Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence 2503612342, 9782503612348

Table of contents :
About the Authors
Refractions of Privacy in Early Modern Letter-Writing. Bastian Felter Vaucanson and Michaël Green
Chapter 1. Epistolary Technologies of Separation and Archives of Emotion. James Daybell
Chapter 2. Public and Private in Seventeenth-Century Scholarly Correspondence. Richard Maber
Chapter 3. La Beaumelle en ‘déshabillé’. Quelques facettes de sa vie privée dévoilées par sa correspondance. Hubert Bost
Chapter 4. Perceptions of Privacy in Diplomatic Correspondence. Dutch and English Ambassadors at the Early Modern French Court. Bram van Leuveren
Chapter 5. Privacy Aspects of Anglo‑Dutch Grand Tour Correspondence (1701–1703). Viscount Woodstock and Paul Rapin-Thoyras to the Earl of Portland. Michaël Green
Chapter 6. Personal Gift-Giving. Attempts at Intimacy in Anna of Saxony’s Letter Exchanges. Natacha Klein Käfer
Chapter 7. Cloistered Correspondence. Engaging and Renouncing the Grand Siècle. Mette Birkedal Bruun
Chapter 8. Privacy and Discretion in the Correspondence of Charles Drelincourt. Jane McKee
Chapter 9. Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondence Between Fénelon and Maintenon. Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Bastian Felter Vaucanson
Index nominum
Index locorum

Citation preview

Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence

EARLY EUROPEAN RESEARCH VOLUME 22 General Editors Kirk Essary, University of Western Australia Jacqueline Van Gent, University of Western Australia Editorial Board Tracy Adams, University of Auckland Emilia Jamroziak, University of Leeds Matthias Meyer, Universität Wien Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Kent State University Florence Center Juanita Feros Ruys, University of Sydney Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Universitetet i Oslo Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto Series founded by Andrew Lynch and Claire McIlroy with the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research, and now directed by The University of Western Australia Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence

edited by michael green and lars cyril nørgaard

© 2025, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. This is an open access publication made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission of the publisher, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. D/2025/0095/131 ISBN 978-2-503-61234-8 eISBN 978-2-503-61235-5 DOI 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138019 ISSN 2295-9254 eISSN 2295-9262 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Contents

About the Authors

7

Refractions of Privacy in Early Modern Letter-Writing Bastian Felter Vaucanson and Michaël Green

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Chapter 1. Epistolary Technologies of Separation and Archives of Emotion James Daybell

27

Chapter 2. Public and Private in Seventeenth-Century Scholarly Correspondence Richard Maber

49

Chapter 3. La Beaumelle en ‘déshabillé’. Quelques facettes de sa vie privée dévoilées par sa correspondance Hubert Bost

83

Chapter 4. Perceptions of Privacy in Diplomatic Correspondence. Dutch and English Ambassadors at the Early Modern French Court Bram van Leuveren

107

Chapter 5. Privacy Aspects of Anglo‑Dutch Grand Tour Correspondence (1701–1703). Viscount Woodstock and Paul Rapin-Thoyras to the Earl of Portland Michaël Green

139

Chapter 6. Personal Gift-Giving. Attempts at Intimacy in Anna of Saxony’s Letter Exchanges Natacha Klein Käfer

173

Chapter 7. Cloistered Correspondence. Engaging and Renouncing the Grand Siècle Mette Birkedal Bruun

191

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Contents

Chapter 8. Privacy and Discretion in the Correspondence of Charles Drelincourt Jane McKee

215

Chapter 9. Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondence Between Fénelon and Maintenon Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Bastian Felter Vaucanson

237

Index nominum

261

Index locorum

268

About the Authors

Hubert Bost is Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL (Paris), where he has held the chair ‘Protestantism and culture in modern Europe, 16th–18th centuries’ since 2023. He is editorin-chief of the Revue d’histoire du protestantisme. A specialist in the philoso­ pher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), whose biography he has published and whose correspondence he has helped to edit, he is also interested in the thought and writings of the Huguenots of the Age of Enlightenment, in particular Court de Gébelin (1728–1784), whose Les Toulousaines he edited in 2023. He has devoted several studies to La Beaumelle (1726–1773), including an edition of his Asiatique tolérant (1748) and his Requête des protestants français au roi (1763), and co-edited the 18-volume edition of his Correspondance générale (2005–2024). Hubert Bost est directeur d’études à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études– PSL (Paris) où il occupe depuis 2023 la chaire ‘Protestantismes et culture dans l’Europe moderne, xvie–xviiie siècles’. Il est rédacteur en chef de la Revue d’histoire du protestantisme. Spécialiste du philosophe Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) dont il a publié la biographie et participé à l’édition de la correspondance, il s’intéresse à la pensée et aux écrits des huguenots du siècle des Lumières, en particulier Court de Gébelin (1728–1784) dont il a édité en 2023 Les Toulousaines. Il a consacré à La Beaumelle (1726–1773) plusieurs études, une édition de son Asiatique tolérant (1748) et de sa Requête des protestants français au roi (1763) et a codirigé l’édition de sa Correspondance générale en 18 volumes (2005–2024). Mette Birkedal Bruun is Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen and Director of The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (2017–2027). She was PI of the collective research project SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century (2013–2017) (ERC). Her research interests include early modern devotion, the monastic movement, representations of the history and topography of salvation. She is the author of The Unfamiliar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) between Withdrawal and En­ gagement (2017) and Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography (2007). She has edited, among other volumes, The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order (2013), Commonplace Culture in Western

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About the Authors

Europe in the Early Modern Period I (with David Cowling) (2011), and Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (with Stephanie Glaser) (2008). James Daybell is Professor of Early Modern British History at the Univer­ sity of Plymouth and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is author of fourteen books and numerous articles and essays on the themes of early modern gender, politics, materiality, letters and heritage, including: Glove Culture in Early Modern England (2024), The Material Letter: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing in Early Modern England (2012), and Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (2006). Michaël Green is a University Professor at the Filip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Łódź and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His research revolves around the topics of early modern religious minorities, such as Huguenots and Jews, and he is interested in the notions of privacy of the time. He is co-editor of the series Studies in Early Modern Privacy and Egodocuments and History (Brill). Among his publications, An Interreligious Dialogue: Portrayal of Jews in Dutch French-Language Peri­ odicals (1680–1715) (2022), Le Grand Tour 1701–1703. Lettres de Henry Bentinck et de son précepteur Paul Rapin-Thoyras, à Hans Willem Bentinck. Édition critique établie par Michael Green (2021), and The Huguenot Jean Rou (1638–1711): Scholar, Educator, Civil Servant (2015). He is the co-editor (together with Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Mette Birkedal Bruun) of Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches (2022), and (together with Ineke Huysman) of Private Life and Privacy in the Early Modern Low Countries (2023). Natacha Klein Käfer is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is the research leader of the HEALTH theme at the Centre for Privacy Studies, the research coordina­ tor of the project Privacy Black & White, and the head of the research group Latin American Privacy Studies. Her research focuses on healing knowl­ edge and its connections to privacy in the early modern period and on transcontinental networks of knowledge. She has published on practices of knowledge production, privacy in maritime history, and healer-patient confidentiality from a historical perspective. She is the editor of Privacy at Sea: Practices, Spaces, and Communication in Maritime History (2024), Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe (with Natália da Silva Perez) (2024). Bram van Leuveren is Assistant Professor in Early Modern European Art History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and researches the essential role of theatrical entertainments and diplomatic rituals

About the Authors

in broadcasting and managing international relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, especially between England, France, and the Low Countries. He/They is the author of Early Modern Diplomacy and French Festival Culure in a European Context, 1572–1615 (2023) and is the recipient of a Maddock Research Fellowship (2019) from Marsh’s Library, Dublin, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union (2021–2023) at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Van Leuveren has published on his/their research in Medievalia et Humanistica, The Court Historian, and Early Modern Low Countries, among others, and currently works towards a new monograph on the ceremonial receptions staged by Netherlandish city councils for Anglo-French royals and their ambas­ sadors between 1577 and 1642. Richard Maber is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was Director of the Durham University interdisciplinary Research Centre for 17th-Century Studies, 1989–2009. He has published extensively on early modern French literature, and on the international networks of scholarly correspondences; he is currently editing the complete correspondence of Gilles Ménage (1613–1692). He is the founder (1985) and General Editor of the journal The Seventeenth Century. Publications include The Poetry of Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) (1982), Publishing in the Republic of Letters: the MénageGraevius-Wetstein correspondence, 1679–1692 (2005), Pierre Le Moyne, Entretiens et lettres poétiques, édition critique (2012), Malherbe, Théophile de Viau, & Saint-Amant, 5th edition (2009), and the edited collections La France et l’Europe du nord au xviie siècle (2016), and (with Joanna Barker) Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France (2017). Jane McKee (Ulster University, retired). Since the late 1990s, her research has focused on seventeenth-century French Protestantism, in France and in Ireland, revolving primarily around the work and correspondence of the Drelincourt family. This has produced publications in a wide range of related areas, from the charity school movement in Ireland to the pastoral theology of Charles Drelincourt and the poetry of Laurent Drelincourt. Her edition of the correspondence of five members of the family — Correspondance de Charles Drelincourt et de ses enfants, 1620–1703 — was published in 2021. She also edited (with Randolph Vigne) The Huguenots: France, Exile and Diaspora (2013) and was a joint editor of The Diary (1689–1719) and Accounts of Élie Bouhéreau (2019). She is a former chair of the Irish Section of the Huguenot Society and is currently a member of the editorial board of the Huguenot Journal. Lars Cyril Nørgaard is Associate Professor at the Section of Church His­ tory, University of Copenhagen, and heads the research cluster “BELIEFS”

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About the Authors

at the Centre for Privacy Studies, headed by Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun and housed at the University of Copenhagen. He is the co-editor of Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approches (2022) and has recently published Madame de Maintenon. Les Petits Livres Secrets (2023). Bastian Felter Vaucanson is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. In January 2023, he obtained a double degree PhD in Church History (University of Copenhagen) and French Literature (Université Rennes 2) and currently benefits from the Carlsberg Foundation’s Reintegration Fellowship. His thesis, which is to be published with Éditions Hermann, analyses the interplay between mysticism, intimacy, and epistolary practices through a case study of the correspondence between Jeanne Guyon and François Fénelon. In his first postdoctoral project, financed by the Carlsberg Foundation Interna­ tionalization Fellowship and undertaken at the University of Québec à Trois-Rivières and Sorbonne Nouvelle, he pursued these themes in the colonial setting of New France. His current research project focuses on the role of private devotion in the production of social space in 18th century Danish Atlantic.

bAStiAN fELtER vAUCANSON ANd miCHAëL gRE EN 

Refractions of Privacy in Early Modern Letter-Writing*

This volume examines early modern letter-writing in Europe from the perspective of historical privacy studies. In his influential book on letterwriting in early modern England, James Daybell concludes that secret writing practices enlarges our understanding of an emerging concept of privacy during the early modern period, and the ways in which it constructed a series of spheres, spaces, social transactions and relationships that were closed and confidential, such as state secrets, family and other intimate relations, and questions of religious conscience.1 The chapters of this volume map these different spheres of early modern privacy through individual case studies that target epistolary practices across the period. Privacy transpires in the interaction between historical agents and requires in-depth analysis of specific cases to be identified and * The authors wish to thank Lars Cyril Nørgaard for fruitful and stimulating discussions about the history of privacy. Bastian Felter Vaucanson’s research was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF138) at the Centre for Privacy Studies in Copenhagen and by the Carlsberg Foundation, grant CF23–0161. Michaël Green’s research has been funded as part of the increased by 2% subsidy for the universities participating in ‘The Excellence Initiative–Research University’ competition, for the University of Łódź. This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). 1 Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 174. Bastian Felter Vaucanson is Asssistant Professor at the Section for Church History and the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. Michaël Green is a University Professor at the Filip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Łódź, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 11–26 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138250 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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described. As a contextual medium that is personal and ever-changing in nature, the early modern letter is a particularly rich place to look for information about this topic. However, it also presents us with difficulties. Recent research has shown that privacy in the early modern world is a multifaceted and contextual phenomenon that emerges in spatial zones such as the soul or the self, the body, the chamber or the studio, the home or the household, the community, and the state or society.2 In a twofold sense, ‘the private letter’ therefore designates an object in permanent flux, a ‘squid-like thing’ of ‘infinite variety’, as Erasmus of Rotterdam said about the genre, that he viewed as impossible to define conceptually. 3 This volume maps the innumerable refractions of privacy as viewed through the early modern letter. Because of the twofold contextual instability of privacy and letters, the chapters in this book use the term ‘privacy’ in divergent ways. How, then, we might ask, can we ascertain what early modern privacy is within the context of letter-writing? In this volume, we use privacy as a perspective that can be applied to early modern epistolary culture with the aim of drawing out the many complexities of the encounter between the ‘individ­ ual’ and ‘society’. In doing so, we are leaning on the method for historical privacy studies that was developed by Mette Birkedal Bruun, and which is currently pursued at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138) of which she is the PI. Designed to tackle the ‘double condition’ that notions of privacy are semantically stable, while practices of privacy are ‘contingent’, this method allows us to use the kaleidoscopic lens of privacy to analyse a variety of sources, including the infinite variations of the early modern letter.4 The innumerable refractions occurring in the relationship between privacy and letters necessitate that we avoid offering a conceptual definition of privacy or the private letter. On the one hand, this is impossible regarding the richness of the historical sources. On the other hand, such a stable definition would not comply with our ambition to analyse privacy in all its multifaceted complexity.5 To 2 These are the ‘heuristic zones’ that make up the phenomenological work method used at the Centre for Privacy Studies, Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach’, pp. 22–24; Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond’, 47. 3 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collected Works of Erasmus, p. 12. 4 Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond’, p. 46. 5 As Hélène Merlin-Kajman posits, there are at least two ways of defining privacy. Either, as that which relates to the personal, domestic, and intimate and which the subject can regulate control to, or simply as that which is not public. While both definitions have merit, either one of them is unsatisfactory for historical privacy studies for the simple reason that they are mutually exclusive. We therefore accept both definitions while insisting on the heuristic value of investigating both aspects through historical case studies, Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier”’, p. 80. Ascribing to the first definition, Patricia Meyer Spacks writes that ‘the subject of privacy, in contrast [to the discussions “private” versus “public”], especially if considered historically, often demands focus on the ways people expose and

reFrACtions oF PriVACy in eArly Modern letter-WritinG

approach this complexity, we rather need a heuristic framework, and this Introduction provides one by giving an overview of the historiography of early modern privacy while putting it into discussion with the historiogra­ phy of letter-writing.

Privacy Studies as a Method for Epistolary Studies Bruun’s method for historical privacy studies consists of a three-fold ap­ proach. First, the ‘terminological’ approach maps occurrences of words with the root ‘priv-’. While stressing that such a mapping ‘generates insight into historical notions of the ‘private’ and ‘privacy’ and is ‘anchored in the sources’, Bruun points out that this aspect risks ‘leav[ing] us with a host of diverse occurrences of terms with the root ‘priv-’, each of which is tied to its Sitz-im-Leben to an extent that hinders overarching examination’.6 Bruun therefore introduces the six heuristic zones mentioned above — the soul or the self, the body, the chamber or the studio, the home or the household, the community, and the state or society — which constitute the second approach in her method and might be labelled as ‘phenomenological’. As she writes, ‘each of the thresholds [between the zones] involves a negotiation where an “individual” meets “society” in some form or other’.7 Although the phenomenological approach runs the risk of an anachronistic projection into the historical sources of a presentday privacy imaginaire, it helps us to identify occurrences of privacy in early modern sources even when the term is absent. Thereby, it emphasizes the many ambiguities and grey zones of the concept. Furthermore, it allows us to ‘map the absorption of privacy in everyday life’.8 This leads us to the third approach in Bruun’s method, which is a semantic mapping identifying the relationship of privacy to correlated terms such as ‘the particular’, ‘intimacy’, ‘secrecy’, ‘confidentiality’, etc., as well as apparent antonyms such as ‘the public’, ‘the common’, ‘the shared’, ‘the evident’, etc.9 Bruun posits that historical analysis of privacy and the private can be obtained through careful balancing of these three approaches, taking care to avoid a dilution of the concept into the meaningless while leaving space for constructing overarching nexuses.

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guard themselves in relation to limited numbers of others’, Privacy, p. 4. Nevertheless, the intellectual discussions between private and public remain pertinent to the historical analysis of privacy practices as controlling regulation because they inform us on different social strata of the early modern world. Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond’, pp. 46–47. Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond ’, pp. 47. Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond ’, p. 43. This approach is described in Bruun, ‘Privacy Work Method’, 2019 and 2021, https://teol.ku.dk/privacy/research/work-method, pp. 5–6.

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Defining Privacy Semantically, privacy has roots in Classical Greece, and in the distinction made by Aristotle between the political life of the ruling class [πόλις] and the domestic sphere [οἰκός], which constituted its basic social unit.10 As highlighted by scholars, the relationship between these two concepts was not exclusive but served to designate, respectively, the body of citizens and its constituent parts.11 As such, it is closely related to the fundamental distinction in Roman Law between the res publica and the res privata.12 Also within the Roman context, scholarship has highlighted that there is no strict opposition between these two terms, which were never well de­ fined.13 Rather, the distinction offered the juridical means to negotiate the relationship between the individual and the state.14 Due to its fundamental importance in Roman law, the terminological development of ‘the private’ in the early modern period unfolds primarily within legal philosophy and state theory, and for this reason ‘the public’ continues to be its most important conceptual complement. Defining the complementary relation­ ship with the ‘public’ characterizes early modern philosophical discourse on ‘privacy’. As Anna Becker has shown in her study of the ‘gendered’ commonwealth, Renaissance thinkers relied on Aristotle’s distinction to politicize the domestic sphere, at times seeing in the res familiaris a model for the res publica.15 At no point of the Renaissance, she states, was there contention among intellectuals about the embeddedness of the public within the private sphere, and vice versa. Thus, the distinction between private and public continued to be a conceptual tool that served to order society and the individual’s role within it according to shifting state ideals. Becker’s argument is aligned with an influential analysis published in the 1950s by Reinhart Koselleck in his Critique und Crisis. Here, he presented the view that the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century were fuelled by a passionate concern for the wellbeing of ‘the public’, and a corresponding ethical demand on individuals to give their all for the commonwealth.16 In continuation of the German historian, Hélène Merlin Kajman has argued on behalf of a fateful fragmentation of the public body commencing in the late sixteenth century.17 According to Merlin-Kajman, the splitting of the public body into equally zealous parties such as the 10 Aristotle, Pol. 1253bl–14. On the distinction between polis and oikos in Classical Greece, see Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, p. 324. 11 Cox, Household Interests, pp. 190–94; Ojakangas, ‘Polis and Oikos’, p. 5. 12 Zoller, ‘Public Law as the Law of the Res Publica’, p. 94. 13 Russel, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome, p. 41. 14 Periñán, ‘The Origin of Privacy as a Legal Value’, pp. 189–90. 15 Becker, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth, pp. 48, 221. 16 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 31; Merlin-Kajman, ‘Fables of the “Mystical Body”’, p. 135. 17 Merlin-Kajman, Public et littérature en France au xviie siècle, pp. 85–87.

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Protestants, Catholics, and ‘Politiques’, who made the king into the only source of authority for the public good, led to the ‘political disengagement of subjects’.18 According to this view, the transfer of political authority to the absolute monarch grew out of the intimate and personal form of Chris­ tianity promoted by the religious Reformations. Thus, Merlin-Kajman argues, the 1598 Edict of Nantes illustrates a fundamental shift in the early modern imaginaire through which the private consciousness of the individual took on a whole new sense of importance. No longer did the king have the responsibility for the salvation of his subjects, instead ‘the life of “particuliers” became the probationary place of true behaviour’, and throughout the seventeenth century ‘the disjunction between what was public and what was particular creeps in everywhere’.19 Scholarship holds that the concern for the interiority of individuals greatly evolved from the late seventeenth century to the nineteenth cen­ tury, and that this evolution reverberated in later definitions of privacy. Beate Rössler, for instance, has argued that the conceptualization of pri­ vacy by liberal thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke associated the term with a philosophy of freedom concerned with the autonomy of the individual, narrowly defined as a European man.20 Greatly inspired by Immanuel Kant’s definition of the private as being only capable of full expression when oriented towards the public, Jürgen Habermas famously expressed the view that the eighteenth century saw the ‘privatization of life’ and the emergence of a distinct sphere of public deliberation.21 Phillipe Ariès nuanced the conception of the domestic sphere when he advanced the view that the idea of the private family with distinct roles for adults and children began to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22 According to Ariès, this transformation marked a shift towards the modern concept of the family as a private, emotional, and nurturing unit. However, feminist authors have since criticized the schematic division of the private and public spheres as over-simplistic.23 Lawrence Klein, for instance, posits that ‘the public and private realms are less well segregated from one another and less exclusively gendered than they are sometimes represented to be’.24 Even if Patricia Meyer Spacks concedes that women lived in

18 Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier”’, pp. 82–83. 19 Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier”’, pp. 82–83. See also Merlin-Kajman, ‘Curiosité et espace particulier au xviie siècle’. 20 Roessler, The Value of Privacy, pp. 26–27. 21 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 44. 22 Ariès, ‘Pour une histoire de la vie privée’. 23 Geoff Eley puts Habermas’s historical analysis within its own context, showing how it is above all a defence of liberalism within a cold-war context, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures’, p. 311. 24 Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, p. 102.

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a state of comparative lack of freedom, this meant that their ‘strategies for privacy display special ingenuity’.25 Showing how, in the eighteenth century, ‘the very idea of privacy could arouse fear’, Spack argues that this ambivalence testifies to privacy as being ‘a psychological possibility’ for both women and men.26 This entailed that the individual could be both temporarily self-sufficient and independent from the state as well as greatly dependent on the public sphere. The public-private binary continuous to be paradigmatic because it brings out the many variations and grey areas that arise in the encounter between the two spheres, but the two concepts nonetheless remain embedded in one-another.27

Privacy in Early Modern Letter-Writing The constant preoccupation throughout the early modern period with defining the private in opposition to the public also leaves traces in the culture of letter-writing. In this domain, too, the private-public binary of Antiquity forms the conceptual foundation for rhetoricians’ attempts to define the epistolary genre. However, as opposed to their contemporary philosophers, rhetoricians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not have a classical model to base their theories on. Rhetorical treatises of Antiquity are almost entirely concerned with defining the discourses proper to the public sphere of the Greek polis, and therefore leave little room for a theory of the letter.28 The discovery in the fourteenth century of a manuscript holding Cicero’s familiar letters therefore provided an important stimulus for the development of epistolary theory in the early modern period. Indeed, Ronald Witt contends that Petrarch’s unearthing of the Roman author’s letters constitutes the defining moment in the invention of humanism.29 Similarly, Kathy Eden speaks of the ‘Renaissance rediscovery of intimacy’ when describing how Cicero’s letters offered a model on which to base a new kind of writing, which Renaissance thinkers placed at the very heart of human existence.30 In part devoted to Erasmus’s

Meyer Spacks, Privacy, p. 25. Meyer Spacks, Privacy, p. 24. Lilti, ‘Private Lives, Public Space’, p. 18. Kennedy writes that rhetorical treatises of Antiquity are primarily based on the three types of discourse defined by Aristotle in the Rhetoric — deliberative, epideictic, and judicia — which are linked to one of the three fundamental institutions of the Greek polis — the public assembly, the public ceremony, and the courts. Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece, pp. 6, 85. 29 Witt, ‘Medieval “Ars Dictaminis” and the Beginnings of Humanism’, p. 31. On the ethical dimension of Petrarch’s literary ideal, see Anheim, ‘Petrarque’, p. 601, and Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self, pp. 9–12. 30 Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, pp. 122–23. 25 26 27 28

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epistolary rhetoric, the study argues on behalf of the emotional value attributed by the great humanist to letter-writing. Thus, Eden contends that Erasmus saw in the letter a privileged medium for writers to ‘express themselves — their thoughts, their feelings, their character’.31 This conclu­ sion is seconded by Marc Fumaroli, who goes as far as to state that the humanist was ‘obsessed’ by the idea of developing a writing style that could ‘transcribe the inner quiver of the Christian soul’.32 In relation to these and similar studies, a central question within schol­ arship on Renaissance epistolary rhetoric has been the inquiry into the relationship between private writing and self-representation. In his study of the evolution of the familiar letter, Luc Vaillancourt argues that the stylistic ideal of familiarity [sermo] evoked in Renaissance letter-writing manuals is, in fact, nothing but the ‘mask of rhetoric’.33 Fumaroli’s study of Erasmus posited that the written conversation finds its apotheosis in the complete mastery of the public conventions established by rhetoric.34 It might therefore be inferred that Erasmus’s understanding of sermo is sat­ urated by the rhetorical ideals of the learned public. In other words, Eras­ mus’s ideal students give their whole self to the public in such a way that it allows them to master the epistolary conventions with such ‘ease’ that they can be liberated from them, that is, use them with virtuosity to express a true self. The complex relationship between the artificiality of rhetoric and the representation of the self was investigated in a precursory study by Anne Jacobsen Schütte. This showed that sixteenth-century Italian intellectuals used the fluent boundaries between literary fiction and private reality when publishing collections of their private letters to influence public opinion and present themselves as representatives and guarantors of shifting religious views.35 The mastery of epistolary rhetoric thus allowed for authors to control the public image of their private selves. As early as in the sixteenth century, writes Toni Bowers, epistolary novels ‘exploited the link between women’s intimate desires and pseudo-private letters’ to create the impression of authenticity.36 As such, women leveraged the prevailing conception of them as ‘private’ actors, who engaged in letter-writing more fervently than men, and who poured their personal essence into their correspondences, all with the aim of exerting an influence on the public sphere. Despite Fumaroli’s compelling presentation of Erasmus’s epistolary ideal, it remains debated whether the artifice of rhetoric allows for any kind

31 32 33 34 35 36

Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, p. 88. Fumaroli, ‘Genèse de l’épistolographie’, p. 888. Vaillancourt, La Lettre Familière au xvie siècle, p. 185. Fumaroli, ‘Genèse de l’épistolographie’, p. 890. Jacobsen Schütte, ‘The “Lettere Volgari” and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy’, p. 674. Bowers, ‘Epistolary Fiction’, pp. 406, 409.

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of authentic self-representation.37 At the close of the seventeenth century, Renaissance ideals of the familiar style had evolved into a fetichism for the ‘spontaneous’, ‘free’, ‘natural’, and ‘simple’ style suited for the private letter. Scholars have fervently debated whether the self-representation promoted in ostensibly private letters that are copied, circulated, and eventually pub­ lished should be taken as real or fictional. Arguing on behalf of the ‘private’ nature of the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné, Roger Duchêne promoted the view that the writings conveyed ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ emotions of love and tenderness towards her daughter.38 Adversely, Bernard Bray insisted that her style betrays ‘artifice’, and that the so-called ‘natural’ style of her letters should be read as a form of autofiction.39 Recent scholarship has sought to reconcile the two positions. Thus, Natalie Freidel argues that whether authentic or artificial, the Marquise succeeded in developing a style of writing that was perceived by her contemporaries as an efficacious expression of inner emotions.40 In fact, the strict distinction between a public self-representation and an authentic private self hardly seems to fit the literary practices of the early modern period. Throughout the eighteenth century, authors and publishers began to play with, exploit, and manipulate the fluid relationship between fiction and reality, making it even more blurred. In the context of the eighteenth century, Marc-André Bernier speaks of an artistic cultivation of ‘fictitious reality’ within histori­ cal novels.41 However, this trait is equally pronounced in the genre of the epistolary novel, which was often presented as either real or at least clearly based on known individuals. Naturally, the ideals of letter-writing were influenced by epistolary literature, and vice versa.42 The ethical and emotional value attributed to epistolary practices by Renaissance rhetoric makes early modern letter-writing manuals a rich source for privacy studies, but scholars have also asked how the intellectual ideals of private writing and its relationship with self-representation play out in practice across the different social classes of early modernity. James Daybell puts the intellectual developments into broader perspective, as he notes that the rise in literacy at the end of the sixteenth century entailed that ‘letters became increasingly private spaces associated with personal writing technologies and detached from the secretarial gaze’, which meant that letter-writing [and reading] practices and experiences cover a broad range ‘of different levels of social interaction [including] collaborative

37 38 39 40 41 42

Lignereux, ‘L’art épistolaire de l’âge classique’, p. 17. Duchêne, Naissance d’un écrivain, p. 221. Bray, ‘Roman par lettres’, p. 73. Freidel, La conquète de l’intime, pp. 669–70. Bernier, ‘Postface’, p. 227. Whyman, The Pen and the People, p. 177.

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writing’.43 Although ‘[o]stensibly private’, letters were widely copied and circulated. However, Daybell’s research into the material aspect of early modern letters has shown how writers did indeed establish privacy bound­ aries through the use of shorthand, ciphers, invisible ink, seals, foldings, watermarks, paper type, neatness or messiness of handwriting, and by circumventing the postal services.44 In the context of seventeenth-century England, Cecile Jagodzinski argues on behalf of ‘the implications that reading and literacy had for the development of an autonomous private self ’.45 Defining, on the one hand, the private in terms of ‘the freedom to reveal all or part of one’s inner self to another’, Jagodzinski also makes the claim that private letter-writing nurtured the emergence of ‘physical’ privacy throughout the seventeenth century.46 Nonetheless, the threshold between private and public remains blurry. As Sophie Ruppel shows in her study of courtly letters between siblings, we must avoid the ‘separation between “private” and “public”’, because ‘the aristocrats […] always stand in the open, and the private sphere is only minimally developed in a figuration that so closely connects family with politics [while] elements [of privacy] also exist rudimentarily’.47 One must agree with Ruppel, who concludes that early modern letter-writing practices begs the question of identifying the shifts in emphasis between ‘private’ and ‘public’ aspects. At the same time, however, research has emphasized that the epistolary was a privileged space for privacy practices in the early modern period. Scholarship has used letters as sources to challenge a gendered percep­ tion of the public-private divide in the century of enlightenment. As liter­ acy grew in the eighteenth century, and the material conditions for writ­ ing improved, letter-writing became more democratized. Showing how authorship of female autobiographical writings such as private letters and memoires is often multilayered, frequently involving cooperative creation, Lynda Thompson has argued that women used the ambiguous relationship between the fictitiousness of public literature and authenticity of private writings to reach a broader readership and influence the public sphere.48 Regarding the efforts to exclude women from the public discourse of the Republic of Letters and confine them to a private sphere, David Norbrook argues that women actively opposed this initiative through private letter-writing.49 In prolongation hereof, Amy Culley has argued that women’s’ personal writings create ‘relational selfhood’ that serve to convey

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Daybell, The Material Letter, pp. 20, 28. Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 107. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, p. 5. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, p. 91. Ruppel, ‘Family Politics, Family Networks and the “Familial Self ”’, pp. 265–66. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’, p. 126. Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere’, p. 224.

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connections and communal bonds, or to participate in the historical record of a given community.50 Thus, the early modern letter does in fact hold a privileged position as a tool used by individuals and communities to practice privacy, but this private reality cannot and should not be studied in isolation from its public readership.

Conclusion The above survey has used Bruun’s three-fold method for privacy stud­ ies to show that the combined perspectives of the terminological, phe­ nomenological, and semantic approach allow us to identify occurrences of privacy in early modern letter-writing while insisting on the malleability and complexity of the concept. The privacy perspective creates refractions of the early modern letter, showing how rich a source it can be for histori­ cal privacy studies. Although epistolary culture of the early modern period is inextricably linked to conceptions of the ‘public’, the letter was in fact perceived as a tool for privacy. Our overview of the scholarly literature on privacy and letter-writing in the early modern period has shown that epis­ tolary practices nurtured momentary occurrences of privacy, but always in a dynamic and ever-changing fashion that requires detailed study of contexts and settings. For example, the historiographical survey has shown that corollary terms such as ‘intimacy’, ‘secrecy’, ‘confidentiality’, ‘simplic­ ity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘the particular’, ‘the natural’ as well as apparent antonyms such as ‘the public’, ‘community’, ‘the shared’, ‘the state’ are necessary to analyse occurrences of privacy in letters. Although none of the corollary concepts are synonymous with early modern privacy, they allow us to describe the phenomenon in greater detail. What is striking about these terms is that they all refer to the complex dynamics arising from individ­ ual’s relationship to the world surrounding them and of which they were a constituent part. When seeking to identify occurrences of privacy in the early modern period, it is thus impossible not to include reflections on the ‘public’. But we should keep in mind that the dichotomy private/pub­ lic always designates the interaction between historical agents, broadly understood. Privacy occurs in the unstable terrain of social interaction and therefore constantly fluctuates with human actions and intentions. Rather than serving to define the ‘private’ in opposition to the ‘public’, the study of early modern epistolary culture is fruitful — as well as challenging — because it forces us to work within the infinite complexities of social reality. Privacy practices in early modern letter-writing are ambiguous and

50 Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, p. 19.

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often divergent because pockets of privacy had to be sought out amid an otherwise public space. It is these pockets of privacy that the following nine chapters tackle from various perspectives.

Essays The idea for producing this volume has originated in the research semi­ nar ‘Privacy in Early Modern Correspondences’. The seminar was concep­ tualized and organized by Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Michaël Green at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies in May 2019 (DNRF138). The book is divided into three main parts. The first is dedicated to the topic of ‘Correspondence, Knowledge and Diplomacy’. In the first out of the three chapters in this part, James Daybell provides an overview of the historical context surrounding early modern correspondence. He delineates letters as a form of social technology that facilitated communication over long distances, thereby bridging diverse geographic gaps. Letters, in their capacity, not only conveyed information but also conveyed emotional states, serving as pillars upholding personal relationships. Beyond their textual content, these letters, as physical arte­ facts, possess emotional significance. Daybell encourages us to re-evaluate the emotional impact and influence carried by the letters exchanged in correspondence. In Chapter 2, Richard Maber zooms into the European Republic of Letters and delves into an analysis of the practical dynamics of scholarly correspondence within this intellectual network. Within various exchanges and the accompanying societal norms, these correspondences regarded privacy as a matter of confidentiality. While writers were aware of the possibility of broader circulation, they still regarded letters sent to their scholarly associates as personal in nature. The scholarly letter, Maber contends, operates on multiple levels with a ‘public’ intention at its core. However, he argues that this public intentionality does not negate the pres­ ence of ‘private’ elements and dimensions. Instead, these private aspects coexist with the public ones, offering unique insights into the lives and experiences of early modern scholars in various ways. In the third chapter, Hubert Bost conducts an analysis of the case of Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle (1726–1773), an individual renowned as both a celebrated writer and a figure of controversy, whose extensive and multifaceted correspondence offers a unique perspective. These letters possess a conspicuous quality in which the persona of the letter-writer cannot be entirely divorced from his ‘vie privée’. Bost demonstrates that despite this, La Beaumelle’s correspondence provides us with a window into the hidden aspects of his actions and the evolving framework of his thoughts. In this context, it is imperative to regard the private realm

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not as something entirely separate from public appearances. Instead, it emerges through subtle expressions of intimacy, modes of introspection, confidentiality, discretion, and even deliberate or imposed dissimulation. In other words, the private realm constitutes a life lived in the shadow of public secrecy. The second part of the book is dedicated to ‘Letter-Writing at Court’. Bram van Leuveren delves in Chapter 4 into the professional epistolary practices of diplomats at the royal court, focusing on the sixteenth century. He explores the concept of privacy within diplomatic missives sent to for­ eign powers, with a specific emphasis on the correspondence of Aernt van Dorp (c. 1528–1600) and Robert Cecil (1563–1612). By comparing their dispatches, these letters illuminate private zones and the ideals of privacy existing within the inherently public life of the French courts during the reigns of Henry III (r. 1574–1589) and Henry IV (r. 1589–1610). Chapter 5, authored by Michael Green, analyses the Anglo-Dutch Grand Tour Correspondence exchanged, on the one hand, between Henry Bentinck (1682–1726) and his tutor the Huguenot Paul Rapin de Toyras (1661–1725), and, on the other hand, Bentinck’s father, Hans Willem Bentinck (1649–1709), who was a close friend and associate of William III, King of England and Stadtholder of Holland. Written between 1701 and 1703, these letters offer a view of the everyday life of the court and high society, as well as of the War of the Spanish Succession. The concept of privacy emerges in them as particularly significant, primarily as a means of conveying the personal feelings of the correspondents and their views. Particular attention is given to the private circumstances surrounding the copying and preservation of these letters for posterity. In Chapter 6, Natacha Klein Käfer undertakes an examination of the gift-giving practices of Anna of Saxony (1532–1585), the spouse of August the Elector of Saxony (1526–1586). These practices are scrutinized within their political, public, and ceremonial contexts, where Anna’s correspon­ dence offers insights into how she cultivated personal connections with many of the most prominent individuals of her time. Consequently, this extensive collection of letters serves as a documentation of her sophisti­ cated approach to bestowing specific gifts upon her peers, which allowed her to gather and leverage private information in her efforts to establish bonds of intimacy that transcended mere dynastic ties. The third part of the book focuses on the ‘Religious Letter’. It is opened by Mette Birkedal Bruun’s Chapter 7, dedicated to monastic corre­ spondences. She views letters exchanged within this context not as private in terms of their mode of delivery, but their pastoral aim retains a tone that singles out addressees. As a case study she investigates the epistolary practices of the abbot of La Trappe, Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé (1626–1700), which are seen as pastoral in substance. These practices include a message tailored to specific circumstances, capacities, and needs.

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Nevertheless, Rancé’s monastic correspondence introduces an added layer of complexity, as the act of writing letters potentially conflicts with the monk’s duty to renounce the outside world. In Chapter 8, Jane McKee focuses on the correspondence between the Huguenot pastor Charles Drelincourt (1595–1669) and his colleagues in the United Provinces of the Netherlands and in France. She focuses on the private aspects of Drelincourt’s own life, the life of his correspondents as well as his personal views on important political issues of his time. The manner in which he addressed a range of subjects, including religious polemics, delineates, on the one hand, what held significance for him and what did not, and, on the other hand, underscores his inclination towards a private mode of communication regarding profoundly public matters. The presumably private character of correspondence provides a platform for the expression of public concerns. In the ninth and the final chapter of this volume, Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Bastian Felter Vaucanson analyse the letters addressed by François Fénelon (1651–1715) to Louis XIV’s secret wife, Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719). These letters belong to an epistolary situation in flux, which gradually dissolves the private nature of the correspondence and transforms letters into ‘texts’ with a multitude of readers. This transforma­ tion was actively pursued by Maintenon, who, strategically, disseminated letters. However, Fénelon also supported dissemination, and thereby his letters become a type of literature that resists precise classification. They were neither confined to the private space of an epistolary situation nor completely open to a public readership.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aristotle, Politics, 1253bl–14 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. by Jesse Kelley Sowards, xxv (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) Secondary Works Anheim, Etienne, ‘Petrarque: L’écriture comme philosophie’, Revue de synthèse, 129.4 (2008), 587–609 Ariès, Philippe, ‘Pour une histoire de la vie privée’, in Histoire de la vie privée, iii: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. by Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 1–11 Becker, Anna, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Bernie, Marc-André, ‘Postface. Vérité fictionnelle et dispositif rhétorique’, in Mémoires et Roman. Les Rapports entre vérité et fiction au xviiie siècle, ed. by Marc-André Bernier and Zeina Hakim (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2023), pp. 227–46 Bowers, Toni, ‘Epistolary Fiction’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, i: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750, ed. by Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 400–16 Bray, Bernard, ‘Roman par lettres: l’art de la lettre amoureuse des manuels aux romans, 1550–1700’, in Roman par lettres. Usages poétiques de la première personne dans la littérature française, ed. by Odile Richard-Pauchet (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), pp. 53–73 Bruun, Mette Birkedal, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond: Traces and Approaches’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 44.2 (2018), 33–54. ———, ‘Privacy Work Method’, 2019, online edition [Accessed 26 November 2023] ———, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy: The Retirement of the Great Condé’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michael Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 12–60 Cox, Cheryl Anne, Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) Culley, Amy, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

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Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) Duchêne, Roger, Naissance d’un Écrivain: Madame de Sévigné (Paris: Fayard, 1996) Eden, Kathy, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012) Eley, Geoff, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas within the Nineteenth Century’, Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. by Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 297–335 Freidel, Natalie, La conquète de l’intime: Public et privé dans la ‘Correspondance’ de Madame de Sévigné (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2019) Fumaroli, Marc, ‘Genèse de l’épistolographie: Rhétorique Humaniste de la Lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse’, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 78.6: La Lettre au xviie Siècle (1978), 886–905 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) Hansen, Mogens Herman, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1998) Jacobsen Schütte, Anne, ‘The “Lettere Volgari” and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 28.4 (1975), 639–88 Jagodzinski, Cecile, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1999) Kennedy, George, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) Klein, Lawrence, ‘Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. by Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 100–15 Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: Berg, 1998 [1959]) Lilti, Antoine, ‘Private Lives, Public Space: A New Social History of the Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 14–28 Lignereux, Cécile, ‘L’art épistolaire de l’âge classique comme champ d’application du savoir rhétorique’, Exercices de rhétorique, 6 (2016): Atelier. Les typologies des manuels d’art épistolaire, 1–70 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, ‘Curiosité et espace particulier au xviie siècle’, in Curiosité et Libido sciendi de la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. by Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre and Sophie Houdard (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 1998), i, pp. 109–35 ———, ‘Fables of the “Mystical Body” in Seventeenth-Century France’, Yale French Studies, 86 (1994), 126–42

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———, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier” (and Other Words) in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michael Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 79–104 ———, Public et littérature en France au xviie siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994) Meyer Spacks, Patricia, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) Norbrook, David, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, Criticism, 46.2: When Is a Public Sphere? (2004), 223–40 Ojakangas, Mika, ‘Polis and Oikos: The Art of Politics in the Greek City-State’, The European Legacy, 25.2 (2020), 1–17 Periñán, Bernardo, ‘The Origin of Privacy as a Legal Value: A Reflection on Roman and English Law’, American Journal of Legal History, 52.2 (2012), 183–201 Roessler, Beate, The Value of Privacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) Ruppel, Sophie, ‘Family Politics, Family Networks and the “Familial Self ”: Sibling Letters in Seventeenth Century German High Aristocracy’, in Mapping The ‘I’: Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, ed. by Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Lorenz Heiligensetzer (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 251–66 Russel, Amy, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Thompson, Lynda M., The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Vaillancourt, Luc, La lettre familière au xvie siècle: Rhétorique humaniste de l’épistolaire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003) Whyman, Susan, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Witt, Ronald, ‘Medieval “Ars Dictaminis” and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem’, Renaissance Quarterly, 35 (1982), 1–35 Zak, Gur, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Zoller, Elisabeth, ‘Public Law as the Law of the Res Publica’, Articles by Maurer Faculty, 146 (2008), 93–102

jAmES dAYbE LL 

Chapter 1. Epistolary Technologies of Separation and Archives of Emotion*

On 1 July 1634, the Kentish knight, politician, and antiquary Sir Edward Dering sent a personally written letter to his third wife Unton, a private and distant communication dispatched from London to their family seat some sixty miles or so away at Surenden-Dering in Kent. ‘My deare heart’, he wrote, ‘this absence of mine is in all the circumstances of itt the most of any’. The missives continued describing his legal and business affairs in London before ending with dutiful affection: ‘Deare Numpes beare my absence patiently, or els come chide me heere, but truly, chiding will not mende me, for my utmost endeavour is to be with thee’.1 The letter is one of a series held alongside account books and antiquarian collections at the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone that Dering sent to his wife between 1629 and 1642, the turbulent period building up to the Civil War, which drew him from home for extended lengths of time.2 This extensive correspondence — preserved as part of an archival impulse — provides a series of snapshots from the husband’s point of view of how one seventeenth-century couple conducted their marriage periodically at a distance: balanced alongside the day-to-day negotiation of household and estate management and expressions of affection is a deep underlying consciousness of distance and separation. As a generic form the early mod­ ern letter is unrivalled as a technology of separation, with the structure of

* This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). 1 Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Kent, Dering MS, U350/C2/44. See also The Dering Love Letters. 2 Dering MSS. James Daybell is Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Plymouth and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 27–47 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138238 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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distant communication between sender and recipient hardwired into its very DNA; the blank page an enticing site for introspection and writing the self, community, and the family. This opening Dering letter is broadly representative of a large body of surviving correspondence between the period roughly 1500 to 1700 that came into existence by virtue of the fact that people lived apart. Following a broadly postal chronology this article argues that the early modern period represents a distinct epoch for long-distance communications prior to the eighteenth-century democ­ ratization of letter-writing cultures and the routine reliability of national and global postal networks, the invention of technologies like the telegram or telephone in the nineteenth centuries, and innovations in transporta­ tion that allowed for rapid, regularized, and reliable communication and movements of people.3 The irregularity and unreliability of postal condi­ tions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imparted a particular quality of social anxiety and longing to correspondence, the act of letterwriting itself heightening emotional responses to distance. Letters have for a long time been studied as a long-distance commu­ nicative form that connected societies, ancient to modern, from the cache of letters at the Roman fort of Vindolanda to the post epistolary world of global instant digital messaging.4 At the macro level, Dagmar Freist’s Prize Papers Project, Oxford’s Cultures of Knowledge and Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO, and its sister project Women’s Early Modern Letters Online, WEMLO) as well as Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters and the Tudor Networks project at Queen Mary, University of London have or are mapping global letter-writing networks that facilitated the flow of trade and knowledge, uncovering the intersections and entan­ glements of societies and cultures within the early modern world.5 Studies by Cressy, Pearsall, and Bannet among others have explored the nature of transatlantic relationships from the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; while scholars of the nineteenth-century United States use letters home to examine the lives and experiences of immigrants.6 Research into empire 3 Dierks, Letter Writing and Communications in Early America; Decker, Epistolary Practices. 4 Birley, Vindolanda. 5 ‘The Prize Papers Project’, https://www.prizepapers.de/; ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750’ https://culturesofknowledge.history.ox.ac.uk/, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ (and its sister project Women’s Early Modern Letters Online, WEMLO, http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?page_id=2595); Mapping the Republic of Letters http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/; Tudor Networks, https://tudornetworks.net/ [all accessed 9 February 2022]. 6 Cressy, Coming Over; Pearsall, Atlantic Families; Bannet, Empire of Letters; Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires; Bernier and others eds, The Edinburgh Companion to NineteenthCentury American Letters and Letter-Writing, esp. ch. 10. Decker, ‘Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now’, ch. 11, Stewart, ‘Working Away, Writing Home’, ch. 12. Moreton, ‘Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant

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has read colonial correspondence to study a wide range of themes from Margot Finn’s work on the East India Company at home. In both Jeffrey A. Auerbach’s work on Imperial boredom, and Alannah Tomkins’ study of medical misadventure and anxiety in the nineteenth century which draws on correspondence from the Indian medical service, letters emerge as a site for ennui and despair.7 Other studies have variously looked at prison­ ers’ and paupers’ letters to family networks, seventeenth-century Dutch mercantile correspondence as a way of forging bonds of trust with interna­ tional traders; cloistered nuns corresponding to maintain links with family and kin outside of nunneries; or uncovered letters among the archives of London’s Foundling Hospital that shed light on mothers who abandoned their children.8 Long-distanced letter-writing has also been gendered by scholars showing the ways in which women were instrumental in connect­ ing families, letters playing a vital way of not only connecting people with home, but also constructing the home as a resource of longing and emotional significance.9 In many ways then the letter is a capacious form: a textual and material portmanteau that assumes a wealth of functions, personal, private, and emotional, transactional, public, and practical. Structurally letters expose a series of relationships and circumstances that separated individuals across the lifecycle; spatially and geographically; as well as by large-scale invisible historical forces such as empire, trade, war, and religion. Merchants conducted business remotely; states and institutions administered regions from afar; diplomats and ambassadors resident abroad reported home on foreign affairs; newsletter writers di­ gested far-flung news for geographically dispersed clientele. Letters reveal families parted because of war, travel, business, and politics; the changing nature of relationships between children and parents across the lifecycle as sons and daughters marry and move out, or leave home for education, learning, and service, embark on the Grand Tour or travel; the elderly removed from loved ones by the ageing process; patterns of migration that separated kin nationally as well as globally. Viewed spatially the early modern built environment — monasteries, prisons, hospitals, schools, or universities, even domestic dwellings — facilitated or enforced separation, removing individuals from the rest of society in order to purify, punish,

Correspondence’, ch. 13. Floyd, ‘The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and the Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters’. 7 Finn, ‘The Female World of Love and Empire’, pp. 7–24; Auerbach, Imperial Boredom; Tomkins, Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation. 8 Foyster, ‘Prisoners Writing Home’; Zijlstra, ‘To Build and Sustain Trust’; King, ‘Friendship, Kinship and Belonging in the Letters of Urban Paupers’; Walker, ‘Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world’; Evans, ‘Unfortunate Objects’; Frost, ‘Your Mother Has Never Forgotten You’. 9 Chalus, ‘My dearest Tussy’; Smith, ‘Imperial Families’; Hannan, ‘Making Space’; Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts’.

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cure, contain, and educate. In each of these situations the letter is the chief communicative tissue that connects, transacts, and communicates between those parted by distance. Correspondences survive relating to trade, diplomacy, statecraft, and the church as well as what might broadly be termed family life. Importantly, separation was something that almost all people experienced as part of their everyday lives, this was not simply something caused by large-scale impacts like war or migration, it was quo­ tidian, regular, and routine, linked to lifecycle and spatial geographies, as well as socio-economic and cultural forces. Furthermore, separation could be wilful as well as enforced, experienced practically, psychologically, and emotionally, materially as well as metaphorically. The impact of distance could be something to negotiate, connected to isolation and loneliness, but equally separation led to agency, freedom, creativity, and expansion. The focus of this article, however, is primarily on long-distance corre­ spondence between family members — chiefly married couples, parents, and children as well as extended kin — who were used to living together but who for various reasons were separate intermittently, for extended periods or permanently in the case of migrants, and whose experiences are well-documented in collections of transatlantic correspondence. Vast runs of family papers across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shed invaluable light on the ways in which individuals and families experienced separation in practical and emotional terms, a subject that raises a series of intriguing questions for letters as a technology of separation connected to privacy. What was characteristic about premodern distant epistolary communications? How did postal conditions shape the culture and social practices of letter-writing? How did letter writers living apart conceptual­ ize and understand distance? How did early moderns cope with loneliness and isolation? How did men and women love, live, long, and sustain relationships across distances? What roles did letters play in spanning the distance between correspondents moving apart? What emotional states or responses were occasioned by separation or living apart, contingent on circumstance: love, longing, boredom, agency? How far were letter-writing practices connected to separation gendered over the period? At the heart of the article’s analysis is the way that the letter as a technology bridged separation in its manifold forms, paying attention to its function and meaning. It is interested in particular in bringing into dialogue historical and literary critical approaches to material texts with recent theories and methodologies of objects, including recent studies of ‘objects of emotion’. Put simply, it seeks to move beyond looking at how letters communicated meaning through textual and material forms to consider letters as things themselves, things that structured relationships and accumulated social value through their making, exchange, and ownership.

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Models of Epistolarity One way of unpicking our understanding of how to read and interpret early modern letters, is to begin with interrogating traditional models of epistolarity — quite literally the letterness of letters — as carefully outlined by Janet Gurkin Altman in her seminal study Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form and theorized by among others Jacques Derrida in The Post Card and Michel de Certeau in Practices of Everyday life.10 For de Certeau, in his chapter on the scriptural economy, ‘the blank page’ is conceptualized as a space of one’s own and ‘assumes the withdrawal and the distance of a subject in relation to an area of activities’: First, the blank page: a space of its own delimits a place of production. For the subject. It is a place where the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised. It assumes the withdrawal and the distance of a subject in relation to an area of activities. It is made available for a partial but regulatable operation, A separation divides the traditional cosmos, in which the subject remained possessed by the voices of the world. An autonomous surface is put before the eye of the subject who thus accords himself the field for an operation of his own. This is the Cartesian move of making a distinction that initiates, along with a place of writing, the mastery (and isolation) of a subject confronted by an object.11 This model of epistolarity which views the act of letter-writing in simple binary terms is predicated on a shared understanding of correspondence as both providing a private textual space and a reciprocal communicative form that bridges the geographical gap between sender and recipient, a model that is fundamentally instructive, but also more recently has been shown to be flawed by studies stressing the multi-agent complexities of letter-writing cultures.12 The concept of spatial privacy as it relates to writing, dispatch, read­ ing, and archiving of letters was not necessarily singular and secluded, but rather defined as familial, coterie, or trusted.13 Moreover, as literacy levels rose over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, letter-writing became increasingly personalized with the democratization of epistolary skills, and the rise of personally handwritten letters which displaced scribal traditions of corresponding. This challenges misconcep­ tions some historians have held regarding the lack of a concept of privacy during this period. While the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ sometimes

10 11 12 13

Altman, Epistolarity; Derrida, The Post Card; de Certeau Practices of Everyday Life. de Certeau, Practices of Everyday Life, p. 134. Daybell, The Material Letter. Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 44.

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hard to define, this does not mean that privacy did not exist. Indeed, early modern epistolary culture provides abundant evidence of widespread efforts to carve out arenas that are private, secret, hidden, and shared, with communications shared in confidence, as seen by the use of seals to lock letters, employment of secret codes, ciphers, and invisible ink to hide sensitive information, and the use of dependable and secure postal arrangements to ensure the safe consignment of letters.14 In recent years letters have been read through a range of sophisti­ cated lenses — literary, rhetorical, linguistic, historical, gender-based, and material — and there are three approaches or methodologies that are particularly useful in understanding early modern epistolary cultures of distant communications: the first, is material texts or material letters borrowed from literary scholars and manuscript studies; secondly, objects of emotion from material culture and history of emotions; and finally the concept of itineraries, borrowed from the fields of archaeology and cultural anthropology, which complements and has subtle differences from the linearity of Igor Kopytof ’s concept of object biography.15 There is obvious overlap between these different approaches, with the first two offering ways of reading and understanding early modern letters, while the last mentioned offers more of an analytical framework for studying letters across temporalities and modalities, in ways similar to the sociology of texts.16 This approach moves from reading letters as texts or even material texts towards reading them as ‘things’. Over the past decade or so scholars have approached letters as mate­ rial texts, repackaging the less fashionable arsenal of manuscript skills of codicology and palaeography which are given kerb appeal when breathed through with the sociology of texts. Studies by Sara Jane Steen, Alan Stewart, and my own The Material Letter demonstrate that letters commu­ nicated not simply through rhetorical and linguistic forms, but also via material features such as handwriting, ink, paper, manuscript space, and even the way in which letters were folded (a form it almost seems of Renaissance origami) which impart significant social and cultural mean­ ing. Likewise, paratextual features, including enclosures such as objects

14 Daybell, ‘I wold wyshe my doings myght be … secret’. See also Pollock, ‘Living on the Stage of the World’; Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London; Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’. 15 On recent approaches to early modern letters see: Daybell, ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Seventeenth Century’; Daybell, ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Sixteenth Century’; and Daybell and Gordon, ‘Select Bibliography’. On material texts, see Daybell and Hinds, eds, Material Readings of Early Modern Culture; Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England. For recent work on objects of emotion, Downes and others, eds, Feeling Things; Dolan and Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles’. On itineraries, see Hahn and Weiss, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–7. Cf. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, pp. 64–91. 16 McKensie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.

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and goods that accompanied privy communications, emoted in material ways.17 This approach to the materiality of texts is further enriched by paying attention to letters as objects, in other words as physical and material ‘things’ in their own right, which increases our ways of seeing objects and their materials as agentive participants, embedded in processes, in society and culture. The early works of object theorists such as Bjarne Rogan emphasized that there is an ongoing interaction between humans and objects: ‘objects do not just provide a stage setting to human action; they are integral to it’.18 Objects are thus agentive. Alex Preda argues that ‘both human actors and things appear as active entities involved in the pro­ duction of social order’.19 An assumption in this article, therefore, is that there is an interaction between objects and human actors, that letters and their component parts (such as ink, paper, wax) had different meanings in different contexts, and varied capacity in these forms and contexts to exert, establish, stabilize, or disrupt power relations. Letters are thus not simply viewed as finished articles but as both materials and ideas embedded together in a series of processes that move these components through multiple hands, and materialized power operations, as they become and are letters. These lenses on the participatory nature of objects in social and cul­ tural processes of power operations also include attention to the affective. More recently the ‘material’ and ‘emotional’ turns have led to analyses of the emotional life of objects. As the editorial collective of Feeling for Things argue ‘objects [function] as actors which do not emote; which produce and transmit feeling, but do not, themselves, feel’ but have the agency and ‘the capacity to act on peoples feelings’.20 Taking a material-emotions approach to letters is useful in many ways, not least in terms of the concept of making, in other words, the production or making of things is an emotional investment of time, personalization of matter was a gesture that labour is embedded in the object — in this case the letter. Time taken to produce and send a letter was a form of social capital, which we see connected to duty, obligation, and affect. Likewise, the act of letter-writing was imbued with feeling, as was the collecting, archiving, and curating of letters that mattered to people in different ways. Emotional attachments 17 Daybell, The Material Letter; Daybell and Gordon, eds, Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain; Daybell, ‘Material Meanings and the Social Signs of Manuscript Letters in Early Modern England’. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters; Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’; Steen, ‘Reading Beyond the Words’. 18 Gosden and Marschall, ‘Cultural Biography of Objects’; Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’; Bennett, Vibrant Matter, have similar ideas about human object agency. 19 Preda, ‘The Turn to Things’. 20 Downes, Holloway and Randles, ‘A Feeling for Things Past and Present’, p. 11. See also, Brown, ‘Thing Theory’; Gell, Art and Agency. Cf. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology.

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might also be formed with objects, and as Alfred Gell reminds us such ob­ jects acquired agency inherent in cultural situations: a letter passed on to family and friends acquires sentimental value since it has embedded within it the memory of the writer.21 As Daniel Miller has evocatively shown the things that people assemble around themselves have an emotional value entirely detached from their economic worth, which connects to emotional aspects of archiving and memorialization of correspondence.22 Lastly, running through this article is a reflection on the temporalities, trajectories, and mediations of early modern letters. One of the straightfor­ ward ways of thinking about this is to adapt the kind of theories relating to the sociology of texts borrowed from critical bibliography, which allows us to sketch a rather linear letter-writing process from composition and delivery, through reading and reception, to storage and archive, and recent work has demonstrated the complexities involved at each phase, and it is useful to think about separation across these different temporalities of the letter. If as this article has argued we consider letters as objects, then the concept of ‘itineraries’ developed by Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss who have adapted James Clifford’s notion of travelling cultures is instructive in thinking about the multiple itineraries objects (in this instance, letters) take and the different meanings generated as objects travel, transform, are appropriated, re-appropriated, and reinterpreted in different contexts.23 The rest of the article therefore examines the material letter as an object of emotion structured across four itineraries: materials and the material conditions of letter-writing, postal geographies, reading, and archiving.

Materials and Material Conditions Turning first to consider material conditions and materials, letter-writing required the assembly of all the accoutrements of writing: paper, ink, wax, writing surface, templates, and protocols read in letter-writing manuals or absorbed through contact with the form. The material conditions for long-distant correspondence varied enormously. Many households were well-stocked with letter-writing supplies as attested by the frequency of purchases in accounts; and inventories detail the ubiquity of writing surfaces in the form of desks and tables. Those travelling from home, however, needed to prepare for itinerant and irregular correspondence. Many packed supplies or sourced stationary at their destination. Where paper was in short supply it could be shipped (as was the case with New 21 Gell, Art and Agency; Fletcher, ‘Sentimental Value’. 22 Miller, The Comfort of Things. 23 Hahn and Weiss, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–7; Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’.

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England), correspondents also carried portable writing materials, includ­ ing small wooden writing desks; they collected recipes for making ink, and improvised with makeshift materials, finding the time to write aboard ship, on the battlefield, or amidst their daily affairs.24 Secret codes, invisible ink, and secure methods of sealing sought to make the epistolary medium privy and secure. Letter-writing was increasingly a personal activity from the sixteenth century onwards, with handwriting, signatures, personal seals, locks of hair, and other material forms conveying intimacy and significant meaning.25 Objects and enclosures communicated alongside textual and material forms functioning as tokens or remembrances of home; exotic and luxury items from foreign lands connected people to distant cultures and travels. While the rise of personal writing technologies promoted long-distance communication, illiteracy certainly was not a bar to corre­ sponding, and the diary of the seventeenth-century shopkeeper Roger Lowe illustrates that he was in demand to pen letters for those unable to write themselves. ‘Ann Barrow came to towne’ he records ‘and moved me to write a letter for her in answer to a love letter from Richard Naylor’.26 Moreover, letter-writing was an embodied, imaginary, and emotional act. Indeed, the physical act of composing brought the addressee to mind and for many the regular routine of corresponding with absent family connected people in meaningful and emotional ways. The Elizabethan naval commander Sir Thomas Baskerville wrote regularly to his wife Mary when overseas on service, in one letter promising her that in her absence he used to make love to her in his letters; in another he sent her his soul to ‘accompany’ her and lodge in her ‘bosom’.27 Along with prayers and blessings, this textual and metaphorical conveyance of body parts or one’s essential being — the heart, soul, body, or carcass — were common imagined enclosures in correspondence. The process of putting pen to paper was both embodied and psychological. Susan Whyman has argued that letters were symbolic ‘paper visits’, but more than this, actually sitting down to write a letter was often figured as an imagined meeting, letter-writing as time spent with the addressee.28 The leader of the Bay Colony John Winthrop corresponded with his third wife Margaret as often as he was able after his arrival in New England in 1630 until she joined him in 1631. In a letter dated 9 September 1630, Winthrop wrote ‘I am sorry to part with thee so soon, seeing we meet so seldom, and my much business has made me too oft Forget Mondays and Fridays. I long for the time when

Daybell, The Material Letter, ch. 2; Cressy, Coming Over, p. 213. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England, p. 151. The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, pp. 24, 28. British Library, Harleian MS 4762, fol. 19: Sir Thomas Baskerville to Lady Mary Baskerville, 26 May n.y. 28 Whyman, ‘Paper Visits’. 24 25 26 27

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I may see thy sweet face again and the faces of my dear children. But I must break off’.29 Viewing the material conditions of letter-writing through the interpretative lens of emotional objects prompts us to think about making, highlighting that the process itself had value and meaning as an embodied, imagined form of communication. More the production of things — in the case the letter — as argued earlier, was an investment of time and the personalization of matter was a gesture that labour as emotional capital is embedded in the object, with clear investment in the letter arriving and being read by its intended recipient, which is intrinsically bound up with the next stage of a letter’s itinerary and considerations of postal geographies.

Postal Geographies Scholars have been keen to announce a ‘communication revolution’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries linked to the development in print, the rapid and regular consumption of news and information, and the expansion in global trade, travel, and exploration.30 In postal terms too, the opening up of more democratic, regularized postal systems en­ hanced long-distance communications, supplementing elite and somewhat restricted forms of state and diplomatic communications and mercantile networks.31 In England, the 1635 reforms that opened up the royal post to private correspondence and the later advent of the London and then general penny post made keeping in touch more regular, reliable, and affordable. There also appears to have been widespread knowledge of differing modes of posting — including ordinary posts, royal standing posts, pursuivants and royal messengers, footposts, merchants’ posts, car­ riers, personal servants and messengers, and a myriad of idiosyncratic arrangements (friends, family, neighbours and chance travellers who hap­ pened to be journeying in a given direction) — all of which coexisted and overlapped to form an interconnecting world of communications.32 Despite this undoubted development of dense networks of routes and nodes of connectivity, for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries postal conditions for personal and private correspondence were unstable and ad hoc even after Charles I’s reforms, and into the eighteenth century conveying letters overseas was fraught with difficulties. In some cases, carriage could be intolerably and impracticably slow, far from conducive to

29 30 31 32

Emerson, ed., Letters from New England. Behringer, ‘Communications Revolutions’; Seldes, ‘Communication Revolution’. Arblaster, ‘Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers’. Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England; Daybell, The Material Letter, ch. 5; Williams, ‘The Perils of The Post Road’.

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effective government or profitable trade. Two letters from Hugh Clotwor­ thy in Antrim to his brother Simon Clotworthy in the parish of South Molton Devon took almost three months to arrive in the early seventeenth century.33 Correspondence that had to travel by water on postal barques or merchant ships as part of its journey was fraught with delays, and dependent on the weather and tides. Writing from Flushing in August 1612, the military commander Sir Robert Sidney complained to his wife that his letters had ‘been at sea and…driven back’, explaining ‘this bearer I now send to you again: and the wind being so ill as it is I make him go by land’.34 It is telling that the 100,000 or so unopened letters in the High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers were seized and never reached their intended destinations: making them a moving memorial of dead letters!35 While letter writers adapted to the irregular rhythms of early modern postal conditions — writing into the void or sending the same letter via three or four different vessels in the hope that a proportion of letters might get through, or numbering letters sequentially in case of miscarriage — the vagaries of dispatch and delivery of private letters imparted a degree of epistolary anxiety among correspondents, one that conditioned geographical imaginaries, accentuating perceptions of distance, barriers or borders and prompted a language of longing and separation, an empathy of presence and absence.36 The impact of postal irregularities on personal relationships and pri­ vate business are shown by a remarkable sequence of letters that survive from the 1530s between Honor Lady Lisle and her husband Arthur Lord Lisle, the Deputy Lieutenant of Calais, dating from 7 November 1538 during which period Lady Lisle journeyed to London and was away for over 5 weeks negotiating on her own the business of a crown annuity. Her mission took her to the heart of the Tudor court, and included an early morning meeting with the Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell, an encounter described in some detail in communiqués home. During this time, the couple were frequently in touch to discuss the minutiae of her suit, with letters conveyed by an army of personal messengers using the cross-channel postal barque between Calais and Dover; yet the correspondence is full of complaints about postal delays, letters simply not arriving, and the ineptitude of servants. Alongside the practical and legal concerns, and the kinds of opportunistic provisioning that being in London permitted, what is most striking is the candour with which these

33 Kresen Kernow (formerly Cornwall Record Office), Redruth, T/(2) 231/2, 3. 34 Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Kent, U1475/C81/236, 17/8/1612; CKS, U1475/C81/237, 17/8/1612; De L’Isle MSS, U1475/C81/236, 17/8/1612; CKS, U1475/C81/237, 17/8/1612. 35 TNA, HCA 30. 36 Dierks, Letter Writing; Decker, Epistolary Practices.

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letters — many of which were dictated to scribes — dealt with their separation from each other and textualized their emotions.37 In her first letter home after arriving in England Lady Lisle informed her husband of the rough crossing, clearly upset by the fact that she had not managed to say farewell properly at her departure, and was at great pains to explain why she had not written sooner, which is more than the dutiful apologetics of an aristocratic wife. ‘Your absence and my departure’, she wrote, ‘maketh heavy, also for that I departed at the stair at Calais so hastily without taking my leave of you accordingly; but I assure you my lord I thought you had been in the boat’ adding that a servant who promised to attend her for a token and letter from her to him had left without warning.38 This was a couple in their later years, Lisle in his 70s, who were clearly unused to being apart, and therefore ill-at-ease with cross-channel communications during a turbulent period in their fortunes. At the height of protracted negotiations Lady Lisle confided in her husband, ‘I can neither sleep nor eat nor drink that doth me good, my heart is so heavy and so full of sorrow, which I know well will never be lightened til I be with you’, adding in a postscript a desire to keep their correspondence privy: ‘I bessech you keep my letters close or burn them; for though I have sorrows, I would no creature should be partaker, nor knowledge with me’.39 After his wife’s departure, Lisle promised for his part that he would ‘keep little company’ in mourning for her ‘absence’, declaring ‘ther is no man lyuyng wold gladlier have by [his] wyffis company then I would have yours for neuer thowght so long for yow’, a refrain often repeated in his letters.40 Separation in this exchange is heightened by the delays and silences of postal uncertainties, which punctuate the exchange; distance is a perceived and lived experienced through the not knowing and imagining what the other one is up to elsewhere, as much as it is articulated by a deep sense of longing. Furthermore, the correspondence in itself is a reversal of what are typically depicted as the gendered structures of long-distanced correspon­ dences by scholars such as Elaine Chalus, Kate Smith, and Leonie Hannan who have argued that women in particular played key roles in writing about household and maintaining epistolary networks that formed virtual family circles and connecting far-flung families with a sense of home.41 Here the gendered roles are switched, with Lady Lisle overseas reporting the goings on from the court, while her husband by contrast reminds her

37 38 39 40 41

St Clare Byrne, ed., The Lisle Letters, i, pp. 32–37; iv, pp. 229–30. Lisle Letters, v, p. 1262. Lisle Letters, v, p. 1270. Lisle Letters, v, p. 1291. Chalus, ‘My dearest Tussy’; Smith, ‘Imperial Families’, Hannan, ‘Making Space’.

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of life at home in Calais, a mode of political agency that was opened up to early modern elite women.42 The sense of being separated by time and distance becomes more pro­ nounced in transatlantic family correspondence, where the physical barrier of the Atlantic Ocean imposed geographical constraints on communica­ tions between relatives and friends in England and New England.43 Corre­ spondents knew the names, schedules, and embarkation points of ships voyaging across the seas, yet the passage of transatlantic correspondence during the seventeenth century was beset with problems, from shipwrecks, miscarriage of post, and lengthy delays, which conditioned expectations of lengthy erratic communication times and strained relationships lived apart as a result of trade, migration, and demands for religious toleration.44 Themes of distance were prominent in letters, and people were used to not hearing from one another for months at a time. John Winthrop wrote to his son on the 28 March 1631 ‘this ship staying so long here, I am almost out of hope that my letters should come…although I think very long till I see you all here’; Thomas Gwin wrote on 2 October 1692 to his friend and brother William Ellis thanking him for his letters, gladdened that he had ‘a place in thy remembrance, which will not I hope, be blotted out, though our abodes are at so great a distance’.45 Mary Downing wrote to her father Emanuel Downing on the 27 November 1635, I have found so much your love and see that neither time nor distance of place Doth diminish or blast the same, which I confess and desire to acknowledge as a great mercy and the chief comfort for a temporal, that I have to solace myself withal, adding dear father, I am far distant from you and know not how long it will please the Lord to continue it so but howsoever, I desire to rest satisfied with his will and do earnestly desire to submit myself in all duty and obedience as belong of and to a child to yourself and my mother, as if I were with you.46 Letter-writing thus bridged the oceans that divided families, with the letter itself as a site for the performance of daughterly humility and honour. For many of those who emigrated to New England for religious rea­ sons, their faith provided a framework for negotiating separation from

42 43 44 45

Daybell, ‘Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England’. Cressy, ‘Letters Home’. Steele, ‘Time, Communication and Society’; Cressy, Coming Over. Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, pp. 87–88; The Life and Correspondence of William and Allis Ellis of Aieton, pp. 6–7. 46 Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, pp. 179–80.

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loved ones: filial and familial duty prompted writing and strengthened resilience. Some came to terms with life lived apart from loved ones sustained by their desire to follow God’s ordinances in America. Wives left behind by zealous husbands who undertook the passage and began a new life in New England were strengthened in their separation by the resolve that their menfolk were undertaking God’s work, with many choosing to follow on after, once their husbands were settled and a home and future established abroad. In the meantime, correspondence along with prayer acted as a form of sustenance. Alice Ellis wrote to her husband on 15 February 1698: ‘So my dear love, though we be far distant in body, yet as we keep in the universal love of God, we are present in spirit, and as near as ever’.47 In a later letter on 24 May 1698 she expanded on her resolve in being apart: ‘thou hast often been in my remembrance to my great comfort; and such has been the Father’s love, that I can truly say, I have had no want of thee, excepting in our own meeting’, adding that she felt God’s love in her heart ‘and many times earnestly pray in secret of my heart to the Lord, that he may enable thee to perform thy service fully’. ‘I hope’ she continued thou wilt take well my writing after this manner…though I signified the fear that was in my mind, lest thou shouldst be drawn homewards over soon, thou knowest it is not for want of love to thee; for I can truly say, thy company has been always pleasant to me. Even though they were apart, their sacrifice enhanced their love and relationship, which was strengthened by the fact that his work ‘will be a means of spreading the Truth and propagating his Great Name upon earth’. In this sense, distance and the hardship of personal separation is part of God’s will, and supporting her husband is figured as part of her wifely duty and devotion to the cause.48 Geographical barriers such as the Atlantic Ocean and the postal difficulties emphasized temporal and spatial separations in the premodern era, which echo the letter-writing culture of early American society described by Dierks and Decker where families were communicating across thousands of miles with large tracts of territory remaining uncharted.49

Reception, Reading, and Archives of Emotion Once dispatched and delivered, the ongoing itineraries of letters were relate to their reception, reading, and archiving. Recent studies, not least 47 The Life and Correspondence of William and Allis Ellis of Aieton, pp. 61–62. 48 The Life and Correspondence of William and Allis Ellis of Aieton, pp. 71–72. 49 Dierks, Letter Writing; Decker, Epistolary Practices.

