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Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction * : Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing
Points of Departure
Social and Historical Time
Time in Narration and Description
The Traveller’s Times and the Times of Others
This Volume: An Overview
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 1: Time and Temporality in Travel Accounts from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries * : Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin
Outlines of Christian Spatiotemporality
Mandeville’s Travels
Hans Tucher’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
Daniel Ecklin’s Reißbüchlin
Effects of (De-)temporalisation in the Early Modern Period
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Like Moses on the Nile * : Competing Temporalities in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654/1667)
Histories and Futurities
Dislocations and Relocations
Colonial Temporalities and the Others
Concluding Remarks
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Signs of Travel and Memory * : The Case of the Wooden Slabs in Jukkasjärvi (1681–1736)
Aspiring Socialite Travelling North: Regnard
The Huguenot Following Regnard: La Motraye
The Scientist and the Inscriptions: Maupertuis
Concluding Remarks
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Almanacs, Polytemporality, and Early Modern Travel
The Almanac as a Travel Anti-Narrative
Day to Day Polytemporality
Historical Chronologies and Exotic Calendars
Futures Present
Almanacs and Travel Narratives
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Time Travel in the Pacific * : Maritime Exploration and Eighteenth-Century German Historiography
Exploration and Historiography
The Göttingen Historians and Pacific Exploration
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Ruins and Revolutions * : Jacob Berggren on Classical Soil
Between Antiquity and Modernity
Ancient Myths and Modern Clocks
Layered Temporalities
Flight into Egypt
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Jerusalem in Every Soul * : Temporalities of Faith in Fredrika Bremer’s and Harriet Martineau’s Travel Narratives of Palestine
Martineau’s Vision of the Past
Bremer’s Allegorical Geography
Temporalities of Faith: Kairos and Chronos
Nations and Orientalism
The Hebrew People: The Model Nation
Landscape, Time, Nationalism
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Temporalities of the Anti-Modern: Angel Ganivet’s Neo-Romantic Mapping of Western Civilisation
Angel Ganivet, His Work and His Time
Conflicting Time Conceptualisations
Pan-Latin Chronopolitics
On the Relativity of Progress
On Coevalness: Was Ganivet a Precursor of Southern Epistemologies?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing
This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers’ encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of “cultural temporalities” in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues. Paula Henrikson is professor of Literature at Uppsala University. Her current research concerns the long nineteenth century with a special focus on Romantic classicism and philhellenism in Sweden. Previously, she has published on Romantic drama, textual criticism, and the history of philology in Sweden, and with Christian Janss she was the co-editor of Geschichte der Edition in Skandinavien (2013). Christina Kullberg is professor of French at Uppsala University, specialised in contemporary Caribbean literature and early modern travel writing. Her publications include The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives (2013) and Lire l’Histoire générale des Antilles de J.-B. Du Tertre: Exotisme et établissement français aux Îles (2020). Currently, she is completing a book entitled Entangled Voices in French Early Modern Travel Writing to the Caribbean.
Routledge Research in Travel Writing Edited by Peter Hulme, University of Essex Tim Youngs, Nottingham Trent University
French Travel in the Ottoman Empire Marseilles to Constantinople, 1650–1700 Michèle Longino Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing Edited by Miguel A. Cabañas, Jeanne Dubino, Veronica Salles-Reese, and Gary Totten Travel Writing from Black Australia Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality Robert Clarke Travel Writing in Dutch and German, 1790–1930 Modernity, Regionality, Mobility Edited by Alison E. Martin, Lut Missinne, and Beatrix van Dam French Political Travel Writing in the Interwar Years Radical Departures Martyn Cornick, Martin Hurcombe, and Angela Kershaw Travelling Servants Mobility and Employment in British Fiction and Travel Writing 1750–1850 Kathryn Walchester The Desertmakers Travel, War, and the State in Latin America Javier Uriarte Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Travel-Writing/ book-series/RRTW
Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing Edited By
Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg
First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: 1 Kullberg, Christina, 1973- edi | 1 Henrikson, Paula, edi Title: Time and temporalities in European travel writing / edited by Christina Kullberg and Paula Henrikson. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in travel writing | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020039873 Classification: LCC PN56.T7 T56 2021 | DDC 808.8/032094--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039873 ISBN: 978-0-367-65390-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12924-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India
Contents
List of figures List of contributors
Introduction: Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing
vii viii 1
PAULA HENRIKSON AND CHRISTINA KULLBERG
1 Time and Temporality in Travel Accounts from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries: Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin
25
MAXIMILIAN BENZ AND CHRISTIAN KIENING
2 Like Moses on the Nile: Competing Temporalities in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654/1667)
52
CHRISTINA KULLBERG
3 Signs of Travel and Memory: The Case of the Wooden Slabs in Jukkasjärvi (1681–1736)
75
SYLVIE REQUEMORA-GROS
4 Almanacs, Polytemporality, and Early Modern Travel
101
MARGARET R. HUNT
5 Time Travel in the Pacific: Maritime Exploration and Eighteenth-Century German Historiography
132
SÜNNE JUTERCZENKA
6 Ruins and Revolutions: Jacob Berggren on Classical Soil PAULA HENRIKSON
158
vi Contents
7 Jerusalem in Every Soul: Temporalities of Faith in Fredrika Bremer’s and Harriet Martineau’s Travel Narratives of Palestine
182
ANNA BOHLIN
8 Temporalities of the Anti-Modern: Angel Ganivet’s Neo-Romantic Mapping of Western Civilisation
210
PETER STADIUS
Index
228
Figures
3.1 Wooden slab by Regnard, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros 3.2 Wooden slab attributed by the author to La Motraye, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros 3.3 Wooden slab signed Gyllengrip, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros 3.4 Wooden slab signed Johannes Wegelius, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros 3.5 The Käymäjärvi inscription, Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre (1777), vol. 15. gallica.bnrf.fr/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, public domain 5.1 Johann Joachim Schwabe, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande (1747–74), vol. 1, frontispiece. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, public domain
75 84 87 87
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Contributors
Maximilian Benz is Heisenberg-Professor for German Literature at the University of Bielefeld. He studied German and Classical Philology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, earned his doctorate (2012) at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin on the story of trips to the afterlife, and habilitated (2019) at the University of Zurich on the poetic structure and literary-historical position of Rudolf von Ems’ works. Anna Bohlin is associate professor of Comparative Literature at Nordic Literature at the University of Bergen. Her current research project is Enchanting Nations: Commodity Market, Folklore, and Nationalism in Scandinavian Literature 1830–1850. She is the editor of the crossdisciplinary anthology The Production of Loss: Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region (forthcoming), and the co-editor of the third volume, covering the long nineteenth century, of Tracing the Jerusalem Code: Christian Cultures in Scandinavia (2020). Paula Henrikson is professor of Literature at Uppsala University. Her current research concerns the long nineteenth century with a special focus on Romantic classicism and philhellenism in Sweden. Previously, she has published on Romantic drama, textual criticism, and the history of philology in Sweden, and with Christian Janss she was the coeditor of Geschichte der Edition in Skandinavien (2013). Margaret R. Hunt is professor of History at Uppsala University. She is the author of The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680–1780 (1996) and Women in Eighteenth-century Europe (2010), and co-author of The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, with Related Documents (2016), along with numerous articles and book chapters on gender and the law, travel, race, sexuality, and military and maritime history.
Contributors ix Sünne Juterczenka teaches early modern history at the University of Göttingen. Her research interests include cultural and religious encounters, travel and exploration, maritime history, and the history of early modern media. Her first book was a study on seventeenth-century Quaker missionary journeys to Europe (Über Gott und die Welt, 2008); her current work focuses on the media coverage of Pacific exploration during the eighteenth century. Christian Kiening is professor of German literature at the University of Zurich. He studied German Philology, History, and Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, earned his doctorate 1989, and habilitated in 1995/96. He is co-editor of Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, and from 2005 to 2017 he was director of the National Competence Centre of Research “Mediality”. Christina Kullberg is professor of French at Uppsala University, specialised in contemporary Caribbean literature and early modern travel writing. Her publications include The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives (2013) and Lire L'Histoire générale des Antilles de J.-B. Du Tertre: Exotisme et établissement français aux Îles (2020). Currently, she is completing a book entitled Entangled Voices in French Early Modern Travel Writing to the Caribbean. Sylvie Requemora-Gros is professor of French Literature at Aix-Marseille University and member of the research group CIELAM, specialising on the seventeenth century. Her research has explored the intersections between travel writing and other genres in her monograph Voguer vers la modernité: Le voyage à travers les genres au XVIIe siècle (2012) and in edited volumes such as Voyages, rencontres, échanges au XVIIe siècle (2017), Image et Voyage, de la Méditerranée aux Indes (2012), and Voyage et théâtre de l’Antiquité au XIXe siècle (2011). She is the director of Centre de Recherches sur la Littérature des Voyages (Travel Literature Research Centre, www.crlv.org). Peter Stadius holds a PhD in History and is since 2015 professor in Nordic Studies and Research Director of the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. Stadius’ research includes studies on the mental mapping of North and South in Europe from a historical perspective, specialising in imagological relations between Scandinavia and Latin Europe.
Introduction* Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg
In the era of global warming, long-distance travel has become a controversial and politically contested arena. While air travel makes the world more available, at least for some people, it is also a main source for greenhouse gas emissions, which makes modern tourism difficult to reconcile with environmental consciousness. In growing numbers, people advocate the art of “slow travel”, choosing transportation modes like train, bike, or foot to support more sustainable travel, but also promoting a focus on quality of the travel experience rather than distance travelled.1 The apocalyptic framing of contemporary air travel as contributing to climate catastrophe has sparked a renewed interest in time and temporality. In Olivier Klein’s words, linear industrial time has over the last few decades been challenged (but not replaced) by “fragmented time”, defined by speed, unclear discrimination between work time and free time, and an enhanced experience of simultaneousness, suggesting that everyone may be constantly available everywhere.2 Slow travel has been highlighted as a reaction not only to an acute environmental threat but also to the high-speed fragmentation of travel experiences. At the same time, the menace of global warming has led to increased attention to long-term changes as well as those in the short-term. While the implications of a notion like “future” have become highly insecure and uncertain, the realisation that we now live in the Anthropocene has directed our gazes towards the past: to early industrialism and empire, as well as to geological change and “deep time”. From mass tourism to the uber-wealthy crossing the world on private jets, contemporary global movements cannot be dissociated from a long history of European travelling. Who travels as well as why, how, and where we travel reflect inequalities with roots in Western imperialism, as does the current climate crisis. Slow travel is urgent because of centuries of what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” that the rich from Western countries have inflicted upon the poor, a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time We wish to thank Stefan Helgesson for his valuable comments and remarks on this introduction.
*
2 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg and space”.3 European travellers have moved across the globe; they have mapped it, organising it spatially but also temporally. This book examines some of the implications of these practices and ideologies by focusing on travel writing before the twentieth century. Quite rightly, European travellers have been accused of imposing their own sense of time onto the rest of the world, of denying it temporality all together, or of being blind towards the multiple times existing simultaneously in the world. However, there are disagreements concerning the question how the West constructs the time of the Rest, as argued by Stefan Helgesson.4 Is the problem a relativist tendency to conceptualise other temporalities as radically different from Western linearity, which has been considered universal? Or is the issue that the West tends to reject other cultures’ times and temporalities? The primary aim of this volume is not to resolve this question, nor does it focus on late modernity, the period that has most often been scrutinised over the last decades when investigating time and temporalities. Instead, it sets out to explore the variation of time and temporalities from the point of view of European travellers in a period spanning from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century, investigating how travellers negotiate their own experiences and different imaginaries of time. If we, like Helge Jordheim, admit that there is no such thing as a single Time; that “multiple temporalities” pervade simultaneously everywhere, then European time cannot be reduced to one either.5 Taking a cue from the observation that time is plural and that several conceptions of time may co-exist in a particular setting, the case studies in this volume seek to understand how time and temporalities play out in the encounter with and representation of other places and peoples. Written by scholars from literary studies and history, the chapters critically examine how travel itself complicates the representation of time as well as how the experience of time and temporalities affects and is affected by questions of genre, exterior conditions, and cultural imaginaries.
Points of Departure In one of his late essays, Mikhail Bakhtin finds in travel writing the bridge that connects the early Bildungsroman to the realist novel. Realism entails a certain way of observing that Bakhtin traces to Goethe’s Italian voyage. During his travels, Bakhtin argues, Goethe developed a particular gaze that, beyond the ability to spot details or colours in a landscape, could read time in space.6 Space was no longer a stable entity, as opposed to temporal progression, but appeared to the poet as inhabited by time. Travelling thus became a mode of reading signs of progress in geography, in nature, and in peoples’ everyday practices, thereby breaking with a long European history of ars apodemica. The poetic gaze, not guide books or heroic history, would make sense of the experience of travelling and reveal the creative side of the past.7 Bakhtin’s analysis of a temporal
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 3 deciphering of space and practices pertains to European travel writing long before Goethe. Most travel writing employs a complex temporal relationship with the world. For centuries, voyagers destined for Rome and other places have demonstrated in various ways a sensitivity towards time in nature and in culture as they, too, observe the life cycles of the locals, comparing local temporalities with their own sense of time. But there is more to time in travel writing than the juxtaposition of the traveller’s experience of time with their observation of time in the places visited. All readings of time are both collective and individual; they are constrained by ideologies and codes of writing. Adding to this, the ability to read time, both in nature and in culture, is a question of distance and scale. It was no doubt easier for Goethe to make sense of time in the Italian landscape than it was for Louis Antoine de Bougainville when he arrived in Tahiti. One can imagine that the force of cultural imagination, imbued with ideology, increases in the encounter with and representation of faraway places. Still, despite these biases, travel writing has unravelled a multitude of simultaneous temporalities in the world, as well as the multitemporality of different places and practices. This can, of course, be seen as a form of cultural relativism that still would not fully include these other temporalities within a general notion of time. Nevertheless, travellers have indirectly (and perhaps inadvertently) showed that European linear conceptualisations of time are culturally produced rather than universal. Hence, it is not surprising that, in 1955, time was evoked as one of the defining axes of any representation of a journey by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who remarked in his Tristes Tropiques: “People generally think of travel in terms of displacement in space, but a long journey exists simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy”.8 In line with such an observation we assume that dimensions of space, time, and power cannot be read apart from each other in travel writing. Also, in order to account for the temporal complications in travel writing, our point of departure is that time is not an absolute category of perception. Rather, we understand time as comprising various measures of duration and the experience of time as dependent on many factors. The lived time of a particular phase of a journey is influenced by external material conditions, physical dispositions as well as imaginaries and discourses. Temporalities can be distinguished as certain articulations of time; they refer to larger conceptions of pasts, presents, and futures. François Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity, referring to the order of historicity of the experience of time, is particularly useful here as it underscores that lived time is contextually dependent.9 While time might not always be thought of as the central characteristic of travel writing, it does indeed intervene productively in the ways in which travellers present not only their journey but also the places they visit. Time encapsulates a vast array of dimensions in travel writing, covering everything from detailed generic characteristics to the impact of
4 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg scientific progression, notions of history, and questions of the origins of humans. Competing temporalities permeate all different kinds of writing that travellers leave behind, including travel notes, letters, literary works, diaries, travelogues, and autobiographies. Different types of travelling imply alternate ways of experiencing time and space. Moving by bike entails different senses of time than travelling by train, and crossing vast oceans triggers symbolic meanings that depend on the period and the person sailing. The landscape through which a traveller moves may itself be historically layered, and the travellers construct meaning from the things they observe through temporal relations. Different geographies have been associated with different notions of temporality, deeply embedded in the European imagination: the Americas, for example, were considered to have another temporality than the East; within Europe, the North was associated with a different temporality than the South. Taken together, travellers express their own personal experience of time when passing through faraway fields, observing cultural practices that are unknown to them, taking notes of ruins from past times that did not directly concern them but to which tradition might have made them culturally connected. They constantly reflect on history, memory, and simultaneity, as well as on the future, and the ways in which they express time and temporality are general but at the same time singular, capturing competing senses of time. Historical time, mythological time, and different temporal aspects are actualised in different passages, creating a range of dynamic perspectives. Considering the complexity of time and temporality, one can wonder why these aspects remain an underexplored area within research on travel writing. A possible explanation would be that the spatial turn found a direct resonance in research on travels. The reasons for this are obvious: to travel is to change place, to orient oneself through space. Symptomatically, maps, territorial conquests, global networks, and cultural encounters are some examples of spatial themes that have received much attention within the field of travel research. In the most recent collected volumes on travel writing originating from British scholarship, there are, among other important contributions, new perspectives on the role of the senses, on forms, periods, and modes of travel writing, and on cultural encounters, but no chapter deals with time specifically. This is the case in both The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Tim Youngs and Alasdair Pettinger, and the voluminous Cambridge History of Travel Writing, also edited by Youngs together with Nandini Das. These collected volumes are structured in ways that make the reader re-think the genre and its vast impact on society and intellectual history. Indeed, research on travel writing has in critically productive ways used theoretical and methodological approaches ranging from archival studies to translation studies, ecocriticism, and sound studies, not to mention important perspectives from the fields of gender and postcolonial studies.
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 5 Nonetheless, there is a clear absence of a coherent analysis of temporal implications in travel writing, and only recently has the productive and even decisive impact of time been identified. Three examples demonstrate the topicality of this theme in recent travel writing research. First, Robert Clarke has noted that “time is a complicated feature of the journey as well as of the storytelling”.10 In passing, Clarke thus points to an important insight that motivates this volume: time is a complex element in travel writing. His contribution deals with postcolonial travels in which the essential role of time and temporality, as instruments of power as well as alternative ways of perceiving the world, is difficult to ignore. He registers the levels of time that permeate travel writing: “the time of the journey, the time of the telling, and the inevitable lag between event and narration, mediated through processes of editing”, as well as the time of the reading, of places and people visited, and of the traveller’s memories.11 Second, Albrecht Classen, evoking Bakhtin’s chronotope, stresses the role of time and travel in identity formation in his introduction to the volume Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time (2018).12 And third, in his recent monograph ReiseSchreiben (2020), Ottmar Ette elaborates on the Levi-Straussian dimensions of travel mentioned above. He emphasises that the time dimension is both heterogeneous and multiple: the traveller is infused by his own time (his “Eigenzeitlichkeit”), while at the same time moving between different historical and cultural times as well as within the chronology of travel itself. Hence, the temporal dimension of travel inevitably entails the coexistence of plural times and plural notions of time.13 Time is an important factor in constituting travel writing as a discourse of domination, and also in the constitution of the genre itself. One could argue that travel forms a particular chronotope, entangled with a multitude of temporalities and depending on the medium of travel and of writing. Most intriguingly, rather than the chronotope of condensed time that Bakhtin found in Goethe’s connections between geographies and human practices, the temporalities activated through travel writing are often intertwined with one another. Exploratory travels in the name of science lean towards future progress; pilgrim travels tend to evoke salvational time and eschatological temporality; educational journeys typically do not just focus on works of art, antiquities, and memories from past times, but they are often future-oriented, as they are meant to contribute to the traveller’s formation and development. Physical “time-objects”, using a term coined by Paul Smethurst, may allow for historical time to break into travel writing.14 Travellers, it seems, are sensitive to multiple temporalities because travelling in itself often implies a special relationship to space: not only do they observe geography from a distance; they live it. Travelling is a physical experience, and travellers share the same space as the locals even if they inhabit it differently and even if they might deny this contemporaneity when they tell about their trip. This volume
6 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg hopes to contribute by fine-tuning existing theories and methodologies to account for the many layers of time implied in the experience and expression of travel.
Social and Historical Time Time is intimately connected to travel not only in the traveller’s experiences; it is also a product of the infrastructure of travel itself. The European attempts to standardise time in the late nineteenth century that sprang from the expansion of long-distance railway travelling are a striking example of the interconnectedness between time and travel. David Harvey’s notion of “time–space compression”, founded in Marxist theory, is deeply connected with new and faster means of travel.15 Wolfgang Schivelbusch has illustrated how such an “Annihilation of space and time” resulted from railway logic: while speed made distant places easily accessible, it also tended to make the journey itself – the space in between – irrelevant. Space travelled became less important while the destination came closer.16 Hence, the familiar narratives about adventures along a stagecoach route tended to disappear from travel writing while, at the same time, the focus on aims and goals was enhanced. With increasing speed, time had to be standardised. The need to make time uniform was discussed at international conferences, where the importance of global standards was emphasised but, at the same time, national considerations and geopolitics played a significant role: should uniform time be based on a prime meridian of Paris, Cadiz, Ferro, Jerusalem, or Greenwich? The efforts to localise global time can be followed in terms like “Adriatic Time”, “Bosporus Time”, and “Oriental Time”, adapted to serve geopolitical ends of different kinds.17 The standardisation of time was also a consequence of growing European empires; colonial possessions required a common measure of time. As argued by Adam Barrows, this global and imperialist politics is an important context for the obsession with dimensions of time and temporality in modernist fiction. He shows how this literary endeavour was a deeply politicised one: modernist authors actively operated in a space characterised by imperial temporal suppression, globalisation, and temporal resistance of different kinds.18 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this contraction of space to which railway contributed has continued and accelerated. As Hartmut Rosa has noted, the distance between London and New York, measured in the timespan it takes to travel, has now shrunk to less than 1/60th as compared to pre-industrial time.19 The method of measuring spatial distance in temporal units goes a long way back but has, Rosa claims, come to dominate: “Modern travelers fight with schedules, transfer-times, congestions and delays, not with the obstacles of space.”20 The accelerated time of modernity was not necessarily met with enthusiasm. As discussed
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 7 in Chapter 8 in this volume, signs of progress have been met with negative reactions in terms of a loss of other cultural temporalities. Time is always social, and sociologists have shed light on the manifold roles of times and temporalities, in plural, in human interaction. In Norbert Elias’ early analysis of social time, emphasis was put on temporality as social regulation. The gradual invention of calendars and clocks in early societies served a need to synchronise human behaviour and was slowly interiorised to the extent that even a clock system that a child would need seven to nine years to master can be felt as perfectly natural.21 So internalised is the concept of time that the imposing of one society’s time management on another is a powerful instrument of domination. However, a lesson to learn from historical studies on measuring and experiencing time is that one time system is rarely replaced by another. As discussed in Chapter 4, parallel to the imposition of official, standardised time, the ways almanacs were used in travel show how people had other ways to account for more quotidian and local ways of experiencing time. The experience of time and the temporalities we live under are always manifold, diverse, ambiguous, and contradictory; they are relational as well as contextual. Time systems multiply in a “pluritemporal” or “polychronic” manner, and one individual is always influenced by several parallel, even conflicting temporal regimes.22 Paying careful heed to this circumstance helps us avoid reductive dichotomies as well as the othering of some temporal experiences.23 Current critical attentiveness to questions of time and temporality is shaped by the distinctly late-capitalism experience of impermanence, what Zygmunt Bauman terms the “liquid” condition of present times, when social forms “can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them”.24 If the twentieth century was a century of ruptures and lost trust in human progress,25 ours is a state of “presentism”, as Hartog puts it, “the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now”.26 We are removed from earlier periods’ heterochronic conceptualisation of time, where the past was experienced as deeply embedded in the contemporary. This is important for understanding how accounts from early stages of colonisation would turn to antiquity, not only to describe the indigenous peoples but also to represent and justify the often-violent process of settlement, as discussed in Chapter 2 in this volume. Our current uneasiness about a present that seems to defy history and memory as well as the needs of future generations may well be an impetus for the enhanced interest in time and temporality in current scholarship. Hence, the “spatial turn”, which since the 1980s has invigorated travel writing research, has been accompanied by claims of a “temporal turn” in the humanities and social sciences, emphasising the need to take
8 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg into account the role of social time in all kinds of human production.27 It may be questioned whether repeated “turns” in different directions – itself a spatialised argument – are best suited to explain the urge to make sense of the temporal space or spatialised time that travel writing emerges from. However, it is clear that scholarly work from the last decades has given increased attention to time and temporality. A fundamental focus concerns the transformations over time of temporal consciousness itself, mapping the history of human time awareness. A recurring point of reference has been Reinhart Koselleck’s claim that in the late eighteenth century and as a consequence of accelerating change, a growing gap occurred in European consciousness between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”.28 In the era of revolutions, the world changed so rapidly that what had happened in history could no longer work as a reliable prediction of what would happen in the future. The future was no longer expected to display versions of what we already knew, but to bring about radical newness and novelty. In nineteenth-century travel writing, revolutionary temporalities charged the travelled space with new temporal layers. An example of this is discussed in Chapter 6, where uncertainty and ambiguity at the time of the Greek war of independence are also conceptualised as an affirmative temporal pluralism, oriented towards the future. Koselleck’s demand that “futures past” should be taken into consideration in historical studies of temporal awareness is a useful reminder of the importance of human projection but also of the interconnectedness of space and time, visible in his choice of metaphors such as “space” and “horizon”. Among the rapid changes that provoked an experience of accelerating time in late eighteenth-century Europe was intensified travelling, across the European continent as well as to more distant places. Exploratory, imperial, and colonial travels were also marked by a temporality of the modern nation, or “homogeneous, empty time”, as Benedict Anderson, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, termed a distinct modern temporality.29 According to Anderson, a medieval concept of unearthly simultaneity was alien to the kind of secular temporality that would pave the way for modern nationalism, and where simultaneity was no longer a promise of anticipation or fulfilment but a matter of “temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar”.30 Anderson touches upon the role of travel in the construction of imagined communities, for example how pilgrim travels promoted religious communities but also how exploratory travel contributed to the weakening of religiously imagined communities after the Middle Ages.31 However, it seems as if time and temporalities play yet unexplored roles in these processes. The discussion in this book’s Chapter 1 of medieval pilgrimages to Palestine stresses the ambiguous temporal engagements in pilgrimage travel writing. Yet other, later, examples, such as Protestant women’s pilgrimages to Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, analysed in Chapter 7, suggest
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 9 that “messianic time” could reoccur precisely at the time of modern nation-building.
Time in Narration and Description Travelling is often haunted by an obsession with temporal precision. Travellers keep journals or log books, noting the exact dates and times for departure and arrival, and this occurred long before time was measured in minutes and seconds. As Grégoire Besson points out, this is indeed a generic quality, particularly for those travelogues that are not organised linearly.32 However, despite seemingly direct chronologies and temporal precisions, travel writing builds on complicated temporal layers. Most published travelogues are written after the actual experience of travelling. Hence, they oscillate between the time of writing and the time of travelling, combining the personal temporal experience with temporalities of previous travellers. How these temporal aspects are displayed in the travel narrative is affected by the era and context of travel and by the type of travelogue, for example, whether it is told from a first-person perspective or from the point of view of an omniscient narrator and whether it is a journal or a published work. The temporalities implied in the narrative structure of travel writing show an affinity for storytelling that goes all the way back to the Odyssey and the epic of Gilgamesh. To some extent one could even suggest that the Western novel borrows its structure from travel: the hero sets out on a quest in an incoherent world, and the novel form is that of the (interior and exterior) adventure.33 Eberhard Lämmert reminds us that narrative art follows “the principle of ‘succession in time’ [that] has been acknowledged as a fundamental prerequisite of poetic enunciation”.34 Another narratologist, Gérard Genette, also returns to metaphors of travel when describing how time operates in novels. Like all things, he says, narratives exist in space but are produced in time: “the time needed for ‘consuming’ it is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field”.35 The novel is structured like a voyage, and to read a novel is to move through a field or advance on a road. Reversely, travelling seems equally dependent on narration. For if travel writing is the discourse of a voyager relating a spatial displacement and an encounter with alterity, travel in itself is a “movement through space”.36 This definition echoes Aristotle’s contention that time is “the number of movement according to the before and after”.37 Travel is a body moving in space, and time is its measure. The citation from Aristotle is quoted from Cornelius Castoriadis’s essay on time and creation, which highlights another link between time and travel writing: time also draws from its relationship to alterity.38 Travel narratives not only play out complicated narrative times but, being factbased, they are directly linked with the entanglements of extra-linguistic times, of lived and experienced times.
10 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg This leads us to the question of genre. It is notoriously difficult to define travel writing. It is not fictive, nor is it entirely factious; it belongs to several discourses at once.39 As many researchers have concluded before us, travel writing can only be considered in terms of a hybrid genre that is perhaps best described as paratopic: it does not fully belong to any genre, yet it borrows from and covers most genres. The chapters in this volume illustrate this variety, dealing with different travel writing forms, from pilgrimage accounts, travel notes, travelogues, and natural histories, to more atypical material such as almanacs and inscriptions left by travellers. Following Friedrich Wolfzettel, travel writing is understood here in a broad sense as “a personal discourse (most often written in the first person) that relates the experience of an encounter with the Other, that is of a real voyage”.40 Wolfzettel’s definition is useful because it allows for maintaining the heterogeneity of the many subgenres travel writing may take while clearly separating it from imaginary travels. In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, Das and Youngs choose to talk about various traditions within travel writing rather than trying to pin down the nature of the genre. However, in line with Wolfzettel, they do distinguish between mythological or supernatural travel texts and travel texts with documentary ambitions.41 A strict textual perspective is not tenable in regard to travel writing, where time is articulated in correlation with an actual journey or sojourn. Travellers may also leave other imprints of their journey, as is discussed in Chapter 3, that further complicate temporal relationships between the voyage and the various kinds of writings that emerge from it. Das and Youngs further argue that voice influences the nature of the travel text, e.g. in the choice between a third person narrative and the “sense of individual experience” first introduced in pilgrimage accounts.42 The travellers either seek to efface themselves by speaking through an impersonal narrative mode that would presumably register the world in an objective way, or they accentuate the subjective experience, letting the narrative I be the nodal point of the account. These modes are often combined within the same text, and narrative voices are added by copying passages from other travelogues, quoting others, and inserting long anecdotes based on hearsay. The compilation of multiple discourses and narrative voices, typical for travel writing, results in a narration in which the relationship between story time and narrative time is not always coherent. Generally, narrative mode is a temporal marker whereas description is a spatial marker. Yet, the two often operate together. Narrative amplitude – how much narrative space a certain episode is given in a story – is of crucial importance both for the individual traveller’s experience and for the cultural importance assigned to a particular space. For example, to avoid a complete narrative ellipse and to keep a sense of progression, travellers fill the duration of the monotonous sea passage with anecdotes and brief accounts of minor events (watching flying fish, spotting other
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 11 ships, etc.). Some travellers construct the ocean as a scene for adventures where pirates roam. Missionaries typically project a symbolic, existential, and religious value onto the sea, whereas explorers would turn it into a laboratory where knowledge can be tested. In this setting, descriptions of storms, an often-mocked travel cliché in early modern times, constitute a particularly telling example.43 The sea storm simultaneously functions as a scene that halts the progression of the narrative at the same time as it is a narrative ellipse since the scene replaces the story of the long, tedious oceanic crossing. By playing with narrative time, a space is thus filled with meaning, which is a profoundly literary construction. This is not only interesting from a narratological point of view; the dissection of temporal layers in narrative discourse can also help us understand the cultural significance of the representation of certain places and experiences. In fact, the combination of different time lapses has a direct impact on the ways in which the foreign world is represented. For example, when Gustave Flaubert arrives in Egypt during his voyage to the Middle East, he describes in detail and with amazement the pyramids, the archaeological objects, thus prolonging the duration of the narrative.44 However, after a while he gets bored, and the same objects that at first were worthy of longer descriptions are now reduced to a series of repetitions, suggesting that the once-“exotic” country has no more to offer the jaded traveller who has consumed it all. Narrative amplitude can thus be both cultural (some events or descriptions are expected to have great amplitude in the account) and personal (places and actions take more or less space depending on the traveller’s attitude towards them). This has consequences beyond the text in itself. Exploring time models in narrative theory, Roland Harweg introduces the notion of “observation-time” in order to account for perspectival aspects in the representation of time.45 The observation-time for static descriptions could, for example, be revealed in the use of the present tense and in the absence of a visible narrator. This narrative stance opens up to an all-encompassing view of society that evicts temporal aspects and freezes it into an eternal present, dependent on the knowledge of the observer. Even if such stance is an illusion, since the perceiving/experiencing entity is always placed in space as well as in time,46 by privileging vision, the traveller–narrator can present themselves as moving in space and thus progressing with time. At the same time, the geographies and cultures visited can be portrayed as sedentary and even outside temporal progression. Attention to narrative time layers thus exposes the discursive construction behind the division of the traveller moving through space, belonging to time, and the “travelee” existing in a static place outside of history. Through intricate narrative times, faraway places can conveniently be constructed as if they were not undergoing change, as if they did not belong to history or modernity, but were simply there to be discovered and visited by travellers.
12 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg
The Traveller’s Times and the Times of Others Johannes Fabian famously analysed such temporal divisions in terms of a “denial of coevalness”.47 There is, Fabian contends, an imbalanced relationship between anthropological knowledge and the Other, which means that anthropology, allegedly situating itself in a modern timeframe, has usually displaced the Other to a less developed temporality, typically expressed through notions such as “primitive” or “savage”. What is at stake is a structural temporal divide between the time of the anthropologist and the time of the people he observes, which equates geographical remoteness (from a European point of view) and temporal remoteness. As discussed in Chapter 5, such temporal divisions separating Western time from other times are foregrounded in eighteenth-century European explorations and have been decisive in the formation of the modern historical discipline. The Other is assumed to never access modernity or, as it were, the present, as the spatio-temporal distancing is produced even in the very moment of encounter. To paraphrase L. P. Hartley, Fabian shows how anthropology constructed the foreign country as a past, which could not be permitted simultaneity with the observer. Epistemologically related to colonial imperialism, anthropology was inscribed in an evolutionary temporality: “Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time.”48 Ideas of belatedness and progress, development and stagnation, have thus been employed by travellers and travel writers as a means of temporally organising societies along a normative scale, in which only the Western, imperial traveller was allowed full presence in the present. There is undeniably a racial bias that sharpens the spatio-temporal distancing. Chronopolitics is a forceful way of exercising power. In Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of how Europe constructed the world, vision appears as the sense through which a traveller perceives and navigates their surroundings, and to the same extent space seems privileged over time: the imperial traveller in her account registers, classifies, and enumerates but does not narrate or dramatise the place visited. By giving priority to a mode linked to space, description, and downplaying the temporal mode, narration, the traveller evicts time from their writing. The absence of history, background, or expressed motives creates a travel account that is flat and mysteriously devoid of temporal markers. The active force lies with the eye, systematically spanning and charting the landscape. As observed by Pratt, the spatial, synchronic rhetoric in the travelogue hides a temporal logic, as “the eye scanning prospects in the spatial sense knows itself to be looking at prospects in the temporal sense – possibilities of a Euro-colonial future coded as resources to be developed, surpluses to be traded, towns to be built”.49 This dimension of
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 13 Pratt’s study highlights the extent to which the suppression of temporality and temporal indicators in a travelogue may in itself be a forceful indication of the significance and interpretive relevance of time and temporality. The denial of the other’s time is thus simultaneously the result of colonial discourses and narrative constructions. However, the juxtaposition of synchrony with diachrony, space with time, also runs the risk of reifying oppositions in a model that is far less multiform than the reality it seeks to explain. There is no doubt that the construction of European narratives of the nation and of modernity builds on either the negation of other peoples’ temporalities or the projection of certain temporalities onto faraway places. While such constructions of temporalities belong to the macro level of travel narratives or to what one may call a discursive level, things get more complicated if we shift perspectives, looking at the lived time of the traveller and focusing on the textures of descriptions. Even if travellers might want to present themself as objective observers, the reality of travel is often messy. Indeed, synchronic description in a travelogue can be a way of escaping hegemonic discourses while favouring immediacy, shared experience, and emotion.50 In that sense, Pratt’s appeal to the “contact zone” as an invocation of “the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect” is more useful for the examination of exchanges beyond a travel narrative’s macro-structural dimensions. Pratt highlights the interactive potential of the colonial encounter, thus allowing for a dynamic view on the “radically asymmetrical relations of power”.51 Along this line of thought Dipesh Chakrabarty states that the understanding of temporally as well as geographically distant people as contemporaries is a prerequisite for handling them as “intelligible”: “Thus the writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself.”52 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses the notion of “timing” as a way to capture time as a sequential process of events that concern “life and ground-level history”.53 Much like Chakrabarty’s “discrete temporalities”, Spivak’s “timing” enables a reading of multiple temporalities also within a situation of unequal power relations. As Andrew Abbott argues, projecting stagnation onto the described object is not an inherent feature of the descriptive mode.54 However, the moment a traveller is immersed in everyday life at the place of sojourn, another dynamic descriptive mode is possible, which is still different from that of the narration of the moving traveller. Clifford Geertz speaks about “thick description”, which takes into account the larger context and engages in interpretation, not entirely different from Pratt’s idea of the “contact zone”.55 Abbott prefers the notion of dynamic or performative description and suggests that description is already a form of interpretation in so far as it can contain narrative components and thus in itself be processual, capturing a series of microscopic moments and objects.56
14 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg Needless to say, European travel writers operate within the frames of European forms of narration. However, even if the agenda might be imperialistic, they also engage in attempts to represent other ways of experiencing present, past, and future that do not necessarily fit easily into European forms of narrative. Travellers bring with them and are confronted by competing ways of making sense of time, whether in order to achieve maximal efficiency, to respond to psychological needs, to serve national, imperial, or colonial ends, or to bridge between a transient earthly existence and a quest for eternity. Rather than defining travel as merely a movement in space, we must consider that the deep cultural impact of travel and travel writing partly can be explained by its complicated engagement with time and temporalities. To conclude then, we suggest that whereas European travel writing is often governed by a linear conceptualisation of time, be it articulated as a salvational time or as a time of progress or of imperial expansion, it carries traces of a vast array of co-existing times and temporalities. Between the lines of travelogues, we can see precisely that time is mediated through the physical experience of voyaging and encountering others as well as through language, social codes, and imaginaries. Careful analysis of time and temporalities can thus help us shed new light on intercultural exchanges. While acknowledging underlying unequal structures of power, a careful consideration of how time is embedded in specific encounters reveals how other places and peoples actively affect the traveller and thereby moves beyond binary divisions.
This Volume: An Overview The eight case studies in this volume are arranged chronologically, spanning a time period from the late Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century, and they cover European travellers voyaging within and outside Europe. The first chapter by Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening investigates concepts of time and temporality in late medieval travel writing, focusing on three popular pilgrimage texts: Jean de Mandeville’s Travels from the fourteenth century, Hans Tucher’s travel book from the fifteenth century, and Daniel Ecklin’s short travelogue from the sixteenth. The chapter explores dimensions of time and temporality in these accounts, especially the role of salvational time in the travellers’ attempts to bring order to earthly contingency and to the geographical space they travel through. Benz and Kiening show how a complex temporal arrangement of past, present, and future structures the texts and is intertwined with the authors’ frequent use of temporal and spatial markers. Their demonstration of the extent to which spatiality and temporality is interdependent in these texts has general applicability in the study of travel writing at large. Chapter 2 by Christina Kullberg investigates how Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire Générale des Antilles habitées par
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 15 les François (1667) placed the French settlements in the Caribbean within a classical and biblical timeframe. Mythological European temporality was thus linked to the politics of early colonisation and missions, creating a historical narrative of the French Antilles built on competing temporalities. On one level, the chapter studies metaphors, iterations, and visual images employed to create coherence within the layered and competing temporalities at play. On another level, the analysis shows how Du Tertre embeds the story of French colonialism with a sense of moving forward, towards the future and a new community to come, at the same time as this very movement not only temporally displaces the islands but also excludes Native inhabitants and enslaved people from the imagined futurity. Chapter 3 by Sylvie Requemora-Gros focuses on a wooden slab engraved by the French dramatist and traveller Jean-François Regnard in North Scandinavia and kept at the church of Jukkasjärvi, in order to examine time through a material poetic of memory. These wooden inscriptions appear as an enigmatic layering of engraving, carpentry, art, and poetics, which opens up for a reading of a lineage of French travellers to the North. Regnard’s Voyage en Laponie (1681) can be linked to Aubry de la Motraye’s Voyage du Sieur A. de la Motraye, en Europe, Asie et Afrique (1727), and Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’ Relation d’un voyage au fond de la Laponie pour trouver un ancient monument (1756). Juxtaposing the inscriptions left by these French travellers, the chapter discusses the question of memory and the practice of engravings in travel writing in terms of a poetics of the stele, a unique textual and visual form, considered at once as a punctual celebration, a timeless memorial, and an exercise in classical rhetoric. Chapter 4 by Margaret R. Hunt critically examines printed almanacs for what they can tell us about early modern English attitudes towards time, temporality, and travel. Almanacs were cheap and extremely popular, and they not only reached out to travellers, but spread quickly to European settlements abroad. A closer look at almanacs as a genre shows us, first, that they celebrated multiple temporalities in everyday life; second, that they often encouraged readers to employ temporal comparisons to think about and assimilate foreignness and difference; and third, that they claimed to offer readers new ways to make travel (and the future more generally), safer, more convenient, and more predictable. Studying almanacs gives us clues as to how ordinary early modern travellers, who did not necessarily write about their voyages, may have constructed their views of the world, both spatially and temporally. Hunt argues that almanacs, because they encouraged a new consciousness about temporality, especially in relation to travel, and because of their wide distribution, deserve to be seen as agents of change in their own right. Chapter 5 by Sünne Juterczenka sheds new light on the links between travelling and the epistemology of historical research by questioning how
16 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg eighteenth-century explorations to the Pacific region intervened in contemporary historiographical theories, which posited that different peoples represented different historical stages of human development. Her investigation focuses on German scholars such as Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig von Schlözer who were at the forefront of theoretical debates on the history of humankind at the newly founded University at Göttingen. Juterczenka shows not only that these scholars thought Pacific voyaging could yield insights into remote periods of European history but also that their own time, as a result of the new, ground-breaking geographic discoveries, from a European point of view, coinciding with the emergence of a history of humankind as a major new field of research, was especially propitious for tackling vexing methodological problems. Chapter 6 by Paula Henrikson explores romantic imaginations of ruins through the writings of Jacob Berggren, a Swedish traveller to the Ottoman Empire. Berggren’s journey in 1819–23 coincided with the outbreak of the Greek war of independence, and the publication of his threevolume travelogue in 1826–28 overlapped with the short but intense wave of Swedish philhellenism that sprang from a call published in May 1826. Henrikson investigates the competing temporalities of his account, from the layered temporalities of antiquity and modernity to biblical and Homeric temporalities, imperial clock-time, and Berggren’s personal orientation on his future career. Shaped by the revolutions and written from a marginal position in Northern Europe, his travelogue expresses a sensibility for conflicting temporalities of his time, but also a confirmative attentiveness to plurality and local distinctiveness. Chapter 7 by Anna Bohlin examines the intersections between the temporality of the modern nation and temporalities of Christian faith in travelogues by two nineteenth-century female travellers to Palestine: Harriet Martineau’s Eastern Life: Present and Past (1848) and Fredrika Bremer’s Life in the Old World (1860–62). Their Protestant ideas about the progress of humankind, together with a teleological model of historical development, governed their perceptions as travellers and contributed to their Orientalist conceptualisations as well as their interpretations of the Palestinian geography. However, due to their differing temporalities of faith their ideas about the Palestinian landscape diverged: while for Bremer Jerusalem was quintessential for modern nationalism, the city was of mere historical interest to Martineau. The eighth and final chapter by Peter Stadius analyses questions of temporality, modernity, and progress within an intra-European South–North axis in an age of a progressing Western modernity, the late nineteenth century. The empirical evidence is drawn from the travel letters of the Spanish author and diplomat Angel Ganivet, written while he was stationed in Helsinki, and published in 1896–98. Ganivet’s anti-modern and neoRomantic attitudes were the foundation of his ideas of a strong dichotomy between the North and South of Europe, ideas that Stadius interprets as a
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 17 critique of the linear conception of time that usually represented modernity and progress. Ganivet’s protests against Northern ideas of development and modernity, as well as his promotion of a conservative nationalism imply his defence of a cyclical temporality and of the virtues of older times. The volume ends at an era when the modernity that travellers like Ganivet would scorn takes over. Now we stand on the threshold of new, radical forms of transportation, which accelerate movement through space and thereby successively turn the globe into a smaller place. However, these new techniques not only alter travelling; as modernity spreads, a feeling of loss seems to accompany travellers. Ganivet’s loss was that of his imagined Spain, untouched by the ravages of modern times. Other travellers will express a sense of nostalgia of a time when discovery and exploration were still possible. “I should have liked to live in the age of real travel”, Lévi-Strauss exclaims in Tristes Tropiques. He is nostalgic for what will never be seen because it is too late: “[I]n the centuries to come, when another traveller revisits this same place, he too may groan aloud at the disappearance of much that I should have set down, but cannot.”57 Lévi-Strauss projects the original failure of each traveller – we cannot see that which is foreign to us; we are forever trapped in our own cultural perspective – onto the future. Only the past, not the present, can be turned into an object of knowledge. The travellers’ direct knowledge will always be obscured by “timing”, those radical multiple temporalities mediated through body, social context, and language. Four of the eight chapters in this volume were first presented at a workshop on time and temporality in travel writing that took place in Uppsala in 2015. We wish to thank the Olle Engkvist Foundation for funding this workshop and thank the participants for fruitful discussions. Further, we wish to thank the Vilhelm Ekman University Foundation, the Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation, and the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University for supporting this volume. We would also like to express our gratitude to Maria Lidén for helping us with editorial matters and to Rebecca Ahlfeldt for her attentive proofreading. A special thanks goes to the anonymous reviewers for their important work.
