; tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem conspexere, silent arrectisquie auribus astant; ille regit dictis ammos et pectora mulcet: sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam prospiciens genitor caeloque invectus apeto flectit equos curruque volans dat lora secundo.  For Virgil, the furor of a furious crowd reflects psychological derangement that turns a mob’s public behavior into more than mere social disorder. The word furor is used earlier in book 1 to describe the place where Aeolus’ winds are born (“Aeolia, breeding-ground of storms / their home swarming with raging gusts from the South” [Fagles 62, which translates “loca feta furentibus Austris” (the hatching place of the raving south winds), suggesting that these winds were born where a rival creation, 52



canetti’s “biology” of the crowd27

divinely sanctioned and self-mastered civic force reflects part of our idealist (perhaps naïve) political inheritance from the Romans. It does not, of course, reflect, except in its idealization of the leader, whose self-sufficient presence makes it possible for his words to recreate social order, any of the social negotiations through political para­ bles  that patrician taming could take.53 Presence precedes words in perhaps an anti-creation, an anti-Roman creation, occurred]). It is these winds, which could “blow the world away” (Fagles 71), that Juno would use to destroy the Trojan fleet, destined to found Rome and destroy Carthage, her city; Juno’s “relentless rage” at the Trojans (Fagles 5, which translates the Latin ira) in part reflects her gall, as the sister and wife of Jove, at being bested by Minerva, Jove’s daughter, who was able to burn the Argive fleet, sweep Ajax up in the cyclone and impale him on a crag, while she is fated to wage unsuccessfully war against the Trojans year after year. Juno’s ire is personal as well as metaphysical. While ira implies anger that has, for Juno at least, world-historical justification—ire is not madness—furor implies a frenzy that over­ whelms the mind, the natural seat of civic values. Furor in Virgil reflects derangement of nature, including some divine natures, as well as potentially all human nature. The presence of the civic man as the self-mastered man, calming the rebellious—selfmastery as the defining characteristic of a god—is analogous to Neptune’s calming the waves he rules as a god; indeed neptune’s horses, governed by his civic virtue, can be given free rein because they, like a calmed crowd, are not subject to their ani­ mal, to their less than civic, natures. What is reflected here is Virgil’s view that nature itself, including human nature, has been, or can be, enfolded within Roman selfmanagement which has imperial consequences. For a history of Rome from its found­ ing to the time of Augustus that Anchises shows Aeneas in the underworld as the his­ tory of great men taming enemies and rousing the people to great things, see VI. 936– 40: “And after him comes Tullus / disrupting his country’s peace to rouse a stagnant people, / armies stale to the taste of triumph, back to war again. / And just behind him, Ancus, full of the old bravado, / even now too swayed by the breeze of public favor” (“cui deinde subibit / otia qui rumpet patriae residesque movebit / Tullus in arma viros et iam desueta triumphis / agmina. Quem iuxta sequitur lactantior Ancus/ nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris” [812–16]). Indeed Rome’s imperial (imperialist) program is spoken of without irony in terms of the fortunate subjugations of the masses (981–84): “But you, Roman, remember, rule with all our power / the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts: / to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, / to spare the defeated, break the proud in war” (“tu regere imperio populus, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” [851–52]). On Marcellus, see 989: “he will steady the Roman state when rocked by chaos” (“hic rem Romanam magno turbante tumultu / sistet” [857–58]). The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Alan Mandelbaum (New York, 1981) renders “turbante tumultu” as “great mutiny” (1144), which has an appropriately civic register. 53   See, for example, Livy, The Early History of Rome, bks. 1–4, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (London, 1960), pp. 141–142, for the fable of the Belly and the Limbs that Menenious Agrippa used—he “was a good speaker, and the commons liked him as he was one of themselves”—to “mollify” the “anger of the populace against the governing class.” See McClelland, p. 48: “Something had to be done to restore the harmony of the state, and the Senatorial party chose Menenious Agrippa, a plebeian, to parley with the people… [he explained] that if the members tried to subdue the belly by ­starvation, the whole body wasted away to nothing. The belly has no mean service to perform, for it nourishes the members by sending blood back through the veins, and upon this

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Virgil in a kind of “spectacular theatre.” Virgil’s view of the effects of power reflects a triumphalist Augustan ideology that leaves crowds as the objects their leaders see from a distance, objects that under­ stand  immediately (intuitively, one wants to say) the social force— the virtue—to which they will yield. Virgil makes no distinction between a powerful leader and the person or god authorizing the “rab­ ble” to enfold itself in harmonious order. His view of the mob shares Tacitus’ idea of the state as a place of political theatre, though in Virgil those participating in “spectacular power” are not at the limen of polit­ ical life.54 IV In this example from Virgil, the leader is embodied authority. He can calm and renew; he can create and recreate. But the book of Exodus offers a model for imaging a crowd that wants to demonstrate how it continues to be a crowd despite its leader, but not despite the authority that has empowered him, authority to which the leader consciously defers, refusing to usurp authority’s foundational presence. This is an example that illustrates the relationship between power and authority that distinguishes the leader, who speaks on behalf of a crowd to the source that empowers him, on the one hand, from the source that authorizes a crowd, a source embodied in some way, perhaps in its most radical form, only as sheer voice. The consequence implicit in this example is that the crowd as a collective is given, if you will, to its authorizing source and not to a leader whose behavior may for a while change it into his ideological instru­ ment or indeed his ideological enemy, in both cases, a mob. I offer the crowd model from Exodus, an example of the distinction between

blood our life and our health depend. This rather confused piece of biology convinced the people that the governing class was not useless.” See McClelland’s summary, p. 46: “Livy’s account of Roman history up to the sack of the city by the Goths is a frank account of class war between the plebs and the patricians. The patricians embody the stoical virtues of constancy and self-restraint while the plebs always threaten to turn into a mob if their desires are thwarted.” 54   See McClelland’s summary, pp. 50–54. See esp. p. 54: “There is no trace in Tacitus of the Polybian balance between political forces which Livy’s account of the struggles between plebs and patricians could not conceal. The Roman people [in Tacitus] no longer have a part in the making of their history; they no longer compete with the patricians on the equal and sometimes more than equal terms of the republic.”



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power and authority, where the leader is merely, in ontological terms, an epiphenomenon, as a model that is as available in Western tradition as the Virgilian, or indeed its Canettian anti-Virgilian model, is. We should note that in locating the source that generates as well as sustains a crowd in somatic elements, Canetti displaces the crowd’s authority from god to gene, a fascinating move. I suspect that for Canetti a “speaking god,” should he be seen, becomes a leader—a demagogue— though Exodus conceives of a divine authority refusing to appear, or to appear in deflecting, indeed disappointing, ways, to those addressed. The God of Exodus works against, indeed legislates against, His own idolatry, the consequence of His being seen. The revelation at Sinai illustrates how an authority does not become a visible presence and, in this way, lets us refigure the relationship between leader and authority that Canetti’s historical reality could not allow him to do. Moses in Exodus does not become a demagogue. In Exodus 19, the beginning of the Children of Israel is not described in ways that entail responses to a leader’s “sting of power.” Exodus 19 does not describe the reversal crowd in dynamic throes with its leader—the Children of Israel do not become children. Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all that the Lord has commanded. All the people answered as one, saying, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!” And Moses brought back the people’s words to the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, “I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.”55

The crowd here is multilayered after the manner of a hierarchy, though loosely so: the people, the elders of the people, Moses, and God. God speaks to Moses in 19.3–6 about Himself as He Who brought the Children of Israel out of Egypt, commanding Moses to tell the Israelites what He did for them. This is in fact the subject of the first communi­ cation between God and Moses. The Ten Commandments are not given in 19.3–6 nor indeed are any other commandments given, only the terms of a covenant that entails recognition of God’s action and the promise that the Children of Israel, if they live according to that recog­ nition, will be His “treasured possession among all the people” (19.5).

 Exodus 19. 7–9. All references to Exodus are from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, The New Jewish Publication Society Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia / Jerusalem, 1985). 55

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What occurs in 19.3–6 between God and Moses and what occurs in 19.7–9 and in subsequent communication between Moses and God on Mt. Sinai and in the Tent of Meeting—there are numerous ascents up to and descents down from Mt. Sinai on Moses’ part, as well as descents down Mt. Sinai and then down to the Tent of Meeting on God’s part— reflect continually repeating clarifications from God, clarifications about His nature as God, about what His divinity entails for His chil­ dren, about who He is taking as His children and His expectations of them, as well as clarifications about what Moses understands and will do. Human laws fall out from the revelation of God’s nature, laws which create a human community—a polity—that establishes and reestablishes itself on the authority of God, though He may divide up and pass the administration of His presence to human power struc­ tures. What is established is a nation whose author encourages free assent to authority itself. Requests for contact between the Children of Israel and God in 19.7–9, for seeing God first-hand—for mystical connection—become only “seeing words.” This reflects the blessedly qualifying contact God seems to want at Mt. Sinai so that what is enacted on that mountain, in moving down the mountain, at its base, and for those ascending it— not everyone is permitted to ascend—is the “revelation of the human being in larger range and strength.”56 The revelation at Sinai, the moment when authority through a leader constitutes a people, is nar­ rated in deconstructing ways. What the desire for closeness in purely human terms wants, and what closeness in purely divine terms estab­ lishes, are important distances between participants; the people want to see God (seeing is privileged for them) and God speaks ideas that can only be imagined, metaphors that taken together confound.57

  See Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York, 2001), p. 264 (italics hers). A “new consciousness is born in this revelation; the Israelites endure an initiation that ensures them against the extremities of history: God comes at Sinai, so that the human may come fully into its own” (p. 264). 57  With respect to metaphors that confound, see Exodus 19.4 (“You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me”). The image of eagles’ wings “engenders in the people a sense of their own lightness. It deflates their grandiosity; and evokes a relation to God, in which their kavod, their weighti­ ness, becomes insignificant.” The image “… achieves the uncanny” in which “past iden­ tities are swept up in a rush of God’s wings. History is driven entirely by God’s motion. The human reality; the gravity of personal experience, is absorbed into that surge.” But “such a consciousness of the unbearable lightness of being … is bearable only for short periods and only within the world of imagination. The metaphor is deployed, 56



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What these distances mean for all the participants, including God, is highly and intentionally nuanced; the covenant depends on it.58 At Mt. Sinai, God reveals himself to Moses as voice concealed, as a voice that, overheard by the Israelites (neither God nor Moses is seen), affirms the identity of the Children of Israel. God speaks the Decalogue (in Hebrew, the “ten words”) and the Israelites accept these words and the others to come (Exodus 21–23); nothing here is literally inscribed on stone. What is narrated in Exodus after 19.7–9 about the relation­ ship between authority and power is a surprising and theologically important reversal of positions: Moses becomes not simply a function­ ary of the Lord, His spokesman to the people, or an intermediary, the people’s spokesman, but a leader who communes with God in “the midst of a cloud.” The implication is that Moses will return empowered by divine authority. At Exodus 24, Aaron and two others, Nadab and Abihu, including seventy elders of Israel, who are an unnamed subset of the people—the relationship between named leaders and unnamed others is repeated as a model of the social community (24.1–2, 9)—ascend the mountain with Moses. The people remain below offering sacrifices to God that Moses, before he ascends, using the blood of the animals sacrificed, anoints. Moses is here distributing laterally and in anticipation of his position on his mountain (“above” the people), part of the offerings to God that were themselves “ascending Mt. Sinai.” Moses’ anointing the Israelites is, in light of 19.7–9, God’s response through Moses to the therefore, to induce in the people a momentary and a partial sense of a transcendent perspective—attuned to ‘what the ear is capable of hearing’ ” (Zornberg, p. 258). 58   See Zornberg pp. 255–268 on the relationship between the children of Israel and authority, that is, the voice of authority that is both “word” and “vision,” as well the people’s oscillation between wanting to see God, a transgressive move, and the fear they have for themselves in actually seeing God (“Face to face with God, they may lose all contact with the reality principle, with a sense of the distinctions and distances that characterize the human world” [p. 262]), and their relationship to the words of authority they hear and the location of those words within them (hearing God’s voice themselves, they will themselves, according to Rambam, become prophets” [see pp. 259–262]). We should note that it is Moses’ father-in-law who urges Moses to “rep­ resent the people before God” (18.19), in this way, as Jethro says, releasing Moses of the unrelenting burdens of power, perhaps from the arrogance of power; Exodus 18.19 already assumes Moses has, by speaking to authority. Exodus 18.19, which is out of chronological order in the text—it should follow as narrative Moses’ decision to leave Aaron and Hur in charge of the people when he ascends Mt. Sinai, which Moses does—shows the ways that power is imagined as negotiating its relationship to author­ ity and establishing hierarchies of command (that is, not claiming for itself authority that belongs to another).

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sacrifice being given Him. Response and acknowledgement occur vir­ tually simultaneously and from “below the mountain.” But as Moses and the others ascend, what occurs is a new hierarchy. At Exodus 24, the zones that initially figure the closeness between authority and those who bring God down from the mountain, zones that implicitly designate how closeness to authority empowers Moses and the others, are refigured a number of times. There is the sugges­ tion, for example, that those who ascend with Moses to a zone of rev­ elation that approaches the place where Moses will finally see God face-to-face, only see Him “from below” (“under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity” [24.10]). Only Moses and Joshua, then, are called to the human place closest to God, but only Moses “sees” Him in a series of complex changes of loca­ tion, a series of locations the people see from the very bottom of Sinai: Moses sees God for six days in the “midst of the cloud,” which is God’s presence on Mt. Sinai; then he is called into God’s presence, which is now a “consuming fire.” The people see Moses being called into the fire; God is both a cloud that hides and elevates, perhaps like the eagles’ wings referred to at 19.4, and as a fire that transmutes. Then Moses sees Him within the cloud for forty days and forty nights. Once Moses descends, a profoundly immediate, as well as mediated, relationship between the people and God is created. This relationship is direct as well as textual, so that he who was closest to God and who saw him face-to-face has ultimately no privileged place with respect to Him except as the “agent of the relationship.”59 Relationships at Exodus 24 that depend on, or that seem to depend on, a geographical hierar­ chy—those at the top closest to God—are confounded; expectations for the division and distribution of power derived from authority—the logic of power—are unsettled, treated in paraodic ways. This has con­ sequences for Moses’ behavior when he sees the Children of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf and when he and God communicate “on the ground” in the Tent of Meeting. We should add that establishing the lines of power that descend from ultimate authority are virtually impossible to sort out: those below hear God—the people see Him, which is hearing Him; they hear Moses reading from what is called the Book of the Covenant, a written document; we are told that God writes the Decalogue and Moses   Zornberg, p. 313 (the phrase is hers).

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brings it, as well as the Book of the Covenant, down the mountain (which the people see) and then reads both the Decalogue and the Book of the Covenant. The phrase “record of the covenant” (24.7) is, in one thread in Rabbinic tradition, taken to mean a scroll or stone inscription containing “a narrative that covers the history of the world from Creation to the present moment,”60 so that Moses is said to be reading at Sinai in “preparation for the giving of the Torah.”61 That rev­ elation occurs, and is recorded in Exodus as occurring, in a moment of “rich undecidability,”62 when the people commit themselves to obeying what they have not yet considered, but only heard: “We will do and listen” (24.7 in the most literal translation). The response of the people to authority is, I would argue, from an ordinary point of view that is crucial to understanding how authority and power are configured in the story of the revelation at Mt. Sinai (and thus in Judaism), altogether surprising. Having heard the Decalogue and the Book of the Covenant that Moses declaims, the Israelites proclaim that they will obey what they have heard and only then consider what they have agreed to do. This confounding of the natural order in which one accepts something—one usually decides if one will do what one has heard after one has considered it—reflects, in Judaism, the significant feature of the relationship between Israel and God, a relationship that Emmanuel Levinas, for example, reads as con­ necting the ontological (the revelation of Being in this world) and the ethical (the response to the voice of that revelation). For Levinas, the Revelation at Sinai enacts the only possible human response to the Other (to the Altogether-Other or any Other): ethical engagement. “To hear a voice speaking to you is ipso facto to accept obligation towards the one speaking.”63 Obligation precedes the substance of what is said. As Avivah Zornberg puts it, “… sensitivity to the voice, to the ‘expression’ of the Other, is the essential work of Sinai.”64 The relation­ ship between doing first and considering second puts the people in a relationship with authority that an intermediary like Moses, even as a

  Zornberg, p. 292 (capitalization hers).   Zornberg, p. 302. 62   Zornberg, p. 313. 63   See Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington, 1990), p. 48. 64   Zornberg, p. 309. 60 61

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figure of power called to see God face-to-face and then to bring His words to Israel, cannot come between.65 There are, to be sure, disputes within Rabbinic tradition as to what, and how much, was said and heard at Sinai and how much was written down and declaimed—and when. But that only reflects that what is being confounded in the text of Exodus—as well as established there— are the modes by which authority reveals itself as heard, written, declaimed, and then codified. The point is that God, with respect to His children, is glancing at them, confounding a potentially idola­ trous  relationship between Himself and His people that would unit authority and power in a physical presence that makes no room for internalization.66 Moses can, of course, chastise the Israelites when their direct cove­ nantal relationship with authority is betrayed. Thus, when God sees the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf, He retreats. That retreat has dimensions of anger at being betrayed (He has been displaced by another god, an older god) and disappointment grounded on compas­ sion for the panic His communion with Moses “in private” occasioned. Indeed, God’s writing the words of the covenant for Moses after He spoke them for forty days suggests a certain compassionate awareness imagined in Exodus for the memorial limitations of Moses, the agent of God’s children. The written covenant on stone mediates between God’s direct voice to Moses and His children’s having overheard it. God’s complex retreat, complex psychologically and in Talmudic exegesis of this portion of Exodus—God tells Moses that he (Moses) is responsible for the “sin” of the Israelites, that is, their retreat from Him—opens the space for the creation of Moses as leader and as, which is surprising and theologically important in Judaism, the media­ tor of God’s continuing explicable communication with His people. The particular space created by God’s refusal of His people when He sees their refusal of Him reconfigures the power-to-authority   See Levinas, p. 48: “Consciousness is the urgency of a destination leading to the other person and not an eternal return self.… the ‘we will do’ does not exclude the ‘we will hear’. Prior fidelity is not a naïvete—everything in it can and must become speech and book calling forth discussions.” 66   See Zornberg, p. 410, on the nature of idolatry: “These are the two faces of idola­ try—infatuation with the object, rejection of the object. In one narrative, God’s antag­ onist is everything that is received from culture and from others; indeed, this may include large parts of the self that have been formed by the residues of the past. In the other narrative, idolatry is represented by a restless mania which constantly seeks ‘like a hungry man for new object-cathexes.’ ” 65



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relationship—seeing implies understanding and perhaps forgive­ ness.  Indeed, God’s rebuke of the people, whom He has led out of Egypt, a rebuke addressed to Moses, has about it a certain face-saving narcissism. The Lord spoke to Moses, “Hurry down, for your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have acted basely. They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I enjoyed upon them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” (32.7, italics mine)

God here expresses, in Canetti’s terms, a certain anxiety of command. In Moses’ absence, the crowd wants to sustain itself with explicable, projected authority. It wants God or the presence of God’s agent, Moses, always there to bind them together. The Israelites at this moment create authority rather than the other way around. Out of fear the Israelites refuse a God who works against His own tyranny; the people—the crowd—is unable to internalize the presence of its divine source, creating instead a fixed and visible authority that makes the worshiper abject. Vision triumphs over “words overheard.” The written covenant has not yet arrived, a fixed object that requires adjudication, an entangling object of words the worshiper hears as he reads, dupli­ cating the revelation at Mt. Sinai in ways that forestall transgressive moves toward vision and idol worship—transgressive moves towards reification. Listen to Moses’ stand before God, a kind of standing up to Him which theorizes, or rather theorizes anew, the Exodus for God Himself and implicitly for the Children of Israel. Moses calls out God’s nature to God Himself. He repositions God to God. It is Moses who refuses the idolatry of the Children of Israel, refusing their panic at God’s retreat, which he has not personally experienced. Moses insists on the revelation, a new world. But Moses implored the Lord, his God, saying, “Let not Your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against Your people, whom You delivered from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand. Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that He delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.’ Turn from Your blazing anger, and renounce the plan to punish Your people. Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, how You swore to them by Your Self and said to them: ‘I will make your offspring as numer­ ous as the stars of heaven, and I will give to your offspring this whole land of which I spoke, to possess forever.’ ” And the Lord renounced the

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leonard michael koff punishment He had planned to bring upon His people. (32.11–14, italics mine)67

What Moses says (“Let not Your anger”) gives the Israelites back to God who, in His anger, gave them away. But the reason Moses adduces for encouraging God to take back His children is made as an appeal to God’s “self,” an appeal to ego. He, Moses says, referring to God in the third person in the voice of God’s putative Egyptian interlocutors, exhibited “great power” and a “mighty hand” when He brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and other people will judge Him poorly for His abandonment of them: Moses asks God, as we would put it, what will the Egyptians say? Moses then enumerates the Hebrew patriarchs who, individually, chose Him over other gods: this God does not compel. Nonetheless, as Moses implies, this God can forget His promises, which is fascinating theologically because it opens the divine to human reminders, human presence, human prayer. And in reminding God of His promises, Moses is affirming the covenant with God at the very moment he and God participate in it. As a model for an idea of power and participation in power in the context of the Ancient Near East, the revelation at Sinai is groundbreaking—radical and radicalizing. It gives to the crowd a mode of ascent to authority because power itself makes that possible. Moreover, when Moses sees that the people have built the Golden Calf, he shatters the tablets God has written. In this one moment, Moses performs God’s anger in a god-like way, but not to wrest power from Him. After having mollified God, Moses’ anger is God-affirming. Power relations between God and Moses have, of course, shifted, but the shift does not result in the overthrow of authority; there is no rebel­ lion here between heaven and earth. God now comes to Moses in the 67   See Zornberg, p. 414, on Talmudic readings of 32.11–14: “ ‘R. Abbahu said: If this were not written in the text, it would be impossible to say such a thing. This teaches that Moses seized hold of the Holy One blessed be He, like a man who seizes his fellow by his garment and said before Him: Sovereign of the Universe, I will not let You go until You forgive and pardon them.’ In commonsense terms, it is obvious that the text does not explicitly state that Moses seized hold of God.” Rather “the midrashic project … invites us to read again, to open our ears to the complex tonalities of God’s speech.… The midrashic rhetoric attributes to God a subconscious, an alternative nar­ rative. God responds to an unvoiced protest on the part of Moses. Implicitly, He invites him to persist in his Ancient Mariner narrative passion: ‘Do not let Me be … Only your version of the narrative can save them, can save our shared history …’ Unconscious speaks to unconscious, as a certain kind of forgetting—Freud’s ‘evenly suspended attention’—supersedes the attempt to fix specific things in memory.”



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Tent of Meeting that Moses pitches at some distance—a telling dis­ tance, as we’ll see (power relations have not ended)—from the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the Tent, all the people would rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after Moses until he had entered the Tent. And when Moses entered the Tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the Tent, while He spoke with Moses. When all the people saw the pillar of cloud poised at the entrance of the Tent, all the people would rise and bow low, each at the entrance of his tent. The Lord would peak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another. And he would then return to the camp; but his attendant, Joshua son of Nun, a youth, would not stir out of the Tent. (33.8–11)

Although God descends the mountain and Moses communicates with Him on level ground, the duplicated distance between authority and (persons of) power, now made lateral rather than verticle, is preserved. Joshua remains in the Tent of Meeting perhaps because he will replace Moses as Israelite mediator; the attendees stand at the entrance of the tent and then bow low. Distance is the marker of covenantal closeness because it permits the oscillation forward and back (or up and down) among participants, including God Himself; indeed oscillation, and the possibilities for oscillation, make a covenant among all participants possible. Neither on or at Sinai, nor in or outside the Tent of Meeting, is a fixed position. The desire for visible presence and the anxieties about the openness of words remain: anxiety about absence, anxiety about words that only let us speak metaphors, that let us imagine them, anxiety about words that are declaimed, words inscribed on objects that are finally not idolatrous objects at all. These are the necessary configurations of a covenant intended to loosen structures that tyran­ nize. Nothing that is human is ever taken from the Children of Israel or from Moses at the moments (plural) of revelation. We should add a few refining points here: although Moses commu­ nicates with God in a cloud on Mt. Sinai (24.15–18), and although Moses descends with the second set of tablets, his face radiant “since he had spoken with Him”—that radiance creating a certain distance between him and the people (“and they shrank from coming near him” [34.30])—Moses is only said to see God when He is writing the second set of tablets on the stones Moses brings to Him as He passes by. This moment reads as if Moses only sees God’s back: “and as My Presence passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with My hand until I have passed” (33.22). God is being careful here to not cre­ ate any possibility that Moses will claim a superior position among the

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Israelites because he has seen the face of God. Although God and Moses speak as friends in the Tent of Meeting, that intimacy does not translate into reversals—intimacy does not become the foundation for revolution, where Moses displaces authority. Whenever Moses “went in before the Lord to speak with Him,” he removed the veil and that signified direct communication with God. and when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been com­ manded, the Israelites would see how radiant the skin of Moses’ face was. Moses would then put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with Him. (34.34–35)

Moses seems to remove the veil only to show the people that God com­ municated with him. Moses does not make God’s radiance his own; he does not usurp the radiance he displays. Moses works against his being made a god. Moreover, as part of the second giving of the Decalogue, God pro­ claims His name, which amounts to an enumeration of His attributes and behaviors (34.4–7), a proclamation of His explicable, accessible nature: God is a conjunction of ethical qualities, not a mystic presence into which the people disappear as people. When He names His nature, God reveals Himself in ways we can know, and the Israelites see Him in a species of mysticism that only brings them closer to God’s ethical presence among them. God here is making Himself accessible—expli­ cable—by degrees, continuing to move toward His lateral presence among the Israelites. It is only when God reveals His own nature, when He comes closer to the Israelites conceptually, that Moses asks Him to “go in our midst” (34.9), which He does in the Tent of Meeting. If Virgil’s Aeneid figures the leader as the authorizing presence before a crowd he commands so that authority and power exist in one person, Exodus figures the leader as the mediator of authority in the interests of both authority and the crowd. Exodus anatomizes the changing structures of authority and power, which reveal how a leader assumes command in ways that give the people the space they require— the space authority requires for them—to constitute themselves as a people. Exodus imagines the literal, hence conceptual, space for a crowd to come into being without the sting of command, without the embodied fear that creates a collective whose stand against authority defines it in dependent and hostile configurations. Renewing a cove­ nant lets people participate in a social contract that creates them freely. The example of power displaced in Exodus thus implicitly repre­ sents an idea of a crowd that interrogates the notion of the helpless



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crowd, one that, determined somatically, as Canetti suggests (who has a sense of the crowd as a potentially dangerous social formation), ensures that those of us who may be “in it,” as well as those of us who may observe it—and theorize it—not able to do anything about its coming into being or about its consequences: its madness, on the one hand, or its capacity to do good—to be a beneficial, or simply comfort­ ing, formation, on the other. Making and renewing a covenant lets people participate collectively in a social construct, mobile, to be sure, usually discontinuous, though always possible as a configuration that defines itself as a collective, sometimes a responsible collective. Its only ideology, as Canetti would say, is its wanting to be born.

The Rage of Heraclitus: Reflections on the Difficult Relationship between the Philosopher and the Masses Ben Schomakers The relationship between the masses and the philosopher has, at least in the West, been strained from its beginning; indeed the tension at times has been marked by forthright hatred—in both directions. In the fifth Century BCE, a philosopher, Socrates, was put to death. In the early fifth Century CE, a mob, encouraged to do so by the Christian bishop, Cyril, publicly lynched the beautiful female Neoplatonist philosopher, Hypatia.1 Conversely, aggression towards the masses is a common phenomenon among philosophers. Usually aggression does not manifest itself in a physical form, though some philosophers, or rather would-be philosophers, assassinated ideologically-driven leaders or representatives of the masses. More often, however, the aggression transformed itself into philosophical disdain for the masses, in one case symbolic provocation. The Cynic, Diogenes, showed his disrespect for the mass by masturbating in public.2 One of the most notorious ancient philosophical deriders is Heraclitus, an archetype in this respect, not only because he has been the first Greek philosopher turning his aversion of the masses into a philosophical theme, but also because the dynamics of his attitude towards them seem to encapsulate emblematically what is possibly the defining aspect of this attitude. Looking closely at Heraclitus, who in a sarcastic verse was called a mob-hater, or a mob-slanderer,3 may help us understand the nature of philosophical disdain for the masses, the subject of this essay.

1   For the circumstances of her death, see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 83–100. 2   Diogeni Laertii vitae philosophorum, ed. Miroslav Marcovich, bks. 1–10 (Stuttgart, 1999), 6.69, hereafter referred to as DL. 3  An ochloloidoros, in a verse by Timon quoted by DL 9.6.

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Heraclitus, who lived in the second half of the sixth century BCE, wrote a large number of short aphorisms that together may have once constituted a book. These aphorisms are not fragments of a philosophical system that we are not able now to piece together; rather they reflect a common theme: having “true insight”—Heraclitus’ true insight—into the nature of reality and “being blind,” as the masses (the dèmos or the hoi polloi) are, to that same reality. Heraclitus characterizes the masses as passive, as unaware, as living in a world of their own but dreaming that they have found reality,4 condemning those who do not agree with them, those who are looking for a more adequate knowledge of reality.5 Heraclitus is disdainful of those who would not like to be drawn into the circle of “those who know.” Who would not like to be drawn into such a circle? Apparently not everyone. Although certain modern philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger (or perhaps their admirers), have put Heraclitus in the center of their own thought and created virtually a cult of Heraclitus in which he appears as an inspired prophet of (perhaps pre-metaphysical) truth, my difficulty with several aspects of Heraclitus’ thought does not begin with the judgment of others. Rather it begins with certain questions. What indeed is the nature of philosophical disdain, the natural tension within the philosopher—within the reflective individual, if you will—with disdain for the masses? What stirs such disdain? The Rage of the Masses Understanding what may be wrong with a philosopher’s disdain for the masses presupposes understanding the logic of that disdain: its 4  In referring to the fragments of Heraclitus I use the universally accepted numbering introduced by Hermann Diels, revised by Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1934), hereafter referred to as DK. Their edition of the Greek text is, as they were fully aware, far from adequate. I have, therefore, added within brackets references to the best edition to date: Miroslav Marcovich, Heraclitus: Greek Text with a Short Commentary (Merida, 1967), hereafter referred to as M; it has a recent strong competitor in Serge Mouraviev, Heraclitea: Édition critique complète des témoignages sur la vie et l’oeuvre d’Héraclite d’Éphèse (2006). For my English reader, I give the roman ciphers of Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, UK, 1979). Texts of Heraclitus condemning the lack of insight of the mass include DK B1 (M1, K I), DK B2 (M23b, K III), DK B17 (M3, K IV), DK B19 (M1g, K XVII), DK B34 (M2, K II), DK 56 (M21, K XXII); sleep and dream texts are found in DK B1 (M1, K I), DK B21 (M49, K LXXXIX), DK B26 (M48, K XC), DK B73 (M1h1, K V), DK B75 (M1h2, K XCI), DK B89 (M24, K VI), DK B104 (M101, K LIX). 5   For example, DK B97 (M22, K LXI), DK B121 (M105, K LXIV).



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origin and what in particular accounts for Heraclitus’ “cantankerousness,” if I can put it this way. One possible explanation sees philosophical disdain not so much as endogenous to the philosopher as a response to the behaviour and the nature of the masses themselves. Disdain doesn’t arise spontaneously and may be triggered by attitudes towards the philosopher. In this view, the philosopher’s disdain reflects psychological and perhaps moral vengeance with respect to the masses: I dislike you because you treat me badly. Nowadays the masses simply ignore philosophers. They are no longer considered persons whom the masses feel coerced to dislike. Rather, philosophers can be regarded with indifference: let them live in their irrelevance, building castles in the air, as a Dutch EU commissioner recently said—he was, curiously enough, speaking for the masses—on the occasion of his receiving the first copy of the Dutch translation of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. This “proclamation of philosophy’s irrelevance” is somewhat puzzling and, in a way more painful, because the Dutch EU commissioner holds an academic degree in philosophy. It was Plato, however, who in anatomizing the nature of the masses, pinpoints why they object to the philosopher. In his Republic Plato describes that fantastic subterranean scene in which prisoners shackled to the walls of the cave cannot move their heads and must see what is in front of them, that is, the projected shadows of Being, and hear the sounds and shrieks produced by their fellow prisoners.6 This is their reality. And if by some force, whose nature is not made clear, or by dint of an inner impulse,7 an individual manages to rid himself of his bonds and ascend to the source of the light, escaping the cave and enjoying for a while the sight of what Plato describes as “true being,” but then having to return to the cave because living in “true being” is impossible for mortals, he will be received by the prisoners with amazement as well as aggression: Wouldn’t they laugh at him and mock him, and whisper about him that on ascending he must have destroyed his eyes and state that it is not worthwhile to attempt to climb up, and even that if he would try to set them free and lead them up, in that case, if it were possible to get him in their hands and kill him, wouldn’t they kill him?8 6   Platonis Rempublicam, recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit, S.R. Slings (Oxford, 2003), 514A–515C, hereafter referred to as Republic. 7   Republic 515C. 8   Republic 517A.

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The real Socrates was killed by his fellow cave dwellers because they could not—did not—want to receive him. For Plato, the man who is capable of escaping the cave stands for a philosopher in his natural dedication to insight of a kind that surpasses the passive confrontation with reality as it appears to be; the philosopher looks beyond the appearance of things. In this respect, the philosopher is alien to the masses since he aspires to know, perhaps even to possess, an insight into Being. According to Plato, a philosopher attempts to guide the denizens of the cave to ascend with him and share his insight. About the exact nature of the masses’ resistance to the philosopher’s attempts to guide them, Plato is not explicit. To be sure, people alien to their social environment, people who distrust it, are naturally hostile to those who seem strange or unfamiliar or claim to be superior. Interacting with persons we don’t understand puts us in tense situations; we naturally come to distrust such persons, perhaps even fear them. Socrates expressly asks those who remained in the cave to follow him,9 to abandon what is familiar and proper to them, to dedicate themselves to something that is unfamiliar, of which the meaning and value, from their perspective in the cave, seems dubious. They are invited, perhaps urged to undertake something of which they do not recognize the prospects; naturally they protest against coercion that is essentially of a moral kind, for the force philosophers apply is that of persuasion, comprehension, and appeals to the fundamental values and structures of humankind. A philosopher beckons the masses to accompany him to a realm where humans ought to spend time and attention, but which the masses don’t want to enter. Thus blaming, ridiculing, perhaps ostracizing, exiling or, if circumstances permit, literally killing the philosopher may provide the masses with a means for silencing their unhappy conscience. Philosophers have something to offer of which the rejection may be at variance with man’s nature and natural ethics. If this is true, the masses’ disdain for the philosopher is at least partly due to a psychological mechanism: exteriorizing an inner conflict and directing the aggression provoked inwardly towards an exterior object. The suffering of Socrates, an archetype for the philosopher, is due to the tension of the repressed awareness that the masses don’t live up to a “human standard.”  See Republic 516C–517A. Cf. Republic 520AB.

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Perhaps, of course, the dynamics of the masses’ stance against the philosopher has nothing to do with their putative bad conscience. For it is, I think, a different logic to take the masses’ aggression toward the philosopher as an expression of the need for identity and selfdefinition. The masses may not know exactly what self-definition is; they may not have positive access to themselves. And yet the kind of insight philosophy embodies may somehow stand in the way of the masses’ desire to “be themselves.” Perhaps that desire is only present in a confused state before a confrontation with philosophy forces the masses to ask what the means, or perhaps the masses’ desire for fulfilment assumes shape in the very processes of confrontation. Perhaps the masses disdain philosophers because they simply cannot deal with the questions and suggestions the philosopher poses. The masses may simply need unfortunately to rid the philosopher, in a more or less violent, a more or less literal way, from their purview.10 But this is only the one part of the story. Does a philosopher’s distaste for the masses follow logically and legitimately from the masses’ disdain for the philosopher? Must disdain be answered by disdain? It is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which this may be the case. Hypatia was lynched by a mob of Christians; Socrates was sentenced to the hemlock death after the men of Athens tried him.11 Philosophers may detest the masses, who commit philosophical murders or demonstrate their negative attitude towards philosophers in otherwise excessively militant ways, but an adequate philosophical answer to hostile blows administered by a raging mob is not necessarily that of restraint and sublimation. Plato, for instance, managed to constrain his fury at Socrates’ death, which he cannot but have experienced to the bone. But instead of drawing a sword against the masses and its leaders, he developed a kind of educational program based on what he considered an analysis of the nature of their offensive behaviour. With respect to Heraclitus, it is not easy to determine whether he, spiteful and grudging, was a rejected or derided citizen of his native town, Ephesus.

  See René Girard, Le bouc émissaire (Paris, 1982) on the scapegoat scheme.   For Hypatia, see note 1. Socrates’ trial is, of course, described in Plato’s Apology. See I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (London, 1989), Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato’s Socrates (Oxford, 1994); M.G.J. Beets, Towards the End of Becoming. A Companion to Plato’s Apologia and Crito (Amsterdam, 2001); Beets, Socrates on the Many and the Few. A Companion to Plato’s Politeia, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 2002). 10 11

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Stories seem to point both to respect from his fellow citizens12 and to an unmistakable tension towards him, for how otherwise can we take the following bitter aphorism? The Ephesians deserve to be hanged to the last man and must leave the town to the younger generation, as they expelled the best man among them, Hermodoros, commenting thus: no one must be the best among us; but if one is, let him go elsewhere and be among others.13

There is, of course, no clear indication that Heraclitus himself had been a victim of the masses’ aversion and as far as I can judge from an enormous distance, he doesn’t seem to be objectively justified in his misanthropy. It may well be the case that philosophers rightly feel impelled to dissociate themselves from the masses in the best of circumstances: to  spurn them. And yet one might wonder whether it is really philosophical—worthy of a philosopher—to answer disdain with disdain and turn this response into a central theme of an oeuvre, which is the case with Heraclitus. Here, in a sense, I’m begging the question, for it may be that philosophy essentially consists in gauging and defining the attitude of the individual towards the masses at the risk of limiting philosophy to anthropology. I will argue differently in a moment. But let me say in anticipation that philosophers must pay attention to the masses, or to what they consider to be the masses, an audience after all for the early Greek philosophers, even the pre-eminent audience, because the masses in many cases constituted part of a community to which philosophers themselves belonged; indeed philosophers communicated their texts and insights in public recitations. The Life of Reflection At this point, a brief excursion into a crucial question seems requisite, for in trying to establish whether philosophical disdain for the masses is in any sense to be rejected, it must at least be clear what the nature of philosophy is and who or what a philosopher may be. This is a question   Pro esteem: Heraclitus is said to have been buried at the agora or the market-place or Ephesus, which was a place of honour (DL 9.16); he declined the hereditary crown of kingship offered to him (9.6) and had access to the Ephesian temple of Artemis, where he deposited his book (9.6). 13   DK B121 (M105, K LXIV). 12



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as old as philosophy itself. In this context, then, let me offer a possible origin of philosophy in the individual which serves as a precondition for the philosophical life itself and, in that sense, can be considered a defining criterion of philosophical activity. As for what constitutes the philosophical life, let me suggest this: there exists a propensity to reflection in the individual, a ceaseless process that may not have a particular theme, but whose aim is to question the naive experience of all phenomena, including the individual himself involved in reflection’s relations with phenomena. Reflection can investigate details of reality without rigidly keeping with a certain perspective; it can consider all possible perspectives in order to transcend what it has become acquainted with and, in this way, reach new and more adequate insights. Of course, as reality may be considered to be infinite, and as there is no guarantee that attempting a number of perspectives yields definitive insight, reflection may become an endless activity. The idea of a propensity to philosophize, present in all, though more emphatic in some, occulted or ignored in most, seems to be close to the sphere in which Heraclitus and others were first to think about the philosophical capacities of man. Heraclitus himself was angry with his non-philosophical compatriots, not based on an explicit distinction between himself and the masses, which would leave him happily unhappily isolated with his “philosophical ambitions,” but rather on his belief in the natural philosophical bent in all people and his wanting to draw them into his own philosophical project. Heraclitus, I would argue, felt disappointed by what he thought was the masses’ lack of response. The same missionary attitude, based on ideas of man’s nature, his being perfected through insight and the call of reality to a heightened awareness, is discernable in Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, and in Plato, in spite of the hard lessons reality taught him that not any life can be turned into a philosophical life. As a result, Plato believed that within society intellectual tasks ought to be divided and assigned to those who are capable of performing them. Let me make some comments here. Reflection is not something a thinking person does because others do it. It is not entirely reactive, as it would be, for instance, if based essentially on the negative principle that reality, as we experience it, cannot be right and thus has to be denied and transcended in an act of reflection without an inkling of some alternative being implied. Nor is reflection triggered by either a systematic or casual suspicion. Rather it is triggered by some innate

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unease, by something prompting us, perhaps telling us, perhaps silently teaching us that what we are confronted with in reality is not exactly or fully how things are. Reflection examines reality by attempting to grasp a different perspective on it, by arriving at a more adequate perspective that is by nature provisional. Reflection is set into motion by the presence of a standard of some kind applied to reality, though we may not be consciously taking initiative based on it, for the actual process of reflection is nothing but the attempt to explicate the critical relationship between a standard and reality. I would even argue, still without wanting to determine the idea’s exact status, that those in the spell of reflection are forced to defend reflection as important in itself, as utterly relevant for an adequate comprehension of reality, as well as for fertile communication between people and between people and reality. Heraclitus, for example, finds fault with most of the citizens of Ephesus for the reason that they were living as if their thoughts were private to them and thus neglected what they and their thoughts have in common, that is the account or the report, that is, the logos.14

Obviously Heraclitus thinks his sharp, grumpy, ill-humoured comments are capable of contributing to the welfare of society. Reflection itself has ethical relevance, not merely because it triggers that process of reflection and thus unsettles naive or, in Heraclitus’ words, sleepy or a dreamlike experience of reality, but also because, in as far as it as a process that encompasses possible perspectives on reality and thus the mutual acknowledgments of all elements of reality, represents a kind of ideal of reality, an ideal in the sense that we cannot but engage with it and perhaps even in the sense that it shows how reality ought to be. Reflection functions as a beacon for thinking, for ethical judgments, and for determining the possible meaning of reality. Philosophy is not an academic discipline that we can pay attention to during working hours and happily leave behind on going home, switching off one light and switching on another. Philosophy is rather the effect of a force that is there. Philosophy is a vocation; it regards all aspects of a philosopher’s life and the lives of those he confronts in the light of reflection, turning them into a theme for investigation, creating the feeling that obeying philosophy’s command is the only ethical

  DK B2 (M23b, K III).

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stance philosophy allows. The philosophic stance cannot be at ease in the world, nor can it be righteous if reflection has been refused. And thus the masses accost the philosopher and inevitably create a certain tension between themselves and philosophers; for as soon as the philosopher turns his head to one side, the masses tend to draw him back and again catch him in their spell. It seems that Heraclitus, too, felt, and perhaps suffered from, this tension. This can be deduced not only from the continuous emphasis he puts on the somnambulistic character of the masses, who implicitly praise his ceaseless waking, his utter alertness that seems to gain heroic proportions, and this may have been no light burden on his shoulders. Heraclitus has accepted the natural responsibility of man in contrast to the masses. And indeed we possess his enigmatic utterance, preserved (and probably written and presented) apart from any context: Τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι How can one ever escape the notice of that which never sets?15

If my interpretation of this aphorism, which attracted the particular  interest of Heidegger,16 is correct, Heraclitus here compares the standard that triggers the incessant process of reflection present to his soul with the sun, a natural light. This sun in the soul never sets; it allows Heraclitus neither night nor rest, but summons him perpetually to think. Its presence marks the philosophical identity of Heraclitus as his fate. The Double-Bind To return to the question that occupies us here, namely what may be wrong with the philosophical disdain of the masses of the kind Heraclitus displays, the above remarks on the reflective nature of the philosopher provide, I think, clues to understanding, indeed to appreciating, the origin of disdain in psychological terms. To be sure, a psychological explanation is not expected to hold for all philosophers who manifest a dislike for the masses because it doesn’t get to the essential structure of disdain, philosophical disdain accidental and individual;

  DK B16 (M81, K CXXII).   See Martin Heidegger, Aletheia: Heraklit, Fragment 16 (1943), included in his Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfüllingen, 1978), pp. 249–274. 15 16

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yet it seems, nonetheless, to be applicable, in a large number of instances, to philosophical antipathy for the masses. The explanation I have in mind is that which has sometimes been described by psychologists as the double-bind, the essence of which is that a subject attaches itself to an object that is indispensable, but that also incites the subject’s hate. The subject thus is continuously contradicting itself, trying to rid itself of what is vital to it and the object finds itself locked in an unbearably ambiguous circumstance in which it cannot make out whether it is loved or hated, indeed whether it is expected to stay or to go.17 A double-bind is utterly unhealthy both for the subject and for the object, and it is utterly unphilosophical too. The reason why philosophers tend to get caught in double binds with the masses, but with other objects too, such as women who function as targets of a philosopher’s ambivalence, can be deduced from my tentative description of the reflective life as the natural core of the philosopher. The reflective process, as I’ve suggested, is essentially infinite; it does not arrive at finite insights, but time and again tries to define a standard it probably may never attain. As a consequence, a philosopher who is in the throes of his own philosophical nature and who doesn’t compromise himself by escaping it, has, in a sense, nothing to offer, no insight, no definitive advice, nothing he wholeheartedly defends, not even a displayable identity; and he will be recognized as an evasive and ungraspable individual. One of the rare exceptions seems to have been Socrates who didn’t force himself to adapt and give or sell insights that he might have to withdraw again. Of course, Socrates has his convictions and held steadfastly to his dedication to the reflective life, for him ultimately connected to the “good” as its standard. But a radically lived philosophical life was difficult for him to bear, as it cut him off from normal patterns of communication and exchange and, yes, was perceived as an offence to the masses who felt themselves shunned, beaten about, not taken seriously.18 17   See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago, 1972), pp. 271–277, and Gregory Bateson, D.D. Jackson, J. Haley and J. Weakland, “Toward a theory of schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science 1 (1956), 251–264. 18   See, among many others, Gregory Vlastos, Socrates. Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, 1991); Brickhouse and Smith, Plato’s Socrates; and Brickhouse and Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guide to Plato and the Trial of Socrates (New York / London, 2004); Beets, Towards the End of Becoming; Beets, Socrates on the Many and the Few, as



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But Heraclitus was no Socrates and entrusted only some of his thoughts to papyrus, not unambiguously and not without reservations perhaps, but nevertheless so: he made himself finite and thus brought the process of reflection, infinite by its nature, to some end, showing in the form of aphorisms flashes of it. On the one hand, Heraclitus insis­ tently condemns the masses for not having insight into themselves and for defending and relying on a reality that, in Heraclitus’ eyes, is nothing but reality’s surface. He uses various negative metaphors, most of them appealing and as such persuasive, to show that the masses are absorbed within their own mental or emotional frame, trusting evidence that cannot be trusted, obeying the wrong rules and private laws, hitting on things while not recognizing them and only forming quick impressions, and so on.19 On the other hand, a real Heraclitean doctrine seems absent. Reviewing his aphorisms I found, side by side with the host of polemic texts directed to the masses, intimations and suggestions of profound insights that, however, remain hidden. Many of these summon his audience in a returning refrain to make contact with the common, the ultimate object of insight that is itself not revealed nor described in a philosophically satisfactory way. The consequence is that neither ancient nor modern readers have been capable of forming a solid idea about the possible nature of that essential, enigmatical logos Heraclitus announces he is offering his listeners, or forcing them to heed in his possible book. What does this logos refer to: a spoken or written report, perhaps nothing but his own book, or a governing metaphysical principle, which then cannot be said to have been articulated but only hinted at? Similar uncertainties hold for Heraclitus’ alleged firedoctrine (or is this simply a metaphor?) and that amazingly widely hailed idea that all things are in a perpetual flux, an idea that sounds a bit naïve and is rather a provocation, an idea to think about rather than a substantive tenet. Of course, Heraclitus’ philosophy may have added up to more, and it may be the case that Heraclitus, one of the first authors phrasing philosophy in prose and thus assisting in creating a genre, didn’t want, or didn’t dare, or didn’t know how to deliver insights in a written form

well as Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Princeton, 1989). 19   DK B17 (M3, K IV).

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and felt safer with oral communication, though he doesn’t show particular enthusiasm in this respect either. His written words are signs that indicate places in the soul—a philosophical soul—where precious insights are to be excavated. And yet for the sake of the argument, let me not give Heraclitus the benefit of the doubt and assume that the written remains are in tune with Heraclitus’ philosophical activity and that the state of his thoughts was really rather inchoate, perhaps nuclear, rather than articulate, precise, and committed to a certain perspective. For then, I think, Heraclitus may be discussed as a likely example of a philosophical double-bind with the masses who are an object of possible impossible attachment. Assuming he is in the throes of infinite reflection, Heraclitus needs the masses in order to give an articulate shape to himself. They provoke him to target them, to comment on them, in the form of irritation, criticism, correction, admonition, and advice. The masses provide Heraclitus with an occasion to leave the inner darkness of his reflection and assume the profile of a prophet of insight. As far as the masses are concerned, however, Heraclitus might have remained silent as, to put it bluntly, an aimless philosopher eating out his own dissatisfied heart. If we suppose, empathically, that Heraclitus felt he had to offer the riches of his reflections, he being incapable of digging them up himself, his utterances merely pointing out the place where treasure is to be found, inviting his readers to dig it out,20 then it can be imagined that he relied on the masses and expected something from them. If the masses functioned as a target and provoked him to philosophize in a finite way, they also assisted him in unfolding himself, indeed, to put it dramatically, to saving and liberating himself. For a philosopher, however, by nature disposed to the reflective life, making his thoughts explicit, appearing outside his inner processes is, in a way, an eventual justification of a recondite activity; it shapes social identity, an identity philosophers need. Socrates on trial defended himself by appealing to his social commitment. If these observations are correct, Heraclitus, and those philosophers of whom he can be said to be the archetype, depended rather heavily on the masses for their own thought and for their life. Indeed, Heraclitus may have felt coerced

20   “Desiring and looking for gold they dig up much earth but find little” (DK B22 (M10, K VIII).



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to attack the masses. His aversion is definitely related to the disturbing discrepancy between the ethical standard of reflection and the behaviour of the masses, but it is also unique to Heraclitus whose propensity to philosophize was energized by antipathy and correction rather than, for example, by love or solidarity, which can, of course, function as philosophical themes. Heraclitus thrives on unmasking the naiveté he spied and celebrating his disclosure grimly and triumphantly. Yet there seems to be more to Heraclitus’ hatred. No one can easily stand to be dependent on that which he disdains and for many, not only for proud philosophers assuming the air of prophets with a privileged access to insight and truth, it is difficult to bear the awareness of being dependent. Heraclitus’ anger may be associated with the expectations of intellectual and “personal” salvation which the masses might provide him because they made him philosophize, turning him into one who reveals himself to the world. Again, expectations of this kind will subconsciously create resistance, as proud and self-convinced human beings do not readily accept the idea of external salvation, especially by those whom they regard as their inferiors. Moreover, in the dynamics of this expectation, the masses cannot but let Heraclitus down, for even if they trigger his thoughts, they will stop doing so and force him either to repeat himself ad infinitum or look for an other target or simply fall silent. Thus Heraclitus may have needed the masses in order to think and to be—at least to be socially—dependent on those whom he did not revere. Hatred is natural to him because the masses confront him with a painful paradox of his being. Now if Heraclitus’ disdain for the masses is, if not engendered, then at any rate essentially aggravated and solidified by his double-bind relationship with the masses, such disdain may be regarded as a good reason for being suspicious of Heraclitus’ philosophical stance. Any double-bind relationship seems harmful and unsound, as well as natural and common. It is not the sign of a worthy person to allow emotional motives, originating in dissatisfaction with, and fear for, one’s own impotence, needs, and attachments to determine insights that are presented as philosophical—as objective and necessarily true— if they have a strong moral flavour and at least partly bash others. One can hardly doubt that any double-bind relationship is blatantly at variance with the nature of philosophy, with its reflective thrust and the impulse “never to rest.” For in a double bind, the subject does not require an object as such; rather it has as its object its own relationship within the double bind. Heraclitus concentrates on a single aspect of

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the masses, their lack of insight into the nature of reality, into the wisdom to which he boasts of having access, irrespective of whether the masses really lack insight or whether the type of insight Heraclitus is looking for merits looking for or whether the masses really exist as a collection of people blind to the truth—some do lack insight, but some don’t; it is clear that Heraclitus doesn’t discuss the nature of the masses. Moreover, he doesn’t see or appreciate their presence. He sticks to a single biased perspective that, on the one hand, allows him to speak and indeed show his anger but, on the other, halts the reflective impulse. If Heraclitus’ double-bind relationship with respect to nonphilosophers is perhaps characteristic for all philosophers and if we assume that bad conscience may be veiled and hidden behind words, but that it still never sets, quoting and alluding to Heraclitus,21 we have a clue why philosophers often fall into bitterness or silence or abandon their philosophical lives altogether. Philosophical Indignation The preceding considerations are dependent on denying Heraclitus the benefit of the doubt in respect of his unhappy double-bind relationship with the masses. But what if Heraclitus may legitimately claim this benefit? What if he offers in spoken or written word, or perhaps only in the recondite realm of his own soul, a philosophy in the real sense, not a suggestive collection of thoughts that gain strength and conviction as a result of a polemical stance he takes towards the masses, a philosophy that can stand in its own right and represent a more or less comprehensive positive philosophical take or perhaps a world-view? We will probably never know whether he, already in Antiquity regarded as “the Obscure,” described as puzzling, whose unfathomable texts were in need of a Delian diver,22 articulated a coherent philosophy, nor can we reconstruct it. But if it once had been there, I at any rate lose part of an   DK B16 (M81, K CXXII).  For Heraclitus’ epithet “the Obscure,” see Suda s.v. Heraclitus and Strabo, Geographica 14.1.25. According to a certain Croton, Diogenes Laertius reports, the book of Heraclitus was so difficult (and deep), it needed a Delian diver, one of the besttrained, not to get drowned in it (DL 9.12). The remark is also attributed to Socrates, who on receiving a copy of Heraclitus’ book from the hands of Euripides and being asked for his opinion, answered that that part of the book he understood, he thought excellent, while that part he didn’t understand, he believed to be excellent as well; it only needed a Delian diver (DL 2.22). 21 22



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argument that clarifies my uneasiness with Heraclitus’ anger. For in that case I cannot unqualifiedly claim that Heraclitus’ anger was caused by inner conflict. Let me consider, then, another view, no less serious than the previous. It is at least likely that Heraclitus’ rage, partly natural with him, was triggered not exclusively as an emotional or psychological reaction to the masses, but as a philosophical response to aspects of the behaviour of the masses, experienced by him to be philosophically and ethically unacceptable. For philosophy has a moral dimension, and establishing the difference between reality—the reality of the masses, for instance—and the moral standard implied in philosophy entails offence and indignation, in the same way as the harmony between reality and the moral results in feelings of satisfaction, benevolence, or even love and happiness. If we are capable of abstracting our personal associations from the situations with which we are confronted, we can function as judges of an ethical and objective sort for whom the voice, easy to be overheard, is that of conscience. Philosophy’s moral dimension is implied, first, in the method and the logic of philosophy itself, which does not accept contradictions, which cannot but avoid untruth (which is what is at stake in the infinite reflective process), and which ultimately aims at truth of some kind. Moreover, the philosopher expects reality to meet this ethical demand, having no resources to imagine otherwise. The reflective process defining philosophy, set in motion by a standard that never allows the process to come to an end and, at the same time, functions as an ideal for reality—representing what reality can be, what it ought to be—must meet the demand. The “hidden hand” guiding the process of reflection is an ethical standard that, to put it generally, comprises all possible perspectives on reality and is what can be described as an ideal of infinite mutual acknowledgement. Thus it is not difficult to decry the acts of the masses that violate philosophy’s expectations. People can be untruthful in many respects in, for example, their behaviour towards each other. But provided they do not deny or repress that awareness, they know that they are violating standards, promises, and expectations. Indeed it is not an exceptional human propensity to assume an attitude that pretends to be sincere, truthful and that deliberately contrasts itself with other attitudes as a way for people to erect a smokescreen for their own consciences, behind which they can behave as badly as they wish. It is a rather appalling form of inconsistency, to which people are also prone,

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to look for interests that vary from one moment to the next, only to satisfy needs, material or psychological. These may not be in harmony with one another, but contradict and impede each other, necessarily so, and end up continuously betraying what and who we wanted, or thought, ourselves to be. And thus philosophers seem to have a right to become inflamed with the masses, to be disdainful of them because they may betray the ethics philosophy offers, both implicitly with respect to the way they behave and explicitly by remaining deaf to, or even denying, the ethics philosophy protects. But does this mean philosophical disdain is justified and can be sanctioned as in, for example, Heraclitus’ definitive verdict with regard to the masses? Let me suggest that the behaviour of the masses is often not entirely the responsibility of the masses themselves. As such, the masses do not deserve the disdain they receive. The masses can act, it seems to me, on their own initiative only at particular occasions, marked by outbursts of hatred or joy, for instance, at sport’s events, or in upheavals in political or other social contexts. Actions of this kind are most often incidental, sparked by circumstances; they do not characterize the masses as a unified whole who may remain after the event: when the match is over, the crowd dissipates into the professors, the bakers, butchers, administrators and car dealers that made it up, having nothing in common except the fact that they are fans of the same team. But the masses that stick together have, as a rule, a leader who, in the worst case, makes them into whatever the leader wants or helps them to be as a group, pointing out their social position, their religious needs, their material needs, the needs of their souls. And this is inevitable, indeed necessary; for people must live together and in spite of their differences accept each other and undertake joint projects. The masses must surrender to certain codes, certain forms of solidarity. Individuals can try to refuse such codes and lead independent lives, but they seldom succeed. The behaviour of the masses as a crowd is inimical to the ethics inherent in philosophy. A philosopher’s disdain thus ought, if justified, to concern itself with leaders, with individuals, rather than with the masses. They themselves have no face and are not responsible in the same way as an individual is. Moreover, a disdainful attitude towards the masses is blind to the fact that not all individuals lie or deceive or betray in the same degree; and, moreover, that an individual’s life story is likely not to be exclusively composed of chapters that clearly reveal despicable actions. Most people display good and bad behaviour. Heraclitus’ philosophical



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allergy toward the masses is thus the result of improper generalization that identifies the immorality of some aspects of some people as the fundamental characteristics of the human world in which he lives. There is in fact more that is unsound in philosophical disdain, for it may seem to contradict the ethical standard by which it itself judges the masses. Philosophers yielding to the dissatisfaction they experience in confronting the masses and their own philosophical standards may, if critically observed in the light of philosophical ethics, be found to not be in accord with it; they commit unphilosophical acts themselves. Disdain, antipathy, holding grudges cannot be said to contribute to mutual acknowledgement between the philosopher and the masses, though at times even philosophers, calibrating their judgment and behaviour on an ethical ideal, seem to have no alternative but to hate. Forgiveness and love, an alternative not reflected in Heraclitus, are attempts to overcome irritation and dislike. But in themselves forgiveness and love can turn out to be profoundly unphilosophical since it is part of mutual acknowledgement to say what is wrong, too. Love as a principle attitude is too easy and may tend to blind people to what reality is. Probably the attitude most in tune with philosophical ethics is that which is both open to irritation and keen to understand the factors that play a role in the reality that makes mutual acknowledgement impossible and that seems, moreover, to violate the idea of mutual acknowledgement. We may have overlooked many aspects with which we are not familiar, confined—shackled, to use Plato’s word—as we are, for we are in our own perspectives. Distaste and anger may end the reflective process and give a kind of premature answer when reflection is needed again and again. In this respect Heraclitus, moving to antipathy and irritation, runs the risk of having opted for a philosophical shortcut. Impossible Reflection Let me then approach the anger of Heraclitus from a view that may be called psychological, but that differs from the idea of the double-bind in that it does not focus on individual occasions that lead to behaviour that could have been avoided, but rather pictures, if I can put it this way, the natural structure of the philosopher’s soul. This approach is a kind of anthropological description of the intricate and problematic

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nature of the philosopher. As I’ve suggested, his life is devoted to the reflective process and its implied ethical stance which forms, to echo Plotinus,23 the center of the soul. If because of circumstances originating in himself or in his environment, a philosopher cannot stay in or close to this center, he would, I would argue, be pained at having to abandon his very nature. Outside the center of his soul, that is, outside himself, the philosopher is not at ease since he is philosophically out of touch with who he is. Indeed, a philosopher’s very nature may doom him to a life that may be impossible. In most cases, a philosopher will by nature be centred in the life of reflection, but he may also be expelled from that center, spending, as it were, a part of his life as a foreigner, an alien. If absorbed into his center, of course, he sacrifices reality. There are a few exceptions— philosophers, for example, or religious persons—who are naturally capable of living at their reflective center and whose life has not essentially been divided between center and periphery. Socrates may have been one such philosopher. Heraclitus, however, is obviously so engaged with life in reality—a better life than he actually found and could share, though he wanted to share it—that there can be no doubt that his life was eccentric. In trying to imagine the state of mind of a philosopher’s oscillation between the center and the periphery, the first element I would single out is the philosopher’s solitude, both elevating and difficult to bear. The reflective process is lonely, for it is the “I” that explores an inner realm seeing and thinking things that cannot be put into words. The nature of attachments and relationships, for example, on which a philosopher, too, must rely but which on reflection lose their supportive character, start to unravel—these are the counter forces with which the philosopher must grapple. In his radical doubt and reinvestigation, the reflective person cannot easily share the insights to which his infinite reflective process leads. Reflection tends to become more abstract as it proceeds and thus grows more difficult to communicate. Moreover, if the philosopher in his solitude decides to form new relations with reality, he decides to do so within himself. Reconciliations, ambivalences, doubts, and oscillation between two worlds form part of his inner life. The solitude of a philosopher’s reflective life is further

 See Plotini opera, eds. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer (Paris, 1954–73), bk. VI. 9.8. 23



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intensified by the ethical logic implied by it and the standard and aim that steer it toward some ideal. Keeping in tune with the logic of the reflective process, that is, being truthful in all circumstances and trying to be consistent is arduous and, moreover, a task to be performed in solitude. The ethical aim of the reflective process—getting nearer to the ideal of infinite mutual acknowledgement—again is likely to emphasize the philosopher’s solitude as he leads his life in the light of that ideal, sacrificing a possible, impossible life elsewhere. He will come in time to realize that the masses do not live up to the standards he advances, though his commitment to reflection impels him to undertake philosophical explorations that he may consider in his weak moments a service he could render. Indeed, philosophers seem to be naturally disposed to proselytize, that is, to want to convert that part of the world to which they have access. Philosophical conversion occurs in various forms, most of which are not violent or at least not physically violent, except if philosophy degenerates into ideology. But in principle a proselytizing philosopher is an individual over and against the masses; he has no other means to convince than the attraction of his ideas and the way in which he expresses them—recommending them, expounding them, inviting the masses to taste, gauge, appreciate and share them, or sharply, by means of provocations, perhaps even insults, shocking his audience by confronting it with what it lacks, with its failures, and thus attempting to stir it to become his followers. And this is what Heraclitus had turned into his art. This report, which is, the people always prove not to understand, both before they heard it and once they have heard it; for although all things arise and happen in accordance with this report, the people seem to be inexperienced in trying to experience the words and acts of the kind I am expounding, distinguishing each according to its nature and displaying how it is: but to the people it remains hidden what they are doing while awake in the same manner as they forget what they are doing in their sleep.24

The consequences of the philosopher’s propensity to try to convert others is predictable, as is, to some extent, its effect on the philosopher’s state of mind, for conversion will not work. If it does, it works only on a small scale. It is true that abstract thoughts can manipulate   DK B1 (M1, K I).

24

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the masses, mobilize them, turn them into mobs, but in such cases the thoughts usually do not reflect philosophy. Rather they mark an interruption or even an end of philosophy, since philosophers have abandoned, may even be explicitly spurning, the reflective process. Words become detached from thought. The masses, so to speak, are served at their bequest or provoked where they are sensitive and exposed. In this respect Heraclitus is free from suspicion. Philosophers who have been chiselling out thoughts and ethical convictions at great pains, and then finally deciding to offer them, will ultimately feel condemned and disappointed. This probably will contribute to the burden of solitude, although the ricochet-result of these efforts to hand over a precious philosophical treasure is not unlikely to result in disdain. This unhappy ending is not perhaps necessary because some may accept the rejection by the masses as encouraging their philosophical cunning and making them look for other ways, better words, more efficient policies, or as a happy confirmation of solitude. Some philosophers indulge, at least at certain moments, in their isolation and ostentatiously welcome it as a part of their identity. Oh solitude, my sweetest choice! But many, too, will simply end up disappointed, thrown back on themselves, and, finally aggressive, angry, and perhaps disdainful of the masses who could not honour philosophical invitation. The Masses in the Philosopher Heraclitus, I suggest, falls victim to this logic. It is highly improbable, I think, that Heraclitus, or any philosopher looking for intellectual soul mates, can win souls for the ideal of philosophy, let alone impatient souls. It is even more unlikely that the philosopher will manage to invite the masses to share his own solitude and thus to dispel it. The very nature of reflection forbids it. Reflection is a solitary undertaking. Some philosophers confess their disdain moderately, in disguise, as it were, by simply formulating an alternative, superior life in the form of a very elite philosophy. Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, as well as those they inspired, did. Others, such as Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, did not feel the need to mince words and turned their disdain for the masses into philosophical themes. But Heraclitus to my mind is the grumpy philosopher’s archetype.  He probably did not bear the masses a grudge. Rather he was worried by that aspect of his soul that prevented him from staying at



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its reflective center. The needs of life alienated him from his philosophical vocation, and the masses may represent in Heraclitus’ eyes that heavy, earthbound part of himself he could not be rid of. The masses are, in many instances of philosophical derision, much more a construction that gives a face to the complex aspects of the philosopher’s own being than a reality he comes to know thoroughly by experience and which has a right to be infuriated. Heraclitus seems to have fought his own battle, a battle with himself, that he couldn’t get insight into, although he had gone, to quote him, in search of himself with no result,25 and indeed he attacked himself with his visor closed and mirrored in the faceless presence of the masses. If this is true, Heraclitus himself, a cunning, pungent and intriguing philosopher, keen on mocking the masses, merits to be mocked himself, to be regarded with irritation and displeasure, be it only for a moment, for it may be we who have come to understand something of him.

  DK B101 (M15, K XXVIII).

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Armies as Mobs in the Early Middle Ages Bernard S. Bachrach It is highly unlikely that historians will be able to develop a valid definition of the “mob phenomenon,” one that is both necessary and sufficient. The problem of definition for this and similar issues is normally the case when scholars deal with human behavior. As a result, it is often more useful to identify a “bundle of characteristics”—often necessary, usually not sufficient— that can provide insights into a controversial aspect of human behavior.1 While efforts of this type may only be of heuristic value, we can, nonetheless, come away from them with provisional answers to questions we have formulated and, perhaps more importantly, with additional questions to ask. I have identified a “bundle of characteristics” which, based upon my historical studies, seem of importance for a discussion of mobs. For example, and especially relevant to this paper, specialists in military matters, both scholars and practitioners, often think of an army or a military force as a mob waiting to escape.2 This cliché did not emerge without reason. Under various conditions, some of which will be discussed shortly, military forces are known to ignore or disobey orders, a situation characterized in military handbooks as a loss of “command and control” and, as a result, to act in an undisciplined mob-like manner. Command and control is military jargon for a rather simple process: officers give orders to the troops, that is, they exercise command and, through the soldiers’ obedience to such orders, they exercise control. Military orders, whether they are given on the field of battle or in other situations are juridical or legal acts. To disobey an order, or as in 1   I have addressed this methodological problem on two occasions: see Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 1–2; and “Charlemagne and the Carolingian General Staff,” The Journal of Military History 66 (2002), 313–357. 2  See two important articles regarding discipline in this context, John France, “Close Order and Close Quarter: The Culture of Combat in the West,” The International History Review XXXVII (2005), 498–517; and Richard Abels, “Cultural Representation and the Practice of War in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval Military History 6 (2010), 1–31.

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more recent history, to disobey a lawful order, is to act illegally. Such disobedience sometimes can be characterized as a mutiny, which highlights the illegal nature of the act or acts under consideration.3 Discipline here is the issue, and on rare occasions we learn of situations in which a mob, through exceptional efforts, is converted into a military force. The notion that a military force has escaped from command and control helps put the characteristics that define a mob in perspective. When we think of armies, we think of violence. But armed soldiers are educated in the means by which they can inflict deadly force. As a result, soldiers have the potential to perpetrate violence in a controlled and legal manner. In fact, it is in the nature of both military and civilian thinking about the military that an army is deployed to accomplish its tasks either through rationalized violence or the threat of violence. The mob that illegally escapes from an army because of a lack of disciple also has a potential for violence since its members are armed with lethal force, but such a mob threatens violence or actually acts violently in random ways. A legally constituted, disciplined, and peaceful mob is a contresense. Nowadays armies are thought of as large forces composed of several divisions or corps. Armies can include many thousands of soldiers and a mob of such an order of magnitude undoubtedly must be considered dangerous. There have been times when armies were not as large as they are now. If we consider smaller military forces that take on the characteristics of a mob, does size of necessity make a difference in our understanding of what is or is not a mob? From a military perspective, the size of an army is considered relevant in relation to the objectives that have been set for it. Thus, it is worth reiterating that the failure of discipline in a military force, which creates an illegal entity, has by its nature an absolute transformative effect; a mob exists where previously there had been an army. By contrast, the size of the military force and of the mob that it becomes is only of relative importance in the particular circumstances in which the transformation occurs. To put it another way, a military force is deployed so that it can carry out a mission by the use of violence or the threat of violence. The military unit, however, must be large enough to carry out its mission, that is, no smaller than what is required. A mob, of course, has no mission, but   Abels, “Cultural Representation,” pp. 1–31.

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rather is perceived by those against whom it may act as capable of using or threatening violence indiscriminately. If an undisciplined and illegally constituted group capable of violence comes into being in a particular context, must it be of a sufficient size to constitute a serious threat of violence? Indeed, how should we characterize a group that is of insufficient size in relation to the resources of those who oppose it so that its capacity to cause violence or serious damage is thought to be negligible? To put in another way, do we dismiss from the category of mob undisciplined illegal groups whose potential for violence is so limited as not to be regarded as significant by those against whom it may act? These questions require, I think, that we consider the size of a group in relation to its potential for causing serious problems. Stopping the Mob from Escaping Awareness by military leaders throughout the history of the West of the problem of maintaining discipline among the troops, that is, of avoiding the emergence of the mob, resulted in the development of various regimes intended to maintain command and control. All of these efforts come under the broad rubric of training, and in the West both the Greeks and the Romans assiduously worked to maintain military discipline through various types of exercises.4 In relation to medieval military history, the Roman tradition, which included much that had been developed by the Greeks, was of primary importance because it was easily accessible in Latin; Greek texts were not. The opposite was the case among the Byzantines who followed the Greek tradition. In the western Islamic world of the Magreb, the Greek tradition was also more important than the Latin.5 In the ancient West, the Greco-Roman view of maintaining discipline was widely discussed both by professional military men and civilians who understood very well the potential danger that could be 4   For a brief review of military manuals, see Brian J. Campbell, “Teach Yourself How to Be a General,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987), 13–29; for further elaboration in regard to pre-Crusade Europe, see Bernard S. Bachrach, “ ‘A Lying Legacy’ Revisited: The Abels-Morillo Defense of Discontinuity,” Journal of Medieval Military History 5 (2007), 154–193. 5  Alphonse Dain, “Les stratégistes byzantins,” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967), 317–392.

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caused by an army turned mob.6 In this context, the work of Marcus Terentius Varro (d. 27 BCE), a Roman intellectual whose works exercised considerable influence not only in the late Republic, but upon his posterity, is central. Varro wrote an important tract De Lingua Latina that, in section V.87, made clear that the technical term for an army (exercitus) developed from the word exercitare [to train].7 His more famous contemporary, Marcus Tullius Cicero (d. 43 BCE), emphasized in the Tusculum Disputationes (II, 16, 37) that a body of armed men that lacked training cannot be considered an army. In this context, it is important that the Romans regarded training as a discipline, that is, a subject of study that had both a physical and an intellectual dimension.8 Roman training of both the body and the mind was intended to prepare soldiers to deal with the enemy on the field of battle without being debilitated by fear, especially when the odds were against them. If necessary, they were to face death without faltering in their duty. In this context, the Romans designed such a rigorous training regime that soldiers looked forward to battle because it was believed that combat would be less difficult and demanding than the exercises they practiced and endured on a daily basis. In fact, those commanders who failed to train their soldiers on a daily basis were condemned for laxity and in the long run for endangering safety of the res publica. Soldiers who complained were regarded as slackers.9 In the Roman army, if discipline failed on the field of battle, the entire unit was liable for decimation, that is, one of each ten soldiers who survived was selected at random and executed. This was “collective punishment” inflicted by lot. Thus, any particular soldier who had served in the battle, regardless of his personal performance, could be selected for execution.10 Decimation is also an important indicator of how Roman soldiers were conditioned to view their performance

 6   A useful introduction to Roman military training in the early empire is provided by Yann Le Bohec, The Imperial Roman Army (London, 1994), pp. 105–119.  7   References to classical and late antique sources follows the system utilized by the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., eds. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford, 1999), pp. xix-liv. Complete references to the best modern editions are to be found there as well.  8  Le Bohec, The Imperial Roman Army, p. 107.  9   G.R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (Ithaca, 1969), pp. 54–72. 10   James Campbell, The Emperors and the Roman Army: 31 BC-AD 235 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 195–198, 300–306.



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on  the field of battle as part of a unified effort and not in terms of individual glory. Military commanders, whose forces failed in battle, whether because of their own mistakes or if the troops under their command proved to be unreliable as a result of a lack of discipline, were expected to take their own lives. This was the case, for example, with regard to Varus, who lost some 20,000 men in the battle of the Teutoburger. In this campaign, several of Varus’ senior officers also are reported to have committed suicide.11 In short, the process by which an army became a mob not only resulted in the punishment of the soldiers who did not perform up to expected standards, but such a failure ultimately was judged to be the responsibility of the commander. These brief observations should provide a sense of the great importance that was attributed by Roman elites to the maintenance of military discipline and the high priority that was given to keeping the mob from escaping. Thus, it is of considerable importance in the present context that we see that Roman ideas about military matters were not only available in great detail throughout the history of medieval Europe, but also exercised a decisive influence, especially among successful commanders. Roman influence endured in part through the direct access by decision makers and their advisers in pre-Crusade Europe to the texts of numerous writers, among them Frontinus and Josephus (in Latin translation), in addition to Varro and Cicero, whose works were to be found in monastic, episcopal, and secular libraries.12 These classical texts were preserved in large numbers on durable parchment beginning in the eighth century; earlier Roman exempla that traditionally had been maintained on far more fragile papyrus were replaced (the latter rapidly deteriorated in the cold damp climate of the European West).13 Copies were made frequently of the most important texts throughout the Middle Ages and especially in the early medieval period.14

11  Hans Delbrück, The Barbarian Invasions, trans. Walter J. Renfroe, Jr. (Lincoln, 1980), p. 78. 12   See the discussion by Bachrach, “ ‘A Lying Legacy’ Revisited,” 154–193. 13   A useful introduction to the transmission of classical Latin texts to the medieval West is provided by Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L.D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983). 14  A useful introduction is provided by Bernhard Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Michael Gorman (Cambridge, UK, 1994).

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bernard s. bachrach Vegetius’ De re Militari: The Medieval Authority

Most important for the conveyance of military ideas from the ancient to the medieval world, however, were not the individual works of writers such as Caesar, Statius, and Lucan, but a handbook, De re Militari, written ca. 400 by the Roman author Renatus Flavius Vegetius. This highly influential Latin tract did not survive in the original, but was preserved for posterity in a redaction done at Constantinople in 450.15 De re Militari was copied hundreds of times during the Middle Ages.16 In addition, the text often was excerpted for educational purposes, regularly quoted by various writers, and in general relied upon widely.17 It may be noted that the most significant use of De re Militari for theoretical purposes is Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra.18 The great popularity of De re Militari in the Middle Ages is exemplified further by numerous translations. The process of rendering Vegetius’ handbook into the vernacular languages began during the thirteenth century and numerous translations were made into French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese before the end of the Middle Ages.19 In fact, during the Middle Ages, Vegetius’ handbook was the most frequently copied and translated practical secular Latin text, and the most frequently copied and translated Latin of any kind, that had its origins during the later Roman empire. Thus, it is hardly surprising that throughout the course of the Middle Ages De re Militari was regarded 15   A basic treatment is Walter Goffart, “The Date and Purpose of Vegetius’ De re Militari,” Traditio 33 (1977), 65–100; rpt. in Walter Goffart, Rome’s Fall and After (London, 1989), pp. 45–80. 16  Philippe Richardot, Végèce et la culture militaire au moyen âge (Ve-Xv siècle) (Paris, 1998), pp. 195–216, but much more work on this topic needs to be done. 17  L.K. Born, “The Perfect prince: A Study in Thirteenth and fourteenth Century Ideals,” Speculum 3 (1928), 288–183; The World of John of Salisbury, ed. C. Brooke. et al (Oxford, 1984); B. Munk Olsen, “Les classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 10 (1980), 115–169; F. Sherwood, Studies in Mediaeval Uses of Vegetius Epitoma Rei Militaris (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980); J.A. Wisman, “L’Epitoma rei militaris de Végèce et sa fortune au Moyen Âge,” Le moyen âge 85 (1979), 13–31; and Bernard S. Bachrach, “The Practical Use of Vegetius’ De Re Militari During the Early Middle Ages,” The Historian 47 (1985): 239–255; and reprinted in Bernard S. Bachrach, Warfare and Military Organization in Pre-Crusade Europe (London, 2002) with the same pagination. 18  Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War, trans. Christopher Lynch (Chicago, 2003). 19  Philippe Contamine, La Guerre au Moyen Âge, (4th ed., Paris, 1994), pp. 353–354.