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my own work, have delineated the private, communal, and public ways in which letters were consumed and circulated.50 While many missives were intended for the eyes of the addressee only, others were passed among fam­ ily and friends, or were sent open for wider perusal; correspondents spec­ ifying restricted coterie audiences, while some letters circulated uncon­ trolled in manuscript and print, a form of public opinion. The concern here again though is less with text and dissemination than with understanding the letter itself as an emotional object, and thinking about the impact of receiving an unopened letter, with recognizable handwriting and seals, itself the product of emotional investment, which is embedded within its very matter. Use of secretaries and amanuenses to pen letters prompted re­ buke from family, while personal handwritten correspondence, postscripts, even sketches and doodles occasioned appreciation of time taken to write oneself. As with writing, the receipt and reading of personalized corre­ spondence was an embodied experience. The Warwickshire-based Hannah Dugard informed her cousin Mary Wyllys in Hatford Connecticut, ‘it is a comfort that they [her letters] come to hand any time, being such a distance’; Johanna Tuttle informed her daughter in New England that ‘The letter I received from you lay by me as a cordial which I often refresh myself with’.51 These were not letters regularly exchanged, but rare often unexpected communications received from distanced relations, which heightened their social importance not only as texts to be read and reread, passed around and shared with wider kin, but also as emotional objects that represented absent family: a material extension of the self to be held, contemplated, and hoarded. The emotional currency of receiving letters also connects to the preser­ vation and archiving of correspondence. Letters here fit into wider patterns of assembling materials of memory — which included diaries, bibles, re­ ceipt books, other personal writings as well as material objects — whereby early modern families throughout Europe and Colonial America were active in forming family archives. Part of this process is related to what the self-styled Professor of Archivisitics Eric Ketelaar has termed ‘cultural patrimony’, in other words, the idea that ‘records created for current business be transferred as a heritage to future generations who will value those records as cultural assets’.52 Running alongside (and often connected with) this very pragmatic use of archives was a more personal concern with family, and an impulse to preserve genealogical records as a form of family history, a mode of textual memorialization and the formation of archives of

50 Daybell, ‘I wold wyshe my doings myght be … secret’. 51 The Wyllys Papers, p. 107 (10 April 1648); Emerson, ed., Letters from New England, pp. 139–40. 52 Ketelaar, ‘The Genealogical Gaze’, p. 9. See also, Ketelaar, ‘Muniments and Monuments’; Leniaud, Les archipels du passe.

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emotion. Thus, many of the letters of seventeenth-century English gentle­ woman Mary Baskerville (d. 1632) were kept in a manuscript miscellany by her son, the antiquarian Hannibal Baskerville (1597–1668). They func­ tioned not only as a material memory of his mother (as examples of letters in her own hand), but also the very paper on which they were penned formed the physical site for her biography, which Baskerville annotated on the reverse sides of the letters.53 The compiling, selection, and ordering of archives in this manner was often deliberate by sons and daughters, husbands and wives as material memories; family correspondence and papers did not automatically gravitate towards muniments rooms, but did so as a result of archival decisions that chose to privilege and preserve. Thus, we move from studying the letter and letter-writer per se connected to an essential moment of composition or production, towards focusing instead on the itineraries of letters as objects across different stages of transmission, reception, and archiving: the archiving of a letter was itself an investment of emotional capital.

Conclusion Throughout the early modern period then the letter was unrivalled as a technology of separation that facilitated long-distance communications, mediating family, business, political and diplomatic relations. The six­ teenth and seventeenth centuries mark an epoch in letter-writing culture during which period uneven and erratic postal conditions accentuated a sense of longing and distance, and heightened the emotional freight and value of correspondence prior to the democratization of epistolary skills in the eighteenth century, regularized national postage systems for private mail, and the revolutionary communications advances of the nineteenth century. While letter-writing at some basic level was structured around separation and distance, communication and meaning was not straight­ forward, but generated across different itineraries, from materials and composition, delivery, reception and reading and archiving, with meanings communicated textually, linguistically, and rhetorically, as well as through material forms. Viewing letters not simply texts, or even material texts, but as emotional objects adds a further layer of interpretation to understand and conceptualize the writing, reading, and archiving of correspondence as embodied, imaginary, and emotional acts.

53 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS, D 859, fols 1r-v, 2r-v, 3r-v, 4r-v, 5r–6v, 7r-v, 8r-v, 9r-v, 10r-v, 11r-v, 36r–37v, 73r. Mortimer, ‘Baskerville, Hannibal (1597–1668)’, ODNB.

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Works Cited Archival Sources Redruth, Kresen Kernow (Cornwall Record Office), T/(2) 231/2, 3 Kew, The National Archives, HCA 30 London, British Library, Harleian MS 4762, fol. 19: Sir Thomas Baskerville to Lady Mary Baskerville, 26 May n.y Maidstone, Kent History and Library Centre, De L’Isle MSS, U1475/C81/236, 17/8/1612 ———, CKS, U1475/C81/237, 17/8/1612 ———, Dering MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS, D 859, fols 1r-v, 2r-v, 3r-v, 4r-v, 5r–6v, 7r-v, 8r-v, 9r-v, 10r-v, 11r-v, 36r–37v, 73r Primary Sources The Dering Love Letters: A Collection of 17th Century Love Letters Sent by Sir Edward Dering to his Beloved Wife Unton, ed. by Alison Cresswell (Maidstone: Kent County Council, n.d.) The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663–74, ed. by William L. Sachse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938) Emerson, Everett, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976) The Life and Correspondence of William and Allis Ellis of Aieton, ed. by James Backhouse (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849) The Wyllys Papers: Correspondence and Documents Chiefly of Descendants of Gov. George Wyllys of Connecticut, 1590–1796, ed. by Lemuel A. Welles (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1924) St Clare Byrne, Muriel, ed., The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), i, pp. 32–37, iv, pp. 229–30 Secondary Works Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982) Arblaster, Paul, ‘Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications’, in News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe, ed. by Joad Raymond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 19–34 Auerbach, Jeffrey A., Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

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Behringer, Wolfgang, ‘Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept’, German History, 24.3 (2006), 333–374 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) Bernier, Celeste-Marie, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Birley, Robin, Vindolanda: Extraordinary Records of Daily Life on the Northern Frontier (Carvoran, Greenhead: Roman Army Museum Publications, 2005) Bogost, Ian, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Brayshay, Mark, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England: Achieving a Joined-Up Realm (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2014) ———, ‘Messengers, Pursuivants and Couriers: Agents of the English State, c. 1512-c. 1640’, Quaderni di storia postale, 35 (2020), 280–317 Brown, Bill, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), 1–22 Chalus, Elaine, ‘“My dearest Tussy”: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle Papers, 1800–14)’, in A New Naval History, ed. by Quintin Colville and James Davey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 47–69 Clifford, James, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96–116 Cressy, David, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) ———, ‘Letters Home: Old and New England in the Seventeenth Century’, History Today, 37, 10 (1987), 37–41 Daybell, James, ‘“I wold wyshe my doings myght be … secret”: Privacy and the Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion, ed. by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 143–61 ———, The Material Letter: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) ———, ‘Material Meanings and the Social Signs of Manuscript Letters in Early Modern England’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 1–21 ———, ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Seventeenth Century’, English Literary Renaissance, 36.1 (2006), 135–70 ———, ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Sixteenth Century’, English Literary Renaissance, 35.2 (2005), 331–62 ———, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

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———, ‘Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England’, in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, ed. by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 101–19 Daybell, James, and Andrew Gordon, eds, Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain,1580–1690 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) ———, ‘Select Bibliography: The Manuscript Letter in Early Modern England’, Lives and Letters, 4.1, special issue: ‘New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Letters’ (2012), 8–35 Daybell, James, and Peter Hinds, eds, Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunication (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1998) de Certeau, Michel, Practices of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011) Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979) Dierks, Konstantin, Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Dolan, Alice Dolan, and Sally Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles: An Introduction’, Textile, 14.2 (2016), 152–59 Downes, Stephanie, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles, ‘A Feeling for Things Past and Present’, in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History, ed. by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 11 ———, eds, Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Evans, Tanya Evans, ‘“Unfortunate Objects”: London’s Unmarried Mother in the Eighteenth Century’, Gender and History, 17.1 (2005), 127–53 Finn, Margot C., ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780–1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40.1 (2006), 203–31 ———, ‘The Female World of Love and Empire: Women, Family and East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Gender & History, 31.1 (2019), 7–24 Fletcher, Guy, ‘Sentimental Value’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 43.1 (2009), 55–65 Foyster, Elizabeth, ‘Prisoners Writing Home: The Functions of their Letters, c. 1600–1800’, Journal of Social History, 47.4 (2014), 943–67 Frost, Ginger, ‘“Your Mother Has Never Forgotten You”: Illegitimacy, Motherhood and the London Foundling Hospital, 1860–1930’, Annales de démographie historique, 127.1 (2014), 45–72 Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: A New Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

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Gibson, Jonathan, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, The Seventeenth Century, 12.1 (1997), 1–9 Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology, 31.2 (1999), 169–78 Hahn, Hans Peter, and Hadas Weiss, ‘Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things’ in Mobility, Meaning and the Transformation of Things, ed. by Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), pp. 1–14 Hannan, Leonie, ‘Making Space: English Women, Letter-Writing, and the Life of the Mind, c. 1650–1750’, Women’s History Review, 21.4 (2012), 589–604 Ketelaar, Eric, ‘The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’, Libraries & the Cultural Record, 44.1 (2009), 9–28 ———, ‘Muniments and Monuments: The Dawn of Archives as Cultural Patrimony’, Archival Science, 7 (2007), 343–57 King, Steven, ‘Friendship, Kinship and Belonging in the Letters of Urban Paupers, 1800–1840’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 33.3 (2008), 249–77 Kopytoff, Igor, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91 Leniaud, Jean-Michel, Les archipels du passe: Le patrimoine et son histoire (Paris: Fayard, 2002) McKensie, Donald Francis, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; 1999) Miller, Daniel, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, in Materiality, ed. by Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–50 ———, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009) Mortimer, Ian, ‘Baskerville, Hannibal (1597–1668)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Orlin, Lena Cowen, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Pearsall, Sarah M. S., Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Pollock, Linda, ‘Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy Among the Elite of Early Modern England’, in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its Interpretation, ed. by Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 78–96 Preda, Alex, ‘The Turn to Things: Arguments for a Sociological Theory of Things’, The Sociological Quarterly, 40.2 (1999), 347–66 Rothschild, Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)

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Seldes, Gilbert, ‘Communication Revolution’ in Explorations in Communication: An Anthology, ed. by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), pp. 196–99 Smith, Kate, ‘Imperial Families: Women Writing Home in Georgian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 24, 6 (2015), 843–860 Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Steele, Ian K., ‘Time, Communication and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702’, Journal of American Studies, 8 (1974), 1–21 Steen, Sara Jayne, ‘Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation’, Quidditas, 22 (2001), 55–69 Stewart, Alan, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations, 50 (1995), 76–100 ———, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Tomkins, Alannah, Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 1780–1890 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) Walker, Claire, ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter Writing in Early Modern English Convents’, in Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, ed. by James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001), pp. 159–76 Williams, Megan K., ‘The Perils of the Post Road: Diplomats, Diplomatic Couriers, and the Informational Fabric of Early Modern Europe’ in Information and Power in History, ed. by Ida Nijenhuis, Marijke van Faassen, Ronald Sluijter, Joris Gijsenbergh, and Wim de Jong (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 105–21 Whyman, Susan, ‘“Paper Visits”: The Post-Restoration Letter as Seen through the Verney Family Archive’, in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1699–1945, ed. by Rebecca Earle (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 15–36 Zijlstra, Suze, ‘To Build and Sustain Trust: Long-Distance Correspondence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Merchants’, Dutch Crossing, 36.2 (2012), 114–31

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Chapter 2. Public and Private in Seventeenth-Century Scholarly Correspondence*

In the early modern period it is no exaggeration to say that, across the whole of Europe, intellectual life was sustained by the vast international networks of scholarly correspondence. Thousands of scholars exchanged millions of letters, of which hundreds of thousands survive. It has long been an ideal to establish a coherent overview of the European Republic of Letters in action through its epistolary networks, especially from the mid-seventeenth century onwards; but the extraordinary complexity of this immense field must inevitably make any attempt incomplete.1 The ways in which these epistolary cultures actually worked in practice can be extremely varied; nevertheless, in all their variety, the great majority of these correspondences were underpinned by unspoken but shared as­ sumptions. * This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). 1 It has been hoped that digital resources could provide the means for a Gesamtanschauung of early modern European correspondence networks, and several have been set up with substantial funding. These programmes show the potential, but also, soberingly, how great the challenges are. See, notably, the resource, ‘Early Modern Letters Online’, of the Oxford research project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750’: https://culturesofknowledge.history.ox.ac.uk/, and the Dutch site, ‘Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic’, https://ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl; also ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ at the Stanford Humanities Center, https://republicofletters.stanford.edu. The European COST Action IS1310, ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500–1800’, has resulted in a networking programme framework described in: Hotson and Walling, eds, Reassembling the Republic of Letters. Richard Maber is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 49–81 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138239 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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The understanding of privacy, or the balance between personal com­ munication and the likelihood of wider circulation, is of central impor­ tance in the correspondences. The scholarly exchanges were of a distinct nature compared with other common types of correspondence where quite different assumptions and practices apply: diplomatic correspon­ dence, love letters, commercial correspondence, or exchanges within cir­ cles of political opposition or heterodox religious thought, all of which are normally intended to be private documents. This essay will focus on a number of groups and individuals who maintained active networks over a period of about seventy years, from the 1630s to the early eighteenth century. These include, among others, the elite circle of intellectuals asso­ ciated with the cabinet Dupuy in Paris; some French travellers, especially to the Levant; Italian scholars based in Florence and Pisa; Dutch scholars and travellers throughout the period; some scholars based primarily in Germany, and also John Locke (1632–1704) in England and the Polish Socinian exile Stanisław Lubieniecki (1623–1675). In all, about forty scholarly correspondents will be included, which it is hoped will provide a representative range of diverse practice throughout the period.2

I It was generally agreed in the early modern period that, for the most part, scholarly correspondences were not intended to be exclusively private communications, but were treated by both writer and recipient as being sent in the expectation of reaching a wider audience: the assumption being that a letter would be circulated among a group of learned friends, and possibly collected and published for even wider readership. Many of these letters only survive in published collections, and when we read them in this form, we are of course reading the approved ‘public’ version put out by the writer or his admirers, which can be extensively rewritten from the originals to the extent of almost being in different stylistic registers. The polymathic scholar and man of letters Gilles Ménage (1613–1692) published two collections of his Italian letters,3 but the originals survive in Florence of most of the letters from the early 1660s to the scholar and scientist Carlo Dati (1619–1676), the secretary of the Accademia della 2 A small number of the examples quoted in this paper have already been quoted, in a quite different context: Maber, ‘Les Réseaux de communication érudits et les pouvoirs de l’état en France’, pp. 17–29. In all quotations the letters i/j and u/v have been regularized, conventional contractions for which there is no modern equivalent have been expanded, and very occasionally accents added to avoid ambiguity, e.g. to past participles. 3 Mescolanze d’Egidio Menagio, Paris, Louis Bilaine, 1678, and the greatly expanded second edition: Mescolanze d’Egidio Menagio, Secunda edizione, corretta, ed ampliata, Rotterdam, R. Leers, 1692.

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Crusca, and Antonio Magliabechi (1633–1714), the formidably learned librarian of the Grand Duke of Tuscany;4 he has sometimes clearly re­ worked them, often giving a letter to a friend a more formal and literary tone, and for some reason putting incorrect dates on some of them.5 He even seems to have ‘improved’ letters that he had received from Italian scholars before publishing them.6 More famously, Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) seems to have seen him­ self as the modern Cicero, judicious and authoritative, and saved copies of his letters received and sent — more than 4,000 of them — for the admiration of subsequent generations. Unfortunately, by the time he died he had lost most of his authority; his letters were not published until the nineteenth century,7 since when they have been extensively quoted and referred to. Chapelain left ambiguous instructions about the possible pub­ lication of his correspondence, but despite his protestations of modesty he was clearly very proud of it and, even if not published, the letters were intended to be far from private documents. In his will he instructed that his library was to be preserved intact; and in a startlingly boastful codicil dated 15 April 1671 he listed the letters that he had received, not by date or subject matter, but by the social status of the writers: Il faudra mettre toutes les lettres que j’ay receues des princes et princesses, cardinaux, ducs et pairs, mareschaux de France, marquis, comtes et autres personnes de haute qualité qui m’en ont honoré; celles dont j’ay gardé copie pour me conduire avec mes correspondans, comme Mrs Balzac, Heinsius, et toute cette foule d’excellens hommes de toutes nations, à qui mon tesmoignage seul a eu le bonheur de procurer des bienfaits du Roy, seront aussi enfermées avec soin dans le plus long de mes coffres que j’ay destiné à cela, comme aussi celles qu’ils m’ont escrites, qui sont autant de monumens de la glorieuse

4 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MSS Magi. VIII. 362. These letters have been published, very inaccurately: Lettres de Ménage à Magliabecchi [sic] et à Carlo Dati, ed. by Pélissier. Unfortunately, the editor frequently confuses Magliabechi and Dati as recipients of individual letters. 5 This curious feature reappears in many early modern published collections of letters, and is a recurrent pattern in, e.g., Guez de Balzac’s published letters; Jean Chapelain’s letters often bear a different date from the copy that he kept of them himself; while in Ménage’s case he might simply have forgotten the exact date and put on an approximate guess, since, unlike many scholars, he seems not to have maintained well-ordered copies of his own letters. 6 Dati’s own copy survives of one letter to Ménage, of 15 July 1660: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MSS Baldovinetti 257, 31, no. 1. There are numerous variants from the version published in Ménage’s Mescolanze, 1678, pp. 197–200, although it is of course possible that Dati revised the letter himself before sending it. 7 Lettres de Jean Chapelain, de l’Académie Française, ed. by de Larroque; also Jean Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius (1649–1658), ed. by Bray, and Jean Chapelain, Lettere inedite a correspondenti italiani, ed. by Ciureanu.

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habitude que j’ay eue avec eux pendant ma vie et que j’ay par tant d’années fidellement et constamment entretenue, pour ne les jamais publier, non plus que les miennes, qu’en cas qu’elles fussent nécessaires non pas pour ma gloire, mais pour la défense de ma réputation.8 (There should be placed in it all the letters that I have received from princes and princesses, dukes, Marshals of France, marquesses, counts, and others of high rank who have honoured me with their correspondence; along with them, those letters of mine which I have kept in copy form to guide me in my relations with correspondents such as Messieurs Balzac, Heinsius, and all that host of excellent men of all nations who owe the rewards that they have received from the King entirely to my recommendation of them. The letters should be carefully preserved in the longest of my chests, which I have set aside for this purpose, together with those that they have written to me, each one a testimony to my glorious familiarity with them throughout my life, which I have faithfully and unfailingly maintained for so many years. Neither these letters nor my own should ever be published, unless it should be necessary to use them, not for my glory, but to defend my reputation.) However, many of Chapelain’s letters do also survive in the form that they were sent and received — for example, among many others, those to the outstanding classical scholar Johann-Georg Graevius, professor of history at Utrecht (1632–1703), in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.9 One can see from these how extensively the copies that Chapelain has kept can differ from the versions that were actually sent, and how he seems to have discarded ones that he felt were not important enough for posterity.10 Returning to letters in their original form, we find that they frequently contain turns of phrase which indicate the extent to which the assumption of public circulation could be taken for granted: for example ‘nous’, or ‘nos’ where one might have expected ‘je’ or a first-person singular. Thus in 1689 Ménage began a letter from Paris to Grævius in Utrecht by linking their correspondence explicitly with a group of mutual friends: ‘Monsieur, Je vous demande des nouvelles de votre santé, dont je suis en peine, y aïant tres longtans que nous n’avons reçu icy de vos lettres’ (Monsieur, please send me news of your health; I am concerned about it, because we have not received any letters from you for a very long time).11

8 Lettres de Jean Chapelain, ‘Avertissement’, i, pp. vii–viii. 9 Copenhagen, KB, MS Thott 1259 4o. 10 See in particular the detailed analysis of this question in Bray’s ‘Introduction’ to Soixante-dixsept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius, pp. 21–45. 11 Letter of 4 November 1689, Copenhagen, KB, MS Thott 1264, 4o; printed in Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, p. 113.

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If you knew that your correspondents were close friends, it almost did not matter which one you wrote to. When the patristic scholar Émery Bigot (1626–1689) was travelling in the Netherlands and Germany in the 1650s, he wrote wonderfully picturesque accounts of his adventures in letters addressed indifferently to Gilles Ménage and the astronomer Ismaël Boulliau (1605–1694), knowing that they would instantly be shared.12 But this can create problems for the modern scholar: if you were now editing the correspondence of either Ménage or Boulliau — both of which are crying out to be done13 — you would only get half of this fascinating three-way conversation. Bigot’s letters form a particularly interesting exam­ ple of the different registers of public and private that can coexist in a correspondence. He would certainly have anticipated that Ménage and Boulliau would share them with their group of close friends. However, he spent some time in Frankfurt observing the election of the new Emperor, and in view of his hilariously indiscreet and irreverent pen-portraits of some of the major participants — notably the stupendously drunken antics of the Elector of Saxony — it seems equally certain that he intended their circulation to be strictly confined to this small, intimate circle. The same was true in wider circles. The most influential of all the elite intellectual gatherings in Paris was the famous cabinet Dupuy, based on the de Thou library and presided over by the welcoming Gallican par­ lementaire brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy (1582–1651 and 1591–1656 respectively), from around 1617 until the death of Jacques Dupuy.14 In the Dupuy cabinet the brothers would read out letters that they had received from members of the group on their travels: when the brilliant young scholar Nicolaas Heinsius (1620–1681) was in Rome in 1647, Jacques Dupuy wrote that his letters ‘m’ont apporté un contentement merveilleux et à tous nos amis auxquels j’en ai fait part’ (have given immense plea­

12 Bigot’s letters to Ménage: Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1343, fols 4–23 and Rothschild A. XVII.79–98. Bigot’s letters to Boulliau: BnF, Ms français 13024, fols 3–44. A short selection from these letters was published by Omont, ‘Lettres d’Émery Bigot à Gilles Ménage et à Ismaël Bouillaud au cours de son voyage en Allemagne lors de l’élection de l’empereur Léopold Ier (1657–1658)’, pp. 227–55. 13 On Ménage’s correspondence, see Maber, ‘La correspondance de Gilles Ménage’, pp. 35– 46. On Boulliau’s correspondence: Hatch, The Collection Boulliau, which gives details of these forty-one volumes and 23,000 pages; and Hatch, ‘Between Erudition and Science’, pp. 57–72; this chapter also considers the networks of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Marin Mersenne, and Henry Oldenburg. The details of Boulliau’s long life and extensive travels are covered in Nellen, Ismaël Boulliau. 14 On the Dupuy brothers and their cabinet see the inexhaustible riches of the Fonds Dupuy in the BnF, Paris, and the numerous publications of their pre-eminent modern historian, Jérôme Delatour, notably, in this context: Les Frères Dupuy (1582–1656) ; Delatour, ‘Les frères Dupuy et leurs correspondances’, pp. 61–101; Delatour, ‘Le Cabinet des frères Dupuy’, pp. 157–200.

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sure to me, and to all our friends with whom I shared them).15 Other participants would do the same: they would bring along letters that they had received and read them out as well, giving a strong sense of group bonding. When — as very often — a letter ends with greetings to be passed on to a named list of friends, this is more than just a friendly gesture: it is saying that these are the people whom the writer assumes that the contents of the letter will be passed on to, and so they are being vicariously included in the correspondence as well. In his remarkable letters to Dupuy from the Levant, Constantinople, and Venice, Boulliau generally ends with greetings for a named list of perhaps half a dozen friends, ‘et tous les amis du cabinet’ (and all the friends in the cabinet) — meaning ‘read this out to everyone if you like, but do make sure that these special friends share in my letters’. Heinsius does exactly the same when writing to the Dupuys on his travels in Italy. Even more precisely, in a letter of 1650 to Jacques Dupuy from Sweden, he provided a numbered list, from 1 to 16, of the people to whom the letter is addressed — perhaps even as a corrective to rather vague assurances from Jacques Dupuy, such as his earlier ‘tous nos amis auxquels j’en ai fait part’. Heinsius is anxious to maintain his friendship with all the most scholarly members of the cabinet; in asking Jacques Dupuy to pass on his greetings to all of those whom he names, he also ensures that they all see his letter: Vale vir nobilissime, et ni molestum est, pro innata tibi comitate, fratres tuos caeterosque amicos meo nomine plurimum saluta. Holmiae Ao 1650. Nonis Augustis Julianis. I. Puteanis fratribus

IX. Carolo Annibali Fabroto

II. Archiepisco Tholosano

X. Valesiis fratribus

III. Marchioni Montoserio

XI. Jacobo Sirmondo

IV. Claudio Sarravio

XII. Gabrieli Naudaeo

V. Aegidio Menagio

XIII. Guidoni Patino

VI. Alexandro Petavio

XIV. Gulielmo Coletoso

VII. Johanni Capellano

XV. Rolando Maresio

VIII. Jo. Ludovico Balzacio

XVI. Joh. Baptistae Lantino.16

15 Letter of 4 January 1647, Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS BPL 1293 (1), printed in: Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius (1646–1656), ed. by Bots, p. 6. 16 Letter of 5 August 1650, Leiden, UB, MS Burm.F.8; printed in Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius, p. 67.

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(Adieu, most noble sir, and if it is not too much to ask, in the natural kindness of your heart, please give warm greetings from me to your brothers, and to the rest of my friends. Stockholm, 5 August 1650. I. The Dupuy brothers. II. The Archbishop of Toulouse. III. The marquis de Montausier. IV. Claude Sarrau. V. Gilles Ménage. VI. Alexandre Pétau. VII. Jean Chapelain. VIII. Jean-Louis de Balzac. IX. Charles-Annibal Fabrot. X. The de Valois brothers. XI. Jacques Sirmond. XII. Gabriel Naudé. XIII. Gui Patin. XIV. Guillaume Colletet. XV. Roland Desmarests. XVI. JeanBaptiste Lantin.) When one of the cabinet, Nicolas Du Loir, was based in Constantinople from 1639 to 1641, in the entourage of the French ambassador Jean de La Haye, he went further than Boulliau in making sure that his letters were shared among his learned friends. He described his experiences in a series of ten exceptionally interesting letters, each one addressed to a different friend in the group, in the certainty that each one would be circulated. The letters were collected and published in 1654 as the Voyage du sieur Du Loir.17 These letters show a subtle interplay between the public and the personal. Although, as intended, they were immediately shared around the wider group, each one is nevertheless addressed to a named individual, and clearly also received to some extent as a personal testimony of friendship: the Préface to the published volume begins: ‘Je donne ces Lettres au public que j’avois escrites familierement à quelques-uns de mes amis’ (I am offering to the public these letters, which I had written informally to some of my friends).18 As the sequence progressed, Ménage increasingly came to feel that he had been left out, on a personal level, by the fact that he had not received one; but he was more than satisfied when he received the tenth and last letter, which was not only the culmination of the whole series, but also by far the longest of them all. Du Loir begins his letter with the words: Monsieur, S’il est vray comme on me l’a mandé que vous vous estes un peu plaint de moy de ce que jusqu’à present je ne vous ay rien escrit du Levant, je croy que d’oresnavant vous aurez lieu de vous en satisfaire, & je me promets bien plutost des remercimens de vous que des reproches, aprez que vous aurez veu combien vous estes advantagé dans le partage que j’ay fait de mes Lettres à mes amis.19

17 Du Loir, Voyage du sieur Du Loir. The letters are addressed to MM. Hullon, Lantin, de Boüillon, Pierre Du Puy, Boulliau, Le Pailleur, Lengrené, Charpentier, Hardy, and Ménage. 18 Du Loir, Voyage du sieur Du Loir, sig. ã4r. 19 Du Loir, Voyage du sieur Du Loir, p. 283.

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(Monsieur, if what I am told is true, that you have complained a little about me because until now I have not written to you at all from the Levant, then I think that now you will have good reason to be satisfied; and I anticipate that you will send me thanks rather than reproaches when you have seen how much you have been favoured in the way that I have shared out my letters between my friends.) This is a revealing indication of the private sensitivities that could be involved even in such effectively public communications as these letters. A later traveller in the Levant, the orientalist and numismatist Antoine Galland (1646–1715), adopted different patterns of communication with his friends in Paris. He wrote private letters to individual friends, without any of the conventional formulae to indicate that they were intended for wider circulation; but he also sent longer letters, and Relations of his expe­ riences along with some of the personal letters, and these were intended to be shared. This was a familiar pattern: for many years, when writing private letters from Paris to his friends in the provinces, Ménage would also send weekly newsletters (usually drawn up by his secretary) to be read more widely, and it is clear from his correspondence that these were greatly appreciated. However, in Galland’s case the boundaries between public and private could be curiously flexible, and there are indications in the letters about the different ways in which they could remain private or get wider circulation. Thus he wrote four letters from Constantinople on the same day, 4 August 1673, to be carried together to Paris.20 Two were personal in tone (to the chevalier d’Ervieux, a former envoyé extraordinaire to Con­ stantinople, and to a ‘sieur Lévi’), and not apparently intended for sharing widely; although in the case of one at least, as we shall see, the situation is more complicated. Of the other two, one, addressed to ‘M. Baudequin’,21 makes specific reference to a Relation sent with the fourth letter, which was addressed to Nicolas Petitpied l’ainé (1627–1705): ‘J’en envoie une [Relation] présentement à Mr Petitpied dont la lecture qu’il ne vous refusera pas aura comme je croy le bonheur de vous plaire’ (I am sending one to M. Petitpied at the same time as this; I am sure that he will allow you to read it, and that you will enjoy it).22 As well as the Relation, though, this fourth letter, to Petitpied, also includes a curious instruction:

20 Abdel-Halim, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, pp. 65–76. All four letters were sent ‘De Thérapia’ (Tarabya, on the outskirts of Constantinople, a more salubrious location favoured by ambassadors). On Galland’s correspondence, see: Maber, ‘La Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, pp. 389–99. 21 ‘Aucune information ne nous est parvenue sur ce correspondant de Galland’, Abdel-Halim, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, p. 44, n. 1. 22 Abdel-Halim, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, p. 72.

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J’écris une lettre à la persone qui contribua il y a un an à faire sauver le petit Desmartin que je vous prie de luy rendre cachetée. Je vous l’envoie décachetée parce que je luy mande des choses que je suis bien aise que vous sçachiés.23 (I am writing a letter to the person who helped to save young Desmartin a year ago, and I would ask you to give it to him sealed. I am sending it to you unsealed, because I tell him things which I would like you to know.) It is not clear which of the other letters Galland is referring to, whether to d’Ervieux or to Lévi, or indeed if this is a different letter entirely. But what this shows is that even a sealed letter could not necessarily be regarded as private, because there was no guarantee as to when it had actually been sealed. Regular correspondents generally used a distinguishing seal, frequently armorial, but Galland seems to have used a less unique design on his seal, and wrote too infrequently for it to have been a factor in recognizing the seal on his letters. If a letter was not sealed when it was sent to be passed on to its addressee, the assumption seems to have been that it was also intended for the intermediary to read, whether or not the actual addressee realized this. When Nicolaas Heinsius sent a number of letters from Stockholm in 1652 for Jacques Dupuy to pass on, only one was not sealed, and Dupuy took this as a sign that it was not private: Toutes vos lettres ont esté rendues seurement et comme celle que vous avez escrite à Monsieur de Balzac estoit ouverte je croi que vous n’aurez pas esté marri que j’en aye pris la lecture.24 (All your letters have been delivered safely, and since the one that you wrote to Monsieur de Balzac was unsealed, I believe that you would not mind my having read it.) Similarly, when Galland was back in Paris in 1677, the archaeologist and doctor Jacob Spon (1647–1685) wrote to him from Lyon enclosing a letter to be forwarded to the mathematician Adrien Auzout (1621–1691); and Galland seems to have regarded it as quite natural to read it first, and even to join in the conversation, starting his reply with the words: ‘Monsieur, J’ai eu soin de rendre à Mr Auzout la lettre que vous lui adressiés chez Mr Justel où l’ayant lûe, je remarquai que vous lui parliez de ΕΚΙΡΟΙΝ’ (Monsieur, I have made sure to give M. Auzout the letter that you wrote to

23 Abdel-Halim, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, p. 71. 24 Letter of 11 October 1652, Leiden, UB, MS Burm.F.8; printed in Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius, p. 110.

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him at M. Justel’s address, and having read it, I noticed that you discussed EKIPOIN with him’).25 Such ambiguity between the public and the private can extend to the actual writing of a letter. We frequently find mention of the fact that the letter is being written in the presence of, or even in the study of, one or more friends, who take the opportunity to pass on their own messages. Thus on one occasion when Antonio Magliabechi was writing from Flo­ rence to the German archaeologist and classical scholar Marquard Gudius (1635–1689), a friend, the scientist, poet and philologist Francesco Redi (1626–1697), was with him, and sent his own greetings in the course of the letter. As Magliabechi wrote: ‘Il Signor Dottor Redi qui presente mi impone di riverirla in suo nome, ed insieme pregarla a scusarlo, mentre ella fu qua, non hebbe campo di riverirla, e servirla come se deve al suo merito’ (Dr Redi is here with me, and asks me to pay you his respects, and also he begs you to excuse him for not having had the opportunity while you were here to do so, and to be of service to you as your merit deserves).26 Similarly, when the scholarly printer Henrik Wetstein (1649–1726) was corresponding from Amsterdam with Ménage in the 1680s, he several times comments that their mutual friend, the poet Petrus Francius (1645–1704), is in the room with him, and passes on messages from Francius about quite different topics: ‘Monsieur Francius Vous salue, & promet de Vous envoyer une autre de ses elegies’ (Monsieur Francius sends you his greetings, and promises to send you another of his elegies).27 It is even not at all uncommon to find a bystander joining in with the writing, and adding their own notes or extra messages on to someone else’s letter — as the physician and Hellenist Raymond Formentin (died 1703) did to a letter from the biblical scholar Nicolas Toinard (1628–1706) to John Locke in May 1684.28 Such details are a real challenge to anyone working on, or editing, the correspondence of the annotator. Most elusively of all, we find that whole epistolary conversations can be carried on vicariously, embedded in letters addressed to someone else. Johann-Friedrich Gronovius (1611–1671) and Gilles Ménage were old friends, dating back to the 1640s; but by the 1660s they seem not to have

25 Galland to Jacob Spon, 9 March 1677: Abdel-Halim, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, p. 115. 26 Magliabechi to Gudius, n.d., in Marquardi Gudii et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolæ, p. 65 of Gudius letters. 27 Wetstein’s letter of 16 December 1684: Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, p. 80; see also, e.g., pp. 68, 70. 28 Letter from Nicolas Toinard to John Locke, 14/24 May 1684. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Locke c. 21, fol. 138; The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. by de Beer, ii, letter 778. This letter is, so far as I know, the only surviving direct message from Formentin to Locke, although Locke always considered Formentin a good friend and refers to him by jokey nicknames.

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been in direct correspondence. This does not mean, though, that they were out of touch; they seem to have piggy-backed on to the letters of mutual friends to write to one another. So we find, in a surviving letter of 7 February 1665 from Bigot to Ménage, that Bigot transcribes a substantial part of a letter from Gronovius intended for Ménage (asking about a manuscript of Livy that Ménage had owned), and he asks for a message to send back to Gronovius in his turn. Interestingly, Bigot uses the phrase ‘avoir communication d’un MSS’ from Ménage, even though it was to be sent through a third party; and in his quoted letter Gronovius refers to Ménage as ‘Menagius noster’, implying warm friendship: Mr Gronovius m’ecrit que son Tite Live tire à la fin et qu’il seroit bien aise auparavant de le publier d’avoir communication d’un MSS que vous aves eu de Mr Mainard. Mandés moi quelle response vous desirés que je luy fasse et à qui vous avés donné ce MSS. Parceque je ne pense pas que vous l’ayés encore. Voila les mots de sa lettre: [there follow six lines of direct quotation of Gronovius’s Latin letter].29 (M. Gronovius writes to me that he has nearly finished his edition of Livy, and that, before publishing it, he would very much like to have information about a manuscript that you obtained from M. Mainard. Let me know how you would like me to reply to him, and to whom you gave that manuscript, because I don’t think that you still have it. This is what he wrote in his letter:) In just the same way, in January 1666 Ménage wrote a letter to Francesco Redi in Pisa, asking for part of it to be copied and passed on to Carlo Dati in Florence; and Dati similarly sent his long reply to Redi, for it to be copied and included within Redi’s next letter to Ménage: twenty-four lines from Dati are quoted directly in Redi’s letter to Ménage of 29 January 1666, which opens: Mandai a Firenze al S. Dati il capitolo della lettera di V. S. Illustrissima a lui appartenente; insieme con gli Epigrammi e Greci e Latini. Ecco quì ciò che mi risponde: Gratissimi al maggior segno mi sono stati e periodi a me pertinenti della lettera del nostro eruditissimo e cortesissimo Signor Menagio. …30 (I sent to Signor Dati in Florence the section of your letter addressed to him, together with the Greek and Latin epigrams. Now this is what he has replied to me: My most heartfelt thanks, as 29 Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1343, fol. 57r. 30 Ménage’s letter seems not to have survived, and rather surprisingly was not collected into Ménage’s Mescolanze, presumably because he had not kept a copy. Redi’s letter (‘Lettera del Signor Redi al Signor Menagio’) is printed in the Mescolanze, 1678, pp. 301–02; the letter from Dati in fact occupies more than two-thirds of it.

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always, for the letter from our most learned and most courteous friend Signor Ménage …) The curious thing here is that Dati and Ménage were also in correspon­ dence, and Dati sometimes passed on to Redi what he had read in Ménage’s letters: on 29 April 1660, Redi wrote: ‘Ieri il S. Carlo Dati mi fece l’onore di farmi vedere la Lettera di V. S. Ill. & avemmo insieme un lungo discorso appartenente alle Origini della Lingua Toscana, che V. S. Illustrissima presto darà in luce’ (Yesterday Signor Carlo Dati did me the honour of showing me your letter, and we had a long conversation together about the Origins of the Tuscan Language, which you will soon be publishing). 31 They are here making most efficient use of the post, in reducing the number of separate letters passing between Paris and Tuscany. However, when the correspondence between Ménage and Dati was edited (very inaccurately, unfortunately), the editor was unaware of this extra dimension to their relationship, and so gives an incomplete picture of the true extent of the contacts between the two scholars in this crucial period when both were working intensively on the evolution of the Italian language.32 Again, Ménage acted as intermediary between Wetstein and Toinard in December 1683, transcribing a complete letter from Wetstein that he wanted passed on to Toinard, and sending it to his French friend with a short note of his own: ‘Wetstein, Libraire d’Amstredam, qui rimprime mon Diogéne Laërce, vient de m’écrire au sujet de vostre Harmonie des quatre Evangélistes, les paroles suivantes: …’ (Wetstein, the Amsterdam publisher, who is reprinting my Diogenes Laertius, has just written to me about your Harmony of the Four Gospels, in the following terms:). The page-long transcription of Wetstein’s message constitutes almost the whole of the rest of the letter.33 Ménage did exactly the same in 1684 between Johann-Georg Graevius (1632–1703) and the historian Adrien de Valois (1607–1692), writing to Graevius: ‘J’ay envoyé à Mr de Valois l’endroit de la lettre que vous m’avez écrite qui le regarde’ (I sent to M. de Valois the part of your letter to me which concerns him).34 Most striking of all are roundabout, non-direct communications, where messages circulate in a complicated series of exchanges before reaching their destination. Thus in 1679 the German scholar FriedrichBenedikt Carpzov (Carpzovius, 1649–1699) decided to produce a new edition of Ménage’s study of civil law, Juris civilis amoenitates, to meet demand for it in Germany. He wrote indirectly from Leipzig to ask Ménage 31 Mescolanze, p. 204. This seems to be a copy of a letter sent earlier and lost in transit; Redi sent the copy with a second letter (p. 205) which bears the same date. 32 See note 4 above. 33 Letter of 11 December 1683: Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, p. 66. 34 Letter of 9 November 1684, Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, p. 75.

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to send a revised copy for him to prepare the new edition. There was no direct line of communication between Paris and Leipzig, so Ménage sent his annotated copy to Graevius in Utrecht, who forwarded it to Leipzig. Carpzovius wrote from Leipzig to Nicolaas Heinsius in Amsterdam to say it had arrived safely; Heinsius then informed Bigot in Rouen, who passed the news on to Ménage in Paris; and Ménage finally completed the circle by writing again to Graevius to thank him. The whole process took from May to October, which suggests a considerable degree of efficiency despite the convoluted route that the messages took.35 To stay with Ménage, we find a comparable pattern of indirect commu­ nication a few years later, in 1690, in connection with another of the old scholar’s publications. Ménage asked Graevius, again, to help him find a publisher for a new edition of his study of Terence’s Heautontimorumenos. Graevius found the local printer Rudolph van Zyll in Utrecht, who got on with it. But Ménage found out about its progress from someone quite different. The French Huguenot minister Michel Janiçon, who lived in Utrecht, wrote to his brother François (1634–1705), who had feigned conversion to Catholicism and remained in Paris to serve as a link between his Catholic and exiled Protestant scholarly friends. François Janiçon told Ménage, who himself wrote to Graevius in Utrecht, with a message to pass on to van Zyll. So in this case there are only two places, but no fewer than five people are involved in transmitting messages between author and printer;36 and in none of these complicated exchanges can any of the information possibly have remained remotely private.

II Such varied forms of scholarly communication are a vitally important aspect of the working of early modern intellectual life, with a shared acknowledgement that it was at least to some extent a public activity. Some, at the time and since, have held that this should be the model for all such exchanges in the Republic of Letters.37 Inevitably, though, the reality is more complex, and it is far from an invariable pattern that letters between scholarly friends anticipated a more public circulation. A considerable variety of different strategies of privacy are also found in these correspondences, and they are employed for an equally wide range of different reasons. A high proportion of the letters do not consist

35 Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters,, pp. 41–45. 36 Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, pp. 118–19. 37 Chapelain in particular, very influentially for subsequent commentators, tended to hold up his own practice as the ideal: see Bray, ‘Introduction’, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius, pp. 46–72.

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solely of the exchange of scholarly information: a well-crafted letter might be expected also to include personal details, news of mutual friends and their activities, perhaps commentary on political and sometimes military developments, gossip and jokes about mutual acquaintances or — more dangerously — powerful public figures, and so on, to make the letter as interesting, informative, and entertaining as possible. But the nature of a letter, as potentially a semi-public document, could cause serious concerns. Correspondents of the Dupuy brothers often plead for their letters not to circulate beyond the close group of friends: ‘mais cela est pour le Cabinet et à l’oreille’ (read this out to the cabinet, but don’t show them the whole letter) (Nicolas Camus de Pontcarré,?–1660); or even ‘keep this strictly private’: ‘que cela reste entre nous’, ‘que cette lettre ne soit leuë que de vous’ (this letter is for your eyes only) (the classical scholar and administrator Nicolas Rigault, 1577–1654).38 A typical correspondent, the soldier Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (1585–1668), writing to Pierre Dupuy on his various travels, takes it for granted that his letters will be read out to the cabinet, and generally ends with greetings to the company ‘Salut à tous nos amis’ (Greetings to all our friends), ‘je salue la sage Académie’ (my greetings to the wise Académie), ‘je suis tres humble serviteur de toute la congregation’ (please pay my respects to the whole gathering).39 But not all his letters are intended to be public like this, and when a letter is private he specifically emphasizes the fact. Thus he starts a letter of 7 February 1627 with the words: ‘À vous et à moy celle cy’ (This letter is just for you and me), and does not send greetings to ‘les amis’ at the end.40 There could be dangers in treating a letter as a public rather than a private document, and even the cabinet Dupuy had members who were suspected of leaking confidential information — several foreign ambassadors were regular attenders, professionally charming and erudite but ever alert for what they might hear; and it was also suspected that Richelieu could have planted informers among the group. La Hoguette spells this out in a letter to Pierre Dupuy from Blaye of 23 November 1633, when he specifically instructs Dupuy not to read out part of it: Lisés bas presentement si vous voulés que je vous die des nouvelles de ces quartiers, car encor que je sois tousjours plus veritable que partial,

38 These quotations are from Delatour, ‘Les frères Dupuy et leurs correspondances’, pp. 86–87. 39 Written from Brouage, 13 déc. 1626, [?] déc 1626, from Vassy, 9 mars 1630: Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662), ed. by Ferretti, i, pp. 154, 155, 256. 40 Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662), ed. by Ferretti, i, p. 165.

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je pourois estre estimé tel de quelques uns de ceux qui hantent chés vous par l’interest de leurs maistres.41 (Drop your voice now if you want me to tell you the news from these parts, because although I am always truthful rather than biased, I might be thought to be so by some of those who frequent your gatherings in the interest of their masters.) An additional disincentive to self-revelation in letters was the constant danger of their interception, or of their being found in a search and used in evidence. One very frequently finds guarded phrases and concealed meanings; a typical phrase in an otherwise anodyne learned letter might be: J’ai fait ce que vous savez pour l’affaire de notre ami (I have done as we agreed for the affair of our friend), and it is now usually impossible to clarify such allusiveness. In fact, it was highly likely that the ‘ami’ might not actually exist in reality, but was a convenient fiction to add an extra layer of secrecy. Early in the eighteenth century Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1715) even spelled this out in a letter to the distinguished general Mathias Johann von dem Schulenburg (1661–1747), ending with the instruction to destroy his letter, which as so often was disregarded: P.S. Je n’aurois point écrit ce que j’ay mis à la fin de ma lettre, si je ne jugeois, Monsieur, que l’occasion de vous écrire est seure. Car il y a des mauvais interprètes […] Cependant le plus seur sera quand vous me voudrés en marquer vostre sentiment, ou l’estat de la chose; de la faire en paroles generalissimes et dont personne puisse rien tirer. En disant par example Quant à l’affaire de nostre ami, je le trouve faisable ou non, etc. en parlant comme d’un tiers […] Vous m’entendés, Monsieur, à demy mot, et je vous supplie de brûler ce billet.42 (P.S. I would not have written what I put at the end of my letter if I did not believe, Monsieur, that I can write to you in confidence. For there are people who will put a bad interpretation on things […] However, the safest course of action, when you want to give me your opinion, or describe the way the matter stands, would be to do so in extremely general terms, which no-one could get any meaning from. For example, you could say As for the affair of our friend, I believe that it can be achieved, or not, etc., speaking as though of a third person […] You understand me, Monsieur, without my needing to spell it out, and I beg you to burn this note.)

41 Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662), ed. by Ferretti, i, p. 337. 42 Letter of 16 August 1705, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS Savigny 38, fol. 110, 29–29v. Quoted from Ultee, ‘The Republic of Letters’, p. 99 and n. 20.

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One also finds more extreme pleas for secrecy, even among the most famously communicative scholars. In 1692, Antonio Magliabechi (1633–1714) ended a letter to Leibniz with the rather dramatic plea: Perle viscere di Gjesu Cristo, e per tutte le Sante leggi dell’ amicizzia, prego V.S. lllma. a stracciar questa carta, subito che l’avra letta, scrivendolela io in estrema segretezza, e confidenza, ed in sigillo di Confession naturale, perche mai in tempo alcuno possa esser veduta da anima vivente.43 (By the bowels of Jesus Christ, and by all the holy laws of friendship, I pray your illustrious lordship to tear up this letter immediately on reading it, for I write in extreme secrecy and confidence, under the seal of natural confession, that it may not be seen at any time by any living soul.) Needless to say, Leibniz took no notice, and preserved the letter among the other 15,000 or so items in his correspondence. The desire for privacy was not only motivated by subject matter that was politically problematic; it could be a simple matter of tact. So when Boulliau wrote to the Dupuy brothers from Venice, one of his typically entertaining and informative letters, clearly intended to be read out to the company, includes a witty joke at the expense of a couple of mutual friends, Ménage and Balzac; and Boulliau has thoughtfully marked this little passage with the words ‘inter nos’.44 Even in the contemporary printed collections of a scholar’s correspon­ dence, one can find letters with passages of the original omitted and replaced by asterisks as too intimate for wider circulation, a formal ac­ knowledgement that these are not entirely public documents. For exam­ ple, the deeply learned Protestant lawyer Claude Sarrau (1600–1651) was for many years the principal correspondent in Paris of Claude Saumaise (1588–1653), a fellow-Protestant, who was widely revered for his immense erudition, and had been attracted to Leiden by the offer of a prestigious chair. Their exchanges are full of valuable material; they were published posthumously, first by Sarrau’s son Isaac (1634–1713) and later, expanded, by Graevius’s protégé Pieter Burmann (1668–1741), with Gudius’s correspondence.45 Sarrau was never afraid to write blunt truths

43 Antonio Magliabechi to Leibniz, Florence, 5 July 1692, in Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. by Scheel and others, p. 322, with similar pleas numerous times thereafter. Quoted from Ultee, ‘The Republic of Letters’, p. 99 and n. 19. 44 Letter of 2 June 1646, Paris, BnF, Fonds Dupuy 18, fol. 93r. 45 Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis epistolae. Opus posthumum ad Serenissimam Christinam Suediae Reginam, Orange, [sans nom d’imprimeur], 1654; Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis Epistolæ ex Bibliotheca Gudiana auctiores; printed with separate pagination in Marquardi Gudii et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolæ, 1697 (see note 26 above).

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to his eminent friend, which gives his letters a strongly personal flavour. A particularly outspoken moment occurs in a difficult letter to Saumaise, when Sarrau defends himself indignantly against what he regards as false accusations of bad faith from his notoriously quarrelsome correspondent. The letter begins: ‘Monsieur, J’ai souffert en lisant vôtre derniere & prend cette plume avec peine pour y repondre’ (Monsieur, I was deeply hurt to read your last letter, and it is painful for me to take up this pen to reply). Sarrau writes forcefully to correct a series of misunderstandings in this important letter. At one point, in the context of his relations with the great jurist, philosopher, and diplomat Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), he exclaims: ‘Si je n’écrivois pas à Monsieur de Saumaise, je ne me retiendrois pas en ce lieu, & je m’écrierois contre cet outrage & cette horrible calomnie’ (If I were not writing to Monsieur de Saumaise, I would not be able to restrain myself on this matter, and I would protest forcefully against this outrage and this horrible slander).46 Shortly after, there is a break in the printed text and the insertion of four asterisks; and at the foot of the page, a note reads: ‘*Desunt octo circitur lineæ’ (*About eight lines are missing).47 One can only speculate as to what might have been in this passage that was considered too private for general publication even in the context of such a remarkably personal letter. Despite the frequent pattern of clear demarcation between the public and the private by the writers, though, there often seems to have been considerable ambiguity in the ways in which the letters were treated when they were received. For example, in a series of letters in late 1653 and early 1654, Nicolaas Heinsius had given confidential details of the outrageous behaviour of the physician and natural scientist Pierre Michon Bourdelot (1610–1685) while he was at the court of Stockholm. Bourdelot was now back in Paris, and an irregular attender at the cabinet; on 5 February 1654 Jacques Dupuy assured Heinsius: ‘Pour ce qui est de Monsr. Bourdelot ce que vous m’en escrivez demeurera secret entre nous’ (As for Monsieur Bourdelot, what you write to me about him will remain confidential between the two of us).48 And yet on 12 July 1654, Chapelain wrote extremely critically about Bourdelot to Heinsius, and commented: M. Du Puy a fait voir vos despesches à plusieurs de ses Contubernaux et quand il s’y rencontre on luy rompt souvent en visiere sur sa conduitte en vostre Cour et sur les sujets de la haine universelle qu’il s’y est attirée. Mais vous connoissés son front d’airain, et que les opprobres n’incommodent point sa forfanterie.

46 Saumaise’s attack here seems to have been provoked by his deep hostility, as a rigorous Calvinist, to Grotius’s liberal and tolerant Arminian theology. 47 Epistolæ ex Bibliotheca Gudiana auctiores, pp. 265, 268. 48 Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius, p. 140.

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(M. Du Puy has shown your messages to several fellow-members of his gathering, and when M. Bourdelot appears there he is often confronted to his face about the way he behaved at your Court, and the reasons for the universal hatred that he earned himself. But you know what a brass neck he has, and how no condemnation has any effect on his effrontery).49 Chapelain is referring here to Pierre rather than Jacques Dupuy; but even so, the comment casts an ambiguous light on promises of complete secrecy even from such an admired honnête homme as Jacques Dupuy. A particularly complex and intimate moment in these correspondences occurs when one writer suffers a close bereavement. All the friends of the bereaved would naturally be expected to write letters of condolence, and there were models with a very long-established history; precisely because of this, though, one is inclined to feel that the less a letter conforms to a familiar pattern, the more effective it is likely to be. The more worldly letters of consolation included in a collection such as the Nouvelles Lettres familieres of René Milleran (1644–17..) have been published,50 and, seemingly, even written, to be admired by readers who are not sharing in genuine grief. They are full of imperatives: the writer claims to feel the sorrow of the bereaved, while offering wise advice from a position of detached superiority. Thus, to a mother whose daughter has died: Croyez moi, Madame, faites une offrande du sujet de vôtre douleur, je vous assure qu’il changera de naturel, & qu’il deviendra la matiere de vôtre merite. Mettez sur l’Autel la chose que vous regrettez, & vous en augmentera le prix par un usage si saint.51 (Believe me, Madame, make of the object of your grief an offering to God, I assure you that it will be transformed, and that it will become the source of your merit. Place upon the altar the source of your sorrow, and you will increase its preciousness by so devout an action.) Even less consoling is a letter, held up as a model, to a man mourning the death of a friend:

49 Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius, pp. 253–54. 50 The full title is: Nouvelles Lettres familieres, et autres sur toutes sortes de sujets, avec leurs réponses, choisies de Messieurs de Bussi Rabutin, de Furetiere, de Boursault, de l’Académie Françoise & des plus celebres Auteurs du tems. Par René Milleran. Et des Lettres curieuses de litterature & de morale de l’Abbé de Bellegarde. Quoted from the 1709 edition, Brussels, Jean Leonard; the work was first published in 1689. 51 ‘Lettre à une Dame de qualité sur la mort de sa fille’, p. 107.

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Monsieur, Je n’entreprens pas de vous guerir, je me contente de vous dire que je souffre avec vous, & que vos douleurs me sont aussi sensibles que les miennes. […] Il faut néanmoins, Monsieur, que vous écoutiez la raison, & que vous songiez que la mort est une suite nécessaire de la naissance. J’avouë que vôtre ami a cessé de vivre plutôt que vous ne pensiez. En étes vous surpris, le monde ne voit-il pas tous les jours des malheurs semblables.52 (Monsieur, I am not going to try to heal you, I would simply say that I share your grief, and that I feel your sorrows as deeply as my own. […] Nevertheless, Monsieur, you should listen to reason, and reflect that death is the inevitable consequence of being born. It is true that your friend ceased to live sooner than you expected. But are you surprised by this, do we not see similar misfortunes every day?) A more sensitive friend might feel that this is not an appropriate moment for religious exhortation or Stoic platitudes. While it is rare to find such posturing in the scholars’ responses to a death, they do consciously adopt a variety of different registers, public and private. They might well contribute well-turned commonplaces to a Tumulus collection of verse, and an enco­ miastic Éloge in prose, both clearly intended as public commemoration. But they also write private messages to a bereaved friend, letters not of consolation, but of sympathy. Unlike the more worldly ‘model’ letters printed by Milleran, these tend not to be included in contemporary collec­ tions of scholarly correspondence. A typically personal message was written by Ménage, less than six months before the old scholar’s own death, to Johann-Georg Graevius in Utrecht. Graevius had eighteen children, but only one son and five daughters were still alive in 1691. His son, Theodor Georg, was a brilliant young scholar of exceptional promise; on 10 September 1691 Ménage had sent congratulations on the young man’s appointment as lector in history and eloquence at the University of Utrecht. But early in 1692 Theodor Georg had died. Ménage’s letter to his friend, of 8 February 1692, does not attempt any facile consolation, but respectfully understands the father’s grief: Etant votre serviteur au point que je le suis; vous honorant, vous estimant, & vous admirant comme je fais; & vous aïant autant d’obligations que je vous ay; vous ne doutez pas, Monsieur, que je n’aye pris toute la part que je dois dans la perte que vous avez faite de Monsieur votre fîs; & ce n’est, Monsieur, que pour satisfaire à la coutume que je prens aujourdhuy la liberté de vous écrire pour vous

52 ‘Lettre familiére de consolation’, pp. 118–19.

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en assurer. Je vous prie de croire, Monsieur, que je m’interesseray de mesme dans toutes les choses qui vous arriveront. Je prie Dieu qu’il vous console.53 (Being your devoted friend as I am; honouring you, respecting you, and admiring you as profoundly as I do; and having so many obligations towards you; you cannot doubt, Monsieur, that I have felt with you, as I must, at the loss you have suffered in the death of your son; and, Monsieur, it is only to follow the convention that I take the liberty today of writing to assure you of this. Believe me, Monsieur, that as in this, I shall be with you in everything that you experience in your life. I pray that God will grant you consolation.) Had Ménage lived, he would certainly have contributed to the more formal and public expressions of regret at the young man’s death.54 A revealing illustration of the different levels of response, public and private, that might be expected from one scholar in responding to a friend’s grief, and the value that was placed on them, is found forty years earlier in the exchanges between Nicolaas Heinsius and Jacques Dupuy after the death of Pierre Dupuy, the older of the two brothers. Pierre Dupuy died on 14 December 1651, when Heinsius was travelling to Italy. Jacques wrote to him in Rome on 23 February 1652 to break the news; he described his own devastation, and asked Heinsius to write a public tribute, inciden­ tally revealing how much such public testimony meant to the bereaved : ‘J’espere qu’en cette occasion vous tesmoignerez au public et à l’amitié qui a esté entre nous par quelque ouvrage public la part que vous prenez en cette affliction. Vous ne scauriez pas m’obliger en une occasion qui me soit plus sensible’ (I hope that you will mark this by writing a public testimony to our friendship, to show how you feel with us in our grief. If you could do this for me it would mean more than anything you could do at any other time). 53 Copenhagen, KB, MS Thott 1264, 4o; printed in Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, p. 150. Ménage’s letter of 10 September 1691 is printed on p. 139. 54 When he died, Theodor Georg was preparing an edition of Callimachus, which was a typical first publication of a young scholar. His father asked all his eminent friends to help to make it the finest edition ever known; and so it proved, with major contributions from friends including Ezechiel Spanheim and, above all, an extraordinary contribution of 124 pages from Richard Bentley which transformed Callimachus scholarship. The edition was finally published, under Theodor Georg’s name, in 1697: Callimachi Hymni, epigrammata, et fragmenta ex recensione Theodori J. G. F. Graevii cum ejusdem animadversionibus. Accedunt N. Frischlini, H. Stephani, B. Vulcanii, P. Voetii, A. T. F. Daceriæ, R. Bentleii, Commentarius, et Annotationes viri ilustrissimi, Ezechielis Spanhemii. Nec non Praeter Fragmenta, quae ante Vulcanius & Daceria publicarant, nova, quae Spanhemius & Bentleius collegerunt, & digesserunt. Hujus cura & studio quaedam quoque inedita Epigrammata Callimachi nunc primum in lucem prodeunt, Utrecht, F. Halma & G. vande Water, 1697. See Maber, Publishing in the Republic of Letters, pp. 12 and 30, n. 22.

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Heinsius wrote back quickly, on 7 March, with a letter that clearly com­ bined private sympathy with ‘Éloges’, perhaps more suitable for sharing. Interestingly, Heinsus’s letters to Jacques Dupuy at just this period seem not to have been preserved, whereas earlier ones (up to May 1651) and later ones (from September 1652) do survive. However, their contents are clear from Dupuy’s replies. So now, Dupuy replied on 5 April: Vous m’avez sensiblement obligé par vostre derniere des tesmoignages que vous me donnez de la part que vous avez pris en mon affliction, et des Eloges que vous rendez à la Memoire de feu mon frere dont je conserverai le souvenir toute ma vie. Mais ne croyez pas s’il vous plaist en estre quitte pour cela; Je vous ai desja fait une priere, et vous aurez agreable que je vous la reitere ici, qui est que vous laissiez quelque marque à la posterité de l’estime que vous faisiez du pauvre deffunt, et de la part qu’il avoit en vostre amitié. (I am deeply grateful for your last letter, where you show how you share with me in my grief, and your praise in memory of my late brother, which I shall remember all my life. But, Monsieur, please do not think that you have done all that you need; I have already made a request of you, and if I may I shall repeat it now: that is, that you might leave some memorial for posterity of your admiration for my poor brother, and how important his friendship was to you.) Repeatedly, in subsequent letters, Dupuy thanked Heinsius for his re­ newed private expressions of sympathy, and pressed him for the public tribute that clearly meant so much: on 12 April (replying to a letter of 18 March), and again on 31 May, replying to a letter of 29 April: Vous m’obligez trop en me tesmoignant les sentiments d’estime et d’affection que vous avez pour la memoire de feu mon frere; et je m’estimerai bien glorieux quand il paroistra quelque chose au public de vostre part pour un si digne subjet. (You are too kind in writing to me of your feelings of admiration and affection towards the memory of my late brother; and I shall be proud indeed when you publish something that you have written on so worthy a subject). Then, on 25 July, Heinsius did send his ‘Élégie’, and on 16 August Dupuy replied with deeply-felt expressions of gratitude and admiration.55

55 Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius, pp. 84, 87, 90, 93, 101. Heinsius’s elegy was printed with all the other tributes to Pierre Dupuy in Nicolas Rigault, Viri eximi Petri Puteani, Regi Christianissimo a Consiliis et Bibliothecis Vita, Paris, ex officina Cramosiana, 1652, and included in Heinsius’s Poemata, Leiden ex officina Elseviriorum, 1653, pp. 180–83 (notes by Bots, Correspondance, pp. 85–86, n. 3, 4).

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While the responses to bereavement can be seen as a category apart, in the complex mixture of private and public emotions involved in all the forms that they take, they are nevertheless representative in the awareness of the correspondents of the nuances at play in all their forms of communi­ cation.

III Although, as has been mentioned, it was generally expected that leading scholars would maintain abundant, regular, and substantial learned corre­ spondence with their colleagues this was not, in reality, invariable practice, and some highly distinguished scholars followed quite different patterns in their correspondence. While many enjoyed maintaining as wide an international range as possible, others resented the time that it occupied as a distraction from their major projects; they might restrict themselves to writing for strictly practical purposes, and beyond that to a circle of friends with whom they felt at ease. As Émery Bigot wrote to Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1720) in 1668, ‘Je veux avoir pratiqué les hommes auparavant de lier aucune correspondance de lettres avec eux, et en faire le moins que je pourrai doresnavant. Il y a trop de temps à perdre’ (I want to know people well before undertaking any epistolary correspondence with them, and to do as little as I can from now on. It wastes too much time).56 Antoine Galland similarly regarded letters as strictly utilitarian, to be exchanged between friends with common interests. He wrote relatively few compared with many other scholars, and to a very restricted number of correspon­ dents; but in compensation they often took the form of extremely long and valuable scholarly disquisitions, especially on numismatics, on which he was outstandingly authoritative. He detested writing letters unless the correspondents had genuinely worthwhile information to pass on, and could be brutal in ending even long-running exchanges with old friends if he felt that they had ceased to be of any practical value.57 Ménage’s practice was different again; indeed, he rarely conformed to any expected patterns of behaviour. He made only sporadic efforts to write the kind of long, more or less public letters that many scholars exchanged, and that Chapelain held up as the only acceptable practice. Many of his friends teased him for this; while Chapelain’s persistent and almost obsessive belittling of Ménage in his own letters has been taken too

56 Letter of 18 September 1668, Florence, Biblioteca Lauretiana-Medicei, MSS Ashburnham, cass. I, letter 52; see also Doucette, Émery Bigot: Seventeenth-Century French Humanist, p. 79. 57 Maber, ‘La Correspondance d’Antoine Galland’, pp. 392–93.

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literally, and led to a belief that Ménage did indeed write very few letters.58 In fact Ménage maintained an extensive international correspondence, but like Galland he preferred to write to people with whom he felt at ease, and for practical purposes. On the other hand he wrote abundantly to a small group of close friends when they were away from Paris, including the greatly admired scholarly lawyer Louis Nublé, Émery Bigot, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and, on a more worldly note, Madame de La Fayette. To these he would write at least once a week, and often even more frequently, dashing off letters full of corrections and deletions, and hardly ever keeping copies. These correspondences occupy a fascinating borderland between the pub­ lic and the private. An exceptionally interesting case-study of the interplay between public and private in scholarly correspondences is provided by the long-running and unusually complete exchanges between Ménage and Huet, two of the most prominent scholars of the century.59 They first met in the early 1650s, when Ménage was around forty and Huet in his early twenties. Huet wrote in his Mémoires that, on a visit to Paris from his native Caen, j’en profitai pour m’introduire chez Ménage, avec qui je contractai dès lors une amitié que nous avons fortifiée de part et d’autre par toutes sortes de tendresses et de bons offices, et qui a duré jusqu’à sa mort. Je confesse que notre liaison m’a été extrêmement utile, extrêmement agréable, tant à cause de la littérature variée que de la politesse et de l’urbanité singulières de ce personnage.60 (I took the opportunity of introducing myself to Ménage, with whom, from that moment, I contracted a friendship that we strengthened on both sides by all manner of expressions of affection and practical help, and which lasted until his death. I confess that our relationship was extremely useful to me, as well as extremely delightful, both because of Ménage’s wide-ranging learning, and also because of his remarkable social skills and worldly charm.)

58 See Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius; Bray, ‘Les lettres françaises de Ménage à Nicolas Heinsius’, p. 193: ‘il écrit peu’; Maber, ‘La correspondance de Gilles Ménage’, pp. 35–36. 59 On Huet’s scholarly activities see Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters, although this is considerably more limited in scope than the title might imply; and Lux, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth Century France. See also the critique of Lux’s work in Maber, ‘Friendship and Rivalry in Science and Scholarship’, pp. 323–35, especially pp. 331–33. 60 Petri Danielis Huetii Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus, The Hague, H. Du Sauzet, 1718; for the purposes of this article, all quotations will be taken from the French translation by Nisard, Mémoires de Daniel Huet, here, p. 90.

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They remained friends, corresponding constantly when apart, for forty years. When writing of Ménage’s death, Huet added a long, emotional tribute: ‘mon ami le plus intime, le plus cher associé de toutes mes études’ (my most intimate friend, my dearest companion in all my studies);61 and in their correspondence, he typically ends his letter of 28 July 1661 ‘vale, alter ego’.62 Huet profoundly admired his older friend, and seems to have saved every scrap of writing that he received from him, even down to the most trivial notes arranging to meet for dinner; so, unlike many correspon­ dences, there is a striking absence of censorship, by the authors themselves or anyone else, in what has been preserved. Their letters cover a vast range of topics, and equally of registers, consciously public and strictly private, often within the same letter. For much of the time they were engaged in major works of profound scholarship, Huet on his edition and translation of Origen, and Ménage on his linguistic and legal studies, and especially his editions of the vast and notoriously challenging work of Diogenes Laertius, helping one another and involving other scholars in the questions they discussed. At the same time, though, Ménage had a confident worldliness, and a sense of mischief, that the more prudent and intensely ambitious younger man clearly found liberating. Huet several times writes of what fun it is, as well as all their learned exchanges, simply to ‘goguenarder ensemble’ (joke around together): ‘Si je me trouve delivré de ce fardeau [Origène] quand vous le serez de vostre Laërce nous pourrons en suite goguenarder tout à nostre aise, & faire des vers à ventre deboutonné’ (If I can free myself from this burden [Origen] when you are free of your Diogenes Laertius, then we can joke around as much as we like, and make up light verse to our hearts’ content).63 So in August 1661 Huet was horrified when Ménage told him that his latest letter had arrived in the middle of one of Ménage’s Mercuriales, his scholarly salon, and begged to be reassured that it had not been shared as would have been normal practice, since it was frivolous and facetious, and not at all full of the gravitas that the ambitious and career-minded Huet would have liked to project in public: Quand j’ay leu dans vostre lettre du 13e. que vous aviez receu la mienne au milieu de vostre Mercuriale, j’ay eu peur que vous n’ayez monstré les folies que je vous y escrivois à quelqu’un qui n’auroit pas eu tant de bonté pour les excuser que vous.64

61 62 63 64

Mémoires de Daniel Huet, p. 237. Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1341, p. 346. Huet to Ménage, 15 April 1662, Paris, BnF, MSS Rothschild A.XVII.424. Letter of 19 August 1661, Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1341, p. 334.

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(When I read in your letter of the 13th that mine arrived in the middle of your Mercuriale, I was afraid that you might have shown the facetious nonsense that I wrote to someone who might not have pardoned it with the same indulgence as you.) Huet had reason to be worried. He seems to be referring to his letter of 28 July in which, in a correspondence largely devoted to serious scholar­ ship, he expatiates facetiously and at length about the joys of his latest love-affair. The letter opens: Quoy! seroit-il bien possible qu’apres avoir donné à l’Amour tant de vos belles années, luy avoir consacré tant de beaux vers, après l’avoir tant chanté & tant vanté, vous pussiez destourner vos amis de son service? vous me disiez il y a huit jours: aimez, & vous me dittes aujourd’huy: n’aimez point. Me croyez-vous si lent à suiure vos conseils que j’en differe l’execution d’une semaine, ou me croyez-vous si maistre de mes passions que je puisse vaincre, à lettre veue, un amour de huit jours? sachez que vostre conseil est venu trop tard […] Pour les vers que vous m’alléguez, en voicy la response: De folie & d’erreur toute la terre abonde. Mais d’aimer constamment une jeune beauté C’est la plus douce erreur des vanitez du monde. Et n’en deplaise à Madame de la Fayette qui condamne l’Amour sans l’avoir jamais escouté, qu’elle aime trois jours seulement, & puis elle m’en dira des nouvelles.65 (What! Can it be that, after devoting so many of the best years of your life to Love, after it has inspired you to write so much fine verse, after singing its praises as much as you have, you can now dissuade your friends from it? A week ago you said to me: love; and today you say: don’t love. Do you think that I am so slow in following your advice that I would put off following it for a whole week, or do you think me so much the master of my emotions that, on reading your letter, I can overcome a week-old love? I have to say that your advice has come too late […] As for the verses that you quote to me, here’s my reply: The world is full of folly and error. / But a faithful love for a young beauty / Is the sweetest error among the vanities of the world. And, whatever Madame de La Fayette thinks — she who condemns love without ever having felt it — let her love for just three days, and then she’ll soon change her mind.)

65 Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1341, p. 345.

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Indeed, the letter of 19 August, in which Huet expressed his worries, while including a typical range of serious subjects — critical discussion of Ménage’s latest poem, questions of good French usage, news of scholarly friends, and Huet’s own ongoing edition of Origen — then itself ends on a distinctly risqué note: Je donne cet intervalle à Origene & à celle que vous me conseillez de n’aimer point & que j’aimeray pourtant malgré vous & malgré moy, Elle a beau teint, le parler de bon zele, Et le tetin plus rond qu’une groiselle. N’ay je donc pas bien cause d’y songer Toutes les nuits? Vous savez le reste du Rondeau. Je fais mon possible pour me dégager. Je ne scay si j’y reussiray …66 (I’m devoting my time to Origen, and to the lady whom you advise me not to love, and whom I shall love all the same, in spite of you and, indeed, in spite of myself, She has a lovely complexion, she speaks charmingly, / and her nipple is as round as a redcurrant / Don’t I have good reason to dream of her / Every night? You know how the Rondeau goes on. I am doing everything I can to free myself. I don’t know if I’ll succeed …) Huet is quoting a rondeau by Clément Marot, ‘De celui qui ne pense qu’en s’amie’ (On a man who thinks of nothing but his lady-love), which continues (as he says, ‘vous savez le reste’): Touchant son coeur, je l’ai en ma cordelle, Et son mari n’a sinon le corps d’elle : Mais toutefois, quand il voudra changer, Prenne le coeur : et pour le soulager J’aurai pour moi le gent corps de la belle Toutes les nuits. (As for her heart, I have it in my pocket, / And her husband has only her body: / But all the same, if he wanted to swap, / He can have her heart: and in consolation / I’ll have for myself the beauty’s lovely body / Every night.) It is no wonder that Huet was anxious to preserve the privacy of these letters. Although not ordained until quite late in life (1684), he was already at this time enlisting Ménage’s help to cultivate the good graces of the bishop of Bayeux, and public circulation of such friskiness would not

66 Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1341,, pp. 335–36 (the letters are out of order at this point).

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have helped his own future (extremely successful) ecclesiastical career at all. Similarly, on 10 November 1662, in a typically scholarly letter Huet describes meeting Mademoiselle de La Trousse, a friend of Mme de Sévigné and of Ménage, and cannot resist adding: … Je la trouve severe Car cette belle de la Trousse N’est pas de ces belles qu’on trousse.67 (I find her prudish / For this beautiful de la Trousse / Is not one of those beauties one can roger.) Even more riskily than such sexual badinage, in September 1663 Huet sent Ménage a letter for a mutual scholarly friend, Alexander Morus (1616–1670), of whom he and Ménage seem to have been genuinely fond. Morus clearly had an attractive personality: Claude Sarrau had referred to him fifteen years earlier as a ‘fort gentil personnage’ (an extremely pleasant person).68 However, Morus was not only a Huguenot pastor, but a fairly heterodox one, who had repeated difficulties with rigorists in the Reformed Church;69 and Huet, the future bishop and sous-précepteur du Dauphin, begged Ménage to ensure that his letter was passed on privately, ‘en main propre’ — please try not to let anyone else see it: ‘je vous supplie de faire rendre à Mr Morus en main propre, s’il est possible, la lettre que je prens la liberté de vous addresser pour luy’ (I am taking the liberty of sending you a letter for M. Morus, and I would ask you please to make sure that it is given to him personally, if at all possible).70 In such ways the most heterodox scholars were able to maintain close contacts with sympathetic friends at the heart of established intellectual life. Similarly, Ménage exchanged letters about comets with the eminent Socinian astronomer Stanisław Lubieniecki (1623–1675), and these were published along with hundreds of other letters on astronomy to and from Lubieniecki; while a long and very friendly letter from Lubieniecki setting out his attractive but highly unorthodox religious beliefs remained strictly confidential.71 Hugo Grotius, too, made the same distinction between the 67 Caen, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS In-folio 402. 68 Sarrau to Saumaise, 24 January 1648, in Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis Epistolæ ex Bibliotheca Gudiana auctiores, p. 272; printed with separate pagination in Marquardi Gudii et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolæ. 69 Writing to Huet from Paris the following month, Ménage noted: ‘Nostre Ami Morus a esté interdit encore pour un an par le Synode’ (Our friend Morus has been banned again for a year by the Synod). Letter of 17 October 1663, Paris, BnF, MSS Rothschild A.XVII.634. 70 Letter of 6 September 1663, Paris, BnF n.a.f. 1341, pp. 391–92. 71 Letter of 8 June 1649, Reims, Archives Municipales, Coll. P. Tarbié, Carton XIV, 37; compare with the later exchanges with Ménage (1665–1666) printed in Lubieniecki, Theatrum Cometicum … Opus mathematicum, physicum, historicum, politicum, theologicum, ethicum, œconomicum, chronologicum, pp. 859–61.