Notes 1 Janet E. Dickinson, Les M. Lumsdon, and Derek Robbins, “Slow Travel: Issues for Tourism and Climate Change”, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 19, no. 3 (2011), pp. 281–300. 2 Olivier Klein, “Social Perception of Time, Distance and High-Speed Transportation”, Time and Society 13, no. 2–3 (2004), pp. 245–63; Dickinson, Lumsdon and Robbins, “Slow Travel”, p. 291. 3 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2.
18 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg 4 Stefan Helgesson, “Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time”, History and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014), pp. 546–47. 5 Helge Jordheim, “Introduction: Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization”, History and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014), pp. 498–518. 6 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, transl. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 27–35. 7 Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, pp. 33–34. 8 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [1955], transl. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 89. 9 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 10 Robert Clarke, “History, Memory, and Trauma in Postcolonial Travel Writing”, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing, ed. Robert Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 49. 11 Clarke, “History, Memory, and Trauma”, p. 49. 12 Albrecht Classen, “Time, Space, and Travel in the Pre-Modern World: Theoretical and Historical Reflections. An Introduction”, Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 1–75. 13 Ottmar Ette, ReiseSchreiben: Potsdamer Vorlesungen zur Reiseliteratur (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 115–21. 14 Paul Smethurst has used the term “time-objects” for “the physical monuments, buildings and texts which are encountered in the present, but which encapsulate, resonate with, and evoke earlier times”; see his “PostOrientalism and the Past-Colonial in William Dalrymple’s Travel Histories”, Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 159. 15 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 240. Jeremy Stein has pointed out that “interpretations of time–space compression typically rely on accounts of privileged social observers”, and are not necessarily shared by everyone equally. Jeremy Stein, “Reflections on Time, Time–Space Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century”, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 107. 16 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century [1977], Engl. transl. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 33–43; quote p. 33. 17 Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 25–28. See also Ian R. Bartky, “The Adoption of Standard Time”, Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989), pp. 25–56; and Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 35–47. 18 Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2010). See also Adam Barrows, Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), in which he argues that “the spatial turn reinvigorates the ways in which we understand time in literature” (p. 2). 19 Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality (Malmö: NSU Press, 2010), p. 17. Hartmut Rosa,
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 19 Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity [2005], transl. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 72. 20 Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, p. 43. 21 Norbert Elias, An Essay on Time [1984], ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Mennell (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), p. 114. A discussion of Elias’ position between realism and constructivism is found in Barry Barnes, “Between the Real and the Reified: Elias on Time”, The Sociology of Norbert Elias, ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 59–72. 22 See Alexander C. T. Geppert and Till Kössler, “Zeit-Geschichte als Aufgabe”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Sonderheft, 25 (2015), p. 22. 23 See Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 12–42. 24 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 1. 25 As exemplified by Hannah Arendt’s notion of “a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation”, see Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind [1978], one-volume edition (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 212. In Speaking Other Times: Hannah Arendt and the Temporality of Politics, diss. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2019), Frida Buhre states that “Arendt’s discussions of the past, history, and tradition ought to be read against the background that the line of tradition, according to her, is broken and cannot be mended” (p. 181). 26 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, p. xv. 27 See Adam, Timewatch, pp. 149–75; Caroline Rothauge, “Es ist (an der) Zeit: Zum ‘temporal turn’ in der Geschichtswissenschaft”, Historische Zeitschrift 305, no. 3 (2017), pp. 729–46; Geppert and Kössler, “Zeit-Geschichte als Aufgabe”; Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Continuum, 2012); Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is It about Time?”, Social Science History 34, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–12; Robert Hassan, “Globalization and the ‘Temporal Turn’: Recent Trends and Issues in Time Studies”, The Korean Journal of Policy Studies 25, no. 2 (2010), pp. 83–102. 28 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 256. 29 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983], rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 24. 30 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 24. 31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 54, 16. 32 Grégoire Besson concludes that the complication of time is linked to travel writing as a genre, see Grégoire Besson, “L’écriture du temps dans le récit de voyage entre Lumières et romantisme”, Viatica, 6 (2019), http://revues-msh. uca.fr/viatica/index.php?id=316 (accessed Feb. 7, 2020). See also Hartog, Regimes of Historicity. 33 We take our cue from Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A HistoricoPhilosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, transl. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971). 34 Eberhard Lämmert, “The Time References of Narration”, Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader, ed. Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), p. 101. 35 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 34. For studies on
20 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg the relationship between travel writing and the novel, see Roman et récit de voyage, ed. Philippe Antoine and Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2001); Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Jacques Chupeau, “Les récits de voyage aux lisières du roman”, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 77, nos. 3–4 (1977), pp. 536–53; Sylvie Requemora-Gros, Voguer vers la modernité: Le voyage à travers les genres au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université ParisSorbonne, 2012); Roland Le Huenen, Le récit de voyage au prisme de la littérature (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015). 36 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 9. 37 Quoted in Cornelius Castoriadis, “Time and Creation”, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 42. 38 Castoriadis, “Time and Creation”, pp. 61–62. 39 Philippe Antoine underscores the impossibility of articulating a coherent and rigorous poetic for travel writing in Roman et récit de voyage, p. 5. Roland Le Huenen speaks of an “open genre” without “laws” (Roland Le Huenen, “Le récit de voyage: l’entrée en littérature,” Études littéraires 20, no. 1 (1987), p. 45). In Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, Percy G. Adams defines travel writing by means of negations: “The récit de voyage is not just a first-person journal […] It is not just in prose. […] It is not necessarily a story with a simple uncontrived plot […]. It is not just a set of notes jotted down each day or whenever the traveler has time […] It is not just an objective report […] Travel writing [...] is not a branch of history any more than it is of geography. […] Finally, the récit de voyage cannot be a literary genre with a fixed definition any more than the novel is […]. For, like other forms just as amorphous, it evolves and will continue to evolve” (pp. 280–82). Peter J. Brenner notes that while the travelogue, defined as a narrative account of a real journey (“erzählende Darstellung einer realen Reise”), has a long history, it found its social role no earlier than in the late eighteenth century, and not through its literary quality, but through its claims on authenticity (“nicht durch seine literarische Qualität, sondern durch die Funktion der Vermittlung authentischer, durch Autopsie gewonnener Informationen”). Peter J. Brenner, Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur: Ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), p. 1. 40 Friedrich Wolfzettel, Le discours du voyageur: Pour une histoire littéraire du récit de voyage en France du Moyen âge au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), p. 5: “un discours personnel (le plus souvent à la première personne) rendant compte d’une rencontre avec l’Autre, c’està-dire d’un voyage réel”. Translated by Kullberg. 41 The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 1–2. 42 The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Das and Youngs, p. 3. 43 See, for example, Eva Riveline, Tempêtes en mer: Permanence et évolution d’un topos littéraire (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015). 44 Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Orient in Œuvres complètes, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 45 Roland Harweg, “Story-time and Fact-sequence-time”, Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader, ed. Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), p. 145. Harweg offers a four-level concept which corresponds to a quadruple distinction in tense theory between “utterance-time”,“observation-time”,“expressed time”, and “fact-time”(p.146).
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 21 46 See Harweg, “Story-time and Fact-Sequence-time”, pp. 151–52. 47 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object [1983] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 48 Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 17. 49 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [1992] (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 59. On the role of senses in travel writing, see also The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 50 A discussion of description in travel writing is found in Benjamin Colbert, “Description”, The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 166–78. 51 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 8. An attempt to “resist the reduction of crosscultural encounter to simple relations of domination and subordination” is found in the edited volume Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed Books 1999), p. 3. 52 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 109. 53 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Time and Timing: Law and History”, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John B. Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 99. 54 Andrew Abbott, “La description face à sa temporalité”, Pratiques de la description (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2003), https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19811 (accessed April 19, 2019). 55 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 56 Abbott, “La description face à sa temporalité”. 57 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 44, 45.
Bibliography Abbott, Andrew, “La description face à sa temporalité”, Pratiques de la description (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2003), https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19811 (accessed April 19, 2019). Adam, Barbara, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Adams, Percy G., Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983], rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006). Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind [1978], one-volume edition (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, transl. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Barnes, Barry, “Between the Real and the Reified: Elias on Time”, The Sociology of Norbert Elias, ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 59–72.
22 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg Barrows, Adam, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2010). Barrows, Adam, Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Bartky, Ian R., “The Adoption of Standard Time”, Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989), pp. 25–56. Bartky, Ian R., One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Besson, Grégoire, “L’écriture du temps dans le récit de voyage entre Lumières et romantisme”, Viatica, 6 (2019), http://revues-msh.uca.fr/viatica/index. php?id=316 (accessed Feb. 7, 2020). Brenner, Peter J., Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur: Ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990). Buhre, Frida, Speaking Other Times: Hannah Arendt and the Temporality of Politics, diss. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2019). The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Castoriadis, Cornelius, “Time and Creation”, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 38–64. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chupeau, Jacques, “Les récits de voyage aux lisières du roman”, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 77, nos. 3–4 (1977), pp. 536–53. Clarke, Robert, “History, Memory, and Trauma in Postcolonial Travel Writing”, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing, ed. Robert Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 49–62. Classen, Albrecht, “Time, Space, and Travel in the Pre-modern World: Theoretical and Historical Reflections. An Introduction”, Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 1–75. Colbert, Benjamin, “Description”, The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 166–78. Dickinson, Janet E., Les M. Lumsdon, and Derek Robbins, “Slow Travel: Issues for Tourism and Climate Change”, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 19, no. 3 (2011), pp. 281–300. Elias, Norbert, An Essay on Time [1984], ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Mennell (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). Ette, Ottmar, ReiseSchreiben: Potsdamer Vorlesungen zur Reiseliteratur (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object [1983] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Flaubert, Gustave, Voyage en Orient in Œuvres complètes, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
Time, Temporality, and Travel Writing 23 Gabaccia, Donna R., “Is It about Time?”, Social Science History, 34, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–12. Geertz, Clifford, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980). Geppert, Alexander C. T. and Till Kössler, “Zeit-Geschichte als Aufgabe”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Sonderheft, 25 (2015), pp. 7–36. Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Harweg, Roland, “Story-time and Fact-sequence-time”, Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader, ed. Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 143–70. Hassan, Robert, “Globalization and the ‘Temporal Turn’: Recent Trends and Issues in Time Studies”, The Korean Journal of Policy Studies 25, no. 2 (2010), pp. 83–102. Helgesson, Stefan, “Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time”, History and Theory, 53, no. 4 (2014), pp. 545–62. Jordheim, Helge,“Introduction: Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization”, History and Theory, 53, no. 4 (2014), pp. 498–518. Klein, Olivier, “Social Perception of Time, Distance and High-speed Transportation”, Time and Society 13, no. 2–3 (2004), pp. 245–63. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Lämmert, Eberhard, “The Time References of Narration”, Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader, ed. Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 101–08. Le Huenen, Roland, “Le récit de voyage: L’entrée en littérature”, Études littéraires 20, no. 1 (1987), pp. 45–61. Le Huenen, Roland, Le récit de voyage au prisme de la littérature (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques [1955], transl. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, transl. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971). Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [1992] (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Requemora-Gros, Sylvie, Voguer vers la modernité: Le voyage à travers les genres au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012). Riveline, Eva, Tempêtes en mer: Permanence et évolution d’un topos littéraire (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015).
24 Paula Henrikson and Christina Kullberg Roman et récit de voyage, ed. Philippe Antoine and Marie-Christine GomezGéraud (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2001). Rosa, Hartmut, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a critical Theory of LateModern Temporality (Malmö: NSU Press, 2010). Rosa, Hartmut, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity [2005], transl. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Ross, Christine, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Continuum, 2012). Rothauge, Caroline, “Es ist (an der) Zeit: Zum ‘temporal turn’ in der Geschichtswissenschaft”, Historische Zeitschrift 305, no. 3 (2017), pp. 729–46. The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century [1977], Engl. transl. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). Smethurst, Paul, “Post-Orientalism and the Past-Colonial in William Dalrymple’s Travel Histories”, Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 156–72. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Time and Timing: Law and History”, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John B. Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 99–117. Stein, Jeremy, “Reflections on Time, Time–space Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century”, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 106–19. Thompson, Carl, Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed Books 1999). Wolfzettel, Friedrich, Le discours du voyageur: Pour une histoire littéraire du récit de voyage en France du Moyen âge au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996).
1 Time and Temporality in Travel Accounts from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries* Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening Outlines of Christian Spatiotemporality Travelling and travel literature are deeply connected with space: They are grounded in the need for orientation and the desire to possess reliable information about itineraries and places. Travelling is also an activity in time; each place represents different time strata, and travel texts are, for their part, temporally organised. Time has particular importance in the Christian context, in which practices such as pilgrimage intertwining sacred places and salvation history lend special qualities to space and time. This is evident in one of the first examples of the travel literature genre from late antiquity. Four manuscripts from the eighth to the tenth centuries contain an itinerary referred to in the literature as Itinerarium Burdigalense.1 It served as a guidebook for pilgrims travelling from Bordeaux to the holy sites in and around Jerusalem. According to a note on the entry for Constantinople, which may have been made by users at that time, an actual journey took place at the time of the consulship of Dalmatius and Zenophilus: the travellers left Chalcedonia on the third kalends of June (May 30; kalends are the first days of a month according to the Roman calendar) and reached Constantinople again on the seventh kalends of January (December 25). The corresponding consulships can be dated to the year 333 ce.2 The text was written in the late Roman/early Christian period when people first began to consider making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. In his Onomastikon (295 ce), Eusebius of Caesarea compiled an alphabetical list of biblical place names, linking them with then-present-day places, “on the basis of late Roman road maps, he designed a topographical network with a record of the distances between places that served to insert stories from the Bible into the landscape”,3 thereby creating sites from memory. After the ecumenical Council of Nicea (325 ce), Emperor Constantine commissioned the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in order to lend visible form, at the historical foundations of the *Translated from German by Pamela Selwyn (Berlin).
26 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening Christian religion, to the faith thus rendered concrete by the Nicene Creed. In his catechetical lectures to those preparing for baptism (ca. 350 ce), Cyril of Jerusalem propagated the special value of celebrating the liturgy of Holy Week at the scene of the actual events (13,22). The Itinerarium Burdigalense thus belongs to a new, Christianised topography of the Roman Empire in which Jerusalem represented the centre.4 At the same time, it shows how interest in the holy sites differed from the general need to orient oneself while moving through the world. The beginning and closing sections of the text consist of simple lists of potential hostelries (mansio), stations to change horses (mutatio), and towns and villages (vicus, civitas, etc.) as well as the distances between them. Only occasionally is a reference inserted to the historical event associated with a location: “Viminatium, where Diocletian killed Carinus”, “Libyssa: here lies King Annibalianus, erstwhile king of the Africans”. The biblical, Judeo-Christian references increase with growing distance from Constantinople: “The Apostle Paul was born here”, “This is where Elias went up to the widow and asked her for food”, “it was here that King Ahab reigned, and here that Elijah spoke his prophecies”, “here is the field where David struck Goliath dead”. Upon reaching the Holy Land, more extensive narrative digressions ensue. Apart from the time of the journey, which is measured in distances, the text touches on the temporal dimensions of history and the history of salvation. The reader encounters the site of Abraham’s sacrifice as well as various locations significant for the story of Jacob. Complex layers are associated with Jerusalem: In Jerusalem, there are two large pools at the side of the temple, that is, one on the right hand, and one on the left, which were made by Solomon; and further in the city are twin pools, with five porticoes, which are called Bethsaida. Persons who have been sick for many years are cured there; the pools contain water that is red when it is disturbed. There is also a crypt here, in which Solomon used to torture devils. Here is also the corner of an exceedingly high tower, where our Lord ascended and the tempter said to Him, ‘If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence.’ And the Lord answered, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, but him only shalt thou serve.’5 Spatial information ostensibly dominates here: The original includes phrases such as “in Hierusalem” (in Jerusalem), “ad latus templi” (at the side of the temple), “ad dexteram” (on the right hand), “ad sinistram” (on the left hand), “interius civitati” (further in the city) – and time and again “ibi” (there). At the same time, however, deeper temporal layers open up: the time of Solomon is compared to the time of Christ. From the pools of Solomon’s temple one can see directly to the twin pools of Bethesda, which are associated with Christ’s (not explicitly mentioned)
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 27 miraculous healings (John 5:1–15),6 but they are also connected to an apocryphal Solomonic tradition;7 the motif of the tormented demons, introduced in highly abbreviated form, in turn leads to the Temptation of Christ (Mt 4:5–10). These temporal dimensions are expanded in what follows, when, alongside Hadrian’s statues, the text also mentions a contemporary Jewish mourning ritual – that is, when Hadrian’s policy of dejudaisation is related in a complex manner to the Jewish presence (in the form of mourning).8 Although these are usually only brief hints, they make it clear that spatial relations were infused with temporal ones. Only in the melding of the two dimensions does a landscape of memory arise, evoking religious and theological knowledge along topographical points, which in this text still dispenses altogether with actants.9 However rudimentarily the temporal aspect is outlined in the Itinerarium, we can recognise the basic characteristics of what would later influence the tradition of the pilgrimage account: it not only leads through space but also touches on time. It does so from varied perspectives, relating both to the depicted world, with its strata of past, present, and future, and to the textual form, which for its part combines various elements: time in its course, surface time, and deep time. This all becomes much more complex with the model of the time of salvation, which is inextricably linked with the pilgrimage. It is rooted in the historical while evolving in the present time. In it the history of salvation and its fulfilment, beginning, middle and end, time and time-transcending eternity are tightly intertwined. The many dimensions of time are not only reflected in the text as experience, but fostered the formation of other experiences.10 The time of salvation constitutes the framework within which disparate theological, devotional, political, architectural, ethnological, botanical, or zoological bodies of knowledge can be integrated. This occurs by linking them to topographically localisable points in biblical and nonbiblical history, so they form a succession of stations.11 This is not fundamentally different in Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum than it is in Johannes of Würzburg’s Descriptio Sanctae Terrae, Marco Polo’s Milione or Wilhelm von Boldensele’s Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus et praecipue de Terra Sancta. In each case, despite their discursive differences, association with the time of salvation holds an integrative and meaningful function, especially in light of the confrontation with the foreign. However, there is no overlooking that, in the course of the later Middle Ages, the subject – albeit only once in the Itinerarium Burdigalense (and this was perhaps in an addition) – is present within this model as a “we” and assumes growing importance. It marks the Archimedean point at which travel and travel account, individual and collective experience merge, but at which the integration of the disparate concepts of individuality and collectivity can also run up against their limits through spatial association and temporal stratification: where the subject remains general, an account is in danger of losing
28 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening the authenticity and individuality that raises it above the mass of uniform texts; where it becomes strongly individualised, its representative and exemplary quality threatens to be lost.12 One possible method of individualisation while retaining a claim to superindividual validity might lie in lending a very particular and detailed form to the documentation of a journey’s temporal course. This is the case in numerous accounts of journeys to Palestine, which had reached their height of popularity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The travellers/writers record in minute detail when they arrived where and when they departed; they also note the time of day and night. This information can attest that the journey occurred precisely in the way described and not otherwise – notwithstanding the fact that the details might have been borrowed from other texts. A possible side effect of this new temporal saturation is the foregrounding of the journey’s presentday aspects. In this case, encounters with the sites of the history of salvation no longer lead to temporal depths but remain on the surface of a movement to collect metonymic moments. Conversely, however, subjective and salvation-historical temporality can also be brought together in such a way that the celebration of Easter in Jerusalem coincides with an immersion in the temporal dimensions of the history of salvation associated with it. All of this suggests that we should not neglect the temporal dimension of the travel accounts in favour of their apparently more dominant spatial dimension.13 Not only are the two generally intertwined; a clear elaboration of the temporal dimension can also be noted in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This gives rise to our investigative design. We focus on three texts that were among the most popular of their respective eras. Using them, we seek to explore how travel, the history of salvation, temporality, and spatiality were fundamentally connected (Mandeville), how pragmatic and salvation-historical temporality evolved within the context of a concrete journey (Tucher), and, finally, how these patterns were transformed by an altered view of piety (Ecklin). The relationship among these three points should not be understood as a teleological process (for example, in the sense of secularisation). Rather, our objective is to capture a (by no means unambiguous) historical change that played out in the area of conflict between dimensions of the temporal and positions of the subject.
Mandeville’s Travels The book listed in literary histories under the modest title Le livre de Mandeville or simply Travels/Reisen, is a complex construction, both unwieldy and charming. Originally composed in French, it describes the travels undertaken by the knight Jean de Mandeville in 1322, which he was reporting in 1356 (or 1357). It is an account that, as modern research
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 29 has shown, integrates passages from a number of sources, including the travelogues of Wilhelm von Bodensele and Oderico de Pordenone from the 1330s.14 That the empirical author (and also his identity as the traveller) was apparently already mysterious to his contemporaries did not hinder the text’s reception and perhaps even fostered it: The text was repeatedly edited and translated, and more than 250 manuscripts and nearly 50 incunabula of the various versions have survived.15 The version on which we base our remarks here is the Continental European one, as it is represented by the late-fourteenth-century German translation of Michael Velser. The South Tyrolean nobleman, who seems to have had some contacts in scholarly circles, appears to have produced a relatively faithful translation of a French version of Mandeville’s text circulating in Italy, with occasional personal additions.16 Like the other versions, this one is separated into two parts, though the division is not clearly demarcated. Rather, there are smooth transitions between descriptions of the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land, Cairo, Jerusalem, and the holy sites followed by an account on regions farther to the East, Cathay, the land of Prester John, and numerous islands inhabited by more or less foreign beings. One of the text’s peculiarities is that, while it has a narrative subject who repeatedly steps forward, an “I” who has seen or heard this or that, spoken with people, drunk from springs, wandered through dangerous valleys, an “I” who even emphasises on several occasions that he cannot report precisely on certain phenomena, this subject is not continuous or contoured. It is a shadowy presence about whose travels we learn virtually no details, yet it is an exemplary one representing a sort of “super traveller”, one who undertook not one journey upon which he is now reporting but many journeys – an expert whose journey has been underway for more than a decade, including many years spent as a mercenary for both the Sultan and the Great Khan. Another peculiarity is that the text, while possessing key characteristics of a pilgrimage account, also deviates in many respects from the conventions of the genre: Even at the outset, no concrete travel route is provided for the first leg of the journey. Instead, the author lays out a range of possible travel routes. Subsequently, an itinerary is suggested, leading from Constantinople to Jerusalem via Rhodes, Cyprus, Cairo, and the Sinai, which conforms to one of the known pilgrimage routes, but no clear syntagmatic movement occurs. Instead, the individual stations merely seem to provide the occasion for the paradigmatic unfolding of as many spectacular moments and narrative-historical miniatures as possible. Later, too, the text repeatedly mentions alternative routes. Such divergent possibilities do not leave the text’s value system untouched. While Mandeville’s interest in foreign religious practices should not be confused with later forms of tolerance, it does evidence a fascination with the structural orders of alterity and is combined with a critique of the pope or the clergy.17 The status of Jerusalem also changes
30 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening within this framework. To be sure, the Holy City remains the centre and destination of the first part of the Travels,18 but both the mentions of various routes and the constant deviations from the travel narration weaken the purposefulness of the journey.19 The subsequent shift, from the home journey westward to the onward journey to the East, leads to an actual decentring of Jerusalem and the history of salvation as a whole: While phenomena relevant to religion and salvation exist in the East as well – sites associated with the Old Testament, phenomena related to biblical passages – they are mixed with the wonders that unfold abundantly in the East. These mirabilia are essentially just as rooted in divine Creation as the miracula directly tied to the divine history of salvation, but they shift the area of tension from material manifestations and soteriological meanings towards culture and nature. Even Paradise, which the textual subject claims to have approached, is now no longer the ultimate destination of the journey, as it had been in Alexander’s campaigns of world conquest to which Velser refers, but merely one place among many; the text then proceeds to describe a series of other islands. All of these shifts also influence the text’s temporal structures. Time is important to the author. This is evident not just from the relatively large number of temporal indications but also from the pronounced emphasis on the question of measuring time, which is taken from the sources: It is said of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem that the ‘heathens’ had installed a wheel on the altar in order to determine the time of day. Various versions are given of Christ’s age (33 years and 3 months, 40 years), which are explained in terms of the difference between the ancient Roman and the Julian calendar, which consisted of 10 and 12 months, respectively.20 These passages reflect, more intensely at some points than others, principles that mark the text overall: On the one hand, a precisely measurable temporality, which was important to other authors of travel accounts, is noted as rather unusual here; on the other, time in the form of history is closely tied to the figure of Christ and to the history of salvation that extends from him into the past as well as the future.21 In this respect, a different temporality than the usual applies: Adam and Eve entered and were expelled from Paradise on the same day; the Three Kings had made it from India to Bethlehem so quickly, in just 13 days rather than the usual 53 – “not because of their riding, but through divine power”.22 The dominant categories that appear in the text are days and years; occasionally, time is expressed in weeks and months. In some instances, the numbers refer to historical incidents from the Old and New Testaments: Adam lived in the Valley of Mamre for 100 years after the murder of Abel; Sara was 290 years old when Isaac was born; David was King in Hebron for eight and a half years and in Jerusalem for 33 years; Jesus fasted for 40 days and appeared to his disciples eight days after his Resurrection; John the Evangelist was 32 years old at the time of Christ’s Passion and 80 at the time of his own death. However, distances
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 31 are frequently given in days of travel: It took three days from Achon to Palestine, eight days through the desert from Gaza, 40 days from Babylon to Great Babylon, 32 days to Muscat, one day from the Helm Valley to the tomb of St Katherine, and 13 days through the desert from there to Jerusalem, which was a half day’s journey from Bethlehem and a whole day’s journey from Nazareth, and it took three days from Trancundia to Damascus. While some numbers mark spatial distance, these time-oriented details suggest a moment of forward motion, which then repeatedly dissipates. Since the text does not go back to a precisely situated journey, there is no consistent dimension of time in its course. What seems central is the connection between the sites as such; a person can travel from one place to another; a comprehensible order prevails in the travelled and the depicted world. The character of the temporal details is more paradigmatic than syntagmatic. This is also true of the few chronographic markers of absolute time: the year 1322, mentioned at the beginning and the end as the year when the journey started (3,13–14; 178:9), the year 1357, placed at the end;23 before that 292 is written as the year of the conquest of Tripoli by the Sultan (25:5–6), and 509 is given as the year of Mohammed’s ascent to power in Arabia (92:1). Other dates can only be deduced: 1187, the year in which Jerusalem fell to the Muslims, is indirectly mentioned at 51: 2–4 with a note that the infidels had been in possession of Jerusalem for more than 120 years. While time is representationally associated with order, it is diegetically associated with disorder. It concerns more or less catastrophic events, which allow the course of history to deviate from the salvation-historical line re-established by Jesus Christ, and to appear in the present as a terrible jumble of warlike, violent, power-hungry acts. In this context, time means extinguishing or overwriting that which previously existed on the site, transforming it into ruins,24 a danger to memory and the “truth” of the account.25 But it also means the hope of change, of restoration and renewal: “I trust in God”, the author writes in connection with the fall of Jerusalem, that the Saracens “will not hold the city for much longer”.26 Elsewhere, the text recounts at length the story of the Phoenix, which is reborn every 500 years in a process lasting three days – this is not just a well-known analogy to Christ but also serves as a link between the Christian and non-Christian worlds: The temple whose priests are the only ones to know the precise year when the Phoenix will self-immolate “is built like the temple in Jerusalem”,27 albeit with a few differences (32:17–18). The author also seeks traces of renewal alongside those of decay. The possible new era is, if not ushered in, at least recognised in its conditions by the both indistinct and superhuman subject, whose dates of departure and writing frame the text: This dual subject, who as a traveller is in a position to move more quickly than the ancients,28 for example, and as a writer, by skipping over places and condensing events,29 is capable of
32 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening tracing the image of a world in which promise had not yet been lost: The promise of a renewed presence of the early Christian situation. This presence combines with that salvation-historical (supra-)temporality embodied in the Holy Land, that “Promised Land” (1:6; “Terra Promissionis”) mentioned at the outset as the destination of the journey, which through its position at the centre of the world is also linked to the centre of time, Christ’s act of salvation. In the description of Constantinople, the first perspectives on the story of Christ open up based on the relics preserved there (the cross, the robe). With arrival in the Holy Land and Jerusalem, each site and each object then gains significance for Judeo-Christian history.30 The individual moments with the Old and New Testament stories together with them are an invitation to compress events with different relationships to the time of salvation in a complex synchrony. The history of salvation is rendered concrete in topology. Paradise lost and Paradise reopened, which reappears later as Paradise revoked, converge. Like Paradise, Jerusalem stands in an elevated position (albeit not quite as elevated as the former)31 and is also directly connected with it: One hundred-ten steps from our Lord’s temple in the direction of Solomon’s temple, on the outskirts of the city is the bath of our Lord. In this very same bath at this same time water came from Paradise, and it flows there still.32 These compressions in the time of salvation do not simply disappear to the degree that the second part of the text moves away from the Holy Land. Certainly, some passages seem to plunge the reader back into the terrible world suggested at the beginning in connection with Babylon, the first secular ruler Nimrod and his Tower of Babel. As the grandson of Ham, Nimrod also stands at the beginning of the genealogy of all the monstrous races whom Mandeville visits in the second part: Ham’s son begat Nimrod, who became the first king of all time and built the great Tower of Babel. The devils appeared to his wife and the others and had relations with them. Out of these unions came strange and unnatural folk, some headless, others legless, and still others eyeless. The next had horses’ hooves. All of the strange peoples who, as was reported before, can be found on the island, are descended from Ham.33 Yet the references to Judeo-Christian history by no means stop abruptly. Biblically coded places are everywhere, even outside the Holy Land: the rivers of Paradise, the home of Adam and Eve, the mountain on which Noah’s Ark landed, the tomb of the Apostle Thomas.34 Galilee as well
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 33 as Caßdilbe (ms.: Casdisle) in the East are significant for the coming of the end of time – of which there is no trace in the existing text. Rather, with the kingdom of Prester John, something else comes into view that has both a primal and an exemplary character in relation to the present world. Overall, what emerges is a movement not just into the past, but also “toward and into more explicitly heterogeneous temporalities”.35 While at first the continuing indications of the time it took to travel certain distances still suggested that the world of the Far East followed the same rules as those of the Near East, these demarcations diminish in the concluding sections. The indeterminate temporal indicators (etwen, or sometimes) increase. Miscellanea such as the custom of deflowering, which had long existed (165:13–15), are juxtaposed with the encounter with the sorcerer’s perilous false paradise, which had occurred recently (nit lang zyt, 159:17). Everything appears to be connected with everything else: the kingdom of Prester John with the earthly Paradise, but also with an insular land of Cockaigne that can be reached if one sails around the world from a certain island in the land of Prester John: This vast island, some 60 days’ journey long and some five wide, offers enough of anything one might need. Is the East an assemblage of religious, economic and political superlatives? Precisely when the impression of incommensurable strangeness seems poised to prevail, a continuity emerges to unite East and West via the dominance of monotheistic religion: The people encountered on the various islands, who practise different faiths, “pledge themselves together to God the creator of all things” (177:9). It is not the case that a cyclical type of time that runs counter to the linearity of forward movement only comes into the foreground in this concluding section. Such time is present throughout the text, such as in the form of the days commemorating the saints and selected pagans (Aristotle)36 and also with regard to nature. In Egypt there are trees that bear fruit seven times a year (33:14), in Sicily and Trebizond there are ones that remain green all year round (37:18–19), and in the Indian desert there are those that appear anew every day at dawn, only to disappear at dusk. Near Jerusalem, there is a well whose waters turn a different colour three times a year; at the court of the Great Khan splendid feasts are celebrated four times a year; there is an island where all of the fish go on land once a year and remain there until the third day, while on another in the kingdom of Prester John the seasons of summer and winter come twice a year (171). Thus, sometimes the contexts are Christian, and sometimes they are non-Christian; the differences between the two are blurred. Everywhere there are hints of relationships between different elements of the described world(s).37 Forms of cyclicality can serve to mark the foreign, when there is a difference in the usual forms of time. But they can also lead to a connection with the time of salvation. The Oak of Abraham, for instance, hypostasises the caesura in the history of
34 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening salvation, which at the same time has implications for politics and contemporary history: There [sc. in the vale of Mamre] is the dry tree, which the Jews and Saracens call Cirpe. It comes from the time of Abraham; some say it has existed since the beginning of the world. It was evergreen until the time when the Lord died on the Cross; then it became dry. At that time, all of the trees on earth died and dried out. And a prophecy about the dry tree says that a ruler from the West will capture the Holy Land with the aid of Christendom. He shall have a mass read under the dry tree. Thereupon the tree will be revived, with white leaves, and it will bear fruit. The miracle of this tree has caused many Jews and Saracens to convert to the Christian faith.38 In the Travels time is thus not merely an expression of earthly conditions, their contingencies and corruptions; it also embodies the hope of overcoming them in God-given order and abundance: Salvation history is given a decidedly apocalyptic focus by referring to the emperor of the last days. It is not simply heterogeneous like so much in this text compiled from so many sources; it also serves to link the heterogeneous, the creation of subliminal relationships, which reveal the portrayed world to be a network in which beginning, middle and end, centre and periphery, and the Christian middle of the world and non-Christian margins of Creation touch. The effort to create as many nexuses as possible also explains why the idea of travelling around the entire world plays such a large role: It reveals the unity of the world while also guaranteeing that this unity can be experienced – at least for a superhuman figure like Mandeville.
Hans Tucher’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land During the course of the fifteenth century, Mandeville’s Travels became one of the most popular books in the West. The growing frequency of pilgrimages and the accounts written about them did not render the older text obsolete. On the contrary, it was among the sources writers drew upon, and it was one of the travel accounts that began to appear in print in Latin and vernacular editions from 1480 on.39 Velser’s translation, for example, was published in Augsburg by Anton Sorg in 1480 and 1481 and by Johann Schönsperger in 1482. These were the very printers who around that time also brought out another travelogue, probably the first written specifically for the printing press: Hans Tucher’s notes on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1479 and 1480. Tucher, a respected burgher of Nuremberg, who held various municipal offices in his native city, had spent 49 weeks travelling and had already written several letters to his brother Endres during the journey that show his intention to publish. For his book, he relied on the notes of his travelling companion Sebald Rieter
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 35 the Younger as a basis and modified them, using among other sources an older Latin account by Ludolf von Sudheim, which had been published twice in Strasbourg in 1470.40 What is noteworthy about Tucher’s account is not the way in which he sought to combine the documentation of his individual journey with the presentation of a general guide for pilgrims.41 From the beginning, what is striking is the precision with which he localised his enterprise: On a Thursday, namely the sixth day of the month of May, 1479 years after the birth of our precious Lord Jesus Christ, I, Hans Tucher, a burgher and at that time a member of the Lesser Council of the city of Nuremberg, 51 years and 5 weeks old, set forth from thence.42 Such introductory passages are not unusual per se. Similar ones can be found in other texts of the period. Hans von Waltheym, who undertook a pilgrimage through the German Empire, France and Switzerland in 1474/75, begins his account by noting that he had set forth for Erfurt on horseback from his house in Halle “1474 years after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, on the 17th day of the month of February, that was the Thursday before Shrove Tuesday or Estomihi”.43 What distinguishes Tucher’s account from Waltheym’s is that, first of all, the salvation-historical and biographical dimensions appear to be linked from the outset, and, second, that he accords the temporal a precision and concision that renders it a virtual signum of the text. Tucher describes the journey to Venice, his embarkation for the sea voyage, and continues as follows: Item, on the 10th of June, a Thursday, the day of Corpus Christi, in the 79th year, at the 23rd hour, we pilgrims left Venice for the galley. It was docked at San Pietro di Castello. There we lay overnight and waited for wind. And on the 11th day of June, a Friday, we weighed the anchor and travelled one Italian mile towards the Castello and docked there for the night. And on the 12th day of June, Saturday morning, at 4 o’clock before dawn, we set sail and were piloted through the canals for about 10 Italian miles and there again dropped anchor, because the wind was against us.44 The departure proved difficult and halting, exposed to the vagaries of the weather (“gross fortune”). Tucher tries to capture this in his account by contrasting the passage of time with the hindrances to forward movement. It is clear here that time and temporality are not simply elements of the text. They also serve to convey an experience. Tucher’s time designations generally have three or four components: He mentions the month, day, and hour, or at least the part of the day or night, and sometimes also the closest feast day in the calendar of saints.45
36 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening This precision continues throughout the text, even when the journey goes through the Sinai desert. Indeed, the time designations gain more weight there, since there is often little else to report on the individual days.46 What made this precision possible appears to have been that Tucher was carrying a pocket or folding sundial, the kind introduced in Nuremberg a few years before by Johannes Regiomontanus, which Erhart Etzlaub would combine two decades later with a route map.47 In his description of the ascent of the Jebel Katherina, Tucher himself notes that they had walked uphill for five hours “as I actually saw on a compass that I had with me”.48 A brief episode illustrates the importance of this numerical dimension. It occurs in Jerusalem at a point when most of the other pilgrims had already set off for Jaffa and those remaining were no longer forced into a rigid sightseeing schedule. In this situation, when time is suddenly available (“we passed much time in this way”),49 The question of the measurability of time itself becomes a topic: Tucher recounts that he had built a sundial for the monks of the Abbey of the Dormition, so that whenever the sun shines they can see what time of day it is; they took much pleasure in this clock. It rarely rains there at any time of year, and when it does only in November and December. I installed the sundial so high on the southern side of the church that it can indicate twelve hours and can usefully be seen from many places in the abbey.50 At this point, however, measurable time had already acquired a somewhat different character than it had at the beginning of the journey. Arriving in the Holy Land and entering the city of Jerusalem and exploring its holy sites opened up new dimensions of “deep time”, of the salvation-historical past and the apocalyptic future. Like countless others before them, the pilgrims encountered the sites of the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ, which for their part were traditionally assigned to sites from the Old Testament story as well as ones from the period of the rediscovery of the True Cross by Helena. These sites were, in turn, associated with an indulgence, which was usually estimated at seven years and seven quadragenes (karren in Middle High German terminology, a penitential period of 40 days), but also historicised: Pope Sylvester had first introduced the indulgence for the Holy Land at the request of Constantine and his mother, Helena (375:4–7). These multifarious temporal interconnections acquire more complexity still: During his visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Tucher refers, with regard to the pillar where Jesus was flogged, to earlier encounters with fragments of that column in Rome and Lyon (“I Hanns Tucher the Elder, have seen three pieces of this pillar”).51 He also tries to make the description of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 37 more vivid by comparing it to the church of St Sebald in Nuremberg, so that readers could imagine it all the more clearly (391:3).52 The spatiotemporal situations on foreign soil and on home ground are thus intertwined: The returned author Tucher, who steps forward in his text at the exact point where he begins his account of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (“so I took it upon myself to write a description of the temple of the holy sepulchre”),53 visualises the now-past experience of the pilgrim with a memorial space embodying both historical salvation and a personal expectation of salvation.54 At the same time, he communicates this experience to a contemporary audience, which was able to integrate the description into their own local context and would likely have known two facts: The church of St Sebald was itself modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,55 and Hans Tucher would one day be interred there.56 The encounter with early Christian history abroad thus occurs against the backdrop of a local history founded on that very history, and it remains tied to the figure of Hans Tucher, who was a pilgrim, author, and Nuremberg citizen all at once. What emerges is a complex temporal conglomeration – composed not simply of past, present and future but also of various strata of the past, different dimensions of the present, and diverse futures enclosed in the past and the present. This is a conglomeration that the text does not merely reflect but also helps to create. Hans Tucher combines historicising and presentifying strategies on a large and a small scale. He supplements the description of the place with a brief chronicle outlining the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem. And in a single sentence he often interlaces the current perception of a particular monument or phenomenon with its historical dimension. Moreover, he applies methods that accelerate and slow time: Taking the single day as the basis of the journey and its description, he shows this day as more or less uneventful in one case (Sept. 22, 1479 in the desert: “we travelled until sunrise, made camp, sent the animals to drink”) and as full and fulfilling in another – for instance the first encounter with Jerusalem, where Tucher fills 25 pages with the description of just two days (Aug. 4–5, 1479), but then skips over 18 days. During the intense days in Jerusalem, Tucher dynamises the alreadycomplex temporality of local circumstances with regard to the movement of the pilgrims and the order of the description.57 Like other authors, he depicts the movement according to the pattern of the procession, at first emphasising three stations: the site of the Deposition from the Cross, the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, and the chapel of St Mary. He associates these stations with St Katherine’s choir in St Sebald, the Holy Cross Chapel (with a replica of the Holy Sepulchre) in Eichstätt, and the chapel of the Zwölfbruderhaus in Nuremberg, pointing out, however, that he would only describe the sites more precisely in the context of
38 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening the processional sequence. In this way, announcement and fulfilment appear separately. The normal and the solemn movements from station to station diverge. Only the second implements what is hinted at in the first. At the same time, the text assumes a circular structure: Upon the descent from Mount Calvary, references back to the beginning of the procession – still with comparisons to the church of St Sebald – correspond to the initial announcements.58 One could say Tucher does not simply discover the temporal complexity of the pilgrimage; he also turns the text into a specific medium of spatiotemporal experience – mediating between history and present, time of salvation and life time, and religious and secular temporality.