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as the authoritative text with regard to military matters and that Vegetius himself was widely acclaimed as an auctoritas.20 The study of copies of De re Militari has proven valuable to our understanding of the training of soldiers during the Middle Ages. This is especially important in relation to the chronology and geographical distribution of copies of the entire text, that is, both where copies were made and to where they traveled. In addition, particular excerpts selected from the handbook by various medieval authors and commentators on particular chapters contribute greatly to our knowledge of medieval military thinking. The work of these medieval copyists, or more particularly their patrons and of commentators, provide insights into the audience for which this work was being done; the study of De re Militari thus helps the modern scholar understand the value given to training and discipline during the Middle Ages. Conversely, many comments on military actions by medieval authors, especially those who knew Vegetius’ handbook, provide insights into situations when training and discipline failed and the breakdown of order that enabled the mob to emerge.21 In the present context, the first book of the four books that comprise De re Militari is the most important because it treats recruitment and training. With regard to recruitment, it is Vegetius’ aim to provide a key to identifying those men, both in terms of their background and physical characteristics, who make the best soldiers. It goes without saying that Vegetius, like most Romans, believed that in any discussion of nature vs. nurture with respect to making good soldiers, the balance tipped toward the latter. Only through vigorous training—the modern psychologist might say conditioning—was a man of the right background turned into a proper soldier. Vegetius emphasizes that the young man raised in the country makes a far better recruit than one raised in the city. The former is inured to hardship of all types by his environment, while the latter is  Contamine, La Guerre au Moyen Âge, pp. 353–356.   See, for example, three recent studies by Bernard S. Bachrach, “Gregory of Tours, Vegetius, and the Study of War,” in Famille, violence et christianisation au Moyen Âge: Mélanges offerts à Michel Rouche, eds. Martin Aurell and Thomas Deswarte (Paris, 2005), pp. 299–308; “Gregory of Tours as a Military Historian,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, eds. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden, 2002), pp. 351–363; and “L’art de la guerre angevin,” in Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages, eds. Martin Aurell and Noël-Yves Tonnerre (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 267–284. 20 21

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unaccustomed, for example, to the rural diet, to sleeping in the open, and hard physical work. Vegetius observes: “I am inclined to think that a man fears death less if he has less acquaintance with luxury” (I, 3). Here Vegetius articulates an important objective of military training, that is, conditioning soldiers to not fear death because fear destroys discipline. In order to assure the reliability of the troops in this context, Vegetius makes clear that it is necessary that soldiers are not only toughened up by daily exercises, but that they prepare for all of eventualities that may occur in war. He observes: “No one is afraid to do what he is confident of having learned well” (I, 1). Early Medieval Discipline There was great anxiety among military leaders in the West that soldiers on the battle field or those waiting to engage the enemy would panic due to fear; officers would lose command and control and the army, unable to do its duty, would become a mob. Indeed, training was oriented primarily to stop this from happening. Thus, it is of considerable interest that, although early medieval writers were generally clerics and hostile to the military enterprise, they rarely identify situations where fear of the enemy causes defeat. In fact, soldiers standing solidly in their phalanx in the face of the enemy are given an important place in the description of victories won, especially when God’s hand in support of the winning side is given attention. The locus classicus for pre-Crusade Europe regarding the effectiveness of training and discipline is provided by a near contemporary description of Charles Martel’s victory over the Muslims on 25 October 732 in the environs of Poitiers.22 Charles’ army, deployed as an infantry phalanx, soundly defeated a large Muslim force composed largely of mounted archers under the direct command of Abd ar Rachman al-Ghafiqi, the Arab governor of Spain. It is said of Charles’ army that “the northerners having fixed their battle line were standing immobile like a wall… and remained in their ranks like a glacier from the frozen north.”23   There is an extensive scholarly literature dealing with this battle that is marked by serious conflicts over most points. See Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 117– 178, with the relevant literature cited there. 23  Anon., Chron. ed. Th. Mommsen, pp. 361–362 (Continuatio Hispana a. DCCLV, Auctores antiquissimi XI: Monumenta Germaniae Historica [rpt. Berlin, 1961]). 22



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The Muslims, who undoubtedly opened the battle with barrages of arrows, were thwarted in their effort to break Charles’ phalanx by the ability of the Franks to use the testudo. This was a well-developed tactic by which men in the ranks deployed behind those at the front, place their shields overhead in an overlapping “turtle-shell” that the enemy arrows cannot penetrate.24 With archery having failed, the Muslim horsemen charged what undoubtedly was a “dense phalanx” with an “even front.”25 In the ensuing melée of hand-to-hand combat, the Muslims are reported to have been so badly mauled that the chronicler concluded, likely with considerable exaggeration, that “the Muslims were slaughtered in the blink of an eye.”26 The high quality of training enjoyed by early medieval foot soldiers, as advocated in Vegetius’ handbook, is also demonstrated in a battle between two phalanxes in a massive military encounter that took place in the year 612 near the erstwhile Roman fortress of Zülpich. The Frankish chronicler, Fredegar, who reports on this battle, indicates that two large falanges of Franks and their allies engaged in such close order combat that “there was no room for the dead to fall….” Thus, he emphasizes that “they stood in their battle lines, corpse supporting corpse, just as though they were still living.”27 Despite some likely exaggeration by Fredegar, all of this close order combat was, of course, sound tactical doctrine with regard to fighting in the traditional Western infantry phalanx. Vegetius (II, 17) emphasizes that those in the phalanx formation are to stand immobile when engaging the enemy. Through extensive training and high morale, the latter stimulated, at least in part, by religious faith, the early medieval soldier generally is seen to have mastered his pre-combat fears and, as a result, was not likely to panic on the field of battle.28 Rather, when the early medieval  sources leave the impression that military forces escaped from 24   Bachrach, “ ‘A Lying Legacy’ Revisited,” pp. 154–193, discusses the testudo among other aspects of ancient military practice adopted during the early Middle Ages. 25   Concerning the nature of the Frankish phalanx, see Maurice, Strategikon, XI, 3 (Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy, ed. and trans. George Dennis [Philadelphia, 1984]); and Anon., Chron., p. 361. 26  Anon., Chron., p. 362. 27  Fredegar, Chron., IV, 38 (Fredegarii Chronicorum Liber Quartus cum Continuationibus, ed. and trans. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill [London, 1960]). 28   The basic work on the religious aspects of maintaining morale in the Middle Ages is David S. Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War: c. 300–c.1215 (Woodbridge, 2003).

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command and control, they usually are depicted in doing so because of their over eagerness to fight. This was likely, at least in part, a result of what modern scholars recognize in technical psychiatric terms as the “Berserk syndrome,” which more commonly has been referred to though the ages as “blood lust” or “killing frenzy.” It seems that when some fighting men feel themselves to be in serious peril of losing their lives and on seeing their side winning undertake the offensive regardless of orders to hold position.29 “Blood lust” when combined with the desire for booty by victorious soldiers could prove to be a deadly combination in undermining command and control.30 In order to take advantage of the dual stimuli of “blood lust” and greed, military thinkers in the ancient world developed the feigned retreat tactic, which medieval commanders also learned to execute. In this context, the force on the offense, especially when facing an infantry phalanx, would charge the enemy position, usually in a mounted formation, though it was also done on foot. After what was intended to be an inconclusive engagement between the two forces, the attackers would feign a retreat in an apparent disorderly manner, as though defeated, in order to convince the force on the defense that it had won. When the latter broke ranks in pursuit, contrary to orders making it clear that they were to hold their positions, those engaged in the feigned retreat would stop, reform their lines and counterattack. The men, who initially had been on the defense and had broken ranks to pursue, were now a mob out of formation with command and control lost. Thus, they could be killed more easily by the counterattacking force which, in addition, would suffer fewer losses.31 Greed also was a powerful stimulus to undermining discipline, thus bringing about the emergence of a mob from an army. It is hardly surprising that military commanders worked diligently to control such situations. For example, in 507 the Frankish king Clovis, in preparation for a 1,000 kilometer march both through territory that was under his rule and enemy territory that he sought to annex, gave very specific 29   See, for example, Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, 1994), esp. pp. 77–99, where among other things certain physiological observations on “specific brain neurotransmitter function and impulsive violence” of the modern “Berserkers” is marked to be in need of further study. 30   See the warnings in Maurice, Strategikon, VII, 14. 31  This tactic is discussed thoroughly by Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 127–131, 177–179, 198–199.



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orders regarding looting and abuse of the inhabitants.32 One part of these orders deals with the way in which the church was to be treated. Thus, Clovis ordered that under no circumstances were virgins, that is, nuns and widows, to be discomfited in any way. He also indicated that children associated with these women, that is, those living in the same abodes, as well as clerics were to be left untouched. All lay dependents of the church were to be left untouched, too, and all property of the church was to remain intact.33 In addition, Clovis put in place administrative structures to diminish and compensate for the damages that likely were to occur despite his orders to the contrary. Thus, a documentary record of church property, including slaves, was to be presented either by the bishops or their agents to the relevant division commanders in Clovis’ army. In this way there would be available written proof of ownership if any disagreements should arise regarding church property. With these documents, any and all church property seized by the army contrary to Clovis’ orders would be returned. In addition, lay prisoners, taken contrary to the rules that he had established, were to be repatriated if the captive’s bishop sent a letter to Clovis with the appropriate seal and affirmed on oath that the information that he has placed in the letter was true.34 Clovis also made clear that when his troops traversed the countryside, they were permitted to take freely only water and grass, and the land owners did not have to be paid for these resources. This was a restatement of later Roman law on the subject. However, for the soldiers to use anything else, even hay, they had to pay compensation on the spot to the owner. Thus, it is noteworthy that when Clovis is reported to have learned of a case where two men under his command had violated this order and illegally seized stores of hay to feed their horses, he had them arrested and brought into the royal presence. After a vigorous tongue lashing, which would seem to have passed for a trial as the defendants did deny their guilt, the king had the malefactors executed publicly as an example to his troops and as evidence for his

32   The basic treatment of this campaign is now Bernard S. Bachrach, “Vouillé and the Decisive Battle Phenomenon in Late Antique Gaul,” Illinois Classical Studies, 35 (2010), forthcoming. 33   Clovis, “Ad episcopos epistola”, pp. 1–2, in Capitularia, ed. A. Boretius, Legum sectio II: Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin / Hanover, 1883). 34   Cap. reg. Fr. no. 1. I.

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good intentions with respect to the population in general.35 In another somewhat similar case, one of Clovis’ grandsons had a count executed because in violation of a royal order he permitted his troops to plunder the countryside.36 Attila’s Invasion of Gaul Strict orders and brutal punishments meted out both to the rank and file of the army and to officers undoubtedly played a role in maintaining discipline and thus keeping the army from turning into mob. Despite the widespread bias of clerical writers toward exaggerating disasters, recent observations regarding Gregory of Tours are useful, insofar it is agreed that he added “as much lurid, rhetorical detail as possible, whilst probably keeping quiet about campaigns and troop movements which were well conducted and did not cause much misery and disruption.”37 On the whole, however, the ravaging of the countryside contrary to orders, was likely infrequent, and the execution of men, who violated such orders, and officers who failed to maintain command and control, was likely rare. Thus, on a march, opportunities for plunder, whether in accordance with orders or by mobs of soldiers, were more difficult than it might seem. The Hunnic invasion of Gaul, which is estimated conservatively to have included some forty to fifty thousand effectives, is a case in point.38 Attila’s army crossed the Rhine on rafts in late April of 451, when there was sufficient grass to feed perhaps as many as 100,000 Steppe ponies that the Huns and their allies rode, and many thousands of oxen which pulled the wagons that carried their equipment and supplies.39 35   This story is told in Gregory, Hist., II, 37 (Liberi Historiarum X), eds. B. Krusch and W. Levison, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, I.1: Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hanover, 1937–1951). 36  Gregory, Hist., VI, 31. 37  For this quotation, in an otherwise seriously flawed book, see Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (London, 2003), pp. 127–128, whose aim is to use Gregory’s “exaggerations” in order to argue that warfare in early medieval warfare was devastating. Regarding this book, see the review by Bernard S. Bachrach, in The American Historical Review 109 (2004), 959. 38   Concerning the size of the army, see Bernard S. Bachrach, “The Hun Army at the Battle of Châlons (451): An Essay in Military Demography,” in Ethnogenese und Überlieferung: Angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, eds. Karl Brunner and Brigitte Merta (Vienna / Munich, 1994), pp. 59–67. 39   Regarding the problem of climate and fodder for horses, see Bernard S. Bachrach, “Was the Marchfield Part of the Frankish Constitution?” Medieval Studies 36 (1974),



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The chronology of Attila’s march westward, crossing the Rhine at the end of April and establishing a siege at Orléans early in June, some 600 kilometers to the west, makes clear that the Hunnic army had little or no time to undertake a great many plundering operations, much less attacks on Roman fortifications along the route.40 As a whole, Attila’s forces could not move faster than its baggage train, and oxdrawn carts can travel approximately fifteen kilometers per day at maximum.41 Individual mounted units of the Hun army undoubtedly could move much more rapidly than the main column and thus, in principle, could forage for supplies and search for plunder.42 These deployments, however, had to be limited in terms of the range beyond the line of march that they could operate and the size of the units that might be dispatched on such missions.43 A foraging or booty-seeking operation required that those on the mission, if successful, had to transport what they had taken from the area in which it was seized back to the main line of march. Transporting substantial amounts of grain raised questions about the capacity of various types of vehicles—two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons— that were available at the time. In light of the technology available during the fifth century, carts drawn by two oxen were able on average to hold approximately 500 kilograms of cargo, while wagons could carry 150 additional kilograms. Every metric ton of grain foraged 78–85, rpt. with the same pagination in Bernard S. Bachrach, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (London, 1993). For greater detail concerning Steppe ponies and their feeding, see Rudi Paul Lindner, “Nomadism, Horses and Huns,” Past and Present 92 (1981), 3–19, which remains the basic study. Regarding climate change, which shortened the growing season, see J. Koder, “Climatic change in the fifth and sixth centuries,” in The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? eds. P. Allen and E. Jeffreys (Brisbane, 1996), pp. 270–285. 40   The date of the siege depends on V.S. Anniani, chaps. 7, 8, concerning which, see A. Loyen, “Le rôle de Saint Aignan dans le défense d’Orléans,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1969), 64–74. For additional work of interest, see, for example, G. Renaud, Les traditions de l’église d’Orléans sur ses saints évêques Euverte et Aignant. Vies, miracles, cultes (Paris, 1971); Michel Banniard, “L’aménagement de l’Histoire chez Grégoire de Tours: à propos de l’invasion de 451 (H.L. II 5–7),” Romanobarbarica 3 (1978) 18–20; and S. Barnish, “Old Kaspars: Attila’s invasion of Gaul in the literary sources,” in Fifth-Century Gaul: a crisis of identity, eds. John Drinkwater and Hugh Elton (Cambridge, UK, 1992), p. 44. 41   For a discussion of Hunnic vehicles, see Otto Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the  Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 214–219. 42  Lindner, “Nomadism, Horses and Huns,” pp. 3–19, discusses these matters in detail. 43   For a discussion of minor military field actions connected to the invasion, see E.A.Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), pp. 139–140.

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beyond the line of march would require two carts and four oxen.44 If Attila’s army of some 40,000 effectives were on short rations composed largely of bread, it would require forty carts of grain to provide food, that is, 3,000 calories each day.45 Since the vehicles of the Hunnic army could travel at a pace of approximately fifteen kilometers per day, a raiding party that ravaged an area forty-five kilometers from the main line of march would need, for the total operation, a minimum of six days. Thus, the nature of the transportation technology available to the Huns seriously limited the range of Attila’s army in ravaging countryside. If such foraging groups traveled for a distance of perhaps forty-five kilometers on either flank of the Hunnic line of march in an obsessively consistent effort, this meant that an area of approximately 54,000 square kilometers could have been ravaged or less than ten percent of the total surface area of the hexagon. In addition to the limitations imposed by the pace at which booty could be transported and the carrying capacity of vehicles that could be used to haul either booty or forage, sending forces into the countryside of Gaul was problematic both in regard to the likelihood that much would be found that was unprotected or that there would not be local resistance.46 The local populations, following standard operating procedure—one might might even call it doctrine—would be ordered 44   The basic work on this topic remains Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes, L’attelage et le cheval de selle à travers les âges, 2 vols (Paris, 1931), which has a strong experimental underpinning. For the state of the question, see Lynn T. White, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962), pp. 59–61; Albert Leighton, Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe (Devon, 1972), pp. 77, 161; Bernard S. Bachrach, “Animals and Warfare in Early Medieval Europe,” Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo 31, 2 vols (Spoleto, 1985): 1, 707–764, rpt. with same pagination in Bachrach, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (London, 1993), pp. 716–717; John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066–1500 (Cambridge, UK, 1986), pp. 8–10; and for a recent review of the state of the question by Paul Gans, “The Medieval Horse Harness: Revolution or Evolution? A Case Study of Technological Change,” in Villard’s Legacy: Studies in medieval technology, science and art in memory of Jean Gimpel, ed. Marie-Thérèse Zenner (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 175–187. 45  Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1978), pp. 133–145. 46   Regarding the problems inherent in foraging or raiding for booty at particular distances from the main column in regard to the carrying capacity and speed of various types of vehicles, see Engels, Alexander the Great, pp. 11–25 and 11–25; and Jonathan P. Roth, The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 BC-Ad 235) (Leiden, 1999), pp. 61–65, 126–127, 286–292.



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to evacuate undefended villages, vici, and villae, and to bring all that they could carry, especially food stuffs, into strongholds that could be defended against barbarians untrained in the techniques of siege warfare.47 In addition, there were especially built strongholds to serve as refuges for rural populations, defended villae, and other fortified cen­ ters where grain was stored.48 The procedure of stripping the countryside of supplies was not only intended to provide sustenance for Gallo-Roman refugees, but also to undermine barbarian operations by limiting the capacity of the invaders to live off the land.49 While Roman fortress cities, and even lesser fortifications, could not be taken by barbarian armies of the type led by Attila, the march in the spring of 451 was very rapid with no time for sieges with the exception of the failed effort at Orléans. The countryside could be defended by the local militia forces; all able-bodied men from the local area were required to aid in the defense. However well such local farmers were trained—this varied from place to place— they were strengthened by army veterans who were settled in colonies throughout Gaul. Moreover, it was common for magnates, both lay and clerical, for example, for bishops and abbots, to maintain a military household; these were composed of professional soldiers.50 Furthermore, depending upon a particular area, encampments of regular imperial troops were to be found. The realities of the march, as shown by the example of the Hunnic trek across Gaul in the late spring of 451, makes clear that there were serious limitations placed upon even a large invading force with respect to how much of a negative impact it might have on the countryside that it traversed. The point of this example, however, is not to emphasize the rather minor and short term impact of Attila in his invasion of Gaul, but to make clear that should any of the elements in Attila’s army have sought to free itself from the command and control of the Hunnic  Vegetius, De re Militari, III, 3. This was not merely a theoretical matter, but standard operating procedure as evidenced, both east and west, by Ammianus, Res Gestae, XVIII, 7.3; XXX, 81.1. See, Hugh Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe: AD 350–425 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 84–85. 48  Martijn J. Nicasie, Twilight of Empire: The Roman Army From the Reign of Diocletian until the Battle of Adrianople (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 129–130. 49  Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, pp. 214–215. 50  See Bernard S. Bachrach, “Grand Strategy in the Germanic Kingdoms: Recruitment of the Rank and File,” in L’Armée romaine et les barbares du IIIe au VIIe siècle, eds. Françoise Vallet and Michel Kazanski (Paris, 1993), pp. 55–63; and C.R. Whittaker, “Landlords and warlords in the later Roman Empire,” in War and Society in the later Roman Empire, eds. J. Rich and G. Shipley (London, 1993), pp. 277–300. 47

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ruler, such a mob would have had a very limited ability to impact the neighborhood negatively. As subsequent events were to demonstrate, the Huns, after their defeat at Châlons during the latter part of June 451, were forced to flee from Gaul and abandon not only their booty, but whatever else they had initially transported across the Rhine.51 Conclusion Decision makers, both civilians and military leaders, no less during the Middle Ages than in the ancient world, evidenced consistent anxiety regarding the breakdown of army discipline that might result in the emergence of a mob. In order to maintain command and control, it was deemed important to sustain a rigorous training regime for the troops so as to thwart the fears that might undermine discipline either before battle or during it. In general, these efforts seem largely to have been successful, and during the early Middle Ages morale was maintained in part, through sermons and religious rites, such as confession, prior to combat. In fact, when a mob did emerge, it would seem to have resulted from defeat, which sent the losing side into flight—or from victory. When soldiers perceived that the battle was won, enthusiasm—“blood lust or greed—was known to overwhelm the conditioning imposed through rigorous training. Despite the penchant for early medieval writers to exaggerate the damage done by armies that turned into mobs, it seems often to have been the case, as illustrated by Attila’s invasion of Gaul in the spring of 451, that technical restraints, in addition to training and brutal punishments, acted effectively to limit the loss of command and control.

51  Ulf Tackholm, “Aetius and the Battle on the Catalaunian Fields,” Opuscula Romana VII (1969), 259–276.

Assembled in the Presence of God: Majestic Perseverance and the Cantus coronatus Nancy van Deusen When it appeared, the world-wide group of scholars working in the area of medieval studies, as broadly and deeply as this category could be conceived, were alerted several times to the iconoclastic—one would say in German, bahnbrechend—work of Ernst H. Kantorowicz. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology was either adamantly acclaimed or condemned without compromise.1 Only the French, it turned out later, ignored the work altogether. As Kantorowicz himself pointed out in the preface to his study, he had swerved again (as in his previous Laudes regiae2) from “the normal tracks of the medieval historian and broke through the fences, this time, of medieval law, for which he was not prepared by his training.” In other words, his work was a perfect interdisciplinary project. Hoping, nonetheless, to avoid the “dangers customary with some all-too-sweeping and ambitious studies in the history of ideas: that is, loss of control over topics, material, and facts; vagueness of language and argument; unsubstantiated generalizations, and a lack of tension resulting from tedious repetitions,” Kantorowicz used the concept of the “king’s two bodies” as a unifying principle in crafting a coherent work that brought together the history of a concept, its interpretation, relevant texts as documentation within a narrative structure.3 In The King’s Two Bodies, which has become, despite reviews that were agonistically opposed to one another, a classic and much-quoted 1  Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, l957, rpt. 1985). 2  Cf. Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship with a Study of the Music of the Laudes and Musical Transcriptions by Manfred F. Bukofzer (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1946); see also van Deusen, “Laudes regiae: In Praise of Kings. Medieval Acclamations, Liturgy, and the Ritualization of Power,” Procession, Performance, Liturgy and Ritual, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Ottawa, 2007), pp. 82–118, a study preparatory to the one at hand; some few passages, needful to provide a background to the present inquiry, have been incorporated. 3  Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. ix.

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study, Kantorowicz explores the fusion of corporate office that extends beyond the natural lifetime of the one who holds it, in a sense persevering into perpetuity, and the person, as well as bodily manifestations, of the king himself. The king ate, slept, probably occasionally became irritated, and had the normal everyday routines all human beings have in common in his own, howbeit kingly, body; the king as the result of, and in concord with, the fact of his limited lifespan, also obviously could exercise his own personal agendas and look out for himself and his own interests—save his own skin, so to speak—as a matter of fact, one would have been trained, presumably from one’s youth, to do just this: to look out for one’s own interests, to govern with a personal agenda also very much on one’s mind. But fused with the king’s humanity was the corporate body of his kingship, his office, placed in an order that was, or should have been, rooted in legitimate succession, founded on the law of the land, and beyond himself, in the sense that this corporate identity would continue after the king’s natural body had returned to dust. To give the topic its fifteenth-century verbal expression: By the Common Law no Act which the King does as King shall be defeated by his Nonage. For the King has in him two Bodies, that is, a Body natural and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and of Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.4

Furthermore, the body politic is “more ample and large” than the body natural, but there were also, as Kantorowicz states, “truly mysterious forces which reduce, or even remove, the imperfections of the fragile human nature,” going even further to relate the body politic of kingship to the king’s character angelicus. “The Body politic of kingship  appears as a likeness of the ‘holy sprites and angels,’ because it

4  Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 7–8, quoting Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports (London, l816), 212a.



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represents, like the angels, the Immutable within Time. It has been raised to angelic heights, a fact which is worth being kept in mind.”5 In other words, the king’s daily routines, one by one—indeed the king’s himself, as it were—occurred in experiential, measured, time, but his office was untimed. This situation brings to mind an analogy Augustine emphasized that some laws occur in delimited, “real” time, as one experiences everyday time in the world, while other laws are untimed: “Where is the law, Ubi lex?” asks Augustine. The answer is, in time and out of time, as Augustine states, “Duplex est lex, temporalis videlicet, et eterna.”6 The law is twofold, in time and untimed, measured or unmeasured, that is, beyond measurement (ultra mensuram). One could just as well have asked, “Where is the King’s body?” The answer is: he has it, and then again, he does not. This was such an important and intriguing idea that not only corresponded to a reality that everyone who had lived under a monarchy could appreciate, but the concept of “The King’s Two Bodies” was, as Kantorowicz pointed out in his lengthy study, valid for many centuries, reaching a culmination within political discussion of the fifteenth century, particularly in England.

5   The topos of the king’s character angelicus can be found in the Old Testament, II Samuel 14. 17: “Then thine handmaid said, The word of my lord the king shall now be comfortable; for as an angel of God, so is my lord the king to discern good and bad: therefore the Lord thy God will be with thee” (“King James version,” italics mine). As Kantorowicz points out (p. 8, n. 4), the topos has been discussed extensively in the last century, but “the whole problem has not been investigated.” In his treatment of the topic, Kantorowicz himself prioritizes the time-dimension of this question, that angelic beings live in simultaneity, rather than within the ongoing structure of time with a beginning, incremental, processional, phase, and a closure. Cf. King’s Two Bodies, p. 171: “…in some respects the king was under the law of prescription; he was a ‘temporal being,’ strictly ‘within Time,’ and subjected, like any ordinary human being, to the effects of Time. In other respects, however, that is, with regard to things quasi sacrae or public, he was unaffected by Time and its prescriptive power; like ‘the holy sprites and angels,’ he was beyond Time [ultra mensuram] and therewith perpetual and sempiternal. The king, at least with regard to Time, had obviously ‘two natures’—one which was temporal and by which he conformed with the conditions of other men, and another which was perpetual and by which he outlasted and defeated all other beings.” See also p. 171, n. 249. 6   Cf. Augustine, De libero arbitrio, I, 6, 14; Robert Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, eds. Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (London, l986), p. 10: “Item, secundum Augustinum, duplex est lex: temporalis videlicet, et eterna. Et illa que temporalis  est iuste potest commutari per tempora.” Cf. van Deusen, “Ubi lex? Robert Grosseteste’s Discussion of Law, Letter, and Time, and its Musical Exemplification,” Dayton Philosophical Review 22 (l994), 219–232; and “Time out of Time: Musical Exemplification of Eternity and Measured Time,” in The Echo of Music: Essays in Honor of Marie Louise Göllner, ed. Blair Sullivan (Warren, MI, 2004), pp. 113–124.

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The underlying concept of personal space coterminus with, but distinct from, corporate office was not new. Cassiodorus within his psalm commentaries (fifth-sixth centuries), had brought up the matter of the “body” of the church, the ecclesia, indicated by the figura of a crown (corona) placed within and encircling the entire world. This, he informs us in his commentary on Psalm 20, a psalm among many of the psalter, dealing with kings and the privileges and duties of kingship, is a schema, known as a characterismos—a delineatory figura or constructed, definite, characteristic indicator that informed as well as described something that was absent to the actual eye, and to the sense of sight, but present as a cogent, perceptible reality. The head of this body, the church, was Christ Himself, whose majesty he goes on to describe, was great indeed: magna est gloria in salutari. Here, Cassiodorus states, we have another schema, or figura, the epexegesis (in Latin, the explanatio): “For in this glory and great brightness, time is seen to signify justice in God’s Deity: as the psalm states, in God’s deity, the Almighty appears, having glory in justice, decorum in majesty.” Cassiodorus’ commentary then addresses Christ’s two bodies, so to speak, the earthly body with which he descended from glory to die, and the body that will have no end. Time and timelessness, natural body with eternal, glory and justice are brought together in sharp association. This is one of many parallels between what one could identify as “kingship psalms,” Psalm 20 and 118, and the twin topics of rulership, both within time and without time, that bring these two kingship psalms together.7 Cassiodorus’ commentary on Psalm 118 (117) in fact begins with time, bringing simultaneous, present time into direct association with “the multitude”—a mob, so to speak. “Alleluia,” he states, “The first Hebrew word of the Psalm is found in John’s Apocalypse, Alleluia in caelo cantare multitudinem copiosam. Alleluia, the great multitude sings together in heaven.” Cassiodorus goes on to comment: 7  Cf. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL), vols. XCVII, XCVII, ed. Martin Adriaen (Turnhout, l958), I, pp. 183–184 (“corona” which is “characterismos:” Quod schema dicitur characterismos, id est informatio vel descriptio, quae sive rem absentem sive personam spiritualibus oculis subministrat. ) These “kingship psalms,” a study for itself, are treated in van Deusen, “Laudes regiae: in Praise of Kings.” Cassiodorus’ psalm commentaries were wellknown and available throughout the European continent, as the manuscript list included in Martin Adriaen’s edition demonstrates. Harvey Stahl has also contributed to the visual dimension of kingship in Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (University Park, PA, 2008).



majestic perseverance and the cantus coronatus83 That indeed, the four animals, and the twenty-four elders adoring God, say, that all of the heavenly host celebrate together, exercising in the great voice of the loud trumpet, a grandiose hymn of exultation. On this account, we hasten with alacrity to the office of praise. We sing with a pure heart, mixed with the devotion of holy virtues, that earthly honor and grace be made available, due to heavenly blessing. As we think of this, this particular psalm shines out clearly, as the first four verses of the psalm come to the same conclusion as the four gospels so that they are unified in praise to the Lord—a united quartet of exhortation. Here we can say that nothing that detracts from the entire impression has been inserted; nothing is mixed in here, but unification is clearly given by the word, Alleluia, and all is then brought to conclusion by a consonance of words. Here, as well as in the 135th psalm, all of the verses are constructed so that even if they should be separated, we can bring them altogether to be considered as in one place.8

We can observe, by reading Cassiodorus’ comments, that he was a thorough scholar (even sometimes a pedant), proceeding point by point through the Liber or entire book of the psalms, picking out each of the illusions to, and illustrations of, schemata, or figurae of speech and thought, giving them names, and quietly, patiently, explaining exactly what they mean. The Liber psalmorum is full of these schemata—literally hundreds of figurae as they come before one’s eyes and thoughts with the help of Cassiodorus’ earnest, thoughtful comments. Nonetheless, the forest is never lost for the many trees, that is, the underlying principles Cassiodorus is considering never entirely disappear. The raison d’être of the psalms themselves is never eclipsed by all of the names and characteristics of his schemata (figurae). There is always an initial statement or question, followed by one figura after the other, leading, then, to a conclusion—a reward for persevering through his incessant classification—and one is encouraged by this to persevere through the plenitude of figurae Cassiodorus brings to our attention from the rich resource of the Liber psalmorum. One notices in addition that these separate varied and diverse figurae one by one mark out, measure, and indicate discrete segments or points (puncta) in the progress of Cassiodorus’ verbal and conceptual sequence.9 8  Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, Commentary on Psalm 118 (117), II.1048– 1059; cf. II.1138–1139. Cassiodorus has inserted Alleluia before many of his psalm commentaries, as in the case cited above (Latin text paraphrased here). 9  Cassiodorus’ schemata or varied and diverse figurae are made clear in Martin Adriaen’s edition by the insertion of SCHE in the margins each time another figura is introduced.

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What Cassiodorus has been presenting here, in his commentaries on the kingship psalms 20 and 118, is that the visible, immediately apparent, and perhaps personal, ecclesia, as a collected body of believers—Christ’s regnum on earth—is contrasted, but also coterminus with the collected body of all believers from all times and places, simultaneously gathered together within the conceptual figura of the crown (corona), in other words, the figura coronata. One can therefore, as Cassiodorus indeed does, go from the personal to the corporate, from the king’s mortal body to his office, from the Old Testament figure of David the King, living in a specific place at a specific time, occasionally even getting himself into a good deal of trouble, to Christ; and by implication from our own mortal lives to a concept of the timeless office of every Christian believer, as participating in an “eternal weight of glory,” articulated by the Apostle Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians.10 As point of fact, these two collected bodies, seen and unseen, temporal and eternal, were neither so difficult to understand, nor were they necessarily removed from one another; rather, they informed one another. In Marc Bloch’s at the time ground-breaking Les rois thaumaturges (1924), a study of the supranatural character attributed to royal power, particularly in France and England, summarized by Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies, Bloch and, subsequently Kantorowicz, drew attention to what they considered to be a false dichotomy between socalled “profane” and “sacred,” or what is more commonly known today as the separation between the “sacred” and the “secular.”11 Both emphasized the issue that life, and especially “historical life,” seen with 10   II Corinthians 4. 17–18: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (“King James version”). The Apostle Paul also contrasts simultaneity with temporality or temporal time-lapse, as “affliction” is collapsed into “a moment,” with the parallel of “things which are not seen,” which are eternal; both of which contrasting with visible, temporal, “things.” What is subject to time and its ongoing sequence of events is seen, what is eternal is not visible, and is untimed, without measure. Music is particularly useful as an illustration of this comparison, since it is invisible, yet substantial, and individual tones can be given specific duration—or not, that is, ultra mensuram. This is music’s disciplinary ministry, namely, to make unseen things plain and comprehensible, as we will see. 11   Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strassburg, l924, rpt. with a preface by Jacques LeGoff, Paris, 1983).



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hindsight, subject to interpretation, and available as a laboratory with which to test the present, are not carved into “sacred” and “secular” or “everyday,” but comprise a unity. The abstractions of “power” for Marc Bloch, and of corporate office, for Cassiodorus and Kantorowicz, then, could be tested as an experimental system within historical time/life, with direct implications, in kind, for the present. This is exactly what Cassiodorus proceeds to do, that is, apply his comments to life itself. In his extensive commentaries on the Liber psalmorum (which comprise two thick volumes in the Corpus Christianorum edition), Cassiodorus reiterates what for him is an important consideration that the figurae he takes such trouble to describe are useful in documenting the measured sequence of time, instant by instant, indeed, through life. This is also the underlying priority of Aristotle’s Poetica, in which Aristotle points out that each individual, consistent figura or character, in a definite way, marks time, gives identification to the moment-by-moment sequence of the narrative of a theatrical piece, or play, and that one should construct the plot in such a way that this would be recognizably the case. One proceeded, one event marked by a descriptive figura to the other, step by step.12 Cassiodorus, as we have seen, further contrasts this conceptualization of measured time, moment by moment, with timelessness, or eternity, which gathers all events, as well as varied and diverse figurae, into one place—the great company of believers altogether within Christ’s regnum. In perseverance through time, event by event, there is majesty, he writes: majestas est perseverantia, leading ultimately to gloria. This sequence of events has an analogy in, and can be best exemplified by, music, the exemplary material of measurement as it moves along, one tone after the other, in connected, well-considered order, leading to a recognizable conclusion. But there are other ways in which music, or cantus, makes what Cassiodorus has to say plain. The sequence (sequentia) within the liturgy of the mass or Eucharistic celebration, framed by the Alleluia, and constituting a transitional bridge to the reading of the Gospel (the Evangelium or the “Good News” about God’s eternal Kingdom), proceeds tone by self-contained tone, paired with syllable, one instant after the other through time, arriving 12   Aristotle, in the Poetics, on the issue of characters (figurae),1453b1–1454b18, although most English translations suffer through the mistranslation of key terms (such as inserting the English “poetry,” “poet” for poetics itself as a concept [“maker/ fabricator” of a work such as a theater piece]).

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at a conclusion. If one perseveres, one figura13 following another, through what often proves to be a long sequence of tone and text, with varied and diverse figurae such as David, Jesse, Eve, the Virgin Mary, Sampson, Elijah, and many, many more, drawn before one’s eyes and imagination, to the end of a long sequence (such as this example), one arrives finally at “glory” in the company of the saints. There are hundreds of such examples: a sequence of time, with each instant marked out by tone together with syllable, as well as by varied and diverse figurae, such as the branch of Jesse that flowered, Gideon and the fleece, the rod that floated, the bread of angels, Jonah and the worm that attacked his shade-tree, arriving then, one figura after the other to the King in his tabernacle. Finally, after an entire succession of figurae—an allegorical tour de force—the way of moving, or modus, changes to that of eschatological perfection, with people—as a mob—altogether in one place, where time indeed is, as Cassiodorus states, of no consequence. “To God be the glory, by whose grace we have hope for eternal life. This great company of believers is immediately in the presence of God.” Sequences end with phrases such as (paraphrases of Latin included): divina ducat ad celestia (the Divine leads [them] to celestial realms) preparat paradisi gaudium (prepared for the joy of paradise) ducamur ad eterna gaudia (we are led to eternal joy) beatum et eterna gaudia (the blessed and the eternally joyful) hos tuere et per duc ad gloriam (those together through [their leader] to glory) in gloria his cibavi (thus [having] eaten in glory: connotation of having partaken) ducat ad eterna felices regna (led to the kingdom of eternal felicity) curramus ad gloriam (we hurry along, or run, to glory) sedes multe in celestibus gloria (the many together seated in celestial glory) 13   Figura refers to both music notational figura and an alphabetical letter such as an a, a conceptual joining of syllable and tone by means of the same concept/term. Figura, often used erroneously as a synonym for sign, form, image, icon, or symbol, had an important and distinct significance in the Middle Ages as a linear delineator that was deliberately constructed, in order to indicate. We have observed how important, for example, figura as a translation of the Greek schema was for Cassiodorus.



majestic perseverance and the cantus coronatus87 in perenni mereamur exultari gloria (forever the reward of exaltation in glory is merited by us) semper regnemus in excelsis (we reign forever in the highest) qui regit et celestia per infinita (who reigns celestially forever) celestis sede frui valeamus (we are worthy to sit in the celestial regions) valeamus semper in regno tuo per secula (we are worthy forever to be in your kingdom throughout the ages)14

Notice the frequent use of ducat, ducamur, duc ad gloriam, reiterating the concept of directionality, moving forward with the implication of inexorable motion, as well as leadership, culminating in the “eternal present with the company of the crowd of saints.” The sequence is a cantus coronatus; there are hundreds of examples15 of just this idea of the song (cantus) of those who have been crowned with infinite joy, eternally delineated by Cassiodorus’ figura of the crown indicating all Christian believers from every time and place, brought together simultaneously before God. To be in God’s immediate presence, without intervening obstruction, is truly glorious—inexpressible, in fact—both for Cassiodorus, and, as we have seen, for the Apostle Paul. In this example of a sequence one is able to notice the varied and diverse figurae as they occur one by one, both in terms of music notation, as well as imaginative figurae delineated by letters in syntax, with a culmination in the final line of the Christian in company with the assembled group of believers in the kingdom of God. It is worthy of remark that one of the first to have come down to us as a sequence writer, Notker Balbulus, knew Cassiodorus’ commentaries. He writes 14   On the topic of final lines or explicits of sequences reiterating in as many ways as possible the Christian’s presence before God in company with the ecclesia, see van Deusen, “The Use and Significance of the Sequence,” Musica Disciplina 40 (1986), 1–46, “Songs of Exile, Songs of Pilgrimage” in Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and its Music, eds. Sean Gallager, James Haar, and Timothy Striplin (Aldershot, UK, 2003), pp. 105–118; and “Verbum Dei Deo natum and its Manuscript Context,” in Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Houghton Library Publications (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 55–80. Both musical and theological implications of the figurae contained in this sequence are discussed by Marcia L. Colish and Nancy van Deusen, “Promissa mundo gaudia and the Theological Background of a Medieval Sequence,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Albany, NY, l999), pp. 105–138. 15   There are over three thousand sequence texts combined in multivalent ways with approximately 1500 sequence melodies. Cf. van Deusen, The Medieval Latin Sequence, 900–1600: A Catalogue of the Manuscript Sources, 2 vols (forthcoming).

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in his treatise, De interpretationibus [Concerning the Interpretation of Scripture]: In this book of the Psalms, Senator Cassiodorus discusses the interpretation of the many—the multitude, in which together can be seen a font, a source, useful for us in terms of acquiring wisdom in this life, that is, what is manifest is a sweet variety of schemata and metaphors.

Notker is here quoting from Cassiodorus’ preface to his psalm commentaries, dulcissimam varietatem…cum psalterii caelestis animarum mella gustassem. The psalter containing, as it does, apt metaphors and figures referring to the glory of Christ’s kingdom has the effect on our minds that the sweetness of honey has on our sense of taste. We love it, and it makes us happy. This, then, is majestas: perseverance through time, step by step, to coronatus, Cassiodorus’ crown of all Christian believers, past, present, and future, gathered together, first in one’s mind’s eye, as one reflected on this particular figura, then, eventually, in eternity. In the first instance, as one reflected upon what was “absent from the eye,” as Cassiodorus writes, one is situated in everyday time-lapse, moment by moment, as one experiences time passing, measured in increments, as exemplified in music in terms of particular tones. The final reward, or crown of one’s perseverance, is beyond measurement (ultra mensuram), or experience removed from time. Reading through both volumes of commentaries on all one hundred and fifty psalms, one notices that Cassiodorus has a good deal to say on this topic. In fact, it appears to be a locus topici for him, obviously intriguing his mind as he thought and wrote about how figurae, or schemata, first brought an outline or shape to the imagination that could then lead to another related consideration. This was a very interesting phenomenon, of how a figura could stand in the place of substantia, materia, yet effectively bring it to mind, delineating even complex characteristics. The topic, as a matter of fact, is still a relevant topic today, for example, for linguists, philosophers of the mind, as well as cognitive psychologists; but Cassiodorus also brought out the point that mental processionality, step by step, as perseverance through time was always necessary in dealing with schemata / figurae since the principal meaning was often not readily apparent. One needed to proceed step by step, and not lose patience, nor become faint-hearted; and perhaps one reason why metaphors, figures of speech, and thought—the part and parcel of allegory—may be in short supply today is that modern audiences have very little patience with them.



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To continue with Cassiodorus to an understanding of this topic of “majesty as the result of, and reward for, perseverance:” in another context, concerning Psalm 28 (29), which reads, “Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord glory and strength, give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name…The voice of the Lord is upon the waters…the voice of the Lord is powerful, the voice of the Lord is full of majesty…the voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests; and in his tabernacle doth every one speak of his glory,” Cassiodorus writes: Here, if we apply ourselves diligently and proceed gradually we arrive at an understanding of what the scriptures indicate by the concept of the ‘tabernacle.’ The consummation or completion of the tabernacle refers to the world-wide church, now under construction, still to come through perseverance to perfection, presently battling carnal lusts. The object itself, of the ‘tabernacle,’ a habitation, as its name indicates, also occupies an honorable place within Christian doctrine, as the church, after its perfection (post perfectionem generalis ecclesiae), is sung through the Spirit, in praise, by the prophets of the Old Testament. This entire psalm beginning with the injunction, ‘Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, Give unto the Lord glory and strength,’ is full of allusions to God’s majesty.16

This concept of the majesty of perseverance is a topic that unites Greek and Roman learning with the intellectual-spiritual culture of the Latin Middle Ages, or rather, is symptomatic of an intrinsically unified and continuous mental culture from what we now label as “Late Antiquity” throughout the medieval period. We have seen that there is majesty, that is, fruition, perfection, and “glory,” through perseverance for Cassiodorus; but this is true for Aristotle as well, and the conceptpair, therefore, became the topic of intense discussion following the translations from Greek into Latin of primary treatises such as, first the Physica, then especially the Metaphysica, De anima, the Posterior 16  Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, I, pp. 248–254: “Psalmus David in consummatione tabernaculi. Quoniam praecedentia verba iam nota sunt, restat ut ‘consummationem tabernaculi’ paulo diligentius perquirere debeamus. ‘Consummatio tabernaculi’ perfectionem significat Ecclesiae catholicae, quae iam per totum orbem probatur esse constructa. ‘Tabernaculi’ enim nomine in hoc mundo posita declaratur Ecclesia, quae contra carnalia vitia bella gerens, merito expeditionalis habitaculi nomen accepit. Quapropter hunc psalmum christiani dogmatis honore pollentem, post perfectionem generalis Ecclesiae, in laudem Spiritus sancti propheta decantat; ut quia tanta res per prophetas et apostolos beata praedicatione completa est, competenter eius laudibus ornaretur. Est enim totus psalmus Spiritus sancti laude plenissimus et per varias allusiones praeconia eius maiestatis exsoluens. Hoc est quod oratores dicunt demonstrativum genus, quando per huiusmodi descriptionem ostenditur aliquis atque cognoscitur.”

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Analytica, and the Poetica during the late twelfth, early thirteenth centuries. Known as the Aristotelian reception, the commentaries on these works fill European libraries today, a massive testimony to the importance of the mental models presented in these treatises, which also irrevocably changed and shaped all of the disciplines as well as their relationships to one another. In the first chapters of the Metaphysica, The Philosopher makes it plain that the way (via) to the crowning goal of wisdom is to persevere step by step even, or especially, through contrary motions of conflicting circumstances, or contrary lines of thought. In fact, since, in the process he outlines in the Metaphysica, one must proceed one step at a time arduously, patiently to a conclusion, Metaphysics became known in the thirteenth century as the “Lord of the sciences.” This process, Aristotle continues, is of the greatest consequence, underscoring his point by exemplifying his model, which he identifies as theoria, in all of his most important works. In his Physica, Aristotle exemplifies  theoria (in Latin, ductus) in terms of measured directionality of motion within materia; theoria is exemplified as logical sequence in the Posterior Analytica, and the same model is exemplified in terms of the structure of ordered, constructed time-sequence in the Poetica. The Physica was the first to enter the mainstream of Latin intellectual culture with at least three important translations from Greek into Latin available in the early thirteenth century, followed by Robert Grosseteste’s translation of the Posterior Analytics, ca. 1235, and the subsequent translations made by William of Moerbeke of most of the remaining treatises by Aristotle, including the Poetica, during the last generation of the thirteenth century.17 What Aristotle outlined in all of these treatises, that is, perseverance to culmination, step by step in logical, measured, continuity, had an enormous effect, for example, on the studies of logic (the “logica nova”), as well as the new discipline of physics, in fact on the Latinbased intellectual community of the early university overall, including the work of Roger Bacon and his younger contemporary, Johannes de 17   See Bernard G. Dod’s useful outline of the chronology and relative importance of Latin translations of Aristotelian treatises during the reception of the late twelfth, early thirteenth century: “Aristoteles latinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg with Eleonore Stump (Cambridge, l982), pp. 45–79, esp. 74–79; as well as John E. Murdoch, “Infinity and Continuity,” CHLMP, pp. 564–592, and van Deusen, “On the Usefulness of Music: Motion, Music and the Thirteenth-Century Reception of Aristotle’s Physics,” Viator 29 (l998), 167–187.



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Grocheio, among many others. All of this is well-known, but Grocheio’s mention—which is also familiar—of the topic of cantus coronatus must be considered both within a known context for which there is much evidence: first, the context of Cassiodorus’ comments on the psalms, which one can safely assume (on the basis of its manuscript transmission, as well as extant manuscripts even today) that everyone who could read Latin well had read; second, the liturgical sequence as exemplary of these comments—which all knew well; and finally, the overwhelming influence of Aristotle’s theoria model during the period of Grocheio’s life and work. In other words, Grocheio must be considered within his own intellectual context, his background, as well as the relatively new conceptual priorities of his time, namely, the sorting out of newly-presented Latin-language concepts, since Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, Posterior Analytics, and by the end of the century, the Poetics, were being in some cases vehemently debated. Johannes de Grocheio, writing ca. 1316, whose treatise is to be found in two manuscripts today in the British Library, London (Harley 281), and in Darmstadt, (Hessische Landes-und Hochschulbibliothek 2663), written in a script that identifies the copier as having had association with the Parisian university milieu (but actually from elsewhere, perhaps northern Italy), has been identified by Palémon Glorieux as one of the masters of the University of Paris.18 This is good to have from a great scholar of the early university; but we would otherwise be certain of this from the fact that his treatise is informed by vocabulary, concepts, and considerations directly from the newly-translated Latin Aristotle, most notably, the Metaphysics, the Physics, and Aristotle’s treatise on the heavens, De coelo. All this certainly warrants thorough investigation, but in this context we will go directly to his mention of cantus coronatus which, while it is general, and definitely need not accrue anachronistic genre-connotations, should nevertheless be considered within its context, both within the treatise and within the ongoing interactions with Aristotle’s writings. In this context, Grocheio is writing of the cantus of the mass. His short comment centers upon the concept of succession, one longa (or figura indicating a lengthier tone) after the other that, in this steady perseverance of tone after tone, 18   Cf. Palémon Glorieux, La Faculté des arts et ses maîtres au xiiie siècle (Paris, l971), p. 216, who Glorieux believes “without a doubt” to have been a priest, since we also possess, as he states, sermons by Grocheio. Cf. Ernst Rohloff, Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio (Leipzig, 1967). A new edition with English translation and commentary is in preparation.

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has an impact on the very seat of learning, expectation, and devotion, namely, the “heart.” He writes, in a passage that has by now become famous to the small group of scholars working on writing concerning music of the early fourteenth century: “This then is cantus to be sung in succession, one equal, long tone after the other, persevering to its completion (et perfectis) [moving along] in the manner (ad modum) of the cantus of the crowned (cantus coronati).”19 The sequence, proceeds (is “led through”) with equal tones, is directly followed by the reading of the Evangelium (Gospel reading), and is not diversified according to the eight modes, but does have a close connection both to the liturgical feast, as well as regional practice (as described in another mention of cantus coronatus within Grocheio’s treatise). The sequence has other remarkable features. It is recognizable as a liturgical category, first and foremost, by its transitional position proceeding from the Old Testament Alleluia and presenting an array of figurae, employing the allegorical mode of textual interpretation, culminating with the Christian’s presence before God in company with other believers, thus using the eschatological mode of interpretation. Thus the sequence is primarily related, as Grocheio mentions, to its liturgical situation. Finally, the sequence, in a particular way, as it brings to mind the kingdom of God, prepares the heart for the Gospel reading that has predominately to do with that very topic. *** Several oppositions have been introduced in this paper. We began with a comparison between time and infinitude, laws that are the timed and laws that are untimed (ultra mensuram) as presented, for example, by Augustine. Measurement was contrasted with the continuous, unmeasured present, as in the concept of the “King’s Two Bodies,” and 19   Isti autem cantus cantantur tractim et ex longis et perfectis ad modum cantus coronati. Ut corda audiencium ad devote orandum promoveantur. Et ad devote audiendum orationem quoniam immediate dicit sacerdos vel ad hoc ordinates. Isti etiam cantus non diversificantur secundum. 8. modos, sed solum secundum diversa festa et diversos usus ecclesiarum. (Harley 281, new edition 32.4). There are several other instances of cantus coronatus: I have selected the most definitive and fundamental of Grocheio’s descriptions; other instances deal more with local practice. The translation of this passage, as is true of all translations, has been deliberately influenced by using the background of Grocheio’s writing, described above, as a lens through which the Latin vocabulary here can be interpreted. Accordingly, the mention of conductus in another context should be understood as ductus, leading through, persevering, permutations of which are frequently found, as we have seen, in the last lines of sequences.



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a consideration of the mortal body, existing day to day in, and very much influenced by, time—a body that would someday, at a point in time, perish, contrasted with the untimed office of king, of kingship as a “corporate body” that existed in perpetuity. The office itself remained, the corporate body existed outside of time, as was the case in Cassio­ dorus’ discussion of the individual, personal, and living Christian in time, contrasted with the corporate body of all Christians everywhere and from all times. Cassiodorus was convinced on the basis of his careful reading and study of the psalms, that all of these Christians together, persevering one increment or moment at a time, in sequence would, at the end and “perfection” of time, meet—aggregate—in the presence of God, in the immediacy of inexpressible, immediate, participation in glory.20 This is the culmination—inexpressible joy and profound wonder—but it is the result of process, of incremental movement, and in this movement there is also a carefully-worked out resolution of oppositions, of contrary motions. Music by its very nature made these abstractions plain, as one note with a corresponding notational figura followed directly upon the other, leading finally to a culmination. But this point of perseverance leading to the immediate presence in the glory of the Christian before God, in company with the glorious company of prophets, apostles, saints, and martyrs, is the underlying raison d’être of the sequencia—a conceptual nexus that gives logic and meaning as well as significance to a liturgical genre that was sung throughout Europe for at least seven centuries. Cassiodorus’ structure is composed of varied and diverse figurae, contrasted with the total company gathered together in glory, the individual with a characteristic identity compared to, and contrasted with, the group, or joined, community. These comparisons have had 20  Immediacy and spontaneity are key issues here, a topic that is developed in Alan of Lille’s commentary on the sequence, Ad celebres, rex celice, for Michael the Archangel, ascribed to Notker Balbulus, which addresses Pseudo-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy, translated into Latin by Johannes Scotus Eriugena (ninth century). The seraphin (cf. Isaiah 6. 6–7) have an immediate vision of God, the inexpressible, since they, because of their love for God, are closest to God, a topic for itself. See MarieThérèse d’Alverny, Textes inédits avec une introduction sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, l965), pp. 85–108 with extensive notes and bibliographical references. Erika Kihlman has included d’Alverny’s edition of Alan’s commentary in her recent Expositiones sequentiarum. Medieval Sequence Commentaries and Prologues (Stockholm, 2006). Alan of Lille makes pointed reference to Cassiodorus’ prologue to his Expositio psalmorum as he refers to Cassiodorus’ categories of psalm-songs.

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a lasting effect on what one could cite as a history of ideas, as described by Ernst Kantorowicz, but they remain to a certain extent abstractions  until exemplified by music, since music employs the “stuff of life”—time, motion, and the invisible substance of sound. Nothing can be understood without the example of music, wrote Augustine. He was right.



majestic perseverance and the cantus coronatus

Example: Sequentia Promissa mundo gaudia



nancy van deusen

(Cont.) Example: Sequentia Promissa mundo gaudia



majestic perseverance and the cantus coronatus

Example: Sequentia Promissa mundo gaudia (Concluded)

Nationes And Other Bonding Groups At Late Medieval Central European Universities Paul W. Knoll In the institutional evolution of the universities of medieval Europe, one of the most distinctive aspects of their institutional structure was the natio. As Pearle Kibre has shown in her classic study of the “nations” in the medieval universities,1 and as subsequent work by others, especially Jacques Verger and Olga Weijers,2 has revealed, these organizational and administrative units had their roots in associations of students formed on the basis of region or country of origin. At Bologna, the first natio was that of the Ultramontani—most of them Germans, but by the thirteenth century there were fourteen nationes within the collective unit—the universitas—of the ultramontani, with another four “nations” in the university of the Citramontani.3 At the other great archetypal university of the middle ages, Paris, there were four nations in existence by the middle of the thirteenth century, that of the German-English, of the French, and those of Normandy and Picardy. Unlike Bologna, however, these nationes were not student unions but were rather constituted by masters of arts, many of whom were also students in the higher faculties. And at Paris, they had real power, for they exercised strong influence upon university policies as a whole. Each was represented by a procurator who served as one of the chief advisors of the university rector.4   Pearl Kibre, The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities (Cambridge, MA, 1948).  Olga Weijers, Terminologie des universités au XIIIe siècle, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo 39 (Rome, 1987), pp. 56–62; Jacques Verger, “La Faculté des arts: le cadre institutionnel,” in eds. O. Weijers and L. Holtz, L’enseignement des disciplines à la Faculté des arts (Paris et Oxford, XIIIe—XVe siècles), Studia Artistarum 4 (Turnhout, 1997), pp. 30–35. 3   As for terminology, Weijers, Terminologie des universitiés, p. 58, has noted that “At the University of the Citramontani, the nationes were divided into smaller units, represented by their so-called consiliarii, who were to advise the rector of the University. These smaller units were named accordingly: consiliariae. Thus a natio at the University of the Ultramontani corresponds roughly with a consiliaria at the University of the Citramontani.” 4  See the comments on nations by Aleksander Gieysztor,” Management and Resources,” in A History of the University in Europe, gen. ed. Walter Rüegg, vol. 1: 1 2

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There was no systematic reason for the number of nations at medieval universities. Some, like Toulouse, had none, while Orléans had ten, Padua four, and Oxford two: the boreales and the australes, with the river Trent the dividing line. (About 94% of the students at Oxford were English; the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the occasional continental were forced without option to be part of one natio or the other.) As with the difference between Bologna and Paris, some nations were associations with fundamentally social functions—for example, to help students from abroad cope with life in a foreign environment. Other nations were powerful corporate entities within the larger corporation of the university and exercised, as at Paris, their influence at even the highest levels of the institution. As Mariken Teeuwen has concluded, summing up the results of the CIVICIMA Project (the International Committee on the Vocabulary of Institutions and of Intellectual Communication in the Middle Ages [Comité International du Vocabulaire des Institutions et de la Communication Intellectuelles au Moyen Âge]), masterminded and mentored by Olga Weijers, “in the context of the medieval university… natio becomes not only the region of origin, but also an association of people of a common region of origin, or who have the same mother tongue.”5 Thus looking at the natio in either context—the externally influential corporate entity or the association of common origins— helps us to understand something of the role the nationes played in the universities of central and east central Europe. Thus the natio became one of the institutional elements that bound individuals within the academic community together, though, as we shall see below, not the only one. As the university movement spread in Europe, the phenomenon of nations took on a variety of forms. The experience in central and east central Europe was a particularly complex one. And it is on this that I wish to focus in this essay. I will be brief and cursory on some matters and places, treating others, especially Prague and Cracow, more fully. Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 114–116; and, more specifically on one of the nationes, G.C. Boyce, The EnglishGerman Nation in the University of Paris during the Middle Ages (Bruges, 1927). 5  Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, CIVICIMA Études sur le vocabulaire intellectual du moyen âge 10 (Turnhout, 2003), p. 106 (entry on natio, societas, consiliaria, pp. 103–106). The foregoing data on the number and names of nationes at universities noted in the previous two paragraphs are based upon Teeuwen’s summary of the presentations of Weijers and Verger (see n. 2 above).

nationes at late medieval central european universities97 Universities came late to the lands north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. In 1346 Charles of Luxembourg, the new King of Bohemia and emperor elect of the Holy Roman Empire, successfully forwarded a request for the foundation of a studium generale in his capital city of Prague to his former teacher, Pierre Roger, now Pope Clement VI, and in the following year the University of Prague came into being.6 In 1364, Charles’ contemporary Casimir the Great of Poland obtained papal permission for the erection of a university in his capital, Cracow,7 and in the following year Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, called der Stifter, established the University of Vienna.8 Not to be outdone, the other great contemporary ruler in the region, Louis of Anjou, King of Hungary, succeeded in establishing the short-lived University of Pécs (Fünfkirchen, Quinque Ecclesia) in 1367.9 The first university in German lands proper was authorized by the papacy in 1379 for Erfurt, but did not come into existence until 1392. By then universities had been established in Heidelberg (1385) and Cologne (1388). In the Hungarian lands, a second, also short-lived 6   For the foundation and early development, of Prague, especially the Arts Faculty, see now the treatment by František Šmahel, “The Faculty of Liberal Arts 1348–1419,” in A History of Charles University, Vol. I. 1347/48—1622, eds. František Kavka and Josef Petráň, pp. 93–120, which appeared originally in Dějiny Univerzity Karlovy I. 1347/48—1622, ed. Michal Svatoš (Prague, 1995), pp. 101–133; this chapter has now been reprinted in Šmahel, Die Prager Universität im Mittelalter / The Charles University in the Middle Ages. Gesammelte Aufsätze / Selected Studies, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 28 (Leiden / Boston, 2007), pp. 213–271. The traditional older presentations in, for example, Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895); F.M. Powicke and A.B. Emden, eds., 3 vols (Oxford, 1936, rpt. 1987), vol. 2, pp. 211–234; and R.R. Betts, “The University of Prague: The First Sixty Years,” in his Essays in Czech History (London, 1969), pp. 13–28, are now superseded by the chapters in the Kavka-Petráň volume. 7  See Jan Dąbrowski, “Czasy Kazimierza Wielkiego,” in ed., Kazimierz Lepszy, Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w latach 1364—1764, vol. 1 [sic.] (Cracow, 1964), pp. 15–36; and, more recently, Stanisław Szczur, Papież Urban V i Powstanie Uniwersytetu w Krakowie w 1364 r. (Cracow, 1999), who overturns some traditional views regarding legal and procedural matters connected with the foundation. In English, see Paul W. Knoll, “Casimir the Great and the University of Cracow,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 16 (1968), 232–249. 8   For Vienna, see Rashdall, Universities of Europe, pp. 234–245; and the material assembled by Paul Uiblein, “Beiträge zur Frühgeschichte der Universität Wien,” Mitteilung des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 71 (1963), 284–310. 9   Astrik L. Gabriel, The Mediaeval Universities of Pécs and Pozsony (Notre Dame, IN, 1969), pp. 9–35. See also the comments on the issues connected with Hungarian university foundations in the Middle Ages by L.S. Domonkos, “The Problems of Hungarian University Foundations in the Middle Ages,” in Society in Change. Studies in Honor of Béla K. Király, eds. Steven Bela Vardy and Agnes Huszar Vardy (New York, 1963), pp. 371–390, esp. pp. 373–376.

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institution was established in Obuda (Old Buda) by Emperor Charles IV’s younger son, Sigismund, in 1389. In the course of the following century, virtually a “golden age” of university foundations in the region, Cracow was renewed in 1400 (a theological faculty had been authorized in 1397), Würzburg erected in 1402, Leipzig established following a migration from Prague in 1409, and Rostock founded in 1419. Following a quarter century hiatus, Trier (1454), Greifswald (1456), Freiburg-im-Breisgau (1455/56), Basel (1459), Ingolstadt (1459 also), Mainz (1476), and Tübingen (1476–1477) joined the ranks of regional studia generalia. Before that King Mathias Corvinus of Hungary resurrected university studies in the Hungarian lands with the establishment of a studium in Pozsony (Preßburg, today Bratislava) in 1465/1467.10

10   For the details noted in this paragraph, see the following. For the German lands proper, the classic work of Georg Kaufmann, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Universitäten, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1888–1896), vol. 2, pp. 1–45; Rashdall, Universities of Europe, vol. 2, pp. 245–288; Ferdinand Seibt, “Von Prag bis Rostock. Zur Gründung der Universitäten in Mitteleuropa,” in Festschrift für Walter Schlesinger, 2 vols, ed. H. Beumann (Cologne / Vienna, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 406–426; and Rainer Christoph Schwinges, “Prestige und gemeiner Nutzen. Universitätsgründungen im deutschen Spätmittelalter,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 21 (1998), 5–17. For Hungary, see Gabriel, The Mediaeval Universities of Pécs and Pozsony, pp. 37–50; Domonkos, “Problems of Hungarian University Foundations,” pp. 376–385; Domonkos, “The History of the Sigismundean Foundation of the University of Óbuda (Hungary),” in Studium Generale. Studies offered to Astrik L. Gabriel, ed. L.S. Domonkos (Notre Dame, 1967), pp. 3–33; and Domonkos, “The Origins of the University of Pozsony,” The New Review: A Journal of East-European History 9 (1969), 270–289. Developments in Cracow are best treated by Mieczysław Markowski, “Początki Wydziału Teologii w Krakowie w kontekscie uniwersytetów europejskich,” in Jubileusz Sześćsetlecie Wydziału Teologicznego Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Krakowie 20 X 1996—20 X 1997, Studia do dziejów Wydziału Teologicznego Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 10 (Cracow, 1998), pp. 221–247: Paul W. Knoll, “Jadwiga and Education,” The Polish Review 44 (1999), 419–432, esp. 423–425, which treats the foundation of the theological faculty within the context of Queen Jadwiga’s interest in education and the completion of the conversion of Lithuania; and Zofia Kozłowska-Budkowa, “Odnowienie Jagiellońskiego Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego (1390–1414),” in Lepszy, ed., Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, pp. 37–89, esp. pp. 43–56. Most previous scholarship has seen King Władysław Jagiełło as rather passively carrying out the wishes of his deceased spouse Jadwiga and only, by default, eventually reaping the credit for the university’s tradition by having his name associated with it formally as “The Jagiellonian University of Cracow.” Recently, however, in his habilitation lecture at the University of Cracow on 10 January 2003, Krzysztof Stopka has argued convincingly that the king deserves much fuller credit for the beginnings of the university; see his article, based on the lecture, “Jagiellońska fundacja Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego,” Rocznik Krakowski 69 (2003), 35–46, and printed in English as “The Jagiellonian Foundation of Cracow University,” Quaestiones medii aevi novae 8 (2003), 47–66.

nationes at late medieval central european universities99 The picture of nationes in these institutions is varied. Prague and Cracow to one side for the moment, let me provide the following overview of the others. The University of Vienna was in many ways modeled upon Paris. Its first rector was Albert of Saxony,11 who had previously been rector at Paris; and the first statute passed by the university provided for the creation of four nations, composed, as at Paris, of Masters in Arts. These were the Austrian, the Saxon, the Bohemian, and the Hungarian, and it was they, each having one vote, who elected the rector of the university.12 But this picture is essentially meaningless, for Vienna as an institution did not prosper following the death of its founder in 1365. Not until the 1380’s under a new duke, Albert III, was there a refoundation. Again, Parisian influences were strong: Henry of Langenstein, one of the dominant figures of the faculty of Theology at Paris, was the spiritus movens of the Albertine university. As a university of masters, Vienna was now organized into the Austrian nation (including the Italian peninsula), the Rhenish, which encompassed the whole of western Europe, the Hungarian (including the Slavic lands), and the Saxon (the rest of Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain). These nations governed the university, electing proctors, who in turn elect the rector. The Deans of the individual faculties, however, apparently had considerable influence in the consistory or executive council of the school.13 Heidelberg, too, bore the imprint of Paris. Marsilius of Inghen, former rector there, was the first rector at Heidelberg and was regarded by contemporaries as indeed a co-founder with Palatine Elector Rupert I. Despite this, and even though Heidelberg was a typical “masters” 11   For his crucial role, both in obtaining papal authorization and in the early life of the university, see Georg Heidingsfelder, Albert von Sachsen. Sein Lebensgang und sein Kommentar zur Nikomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles (Münster i. W., 1921), esp. p. 29ff. 12   The privileges establishing the university are edited in both Latin and German in 600 Jahre Universität Wien, ed. Paul Uiblein (Vienna / Munich, 1965), pp. 6–25. 13   This revival owed much to the ecclesiastical, political, and educational dislocations caused by the Great Western Schism after 1378; see, in general, R.N. Swanson, Universities, Academics,and the Great Schism (Cambridge, UK 1979). The renewal and development of the university in this period is treated in the early sections of Uiblein’s Mittelalterliches Studium an der Wiener Artistenfakultät (Vienna, 1987). The institutional functioning of the school can be seen against the backdrop of the life and work of its leading faculty member, Heinrich von Langenstein, formerly of Paris, who served as Dean of the Theology Faculty and university rector before his death in 1397; see J. Lang, “Die Christologie bei Heinrich von Langenstein, Teil I: Leben und Schriften des Heinrich von Langenstein,” Freiburger Theologische Studien 85 (1966), 1–78. More briefly, Kibre, The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities, pp. 172–176.

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university, the nations did not develop strongly there. Nineteenth century research on the institution suggested that, despite the mention of nations in the foundation charter, none really emerged, and more recent research, including the classic history of Gerhard Ritter, has confirmed this.14 Some of this may be due to the fact that university recruiting was becoming regionalized, as Hilde de Ridder-Symoens has noted,15 and attachments to geographically defined nations had lost much of its earlier meaning. Although the University of Cologne was certainly modeled upon Paris, its history was closely bound up with the long-standing Dominican tradition and the municipal ambitions of the city, and it is not surprising that nations were absent here too.16 Indeed, throughout the fifteenth century history of the German universities, nationes as administrative and governing units are, with the partial and important exception of Leipzig, conspicuous by their absence. As independent corporations with an external role in the studia, the strength and influence of nations in university matters was not an important aspect of most of the medieval university history in central and east central Europe. In other respects, however, the nations were of considerable importance in understanding the development of these institutions and of the character of the university experience. Thus, in what follows, I should like to turn in more depth to the universities of Prague and Cracow to examine two different aspects of the life of nations, and at the same time showing how, in the case of Cracow, there were other bonding elements within the university than the natio as it had been known at Bologna or Paris. The institutional history of Prague was complicated. The bull of foundation granted by Clement VI and the original charter given by Charles had provided for a Parisian model with all four faculties—arts, theology, medicine, and law—under the governance of a single rector.17 Soon, however, disputes arose over the rights of the rector, and 14  Gerhard Ritter, Die Heidelberger Universität, I. Das Mittelalter, 1386–1508 (Heidelberg, 1936); see esp. p. 64ff. As Kibre notes (The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities, p. 177), whatever the statutes called for in the way of a nationes structure was abandoned almost “at once.” 15   Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, “Mobility,” in A History of the University in Europe 1, p. 287f. 16  In Erich Meuthen’s near-classic study of Cologne’s history, Kölner Universitätsgeschichte, vol. 1: Die alte Universität (Cologne / Vienna, 1988), there is scarcely any discussion of the issue of the absence of nations. 17   Apart from the now standard treatment of the Kavka-Petráň volume (see n. 6 above), see Šmahel, “Die Anfänge der Prager Universität,” in Šmahel, Die Prager Universität im Mittelalter, pp. 3–50, esp. pp. 6–12.

nationes at late medieval central european universities101 among the students in law there developed ambitions to obtain the same student-liberties enjoyed by those studying law at Bologna and Padua. By 1372 it had been agreed to divide the university, and henceforth there was both a legal studium that elected its own rector and the original university, now composed of only three faculties.18 Each was divided into four nations for administrative purposes. Prague was from the beginning the same kind of international institution that the earlier archetypal studia of Paris and Bologna had been. While one of Charles’ purposes in founding the institution was, as he put it, to reduce the time, expense, and danger that local students had to undergo in order to attend foreign universities, there were many students who matriculated from the German and Slavonic lands as well as other lands in the region, along with foreigners from England, France, and Lombardy. Some have suggested the size of the student body in Prague was second only to that of Paris, and this is almost certainly true with regard to northern Europe only. The fact that Prague had been allowed to establish a theological faculty by the pope at Avignon, at a time when the papacy strove to preserve the position of Paris, undoubtedly served to attract students from many locations. Thus, given the Parisian institutional model upon which Prague had been founded and the mix of students from a variety of areas, the university’s nations played from the beginning a vital and dynamic role.19 The Bohemian nation held students from the Czech lands, Moravia, and Hungary though some of these would have been ethnic Germans. The Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish nations (the latter of which was dominated by German-speaking students rather than Slavonic) composed the other three nations. As František Graus, among many others, has pointed out, the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were a period of burgeoning Czech nationalism (or at least, others would say,

  This institution is treated by Peter Moraw, “Die Juristenuniversität in Prag (1372– 1419), verfassungs- und sozialgeschichtlich betrachtet,” in Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 439–486, rpt. Moraw, Gesammelte Beiträge zur Deutschen und Europäischen Universitätsgeschichte. Strukturen—Personen—Entwicklungen, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 31 (Leiden / Boston, 2008 [pp. 101–159; see Moraw’s note 2 for the older literature; his views on the origins of the University of Prague and on the “Juristenuniversität” have been sharply criticized by Šmahel, “Die Anfänge der Prager Universität,” esp. pp. 3–6, but passim. 19   For what follows, apart from the treatment in Kavka-Petráň, see particularly Sabine Schumann, Die “nationes” an den Universitäten Prag, Leipzig und Wien. Ein Beitrag zur älteren Universitätsgeschichte (Berlin, 1974). 18

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of national consciousness),20 and this strained relations between the Czechs and the Germans. There were other elements involved that complicated matters. One was philosophical: many of the German masters in the arts and theology faculties were nominalists (moderni), while the Czech masters were increasingly inclined to a modified realism (reales, antiqui). Yet another was the growing issue of religious reform, increasingly identified with the leadership of John Hus, who by 1408 had earned two degrees in arts and three in theology and had been Dean of the Arts Faculty in 1401–1402. In the background to all this—not only in Prague but in the whole of Europe—was the great western schism which since 1378 had divided Christendom in a scabrous conflict whose broad-scale ramifications are too profound to engage here. The issue that ultimately caused the massive rupture within the university in the first decade of the fifteenth century combined all of these factors. Each natio within what was left of the studium after the departure of the legists was given one vote, and the Czechs in the Bohemian nation were consistently out-voted in university matters by three-toone. Increasingly frustrated, the Czech masters petitioned the king, Wenceslas (Václav), the older son of former king and emperor Charles IV, to change the organization of the university to give the Bohemian nation three votes and the other three nations combined only one. Wenceslas was persuaded to do this in part because he needed the support of the Czechs for his adherence to the cardinals supporting the forthcoming Council of Pisa. (The three German nations of the university held fast to the Roman line of Gregory XII in the expectation, as Howard Kaminsky has noted, that they would make their careers in a Germany that was loyal to Gregory.21) On 18 January 1409, in a decree issued at Kutná Hora, Wenceslas acceded to the demands of the Czech masters and gave their natio three votes and other three nations combined, one. The Germans threatened to secede from Prague if the decree was not withdrawn. When the king refused to do so, about a 20   František Graus, Die Nationenbildung der Westslawen im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1982). See also the treatment of this phenomenon by Šmahel, “The Idea of the ‘Nation’ in Hussite Bohemia I,” Historica 16 (1969), 143–247. 21   This specific formulation by Kaminsky is found in his entry “Hus, John (Jan),” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Joseph R. Strayer, editor-in-chief, 13 vols (New York, 1982–1989), vol. 6 (1985), p. 367, but derives more fully from his own treatment of the events leading up to the decree of Kutná Hora in A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1967).

nationes at late medieval central european universities103 thousand German masters and scholars abandoned Prague either for existing universities in Germany or—for a large continent (some forty masters and about 400 bachelors and students)—to found a new university at Leipzig.22 There the four nations had considerable cohesion and internal identity as well as visibility within the university, each having separate statues, congregations, and consiliarii of their own and exercising considerable influence on university affairs.23 Relatively soon after the decree of Kutná Hora, Prague University began its decline as a result of developments during the Hussite Revolution. In 1417 the school’s privileges were revoked by the Council of Constance because of heresy. Thus the history of its nationes provides us from the fifteenth century with little that helps us understand what role—either as administrative unit or as cultural and linguistic association—it could play in the university context. The reality was that for most of the fifteenth century Prague was regarded as a university of “heretics,” which ensured that its enrollment would decline, that its role in the national and regional life would be diminished, and that its constituent elements would provide us with little information about how identity was shaped. Although some scholars, such as František Šmahel, have begun to show the continuing intellectual vitality of the University of Prague in the second half of the fifteenth century,24 even in the period of its sharpest decline, the lessons that the school’s nations teach us are limited. There were only local students who attended and studied. Their identity was already a given. But if we turn to another institution in the same region, to the University of Cracow, we can find a variation on this theme of how the natio—in Teeuwen’s aforementioned sense of an association of people of a common region or who have the same mother tongue—shaped identity.

22   Šmahel, “The Kuttenberg Decree and the Withdrawal of the German Students from Prague in 1409: A Discussion,” in Šmahel, Die Prager Universität im Mittelalter, pp. 159–171, which originally appeared in History of Universities IV (1984), 153–166. 23   See the treatment of developments at Leipzig in Schumann, Die “nationes” an den Universitäten Prag, Leipzig und Wien. 24   For example, Šmahel, “Paris und Prag um 1450. Johannes Versor und seine böhmischen Schüler,” in Šmahel, Die Prager Universität im Mittelalter, pp. 440–464, originally published in Studia Źródłoznawcze 25 (1980), 65–77. Šmahel has also shown the degree to which Prague continued to be connected to larger European intellectual developments in his “Počátky humanismu na pražké universitě v době poděbradské,” Acta Universitatis Carolinae—Historia Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis 1 (1960), 55–90.

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As noted above, the University of Cracow was founded originally in 1364 by Casimir the Great and was refounded in 1400 by King Władysław Jagiełło. The Casimiran foundation was based on an Italianate model; that by Jagiełło, on a Parisian model. The earliest faculty were, for the most part, drawn from Prague,25 but from the beginning the studium attracted students from throughout the region, though they were not institutionally organized into nations on a Parisian model. Apart from the Polish lands themselves, there was strong representation of students from Hungary, Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia, Switzerland, and the German lands, especially Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia, and Prussia (though after 1466 a significant portion of this region was subject to the Polish crown). Matriculations were small in the early fifteenth century—no more than 130 annually in the first decade, sometimes as low as 35 as in the academic year 1408/1409.26 By the middle decades of the century, however, annual enrollments consistently exceeded 150, and rose above 200 fifteen times between 1420 and 1470. By the end of the century the numbers  often topped 300 and reached 413 and 558 in 1498 and 1499 respectively. Cumulatively the number of students in the century exceeded 18,600. If Silesia can be counted as a foreign territory— formerly ruled by Polish dukes and kings, it had been part of the crown lands of Bohemia since the middle of the fourteenth century—more than 40% of the students at Cracow in the fifteenth century came from outside the Kingdom of Poland, though there was a lower percentage  in the early part of the century in comparison to later period.27

25   The older study by Henryk Barycz, “Dziejowe związki Polski z Uniwer­sytetem Karola w Pradze,” Przegląd Zachodni 3 (1948), 7–41, which provides a general overview, needs now to be supplemented by Jadwiga Krzyżaniakowa, “Profesorowie krakowscy na uniwersytecie w Pradze—ich mistrzowie i koledzy,” in Cracovia. Polonia. Europa. Studia z dziejów średniowiecza ofiarowane Jerzemu Wyrozumskiemu w sześćdziesiątą piątą rocznicę urodzin i czterdziestolecie pracy naukowej, ed. Waldemar Bukowski et al. (Cracow, 1995), pp. 505–527. 26   Peter Moraw, “Die Hohe Schule in Krakau und das europäische Universitätssystem um 1400,” Studien zum 15. Jahrhundert. Festschrift Erich Meuthen, eds. Johannes Helmrath and Heribert Müller, 2 vols (Munich, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 521–539, rpt. Moraw, Gesammelte Beiträge zur Deutschen und Europäischen Universitätsgeschichte, pp. 181– 206, shows—in contrast to traditional Polish historiography—how precarious the early years of the studium actually were and how little it resembled a fully functioning university in its first decade. 27   The general picture of the level of matriculations and the regions and countries from which they came is based upon the older studies of Antoni Karbowiak, Dzieje wychowania i szkół w Polsce, 3 vols (St. Petersburg / Cracow, 1903–1923), and “Studia

nationes at late medieval central european universities105 This significantly high percentage gave the Cracovian studium a cosmopolitan character that is rather different from the pattern at other European universities in this century, when national and territorial interests tended to localize university attendance. In the absence of nations at Cracow, these students incorporated themselves into university life and made their way through the years they spent in Cracow in a variety of ways. First and foremost were the living arrangements for students. Especially in the early part of the century there were numerous private bursae run by faculty, but increasingly as the century went on other arrangements emerged. Several student bursae were founded, some endowed, some partially subvented, others loosely organized around a particular academic or ethnic grouping. While Józef Garbarcik has argued that the city and university bursae had to accommodate an average of 2000 students each year,28 in reality, because of what modern university administrators call the “drop out” rate, the numbers were considerably lower than this. Indeed, the percentage of matriculating students who completed the bachelor in arts was probably only 20%, and of those, only 20% completed the master’s degree, with relatively few continuing on to higher degrees. Thus the Frequenz, as German scholars like to put it, of students at Cracow was not markedly different from that in German institutions, as earlier scholarship29 and the more

statystyczne z dziejów Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 1433/1434—1509/10,” Archiwum do Dziejów Literatury i Oświaty w Polsce 12 (1910), 1–82. His analyses of the metryka of the University have not, however, proved to be totally accurate, and several generations of scholars have been engaged in refining his conclusions as to numbers and provenence. Most recently, a new edition of the Album studiosorum Universitatis Cracoviensis [MS Cracow, BJ 258], that is, the roll of students (matrica or matricula) for the university from 1400 to 1508, has been published: Metryka Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego z lat 1400—1508, eds. Antoni Gąsiorowski, Tomasz Jurek, and Izabela Skierska, with the assistance of Ryszard Grzesik, 2 vols (Cracow, 2004). On its basis it has become possible to undertake the most systematic study of these questions. The cadre of students from the first year of the refounded university’s function has been studied by Antoni Gąsiorowski, “Pierwsi studenci odnowionego Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego (1400/1401),” Roczniki Historyczne 71 (2005), 63–98, using the newly edited Metryka. 28   Garbacik, “Ognisko nauki i kultury Renesansowej (1470–1520),” in ed. Lepszy, Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, p. 211 29   See Franz Eulenburg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitäten, Abhandlung der Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologische-Historische Klasse 54 (Leipzig, 1904), p. 29. See also the percentages given by Kaufmann, Die Geschichte der deutschen Universitäten, vol. 2, p. 305.