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majority of his letters, destined for a wide circulation, and his wholly private exchanges with his Socinian friends.72 As these examples show, the concept of privacy in scholarly correspon­ dence is fraught with complexity and ambiguities. A letter is a physical artefact, and it was in the nature of these correspondences that, in writ­ ing the letter, the author would be aware that it might be read aloud, circulated, copied, or subsequently printed; even an intact seal was no guarantee that the letter had not already been read by someone else, with or without the approval of the author, while the most passionate requests that a letter should be destroyed were routinely ignored. Scholars were also well aware that their communications might be intercepted, mislaid, stolen, or discovered during a search; as a result, they developed strategies for conveying the most sensitive messages, writing in veiled terms (‘l’affaire de notre ami’) or having letters conveyed personally and delivered hand to hand. Despite the dangers, there constantly emerges from the more sustained of these epistolary conversations a warm sense of friendship and intellec­ tual companionship. The scholarly correspondences operate on multiple different levels at the same time, within one correspondence and even within individual letters. The scholars themselves were well aware of the subtle balances between public and private in their exchanges, and in deciphering them we can share in the private, as well as the public, worlds of these remarkable individuals.

72 Nellen, ‘The Correspondence of Hugo Grotius’, pp. 127–64, and Nellen, ‘In Strict Confidence’, pp. 227–45.

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Works Cited Manuscripts Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS Savigny 38, f. 110, 29–29v (letter from Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz to Mathias Johann von dem Schulenburg, 16 August 1705) Caen, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS In-folio 402 (letter from Pierre-Daniel Huet to Gilles Ménage, 10 November 1662) Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Thott 1259, 4o (letters from Jean Chapelain to Johann-Georg Graevius) ———, MS Thott 1264, 4o (letters from Gilles Ménage to Johann-Georg Graevius) Florence, Biblioteca Lauretiana-Medicei, MSS Ashburnham, cass. I, letter 52 (letter from Émery Bigot to Pierre-Daniel Huet, 18 September 1668) Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MSS Magi. VIII. 362 (letters from Gilles Ménage to Carlo Dati and Antonio Magliabechi) ———, MSS Baldovinetti 257, 31, no. 1 (letter from Carlo Dati to Gilles Ménage, 15 July 1660) Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS BPL 1293 (1) (letter from Jacques Dupuy to Nicolaas Heinsius, 4 January 1647) ———, MS Burm. F.8 (letter from Nicolaas Heinsius to Jacques Dupuy, 5 August 1650) ———, ———. F.8 (letter from Jacques Dupuy to Nicolaas Heinsius, 11 October 1652) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 21, f. 138 (letter from Nicolas Toinard to John Locke, 14.24 May 1684) Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 1343, fols 4–23 and MSS Rothschild A.XVII.79–98 (Émery Bigot’s letters to Gilles Ménage) ———, MS français 13024, fols 3–44 (Émery Bigot’s letters to Ismaël Boulliau) ———, Fonds Dupuy 18, fol. 93r (letter from Ismaël Boulliau to Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, 2 June 1646) ———, n.a.f. 1341 (letters from Pierre-Daniel Huet to Gilles Ménage) ———, n.a.f. 1343, fol. 57r (letter from Émery Bigot to Gilles Ménage, 7 February 1665) ———, MSS Rothschild A.XVII.424 (letter from Pierre-Daniel Huet to Gilles Ménage, 15 April 1662) ———, MSS Rothschild A.XVII.634 (letter from Gilles Ménage to Pierre-Daniel Huet, 17 October 1663) Reims, Archives Municipales, Coll. P. Tarbié, Carton XIV, 37 (letter from Stanisław Lubieniecki to Gilles Ménage, 8 June 1649)

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Primary Sources Bigot, Émery, ‘Lettres d’Émery Bigot à Gilles Ménage et à Ismaël Bouillaud au cours de son voyage en Allemagne lors de l’élection de l’empereur Léopold Ier (1657–1658)’, in Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de France, ed. by Henry Omont (Paris: Picard, 1886), pp. 227–55 Chapelain, Jean, Lettere inedite a correspondenti italiani, ed. by Petre Ciureanu (Genoa: Di Stefano Editore, 1964) ———, Lettres de Jean Chapelain, de l’Académie Française, ed by Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880–1883) ———, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius (1649–1658), ed. by Bernard Bray (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966) Du Loir, Nicolas, Voyage du sieur Du Loir, contenu en plusieurs Lettres écrites du Levant, avec plusieurs particularités qui n’ont point encore esté remarquées touchant la Grece, & la domination du Grand Seigneur, la Religion & les moeurs de ses Sujets (Paris: François Clouzier, 1654) Dupuy, Jacques, Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius (1646–1656), ed. by Hans Bots (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) Fortin de La Hoguette, Philippe, Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662), ed. by Giuliano Ferretti, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1997) Galland, Antoine, ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland. Édition critique et commentée’, ed. by Mohamed Abdel-Halim (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Paris, 1964) Graevius, Theodor Georg, ed., Callimachi Hymni, epigrammata, et fragmenta ex recensione Theodori J. G. F. Graevii cum ejusdem animadversionibus. Accedunt N. Frischlini, H. Stephani, B. Vulcanii, P. Voetii, A. T. F. Daceriæ, R. Bentleii, Commentarius, et Annotationes viri ilustrissimi, Ezechielis Spanhemii. Nec non Praeter Fragmenta, quae ante Vulcanius & Daceria publicarant, nova, quae Spanhemius & Bentleius collegerunt, & digesserunt. Hujus cura & studio quaedam quoque inedita Epigrammata Callimachi nunc primum in lucem prodeunt (Utrecht: F. Halma & G. vande Water, 1697) Gudius, Marquard, Marquardi Gudii et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolæ. Quibus accedunt ex Bibliotheca Gudiana Clarissimorum et Doctisimorum Virorum, qui superiore & nostro sæculo floruerunt; et Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis Epistolæ ex eadem Bibliotheca auctiores. Curante Petro Burmanno (Utrecht: Apud Franciscum Halmam. Gulielmum vande Water, Bibliopol., 1697) Heinsius, Nicolaas, Poemata (Leiden: ex officina Elseviriorum, 1653) Huet, Pierre-Daniel, Petri Danielis Huetii Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (The Hague: H. Du Sauzet, 1718) ———, Mémoires de Daniel Huet, évêque d’Avranches, traduits pour la première fois du latin en français, trans. Charles Nisard (Paris: Hachette, 1853) Leibniz, Gottfried-Wilhelm, Sämtliche Schriften, le Reihe, Band 8, ed. by Günter Scheel, Kurt Müller, and Georg Gerber (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970)

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Locke, John, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. by Esmond Samuel de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989) Lubieniecki, Stanisław, Theatrum Cometicum … Opus mathematicum, physicum, historicum, politicum, theologicum, ethicum, œconomicum, chronologicum (Amsterdam: Daniel Baccamude for François Cuper, 1666–1668) Ménage, Gilles, Lettres de Ménage à Magliabecchi [sic] et à Carlo Dati, ed. by LéonG. Pélissier (Montpellier: Hamelin frères, 1891) ———, Mescolanze d’Egidio Menagio (Paris: Louis Bilaine, 1678) ———, Mescolanze d’Egidio Menagio, Secunda edizione, corretta, ed ampliata (Rotterdam: Renier Leers, 1692) Milleran, René, Nouvelles Lettres familieres, et autres sur toutes sortes de sujets, avec leurs réponses, choisies de Messieurs de Bussi Rabutin, de Furetiere, de Boursault, de l’Académie Françoise & des plus celebres Auteurs du tems. Par René Milleran. Et des Lettres curieuses de litterature & de morale de l’Abbé de Bellegarde (Brussels: Jean Leonard, 1709) Rigault, Nicolas, Viri eximi Petri Puteani, Regi Christianissimo a Consiliis et Bibliothecis Vita (Paris: ex officina Cramosiana, 1652) Sarrau, Claude, Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis epistolae. Opus posthumum ad Serenissimam Christinam Suediae Reginam (Orange: [sans nom d’imprimeur], 1654) ———, Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis Epistolæ ex Bibliotheca Gudiana auctiores; printed with separate pagination in Gudius, Marquard, Marquardi Gudii et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolæ. Quibus accedunt ex Bibliotheca Gudiana Clarissimorum et Doctisimorum Virorum, qui superiore & nostro sæculo floruerunt; et Claudii Sarravii Senatoris Parisiensis Epistolæ ex eadem Bibliotheca auctiores. Curante Petro Burmanno (Utrecht: Apud Franciscum Halmam. Gulielmum vande Water, Bibliopol., 1697) Secondary Works Bray, Bernard, ‘Les lettres françaises de Ménage à Nicolas Heinsius’, in Mélanges historiques et littéraires sur le xviie siècle offerts à Georges Mongrédien (Paris : Société d’études du xviie siècle, 1974), pp. 191–206 Delatour, Jérôme, ‘Le Cabinet des frères Dupuy’, Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique, 25–26 (2005–2006), 157–200 ———, Les Frères Dupuy (1582–1656), 3 vols + index volume, thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe (Paris: École nationale des chartes, 1996) ———, ‘Les frères Dupuy et leurs correspondances’, in Les Grands Intermédiaires culturels de la République des lettres: études des réseaux de correspondances du xvie au xviiie siècles, ed. by Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Hans Bots, and Jens Häseler (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), pp. 61–101 Doucette, Leonard E., Émery Bigot: Seventeenth-Century French Humanist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970)

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Hatch, Robert A., ‘Between Erudition and Science: The Archive and Correspondence Network of Ismaël Boulliau’, in Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. by Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), pp. 57–72 ———, The Collection Boulliau: An Inventory (BnF, f. fr. 13019–13059) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982) Hotson, Howard, and Walling, Thomas, eds, Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500–1800: Standards, Systems, Scholarship (Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, 2019) Lux, David, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth Century France: The Académie de Physique in Caen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) Maber, Richard, ‘La Correspondance d’Antoine Galland dans le contexte des réseaux d’information internationaux’, in Antoine Galland (1646–1715) et son Journal, ed. by Frédéric Bauden and Richard Waller (Louvain: Peeters, 2020), pp. 389–99 ———, ‘La correspondance de Gilles Ménage: une ressource révélatrice et méconnue’, in Gilles Ménage: un homme de langue dans la République des Lettres, ed. by Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau, special issue of Littératures Classiques, 88 (2015), 35–46 ———, ‘Friendship and Rivalry in Science and Scholarship: Pierre-Daniel Huet and the Académies de Caen’, special issue Text, Knowledge and Wonder in Early Modern France: Studies in Honour of Stephen Bamforth, ed. by Neil Kenny, Nottingham French Studies, 56.3 (2017), 323–335 ———, Publishing in the Republic of Letters: The Ménage-Grævius-Wetstein Correspondence, 1679–1692 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) ———, ‘Les Réseaux de communication érudits et les pouvoirs de l’état en France au xviie siècle: indépendance et interpénétration’, special issue Savoirs et pouvoirs à l’âge de l’humanisme tardif, ed. by Emmanuel Bury and Fabien Montcher, xviie Siècle, 266 (2015), 17–29 Ménage, Gilles, ‘Les lettres françaises de Ménage à Nicolas Heinsius’, ed. by Bernard Bray, in Mélanges historiques et littéraires sur le xviie siècle offerts à Georges Mongrédien (Paris: Société d’études du xviie siècle, 1974), pp. 191–206 Nellen, Henk J. M., ‘The Correspondence of Hugo Grotius’, in Les Grands Intermédiaires culturels de la République des lettres: études des réseaux de correspondances du xvie au xviiie siècles, ed. by Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Hans Bots, and Jens Häseler (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), pp. 127–64 ———, ‘In Strict Confidence: Grotius’s Correspondence with his Socinian Friends’, in Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, ed. by Toon van Houdt, Emil J. Polak, Jan Papy, Gilbert Tournoy, and Constant Matheeussen (Louvain: Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia, 2002), pp. 227–45

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———, Ismaël Boulliau (1605–1694), astronome, épistolier, nouvelliste et intermédiaire scientifique (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994) Shelford, April G., Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007) Ultee, Maarten, ‘The Republic of Letters: Learned Correspondence, 1680–1720’, The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 95–112

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Chapter 3. La Beaumelle en ‘déshabillé’* Quelques facettes de sa vie privée dévoilées par sa correspondance

Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle (1726–1773), homme de lettres connu en son temps pour avoir défendu Montesquieu (1689–1755) et combattu Voltaire (1694–1778), 1 pour avoir été le premier à publier les lettres de la marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719) et pour avoir agi discrètement en faveur de ses coreligionnaires protestants, a laissé une riche correspon­ dance. L’essentiel en est conservé dans les archives familiales en Cévennes, mais une partie est disséminée dans les lieux par où il est passé : Genève, Copenhague, Berlin et Paris notamment. Ce Cévenol parti courir sa chance réussira, après bien des péripéties, à s’établir comme un notable en Pays de Foix et achèvera sa brève carrière à 47 ans avec le titre d’homme de lettres attaché à la bibliothèque du roi. Plutôt que de partir d’une définition a priori de ce que serait la vie privée/privacy de ou pour La Beaumelle, on cherchera ici à en dessiner les contours à partir de ce qu’en dévoile sa correspondance : au-delà du rappel de son itinéraire singulier, les exemples tirés de cette correspondance active et passive en font apparaître différentes facettes. Mais la correspondance d’un homme réputé pour sa plume a toujours quelque chose d’ostensible, de sorte qu’il n’y a pas lieu d’établir une distinction trop stricte entre l’homme public et l’homme privé; elle permet toutefois de se glisser dans le cabinet de travail, dans les méandres d’une pensée en cours d’élaboration. La vie privée ou privacy apparaît alors comme un mélange d’intimité, d’introspection, de confidences, de discrétion ou de dissimulation voulues ou forcées, voire de

* This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). 1 Lauriol, La Beaumelle, un protestant cévenol ; Lauriol, Études sur La Beaumelle. Hubert Bost est directeur d’études à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études–PSL (Paris). Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 83–105 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138240 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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clandestinité.2 Elle est un tissage de ce que l’on ne cherche pas à montrer et de ce que l’on cherche à ne pas montrer. ‘En déshabillé’ : aux xviie et xviiie siècles, cette métaphore vestimen­ taire désigne les aspects privés de la personnalité et de sa vie quotidienne. Ayant entrepris d’écrire les Mémoires de Maintenon,3 La Beaumelle l’utilise à propos de Louis XIV (1638–1715) : Je ne doute pas que ma Maintenon ne soit dévorée : mais il faudroit être en etat d’en faire les frais de l’impression de 4 volumes de 400 p., car il n’y en aura pas moins avec le volume des piéces justificatives. Mon titre sera : Memoires pour servir à l’histoire de Mme de Maint. & à celle de son tems. Le particulier, le déshabillé de Louis XIV y sera, & mille anecdotes, connues de moi seul.4 Quelques années plus tôt, dans Mes Pensées, il écrivait ces lignes révélatri­ ces de sa conscience introspective. Elles illustrent également le propos de l’historien qui, proche du moraliste en ce qu’il s’efforce d’aller au-delà des apparences, entend percer le mystère des acteurs dont il rapporte la vie : Il est impossible de connaître à fond un homme, si l’on n’a vécu familièrement avec lui. En jugeant de son caractère par les faits, on fait souvent un portrait d’imagination. La vie publique ne dit pas ce qu’on est; elle dit ce qu’on veut paraître. Ce n’est que dans la vie privée qu’on voit de ces traits qui décèlent.

2 Bost and others, Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle [dorénavant abrégé CGLB]. Oxford : Voltaire Foundation (18 tomes prévus) : t. i : avril 1726–avril 1747 (2005) ; t. ii : avril 1747–juillet 1749 (2006) ; t. iii : août 1749–février 1751 (2007) ; t. iv : mars 1751–avril 1752 (2008) ; t. v : mai 1752–14 avril 1753 (2009) ; t. vi : 15 avril 1753–21 janvier 1754 (2010) ; t. vii : 22 janvier 1754–18 octobre 1754 (2011) ; t. viii : 20 octobre 1754–30 juin 1755 (2012) ; t. ix : 1er juillet 1755–fin janvier 1756 (2013) ; t. x : 4 février–30 décembre 1756 (2014) ; t. xi : janvier–décembre 1757 (2015) ; t. xii : janvier 1758–juillet 1759 (2016) ; t. xiii : août 1759–février 1761 (2017) ; t. xiv : mars 1761–décembre 1763 (2018) ; t. xv : janvier 1764–décembre 1766 (2019). Les trois derniers tomes paraissent à Paris aux éditions Champion : t. xvi : janvier 1767–août 1769 (2021) ; t. xvii : septembre 1769–1er août 1772 (2022) ; t. xviii : août 1772–décembre 1778 (2024) Présentation synthétique : Bost, ‘Un point sur l’édition de la Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle’. Bost, ‘L’édition de la Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle: un bilan’. 3 Les Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Mme de Maintenon et à celles du siècle passé (6 tomes), auxquels s’ajoutent 9 tomes de Lettres de Mme de Maintenon, ont fait l’objet de deux éditions in-12 à Amsterdam (1755 et 1756. Voir CGLB, viii à X et Lauriol, Études sur La Beaumelle, pp. 447–62 (chapitre ‘Le premier biographe de Mme de Maintenon réévalué : La Beaumelle’). Dans ces Mémoires où il s’appuie sur la correspondance de la marquise de Maintenon que lui ont confiée les dames de Saint-Cyr, La Beaumelle prétend donner une histoire de la vie privée de Louis XIV à la fin de son règne, mais aussi proposer une lecture de ce règne différente de celle de Voltaire dans Le Siècle de Louis XIV. 4 CGLB, vi , LB 1755 à Jean Angliviel (16 janvier 1754).

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Il y a peu d’hommes qui aient un caractère fixe : le cœur est sujet aux mêmes variations que le visage. Nous ne nous connaissons pas nous-mêmes : comment les autres nous connaîtraient-ils? On a beau dire, le premier est bien plus facile que le second. Et pourquoi ne nous connaissons-nous pas? parce que nous ne sommes presque jamais semblables à nous-mêmes. […] La plupart des historiens prennent le masque pour le visage, le héros pour l’homme : au lieu de représenter ils peignent, ils peignent de profil, et souvent ils se peignent eux-mêmes.5 *** L’existence de La Beaumelle se découpe aisément en deux périodes. La première, jusqu’à la fin de sa seconde incarcération à la Bastille (au­ tomne 1757), est marquée par de nombreux voyages, des conflits retentis­ sants et des succès éditoriaux; au cours de la deuxième, La Beaumelle reste longtemps exilé en Languedoc et ne quitte sa province natale que pour venir à Paris, à deux reprises. Après le rappel des principaux événements qui scandent ces deux périodes, on mettra l’accent sur certains aspects caractéristiques sous l’angle de la vie privée : l’écriture, la correspondance, le commerce, l’amitié, la religion, la sexualité, le mariage, la paternité et la santé. L’entrelacs de ces thèmes et leur importance relative selon les époques permettent de mesurer les permanences ou les évolutions au cours de la vie de La Beaumelle. Tous seront examinés au prisme de la Correspondance, tant passive qu’active : on verra comment ce corpus singulier permet de sinon d’élaborer une théorie de la vie privée, du moins d’en rendre compte par touches qui parfois se superposent. Fils de protestant né à Valleraugue (Cévennes), La Beaumelle a été formé au collège catholique d’Alès (on sait que depuis 1685 le protes­ tantisme est interdit en France, l’édit de Nantes ayant été révoqué par Louis XIV) : il y est resté sept ans et en est sorti catholique convaincu. Le premier moment intime qu’il ait rapporté se produit au moment de son retour dans le village natal : il traverse une crise spirituelle qui le conduit à se réclamer du déisme avant de se convertir à un protestantisme militant :6 prêt à rejoindre la clandestinité des ‘Églises du Désert’ et même à mourir martyr, il finit par obtenir l’accord de son père, Jean I Angliviel (1698–1757), pour se rendre à Genève afin d’y étudier la théologie. Dans la ligne de cet engagement se situe la réflexion qu’il mène sur la légitimité des assemblées cultuelles malgré leur interdiction légale. Il consulte les théologiens de l’académie de Genève, se montrant attentif à

5 Mes Pensées 1752, lxxv : La Beaumelle, Mes Pensées, édition critique par Lauriol, p. 58. 6 Bost, ‘La “conversion” de La Beaumelle’ ; Bost, ‘La Beaumelle nicodémite et militant’.

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tracer la frontière entre le public et le privé au plan religieux :7 peut-on, doit-on transgresser la loi du royaume au nom de l’obligation de fréquenter les saintes assemblées, ou faut-il composer avec la réalité, voire transiger avec sa conscience, et se contenter du culte privé? Question d’autant plus cruciale que La Beaumelle dit s’être lui-même converti au protestantisme en entendant son père lire à voix haute, dans sa chambre, un sermon de Saurin — c’est-à-dire par l’expression de la dévotion privée. Du reste, lorsqu’il en parle avec son père ou son frère, il leur recommande de se contenter de lire les sermons du protestant Jacques Saurin (1677–1730) ou du catholique Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704),8 autrement dit : de ne pas fréquenter les assemblées cultuelles clandestines du ‘Désert’. En mars 1747, La Beaumelle quitte Genève pour Copenhague où il a été engagé comme précepteur du fils du comte Carl Christian Gram (1703–1780), grand veneur du roi de Danemark. La question confession­ nelle demeure ouverte puisque ce protestant réformé se voit confier un élève dont la mère est luthérienne.9 Comme en Suisse, au Danemark La Beaumelle prend fait et cause pour ses coreligionnaires, notamment en polémiquant avec Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754). Il plaide en faveur de la liberté de conscience dans L’Asiatique tolérant, un ouvrage inspiré de Crébillon par sa forme de conte philosophique, du pasteur Elie Benoist (1640–1728) et de Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) pour l’histoire et la philoso­ phie. Mais c’est surtout son intérêt pour les mœurs danoises qui retient l’attention. Dans La Spectatrice danoise, le périodique qu’il lance à l’été 1748, il pose un regard original sur les habitudes de la cour de Frédéric V (1723–1766), regard d’autant plus apprécié des Danois qu’il parsème ses observations d’anecdotes, de confidences et de réflexions spirituelles;10 il y parle parfois de la cour du Danemark d’une manière qui fait du bruit (avril 1749). Après un voyage à Paris — où il réussit à faire venir son frère — et son retour à Copenhague, La Beaumelle lance des nouvelles à la main — donc encore plus personnalisées, mais plus parisiennes, avec sa Gazette de la ville, de la cour et du Parnasse. Il est disgracié en raison de son comportement déplacé avec une dame de la cour. Ici comme à plusieurs reprises par la suite, La Beaumelle semble séduire ou charmer ses auditeurs — et auditrices — sans toujours avoir bien conscience des bornes à ne pas franchir.

7 Bost, ‘Un Protestant cévenol à Genève’. 8 CGLB, iii, LB 550 (13 septembre 1749) à Angliviel père ; voir aussi CGLB, vii, LB 1830 (18 février 1754) à Jean Angliviel. 9 Lauriol, Études sur La Beaumelle, pp. 413–22 (chapitre ‘La Beaumelle et l’éducation : servitudes et grandeurs d’un précepteur français à Copenhague’). 10 Voir Lauriol, Études sur La Beaumelle, pp. 423–32 (chapitre ‘Un grand homme de lettres français à Copenhague : La Beaumelle’).

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On peut glisser rapidement sur la période allemande, au cours de laquelle se produisent quelques passes d’armes avec Voltaire à Potsdam, un épisode galant qui se termine piteusement par une mise aux arrêts à Spandau, une traversée de l’Allemagne en compagnie de la baronne de Norbeck, aventurière de haut vol. Le retour à Paris en octobre 1752 correspond à une véritable phase de clandestinité : arrivé dans la capitale avec des ouvrages imprimés au Danemark ou à Francfort/Leipzig, La Beaumelle risque d’être arrêté par la police dont les espions furètent auprès des libraires. Il l’est effectivement en avril 1753, et aussitôt incarcéré à la Bastille pour ses écrits non autorisés. En prison, le détenu ne peut se confier qu’au papier. Son journal ren­ seigne aussi bien sur des projets d’écriture que sur les denrées qu’il se fait livrer, sur ses états d’âme et sur les rares informations qui lui parviennent. Libéré en octobre 1753, La Beaumelle intensifie son enquête sur la vie de la marquise de Maintenon dont il projette de publier la correspondance. Il est aidé par plusieurs dames de Saint-Cyr, dont Mme de Louvigny (1703–1765), qui lui fournissent une quantité considérable de lettres. C’est en connaissance de cause que ces dames — qui prient bien sûr pour sa conversion au catholicisme11 — permettent à ce jeune écrivain protes­ tant d’entrer dans leur maison (septembre 1754) et lui confient les lettres de leur fondatrice. La Beaumelle part pour Amsterdam en mars 1755, afin de rédiger les Mémoires de la marquise et de publier ses Lettres.12 En tant qu’historien, il rencontre la question de la vie privée à la cour de Versailles, qui culmine avec le mariage de Louis XIV et la dévotion du couple royal. Comme éditeur, il cultive le secret sur le contenu de sa future publication : de crainte d’être trompé par les libraires, il fait recopier discrètement les lettres que lui fournissent les dames de Saint-Cyr; il dissimule aussi qu’il entreprend deux éditions quasi simultanées des Lettres et des Mémoires, ainsi qu’une édition subreptice de La Pucelle de Voltaire dont plusieurs versions manuscrites circulent alors. Sa propre vie privée, en cachette, est le gage d’une réussite publique différée, du succès de l’écrivain qui doit patienter pour atteindre la notoriété à laquelle il aspire. Paradoxalement, cette réussite dépend aussi de la publicité qu’il convient de faire autour du projet : grâce au lancement d’une souscription à travers l’Europe, la curiosité du lecteur est aiguisée par la promesse de découvrir de nouveaux faits sur le règne de Louis XIV, dont La Beaumelle considère qu’il a été mal rendu par Voltaire. Le second retour à Paris, en mars 1756, se déroule selon une séquence comparable au premier : distribution discrète des ouvrages expédiés par ballots d’Amsterdam et entrés ‘à la sourdine’ en France, changement de domicile, mais perquisition et arrestation, et embastillement en juillet. 11 Voir, entre autres, CGLB, vii, LB 1859 (5 mars 1754) de Mme de Louvigny. 12 Bost, ‘Madame de Louvigny’.

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Cette nouvelle incarcération à la Bastille est riche en informations matérielles grâce aux autorisations délivrées par le lieutenant général de la police Berryer (1703–1762) : La Beaumelle reçoit du papier, des habits, ses manuscrits, des aliments, des meubles, des chandeliers, de l’argent et même du vin (8 et 26 février 1757), sans compter plusieurs centaines de livres. Les permissions de visite accordées à sa famille et à ses amis stipulent expressément que la conversation ne doit porter que sur ses affaires personnelles et domestiques :13 à la privation de liberté s’ajoute une restriction des échanges avec l’extérieur, de sorte que le confinement carcéral favorise une intensification de cette ‘vie privée’. Il s’agira notam­ ment de la diffusion et de la vente de ses ouvrages, du mariage de son frère et du cadeau de mariage à sa future belle-sœur, de la santé de son père, du logement où il pourrait s’installer à sa libération et d’un mariage qui lui serait promis… Au cours de cette première partie de son existence, plusieurs aspects caractérisent la ‘vie privée’ de La Beaumelle, à commencer par la pratique de l’écriture : celle-ci concerne à la fois la sphère personnelle — senti­ ments, réflexions — et les recherches historiques, les compilations et le classement, le travail de cabinet secret ou à tout le moins discret : l’invis­ ible et silencieuse gestation d’un ouvrage nourri de lectures préalables et destiné à être publié, c’est-à-dire rendu public. La correspondance de La Beaumelle fourmille de renseignements sur l’antichambre des livres et permet, à plusieurs reprises, de suivre leur élaboration. Ce sont d’abord les sources et les auteurs consultés, et les traces de la lecture qui en a été faite.14 Les cartes à jouer usagées sur lesquelles La Beaumelle note ses réflexions ou recopie des citations dont il pense faire usage par la suite fournissent de précieux indices sur ses idées et ses lectures. Le riche corpus de ces cartes à jouer devenues ‘fiches érudites’15 mériterait une étude spécifique. En outre, quoique tenus de manière sporadique, les journaux personnels permettent, à certaines périodes, de suivre La Beaumelle au jour le jour, avec ses rencontres, ses comptes, ses projets.16

13 ‘Je vous prie, monsieur, de permettre au Sr de La Cour de parler au Sr La Baumelle detenu à la Bastille au sujet de ses affaires domestiques, et que M. Chevalier soit present à la conversation pour qu’il ne soit question que d’affaires de cette nature, et non d’autres, et qu’ils ne puissent se faire passer furtivement des papiers’. CGLB, x, LB 2720 (18 août 1756) de Berryer à Baisle entre autres. 14 Ici l’approche de la ‘vie privée’ pourrait être croisée par une enquête sur la pratique de la lecture et sur le travail d’organisation et de classement qui en résulte, dans la ligne des recherches menées par Cavallo et Chartier (dir.), Histoire de la lecture ; voir aussi Chartier, Inscrire et effacer ; et Blair, Tant de choses à savoir. 15 Voir Bert, Une histoire de la fiche érudite, et, sur Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724–1803) : Comment pense un savant. 16 Voir CGLB, iii: carnet de voyage Paris-Copenhague, 14 novembre–28 décembre 1750 ; Livre de raison = journal des trois premiers mois de 1751 ; t. V : Journal,

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Cette phase discrète de l’élaboration d’un ouvrage et de sa rédaction entraîne des échanges et des réactions dont la correspondance permet de retrouver la trace. Ici, ce sont les observations scrupuleuses que lui prodigue Mme de Louvigny sur Maintenon; là, les conseils que dispense La Condamine (1701–1774) à partir des relectures méticuleuses auxquelles il se livre sur des brouillons ou des esquisses de chapitres : c’est déjà le cas avec la Réponse au Supplément au Siècle de Louis XIV, et ce le sera davantage par la suite avec le Commentaire sur la Henriade et les tentatives pour récrire les vers de Voltaire dont il est assorti. Et plus encore avec la Vie de Maupertuis : La Condamine critique, remanie, exhorte l’auteur à ne pas polémiquer et va jusqu’à retenir le manuscrit biographique afin d’éviter que son jeune ami ne se jette dans la gueule du loup de Ferney. Considérer la pratique de l’écriture en tant qu’elle relève de la vie privée, c’est aussi recueillir des échos sur les ‘marronages’ des ouvriers qui travaillent pour leur propre compte chez un maître imprimeur et sur les contrefaçons dont les libraires pourraient tirer bénéfice au détriment de La Beaumelle; sur les épreuves, sur les souscriptions de Maintenon, sur l’organisation de la diffusion d’ouvrages dépourvus de privilèges royaux et les bénéfices attendus puis effectivement tirés de ces ouvrages — notam­ ment les Lettres et Mémoires de Maintenon. Car La Beaumelle veut être lu et connu, mais aussi s’enrichir. Cadet de famille, La Beaumelle n’attend pas grand-chose de l’héritage paternel. Il sait que la part qui lui reviendra ne s’élève à guère plus que 10 000 livres, une somme insuffisante au regard de ses ambitions. Il aurait pu, comme son père, se lancer dans le négoce. À Genève il a préfacé un ouvrage de Pierre Giraudeau (1693–1763) intitulé La Banque rendue facile aux négociants.17 Lorsqu’il commerce au Danemark pour arrondir ses modestes revenus de précepteur, il combine son propre sens des affaires et sa vaste culture littéraire avec une utilisation avisée du réseau paternel : il importe quantité de livres, qu’il fait venir notamment de Hambourg, mais aussi du vin de Languedoc et du roquefort par l’intermédiaire de son père18 — et ce roquefort s’arrache sur le port de Copenhague. Dans ses lettres, La Beaumelle avoue qu’il s’intéresse à l’argent et qu’il veut en gagner grâce à sa plume; il se vante auprès de son frère de rentabiliser au maximum le temps libre dont il dispose : Où trouvez-vous tant de tems pour composer, direz-vous? Dans ma diligence. Tout ce que je puis dérober à mes devoirs, je le consacre à janvier‑février 1753 ; t. XVII (LBD 356) et XVIII (LBD 359) : Marginalia sur un Almanach royal servant de journal, janvier 1772–janvier 1773. 17 Voir CGLB, i, LB 294 (4 décembre 1745) à Jean Angliviel ; pour l’épître liminaire ‘A Messieurs les Negocians’, voir LBD 18. 18 Voir CGLB, ii, LB 414 (28 octobre 1747) et LB 426 (13 janvier 1748) à Angliviel père, LB 438 (25 avril 1748) d’Angliviel père.

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l’étude. Je ne dors que six heures au plus. Je ne suis en compagnie que le moins que je puis. J’ai très peu de correspondances épistolaires. Il y a près de six mois que je ne puis pas me reprocher d’avoir volontairement perdu un moment. Je vous avoûrai que le motif qui m’anime au travail est moins le desir de m’illustrer que celui de me tirer du sein de la dépendance & de la pauvreté. C’est l’argent qui fait l’homme en ce siècle pervers.19 Un an plus tard, il écrit à son père qu’il aspire au contraire à la célébrité plus encore qu’à la fortune : A propos d’argent, je l’aime, mon très cher pére, non comme un avare, mais pour en jouïr; & n’ai je pas raison? Sans argent, que fait-on ici bas? Qu’est-on? Quel rôle joüe-t’on? Si je n’en acquiers pas, que dois-je espérer, moi que le sort condamne à mourir de faim si mon industrie ne répare pas la partialité de la nature? Je vous ouvre mon cœur, non pour vous y montrer des bassesses, mais pour vous avoüer mes faiblesses. Je n’aime l’argent que parce que je n’en ai pas, & je crois qu’il me serait desavantageux de me corriger de ce défaut jusqu’à ce que je sois à mon aise. Je sens que ma soif des richesses a des bornes forts étroites, mais je n’en connois point à ma soif de la gloire; & même, tel est mon cœur que je consentirois volontiers à mourir sur un fumier pourvu que je mourusse couvert de gloire. Le titre d’illustre gueux ne me déplairait pas.20 Par la suite, La Beaumelle montre que sa ‘soif des richesses’, ou du moins sa recherche d’une certaine prospérité, détermine bien souvent ses choix : les entreprises éditoriales, les terres et les charges qu’il envisage d’acquérir, ses projets de mariage, sont tous traversés par le calcul du bénéfice qu’il en retirera. Le paradoxe de l’‘illustre gueux’ est censé montrer que l’appât du gain n’est pas sa seule motivation. Mais le jeune mercator sapiens qui s’établit au Danemark, distributeur de denrées destinées tant au corps qu’à l’esprit, n’a nullement l’intention de rester ‘gueux’. Il entend aussi s’élever dans la hiérarchie sociale et faire reconnaître ses talents littéraires. Il y parviendra, si l’on en juge par son titre de professeur royal de Langue et Belles Lettres françaises à Copenhague, avant de devenir seigneur du Carla quand il s’installe en Pays de Foix, puis d’être honoré du titre d’homme de lettres attaché à la Bibliothèque du roi lors du retour à Paris. La correspondance est en elle-même un commerce entre esprits.21 Si elle n’abolit pas la distance, du moins la lettre restitue-t-elle quelque chose

19 CGLB, ii, LB 465 à Jean Angliviel (25 août 1748). 20 CGLB, iii, LB 550 (13 septembre 1749) à Angliviel père. 21 Pour les nécessaires considérations générales et l’attention portée aux enjeux d’interprétation des correspondances, voir Haroche-Bouzinac, L’épistolaire.

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de la conversation entre frères ou entre amis. Son témoignage aide à com­ prendre et à mieux connaître les mœurs des protagonistes que l’on étudie. Une comparaison avec la correspondance de Pierre Bayle est éclairante à cet égard : même avec ses amis proches, le philosophe de Rotterdam s’en tient à un registre presque exclusivement intellectuel, pratiquant l’échange d’idées et d’informations érudites. Après 1685, les membres de sa famille restés en France étaient morts, et Bayle n’avait plus d’occasion d’évoquer sa ‘vie privée’. C’est tout le contraire avec la correspondance de La Beaumelle, d’autant plus riche en informations qu’elle est à la fois familiale et sociale, entremêlant affects et émotions, réflexions et polémiques, considérations philosophiques, politiques, religieuses et littéraires. La Beaumelle se livre volontiers, il aime partager ses impressions, décrire et raconter. Arrivant à Copenhague, il brosse pour son père et son frère un portrait des Danois tout à fait original,22 et l’on peut penser que cet exercice lui inspirera certains articles de La Spectatrice danoise. Lorsqu’il séjourne à Paris, il décrit, à l’intention d’une correspondante danoise, les mœurs littéraires qu’il découvre :23 l’intérêt qu’éprouvent les historiens d’aujourd’hui pour la vie privée n’est pas nouveau… Sans amitié, point de correspondance durable, et comment entretenir ce lien intime si fort à distance sinon par l’échange de lettres où les amis se confient l’un à l’autre. Le premier ami que se reconnaisse La Beaumelle est son frère Jean II Angliviel (1723–1812).24 À nouveau un rapprochement avec la correspondance de Pierre Bayle s’impose, cette fois comme un modèle à suivre : Jean aimerait donner à ses échanges épistolaires avec son frère un tour littéraire : on le voit citer une lettre de vœux de début d’année de Bayle à Vincent Minutoli (1649–1709), comme pour placer leur échange fraternel sous l’égide du philosophe de Rotterdam.25 Mais la plume de Jean, pessimiste et moralisatrice, court moins facilement, comme le montrent les innombrables ratures de ses brouillons, tandis que La Beaumelle plaît et captive en racontant et en conversant d’une manière qui semble spontanée : comme Bayle, qui disait ‘fagotter’ sa correspondance au fil de la plume et reprochait à sa famille de lire ses lettres à leur entourage, ‘me produisant en deshabillé devant le beau monde’.26 On ne peut s’arrêter ici sur d’autres amis tels que Lucas27 et l’abbé Lemaire au

CGLB, ii, LB 392 (9 juin 1747), LB 414 (28 octobre 1747). CGLB, iii, LB 630 (20 juillet 1750) à la comtesse Georgine Amalie Schmettow. CGLB, ii, LB 419 (27 novembre 1747) à Jean Angliviel. Jean Angliviel adresse ses vœux de nouvelle année en reprenant ceux que formulait en latin Bayle dans une lettre à son ami Minutoli le 1er janvier 1681 : Labrousse and others, eds, Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, iii, p. 238 ; voir CGLB, i, LB 360 (21 janvier 1747) à Jean Angliviel. 26 Pierre Bayle à Joseph Bayle, 30 janvier 1675 (Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, t. II, p. 44). 27 Voir l’Épître à un ami, 16 juillet 1749 (CGLB, ii, LB 536). 22 23 24 25

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Danemark, ou Lalande (1732–1807) en Allemagne, mais on verra par la suite l’amitié profonde et exigeante qui l’unit à La Condamine. Les correspondants savent que leurs lettres peuvent être ouvertes par la police : d’où l’exhortation mutuelle à la plus extrême discrétion,28 la dis­ simulation et l’usage de pseudonymes dont on affuble ministres et amis29 pour ne pas compromettre ses relations. Une même prudence amène à se servir de doubles enveloppes ou à se faire adresser son courrier chez une personnalité de la cour, ce qui est censé garantir contre la curiosité policière. Toute l’entreprise d’édition des Lettres de Mme de Maintenon est marquée au coin du secret pour les raisons commerciales évoquées plus haut, mais aussi parce qu’il faut garder l’exclusivité des informations jusqu’à la sortie des volumes. La Beaumelle conserve jalousement ce secret, avec la complicité des quelques dames de Saint-Cyr qui sont dans la confidence — et s’appellent elles-mêmes ‘la cabale’.30 La vie amoureuse et sexuelle de La Beaumelle constitue à coup sûr le plus riche des chapitres de sa vie privée, et sa correspondance en fournit de nombreux échos. Après une syphilis contractée à Lyon à la fin de son adolescence, un flirt genevois, une relation avec une très jeune et jolie actrice danoise, la Thielo (1735–1754), une aventure qui semble avoir mal fini — si tant est qu’elle ait jamais commencé — à la cour de Danemark, sa mésaventure à la sortie de l’opéra à Berlin (janvier 1752) — qui lui vaut d’être mis quelques jours aux arrêts à Berlin puis assigné à résidence à Spandau —, l’équipée avec la sulfureuse baronne de Norbeck entre Gotha et Paris via Francfort et Metz (mai 1752), sont quelques-unes des premières affaires galantes connues de La Beaumelle. Qui, quoique volage, songe dès cette époque à se marier (il y pense notamment en mars 1751 avec Mlle Frère, en avril 1751 avec Mlle Thomsen). En 1754–1755, La Beaumelle considère que ses besoins sexuels sont impérieux et que, plutôt que de mener une vie dissolue, il vaut mieux partir en Hollande avec une servante qui lui sert de maîtresse et à laquelle il fait un enfant.31 Ceci scandalise Jean André Delacour († 1765),32 l’oncle qui s’est porté garant de l’entreprise hollandaise des Maintenon. En revanche, La Condamine fait preuve à cet égard d’une grande compréhension, et prend régulièrement des nouvelles de cette jeune femme que les deux amis appellent plaisamment ‘le Barbon’. 28 CGLB, iv, LB 934 (29 octobre 1751) à Angliviel père. 29 Le Kiaya est Berryer, le cochon de lait désigne Malesherbes, le Vizir est le comte d’Argenson. Maupertuis est appelé tantôt le Lapon ou le Japonais, ou Nangazaqui ou Saint-Malo ; Solon désigne Montesquieu, Egiptus est Marmontel, Mafféi est Frédéric II. 30 ‘La cabale vous salue ; je voudrois qu’elle fît mieux encore, c’est le sentiment de nostre mere, il faudroit que ce fût celuy de la republique entiere’. CGLB, x, LB 2604 (28 mai 1756) de Mme de Louvigny. 31 CGLB, viii, LB 2115 (14 novembre 1754) à La Condamine. 32 CGLB, viii, LB 2235 et LB 2236 (8 mai 1755) d’Antoine Joseph Delacour.

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*** Relâché en septembre 1757, La Beaumelle est exilé en Languedoc. Son père étant mort quelques jours après son propre retour en Cévennes, il réside à Valleraugue, à Montpellier, à Nîmes; il séjourne de temps à autre à Uzès, à Toulouse. Sa correspondance montre qu’il cherche alors à s’établir, mais les années qui suivent (1757–1764) sont scandées par une succession de mésaventures, de procès, d’affaires, de controverses, de liaisons amoureuses compliquées et de projets de mariage. Dans ses lettres, le sage et sombre Jean Angliviel reproche régulièrement à son frère les imprudences répétées qu’il commet et les embarras sentimentaux ou judi­ ciaires dans lesquels il se jette. La Condamine, que La Beaumelle appelle affectueusement son ‘père en Apollon’, le trouve lui aussi bien turbulent. Il écrit, et longuement, pour mettre en garde son ‘fils’ adoptif contre le risque de retomber dans ses péchés de jeunesse.33 Préparant son retour en Languedoc, La Beaumelle a la ferme intention de se marier et d’avoir des enfants : à la veille de sa libération de la Bastille, il a demandé au chirurgien de lui couper le frein du prépuce…34 Au souhait de s’établir dont le mariage est une des composantes s’ajoute celui d’engendrer une postérité : le désir de paternité qu’il éprouve rencontre son sens du devoir civique, puisque tout bon citoyen doit avoir le souci de contribuer à la prospérité du royaume.35 Mais avant de demander la main de Rose-Victoire Lavaysse (1733–1813), il aura beaucoup hésité, entre aventures et vraies perspectives de mariage. Si l’on prend en compte les demoiselles courtisées, les maîtresses, les partis auxquels les siens ont pensé pour lui, ceux que lui-même a envisagés, on arrive à une vingtaine d’histoires galantes plus ou moins sérieuses et longues… Les premières années de son exil languedocien sont scandées par ces épisodes sentimen­ taux, mais aussi par des différends et des brouilles que La Condamine impute à son comportement souvent arrogant et à un tempérament peu porté au compromis. Les sermons épistolaires de ce vieil ami tournent souvent autour du même reproche : La Beaumelle ne parvient jamais à demeurer quelque part sans susciter des inimitiés, voire sans se faire de solides ennemis. Il a le don de se retrouver dans des situations sensibles,

33 CGLB, xi, LB 3201 et LB 3239 (11 octobre et 22 novembre 1757) de La Condamine ; CGLB, xiv, LB 3775 (12 avril 1762) du même. 34 ‘Le Sr de La Beaumelle s’est fait faire ce matin une operation à la verge, le chirurgien major luy en a coupé le filet. Ce prisonnier comptant se marier bientot dit que cette precaution lui assurera d’avoir posterité, et que sans cela il n’en auroit jamais eû ; cette [c’est] une sage prevoÿance, et bien louable, et d’un bon citoÿen’. CGLB, xi, LB 3112 (la Bastille 25 août 1757) de Chevalier à Berryer. 35 C’est a contrario l’un des reproches que La Beaumelle adressait dès 1751 aux moines, d’autant plus inutiles à la société qu’ils sont inféconds, et le fondement de sa critique du célibat : La Beaumelle, Suite de la Défense, pp. 124–37.

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parfois scabreuses…36 et toujours la plus grande difficulté à reconnaître qu’il puisse en être responsable. La Condamine ne mâche pas ses mots : Jamais je n’ai eté coupable de quoi que ce soit. Si vous le croyés ainsi la main sur la conscience et sans restriction, vous vous conduirés toujours comme vous avés fait, et les traverses que vous avés essuyées doivent vous pronostiquer à quoi vous devés vous attendre le reste de votre vie. Peu s’en est fallu que vous ne soyiés resté à la Bastille, peut etre dix ans, peut etre 20. Vous savés que je crois très fermement que votre derniere detention etoit injuste, mais une suite d’imprudences et de fautes que vous pouviés éviter vous avoit fait essuyer cette injustice, et une fois commise par des ministres, il est plus ordinaire qu’elle soit aggravée que réparée. Combien de gens plus malheureux que vous, c’est à dire qui avoient moins donné de prise à leur malheur, ont eté oubliés dans les prisons!37 Ce sont les devoirs de l’amitié qui dictent ce reproche, exprimé dans ses lettres avec énergie et à plusieurs reprises. La Condamine renvoie à La Beaumelle une image sans concession : il dresse, avec une bienveillance mêlée d’inquiétude, un portrait moral que l’on ne saurait certes prendre à la lettre, mais qui renseigne sur le caractère entier, rétif aux accommode­ ments, de celui qui se considère comme son fils adoptif : Quand vous serés marié et que votre femme sera bien contente de vous, vous redeviendrés mon enfant. Je n’ai osé vous donner ce nom tant que vous avés fait trembler votre pere. Vous en savés plus que moi de vos disputes.38 On a vu, à propos de la première partie de la vie de La Beaumelle, combien la question de sa confession religieuse lui tenait à cœur. Il ne fait jamais de concession sur son appartenance au protestantisme, quoique cette religion soit interdite en France. Mais jamais non plus il ne brandit son apparte­ nance confessionnelle comme un étendard. Évoquant Claude Brousson (1647–1698) qui avait été condamné et mis à mort et qu’il admirait, La Beaumelle reconnaît que ce célèbre avocat et pasteur ‘sent le fagot’, et il ajoute : ‘je vous avoue que j’aime bien sentir ce que je suis’ tout en niant

36 Des propos imprudemment tenus à Beaucaire en juillet 1758, la rupture théâtrale de ses fiançailles avec Jeanne Pieyre à Nîmes en juillet 1759, une affaire de jeu interdit chez la comtesse de Fontenilles à Toulouse en janvier 1760, un duel dans une autre affaire de jeu fin juillet 1761, son désarmement public par le capitoul David de Beaudrigue en octobre 1761… Ce qui ne l’empêche pas de recueillir, d’août à décembre 1762, plus de vingt certificats de bonnes vies et mœurs signés de ses relations toulousaines, principalement des membres du Parlement. 37 CGLB, xiv, LB 3775 (12 avril 1762) de La Condamine. 38 CGLB, xv, LB 3901 (20 mars 1764) de La Condamine.

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énergiquement, le lendemain, qu’il se soit jamais déclaré huguenot :39 c’est qu’il y a loin entre une dissidence confessionnelle assumée mais cantonnée au domaine privé et ce que représenterait un texte dans lequel il aurait rendu public son protestantisme. Revenu en Languedoc, La Beaumelle a renoué avec les huguenots et mis sa plume à leur service. La Calomnie confondue qu’il rédige au nom du pasteur Paul Rabaut (1718–1794) afin de disculper les protestants attaqués lors de l’affaire Calas, les Mémoires d’État sur la situation du protes­ tantisme en France qu’il adresse au comte de Saint-Florentin (1705–1777), la Requête des protestants français au roi qu’il voudrait faire adopter par le synode national des Églises réformées40 témoignent du rôle actif qu’il joue durant cette période. Toujours en coulisse, car pour faire lever sa lettre d’exil, il doit se montrer respectueux des autorités (d’où l’offre de service à Saint-Florentin) ou s’en tenir à un strict anonymat.41 Il continue de s’intéresser à différentes affaires où ses coreligionnaires sont impliqués, sans jamais franchir les limites de la sphère privée en ce qui le concerne. Un exemple de cette impeccable discrétion est son rôle dans les tenta­ tives pour faire réhabiliter la mémoire de Jean Calas (1698–1762).42 Il est alors personnellement impliqué, à titre privé : à cause de contentieux antérieurs qui l’ont opposé au capitoul David de Beaudrigue; mais aussi en raison de sa relation naissante avec Rose-Victoire Lavaysse, veuve Nicol, qu’il a commencé à fréquenter en octobre 1761 : celle qui va devenir sa femme est la sœur du jeune Gaubert Lavaysse (1741–1786), qui a été inquiété, emprisonné et jugé avant d’être mis hors de cause dans la mort de Marc-Antoine Calas (1732–1761). Le mariage de La Beaumelle et de Rose-Victoire Lavaysse (1733– 1813) est célébré à l’église toulousaine du Taur le 25 mai 1764. Loin de constituer à ses yeux une concession à l’obligation religieuse catholique, il représente une victoire pour La Beaumelle : les conjoints ont obtenu qu’un curé les marie dans les formes légales bien qu’il les sache notoirement protestants. Ils s’installent à Mazères, en Pays de Foix, dans la maison de la Nogarède qu’ils aménagent. La Beaumelle transforme et embellit le domaine pour en faire un lieu où s’exprimeront son industrie, sa réussite et sa notabilité. Au dehors, c’est à la plantation de milliers de mûriers que La Beaumelle consacre son énergie, dans la vue d’élever les vers à soie comme en Cévennes. À l’intérieur de la maison, la pièce maîtresse est le ‘salon des

39 CGLB, vii, LB 1808 et LB 1812 (6 et 7 février 1754) à La Condamine ; LB 1951 (22 avril 1754) au même. 40 Voir La Beaumelle, Deux traités sur la tolérance. 41 Bost, ‘La Beaumelle et la tolérance en 1763’ ; Bost, ‘Cette abusive dénomination de nouveaux-convertis’. 42 Lauriol, ‘La Beaumelle, P. Rabaut, Court de Gébelin et l’affaire Calas’ ; Bost and Lauriol, ‘L’Affaire Calas’ ; Bost, ‘Dans les coulisses de l’affaire Calas’.

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illustres’, où sont exposés plus de mille portraits de personnalités célèbres et dont La Condamine raille plaisamment le caractère hétéroclite : Vous etendés bien loin votre collection de portraits. Il me semble que tout portrait quelconque y entre. Votre liste ressemble aux affiches du coin des rues où l’on voit à coté l’une de l’autre Dissertation sur l’immortalité de l’ame et Traité des gonorrhées.43 L’assagissement de La Beaumelle se traduit dans tous les domaines, qu’il s’agisse de sa vie sexuelle ou du plan social : s’établir, c’est à la fois se marier, éventuellement acheter une charge, acquérir une terre (ce sera finalement la seigneurie du Carla). Au cours des six années qui suivent, marquées par une dégradation progressive de sa santé sur laquelle on reviendra, La Beaumelle continue de travailler à divers projets littéraires : une ‘Vie de Maupertuis’, une ‘Vie de Henri IV’, une mise en dialogue de la célèbre conférence de 1678 entre Bossuet (1627–1704) et le pasteur de Charenton Jean Claude (1619–1687) — avant la révocation de l’édit de Nantes, ce pasteur de Charenton était l’un des plus éminents porte-parole des protestants français —, des traductions d’Horace et de Tacite, la réécriture de la Henriade de Voltaire et même un projet monumental d’édition annotée des œuvres du philosophe de Ferney. Tout à ses projets lorsqu’il n’est pas souffrant, La Beaumelle ne s’intéresse guère à la vie domestique que sa femme régente. Tardivement, à l’été 1768, dans les dernières semaines de la grossesse de Rose-Victoire, il semble prendre con­ science qu’il va devoir la relayer. Écrivant à son beau-frère, Rose-Victoire laisse transparaître sa fatigue et ses doutes : Il y a cinq nuits qu’il dort sans pavot. J’ai un peu de répi, mais il m’a fait bien enrager longtems. Il n’est pas de votre avis sur l’embaras qu’il donne dans une maison. Il se propose de donner aux domestiques ce qu’ils demanderont lors de mes couches, pour cela il apprit il y a quelques jours où je tenois le pain, il vint voir la cave des bouteilles. C’étoit la 1ere fois. Il connoitra les clefs s’il en a le tems.44 La naissance d’Aglaé (1768–1853), le 6 septembre 1768, ouvre le chapitre de la paternité. Lecteur de Rousseau, La Beaumelle observe et décrit sa fille, puis se risque auprès de son frère à quelques remarques pratiques de puériculture : Jean Jacques dit que les yeux de tous les enfans sont ternes : ceux de ma fille sont fort brillans. Le nés me paroissoit devoir être monstrueux, & ce sera, je crois, celui de ses traits le plus régulier. […] Nous ne l’emmaillotons pas, nous lui laissons faire tous les mouvemens, les

43 CGLB, xv, LB 3904 (29 mars 1764) de La Condamine. 44 CGLB, xvi, LB 4367 (25 juillet 1768) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel.

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gambades dans un immense berceau. Nous la lavons tous les jours d’eau tous les jours moins tiède, pour en venir insensiblement au bain froid. Nous avons proscrit la têtière. Il y a bien des enfans de trois mois qui n’ont pas l’air aussi formé qu’elle.45 Dans les mois et les années qui suivent, il s’intéresse à sa croissance, à ses progrès dans le domaine du langage : il l’écoute ‘jaboter’ (on dirait gazouiller), lui enseigne des mots latins… L’allaitement voit s’opposer les deux parents. Rose-Victoire veut le faire durer jusqu’à la sortie des douze premières dents, soit pendant deux ans. Bien qu’il soit certainement influencé par la promotion de l’allaitement maternel en vogue depuis la parution de L’Émile, La Beaumelle prône un sevrage plus rapide car il est condamné à l’abstinence pendant toute cette période :46 Elle nourrit sa fille avec délices, & nous aurons bien de la peine à la lui arracher. Cependant il le faudra : car ma virilité en est à ses derniers soupirs. Notre marché fut qu’elle nourriroit 3 ou 4 mois : il faut qu’elle le tienne, à moins que nous ne trouvions point de bonne nourrice.47 Ma femme veut reprendre Aglaé, sous prétexte que la petite dureté qui lui reste au sein, passera certainement plus vite si elle nourrit encor trois ou 4 mois. J’en suis fâché, parce que je crains fort \ou\ qu’elle ne veuille achever cette nourriture, ou que si je ne le veux pas je ne puisse trouver une bonne nourrice. Cette résolution est fort contraire à l’envie que j’aurois d’avoir postérité. Il me semble que je devrois mettre à profit le peu de santé qui me reste.48 En janvier 1769 — Aglaé vient d’avoir quatre mois —, les deux parents prennent Jean Angliviel à témoin. Face à la détermination de sa femme, La Beaumelle prétend faire valoir son autorité de chef de famille :

45 CGLB, xvi, LB 4382 (22 septembre 1768) à Jean Angliviel. 46 Dans une lettre du 22 juillet 1773 (CGLB XVIII, LB 5030), La Beaumelle reprochera à son frère de ne pas s’être abstenu de coucher avec sa femme alors qu’elle allaitait encore : ‘J’ai su de vos nouvelles par ma femme, mais bien vaguement. Dans une lettre elle me marque que Mme d’Angliviel ne nourrit plus à cause d’un soupçon de grossesse. […] Je suis bien fâché que l’allaitement de mon filleul ait été interrompu, surtout de si bonne heure. Quelle folie aussi, de coucher avec une jeune & jolie femme, quand elle nourrit ! Je plains cette pauvre créature de pâtir de si bonne heure des plaisirs de ses parens. Je n’ai rien de semblable à me reprocher’. On pense alors que ce sont les rapports sexuels qui provoquent les règles et que l’écoulement sanguin corrompt et fait tarir le lait. En outre, les relations sexuelles peuvent entraîner une grossesse qui contraint la femme à cesser d’allaiter car elle ne peut nourrir deux enfants à la fois (Morel, ‘Théories et pratiques’, pp. 393–427, ici p. 400 ; sur les thèses de Rousseau en faveur de l’allaitement maternel, voir p. 406). 47 CGLB, xvi, LB 4382 (22 septembre 1768) à Jean Angliviel. 48 CGLB, xvi, LB 4409 (25 novembre 1768) à Jean Angliviel.

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Ce que vous dites à ma femme est bien propre à la persuader de ne pas nourrir. Mais ni vous ni sa mère ni moi ne la persuaderons : il faudra que je monte sur mon trône, & que je me serve de l’autorité de seigneur & maître.49 Mais tandis qu’il est parti, Rose-Victoire apostille la lettre : Un mot, je vous prie, écoutés mes raisons. Mon cugnat, soyez de mon avis. Ma fille étoit parfaitement nourrie avant que je ne tombas malade. On lui donna au bout de 6 semaines, après qu’elle eut été médicamantée par mon lait, une bonne nourrice qui a 22 ou 24 ans, qui est veuve sans enfans, son lait a à présent 19 mois. Cette femme la remit & l’a nourrie 5 semaines, au bout de ce tems j’ai été en état de donner mon lait, j’ai repris la petite, il y a trois semaines que je la nourris, elle ne rend pas tout le lait depuis qu’elle suce le mien, elle dort au mieux & elle a engraissé. Je veux la nourrir, mon mari ne le veut pas, il veut faire un garçon c’est son dernier mot & sa meilleure raison. Moi je ne veux pas l’empêcher de travailler mais je ne donnerai pas mon Aglaé. Mon lait est le meilleur que je puisse trouver, d’ailleurs j’en ai abondamment. La nourrice en a aussi beaucoup, mais le sien est épais, mauvais tous les mois quelques jours, ce qui marque que la source tarira bien tôt. Le mien est fraix, léger, il passe dans ce petit estomac à merveille, celui de la nourrice au contraire, la nourrit trop & lui remplit l’estomac de glaires dont j’ai eu peine à la délivrer. Elle en vomissoit comme mon mari, depuis quelques jours elle ne vomit plus. Ayez la bonté d’écrire fortement à votre frère, il défférera à votre avis, & ne m’écoute pas.50 Ce dialogue de sourds est révélateur des désaccords qui s’installent alors dans le couple. Grâce à la correspondance des deux frères, et plus encore grâce à celle de Rose-Victoire avec son ‘cugnat’ (son beau-frère, en occi­ tan), on mesure que la relation conjugale se dégrade. Autorisé à revenir à Paris, La Beaumelle s’y rend en mai 1770. Après quelques semaines au cours desquelles il retisse un réseau et se lance dans de nombreux projets dont la plupart n’aboutiront pas, sa mauvaise santé, les drogues et la somnolence reprennent le dessus. Il habite dans le même immeuble que La Condamine et sa femme et qu’une vieille demoiselle qui s’entiche de lui, l’accapare et le comble d’attentions et de présents. Cette Mlle de Faverolles (1713–1785) souhaiterait même vivre avec La Beaumelle et qu’il fasse venir sa femme à Paris. En octobre 1771, Rose-Victoire se résout au voyage pour récupérer son époux et le ramener à Mazères : elle y parvient en août 1772, puisqu’à nouveau enceinte elle en­ tend retourner accoucher chez elle. Avant de repartir pour le Pays de Foix,

49 CGLB, xvi, LB 4434 (11 janvier 1769) à Jean Angliviel. 50 CGLB, xvi, LB 4434 (11 janvier 1769) à Jean Angliviel.

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Aglaé est inoculée en mai 1772. Depuis des années, La Beaumelle suit le combat que mène La Condamine en faveur de l’inoculation. Lui-même en est un partisan convaincu, comme en témoignent le récit de l’opération et le journal de la convalescence de la jeune malade.51 L’éducation et la santé relèvent a priori de la vie privée. Or tant l’allusion à l’auteur d’Émile que le choix éclairé de l’inoculation — qui fait frémir Rose-Victoire mais auquel elle consent — montrent que La Beaumelle conçoit son rôle de père en homme de son temps. Quelques jours avant l’inoculation, La Beaumelle s’est vu confirmer sa nomination officielle, obtenue grâce à l’appui de la comtesse Du Barry (1743–1793) et de sa belle-sœur Chon, en tant qu’‘homme de lettres attaché à la Bibliothèque du roi’ : moins que le titre, c’est la réhabilitation qui importe, après les années d’exil et d’attaques incessantes de la part de Voltaire. La dernière période mazérienne représente un pic dans la production épistolaire de Mlle de Faverolles, dont le contenu est aussi disparate qu’une conversation à bâtons rompus : nouvelles politiques et faits divers, ragots, conseils de santé et appels à revenir à Paris, projet d’édition de la Henriade, commentaires béats sur Aglaé et souvent piqués sur Rose-Victoire… Six mois après la naissance de son fils Victor-Moyse (20 septembre 1772), La Beaumelle repart pour Paris. Malade et dormant beaucoup, il n’y fait pas grand-chose. La Beaumelle a toujours été valétudinaire. Sans remonter à la syphilis lyonnaise, on sait qu’il est tombé gravement malade au Danemark (septembre — novembre 1749) et à nouveau à Paris de janvier à mi-février 1754, avec une rechute en mars-avril qui lui fait frôler la mort. À partir d’avril 1764, il ressent une fatigue extrême et souffre de fortes crises d’asthme en décembre 1765. Ses propres lettres attestent qu’il a conscience de sa mauvaise santé et qu’il ne croit pas avoir une longue espérance de vie, mais ce sont surtout celles de sa femme qui sont révélatrices à cet égard. Rose-Victoire partage son inquiétude avec son beau-frère : Mon mari est encore à Toulouse. Il m’a écrit de l’envoyer chércher. J’attends que la neige & la glace soient fondües. Il m’a bien la mine d’y rester long tems. Il m’écrit qu’il est véritablement astmatique. Pendant huit jours qu’il a plu, il n’a pas céssé de tousser. Il a eu de l’oppréssion, des suffocations en un mot, me dit il : j’ai eu touts les symptomes d’un mien parent qui étoit astmatique. Il est fort content d’avoir fait cette découverte; il y a trois ans que je le lui disois. Mon père lui fait prendre

51 CGLB, xvii, LB 4863 et LBD 356 : à Jean Angliviel (13 juin 1772) et Journal de l’inoculation tenu sur l’Almanach 1772.

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les bouillons de corbeau, ils lui font du bien. Dans le tems qu’il étoit malade & fort inquiet, je l’étois aussi.52 La toux, l’asthme et les maux d’estomac le contraignent à suivre des régimes. Une alerte survient fin janvier — début février 1766, et à nouveau en avril. Après une cure pyrénéenne à Barèges et à Bagnères (juillet‑août 1766), La Beaumelle semble comprendre qu’il devrait mener une vie plus saine. Déférant aux conseils de lecture de La Condamine, il demande à son frère de lui procurer ‘les 4 petits traités de Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566) sur les moyens de conserver la santé pour le régime’ : C’est une lecture d’une heure & il y en a, dit-on, une bonne traduction de 1759. Cornaro, déjà très vieux à 40 ans grace à ses debauches, parvint à 100 ans grace à son régime. Tronchin estime beaucoup cet ouvrage. […] Je mène une vie fort frugale. Ce qui n’empêche pas que ma tête ne soit quelquefois en souffrance. Mais je ne tousse plus. Je ne fais point assez d’exercice. Il faut que je prenne sur moi d’agir davantage.53 Mais ces bonnes résolutions font long feu, la santé de La Beaumelle reste fragile et Rose-Victoire doit jouer les gendarmes. La désinvolture du malade mine la relation conjugale : Mon mari commence à tousser; nous nous sommes grondés en arrivant à Montpeillier, il voulut aller sans chapeau & en habit d’été, je ne fus pas de son avis, de là, querelle, gronderie, il fût plus fort que moi, le voila mis comme un petit-maître de 25 ans & une enroueure qui le talonne; je l’en avertis, le lendemain il fut plus doux, il reprit l’habit de drap & la toux se déclare. Depuis que nous sommes ici il est plus docile, pourtant il n’a pas couvert sa tête chauve.54 Le départ de La Beaumelle pour la capitale, l’inefficacité de son action pour obtenir des places qu’on lui a promises — à la notable exception de celle d’homme de lettres attaché à la Bibliothèque du roi —, la relation assez trouble qui s’instaure entre lui et Mlle de Faverolles, l’obligation dans laquelle se trouve alors Rose-Victoire de faire le voyage à Paris et d’y séjourner dans des conditions d’inconfort matériel et psychologique auxquelles La Beaumelle, prostré dans un fauteuil à longueur de journée, ne paraît guère sensible : le bouquet de tous ces éléments fait éclater une vraie scène de ménage lorsque Rose-Victoire annonce à son époux qu’elle est de nouveau enceinte :

52 CGLB, xv, LB 4046 (27 décembre 1765) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel. 53 CGLB, xv, LB 4105 (11 décembre 1766) à Jean Angliviel. 54 CGLB, xvi, LB 4352 (25 mai 1768) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel.

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Je vous confesserai que j’ai été très affligée de ce qui m’auroit fait grand plaisir si sç’eût été votre femme ou celle de mon frère. Je témoigné le regret que j’avois à mon mari qui eut la bonté de me consoler & qui me promit que si je voulois revenir chez moi il m’accompagneroit, qu’il attendroit que mes couches fussent faites & qu’il reviendroit ensuitte. Je lui dis que c’étoit mon unique but & la seule chose qui pouvoit me faire supporter encore le manque de tout que j’épprouvois ici. Ces mots nous firent entrer dans un détail de misère horrible. Je ne cachai aucun de mes mécontentemens.55 Entre sa maladie et les drogues dont il abuse pour calmer ses douleurs, La Beaumelle est devenu indifférent aux conseils et aux objurgations de sa femme qui le voit s’enfoncer : L’opiom qu’il continuë de prendre absorbe toutes les facultés de son ame, il n’est bien qu’au lit. L’apétit se soutien, mais il a maigri depuis mon arrivée; à la vérité je crois qu’il aura fait un enfant, & comme je ne le défairai pas sans peine, il n’est pas merveilleux qu’il ne lui en coute aussi. Tout doit être partagé. Mr Tronchain que nous vimes un de ces jours lui pronostica que l’opiom le rendroit imbecile. Mais il n’a de repos, de trenquilité, de bonheur &c. que lors qu’il a de ces vilainies dans l’estomac, & il veut à tout prix être heureux & tranquile.56 Deux ans auparavant, le même Théodore Tronchin (1709–1781) avait imputé aux conflits avec Voltaire et aux séjours à la Bastille, dont on sait que Voltaire a contribué à les provoquer, cette complexion maladive et ce vieillissement prématuré de La Beaumelle : Je consulterai ce savant homme tant sur ma santé que sur l’œdème de ma femme, à qui les remèdes qu’elle fait depuis deux mois n’ont aucunement réussi. M. Tronchin est aujourdui l’ennemi mortel de Voltaire. Il dit en me voyant maigre & pâle : C’est ce misérable qui l’a mis dans cet état-là. Il est vrai qu’il n’y a pas nui.57 Rose-Victoire a fini par obtenir que la famille revienne à Mazères, mais elle ne peut empêcher son époux de continuer à nourrir des chimères de succès et de fortune qui passent par son retour à Paris. Du reste, elle ne sous-estime pas le danger que représente la redoutable Mlle de Faverolles, et ses lettres à son beau-frère reviennent régulièrement sur ce thème : J’ai bien sçu le retirer de Paris, mais certe je ne sçais comment m’i prendre pour faire qu’il n’i retourne pas. On ne peut plus lui dire un mot, il entre tout de suitte dans les fureurs que vous lui connoissés. 55 CGLB, xvii, LB 4836 (23 février 1772) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel. 56 CGLB, xvii, LB 4840 (11 mars 1772) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel. 57 CGLB, xvii, LB 4566 (Paris, 24 août 1770) à Jean Angliviel.

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Inutilement je mets en avant l’intérèt des deux enfans, il croit que ce même intérêt doit l’engager à aller chercher une fortune loin de chez lui. […] Si Dieu ne m’eût pas donné des enfans j’aurois été lui aider, mais dittes moi, je vous prie, si on peut se conduire de même lors-qu’on a deux enfans de belle venuë? En vérité je ne sçais à quoi il songe. Cette fille, cette mauditte fille fera par tendresse pour le père le malheur des enfans. Elle lui écrit tous les courriers les choses les plus tendres, elle la pria de toutes les façons possibles sur ce qu’il avoit négligé de répondre aux 1ers lettres, elle a d’abord pleuré, ensuitte fait des reproches, ensuitte menacé de voir un bel esprit qu’on lui proposoit, de cesser de lui écrire, enfin elle a fini par le caresser & lui a promis plus de fromage que du pain. Ces lettres très bien écrittes sont pitoyables, on les prendroit pour celles d’une amante de 18 ans affolée de quelqu’un.58 La cause est entendue lorsque La Beaumelle décide de repartir pour Paris. Il considère que sa femme et son frère se sont ligués pour l’inciter à se contenter d’une existence provinciale, dont étriquée. Rose-Victoire ironise en se confiant à son ‘cugnat’ : Votre éxcellente lettre du 7 fevrier fit un singulier éffét sur l’esprit de celui pour qui elle avoit été écrite. Il me fit le plaisir de la lire à son arrivée de Toulouse. Dieu sçait comme elle fut commentée! Immaginés le, car il me seroit impossible de vous rendre tout dans le vrai. Je me souviens d’avoir été flattée d’un parallele qu’il fit, il ôsa vous comparer à moi, mon cher cugnat, je vous pleins, mais s’il étoit vrai que j’eusse quelque chose de vous, en vérité j’en serois bien glorieuse. Selon lui nous n’avons que des vuës raccourcies, c’est pour cela, dis-je, que vous portés une lorgnette, mais comme elle ne suffit pas pour voir dans le lointain, prenons, mon cher cugnat, un telescope, ho! que nous verrions de belles choses si nous en avions un pareil au sien!59 Revenu à Paris, La Beaumelle continue d’user et d’abuser de l’opium. Il meurt le 17 novembre 1773, âge de 47 ans seulement. Lorsque La Condamine écrit à Jean Angliviel pour lui faire part de cette triste nouvelle, il exhale une tristesse sincère mais ne dissimule pas — ultime expression de son amitié — le sentiment d’avoir assisté à un gâchis : Voilà donc Mr votre frere mort à 46 ans, et qui s’est tué à prendre de l’opium, car il a avoué à Mlle de Favles qu’il en prenoit de crud, \qui est\ beaucoup plus violent que le laudanum et le sirop diacode, pour

58 CGLB, xviii, LB 4958 (18 janvier 1773) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel. Voir aussi LB 4996, sa lettre à son beau-frère du 21 mars 1773 : ‘Sa chère amie lui a écrit dans 7 mois 74 lettres d’une longueur à faire venir des vapeurs, dans presque toutes elle lui dit de venir la joindre pour ne plus le quitter’. 59 CGLB, xviii, LB 4996 (21 mars 1773) de Rose-Victoire à Jean Angliviel.