Daniel Ecklin’s Reißbüchlin Tucher’s travel account was reprinted several times in the 1480s until it was replaced in public favour by the more up-to-date travelogue of Bernhard von Breydenbach (first printed in 1486).59 After that, although journeys to Palestine continued to be very much in vogue, relatively few texts were published; most of them, since they differed from their predecessors only in details, remained in manuscript form. With the Reformation, the pilgrimage, which was associated with the sale of indulgences, fell into disrepute; both Luther and Zwingli spoke out against it. However, by the second half of the sixteenth century, even Protestants began to undertake more journeys and to document them in writing.60 One of the earliest Protestant texts is also one of the most popular: the Wandel oder Reißbüchlin by Daniel Ecklin, an apprentice apothecary from Aarau, Switzerland. Composed largely in 1557, Ecklin’s just 20-page-long pamphlet documents the travels through Europe and, finally, also to the Holy Land that the author undertook between 1549 and 1556. Following Ecklin’s early death (1564), it was not published until 1574, edited by his brother-in-law Hans Huldrich Ragor and published by his brother Georg. This proved the starting point for a phenomenal success story: Max Schiendorfer has documented 40 editions up to the early nineteenth century.61 The text continues in the vein of late medieval pilgrimage accounts. It is evidence less of a framework of salvation sedimented in topography than of an individual’s contingent experience of the world. From the beginning, the paratexts help to transform the travel account, which claims validity beyond the individual, into an authenticated “ego document”: Ragor’s preface and the conclusion (Beschluß), probably also from his pen, assemble elements of Ecklin’s biography; a detailed history of Ecklin’s life, written in first person, serves as a hinge between the preface and the account proper; the account is framed by letters of farewell and recommendation from the city of Aarau at the one end and the Abbey of the Dormition at the other, as well as various apothecaries
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 39 (from Schwäbisch Gmünd, Innsbruck, Padua, Pressburg, and Vienna) in whose shops Ecklin had worked. These paratexts occupy the place traditionally held in accounts of journeys to Jerusalem by shipping contracts and letters of safe conduct. Introduced as authenticating documents, they reveal the different character of this journey and the text: Ecklin had not undertaken a purposeful journey, let alone one to the Holy Land. While he did travel through South Germany and Austria to Italy, his intention was to seek opportunities to work in his profession. The subsequent journey to Corfu, Crete, Alexandria, Cyprus, and Syria then followed the model of the educational tour. It was only after arriving in the Holy Land that Ecklin took the path of a pilgrimage, though without paying any more attention than necessary to the classical monuments and holy sites. It is in keeping with this rather aimless mode of travel that the title of the first edition by Apiarius does not immediately refer to Jerusalem but more generally to Ecklin’s travels and earthly path; the character of the journey to Jerusalem is only emphasised in Apiarius’s second edition from 1575 (Reiß zům heiligen Grab, Journey to the Holy Sepulchre), which apparently attracted so many readers that the title was retained in subsequent editions. However, regardless of this external adaptation to the model of accounts of journeys to Palestine, it is impossible to overlook the text’s various deviations from the usual pattern: In some passages, Ecklin is critical of traditional knowledge, he accords himself a prominent role, and he occasionally inserts narrative episodes, such as when the protagonist narrowly manages to escape forced conversion to Islam, which seem better suited to the genre of the adventure or picaresque novel. From a temporal perspective, the work does contain the three levels observable in other travel literature texts: “a) what happened to the author himself [usually in the perfect tense, more rarely the simple past; both tenses are used in the narrative here]; b) that which always exists [present as the tense of the description]; and c) the time of earlier events, often from Holy Scripture [usually in the perfect here, more rarely in the simple past or past perfect]”.62 But overall, the third level, which is important for the older travel accounts, is more strongly subordinated here to the other two. Precise dates dominate, which make it possible to follow the journey to the day. The detailed biography at the beginning also already focuses time on the author’s lifetime and draws connections between it and the time of salvation: At the end of his curriculum vitae, Ecklin states that he was absent from Aarau for “vij. years and vij. days”,63 that is, from December 16, 1549 (his arrival in Basel) until December 23, 1556. But to arrive at this heavily symbolic information, centring on the sacred number 7, he must leave out both his training in Berne and a visit to Aarau in 1550.64 To the degree that this relates temporality to subjectivity, it also assumes ambivalent characteristics. The binding nature of a salvation-temporal
40 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening order is never explicitly called into question. However, the presentation of the history of salvation common in earlier texts also occurs here. Pragmatic matters dominate: storms, lightning, inclement weather, and seasickness.65 Good Friday is merely a day on the calendar when the danger of assault by pirates is averted by arms and deterrence; on Easter Monday a terrible storm rages, which they survive only because the ship is carrying no cargo. There is no transcendental explanation for the rescue, and the only seemingly supernatural element is the St Elmo’s fire, which the protagonist himself never sees but which is familiar to the seasoned sailors. In contrast, where it is a matter of classification beyond Ecklin’s individual concerns, the author focuses on current political authority – Corfu is “ruled in our day by the Venetians”66 – or on what he can perceive with his own eyes. This has far-reaching consequences: The Holy Land no longer appears as a Promised Land but rather as “the least fertile land I have seen in all of Syria”,67 an inhospitable desert, a barren region, rocky, misshapen, ruled by a crude, cloddish, ugly people, the Turks. This assessment appears to be in need of justification, and Ecklin’s defence is that he distances himself programmatically from the “old scribes” (33; “von alten Scribenten”), paper tigers who had never visited the place but only copied from other writers, thus perpetuating obsolete knowledge. Ecklin nevertheless does not adopt a secular perspective based solely on empirical evidence and personal inspection; he explains the barren state of the Holy Land transcendentally, as punishment “for the sins of the Jewish people” (34; ‘vmb der s nd willen des J dischen Volcks’). The text even occasionally slides into prophetic mode: Because of the homosexual practices that exist on Crete, the island is threatened either with its downfall or at the very least with subjugation by the Turks (understood as a divine scourge). As the traveller approaches the Holy Land, the association with the history of salvation becomes clearer. Amana, Aleppo, Antioch, Damascus, and Laodicea already hold the salvation-historical depth that had always been typical of pilgrimage accounts. The authenticating dates become sparser. While the entry into Jerusalem is marked by an emphatic, subject-related date,68 there is often no longer any focused description of the holy sites; the first-person narrator disappears from the text in places. Personal inspection and tradition as well as present experience and knowledge passed down by other authors can but do not necessarily conflict. Even that which can be perceived in the here and now is clothed in a hermeneutical model: The fertile surroundings of Damascus suggest to Ecklin that the place of Adam and Eve’s creation and the earthly paradise must be nearby; even now, the “remaining legacy” (30; “vber bliebne nachleibschat”) of Paradise is evident there. A landscape that remains tied to underlying associations with the time of salvation and is not seen for its own sake69 is given preference over (contemporary) structures that probably have only mnemonic functions. With the pattern of prophecy and fulfilment, the history of salvation serves the purposes of pure historicisation here.70
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 41 In the account itself, earthly time largely no longer appears to be sub specie aeternitatis but rather a scarce and precious commodity to be carefully husbanded. It is viewed from an economic perspective. According to Ecklin, such an undertaking was beyond both his economic means and his temporal possibilities: He could only pursue his work as an apothecary in Venice, where he initially lacked knowledge of the language, by spending a year paying a premium of “eighteen or twenty crowns” (16; “achtzehen oder zwentzig kronen”) or promising to work for two years. Two years was too long since he wished, after all, “to go into service for a maximum of one year, in order to visit and explore other countries”.71 Such a stance conflicts with that of the editor, the Reformed preacher Hans Huldrich Ragor, who adheres to the perspective of the history of salvation and sees God at work everywhere. He asserts, for example, that the Lord had accompanied the protagonist “with his angel” (7; “mit seinem Engel”) as Raphael had once done with Tobias, while Ecklin’s account speaks only of two “Turkish boys” (28; “mit zwei T rckischen B ben”) who kept him company on his path over Mount Libanus, together with the local shepherd. The general dichotomy between a universal order of salvation, in which everything has meaning and purpose and apparent contingency is abolished, and an individual existence that experiences contingency and resists classification within larger contexts, here acquires additional confessional complexity. Although the account lacks any mention of indulgences and other elements of the economy of salvation,72 and despite the fact that the protagonist draws advantages from his rejection of the obligation to fast, of priestly celibacy, and of the papacy (23), the text is not an expression of fervent Reformed faith. The Reißbüchlin documents one life and one subject characterised by his movement through the world and his attempt to translate this movement into writing.73 The mode of this movement is no longer the pilgrimage, but it can be synchronised with that mode. The objective of the time-recording practices was no longer a Jerusalem steeped in the time of salvation, and yet it can form the vanishing point from which even the adventurous is ennobled.
Effects of (De-)temporalisation in the Early Modern Period These three texts represent but a small section of the stream of travel literature that was becoming far broader and more impactful in the early modern era. Several tendencies are observable: (1) a growing differentiation in both geography and typology, (2) an increasing scholarly and systematic quality, tangible, for example, in the interest in exact, targeted and orderly information, and (3) a decentring of a 1000-year-old model of centre and periphery. People continued to write about travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, but these accounts now represented only a small proportion of the genre. They could not satisfy the growing need for the new
42 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening and the novel, and they also faced competition on their own ground from a new type of Near Eastern ethnography. In the work of Pierre Belon (Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables, 1553) or André Thevet (Cosmographie de Levant, 1554), Jerusalem and its environs are still described, but the chief focus is now on the ethnic groups and the flora and fauna of the eastern Mediterranean region. These tendencies also affected the role of time in travel accounts. While in Mandeville or Tucher, time was still a rather unfamiliar and thus a relatively plainly expressed means of organising the world and the text and of synchronising the experiencing and writing subject, other traits emerged now. On the one hand, the marking of the temporal course of the journey became more self-evident and thus also more inconspicuous; more or less detailed indications of time appear in virtually every account, and yet, even if religious and confessional aspects play a role, they now rarely lead to deeper dimensions of the history of salvation. On the other hand, there is a tendency towards detemporalisation as a function of the fact that many texts not only convey individual experience but were also intended as collections of knowledge that could be systematised. In this sense Hans Staden offers a two-part text in his Warhafftige[n] Historia vnd beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden/ Nacketen/ Grimmigen Menschfressen Leuthen (True History and Description of a Country Populated by Wild, Naked, Man-Eating People), which first appeared in 1557 and became one of the most successful travel accounts of the early modern era: The depiction of his experiences as a captive among native people in Brazil is followed by an ethnographic documentation of the life and rituals of the Brazilian Tupinambá. Special attention to temporal compression could then also accompany the interest in ritual scenarios (such as cannibalism in this case). But here again, Christian knowledge is crucial: The world in which Staden moves and which he describes is not only one created by God but also one that offers possibilities to experience the time of salvation. However, what becomes also visible is that the relationship between the dynamics of movement and the increase of knowledge poses new challenges. While the texts experiment with systematizations of space and time and their connections, they also have to cope with the tension between objective and subjective, encyclopaedic and empirical knowledge.74
Notes 1 The Itinerarium Burdigalense is a special case insofar as it is an itinerary serving not only pragmatic purposes but also developing literary dimensions; see for this and for an overview: Maximilian Benz, “Reiseliteratur”, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 28 (2017). 2 See Itineraria et alia Geographica, ed. Ezio Franceschini et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965); English translation: Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem:
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 43 ‘The Bordeaux Pilgrim’ (333 a. d.), transl. Aubrey Stewart and annot. Sir C. W. Wilson (London: Adelphi, 1887); Jaś Elsner, “The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine’s Empire”, The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000); Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: University Press, 2004). 3 Klaus Bieberstein, “Jerusalem”, Erinnerungsorte des Christentums, ed. Christoph Markschies and Hubert Wolf (Munich: Beck, 2010), p. 66: “Er […] entwarf auf der Grundlage spätrömischer Straßenkarten ein mit Meilenangaben fixiertes topographisches Netz, das dazu diente, Geschichten aus der biblischen Literatur in die Landschaft zu tragen”. All translations in the text are by Pamela Selwyn unless otherwise noted. 4 See Joan E. Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of JewishChristian Origins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 308; R. A. Markus, “How on Earth could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994); Herbert Donner, Pilgerfahrt ins Heilige Land: Die ältesten Berichte christlicher Palästinapilger, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2002). 5 Itinerary, p. 20. (slightly modified). Itineraria et alia Geographica, p. 14: “Sunt in Hierusalem piscinae magnae duae ad latus templi, id est. una ad dexteram, alia ad sinistram, quas Salomon fecit, interius uero ciuitati sunt piscinae gemellares quinque porticus habentes, quae appellantur Bethsaida. Ibi aegri multorum annorum sanabantur. Aquam autem haben hae piscinae in modum coccini turbatam. Est ibi et cripta, ubi Salomon daemones torquebat. Ibi est. angelus [sic] turris excelsissimae, ubi Dominus ascendit et dixit ei is, qui temptabat eum, et ait ei Dominus: ‘Non temptabis Dominum Deum tuum, sed illi soli seruies.’” 6 See Max Küchler, “Die ‘Probatische’ und Betesda mit den fünf ΣΤΟΑΙ (Joh 5,2)”, Peregrina Curiositas: Eine Reise durch den orbis antiquus, ed. Andreas Kessler et al. (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1994), p. 141. 7 See Peter Busch, Das Testament Salomos: Die älteste christliche Dämonologie, kommentiert und in deutscher Erstübersetzung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), p. 21. 8 Itineraria et alia Geographica, p. 16: “Sunt ibi et statuae duae Hadriani; est. et non longe de statuas lapis pertusus, ad quem ueniunt Iudaei singulis annis et unguent eum et lamentant se cum gemitu et uestimenta sua scindunt et sic redeunt.” See Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, pp. 109–17. 9 Concerning social emptiness see Blake Leyerle, “Landscape as Cartography: Early Christian pilgrimage narratives”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996), p. 126; he refers to the “socially empty spaces” on maps, see J. B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy. The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe”, Imago Mundi 40 (1988), p. 66. 10 See Nicole Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 11 See Christian Kiening, Fülle und Mangel: Medialität im Mittelalter (Zurich: Chronos, 2016), esp. chap. 8. 12 See Christian Kiening, Zwischen Körper und Schrift: Texte vor dem Zeitalter der Literatur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003), pp. 223–43 on Opicinus de Canistris, who connected space, time of salvation, and subjectivity in an experimental way. 13 For the spatial dimension see Bernhard Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit in Pilgerberichten, Amerikareiseerzählungen und Prosaerzählungen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993).
44 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening 14 Albert Bovenschen, Die Quellen für die Reisebeschreibung des Johann von Mandeville (Berlin: Pormetter, 1888); The Buke of John Maundeuill, Being the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, 1322–1356: A Hitherto Unpublished Version, from the Unique Copy (Egerton MS 1982) in the British Museum, ed. George F. Warner (Westminster: Nichols, 1889); see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 15 Christiane Deluz, Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une ‘Géographie’ au XIVe siècle (Louvain-La-Neuve: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1988); Klaus Ridder, Jean de Mandevilles ‘Reisen’: Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der deutschen Übersetzung des Otto von Diemeringen (Munich: Artemis, 1991); Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville. 1371–1550 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003); Susanne Röhl, Der livre de Mandeville im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur handschriftlichen Überlieferung der kontinentalfranzösischen Version (Munich: Fink, 2004); Jean de Mandeville in Europa, ed. Ernst Bremer and Susanne Röhl (Munich: Fink, 2007). 16 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung. In deutscher Übersetzung von Michel Velser. Nach der Stuttgarter Papierhandschrift Cod. HB V 86, ed. Eric John Morrall (Berlin: Akademie, 1974). 17 See Christina Henss, Fremde Räume, Religionen und Rituale in Mandevilles Reisen: Wahrnehmung und Darstellung religiöser und kultureller Alterität in den deutschsprachigen Übersetzungen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). 18 See Ian M. Higgins, “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multitext’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville”, Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Suzanne M. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: University Press, 2008), pp. 109–34; Suzanne C. Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient. 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 58–63. 19 See Klaus Ridder, “Übersetzung und Fremderfahrung: Jean de Mandevilles literarische Inszenierung eines Weltbildes und die Lesarten seiner Übersetzer”, Wolfram-Studien 14 (1996), p. 249. 20 Mandevil’s Travels, vol. II, ed. Malcolm Letts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), p. 268; Velser 52,17–53,3. 21 For example, Hermes is Christianised via the paradigm of prophecy; a golden plaque with a trilingual report of the virgin birth and the faith of Christ is found in a grave: “Uff der tauffel da fand man geschriben das der man tod was tusent jar, e das Cristus geborn ward. […] Und sie sprechend daz was der wyß philosophus Hermes” (Velser 12,9–12). 22 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 48,2–5: “Nu s llent ir wissen, als sie unserm herren sin opffer brauchtent, daz sie nit dar kemen von rittens wegen daz sie mochtend hon geton, wann besunder von gottes crafft, wann sie koment in tryzehen tagen.” 23 The year 1357 appears at least in the oldest French manuscript of the continental tradition as the year of the alleged composition of the text, the year of remembering the “time past”, the order, the recording; see Letts: “en prenant soulas en mon chetif repos et en recordant le termps passe, iay ces choses copulees et mises en escript, tout ainsi quil men puet souuenir, lan de grance mil ccc. Lvii., le xxxve an que ie me party de nostre pays.” Mandevil’s Travels, vol. II, p. 411. Velser states, “Und was ensit mers biß man zalt von Christus gebúrt tusent drú hundert und súben und fúnfftzig jär” (178,11–13).
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 45 24 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 66,8–10: “Und uff dem selben berg an der selben statt etwen ein sch n kirch; sie ist nun aber nider geworffen, und ist nit da wan ain ainsidel huß.” 25 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 4,7–11: “Und die enhalb meres sind geweßen múgen verniemen ob ich war sag oder lieg, und ouch ob ich an kainer lay sach f lte, daz sie das recht machtend. Wann dinge die vor langer zitt geschenhen sind, m cht ich licht nit als eben gedencken. Dar umb wil ich das yederman, wa ich nit recht hette, mich múge gestrauffen.” 26 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 51,4: “Sie behaltend sie aber nit lang, ob gott wil.” 27 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 32,17–18: “In der stat ist ain tempel gemachet, der ist gelich dem z Jerusalem […]”. 28 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 171,7–10: “Vor alten zytten fůr man von Priester Johans land in dry und zwaintzig tagen oder in vier und zwaintzig tagen. Nun hond sie schiff gemachet, das man nun fůrt in acht tagen oder in súben tagen dar.” 29 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 4,16–18: “Und wissend das ich nit wil sagen von allen den stetten, d rffern und bergen da man durch faren m ß, wann es wurde ze land ze sagend, wann nun von besunder etlichen land da ain man durch faren můß, wil er die rechten strauß faren.” 30 Cf. Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, pp. 78–110. 31 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 165,21–23: “Da das paradyß ist, da ist das erterich h cher wan es in der welt ienen ist und ist an dem anfang der welt gen orient wert es.” 32 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 59,25–28: “Von unsers herren tempel wol uff zehen und hundert schrit gen Salomos tempel veretz an ainem ende in der statt da ist daz bad unsers herren. Und in das selb bad z den selben zitten kam wasser uß dem paradys, und noch tropffet es da selbs.” 33 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 133,21–27: “Von Chams sun ward geborn Nembrott, der was der erst kúnig der ye ward, der den großen turn von Babilonia hieß machen. Und z des selben wib und z den andern komen och die túfel und hettend mit in z schickend. Und daz das von in geborn wart das ward wunderlich volck wider die natur, ains än höpt, das ander an bain, das dryt on ögen; das ain hett f ß als ain pf rit. Als ich hon vor geseit, menig wunderlich volck das man fint in den ynselen die sind al von Cham kommen.” 34 This principle can also be found in other travel narratives to Asia, see Marina Münkler, Erfahrung des Fremden: Die Beschreibung Ostasiens in den Augenzeugenberichten des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), p. 283. 35 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 78. 36 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 10,24–26: “Da ist Aristotiles begraben under ainem altar, der ist uff sinem grab. Und wenn sin jarzitt ist, so ist da groß kirchwihe, als ob er hailig w re.” 37 Cf. Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 151. 38 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung, 46,11–21: “Da ist der dúrre bom, den haissent sie die juden und die haiden Cirpe, und der ist sider Abrahams zitten. So sprechent etlich daz es sy syder die welt geschaffen ward. Und waz z allen zitten gr n byß uff die zitt da gott an dem krútz starb, do ward er dúrr. Do sturbent und dorrottent all b m, als billich waz uff ertterich. Nun findet man in der prophecien von dem dúrren böm daz sol ain fúrst gesessen
46 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening sin gen occident, daz sol das hailig land gewinnen mit der cristen hilff und sol mesß laussen sprechen under dem dúrren böm. So sol der böm wider z im selber komen und sol wisß pletter haben und frucht tragen. Und von des selben bomes wegen zaichen so hond sich bekert manig juden und haiden z cristenlichem gelouben.” 39 See Michael Herkenhoff, Die Darstellung außereuropäischer Welten in Drucken deutscher Offizinen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), pp. 59–66. 40 Edition and exhaustive study of the transmission of the text: Randall Herz, Die ‘Reise ins Gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren 1479–1480: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung und kritische Edition eines spätmittelalterlichen Reiseberichts (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002). 41 Carla Meyer, “New Methods and Old Records: Awareness and Perceptions of the Near East in Hans Tucher’s account of his journey to the Holy Land and Egypt”, The Medieval History Journal 15, no.1 (2012). 42 Tucher, Reise, 339, 2–5: “NAch Cristi vnsers lieben Heren gepurt M cccc lxxix jar am dorstag, der do was der sechst tag deß monetz may, pin jch Hanns Tucher, burger vnd die zeyt einer deß kleineren ratz der stat Nuremberp, meines alters einvndfunfczig jare vnd funf wochen, soselbst außgezogen.” 43 “Do vone so bitte ich uch wisen, das ich Hans von Waltheym mit mynem knechte noch Cristi vnsers herren gebort thusent virhundert dornoch in dem viervndesobynczigisten iare des sobynczigisten tages des monden februarii, das was der nehiste donnerstag vor fastnacht adir esto michi, zeu Halle uß mynem huse reyt geyn Erfforte.” Die Pilgerfahrt des Hans von Waltheym im Jahre 1474, ed. Friedrich Emil Waltheym (Bern: Stämpfli, 1925), p. 1; see Arnold Esch, “Von Halle in die Provence: Der Bericht des Hans von Waltheym über seine Pilgerreise”, Jahrbuch für hallische Stadtgeschichte 5 (2007). 44 An Italian mile equals 1.8 kilometres. Tucher, Reise, 350,7–351,1: “Jtem am zehenden tag deß monatz juny, waß pfincztag vnsers Heren leichnams tag im lxxix jar, zu xxiij oren, furen wir pilgram von Venedig herauß auf die galein. Die stund pey den castellen heraussen. Do lagen wir die nacht wartend auff den windt. Vnd am xj. tag juny, freitag, do zugen wir furpaß am ancker auff ein welische meil für die castell herauß vnd lagen do auch die nacht. Vnd am xij. Tag juny, samstag frue, vmb iiij oer auff den tag, machten wir den segell auff vnd furen mit sturmannen durch die fusen pey x welisch meilen vnd wurffen aldo ancker, wann der windt wyder vns waß.” On the role of Venice in travel narratives of pilgrims: Andrea Denke, “Auf dem Weg ins Heilige Land: Venedig als Erlebnis”, Das Mittelalter 3, no. 2 (1998). 45 See Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit, p. 70. 46 This is common ground. Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, p. 140, remarks that Ogier d’Anglure, for example, who travelled in the years 1395–96, “merely juxtaposes temporal landmarks, producing the effect of a perpetual sameness of moments in time experienced by someone who feels his activity has been reduced to merely making his way from one well to another”. 47 See Ernst Zinner, Die fränkische Sternkunde im 11. bis 16. Jahrhundert (Bamberg: Reindl, 1934), p. 54. Astronomie in Nürnberg, ed. Gudrun Wolfschmidt (Hamburg: Tredition Science, 2010). 48 Tucher, Reise, 541,11–542,1: “als ich das an einem compass, den ich pey mir hett, eigentlich sahe.” 49 Tucher, Reise, 449,14: “Do vertriben wir vil zeyt, dieweil wir do waren.”
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 47 50 Tucher, Reise, 450,1–7: “Jch machet auch den munchen an die kirchen auff dem perg Syon ein sunnen or, das sie albeg sehen mügen vmb welche zeyt eß am tag ist, so die sunne scheynt, zu der ore sie groß freud vnd geuallen hetten. Es regent gar selten jm jar doselbst, dann newer jme nouember vnd december. Jch machet jn die or gegen dem mittag an die kirchen so hoh, das die xij stund zaygen mag vnd jn an vil enden jm closter dynt, so sie die sehen mugen.” 51 Tucher, Reise, 395,7–8: “Also das jch, Hanns Tucher der elter, dre stuck von dieser seulen gesehen habe.” 52 On this comparison: Reiner Hausherr, “Ein Pfarrkind des heiligen Hauptherren St. Sebald in der Grabeskirche”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 40 (1986); Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit, pp. 71–77; generally on the role of comparisons: Arnold Esch, “Anschauung und Begriff: Die Bewältigung fremder Wirklichkeit durch den Vergleich in Reiseberichten des späten Mittelalters”, Historische Zeitschrift 253 (1991). 53 Tucher, Reise, 390,12–13: “Jtem so hab jch mir furgenommen, ein gleichnuß von dem tempel deß Heiligen Grabs zu schreiben […]”. 54 Christian Kiening, “Prozessionalität der Passion”, Medialität der Prozession, ed. Katja Gvodzdeva, Werner Röcke, and Hans-Rudolf Velten (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010); Kiening, Fülle und Mangel, ch. 8. 55 See Gerhard Weilandt, Die Sebalduskirche in Nürnberg: Bild und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Gotik und Renaissance (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007). 56 Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit, p. 74. 57 See Kiening, “Prozessionalität der Passion”. 58 Tucher, Reise, 402,12: “geleich als vor stet, do man erstlich jn tempel gegangen ist”; Tucher, Reise, 402,1: “alß zu Eystet in vor der stat, alß ich vor am anfang deß tempelß dauon geschriben habe”; Tucher, Reise, 403,10: “wie vor stet, do man die processen anfing.” 59 See Herkenhoff, Die Darstellung außereuropäischer Welten, pp. 180–204. 60 See Sean Eric Clark, “Protestants in Palestine: Reformation of Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Diss. Univ. of Arizona, 2013), http://hdl.handle.net/10150/312483 (accessed Jan. 7, 2020). 61 Daniel Ecklin (1532–2. 1. 1564), Reise zum Heiligen Grab. Nach der Druckausgabe Basel: Samuel Apiarius 1575, ed. Max Schiendorfer (Zurich, 2014): www.mediaevistik.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ff0fb58a-aa1c-4aab9018-323073aca8a2/Ecklin_Reisebericht_Neuausgabe_2014.pdf (accessed Jan. 7, 2020). On the transmission of the text: pp. 48–63; see Max Schiendorfer, “Daniel Ecklin (1532–1564). Ein Aarauer Weltreisender des 16. Jahrhunderts”, Argovia 126 (2014). 62 Larissa Naiditsch, “Grammatische, lexikalische und stilistische Züge einer Reisebeschreibung im 16. Jahrhundert: Daniel Ecklins ‘Reiß zum heiligen Grab’ (1575)”, Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication 2 (2015), p. 129. 63 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 12: “Die zeit so ich von Arow gewesen bin bringt vij. Jar vnd vij. tag.” 64 The visit can be reconstructed, because the “Abscheid vnnd F rdernuß Brieff” of the city of Aarau (date June 18, 1550) mentions that Ecklin appeared at the Council “heüt seiner Datum” (13); cf. Schiendorfer, Daniel Ecklin, p. 13, note 51. 65 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 17. “Den xxx. Mertzens als ein wenig ein starcker wind gieng / vnd das Schiff auff vnnd nider gieng / kam mich so
48 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening ein grausams vnwillen an / daß ich vermeint ich m ste Lung vnd L ber außspewen.” 66 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 20: “Sie wirt z vnserer zeit beherrschet von den Venedigern.” 67 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 33: “Das heilig gelobte Land […] ist das aller vnfruchtbarist Landt so ich in gantzem Syria gesehen hab”. 68 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 31: “Als man zalt nach der menschwerdung Jesu Christi des sons Gottes 1553. Jar / im Brachmonat / am xxix. Tag desselbigen Monats / morgens fr vmb vj. vhr / meines alters im xxj jar / bin ich komen in die Heilig / in aller welt bekante v verr mpte Statt Jerusalem.” 69 Cf. Karlheinz Stierle, “Augen-Lust: Perspektivismus und Innerweltlichkeit in Landschaften des Spätmittelalters und der Renaissance”, Zukunft braucht Herkunft, ed. Hermann Glaser and Dieter Distl (Schrobenhausen: Bickel, 1998). 70 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 34: “Darneben zeigt man alle gebeuw vnd heuser / wie sie vorzeiten gewesen sein / als Pilati / Herodis / etc. Als wann sie nie zerst rt weren mit der Statt / so es doch alles zu grund gangen vnter Tito vnd Vespasiano / wie es jn Christus vor hat gsagt / vnd Josephus der J disch History schreiber alles ordenlich verzeichnet / wie es alles erf lt ist word ” (see also p. 37). 71 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 16: “Der zweyen Jaren halb bedunckt mich die zeit zu lang sein / dann ich keinem Herren mehr lenger verbunden sein wolt / dann ein Jar / damit ich andere L nder auch besichtigen vnd erkundigen m chte”. 72 See Schiendorfer, “Daniel Ecklin”, p. 123 concerning the relic of the True Cross venerated in Cyprus. 73 Ecklin, Reise zum Heiligen Grab, p. 24: “Aber wir saumpten vns hie nicht lang / will derhalben mein federen mit der Schiffart auff Cypern zu wenden”. 74 See Christian Kiening, “‘Erfahrung’ und ‘Vermessung’ der Welt in der frühen Neuzeit”, Text – Bild – Karte: Kartographien der Vormoderne, ed. Jürg Glauser and Christian Kiening (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007).
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Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 49 Clark, Sean Eric, “Protestants in Palestine: Reformation of Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Diss. Univ. of Arizona, 2013), http://hdl.handle.net/10150/312483 (accessed Jan. 7, 2020). Daniel Ecklin (1532–2. 1. 1564), Reise zum Heiligen Grab. Nach der Druckausgabe Basel: Samuel Apiarius 1575, ed. Max Schiendorfer (Zurich, 2014): www. mediaevistik.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ff0fb58a-aa1c-4aab-9018-323073aca8a2/Ecklin_ Reisebericht_Neuausgabe_2014.pdf (accessed Jan. 7, 2020). Deluz, Christiane, Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une ‘Géographie’ au XIVe siècle (Louvain-La-Neuve: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1988). Denke, Andrea, “Auf dem Weg ins Heilige Land: Venedig als Erlebnis”, Das Mittelalter 3, no. 2 (1998), pp. 107–26. Die Pilgerfahrt des Hans von Waltheym im Jahre 1474, ed. Friedrich Emil Waltheym (Bern: Stämpfli, 1925). Dinshaw, Carolyn, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Donner, Herbert, Pilgerfahrt ins Heilige Land: Die ältesten Berichte christlicher Palästinapilger, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2002). Elsner, Jaś, “The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine’s Empire”, The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000), pp. 181–95. Esch, Arnold, “Anschauung und Begriff: Die Bewältigung fremder Wirklichkeit durch den Vergleich in Reiseberichten des späten Mittelalters”, Historische Zeitschrift 253 (1991), pp. 281–321. Esch, Arnold, “Von Halle in die Provence: Der Bericht des Hans von Waltheym über seine Pilgerreise”, Jahrbuch für hallische Stadtgeschichte 5 (2007), pp. 10–39. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Harley, J. B., “Silences and Secrecy. The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe”, Imago Mundi 40 (1988), pp. 57–76. Hausherr, Reiner, “Ein Pfarrkind des heiligen Hauptherren St. Sebald in der Grabeskirche”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 40 (1986), pp. 195–204. Henss, Christina, Fremde Räume, Religionen und Rituale in Mandevilles Reisen: Wahrnehmung und Darstellung religiöser und kultureller Alterität in den deutschsprachigen Übersetzungen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). Herkenhoff, Michael, Die Darstellung außereuropäischer Welten in Drucken deutscher Offizinen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie, 1996). Herz, Randall, Die ‘Reise ins Gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren 1479– 1480: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung und kritische Edition eines spätmittelalterlichen Reiseberichts (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002). Higgins, Ian M., “Defining the Earth’s center in a medieval ‘Multi-Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville”, Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 29–53. Itineraria et alia Geographica, ed. Ezio Franceschini et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965). Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem: ‘The Bordeaux Pilgrim’ (333 a. d.), transl. Aubrey Stewart and annot. Sir C. W. Wilson (London: Adelphi, 1887).
50 Maximilian Benz and Christian Kiening Jacobs, Andrew S., Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late antiquity (Stanford: University Press, 2004). Jahn, Bernhard, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit in Pilgerberichten, Amerikareiseerzählungen und Prosaerzählun gen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993). Jean de Mandeville in Europa, ed. Ernst Bremer and Susanne Röhl (Munich: Fink, 2007). Kiening, Christian, Zwischen Körper und Schrift: Texte vor dem Zeitalter der Literatur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003). Kiening, Christian, “‘Erfahrung’ und ‘Vermessung’ der Welt in der frühen Neuzeit”, Text – Bild – Karte: Kartographien der Vormoderne, ed. Jürg Glauser and Christian Kiening (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007), pp. 221–55. Kiening, Christian, “Prozessionalität der Passion”, Medialität der Prozession, ed. Katja Gvodzdeva, Werner Röcke, and Hans-Rudolf Velten (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), pp. 177–97. Kiening, Christian, Fülle und Mangel: Medialität im Mittelalter (Zurich: Chronos, 2016). Küchler, Max, “Die ‘Probatische’ und Betesda mit den fünf ΣΤΟΑΙ (Joh 5,2)”, Peregrina Curiositas: Eine Reise durch den orbis antiquus, ed. Andreas Kessler et al. (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1994), pp. 127–54. Leyerle, Blake, “Landscape as Cartography: Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996), pp. 119–43. Mandevil’s Travels, vol. II, ed. Malcolm Letts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953). Markus, R. A., “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994), pp. 257–71. Meyer, Carla, “New Methods and Old Records: Awareness and Perceptions of the Near East in Hans Tucher’s Account of his Journey to the Holy Land and Egypt”, The Medieval History Journal 15, no.1 (2012), pp. 25–62. Münkler, Marina, Erfahrung des Fremden: Die Beschreibung Ostasiens in den Augenzeugenberichten des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie, 2000). Naiditsch, Larissa, “Grammatische, lexikalische und stilistische Züge einer Reisebeschreibung im 16. Jahrhundert: Daniel Ecklins ‘Reiß zum heiligen Grab’ (1575)”, Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication 2 (2015), pp. 124–38. Ridder, Klaus, Jean de Mandevilles ‘Reisen’: Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der deutschen Übersetzung des Otto von Diemeringen (Munich: Artemis, 1991). Ridder, Klaus, “Übersetzung und Fremderfahrung: Jean de Mandevilles lite rarische Inszenierung eines Weltbildes und die Lesarten seiner Übersetzer”, Wolfram-Studien 14 (1996), pp. 231–64. Röhl, Susanne, Der livre de Mandeville im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur handschriftlichen Überlieferung der kontinentalfranzösischen Version (Munich: Fink, 2004). Schiendorfer, Max, “Daniel Ecklin (1532–1564). Ein Aarauer Weltreisender des 16. Jahrhunderts”, Argovia 126 (2014), pp. 115–39.
Mandeville, Tucher, Ecklin 51 Sir John Mandevilles Reisebeschreibung. In deutscher Übersetzung von Michel Velser. Nach der Stuttgarter Papierhandschrift Cod. HB V 86, ed. Eric John Morrall (Berlin: Akademie, 1974). Stierle, Karlheinz, “Augen-Lust: Perspektivismus und Innerweltlichkeit in Landschaften des Spätmittelalters und der Renaissance”, Zukunft braucht Herkunft, ed. Hermann Glaser and Dieter Distl (Schrobenhausen: Bickel, 1998), pp. 145–93. Taylor, Joan E., Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The Buke of John Maundeuill, Being the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, 1322–1356: A Hitherto Unpublished Version, from the Unique Copy (Egerton MS 1982) in the British Museum, ed. George F. Warner (Westminster: Nichols, 1889). Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville. 1371–1550 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003). Weilandt, Gerhard, Die Sebalduskirche in Nürnberg: Bild und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Gotik und Renaissance (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007). Yeager, Suzanne M., Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: University Press, 2008). Zinner, Ernst, Die fränkische Sternkunde im 11. bis 16. Jahrhundert (Bamberg: Reindl, 1934).
2 Like Moses on the Nile* Competing Temporalities in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654/1667) Christina Kullberg Visual surprise comes natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. […] The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts. Derek Walcott1
As a writer of one of the most acclaimed natural and moral histories of the French Antilles, Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610–87) can be placed within a humanist tradition that evoked classical forms and discourses in order to account for the New World. There are three versions of his Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667/71): the first one is a manuscript, dated 1648 and addressed to his patron’s, Achille II de Harlay, library. The second is a published edition from 1654, entitled Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique, comprised of two volumes. About ten years later, Du Tertre reworked and extended this edition with two additional volumes for a second publication under the title Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François.2 This book was enriched with illustrations by the most renowned French engraver of the second half of the seventeenth century, Sébastien Leclerc, and published under the patronage of Achille II de Harlay and his son Achille III de Harlay. Four years later, in 1671, two more volumes were added to this edition, supposedly commissioned by France’s Minister of Finances, Colbert, and published under the patronage of Jérôme Bignon, general attorney and master of the Royal Library. No other published book from and about the French establishment on the Caribbean islands had such prominent patrons. They validated the knowledge presented in the book and helped to place it within important *I would like to thank Michael Boyden for his attentive critical reading of this chapter. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous external reviewer for insightful comments.
Like Moses on the Nile 53 political, scientific, and worldly circles of the times. Their status also suggests that Du Tertre’s moral and natural history of the Antilles was not only intended to inform about the early colonisation; appealing to a varied readership was just as important. He wrote for those who had a direct interest in the establishment such as investors and settlers, for learned men as well as for readers with a more literary penchant. So when literary scholar Régis Antoine later calls him “the Herodotus of the islands”, it is precisely because Du Tertre had the ability to please and instruct an eclectic audience by revitalising a classical tradition and form.3 This chapter will examine the ways in which Du Tertre frames the historical narrative of the early stages of France’s Caribbean colonisation with ancient and mythical European temporalities. For Du Tertre, as for the Greeks, history meant an enquiry into things worth being noted in the natural and moral world.4 The presumptuous readers of the time who were part of the life of the salons as well as those participating in the circles of savants were all interested in curiosities from faraway places, whereas the more politically interested audience wanted to learn about the possession of territories and prospects of colonisation. In this context, Du Tertre’s writing of history produced a story that was as much about the present as it was about the past. It described the nature of the islands, looked at the current state of the colonies and elucidated events that shaped the French establishment on the islands. As a moral history, it comprised anthropological descriptions of the inhabitants of the islands, including not only Native Caribbeans but also enslaved peoples and French settlers. In other words, in the context of this book, noteworthy things are not always extravagant, exotic, or even unknown. Moreover, history was never dissociated from propaganda, and the question of what was worth being noted was subject for negotiation. It is from this very space of negotiation that I will address the profoundly contradictory temporalities that haunt Du Tertre’s representation of the French establishment. From the seventeenth century and onwards, noteworthy things are believable rather than marvellous, mirroring an epistemological shift in travel accounts from faraway places that had occurred since the Renaissance.5 This transition, I argue, is most evident in travel writing dealing directly with colonisation, such as Du Tertre’s history. Here, there are no dog-headed men, no giants, and even if the missionary described cannibals, he himself did not claim to have ever witnessed cannibalism. On occasion, he tells about monstrous phenomena, yet these are not interesting in themselves, nor are they presented as an obstacle the French heroically surmount. In one particularly gory passage, for example, a group of settlers, ravaged with sickness and famine, are stranded on a beach on the island Saint-Christophe, today St Kitts. Too exhausted to make it up to the nearby village, they stay on the beach and sleep under the stars. At night, giant crabs come down from the mountains
54 Christina Kullberg and eat the French to the bare bones.6 The passage illustrates how New World curiosities are inserted within the framework of the story about a shipwreck, a familiar topos for the reader, which is here directly linked to colonial politics; it serves as an example to show the reader that the establishment on the islands needs more support. The problem of temporality in early modern accounts of the New World has generally been addressed from two angles. First, temporality is framed in relation to the translatability of faraway places. It is often argued that the new, foreign geographies did not fit into any European conceptual or linguistic categories. To compensate for these shortcomings, travellers sought analogies and comparisons, always reading the New World in light of the Old, and thereby imposing a European and Christian linear timeframe onto the Americas. As an example, some attempted to explain the existence of people hereto unknown and, above all, not mentioned in the Bible, by claiming that the Native Americans were Jews who had been lost during Exodus; others claimed they were, in fact, Africans who then presumably would have “discovered” the Americas before Columbus.7 The absence of existing references in the libraries made travellers integrate the unknown into Christian linear times (since they had to have been something else before). The second temporal framework for interpreting European representations of the New World insists on the tendency to classify indigenous peoples and their world as a-historical, cut off from time as progress and therefore automatically remote, as theorised by Johannes Fabian as the “time of the Other”.8 But the model for such readings comes from Enlightenment texts, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous fictive construction of Natural Man, which posits the Native American as a contemporary version of how Europeans once were, before civilisation corrupted them.9 In the early modern context, as it were, the absence of historicity was either seen as a sign of barbaric backwardness or as a sign of innocence in comparison to European progress and corruption. And the European was cast as he who introduces time into other societies; time is an incision in the Other’s idyllic or chaotic present. These approaches to time take the idea of lack as their points of departure. Either European languages have a shortage of words to denote an American reality or the native Americans are absent from history. In both cases, the response is similar: in order to compensate for the lack and conceptualise “savage” nature and peoples, travellers framed them with references to the Old World, a world that, by virtue of its epithet, is seen as always already past even if it is present, to use the jargon of deconstruction. However, early modern travelogues can never only be interpreted in relation to the foreign world they describe; they must also be considered in light of the world in which they are produced and received. This insight might seem banal, but it does have an impact on the understanding of temporalities.
Like Moses on the Nile 55 As researchers have underscored, the main purpose of framing the Americas through references to the Old World is not necessarily to describe these regions and their peoples as observed and experienced by the travellers. Rather, the references appear as ways to respond to European perceptions of and discussions around the New World. On this basis, François Hartog argues that the Native American came to represent the third term in the dialectics between the Modern and Ancients, a debate that permeated early modern French culture.10 In a different context, Joan-Pau Rubiés has shown that the idea of reading Native Caribbeans in terms of antiquity or biblical mythology played a crucial role in the debate concerning their human status. By using comparisons with the Greek and Roman past, missionaries such as Bartolomé de Las Casas could argue that, despite the fact that they were not Christians, these peoples were part of a varied but unified humankind, sharing a past and a common destiny under one God. Putting the debates together (Do the peoples of the Americas have a place between the Ancient and the Modern? Are they humans?), Rubiés contends that during the Renaissance a “global modern vision” emerged, symbolically articulated through images of transoceanic navigations and supported by a series of analogies between Greeks, Romans, the children of Israel, and the native populations of the Americas, which would soon be transformed into tropes or codes dictating the writing from the New World.11 However, a troubling element seems to have been left out in the trinity suggested by Hartog’s dialectics and by Rubiés’ transatlantic global modern vision. While these models rightfully account for the representations of encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas, they circumvent the chronopolitics implied in depictions of the societies that emerged out of these confrontations; they do not take into consideration how colonisation or (transatlantic) slavery were narrated. This effacement of other temporalities linked to colonisation has in itself a long history, as Madeleine Dobie convincingly demonstrates in Trading Places.12 The representation of the New World, particularly in France, who touted herself as the land of liberty, was in early modern discourses neatly packed as an encounter between European and native, leaving aside the hybrid colonial societies and, most notably, slavery.13 Since the (late-)seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Dobie shows, French culture silenced the historical and cultural processes that emerged from colonialism and slavery. While it is true that historians have begun to shed light on the messy period of the French establishment and early colonisation,14 scholars from literature and cultural studies from Tvetzan Todorov’s Conquest of America: The Question of the Other,15 via Michel De Certeau’s The Writing of History16 and Christian Marboury’s Utopie et primitivisme,17 to more contemporary analysis such as Sara E. Melzer’s Colonizer or Colonized,18 keep returning to the symbolically strong image of the first colonial encounter. This is also true for the work of
56 Christina Kullberg the most prominent literary scholar of early modern French texts on the Americas, Frank Lestringant. His important study of Jean de Léry, Le Huguenot et le sauvage along with his work on representations of cannibalism, Le cannibal, grandeur et decadence, and French travellers to Florida, focus on the sixteenth century when the French colonial ambition in the Americas was meagre and ultimately failed; here, too, the first encounter is central.19 My argument in this chapter is that the blindness in regard to the colonial project has temporal implications. Taking a cue from the observation that it is in the space of negotiations of what is worth being told that competing times and temporalities are actualised, I claim that Du Tertre’s natural and moral history offers an interesting counterexample to the almost obsessive critical engagement with first encounters between Europeans and indigenous populations. In his account it is not the Native Caribbeans or the New World per se that are usually framed through references to European nature, peoples, and myths. Rather, the missionary uses references to Old World sources in order to narrate the establishment in its progression towards becoming a colony. The history of the French settlers and life on the islands, not the descriptions of the Native Caribbeans, are made explicit through analogies to Roman and biblical history and myth. Interestingly, the juxtaposition of ancient myths related to Christianity and the birth of European civilisations, and the Caribbean history of the time produces a narrative of competing temporalities that begins to capture the messy history of settlement in terms of early cultural crossings and creolisations.
Histories and Futurities We know very little of Du Tertre himself: born in Calais in 1610, he was the son of a doctor. During his younger years, he served in the Dutch marines and later in the Dutch army. In 1635, he changed careers rather abruptly, as he entered the order of the Friars at Rue du Faubourg SaintHonoré in Paris. Five years later he was sent to the Antilles with four other missionaries to come to the rescue of the small Dominican mission that had travelled to the islands in 1635 with Monsieur d’Esnambuc, the founder of the French colonies, and the Compagnie des Isles de l’Amérique, created by Richelieu the same year. Du Tertre resided on the island of Guadeloupe periodically between 1640 and 1658 and made five trips back and forth between Paris and the islands. During this period he travelled throughout the Caribbean and gained a thorough knowledge of the region, its geography, nature, and peoples. His sojourn coincides with the French establishment, which roughly stretches from 1625 to 1660. This was a tumultuous era in French Caribbean history: the settlers did not know how to cultivate the lands, and many died from famine or sickness, or they were chased from the islands by other peoples (Native Caribbeans, British, Spanish, or Dutch).