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recent analyses of R.C. Schwinges have shown.30 Therefore many, if not most, of the arts students, along with the much smaller numbers of students in higher faculties, could have been accommodated in the circumstances which I now describe. The Bursa pauperum was the first student hostel to be established.31 John Isner was the leading theologian of the early university. A member of a well-known family in Cracow, he completed the arts course and earned a license in theology in Prague. When he returned to Cracow in 1401 he helped organize many parts of the university, and in doing so became well acquainted with its needs. In 1409 he arranged to purchase a house in the vicinity of the main university building, the Collegium Maius, that was transformed into a student hostel. In his will of the following year he explicitly designated this to be a home for poor students, particularly those from Lithuania and Ruthenia. A few wealthy students were to be allowed to live in the front part of the house, and the higher fees charged them were to go to the general support of the students in the building. He also provided an endowment for an altar in the cathedral of Cracow, reserved for two impoverished Lithuanians studying theology to live in the house and to receive a yearly allowance from the altar’s income. To regulate the hostel, a junior member of the arts faculty was appointed as senior, and it was his responsibility to live in the house, maintain order, and work with the university-appointed provisor to ensure a sufficient supply of fuel and 30   See, for an overview, Schwinges, “Universitätsbesuch im Reich vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert: Wachstum und Konjunkturen,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaften 10 (1984), vol. 1: Universität und Gesellschaft, pp. 5–30, rpt. Schwinges, Studenten und Gelehrte. Studien zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte deutscher Universitäten im Mittelalter / Students and Scholars. A social and cultural history of medieval German universities, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 32 (Leiden / Boston, 2008]), pp. 87–118. The question is addressed more fully in Schwinges, Deutsche Universitätsbesucher im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte des Alten Reiches (Stuttgart, 1986). 31   For the Bursa pauperum (in Polish Bursa Ubogich), see the treatment by Andrzej Włodarek, Architektura średniowiecznych kolegiów i burs Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego (Cracow, 2000), pp. 381–395, esp. pp. 384–387. The biography of John Isner is best approached through Jerzy Zathey, “Jan Isner,” in Polski Słownik biograficzny (Cracow [later also Warsaw and Wrocław], 1935— ), vol. 10, pp. 434–436. The general phenomenon of medieval university Bursa pauperum is discussed by J. Paquet, “L’universitaire ‘pauvre’ au moyen âge: problemes, documentations, questions de méthode,” in Les universités à la fin du Moyen Âge. Actes du Congrès international de Louvain, 26–30 mai 1975, eds. J. Paquet and J. Ijsewijn (Louvain, 1978), pp. 399–425. For a general overview of all the Cracovian colleges and hostels, see Jerzy Wyrozumski, “Kolegia i bursy Uniwersytetu krakowskiego,” in Wyrozumski, Z najstarszych dziejów Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego. Szkice (Cracow, 1996), pp. 59–70.

nationes at late medieval central european universities107 food. The endowment of the bursa was enhanced in 1417 by a cash payment of 200 marks by a former university student in Cracow, Nicholas of Gliwice. Later in the century, canon John Długosz, a former member of the chancery of the Bishop of Cracow and a noted historian who had himself spent some time at the university and was a kind of patron for the school, arranged to have these quarters enlarged through the purchase and remodeling of adjoining buildings.32 We do not know, even approximately, how many students were housed in this bursa, though a floor-plan sketched in 1800 when the building still stood shows sixteen rooms on the ground floor and fifteen on an upper storey. A second great benefaction for students came in mid-century with the foundation of the Jerusalem bursa.33 In 1454 Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki of Cracow purchased a large building near the Collegium Maius and provided 1000 marks for it to be renovated. Upon his death two years later his will conveyed it to the university for student housing, adding another 1000 marks for remodeling and future maintenance. The house is described as having “fifty rooms, with a large chamber for the rector of the hostel, a library, and a kitchen.” To furnish the building, Oleśnicki also donated his silver and his library. This magnificent benefaction provided space for one hundred students. The university quickly established a series of statutes for the house, which provided, among other things, for a faculty senior to be resident and administer the regulations. Although severely damaged by fire in 1462, the executor of the bishop’s will, his former secretary John Długosz, 32  Długosz’s life, while focused upon his service to Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki and his ecclesiastical career as canon of the Cracow cathedral, was also closely connected with the University of Cracow, which he attended but from which he did not graduate. The best way to approach the substantial historiography dealing with him is through two volumes published in connection with the 500th anniversary of his death: Dlugossiana. Studia historyczne w pięćsetlecie śmierci Jana Długosza, ed. Stanisław Gawęnda [Part 1] (Warsaw, 1980), and Dlugossiana. Studia historyczne w pięćsetlecie śmierci Jana Długosza, ed. Gawęda [Part 2] (Cracow, 1985 [Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego DCCII / Prace Historyczne 76]); and Marian Plezia, “Jan Długosz,” in Pisarze staropolscy sylwetki, ed. Stanisław Greszczuk (Warsaw, 1991), pp. 132–173. In English, see my “Jan Długosz, 1480–1980,” The Polish Review 27, 1–2 (1982), 3–28, rpt. Charles S. Kraszewski, ed., Fifty Years of Polish Scholarship: The Polish Review 1956–2006 (New York, 2006), pp. 259–295. 33  Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów i burs Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego, pp. 341–358, esp. pp. 344–347. The literature on Bishop Oleśnicki is very extensive. In addition to Maria Koczerska, “Oleśnicki, Zbigniew,” in Polski Słownik biograficzny 23 (1978) 776– 784, see now her Zbigniew Oleśnicki i kościół krakowski w czasach jego pontyfikatu (1423–1455) (Warsaw, 2004).

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intervened and had the house completely restored in even finer style, apparently with his own money. Through the remainder of the century, this bursa was one of the most important centers of student activity within the university, and at times young masters in arts apparently lived and even taught within the house, making it something like a residential college. (The building housed students until the university abandoned it in 1841; it burned in 1869.) A third example of a student bursa was less substantial then the two previously mentioned. This was the Bursa pisarum, also known as the Bursa juristarum or Bursa pauperum canonistarum.34 Founded by the cathedral chapter of Cracow in 1441 in a house on Canons’ Street (ul. Kanonicza) along a side route to the cathedral atop Wawel Hill, it had no endowment and provided space for only a few students. By 1454/1555 its physical condition was so bad, probably in the wake of a fire, that the university debated whether to repair it. Discussions were apparently inconclusive, however, so in 1469 John Długosz began a series of delicate negotiations with Jewish property holders in the vicinity of the Collegium Maius. These were successfully concluded with the purchase of a larger stone structure, the Bursa was transferred to this building, the university returned the Canons’ Street house to the cathedral chapter, and the Jews were allowed to build a new synagogue and open a cemetery in another part of the city. Beyond this, little is known about this hostel. Długosz was also at the center of the establishment of yet another bursa.35 In 1471 he purchased a relatively large stone house on Grodzka Street, the main route leading from the town square to the base of Wawel Hill, and designated it as a hostel for young students going in arts who intended to go on to the study of canon law. (In theory Cracow’s law faculty included both civil and canon law; in practice only the latter was strong.) Eventually detailed statutes were prepared and the bursa was fully functional shortly after Długosz died in 1480. A faculty senior was appointed to administer the house. His support was derived from an endowed altar in the cathedral, and his faculty responsibilities included lectures on the fourth book of the Decretales. There were three other student units, though we know little about them. One was a Bursa philosophorum near the Jerusalem bursa, which

 Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów i burs Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego, pp. 319–323.  Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów, pp. 278–302, esp. pp. 282–286.

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nationes at late medieval central european universities109 was intended for students in arts. Its senior was a young master, in some instances even a bachelor, in arts.36 There are also fragmentary mentions of students living in a Bursa medicum and a mention of the senior of this hostel.37 The Bursa divitum, that is, the “Rich Man’s hostel,” associated with the Collegium Maius, the home of faculty originally in arts and theology—apparently had no endowment and existed sole on student fees, which should have been readily forthcoming since it housed wealthy students.38 Then there were the housing arrangements specifically developed for foreign students at the university. Chief among them were the Bursa Hungarorum39 and the Bursa nova, or German hostel. The former provided for the needs of students—not necessarily all ethnic Hungarians, of course—from the Kingdom of Hungary, which in the Middle Ages was remarkably an ethnically diverse collection of subjects: Magyars, Germans, Croatians, Slovaks, Romanians, and others to give them their modern appellations. The “Hungarians” composed in total the largest number of foreign students at Cracow in the fifteenth century, numbering nearly 2300, just slightly more than the number from Silesia. The origins of the Bursa Hungarorum can be traced at least to 1457, when a Cracow nobleman willed his house near the Collegium Maius to the university and established a professorship with an endowed altar in St. Anne’s church, which effectively served as the university church. At this time there were already several Hungarian and German students living in this building. For some reason, however, these housing arrangements were not continued. In 1464 John Długosz helped the university buy a house owned by the Melsztynskis— an important noble family—on Bracka [or Brothers’] Street, which led from the bottom of the town square toward the Franciscan house.

 Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów, pp. 324–340, esp. pp. 326–328.  Contained in the Acta rectoralia Almae Universitatis Cracoviensis 1469–1580, 2 vols, eds. Władysław Wisłocki and Stanisław Estreicher (Cracow, 1893–1909), vol. 1, nos. 1671 and 1724. 38  This bursa was in a building behind the Collegium maius, the chief university structure and the site of lectures as well as home to some faculty. As the number of faculty, especially in arts, grew, eventually this building was given in 1476 to faculty in the Collegium minus that had been established as a result of curricular reform in 1449. After 1476, the Bursa divitum ceased to exist. Its history is best followed in the context of the history of the Collegium minus; see Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów, pp. 253– 268, esp. p. 255ff. 39   For the Hungarian bursa, see Włodarek, Architektura kolegiów i burs Uniwersytetu Krakowskiego, pp. 410–429, esp. pp. 411–414. 36 37

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Soon thereafter this building became a student hostel and by 1476 had become the Hungarian center. It housed at least forty students, and in the last decades of the century several hundred Hungarian matriculants lived here, although there were other students, particularly from the German lands, who also resided in the house. In addition, this building served as an unofficial, quasi-academic center, and evidence of early humanistic interests can be associated with it. For example, it was here that Conrad Celtis gave some of his lectures in 1489–1490. The other important national center was the Bursa nova or German hostel.40 In 1486 the executors of John Dlugosz’s will authorized the building of a new house on some of the property that had earlier been purchased from the Jewish residents in the university area. Two years later it was opened for housing German students under the management of John of Głogów, a Silesian and well-known astronomer, who lectured in arts from 1468 until 1506. This bursa was located to the rear of the Collegium Maius on St. Anne’s Street, and John served as its patron on a consistent basis. As a result of the growth throughout the century of facilities for students, the university eventually decided upon a uniform policy about housing. Unless students had family or relatives in Cracow with whom they might live, or were pauperes earning their way by services to some faculty member or private citizen with whom they were able to live, or—since rank has in most times and places held special privileges— were sons of nobles and required private quarters and tutors, the faculty concluded in 1491 that henceforth all students should live in bursae.41 This step may also be seen as an attempt to cut down on student violence and rowdiness. In contrast to the early days of European universities when the studium was directly involved only in the academic education of its students, we see here the gradual evolution of the tradition of the university in loco parentis.

40   This shadowy institution is mentioned in the minutes of faculty meetings and in rectoral decisions; see, for example, Conclusiones Universitatis Cracoviensis ab a. 1441– 1589, ed. Henryk Barycz (Cracow, 1933), p. 56; and Acta rectoralia, I, nos. 1097 and 1180. John of Głogów (Glogau) was one of the many Silesians who attended the university in the 15th century. Although he eventually earned a doctoral degree in Theology, his whole teaching career at Cracow (from 1468 to 1506) was in arts, where he lectured in physics, metaphysics, logic, grammar, and especially astronomy. See Zdzisław Kuksewicz, “Jan z Głogowa,” in Filozofia w Polsce. Słownik piszary (Wrocław, 1971), pp. 140–142, with extensive bibliography to the scholarly literature on John. 41   Conclusiones, p. 63.

nationes at late medieval central european universities111 The possibility that student behavior was a concern to the leaders of the institution, as suggested just above, is one indication of how it was that these groupings of students might have gotten along with each other and within the larger community of Cracow. This topic is too broad to be discussed at length here, and only one or two almost anecdotal illustrations can be provided, but they open the way for us to draw a general conclusion about what the experience of the Polish natio as an association of common origin and language may have been and what it implied for the future. But first a few comments about collective and individual student behavior. As early as the first years after the university’s refoundation, Stanisław of Skalbmierz, the first rector and a faculty member in canon law, preached a revealing sermon that carries with it an air of authentic, eyewitness observation.42 According to him, some so-called students—he calls them vagabonds (girovagi)— neither attend lectures nor formally matriculate at the university. They do not live in the bursae but find housing with their mistresses and in no way are subject to the discipline of student life. Other students, who do register, are really more interested in games and feasting; if they do attend lectures, they do not listen but instead are constantly thinking of the pleasures of the market place, of food, or the beds of their lovers. Some students enter the university as gentle lambs but soon turn into lions and wolves. Then there are those who are only interested in their own welfare, paying no attention to the needs of either the university or even their own mothers. Another category of student includes the ones who, immediately after recitation exercises, before the very eyes of their instructors, don fancy clothes, wear wreaths on their heads, and hurry to the nearest tavern. Others spend their time in the company of fools and women, giving vent to their carnal desires to the extent that they worship these idols of the flesh. (In passing, Stanisław notes that even Solomon did not match their idolatry despite the number of foreign gods he introduced into the temple.43) Many students, according to him, fail to honor their professors, whom—like one’s   The sermon, or speech, is edited and printed from the two extant texts by Zofia Kozłowska-Budkowa, “Stanisław ze Skarbmierza mowa o złych studentach,” Biuletyn Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej 25, i/ii (1964), 11–21 (text pp. 15–21). See also Celina Zawodzińska, “Pisma Stanisława ze Skarbimierza w Kodeksach Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej,” Roczniki Biblioteczne 4 (1960), 313–318, 322–324. 43   “Unde Salomon inordinate amore atque assiduitate libidinis ad hoc usque perductus est, quod qui templum Deo fabricaverat, postea ydolis templa fabricare non timuit” (p. 17). 42

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parents—one can never pay fully for their services; and, as regards payment, few students even bother to pay the professors the fees that are due them. And so forth! Perhaps his indictment of “bad students” is only a familiar topos. But from an examination of the records of hearings recorded in the rectoral courts, whose records are extant from 1469, some of the foregoing is confirmed in concrete instances. There was the matter of dress: an appropriate student garb, quasi-clerical, was normative and recorded in the statutes of the Jerusalem bursa in 1456. But students were consistently fined for failing to dress appropriately: Martin, a Hungarian, wore secular clothes to lectures in 1494;44 a Lithuanian in the Bursa pauperum was fined and suspended for clothes prohibited by the statutes that were of an indecent nature: too colorful, too short, revealing modish boots with pointed toes.45 Other students were fined, suspended, or even excommunicated for brawling with one another in their bursa.46 And in 1474 a noble, Bernard of Lubiszów who lived in the Bursa divitum, was accused of parading with his sword in front of the Jerusalem hostel at night shouting insults at its inhabitants in a loud voice. Among those mentioned in the rectoral proceeding were epithets that the students there, many of them Germans, were “illegitimate offspring of Pontius Pilate,” a “bunch of Jews,” and “other injurious words.”47 This last example reflects some of the strong regional and national antagonisms present within the student corps of the university despite the ideal of a common community of learning and even the tendency toward unity with which I will conclude below. Conflict between students from southern Poland around Cracow (the region of Little Poland—Polonia minor) and those from Mazovia, the region around Warsaw and Plock was especially strong. In 1493 John of Ostrzeschów was disciplined because in the presence of the rector he referred to  Mazovians as swine, declared them to be “ignorant idiots,” and 44   Acta Rectoralia, I, no. 1732: “ad audiendum lectiones laicaliter intrabat in mitris prohibitis. … “ He was fined one-half florin. 45   Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, no. 1677. These boots, which curled up from the toes, were called Cracowes or poulaines and were known through Europe, including England. John Wyclif in 1380 condemned Cracowes as a work of the devil; see Violetta Włoch, “Obowie Krakowskie w średniowiecznej Anglii,” Kronika Miasta Krakowa 1959–1960 (Cracow, 1962), pp. 67–78. 46   See, for example, the outcome of an incident in the Jerusalem bursa from 1475: Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, no. 369. 47   Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, no. 316.

nationes at late medieval central european universities113 otherwise denigrated them.48 Among many from Little Poland, Mazovians had the contradictory general reputation of being both dullards and crafty sneaks. Their distinctive regional dialect was laughed at, and one rectoral court case adjudicated a fight between some “Poles” and Mazovians in the Bursa pauperum. It had been caused when one of the former had gone from room to room asking if it were true that Judas had been sent to convert the Mazovians; when questioned why, he replied that was the only way one could explain their funny language. Another, in this same hearing was reported to have inquired whether there were vowels in Mazovian, with the first student answering “there were,” then illustrating each with five slang words of some vulgarity.49 One satirical epigram that circulated in the university was similarly disparaging: “rightly I say to you, flee the company of Mazovians, because fraud and envy rule in Mazovia.”50 This regional hostility was often equaled and exceeded by national antagonisms, especially directed against Hungarians and Germans, the latter of whom were often called such typical epithets as reported in a rectoral hearing in 1493: fur, asinus, beanus, scrofa, canis, illegitime natus.51 To be fair, however, the contents of the Acta Rectoralia, while they reveal much litigiousness and petty infractions of the rules, are less suggestive of a robust student life than similar records from, for example, Paris or Oxford. One need only mention Jacques de Vitry’s famous skewering of foreign university students whom he regarded as responsible for the debauchery and drunkenness of the Latin Quarter.52   Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, no. 1580.   Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, nos. 2189 and 2191 from 1513: “ … quot sunt vocales apud masovitas. Quidam dicebant quinque, videlicit: ‘Stank, penk, mienk, pock, tutka,’ quidam septem, ad quinque descriptas addebant duas: ‘ssziejeno, topka’. … “These seven words were marked to be deleted by a later scribe. 50   Wojciech Kętrzyński, “Varia e variis codicibus,” in Monumenta Poloniae Historica / Pomniki dziejowe Polski, 6 vols, ed. August Bielowski (Lwów and Cracow, 1864– 1893), vol. 5 (1888), p. 1010f.: “Dico vobis rite, fugite consortium Mazovite, / Quia fraus et invidia regnat in Mazovia.” This passage is further elaborated by the statement: “Mazovita interpretatur quasi malarum accionum zelator, odiens veritatem iramque tenens amarissimam.” The antagonism in contemporary Poland between Cracovians and Varsovians (the capital of Mazovia and national capital) remains strong. 51   Acta Rectoralia, vol. 1, no. 1574. 52   Jacobus de Vitriaco, Historia Hierosolymitana abbreviate [Historia occidentalis], bk. 2, chap. 7, in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European history, published for the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1897?—1907), vol. 2:3, pp. 19–20, available on-line at The Medieval Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/vitry1.html Accessed 22 January 2009. 48 49

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Finally I should like to mention one way in which the Polish nation at Cracow was full with import for the future. I follow here the suggestions of the late Brygida Kürbisówna of Poznań, who, in addition to her analyses of Polish historical writing, was a keen observer of language and custom. It was she who pointed out that the university was the locus in which the Polish language and identity first began to take shape.53 For example, in 1431, in a debate between Cracovian faculty and representatives of the Czech Hussite movement, John Długosz reports that Polish was the language of discussion, apparently thought capable of expressing intellectual content and argument.54 Throughout the century, the university brought together several thousand Polish students, the majority from urban backgrounds, each speaking an idiom particular to their own region. Despite the regional tensions noted above, the effect of the common society of the community began gradually to erase these differences in language. As these students returned to their homes or served in various professional capacities throughout the kingdom they took with them the beginnings of what would be in the following century the first flowering of a literary Polish expressed in the prose and poetry of Mikolaj Rej, Jan Kochanowski, Marcin Kromer, and others. One should not overestimate either the degree or the speed of this phenomenon, but one can recognize nevertheless the slow and steady progress which was made. At the same time, the communal life of the Polish natio at the university played a role in the shaping of a sense of national consciousness. Some of this was the result, particularly for those from urban backgrounds, of being a part of the community that constituted the life of the studium, but in addition the university brought its native students into contact with a number of foreign scholars from lands, particularly Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, that already had a relatively highly developed feeling of national identity. This reinforced the Poles’ sense of themselves. The fact that the Polish students in Cracow constituted a corporate group, based upon leaders from all areas and even all social classes and engaged in a common professional enterprise gave further expression 53   Brygida Kürbis[ówna], “Mieszczanie na Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim w XV w. i ich udział w kształtowaniu świadomości narodowej. Ze studiów nad literaturą staropolską,” Studia Staropolskie 5 (1957), 5–79. 54   Joannis Dlugosii Annnales seu Cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae, 11 vols, ed. Jan Dąbrowski et al. (Warsaw / Cracow, 1964–2005), vol. 9: Liber undecimus et Liber duodecimus 1431–1444 (Warsaw, 2001), p. 19 (sub anno 1431): “Duravit autem disputacio ipsa diebus aliquot, cum in Polonico fere omnia argumenta et responsiones fierent.”

nationes at late medieval central european universities115 to their growing consciousness of being a part of the larger nation. Many elements outside the studium were of course important in this process, but it is significant that beyond the church and the monarchy, the university was the only other national institution in Poland and was thus one of the foci of this development. Nations were thus fundamental in medieval universities, not only in the earlier archetypal studia of Italy and France, but also in central, especially east central Europe. Whether as an organizational entity imbued with institutional and political power within the university, as at Prague, or as an association of individuals of common origin and language living and studying together, as in Cracow, the natio was an important element in helping us understand the nature of identity, group bonding, and belonging in the medieval university.

Picturing and Promoting New Identities: The Medieval University at Paris and Its “Nations” Charlotte Bauer The medieval University at Paris was neither founded on a specific date nor a specific site; rather it emerged from a more loosely affiliated group of men who traveled to the city to study primarily arts or theology with the renowned masters who had gathered there. In the twelfth century, Jacques de Vitry, the famous preacher and scholar of theology at Paris, characterized the diverse foreign groups studying there: The English are drunken cowards, the French proud, soft and effeminate, the Germans quarrelsome and foul-mouthed, the Normans vain and haughty, the men of Poitou treacherous and miserly, the Burgundians stupid brutes, the Bretons frivolous and flighty, the Lombards miserly, spiteful and evil-minded, the Romans vicious and violent, the Sicilians tyrannical and cruel, the men of Brabant are thieves and the Flemings are debauched.1

This account of “regional characteristics” reflects the “international” character of the city’s many scholars and students. Estimates for the population of Paris around in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century range from 25,000 to 50,000 people, with the students ranging anywhere from ten to fifteen percent. The majority of these would have been arts students, by far the largest of the disciplines, so large in fact that they were later divided in to four subgroups, its so-called “nations.” Moreover, the concentration of scholars was certainly sufficient to impact the city; they became part of its urban identity. When King Philip Augustus built a new wall around the city between 1190 and 1209, he circumscribed an urban environment comprised of three major areas: the Ile-de-la-Cité at its center housed religious, administrative, and judiciary sectors; the right bank, its financial

1   Jacobus de Vitry (1160/70–1240), Historia occidentalis, vol. 2, ed. J. F. Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972), p. 92, English translation given in D. C. Munro, Translations and Reprints, vol. 2, no. 3 (Philadelphia, n.d.), pp. 19–20; rpt. A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, UK, 1992), p. 282.

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district; and the left bank—known later as the Latin Quarter—its scholars. The Left Bank wall was paid for exclusively by royal funds; the wall on the right bank was partially funded by citizens—a sign of the king’s acceptance of this emerging faction of the urban population, despite the many “town and gown” disputes that ensued, disputes that typically began with a drunken brawl in a tavern and ended with severe injury or even death of Parisian citizens, students, or both. These physical upheavals not only differentiated the University at Paris from the citizens of Paris, but also served as part of the impetus for the University to band together as a group. Many of the University’s early charters, such as the so-called statues of 1215 or those of 1231, were prompted by violent town and gown upheavals, ignited by drunken outbursts that escalated into brutal attacks completely polarizing the scholars and citizens. This was the case in 1229, for example, when a dispute erupted between a group of drunken students and a tavern owner. Having been beaten and tossed out on the street, the students returned the next day in larger number armed with clubs to repay the owner. In an attempt to control the riot that erupted, Blanche of Castile, then regent of France, called on the city guardsmen who proceeded to kill several of the students. The tension brought about in this instance between these two groups was due in part to the fact that students were protected by their clerical rights that put them under papal jurisdiction and exempted them from jurisdiction of the royal court. Scholars in Paris responded by closing up shop and going on strike, many relocating to Oxford or Toulouse for a period of more than two years. The statutes of 1231, the Parens Scientiarum of Gregory IX, thus came about as part of restoring the scholars in Paris after such repeatedly escalating conflict.2 While some historians have argued that the University of Paris arose spontaneously out of a set of the particular conditions found in Paris— its renowned cathedral schools, the reputation of its scholars, availability of food and housing, an emerging book trade, and the “special rights of defense” permitted them by Capetian kings—others contend that its emergence was more an internally-driven administrative means for dealing with the rapid growth of students and scholars on the Left Bank. Jacques Verger has suggested that while the circumstances in

  Parens Scientiarum of Gregory IX, in Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols, eds. H. Denifle and É. Châtelain (Paris, 1888–1897), vol. 1, p. 79. 2



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Paris were undoubtedly crucial to the University’s development, it never spontaneously arose because it always had a political will that made it possible to overcome local powers, such as the bishop and the chancellor.3 But by the early thirteenth century the University’s collective identity and institutional structure were taking shape, even if the specifics remain enigmatic. No foundation charter per se survives; rather a series of thirteenth-century letters reveal increasing levels of organization among the masters and varying degrees of independence through various privileges and incomes granted from both the Church and State.4 By positioning itself carefully in relation to these powers, the corporation gained leverage with which to promote and assert itself and began to circumscribe its own boundaries. I Anthony Cohen stresses the fundamental importance of boundaries in defining a group and making it discernible from others: “Boundaries are marked because communities interact in some way or other with entities from which they are, or wish to be distinguished.”5 While some boundaries may be physical, others are more abstract as in the case of national or administrative boundaries, which are “statutory and enshrined in law.” The perception of these boundaries is regulated by the mutual participation of communities—both that within and outside of the group. This is evident in the case of the University at Paris. As a legal corporation, the universitas parisiensis shared similarities with trade and merchant guilds, which regulated the training and trade-specific knowledge of their practitioners. It could also, of course, draw on monastic examples. What was distinct, however, for Paris was the notion of becoming a professional intellectual, someone trained in a manner regulated by others who were trained in the same fashion. A consideration of visual images associated with the University and its nations provides a glimpse into how boundaries were circumscribed and how a flexible and emerging identity is made visually concrete. One of the earliest and most prominent examples of the University’s  Verger, Men of Learning in Europe at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall, (Notre Dame, 2000), p. 46. 4  See esp. the Parens Scientiarum of Gregory IX, in Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, p. 79. 5  Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London, 1985), p. 12. 3

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desire to act autonomously is the adoption of its own corporate seal— an important step in its formulation as a legal corporation. Figure 1 shows the oldest extant copy of that seal, which is attached to a document from 1292. Its legend reads: Sigillum Universitatis magistrorum et scolarium Parisius, clearly identifying it as belonging to the group collectively. Seals communicate clear, easily recognizable images—first engraved into a metal or stone matrix that is then pressed into wax—creating a sign of authenticity that affirms and asserts the bearer’s identity. In this way, seals present self-portraits of their owners, though not necessarily portraits bearing physical likeness—many seals employ heraldic or emblematic images to identify their owners. Seals thus present portraits in the sense that they identify their owners through emblematic means. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak notes the dual nature of medieval seals: “[t]he intaglio-engraved matrix was an inward-oriented symbolic object of personal identity; the impression issued from the matrix was an image outwardly oriented and emblematic of its owner.” When used for a corporation such as the University at Paris, a seal provides an indication of how a group wished to portray its own collective identity. The University’s corporate seal portrays a range of figures enclosed within an architectural framework that is distinctly Parisian in style and evocative of Notre-Dame cathedral. The Virgin and Child are seated in the largest uppermost niche. Flanking them are Saint Catherine, one of the major patron saints of scholars, on the right, and a bishop in profile on the left. Below them are six compartments with figures of students and masters lecturing, disputing and reading. In the twelfth century, Peter the Chanter named reading, disputation, and preaching as the three requirements of the master of theology. He describes them as fundamental parts of a building: The practice of Bible study consists in three things: reading (lectione), disputation, preaching…Reading is, as it were, the foundation and basement for what follows, for through it the rest is achieved. Disputation is the wall in the building of study, for nothing is fully understood or faithfully preached, if it is not first chewed by the tooth of disputation. Preaching, which is supported by the former, is the roof, sheltering the faithful from the heat and wind of temptation.6

6   Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum, PL 205, c. 25, trans. in B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed rev. (Oxford, 1952), p. 208.



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The architectural arrangement Peter the Chanter describes is not strictly identical to the one engraved on the University’s seal, but it does resonate with it. The lowest niches show learning and disputation as the foundation, which support the figures above them, closer to the Virgin and larger in scale. Formal elements are integral to conveying relationships both actual and prescribed into an ideal order for the University. Modern scholars have suggested that these scenes represent the University’s four nations or its four faculties, wanting to associate the images with the University’s subgroups, but this is not possible because it does not account for the total number of scenes. Yet the inclusion of these lower six compartments is highly significant because these scenes combine two visual formulae for seals: the first is that of ecclesiastical and monastic seals, which often employ saints and pious officials placed inside an architectural framework. One example is the corporate seal of 1307 for the abbey of Lieu-Restaure (fig. 2). The second model is guild seals, which frequently portray images of work as emblematic of their corporations. Take, for example, an early fifteenthcentury seal for the fishmongers of Bruges, where the fishmongers clean fish (fig. 3), or, an example of the Parisian water merchants’ seal, even simpler in its composition, which merely shows the vessel associated with their work (fig. 4). What guild seals typically do not do, however, is situate the professional activity within a hierarchy or framework. Thus, the University’s corporate seal draws on visual formulae derived from both ecclesiastical seals and guild seals, and then merges the two together. The University of Paris first used a corporate seal from 1221 to 1225, but not without consequence. In his protest to the Pope, the Bishop of Paris accused the University of going beyond the rights designated in its statutes and of stepping into episcopal jurisdiction by misusing the seal it had recently made. After hearing the bishop’s complaint, Pope Honorius III suggested breaking the seal; instead its use was suspended until further examination. The case was never settled in Rome, but in Paris in 1225 when Cardinal-Legate Romano of Saint-Angelo is reported to have “broken” the University’s seal, probably by defacing its matrix. University masters immediately showed their objection by taking up arms with sticks and swords and storming the episcopal palace where the cardinal was residing. The uproar only subsided with the arrival of Louis VIII’s army to escort the cardinal safely out of Paris. Just before leaving, he excommunicated all who had participated in the

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attack. The University fared somewhat better a few years later under Pope Innocent IV who, while renewing several scholarly privileges in 1246, gave the masters permission to use their own seal, noting the inconvenience they had suffered since the breaking of their corporate seal by Cardinal Romano. When not using a corporate seal, the University would have had to appeal to the Chapter of Notre-Dame to have their documents sealed, not a very desirable practice when trying to get around about the bishop. Smaller subgroups within the University, such as its nations, also asserted their own corporate identities in images. The nations are particularly interesting because, on one hand, they provided a system of organizing the large number of arts masters by grouping them according to their native language, place of origin, and diocese. On the other, they completely complicated the notion of collective identity. Despite Jacques de Vitry’s lengthy list of international students and scholars, Paris had only four nations: French, Picard, Norman, and English.7 The titles are not by any means strictly descriptive of their constituents, as these geographic regions were defined quite roughly. The French nation included those from the Ile de France, the south of France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece and Asia Minor; the Norman nation those from Rouen and its surrounding provinces; and the Picard nation served those from northeastern France and the Low Countries up to the Meuse. The English nation, later renamed the German nation during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), was, either way, somewhat of a misnomer because in addition to the English and Germans, it contained scholars from Hungary and the Slavic lands. Between the early thirteenth and the fifteenth century, nations became increasingly more integrated in the political and social life of the University. Each was headed by a proctor and each had one vote in the election of the University’s rector, who was head of the Faculty of Arts and was in charge of the University’s seal. In addition, each had its 7   The system of nations was not unique to Paris, but it evolved a bit differently at each medieval university, especially with regard to the number and types of nations. Bologna’s nations were comprised of students, rather than masters. Most likely Bologna’s nations arose from the differences in rights between citizens and noncitizens, that is, foreigners. Students at Paris were not members of the nations: they neither voted, nor took part in deliberations. Why Paris stuck with four is a bit of a mystery, but it has been argued that the maintenance of only four led to an increased autonomy of the nations at Paris compare with other universities. Orléans, for example, had ten nations. See also Paul Knoll, “Nationes and Other Bonding Groups at Late Medieval Central European Universities,” in this volume.



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own designated patron saints and feast days: Saint Guillaume of Bourges for the French nation; Saint Nicholas for the Picard nation; Saint Romain for the Norman nation; and Saint Edmund for the English nation (later Charlemagne when it became the German nation). And, each had its own motto expressing a virtue that it would uphold: honoranda (French); fidelisima (Picard); veneranda (Norman); constantissima (English).8 As corporations in their own right, nations assumed and promoted their own group identities—identities that were often visibly displayed in public ceremonies, processions, and celebrations, and on material objects such as manuscripts and seals. One of the earliest mentions of the nations’ seals is in a letter from the University to Pope Alexander IV dated October 1249, concerning the election of the rector. The letter explicitly states that there are four nations and that each has its own seal. The letter also “stresses the antiquity of the nations” in an effort to suggest a long-standing and honorable tradition.9 Boyce and Rashdall speculate that the nations may have adopted their own seals soon after the University’s corporate seal was destroyed, implying that this was done in part as a means of acting independently despite the bishop’s objections to the use of a single corporate seal.10 The best preserved impressions of the four nations’ seals are attached to a single letter sealed at the convent of the Mathurins on July 11, 1398, in which the University urges the king to withdraw his support of the schismatic Pope Benoît XIII. Why each of four nations and four faculties sealed this letter at a time when the University’s corporate seal was also in use is unclear, but perhaps the message took on a more powerful and unified voice through the display of multiple of seals. The visual formula employed on the University’s corporate seal of the 1292 is reiterated on the seals of its nations, with only minor iconographic modifications to reflect the particular nation. Take, for example, the seal for the English nation (fig. 5). While the overall composition of the image mirrors the University’s corporate seal, the inclusion of  8   Henri Omont, “Le ‘Livre’ ou ‘Cartulaire’ de la Nation de Normandie de l’Université de Paris” in Mélanges. Documents publiés et annotés par MM. l’Abbé F Blaquart, Edouard Lecorbeiller, H. Omont, et. R. N. Sauvage (Rouen / Paris, 1917), p. 9.  9   CUP, I, 215–216 and Tuilier, p. 70, n. 4–6. CUP, I, 45, a bull of Honorius II of May 1222 is the earliest mention of the nations. 10  Gary C. Boyce, The English-German Nation in the University of Paris during the Middle Ages (Bruges, 1927), p. 33, and Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1895), pp. 318–319.

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specific saints in the two top zones customized it to the English nation. Saint Edmund, the martyred king (d. 1017) was the English nation’s patron saint and Saint Catherine was one of the two principle patron saints of the Faculty of Arts. Saint Martin’s appearance is curious because his feast day was not one of those celebrated by the English nation, but his inclusion seems to express the virtue of generosity associated with the saint and by extension with the nation. In the lowest niche are masters and students engaged in learning, similar to the University’s corporate seal. The French, Norman, and Picard seals also follow this basic visual format (figs. 6, 7 and 8). Thus, they are visually unified with one another, but also with the University and its Faculty of Arts. This is not true of the University’s other faculties. The seal for the Faculty of Theology (fig. 9) shows an image that is more evocative of Biblical illuminations with the symbols for the four Evangelists surrounding Christ in an image of the second coming that closely resembles a relief panel on the north side of Notre-Dame (fig. 10). Different still is the seal for the Faculty of Medicine (fig. 11) that shows a personification of wisdom or Sophia, holding a bundle of herbs, similar to the thresh of wheat that Grammar typically holds, or even uses to reprimand her students. II Manuscripts provide another source of information for how the nations presented themselves. Unlike the seals that visually affiliate themselves with the Faculty of Arts, the images added to the nations’ manuscripts evoke the importance of the administrative and ceremonial aspects of the nations’ activities. The most extensively illustrated manuscript is the Conclusions de la nation de Picardie, 1476–1484 (Archives de l’Université de Paris Register 9[11]). It is a collection of oaths for forty-five of the nation’s proctors, nearly each of which is treated with a prefatory decoration or space for intended decoration. Its illustrations employ a repetition of iconography that references the performative and ceremonial aspects of a proctor’s inception to the office. These scenes may reflect an actual ceremony, either as a record of one performed, a prescription for one to be carried out, or as a visual compilation in order to certify the proctor’s legitimacy, evoking the moment he took office. By including them at the preface of the recorded acts, the designer(s) created an image of authority and validation for the office and visualized a tradition for the corporation.



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The first folio in this manuscript begins the section for Johannis de Vendeuil from dyocesis[s] Laudunensis, but it also acts as the frontispiece to the entire volume and definitely sets the tone for the majority of images that follow it. On the top of the page, the elaborate initial E contains the Annunciation to the Virgin in its upper compartment and the newly-elected proctor in the lower one. There is an obvious mirroring between the two scenes, where both the Virgin and the proctor kneel with clasped hands before their open books. Although the Virgin is rendered in a three-quarter frontal position, the position of her bench indicates that she is turned toward the background to receive the news from the angel who has just arrived. With a banderole that reads “Ave Maria…” in his left hand, the angel points to Heaven above with his right. Underneath this scene the proctor kneels in prayer in a position that mirrors hers. There is no doubt that a visual comparison between the two was intended. On the lower third of the page, another type of annunciation scene takes place. On the far right-hand side, the messenger announces himself through the scroll that unfolds from the tree’s center stating his name, who has sent him, and from which diocese he comes: Jehan le Queux, messagier de Guyse en Thiérasse, ou dyo[ce]se de Lan. At the same time, the beadle gives to the proctor the objects for his office—here either the nation’s statute book or the coffer to hold the nation’s funds, both of which he would have received upon his inception—along with the nation’s seal. Each of the nation’s proctors also received one of the keys needed to unlock the chest in the rector’s care that contained the University’s corporate seal. While there is considerable variation in the styles and quality of execution among the images in the Picard nation’s manuscript, all of the images show the proctor’s position being announced to him, usually by a beadle and messenger. Visual references to the annunciation recur throughout. If not reiterated explicitly as on folio 1, it is done implicitly by a symbolic reference as, for instance, on folio 12v, the frontispiece marking the deeds of Eustache Billot who came from the town of Lille and was sworn in as proctor of the Picard nation on October 21, 1476. In this image the lilies in the vase in the lower left corner evoke the Virgin, making a looser but still unmistakable reference to her. On folio 38v the frontispiece for John Standonck, the association is even more overt, and the composition itself evokes the Annunciation to the Virgin. Inside a chapel, John kneels in prayer to Saint Romuald. He assumes the position of the Annunciate Virgin, so often absorbed in her devotional

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reading when the angel visits her. In an amusing variation on the Annunciation iconography, it is the beadle, rather than the angel, who arrives with good news. These illustrations also allude to the tradition and longevity of higher learning and convey qualities of character that the proctor was expected to possess. For instance, the use of coats-of-arms and trees evoke genealogic themes. Visualized medieval genealogies often utilize trees draped with coats of arms to symbolize, organize, and demonstrate noble bloodlines. Genealogical trees are also sometimes used for a succession of popes and scholars, in the latter case to demonstrate the notion of translatio studii, the transfer of ancient knowledge from Greece to Rome, and then to Paris, an idea widely promoted among Parisian scholars and royal advisors. Originally adopted by theologians the translatio studii was a means of explaining the transfer of knowledge from Christ to his apostles and then to bishops. It parallels the notion of translatio imperii in which imperial authority moves from the Roman emperors through Charlemagne to kings. Already in the twelfth century, the poet Chrétien de Troyes imagined a version in which learning originated in the East, passing through Greece and Rome, as it moved westward to arrive in France. An early sixteenthcentury text expresses this notion even more elaborately: The lofty framework of the colossal Carian has fallen, the pyramids of Egypt and Dardanian Troy belong to the past. Rome is silent, fallen are its wonders. Thebes is overthrown and in ruins. The Delphic temples abandon Thracian Samos. Carthage and Jerusalem are fallen; likewise the Germanic palace and Suza more stately than the home of Croesus. So too the cities of Europe and those of Asia and of Africa united to the lands of West. All lie prostrate on the ground, or their wide-flung halfruined walls are polluted to the last degree with filth. The glory of Paris alone survives to the present day, bright, inexhaustible, chosen to honor the Frank. The Parisians survive, also their golden, valiant city, palace of Athena, first gateway to the home of Pheobus, rich, sumptuous, sagacious, not lacking in praise, modest, eloquent, renowned, pious, strong. Worthy indeed of praise she has found a Smyrnean Homer to sing in flowing verse of her great services; and Goulet, rare glory of Norman realm, has given us an account replete with the milk of Patavium. Therefore, make all haste, Orontius, our Glory, and see with me here the studies of Paris.11

11  Robertus Goulet, Compendium Universitatis Parisiensis, 1517, ed. and trans. Robert Belle Burke (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 14.



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The Picard nation’s manuscript encapsulates performative elements of the proctor’s inception in its depictions of the beadle presenting the emblems of office to the proctor. Other examples include manuscripts that were actually used during ceremonies, as is the case with cartularies that were frequently used for the swearing of oaths. Such manuscripts often include an image of the Crucifixion, on which the oath was actually sworn.12 The Livre de la Nation de Picardie dans l’Université de Paris (Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 1655) contains a Crucifixion scene for this purpose, but just as significant is the Ordo transcribed after it, which lists the members of the various groups, including officials, colleges and the professions, which served and swore oaths to the University. It reveals an envisioned order and hierarchy among the university’s internal units, beginning with twenty-one of the colleges followed by officials of several monastic orders, the masters, bachelors and doctors of the different faculties, all of whom are followed by the rector. At the very end of the procession are various book trades and messengers: conciliarii, librarii, papetarii, pergamenarii, scriptores, religatores, illuminatores and nuncii universitati. This latter grouping represents the very people who helped make the University’s corporate image concrete by recording it in texts and images. The Livre des procureurs de la nation de France de l’Université de Paris (Paris BnF, n. a. lat. 2060) of 1355 contains two high-quality illustrations , The first, on folio 9, shows the Crucifixion in the upper half and the Pope handing out papal privileges below. It follows a wellplanned calendar indicating feast days to be celebrated by the French nation and acts as the frontispiece to the text recounting papal privileges. The opening lines from the Gospel of John (“In principio erat verbum…”) are written on fol. 8v—the opposing page—making a double-page spread with the illustration, an appropriate combination for swearing oaths. This image was most certainly used in this manner because the lower right-hand corner—where one would place one’s hand—is very dirty and worn. Two figures—probably the rector and the proctor of the French nation, appear as witnesses to the Crucifixion. The scene below the Crucifixion is presented to the viewer through parted striped curtains. On the left of the image, a figure peeks out 12  Of the nations’ manuscripts, three examples survive: the Livre de la Nation de Picardie dans l’Université de Paris (Bibliothèque de Sainte-Geneviève 1655), the Liber de la Nation d’Allemagne (BnF, n. a. lat. 535), and the Livre des procureurs de la nation de France de l’Université de Paris (BnF, n. a. lat. 2060).

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from the side of the curtain as is typical in author portraits of John the  Evangelist, perhaps another reference to Gospel of John on the opposing page. In the center six cardinals and the Virgin surround the  Pope who hands a sealed document to fourteen scholars. The pope  is probably Simon de Brie (Brion), Cardinal of Saint Cecil, later Pope Martin IV (1281–1285). Simon de Brie is the author of the first document (dated August 27, 1266 and renewed in 1279), which settled a dispute between the French nation and the other three over the election of the rector. It stipulated that the rector should be elected for three months by the four proctors of the nations or by four maîtres jurés.13 On the right, the curtain is drawn back to expose the cluster of masters and scholars, members of the French nation. The second image is somewhat awkwardly added to the top of fol. 55, but follows a similar composition to the first. It shows the distribution of royal privileges and acts as a header to that portion of the text. In this longer rectangular scene, the king is similarly surrounded by six peers and the Virgin, and also hands a sealed document over to the scholars. On the right the schools kneel humbly before the king. Here the nation’s members are arranged according to rank as indicated by their costume.14 These manuscripts show the importance of performance and visual display in an urban milieu, by being objects themselves used in ceremonies, and by attesting to the importance of presentation in public processions. III Within the University, the developing group identities for each of the four nations is evident in the number of both social and political conflicts that arose between them, some of which were extremely violent.15 By 1275, the Faculty of Arts decreed that members of one nation were prohibited from attending or disturbing in any way the festivities of another.16 Moreover, nations strove to protect their individual 13   Pearl Kibre, The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities, (Cambridge, MA, 1948), pp. 21–25. 14   Christina Frieder Waugh (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000, esp. pp. 170, 180) has noted the attention paid to clothing in this image; for example, the man in the first rank wears a gardecorps; the men in the second rank wear the houce, and the last wear a simple cote and hood. 15  Kibre, Nations, pp. 22–23. 16  Boyce, The English-German Nation in the University of Paris, pp. 151–153.



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corporate rights, even from the potential threat of other nations. For example, when the English nation’s membership decreased significantly during the Hundred Years’ War, the Norman nation proposed that it lose its voting rights in the Faculty of Arts.17 Even for scholars who advanced to studies in law, medicine, or theology—which undoubtedly brought additional affiliations—loyalty to one’s former nation was expected. In their inception oaths, members swore “to observe, and defend the statutes, privileges, liberties, and praiseworthy customs…of the faculty of arts and of their nation, no matter what their station might be.”18 The images on seals and in administrative manuscripts show how the nations at Paris envisioned themselves, how they affiliated themselves with one another and the Faculty of Arts, but also how they differentiated themselves as distinct corporations. Indeed it was the balance of power among the four nations and their political force that helped to shape their own identities as much as their cultural and social differences—or, one might say, in spite of their internal cultural and social differences. In striking contrast to Jacques de Vitry’s twelfthcentury descriptions is a poem by Egidius Delft, from the diocese of Utrecht, written in 1479 that projects a very different sensibility: Our Nation. You ask what is our Nation? Certainly it is not I, nor you, not he and he, But a multitude, a multitude forming a unity.19

17  Astrik L. Gabriel, “The English-German Nation at the University of Paris from 1425–1495,” Garlandia: Studies in the History of the Mediaeval University (Notre Dame, 1969), pp. 167–200. 18  Kibre, Nations, p. 15 and n. 69. 19  Gabriel, “English-German Nation,” p. 190 and Auctarium Chartularii Universitatis Parisiensis, eds. H. Denfle et al., 6 vols (Paris, 1894–1966), vol. 3, no. 419.

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Figure 1:  Replica of the Great Seal for the University of Paris, 1292. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D 8015. Size 70mm. (Author’s photograph).



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Figure 2:  Seal for Abbey of Lieu-Restaure, 1307. Archives nationales de France, D 8261, Size: 46mm.

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Figure 3: Author’s drawing of the Fishmongers of Bruges, 1407. Archives nationales de France, SC/F4757. Size: 53mm.



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Figure 4: Author’s drawing of the water merchants of Paris, 1210. Archives nationales de France, SC/D5582. Size: 45mm.

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Figure 5: Seal of the English Nation at Paris, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8016. Size: 75mm.



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Figure 6:  Seal for the French Nation at Paris, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8017. Size: 70mm.

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Figure 7:  Replica of the seal for the Norman Nation, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D8018. Size: 75mm. (Author’s photograph).



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Figure 8: Seal for the Picard Nation, 1398. Archives nationales de France, D 8019. Size: 70mm.

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Figure 9:  Replica of the seal for the Faculty of Theology, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D8020. Size: 65mm. (Author’s photograph).



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Figure 10: Notre-Dame Cathedral, north side relief sculpture. (photograph courtesy of Anne D. Hedeman).

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Figure 11: Replica of the seal for the Faculty of Medicine, 1398. Original held in the collection of the Archives nationales de France, D 8022. Size: 50mm.

Communities, Crowd-Theory, and Mob-Theory in Late-Fourteenth Century English History Writing and Poetry Andrew Galloway Nineteenth and twentieth-century America and Europe have stronger claims for central consideration in the political and social history of crowds and mobs than late-medieval England; Marx, Freud, and Poe, Walter Benjamin, and Nathaniel West have more obvious claims in its literary and intellectual history. Yet the period from the Good Parliament (1376) to the end of Richard II’s reign (1399) is nonetheless remarkable for its rich though often volatile treatment of the power and nature of communities, crowds, and mobs—categories that, although often represented by much smaller numbers of people than the masses of later times, were more fully in flux than perhaps at any later time. For if we distinguish communities from crowds, and both again from mobs, in the first instance as, simply, groups with decreasing moral or legal legitimacy in (some particular) contemporary eyes, then we find unusually unsettled visions of what such groups were, and who belonged in them, in the late fourteenth century. And, particularly, we find an acute importance of this issue in the production of narrative, both historical and literary. The volatility of the status of groups engaged in group action is due at least in the first instance to the new kinds of groups visibly carrying it out. From the “Good Parliament” of 1376 to the “Peasants’ Revolt” of 1381 to the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 and beyond, communities, crowds, and mobs were fluidly transformable categories because they were constituted by groups whose effectiveness had never been witnessed on such a scale. Arguably legitimate crowd action in itself, of course, was no novelty. Indeed, the very emergence of the parliamentary Commons, of a widespread group of “peasant” or at least rural rebels, and of a group of widely popular higher nobility acting against the king as at least momentarily efficacious agents for major political change (as appeared, respectively, in 1376, 1381, and 1388) depended on a settled idea in medieval culture that “the people” had a potential

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for basic moral and legal legitimacy that often seems absent from our world. One might go so far as to see this as a central distinction between medieval and post-medieval culture. The social philosopher Charles Taylor provides important tools for considering that possibility. Taylor proposes that a key type of “premodern moral order” is the notion of “the Law of a people.” In premodern culture, he argues, a collective world is always the basis for law, rights, and thus individualism insofar as it might exist.1 Vox populi vox dei est, as the medieval proverb runs. By the seventeenth century, however, Taylor claims, this assumption is both absorbed and displaced by the mode of an individualized contractual society articulated by Hugo Grotius and John Locke, in which individual rights are conceived of as grounding the arrangements concocted by the political world. The “Law of a people” becomes seen as a calculated construction, because it is now seen to be created in order to serve individualized purposes. Taylor is no crowd-theorist (if such theory can be said to have a settled identity), but if groups of people and communities in premodern culture are assumed in the first instance to hold the force of lawful authority, it follows that only after displaying some collective perversion of proper moral and legal order, some lack of informed leadership, would a crowd be revealed as that illegal and immoral entity we think of as a mob. But until proven otherwise, groups would be communities in medieval culture. They would be assumed to have a history and a cohesive place, and a kind of moral authority. Identity, Taylor’s claims imply, would spring in the first instance from one’s identification with such a community or a crowd. His claims also suggest that the opposite would obtain in modern culture. For since in modern culture, “one” preexists any crowd, which is conjured into some sort of organized existence (if any) only by individual contractual choices in the pursuit of self-interest, therefore, until that rational, self-interested contract were established, a group would have no already-given authority or legitimacy. In modern culture, crowds would be mobs until proven otherwise. I have had to extend Taylor’s views to articulate claims that I think can be supported by fourteenth-century materials, and, even so, such sweeping distinctions cannot be supported very smoothly by the uneven and contradictory ideas and discourses of social and literary   Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, 2004).

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history. Crowd-theory is a relatively young science, and many materials and contexts need to be investigated before any general claims can emerge or even be steadily hypothesized. Yet Taylor’s attention to the gradually transformed notion (or “social imaginary”) of the “law of a people” is useful for considering how later fourteenth century writers in England gauged the legitimacy of the many sorts of unpredictable collective action that seemed to emerge rather dramatically from many sides from at least the 1370s until the end of the fourteenth century. Such outbreaks of effective, collective action can be seen in the famous or notorious parliamentary trials of 1376, and 1388, and the nationwide popular rebellion of 1381; such questions even emerge in the period’s proliferation of professional identities, with their distinctive and even legislated clothings (the briefly enforced statute of 1363 sought to enforce the distinctions, but many writers continued to complain that English “variation”—varietas—frustrated such orderly schemes).2 So too the development of “livery”: that is, visible trappings of alliance or affiliation (a badge, pendant, or full uniform) to a particular lord, including the king as private lord, whose proliferation constituted the sense of innumerable followings that dominated England through the fifteenth century, only slightly modified by the legislation of 1390 that sought to make sure that such signs of affiliation were given out only by the higher nobility, especially John of Gaunt and King Richard himself. Thus, in spite of such apparent legal constraint, the Lancastrian “linked SS” collar, found on the statue in Southwark Cathedral (London) of the poet John Gower at his tomb made at Gower’s death in the early fifteenth century and evidently worn by Gower at least in his later years, is still proudly displayed by Thomas More in Hans Holbein’s portrait of 1527.3 The splintering into such discrete, often combative followings—virtual private armies—has long been responsible for the label “bastard feudalism” to be applied to 2  See Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, 1980); see also Galloway, “Latin England,” in Imagining a Medieval English Community, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 41–95, esp. pp. 45–73; also Galloway, “The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature,” Viator 40 (2009), 309–31. A number of the points in the current essay develop ideas that I have broached elsewhere, where also can be found more documentation and further references than can be included here. 3   For the law, 13 Richard II, st. 3, see Statutes of the Realm, II.74–75 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1810–28), rpt. in Selected Documents of English Constitutional History, 1307–1485, eds. S. B. Crimes and A. L. Brown (London, 1961), pp. 157–8.

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the entire period.4 A visible kaleidoscope of ragged followers of lords suggests the immediate problem of identifying this world as a realm of multiple communities, or a field of gangs. Some such groups, indeed, attained purely “outlaw” status even before 1390, like the notorious Folvilles of the early fourteenth century, who “wore the robes of Sir Robert Tuchet, lord of Markeaton, Derbyshire, and Ashwell, Rutland” but were well known for murder, rape, and robbery.5 In later decades, even well-established lords might assemble an army of followers to attack a neighbor whom they considered to hold lands that should, or simply could, be appropriated by themselves, like the attack by the Duke of Suffolk’s “five hundred men” in late October 1465 against a manor and church owned by the Paston family, which Margaret Paston defended with her own followers in her husband’s absence but at great loss of livestock and personal property.6 So too other outbreaks of passionate collective action, along with new or more highly self-conscious groups brought into being by them, can be seen in the widespread interest in and severe condemnation of the heresies of the academic John Wyclif in the 1380s—especially when such heresies became associated with the agenda of biblical translation and theological debate in English (which Wyclif himself endorsed but seems never to have attempted on his own part).7 Such groups typically claimed universal public authority for their own actions but were seen  as mobs and gangs by their opponents. The ideal of collective,

4  See Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995), pp. 63–65; Nigel Saul, A Companion to Medieval England, 1066–1485 (rev. ed., Stroud, UK, 2005), pp. 30–2; Paul Strohm, “The Literature of Livery,” in Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 179–85. 5  See Henry Summerson, “Folville, Eustace (d. 1346),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn., Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/49676 Accessed 4 August 2009]. 6  See Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, part 1, EETS, SS 20, ed. Norman Davies (Oxford, 2004), October 17 and 27, 1465, nos. 194–96, pp. 323–32. The key passages are reprinted but without the poignant inventory of goods and livestock taken and destroyed (including a “boke of Freynsh” taken from Sir John Paston’s personal quarters) in The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Davies (Oxford, 1983), nos. 70–71, pp. 146–50. 7   Key starting points for current thinking about the Lollards are Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988); Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, eds. Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge, 2003); and Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge, UK, 2007). For still the best beginners’ selection of some of the other English writings by them, see Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Hudson (Cambridge, UK, 1978).



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universally popular action remained the basis for legitimacy, as is clear in King Richard’s deposition in 1399. Although the deposition was (like most political changes) rigged by a small group, it was still framed by contemporaries and later writers as a (legitimate) popular uprising, “populo pre nimio gaudio fortiter applaudente” (“with the people strongly applauding from enormous joy”), as the Record and Process, written and promulgated soon after 1399, describes Richard’s deposition and Henry IV’s enthronement.8 Yet the same document emphasizes as one of its strongest reasons for deposing a king Richard’s cultivation of his own mob. The Record and Process declares that Richard’s Cheshire followers were a “magnam multitudinem malefactorum” (“a great host of evil-doers”) who wandered around with the king throughout the kingdom, “tam infra hospicium regis quam extra, ligeos regni crudeliter occiderunt, et quosdam verberauerunt, vulnerauerunt, et depredarunt bona populi, et pro suis victualibus soluere recusarunt, et vxores et alias mulieres rapuerunt et violauerunt, et licet super eorum huiusmodi excessibus graues querimonie deferebantur ad audienciam dicti regis, idem tamen rex super hiis iusticiam seu remedium facere non curauit, set fauebat eisdem gentibus in maleficiis eorundem” (“both within and without the king’s household, viciously killing [true] lieges of the kingdom, beating and wounding others, stealing the goods of the people, refusing to pay for their own supplies, and raping and violating wives and other women; and even if grievous complaints about their excesses of this kind were brought to the king’s attention, the king cared little about imposing any justice or making any remedy for these things, but cast his favor on those people in their very wickednesses” [art. 5; pp. 34–35]). We often think of “Chaucer’s age” as an inchoately “individualist” period, but perhaps it is better to think of it as a period when the idea of the “mob” and the “gang”—in our sense rather than following the Old English genge, “band of warriors”—began to take hold. In the extension of Taylor’s terms suggested above, indeed, individualism and the idea of the mob would be two sides of the same coin. These instances also prove, however, that the legitimacy of communities and groups remained a very strong value in the period, even if judging such legitimacy became a problem, or indeed a legal paradox 8   The Deposition of Richard II: “The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II” (1399) and Related Writings, ed. David Carlson (Toronto, 2007). Hereafter cited in text; translations mine.

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(like the king’s outlawing of liveries in 1390, which in fact was legislated by a king who eagerly continued to use that mode, indicated in his case by the badge of the white hart). So powerful were the emotions at stake in these distinctions that groups and their actions, good or ill, were often seen by chroniclers as either “miraculously” legitimate or “diabolically” perverse. A breeze of sacred or demonic power seems to stir through many of the accounts of these collective actions, even by writers capable of presenting bitingly acute Realpolitik. To be sure, writers (and no doubt others) throughout the Christian Middle Ages often see or claim to see the miraculous or demonic in massive public events. But usually the “proof ” of such views is an astounding but specifically physical miracle: a comet at a death or birth, an earthquake at a denunciation of a heretic. In contrast, late-medieval English chroniclers describe a sense of marvelous or diabolical forces at play within or moving through crowd actions, and merging with the sense of spontaneous public spirit, for good or ill, authorized and in turn later titled by the public as a whole. Particular parliaments were given names indicating their legendary or numinous status—“De parliamento facto Londoniis, quod multum bonum a quibusdam dicebatur” (“Concerning the parliament held in London which was called the very good one by certain people”), the monastic historian of St. Albans, Thomas Walsingham, says by way of a title to his account of 1376;9 the “Narracio de Modo et Forma Mirabilis Parliamenti” (“Narrative of the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament”), the pamphleteer Thomas Favent describes the parliaments of 1386 and 1388;10 “Parliamentum apud Westmonasterium operans mira” (“A parliament at Westminster that worked wonders”), the monastic historian of Leicester Abbey, Henry Knighton (c. 1330–1396), describes the parliament of 1388  9   The St. Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham: Vol. I: 1376–1394, eds. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy Childs, and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–2. Hereafter cited in text; translations are closely based on Taylor’s et al., but I have adapted where necessary for more literal meaning. 10  See Historia sive Narracio de Modo et Forma Mirabilis Parliamenta apud Westmonasterium Anno Domini Millesimo CCCLXXXVI … per Thomam Favent Clericum indicata, ed. May McKisack, Camden Miscellany 14 (London, 1926); A. Galloway, trans., “History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386, in the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Richard the Second after the Conquest, Declared by Thomas Favent, Clerk,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, eds. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, 2002), pp. 231–52. See Clementine Oliver, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England (York, 2010).



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(he elsewhere says it was “subsequently called ‘The Merciless Parliament’ for mercy was extended to none without the consent of the lords”).11 If nothing else, such collective authorship, often with a whiff of the other world, indicates how powerful—and how unpredictably so—the results of all such group actions were. Groups had major effects on later fourteenth century politics, and often those effects seemed to take someone or other by surprise. The capacity for apparently rapid mobilization of groups is one of the period’s features, and this is visible in how writers treat group actions in collectively “authorized” and named if not supernatural terms. The chroniclers were, of course, all artful shapers of the information they received, canny in where they cite miracles or “oral tradition,” and where they present texts. For all their claims of collective authorship and even collective titling of these events, they certainly deserve as much narratological scrutiny as the period’s literary authors. The treatment of groups by Thomas Walsingham, chronicler and head of the scriptorium at the monastery of St. Albans (c. 1340–1420), particularly deserves close analysis. He prefaces his account of the parliament of 1376, for instance, with a story of a dream-vision by one Sir Thomas Hoo on the eve of the parliament. Sir Thomas reported to Walsingham himself (on oath) that he dreamed it “one night when he was resting on his bed … thinking about this present business, as to the ways and means of restoring the king to a more reputable life and of inducing him to take wiser counsel, and also how the abuses which had been perpetrated in the kingdom up to then might be thoroughly rooted out so that the people of the land could enjoy peace and justice more fully” (4–7). In his dream, Sir Thomas found himself sitting in the chapterhouse of St. Paul’s where the Commons (the knights and citizens representing the various regions and counties of the nation) would meet for the parliament, and looking down, Sir Thomas discovered seven gold coins. Endeavoring to locate their proper owner, he wandered around asking whom they belong to, until he met near the choir inside St. Paul’s a group of Benedictine monks. The oldest of these examined the coins and told him that the gold was actually already in its owner’s hands. For the seven coins were the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the

11   Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), pp. 431, 414.

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monk said, which it was for him and his colleagues to use in planning and explaining to the higher lords of the kingdom how they might restore the well-being of the realm. This vision of a surprise discovery of the miraculous “resources” of the Commons—in a parliament that was indeed much concerned with the proper use of the kingdom’s taxes and other money—is an illuminating prelude to the seemingly miraculously efficacious collective action that followed. During the ten weeks that the parliament met in spring and early summer (April 28–July 11) near the end of King Edward III’s life, the Commons, stirred by the crown’s request for new taxes to support the badly failing wars in France, were bold enough to accuse the king’s closest companions of financial mismanagement. The Commons’ attacks were transmitted to the higher lords through their member Sir Peter de la Mare, whose role the Commons created (for the first time) as their “speaker.” The capacity to create an authority for such a group seemed miraculous, at least as Walsingham reports it, and this makes the eventual failure of the Commons’ effort at the hands of John of Gaunt all the more embittering to Walsingham. Initially, Walsingham stresses Sir Peter’s divinely inspired capacity to represent artfully but boldly and effectively to the higher nobility the Commons’ accusations against the corrupt confidants, money-lender, and the mistress of the senile King Edward III: Petrus ergo supradictus de Dei confisus adiutorio onus uerbi suscepit, et astans cum sociis suis coram proceribus, quorum maximus erat dominus Johannes dux Lancastrie … taliter fari cepit: “Domini,” inquit, “et proceres, quorum fide et industria regi debent moderamina regni huius, nequaquam ambigo uestram latere prudentiam quantis talliarum uexationibus depressa fuerit plebs comunis, nunc quintam-deciman persoluendo, modo decimam tribuendo,  modo uero nonam regis usibus concedendo. Que omnia ferret equanimiter, si dominus noster rex siue regnum istud exinde aliquid comodi uel emolumenti sumpsisset uideretur; etiam plebi tollerabile, si in expediendis rebus bellicis, quamuis gestis minus prospere, tanta pecunia fuisset expensa. Set palam est, nec regem comodum nec regnum ex hac fructum aliquem percepisse. Et iccirco, quia nullatenus innotuit comunitati qualiter tanta sit expensa summa pecunie, rationem compoti ab hiis, qui eam receperunt efflagitat plebs comunis; non enim est credibile regem carere infinita thesauri quantitate, si fideles fuerint qui ministrant ei” [8–10]. Sir Peter, therefore, trusting in God’s help, shouldered the burden of speaking. Standing alongside his colleagues he began to speak as follows before the nobles, the greatest of whom was John duke of Lancaster …



communities, crowd-theory, and mob-theory149 “My noble lords,” he said, “by whose honesty and diligence the governance of this realm should be directed, I have not the slightest doubt that it has escaped your knowledge how oppressed the commons are by the great burden of taxation, one time obliged to pay a fifteenth, at another having to pay a tenth, and then again having to grant a ninth for the king’s business. They would endure all this with equanimity if our lord king or the kingdom had then appeared to have enjoyed some advantage or benefit; the people themselves would endure it if the money had been spent in furthering the war effort, even if the war were not successful. But it is clear that the king has not derived any benefit from these taxes nor the kingdom any profit. Accordingly, since the people have no idea whatsoever how such large sums of money have been spent, they are demanding that they be given an explanation by those who have received the money; for it is inconceivable that the king should lack immense resources in his treasury if those who administer it have been honest.”

Only Walsingham directly presents this speech by Sir Peter, though the remarkably detailed (and presumably more immediately informed) account of the Good Parliament in the Anonimalle Chronicle presents several anonymous speeches with some of the same points. We may attribute this adroit speech (as is common in medieval historical writing) to Walsingham’s own crafting of the kind of statement that ought to have been said.12 In Walsingham’s words, Sir Peter’s speech makes the Commons into perfect representatives of “plebs comunis” (“common people”) of the realm, just as Sir Peter is the perfect representative of the parliamentary Commons. Those “common people” are figured in Walsingham’s version of Sir Peter’s opening speech as a rational and forgiving but justice-seeking community, forging and mobilizing the image of the popular world as a community of law and reason, whereas the king’s followers who have caused all these troubles are, soon enough, figured by the Commons as a disreputable gang. So too, the lords who are so unresponsive to the problems of the common public (“commons” with a small “c”) are simply uninformed—a typical feature 12  For the Anonimalle Chronicle’s Anglo-Norman account, see The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), pp. 79–100. An excellent translation is available in John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1987), pp. 301–13. For manifestly fictional dialogue in chronicles, see Galloway, “Writing History in England,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999; rpt. with addenda, 2002), pp. 255–83, esp. p. 270.

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of medieval criticism of the powerful, used, indeed, even when Richard II is condemned: in at least some accounts, he—like other kings in medieval literary tradition—is said to be misled by corrupt advisors.13 Walsingham’s account, however, also shows how volatile and performatively established are the designations of a legitimate community or group. We can see this volatility both in the power of Sir Peter’s inspired rhetoric and in Walsingham’s own alterations to the account. For across his career, Walsingham presented at least two slightly but significantly different versions of the Good Parliament. The early one includes long passages in which John of Gaunt is the diabolically evil opponent to the Commons, who have justly indicted the closest courtiers of the aged and senile King Edward III, representing briefly a kind  of velvet revolution. The later version, most likely produced when  Gaunt’s son had become king, simply removes the chapters and  frequent phrases portraying John of Gaunt as evilly seeking by every means to enrich himself and corrupt the kingdom—for example, “John … a man whose deeds always belied his name [namely, John the Baptist], for he ever lacked the divine grace, it is believed as well as human grace” (9). The self-censorship is achieved by Walsingham literally cutting out the pages of his own authoritative copy (although fortunately for us, at least two other copies of the earlier account had already been made). The excision of Gaunt’s inhumanely demonic role lessens the account’s immediate display of an otherworldly agon. Yet the divinely authorized role of the Commons remains clear in both versions, and indeed the dream-vision of Sir Thomas Hoo seems added late in Walsingham’s career, as paleographical evidence suggests, indicating that even after neutralizing the portrayal of Gaunt, he still did not want to remove the signs of divine legitimacy in the collective actions of the Commons.14 The censored account simply shows that much more clearly how Gaunt also seeks to tar the Commons as a mere gang, suggesting Walsingham’s interest in the unstable categories of illegitimate mobs and legitimate crowds: “Quid . . isti degeneres et sepium milites moliuntur?” (“what are these degenerate knights of the 13  On that trope, see Dan Embree, “The King’s Ignorance: A Topos for Evil Times,” Medium Ævum 54 (1985), 121–26. 14   For the paleographical evidence, see The St. Albans Chronicle, eds. Taylor et al., pp. lix–lx.



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hedgerows plotting?”), one chapter in Walsingham’s censored, “scandalous” version of the event has Gaunt say (10–11). Gaunt’s confidants, though, tell him in that censored chapter that he must not think these knights are mere rabble: “non plebei, ut asseruistis, set armipotentes” (“not commoners, as you assert, but men strong in arms”). Even in this debate, the Commons’ authority is confirmed by their faithful representation of and support from the wider world of actual crowds, even the lowest: “Londoniensis etiam omnes et singuli et commune uulgus tantum penes eos afficiuntur, quod non permitterent eos uel probris pregrauari uel minima iniuria molestari” (“All and sundry Londoners, even the common horde, are so fond of them that would not permit them either to be aggrieved by assaults or be bothered by the least bit of injury” [12–13]). Such discourse is common enough, but in Walsingham’s case we should consider his literary sources, since he was a highly learned writer, schooled in what we are now seeing more clearly as the learned setting of St. Albans monastery, and steeped in the inter­ests  in ancient writings spreading through monastic culture in late-medieval England.15 A number of phrases in Walsingham’s account of 1376, especially in describing William Latimer, Lord Chamberlain from 1371, are lifted directly from the first-century BCE Roman historian Sallust’s account of Catiline’s “Conspiracy.” The editors of the most recent edition and translation of Walsingham’s narrative briefly note his use of Sallust, but they misidentify one allusion to Sallust in Walsingham’s text, and overlook two others.16 The importance of this matter for the present concern is the witheringly cynical perspective that Sallust provides Walsingham for various images of the public world, including pampered Roman aristocrats’ manipulation of the public realm, and more generally a view of urban life as depraved and filled by mobs, driven by ambition and, especially, greed. Walsingham too portrays Lord Latimer as “a slave to greed and to a love of plundering,” given to “abandoning his noble wife” and spending his nights “in the lewd company of London prostitutes,” where

15   James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St. Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c. 1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004); also Galloway, “John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism,” JEGP 107 (2008), 445–471. 16   The St. Albans Chronicle, eds. Taylor et al., p. 26, bis, but incorrectly as noted. Sallust is not included among the “sources” for Walsingham listed on pp. cxi-cxvii, by which the editors mean “contemporary historical sources.”

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he squandered “what he had extorted from his poor tenants.” His avarice “took from him the loyalty which he owed the king and the realm, robbed him of his honesty, and destroyed his other good qualities. In place of these it taught him arrogance and cruelty, to neglect God, and to consider that everything could be bought for a price” (26– 27). Apart from the change from “gods” to “God,” Walsingham has taken this passage directly from Sallust’s description of the general state of Rome.17 So too Walsingham notes that Latimer was “wickedly led astray by the counsel of such men who constantly attended upon him,” and then he goes on to comment on the general evil of those who corrupt those around them: “Et reuera quisquis, licet a culpa uacuus, in amicitiam prauorum inciderit, cotidiano usu atque illecebris par talibus efficietur” (26–27). This reapplies, slightly transformed into a general truth, Sallust’s comment about Catiline’s pernicious influence on everyone, even those who at first were innocent: “quod si quis etiam a culpa vacuus in amicitiam ejus inciderat, cotidiano usu atque illecebris facile par similisque ceteris efficiebatur” (“And if anyone as yet innocent happened to become friendly with him, the temptations to which daily intercourse with Catiline exposed him soon made him as evil a ruffian as the rest”).18 It is possible, indeed, that Walsingham viewed the corrupt courtiers being indicted as so many versions of Sallust’s Catiline and his followers: abusers of wealth, and misleaders of those of the populace who might be led to demean the Senate and thus unravel the Republic. Walsingham’s designations of the divinely sanctioned Commons with its gifted orator, Sir Peter de la Mare, facing a dangerous clique are perhaps generally formed in terms of Cicero’s and Sallust’s portrayal of a Senate facing Catiline’s conspiracy. More broadly, Sallust’s Rome establishes image of urban mobs and public oratory that could be pondered and reused by historians like Walsingham, whether or not they left such directly literal trails as the instances just

 Sallust, De conjuratione Catilinae. 10.2–4, citing from Conjuration de Catilina, Guerre de Jugurtha, Fragments des histories, ed. and trans. François Richard (Paris, 1933). Taylor et al. note the phrase “omnia venalia” as Sallust’s but mislocate it as from his Bell. Jug. 8.1, where that phrase also appears. In fact the entire section and part of the next in Walsingham draw on the Conspiracy of Catiline. 18   De conj. Cat. 14.2; trans. S. A. Handford, Sallust: The Jugurthan War/The Conspiracy of Catiline (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 184. 17



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noted.19 For instance, Sallust attributes the rise of Catiline to the general selfishness of the citizens of Rome where “the city populace,” Sallust writes, “were especially eager to fling themselves into a revolutionary adventure”: Those who had made themselves conspicuous anywhere by vice and shameless audacity, those who had wasted their substance by disgrace­ ful   excesses, and those whom scandalous or criminal conduct had exiled from their homes—all these had poured into Rome till it was like a sewer…. The whole truth—to put it into a word—is that although all disturbers of the peace in this period put forward specious pre­ texts,   claiming either to be protecting the rights of the people or to be strengthening the authority of the Senate, this was mere pretence: in reality, every one of them was fighting for his personal aggrandizement.20

This is horror turbae (“horror at the mob”), if we may coin a term. Yet the difference between Sallust’s view and the typical medieval one, including Walsingham’s, is that Sallust sees the entire populace as corrupt. The usual medieval presentation suggests instead that —like the trope of the “bad advisors” who have misled the king or others—a small group is responsible for a larger corruption of the populace. Thus in Walsingham’s narrative of 1376, the image of the evil crowd appears (only in the censored portion) in the mouth of the villainous John of Gaunt and his advisor, who speak of “degenerate knights of the hedgerows” and “the common horde.” They are the misleaders of the public; the possibility for identifying the general public in these disparaging or alienating ways exists for Walsingham only as the corrupt influence of a few. In his account, the nightmare of the modern “mob” is held at bay by the dream-vision of the ideal Commons. But the latter contains all the elements of the other: spontaneous, self-legitimating, and surprisingly powerful. The unwillingness, however, to consider crowds as mobs in the first instance, remains even in Walsingham’s full opportunity to unleash his  horror turbae with the Rising of 1381, which was particularly fiercely waged in Walsingham’s immediate world at St. Albans, where the tenants rose up after decades of simmering struggles with their 19  On the general interest in Sallust by medieval historians, see Beryl Smalley, “Sallust in the Middle Ages,” in Classical Influences on European Culture AD 500–1500, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge, UK, 1971), pp. 165–75. 20   De conj. Cat., sections 37–38; trans. Handford, pp. 204–5.

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landlord, the abbey.21 Even on this occasion Walsingham treads carefully, approaching his fullest vision of the rebellious rural tenants as a mob only in the sense that they are misled by corrupt leaders, though indicating the volatility of these issues by using the unstable form of satire. Just as his imagined dialogue between a demonic Gaunt and his advisor speaks of the English populace as a “communis vulgus,” so in Walsingham’s narration of the Rising of 1381 he speaks of the rebellious tenants of St. Alban as a “turba rusticorum” (“crowd of peasants”), a “rusticorum et communis uulgi” (“horde of peasants and commoners”), and the “membra diaboli” (“limbs of the devil”; 426, 428). Walsingham also portrays the rebels as pathetic emulators of the higher social status of a knightly caste, a ludicrous self-image further punctured by the chronicler’s application of the labels of communal identity that the rebels actually hold in relation to Walsingham’s abbey, their lord. But he makes clear that all these novel instances of mob-identity were imposed on traditional communities by a small number of wicked instigators, the ineptness of whose delusions he conveys in satiric portraiture: Rustici namque, quos natiuos uel bondos uocamus, simul cum ruralibus accolis in Essexia, maiora suis concipientes uiribus, et spem habentes omnia subiicienda sue stoliditati, conglobata multitudine, pro libertate tumultuare cepere, et pares dominis effici, et nulli omnino alicuius de cetero astringi seruicio, meditate sunt. Et ut efficacius sua uota perducerent ad effectum, mox ad quamlibet primo paruam uillam uiri tantum duarum uillarum, qui auctores et primi motores huius mali fuere, mittere curauerunt, ut omni excusacione postposita, omnes, tam senes quam florentes etate, ad eosdem confluerent armis instructi, prout quisque poterat, scientes eorum bona qui uenire supersederent, necgligerent, aut contempnerent, dissipanda, domos conflagrandas uel deponendas, capita amputanda. Terribilis ergo comminacio cunctos coegit accurrere, ut aratri relictis negociis, seminandique comoditatibus, uxoribus suis et prediis, in breui tantus coactus sit numerus, ut ad quinque milia recenserentur uilissimorum communium et rusticorum; quorum quidam tantum baculos, quidam rubigne obductos gladios, quidam bipennes solummodo, nonnulli arcus pre uetustate factos a fumo rubicundiores ebore antiquo, cum singulis sagittis, quarum plures contente erant una pluma, ad regnum conquerendum conuenere (410–13).