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qu’elle ne s’en aperçût pas. Je le regrette sincèrement, quoique vous sachiés comme moi qu’il ne mettoit pas assés du sien dans la societé. Je lui avois écrit trois semaines ou un mois avant sa fin une longue lettre à laquelle il ne m’a repondu. Je lui disois qu’il prît garde à m’obliger de changer encore mon testament.60 *** Plutôt que de partir d’une définition a priori de la vie privée/privacy, on a cherché à en dessiner le périmètre en s’appuyant sur ce qu’en révèle la correspondance de La Beaumelle. Il en résulte un mélange d’intimité, d’introspection, de confidences, de discrétion ou de dissimulation voulue ou forcée, voire de clandestinité. Au terme de ce parcours, on peut con­ clure en faisant deux remarques. La première, générale, consiste à rappeler une évidence : pour l’histo­ rien qui ne se contente pas d’être un historien des idées ou de la pensée, la dimension ‘non publique’ de l’élaboration d’une pensée et d’une œuvre est essentielle. Mais assez vite, l’opposition public/privé s’avère simpliste, et les zones intermédiaires et floues entre vie publique et vie privée paraissent presque les plus intéressantes. La seconde concerne certains choix de La Beaumelle qui se situent à la lisière du public et du privé, voire que lui-même considère comme tels : en raison de son parcours personnel et de son statut atypique tant au plan social qu’au plan confessionnel, la question religieuse est le domaine dans lequel cette dialectique s’exprime avec le maximum d’intensité : de ses études genevoises à son retour en Languedoc, La Beaumelle a cherché à répondre à la question de l’expression de la foi : quel équilibre, quel compromis entre devotio privata et liberté d’expression, entre discrétion personnelle et interpellation de l’opinion publique? Différents paramètres vont l’amener à rester dans cette zone intermédiaire : son appartenance à une confession interdite en France, mais aussi la prudence dont il doit faire preuve en raison de l’exil qui le frappe et qu’il voudrait voir lever — sans compter les attaques de Voltaire qui l’accuse d’être un prédicant, autrement dit un fanatique. Finissons sur une comparaison théâtrale : parler de vie privée conduit à mettre l’accent sur la coulisse plus que sur la scène. La correspondance éclaire l’interaction de l’une et l’autre chez La Beaumelle : le regarder ‘en déshabillé’ aide à comprendre les costumes qu’il revêt et les rôles qu’il répète. Mais l’intérêt de la prise en compte de la zone intermédiaire incite à le comparer au souffleur qui parle depuis sa trappe, sur scène sans être en scène.

60 CGLB, xviii, LB 5068 (25 novembre 1773) de La Condamine à Jean Angliviel.

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Works Cited Primary Sources La Beaumelle, Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle (1726–1773), ed. by Hubert Bost, Claude Lauriol, and Hubert Angliviel de La Beaumelle, 18 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005–2019; Paris : Honoré Champion, 2021–2024) ———, Deux traités sur la tolérance : L’Asiatique tolérant (1748) — Requête des protestants français au roi (1763), critical edition by Hubert Bost (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012) ———, Mes Pensées ou Le qu’en dira-t-on?, édition critique par Claude Lauriol (Geneva: Droz, 1997) ———, Suite de la Défense de L’Esprit des lois. Texte établi par Claude Lauriol, introduit et annoté par Gilles Susong, in La Beaumelle et le ‘montesquieusisme’. Contribution à l’étude de la réception de L’Esprit des lois (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1996) Secondary Works Bert, Jean-François, Comment pense un savant? Un physicien des Lumières et ses cartes à jouer (Paris : Anamosa, 2018) ———, Une histoire de la fiche érudite (Lyon : ENSSIB, 2017) Blair, Ann, Tant de choses à savoir. Comment maîtriser l’information à l’époque moderne (Paris : Seuil 2020) Bost, Hubert, ‘La Beaumelle et la tolérance en 1763 : pour une réintégration des protestants en France’, in Voltaire, la tolérance et la justice, ed. by John Renwick (Louvain: Peeters, 2011), pp. 141–55 ———, ‘La Beaumelle protestant : un singulier alliage de nicodémisme et de militance’, in Un parcours en protestantisme. Hommages à Yves Krumenacker, ed. by Julien Léonard et Noémie Recous (Lyon : Chrétiens & Sociétés, 2023), ii, pp. 157–88 ———, ‘“Cette abusive dénomination de nouveaux-convertis”. La Beaumelle face à la dénégation et à la stigmatisation des protestants français sous Louis XV’, in Énoncer / dénoncer l’autre. Discours et représentations du différend confessionnel à l’époque moderne, ed. by Chrystel Bernat and Hubert Bost (Turnhout : Brepols, 2012), pp. 265–79 ———, ‘La ‘conversion’ de La Beaumelle au protestantisme’, in La conversion. Expérience spirituelle, expression littéraire, ed. by Nicolas Brucker (Bern : Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 101–17 ———, ‘Dans les coulisses de l’affaire Calas : La Beaumelle et Court de Gébelin avant et après Voltaire’, Revue d’histoire du protestantisme, 7 (2022), 193–230

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———, ‘L’édition de la Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle: un bilan’, Revue d’histoire du protestantisme, 9 (2024), 235–62 ———, ‘“Madame de Louvigny est ma mère en Jésus-Christ” : La Beaumelle, le huguenot de Saint-Cyr’, in Croire à la lettre : Religion et épistolarité dans l’espace franco-britannique (xviie–xviiie siècles), ed. by Anne Dunan-Page and Clotilde Prunier (Montpellier : Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013), pp. 229–47 ———, ‘Un point sur l’édition de la Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle’, Revue d’histoire du protestantisme, 2 (2017), 251–80 ———, ‘Un Protestant cévenol à Genève : les réseaux de La Beaumelle étudiant en théologie (1745–1747)’, in Réseaux de correspondance à l’Âge classique (xvie–xviiie siècle), ed. by Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Jens Häseler, and Antony McKenna (Saint-Étienne : Publications de l’Université, 2006), pp. 251–69. (Reprinted in Bulletin de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Genève, 34–36 (2008), 83–107) Bost, Hubert, and Claude Lauriol, ‘L’Affaire Calas d’après les lettres de La Condamine à La Beaumelle’, in Études sur le Traité sur la tolérance de Voltaire, ed. by Nicholas Cronk (Oxford : Voltaire Foundation, 2000), pp. 68–84 Cavallo, Gulielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds, Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental (Paris : Seuil, 1997) Chartier, Roger, Inscrire et effacer : culture écrite et littérature (xie–xviiie siècle) (Paris : Seuil 2005) Haroche-Bouzinac, Geneviève, L’épistolaire (Paris : Hachette, 1995) Labrousse, Elisabeth, Antony McKenna, Hubert Bost, Edward James, and Wiep van Bunge, eds, Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, 15 vols (Oxford : Voltaire Foundation, 1999–2017) Lauriol, Claude, ‘La Beaumelle, P. Rabaut, Court de Gébelin et l’affaire Calas’, in La tolérance, république de l’esprit (Paris : Les Bergers et les Mages, 1988), pp. 83–95 ———, La Beaumelle, un protestant cévenol entre Montesquieu et Voltaire (Geneva : Droz, 1978) ———, Études sur La Beaumelle (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2008) Morel, Marie-France, ‘Théories et pratiques de l’allaitement en France au xviiie siècle’, Annales de démographie historique (1976), 393–427

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Chapter 4. Perceptions of Privacy in Diplomatic Correspondence* Dutch and English Ambassadors at the Early Modern French Court

Introduction In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, writers of instruc­ tion manuals for ambassadors usually associated the field of diplomacy with practices of secrecy: the intentional withholding of activities or infor­ mation, notably relating to classified matters of state, from third parties.1 Jean Hotman (1552–1636), a French jurist and trained envoy, believed that protecting ‘les secrets de l’Estat’ (the secrets of the state) was crucial for the successful completion of any diplomatic mission.2 In his highly

* This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). All dates in this chapter are given in New Style. The Old Style dates in English sources have been converted. To avoid confusion, 1 January has been taken as the beginning of the new year. I would like to thank the editors, the anonymous reviewer, and the participants of the seminar ‘Privacy in Early Modern Correspondences’ (Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, 6–7 May 2019) for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Research on the latter has been mostly completed during my doctoral studies at the University of St Andrews, which was sponsored by the University’s School of Modern Languages with a Seventh Century PhD studentship. I am grateful to Julia Prest and Ingrid De Smet for our conversations about Aernt van Dorp’s and Robert Cecil’s embassies. 1 For relevant studies on secrecy within the context of early modern diplomacy and statecraft, see, for example, Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs; Snyder, Dissimulation and Secrecy; Spies, Espionage and Secret Diplomacy, ed. by Braun and Lachenicht; Rous, Geheimdiplomatie. 2 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 3, 38. All translations in this chapter are mine. On early modern diplomacy and the secrets of state or arcana imperii, see Netzloff, ‘Public Diplomacy’, p. 185; Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy’, p. 401. Bram van Leuveren is Assistant Professor in Early Modern European Art History at Utrecht University. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 107–138 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138241 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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influential instruction manual L’Ambassadeur (The Ambassador, 1603), Hotman discouraged envoys from indulging in the ostentatious entertain­ ments that were so frequently organized at courts across Europe, including balls, masquerades, tournaments, suppers, and week-long festivals.3 He used phrases like ‘en public’ (in public) or ‘ouvert’ (open) to designate such grand-scale events.4 In Hotman’s view, court entertainments were ‘public’ or ‘open’ insofar as they were accessible to, and on display for, a large portion of the ruling elite. Their access to such events was not strictly regulated and therefore open to all kinds of interested, and potentially malicious, parties. Being an ardent Protestant, Hotman feared that the earthly pleasures evoked at court festivities through dancing, feasting, and playing games would tempt ambassadors to share confidential information about their mission and matters of state with spies and other intelligencers. Such information could thus no longer be kept secret and would — quite literally — be on display for an undesirably large audience of court elites. ‘[À] la vérité’, Hotman wrote, ‘le vin et le secret sont choses incompatibles’ (In truth, wine and secrecy are incompatible things).5 Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), an Anglicized Italian jurist, also warned diplomats against the dangers of indulgence at court entertainments. In his equally authoritative manual De Legationibus, Libri Tres (Three Books on Embassies, 1585), he argued that frequent banqueting and the acceptance of expensive gifts (as was especially common upon the arrival and depar­ ture of delegations) could damage the social reputation of ambassadors and compromise the classified nature of their mission.6 Unlike Hotman, Gentili did not use (the Latin variants of) phrases like ‘en public’ (public) or ‘ouvert’ (open) to refer to such occasions. Instead, he reserved ‘pub­ lica’ (public) for the ‘legatio’ (office of the ambassador), since embassies were employed by rulers to promote the interests of their respublica: the ‘caussa’ (affairs) of the public or people of a state.7 Although not using

3 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 34–35. Hotman’s manual was translated into English as The Ambassador that same year which further boosted the international reach of the work. For the historical context of L’Ambassadeur, see Bély, ‘La Polémique’. On court entertainments, see Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy; Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 32–33. 4 See, for instance, Hotman’s advice on how diplomats should behave at court entertainments and other events staged ‘en public’ (in public): ‘[I]l [the ambassador] faut qu’il se garde de dire en public ce qu’il juge de la Justice de ses pretensions sur quelque Estat’ (he must be careful not to speak publicly of the perceived legitimacy of his own opinions of another State). Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, p. 38. I thank Elsa Court for her help with this translation. See also Hotman’s description of a court banquet as ‘plus ouvert’ (more open) than a ruler’s secret cabinet. Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, p. 66. 5 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 34–35 (quotation on p. 35). 6 Gentili, De Legationibus, pp. 118–20. 7 See, for example, Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 8. Gentili’s understanding of ‘publica’ as ‘public’, the people of a given state, was the most common interpretation of the word in the early modern period. See Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier”’, p. 79.

PerCePtions oF PriVACy in diPloMAtiC CorresPondenCe

the same terminology, Hotman and Gentili were concerned about the same phenomenon. Both were deeply aware of the ‘public’ nature of court entertainments, which Hotman understood in explicit reference to the sheer size, as well as the conspicuous and relatively unrestricted nature, of such events, which, according to the authors, would draw unwanted attention to any potential faux pas of the ambassador, resulting from their indulgence in feasting and fêting. At the same time that Hotman and Gentili denounced the public nature of court entertainments, they considered honouring one’s ruler and host through conspicuous display to be one of the chief duties of the ambassador. Such display was ‘public’ or ‘open’ in Hotman’s sense (though neither men used those or related terms in this context) insofar as it was intended to be performed in clear view and for as many people at court as possible.8 Hotman insisted that a large retinue, ample horses, fashionable clothes, and a richly supplied kitchen were essential to any successful delegation, since such forms of public ostentation demonstrated the esteem of the ruler whom diplomats were supposed to represent at their host court.9 He thus reminded ambassadors that ‘la vertu la plus pro­ pre et plus essentielle d’un Prince est d’estre liberal, celuy qui represente sa grandeur chez les estrangers luy fait tort et s’acquiert un mauvais nom s’il est chiche et mecanique’ (the most proper and most essential virtue of a Prince is to be liberal; whoever represents his greatness among foreigners does him wrong and gets himself a bad name if he is stingy and vile).10 Gentili shared a similar view and believed that public display, especially in the form of an impressive entourage, helped to flatter the hosting sovereign and thus improve the negotiation position of the visiting delegation.11 Contrary to the ‘public’ entertainments and ambassadorial displays at court, Hotman used phrases like ‘en particulier’ (in private) or ‘secret’ (secret) to denote physical spaces that were admissible to only a small number of people. They included ‘les cabinets les plus secrets des Princes’ (the most secret cabinets of Princes) and embassy’s houses where ambas­ sadors could receive friends and other visitors while residing in their host country.12 Gentili, on the other hand, reserved ‘privatas’ (private) almost

8 Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 96; Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 22–23. 9 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 22–23. 10 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, p. 23. Early modern ideas about princely liberality were mostly based on Aristotle who ranked it first among the cardinal virtues. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, iv. 1, 11. 11 Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 96. 12 Hotman, L’ambassadeur, pp. 15–16, 66. For Hotman’s reference to diplomats receiving friends ‘en particulier’ (in private), that is, at embassy’s residences, see Hotman, L’ambassadeur, pp. 15–16: ‘[I]l [the ambassador] se fera beaucoup reluire, soit qu’il parle au Prince […] ou qu’il entretienne ses amis en particulier’ (he will make himself very gracious, whether he talks to the Prince […] or entertains his friends in private).

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exclusively for ‘personae’ (persons) who were not employed by rulers to promote the ‘caussa’ (affairs) of their subjects (the respublica or ‘public’) and whose interests were thus strictly individual.13 On one occasion, how­ ever, did he use in his instruction manual the adjective ‘privatas’ (private) to refer to the ‘aedas’ (houses) of embassies.14 Gentili’s description of such houses as ‘private’ was similar to Hotman’s, because ‘privatas’ in this context denoted a physical space that was owned and operated by only a handful of people, namely the embassy’s delegates and their guests, rather than large portions of the court elite. Whereas modern definitions of ‘private’ and ‘privacy’ often presuppose a clear opposition to ‘public’, Hotman and Gentili did not recognize such a distinction.15 In their understanding, ‘private’ and ‘public’ were not oppositional entities that existed in isolation from each other, but porous and flexible realms that intersected with one another, depending on the situation and context in which embassies and their ambassadors operated. We have already seen how Hotman and Gentili valued public life at court differently according to the duties that they prescribed for the diplomat: indulgent behaviour at entertainments was to be eschewed, while honouring one’s ruler and host through opulent display was strongly recommended. Similarly, Hotman suggested that the secret nature of rulers’ cabinets or private studies was but relative, since bribes could easily ‘fait ouvrir les cabinets les plus secrets des Princes’ (open the most secret cabinets of Princes), just like the entertainments that diplomats organized ‘à part’ (separately), that is, at an embassy’s house, could serve as occasions for spies to obtain secret information from attendees.16 Writing about the lodgings of foreign ambassadors in ancient Rome, Gentili, too, noted that the ‘privatas aedes’ (private houses) of embassies could easily fall victim to the intelligence of ‘speculatores’ (spies).17 Hotman’s and Gentili’s instruction manuals attest to the fact that, among early modern diplomats, ‘privacy’ in our modern sense — the seclusion of individuals or information from public scrutiny — was never absolute and always a matter of degree.18 Regardless of their size or the number of participants they housed, relatively private spaces such as rulers’ cabinets and embassy’s residences, but also courtly gardens and galleries,

13 See, for instance, Gentili, De Legationibus, pp. 4–5. Gentili’s understanding of ‘privatas’ as not being in the service of ‘the public’ or people of a given state was the most usual interpretation of the word in the early modern period. See Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier”’, pp. 79, 81–82. 14 Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 28. 15 On modern definitions of ‘private’ and ‘privacy’, see Nørgaard, ‘Past Privacy’, pp. 1–3; Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, pp. 15–20. 16 Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, p. 66. 17 Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 28. 18 Nørgaard, ‘Past Privacy’, pp. 1–3.

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were continuously subject to the public gaze of diplomats, courtiers, and intelligencers, as will be discussed in the course of this chapter.19 Partic­ ipating in public life at court while also safeguarding the confidential nature of one’s mission thus posed a challenge to the diplomatic enterprise that neither Hotman nor Gentili managed to come to terms with. This chapter explores how Dutch and English ambassadors who worked around the same time as Hotman and Gentili, namely in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, thought and wrote about issues of privacy themselves. I understand privacy here as the attempt or aspiration to avoid public scrutiny through ‘practices and experiences of withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access’ to particular spaces, notably backdoor rooms at court, such as the aforementioned private study of the ruler.20 I understand ‘public’, by contrast, as the experience or desire of being subject to the attention or scrutiny of third parties, most typically in spaces hosting large-scale events, such as court entertainments or giftgiving ceremonies. My definition of the term equals Hotman’s and Gentili’s understanding of ‘public’ in their respective instruction manuals. This chapter examines the written correspondences of Dutch and English ambassadors with their home governments while visiting or re­ siding at the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century court of the late Valois and early Bourbon rulers of France. It demonstrates that let­ ters offered these diplomats the tools to negotiate boundaries between private and public, between secret and public knowledge, and between rumour and fact. Of central interest are the dispatches of Aernt van Dorp (c. 1528–1600), a Dutch envoy who struggled to obtain public recognition at the court of Henri III (1551–1589) during the winter of 1585, and Robert Cecil (1563–1612), an English ambassador. Cecil visited the court of Henri IV (1553–1610) during the spring of 1598 but was forced to consult the king in backrooms due to the ongoing peace negotiations of the French crown with Spain (signed at Vervins on 2 May 1598).21 The methodology of the present chapter is comparative in scope. By reading the dispatches of Van Dorp and Cecil alongside each other, it aims to detect meaningful patterns — differences as well as similarities — in how both deputies represented and dealt with questions and concerns of privacy. As will be shown, a comparative approach to early modern 19 On the diplomatic relevance of early modern gardens and galleries, see Berger and Hedin, Diplomatic Tours; Anderson, ‘Marginal Diplomatic Spaces’. 20 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, p. 13. 21 For an extensive discussion of Van Dorp’s embassy, see Van Leuveren, ‘Disputed State, Contested Hospitality’; Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 130–73. Liesbeth Geevers has previously examined the mission in relation to Dutch-Spanish relations. Geevers, ‘The King Strikes Back’, pp. 86–89. Cecil’s delegation has been discussed in Imhof, Der Friede von Vervins 1598, pp. 225–26; Haan, ‘La Dernière Paix’, pp. 51–53; Poussou, ‘La Politique extérieure’, pp. 259–60); Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 174–201.

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diplomacy and letter-writing reveals that many of these questions and concerns related to the highly public nature of court life in France. My understanding of early modern privacy in this chapter corresponds to recent discussions of pre-1800 notions of privacy by Mette Birkedal Bruun, who has argued that ‘boundary-keeping’ was central to the ‘phe­ nomena, practices, and experiences’ of privacy, and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, who has shown that privacy was neither ‘fixated’ nor ‘clear-cut’ but ‘malleable, ephemeral, and situational’.22 Bruun and Nørgaard, as well as their colleagues at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, have demonstrated that although the word ‘privacy’ did not exist as such in the early modern period, the ‘phenomena, practices, and experiences’ of privacy were nonetheless present and discussed in early modern sources.23 The same holds true for the written correspondences of the Dutch and English ambassadors under consideration here. Aernt van Dorp incidentally used words like ‘secreet’ (in private), ‘openbaer’ (in public), and ‘apart’ (separately) to identify his diplomatic interactions at the French court, whereas Robert Cecil used no such terms in their English variants.24 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), however, had instructed Cecil to negotiate with Henri IV’s ministers ‘alone’, meaning in the absence of third parties.25 Despite the infrequent use of relevant terminology in the historical sources, I will contend that issues and concerns over what I have defined as ‘privacy’ were of central importance to the Dutch and English ambassadors, and were discussed by them as such in their corre­ spondences. As Europe’s diplomatic community well understood, everyday life at the court of the late Valois and early Bourbon rulers was all about seeing and being seen. Ellen R. Welch has recently shown that the French court was like a theatrum mundi, a reflection of the European hierarchy of princes that allowed diplomats to compete for attention and, following the advice of experts like Hotman and Gentili, boost the international stand­

22 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, p. 49; Nørgaard, ‘Past Privacy’, p. 11. 23 See the contributions to Early Modern Privacy, ed. by Green and others (quotation in Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, p. 49). 24 Van Dorp’s personal correspondence with the Gecommitteerde Raden van Holland (Committed States of Holland) is largely printed in Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ed. by De van der Schueren, i–ii (quotations on pp. 506–08). Unpublished notes, financial records, and other documents on the special mission to Paris are held at The Hague, Nationaal Archief, Archief familie Van Dorp and Archief Staten-Generaal 1576–1588, some of which will be referenced in the remainder of this chapter. Cecil’s personal correspondence with the Privy Council about his mission to France is printed in Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 10–74. 25 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 11–12. Elizabeth’s instructions will be discussed below.

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ing of their rulers with much pomp and expensive apparel.26 Naturally, ambassadors hoped that their attention-grabbing performance at court would be recorded for posterity in the letters, memoires, or chronicles that other diplomats and deputies sent to courts across Europe to inform their own governments about shifting relations and hierarchies among rulers. Privacy was thus difficult to obtain and, given the desire among foreign en­ voys for public recognition, often unwanted. At the same time, diplomats realized, just like Hotman and Gentili, that some degree of privacy was essential to the successful completion of their mission in France. After all, letters to one’s government could be intercepted by rival parties, deputies could be misled by spies and intelligencers trying to secure classified information, and ostensibly private interactions and conferences could be overheard at court.27 This chapter seeks to unpack ambiguous notions of privacy as observed in the correspondences of the Dutch and English deputies and examines how these notions related to their interaction with other representatives at the French court, especially from Catholic factions in France, such as the ultra-orthodox Catholic League, and other Catholic powers in Eu­ rope, such as Rome and Spain. Rather than studying ‘real’ or ‘performed’ states or conditions of privacy, it examines how ambassadors wrote about ‘phenomena, practices, and experiences’ of privacy to their governments back home and how letters helped to mediate those.28 I will argue that Van Dorp and Cecil deemed a minimal degree of privacy beneficial to the secret nature of their business in France but also that they realized that too much seclusion from public life at court was detrimental to the public recognition that they, as representatives of their rulers, equally sought. Ambassadors were thus required to strike a fine if uneasy balance between safeguarding their privacy, on the one hand, and seeking to improve the prestige of their sovereign, on the other. This chapter will first discuss in what ways diplomatic correspondence may have functioned as a privileged medium to reflect on, as well as monitor, this balance. Special attention is devoted to why ambassadors and other diplomatic stakeholders occa­ sionally publicized seemingly private correspondences and interactions for diplomatic purposes. By drawing on the dispatches of Aernt van Dorp and Robert Cecil, the present chapter will then analyse how both envoys per­

26 Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy, pp. 33–35. See also Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy. Sheila Barker and Tessa Gurney have studied how fierce competition among European diplomats could result into fights over seating arrangements for a court ballet. Barker and Gurney, ‘House Left, House Right’, pp. 137–65. 27 Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, p. 161; Hugon, Au service du Roi Catholique, pp. 359–408. 28 Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy’, p. 49.

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ceived the intricate relationship between privacy and public recognition and between privacy and the related concept of intimacy, which will be discussed in more detail below.

Diplomacy and Written Correspondence Most historians of early modern diplomacy agree that maintaining fre­ quent correspondence with one’s government and wider network of mes­ sengers and intelligence gatherers was of great, if not essential, importance to the successful completion of a diplomatic mission. Timothy Hampton has influentially argued that diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was ‘deeply invested in the dynamics of writing, in the struc­ turing of narrative, and in the development of scriptural authority’.29 Although his 2009 book Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe is mainly concerned with the symbiotic relationship between diplomatic theory and literary fiction, it usefully comments on the shared semiotic nature of conducting diplomacy and writing about that diplomacy through correspondence. Hampton argues that diplomatic missions and the reports that ambassadors wrote about those missions to their home courts were both concerned with the production, exchange, and interpretation of meaning.30 Just as diplomatic missions required emissaries to engage in complex practices of communication to enable negotiation with peers from a wide range of national, cultural, linguistic, and politico-religious backgrounds, so too did written correspondence help them to reflect on, as well as evaluate and contextualize, their own meaning-making practices. Hampton thus concludes that ‘the process of writing up one’s diplomatic negotiations was often as important as the negotiations themselves’.31 Lucien Bély has gone so far as to suggest that writing was the single most important activity of the early modern ambassador.32 Following Hampton, he argues that written correspondence not only allowed envoys to make sense of their own involvement in the diplomatic mission, but also offered them the tools, including literary tropes, textual strategies, and rhetorical conventions, to inform, convince, flatter, and engage their addressees.33 Writing letters to one’s government or colleagues could thus help ambassadors to control the reception of their diplomatic actions and shape public opinion about these actions or other aspects of international

29 30 31 32 33

Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, p. 7. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, pp. 5–7. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, p. 7. Bély, ‘Peut-on parler’, p. 14. See also Bély, ‘L’Écrivain diplomate’. Bély, ‘Peut-on parler’, p. 14.

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relations towards their advantage. As Hampton succinctly puts it, ‘diplo­ matic success may have less to do with what one does as an ambassador, than it has to do with what one writes about what one does as an am­ bassador’.34 Nathalie Rivère de Carles has recently arrived at a similar conclusion. She argues that rhetorical figures, often borrowed from con­ temporaneous drama, were of essential importance for early modern diplo­ mats while articulating ‘paradoxes’ and making sense of their involvement in ‘appeasement strategies’.35 Their very correspondence, then, became ‘diplomatic instruments’.36 Although the alleged importance of written records for early modern diplomacy has been nuanced in recent years, Hampton and Bély are right to highlight the key role that letters played in the evaluation, narration, and promotion of the diplomatic actions of an envoy.37 In what follows, it will be proposed that written correspondence was a particularly effective, and arguably privileged, medium to help am­ bassadors negotiate their private and public activities, reflect on the wider diplomatic significance of those activities, and shape public opinion about them. Perhaps the most obvious way in which diplomatic letters could enable ambassadors to mediate between their private and public actions was the opportunity that cipher or coded language offered to transmit secret information to addressees without being understandable to rival parties. Cipher thus ensured a necessary degree of privacy that helped safeguard one’s mission or broader diplomatic scheming from interference.38 In Oc­ tober 1585, for example, Francis Walsingham (c. 1532–1590), the English ambassador to France, sent a largely encoded letter to William Harborne (c. 1542–1617), the English diplomat to the Ottoman Empire, to secretly discuss plans for an Anglo-Turkish alliance against Spain.39 Additionally, cryptography allowed ambassadors to protect the identity of the spies and intelligencers they had hired to obtain confidential information from other embassies or factions at court. In a report to Walsingham, Edward Stafford (1552–1605), extraordinary member of the English delegation that offered Henri III the Order of the Garter in February 1585, encoded the name of the spy whom he had instructed to shadow the embassy of Aernt van

Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, p. 7. Emphases in original. Rivère de Carles, ‘The Poetics of Diplomatic Appeasement’, p. 3. Rivère de Carles, ‘The Poetics of Diplomatic Appeasement’, p. 3. Filippo de Vivo has argued that ‘[diplomacy] was conducted primarily through the oral medium, as ambassadors, sovereigns and ministers met face to face in personal encounters generally known as audiences and signed written agreements only after protracted discussions’. De Vivo, ‘Archives of Speech’, p. 520. 38 Monts de Savasse, ‘Les chiffres de la correspondance diplomatique’. 39 Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Tanner 78, fol. 66 (18 October 1585). 34 35 36 37

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Dorp.40 Van Dorp’s delegation happened to be in Paris around the same time. Since English diplomats were not accustomed to share extensive details about their mission in their correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, regardless of whether these details could be provided in cipher or not, Stafford added that ‘I would not in my general letter [to the queen] give the name of him that I have sent to the [Dutch] deputies, as he desired not to be named’.41 More often than not, ambassadors were hesitant to share large amounts of secret information in writing. Detailed accounts of their conferences or meetings at court are therefore relatively scarce. Pref­ erence was regularly given to oral transmittance by loyal couriers of letters who could relay confidential details about a mission to the addressee in person to reduce the risk of interception.42 For this very reason, as will be discussed in more detail below, Robert Cecil was careful to inform the Privy Council, the queen’s advisory council, appointed to give ‘private’ or confidential advice to the monarch, that the ‘many pleasant and familliar discourses’ that he had shared with Henri IV in April 1598 were ‘not fitt for paper’ and were ‘to bee related at other tymes’.43 Besides communicating and protecting secret information, written cor­ respondence allowed for sustained reflection on the diplomatic implica­ tions of the ambassador’s private and public activities at court. Dispatches often displayed a deep awareness of the public nature of diplomacy and court life at large. For example, ambassadors were keen to record their presence in the audiences for the many theatrical entertainments given at the French court, including evening-long ballets, mock tournaments, and firework dramas. These entertainments often directly engaged with international relations through allegorical or mythological representation and contained diplomatic messages specific to the visiting deputies.44 In a long dispatch to Elizabeth from February–March 1585, Edward Stafford and Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby (1531–1593), who headed the English embassy at Henri III’s court, were therefore eager to document all the banquets and spectacles that had been staged in their honour, including

40 Calendar of State Papers, ed. by Crosby, pp. 276–77 (22 February 1585). The name of Stafford’s spy was Hermann Taffin, sieur de Torsay (b. 1528). The English diplomat must have rewarded Torsay generously because he was the brother of Van Dorp’s treasurer, Quintijn Taffin, sieur de la Prée. 41 Calendar of State Papers, p. 276. For more on diplomatic letters addressed to Elizabeth versus those written to secretaries of state, see Stewart, ‘Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher’, p. 121. 42 Stewart, ‘Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher’, pp. 125–28. 43 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38 (2 April 1598). 44 The diplomatic function and European reception of festival culture in France between 1572 and 1615 is the topic of my latest monograph (Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy).

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a splendid ballet that featured the king himself in a leading role.45 Letterwriting, in other words, frequently served to draw the attention of the addressee (the ruler, their chief advisor, or general board of advisors) to the public recognition gained at the host court and the prestige this had conferred, or was believed to have been conferred, on the person of the diplomat and — by extension — the addressee themself. However, not all events worthy of recording in diplomatic correspon­ dences were as ostentatious as Henri III’s ballet for the English ambas­ sadors. In June 1572, for example, Thomas Smith (1513–1577), an English deputy, reported to Elizabeth’s main advisor, William Cecil (1520–1598), that his embassy was invited for a private supper at the château de Madrid, located just outside Paris.46 Since the château was a private residence not normally open to visiting delegates, the invitation heightened the compli­ ment paid to Smith’s embassy. More than functioning as a testimony to public recognition alone, written correspondence also helped ambassadors to evaluate the diplomatic ramifications of their private and public actions. As will be examined at length below, Aernt van Dorp was disappointed to observe that his private audiences with Henri III did not allow him to publicly engage with the other foreign envoys at the French court. Robert Cecil, by contrast, was largely content with his private conversations with Henri IV but eventually realized that the prestige thus bestowed on him was not entirely genuine. For both deputies, letter-writing offered a space to voice concerns about the impact of their public and private appearances at court, as well as a tool to keep the balance between those appearances in check. Just as letter-writing enabled ambassadors to record and evaluate their private and public actions, it also helped to shape public opinion about those actions. Early modern diplomats and their rulers were highly aware that everything taking place at court could potentially be put in writing and dispatched to recipients across Europe. This heightened awareness about the international reach of one’s actions can be compared to our me­ dia culture today in which we have become increasingly aware of the fact that everything happening in the public space can potentially be captured on camera and uploaded to social media platforms worldwide.47 Early modern diplomats and rulers, too, understood that any form of interaction among them, however private or public, could be recorded, become the subject of widespread gossip at courts across Europe, and ultimately deter­ mine their position on the world’s stage. This awareness made them highly

45 Bodl. Lib., MS Tanner 78, fols 36r–38v (27 February and 4 March 1585). For a detailed discussion of the dispatch and the king’s ballet, see Strong, ‘Festivals for the Garter Embassy’, pp. 52–55. 46 Original Letters, p. 12 (28 June 1572). 47 Berry and others, ‘Introduction’, pp. 8–9.

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aware of their performance in public which could then be manipulated in such a way that it served one’s own diplomatic purposes. A vivid example of how such a manipulated performance could be observed by diplomats and consequently be recorded in written correspondence is the account that Thomas Smith sent to William Cecil in June 1572.48 At the time, Smith served as a member of the English embassy that resided at the court of Charles IX (1550–1574) in Paris to celebrate the conclusion of the Treaty of Blois, a commerce-defensive accord between France and England. In his account, Smith reported a seemingly private chat between Charles IX, his brother Anjou (the future Henri III), and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572), military leader of France’s Huguenot minority. Their conversation took place after the English diplomats and French nobles had enjoyed a lavish dinner in the Tuileries Gardens of the Louvre Palace. Smith reported that the three men ‘had long & very familiar, and, as apperid, pleasaunt talke’ which lasted uninterruptedly for ‘almost an hower’ and was, as the diplomat pointed out, ‘very comfortable to som, and, as suspicious and displeasant to other’.49 By ‘other’, Smith almost certainly meant to refer to the displeased Catholic guests at the dinner table, most of whom were members of the ultra-orthodox Guise family. Since the conversation between the three men was protracted and held in plain sight to attract attention, we may surmise that the king and his brother hoped that the occasion would quickly become subject to gossip among their English and French guests and subsequently be recorded in writing, as Smith would eventually do in his letter to Cecil. By granting Coligny a private chat that was nonetheless clearly staged in the open, Charles hoped to reinforce ties with the Huguenot faction at court and keep the power-hungry Guises at bay.50 Written correspondence, then, was not only an important means to promote one’s diplomatic agenda but also a medium through which others — to a certain degree — could manipulate that very agenda. It is worthy of note, finally, that diplomatic correspondence was occa­ sionally printed (in redacted form) as pamphlets to reach international audiences of diplomatic stakeholders that extended beyond the traditional ruling elite. Rosanne M. Baars has recently studied this practice within the context of late sixteenth-century France and the Netherlands.51 She focuses on chroniclers and diarists from both countries who consulted pamphlets, some of which were published by ambassadors, based on their own correspondence, to keep informed about events in the Dutch Revolt

48 49 50 51

Original Letters, pp. 12–22 (28 June 1572). Original Letters, p. 18. Sutherland, ‘The Role of Coligny’, pp. 323–39; Holt, The Duke of Anjou, p. 19. Baars, Rumours of Revolt.

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and the French Wars of Religion. The publication of such pamphlets was often financed by the authors of the correspondence themselves and served to influence public opinion about, and promote or defend their involvement in, a wide range of diplomatic events and activities.52 Therefore, many of the pamphlets originally published in — or as — diplomatic letters were harangues: speeches of an ambassador to a ruler or political leader, normally delivered during a court audience, that sought to criticize or protest a particular act or decision taken — often by that same ruler or spokesperson. Ambassadors and their rulers frequently circulated multilingual issues of these and other pamphlets among their international correspondence network of envoys and intelligencers. The pamphlets were sometimes dispatched together with, or enclosed in, other printed media that were deemed of diplomatic interest, including apolo­ gias, broadsheets, newspapers, and booklets commemorating diplomatic events such as court festivals or ceremonial entries.53 Baars convincingly demonstrates that practices of chronicling and pamphleteering in France and the Netherlands gave rise to ‘a transnational news culture’ and ‘a public of critical international news consumers’.54 Occasionally, harangues of ambassadors were circulated in pamphletform by their opponents to inform adherents of the other party’s diplo­ matic scheming and wider intentions. In early 1585, for example, an anonymous supporter of the Dutch mission to Henri III’s court in Paris published a copy of the speech that Bernardino de Mendoza (1540–1604), the Spanish ambassador to France, had delivered to the French king during a court audience in February of that same year.55 Written in French, the pamphlet was printed in Ghent and targeted at the town’s citizenry who continued to rebel against their lawful Spanish rulers. In the preface to the pamphlet, the anonymous publisher explained that Mendoza’s harangue demonstrated the aggressive ambitions of Philip II, as the ambassador had angrily requested that Henri III should abort negotiations with the Dutch rebels and hand them over to his master.56 Diplomatic stakeholders thus frequently sought to exploit the global impact of the printing press to express their own view on a particular diplomatic event or situation. In other words, early modern diplomacy was as much about secrecy as it was

52 Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy’. 53 Van Leuveren, ‘Crossing Borders’, pp. 29–31. 54 Baars, Rumours of Revolt, p. 210. For general accounts on pamphlet cultures in sixteenth — and early seventeenth-century France, see Le Pamphlet en France au xvie siècle; Sawyer, Printed Poison. 55 Copie de l’Harenge. BL, General Reference Collection, T. 1716. (4.). On Mendoza’s diplomatic career in France, see Jensen, Diplomacy and Dogmatism. 56 Copie de l’Harenge, ‘Au Lecteur’, p. 30. For an extensive discussion of the pamphlet, see Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 163–66.

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about public engagement with international audiences. Historians of early modern diplomacy have labelled this type of public engagement as ‘public diplomacy’.57

Privacy and Public Recognition The personal correspondence that Aernt van Dorp maintained during his special embassy in France from January to March 1585 with the Gecommitteerde Raden van Holland (Committed States of Holland) in Hoorn offers an interesting test bed for the way in which envoys of a Calvinist and rebel state perceived issues of privacy at one of Europe’s most powerful Catholic and royal courts.58 Van Dorp had been the herald and closest favourite of Prince William I of Orange (1533–1584), leader of the Dutch Revolt against Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), the legitimate Habsburg overlord of the Provinces, whose violent and oppressive rule was the catalyser of the rebellion.59 The States-General, the legislative body of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, had deposed Philip in direct violation of the scared institution of the monarchy on 26 July 1581 by the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration). Following the assassination of William of Orange by a fanatical supporter of Philip three years later, the States-General instructed Van Dorp to travel to Paris and offer the French king, Henri III, the titular rule of the Provinces. Henri was the elder brother of Hercule-François, duc d’Anjou and d’Alençon (1555–1584), who had briefly — and ultimately unsuccessfully — acted as overlord of the Dutch rebels from 1579 until his premature death.60 The States-General hoped that Henri would accept a similar position and offer the Provinces much-needed protection against Spain. It is important for my analysis of Van Dorp’s understanding of privacy to know more about the way in which the Dutch embassy was received at the French court, given the secrecy surrounding the exact purpose of their mission and the international status of the Provinces as a rebel state whose diplomatic agency was severely contested.61 Henri was genuinely concerned about the privacy of Van Dorp’s delegation, as he feared that the

57 Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy’; Rossiter, ‘“Lingua Eius Loquetur Mendacium”’; Cultural and Public Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. by Van Gelder and Lamal; Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 7–9. 58 The Gecommitteerde Raden van Holland (hereafter Gecommitteerde Raden), also known as the Gecommitteerde Raden van Holland in the Noorderkwartier (Committed States of Holland in the Northern Quarter), was the executive council of the Province of Holland who had elected Van Dorp as head of the special embassy to France. 59 For Van Dorp’s biography, see Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, i, pp. xiii–xlix. 60 Holt, The Duke of Anjou, pp. 93–112; Duquenne, L’Enterprise du Duc d’Anjou. 61 Heringa, De eer en hoogheid van de staat; Geevers, ‘The King Strikes Back’, pp. 81–95.

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other foreign ambassadors at court, including the aforementioned English delegation, the papal nuncio, and the Spanish and Savoyard deputies, would pester the Dutch envoys and try to obtain intelligence about their mission.62 According to the English diplomat Edward Stafford, the king had instructed Roch de Sorbiers, sieur des Pruneaux (d. 1596), the French agent to the States-General, to keep a close watch on Van Dorp’s deputies ‘to see who comes to them and whither they go’.63 Although the diplomatic community in Paris was largely aware of the offer of overlordship that the States-General had proposed to Henri, the king was careful not to disclose any details about his negotiations with Van Dorp to inquisitive ambas­ sadors at court. In early March 1585, the English delegation complained that Henri’s appreciation of privacy had become somewhat excessive and would cause offence to Elizabeth who took a keen interest in the future of the Provinces herself, given her wish to create a defensive front with France and the States-General against the aggressive ambitions of Spain.64 The head of the English embassy, Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, thus wrote together with Stafford to Walsingham, their residing colleague in France, to inform him that the French king had refused to ‘make her Majesty [Elizabeth] partaker of his mind’.65 Not surprisingly, Henri kept the reception of the Dutch envoys delib­ erately low-key. Rather than being conspicuously entertained in towns across France, as was common when special embassies travelled through the kingdom en route to Paris, Van Dorp’s train was forced to spend their nights at cheap staging posts.66 In the capital, the deputies were lodged in local inns, instead of the rooms specially reserved for diplomats at the Louvre Palace, and were not invited to any public events at court to avoid interaction with other visiting dignitaries.67 The only ceremony that the Dutch envoys received was held in late January 1585 at Senlis, some forty kilometres to the north of Paris, where they were welcomed by one of the gentilshommes de la Chambre du Roi (Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber).68 By receiving the embassy well outside the capital,

62 The names of these other foreign ambassadors were Gerolamo Ragazzoni (1537–1592), the aforementioned Bernardino de Mendoza, and René de Lucinge (c. 1553–c. 1615) respectively. 63 Calendar of State Papers, p. 274 (dispatch from Stafford to Walsingham, 22 February 1585). 64 Calendar of State Papers, p. 295 (5 March 1585). 65 Calendar of State Papers, p. 295. 66 The financial records of Van Dorp’s journey from Boulogne to Paris are held at the Nationaal Archief, Archief familie Van Dorp, inv. no. 1008 (four infoliated stapled papers, January– February 1585). 67 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ed. by De van der Schueren, ii, p. 506 (dispatch from Van Dorp to the Gecommitteerde Raden, 22 February 1585). 68 Hooft, P. C. Hoofts Nederlandsche historien, p. 262.

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Henri hoped to minimize public interest in Van Dorp’s mission.69 In his personal correspondence with the Gecommitteerde Raden, Van Dorp repeatedly commented on the clandestine nature of his reception and the consequences that it carried for his public appearances at the French court. On 22 February 1585, the envoy reported that ‘[I]ck [en can] noch anders nyet vermercken, dan dat men [the French] ons hier [at the court in Paris] metter harten meent, doch meer int secreet, dan int openbaer’ (I cannot but notice that they treat us here as if we were close to their hearts, though more in secret than in public).70 Van Dorp thus suggested that privacy came at the expense of the public recognition that he would otherwise have sought or appreciated, just like any other foreign ambassador. As we have seen, Hotman and Gentili believed that the public recognition of one’s ruler and state, and thus of one’s own diplomatic agency, could be achieved through conspicuous displays of wealth and largesse, by which embassies could simultaneously honour their hosting court.71 Obtaining public recognition was particularly urgent in the case of the Provinces whose diplomatic agency was heavily contested and challenged by more powerful countries in Europe, notably Spain and its Catholic allies.72 This interpretation is reinforced further by Van Dorp’s brief comment, in the same dispatch to the Gecommitteerde Raden, on his carefully planned meetings with several prominent members of the French royal family, in­ cluding the king’s wife, Louise de Lorraine (1553–1601), and his mother, Catherine de Médicis (1519–1589), who had occupied a powerful role as regent and governor to her sons from the 1560s until the end of the 1580s and had acted favourably towards her Protestant subjects in the past.73 Van Dorp wrote that these meetings, held in early February 1585, were ‘ghenouch int openbaer (maer elck apart)’ (sufficiently public (but each separately)).74 In the envoy’s report, it remains unclear how ‘openbaer’ (public) his interactions with the royal family actually were and how many deputies at court would have been able to witness the events. We may surmise that the public nature of the meetings would have been minimal (as suggested by the phrase ‘ghenouch int openbaer’ (sufficiently public) and might have been partly staged behind a tapestry.75 It is clear, however, that a formal public audience with the king and his family, as

Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ii, p. 506. Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ii, p. 508. My italics. Hotman, L’Ambassadeur, pp. 22–23; Gentili, De Legationibus, p. 96. Since the late 1560s, the States-General frequently distributed multilingual pamphlets and engravings to gain international sympathy for their revolt against Spain and, ultimately, public recognition as an independent diplomatic player. See Horst, De Opstand in zwart-wit; Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy’. 73 Cloulas, Catherine de Médicis; Crouzet, Le Haut Cœur de Catherine de Médicis. 74 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ii, p. 507. 75 On the tapestries at the Louvre in early 1585, see Chatenet, ‘Henri III au Louvre’. 69 70 71 72

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was commonly awarded to visiting dignitaries upon their arrival at court, was not reserved for contested embassies like Van Dorp’s and would have attracted unwanted attention to the Dutch delegation and its mission whose exact purpose was so painstakingly kept secret. In other words, the individually planned meetings of Van Dorp with the royal family seem to have been just about civil enough so as not to have been offensive, while offering the States-General some form of public recognition. Van Dorp’s ambiguous conception of privacy, as both a diplomatic necessity and an antidote to public recognition, can also be gauged from his account on the embassy’s negotiations with Henri about their offer of overlordship, which was part of the same report of 22 February 1585. All of these negotiations were held behind closed doors, in the king’s ‘secreet cabinet’ (private study), which meant that the Dutch envoys spent most of their stay at the French court in this room.76 Van Dorp probably realized that retreating into the king’s private cabinet was a diplomatic necessity, for both Henri and his own embassy, if intervention from espe­ cially the Catholic deputies at court was to be avoided. In his dispatch to the Gecommitteerde Raden, Van Dorp claimed that these emissaries had desperately tried to break off his first audience with Henri on 12 February and his ensuing negotiations with the king over the States-General’s offer of overlordship: Ick en sal hier nyet besunders schrijven, wat dambassadeurs vanden Paus, Savoyen, van Spaengien, met meer andere, al gedaen hebben, eerst om daudientie ende daernaer om den voortganck van desen handel te verhinderen, ghemerekt uwer E. dat selffs wel connen bedenkcken. (I will not write in detail here what the ambassadors of the Pope, Savoy, of Spain, with more others, have done to obstruct, first, the audience and, after that, the proceedings of this business, as your Noblemen can well imagine).77 More than a diplomatic necessity alone, Van Dorp evaluated his first audience with the king, during which he presented the States-General’s

76 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ii, p. 507. On Henri’s private study, which was located above the chambre du roi (royal chamber) and could only be accessed via a separate staircase, see Le Roux, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais’, pp. 232–33, 259–60. According to Nicolas Le Roux, the room was reserved for ‘entretiens particuliers, […] repos et […] dévotions privée du prince’ (private conversations, repose, and the prince’s private devotion). Le Roux, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais’, p. 232 (quotation). 77 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ed. by De van der Schueren, ii, p. 508. Unfortunately, Van Dorp did not elaborate further on the wrongdoings of these ambassadors, probably for fear that his dispatch to the Gecommitteerde Raden would be intercepted by the diplomats in question.

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proposed articles of overlordship, in largely optimistic terms. In his report to the Gecommitteerde Raden, the envoy wrote that ‘uwer E. [mach] wel verseeckeren, dat dees antwoorde [of Henri, in response to the articles] verselschapt was met een blijde ende vriendelick gelaet’ (your Noblemen can be assured that this reply was accompanied by a happy and friendly countenance).78 Van Dorp’s emphasis on Henri’s ostensibly positive re­ sponse is significant here, as it was rare for the king in early 1585 to treat any visiting delegation to face-to-face interactions, let alone to conversa­ tions in which he suggested to be on friendly terms with them. Monique Chatenet and Nicolas Le Roux have shown that, just one month before Van Dorp’s arrival, Henri had refurbished his apartments at the Louvre, which made it considerably difficult for visitors to access his person. Whereas previously there had been only one antechamber between the salle (entrance hall) and chambre d’audience (audience room), the room where most visitors would have been received, the number of antecham­ bers had now been multiplied to three, which extended the distance that delegations had to cover upon arrival at the palace.79 The prolonged route from entrance hall to audience room subjected visitors to various ‘temporal as well as spatial thresholds connected to rank’ which increased competence among embassies who wished to converse with the king.80 Henri could only be addressed or approached upon invitation.81 According to Le Roux, the king’s study was the most secluded space among the royal apartments. Since contemporaries often believed that Henri’s cabinet was a room where the secrets of state were both managed and metaphor­ ically kept safe, being invited to the space was considered a significant privilege.82 The privacy afforded by Henri’s cabinet permitted Van Dorp’s embassy direct access to the person of the king and, hence, to France’s centre of power — an exclusive form of proximity that, as seen above, was not even awarded to Derby and Stafford, the English representatives at court.83 The Dutch emissaries may thus very well have regarded privacy as a form of social capital but likely only partially so. Their evaluation of the privacy awarded to them in Henri’s study was probably not outright positive but

78 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ed. by De van der Schueren, ii, p. 507. The articles, as they were presented to Henri by Van Dorp, are held at the Nationaal Archief, Archief StatenGeneraal 1576–1588, inv. no. 88 (six leaves, not foliated, 11 February 1585), and include the king’s revisions. 79 Chatenet, ‘Henri III et l’ordre de la cour’; Chatenet, La Cour de France, pp. 135–40; Le Roux, La Faveur du roi, pp. 177–86; Le Roux, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais’; Chatenet, ‘Henri III au Louvre’. See also Van Leuveren, ‘Disputed State, Contested Hospitality’, p. 226. 80 Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, p. 162. 81 Le Roux, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais’, p. 259; Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, p. 162. 82 Le Roux, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais’, p. 263. 83 For more on princely access, see The Key to Power?

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more ambiguous instead. After all, the embassy’s enforced seclusion from public life at the French court proved eventually detrimental to the inter­ national recognition that the States-General, for reasons discussed above, would also have been keen to obtain. The fact that Van Dorp emphasized to the Gecommitteerde Raden that he was received at court ‘meer int secreet, dan int openbaer’ (more in secret than in public) demonstrates that the envoy was himself keenly aware of his inability to claim such recognition.84 Ultimately, Van Dorp’s failure to fully engage in public life at the French court, combined with his general lack of negotiation power as a representative of a rebel state, did not allow him to effectively advance the States-General’s interests, let alone improve the international reputation of the Provinces through public displays of affluence, as recommended by Hotman and Gentili. Henri, in turn, was faced with domestic conflicts at home and pressure from Catholic powers abroad and could thus not accept the Dutch offer of overlordship. Only eleven year later, in May 1596, when Henri IV invited the Provinces to join a defensive alliance between France and England against Spain — the so-called Triple Alliance of Greenwich — could the States-General navigate Europe’s diplomatic com­ munity with much greater confidence.85

Privacy and Intimacy In the diplomatic correspondence discussed in this chapter, privacy is not only defined in terms of seclusion but also frequently associated with in­ timacy. I understand intimacy here as managing bonds of loyalty or clien­ telism through performed — that is, orchestrated and not necessarily ‘real’ or genuine — gestures of affection or favouritism.86 One common gesture of intimacy that rulers extended to visiting delegations was to suggest or claim that for the duration of a particular interaction they would abolish ceremonial protocol, notably the use of honorific titles, polite phrases, or rules of precedence, thereby signalling to the embassy in question that they were held in higher esteem, and were thus considered to be more loyal or important, than any other.87 In March and April 1598, thirteen years after Van Dorp’s failed embassy to Paris, the English diplomat Robert Cecil went to greater lengths than the unfortunate Dutch envoy to convince his 84 Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken, ii, p. 506. 85 Wernham, The Return of the Armadas, pp. 70–81. 86 Intimacy is an important theme in scholarship on early modern access and court culture, but rarely explicitly defined. See Adamson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 13, 33; Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, pp. 161–80; The Key to Power?. On early modern concepts and practices of clientelism, loyalty, and friendship among the ruling elite in Europe, see Kettering, ‘Friendship and Clientage’; Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients; Kooijmans, Vriendschap. 87 Asch, ‘Patronage, Friendship and the Politics of Access’, p. 184.

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government of his intimacy with the French king, Henri IV. Cecil’s special embassy to France, which took him to the king’s châteaux in Angers and Nantes, was motivated by Henri’s recent peace negotiations with Spain which had called his commitment to the aforementioned Triple Alliance of Greenwich, and thus to his friendship with England, into question. In his weekly dispatches to the Privy Council in London, Cecil gave the impression that Henri treated him as a good friend without any regard for courtly or diplomatic formalities. On 2 April 1598, Cecil reported his third audience with the king at Angers, held that same day in his private study or cabinet, while the latter was in bed: Hee [Henri] heard mee all this [Cecil’s misgivings about France’s peace talks with Spain] with great attention […] Rethoriques was for pedants. Hee [the king] could now truely and freely answere mee and not as hee answered ordinarye ambassadors, seeing the Queene [Elizabeth] had sent her tabletts [letters of credence].88 Similar to Van Dorp’s private audiences at the Louvre Palace, Cecil’s invitation to the king’s private study offered him a form of privacy and, as suggested in the diplomat’s account, intimacy, that was unattainable during formal public audiences with a monarch given in the great hall of a royal residence in France. Those audiences, after all, were attended by a wide range of courtiers, envoys, and other court officials. ‘In the context of the highly public, theatrical culture of the court’, as Ellen R. Welch rightly notes, ‘privacy and intimacy were powerful alternative forms of per­ formance’ that could signify the king’s liking for a particular ambassador and — by implication — their government or sovereign.89 Cecil’s emphasis on the alleged familiarity of his audience with Henri suggests that the diplomat was well aware of the privilege and general favour that this form of privacy conferred on him. At the same time, how­ ever, Cecil was probably aware that some members of the Privy Council were doubtful if the king’s commitment to his alliance with England was genuine and the diplomat may have tried to demonstrate Henri’s good intentions to prove them wrong. The anonymous writer of a preparatory draft on the English mission had predicted that the king would use the visit of Cecil’s delegation to defend his honour as a trustworthy ally of Elizabeth.90 But rather than genuinely committing himself to friendly relations with the queen, the writer suspected that Henri would try to fob off Cecil’s train with diplomatic niceties:

88 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 42. 89 Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy, p. 30. 90 Calendar of the Manuscripts, [ed. by Roberts], pp. 7–9 (19 January 1598).

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[I]t is thought by many […] that he [the king] will, at the length, suffer himself to be enforced to a peace without any regard of his allies by the importunacy of his realm and Councils, and so under that colour, and these ceremonious preambles and ambassages, give the world a kind of satisfaction and defend his own honour.91 In other words, just as kings could express sympathy to diplomats and their masters through coordinated performances of privacy and intimacy, so could they also use these performances to create the false impression that they shared the same ideas, beliefs, and assumptions as the visiting ambassador in question.92 By claiming that Henri’s reception of Cecil’s delegation ‘[would] give the world a kind of satisfaction’, the anonymous writer of the draft suggested that the king would try to satisfy Elizabeth, as well as other Protestant rulers, who eagerly maintained correspondence with their diplomats in France, without actually taking her seriously as an ally or accommodating any of her demands and wishes.93 Whether Henri’s display of intimacy towards Cecil was deceptive or not, it is significant that the English diplomat tried to convince the Privy Council of its sincerity. Unlike Van Dorp’s ambiguous conception of privacy at the court of Henri III, Cecil perceived the intimacy afforded to him in Henri IV’s private study as a largely positive form of social capital that elevated him above the ‘ordinarye ambassadors’, as the king, according to the ambassador in his dispatch, had put it.94 It is for the purposes of this chapter interesting to note that Cecil reflected in his dispatches on the various degrees of privacy involved in his diplomatic interactions with the king. As discussed, Henri’s private study accommodated a kind of privacy that could not be obtained in the busy halls of his château in Angers. However, this privacy was clearly relative. While conversing with Cecil in his cabinet, Henri was still surrounded by advisors and favourites who could overhear or take note of their conversa­ tion.95 In Cecil’s account of his first audience with the king in his private study two days before, included in the same dispatch of 2 April 1598, the envoy described how, near the end of the event, the presence of a great 91 Calendar of the Manuscripts, [ed. by Roberts], pp. 8–9. 92 Audrey Truschke has called this feigned type of understanding ‘deceptive familiarity’, see ‘Deceptive Familiarity’. 93 Calendar of the Manuscripts, [ed. by Roberts], p. 9. Since the United Provinces of the Netherlands had also signed the Triple Alliance of Greenwich, the States-General took a keen interest in Cecil’s delegation which coincided with the visit of a Dutch embassy, headed by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619) and Justin of Nassau (1559–1631). The travel diary that Van Oldenbarnevelt and Nassau kept during their embassy in France often referred to Cecil’s interactions with Henri IV (Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, ed. by Haak, pp. 407–63). 94 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 42. 95 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 37.

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many courtiers prompted him to request for a more private conversation with the king, without the intervention from others: I, the Secretary, made request unto him [Henri] because the tyme and place was now improper for any further particularityes, that hee should yield mee some other accesse where with more freedome hee mighte understand what wee [the English delegation] had in comission.96 The king’s unexpected response to Cecil’s request, as recorded by the English diplomat, is telling because it suggests that Henri was highly aware of the limitations that public life at court posed to privacy and the prestige that arranging for a peer-to-peer conversation in a more private setting would confer on the deputy: And soe suddainely [the king] tooke me by the hand contrarie to myne expectation, saying hee would walke with mee downe into the garden en qualitye de amy [as friends], where he entertayned mee an hower and a halfe with many pleasant and familliar discourses of his opinion of diverse of his subjects and other particulers not fitt for paper nor of necessity now though fitt to bee related at other tymes.97 As shown by Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin and, more recently, Roberta Anderson, early modern gardens often functioned as ‘informal third space[s]’ for diplomatic activity that, unlike the great halls and conference rooms at court, did not require the formal presence of a scribe or body of advisors, and thus did not have to conform as stringently to ‘the necessary formalities’ of diplomatic audiences or conferences.98 Although inquisitive courtiers could, of course, still eavesdrop on diplomatic interac­ tions (as they would surely have done during Cecil’s conversation with Henri), gardens usually allowed deputies and other visitors at court a higher degree of access to the king that minimized intervention from third parties and permitted, as Cecil phrased it, ‘more freedome’ to negotiate and discuss affairs of state.99 Cecil’s account of his garden talk with Henri brings into focus yet another aspect of privacy that is of interest to our discussion. Rather than reporting his conversation with the king in a matter-of-fact fashion, the English diplomat tried to recreate the sense of privacy and intimacy that he 96 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38. 97 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38. Emphasis in original. 98 Berger and Hedin, Diplomatic Tours; Anderson, ‘Marginal Diplomatic Spaces’ (quotations in Anderson, ‘Marginal Diplomatic Spaces’, pp. 163, 165). A narrow staircase on the northeastern side of the château directly connected the royal lodges to the gardens downstairs. This helped evading inquisitive courtiers whom Henri and Cecil would otherwise have encountered had they taken the regular route to the gardens via the inner court. Guillaume, ‘Château, jardin, paysage’, p. 13; Van Leuveren, Early Modern Diplomacy, pp. 191–94. 99 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38.

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purportedly shared with Henri. This is mostly conveyed through a direct quotation of the original French: ‘[E]n qualitye de amy’ (as friends).100 By citing the king’s words verbatim, or by creating the impression that he did, Cecil demonstrated to the Privy Council that Henri was genuinely committed to preserve friendship with Elizabeth through him, the queen’s servant.101 The quotation thus evoked a sense of the king’s emotional attachment to this friendship, as well as a sense of what it was like, from Cecil’s point of view, to share ‘pleasant and familliar discourses’ with the king.102 In other words, the English ambassador was at the same time keen to showcase his close proximity to Henri, and the personal attention that this entailed, which he could use as evidence to promote his diplomatic successes at the French court to the Privy Council at home. Cecil’s account of his garden talk, however, suggests that privacy remained limited within a courtly and diplomatic context. The envoy’s comment that some of the ‘other particulers’ discussed with the king were not ‘fitt for paper […] though fitt to bee related at other tymes’ indicated that confidential infor­ mation, as demonstrated above, would normally not be committed to paper (unless, of course, encoded in cipher) but communicated to the recipient by a courier.103 Cecil’s correspondence, then, served to reflect on the diplomatic implications (of various degrees) of privacy for his mission in France, while also safeguarding the very privacy of that mission through careful wording. Why did Cecil seem to evaluate the privacy that he enjoyed at the French court in almost exclusively positive terms, contrary to Dorp at the opening of 1585? Similar to Henri III’s welcome of Van Dorp’s embassy, Cecil’s reception at Henri IV’s château in Angers was low-key. The king realized that an all too public reception of Cecil’s embassy would seriously endanger his relationship with the pope and his success at securing peace with Spain. Before talks about a Franco-Spanish accord had even began, Pope Clement VIII (1536–1605) had warned that by no means would he accept the participation of Protestant states in negotiations carried out under his authority.104 Public audiences, banquets, and other tokens of

100 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38. 101 Rayne Allinson has studied the ‘spiritual kinship’ between Elizabeth and Henri in their correspondence before Henri’s coronation as King of France in 1589. Allinson argues that Elizabeth and Henri’s kinship — ‘intimacy’ in the definition given above — was based on a shared commitment to the Protestant cause. Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters, pp. 151–66 (quotation on p. 151). 102 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38. 103 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, p. 38. 104 Lettres du cardinal de Florence, ed. by Ritter, pp. 164–65 (letter of Alessandro de’Medici to Pietro Aldobrandini, 17 July 1597); Haan, ‘La Dernière Paix’, pp. 51–53. Besides England, Clement refused to negotiate with the Dutch Republic, the Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire, Scotland, and the Swiss Cantons.

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hospitality were thus kept to an absolute minimum to avoid unwanted attention from papal and Spanish ambassadors, as well as from representa­ tives of the Habsburg-sponsored Catholic League who were also present at Henri’s court at Angers.105 As a representative of one of France’s closest al­ lies, however, Cecil was in a much better position than Van Dorp was thir­ teen years before to accept that a high degree of privacy was indispensable to convince Henri of the necessity to maintain his controversial friendship with England and would come at the expense of public recognition. The queen’s instructions to the special embassy also underlined the importance of operating in relative privacy to evade interference from especially the Catholic ambassadors at court.106 In it, Elizabeth warned Cecil and his personal secretary, John Herbert (c. 1540–1617), not to ‘enter into any conference or treaty with any commissioners to the Kinge of Spaine’ and to limit their diplomatic interactions to a small number of stakeholders, namely the king himself, his ministers (conferences with whom should be held ‘alone’), and a befriended delegation of Dutch ambassadors who had also travelled to France to find out more about Henri’s peace negotiations at Vervins.107 Although received favourably via the backchannels at court, Cecil’s train could ultimately not dissuade Henri from concluding the FrancoSpanish rapprochement. It is evident from a dispatch by François van Aerssen (1572–1641), the new agent of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in France, that the king had intentionally delayed the signing of the Peace of Vervins until 2 May 1598.108 This was just days after the English and Dutch embassies had left the kingdom.109 Henri undoubtedly feared that the simultaneous presence of the Protestant ambassadors at court would increase tensions and worsen mutual relations. Judging from Cecil and Herbert’s report to the Privy Council of their first audience with the king at his château in Nantes, held on 15 April 1598, both men were seriously disappointed with Henri’s breach of friendship, as it was already clear to them that he would press ahead with the peace talks at

105 Cecil’s embassy coincided with the visit of the last standing leader of the Catholic League, Philippe Emmanuel, duc de Mercœur (1558–1602), and his representatives. Mercœur had travelled to Angers to negotiate his reconciliation with Henri which would result in the betrothal of his daughter Françoise de Lorraine (1592–1669) to the king’s illegitimate son César de Bourbon (1594–1665) on 5 April 1598. 106 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 11–20 (10 February 1598). 107 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 11–12. For more on the Dutch embassy, see note 93 above. 108 The Hague, Nationaal Archief, Archief van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, 1586–1619, inv. no. 2026 (Van Aerssen to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Justin of Nassau, 2 May 1598). For a biography on Van Aerssen, see Barendrecht, François van Aerssen. 109 The English delegation left Nantes on 25 April 1598; the Dutch embassy departed that same town one day later.

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Vervins regardless of their protestation.110 The dispatch recorded Cecil’s bold reaction to Henri’s course of action and suggested that the diplomat had actually shared this response during the embassy’s audience with the king: France […] must presently bee taken without respect of his allyes […] [I hope] that hee [Henri] would bee more respectfull then to loose so great reputation and the hearts of so many by doing so great an injury to her [Elizabeth] who never had fayled him.111 Similar to Van Dorp’s failed mission at Henri III’s court, Henri IV’s per­ formance of intimacy and personal attention did not necessarily indicate advancement in diplomatic negotiation and it certainly did not result in favourable diplomatic agreements. Although initially reviewed positively by Cecil in his correspondence with the Privy Council, the diplomat seemed to have realized during his audience at Nantes that the privacy afforded to him in terms of access to the king was ultimately deceptive and even treacherous, as had already been predicted by the anonymous author of a preparatory draft for the English mission.

Conclusion Separated by thirteen years, the special embassies that took Aernt van Dorp and Robert Cecil to the French courts of Henri III and Henri IV pre­ sented them with a range of diplomatic challenges related to the intricate and often fraught relationship between privacy and public recognition, privacy and seclusion, and privacy and intimacy. In their popular instruc­ tion manuals for the working diplomat, Jean Hotman and Alberico Gentili recommended their readership to minimize their involvement in public life at court and cultivate their private interactions with trusted peers. But as can been gauged from my comparative reading of Van Dorp’s and Cecil’s correspondence to their home governments, privacy was not always perceived as straightforwardly by the ambassadors themselves, especially not by those from rebel or Protestant states. This chapter has argued that privacy at the French court was a muddy and highly ambiguous concept: it was as much a desired good as it was something to be avoided. Van Dorp’s and Cecil’s evaluation of the privacy afforded to them, ranging from an exclusive audience at the king’s study to a peer-to-peer conversation in his secluded garden, depended on the diplomatic context of the given situation and the degree, as well as duration, of the private moment shared. While an occasional invitation to the king’s cabinet could serve to confer 110 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 67–72 (20 April 1598). 111 Calendar of the Manuscripts, ed. by Owen, pp. 71–72.