Like Moses on the Nile 57 Even if the settlers periodically lived peacefully alongside with the Native Caribbeans, wars often erupted as a result of conflicts over territories. We learn from Du Tertre’s account that the French massacred the Native Caribbeans on several occasions, and he did not always side with his compatriots in these reports, partly because these killings complicated evangelical work with the Caribs. The French gained some control by 1640, but the chaotic regency that followed Louis XIII’s death in 1643 and led France to the brink of civil war left the islands under the rule of proprietors and governors.20 The Compagnie des Isles de l’Amérique went bankrupt; proprietors refused to take orders from Paris, and together with governors they opted for personal profit, often at the expense of the well-being of both French and native inhabitants. The French presence was, in fact, far from triumphant and remained precarious up until 1660 when the French and the British signed a peace treaty with the Native Caribbeans and divided the islands between them; now the Caribs only had the right to inhabit Dominica and Saint-Vincent. By this time, Louis XIV had reached the age of majority, and his rise to absolute power affected the colonies. Under Colbert’s supervision, French colonial politics became centralised and directly controlled by the crown, a transition that happened as the sugar industry and the slave economy burgeoned, setting in place what historians have called “the colonial machine”.21 Du Tertre’s work is not the only written record of the establishment, but most of the texts from this period are shorter, written mainly for an audience of missionaries.22 There is only one longer book that rivals Du Tertre, namely Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morales des îles Antilles de l’Amérique, published in Rotterdam in 165823 – and they were indeed rivals, for Du Tertre accused Rochefort of having plagiarised his manuscript.24 What is most interesting for my purposes here is that the fundamental difference between the two histories stems from the authors’ diverging engagements with the Caribbean early colonial societies. Rochefort was a Protestant pastor and could not take part in colonial and missionary politics to the same extent as Du Tertre did. Moreover, Rochefort did not stay as long on the islands, and he did not participate in the everyday lives of the settlers. This is reflected in the narratives. Whereas Du Tertre often emerges in the first person, Rochefort takes a distanced narrative stance and is mostly absent from the account. These distinct positions vis-à-vis the narratives determine the question of time: from his more distanced position, Rochefort does not engage in the entanglements of colonial temporalities. In Du Tertre’s history, on the other hand, time becomes a narrative means to negotiate interests and positions that are sometimes contradictory. To understand the temporal layers in Du Tertre’s book, we have to get a sense of its form. The title gives the generic denomination histoire, and, based on the genre of natural and moral history as it developed from Aristotle, Herodotus, and Pliny the Elder by the Spanish and
58 Christina Kullberg Dutch, chroniclers of the Americas, notably José de Acosta, Willem Piso, Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, it is not organised chronologically. The first volume includes the history of the French establishment in the 1620s and 1630s, when Du Tertre himself was not yet present in the Caribbean, up to 1650 for the first edition (1654), and up to 1664 for the second edition (1667). The second volume contains the natural and moral history of the region, starting with the missionary’s own travels and then continuing, from the air and climate, through the natural world, and ending with the description of the different inhabitants of the islands: indigenous peoples, the French and slaves (both indigenous slaves and enslaved people with African origin). The third and fourth volumes from 1671 were not anticipated in 1667, and were probably written on demand from Colbert as an account of the success of his new colonial politics. These volumes no longer include natural and moral history but narrate more contemporary events and anecdotes, focusing on how the crown successfully dismantled the power of the proprietors and the governors and resumed control over the islands. Taken together, the volumes present different times and, on a narrative level, deploy different temporalities, depending on the narrator’s relationship to the events told. Roughly, it is possible to identify traces of two pasts – European history related to the region and Caribbean history prior to the arrival of the French. Adding to these historical times, there are different narrative temporalities. Du Tertre is at once un voyageur compilateur (a compiler traveller) relating other peoples’ accounts, and an eyewitness who participated in many of the events that constitute the narrative. Thus, he combines two distinct modes of travel writing and opens up for even more narrative temporalities. The text contains the times of the many trips he made over the Atlantic during the course of 18 years, the time of his sojourns, the time for all the other “trustworthy” sources on whose stories Du Tertre relies when he reports events in which he did not himself participate, and the various times of the written sources he uses. The temporalities of the narrative discourse bring further temporal entanglements: the time of the writing, the time of the narrative of events, particular temporalities of descriptions depending on whether it is a generic description introducing a chapter or if it is a description of objects or of practices. Finally, the illustrations have their temporality, distinct from those of the narrative. Clearly, the thematic structure of history writing produces a layered temporality, and the temporal folds have both a function and a symbolic significance since they facilitate connections between the Old World and the New. The book’s fragmented disposition also recalls the isolario, a book of islands, as if there was a relationship between the scattered geography of the Caribbean and the layered temporality of Du Tertre’s book.25 He writes: “Since I only wanted to write a history and not the annals of the region, I haven’t been strictly following the order of the time of
Like Moses on the Nile 59 the events”.26 Instead of letting linear time govern the organisation of his book, he opens up his writing to the archipelagic geography. To follow the chronology of the events would have made the text unreadable, says Du Tertre, because he would have had to jump “from one island to another”.27 His choice of genre is thus motivated by tradition, epistemology, and subject matter, but also by the fragmented spatiality of the region itself. In other words, the entire construction of the book seems to be made for temporal complications, apt at capturing what Thomas Pavel calls heterochronia, a way to live and to perceive “present time as organically linked to past times”, which characterised the early modern period.28 What is interesting in travel narratives from afar is that heterochronia implies heterotopia, a double spatial and temporal articulation. This double time-space permeates Du Tertre’s history. In one passage, for instance, where he relates how the French have been chased from Saint-Christophe by Native Caribbeans and Englishmen, he compares the settlers’ destiny with mythical, past times in the Mediterranean region: “Let us return to our poor colony, which floats on the waters of the ocean like the two small twins on the Tiber, like Joseph in the well, and like Moses in his basket on the Nile”.29 The comparison has a double purpose. First, the narrator has temporarily lost the narrative thread. In order to recapture the reader’s attention and resituate the story, he refers back to mythical figures. The reference is recognisable to the reader on many levels. In fact, Du Tertre begins the 1654 edition by comparing the colony to Romulus and Remus, Moses, and Joseph, as we shall soon analyse in detail. The point here is that he rearticulates that framing of colonisation in order to refocus the narrative story. Second, the precarious initial phases of settlement are here symbolically charged by means of analogy to these central mythical figures. The symbolism has temporal significance. The hardships and sufferings of these supposedly courageous Frenchmen are not in vain; they will bear fruit: like Romulus and Remus they will lay the foundation of an empire to come. The writer’s pro-colonial stance is evident, but between the lines, Du Tertre criticises colonial politics, suggesting that they – God’s chosen ones – were abandoned by their brothers, like Joseph in the well. Yet, the criticism is quickly mitigated as the narrator alludes to Moses, whose mother abandoned him to save him, and who reunited with his people. The references point in various directions, but the mythical figures invoked by Du Tertre share a common destiny: they start from abandonment and exile – two of them were even reduced to slavery, which clearly charges the comparison with unintended, horrific connotations in regard to the context of the Caribbean and the slave trade that Du Tertre does not develop here – but against all odds, they break their exile and end up as triumphant leaders. The passage shows that in the context of early French settlement, colonial domination does not operate from a position of narrative superiority.
60 Christina Kullberg Du Tertre borrows from the fragile elements of epic mythologies, particularly the passages where the heroes are children, weakened by storm and lost at sea. The comparisons suggest that authority over the new territories and peoples is gained through struggles; it is not given. Yet, the narrative of its hardships is not situated in the reality of the Caribbean but on the Nile and the Tiber. The French’s American adventure is placed in the lineage of a European heritage, as if the author tries to let writing infuse the narrative with the sigh of History as a supplement for what Derek Walcott, in his Nobel Lecture quoted in the beginning of this chapter, identifies as an “absence of ruins”, which characterises the Caribbean landscape. Moreover, the comparison relies on paradoxical or even contradictory temporalities. The references to the Bible and to antiquity introduce a mythical past tense into the “true” narrative of contemporary history (from the time-zero of the writing) of French colonialism. Myth merges with history. Even more interestingly, the destiny of the mythic figures used by Du Tertre points not towards the past but in the opposite direction, introducing a progressive temporality. Moses, the twins, and Joseph are abandoned homeless children who, through the course of time, will earn power and recognition. This way, the references to ancient times operate as a narrative prolepse, announcing prematurely the success that the colony will eventually achieve. Du Tertre embeds the story of French colonialism with a sense of moving ahead, towards the future and a new community to come, at the same time as this very movement is based upon an “inscription” in the mythical past. The process is mirrored in the very word colony: “Colony” is a floating signifier, not only because it is compared to Moses on the Nile but because it will progressively acquire a different meaning from denoting a group of people to referring to a territorial settlement by these people. Clearly, references to European history and myth do not, in this context at least, intervene in order to make sense of an inconceivable foreign reality. They do not impose an order to domesticate the islands by turning them into a mirror of the same. Rather, these complex temporalities tell us that colonial domination works by virtue of its temporal projection forward. They seize a moment of tension when a new society will soon be shaped through the exploitation of lands and peoples.
Dislocations and Relocations Let us look closer at this movement forward by analysing the beginning of the 1654 edition that places the history of the Antilles not on the islands but in the Mediterranean, with Moses, Joseph, and Romulus and Remus: I have often admired in the secular Antiquity the adventure of the two small twins who, just after they were born and after having
Like Moses on the Nile 61 been thrown into the Tiber, were fetched by a she-wolf that played the role of their mother, raised in a shepherd’s hut, and became the fertile seeds that produced the Roman Empire, whose branches are extended and multiplied in the universe. I haven’t found less strange what the Holy Scripture teaches us about the marvellous fortune of little Joseph, saved from the well, released from his chains to become King of all Egypt. The elevation of Moses is another great miracle of Providence that saved this child from an insurmountable sinking only to make him the Pharaoh’s God and the liberator of his people. But I can say without flattery that the establishment of our French Colony on the Cannibal islands is not less marvellous or surprising.30 The opening is a personal address in which the missionary offers his own reading of the destiny of the establishment on the islands. The firstperson narrative connects past events that he is about to relate, but did not himself witness, to the moment of writing. Referring to the old myths makes the missionary eligible to speak as an historian, but his choice is equally derived from a poetic logic. In this excerpt as well as in the earlier example, an aquatic element mediates the comparison to all the mythical figures and their stories. The waters in the well, in the Tiber, and in the Nile echo in the ever-present waters surrounding the Caribbean islands and link the American archipelagic reality to that of Europe; the seascape thus allows for connecting disparate temporalities present in this heterogeneous mixing of myths from antiquity and the Bible without any particular distinction except, as we have just seen, that these mythical anecdotes point towards the foundation of a community and the hardships such foundation entails. The poetic logic that carries the comparison reminds us that the references are also tropes of repetition that have other temporal implications. Reiteration is, as many scholars have pointed out, a poetic figure characteristic in travel writing that poses stylistic challenges to the genre: How does the traveller-narrator repeat without imitating that which has already been described by so many before them? Iteration shows a tension within the genre between conventions and a demand for singularity, between the traveller’s lived experience and the codes that govern writing, and is therefore an intricate temporal marker. However, in the case of referring back to the Bible and the myth of the foundation of Rome in the context of travel to the Caribbean, iteration does not occur as it usually does. What is repeated here is not the story of a traveller’s encounter with a particular site or object but the framing of history. The iteration in itself is disconnected from space and only operates on a textual level; this repetition creates a temporal and spatial dislocation. It breaks with the referential world and time and does not depend on the usual predicament of travel writing, which is to recount what happened.
62 Christina Kullberg Significantly, the passage quoted above is not part of the narrative body of Du Tertre’s history. It is an introductory discourse, a captatio benevolentiae and, as such, part of what we may with Gérard Genette call a paratext within the book, a textual threshold that allows the reader to enter into the narrative.31 It sets the tone and guides the readers as they move along. It is here that politics come into play. The comparison to mythical figures who started out as helpless, abandoned children but ended up as triumphant leaders associates the destiny of the colony to that of the young King Louis XIV.32 When Du Tertre wrote his book, Louis had just seized power and France saw an end to the civil war that had ravaged the country during the regency of Anne of Austria and Mazarin. Du Tertre, who was a royalist and did not approve of the tyranny of the Caribbean governors and proprietors who, in his opinion, had exploited the unstable situation in France and taken control of the islands during the 1640s, certainly saw an opening now that the king had reached majority and was now fit to rule the country. Alluding to the triumphant mythical figures, he places France, united and centralised after decades of religious conflicts and bloody uprisings, as the new Rome, an empire that brings peace and spreads its light across the globe. The image is also a direct challenge to the Spanish dominance in the New World, which Du Tertre often depicts as cruel, unlawful, and godless. In this context, the hardships of the French settlers are given a larger meaning. For contrary to the Spanish colonisers, who never had to pay for their exploitation of God’s children and land in the Americas, “In regard to the French, God acted as he had done toward the Israelis in the desert. He did not let one single crime go unpunished, because it is certain that each one who has sullied his hands with blood from these poor innocent peoples have paid for the massacre they committed with their life or their goods”.33 In short, the French obeyed God’s law and were being punished for their misdeeds against the native populations and against the earth, whereas the Spanish simply ignored it and were thus not worthy of having control over the Americas. Doris Garraway accurately compares Histoire Générale des Antilles with “a morality tale in which the French colonists are challenged, judged and disciplined by the deity whom they serve”.34 But the religious image does not stand alone. The biblical references work in tandem with the Roman intertextuality, which is more directly political. In fact, this captatio benevolentiae recalls that which Frank Lestringant has identified as an allegorical mode often present in travel accounts from the Renaissance and onwards, which operates as a circle in order to appropriate the New World under a symbolic system where the king is at the centre. The struggle of the colonial settlers receives a symbolic dimension by being compared to biblical and antique struggles and victories, which, in extension, connects the new colonies to the king. This kind of allegoric process, Lestringant notes, “turns the New World into not a true mirror image of the Old World, but into its lost Ancient
Like Moses on the Nile 63 ideal”.35 And, paradoxically, in pairing the colonies with the lost Ancient ideals of the Old World rather than with the present state of France, the passage builds a future temporality into the history of the establishment. Indirectly then, through its mythical references, Histoire générale des Antilles not only shows how France has evolved as a colonial power and is now morally worthy of possessing lands in the Americas, but the references also open up for the question of whether France is at the moment of the ascension of Louis XIV, ready to match Rome. Throughout the book, Du Tertre parts from the common use of Rome as a political model and an allegory of an empire. The focus is not on France being a replica of Imperial Rome, laying other nations under her feet. The target is the colonising process from the perspective of the settlers. The passage is an introduction to the history of the settlement, a history that is told as a historia magistra vitae without noble subjects. As Réal Ouellet points out, by referring back to Rome and the Bible, Du Tertre places the Caribbean islands in European history and temporality as part of a state-building that includes the colonies. Such displacement is, Ouellet suggests, also a conscious re-writing of Caribbean history: “By evoking Roman and Biblical myths, the chronicler tears the history of the Antilles from its pirate roots in order to situate it in a humanistic and providential perspective”.36 The islands should no longer be considered as a lawless region in which anybody could purchase land and rule freely. Instead, Du Tertre wants to promote the idea that the personal liberty and commercial gain that can be acquired in the Antilles are now part of a common community-building. Yet, even if the intention is to impose a linear, Christian time onto the region as a basis for community building, Du Tertre’s references contribute to the construction of layered temporalities. The constant movement between here and there, then and now, amounts to a narration that paradoxically ends up capturing a Caribbean colonial time rather than imposing a European Christian chronology. Looking closer, Du Tertre’s biblical and antique references are framed within a kind of American intertextuality. “I have often admired”, “I found it strange”, even “marvellous” or “surprising”, Du Tertre states in the quote above. The vocabulary of marvel and wonder is intimately associated with the Caribbean islands. However, the marvels admired by Du Tertre are not fantastic, monstrous, new, or strange as they would in a Renaissance discourse. Instead, he marvels over an actual historical process, over the labour of men that enables the establishment. In other words, we can again note a tendency to re-write Caribbean history, not only by downplaying the pirate roots as observed by Ouellet, but also by re-framing the Mediterranean references within a Caribbean context. When looking at how the quote evolves, this interpretation is justified: Because if we consider carefully the colony’s beginning and progress, we will see how it is born out of a small source that is gradually
64 Christina Kullberg cleared by ways known only to God, despite the mountains hindering it and men contesting it, and will water the most beautiful lands of the Americas. [The colony] will first, at the time of her birth, seem ruined to your eyes, and you will at the same time notice that by collecting the pieces of her debris, she will be restored on her own ruins against all hope, and will find such advantage and such success that even if she was abandoned and persecuted, even by those who were supposed to take care of her, she fills already several beautiful lands, that could become provinces, with French inhabitants.37 The passage is written in future tense, mixed with the present. The narrator directly addresses the reader in the inclusive “we” and prepares them for what is to come, at the same time asking for patience and reassuring that the story will end well. Here Du Tertre leaves the mythical figures behind and resituates the colony in Caribbean history and reality. The progressive temporality is again underscored. Comparing the colony to a source echoes with the common trope of the Antilles being the earthly paradise. But then, by introducing the idea of ruins, Du Tertre brings us back where he started: in Rome. Spain’s cruelty and negligence is indirectly evoked – driven by a thirst for the gold from the continents, Spain abandoned the islands, leaving them in ruins. This imaginary actualises the Caribbean past at the same time as it suggests that the islands will rise from their ruins and points to France’s glorious future empire, again mirroring Rome. Yet everything is framed in a natural, paradisiac setting, characteristic of representations of the island space. And with the particular temporality implied in the evocation of ruins – nostalgia and melancholia, which are also already a theme linked to American travels, long before Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques – the imperial intertextuality turns Du Tertre’s story of French colonisation into a tale of sacrifices and of ongoing constructions.
Colonial Temporalities and the Others Since Du Tertre’s temporal comparisons do not mainly serve to frame the Native Caribbeans or the New World in itself but, instead, to focus on the process that the colony undergoes as it takes the islands in possession, we have to rethink the assumption that the Greeks and the Romans provided the model for the French’s relationship with Amerindians. This observation might be relevant for earlier travellers who borrowed directly from Las Casas’s cultural relativism or for later travellers to New France, such as Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746), who developed a particular kind of early modern comparative anthropology. But looking at the French colonial context of the seventeenth century, arguments claiming that “the Ancients were for the French what the French were to be for the Native American barbarians” are simply inaccurate.38 As we have seen, rather than juxtaposing the a-history of the “savage” with
Like Moses on the Nile 65 European chronology and using references to antiquity to include the Native Caribbeans into the common history of humankind, united under one God, time comes out as a complex issue, intimately connected to colonisation and missionary practice. In Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, the other is not who we think; in most cases, it is not the Amerindian who takes the place as the Barbarian, but French New World libertines, “savage” French inhabitants, and governors who act like tyrants and disobey the crown.39 The Barbarian is not first and foremost an ethnic category in Du Tertre’s book but an ethical stance. If we contextualise Du Tertre’s history, it makes sense that he would choose not to privilege the encounter between Native Americans and French in the framework he borrowed from the Bible and from Roman mythology. As we have already discussed, his interest was to attract investors in the Caribbean and promote the mission. We also know that he supported the crown, meaning that for him the colonial enterprise was a way to extend celestial and civic powers, not mainly about personal profit. But there are more layers to explore: Focusing on settlers rather than on indigenous people reflects the shifting role of the missionaries in the Antilles. The Dominicans were supposed to convert Native Caribbeans, but the evangelical practice failed. As one example, the Dominican missionary Raymond Breton only converted four people after several years living with the people of Dominica.40 In order to motivate their presence in the Caribbean, the Dominican missionaries thus changed orientation. Instead of wasting time on fruitless conversions, they took on the task of maintaining order in the colonies among the French inhabitants and converting enslaved people. In other words, putting the colony rather than the Amerindians within an ancient timeframe can also be read as a way to justify the new objecting of missionary activity. How, then, are they and other non-Europeans included into or excluded from colonial temporalities? In fact, the Caribs are partly barred from Du Tertre’s rewriting of French Antillean history precisely because he does not frame them with references to the Old World. Indeed, one finds in the introduction to the section on “the natural inhabitants of the Antilles” an idealised portrait of the Native Caribbeans who are situated within an idyllic space-time, an eternal present that appears untouched by both past and future.41 The passage sets the frame for the description that follows and is thus partly disconnected from the narrative of colonial history. It is not that Du Tertre thought that the island populations did not have history – he writes about how they sometimes would tell the missionaries about recent history and keep myths alive by storytelling – but he claims that they do not care about the past other than close past events that may be the motivation to start a war, for instance. What was, on the other hand, a real issue for the missionary was what he identified as their inability to think about the future. Du Tertre writes that he is amazed to see how the Caribs are ready to suffer torments in their earthly lives
66 Christina Kullberg even without the promise of a Paradise to come. This means that they could become good Christians. However, it also implies that they are not threatened by the idea of the final judgement, which meant that one of the most common missionary rhetorical strategies – to depict the horrors of hell – had to be discarded. If only they could imagine a future of outrageous torture in the afterlife, they would refrain from committing sinful acts, he argues.42 For Du Tertre, the Caribs are thus not outside history; the problem is that they neglect the future. They do not project themselves forward, and it is on this basis that the Native Caribbeans are not so easily persuaded by Christian chronology. Enslaved people brought from Africa represent yet another notion of time in the narrative. According to Du Tertre and other observers, they had a strong sense of life after death; it brought them hope of a return to Africa. The difference between Christian temporality is fundamental; salvational time is not to be found in the Kingdom of Christ but in a return to the land before. Nevertheless, the fact that they did picture a life after this made them inclined to the Christian message. However, Du Tertre tended to integrate them into colonial temporalities, though for reasons that were commercial rather than religious. He takes recourse to a similar set of references that he used to frame the colony when describing slavery, even if it is in more ambiguous terms. Du Tertre clearly struggled with the contemporary debate about whether it was just for Christians to have slaves and, even more so, if it was just to have Christian slaves. As argued by Sue Peabody, he saw diasporic Africans as God’s children and could not fully follow Las Casas’s initial idea that the deportation and enslavement of Africans could be a solution to the burden laid upon the Amerindians.43 At the same time, he partly considered enslavement as a way to save souls: enslaved Africans were more easy to convert than Native Caribbeans, which would not have been the case had they stayed in Africa. This argument was common and is often wrongly cited as one of the reasons why Louis XIII allowed slavery and slave trade on French soil.44 However, in Du Tertre’s narrative this reasoning cannot fully justify a system of exploitation of God’s children. He saw Africans as well as Native Caribbeans as parts of mankind and could not come to terms with the horrible and unfair destiny of enslaved Africans. Nevertheless, as a pro-colonialist he could not fully condemn slavery either since he believed that the prosperity of the colonies depended on it. The commercial argument for slavery ultimately overshadowed his religious doubts. Yet, these arguments are not explicitly stated. Instead, slavery is embedded in a literary universe. In order to make sense of the fate of the enslaved Africans, Du Tertre refers to the myth of Cain and Abel and the condemnation to a life of labour, and concludes that black people suffer more than others for the sins of mankind. In this context, allusions to the Ancients appear as a way to negotiate his own contradictory position and alleviate the account of France’s barbary. Instead of arguing
Like Moses on the Nile 67 directly against slavery, he voices his scepticism by embedding his discourse with references to the Ancient Greek critic of slavery, Seneca. The displacement permitted him to subtly question enslavement and, at the same time, displace Caribbean slavery into a classical context. This way, he could construct a narrative of a more “civil” system of slavery. In one passage describing the way the enslaved people lived, he frames slavery in an almost Arcadian setting: “Their cabins have some likeness to those in which the people of the Golden Age retired whose happiness is described by Seneca”.45 Seneca’s version of the myth of the Golden Age in Phaedra is said to be the mundane myth of terrestrial Eden. Transposed onto the brutal reality of Caribbean slavery, Hippolyte’s discourse served to mitigate the cruel exploitative present. Du Tertre framed the life of slaves as beautiful, harmonic, and peaceful in order to better make it fit into his version of a progressive colony based on liberation and the overcoming of struggles. The same idea re-emerges in the context of African women who are, he says, naturally very fertile to the point where it “seems like God in their person has renewed the wonder of the Jewish enslaved women in Egypt, because the more they suffer the more children they have”.46 The passage expresses pity towards the enslaved women, indicating that the missionary was not entirely at ease with the idea of bearing a child into slavery. Yet again, to resolve the moral dilemma he took refuge in references to Old World stories of slavery. By inserting the destiny of enslaved women in the Caribbean into a biblical framework, Du Tertre further underscored that slavery was part of the narrative of French Antillean history. As referenced previously, the colony was compared to the Israelites during Exodus, and the slaves went through a similar destiny. Thus, they are introduced as participants in the triumphant community of the New World, though in reality they are clearly not included on the same terms as the French. But whereas slavery could be integrated into a mythic past belonging to the Old World, the enslaved peoples’ participation in the future colonial temporality was more problematic. For, contrary to the free habitants of the Caribbean, they did not profit from their hard work: “all their sweat is for their Master’s profit and when they collect mountains of gold, [the slaves] never get anything and if they lived for centuries and worked even more they still would not earn a penny for all their hardships”.47 In other words, even if the enslaved people were inserted into the complex temporalities of the establishment that Du Tertre explores, they were excluded from the future tense of the prosperous colony.
Concluding Remarks Susan Gillman argues in American Archipelagos that “the archipelagic logic produces a disjunctive parallel”.48 Likewise, the transposition of Old World temporalities onto the early modern Caribbean seems to
68 Christina Kullberg create chasms and temporal layers rather than a smooth narrative of European continuation in the New World. This suggests that the intricate play with temporalities produces an epistemic shift in the ways in which the Americas are perceived. By linking the Antilles to a known past, be it lost and mythical, Du Tertre breaks with the idea of the islands as virginal, untouched nature and suggests that the Caribbean needs to be captured in terms of competing temporalities. The insular space is no longer a blank page onto which travellers (armchair travellers and real travellers alike) could project any kind of fantasy – unicorns, dog-headed humans, giants, or construct utopic stories about the perfect society. Via a mythic detour through the Old World, the Antilles actually become more real. Using overlapping or even contradictory temporalities, Du Tertre creates a narrative of early colonisation that includes struggles and suffering, not only of settlers but also of indigenous and enslaved people. This way, his narrative gives a more complex version of the colonial story of triumph and dominance. References to the Bible and Roman mythology allow for him to construct the image of a new community, in which even the cruellest component of Caribbean society – slavery – can be critiqued at the same time as it can appear in a golden shimmer. From this constant working with textual layers emerges a melancholic and nostalgic story of colonisation, with several temporalities and spaces always latently present. He thus builds on temporalities of creolisation, acknowledging that the Caribbean is a space of cultural crossings with a history of entanglements linked to the different heritages and histories at play in the region. Du Tertre’s account does not construct the islands or other peoples on the basis of a denial of coevalness. Rather, Caribbean space-time comes out as something that is continuously produced by the actors of this colonial drama.
Notes 1 Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, Nobel Lectures, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture (accessed Oct. 30, 2019). 2 Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, BnF, ms. NAF 9319; Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique, où l’on verra l’établissement des Colonies Françoises dans ces Isles; les guerres civiles et étrangéres, et tout ce qui se passe dans les voyages et retours des Indes, comme aussi plusieurs belles particularités des Antilles de l’Amérique; une description générale de l’Ile de la Guadeloupe; de tous ses minéraux, de ses pierreries, de ses rivières, fontaines et étangs et de toutes ses plantes. De plus, la description de tous les animaux de la mer, de l’air, et de la terre, et un traité fort ample des mœurs des sauvages du pays, de l’état de la colonie françoise et des esclaves, tant mores que sauvages (Paris: Jacques et Emmanuel Langlois, 1654); Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes et de figures (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667). All translations from Du Tertre are mine.
Like Moses on the Nile 69 3 Régis Antoine, Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Broché, 1994), p. 30. 4 See Roger French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Samir Boumediene, La colonisation du savoir: Une histoire des plantes médicinales du ‘Nouveau Monde’ (1492– 1750) (Vaulx-en-Velin: Éditions des Mondes à faire, 2016). 5 The depiction of the New World in terms of marvels has been researched by Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing (400–1600) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 6 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 24. 7 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?”, Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History of the Humanities, ed. Amos Morris-Riech and Dirk Rupnov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 8 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [1983] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For a further discussion about denial of coevalness, historiography, and travels, see Chapter 5 in this volume, Sünne Juterczenka, “Time Travel in the Pacific: Maritime Exploration and Eighteenth-Century German Historiography”. 9 I am referring here to A Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, transl. Maurice Cranstone (London: Penguin, 1985). 10 François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade Éditions, 2005). 11 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Mission”, Studies in Church History 53 (2017), p. 279. 12 Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonisation and Slavery in EighteenthCentury French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 13 See also Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancient Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 14 See, for example, Christian Bouyer, Au temps des isles: Esclaves, planteurs et flibustiers (Paris: Tallandier, 2005); Frédéric Régent, Les Maîtres de la Guadeloupe propriétaires d’esclaves (1635–1848) (Paris: Tallandier, 2019); Éric Roulet, La Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique 1635–1651: Une entreprise coloniale au XVIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses de l’université de Rennes, 2017). 15 Tvetzan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other [1982], transl. Richard Howard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 16 Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History [2001], transl. Tom Conley (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1992). 17 Christian Marboury, Utopie et primitivisme: Essai sur l’imaginaire anthropologique à l’âge classique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990). 18 Sara Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 19 Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: L’Amérique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des guerres de religion (1555–1589) (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990); Le cannibale: Grandeur et decadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994); Le théâtre de la Floride: Autour de la “Brève narration des événements qui arrivèrent aux Français en Floride, province d’Amérique”, de Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (1591) (Paris: Presses de l’université ParisSorbonne, 2017).
70 Christina Kullberg 20 See Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: The Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Dominque Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003); Dominique Deslandres, “Indes intérieures et Indes lointaines: Le modèle français d’intégration socio-religieuse au XVIIe siècle”, La France-Amérique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Champion, 1998). 21 James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 22 For an overview of texts from the French establishment in the Caribbean, see Chapter 1 in Christina Kullberg, Lire l’Histoire générale des Antilles de J-B Du Tertre: Exotisme et établissement français aux Îles (1625–1671) (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 23 Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morales des îles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnould Leers, 1658). 24 For a discussion about the presumed plagiarism, see Benoît Roux, “Le Pasteur Charles de Rochefort et l’Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l’Amérique”, Les Indiens des Petites Antilles: Des premiers peuplements aux débuts de la colonisation européenne, ed. Bernard Grunberg (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). 25 See Frank Lestringant, Îles et insulaires (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017) and Le Livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 26 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 107: “Comme j’ay seulement entrepris d’écrire une histoire & non pas faire des annales, je ne m’attacheray pas aussi scrupuleusement à suivre l’ordre du temps auquel les choses sont arrivées”. 27 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 107: “[…] c’est pourquoy, afin de ne’estre pas obligé de sauter continuellement d’Isle en Isle, […]”. 28 Thomas Pavel, L’art de l’éloignement: Essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 137. 29 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles, p. 17: “Retournons à nostre pauvre Colonie, qui flotte sur les eauës de la mer, comme les deux petits Iumeaux sur le Tybre, comme un Ioseph dans sa cisterne, & comme Moyse dans son berceau sur le Nil […]”. 30 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles, pp. 1–2: “I’ay souvent admiré dans l’Antiquité prohane l’avanture de deux petits jumeaux nouvellement nez, qui apres avoir esté jettez dans le Tybre, recueillis par une louve, qui leur fit office de mere, & élevez dans une cabane de Berger; ont esté comme la semence feconde qui a produit ce grand arbre de l’Empire Romain, dont les branches se sont étenduës & multiplées par l’Univers. Ie n’ay pas trouvé moins étrange ce que les lettres sainctes nous aprennent de la merveilleuse fortune du petit Ioseph, tiré de sa cisterne, & dechargé de ses chaines, pour s’estre fait Viceroy par tout l’Egypte. L’élevation de Moïse est encore un grand miracle de la Providence, qui sauve cét enfant exposé d’un naufrage inévitable, pour en faire le Dieu de Pharaon, & le Liberateur de son peuple: Mais ie puis dire, sans rien donner à la flatterie, que l’establissement de nostre Colonie Françoise dans les Isles Cannibales n’est pas moins émerveillable, ny moins étonnant”. 31 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 7. See also Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Réal Ouellet, “Le paratexte liminaire
Like Moses on the Nile 71 de la relation: Le voyage en Amérique”, Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises 42, no. 1 (1990). 32 I want to thank Frédéric Tinguely for pointing out the allegory. 33 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles, p. 4: “[…] Dieu s’est comporté envers les François, comme il a fait avec les Israëlites dans les deserts, ne laissant pas impuny un seul de leurs crimes; car il est certain que tous ceux qui ont trempe leurs mains dans le sang de ces pauvres innocens, ont expié leur massacre par la perte de leur vie ou de leur biens”. 34 Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 54. 35 Frank Lestringant, “L’exotisme en France à la Renaissance: De Rabelais à Léry”, Littérature et exotisme XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: École des chartes, 1997), p. 12. 36 Réal Ouellet, La relation de voyage en Amérique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): Au carrefour des genres (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval/éditions du CIERL, 2010), p. 45. 37 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles, p. 2: “Car si nous considérons avec attention son commancement & son progrez, nous la verrons naistre comme une petite source, qui se dégorgeant insensiblement par des voyes connuës seulement de Dieu, malgré les obstacles des montagnes, & les contradictions des hommes, va innonder les plus belles terres de l’Amerique. Elle vous semblera d’abord ruïnée tout à fait dans sa naissance, & vous remarquerez en mesme temps, que recueillant les pieces de son débris, elle se restablit sur ses propres ruynes contre toute sorte d’esperance, & avec tant d’avantage & tant de succez, que toute abandonnée & toute persecutée, mesme qu’elle estoit de ceux qui la devoient maintenir, elle remplit desia d’habitans François plusieurs belles terres capables de composer autant de Provinces”. 38 Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized, p. 18. 39 See Doris Garraway’s book The Libertine Colony. 40 See Sylvain Auroux and Fransisco Queixalos, “La première description linguistique des Antilles françaises: Le Père Raymond Breton (1609–1679)”, Naissance de l’ethnologie? ed. Claude Blanckert (Paris: Cerf, 1985), p. 112. 41 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, pp. 356–57. 42 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, pp. 413–14. 43 Sue Peabody, “‘A Nation Born to Slavery’: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-Century French Antilles”, Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (2004), p. 115. 44 Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles 1635–1800”, French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002). See also Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 17–19. 45 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 517: “Leurs Cases ont du rapport à celles où se retiroient les habitans du siècle d’or, dont Seneque nous décrit le bonheur […]”. 46 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 505: “[…] il semble que Dieu renouvelle en leur personne la merveille des femmes Iuives esclaves en Égypte: car plus elles ont de mal, & plus elles ont d’enfans […]”. 47 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles, p. 525: “[…] ils sçavent bien que toutes leurs sueurs vont au profit de leurs Maistres, & que quand ils leurs amasseroient des montagnes d’or, il ne leur en reviendra jamais rien, & que quand ils vivroient des siecles entiers, & qu’ils travailleroient davantage qu’ils ne font, ils ne retireroient pas un sol de profit de toutes leurs peines”.
72 Christina Kullberg 48 Susan Gillman, “It Takes an Archipelago to Compare Otherwise”, Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 135.
Bibliography Antoine, Régis, Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Broché, 1994). Auroux, Sylvain and Fransisco Queixalos, “La première description linguistique des Antilles françaises: Le Père Raymond Breton (1609–1679)”, Naissance de l’ethnologie? ed. Claude Blanckert (Paris: Cerf, 1985), pp. 107–24. Boucher, Philip, France and the American Tropics to 1700: The Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Boumediene, Samir, La colonisation du savoir: Une histoire des plantes médicinales du ‘Nouveau Monde’ (1492–1750) (Vaulx-en-Velin: Éditions des Mondes à faire, 2016). Bouyer, Christian, Au temps des isles: Esclaves, planteurs et flibustiers (Paris: Tallandier, 2005). Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing (400–1600) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). De Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History [2001], transl. Tom Conley (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1992). Deslandres, Dominque, Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003). Deslandres, Dominique, “Indes intérieures et Indes lointaines: Le modèle français d’intégration socio-religieuse au XVIIe siècle”, La France-Amérique (XVIe– XVIIIe siècles), ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Champion, 1998), pp. 369–77. Dobie, Madeleine, Trading Places: Colonisation and Slavery in EighteenthCentury French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, BnF, ms. NAF 9319. Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes et de figures (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667). Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique, où l’on verra l’établissement des Colonies Françoises dans ces Isles; les guerres civiles et étrangéres, et tout ce qui se passe dans les voyages et retours des Indes, comme aussi plusieurs belles particularités des Antilles de l’Amérique; une description générale de l’Ile de la Guadeloupe; de tous ses minéraux, de ses pierreries, de ses rivières, fontaines et étangs et de toutes ses plantes. De plus, la description de tous les animaux de la mer, de l’air, et de la terre, et un traité fort ample des mœurs des sauvages du pays, de l’état de la colonie françoise et des esclaves, tant mores que sauvages (Paris: Jacques et Emmanuel Langlois, 1654). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [1983] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). French, Roger, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Garraway, Doris, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Like Moses on the Nile 73 Genette, Gérard, Palimpsestes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987). Gillman, Susan, “It Takes an Archipelago to Compare Otherwise”, Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 133–52. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hartog, François, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade Éditions, 2005). Kullberg, Christina, Lire l’Histoire générale des Antilles de J-B Du Tertre: Exotisme et établissement français aux Îles (1625–1671) (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Lestringant, Frank, Îles et insulaires (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017). Lestringant, Frank, Le théâtre de la Floride: Autour de la “Brève narration des événements qui arrivèrent aux Français en Floride, province d’Amérique”, de Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (1591) (Paris: Presses de l’université ParisSorbonne, 2017). Lestringant, Frank, Le Livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: Droz, 2002). Lestringant, Frank, “L’exotisme en France à la Renaissance: De Rabelais à Léry”, Littérature et exotisme XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: École des chartes, 1997), pp. 5–16. Lestringant, Frank, Le cannibale: Grandeur et decadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994). Lestringant, Frank, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: L’Amérique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des guerres de religion (1555–1589) (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990). Marboury, Christian, Utopie et primitivisme: Essai sur l’imaginaire anthropologique à l’âge classique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990). McClellan III, James E. and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). Melzer, Sara, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Miller, Christopher, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Ouellet, Réal, La relation de voyage en Amérique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): Au carrefour des genres (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval/éditions du CIERL, 2010). Ouellet, Réal, “Le paratexte liminaire de la relation: Le voyage en Amérique”, Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises 42, no. 1 (1990), pp. 177–92. Pavel, Thomas, L’art de l’éloignement: Essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Peabody, Sue, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles 1635–1800”, French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002), pp. 53–90. Peabody, Sue, “‘A Nation Born to Slavery’: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-Century French Antilles”, Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (2004), pp. 113–26. Peabody, Sue, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancient Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Régent, Frédéric, Les Maîtres de la Guadeloupe propriétaires d’esclaves (1635– 1848) (Paris: Tallandier, 2019).
74 Christina Kullberg Rochefort, Charles de, Histoire naturelle et morales des îles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnould Leers, 1658). Roulet, Éric, La Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique 1635–1651: Une entreprise coloniale au XVIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses de l’université de Rennes, 2017). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, A Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, transl. Maurice Cranstone (London: Penguin, 1985). Roux, Benoît, “Le Pasteur Charles de Rochefort et l’Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l’Amérique”, Les Indiens des Petites Antilles: Des Premiers peuplements aux débuts de la colonisation européenne, ed. Bernard Grunberg (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pp. 175–216. Rubiés, Joan-Pau, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Mission”, Studies in Church History 53 (2017), pp. 272–310. Rubiés, Joan-Pau, “Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?”, Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History of the Humanities, ed. Amos Morris-Riech and Dirk Rupnov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 33–87. Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Todorov, Tvetzan, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other [1982], transl. Richard Howard (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). Walcott, Derek, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, Nobel Lectures, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture (accessed Oct. 30, 2019).
3 Signs of Travel and Memory* The Case of the Wooden Slabs in Jukkasjärvi (1681–1736) Sylvie Requemora-Gros
In Jukkasjärvi, a small town located in the county of Kiruna, situated nearly 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, there is an old church, built in 1608, in which one finds a wooden plaque, more precisely the back of a reindeer sleigh, with a curious inscription:
Figure 3.1 Wooden slab by Regnard, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros
It reads: Gallia nos genuit, vidit nos Africa, Gangem Hausimus, Europam que oculis lustravimus omnem: Casibus et variis acti terra que mari que, Stetimus hic tandem nobis ubi defuit orbis De Fercourt. De Corberon. Regnard 18 Augusto 1681 * The text is translated from French by Olivia Trolley and edited by Christina Kullberg. All translations of quotes from French are Trolley’s and Kullberg’s. The Latin was first translated by Requemora-Gros to French. The English versions were then carefully corrected and adjusted by one of the anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to the anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions and to the editors of this volume for help with Swedish language sources.
76 Sylvie Requemora-Gros The short verse in Latin translates as follows: France has given birth to us. We have seen Africa and the River Ganges, travelled the entirety of Europe. We have had many different adventures, by land and by sea, and we have stopped here, in this place, where the earth came to an end.1 The wooden plaque with its engravings in Latin, which recall the inscription on Virgil’s tomb (“Mantua me genuit […]”), is still visible today in the church at Jukkasjärvi.2 It was the French playwright Jean-François Regnard (1655–1709), widely known in France as Molière’s successor, who had it engraved when he travelled to the North in the 1680s. He wrote about his journey to the region in his fictional work but also, most notably, in a travelogue, Voyage en Laponie, which was published posthumously in 1731. Here we learn more about the context of the engraving: It took us nearly four hours to get to the summit, walking along paths that had not before been known to any mortal, and when we arrived we saw the whole stretch of Lapland and the Nordic Sea, right up to the northern cap, where it turns west. That, my friend, is called tackling the pole’s axis, and getting to the very edge of the world. It was there that we placed the following inscription in its true home, which, I believe, will never be read by anyone but bears.3 The book then continues with the quote from the wooden plaque, quoted above. The passage describes how Regnard and his fellow travellers first made the inscription on a stone in the northern landscape. I will come back both to the company of travellers and the stone inscription later in this chapter. Here, I want to underscore that in the published text, commenting on the inscription, Regnard notes the precise duration of the inaugural ascension (four hours) and the timelessness of its final reception (never to be read by anyone but bears), located in a time that is synonymously suspended, inexistent, and ad æternam. The temporal progression thus leads to a kind of denial of time, which strongly suggests an immemorial desire for spiritual, literary, and geographical immortality. Regnard’s wooden slab thus allows to reflect on travel and temporality in relation to materiality and to establish links between early modern French travels to the far North. In fact, Regnard’s engravings can also be read in connection with other inscriptions in the same church. One of the other plaques in Jukkasjärvi is difficult to decipher but is recognisable as being that of Aubry de La Motraye (1674–1743), a French Huguenot who travelled through Europe and parts of Asia and Africa at the turn of the eighteenth century. In 1715 he came to Sweden with the Swedish King Charles XII’s secretary, and he explored Lapland in 1718. The other inscription refers to Pierre Louis
Signs of Travel and Memory 77 Moreau de Maupertuis’s travels (1698–1759). Maupertuis was a mathematician who went to Lapland on an expedition sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences to prove that the earth is flattened by its two poles. The inscription commemorating his travels features a signed overleaf by Johannes Wegelius, a lecturer at the school of Torneå, on the front and on the back by Gabriel Gyllengrip, the governor of the region, both of whom welcomed Maupertuis in 1736. Plaques like these reflect the interrelationship between engraving, art, crafts, and meaning, but in the early modern period, they first and foremost represented a celebration of time and space, a work of classical rhetoric positioned as a timeless memorial. In a way, the wooden slabs in Jukkasjärvi need to be understood in a larger context of imperial expansions and the practice of marking a space as a form of remembrance and of possession. They could even be considered as an example of a Nordic padrâo, a kind of “stone pillar mounted with a cross or a Portuguese crest of arms, bearing an inscription”.4 Portuguese travellers who became wealthy by discovering “new” lands in the fifteenth century often used these pillars in order to commemorate the places that they had visited but also to claim possession of these territories. The first to put this into practice was Diogo Cão under the orders of Jean II in 1482 at the opening of the Zaire River. Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco de Gama also used these kinds of markers. Interestingly, in light of this imperial travel practice, the French travellers to northern Sweden used wood rather than stone, and even, in the case of Regnard, a reindeer sleigh.5 Moreover, French travellers to the North had other ambitions than Portuguese explorers in Africa and the New World. As historical remainders, the plaques celebrating and commemorating Regnard, La Motraye, and Maupertuis were not signposts for political and commercial spaces of conquest. Instead, they represent an exercise in poetic style and reveal the desire to leave a temporal, historical, and artistic marker that needs to be understood in the context of French early modern writing practices. Leaving traces on a plaque can be translated into an aspiration to situate oneself and one’s travels in an atemporal perspective; it communicates a quest for glory and immortality. Inscriptions left by travellers reignite the past culture of antiquity, reflect the modern concept of a present worthy of respect, and look towards a future worthy of being remembered and marked, in both the history of science and of literature. This chapter argues that the series of inscriptions in Jukkasjärvi make it possible to trace a lineage of French voyagers to the North. The objective is to investigate this lineage in order to reflect on temporal dimensions in travel by looking at the relationships between travelogues and other forms of writing that travellers left behind, in this case engravings. The chapter also examines the specific form of such travel inscriptions. What kind of poetics do these inscriptions on wood convey? The plaques can be seen as historical markers, which are simultaneously worldly and
78 Sylvie Requemora-Gros topographical, but they also embody an original kind of visual and textual medium. Being both a material and a scriptural remnant of travels, they seem to operate on different temporal levels: As memorials of the travellers, they are linked to the place visited, at the same time as they draw on antique traditions, through the prism of French classicism, which suggest another temporality that seems to be articulated in a tension with the time of a French imaginary of the North.