21  See Galloway, “Making History Legal: Piers Plowman and the Rebels of Fourteenth-Century England,” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen Hewett-Smith (York, 2001), pp. 7–39.



communities, crowd-theory, and mob-theory155 The serfs, whom we call “villeins” or “bondsmen,” in company with oth­ er   countrymen of Essex, conceiving ambitions beyond their powers and harboring hopes of subduing everything to their foolish designs, assembled in large numbers, and began to clamor for liberty. They imagined that they could become the equals of their masters, and never again be bound by servitude to any of them. To achieve their wishes as successfully as they could, men of just two villages who were the authors and instigators of the wickedness first made it their business to send with all haste to every village, however small. Their aim was to get both the old and those men in their prime to join them equipped with such weapons as they could muster, allowing no excuses at all, so that those who refrained from joining them, and those who refused or disdained to do so, would know that they would have their possessions pillaged, their homes burned down or demolished, and themselves be executed. Such terrible threats impelled all to make haste to join them. So, abandoning the work of the plow, and the benefits of sowing seed, as well as their wives and estates, so large a number was soon collected that they were said to number as many as five thousand of the lowest class of common people and peasants. Some of these had come together to conquer the kingdom of England, having only staves, some swords covered with rust, yet others had only battle-axes; some had bows which were very old and had been made redder than ancient ivory by smoke but had only one arrow each, and many of these arrows had but one feather.

The focus on the major role of coercive, demonic instigators persists in all of Walsingham’s narrative of the Rising, and it is linked to his mentions of the novel (to him) kinds of community that the rebels were claiming. Yet within those descriptions, a sense that the rebels as a whole claimed such terms of communal identity continuously seeps through his emphasis on the power of instigators. Thus during one of the negotiations between the rebellious tenants at St. Albans and the monastery, an important “villein” (tenant) named Richard sent for the abbot “ut … comunibus responderet” (“that he reply to the commons”)—for, Walsingham adds, “ita enim tunc temporis gloriabantur eo nomine ut nullum censerent nomen honorabilius nomine comunitatis” (“at that time they so gloried in the name of the ‘commons,’ and considered no name more honorable than the name of ‘the commonalty’ ” [452–53]). The volatile, satiric efforts that Walsingham exerts to insist that they are a merely traditional community that has been perverted into a more uppity identity are signs of the threat that the rebels posed in their bid to claim legitimacy as a communitas with real wrongs, real

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historical bases to their grievances. 22 The chronicler’s metahistorical, definitional battles against the rebels are as important as the abbey’s and king’s real conflicts against them. It is crucial for Walsingham to define their company as created by self-seeking motives of a few rather than community loyalties, though at times he seems to appreciate the massive support that the Rising had: “currebatur reuera ad eos ex omni parte ab hiis qui uel oppressi fuerant ere alieno, uel censuram iuris timebant propter malefacta, et fiebat plebanorum conglomeracio, quantam nullus miminisse potuit, uel audisse, insimul conuenisse” (“in fact men who either were weighted down with debt, or feared the punishment of the law for their crimes, hastened to join them from all parts, and the size of the gathering of common people that came together at one time was greater than anyone could remember seeing or hearing about” [414–15]). At moments like those, where a general notion of such novelly independent, or alienated, community identity seems to emerge from the rebels, Walsingham most closely echoes Sallust’s disparagement of the entire Roman populace. With that echo of an ancient Roman outlook, we might say that Walsingham there presents his modernity. *** Poets, too, in this period often offered pointed but sometimes equally volatile analyses of the principles of community, groups, and group actions. Indeed, poets are far more often discussed in such terms than the chronicles as the period’s creators of “public poetry.” The term is derive from Anne Middleton’s influential essay of 1979, arguing that the poets in Ricardian English could achieve a new kind of “public” voice, addressing and speak for both secular and religious concerns, and for a “middle” range of social and economic spheres.23 In treating 22   Precisely how much Walsingham was aware of this has been debated: see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1994), e.g., p. 169; see Galloway, “Making History Legal,” pp. 31–39; and again Justice, “Religious Dissent, Social Revolt and ‘Ideology,’ ” in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes, eds. Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss and Chris Wickham, Past & Present Supplement 2 (2007), 205–16, although the degree of Walsingham’s understanding of the events is tangential to Justice’s interest in the rebels’ own views. 23  Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978), 94–114; Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge, UK, 1982), pp. 101–23.



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this writing, however, it might at once be added—as Middleton also indicates—that for all its claims on public authority, such poetry also debated still more freely and extremely than the period’s histories  the nature of that public, and the status of mass groups and group-actions. Most pertinent among these are the texts known as Piers Plowman by William Langland, itself cited by the rebels of 1381 or at least tangentially known to them.24 Langland’s meditation on the principles of crowd identity, however, are hardly reassuring, for revolutionaries or defenders of the status quo ante. For all of the “public” posture of his work, with all of its invocation of common discourses, it also glimpses a resolution of its extremes as in a “bad dream.”25 The B text, dated after 1378, first includes in its Prologue a debate among the thousands of rats and mice who have gathered at a “counseil for the commune profit” about whether to hang a bell on a “cat of a court,” who has been pouncing on the rodents at will (B.Prol.148).26 One speaker in the debate broadly identifies the bell as a kind of alternative livery, as worn by those “in the Cite of Londoun” who “Beren beighes [necklaces] ful bright abouten hire nekkes, / And somme colers [collars] of crafty work” (Prol.161–2). This and other elements in the scene would appear to suggest a large concern with ruling and ruled classes. But scholars usually assume a narrower topical allusion to the Good Parliament of 1376, particularly since Bishop Thomas Brinton of Rochester preached a sermon to a convocation of clergy during the Good Parliament in which he argued that judgments against the powerful should be carried out—the very question that Langland leaves undecided in his debate of the rats and mice. In that sermon of May 18, 1376, Brinton argued that the king was ruled by wanton boys and people of low birth, concluding that both lords and clerical prelates should condemn and correct this scandal. Brinton invokes the same fable to make his point: “Non sic, domini reuerendi, sed ne parliamentum nostrum comparetur fabuloso parliamento murium et ratonum” (“not thus, revered  See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 102–39.  See Middleton, “Public Poetry,” p. 103; for a more sanguine view of the public discourses invoked by the work, and a full exploration of their scope, see C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA, 2004). 26   Citations and many of the glosses are from William Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (2nd ed., London, 1995). 24 25

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lords, let our parliament be compared to the fabled parliament of the rats and mice”).27 For Brinton, that fable—in most versions of which the rats and mice agree that the cat should be belled but find none of them willing to carry that plan out—is a means of supporting his sermon’s theme, “Factor operis hic beatus” (“A doer of the work, this man shall be blessed” [James 1. 25]). But for Langland, the fable is not an exemplum about failure of will, but an opportunity for questioning, an entry into debate about just what kind of group the rats and mice constitute. Langland’s presentation does not have an exemplum’s “point,” but instead begins a debate that continues through the rest of the poem. First, one “rat of renoun, moost renable of tonge,” steps forth to argue, as in the received version of the fable, that it would be very nice to have a bell on that cat, perhaps one hanging from the very collar that all such cats wear. The eloquent Rat of Renown, usually assumed to be modeled on Sir Peter de la Mare, suggests that with such a bell, the rats and mice might know “Wher he ryt or rest or rometh to pleye” (171). But this turns out to be a means for them to be more cannily subservient courtiers, for if hym list for to laike, thanne loke we mowen And peeren in his presence the while hym pleye liketh, And if hym wratheth, be war and his wey shonye. 172–74

[he wishes to sport [appear [He is angry; path; shun

As in the traditional fable, none of the rats wish to carry out the plan. But Langland adds a further voice arguing that this outcome was the wisest after all. A “mouse that muche good kouthe … Strook forth sternely,” and tells them that they should let the cat be, since their own nature is too undisciplined to exist as a legitimate source of the “commune profit.” They need the cat to keep them restrained as useful parts of the “al the commune,” a point that exploits the literal identity of rodents as pests:

 See The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), 2 vols, ed. Sister Mary Aquinas Devlin, Camden Society, Third Series 85–86 (London, 1954), sermon 69, 2:317. See George Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975), pp. 103– 4. See also Galloway, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume 1: C ProloguePassus 4; B Prologue-Passus 4; A Prologue-Passus 4 (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 133–41. 27



communities, crowd-theory, and mob-theory159 For many mannes malt we mees wolde destruye, And also ye route of ratons rende mennes clothes, Nere the cat of the court that kan yow overlepe; For hadde ye rattes youre will, ye kouthe noght rule yowselve. 198–201

[mice; destroy [tear [Were it not for; spring on [could

Plausible as is the common use of this for dating the B text, the parliament of rats and mice is far more than a topical judgment on a single parliament. Instead, with it Langland announces a major debate about legitimate and illegitimate group-actions and judgments, and legitimate and illegitimate kinds of groups. The voice of the denuncia­ tory   mouse is especially notable. Although the invention of an illegitimate mob or gang is (as I have suggested) a notable feature of the period, the notion is otherwise invariably applied to others, not adopted for one’s own group. Self-indictment as a member of a mob in need of policing is extremely rare, in the later fourteenth century or any time. But Langland’s satire, always prone to the disabling effects of selfindictment, not only generates many visions of unguided and disenfranchised mobs, it also continually casts the narrator as one of them: “And so my wit weex and wanyed til I a fool were; / And some lakkede my lif—allowed it fewe— / And leten me for a lorel” (15.3–5). The poem’s narrator’s identity as a quasi-prophetic figure continually flirts with an identity as a wastrel, imposed because he is continually seen, and even identifies himself, as a member of an unruly mass. A wealthy and educated friar whom the narrator dines with at one point is, the narrator mutters in his presence, a hypocrite, preaching “of penaunces that Paul the Apostle suffrede” but showing in his actual deeds that he “Hath no pite on us povere” (13.66, 79). Even in the poem’s own terms, such identification with the poor may be self-authorizing or selfdisparaging: a means of claiming the high moral ground of the community of saintly poor, or of admitting to a membership in a disreputable horde, including those who use claims of poverty to manipulate others for unwarranted gain, chief among the instances of which in the poem are the friars, descendants of an original saintly poor man, St. Francis.28 28  On poverty, beggars, and the poor in the poem, see Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004); William Langland: Piers Plowman: A New Annotated

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With its frequently subtle mixture of Latin and English, Piers Plowman invokes and speaks in the two kinds of “language” separating the clerical and lay communities, and it often speaks the same message in both.29 Yet in the poem, the flexibility and controversy in the status of any group or populace—as mob, crowd, or community—are exploited in a way found nowhere else in this period. Not only are these debates responsible for the narrator’s own uncertain status and identity, they are also responsible for the uncertain identity and status of the entire social world, a topic pondered throughout the poem. Is it legitimately self-governed, or so intrinsically unruly that it “kouthe noght rule” itself, and must find some powerful constraints? The entire “field full of folke” is conceived from the outset as a mass in search of at least superficially legitimate identity: Somme putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful selde,

[themselves; seldom [planting; toiled [Obtained what

In settynge and sowynge swonken ful harde, And wonnen that thise wastours with glotonye destruyeth. And somme putten hem to pride, apparailed hem [dressed; therafter, accordingly In contenaunce of clothynge comen disgised. Prol. 23–24

Their initial collective efforts to find salvation in the poem are mobilized when Hope first blows a horn, but this soon collapses because they need guidance: A thousand of men tho thrungen togideres, Cride upward to Crist and to his clene moder To have grace to go to Truthe—God leve that they moten! Ac there was wight noon so wys, the wey thider kouthe, But blustreden forth as beestes over baches and hilles. 5.510–14

[thronged [Cried; pure [Grant; might [(who) knew [strayed; valleys

Although Piers as their labor manager tries to impose unity on these “thousand,” he fails with this folk’s disintegration into malcontents Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, 2008), pp. 34–36; and Galloway, “Economy of Need,” esp. 328–30. 29  On this issue see Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995), 68–105.



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and rebels. This—ending with the abrupt arrival of the Pardon and marking the first major disintegration of the poem’s overall narrative progress—has been often discussed in terms of the period’s struggles in labor control;30 but the metapoetic debate about what sort of group this mass is governs the drama there as well. Since the folk cannot persist either as pilgrims or as laborers, they cannot constitute a community or even a crowd. What sort of group, then, is left? Langland’s exploration of that question leads his poem to the brink of the modern, Grotean-Lockean imaginary, and to the principles of the mob. The figure of Hunger, who appears when all discipline has been lost among the group set by Piers Plowman to plow a field, first presents the only remaining suggestion: a group unified and made moral by basic need. Invoked by Piers in order to police the unruly people who should be laboring diligently in the fields, Hunger preaches what Piers at first calls a “lovely lesson” about the reforming powers of material constraints (6.275): gluttons and false professionals like doctors will all be forced to live morally, and indeed such disreputable professions will disappear. With Hunger himself as the teacher, however, this lesson is not simply an exemplum or a fable to be considered from a scholarly distance. Instead, this testing of a proto-Grotean-Lockean (or, better, Hobbesian) idea with its reality sets in motion a debate about what kinds of community people can constitute when joined simply by raw need. Hunger puts his lesson into unhappy practice when—in an ironic twist—as an afterthought Hunger asks to have a meal before departing: “hennes no wole I wende / Er I have dyned bi this day and ydronke bothe” (6.277–78). Hunger’s post-sermon meal of all the people’s food is, appropriately, so endless that the workers nearly starve. It is an object lesson, but it leaves unsettled the further question of community legitimacy. Starvation indeed brings the people to a kind of unity, but only in the most basic form of desperation, under whose amoral terms the common people are the first to suffer: Al Hunger eet in haste and axed after moore. Thanne povere folk for fere fedden Hunger yerne With grene poret and pesen to poisone hym thei thoghte! 6.295–97

[asked [anxiously [Cabbage

30  David Aers, “Piers Plowman: Poverty, Work, and Community,” in Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (London, 1988), pp. 20–72.

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Basic need is, in this presentation, an easy but unreliable and unfair foundation for community. The issue this raises climaxes with the narrator’s own last temptation from Need himself. This figure appears in the final vision to offer the narrator his social and legal philosophy to “excuse thee,” allowing in principle the narrator to take anything he wants since he can use need to excuse such self-interest: for “nede ne hath no lawe” (20.10). The temptation that Need offers is to turn the objective principle of social charity toward the poor into the subjective principle of universal self-interest.31 Once again, and now at the finale of the poem, the narrator’s own identity as a member of a community, however traditionally “medieval” an identification, is made a focus for the uncertainties about what legitimates community itself in the medieval tradition. It is a sharp movement of that tradition toward what in the terms suggested at the beginning of this essay are those of modernity. The mass-public created by those following the philosophy of Need, as universal self-interest, like the workers facing Hunger, will not be legitimized by any selfless morality or mission to expend divine gifts; they will simply pursue self-interest to the extent that society allows them. The Grotean-Lockean world of society, as a contractual means for the pursuit of self-interest, emerges into view, again through a dark mirror. The mob, as the basic form of human collectivity, comes into being by the same means. Thus at the end of Piers Plowman, even the followers of Conscience whom he is trying to gather into the Barn of Unity under the onslaught of the Antichrist can, in the event, be brought together only because, at Conscience’s prayer to Kynde (God, or God’s power through nature), terrible diseases descend on them. Momentarily, their pride is broken; chastened, they begin to move toward Unity. But as soon as Kynde relents and removes the diseases (again at Conscience’s request), they return to the kind of pride that characterizes the forces of Antichrist and the society of self-interest: … thanne lough Lyf, and leet daggen hise clothes, And armed hym in haste in harlotes wordes, And heeld Holynesse a jape and Hendenesse a wastour, And leet Leautee a cherl and Lyere a fre man; Conscience and counsell, he counted it folye. 20.143–47  Galloway, “Economy of Need,” p. 330.

31

[cut in fancy shapes [lascivious speech [Courtesy [considered; noble



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The poem ends with Conscience failing to keep his band together in the Barn of Unity because one (typically) hypocritical friar, seeking to “cure” the band of its painful experiences of penance provided he is paid, enters the Barn to apply his professional services. The figure Need, indeed, had warned Conscience that friars seeking to flatter the wealthy would arrive “for coveitise to have cure of soules” (20.233), and in the poem they are made the key figures ushering in the new dispensation of a society of self-interest. Piers Plowman ends with Conscience despairing of forging any new community, since friars “for nede flateren” and lead everyone to forget him, Conscience. He can only become a solitary pilgrim, crying after Grace, the voice that awakens the narrator to the social world, but whether a new or the old one we are not shown. Though the poem stops before describing that world, it holds the clear prospect that need might now already be the only principle of community and morality, and in turn, that the living “public” that the poem seeks to address is but a veneer for the selfinterested greed, ambition, and factionalism of the mob. Langland is the most boldly articulate crowd-theorist of the period’s poets, and perhaps of any writer of the period. He was also the least consoling, at least for any traditional view of communal identity. It is a mistake to think of Piers Plowman as one of the most traditional or nostalgic poems of that innovative period during the authoritarian yet rebellious reign of Richard II. Even Chaucer’s portrayal of the brittle adhesion of a “companye” of self-serving professionals and estates representatives displays a stronger because more directly cynical basis for continued common life—perhaps because Chaucer at least at some points more directly embraces the kind of contractual view of society associated later with Grotius and Locke.32 Langland has no such positive endorsement of that outlook, inevitable though it appears to be in his poem. He is, in fact, the first sustained contributor not to crowd theory but to mob theory. That achievement, uneasily as it might suit the long tradition of medieval Christian and general social ideals of community that Langland’s poem invokes throughout, puts Piers Plowman in conversation not simply with the fourteenth or seventeenth century but with our own time, and us. This in itself shows that 32  On this, see Galloway, “Chaucer’s Quarrel with Gower, and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism in Fourteenth-Century London Poetry,” in Calliope’s Classroom: Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds. Annette Harder, Geritt Reinink, and Alasdair MacDonald (Leuven, 2007), pp. 245–68.

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Piers Plowman is a remarkable instance of late-medieval social imagination and thought, even within a context that could include Walsingham’s more carefully hedged elaborations of the same concerns. Challenging as we might find it to articulate and theorize such topics and perspectives, they are still vastly more obvious, more nearly inevitable, for us than they would be for any writer at the brink of the early modern period.

Boccaccio’s Mobs: Religious Devotion, Xenophobia, and Fama in Three Decameron Novelle Robert W. Hanning The novelle of the Decameron, steeped in household intrigues and replete with tricks played by clever Florentines on gullible, arrogant, or downright stupid victims, tend not to deal in, or need, groups larger than the male relatives of an errant, or supposedly errant, wife or daughter. But the three novelle that constitute the collective subject of this essay do depict what we would call mobs (in Boccaccio’s Italian the nearest equivalent to “mob” is calca): large groups of people driven by passion rather than reflection to public actions containing some element of violence. The violence in question does not, however, arise from mass political or economic dissatisfaction and resistance.1 Instead, the behavior I will examine in Decameron 1.1, 2.1, and 4.2 plays a key role in a Boccaccian urban drama staging the paradoxical intersection between religious devotion (more specifically, devotional credulity) and negative attitudes toward foreigners, two staples of Decameronian comedy. I call this intersection paradoxical because in these novelle the native inhabitants of a town are presented as particularly susceptible to claims of superior virtue, of outright sanctity, and even of miraculous intervention, when put forward by or about an outsider; but if (as in two of the three novelle under discussion here) they discover these claims to be bogus, and themselves to have been taken advantage of, their rage is compounded by the fact that the malefactor is a stranger within their gates who thus adds civic insult to creedal injury, prompting their particularly tempestuous group response. The actions of Boccaccio’s fictitious mobs reflect an actual tension within fourteenth-century Italian life between intense political localism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the constant presence, within 1  As it did in Florence in 1378, three years after Boccaccio’s death, during the so-called “revolt of the Ciompi,” the revolutionary rising of the lowest paid, most exploited workers within the Florentine cloth industry, the city’s most important.

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the walls of the peninsula’s myriad autonomous cities, states, and kingdoms, of non-natives pursuing activities as diverse as religious pilgrimage, commercial transactions, and diplomatic negotiations, or simply (like Dante) living in forced exile from their own natal communities. To Boccaccio the storyteller, these outsiders offered rich possibilities as, so to speak, free radicals afloat within the body politic. They also provided him with an opportunity to consider from a unique perspective another theme frequently sounded in the Decameron, namely, the complex impact of fama on human understanding and affairs.2 The Latin term fama has a wider range of meanings than its English cognate, encompassing not only fame but reputation in general, and also, crucially, the means by which reputation, and indeed all other kinds of information about people and events, is circulated within a community (or the world as a whole): not only factual report (what we might call “news,”) but also gossip, rumor, and storytelling, both true and fictional. In my three exemplary novelle, fama, in many if not all of its significations, frequently affects the progress and/or outcome of the tale. Thus, in 1.1, a mob is generated by false information about extreme holiness; in 4.2, the creation of a mob responds to accurate revelations of extreme fraudulence. In 2.1, these paradigms combine: a mob formed as the popolo of a city moves from credulous reverence to violent anger at a stranger who has exploited, and mocked, that reverence. I Decameron 1.1 contains a scene of shared devotional frenzy that in effect fuses that novella’s three main themes: rhetorical selfconstruction as an important, indeed life-saving, prudential strategy; credulity as a central component of Christian practice, especially with respect to private confession; and mediation as a shared feature of both ecclesiastical and commercial structures, one Boccaccio uses to imply as well a common interest in turning a profit wherever, and by whatever means, possible. The scene in question, which concludes the 2  On the importance of the concept of fama, see Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, eds. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, 2003).



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novella, describes how a large congregation—“quasi tutto il popolo della città, uomini e donne” (84) [almost all the inhabitants, male and female, of the city]3—assembled within the church of a fraternal order in a town somewhere in Burgundy, listens attentively to a sermon by one of the friars, extolling the almost superhuman virtue of an Italian, Ser Ciappelletto, who has recently died while a guest in the home of other Italians living nearby. Having ingested this extraordinary account “della sua vita, de’ suoi digiuni, della sua virginità, della sua simplicità e innocenzia e santità… e della sua lealtà e della sua purità” (85–86) [of his life, his fasting, his virginity, his simplicity, innocence and sanctity… and of his loyalty and purity], the congregation, convinced that they are in the presence of a saint’s body, become a pious mob—“la maggior calca del mondo” (86) [the biggest mob in the world]—as they rush to kiss the dead man’s hands and feet and to rip from his corpse all its clothes in the belief (widespread among early and medieval Christians and still operative among many today) that possession of, and contact with, articles that have touched a saint—or, in the case of relics, a bodily part—mediate to the believer some of the power of divine grace concentrated within the holy one during his or her life and still able to radiate from him or her after death. As the novella’s narrator puts it, “tutti i panni gli furono indosso stracciati, tenendosi beato chi pure un poco di quegli potesse avere…” (86) [all the clothes were stripped from his back, each person considering him [her]self blessed who could grab even a little piece of them]. Furthermore, Ser (now Saint) Ciappelletto’s devotees “affermano molti miracoli Idio aver mostrati per lui e mostrare tutti giorni a chi divotamente si raccomanda a lui” (88) [swear that God has shown many miracles through him, and continues to do so every day, to whoever prays devoutly to him for assistance], at his marble tomb in a chapel of that same church.4 So, what’s wrong with this picture? Quite a bit, as will be clear to anyone who has read the novella from its beginning. The subject of the friar’s persuasive homily is, according to the narrator, one of the 3   All citations of the text of the Decameron follow Vittore Branca, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IV (Milan, 1976). The translations are my own. Numbers in parentheses correspond to Branca’s subdivisions of Boccaccio’s text. 4  On the healing and other miraculous powers attributed by western Christians from late antiquity onward to the bodies, relics, and artifacts of the saints, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), and Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1982), pp. 222–50.

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worst—not best—human beings ever to walk the face of the earth (“il piggiore uomo forse che mai nascesse” (35) [perhaps the worst man ever born]): a crooked notary specializing in forgery and perjury; a hypocrite, thief, sodomite, blasphemer, glutton… you name it. Ser Cepparello of Prato (called Ciappelletto by the French, who can’t even get his name right) is commissioned by a rich Tuscan merchant, Musciatto Franzesi, who has been living in Paris but must now leave it, to collect money owed him by some Burgundians, whom Musciatto believes to be, as a group, “uomini riottosi e di mala condizione e misleali” (8) [treacherous, quarrelsome nogoodniks (though “riottoso” can also mean riotous; perhaps an ironic foreshadowing of the devotional “riot” that concludes Ciappelletto’s story)], and who therefore require a similarly vicious representative to get the best of, and the most from, them. Already a middle-man as a notary, representing common people in legal matters and composing letters of all kinds to express in writing the needs or desires of illiterate clients, Ciappelletto now becomes as well a go-between in the highly mediated world of international commerce. What appears to be shaping up as a commercial confrontation is, however, suddenly transformed by the novella into something completely different. Ciappelletto arrives in Burgundy, where he takes up residence with two Florentine money lenders, acquaintances of Musciatto, who welcome him for Musciatto’s sake. But he soon becomes ill, and despite medical intervention his sickness rapidly becomes lifethreatening—not only to him but to his hosts as well: as the beleaguered Florentines put it, “noi in ogni guisa stiam male se costui muore” (24–26) [no matter what we do, we’re in big trouble if this guy dies]. If, on the one hand, they throw the sick man out of their home, they will be blamed for cruelty. On the other hand, keeping him may be worse: should he refuse to confess his many sins and receive the Church’s last rites, he will be denied Christian burial and end up thrown in a ditch; while, should he opt for confession, the resulting narrative will be so horrible that he will be denied absolution—and end up thrown in a ditch. In which case, the people of the district, who despise the usurious practices of “these Lombard dogs” (“questi Lombardi cani”) will use the presence in their house of an unshriven sinner as an excuse to rob, and perhaps even murder, them. Taking stock of this ethnically and commercially fraught situation, Ciappelletto assures his hosts that their fears for their possessions and safety are unfounded, as he is quite ready to sin one last time on their



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behalf; as he puts it, “Io ho, vivendo, tante ingiurie fatte a Domenedio, che, per farnegli io una ora in su la mia morte, né più né meno ne farà” (28) [I’ve offended God so many times while I lived that one more offense an hour before I die won’t make that much difference]. Accordingly, he asks the Florentines to bring to him “un santo e valente frate, il più che aver potete, se alcun ce n’ è” (29) [the holiest, worthiest friar you can find—if there are any]. Note the delicious sting in the tail of this request, a Boccaccian gesture toward the widespread suspicion in which the fraternal orders were held by many in late medieval western Europe.5 Applying at a local convent for “alcuno santo e savio uomo” (30) [some wise and holy man] to hear their sick guest’s confession, they obtain for the purpose “un frate antico di santa e di buona vita e gran maestro in Iscrittura e molto venerabile uomo” (30) [an old friar of good and holy life, a most venerable man and a specialist in Bible study]. To this sage, Ciappelletto, fully acquainted with the rhetorical tropes, though totally lacking in actual experience, of the sacrament of penance—“mai confessato non s’era” (32) [he had never confessed his sins]—offers a fraudulent masterpiece of repentance, combining a narrative of near-impossible asceticism and goodness with exaggerated worry over tiny (or non-existent) infractions, such as once having accidentally spit in church, the culpability of which the friar smilingly dismisses with this ironically self-incriminating remark: “Figlioul mio, cotesta non è cosa da curarsene: noi che siamo religiosi, tutto il dì vi sputiamo” (63) [My son, that’s nothing for you to worry about; we religious spit there all day long]. Using his ability to shed tears at will—crying was thought by some theologians of confession to be a sure sign of repentance—Ciappelletto even pretends to despair of being absolved for “un peccato… del quale io non mi confessai mai, si gran vergogna ho di doverlo dire; e ogni volta che io me ne ricordo piango come voi vedete, e parmi esser molto certo che Idio mai non avrà misericordia di me per questo peccato” (67) [a sin… that I have never confessed, so ashamed I am to have to admit it; and every time I remember it, I cry just as you can see, and it seems to me very certain that God will never have mercy on me because 5  On the origins and dissemination of anti-fraternal polemics, see Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, 1986), esp. chaps. 1–4. In her introductory comments to Decameron 4.2, the narrator, Pampinea, launches a bitter attack on friars as a preface to her tale of Frate Alberto.

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because of that sin]. After much plangent resistance, and encouragement by his confessor, the pseudo-penitent tells all: “ ‘sappiate che, quando io era piccolino, io bestemmiai una volta la mamma mia.’ E così detto ricominciò a piagner forte”6 (71) [you should know that, when I was very young, I once cursed my mother. And having said that, he again began to cry bitterly]. In short, by this hyperbolic recital of his non-existent virtues, the wily Tuscan completely fools the priest, compromising the latter’s position as Christ’s, and the Church’s, mediator in offering absolution to repentant sinners. Two factors contribute to the success of this masquerade: first, that it is a death-bed confession, when one would expect to hear the truth. The Florentines, overhearing Ciappelletto’s account of himself, and recognizing it as completely fictitious, are amazed that “né vecchiezza né infermità né paura di morte, alla qual si vede vicino, né ancora di Dio, dinanzi al giudicio del quale di qui a picciola ora s’aspetta di dovere essere, dalla sua malvagità l’hanno potuto rimuovere” (79)7 [neither age nor illness nor fear of either his death, which he knows is very near, or of God, whose judgment he knows he must face very soon, has been able to wean him from his wickedness]. Second, the friar, unlike the Florentines, has no idea with whom he is dealing, since Ciappelletto is “in Borgogna, dove quasi niuno il conoscea” (19)8 [in Burgundy, where almost no one knows him], and is thus 6   Medieval penitential manuals of instruction for both confessors and penitents often address the danger posed by despair that one’s sins are so grave they cannot be forgiven by God. Confessors are instructed how to encourage those reluctant to reveal what they consider unforgivable or particularly shameful sins and to assure them that God is all merciful. For a supposedly factual example of a penitent who suppresses a sin for many years until fear of damnation drives her to attempt to reveal it to her confessor, only to be driven mad when the latter does not show sufficient compassion and encouragement, see the account of her life written by the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Englishwoman, Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, 1996), chap. 1, pp. 21–22. 7  Is this, Ciappelletto’s last, best lie, a guarantor of his damnation? Panfilo, the novella’s narrator in the Decameron, opines in his conclusion to his tale that, barring last-minute, secret contrition, “secondo quello che ne può apparire ragiono, e dico costui [Ciappelletto] più tosto dovere essere nelle mani del diavolo in perdizione che in Paradiso” (89) [according to all appearances, I assume, and have to say, that he is more likely to be in the hands of the devil in Hell rather than in Parisdise]. It could, however, be argued that Ciappelletto’s act is one of Christ-like self-sacrifice, laying down his [eternal] life to save his hosts, and, paradoxically, in the process saving himself. I think Boccaccio relished putting his readers in such an interpretive and moral bind. 8  Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) mandates the layperson’s confession to his/her parish priest, doubtless in part to prevent such capers as Ciappelletto’s



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shielded from what would otherwise be the negative effect of his notorious fama. But—and here the novella takes its last ironical turn—the friar’s religious gullibility ultimately coexists with, and is more than redeemed by, his commercial shrewdness. Having given absolution to this vicious trickster whom he mistakes “per santissimo uomo” (74) [for a most holy man], he asks, and receives, Ciappelletto’s permission to have his body buried in the friar’s conventual church. He then convinces the prior and fellow friars of the convent to accept the body on the grounds that (based on his confession) this was a holy man, and in the hope that “per lui Domenedio dovere molti miracoli dimostrare” (83) [God should bring about many miracles through him]. What Boccaccio’s text does not make explicit, but what would have been clear to his readers, is that having a reputed saint buried in your church would attract pilgrims whose offerings at the saint’s grave or shrine would generate a tidy profit, year in and year out.9 For this expectation of enrichment to be realized, what is necessary, of course, is a public as convinced of Ciappelletto’s sanctity as is his confessor. To bring this about—to endow this villain with the fama of a saint—the convent brings into play all the available resources of the clergy, both liturgical and rhetorical. First, the friars hold a solemn evening vigil over the now deceased Tuscan’s corpse, and the following morning bring it to their convent with maximum pomp and ceremony, as circumstantially described by Boccaccio: “tutti vestiti co’ camisci e co’ pieviali, con li libri in mano e con le croci innanzi cantando andiron per questo corpo e con grandissima festa e solennità il recarono alla lor chiesa” [all in ecclesiastical vestments of surplices and copes, with service books in hand and the Cross leading the way, they went singing to get the body and with great and solemn rejoicing they brought it back to their church], and eliciting the desired effect: “seguendo quasi tutto il popolo della città, uomini e donne”

here. One reason friars were popular confessors was presumably that they wouldn’t know penitents, and their foibles, as well as would their parish priests. 9  On this point see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), pp. 138–39, and R. W.  Hanning, “Custance and Ciappelletto in the Middle of it All: Problems of Mediation in The Man of Law’s Tale and Decameron 1.1,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, eds. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Cranbury, NJ, 2000), pp. 177–86.

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(84) [with almost the entire population of the town, men and women alike, following them]. Then, with captive audience in place, the friar confessor delivers what we may well consider the homily of his life—and friars were well known to be persuasive pulpit rhetoricians10 —detailing the dead man’s incredible moral excellence (in the process violating the seal of the confessional, an infraction deserving, according to canon law, the most severe punishment) and thus generating not only the mob scene described at the beginning of this discussion, but post hoc, propter hoc the marble tomb, the stream of pilgrims, the popular conviction of miracles performed for those visiting the shrine—and the steady income to the convent. And so, just as Ciappelletto sets out to be Musicatto’s middleman in the collection of the latter’s debts, the friar turns out to be Ciappelletto’s middleman in making him a saint—the saints being themselves intercessory mediators between sinful humanity and its Creator11—and the convent’s middleman/salesman in convincing the laity to venerate the old reprobate, and in the process provide a new, generous, and lasting source of wealth for the congregation of friars. The line between commercial and sacramental mediation blurs; using mediated structures to make money becomes their common denominator. As for the mob that plays a key role in making Ciappelletto a money-making saint, its creation depends on the friar’s verbal virtuosity, which transmits a fama fabricated by Ciappelletto out of whole cloth; on his excellent reputation among the layfolk of the town, as a priest “nel quale tutti i cittadini grandissima e speziale divozione aveano” (30) [to whom all the townsfolk had a great and unusual devotion], which guarantees the effectiveness of his words, “alle quali era dalla gente della contrada data intera fede” (86) [to which the people of the district gave 10   The four late medieval fraternal orders were founded in the thirteenth century as part of an ecclesiastical initiative to evangelize and instruct the laity. Preaching soon became a central part of their mission; indeed, the official name of one of the four, the Dominicans, is the Order of Preachers (Ordo praedicatorum). Boccaccio parodies persuasive fraternal preaching in Decameron 6.10, which recounts the pulpit exploits of the relic-hawking Frate Cipolla (Brother Onion), while in 4.2 (see below), the scoundrelly protagonist, Frate Alberto (Friar Albert) is also a “gran predicator” [great preacher]. 11  In concluding his narration, Panfilo (with Boccaccian irony) praises God for overlooking the fact that people sometimes mistake sinners for saints, “così faccendo noi nostro mezzano un suo nemico” (90) [thus making an enemy of God into our mediator to him]. The word mezzano can refer to a saint, a commercial middleman, or a pimp.



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their entire trust]; and, of course, on the fact that, like the friar, the congregation knows nothing about the real Ciappelletto because he is a stranger to the district. Indeed—and here is instantiated the paradox to which I referred earlier—despite the climate of mutual hostility that obtains between Burgundians and “Lombards” (the age’s generic, somewhat deprecatory, term for Italians among non-Italians), Ciappelletto can become venerated by the Burgundians as a saint due in no small part to the fact that he is a foreigner, as well as a good liar, fortunate in his sacramentally credulous, but commercially astute, confessor. II Frate Alberto, the protagonist of Decameron 4.2, and Ser Ciappelletto are similar characters in many ways: both are amoral and exploitative; both operate best as foreigners / immigrants in communities that are therefore unfamiliar with their shady pasts. However, whereas Ciappelletto comes to Burgundy on a hit-and-run assignment, as it were, Alberto (formerly Berto della Massa) arrives in Venice on-therun (“disperato”), “un uomo di scelerata vita e di corrotta” (8) [a man of wicked and corrupt character] who must leave Imola where, as his name suggests, he is already a foreigner, and where his schemes and scams have made him persona non grata. In moving to Venice, Berto throws over his true colors a mantle of holiness, not (like Ciappelletto) in the privacy of confession but in the public eye of the city, transforming himself into Frate Alberto da Imola, friar and priest, who, by his oratorical skills as a preacher and show of virtue (including the false appearance of an ascetic life and a by now [to us] familiar knack of shedding tears whenever he wishes), achieves as good a fama as his formerly bad one—“Né se ne fu appena avveduto alcuno, che di ladrone, di ruffiano, di falsario, d’omicida subitamente fu un gran predicator divenuto” (10) [Nor was hardly anyone ever seen who, from being a crook, a ruffian, a cheat, and a murderer, so suddenly became a great preacher], the narrator marvels, ironically—and inserts himself profitably into Venetian society as a widely sought-after confessor, business adviser, and keeper and trustee of citizens’ wills. Ultimately, however, he falls from grace, as these same Venetians, having learned of Frate Alberto’s scams, particularly his seduction of a merchant’s foolish wife, turn against him and, as an angry mob, abuse him physically and drive him from their midst.

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What we are told about Venetians by the narrator of 4.2 invites scrutiny as an instance of Florentine xenophobia, disseminating evil fama about its object. The narratorial indictment has several counts: Venice is introduced, when Berto moves to it, as a polity “d’ogni bruttura ricivitrice” (8) [willing hostess to every kind of filth]; its inhabitants talk too much (“essi son tutti bergoli” (12) [they’re all silly chatterboxes]) and have an unquenchable propensity to gossip: more than any other Decameron novella, 4.2 abounds with iterations, both nominal and verbal, of the word novella, playing on its double sense of “news” and “story,” especially relevant to Venice’s lively public discourse. Finally, Venetians, we are assured, are disloyal: when Frate Alberto is betrayed by a Venetian citizen whom he has paid to protect him at a moment of great personal danger, the narrator scoffs, “e fu lealtà viniziana questa” (52)12 [and that was Venetian loyalty in action]. Yet as the novella unfolds, the last two of these putative shortcomings turn out to be necessary mechanisms of defense against the consequences of the first. To contend with the machinations of foreigners who come seeking to exploit or seduce its citizens, the tale of Frate Alberto suggests, a lively tradition of public discourse about unusual and suspicious happenings and a readiness to fight trickery with trickery may well be among a community’s most effective (if not its most moral) resources. Furthermore, by rooting its crooked protagonist’s story in the fertile soil of two important, and related, Venetian celebrations–of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary and of pre-Lenten carnival— Decameron 4.2 provides a kind of iconography, albeit one rich in comic irony, of both the vulnerabilities and the strengths of a closeknit, self-congratulatory polity: its individual members, in their provincialism, can be taken advantage of by an outsider who manipulates their excessive self-regard to his advantage; but the very intimacy of their mutual association can also provide the basis for acts of civic responsibility and solidarity, including mob action, that unmask and punish the predatory foreigner. At the center of 4.2’s tale of Frate Alberto is his relationship with Monna Lisetta da ca’ Quirino, the vain and simple-minded “moglie 12  See Giorgio Padoan, “Sulla novella veneziana del ‘Decameron’ (IV 2),” Studi sul Boccaccio 10 (1977–78), 199: “L’anti-venezianismo era tradizionale in un fiorentino”; Padoan offers explanations of Venetian policies that would invite such negative comments.



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d’un gran mercatante” (12) [wife of a major merchant], conveniently  out of town, who comes one day to have the fashionable friar hear her confession. Bored by the typically Venetian garrulousness of her revelations, the faux priest interrupts to ask if she has lovers, only to be scolded for his foolishness in not realizing the full significance of her great beauty: “Deh, messer lo frate,” she asks him in pique, “non avete voi occhi in capo? Paionvi le mie bellezze fatte come quelle di queste altre? Troppi n’avrei degli amadori se io ne volessi; ma non son le mie bellezze da lasciare amare da tale né da quale” (13) [Just a minute, Mr. Friar; haven’t you got any eyes in that head of yours? Does my beauty seem to you no better than all these other women? I could have plenty of lovers if I wanted them, but looks like mine aren’t there for the taking by any Tom, Dick, or Harry]. Her charms, she assures her bemused confessor, far exceed those of her fellow citizens, “ché sarei bella nel Paradiso” (13) [because I’d be beautiful even in Paradise]. Recognizing in Monna Lisetta’s narcissistic words the self-portrait of a potentially perfect object of his wiles (and desires), and taking a cue from her conviction that her beauty finds heavenly favor, Alberto subsequently visits her at home, ostensibly to apologize abjectly for having insulted her, and claims that no less than the angel Gabriel appeared to him at night and beat him severely for his harsh words to one of the angel’s most beloved creatures, promising further thrashings unless he seeks, and Lisetta grants, her forgiveness. Furthermore, Alberto confides that Gabriel is so fond of Lisetta that “a voi vuol venire una notte e dimorarsi una pezza con voi” (23) [he wishes to come some night soon to stay a while with you], taking on human form so that she can enjoy his presence. He follows up this revelation with a request to Lisetta that, since the angel will need a human body for his visitation, she grant him the privilege of supplying it, his reason being that for as long as Gabriel takes his corporeal place, his soul will be transported to the angel’s heavenly dwelling, there to enjoy all its beauties. The delighted simpleton of course agrees, thus closing the libidinous cleric’s trap. Accordingly, he appears a few nights later, having transformed himself into angelic semblance “con sue frasche che portate aveva” (30) [by means of some cheap props that he had brought with him], and takes Lisetta to bed where “altra giacitura faccendole che il marito, molte volte la notte volò senza ali” (32) [showing her some positions quite different from her husband’s, he flew without wings several times that night].

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This comic seduction is, of course, a parody of the Annunciation, that originary moment of Christianity from Luke’s Gospel in which Gabriel appears to Mary to announce her conception of Jesus by the action of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1. 26–38). Alberto, as Gabriel’s supposed intermediary to Lisetta, becomes, in effect, God’s messenger’s messenger, or, to put it bluntly (as Boccaccio doubtless would prefer), Gabriel’s pimp. When he tells Lisetta that as a result of Gabriel’s visit “voi, più che altra donna che viva, tener vi potete beata” (23) [you, more than any other woman alive, can consider yourself blessed], he is paraphrasing the angel’s famous words to Mary, “benedicta tu in mulieribus” (Luke 1.28) [blessed are you among women]. Unlike Mary, who is disturbed by the angel’s greeting—“Turbata est in sermone eius” (Luke. 1.29)—Monna Lisetta expresses delight when Alberto reveals Gabriel’s interest in her, and at once makes sense (or, more precisely, nonsense) of the connection between her angelic visitation and Mary’s by filtering Alberto’s proposition through both her enormous self-conceit and her familiarity with depictions of the Annunciation she has seen in church: she is pleased that the angel Gabriel loves her because she has always loved him, never failing to light a candle before his painted image. She welcomes his visit— “qualora egli volesse a lei venire, egli fosse il ben venuto, ché egli la troverebbe tutta sola nella sua camera” (24) [whenever he might want to come to her, he’d be welcome, since he’d find her all alone in her bedroom]—but with this proviso: “che egli non dovesse lasciar lei per la Vergine Maria, chè l’era detto che egli le voleva molto bene, e anche si pareva, che in ogni luogo ella il vedeva le stava ginocchione innanzi…” (25) [that he mustn’t abandon her for the Virgin Mary, whom she has been told he loves very much, and indeed wherever she sees him he’s always kneeling before Mary]. Lisetta’s “iconographic” response prompts Alberto’s decision to embellish himself for his subsequent, angelic, visit with cheap, rubbishy bits and pieces (the aforementioned frasche), including some version of the wings with which Gabriel is frequently depicted in Renaissance Annunciation paintings, as seems clear from the narrator’s comment that he flew without them (a popular euphemism for the sex act) once in bed with his victim.13 13   The comic transformation of the Annunciation into a sexual ruse is hardly original with Boccaccio. Rather, it acknowledges and perpetuates a long-standing, cynical counter-narrative, according to which Mary is seduced by a young man claiming to be an angel. For example, within the so-called “Mary Play” preserved in BL MS Cotton



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Boccaccio’s staging of Frate Alberto’s conquest is, however, more than a profane Biblical parody. It also alludes to the special place occupied by the Annunciation in the annual register of Venetian public observances and festivities. As David Rosand notes in Myths of Venice, According to standard legend, Venice was founded on March 25, the date of the Annunciation..…Going back at least to the twelfth century, the identification of March 25 as the birthday of Venice was subsequently elaborated in ways that exploited its fullest resonance.… More than a new Rome or a new Constantinople, Venice was a new Jerusalem, a city beloved of God, who caused her to rise from humble mud, resplendent above the waters, a beacon of Christian liberty.… As the Archangel Gabriel had announced the conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary of a Savior to redeem humanity from Original Sin, so did God assure the political salvation of mankind through the foundation of this Christian republic on the very same date. Thus did the Feast of the Annunciation become an integral part of the state calendar. A celebration (like all such feasts in Venice) at once religious and patriotic, it was an occasion for an official andata in trionfo, the triumphal procession of the doge and Signoria, on the feast that came to be known as the Madonna di Marzo.14

Likewise, in Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Edward Muir speaks of “the Venetian ceremonial practice, which went back to possibly the eleventh century, of marking the beginning of the year on the day of the Annunciation.” On this basis, thirteenth and fourteenth-century chroniclers created the legend that Venice was founded on March 25, 421. “Thus, in Venice the founding day of the city was mystically conjoined with the founding of Rome, the beginning of the Christian era, the annual rebirth of nature, and the first day of the calendar year,” while “the Annunciation Day procession and high mass in San Marco

Vespasian D.8 (late fifteenth century), as a constituent of the (also so-called) N-Town Cycle of Mystery Plays, there is a scene called by its modern editor “Joseph’s Doubt.” In it, the elderly Joseph, who has been working away from home, returns to find his young wife pregnant, and upbraids her for her “synfull gyse.” One of Mary’s maids (not a Biblical figure) defends her mistress, saying, “Forsothe, the aungel, thus seyd he,/ That Goddys sone in Trinité/ For mannys sake a man wolde be…,” Joseph snorts, “An aungel! Alas, alas! Fy, for schame!/ Ye syn now in that ye to say,/ To puttyn an aungel in so gret blame!/ Alas! Alas! Let be! Do way!/ It was sum boy began this game/ that clothyd was clene and gay./ And ye yeve hym now an aungel name…” See The N-TownPlay. Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector, EETS, SS 11 (Oxford, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 125–26. 14  David Rosand, Myths of Venice: Figurations of a State (Chapel Hill, 2001), pp. 12–13.

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permanently bound the destiny of Venice to the veiled will of God, the harmony of nature, and the imperial authority of Rome.”15 Given this assimilation of the Annunciation to the origin, prosperity, and triumphs of Venice, Alberto’s seduction of Monna Lisetta—the wife of a merchant who is off in Fiandra (12) [Flanders], engaged in that commerce which guarantees Venice’s continued wealth and power—can be understood as an appropriation of Venice’s public feast for private gain: a symbolic enactment of the false friar/foreign interloper’s seduction of the Venetian polity as a whole, by inserting himself, through his deceptive self-representation as a holy friar, into its religious and business affairs, even as he seduces Lisetta by hiding behind the persona of the angel Gabriel. There is, however, one basic risk, or flaw, in Frate Alberto’s campaign to seduce Venice and, in symbolic quintessence, Lisetta. It depends on

15  Edwin Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), pp. 70–72. Padoan, 176, quotes the thirteenth-century chronicle, Estoires de Venise, on the observance of the Feste delle Marie, which marked the feast of Candlemas (the Purification of the Virgin) on 2 February. Padoan notes that in the course of the twelfth century “La Festa delle Marie venne collegata alle cerimonie pubbliche che si tenevano nei giorni immediatamente precedenti, sì da formare dal 25 gennaio al 2 febbraio una ininterrotta sequenza di riti e di processioni, in cui—come sempre a Venezia—alla finalità religiosa era sotteso l’intendimento della celebrazione politica.” (174–75) [The feast of the Marys became linked to the public ceremonies that took place in the immediately preceding days, so as to form an uninterrupted sequence of rites and processions from 25 January to 2 February, in which, as always in Venice, the intentions of the political celebration came to underlie the religious manifestations]. According to Martino da Canal, on the last day of January, as the climax of a procession to the church of Sta. Maria Formosa, two clerics enact the Annunciation, one “aparillés en senefiance de angle est entré dedens l’iglise et il voit l’autre qu’est aparillés en senefiance de la virge Marie” (Padoan, 176) [dressed to represent an angel enters the church and sees the other dressed to represent the Virgin Mary], at which point the two exchange the words spoken by Gabriel and Mary in the Lucan Gospel account. According to Muir, this festival (which he calls the Festival of the Twelve Marys), “a grand communal rite matched only by the marriage of the sea” (140), was at its height when Boccaccio composed the Decameron; it was discontinued in 1379. Each year two contrade (neighborhoods) sponsored the festival in rotation. On 31 January “the two contrade formed processions in Piazza San Marco…”; at the rear of one came “four men shouldering a throne upon which sat a priest dressed as the Virgin Mary.… After the priest impersonating the Virgin paid his respects to the doge, the procession of the first contrada moved on to Sta. Maria Formosa to await that of the second, which was identical to the first save only that the second contrada’s priest impersonated the Angel Gabriel. When the two processions met at Sta. Maria Formosa the two enthroned priests re-enacted the Annunciation as reported in Luke 1. 28–38” (141–42). Perhaps Boccaccio got the idea for the novella from seeing, or hearing about, a priest playing the angel Gabriel in a dramatization of the Annunciation. Padoan argues for the Florentine’s first-hand knowledge and experience of Venetian festivities.



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keeping secret Alberto’s true character and, therefore, his masquerade as the angel Gabriel. So when he first visits Lisetta to set up his subsequent “angelic” appearances, Alberto attempts to impose the equivalent of the seal of confession on her (in an amusing reversal of their original, confessional relationship): “ma una cosa vi ricordo, che cosa che io vi dica voi vi guardiate di dire a alcuna persona che sia nel mondo, se voi non volete guastare i fatti voi, che siete la più avventurata donna che oggi sia al mondo” (21) [But I warn you of one thing, that you must take care not to tell what I’m telling you to anyone in the world, if you don’t want to ruin everything—you who are the most fortunate woman in the world today]. But since, as we’ve been informed by the narrator, Venetians are by nature foolishly chatty (bergoli), Lisetta, constitutionally unable to abide by Alberto’s caveat, brags to “una sua comare” (39; a term with the same extended, prejudicial meaning as English “gossip”) that the angel Gabriel is her “intendimento,” or lover, who has come to consort with her “per ciò che io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo”16 (43) [because I seem to him more beautiful than any woman who may be in heaven]. Needless to say, the comare is impatient to share this juicy (and ridiculous) novella with as many fellow citizens as possible, and without delay: “le parve mille anni che ella fosse in parte ove ella potesse queste cose ridire” (44) [it seemed to her to be a thousand years before she’d have a chance to pass on what she’d heard]; but while the dissemination of Lisetta’s folly throughout Venice may seem almost viral in its thoroughness and rapidity, recalling the spread of the plague through Florence in the Decameron’s Introduction—the comare tells the tale to “una gran brigata di donne” [a large gathering of women], who relay it to “a mariti e a altre donne” [to their husbands and still other women], so that “in meno di due dì ne fu tutta ripiena Vinegia” (44) [in less than 16   The term “comare” means godmother, the adult who stands in for the natural parents as a sponsor at a child’s baptism. The relationship between a child’s parents and godparents was considered a form of kinship; the term’s significance was later extended in popular usage to refer to a woman’s close friend, with whom she would exchange news and rumors and share secrets, a form of social conversation—heavily dependent on the dissemination of good and evil fama—which in English is called “gossip.” In a manner analogous to the Italian development, this noun, literally meaning “godparent” (gossip= Old English god [God] + sib [kin]), came over time, as noun and later verb, to refer to a) a person (usually a woman, thanks to male prejudice) who tells tales about her neighbors; b) the content of her conversations; and c) the act of communicating a miscellany of truth and lies, secrets and public doings to anyone who will listen.

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two days it had saturated Venice]17—the tale also manifests the social coherence of the Venetians and sets the stage for their escape from the one-man plague that is Frate Alberto. Lisetta’s male relatives become the first agent of that escape; when the fama of their kinswoman’s disgrace reaches their ears, “sanza alcun cosa dirle, si posero in cuore di trovar questo agnolo e di sapere se egli sapesse volare” (44) [without saying anything to her, made up their minds to find this angel and find out if he really knew how to fly], and accordingly begin surveillance of her house. Alberto walks into their trap soon thereafter, on a night when he comes not only for more angelic sex, but also to scold his paramour for breaching their contract of secrecy, since “di questo fatto alcuna novelluzza ne venne a frate Alberto agli orecchi” (45) [some passing mention of this business had come to the attention of Frate Alberto]. (The use of the diminutive, novelluzza, may be intended to suggest that by the time the story gets to the supposedly holy friar it is no longer front-page news in Venice). Caught literally with his pants (and frasche) down when Lisetta’s kin storm the bedroom, Alberto, to save himself from grave bodily harm at the least, must jump naked out the window and into the Grand Canal, leaving his would-be assailants to find “che l’agnol Gabriello, quivi avendo lasciate l’ali, se n’era volato” (47) [that the angel Gabriel had flown away, leaving his wings behind]. This literalization of wingless flight, as an act of desperation rather than ecstacy, coming on the heels of the kinsman’s ominous transformation of the metaphor into a threat (see above), encapsulates with pithy discursive precision the passage of control within the novella from Alberto to his former dupes. Events now move quickly, as the frightened fugitive, having momentarily evaded his pursuers, cannot escape the new round of fama that now races through the city, uniting the populace in antagonism to the pseudo-angel who “era la notte andato a giacere con madonna Lisetta e, da’ cognati trovatovi, s’era per paura gittato nel canale” (48) [had gone to have sex with madonna Lisetta and, found there by her family, had thrown himself, terrified, into the canal]. The “buono uomo” (46) [good man] in whose house across the canal Alberto seeks refuge soon hears enough, while out on the Rialto, to put two and two

17  Branca, p. 1218, n.3, compares the rapid circulation of the story throughout Venice to the action of Fama, spreading the word of Dido’s affair with Aeneas throughout Africa, in Aeneid IV.



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together and get 50, that is, a promise of that many ducats in return for not turning his unexpected guest over to the outraged cognati, who have staked out the neighborhood in order to apprehend him. Claiming there is no other way to avoid this cruel fate, Alberto’s host-turned-captor proposes a plan that will play out the novella’s final act before a crowd in Venice’s grandest public space, a conclusion whose striking contrast to the confessional privacy in which the tale began emblematizes both the secrecy on which Alberto’s civic hegemony depends and the crucial role of urban communication networks— with their origin in “gossip”—as the ultimate obstacle to such private self-aggrandizement at public expense. “Noi facciamo oggi,” the good man explains, “una festa, nella quale chi mena uno uomo vestito a modo d’orso e chi a guisa d’uom salvatico… e in su la piazza di San Marco si fa una caccia, la qual fornita, è finita la festa: e poi ciascuno va, con quel che menato ha, dove gli piace” (49) [We’re having a holiday today, in which some people lead in a man dressed as a bear, others somebody dressed as a wild man… and then, in the Piazza San Marco, we stage a hunt; when that’s over, the celebration’s done, with everybody going off wherever he wants, taking with him the person he led into the piazza]. His reluctance overcome by fear, Alberto agrees to be transformed into “uom salvatico” and led to the Piazza, in return for the promise of then being escorted to safety. Instead, however, Alberto’s supposed rescuer spreads the word— fama again—that “chi volesse veder l’agnol Gabriello andasse in su la piazza di San Marco” (52) [whoever wants to see the angel Gabriel should go the Piazza San Marco], and soon Alberto, symbolically coated with feathers (recalling his angelic imitation) held on by honey, and tortured by the flies the honey attracts—a Dantesque contrapasso reserved, here as elsewhere in the Decameron (cf. 2.9), for those who have sweet-talked their way to undeserved social, commercial, or sexual advantage—stands, masked and chained to a column in the Piazza, posing as a wild man holding two mastiffs on leashes, and a club like the one with which an angry Gabriel supposedly beat him for impugning Lisetta’s preoccupation with her own beauty. The moment of truth soon arrives: “poi che costui [Alberto’s ‘sponsor’] vide la Piazza ben piena, faccendo sembiante di volere scatenare il suo uom salvatico, a frate Alberto trasse la maschera dicendo, ‘Signori, … io voglio che voi veggiate l’agnolo Gabriello, il quale di cielo in terra discende la notte a consolare le donne viniziane’ ” (55) [When he saw that the Piazza was quite full, pretending to unchain

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his wild man, he ripped the mask from Frate Alberto, saying, “Signori, I want you to see the angel Gabriel, who comes down from heaven to earth at night, in order to comfort the women of Venice”]. On recognizing the former darling of Venetian society, the crowd becomes a howling, vengeful mob: “contra [Alberto] si levaron le grida di tutti, dicendogli le più vituperose parole e la maggior villania che mai a alcun ghiotton si dicesse, e oltre a questo per lo viso gittandogli chi una lordura e chi un’altra” (56) [a general shout went up against Alberto, trash-talking and calling him the worst names that were ever hurled at any lowlife, and at the same time bombarding his face with whatever kind of filth each person could find.] The assault continues until fama intervenes again, for once to Alberto’s benefit, “per ventura la novella a’ suoi frati pervenuta, infino a sei di loro mossisi quivi vennero, e gittatagli una cappa indosso e scatenatolo, non senza grandissimo romor dietro, infino a casa loro nel menarono” (57) [the news having come by chance to his fellow friars, it was finally agreed that six of them should go there, and, having unchained him and thrown a hood over him, not without a great ruckus following them they brought him back to their convent], where, in enforced seclusion, he spends the rest of his “misera vita” (57) [wretched life]. The event on the Piazza San Marco—a kind of lynching (or crucifixion and deposition) of Frate Alberto—gains significance by its assimilation to another actual Venetian festival, this time secular: the celebration of Carnival, which extended from the feast of St. Stephen (26 December) to Shrove Tuesday. The fanciful costumes—including the popular figure of the wild man—and masks were (and remain) characteristics of the celebration, and so was the hunt (caccia) to which Aberto’s ad hoc host refers in setting the grounded angel up for his eventual public disgrace. To quote Branca (1220, n.5), “nelle cacce che si usavano fare in Piazza S. Marco un uomo armato di bastone aizzava contro la ‘fiera’ (un cinghiale, un orso, un toro generalmente) dei cani particolarmente feroci, che erano addestrati proprio al Macello: sia la fiera che i cani erano trattenuti da catene”18 [In the hunts customary in 18  See Muir, Civic Ritual, on Carnival, p. 156 f.: “In Venice the carnival season lasted from the feast of St. Stephen [26 December] to the first day of Lent, during which time there were numerous popular entertainments, such as bull chases and human pyramids; comedies were produced and fireworks displayed; and the alleys and squares came alive with drinking, feasting, masquerading, and fighting” (p. 156). The Feast of the Marys fell squarely within Carnival, which introduced distinctly non-religious



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Piazza San Marco, a man armed with a club set loose against the “wild beast” (generally a boar, a bear, or a bull) some particularly ferocious dogs, who were trained at the civic slaughterhouse; both the beast and the dogs were kept on chains]. In this case, of course, it is not a traditional caccia that the populace has assembled to enjoy, but rather the ad hoc hunting down (or, more precisely, the celebration of the capture) of that alien beast, Frate Alberto da Imola. Placing in the chained villain’s hands a club and the leashes of the two ferocious dogs at once provides the iconographic key to the occasion and adds to it a supremely ironic touch: far from inciting the dogs to attack the (absent) fiera, Alberto will, in the moment of his unmasking, incite the outraged citizenry to attack him. The vituperation (and filth) hurled at the fraudulent friar by the angry mob represents a compression into one explosive act of civic cleansing  and civic celebration—a celebration of, among other things, the salutary power of urban storytelling (novellando) in its most durable manifestation: gossip. III According to its narrator, Decameron 2.1 illustrates the proverb that one who aims to trick others often finds that the joke is on him, while also telling a story of survival snatched from the jaws of destruction: “intendo di raccontarvi,” he tells the brigata, “quello che prima sventuratamente e poi, fuori di tutti il suo pensiero, assai felicemente a manifestations into its celebration. “Throughout the early fourteenth century the Senate repeatedly and vainly passed laws designed to eliminate the popular disorders and irreverences: there were orders to the Council of Ten to watch out for suspiciouslooking foreigners [!], to prevent brawls between the contrade members, and to guard against stabbings and murders; a 1339 law made it illegal to throw turnips or apples at the Marys…” (p. 152). Several of these details (suspicious-looking foreigners; throwing fruits and vegetables) find echoes in themes and incidents within Decameron 4.2. On Giovedi Grasso [Fat Thursday], the central moment of Carnival, “popular forms mingled with governmental rituals” (p. 160). The day commemorated Venice’s defeat of the Patriarch of Aquilea, who had attacked a Venetian dependency in 1162. As tribute, the defeated Patriarch had to send to Venice each year on Giovedi Grasso one bull, 12 pigs, and 300 loaves of bread; the animals were chased around the Piazzetta in front of the Ducal palace, captured, and decapitated, after which, in the Senate Hall of the Ducal Palace, “usually solemn senators… dressed in scarlet, wield[ed] clubs to smash miniature wooden castles built for the occasion as representations of the Friulan fortresses destroyed after the defeat of the Patriarch” (p. 161). In sum, they behaved like wild men in celebrating Venice’s triumph over threatening foreign forces. The parallels with the last scene of Decameron 4.2, while not precise, are suggestive.

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un nostro cittadino advenisse” (2) [I propose to tell you a story about a fellow citizen of ours, a story that started out very badly for him, but ended happily beyond his wildest dreams]. So the protagonist of 2.1 is a Florentine, but his adventures take place when, and because, he is an outsider in another city—in this case, Treviso in northern Italy—and, like Ciappelletto in 1.1 and Frate Alberto in 4.2, attempts to use to his advantage the fact that he is unknown there. This novella can almost be called an alternative ending to 1.1—one might say a revisionist look back, in beginning the second day of story telling, on the tale that began the first day—since it opens with the exaltation of a foreigner by the people of Treviso to the status of a saint; but it is also a kind of “prequel” to 4.2, in that a (different) foreigner (the Florentine), having taken advantage of civic and religious credulity—albeit for fun rather than profit—is exposed as a fraud, through the sudden intervention of fama, and must face the wrath of a vengeful mob. What distinguishes 2.1 from these other exemplars of Boccaccian mobs is a series of subsequent developments that further  endangers the protagonist before finally extricating him from the trouble into which his attempt to fool the Trevisans has led him. Along the way, the novella suggests that mobs can be materialistically opportunistic as well as religiously enthusiastic (as in 1.1) or civically indignant (as in 4.2), and that relations between the autonomous communities of Boccaccio’s Italy, while often scarred by xenophobia, can also be amicable. Three itinerant Florentine entertainers, specialists in contortionism and improvisatory imitation, arrive in Treviso as that town celebrates the life and recent death of a resident widely believed to be a saint, whose body, when touched, will cure the disabled and infirm. To get close to the holy corpse through the surrounding press of worshippers and supplicants, one of the Florentines, Martellino, contorts himself into the shape of a cripple, is carried through the obliging crowd by the other two, Marchese and Stecchi, and, having been laid atop the saint’s body, uncoils himself, to the onlookers’ thunderous acclaim of the saint. However, yet another visiting Florentine recognizes the trickster and explains his trick, whereupon the disabused crowd instantly becomes a howling mob which, falling upon the “traditore” (17) [traitor], strips and beats him. In a desperate effort to save his colleague’s life by having him snatched from the mob, Marchese denounces Martellino to a nearby officer of the law as a pickpocket who must be arrested. Martellino is taken before a judge, but many



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Trevisans, intent on vengeance, testify that Martellino has stolen their purses, as well. While the prisoner, tortured and facing hanging, seeks to absolve himself of that crime, Marchese and Stecchi, realizing that their pickpocketing ruse has thrown their friend out of the frying pan and into the fire (a literal translation of “noi abbiamo costui tratto della padella e gittatolo nel fuoco” [29]), seek help for him, coming eventually to Sandro Agolanti, a wealthy, well connected Florentine living in exile in Treviso, who intervenes with the authorities to free the terrified contortionist and allow the three cowed entertainers to return to Florence. One thing that stands out in the narrative of 2.1 is the variety of roles played by foreigners in Trevisan society. There is, first of all, Arrigo, a humble porter, “di santissima vita e di buona” (3) [of good and most holy life], whose sanctity, as proclaimed by the people of Treviso, occasions the outrageous masquerade at the heart of the novella; he is not a native but “un tedesco” (3) [a German (from Bolzano, historically)]19 who has become so much a part of the city’s life that when the Trevisans discover that Martellino’s supposed cure is fraudulent, they charge him as “traditore e beffatore” (17) [traitor and trickster], with mockery of “il nostro santo e noi” (17) [our saint and us]. Because of Treviso’s geographical position near German-speaking lands, Arrigo is not alone in having settled there; in the “tumulto e discorrimento di popolo” (6) [tumult and crush of people] that follows his death, a good part of the crowd blocking those other foreigners, the visiting Florentine mountebanks, from access to his body in the “maggior chiesa” (4) [Treviso cathedral] is made up of “tedeschi” (7) [Germans], apparently fellow immigrants. Nor are Martellino, Marchese, and Stecchi the only Florentines in Treviso that day: the contortionist’s trick, as I’ve already noted, is revealed by a fourth, “il quale molto bene conoscea Martellino” (14) [who knew Martellino very well]. (Florentine students, merchants, and artisans in fact constituted a natio florentina [Florentine community] within early fourteenth-century Treviso.)20 But if the presence of a fellow citizen in a foreign city can be dangerous to one’s health and safety, it can also have the reverse, salutary effect: only the 19  On Beato Arrigo of Treviso, a historical figure, see the studies mentioned in Branca’s note 3, pp.1045–46. The same note documents the historicity of two of the three Florentine entertainers, Martellino and Stecchi. 20  See Branca, p. 1049, n. 7.

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intervention of the Florentine, Agolanti, “il quale in Trivigi abitava e appresso al signore aveva grande stato” (30) [who resided in Treviso and had a good deal of influence (or a high position) with the lord of the city], saves Martellino from the gallows to which the judge, who “per avventura avendo alcuno odio ne’ fiorentini” (31) [perhaps harboring some hatred for Florentines], is quite ready to send him until constrained, against his will, to hand the prisoner over to the signore. That worthy, according to Branca, is himself probably not a native ruler at the time when Boccaccio sets the tale, but rather a podestà [chief administrator] brought in from Gubbio to serve as the commune’s supreme legal authority.21 More than 1.1 or 4.2, Decameron 2.1 also explores the varied consequences of permeable civic boundaries. The contrast between Sandro Agolanti’s good standing with the ruler of Treviso and the animus borne toward Florentines by the ruler’s judicial surrogate hints at the complexity of intercommunal relations at the institutional, and upper socio-economic, level. At a more demotic level, such relations are governed within the novella according to the criteria of credulity and civic pride, as these motivate not so much individuals as large, impressionable (and thus volatile) groups. The Trevisan popolo, knowing Arrigo to be a good man, is convinced of his sanctity by a supposed miracle (“o vero o non vero che si fosse” [4] [whether or not it was true], the Florentine narrator notes smugly, namely, that at Arrigo’s death the bells in the cathedral rang of their own accord. This occurrence prompts “tutto il popolo della città” (5) [the entire population of the city] to take the dead man’s body to that “chiesa maggior,… menando quivi zoppi, attratti e ciechi e altri di qualunque infermità o difetto impediti” (5) [cathedral… bringing there the lame, the halt, and the blind and others hobbled by any infirmity or defect whatsoever], in the shared belief that “quasi tutti dovessero dal toccamento di questo corpo divenir sani” (5) [almost all of them would be healed by touching the body]. This faith, which, we recall, the Trevisans share with the Burgundians of 1.1, leaves them, like their Francophone counterparts, open to manipulation by tricksters such as Martellino. But when fortune and fama combine to lay bare the trick (by the accidental presence of that Florentine who can testify to Martellino’s contortionism), the   Branca, p. 1047, n. 5, p. 1049, n. 4.

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consequences are terrible: the pious crowd turns on him, “e presolo per li capelli e stracciatili tutti i panni indosso gl’incominciarono a dare delle pugna e de’ calci… “(18) [and having grabbed him by the hair and torn the clothes off his back, they began to hit and kick him…]— they have become a calca (19), a mob. The same word, we recall, is used to describe the Burgundian popolo when, convinced by the eloquent friar that Ciappelletto was a saint, they rush to strip his corpse of its clothes, now believed to be holy relics; here, however, it is rage, not devotion, that inspires the rending of a foreigner’s garments. The furious response of the Trevisans to Martellino’s silly gambit precisely parallels that of the Venetian popolo to the much more incriminating revelation that the chained “uomo salvatico” in the Piazza San Marco is actually the supposed angel Gabriel who has seduced Monna Lisetta and besmirched the civic honor. Nor does the populace’s pendulum swing, from a credulity recalling that of 1.1 to an animosity anticipating that of 4.2, exhaust Decameron 2.1’s anatomy of urban stress. Rather, the novella portrays an evolving  battle of wits between natives and foreigners in a situation rendered fraught by the interaction of religious observance and civic pride, a situation, moreover, in which all participants display a shrewdness that is either ultimately self-defeating or inadequate to achieve its desired goal. First Martellino goes too far in applying his contortionist’s art to the problem of gate-crashing the emotionally charged celebration of a saint; next, Marchese, to get his compatriot away from the mob’s fury, accuses him to the civic police as a pickpocket who must be arrested, but this strategy not only opens Martellino to judicial torture; it also offers the avenging Trevisan mob the chance of further punishing their humiliator by accusing him of having taken many of their purses, as well–a collective brainstorm that puts the Florentine at risk of being hanged. Faced with such a drastic outcome, Martellino outwits his opponents by having the judge collect their testimony as to when he robbed them; as he expects, they spread his supposed crimes across several days, and are easily disproved by checking the civic register that records the precise arrival time of all visitors to Treviso (in his case, earlier that day). Yet Martellino’s quick, self-exculpatory thinking does not save him, given the judge’s already noted dislike for Florentines: “il giudice niuna cosa in sua scusa voleva udire” (31) [the judge had no interest in hearing anything in his defense]; even ingenuity is no match for xenophobia.

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What does finally save Martellino from the hangman’s noose is laughter: first of all, the laughter of the innkeeper in whose hostelry the Florentines are staying, when Marchese and Stecchi turn to him for assistance in saving their countryman; “di che esso ridendo, gli menò a un Sandro Agolanti” (30) [laughing at what had happened, he brought them to a certain Sandro Agolanti]. In turn, Sandro, “dopo molte risa” (31) [after a good laugh], agrees to take Martellino’s case to the signore of Treviso; and when the once cocky contortionist, now deeply shaken by his near-death experience at the hands of a hanging judge, comes before the signore and pleads to be allowed to leave Treviso at once for Florence, the ruler “fece grandissime risa di così fatto accidente” (33) [had the biggest laugh of all at such a hard-luck story] before sending the three thoroughly chastened entertainers back, “sani e salvi” (33) [safe and sound], to their own city. The shared laughter of Trevisans and Florentines who operate outside the “combat zone” centered on the body of St. Arrigo may represent the possibility of an interurban amicability countering the negative impact of religious enthusiasm and xenophobic malice. Or it may just be Boccaccio’s way of embracing, avant la lettre, the old rallying cry: laughter is the best medicine.

The Way Many Aspired to the Eloquence of the Few: The Neo-Latin Colloquium Terence Tunberg During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Latin was not the language of crowds, but the educated elite who were always a small minority of the total European population. Before the second half of the seventeenth century, however, Latin was the main vehicle for the discourse of the scientific community, the scholarly world, and all the main academic disciplines. Latin was the universal language of the Roman church, and Latin also continued to be the linguistic medium for a vast European-wide literature. So we are indeed concerned with a “crowd” of sorts, namely the “critical mass” of Latin users, even if they, when compared with all other orders of society, were a minority. Specifically, we turn our attention here to a neglected genre of NeoLatin texts that were written with the aim of teaching everyday Latin usage to the mass of would-be Latin users. If there was a common sense among those who belonged to the res publica litterarum, such a sense obtained, to one degree or another, among those who would be Latin writers and speakers. The texts in question are short Latin dialogues, designed chiefly (though not always exclusively) for school use, which are distinctive for vocabulary pertaining to daily life, and often (though by no means always) daily life in a school setting. These dialogues, typically known as colloquia, and sometimes colloquia scholastica or colloquia familiaria, were intended to be models for everyday Latin conversation.1 But the colloquia must be distinguished from the Latin dialogue in general, a genre which flourished in the Renaissance, since Neo-Latin authors, following the distinguished example of Cicero, who in turn had adopted the practice of Plato and other Greek 1   L. Massebieau, Les Colloques Scolaires du Seizième Siècle et leurs Auteurs (1480– 1570) (Paris, 1878); A. Bömer, Die lateinischen Schülergespräche der Humanisten (Berlin, 1897–1899); F. Bierlaire, “L’apprentissage du latin à la Renaissance,” L’enseignement des langues anciennes aux grands débutants (problèmes, méthodes, finalités). Actes du colloque de Wégimont 1984, eds. C. Aziza, M. Dubuisson, E. Famerie (Liège, 1986), pp. 141–154.

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authors, greatly favored the dialogue as an effective way to treat all sorts of philosophical, scientific, literary, rhetorical and other elevated subjects.2 Many patristic and medieval authors had also composed dialogues of this sort. The Renaissance Latin colloquia, however, even if they also had a moral purpose, were chiefly intended to serve as linguistic models, and this fact distinguishes them from philosophical or other learned dialogues. To appreciate the role of the colloquia, we must keep in mind that Latin in the Renaissance was no one’s native language; it was a language whose norms were to be learned from books and was, therefore, what linguists might define as a “dead language.” Nevertheless, it was a working language: namely people learned it to use it in writing, and not rarely in spoken communication. The fact that nearly everyone in the Middle Ages and Renaissance who learned Latin did so not merely to be able to read and understand the written sources of the academic disciplines (virtually all of which were in Latin), but also to acquire the practical ability to use Latin themselves as a means of communication, constitutes a major difference between the way Latin was learned then and the way it is learned now. The vitality of written expression in Latin is immediately obvious from the immense mass of surviving medieval and Renaissance Latin literature. But the spoken use of Latin is, not surprisingly, much harder to assess and document. By whom and under what circumstances was Latin employed in Renaissance Europe as a spoken language? Although Latin continued to be used in public administration and diplomacy, the vernacular languages, especially in Spain, France, and Italy, were employed with ever increasing consistency in governments, chanceries, and legations from the later Middle Ages onward. However, Latin certainly remained the international language of the Roman church not only in the Renaissance, but long afterwards. It was always the medium for church councils, although Erasmus implies that if two clerics with the same native tongue found themselves at such a meeting, they would more often than not quickly revert to their common

2  See D. Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA, 1980), a good study, which, however, is limited (from the point of view of Neo-Latin) to authors who wrote in Italy. See also the useful and brief overview in J. IJsewijn and Dirk Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, II: Literary, Linguistic, Philological and Editorial Questions, 2nd rev. ed. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 14 (Leuven, 1998), pp. 232–238.



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vernacular.3 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was apparently not rare for Latin to be used in a casual way even outside strictly academic, ecclesiastic and diplomatic spheres, especially between people of different linguistic background who did not know each other’s languages.4 The utility of Latin for international communication is quite often stressed in texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.5 Nevertheless people tended to pronounce Latin according to the conventional sounds of their native tongue (there was no agreed-on restored pronunciation of Latin such as we find today in schools in Germany, Britain, and America, at least), and there are many accounts of how difficult it could be to understand a foreigner speaking Latin. Hence John Milton advises English youths going abroad to learn and use the Italian pronunciation, which was understood in many regions.6 Foreign students studying in universities would of course settle down in the region of the University, and would have a space of time to become acclimatized to the pronunciation of the professors—getting used to a strange pronunciation would

3   P. Mesnard, ed., Dialogus Ciceronianus, in Des. Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia, vol. 1, part 2 (Amsterdam, 1971), pp. 654–655. 4  P. Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 34–65: Massebieau, Les Colloques Scolaires, pp. 36–37. 5   “Sed quae potest esse magis necessaria lingua quam ea per quam cum exteris nationibus… nobis est honesta ac prompta sermonis communicatio? Qua sublata, quanam lingua Itali homines de privatis publicisque rebus agant cum Gallis, Germanis, Hispanis, Sarmatis…? Aut eos per interpretem appellent necesse fuerit, aut illorum linguas condiscant…” Romuli Amasei De linguae Latinae usu retinendo in Romuli Amasaei orationum volumen (Bononiae, apud Ioannem Rubrium, 1564), p. 129. “Apud has autem gentes [the author is speaking about Spaniards, Germans, and Frenchmen], si quis domestici et vernaculi ipsorum sermonis ignarus versetur, nisi Latino sermone interprete utatur, nihil possit agere, nihil cum eis contrahere, sed mutus et elinguis prorsus esse cogatur.” We read these words in the preface to a revised edition of Nizzoli’s famous early sixteenth-century Cicero lexicon. See Epistula nuncupatoria, in Nizolius sive Thesaurus Ciceronianus, post Mar. Nizolii, Basilii Zanchi, et Caelii Secundi Curionis…operas, per Marcellum Squarcialupum Plumbinensem, cum insigni accessione… digestus et illustratus (Basileae, ex officina Hervagiana, 1576), f. A4r. For some other references to this use of Latin, see also Francisci Floridi Sabini apologia in Marci Actii Plauti aliorumque poetarum et linguae Latinae calumniatores (Lugduni, apud S. Gryphium, 1537), pp. 56–57 and Ioannis Caii de pronuntiatione Graecae et Latinae linguae cum scriptione nova libellus (Londini 1574), rpt. with intro. by I.B. Gabel (Leeds, 1968), pp. 11–12. 6   M. Minkova and T. Tunberg, “De rationibus variis, quibus homines verba Latina aetate litterarum renatarum enuntiabant,” Melissa, 122 (2004), 2–7; T. Tunberg, “Observations on the Pronunciation of Latin during the Renaissance,” The Classical Outlook, 82/2 (2005), 68–71.