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prestige on an ambassador and limit the interference from intelligencers and spies (as in the case of both Van Dorp and Cecil), prolonged stays in the study evidently compromised the public functions of the diplomat at court (as in Van Dorp’s situation), just like an invitation to the room itself could be a means to fob off embassies (as Cecil ultimately realized). This chapter has shown that written correspondence offered envoys like Van Dorp and Cecil a privileged medium to reflect on the diplomatic im­ plications of their private and public activities at court, as well as a tool to account for, and promote, these activities to their respective governments. Needless to say, more systematic research is needed to examine issues of privacy in a larger body of diplomatic correspondence and within the context of a greater number of diplomatic actors. It is hoped that the comparative approach of the present chapter will inspire avenues for future research on those issues. Questions that may be pursued in this regard include the following. Did perceptions of privacy in diplomatic correspon­ dence differ among European countries and between European countries and empires overseas, such as the Ottoman, Mughal, or Qing Empire? Did these perceptions vary among representatives from different confessional and political groups (such as Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus)? Did conceptions of privacy differ among diplomats of various ranks (ranging from contested deputies like van Dorp to extraordinary ambassadors like Cecil) or intelligence agents of unofficial status (consuls, merchants, missionaries, spies, and so on)? And between diplomats and other members at court? What developments can we observe in terms of how diplomats, as well as diplomatic theorists, understood privacy over time? And, finally, how did diplomatic correspondence relate to, or interact with, public (printed) media such as engravings, broadsheets, multilingual pamphlets (apologias, harangues, excerpts from dispatches), the periodical press, and commemorative books on diplomatic events such as court festivals and ceremonial entries? Research on these questions will not only be of benefit to historians of early modern privacy and diplomacy but also to scholars of court studies, media history, and cultural, political, religious, and social history.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources The Hague, Nationaal Archief, Archief familie Van Dorp, inv. no. 1008 (four infoliated stapled papers, January–February 1585). Financial records of Aernt van Dorp’s journey from Boulogne to Paris ———, Archief Staten-Generaal 1576–1588, inv. no. 88 (six leaves, not foliated, February 1585). Articles moderated by Henri III and offered to him by the deputies of the States-General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands ———, Archief van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, 1586–1619, inv. no. 2026 (dispatch from François van Aerssen to Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Justin of Nassau, 2 May 1598) London, British Library, Copie de l’Harenge de l’Ambassadeur d’Espaigne prononcee à sa Majesté très-Chrestienne, lors de l’arrivee de Deputez des Estats de Flandres ([Ghent]: [n. pub.], 1585). General Reference Collection, T. 1716. (4.) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 78, fols 36r–38v (dispatch from Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, and Edward Stafford to Elizabeth I, 27 February and 4 March 1585) ———, MS Tanner 78, fol. 66 (dispatch from Francis Walsingham to William Harborne, 18 October 1585) Primary Sources Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 73, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934; original publ. 1926) Brieven en onuitgegeven stukken van Jonkheer Arend van Dorp, Hr. van Maasdam, enz., ed. by Johannes B. J. N. de van der Schueren, Werken Historisch Genootschap, Nieuwe Serie, 44, 50, 2 vols (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1887–1888) Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, K. G. P. C. G. C.V. O. C. B. T. D. Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire, [ed. by Richard A. Roberts], Historical Manuscripts Commission, 24 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1883–1976), viii: 1598 (1899) Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, K. G. P. C. G. C.V. O. C. B. T. D. Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire, ed. by Geraint Dyfnallt Owen, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 9, 24 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1883–1976), xxiii: Addenda 1562–1606 (1973)

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Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth. Preserved in the State Paper Department of her Majesty’s Public Record Office, ed. by Allan James Crosby, 23 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1863–1950), xix: 1584–1585 (1916) Gentili, Alberico, De Legationibus, Libri Tres (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1585) Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon, P. C. Hoofts Nederlandsche historien, ed. by Matthijs Siegenbeek, Adam Simon, and Johannes Pieter van Cappelle, 8 vols (Amsterdam: Johannes van der Hey en Zoon, 1820–1824), vi (1823) Hotman, Jean, L’Ambassadeur ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1603) ———, The Ambassador (London: V[alentine] S[immes] for James Shawe, 1603) Johan van Oldenbarnevelt: Bescheiden betreffende zijn staatskundig beleid en zijn familie, ed. by Sikko P. Haak, Grote Serie, 80, 3 vols (The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1934–1967), i: 1570–1601 Lettres du cardinal de Florence sur Henry IV et sur la France, ed. by Raymond Ritter (Paris: Grasset, 1955) Original Letters, Illustrative of English History; Including Numerous Royal Letters: From Autographs in the British Museum, and One or Two Other Collections, ed. by Henry Ellis, 2nd series, 4 vols (London: Harding and Lepard, 1827), iii Secondary Works Adamson, John, ‘Introduction: The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court, 1500–1700’, in The Princely Courts of Europe: Rituals, Politics and Culture Under the ‘Ancien Régime’, 1500–1750, ed. by John Adamson (London: Seven Dials, 2000), pp. 7–41 Allinson, Rayne, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Anderson, Roberta, ‘Marginal Diplomatic Spaces During the Jacobean Era, 1603–25’, in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Diplomacy, ed. by Nathalie Rivère de Carles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 163–182 Asch, Ronald G., ‘Patronage, Friendship and the Politics of Access: The Role of the Early Modern Favourite Revisited’, in The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, ed. by Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 178–201 Baars, Rosanne M., Rumours of Revolt: Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598 (Leiden: Brill, 2021) Barendrecht, Sietske, François van Aerssen: Diplomaat aan het Franse hof (1598–1613) (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1965) Barker, Sheila, and Tessa Gurney, ‘House Left, House Right: A Florentine Account of Maria de Medici’s 1615 Ballet de Madame’, The Court Historian, 21.1 (2015), 137–65

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Bély, Lucien, ‘L’Écrivain diplomate des temps modernes, entre nécessité politique et practique culturelle’, in Écrivains et diplomates: L’Invention d’une tradition, xixe–xxie siècles, ed. by Laurence Badel (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), pp. 31–42 ———, Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: [Fayard], 1990) ———, ‘Peut-on parler d’une culture diplomatique à l’époque moderne?’, in Formes de la diplomatie (xvie–xxie siècle) / Forms of Diplomacy (16th–21st century), ed. by Nathalie Duclos and Nathalie Rivère de Carles, Caliban, 54 (2015), pp. 13–32 ———, ‘La Polémique autour de L’Ambassadeur de Jean Hotman: Culture et diplomatie au temps de la Paix de Lyon’, Cahiers d’histoire, 46.2 (2001), pp. 327–54 Berger, Robert W., and Thomas F. Hedin, Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Berry, Chris, Janet Harbord, and Rachel O. Moore, ‘Introduction’, in Public Space, Media Space, ed. by Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel O. Moore (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–15 Bruun, Mette Birkedal, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy: The Retirement of the Great Condé’, in Early Modern Diplomacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 12–60 Chatenet, Monique, La Cour de France au xvie siècle: Vie sociale et architecture (Paris: Picard, 2002) ———, ‘Henri III au Louvre: Distribution et mobilier du logis du roi en 1585’, Revue de l’Art, 169.3 (2010), pp. 1–7 ———, Henri III et l’ordre de la cour: Évolution de l’étiquette à travers les règlements généraux de 1578 et de 1585’, in Henri III et son temps: Actes du colloque international du Centre de la Renaissance de Tours, octobre 1989, ed. by Robert Sauzet (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992), pp. 133–39 Cloulas, Ivan, Catherine de Médicis (Paris: Fayard, 1979) Crouzet, Denis, Le Haut Cœur de Catherine de Médicis: Une Raison politique aux temps de la Saint-Barthélemy (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005) Cultural and Public Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. by Klaas Van Gelder and Nina Lamal, The Seventeenth Century, 36.3 (2021), 367–507 De Vivo, Filippo, ‘Archives of Speech: Recording Diplomatic Negotiation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’, European History Quarterly, 46.3 (2016), 519–544 Duindam, Jeroen, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780, New Studies in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

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Duquenne, Frédéric, L’Enterprise du Duc d’Anjou aux Pays-Bas de 1580 à 1584: Les Responsabilités d’un échec à partager (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998) Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2021) Geevers, Liesbeth, ‘The King Strikes Back: The Spanish Diplomatic Campaign to Undermine the International Status of the Dutch Republic, 1581–1609’, in The Act of Abjuration: Inspired and Inspirational, ed. by Paul Brood and Raymond Kubben (The Hague: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2011), pp. 81–95 Guillaume, Jean, ‘Château, jardin, paysage en France du xve au xviie siècle’, Revue de l’Art, 124 (1999), 13–32 Haan, Bertrand, ‘La Dernière Paix catholique européenne: Édition et présentation du traité de Vervins (2 mai 1598)’, in La Paix de Vervins: 1598, ed. by Claudine Vidal and Frédérique Pilleboue ([Laon:] Fédération des Sociétés d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de l’Aisne, 1998), pp. 9–63 Hampton, Timothy, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) Helmers, Helmer, ‘Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe’, Media History, 22.3–4 (2016), 401–420 Heringa, Jan, De eer en hoogheid van de staat: Over de plaats der Verenigde Nederlanden in het diplomatieke leven van de zeventiende eeuw (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961) Holt, Mack P., The Duke of Anjou and the Political Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Horst, Daniel R., De Opstand in zwart-wit: Propagandaprenten uit de Nederlandse Opstand (1566–1584) (Walburg Pers: Zutphen, 2003) Hugon, Alain, Au service du Roi Catholique: “Honorables ambassadeurs” et “divins espions”: Représentation diplomatique et service secret dans les relations hispanofrançaises de 1598 à 1635 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004) Imhof, Arthur Erwin, Der Friede von Vervins 1598 (Aurau: Keller, 1966) Jensen, De Lamar, Diplomacy and Dogmatism: Bernardino de Mendoza and the French Catholic League (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, ed. by Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Kettering, Sharon, ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France’, French History, 6.2 (1992), 139–58 ———, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) Kooijmans, Luuc, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997) Le Roux, Nicolas, ‘La Cour dans l’espace du palais: L’Exemple de Henri III’, in Palais et Pouvoir: De Constantinople à Versailles, ed. by Marie-France Auzépy and Joël Cornette (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003), pp. 229–67

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———, La Faveur du roi: Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (vers 1547–vers 1589) (Seyssel: Éditions Champ-Vallon, 2002) Leuveren, Bram van, ‘Crossing Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe’, Arti dello Spettacolo / Performing Arts, 6 (2020), 24–35 ———, ‘Disputed State, Contested Hospitality: Dutch Ambassadors in Search of a New Overlord at the French Court of Henry III, 1584–1585’, Early Modern Low Countries, 4.2 (2020), 205–233 ———, Early Modern Diplomacy and French Festival Culture in a European Context, 1572–1615 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023) Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier” (and Other Words) in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Early Modern Diplomacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 79–104 Monts de Savasse, Jacques de, ‘Les chiffres de la correspondance diplomatique des ambassadeurs d’Henri IV, en l’année 1590’, in Correspondre jadis et naguère, ed. by Pierre Albert (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1997), pp. 207–35 Netzloff, Mark, ‘Public Diplomacy and the Comedy of State: Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive’, in Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, ed. by Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 185–97 Nørgaard, Lars Cyril, ‘Past Privacy’, in Early Modern Diplomacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 1–11 Le Pamphlet en France au xvie siècle, ed. by Robert Aulotte (= Cahiers V. L. Saulnier, 1 (1983)) Poussou, Jean-Pierre, ‘La Politique extérieure d’Elizabeth Ière et la paix de Vervins’, in Le Traité de Vervins, ed. by Jean-François Labourdette, Jean-Pierre Poussou, and Marie-Catherine Vignal (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 247–63 Rivère de Carles, Nathalie, ‘The Poetics of Diplomatic Appeasement in the Early Modern Era’, in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power, ed. by Nathalie Rivère de Carles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–23 Rossiter, William T., ‘“Lingua Eius Loquetur Mendacium”: Pietro Arentino and the Margins of Reformation Diplomacy’, Huntington Library, 82.4 (2020), 519–537 Rous, Anne-Simone, Geheimdiplomatie in der Frühen Neuzeit: Spionage und Chiffren in Sachsen, 1500–1763 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2022) Sawyer, Jeffrey K., Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) Snyder, Jon R., Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) Spies, Espionage and Secret Diplomacy in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Guido Braun and Susanne Lachenicht (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2021)

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Stewart, Alan, ‘Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing’, in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, ed. by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 120–37 Strong, Roy, ‘Festivals for the Garter Embassy at the Court of Henri III’, Dance Research, 1.2 (1983), 45–58 Sutherland, Nicola M., ‘The Role of Coligny in the French Civil Wars’, in Actes du Colloque: L’Amiral de Coligny et son temps (Paris, 24–28 Octobre 1972) (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1974), pp. 323–39 Truschke, Audrey, ‘Deceptive Familiarity: European Perceptions of Access at the Mughal Court’, in The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, ed. by Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 65–99 Welch, Ellen R., A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Wernham, Richard B., The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War against Spain, 1595–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994; repr. 2002)

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Chapter 5. Privacy Aspects of Anglo‑Dutch Grand Tour Correspondence (1701–1703) Viscount Woodstock and Paul Rapin-Thoyras to the Earl of Portland*

In the autumn of 1701, Europe was on the verge of war. Two major powers, France and the Holy Roman Empire, were competing to win the Spanish crown for their respective heirs — Philippe of the House of Bourbon (1683–1746)1 and Archduke Charles of the House of Habsburg (1685–1740).2 Other countries, among which were the United Provinces, England, some of the German principalities and the Duchy of Savoy, either supported one of the two powers already, or were due to join one of the sides in the following months. Despite the difficult political and military situation, Hans Willem Bentinck (1649–1709), the Earl of

* Research funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF138) and the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, which also generously funded Open Access for this chapter; it was reworked during my stay at CLUE+ programme at the Free University of Amsterdam and finalized at the University of Łódź, funded there as part of the increased by 2% subsidy for the universities participating in ‘The Excellence Initiative– Research University’ competition, for the University of Łódź. This is the slightly reworked original English version of the introductory chapter of my French edition of this grand tour correspondence: Green, ‘Autour de Grand Tour (1701–1703): les originaux, les copies et la vie privée’, in Le Grand Tour 1701–1703. Published here with kind permission from Honoré Champion. I would like to express my gratitude to my former colleagues at the Centre for Privacy Studies in Copenhagen for our productive discussions on the notions of privacy in the early modern period. My gratitude further extends to all those who helped me to trace obscure facts, to decipher problematic words, and supported me throughout the book project. The Grand Tour correspondence in question here has been initially discussed by me from the educational perspective in my article: ‘Reporting the Grand Tour’. 1 King Philip VI of Spain from 1700 until 1724. 2 The Roman Emperor Charles VI from 1711. Michaël Green is a University Professor at the Filip Friedman Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Łódź and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 139–171 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138242 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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Portland, decided upon the Grand Tour for his eldest surviving son, the nineteen-year-old Henry Bentinck, Viscount Woodstock. Being one of the most prominent Dutch and English politicians of his time, Portland had to ensure his son kept and extended the family’s connections throughout Europe. This educational journey would eventually last one-and-a-half years. Accompanied by his Huguenot head-tutor, Paul Rapin-Thoyras, Woodstock was to travel from The Hague in the United Provinces through various German and Italian states, with both the French tutor and the Dutch pupil writing letters in French back to the father on an almost weekly basis. The originals of these letters are kept in the Special Collec­ tions of the University Library of Nottingham under the general shelf mark Pw A, and the letter book containing copies of most of the letters is held at the British Library under the shelf mark EG 1706. Contrary to much of the known Grand Tour correspondence, in which travellers focus primarily on reporting curiosities seen and visits paid, the letters written by Woodstock and Rapin present an exciting account of their life on the road.3 They also offer a glimpse into their inner world, their feelings and thoughts, as well as personal conflicts and the difficult relationship they both had with the Earl of Portland. Not least, this correspondence provides alternative details on the War of the Spanish Succession, which were not previously widely known. The struggles of the tutor depicted in the correspondence illustrate the difficulties Huguenot refugees faced in their attempt to secure income in the countries of their refuge.4 Another important aspect of this correspondence is the financial accounts and details of expenses sent to the father.5 This allows us not only to reconstruct the costs of such a trip, but also to obtain information on the exchange rates and prices of various objects and services in the countries visited.

3 See for example the published Grand Tour correspondence of another tutor of Huguenot origin, Francis Tallents: Cox, ed., The Travels of Francis Tallents. See also the compilation: Boulton and McLoughlin, eds, News from Abroad, as well as Brennan, The Origins of the Grand Tour. For unpublished correspondence, see for example: British Library, Add Ms. 46954 A, B, C (1676–1678), which contains various letters from the Grand Tour of Philip Perceval and his Huguenot tutors Jean Gailhard and Alexandre de Rasigade, written to Perceval’s uncle, Robert Southwell. 4 The decision of Louis XIV to revoke the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 effectively deprived the Huguenots of the possibility of exercising their religion in France. Consequently, numerous Huguenot refugees arrived in the United Provinces in the months and years following the Revocation. See Yardeni, Le refuge protestante; Yardeni, Le refuge huguenot. 5 In his letter sent to Portland on 6 October 1702, Rapin presents his final account and explains how much he has done to preserve Portland’s money throughout the journey. See Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1068/1–2.

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Early Modern Privacy? Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen is dedicated to study of the early modern notions of privacy.6 Although this topic is not new, there was little systematic research conducted on it.7 Examina­ tion of privacy allows a better understanding of societal dynamics and relationships, both between individuals and between the individual and the society. This Grand Tour correspondence is interesting from a privacy perspective for several reasons. First of all, the letters contain information about the thoughts and ideas of Woodstock and his tutor. They shed light on the early modern elite’s common understanding of privacy zones (of which we will talk below) and allow us to trace the ways in which these zones were defined and negotiated. At the same time, the act of copying these letters several decades after the Grand Tour took place, while excluding the most sensitive ones from being included in the letter book, is by itself an act to protect the family’s privacy. In this chapter, it is my goal to use this correspondence to examine early modern notions of privacy. This will be done both through analysis of the content of the correspondence and by examining the reasons for which some letters were excluded from a copied letter book kept in the British Library (as I will outline below). Could we use this corpus of letters as a window into a more private dimension of the relationship in the educational sphere, between pupil, tutor, and father? Do the letters teach us anything relating to the notions of privacy cultivated by the early eighteenth-century elite? Those are important questions that need to be asked when accessing this kind of material. However, before we delve into the correspondence itself, we will first examine what Grand Tour meant at the time, get acquainted with the key figures, and discuss the state of the letters.

6 Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138), based at the University of Copenhagen and directed by Mette Birkedal Bruun. The centre is dedicated to site-based analyses of notions of privacy and the private in the period 1500–1800. 7 See for example Ariès and Duby, eds, Histoire de la vie privée, and in particular vol. iii, dedicated to the early modern period; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Particularly about the Dutch context: Wheelock, Jr. and Seeff, eds, The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age.

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The Grand Tour Grand Tour: Some Definitions and Background

The Grand Tour was a common social practice for the urban elite in the early modern period.8 The usual journey would last roughly one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half years. It would often conclude the child’s education, and the travellers were mostly boys aged anywhere between their mid-teens to their early twenties. Woodstock summarizes the goal of his journey in the following words: Je m’y suis preparé et ay regardé ce temps auquel je pourrois aller dans les cours etrangeres, apprendre et connoitre les moeurs et manieres des autres païs, et en profiter, comme un temps de plaisir […].9 (I am prepared for this and viewed this time in which I could go to the foreign courts, to learn and get to know the morals and the manners of other countries, and to profit from this as a time of pleasure […].) In fact, the Grand Tour had a dual purpose. On the one hand, it was supposed to reaffirm family connections for the new generation, introduc­ ing the young man (or woman) to his (her) foreign peers. On the other hand, it was intended to teach the adolescent the traditions, culture, and history of countries other than his own. This experience would encompass both Catholic and Protestant countries.10 It was also a tool to acquire or improve linguistic skills through practice. Writing letters to one’s family, and at times also a travel diary, was both a means to report on the places seen and people met, and a way to improve one’s epistolary style. The

8 Much has been written about the Grand Tour in the past twenty years. This section gives a very brief overview of the topic, based on the following literature: Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour; Sweet and others, eds, Beyond the Grand Tour; Verhoeven, Europe within Reach; Hudson, The Grand Tour; Black, France and the Grand Tour; Black, Italy and the Grand Tour; Black, The British and the Grand Tour; Boutier, ‘Compétence internationale, émergence d’une ‘profession’ et circulation des savoirs’; Brennan, The Origins of the Grand Tour; Bepler, ‘Travelling and Posterity’; Grabowsky and Verkruijsse, eds, Eennaektbeeldt op een marmore matras seer schoon; Redford, Venice & the Grand Tour. Some theoretical perspectives can be found in: Becker, ‘Machiavellismus als Modell?’. 9 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 7–8, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 57/1–2, Woodstock to Portland, The Hague, 29 March 1701. All citations are in their original spelling; translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. 10 Verhoeven, ‘Calvinist Pilgrimages and Popish Encounters’.

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travelling party would typically include a travelling tutor.11 As Michèle Cohen suggests, the Grand Tour can be interpreted as a passage into masculinity.12

The Correspondents Since the figure of Hans Willem (William) Bentinck has largely been researched, I will only provide brief biographical details.13 He was born in 1649 into a Dutch noble family.14 He was just one year younger than William III, (1650–1702) Prince of Orange (later Stadtholder of Holland and King of England), and in 1664, when he was fifteen years old, he was appointed as a page to the young prince. The friendship that developed between the two played an important role in Bentinck’s future career.15 As David Onnekink writes in his political biography of Bentinck, he became William III’s favourite at an early age and kept the king’s affection until the latter’s death on 8 March 1702, even after quitting his official functions in 1697.16 Before that he held various diplomatic positions and served as envoy of William III to England and France. Portland’s son, William Henry Bentinck (1682–1726), Viscount Woodstock and later first Duke of Portland, was his third child with his first wife, the English Anne Villiers (d. 1688), daughter of Sir Edward Villiers of Richmond.17 As a son of one of William III’s closest friends, it

11 For example, the Huguenot philosopher Pierre Bayle and the Huguenot Professor from Franeker, Jean Lemonon, were hired while still students because of their university education. 12 Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour’. This is relevant for the early period of the Grand Tour. Later in the eighteenth century, women also undertook such journeys. See for example the collection of articles by Colletta, ed., The Legacy of the Grand Tour. 13 This section largely draws on my own paper: Green, ‘Early Employment Networks of Paul Rapin-Thoyras’ and on Green, ‘Reporting the Grand Tour’. 14 His older brothers were: Hendrik Bentinck, married to Ida Magdalena van Ittersum, and Berhnhart Bentinck, married to Lysbeth van Brakel. He also had an older sister, Eleonora Sophia Bentinck, as well as younger sisters Isabella and Anna Adriana. See: van Hoostraten, and van Nidek, eds, ‘Berhnhart Bentink’. Hans Willem Bentinck had several biographical studies dedicated to him, including Grew, William Bentinck, which is particularly interesting because of its focus on the relationship between the Prince of Orange and Bentinck. A more recent political biography is: Onnekink, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite. 15 For example, he was by William III’s side throughout the years which followed William’s appointment as Stadtholder of Holland, and was involved in negotiating his marriage. See Portland biographies mentioned above. 16 Onnekink, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite, pp. 3–7; Grew, William Bentinck, p. 416. 17 William Bentinck (1681–1688).

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was expected that Henry be thoroughly educated, hence the choice of the promising young Huguenot Paul Rapin-Thoyras for this task.18 One of the most important occasions in young Henry’s life was his stay in France during 1698, while his father was acting as a representative of William III. He was then accompanied by his Huguenot head-tutor Paul Rapin-Thoyras.19 Three years after this French visit, in 1701, Wood­ stock embarked on the Grand Tour discussed here. In 1704, the year following his return from the Grand Tour, he married Elizabeth Noel (?–1737), daughter of Wriothesley Baptist Noel (1661–1690), Earl of Gainsborough.20 A year later Woodstock became a member of Parliament. In 1721, Woodstock became Governor of Jamaica, where he died on 4 July 1726.21 The figure of the tutor too has been broadly researched, yet per­ haps one of the most remarkable things about Paul Rapin-Thoyras (1661–1725), a prominent Huguenot scholar and author of L’Histoire d’Angleterre (1725), a famous and extremely popular book both in his day and for a hundred years later, is the fact that no full-length research biography has ever been dedicated to him.22 Paul was born on 21 March 1661 in Castres. His father Jacques came from a noble Savoyard family that converted to Protestantism and emigrated to France in the mid-sixteenth century. His mother, Jeanne Pellisson, was a sister of the future royal favourite Paul Pellisson (1624–1693).23 Jacques Rapin-Thoyras was serv­ ing at the Chambre de l’Édit of Castres. To prepare his son for a juridical career, his father opted for the standard educational path for provincial Huguenot nobility: after having first been home-schooled, Paul attended the Academy of Puylaurens for several years, and then continued his

18 The biographical information on Henry Woodstock in this section is based on: ‘Biography of Hans William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709)’; ‘Biography of [William] Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland (1682–1726)’. 19 For more about Portland’s embassy in Paris, see Grew, William Bentinck, pp. 299–347. 20 Grew, William Bentinck, pp. 401–02. 21 Two letters sent by Rapin to Woodstock in 1721 are published here for the first time in Appendix V: Nottingham University Library, Pw B 68/1–2, Letter from Rapin to Woodstock, Wesel, 14 February 1721; Nottingham University Library, Pw B 69, Letter from Rapin to Woodstock, Wesel, 18 February 1721. These are the only preserved letters that Rapin sent to his former pupil. 22 Over the past sixty years, several research papers and a book have been produced on Rapin-Thoyras, including: Franchina, ‘The Making of a Man of Letters’; Franchina ‘Writing an Impartial History in the Republic of Letters’. See also Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig Historian’; Trevor-Roper, ‘A Huguenot Historian’; as well as the earlier publication of Girard d’Albissin, Un précurseur de Montesquieu. However, most of our biographical knowledge of Rapin-Thoyras is based on: de Cazenove, Rapin-Thoyras, sa famille, sa vie et ses œuvres. Many of Cazenove’s sources are nowadays untraceable. 23 On Paul Pellisson, see Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et leur monde.

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education at the Academy of Saumur.24 However, at this time, Rapin was preparing to become a lawyer, although he never worked as such. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, the young Paul, who was merely twenty-five at the time, had to flee France. Having briefly stayed in London, he went to the United Provinces. There, in Utrecht, he joined the military under Marshal Schomberg (1615–1690), who was in the service of the Stadtholder William III.25 However, Rapin’s career in the army was terminated abruptly at the end of 1693. The king ordered him to come to London in order to take up the position of head-tutor to Henry Bentinck, Viscount Woodstock, the son of his favourite, Hans Willem Bentinck.26 An important discovery was made while reading the Grand Tour Correspondence. None of Rapin’s biographical accounts mention his pro­ fessional occupation after his return to The Hague after the Grand Tour. However, the present correspondence contains an important clue as to Rapin’s further engagement. It appears in a letter sent by Woodstock to his father on 27 March 1703, while on his way back to The United Provinces. He writes from Celle that he is sure that [Q]u’il n’en fera rien, et aussi, s’il est permis de dire mon avis là dessus, il n’est aucunement capable de le faire, en [sic : à] moins qu’il ne change comme de la nuit au jour, sa famille et mille autres choses occupent tellement son esprit qu’il ne peut plus songer à ce qu’il faut qu’il fasse […].27 (He will not do anything about it, and also, if I am allowed to tell my opinion on this, he is absolutely incapable of doing it, at least [unless] he changes from the night to the day, his family and thousand other things completely occupy his spirit that he can no longer think about that he has to do […].) One can only wonder what Woodstock meant when saying that Rapin would not succeed in his intentions, but following on from this, Wood­ stock hints at a potential tutorship: […] je plains le jeune homme qui doit avoir beaucoup à faire avec lui, je ne dis point ceci pour lui faire tort, j’ay beaucoup de sujet de me louer de lui, en plusieurs occasions il m’a donné bien de marques

24 Maag, ‘The Huguenot Academies’; Pittion, ‘Instruire et édifier’, Laplanche, L’écriture, le sacré et histoire. 25 Glozier, Marschal Schomberg. On William III, see Troost, William III; Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 26 Rou, Mémoires, ii, p. 226. 27 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 175–76, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 125, Woodstock to Portland, Celle, 27 March 1703.

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d’amitié, mais je connoissois son humeur, et puis dire que je m’y accommodois mieux que peut être un autre ne pourra faire, quoyque vers la fin je deusse me servir de toute ma patience.28 ([…] I pity the young man that has to do much with him, I am not saying this at all to hurt him, I had many things to praise him, on many occasions he has given me signs of his friendship, but I knew his mood, and then say that I got on better with it than someone else can do, although towards the end I had to use all my patience.) While we do not read the details of Rapin’s request to Portland in Wood­ stock’s letter, some information can be found in a letter Abel Tassin d’Alonne wrote from The Hague on 8 May 1703. There he informed Port­ land that Rapin was writing a text for Algernon Seymour (1684–1750), the son of Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset (1662–1748). Therefore, we may assume that Rapin was either employed, or planning on being so, in some educational capacity with the young nobleman.29 This text mentioned by d’Alonne is lost. In 1707 Rapin left for Wesel, where he remained until his death. His later years were dedicated to scholarly work. In 1717, Rapin published in The Hague his Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys. His next and final work was appeared between1724 and 1727: his highly recognized Histoire d’Angleterre in ten volumes.30

The Grand Tour of 1701–1703: An Outline The Grand Tour was planned by Portland in early 1700. Rapin prepared an outline of the journey and the major places to visit on their way. Woodstock was supposed to attend all the main European courts in these territories and get to know their languages and customs. Indeed, according to the accounts presented by Rapin, we see that, as part of the preparation for the journey, a tutor of the Italian language was hired.31 Woodstock’s valet de chambre was German, and was thus able to help him to practice

28 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 175–76, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 125, Woodstock to Portland, Celle, 27 March 1703. 29 See: Nottingham University Library, Pw A 317/1–2, ‘Letter from Abel Tassin d’Allonne, the Hague [Netherlands], to William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland’, and its transcription published by Japikse, Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck, Eersten Graaf van Portland, pp. 542–45. The transcription above is taken from Japikse. 30 Rapin-Thoyras, Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys; Rapin-Thoyras, Histoire d’Angleterre. 31 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1042/1–2, Rapin-Thoyras, Account for expenses from 1 January 1701 until 6 September 1701. It states that the ‘maitre italien’ received twice the sum of 19 livres for his services during this period.

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this language.32 It is important to remember that Rapin designed his travel plan before the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, which broke out in July 1701. The actual trip, as can be seen from the correspondence, differed significantly from this plan. The Grand Tour actually began on 22 October 1701. The initial path was via Bentinck’s estate in Nijenhuis into the German lands, making their first stop in Dusseldorf. They then continued to Cologne, where they met the Elector of the Palatinate. They progressed further south to Nuremberg, where they arrived on 21 November 1701, and from there, with a stop in Augsburg, to Munich, where Woodstock made personal acquaintance with Maximillian II Emmanuel (1661–1726), Elector of Bavaria. The next major destination was Vienna, where they spent Christmas and New Year of 1702. Around mid-February the travelling party finally left Vienna for Italy, with a short stop in Innsbruck. There, they visited the captured French marshal de Villeroy, who was an acquaintance of Portland. The correspon­ dence presents an account of his capture given by Villeroy to Rapin and Woodstock, which varies slightly from the known version of events.33 On 24 February 1702, the pair reached Venice. On 3 March 1702 there was the first of what would be many direct confrontations between Rapin and Portland. These confrontations revolved around one concrete topic: the father wanted his son to serve in the German army in Italy, which Rapin thought not to be a particularly good idea for numerous reasons, including the lack of suitable equipment available, lack of potential guidance, lack of pastoral and religious care, and complete dissonance between Woodstock’s personality and the German ways. Woodstock himself was not satisfied with the idea of serving in the German army either. This issue would from then on be in the background of every letter that was sent to Portland. From Venice, the travelling party went to Rome via Bologna and Ascona. Having stayed in Rome for three months, by 24 June 1702 they finally arrived in Florence. By mid-summer 1702 the party decided to return from Livorno to Venice and from there make their journey home, with Woodstock taking a slower route in order to visit a few other German courts, in particular Berlin, Hanover, and Celle. Following months of petitioning Portland, Rapin eventually got permission to leave, and he left

32 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 82–84, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 77/1–3, Woodstock to Portland, Venice, 10 March 1702. 33 François de Neufville, Duc de Villeroy (1664–1730) was Marshal of France from 1693. He was in close contact with Louis XIV. Having been sent to replace Catinat as the leader of the French army fighting the Imperial forces, he was defeated and imprisoned at the Battle of Cremona by Prince Eugene of Savoy. Later, he was a tutor to Louis XV during the Regency. See ‘III. Neufville, (François de)’, in Nouveau dictionnaire historique, ed. by L.-M. Chaudon, p. 462; The Poems of Thomas Davis, pp. 227–28.

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directly for The Hague from Nuremberg, as he informed Portland in his last letter from the Grand Tour, on 6 October 1702. Having been left on his own, Woodstock focused in his letters primar­ ily on whom he saw and whom he met, aiming at presenting Portland with a picture of things running smoothly after Rapin’s departure. The final leg of the Grand Tour started in April, when Woodstock left Celle for the United Provinces, passing on his way through Bremen, Hamburg, and Lingen. There are no letters preserved in the archives written from these cities and it may be that no such letters were written. The journey finished on 29 April 1703 in The Hague, where it had begun two-and-a-half years earlier.

The Correspondence Dating the Copies Held in the British Library

The beautifully-bound volume of the Grand Tour correspondence con­ tains eighty-seven transcriptions of letters by Rapin and Woodstock out of the 101 held in Nottingham. The acquisition records of the British Library reveal that the volume was acquired on 14 November 1857 from a German collector, Tycho Mommsen (1819–1900), who resided in Oldenburg at the time.34 The copied letters contain all the words included in the origi­ nals, with the exception of closing formulae, and modification of spelling. Yet, not all of the letters were copied. As James Daybell informs us, the practice of copying letters into letter books was initially bureaucratic, for the purpose of keeping records. He states that the usual goal of copying a correspondence was to build up a portfolio that presented oneself and one’s connections in a chosen way.35 Therefore, the fact that the Grand Tour correspondence presented in this volume was transcribed is not in itself unusual for this type of material. The copy does, however, invite the questions of who transcribed the letters, for whom, and for what purpose. While no explicit information is known, a closer examination of the paper of the copies reveals some useful information about its provenance. There are watermarks on the pages which read ‘J Honig’ and ‘Zoonen’, which point to the Dutch origin of the

34 Special thanks to Mr Jeff Kattenhorn, Reference Specialist at the British Library, who discovered this information. Carl Johannes Tycho Mommsen was a pedagogue and worked as director of several schools. He also authored several books and translations from Classical languages, among them: Beiträge zur Lehre von den griechischen Präpositionen. On Tycho Mommsen, see Kitzbichler and others, eds, Dokumente zur Theorie der Übersetzung antiker Literatur in Deutschland seit 1800, p. 179. 35 Daybell, Manuscript Letters, p. 175.

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paper. The company J Honig & Zoonen existed between 1765 and 1837 in Zaandijk, in the vicinity of Amsterdam.36 The watermark also contains a lily attached to the bottom with a beehive. Based on the developments of the watermark a possible dating for the paper of the copies would be 1765–1788. It is my assumption based on the content of the copied letters that the copies held in the British Library were more ‘public’ and aimed at a broader readership than the more ‘private’ originals, as I will explain below. Although we do not know who copied the letters, the selection of the material makes it clear that the copyist, by eliminating nineteen letters from the letter book, did so with the purpose of constructing a certain image of the trip, of the family, and of the travelling tutor.37 What might that image be, and what information was contained in the omitted letters? A discussion of early modern notions of privacy will shed some light on this matter. But first, let us focus on the letters themselves.

The Woodstock-Rapin-Portland Correspondence and the Question of Privacy While thinking about privacy in the context of the Grand Tour, one of the first things that comes to mind is the physical demarcation of spaces. Indeed, private space is one of the obvious private domains, but it is not the only one. The present correspondence offers an invaluable oppor­ tunity to explore early modern notions of privacy from three perspectives: 1. the relationship between tutor, father, and son; 2. the difference between originals and copies; 3. the references to different degrees of intimacy that may be elucidated by the use of the zones of privacy, which I will explain below. As mentioned above, these letters sent during the Grand Tour were copied shortly afterwards, and the copyist omitted important letters from his letter book. This selective copying points to various privacy concerns that the copyist (or the family) maintained in relation to the content of the letters. Additionally, I will point out the aforementioned

36 See the overview of the company in: ‘Honig & Zoonen, J.’, Website of Stichting Papiergeschiedenis Zaanstreek ‘De Hollander’. Online edition. For the development of the beehive, see Colecciones de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, MS Inv. Num. A-1026, Díaz, ‘Planta principal y sección ON de una aduana’, drawing, 1788. Online edition. For the elaborated version of the beehive, see Colecciones de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, MS Inv. Num. A-2382, Bravo, ‘Planta de un almacén en el puerto de la ciudad de Cádiz’, drawing, 1833. Online edition. 37 This is not to contradict Lisa Jardine’s study on Erasmus, in which she argues that he constructed his own image through several editions of the letters produced during his lifetime. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, pp. 23–24. Also referred to in Daybell, Manuscript Letters.

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spatial aspect of privacy when such references are made in the text. As Mette Birkedal Bruun reminds us, the early modern notion of ‘[p]rivacy is contingent, and can be examined only in concrete contexts’. She suggests examining privacy through heuristic zones that map early modern society. These are: ‘soul/self, body, chamber, house, community, state/nation’. The negotiation of privacy between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ takes place at the thresholds of these zones, when the state attempts to influence the mind, such as in religious matters, or when the household impacts the family, etc.38

Father, Son, and Tutor These heuristic zones can help us to get a better understanding not only of early modern notions of privacy, but also of the motives behind certain actions. This field can be explored within a given twofold setting, in this case that of an educational trip. On the one hand, the tutor is the employee of the father, hence there is a subordinate relationship between them. On the other hand, the personal letters sent by a son to his father and by the tutor to the father constitute a private sphere at the intersection of the self, the family, and the household. The educational process is an intimate process, where trust between the pupil and the tutor is extremely important. This intimacy is explained by the aforementioned Jean Rou, a seventeenth-century educator and friend of Paul Rapin-Thoyras: [N]ononbstant la difference d’âge et ma qualité de gouverneur, je voudrois agir avec lui comme d’ami à ami ou de frère à frère, ne procédant point par voie d’ordre et de commandement, mais par voie d’avis et de conseil; en un mot, je le traiterois avec tant de cordialité et d’attachement à ses petits intérêts, que s’il y avoit moyen, il seroit le premier à croire de n’être nulle part si bien qu’avec moi.39 ([N]otwithstanding the difference in age and my capacity as governor, I would like to act with him as friend to friend or brother to brother, not acting by way of order and command, but by way of advice and counsel; in a word, I would treat him with so much cordiality and attachment to his little interests that if there was any 38 Birkedal Bruun, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond’; and elaborated in Green and others, ‘En privé & en public’. 39 Rou, Memoires, ii, p. 302. This idea is possibly based on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8. Thanks to Anna Becker for this information. Another possibility is an Epicurean influence: friendship in the Epicurean community was certainly crucial. Friendship represented support in life and in moral improvement, which also included learning. See for example, Konstan and others, eds, Philodemus, in particular the introduction, as well as Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World.

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way, he would be the first to believe that he was nowhere as good as with me.) The reference to the relationship between brothers and friends evokes the most important thing about these relationships, which is trust. While it is of course impossible to assess the depth of trust that existed between two people without a sufficient amount of evidence in the sources, keeping in mind that Rapin was tutoring Woodstock for eight years before the Grand Tour, it is reasonable to assume that without the trust of the father and a working relationship with his pupil, he would not have been sent abroad alone with the latter. We repeatedly see that letters sent by Rapin and Woodstock contain many personal details which seem to indicate that only the father was supposed to read them. Woodstock continually mentions that he has a separate correspondence with his stepmother and sisters.40 I suggest that the zone shared by tutor, father, and son in the correspondence should be called ‘the educational zone’ and that this zone was exclusive to the three of them. At the same time, each of the participants belongs to other zones: the father and the son to the family, and the tutor, together with his pupil and the father, to the household. At the same time, we need to define the unique relationship that exists between any of the pairs within this educational trinity: this could be called a ‘private nexus’ — a place where an exclusive relationship between any two of them exists.41 This means that each of these three people has two other people with whom he has to establish their own safe and private space, not available to others. Such relationships provide the possibility of remaining discreet within a given heuristic zone. Rapin illustrates this relationship with his pupil by stating that ‘je ne me suis jamais servi de la voye d’authorité, même dans sa plus grande jeunesse’ (I never used the path of authority, even in his youngest years), rather than taking a position of power and dictating how to act to Woodstock.42 The uncopied letters are deeply concerned with the privacy of the father and the son. While the financial difficulties could be shared between the three of them, the unpleasant accusations exchanged by the tutor and the father would not be appropriate for sharing with anyone outside their nexus, including the

40 See for example, British Library, Eg. 1706, fol. 72, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 74, Woodstock to Portland, Vienna, 4 February 1702: ‘je ne puis avoir l’honneur d’écrire aujourd’hui à Madame, ni à mes sœurs’ (I could not write today neither to Madam nor to my sisters). He refers here to his stepmother Jane Temple and his sisters Frances Willemina and Isabella, and possibly to Anna Margaretha. His eldest sister Mary was already married by this time. 41 I would like to thank Pernille Ulla Knudsen and Mette Birkedal Bruun for a fruitful discussion of the term ‘nexus’. 42 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1040/1–2; copy British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 9–12. Rapin to Portland, The Hague, 1 April 1701.

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pupil. This is particularly important, as Woodstock, at least according to Rapin, often wanted to see the letters that his tutor wrote to his father. In fact, the nexus of privacy was an ‘exclusive’ place, from which others, even located within the same heuristic zone, were to be excluded.

Uncopied Letters — A Privacy Concern? The bound volume of the Grand Tour correspondence located in the British Library gives the impression of a desire to share the details of the educational journey. Yet, it is only with the entire correspondence in hand, including the manuscript letters to be found in Nottingham and missing in the volume, that one gets the idea of the editorial work and perhaps even of censorship exercised by the copyist of the bound volume. The topics omitted have to do with quarrels and money. It is my assumption that this has to do with the will to protect the image of the individuals involved, or in other words to protect their privacy. The entire Grand Tour correspondence contains twenty-nine original letters sent by Paul Rapin-Thoyras and seventy-two letters sent by Vis­ count Woodstock.43 These 101 originals are preserved in the University Library of Nottingham Special Collections. In comparison, the letter book held in the British Library contains only fourteen letters by Rapin and sixty-eight by Woodstock, making eighty-two letters in total. Only three letters from people related to the Grand Tour are included in the letter book, leaving out nineteen additional letters of potential relevance held in Nottingham. Thus, the letter book contains altogether eighty-five letters. This overview invites the question as to why the copyist omitted twenty letters from the main correspondents. To get a better understand­ ing of the possible answers, let us look into the content of these letters. The first missing letter was sent by Rapin from Vienna on 4 January 1702.44 In the letter, Rapin reports to Portland on the financial account of the Grand Tour up to 1 January 1702. He writes proudly that he has managed to minimize expense, but at the same time he warns that the expense will grow, because: [A]u lieu d’estre aidé en cella par le valet de chambre de Mylord Woodstock, il est au contraire l’advocat perpetuel de tous ceux qui demandent de l’argent, de quelque maniere que ce puisse estre,

43 This information was not available to me when I wrote my first article about this correspondence in 2014. See Green, ‘Reporting the Grand Tour’. 44 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1048, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Vienna, 4 January 1702.

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captivant toujours leurs bonnes graces à vos depens, et ayant plus de honte de leur refuser un escus que de chauser dix escus de depensse.45 ([I]nstead of being helped in this by the valet of Mylord Woodstock, on the contrary, he is the perpetual advocate of all those who ask for money, in whatever way it may be, always captivating their good graces at your expense, and being more ashamed to refuse them an ecu than to cap ten ecus of spending.) He then continues, expressing his displeasure at being held responsible for a budget that he cannot fully control: Je suis obligé de dire cella à vostre Excellence pour ma justification parce qu’il me semble qu’il n’est pas just[e], que je sois chargé d’une depensse, dont je ne suis nullement le maitre.46 (I am obliged to tell this to Your Excellence in order to justify myself, because it seems to me that it is not just that I am responsible for an expense of which I am no master.) Rapin attempted to save money during the trip in order to stay within his programmed budget. His remark about Woodstock being influenced by his valet, who causes extra expenses, concerns two aspects. Both are private: financial issues, and closeness to a low-born servant, which would hardly portray the young nobleman in a particularly positive light had they been read by an outsider. Here we can see how the zones of household and education intertwine. The valet who interferes with the educational process is being reprimanded by the tutor, who in his turn reports the problem to the father, in what we defined earlier as a ‘private nexus’ that allows a private channel of communication between the two. Could these two remarks be the reason for the omission of the letter from the letter book? Let us examine further examples of omitted letters. The following letter from 11 February 1702 is also written by Rapin and concerns the same point — the excessive use of funds encouraged by the valet.47 An undated letter, probably sent a few weeks later from Vienna, seems to touch upon even more private issues.48 After a short recital of the persons of impor­ tance that Woodstock met in Innsbruck, Rapin reports to Portland that he

45 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1048, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Vienna, 4 January 1702. 46 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1048, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Vienna, 4 January 1702. 47 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1051, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Vienna, 11 February 1702. 48 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1053, Letter from Rapin to Portland, n.p., n.d. [probably Vienna before 14 February 1702].

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did not manage to persuade Woodstock to continue the trip to Hungary as was initially planned, mostly because ‘[il] n’en a point du tout [d’intérêt] que pour les personnes, et mesme entre les personnes, ce n’est que pour les dames’ (he has no [interest] at all, but in people, and even among people, it is only for women), rather than for paintings and buildings. At the same time, ‘il est certain que la conversation des hommes pourrait luy faire plus de bien que celle des dames’ (it is certain that the conversation of men could do more good to him than that of women).49 Furthermore, Rapin depicts a rather grim picture of the stay; the people at the court are not very sociable, and Woodstock has only been invited for a meal by them as a means of attesting their own status, rather than for ‘the love of him’. Even worse, no one has paid him a visit during his entire stay, with the sole exception of a young man who had visited England. Once again, the private nexus between tutor and father allows for this kind of conversation, but this unflattering description would be quite damaging not only to the reputation of Viscount Woodstock (who was probably long dead by the time the copies were made), but also to the reputation of his father, the Earl of Portland, showing that his position in Austria was weak. On 3 March 1702, in his second letter written on that date, Rapin replies to Portland’s demand that he says what he thinks about Wood­ stock’s possible participation in a military campaign in Italy, where the War of the Spanish Succession was unfolding at the time.50 This is a very intimate request from the father, which also signifies that all three persons involved had a very close relationship. Rapin, as a head-tutor who had seen Woodstock on a daily basis over the past nine years, had perhaps a better knowledge of his personality than his father. As we will see below, this of course did not mean that there was a completely trustful relationship between Rapin and Woodstock. One of the particularly intimate things that Rapin mentions is that Woodstock was very little inclined to study and his knowledge was very minimal, and consequently he had very little chance of obtaining employment that would demand a certain degree of competence; therefore, a military campaign would be a good option for him. He also warns the father of the possibility of Woodstock being bullied by his peers if he did not take part in any military action. Such direct opin­ ion could be given by a subordinate to his superior only when a private nexus existed between the two. The tension is created by this attempt to ensure the success of the pupil while being paid by the father whose actions the tutor criticizes. At the same time, such a private depiction of

49 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1053, Letter from Rapin to Portland, n.p., n.d. [probably Vienna before 14 February 1702]. 50 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1055/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Venice, 3 March 1702. On the War of the Spanish Succession, see Pohlig, The War of the Spanish Succession.

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Woodstock’s weaknesses would not be suitable to be read by anyone but the father. Furthermore, in the same letter Rapin tells Portland that he will not go to war alongside Woodstock, and even if he did, he would go there with a rifle rather than as a head-tutor, who in fact was more of a maître d’hotel. He goes on to complain that the profession of a tutor is a profession where one does not find either a fortune or honour, and he felt stuck at the same point where he found himself ten years ago when he started this position.51 Rapin is extremely frustrated with his position, which in his opinion brings him neither glory, nor advancement in his career, nor money. He even goes so far as to say that Woodstock no longer needed a head-tutor but rather an older friend, as for Woodstock he would from now on only be a sort of a spy of his deeds.52 This shows that there was tension between the tutor and the pupil. One can hardly be surprised that the nineteen-year-old Woodstock was not happy about his actions being reported back to his father, even if he knew that it was Rapin’s task to do so. At the same time, even though it was one of the tutor’s tasks to report on his pupil, Rapin suspected that Woodstock saw him as a spy. This implies that in Rapin’s eyes, Woodstock felt his privacy was invaded.53 On two occasions Rapin writes to Portland that Woodstock has demanded to see the letter he was writing, one54 being 51 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1055/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Venice, 3 March 1702. 52 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1055/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Venice, 3 March 1702. 53 For an overview of studies on surveillance in a historical context, see Weller, ‘An Historical Perspective on Surveillance’. 54 ‘Comme il pourroit se faire que Mylord Woodstock me priera d’ouvrir ma lettre pour scavoir ce que j’écris à Votre Excellence sur son sujet, j’ajouterai ici ce que n’ai pas osé mettre clairement dans ma lettre, c’est que je trouve qu’il a effectivement une tres grande envie, d’aller à la guerre et d’avoir votre Regiment, ne doutant point que le Roy ne le luy donne si vous voulez y consentir; c’est ce qui m’a empêché de luy faire voire votre lettre, de peur que dans la suitte quelqu’un ne prenne occasion de là, de luy persuader que vous avéz empêché ou negligé de luy procurer cet avantage […]’ (As it could happen that My Lord Woodstock will ask me to open my letter to know what I am writing to Your Excellency on his subject, I will add here what I did not dare to put clearly in my letter, which is that I find that he actually has a very great desire to go to war and have your Regiment, having no doubt that the King will give it to him if you are to consent; This is what prevented me from sending him your letter, for fear that later someone would take the opportunity to persuade him that you had prevented him from or neglected to provide him with this advantage), in: Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1040/3; British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 13–142, P. S. Letter from Rapin to Portland, The Hague, 1 April 1701; ‘Si V[ostre] Exc[ellence] me fait l’honneur de me repondre, et que vous ne voulies pas que Mylord W[oodstock] voye vos lettres, il faudra s’il vous plait faire faire l’adresse par une main inconüe qui ne soit ni de vous ni de Mr Van Lewen, car vos deux derniers lettres ayant esté enfermëes dans les siennes, il est un peu faché de ce que je n’ay pas voulu les luy montrer’ (If Your Excellency gives me the honor of replying, and you do not want My Lord W[oodstock] to see your letters, you

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this very letter. On another occasion, it is Rapin who shows a letter from Portland to Woodstock.55 Curiously, references to matters of privacy become more and more frequent. Just a week later, on 10 March, Rapin reports on Woodstock’s discontent at the news that he is to serve in the army in Italy, and remarks that Portland has not prepared anything for his son’s campaign.56 He insists on giving his opinion on Portland’s decision, despite the fact that Portland has not asked for it, because he felt responsibility for his pupil.57 Despite the lack of trust on Woodstock’s part towards Rapin, the tutor presents himself as someone who does indeed care for his pupil, and once again the fact that he permits himself to address Portland directly shows that, within the educational zone, the nexus between father and tutor allows for this kind of bluntness. The first letter from Woodstock that was not copied is from 20 May 1702.58 Like Rapin, he keeps on resisting the will of Portland that he joins a campaign in Italy, because then he said ‘I will find myself in a land of the enemy, which cannot be but very unpleasant’ (je me trouveray dans un pais ennemi ce qui ne peut estre que tres desagreable). While seemingly it is just a few lines of confrontation with his father, it seems that for the copyist this was sufficient for it to be left out of his volume. It is possible that the copyist wanted to protect such an image from the eyes of anyone outside of the family. Perhaps he even wanted to hide it from a later generation of the same family. The image of the father and the son needed to be protected. There is one letter that is not mentioned at all in the list of uncopied letters of the letter book — Rapin’s letter sent from Florence on 24 June 1702.59 This very brief letter contains only a note that he and Woodstock have arrived safely in the city, while noting that Woodstock is so sleepy that he would not be able to write to anyone. It seems that this letter

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will please have the address made by an unknown hand which is neither from you nor from Mr Van Lewen, because your last two letters having been enclosed in his, he [Woodstock] is a little bit upset that I did not want to show them to him), in: Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1055/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Venice, 3 March, 1702. ‘J’ay fait voir votre lettre à Mylord Woodstock qui m’a paru tres disposé à vous obeïr en toutes choses […]’ (I showed your letter to Mylord Woodstock who seemed to me very disposed to obey you in all things), in: British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 16–17 and Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1041, Letter from Rapin to Portland, The Hague, 12 April 1701. Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1056/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, [Venice] 10 March 1702. Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1056/1–3, Letter from Rapin to Portland, [Venice] 10 March 1702. Nottingham University Library, Pw A 87, Letter from Woodstock to Portland, Rome, 20 May 1702. Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1062, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Florence, 24 June 1702.

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was either overlooked or unavailable at the time, as otherwise it would be mentioned in the list above. Other letters sent by Rapin contain similar complaints to those men­ tioned above, including his warnings of the dangers of the road, the risks of a military campaign, his lack of desire to continue the trip, and his financial anxieties, as well as references to the great expenses involved.60 Similar remarks are found in Woodstock’s letters: the dangers of the road, and in particular extensive references to the troubles he is having with his tutor: ‘ever since I left Venice, Mr Rapin is in consolable melancholy’ ([d]epuis que je suis party de Venise Mr Rapin est d’une mélancolie inconcevable).61 In another letter, Woodstock justifies himself to his father for having asked a favour for his tutor.62 A last uncopied letter was sent by Rapin to Portland from Nuremberg, either on the day of his departure or one day ahead of it. In it, he merely confirms the approval that Portland gave him to return to the United Provinces, and sums up the financial difficulties and reasons for which he was leaving his job: J’aurois volontiers continüé mes tres humbles services à V[ostre] Excell[ence]et à Myl[ord] Woodstock; mais je vous assure avec toute la sincerité possible que ce que V[ostre] Excell[ence] m’a donné jusques icy n’a pas esté suffisant pour balancer les depensses que j’ay faittes à fin de faire honneur à V[ostre] Excellence, à Myl[ord] Woodstock, à moy mesme et à mon employ; ainsy perdant au lieu de gagner, et estant obligé d’abandoner ma famille, et mes affaires particulières, sans que V[ostre] Excell[ence] me fist esperer rien qui peut [sic] quelque jour me dedomager, j’espere qu’elle aura la bonté de m’excuser si je luy ay demandé mon congé, puisque je me crois obligé de travailler pour le bien de ma famille, preferablement à tout autre d’autant plus que la

60 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1063/1–2, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Florence, 1 July 1702; Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1064, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Florence, 22 July 1702; Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1065, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Livorno, 4 August 1702; Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1066/1–2, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Florence, 12 August 1702; Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1067, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Venice, 1 September 1702. 61 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 92, Letter from Woodstock to Portland, Florence, 22 July 1702; Nottingham University Library, Pw A 93/1–3, Letter from Woodstock to Portland, Livorno, 4 August 1702. 62 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 94, Letter from Woodstock to Portland, Florence, 12 August 1702.

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pension dont le feu Roy63 m’avoit favorisé, est extremement incertaine si non entierement perdue […].64 (I would have readily continued my humble services to Your Excellence and to Mylord Woodstock; but I assure you with all the sincerity possible that what Your Excellence has given me until now was not sufficient to balance the expenses which I made in order to honour Your Excellence, Mylord Woodstock, myself and my post; therefore loosing instead of gaining and being obligated to abandon my family and my personal affairs, without Your Excellence having me expect anything that would compensate one day, I hope that you will have the goodness to excuse me if I asked you to leave, because I feel obliged to act for the well-being of my family, more than any other, especially since the pension granted me by the late king [William III, MG], is extremely uncertain, if not completely lost […]) Indeed, the feeling of being underpaid by Portland without any prospects of improving his situation, as well as the danger of losing his additional income from the pension granted by the late William III, is a serious concern for Rapin. He excuses himself from the service of Portland’s household on the pretext of the need to maintain a household of his own. Consequently, we can conclude that the copyist, whether he was a clerk or a member of the Bentinck family who had access to the letters, did not want to include anything that might have sounded controversial or implied improper conduct either on the part of the Earl of Portland or his son, even less so anything that might let others know about the conflicts that arose between the parties during the Grand Tour. This is because of the need to present to anyone outside this triangle a picture of an ideal relationship between the three parties.65

63 The reference here is to William III of Orange (1650–1702). Rapin relates to this pension in his letters from 4 August 1702 and 6 October 1702. In Rapin’s biography by Cazenove, it is stated that he petitioned the States-General for this pension twice: once in September 1703 (while still travelling with Woodstock) and once again on 6 February 1704. See Cazenove, Rapin-Thoyras, pp. 203–05, footnote 1. 64 The king died on 8 March 1702. Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1068/1–2, Letter from Rapin to Portland, Nuremberg, 6 October 1702. 65 For an idealistic view of the relationship between parent, tutor and pupil, see the book of Erasmus, which was still considered important at the time: Erasmus of Rotterdam, Declamatio de pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis. See Green, ‘A Huguenot Education for the Early Modern Nobility’, for a discussion of this topic.

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Notions of Privacy in the Grand Tour Correspondence The correspondence between the father, the son, and the tutor handles matters that we would consider private on different levels. Nowadays, such private matters would concern, among others, health issues. It seems, however, that this was not the case for the early modern period, or at least these were considered less private than in our contemporary society. It also seems reasonable that Woodstock mentions his own illnesses on several occasions: throughout the journey he suffered from colds and colic.66 On one occasion Rapin reports on Woodstock’s illness in his own letter, which can be regarded as his duty to his employer.67 These rather routine mentions of illnesses are not presented by either of the correspondents as a private matter, they are not told in secret and it is not asked of the father to keep this information confidential. This particularly related to the question of their own illnesses. Yet, when Woodstock and Rapin report the illness of another person, such as for example, the rumours that James Cresset, the English Envoy in Hanover, is on his deathbed68 or the illness of the Archduke Charles, one of the pretenders to the Spanish Crown,69 it seems from the text that they are much more aware of the consequences that this information might have — either on the future of the War of the Spanish Succession or on the personal fate of the envoy. In both cases, however, there is no indication that the authors considered illness to be a private matter. Many letters mention the reception of honnêtetés, which were personal honours given to a particular person, and hence relate to the private do­ main. Woodstock explains that what the honnêteté was and how restricted its scope was: ‘il y en a plusieurs autres, comme aussi plusieurs ministres étrangers, qui me font beaucoup d’honnêtetés, ce qui consiste à inviter à diner’ (there are many others, such as numerous foreign ministers, who give me a lot of honnêtetés, which consist of a dinner invitation).70 In the same letter he writes of another acquaintance who has a more extensive conception of honnêtetés: ‘Mr Stepney m’a toujours été tres obligeant, et

66 See for example, British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 51–52, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 67, Woodstock to Portland, Vienna, 7 January 1702; British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 171–72, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 123, Woodstock to Portland, Celle, 17 March 1703. 67 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1051, Rapin to Portland, Vienna, 11 February 1702. 68 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 154–55, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 115, Woodstock to Portland, Hanover, 30 January 1703 and British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 157–60, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 118/1–2, Woodstock to Portland, Hanover, 16 February 1703. 69 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 56–57, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 68, Woodstock to Portland, Vienna, 15 January 1702. 70 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 68–69, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 73, Woodstock to Portland, Vienna, 4 February 1702.

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me rend tous les services imaginables’ (Mr Stepney has always been very helpful to me, and provides all the help imaginable), which would mean introducing him to the right people at court and possibly helping with practicalities. Because the honnêtetés were personal, the privacy aspect becomes more visible. This in fact shows how through honnêtetés courtiers established the ‘private nexus’ with the young man, and created a zone of trust with him, through which he could have obtained services from them, and they could have used his services or connections for their own benefit. Maarten Duijvendak writes that ‘[i]t is a well-known thesis that at some time during the modern period a kind of “affective individualism” arose’.71 He elaborates on the fact that two elements were essential for elite families (he refers mostly to elite bourgeoisie, but his analysis can be applied to the nobility, as this present correspondence shows) — these are honour and status, that should be given and received by this social group. Because of this, the elite combined the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres, and this combination is clearly visible when one considers that seemingly private ceremonies, such as weddings and funerals, became public in the early modern period.72 Through these ceremonies, families would gain prestige in the eyes of the observers. Indeed, the Grand Tour letters show us that in order to both give and receive honours and to affirm status, social boundaries were crossed. Therefore, moving through both the invisible and visible boundaries by entering the individual’s home (even when it is a public person in question) in order to attend a dinner could be considered as a move from the ‘community’ zone into the zone — and indeed physical space — of the home, which as public as it might be still provides a closed space, with only a limited audience present. The spatial aspect of privacy is evident on several occasions when we consider both physical and mental space in this correspondence. This is relevant not only for the three correspondents, but also for the people they encountered during the Grand Tour. Keeping in mind the developments in the spatial privacy in the seventeenth-century United Provinces, and the limitation of access to the inner parts of the Dutch houses as seen in several egodocuments from the time, we can see that such cases are also visible in our correspondence.73 For example, just as the trip is beginning, Woodstock writes from Dusseldorf on 31 October 1701 that he went to visit a certain Mme Marlot in her home, and after having mistaken her daughter for herself, he describes that: la vie[i]lle femme paroissoit avoir de l’esprit, et la maison etoit assez propre, en considerant la meute de chiens qui y court de toute espèce,

71 Duijvendak, ‘Elite Families between Private and Public Life’, p. 72. 72 Duijvendak, ‘Elite Families between Private and Public Life’, p. 75. 73 Green, ‘Spaces of Privacy’.

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lesquels sautoient sur le lit de la veille, qui avoit mis de[s] draps nets à cause qu’elle sçavoit que je devra [sic: devois] venir. (the old woman seemed to have wit, and the house was clean enough, considering the pack of dogs of all kinds running there, jumping on the bed the day before, although she had put on clean sheets knowing that I have to come).74 Indeed, Woodstock understands that he is allowed into the private zone of that family, that is to say inside their house, and this is done, as suggested by Duijvendak, for the purpose of honour and status, even if the old lady is not seen at her best. On another occasion, Woodstock writes that Maximillian II Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, invited him to join the boar hunt, and in the evening, after dinner, the elector was supposed to go to his countryside house called Heising, and planned to take Woodstock with him. However, this did not go through, because: [I]l avoit dessein de me prendre avec lui, mais il n’y avoit pas une chambre meublée où il y avoit un lit que la sienne, ses domestiques y avoient envoyé des lits de camp, apres avoir fait voir s’il n’y avoit pas moyen de preparer une chambre pour moy, qu’il ne se pouvoit pas.75 ([H]e intended to take me with him, but there was no furnished room where there was a bed other than his; his servants had sent camp beds there, after having checked whether there was no way to prepare a room for me, which there was not.) Here we see that Woodstock was granted the higher honour of the possi­ bility of sleeping under the same roof as the elector, in a house which was not intended as an official residence where guests would usually be received. Indeed, Woodstock was supposed to be provided with accommo­ dation according to his rank, yet, this honour in this case is connected with the fact that Woodstock was not only meant to have such an accom­ modation, but he would have slept in the same room as the elector. While sleeping arrangements of the early modern period can be seen as depriving privacy rather than providing it, in the case of high nobility, only the closest servant were allowed to share the sleeping space.76 He was thus transcending boundaries into the private zone of the elector’s home by being allowed to sleep there, even if he did not actually do so.

74 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 23–25, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 62/1–3, Woodstock to Portland, Dusseldorf, 31 October 1701. 75 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 44–48, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 65/1–3, Woodstock to Portland, Regensburg, 12 December 1701. 76 See the examples of bed-sharing in my article: ‘Spaces of Privacy’.

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Another instance when the private zone as physical space is revealed is when Woodstock describes the way that audiences were held in the Imperial court of Leopold I in Vienna. He writes that pour l’Empereur on le voit seul, et dans une chambre asséz obscure, mais chez l’Imperatrice toutes les dames de la cour sont plantées en haye, et il y faut passer en revue, il faut un peu de hardiesse pour n’être pas deconcerté. (for the Emperor one sees him alone, and in a rather obscure room, but at the Empress’s all the ladies of the court are planted in a hedge, and it is necessary to pass in front of them, it takes a little boldness not to be not confused).77 It appears that on the one hand, the audiences of the Emperor were held in an ‘obscure’ room, i.e. one-to-one, or at least with a limited number of people present, something that could allow for a more sensitive exchange of information. The Empress, on the other hand, had her audiences in public, giving the ladies present the opportunity to examine everyone who came in. This of course points to the intersection of the private and public zones, and could be used as a starting point for the discussion of privacy at court, while keeping in mind that women could not have the same intimacy with guests as could men, for reasons of honour. One needs to remember that while it might seem that it is a modern concept applied here, but in fact, it is Woodstock himself, who stresses the difference between seeing the Emperor one on one, versus seeing the Empress in a room full of people. Again, relating to spatial demarcations, Woodstock writes that ‘je m’en allois au logis pour ecrire’ (I went to my lodgings to write), meaning that he went to the inn in order to have a place to write his letter to Portland. We assume that he would have needed a place conducive to letter-writing, and he chose to do it within his home (even if a merely temporary one).78 We can detect a direct reference to Woodstock’s self as a private zone when he writes that ‘[j]e fus tellement attaqué à Hambourg des marchands que je n’eus pas un moment de temps à moy’ ([I] was so attacked in Hamburg by the merchants that I did not have a moment to myself),79 or on another occasion that ‘depuis que je suis ici je n’ay pas encore eu un

77 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 51–52, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 67, Woodstock to Portland, Vienna, 7 January 1702. The reference here is to Empress Eleonore Magdalene of Neuburg (1655–1720). 78 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 169–70, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 122, Woodstock to Portland, Celle, 9 March 1703. 79 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 178–79, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 127, Woodstock to Portland, Nijenhuis, 24 April 1703.

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moment à moy’ (since I came here, I did not have a moment for myself).80 This expresses Woodstock’s sense of stress and perhaps even overload, but also reflects his own feelings and that these sentiments are about time rather than space. While these sentiments are only presented in a small number of letters, they do allow us to see the distinction he makes between his ‘public’ duties of being out with people, travelling and fulfilling his father’s wishes of engaging in various activities, and of the need he has for some form of privacy. The time perspective with relation to private time should no doubt be further developed in future research into early modern privacy. Finally, we should also consider terminological references to privacy; there is at least one term associated with privacy that can be found throughout the correspondence: this is the word particulier, which is close in meaning to the Latin term privatus.81 This word repeats many times in the text, such as when Woodstock tells of the Count and Countess of Kaunitz, ‘je les ay connu fort particulierement à la Haye’ (I knew them very personally in The Hague).82 On another occasion, Rapin mentions Portland’s lack of ‘amis particuliers’ (personal friends) in the German army, who could help Woodstock in the military campaign Portland wanted his son to join.83 These words, too, construct a distinction between the ‘general’ or ‘public’, and the ‘private’, in this case concerning human relationships.

Conclusions As it seems from the correspondence, privacy took many shapes during the Grand Tour. It shows how privacy was constructed through different means by various people mentioned: Woodstock, Rapin, Portland, and the emperor. It also demonstrates what was understood as private: the room, sometimes the house, the educational relationship, friendship, and of course financial affairs. This is particularly interesting in the context of comparing the original letters and the copies, as by omitting certain letters the copyist in fact allows us to trace his own idea about ‘private matters’.

80 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 134–35, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 103, Woodstock to Portland, Berlin, 11 November 1702. 81 For a discussion on the translation of this word, see Becker, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth. I thank the author for discussing her work with me in the context of this correspondence. See also Merlin, Public et literature en France au xviie siècle, in particular, pp. 129–41. 82 British Library, Eg. 1706, fols 77–81, Nottingham University Library, Pw A 76/1–3, Woodstock to Portland, Venice, 3 March 1702. 83 Nottingham University Library, Pw A 1055/1–3, Rapin to Portland, Venice, 3 March 1702.

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We have seen that our protagonists wrote about privacy without in fact using that word at all, yet by referring to various limitations of access or on the contrary by allowing or being allowed access to another person. This all makes it much more important to realize that although there is no mentioning of the word ‘privacy’, we can detect its presence through vari­ ous means, such as understanding where these access limits lie, how one protects him or herself from others by withdrawing into another space, how one shares information on a given topic, and how certain events are depicted. The modern reader can be almost never absolutely sure whether it is indeed privacy that is concerned here, but the ensemble of descriptions, the tone, the choice of words and the underlying sentiment can all point out to the fact that it is privacy that is referred to in that particular instance.

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Works Cited Manuscripts London, British Library, Add Ms. 46954 A, B, C (1676–1678) ———, Eg. 1706 Nottingham, University Library, Pw A 57/1–2 ———, Pw A 62/1–3 ———,

——— 65/1–3

———,

——— 67

———,

——— 68

———,

——— 73

———,

——— 74

———,

——— 76/1–3

———,

——— 77/1–3

———,

——— 87

———,

——— 92

———,

——— 93/1–3

———,

——— 94

———,

——— 103

———,

——— 115

———,

——— 118/1–2

———,

——— 122

———,

——— 123

———,

——— 125

———,

——— 127

———,

——— 317/1–2

———,

——— 1040/1–2

———,

——— 1041

———,

——— 1048

———,

——— 1051

———,

——— 1053

———,

——— 1055/1–3

———,

——— 1056/1–3

———,

——— 1062

———,

——— 1063/1–2

———,

——— 1064

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———,

——— 1065

———,

——— 1066/1–2

———,

——— 1067

———,

——— 1068/1–2

———, Pw B 68/1–2 ———,

——— 69

Primary Sources Deladine, Antoine-François, and Louis-Mayeul Chaudon, Nouveau dictionnaire historique, ou Histoire abrégée de tous les hommes qui se sont fait un nom par des talens… (Caen: chez G. Le Roy, imprimeur du Roi, Hôtel de la Monnoie, rue Notre-Dame, 1783) Erasmus of Rotterdam, Declamatio de puerisstatim ac liberaliter instituendis (Basel: Johan Froben, 1529) Japikse, N., Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck, Eersten Graaf van Portland, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, no. 24, The Hague (1928), 542–45Rapin-Thoyras, Paul, Histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols (The Hague: Alexandre de Rogissart, 1724–1727) ———, Dissertation sur les whigs et les torys (The Hague: Charles Le Vier, 1707) Rou, Jean, Mémoires inédites et opucscules, trans. by Francis Waddington, 2 vols (Paris: Agence centrale de la société de l'histoire du protestantisme français, 1857), ii Van Hoogstraten, David, and Matthaeus Brouerius van Nidek, eds, ‘Berhnhart Bentink’, in Groot algemeen historisch, geografisch, genealogisch, als oodeelkundig (Amsterdam: Brunel, Wetsteins, Waesberge, de Coup, Humbert, Willem van de Water, 1725), ii Secondary Works Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby, eds, Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985–1987) Becker, Anna, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth: Family, Friendship and Sociability in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) ———, ‘Machiavellismus als Modell? Der angelsächsische blick auf das politische Italien im 17. Jahrhundert’, in Keyßlers Welt. Europa auf Grand Tour, ed. by Livia Gardénas and Achatz von Müller (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), pp. 105–13

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Bepler, Jill, ‘Travelling and Posterity: The Archive, the Library and the Cabinet’, in Grand Tour. Adeliges Reisen und Europaïsche Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundret. Akten der internationalen Kolloquien in der Villa Vigoni 1999 und im Deutschen Historischen Institut Paris 2000, ed. by Rainer Babel and Werner Paravicini (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2005), pp. 191–203 Birkedal Bruun, Mette, ‘Privacy in Early Modern Christianity and Beyond: Traces and Approaches’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento/Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, 44.2 (2018), 33–54 Black, Jeremy, The British and the Grand Tour (London, Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985) ———, France and the Grand Tour (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) ———, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Boulton, James T., and T. O. McLoughlin, eds, News from Abroad: Letters Written by British Travellers on the Grand Tour, 1728–71 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012) Boutier, Jean, ‘Compétence internationale, émergence d’une ‘profession’ et circulation des savoirs: le tuteuraristocratique dans l’Angleterre du xviie siècle’, in Saperi in Movimento, ed. by Maria-Pia Paoli (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2006), pp. 149–77 Brennan, Michael G., The Origins of the Grand Tour: The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649–1654), William Hammond (1655–1658), and Banaster Maynard (1660–1663) (London: London Hakluyt Society, 2004) Cazenove, Raoul de, Rapin-Thoyras: sa famille, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1866) Chaudon, Louis-Mayeul, ed., Nouveau dictionnaire historique, ou Histoire abrégée de tous les hommes qui se sont fait un nom par des talens, des vertus, des forfaits, des erreurs etc., 7th edn, vi (Caen, Lyon: G. Le Roy, Bruyset, 1789) Cohen, Michèle, ‘The Grand Tour: Language, National Identity and Masculinity’, Changing English: Studies in Reading & Culture, 8.2 (2001), 129–41 Colletta, Lisa, ed., The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture (Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015) Cox, Janice V., ed., The Travels of Francis Tallents in France and Switzerland 1671–1673 (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2011) Daybell, James, Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of LetterWriting, 1512–1635 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

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Duijvendak, Maarten, ‘Elite Families between Private and Public Life: Some Trends and Theses’, in Private Domain, Public Inquiry: Families and Lifestyles in the Netherlands and Europe, 1550 to the Present, ed. by Anton Schuurman, and Pieter Spierenburg (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), pp. 72–88 Franchina, Miriam, ‘The Making of a Man of Letters: The Backstage and Afterlife of Paul Rapin-Thoyras’, Histoire d’Angleterre’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 3.3 (2018), 314–47 ———, ‘Writing an Impartial History in the Republic of Letters: Paul Rapin-Thoyras and his Histoire d’Angleterre (1724–1728)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2017) Girard d’Albissin, Nelly, Un précurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin-Thoyras. Premier historien français des institutions anglaises (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969) Glozier, Matthew, Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002) ———, Marschal Schomberg, 1615–1690: ‘The Ablest Soldier of his Age’ (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005) Grabowsky, Ellen M., and Pieter Jozias Verkruijsse, eds, Eennaektbeeldt op eenmarmorematras seer schoon: Het dagboek van een ‘Grand Tour’ (1649–1651) door Arnhout Hellemans Hooft (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001) Green, Michaël, ‘Early Employment Networks of Paul Rapin-Thoyras: Huguenot Soldier and Tutor (1685–1692)’, Diasporas, 31 (2018), 101–14 ———, Le Grand Tour 1701–1703. Lettres de Henry Bentinck, vicomte de Woodstock, et de son précepteur Paul Rapin-Thoyras, à Hans-Willem Bentinck, comte de Portland (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021) ———, ‘A Huguenot Education for the Early Modern Nobility’, The Huguenot Society Journal, 30.1 (2013), 73–92 ———, The Huguenot Jean Rou (1638–1711): Scholar, Educator, Civil Servant (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015) ———, ‘Reporting the Grand Tour: The Correspondence of Henry Bentinck, Viscount Woodstock, and Paul Rapin-Thoyras with the Earl of Portland, 1701–1703’, Paedagogica Historica, 50.4 (2014), 465–78 ———, ‘Spaces of Privacy in Dutch Early Modern Egodocuments’, Tijdschrijft voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis/Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 18.3 (2021), 17–40 Green, Michaël, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun, ‘En privé & en public: The Epistolary Preparation of the Dutch Stadtholders’, Journal of Early Modern History, 24.3 (2020), 253–79 Grew, Marion E., William Bentinck and William III (Prince of Orange): The Life of Bentinck Earl of Portland from the Welbeck Correspondence (London: Appleton, 1924)

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Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) Hudson, Roger, The Grand Tour, 1592–1796 (London: Folio, 1993) Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Jardine, Lisa, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print, updated edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) Konstan, David, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Kitzbichler, Josefine, Katia Lubitz, and Nina Mindt, eds, Dokumente zur Theorie der Übersetzung antiker Literatur in Deutschland seit 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009) Laplanche, Frédéric, L’écriture, le sacré et histoire. Érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France au xviie siècle (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press,1986) Le Vassor, Michel, Histoire du règne de Louis XIII, Roi de France et de Navarre, 10 vols (Amsterdam: Pierre Brunel, 1700–1711) Maag, Karin, ‘The Huguenot Academies: Preparing for an Uncertain Future’, in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1665, ed. by Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 139–56 McKenna, Antony, ‘Les Soupirs de la France esclave: le problème de l’attribution’, in Littérature de contestation: pamphlets et polémiques du règne de Louis XIV aux Lumières, ed. by Pierre Bonnet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), pp. 229–68 Merlin, Hélène, Public et littérature en France au xviie siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994) Mommsen, Carl Johannes Tycho, Beiträgezur Lehre von den griechischen Präpositionen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1895) Niderst, Alain, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et leur monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976) Nouvelles littéraires contenant ce qui se passe de plus considérable dans la République des Lettres, viii.2 (Amsterdam: Henri du Sauzet, 1718) Onnekink, David, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite: The Career of Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Philodemus: On Frank Criticism, ed. by Konstan David, Clay Diskin, and Clarence E. Glad (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998) Pittion, Jean-Paul, ‘Instruire et édifier: Les protestants et l’éducation en France sous l’Édit de Nantes’, in Les huguenots éducateurs dans l’espace européen, ed. by Geraldine Sheridan, and Viviane Prest (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), pp. 19–45 Pohlig, Matthias, The War of the Spanish Succession: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

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Redford, Bruce, Venice & the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Sweet, Rosemary, Gerrit Verhoeven, and Sarah Goldsmith, eds, Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour (London: Routledge, 2017) ———, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) The Poems of Thomas Davis: Now First Collected. With Notes and Historical Illustrations (Dublin: James Duffy, 1857) Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘A Huguenot Historian: Paul Rapin’, in Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550–1800, ed. by Irene Scouloudi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), pp. 3–19 ———, ‘Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’, in Hugh Trevor-Roper, From Counter Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1993), pp. 249–65 Troost, Wout, William III, the Stadholder-King: A Political Biography, trans. by J. C. Grayson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Verhoeven, Gerrit, ‘Calvinist Pilgrimages and Popish Encounters: Religious Identity and Sacred Space on the Dutch Grand Tour (1598–1685)’, Journal of Social History, 43.3 (2010), 615–34 ———, Europe within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585–1795), trans. by Diane Webb (Leiden: Brill, 2015) Weller, Toni, ‘An Historical Perspective on Surveillance’, in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed. by Kristie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 57–63 Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr., and Adele Seeff, eds, The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Newark: University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses, 2000) Yardeni, Myriam, Le refuge huguenot (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002) ———, Le refuge protestante (Paris: PUF, 1985) Websites ‘Biography of Hans William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709)’, in University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections Website, online edition [Accessed on 6 November 2018. ]

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Colecciones de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Inv. Num. A-2382, C. Bravo, ‘Planta de unalmacén en el puerto de la ciudad de Cádiz’, drawing, 1833. Online edition [Accessed on 15 August 2019. < https://www.academiacolecciones.com/buscador.php? q=A-2382&cat=dibujos#&gid=1&pid=A-2382>] Colecciones de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Inv. Num. A-1026, J. Díaz, ‘Planta principal y sección ON de una aduana’, drawing, 1788. Online edition [Accessed on 15 August 2019. < https://www.academiacolecciones.com/buscador.php? q=a-1026&cat=dibujos#&gid=1&pid=A-1026>] ‘Honig & Zoonen, J.’, in Website of StichtingPapiergeschiedenisZaanstreek ‘De Hollander’. Online edition [Accessed on 15 August 2019. ]

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Chapter 6. Personal Gift-Giving Attempts at Intimacy in Anna of Saxony’s Letter Exchanges*

Giving and Gaining: Gift-Exchanges in Context Anna of Saxony (1532–1585), daughter of King Christian III of Denmark (1503–1559) and wife of Elector August of Saxony (1526–1586), was renowned during her lifetime for her extensive communication network. She exchanged letters, books, pharmaceutical recipes, botanical specimens, and luxury objects with nobles from Protestant and Catholic territories alike.1 She managed to create this carefully crafted network by using con­ stant correspondence and tailored gifts to key individuals, helping to turn Saxony into an essential node in sixteenth-century information exchanges. Gift-giving is one of the strongest means of creating and maintaining social bonds. Historically, gifts have served as a way of establishing per­ sonal connections, as well as political tools for diplomatic relations. In the early modern period, gift-exchange was one of the main strategies noble people employed to maintain kinship ties, create communication channels,

* Research funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF138) at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, which also generously funded the Open Access of this chapter. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Centre, in particular the members of the Dresden case team, with whom I have been researching privacy in early modern Saxony, and the director Prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun. I am grateful for the advice of Prof. Jill Bepler, who gave me excellent suggestions in the early stages of this chapter. Furthermore, I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Prof. Michaël Green and Prof. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, for their insightful comments. 1 Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 100–02. Natacha Klein Käfer is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 173–189 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138243 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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and to demonstrate wealth and power.2 Gift-exchanges were instruments of power that depended on the idea that the giver and the receiver were connected through the object. A personal gift could, at the same time, rein­ force ceremonial bonds and pierce the formal bubble, providing a certain level of intimacy — or at least the impression of it. In the study of early modern gift-exchange among the elites, the dynamics of gift-giving are mostly perceived as being marked by social performance and the concealment of self-interest.3 Although it is hard to question the importance of these elements, here I argue that gift-giving was also a way of establishing more personal and intimate connections be­ tween individuals. These positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.4 We cannot neglect the public side of strategic and symbolic gift-giving, but personal, more intimate ties were also crucial for these noble networks to operate. More than a ceremonial act of ‘collectively maintained and approved self-deception’,5 sending a gift meant that one could have one’s presence felt at a different court, at least at some level. A meaningful gift also required collecting information about the recipient’s tastes and preferences as a way of showing appreciation and the wish for a personal connection with the particular individual. This information, and the gifts deriving from it, served to show what the people had in common, provid­ ing a basis for conversation and the first steps towards some level of trust. Gifts also worked to maintain long-lasting bonds between courts, as there was an implied duty of reciprocation.6 As such, the act of giving created an opening for a back-and-forth between the people.