Aspiring Socialite Travelling North: Regnard Regnard set off towards Flanders on April 26, 1681, and travelled via Holland and Denmark to reach Sweden. Encouraged by the king of Sweden, Charles XI, he embarked at Stockholm on July 23 and journeyed to Lapland with his companions, Nicolas-Augustin Corberon and Claude Auxcousteaux de Fercourt, returning to France on December 4, 1681.6 He travelled through Lapland for six weeks, covering around one thousand kilometers of ground in just one month. At the end of the seventeenth century, Sápmi was not a geographical unity. It was a land at a crossroads between nations, defined simply as a region inhabited by those known as “Lapps”, the Sami. The Sami were disseminated across the region since the ninth century by a systematic treatise of Finnish hunters and became connected to the Swedish crown in the sixteenth century under King Gustav Vasa (1496–1560). The treaty of Teusina (1595) and Knäred (1613) drew political divisions between Lapland and Sweden, Russia, and Denmark.7 It was in this geopolitical context that Regnard travelled to the far North. For a French seventeenth-century traveller, arriving above the Polar Circle was conceived as a considerable achievement. The destination in itself was uncommon at the time. French travellers would preferably voyage south, to Italy and Greece, or towards the Middle East to look for education or alliances, adventure, or exotic encounters. In other words, Regnard had his reasons for giving his northern voyage a slightly exaggerated and poetic tone: He had to justify this unusual destination. Typically, he calls Torneå “the last town of the world on the northern edge” as if one would fall into the abyss if one was to go further.8 One could, of course, question how dramatic their voyage to the far North really was, considering that they travelled during the summer. Nevertheless, in the imaginary of southern Europeans, the landscapes above the Polar Circle represented the door towards a radical elsewhere – an arctic barbaric space. On an imaginative level, Regnard presents the area as not only geographically remote but also temporally distanced; it is “savage” and “archaic”, meaning that going to these faraway lands would imply a journey across space and equally across time. Several possible explanations have been given as to why Regnard’s travel account to Lapland remained unpublished during his lifetime. One
Signs of Travel and Memory 79 explanation might be that a substantial amount of the information contained was taken from the Lapponia id est regionis Lapponum by Johannes Schefferus, a German philologist who became the professor of eloquence and politics at Uppsala University in 1647. His study of Lapland was published in Latin in 1673 and translated into French by Père A. Lubin, under the title Histoire de la Laponie, in 1678.9 Considering the popularity of this translation, it is possible that Regnard might have chosen not to publish his own account: The translation would have revealed to what extent Regnard’s text was fraught with “plagiarisms”.10 Moreover, with the success of Histoire de la Laponie the market for Nordic exoticism would have been saturated. Unlike Regnard, however, Schefferus never went to Lapland. Schefferus’s text is a compilation of notes taken by priests and parishioners on the request of the philologist. But rather than “facts” on the region, it was a certain imaginary of the North, inspired by Histoire de la Laponie, that marked Regnard’s travelogue. This imaginary did not come from the Latin edition of Schefferus’s history but from the French translation. Included in the French 1678 edition, one finds illustrations by the engraver René Michault that were highly influential and allowed the exotic image of Lapland to be disseminated at the time – an imaginary vision that clearly influenced all French travellers to Scandinavia, including Regnard.11 Another explanation as to why Regnard did not publish his travels is political. The moment when Sweden abandoned its alliance with France, the French king aligned with Denmark. In the light of these changes in alliances, it has been speculated that Regnard could have been sent on a secret mission to reassure the Danish chancellor.12 Would Regnard then have been travelling to the North as a diplomat? It is possible, but there is no evidence of this and Regnard makes no mention of any such thing. At the core of his voyage seems to have been an interest in all things worldly and courtly and a desire for a grand tour of the North.13 Contrary to what he writes in the novel La Provençale (1731), which is one of his fictional accounts of his many journeys, the departure towards Scandinavia was not brought about by a failed love story. He did not express any hope that “the cold of the North would somewhat calm the fervour” of his unquenched love and he did not embark on the journey “with as much sadness as with curiosity” as it is claimed in the novel.14 Rather, it was a quest for knowledge of the world (curiosité) and a desire to develop his sociable side that motivated him. Following the model of well-to-do youth who completed their training by doing a cultural tour across the humanist heights of antiquity, Regnard set off with his two companions, de Fercourt and Corberon. Vidit nos Africa, as they claimed in the Jukkasjärvi inscription, which can literally be translated as “Africa has seen us” (a common way of saying “I was touring Africa” in Latin). It thus seems like they wanted to present themselves as cosmopolitans.
80 Sylvie Requemora-Gros The names of those who had travelled alongside Regnard do not, generally, appear in any of his published travel accounts or in other published writings: in La Provençale, Fercourt is totally absent, as is the case with the travelogue of his trips to Flanders, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Germany. The names do not even appear in his account of the journey to Lapland, with the exception of the mention on the plaque inscribed in Latin. Here, finally, his companions appear, and even if they were completely excluded from Regnard’s other texts, the inscription suggests that the company as a whole was significant for the journey. Together the three men formed a group of young aspiring socialites, who had not yet reached the peak of their careers but who, nevertheless, chose to embark on a journey towards an obscure destination, at least from the point of view of a Frenchman. Corberon had been an active lawyer in the Grand Chamber of the Paris parliament from 1669 and was deputy public prosecutor of the General Counsel when they set off towards Sweden. Surprisingly then, he had put his political ambitions on hold and left to discover the world, venturing to Asia all the way to the Ganges River. On the plaque in Jukkasjärvi Ganges and Asia are mentioned, making a direct reference to Corberon’s travels and not those of Regnard. Upon his return from Scandinavia in 1683, Corberon married Mademoiselle Magdeleine Du Four. She was the daughter of a former consulate and member of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and her dowry, combined with the financial support of François-Michel Le Tellier de Louvois, Louis XIV’s Secretary of State and War, allowed Corberon to obtain the title of Counsellor and General Prosecutor at the parliament of Metz in 1684. De Fercourt was a noble gentleman from Picardy, who did not have as brilliant a career as did Corberon but was made counsellor in the office of Beauvais and ultimately became major of the town.15 Before going to Scandinavia, de Fercourt had travelled with Regnard in the Mediterreanean region, where they visited Italy and North Africa. Several texts published at the time state that Regnard was always by de Fercourt’s side although their travels would later lead to controversies between the two friends. This is notably the case concerning the account of when they were captured by pirates and held in Algeria. A nobleman and of higher value to his kidnappers than Regnard, de Fercourt escaped along with a valet, of whom we know nothing, aside from the fact that de Fercourt gave him a considerable sum during the negotiation for his ransom. The two travel companions were no doubt important to Regnard, who did not enjoy the same social status as they did. Yet, in his publications, Regnard would not only silence his fellow travellers; he would, at least according to de Fercourt, also fabricate. When de Fercourt became conscious of the publication of Regnard’s Scandinavian journey in 1731, three years before de Fercourt’s death, he was eager to rectify the mistaken facts: “Nothing could be more false”, he said about the account.16 He also published his own version of the captivity in Algeria before he
Signs of Travel and Memory 81 passed away. He was just as irritated by the tales he found in Regnard’s La Provençale and quite possibly also by the fact that Regnard in his play La Coquette let a ridiculous character have de Fercourt’s title of counsellor to the presidial counsel of Beauvais.17 Considering his old age, he could only point out what he deemed to be blatantly false about Regnard’s versions of their journeys. In an unedited letter addressed to Jean-Pierre Nicéron, de Fercourt wrote of his bitterness and powerlessness: All our travels have been published under the name of M. Regnard, but the details of the fragments that we found after his death are so poorly recounted: There are so many things that have been omitted, and others that are so badly placed that I really wish I could do something about it; but where, when, and how?18 In a way, the plaque in Jukkasjärvi at least acknowledges the presence of Corberon and de Fercourt even if they are far from giving us an idea of their version of the voyage. The companions are also crucial for understanding Regnard’s travel writing and the inscription. They testify that despite the strange destination, he hoped that the journey would contribute to better position him in the Parisian social circles. Regnard’s voyage to Lapland took place before he became a famous dramaturge and Molière’s “sole beneficiary”.19 Tellingly, once he had become famous for his theatre – some time after his return from Scandinavia – Regnard revealed this mondain dimension of himself. But this side of him was clearly already there in his travels to the North as can be seen in his writing strategies. In the preface to the posthumous travelogue, Regnard addressed a reader that he wanted to please, namely the French ambassador in Stockholm. In so doing, he presented the account of his journey to Lapland like a long letter, punctuated with information but also filled with entertaining stories. This placed his account in the line of French galant travel narratives of the period. He used stylistic features that were common in galant writing, such as prosimetrum, which combines prose and verse. Moreover, the very structure and form of his travel writing tend towards galant literature. He inserted a poem on the beauty of the solitary Nordic landscapes by taking up the antique topic of the sublime locus terribilis, whilst all along playing with a number of possible intertexts, like “La Solitude” or “Le Contemplateur” of Saint-Amant, thus foreshadowing the beauty of the North that would later be enhanced by Madame De Staël (1766–1817). Finally, his writing often tended towards a dramatisation of the Other. For example, he depicted the movement of the Sami in terms of a mute theatre. In so doing, he added a theatrical aspect to his Cartesian conceptualisation of the Sami as a “little machine”.20 The galant style and form is also reflected in the ways in which he travelled. Regnard’s entire itinerary was determined by his worldly intention
82 Sylvie Requemora-Gros to connect with the courts of northern Europe in order to make himself known. He first visited the court of Denmark, then that of Sweden, and as previously mentioned it was in order to please the King of Sweden, who had suggested the voyage in the first place, that he undertook the journey to Lapland. The other trips to Flanders and Holland were equally courtly adventures, tracing royal genealogies more so than tracing descriptions of the particularities of these countries, as if the inscription of a particular place and time interested him more than contemporary geography. This worldly intention to leave a mark in this “barbarian and uncivilised” North, a North that he then transformed through a gaze that was at once antiquarian (turning it into a locus amoenus) and modern (a pre-romantic conception of the beauty of the savage place), thus allowed Regnard to place himself in a sociable and civilised present, beyond the memorial aspect of the plaques. In other words, while the plaque is commonly a commemorative practice that inscribes the voyager into the visited place, Regnard’s inscription is at the same time directed towards the future and towards other spaces: This traveller was interested in leaving a trace of himself not only in a church in Jukkasjärvi or at the “edge of the world” where it never would be “read by anyone but bears”, but in the aristocratic circles in Paris. But the plaque remains temporally stable; it is there reminding future visitors to the church that he and his friends were there. In contrast, his published texts evoking his travels played with more disruptive temporalities as they resurface in different contexts, in different forms of writing, and were ultimately published posthumously. Regnard’s wooden plaque would indeed leave a mark in accounts by European travellers to come. In this way, it seems, the sociable and galant exercise in style infiltrated the more scientific travels to the North in the eighteenth century, too. Above and beyond its commemorative dimension, the engraving thus exists in an interesting temporality; the inscription itself becomes part of another genealogy, that of a line of explorers in Lapland.
The Huguenot Following Regnard: La Motraye When La Motraye arrived in Jukkasjärvi during the winter of 1718, he found Regnard’s text engraved on the back of a reindeer sleigh and placed by the altar in the church. Guided by a local who had been Regnard’s guide 37 years earlier, La Motraye visited the rock upon which the original engraving was to be found. In his travelogue, he describes his own journey to the rock and quotes the original inscription: After a stretch of three thousand miles across glacial plains, our precursor showed me the non plus ultra of three French travellers. [The guide] told me that, around thirty-seven years earlier he had provided these three men with boats on the same unfrozen lake. This non plus
Signs of Travel and Memory 83 ultra is the extremity of a chain of bare mountains […] which almost make up an island, that he named Pescomarca […], and from which these men had wanted to see the tip, like someone from that side of the world would do […] In so far as his memory served him, the old man pointed out the place where he had seen them inscribe something, but what, he said, he did not know. I scraped the moss off the rock and discovered these all-too-legible words: Gallia nos genuit; vidit nos Africa; Gangem Hausimus, Europamque oculis lustravimus omnem: Casibus et variis acti terraque marique, Stetimus hic tandem, nobis ubi defuit orbis De Fercourt, De Corberon, Regnard Anno 1681, die 22 Augusti21 The toponomy “Pescomarca” has been identified as a neck of land in the southeastern part of Lake Torneträsk called Pieksenjarka in Sami.22 The stone version of Regnard’s wooden plaque that La Motraye here claims to have seen, remains lost despite the attempts made in the beginning of 1900 by Karl Bernard Wiklund, professor at Uppsala University, to encourage tourists and archaeologists to find it.23 Nonetheless, it is clear that La Motraye constructs the landscape that lies before him through the perspective of Regnard and his companions, even if Regnard’s Voyage en Laponie had not yet been published at the time of La Motraye’s voyage. Instead of the temporal precisions related to travel that we saw in Regnard’s inscription, La Motraye operates in the time-space of memory: The recollection of his own journey to the site of the stone and the memories of the local guide, who had helped Regnard and his companions 37 years earlier and now accompanied La Motraye to the same spot. Clearly, there was a tradition among travellers from the South after Regnard to leave a mark in the church of Jukkasjärvi. Guiseppi Acerbi, an Italian naturalist who voyaged to Lapland in 1798 and 1799, wrote in his travel journal and later in his travelogue, that he had read in the Turku gazettes that the plaques were counted in a list that had been left in the church of Jukkasjärvi.24 “In the church of Jukasjervi”, he writes in his travelogue, “there is a book, in which, in imitation of Regnard […], [travellers] have had the ambition to write their names, and to shew their talents as men of wit”.25 Amongst them, Acerbi notes, there was one in Latin that referred to La Motraye’s visit in June 1718. There are no mentions of the Turku gazettes in the French or English translations of his travelogue; instead he lists and then cites the inscriptions on the inside of the church in Jukkasjärvi. In this context, he evokes La Motraye’s own inscription on a curious semi-circle-shaped plaque, which is still found in the church but is today very difficult to read. Nonetheless, the first verse on this curious plaque very clearly suggests that Acerbi in his travelogue quotes this particular inscription.
84 Sylvie Requemora-Gros
Figure 3.2 Wooden slab attributed by the author to La Motraye, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros
Gaul gave life to me, and England gave me a safe haven; the two Germanies, Great Greece and Greece, Naxos, Barcelona, Hercules’ columns, the two Asias, Italy, Africa, and Malta, which lies opposite the latter two, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, the Caspian Sea, but also the Baltic shores saw me, even the north pole itself saw me, and Lapland made me see the midnight sun and offered me the meat and milk of reindeer to eat and drink, like Tartaria once offered me the meat and milk of horses. This was written in Jukkasjärvi by Aubri de La Motraye, subject of Great Britain, on his return from Lake Torneträsk on June 13, 171826 La Motraye was a more experienced traveller and outpaced Regnard in the number of countries he had visited. He was also a Huguenot and a “subject of Great Britain” who, after he had travelled to Rome, Lisbon, London, and the Ottoman Empire, departed towards Sweden in 1715 together with Otto Wilhelm Klinckowström, secretary of the Swedish king Charles XII. In 1718 he explored Lapland and discovered the traces of Regnard. Being a Huguenot travelling in a Lutheran country, La Motraye is quick to nuance Regnard’s representations of the North, as if he could detect that Regnard
Signs of Travel and Memory 85 was more interested in pleasing a social elite than in giving a precise and accurate description of the region. Nonetheless, La Motraye, too, continued the practice of inscribing classical sociable poetics in the far North. In his travel account, La Motraye explicitly writes that this exercise in style, the art of engraving on a plank of wood, like an “ancient votiva Tabula”, takes shape in the wake of Regnard’s inscription: After dinner [the local guide] showed me the church and the four verses written by the travellers that I mentioned previously, who had engraved them onto a plank of wood that they had suspended against the wall next to the altar, much like an ancient votiva Tabula. I made him understand how much freedom these men had given to their muse at the expense of truth, in calling Peskomarca the edge of the world, and he asked me if I did not also want to leave something in memory of my travels. I told him that I would think about it that evening: in fact, it was not long after I had got back to my lodgings after having dined with him that I picked up my pen and wrote the following words, in which I recount my travels.27 Describing the wooden plaque as a Votiva Tabula, a gallery of celebrities or a place of worship turned into a place of sociability, it becomes part of a new epigrammatic and poetic collection and of a coded genre: The opening line of all of La Motraye’s and Regnard’s poems starts in the same way, by putting France first. Regnard begins “Gallia nos genuit”, and “Gallia mihi lucem dedit” is La Motraye’s first line. In taking up a process of imitation, La Motraye thus in a way constructs his wood engraving as a particular style. Speaking of Regnard and his companions and following the proverb “long ways, long lies”, he points out “how much freedom these men had given to their muse at the expense of truth”, a typical topos of travel narratives. But La Motraye himself improved his own engraving when he quoted it later in his travelogue. In the published version, La Motraye transforms the short piece of prose to eleven more elaborate verses, and, thus, he posits himself as a traveller-liar in the wake of Regnard. Acerbi signalled that there are different versions of La Motraye’s text – the inscription in itself and the poem later included in his travel journal – thus emphasising how writing and, perhaps, the very experience of travelling changes with time: Mr. Motraye seems to have been a traveller of consequence. It appears from his biographer that he lived in particular habits of friendship with Charles the XIIth, king of Sweden. When he printed his Travels in England, he does not seem to have been quite pleased with his inscription at Jukasjervi, which is neither verse nor prose (as he would make us believe that he wrote it extempore) and he has altered it […].28
86 Sylvie Requemora-Gros Arcebi seems to have mixed up the moments of inscription in his account as he dates the wooden plaque to June 13, 1718, and the published verse to June 23, 1718. The word choice “extempore” is a temporal marker, and La Motraye himself plays with temporality by evoking the votiva tabula. More importantly, the transformation of the text from the engraving to the published book breaks with the principle of imitation. La Motraye does not copy but reinvents Regnard’s style and form. He seems to explore the possibility of contributing to a dimension of the travel genre that is in the process of taking shape; inscribing one’s presence in the North in the form of a poem engraved on local material turns into a practice and a genre that occurs as an appendix to the travelogue. Acerbi does not say exactly where in the church the plaque was placed. Nonetheless, his remarks suggest that La Motraye is proud to have his inscription “in the church near the others”, meaning Regnard, Fercourt, and Corberon.29 According to Acerbi, the “guest book” from the church in Jukkasjärvi, which he, following the French translation, describes as a “merging of all of these accounts [témoignages] in the form of a literary swordfight”,30 was written “in imitation of Regnard […] to shew their talents as men of wit”.31 However, it appears to have disappeared. Literary scholar Marthe Emmanuel claims that this “literary swordfight” unfolded in the lost “guest book” and was thus not engraved but written “on paper that has not stood the test of time, like Regnard’s wood”.32 However, the existence of the disc-shaped wood, quoted above, proves the very opposite: La Motraye quite literally followed Regnard’s practice. He not only left words on paper but also on wood. Moreover, his semi-circled plaque is placed beside two other large pieces of wood containing engravings that do not figure in Acerbi’s list. These plaques celebrate the travels of Maupertuis, the next voyager to participate in the “literary swordfight” in the church in Jukkasjärvi.
The Scientist and the Inscriptions: Maupertuis Maupertuis was a pioneer of Newton’s theories in France, who travelled on a scientific mission to Lapland supported by the French Academy of Sciences in 1735. The aim was to determine the measures of a meridian arc of one degree, evaluate the curve of the terrestrial sphere, refine the calculations of the lunar parallax, and improve measurements for maritime navigation. He travelled with the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, four other scholars, a secretary, and an illustrator. The aim of the travel was thus clearly scientific, but the expedition was surrounded with more social encounters. Gabriel Gyllengrip, governor of West Bothnia, welcomed Maupertuis and his team when they arrived and organised a celebration in their honour. When the expedition reached its end, Johannes Wegelius, a teacher at Torneå, organised a farewell evening ahead of their departure. Both these occasions were commemorated in writing.
Signs of Travel and Memory 87
Figure 3.3 Wooden slab signed Gyllengrip, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros
Figure 3.4 Wooden slab signed Johannes Wegelius, Jukkasjärvi church. Photo: Sylvie Requemora-Gros
88 Sylvie Requemora-Gros The two sides are signed respectively Gyllengrip and Wegelius and were engraved during Maupertuis’ travels to the region. Here we have two locals who left their poetic marks alongside the foreign travellers to celebrate the French scientist’s journey, and thus contributed to the poetics of inscriptions in Jukkasjärvi. The translation of the epigram signed by Gyllengrip reads as follows: Under the majestic reign of the great Frederick the First King of the Swedish, Germanic, and Vandal peoples, Gabriel Gyllengrip, free baron and Governor of West Bothnia Views the great wonder that is the midnight sun, Examines the forests, groves, and the running rivers, Explores the richness of the earth, the minerals, mountains, Trees, flowers, roots, and birds He observes the insects as well as all living creatures, Whilst, under the auspices of the great King, he explores the Pole. Near Jukkasjärvi, on the 21st of June, in the year 1736, of the Christian era.33 It paints a self-portrait of the governor as a new kind of Linnæus, a knowledgeable botanist, geologist, taxonomist, and accomplished explorer. Indirectly then, the verse celebrates and remembers two scientific explorations to the North – that of Linnæus in 1732 and that of Maupertuis and Celsius in 1736 – and suggests that the governor himself will, in the wake of these explorations, look at the northern provinces like these men of science, exploring it in the interest of the King. Wegelius appears to improvise to the best of his ability apparently without using a dictionary, but relying on his classicist education and his knowledge of Antiquity. However, even if the meter is often irregular, the poetic composition is interesting, as it is based on a double encomiastic prosopopoeia, referring first to Lapland itself and then to its inhabitants: To the highly illustrious nobleman Gabriel Gyllengrip, Free Baron and governor of West Bothnia upon his arrival Echo of the Mountains Rise up, inhabitants of the mountains, may frozen Pallas come to live again, whilst under your auspices, Frederick, arrives the learned royal contingent; may the haughty summits erect statues, may the unrefined inhabitants sing songs that bring luck to you. Since your name, Frederick, is known all over the world,
Signs of Travel and Memory 89 it has learned to find joy in peace and in an honorable soul, and just as the ingenious artist Atlas has taken the world upon his shoulders, he dares visit the high areas of the heaven. The nurturing earth has refused me forests, houses, and the gardens of Alcinous, thunders are everywhere, the mist casts a thick cloak over us, and clouds and stars are but a hand’s reach away, the never setting star Capra brings us our share of afflictions, and you will see ice, and then and shadows, rocks, snow, beasts, and how the access to the bay is being closed. But believe me, I am rich with many treasures, and behold them, here in my full bosom. The never-setting sun chases the Cimmerian darkness away, the strong winds sweep away with the fowl smells. And it is in this that the intentions of the heavenly God comes through, and all types of climate bring about his richness. Everything is a reflection of God, there is nothing vain in anything. Accept this, generous spirit, in a more candid way. The North rightly rejoices at such honours, and now rightly thanks you, great Hero; may Frederick forever enjoy a never ending glory, may he live and may his name never be forgotten on earth. In the name of the Sami mountain inhabitants, unversed in literature, I, their herald and formerly resident of Enontekiö, express my joy and gratitude, Johannes Wegelius.34 The eulogy to Fredric the First, King of Sweden and Prince of Finland from 1720 to 1751, starts off with a common prosopopeia, juxtaposing the motif of the cold country with the revival brought about by the head of the scientific team in charge of Maupertuis’s mission. Like a kind of polar bucolic, it insists on the passage of time via the seasons and on the role of the North Pole as the central point for Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders. The theme of the cold (mist, heavy coat, Auriga constellation, ice, snow, darkness) does not hinder the richness of the various treasures celebrated by Wegelius, who in the end of the poem states himself as the hero of the Samis, who speaks in their name. In his Mémoires (1718), Pierre-Daniel Huet, who never personally visited these regions let alone encountered any of its inhabitants, claims that “the people who, born under a cold climate, and who do not experience the well-meaning influence of the sun as much as we do, are slower in
90 Sylvie Requemora-Gros the operations of the spirit, and less capable of distinguishing truth from falsity. It is in this way that the Lapps, who are confined to Sweden, the Icelandic folk, and those from Greenland are depicted in the accounts of trustworthy writers”.35 This picture of a Lapland that is untamed, left behind, and bound in an archaic temporality, “unversed in literature” (written on the plaque as “incultæ litteraturæ”), was recurrent in travel narratives of the region. In his “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale, pour trouver un ancien monument” (Account of a journey into northern Lapland in search of an Old Monument), Maupertuis repeatedly alludes to the supposed stupidity of the Sami. Repeating the racist theories of his time, he claims that the “Lapps” were hardly human, but “a species of men who live as beasts in the forest”.36 Explicitly, he justifies this conclusion with references to an antique perception of the North: “What attention can we give to these people who antiquity pronounced to be illiterate and who more often than not do not know their mother?” he asks rhetorically.37 For Maupertuis, the region and its people clearly belong to an illiterate space, where fine arts and sociability usually had no place. Maupertuis never left any inscription of his own in the church. However, there is another, local inscription that surfaces in Maupertuis’ travel writing, namely the famous stone of Käymäjärvi, also known as the “stone of Pajala” or the “stone of Vinsavaara”.38 This curious stone is not linked to the plaques in the church, but, as we shall see, Maupertuis indirectly associates it with the practice of engraving inaugurated by Regnard. He tells about how he set out to look for the stone, or rather a monument of the past – “an old monument” – which the Samis “looked upon as the wonder of their country, and within which they believe lies the science of everything that they do not know”.39 When Maupertuis finally found the monument, he was embarrassed that he could not interpret its signs, and he did not know whether to attribute them to the work of humans or “a trick of nature”: The stone upon which these lines are engraved is made up of various layers; the characters are written on a sort of pebble, whilst the rest, and above all between the two lines, seems to be written in a stone that is slightly wetter and more porous. In any case, M. Celsius and I copied, individually and with great care, all that we could decipher, as you see it here. Whether or not it is nothing more than a trick of nature, the reputation that this stone has in this country necessitated that we give the description. This stone certainly does not have the beauty possessed by the monuments of Greece and Rome: but if it does indeed contain an inscription, this inscription seemingly has the advantage of being
Signs of Travel and Memory 91
Figure 3.5 The Käymäjärvi inscription, Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre (1777), vol. 15. gallica.bnrf. fr/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, public domain.
the oldest in the universe. One would never have believed that [the Lapps] might ever have had a memorable event that they would have wished to pass on to posterity; nor that if they had wanted to do so would they have known how. One would never have thought that this country, given its current position, would ever have had any more civilised inhabitants. The dreadful climate and sterile earth are destined to be nothing more than a retreat for miserable people who do not know any other climate. It thus seems that our inscription must have been engraved at a time when this country enjoyed a different climate; and before one of those big revolutions, that we are certain must have happened upon the earth. The position that its axis has today in relation to the
92 Sylvie Requemora-Gros ecliptic plane means that Lapland only very rarely receives any sunlight; it is thus condemned to a long winter, fatal to man and to all of nature’s productions; its ground is sterile and deserted.40 Maupertuis emphasises the age of the monument and compares it to the vestiges of the Greco-Roman times at the cradle of humanity. In fact, he goes further and gives it the higher value of an even older object (“the oldest in the universe”), making it out to be the original stone (la pierre originale), the most memorable source of civilisation, the mother of human genealogy. Yet, such conclusion seems to be at odds with the primitive appearance of the people of Lapland. The complexity of the signs could not possibly, for Maupertuis, be the work of such a baffled people from a cold country with a horrible and sterile climate, so it must have been that the climate was different at the time the inscription was made. This leads to a radical geographical interpretation of the deep time of the North: If the stone was indeed the sign of culture, not of nature, then there must have been an age when the cold did not ravage the region. Maupertuis imagines a tropical polar country and concludes: “The polar circles were maybe what the tropics are now”.41 Logically, then, for Maupertuis to be able to contemplate the possibility of a previous warming of the earth, he does not imagine a kind of anachronistic climate change but rather imagines a change in the earth’s axis to explain the desolation of the northern space. But conscious of the fact that he was on this point risking to venture into the realm of historical fiction, he referred to the sacred authority of the biblical story which recounts the deluge: “The sacred story teaches us that water once covered the highest mountains. It would be difficult to conceive of such a flood, with the displacement of the earth’s gravity, and its climates”.42 Maupertuis’ speculations that the stone might have been caused by a “trick of nature” are confirmed by researchers today.43 He was also right in signalling the cultural significance of the stone for the Sami.44 But faced with the perplexity raised by this vestige of the past of the Käymäjärvi stone, subject to a mysterious temporality, located in a vertiginous temporal mise en abyme, Maupertuis also imagined that it could be another votiva tabula, preceding that of Regnard and La Motraye, made by travellers who would have anticipated and fulfilled his own desire to inscribe himself in this tabular genealogy: “If we want to have recourse to these changes, we might find the origins of Windso’s inscription [on the Vinsavaraa stone] in some event that was as unique as our journey”.45 In a strange temporal palimpsest, Maupertuis compares his own description of the stone to that which he would like to have engraved, following the lead of Regnard and La Motraye. He did, in fact, have the intention to add to the collection at Jukkasjärvi by making an inscription in Torneå, but the project failed due to the lack of craftsmen at hand capable of carrying out the task. The reason why
Signs of Travel and Memory 93 we know about it is that the project is mentioned in a letter from Pierre Michel Hennin to Maupertuis dated August 1, 1756: An inscription containing the story of the project that we undertook in this country will perhaps one day be as obscure as the inscription [on the Vinsavaraa stone]: and if all science and knowledge had been lost, who would then be able to discover, or imagine, that such a monument could be the work of the French; and that what they would see engraved would, in fact, be the distance of the degrees of the earth, and the determination of its shape?46
Concluding Remarks More work remains to be done on this topic; in a sense this chapter is directed towards the future. We would have to go back to the archive and return to the church in Jukkasjärvi in order to find the “guest book” referred to by Acerbi. We would also have to search again the surroundings for the rock engraved by Regnard and seen by La Motraye, near Pieskenjarka. These are travel writing artefacts, not intended for publication, in which the text becomes a memorial and an atemporal image, a circumstantial game of sociable rhetoric in “an enchanted country whose philosophers are fairies”, to borrow the words of Voltaire, written in a letter to Maupertuis.47 Situated in a landscape of the far North, these plaques signal, above and beyond the published writings, an album amicorum, an arctic equivalent of the famous Guirlande de Julie written in 1641 by several poets who frequented the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet to honor Julie d’Angennes on her birthday. This circumstance places the inscriptions in a context of French ancient regime sociability. Moreover, the inscriptions constitute borders, marking the far North at the same time as they signal the end of the travellers’ itineraries and their return to the social world. In that sense, they represent at once geographical, anthropological, and, above all, temporal borders. The plaques allow us to reflect on the past, linking the faraway space to deep time, on the genealogy of origins, where antique references are surpassed by the constitution of a Nordic base that could be the foundation for a historical reconstruction. This requires a present experience able to be passed on to future readers of all times.
Notes 1 The author’s own translation of the Latin to French can be found in JeanFrançois Regnard, “Voyage en Laponie”, Les Œuvres de Mr. Regnard, nouvelle édition revue, corrigée & augmentée, vol. 1 (Paris: Pierre-Jacques Ribou, 1731), p. 209: “La France nous a donné la naissance. Nous avons vu l’Afrique et le Gange, parcouru toute l’Europe. Nous avons eu différentes
94 Sylvie Requemora-Gros aventures, tant par mer que par terre; et nous nous sommes arrêtez en cet endroit, où le monde nous a manqué”. His travels have been re-edited as Jean-François Regnard, Voyages: Romans et récits, ed. Sylvie RequemoraGros (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020). 2 “Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc / Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces”. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who noticed this reference. 3 Regnard, Voyage en Laponie, p. 209: “Nous fumes bien quatre heures à monter au sommet par des chemins qui n’avoient encore été connus d’aucun mortel, & quand nous y fumes arrivez, nous aperçumes toute l’étendue de la Laponie & la Mer Septentrionale, jusqu’au Cap du Nord, du côté qu’il tourne à l’Oüest. Cela s’apelle, Monsieur, se froter à l’essieu du Pôle, & être au bout du monde. Ce fut-là que nous plantâmes l’Inscription précédente qui étoit sa veritable place, mais qui ne sera, comme je croi, jamais lûë que des Ours”. 4 Paul Teyssier, “Les cent glorieuses”, Lisbonne hors les murs. 1415–1580: L’invention du monde par les navigateurs portugais, ed. Michel Chandeigne (Paris: Édition Autrement, 1992), p. 19: “pilier de pierre surmonté d’une croix ou du blason portugais et comportant une inscription”. 5 This has been read in terms of a colonial appropriation of local material; see Jonas M. Nordin and Carl-Gösta Ojala, “Collecting, Connecting, Constructing: Early Modern Commodification and Globalization of Sámi Material Culture”, Journal of Material Culture 23, no. 1 (2017), pp. 61–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183517741663 (accessed Jan. 20, 2020). 6 Alexandre Calame, Regnard: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), p. 41: “The text concerning the journey to Poland is dated 1683. It is sufficiently evident not only in the letter to Marcadé (‘I leave immediately for France’), but also in the accounts of Regnard’s presence in Paris on March 17, 1682 that it makes sense to rectify 1683 to 1681”. (“Le texte du Voyage de Pologne porte la date de 1683. Il est suffisamment évident tant par la lettre à Marcadé (‘Je pars incessamment pour France’) que par la présence attestée de Regnard à Paris le 17 mars 1682 qu’il convient de rectifier 1683 en 1681”.) 7 See John Trygve Solbakk, The Sámi People: A Handbook, ed. John Trygve Solbakk (Vasa: Davvi Girji OS, 2006), Chapter 1.4 “Colonisation and Division of Sápmi”, pp. 35–57. 8 Regnard, Voyage en Laponie, p. 97: “dernière ville du monde du côté du Nord”. 9 Johannes Schefferus, Lapponia, id est regionis Lapponum et gentis nova et verissima descriptio. In qua multa De origine superstitione, sacris magicis, victu, cultu, negotiis Lapponum, item Animalium, metallorumque indole, quæ in terris eorum proventium, hactenus incognita. Produntur, et eiconibus adjectis cum cura illustrantur, Francofurti, ex officina Christiani Wolffii (Frankfurt, 1673). 10 See Théophile Cart, “Le Voyage en Laponie de Regnard”, Revue des cours et conférences, no. 24 (May 1900), pp. 321–27. 11 For an analysis of the construction of the North as Other in the early modern era, see Magdalena Naum, “Between Utopia and Dystopia: Colonial Ambivalence and Early Modern Perception of Sápmi”, Itinerario 40, no. 3 (2016). She briefly discusses Regnard and La Motraye on pages 494–95. 12 See Calame, Regnard: Sa vie et son œuvre, p. 35. 13 For a discussion of the Grand Tour in a French perspective, see Gilles Bertrand, “Le voyage et les usages de l’espace méditerranéen à l’époque
Signs of Travel and Memory 95 du Grand Tour”, Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie 28 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/ ilcea.4087 (accessed May 13, 2020). 14 Jean-François Regnard, “La Provençale”, in Les Œuvres de Mr. Regnard, nouvelle édition revue, corrigée & augmentée, vol. 2 (Paris: Pierre-Jacques Ribou, 1731), p. 103: “les froids du nord pourraient un peu ralentir ses ardeurs”; p. 101: “autant par chagrin que par curiosité”. 15 Claude Auxcouteaux de Fercourt, La relation de l’esclavage des sieurs de Fercourt et Regnard, ed. M. Targe (Toulouse: Privat, 1905), p. 13. 16 The letter from Fercourt to l’abbé Niceron is quoted in Fercourt, La relation de l’esclavage, p. x: “How can we possible have any faith in Memoirs in which there is nothing either truthful or serious?” (“quelle foi peut-on avoir à des Mémoires, dans lesquels il ne doit y avoir rien que de vrai et de sérieux?”). 17 Jean-François Regnard, “La coquette, ou l’Académie des Dames, comédie italienne en 3 actes, mêlée de scènes françaises, en prose (January 17, 1691)”, Le théâtre italien: Les comédies italiennes de J.F. Regnard recueillies par Évariste Gherardi, ed. Roger Guichemerre, vol. 2 (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996). 18 Fercourt, La relation de l’esclavage, p. 15: “Tous nos voyages ont été imprimés sous le nom de M. Regnard, mais mal sur des fragments qu’on a trouvés après sa mort; il y a tant de choses qui ont été omises et d’autres si mal placées qu’on souhaiterait bien que je voulusse y travailler; mais où, quand et comment?” 19 See Jean-François Regnard, Théâtre français, vol. 3: Le Légataire universel, La critique du Légataire, Sapor, Les souhaits, Les vendanges ou le Bailli d’Asnières, ed. Sabine Chaouche, Noémie Courtès, and Sylvie RequemoraGros (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). 20 Regnard, Voyage en Laponie, p. 129. See my analysis of Regnard’s description of the Sami, “Comment peut-on être lapon? Singularités Nordiques: J.-F Regnard en Europe du Nord, entre anomalie et ironie”, La France et l’Europe du Nord au XVIIe siècle: de l’Irlande à la Russie, ed. Richard Maber (Tübingen: Narr, 2017). 21 Aubry de La Motraye, Voyages du Sr de la Motraye en Europe, en Asie et Afrique, ou l’on trouve une grande variété de recherches géographiques, historiques et politiques sur l’Italie, la Grèce, la Tartarie, Crimée et Nogaye la Circassie, la Suède et la Laponie, etc., avec des remarques instructives sur les mœurs, coutumes et opinions […] des peuples et des pays où l’auteur a voyagé […], vol. 2 (Hague: T. Jonson & J. Van Duren, 1727), p. 360: “Après une course de trois Milles sur la plaine glaciale, notre précurseur me montra le non plus ultra de trois voyageurs François, à qui il me dit qu’il avoit fourni près de trente-sept ans auparavant des bateaux sur le même Lac dégelé. Ce non plus ultra est l’extrémité d’une chaine de montagnes toutes nues […], composant une espece de presqu’Isle, qu’il nommoit Pescomarca […], de laquelle ces Messieurs ont voulu faire regarder le bout, comme celui du monde de ce côté-là […]. Le vieillard m’indiquant autant que sa mémoire le lui fournissoit l’endroit où il les avoit vû graver quelque chose qu’il ne connoissoit, disoit-il, pas, j’arrachai la mousse du rocher, & y découvris ces vers bien lisibles, Gallia nos genuit; vidit nos Africa / Gangem Hausimus, Europamque oculis lustravimus omnem: / Casibus et variis acti terraque marique, / Stetimus hic tandem, nobis ubi de fuit orbis / de Fercourt, de Corberon, Regnard Ad Pescomarcam 18 Aug. 1681”.
96 Sylvie Requemora-Gros 22 Marthe Emmanuel, La France et l’exploration polaire (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1959), p. 163. Emmanuel does not name the professor at Uppsala University who identified “Pescomarca”, but the identification was published by Karl-Bernard Wiklund in “En liten uppgift att lösa vid Torne träsk”, Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift, 1904, p. 362. 23 It was Wiklund who launched the appeal in the Swedish Tourist Association bulletin: “En liten uppgift att lösa vid Torne träsk”, pp. 361–62. The call is launched again in 1931 by Hilding Kjellman, “Regnards resa i Lappland”, Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift, 1931, p. 258. Lucien Maury who was employed as a professor of French at Uppsala 1900–06 writes that he had read in a Swedish guide book about the stone inscription, Lucien Maury, “À la recherche de Regnard en Laponie”, Les nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, April 19, 1930, p. 10. 24 Giuseppe Acerbi, Viaggio in Lapponia 1799, ed. Luigi De Anna and Lauri Lindgren (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1996), pp. 26, 122. For an analysis of La Motraye’s voyage see Alessandra Grillo, “La Laponie d’Aubry de la Motraye (1718): L’interaction entre texte et image”, Astrolabe 18 (2008), www.crlv. org/astrolabe/novembred%C3%A9cembre-2008/la-laponie-daubry-de-lamottraye-1718 (accessed Dec. 10, 2019). 25 Giuseppe Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland to the North Cape in the years 1798 and 1799, vol. I (London: Joseph Mawman, 1802), p. 348. The French translation is made by Joseph Lavallée, Voyage au Cap Nord par la Suède, la Finlande et la Laponie (Paris: Levrault et Schoell, 1804), p. 138. 26 Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, p. 350: “Gallia mihi lucem dedit, et liberum Anglia portum; utraque me Germania, Græcia Magna Minorque, mons Jovis, ac Barcellona, Herculisque columnæ, ambæ Asiæ, Italia, Africa, hisque opposita Melite, Euxina et Mæotica, Caspia, Baltica nec non littora viderunt, vidit Polus Arcticus ipse, et mihi inocciduum ostendit Lapponia solem; proque cibo et potu carnem et lac rangiferinum præbuit, ut Tartaria olim præbebat equinum / Hæc scribebat ad Jukasjerviam rediens ex Torniavensi lacu Aubris de la Motraye, Magnæ Britanniæ subditus, 13 Junii, 1718”. The two Germanies refer to the military division of Germania inferior and Germania superior; Magna Graecia refers to the Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily; the two Asias refer to Minor Asia and the rest of Asia. 27 La Motraye, Voyages, p. 376: “Après dîner il me montra l’Eglise, & les quatre Vers des Voyageurs que j’ai déjà rapportez, qui les avoient gravez sur une Planche de bois qu’ils y avoient pendue contre le mur à côté de l’Autel, comme une votiva Tabula des Anciens. Je lui fis entendre combien de liberté ces Messieurs avoient donné à leur Muse aux dépens de la vérité, en appellant Peskomarca la fin du monde; & il me demanda si je ne voulois pas aussi laisser quelque chose en mémoire de mes voyages. Je lui répondis que j’y penserois le soir: en effet je ne fus pas plutôt de retour à mon logis, après avoir soupé avec lui, que je pris la plume & fis les Vers suivants, dans lesquels j’indiquai mes voyages”. 28 Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, p. 350. 29 La Motraye, Voyages, p. 377: “dans l’Eglise auprès des autres”. 30 Acerbi, Voyage au Cap Nord par la Suède, la Finlande et la Laponie, p. 140: “comme la réunion de tous ces témoignages en genre d’escrime littéraire”. 31 Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, p. 348. 32 Emmanuel, La France et l’exploration polaire, p. 162: “inscrits évidemment sur des papiers et n’ont pas résisté au temps comme le bois de Regnard”.