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probably not, for the most part, be quite as difficult or time-consuming as learning an entirely new language.7 In pre-university education pupils in Latin schools began at a very young age to speak the language. In France, in the low countries, in Germany, and in Scandinavia we find similar conditions. After a period of indoctrination, typically after the second year, it was the rule in many Latin schools, often sanctioned by severe penalties, that the pupils (and of course the teacher) speak only Latin in the premises of the school (sometimes with recess times excepted).8 This practice was typical also of the academies of the Jesuit order, as is clear from many passages in the famous ratio studiorum.9 Such an acclimatization to the spoken use of Latin was, of course, also a preparation for university life. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in the preceding medieval period, the language of university activities all over Europe was Latin. Lectures, disputations, examinations, publications, and ceremonies were conducted in Latin. Hence anyone who entered a university would be very ill prepared indeed if they did not already have at least some experience in the spoken use and auditory comprehension of Latin.10 Thus the colloquia offer us a glimpse of one of the ways in which Renaissance students were trained to use Latin, not merely for treating  academic subjects, but also for discussing the daily problems of   Tunberg, “Observations,” p. 70–71.   Two excellent recent studies offer an in-depth look at many aspects of late medieval and Renaissance education: A.Willemsen, Back to the Schoolyard: The Daily Practice of Medieval and Renaissance Education. Studies in European Urban History, 1100–1800 (Turnhout, 2008); D. L. Sheffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany: Regensburg, 1250–1500. Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 33 (Leiden, 2008). Even more about the spoken use of Latin in schools may be found in the following works: W. Nelson, A Fifteenth-Century School Book (Oxford, 1956), p. 22; R. Hoven, “Programmes d’écoles latines dans les Pays-Bes et la Principauté de Liège au XVIe siècle,” Acta conventus neo-latini Amstelodamensis. Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Amsterdam 19–24 August 1973, eds. P. Tuynman, G. C. Kuiper, and E. Kessler (München, 1979), pp. 546–59; G. Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana, 1984), pp. 72–74; H. Aili, “Sweden,” A History of Nordic Neo-Latin Literature, ed. Minna S. Jensen (Odense, 1995), p. 140; N. Orme, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, 2006), pp. 148–149.  9   Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis Iesu (1586, 1591, 1599), in Monumentorum paedagogicorum Societatis Iesu, vol. 5, ed. L. Lukács, S. I. (Romae, 1986), pp. 131–132; 199; 242; 245–246; 260. 10   P. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2002, pp. 151– 157; S. Rizzo, “Il latino nell’Umanesimo,” in Letteratura italiana. V. Le questioni, ed. A. Asor Rosa (Torino, 1986), pp. 398–399.  7  8



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contemporary life. Beginning around 1500 the number of colloquia published seems to have radically increased.11 During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thousands of colloquia were written by scores of authors, who included some of the most famous humanists of the age, such as Erasmus, Vives, Sturm, and Corderius.12 I Where did the genre begin? There appears to be one surviving ancient example, perhaps written by one Julius Pollux in the early third century to acclimatize Greek speakers in the eastern half of the Roman empire to Latin.13 There are a few early medieval antecedents, the best known of which is the collection of colloquia by Aelfric, produced in Anglo-Saxon England for a monastic setting, perhaps in the early eleventh century.14 But, Aelfric’s works excepted, very few medieval

11   The striking increase in the number of colloquia produced after 1500 is emphasized by Massebieau and Bömer (see n. 1 above). 12   The late Ross Scaife of the University of Kentucky, helped by a dedicated group of Classics graduate students, created a digital archive of colloquia texts. The archive currently includes about 650 of these small dialogues, and it became apparent to the researchers as they worked that many, many more texts and authors could be added. Although the development of this archive stopped about three years ago, it is hoped that funding for this project can be restored, and that work on expanding the colloquia archive can resume. The archive can be consulted at: http://www.stoa.org/colloquia/ It includes either substantial portions, or the entire texts of the following works: Sebastianus Castalio (1515–1563), Dialogorum sacrorum libri quatuor. Franciscus Cervantes de Salazar (1514?–1575), Ad. Exercitia linguae Latinae dialogi. Maturinus Corderius (1479–1564), Colloquia scholastica. Laurentius Corvinus (ca. 1465–1527), Latinum ydeoma. Martinus Duncanus (1505–1590), Praetextata Latine loquendi ratio. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Colloquia familiaria. Ioannes Fontanus (1545–1615), Hortulus puerorum pergratus ac perutilis Latine discentibus. Petrus Mosellanus (1493–1524), Paedologia. Beraldus Nicolaus (1473–1550), Dialogus quo rationes quaedam explicantur quibus dicendi ex tempore facultas parari possit. Iacobus Pontanus (1542–1626), Progymnasmatum latinitatis, sive dialogorum volumen primum, cum annotationibus. Petrus Popo (birth and death dates to be ascertained), Colloquia de scholis Herbipolensibus. Johannes Ludovicus Vives (1492–1540), Exercitatio linguae Latinae. 13   W. H. Stevenson Early Scholastic Colloquies (Oxford, 1929), intro., v–vii. 14  Stevenson (see n. 13 above, and S. Gwara, Latin Colloquies from Pre-Conquest Britain, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 22 (Toronto, 1996).

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colloquia are known. A spoken use of Latin existed in the Middle Ages, too, and in much the same spheres of society as during the Renaissance, yet although recent scholarship has revealed a great deal about the interaction of Latin and vernacular during the Middle Ages and the relative spheres of each, there seems to have been almost no systematic investigation of the practice of spoken Latin per se during the Middle Ages. We know that students of pre-university age learned Latin and began to read Latin authors from teachers who gave their explanations sometimes in Latin, sometimes in a vernacular tongue, often in a mixture of both. In England, to mention just one example, before the twelfth century elementary pre-university Latin teaching was done in Latin and old English, from the twelfth century to the early humanist age French was used for the earlier stages of Latin learning. But more advanced students in many English grammar schools were expected to communicate exclusively in Latin with their teachers and with each other.15 In university life, Latin ruled. At least as far as laws and statutes were concerned, the use of Latin in university life was supposed to include not merely lectures, disputations, examinations, publications, but also daily discourse in the domestic life of colleges.16 Obviously not  everyone would have obeyed, and we have indications that although students and masters when performing university functions, 15   The vernacular would be used exclusively in the beginning stages of learning, and even afterwards the instructor might use the vernacular to explain unfamiliar Latin words and phrases. This method of instruction is stressed by T. Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-century England, 3 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1991); R. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2001). But it is clear that the goal was an environment where Latin was the linguistic vehicle for classroom explanation and activities (even if a vernacular word or phrase might be employed from time to time), and that such an environment would be the rule for students who advanced beyond a certain level. See, for example, A. Iacono, ed., Uno studente alla scuola del Pontano a Napoli: Le Recollecte de MS. 1368 (T.5.5) della Biblioteca Angelica di Roma, Nova Itinera Humanitatis latinae. Collana di Studi e Testi della Latinità medievale e umanistica 4 (Neapoli, 2005), and the explanation of Orme, Medieval Schools. 16  See M.H. Jullien de Pommerol “Le vocabulaire des collèges dans le midi de la France,” Vocabulaire des collèges universitaires (XIIIe – XVIe siècles). Actes du colloque Leuven 9–11 avril 1992, ed. Olga Weijers (Turnhout, 1993), pp. 39–40. In Oxford colleges during the fourteenth century, the two legitimate languages for college life were, according to university statutes, Latin and French, but no other languages. This statute, of course, endorses the role of Latin as the working language of academia, but is noteworthy for also permitting the use of French in domestic college life. French, of course, was a highly important language for the English nobility in the later Middle Ages. See J. Parker, Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford, vol. 1 (London, 1853), pp. 8, 14.

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disputations, examinations, lectures, and so on, used Latin, they tended to seek out their own countrymen when they were away from the academic setting and used their vernacular (after all, most of them were not using Latin in university because of any zeal for Latin, but because it was then the obligatory language of the academic world).17 Nevertheless statutes, supported by other indications, reflect a real condition which existed near the time they were written, and a need to maintain Latinate environment. II Two major questions arise at this point. First, how did medieval preuniversity students get acclimatized to oral and auditory communication in Latin? Second, why did the colloquium as a genre suddenly acquire such vigorous life in the humanist age, namely around the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? We can suggest no clear-cut answers to the first question, but perhaps we are in a position to identify some answers to the second one. A goal of the humanists, as we know, was to purge Latin, Europe’s international language, of the jargon of scholastic theology and speculative grammar, and to obliterate peculiar usages characteristic of subtypes of medieval Latin (especially in law and documents) and restore modern Latin to the standards and stylistic canons of the pagan Roman authors.18 There were, of course, disagreements among the humanists themselves as to how this should be done. Some favored holding up a single model, especially Cicero, as the standard to aim at. Others, like Valla and Erasmus, were more eclectic, and urged that modern Latin stylists should select the elements of diction from a variety of pagan authors. But the humanist movement was pan-European and immensely successful. By the mid-sixteenth century, with the exception of the works of a few die-hard theologians, and some legal documents written according to time-honored customs, the great mass of Latin produced by the academic, administrative, and ecclesiastical elite is humanist Latin, and very obviously, by comparison with medieval

 Massebieau, Les Colloques Scolaires, pp. 52–60.   J. IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Part I: History and Diffusion of NeoLatin Literature, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 5 (2nd rev. ed., Leuven, 1990), pp. 27–53. 17 18

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texts, reflects the stylistic and grammatical canons of pagan Roman Latin, even if medieval vocabulary for post–antique institutions might be retained, and new words sometimes coined for new things.19 If we can believe the prefaces to some of the colloquia collections, the authors of these dialogues regarded the spoken use itself and the colloquia they wrote as models for this usage as an important weapons in the battle to purify Latin. The spoken usage of students at the time the authors of the first humanist colloquia wrote, was typically redolent of scholastic jargon, and not infrequently quite ungrammatical. This usage above all had to be reformed, or at least a new standard proposed. These humanists believed that mastery of sermo cottidianus (“daily conversation”) modeled on classical authors provided the best way to train children to directly in good Latin rather than imitating the bad habits of the sermo cottidianus that was then current, or simply translating mentally from their vernacular languages. No humanist expressed this idea more succinctly and clearly than Erasmus of Rotterdam: Praecepta volo esse pauca sed optima, quod reliquum est arbitror petendum ex optimis quibusque scriptoribus, aut ex eorum colloquio, qui sic loquuntur ut illi scripserunt.20

This immense effort on the part of the humanist teachers of Latin has been so well described by Ann Moss in her recent and excellent book, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn, that some of her words are worth quoting (even if she is not speaking specifically about colloquia). … the humanist schoolboy was supposed to speak, write, and think as if he were an integrated member of the same speech community as Cicero and Virgil. Latin language learning in the late Middle Ages had started from non-classical Latin texts (the moralizing verses of the octo auctores of the typical late medieval school), was reinforced by a descriptive and prescriptive grammar, and normally ceased as soon as a certain adequacy had been attained.… For the humanists, what mattered was language in use, its specificities, and the cultural context from which those specificities acquired precision of meaning. Grammar and lexical usage were to be explored in the written discourse of “good” authors. [These] were the authors of antiquity, “uncorrupted” by later linguistic evolution.21   J. IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies.   Des. Erasmi Roterodami opus epistularum, vol. 4, ed. P.S. Allen (Oxford, 1922), p. 290, v. 31–34. 21   A. Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford, 2003), p. 2. 19 20



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But the world of the sixteenth century was not the world of pagan Rome, and it was that contemporary sixteenth-century world the student would be using his pure classical Latin to describe. The humanist teachers understood this very well, and this factor is one of the main reasons for the utility of the colloquia. Jacobus Pontanus, a Jesuit master, in the preface to his Progymnasmata, a massive collection of expertly composed colloquia that pertain to manifold aspects of daily life, elucidates this utility. Cicero, and especially the letters of Cicero, says Pontanus, provide the best model for daily speech in Latin, but the colloquia, written in a Ciceronian style, are perhaps even more useful for the young student, and should be studied and learned by them even before they read many of Cicero’s letters. This is because colloquia deal with subjects familiar in the lives of students, subjects never found in Cicero’s letters, but also because the colloquia provide the classicizing Latinity appropriate for treating such subjects.22 III One of the primary purposes of the colloquia, therefore, was linguistic. They clearly fulfilled a linguistic need and in this they offer a partial explanation for the rapid growth of the genre. No less important, however, was their moral purpose. Not a few humanist teachers in northern Europe were anxious to apply the humanist method to the study of Christian sources. These were highly devout men, and some of them, such as Erasmus, gave voice to the fear that the enthusiasm for pagan Latin might give rise to a neo-paganism and weaken the roots of Christian society. This hostility to a latent paganism is clearly one of the main elements in Erasmus’s famous satire entitled Ciceronianus. In the colloquia, therefore, teachers had a chance to offer their students not only models of impeccable Latin, but also models of moral behavior deemed appropriate by contemporary Christian standards. Most of the writings of Cicero, of course, were not nearly as offensive to Christian moralists as the works of some other pagan authors (such as

22   “… Fatendum est res iis epistulis inclusas laboriosius et imperfectius a pueritia tenerisque ingeniis comprehendi, quam quae cadunt in Dialogos, quorum argumentis atque rebus nihil est usitatius, nihil notius, nihil magis obvium atque domesticum…” Jacobi Pontani Progymnasmata, vol. 1 (Ingolstadii: Excudebat Adam Sartorius, 1599), praefatio, f. B2. Note that the words “iis epistulis” refer to the letters of Cicero, and the word “Dialogos” denotes the colloquia.

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the love poetry of Catullus, Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus). Yet even in certain works of Cicero, which were considered to be good stylistic models, such as Cicero’s letters, the morality and ideology appropriate to a Christian society were not always easily apparent. Petrus Mosellanus, for example, who wrote his colloquia, entitled Paedologia, in the early sixteenth century, says he wrote them for moral as well as scholastic purposes. …quae, si pueris suis litteratores praelegant attente, queant cum studiorum abusum tollere, tum pueritiae mores ad Christianam regulam corrigere.23

In very many, and perhaps most of the prefaces to the various colloquia collections these twin goals are repeated and stated in various ways: the purpose of the colloquia was to teach good Latin useful for everyday life and to offer appropriate moral models for the students who learned the dialogues.24 So the student characters in the colloquia are generous; they help not only their fellow students but also people in the community at large: good boys are rewarded, bad ones are punished, religious festivals and the like are strictly observed. But in colloquia of some authors, such as Erasmus, Vives, and Corderius, this moral purpose sometimes goes beyond the level of mere examples of moral behavior and moves into the realm of satire. This tendency is especially conspicuous in the colloquia of Erasmus, who revised and amplified his collection several times during his life. 23  H. Michel, ed., Paedologia Petri Mosellani Protegensis in puerorum usum conscripta (Berlin, 1906), praefatio, p. 3 24   The words of Corderius will offer a good representative example. “Sunt enim haec nostra Colloquia eiusmodi, quae (nisi me fallit animus) bonae indolis pueros magnopere iuvare possint ad eas res consequendas quas ego semper in votis habui, et in quibus ut pueri exercerentur, omni professionis meae tempore potissimum laboravi: hoc est, (ut supra dixi) ad pietatem et bonos mores cum literarum elegantia coniungendos. Equidem fateor aliis opus esse ad eam rem adiumentis, praeterquam his, quae puerilia sunt Colloquia: sed tamen si pueri, diligenti Magistrorum exhortatione assidue incitati, in his lectitandis sese oblectarint, futurum confido, ut non solum purius et honestius sermones inter se conferre assuescant, sed a pravis etiam colloquiis abstinere, quibus (ut ait Apostolus ex Menandro) mores boni corrumpuntur. Hic etenim, praeter linguae Latinae simplicem puritatem, multae interiectae sunt modo ad pietatem et Dei timorem admonitiones, modo praecepta salutaria de moribus, passim vero documenta sive exempla ad recte vivendum accommodata…” Maturini Corderii Colloquiorum Scholasticorum Libri IV diligenter recogniti. Protrepticon, Ad bene vivendi recteque loquendi studiosos. Calvinus didicit quo praeceptore Latine Grammaticeque loqui, quantus hic autor erat. Hinc bene vivendi documenta apteque loquendi, O pueri, a teneris imbibite unguiculis. (Londini Typis M. F. et I. G. pro Societate Stationariorum, 1679), praefatio.



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The earliest versions of Erasmus’ colloquia are little more that Latin phrase books for situations in daily life. In the last editions, however, the colloquia have evolved into subtle and witty social satire which the young learners, for whom most texts of this kind were primarily designed, would probably never have been able to appreciate. It will be worth our while to consider just one example of this. In the colloquium entitled Abbatis et eruditae Erasmus not only lampoons corrupt monastic orders, whose leaders, he claimed, were busier living an indulgent life than a holy one, but also champions a humanistic education for women, something a number of humanists, such as Thomas More, wanted to translate from theory to practice. In Abbatis et eruditae the learned woman Magdalia makes a fool of the complacent and stolid Abbot Antronius. We may briefly consider the following excerpt, in which Antronius asserts that he does not want the monks entrusted to his care to be too versed in books. Ma. Quid si mihi suavius sit legere bonum auctorem, quam tibi venari, potare, aut ludere aleam; non videbor tibi suaviter vivere? An. Ego non viverem. Ma. Non quaero, quid tibi sit suavissimum, sed quid deberet esse suave. An. Ego nolim meos monachos frequentes esse in libris. Ma. At meus maritus hoc maxime probat. Sed quam ob rem tandem non probes hoc in monachis tuis? An. Quoniam experior illos minus morigeros: responsant ex Decretis, ex Decretalibus, ex Petro, ex Paulo.25

There are several layers of satire in this passage. On one level Antronius is absurd because one of the main purposes of the monastic life should be meditation on scripture and devotional texts, so his assertion that he does not want his monks to read is, even on the superficial level, antithetical to the whole justification for the true monastic life. But also on another level Antronius’ answers are highly ironic: he assumes that the main texts his monks would read—if they were readers at all— would be the texts of scholastic canon law (Gratian’s Decretum, the Decretales of Gregory IX, the commentaries of Baldo degli Ubaldi [Petrus] and Paulo de Castro [Paulus]), not the main texts of scripture and the fathers. So in this passage we not only have a satire of corrupt monks, but a skillful example of a humanist attack on scholastic 25   Colloquia, in Des. Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia, vol. 1, part 3, eds. L. –E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, R. Hoven (Amsterdam, 1972), p. 404, ll. 35–44.

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philosophy and theology inherited from the Middle Ages, whose practitioners still existed in the universities of Erasmus’ time. Such philosophers and theologians were accused by the humanists of paying much more attention to the secondary works of the medieval commentators, excerptors and theorists, such as the sentences of Peter Lombard, than to the primary texts of scripture itself and the fathers, which should have been, as the humanists saw it, the primary objects of all Christian philosophy and learning. Erasmus’ mockery of the character represented by Abbot Autronius has yet another facet, because the Abbot refers to the two jurists as Peter and Paul, names that hint, clearly deliberately, at two apostles whose writings should have been the first objects of monastic reading! Furthermore, colloquia provide historians with a rich mine of information on daily life in the towns and cities of renaissance Europe, as well as academic life in schools and universities. In the Paedologia of Mosellanus, for example, a text we have cited above, we learn the Latin authors studied in a given term could include works of contemporary humanists like Erasmus, as well as those of Roman authors like Cicero and Horace. We learn that it was still hard to find courses in Greek at most schools. We learn that better-off students might live off gifts from home, but many had to beg or do sordid jobs in the town to subsist. This was not just true of university students, but even of young boys in grammar schools. We see our student characters dress themselves for a festival, and learn that taking a bath was a special occasion, something one did only three or four times a year! In the colloquia not only of Mosellanus, but of many other authors too, we get a glimpse of the seedy characters, thieves and con-artists, pseudo-doctors who frequented the streets of late medieval towns. IV As we have said, colloquia were written in vast numbers, and their authors came from all over Europe. Moreover they were very widely used in Latin schools in many regions (such as the low countries, France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary), as we quickly realize when we learn that even of Jacobus Pontanus’ Progym­ nasmata, a text which has not received great attention in modern scholarship, there were about twenty five editions and printings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries! Colloquia continued to



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be written and published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though in much diminished quantities, which is hardly surprising since the active employment of Latin as the language of the learned world vastly contracted in the same period. It is reasonable to assume that the spoken use of Latin would have always been linked to the use of Latin as a language for written publication, and that as publication in Latin declined, so too the oral use of Latin would have received less and less attention. Nevertheless, even in the twentieth century, Cappellanus’ Sprechen sie Lateinisch?, and a few other manuals of Latin for daily use much beloved by Vatican latinists were distant descendents of the old colloquia familiaria.26 These latter texts retained a certain utility, since the Vatican remained a last bastion of active Latin usage up to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, and this active usage still survives today in the persons of a few advocates such as Father Reginald Foster. Most recently there has been a revival of interest in spoken Latin among teachers of Latin, because a growing number of teachers perceive that speaking the language might be a better way to learn it, and to bolster reading ability. Very recently a few handbooks, such as Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency by John Traupman, have been published to cater to this interest: not surprisingly, several of these books contain simple dialogues about common situations in everyday life.27

26  G. Capellanus, Sprechen sie Lateinisch? Moderne Conversation in lateinischer Sprache (Leipzig, 1890). There is an English version entitled Modern Latin Conversation, Translated from the German of George Capellanus by B. F. Kraus (New York, 1930). See also Ch. Dumaine, Conversationes latines (3rd ed., (Paris, 1930); O. Tempini, Manuale di conversazione latina (Torino, 1941); J. M. Mir, Nova et vetera (Barcelona, 1949), and Mir, Nova verba Latina (Barcelona, 1969); S. Albert, Cottidie Latine loquamur (Saarbrücken, 1987). 27   J. C. Traupman, Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency (4th ed., Wauconda, Il, 2007); T. McCarthy, Nunc loquamur (Newburyport, 2005); R. Maier, M. Hofmann, K. Sallmann, S. Mahr, S. Trageser, D. Rauscher, and T. Gölzhäuser, Piper Salve, Cursus vivae Latinitatis (Frankfurt, 1992–1998).

Preaching to the Mob: Space, Ideas, and Persuasion in Renaissance Florence Peter Howard That the best show in town could be a preacher in his pulpit may be a claim that challenges and sorely stretches our historical imaginations, if not our credulity, for it is not what comes to mind when we daydream of Florence in its Renaissance or of the enduring legacy of the culture of Renaissance Italy. If we stand back, however, and let the people of the Renaissance period speak in their own terms, they tell how the preacher was fundamental to their normal daily experience of life. Even a sophisticated bibliophile, historian, and social critic like Poggio Bracciolini, papal secretary and eventual chancellor of Florence, could not persuade himself to stay away when the preachers of repentance came to town (fig. 1): Several times I went to listen to them myself, for amusement; and I heard them saying things that could cause even the most austere and formal man to burst out laughing. Now they shake themselves hurriedly, as though they are about to jump down from the pulpit; now they shout at the tops of their voices and [now] speak softly; now and again they forcefully bang their hands on the wood; at times they even laugh. In short, they assume many diverse modes of reproach in order to be seen as a new Proteus. Indeed, they resemble apes more than preachers.1

Leon Battista Alberti, often regarded as the paradigmatic humanist, was much more positive in his assessment of preachers than was Bracciolini.2 He was particularly interested in those religious orders that combined religious duties with a study of what he calls “the noble arts” by which he meant both the liberal arts and religious studies. In his book on building and architecture, written in the 1450s, he 1  Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout, 2001), p. 1. Proteus refers to the chameleon sea-god of classical mythology. For an example of such a scene, see Figure 1. 2   For a recent study, see Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (London, 2000).

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places the monasteries of such orders, geographically, “alongside public spaces,” “close to human concourse.” Why? He tells us: “So as to offer a close involvement in human affairs, as their undertaking demands.”3 Many “will converge to hear sermons, and for discussions on religious matters,” he reports, and a little further on in the same passage, in phrases reminiscent of Cicero and Augustine, he reinforces the idea that monasteries should be located at the heart of things: …so that the mob would gladly converge there of its own accord for amusement, and be more exposed to efforts to persuade and exhort, and to be enticed to denounce vice for virtue, and ignorance for an understanding of things noble.4

What is striking is that, in this first treatise to be written on architecture in over a thousand years, Alberti is simply reporting (as happens consistently in his treatise) what was already the case in the city during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: preaching broke out of the confines of churches into the streets and, at public expense, piazzas in front of the churches of the new, mendicant preaching orders were built, as one communal document records, “ad utilitatem animarum et decorum civitatis” [for the profit of souls and the adornment of the city].5 Even more salient in terms of the theme that I am pursuing here is that with Alberti, as with Bracciolini, you have the sense that preachers did provide the best show in town; they were amusing and entertained “the mob [which] would gladly converge [to listen].”6 My overall interest is in the culture of hearing that such preaching implied. While reading texts was an option for some, or indeed many citizens, all Florence participated in the culture of hearing. It was a 3  Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, MA / London, 1988), vol. 5, p. 128. 4  Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, p. 128. The 1485 Latin text of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria is published under the Archimedes Project by Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute at: http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/docuserver/ images/archimedes/info/pdf.html, p. 149: “Recte locabuntur apud diuersoria publicorum operum theatri/circi/ plateæ/ quo multitudo sponte sua sese animi gratia perlubenter conferens facilius patiatur istorum persuasio ne/hortatione/admonitione a uitiis ad uirtutem: ab imperitia ad rerum optimarum cognitionem euocari.” 5   Quoted by Giovanni Fanelli, Firenze (Rome, 1980), p. 25. For preaching spilling out of churches, see Peter F. Howard, “The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, eds. Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York, 2006), pp. 376–393, and notes pp. 584–96. 6  Here I translate multitudo as “mob.” See A Latin Dictionary, eds. Charlton T. Lewis and. Charles Short (Oxford, 1879): “In partic.: 2. Of the common people, the crowd, the multitude (cf. turba).”



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vernacular, not elitist, experience; it was for the multitude, not a privileged few, as Alberti points out: the mob would gladly converge. In the very active research field that medieval sermon studies is, there has been much focus on preachers and what they said, but little on those who converged [confluere].7 That is to say, there has been much emphasis on sermons as words to be analysed, less on sermons as events to be experienced.8 This present essay examines the mob in the city and the role of the preacher in relation to it. I argue that the role of the preacher was to transform the mob into an orderly crowd of citizens concerned with the common good. This is the implication of the passage from Alberti. The word which I have translated as “mob” is multitudo. This Latin word implies a throng, a rabble, a mob, rather than an orderly crowd. The figure of the preacher, no matter how ridiculous, provided the moment of convergence and the possibility of the transformation of both individual and community into something more noble. This accords with the overall humanist belief, emerging in this period and evinced by Alberti, that urban spaces, especially well conceived urban spaces, were civilizing: they created people of noble temperament, working together for the common good, the bonum commune.9 The same idea was articulated thirty years before Alberti wrote his treatise by a Florentine preacher who was to assume a central role in shaping the moral and aesthetic ethos of the city as its archbishop during the

7   For an overview of sermon studies, see the journal of the International Society of Medieval Sermon Studies, Medieval Sermon Studies, and the convenient overview in The Sermon, ed. Beverly Kienzle (Turnhout, 2000); also Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden / Boston, MA, 2002). 8   See Cynthia Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and his Audience (Washington, 2000), p. 39. The importance of the preaching event as experience is well illustrated in the diary of an anonymous merchant who records how in a sermon a preacher said “many beautiful and indeed very beautiful things which I don’t know how to express, nor do I remember exactly” [Disse in questa predicha molte belle e bellissime chose, le quali io non so dire e non mi richord]; see Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, MS 1186C, fol. 54r; transcribed in Zelina Zafarana, “Per la storia religiosa di Firenze ne Quattrocento: Una raccolta privata di prediche,” Studi Medievali, 3a ser., 9 (1968), 1079. For more on this, see my “The impact of Preaching in Renaissance Florence: Fra Niccolò da Pisa at San Lorenzo,” Medieval Sermon Studies 48 (2004), 29–44. 9  On mendicant preaching and the bonum commune in Renaissance Italy, see Bernadette Paton, Preaching Friars and the Civic Ethos: Siena, 1380–1480 (London, 1992), pp. 90–99; on Fra Antonino’s approach see my “ ‘You cannot sell liberty for all the gold there is’: Promoting good governance in early Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Studies 2 (2010), 207–233.

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period of the ascendancy of the Medici family. The Dominican friar, Antonino Pierozzi, as Florence’s preacher for the Lent of 1427, had this to say in the course of his sermon about “social stability” (to use a modern term) on Quinquagesima Sunday: “It is commonly said that where there is a mob, there is confusion (or trouble). This is true, when there is no order. Otherwise there is greater, magnificent nobility.”10 “Dicitur communiter, quod ubi multitude ibi confusio. Quod verum est, quando non est ordo” is how Fra Antonino begins, at least according to his “model sermon,” the Latin basis of his vernacular extemporization. The key word here, as in Alberti, is multitudo. How this translates into the Tuscan vernacular in which he preached could have been folla or massa [crowd], or more likely calca [throng, mob], which is the word Boccaccio used in relation to preaching friars and their audience in his novelle.11 I turn next to the nature of the preacher’s mob, before discussing the space the mob occupied, and finally what preaching achieved with the mob. The Mob Preaching implies hearers, and the sign of a good preacher was the crowd attracted to him. One such preacher who came to Florence periodically in the 1420s was the Franciscan friar Bernardino of Siena, one of the usual suspects (along with Savonarola) when historians want to think about preaching in the Renaissance (fig. 2).12 Another, whom I have already introduced, was Fra Antonino Pierozzi. What attracted the mob to a particular preacher was not just his entertainment value; it was also his reputation for holiness, for as Paul Ricoeur has reminded us, in this period holiness did not reside in texts like the bible, but rather in living examples [exempla] of the inscribed text—in saints,

10   Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (hereafter BNCF), conventi soppressi MS A.8.1750, fol. 3rb. The sermon is organized around Luke 18.43: “Et omnis plebs ut vidit, dedit laudem Deo” [And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God]. The context of the phrases which I cite from the first section of Fra Antonino’s text is that “God takes sinners and calls them to himself.” On Fra Antonino’s preaching, see my Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Florence, 1995). 11   See, for example, Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron, ed. Carlo Salinari (Bari, 1986), 6. 10, p. 464 (“Con grandissima calca tutti sappressavano a frate Cipolla”). 12   Figure 2 is one of several examples of such scenes painted by Sano di Pietro.



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who in this period, were all preachers.13 In 1429, the humanist chancellor of Florence, Leonardo Bruni, wrote of Fra Antonino as one to whose church “flocked an incredible mob of devotees [ad quam confluit devotorum hominum incredibilis multitudo].” The word multitudo recurs.14 Preachers were sites of devotion to which the crowds mobbed, as is also clear from contemporary images in, for example, the evocative scene depicting San Bernardino putting to flight little demons with which some of the crowd seem to be possessed.15 Fra Antonino’s reputation in Florence “as one able to bring forth fruit from souls” took off with the Lenten sermon series he preached there in 1427, a politically and socially volatile year for the city.16 Similarly, Antonio (di Tuccio) Manetti, in his life of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, recounts how in 1428 one of the Masters of Theology at Santo Spirito, Francesco Mellini, known as Zoppo (“the lame”), was preaching the Lenten series of sermons there. Like Fra Antonino, “he (as far as is known) accorded his life with his words and appeared to do so throughout his life.” Manetti sees this as the reason for the “great concourse of citizens” [gran concorso di cittadini], especially from the neighbourhood who were attracted to hear him,17 given that the population of Florence in 1427 was 37,000, even if everyone did not turn out to hear the preacher, as they were obliged to by civic statute. Even beyond positive law, there was a moral pressure to attend: Goro Dati, the merchant of Prato, for example, wrote of the guilt he felt when he did not.18 The mobs that attended were therefore very large. 13   Paul Ricoeur, “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (Minneapolis,1995), pp. 68–72; Ida Magli, Gli uomini della penitenza: Lineamenti antropologici del medioevo italiano (Milan, 1967), p. 105; Augustine Thompson, O.P., Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Oxford, 1992), p. 11; Howard, “The Aural Space of the Sacred,” p. 378 and n. p. 586. 14  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 139. 15  See, for example, Maestro di S. Giovanni, S. Bernardino predica all’Aquila davanti alla Chiesa di Collemaggio, 15 sec. (L’Aquila, Museo Nazionale), which can be viewed at http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/primopiano/foto/muzzarelli/muzzarelli_05 .gif Accessed 28 November 2010; see also Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Pescatori di uomini: Predicatori e piazze alla fine del medioevo (Bologna, 2005), Figure 6. For an excellent series of studies on the charisma of the preacher see Charisma and Religious Authority:Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching 1200–1500, eds. Katherine Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout, 2010). 16  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 135–138. 17   The Life of Brunelleschi by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, Introduction, Notes and Critical Text Edition by Howard Saalman, trans. Catherine Engass (University Park, PA / London, 1970), pp. 122–123 (lines 1470–1490). 18  Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (London, 1984), p. 315.

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One contemporary account indicates that crowds at San Bernardino’s sermons fluctuated between three and eight thousand, depending on the day of the week, with the highest figures being on Sundays and market days.19 Can we imagine the mob? Manetti’s account of the “great concourse of citizens” at Fra Zoppo’s sermons says that “Lorenzo Ridolfi, Bartolomeo Corbellini, Neri di Gino Capponi, Ghoro di Stagio Dati”— lawyers, politicians, bankers—“and many others of intellect, reputation and standing came.”20 The mob, therefore, was comprised of some of the foremost citizens, not just the fringes of society. A description by an anonymous friar gives an indication of those who came to hear San Bernardino: The learned as well as the ignorant flocked to the holy man’s sermons: the most famous theologians, skilled doctors and lawyers, every religious order. Also temporal lords, nobles, common people, merchants, rustics, mercenaries, prostitutes, and even Jews—people of every condition hurried to the sermons, most desirous to hear.21

While Fra Antonino might sometimes have imagined his Florentines as “leoni superbi, orsi crudeli, lupi rapaci, disonesti porci” [proud lines, cruel bears, rapacious wolves, dishonest pigs], his sermons project, in various ways, the implied, intended or actual mob gathered around the pulpit.22 An analysis of the asides of his 1427 sermon series reveals some twenty-eight groups among the generalized audience of the populus cristianus, including merchants and bankers, administrators, craftsmen, women, wives, husbands, virgins, celibates, the betrothed, judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers, scholars, students of medicine and law, the heads of households, magnates, leaders of the commune, communal officials, prelates, rectors of churches, clergy, confessors, and even preachers.23 In his sermon notes we find phrases

 Polecritti, Preaching Peace, p. 40.  Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, p. 123. 21  Polecritti, Preaching Peace, pp. 40–41. 22   For the phrase, see Peter F. Howard, “ ‘Leoni Superbi’: Florentines, Sant’ Antonino and his preaching in the Duomo,” in Atti del VII Centenario di S.Maria del Fiore, eds. Timothy Verdon and Annalisa Innocenti, (Florence, 2001), pp. 495–509, esp. pp. 502– 503. On the idea of an implied audience, see Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983), 137–45, esp. 140: [The implied audience is] “a hypothetical construct, the sum of all the author’s assumptions about the person he or she is addressing.” 23  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 146–47. 19 20



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like: “Discurre per singulos status et conclude totum etc” [skip through each occupation and bring it all to a conclusion].24 He pinpointed particular types of people in the crowd clustered around his pulpit. Each preacher dissected the mob in terms of his imagined social reality in order to focus his message. Effective sermons, therefore, were not delivered to a generalized other, an undifferentiated mob. Rather they were framed with a view to the circumstances of particular audiences. Fra Antonino attracted his crowds, not just because of his reputation for holiness, but because “he accommodated doctrine … and came down to people’s very way of living.”25 He put into practice the dictum of his own treatise on the art of preaching: “attention to circumstances.”26 In his model sermon notes there is often his instruction to himself as a preacher: “Descende ad practicas cum exemplis suis et conclude hoc primum et cetera.” [Get down to the practical with examples and conclude this first [part] and so forth].27 The same point can be illustrated by referring to the prediche burlesche [the ribald sermons] of the Piovano Arlotto. The Piovano was a country priest with a scandalous reputation who associated with disreputable characters, frequented taverns, transgressed the virtue of young virgins, was always up to some sort of shady deal, and so was always being dragged before the archbishop’s court, over which, indeed, Archbishop Antonino presided.28 The preface to his little book, which can still be easily bought at bookstalls in Florence, makes the point that when the Piovano was with religious people, he argued about spiritual things; when he was with soldiers he reasoned with arguments suitable for them; when he was with merchants he reasoned in terms of commerce; when he was with women, gowned and well-bred, he conversed appropriately with 24   Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, MS 308, fols. 124r–125r; see Howard, “Leoni Superbi”, p. 507. 25   “Non enim de universalibus tantum ebus scripsit; verum etiam ad particularia quaeque descendens, ad hunc nostrum vivendi usum et ad singularem quamdam humanae vitae operationem, doctrinam accommodavit” (Francesco Castiglione, Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum: Vita, in Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa Theologica [Verona, 1740; rpt. Graz, 1959], cols. xxii–lxxii at col. lxi). See also Peter Howard, “The Preacher and the Holy in Renaissance Florence,” in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Louvain-La-Neuve, 1996), pp. 355–370. 26  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, chap. 5. 27   Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, MS 308, ff. 124r–125r. 28   See F.W. Kent and Amanda Lillie, “The Piovano Arlotto: New Documents,” in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, eds. C. Elam and P. Denley (London, 1988), pp. 347–368.

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peter howard some elegant, funny stories; and when he was with bawdy women he had little stories just for them.29

The Piovano, therefore, had the habit of mind of the good preacher: he adapted his discourse to circumstances, or in the language of the text “in ogni caso col ragionamento adattava alla circonstanza.” Sermons were not delivered into a vacuum. What was actually said was shaped by the preacher’s perception of the audience before him: their needs, capacities, and even resistance to his message.30 The disposition of the mob at a preaching event is represented in paintings and frescoes of the time. The modern viewer is struck immediately by social hierarchies, and gender and religious differentiation as, for example, in the representations of the preaching of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer by Bartolomeo degli Erri (fig. 3).31 The third order of Dominicans, female mantellate, are centred in the piazza before the preacher, who himself is flanked by important personages. Around the piazza burghers frame the scene. Representations of Bernardino of Siena preaching are similarly disposed.32 The preacher is in command of an orderly and attentive audience. Note the vela: the separation of men and women by a silk curtain in many of the images reflects the spatial arrangements for preaching and indicates how in this period the congregation was often, though not always, arranged

29   “Quando era con religiosi ragionava di cose spirituali, quando era con soldati ragionava di argomenti a loro addati, quando era con mercanti ragionava di mercatanzia, quando era con donne costumate e nobili, teneva discorsi appropriati con qualche bella novella da ridere, quando era con donne lascive aveva storielle per loro” (Facezie, Motti e Burle del Piovano Arlotto, ed. Chiara Amerighi [Florence, 1982], p. 30.) 30  Cf. Polecritti, Preaching Peace, p. 39. 31  Roberto Rusconi, “Vicent Ferrer e Pedro de Luna: sull’iconografia di un predicatore fra due obbedienze,” in Conciliarismo, Stati Nazionali, Inizi dell’Umanesimo Atti del XXV Convegno storico internazionale Todi, 9–12 ottobre 1988, Centro di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1990), pp. 213–234, esp. pp. 226, 228–229, 234 (fig.11). Rusconi bases his reading of the painting on the official hagiographical account of the saint’s life written by the Sicilian Dominican Pietro Ranzano. By contrast, Christopher Lloyd, in his catalogue of the holdings of the Ashmolean Museum, asserts more specifically that this painting of S. Vincent Ferrer preaching before a pope is by Bartolomeo degli Erri himself (Modena: c.1430–79, painted between 1474 and 1479), rather than the more conservative attribution to the “Bottega degli Erri” cited by Rusconi. According to Lloyd, the scene of S. Vincent Ferrer preaching before the antiPope Benedict XIII and Ferdinand of Aragon at Tortosa in Spain is here transferred by Degli Erri to, perhaps, the Piazza of San Domenico in Modena. See A Catalogue of the Earlier Italian Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, ed. Christopher Lloyd (Oxford, 1977), pp. 19–21, plate 16. Rusconi makes no reference to Lloyd’s catalogue. 32   There are many representations of San Bernardino preaching, especially in the Campo of Siena; see n. 12 above and Figure 2.



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according to gender as well as social and religious status.33 In their physical arrangement in the urban space, those who have converged before the preacher constitute the converse of the mob, and show nothing of the chaos to which Fra Antonino referred (“where there is a mob there is chaos”) and which other preachers feared. The representations show the ideal social placement of the urban population. Preaching, as a social event, projected in microcosm the idealization of the supposed social organisation of the city. The mob, in the act of preaching, has here been quelled into submission and order. Indeed, as archbishop, Fra Antonino imagined the word of the preacher as a sword, and preached how he “[ought] to draw [this sword] from the scabbard: preaching, admonishing, disputing, counselling according to the writings of the Old and New Testaments.”34 Most of the images reflect the power of the charismatic preacher in effecting such social arrangements, with the lines of order converging on the preacher as the focal point of perspective.35 That the mob was ever a mob, and that such a sword was always necessary, are reflected in the view of the preaching event proposed by the images attributed to Francesco di Giorgio (fig. 4).36 Unusually, here the focus is on the audience. The preacher, San Bernardino, is a small, distant figure, announced by trumpeters, and framed by elaborate renaissance architecture; the scene is almost one that could have been envisaged by Alberti in his book on architecture. The crowd is composed of disparate little groups, some chatting, some looking the other way, genders and different social groups intermingling. Other matters are clearly on their minds apart from the preacher in his pulpit. That the preacher had some ideas of the distractions flitting across the minds of those in the audience can be gleaned from his asides. Fra Antonino, in the course of his 1427 series of sermons, mentions  See Adrian Randolph, “Regarding Women in Sacred Space,” in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge, UK, 1997), pp. 17–41, esp. pp. 21, 32. For evidence of payments for cloth to make a veil to spread down the church during preaching, see, for example, “Giuliano e Arrigo di Giovanni linaiuoli deono avere per insino adì 20 di novembre 1451 lire quattro s. dieci sono per braccia xviij di panno azurro per s. 5 braccio, avemo da lloro per fare una vela da distendere in chiesa quanda si predica lire iiij, s.x,” Ragione dirimpetto fol. 159r, in “Campione Nero” (1442–1454) in the Archivio della SS. Annunziata published in Eugenio Casalini, Michelozzo di Bartolommeo e l’Annunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1995), p. 175. 34  Howard, “Leoni Superbi,” pp. 500–1. 35   See Polecritti, Preaching Peace, p. 20, for the seed of this idea. 36   This idealized image of the Campo in Siena was painted during Francesco di Giorgio’s early years when he was in the workshop of Lorenzo di Pietro. 33

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people’s motives for coming along to the preaching: mothers bringing daughters to facilitate their marriage prospects by putting them on show, or merchants on the look-out for business.37 Given that sermons often lasted as long as four, even five-and-a-half hours, it is perhaps little wonder that the attention of the mob seems a little fragmented.38 Space Contemporary representations of scenes of preaching draw attention to the implications of preaching for the spatial arrangement of the city.39 The visual impact of the coming of the friars to Florence in the thirteenth century was immediate. The continuous re-elaboration of the urban space over the next two or more centuries demonstrates the growing importance of the presence of the mendicant orders and their activity as preachers in the city. In December 1244, at the instigation of S. Peter Martyr, OP, the Florentine government gave permission for the enlargement of the Piazza Vecchia of Santa Maria Novella to facilitate preaching.40 The piazza was again enlarged in the early 1300s to accommodate the huge crowds who came to hear Fra Remigio de’ Girolami, after which it became a Dominican tradition generally to preach in the piazza.41 In 1422 operai were elected to look after the church and its two piazzas.42 At SS. Annunziata, an outdoor stone pulpit was erected in 1454 because the church itself could not contain the crowd that flocked to hear, in the words of a contemporary, “that great preacher M. Domenico da Viterbo, who appeared in those times a  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 147.  On the length of sermons, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 144–45. 39   The next few paragraphs of this section derive from my “Aural Spaces of the Sacred.” 40   Documenti dell’Antica Constituzione del Commune di Firenze, ed. Piero Santini (Florence, 1895), pp. 482–484, 1244, 20 December: “ad instantiam et postulationem klarissimi fratris Petri professionis ordinis predicatorum … pro faciendo plateam et dictam plateam que ibi erat crescendo causa faciendi predicationem vel predicationes ad voluntatem dicti fratris Petri et aliorum fratrum capituli dicte ecclesie sancte Marie Novelle et ab utroque consilio supracripto… sed semper libera et expidita ad dei laudem et honorem et ad utilitatem hominum ibidem predicationem audientium debeat remanere.” Also, Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze (Florence, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 409–410. 41   Stefano Orlandi, OP, ‘Necrologio’ di S. Maria Novella, 2 vols (Florence, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 217–18. 42  26 Feb 1421/2: election of the Operai of the church of Santa Maria Novella and the two piazzas (la Vecchia and la Nuova), see Orlandi, Necrologio, vol. 2, pp. 499–501. 37 38



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blinding flash of eloquence, and a marvel of doctrine.”43 Contemporary artworks show just how common it was for temporary pulpits to be erected in piazzas to accommodate the crowd that flocked to hear famous preachers. When it came to enlarging piazzas, the Signoria was always careful to ensure consistency in approving expenditure for each of the mendicant orders and funded projects similar to the one at Santa Maria Novella also at Santo Sprito, Santa Croce and San Lorenzo. The coming of the friars, therefore, partly explains the various urban renewal plans that were sponsored by the Signoria beginning in the fourteenth century and the enlargement of piazzas evinces the way in which the state, in collaboration with the mendicant orders of the city, re-ordered the geographical, and thereby the religious and social, map of the city. The re-elaboration of Florence’s piazzas signaled, with the coming of the friars, a new relationship between the interior of the church and the outside world.44 Preachers addressed crowds from the Loggia della Signoria, and from temporary pulpits set up in front of churches, as we know from works of art of the period.45 Bartolomeo da Corazzo’s diary (1405–1439) is peppered with references to preaching and where he heard it, very often in piazzas, and not always those of churches.46 Indeed, the traditional relationship between liturgy, the laity and sacred space underwent a profound transformation due to the renewed emphasis on the preached word. The sacred spilled out of the confines of churches into the streets. Even the celebration of Masses that preceded the preaching could now take place in the piazza. To ensure that   “Di ciò ne habbiamo noi lo esempio su gli occhi di quella che rispondeva su la piazza nostra della Nunziata sopra quel pergamo di pietra, che nel 1454 vi bisognò fare, per non essere capace tutta lachiesa a udire quel gran predicatore M. Domenico da Viterbo, che parve in quei tempi un fulgore d’eleoquenza, e uno stupor di dotrina, bisognando, che egli predicasse in quella piazza, dove per divozione de popoli si fece dipingere la Madonna co l’imagine del B. Filippo Giani” (Della Historia del Beato Filippo Benizzi [1604], p. 333, cited by Piero Morselli, Corpus of Tuscan Pulpits, 1400– 1550 [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1979], p. 97, who discusses the pulpit on pp. 95–97). On pulpits in Florence, see Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, The Renaissance Pulpit Art and Preaching in Tuscany, 1400–1550 (Turnhout, 2007). 44   An idea suggested by an observation of Fanelli, Firenze, p. 25. 45   See Roberto Rusconi, “ ‘Trasse la storia per farne la tavola’: immagini di prediactori degli ordini mendicanti nei secoli XIII e XIV,” in La Predicazione dei Frati della metà del ‘200 alla fine del ‘300: Atti del XXII Convegno internazionale, Assisi, 13–15 ottobre 1994 (Spoleto, 1995), pp. 405–50. 46   Bartolomeo Del Corazza Diario Fiorentino (1405–1439), ed. R. Gentile (Rome, 1991), p. 20 (5 May 1406: “La mattina detta predicò frate Giovanni Dominici in sulla detta piazza” [Piazza de Peruzzi]). 43

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he did not scandalize the weak-in-faith, Bernardino of Siena reassured the crowd from the pulpit that he would not have said Mass outside the church were it not that he had been authorized by the pope to celebrate it in the piazza, or in other such honest places. Pope Martin V, in Florence at the time, conceded the same license to other preachers as well.47 The popularity of mendicant preaching transgressed traditional spatial and temporal arrangements in the city, and the concentration of people in particular places at particular times drastically altered the traditional ritual map. Not only was the urban space of the city linked to an oral-aural function, but so were the interior arrangements of the mendicant churches. Whereas the disposition of a monastic church like San Miniato was centred on the elaborate choir area where monks prayed the ordered liturgy of the hours on behalf of a silent laity, that of the new churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans was geared to a newly emphasized function: preaching. All the mendicant churches—Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Santa Maria del Carmine, and later, San Marco included48—were distinguished, up until Vasari’s mid-sixteenth century reconstructions, by huge tramezzi or ponte [rood screens] that stretched across the aisles between the choir and the nave. These were intended to protect the friars from the laity and often served as stages for sacre rappresentazioni [miracle plays]. Up until the second half of the fifteenth century, the lessons were read and the sermons preached from the ambo that was incorporated into the screen. This architectural feature only served further to highlight a religiosity that underscored the importance of preaching and delineated it as an oral space. The mid-fifteenth century witnessed a re-orientation of the spatial arrangement in the part of the nave reserved for the laity, a reform that underlines further the increasing emphasis on preaching during this period. In both Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, pulpits were commissioned in the late 1440s and 1470s respectively. A pulpit was a part of Michelozzo’s plan for the newly rebuilt S. Marco in the 1440s. It was this part of the century that also saw the appearance of pulpits at 47   Fra Giovanni da Capestrano and Fra Matteo da Girganti. S. Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche Volgari: Predicazione del 1425 in Siena, ed. C. Canarozzi, O.F.M. (Florence, 1957) vol. 1, pp. xxx–xxxi. 48   The old Santo Spirito seems to have had one; however, no provision was made for one in the new Brunelleschian structure. The pulpit was an entirely separate structure, and was to incorporate features apparent in the one recently constructed in S. Croce. See below.



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the Badia in Fiesole, in the new Santo Spirito (1487) and the Duomo (before 1493), the last so often depicted in woodcuts of Savonarola preaching there (fig. 5).49 Even a cursory examination of the placement of the pulpits in these churches shows the way in which pulpits were centralized in the space in relation to the ponte. The fifteenth-century pulpits in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce were situated at those pillars in the nave that exactly bisected the space where the congregation gathered (the left of the nave in Santa Maria Novella, and the right in Santa Croce) and provided a focus for the congregation (standing and without seating in this period) that was at right angles to the EastWest orientation of the churches themselves (fig. 6).50 Why this should happen in the last part of the fifteen century is not immediately clear. One study shows how the ambo gradually fell out of use in the fourteenth century and was superseded by the pulpit in the fifteenth can only suggest it was “to be more plainly understood by the large crowds of faithful filling the vast interiors of the mendicant churches.”51 Certainly, Archbishop Antonino emphasizes in his tract on preaching that the preacher must be clearly audible and able to be understood, and this emphasis by a “mover-and-shaker” in the Florentine ecclesiastical world could have been influential. As depositions before Archbishop Antonino’s court show, the attachment of pulpits to pillars created conflicts of patronage rights. That powerful families wanted their crests associated with preaching, displayed before the eyes of the mob, perhaps reinforces the notion of the centrality of preaching in the city. For example, when the Rucellai clan began construction of the pulpit in Santa Maria Novella, it was challenged by the Minerbetti family which pleaded that the column belonged to them. The court ruled that the work could continue on condition that the 49  In his Compendio Savonarola laments that many in the crowd tried to write down what he preached from the pulpit, but through lack of understanding (or malice) did not represent an accurate version, but rather one butchered and mixed with error which they “spread among the crowd with additions, substractions, and many distortions.” See “Girolamo Savonarola: The Compendium of Revelations,” in Apocalyptic Spirituality, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York, 1979), pp. 192–275, esp. p. 192. 50   For a discussion of rood-screens in Florentine churches, see Marcia Hall, “The Ponte in S. Maria Novella: The Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 157–173; “The ‘Tramezzo’ in S. Croce, Florence and Domenico Veneziano’s Fresco,” Burlington Magazine, 112 (1970), 797– 799; “The ‘Tramezzo’ in Santa Croce, Florence, reconstructed,” The Art Bulletin, 56 (1974), 325–341; Renovation and counter-reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce, 1565–1577 (Oxford / New York, 1979). 51  Morselli, Corpus of Tuscan Pulpits, p. 4.

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Rucellai be content to remove the pulpit if the Minerbetti were prepared to place there a pulpit similarly or more beautiful.52 What in the end counted was that there should be a beautiful pulpit; whose coat of arms appeared on it was a secondary consideration. According to the convent’s records at the time, the contested project was pursued “pro predicatione” [for the sake of preaching]. In the context we have been exploring, this is a highly charged phrase. Moreover, the beautifully wrought design is inscribed with a telling scriptural text that underscores both the function of the pulpit and the significance of the preaching as an event: “… Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”53 This phrase introduces aptly the final part of this essay. Persuasion: The Impact of Preaching on the Mob Considerations of space and the pulpit show the way in which the preaching event, even apart from the words spoken, served to promote and re-enforce social order: the mob was transformed into a delineated, ordered crowd. Popular preachers were seen to bring order and peace to the fractured social climate within towns. This was one of the aims of preaching: “to reconcile enemies and calm faction,”54 or as Archbishop Antonino puts it in his own treatise on the art of preaching: preaching must pertain “in civitate inter civem et civem” [in the city between citizen and citizen].55 Indeed, Fra Antonino’s sermon series in the Lent of 1427 sought to resolve the factional conflicts that are often associated with the rise of the Medici in Florence in the late 1420s. For instance, his sermon for the third Sunday of Lent moves quickly from a short quotation, taken from John Chrysostom—“nothing on earth is stronger than the kingdom and yet it perished through altercation” —to the heart of the matter. 52   Archivio di Stato Firenze (hereafter ASF), Notarile, Jacopo de ser Antonio di Jacopo da Romena, J. n. 10 (a. 1443–1448), fols. 926r–927r, a transcription of which is in Stefano Orlandi, O.P., S. Antonino, Arcivescovo di Firenze, Dottore della Chiesa: Studi, 2 vols (Florence, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 308–310. 53   Luke 11.28. The full inscription reads: “BEATUS VENTER QUI TE PORTAVIT ET UBERA QUAE SUXISTI—BEATI QUI AUDIUNT VERBUM DEI ET CUSTODIUNT ILLUD.” 54  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1990), p. 299. 55   Summa III:XVIII:V, col.1030.



space, ideas, and persuasion in renaissance florence217 And what [Chrysostom] is talking about is clear, for Rome had a universal dominion, and lasted a long time, at least for as long as Romans looked to the common good [bonum commune]. But when the citizens began to look to their own personal good, that city went from bad to worse, to the extent that it is now almost nothing. Therefore, turn to the Lord your God.56

No one in that politically fractious year in Florence would have missed the message. Preaching the peace—transforming the mob into the orderly crowd which participated in a greater good—was one of the main political tasks of preachers in the fifteenth century. For this reason, one of Florence’s generals wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1472, petitioning for a preacher to bring the peace to the Tuscan Romagna.57 But preachers could also be fomenters of riot and indeed provoke mob violence. For example, one chronicler recounts that: A strange incident took the city to the edge of revolt. That is, it was the impudence of a Franciscan friar from Milan, of the house of Visconti, who in the course of many sermons had begun to show how it could be legitimate to take from the Jews all that they possessed, as stuff which was not truly theirs, but gained from others by usury; this he did even though the archbishop had said to him to apply himself to other material so as not to stir up the people with this, his mad enterprise—not if he wanted to remain.58

The story concludes with two officials from the government dragging the preacher out of bed at 3 AM, accompanying him to the city

56  In eadem 3a dominica XLme, fol. 26rb: “Omne regnum etc. Convertimini etc. Dicit Chrysostomus, quod nil in terra fortius regno et tamen per altercationem perit. Et hoc patet in Roma quae habuit dominium universale, quod duravit tantum, quantum Romani quaerierunt bonum commune. Sed cum cives coeperunt quaerere bonum particulare, illa civitas ivit de malis in peius, ut nihil quasi modo sit. Convertimini ad Dominum Deum vestrum.” For the quotation, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 135–137. 57   Giovanni Giugni, Captain of Castrocaro, ASF MAP 23, 473 16 July 1472. 58   “Ma per uno strano accidente portò la città pericolo di sollevazione. Ciò fu per l’improntitudine d’un frate di San Francesco milanese della casa de’ Visconti, il quale per multe prediche avea preso a mostrare come si potea legittimamente torre a’ giudei tutto quello che essi tenevano, come roba che veramente non era loro, ma guadagnata altrui con usure; il quale benché dall’arcivescovo (Antonino) gli fosse detto che attendesse ad altra materia per non far sollevare il popolo, da questa sua matta impresa non si volea rimanere. Perché la signoria gli mandò in su le tre ore della notte due mazzerieri, che in quell’istess’otta fuor della porta della città l’accomiatarono, con ardire che fra tre dì si trovasse avere sgombre i terreni della Repubblica,” in Istorie fiorentine di Scipione Ammirato (Turin,1853), bk. 23, cited in Sant’Antonino nel V Centenario della Morte 1 (1958), 12.

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gates, and ordering him to remove himself from the territory of the republic within three days. Literally, he was run out of town for stirring up trouble. Almost axiomatic in the period was the idea that to control the piazza was to control a city. Because the preacher was central to this, good preachers were in demand: governments vied for them; confraternities sought them; churches paid for them; everyone judged them. In May 1521, the powerful Florentine Wool-Guild consuls were already looking anxiously ahead to the following Lent, and wrote to Niccolò Machiavelli: “We, being entrusted with our cathedral church, Santa Maria del Fiore, have among our other public charges the choice of the preacher; and over two months ago we chose Fra Giovam [sic] Gualberto …, lest all the best itinerant preachers should be already snapped up.…”59 In 1445 a Fra Alessandro (or perhaps Alessandrino) from Bologna was paid by the chapter of Santa Maria Novella an offering of 12 florins and given other things to honour him because of the huge audience and the applause which his preaching occasioned [per la numerosissima udiensa ed applauso alle prediche].60 Archbishop Antonino judged critically another preacher, Fra Manfredo da Vercelli, for his use of fear tactics; the Bolognese chronicle of Pietro di Mattiolo records how Vercelli sustained strong penitence by announcing the next coming of the Antichrist.61 Preachers regulated the civilized ethos of cities. In the sermon series of Fra Antonino Pierozzi (1427), the fifty topics through which he ranged were diverse, if traditional, in presenting some forty-nine vices, among them, hypocrisy, ingratitude, hatred, pride, envy, infidelity, ambition, vicious talk, homicide, division, anger, dissent [murmuratio]. These climaxed in Holy Week with sermons on cruelty, betrayal, and ignorance. Even a cursory reading reveals the extent to which they were conceived to promote stability in the city. “Every creature is content with his condition in life,” preached fra Antonino at the very

59  Letter to Machiavelli in Niccolò Machiavelli, Legazioni e commissarie, ed. S. Berteli (Milan, 1964), p. 1555. 60  Orlandi, S. Antonino, 2:580. “1445 – Uffiziali: M.o Fr Alessandro di Bologna Predicatore della Quaresima - Gli si d… per elemosina fior. 12 ed altrettanti di onorario per la numerosissima udiensa ed applauso alle prediche.” 61   For Vercelli’s use of fear, see Chroniques de Saint Antonin: Fragments Originaux du Titre XXII (1378–1459), ed. Raoul Morçay (Paris, 1913), p. 38. See also Storia della Chiesa di Bologna, 2 vols, ed. Paolo Prodi and Lorenzo Paolini (Bologna, 1997), vol. 2, p. 555 and p. 562, n. 49.



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beginning of Lent, “except for miserable man who is never happy with his state or condition, whatever it happens to be: if he is sick, he wants to be well, if he is well he wants to be rich, if he is rich he wants to be wise, and so forth.”62 The same sort of idea emerges in the deliberations of the government a little later: “…every man, those of great, of small and of middling rank, should be content with his limitations and live peacefully.”63 The relationship between preaching and civic legislation is clearest in the case of San Bernardino and Siena in 1425: the magistracy of Siena incorporated all that the preacher condemned into law and appointed a new official, the Capitano ed Esecutore di Guistizia, to regulate “the good and virtuous living” of the citizens.64 Fra Antonino emphasized the notion that for its well being the republic of Florence had the responsibility to provide preachers.65 Later on, as archbishop, he believed that his words were swords with which he shaped the Florentine social and religious ethos.66 Preachers made citizens. In a telling passage, he says: In general, the contrast is marked among those who hear sermons frequently, and those who neglect them, that is, those who do not wish to hear. These latter, because they do not hear them, are like beasts, immodest and infected with all kinds of wrong-headed ideas. Against these there are those who frequent sermons, men of civic spirit, moderate, zealous for the faith. They are given the capacity for this because the doctrine of the church, when preached, is entirely civic and in accordance with moral philosophy.67

For Renaissance Florence, indeed for early modern cities in general, the religious and the civic coincided.  Sermo III. Quinquagesima. MS BNF Conv.soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 3vb, cited in Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 170. 63   The assertion is recorded in the Consulte e pratiche, 21 November, 1429, cited in Dale Kent, The Rise of the Medici (Oxford, 1978), p. 247. 64   D.Pacetti, S.Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche Volgari Inedite: Firenze 1424, 1425; Siena 1425, Classici Cristiani No. 56 (Siena, 1935), p.43; Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 89. 65  Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 198, 89–90. 66  Howard, “Leoni Superbi,” pp. 495–509. 67   “Si malum est negligenter audire verbum Dei, idest non attente vacare, aut mente retinere; quanto magis non audire praedicationem? Communiter ista differentia reperitur inter eos, qui audiunt praedicationes frequenter, et eos qui negligunt, idest qui nolunt audire; quia non audientes eas sunt homines ferales, immodesti, diversis erroribus infecti. Et contra frequentantes praedicationes sunt homines civiles, modesti, fidei zelatores: et merito, quia doctrina ecclesiae, quae praedicatur, est tota civilis, et secundum philosophiam moralem” (Summa II:IX:XI, #II, col.1007d–e). 62

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In recent historiography, Renaissance Florence has been viewed as a fragmented city with a complex ritual life.68 It was a city defined by social bonds that were agonistic in character, that is, they were at one and the same time adversarial and supportive.69 My argument here is that the very event of preaching, even without considering its message, gave form and shape to what could otherwise have been an unruly mob. The preacher who had training in the art of preaching could not help but engage his audience on their terms, or at least in terms of his perception of them. Sermons were, therefore, “representations,” reflecting back to Florentines their values and attitudes in distilled, concentrated form as preachers endeavoured to shape citizens’ behavior.70 The argument can be further extended to suggest that the culture, considered overall, was a sermon culture and that all our percep­ tions   of the time have to be placed inside this “sermon” of the culture.71 The multitudo, the subject of this essay, participated in an oral culture that was the medium for social, cultural, and intellectual, not just religious, formation. Indeed the culture itself in many ways was a “sermon,” embedding and prolonging the ephemeral words of the preacher. The tolling of bells summoned citizens to the church or piazza to come together as the multitudo, with attention focused on the preacher high in the pulpit. The mob would be one in its attention, even if unattentive at the edges. The bells acted as a sign of the preaching event. Hearing the bells, people not present at the church in question may have known who was preaching and may have supposed that it was the usual fare, and although they might have conjectured about what was being said, they could not be sure. This view of preaching Fra Niccolò da Pisa confided to his congregation in San Lorenzo. He also suggests that preacher’s sermons were circulated as gossip throughout the city.72 In so far as the bells acted as a signal summoning the populace to respond (“signum fieri ad predicationem”), they were part of 68   See most notably Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980, rpt. Ithaca, 1991). 69  Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982), pp. 27, 30. 70   See D. D’Avray, Death and the Prince (Oxford, 1994), chap. 5. 71   Augustine Thompson, O.P., “From Texts to Preaching: Retrieving the Medieval Sermon as an Event,” in Muessig, Preacher, Sermon and Audience, p. 22, developing a concept of Peter Howard. 72   See Howard, “The Impact of Preaching in Renaissance Florence,” p. 55.



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the liturgy. Fra Antonino pushes the relationship between bells and preaching, sign and signifier further: “campanae sunt praedicatores verbi Dei” [the bells are the preachers of the words of God].73 The ringing of the bells was not only a summons to gather in order to hear the preaching, but for those who did not respond in person and become part of the “mob,” it was a reminder of who may have been preaching and what the message may have been. Otherwise they were like wild beasts and not citizens at all.74 Not only bells, but paintings and frescoes often acted as mnemonics of the ephemeral words of preachers. For example, whether passing or entering the Brancacci chapel, in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Masolino’s fresco of St Peter preaching reminded devotees of the key place of the preaching event in life: their local preachers were other Christs and other Peters. The modern viewer has to do much work to come close to understanding what significance any image may have had for a contemporary (fig. 7).75 Beyond being an illustration of the text of Matthew 17, Masaccio’s Tribute Money was the biblical exemplum used by preachers in that crucial year of 1427, amid the controversies surrounding the first systematic collection of household tax in Western European history (the catasto) and whether clerics should or should not be exempted, for even Christ had paid tax. Frescoes such as these, constructed out of the tinkering with, and linking of, fragments of biblical text, continued to attract new meanings as citizens listened to preachers who employed the same texts to engage changing issues generated by the urban context. There was a sacra conversazione, as it were, played out between the church-going citizen, preacher, and painter where the istoria of one was a reminder of the exemplum of the other and vice versa. Both preacher and artist relied on a similar method and a common biblical culture so that the hearer or viewer could supply the context and connections required for the exempla or image to have its impact.76

73   Summa III:XII:I, col. 507c. In a fascinating exemplum that Fra Antonino records in his Summa (Summa II:IX:XI, cols.1010–1011), the bells summon the crowd to hear the devil; see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 90–93. 74   See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 198. 75  For the images of the Brancacci Chapel, there are many sites on the worldwide-web. One very good one is: http://www.christusrex.org/www2/art/brancacci. htm. Most show the chapel prior to the late twentieth-century restoration. 76   These themes I develop in Howard, “ ‘The womb of memory’: Carmelite Liturgy and the Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel,” in The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function and Setting. Collected Essays of a Symposium Held 6–7 June 2003 in The Harvard

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Preaching to the mob, therefore, was not a peripheral activity in the Renaissance city. The sermon, as word and event, created and recreated the encompassing culture, one that strove to tame the proud lions, cruel bears, rapacious wolves and dishonest pigs. The “mob would gladly converge there of its own accord for amusement, and be more exposed to efforts to persuade and exhort, and to be enticed to denounce vice for virtue, and ignorance for an understanding of things noble.” Ideally, the mob which could spell chaos and trouble would take on order and form and be transformed into communitas—an earthly embodiment of the communion of saints.

University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, ed. Nicholas Eckstein, Villa I Tatti Series (Florence, 2007), pp. 177–206. On terminology, see Anthony Grafton, “Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context,” I Tatti Studies 8 (1999), 37–68, esp. 58, 62–63, 67–68.



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Figure 1:  Agnolo degli Erri (fl. 1440s–1497), A Dominican Preaching (c. 1470). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Frieda Schiff Warburg in memory of her husband, Felix M. Warburg. © 2010. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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Figure 2:  Sano di Pietro (1406–1481), San Bernadino Preaching in the Piazza del Campo. Siena, Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana. © 2010. Photo Opera Metropolitana Siena/Scala, Florence.



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Figure 3: Bartolomeo degli Erri (fl.1460–76), St. Vincent Ferrer (c. 1470). © 2010. Photo Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Figure 4:  Francesco di Giorgio Martini (c1470), San Bernardino Preaching. Walker Gallery, Liverpool. © 2010. Photo National Museums, Liverpool.

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Figure 5: Savonarola Preaching in the Cathedral, Florence. From Savonarola’s Compendio di rivelazioni (1496) © 2010. Photo Württemberg Federal State Library, Stuttgart.

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Figure 6:  Pulpit in relation to the ponte, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (position of ponte based on the reconstruction by Marcia Hall).



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Figure 7: Masolino (1383–1440), Peter Preaching to the Crowd. Florence, Santa Maria del Carmine (Brancacci Chapel). © 2010. Photo Scala, Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto - Min. dell’Interno.

The Signs—and Bells—of Mass Pilgrimage Cornelia Oefelein [T]he lower church was so much cramped by its narrowness that, on the hour of the Holy Sacrifice, the brethren partaking of the most holy Eucharist could not stay there, and that they were oftentimes unable to withstand the unruly crowd of visiting pilgrims without great danger. (Abbot Suger, Ordinatio, ca. 1140/41)1 And it was the most remarkable thing that ever was seen, that during the whole year there were in Rome, besides the Roman people, 200,000 pilgrims, not counting those who were coming and going along the roads … and I can bear witness, for I was there and saw. (Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, 1300)2 In the year of our Lord 1450, that is the Holy Year … on the 19th of December … there was a great crush on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo … two hundred people and three horses were drowned, and [a panicked] mule and many people fell into the river. Some of the dead were taken to Santo Cello and part to the Campo Santo, where eighteen cartloads full of dead people were carried. (Stefano Infessura, Diario della Città de Roma)3 In the year after Christ’s birth 1475, in the weeks following the feast day of St. John the Baptist, there was a strange occurrence in the lands of Thuringia, Franconia, Hesse and Meissen. Young people, boys and girls between twenty and eight years of age, even small children, ran to the

1   Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky (2nd ed., Princeton, 1979), p. 135. Regarding the dating of Abbot Suger’s works, see the most recent edition: Abt Suger von St. Denis, Ausgewählte Schriften: Ordinatio, De Consecratione, De Administratione, eds. Andreas Speer and Günther Binding (Darmstadt, 2000). 2   Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, trans. Diana Webb, in Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (London, 1999), p. 117. 3   Diario della Città de Roma di Stefano Infessura, trans. Diana Webb, in Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West, pp. 121–22.

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cornelia oefelein Holy Blood [Wilsnack]…. The authorities in Erfurt decreed that such people should not be allowed to enter the city gates.… (Konrad Stolle, Memoriale)4 I remember very well, that we rode so hard that we passed—so we estimate and so we heard—more than 50,000 people, and I also believe that more than 18–20,000 men and women who had not made it to Düren on time that day for the showing [of St. Anne’s head] slept in the woods and corn fields that night. (Philipp de Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, 1510)5

As the various eyewitness accounts extending from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth century vividly illustrate, pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was a mass phenomenon touching, indeed infecting people of all social strata. Despite the risks and dangers inherent to travel in those times, medieval pilgrimage was, for the most part, longdistance pilgrimage, as opposed to the more local pilgrimage of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.6 Scholars estimate that at its peak, up to 25% of the European population was on pilgrimage at one time. Chronicles, eyewitness accounts similar to those quoted above, contemporary account books from numerous pilgrimage goals, charters and other written sources attest to a remarkable religious mobility in the Middle Ages. Mass pilgrimage posed challenges not only to the infrastructure at the cult centers and cities involved, but also to the infrastructure en route: the roads leading to and from the pilgrimage goals, the bridges themselves, as well as those institutions providing hospitality and catering to the pilgrims’ needs, such as monastic guest houses, hospices, inns, taverns, and hospitals. One of the greatest mass pilgrimages of the High Middle Ages is recorded for the year 1349, 4   Konrad Stolle, Memoriale—thüringisch-erfurtische Chronik, ed. Richard Thiele, in Geschichtsquellen der Provinz Sachsen und angrenzender Gebiete 39 (Halle, 1900), pp. 377–78. 5  Philipp de Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch [Memorial], in Eduard Teichmann, “Zur Heiligtumsfahrt des Philipp von Vigneulles im Jahre 1510,” in Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins 22 (1900), 138. 6  Kurt Köster, “Mittelalterliche Pilgerzeichen und Wallfahrtsdevotionalien,” in Rhein und Maas. Kunst und Kultur 800–1400. Eine Ausstellung des Schnütgen-Museums der Stadt Köln und der belgischen Ministerien für französische und niederländische Kultur, vol. 2, ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1972), pp. 149–154, esp. p. 146; this catalogue hereafter cited as Rhein und Maas.