2 As stated by Felicity Heal: ‘Cultures in which personal bonds of patronage, affinity, and deference were central to political identity, and beneficence and informal support was largely maintained through networks of kinship, neighbourliness, and group identity, have proved particularly amenable to study through the mechanism of gift-exchange’. Heal, The Power of Gifts, p. 5. 3 Most of these studies are inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the affective power of the symbolic gesture of gift-giving (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.) For an example based on the English context, see Scott, Selfish Gifts. 4 Katrin Keller argues that Anna of Saxony’s gift-giving was less a case of making friends, but more a way to strengthen established bonds or as basis for future requests (Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 100–01.) I build on Keller’s notion that these gifts were part of the maintenance of dynastic bonds by stressing that the strengthening of these bonds required personal touch, and therefore — sometimes even inadvertently — also resulted in more friendly and intimate bonds. 5 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 6. 6 Marcel Mauss introduced the idea that gifts must be free from any interest from the giver and come with the obligation of reception and reciprocation. See Mauss, The Gift. This reciprocity in gift-giving has been complicated by more recent studies, especially after Derrida’s Given Time, see Hénaff, ‘Derrida: The Gift, the Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity’, pp. 11–29. However, instead of understanding gift-exchange as a ‘competitive marketplace’ (Scott, Selfish Gifts, p. 16.), I will observe how reciprocity in gift-exchanges worked as a way of maintaining personal bonds.

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In early modern court culture, these networks of gifts relied on mes­ sengers and letters to accompany the present in order to describe the personal reason for the gifting act and the importance of the object.7 Epistolary culture and object exchanges were intrinsically connected in attempts to maintain social bonds at a distance. As such, an analysis of cor­ respondence can help us understand the material culture of early modern networks and see the importance of the notion of intimacy within diplo­ matic relations. Anna of Saxony’s correspondence collection is a fruitful starting point to explore this dimension, as she transformed gift-exchange into a central element in the creation and maintenance of her network. Noble epistolary networks relied on gifts not only as a ‘proxy’ of the individual at a distant court but also as a step into the process of becom­ ing more intimate with important contacts. Dynastic connections alone would not necessarily imply that one could have a private relationship with a fellow member of the nobility, especially when considering the lack of physical proximity in most of those relationships. Navigating the boundaries between private communication and public negotiations was a complex task, informed by ceremonial expectations, deference, and a usually slow process of building up a personal connection. As James Day­ bell has pointed out, ‘private correspondence’ in the early modern period operated within a complex system of reading access that went beyond the simple two-way communication between sender and addressee having an exclusive reading of each other’s letters to one another.8 Although the desire for epistolary privacy existed, having a ‘for your eyes only’ type of exchange was not as straightforward to achieve. In the networks of power, retreating to read one person’s letter in private rather than others would also send a public message about the closeness of their relationship.9 Building up an intimate-enough relationship with fellow nobles to have a private correspondence with them was crucial to develop friendships, exercise political sway, and strengthen ties within circles of influence. Tailored gifts operated, then, as an important first step into demonstrating this willingness to establish such bonds. Another ‘private’ aspect of gift-giving is the passing of property from one pair of private hands to another. As expressed by Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘[t]o make gifts, things must be individual or private enough to be given away (…) but not so “private” that owners could not imagine 7 In her analysis of Anna of Saxony’s ‘gift politics’, Katrin Keller states that ‘Geschenke begleiteten jedoch vielen Korrespondenzen dauerhaft oder kommen doch zumindest als Begleitumstand aller länger anhaltende Korrespondenzen sowie viele Bittsuche vor’. (Gifts were an enduring part of many forms of correspondence, or at least appear as an accompanying circumstance for all long-lasting correspondence, as well as many requests.) Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), p. 100. 8 Daybell, ‘“I Wold Wyshe My Doings Might Be…Secret”’. 9 Daybell, ‘“I Wold Wyshe My Doings Might Be…Secret”’, p. 157.

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separating themselves from them.’10 The presents exchanged in the context of this chapter gained value both from the tailoring to particular individu­ als and from the exclusivity of receiving something that was previously privately owned by another member of the nobility. This also included non-material gifts, such as knowledge of restricted recipes and general sharing of secrets as a sign of trust. Privacy and secrecy went hand-in-hand as tools of personal control, which, therefore, added value to — or as — a gift.11 This contribution looks at how even very performative gifts involved in public and ceremonial settings can contribute to the constitution of per­ sonal and intimate bonds, especially among noblewomen. These personal bonds were crucial in early modern politics, facilitating diplomatic efforts and establishing the ground for alliances and trade.12 To demonstrate the finer mechanisms of gift-giving as a gateway to intimacy, I will use the example of Anna of Saxony’s strategies of letter-writing and gift-exchange to show how she managed to cultivate a close network of contacts, traded personal information, and shared secret knowledge. I will explore the first letters sent to people that became closer contacts and political allies of the Electress of Saxony, showing how tailored gifts enabled her to develop alliances that blended personal connection and political influence. The examination of the sources and the analysis of this context will be done in three sections. Firstly, I will provide a quick overview of Anna of Saxony’s letter-writing practices. Since Anna was a prolific letter-writer, a brief explanation of her patterns of practice in correspondence will help to situate the particular examples of her gift-giving explored in the following sections. Secondly, I will present the example of Anna’s exchange of material goods, especially in her first contact with the Holy Roman

10 Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, p. 13. 11 On the relationship between privacy and secrecy, the philosopher Sissela Bok writes: ‘Having defined secrecy as intentional concealment, I obviously cannot take it as identical with privacy. I shall define privacy as the condition of being protected from unwanted access by others — either physical access, personal information, or attention. Claims to privacy are claims to control access to what one takes — however grandiosely — to be one’s personal domain. Through such claims, and the counterclaims they often generate, people try to reinforce or expand this control. Privacy and secrecy overlap whenever the efforts at such control rely on hiding. But privacy need not hide; and secrecy hides far more than what is private. A private garden need not be a secret garden; a private life is rarely a secret life. Conversely, secret diplomacy rarely concerns what is private, any more than do arrangements for a surprise party or for choosing prize winners. Why then are privacy and secrecy so often equated? In part, this is so because privacy is such a central part of what secrecy protects that it can easily be seen as the whole. People claim privacy for differing amounts of what they are and do and own; if need be, they seek the added protection of secrecy. In each case, their purpose is to become less vulnerable, more in control.’ Bok, Secrets, p. 11. 12 Bepler, ‘Dynastic Positioning and Political Newsgathering’.

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Imperial couple, to show how personal gifts and information gathering go hand-in-hand in sixteenth-century court culture. Thirdly, I will explore how exchanges of knowledge were an integral part of the gift-giving culture among noblewomen within the German principalities and how knowledge bonds became a prime reason for establishing epistolary privacy in the early modern period.

Anna of Saxony’s Epistolary Exchanges In the nineteenth century, Karl von Weber, the archive director of the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, estimated that over 33,000 letters to and from Anna could be found in the archive’s collection. This assessment was made based on an assumed average of letters in each of the compiled volumes.13 However, a closer analysis showed that the number is probably closer to 20,000, although the total amount is still unknown.14 Given the still-extensive surviving records of Anna’s communication between the years of 1554 and 1585, situating Anna’s epistolary patterns requires significant palaeographic and contextual research. The high volume of records pose certain difficulties. It is hard to assess what is standard and what is unique about each exchange when the corpus available is so vast. Thankfully, authors like Katrin Keller,15 Pernille Arenfeldt,16 and Alisha Rankin17 dedicated comprehensive studies to Anna’s correspondence, pro­ viding a substantial analytical background for this study on her gift-giving

13 ‘Wir haben in einem der Copialbände die Zahl der Briefe gezählt und fanden deren 525: dies als durchschnittlich angenommen, wären demnach über 11000 Briefe von Anna selbst vorhanden. In einem der Bände mit Briefen an Anna fanden wir deren 173. Der Gesammtbetrag der aus Anna’s Correspondenz noch erhaltenen Briefe mag sich daher wohl über 22000 belaufen, die der Verfasser im Laufe der Jahre bei Ordnung und Revision der Handschreiben aus jener Zeit insgesammt durchgesehen hat’ (We counted the number of letters in one of the cartularies and found 525 of them: assuming this to be an average, there would be over 11.000 letters from Anna herself. In one of the volumes of letters to Anna, we found 173. The total amount of the letters received by Anna may therefore amount to more than 22.000, which the author [Weber] has looked through over the years when organizing and revising the manuscripts from that time.) Weber, Anna Kurfürstin zu Sachsen, p. 3. 14 Katrin Keller identified ‘at least 16.000 existing letters’ in her research on Anna’s correspondence (Keller, ‘Kommunikationsraum Altes Reich’, p. 212). However, there is a chance that some letters have not been accounted for since Weber’s time. 15 Keller, ‘Kommunikationsraum Altes Reich’; Keller, ‘Zwischen Zwei Residenzen’, pp. 365– 82; Keller, ‘Die Sächsischen Kurfürstinnen in Der Zweiten Hälfte Des 16. Jahrhunderts– Familie Und Politik’, pp. 279–96; Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585); Keller, ‘Die Kurfürstin Im Alten Reich’, pp. 189–206. 16 Arenfeldt, ‘Gendered Patronage and Confessionalization’, pp. 1–26; Arenfeldt, ‘Wissensproduktion und Wissensverbreitung im 16. Jahrhundert’, pp. 4–28; Arenfeldt, ‘“The Queen Has Sent Nine Frisian Cows”’, pp. 116–31. 17 Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters.

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practices. The impressive number of sources available concerning Anna of Saxony, together with her prominent position in the network of nobility during her time as Electress of Saxony, allows for a unique insight into gift-exchange practices in sixteenth-century German courts. As the Electress of Saxony and daughter of the Danish King, Anna had a widespread network of communication across northern Europe and the Holy Roman Empire. She corresponded with men and women of various rankings, dealing with political, economic, and legal decisions. She wrote to the Queen of England and the Prince of Orange, to councillors of Saxony and abroad, to religious authorities in German and Danish territories, to doctors and other professionals, as well as to royals and nobles of different European regions. In quantitative terms, 70 per cent of Anna’s letters were sent to women.18 Women are also the main recurrent correspondents, especially in Anna’s familial and alchemical networks.19 Although Anna knew Danish to some extent, all of her correspondence is in German. As she never learned Latin,20 all communication that re­ quired this lingua franca had to be translated by her scribes. In terms of formula, most of Anna’s letters follow the traditional format of letterwriting manuals, dividing the writing into salutatio, exordium, narratio, petitio, and conclusio.21 This format is clearly the template for first-contact letters, while subsequent communication could slightly vary in structure, depending on the level of familiarity and social ranking of the addressee. When it comes to the writing style, Anna’s language and rhetoric remained very similar throughout her life, with only subtle adaptations depending on the gender or status of the addressee or the nature of the communica­ tion. Pernille Arenfeldt divided Anna’s letters into the following typology: 1) requests and instructions (usually to court servants, administrators, or other subjects); 2) intercessions and supplications (in which she wrote in behalf of friends, relatives, or clients for particular favours); 3) formal greetings (congratulatory writings and messages for holidays); 4) contin­ ual correspondence (ongoing communication with friends and clients of a more personal, trusting nature); and 5) familiar letters (usually used to reconfirm dynastic connections).22 Gift-giving was an integral part of all of these types of letters, with the exception of supplications, as gifts in that context could hint towards bribery.23 18 Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, p. 45. 19 Maybe except for Anna’s brother, Fredrik II of Denmark, see Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, pp. 45–49. 20 Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), p. 14. 21 This is the traditional medieval model of letter-writing from the artes dictandi. See Wetterhall, ‘Medieval Origins of Corporate Communication’, pp. 112–23. 22 Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, pp. 54–56. 23 Ilana Ben-Amos dealt with similar issues of misinterpretation of gift in Chapter 8 ‘The perils of gifts’ in her work Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving, pp. 275–305.

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When it came to gift-giving, Anna had a signature present: her selfmade Aqua vitae, a strong distilled alcohol, informally used to treat a vari­ ety of illnesses by doctors and lay people alike.24 The Electress managed to build a reputation as a brewer of remedies and collector of alchemical and healing recipes. This reputation served her well in the building and maintenance of communication networks, with several nobles writing her to enquire about her specialities. Beyond the Aqua vitae, Anna was also known for her salves and her Giftpulver, an antidote for multiple kinds of poisons. Although it was common practice that Protestant noblewomen produced their own remedies, Anna of Saxony managed to increase her production to an almost industrial scale.25 Another common type of gift was produce from her personal garden. Anna and August of Saxony had an impressive botanical collection in their gardens, gathering fruits, herbs, and flowers from different parts of the world.26 The rarity of some of their specimens made for special gifts,27 while the abundance of other produce allowed them to make more regular deliveries to a wider group of people.

Walnuts and Salves: Personal Contacts Through Material Gifts Objects were at the core of early modern gift-giving. These objects, however, could have different levels of permanence. Some were meant as a more perpetual token of a particular bond, becoming heirlooms of the connection between the parts involved — jewels, exquisitely-crafted weapons, rare books, treasures of all kinds. Others were more ephemeral, aimed to tackle particular tastes — fruits and other foods, perfumes, wines and other drinks, commissioned performances. While Anna of Saxony provided her contacts with both types of gifts, most often her presents would be consumable. These consumable goods as gifts served multiple purposes. Her more ephemeral presents were usually self- or locally-made and mostly consisted of or used ingredients she could find with relative ease and abundance. This meant that she could share a significant amount of these goods — usually her remedies or preserved foods — with a wider

24 There are several variations of Aqua vitae recipes. Anna of Saxony learned her version of Aqua vitae from the Duchess Dorothea of Mansfeld, who was her personal mentor in alchemical pursuits. Dorothea and Anna actually shared two different versions of Aqua vitae: a white one and a yellow one. (More information can be found in Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters.) 25 The inventories of Anna’s Destillierhäuser show the vast amount and variety of ingredients, equipment, and storage used by Anna’s alchemical procedures. See also Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 153–56. 26 Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 56–58. 27 Keller, ‘Tulips, Tobacco and Parrots’.

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group of people. In addition, consumable gifts usually ensured that the gift-receiver maintained personal bonds with the Electress as a way of continually receiving a supply of the particular goods shared by Anna. A great example of ongoing communication being maintained by Anna’s consumable gifts is the case of Anna’s Aqua vitae. Most of the repeated correspondents in the collection of letters received by the Elec­ tress requested vials of Aqua vitae at some point.28 The Electress provided Aqua vitae to many of the German princes.29 Religious authorities would also reach out to receive the remedy from Anna.30 While Aqua vitae was a staple of Anna’s gift-giving, it usually was sent either through a request — by the receiver themselves or someone related to them — or as the result of Anna overhearing about the person’s condition and sending the distilled liquid as a possible remedy. If even a panacea like Aqua vitae de­ pended on personal information reaching Anna to find its way, other more specific gifts definitely required shared information about the personal needs of particular receivers. A great example of Anna’s gift-giving as based on collected personal information comes from her first direct epistolary interaction with the Holy Roman Imperial couple. Anna’s first recorded letter to Maria of Spain (1528–1603), the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (1527–1576), is sent on 13 March 1570, after they met in person in Prague. She addressed the Em­ press as ‘most gracious Lady’ and described how she was sending gifts to thank Maria for treating her with ‘almost too much humbleness’.31 She sent self-cultivated and prepared walnuts for the Emperor (as she heard they were his favourites),32 chequers fruit, apples, and a barrel of cherry juice with instructions on how to turn it into sweet wine. She also mentioned how she heard Maria complain about eczema on her hands, so she sent her a remedy: a salve made by Anna herself. The ointment is sent with instructions on how to apply it (placed on a clean cloth and carefully put

28 The main exceptions in this case were the communication with Anna’s immediate family in the Danish court, and her exchanges within her alchemical network, as we will see below. 29 Alisha Rankin explores Anna’s correspondence with Duke Heinrich the Younger of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and his constant requests for Aqua vitae in Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, pp. 158–59. 30 The Lutheran theologian Nikolaus Selnecker wrote to Anna requesting Aqua vitae once he was away from the court of Dresden (1577, SHStA Dresden, Loc 08536/05, fol. 193r-v). However, Archbishop Johann Jakob of Salzburg also received Aqua vitae from Anna in 1567 (SHStA Dresden, Kopial 512, fols 174v–75r). 31 SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 121v. 32 ‘Weil Ich aber uernommen das E(wrerr) A(ller)g(nädigs)t(en) hertzliebsten herr mein allergnedigster Kaÿser, die welsch nuss, so Ich pflege einzumachen, (uillaicht mir zu gnaden) lohben loben und ruhmen’. SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 121v. From here on, the greeting ‘most gracious’ (allergnädigst) will be shown as abbreviated in the sources (Agt.).

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on the skin until it gets better).33 Anna also mentioned how she learned that the Imperial couple had the best and most exquisite ‘candied fruits of all sorts’ as a casual hint of a possible return gift.34 Anna’s next letter, on 28 August 1570, starts with how thankful she is that Maria accepted and appreciated her little gifts.35 She also apologized for not sending the recipe for the salve together with the ointment. Anna insisted that it was not for lack of trust in the Empress or a desire to keep the recipe a secret from her, but that she thought the salve was such a minor present, based on ‘common peasant knowledge’. She sent then not only the salve recipe but another commonly known recipe for eczema, expressing regret for not sending this information from the beginning.36 As we will see in the section below, sharing knowledge was considered a crucial element in gift-giving. As a result of the interactions with Maria, in Anna’s first recorded letter to Maximilian, in July 1570, she thanked him for the cherries and tart cherries sent by the Imperial couple. She expressed her appreciation that the fruits were collected directly from the Imperial garden, a generosity that she could not possibly match, and was happy to report that they arrived undamaged and tasted very good. In both letters, Anna referred to herself as humble and subservient towards the gracious Imperial couple.37 The communication seems to merge between Maria’s and Maximilian’s letters — for Anna, the Imperial couple worked as a unit. The idea of the ruling couple being united in mind and soul was fundamental to the Electress. For German Protestant principalities, having the ruling couple as a united front — as father and mother of the Land — was an integral part of the governing structure.38 33 ‘Als auch Ewrerr Agt. Jungst zu Praga unter anderen gnedigstem gesprüch der flechten halben auff den henden / gegen mir gedacht, und Ich derselben unterthenigste zusage gethan ein Arznej dafur zuubersenden demselben nach schicke E. Agt. Ich hieneben erstlich/ einen korb mit Opfeln die darfur dienen Wir E. Agt Ich unterthenigst hab berichten lassen so gut Ich die nach gelegenheit dieses Jar gewitters hab erfulten konnen und dan Ein Salben die pflegt man uff ein rein tuchlein streichen und uber die flechten biss zur besserung zulegenn’. SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 122r. 34 ‘Und wir wohl mir bewüst das E. Agt. die aller besten und kostlichst Candirten fruchte uon allerlej arth haben’. On the margins of the letter draft states also ‘als die zubekommenn sein mag’. SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 121v. 35 ‘die geringschätzigen von mir uberschicken ding’, SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 127v. 36 ‘Das aber E. Agt. Ich nicht das Recept zu dem sälblen zu den handen mitgeschickt hab. Ist warlich nicht derhalb vorblicken das Ich einig bedenck hette E. Agt. dasselbig treulich zuoffenbarenn oder das E Agt dasselbig geheim halten. Sondern weil es so gar geringe stuck, so darzu gehörenn kommen. Vnd wie de dir man sagt mir gemeine Pawer kunste sein. Habe Ich unterthenigste schon getragen E Agt. dauon bericht zuthun. Juligend aber uberschick E Agt Ich nicht allein das Recept von dem vorigen sälbel, sondern noch eine gemeine doch gewisse kunst fur die flechten’. SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 127v. 37 The terms used by Anna are ‘demutig’ and ‘unthertenig’ [sic]. 38 Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon, p. 162.

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These letters are only one of many examples of how the Electress’s power was maintained and reinforced by her interpersonal relationships, which she carefully crafted by using the ‘personal’ in her correspondence.39 To develop this ‘personal’ approach, Anna made cautious use of her private network. In a context in which the messenger is almost as important as the message, Anna chose her intermediary carefully. Although Anna’s husband August was a long-term acquaintance of Maximilian II and maintained regular correspondence with the Emperor, she worked to forge her own personal connections. Her foot in the door of the Imperial court’s inner circle was the baroness Brigitta Trautson (1510/15?–1576).40 The wife of the Emperor’s Obersthofmarschall — one of the supreme offices of the Holy Roman Empire —, Brigitta was well established in the court of Vienna. Anna and Brigitta met in Frankfurt at Maximilian II’s election as King of Germany in 1562 and maintained a steady thread of correspon­ dence from 1563 onwards.41 When we look at the collection of letters sent by Anna, every time she wrote to the Holy Roman Imperial court, a letter to Brigitta also closely followed, especially when it came to the commu­ nication with Empress Maria.42 The letters to Brigitta gave instructions on how to present the gifts, stressing how they were made to fit Maria’s personal needs and tastes while also showing the proper reverence to Maria’s status as Empress.43 The care that Anna took in the presentation of the gifts shows that there was also a tenuous balance to be struck between how personal the gifts were and the respect towards social ranking. These examples show how vital knowing personal details was for the exchange of meaningful gifts between sixteenth-century courts. Sending presents or requesting exclusive goods helped to create or reinforce bonds between members of the nobility, but also facilitated moving the conversa­ tion to more personal grounds, establishing a closer connection between the parties. As we can see in the exchange with Maria and Maximilian, more important than the objects themselves are the personal aspects of the gifts — the homemade remedy, the fruits directly from the Imperial garden, and the attention paid to the Empress’s ailments and the Emperor’s preference for walnuts. Although these exchanges were most definitely forms of maintaining public relations — as stressed by Anna’s pledges of loyalty in the letter to Maximilian —, the personal details are what 39 Examples from people of different rankings can be found in her communication with the theologian Nikolaus Selnecker (Arenfeldt, ‘Gendered Patronage and Confessionalization’), and with the Duchess Dorothea of Mansfeld (Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters). 40 She is mentioned in the secondary literature as Brigitta Trautson, but she signed her letters as ‘Brigita’. 41 For more details about the communication between Anna and Brigitta as a point of connection between the two courts, see Keller, ‘Zwischen Zwei Residenzen’. 42 This is the case until Brigitta Trautson’s death in 1576. 43 SHStA Dresden, Kopial 514, fol. 157r-v.

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denoted value to the gifts. Anna used personalized language, carefully highlighting how her initiative to send them gifts is her own and not some stiff, official communication between the principality of Saxony and the Holy Roman Empire. The result was an exchange with the Emperor inde­ pendent from Maximilian’s close relationship to her husband August, and a long-lasting communication with Maria, even after Maximilian’s death. In August of 1582, Maria specifically asked Anna to make sure that her son Rudolf II (1552–1612), the successor of Maximilian II, would receive Saxony’s support, given the bonds between the two women.44 Maria also requested remedies from Anna to her close relatives, such as her sister, the Queen of Portugal.45 In this case, Maria confided in Anna that her sister had haemorrhoids, showing how private health information became part of the exchange between them. As such, the proximity that Anna established with the Imperial couple helped her to extend the reach of her network across Europe, providing her with more personal information about people at different courts.

Knowledge is the Greatest Gift: Exchanges of Information and Recipes Anna’s knowledge of medicinal brewing and alchemical procedures were mostly a result of her interaction with the Duchess Dorothea of Mansfeld (1493–1578). Dorothea was a recognized healer, who was respected by doctors and nobles across the German territories. Beyond teaching Anna how to prepare her Aqua vitae and other remedies, Dorothea was also an example in gift-giving. Highly regarded for her charitable healing, Dorothea was also known for her generosity, providing not only her self-brewed medicines to people of all ranks in society but also gifting the knowledge of how to make them. The latter, however, was a special gift given only to a selected few.46 A particular way in which Dorothea used her knowledge in gift-giving was with tailored-made recipes. A prime example of that was her wish to develop a sweet Aqua vitae specifically as a gift for Anna and August

44 SHStA Dresden, Loc. 08534/1, fol. 254r. 45 It has not been established who exactly was the person referred to here. The case was also mentioned by Alisha Rankin, and she speculates that it is a reference to Joanna of Austria (1535–1573). See Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, p. 25. 46 Besides Anna of Saxony, Dorothea of Mansfeld also taught Anna of Hohenlohe, Agnes of Solms, Dorothea of Schonberg, and Magdalena of Mansfeld. Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, pp. 111–12. By teaching these women, Dorothea created a very intimate circle between them, to the point that they refer to her as ‘Mother Dorothea’ or ‘Mother of Mansfeld’. Rankin mentions that ‘[w]ith the exception of Anna [of Saxony], all of the women referred to Dorothea as “my mother of Mansfeld”’ (p. 112).

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of Saxony.47 Recipes dedicated to people were one of the main ways in which doctors, alchemists, and other healers paid homage to their patrons. Compiled recipe collections could almost be seen as a ‘map of nobility’ by the number of recipes dedicated to royals and nobles.48 It is hard, however, to discern which recipes were dedicated to these nobles and which were developed by them (such as Dorothea’s and Anna’s recipes), as they appear side-by-side without distinction. This equal standing between dedicated and self-developed recipes seems to suggest that the attribution of a recipe could, then, also be a form of a gift. At a time when patents on healing knowledge were basically non-existent, these forms of attribution had a long-lasting legacy, making it an exceptional present. Anna of Saxony, however, kept her recipes relatively close to her chest. She relied on the exclusivity of her knowledge to transform the sharing of this information into a special gift. She was cautious with whom she would share this knowledge, making sure to transmit it only through safe means, many times sending information separately to guarantee that it would not be intercepted. An interesting case to observe how Anna thought of ‘secret knowledge’ as a gift was her communication with the Duchess Anna of Bavaria (1528–1590). On 5 January 1563, Anna of Saxony wrote a four-page letter, with an accompanying note (Zeddel), to Anna of Bavaria. The missive starts with wishes for a happy new year, full of sisterly love.49 As both women had met each other during Maximilian II’s coronation in Frankfurt (1562), the Electress dedicated a long letter as the first attempt at a personal written communication with the Duchess. Beyond the wishes of health to Anna of Bavaria and her children, the Electress also sent — similarly to her communication with Empress Maria — Aqua vitae and nuts to the Duchess’s husband, Duke Albert V (1528–1579). As a gift to the Duchess, however, Anna of Saxony decided that the best choice was the ‘sisterly and confidential’ sharing of her knowl­ edge of the art of distillation.50 On the same day that she wrote to Anna of Bavaria to present this gift, the Electress also sent a letter to the Countess Anna of Hohenlohe (1520–1594), describing how the Duchess expressed her interest in learning such ‘works’ when they met in Frankfurt.51 As such,

47 Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, p. 125. 48 A clear example of such collection can be found at SLUB Dresden, MS 2975. 49 The terms used are ‘Schwesterlich treuen ehren liebe und gute vormogen’, calling Anna of Bavaria her ‘liebe Muhme und Schwester’. SHStA Dresden, Kop. 511, fol. 68r. The use of the word ‘Muhme’ (which today would be translated as aunt) as a denotation of proximity and kinship has been explained by Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, p. 81. 50 ‘…unsern distilir unnd Brannzeugenn schwesterlich und vortreulich mit zutheilenn’. SHStA Dresden, Kop. 511, fol. 68r. 51 SHStA Dresden, Kop. 511, fol. 67v.

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even though it might seem factitious that the Electress would make claims of confidentiality already in the first letter shared with Anna of Bavaria, the message was a follow-up on their personal communication during Maximillian II’s coronation. By sending this confidential information to the Duchess, Anna of Saxony was also gifting a clear sign of trust. This communication with Anna of Hohenlohe also shows how important it was to maintain the distillation information within this knowledge network, making sure that the other people in their knowledge circle were aware of how this information was being distributed. To ensure that it would be clear to Anna of Bavaria that this trust was part of the gift-giving, the Electress did not hold back on the performance of secrecy. In the letter, she mentioned how she is sending the equipment for distillation along with the letter, including the necessary glasses and in­ gredients to produce Anna’s famous Aqua vitae. The instructions, however, were sent separately, and a servant was sent to set up the equipment and provide the necessary directions and advice about the process in person. In multiple parts of the letter, she wrote how this information should be kept in confidence. She apologized for the things that were not in writing.52 Since the Electress confidentially shared almost all her secrets, she also asked that if any information of these arts became available to the Duchess, she would share with them as well. Anna of Saxony also pleaded that the secrets shared by her would not be made into common knowledge.53 This insistence in the separation between secret (geheimb [sic]) and common (gemein) knowledge — also present in her communication with Empress Maria — shows how the performance of secrecy was not a mere strategy to present this knowledge as a valuable gift. For Anna of Saxony, maintaining the exclusivity of this knowledge was what made it such a valuable present to begin with. The pageantry of secrecy was also functional in protecting this knowledge from becoming public, which would remove its value within this noble network. This first letter was the slow start of a long-lasting and robust alliance with Bavaria. Although the communication between the Electress and the Duchess was sporadic at first, the correspondence between Anna of Saxony and Anna of Bavaria lasted twenty-three years. After 1570, Anna of Saxony’s letter registry shows that at least three letters per year were sent to Anna of Bavaria in a regular flow.

52 SHStA Dresden, Kop. 511, fol. 69v. 53 ‘Weil wir EL auch fast alle vnsere geheimbste Kunste vortraulich mittgetheilt, So bitten wir hinweder wo EL etwas gewisses vnd sondeliches hetten, sie woltenn vns dasselbige auch Swesterlich nicht vorhalt(en). Solchs wollenn wir jnn gutter geheimb bei vnnβ bewaren. Jnnmassen wir vnnβ vorseh(en) EL das jrige so sie von vnnβ bekommen, auch nicht gemein mach(en) werden’. SHStA Dresden, Kop. 511, fol. 69r.

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This initial contact with the exchange of knowledge as a gift of trust ensured a strong bond between the two women, even beyond their confes­ sional difference.54 The two even engaged in discussions of confessional issues, as well as Catholic and Protestant conflicts, without questioning their own personal bonds.55 Also, possibly it was this bond that made possible the negotiations to marry Anna of Saxony’s brother Frederik II (1534–1588, the successor of Christian III as Danish King) to one of Anna of Bavaria’s daughters, as a way of strengthening the alliances between Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. Such a cross-denominational mar­ riage was at first considered unsuitable by the Danish court. Still, Anna of Saxony insisted on the great potential of the match, as shown by the con­ stant communication on the subject with both Frederik and their mother, Dorothea (1511–1571).56 Even after Frederik’s refusal, the Electress and the Duchess maintained close contact, sharing personal experiences and exchanging medical and culinary recipes for several years.57

Gifts at the Intersection of Performance and Genuine Personal Connection This chapter was an exercise in identifying the importance of the ‘personal’ within the political art of gift-giving as a performative, but also genuine form of connection. Through the analysis of how gifts were presented within the epistolary culture of Anna of Saxony, we can see how even the most strategical and political of gifts depended on a certain level of per­ sonal care. By looking at the aftermath of these first-contact letters, we can see how long-lasting communication, exchanges of goods, and sometimes even friendships developed from the careful selection and presentation of initial gifts. Anna of Saxony was an interesting figure in this exercise, as she managed to use her networks to gather personal information about the people she wanted to gift at the same time that she crafted this network through tailored gift-giving. She managed to pierce through confessional borders and rank discrepancies by using material and non-material gifts presented by careful narratives of possible proximity.

54 Although the communication between Anna of Saxony and Anna of Bavaria was not as close as Anna of Saxony correspondence with some Protestant consorts, the alliance between the consorts of Saxony and Bavaria was definitely exceptional as a cross-confessional bond, as shown by Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, p. 50. 55 Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 144–45. 56 Arenfeldt, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585’, pp. 167– 75; Keller, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585), pp. 86–87. 57 Weber, Anna Kurfürstin zu Sachsen, p. 95.

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In her communication with the Holy Roman Imperial couple, Anna used a combination of consumable goods and detailed communication of how these gifts related to each of the people involved. Her letters stressed how their particular tastes were taken into account and how the homemade remedies were created specifically for them. She was clear about where this information came from, reminding Empress Maria of when and how they met and specifying where her initiative to send the gifts came from. In the same vein, Anna also showed that this initiative came individually from her instead of being an official Saxonic manoeuvre. In the first written contact with Anna of Bavaria, the records of Anna of Saxony’s letters show how the exchange of knowledge could be one of the most powerful forms of gift-giving, creating an almost immediate aura of trust and confidentiality between the parts. Sharing ‘secret’ knowledge was meant to integrate people into this network of ‘people in the know’, linking them to some kind of inner circle. This, however, also implied that knowl­ edge had to be kept out of the grasp of a wider public as a way of adding value to the knowledge and this inner circle at the same time. This was seen as a special gift, which pushed forward a continuous communication and a sometimes-implicit bond of trust that could be extended to political and personal levels alike. Gift-giving among the sixteenth-century elites cannot be extricated from its political, public, and ceremonial context. However, to neglect how these gifts were rooted in personal efforts and how they created continuous communication between individuals (technically extending one’s presence to a different court) is to ignore what made those gifts significant in the first place. Early modern political networks relied on people interacting with each other, and there was a layer of power that could only be reached when the personal encroached the threshold of the political. A carefully tailored gift could be the needle that pierced through these personal/political bubbles, ensuring that even the most public of people could feel personally interconnected.

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Works Cited Archival Sources Dresden, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (SHStA Dresden), Loc 08536/05 ———, Loc. 08534/1 ———, Kop. 511 ———, Kop. 512 ———, Kop. 514 Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek — Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB Dresden), MS 2975 Secondary Works Arenfeldt, Pernille, ‘Gendered Patronage and Confessionalisation: Anna of Saxony as “Mother of the Church”’, Renæssanceforum, 4 (2008), 1–26 ———, ‘The Political Role of the Consort in Protestant Germany, 1550–1585: Anna of Saxony as “Mater Patriae”’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, European University Institute, Department of History and Civilization, 2006) ———, ‘“The Queen Has Sent Nine Frisian Cows”: Gender and Everyday Cultural Practices at the Courts in Sixteenth-Century Germany’, in Der Hof, ed. by Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antje Tumat (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013), pp. 116–31 ———, ‘Wissensproduktion und Wissensverbreitung im 16. Jahrhundert: Fürstinnen als Mittlerinnen von Wissenstraditionen’, Historische Anthropologie, 20.1 (2012), 4–28 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and GiftExchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Bepler, Jill, ‘Dynastic Positioning and Political Newsgathering: Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Gottorf, Queen of Sweden, and her Correspondence’, in Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, c. 1500–1800, ed. by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 132–52 Bok, Sissela, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)

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Daybell, James, ‘“I Wold Wyshe My Doings Might Be…Secret”: Privacy and Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion, ed. by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 143–61 Heal, Felicity, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Hénaff, Marcel, ‘Derrida: The Gift, the Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity’, in The Philosophers’ Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity, trans. by JeanLouis Morhange (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 11–29 Keller, Katrin, ‘Kommunikationsraum Altes Reich: Zur Funktionalität der Korrespondenznetze von Fürstinnen im 16. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 31.2 (2004), 205–30 ———, Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen (1532–1585) (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2010) ———, ‘Die Kurfürstin Im Alten Reich. Korrespondenz Und Klientel Im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert’, Neues Archiv Für Sächsische Geschichte, 83 (2012), 189–206 ———, ‘Die Sächsischen Kurfürstinnen in Der Zweiten Hälfte Des 16. Jahrhunderts - Familie Und Politik’, in Die Sächsischen Kurfürsten Während Des Religionsfriedens von 1555 Bis 1618, ed. by Helmar Junghans (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), pp. 279–96 ———, ‘Tulips, Tobacco and Parrots: Consorts and their Role in the Transfer of Animals and Plants in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’, in Telling Objects: Contextualizing the Role of the Consort in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Jill Bepler and Svante Norrhem (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz, 2018), pp. 171–90 ———, ‘Zwischen Zwei Residenzen: Der Briefwechsel Der Kurfürstin Anna von Sachsen Mit Freiin Brigitta Trautson’, in Viatori per Urbes Castraque. Festschrift Herwig Ebner, ed. by Helmut Bräuer, Gerhard Jaritz, and Käthe Sonnleitner (Graz: Instituts für Geschichteder Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 2003), pp. 365–82 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Routledge Classics, Reprint (London: Routledge, 2002) Rankin, Alisha Michelle, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013) Scott, Alison V., Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literature 1580–1628 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) Weber, Karl von, Anna Kurfürstin zu Sachsen: Ein Lebens- und Sittenbild aus dem sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Europäischer Geschichtsverlag, 2015) Wetterhall, Thomas Martha, ‘Medieval Origins of Corporate Communication: Sampson of Oxford and the Method of Letter‐writing’, ed. by Michael B. Goodman, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 13.1 (2008), 112–23 Wunder, Heide, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)

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Chapter 7. Cloistered Correspondence Engaging and Renouncing the Grand Siècle*

Prologue Monks and nuns who abide by the Rule of St Benedict have no privacy. The Benedictine regime comes with, among other things, celibacy, absten­ tion from property, and constant surveillance by peers and superiors. It thus systematically denies its followers the constituents of privacy in its modern-day descriptions – be that in Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 definition as ‘the right to be let alone’, the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence that is stipulated in, e.g., article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention (1950), or Altman’s notion of privacy as ‘a boundary control process whereby people sometimes make themselves open and accessible to others and sometimes close themselves off from others’.1

* Research funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF138) at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, which also generously funded the Open Access of this chapter. I am thankful to my colleagues: this text owes much to their ongoing research into notions of privacy and the private in the early modern period. Special thanks are due to Michaël Green and Lars Nørgaard as well as to the late David Seton. This analysis of Rancé’s letters forms part of a more extensive study on the abbot and his reform, The Unfamiliar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) between Withdrawal and Engagement (University of Copenhagen, 2017); see also my article ‘A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries’. 1 Warren and Brandeis, ‘The Right to Privacy’, pp. 193–220; Guide on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (European Court of Human Rights, 2020) https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-human-rights-article-8-0 [accessed 4 March 2021]; Altman, ‘Privacy Regulation’, p. 67. Mette Birkedal Bruun is Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen and Director of The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (2017–2027). Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 191–213 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138244 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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Renunciation of privacy is, then, a component of the Benedictine asceticism. Maintaining this renunciation with unhesitating obedience is a permanent dimension of the monastic forsaking of the world. Conse­ quently I suggest that the Benedictine regime is one of several historical instances in which the explicit negation of privacy, although not identi­ fied in such terms, represents an indirect affirmation of the historical significance of the condition. If we wish to understand historical views of privacy, monks and nuns offer a paradigmatic example — albeit in the negative. Things are, however, more complicated than that. While denying its inhabitants private property and a life free of prying and surveillance, the monastic universe teems with experiences and processes that are private both in the sense that they pertain to the individual and cannot be generalized, and in the sense that such experiences and processes concern a closed circle that involves none but the monk or nun, the superior, and God. Letters are central in this world. They play a role in the negation of pri­ vacy and as a support as well as conveyor of private spiritual experiences. If monks and nuns wish to curb the post-lapsarian self — and this is a primary aim of the cloister — they must gain freedom from earthly ties. Letters are tokens of such earthly ties because they connect the monastic inmates to the extra-mural world that they left with their profession. The monastic tradition generally responds to this mediatory potential of letters with keen apprehension. However letters between the cloister and the world also serve monasti­ cally acceptable ends, and letters are a fundamental monastic genre.2 They are deployed as vehicles for the dissemination of political counsel from cloistered figures to the wider world, but above all as a communicative tool in quasi-private exchanges between extra-mural believers and intra-mural spiritual directors, with God as the inferred interlocutor. For Christian directors, from Saint Paul onwards, letters are a principal medium for pastoral care; the monastic context intensifies their supervisory potential in that letters allow for communication of pious guidance without disrupt­ ing the physical clausura. This dimension of monastic correspondence is associated with the monastic superior’s obligation to provide pastoral care: principally to the abbey, but possibly beyond. Are such pastoral letters private? Constable opens his study of me­ dieval epistolography with a discussion of the non-private character of medieval letters, warning against projecting the ‘intimacy, spontaneity, and privacy’ of the modern epistolary genre onto the Middle Ages.3 However, both for the medieval and the early modern period, we should distinguish the circumstances of delivery and circulation which often have little to 2 See, e.g., Rubenson, ‘The Letter-Collections of Antony and Ammoas’, pp. 68–79. 3 Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, p. 11.

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do with secrecy and exclusivity, from the tone, substance, and aim of the words, which often hint at exclusivity or intimacy regardless of circulation. The pastoral aim does not automatically render letters from an abbot or an abbess private in the sense that they are exclusive to the recipient, but it does elicit a particular tone that may be termed personal or private in so far as it purports to address the particular spiritual needs of a specific addressee. I thus suggest that a letter can lack privacy in terms of delivery and circulation, while maintaining the inherent claim that it addresses one particular person, thus being ‘private’ in its tone of address if not in the practical circumstances surrounding its dispatch and reception. This chapter examines the double character of monastic correspon­ dence. Our focus is directed to the reform of the strict Cistercian abbey of La Trappe that was led by a keen letter-writer, Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé (1626–1700). The first part is dedicated to letters as a token of worldly attachment, and it zooms in on the Trappist decree that letters be banned from the cloister because they nurture the monks’ ties to the world, and on related attacks on Rancé’s vast correspondence as a sign of hypocrisy. Then we turn to Rancé’s correspondence and, more specifically, to a small portion of the extant (c. 3500) pages of abbatial letters dedicated to pastoral care.4 The abbot’s directions were private in the sense that it was the corresponding director’s task to help each recipient understand what God demanded of them in their particular position; thus the letters were fitted to each individual recipient’s own circumstances, capacities, and needs. At the same time Rancé’s letters shared the fate of early modern correspondence in general: they were shown, lent, copied, circulated, published, and thus anything but private.

Dangerous Letters The abbey of La Trappe, some 150 kilometres west of Paris, was founded in 1140 and became Cistercian soon after.5 Like most Cistercian abbeys, it saw a severe decline after its first medieval prosperity, and by 1658 it had only six monks and was in a parlous material and spiritual state. This changed when Armand-Jean de Rancé became abbot in 1663. His trajectory is not our interest here, but it is important to bear in mind 4 Rancé’s extant letters have been published in Correspondance, ed. by Krailsheimer, a collection anticipated by Krailsheimer’s translations and paraphrases in The Letters of Armand-Jean de Rancé. 5 For an overview of the history of La Trappe from its foundation to the seventeenth century, see Bell, The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe, pp. 1–9. The Cistercian order was founded in 1090 and based on ideals of simplicity and a stringent compliance with the Benedictine Rule. In the seventeenth century, a conflict led to a fractioning into a strict and a conventional branch; the reform at La Trappe augmented the severity of the strict branch.

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that he belonged to the influential Bouthillier family whose members were central to the political machinery of Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), that he had a substantial network among the social and religious elite of the grand siècle, and that up until his conversion, his life was that of a worldly ecclesiastic: combining study and preaching with hunting and a mistress.6 In his mid-thirties he underwent a conversion which culminated in his monastic profession and assumption of the abbatial office at La Trappe, whose commendatory abbot he had been since the age of twelve. Here he launched an austere reform, centring on strict isolation from the world. This isolation was buttressed by a demanding penitential regime, including the command to keep an almost permanent silence and to sever any bond to the world outside.7 Letters are a liability to the monastic demand for isolation from the world. It is a basic monastic requirement that monks and nuns reject their family,8 and already John Cassian (360–435) portrays a monk who, at the mere touch of a stack of unopened letters from his parents, felt that his spiritual focus was redirected from God to the world. Only with great effort did he turn back and throw all the letters on the fire without reading them.9 This spirit also permeates Chapter 54 of the mid-sixth-century Rule of St Benedict which states that ‘Nullatenus liceat monacho neque a parentibus suis neque a quoquam hominum nec sibi invicem litteras, eulogias vel quaelibet munuscula accipere aut dare sine praecepto abbatis’ (In no circumstances is a monk allowed, unless the abbot says he may, to exchange letters, blessed tokens or small gifts of any kind, with his parents or anyone else, or with a fellow monk).10 The early modern epistolary situation is different from the medieval. Just as the traditional monastic demand for silence gains additional mean­ ing in an age preoccupied with the art of conversation, the seventeenthcentury monastic prohibition of letters comes to signify not only an adher­ ence to established norms, but also a recoiling from distinct and valued contemporary practices. Late seventeenth-century France seethed with epistolary zeal. Letters, clandestine or public, were central to friendships,

6 For Rancé’s biography, see Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé and Bell, Understanding Rancé. 7 For this regime, see, e.g., Anon., Les Reglemens de l’Abbaye de Nostre-Dame de La Trappe and Rancé, De la sainteté et des devoirs de la vie monastique. 8 As Cassian reminds us, one of the biblical passages that prompted Antony’s conversion was Luke 14.26, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ (Collationes 3.4.2): biblical quotations are cited according to the New Revised Standard Version. The need for monks to abandon parents is reiterated in, e.g., Jerome’s fourth-century Epistola 14 to Heliodorus, and Bernard of Clairvaux’s twelfth-century Epistola 322. 9 Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 5.32. 10 Regula S. Benedicti 54.1, ed. and trans. by Fry and others, p. 258; trans. p. 259.

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politics, amours, and intrigues; they created, disturbed, and supported networks, and they affirmed social hierarchies.11 Letters were a lifeline for people separated from Paris, whether by exile or appointment, sating as they did the greed for news from the capital. Letters were a principal medium for the display of wit and character, and a means for interlocutors to polish their discourse to the point of refined perfection; manuals taught the art of epistolography as written conversation.12 The Trappist regulations rehearsed the Benedictine wisdom that the reception of letters and gifts came with a risk and required abbatial dispen­ sation. Letters from family members were considered particularly danger­ ous. Rancé adhered to the demand that monks sever their familial ties, reclaiming the biblical locus classicus of conversion, ‘Obliviscere populum tuum, & domum patris tui’ (forget your people and your father’s house) (Psalms 44.11; Psalms 45.11).13 He did not stop at a spiritual understand­ ing of this verse, but held that the vow of stabilitas prevented the monks from leaving the monastery to tend to sick parents, filial bonds being an obstacle to true renunciation of the world, thus challenging contemporary principles regarding societal cohesion and filial duty.14 The abbot found that contact with parents tugged at the monks’ terrestrial heartstrings and involved a risk of hearing perturbing news from the world. Commenting on Chapter 54 of the Rule of St Benedict and its restraints on the reception of letters or gifts, he avers that if this decree is not obeyed verbatim, all the superior’s work to purge the abbey of worldly vices is useless, and that une lettre de quatre lignes feroit le même desordre dans le cœur d’un Religieux, que des conversations de plusieurs années. Ils sçauroient tout ce qu’il faut qu’ils ignorent, & leur occupation la plus ordinaire seroit de former des réflexions sur toutes les choses qu’ils ont dû effacer pour jamais de leur mémoire. En un mot, ce seroit ouvrir la porte de la Maison à l’esprit du monde, & à celui de la Religion; à l’un pour en sortir, & à l’autre pour y entrer […].15

11 See Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial’, pp. 33–88. 12 For example, Colomiès, La rhétorique de l’honnête homme; Colomiès lists key epistolary types, each with its own generic requirements, La rhétorique de l’honnête homme, p. 5. See also Goldsmith, ‘Exclusive Conversations’, pp. 28–40. 13 See, e.g., Rancé, ‘Conference tenue le I. Dimanche d’apres Pasques’, in Conferences ou Instructions, ii, p. 372. 14 The period after the Council of Trent saw a surge in catechetical exhortations for children to honour the fourth commandment, Flandrin, Familles, pp. 135–36. 15 Rancé, La Règle de Saint Benoist, ii, pp. 349–50. Rancé is not alone in his strict view on parental bonds; for the saintly curbing of family visits as a topos in nuns’ biographies, see Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, p. 145.

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(a four-line letter would upset the monk’s heart as much as several years of contact. They would get to know everything they are supposed not to know, and their most common occupation would be reflections on all the things that they ought to have effaced from their memory forever. In short, it [i.e. receiving letters] would open the doors of the abbey to the spirit of the world and to religion: so that one might leave and the other enter […].) Letters, that is, have the power to annul the clausura. One visitor to La Trappe relates that letters from parents or other extra-mural persons were burnt or shredded unless the abbot found that they concerned the house.16 Scattered evidence shows, however, that not only Rancé, but also his monks corresponded with the outside world.17

Rancé’s Correspondence Even by the standards of a period characterized by hectic letter-writing, Rancé was an intensely busy correspondent.18 Some two thousand letters remain; many have been lost.19 His letters belong to a long-standing monastic tradition of the exertion of abbatial authority, polemic, and pastoral care, but they are also firmly embedded in seventeenth-century epistolary culture as vehicles of networking, maintaining friendships, confounding opponents, and dispensing spiritual guidance. Goldsmith suggests that the letters of Mme de Sévigné, that icon of grand-siècle epistolography,20 helped her to create a ‘territorial coherence’ between scattered friends and peers,21 and in the same way, Rancé’s letters replace

16 Anon. Maurist, ‘Lettre d’un Religieux Benedictin de la Congregation de saint Maur’, printed in Description de l’Abbaye de la Trappe, pp. 95–96. 17 For examples of letters and books exchanged between La Trappe and the wider world, see, e.g, Rancé’s letter to Pavillon of 23 July 1672, Correspondance, i, p. 479; Rancé’s letter to Quesnel of 7 February 1677, Correspondance, ii, pp. 110–11; Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, p. 117; Tournouër, Bibliographie et iconographie de la Maison-Dieu Notre-Dame de la Trappe, ii, pp. 183–88. 18 Craveri, The Age of Conversation, p. 94. 19 Lucien Aubry estimates that these are but a tenth of the abbot’s epistles, ‘Introduction à la spiritualité de Rancé’, in Correspondance, i, pp. 30–42 (39). For example, we have sixty-one letters from Marguerite de la Sablière to Rancé, many of which include passages from his letters, but only one letter remains from him to her; and the exchanges, indicated in Bossuet’s correspondence, between Rancé and Marie-Thérèse de Luynes, a nun of Jouarre known as Mme d’Albert, have left no trace in Krailsheimer’s edition; see, e.g., Bossuet’s letters of 21 December 1691 and 7 February 1691, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Correspondance, ed. by Urbain and Levesque, iv, pp. 163 and 179. 20 Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626−1696). 21 Goldsmith, ‘Exclusive Conversations’, p. 123.

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the physical presence he renounced with his profession, enabling him to connect to virtual communities of like-minded correspondents.22 Individual letters by Rancé, or excerpts from them, circulated during his abbacy.23 Mlle de Vertus, whom we shall meet later, passed on his let­ ters to the abbess of Leyme, Anne d’Orvilliers de la Vieuville (1645–1685) without his knowledge,24 just as the abbot’s letters circulated between his Visitandine niece Louise-Henriette d’Albon (c. 1646–1688) and his former tutor Jean Favier (1609–1703).25 The letter to the marshal of France, Bernardin Gigault de Bellefonds (1630–1694) of 30 November 1678, in which Rancé disavows Jansenist sympathies, had a particular repercussion; already some four months after its composition, a broad reaction is discernible,26 and still in 1690 comments appear on its beautiful prose.27 Krailsheimer avows that this dissemination owed everything to the recipients and nothing to the abbot’s intention,28 but there is little doubt that Rancé was aware of the risk of circulation — and perhaps also of the potential. One of the first letters by Rancé to be published was his 226-page epistle to Guillaume Le Roy (1610−1684), abbot of Hautefontaine, con­ cerning humiliations (1677).29 The pirate volume on La Trappe, which

22 For some this was not enough. Rancé’s friend Étienne Le Camus (1632–1707), bishop of Grenoble, deemed his correspondence with Rancé a poor substitute for the meetings at La Trappe that their common friend Henri de Barillon (1639–1699), bishop of Luçon, enjoyed, letter from Le Camus to Henri de Barillon of 27 November 1678, Lettres inédites du Cardinal le Camus, ed. by Faure, p. 323. According to Hurel, 16.8 per cent of Rancé’s correspondents were lay people and this segment of them formed the second largest after Benedictine or Cistercian monks (21 per cent), Hurel, ‘L’étude de correspondances et l’histoire du monachisme’, p. 323; these numbers remain artificial, given how many letters have been lost, and can serve as little more than a hint at proportions. 23 Already in 1686, Le Camus thanks an unknown recipient for a fragment of a letter from Rancé, letter to ‘X***’ of 3 December 1686, Lettres inédites, p. 292. Mme de Sévigné refers to some Rancé letters which her son has asked for, but they are in manuscript and not fit to be sent, letter from Mme de Sévigné to Charles de Sévigné of 20 September 1695, Mme de Sévigné: Correspondance, ed. by Duchêne, iii , p. 1121. In 1692 Sainte-Marthe mentions that he has received a collection of Rancé’s letters, the first of which dates from eight years after the abbot’s conversion, Sainte-Marthe, Lettres à M. l’abbé de la Trappe, p. 230. 24 Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, pp. 185 and 286. 25 See, e.g., the letter from Louise-Henriette to Favier of 12 August, no year, Jaloustre, ‘Un précepteur auvergnat’, p. 110. Also Rancé’s correspondence with Le Roy circulated between these two interlocutors, Krailsheimer (ed.), Correspondance, i, p. 583. 26 Neveu, Sébastien-Joseph du Cambout de Pontchâteau, p. 154. 27 Lettres de Messire du Rabutin comte de Bussy, vi, pp. 231–34. 28 Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, p. 188. 29 In the ‘Avis’, the publisher states that, since one of the more correct copies has come into his hands, he has deemed it expedient for other monks and even for people of the world to have a published version of Rancé’s letter, and that he hopes that given ‘le bien & l’utilité publique’ (the public good and usefulness), neither the author, nor the original recipient would mind, Rancé, Lettre d’un abbé regulier, unpaginated ‘Avis’. They did, however, mind.

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was put together in the aftermath of the publication of Rancé’s monastic manifesto De la sainteté et des devoirs de la vie monastique (1683), included seven monastic letters by the abbot to the abbots of Cîteaux and Clairvaux as well as to anonymous monks and nuns.30 Two volumes of letters were published immediately after his death in an attempt to systematize and disseminate his pastoral endeavours.31 With its brief introduction to each letter, this edition broadcasts devotional counsel distributed to different typical figures in a way that is akin to contemporary devotional manuals attuned to different groups and estates.32 This edition prompts one of Rancé’s hagiographers to praise the abbot’s increasing reach; first he sanc­ tified the monastery, then God wanted him to sanctify the wider world by his wise counsel; thus those most elevated at court, bishops, clergy, monks and nuns, as well as sinners, all just wanted to live under his epistolary direction since they could not live under his abbatial regard.33 This collection brings together two different epistolary traditions. On the one hand, it is an example of the established genre of the abbatial letter collection, which, as observed by Verbaal, should be considered as a work in its own right.34 On the other hand, it testifies to the early modern propensity for gathering and circulating bundles of letters.35 Not everybody admired the abbot’s epistolary energy. In the last decade of Rancé’s life, the Maurist Denis de Sainte-Marthe (1650–1725) comments scathingly on the reams of letters written by the abbot and has the abbé, one of the interlocutors in a fictive dialogue of his own creation, narrate that Rancé entertains some five hundred friends all over France with his letters. The abbé goes on to relate his experience of a visit to La Trappe. He marvels that the abbot managed to be present throughout. Only once did he disappear for a moment and came back, declaring with a joyful mien, ‘Je viens d’expedier 40. lettres, il ne me reste plus que

30 31 32 33

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See, e.g, Rancé’s letter to le Roy of 14 April 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 133. See also Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, pp. 40–41. Félibien des Avaux and others, Description de l’Abbaye de la Trappe. Lettres de pieté ecrites a differentes personnes, par le R. P. Dom Armand Jean Bouthillier de Rancé, 2 vols (Paris: François Muguet, 1701–1702). This is a Jesuit specialty, see, e.g., Louis le Valoir’s Lettres sur la necessité de la retraite (1682) which offers guidelines for retreats tailored to, e.g., priests, magistrates, and soldiers as well as the gender-specific advice given in François Guilloré’s Retraite pour les dames (1685). Maupeou, La vie du très-reverend père dom Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, ii, pp. 143– 44. Another hagiographer avers that Rancé’s correspondence was driven by a charity that did not allow him to turn down those who asked for his help, Marsollier, La vie de Dom Armand-Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, i, p. 319. See Verbaal, ‘Voicing your Voice’, pp. 103–24. Monastic letter collections are an institution as old as the monastic regime itself, see Choat, ‘From letter to letter-collection’, pp. 80–94; see also the introduction to medieval monastic letter collections in Haseldine, The Letters of Peter of Celle, pp. xix–xxviii and Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections. See Daybell, The Material Letter, pp. 175–216.

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60. réponses à faire; ainsi me voilà l’esprit en repos’ (I have just sent off 40 letters; now I only need to do 60 replies; and so my mind is at rest).36 Sainte-Marthe’s venomous statement belongs in the intense conflict concerning monastic studies. Rancé asserted that monks were not to engage in studies, and the studious Maurist monks retorted with various degrees of sophistication. The conflict is not our concern, but SainteMarthe’s text is of interest. On the one hand, it offsets the hagiographic enthusiasm for Rancé’s wide pastoral embrace. On the other hand, it calls to mind the expectations as to what we may see as epistolary privacy, since Sainte-Marthe finds that these expectations were violated by the abbot in the 1677 publication of Le Roy’s letter on humiliations mentioned above.37 The Maurist concludes, Un amy écrit à son amy croyant ne parler qu’à luy seul. Dans cette pensée il ne prend pas tout le soin de lier, de fortifier de polir ce qu’il écrit, qu’il prendroit s’il croyoit parler à toute la terre dans un ouvrage imprimé.38 (A friend writes to a friend, believing that he is speaking only to him. Being thus convinced, he does not take all the care to compose, strengthen, and polish what he has written, that he would have taken, had he known he was talking to the entire world in a printed work.) Sainte-Marthe’s criticism expresses a general concern of the age. Seventeenth-century letters circulated regardless of authorial intentions and, indeed, expectations, and Rancé’s correspondence is no exception.39 Rancé’s letters dole out counsel on an astonishing range of topics. Matters of health are omnipresent,40 and so are instructions concerning 36 Sainte-Marthe, Lettres à M. l’abbé de la Trappe, p. 54. 37 I owe to my colleague Sari Nauman the reminder that expectations as to privacy often come to the fore when such expectations are violated. 38 Sainte-Marthe, Lettres à M. l’abbe de la Trappe, unpaginated ‘avertissement’. Sainte-Marthe’s polemic reasoning seems to be that he may as well publish his four letters to Rancé immediately, since the abbot is going to publish them anyway. 39 In a letter to Mme de Saint-Loup, written in the context of the Jansenist address to Innocent IX (1676), Rancé promises that he has burnt the lady’s dispatch and asks her to do the same with his, letter of 20 January 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 106. For reasons of security, it was common practice not to sign letters or to abstain from naming the addressee, and Rancé apologizes to Anne de Goëllo that he has not recognized her as sender from the handwriting alone in a letter of November 1675, Correspondance, i, p. 708. Several letters implore interlocutors to take care that their dispatches do not end up in the wrong hands, see, e.g., his letters to Jean Favier of 11 October 1642, Correspondance, i, p. 61 and to Claude Nicaise of 28 June 1694, Correspondance, iv, p. 308. Like his contemporaries, Rancé preferred to convey important messages orally by means of go‑betweens, Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, p. 203. 40 See, e.g., his letter to Mme de Sablé of 5 August 1675, Correspondance, i, p. 694.

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discipline and dispensation. Some should withdraw from the world, others should remain in it;41 some had better drop their withdrawal if it is not sincere,42 and sometimes even nuns must remember that what seems most austere need not be God’s will.43 Rancé writes about life at La Trappe;44 he writes about common friends;45 he comforts;46 he counsels on conjugal problems,47 an eloped daughter,48 and, as we shall see, the education of children. Generally he gives his advice freely, but in the elopement case he makes his excuses, explaining that it is not proper for one withdrawn from the world to involve himself in such matters.49 His letters also attest to the wealth of information conveyed by his correspondents, in stark contrast to the ban on news in the monastic regulations.50 His friend Étienne Le Ca­ mus thus complains to him about the conflicts provoked by Jansenism and Molinism;51 Élisabeth Marguerite d’Orléans (1646–1696), Mme de Guise,

41 For his recommendations regarding various degrees of withdrawal, see my ‘Solitude’, p. 474. 42 See his letter to Mme de Guise of 23 August 1693, Correspondance, iv, pp. 266–67, commenting on Mme de Mornay’s sister. 43 Letter to Louise-Henriette d’Albon of 3 December 1671, Correspondance, i, p. 410. 44 See, e.g., Rancé’s letter to Mme de Guise of 16 March 1693, Correspondance, iv, p. 237 where he tells her about a Trappist whose death he has just attended. 45 See, e.g., his letter of 7 June 1673 to Robert Arnauld d’Andilly where Rancé relates that Mme du Plessis-Guénégaud has visited La Trappe and talked of d’Andilly, Correspondance, i, p. 555; see, as one of many examples of letters concerning recently deceased persons, the letter to Pomponne of October 1674 which offers condolences at the death of d’Andilly, Pomponne’s father, Correspondance, i, pp. 647–48. 46 See his letter to Mme du Plessis-Guénégaud from late March 1676, comforting her on the death of her husband, Correspondance, ii, p. 40; see also his letter of 25 August 1679, consoling the duchesse de Luynes at the death of her daughter, Correspondance, ii, p. 312. 47 The husband has sought out the abbot at La Trappe; Rancé advises him to reestablish harmony with his wife, letter from Rancé to ‘Monsieur’ dated November 1675, Correspondance, i, p. 716. Krailsheimer opts cautiously for the duc de Mazarin as addressee, but the description of the conjugal relation does not quite chime with other accounts of the duke’s marriage to Hortense Mancini, see, e.g., Cholakian, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation, pp. 85–86. 48 See Rancé’s letters to the duc de Mazarin of 13 March 1682, declining to enter the turmoil surrounding his daughter’s elopement (Correspondance, ii, p. 735) and 12 March 1684 where he reminds the duke that God is always on the side on those unfairly judged by public opinion, Correspondance, iii, p. 168. 49 Letter to the duc de Mazarin of 13 September 1682, Correspondance, ii, p. 735. 50 News travelled swiftly to the abbot. On 6 September 1674 Françoise d’Aubigné, who became marquise of Maintenon the following year, comments on the recent death of the libertine M. de Villandri. Three days later Rancé does the same; see his letter to Bellefonds of 9 September 1674 and Krailsheimer’s comments, Correspondance, i, pp. 643–45. See also his warning to François de Rohan, prince de Soubise (1630–1712) that even though the abbot knows only very little of what goes on in the world, he has learnt that things are not what they ought to be with the prince, letter of 28 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 128. 51 Letter from Le Camus to Rancé of 12 November 1689, Lettres inédites, p. 361.

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keeps him up-to-date with Louis XIV’s medical and military fortunes;52 the erudite cleric Claude Nicaise (1623–1701) seems to have taken a special delight in defying Rancé’s isolation, and several abbatial responses attest to discomposure caused by Nicaise’s letters.53 In most cases we only have the abbot’s side of the correspondence, but we should not forget the many letters that were written to him. Le Camus suggests that for people who could not visit La Trappe, pouring out one’s heart in a letter written to Rancé could serve as a miniature retreat and that, in the act of writing to Rancé, Le Camus himself was withdrawing to a virtual desert, lamenting his sins.54 Some of Rancé’s answers seem to indicate that other correspondents wrote in a similar spirit. Sometimes Rancé’s letters came with gifts. He sent to Mme de Guise images as well as products from the Trappist workshops: a spoon and a fork of boxwood and six crosses, two of which were white and made of cherry wood;55 he sent rosaries of oak and medals to his sister MarieLouise (1630–1705), who was a nun in the order of the Annonciades;56 spoons and forks to the abbess of Essai;57 as well as boxwood forks to Pontchâteau, the gardener of Port-Royal, and seeds for the garden.58 These gifts are at once tokens of friendship and of the saintliness of La Trappe, practical tools, and a distribution of resources.59

52 See Rancé’s troubled reference to her report on the siege of Rheinfels in his letter of 12 January 1693, Correspondance, iv, p. 227. 53 Nicaise sent the abbot his treatise Les sirenes ou discours sur leur forme et figure (1691), and Rancé responded that the work had led him to understand that he was not as dead to the world as he ought to be, letter to Nicaise of 4 October 1691, Correspondance, iv, p. 127. Nicaise commented on Sainte-Marthe’s four epistles, mentioned above, and Rancé replied that the letter perturbed him, letter to Nicaise of 6 March 1693, Correspondance, iv, p. 236. Sometimes the abbot clenched his teeth at what may have been an attempt to elicit a response, see, e.g., his comment of 13 March 1696 that he has imposed eternal silence on himself regarding the subject of Nicaise’s latest epistle, Correspondance, iv, p. 378. Krailsheimer comments that when Rancé refers to eternal silence, it is normally to do with Jansenism, p. 379. Finally, Nicaise provoked the ageing abbot’s pondering of Guilleragues’s daring Lettres d’une religieuse portugaise (1668), letter to Nicaise of 5 June 1698, Correspondance, iv, p. 430. 54 Letter from Le Camus to Rancé of 12 November 1689; Lettres, p. 361. 55 Letters to Mme de Guise of 14 September 1683, 24 February 1685, 1 January 1686, and November-December 1687, Correspondance, iii, pp. 96, 248, 328 and 500. See also Bruun and others, ‘Withdrawn amidst the World’, pp. 57–74. 56 Letter to Marie-Louise Bouthillier of 10 September 1667, Correspondance, i, p. 269. 57 See his letter to the abbess of Essai of June 1681, Correspondance, ii, p. 486. 58 Letter to Sébastien de Pontchâteau February 1668, Correspondance, i, p. 272. 59 For the role of gift-giving in relation to correspondence, see Klein Käfer’s chapter in this volume.

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Spiritual Guidance Let us turn to three prominent examples of pastoral care among Rancé’s letters. They throw light on the abbot’s epistolary practice, but also on the malleability of his allegedly absolute claim for isolation from the world. He addresses each recipient in her particular condition and thus in a manner that makes these letters private in terms of their substance, if not in terms of the circumstances of their circulation. The Marquise de Tourouvre

Our first example is Rancé’s exchange with his neighbour, the marquise de Tourouvre, Marie de Remefort (1633–1710) who lived with her hus­ band, Antoine de La Vove, marquis de Tourouvre (1618–1705) and nine children some ten kilometres south-east of the abbey, through the Perche forest.60 The couple were close friends of the abbot,61 and from 1677 they were mentioned in the prayers of La Trappe.62 The family were friends of Port-Royal, and in the period 1675–1685 had as tutor for their children Pierre Coustel (1621–1704), a former teacher at the petites écoles.63 Only one letter from Rancé to these neighbours remains, but it is long and detailed. The children are sick, and Rancé encourages their mother to put her faith in God with perfect resignation, trusting that he will arrange her life to her benefit.64 The marquise has asked for Rancé’s opinion on the activities of the children, and he instructs her that [p]our ce qui est d’apprendre à chanter à MM. vos enfants, mon sentiment est que vous ne le devez point faire. De chanter agréablement, c’est une qualité dont les gens du monde ont toujours fait un mauvais usage. Mettez tant qu’il vous plaira de ces airs tendres sur ces paroles de piété, on oubliera ces paroles et on en substituera d’autres en leur place. […] Je n’ai jamais vu un homme du monde

60 The couple had four girls and five boys, Montagne, ‘Les Enfants’, pp. 6 and 8. Fret avers that Rancé was the godfather of their son, Jean-Armand de la Vove de Tourouvre (1674–1733), who became bishop and count of Rodez in 1716, Fret, Antiquités et chroniques percheronnes, iii, pp. 494–95. 61 See Rancé’s letter to the abbess of Essai from May 1681, Correspondance, ii, p. 484, and his letter to Bellefonds of 25 April 1683, Correspondance, iii, p. 61. 62 Montagne, ‘Les Enfants’, p. 26. 63 Coustel was at the petites écoles in 1646–1660, Montagne, ‘Les Enfants’, p. 9. Indeed Montagne suggests that the bulk of Coustel’s Règles de l’Education des Enfants (1687) was written at Tourouvre, Montagne, ‘Les Enfants’, p. 10, and she reads Coustel’s treatise as a representation of the life led there. 64 Letter of 8 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 121.

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chanter un air de dévotion, et ainsi je trouve que ceux qui n’ont point de voix, et qui ne savent pas chanter, sont heureux.65 (with regard to teaching your children to sing, it is my opinion that you should not. To sing agreeably is a quality that has always been misused by people of the world. Set as many as you may like of those pious words to tender airs, we shall forget the words and replace them by others. […] I have never seen a worldly creature sing a pious air, and therefore I find that those who have no voice and cannot sing, are fortunate.) He warns her not to tolerate card games for her children and to keep them far from the theatre. She must refrain from encouraging people to gamble (le jeu), and if she cannot hinder it, she herself must at least abstain. Although it is for her but an innocent pastime, it is incompatible with the desire, instilled in her by Christ, to give herself entirely to him and to seek only to render herself agreeable to him.66 The marquise worries about a daughter’s devotional inclinations. Rancé calms her, volunteering his view that the daughter should be al­ lowed to live out all her pious desires; such leanings are so rare at that age, and they are surely God-given.67 On her side, the mother must devote herself to being a model even when her poor health makes it difficult, et comme vous devez l’exemple à votre famille, lorsqu’il arrive que votre mauvaise santé vous contraint de vous dispenser des règles communes, il est bon qu’on sache que c’est la pure nécessité qui vous fait agir, et non pas une délicatesse affectée.68

65 Letter of 8 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, pp. 122–23. Generally Rancé subscribes to the classical view that music may evoke emotions and passions both virtuous and vicious. He clearly feels, however, that with children one had better be on the safe side; see also Rancé, La Régle de saint Benoist, ii, pp. 50–53 and Bruun and others, ‘Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century’, pp. 274–75. 66 Letter of 8 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 123. In this counsel, Rancé differs from Coustel’s view that divertissements relieve the spirit and strengthen the body. While the tutor advises against chess, cards, and dice, he does recommend billiards and ball games, reminding parents and tutors to teach children to play like honnêtes gens, without tricks and without showing themselves too eager to win, Coustel, Les régles de l’éducation, ii, pp. 114–18. 67 Letter of 8 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 123. It is possible that these remarks concern the youngest daughter Marie (1668–1726) whom Rancé would later try to place at the convent of Essai, see his letter to the abbess of Essai of May 1681, Correspondance, ii, p. 484. His patronage of the Tourouvre children extended beyond the monastic realm, and he tried to make Bellefonds act in favour of one of the teenage boys who had entered naval service under the command of Bellefonds’s son-in-law, see Rancé’s letter to Bellefonds of 25 April and the thankful note in his letter of 24 October 1683, Correspondance, iii, pp. 61 and 112. 68 Letter of 8 March 1677, Correspondance, ii, p. 124. Two of the daughters, Françoise (1664–?) and Marie-Jeanne (1662–1686) were pensionnaires at Port-Royal until 1679, Delforge and

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(And since you must set the example to your family, when your ill health compels you to dispense from the usual rules [of a devotional life-style], it is good that they know that you are driven by straightforward necessity and not pretentious delicacy.) Apparently Rancé found that his counsel was taken to heart. At least he praised the regulated and edifying life of the Tourouvre family in a letter four years later.69 Rancé’s letter to the Marquise de Tourouvre shows the abbot in an, ad­ mittedly untypical, role as educational supervisor. It also demonstrates his favoured strategy, seeking to adapt to different circumstances his rigorous demand that his correspondents surrender to the divine will as much as possible. This aim makes his letter private in the sense that it speaks to the particular life situation of the marquise and her private-public role as a mother, and hence a designated educator and model to her household. Mme de La Grillière

Rancé’s care for the Tourouvre clan extended to the Marquise de Tour­ ouvre’s mother, Jeanne de Remefort (d. 1690), Mme de La Grillière (or Grélière), who is our second example. Mme de La Grillière stayed in Tourouvre in 1682 and may have met Rancé then,70 but her home was in Nonancourt, some fifty-five kilometres east of La Trappe. The two extant letters from Rancé to her date from 1683 and 1686, and they are another example of his accommodating his advice to the condition at hand; in both letters does Rancé remind the ageing woman not to exert herself too much in her pious practice. The elderly lady has eye problems, and the abbot recommends self-insight — a form of vision available also to the blind — as the starting point of the work to seek the correlation of interior state and exterior practice.71 The first letter concerns her Lenten routine. Mme de La Grillière would have been expected to spend Lent in the temper prescribed in works such as Pasquier Quesnel’s Jésus-Christ pénitent ou Exercice de pieté pour le tems du carême (1688) which prescribes, as a Lenten exercise, a ten-day retreat — be it physical or mental — dedicated to meditation on the seven penitential Psalms, augmented by vigils, fasting, and a sincerely

McKenna, ‘Tourouvre, Françoise de La Vove de’, in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, p. 977; Delforge and McKenna, ‘Tourouvre, Marie-Jeanne de La Vove de’, in Dictionnaire de PortRoyal, p. 978. 69 Letter to the abbess of Essai of May 1681, Correspondance, ii, p. 484. 70 Montagne, ‘Les Enfants’, p. 11. 71 Krailsheimer informs us that Mme de La Grillière suffered from a cataract, Correspondance, iii, p. 39.