Signs of Travel and Memory 97 33 Gabriel Gyllengrip, transcribed from the plaque by Sylvie Requemora-Gros: “Augusto Sveonum Gothorum Vandalorumque / Imperio, Regis Magni, Primi Friderici, / Solis inoccidui miracula maxima lustrat, / Silvas et nemora, Fluidasque examinat undas, / et Scrutatur opes terræ mineralia montes, / arbores et Flores radices atque volucres / insectaqve notat nec non animalia cuncta, / auspiciis regis Summi, dum permeat Arctum. / Gabriel Gyllengryp. / Liber Baro et Botniæ Occidentalis / Gubernator / Ad Juccasjeriwam / anno Æræ christianæ 1736 / die 21 Junii”. 34 Johannes Wegelius, transcribed from the plaque by Sylvie RequemoraGros: “Advenienti Perillustri nec non Generosissimo Libero Baroni / et Gubernatori Bothniæ occidentalis domino Gabrieli Gyllengrijp / Echo ex Alpibus / Surgite Saxicola, Pallas frigefacta vigescat, / Dum FRIDERICE tuis, advenit auspiciis / Regia docta cohors, facient juga celsa colossos, / carmina cantet iners, incola fausta tibi. / nomen quod FRIEDERICE tuum pernotuit orbi, / pace [P]roboque animo didicit esse Felix, / utque Polum cervice tulit Solertior Atlas, / Sic Cœli superas audet adire plagas; / Alma mihi tellus sylvasque domosque negavit, / alcinoique hortos, Tundura ubique tonant, / densa tegit nebula, tangunt nos nubes et astra / Nobis inoccidua, fert morosa Capra / inveniesque gelu, mox tenebras / Saxa nives, beluas, clausaque claustra Sinus. / Crede tamen variis thesauris turgeo dives. / Quos gremio gravido, conspice quæso meo. / Pellit inoxiduus tenebras Soll Cimmeriasqe, / Toxica pestifera flamina dura fugant. / Scilicet hinc Jovæ, sententia prominet alti, / Cujus divitias climata cuncta ferunt. / Cuncta DEUM referunt, nihil est in rebus inane. / Tu Sincerius hæc, mens generosa cape / Arctos jure sibi, tantos gratulator honores / Jure refert grates nunc tibi, magne heros / Semper inextincto crescat FRIDERICUS honore / vivat inocciduum nomen in orbe gerat! / nomine Saxicolarum Lapponum incultæ litteraturæ, / Gratulatur præco eorundem olim Enotecrensis. / JOHANNES WEGELIUS”. 35 Pierre-Daniel Huet, Mémoires (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), p. 40: “peuples qui, nés sous un climat froid et ne se ressentant pas aussi bien que nous de la bienfaisante influence du soleil, sont plus lents dans les opérations de l’esprit et moins propres à distinguer la vérité de l’erreur. Tels sont, au rapport d’écrivains dignes de foi, les Lapons, qui confinent à la Suède, les Islandais et les Groënlandais”. 36 Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, Maupertuis en Laponie: A la recherche de la figure de la Terre, ed. Osmo Pekonen and Anouchka Vasak (Paris: Hermann, 2014), p. 192: “[…] espèce d’hommes qui vivent en bêtes dans les forêts”. 37 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 192: “quelle attention peut-on faire à ce que débitent sur des antiquités des gens qui ne savent pas leur page, et qui le plus souvent ne connaissent pas leur mère?” 38 Vesa-Pekka Herva, Janne Ikäheimo, Matti Enbuske, and Jari Okkonen, “Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North: The Materiality and Meanings of the Pajala ‘Runestone’ (Vinsavaara Stone), Northern Sweden”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28, no. 4 (November 2018), pp. 613–28. “The Swedish Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) has defined the Vinsivaara stone as a natural rock with folklore associated with it” (p. 615). 39 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 183. 40 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, pp. 192–93: “La pierre sur laquelle ces lignes sont gravées est composée
98 Sylvie Requemora-Gros de différentes couches; les caractères sont écrits sur une espèce de caillou, pendant que le reste, et surtout entre les deux lignes, paraît être d’une pierre plus molle, et feuilletée. Quoi qu’il en soit, nous copiâmes, M. Celsius et moi, séparément et avec soin, tout ce que nous pûmes discerner, tel qu’on le voit ici. Quand ce ne serait qu’un jeu de la nature, la réputation qu’a cette pierre dans ce pays méritait que nous en donnassions la description. Cette pierre n’a pas assurément la beauté des monuments de la Grèce et de Rome: mais si ce qu’elle continent est une inscription, cette inscription a vraisemblablement l’avantage d’être la plus ancienne de l’Univers. On ne croira guère qu’ils aient jamais eu aucun événement mémorable à transmettre à la postérité; ni, quand ils l’auraient eu, qu’ils en eussent connu les moyens. On ne saurait non plus supposer que ce pays, dans la position où il est, ait eu autrefois d’autres habitants plus civilisés. L’horreur du climat, et a stérilité de la terre, l’ont destiné à ne pouvoir être la retraite que de quelques misérables, qui n’en connaissent aucun autre. Il semble donc que notre inscription aurait dû être gravée dans des temps où ce pays se serait trouvé situé sous un autre climat; et avant quelqu’une de ces grandes révolutions, qu’on ne saurait douter qui ne soient arrivées à la Terre. La position qu’a aujourd’hui son axe par rapport au plan de l’écliptique, fait que la Laponie ne reçoit que très obliquement les rayons du soleil; elle est condamnée par là à un hiver long, et funeste aux hommes, et à toutes les productions de la nature; sa terre est stérile et déserte”. 41 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 194: “les cercles polaires ont pu être ce que sont aujourd’hui les tropiques”. 42 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 195: “L’histoire sacrée nous apprend que les eaux ont autrefois couvert les plus hautes montagnes. Il serait bien difficile de concevoir une telle inondation, sans le déplacement du centre de gravité de la Terre, et de ses climats”. 43 Herva et al., “Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North”, p. 616. 44 Herva et al., “Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North”, p. 618. 45 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 195: “Si l’on veut point avoir recours à ces changements, on pourrait trouver l’origine de l’inscription de Windso dans quelque événement aussi singulier que notre voyage”. 46 Maupertuis, “Relation d’un voyage fait dans la Laponie septentrionale”, p. 195: “Une inscription qui contiendra l’histoire de l’opération que nous étions allés faire dans ces pays, sera peut-être un jour quelque chose d’aussi obscur que l’est celle-ci: et si toutes les sciences étaient perdues, qui pourrait alors découvrir, qui pourrait imaginer, qu’un tel monument fût l’ouvrage des Français; et que ce qu’on y verrait gravé fût la mesure des degrés de la Terre, et la détermination de sa figure?” 47 Letter from Voltaire to Maupertuis, May 22, 1738, Voltaire, Troisième Suite des mélanges de poésie, de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (Paris: Prault, 1761), p. 133: “pays enchanté dont les philosophes sont les fées”.
Bibliography Acerbi, Giuseppe, Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799, vol. I (London: Joseph Mawman, 1802). Acerbi, Giuseppe, Viaggio in Lapponia 1799, ed. Luigi De Anna and Lauri Lindgren (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1996).
Signs of Travel and Memory 99 Acerbi, Giuseppe, Voyage au Cap Nord par la Suède, la Finlande et la Laponie, transl. Joseph Lavallée (Paris: Levrault et Schoell, 1804). Bertrand, Gilles, “Le voyage et les usages de l’espace méditerranéen à l’époque du Grand Tour”, Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie 28 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/ilcea.4087 (accessed May 13, 2020). Calame, Alexandre, Regnard: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960). Cart, Théophile, “Le Voyage en Laponie de Regnard”, Revue des cours et conférences, no. 24 (May 1900), pp. 321–27. Emmanuel, Marthe, La France et l’exploration polaire (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1959). Fercourt, Claude Auxcouteaux, La relation de l’esclavage des sieurs de Fercourt et Regnard, ed. M. Targe (Toulouse: Privat, 1905). Grillo, Alessandra, “La Laponie d’Aubry de la Motraye (1718): L’interaction entre texte et image”, Astrolabe 18 (2008), www.crlv.org/astrolabe/ novembred%C3%A9cembre-2008/la-laponie-daubry-de-la-mottraye-1718 (accessed Dec. 10, 2019). Herva, Vesa-Pekka, Janne Ikäheimo, Matti Enbuske, and Jari Okkonen, “Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North: The Materiality and Meanings of the Pajala ‘Runestone’ (Vinsavaara Stone), Northern Sweden”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28, no. 4 (November 2018), pp. 613–28. Huet, Pierre-Daniel, Mémoires (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993). Kjellman, Hilding, “Regnards resa i Lappland”, Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift, 1931, pp. 235–58. La Motraye, Aubry de, Voyages du Sr de la Motraye en Europe, en Asie et Afrique, ou l’on trouve une grande variété de recherches géographiques, historiques et politiques sur l’Italie, la Grèce, la Tartarie, Crimée et Nogaye la Circassie, la Suède et la Laponie, etc., avec des remarques instructives sur les mœurs, coutumes et opinions […] des peuples et des pays où l’auteur a voyagé […], vol. 2 (Hague: T. Jonson & J. Van Duren, 1727). Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, Maupertuis en Laponie: A la recherche de la figure de la Terre, ed. Osmo Pekonen and Anouchka Vasak (Paris: Hermann, 2014). Maury, Lucien, “À la recherche de Regnard en Laponie”, Les nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, April 19, 1930, p. 10. Naum, Magdalena, “Between Utopia and Dystopia: Colonial Ambivalence and Early Modern Perception of Sápmi”, Itinerario 40, no. 3 (2016), pp. 489–521. Nordin, Jonas M. and Carl-Gösta Ojala, “Collecting, Connecting, Constructing: Early Modern Commodification and Globalization of Sámi Material Culture”, Journal of Material Culture 23, no. 1 (2017), pp. 58–82, https://doi. org/10.1177/1359183517741663 (accessed Jan. 20, 2020). Regnard, Jean-François, Le théâtre italien: Les comédies italiennes de J.F. Regnard recueillies par Évariste Gherardi, ed. Roger Guichemerre, vol. 2 (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996). Regnard, Jean-François, Les Œuvres de Mr. Regnard, nouvelle édition revue, corrigée & augmentée, vol. 2 (Paris: Pierre-Jacques Ribou, 1731). Regnard, Jean-François, Théâtre français, vol. 3: Le Légataire universel, La critique du Légataire, Sapor, Les souhaits, Les vendanges ou le Bailli d’Asnières,
100 Sylvie Requemora-Gros ed. Sabine Chaouche, Noémie Courtès, and Sylvie Requemora-Gros (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). Regnard, Jean-François, “Voyage en Laponie”, Les Œuvres de Mr. Regnard, nouvelle édition revue, corrigée & augmentée, vol. 1 (Paris: Pierre-Jacques Ribou, 1731). Regnard, Jean-François, Voyages: Romans et récits, ed. Sylvie Requemora-Gros (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020). Requemora-Gros, Sylvie, “Comment peut-on être lapon? Singularités Nordiques: J.-F Regnard en Europe du Nord, entre anomalie et ironie”, La France et l’Europe du Nord au XVIIe siècle: de l’Irlande à la Russie, ed. Richard Maber (Tübingen: Narr, 2017), pp. 185–94. Schefferus, Johannes, Lapponia, id est regionis Lapponum et gentis nova et verissima descriptio. In qua multa De origine superstitione, sacris magicis, victu, cultu, negotiis Lapponum, item Animalium, metallorumque indole, quæ in terris eorum proventium, hactenus incognita. Produntur, et eiconibus adjectis cum cura illustrantur, Francofurti, ex officina Christiani Wolffii (Frankfurt, 1673). Solbakk, John Trygve, The Sámi People: A Handbook, ed. John Trygve Solbakk (Vasa: Davvi Girji OS, 2006). Teyssier, Paul, “Les cent glorieuses”, Lisbonne hors les murs. 1415–1580: L’invention du monde par les navigateurs portugais, ed. Michel Chandeigne (Paris: Édition Autrement, 1992), pp. 14–53. Voltaire, Troisième Suite des mélanges de poésie, de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (Grangé: Prault, 1761). Wiklund, Karl-Bernard, “En liten uppgift att lösa vid Torne träsk”, Svenska turistföreningens årsskrift, 1904, pp. 359–62.
4 Almanacs, Polytemporality, and Early Modern Travel Margaret R. Hunt
This chapter explores time, temporality, and travel in early modern England and in some European settlements in other parts of the world. Its main source-base for doing that is almanacs. Almanacs were a cheap, popular print-genre that specialised in offering simple solutions to the logistical and intellectual challenges and uncertainties of everyday life, including travel. They also encouraged people, sometimes in a rather playful fashion, to think comparatively about conventional time schemas like calendars. Seventeenth-century England, with its robust market for popular printed books and pamphlets, is the centre of gravity of this chapter, but, just as travellers did, it also ranges more widely in time and space. Early modern almanacs have often been seen as a window into early modern knowledge systems and cultural preoccupations. The larger claim of this chapter is that they also were agents of change in their own right. They probably went some way towards helping readers to develop new mental maps of the world; they may also have helped non-elite people to think in a more complex way about cultural sameness and difference, especially in relation to calendrical systems and historical chronology; and they offered new “technologies” for coping with the risks of travel. Several questions structure the discussion. First, what was distinctive about the almanac genre, and what was its relationship to more familiar travel genres? Second, what kinds of complex temporalities did the almanacs display, and how were these linked to the risks and rewards of travel? Finally, is there any relationship between almanacs and seventeenth-century travel writing? Though this is not a chapter about travel narratives, it is the topic of the larger collection. Therefore, towards the end of the chapter, a preliminary comparison is attempted between almanacs and two late seventeenth-century narratives of travel to South Asia. As we will see, there are some parallels between almanacs and the two narratives that will be examined here, and certainly both genres show an interest in polytemporality.
102 Margaret R. Hunt An almanac is, and was, a calendar of dates, rendered in tabular form.1 It listed feast-days, offered information about the phases and movements of the sun and moon, and predicted eclipses. The almanacs discussed here took the form of printed booklets or, occasionally, larger single sheets for posting on a wall. They were almost always associated with a specific year, though perpetual calendars2 crop up from time to time, and they featured an eclectic mix of calendrical, cosmological, astrological, health, agricultural, and weather information. The classic English, and, indeed, continental almanac from the early sixteenth century onward also included a set of “prognostications” (predictions, usually astrologically based) for the upcoming year.3 As will be shown, many almanacs reached out to travellers, and this chapter focuses especially on almanacs that contained open appeals to a travelling readership or content clearly directed at them. Almanacs were one of the great success stories of the first great age of European print. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz printed his first almanac in 1457, almost a decade before he published his celebrated Bible, and the almanac went on to become one of the most widely distributed print genres of the early modern period. For England, about 400,000 almanacs were being printed per year by the middle of the seventeenth century, which translates into one for every three to four households.4 Because they were so cheap (one to two pence per booklet in the early seventeenth century, a few pennies more by century’s end) they were well within the capabilities both of rural householders and urban workers. In fact, tens of millions of them were published across Europe and in European settlements and colonies between 1600 and 1850. Almanaclike genres also developed independently of European influence in many parts of the world. Printed almanacs were common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, Korea, and Japan, reproduced in large numbers using wood-block printing.5 Moreover, both manuscript almanacs and almanac-like productions utilising various media have flourished in other parts of the world, some of them for millennia.6 The cheapness, popularity, and ubiquity of almanacs means that they can provide clues for how quite ordinary travellers, people who might never have thought to pen a travel narrative, made sense of their world. Because almanacs were all about time, they also offer a valuable opportunity to explore early modern temporalities, both for those who stayed at home and those who went abroad. Indeed, one of the claims made here is that, in almanacs, the experience, and possibly the fantasy of travel, was particularly likely to be expressed through a focus on plural temporalities. In this chapter temporal pluralism and polytemporality are used interchangeably to mean the simultaneous occurrence, overlap or merger of two or more systems of organising time.7 There were at least three ways that the almanac displayed, and possibly encouraged polytemporal thinking. First, almanacs represented the immediate present (the
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 103 month-and-day tables that probably were their main raison d’être) in the form of multiple, overlapping temporal regimes. Second, they played a good deal with cultural representations of time, both in the form of popular historical chronologies, and by emphasising the differences between the Julian calendar (the official English calendar up to 1752) and various foreign calendars. Readers were encouraged by the format of the almanac to learn to compare familiar and local representations of time with less-familiar, indeed, sometimes fairly exotic ones. Finally, almanacs dealt very explicitly with the future, both by supplying useful information (such as tide charts) designed to make the future more knowable, and by encouraging readers actually to divine the future using astrology. Future thinking becomes polytemporal when the future erupts into and begins to affect the present8 and that is the process almanacs tried to assist and encourage. As this chapter will show, they did so especially insistently in relation to the hazards and challenges of travel.
The Almanac as a Travel Anti-Narrative Almanacs were much occupied with travel, but they could not in any way be confused with a travel narrative. For one thing, their pages usually contained more tables of numbers and symbols (the monthly calendars and ephemerides9) than text. For another, they had no protagonist. There was, of course, an imagined consumer, who might be a traveller: as we will see, some almanacs addressed that traveller directly in their titles, or in the text. Almanacs seem to have assumed that if someone was travelling it was probably for purposes of trade, to pursue a legal matter, or to attend university; this was not travel for self-improvement, nor was it travel for purposes of “discovery”.10 It is also notable that the forward march of time in almanacs, unlike in many other travel genres, was not linked to people, or even movement from departure point to destination in the way guide books often conceived of it, but to the arbitrary start and end date of the calendar year. One thing that almanacs did share with many travel narratives was a strong focus on challenges to be overcome. One had to plan one’s route, predict the time it would take, and figure out a mode of transport. To facilitate this process, many almanacs included charts of distances between towns. A traveller might miss his or her boat because the skipper had had to sail with the tide; to prevent this, many almanacs offered charts showing when high tide was likely to be on any given day of the year. Shipwrecks generated a very particular kind of anxiety among travellers, and almanacs routinely gave advice about auspicious and inauspicious days or seasons in which to travel by sea. Other problems might arise once one had reached one’s destination. For example, an unscrupulous local trader might quote you a false rate of exchange; to pre-empt this possibility almanacs often included information on foreign coinages
104 Margaret R. Hunt and their value. Finally, a particular trip or enterprise might be plagued with bad luck from the start, born, so to speak, under an evil star, and like the astrological practitioners who were often their compilers, almanacs were fully prepared to give advice about when one should and should not embark on a trip or a business venture. Almanac compilers sought solutions – both practical and astrological solutions – to all manner of problems, and they succeeded in doing it in a way consumers apparently found both appealing and reassuring. Almanac compilers appear to have seen travellers as ideal consumers for the kinds of information they had on offer. This is clear from some almanacs’ titles as well as their content. The City and Countrey Chapmans Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1690 (a chapman was a travelling salesman) helpfully lists “all the Marts and Fairs in England and Wales”, with the commodities most often found there, along with the post roads, and a variety of other kinds of information “Useful for All Travellers, Tradesmen, or Chapmen of What Kind Soever”.11 Most almanacs also advertised their geo-spatial coordinates on their title pages, usually in the form of the latitude and meridian (longitude) of the compiler’s natal town, partly a mark of local pride, but also information of particular relevance to travellers, especially seamen.12 As we have seen, many almanacs also offered tables of distances between towns, tide-tables, and monetary exchange rates, often against several European and sometimes non-European currencies. Often, they also included information about fairs, lists of local town officials, tables of the rate of interest, tables of weights and measures and their equivalents, dates of postal pickups, and even tables of accounts that eliminated the need to do one’s own calculations when buying goods in bulk.13 Continental almanacs offered similar information to the English ones, which suggests both that the genre was well-established and that it met a real need. Thus, Hermann Wahn’s Hamburgisch Verbesserter SchreibCalender of 1747 listed the dates of market-fairs and “der Fluth und Ebbe des Elbestrohms” (the ebb and flood of the tide in the river Elbe). Slightly less typically, it also listed the times of the sermons and musical performances at all the churches and civic institutions in the city, suggesting, perhaps, an emerging touristic sensibility.14 From roughly the last quarter of the sixteenth century European almanacs also began to register a mounting interest in more distant parts of the world.15 Henry Alleyn’s Double Almanac and Prognostication for 1607 claimed to be useful for all those who “Shall Haue Ocasion to Trauell beyond the Seas, about Trafficke of Marchandize”16 and other almanacs expressed similar aspirations. However, the reality was that most European-based almanacs were not well-equipped to cope with the logistical problems posed by travel across entire oceans.17 In many cases their purview did not extend much beyond a 100-mile radius from their “home” coordinates. Accordingly, colonial almanacs began appearing,
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 105 ambitious to fill the gap. The first North American almanac (unfortunately no longer extant) appeared in 1639 in Boston, Massachusetts, compiled by a sea captain named William Pierce.18 Thousands of North American almanacs would follow, offering useful information on tides, routes, currencies, time zones, and so forth, but, as with European almanacs, gradually extending their information base to coach hire, inns, etc., as the infrastructure of travel evolved. For the Caribbean, John Gadbury’s series of almanacs and ephemerides for Jamaica, dating from the 1670s, was full of useful information on tropical health, local fruits and vegetables, the local planter elite, and regionally distinctive star arrays.19 The eighteenth century saw a robust market in almanac-style books in Latin America as well, often combined with information on travel.20 By the early nineteenth century, almost all the European settlements in Asia and a few in Africa had also begun to publish almanacs.21 One of the most impressive almanac projects was launched in the Danish settlement of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India using a printing press sourced from London and type cast at Halle in Saxony. This was an area with a strong indigenous tradition of astronomical knowledge, though whether this influenced the European project or not is unknown. At any rate, from 1714 the Protestant missionaries there published almanacs both in Portuguese and in Tamil, and these apparently ran until the late eighteenth century, though only a tiny number of copies have survived.22 The almanac appears to have become both a badge of pride for communities abroad and a key source of information for how to cope with foreign climes and unfamiliar peoples; in the case of missionaries it was also a way to spread their spiritual message. Part of the issue for almanac compilers, and one reason why almanacs did not always travel well, was because their compilers had to make sense not just of foreign climes but, at least in the southern hemisphere, of strange stars. Even when the stars were familiar, the names and symbolic associations of asterisms and constellations could be quite different depending on the place, and so were local and regional systems of divination, prediction, and navigation. Time itself, or at least seasonal weather systems, worked differently in other parts of the world, two well-known examples being the monsoon season in the Indian Ocean, and the hurricane season in the Caribbean. The temporal-spatial-cosmological challenges of long-distance travel seemed to demand new knowledge, and the transfer of that knowledge, whether through people or the written word, began, accordingly, to seem more urgent. Several examples can be cited. In the sixteenth century the Franciscan friar Bernardino Sahagún urged applying Aztec disciplinary measures – based, he thought, on their specialised knowledge of the baleful influence of American stars – to the challenge of getting indigenous Mexicans to submit to Christian rule.23 In the late seventeenth century, French intellectuals began circulating a Hindu celestial chart from Siam.24 Between the mid-eighteenth and
106 Margaret R. Hunt mid-nineteenth centuries the British in India drew heavily upon indigenous knowledge of surveying, astronomy and mathematics – and relied on a largely Indian workforce – in a major project to map their new South Asian domain.25 Moreover, in 1784, one compiler in Calcutta attempted an almanac that incorporated not just Hindu and Muslim calendars but information on Hindu astronomy, plus plates of “the Oriental zodiac”; “the Hindoo lunar mansions”; and a “chart of zodiacal stars which form the Oriental lunar mansions”.26 What is the larger significance of the almanac’s engagement with travel? One way to look at it is through the concept of mental maps.27 Mental or cognitive mapping is a concept drawn from the discipline of geography that refers to peoples’ mental picture of where other parts of the world are in relation to them. While there is some question as to whether mental maps are primarily a hermeneutic device of geographers and historians or something people actually “see” in their mind’s eye, they are, nevertheless, a useful way to think about how people orient themselves in the spatial world, imagine and cope with difference, define foreignness, and form personal and family identity. People’s orientation to their surround, near and far, may also affect their willingness to travel abroad. Mental maps were presumably built up over an individual’s lifetime, based upon multiple inputs: visual, cognitive, physical, and emotional. Almanacs provided some of the kinds of information we would expect to contribute to such a process. For example, they encouraged people to compare travel distances and to construct rough mental simulacra of surrounding towns and waterways, and sometimes more distant ones. They pushed people to think about their own and other locales within the grid of latitude and longitude. They also piqued people’s imagination about what it would be like to be faced with currencies, calendars, and other fairly complex cultural constructs that were different from their own. Finally, they helped people to think more systematically about their relationship to the heavens. Much of the literature on mental maps assumes an earth-bound conception of spatiality.28 But mental maps in the premodern period were probably more three-dimensional because many people still oriented themselves in relation to (moving) celestial bodies, and not just stable points on the earth’s surface. Almanacs were fully prepared to accommodate that desire: they helped to orient people in space, and the dynamic space/time linkages at the heart of their enterprise may also have prepared people to think more complexly about time.
Day to Day Polytemporality Almanacs, as we will see, encouraged readers to think about ordinary life in more – or at least differently – polytemporal ways than they had before, and that project was often linked to the experience of travel. However, before examining this issue in more detail, it is worth asking
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 107 what people’s experiences of time were like before the widespread availability of almanacs. In a forthcoming essay, Keith Wrightson uses court depositions from the northeast of England taken between 1565 and 1729 to demonstrate change over time in the way early modern English people talked about, and presumably thought about, time. As he shows, in the later sixteenth century significant numbers of people, especially people in the country, expressed time in terms of saints’ days or other holidays (e.g. a week after St Swithin’s day), the harvest or other agricultural season (e.g. “it was at the time when farmers sow barley”) or other largely non-numerical referents. However, the now standard linkage of month/ numerical day/numerical year29 gained substantially over other ways of expressing time in the course of the roughly 160-year period studied. Wrightson argues that almanacs, which ballooned in popularity in the seventeenth century, and were clearly organised around the month/ numerical day/numerical year schema (which he calls “almanac time”), were one of the main forces behind this shift. This is a rare example of an effort both to take seriously the history of popular temporalities and to think of almanacs as drivers of change in their own right.30 In its broad outlines Wrightson’s argument is surely correct. Dating based on the numerical day and year (plus the semi-numerical month) was the most important dating schema of the almanacs, and the one around which the others revolved. Still, this was by no means the only way almanacs expressed time. Take, for example, Richard Allestree’s long-running and very popular almanac series published between 1617 and 1651. Looking at the almanac for 1620, we first find the dates for the beginning and end of Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas terms, that is to say, the legal year in most English law courts, which was crucial to know if one was planning a trip in relation to a pending legal case. The calendar pages, arranged by month, offered the days of the month in both Roman numerals and the relatively new (at least for England) HinduArabic numeration system.31 They also displayed the days of the week, coded by letter to save space. Saints’ and martyrs’ feast days were listed in another parallel column. We also find the ephemerides and the Julian and Gregorian calendars in parallel columns. Separate tables on each calendar page give the phases of the moon (and thus, implicitly, the lunar months and year); and a formula for figuring out the rising and setting of the sun for any given day. In addition, this particular almanac left blank space for the owner to put in his or her own memorable dates.32 The temporal centre-point around which almanacs revolved may have been “almanac time” but they also encouraged constant negotiations among and between different systems of dating, including “natural” ones (that is, based on lunar and solar progressions), ones that were all too obviously the product of human contrivance and debate (i.e. the Julian calendar, used in England, versus the Gregorian, used in many Continental countries), and ones that were localised and personal. Their layout, we could
108 Margaret R. Hunt argue, encouraged both mental comparison and synchronisation, and the proliferation of ways of thinking about time, albeit with a new emphasis on numerical rather than discursive ways of talking about it.33 One way to look at the polytemporality of almanacs is as a sort of numbers game, a curiosity, and this may have formed part of their appeal for some people.34 However, it is not impossible that people were predisposed towards seeing time as multiple because polytemporality was part of their conscious or unconscious experience. A life is not easy to shoehorn into a single temporal schema, numerical, or otherwise. Humans experience linear as well as teleological time in the process of ageing, and perhaps in the experience of giving birth and raising children, as well as in the seriatim numbering of years, where time is thought of as a progressive ascent into the future. In turn, these coexist with various forms of cyclical time, such as the repetitive tasks of daily sustenance, the menstrual cycle, the agricultural year, the distinct tempo of the work week, and so on. Moreover, most people’s conscious experience of moving through life probably consists in part of jumbled, episodic, and conflicted personal and social temporalities that follow no appreciable pattern.35 Social and cultural differences also seem to multiply temporalities. In a classic essay from 1967, E. P. Thompson showed the conflicts caused by the forcible imposition of “factory time” on several generations of English industrial workers.36 In recent decades a lot of historical and sociological research has focused on the tension between “women’s time”, “family time”, “leisure time”, and other kinds of time.37 Colonial labour regimes, and, in particular, slavery, have also generated a literature focused in part on conflicts over time and temporality.38 Finally, the study of cultural entanglement and globalisation has produced a significant literature on confrontations between different ways of organising time.39 It is, of course, to be expected that the experience of travel as well as of colonial settlement would complicate temporal assumptions. The almanacs suggest all sorts of ways that travel could alter time and multiply ways of thinking about it, from the shift of ten calendrical days that would accompany any trip to the Continent, and the anticipated difference in holy days between (for example) Catholics and Protestants, to the way that moving to a different latitude and longitude could be expected to alter the influence of the stars. They also show evidence of the way colonialism and the institution of slavery affected labour regimes.. Take Gadbury’s series of almanacs for Jamaica, which, unsurprisingly, was directed mainly at the interests of slave-holding English planters. One from 1674 offers the following chilling prediction: If Indico have formerly yielded twelve pounds, or fourteen pound sterling, per Annum, per Acres, for every Negro-slave that works upon that commodity, it is now likely (by Gods goodness in this
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 109 Revolution [i.e., the orbit of the planet Jupiter]) to yield them sixteen, seaventeen, or eighteen pounds per Annum, per acre, possibly more […].40 With its artless blend of magical reasoning, capitalist boosterism, and extreme dehumanisation, this passage speaks clearly to the difference between the temporal regime imposed on enslaved people and the one lived by planters.
Historical Chronologies and Exotic Calendars Some, though not all of the polytemporal schemas found in almanacs either derived from the experience of travel and settlement (Gadbury is an example of this) or encouraged readers to think cross-culturally about time. However, almanacs also showed some more concerted attempts to grapple both with multiple time schemas, and with their connections to travel, or at least to foreign lands. The two most important of these were almanac compilers’ (and, apparently almanac buyers’) interest in historical chronologies or timelines, and their enthusiasm for what I will call “exotic calendars”.41 Almanac compilers were far from being pioneers with respect to historical chronologies: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a significant increase in scholarly interest in biblical and other historical chronologies. This project was greatly enhanced by new cultural and linguistic knowledge that was at least partly the result of travel to and from more and more distant places. The pace of speculation about the end times also picked up in the early modern period, and this encouraged efforts to line up the prophetic books of the Bible, especially the book of Revelation, against significant events and people in the previous millennium and a half.42 The almanac version of the historical chronology most often was a case of taking the work of professional academics, excising the scholarly apparatus, and repackaging it for a popular audience. This was history for the common man or woman, for some their first taste of it.43 Naturally, the interest in historical chronologies also meant that almanacs got into the business of comparing other traditions’ views of history. Chronologies executed by and for Catholics could look quite different from those intended for Protestants, as we can see from Henry Hills’ Catholic Almanac for 1687. Hills was the official household printer for King James II (a Catholic convert) and Hills’ almanac pointedly included a chronology of popes and a “catalogue of the archbishops of Canterbury, from St. Augustine till the Reformation”, along with an array of saints that had largely disappeared from English almanacs. This was patently an attempt to reconcile English history with the chronological preoccupations of Rome.44 A different kind of chronology could be found in Isaac
110 Margaret R. Hunt Abendana’s Oxford Almanac, also known as “The Jewish Almanac”. The 1697 edition featured an elaborate chronology of Jewish history from the creation of the world up to the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. Abendana, who was Jewish, was a distinguished translator, book-collector, and lecturer in Hebrew at both Cambridge and Oxford from the 1660s through the 1690s.45 These comparisons not only emphasised the various religious groups’ differing conceptions of key people and dates in history but they presented sometimes radically different notions about controversial questions like the age of the earth. Some almanacs openly tried to capitalise on the confusion. George Wharton’s Hemeroscopeion of 1653 not only emphasised the difference between Eastern Orthodox and Jewish estimates of the age of the earth, but composed a poem on the discrepancy: Heav’ns direct us! What a difference here’s. Full seventeenth hundred fourty twice four years: Whose Reck’ning shall we trust? or will we wait. Till some New-Prophet Rise, and Calculate. The year?46 Many seventeenth-century English almanacs included historical chronologies of England. However, extending this to Rome, to the (ancient) Holy Land, to the Iberian peninsula, and, in the case of the discussions of Eastern Orthodoxy, to Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East, suggests an increasingly plural, even cosmopolitan conception of the passage of historical time and of temporality in general.47 As we have seen, most almanacs, as a matter of course, included both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, so comparison was already built into the genre. However, some almanacs went much further. William Bedwell’s 1614 Kalendarium Viatorium Generale: The Travellers Kalendar Serving Generally for All Parts of the World, was said to be published “for the benefit of marchants, factors, sea-men, and travellers”. It attempted to reconcile an impressive array of ten calendars starting, obviously, with the new Gregorian and Julian, and extending to Greek, Syrian, Jewish, Hijri (Islamic), Egyptian, Abyssinian, Persian, and Mexican calendars. Bedwell even supplied a brief and, at times, rather fanciful guide explaining where travellers were most likely to find these calendars actually in use: The Abyssine yeare is in use for ought I can learn, only amongst those nations which are under the obedience of Prester John, as they call him […] [While] the Egyptian, which anciently Potolomey and the astronomers were wont to use, is now in use amongst, the Georgians, Iacobites, and other sorts of Christians inhabiting in Egypt, Palestina, the deserts of Arabia, &c.48
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 111 The spatial spread of the “Egyptian” or Ptolemaic calendar was sensible, but Prester John was a wholly mythic king derived from twelfth-century European fantasies about north east Africa, the Middle East, and India.49 Bedwell’s Kalendarium was at the extreme end of the polycalendrical spectrum, but, it was not at all odd to include other calendars in addition to the Julian and Gregorian ones. Most common was the Jewish calendar, both exotic by the standards of most English readers and useful for Bible study.50 “Ancient Roman” calendars appealed to the continuing prestige of Latin, even, one presumes, among some people who had never had the opportunity to learn it. More unusual calendrical projects turn up elsewhere in Europe, as can be seen in one 1784 Swedish perpetual calendar that aimed to match “runic calendar” signs to the Gregorian calendar.51 Some colonial almanacs, most of them from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, also made it a point to include indigenous calendrical information. The Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory for 1815 was published at the behest of the British military government not long after the British conquest of Dutch Batavia in 1811. It went to some trouble to indicate the names of Javanese weeks and months, including the number of days in each.52 The appeal of foreign calendars (foreign from the perspective of most English readers at any rate) certainly can be ascribed in part to religious reform and religious conflict, which increased the weight attached to calendrical debates. It was also a function of the fact that people actually were travelling and communicating across longer distances, and, as a result, encountering new and unfamiliar problems, some of them to do with time. William Bedwell claimed in his preface to have been much employed in translating “bills, bonds and letters” from foreign languages, presumably on behalf of litigants in court cases. He made much of the temporal challenges involved. For instance, if one needed to know when a debt was legally due, it was essential to be able to compare documents “dated after a computation of years, far different from that used by us”53 against a local understanding of time. His message was that an inability to compare calendars could have both legal and financial consequences. Sometimes the interest in calendrical comparison reflected the composition of the community from which it came. The Surinaamsche Staatkundige Almanach voor den Jaare 1793, and most subsequent Surinam almanacs into the twentieth century, featured Jewish feast days especially prominently; later numbers also listed the whole Jewish calendar plus feast days in a parallel column to the Gregorian one, along with other information of relevance to Jews and people who associated or did business with them. This reflected the fact that Dutch Surinam had one of the oldest and largest Jewish communities in the New World.54 Other almanacs played to the interests of scholars. In addition to its chronology of Jewish history, Isaac Abendana’s “Jewish Almanac” featured the
112 Margaret R. Hunt Julian and Gregorian calendar and the “Hebrew” calendar on alternating pages, a calendar of ancient Rome, and a list of the “scarlet gown days” at Oxford and Cambridge. Colonial rivalries could also play a role. The Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory of 1815, mentioned above, was openly part of a propaganda campaign by the English designed to cement their recent military victory over Dutch Batavia. The inclusion of an indigenous calendar may have been part of an effort to enlist nonEuropeans in that project. Still, the sheer number of parallel calendars and other time schemas jostled against one another in the typical almanac must surely have exceeded the practical needs of many or most readers. Probably there were other factors at work. One may have been that other people’s historical chronologies and calendars made readers feel more cosmopolitan than they really were. Like travel narratives, almanacs offered access to insider information about places many of their readers would never see. In this respect, chronological and calendrical comparisons, coupled with some of the almanacs’ other deliberately cross-cultural forays, such as coinage-tables, were an ideal way to encounter difference, a shortcut to a rich mine of imagined intercultural knowledge. Of course, in most cases that encounter was a very superficial one, not least because almanacs were better at talking about stars and numbers than about people. On the plus side, they less often descended into the kind of religious rancour one finds in many travel narratives from the same period, though perhaps only for lack of space.55 What is the significance of this kind of chronological and calendrical play for travellers? Chronologies were primarily about contrast. There really was no way to fully reconcile key Catholic dates in history with Protestant or Jewish ones, or, for that matter, Muslim or “Ancient Roman” ones. Chronologies were primarily a testimony to cultural and religious diversity and difference. Also, while some of them might have been useful to people trying to match historical events to apocalyptic prophecies, they were, at best, of secondary benefit to the practical traveller. What they did do was to give a very summary historical overview of some foreign lands and faiths. In that sense they may have offered a basic template for thinking in a relativistic way about the people and customs travellers were likely to encounter in foreign climes. The calendars were a different matter, especially the non-European ones. Local informants, often scholars or priests, or both, must initially have given them to travellers or missionaries. Later, writers on geography or prominent chronologers and linguists like Joseph Scaliger publicised many of them.56 However, unlike historical chronologies, which tended to stress difference, the inclusion of foreign calendars in almanacs was almost always yoked to a project of synchronisation. Calendars were presented in such a way as to facilitate direct comparison with the calendar the reader was presumed to know best (in England up to 1752
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 113 the Julian one). Of course, as we saw with the historical chronologies, there were irresolvable conflicts between the Catholic and Protestant significant days, or the Christian sabbath and the Muslim Salat-al-Jumu’ah (Friday day of prayer). Still, it was possible for the traveller to find out when he or she was about to happen upon these differences in practice, and notionally to link the unfamiliar to the well-known. It seems likely this would have gone some way towards making travel seem both more predictable and less strange.
Futures Present Historical chronologies (focused on the past) and exotic calendars (located, for the most part, in the present) relied upon temporal comparisons both to highlight difference and diversity and to resolve and domesticate it. In addition to the past and present, almanacs were also concerned with the future, and there, too, we see both a preoccupation with travel and a rather complex notion of temporality. However, in this case that pairing is aimed at a different set of problems, namely, how to foresee and protect oneself from life’s perils, especially the perils of travel. Though the future is a different time from the “time of now”, what people think will happen in the future necessarily affects their actions in the present. This happens most obviously when people make plans, and one way to think about planning is as an alteration in one’s behaviour or thinking in the present with the aim of changing the shape of the future. Almanacs were nothing if not an incitement to plan, and the knowledge they offered respecting the body and health, agriculture, politics, love, travel, and the fate of nations was largely oriented towards this end. Almanacs clearly derived part of their appeal from promising useful information to people who wanted to minimise their exposure to future risk. They also had a larger ambition: to democratise astrology itself. Astrology was a sophisticated method of diagnosis and prediction that required years of study and a confident grasp of mathematics to master, but almanac compilers sought to turn it into a set of simple techniques that almost anyone could benefit from. One astrological specialty was helping people to make potentially life-changing decisions, and whether or not to embark on a trip, especially a trip that involved travel over water, was just such a decision.57 As one London astrologer announced around 1690 in a promotional flyer: He [that is, the advertiser] tells what Good or Ill shall befal you, and when? […] When a change shall happen? What Part [of the city?] is best to live in? If an absent party be dead or Alive? Shall you recover Goods or Money lent or due? If good to travel? Good to remove [i.e. move to another house or town] or not? [etc.]58
114 Margaret R. Hunt However, the services of a professional astrologer would presumably have been more comprehensive than what buyers of an almanac got, and also considerably more expensive. With respect to cheap almanacs, travellers had several options available to them. They could simply consult the weather predictions many almanacs offered. If the forecast called for high winds and many storms for September and October, the prudent traveller would be well-advised to put off taking a sea-journey in those months. Alternatively, some almanacs simply listed inauspicious days to travel. As the Countryman’s Kalendar of 1698 bluntly put it: “Whoso beginneth a journey on any of these [evil] days, he shall be in danger of death, before he return.”59 Other almanac compilers offered subtler prognostications. Henry Alleyn predicted in his almanac for 1607 that autumn would be dry and cool but he also warned of “many unexpected and unwelcome stores of thunder haile, and lightning, & such other ghastly wethers [sic]”. If this were not enough to deter the traveller, the alignments of the stars also portended “infidelitie, impietie, disloyaltie, uncharitableness, and hard-hartedness. Thereby incensing the minds of many to immoderate lust, secret practicing of trecherie, and mischief, pilfering, robbing, & spoiling of travellers and passengers by seas and land [...]”.60 Travellers setting off in the fall of 1607, at least according to Alleyn, had plenty to worry about, from nasty and unpredictable bouts of bad weather to pirates and highwaymen. Some compilers tried to educate their readers on the rudiments of astrology, so that they could make travel plans on their own (obviously with the aid of their almanac): “Jupiter, Venus, the Sunne and Mercury fortunate in the ninth house, denote that [a person] shall be happy in viages [voyages] by Land and by Sea. Saturn and Mars signify to the contrary […]” wrote John Poole, also a compiler of almanacs, in Country Astrology in Three Books (1650).61 The ever-active John Gadbury offered a series of elaborate case studies of astrology applied both to ocean travel and to the ships a traveller might sail on. One of his examples was meant to answer the question whether the intended trip would be profitable; another involved casting up the “nativity” of a ship at her first launching, as an aid to predicting whether she would end up wrecked.62 There is general agreement that astrology began to lose credibility in England from the latter part of the seventeenth century. This was not a straightforward process, however. Many prominent seventeenth-century intellectuals, including scientists, took at least some of the claims of astrologers seriously, and there were a number of attempts both to prove astrology’s claims of celestial influence empirically and to put its methods on a more scientific footing.63 However, for a variety of reasons, one of which may have been its large non-elite following, astrology’s prestige gradually declined by comparison with some other forms of expert knowledge. At least where travellers were concerned, an additional factor may have
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 115 been competition from another star-based science, celestial navigation. Like astrology, navigation relied on observations of the heavenly bodies, and the two had concepts and techniques in common. By the later seventeenth century, however, some of the seamen’s almanacs were paying a good deal more attention to navigation than to astrology. Henry Seaman’s Kalendarium Nauticum the Sea-Man’s Almanac, for the Year of Christ 1676 has the bare minimum of astrological information, but spends many pages familiarising his readers with techniques for deriving latitude and longitude from the stars.64 Later almanacs, like the famous Nautical Almanac, put out from 1767 on by the Commissioners of Longitude at Greenwich, and still going to this day, relegated astrological information to the inferior status of “other phenomena”.65 The central focus had shifted decisively to discovering latitude and longitude using star observations and logarithms. Still, it would be unwise to underestimate astrology’s staying power. Take the case of the previously mentioned Java Half-yearly Almanac of 1815. The British compilers did include ephemerides and astrological information, but it appears that they cribbed the material from a nonBatavian almanac, perhaps one from Calcutta in Bengal (much of the occupying British force had embarked from there).66 In any event, the ephemerides and eclipse information were not correct for Java, which was 2500 miles to the southeast of Calcutta and on the other side of the Equator. This made them essentially useless for either astronomical or astrological purposes. The British wanted their almanac to celebrate their military and administrative superiority, but they apparently missed their mark on matters cosmological. At least one extant copy of the Java Halfyearly actually has a second almanac in Dutch for the same year bound into it, evidently because, unlike in the English almanac, the celestial data in the Dutch one unequivocally matched the coordinates of the Javanese city of Samarang. The Dutch almanac also featured both locally relevant eclipse information and, more ominously, a historical table of significant earthquakes in the region.67 At one level the knowledge that almanacs promoted was utilitarian, locally specific, and aimed at managing some fairly predictable risks. That knowledge might be as basic as the distance between one town and another, the calendar of the law courts, a table of the tides, some personal notation about an important business transaction, or, indeed, a timeline for earthquakes. On another level, it could be quite expansive, aimed at harnessing celestial influences so as to promote safe and successful voyages. But whether the knowledge was down-to-earth or otherworldly, almanacs encouraged travellers to think they could take control of the future. There were many factors behind the large increase in the frequency of travel in the early modern period, but the incentives and reassurance almanacs provided presumably were part of the mix.