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when the arrival of the Black Death in the Rhineland coincided with Karl IV’s coronation. The streets of Aachen were so overcrowded that Karl was forced to postpone his ceremonial coronation ride into the city and to spend several extra days in Bonn until the roads cleared.7 Chronicles frequently mention great numbers, even thousands of pilgrims visiting on one day. However, numbers such as these may not be dismissed as exaggerated estimates: in 1392, 40,000 pilgrims visited Munich on a single day for a special public showing of the Andechs relics. The city itself had a population of 10,000 at the time. The city employed a remarkably simple and ingenious method to count the pilgrims: for every visitor passing the gates, a pea was thrown into a pot. When the throngs became too large, or when city authorities saw themselves compelled to close the city gates, thousands of stranded pilgrims were forced to camp on fields and in woods nearby. Konrad Stolle, vicarius at St. Severin in Erfurt, reports in his Erfurt Chronicle: “They went in groups of two or three hundred at a time. … From the town of Arnstedt three hundred and twenty-four children … from Tennstedt thirty-four children ran all at once, and from all cities and towns. … item from the land of Franconia … thirty came from one town [near Coburg] … from the city of Eisleben eleven hundred ran, from Hettstedt three hundred, item such great masses from Austria and Hungary and from all cities and lands they could not be counted.”8 When the pilgrims from Arnstadt returned to Erfurt on their way back from Wilsnack, they were again denied entrance to the city, and the 310 (originally 324) lads and girls stood at the moat waving their banner and protested the poor treatment.9 Perhaps the most vivid contemporary account is the memorial or diary written by Philipp de Vigneulles, burgher of Metz, who visited the great centers of pilgrimage in the Rhine-Meuse region in the summer of 1510. He provides detailed descriptions of the great public showings in Aachen, Kornelimünster, and Düren. On July 17, he visited an early mass in Aachen cathedral, and “some of us went to confession, but so many people were going that it was push-and-shove, and it was impossible to kneel and hear Mass. There was such a great crush and such a crowd one could not reach the altars at all, or only with great difficulty.”10   Erich Stephany, “Heiligtumsfahrt,” in Rhein und Maas, pp. 142–44, esp. p. 143.  Stolle, Memoriale, pp. 377, 379.  9  Stolle, Memoriale, p. 379. 10  Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, p. 125.  7  8

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After mass, Philipp spent the morning sightseeing, visiting other churches in the city, until it was time for the great exhibition of the Holy Relics. To see these, such an enormously great crowd had assembled, that it is quite unbelievable for anyone who has never been there. Everyone tried to get as good a spot as possible, since all houses around the church were so filled with people and secured with such thick wooden beams, it was amazing. On one of these houses we got a pretty good spot for our money for viewing the relics; from there we looked down upon such a great mass of people that we saw nothing but head upon head, and there were just as many people on top of the houses.11

When the presentation was finished, there was again such a great crush in the church and at the city gates that Philipp had great difficulties getting into the church to visit Charlemagne’s tomb: “I assure you, it was so crowded, that if anyone had dropped a coin there it would have been impossible to pick it up, and because of the great crush people were lifted up and carried through.”12 From Aachen, Philipp continued on to the abbey of Kornelimünster and arrived there just in time to see the presentation of the relics. “Astonishingly enough,” writes Phillip, “there were already just as many people in this town as there had been in Aachen.”13 When the crowd had dispersed a bit, he was able to enter the church and see more relics being shown inside. Next on his agenda was Düren. He was in some hurry to get there, since he needed to find lodgings for the night. The exhibition of St. Anne’s head relic was at 7 o’clock the next morning. “We took the great Düren Road and hurried forward with all our might with the firm intention of spending the night in Düren. But along the way there were so many people and such an amazingly great crowd that we hardly made any progress at all.”14 It was here that Philipp and his companion rode past the multitudes of pilgrims on foot and the tens of thousands stranded without lodging sleeping in the fields and woods: “Even we, though we had ridden well, were forced to spend   Vigneulles, p. 126.   Vigneulles, p. 130. Abbot Suger reports of similar conditions in Saint-Denis in 1140/41: “You could see how people grievously trod down one another; how—what many would not believe—eager little women struggled to advance toward the altar marching upon the heads of the men as upon a pavement….”; Ordinatio in Panofsky, p. 135. 13   Vigneulles, p. 131. 14   Vigneulles, p. 133. 11 12



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that night about one hour away from Düren. We were lucky and found pretty good lodgings with a clergyman in a village, since we were the first to arrive. Soon, however, so many people came that everyone else had to sleep outside.”15 One of the responses to the challenges of managing and accommodating those steadily swelling masses of pilgrims were architectural modifications to the churches at the holy destinations. The earliest example recorded, is the remodeling and expansion of the abbey church of Saint-Denis from 1140 to 1144. Abbot Suger describes the dramatic situation: Often on feast days, completely filled… [the basilica] disgorged through all its doors the excess of the crowds as they moved in opposites directions, and the outward pressure of the foremost ones not only prevented those attempting to enter from entering but also expelled those who had already entered. At times you could see, a marvel to behold, that the crowded multitude offered so much resistance to those who strove to flock in to worship and kiss the holy relics, the Nail and Crown of the Lord, that no one among the countless thousands of people because of their density could move a foot; that no one, because of their congestion, could [do] anything but stand like a marble statue, stay benumbed or, as a last resort, scream. … Moreover the brethren who were showing the tokens of the Passion of Our Lord to the visitors had to yield to their anger and rioting and many a time, having no place to turn, escaped with the relics through the windows.16

At most of the medieval pilgrimage centers, existing romanesque churches or cathedrals underwent extensive and elaborate gothic rebuilding campaigns similar to Saint-Denis. Various measures were taken to enhance the presentation of the holy relics to accommodate the growing demand among the faithful for greater visuality. This development may be observed for all the major European shrines, especially in the Rhine-Meuse area in Aachen, Cologne, Maastricht, and Trier.17 Church treasury chambers were expanded and rebuilt to include exhibition windows, like those of Kornelimünster and St. Matthew’s in Trier.18 Shrines were elevated on high pillars to allow

  Vigneulles, p. 133.   Abbot Suger, De consecratione in Panofsky, pp. 87, 89. 17   Philipp de Vigneulles mentions in passing that the abbey church of Kornelimünster was being fully rebuilt at the time of his visit in 1510; Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, p. 132. 18  Franz J. Roning, “Die Schatz- und Heiltumskammern,” in Rhein und Maas, pp. 134–35. 15 16

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pilgrims to pass underneath, like that of Charlemagne in Aachen Cathedral.19 Often the churches themselves were rebuilt to resemble giant reliquaries: Aachen Cathedral’s magnificent new gothic choir (1355–1414), the so-called “glass chapel” modeled after the SainteChapelle in Paris, is one prominent example. Further modifications to Aachen’s cathedral during the fourteenth-century gothic remodeling campaign even included new altars and chapels for specific groups and nationalities of pilgrims (Hungarians, Poles, and Slavonians). The most significant changes made, however, involved the remodeling of its romanesque tower, begun ca. 1300, to add spiral staircases with chapels for the relics, galleries, and the so-called “bridge” between the tower and octagon of Charlemagne’s eighth-century church, from which the great relic presentations were performed.20 Aachen was the first shrine to introduce ceremonial public “showings” of relics in regular seven-year cycles; the earliest documented ostensio from the tower was performed in 1322. Soon after, Cologne followed suit and transferred the exhibition of its relics from inside the cathedral to a special high wooden platform outside. Such showings were also held in Düsseldorf, Kornelimünster, Maastricht, Tongern and Utrecht, several of these shrines even scheduling their exhibitions to coincide with Aachen’s seven-year cycle. Time and again there are reports of overcrowded viewing platforms or roofs buckling under the great weight of the masses. One such catastrophe occurred during the Aachen Exhibition of 1440, when a house collapsed, burying 17 under the rubble and wounding many more.21 This tragedy establishes the proper context for an appropriate appreciation of Philipp de Vigneulle’s commenting on the houses around the church being secured with such thick wooden beams.22 Mass pilgrimage did not only influence the method of relic exhibition. The demand for greater visuality had a direct impact on the design of shrines and reliquaries themselves. Up until the thirteenth century, it was generally prohibited to display or exhibit exposed relics. The shrines and reliquaries were therefore designed to completely enclose the relics, most commonly in the form of chests or caskets  Philipp de Vigneulles describes this in his account; Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, p. 130. 20   Erich Stephany, “Heiligtumsfahrt,” p. 143. 21   Teichman, “Zur Heiligtumsfahrt,” p. 141. 22  Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, p. 126. 19



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without apertures or openings. Around the turn of the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, with the emergence of ceremonial relic exhibitions, ever more transparent display vessels and monstrances soon displaced closed reliquaries. Cologne Cathedral’s great new shrine of the Three Magi (1190–1220) is perhaps the earliest example of this development towards more visuality in reliquary design: a removable trapezoid plate was inserted in the shrine around 1200 to be able to reveal the three crowned skulls resting within (fig. 1). Earlier reliquaries, and others of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are not equipped with such exhibition devices.23 Within the context of Eucharistic devotion, the same demand of the faithful for greater visuality gave rise to the rite of elevation in the thirteenth century. These general developments in medieval piety, the changes in devotional emphasis in Christian theology and praxis in the fourteenth and fifteenth-century West are manifest in the cults themselves.24 While the main motivation for pilgrimage—to visit those sacred places where God had chosen to reveal Himself through miracles, that is, the desire for direct contact with the divine or direct access to God through holy matter—remained constant, the meaning of pilgrimage itself was evolving. From the twelfth century, there was an increase in pilgrimage to the shrines of the apostles and to places where relics of Mary and Christ—including objects that had been in touch with them–were venerated.25 Between 1300 and 1500 the veneration of relics of the blood of Christ—blood cult—changed, when “one kind of holy matter (bleeding hosts) tended to replace another (blood relics).”26 Yet another strand is the emergence of sacramental relics becoming objects of pilgrimage, in Germany, for example, at Blomberg (Westphalia), Gottsbüren (Hesse), Wilsnack (Brandenburg)

  Walter Schulten, “Kölner Reliquien,” in Ornamenta Ecclesiae. Kunst und Künstler der Romanik in Köln, Katalog zur Ausstellung des Schnütgen-Museums, vol. 2, ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1985), pp. 61–78, esp. pp. 63–4. Today, this trapezoid is only removed to display the relics on Epiphany (January 6). 24  Fine analyses are provided by André Vauchez, The Spirituality of the Medieval West from the Eighth to the Twelfth Century, trans. Colette Friedlander, Cistercian Studies 145 (Kalamazoo, 1993); André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein and trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN, 1993); and most recently by Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007). 25  Vauchez, Spirituality, p. 148. 26  Bynum, Blood, p. 257. 23

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and Sternberg (Mecklenburg) (fig. 2). “There were many bloods of Christ in the north of Germany in the long fifteenth century (1370s to 1520s). Tales of bleeding hosts led parish churches such as Wilsnack and Sternberg to become pilgrimage goals, vying with older sites such as Braunschweig and Schwerin that claimed to possess vials of sanguis Christi from the Holy Land.”27 Mass pilgrimage traffic was instrumental in creating hospitals and inns along the routes, as well as engendering secondary goals of pilgrimage. These, in turn, would become important stations for longdistance pilgrims on their way to Santiago or Rome. The shrines in Königslutter (Lower Saxony, near Brunswick) (fig. 3), Nikolausberg (Lower Saxony, near Göttingen) (fig. 4) and Jakobsberg (Westphalia) (fig. 5), cults that emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth century respectively along major trade routes through Germany, are examples of secondary or transit goals of this kind. Long-distance pilgrims coming from the far north or east, like Margery Kempe in 1433, would visit Wilsnack (fig. 6) on their way westward.28 Since pilgrims aspired to visit as many shrines as possible on their journey,29 it was not unusual for some to accept detours. The Hungarians passing through Erfurt on their way to Wilsnack in 1475, for example, were in all probability on their way to Aachen, since this was the year of a Great Exhibition. Another Hungarian group en route to Aachen in 1517 passed through Hildesheim: the most likely explanation for this unusual itinerary is a detour to Wilsnack.30 Pilgrims increasingly desired to acquire tangible evidence of their journeys, material tokens of the shrines visited. These were more than just religious souvenirs, however. They were visible proof of a  Bynum, Blood, p. 249.   Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, 1996); her trip from Danzig to Aachen via Wilsnack described in bk. 2, chaps. 4–7. 29   Another case in point is Landgrave Ludwig I of Hesse. Financial records for the period beginning in early August 1430 up to the end of July 1431 have survived, recorded by his clerk Siegfried Schrunter, listing all the Landgrave’s expenses. The landgrave’s pilgrimages in the years 1430 and 1431 are recorded here in detail, as the clerk accompanied Ludwig on these trips; see Friedrich Küch, ed., “Eine Quelle zur Geschichte des Landgrafen Ludwig I.,” in Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde 43 [= NF 33] (1909), 144–277. 30  Stolle, Memoriale, p. 379. The regular route led from Vienna via Passau, Regensburg, to Nuremberg and further up the Rhine via Cologne to Aachen; see Hartmut Kühne, “Unterwegs nach Wilsnack,” in Wunder-Wallfahrt-Widersacher. Die Wilsnackfahrt, eds. Hartmut Kühne and Anne-Katrin Ziesack (Regensburg, 2005), pp. 28–9. 27 28



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completed pilgrimage, testimonies of the bearer’s accomplishment and status. As such, they were worn conspicuously on the brim of the pilgrim hat or cloak. The practice of manufacturing and selling devotional souvenirs and other commemorative merchandise was common in the Holy Land from as early as the sixth century, mainly to circumvent the quarrying of souvenirs from the sacred shrines. It was not until the pilgrimage boom of the twelfth century that manufactured metal souvenirs such as badges and ampullae became avail­ able at the pilgrimage centers of the West.31 The earliest reference to the marketing of pilgrim signs in the West occurs in the twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: “Behind the fountain … there is the parvis, all of it paved out with stones. It is there that scallop shells, the insignia of Santiago, are sold to the pilgrims.”32 Each shrine would issue signs of a distinctive design, so it would be immediately recognizable to which particular places its bearer had been. The oldest medal badges preserved in the west date from the twelfth century at the latest and were issued in Cologne, Maastricht and Rocamadour. Soon mass pilgrimage generated an enormous demand; at the peak of the pilgrimage season at major shrines often hundreds of thousands were sold within but a few weeks’ time. Extant invoices from Einsiedeln Abbey, for example, record the sale of 130,000 badges in the 14-day period of the “Engelweihe” feast in 1466, the anniversary commemorating the miraculous consecration of St. Meinrad’s chapel (fig. 7). In Regensburg in 1519, the first year of the new pilgrimage to the “Fair Madonna,” 50,000 pilgrims flocked to the city, catching church authorities by surprise. The church badge shop sold 10,172 pewter badges and 2,430 in silver, but demand far exceeded supply. They were short by thousands of badges and, according to a contemporary account, “many pilgrims who did not received one wept and had to return home empty-handed.” In the following year, they were better prepared: according to the invoices, 109,698 lead badges and 9,763 silver ones were sold in 1520.33 31  Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London 7 (London, 1998), p. 3. 32   The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela, ed. and trans. William Melczer (New York, 1993), p. 122. Cf. Webb, Pilgrimage and Pilgrims, p. 124. 33   Kurt Köster, “Mittelalterliche Pilgerzeichen,” in Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen. Themen zu einer Ausstellung des Bayrischen Nationalmuseums und des Adalbert Stifter Vereins, München, eds. Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck and Gerda Möhler (Munich, 1984), pp. 203–23, esp. pp. 206–7. Cf. Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. 14.

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As a rule, the ecclesiastical institutions at the shrines would reserve exclusive rights over the manufacture and sale of their badges. Einsiedeln Abbey had its own “badge office,” but would permit others to produce and sell other types of devotional souvenirs, such as small bells or clay reproductions of the Einsiedeln Madonna. In some cases, ecclesiastical authorities would grant the privilege to manufacture badges to specific guilds, usually silversmiths, privileges that were often handed down within families over many generations. Often enough in times of high but highly unpredictable demand, those holding such privileges were confronted with extreme technical and organizational problems. To meet the enormous demand for the Great Exhibition in Aachen every seven years, authorities were forced to lift the ban on souvenir production for the peak period between Easter and St. Remigius (Oct. 1), opening the production and sale of all forms of religious souvenirs to anyone, even foreigners. It was this provision that allowed Johannes Gutenberg to produce “mirrors,” that is, signs on a large scale for the Great Exhibition in 1440 (fig. 8).34 The general developments in religious expression and piety, influencing everything from the architecture, the design of reliquaries and styles of presentation outlined above, also had their effect on the design of pilgrim badges. The earliest extant badges from the late twelfth to early thirteenth century are usually solid, flat plaques, either circular or pointed-oval in shape like those from Rocamadour, or rectangular like those issued in Noblat or Cologne. Eventually more elaborate designs were developed, so that by the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century the more intricate openwork type of badge predominated. Each place had its own particular signs, with imagery and configuration special to that place and to the saint or relics venerated there. Successful shrines like Aachen and Cologne produced more than one type. These tend to be based, however, on just a few basic iconographic programs. A widespread fashion in the fifteenth century were the mirror souvenirs, such as those manufactured by Gutenberg, that emerged in connection with the public showings of relics from galleries and balconies to the vast throngs of pilgrims on the ground or on viewing platforms. Pilgrims were no longer able to come into direct contact with the shrines, to approach and touch them with their pilgrim souvenirs. 34  Köster, Rhein und Maas, p. 147; Köster, “Gutenbergs Straßburger AachenspiegelUnternehmen von 1438/1440,” in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 58 (1983), 24–44.



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They held up mirror-badges, instead, thus obtaining a share of the relics’ miraculous virtue by capturing its reflection. Like touch-relics, mirrors were thought to encapsulate some of the radiated grace and retain it for future use. This practice began in Aachen, but was soon adopted at other major pilgrim centers such as Cologne, Düren, Brussels, Venice, St. Nicolas-de-Port, Larchat, Syon Abbey, Isleworth, Middlesex, and possibly Walsingham (fig. 9).35 In this manner, pilgrim signs absorbed a measure of saintly grace. One indication of their immaterial value is the devotion with which sophisticated pilgrims regarded their souvenirs: more affluent pilgrims would occasionally list plain badges among their jewelry collections or sew them onto pages of books of hours.36 Those no longer worn by their owners appear to have fulfilled apotropaic functions in a variety of settings: some have been discovered in or beneath foundations of buildings,37 others were nailed to boards and hung in homes,38 or fixed to entrances to yards and stables or buried in gardens and fields.39 In some regions there was a tradition of casting pilgrim badges onto church bells. Bell founders would embed the original signs into the clay outer moulds of the bells. The signs, made of a tin-lead alloy, melted in the casting process, leaving a facsimile on the face of the completed bell. This practice is only partially attributable to the belief in a sign’s apotropaic powers. More important were the properties it had acquired as a touch-relic: when the bell was rung, the grace stored in the badge would radiate over the community and surrounding countryside. It is important to keep in mind that a church bell was more than a musical instrument or a mere piece of technical equipment. Bells for churches were consecrated in an elaborate ritual that included  Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. 18.   See the definitive article by Kurt Köster, “Religiöse Medaillen und WallfahrtsDevotionalien in der Flämischen Buchmalerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Buch und Welt, Festschrift Gustav Hoffmann, eds. Hans Striedel and Joachim Wieder (Wiesbaden, 1965), pp. 459–504. 37  Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. 18. 38  Jürgen Wittstock, “Pilgerzeichen und andere Wallfahrtsdevotionalien in Norddeutschland,” in Aus dem Alltag der mittelalterlichen Stadt. Handbuch zur Sonderausstellung vom 5. Dezember 1982 bis 24. April 1983 im Bremer Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Focke-Museum), Hefte des Focke-Museums 62, p. 196, ill. 9: crude wooden plank with pilgrim badges from Wilsnack and Blomberg attached, unearthed in Amsterdam 1973 during construction work on the subway system; Amsterdam Bureau Monumenten en Archeologie, Inv.-no. MW2-6. 39  Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. 18. 35 36

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washing, anointing, and incensing after they were cast. Only bishops or papal legates were authorized to consecrate bells. The bell was vox dei, the voice of God that was capable of shattering the powers of evil and of imparting grace upon mankind. Just as the physical church building is representative of the community of the faithful, so too is the bell its external audible voice. The bell’s sound was a sacramental. In the Middle Ages bells also symbolized preachers of the Gospel.40 It has been common practice since the eleventh century to decorate bells with inscriptions and ornaments; for church bells these had to be of religious nature and content. The most frequent bell inscription in Europe is the invocation: o rex gloriae veni cum pace, or variations thereof.41 Bells would be adorned with a large variety of images and symbols, including depictions of patron saints, reliefs showing themes from the Life and Passion of Christ, especially pictures of the Virgin and the Child and Christ Crucified, as well as other religious symbols such as great ornamental Greek A and Ω, and, naturally, crosses in all forms. The seal or coat of arms of a patron and bell founders’ seals may also be found. Pilgrim badges used as bell ornaments were special in that they were considered to be, as we have indicated, holy objects, quasirepresentatives of the holy relics at the holy shrines visited. When such a badge came into direct contact with the shrine or saintly relics, it absorbed part of the virtue and was thus transformed into a relic itself. Such touch-relic badges may also occasionally be found in reliquaries, altars, and baptismal fonts.42 A pilgrim might have donated his precious badge to his community or bishop, who may have sponsored the pilgrimage, in gratitude upon his safe return. They might also have been votive offerings of pilgrims en route. Unfortunately, written sources documenting such donations have yet to be discovered. We have only the testimony of the bells themselves. 40   Ludwig Eisenhofer, Handbuch der katholischen Liturgik, 2 vols (Freiburg, 1941), vol. 1, pp. 388–99; vol. 2, pp. 472–5. See also Peter Howard, “Preaching to the Mob: Space, Ideas, and Persuasion in Renaissance Florence,” in this volume. 41  Eisenhofer, Liturgik, vol. 1, p. 388; Friedrich Wolff, Die Glocken der Provinz Brandenburg und ihre Gießer (Berlin, 1920), p. 19. 42   Kurt Köster, “Meister Tilman von Hachenburg. Studien zum Werk eines mittel­ rheinischen Glockengießers des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der als Glockenzier verwendeten mittelalterlichen Pilger- und Wallfahrtszeichen,” in Jahrbuch der hessischen kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung 8 (1957), 1–206, at 55.



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The first church bells to be adorned with pilgrim badges were made by the fourteenth-century bell foundries of Cologne. The practice was especially common during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but great regional differences may be observed. In Germany the tradition was most prevalent in the north, as well as in the Rhineland, and in the central territories of Hesse, Thuringia and Saxony. The custom was also popular in Scandinavia, but completely unknown in France. On bells in the Netherlands, Westphalia and in southern Germany, pilgrim badge casts are found only occasionally.43 Pilgrim badge casts on bells play a central role in pilgrimage studies. As source material they are invaluable, since, ironically, only a tiny proportion of these mass-produced pilgrim souvenirs now survives. The manufacture of these signs over a period of four centuries ran into many millions. Of the frail originals, however, no more than a few thousand—many of them mere fragments—have been excavated or discovered.44 Only the bells document the wide variety in form, size, and type of signs from a particular pilgrim center. Frequently, fragments found in archeological excavations may only be reconstructed and identified with the help of complete cast specimens found on bells. Most recently, for example, our discovery of a badge from Blomberg on the bell in Rohlsdorf (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) dated 1487 (fig. 10).45 It is the only known dated badge from Blomberg. Four fragments of originals have survived—either the upper portion or the base with the inscription CORP XPI BLOMBERG—excavated in the Schelde estuary in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. Another bell cast of much poorer quality appears on an undated bell in Frøslev, Denmark. As yet it is catalogued as a “Eucharistic miracle” badge of

43   Andreas Haasis-Berner and Jörg Poettgen, “Die mittelalterlichen Pilgerzeichen der Heiligen Drei Könige. Ein Beitrag von Archäologie und Campanologie zur Erforschung der Wallfahrt nach Köln,” in Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters 30 (2002), 173–202, esp. 178; Kurt Köster, “Pilgerzeichen und figürlicher Schmuck auf mittelalterlichen Glocken,” in Glocken in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Beiträge zur Glockenkunde, ed. Kurt Kramer (Karlsruhe, 1986), pp. 66–71, esp. p. 67. 44  Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, p. 13. 45   Cornelia Oefelein, “Pilgerzeichen – Neue Funde auf Glocken in Brandenburg,” in Das Zeichen am Hut im Mittelalter. Europäische Reisemarkierungen, Symposiun in memoriam Kurt Köster (1912–1986), Die Pilgerzeichensammlung des Berliner Kunstgewerbemuseums, eds. Hartmut Kühne, Lothar Lambacher and Konrad Vanja, Europäische Wallfahrtsstudien 4 (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), pp. 115–126, esp. p. 121.

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unknown origin, depicting “two angles holding up the host(s).”46 Based on the new find on the Rohlsdorf bell, these fragments—and the cast on the Frøslev bell—may be identified as the same type of Blomberg badge.47 Dated bells may serve as a reliable aid in dating a pilgrim badge, whereas badges found in archeological excavations are only datable when found together with or by additional datable material.48 For example, on the bell in Groß Kreutz (located between the cities of Brandenburg and Potsdam) we discovered a very well preserved pilgrim badge from Königslutter (fig. 11).49 Little is known about the history of the pilgrimage to Königslutter, presumed to have commenced around 1400; the earliest extant written source dates from 1408.50 A number of Königslutter pilgrim badges dating from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century have been found in archeological excavations and cast on bells. The bell in Groß Kreutz is dated 1409, making this the oldest known dated pilgrim badge from Königslutter.51 46   Kunera-databank object no. 04205; cf. Lars Andersson, Pilgrimsmärken och vallfart. Medeltide pilgrimskultur i Skandinavien, Lund Studies in Medieval Archeaology 7 (Kumla, 1989), p. 136, no. R6. 47  For the Schelde fragements, see H. J. E. van Beuningen (Jos) and Adrianus Maria Koldeweij, Heilig en Profaan. 1000 laat-middeleeuwse insignies uit de collectie H.J.E. van Beuningen, Rotterdam Papers 8 (Cöthen, 1993), p. 143, ill. 122, and Heilig en Profaan 2. 1200 laat-middeleeuwse insignies uit openbare en particuliere collections, Rotterdam Papers 12 (Cöthen, 2001), p. 367, ills. 1541 and 1542. Three types of pilgrim badges from Blomberg have been identified: Kurt Köster, “Eine neuerschlossene Quelle zur Geschichte der Blomberger Wallfahrt und ihrer Pilgerzeichen,” in Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 32 (1963), 5–15; Köster, “Ein spätmittelalterliches Blomberger Pilgerzeichen. Zu einem Amsterdamer Bodenfund von 1973,” in Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 43 (1974), 9–18; and Carina Brumme and Hartmut Kühne, “Jenseits von Wilsnack und Sternberg: Pilgerzeichen spätmittelalterlicher Heilig-Blut-Wallfahrten,” in Varia Campanologiae Studia Cyclica, 25 Jahre Deutsches Glockenmuseum auf Burg Greifenstein, FS Jörg Poettgen, Schriften aus dem Deutschen Glockenmuseum 6 (Greifenstein, 2009), pp. 129–142, esp. pp. 136–138. 48   Jörg Poettgen, “Europäische Pilgerzeichenforschung. Die Zentrale Pilgerzeichenkartei (PZK) Kurt Köster (†1986) in Nürnberg und der Forschungsstand nach 1986,” in Jahrbuch für Glockenkunde 7/8 (1995/96), 195–206, esp. p. 205. 49   This badge is mentioned in none of the previous publications; hand-written lists in the archives of the state ministry of historical monuments (in Wunsdorf) compiled in the 1960s only mention a “relief ” without further description. 50   Contained in Brunswick’s city ordinance; see Hartmut Kühne, “Das Heilige Blut der Welfen und die Ablässe des sächsischen Kaisers—Braunschweig und Königslutter,” Wunder-Wallfahrt-Widersacher, pp. 185–190, esp. pp. 188 and 190. 51   See the respective entries in the online databanks “Kunera” (http://www.kunera .nl, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), and “Pilgerzeichendatenbank” (http://www .baitwakil.de, Kunstwerbe museum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).



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Conversely, an identified badge may help date an undated bell. In all previous catalogues, the undated bell in Börnicke (Barnim) is estimated to date either from the second half of the fourteenth century,52 or thirteenth / fourteenth century.53 The three pilgrim badges, typically described as “reliefs,”54 remained hitherto unidentified as such. In fact, the two “reliefs showing the adoration of the Magi” are pilgrim badges from Cologne (figs. 12 and 13). Both are of the same early type manufactured in Cologne from 1280 until no later than 1350.55 The third “relief showing a crucifixion group” is in fact a pilgrim badge from Gottsbüren (fig. 14). Pilgrimage to Gottsbüren and pilgrim badge production there commenced in 1331.56 Thus, this group of pilgrim badge casts enables us to narrow the casting date of the Börnicke bell down to no earlier than 1331 and no later than 1350. The historical significance and value of the cast badges are not limited to the disciplines of archeology and campanology, they are also important sources for historical-geographical studies of pilgrimage. The signs preserved on bells reflect the geographic range or impact of a particular cult. The geographic distribution of pilgrim signs may also document the actual significance of a shrine, or even the existence of shrines long extinct and forgotten. One example is Niedermünster (Alsace, France). The abbey, founded in the ninth century, was a wellvisited center of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages; Richard the Lionheart journeyed to the abbey in 1194. In 1540 it was completely destroyed and its relic, a miraculous cross, transferred to the neighboring abbey of Hohenburg. In 1580 the cross was transferred yet again to Mosheim; it disappeared without a trace in the French Revolution. In addition to the two casts found by Kurt Köster 52  Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, Berlin, Bestand 525, “Glockenerfassung Richard Heinzel”, inv.-no. 175/1770. 53  Matthias Friske, Die mittelalterlichen Kirchen auf dem Barnim: Geschichte— Architektur—Ausstattung, Kirchen im ländlichen Raum 1 (Berlin, 2001), p. 447. The entry in Wolff ’s inventory contains the comment “very old” (p. 52). 54   Both Heinzel and Friske list “reliefs, two with the adoration of the Magi and one crucifixion group”, although Friske does add in his description of the first “relief ” of the Magi, in parentheses, “in the shape of a pilgrim badge, from Cologne?”, p. 112. 55   Type A II, one with the Virgin seated on the left and one with her seated on the right; cf. Haasis-Berner/Poettgen, “Pilgerzeichen der Heiligen Drei Könige,” 182–184 and Figure 7. The later date given by Haasis-Berner/Poettgen is “up to 1322/1350 at the latest.” 56   Kurt Köster, “Gottsbüren, das ‘hessische Wilsnack’. Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte einer mittelalterlichen Heiligblut-Wallfahrt im Spiegel ihrer Pilgerzeichen,” in Festgabe für Paul Kirn, ed. Ekkehard Kaufmann (Berlin, 1961), pp. 198–222.

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on fifteenth-century bells in Hesse,57 only four other casts (three on bells, one on a bronze baptismal font) have since been identified. To this day, no original badges from Niedermünster have been found. In the course of our investigation of the bells in Brandenburg, an additional cast of this rare sign was discovered on an undated bell from ca. 1375 in Nackel (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) (figs. 15 and 16) from the second half of the 15th century.58 Bells testify to the immense religious mobility of the Middle Ages by defining from where the pilgrims came and where they went. In recording the starting points and goals of journeys of pilgrimage, they may provide useful information for the reconstruction of historical  roads and trade routes, major and secondary, for which written sources, such as maps or itineraries, are rarely extant. The study of pilgrim badges in Germany has been closely connected to campanology from the beginning. Inspired by Frederik Uldall’s publication of 1906 on medieval bells in Denmark, the very first study of pilgrim badge casts on bells to appear,59 Paul Liebeskind published a similar study describing badges appearing on bells in Thuringia.60 While scholarly interest in pilgrim badges waned elsewhere until 1940, Friedrich Wolff published his complete inventory of the bells in Brandenburg in 1920. In his introductory text, Wolff also discusses the topic of pilgrim badges on bells and attempts to describe and catalogue as many as possible, yet admits his data is incomplete.61 However, Wolff did not personally do any on-site research, but gleaned all descriptions of badges from available archival material.62

57   Kurt Köster, “Pilgerzeichen-Studien. Neue Beiträge zur Kenntnis eines mittelalterlichen Massenartikels und seiner Überlieferung,” in Bibliotheca docet, Festscrift Carl Wehner, ed. Siegfried Joost (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 77–100. Cf. Niedermünster, pp. 88–89. 58  It appears together with seven other pilgrim badges from unknown shrines; cf. Oefelein, “Pilgerzeichen,” pp. 121–4. 59  Frederik Uldall, Danmarks middelalderlige Kirkeklokker (Copenhagen, 1906). 60   Paul Liebeskind, “Pilger- oder Wallfahrtsmedaillen auf Glocken, Teil I/II,” in Die Denkmalpflege 6 (1904), 53–5, and Die Denkmalpflege 7 (1905), 117–120 and 125–8. 61   The study of pilgrim badges was still nascent at the time, so Wolff was unable to interpret these signs, nor to determine their provenances for lack of comparable material. At the time, the only published catalogues were those of Arthur Forgeais on the archeological finds from the Seine River in Paris from 1863, 1865, and 1873. The first archeological find in Germany was from the Weser River in Bremen in the late 1920s. 62   Wolff, p. 11.



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The founder of systematic pilgrim-badge studies in Germany was Kurt Köster, who published numerous articles from 1957 up to the year of his death in 1986 and compiled a systematic file of all known pilgrim badges. Köster died before his projected handbook could be published.63 Further regional studies on pilgrim badge casts on bells were published in 1989 for Scandinavia by Lars Andersson, 1993 for Mecklenburg, Germany by Monika Schaugstat, and for Trier, Cologne and Thuringia by Jürgen Poettgen in 1994, 2002 and 2009.64 Of the “German Bell Atlas,” conceived in the 1950s, only four volumes have been completed to date (1959, 1967, 1973, 1985), all concerning southern regions of Germany. Systematic, comprehensive regional investigations of bells within the context of pilgrim badge studies remain desiderata. For Brandenburg, no such investigation has been attempted thus far.65 It is the projected goal of the research project introduced here, still in progress, to compile the first comprehensive catalogue of all pilgrim badges cast on all medieval bells still extant in Brandenburg (within today’s boundaries). The fieldwork involves visiting 496 church towers in all, spread over a total area of 29.479 km2 (fig. 17). This poses great logistical challenges: not only the distances involved, but difficulties, and certain risks, encountered at the sites themselves can be daunting. First, the local custodian of the key must be found to gain access to the bell tower; then the ascent to the bells, which entails climbing up

63   Köster’s entire collection has recently been incorporated into the electronic databank “Kunera.” 64  In addition to the literature previously cited above, see Monika Schaugstat, “Mittelalterliche Pilgerzeichen auf Glocken in mecklenburgischen Dorfkirchen,” in Mecklenburgische Jahrbücher 109 (1993), 19–54; Jörg Poettgen, “Vorreformatorische Wallfahrtsdevotionalien aus dem Matthiaskloster zu Trier,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 34 (1994), 47–76; Poettgen, “Kryptogramme und Pilgerzeichen auf spätmittelalterliche Glocken im östlichen Thüringen. Studien zur Werkstatt des Meisters Herman Herlin in Jena,” Jahrbuch für Glockenkunde 9–10 (1997/98), 81–98; Jörg Poettgen and Hartmut Kühne, “Mittelalterliche Pilgerzeichen aus der Diözese Trier: Kurzkatalog und Befunde,” in Wege zum Heil: Pilger und heilige Ort an Mosel und Rhein, eds. Thomas Frank, Michael Matthäus and Sabine Reichert, Geschichtliche Landeskunde 67 (Stuttgart, 2009), pp. 135–80. 65   All archival material on Brandenburg has proven to be incomplete, including the collection of the German Bells Archive preserved in the German National Museum in Nuremberg, as well as the “Glockenerfassung Richard Heinzel,” in the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin, an unpublished inventory of the church bells of East Germany commissioned by the Protestant Church, compiled from 1951 to 1954. Heinzel did his own on-site research in bell towers, but poor health prevented him from finishing the project.

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rickety stairs and ladders and over brittle boards carrying heavy equipment (camera case, lighting, and cables, and so on) (fig. 18). Since the bells seldom hang at eye level, further climbing and balancing on beams is required to reach them. These obstacles are probably the reason why studies of pilgrim badge on bells remain incomplete. The on-site investigations in 386 church towers are concluded, 110 church towers remain to be examined. All pilgrim badge finds are documented (photographs, plaster casts). To date, 46 new pilgrim badge finds of identified signs have been documented, in addition to the 41 previously known signs, nine known signs newly attributed, and 29 new finds catalogued that remain unprovenenced, in addition to the 17 previously known.66 The finds still need to be analyzed and interpreted. In what way do the signs mirror the general evolution of medieval pilgrimage? They seem to indicate the outlines of a pilgrimage landscape in Brandenburg. Do multiple signs cast on single bells—like in Gramzow (16), Rohlsdorf (15), Falkenhagen (10), Nackel (8), and Jeserig (5)— reflect individual itineraries? Are particular clusters of finds along major routes of trade and traffic indicative of the religious mobility of the people of the entire region? The identified finds include badges from shrines across Germany and Europe: Aachen, Blomberg, Canterbury (England) (fig. 19), Cologne, Einsiedeln (Switzerland), Elende, Gottsbüren, Jakobsberg, Königslutter, Lucca (Italy), Neuss, Niedermünster (France), Nikolausberg, Maastricht (Netherlands), St.-Josse-sur-Mer (France) (fig. 20), Thann (France), Werben, Willershausen, and Wilsnack. Do they give evidence of the vast network of routes and the intricate web of access roads, tributaries and detours of pilgrim traffic spanning Europe?

66   The fieldwork was completed in 2010. The finds are being published in Rainer and Cornelia Oeflein, Pilgerspuren Die Pilgerzeichenfunde auf den mittelalterlichen Glocken Brandenburgs, Berlin (forthcoming).



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Figure 1:  Pilgrim badge from Cologne.   Motif: Crowned busts of the Three Magi.   Gramsow (Uckermark) undated bell (1st half 15th century).

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Figure 2:  Pilgrim badge from Sternberg.   Motif: Holy Blood–monstrance with miraculous hosts.  New find 2006: Preddöhl (Prignitz) bell dated 1515.



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Figure 3:  Pilgrim badges from an unknown Marian shrine (Cologne?) and Königslutter.  Motifs: Madonna on throne, above her shoulder on the left a star. Crucifixion above the crowned bust of Lothar of Süpplingenburg.  New find 2005: Falkenhagen (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.

Figure 4:  Pilgrim badges from Neuss, Nikolausberg, and an unknown St. Christopher shrine (left to right).  Motifs: St. Quirinus (left). St. Nicholas (middle), St. Christopher (right).  New find 2009: Jeserig (Fläming) bell dated 1479.

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Figure 5:  Pilgrim badge from Jakobsberg.  Motif: St. James wearing pilgrim’s hat and carrying pilgrim’s staff; above the tip of the staff a scallop shell is visible, to the left of the saint a small figure kneels.  New attribution 2005: Falkenhagen (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.

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Figure 6:  Pilgrim badge from Wilsnack.  Motif: Holy Blood – three miraculous hosts with scenes from the Passion of Christ.  New find 2009 (second of two signs); Bertikow (Uckermark) undated bell (15th century). .

Figure 7:  Pilgrim badge from Einsiedeln–fragment, left half.   Motif: miraculous chapel consecration.  New attribution 2005: Wildberg (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) bell dated 1476.

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Figure 8:  Pilgrim badge from Aachen—mirror badge.  Motif: Lamentation of Christ, in the larger lower field; the presentation of the Virgin’s Shroud in the upper field; in between the small circular frame for the mirror.  New identification 2004 (previously published as “Virgin and Child” motif): Barsikow (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) bell dated 1513.

Figure 9:  Pilgrim badge from Cologne—mirror badge.  Motif: Adoration of the Magi topped by another Virgin in a small tower, flanked by two circular frames for mirrors.  New find 2009: Bornim (Havelland) undated bell (early 15th century)

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Figure 10:  Pilgrim badge from Blomberg.   Motif: monstrance with miraculous hosts falling into well.  New find 2007: Rohlsdorf (Prignitz) bell dated 1487.

Figure 11:  Pilgrim badge from Königslutter  Motif: Crucifixion in upper section; in lower field, King Lothar of Süpplingenburg holding scepter and orb; the imperial coat of arms with eagle.  New find 2009: Groß Kreutz (Havelland) bell dated 1409.

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Figure 12:  Pilgrim badge from Cologne.   Motif: Adoration of the Magi—Virgin seated right.  New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).

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Figure 13:  Pilgrim badge from Cologne.   Motif: Adoration of the Magi—Virgin seated left.  New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).

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Figure 14:  Pilgrim badge from Gottsbüren.   Motif: Holy Blood—Crucifixion.  New find 2009: Börnicke (Barnim) undated bell (ca. 1331–1350).

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Figure 15:  Pilgrim badge from Niedermünster.   Motif: camel carrying miraculous jeweled cross.  New find 2005: Nackel (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) undated bell (2nd half 15th century).

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Figure 16:  Pilgrim badge from Niedermünster.   Motif: camel carrying miraculous jeweled cross.  New find 2005: Nackel (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) undated bell (2nd half 15th century).



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Figure 17:  Bell tower.

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Figure 18:  Bell tower abyss.

Figure 19:  Pilgrim badge from Canterbury.   Motif: Thomas Becket’s flight.  New find 2006: Preddöhl (Prignitz) bell dated 1515.

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Figure 20:  Pilgrim badge from St.-Josse-sur-Mer.   Motif: St. Jodocus.  New find 2009: Dedelow (Uckermark) undated bell (1st half 15th century).

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Philip II’s Entry into Zaragoza in 1585: A Theater of Power or Contestation? Teofilo F. Ruiz In 1585, the king of Spain, Philip II (1556–1598), went traveling for almost a year and a half. It was not overall a good trip, and it must have reinforced Philip II’s natural reluctance to public displays. But his long journey through the Crown of Aragon provides us with a unique perspective on the peculiar nature of the relations between a king and his subjects in early modern Spain in particular and Europe in general. What was this trip and the festivals that were associated with Philip II’s sojourn all about? Shortly after the Christmas celebrations, Philip II, the most powerful ruler in sixteenth-century Europe and probably in the entire world, left his austere surroundings in the newly built monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial and travelled to nearby Madrid, his recently appointed capital.1 He remained in Madrid for a few days, and on 19 January 1585 the Spanish king embarked on a more than a year and a three-month perambulation throughout his eastern realms: Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. A reluctant traveler and an intensively private ruler, Philip II always preferred the daily routine of exhaustive work at his desk than the festive displays usually associated with peripatetic kingship.2 The long and trying journey took all of 1585 and the early portions of 1586. Such absence from the center of the spider web from which he ruled most of the world had become necessary for “reasons of state” (the famous razón de estado). The journey had been undertaken purportedly to preside over the lavish wedding of his daughter Catalina to the Duke of Savoy, but the long voyage also served to insure the smooth succession of the young Infante Philip (to become 1   There is a vast literature on Philip II and I limit myself here to the most recent works. See John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (New York, 1964), pp. 242–78; John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, 2 vols (2nd ed., New York, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 177–367. More recent works include Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, 1997); Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, (3rd ed., Chicago, 1995). 2   See Parker, Philip II, p. 45.

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Philip III, king of the Spains in 1598) to the diverse realms and possessions that constituted the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth century and to place the authority of the monarch on display.3 Henry Cock, an archer in Philip II’s Flemish guard and a papal notary as well, has left us a detailed account of Philip’s journey and of the numerous events, festive and political, that played out along the way.4 His narrative, 256 pages in the nineteenth-century edition, includes significant historical details and ethnographic information about the cities and small towns he visited during Philip’s travels throughout the peninsula. It also provides detailed descriptions of buildings, customs, and other such information of interest to Cock’s inquisitive and observing mind. Written by a foreigner who spent close to a decade or so in Spain while in the service of his king, Henry Cock’s account provides us with a remarkable perspective on sixteenthcentury culture, and the close relationship that existed (and still exists) between spectacle, the contestation of power, and crowds. Although Cock’s account is deserving of a monograph—I have just published A King travels on late medieval and early modern Spanish festivals in which Philip II’s travel in 1585–86 play a central role— I focus in these pages on following Philip and his cortege from Madrid to Zaragoza, while attempting to provide a “thick description” of the meaning of the processions and celebrations that marked the king’s progress through his kingdoms. At the same time, I would like to question the efficacy of spectacles in the workings of power in early 3   Spain was what John H. Elliott has accurately described as a “composite monarchy.” This means that Philip II, as well as all his Habsburgs predecessors and successors, exercised limited authority outside Castile. That fact is at the core of this essay. See John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137 (1992), 48–71; Ruth Mackay, The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile (Cambridge, UK, 1999). 4   The original of this narrative is extant at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), in the manuscript collection (Richelieu) Espagnol 272. I consulted this version, written by a very clear hand in Latin and Castilian, in the Summer of 2007. For Cock’s account, see Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585, á Zaragoza, Barcelona y Valencia, eds. Alfredo Morel-Fatio and Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid, 1876). All references are to this edition, hereafter Relación. On Henry Cock and the manuscript see Relación, pp. v–xvii. The actual title of Cock’s account is Anales del año ochenta y çinco, en el qual el rey catholico de España Don Phelipe con el prinçipe Don Phelipe su hijo fué á Monçon á tener las cortes del reino de Aragon. Henry or Henrique Cock was the author of yet another significant account of Philip II’s voyage (Jornada de Tarazona hecha por Felipe II en 1592 pasando por Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, Búrgos, Logroño, Pamplona y Tudela, eds. Alfredo Morel-Fatio y Antonio Rodriguez Villa [Madrid, 1879]) which I examine in detail in A King travels (Princeton, 2012).



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modern Spain and Europe, and to argue that we need to think of these spectacles in new and more complex ways. Philip II and His World In 1585, Philip II was at the very height of his considerable powers and of his remarkable abilities as a statesman. Recent biographies and studies, most of them published on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death in 1598, have provided a much needed revision of the king’s life and policies. Far from the negative assessments of the king, emerging from the vitriolic polemics of the Black Legend, we have now a portrait of Philip II as a dedicated servant of the state. Philip was perhaps the first true royal bureaucrat in European history. A man of great political cunning, he understood, in spite of his well-documented and heart-felt piety, political necessity. Someone who has been quoted as stating that religion was too important to leave to the Pope, was keenly aware of the role of Christianity and belief as tools for ruling. These tools he deployed adroitly throughout his reign.5 In 1585 his rule extended through parts of Asia, Africa, the entire Iberian peninsula (having become king of Portugal and of its vast maritime empire in 1580), the New World, most of Italy, and the Low Countries. Spanish armies, still undefeated in pitched battle and enjoying a considerable superiority over any other national army, served as the bulwark for Habsburg interests in Austria and Catholic Germany. Yet in 1585, while still in what Parker describes as “years of triumph,” the Spanish Monarchy was beginning to be beset by mounting problems that would, in a little over half a century, lead to Spain’s eventual demise as a major political power. Rebellion in the Low Countries, sectarian and national in nature, presented serious problems for Philip as the struggle turned into an unsolvable quagmire. Staying the course meant a continuous drain of Spanish manpower and fiscal resources. Twice already Philip II had to declare bankruptcy, and he would be forced to do so again before his death. Abandoning the Low Countries, with its historical ties to Burgundy and to Philip’s ancestral home was not yet a possibility.6   See Parker, Philip II, chap. 9.  On Philip’s growing economic problems see Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, vol. 1, pp. 129–55; Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 279–95. 5 6

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The Spanish economy, which had been growing since the late fifteenth century, entered a period of decline. Plagues and other endemic illnesses reduced the population of the peninsula. Castile, which had been the great source of taxes and conscripts, witnessed how its peasant population, overburdened by taxes, began to flee to the peripheries of the empire. The very ambitious programs of the 1570s—the great census of the Monarchy’s resources undertaken in the Relaciones topográficas, the pictorial depiction of Spanish cities, and other such humanist projects—had been shelved in the library of the monastery of El Escorial as mere additions to Philip II’s once ambitious programs and fierce collectionist impulses. In 1585, the kingdom had not yet fully recovered from the brutal Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras between 1568 and 1570 (brutal in the actions and reprisals of both contending forces). The Ottoman empire, in spite of having been soundly defeated at Lepanto in 1571, still presented an overwhelming threat in the Mediterranean and, together with Barbary pirates, a continuous menace to Spain’s Mediterranean shores. Even Spanish possessions in the New World had come under pressure from English and Dutch privateers, and though the Empire was not seriously threatened, it was a costly nuisance. In 1585, the preparations for the Invincible Armada (which did not prove to be so invincible after all) were already under way.7 Religious conflicts in Germany and Central Europe also demanded continuous outlay of men and money. The king’s star was no longer on the rise. In hindsight one can see that all these problems would eventually wreck Spain, much more so when Philip II’s successors, his son, grandson, and great grandson were either indolent, incompetent, or, in the case of Charles II, insane. The king’s long and difficult journey in 1585 was not undertaken from a position of strength, but it was not directly aimed at addressing any of these issues. The main purpose of the perambulations through his eastern realms was to meet the mounting political difficulties in ruling the Crown of Aragon. It is in the context of these political tensions that we must place Philip II’s journey and the scripted, and often not so successfully scripted, ceremonials that accompanied his slow progression from Madrid to Zaragoza (the capital of the kingdom of Aragon) to Catalan cities and eventually to Barcelona, the capital of the  Parker, Philip II, p. 148.

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Principality of Catalonia (where he entered without celebration because, as Henry Cock tells us, the great men of the city and the king could not agree on a reception befitting the king). From Barcelona, the king proceeded to Monzón to have his young son sworn as heir to the thrones of the Crown of Aragon by a combined meeting of the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian parliaments. And from Monzón, the king traveled to Valencia, the eponymous capital of the kingdom. A voyage to the Crown of Aragon was always a risky business. The eastern kingdoms resented violently any infringement of their traditional liberties. They contributed little to the Spanish monarchy’s far flung enterprises: little taxes, fewer men. The county of Ribagorza, strategically located on the Pyrenean border with France, had been in an open civil war between the lord of the region and its peasants for centuries. Violent attacks against Moriscos in Aragon and Valencia were common. Morisco reprisals were as common. Banditry was widespread, and the great road connecting Zaragoza and Barcelona was, for all practical purposes and as Cervantes describes in Don Quixote, in the hands of bandits.8 Mobs could be mustered at any time by wily lords and city officials to create disturbances and put pressure on visiting dignitaries. The Crown of Aragon was a headache and a heartache.9 Philip II’s Entry into Zaragoza After such long, but necessary, introduction, we should look carefully at that part of his journey that led him from Madrid to Zaragoza and attempt to explicate its meanings, successes, failures, and the role which crowds played in these theaters of power. It is important to reemphasize the nature of our source. The narrator, Henry Cock, was part of a royal guard manned exclusively by foreigners. In his account Cock includes a roster of the entire guard and they were overwhelmingly from the Low Countries.10 He wrote, therefore, as a foreign observer and from within a foreign context. Moreover, his narrative is  8   See Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer, 2 vols (12th ed. Barcelona, 1995), vol. 2, p. 60.  9  See Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London, 2001), pp. 176–82, 200–05. 10   Relación, pp. 91–95. The guard consisted of 100 archers, most of them from Flanders, Holland, Brabant, and Burgundy.

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far more concerned with the description of what he saw and the history of the places he visited along the way than with the political implications or any ulterior motive to describe the spectacle of monarchy for ideological purposes. We must trust our source and what it shows about the social and cultural contexts in which Philip undertook his long and tiring travels through the eastern realms. The king’s explicit aim for his visit to Zaragoza was to marry his daughter, the Infanta Doña Catalina of Austria, to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy. The wedding took place in Zaragoza, but it could have taken place in Madrid as easily. One far more important reason was, as noted early, to have the different Cortes of the Crown of Aragon recognize the young Infante Philip (he travelled on the knees of one of his sisters) as heir to the throne. The underlying aim was to parade the majesty of the king among his often recalcitrant Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian subjects and to enhance royal authority and devotion for the Crown. As prelude to the voyage to Aragon, the Infante was sworn as heir to Castile by the usually pliant Castilian Cortes on 11 November 1584. Royal officials were then sent in advance of the royal journey to Zaragoza and along the road between Madrid and Zaragoza to prepare suitable accommodations and supplies for the king and his court.11 There must have been careful negotiations as to the nature of the entry, the expected reception, and other such matters which were part of the careful scripting of royal movement through the kingdom. It is clear, nonetheless, that the size of the royal entourage and of the mounted guards was far greater than what many of the small locations along the way could host. Henry Cock and his fellow guardsmen often rested in different towns from where the king slept, which also tell us something about Philip II’s sense that in Castile he was quite safe. Implicit in the account of the king’s perambulations from Madrid to his eastern realms is the harsh reality that the most important king in sixteenthcentury Europe could not command a flow of supplies sufficient to support him and his court for a few days in small localities. In fact, many courtiers and others bent in accompanying the king were ordered to stay behind in Madrid or to proceed ahead to Zaragoza. 11   Relación, p. 9. This description contains a pejorative reference to Spanish peasants. Royal orders were given to ensure a just price for goods purchased along the royal journey because “the peasants of Spain are inclined to deception and theft …” (translation mine).



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On Saturday 19 January 1585, Philip II, riding on horseback and followed by large carriages, each of them pulled by six horses and carrying his daughters, the young prince, and the Infanta’s ladies-in-waiting, left his palace. After a brief stop at the monastery of the Discalced Carmelites in Madrid to visit his sister, Philip II proceeded to the village of Barajas, where he spent the night at the palace of the count of Barajas and graced with his presence the marriage of the count’s daughter. From Barajas, just a mere thirty minutes today by car from the center of the city and the location of Madrid’s international airport today, the king and his cortege proceeded to Alcalá de Henares, site of a famous university. There he was received, the account tells us, with “great happiness and festivities.” Learned speeches in Latin were given in the king’s presence, who also ordered that they be given in the “romance”(in Castilian) so that the princesses and Infante could understand the speech. A touching moment of paternal concern, the king’s remark serves as a reminder of the vigor of the vernacular and the fact that even the high-born Infantas could not understand Latin.12 From Alcalá the king traveled a short distance to Guadalajara, the seat of the powerful dukes of Infantado. He remained there for four days, as he prepared to cross the sparsely inhabited region between Guadalajara and the Aragonese border. A substantial number of the members of the royal cortege left ahead for Zaragoza, not only to pave the way for the king’s arrival, but also not to overburden the small villages along the way. As the king made his slow progression through eastern-central Castile, often delayed by bad weather, snow, and terrible roads, the local population, most of them peasants, came to the road and danced for the benefit of the king, “making noises” by snapping their fingers or playing castanets.13 The first leg of the royal trip serves as a prelude to his arrival in Aragon and his eventual royal entry into Zaragoza. It deserves some explication. Even in the late sixteenth century, royal itinerancy, as Rita Costa Gomes has pointed out, helped fix the territory.14 Even for a king as fond of the Escorial as Philip was, showing his royal presence around his lands was an important aspect of rulership. This worked at two levels: a royal visit to a high nobleman—as his stay at the count of   Relación, pp. 10–12.   Relación, pp. 13–16. 14   See Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (Cambridge, UK, 2003), pp. 291–95. 12 13

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Barajas’ house and presence at the wedding of the count’s daughter show, or as his long stay in Guadalajara (the see of one of the most powerful noblemen in Castile) may indicate—was a great honor to be treasured. It built loyalty and enhanced the prestige of both noblemen and king. It bound the monarch and the nobility together through ceremonial and commensality. Showing the magnificence of the royal court, even though Philip II usually dressed in austere black, was an important component in the theatricality of power. His retinue, including Henry Cock’s archers, were garbed in bright colors, serving as a vivid tableau vivant for the common people who came to the side of the road to see their king. At Brihuega, a small town or outgrown village, all the members of the town’s council waited outside the gates to kiss the king’s hand in obeisance. Then they led him through Brihuega’s streets, all of them adorned with triumphal arches made of ivy and covered with poems celebrating the king’s visit. Philip II reached the main square of the town and the house where he was to rest that night. One should note that Philip II had entered Brihuega after 5 PM, which should have been quite dark and cold, making the whole celebration a bit difficult for everyone. As the king gazed at them from a balcony, the citizens of Brihuega danced two types of dances for the king’s entertainment. One was a dance of savages and the other that of peasants, though for members of the sixteenth-century upper elite if it concerned rustics, savages and peasants were one and the same. After the dances had concluded, the entire town’s population—Henry Cock estimated them at around 1,200 citizens (or around 5,000 inhabitants), paraded in front of the king.15 If one considers how cold it must have been, how difficult it must have been for Philip to stand in the balcony with his frequent attacks of gout, and how tiresome and unsophisticated the whole affair must have been for such a punctilious king, one comes to realize what a very difficult task ruling was in early modern Europe. Yet one also understands how important these intimate contacts between a king and his people were for the well being of the monarchy. Beyond these highlights, Henry Cock’s narrative provide us with a vivid portrait of Castilian rural life, the sparse population, the insignificant and impoverished villages along the way, the awful weather, the impassable roads. Philip II’s Spain was a giant with feet of clay, to   Relación, p. 16.

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borrow Ferdinand Lot’s felicitous phrase about the late Roman Empire. When one thinks of the Loire valley in France and the network of pleasure chateaux built by the Valois kings and their prosperous subjects around the same time as Philip’s journey, one is struck by the realization that though Spain still enjoyed an undisputed military hegemony in Europe, that hegemony was not sustainable. By 15 February, almost a month after departing Madrid, the king’s glacial progression through his own secure and loyal kingdom of Castile brought him finally to the boundary with the kingdom of Aragon. Crossing into Aragon required a series of ceremonies that signalled Philip II’s acknowledgement of Aragon as a separate jurisdiction from that of Castile, or, as the narrative puts it, that it was “another kingdom.” On the Aragonese side of the border, the Justicia of Aragon waited, together with the inhabitants of the region singing and dancing in honor of the king. The office of the Justicia of Aragon dated back to the thirteenth century and was the most important office in Aragon proper. The Justicia, essentially an ombudsman, was the jealous defender of Aragonese liberties and privileges and, as Philip II found to his chagrin in 1592, capable of effectively thwarting royal authority in Aragon.16 His presence at the border provided a vivid reminder of the limitations of Philip’s power when it came to Aragon. In approaching the border, Castilian royal officials placed their staffs of office on the ground, signifying that they had no jurisdiction whatsoever in Aragon. The royal guard discharged their pistols as they crossed into yet another of Philip’s realms. Processions and celebrations were always multivocal performances. The king gained a great deal from them; others did as well. Festivities, in this particular case, the ceremonial crossing of a border, functioned as dialogical discourses. In Castile, where Philip II ruled with a great deal of authority (though not as much as we had once assumed), processions and spectacle were highly scripted to enhance the king’s image and authority. In Aragon, or as would be the case later on in Catalonia and Valencia, Philip II could not always be sure of what was in store for him.17 As we

16   Relación, p. 22. On the Justicia of Aragon, see Luis G. De Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas. De los orígens al final de la Edad Media (Madrid, 1968), pp. 571–80. 17  For Philip II’s travels, above all those sojourns to the Crown of Aragon, see María de los Angeles Pérez Samper, “La corte itinerante. Las visitas reales,” in Felipe II y el Mediterraneo, ed. Ernest Belenguer Cebria (Madrid, 1999), pp. 115–42.

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have seen, the royal entry into Barcelona never took place and was, in many respects, a humiliating failure. Reaching Daroca on 16 February, the king left the comfort of his carriage and rode into the town led by the Justicia, the council, and knights of Daroca. There he remained until Sunday with the usual masses, the exposition of the Corpus Christi, running of cows, and theatrical representations of St. George slaying the dragon.18 The political implications could not have been lost to the king in spite of the entertaining real flames pouring out of the dragon’s mouth and nostrils. St. George was a saint emblematic of the Crown of Aragon and its privileges. He was not the king’s favorite saint. Finally, after other stops and replay of such ceremonies, the king reached the outskirts of Zaragoza. His guard had gone into the city earlier and now it came out through the city’s main gate, blowing their trumpets to announce the king’s arrival. A procession was soon organized in a strictly hierarchical order. The king was to ride into the city flanked by the “jurado” of Zaragoza, a municipal official, and the governor of Aragon, Juan de Gurrea. The latter, either because of sickness or more likely because of political conflicts, was not available and was replaced at the eleventh hour by the archbishop of Zaragoza. The ceremonial procession was led by a large contingent of knights from Castile and Aragon, riding on their well-appointed horses. City officials and deputies to the Cortes, dressed in red velvet with gold trimmings followed. Behind them marched the members of the royal council of Aragon with their mace bearers dressed in scarlet robes with silver trimmings. Occupying the fourth group in the procession, eight deputies of the Corts or parliaments of Aragon, two each as representative of the four branches composing the Corts: ecclesiastics, high nobility, lower nobility, and urban representatives. Four mace bearers marched with them, holding their maces high in the air. Mixed with them, the grandees of Castile walked into the city. And then the king rode on his horse, flanked by the jurado de Cap and the archbishop, with his German and Castilian guards on both side of the road. Behind the king rode the royal carriage with the Infantas and the young heir to the throne. Other carriages with the ladies-in-waiting followed, while Henry Cock’s guard of Flemish archers closed the ceremonial procession. Slowly the king entered the city   Relación, p. 24.

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surrounded by a large but orderly crowd. All the houses and windows along the royal procession were gaily decorated with silk banners and tapestries. Beautiful maids, our observant informant does not fail to tell us, gazed from balconies and windows. At very short intervals along the royal route, stages had been built where musicians played. Bonfires were lit in every corner as throngs of people marched carrying torches and candles. Finally, the king reached the palace of the Count of Sástago, where he was to remain during his long stay in Zaragoza.19 That night around 8 PM more was yet in store for the longsuffering king, but before providing yet another description of yet another procession, one should make some attempt to explicate the meaning of this particular episode in the king’s entry into the capital of Aragon. The Meaning of Festivals: Theaters of Power or Contestation? Functionalist views of late medieval and early modern spectacles establish a secure and unfailing link between performance and power. Royal entries, calendrical and non-calendrical festivals projected, one has traditionally assumed, the power of kings to special interest groups and/or to the population at large. Through colors, symbols, and display, these peripatetic theaters of power buttressed royal authority and that of the Church especially, in the case of the latter in the great Corpus Christi processions and spectacular auto-da-fé. But did these theaters of power work always to the benefit of rulers? The simple answer is that they did not. In spite of Sir Roy Strong’s rightly famous book, Art and Power, which implicitly accepts the link between performance and lordly power, it is clear that some of these spectacles were, more often than not, sites of contestation and part of an elaborate and intricate dialogue between different political forces.20 While royal authority was never overtly challenged, and careful steps were taken to enhance the ruler’s majesty; other agendas were very much at play. At the end, the specific political and regional contexts dictated the scripting of processions and the great festivals of early modern Europe. We must, therefore, abandon overarching interpretations because they do   Relación, pp. 32–35.   Sir Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, 1984). 19 20

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not truly describe the myriad of possibilities inherent in all festive displays. But what about Philip II’s entry into Zaragoza? Here I attempt only the most perfunctory of analysis. The Spanish king went to the capital of the kingdom of Aragon for very specific reasons, the most important of which was having his young son, Philip, sworn as heir to the motley kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. While there was no real threat to the succession, the Crown of Aragon in general, and the kingdom of Aragon (the Crown of Aragon consisted of the kingdom of Aragon, that of Valencia, and the Principality of Catalonia) and its capital city, Zaragoza, in particular, had proven to be quite resistant to royal authority. I have already mentioned the brutal civil war raging in the large and strategically important county of Ribagorza. Juan de Gurrea, who allegedly could not accompany the king in the ceremonial entry because of illness, was a member of the family that ruled Ribagorza and had been carrying out predatory campaigns against its own dependant peasants for decades. They sponsored and paid bandits to raid Morisco enclaves in the Zaragoza hinterland, massacring Moriscos at Pina, Codo, Gelsa and other Morisco villages. Led by the infamous bandit, Lupercio Latrás, but with the open support of the Gurreas, these gangs of bandits sacked Pina in 1588, killing more than 300 Moriscos, raping and killing their wives, smashing the heads of their children against the walls, and looting Morisco property. The village of Pina was under the jurisdiction of the Marquis of Sástago, a royal ally and in whose house the king remained throughout his long sojourn in Zaragoza.21 I hope the reader is getting a sense of how, once we begin to deconstruct these spectacles, they are no longer straight forward assertions of royal power, but a complicated political dance. In fact, Philip II, unable to pacify Ribargorza by force, had to buy the county from the Gurreas at a very high price a few years after his solemn entrance into Zaragoza. It was the only way to restore royal rule to the region. The city itself, which received the king with music and celebrations in 1585, rebelled against the king in 1592 and refused to accept Philip II’s authority and his demands for the return of Antonio Perez as being in violation of Aragonese liberties.22 That the king entered the city flanked  Ruiz, Spanish Society, pp. 179–82.  For the disturbances of 1592 and the Antonio Pérez affair, see Kamen, Philip of Spain, pp. 284–92; Parker, Philip II, pp. 186–90. 21 22



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by the highest municipal official, the jurado de cap, and that the latter rode on equal footing with the king and the archbishop spoke volumes to the crowds lining the royal entry about the autonomy of Zaragoza’s authority and sent a clear message to the waiting throngs about the power of the city and its relation to its distant (and Castilian) king in Madrid. And to add insult to injury, while the royal council’s mace bearers walked in the entry with their maces pointing downwards, those holding the Corts’ signs of authority lifted them proudly not only to the avid gaze of the mobs crowding the city’s streets but to the king himself who followed directly the parliament’s representatives and who had a long history of conflict with the Aragonese Corts. The processional order, giving the place of honor to the Corts, was clearly part of a highly scripted ceremonial to which the king might have acquiesced out of political necessity, but about which he could not have been very happy. And we should not neglect to note the robes of vivid colors worn by municipal and parliamentary officials and the impact that their scarlet clothes, trimmed with silver and gold, must have had on the crowds attending these spectacles. Their colorful garments, restricted by sumptuary legislation and by their expense only to those on top, contrasted powerfully with the habitual simple garments of the king and, of course, with the vestments of those in the huge crowds which, as reported by Henry Cock, gazed avidly on the royal procession. Unfortunately for Philip II, the day was not yet done and he had still to submit to another scripted procession that evening and yet another the next day. In what amounted to the epilogue to Philip II’s initial sally into the kingdom of Aragon—more as we know waited him in days, weeks, and months to come—a “popular” demonstration was organized in honor of the king. Any thought that this may have been an spontaneous show of loyalty and love for the king by the common people is given the lie by the procession’s rigid hierarchical organization and by the clear messages conveyed to the king and to the citizens of Zaragoza in the symbols displayed at the event that evening and the succeeding day. The king had barely any time to rest when he was called to the balcony as tradesmen and crafts, all marching in separate ranks, paraded by the king’s residence with trumpets and lit torches. They were followed by forty-eight knights, divided into four squadrons of twelve, carrying torches. Each group wore a distinctive color: white, red, gold, and blue, playfully engaging in Moorish style skirmishes, rituals, and

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ceremonies. Finally, two bulls, with torches tied to their horns, were let loose upon the celebrants, allowing the king and his family to rest for a little while. The next day, after attending several masses, nobles came, one by one, to kiss the king’s hand in obeisance, followed on that early evening, 26 February 1585, by another procession.23 Once again, with the king painfully perched on his looking outpost, a highly elaborate affair was staged. Shortly after 8 PM, and it may have been a bitterly cold February night in Zaragoza, the king stood with some of his children and retinue on one of the windows of the dukes of Sástago’s palace to gaze on a large crowd parading past his window. Departing from the cathedral of San Salvador de la Seo, the procession was led by a large group of mentecatos, that is, the mentally impaired. These men and women dressed in two colors, with the men playing tambourines, were the inmates of the hospital of the Annunciata, a reminder that mental asylums existed in Zaragoza avant Foucault. The mentally disabled were followed by a large group of orphans, also the inmates of another philanthropic institution. The third rank of the procession included those who had been found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition. These were the sanbenitos, in their peculiar saffron garments and pointed hats. Each of them carried crosses. They were swiftly followed by members of Zaragoza’s confraternities and guilds, with their banners, lit candles, and music. The fifth rank consisted of representatives of the Mendicant orders, walking in pairs and followed by the laymen and priests attached to their respective monasteries. They carried with them gold and silver boxes filled with relics. Behind them, the secular clergy formed the sixth rank, singing hymns with the archbishop closing the procession. Five days afterwards carnival celebrations, according to Henry Cock, one of Philip’s favorite festivals began throughout the city. Together with the arrival of the Duke of Savoy, the conflation of carnival and wedding led to innumerable festivities and noble receptions. We should not end these descriptions of the different spectacles of power without attempting to explicate, once again, the sequence and nature of the entry and successive processions and the role of the crowd in these performances. From the royal entry, a spectacle dominated by the Corts and aimed at reminding the king of the Aragonese long-held privileges, we move to a more “popular” and knightly evening parade,   Relación, p. 35.

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with its evocation of Reconquest battles, the colors of the Crusade (red and white), and carnivalesque elements (the two bulls with flaming horns). This was quickly followed by the ecclesiastical parade of 26 February. In some respects, we see every section of society—the well known medieval tripartite imaging of society—competing for the attention of the king and flaunting their particular attributes and special relations with the Crown. Each of these processions was highly scripted, albeit being presented as spontaneous celebrations. Each and everyone of the processions emphasized the hierarchical nature of early modern Spanish society. These claims to social distance sought to advance different agendas. In the actual royal entry, we can see attempts to articulate parliamentary independence and the Corts’ “constitutional” relation with the Crown. In the parade that evening, although the early ranks of the procession were manned by the guilds, the emphasis was on knightly prowess and the superiority of nobles to tradesmen. Next day, the ecclesiastical parade established a clear gradation of mental competence and orthodoxy that privileged the secular Church and diocesan authority over Mendicant pretensions. There is not enough space here to explicate the many lessons to be drawn from Henry Cock’s narrative, but one must question the by-now almost discredited notion that early modern kings, and in this particular case, Philip II, had unassailable powers. There were no absolute rulers in the sixteenth century and Philip’s authority was not that extensive even in Castile. When he crossed the border into Aragon and throughout the next year as he traveled in Catalonia and Valencia, he must have been shaken by the real limitations he encountered to the exercise of his power in Iberia. Festivals, which are the quintessential example of how rulers manipulated spectacle to project their authority and uniqueness in early modern Europe, were not always sure things and may have benefited, in some cases, those challenging the authority of the king far more than they did the king himself. The entry into Zaragoza is an example. The failed entry into Barcelona is an even crueller affirmation of this reality. Festivals as theaters of power functioned in unpredictable ways. We should remember that all these processions would have been useless exercises if they would not have taken place in the midst of, and performed for the benefit of, local crowds. The diverse messages, the mise-en-scene of royal, municipal, and ecclesiastic power, were effective because they enjoyed the sanction of “popular” participation. The crowds that received the king into the city and that lined up the streets

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of Zaragoza became an important component of the many political conversations carried out through processions and performance. The nameless mobs enjoyed the exuberance of the moment and the sheer entertainment of the occasion. They provided legitimacy to the enterprise, but they were still unwitting participants in complex political plays.

The People Submissive, The People Rebellious1 Richard Taruskin In Russia, as everywhere else in Europe, the nineteenth century was the great century of historiography. During the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II (1855–81), the emancipator tsar, even the censor stood back briefly and let a hundred schools of thought contend.   Well, three, at any rate. The main contenders were: 1. the old school of dynastic historians, established by Ivan Karamzin (1766–1826), the “Official Historiographer” appointed by Alexander I, whose monumental History of the Russian State appeared in twelve volumes beginning in 1818 (the last published posthumously) and lay the foundations for the Official Nationalism proclaimed in 1835 on behalf of Alexander’s younger brother and successor, Nikolai I, according to which nationhood (narodnost’) rested on the twin pillars of orthodoxy (pravoslaviye) and autocracy (samoderzhaviye);2 2. a neo-Hegelian “statist” school, most prominently represented by Sergey Solovyov (1820–79), whose unfinished 29-volume History of Russia from the Earliest Times, the most comprehensive history of Russia ever attempted by a single author and a deliberate attempt to supersede Karamzin, began appearing in 1851 and had reached the year 1774 when it was interrupted by the author’s death; its view of historical agency was as top-down as that of dynastic historians, but it was also rigorously teleological, a strong and centralized state being the goal toward which all progressive action tended, the “great man … always and everywhere satisf[ying] the needs of the nation in a certain time”;3 1   My title pays tribute to an earlier article—A. Tsuker’s “Narod pokornïy i narod buntuyushchiy,” Sovetskaya muzïka (1972.3), 105–9—which first alerted me to the historiographical ramifications of the old “versions” problem surrounding “Boris Godunov,” Musorgsky’s one completed opera. 2   See Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1959). 3   Sergey Solovyov, Istoriya Rossii s drevneyshikh vremyon, vol. 3, with vols. 5 and 6 (Moscow, 1963), p. 704.

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3. a short-lived “populist” school, which could only exist for the duration of the little window Alexander II’s relaxed censorship had suffered to open, which promulgated a bottom-up theory of historical agency, and whose primary exponent was Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–85), who is known to all scholars of Russian music for having declared of Musorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” (1874) that it was an authentic “page of history.”4 The historian’s interest in contemporary opera was symptomatic of the time. Musorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” based on a play by Pushkin that had until 1870 been banned from the stage (though not from publication), was also a product of that little window. The composer was an enthusiastic student of history, and in his next (unfinished) historical opera, “Khovanshchina,” took the unprecedented step of fashioning a libretto directly from primary documentary sources rather than availing himself of a pre-existing literary treatment. In that positivistic and optimistic moment in Russian intellectual history, operas could be taken quite seriously by the theatergoing public and its intellectual preceptors as contributions to historiography. The very first issue of the European Courier, one of the thickest of the famous Russian “thick journals” of historiography and liberal opinion, contained a learned exchange between Kostomarov and the arts publicist Vladimir Stasov (a professional librarian) on the historical verisimilitude of an operatic production, that of “Rogneda,” an opera by Alexander Serov that was set in tenth-century Kiev. The editor of the journal, Mikhaíl Stasyulevich, gave their colloquy an introduction that could stand atop this chapter as an epigraph: Perhaps a few of our readers will be surprised that in our “Historical Chronicle” section we speak of the theater and of scenic productions, even though the journal is devoted specifically to historical scholarship. But such doubts will not visit those who, like us, think of the theater not as an idle amusement but accord it a high significance among the organs that motivate and develop the intellectual life of man, and, consequently, have an influence on the history of societies.5

4   The remark appears twice in the writings of Vladimir Stasov, who overheard (or, possibly, elicited) it: first, in Stasov’s 1881 obituary for Musorgsky (see Vladimir Vasil’yevich Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya, vol. 3 [Moscow, 1952], p. 199), and, somewhat differently worded in “Pamyati Musorgskogo,” an essay marking the fifth anniversary of the composer’s death (Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya, p. 34). 5   Vestnik Yevropï, vol. 1, n. 1 (1866), 84.



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Indeed, all three of the historical schools sketched above had important operatic embodiments in the 1870s. Any opera that was based on a play by one of the many writers who used Karamzin as a source was willy-nilly a mouthpiece for the dynastic view. Chaikovsky’s early opera “The Oprichnik” (1870–72) is the classic example. It is based on a tragedy by Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869) about a young nobleman who joins the oprichniki, Ivan the Terrible’s personal army, to avenge his mother, who then turns around and disowns him for what she takes to be his class perfidy; he then petitions for release in order to marry, and thus dooms mother, bride and self alike for having tempted Ivan’s arbitrary, bloodthirsty cruelty. The play, and consequently the opera, reflects Karamzin’s harsh judgment of Ivan (a verdict meant to reflect glory on the Romanov dynasty, the Official Historiographer’s employer, which had succeeded him): Amid other sore trials of Fate, beyond the misfortune of the feudal system, beyond the Mongolian yoke, Russia had also to endure the terror of an Autocrat-Torturer. She withstood it with love for the autocracy, for she believed that God sends plagues, earthquakes, and tyrants alike; she did not break the iron scepter in Ivan’s hands but bore with her tormentor for twenty-four years, armed only with prayer and patience, in order to have, in better times, Peter the Great and Catherine the second (History does not like to name the living).6

The statist view was embodied pre-eminently in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Maid of Pskov” (1873), based on a play by the poet Lev Alexandrovich Mey (1822–62).7 In keeping with the positivist impulse of the age, the play had proposed an answer to an actual historical riddle: why had Ivan the Terrible, who destroyed the republican Hanseatic port of Novgorod to enforce the unification of Russia under his autocratic rule, nevertheless spared Pskov, Novgorod’s republican sister city? In a series of soliloquies, Ivan, who seems to have read both Karamzin and Solovyov, ponders his various historiographical images. In one speech he summarizes the popular Karamzinian view of his character and reign: “A bloodthirsty blackguard, persecutor of the

6   Nikolai Karamzin, Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo, vol. 9 (St. Petersburg, 1892), pp. 273–74. 7   Mey wrote three plays in all: two on episodes in the life of Ivan the Terrible—The Tsar’s Bride (Tsarskaya nevesta, 1849), The Maid of Pskov (Pskovityanka, 1859)—and one, Servilia (1853), which takes place in ancient Rome. All three were turned into operas by Rimsky-Korsakov.

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boyars and his zealous servants, a torturer, a killer, a monster!”8 But in another, a famous address to his son (quite obviously modeled on Boris Godunov’s farewell to his son in Pushkin’s play), which RimskyKorsakov turned into a monologue, Mey’s Ivan gives his reasons: Only that kingdom is strong and great, Where the people know they have A single ruler, as in a single flock There is a single shepherd. … Let the shepherd Grant the herd boys their will—and the whole flock perishes! Never mind the wolves; they themselves will do the killing And lay the blame to the dogs. … No! I would like to rule so that Rus’ will be bound by law, like armor, But will God grant me the insight and the strength?

“How comical is this Ivan Vasil’yevich, discoursing on his theories of government just like Mr. Solovyov, … almost a sweet and tenderhearted Ivan Vasil’yevich, this,” was the assessment of Apollon Grigoryev, a rival poet and playwright.9 But Mey’s embodiment of ongoing historiographical controversy was seen as progressive by progressives, including musical progressives like Rimsky-Korsakov and the roommate who shared his bachelor quarters at the time he was finishing “The Maid of Pskov,” one who was then at work on a historical—or rather, historiographical—opera of his own. In the fall of 1871, Musorgsky was between versions of “Boris Godunov.” The opera as composed in 1869–70 had been submitted to the Imperial Theater’s directorate, whose opera committee famously rejected it in February 1871 on the grounds that it contained no prima donna role. But the changes that Musorgsky made in revising the opera went so much further than anything required by the committee that one can only conclude that the main impetus toward rethinking his opera lay elsewhere.10 One of the biggest changes that had nothing to

  Pskovityanka, Act V, sc. x, in L. A. Mey, Dramï (Moscow, 1961), p. 194.   Sochineniya Ap. Grivor’yeva, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1876), p. 515. 10   A comprehensive treatment of the revision in all its overdetermined aspects is attempted in R. Taruskin, “Musorgsky versus Musorgsky: The Versions of Boris Godunov,” 19th Century Music 8 (1984–85), 91–118, 245–72, rpt. in Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, 1993), pp. 201–99; for a more comprehensive examination of the relationship between Russian historiography and Russian historical opera, see R. Taruskin, “The Present in the Past: Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, circa 1870,” in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris  8  9



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do with the Imperial Theater’s demands was the substitution of one crowd scene by another. The change embodies far more than a musical or dramaturgical revision. It represents a 180-degree shift from Karamzin’s top-down conception of history to the bottom-up view only lately propounded by Kostomarov. I know of no other case in the history of opera in which two versions of an opera so directly polemicize with one another in keeping with contemporaneous debates in the realm of scholarship. It testifies to the uniqueness of its moment in Russian intellectual history. The Karamzinian view had come to Musorgsky straight from Pushkin. The original version of the opera was composed at a time when the composer was entertaining very strict “realist” views as to the relationship between operatic and spoken theater. In the wake of a famous experiment by Alexander Dargomïzhsky—that “great teacher of musical truth” as Musorgsky called him on two separate occasions— who set the text of Pushkin’s “The Stone Guest” (one of four “little tragedies” of 1830) exactly as it stood, without any specially prepared libretto, Musorgsky had written an even more radically realistic opera, a setting of several scenes from the first act of Gogol’s farce “Marriage” as an “experiment in dramatic music in prose” that would make absolutely no compromise with the criteria of spoken drama. The original libretto of “Boris Godunov” was a non-libretto of this type. Virtually all of its words came directly from Pushkin’s original text, although because, unlike “The Stone Guest,” “Boris Godunov” was a full-length play, it had to be whittled down for musical treatment, musical tempos being generally so much slower than spoken ones. Musorgsky’s solution, calculated on the presumed familiarity of the historical plot to his audience, was to cherry-pick. The two scenes that together made up the first act—namely, the monastery “Cell Scene” that launches the career of the Pretender, or False Dmitry, and the “Scene at the Lithuanian Border” that shows its progress, were evidently chosen because they embodied a stark Shakespearean contrast that would give Musorgsky’s radical methods an ideal proving ground. The Cell Scene was famous for its lofty idealization and its beautiful iambic-pentameter verses, while the Scene at the Border was a comic scene in prose. The one could be set à la “The Stone Guest” and the

Schwarz, ed. Malcolm H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1984), pp. 77–146; rpt. Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, pp. 123–200.

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other à la “Marriage.” For the rest, apart from the opening scene that shows the crowd in forced supplication to the Tsar-elect, conflating lines from the second and third scenes of Pushkin’s first act, Musorgsky simply threw out all the scenes in which the title character failed to appear, leaving a total not of twenty-three but only six from which to adapt his text—a text in which Boris Godunov looms much larger than he did in Pushkin’s play, which chiefly concerns the progress of the Pretender (and thus belongs to a genre known to literary historians as the “Demetrius play,” descending from the Spanish and English theaters of the early seventeenth century).11 One (and only one) of these scenes brought Boris into confrontation with the crowd. Pushkin’s scene 19 (Square in Front of the Cathedral in Moscow) corresponds to the sixth (penultimate) scene of the opera in its 1869 version, designated “Square before the Shrine of the Blessed Basil,” that is, Red Square. Pushkin had based it on a passage in Karamzin that concerned not the rise of the False Dmitry but rather the death of Boris’s own first-born son in 1588, ten years before he became tsar. Godunov, … having at the time only one infant son, took him recklessly with him, though the boy was sick, to the church of St. Basil the Blessed, paying his doctors no heed. The infant died. At the time there was in Moscow a fool in God [yurodivïy], esteemed for his real or imaginary holiness. Walking naked through the streets in bitter cold, his hair hanging long and wild, he foretold calamities and solemnly calumniated Boris. But Boris held his peace and dared not do him the smallest harm, whether out of fear of the populace or because he believed in the man’s holiness. Such yurodivïye, or blessed simpletons, appeared frequently in the capital wearing chains of penance called verigi. They were privileged to reproach anyone, no matter how important, right in the eye, if their conduct was bad. And they could take whatever they wanted from shops without paying. The merchants would thank them for it as if for a great favor.12

As Pushkin adapted it, Boris orders a church service so as to pronounce an anathema on the Pretender. On his way out, he is accosted by the yurodivïy, who complains to Boris that some boys have stolen a penny from him, and that the tsar should have them killed in the

11   See Erwin C. Brody, The Demetrius Legend and Its Literary Treatment in the Age of the Baroque (Rutherford, NJ, 1972). 12  Karamzin, Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo, vol. 10, p. 169.



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way he had had the lawful tsarevich killed. Boris asks the holy man to pray for him but is rebuffed. The scene opens with some mutterings from the crowd, which show them ignorant and apathetic: First man. Another. First man. Second man. First man. Second man. First man. Third man. Fourth man.

Will the Tsar soon come out of the cathedral? The mass is ended; now the Te Deum is going on. What! Have they already cursed him? I stood in the porch and heard how the deacon cried out:–Grishka Otrepyev [that is, the False Dmitry] is anathema! Let them curse to their heart’s content; the Tsarevich has nothing to do with Otrepyev. But they are now singing mass for the repose of the soul of the Tsarevich. What? A mass for the dead sung for a living man? They’ll suffer for it, the godless wretches! Hist! A noise. Is it not the Tsar? No, it is the yurodivïy.13

With some little modifications, Musorgsky set these lines as “realistic” choral recitative. Then comes the episode of the yurodivïy and the thieving boys, following which the crowd cries out, “The Tsar! The Tsar is coming.” As Boris and his entourage file out of the church, the crowd accompanies their procession with a few lines that Musorgsky cobbled himself: Our provider, Little Father, give for Christ’s sake! Our father, Lord, for Christ’s sake! Tsar, our Lord, for Christ’s sake! Our provider, Little Father, send aid for Christ’s sake! Bread! Bread! Give to the hungry! Bread! Bread! Give us bread! Little Father, for Christ’s sake!

Musorgsky set these plain lines beautifully, in a folkloric lyric style rather than as recitative, and in so doing emphasized that it was very much Karamzin’s crowd that he was showing us: a submissive, passive, impotent lot, conscious only of its bodily needs and looking trustingly to their Tsar, heaven’s emissary, for salvation. They are shown in the act of withstanding adversity, as Karamzin would say, with love for the autocracy. The crowd does not participate in the searing confrontation with the yurodivïy; on the contrary, when he accuses the 13   Slightly adapted from the translation by Alfred Hayes in The Poems, Prose & Plays of Pushkin, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York, 1936), p. 394.