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contrite spirit.72 Rancé has been in touch with Mme de La Grillière’s parish priest, Pierre de Maupeou (d. 1713) regarding her Lenten programme. Je témoignai à M. de Maupeou que vous n’étiez point en état de faire le Carême, ni même de ne point manger de viande. Les œufs ne vous suffiraient pas dans la situation où vous êtes. Dieu, qui a affaibli votre santé par les maladies qui vous sont arrivées depuis quelque temps, vous décharge de la pénitence dans laquelle vous voudriez vivre, et vous ne devez faire aucun scrupule de mesurer votre conduite à vos forces ou plutôt à votre faiblesse.73 (I explained to M. de Maupeou that you were in no state to go through the Lenten regime, not even to abstain from meat. Eggs would not be sufficient in your situation. God, who has weakened your health with illnesses for some time now, discharges you of the penitence in which you would want to live, and you must have no qualms as to modifying your conduct according to your strength, or rather your frailty.) In his letters, Rancé habitually shows lenience towards correspondents whose health prevents harsh asceticism, reminding them that their mental disposition is what matters most.74 Thus, instead of practical guidance on penitential effort, the abbot offers his correspondante a mini-sermon fit for a contemplation that will lead her into this desirable disposition of trusting penitence. Je ne doute point, Madame, […] que vous ne considériez votre homme intérieur comme un édifice qui est sur le penchant de sa ruine et qui ne cessera de se démolir jusqu’au point de son entière destruction. Mais le principal est de voir cette disposition dans un esprit de paix, dans une confiance ferme que Dieu réédifiera la maison après l’avoir détruite et que son rétablissement ne connaîtra plus ni de changement ni d’inconstance. Ce corps de terre sera réparé; il en naîtra 72 Quesnel, Jesus-Christ penitent, e.g., p. 95. The work is later than Rancé’s letters, but it is representative of a rigorist tenor that Rancé shared. Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) was Arnauld’s successor as leader of the Port-Royalists and had a long-term friendship with Rancé which is, however, beside our point. 73 Letter of 11 February 1683, Correspondance, iii, pp. 38–39. Pierre de Maupeou (d. 1713) stayed at La Trappe in 1681 with a view to profession, but had to give up. In 1682 he began his biography of Rancé, based on, e.g., information from Maupeou’s brother Grégoire who became cellarer of La Trappe in 1688, Krailsheimer, Correspondance, iv, p. 606. This communication between the abbot and the parish priest concerning a parishioner is probably exceptional, caused by Rancé’s familiarity with both parties. 74 See, e.g., his letter to the marquis de Lassay, who has asked for guidance concerning Lenten exercises. Given the addressee’s frail health, the abbot recommends that he engage in as much of a retreat as he is able to, eat only a morsel of bread in the evening, and keep a penitential heart, letter of 24 March 1683, Correspondance, iii, p. 52.

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un de ses cendres qui ne sera plus sujet à la dissolution et dont la durée sera immortelle.75 (I do not doubt, Madame, […] that you consider your interior being as nothing but a building on the verge of ruin and which will continue to crumble to the point of complete destruction. But the most important is to look upon this disposition in a peaceful spirit and in the firm confidence that God will rebuild the house after having destroyed it and that his reconstruction will no longer feel either alteration or inconstancy. This earthly body will be repaired; from its ashes, another will appear which is no longer subject to dissolution and whose lifespan is immortal.) The frailty of life and the proximity of death are everywhere in Rancé’s letters. In the abbot’s second letter to Mme de La Grillière, her increasing blindness cues his encouraging reminder that, if God so wills, her condi­ tion only opens her soul’s eyes even wider to her needs and her suffering. He tells her to cling to her confidence in God’s mercy as if to a plank in a tempestuous sea, so as to gain peace until God grants her the final repose which is the end of all human hopes.76 This is quite a devotional commonplace, and Rancé’s letters to Mme de Grillière do abound in fairly general recommendations. At the same time, these formulae are written into her particular situation in a way that makes them private in the sense that they are particular to her. Mlle de Vertus

Our last example is of an altogether different nature. We shall linger briefly over Rancé’s exchange with Catherine-Françoise d’Avaugour de Bretagne, Mlle de Vertus (1615–1692).77 The case is piquant given that this pious lady’s much less pious sister, Marie d’Avaugour (1610/1612– 1657), the duchesse de Montbazon, had been Rancé’s mistress before his conversion,78 and the extant letters are characterized by a frankness that might well testify to a long friendship. After a sprightly youth, Mlle 75 Letter of 11 February 1683, Correspondance, iii, p. 39. 76 Letter of 14 August 1686, Correspondance, iii, pp. 376–77. 77 For Vertus’s biography, see Pouzet, ‘Vertus, Catherine-Françoise de Bretagne d’Avaugour, dite Mlle de’, in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, pp. 995–96. Vertus was a close friend of the duchesse de Longueville, and Hillman describes her as Longueville’s ‘companion-attendant’, Hillman, Female Piety, p. 115. In 1670 Vertus withdrew to Port-Royal des Champs and spent the rest of her life there in a lodging next to Longueville’s. She took the black veil of the novices, but never professed vows. 78 For this relationship, see Bell, Understanding Rancé, pp. 176–93 and Bell, ‘Daniel de Larroque’, pp. 305–31. Rancé’s correspondence also includes letters to Montbazon’s son and daughter as well as to another sister.

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de Vertus veered towards devotion of the austere port-royalist flavour.79 Rancé and Vertus were in close contact during the twenty years she lived at Port-Royal, and Krailsheimer estimates that he wrote to her once a month.80 This is a rich and varied correspondence. Vertus’s bad health is a recur­ rent theme. Rancé refers her to the remedies of Dr Hamon at Port-Royal, but does not refrain from adding his own piece of advice, ‘Le café est un soulagement si commun que vous pouvez en user sans façon’ (coffee is a source of relief so common that you may use it as a matter of course).81 He writes that her condition allows her to prepare properly for her death, and that this makes her more fortunate than most.82 They gossip about the community at Port-Royal and other shared acquaintances;83 he commiser­ ates, knowingly, with her obligation to see people when she would much rather withdraw;84 and he sends her edifying reminders of her obligation to keep her heart and her deeds in harmony, thus not simply feeling, but also showing charity.85 Sometimes he addresses particular questions. She has, it seems, asked him whether it is appropriate to take communion after having been in a state of perturbance? — she has not, and he finds that praiseworthy.86 In the correspondence with Mlle de Vertus Lenten exercises are again in focus. Rancé praises her isolation, concurring that the more she withdraws from other human contact, the more she gives herself to God, and he underlines that given her poor health, her key exercise takes place in the heart.87

79 The Jesuit René Rapin, who was no friend of Port-Royal, portrays Mlle de Vertus in harsh terms, claiming that her eagerness to please was coquettish in her early years and devout later on, but equally shallow in both guises, Rapin, Mémoires, ed. by Aubineau, iii, p. 234. He snarls that their Jansenist convictions secured Longueville and Vertus adoration when they were no longer adorable, Mémoires, iii, p. 429. Tallemant des Réaux is more generous in his remark that Vertus had merit and knew Latin, Historiettes, ed. by Adam and Delassault, ii, p. 213. 80 Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, p. 280. 81 Letter of 28 March 1685, Correspondance, iii, p. 252. Coffee was introduced in Paris in the 1660s, and by 1671 was available in several Parisian shops. During the 1670s it came under medical suspicion; Leclant, ‘Coffee and Cafés in Paris’, pp. 87–88. In 1685, however, the year Rancé commends coffee to Mlle de Vertus, appeared Philippe-Silvestre Dufour’s Traités nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate which praised the therapeutic effects of coffee, Leclant, ‘Coffee and Cafés’, p. 97 n. 49. 82 See, e.g., his letters of 30 November 1685 and 24 February 1686, Correspondance, iii, pp. 321 and 346. 83 See, e.g., his letters of 6 November 1684 and 3 March 1687, Correspondance, iii, pp. 221 and 437. 84 See his letter of 4 November 1685, Correspondance, iii, p. 305. 85 See his letter of 6 April 1678, Correspondance, ii, pp. 210–11. 86 See his letter of 4 November 1685, Correspondance, iii, pp. 305–06. 87 Letter of 28 May 1685, Correspondance, iii, p. 266.

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This is but a quick scan. Especially the correspondence with Vertus has many more facets than those touched upon here. Readings across these three correspondences, however, show how central devotional themes such as renunciation of the world, penitence, and pious surrender are rehearsed in different forms, adapted to the health and social conditions of each of these women and couched in a voice marked by their individual relationships with Rancé.

Concluding Remarks The case of La Trappe exemplifies some of the complexities that appear when we read early modern material in pursuit of instances of privacy and the private. The monastic universe features several phenomena that look like privacy, not least the withdrawn location and lifeform of the abbey and its inhabitants. However, at a closer look, the case of the abbey chal­ lenges our immediate dichotomies and assumptions regarding clear-cut delineations between public and private. The monastic regulations annul spatial privacy in their celebration of the communal life and their stipula­ tion of a regime aimed to prune away any leaning towards singularity. At the same time, ideally each monk enters into a form of spiritual privacy shared by himself, the abbot, and God. Letters partake of this paradox. On the one hand, they are shunned because they represent and strengthen the bonds to the extra-mural world. On the other hand, they are a cherished and, indeed, vital tool for administering pastoral care beyond the monastic precinct. Letters dispatched from La Trappe share the fate of other early modern letters in that they may be circulated, copied, and printed without authorial approval. The outrage caused by such distributions reminds us, however, that even though genuine privacy may be hard to come by when dealing with early modern letters, expectations of privacy as an epistolographic code of honour clearly looms large among early modern letter writers. Rancé’s extant letters, a mere proportion of his original correspon­ dence, open an epistolary window onto the abbot’s efforts to spread his vision of solitude beyond the monastic walls. This solitude is at once absolute and pliable. According to Rancé, on the one hand, withdrawal is undoubtedly required of all Christians and must be sought with fervour and diligence in interior disposition and exterior demeanour; on the other hand, withdrawal comes in different guises, depending on personal circumstances. We have seen this form of accommodation exemplified in three different exchanges between the abbot and some of his many correspondents. To the marquise de Tourouvre, the pious mother, he gives counsel regarding the education of her children in a manner that prepares them for the world without making them worldly. To Mme de

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La Grillière, the marquise’s frail elderly mother he prescribes that worldforsaking Lenten practices must be balanced according to her waning physical strength. Finally with Mlle de Vertus, who has withdrawn to Port-Royal and is Rancé’s old friend and regular interlocutor, he engages in an ongoing conversation concerning shared acquaintances and spiritual guidance suited to her status as a penitent at Port-Royal. Not everyone is able to withdraw as radically as the monks of La Trappe, but all should strive to withdraw as much as their condition allows. The letters are crucial vehicles for delineating and addressing such individual conditions. While the circumstances regarding circulation prevent us from ascribing privacy to such correspondence, the substance is to a high extent private, in that it is distinctly individual. Taking this argument one step further, and bearing in mind Le Camus’s remark that writing to Rancé served as a form of retreat, we may suggest that such private communications create a sense of devotional privacy that encompasses the abbot, the correspondent, and God and is thus a written version of the distinct pastoral direction that the abbot owes to each monk in his care. The monastic example suggests that grand-siècle letters purport a form of intimacy — or even privacy — irrespective of the looming threat of publication. Their intimate tenor makes letters a threat to the monastic severance of worldly ties; it warrants a real or alleged expectation of exclu­ sivity that underlies the ever-present outrage at epistolary indiscretion; finally, this intimate tenor commends the letter as a tried and trusted remedy for pastoral care because it allows directors such as Rancé to mould their guidance to individual, indeed private, needs.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Anon., Les Reglemens de l’Abbaye de Nostre-Dame de La Trappe en forme de constitutions qui contiennent les exercices et la maniere de vivre des Religieux (Paris: Florentin et Pierre Delaulne, 1690) ——— Maurist, ‘Lettre d’un Religieux Benedictin de la Congregation de saint Maur, à sa sœur Religieuse’, printed in Description de l’Abbaye de la Trappe avec les constitutions […], la mort de quelques Religieux de ce Monastere […] (Lyon: Laurent Aubin, 1683) Benedict of Nurcia, Regula S. Benedicti, ed. and trans. by Timothy Fry with Imogene Baker, Timothy Horner, Augusta Raabe, and Mark Sheridan, RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1980) Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, letters; Correspondance de Bossuet: Nouvelle édition augmentée, ed. by Charles Urbain and Eugène Levesque, 12 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1909–1920) Bussy, Roger de Rabutin, comte de, letters; Lettres de Messire du Rabutin comte de Bussy, vi (Amsterdam: Zacharie Chatelein, 1728) Colomiès, Paul, La rhétorique de l’honnête homme, ou La manière de bien écrire des lettres, de faire toutes sortes de discours […] (Amsterdam: George Gallet, 1699) Coustel, Pierre, Les régles de l’éducation des enfans, 2 vols (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1687) Félibien des Avaux, André, and anon., Description de l’Abbaye de la Trappe avec les constitutions […], la mort de quelques Religieux de ce Monastere […] (Lyon: Laurent Aubin, 1683) Le Camus, Étienne, Lettres inédites du Cardinal le Camus: évêque et prince de Grenoble (1632–1797), ed. by Claude Faure (Grenoble: Imprimerie Allier père et fils, 1932) Marsollier, Jacques, La vie de Dom Armand-Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé: Abbé regulier et reformateur du Monastere de la Trappe, de l’Etroite Observance de Cisteaux, 2 vols in one (Paris: Jean de Nully, 1703) Maupeou, Pierre de, La vie du très-reverend père dom Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, 2 vols (Paris: L. d’Houry, 1602 [i.e. 1702]) Quesnel, Pasquier, Jesus-Christ penitent ou Exercice de pieté pour le tems du Carême (Paris: Lambert Roulland, 1688) Rancé, Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de, Conferences ou Instructions sur les epitres et evangiles des dimanches et principales festes de l’année, Et sur les Vêtures & Professions Religieuses, 4 vols (Paris: Florentin & Pierre Delaulne, 1698) ———, Correspondance, ed. by Alban John Krailsheimer, 4 vols (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1993)

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———, Correspondance, trans. by (partial) Alban John Krailsheimer, The Letters of Armand-Jean de Rancé, abbot and reformer of La Trappe, 2 vols (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984) ———, De la sainteté et des devoirs de la vie monastique, 2 vols (Paris: François Muguet, 1683) ———, La Règle de Saint Benoist: Nouvellement traduite, et expliquée selon son véritable esprit, par l’Auteur des Devoirs de la Vie Monastique, 2 vols (Paris: F. Muguet, 1689) ———, Lettre d’un abbé regulier. Sur le sujet des Humiliations, & autres Pratiques de Religion (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1677) ———, Lettres de pieté ecrites a differentes personnes, par le R. P. Dom Armand Jean Bouthillier de Rancé, 2 vols (Paris: François Muguet, 1701–1702) Rapin, René, Mémoires du P. René Rapin de la compagnie de Jésus sur l’église, la ville et le jansénisme, ed. by Léon Aubineau, 3 vols (Paris: Gaume Frères et J. Duprey, 1865) Réaux, Tallemant des, Historiettes, ed. by Antoine Adam and Geneviève Delassault, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970) Sainte-Marthe, Denis de, Lettres à M. l’abbé de la Trappe, ou l’on examine sa reponse au Traité des Etudes monastiques & quelques endroits de son commentaire sur la règle de Saint Benoist (Amsterdam: Henry Desbordes, 1692) Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, Mme de Sévigné: Correspondance, ed. by Roger Duchêne, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) Secondary Works Altman, Irwin, ‘Privacy Regulation: Culturally Universal or Cultural Specific?’, Journal of Social Issues, 33.3 (1977), 66–84 Bell, David N., ‘Daniel de Larroque, Armand-Jean de Rancé, and the Head of Madame de Montbazon’, Cîteaux, 53 (2002), 305–31 ———, The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe: A Study of its History from the Twelfth Century to the French Revolution, with an Annotated Edition of the 1752 Catalogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014) ———, Understanding Rancé: The Spirituality of the Abbot of La Trappe in Context (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2005) Bruun, Mette Birkedal, ‘A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries: The Abbey of La Trappe between Isolation and Engagement’, in Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Christine Göttler and Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 451–79 ———, Lars Nørgaard, Eelco Nagelsmit, Sven R. Havsteen, and Kristian Mejrup, ‘Withdrawn amidst the World: Rancé’s Conduite Chrétienne for Mme de Guise (1697)’, Early Modern French Studies, 39 (2017), 57–74

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———, Sven R. Havsteen, Kristian Mejrup, Eelco Nagelsmit, and Lars Nørgaard, ‘Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century: Four Case Studies’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 1.2 (2014), 249–343 Choat, Malcolm, ‘From Letter to Letter-Collection: Monastic Epistolography in Late-Antique Egypt’, in Collecting Early Christian Letters: From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity, ed. by Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 80–94 Cholakian, Patricia Francis, Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000) Constable, Giles, Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976) Craveri, Benedetta, The Age of Conversation, trans. by Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005 [Italian 2001]) Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Delforge, Frédéric, and Antony McKenna, ‘Tourouvre, Françoise de La Vove de’, in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. by Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), p. 977 ———, ‘Tourouvre, Marie-Jeanne de La Vove de’, in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. by Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), p. 978 Diefendorf, Barbara B., From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Familles: parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne societé (Paris: Hachette, 1976) Fret, Louis J., Antiquités et chroniques percheronnes, 3 vols (Mortagne: Imprimerie de Glaçon, 1840) Hillman, Jennifer, Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) Goldsmith, Elizabeth C., ‘Exclusive Conversations’: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988) Haseldine, Julian, The Letters of Peter of Celle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Hurel, Daniel-Odon, ‘L’étude de correspondances et l’histoire du monachisme: Méthodes et enjeux historiographiques’, in Érudition et commerce épistolaire: Jean Mabillon et la tradition monastique, ed. by D.-O. Hurel (Paris: J. Vrin, 2003), pp. 301–42 Jaloustre, Élie, ‘Un précepteur auvergnat de l’Abbé de Rancé’, Revue d’Auvergne, 4 (1887), 85–119 Krailsheimer, Alban John, Armand-Jean de Rancé: Abbot of La Trappe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

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Leclant, Jean, ‘Coffee and Cafés in Paris, 1644–1693’, in Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales, ed. by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 86–97 Lesaulnier, Jean, and Antony McKenna, eds, Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004) Montagne, Mme Pierre, ‘Les Enfants de Monsieur de Tourouvre vers la fin du xviie siècle’, Société historique et archéologique de l’Orne (1979), 3–30 Neveu, Bruno, Sébastien-Joseph du Cambout de Pontchâteau (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1969) Pouzet, Régine, ‘Vertus, Catherine-Françoise de Bretagne d’Avaugour, dite Mlle de’, in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. by Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 995–96 Rubenson, Samuel, ‘The Letter-Collections of Antony and Ammoas: Shaping a Community’, in Collecting Early Christian Letters: From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity, ed. by Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 68–79 Sternberg, Giora, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, Past and Present, 204 (2009), 33–88 Tournoüer, Henri, Bibliographie et iconographie de la Maison-Dieu Notre-Dame de la Trappe au diocèse de Sees, de Dom A.-I. le Bouthillier de Rancé, Abbé et Réformateur de cette abbaye et en général de tous les religieux du même monastère (Mortagne: Marchand & Gilles, 1894) Verbaal, Wim, ‘Voicing your Voice — The Fiction of a Life: Early Twelfth-Century Letter Collections and the Case of Bernard of Clairvaux’, Interfaces, 4 (2017), 103–24 Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis, ‘The Right to Privacy’, Harvard Law Review, 4.5 (1890), 193–220

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Chapter 8. Privacy and Discretion in the Correspondence of Charles Drelincourt*

Introduction Based on correspondence written by the pastor Charles Drelincourt (1595–1669) to two colleagues, one in Holland and the other in Metz, this chapter will seek to establish the extent to which the pastor’s letters reveal a concern for privacy, either his own or that of people to whom or about whom he writes. In its oldest definition, the word private relates to the domestic sphere, as opposed to the public sphere of political affairs. The concept of privacy has, of course, evolved over the centuries and varies to some extent from culture to culture, but it includes ideas of denying access by others — individuals, social groups, or public authorities — to aspects of one’s personal life and opinions. Discretion, in the context of this paper, relates to respect for the privacy of others. What can the correspondence of this clergyman in the middle years of the seventeenth century tell us about his view of what should be kept private and what need not? From 1620 until his death in 1669, Charles Drelincourt was a minister of the French Reformed Church, one of a number of pastors of the church at Charenton which served the Protestant community of the capital.1 Protestants were a minority in France, their rights protected, but also

* This chapter has been published in Open Access thanks to the generous funding of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138). 1 This church was usually served by four pastors, although the number could rise as high as six for brief periods. Jane McKee (Ulster University, retired) is a former chair of the Irish Section of the Huguenot Society and is currently a member of the editorial board of the Huguenot Journal. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 215–236 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138245 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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limited, by the provisions of the edicts known collectively as the Edict of Nantes, 1598. The unsuccessful Huguenot revolt in the 1620s resulted in the loss of their military strongholds and a considerable weakening of their political power under the Edict of Grace in 1629. Their position was further eroded by conversions among the Protestant aristocracy, on whom they depended for influence and for the continued existence of churches on their estates, and also by legal challenges to their churches, occupations, and freedoms, mounted by regional authorities and the Catholic clergy. So Drelincourt lived in a world where the position of the church he served was gradually becoming weaker and Protestants were increasingly depen­ dent on the goodwill of the monarch and the influence of a dwindling number of high-ranking aristocrats. The 212 letters examined here were written between 1620 and 1669, to the pastors Paul Ferry (1591–1669) in Metz and André Rivet (1572–1651) in the Dutch Republic. The correspondence with Rivet began quite formally in 1625 and it is clear that the men had not previously met in person. Rivet was more than twenty years older than Drelincourt and a very eminent theologian who had made his reputation in France before moving to the Dutch Republic in 1620, to take the chair of Biblical Studies at the University of Leiden. Drelincourt, for his part, was a junior member of the pastoral team at Charenton, but the men were linked by ties to Pierre Du Moulin, former pastor of Charenton and brother-in-law of Rivet, a man for whom Drelincourt had a profound respect. Indeed Drelincourt wrote his first, very deferential letter to Rivet to accompany a translation into French of one of Du Moulin’s books.2 Rivet’s career continued to flourish and he was appointed to The Hague in 1630 to serve the French-speaking church there and, more importantly, to supervise the education of the son of the stadholder, Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau, the future William II of Orange (1626–1650). He remained in The Hague until 1646, serving the French-speaking church and the prince and was then appointed rector of the new Orange College in Breda, where he died in 1651. Rivet had been a protégé of the powerful La Trémoille family in France and later became a person of influence at the Dutch court. He published a large number of works of theology and religious polemic, mostly in Latin, and continued to involve himself in the affairs of the French Reformed churches. He took an active part in countering the efforts by Théophile Brachet de La Milletière and others to unite the Catholic and Reformed churches in France, as well as in opposing the new and more liberal doctrine of grace proposed by Moïse Amyraut and other theological ideas associated with the Academy of Saumur. Drelincourt and his colleagues shared Rivet’s opposition to La Milletière, but the two men

2 Du Moulin, Traicté de la cognoissance de Dieu. Original in Latin: De cognitione Dei tractatus.

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were brought closer together by the conservative theological views which led them to oppose Amyraut, unlike most of Drelincourt’s colleagues at Charenton. Drelincourt was one of over four hundred people, in Holland, France, and elsewhere, who were in correspondence with Rivet, but the correspondence between the two men was regular and continued for twenty-five years.3 The University of Leiden holds some 168 letters from Drelincourt to Rivet, written between April 1625 and September 1650.4 The other collection of letters by Drelincourt under examination here was written to the Metz clergyman, Paul Ferry (1591–1669), a closer contemporary. Drelincourt came from Sedan, an independent principality about seventy miles north-west of Metz, and seems to have known Ferry quite early. The first letter of the collection, dated 10 February 1620, was written from Langres where the recently-ordained Drelincourt was trying unsuccessfully to set up a new church.5 This letter is the first direct exchange between the two men, but they seem to have had some indirect contact, perhaps when Ferry preached in Sedan in 1616 and 1619.6 Refer­ ences to Drelincourt’s sisters in the second letter of 6 July suggest that Ferry may even have stayed with Drelincourt’s family in Sedan, and his friend and later son-in-law, Jacques Couët du Vivier, was staying there in April 1629, in charge of two young gentlemen, when their mother died unexpectedly.7 In Metz, Ferry operated on a much smaller professional stage than Rivet or Drelincourt. Although the city had come under French control in 1552, the territory did not formally become French until 1648. The Reformed church of Metz was not part of the structures of the French Reformed churches, but formed a separate small unit with a few other churches in the territory attached to the city. As a result, its clergy did not have the visibility or the influence of those who attended the large regional and national synods of the French churches. Ferry was much admired as a preacher and very prolific. He left an enormous number of manuscripts, primarily of sermons but also of studies of local and regional history. However he published very little in comparison with Drelincourt or Rivet, just a few sermons and some polemical works.8 He was interested in the idea of a union of Protestant churches and also had some discussions with Bossuet in the 1660s which led to unjustified rumours of his conversion to

3 Dibon, Inventaire de la correspondance d’André Rivet, p. xiii. 4 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS BPL 273, fols 6–180. 5 Drelincourt to Ferry, 10 February 1620, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 45–46. The manuscript of this correspondence, MS 760(5) fols 98–140, is held in Paris in the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français. 6 Léonard, Être pasteur, p. 77. 7 Drelincourt to Rivet, 6 July 1620; Drelincourt to Jacques Couët du Vivier, 28/29 April 1629, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 46–47, 50–53. 8 Ferry found it difficult to get his work published in France. See Drelincourt to Ferry, 12 October 1629 and 29 April 1630, McKee, ed., Corrrespondance, pp. 56, 61.

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the Catholic faith. This correspondence is less focused on theology and the affairs of the French churches than that between Drelincourt and Rivet and it is also much more irregular. Six letters of the surviving correspondence were written between 1620 and 1630 and a further thirty-seven between 1650 and 1668. Like his correspondents, Charles Drelincourt was a serving clergyman, preaching and teaching and spending long hours in his study, reading works of theology, preparing his sermons, and writing books. Unlike Rivet, he did not see himself as a theologian and, unlike Ferry, he was not a famous preacher, suffering from some sort of speech impediment which affected his delivery of the long sermons of the time to the large congre­ gations which were characteristic of Protestant worship. He was known in his own time as a religious polemicist, taking on Catholic adversaries of all ranks. His lasting reputation, however, was earned by his pastoral writings, for he saw himself primarily as a pastor, the shepherd of his flock, writing in French for the common man, rather than for other clergy and theologians. He made this point explicitly on two occasions in his correspondence with the famous scholar, Claude Saumaise,9 referring to the book he was then writing in an effort to prepare the Reformed faithful better to resist the conversion campaigns of Catholic lay missionaries.10 His most important pastoral works, The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death, his Catechism, and his Charitable Visits were to follow in the 1650s and 1660s and they were to run to many editions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.11 The correspondence between these men was primarily professional, but the interactions between Drelincourt and his correspondents covered a wide range of subject matter, from rare requests for purchases for spouses or nieces, more common requests for the loan of books or verification of references, to discussions of theological points and church affairs, requests for assistance for travellers and news of family or other persons of interest. He also writes at times at the behest of others, mostly, but not always, the consistory of the church at Charenton. Neither correspondence is complete and we do not have the letters written to Drelincourt by his correspondents. It is obviously impossible to know what he decided not to send or how many of his letters may have been destroyed or lost by his correspondents. But we can examine the correspondence we have to see if and where he appears to exercise some form of self-censorship or discretion. We will begin with a brief consideration of the conditions of

9 Drelincourt to Claude Saumaise, September-December 1646 and 27 December 1647, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 317, 326. 10 Drelincourt, Dialogues familiers. 11 Drelincourt, Les consolations de l’âme fidèle; Drelincourt, Catéchisme; Drelincourt, Les visites charitables.

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transmission of the correspondence and of Drelincourt’s expectations in relation to confidentiality. Then we will look at his attitude to privacy, his own and that of other people, in the following areas: family life and friends, discussion of third parties, theological divisions within the Reformed churches, and loyalty to the monarchy.

Security of Correspondence and Expectations of Confidentiality There is no mention of letters going astray in these collections of cor­ respondence, as there is in the later correspondence between Laurent Drelincourt in Niort and Élie Bouhéreau in La Rochelle.12 Drelincourt usually sends letters of recommendation with the individuals concerned, and other named individuals are also occasionally entrusted with letters. For letters to Rivet in The Hague, he also has access to the services of the Dutch embassy in Paris. Letters seem to have been transmitted through Jan van Euskercken, secretary at the Dutch embassy in Paris, in the late 1630s. Drelincourt mentions him in six letters between 7 August 1637 and 29 September 1640, in the context of the transmission and reception of correspondence to Rivet.13 Van Euskercken died in 1642 and by 1643 the correspondence was being transmitted through the office of the Flemish banker, Jean Hoeufft, commissioner for the financial affairs of the Dutch Republic in France.14 Rivet’s nephew, André Pineau, often accounts to his uncle between 28 October 1643 and 9 December 1650, for the delivery of his mail, received from the offices of Mr Hoeufft, to a variety of individuals, including Charles Drelincourt.15 So secure transmis­ sion of letters to a correspondent in Holland does not seem to pose any problems and there is no suggestion that letters are likely to be intercepted by the French authorities.16 We do not have similar information about the security of communication with Metz, but there is little evidence of 12 Laurent Drelincourt to Élie Bouhéreau, 1 May 1675, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 422. 13 Drelincourt to Rivet, 7 August & 18 December 1637, 26 March 1638, 27 January, 5 May, 29 September 1640. McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 135, 147–48, 160, 195, 202, 210. Van Euskerken had married into a Reformed family in Paris. 14 Jean Hoeufft (1578–1651) was a banker of Flemish origin who had businesses in Rouen and then in Paris where, in 1634, he became the financial intermediary between the Dutch Republic and France, see Morera, ‘Du commerce’, p. 17. 15 Tulot, ed., ‘Un huguenot à Paris’. 16 A print run of one of Drelincourt’s books was intercepted in Lyon, on its way from Geneva to Paris in 1661, perhaps because it dealt with the possibility of accepting closer linkage with the Anglican Church and particularly with the acceptability of bishops. It was written just after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and at a time when pressure was being put on Huguenots in England to use a French version of the Anglican liturgy in the Savoy Church in London. See Drelincourt to Ferry, 8 June 1661, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 392.

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concern in Drelincourt’s correspondence with Ferry about letters being lost or opened by the authorities whilst in transit, although by 1665 he is sufficiently concerned about sending certain decrees requested by Ferry, to announce he is sending them to another person in Metz, for Ferry to collect.17 The correspondents, then, can be relatively confident that letters will arrive safely, but to what extent do they need to assume that they may be read or passed on to others? There are some indications in the correspondence that Drelincourt takes the issue of confidentiality very seriously. He is, of course, happy to have others read particular letters with his permission. In June 1643, he sends Rivet an account of Reformed relations with the new queen regent and requests that it be sent on to the conservative theologian Friedrich Spanheim in Leiden18 and in January and February 1645, he sends Rivet unsealed letters addressed to Spanheim for Rivet to read before sealing them and sending them on.19 In March of the same year Spanheim sends Rivet a letter from Drelincourt addressed to him, Spanheim,20 and, in May, writing about the provincial synod of the Île-de-France, Drelincourt asks Rivet to share what he has written only with Spanheim.21 The three men were friends and united in their opposition to the new theology of grace expounded and developed by Moïse Amyraut (1596–1664) and his colleagues at Saumur. This is the subject of the letters of March and May 1645. At the time, Spanheim was working on a comprehensive refuta­ tion of Amyraut’s theology which was published in 1646.22 Drelincourt, then, was willing occasionally to share correspondence on particular issues with trusted friends who shared his views. But he reacted very angrily when told that one of his protégés in Holland, the pastor and former parish priest, François Cupif, had demanded to know the contents of a letter sent to Rivet about a couple seeking assistance.23 He also reacted angrily when the clergyman Balthasar-Octavien Amyraut showed around a letter from Ferry, in support of his claim to have been

17 Drelincourt to Ferry, 8 July 1665, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 400. The letter does not give details about the decrees requested. 18 Drelincourt to Rivet, 27 June 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 262. Friedrich Spanheim (1600–1649) had taught in Geneva for many years before accepting a chair of Theology at Leyden in 1642. See Bayle, Dictionnaire, xiii, pp. 401–06. 19 Drelincourt to Rivet, 21 January [1645], 18 February 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 285, 289. The letters for Spanheim were sent on to him and do not appear in the Rivet correspondence. 20 Drelincourt to Spanheim, 20 March 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 289–90. Included in the Drelincourt to Rivet correspondence. 21 Drelincourt to Rivet, 27 May 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 297–98. 22 Spanheim, Exercitationes de gratia universali. 23 Drelincourt to Rivet, 30 May 1642, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 238–40.

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wronged by Drelincourt, writing that Amyraut should not have divulged what had been communicated to him in confidence.24 As far as Drelincourt is concerned, his letters are primarily private documents, particularly when dealing with the personal affairs of other individuals. In relation to theological matters, he is occasionally happy to have his letters shared with like-minded friends and he understands that information in his letters may be passed on to third parties, but there is no indication that he expected his letters to be read without permission by anyone other than his correspondent.

Family and Friends As one of the pastors of Charenton, Charles Drelincourt was a significant public figure in Reformed circles, but his published works show little con­ cern for protecting his privacy. The prefaces often give information about his personal life, as for example the account of his ordination and first post in Langres, published in the preface to a collection of sermons in 1664.25 His correspondence with Rivet is primarily focused on church affairs, but the two men also had social links which deepened over the twenty-five years of their correspondence, and mentions of domestic affairs appear regularly. We do not know whether he and Ferry continued to correspond between 1630 and 1650, but their initial contacts had a strong family element and this is still present in the later correspondence. A native of the principality of Sedan, Charles Drelincourt lived in Paris as part of a large family circle, with a brother and three sisters living in the same city and a very large brood of at least fifteen children. Six of them died in infancy, two in their teens, and another in early adulthood. Just five sons and a daughter survived to make careers, marry and have children. Drelincourt’s mother, Catherine Buyrette, also lived with him for some time before her death in 163826 as did a widowed sister, Marie who died in 1640.27 There is no systematic effort to send family news, but several of Drelincourt’s siblings and some of their offspring make their appearance in his correspondence, as do some of his older children. We witness, for example, his satisfaction as he prepares to preach at the marriage of a niece,28 or his request for support for a badly behaved fatherless nephew,

Drelincourt to Ferry, 28 June [1656], McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 361. Drelincourt, ‘Épitre dédicatoire’. Drelincourt to Rivet, 8 & 29 January 1638, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 150–53. Drelincourt to Rivet, 1 September 1640, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 208. Marie Drelincourt was the widow of Pierre Le Pin. 28 Drelincourt to Rivet, 17 October 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 269. The niece in question was Marguerite Trouvé, daughter of Élisabeth Drelincourt and the doctor, Pierre 24 25 26 27

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on his way to the Indies.29 Of his own children, only the older ones are mentioned and he is silent about the births and deaths of those who died in childhood, or even as teenagers, as was the custom at the time. The sec­ ond son, Charles (1628–1647), appears as a troublesome boy, as a student of the college at Châtillon and on his death in 1647.30 Henri (1631–1676) is mentioned twice in connection with his studies and again at the time of his ordination in Gien in 1658.31 With these sons, Drelincourt is a concerned and careful parent, but he seems much more deeply attached to his eldest son, writing emotionally of his pride and profound sense of loss when Laurent (1625–1680) is called from his side to serve the church of La Rochelle in 1651.32 He reports his wedding in 1657, enlists his help in finding a post for Ferry’s grandson in 1659, and announces his expulsion from his post in La Rochelle and the death of his first child in 1661.33 All these references to his own family life find a parallel in the interest he takes and the information he is given about the families of his correspondents, following the affairs of his former colleague and Rivet’s brother-in-law, Pierre Du Moulin (1568–1658), helping his son, Cyrus Du Moulin, to a post as pastor of Chateaudun, advancing money to Rivet’s elder son, or keeping an eye on Ferry’s beloved grandson, Jacques Couët du Vivier when he first arrives in Paris, among many other examples. He is also happy to evoke his contacts with other people, mostly mem­ bers of the Reformed community of Paris, but also travellers from other parts of France and from elsewhere. He regularly mentions his dealings with members of the nobility, and seems to have particularly close ties to the members of the Chatillon and La Force families. He shares worries with his correspondents, about the political situa­ tion, his children, or the fact that his theological conservatism is not shared by most of his colleagues in Charenton, but his letters generally convey the impression of a man at ease with himself and fully in command of his affairs. There is, however, one letter, written in June 1656 to Paul Ferry,

29

30 31 32 33

Trouvé. She married Jean Cornil or Counil de l’Isle, an elder of the Charenton church, in 1642. Drelincourt to Rivet, 2 December 1633, 6 January 1634 and 17 February 1634, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 71–73, 81. The nephew had behaved badly as an apprentice in Paris and was being sent to the Dutch Republic with the intention that he should emigrate to the Indies. Rivet was asked to keep an eye on him, but in the end, it was soldier cousins in Maastricht who took charge of him. Drelincourt to Rivet, 18 August 1640, 1 August 1643 and 15 February 1647, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 206–07, 265, 318. Drelincourt to Rivet, 18 September [1649], 10 September 1650, 18 September 1658, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 335–36, 341–42, 373. Drelincourt to Ferry, 11 August and 16 September 1651, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 342–44, 346. Drelincourt to Ferry, 4 September 1657, 3 December 1659, 20 October 1661, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 367–68, 380–81, 395–97.

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which shows that, on one occasion at least, he chose to protect himself and his son by initially limiting access to negative information about his personal affairs.34 Replying to Ferry who seems to have been complaining about his own treatment by the church in Metz, Drelincourt launches into a diatribe, listing a long series of examples of his willing service to his church, before coming to the nub of the problem, the rejection of his proposal, in 1650 or 1651, that his eldest son Laurent be appointed a minister of Charenton and the fact that, since then, some members of the congregation suspect him of opposing other possible appointments, such as that of the contro­ versial Alexandre Morus35 or of Ferry’s correspondent, Balthasar-Octavien Amyraut,36 in order to facilitate the return of his own son to the Paris church. This paints a very different picture from that offered in the letters of 11 August and 16 September 1651 concerning Laurent’s appointment to La Rochelle which was presented as a triumph and in which there was no mention of a failed attempt to have Laurent appointed to Charenton. Drelincourt initially seeks to protect his self-esteem and that of his son by concealing this failure from his correspondent. Clearly aware that he has let his guard down, he finishes the letter with a request for Ferry to throw it in the fire, a request repeated on a few other occasions when he feels he has let his control slip. In all surviving cases he nevertheless seals and sends the letter and the recipient does not respect his request to burn it, so the request may have been understood by both correspondents simply as a request for extra discretion. Once again, his behaviour indicates both trust in his correspondents and considerable openness on the part of Drelincourt. The after-effects of the episode above can be seen in his treatment of the ordination of his second son, Henri, two years later. At the end of a letter to Paul Ferry, he mentions that he is to go to Gien for the formal examination of Henri to be minister of that church and comments that he is a very promising young man, but that he dares not say more because Henri is his son, a clear allusion to his misfortunes over Laurent.37 His experience with his eldest son taught him to be much more cautious about openly expressing pride in any of his children and this may be part of the reason why only his three eldest sons appear in the

34 Drelincourt to Ferry, 24 J[une] 1656, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 355–60. 35 Alexandre Morus (1616–1670) was a gifted preacher, but he provoked considerable opposition during his career in Geneva and in the Dutch Republic. He was appointed to the church of Charenton in 1659: Haag and Haag, La France Protestante, 1st edn, vii, pp. 543–47. 36 Balthasar-Octavien Amyraut (1615–1659), had been pastor of the church in Sainte-Marieaux-Mines since 1651. On a protracted visit to Paris, he had worked for a time as part of the pastoral team at Charenton and he believed that Drelincourt had blocked a permanent appointment: Haag and Haag, La France Protestante, 2nd edn, i, cols 206–09. 37 Drelincourt to Ferry, 18 September 1658, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 373.

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correspondences. The Charenton episode also shows that, although he trusts his correspondent and tells him the full story in the end, his first reaction was to protect his own ego and that of his son by being less than frank about the true circumstances of Laurent’s appointment to La Rochelle.

Discussion of Third Parties Like most of us, then, Charles Drelincourt likes to present a successful im­ age to the world. He writes with considerable satisfaction, for example, of theological disputations against Catholic adversaries in which he brought members of the Catholic laity to recognize the truth of the Reformed faith or confirmed doubting members of his own church in their Protestant faith, defeating the Catholic missionary François Véron (1575–1649) in one case in 1639 and mentioning further successes in 1642 and 1645.38 We do not hear of any occasion on which such disputations ended in defeat for Drelincourt, although members of some of the great families to which he was close embraced the Catholic faith, and he is likely to have been asked to help prevent their departure or bring them back to the true faith. In writing of these events, Drelincourt is very careful not to give the names of those whose conversion is being sought, although he does sometimes mention the name of the Catholic opponent involved: François Véron, in 1639, and a certain La Place, in 1645. One convert, Papillon, is named because he came to the 1645 debate as La Place’s assistant, but it seems clear that Drelincourt sought to give a right to privacy to those for whose souls he had fought and who might suffer in some way, if their hesitation or change of religion became widely known. He seems to have adopted a similar policy in relation to those former religious or members of the Catholic clergy for whom he wrote letters of introduction to Rivet or Ferry. Writing letters of introduction was a standard part of his role as a pastor. Those found in Drelincourt’s corre­ spondence were sometimes given to the individuals concerned to be pre­ sented to the addressee in person, but recommendations were sometimes included in the body of a letter, and a letter given to a traveller might also be followed up with a description of the person or a more candid assess­ ment in a personal letter. Recommendations for co-religionists, students, soldiers, or other travellers were generally very straightforward. Those for recent converts were much more problematic. Many were confidence

38 Drelincourt to Rivet, 12 November [1639], 24 and 30 May 1642 and 13 May 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 191–92, 237, 239, 295–97. François Véron was a famous controversialist who had left the Jesuit order to spend his life challenging the religious beliefs of the Reformed clergy and laity.

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tricksters, using conversion as a means of swindling gullible individuals and consistories into giving them money. Drelincourt is very aware that conversions may be fraudulent, but he generally gives converts the benefit of the doubt, often explaining, when they are found to be confidence trick­ sters, that he had had his doubts about them. A particular problem was posed by converts who were priests or members of religious orders. Some of these were fraudsters, but those whose conversion was genuine faced real difficulties in making a living as a Protestant.39 They were also at risk of pursuit by their orders or the church authorities in order to bring them back into the fold. Drelincourt is particularly careful in his letters about these converts, except where the conversion was already widely known, as in the case of François Cupif, whose letter of recommendation was written in September 1637, after his change of religion had already come to public notice with his expulsion from the Sorbonne in the previous July.40 In a number of other cases, however, Drelincourt is much more cautious, saying simply that he is leaving it up to the traveller to explain what he or she was in their previous life or why they have had to leave France. He respects their privacy because not to do so could cause real problems for them and could also put their conversion to the Reformed faith at risk. This discretion about the background of the person recommended appears to be an extension of the concealment of the identity of new or potential converts mentioned above. By contrast, he sees no need for such protection for himself and the expression of his own views on the treatment of Protestants in France, complaining freely about measures taken against French Protestants at various times by regional authorities, particularly in the south of the coun­ try. On one occasion he even tries, through Rivet, to enlist the services of the Dutch ambassador to protest to the Regent, Anne of Austria, and her Council about the 1645 decree that Protestants were no longer to be permitted to send their children out of France to be educated in Protestant states.41 He had built a reputation as a polemicist early in his career and was happy to take on some very eminent opponents in religious contro­ versy, among them Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of Belley, Prince Ernest,

39 Priest converts who wished to pursue a clerical vocation in the Walloon churches were obliged to wait for four years to be approved and given an appointment. This caused serious problems, both material and spiritual. François Cupif was eventually appointed to a church, but Pierre Jarrige was unwilling to wait and rescinded his conversion. Drelincourt to Claude Saumaise, 23 October 1649, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 336–37. 40 Drelincourt to Rivet, 18 September 1637, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 140. François Cupif was a doctor of the Sorbonne and a parish priest in the diocese of Angers who had embraced the Protestant faith. He had been expelled by the Sorbonne on 15 July 1637, after publishing a book to explain the reasons for his conversion. Haag and Haag, La France Protestante, 2nd edn, iv, cols 978–80. 41 Drelincourt to Rivet 10 May 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 294.

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Landgrave of Hesse, a former Calvinist who had converted to the Catholic faith, and even Cardinal Richelieu himself, although after his death.42 During the Cardinal’s lifetime he also freely attacked two of his protégés, the Protestant disciple of church unity in France, Théophile Brachet de La Milletière, a member of the Charenton congregation, and the Catholic missionary and former Jesuit, François Véron. In all this he was behaving as was expected from a Reformed clergyman, but his concern to protect the privacy of others arises again in the case of La Milletière and in relation to later efforts to promote the union of churches. Théophile Brachet de La Milletière, formerly a member of the Paris consistory, started a campaign in 1634 to persuade his co-religionists to agree to join a new French church which would include both Catholics and Protestants, a project greeted with derision by Drelincourt and his colleagues. Involved in the Huguenot rebellion of the 1620s which culmi­ nated in the siege and fall of La Rochelle in 1629, La Milletière had been sentenced to death, then reprieved, with his sentence commuted to one of imprisonment. It was widely believed that Richelieu had offered him his life in return for his services, although his release in 1631 may have been due to the actions of influential relatives.43 By 1634 he was actively promoting the union of churches in France, a project close to the heart of Cardinal Richelieu. Drelincourt reports regularly to Rivet on La Milletière’s activities from November 1634 and pours scorn freely on his theological arguments, his arrogance, and his corruption, stating as a fact that he is being paid to serve the interests of the Cardinal and the King.44 He is considerably more discreet when writing about La Milletière’s claim that one of the ministers of Charenton agrees with him, asserting that this is known to be untrue, but giving no name to the clergyman in question.45 He is equally discreet when approached in a later attempt to revive the idea of church unification. The names of those making approaches to Drelincourt are not mentioned, although we are told that one has been sent by the Queen Regent and her director of conscience46 and that the other is a person of quality, claiming to be authorized by the highest authorities.47 He probably avoids naming the clergyman in order to protect him, but his discretion about those involved in the later approaches is almost certainly due to the involvement of the Queen. In both these cases, 42 Drelincourt, La défense de Calvin. This book was a response to Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal duc de Richelieu, Traitté qui contient la méthode. 43 Van de Schoor, Irenical Theology, pp. 11–25. 44 Drelincourt to Rivet, 7 August 1637, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 135–36. 45 Drelincourt to Rivet, 13 November 1637, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 144. The minister in question was most likely Jean Mestrezat, according to Van de Schoor, Irenical Theology, pp. 36–38, 96. 46 Drelincourt to Rivet, 28 May 1644, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 277–79. 47 Drelincourt to Rivet, 18 February 1645, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 289.

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his refusal to name other people contrasts with his willingness to express his own opinions. There was, however, one occasion on which he seems to have adopted a more cautious approach. He was widely believed to be the author, in 1656, of two anonymous books48 refuting the attack on French Protestants at the 1655–1657 assemblée du clergé49 by Henri Pardaillan de Gondrin, archbishop of Sens, in a diatribe which the pastor described as full of bitterness, lies, and deception. Earlier requests at the assembly for action against Protestants had drawn little reaction from Cardinal Mazarin, so a copy of Gondrin’s speech was delivered directly to the young Louis XIV. The King took the matter to his Council and it was discussed at a series of meetings between representatives of the Council and the clergy between May and August 1656.50 It was a serious attack on the Reformed commu­ nity, and Drelincourt mentions it in a letter to Ferry on 18 September 1656, describing it as a tissue of lies and saying that he has been told that someone is writing a reply which will appear very soon: On m’assure qu’on y a repondu; et que la reponse se verra au premier jour. (I am assured that a reply has been written and will appear shortly).51 It may be that he was not in fact the author of the refutation of Gondrin’s diatribe, but it may also be that he thought it wiser to protect his privacy by use of a pseudonym, Philalèthe, and to conceal his authorship even from a trusted correspondent. The books were published in 1656 and gave sufficient offence to be sentenced to be burnt by the public executioner, in 1657.52

Theological Divisions Within the French Reformed Churches Drelincourt generally shows a concern to protect his own privacy only insofar as he tends to avoid allusion to personal failure and to present things in the best light, although we have examined one incident where he confides in Paul Ferry about a very painful failure. He is happy to take on Catholic opponents of all kinds and to comment freely on efforts to limit Protestant rights, but he protects himself from serious risk by concealing

48 Drelincourt [Philalethe], Lettre d’un Habitant de Paris; Drelincourt [Philalethe], Seconde lettre sur la remonstrance. 49 The Assembly ran from 25 October 1655 to 23 May 1657. Gondrin made his speech on 2 April 1656. 50 Bourlon, Les assemblées du clergé, pp. 49–58. 51 Drelincourt to Ferry, 18 September 1656, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 367. 52 Bourlon, Les assemblées du clergé, p. 57.

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his authorship of the responses to the Archbishop of Sens. In relation to other people, we have seen that he is careful to practise discretion where openness might be harmful to them. If we turn now to his treatment of the great dispute within the French Reformed churches, we will see that his behaviour is guided by the same principles. The new theology of grace developed by Moïse Amyraut caused enor­ mous dissension within the French Reformed churches for at least fifteen years after its first airing in his Brief Traitté de la Prédestination et de ses principales dépendances in 1634. Following in the steps of John Cameron,53 Amyraut presented a version of the doctrine of predestination which offered more hope of salvation to the individual than that agreed at the synod of Dort in 1618–1619.54 Written in French, his book was accessible to everyone and his ideas quickly gathered support, but he was opposed by more conservative theologians, chief among them André Rivet and his brother-in-law, the redoubtable Pierre Du Moulin. Other authors have traced the evolution of this dispute.55 Our purpose here is to examine Drelincourt’s treatment of it in his correspondence to see what issues of privacy it presented for him. He was very clearly a conservative, feeling no inclination to move in the direction of Amyraut’s new theology. For him the truth is unchanging, and that truth is the doctrine of grace and predestination agreed at the Council of Dort. He makes his position clear in a letter to Rivet on 23 August 1635, where he outlines his principal objections to Amyraut’s position and also his fears that this new doctrine is attracting adherents in France and may create huge division and even schism within the French Reformed churches. But, in November 1635, he joins with his colleagues in Charenton, most of whom support Amyraut, to try to resolve the dispute, efforts which include the suggestion that Amyraut should write in future in Latin rather than French, thereby limit­ ing access to the discussion to theologians, the clergy, and educated men.56 He believes the truth must be defended, so he urges Rivet to inter­ vene57 and tells him that he (Drelincourt) is also accused of being at the origin of Du Moulin’s earlier intervention, although he claims to have urged Du Moulin to moderation.58 Crucially, however, he wants both of

53 John Cameron (1580–1625) was a Scottish theologian who had taught theology at the academies of Saumur and Montauban. 54 This synod, convened by the Dutch Reformed Church, was primarily concerned with the dispute over Arminianism. It was an international conference, attended by representatives of a number of Reformed churches in other countries, as well as the Church of England. 55 Van Stam, The Controversy over the Theology of Saumur, among others. Although Amyraut was the figurehead, other theologians were also associated with his views, among them Testard of Blois and colleagues in the Academy of Saumur. 56 Drelincourt to Rivet, 2 November 1635, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 96. 57 Drelincourt to Rivet, 5 September [1636], McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 106–08. 58 Drelincourt to Rivet, 24 October 1636. McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 110–12.

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them to respond in manuscript form rather than printing their responses, fearing that a printed book would be more widely accessible to members of the Reformed community and also to members of the Catholic Church, offering them an easy triumph in the perpetual war between the two faiths. He is even concerned, in September 1636, about the number of manuscripts which might be circulated. Indeed, he notes in the same letter that he has chosen not to respond to the defence of Amyraut’s position written by his colleague Jean Mestrezat, in spite of being invited to do so by Mestrezat himself. As the dispute develops, Drelincourt’s hostility to Amyraut’s doctrine remains undiminished, but his awareness of the harmful repercussions of the dispute increases. He is in a minority among his colleagues at Charenton who include some of Amyraut’s strongest supporters. Giving an account of the provin­ cial synod of the Île-de-France in March or April 1637, he notes that his colleague, Jean Daillé (1594–1670), was acting there as a representative of Amyraut and the Academy of Saumur; that another colleague, Edme Aubertin (1595–1642), considered Du Moulin’s attack on Amyraut’s view of grace to be highly offensive, and that Jean Mestrezat (1592–1657) also felt himself under attack by Du Moulin.59 Drelincourt tried to find common ground and an acceptable compromise between the parties at the provincial synod of 1637 and this was to be his position as the dispute rumbled on into the following decade. His view of the new theology did not change, but his later efforts seem to have been directed principally towards damping down the conflict, in accordance with the decision of the National Synod of Alençon in 1637, which asked Amyraut and Testard for changes in terminology but did not condemn them.60 In April 1638, for example, he implores Rivet not to publish the letter he sent to the National Synod of Alençon in 1637, because some of Drelincourt’s colleagues will certainly take up their pens against him and reignite the controversy, exposing the Reformed clergy to the ridicule of the Catholic Church and producing a Reformed version of the disputes which took place at the Council of Trent over grace and justification.61 For Drelincourt then, ma­ jor theological disputes within the Reformed churches are to be avoided, suppressed, or resolved privately, for fear of causing scandal within the Reformed community or exposing the churches to the ridicule of their Catholic opponents. At the same time, the truth must be defended, so he urges his fellow-conservatives to use their influence against the new theology. As the disputes continue into the 1640s, we see him once again clear about what he believes, concerned about discord within the French Reformed churches, and trying to find theological common ground and 59 Drelincourt to Rivet, 9 March–17 April 1637, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 118–19. 60 Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux, ii, pp. 571–76, 604–19. 61 Drelincourt to Rivet, 16 April 1638, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 165–66.

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to do what he can to pour oil on troubled waters.62 While his efforts here to limit the dissemination and the impact of the dispute are primarily a product of his desire to avoid schism within his Church, they are also prompted by a desire to keep internal differences private and avoid putting theological disunity on public display. If there must be internal disagree­ ments among Reformed theologians, Drelincourt wants them to be kept as private as possible.

Drelincourt’s Loyalism: Expedient or Genuine? After 1629, the Reformed community lost its military citadels and became wholly dependent for its survival in France upon the goodwill of the reign­ ing monarch. This dependence led to what some historians have described as a cult of the monarchy which contributed to the decline of the position of the Reformed churches in France.63 Drelincourt has been particularly associated with this loyalism,64 so it seems worthwhile to examine our pastor’s attitude to public affairs and the monarchy in his correspondence to see whether it is possible to detect a private attitude at odds with his public stance of total devotion to the crown. Drelincourt does not usually indulge in extended commentary on public affairs in his letters and, when they do appear, it is generally in the form of rapid comments at the end of letters, evoking, for example, the satisfactory progress of French or Dutch campaigns in the Thirty Years War, the involvement of the Protestant colonel Jean de Gassion in the suppression of the Nu-Pieds revolt in Normandy in late December 1639,65 or the possible effect on Du Moulin in Sedan of the military campaign against the army of the Spanish Netherlands, earlier in the same year.66 The death of Richelieu merits more extended treatment, as do the death of Louis XIII and the early days of the regency of Anne of Austria, while the birth of Louis XIV in 1638 inspires a Méditation of which four copies accompany his letter, with a request for one to be presented to the Princess of Orange and another, perhaps, to Marie de Médicis, then also in The Hague.67

62 Drelincourt to Rivet, 25 November 1645, After 11 January 1646, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 308, 310–12. 63 Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, ii, pp. 361–63. 64 Bost, ‘Le loyalisme du pasteur Drelincourt’, pp. 46–57. This article offers an analysis of a collection of prayers offered at Charenton by Drelincourt between 1638 and 1661, relating to important royal events. 65 Drelincourt to Rivet, 31 December 1639, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 192–93. 66 Drelincourt to Rivet 13 August 1639. McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 186–87. 67 Drelincourt to Rivet, 18 September 1638, 5 December 1642, 23 May, 13 & 27 June 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 174–75, 252–53, 256–62.

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As we have already seen, he feels free to deplore efforts to attack or undermine Protestant churches or rights, but when he does so, he takes considerable care to avoid criticism of Louis XIII and his chief minister, Richelieu. Thus, for example, when a colleague, Edme Aubertin, had to take refuge in the Dutch embassy in 1632 after his use of the term Reformed religion rather than ‘religion prétendue réformée’ (so-called Reformed religion) in a book had caused offence, Drelincourt professes himself delighted that there may be a meeting between the Cardinal and a delegation from the provincial synod, saying that Richelieu will surely recognize the justice of the delegation’s request.68 In February of the following year, in a letter lamenting all the very damaging measures being taken against the French Protestant churches: the expulsion of ministers born outside France, the ban on Protestant clergy serving in a second church outside the town in which they lived, and the insistence on Catholic involvement in teaching in colleges in Montauban and Nîmes, as well as in theology teaching in the academy of Montauban, Drelincourt comments that people are frightened, but trust in the King to set matters right.69 He goes to considerable pains in his correspondence to separate King and Cardinal from the results of actions in which they must at least have acquiesced. He reacts in the same way in 1643, when there was a long delay before the Regent, Anne of Austria, confirmed the provisions of the Edict of Grace. He attributes the difficulty to the people by whom she was surrounded rather than to the Regent herself, although he tells Rivet in the same letter that the député général70 had found it difficult to obtain an audi­ ence with her and that she was unwilling to meet the Protestant clergymen sent to meet her on the matter by the provincial synods of Normandy and the Île-de-France.71 This delay was to have significant consequences, for the following letter tells us that rumours had spread in Paris and the risk of attack on worshippers returning from Charenton was deemed sufficiently great for soldiers to be sent to Charenton, on the orders of the Regent, to reassure the congregation and protect them on their way home. Their appearance in Charenton was frightening and caused panic among the congregation. This episode illustrates the fundamental insecurity of the Reformed community in Paris, totally dependent on the protection of the monarch and it indicates that Drelincourt’s professions of loyalty are tinged with a considerable element of expediency.72

68 Drelincourt to Rivet, 2 December 1633, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 71. 69 Drelincourt to Rivet, 17 February 1634, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 79–81. 70 The député general was a Protestant nobleman appointed, with royal approval or directly by the king, to represent the French Protestant community at court. 71 Drelincourt to Rivet, 13 June 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 258–59. 72 Drelincourt to Rivet, 27 June [1643], McKee, ed., Correspondance, pp. 260–62.

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His reactions to the English Civil War are also largely driven by a concern for the repercussions on his own community in France. In 1642, for example, fearing that the executions of priests in England will provoke a massacre of Protestants in Paris, he begs Rivet to use his contacts among the English Parliamentarians to make them stop.73 So we see that the fear of another massacre of French Protestants was a recurrent concern for him. In 1643, with things going badly for Charles I,74 he is again fearful of violent repercussions in France and feels a need to reaffirm, even in a private letter to a trusted friend, the absolute loyalty of French Protestants to the crown and the Regent and to assert that this is a religious as well as a secular obligation.75 The Reformed churches had close doctrinal links with the Scottish Presbyterians who were resisting efforts by King Charles to impose Angli­ canism in Scotland, and a number of Scottish pastors and theologians had worked and taught in France, some of them, like John Cameron, much admired. But, for Drelincourt, all this seems to carry little weight when compared to danger for his own community. In December 1643, for example, he complains about the danger to French Protestants of the Scottish invitation to foreign churches to follow their example.76 Once again, it is clear that his primary concern is to protect his community by maintaining a position of total loyalty to the French crown. The correspondence, therefore, leaves the reader with a clear impres­ sion that Drelincourt is totally respectful of the secular authorities and offers them complete loyalty, finding ways to avoid any criticism of the ruler or his chief minister, even when he protests against measures harmful to the Reformed churches. He shows no hostility to any public figure of authority, but his correspondence makes it clear that he fully recognizes the complete reliance of his community on the goodwill and protection of the monarch and that his loyalty is primarily a matter of necessity, seeking in total obedience to the King or Regent a defence against renewed physical attacks by the Paris mob and legal harassment by the Catholic clergy. A loss of faith in the goodwill of the monarch was to emerge clearly during the 1660s, when his four youngest sons all left France to make

73 Drelincourt to Rivet, 15 March 1642, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 234. Rivet had accompanied the future William II of Orange to England on the occasion of his marriage in 1641 and had made contacts there. 74 The English parliament had begun to improve the organization and financing of its army in August 1643. They had also signed a military pact with Scottish presbyterian forces in revolt against the king, see Coward, Stuart Age, pp. 182–83. 75 Drelincourt to Rivet, 22 August 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 266. 76 Drelincourt to Rivet, 12 December 1643, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 270. The Solemn League and Covenant of August 1643 invited churches suffering under anti-Christian tyranny to follow the example of the Scots and English rebels.

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their careers elsewhere, two of them to study in Geneva in 1666 and the other two to practise medicine, one in Switzerland and the other in Leiden.77 Charles, the oldest of the four, was sufficiently well established to have made his own decision, but his younger brothers are likely to have been influenced to a considerable degree by the wishes of their father. The correspondence records the event which may have sparked this loss of faith, the fact that his beloved eldest son, Laurent, was forced to leave La Rochelle in 1661, along with all other Protestants not born in the city, in spite of the fact that he had been given special permission in 1651 to become one of the pastors of the church in that city.78

Conclusion What conclusions can we draw from our examination of this correspon­ dence about Drelincourt’s view of what should be kept private? He is a sociable man with a real interest in other people, whether he is dealing with the family affairs of his correspondents or his own. He does not initially feel any need to exclude mentions of his family or his own affairs from his correspondence or indeed the prefaces to his books. But he is certainly capable of concealment of negative events, presenting Laurent’s appointment to La Rochelle initially as a triumph and revealing his failure to have his son appointed to Charenton only several years later. Like all of us, he is also more likely to record triumph than disaster in describing his own activities and those of his son and he conceals his identity when his response to the Archbishop of Sens might put him at real risk. In relation to others mentioned in the correspondence, he is discreet where giving information might cause problems for the person discussed, such as the previous occupation of clerical converts or the names of those considering conversion. He is also discreet in relation to accusations made against colleagues or persons making approaches on behalf of royal personages. In this he is protecting the privacy of the persons concerned. He is quite happy to engage in religious disputes, even with senior members of the Catholic clergy and noble converts to Catholicism, and he ridicules the Protestant advocate of church unity, Théophile Brachet de La Milletière, even though he believes him to be working at the behest of Cardinal Richelieu. His attitude changes completely, however, when dealing with

77 The second of two sons named Charles was a doctor and became a professor of medicine in Leiden in 1668; Antoine became a doctor in Switzerland in 1666; Benjamin Nicolas died in 1666, during his studies in Geneva, and Pierre also studied in Geneva (1666–1667) before entering the Anglican Church in Ireland where he became dean of Armagh in 1691. See also McKee, ‘Departure and Exile in the Drelincourt Correspondence’. 78 Drelincourt to Ferry 20 October 1661, McKee, ed., Correspondance, p. 396.

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theological disputes within his own Reformed community. Then it be­ comes very important for the dispute to remain private. With a number of his colleagues at Charenton in the opposite theological camp, he seeks solutions in silence and compromise, in an attempt to keep his community together and to protect its privacy in order to avoid exposing it to the derision of its Catholic opponents. Finally, we attempted to ascertain whether his private view of the monarchy may have differed from his professed loyalism, noting the large element of expediency in his declara­ tions of loyalty to the monarch and in his attitude to the turmoil in Great Britain. Our attempt here to gain some understanding of Drelincourt’s idea of privacy suggests that, for this open, sociable individual, concerns for privacy and discretion primarily revolve around questions of saving face and protection, relating to individuals and to the Reformed churches and community in France.

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Works Cited Manuscripts Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS BPL 273, fols 6–180. Rivet Correspondence: letters written by Charles Drelincourt Paris, Bibliothèque de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (BSHPF), MS 760 (5), fols 98–140. Ferry Correspondence: Letters written by Charles Drelincourt Primary Sources Amyraut, Moïse, Brief Traitté de la Prédestination et de ses principales dépendances (Saumur: Jean Lesnier et Isaac Desbordes, 1634) Aymon, Jean, Tous les Synodes nationaux des églises réformées de France, 2 vols (The Hague: Charles Delo, 1710) Drelincourt, Charles, Catéchisme ou Instruction familière sur les principaux points de la religion chrétienne (Charenton: Louis Vendosme, 1662) ———, Les consolations de l’âme fidèle contre les frayeurs de la mort (Charenton: L. Vendosme, 1651) ———, La défense de Calvin contre l’outrage fait à sa mémoire dans un livre qui a pour titre Traitté qui contient la méthode la plus facile de convertir par le cardinal de Richelieu (Geneva: Jean Ant et Samuel De Tournes, 1667) ———, Dialogues familiers sur les principales objections des missionnaires de ce temps (Geneva: Pierre Chouet, 1648) ———, ‘Épitre dédicatoire à Messieurs Heudelot, seigneurs de Precigny; Et aux autres Fideles de la Ville de Langres et de ses environs’, in Recueil de Sermons sur divers passages de l’Écriture sainte (Geneva: Jean-Antoine et Samuel de Tournes, 1664) ——— [Philalethe], Lettre d’un Habitant de Paris à un de ses amis de la campagne. Sur la Remonstrance du clergé de France faite au Roy par Monsieur l’archevesque de Sens (n.p.: n. pub., 1656) ——— [Philalethe], Seconde lettre sur la remonstrance du clergé de France faite au Roy par Monsieur l’archevesque de Sens (n.p.: n. pub., 1656) ———, Les visites charitables ou les consolations chrestiennes pour toutes personnes affligées, 3 vols (Charenton: O. de Varennes, 1665–68) Du Moulin, Pierre, De cognitione Dei tractatus (Leiden: n. pub., 1625) ———, Traicté de la cognoissance de Dieu, trans. by Charles Drelincourt (Charenton: Samuel Petit, 1625) Du Plessis, Armand Jean, cardinal duc de Richelieu, Traitté qui contient la méthode la plus facile et la plus asseurée pour convertir ceux qui se sont séparez de l’Église, par le cardinal de Richelieu (Paris: S. et G. Cramoisy, 1651)

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McKee, Jane, ed., Correspondance de Charles Drelincourt et de ses enfants, 1620–1703 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021) Spanheim, Friedrich, Exercitationes de gratia universali. Accessere L erotemata auctori proposita et ab eodem decisa, cum mantissa C anterotematum (Leiden: Jean Maire, 1646) Tulot, Jean Luc, ed., ‘Un huguenot à Paris au milieu du xviie siècle: correspondance d’André Pineau à son oncle André Rivet’

[accessed 11 December 2020] Secondary Works Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire historique et critique de Pierre Bayle [Texte imprimé]. Nouvelle édition, augmentée de notes extraites de Chaufepié, Joly, La Monnoie, Leduchat, L.-J. Leclerc, Prosper Marchand, etc., publiée par A-J.-Q., 16 vols (Paris: Desoer, 1820–1824) Bost, Charles, ‘Le loyalisme du pasteur Drelincourt’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 74 (1925), 46–57 Bourlon, Isidore, Les assemblées du clergé et le protestantisme (Paris: Bloud, 1909) Coward, Barry, The Stuart Age (London: Longman, 1987) Dibon, Paul, Inventaire de la correspondance d’André Rivet (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) Haag, Émile, and Eugène Haag, La France Protestante, 1st edn (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1846–1859) ———, La France Protestante, 2nd edn (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1877–1888) Léonard, Emile G., Histoire générale du protestantisme, ii (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1988) Léonard, Julien, Être pasteur au xviie siècle: Le ministère de Paul Ferry à Metz (1612–1669) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015) McKee, Jane, ‘Departure and Exile in the Drelincourt Correspondence’, in The Huguenots: France, Exile and Diaspora, ed. by Jane McKee and Randolph Vigne (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), pp. 55–64 Morera, Raphaël, ‘Du commerce aux finances. La fortune de Jean Hoeufft (1578–1651), entre la France et les Provinces-Unies’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 63.1 (2016), 7–29 Van de Schoor, Robertus J. M., The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de La Milletière (1588–1665) (Leiden: Brill, 1995) Van Stam, Frans Pieter, The Controversy over the Theology of Saumur, 1635–1650: Disrupting Debates among the Huguenots in Complicated Circumstances (Amsterdam: APA — Holland University Press, 1988)

LARS C YRiL NøRgAARd ANd bAStiAN fELtER vAUCANSON 

Chapter 9. Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondence Between Fénelon and Maintenon*

Introduction The first missive addressed by the renowned Sulpician priest François Fénelon (1651–1715) to the secret wife of Louis XIV, Françoise d’Aubigné (1635–1719), dates to 4 October 1689 or shortly thereafter. It reveals a rather distanced relationship, but also evokes themes of spiritual intimacy: Je suis fâché de n’avoir pas su que vous vous appelez Françoise, avant de dire la messe. Je souhaite que vous ayez toute la petitesse, le détachement, le renoncement à vous-même, le pur amour dont votre bon patron vous a donné l’exemple. M. de […] m’a dit que vous étiez peinée sur la disposition des esprits de Saint-Cyr. Dieu vous aime, et veut que vous le fassiez aimer. Vous avez besoin pour cela de la sainte ivresse de saint François qui surpasse la sagesse des plus éminents

* Research funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF138) at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, which also generously funded the Open Access of this chapter, as well as by the Carlsberg Foundation, grant CF23–0161. Housed at the theological Faculty of the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with the Royal Danish Academy: Architecture, Design, Conservation in Copenhagen, the Centre is directed by prof. Mette Birkedal Bruun. Lars Cyril Nørgaard is Associate Professor at the Section of Church History, University of Copenhagen, and heads the research cluster ‘BELIEFS’ at the Centre for Privacy Studies. Bastian Felter Vaucanson is Asssistant Professor at the Section for Church History and the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, ed. by Michael Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Early European Research, 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 237–260 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.138246 This is an open access article made available under a CC bY-NC-Nd 4.0 International License.

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docteurs. Quand est-ce l’amour de Dieu sera connu et senti, au lieu de la crainte servile qui défigure la piété?1 (I am sorry to not have known that your name is Françoise before performing mass. I want for you to have all the modesty, the detachment, the renouncement of yourself, [and] the pure love of which your good patron surveys you as the example. M. de […] has told me that you had pains concerning the state of the spirits at Saint-Cyr. God loves you and he wants you to make him loved. For this you need the drunken holiness of saint Francis which surpasses the wisdom of the most eminent doctors. When will the love of God be known and felt instead of the servile fear that disfigures piety?) Referring to the feast day of Francis of Assisi (4 October), who was the name saint of the addressee,2 Fénelon’s missive refers to an otherworldly type of love that cannot be grasped by the most skilled theologians and their sobering formulations. This pure love constitutes a holy drunkenness that moves beyond what words describe. By contrasting the false wisdom of the eminent doctors to the humble simplicity of the child-like saint, the recipient of the letter is invited to partake in a mode of piety that is characterized by intimacy and allows believers to follow God’s will not out of fear for punishment but out of pure love. Distant yet close, Fénelon’s first missive to Madame de Maintenon is a letter of apology. However, the same letter implies intimacy. The hagiographical scene evoked by Fénelon refers to the conversion of the saint, who would go on to persuade a 1 Letter from Fénelon to Madame de Maintenon, 4 October [1689]; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 135–36. All translations are our own. 2 Françoise d’Aubigné had been married to the poet Paul Scarron (1610–1660), who was a prominent figure in the literary milieu of Les Marais in Paris. After Scarron’s death, she became the governess of the king’s illegitimate children with Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, the Marquise de Montespan (1640–1707). This charge was undertaken in 1668, and when the children were finally recognized in 1673 as the offspring of the king, their governess followed them to court. In 1674, the king supported Françoise’s purchase of the Château de Maintenon and its surrounding lands, and from 1675 she would be known as Madame de Maintenon. By 1680, Françoise seems to have developed a more intimate relationship with the king, and after Montespan’s fall from royal grace Maintenon, increasingly, became the new ‘favourite’. Modern historians agree that a secret marriage must have taken place, and that it was most likely to have been on the eve of 9–10 October 1683. Together, the royal couple founded La Maison Royale de Saint Louis (1686–1793), located at Saint-Cyr just five kilometres southeast of the gates of Versailles. In its initial phase, this community consisted of thirty-six Ladies of Saint Louis. Together with a small number of novices and postulants, these Ladies educated two hundred and fifty ‘demoiselles’ from the lesser nobility, who, on entrance, had to provide proof of noble lineage for a minimum of four generations. Their families also had to have supported the king in his war efforts. In return, the king paid for their education and eventual dowry. In the following, we use Saint-Cyr for what was La maison royale de Saint Louis in the estate of Saint-Cyr.