116 Margaret R. Hunt
Almanacs and Travel Narratives Given how ubiquitous almanacs were, and how pronounced their interest in travel, it seems reasonable to think that they might have left a mark on other travel genres, including the travel narrative. Certainly, the reverse was true. Travellers (and, some of the time, travel narratives) did sometimes facilitate the transfer of indigenous calendrical expertise and other forms of knowledge to European scholars, knowledge that would ultimately appear in simplified form in almanacs.68 Influence in the other direction, from almanacs to travel narratives, is probable, but difficult to prove. Almanacs collected and digested knowledge from all sorts of places, and so did travel writers. If a particular travel writer takes a strong interest in historical chronology or in unusual calendars that might suggest a familiarity with almanacs. However, especially in the case of middle- or upper-class writers, the template (and the interest) could easily have come from some more up-market or scholarly sources. The same is true of the more practical kinds of information that turn up both in almanacs and some travel narratives. Take, for example, foreign coinage tables. Many almanacs contained such information and clearly someone, at some point, would have had to travel to or from a foreign currency regime and done the calculations. In the seventeenth century one could also find such information in handbooks for learning accounting, guides for Bible study – which had taken to including information on ancient coinages, “universal geography” books, “cosmographies”, and the more regionally focused “chorographies”, or, indeed, specialised coinage reference books.69 What probably most distinguished the almanac was not any one type of content, but rather the combination of a lot of fairly mundane but useful kinds of travel-related knowledge presented in tabular fashion, a good deal of play with temporalities, some simple astrology, brevity, and, unlike some of the other genres mentioned above, extreme cheapness. One cannot, therefore, definitively say that a given literary production drew from almanacs, because the lines of influence are too tangled. What we can say is that there are some striking similarities between some later seventeenth-century travel narratives and almanacs in terms of the kinds of knowledge they contained and the way they packaged it. There is only the space here to look at a few examples, and I have chosen two from the latter part of the seventeenth century that reflect my own interest in South Asia.70 The almanac-like themes seen here include calendrical comparison; an interest in foreign peoples’ feast days; attention to indigenous historical chronologies; latitude and longitude information; tables of distances between towns; coinage systems; and discussions of astrology. The likeliest place for humbler travellers, especially, to have found all those things in one cheap, portable package was the almanac, but that is as far as one can go in terms of assigning influence.
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 117 Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681) was one of the best-selling travel narratives of the late seventeenth century, and is said to have been one of the sources that inspired Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.71 While still a teenager, Knox was captured on the Island of Ceylon, along with the rest of the crew of the ship he was serving on, and he spent the next 19 years there. During that time, he learned Sinhalese and supported himself by trade and handicraft production, before finally escaping to a Dutch fort and from there getting passage back to England. He subsequently commanded several more voyages to the East Indies.72 Almanacs appear to have provided one of the templates for Knox’s account. In fact, Knox makes it clear in his text that he was familiar not just with English almanacs but with Ceylonese ones. He was clearly impressed with Ceylonese astronomers, and he notes their ability to predict both lunar and solar eclipses. He also mentions a genre the Ceylonese called “leet”, which, tellingly, he translates as “monthly almanac”, written upon tallipat leaves, in which are told “the Age of the Moon, and the good Seasons and time to begin to Plough or to Sow, or to go on a Journey, or to take any work in hand”. Knox further discusses Ceylonese historical chronologies, the ways they organised the solar year, and the names of the months and days. Elsewhere, there are descriptions of feast days and festivals and their relationship to the phases of the moon. Moreover, as with many European almanacs, there is a detailed discussion of weights, measures, and coinage, and their European equivalents.73 Though the framing of Knox’s attempts to characterise Ceylonese culture would have been thoroughly familiar to any almanac reader, there are some discordant notes. For example, he spends a good amount of time decrying the excessive authority of Ceylonese astrologers and priests and the credulousness of the laity, as well as the heathenish character of their religious feasts. This sort of thing was certainly not unknown in almanacs, but it was not all that common either. It could have been an attempt on Knox’s part to deflect any claim that his long sojourn in a heathen land had made him lose his faith; it may also reflect the genre. Reflexive defences of Christianity against heathenism were relatively uncommon in almanacs, but they were standard fare in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury travel narratives. There are even closer parallels with almanacs in a book published almost 20 years later called A New Account of East-India and Persia, in Eight Letters (1698). John Fryer, the author, was a doctor in the employ of the English East India Company, and he travelled widely between 1672 and 1682 on the Company’s behalf. In the body of his quite complex narrative he frequently breaks off to supply local details, presented very much in the style of an almanac. Thus, we find him supplying meridians or distance advice for different locations, paying close attention to the holidays of different Indian religious communities, and their relationship to the phases of the moon, and discussing Hindu astronomy and
118 Margaret R. Hunt astrology. Appended to the main narrative, moreover, are two different “chorographies”, for India and Persia (a chorography was similar to an almanac in terms of its content and preoccupations, though usually longer, more detailed, and more expensively produced).74 Fryer’s chorography for India gives the names of the months in Hindi and has a discussion of time-keeping with a water-clock and modes of dividing both daily time and the seasons. The influence of the seasons, and especially the monsoon, on health is analysed in detail. This mimics contemporary European almanacs, which often included health advice tied to particular months, the orbit of different planets, and the seasons. There is also a section on Indian intellectuals, which mentions their mathematical labours and astrological practices, along with an extraordinarily detailed discussion of coins, weights, and precious stones “usual in those places of Trade within the Charter of the Honourable [English] EastIndia Company”.75 The Persian section is a mixture of recollections of an actual trip Fryer took to Persia, details about the exact distances between resting places en route, and diatribes against Muslims and Zoroastrians. It also includes a lengthy discussion of the Armenian Christian calendar as well as a table of Armenian patriarchs starting with St Gregory, the saint who converted the Armenian king to Christianity in the early fourth century, and stretching 425 years. This numeration, Fryer tells us, is “based on [the Armenians’] own unbias’d Chronologers”, the implication being that this is a purer and better chronology of late antiquity than anything the Catholics could come up with. There is also a discussion of ritual practices and days, and here too we find descriptions of the diseases most linked to particular seasons. In Fryer’s account the tension between narrative and almanac-style knowledge is especially striking, with the latter (distances between towns, coinage tables, etc.) thrown down onto the page – as in an almanac – in a way that interrupts and complicates the narrative flow. Thus we see a considerable number of similarities between these two travel narratives and almanacs in terms of the sort of “useful” travel information they see fit to include (like distance charts and coinage tables), their interest in comparative calendars, and their fascination with astrology, though the latter is sometimes used polemically to disparage non-Christian intellectuals and religious figures in a way that one would be less likely to see in an almanac. These parallels are certainly suggestive and further inquiry might turn up more.
Conclusion Why were these odd, cheaply produced little books so wildly popular? On the one hand, some of the polytemporal play almanacs specialised in was just that, a kind of mental game that many people appear to have enjoyed. On the other hand, there was a good deal that was more
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 119 practical about almanacs: they supplied all kinds of useful information, from coinage tables, distance tables, and tide-tables, to foreign calendars. Much of this information could only have been obtained through someone’s painstaking data-collection and collation. Almanacs also contained a good deal of knowledge usually only available from specialists at a steep price. Moreover, they presented this information in a form that was fairly simple to understand, and relatively easy to apply to one’s own life. The most obvious case of this was astrology itself: the almanacs “translated” a very arcane and difficult body of knowledge and techniques into something that, at least in theory, ordinary lay people could use to solve everyday problems, like a decision about whether or not to embark on a voyage. The central argument of this chapter is that almanacs should be seen not just as quaint windows into seventeenth-century popular culture, but as agents of change in their own right. First, the type of information contained in almanacs probably contributed to the process by which early modern people formed “mental maps” of themselves in relation to the rest of the world. In this respect, almanacs are likely to have helped encourage a wider intellectual and practical engagement with the wider world of travel. Second, almanacs encouraged cross-cultural encounters with foreign time-schemas, including both other people’s calendars and alternative conceptions of historical chronology. While these encounters could be asymmetric and exoticising, they probably did familiarise would-be travellers with foreign conceptual schemas, and they may have destabilised canonical assumptions about both time and history (most notably claims about the age of the earth). Finally, almanacs encouraged people to take a more directive stance towards the future, both by constructing the future (especially future travel) as a series of logistical challenges to be overcome, and by offering an assortment of informational tools, from tide-tables to astrological advice, aimed at doing the job. In addition to discussing the likely impact of almanacs on their readers’ consciousness of time, travel, and the world, this chapter has addressed questions of influence in a different way, by looking at parallels between almanacs at the height of their popularity in the later seventeenth century, and travel narratives. As we saw in our admittedly small sample of two, the constellation of useful knowledge found in almanacs – chronologies, calendars, distances between towns, coinage systems, astrology, etc. – did make its way into some seventeenth-century travel narratives. However, it is difficult to say whether almanacs were the main source, and more research, with a larger sample of travel narratives, is clearly needed. Adam Smyth has remarked that seventeenth-century English almanacs “epitomiz[ed] vastness in as small a form as possible”.76 This chapter has tried to work through the relationship between these tiny, cheap, unpretentious, throw-away books and the vastness and complexity of time, and to do so while still paying attention to the people who actually
120 Margaret R. Hunt bought and read them. Its main hope has been to cast light on the multiple and dynamic temporalities of people in the past, especially people on the move.
Notes 1 In the seventeenth century there was no discernible difference between a calendar (often spelled “kalendar”) and an almanac, and some almanacs refer to themselves as “kalendars.” 2 Perpetual calendars aimed to cover a number of years, and they often supplied mathematical formulas to allow their readers to make the necessary conversions. 3 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500– 1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). The majority of the almanacs used here can be found in the Early English Books Online series. 4 Cyprian Blagden, “The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century”, Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958). These figures only include almanacs printed under the Stationers’ Company monopoly. For pirated and unstamped almanacs, though in a later period, see Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775– 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 36–42, 50–51. 5 Nan Wang, “Time and Change: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Almanacs” (PhD Thesis, Rice University, 1993); Timothy Brook, “Guides for Vexed Travelers: Route Books in the Ming and Qing”, Ch’ing-Shih Went’i 4, no. 5 (1981); Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 141, 158, 198, 200. 6 See, for example, Stephen P. Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Ray P. Norris and Duane W. Hamacher, “Australian Aboriginal Astronomy – An Overview”, Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy, ed. Clive L. N. Ruggles (New York: Springer, 2015) and F. Mario Aliphat, “Almanacs, Stars and Calendars”, in Laura Caso Barrera and Fl. Mario Aliphat, Chilam Balam of Ixil: Facsimile and Study of an Unpublished Maya Book, transl. Quentin Pope (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 7 A. R. P. Fryxell, “Time and the Modern: Current Trends in the History of Modern Temporalities”, Past & Present 243 (May 1, 2019), pp. 286, 289– 90. See also Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s”, American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013); Vanessa Browne, Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1–4, 25–26, 42–45 et passim. 8 See especially Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 9 The ephemerides were tables of the movements of the celestial bodies. In almanacs they were usually incorporated into the monthly calendars. 10 We can glean this from the fact that so many almanacs included lists of fairs and the calendars of the law courts and of Oxford and Cambridge terms. 11 The City and Countrey Chapmans Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1690 (London, 1689). 12 Longitude was not difficult to compute on land, though doing it at sea was a problem. See Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt, Finding Longitude: How
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 121 Clocks and Stars Helped Solve the Longitude Problem (London: Collins, 2014). 13 See, for example, The Chapmans and Travellers Almanac for the Year of Christ 1695 Wherein All the Post-Roads, with Their Several Branches and Distances, the Marts, Fairs, and Markets in England and Wales, Are Alphabetically Disposed in Every Month: To Which Is Added a Table of Accounts Ready Cast up [...] and Other Tables and Things Useful for All Travellers, Traders, or Chapmen Whatsoever: As Also the Rising and Setting of the Sun and Moon, the Tides, and Whatsoever Else Is Necessary for an Annual Almanac (London, 1694). 14 Hermann Wahn, Hamburgisch Verbesserter SchreibCalender Aufs 1747 (Hamburg: Conrad König, 1746). 15 This was not, of course, unique to almanacs. See Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015 [1983]), pp. 39–41. 16 Henry Alleyn, A Double Almanacke & Prognostication, for This Year of Our Lord Christ 1607 (London, 1606), title page. 17 On almanacs as a fundamentally parochial genre see Alison A. Chapman, “Marking Time: Astrology, Almanacs, and English Protestantism”, Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007), pp. 1257–90. For a contrasting view, see Adam Smyth, “‘The Whole Globe of the Earth’: Almanacs and Their Readers”, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2009), pp. 294–304. 18 William Pierce, An Almanac Calculated for New England (Cambridge, Mass.: 1638?). See Hugh Alexander Morrison, Preliminary Check List of American Almanacs, 1639–1800 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1907), pp. 32. 19 John Gadbury, The West India, or Jamaica Almanac 1674 (London, 1673). In early modern astrology the word “star” was used for all the heavenly bodies, including the planets and the moon. 20 See among others José Miguel Quintana, La astrología en la Nueva España en el Siglo XVII (de Enrico Martínez a Sigüenza y Góngora) (Mexico City: Oasis, 1969); Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650”, American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999); Lina Cuellar Wills, “Territorios en Papel: Las Guías de Forasteros en Hispanoamérica (1760–1897)”, Fronteras de la Historia 19, no. 2 (December 2014); and Rolando M. Carrasco, “Almanaques: Género Ilustrado y Futuro Pronosticable en el Virreinato del Perú (s. XVIII)”, Genre and Globalization: Transformación de Géneros en Contextos (Post-) Coloniales/Transformation des Genres dans des Contextes (Post-) Coloniaux, ed. Miriam Lay Brander (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2018). 21 For Africa, see “Early Cape Printing 1796–1802”, South African Library Reprint Series No. 1 (1971). 22 Volmer Rosenkilde, “Det Danske Trykkeri i Trankebar: 1712–1845”, Bogvennen, New series, 4 (1949); Antoni J. Üçerler, S.J., “Missionary Printing”, The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 109. 23 Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars”, pp. 44–45. 24 Simon de La Loubère, Description du royaume de Siam (Amsterdam: Chez Henry & la veuve de Theodore Boom, 1700), pp. 195–96; Pramatha Nath Bose, Centenary Review of the Asiatic Society of Bengal from 1784 to 1883,
122 Margaret R. Hunt Part III, Natural Science (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Company, 1885), pp. 20–25. 25 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 79–81. 26 Reuben Burrow, English, Hindoo, & Mahomedan Almanac, for the Year of Christ, 1784; Being Bissextile or Leap Year, Adapted to the Meridian of Calcutta (Calcutta: Printed by George Gordon, 1783); I am relying here on the description in Graham W. Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800: A Description and Checklist of Printing in Late 18th-Century Calcutta (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1981), pp. 83–84. See also Leslie Stephen and Ruth Wallis, “Burrow, Reuben (1747–1792), Mathematician and Orientalist”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4110 (accessed Feb. 28, 2020). 27 Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Tatjana N. Jackson, “Ways on the ‘Mental Map’ of Medieval Scandinavians”, Analecta Septentrionalia: Beiträge zur nordgermanischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte, ed. Wilhelm Heizmann et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009). See also Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Springer, 2001). 28 Though see Michael R. Curry, “Toward a Geography of a World without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 3 (September 1, 2005). 29 The exact order of these three elements is immaterial to Wrightson’s argument, i.e., it could be month/day/year as in February 28, 1697, day/month/ year as in 28 February 1697, year/day/month as in 1697-28-02; month/ day/year as in 02/28/1697, etc. The point is that the day-referent derives its specificity largely from numerical markers. 30 I am grateful to Keith Wrightson for letting me read his 2019 working paper “Reckoning Time: ‘Dating Statements’ and the Rise of ‘Almanac Time’ in England, c.1565–c.1720”. See also Keith Wrightson, “Past Times: Temporalities in Early Modern England”, Marking Time: Objects, People and Their Lives, 1500–1800, ed. Edward Town and Angela McShane (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 16–17, 19, 20, 22–23. 31 On the late adoption of the Hindu-Arabic system in England see Peter Wardley and Pauline White, “The Arithmeticke Project: A Collaborative Research Study of the Diffusion of Hindu-Arabic Numerals”, Family & Community History 6, no. 1 (May 1, 2003). 32 Richard Allestree, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, for this Yeare of Our Lord God 1617 (London, 1616). See also Bernard Capp, “Allestree, Richard (b. before 1582, d. c. 1643), Almanac Maker and Mathematician”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/53655 (accessed May 14, 2020). 33 For almanac annotation see Adam Smyth, “Almanacs, Annotators, and LifeWriting in Early Modern England”, English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008). 34 Mathematical games and curious mathematical techniques were extremely popular in the seventeenth century, and they were also increasingly used to better understand other kinds of games, especially games of chance. See
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 123 Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 35 Reinhart Koselleck is one of the most perspicacious theorists of complex and multiple temporalities, despite the fact that he is more associated with an influential theory about a transition between two apparently relatively homogeneous time regimes. For some of his own thoughts on this tension see Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 2. See also Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities”, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012). 36 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past & Present, no. 38 (1967). 37 On “family time”, see Tamara K. Hareven, “Synchronizing Individual Time, Family Time, and Historical Time”, Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John B. Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). On gender and working-class politics, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 38 Frederick Cooper, “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa”, Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Mark Michael Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 39 See, for example, Sebastian Conrad, “What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999); Velcheru Narayana Rao et al., Textures of Time: Writing History in South India (New York: Other Press LLC, 2003); Kevin Birth, “Calendars: Representational Homogeneity and Heterogeneous Time”, Time & Society 22, no. 2 (2013), pp. 216–36; Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Sebastian Conrad, “‘Nothing Is the Way It Should Be’: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century”, Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 3 (November 2018). 40 Gadbury, West India, or Jamaica Almanac 1674, separately paginated “Astrological Observation”, p. 5. 41 I use the term “exotic” to signal the exoticising element common to many of these forays into the polytemporal. On this issue see especially Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), but also the many subsequent studies that have nuanced or critiqued Said. 42 See especially Anthony T. Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline”, History and Theory 14, no. 2 (1975); Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013). 43 Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 215–24. 44 Henry Hills, The Catholick Almanac for the Year 1687 Containing Both the Roman and English Calendar (London, 1686). 45 Isaac Abendana, An Almanac for the Year of Christ, 1697 (Oxford, 1696). See also David S. Katz, “Abendana, Isaac (d. 1699), Hebraist and Book Collector”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37091 (accessed May 14, 2020). 46 George Wharton, Hemeroscopeion Anniaerae Christianae 1653 Presenting the English and Roman Kalendar, Planetary Motions, Passions and Positions, Meteorologicall Observations, Chronologicall Collections, and Judgements
124 Margaret R. Hunt Astrologicall, &c. Respecting the Meridian, and Latitude of Kirkby-Kendall (London, 1652), p. 3. 47 The Gregorian calendar was adopted by Catholic countries and their overseas dominions in 1582. In the seventeenth century it was ten days ahead of the Julian calendar. Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. 48 William Bedwell, Kalendarium Viatorium Generale The Travellers Kalendar Serving Generally for All Parts of the World. Published for the Benefit of Marchants, Factors, Sea-Men, and Trauellers (London, 1614), unpaginated. Bedwell was one of the foremost Arabic specialists of the day. See Alistair Hamilton, “Bedwell, William (Bap. 1563, d. 1632), Arabist and Mathematician”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1942 (accessed May 14, 2020). The “Mexican” calendar is recognisably a version of the 365-day xiuhpōhualli Aztec calendar. 49 Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John (New York: Doubleday, 1972). 50 Scholarly and popular interest in Judaism in the early modern period was heavily tinged by exoticism, idealization, and (often) conversionism. See among others: Hans-Joachim Schoeps, “Philosemitism in the Baroque Period”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 47, no. 2 (1956); Richard H. Popkin, “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchanges in Holland and England 1640–1700”, Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Springer, 1988); and Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, Philosemitism in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 51 Peter Planberg, Ständig Års Räkning, eller Almanach, Inrättad efter Gregorianiske Förbättrade Calendarium (Stockholm: Johan Georg Lange, 1784). The perpetual calendar (like runic calendars) was based on the 19-year metonic cycle, in this case the version of it outlined in Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica of 1679–1702. The almanach did not, in fact, reproduce the runes, but it did include standardised symbols, often found in medieval and early modern runic calendars, for feast days and other key dates in Swedish ecclesiastical and political history. For the background see Planberg, Ständig Års Räkning, pp. 4–5 and Olof Rudbeck, Atland eller Manheim […] / Atlantica sive Manheim […], vol. 2 (Uppsala, 1679), pp. 635–36. Thanks to Henrik Ågren and Simon Berggren for help untangling this puzzle. 52 Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory for 1815 (Batavia: Printed by A. H. Hubbard at the Government Press, 1815). 53 Bedwell, Kalendarium Viatorium Generale, p. A4. 54 Charles Brouwn, Surinaamsche Staatkundige Almanach voor den Jaare 1793 (Paramaribo: W. P. Wilken, 1792). 55 That having been said, some of the almanacs of the mid-seventeenth century, in particular, were both polemical and rancorous. See Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 67–101, 150–63. 56 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. II, Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 57 Laurel Means, “Astrological Influences on Travel”, Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 34–36. See also Laurel Means, “Electionary, Lunary, Destinary, and Questionary: Toward Defining Categories of Middle English Prognostic Material”, Studies in Philology 89, no. 4 (1992), pp. 367–403. 58 At the Sign of the Moon and Stars in Leopard’s Court in Baldwins-Gardens near Holborn, Lives a Gentleman, Who […] Has Arrived to a Greater
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 125 Perfection in Several Arts than the Common Practioners in Physick and Astrology Can Justly Pretend To (London, 1690?), unpaginated. 59 The Compleat Book of Knowledge: Treating of the Wisdom of the Antients and Shewing the Various and Wonderful Operations of the Signs and Planets, and Other Celestial Constellations […] To Which Is Added, the Country Man’s Kalendar; with His Daily Practice, and Perpetual Prognostication for Weather […] (London, 1698), p. 53. 60 Alleyn, Double Almanacke & Prognostication, for […] 1607, unpaginated. 61 John Poole, Country Astrology in Three Books (London, 1650), p. 47. See also John Poole, A New Almanac and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord God, 1642 (London, 1641). The ninth house was the one said to govern long journeys. 62 John Gadbury, Astrologonaytis or, The Astrological Seaman Directing Merchants, Mariners, &c. Adventuring to Sea, How (by God’s Blessing) to Escape Many Dangers Which Commonly Happen in the Ocean (London, 1697), pp. 20, 25. 63 Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 191–204, 238–69; Patrick M. Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Polity Press and Princeton University Press, 1989). 64 Henry Seaman, Kalendarium Nauticum the Sea-Man’s Almanac, for the Year of Christ 1676 (London, 1675). 65 Commissioners of Longitude, The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, for the Year 1774 (London: Sold by J. Nourse, 1773), p. 1. 66 For the many almanacs published at Calcutta from 1780, see Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800. 67 Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory for 1815. Also bound in with this copy is Almanach naar den Gregoriaanschen Styl voor het Jaar[...]1815 (publication details unknown). It is unclear whether the Dutch almanac was included in all copies of the Java Half-yearly, or only this one. This is the online Google Books copy, though incorrectly listed under the name Almanak van Nederlandsch-Indië. The original is said to be at the National Library of the Netherlands. 68 For go-betweens, both indigenous and European, see especially Simon Schaffer et al., ed., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35 (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009). 69 The cosmographies and chorographies had a good deal of overlap with almanacs, though they were more systematic and usually, unlike almanacs, they had pretensions to world-coverage. They were also more text-heavy – though many also featured a good deal of tabular information, including chronologies – they had more illustrations (maps, especially) and they were much longer and a good deal more expensive than almanacs. For the classic cosmography, see Steven Vanden Broecke, “The Use of Visual Media in Renaissance Cosmography: The Cosmography of Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius”, Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (January 2000), pp. 130–50. An oft-reprinted coinage guide was Loduwyck de Bruyn, Verbetert en Vermeerdert Specie-Boeck/Vervattende Alderhande Goude en Silvere Specien […] (Amsterdam, 1675 and later). 70 See Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern, The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford & St. Martin’s, 2016). 71 Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (London, 1681).
126 Margaret R. Hunt 72 Anna Winterbottom, “Producing and Using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society”, The British Journal for the History of Science 42, no. 4 (2009) examines some of the other sources for Knox’s account. 73 Knox, Historical Relation, pp. 56–80, 97–98, (quote) 110, 111. 74 John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, in Eight Letters: Being Nine Years Travels Begun 1672, and Finished 1681 (London: 1698), pp. 15, 107–10. 75 Fryer, New Account of East-India and Persia, pp. 186–87, 191, 205 (quote); 206–16. 76 Smyth, “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England”, p. 201. See also Smyth, “‘Whole Globe of the Earth’”.
Bibliography Primary Sources Abendana, Isaac, An Almanack for the Year of Christ, 1697 (Oxford, 1696). Allestree, Richard, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, for this Yeare of our Lord God 1617 (London, 1616). Alleyn, Henry, A Double Almanacke & Prognostication, for this Year of Our Lord Christ 1607 (London, 1606). Almanach naar den Gregoriaanschen Styl voor het Jaar [...] 1815 (publication details unknown). At the Sign of the Moon and Stars in Leopard’s Court in Baldwins-Gardens near Holborn, Lives a Gentleman, Who […] has Arrived to a Greater Perfection in Several Arts than the Common Practioners in Physick and Astrology Can Justly Pretend to (London, 1690). Bedwell, William, Kalendarium Viatorium Generale. The Travellers Kalendar Serving Generally for All Parts of the World. Published for The Benefit of Marchants, Factors, Sea-Men, and Trauellers (London, 1614). Brouwn, Charles, Surinaamsche Staatkundige Almanach voor den Jaare 1793 (Paramaribo: W. P. Wilken, 1792). Bruyn, Loduwyck de, Verbetert en Vermeerdert Specie-Boeck/Vervattende Alderhande Goude en Silvere Specien […] (Amsterdam, 1675). Burrow, Reuben, English, Hindoo, & Mahomedan Almanack, for the Year of Christ, 1784; Being Bissextile or Leap Year, Adapted to the Meridian of Calcutta (Calcutta: Printed by George Gordon, 1783). Chapmans and Travellers Almanack for the Year of Christ 1695 Wherein All the Post-Roads, with their Several Branches and Distances, the Marts, Fairs, and Markets in England and Wales, Are Alphabetically Disposed in Every Month: To Which Is Added a Table of Accounts Ready Cast up […] and Other Tables and Things Useful for All Travellers, Traders, or Chapmen Whatsoever: As also the Rising and Setting of the Sun and Moon, the Tides, and Whatsoever Else Is Necessary for an Annual Almanack (London, 1694). City and Countrey Chapmans Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1690 (London, 1689). Commissioners of Longitude, The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, for the Year 1774 (London: Sold by J. Nourse, 1773).
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 127 Compleat Book of Knowledge: Treating of the Wisdom of the Antients and Shewing the Various and Wonderful Operations of the Signs and Planets, and Other Celestial Constellations […] To Which Is Added, the Country Man’s Kalendar; with His Daily Practice, and Perpetual Prognostication for Weather […] (London, 1698). Fryer, John, A New Account of East-India and Persia, in Eight Letters: Being Nine Years Travels Begun 1672, and Finished 1681 (London, 1698). Gadbury, John, The West India, or Jamaica Almanack 1674 (London, 1673). Gadbury, John, Astrologonaytis or, the Astrological Seaman Directing Merchants, Mariners, & c. Adventuring To Sea, How (by God’s Blessing) To Escape Many Dangers Which Commonly Happen in the Ocean (London, 1697). Hills, Henry, The Catholick Almanack for the Year 1687 Containing Both the Roman and English Calendar (London, 1686). Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory for 1815 (Batavia: Printed by A. H. Hubbard at the Government Press, 1814) Knox, Robert, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (London, 1681). La Loubère, Simon de, Description du Royaume de Siam (Amsterdam: Chez Henry & la veuve de Theodore Boom, 1700). Pierce, William, An Almanac Calculated for New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1638?). Planberg, Peter, Ständig Års Räkning, eller Almanach, Inrättad efter Gregorianiske Förbättrade Calendarium (Stockholm: Johan Georg Lange, 1784). Poole, John, A New Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord God, 1642 (London, 1641). Poole, John, Country Astrology in Three Books (London, 1650). Rudbeck, Olof, Atland eller Manheim […] /Atlantica sive Manheim […], vol. 2 (Uppsala, 1679). Seaman, Henry, Kalendarium Nauticum. The Sea-Man’s Almanack, for the Year of Christ 1676 (London: 1675). Wahn, Hermann, Hamburgisch Verbesserter SchreibCalender aufs 1747 (Hamburg: Conrad König, 1746). Wharton, George, Hemeroscopeion Anniaerae Christianae 1653 Presenting the English and Roman Kalendar, Planetary Motions, Passions and Positions, Meteorologicall Observations, Chronologicall Collections, and Judgements Astrologicall, & c. Respecting the Meridian, and Latitude of Kirkby-Kendall (London, 1652).
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130 Margaret R. Hunt Norris, Ray P. and Duane W. Hamacher, “Australian Aboriginal Astronomy – An Overview”, Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy, ed. Clive L. N. Ruggles (New York: Springer, 2015), pp. 2215–22. Ogle, Vanessa, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s”, American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013), pp. 1376–1402. Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Perkins, Maureen, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Popkin, Richard H., “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchanges in Holland and England 1640–1700”, Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Springer, 1988), pp. 3–32. Quintana, José Miguel, La astrología en la Nueva España en el Siglo XVII (de Enrico Martínez a Sigüenza y Góngora) (Mexico City: Oasis, 1969). Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Springer, 2007). Rosenberg, Daniel and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013). Rosenkilde, Volmer, “Det Danske Trykkeri i Trankebar: 1712–1845”, Bogvennen, New series, 4 (1949), pp. 91–113. Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Schaffer, Simon et al., ed., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35 (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009). Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, “Philosemitism in the Baroque Period”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 47, no. 2 (1956), pp. 139–44. Shaw, Graham W., Printing in Calcutta to 1800: A Description and Checklist of Printing in Late 18th-Century Calcutta (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1981). Silverberg, Robert, The Realm of Prester John (New York: Doubleday, 1972). Smith, Mark Michael, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Smyth, Adam, “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England”, English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008), pp. 200–44. Smyth, Adam, “‘The Whole Globe of the Earth’: Almanacs and Their Readers”, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Chichester, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 2009), pp. 294–304. Stephen, Leslie and Ruth Wallis, “Burrow, Reuben (1747–1792), Mathematician and Orientalist”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4110 (accessed Feb. 28, 2020). Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past & Present, no. 38 (1967), pp. 56–97. Üçerler, Antoni J. S. J., “Missionary Printing”, The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 107–15.
Almanacs and Early Modern Travel 131 Vanden Broecke, Steven, “The Use of Visual Media in Renaissance Cosmography: The Cosmography of Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius”, Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (January 2000), pp. 131–50. Wang, Nan, ‘Time and Change: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Almanacs’ (PhD Thesis, Rice University, 1993). Wardley, Peter and Pauline White, “The Arithmeticke Project: A Collaborative Research Study of the Diffusion of Hindu-Arabic Numerals”, Family & Community History 6, no. 1 (May 1, 2003), pp. 1–17. Winterbottom, Anna, “Producing and Using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society”, The British Journal for the History of Science 42, no. 4 (2009), pp. 515–38. Wrightson, Keith, “Past Times: Temporalities in Early Modern England”, Marking Time: Objects, People and Their Lives, 1500–1800, ed. Edward Town and Angela McShane (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 15–29. Wrightson, Keith, “Reckoning Time: ‘Dating Statements’ and the Rise of ‘Almanac Time’ in England, c.1565–c.1720”, (working paper 2019; used by permission of author).
5 Time Travel in the Pacific* Maritime Exploration and Eighteenth-Century German Historiography Sünne Juterczenka Johann Joachim Schwabeʼs comprehensive collection Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande (1747–74) contains a striking frontispiece that exemplifies a visual genre widespread in eighteenth-century Europe: An allegorical rendering of the four then-known continents.
Figure 5.1 Johann Joachim Schwabe, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande (1747–74), vol. 1, frontispiece. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, public domain. * I wish to thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous reviewer for extremely valuable suggestions. Peter H. Reill, who read and commented on an earlier version of this chapter, sadly passed away before it was printed. His generous support will always be gratefully remembered.
Time Travel in the Pacific 133 Centre-stage, Europe sits regally with a crown and sceptre. She is surrounded by folio volumes, a lyre, an artist’s palette, and an architectural model of a Greek temple. Africa, donning an elephant-hide headdress and accompanied by wild animals, is carrying a cornucopia overflowing with tropical plants. America, decked in a feather costume, is holding a bow and arrow. Asia, wearing a floral wreath, is bringing an incense burner. The scene is framed by allusions to the theme of Schwabe’s collection: the on-going exploration of the earth. In the foreground, a cherub is pointing to a compass and nautical instruments with his right hand and to Europe with his left. At the back, two cherubs holding the wand of Hermes are unveiling a large globe. The image displays a symbolic hierarchy: While the books and artistic implements underscore Europe’s dazzling achievements in scholarship and the arts, the other continents merely offer their natural resources, archaic weapons, and religious paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the image also suggests that exploration will bring new knowledge and (symbolised by the wand of Hermes) commercial exchange to all continents.1 Schwabe’s Historie was a translation of the two most comprehensive travel compilations of his time, the English publisher Thomas Astley’s New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1745–47) – which included an earlier version of the frontispiece – and the French author and novelist Antoine-François Prévost’s greatly expanded version, Histoire générale des voyages (1746–91). Astley’s Collection summarised European “discoveries” since the fifteenth century, beginning with the Portuguese exploration of the West African coast and ending with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century voyages to the east coast and China. Prévost’s and Schwabe’s versions added numerous seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century voyage accounts. In contrast with earlier collections, like Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi (1550– 59) or Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589–1600), Astley and Prévost did not assemble first-hand voyage accounts. Instead, they compiled entirely new narratives. Welding first-hand accounts into a sequential whole, arranging them in books and chapters, listing previous publications, and enriching the whole with maps, tables, engravings, and indices, these collections offered an overview of the entire known history of European voyages and of the “present state” (“wirklicher Zustand”, “état actuel”) of all nations, as their titles suggest. Compiling and translating these narratives was a transnational effort, which demonstrates the European-wide interest in this kind of publication.2 By choosing the continent allegory to visually represent their work, Astley and Schwabe furthermore tapped into a rich iconographic tradition. At least since the sixteenth century, continent allegories had been depicted mainly in engravings and architectural decorations.3 These allegories express the self-confidently optimistic spirit engendered by the early modern “oceanic revolution”. Carefully composed and aesthetically
134 Sünne Juterczenka pleasing, the frontispiece, nevertheless, also points to some more problematic aspects of European expansion: the self-praise and corresponding failure to acknowledge extra-European cultural achievements, the glossing over of violence, and the gendered and racialised discourses of dominance and dispossession. The symbolic hierarchy in the image rests on the conviction that contemporaneous societies differ in degrees of cultural refinement. It represents Europe, accompanied by all the signs of progress, as several steps ahead of the other continents. Moreover, the illustration represents Europe as taking the lead in the on-going exploration of the earth, which will continue to connect the continents and encourage commerce. She is, therefore, paid homage by the other continents, who acknowledge her as the driving force in this historical process. This idea pervades the text, such as when Schwabe justifies the extent and the detail of his compilation by pointing out that exploration has brought enormous changes to the “discovered” countries.4 By representing the continents according to their “present state”, the collections also place them in a graduated time frame. They juxtapose contemporaneous cultures in a way that suggests they belong to different but simultaneously existing historical planes, a line of thinking that cultural anthropologist Johannes Fabian, in his epistemological critique of modern anthropology, called a “denial of coevalness”. Following the lead of Edward Said and other postcolonial critics, Fabian used the term to describe how anthropological writing situates the practitioners of fieldwork in the present and their subjects in a remote past, thereby creating a temporal distance between observer and observed that makes it possible to equate difference with delay, despite the fact that fieldwork requires direct encounters within the same historical space.5 As the frontispiece shows, the basic notion of co-existing historical stages was already common before the emergence of modern anthropology. By advancing this notion, the compilers framed travel writing as akin to history writing, highlighting the nexus between geographic exploration and historical research. This nexus and the tension between the claim to construct a truly global historiography on the one hand and the rejection of a universal temporality on the other are in focus in this chapter. I argue that eighteenth-century historians fundamentally relied on the ideas of simultaneously existing historical stages and of worldwide progress brought on by exploration. The chapter seeks to shed new light on these scholars’ fascinations with variations in human appearance and life forms and on their tendencies to equate cultural difference with temporal difference. The first step will be to outline the geopolitical background and the intellectual premises that prompted scholars to use information from voyage accounts in crafting their historiographical narratives. Germany, which is at the centre of this chapter, did not possess any colonies during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the idea of “progress through exploration”
Time Travel in the Pacific 135 eminently appealed to German historians. The chapter builds on earlier, postcolonial scholarship that emphasises the tenacity of colonialist thinking even amongst eighteenth-century Germans who were not actively involved in colonial politics. Such scholarship has identified “colonial phantasies” and a “collective mentality” prone to colonial ambitions even prior to the nineteenth-century German colonial ventures.6 This work has been widely quoted but has also drawn some criticism.7 The psychological category of a “collective unconscious” that it presupposes is extremely hard to verify using textual evidence. Moreover, recent scholarship has highlighted the plurality of Enlightenment thinking, particularly amongst German scholars. Some of these scholars were explicitly critical of colonialism.8 In this chapter, I follow Fabian’s course in trying to situate the role of cultural hierarchies in a concrete intellectual context.9 That context, the writing of history on a grand scale, was closely related to the emerging field of ethnography. I argue that exploration fulfilled specific epistemological functions and helped historians in staking out contested areas of expertise in a competitive intellectual climate. In this situation, the “denial of coevalness” was a productive line of thinking. If this line of thinking offered historians exciting new perspectives during the eighteenth century, the long-term methodological consequences of adopting it only became fully clear in hindsight.
Exploration and Historiography Schwabe’s collection appeared on the cusp of a new era of vigorous, state-sponsored geographic exploration. Following the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century voyages initiated by the Iberian powers, voyages that mainly concentrated on the Atlantic region, and a period of relatively little interest in exploration during the seventeenth century, the Pacific came sharply into focus as a new field of geopolitical interest. Spain, Russia, Great Britain, and France initiated a series of expeditions. However, Spain, which had for a long time claimed territorial possession of the Pacific region based on papal jurisdiction and the Treaty of Tordesillas, was neither interested in exploring the South Pacific nor in publishing the results of its expeditions. Meanwhile, the Russians concentrated on exploring the northern parts of the Russian empire. But to Great Britain and France, Oceania seemed to be one of the most likely regions for establishing new colonial or commercial spheres of influence that would compensate for the territorial losses incurred during the Seven Yearsʼ War and American Revolution. British and French Pacific voyages included those led by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729– 1811), James Cook (1728–79), and Jean-François Galaup de La Pérouse (1741–88). These voyages are today regarded as major navigational and scientific feats, and the accounts written about them are considered integral to the Enlightenment. However, in the mid-eighteenth century, it
136 Sünne Juterczenka was not yet clear that these costly ventures would be worthwhile, and it was not until after Cook’s return from his first successful voyage (1771) that government support and funding became available for expeditions. Therefore, the first Cook voyage was partly funded by the aristocratic gentleman-scholar Joseph Banks, who also accompanied it.10 Banks had been made aware of the scientific potential of Pacific exploration through the efforts of advocates, including the French scholar Charles de Brosses (1709–77), who actively supported Bougainville’s voyage in 1766–69 (the first that was accompanied by professionally trained naturalists), and the British geographer Alexander Dalrymple (1737– 1808), at one time designated to accompany Cook’s first voyage (he later became the British Admiralty’s first official hydrographer). In the 1750s, de Brosses and Dalrymple both published historical overviews of the discoveries already made in the Pacific region. These publications were intended to spur rulers’ ambitions by highlighting the competitive nature of exploration. They were also scientific to-do lists based on the model of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna (1620): Summaries of what had already been achieved and what lay ahead in geographical exploration. They sketched a continual history of exploration and “discovery” that began with Columbus, gained a scientific standard from Bacon and the seventeenth-century “scientific revolution”, and culminated in the Enlightenment voyages. De Brosses and Dalrymple were especially keen to locate the fabled southern continent Terra Australis and the longsought-after passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.11 Other scholars, particularly those with professional interests in historiography, were more concerned with the cultural diversity that voyagers encountered in the Pacific region. When de Brosses and Dalrymple published their historical overviews, such scholars were already familiar with the ranking of different peoples according to degrees of cultural refinement as visualised in the continent allegories. In particular, Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment relied on travel literature as evidence of a continuous civilisational process and of the evolution of “civil societies”.12 Historian Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) cited, among others, the French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafiteau, the British pirate-explorer William Dampier, the Italian adventurer Giovanni Gemelli Careri, and authors from an anonymous Dutch collection – a wide variety of travellers from different European countries who had provided first-hand accounts of their encounters with Native Americans.13 Ferguson regarded such meetings as prime opportunities to study degrees of cultural refinement: The Romans might have found an image of their own ancestors, in the representations they have given of ours: and if ever an Arab clan shall become a civilized nation, or any American tribe escape the poison which is administered by our traders of Europe, it may be from
Time Travel in the Pacific 137 the relations of the present times, and the descriptions which are now given by travellers, that such a people, in after ages, may best collect the accounts of their origin. It is in their present condition, that we are to behold, as in a mirrour [sic], the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our fathers were placed.14 If even the much-admired Romans might have learned something about their humble beginnings by paying attention to the rude Germanic peoples, and if future “clans” and “tribes” might sometimes be grateful for travellers’ observations that would reveal to them “their origin”, Ferguson implies, then present-day scholars should lose no time in availing themselves of this “mirror” to investigate the “features” of their “own progenitors”. In other words, by reading travel literature, one could, as if poised on the top rungs of an imaginary ladder of civilisational progress, observe the cultural development of one’s own forbears. Therefore, Enlightenment exploration pertained directly to the recent realisation of the historicity of humankind – including the historicity of historical scholarship. Soon, Scottish scholars quoted from accounts of the newly commissioned Pacific voyages to bolster similar theories. The philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) asked the physician James Lind (1716– 94), who was planning to accompany Cook on his second Pacific voyage, to look for correlations between the different “varieties” of humans and animals and the climates in which they lived. In the end, Lind never made the tour, and Kames sent his Sketches on the History of Man (1774), which described human history in four stages, to the press before Cook even returned to Europe. But Kames did refer to Bougainville and to Cook’s first voyage, illustrating the link between voyaging and contemporary social theories.15 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99), an early proponent of linguistics, suggested in his Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92) that the Pacific islands were the place to “look for people living in the natural state”, without government and civil society, that the “human race must have begun in those countries”, and that humans subsequently moved to “other climates”, propagating their language to other parts of the globe. He included quotations from Bougainville and Cook’s voyage accounts to substantiate this claim.16 In a similar vein, James Dunbar (1742–98), historian at Aberdeen, in his Essays on the History of Mankind (1780), compared the “Soldurii in Gaul […], the ancient Germans and other public bodies […] in the simple ages” to societies encountered by “explorers” on the Pacific islands. He believed that “the history of some of the South Sea Isles […] enables us to glance at society in some of its earlier forms, and to mark, in some striking examples, the invisible fidelity of social love”.17
138 Sünne Juterczenka Scottish scholars also thought that exploration influenced the course of history itself. Edinburgh historian William Robertson (1721–93), in his biography of Charles V (1769) and his History of America (1777–96), extolled exploration as facilitating what he, like the famous economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90) and many others in his wake, regarded as paramount to the advancement of civilisation: commerce. Robertson considered Columbus’s voyages “the most splendid portion of the American story” and his History included a summary that resembled de Brosses’ and Dalrymple’s overviews of Pacific exploration. Robertson corresponded with Bougainville and borrowed books from Dalrymple.18 He declared that “discovery” itself required a certain degree of cultural refinement which had only recently been attained in Europe: The rude and imperfect state in which navigation is still found among all nations which are not considerably civilised, […] demonstrates that, in early times, the art was not so far improved as to enable men to undertake distant voyages, or to attempt remote discoveries.19 Clearly, the “spirit of discovery” that Robertson so frequently conjured up was nearing its apogee. Unsurprisingly, the advocates of state-sponsored expeditions used the Scottish hierarchy of stages and the idea that exploration would shape history to promote their campaign. De Brosses, in his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes (1756), pondered the idea that Europe’s own, “primitive” ancestors had been civilised with the help of other, further advanced peoples. He compared contemporary Austral peoples to the “savage Europeans” who supposedly owed their first knowledge to the Phoenicians and thus sketched the possibility of an Enlightened civilising mission in Terra Australis. He viewed colonisation, especially the French colonisation of Australia, as a means of “world unification”.20 Similarly, Dalrymple set forth in his Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Disoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (1770) that “uncivilised” societies would learn from “explorers” and those that would follow them: […] if the intellectual endowments of the human species have not been extended, their common rights, at least, have been almost everywhere promoted, and established in some countries, in which, before this era, the people were mere slaves to an ignorant race of nobles. Dalrymple did not explicitly support colonisation. But he certainly thought that an “amicable intercourse” engendered by exploration would benefit present-day “slave peoples” in climbing the ladder of cultural refinement and asserting their “common rights” – a sort of historical shortcut pointed out to these peoples by the European torch-bearers of freedom.21
Time Travel in the Pacific 139 While de Brosses and Dalrymple were amateur historians, the idea of simultaneously existing cultural stages was also pertinent to the recently established academic discipline of history. Scholars studying travel literature have long claimed that the genre was “an important medium of diffusion” for a modern historical consciousness and for the “constitution of modern historical scholarship”.22 The voyages contributed to the eighteenth-century anthropological turn, and exploration seemed to make comprehensive cultural comparison possible for the first time. Cultural progress became the most important reference factor in historical thinking. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of several variants of secularised grand-scale historiography that intersected and overlapped: Universal history, world history, and the history of mankind. Scholars did not agree on the definitions of these variants nor on the future direction of historiography. In fact, they all were hotly contested, and the widening of the scope of historiography was one of the few objectives that the scholars could agree on. The new line of large-scale historiography, prefigured in JacquesBénigne Lignel Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) and in Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs (1739), unfolded in voluminous publications just as Astley, Prévost, and Schwabe were compiling their successive volumes.23 The collaborative Universal History (1736–68) was probably most prominent among these. One of its authors was an elusive “journeyman writer” named John Green, also known as Braddock Mead, the ghostwriter for Astley’s New General Collection. His dual role yet again highlights the close connections between travel writing and historiography at the time.24 The German translation of the Universal History was produced and published in Halle an der Saale and later in Göttingen in Germany under the title Übersetzung der Allgemeinen Welthistorie (1744–66), and it was reviewed extensively in German review journals.25 A multi-volume project, it exemplifies the challenges that the new kind of history-writing had to contend with: what to do with the rapidly increasing amount of knowledge about human cultures and what to make of the countless cultural differences. How did scholars meet these challenges? The authors of the Universal History simply accumulated factual accounts until their work added up to 65 volumes, and indeed, the Universal History resembled contemporary encyclopaedic projects in scope. But such an additive approach did not satisfy everyone, and the authors were criticised for their “effort to know everything”.26 Remarkably, however, it was precisely the enormous wealth of material that seems to have convinced historians that they had reached a decisive point in the history of historiography. That impression was hinted at by an anonymous German reviewer of the Universal History. He justified the ancient Greek historian Polybios’ limited geographical knowledge by reminding his readers that America had been “discovered” only after Polybios had written his celebrated universal
140 Sünne Juterczenka history of Rome. The reviewer added that a substantial portion of the globe was still insufficiently known, and that a “general history in the true and original sense” would not become conceivable until it was fully “discovered”.27 In other words, the on-going exploration of the world was a unique opportunity for historians to get ahead of their predecessors. The impression of living at a time when exploration was about to broaden the historian’s horizon dramatically was also articulated, for example, by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744– 1803). In developing his ideas, Herder frequently relied on travel literature; he especially praised Georg Forster’s Voyage around the World (1772), an account of Cook’s second Pacific expedition. Herder made it clear that similar accounts of other parts of the world would be highly desirable and especially useful to the study of history.28 In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), he characterised his own time, beginning with Cook’s last voyage, as a “new, higher period” in the visualisation of human diversity, in which the “exact and as it were natural historical art in depicting the human families [Geschlechter] of the whole world” would become possible.29 Georg’s father Johann Reinhold Forster, in his Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Schiffahrten im Norden (1784), which included a detailed account of Cook’s last voyage, agreed with Herder’s optimism, and welcomed the renewed interest in exploration. “In general”, he writes, “voyages undertaken in order to satisfy curiosity and to advance commerce seem to have contributed exceptionally to the diffusion of Enlightenment and the introduction of milder customs”. Repeating the view expressed in the frontispiece discussed above and in Robertson’s History of America, Forster added that “only very cultivated peoples seek far-away countries for the sake of commerce; just like the seeking of unexplored regions and peoples for the sake of satisfying curiosity requires an even higher degree of refinement and culture”.30 Thanks to the advanced stage of European culture, including scholarship, the study of cultural diversity seemed to have arrived at a pivotal moment.