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“Tsar-Herod” of murder, the crowd—according to Musorgsky’s stage direction, not Pushkin’s—disperses in horror. I Before his departure from Petrograd I went to see him and experienced something extraordinary. This something is none other than a milestone in Korsinka’s talent. He has realized the dramatic essence of musical drama. He, that is Korsinka, has concocted some magnificent history with the choruses in the veche—just as it should be: I actually burst out laughing with delight.14

Korsinka was Rimsky Korsakov and the veche was the scene in “The Maid of Pskov” that showed the Pskov republican council or veche in panicky session, attempting to cope with the prospect of Ivan the Terrible’s likely attack. The scene ends with an internal schism and the secession of a gang of rebels who (unlike the accommodating governors) will meet a violent fate. It was the internal dissension, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s success in finding a way of rendering it musically, that captured Musorgsky’s imagination. At the end of the scene, the rebels march off singing a genuine (transcribed) folksong; the governors implore them to reconsider in impassioned recitative, the town tocsin sounds an alarm, and the dread Tsar’s leitmotif looms over all. This contrapuntal tour-de-force, montaging three “natural” or lifedrawn artifacts—virtually unretouched folksong, speech-mimicking recitative, and mimetic orchestral effect—was the very epitome of realist ideals as then conceived by the reform-minded composers of the New Russian School (known informally in English-speaking countries as the Mighty Five), and César Cui, the member of the group whose music is most irretrievably forgotten but who was at the time its most famous member because he was a big tough critic as well as a composer, greeted it with what for him was an orgy of praise: You forget that before you is a stage, and on it choristers performing a more or less skillfully constructed crowd scene. Before you is reality, the living people, and all of it accompanied by matchless, meaty music from beginning to end. A crowd scene like this has never appeared in any existing opera. Even if everything else in The Maid of Pskov had been 14  Musorgsky to Nadezhda and Alexandra Purgold, 18 June 1870; Musorsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, eds. Alexandra Orlova and Mikhaíl Pekelis, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1971), p. 110.



the people submissive, the people rebellious293 completely worthless, this veche scene alone would have been enough to give the opera significance in the history of art and a prominent place among the most remarkable of operas, and its author a place among the best operatic composers.15

Musorgsky must have been fairly itching to emulate this scene, and must have welcomed the rejection of the earlier version of “Boris Godunov” for the pretext it gave him to do so. He had a particularly bemusing experience with the St. Basil’s scene in July 1870, a month after expressing his enthusiasm for Rimsky’s veche. At a gathering at Stasov’s dacha outside St. Petersburg, Musorgsky played the first version of the opera, then in limbo between completion and rejection, and found to his bewilderment that even such a sympathetic, handpicked audience could mistake the opera’s genre and tone, hence its meaning. “As regards the peasants in Boris,” he wrote to Rimsky, “some found them to be bouffe(!), while others saw tragedy.”16 Perceiving that in the eyes—or ears—of his audience the prose recitative of his choral scenes ineluctably spelled “comedy,” its traditional medium, Musorgsky had to acknowledge a formerly unrecognized problem for realist art. From this moment, perhaps, and not from the eventual rejection, dated his first impulse to revise his opera. The needed revision was one that would clarify the opera’s genre by making decisive the contrast between what was “bouffe” and what was not, and by elevating the tone of the opera to a level appropriate to tragedy. In place of the realist, Pushkin-derived prose recitative in the St. Basil’s scene, Musorgsky wrote himself a text that contained all the elements Rimsky had deployed in his veche: naturalistic recitative, to be sure (including choral recitative); but also sweeping orchestral music, some of it mimetic of the stage action, and choral folk song adapted from various genres including wedding songs and epic narratives or bïlinï. Musorgsky also wrote verses for a “revolutionary” chorus (Razgulyalas’ udal’ molodetskaya [Valiant daring has run free]) that would provide a more extended and developed continuous number than anything in Rimsky’s setting. The whole would end with the Pretender’s arrival on the scene, to be greeted by the crowd and followed offstage to victory, leaving the yurodivïy (salvaged from St. Basil’s along with the little episode of kopeck-stealing) to lament the Time of Troubles.   César Antonovich Cui, Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 1(Leningrad, 1952), p. 221.  Musorgsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 1, p. 117.

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The trouble was that Pushkin, who had no such conception of such collective popular agency, had not furnished material for such a scene. The closest to the sort of unruly crowd scene Mey had provided for Rimsky to set comes in Pushkin’s penultimate scene, when the crowd, having been incited to riot by a tirade uttered by the poet’s namesake, the boyar Pushkin, rushes off toward the palace now occupied by Boris’s helpless son, shouting, “Bind him, drown him! Hail Dmitry! Crush the race of Godunov!”—an episode that comes straight from Karamzin, and could have gone straight into Musorgsky. A tiny hint of post-Karamzinian crowd behavior may also lurk in Pushkin’s immediately preceding scene, when the boyar Pushkin, conferring with the boyar Basmanov (a fellow defector to the Pretender’s cause), confidently predicts victory: … Basmanov, dost thou know Wherein our true strength lies? Not in the army, Nor yet in Polish aid, but in opinion— Yes, popular opinion. Dost remember The triumph of Dimitry, dost remember His peaceful conquests, when, without a blow The docile towns surrendered, and the mob Bound the recalcitrant leaders?17

But that is all one finds in Pushkin—just a hint, and no words on which to base a libretto. The first actual spark of the eventual scene that Musorgsky wrote to replace St. Basil’s may have been touched off by a couple of lines on the Pretender’s progress, which Musorgsky himself inserted into the text of that very scene: “He’s already got as far as Kromy, they say. –He’s coming with his troops to Moscow. –He’s blasting Boris’s troops to smithereens.” Even this, however, is a long way from the eventual “Scene at Kromy” (stsena pod Kromamï) or “revolution scene” on which Musorgsky embarked in November 1871, while sharing quarters with Rimsky-Korsakov (who was at that very moment orchestrating the veche, so that its strains were probably resounding on the communal piano every day). The inserted lines refer to the siege and pitched battle of 1605 described in detail by Karamzin, at which the False Dmitry’s Polish troops were joined by several hundred Don Coassacks. It was these Cossacks who had bound and taken prisoner the boyar Khrushchev (whose name had to be omitted from Russian   The Poems, Prose &Plays of Pushkin, pp. 406–7.

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programs, whether of the play or of the opera, between 1956 and 1964), whom Boris had sent to lead them against the Pretender. They presented Khrushchev to Dmitry as a trophy at Kromy, a town near Oryol, about 220 miles south-southwest of Moscow. According to Karamzin, this was the turning point in the Pretender’s campaign. But was Karamzin’s account Musorgsky’s source? In his obituary, Stasov claimed it was, and that he and Musorgsky had planned the scene together. Indeed, there are a few footnote references to the Official Historiographer in the earliest printed libretto of Musorgsky’s Kromy scene. But Alexandra Orlova and Maria Shneerson, who tried to run the citations down, concluded that they were fictitious references to mislead the censor, and have reached the same conclusion as have I, after a thorough perusal of Karamzin, that “revolt is not even mentioned in [his] history”—as indeed one would not expect it to be.18 The closest Karamzin ever comes to admitting that “the people” (narod) had any active role in the downfall of Godunov is a single caustic remark: In the cities, the villages, and along the highways, proclamations of Dmitry to the inhabitants of Russia were circulated, containing news that he was alive and would soon be among them. The people were astonished, not knowing whether to believe it. But the tramps, the goodfor-nothings, the robbers long since inhabiting the northern regions, rejoiced: their time was coming. Some came running to the Pretender in Galicia; others ran to Kiev, where … a banner had been set out to rally a militia.19

Musorgsky surely read this passage and was impressed, for in his correspondence he always refers to the Kromy scene as “the tramps” (brodyagi). But Karamzin did nothing more than name them; his tramps were an anarchic element to be harshly judged and explicitly distinguished from “the people”: It was not a host that assembled against Boris, but a scum. An entirely insignificant portion of the [Polish] nobility, in deference to their king, … or else flattering themselves with the thought of deeds of derring-do with the exiled tsarevich, showed up in Sambor and Lvov. Also there hurried thither all manner of tramps, hungry and half-naked,

18  Alexandra Orlova and Maria Shneerson, “After Pushkin and Karamzin,” in Musorgsky: In Memoriam 1881–1981, ed. Malcolm H. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 253. 19  Karamzin, Istoriya gosudarstva rossiiskogo, vol. 11, p. 85.

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Musorgsky could not have drawn his inspiration from the riffraff Karamzin describes. Although he, too, harshly judged the revolting mob (which furnished, in its credulity, the revised opera’s tragic hero), he needed a historian who drew the kind of unambiguous connection that Karamzin was unwilling to draw between the famine-inspired lawlessness in the Russian countryside and the progress of the False Dmitry. In order to find a reliable historiographical sanction for a choral scene to match Rimsky’s veche, Musorgsky needed a historian who viewed the people as an authentic agent in the events of the Time of Troubles between the Russian dynasties, not a mere reactor to them, as portrayed both by aristocratic historians like Karamzin and by “statists” like Solovyov. In short, he needed Kostomarov, and eventually he found his man. Kostomarov’s idealization of the peasantry made it inevitable that he should specialize in the chronicling of popular uprisings. His first big success was Stenka Razin’s Revolt (Bunt Stenki Razina, 1859), one of the first fruits of the liberalized censorship under Alexander II. Its popularity was phenomenal and made its author a hero. In the early sixties his lectures were so appealing to the St. Petersburg University students who crowded his auditorium that more than once Kostomarov was carried out on their shoulders.21 Kostomarov’s magnum opus was The Time of Troubles of the Russian State in the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (Smutnoye vremya moskovskogo gosudarstva v nachale XVII-ogo stoletiya), first published serially in the European Courier in 1866. It was the most recent authoritative word on the subject when Musorgsky came to revise Boris. Its narrative began at the year 1604, the year of the False Dmitry’s victory over the forces of Boris Godunov. In the scene-setting introduction to the main account, Kostomarov wrote an extended paragraph that directly related the unrest caused by famine to the progress of the

  Karamzim., p. 84.  Oblique testimony to Kostomarov’s status can be found in Stasov’s hysterical letter of 17 May 1863 to Balakirev on Serov’s Judith, an opera by his worst enemy: “Immediately, from the very first note Serov became the idol of St. Petersburg, just such an idol as Kostomarov was recently”; see M. A. Balakirev and V. V. Stasov, Perepiska, ed. Anastasiya Sergeyevna Liapunova, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1970), p. 199. 20 21



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Pretender, thereby setting out the conceptual kernel of Musorgsky’s Kromy scene: If old-timers couldn’t remember such a horrible famine in Russia, neither would they remember such vagrancy [brodyazhnichestvo] as then was rife. Lords had turned out their servants when it became excessively dear to feed them, and later, when the price of bread had fallen, wanted to get them back. But their former serfs, if they had managed to survive the famine, were living with other masters or else had developed a taste for wandering—and did not wish to turn themselves in. Lawsuits and prosecutions multiplied. Hunted fugitives gathered in gangs. To these tramps were added a multitude of serfs who had belonged to fallen boyars. Boris had forbidden taking them as serfs, and this had been just as hard on them as the prohibition on transfers had been on the peasants. Having been indentured to one master, it was a rare serf who wanted to leave the status of serf altogether; practically all ran away to find another place. These “fallen” serfs gathered at that time by the thousands. Deprived of the right to roam from court to court, they attached themselves to the robber gangs, which sprang up everywhere in varying numbers. Most serfs had no other way of feeding themselves. The only exceptions were those who knew some trade. There were a multitude of fugitives from noble courts, from monasteries, from outlying settlements. They ran wild during the famine, and later, when they were sought by their former masters, they couldn’t buy themselves off, especially since so many died in the famine. On the survivors a huge tax was declared before they could be free of their obligations. And so they ran, cursing the extortion, the injustice of the bailiffs and elders, the violent measures of their henchmen. Some ran off to Siberia, others to the Don, still others to the Dnepr. Many settled on the Ukrainian plains and there evaded their state-imposed obligations. The fact that the northern Ukraine had happily been spared the worst of the famine was the reason for an extreme concentration of people in that region. The government began to take measures for the return of the fugitives, and they for their part were prepared to resist. This whole fugitive population was naturally unhappy with the Moscow authorities. They were prepared to throw themselves with joy at whomever would lead them against Boris, at whomever would promise them an advantage. This was not a matter of aspiring to this or that political or social order; the huge crowd of sufferers easily attached itself to a new face in the hope that under a new regime things would be better than under the old.22

Not a scum, then, but a mass of insulted and injured with whom one can (and the historian does) sympathize. As to the people as an active force that, when aroused, can threaten tsars, consider Kostomarov’s   Sochineniya N. I. Kostomarova, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1903), pp. 42–43.

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description of the gang of Khlopka Kosolapïy (and substitute the name Khrushchev for Basmanov): Khlopka did not limit himself to attacking travelers on the highway; with an enormous gang he went straight to Moscow, threatening to annihilate the throne, the boyars, and all that was sanctioned by authority, powerful, rich, and oppressive in Rusia. In October 1603, Boris sent troops to destroy this gang, under the leadership of the okol’nichiy Ivan Fyodorovich Basmanov. They had not gotten far from Moscow when suddenly “thieves” fell upon Basmanov. They attacked the tsar’s troops on a path that cut through the underbrush. Basmanov was killed.23

As for Khrushchev himself, the story of his capture by the Don Cossacks and his acceptance of the False Dmitry (which last is part of the action in Musorgsky’s Kromy scene) is related by Kostomarov in much greater detail than had any previous historian: Here [on the left bank of the Dnepr near Kiev], there came again to Dmitry emissaries from the Don Cossacks with representations of the willingness of the whole independent population of the Don basin to serve the miraculously spared tsarevich. As an earnest of their fidelity they lay at their feet the nobleman Pyotr Khrushchev, who had been sent by Boris to incite them against Dmitry. The prisoner, brought before him in shackles, no sooner caught sight of the Pretender than he fell at his feet and said, “Now I see that you are the natural-born, true tsarevich. Your face resembles that of your father, the sovereign Tsar Ivan Vasil’yevich [the Terrible]. Forgive us, Lord, and show us mercy. In our ignorance we served Boris, but when they see you, all will recognize you.”24

Finally, Kostomarov narrates several incidents that furnished Musorg­sky with the model for the chorus of mockery in his Kromy scene. They relate, actually, to the period immediately following Boris’s death, when his son and family were routed from the palace. Here are two: Meanwhile, on the other side of the river there were still those who, having sworn loyalty to Boris’s widow and son, wished to remain true to their vows and persuaded others in the name of church and duty not to turn traitor. They reviled Dmitry, proclaiming, “Long live the children of Boris Fyodorovich!” Then Korela shouted: “Beat them, beat them, not with swords, not with sticks, but with poles; beat them and say ‘There you are, there you are! Don’t you be picking fights with us!’ ” This appealed to the assembled troops, especially the ones from Ryazan.   Sochineniya N. I. Kostomarova, p. 43.   Sochineniya N. I. Kostomarova, p. 83.

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the people submissive, the people rebellious299 The Godunovites were turned loose, and the Dmitryites chased them with laughter and beat them, some with whips, some with sticks and some with fists.25 [The supporters of Boris] were robbed and plundered without any mercy, from those marked by the people’s hatred even the clothing was ripped, and many were seen that day—so eyewitnesses report—covering their nakedness as Adam did, with leaves. The mob, who had suffered long and much, who had been so long humiliated, rejoiced in this day, amused themselves at the expense of the noble and wealthy, paid them back for their former humiliation. Even those who had not sided with the Godunovs suffered on that day; it was enough to have been rich. And the general plunder and drunkenness continued until nightfall, when all slept like the dead.26

So when Kostomarov said of Musorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” that it was “a page of history,” one understands what he meant—it was a page of his history. That he was referring to Kromy, the scene that concluded the revised version in the original production, can go without saying. The difference between Kromy and the rest of the opera was precisely the difference between Karamzin and Kostomarov. But was that difference indicative of Musorgsky’s political views? One of his intimates, Alexandra Molas (née Purgold), RimskyKorsakov’s sister-in-law and a singer to whom Musorgsky had dedicated several songs in the 1860s, much later told the young Boris Asafyev that “the Kromy Forest scene arose in connection with the fact that Musorgsky recast the denouement of his tragedy in keeping with the burgeoning populist [narodnichestvennïye] tendencies” of the time.27 That much is true, but Asafyev, by then the sanctioned voice of the Soviet musicological establishment, added tendentiously that “precisely what Nikolai I’s regime did not permit Pushkin to do was done here by Musorgsky.”28 Musorgsky’s scene followed a historiographical line that did not so much as exist in Pushkin’s time, nor indeed until the 1860s. Kostomarov’s interpretation of events was as much a denial of Solovyov’s “statism” as the latter had been of Karamzin’s absolutism, the source of Pushkin’s view of the Time of Troubles, and, at first, of Musorgsky’s as well.   Sochineniya N. I. Kostomarova, p. 117.   Sochineniya N. I. Kostomarova, pp. 127–28. 27  Boris Asafyev, “ ‘Boris Godunov’ Musorgskogo, kak muzïkal’nïy spektakl’ iz Pushina,” in Akademik Boris Vladimirovch Asafyev, Izbrannïye trudï, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1954), p. 132. 28  Asafyev, Izbrannïye trudï, p. 137. 25 26

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Nevertheless, it would be facile to claim that the Kromy scene is a direct expression, or even evidence, of Musorgsky’s own changed ideological commitment, however palatable to liberal opinion (to say nothing of Soviet opinion, asserted as dogma against occasional questioners).29 The evidence suggests a rather more tortuous conception, in which Musorgsky’s initial stimulus was more likely musical than political, less a principled commitment to populism (unlikely, after all, in a member of the gentry class who had been impoverished by Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs) than admiration for Rimsky-Korsakov’s choral dramaturgy in that quintessentially “statist” opera “The Maid of Pskov,” where the theme of popular rebellion had, from the purely historiographical standpoint, sounded a curiously discordant note—and came to a bad end. Mob action comes (implicitly) to a bad end in “Boris Godunov” as well. After Kostomarov’s unruly crowd of rebels follow the Pretender and his Polish retinue offstage, Pushkin’s yurodivïy, transferred to Kromy from the discarded St. Basil’s scene, is left alone to croon his crazed prophecy of Russia’s downfall: Gore, gore Rusi,/ Plach’, plach’, russkiy lyud,/ golodnïy lyud!.… (Woe, woe to Rus’,/ weep, weep, Russian folk,/ hungry folk!…) II By transferring the role of the yurodivïy from St. Basil’s to Kromy, Musorgsky made sure that the two scenes could not be performed in a single performance. One was definitely intended to replace the other. (In fact, they were both intended to occupy the same—penultimate— position in the sequence of scenes, before Boris’s death, until Musorgsky—or rather, his historian friend Vladimir Nikolsky—had the inspired idea of ending with Kromy and the yurodivïy’s heartbreaking lament.) They were as incompatible ideologically as they were textually and musically redundant. For a long time no one was tempted to conflate them, for the simple reason that the St. Basil’s scene lay unpublished and forgotten in Musorgsky’s archive at the St. Petersburg Imperial (later State) Public Library. Not counting an imprecise and ambiguous passing reference 29   See Yury Nikolayevich Tyulin, Alexey Ivanovich Kandinsky, et al., “K izucheniyu naslediya M. P. Musorgskogo: stsena ‘pod Kromami’ v dramaturgii ‘Borisa Godunova,’ ” Sovetskaya muzïka (1970.3), 90–114.



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to it in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s memoirs, first published (posthumously) in 1909,30 the scene was first brought to public attention by Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer’s musicologist son, who had succeeded Stasov as curator of musical manuscripts at the Library, in an article that appeared in 1917 (not an auspicious year for Russian musicology) in a scholarly journal of small circulation that the younger  Rimsky-Korsakov was then editing.31 Nine years later, in 1926, Oskar von Riesemann, an Estonian-born musicologist living in Germany, finally published the St. Basil’s scene as an appendix to his biography of Musorgsky. Two years after that, the whole first version of the opera was published in Pavel Lamm’s edition and performed in Leningrad, and won for itself a cult following among Russian operatic cognoscenti. Thus, when a gala new production of “Boris Godunov” was mounted at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater in honor of the composer’s birth centennial in 1939, the theater had the strange but somehow inevitable idea of inserting a re-orchestration of The St. Basil’s Scene that the venerable composer Mikhaíl Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859–1935), a former pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, had made while briefly the music director of the theater in the 1920s, in an effort to adapt the first version of the opera to the brilliant orchestral style of his teacher’s retouched re-orchestration of the rest of the opera in its revised version, which was and would remain the Bolshoi’s standard performing text. The two scenes, in this production, flanked the death scene (St. Basil’s before and Kromy after), which somewhat mitigated their redundancy. There was no way one could logically justify the conflation, which Musorgsky had never envisaged (and actually made impossible—or so he thought), and there is every reason to suppose that it was motivated in the first place by a Stalinist view of the opera’s role as a political commentary on the illegitimacy of tsarist rule, each scene contributing its mite to that propagandistic task. And yet both scenes are searingly effective musical and dramatic  achievements. Both bring tears to the eyes of the audience, and the reprise of the yurodivïy’s lament (which is not a reprise unless both of the scenes are included) is perhaps the crowning stroke of 30   See Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (London, 1974), p. 110. 31  See Andrey Nikolayevich Rimsky-Korsakov, “  ‘Boris  Godunov’  M.  P. Musorgskogo,” Muzïkal’nïy sovremennik, 5–6 (January–February 1917), 108–67.

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musicodramatic genius. No wonder the version of the opera concocted in Moscow possibly for political purposes became canonical in the Soviet Union, achieved popularity abroad thanks to recordings and a widely shown film, and has remained viable even in post-Soviet Russia. Although unforeseen and seemingly disallowed by the author (even though it uses only material he composed), it is, I believe, a greater work than either of the two authorial versions. (And if that is musicological heresy, make the most of it.) But greater on what basis? If you measure greatness the modernist or academic way, in terms of internal unity and elegant form, it is a travesty.32 If you measure greatness the way audiences measure greatness, in terms of what it does to them, it is a masterpiece. Modernists (and academic critics, who by and large still follow modernist principles by default), for whom the very first principle of art is “the customer is always wrong,” cannot be expected to respect such a definition of greatness, and that is exactly where I differ with them (though whether to call that difference premodern or postmodern I gladly leave to others to decide.) My sympathy, as a member of the audience, is finally with my own kind. Does an evil message (say, the Stalinism to which I have already called attention, or the anti-Semitism of Bach’s “St. John Passion,” or the German chauvinism of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”) prevent a work from achieving the status of a masterpiece? Only by the sort of circular critical fiat that declares evil masterpieces to be a contradiction in terms that must be resolved either by proving that they are not evil or by proving that they are not masterpieces. But even though my preference may seem to contradict the composer’s, in another sense I am in solidarity with him. For Musorgsky’s seeming ideological or historiographical change of heart in revising “Boris Godunov” had its origin, as I have argued, not in a considered historiographical analysis of the events the opera depicts, but in an esthetic and stylistic crisis. Whatever political or ideological messages Musorgsky’s contrasting versions may appear to espouse are thus by-products rather than premises of his artistic performance. For him, the Kromy mob was less an historical agent than a musicodramatic

32   And so I myself argued, quite puritanically, a quarter century ago (in “Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky” [see n.10 above]).



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device. Its purpose was not to secure a truthful representation of historical events but to “realize the dramatic essence of musical drama” and “concoct some magnificent history,” the way Rimsky-Korsakov had done in “The Maid of Pskov.” Representation—or, in Musorgsky’s language, concoction—was the end, mobs the means.

A Riot, a Harangue, and a (Failed) Uprising: Three Scenes from Nineteenth-Century Operas David Rosen Richard Wagner: “Die Meistersinger” (“The Mastersingers,” 1868), The Riot Scene (Act 2, Scene 7) Let us begin with the most famous riot in nineteenth-century opera, if not all opera. This riot scene is also the least typical, and its unusual features will set in relief the other scenes to be discussed here; often we can better understand a phenomenon by understanding what it is not. In the final scene of Act 2, a fight between the apprentice David and the Meistersinger Beckmesser attracts the attention of the townsfolk and triggers a general riot, rather like the usual free-for-all barroom brawl in Hollywood Westerns. Here are the events that concern us.1 David, thinking that Beckmesser is wooing his love, Lene, attacks him with a cudgel. Nine of the twelve Meistersinger come into the street in their nightclothes and soon take up fighting among themselves for no apparent reason, Vogel starting by striking Zorn.2 In the course of the fray, there appear the apprentices, blaming this or that group (for example, the tailors, the cobblers, the locksmiths) for starting the fight; the journeymen (Gesellen) and even the Masters and older citizens (die Meister und älteren Bürger) join in. The women (Nachbarinnen) exhort their brawling men folk to stop and eventually pour buckets of water upon them; this and the simultaneous sounding

1   Readers unfamiliar with the opera may consult one of the many available plot summaries, for example, Barry Millington, “Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die,” Grove Music Online (accessed 14 July 2009). 2  The score identifies the nine Meistersinger (all those but Sachs, Beckmesser, and Pogner), but the libretto simply refers to them as Nachbarn (neighbors) and presents their lines without giving a sense of the heated dialogue between the individual characters. Although the stage directions indicating violence are limited to the “neighbors,” some of the lines of the women establish that it is a general brawl (for example, “Seht dort den Christian, er walkt den Peter ab!” [Look at Christian, he’s thrashing Peter!]—neither name belongs to a Meistersinger).

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of the night-watchman’s horn (in a foreign, unexpected key) produce a general panic. The combatants flee in all directions emptying the stage.3 The cause of the riot? No charismatic leader goads the men into action—David’s attack on Beckmesser suffices. A few lines suggest that there were grudges, old scores to be settled—for example, Köthner shoves Nachtigall: “Euch gönnt ich’s schon lange” (I’ve owed you that for a long time). Nonetheless, I think we should agree with the view Hans Sachs expresses in the “Wahn” (Madness) monologue in the next act: “How that happened, God knows. A goblin must have helped: a glow-worm could not find its mate; it set the trouble in motion”4 (a foreshadowing of the butterfly’s flapping wings beloved of chaos theorists). Unusually, the very randomness of the riot is thematized. This is only one of a number of atypical aspects of this scene. In most operatic riots or uprisings, one group attacks another group or an individual, but here it is a free-for-all. Appropriately, the musical setting is of great complexity, far greater than anything to be encountered in nineteenth-century French or Italian opera.5 That a group attempts to stop the riot recalls Alessandro Manzoni’s depiction of the bread riot in I promessi sposi: In popular uprisings there are always a certain number of men, inspired by hot-blooded passions, fanatical convictions, evil designs, or a devilish love of disorder for its own sake, who do everything they can to make things take the worst possible turn. They put forward or support the most merciless projects, and fan the flames every time they begin to subside. Nothing ever goes too far for them; they would like to see rioting continue without bounds and without an end. But to counterbalance them, there are always a certain number of other men, equally ardent and determined, who are doing all they can in the opposite direction, inspired by friendship or fellow-feeling for the people threatened by the mob, or by a reverent and spontaneous horror of bloodshed and evil deed. God bless them for it!”6

3  Wagner’s stage direction: “… wirkt auf alle mit einem panischen Schrecken. Nachbarn, Lehrbuben, Geselle und Meister suchen in eiliger Flucht nach allen Seiten hin das Weite, so dass die Bühne sehr bald gänzlich leer wird …” 4   “Gott weiss, wie das geschah?– / Ein Kobold half wohl da! / Ein Glühwurm fand sein Weibchen nicht” 5   Millington, “Meistersinger”: “The music of the Riot Scene … which contains more than a dozen polyphonic lines, is notoriously difficult to perform; a simplified version, initiated by Toscanini, is used in many houses.” 6   Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (London, 1972), p. 252. Manzoni’s original reads: “Ne’ tumulti popolari c’è sempre un certo numero d’uomini che, o per un riscaldamento di passione, o per una persuasione fanatica, o per un



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In “Die Meistersinger” it is not “a certain number of other men” but the women who eventually bring the brawl to an end (aided by the Watchman’s horn), the presence of any group that attempts to calm things down, though in accord with Manzoni’s statement, is rare in opera. Perhaps there are musical reasons for that—the need to add musical representation of an opposing group (those who oppose the rioters) would usually require a separate, contrasting chorus. That is not an issue, however, in this scene from “Die Meistersinger”; the voices are generally subservient to the orchestral play upon two motives (those associated with the cudgel and with Beckmesser’s song), and the women’s voices are not significantly differentiated from the rest. Another unusual feature of this riot scene is that the participants in the action are bourgeois, rather than le peuple or il popolo. Historically, the “mob” has had two strands of meaning, the lower classes and a crowd bent on violence. In much political thought before the end of the nineteenth century, these strands are fused: it was Edmund Burke’s “swinish multitude” and Cesare Lambroso’s criminal class that formed violent crowds. The riot in “Meistersinger” is closer to the theories proposed by Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 Psychologie de la foule: even ordinary, middle-class folks, when placed in a crowd, do things that they would not do as individuals.7 This is unusual in opera, however. Except for conspiracies, which may involve nobles as well as commoners, aggressive, violent crowds usually are composed of the lower classes, such as the peasants in Scribe and Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” (discussed below).

disegno scellerato, o per un maledetto gusto del soqquadro, fanno di tutto per ispinger le cose al peggio; propongono o promovono i più [spietati] consigli, soffian nel fuoco ogni volta che principia a illanguidire: non è mai troppo per costoro; non vorrebbero che il tumulto avesse nè fine nè misura. Ma per contrappeso, c’è sempre anche un certo numero d’altri uomini che, con pari ardore e con insistenza pari, s’adoprano per produr l’effetto contrario: taluni mossi da amicizia o da parzialità per le persone minacciate; altri senz’altro impulso che d’un pio e spontaneo orrore del sangue e de’ fatti atroci. Il cielo li benedica” (I promessi sposi: storia milanese del secolo XVII scoperta e rifatta da Alessandro Manzoni in Alessandro Manzoni, Tutte le opere, gen. ed., Bruno Cagli [Rome, 1965], chap. 13, p. 353). See also Aino Anna-Maria Paasonen, “The Hourglass Figure in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]: Multiplicities in Flux, Spatial Forum, and the Milanese Bread Riots of 1628,” in this volume. 7  Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, with a new introduction by Robert A. Nye, (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995). In Le Bon’s view, one reason for that is a sense of invincibility  arising from the anonymity of the members of the group. That does not, however, apply to the riot in “Die Meistersinger”; the Meistersinger know each other all too well.

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Antonio Solera and Giuseppe Verdi: “Nabucco” (“Nebuchadnezzar,” 1842), No. 11, “Coro e Profezia” (Act 3, Second Set, Scenes 4–5) Let us begin with Roger Parker’s description of this number. 3.ii The banks of the Euphrates The closing scene of Part 3 is entitled “Coro e Profezia.” The Hebrews’ sighs for their lost homeland are violently countered by Zaccaria, who presents a vision of the future in which Babylon will be reduced to ruins. The Hebrews’ choral lament (“Va pensiero”) is the most famous piece in “Nabucco”, perhaps in all Verdi. It is deliberately simple, almost incantatory in its rhythmic tread, unvaried phrase pattern and primarily unison texture; and by these means it creates that powerful sense of nostalgia which, later in the century, gave the chorus its status as a symbol of Italian national aspirations. In the context of the drama, however, the chorus’s attitude is cast aside by Zaccaria [High Priest of the Hebrews], whose two-part minor–major profezia (“Del futuro nel buio”) takes up rhythmic and melodic strands from “Va pensiero” and places them in a fresh dynamic context.8

Thanks to Parker’s research we now know that “Va pensiero” was not encored at the première of “nabucco” and did not become the Risorgimento equivalent of “We shall Overcome.”9 If it did gain iconic status as a symbol of the Risorgimento, it was only after Unification was complete, that is, after 1870.10 Here is the text:11 Va pensiero sull’ali dorate Va ti posa sui clivi, sui colli Ove olezzano tepide e molli L’aure dolci del suolo natal! Del Giordano le rive saluta, Di Sionne le torri atterrate… Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta! O membranza sì cara e fatal! Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati Perché muta dal salice pendi? Le memorie nel petto raccendi, Ci favella del tempo che fu!  8   Roger Parker, “Nabucco [Nabucodonosor],” Grove Music Online (accessed 17 May 2010).  9   Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act (Princeton, 1997), chap 2 (“ ‘Va Pensiero’ and the Insidious Mastery of Song”), pp. 20–41; Parker, “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati”: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, 1997). Parker goes into more detail about the scene, including discussion of the music, than I can do here. 10  In the years 1859–1861 most of Italy had been unified under the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia; the Veneto was added in 1866, Rome in 1870. 11  Text and translation from Parker, Arpa d’or, pp. 23–25.



scenes from nineteenth-century operas309 O simile di Solima ai fati Traggi un suono di crudo lamento, O t’ispiri il Signore un concento Che ne infonda al patire virtù. (Go thoughts on golden wings, / go rest upon the slopes, the hills, / where, soft and mild, the sweet breezes / of our homeland smell so sweet! Greet the banks of the Jordan, / The ruined towers of Zion … / Oh, my homeland so beautiful and lost! / Oh, remembrance so dear and fateful! Golden harp of the prophetic bards: Why hang mute on the willow? / Rekindle the memories in our breast, / tell us of times past! Either, similar to the fate of Jerusalem, / give forth a sound of harsh lamentation, / or let the Lord inspire you with harmonies / that will infuse our suffering with courage!)

The alternatives offered by the arpa d’or—harsh lamentation or bearing one’s suffering with courage—offer excellent musical possibilities but little in the way of effective political action. This chorus would work badly as an inspirational hymn for contemporaries who were familiar with the opera, for Zaccaria, rightly, I would say, rejects their lamenting, calling them cowardly women (or, more accurately, women not disposed to war—those terms are not synonymous): Oh chi piange? di femmine imbelli Chi solleva lamenti all’Eterno? … Oh sorgete, angosciati fratelli Sul mio labbro favella il Signor! (Oh, who weeps? Who raises the laments of cowardly women to the Everlasting? Oh, rise up, anguished brothers, the Lord speaks from my lips!)

He then utters his prophecy: not only will the “shameful chains” be broken (“Ecco rotta l’indegna catena! …”), but Babylon will be destroyed: “Hyenas and serpents will come to settle upon the skulls and bones” (“A posare sui crani, sull’ossa / Qui verranno le jene, i serpenti!”). For most of the prophecy the chorus listens in silence;12 unlike the scene in “Le Prophète,” discussed below, there is no musical representation of a gradual galvanization of the crowd. On the final couplet (“Niuna pietra ove sorse l’altiera / Babilonia allo stranio dirà!” [No stone will tell the stranger / where rose 12   There is only one choral intervention during Zaccaria’s prophecy: “Oh futuro” after his first stanza. This is not in the libretto.

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proud Babylon]), Zaccaria launches an energetic stretta (Poco più mosso). Zaccaria is a skilled manipulator of his flock; the chorus enthusiastically repeats his phrase fortissimo, not even waiting for him to finish it (Example 1).13 The entire scene is in the same decasyllabic poetic meter, only one indication that “Va pensiero” is not an independent movement, only the first section of a single number, labeled “11. Coro e profezia” in Verdi’s autograph score.14 In technical terms “Va pensiero” is the slow movement, Zaccaria’s prophecy the “tempo di mezzo” (middle movement) and then, with the faster tempo, the stretta of a conventional operatic form found in arias and ensembles, including internal finales (finales in acts other than the last). Given the context of “Va pensiero,” it is difficult to view it as a independent chorus,15 and difficult to forget Zaccaria’s angry rejection of it. Even though Zaccaria, however, has moved the Hebrews from static nostalgia to bellicosity, it is a static bellicosity that leads not to a heroic assault, but to a curtain that interrupts their ardor. There is no stage direction indicating bellicose action—they just stand there. What is more, the Hebrews play no role in achieving their freedom in the following act; that is accomplished only because Nabucco regains his sanity and (improbably) converts to Judaism. Indeed, in the entire Finale ultimo of Act IV, when the Hebrews next appear, the “Coro d’Ebrei” has a low musical profile: it sings in only five measures; elsewhere it is subsumed into the tutti, which includes the popolo and the warriors (guerrieri) who enter with Nabucco.16

13   The musical example is drawn from Nabucodonosor: dramma lirico in four parts, ed. Roger Parker, trans. Andrew Porter (Chicago / Milan, 1996), pp. 275–277. That the soloist begins and the chorus follows is the usual procedure; what is unusual here is that the entrance of the chorus overlaps the soloist’s statement. 14   The same poetic meter was used for two other celebrated “patriotic” choruses, “O signor, dal tetto natio” (“I Lombardi alla prima crociata,” Act 4; “Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia,” “Ernani,” Act 3. 15   The tonal scheme is unusually teleological, the slow movement in the dominant (F# major), the middle movement in the tonic minor (B minor), and the stretta in the tonic major (B major). This too encourages us to view the number as a single unit. 16  In Verdi’s autograph score the chorus is labeled “Coro d’Ebrei” at only two points: mm. 71–72, when the Hebrews respond to the offstage cry “Viva Nabucco” (a slip on Verdi’s part? there is no reason why the remainder of the chorus shouldn’t respond as well); and mm. 176–77 and 181, when they join Abigaille in singing the phrase “Solleva Iddio l’afflitto” (God raised up the afflicted)—this is appropriate, since Abigaille claims that she is quoting a phrase that the Hebrews had said in the past (“Ah! tu dicesti … o popolo … Solleva [etc.]”) (“Ah! you said, o people, God [etc.]”).



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One of the standard clichés about “Nabucco” is that Italians eager to throw off the yoke (it is always a yoke) of Austrian tyranny identified the Babylonians as the Austrian oppressors and themselves as the Hebrews. But what would be the message of this Risorgimento allegory? Let’s get stirred up (in Act 3) but then sit on our hands and wait until the Austrians see the light, are converted to our cause, and grant us independence. This is hardly a message that patriotic Italians should have welcomed! This scene is an excellent example of a forceful, demogogic leader skillfully working a crowd. If the plot and historical circumstances did not demand that the Hebrews have our support—if the cards weren’t stacked against the Babylonians—we might even describe Zaccaria as manipulating a gullible crowd (as we might describe the way that the Anabaptists manipulate the peasants in “Le Prophète” [see below]). Although the clash of Hebrews and Babylonians trumps any divisions based on class, the category “Ebrei” includes commoners; unlike the scene in “Meistersinger,” here the group might be called il popolo (ebreo), and indeed, Abigaille addresses them thus in her swan song in Act 4.17 The inaction of the Hebrews after Zaccaria rouses them through his rhetoric raises an issue to which I will return in the final section of this essay. Eugène Scribe and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” (1849), Act I, No. 3, “Le Prêche Anabaptiste (morceau d’ensemble)” Although “Le Prophète” premiered in 1849, it was essentially completed years before. The postponement of the opera’s premiere until after the 1848 revolution gave it added relevance: the speeches of the Anabaptists were compared to those of the Communists.18 The scene with the Anabaptists in Act I—“No 3 Le Prêche Anabaptiste (morceau d’ensemble)”—more than any other operatic scene I can think of, effectively shows the chorus gradually brought to the boiling point.

  See the previous note.  Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago, 1998), p. 253: “Alexandre Dumas père … commented that ‘the subject of the libretto seems expressly chosen for the preoccupations of the present time. The hero is the king of these Anabaptists whose political doctrines offer so many resemblances to those of our own communists [de nos communistes].’ ” 17 18

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It is like the celebrated scene from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” played in reverse: in “Le Prophète” the trajectory is from calm to violence. Here we will need to look at the music in some detail. Readers unfamiliar with the plot may want to refer to a synopsis, although I try to provide all the necessary information for the scene under discussion.19 The opening pastoral chorus establishes that the peasants are happy … because it’s a nice day: “Trop souvent l’orage / Attriste nos coeurs / D’un jour sans nuages / Goûtons les douceurs” (Too often the storm saddens our hearts. Let us savor all the sweetness of a cloudless day).20 The staging manual—the Mise en Scéne (sic) first published as a Supplément à la Revue et Gazette des Théâtres—indicates that they partake of soup, bread, and beer.21 Life is good. They voice no complaints about their lot in life. They are not contemplating rebellion. All that will change. But politics alone will not suffice to generate a grand opéra. There needs to be a personal conflict. Berthe wants to marry Jean, but, as she explains to Fidès, Jean’s mother, as a vassal she must obtain the consent of Oberthal, the feudal lord, to marry or to leave the manor. Berthe and Fidès set off to obtain Oberthal’s permission, when the three Anabaptists, dressed in black, appear on a hill and descend towards the peasants, accompanied by a three-part free canon played by horns and bassoons, heavily laden with “churchy” suspensions (Example 2).22 The number, “No. 3 La Prêche Anabaptiste,” can arbritarily but usefully be divided into six stages. At the outset of the number, the Anabaptists sing their signature hymn, “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam iterum venite, miseri” (Come once again to us, you poor people, to the 19  For plot summaries, see Steven Huebner, “Prophète, Le,” Grove Music Online (accessed 30 January 2010); Gerhard, Urbanization, pp. 247–50; Laura De Marco’s Synopsis in Le Prophète …, a facsimile edition of the printed orchestral score, Early Romantic Opera, no. 21, 2 vols (New York, 1978), 4 unnumbered pages in the front matter. 20  Unless otherwise indicated, I cite the readings of the printed orchestral score (see preceding note), but set out as poetry (for example, without text repetitions and the like). There are slight differences in the libretto printed in Oeuvres complètes de M. Eugène Scribe Membre de l’Académie française, new edition, 16 vols (Paris, 1854), vol. 16, pp. 1–20. 21  The document is reprinted in facsimile in The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières, Musical Life in 19th-Century France, vol. 3, ed. H. Robert Cohen (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991), pp. 151–82, at p.152 (in the pagination of the original document, pp. 77–108, at p. 78). 22  Examples are taken from the piano-vocal score published by Brandus, plate number 9244.



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healthy water, Come to us O people) (Example 3). The theme is in C minor, with some Aeolian inflections;23 C will prove to be the tonal center of the entire number. The peasants decide to listen (a six bar phrase in C major). Despite the text of their hymn, re-baptism is not the central concern of the three Anabaptists. In the second stage they make their pitch, three tempting questions  sung in a recurring spiky, parlante passage, each followed by the “Ad nos, ad salutarem” hymn in C minor.24 Zacharie begins: “Des ces champs fécondés / Longtemps par vos sueurs, / Voulez-vous être enfin / Les maîtres et seigneurs? Le voulez vous?” (Of these fields, long made fertile through your sweat, do you wish to be at last the lords and masters? Do you wish it?).25 Further enticements follow. In the second passage, Jonas preaches to another group: “Veux tu que ces châteaux / Aux tourelles altières / Descendent au niveau / Des plus humbles chaumières? Le veux tu?” (Do you wish these castles with their haughty towers to descend to the level of the most humble cottages? Do you wish it?). In the third and final cycle, it is Mathisen’s turn: “Esclaves et vassaux / Trop longtemps à genoux, / Ce qui fut abaissé / S’élève. Levez-vous!” (Slaves and vassals, too long on your knees, What was lowered is rising. Arise!). The staging manual takes this literally; the peasants had fallen to their knees but rise again on the words “Levez-vous.” This is followed by “Ad nos salutarem,” closing the section in C minor. All three parlante passages are linked by the chattering octave leaps and scalar passages played by the bassoons, but the first is also connected to the hymn: Horn 1 quotes the first three notes of the hymn, g, c, b (Example 4, which presents the first parlante passage, the statement of the hymn, and most of the second passage). In the first two stages there has been little or no interaction between the Anabaptists and the peasants, and the music has been relatively

23   Meyerbeer told Liszt that he had tried to give the hymn “the colour of a song of the time” (John H. Roberts, “Meyerbeer: Le Prophète and L’Africaine,” The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton [Cambridge, UK, 2003], pp. 208–32, at p. 213). This may help to explain the modal inflections (the B flats within a C-minor context). 24   Parlante: the orchestra provides the thematic material and the structure, while the voices declaim against it. 25   The translation is adapted from that accompanying the c. 1976 recording with Marilyn Horne, James McCracken, and Renata Scotto, with Henry Lewis conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (CBS MSK 79400; MSK 34340).

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static, rarely departing from the home key of C minor and inevitably returning to the Anabaptists’ “Ad nos, ad salutarem.” In the third stage the peasants interact with the Anabaptists, and the music becomes more intense. The peasants, now interested, confer among themselves and choose one of their number to interrogate the Anabaptists. The music turns to a rustic, country-bumpkin 6/8 F major, speeding up to Allegro moderato (Example 5). The theme is related to the hymn, adopting its first, second, fourth, and fifth notes, as though the hymn had made a deep impression on the peasants. “Ainsi ces beaux châteaux?” (And so these beautiful castles?), the designated interlocutor  asks. “Il vous appartiendront!” (They will belong to you), Jonas replies without missing a beat. Mathisen echoes him. The successive questions touch on tonal areas not explored before—ii (g, mm. 71–73), vi (d, mm. 75–78), and even bii (Gb, mm. 87–91).26 The peasants, now six tenors, then repeat their questions, seeking confirmation. The question-answer cycle accelerates from four measures to two, and a sequence in whole-tone steps (Db-Eb-F -G), leads back to C minor (mm. 87–91). The fourth stage: the peasants are now convinced—“Ils ont raison: écoutez-les!” (They are right—listen to them). The thematic material is related to both the “rustic” music of the preceding section, but also to the hymn. The Anabaptists egg them on, repeating “Ad nos” obsessively as the music locks on to the dominant and an ascending chromatic line cresendoes into a climactic fortissimo restatement of the “Ad nos, ad salutarem” theme, with the Anabaptists singing their original religious text and the peasants, completely under their sway now, exclaim “Malheur à qui nous combattrait / Son supplice est tout prêt / Dieu signe l’arrêt” (Woe to him who would fight us / His punishment is all ready; God signs the degree), linking religion and murderous uprising through the shared music (Example 6). In the fifth stage, the peasants arm themselves and march off in military fashion, leading the three Anabaptists in triumph (“… en ordre militaire. Ils promènent les trois Anabaptistes en triomphe”). The Anabaptists’ sixteen-bar period is repeated by the peasants (Example 7). What are we to make of this chorus? Opening the melody

26   An additional intensifying detail: the Anabaptists’ answers to the first two questions are repeated by a single Anabaptist, the third question by two, and the fourth question by all three.



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away from the tonic (on V/IV) is a sophisticated touch that elevates the chorus above the usual school songs sung vigorously at football games, but in compensation the clumsy thumps at the ends of the phrases, accompanied either by an unnecessary text repetition (“sur nous” / “pour tous”) or awkwardly compressed text (“c’est le grand jour” / “soit notre amour” / “fera le tour”) arguably characterizes the chorus and those who sing it negatively. Did Meyerbeer intend to write a banal march, to characterize the Anabaptists as knaves and the peasants as fools? I don’t know, but I think that this is an appropriate reading of the chorus, and so I invite other listeners to interpret it that way as well. This issue is worth pursuing, I think. As the Anabaptists and the peasants approach Oberthal’s castle, let’s look briefly at another example of a purportedly “banal” chorus, from the Prologue of Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” (1857, revised 1881—the chorus remained unchanged in the revised version). Simon Boccanegra agrees to be elected Doge of Genoa, only so that he can finally marry Maria. In a twist worthy of an O’Henry short story, Maria dies shortly before Simon is acclaimed Doge. Today’s commentators generally view the chorus as deliberately banal. For example, “When, at the end of the scene, Simon learns of Maria’s death, he cries out in torment. At that very moment, music of jarring banality accompanies the choral expression of delight at the political success of the candidate of the plebians (Simon) over the patricians.”27 And, “Here the people unknowingly mock Simone’s grief … by hailing the corsair as Doge to the accompaniment of vigorous (and, for Verdi, purposely trivial) Risorgimento ‘public-music’—very much in the old style.”28 For a more nuanced (or perhaps self-contradictory) view: “The banda-like orchestral theme which brings on the populace is without doubt Verdi’s most successful essay in deliberate banality. Not that it embarrasses since, unlike many of his melodies actually written for banda, it is not a debasement of something lyrical. It is simple, direct and popular, and in its context brilliantly effective.” But the author continues, “It jars on our nerves as it jars on Simon’s with a thoughtless cheerfulness which does more to

27  Philip Gossett, “ ‘Becoming a Citizen’: The Chorus in ‘Risorgimento’ Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 41–64, at 62. 28   James A. Hepokoski, “An Introduction to the 1881 Score,” “Simon Boccanegra / Giuseppe Verdi” English National Opera Guide (London, 1985), pp. 13–26, at 17.

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bring home the hollowness of his triumph than any conventional monologue of despair.”29 What little evidence we have of contemporary reactions to this scene, however, suggests a different perspective. From Abramo Basevi’s 1859 Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi: “The finale of the Prologue, after a recitative that is not brief, has an allegro assai vivo that serves for the acclamations of the chorus, and, after the monotony and the limpness [floscezza] of the music that precedes it, is heard with pleasure…. The effect that it produces at this point is a proof of the influence that pieces have on those [pieces] that follow them.”30 And according to the disposizione scenica (the staging manual) issued by the Ricordi publishing house in 1883, “It is also essential that this last crowd scene [scena popolare] should be played with the utmost liveliness and the contrast between this scene and the dark, dramatic colouring of those preceding is the aim that the composer has set himself, and it is from this contrast that the desired effect can be obtained.”31 Not a word about banality, deliberate or otherwise. The dramatic irony—the contrast between Boccanegra “crushed with grief ” (“accasciato dal dolore”) and the “crowd, increasingly tumultuous and joyous” (“la folla è sempre più tumultuante e gioiosa”) —is surely intentional, but did Verdi deliberately write “banal” music, music that would depict the crowd negatively? I don’t know, but again, it makes sense to hear it in that way and I invite listeners to do so. To return to “Le Prophète” …

  Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols (rev. ed., Oxford, 1992), vol. 2, p. 287.  “Il finale del Prologo, dopo un recitativo non corto, ha un allegro assai vivo, che serve alle acclamazioni del coro, e che, dopo la monotonia e la floscezza della musica precedente, è udito con piacere…. E l’effetto che produce in questo punto è una prova dell’influenza dei pezzi che precedono su quelli che seguono.” See Abramo Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859), p. 273, in the critical edition of Ugo Piovano (Milan, c. 2001), p. 336. 31  Translation from Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2, p. 287. The original text reads “È pure indispensabile che quest’ultima scena popolare sia eseguita con grandissima vivacità e con movimenti tumultosi: il contrasto fra questa scena e la tinta cupa e drammatica delle scene che precedono è lo scopo prefissosi dal maestro, ed è appunto da tale contrasto che si ottiene il voluto effetto.” The disposizione scenica is reproduced in facsimile in Marcello Conati and Natalia Grilli, “Simon Boccanegra” di Giuseppe Verdi, Musica e spettacolo: Collana di Disposizioni sceniche diretta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrero (Milan, 1993), 127–186, at p. 139 (p. 11 in the original document). For an English translation of the entire disposizione scenica, see Verdi’s “Otello” and “Simon Boccanegra” (revised version) in Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. by Hans Busch, 2 vols (Oxford, 1988) vol. 2, pp. 423–480. 29 30



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In the sixth and final stage,32 the three Anabaptists and the peasants reach the castle, but when Oberthal, the lord of the manor, comes out the peasants stop dead in their tracks. Those who had already started up the stairway come back down again in fright, and they hide the clubs with which they armed themselves. In the score and libretto he is chatting with his friends. As one commentator notes, “[Oberthal] does not establish a strong musical presence as he dismisses the seditious activities of the Anabaptists in nondescript recitative; from the musical point of view, the stage instructions for peasants to cower before him are scarcely credible.”33 However, to be fair to the peasants (and to Scribe and Meyerbeer), the staging manual specifies that he is preceded by ten armed guards (“précédé de dix gardes, armés de piques”34), one of many instances where staging manuals provide important information not found in the libretto or score.. The ardor of the easily swayed crowd is thus as easily dampened, just by the sight of a man wielding power. The same situation occurs in Act I of “Les Vêpres siciliennes” (Monfort, the French governor of Sicily), in Act IV of “Don Carlos” (the Grand Inquisitor), and in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” (the Comandante [the captain of the ship]). At the end of the act, Oberthal abuses his power, refusing to let Berthe leave the manor to marry Jean, and he threatens the crowd when they protest. Once again, they approach Oberthal but their cowardice overcomes them. The Anabaptists reappear with their hymn. The peasants remain silent, but their kneeling shows their allegiance to the Anabaptists. The point is made by visual means. It is a personal offense—Oberthal’s seizing Berthe—that leads Jean to join the Anabaptists in Act 2. Over the course of the opera, this will lead to bloodthirsty excess, and Jean will turn against his followers  eventually, Samson-like, bringing the palace down upon their heads, as well as his own. This is a familiar situation. A celebrated example is Kleist’s 1808 novella, Michael Kohlhaas (and its later adaptation, Doctorow’s Ragtime). A personal offense, by a ruler, his representative, or someone under his protection leads to a quest for redress if not vengeance, and this escalates to bloody rebellion and war,  In the score this is labeled “Récitatif ” and might as sensibly be grouped with the following number, No. 4, the “Romance à deux voix,” but I follow the score in treating it as the end of the Prêche Anabaptiste. 33   Huebner, “Prophète.” 34   Mise en Scéne (see n. 21), p. 154 (p. 80 in the original document). 32

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with the audience’s sympathies eventually turning away from the main character and his fanatical followers. We see this in “La Muette de Portici,” and similar murderous fanaticism is found also in “Les Vêpres siciliennes.” And so the theme of “le juste milieu” and the avoidance of excess remains a constant, found in operas written during the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Third Empire and, no doubt, beyond. *** As we have seen, the Hebrews in “Nabucco” are brought to the boiling point, but do not boil. This is not surprising. Before the unification of Italy, scenes of revolt, of aggressive crowds that take action, are rare in Italian opera. To be sure, there are scenes in Italian opera in which crowds are manipulated, such as the one in “Nabucco,” but it is hard to think of a lynch mob in a major Italian opera before “La gioconda” (1876) or a riot before the sommossa in the council chamber scene in the revised version of “Simon Boccanegra” (1881). The experience of the Terror and the tradition of French opera itself, with its focus on the chorus rather than soloists, help to account for the attraction to such scenes in French opera, but do not explain their absence in the Italian operatic repertoire. One important reason for that absence, I believe, is the stringent censorship in Italy. An opera with revolutionary overtones, even if accepted by the censors in the North, would probably be mutilated by the censors in the Papal States and points south, if it were allowed to be performed at all. How would one test that hypothesis? One test would be to chart the fate of French operas with such scenes when they were imported to Italy. What was the fate of “La Muette de Portici,” “Les Huguenots,” “La Juive,” and “Le Prophète” in Italy? Here I concentrate on the latter. The Italian premiere of “Le Prophète,” in Italian translation as “Il profeta,” took place in Florence in 1852, but Ricordi had already published the libretto a few years earlier, a generic libretto without the names of particular performers.35 Individual theaters would insert a page with the cast and other information specific to their production. The translation shows signs of censorship—additional research would be needed to establish whether this was a case of self-censorship or 35   The plate number—21672—lies between those of the Ricordi editions of “La battaglia di Legnano” and “Luisa Miller,” operas from 1849. The copy I consulted is available on line: http://www.braidense.it/rd/06296_19.pdf.



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whether censors had imposed changes on a translation submitted for their approval. The censorship in northern Italy was less stringent than in the South where, in addition to political concerns, there were additional concerns about morality and religion. For example, Berthe’s suicide, a mortal sin, would have posed an obstacle to the censors’ acceptance of the libretto in the Papal States. Significantly, “Il profeta” was not performed at the Naples Teatro San Carlo, the most important opera house in the South, until 1865, that is, after Unification. The censors’ choice was to prohibit the opera altogether or to effect changes to make it acceptable. It is difficult to imagine a production of the opera in which the peasants didn’t attempt an attack on Oberthal’s palace in Act I, and in which the Anabaptists and their followers didn’t enjoy temporary successes and commit excesses in the following acts. The principal strategy of the Italian censors—that is, when the opera is not rejected outright—is to keep the aggressive crowds but change their motivation to discontent from political offenses (oppression, unjust taxes, arbitrary exercise of power) to personal offenses, preferably taking liberties with the women of the subaltern group (whether indigenous people oppressed by the foreign invaders or by feudal lords).36 Here, for example, is the Anabaptists’ initial approach to the peasants (compare with the original French text in the second stage above). Zaccaria begins: “Volete, o vassalli / Di queste convalli / Salvar le donzelle / A voi fidanzate / Da mani spietate / D’impuro signor?” (Do you wish, o vassals of these dales, to save the women engaged to you from the pitiless hands of the impure lord?). Gionata follows with “Vuoi tu che il castello, / Che s’erge vicino, / Non sia pel tapino / Più l’onta e il rossor?” (Do you want the castle that rises up near by to cease to be [a place of] humiliation and shame for the wretched?). The dialogue between the peasants (contadini) and the Anabaptists in the third stage reads as follows: I. CON. Ebben le nostre spose? GION. Pure diventeran. I. CON. Sì barbari costumi? GION. Per sempre spariran. 36   Censors adopted this strategy with “La muta di Portici”; see my “A Tale of Three Libretti: La Muette de Portici in Italy,” in L’immaginario scenografico e la realizzazione musicale. Atti del Convegno dedicato a Mercedes Viale Ferrero, eds. Maria Ida Biggi and Paolo Gallarati (Turin, 2010), pp. 160–180.

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david rosen I. CON. Chi ci darà la forza? MAT. Il Ciel v’assisterà II. CON. Ed il padron sì altero? ZAC. Umil diventerà. (And so our wives? They will become pure. Such barbaric customs? They will disappear forever. Who will give us the power? Heaven will assist you. And the Master so proud? He will be humbled).

In 1863 Ricordi published a “nuova edizione,” “traduzione conforme all’originale francese” (new edition, translation conforming to the French original). The sense of the original, with its subversive text, is restored. After Unification, Italian operas were free to include scenes of lynch mobs, riots, and the like. But the story of crowds or mobs in operas of the last third of the century is a topic for another essay.

Example 1:  Verdi: Nabucodonosor, Part 3, No. 11, Coro e Profezia, mm. 86–97.

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Example 2:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 2, Scène, mm. 12–22 from the end.

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Example 3:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 1-19.

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Example 4:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 20–44.

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Example 5:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 63–91.

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Example 6:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 92–131.

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Example 7:  Meyerbeer: Le Prophète, Act I, No. 3, Le Prêche Anabaptiste, mm. 132–158.



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The Hourglass Figure in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]: Multiplicities in Flux, Spatial Form, and the Milanese Bread Riots of 1628 Aino Anna-Maria Paasonen The Hourglass Figure in the Novel’s Iconic Lake-River-Lake Landscape The Betrothed’s first chapter’s famous opening landscape traces a complex and almost ungraspable site, occasionally oscillating between the nineteenth-century locus of the narrator (which becomes that of a twenty-first century reader) and the seventeenth-century past, offering a spectacular panorama to the eye: a longitudinal lake country, flanked by mountains, that acts as a theater or “container” of visual meanders and watery flows.1 Varying “cinematic” points of view, repeatedly zoom in on details and riparian recesses and then zoom out to larger frames of reference, foreshadowing the novel’s own narrative strategies.2 The impact of this scene is such that a reader may retrospectively recognize it as a symbolic template or even “chronotope,” Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a point or “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse.”3 In this grand Manzonian introit, just as Bakhtin theorized, “time takes on flesh and

1   Francesco Casetti, “La pagina come schermo. La dimensione visiva nei ‘Promessi sposi,’ ” in Leggere i Promessi sposi, ed. Giovanni Manetti (Milano, 1989), pp. 313–324. Casetti refers to a wide consensus of opinion finding much of nineteenth century Italian literature engaged in creating “scenography, illustration, cartography and tracings,” in a “spettacolarizzazione della realtà.” He discusses Manzoni’s initial landscape as a play of points of view engaging the author and a scripted reader (voi or “you”), as well as the first character to appear in the landscape as the plot begins. 2   Already in 1952, Remo Fasani attributed to Manzoni the intention of making the initial landscape or “Overture” foreshadow fateful future events. Especially in his 1997 lecture, which revisits this passage, Fasani recognizes the importance of the landscape description as “perhaps suggesting the movement of the novel to come.” See his Non solo“Quel ramo …”. Cinque saggi su “I promessi sposi” e uno sul canto V dell’Eneide (Florence, 2002), p. 126. 3   Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, eds. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), p. 84.

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becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people.”4 Although the landscape surrounding Lecco is not the Duchy of Milan, it can be seen to function as a symbolic representation of the city and Duchy of Milan, and also surely as a Bakhtinian “monument” to the forces that were shaping and still shape a sense of Italian national identity, and beyond that, perhaps, even to the whole human adventure, “flowing” from life towards death and perhaps into a surmised afterlife. A quick glance at the map reveals, for those unfamiliar with the Lake of Como, that from an imagined center that body of water is composed of three arms, two southerly and one northerly. The first chapter of I promessi sposi, however, refers only to the southerly tip of the eastern branch (directed southward between mountain chains), visible from Lecco and its surroundings, as if this were a separate “lake,” isolated entirely from the lake as a whole. He calls this relatively small stretch of water “closed off ”—which is factually untrue—and, as if correcting a lapsus, redefines the lake’s real extension as being “lost from view.” The first sentence’s main verb describes this “arm” of the lake suddenly narrowing to become the River Adda, overarched by a bridge that visually accentuates the transformation. The water soon ceases to be called the Adda as it widens to become a lake again. The second stretch of lake, south of Lecco, thus seems to be similar to what is seen north of Lecco, making the two visible stretches of “lake” somewhat symmetrical, as if the second one is an iteration of the first. I would argue that this image encodes reality within a stylized spatial form. This particular and extremely well-drawn configuration is what I will call the “lake-river-lake” hourglass figura or template. Etching this iconic shape more deeply in the reader’s mind, Manzoni describes it a second time, still in the first chapter, before the plot begins to unfold. After establishing the geographical “theater” (which contains the lake-river-lake) and the presence in it of a local population oppressed by Spanish soldiers, the narrator’s gaze returns to range once more over the “vast and varied mirror” of “the lake,” with a kinetic sense of how the landscape unfolds both as viewed from a boat or as grasped from some mountain height (a bird’s eye view that excludes the wider context) in its entirety, north to south:  Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 84.

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…on this side a lake, closed off at its extremity or rather lost in a cluster or maze of mountains, then gradually widening between other mountains that body forth one by one to the eye, which the water reflects upside down, villages on their shores; on this side, a stretch of river, then lake, then again river, which snakes away in a shiny ribbon, once more between accompanying mountains of diminishing size, almost lost to sight, they too, at the horizon.”5

In this second iteration, the figure has a coda, as it were, because the second of the two lake sections ends with the river exiting from it only to disappear from view—following actual geography. This detail, too, however, foreshadows and exemplifies Manzoni’s interest in larger spaces narrowing then opening once more onto larger spaces, as a series or sequence of containers. In the castles of Don Rodrigo and the Unmentionable Count, large rooms and corridors alternate and lead forward to attics, mazes, or exits. Unlike the geographical sketch of the Duchy that opens Giuseppe Ripamonti’s history of Milan during the Plague of 1630, the novel’s major source, Manzoni’s topography does not refer to the Ticino River which, like the Adda, marks a border of the Duchy and is a tributary of the Po. Nor does the novel mention the Po, nor its delta on the Adriatic. Manzoni does refer to three sizeable mountain torrents (tre grossi torrenti) that feed the lake, and also to water’s forceful work (il lavorío dell’acque) in shaping the landscape by erosion. Erosion implies the “work” of rain, snow, ice, sun, wind, rivulets and streams not specified in the description of the mountainous terrain around the lake. Still, what Manzoni delineates is a wavering, elongated, and irregular hourglass shape, suggesting an underlying symbolic form. The grand narrative that begins with this figura, relies, in large part, on representations of urban crowds in movement: rioting crowds; religious processions; indigent masses moving through the streets of Milan during a famine, thousands of them forced into improvised shelters in the huge hospital; squadrons of foreign mercenaries moving

 Alessando Manzoni, I promessi sposi, ed. Biancamaria Travi (Milano, 1993), p. 10.6–7 (emphasis mine). This edizione scolastica numbers roughly ten-line sections. All citations from the novel are from this edition, hereafter cited as PS. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French or Italian are mine. A close comparison of her exordium to that of Manzoni’s first draft of the novel, Fermo e Lucia (1821–1823) and to the first published edition, I promessi sposi (1824–1827) reveals that this lake-riverlake figure, already loosely sketched out in the earlier drafts, comes into sharp focus in the last and definitive edition (published 1840–1842). 5

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south towards Mantova along the river Adda, making incursions into the Duchy of Milan, looting and raping as they go; and finally—with the bubonic plague, brought to the city of Milan in 1629 by a soldier— resulting in flows of diseased people moving freely or by coercion through the streets, towards the overflowing hospital, or as processions of open carts loaded with corpses on their way to mass graves. Before analyzing Manzoni’s hourglass figure in the descriptions of rioting crowds in the 1628 Milanese bread riots, a first step might be to note other multiplicities in flux in the novel and whether or not they are also contained in an hourglass or lake-river-lake configuration. Multiplicities in Flux and Symbolic Images of Profusion Set in the Duchy of Milan at a time of colonial occupation, famine, war and plague (1628–31), Manzoni’s capacious historical novel so often represents a “multiplicity” that images of profusion seem an essential characteristic of its imaginative conception. In this varied narrative, pluralities—not only human ones—are usually contained, even confined, in spatial constructs within which they move in multiplicative or dispersing patterns, interactions or flows. Not long after he had begun work on the novel, Manzoni, in notes on Lombard history appended to his play Adelchi, made clear that he was interested in “immense numbers of people” affected by historical events without being key players. He refers to these ordinary masses as a continuous flow, “one generation after another, that live and die, in their homeland, unobserved, without leaving a trace.”6 Multitudinousness as a characteristic of the narrative approach builds the novel’s “oceanic” grandeur at the descriptive and figurative levels, and even at the syntactical level, too, as when enumerations, dizzying catalogues or lists are deployed. In a key passage of the novel’s first chapter, Manzoni explains the human “tendency” to form classes or associations for protection and advantage, a tendency, the narrator notes, active in the highest degree in “those days” in which the novel is set. He lists the clergy, the aristocracy, the military, merchants, artisans, members of the legal professions, and doctors, all of them gathered as if in “small oligarchies,” not 6  Alessandro Manzoni, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia Longobardica in Italia (1822) in Liriche e Tragedie di Alessandro Manzoni (Torino, 1980), pp. 471, 512.

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all of them equally powerful, yet each of them capable of empowering a single member, for good or evil.7 Manzoni’s world view is highly concerned with ethics and Catholic Christian piety and the novel’s historical focus and subplots all explore issues of justice, showing how power is abused or used for good, while the fictional plot focuses on a working class couple struggling against the machinations of an abusive nobleman. It should not surprise us that Manzoni’s poetic images of large aggregates usually have a moral dimension and that what “moves” them in flow patterns can, on the one hand, be chaotic or labyrinthian, but can, on the other hand, be orderly and peaceable, when there is not—in a third type—an interacting admixture of positive and negative agencies. Towards the end of the novel, for example, when the scourges of war, famine and plague take center stage, human “associations” face violent destruction and random dispersion. In chapter twenty-seven, announced “extreme events” are compared to an apocalyptic wind that will cause upheavals affecting “even” the lives of Manzoni’s humble protagonists, allegorized as minute twigs and leaves: Finally new events, more universal, more violent and extreme, visited them, too, even the very least of them, according to the world’s estimation: like a hurricane rushing forward aimlessly, toppling and uprooting trees, flaying roofs, lifting off the tops of steeples, knocking down walls, and strewing wreckage in all directions, [wind] lifts up small twigs hidden in grass, and searches out the dry, matted leaves stuffed in tight corners by a lesser wind, and sucks them aloft in its rushing fury.8

In this epic simile, Dantesque and Shakespearean, a whirlwind destroys all that is solid—human constructs and social institutions associated with power can be inferred—while also dispersing and uprooting the frail and nameless lives of the “weakest,” or humblest people, the “nobodies.” The formerly stable or inert objects set in motion by the “flux” are disparate, and their centrifugal dispersal follows only the directional swirl of the wind. The human chaos hereby alluded to is indeed an “extreme” event affecting all things, one which no human agency can resist. More literally, as Milan is turned upside-down by the plague, criminals seize control of the city at large, worsening conditions already

  PS, p. 19.49–50.   PS, p. 435.59

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made untenable by colonial misrule. The narrator comments: “The thugs that the plague didn’t kill or neutralize found, in the general confusion, in the collapse of all public order, a new occasion for activity and also a new guarantee of impunity. In fact, the exercise of public order came, in large part, to be in the hands of the worst of them.”9 The plague chapters continue to elaborate the abuses of power of those survivors organized as “relief ” and mortuary workers, but also praise the virtues of Franciscan monks who devote and often sacrifice their lives in humanitarian service. Both the evil “association” and the charitable one, are shown at work, each in their own trajectories and patterns. In the aftermath of the devastation caused by war, famine, and plague, before order is entirely restored, a haphazardly heterogeneous social amalgam is described in the much studied allegorical tableau of Renzo’s plundered, wrecked and weed-infested vineyard, towards the end of chapter thirty-three.10 Manzoni’s precise botanical nomenclature evokes a relatively small and contained site so crowded with diverse plant species that the reader recognizes in its profusion a running analogy to a devastated human community struggling for survival. Without any other principle of order, the strong oppress the weak, and signs of former cultivation are choked by the wild energies of plants inimical to man. Though this “landscape” appears at first to be motionless, the exuberant “weeds” and otherwise useful but decimated plants are described as having grown, overtaken, crept, stolen, covered over, encircled, twined around, clung to, weighed down or choked each other. The scene’s implied movement suggests a thickly interwoven aggregate made up of destructive and benign organisms, the former quite hardy, the latter depressed. In this example, the very slowness of plant motility, in the absence of wind, makes particular individuals and their fates sharply visible, as single objects but also as botanical “families,” or groups, competing and propagating themselves through reproduction. The most shocking image of chaotic “crowding,” that is not a mob, is Manzoni’s rewriting in chapter thirty-for of Giuseppe Ripamonti’s eye-witness account of the Plague of 1630, showing cadavers piled

  PS, p. 513.41  Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (London, 1972), p. 621.  9 10



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high on horse-drawn carts on their way to mass graves. This description is more emblematic than allegorical: Most of these bodies were naked, though some had been hastily wrapped in rags, piled up and commingled, like a covey of snakes that slowly uncoil on a tepid spring day; so that, at every lurch or jolt, one saw those grisly tangles writhe and slither horribly, with pendulous heads and lengths of virginal hair falling forward, and arms breaking loose to hit against the wheels…11

Turning a corner, the carts are pulled into view, one after another, a multiplying and staggering spectacle, with its own internal viscosity, moving forward along a street. At a time when individual and familial burial rites had become impracticable, the innumerable dead are an object of funereal contemplation that Manzoni elevates by having his protagonist (Renzo) pray for the souls of these unknown deceased. The macabre procession functions as a call for compassionate and elegiac piety on a vast scale, which the novel reiterates in many more scenes of multitudinous suffering.12 Aside from objective, metaphorical or symbolic representations of human aggregates, or of actual human bodies piled together, Manzoni also frequently refers to the mental states of his characters as “crowded” with feelings, thoughts and visions, including dream visions, and we can infer that he conceptualized his own cogitations and mental processes as a man and as an author of a “polycentric” and “polyphonic” novel along these same lines.13 These descriptions too, should be taken into account when combing the text for the full range of use to which “multiplicity” is employed. The terms “choral” and “symphonic” are often used by critics to describe Manzoni’s extraordinary foregrounding of human multitudes, and his evocation of the sounds they make. Remo Fasani was perhaps the first, in 1952, to use “symphonic” for the

11   PS, p. 544.26. Biancamaria Travi translates the scene as found in Ripamonti’s De peste Mediolani quae fuit anno 1630 (Milan, 1640) in n.18. An Italian translation of this book was published as Giuseppe Ripamonti, La Peste di Milano del 1630, trans. Francesco Cusano (Milano, 1841), facsimile edition (Verona, 1969), soon after Manzoni’s final edition of the novel began appearing. 12   Though Manzoni relied on a great many other historical sources, Ripamonti’s importance for him resembles Plutarch’s importance for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. 13   The terms “polyphonic,” “dialogic,” and “polycentric,” deriving from Bakhtin, are frequently applied to Manzoni by Biancamaria Travi in her introduction to PS, p. xiii, and also by Ezio Raimondi, La Dissimulazione romanzesca. Antropologia Manzoniana (Bologna, 2004) p. 13.

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description of the riots in Milan, and to develop at some length comparisons between Manzoni’s novel and musical composition.14 The Fluid Behavior of Milanese Crowds during the Bread Riots of November 11, 1628 Manzoni’s “choral” and “symphonic” use of congregating people is evident everywhere in the novel but the most climactic mob scenes erupt in chapters twelve and thirteen, where the famine (carestia), brought on by a second year of disastrous harvests, is shown to be compounded by the criminal negligence of the Spanish governor of Milan, Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, waging a senseless war on the Duchy of Mantova, and by the demagogic tergiversations of his minister Antonio Ferrer.15 At the end of chapter eleven, fleeing the ire of a Spanish noble who has prevented his marriage to Lucia, the novel’s protagonist, Renzo, Lucia’s betrothed, arrives alone at the gates of Milan, a wide-eyed country fellow (contadino) new to the city. In chapters twelve, thirteen and in some measure in fourteen, the narrative describes the fluid nature of mob formation as a crescendo of objects, people and events move from the riots at the Bakery of the Ovenhooks (Forno delle Grucce), to the attempted lynching of the Commissioner of Supplies, with Renzo caught in the turbulence.16 Renzo’s first encounter with the mob, on entering a city he soon realizes is in rebellion, is purely aural, as he looks towards the direction from which comes a swarming buzz. In a lapidary and foreshadowing phrase, such as Manzoni often uses to mark a fatal turning point in a character’s life, the narrative reads: “The vortex attracted the onlooker.”17 Still invisible, the rioting crowd is already adumbrated as a turbulent swirl exerting an attraction on that one it will soon incorporate.   In Remo Fasani, Non solo“Quel ramo…,” p. 78.  The terms “choral” and “symphonic” are often used by critics to describe Manzoni’s extraordinary foregrounding of human multitudes, and his evocation of the sounds they make. Fasani was perhaps the first—in 1952—to use “symphonic” for the description of the riots in Milan, and to develop to some length comparisons between Manzoni’s novel and musical composition. Fasani, Non solo“Quel ramo …,” pp. 72, 128. 16   PS, p. 209, n. 44. Biancamaria Travi quotes Lanfranco Caretti’s explanation of the meaning of grucce, unhappily translated by Bruce Penman as “crutches,” as applying to flat wooden sticks used by Bakers to hook and pull out hot bread from brick ovens. 17   PS, p. 201.73. “Vortex”—from Latin vertere + ex—is a term associated with fluid dynamics. 14 15



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In a historical digression to the day’s antecedents, which serves to develop the climax to come, Manzoni explains the false reasoning that infects masses of people, in times of scarcity and soaring prices, into believing that grain and flour are being hoarded in overflowing warehouses and granaries.18 To placate the grave unrest, the demagogic grand chancellor, Antonio Ferrer, creates an impossibly tense situation, dropping the price for bread to less than half of what it actually costs to produce. People crowd bakeries, “shoving and grumbling in bullying tones, threatening to take the law into their own hands and have popular justice done in the worst manner that justice can be done.”19 When a government committee raises the price of grain, flour, and bread, the narrator notes, “The bakers heaved a sigh, but the people seethed like beasts.”20 To render the full build-up of the mob into which Renzo will be drawn, Manzoni recounts the previous day’s events, frequently using water similes or metaphors to describe the incipient mob: men swarming on the city streets are transported by a common rage to gather in groups, merging “like droplets of water on an inclined plane.” Manzoni distinguishes between indignant men carried away by passion, and others more cynical who enjoy watching “waters being stirred up,” and who purposefully “muddy” them further, manipulating the crowd, intent on not letting “those waters” calm down without having “gone fishing” in them.21 The flashback moves forward, like a tide ebbing and flooding; first there is a lull, then a gathering storm, in which tension builds: Thousands of men went to bed feeling a restless conviction that something had to be done, that something would be done. Before daybreak, the streets were again filled with clusters of children, women, men, the elderly, workers, poor people gathered at random: there was a confused buzz of voices; there someone was preaching, and others applauding; this one turns to the man closest to him to repeat a question he’s just been asked; another man repeats the slogan ringing in his ears; everywhere complaints, threats, exclamations of surprise. Nothing is wanting but an excuse, a shove, a ripple of any kind to turn words into actions; and before long it happens.”22 18   Though Ripamonti writes credibly that he was a witness of such avaricious hoarding, it is clear that Manzoni wants to highlight the irrational beliefs of the hungry masses who seek scapegoats for their suffering. 19   PS, p. 206.11. 20   PS, p. 207.16. 21   PS, p. 207.16. 22   PS, p. 207.18. In this passage, I translate avviamento as “ripple.”