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wolf in Gubbio. Before the religious vocation encompassed his entire life, Francis had struggled to escape his patrimonial commitments. His father initiated a legal process and accused the future saint of having wrongly expended family values. During this process, hagiographers inform us that Francis suddenly stripped naked before the bishop of Assisi and renounced worldly wealth and, more specifically, his own inheritance.3 This account targets the body and implies a reconfiguration of physical nudity as an exterior sign of interior nudity, that is, devotion to God. This message speaks to a personal relationship between the addressee and the saint. On 4 October 1689, Fénelon had been ignorant of this relationship. Spiritual correspondences were immensely popular in early modern France, and such letters are therefore fecund grounds for investigating the ostensibly private nature of early modern corresponding. Many letter types can be classified as personal, simply because they were not written for pub­ lic consumption. Indeed, published letters of spiritual direction required substantial revision before they could be made available to the general public.4 Letters were also destroyed systematically. This widespread prac­ tice ensured that for instance spiritual letters did not fall into the wrong hands. Such technics of secrecy seem to imply privacy, but we should be careful not to impose a nineteenth-century concept on early modern sources. Although terms derived from the Latin privatus existed before modernity, these had quite different meanings.5 The aim of the following contribution is not to argue, anachronistically, for early modern privacy. Instead, we outline the epistolary conventions that governed Fénelon’s letters to Maintenon. This outline does not allow us, univocally, to situate the epistolary exchange within a private sphere. However, this exchange also resists any allocation to the public sphere. These letters deny the dilemma of such an alternative. Nonetheless, the dichotomy is central to our analysis because it emphasizes the complexity of the social reality in which these letters were written, transmitted, read, and circulated. To paint a nuanced picture of the epistolary practice we offer, first, an overview of the relevant source material and its early stages of transmission. Second, we investigate the appeal to exclusivity that per­ meates Fénelon’s letters. This appeal situates the correspondence within a particular context, where secrecy seems to have been of prime importance. 3 ‘Insuper ex admirando fervore spiritu ebrius reiectis etiam femoralibus totus coram omnibus denudatur dicens ad patrem: usque nunc vocavi te patrem in terris amodo autem secure dicere possum: Pater noster qui es in caelis apud quem omnem thesaurum reposui et omnem spei fiduciam collocavi’, in Bonaventura, Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis, pp. 564–65. 4 See e.g., Jean-Jacques Olier, Lettres spirituelles de M. Olier, cf. Noye ‘Monsieur Tronson devant le mysticisme’, p. 122. 5 See Merlin-Kajman, Public et littérature en France au xviie siècle; Merlin-Kajman, ‘Le public et ses envers, ou l’archaïsme de Furetière’; Merlin-Kajman, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier” (and Other Words) in Seventeenth-Century France’.

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Next, we return to issues of transmission. Madame de Maintenon seems systematically to have disseminated Fénelon’s letters because she viewed their message as useful in contexts far beyond the space of epistolary exchange. Finally, we turn to the theological profile of Fénelon’s letters and the type of devotion that they promote.

Texts and Letters Fénelon arrived at court in August 1689.6 This date explains why Fénelon did not know the first name of the letter’s addressee, when he, on 4 Octo­ ber 1689, presided over the Feast of Saint Francis. In the following years, Madame de Maintenon would regularly receive letters from the royal preceptor. At first glance, the preserved amount seems relatively modest. A little more than thirty letters can be identified for the period between January 1690 and May 1694. With rare exceptions, these are all from Fénelon to Maintenon. After 1694, the number of letters becomes increas­ ingly rare. One letter can be dated to around September 1695,7 a second letter dates to 7 March 1696,8 a third to November 1696,9 a fourth to July 1697,10 and, finally, we know a letter from August 1697.11 For the period between 1690 and 1694, we can count thirty letters addressed by Fénelon to Madame de Maintenon. To these letters, we must add a series of spiritual texts and fragments of such texts. Although they are difficult to date and authenticate, many still carry markers that point to their original epistolary form. As such, they further document the relationship between Fénelon and Maintenon. During several stages of transmission, texts and letters have also been conflated.12 While a few texts remain in manuscript form, many were published during the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century.

6 To the appointment of Fénelon as the preceptor of the Duke of Bourgogne, see Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, i, pp. 191–96. 7 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, [September] 1695; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iv, p. 34. 8 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, 7 March 1696 Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iv, pp. 60–64. 9 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, [November] 1696; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iv, pp. 105–06. 10 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, July 1697; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iv, pp. 202–04. 11 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, 1 August 1697; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iv, p. 208. 12 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 141–48. The letter does not exist in manuscript and according to Jean Orcibal its corrupted state makes it very likely that it constitutes a compilation of fragments of letters and texts from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iii, p. 227.

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During this process of editing, linguistic markers that speak to the context in which these texts originated have been preserved. Following Roger Duchêne,13 we might be tempted to view this as a disruption of the epistolary situation. Publishing letters turned them into something differ‐ ent from their original and more limited purpose. They were assigned to an author, and formulations became a function of literary skill as this manifests itself in the author’s works. In the case of the spiritual texts to Maintenon, matters are further com­ plicated. Fénelon oversaw the editing of his letters, actively participating in the process of turning them into texts and incorporating them into his work. This raises an obvious issue of originality.14 On one level, the spiri­ tual works are part of a correspondence and testify to a social relationship that unfolded between 1690 and 1694. Texts and letters circulated, and this circulation seems somewhat private in so far as the letters were drafted for a particular individual and appear highly sensitive to her life and spiritual needs. On another level, and removed from this initial circulation, the letters were edited and made widely available. This turns the original com­ munications into a kind of ‘avant-textes’ for the printed texts, but it also marks a complex interplay between, on the one hand, the private context of an individual recipient and a closed network of readers and, on the other hand, the larger readership of published devotional literature. Following Gérard Genette, we might speak of a ‘confidential’ and ‘private’ textual situation in which Fénelon originally addressed the letters to Maintenon, for her own sake and whose ‘personality’ is therefore important for the communication at hand. 15 In no way would such a conclusion exclude the possibility that he had some sort of publication in view from the very beginning. To Fénelon’s editorial agency, we should add another layer of com­ plexity. Madame de Maintenon, strategically, copied certain letters and, without Fénelon’s consent, disseminated them. This dissemination took place in different phases but during 1694 Maintenon seems purposefully to have breached the confidentiality that otherwise surrounded the corre­ spondence. To fully appreciated this strategic breach, we need to recall that Fénelon during the early 1690s was attempting to formulate a novel concept of divine love, that is, an affective love (amor) that spills over into efficacious love (caritas) and thereby decentres individuals from their sinful nature (amor sui). This theological elaboration was partially inspired by his epistolary exchange with Jeanne-Marie Guyon (1648–1717),16 who

13 14 15 16

Duchêne, ‘Du destinataire au public’, pp. 41–43. To the following, see the short but seminal piece: Le Brun, ‘Les œuvres de piété de Fénelon’. Genette, Paratexts, p. 371. After their first encounter in October 1688, Guyon approached Fénelon and asked him to read and comment on her spiritual writings. For unclear reasons, Fénelon seems to have

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in 1688 had been imprisoned because her published works were viewed as resonating ideas of the so-called quietists.17 In late 1692, these accusations resurfaced and in March 1693 restrictions were imposed upon Guyon’s physical movements. At Issy, Guyon would be investigated by a host of prominent clergymen in a series of conferences that lasted from July 1694 until March 1695. Her teachings as well as her character were examined by the bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), the future bishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles (1651–1729), the superior of Saint Sulpice, Louis Tronson (1622–1700), and by her close friend, Fénelon. During these investigations at Issy, Fénelon attempted to formulate a difficult compromise. Behind the scenes he was working to justify his and Guyon’s conceptions. It soon became apparent, however, that such a justification was a pipe dream. By the summer of 1694, Fénelon found himself implicated in the investigations and subject to various ac­ cusations. Researchers have offered different explanations why attitudes towards Fénelon changed in such a dramatic fashion. His nomination as archbishop of Cambrai in February 1695 complicates the explanation, as it indicates that the king at this point knew nothing about the suspicions towards Fénelon. Yet such suspicions were clearly brewing. Initially, the bishop of Chartres, Paul Godet des Marais (1648–1709), who was also

hesitated before finally accommodating Guyon’s wish in December 1688. The approximately 200 letters that have been preserved for the period from October 1688 until December 1690 testify to the intensity of the ensuing correspondence, where many themes from Fénelon’s correspondence with Maintenon repeat. The osmosis between the two sets of correspondence requires further investigation, and in the following we shall indicate just some of the most notable instances of such osmosis. For a detailed analysis of the correspondence between Guyon and Fénelon, see Vaucanson, ‘La Covnersation éternelle’, pp. 185–277. 17 Quietism was a heresy that originated in Rome. Its followers were accused of practising a new mode of prayer where interior states were more important than exterior actions and objects. The radical passivity of the soul when conversing with the divine makes vocal prayer into an intermediary step. In July 1685, the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628–1696) was arrested on the grounds that he was promoting Quietist ideals. He was also accused of allowing lax moral standards because he argued that divine truth unfolds in the interior and remains untouched by exterior actions. On 28 August 1687, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came to a final conclusion, and Molinos abjured his position on 3 September 1687, but was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Almost three months later, on 20 November 1687, the Papal Bull Coelestis Pastor was pronounced, and hereafter suspicions of Quietism were voiced across Europe. Guyon’s spiritual director and travel companion, the Barnabite François La Combe (1640–1715), came under such suspicion and was imprisoned. According to her spiritual autobiography, the widowed Guyon had left her home and family in 1681 to travel the regions of the Alps in search of inner spiritual growth, and upon her return to Paris in early 1688 she was held at the Visitation of Sainte-Marie on the grounds of her relation to La Combe. However, her interrogator, Edme Pirot (1631–1713), did not find cause to detain her.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

the spiritual director of Madame de Maintenon, had voiced concerns. Educated at Saint Sulpice and working in close collaboration with Fénelon, he initially contacted Tronson and called attention to a potential conflict of interests. As one of the official investigators of Guyon, Godet suspected that Fénelon was himself entertaining ideas that bordered on the unortho­ dox. The bishop of Chartres relayed to Tronson a compilation of materials that Fénelon had written to Madame de Maintenon. As her spiritual director, Godet was privy to this kind of material, but Maintenon surely could have kept most of it from his eyes if she wanted to. This first critique of Fénelonian ideas was formulated in May 1694.18 More specifically, Godet annotated Fénelon’s letters and texts before for­ warding them to Tronson, who received these annotated versions in July 1694.19 These annotated letters are today lost, but we know that the supe­ rior of Saint Sulpice had initial talks with Fénelon in June 1694.20 Tronson seems to have withheld the scope of Godet’s critique, and the eventual reply from Fénelon dates to November 1694 where he announces ‘un écrit où j’ai ramassé tous les endroits de mes lettres à Madame de Maintenon, que M. l’Évêque de Chartres lui a marqués comme suspects’ (a piece of writing in which I have gathered together all the places in my letters to Madame de Maintenon, which the bishop of Chartres has indicated to her as suspicious).21 Fénelon’s formulation allows us to decipher two stages in the transmission that would implicate him in the process against Guyon. As spiritual director, Godet had explicated to his eminent charge that a third party in their spiritual dialogue was entertaining unorthodox ideas. In a second step, Godet, Maintenon, or both of them together made Tronson 18 Letter from Godet to Maintenon, May 1694; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 285–87. 19 In a letter to Maintenon, Tronson speaks of ‘les livres’ that he had been entrusted and asked to examine, Letter from Tronson to Madame de Maintenon, 20 June 1694, in Tronson, Correspondance de M. Louis Tronson, ed. by Bertrand, iii, p. 455. The reference to ‘livres’ also appears in other letters, see the letters from Tronson to Godet des Marais, dating to 27 June 1694 and 10 July 1694; Tronson, Correspondance de M. Louis Tronson, ed. by Bertrand, iii, pp. 457, 461. A similar designation appears in a letter from 29 June 1694, where references are made to the ‘livres rouges’ that most likely refer to the binding of these books, see letter from Tronson to Godet des Marais, Correspondance de M. Louis Tronson, ed. by Bertrand, iii, p. 458. 20 Letter from Tronson to Godet des Marais, in: Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 290–91. 21 Letter from Fénelon to Tronson, 6 November [1694] in: Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 301. To this piece of writing, see Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 302–12. This piece has been preserved in Fénelon’s hand but the state of the manuscript suggests that it originally was a longer text. A foreign hand has added the title Explication de quelques expressions tirées des lettres de Fénelon à Madame de Maintenon, and the text begins with a lower case ‘s’ in the first sentence which reads: ‘sur la résistance à l’ésprit de Dieu’. Masson has argued that these words constitute the ending of the final sentence of a preceding text that is now lost, see Masson, ‘La correspondance spirituelle’, p. 71.

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privy to their concerns. In this transition, the letters change status, and Fénelon was no longer an ‘epistolaire’ (letter-writer) but rather an ‘auteur d’épistolaire’ (epistolary author).22 His letters had become one piece in a theological puzzle. As part of Fénelon’s work, these letters like other works of the author should conform to certain shared standards, in this case, to certain shared theological standards. We might be tempted to view the transition from letter-writer to epistolary author as a transition from private to public, but this would be a severe simplification of the issue at hand. Epistolary conventions seem to move us beyond a world of crisp boundaries, and instead the lines between private and public begin to blur.

The Small Community In Fénelon’s letters to Maintenon, salutations often evoke physical meet­ ings. These spiritual letters posit a communicative space adjacent to the correspondence and accessible to the letter-writer and the intended ad­ dressee. Fénelon crafts a continuity in correspondence that initially seems exclusive to himself and Maintenon. A letter from February 1690 refers to ‘l’attrait dont je parlais’ (the appeal which I talked about),23 while the composite Sur vos défauts (On your faults) holds a fragment that opens by stating: ‘Le “moi”, dont je vous ai parlé si souvent est encore une idole que vous n’avez pas brisée’ (the ‘me’ about which I so often have spoken to you remains an idol that you have not smashed).24 In March 1691, a letter opens by distinguishing two modes of communication, one oral and another written: ‘Tout ce que j’ai eu l’honneur de vous écrire ou de vous dire sur le courage dont il faut se défier se réduit à ceci […]’ (Everything I have had the honour to write or say to you about the kind of courage that one should reject boils down to this […]).25 A letter from January 1691 opens by remarking ‘Je crois, Madame, tout ce que vous dites en parlant de vous-même […]’ (I believe, Madame, in everything that you say when speaking about yourself).26 These recurring allusions to

22 To this distinction, see Duchêne, ‘Réalité vécue et art épistolaire’. 23 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 150. 24 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 141. The reference to the ‘moi’ could be a reference to Fénelon, À une personne engage dans le monde, in Œuvres, éd. by Le Brun, pp. 564–66. This term is also elaborated in Fénelon, De la Reconnaissance, in Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, pp. 586–89. 25 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, March 1691; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 213. Date modified based on the position of the copied letter in Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles (hereafter: BmV), MS 38, fols 80r–80v. On this issue, see Nørgaard, ‘Introduction’, pp. 15–19. 26 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, January 1691; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 209.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

physical meetings and a space of conversation are coupled by a spiritual direction which emphasizes exclusivity. A letter from February 1691 makes this point clear. Pour l’oraison dont nous parlions hier, vous savez, Madame, combien de fois je vous ai dit que des choses, très bonnes en elles-mêmes, ne doivent point être communiquées à certaines personnes, qui ont besoin d’un autre aliment.27 (Concerning the prayer we talked about yesterday, you know, Madame, how many times I have told you about things that, in themselves, are very good but should not be communicated to certain individuals, who are in need of a different kind of food.) This statement outlines the space of communication as Fénelon imag­ ines it. The information about spiritual issues discussed in writing and in person is of essential value. However, not all believers are to be informed about them.28 The sender of the letter makes appeal to the exclusive nature of the correspondence. In prolongation of Guyon’s epistolary and devotional practice, exclusivity was a central issue in Fénelon’s theological thought as it developed during 1693 and 1694.29 Yet, this exclusive type of knowledge was communicated to a small community of believers at court, who were made privy to a special kind of spiritual insight. The issues debated are not universally applicable, and this supports a sense of exclusivity, while the formulations in Fénelon’s letter do not exclude that other individuals could benefit from those same issues. The letter, then, is neither entirely private nor fully public; rather, it exists to various degrees as both at once. Fénelon’s letters are specifically addressed to Maintenon, whom he positions as a member of a small community of elite believers. This position seems to be corroborated by a passage from Phélypeaux’s memoire: [T]ous les dimanches, il [Fénelon] dinoit en particulier avec Madame de Maintenon chez la Duchesse de Chevreuse, & sur les deux heures après midi, il faisoit une conference spirituelle où se rendoient toutes les devotes de la Cour. Il leur communiquoit des écrits contenant des regles de perfection, avec cette précaution néanmoins que tout le monde n’en étoit pas capable.30 27 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, February 1691; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 233. Date modified based on the position of the copied letter in Versailles, BmV, MS 37, fols 77–80. 28 Pauline Chaduc holds such secrecy to be one of the main elements of Fénelon’s letters of spiritual direction, see Chaduc, Fénelon, direction spirituelle et littérature, pp. 434–43. 29 On Guyon’s use of spiritual exclusivity and its possible influence on Fénelon, see Vaucanson, ‘La Conversation éternelle’, pp. 47–58. 30 Phélypeaux, Relation, i, p. 43; cf. Ledieu, ‘Mémoires’, ed. by Levesque, p. 21.

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(Every Sunday, Fénelon dined alone with Madame de Maintenon at the household of the Duchess of Chevreuse, and from 12.00 until 14.00 he performed a spiritual conference which all the pious women attended. He shared with them writings about the rules of perfection, taking this precaution nevertheless that not everybody was capable [to follow such rules].) These weekly meetings would include other courtiers, notably mem­ bers of the Colbert clan, that is, the sisters Henriette-Louise Colbert (1660–1733) and Jeanne-Marie-Thérèse Colbert (1650–1732), together with their respective husbands the Duc de Saint-Aignan, Paul de Beauvil­ lier (1648–1714), and the Duc de Chevreuse, Charles-Honoré d’Albert de Luynes (1646–1712). We have no indication that Madame Guyon par­ ticipated in these meetings, but her presence nevertheless hovered above the group. A document finalized by Guyon before October 1694 names the courtiers that were members of this group as ‘les petits Michelins’ (the little Michaels),31 and Phélypeaux remarks how members would have a special engraving made of the Archangel Michael and hang it above their beds, signalling this identity within their private lodgings.32 Furthermore, the ‘Michelins seront sous la main de mon petit Maître’ (little Michaels will be directed by my little master), that is, Fénelon, whom the text also refers to as the leader.33 According to Guyon, the group is supported by Louis de France, the Duc de Bourgogne, and by the bishop of Chartres. It includes among its members Isaac Du Puy, Gentilhomme du Duc de Bour­ gogne, Marie Foucquet (1640–1720), the Duchesse de Béthune, Nicolas de Béthune (1660–1699), and Pantaléon Beaumont (1660–1744), who assisted Fénelon as preceptor to the young prince. Guyon lists these and other names by using abbreviations and pseudonyms, and this strategy of secrecy highlights the exclusive nature of the group. Of course, we should not confuse a list of names with reality, and the meetings that Maintenon attended surely do not mean that she was counted among the members of this almost secret society. However, she was influenced by Fénelon and seems for a limited period to have been associated with the brand of spirituality that he promoted at court.

31 The source is preserved in two copies: Paris Archive Saint Sulpice (hereafter: ASS) MS 2055, fol. 94; MS 2173 fol. 114; cf. Guyon, Correspondance, ed. by Tronc, ii, pp. 330–35. 32 According to Phélypeaux, Fénelon also commissioned an engraving portraying the state of interior calm, which was reserved for those initiated in the secret spirituality of child-like devotion, see Phélypeaux, Relation, i, pp. 198–200. 33 Letter from Guyon to Nicolas de Bétune-Charost; Guyon, Correspondance, ed. by Tronc, ii, p. 332.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

Readerships It is tempting to conclude that Fénelon was the spiritual director of Madame de Maintenon because his letters conduct her soul and make ex­ plicit reference to actions that she should perform. Most notably, his letters envision how Maintenon might influence Louis XIV.34 He also addresses the issue of frequent communion,35 interprets bodily pains,36 and curtails her desire to withdraw from court life.37 However, we must remember that Maintenon had several different directors. Since her arrival at court, she had engaged the services of the Sulpician François Gobelin († 1691), who was also superior of Saint-Cyr. During Gobelin’s illness in 1688, Maintenon grew closer to Godet des Marais, and his 1690-nomination to the vacant See of Chartres confirms their close relationship. Maintenon also asked for Godet’s permission to read a text by Fénelon and follow his instructions. This text was received in January 1690, and it confirms that, at this date, Maintenon submitted her devotional practice to Godet’s evaluation.38 This complex set of relations has often been neglected by researchers, who for different reasons are eager to confirm that Fénelon greatly influenced Maintenon. This holds true for Marcel Langlois,39 but also a more recent editor of Maintenon’s correspondence.40 However, we should consider this influence in a more concrete fashion. Fénelon’s Discours sur la dissipation et la tristesse (Discourse on deple­ tion and sadness) survives in a copy in the hand of Madame de Main­ tenon.41 In a letter of 1697, Maintenon states that the text was originally composed for the Duchess de Chevreuse,42 who was one of the members of the above-mentioned society that gravitated towards Fénelon. Indeed, a letter from Fénelon confirms this designation, and we can date the

34 See, e.g., Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, May 1690; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 163. This ambition also comes to the fore in the famous ‘Lettre à Louis XIV’, see Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, pp. 541–54. 35 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 162. 36 To the interpretation of her permanent toothache, see Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 163. For more general observations on the body and the spirit, see letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, January 1691; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 210. 37 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 197. 38 Letter from Godet to Maintenon, [1–3] January 1690; Versailles, BmV, MS P 36, fols 2–7v. 39 See, e.g., Langlois, Fénelon; Langlois, ‘Les Petits Livres secrets de Madame de Maintenon’. 40 See Bots, ‘Les rapports complexes de Mme de Maintenon avec Fénelon’, pp. 111–26. Similar opinions are voiced in Bryant, Queen of Versailles, pp. 131–36. 41 Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, pp. 573–81, cf. Diverse sentiments et avis chrétiens, Paris, ASS MS 2047, i. 42 Letter from Maintenon to Noailles, 1 April [1697]; Maintenon, Lettres, ed. by Bots and others, ii, p. 785. This letter refers to a ‘petit livre’ where this text on dissipation and sadness appears together with two other texts, which Fénelon had composed on Maintenon’s behest.

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small treatise to the summer of 1690.43 In December 1690, the king’s wife proceeds to quote this text in a letter to Françoise-Silvine Le Maistre de La Maisonfort (1663–1729).44 Maisonfort had more or less been forced into the novitiate at Saint-Cyr,45 and it was upon this ‘joyous’ event that Maintenon addressed her in December 1690: Vous allez trouver la paix, vous voilà dans ce fond de l’abîme où l’on commence à prendre pied: vous savez de qui je tiens cette phrase. Je le verrai demain, je lui demanderai pour votre retraite tout ce que Monsieur de Chartres vous a marqué. Abandonnez-vous bien à Dieu, ma très chère; laissez-vous conduire les yeux bandés.46 (‘Now that you [are] in this bottom of the abyss where one begins to find one’s footing’, you will find peace. You know from whom I have this sentence, I shall see him tomorrow and ask him about everything that Monsieur de Chartres has remarked to you concerning your retreat. Give yourself completely over to God, my dearest, let yourself be conducted with eyes blindfolded.)

43 Letter from Fénelon to the Duchess de Chevreuse, 27 July [1690]; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 191. 44 Maisonfort was the cousin of Madame Guyon, and she is believed to have negotiated Guyon’s release from imprisonment in 1688: she is said to have engaged Maintenon and other courtiers, which proceeded to argue a release. 45 Fénelon was commissioned as her director of conscience and presided over her eventual profession that took place on 1 March 1692, cf. Recueil des tous les actes faits par les Dames et sœurs avant l’érection de la Maison en Monastère, Yvelines, Archives Départementales des Yvelines (hereafter: ADY), MS D 157, fol. 17. Phélypeaux conveys a letter from Godet des Marais to Madame de La Maisonfort that confirms this, see Phélypeaux, Relation, i, pp. 51–52. On this occasion, Fénelon may have delivered his Discours sur les avantages et les devoirs de la vie religieuses, see Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, pp. 894–913. When Maisonfort’s worries about the religious vocation resurfaced, Guyon visited her at Saint-Cyr. These worries were brought about by the regulation of Saint-Cyr, which was officially declared in December 1692, when the community had to enter a second novitiate. Maisonfort would eventually be viewed as entertaining quietist ideas and she was removed from the community together with other members. 46 Letter from Maintenon to Madame de La Maisonfort, 12 December 1690; Maintenon, Lettres, ed. by Bots and others, ii, p. 91. This letter refers Maisonfort to the bishop of Chartres, who played an important role in all affaires at Saint-Cyr, because this royal institution was situated within his diocese. A missive of December 1690 from Godet to Maisonfort uses a similar language: ‘Mettez un bandeau sur vos yeux, je vous prie, si vous vous confiez en lui à l’aveugle, vous verrez étaler sur vous les richesses de sa miséricorde’ (I beg of you to place a piece of cloth over your eyes: if you blindly confide yourself in him [God], you will see the richesses of his mercy spread over you), quoted in Phélypeaux, Relation, i, p. 38. The themes of blindness and following with closed eyes also play a crucial role in Fénelon’s direction of Maisonfort, see, e.g., the dramatic comparison to Lot’s wife in the letter from Fénelon to Maisonfort, 29 February 1691; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 236–37. Louis Cognet makes the convincing point that this appeal to a mode of ‘non-voir’ is drawn from Guyon, see his: Crépuscule des Mystiques, pp. 139–41.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

Maintenon quotes a text that was written for the Duchess de Chevreuse, and which Maintenon had copied in her own hand. At the same time, the letter seems to presuppose that Madame de La Maisonfort at Saint-Cyr would readily recognize a quotation from this text. Is Maintenon presup­ posing that Maisonfort is so familiar with the Fénelonian style that she would immediately recognize his style? Or was Maisonfort in possession of this text, either in Maintenon’s copy or in her own?47 Both scenarios are possible. However, we should ask why Maintenon, in the first place, would be in possession of a text that Fénelon had authored for another courtier who was a member of a devout network at court. And we could answer that, most likely, this overlap owes to the fact that Maintenon frequented the Sunday meetings. She would have been present when Fénelon deliber­ ated on this specific topic and subsequently asked permission to copy his written response to Chevreuse’s queries. Next, we might wonder why this text ended up in Maisonfort’s hands. She entertained a particularly close relation to Fénelon, but was he aware of this dissemination of his texts? We do not know but somewhat in hindsight Fénelon does recall having warned Maintenon against such dissemination: Je lui avais dit, dans le commencement, que mes petits écrits conviennent á fort peu de gens : elle ne pouvait le croire, et jugeant sur son goût, elle voulait en faire part à tous ceux qu’elle désirait gagner. Dans la suite, l’expérience lui a fait sentir que j’avais raison, et elle me l’a dit avec une entière simplicité, comprenant que ces écrits avaient un fond de vérité très utile à un petit nombre de gens, et très dangereux à tout le reste qui en est incapable.48 (In the beginning, I had told her that my small texts are appropriate for very few individuals but she could not believe it and, following her own opinion, she wanted to make them known to everybody that she wanted to win over. Later, experience made her understand that I was correct, and she has plainly admitted this to me, understanding that these texts contain a depth of truth that is very useful to a small number of individuals, and which is very dangerous to everybody else, who are incapable (of grasping this truth).) It is challenging to substantiate this claim; however, as we have seen, Fénelon appears to have been quite clear about the exclusivity of his letters. In numerous missives addressed to members of the religious

47 A copy made by an unknown hand also exists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter: BnF), Fr. Ms. 10935, pp. 14–36. 48 See letter from Fénelon to Maisonfort, 7 June 1692; Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 246.

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community at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon nevertheless quotes phrases and frag­ ments.49 As we have seen, she even presupposes that Maisonfort had some kind of access to Fénelon’s writings. Indeed, this presupposition extended to other members of the community at Saint-Cyr. This is clear from a letter to Anne-Françoise Gautier de Fontaines (1658–1743), who had professed vows and who did not engage in correspondence with Fénelon. Thus, Madame de Maintenon informs Madame de Fontaines: Je garderai vos questions, pour les faire voir à M. l’abbé de Fénelon […] Il écrit présentement quelque chose pour moi, et par conséquent pour vous. Mais, en attendant, je ne puis m’empêcher de vous dire qu’il me semble qu’il y a bien des choses, dans la lettre que j’ai donnée à Mme la chanoinesse [Mme de la Maisonfort], qui répondent à ce que vous me demandez. ‘Cet abandon à la volonté de Dieu; cette parfaite indifférence à toutes sortes d’emplois, pourvu qu’ils soient dans son ordre et dans notre état; cette sûreté qu’en quittant pour lui ce qui paraît le plus nous approcher de lui, il sort avec nous et nous accompagne dans toutes nos actions’. Il me semble, dis-je, que cette confiance doit mettre en grand repos les personnes qui vivent dans une grande communauté et qui veulent remplir leur devoir sans se distinguer des autres. Elles les rempliront bien parfaitement, si, après avoir offert le matin, toute la journée et se remettant de temps en temps dans la présence de Dieu, elles portent partout cette paix et cette indifférence. […] Lisez les lettres de M. de Fénelon, je vous prie; elles sont d’une pratique continuelle, on les retrouve mille fois le jour. Mme la chanoinesse les a toutes.50 (I shall keep your questions in order to show them to the Reverend Fatherde Fénelon […] he is writing something for me and, by extension, for you. But while awaiting [this piece of writing] I cannot keep myself from telling you that the letter I have given to the canoness seems to hold many answers to what you ask me. ‘This abandonment to the will of God, this perfect indifference towards all activities, provided that they are in accordance with his order and with our station in life, this certainty that in leaving,

49 The instances between 1690 and 1694 are too many to reference in total. For particular instances, see, e.g., Maintenon, Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, ed. by Bots and others, ii, pp. 89, 91, 93, 132, 253. 50 Letter from Maintenon to Fontaines, date unknown; Maintenon, Lettres, ed. by Bots and others, i, pp. 814–15. Langlois dated this letter to May 1689, and this date is maintained in the latest edition, although a number of things contradict this. First, Fénelon did not arrive at court before August 1689. Second, he was not commissioned as Maisonfort’s director before December 1690, when she entered the novitiate. Third, Maintenon’s addresses Madame de Fontaines as Maîtresse générale des classes that support dating the letter to 1691 or to the first half of 1692.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

for his sake, that which seems to draw us towards him, he comes out with us and accompanies us in all our actions’. It truly seems to me that this confidence must put all persons at rest who live in a great community and who wish to fulfill their duties without distinguishing themselves from others. Indeed, they would fulfill their duties to perfection if they carried this peace and this indifference [within them] after having offered [prayer] in the morning and all day long putting themselves from time to time in the presence of God. […] I urge you, read the letters from M. de Fénelon for they are of a continuous practice and one returns to them a thousand times a day. The canoness has them all.) The construction ‘par consequent’ posits a logical inference from ‘pour moi’ (for me) to ‘pour vous’ (for you), but the body of the letter also expresses a level of caution. It seems Maintenon is astutely aware of the potentially transgressive nature of what she is proposing. Indeed, we find no such usage of Godet’s letters, who, as bishop of Chartres, wrote many letters to the community and its members.51 Maintenon suggests to Madame de Fontaines that she should read letters from Fénelon, although they were not addressed to her. Thus, the relationship between addressee and letter-writer is transgressed. Were such transgressions completely unforeseeable to Fénelon, or would he have, to some extent, expected communications to circulate? Even if he expected such circulation, the addressee of letters becomes ambiguous at Saint-Cyr, where a community of readers engages with words that, originally, were addressed to particular individuals. In this sense, the correspondence was no longer private in the sense that it was exclusive to the relationship between the letter-writer and addressee, although it was conceived in a private setting. Maintenon viewed their personal message as useful far beyond the narrow relationship between herself and Fénelon. However, at this early stage, the letters were also not public, as they had not been made available to everybody who had the funds to purchase them on the book market. Instead, the letters reside somewhere between private and public. Although personal and private in nature, the message of the spiritual letter seems to transcend the private sphere and allow for a broader readership. At the same time there seems to have been different views between letter-writer and addressee as to the precise constitution of the letters intended readership. We find a similar instance in a letter from Maintenon to Madame de Radouay (1668–1736), who was charged with financial matters at 51 See, e.g., Instructions et lettres de Mgr l’évêque de Chartres, Yvelines, ADY, MS D 120*. Actually, Maintenon would copy letters that the bishop wrote for the community and preserve them for herself, cf. Sur l’humilité, Versailles, BmV, MS P 36, fols 70–80, cf. Instructions et lettres, Yvelines, ADY, MS D 120*, fols 86–90. On this devotional practice, see Nørgaard, ‘Introduction’.

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Saint-Cyr. On 5 March 1692, Maintenon quotes to her a passage from a letter that Fénelon had authored to the Countess of Gramont, Elizabeth Hamilton (1641–1708). Originally dated to 23 February 1690,52 Main­ tenon remarks two years later: Il m’est tombé, depuis peu, entre les mains une lettre de M. l’abbé de Fénelon qui finit ainsi: ‘Aimez Dieu et vous serez humble, aimez Dieu et vous ne vous aimerez plus vous-même; aimez Dieu et vous aimerez tout ce qu’il veut que vous aimiez pour l’amour de lui’. Méditez ces trois vérités, notre très-chère dépositaire et vous trouverez en effet que voilà le chemin le plus court et le plus sûr pour attaquer notre orgueil, notre amour-propre et le mépris que nous avons pour les autres.53 (A letter from the Reverend Father Fénelon has recently fallen into my hands. It ends like this: ‘Love God and you shall be humble, love God and you will never love yourself, love God and you will love all that he wishes that you should love out of love for him’. Mediate these three truths, our dear depositary, and you will certainly find that here lies the shortest and surest path to combat our pride, our self-love and the contempt we have for others.) Clearly, a shared devotional practice created a social bond between Main­ tenon and Gramont, strong enough for a personal letter addressed to Gra­ mont to be shared with Maintenon, who then communicated a passage to Radouay. Thus, Fénelon’s letters of spiritual direction circulated in copied form amongst a wider readership. These letters, from the very beginning, were ascribed with a value that extended beyond the private relationship of the individuals in correspondence. This fact seems to rule out any univocal classification of the letters as private. Indeed, the spiritual writings were extended beyond the walls of Saint-Cyr and the palace of Versailles, when texts and fragments found their way into print. The earliest of such publications date to March 1690,54 while two compilations from

52 Letter from Fénelon to the Comtesse de Gramont, 23 February [1690]; Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, pp. 152–53. 53 Letter from Maintenon to Madame de Radouay, 5 March 1692; Lettres ed. by Bots and others, ii, p. 195. In a compilation of copied letters completed at Saint-Cyr in the mideighteenth century, we find a copy of Fénelon’s letter to Gramont: Les Lettres Édifiantes, Versailles, BmV, MS P. 64, pp. 82–89. A copy preserved at Saint Sulpice bears the watermark of the empress of Austria, Maria Theresa (1772–1807). Thus, the letter to Gramont may itself be another transcription of the original letter that was not necessarily addressed to her but maybe to a third, unknown party, cf. Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, iii, p. 244. 54 Fénelon, De la véritable et solide piété, in Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, pp. 844–70. This text likely dates to the 1680s and may have been addressed to the Nouvelles Catholiques in Paris, a boarding school dedicated to the reeducation of young girls from respected families whose parents, originally Protestant, had been converted to Catholicism. For more details, see Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, i, pp. 219–28.

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1704 hold several texts that had originally been composed for Madame de Maintenon.55 During the following years, these publications would be re-edited and elaborated. The Œuvres Spirituelles of 1718 published spiritual letters and fragments of such letters. With such publications, we reach the culmination of a complicated transmission process that had been initiated in December 1689, when Maintenon began reading and recycling materials from Fénelon.

Theological Profile As we have argued above, the message of Fénelon’s spiritual letters was per­ ceived by Maintenon as extending beyond their relationship. This message, however, was not univocal but highly sensitive to particular situations. About the little Michaels and their life at court, we learn that members of this group ‘seront petits, joyeux, allègres, faibles, enfantins, n’attendant ni n’espérant rien d’eux, ne voulant rien pour eux, non par courage et soutien, mais en vérité par faiblesse et impuissance’ (shall be small, joyous, cheer­ ful, weak, child-like, waiting for and hoping for nothing from themselves, nor wanting anything for themselves, not through courage and support but through weakness and helplessness).56 As we have seen, Fénelon’s first letter evokes the Franciscan theme of a child-like folly. This theme reoccurs in the second missive to Maintenon that survives as a fragment and can be dated to Christmas Day 1689: ‘Je vous souhaite, Madame, une parfaite enfance, avec celui qui s’est fait enfant pour nous. Si nous ne devenons semblables à lui en cet état, nous ne serons point véritablement renouvelés’ (I wish you, Madame, a perfect childhood with him who made himself a child for our sake. If we do not become similar to him in this state, we shall never truly be renewed).57 A prayer authored by Fénelon for the day of purification carries strong resemblance to this wording,58 making it likely to have originally been a part of a letter to Maintenon:

55 Fénelon, Sentimens de piété; Sentimens de penitence et de pieté; Reflexions saintes. In Le Brun’s critical edition, forty-eight spiritual texts are published. He identifies sixteen texts as being originally letters addressed to Madame de Maintenon. For more details, see Le Brun, ‘Œuvres Spirituelles Notice’, pp. 1415–19. 56 Letter from Guyon to Nicolas de Bétune-Charost; Guyon, Correspondance, ed. by Tronc, ii, p. 330. 57 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon, 25 December 1689; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 140. 58 The day of purification is a feast of devotion to the child Jesus. It is celebrated 40 days after Christmas on 2 February, and recalls the scene recounted in the Gospel of Luke where Mary and Joseph present the young Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.

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O Divin Enfant, souffrez que je me présente avec vous. Je veux être, comme vous, dans les mains pures de Marie & de Joseph, me [sic] je ne veux plus être qu’un même enfant avec vous, qu’une même victime (Oh! Divine child, you endure so that I may present myself [before God] with you. I want to be, like you are, in the pure hands of Mary and Joseph, I no longer want to be anything else but one child with you, but one victim.59) Another small text, entitled De la parole intérieur (On the interior speech), links the devotion to the Jesus Child to questions of obedience and docility.60 Fénelon cites from this text in his apologetic letter to Tronson in November 1694, documenting its original form to have been a letter to Madame de Maintenon: Ô mon Dieu! Je vous rends grâces avec Jésus-Christ de ce que vous cachez vos secrets ineffables à ces grands et à ces sages, tandis que vous prenez plaisir à les révéler aux âmes foibles et petites! Il n’y a que les enfants avec qui vous vous familiarisez sans réserve. Vous traitez les autres à leur mode […] Ils n’auront jamais [s]on entretien familier, comme dit l’Écriture, est avec les simples.61 (My God! With Jesus Christ, I give thanks to you because you hide your inexpressible secrets from those who are powerful and wise, while you find pleasure in revealing them [the inexpressible secrets] to the weak and little souls! It is only the children with whom you make yourself completely known. You treat the others befitting for their way […] As Scripture says, he only communicates himself intimately to the simple.) Fénelon’s evocation of a child-like folly implies intimacy, theologically and emotionally speaking, but it also refers to a level of spiritual insight that separates the addressee from the majority of believers in the church. She belongs to an elite group of Christians, and their interior experiences and devotional exercises prompt a language use only understandable to the initiated few. This differentiation in levels of spiritual insight would be central to the ensuing debate on quietism,62 and it constitutes a common

59 60 61 62

Fénelon, Pour le jour de la purification, p. 252. Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, pp. 589–93. Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, p. 593. This constitutive feature of the debate is evoked by Godet in his Ordonnance et instruction pastorale from November 1695, where he condemns Guyon’s writings. Concerning the distinction between the beginners and the perfect, Godet refers to ordonnances published by Bossuet, Noailles, and to the vicious condemnation by the Archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon (1625–1695), cf. Godet des Marais, Ordonnance et instruction pastorale, p. 48.

PriVACy MisConstrued?

feature in early modern religious culture, where private gatherings within the church became fashionable and therefore suspect. In a letter likely dating to July 1689, Fénelon had warned Guyon against publishing a text on the passive purifications of the soul. This kind of material should only be read by ‘le petit nombre des âmes éprouvées par les entretiens secrets d’un sage directeur’ (the small number of souls who are experienced through the secret conversations with a wise [spiritual] director).63 The type of knowledge in question is reserved for a small group of believers, who are correctly directed along the path to spiritual insight. Fénelon’s letters aim to include Maintenon among this group of elite believers. They perform this inclusion. This performance resurfaces in the composite letter Sur vos défauts in which Godet would mark the following passage as worrisome: ‘Ce n’est point une obligation précise pour tous les chrétiens; mais je crois que c’est la perfection d’une âme qu’il a autant prévenue que la vôtre par ses miséricordes’ (It is not a particular obligation to all Christians [that they should die to everything without exception] but I believe that it is the perfection of a soul which, like your soul, he has let know so much in ad­ vance by his merciful deeds).64 Godet seems to have taken offence against Fénelon’s use of ‘les enfants’ and the explicit intention of placing Madame de Maintenon within their ranks. We can infer this from Fénelon’s letter of November 1694, where he defends himself against suspicions levelled against him by the bishop of Chartres. As mentioned, the process against Madame Guyon looms large in this defence. In the letter to Louis Tronson that accompanied his apologetic explication, Fénelon remarks: ‘En tout cela, il ne s’agit point de Mme de G[uyon], que je compte pour morte, ou comme si elle n’avait jamais été. Il n’est question que de moi et du fond de la doctrine sur la vie intérieure’ (In all this [referring to his letters to Madame de Maintenon], it is not about Madame Guyon, who I view as dead or as if she had never existed. It is only a question of me and the depths of the doctrine concerning the interior life).65 Indeed, the explication evokes the conferences at Issy and Fénelon’s co-investigators.66 Should we believe the royal tutor, when he avers that his correspondence with the king’s wife bares not a single trace of the spiritual teachings that were elaborated in his correspondence with Guyon? Were these two correspondences completely insular, completely kept from each other, and no osmosis between them possible?

63 Letter from Fénelon to Guyon, [ July] 1689; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 110. 64 Letter from Fénelon to Maintenon; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 145. 65 Letter from Fénelon to Tronson, 6 November 1694; Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 302. 66 Fénelon, Correspondance, ed. by Orcibal, ii, p. 309.

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Approaching this question, we might remark that Fénelon’s correspon­ dence with Guyon is permeated by references to the Jesus Child. Popular in the seventeenth century,67 Guyon placed a special importance upon the child-like folly that characterizes the illuminated soul, and it seems unde­ niable that this idea migrates into, e.g., Fénelon’s De la parole intérieure.68 In Fénelon’s correspondence with Guyon, letters abound which elaborate spiritual folly, and it seems Fénelon recycled and reformatted these ideas in his letters to Maintenon. This interface between letters exchanged with Guyon and letters exchanged with Maintenon requires further investiga­ tion, and the devotion to the Jesus Child is just one important point of convergence. Indeed, this object of devotion is central to Guyonian spirituality and permeates almost every aspect of her spiritual writings.69 In turn, these writings seem to have influenced the devotional practice of a community of believers at the court of Versailles that gravitated towards Fénelon, and which include Madame de Maintenon as a peripheral mem­ ber.

Conclusion From the very beginning, Fénelon’s letters engage Maintenon and place her within a particular devotional circle. A central theme in this regard was the child-like folly, but this theme would also turn out to be controversial. The intimacy that Fénelon sought to establish by spiritual letters separated Maintenon from other believers, and therefore the language fitting for her experiences could not be widely broadcasted. The early letters pre­ suppose this distinction between the common believer and the perfect believer, where the latter is ascribed spiritual needs different from the rest. However, the king’s wife seems not to have recognized and respected this distinction. She actively broadcasted Fénelon’s letters and thereby blurred the threshold between the common and the perfect soul. Did she purposefully misconstrue the privacy intended in Fénelon’s letters? This is certainly a possibility during the troublesome month of May 1694. Perpetuating the downfall of Fénelon, she could have disclosed what the letter-writer clearly perceived as private. This explanation, however, is not the only possibility, and we have seen how Maintenon throughout the period from 1690 until 1694 would share letters. This consistent displacement of the epistolary situation dissolves the private nature of the correspondence, and the letters and the position of their implied addressee

67 See e.g. Loskoutoff, La sainte et la fée. 68 See the comment by Jacques Le Brun in Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Le Brun, i, p. 1430. 69 Thus, a central passage in her Vie presents Guyon’s union with God as a private marriage to the Jesus Child, see Guyon, La Vie par elle-même, ed. by Tronc, i, pp. 300–01.

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are transformed. Letters become texts, and the addressee in the singular turns into a multitude of readers. Eventually, the printed versions would reach the general public, while the private letters, through several nested zones of publications, detached themselves from the explicit addressee and became a type of literature. Moving through these zones, Fénelon’s letters resist precise classification. They are neither confined to the privacy of the epistolary situation nor completely opened to judgement of a literary public. They are both public and private at once without being any of them.

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Works Cited Manuscripts Paris, Archive Saint Sulpice [ASS], MS 2047 ———, MS 2055 ———, MS 2173 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], Fr. MS 10935 Versailles, Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles [BmV], MS P. 36 ———, MS P. 37 ———, MS P. 38 ———, MS P. 64 Yvelines, Archives Départementales des Yvelines [ADY], MS D 120 ———, MS D 157 Primary Sources Anonymous [Fénelon], Réflexions saintes pour tous les jours du mois (Paris, J.-B. Delespine, 1704) ———, Sentiments de pénitence et de piété pour tous les temps et les différents états de la vie (Paris : J.-B. Cusson, 1704) Bonaventura, Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saec. XIII et XIV conscripitae, i, in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: n. pub., 1941) Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe, Correspondance de Fénelon, ed. by Jean Orcibal, vols 1–3 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972) Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-, Œuvres, ed. by Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1983/1997) [Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe], Sentimens de pénitence (Paris: Delespine, 1704) ———, Œuvres spirituelles, 2 vols (Anvers: de la Meule, 1718) ———, Œuvres spirituelles, 2 vols (Rotterdam: Hofhout, 1738) Guyon, Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe, Correspondance, ed. by Dominique Tronc, 3 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003–2005) ———, La Vie par elle-même et autres écrits biographiques, ed. by Dominique Tronc, 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014) Ledieu, François, ‘Mémoires de l’abbé Ledieu sur le quiétisme’ [1699], ed. by E. Levesque, Revue Bossuet, 7 (1909), 19–56 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné de, Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, 7 vols, ed. by H. Bots and E. Bots-Estourgie (vols 1–3, vol. 7), L. Marcel (vol. 4), M. Christine (vol. 5), J. Schillings Jan (vol. 6), and C. Hémon-Fabre (vol. 7) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009–2013)

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Marais, Paul Godet des, Ordonnance et instruction pastorale de Monseigneur L’Evêque de Chartres pour la condamnation des Livres intitules Analysis orationis mentalis &c. Moien court & très-facile de faire oraison &c. Règle des Associes à l’Enfance de Jésus &c. Le Cantique des Cantiques de Salomon, interprété selon le sens mistique &c. & d’un Manuscrit qui a pour titre Les Torrens (Paris: Louis Josse, 1695) Olier, Jean-Jacques, Lettres Spirituelles (Paris: Jacques Langlois, 1682) Phélypeaux, Jean, Relation de l’origine, du progrés et de la condamnation du quietisme répandu en France, avec plusieurs anecdotes curieuses, 2 vols (n. p.: n. pub., 1732) Tronson, Louis, Correspondance de M. Louis Tronson, troisième supérieur de la Compaigne de Saint-Sulpice, ed. by Louis Bertrand, 3 vols (Paris: V. Lecoffre, 1904) Secondary Works Bots, Hans, ‘Les rapports complexes de Mme de Maintenon avec Fénelon à travers leur correspondance au cours des années 1689–1697’, in Madame de Maintenon. Une femme de lettres, ed. by Christine Mongenot and MarieEmmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), pp. 111–26 Bryan, Mark, Queen of Versailles: Madame de Maintenon, First Lady of Louis XIV’s France (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) Chaduc, Pauline, Fénelon, direction spirituelle et littérature (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015) Cognet, Louis, Crépuscule des Mystiques. Bossuet–Fénelon (Geneva: Desclée, 1958) Duchêne, Roger, ‘Du destinataire au public, ou les métamorphoses d’une correspondance privée’, Revue d’Historie Littéraire de la France, 1 (1976), 29–46 ———, ‘Réalité vécue et art épistolaire : le statut particulier de la lettre’, Revue d’Historie Littéraire de la France, 2 (1971), 177–94 Guerrier, Louis, ‘Correspondance spirituelle de Godet des Marais’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique et Historique de l’Orléanais, 23 (1892), 1–39 Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Langlois, Marcel, Fénelon. Pages nouvelles pour servir à l’étude des origines du quiétisme avant 1694 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934) ———, ‘Les Petits Livres secrets de Madame de Maintenon. Madame de Maintenon découvre le quiétisme (mai 1694)’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 35.3 (1928), 354–68 Le Brun, Jacques, ‘Les œuvres de piété de Fénelon. Critique textuelle et histoire de la spiritualité’, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 61.1 (1977), 4–18 ———, ‘Paul Godet des Marais, Évêque de Chartres (1648–1709)’, Bulletin de la Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir, 23.2 (1965), 47–78

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Loskoutoff, Yvan, La sainte et la fée. Dévotion à l’enfant Jésus et mode des contes merveilleux à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (Geneva: Droz, 1987) Masson, Maurice, ‘La correspondance spirituelle de Fénelon avec Mme de Maintenon’, Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 13.1 (1906), 51–72 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, ‘“Privé” and “Particulier” (and Other Words) in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, edited by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 79–104 ———, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994) ———, ‘Le public et ses envers, ou l’archaïsme de Furetière’, Littératures classiques, 47 (2003), 345–80 Nørgaard, Lars Cyril, ‘Engaged Withdrawal: Sources of Soul-Formation’, Publications of the Faculty of Theology, 70 (PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2017) ———, ‘Introduction’ in Madame de Maintenon, Les petits livres secret. Suivi de divers textes copies, ed. by Lars Cyril Nørgaard (Paris: Honoré Champion 2023), pp. 11–34 Noye, Irénée, ‘Un juge défiant ? Monsieur Tronson devant le mysticisme’, in Fénelon mystique et politique (1699-1999). Actes du Colloque international de Strasbourg pour le troisième centenaire de la publication du Télémaque et de la condamnation des Maximes des saints, ed. by François-Xavier Cuche and Jacques Le Brun (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2019), pp. 115–24 Vaucanson, Bastian Felter, ‘La Conversation éternelle. L’intimité spirituelle dans la correspondance Guyon-Fénelon’ (PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, and Rennes, 2023)

Index nominum

Aerssen, François van: 130 Albert V, duke of Bavaria: 184 Albon, Henriette-Louise d’: 197 Alonne, Abel Tassin d’: 146 Amyraut, Balthasar-Octavien: 220–21, 223 Amyraut, Moïse: 216–17, 220, 228–29 Anjou and Alençon, HerculeFrançois, duc d’: 120 Angliviel, Jean I: 85, 88, 90–91, 93 Angliviel, Jean II: 86, 88, 91, 93, 96–100, 102 Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Aglaé: 96–99 Angliviel de La Beaumelle, VictorMoyse: 99 Anna of Bavaria, archduchess of Austria: 184–87 Anna, countess of Hohenlohe: 184 Anna, electress of Saxony: 22, 173, 176–87 Anne of Austria, queen and regent of France: 220, 225–26, 230–32 Aristotle: 14, 16 n. 28, 109 n. 10, 150 n. 39 Aubertin, Edme Augusta of SaxeGotha: 229, 231 August, elector of Saxony: 22, 173, 179, 182–84 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de: 51–52, 54–55, 57, 64 Barrow, Ann: 35 Barry, Jeanne Bécu, countess du: 99

Barry, Françoise-Claire (“Chon”) du: 99 Baskerville, Hannibal: 41, 42 n 53 Baskerville, Lady Mary: 35, 41–42 Baskerville, Sir Thomas: 35 Baudequin, M.: 56 Bayeux, Évêque de see Nesmond, François III de Bayle, Pierre: 86, 91, 143 n. 11 Belle fonds, Bernardin Gigault de: 197, 203 Beaumont, Pantaléon: 246 Beauvillier, Henriette-Louise, duchess of Saint-Aignant: 246 Beauvillier, Paul de, duke of SaintAignan: 246 Bellefonds, Bernardin Gigault de: 197, 200 n. 50, 202 n. 61, 203 n. 67 Belley, Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of: 225 Benoist, Elie: 86 Bentinck, Anna Adriana: 143 n. 14 Bentinck, Anna Margaretha: 152 n. 40 Bentinck, Bernhart: 143 n. 14 Bentinck, Eleonora Sophia: 143 n. 14 Bentinck, Frances Willemina: 152 n. 40 Bentinck, Hans Willem (William), the earl of Portland: 139–41, 143, 145–48, 150–59, 163–64 Bentinck, Hendrik: 143 n. 14 Bentinck, Henry, Viscount Woodstock: 22, 140–48, 151–64

262

index noMinuM

Bentinck, Isabella: 143 n. 14, 152 n. 40 Bentinck, Mary: 152 n. 40 Bentinck, William: 143 n. 17 Bentley, Richard: 68 n. 54 Bernard of Clairvaux: 194 Berryer, Nicolas René: 88 Béthune-Charost see Fouquet, Marie, duchesse of Béthune-Charost and Fouquet, Nicola, duke of Béthune-Charost Bigot, Émery: 53, 59, 61, 70–71 Bonaventura, Saint: 239 n. 3 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, bishop of Meaux: 96, 196 n. 19, 217, 242, 254 n. 62 Boulliau, Ismaël: 53–54, 55 n. 17, 64 Bourbon, César de: 130 n. 105 Bourdaloue, Louis: 86 Bourdelot, Pierre Michon: 65–66 Bouthillier, Marie-Louise: 201 Brachet de La Milletière, Théophile: 216, 226, 233 Brakel, Lysbeth van: 143 n. 14 Brousson, Claude: 94 Burmann, Pieter: 64 Calas, Jean: 95 Calas, Marc-Antoine: 95 Carpzov, Friedrich-Benedikt: 60–61 Cassian, John: 194 Catherine de Medici, queen consort of France: 130 n. 105 Catinat, Nicolas, marshal of France: 147 n. 33 Cecil, Robert: 22, 107, 111–13, 116–18, 125–32 Cecil, William: 117–18 Champvallon, François de Harlay de, archbishop of Paris: 254, n. 62 Chapelain, Jean: 51–52, 54-55, 61 n. 37, 65-66, 70, 71 n. 58 Charles I, king of England: 36

Charles IX, king of France: 118 Charles VI, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, previously archduke: 139, 159 Charles IX, king of France: 118 Charpentier, Nicolas: 55 n. 17 Chevreuse, Charles Honoré d’Albert, duke of Luynes: 246 Chevreuse, Jeanne-Marie-Thérèse Colbert, duchess of Luynes: 245–47, 249 Christian III, king of Denmark: 173 Cicero: 16 Claude, Jean: 96 Clement VIII, pope: 129 Clotworthy, Hugh: 37 Clotworthy, Simon: 37 Colbert, Jeanne-Marie-Thérèse see Chevreuse, Jeanne-MarieThérèse Colbert, duchess of Luynes Colbert, Henriette-Louise: 246 Coligny, Gaspard de: 118 Colletet, Guillaume: 54–55 Combe, François La: 242, n. 17 Cornaro, Luigi: 100 Couët du Vivier, Jacques, Sr: 217 Couët du Vivier, Jacques, Jr: 222 Coustel, Pierre: 202–03 Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot de: 86 Cresset, James: 159 Cromwell, Thomas, Lord: 37 Cupif, François: 220, 225 Daillé, Jean: 229 Dati, Carlo: 50, 51 n. 4, n. 6, 59–60 David de Beaudrigue, FrançoisRaymond: 95 Delacour, Jean André: 92 Derby, Henry Stanley, earl of: 116, 121, 124 Dering, Edward, Sir: 27 Dering, Unton, Lady: 27

index noMinuM

Desmarets, Roland: 54–55 Desmartin ‘le petit’: 57 Dorothea of Mansfeld: 183–84 Dorothea of Saxe Lauenburg, queen consort of Denmark: 186 Dorp, Arent van: 22, 107, 111–13, 116–17, 120–23, 124–27, 131– 32 Dowing, Emanuel: 39 Dowing, Mary: 39 Drelincourt, Charles: 23, 215–34 Drelincourt, Charles, Jr: 23, 222 Drelincourt, Laurent: 219, 222–24, 233 Drelincourt, Henri: 222–23 Drelincourt, Marie: 221 Dugard, Hannah: 41 Dupuy, Jacques: 53–55, 57, 62, 64–66, 68-69 Dupuy, Pierre: 53–55, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69 n. 55 Eleonore Magdalene of Neuburg, empress of Holy Roman Empire: 162 Elizabeth I, queen of England: 112, 116–17, 121, 126–27, 129–30, 131, 178 Ellis, Alice: 39, 40 Ellis, William: 39, 40 Erasmus of Rotterdam: 12, 16–17 Ernest, prince of Hesse: 226 Ervieux, Chevalier d’: 56–57 Eugene, prince of Savoy: 147 n. 33 Fabrot, Charles Annibal: 54–55 Faverolles, Mlle de: 92 Favier, Jean: 197 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe: 23, 237–57 Ferry, Paul: 216–18, 220–24, 227 Fontaines, Anne-Françoise Gautier, Mme de: 250–51

Formentin, Raymond: 58 Fortin de La Hoguette, Philippe: 62, 63 n. 41 Fouquet, Marie, duchesse of Béthune-Charost: 246 Fouquet, Nicola, duke of BéthuneCharost: 246 Francis of Assisi, Saint: 237–40 Francius, Petrus: 58 Frederik II, king of Denmark: 186 Frederick Henry of Nassau, prince of Orange, 216 Gailhard, Jean: 140 n. 3 Galland, Antoine: 56–57, 58 n. 25, 70–71 Gentili, Alberico: 108–10, 111–13, 122, 125, 131 Giraudeau, Pierre: 89 Gobelin, François: 247 Goëllo, Anne de: 199 Grævius, Johann-Georg: 52, 60–61, 64, 67 Grævius, Theodor-Georg: 67, 68 n. 54 Gram, Carl Christian: 86 Gramont, Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess of: 252 Gronovius, Johann-Friedrich: 58–59, 61 Grotius, Hugo: 65, 75 Gudius, Marquard: 58, 64 Guise, Élisabeth Marguerite d’Orléans, Mme de: 200–01 Guyon, Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe-: 241–43, 245–46, 248 n. 44, 254, n. 61, 255–56 Gwin, Thomas: 39 Hardy, Claude: 55 n.17 Heinsius, Nicolaas: 51–54, 57, 61, 65, 68–69

263

264

index noMinuM

Henri III, duke of Anjou, king of France: 111, 115–20, 121–23, 123–25, 129, 131 Henri IV, king of Navarre, king of France: 111–12, 116–17, 125– 30, 131 Herbert, John: 130 Hesse, prince of see Ernest, prince of Hesse Hoeufft, Jean: 219 Holberg, Ludvig: 86 Horace: 96 Hotman, Jean: 107–13, 122, 125, 131 Huet, Pierre-Daniel: 70–75 Hullon, Jean Baptiste: 55 n. 17 Ittersum, Ida Magdalena van: 143 n. 14 Janiçon, François: 61 Janiçon, Michel: 61 Jarrige, Pierre: 225 Jerome, Saint: 194 Justel, Henri: 57–58 Kaunitz, count and countess of: 163 La Beaumelle, Laurent Angliviel de: 21, 83–105 La Beaumelle, Rose Victoire see Lavaysse, Rose Victoire La Condamine, Charles-Marie de: 89, 92–94, 96, 98–100 La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de la Vergne, countess of: 71, 73 La Grillière, Jeanne de Remefort, Mme de: 204–06, 209 La Haye, Jean de: 55 La Maisonfort, Françoise-Silvine Le Maistre, Mme de: 248–49 La Prée, Quintijn Taffin, sieur de: 116 n. 40 La Trousse, Mlle de: 75

La Vieuville, Anne d’Orvilliers de: 197 Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Le François de: 92 Lantin, Jean-Baptiste: 54–55 Lavaysse, Gaubert: 95 Lavaysse, Rose Victoire: 93, 96–102 Le Roux, Nocolas: 123 n. 76, 124 Le Roy, Guillaume: 197, 199 Le Pailleur, Jacques: 55 n. 17 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 63–64 Lemaire, Mathurin Rodolphe: 91 Lemonon, Jean: 143 n. 11 Lengrené, Nicolas: 55 n. 17 Leopold I, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire: 162 Lévi, Sieur: 56–57 Leeuwen, Jacob van: 156 n. 54 Lewen, Mr. van see Leeuwen, Jacob van Lisle, Arthur, Viscount: 37–38 Lisle, Honor, Viscountess: 37–38 Locke, John: 50, 58 Loir, Nicolas du: 55 Lorraine, Françoise: 130 n. 105 Lorraine, Louise de: 122 Lot, wife of: 248, n. 46 Louis XIII, king of France: 226, 230–32 Louis XIV, king of France: 23, 84, 87, 140 n. 4, 147 n. 33, 201, 227, 230, 237, 238 n. 2, 247 Louis XV, king of France: 147 n. 35 Louis de France, duke of Burgundy: 240 n. 6, 246 Louvigny, Madeleine Charlotte Bouvet de: 87, 89 Lubieniecki, Stanisław: 50, 75 Lucas: 91 Lucinge, Réne de: 121 n. 62 Magliabechi, Antonio: 51, 58, 64

index noMinuM

Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, marchioness of: 23, 83, 87, 92, 237–56 Mancini, Hortense: 200 Marais, Paul Godet des, bishop of Chartres: 242–43, 246–48, 251, 254 n. 62, 255 Maria of Spain, empress of Holy Roman Empire: 180–83, 187 Marie de Médicis, queen of France: 230 Marlot, Mme see Morlot, Gabrielle Marot, Clément: 74 Maupeou, Pierre de: 205 Maximilian II, emperor of Holy Roman Empire: 180–85 Maximillian II Emmanuel, elector of Bavaria: 147, 161 Maynard, François: 59 Mazarin, Jules, cardinal: 227 Ménage, Gilles: 50–56, 58–61, 64, 67–68, 70–72, 74–75 Mendoza, Bernardino de: 119, 121 n. 62 Mersenne, Marin: 53 n. 13 Mercœur, Philippe Emmanuel, duke of: 130 n. 105 Mestrezat, Jean: 226, 229 Michael, Archangel: 246 Milleran, René: 66–67 Minutoli, Vincent: 91 Molinos, Miguel de: 242, n. 17 Moltke, Adam Gottlob Mommsen, Carl Johannes Tycho: 148 Montbazon, Marie d’Avaugour, duchess of: 206 Montespan, Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Mme de: 238 n. 2 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron of: 83 Monthausier, Charles de SainteMaure, duke of: 54–55

Montchal, Charles de, archbishop of Toulouse: 54–55 Morlot, Gabrielle: 161 Morus, Alexandre: 75, 223 Moulin, Pierre du: 216, 222, 228–30 Moulin, Cyrus du: 222 Nassau, Justin: 127 n. 93 Naudé, Gabriel: 54–55 Naylor, Richard: 35 Nesmond, François III de, bishop of Bayeux: 74 Nicaise, Claude: 201 Nisard, Charles: 71 n. 60 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, archbishop of Paris, cardinal: 242, 254, n. 62 Noel, Elizabeth: 144 Noel, Wriothesley Baptist, earl of Gainsborough: 144 Norbeck, Julie Schweikern de Montolieu, baroness of: 87, 92 Nublé, Louis: 71 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van: 127 n. 93 Oldenburg, Henry: 53 n. 13 Patin, Gui: 54–55 Paul, Saint: 192 Peiresc, Claude Fabri de: 53 n. 13 Pellisson, Jeanne: 144 Pellisson, Paul: 144 Perceval, Philip: 140 n. 3 Petau, Denis: 54–55 Petitpied, Nicolas, l’ainé: 56 Petrarch, Francesco: 16 Phélypeaux, Jean: 245–46, 248 Philip II, king of Spain: 119–20 Philip VI, king of Spain: 139 Pirot, Edme: 242, n. 2 Pontcarré, Camus de: 62 Pontchâteau, Sébastien-Joseph du Cambout de: 201

265

266

index noMinuM

Portland, earl of see Bentinck, Hans Willem (William) Pruneaux, Roch de Sorbiers, sieur de: 121 Puy, Isaac du: 246 Quesnel, Pasquier: 204–05 Rabaut, Paul: 95 Rabutin-Chantal, Marie de, marquise de Sévigné: 196–97 Radouay, Suzanne, Mme de: 251 Ragazzoni, Gerolamo: 121 n. 62 Rancé, Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de: 22, 195–209 Rapin, René: 207 Rapin-Thoyras, Jacques: 144 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul: 22, 140, 144–59, 163–64 Rasigade, Alexandre de: 140 n. 3 Réaux, Gédéon Tallemant des: 207 Redi, Francesco: 58–60 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal and duke of: 62, 194, 226, 230–31, 233 Rigault, Nicolas: 62, 69 n. 55 Rivet, André: 216–22, 224–26, 228–29, 231–32 Rou, Jean: 150 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 96, 99 Rudolph II, emperor of the Holy Roman empire: 183 Saint-Florentin, Louis Phélypeaux, count of: 95 Sainte-Marthe, Denis de: 197–99, 201 Saurin, Jacques: 85 Sarrau, Claude: 54–55, 64–65, 75 Saurrau, Isaac: 64 Saumaise, Claude: 64–65, 75 n. 68, 218 Scarron, Paul: 238 n. 2

Schomberg, Frederick, marshal, duke of: 145 Schulenburg, Mathias Johann von dem: 63 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise of: 18, 75 Sens, Henri Pardaillan de Gondrin, archbishop of: 227–28, 233 Seymour, Algernon: 146 Seymour, Charles, duke of Somerset: 146 Sidney, Barbara: 37 Sidney, Robert: 37 Sirmond, Jacques: 54–55 Smith, Thomas: 117–18 Soubise, François de Rohan, prince of: 200 Southwell, Robert: 140 n. 3 Spanheim, Ezechiel: 68 n. 54 Spanheim, Friedrich: 220 Spon, Jacob: 57, 58 n. 25 Stafford, Edward: 115–16, 121, 124 Stepney, George: 160 Tacitus: 96 Tallents, Francis: 140 n. 3 Temple, Jane: 152 n. 40 Thielo, Caroline: 95 Thomsen, Mlle: 92 Toinard, Nicolas: 58, 60 Torsay, Hermann Taffin, sieur de: 116 n. 40 Toulouse, archbishop of see Montchal, Charles de Tourouvre, Antoine de La Vove, marquis of: 202 Tourouvre, Françoise de La Vove de: 203–04 Tourouvre, Jean-Armand de La Vove de: 202 Tourouvre, Marie de Remefort, marquise of: 202–04, 208

index noMinuM

Tourouvre, Marie-Jeanne de La Vove de: 203–04 Trauston, Brigitta: 182 Tronchin, Théodore: 101 Tronson, Louis: 242–43, 254–55 Tuttle, Johanna: 41 Valois, frères de (Adrien et Henri) 54–55, 60 (Adrien) Van Zyll, Rudolph: 61 Véron, François: 224, 226 Vertus, Catherine-Françoise de Bretagne d’Avaugour, Mlle de: 206–09 Villeroy, François de Neufville, duke of: 147 Villiers, Anne: 143 Villiers, Edward: 143

Vivo, Filippo de: 115 n. 37 Voltaire: 83, 87, 89, 96, 99, 101–02 Walsingham, Francis: 115, 121 Wetstein, Henrik: 58, 60 William I, the Silent, prince of Orange: 120, 178 William II, prince of Orange: 216, 232 William III, prince of Orange, king of Great Britain: 143–45, 156 m. 54, 158 Winthrop, John: 35–36 Winthrop, Margaret: 35–36 Woodstock, viscount of see Bentinck, Henry Wyllys, Mary: 41

267

Index locorum

Alençon: 229 Alès: 85 Alps: 242 Amsterdam: 58, 60–61, 87, 149 Angers: 126–27, 129–30 Antrim, Northern Ireland: 37 Augsburg: 147 Austria: 154 Bagnères: 100 Barèges: 100 Bavaria: 184–85 Bayeux: 74 Berg, Duchy of: Berlin: 83, 92, 147, 163 m.80 Blaye: 62 Bologna: 147 Breda: 216 Bremen: 148 Brouage: 62 n. 39 Boulogne: 121 n. 66 Caen: 71, 75 n. 67 Calais: 37–38 Carla: 90 Castres: 144 Celle: 145–48, 159 n. 66, 163 n. 78 Charenton: 96, 215–18, 221–24, 226, 228–31, 233–34 Cîteaux: 198 Clairvaux: 198 Cologne: 147 Constantinople: 54–56, 56 n. 20 Copenhagen: 52, 83, 86, 89–91 Cremona: 147 n. 33

Denmark: 173, 186 Dover: 37 Dusseldorf: 147, 161 Dutch Republic see United Provinces England: 50, 118, 125–26, 129 n. 104, 130, 139, 143, 154, 219, 228, 232 Europe: 107–08, 112–14, 117, 120, 122, 125, 132, 139, 146 Ferney: 89 Florence: 50, 58–59, 64 n. 43, 147, 157 Flushing: 37 Foix: 90, 95, 98 Frankfurt–am–Main: 53, 182, 184 France: 111–13, 112 n. 24, 115, 116 n. 44, 118–19, 119 n. 54 and 55, 120–21, 120 n. 58, 124–27, 127 n. 93, 129–30, 129 n. 101, 131, 139, 140 n. 4, 142 n. 8, 143–45, 239 Franeker: 143 n. 11 Geneva: 83, 85–86, 89 Germany: 50, 53, 60, 139–40, 147, 163 Ghent: 119 Given: 222–23 Gotha: 92 Greece (Classical): 14 Gubbio: 239 Hamburg: 89, 148, 163 Hanover: 147, 159

index loCoruM

Hautefontaine: 197 Heising (Heysing): 161 Holland, province of: 112 n. 24, 120, 215, 217, 219–20 Holy Roman Empire: 129 n. 104, 139, 176, 178, 180, 182–83, 186 Île–de–France: 220, 229, 231 Innsbruck: 147, 153 Issy: 242 Italy: 54, 140, 147, 154, 156–57 Jamaica: 144 La Rochelle: 219, 222–24, 226, 233 La Trappe: 22, 191–209 Langres: 217, 221 Le Carla: 90, 96 Leiden: 54 n. 15, n. 16, 64, 216–17, 220, 233 Leipzig: 60–61, 87 Levant: 57 Lingen: 148 Livorno: 147, 157 n. 60, n. 61 London: 27–29, 36–37, 145, 126 Lyon: 92 Maintenon, Château de: 238 n. 2 Maison Royale de Saint Louis see Saint-Cyr Marais, Les: 238 n. 2 Mazères: 95, 98, 101 Metz: 92, 215–17, 219–20, 223 Montpellier: 93 Mughal Empire: 132 Munich: 147 Nantes: 85, 96, 126, 130–31, 140 n. 4, 145, 216 Netherlands, the see United Provinces Nijenhuis: 163 n. 79 Nîmes: 93

Niort: 219 Normandy: 230–31 Nottingham: 148, 152 Nouvelle Catholiques in Paris: 252 Nuremberg: 147–48, 157, 158 n. 64 Oldenburg: 148 Ottoman Empire: 115, 132 Oxford: 49 n. 1 Paris: 50, 52–53, 56–57, 60–61, 64–65, 71, 75 n. 69, 83, 86–87, 90–92, 98–100, 102, 112 n. 24, 116–22, 125, 238 n. 2, 242 Palatinate: 147 Pisa: 50, 59 Port–Royal: 201–03, 206–07, 209 Potsdam: 87 Prague: 180 Puylaurens: 144 Qing Empire: 132 Reims: 75 n. 71 Rome: 53, 110, 113, 147, 157 n. 58, 242, n. 17 Rotterdam: 91 Rouen: 61 Saint-Cyr: 87, 92, 237–38, 247–52 Saint Sulpice: 243 Sainte Marie, Visitation of: 242, n. 17 Saumur: 145 Savoy: 123, 139, 144 Saxony: 173, 176–78, 183 Scotland: 129 n. 104, 232 Sedan: 217, 221, 230 Senlis: 121 South Molton, Devon: 37 Spain: 111, 113, 115, 120–23, 125–26, 129–30 Spandau: 87, 92 Stockholm: 55, 57, 65

269

270

index loCoruM

Surenden-Dering, Kent: 27 Sweden: 54 Swiss Canton: 129 n. 104 Tarabya see Thérapia The Hague: 112 n. 24, 142 n. 9, 145–46, 148, 151 n. 42, 156 n. 54, n. 55, 163, 216, 219, 230 Thérapia: 56 Toulouse: 93, 95, 99, 102 Travendahl Trent: 229 Tuscany: 51, 60 Utrecht: 52, 61, 67, 145 United Provinces: 53, 118–22, 125, 127 n. 93, 130, 139–40, 145, 148, 158, 161, 216, 219, 222–23

Uzès: 93 Valleraugue: 85, 93 Vassy: 62 n. 39 Venice: 54, 64, 147 n. 32 Verona Versailles: 87, 238 n. 2, 252, 256 Vervins: 111, 130–31 Vienna: 147, 151 n. 40, 152–53, 154 n. 49, 159 n. 66, n. 69, 160 n. 70, 162, 182 Vindolanda: 28 Wesel: 144 n. 21, 146 Zaandijk: 148