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In the sounds, in the varied voices, in the collective nouns referring to age, gender, and class, a growing and “seething” mob comes into being. Phrase by phrase the crowd becomes denser. Subversive action erupts at daybreak with a mob on the move, with a crescendo of tramping and howling heard from the bakery soon to be attacked. Manzoni is always attentive to the acoustic forewarning of the mob’s approach and the crescendo of sound that announces an intensification of action, as he is to the sound of rushing water that announces the presence of the Adda River before Renzo sees it.23 Arriving at the bakery, in an effect of compression, people in front are shoved and trampled by others who arrive from the rear in increasing numbers, as “waves press on waves.”24 As the baker’s front doors and windows are attacked, two youths are killed by stones thrown from an upper window and a dynamic increase in violence is immediately registered: “Rage lends the multitude strength: the door is pushed in, bars on the windows torn off; and a flash flood pours in from every opening.”25 Once people move, they do so like water, slowly gathering at first, then speeding up and turning into a forceful torrent which then changes pace and direction. After the bakery is emptied out and burglarized in a pushing and howling mêlée, this first storm exhausts itself in clouds of billowing flour that veil all that the eye can see.26 A new, ancillary flow pattern consists of two moving processions made up of those getting out with all they can carry and those pushing in to find what’s left. Such is the situation, violence relatively spent, when Renzo comes walking onto the locus delicti, hearing men yelling about lying bakers, about how all this isn’t a drop in the bucket (literally “a hole in water” [“un buco nell’acqua”]) to the justice that must be done.27 As anonymous voices call for a new target of violence, the observant Renzo, out of curiosity, follows a man with a load of splintered wood to the cathedral piazza (mid-way there, Manzoni has Renzo gape for a moment at the unfinished duomo). The anonymous man, with Renzo close behind, penetrates the “swell of the crowd” (“l’onda del popolo”)—like a boat cutting through waves. What Renzo witnesses is the end of one   Manzoni’s makes large crowds and rushing water isomorphic.   PS, p. 210.24. 25   PS, p. 211.30. 26   PS, p. 211.32. 27   PS, p. 212.36. 23 24

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tidal episode and the beginning of another, as a dying fire briefly flares and people shout “Long live plenty! Death to those who starve us! Devil take the city council” and “Death to the commissioner! Long live bread!”28 With no new fuel in sight, the restive crowd hears a voice call out that another bakery is being attacked in a small piazza nearby, and Renzo, not without misgivings, lets himself be “pulled along in the torrent” (“trascinato dal torrente”), keeping to the rear.29 In “Observing a Crowd: The Structure and Description of Protest Demonstrations,” Charles Fisher notes that “crowds are extremely fluid scenes … the configuration of the gathering consistently flows from one shape to another. In some sense, the essence of a thing called ‘crowd,’ is just a spontaneous, unstable flow.”30 Manzoni has caught just this quality, multiplying comparisons between the crowd and a body of water, though readers have perhaps not been consciously aware of the connection between the fluid crowds and the isomorphic flow pattern that opens the first chapter’s landscape, the novel’s Natureingang. Now, in a transposed iteration of that first template, the angry crowd flows like water from the cathedral piazza, through a short and narrow street called Old Fishmarket Lane (Pescheria Vecchia), under an arch, into the piazza de’ Mercanti, where many people cast an unthinking glance at a large marble statue of the Spanish Emperor, Phillip II. Without pausing, from this mid-point, the crowd passes under another arch, into the Via de’ Fustagnai (Street of the Corduroy Workers), and from there flows out (sboccare is used of water) into a small piazza, where the bakery in question is forewarned, its doors locked and armed men visible at the windows. At the end of this trajectory, near the end of chapter twelve, the crowd’s accelerated momentum halts, though people come pouring out from the narrow street into the piazzetta, shoving against those in front who no longer advance, “like a plug or upswell” (“come un ristagno, una titubazione”). To recapitulate, the crowd has “flowed” from one piazza through a narrow street and under an arch, to another   PS, p. 214.45.   PS, p. 215.48. 30   Research on Deviance, ed. J.D. Douglas (New York, 1972), cited in Sam Wright, Crowds and Riots: A Study in Social Organization (Beverly Hills, 1978) p. 25. In Laura Fournier, ed., La Foule en Italie (XIXe-XXe siècles). Laboratoire Italien. Politique et société 4 (2004), Fournier points out that the theme of crowds involves “movement, emotions, collective experience, but also feelings of suffocation and alienation in modern urban spaces,” of which Manzoni is a first modern example (p. 9). 28 29

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piazza that holds a central statute, then under another arch, along another street, to a new piazza, in what one might call variations on the hourglass or lake-river-lake pattern established by the water of one section of Lake Como rushing through the narrow stretch of river, under a bridge and back out into another section of widening lake-water. Amid a buzz of clashing voices, a “damnable voice” (“una maledetta voce”) now incites “the throng” (“la turba”) to attack the house of the Commissioner of Supplies, which is close by. Chapter twelve ends with a flood of people rushing forward once more. Thus, in the sequence from the cathedral square to the Commissioner’s house, the flow pattern has narrowed and widened according to the width and the narrowness of the streets and squares, being briefly pent up as if by a dam but, finding the path of least resistance, all the more forcefully breaking free for the next, climactic rush. Fluid Dynamics in the Near Lynching of the Commissioner of Supplies Anticipating Hippolyte Taine’s study of crowds in the French Revolu­ tion and before Scipio Seghele and Gustave Le Bon wrote their influential books (apparently without having read the published I promessi sposi, translated as Les Fiancés), Manzoni explored the phenomenology of a mob forming from small groups that merge into a larger one, and the larger group, energized by a purpose, attracting ever growing numbers of people. Building on the reports of the ecclesiastical historian Ripamonti and depictions of mobs in literature, including Shakespeare’s and Walter Scott’s crowds, Manzoni presents crowds as made up of indeterminate and contradictory tendencies, dissipating  and recomposing, pushed forward without discernment by the passionate need for “something to be done,” thronging to the magnet of further riotous action, easily manipulated by evil-doers, but also by generous sentiments, in short, “mobile” like the proverbial donna mobile, though Manzoni avoids giving the crowd a gendered character.31

31   For gendered notions of the crowd, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Ninetheenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981).



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Chapter thirteen begins in the commissioner’s house, where servants step out the door to look toward the threatening sound signaling a tumultuous approach—we could speak of a narrative parallelism linking this prelude to the earlier violence at the Bakery of the Ovenhooks. Like the mob that converged on the bakery, this throng swings into sight before those inside, namely the commissioner, can flee. The door is barely bolted and barred when, heard from within, the volume of howling and yelling sounds like thunder from on high. The metaphor of a “thunderstorm” (“la burrasca”), with its promise of violent waters—which Manzoni borrows from Ripamonti—is the commissioner’s own metaphor for the general rebellion, but he does not realize it is about to come crashing down on his own head.32 The meteorological metaphor is developed further when the servants close the shutters, “as one does when the sky darkens ominously and hail is expected at any moment.” The thunderous howling that “echoes in the courtyard and every angle of the house,” is, in fact, followed by a thick hammering of stones thrown against the door and the commissioner, hiding in his attic, hears the riotous “bellowing” (“muggito” could be used of the sea) escalate and the hail of stones redouble. Once more, I summarize the action, pointing out the use of fluid dynamics in the climactic scene. Renzo is now in the midst of the mob, “not pushed there by the swelling current” (“non già portatovi dalla piena”) but thrust forward deliberately in a good-natured attempt to stop the commissioner from being lynched. As the house is besieged, the narrator distances us from the action by drawing attention to himself, saying, “the scene, let me tell you, was nothing but a helter-skelter of people of various ages, male and female, who stood there watching.” In the crowd’s thick and permeable body, Renzo escapes being pummeled, thanks to the sudden and riveting arrival of a long ladder carried by men who move forward in “undulating surges,” shoving and being shoved, once dropping the ladder which fitfully jumps up and down and “snakes” forward in other hands (“andavano a onde … s’avanza balzelloni, e serpeggiando”). The crowd’s murderous mood, however, shifts, at the arrival of Ferrer, whose edict has made bread cheap, and the news ripples its way from mouth to mouth, welcomed with joy by some, with rage by others. Ferrer, in his carriage, has come to take the commissioner to prison, so that “justice will be done.” 32   PS, p. 218.1. The attack on the Commissioner of Supplies occurs in PS, pp. 218– 231. Further brief quotations can be found there.

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At this new apparition, Manzoni interrupts the narrative to theorize on crowd psychology. Suspense creates a platform from which to digress momentarily. Manzoni is also advancing the plot through this pause, during which the crowd’s mood will have shifted as if “in real time.” The narrator explains: Popular uprisings always contain a certain number of men determined to make the worst happen; and a certain number of other men who, with similar passion, work to produce the opposite effect—may heaven bless them. The mass of crowds is a random mixture of people who tend more or less towards one of these extremes: somewhat hot-headed, somewhat crafty, somewhat inclined to a certain idea of justice, as they see it; somewhat desirous to witness something really impressive, ready to be cruel or merciful, to hate or adore, depending on opportunities for these two feelings to be fully indulged; at every moment wanting to believe in and yell out something huge and important, to cheer for someone or curse him. Easily led by a few words, these people become actors, audience, instruments, obstacles according to how the wind blows; they are even ready to be silent when they no longer hear slogans to repeat, and to go away when there are no instigators, when many voices have said together, “Let’s go,” and are not gainsaid; and they go home, asking each other, “What was that all about?” Even so, this mass has the power of numbers, and can support whom it will, so that each instigating group uses every artifice to manipulate the crowd and control it. It is as if two enemy souls fight to enter into a thick, lumbering body, and make it move. They work to best spread the words that will excite passions, to best implement this or that purpose; to best advertise rumors that stir up resentments or calm them, stir up hopes or fears; to best forge a slogan which, repeated loudly by the majority, will all at once express, confirm and win the adhesion of the majority to one or the other party.33

Manzoni’s sociological approach is situated, according to Andrea Matucci, between two polarized nineteenth-century conceptions of crowds as either dangerously unpredictable or, in a more democratic and Romantic stereotype, as heroic humans collectively standing up for their rights, as did the popular base of the French Revolution.34 For Matucci, Manzoni does not hold a “positive” or “democratic view” of the crowd, but sees it only as containing good or constructive as well as criminal and dangerous elements. Because Manzoni lived in a Milan occupied and governed by Austrian Habsburgs, and writes of   PS, pp. 222–223.22–26. The last sentence is truncated in my translation.   Andrea Matucci, “La folla nel romanzo storico italiano da Manzoni a Pirandello,” in La Foule en Italie (XIXe-XXe siècles). Laboratoire Italien. Politique et société 4 (2004), 15–36. 33 34

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Milan once governed by the Spanish Habsburgs, one could assume he may be obliquely addressing the issue of Italians oppressed by foreigners who do not have the welfare of their subjects at heart. Like other critics, Matucci finds Manzoni unable to make the crowd come alive as anything but an abstraction of faceless bodies, out of which one figure may be singled out as voice, as an instigator. Nevertheless, Matucci points out, Manzoni provides the model for how to describe crowds—a prominent theme of the developing Italian novel, and thus profoundly influenced Italian novelists of the following generations—Manzoni’s model remains a model still be reckoned with.35 While Manzoni’s crowds owe much to Giuseppe Ripamonti’s detailed seventeenth-century account of the bread riots and evocations of crowds during the Plague in Milan, what is original in Manzoni is precisely his use of fluid dynamics and hourglass spatial figurae, notably absent in his theoretical discussion just quoted, but all the more apparent once the “poetic narrative” resumes. In a nautical image, the “movable assembly” (“mobile adunanza”) through which Ferrer’s carriage slowly makes its way, surges “in front, behind, to the right and to the left of the carriage, like swelling waves around a ship pitching on through the worst of a tempest.” The elderly statesman, in a toga, all the while “sprinkles” the crowd with gestures and smiles (“saluti che scialacquava al pubblico in massa”). The word soffogare [suffocate], which is associated with affogare [to drown], occurs twice in this scene, once to describe Ferrer overwhelmed (“soffogato”) by the noise and once referring to a remnant of opposition, drowned out (“soffogato”). As a passageway is pushed in through the crowd, dividing it in two, Renzo helps escort the carriage to the Commissioner’s house and contain the two pressing “waves” (“onde”) of people on either side. Once Ferrer gains entry to the house, he quickly slams the door, whipping in the train of his toga “like the tail of a snake in flight disappears in its hole” (“lo strascico, che disparve come la coda d’una serpe, che si rimbuca inseguita”). The snake motif in Manzoni is a fluid gesture that recurs frequently in the novel, from when the river Adda first snakes away into the distance. When the carriage, bearing both Ferrer and the commissioner, makes its way back out through the “two crowds” separated till then by   Matucci, “La folla nel romanzo storico,” 22–23.

35

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the “men of good will,” the populace surges back together and merges in its wake (“Di mano in mano che s’avanzava, le due folle rattenute dalle parti, si ricadevano addosso e si rimischiavano, dietro a quella”). This detail reaffirms the comparison between the crowd and the behavior of water, closing behind the carriage as water closes behind a ship, a variation on the lake-river-lake template. In the watery crowd, like the biblical Red Sea, divided by a passageway acting as a temporary separation, we find Manzoni’s characteristic mirror symmetry. Ferrer’s coming and going also provides a variation on the template seen as folded on itself spatially, with the house in the middle. Zooming out to see the riot at the bakery and the assault on the Commissioner as linked by a theoretical digression that explains the two possible tendencies in crowds, we recognize Manzoni’s predilection for the hourglass template in the text’s disposition: narrativetheory-narrative. That this is a deliberate effect of poetic crafting will be evident from what follows. Ripamonti’s and Manzoni’s Experience and Description of Crowds Giuseppe Ripamonti, the priestly historian from whom Manzoni borrowed so much, referring to the uprisings in November 1628, wrote, “I was a spectator of all these events, a fortuitous witness to the beginning of the uprising.”36 Ripamonti, too, makes a few general, though succinct, remarks on the nature of crowds, calling the plebeian mass (“plebe”) an “animal with many heads.” Yet the mob that attacks the bakery and the Commissioner’s house in Ripamonti’s seventeenthcentury account has surprisingly little mobility. The scenes are given, but not the flow patterns and shapes that Manzoni has imposed on them. There is no mirror symmetry. Ripamonti speaks of the upheavals as a thunderstorm (“burrasca”), of the plebe besieging bakeries (“assediava”), of people attacking (“mossero incontro”) bakery boys, breaking out in misdeeds (“proruppero in misfatti”), of the crowd moving forward (“s’avvió”) without a leader, arriving by chance in front of a bakery (“capitarono a caso”), people coming and going (“andavano e venivano”), running delirious and furious to kill the Commissioner (“la plebe giunse al colmo dell’atrocità, correndo delirante e furibonda 36  Giuseppe Ripamonti, La Peste di Milano del 1630, trans. Francesco Cusani (Milano, 1841). Facsimile reproduction (Bologna, 1977), p. 35.



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per uccidere il vicario”), spurred on by an old man carrying a hammer and nails—a figure to whom Manzoni gives the eyes of Dante’s Charon.37 In Ripamonti, Ferrer is described as advancing in his carriage through the crowd (“avanzandosi in carozza tramezzo la folla”), with no comparisons to boats and waves. Ferrer’s departure through the crowd is not described at all. Such differences in the story-telling help point up what Manzoni was crafting through his use of the versatile hourglass template. In Ripamonti, wood from the bakery is burned in front of it, not in the cathedral piazza. There is no rushing through narrow streets under arches. These are events Manzoni, the poet, imagined, perhaps walking the streets with a friend, from one historical location to the other and looking for order and symmetry to contain scenes of chaos. We must also ask how Manzoni’s own experience of crowds may have contributed to his narrative. One incident famously identified as a turning point of his life, occurred in Paris on April 2,1810, as he and his young wife, Henriette Blondel, stood on the street watching the celebrations for Napoleon’s nuptials with Marie-Louise of Austria. Huge crowds thronged the boulevards, waiting for fireworks planned as a fluid spectacle, “starting at L’Etoile, and continuing down the hill in sparkling waves of fire.”38 According to the next day’s newspaper reports, somewhere near the Place du Carousel—not far from Manzoni’s apartment—a rocket swerved off course and landed in the crowd, which panicked. Alessandro, caught in the violent press, saw Henriette almost crushed. At this point he suffered the first of what were to become recurring “seizures” related to agoraphobia. A week later he, a lapsed Catholic, began religious instruction with the priest who had converted Henriette from Calvinism to Catholicism earlier that year. Another crowd experience more closely informs Manzoni’s version of the attack on the Commissioner’s house. It occurred in 1814, as the Napoleonic French viceroy’s “Italian reign” was tottering. By mid April, the Austrians were at the gates of Milan. On April 19, needing a scapegoat on whom to vent their rage, the frenzied populace fixed their hatred on the Minister of Finance appointed by the French, General 37   Edgar Allan Poe borrowed this character from Manzoni for a story called “The Man of the Crowd.” 38   Archibald Colquoun, Manzoni and His Time (New York, 1954), p. 93. I summarize from Colquoun for both incidents given here.

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Prina, whom they attacked in his official residence, in the Piazza san Fedele, across the square and visible—despite the heavy rain—from the Blondel house where Manzoni found himself. The Blondel’s garden abutted on a smaller house where the minister attempted to hide but was smoked out. Manzoni wrote in a letter to Claude Fauriel, “Our house is situated very near the house where Prina lived so that for some hours we heard the cries of those looking for him, which kept my mother and wife in constant anguish, for they thought the mob would not stop there…” The Prina riots ended with the minister being dragged out into the street and killed.39 The civil guards halted at the edge of the mob in the Prina riot, as did the Spanish soldiers in Milan, on November 11, 1628, according to Ripamonti’s eyewitness account. We are told that Manzoni suffered severe agoraphobia, which worsened as he became older, so that he could not go out of his home without someone by his side, for fear an abyss would open up before him. Towards the end of his life, his imaginative grasp and interest in large aggregations of people brought him to research and write about the French Revolution. The behavior of mobs associated with La Terreur must have represented a vortex of what he feared and thus wished to master through writing. Phillip II’s Statue:Another Iteration of the Hourglass Figura Some critics have taxed Manzoni with having an ironic, distanced and paternalistic attitude towards his working class protagonists. For Antonio Gramsci, Manzoni was too Catholic and aristocratic to think that the voice of the people was the voice of God.40 Filippo Noto Campanella, writing about crowds in I promessi sposi, accuses Manzoni of paternalistic “bad faith” in creating working class characters without  depth or autonomy.41 Noto Campanella, among others, singles out the term marmaglia [rabble] in the description of the bread riots, as an expression of the omniscient narrator’s—and hence Manzoni’s— scorn. If, however, we look closely at the various terms Manzoni uses to refer to the crowd, we are led to distinguish between points of view

  Fauriel cited in Colquoun, Manzoni and His Time, p. 110.   Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Torino, 1950) pp. 72–77. 41   Filippo Noto Campanella, “Rilievi critici e psicanalitici sulla ‘folla’ nei Promessi sposi,” in La Tavola Rotonda (April, 1973). 39 40



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attributable to characters within the narrative and those of the narrator. In part, Manzoni employs in Italian the terms used by Ripamonti in Latin. But as the novel’s crowd is far more detailed, his vocabulary is much richer than that of his source. From the end of chapter eleven to the end of chapter thirteen, a wide variety of terms with shifting associations appear.42 Taking stock of Manzoni’s lexical range in referring to the mob one recognizes a full range of terms, many of them borrowed directly from Ripamonti, most of them neutral, some of them insults hurled at the crowd by the police or by parts of the crowd adverse to each other, some describing the heat of action, some the ebb. The chiastic variation in the use of children-women-men / men-women-children, a term that exercises Noto Campanella to accuse Manzoni of inexcus­ able aristocratic hauteur, the rabble deserves closer scrutiny. 42   Here is a list, with English translations and the original Italian terms, and, in parentheses, the number of times they recur in close proximity without an intervening synonym:

upheaval tumulto, conquerors conquistatori, swarm brulichìo, vortex vortice, multitude moltitudine (3) populace popolo (3), men uomini, thousands of men migliaia d’uomini, children women men fanciulli, donne, uomini, old people vecchi, workers operai, poor people poveri, group of people crocchio di gente, a hundred voices cento voci, many hands molte mani, people gente, gang masnada, people gente (2), crowd folla, anthill-swarm formicolaio, sons figliuoli, Milanese milanesi, vile rabble canaglia, (3), tempest tempesta, press calca, knaves, birboni, scoundrels furfantoni, poor people povera gente, multitude moltitudine, the victorious vincitori, crowd folla; men women children uomini, donne, fanciulli; throng calca, processions processioni, people gente, crowd folla, turmoil trambusto, crowd folla, upheaval tumulto, poor people povera gente, young simpletons merlotti, people gente (2) populace popolo, multitude moltitudine, faces visi, people gente, multitude moltitudine, throng calca, torrent torrente, chaotic noise baccano, skirmishes mischia, riotous army esercito tumultuoso, rabble marmaglia (2) multitude moltitudine, crowd folla, throng turba, i folla, forerunners vanguardia, raging ones furibondi, upheaval tumulto (2), throng turba, siege assedio, crowd folla, people gente, chaotic crowd ciurma, crowd folla (2), people gente, upheaval tumulto, crowd folla, poor people povera gente, crowd folla, rebellion sommossa, popular revolts tumulti popolari, men uomini; the mass la massa, the substance of the upheaval il materiale del tumulto, thick mass massa, huge body corpaccio, purality pluralità, people gente, humans umani, multitude moltitudine, souls animi, multitude moltitudine, beast bestia, souls animi, partisans of peace partiggiani della pace, people gente, furious and obstinate furiosi e ostinati, fluid congregation mobile adunanza, scoundrels birboni, the adverse party la parte contraria, crowd folla, the benevolent i benevoli, the public il pubblico, people la gente, throng of friends brigata d’amici, a group un crocchio, helpers ausiliari, throng calca, the two throngs le due calche, populace popolo, crowd folla, multitude moltitudine (2), crowds folle, good Milanese buoni milanesi, vassals vassalli, throng calca, a few city-dwellers qualche cittadino.

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In order to study it, we must go back to the twinned hourglass flow pattern which takes the crowd from the cathedral piazza, through a narrow street and under an arch, to a piazza, under another arch, along another street, to a new piazza, and note that in the middle of this symmetrical streetscape, the point of view focuses on a large marble statue of the Spanish Habsburg Emperor Phillip II, standing in the middle of a colonnade of the Collegium of Learned Doctors in the Piazza de’ Mercanti.43 While the crowd only casts a passing glance at the statue, Manzoni zooms in to let us see that it “had the dour, surly, scowling face—and I’m not doing it justice—of don Filippo II, who, even in marble, commanded a kind of respect, what with that outstretched arm, seeming about to say, ‘I’ll get you in a minute, you rabble’ ” (“quel viso serio, burbero, accipigliato, e non dico abbastanza, di don Filippo II, che, anche dal marmo, imponeva un no se che di rispetto, e, con quel braccio teso, pareva che fosse lì per dire: ora vengo io, marmaglia”).44 And at this word, marmaglia, pronounced by the statue, Manzoni opens a brief historical digression (as he often does), during which, in the reader’s mind, the crowd continues to flow past, perhaps in slow motion. The novel has such cinematic effects. In a tone of casual conversation among Milanese gentlemen—one of them Manzoni, who adds a metatextual and deictic note here (“I’m not doing it justice”)—the reader is suddenly given an update on the statue’s fate, long after the time in which the novel is set. In this aside, the narrator informs us: That statue isn’t there any more, as a result of a surprising turn of events. About 170 years after the time we are talking about, one fine day, the head was replaced, the scepter taken away, a dagger put in its place, and the statue renamed Marcus Brutus. In this guise, it remained for a couple of years. But one morning, some people who didn’t like Marcus Brutus, in fact they must really have had it in for him, threw a cable around the statue and toppled it, and subjected it to a hundred indignities; and, mutilated and reduced to a shapeless torso, they dragged it, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, tongues hanging out, along the streets, and when they were exhausted, they rolled it away, who knows where. Can you imagine Andrea Biffi, the sculptor getting wind of this as he was sculpting it!45

43  http://www.storiadimilano.it/cron/dal1601al1625.htm. The statue sculpted by Gian Andrea Biffi was inaugurated in 1611. 44   PS, p. 215.49. 45   PS, p. 50.

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As he does in the theoretical digression when he says, “let me tell you,” here, too, the narrator draws attention to himself and his experience. It seems clear that the statue of Phillip II was one Manzoni himself knew, or he would not add, when describing it, “I’m not doing it justice.” If he knew it in its original guise, he also knew it in its reinvention as Marcus Brutus, and it’s possible that he could have witnessed the statue’s toppling in 1814, by an angry crowd. Immediately after the digression on the statue the term marmaglia recurs, as if to signal—by anadiplosis or doubling back—the narrative’s return to the throng running past the statue on November 11, 1628. Marmaglia is now used ironically and cannot express Manzoni’s supposed contempt for the Milanese crowd. It reflects the scorn expressed by Phillip II—not Manzoni—for the rabble ruled by his disastrous colonial government. This digression has not been looked at carefully enough. Remo Fasani, who highlights the allusion to Spanish misrule in the novel’s introductory pseudo-Baroque fragment as an instance of Manzoni’s covert protest against Austrian misrule, considers the allusion to the statue in chapter twelve an inappropriate interruption of the fast-paced narrative of the bread riots.46 But if we parse it carefully, it seems that Manzoni has embedded in his novel, which had to pass Austrian censors, a scene that refers directly, though with indirection, to the presence of the Austrian overlords in Milan. The statue of the Hapsburg Phillip II could symbolize the 170 years of Spanish rule, but Manzoni, in what seems a fortuitous sleight of hand, refers instead to a time 170 years “after the events we are relating,” which are set in 1628. By doing so, he can point, without being obvious, to the “liberation” of Milan by Napoleon in 1796, which occurred 168 years after 1628, that is, in 1796. Thus, without alerting the censors, he conflates the Austrian and Spanish rules, both foreign occupations of Italy. On this approximate 170 years to the time when the statue is “recycled” by the French follows a more egregious approximation, when Manzoni telescopes into the off-hand “a couple of years later,” the 18 years it actually took for the Austrians to reclaim power from the French, in 1814. What other reason than the need to avoid direct reference to Austrian rule could have motivated Manzoni’s dissimulation in this passage? This is a case of the battle for Italy’s independence being  Fasani, Non solo“Quel ramo…,” p. 78.

46

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fought with literary weapons, and it must have been clear to most of Manzoni’s readers that the violence of the Milanese mob in 1628, caused in large part by the criminal incompetence of the Spanish governor and his ministers, had something to do with foreign ­domination—Spanish, Austrian, or French, for that matter.47 That the statue’s toppling foreshadows the fate of that home-grown dictator, Mussolini, whose outstretched arm professed an imperial hubris of his own (promoting Italy’s colonial enterprise in Lybia, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and Ethiopia), makes Manzoni seem prescient. I do not claim that Manzoni was a prophet, but in its context, the story of the statue resembles “dangerous” truths told by Cervantes about the reign of Phillip II, under the guise of the adventures of a madman, in which the burning of “foolish” books by a well-read priest, refers obliquely to the burning of human beings by the Inquisition—a topic that could not be written about directly. In his short digression on the statue, Manzoni has conjured up the Spanish and Austrian rule—still a fact in his own time, in Naples, Sicily, and much of Northern Italy—that of the French “liberators,” and the return of the Austrians, with a long view of history, in which imperial invaders come and go, change names but have one substance. The statue, he says, is now gone. If this factual and apparently innocuous remark is given a political interpretation, it calls attention to a projected future which Manzoni and others did contemplate: one in which Italy finally was unified, became a sovereign nation, no longer ruled by foreign powers. The empty niche, where the statue had once stood, rather than waiting for King Alberto or Vittorio Emmanuele II, could be seen as a negation of earthly power. The future emptiness is prophetic, I think, as if Manzoni were saying to the Austrians, “God rules, and we’ll get rid of you, too, you despots,” as the frenzied crowd hurries by. I would like to suggest that the pace of the historic digression about the statue of Phillip II, interrupting a fast-flowing narrative that then resumes its rapid action, with the fast-moving crowd, furnishes us with another variation on the lake-river-lake or, in this case, river-lake-river template, with the two narrative or fluvial sections flowing in synchronic sequence, and the historical digression placed square in the 47   John Rallo, The Crowd in the Italian Novel of the Romantic Period (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1958) p. 234. If Gramsci had lived a normal life span and had read the novel more attentively, he would have appreciated Manzoni’s use, in this passage, of literature as a tool for political liberation.



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middle flowing diachronically. As we can begin to recognize such recurring strategies in Manzoni’s style, we could even speak of a forma mentis. Within the digression itself, the iconic human-shaped marble form undergoes a surprising transformation from one identity to another, only to be dragged away as a mutilated ruin, sluggishly rolling off into oblivion. This, too, even from a purely conceptual point of view, is a rich poetic variation on the original figura, marble undergoing metamorphosis and even turning into something almost fluid, ferried away as if by a flow. Various other instances of crowds occur in the novel: beggars during  the famine, terrified and terrifying people who almost lynch a doctor who declares the plague is real, worshippers flocking to see and hear the cardinal, city youths heckling the departing Spanish governor, survivors of the plague released from the hospital.48 The flow pattern, hourglass figura, template, or forma mentis I have described at the beginning of this essay is found in these scenes, too, and at every level of the text, the literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical levels— if we refer to one ancient exegetical model Manzoni might have had in mind. The Novel’s Title and the Hourglass Figure As Manzoni wrote and rewrote his masterpiece, its title changed from the initial Fermo and Lucia to the conjectured I sposi promessi, to I promessi sposi, but from the first it was focused on the protagonists, a man and a woman engaged to be married. The original version links the couple grammatically, the variations that no longer identify them by name but as betrothed still foreground two people linked to each other by their vows of engagement. That Renzo (the name that replaced Fermo) and Lucia are two linked bodies or two linked souls is evidently also interpretable as an instance of mirror symmetry, a variation on the idea of a unified whole made of two linked parts. Is this in any way connected to what I call Manzoni’s forma mentis? Is the shift implicit in betrothals—a transformation from a celibate state to a permanent union arrived at through the sacrament of marriage—also an 48   Filippo Noto Campanella, “Rilievi critici…,” has usefully listed most of the crowd scenes in the novel, but jumps to perhaps unwarranted conclusions about Manzoni’s scorn for the crowd.

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instance of an hourglass figura? Does such a question ignore the symbolic charge of the hourglass figure if it is to be read as a metaphysical interpretation of the nature of life which must pass through death, in Catholic escatology, to enter into another form of life—an eternal afterlife? That all humanity must follow this pattern sets the story of Lucia and Renzo against an apocalyptic background. Perhaps Verdi’s Requiem, first performed on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death, should be experienced as a musical flow that is a part of the novel’s afterlife. A complete analysis of Manzoni’s entire literary output, which I could not undertake here, reveals that his predilection for the hourglass figura is evident throughout his oeuvre.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Witchcraft and Mob Hysteria in America A. Richard Sogliuzzo Arthur Miller’s The Crucible had its Broadway premiere at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on January 22, 1953 and that year received the prestigious Antoinette Perry and the Donaldson Awards. Set in 1692, based on historical documentation of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, The Crucible was a veiled indictment of the powerful House on Un-American Committee (HUAC, 1945–1975), which focused its investigations on what it regarded as both real and suspected Communists in positions of power, particularly in the film industry.1 Miller drew parallels between the injustices of the HUAC in its search for Communists and the Salem trials in which a number of citizens, falsely accused of witchcraft, were executed. Despite its critical success, The Crucible ran for only 197 performances, which Miller attributed to a weak production, badly directed by Jed Harris, and the “hostility” of New York audiences who resented the play’s implicit condemnation of the government: “ice formed over their heads, thick enough to skate.” Miller recalled the reaction of the opening night audience: “In the lobby … people with whom I had some fairly close professional acquaintanceships passed me by as though I were invisible.”2 Despite its inauspicious opening and lack of audience appeal at the time, The Crucible has nevertheless become the most produced American play, both nationally and internationally, in history.3 Its popularity may be explained by its appeal as a political parable, based on one of the most terrifying events in American history during the early modern period when a village became an hysterical mob and virtually destroyed itself. 1   For a detailed account of HUAC investigations during the 1950s, see Larry Ciplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community 1930–1960 (Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 362–425. 2   Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York, 1987), p. 347. 3   James Martine, The Crucible: Politics, Prosperity, and Pretense (New York, 1993), p. 11.

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Miller first became familiar with the Salem Witchcraft phenomenon in his undergraduate history class at the University of Michigan; he regarded the trials then as “one of the inexplicable mystifications of the long dead past when people commonly believed that the spirit could leave the body, palpably and visibly.” The story came back to him in vivid detail, however, years after reading Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts, but Miller “rejected the idea of a play on the subject” since his “rationality was too strong” to enable him to capture “this wildly irrational outbreak.” But during the 1950s, Miller perceived a similarity between the Salem Witch Trials and the actions of the HUAC: the one chased witches; the other Communists. Each spread fear. A witness who admitted guilt and then provided the Salem court, or the HUAC, with the names of other witches, or other Communists, could receive a lighter sentence or be totally exonerated than someone who did not. A witness knew “in advance”—to use the language of the seventeenth century—that he or she was “required to provide names, make public confession, damn his confederates as his Devil Master,” and guarantee “sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people.”4 The Salem court and the Committee generated a kind of mob mentality; suspicion was rampant, and freedom of speech suppressed or denied. The Salem court and the Committee used their respective authority and interpretation of the law, religious or governmental, to condemn the innocent. Sanctimony and selfrighteousness veiled their true objective—to maintain power. Fear became their weapon of choice. Those accused of being Communists, or who refused to name names, were not sentenced to death, as in Salem, but suffered instead a professional demise in the sciences, arts, business, and academe. Because of the notoriety it afforded the HUAC, the film industry was especially targeted; actors, writers, directors, and other film artists were blacklisted and no longer found employment.5   Timebends, pp. 330–331.   Arthur Miller, “Are You Now Or Were You Ever?” The Guardian / The Observer (June 17, 2000), 1. Theatre artists in New York were also blacklisted, but HUAC concentrated primarily on the film industry. To save his own career, the legendary director, Elia Kazan, for example, testified before the Committee and named “names,” ruining the professional lives of some dozen or so individuals he had known during his months in the Communist Party many years earlier. He lived the remainder of his life 4 5



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Miller was subpoenaed to appear before the Committee in 1956, but refused to identify writers he had met years earlier at one or two Communist meetings. Cited for Contempt of Congress for his refusal, Miller later learned through his attorney, Joseph Rauh, that his forthcoming marriage to Marilyn Monroe prompted the subpoena. Chairman Erich Walter sent word to Rauh that he was inclined to cancel the subpoena if “Miss Monroe would consent to have a picture taken with him.” Miller refused and, in addition to being charged with Contempt, was fined $500, incurred $40,000 in lawyer’s fees and a year of “inanition” in his “creative life.” The Chairman, noted Miller, “entreated me” to write “less tragically about our country.”6 Miller experienced an unimaginable “hatred” for the country’s “stupidity” in “throwing away” its freedom: “Who or what was now safer because this man [Elia Kazan] in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself? What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?” His anger was not directed toward Kazan, whom he “loved like a brother,”7 but against the Committee that he considered “a band of political operators with as much moral conviction as Tony Anastasia [Vice President of Local 1814 of the International Longshoreman’s Association with ties to infamous mob syndicate, Murder Incorporated] … probably somewhat less.” II The Salem Witchcraft Trials were the first and only event in which a local government, a theocracy, incited the community to become suffering the judgment of others, as well as his own, for his betrayal. In interviews with Kazan, Jeff Young challenged Kazan’s assertion that his testimony was patriotic, and not self-serving. Kazan insisted there was a dangerous Communist conspiracy in the industry, but that his testimony harmed no one, since the Committee already knew the names he provided. “Why didn’t you go further?” asked Young. “Why didn’t you tell them things that they didn’t know, give them names that they didn’t already have, get rid of all the Red Bastards.” Kazan paused and quietly replied: ‘I don’t have to defend myself to you or anyone else.’ He held my eyes a moment longer,” recounted Young. “Then his head dropped forward, and he passed out cold” (see Kazan the Master Director Discusses His Films [New York, 1999], p. 331). Of course, this may have been a clever theatrical rouse by Kazan to stop any further discussion of the subject. 6   “Are You Now Or Were You Ever?” 7  On a rainy day in April 1952, Miller visited with Elia Kazan at Kazan’s home in Connecticut and was informed of Kazan’s decision to cooperate with HUAC. After the visit, Kazan, his wife, Molly, and Miller waved “rather grimly” to each other as Miller “pulled away” and drove to Salem to conduct research on the witch trials. See Timebends, pp. 330–333.

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a mob—part of a population given to lawlessness, its hostility focused on the destruction of a particular scapegoat through fear and hysteria, resulting in the financial ruin or deaths of a number of its citizens. As a result of the hysteria that pervaded Salem, and the court’s actions, over 150 out of a total population of 600 people were arrested and imprisoned, and more than 150 people were accused, but not formally pursued by the authorities. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens “languished in jail for months without trials.” Twenty-nine were convicted of the capital felony of witchcraft, and of that number, nineteen—five men and fourteen women—were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, and hanged. At least five more of the accused died in prison. Giles Corey, over eighty years old, refused to enter a plea and submit himself to a trial of witchcraft. He was tortured to force him to agree to a trial; heavy stones were placed on his chest until he was crushed to death with the increased weight of the stones.8 Many of these historical facts are dramatized, mentioned, or alluded to in the play. Neither in the historic Salem nor in The Crucible was there open violence and destruction of property characteristic of an aggressive mob. Rather, violence and destruction were indirect. By hanging the innocent, the government of Salem, represented by the judges, behaved violently. The villagers’ willingness to make false accusations of witchcraft made them complicit in the court’s violent action: cry witch first, save your neck, and hang your neighbor. Better to lie and dissemble rather than suffer the court’s judgment. Since those imprisoned or dead could no longer attend to their homes or fields, there was “destruction of property.” Rather than breaking into each other’s homes and stealing, they lied to acquire another’s possessions cheaply when auctioned, a form of looting. In effect, the court and most of the village became a mob. Ostensibly, those accused of witchcraft were given legal due process;  a court was established to determine their innocence or guilt.9 8  Douglas Linder [[email protected]], “A Brief History of Witchcraft Persecutions Before Salem,” in Famous Trials, 1692 (University of Missouri School of Law, 2008), http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/witchhistory.html. Professor Linder has published numerous articles in the fields of constitutional law and famous trials. The Famous Trials website is the Web’s largest and most visited collection of original essays, images, and primary documents pertaining to great trials and has been an ongoing project of Professor Linder’s since 1996. 9   Early in 1692, Sir William Phips, the newly appointed colonial governor, “constituted six members of his advisory council as a special Court of Oyer and Terminer



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The court proceeded under the firm belief in the existence of witches as an abominable fact of Satan’s power on earth and that is was legally empowered to try individuals accused of being witches, or participating in the demonic practice of witchcraft. Since it was impossible to produce tangible evidence or material fact to substantiate the existence of spirits with respect to matters such as witchcraft, many in Salem were falsely accused and condemned to death. III The events that occurred in Salem paralleled witch-hunts in Europe throughout the centuries. Those accused and condemned to death were fewer in Salem, but the cruelty and injustices were comparable. In Europe, witch trials and persecutions by governments and religious groups were widely practiced, finding justification in the Bible: earliest references date back to around 560 BCE: in Exodus, 22.18, for example (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) and Leviticus, 20.27 (“A man or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard shall surely be put to death”).10 The prophet, Samuel, admonishes King Saul for seeking the aid of the “Witch of Endor.”11 “Outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria, with subsequent mass executions, began to appear in the early 1500s. Authorities in Geneva, Switzerland burned 500 accused witches at the stake in 1515. Nine years later in Como, Italy, “a spreading spiral of witchcraft charges led to as many as 1000 executions.”12 Gustave le Bon explains the mob mentality of theocracies such as Salem that ‘to hear and determine’ the enormous backlog of witchcraft cases.” Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA, 1974), p.7. Because of the excesses of the appointed court, both in terms of its convictions and executions, Governor Phips received instructions from England in May 1693 to discontinue the trials and put an end to all proceedings. Phips immediately issued a proclamation; terminating further court proceedings against accused witches, and pardoning all condemned that were in jail. K. David Goss, The Salem Witch Trials (Westport, 2008), p. xviii. 10  Linder, Brief History of Witchcraft. 11  Goss, Salem Witch Trials, p. xviii. 12   Although belief in witchcraft was still existent in Salem in 1692, the last witch to be tried in England occurred in 1682. “Temperance Lloyd, a senile woman from Bideford, became the last witch ever executed in England. Lord Chief Justice, Sir Francis North, a passionate critic of witchcraft trials, investigated the Lloyd case and denounced the prosecution as deeply flawed.” His criticism discouraged additional prosecutions and witch hunting. By the late 1680s, the Enlightenment contributed to the end of witch hunts throughout Europe (cf. Linder, Brief History of Witchcraft).

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sanctioned spurious judgments of witchcraft: “Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths … Everyone is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire they exercise on men’s minds.”13 The sequence of events in The Crucible follow the broad outlines of events in historic Salem: a group of young girls practice certain religiously forbidden activities and shortly thereafter begin to manifest hysterical behaviors—fits of screaming, screeching, flailing arms, physical and facial contortions, which the local doctor could neither cure nor explain. Word spreads quickly throughout the village; fear and hysteria mount, belief that the girls’ behavior was the work of the devil. Inquisitors from Salem town arrived and concluded that supernatural forces indeed were at play: the girls were possessed by the devil, which imbued them with extraordinary powers. A possessed person was believed to be clairvoyant and prescient, sometimes referred to as having the second sight, able to see spirits and gain vision of the usually invisible world of witches: “There was a lethal twist to this notion: the Devil cannot assume the ‘shape’ or ‘appearance’ (spirit form) of an innocent person. Hence the persons visible to the girls ‘second sight’ were by definition witches or devils.”14 The court relied heavily upon the girls who became forces to be reckoned with, empowered to discern the presence of the devil in others. Their hysteria in court in the presence of those accused was irrefutable proof that such defendants were witches or practiced witchcraft. Those accused of witchcraft who subsequently confessed their crime were considered redeemed by the Court and forgiven. Defendants questioning the Court’s accusations, especially the validity of the girls’ testimony, were summarily found guilty and imprisoned. Marion L Starkey described the irreparable psychological damage caused by the witchcraft hysteria in Salem. Husband had “broken charity”’ with wife and wife with husband, mother with child and child with mother. Even worse had been the tattling of neighbor against neighbor. Relationships in so small a community 13   The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind, new intro. by Robert K. Merton (New York, 1960), p. 53. 14   Hans Sebald, Witch-Children: from Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Courtrooms (Amherst, 1995), p. 72.

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are organic; no matter what the petty jars of day-to-day collisions, there must be in a crisis a community of sympathy and understanding else there is no health. And here was little health; not in a generation would it be forgotten how neighbor had responded with spite to a neighbor’s need.15

Influenced by Starkey and other source materials available at the time, particularly the court records, Miller nevertheless admitted to taking artistic license with historical detail: “Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one … while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth” (Act 1, “Historical Accuracy”). Factually, there were eight judges; five had to be present to “form a presiding bench.” In the play, neither Hathorne nor Danforth represents the demagogue, Joseph McCarthy, whose name became synonymous with the entire period of the House hearings during the 1950s. He in fact did not join the Committee until February 3, 1953, a month after the play opened on Broadway. Miller’s assertion that he had captured “the essential nature” of one of the “strangest and most awful chapters in human history” is justified. By the end of the play, one has a sense of time, place, and the horror of the actual event—the mob hysteria that ruined the lives of many and caused a number of deaths. The accused were denied a fair trial: witches had no legal counsel nor could anyone testify under oath in their behalf, and there were no formal avenues of appeal, remarkably reminiscent of the proceedings of the HUAC.16 Judges Hathorne and Danforth were obviously meant to represent the entire HUAC, which Miller viewed as as tyrannical and cruel as the Salem judges together were. However, the witch trials had one advantage over the Committee proceedings: those accused could produce evidence in their own behalf and cross-examine accusers. Head Judge of the Court, Danforth, asks Reverend Hale, whether he “heard of rebellion spoken in the town,” as a result of the trials and the deaths of those accused of being witches. Hale responds: “Excellency, there are orphans wandering from house to house; abandoned cattle bellow on the highroads, the stink of rotting crops hangs everywhere, and no man knows when   The Devil in Massachusetts (New York, 1949), p. 258.  “The Crucible, “A Note On The Historical Accuracy of the Play,” Contemporary Drama, Fifteen Plays, eds. E. Bradlee Watson and Benfield Pressey (New York, 1966), p. 484. 15 16

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the harlots’ cry will end his life—and you wonder yet if rebellion’s spoke? Better you should marvel how they do not burn your province” (Act 4). Miller’s believed he was faithful to the historical facts of Salem, although admitting to reducing the number of girls involved in the “crying out.” However, his assertion that “there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar—and in some cases exactly the same—role in history” is wrong (Act 1). A comparison between the details of history and those of Miller’s plot reveals significant differences between fact and fiction, beginning with the very nature of the illicit act performed by the girls, which precipitates the witch-hunt. In the play, Reverend Samuel Parris describes the act, which he witnessed one evening in the woods. This event, a group of girls dancing around a fire, occurred prior to the opening of the play. Among those participating were Parris’ daughter, Betty, age nine, his niece, Abigail, seventeen, and his black West Indian slave, Tituba, in her forties, renown for her knowledge of fortune telling, sorcery and magic. Parris believed he also saw a naked girl running away. This was complete invention on Miller’s part. In fact the girls in Salem were indulging in forbidden yet commonly practiced fortune telling, attempting to divine their future husbands with an egg in a glass—“crystal-ball style.”17 As for the black slave, Tituba, Miller was probably influenced by Starkey, who followed the historical inaccuracy of earlier scholarship: “Tituba yielded to the temptation to show the children tricks and spells, fragments of something like voodoo remembered from the Barbados.”18 However, recent research indicates that Tituba was not of “Black African descent,” but Ameridian, probably South American Aarawak, consistently referred to in the documents of the period as an “Indian Woman.” Starkey and other earlier scholars probably assumed she was African and from Barbados, since her master, Reverend Parris, arrived from the West Indies with two slaves, Tituba and her husband, John Indian (absent in the play). They were asked by a neighbor, Mary

17   Margo Burns [[email protected]], Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Fact & Fiction, (or Picky, Picky, Picky…) A Note on The Historical Accuracy of This Play [http:// www.17thc.us/docs/fact-fiction.shtml]. Margo Burns is the Project Manager of Records of Salem Witch Hunt, responsible for editorial principles, and chronological arrangement with Bernard Rosenthal. Ms. Burns is Director the Language Center, St. Paul’s School, Greater Boston Area. 18  Starkey, The Devil, p, 10.

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Sibley, to bake a “special ‘witch cake’ made of rye and the girls’ urine fed to a dog—European white magic to ascertain” the witch afflicting the girls.”19 Actually, the exotic nature of a voodoo practicing slave and the titillating acts of girls naked in the woods, one drinking blood, are fictional, but essential to Miller’s story of sex, romance, jealousy, adultery, resulting in marital discord, which he inexplicably believed was true: For even in the first weeks of thinking about the Salem story, the central image, the one that persistently recurred as an exuberant source of energy was that of a guilt-ridden, John Proctor, who having slept with his teenage servant girl, watches with horror as she becomes the leader of the witch-hunting pack and points her accusing finger at the wife he himself betrayed. The story’s lines of force were still tangled, but instinct warned that as always with me they would not leave me untouched once fully revealed.20

Miller believed his hoped-for plot line was actually confirmed in Charles Upham’s, Salem Witchcraft, “the hard evidence of what had become my play’s center: the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail William’s determination to get Elizabeth murdered so she could have John, whom I deduced she had slept with while she was their house servant, before Elizabeth fired her.”21 Miller’s deduction had no basis in fact. Although acknowledging that he raised Elizabeth’s age to seventeen, Miller failed to indicate that she was eleven years old at the time and that John Proctor was sixty, not in his middle thirties, so that an affair between them was far-fetched. Moreover, there is no documentation of Proctor’s being tried for adultery. He defied the court and was subsequently accused of being a witch and hanged. Thus, the sub-plot regarding Elizabeth Proctor’s knowledge of such an affair, her jealousy, and inability to forgive her husband until the last moments of the play were Miller’s invention.  During the Examination of Elizabeth at the actual Salem trial, Captain Jonat Walcott and Lt. Nathaniell Ingersull testified that they witnessed her (Mary Proctor) along with forty other witches partaking  in a “sacrament of blood drinking outside” Parris’ house, “They

 Burns, The Crucible Fact and Fiction.   Timebends, p. 332, See Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, With an Account of Salem Village and A History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects, 2 vols (Boston, 1867, rpt. New York, 1969). 21   Timebends, p. 337. 19 20

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[the defendants] said it was our blood, and they had it twice that day.” Abigail accused John Proctor’s specter of sitting on her chest at night and pinching her; she “cryed out w’t are you come to, you can pinch as well as your wife & more to that purpose.”22 The latter suggests the sexual delusion of a pre-pubescent girl. Therefore, what occurred inexplicably in Salem, girls exhibiting hysterical behavior and going on a spree of witch accusations, was changed into deliberate deception, which drives the action of Miller’s play. The moment occurs at the end of Act 1. Reverend Hale puts the fear of God into Tituba, insisting that she was chosen to help them cleanse the village and will be blessed by the Almighty for doing so. She immediately falsely accuses Sarah Good and Goody Osburn of being witches. Abigail senses danger if her part in the profane rites be revealed, since she conceived the idea of having Tituba lead them in voodoo rituals in the woods. It was Abigail who drank blood in order to murder Elizabeth and regain John’s love. With her extraordinary ability to act and deceive, Abigail rises and as “though inspired,” declares she wants to “open herself to ‘the light of God,’ and ‘sweet love of Jesus,’ and admits to dancing for the Devil; then claims to have seen Goody Osburn and Bridget Bishop with the Evil One. Betty decides to save herself as well, rises from her bed “as in a fever,” and picks up Abigail’s chant, accusing George Jacobs and Goody Howe of being in league with the Devil. Reverend Hale, the court’s inquisitor sent to determine the presence of witchcraft, is deceived: “Glory to God! It is broken, they [the girls] are free.” Betty and Abigail continue chanting out the names of witches. Hale commands that the “marshal bring irons,” a major plot point, the fatal moment from which there is no turning back: a theocracy deceived by liars spreads terror and causes widespread hysteria, condemning and murdering the innocent all in the name of God (Act 1). The other girls participating that night later join Abigail and Betty in lying; in both Miller’s The Crucible and the actual trials, the girls play a pivotal role by providing the judges with damning testimony.23 22   “Examination of Sarah Cloyse and Elizabeth Proctor; 11 April 1692;” “Abigail Williams v. John Proctor, 1692, April 4,” Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcriptions of the Court Records, eds. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (New York, 1917), vol. 2, pp. 659, 678. 23  Linder, Brief History of Witchcraft.



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The Crucible is a didactic play, clear in execution, realistic, wellstructured, rising in intensity to its powerful climax: the protagonist’s (John Proctor’s) decision to maintain his honor and suffer the consequences. Following that moment, the play quickly advances to its thematic resolution: honor above all—defy tyranny even at the expense of one’s own life. The title refers to a crucible, which is a severe test, or hard trial, and also to a container that resists great heat, used for melting and calcinating ores, resulting in a purer high-grade steel, an allusion to John Proctor who undergoes the hard trial of the Court and emerges morally stronger.24 Other than the metaphorical title, there are no complex levels of meaning, no weighty symbolism, allegorical allusions, ambiguities in character or action. The dominant images throughout are darkness and dirt. When the Reverend Parris questions his niece Abigail’s purity (“Your name in the town—it is entirely white, is it not?”), she declares that her name is not soiled, “There is no blush about my name” (Act 1). Abigail’s response is true, not because of her innocence, but because she cleverly accused others of witchcraft, concealed her role as the girls’ ring leader and her affair with Proctor. Miller’s characterization of her as anything but innocent is borne out by Starkey’s analysis of the real Abigail whose “state of mind would not, if detected, have been classified as innocent even by Calvinist standards, nor was it happiness…. too much of her native gusto had been repressed by an environment … confining to her spirit … she was a child who longed to make far more noise in the world.”25 Despite the clarity of the text itself, Miller felt it necessary to provide lengthy stage directions explaining theme and characters to clarify his intent in Act 1 (“An Overture”). The Salem tragedy … developed from a paradox … in whose grip we still live, and there is no prospect yet that we will discover its resolution … for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to

24  James J. Martine, “Metaphorical Use of the Crucible,” in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Bloom’s Notes, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1996), p. 66. 25   Starkey, p. 5.

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richard sogliuzzo keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies … grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition … the time came in New England when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organized. The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom (Act 1).26

Later in Act 1, Miller expounds upon the world’s simplistic views of good and evil, the Devil being a “respectable view” of cosmology. Societies still believe that “certain ideas, emotions and actions” are God’s and the “opposites” belong to Lucifer. With a reference to Martin Luther, Miller contends that we are “children of a history that still suck at the Devil’s teats.” In Communist countries, he explains, significant resistance to the government is “linked to totally malign capitalist succubi,” while in America those who are not “reactionary” in their views are “open to the charge of alliance with the red bull.” According to Miller, Communist countries and reactionary forces in America seek to maintain absolute control of the citizenry under the guise of protecting them against the Devil, that is, those opposed to the prevailing governmental authorities (Act 1). The Crucible dramatizes the tragic consequences of such political control: hysteria and mob violence, as individuals attempt to exonerate themselves by accusing each other of consorting with the Devil. Regarding the stage directions, Miller cannot resist donning the mantle of historian and social critic, explaining what is patently evident in the play itself, and effectively dramatized: the chilling atmosphere, the dark night, shadowy interiors, foreboding courtroom and jail, anger, rage, violence, the delusional demons of Hell that live as reality in the minds of the characters. In short, the terrifying world of the play, more powerful than any analytical stage direction. Either Miller did not trust his own skills as playwright, or just equally enjoyed the role of essayist. George Bernard Shaw, an influence on Miller, provided lengthy and detailed analysis and commentary in the prefaces to his plays, but Miller’s explanations are contained within the

26  In a 1958 Off-Broadway revival of The Crucible, the director used the stage directions in Act 1 to create an on-stage narrator to “set the scenes and give the historical background of the play.” See Orm Overland, “The Action and Its Significance: Arthur Miller’s Struggle with Dramatic Form,” in Bloom, Miller’s The Crucible, p. 46.

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play itself as the stage directions. Perhaps it was a way of ensuring that the reader never missed his ideas. After all, one can skip a preface, but stage directions are, in this case, integral to the text. Although a social moralist, Miller is neither moralistic nor pedantic as a playwright. The Crucible is a compelling, highly theatrical drama, politically relevant drama. The characters are not social stereotypes, but real human beings with highly individual attributes, caught in a terrifying situation: a community driven to its own destruction through fear. Miller took pains with the dialogue so that it accurately reflected English as spoken in Salem at the time. In that regard, the court records proved invaluable: “I wanted to study the actual words of the interrogations, a gnarled way of speaking to my ears … it seemed from the orthography to be a burred and rather Scottish speech.”27 Whether a production of The Crucible is done suggestively with nothing more than furniture and properties against a backdrop of black drapes and curtains with actors wearing period costumes, or detailed, historically accurate settings, properties, and costumes, one factor is unmistakable: the play recreates an actual event that occurred in seventeenth century Salem. However, The Crucible is not docudrama. Rather Miller uses history selectively, with artistic license, in order to create a play condemning political events occurring in America during the 1950s.28 V The events that occurred in Salem were consistent with historians’ theories regarding the causes for witch hunts over the centuries: mass hysteria, delusion, religious rebellion, disaster, social accusations, greed, and social control. Documents and court records indicate that these factors were present in Salem as well and either precipitated or resulted from the witch-hunts. Miller was influenced by such documentation as well as existing scholarship at the time of his research; and factors such as greed, social control, and so on were inevitably infused into The Crucible. Examined individually, these factors provide insights

  Timebends, p. 336.   See Edmund S. Morgan, “Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the Salem Witch Trials: A Historian’s View,” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, Arthur Miller, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 2007), pp. 9–21. 27 28

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into the mob behavior of the characters: their fear, hysteria, and cruelty that led to the executions of innocent villagers.29 Disasters such as disease or war existed in Salem in 1692, a period of social and political unrest that had a disastrous effect upon the village. Starkey describes the “dismal” state of Salem that winter: “smallpox, Indian raids,” the “growing certainty that New England had lost forever the near-independence it had enjoyed under the charter.” God had turned his back on the people of Salem, no longer “to be chosen as He had once chosen them,” and they seriously believed “Doomsday was imminent … the Kingdom of God” was “at hand.”30 Moreover, there was considerable factionalism, originating in the governmental difficulties existing between Salem Village and the Town, dating back to 1672, and continuing to 1692. The Village’s “uncertain status seems … to have contributed to a strikingly high level of internal bickering and disarray.”31 In the play, the righteous and reasonable, Rebecca Nurse, pleads with Parris to send the learned Reverend Hale back as soon as he arrived, because “it will set us to arguin again … and we thought to have peace this year” (Act 1). Ironically, she is among the first to hang for witchcraft. Another factor contributing to the “madness” was the “predilection for minding other people’s business,” which generated widespread suspicion among the people. “Outsiders” judged that the “intensity of the conflict within the community was the consequence of some collective defect in the social temperament of its inhabitants.”32 In this general state of despondency, villagers might seek out the presence of the Devil as the cause of their difficulties. Elias Canetti explains that “one of the most striking traits of the ‘inner life of a crowd’ is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies,” whose behavior is from then on “interpreted as springing from an unshakable malevolence, a premeditated intention to destroy the crowd, openly or by stealth.”33 29  Brian A. Pavlac, [[email protected]], Ten General Historical Theories About The Origins and Causes of Witch Hunts, http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/ witch/worigin.html. See also Pavlac, Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials (Westport, 2009). 30   The Devil in Massachusetts, p.13. 31  Boyer, Salem Possessed, p. 45. 32  Boyer, Salem Possessed, p. 51. 33   Crowds and Power (New York, 1962), p. 22.

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Miller refers to the significant differences that existed between the people of Salem in 1692 and the “dedicated folk that arrived on the Mayflower.” A revolution had “unseated the royal government and substituted a junta.” The people of the village regarded the times as “out of joint,” and “seemed as insoluble and complicated as do ours today.” Not surprisingly, many concluded that their difficulties had been brought about by “deep and darkling forces,” and because of such “social disorder,” it is “too much to expect people to hold back very long from laying the victims with all the force of their frustrations” (Act 1). Other than these stage directions, there is no discussion by any of the characters in the play itself of the existent social unrest and certainly no analysis of their behavior, but the information Miller provides contributes to an understanding of the period, certainly the primary benefit of the stage directions. While there is no religious rebellion in The Crucible, characteristic of other witch-hunts, the girls’ satanic practices in the woods constitute a violation of sacred belief. News spreads quickly through the village. Fearing punishment for participating in these acts, Parris’ daughter, Betty, pretends to be in a deep trance-like sleep, victim of an evil spell. Mrs. Ann Putnam (daughter, Ruth, is in a similar trance-like state) is “a twisted soul of forty-five, a death-ridden woman haunted by dreams.” She tells Reverend Parris that Betty flew, that Mr. Collins saw her “goin over Ingersoll’s barn and come down light as bird” (Act 1). Mrs. Putnam’s apparent sighting exemplifies the delusion theory. Soon other characters begin to see or be visited by witches, consistent with Le Bon’s perception of the “excessive suggestibility” of crowds (in the case of the play, the village is the crowd) “a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction.”34 The circumstances of “social accusation” are thus exemplified in The Crucible. Characters are in conflict with each other, and themselves, suffering from internal doubts and torments, sexual guilt and self-loathing. They attempt to expiate their sins by projecting them upon others; that is, it became “patriotic and holy” for a man to say that Martha Corey had come into his bedroom at night, while his wife was sleeping at his side, and laid herself on his chest and “nearly suffocated him.” It was only “her spirit,” of course, but “his satisfaction at confessing himself publicly is no lighter than if it had been Martha   The Crowd, p. 39.

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herself ” (Act 1). Thomas Putnam and his wife, Ann, are tormented by the fact that seven of their eight children have died. They refuse to believe that it is God’s will, as suggested by the midwife, Rebecca Nurse, which could be interpreted as punishment for their own transgressions, and so accuse her of being a witch and causing the death of their children. Ann claims that her babies always “shriveled in her hands” (Act 1). The Putnams succeed in having Rebecca hanged. There is considerable greed and cheating, consistent with the theory that witch-hunts were started by “the elites in order to confiscate the property of others.”35 Following Hale’s decision to imprison those villagers, the girls, some of the wealthiest in the village, who are accused of witchcraft, seize the moment to gain property. Thomas Putnam, the greediest and most power hungry man in the Village, and his brother, John, had the former minister of the village church, George Burroughs, jailed for “debts he did not owe.” Many did not escape Putnam’s avariciousness: Proctor was accused of cutting lumber on property he claimed had been willed to him by his grandfather. Proctor denied the charge, declaring that the “old man” (Putnam’s grandfather) had a “habit of willing land that never belonged to him” (Act 1). Putnam accused a number of people in the village of witchcraft, aided by his daughter, Ruth, one of the girls in the group who cried “witch” at opportune moments against any of her father’s enemies, enabling him to purchase their land cheaply when it inevitably came up for sale after they were hanged. Giles Corey complained that his wife, Martha, read too many books, thereby arousing the court’s suspicions that she was acquiring demonic knowledge. Their suspicion was further aroused when she is accused of being a witch; Corey declared this a lie perpetrated by “that bloody mongrel Walcott” (Jonathan Walcott, Putnam’s son-in-law) because she refused to return the money he paid her for a pig that died soon after the sale. She blamed his stupidity for the animal’s death: “if you haven’t the wit to feed a pig properly, you’ll not live to own many” (Act 2). Corey resented the villagers’ bickering and litigation for financial gain, “Everybody is suing everybody else … it’s a deep thing, and dark as a pit. I have been six times in court this year” (Act 1). Reverend Parris, who loved Mamon more than Christ, continually complained of being underpaid for his services as minister and demanded he be given the deed to the house provided  Pavlac, Ten General Historical Theories.

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by the congregation. He repeatedly preached to his congregation for golden candlesticks until he got them, angering Proctor: “I labor the earth from dawn of day to blink of night … when I look to heaven and see my money glaring at his elbows – it hurts my prayer” (Act 1). Greed also affected the villagers’ treatment of the Indians, failing to convert them, because of “parochial snobbery,” and preferred “to take lands from heathens rather than from fellow Christians” (stage directions, Act 1). The link between witchcraft and political power is inherent in the theory that early modern governments “exploited the fear of witchcraft” to “impose cultural uniformity” and suppress any “dangerous conspiracy.” The theory was evident in Salem and, of course, pervades The Crucible. Fear of witches and the judges creates hysteria that spreads quickly through the village. Mary tells John that “there be a hundred or more” confessed, which occurred either in court or under questioning in their homes (Act 2). Historically, there were probably a number of inquisitors going to villagers’ homes, while in the play Reverend Hale alone assumes this function. In a key scene, he questions John and Mary at home, disturbed by Proctor’s infrequent church attendance. Under questioning, Proctor cannot correctly cite the Ten Commandments, faltering on adultery, undoubtedly caused by guilt for having an affair with Abigail, thus far concealed from the community. However, in a pivotal moment, John and Elizabeth incriminate themselves: he admits uncertainty to the existence of witches and she outright disbelief, a major violation of Puritan belief, the Court, and of the word of God. Hale is shocked, “You surely do not fly against the Gospel—the Gospel” (2 Corinthians, 10.4–5). Proctor cries out in her defense, “She do not mean to doubt the Gospel, sir, you cannot think it. This be a Christian house, Sir, a Christian house.” Elizabeth’s admission is extraordinary, considering that shortly before Hale’s arrival, she informed Proctor of the terrible actions of the General Court: fourteen villagers had already been imprisoned, “They’ll be tried and the court have power to hang them too” (Act 2). However, her defiance under questioning is provoked by the fact that she, a devout woman, should be suspected by the Court of impiety, while Abigail, a liar and sinner, is able to accuse others of witchcraft. In an act of kindness and courage which, if divulged, could result in his own downfall, Hale decides not to report them, but urges immediate action to change their suspicious behavior: “let the third child be quickly baptized, and go you without fail each Sunday in to Sabbath

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prayer; and keep a solemn, quiet way among you. God Keep you both” (Act 2). The Court’s tyranny is embodied in Danforth. He declares the Court to be God’s will on earth, a hell where liars are exposed and condemned, “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.” Upon his signature, he boasts, “nearly four hundred are in jails, and “seventy two condemned to hang” (Act 3). To avoid punishment by the court, many in the village make false confessions of consorting with witches or delude themselves that they were victims of witches. Miller equated the lying that occurred in Salem with witnesses who testified before the HUAC, accusing colleagues of being Communists to protect themselves and condemn others. The conflict between government and the freedom of the individual to question its judgment is central to the play, epitomized by John Proctor. Historically, he was a man esteemed for his honesty and forthrightness, and among the first to loudly condemn the girls: “They should be at the whipping post. If they are left alone we should all be devils and witches … Hang them! Hang them!”36 Miller’s characterization resembles the real Proctor, who is equally strong-minded and honest, forcefully challenging Reverend Hale’s assertion that those confessing to having dealt with the Devil are honest, “And why not, if they must hang for denyin it. There are them that will swear to anything before they’ll hang for it” (Act 2). In effect, Proctor declares that they have admitted guilt, that is, lied, to save their own lives. Determined to prove the girls liars, Proctor has his servant, Mary Warren, one of the group of girls, present written testimony before the Court attesting to their deception. Unfazed, Abigail puts the fear of God into Judge Danforth: “Think you to be so mighty that the power of Hell may not turn your wits.” Then from an “accusatory attitude,” she looks up and claims “a cold wind has come,” and then she and the others pretend to be freezing, “teeth chattering.” Danforth turns on Mary: “I say to you, do you witch her, do you send your spirit out?” Mary is frightened; the scene comes to a terrifying conclusion with all the girls pointing to the ceiling and in unison “let out a gigantic scream.” Mary “screams with them,” and accuses Proctor of “being the Devil’s man” (Act 3). Danforth demands that Proctor admit to being “befouled with hell.” Defiant, Proctor declares that “God is dead,” and believes that Hathorne and Danforth are frauds, merely using the girls to terrify the village  Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts, pp. 76, 82.

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and so maintain the power of the government. Danforth proclaims, “This is the highest court of the supreme government of this province” (Act 3). Imbued with extraordinary power, Danforth and Hathorne imprison and murder indiscriminately, all in God’s name. Proctor condemns Danforth and himself for failing to reveal the truth. Proctor knew of the girls’ deception much earlier, but rejected his wife’s plea that he go to the authorities and reveal Abigail’s part in making false accusations of witchcraft. He feared his affair with her would be revealed and adultery exposed: “I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! It is my face and yours! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have … and you now when you know in your black hearts that this be fraud – God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together (Act 3). John and Elizabeth are found guilty of witchcraft, and condemned to death. Reverend Hale undergoes a significant change of character, realizing that it not God’s will that is being exercised, but the tyranny of the church as institution in league with the government. He perceives the injustices wrought upon Proctor and others, senses that a “rebellion” is imminent in the village, and urges that the hangings be postponed. Danforth refuses, reaffirming the absolutism of church and state: “I speak God’s law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering … I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law” (Act 4). Despite his threat, Danforth also fears rebellion and will free Proctor if he confesses to consorting with the Devil. Proctor agrees to the court’s demand, admitting, “It is evil,” but bitterly justifies his decision” “Good, then – it is evil, and I do it” (Act 4). His willingness to lie to save his life adds complexity to Proctor’s character. He is not an emblematic figure of heroism ready to die unhesitatingly for the truth. Although tormented by his false confession, Proctor nevertheless chooses life rather than a noble death. But when Danforth demands that he admit to having seen Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and others with the Devil, Proctor refuses. This is a pivotal moment in the plot: Proctor defies Danforth, refusing to lie to save his own life. He signs the document attesting to his guilt without accusing others, but then snatches it back from Danforth, who intends to nail the confession to the church door for all to see. Proctor realizes that by exposing his lie to the community, his ethos is shattered; he is no longer able to teach his sons “to walk like men in the world.” The stage directions indicate the depth of his belief, “a cry of his whole soul.” His words convey the theme of the play: “Because it is my name … I cannot have

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another in my life! I lie and sign myself to lies! … I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name” (Act 4). Despite Danforth’s demands to return the document, Proctor “tears and crumples” it. Hale pleads with him, “Man, you will hang! You cannot!” At this moment Proctor becomes heroic; his honor has greater significance than saving his life. Here is the triumph of truth over tyranny. Hale makes one final plea to Elizabeth that she urge John to live: “What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? Shall the worms declare his truth?” Nearly collapsing with grief, Elizabeth, in prison, supports herself with the “bars of a window” and cries out, “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him” (Act 4). VI John and Elizabeth Proctor, and other equally honest villagers, died heroically. The price for life is too great, their honesty and good names. The tragedy of The Crucible is not individual but societal; victims of a community become a cruel mob, ruled by fear, incited and perpetrated by a tyrannical theocracy. The scales of justice are weighted down by the hangman’s noose. The conclusion of the play represents Miller’s condemnation of the HUAC and admiration for those who refused to comply with its demands, defying tyranny and suffering the consequences. Miller demonstrated the same courage, refusing to acquiesce to HUAC demands. Like Proctor, he preserved his good name: art and life fuse. Today’s audiences may be unaware that The Crucible was intended as a parable of HUAC activities during the 1950s. Miller, however, observed that the play “speaks for people against tyranny,” and when produced in a foreign country, particularly in Latin America,” it indicated to him that a strong possibility existed that a “dictator” was “about to rise and take over,” or had “just been overthrown.”37 The play’s relevance endures; it tragic themes remain a terrifying fact of modern life.

 Martine, The Crucible, p. 11.

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Index Aachen  233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 248, 256 Aelfric 193 aggregation  93, 356, associations  342, conglomeration 156 Alberti, Leon Battista  203, 204, 205, 206 Alexander II (Tsar)  285, 286, 300 Aristotle  85, 89, 90, 91 Attila 74–78 Augustine  81, 92, 94, 204 authority  28, 29, 31, 38, 124, 142, 147 Bacon, Roger  90 Bakhtin, Mikhail  7, 339, 340 bandits  280, 295 bells  220, 221, 241–244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252–264, 267, 268, (bell tower)  265, 266 Benjamin, Walter  141 “Berserk syndrome”  72 “Black Death”  233 Bloch, Marc  7, 84, 85 blood-lust 72 body (corporate/politic), 3, 13, 27, 64, 66, 79, 80, 82, 93, 96, 121, 124, 166, 357 (invisible)  2, 84, (of law)  2, 80, (physical/touch)  12, 19, 80, 345, 361 bonum commune 205 boundaries  119, 306 bourgeois, bourgeoisie  307 Bracciolini, Poggio  203, 204 brigata 183 bursa (collegium)  105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112 calca  165, 187, 206, 357 Canetti, Elias  1, 9–14, 16–20, 22–25, 29, 35, 39, 376 cantus  85, 87, 92 Cassiodorus  82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93 “cave” metaphor  43, 44 Cervantes y Saavedra, Miguel de  273, 360 character angelicus  80, 81 Chaucer, Geoffrey  163 “Children of Israel”  7, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 38, (“Hebrews”)  308, 310, 311, 318

Church, The  19, 82, 89, 119 Cicero, Marcus Tullius  66, 67, 152, 195, 197, 198, 204, (“Ciceronian”)  197 circle 1, circular 302 Citramontani 95 Clovis (King)  72, 73 Cock, Henry  270, 273, 274, 376, 278, 281, 282, 283 collection(s), collective (identity)  1, 9, 11, 15, 25, 28, 84, 122, 144, 147, 294, 348, 352, 357 (colloquium[ia]) 189, 190, 192, 195, 197, 198, 200, (collective punishment)  66 Cologne  236, 237, 240, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251, 257, 260, 261 command  63, 64, 65, 70, 78 communitas  5, 222 community  2, 3, 4, 30, 31, 93, 111, 112, 114, 119, 141, 142, 158, 160, 173, 174, 189, 369, 374, 376, 381, 382 congregation(s) 103 control  63, 64, 65, 70, 78 “contrary motion”  7 conversion 59 Corderius, Maturinus  193, 198 cortege 275 “crowd-man” 24 Crown of Aragon  273, 274, 277, 280, 281, 283 crystallization 19 culture  5, 142, 204, 220 Dante,  4, 343, 355 David (King)  84, 86 “Delian diver”  54 demagoguery  22, 311, 347 demos 42 Diogenes 41 discipline(s)  66, 72, 78, 111, 117 disintegration 11 ductus  90, 92 Düren  5, 232, 233, 234, 235 ecclesia,  82, 89 Edward III (King)  148, 150 Einsiedeln Abbey  239, 240, 248, 255 Empedocles 47 equality  11, 12, 28

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Erasmus of Rotterdam  193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200 Erfurt  233, 238 eruption 11 eschatological modus/sense/ apocalyptic  92, 343, 360, 362, 376 ethics  56, 59, 343 event 6 everyday life  5, 85, 196 evolution 22 exercitus  66, (exercise[s])  283, 357 exile  4, 166 Exodus  28, 29, 31, 32–38 falanges 71 fama  166, 172, 173, 174, 180, 181, 184, 186 festivals  269, 270, 279, 283 figura(ae)  82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 339, 340, 341, 353, 354, 361, 362, 381 figura coronata 84 folla  206, 316, 355, 356 Fredegar 71 “free-for-all”  6, 7, 306 Freud, Sigmund  18 Frontinus 67 fugitives 297 furor  27, 354 Gabriel (Angel)  178, 179, 181, 187 gang(s)  145, 292, 297, 298, 357 goal(s)  13, 246 Goths 28 Gower, John  143 greed  72, 163, 375, 378 Gregory IX (Pope)  118, 199 Gregory XII (Pope)  102 Gregory of Tours  74 Grosseteste, Robert  81, 90 guilds 119 Heidegger, Martin  42, 49 heretics 103 hierarchy(ies)  29, 31, 210, 281 historiography  286, 299, 302 hoi polloi 42 “Holy Roman Empire”  97 hordes  2, 10 horror turbae  4, 153 HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)  7, 363, 364, 369, 380, 382 Hundred Years’ War  122 Hunnic invasion (of Gaul)  5, 74–78

Hus, John  102 Hypatia  41, 45 Innocent IV (Pope)  122 inquisition  282, 379 intelligence  22, 64 Jacques de Vitry  113, 117, 122, 129 Johannes de Grocheio  90–92 Johannes Scotus Eriugena  93 Johannis de Vendeuil  125 John Chrysostom  216 John of Gaunt  143, 148, 150, 153 Josephus 67 Kantorowicz, Ernst H.  79, 80, 81, 84, 94 Karamzin, Ivan  285, 287, 289, 291, 294, 295, 296, 299 Kostomarov, Nikolai  286, 289, 296, 298, 299 lament  300, 301, 308 Langland, William  4, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163 Latimer, William  151, 152 Laudes regiae 79 lawful order  64, 81 Le Bon, Gustave  307, 350, 367 leader, leadership  7, 23, 29, 31, 56 legality  63, 64, 65 legitimacy  4, 141 Liber psalmorum  83, 85 Livy 28 Locke, John  161, 163 logica nova 90 logos  48, 51 Lombard, Peter  200 longa 91 Lot, Ferdinand  277 Machiavelli, Niccolò  68 majestas/ majesty  85, 88, 89, 279 de la Mare, Peter  148, 152, 158 Martel, Charles  70 mass/mob/groups  41, 165, 206, 211, 232, 233, 273 294, 303, 306, 307, 311, 313, 320, 342, 344, 347, 351, 352, 353, 363, 368, 376, 382, (blindness of/ hysteria)  2, 369, 375, 379, (calmed)  26, (as a crowd)  56, 232, 233, 307, 309, (dense)  1, 12, 348, 357, (desire for fulfillment)  45, (disdain for/of)  49, 53, 56, (faceless)  2, (function of)  3, (helpless/

index385 indigent)  38–39, 312–313, 341, 357, (military, as armies/troops)  2, 5, 64, 66, 204, 298, 310, (mobility of)  10, 60, 141, 246, 340, 343, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 357, (nature of)  54, 364, (phenomenon of)  1, 63, 232, 294, 350, 352, (public)  162, 352, 353, (resistance to)  45, (reversal of)  24, (riot)  305, 306, 320, 341, 346, 354, (undifferentiated) 209 mob syndicate  365 Medici family  206 “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”  7, 305–307 Mendicant orders  282, 283 Milton, John  191 mission(s)  64, 75 mob-hater  2, 41 Monod, Jacques  20–22 moral responsibility  2, 4, 55, 56, 57, 141, 142 Morisco(s) 273 Mosellanus, Petrus  198 Moses  7, 29–38 multitude(s)/crowd(s)  204, 205, 206, 207, 220, 234, 246, 281, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 297, 307, 311, 316, 320, 342, 345, 348, 349, 352, 356, 357, 358, 359, 361, 376, 377, (heavenly), 1, 11, 82–83, 86–87, 92, 93, (insulted and injured)  297, 312, 313, 341, (as nation)  129, 285, (ordered/orderly)1, 205, 206, 211, 216, 279, 343, 344, 352 Neptune 27 network(s)  1, 24, 248 Nicolai I (Tsar)  285, 299 Nietzsche  42, 60 Notker Balbulus  87, 88 organism 20 outlaw(s) 144 packs  10, 371 Parmenides 47 Paul, the Apostle  159 people(s), the/ populo  27, 30, 32, 96, 141, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 186, 187, 279, 281, 286, 292, 295, 300, 307, 310, 311, 312, 315, 316, 340, 344, 353, 354, 357 (populus cristianus)  208, (law of)  143, (popular)  282, 283, 296, 306 performance 279 Peter the Chanter  120

Philip Augustus (King)  117 Piers Plowman  4, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164 Plato  43, 44, 45, 47, 189 Plotinus  58, 60 plunder 74 Pollux, Julius  193 Pontanus, Jacobus  197, 200 power, empowerment  2, 9, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 85, 129, 211, 270, 271, 279, 280, 282, 283, 311, 343, 344, 352, 373, 374, 379 procession(s)  128, 270, 277, 279, 281, 282, 291, 341, 342, 357 profusion 7 psalms, “kingship psalms” 82 “Pseudo-Dionysius”  1, 93 public 4 punctum (puncta) 83 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich  6, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294 rage  55, 347, 354, 355, 374 ratio studiorum 192 rebellion  272, 300, 306, 317, 351, (revolution)  293, (riot)  305, 306, 320, 341, 346, 354 reflection (as way of life, reflective process)  46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 58, 59, 60 regnum  84, 85, 87 res publica  5, 66, 189 Richard II (King)  143, 145, 163 Richard the Lionheart  245 riffraff 296 Roman(s)  2, 27, 28, 65, 67, 77 (Roman law) 73 Rome  5, 153, 177, 238 Sachs, Hans  7, 306 Saint-Denis  5, 235 Sallust  4, 152, 153 Santiago de Compostela  238, 239 Savonarola 206 schema (schemata)  82, 83, 88 Schopenhaur, Arthur  60 scoundrels 357 sequence (sequentia)  2, 85, 87, 93 sermo cottidianus 196 “smart” mob  24 Socrates  41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 58 solitude  18, 58, 60 Solovyov, Sergey  285, 287, 288 soul(s)  58, 60, 175, 357, 361

386

index

spectacle(s)  6, 271, 279, 280, 282, 283 studium/ studium generale  97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110, 114, 115 substantia (materia)  88, 90 swarm  15, 357 symphonic  345, 346 Tacitus 28 Taine, Hippolyte  350 teleomony  20, 21 theoria  90, 91 thieves/robbers/criminals (as group)  297, 298, 343 throng  2, 350, 357 “town and gown”  3 tramps (as group)  295 translatio imperii 126 translatio studii 126 tribes 11 turba  4, 350, 357, turba rusticorum 154, 314, (peasants)  296, 312, 313, 314, 315, 317, 319 types (of crowds)  1 ultra mensuram  81, 92 Ultramontani 95 urban spaces  5, 205, 212–216, 278, 311, 341

Valla, Lorenzo  195 varietas 143 Varro, Marcus Terentius  66, 67 Varus 67 Vegetius, Renatus Flavius  68–70, 71 Venice  177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 187 via (in via) 90 violence  64, 65, 165, 273, 307, 351, 356, 366, 374 Virgil  25, 26, 28, 29, 38 Vives, Johannes Ludovicus  193, 198 vox populi  4, 142 Walsingham, Thomas  4, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 164 West, Nathanael  13–17, 141 William of Moerbeke  90 Wilsnack  5, 232, 233, 237, 238, 241, 248, 254 women  50, 73, 111, 145, 182, 209, 210, 307, 319–320, 347, 350, 357, 366–367, 378 Wyclif, John  144 Xenophanes 47 xenophobia  184, 187