The Göttingen Historians and Pacific Exploration Cultural diversity was a subject of great interest at the recently founded university in the provincial town of Göttingen in Germany. When Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99) set up the “Königliches Institut der historischen Wissenschaften” in 1764 and when the two leading historical journals (the Allgemeine Historische Bibliothek and the Historisches Journal) were established, in 1767 and 1772 respectively, Göttingen became the centre of historical studies in Germany. Review journals including the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen ensured that foreign-language publications like the Scottish scholars’ studies and the numerous tomes of the Universal History were digested and assessed for German scholars. The Göttingen
Time Travel in the Pacific 141 “school” of history made important contributions to the establishment of history as an academic discipline and to the debates about large-scale historiography.31 Göttingen also became the scene of an acrimonious controversy about “Universalgeschichte”, mainly between Herder and August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809), and when Göttingen scholars eventually took over the German-language continuation of the Universal History in 1771, they asserted their claim to intellectual leadership in German historiography.32 In addition, Göttingen scholars were deeply committed to advancing the new “science of man”, which confirmed the historicity of humanity and thus helped pave the way for a modern historiography.33 In part because of its close connections with Great Britain, based on the Union of the British and the Hanoverian crowns, and because the Forsters (who in turn had close connections with Göttingen scholars) had accompanied Cook’s second voyage, Göttingen further became a hub for the German interest in Pacific exploration. Gatterer and his colleagues Schlözer and Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), all teaching at Göttingen, eagerly scoured voyage accounts for information that would help construct a historiography encompassing all historical periods and all geographical regions. According to Gatterer, “Universalgeschichte” should cover “all kinds of remarkable things in all the known nations”, an endeavour that he saw only partly realised in the Universal History.34 Schlözer thought that universal history should “unite all parts of the world and all periods, and should bring all peoples in all countries together”, and that world historians should “travel the unnoticed route followed by traders, apostles, and travellers”.35 Distinguishing sharply between “universal history” and the “history of mankind”, Meiners characterised the latter as “a science in which […] the successive proliferation [of humans] across all parts of the world […] is shown and the varying degrees of culture […] are compared”.36 These scholars clearly agreed that exploration was key to their newly expanded historical scope, although they arrived at very different conclusions regarding the methodological consequences. Gatterer and Schlözer, who firmly believed in the unity of humankind, came remarkably close to present-day conceptions of world history but ended up with Eurocentric narratives that privileged European historical developments over others. In contrast, Meiners believed in the polygenist theory of human origins, wrote about extra-European peoples in a disturbingly negative manner, and even argued in favour of slavery, but he sought to include all peoples and insisted on their importance to the “history of mankind”. True to the idea that large-scale history was a history in the making, all these scholars laid out a timeline that would accommodate the future growth of historical knowledge. They agreed that the most recent period (their own) should begin with Columbus’s voyage to America but that the most significant historical developments had taken place within Europe. Gatterer expressed this view in his “Vom historischen Plan, und
142 Sünne Juterczenka der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen” (1767) and in his Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie (1771).37 For him, the special significance of the period beginning with Columbus rested in the emergence of the European state system. The “discoveries” in Asia and America, he argued, had made this system necessary; it guaranteed the European power balance: The West Indian territories and shipping to East India give some European nations predominance over others. These other peoples, who believe themselves to be in danger, help each other through alliances, and thus the European nations on the two sides of the scale are in balance.38 Schlözer based the second, expanded edition of his Vorstellung der Universal-Historie (1775) and his WeltGeschichte (1792) on a similar view, counting the period beginning with Columbus as the fifth. From his point of view, its significance lay in the concentration of innovative potential in Europe, which had made “discoveries” in other parts of the world possible in the first place. According to Schlözer, the current period had already made a series of “remarkable advances” [erstaunliche Progresse]: “Concentrated in our small part of the world, there are a lot of new inventions which have changed its shape and also influenced other parts of the world”.39 Demanding that historians not merely accumulate a mass of disparate stories like the Universal History (“Aggregat”) but create a coherent and meaningful narrative based on a selection of the most significant, connecting events in history (“System”), Schlözer was eager to emphasise historical connections between Europeans and others, stating his conviction, for instance, that Tahiti must have “been influenced by our Europe, long before the first European ship landed on its coast”, even though he knew no sources to support this thesis.40 He acknowledged cultural diversity and the plurality of different peoples’ histories. But in Schlözer’s mind, it was doubtless Europe that was exerting its influence over other regions, and he unambiguously prioritised Europe for its unifying influence. Even Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren (1760–1842), who succeeded Gatterer in his chair but did not show any serious interest in universal history (although he certainly read his colleagues’ works), began his Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems (1809) with Columbus and envisioned the “material for historians of centuries to come” in a “greater and more liberated future […] by the diffusion of European culture to far-flung parts of the world”. Heeren shared Gatterer’s view that the emergence of the European state system was the single most important development of the current historical period.41 Ironically, of all the Göttingen scholars, it was Meiners who, in his rambling and often blatantly racist writing, most heavily relied on travel literature. He claimed that unlike universal history or world history, the
Time Travel in the Pacific 143 “history of mankind” that he envisioned would include all parts of the globe and all peoples, regardless of their overall influence. Meiners stipulated specifically that historians should investigate “especially the savages and barbarous peoples in all parts of the world, who have not effected the slightest noticeable change to the history of mankind”, because “one small tribe of savages and barbarians can often make more important contributions to the knowledge of human nature than the most illustrious nations”.42 He was not interested in a systematic periodisation nor, indeed, in any kind of system. Nevertheless, in his Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen (1811), he cast the “discoveries of both Indies” and the “circumnavigation of the earth by Magellan and his great followers” as epoch-making “revolutions”. Regarding his own time as especially revolutionary, Meiners attached more importance to the eighteenth-century “discovery” of Australia than to the earlier one of the Americas, and he predicted that the Pacific Islands would be settled by Australian colonists: “Should the colonisation of Australia continue as it has begun, or as the population of the New World [America] has done, there will perhaps be more important changes to trade in general than the discovery of America has brought”.43 Disdained by his colleagues at Göttingen, Meiners’ books have not drawn much attention in more recent scholarship, either.44 But they were highly popular amongst a more general readership at the time and saw multiple editions. His appreciation of the value of voyage accounts to historiography is thus particularly pertinent to the question of how this value may have been assessed amongst a wider reading public.45 In his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785), he called the critical compilation of travel accounts a necessary prerequisite for a productive analysis by historians. Since the geographical horizon of the Greeks and Romans had been very limited and since “some works of the greatest travellers about the most important countries and peoples of the world” had been published during the previous century, Meiners thought, there had been a “lack of taste and know-how” for “using the most important testimonies to the real knowledge of human nature and the observations of reliable and understanding travellers”.46 Like most students of travel literature, Meiners believed that this literature had far too long been rated as entertainment rather than instructive reading. No wonder he was enthusiastic about compilations, like those by Astley, Prévost, and Schwabe, and about de Brosses’ and Dalrymple’s historical overviews of Pacific exploration. He praised Dalrymple’s Historical Collection as a “magnificent work!”47 His Untersuchungen includes references to the Pacific peoples, and he quotes from an enormous range of travellers like Dampier, Cook, Bougainville, and the Forsters but also from the anthropological contemplations of de Brosses.48 These “great men of our period”, Meiners concluded in his Grundriß, “doubtless deserve the honour of having revealed to the reading public the richest treasure troves of
144 Sünne Juterczenka useful knowledge in the travel accounts and of having used these treasure troves to the happiest success”.49 Clearly, voyaging left its mark in historical thinking. Not all scholars embraced de Brosses and Dalrymple’s interest in Terra Australis in the same way as Meiners did. But even those who largely excluded “savages and barbarous people in all parts of the world” from their historical narratives included them in their conceptions of large-scale history, insofar as exploration promised a rich harvest of “useful knowledge” on which they might rely, if only for a sense of scale and priority. For Gatterer and Schlözer, registering and gauging cultural diversity was a necessary step in order to arrive at the (Eurocentric) conclusion that the most decisive action had taken place in Europe. Furthermore, even to those who did not agree with Meiners on including “savages and barbarous peoples” in the grand scheme of history, travel writing was useful in revealing previously inaccessible layers of the European past, as Ferguson had indicated. Building on the hierarchy of stages elaborated by their Scottish colleagues, German historians projected a step-ladder process of cultural development into the global space. They observed and commented on this process by analysing travel literature, literally going on expeditions into the past. Schlözer formulated this idea of the newly reclaimed knowledge about the European past in his WeltGeschichte nach ihren HauptTheilen (1792): But since Columbusʼs times, we have known peoples who are still in the childhood stage of humanity or at least many steps below us highly refined Europeans; and since then we can, with the help of travel writers, determine the gradual advancement of humankind much more precisely and salvage the forgotten primitive state of our own nations. Like Herder and many prominent Enlightenment thinkers, including Rousseau and Diderot, he compared different stages of cultural progress to the life ages of an individual, ranking “primitive” nations in the childhood stage and “highly refined” ones in mature adulthood. Like de Brosses and Dalrymple, Schlözer implied that those who were still in the childhood stage depended on others for guidance. Like Ferguson, he pressed scholars to seize the opportunity to learn more about the “highly refined” nationsʼ pasts by studying those still in a “primitive state”.50 History, for Schlözer, had acquired the “new function” of tracing “how society had evolved and might evolve”.51 While historians in Göttingen enjoyed exceptional access to Englishlanguage travel literature thanks to the Union, they were by no means the only German-speaking scholars who regarded scientific exploration as relevant to historiography. Most notably, the Swiss historian Isaak Iselin (1728–82), who had studied at Göttingen, cited numerous travel
Time Travel in the Pacific 145 accounts in the different editions of his Geschichte der Menschheit (first published as early as 1764). Some of these accounts appeared while he was still revising his work.52 Georg Andreas Will (1727–98), professor at the University of Altdorf, quoted Schwabe’s compilation as useful to historical scholarship in his “Einleitung in die historische Gelahrtheit” (Introduction to historical scholarship, 1766) but relegated the study of travel literature to geography, which he classified as an auxiliary science (“Hülfswissenschaft”).53 In particular, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) extolled the recent blossoming of travel literature in his much-quoted inaugural lecture delivered on the eve of the French Revolution in May 1789. He made the concept of discoveries the illustrative material of his universal historical principles. Echoing Ferguson’s earlier rhetoric, he put in a nutshell what had been described by others as the basis for a new universal historiography: “Discoveries” would help historians in taking stock of Europe’s own cultural development. As if directed by a “wise hand”, new knowledge was fortuitously being made available exactly at the point in time “when we in our own culture have advanced far enough to be able to make a useful application of this discovery and to reconstruct the lost beginnings of our species from this mirror”.54 Schiller summarises neatly how German scholars committed to large-scale historical thinking saw themselves as being offered the key to solving methodological problems that their predecessors had been unable to solve. To these historians, the era of Bougainville and Cook was equally important as that of Columbus: While the former marked the beginning of the latest period in history, the latter heralded the beginning of a new historiographical epoch.
Conclusions The conviction of living through global history in the making and the idea that voyages resembled expeditions into the European past made European expansion during the eighteenth century above all an exercise in historical self-discovery. In the words of John G. A. Pocock, the most important cultural encounter in the context of the Enlightenment was probably Europeans’ encounter with themselves, with their pasts and with their own historicity, so that it was into these highly sophisticated and even self-critical schemes of historiography that they sought to integrate, or gave up trying to integrate the cultures with which they came in contact.55 Seeing how exploration inspired historiographical thinking helps explain why cultural hierarchies met with approval even amongst scholars like the Göttingen historians, who were so eagerly studying cultural diversity. These scholars seem to have anticipated a future in which all the world’s peoples would be “discovered”, and, indeed, some
146 Sünne Juterczenka of their own students participated in major expeditions. At least from de Brosses, Dalrymple, Gatterer, and Schlözer’s points of view, it was only a question of time until those peoples would climb the ladder of cultural refinement. Only then would they finally be able to construct a truly universal historiography. Based on these findings, it seems fair to say that the German historians neither directly anticipated nor advocated for German colonialism. But their conceptions of large-scale historiography did resonate with cultural hierarchies precisely because, following the Scottish social theories, they sought to engage with and make sense of cultural diversity. They did so mainly through comparison and on the basis of a diffusionist model of cultural development. In their references to ancient historians like Polybios, their reception of foreign-language scholarship, their commitment to translating and enlarging the Universal History, and their debates about “universal history” vs the “history of mankind”, these scholars were striving to stand their ground in competition with their predecessors as well as their contemporaries. In this regard, exploration conveniently enlarged their playing field. Considering the bigger picture, the interplay between eighteenth-century historiography and exploration suggests that when German scholars did embrace colonialism in the nineteenth century, this was perhaps less a result of long-standing unconscious desires than of the ambivalence inherent in all Enlightenment endeavours: Eighteenthcentury exploration furnished a rich repository of material to those interested in cultural diversity. That material could serve a range of purposes, not all of these necessarily in line with Enlightenment universalism. This chapter has thus sought to qualify previous assessments that cast eighteenth-century German scholarship as proto-colonialist. This is not to deny such scholarship’s utility to subsequent intellectual developments that were instrumental to colonial ideology. That utility is most obvious in Meiners’ work, whose crude rhetoric is sometimes casually brushed aside as “atypical of Enlightenment historiography”.56 Meiners’ writings foreshadowed the shift from Enlightenment racial theories to scientific racism by assembling a vast amount of empirical observations on human diversity from the travel accounts and by using these observations to make value judgements about different peoples, based on aesthetic criteria. Meiners thereby inspired nineteenth-century French proponents of physical anthropology.57 Gatterer and Schlözer, on the other hand, helped prepare the ground for nineteenth-century historiography and for cultural anthropology.58 The “denial of coevalness”, that, as Fabian so convincingly showed, enabled modern cultural anthropology to “make its object” was transmitted from Scotland to continental Europe and to a broader reading public, in part via Göttingen. Despite their manifest fascination with cultural diversity, these scholars made far-reaching methodological decisions that privileged Europe in their influential works. Despite some
Time Travel in the Pacific 147 attempts, at least on Schlözer’s part, at showing connections between historical developments in far-flung corners of the globe, they favoured comparison as a method and diffusion as a developmental model. In the long run, these preferences may well have pre-empted viable alternatives to Eurocentric but consequential ideas like those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Imagining the “Weltgeist” as progressing from East to West, with Europe as “the endpoint of history”,59 Hegel would further propagate the diffusionist model and in turn inspire a long tradition of historiography focused on explaining the “European miracle” of economic success and world domination, thereby dividing the world into “the West” and “the Rest”.60 It is revealing that so much current historiography tries to overcome the Eurocentric bias by favouring global connections and exchange over comparison and diffusion. Such scholarship often takes its cues from more recent innovative trends in cultural anthropology. Acknowledging shared albeit historically and culturally specific human fundamentals, as the historiographical movement of Historical Anthropology has now been doing for several decades, also in Germany, makes strides in acknowledging complexity and contemporaneity in other cultures without denying that global asymmetries have profoundly shaped all cultures.
Notes 1 The frontispiece appears in Johann Joachim Schwabe, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande; oder Sammlung aller Reisebeschreibungen, welche bis itzo in verschiedenen Sprachen von allen Völkern herausgegeben worden, und einen vollständigen Begriff von der neuern Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte machen; worinnen der wirkliche Zustand aller Nationen vorgestellet, und das Merkwürdigste, Nützlichste und Wahrhaftigste in Europa, Asia, Africa und America […] im Englischen zusammen getragen, und aus demselben ins Deutsche übersetzt, 21 vols. (Leipzig: Arkstee und Merkus, 1747–74). 2 The original work on which Schwabe relied was [John Green], A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Consisting of the Most Esteemed Relations, Which Have Been Hitherto Published in Any Language: Comprehending Every Thing Remarkable in Its Kind, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America […]. So as to Form a Complete System of Modern Geography and History, Exhibiting the Present State of All Nations […], 4 vols. (London: Thomas Astley, 1745–47); an extended version (without the frontispiece) was published in French as Antoine-François Prévost d’Exiles, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre, qui ont été publiées jusqu’à présent dans les différentes langues de toutes les nations connues […] pour former un systême complet d’histoire [et] de géographie moderne, qui représente l’état actuel de toutes les nations, 20 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1748–89). 3 On the genre of continent allegories, see Clare le Corbeiller, “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 19 (1961). More recently,
148 Sünne Juterczenka and with a focus on the German-speaking lands: The Language of Continent Allegories in Baroque Central Europe, ed. Wolfgang Schmale, Marion Romberg, and Josef Köstlbauer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016). For a brilliant analysis of a pair of similar allegories, see Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Australia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), Chap. 3. 4 Schwabe, Allgemeine Historie, vol. 1, p. 18. 5 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 6 Most groundbreaking was Susanne Müller-Zantop, Kolonialphantasien im vorkolonialen Deutschland (1770–1870) (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999). Also see Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, ed. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Reisen über Grenzen: Kontakt und Konfrontation, Maskerade und Mimikri, ed. Renate Schlesier and Ulrike Zellmann (Münster: Waxmann, 2003). 7 Müller-Zantop, for instance, is now quoted in standard works like Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 15. For a critical assessment that emphasises the cosmopolitan over the national outlook particularly in Herder, see Helmut Peitsch, “Deutsche Peripherie und europäisches Zentrum? Herders Aneignung der außereuropäischen Forschungs- und Entdeckungsreisen in den Ideen”, Vom Selbstdenken: Aufklärung und Aufklärungskritik in Herders ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’, ed. Regine Otto and John H. Zammito (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2001). 8 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Benedikt Stuchtey, Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert (München: Oldenbourg, 2010). 9 In a similar vein, see Sven Trakulhun and Daniel Carey, “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment”, The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 10 John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 11 Charles de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes. Contenant ce que l’on sçait des mœurs & des productions des contrées découvertes jusqu’à ce jour; & où il est traité de l’utilité d’y faire de plus amples découvertes, & des moyens d’y former un établissement, 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1756); Alexander Dalrymple, Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (London: Author, 1770–71). 12 Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the hierarchy of stages, see Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 13 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See especially Part 2, Sections I and II about the history of “Rude Nations”. For the German reception, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); for the reception in Göttingen specifically, see Norbert Waszek, “Die schottische Aufklärung in der Göttinger Wissenschaft vom Menschen”, Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800: Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische
Time Travel in the Pacific 149 Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). 14 Ferguson, Essay, p. 80. 15 Nicholas Thomas, “‘On the Varieties of Human Species’: Forster’s Comparative Ethnology”, in Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. xxiii– xl; Henry Home, Sketches on the History of Man, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1774), vol. 1, pp. 19, 23, 180–82, 369. 16 James Burnett, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Balfour; London: T. Cadell, 1773–92), vol. 1, pp. 252, 390–91. 17 James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell in the Strand; and J. Balfour, Edinburgh, 1781), pp. 25–26. 18 William Robertson, The History of America, 3 vols. (Dublin: Whitestone, Watson, Corcoran et al., 1777–96), vol. 1, pp. vi, xiii–xiv. 19 Robertson, The History of America, vol. 1, p. 2. 20 Mythes et géographies des mers du Sud: Études suivis de l’Histoire des navigations aux Terres australes de Charles de Brosses, ed. Sylviane Leoni and Réal Ouellet (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2006), pp. 101, 108– 09, 171. 21 Dalrymple, Historical Collection, pp. xvii–xviii. 22 Hans-Erich Bödeker, “Reisebeschreibungen im historischen Diskurs der Aufklärung”, Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Georg Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2nd ed. 1992, first publ. in 1986). 23 For the pre-history of eighteenth-century universal history, see Georg G. Iggers, “The European Context of Eighteenth-Century German Enlightenment Historiography”, Aufklärung und Geschichte, pp. 225– 45, especially p. 230. For an overview of grand-scale historiography that includes more than can be addressed within the limited scope of this chapter, see Michael Harbsmeier, “World Histories before Domestication: The Writing of Universal Histories, Histories of Mankind and World Histories in Late Eighteenth Century Germany”, Culture and History 5 (1989). 24 Gerald R. Crone, “John Green: Notes on a Neglected Eighteenth-Century Geographer and Cartographer”, Imago Mundi 6 (1949); Gerald R. Crone, “Further Notes on Bradock Mead, Alias John Green, an Eighteenth-Century Cartographer”, Imago Mundi 8 (1951), pp. 69–70. 25 An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time. Compiled from Original Authors; and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, &c. With a General Index to the Whole, 65 vols., ed. George Sale et al. (London: T. Osborne, 1736–68); Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie die in Engeland durch eine Geselschaft von Gelehrten ausgefertiget worden: Nebst den Anmerkungen der holländischen Uebersetzung auch vielen neuen Kupfern und Karten, 41 vols., ed. Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Georg Meusel et al. (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1744–79). 26 On the Universal History, see Guido Abbattista, “The Business of Paternoster Row: Towards a Publishing History of the Universal History (1736–1756)”, Publishing History 17 (1985); on the German translation, see Marcus Conrad, Geschichte(n) und Geschäfte: Die Publikation der ‘Allgemeinen Welthistorie’ im Verlag Gebauer in Halle (1744–1814) (Wiesbaden:
150 Sünne Juterczenka Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010). Quotation from Johan van der Zande, “August Ludwig Schlözer and the Universal History”, Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen Austausch 1750–2000, ed. Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert, and Peter Schumann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 135–36. 27 “Gedanken von der allgemeinen Welthistorie”, Hannoverische Beyträge zum Nutzen und Vergnügen 4 (1762). 28 Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982), p. 227. For a list of the travel literature cited by Herder in his Ideen (including Schwabes Allgemeine Historie and titles related to the Pacific voyages), see Hans-Wolf Jäger, “Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur”, Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert: Neue Untersuchungen, ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: C. Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1986), pp. 181–99. 29 Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1965), p. 245: “Indessen wäre es zu wünschen, daß nach den Anfängen, die wir haben, die genaue und gleichsam naturhistorische Kunst in Abbildung der Menschengeschlechter für alle Gegenden der Welt ununterbrochen dauren möche. […] die letzte Reise Cooks scheint nach dem Ruhm, den man ihren Gemälden gibt, eine neue, höhere Periode anzufangen, der ich in andern Weltteilen die Fortsetzung und eine gemeinnützigere Bekanntmachung wünsche”. 30 Johann Reinhold Forster, Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Schiffahrten im Norden (Frankfurt an der Oder: Carl Gottlieb Strauß, 1784), p. 8: “Ueberhaupt scheinen die Reisen zu Befriedigung der Wißbegierde, und zu Beförderung des Handels, vorzüglich zur Ausbreitung der Aufklärung und Einführung milderer Sitten viel beigetragen zu haben. Denn nur sehr culti vierte Völker suchen des Handels wegen neue Länder und Völker auf; so wie die Aufsuchung unentdeckter Gegenden und Völker um die Wißbegierde zu befriedigen, einen noch höheren Grad von Verfeinerung und Cultur voraus setzet”. 31 Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012), pp. 369–86; Rudolf Vierhaus, “Die Universität Göttingen und die Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert”, Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen: Eine Vorlesungsreihe, ed. Hartmut Boockmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), pp. 9–29; André de Melo Araújo, Weltgeschichte in Göttingen: Eine Studie über das spätaufklärerische universalhistorische Denken, 1756–1815 (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012). More generally on Enlightenment historiography, see Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). On the exceptional role of Göttingen in German Enlightenment scholarship: Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). 32 Gierl, Geschichte, pp. 359–65. 33 Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne, “Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen: Skizze der Fragestellung”, Wissenschaft vom Menschen, p. 15. 34 Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Vom historischen Plan und der sich darauf gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen”, Allgemeine Historische Bibliothek von Mitgliedern des königlichen Instituts der
Time Travel in the Pacific 151 historischen Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 1 (1767), p. 26: “Eine allgemeine Völkergeschichte hingegen, die sich auf alle Arten von Merkwürdigkeiten aller bekannten Nationen ausbreitet, und von Erschaffung der Welt bis auf unsere Zeit geht, ist die wahre und eigentliche Universalhistorie; ein Werk, das noch nicht geschrieben ist, ob ich wohl glaube, daß sich das bekante Werk der Engländer dem Umfange einer solchen allgemeinen Welthistorie in manchen einzelnen Theilen nähert”. Excerpts from most of the Göttingen scholars’ works can be found in Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärungshistorie, 2 vols., ed. Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990). While these volumes offer an excellent introduction to German enlightened historiography, I quote from the originals for the sake of completeness. 35 August Ludwig Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1772–73), vol. 1, p. 3, vol. 2, pp. 272–73: “Die Gänge dieser Verbindung aber suche der Weltgeschichtforscher ja nicht bloß, wie bisher geschehen, auf Heerstraßen, wo Conqueranten und Armeen unter Paukenschall marschiren; sondern auch auf Nebenwegen, wo unbemerkt Kaufleute, Apostel, und Reisende, schleichen”. “Sie umfasset alle Welttheile und Zeitalter, und sammlet alle Völker in allen Ländern zusammen”. 36 Christoph Meiners, “Vorrede”, Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer’sche Buchhandlung, 1785), [p. 15]: “Die Geschichte der Menschheit ist eine Wissenschaft, in welcher […] die allmählige Verbreitung derselben über alle Theile der Erde […] auseinander gesetzt, und dann die verschiedenen Grade der Cultur […] miteinander verglichen werden”. 37 Gatterer, “Vom historischen Plan”, p. 59. He entitled the last chapter “Viertes Zeitalter, oder Zeitalter der Sammler, Aesthetiker, Kritiker und Pragmatisten, neue Zeit von der Entdeckung Amerikens 1492 bis auf unsere Zeiten”. Johann Christoph Gatterers […] Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalgeschichte zur Erläuterung seiner synchronistischen Tabellen (Göttingen: Verlag der Wittwe Vandenhoeck, 1771). 38 Gatterer, “Vom historischen Plan”, p. 59: “Die Westindischen Besitzungen und die Schiffarth nach Ostindien geben einigen europäischen Nationen eine Ueberwucht für den andern. Diese andern Völker, welche in Gefahr zu seyn glauben, helfen sich durch Bündnisse, und es theilen sich dadurch die Europäischen Nationen in 2 Waagschalen”. 39 Schlözer, Vorstellung, vol. 1, p. 74: “Da drengten sich in unserm kleinen Welttheile eine Menge neuer Entdeckungen zusammen, die seine Gestalt umschufen, und auch auf die übrigen Welttheile Einfluß hatten”. 40 Schlözer, Vorstellung, vol. 2, p. 274: “So glaube ich, daß Otaheiti schon lange vorher Einflüsse von unserm Europa bekommen, ehe neulich das erste Europäische Schiff an seiner Küste landete”. 41 Arnold Ludwig Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems und seiner Colonien von der Entdeckung beyder Indien bis zur Errichtung des Französischen Kayserthrons (Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Röwer, 1809), p. xii: “durch die Verbreitung Europäischer Cultur über ferne Welttheile […] die Elemente zu einem freyern und größern […] Weltstaatensystem […], der Stoff für den Geschichtsschreiber kommender Jahrhunderte!” 42 Meiners, “Vorrede”, p. 14: “Die Geschichte der Menschheit hingegen würdigt gerade die Wilden und Barbaren aller Erdtheile, die in den Schicksalen des ganzen Menschengeschlechts nicht die geringste bemerkbare Veränderung hervorgebracht haben, ihrer vorzüglichen Aufmerksamkeit, weil oft eine einzige kleine Horde von Wilden und Barbaren zur Kenntniß der menschlichen Natur mehr Beyträge liefern kann, als die glänzendsten Nationen”.
152 Sünne Juterczenka 43 Christoph Meiners, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen (die verschiedenen Menschenarten) in Asien und den Südländern in den Ostindischen und Südseeinseln nebst einer historischen Vergleichung der vormaligen und gegenwärtigen Bewohner dieser Continente und Eylande (Tübingen: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1811), p. 479: “Sollte die Colonisation der Austral-Länder so fortgehen, wie sie angefangen hat, oder wie die Bevölkerung der Neuen Welt fortgegangen ist; so werden dadurch in dem Handel überhaupt vielleicht noch größere Veränderungen hervorgebracht werden, als die Entdeckung von America hervorgebracht hat”. 44 Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, “Christoph Meiners’ ‘New Science’ (1747–1810)”, The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 68–83. 45 Müller-Zantop stresses this point, and indeed, it stands to reason that Meiners’ widely read books may have informed discussions of race among the German reading public more than many of the more prominent thinkers associated with the Enlightenment. Kolonialphantasien, pp. 88–89. 46 Meiners, “Vorrede”, p. 17: “In der letzten Hälfte des vergangenen, und im Anfange des gegenwärtigen Jahrhunderts erschienen zwar die Werke der größten Reisenden über die vornehmsten Völker und Länder der Erde; allein bey aller Aufklärung, und allem Eifer für andere Wissenschaften […] fehlte noch immer der Geschmack und die Kunst, die wichtigsten Urkunden ächter Menschenkenntniß, die Beobachtungen zuverläßiger und einsichtsvoller Reisenden zu nützen”. 47 Meiners, “Vorrede”, commented bibliography, no pagination. 48 E.g. Meiners, Untersuchungen, pp. 308–09, 319. 49 Meiners, “Vorrede”, p. 18: “[…] den großen Männern unseres Zeitalters gebührt daher unstreitig die Ehre, dem lesenden Publico die reichsten Fundgruben nützlicher Kenntnisse in den Reisebeschreibungen entdeckt, und diese Fundgruben zugleich mit dem glücklichsten Erfolge bearbeitet zu haben”. 50 August Ludwig von Schlözer, WeltGeschichte nach ihren HauptTheilen, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1785), pp. 55–56: “Aber seit Coloms Zeiten kennen wir Völker, die noch in der Kindheit der Menschheit sind oder doch noch um viele Stufen unter uns hochverfeinerten Europäern stehen; und seitdem läßt sich, mit Hilfe der ReiseBeschreiber, das allmälige Fortrücken des MenschenGeschlechts bis zu seinem heutigen StandOrte, weit genauer bestimmen, und die (!) vergessene UrZustand unsrer eigenen Nationen wiederfinden”. 51 Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 53. 52 Horst-Walter Blanke, “Iselin und die Historik der Aufklärung”, Isaak Iselin und die Geschichtsphilosophie der europäischen Aufklärung, ed. Lucas Marco and Wolfgang Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2011), pp. 80–81. 53 See Fleischer and Blanke, Theoretiker, vol. 1, pp. 331–32. 54 Friedrich Schiller, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? Eine akademische Antrittsrede bei Eröfnung seiner Vorlesungen gehalten (Jena: In der Akademischen Buchhandlung, 1789), p. 364: “Eine weise Hand scheint uns diese rohen Völkerstämme bis auf den Zeitpunkt aufgespart zu haben, wo wir in unsrer eignen Kultur weit genug würden fortgeschritten seyn, um von dieser Entdeckung eine nützliche Anwendung auf uns selbst zu machen, und den verlohrnen Anfang unsers Geschlechts aus diesem Spiegel wieder herzustellen”. 55 John G. A. Pocock, “Nature and History, Self and Other: European Perceptions of World History in the Age of Encounter”, Voyages and
Time Travel in the Pacific 153 Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840, ed. Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), p. 29. 56 Fleischer and Blanke, Theoretiker, vol. 2, p. 756. 57 Martin Gierl, “Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit und Göttinger Universalgeschichte. Rasse und Nation als Politisierung der deutschen Aufklärung”, Wissenschaft vom Menschen, p. 431; Meiners’ racist writing was later much admired by Nazi scholars. See Rupp-Eisenreich, “Christoph Meiners’ ‘New Science’”, pp. 68–70, 74–75. 58 Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Stagl, History of Curiosity, Chap. 6. 59 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 1: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 134. 60 Patrick O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History”, Journal of Global History 1 (2006).
Bibliography Abbattista, Guido, “The Business of Paternoster Row: Towards a Publishing History of the Universal History (1736–1756)”, Publishing History 17 (1985), pp. 5–50. Araújo, André de Melo, Weltgeschichte in Göttingen: Eine Studie über das spätaufklärerische universalhistorische Denken, 1756–1815 (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012). Blanke, Horst-Walter, “Iselin und die Historik der Aufklärung”, Isaak Iselin und die Geschichtsphilosophie der europäischen Aufklärung, ed. Lucas Marco and Wolfgang Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2011), pp. 66–83. Bödeker, Hans-Erich, “Reisebeschreibungen im historischen Diskurs der Aufklärung”, Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert [1986], ed. Georg Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), pp. 278–98. Bödeker, Hans Erich, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne, “Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen: Skizze der Fragestellung”, Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800: Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 11–20. Brosses, Charles de, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes. Contenant ce que l’on sçait des mœurs & des productions des contrées découvertes jusqu’à ce jour; & où il est traité de l’utilité d’y faire de plus amples découvertes, & des moyens d’y former un établissement, 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1756). Burnett, James, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Balfour/London: T. Cadell, 1773–92). Conrad, Sebastian, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Conrad, Marcus, Geschichte(n) und Geschäfte: Die Publikation der ‘Allgemeinen Welthistorie’ im Verlag Gebauer in Halle (1744–1814) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010). Corbeiller, Clare le, “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 19 (1961), pp. 209–23.
154 Sünne Juterczenka Crone, Gerald R., “John Green: Notes on a Neglected Eighteenth-Century Geographer and Cartographer”, Imago Mundi 6 (1949), pp. 85–91. Crone, Gerald R., “Further Notes on Bradock Mead, Alias John Green, an Eighteenth-Century Cartographer”, Imago Mundi 8 (1951), pp. 69–70. Dalrymple, Alexander, Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (London: Author, 1770–71). Dunbar, James, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell; Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1781). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Forster, Johann Reinhold, Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Schiffahrten im Norden (Frankfurt an der Oder: Carl Gottlieb Strauß, 1784). Gascoigne, John, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Gatterer, Johann Christoph, “Vom historischen Plan und der sich darauf gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen”, Allgemeine Historische Bibliothek von Mitgliedern des königlichen Instituts der historischen Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 1 (1767), pp. 15–89. Gatterer, Johann Christoph, Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalgeschichte zur Erläuterung seiner synchronistischen Tabellen (Göttingen: Verlag der Wittwe Vandenhoeck, 1771). “Gedanken von der allgemeinen Welthistorie”, Hannoverische Beyträge zum Nutzen und Vergnügen 4 (1762), pp. 109–12. Gierl, Martin, “Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit und Göttinger Universalgeschichte. Rasse und Nation als Politisierung der deutschen Aufklärung”, Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800: Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 369–86. Gierl, Martin, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012). [Green, John], A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Consisting of the Most Esteemed Relations, Which Have Been Hitherto Published in Any Language: Comprehending Every Thing Remarkable in Its Kind, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America […]. So as to Form a Complete System of Modern Geography and History, Exhibiting the Present State of All Nations […], 4 vols. (London: Thomas Astley, 1745–47). Harbsmeier, Michael, “World Histories before Domestication: The Writing of Universal Histories, Histories of Mankind and World Histories in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany”, Culture and History 5 (1989), pp. 23–59. Heeren, Arnold Ludwig, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems und seiner Colonien von der Entdeckung beyder Indien bis zur Errichtung des Französischen Kayserthrons (Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Röwer, 1809).
Time Travel in the Pacific 155 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Werke, vol. 1: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Herder, Johann Gottfried, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 2 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1965). Home, Henry, Sketches on the History of Man, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1774). Iggers, Georg G., “The European Context of Eighteenth-Century German Enlightenment Historiography”, Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert [1986], ed. Georg Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), pp. 225–45. Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, ed. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Jäger, Hans-Wolf, “Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur”, Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert: Neue Untersuchungen, ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: C. Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1986), pp. 181–99. Marino, Luigi, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). Marshall, Peter J. and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982). Meek, Ronald L., Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Meiners, Christoph, Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer’sche Buchhandlung, 1785). Meiners, Christoph, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen (die verschiedenen Menschenarten) in Asien und den Südländern in den Ostindischen und Südseeinseln nebst einer historischen Vergleichung der vormaligen und gegenwärtigen Bewohner dieser Continente und Eylande (Tübingen: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1811). Müller-Zantop, Susanne, Kolonialphantasien im vorkolonialen Deutschland (1770–1870) (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999). Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Mythes et géographies des mers du Sud: Études suivis de l’Histoire des navigations aux Terres australes de Charles de Brosses, ed. Sylviane Leoni and Réal Ouellet (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2006). O’Brien, Patrick, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History”, Journal of Global History 1 (2006), pp. 3–39. Oz-Salzberger, Fania, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Peitsch, Helmut, “Deutsche Peripherie und europäisches Zentrum? Herders Aneignung der außereuropäischen Forschungs- und Entdeckungsreisen in den Ideen”, Vom Selbstdenken: Aufklärung und Aufklärungskritik in Herders ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’, ed. Regine Otto and John H. Zammito (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2001), pp. 73–85. Pocock, John G. A., “Nature and History, Self and Other: European Perceptions of World History in the Age of Encounter”, Voyages and Beaches: Pacific
156 Sünne Juterczenka Encounters, 1769–1840, ed. Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), pp. 25–44. Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine-François, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre, qui ont été publiées jusqu’à présent dans les différentes langues de toutes les nations connues […] pour former un systême complet d’histoire [et] de géographie moderne, qui représente l’état actuel de toutes les nations, 20 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1748–89). Reill, Peter H., The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Reisen über Grenzen: Kontakt und Konfrontation, Maskerade und Mimikri, ed. Renate Schlesier and Ulrike Zellmann (Münster: Waxmann, 2003). Robertson, William, The History of America, 3 vols. (Dublin: Whitestone, Watson, Corcoran et al., 1777–96). Rupp-Eisenreich, Britta, “Christoph Meiners’ ‘New Science’ (1747–1810)”, The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 68–83. Schiller, Friedrich, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? Eine akademische Antrittsrede bei Eröfnung seiner Vorlesungen gehalten (Jena: In der Akademischen Buchhandlung, 1789). Schlözer, August Ludwig, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1772–73). Schlözer, August Ludwig von, WeltGeschichte nach ihren HauptTheilen, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1785). Schwabe, Johann Joachim, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande; oder Sammlung aller Reisebeschreibungen, welche bis itzo in verschiedenen Sprachen von allen Völkern herausgegeben worden, und einen vollständigen Begriff von der neuern Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte machen; worinnen der wirkliche Zustand aller Nationen vorgestellet, und das Merkwürdigste, Nützlichste und Wahrhaftigste in Europa, Asia, Africa und America […] im Englischen zusammen getragen, und aus demselben ins Deutsche übersetzt, 21 vols. (Leipzig: Arkstee und Merkus, 1747–74). Sebastiani, Silvia, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Stagl, Justin, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Australia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995). Stuchtey, Benedikt, Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert (München: Oldenbourg, 2010). The Language of Continent Allegories in Baroque Central Europe, ed. Wolfgang Schmale, Marion Romberg, and Josef Köstlbauer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016). Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärungshistorie, 2 vols., ed. Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990). Thomas, Nicholas, “‘On the Varieties of Human Species’: Forster’s Comparative Ethnology”, in Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. xxiii–xl. Trakulhun, Sven and Daniel Carey, “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment”, The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century
Time Travel in the Pacific 157 Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 240–80. Uebersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie die in Engeland durch eine Geselschaft von Gelehrten ausgefertiget worden: Nebst den Anmerkungen der holländischen Uebersetzung auch vielen neuen Kupfern und Karten, 41 vols., ed. Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Georg Meusel et al. (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1744–79). An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time. Compiled from Original Authors; and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, &c. With a General Index to the Whole, 65 vols., ed. George Sale et al. (London: T. Osborne, 1736–68). Vermeulen, Han F., Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Vierhaus, Rudolf, “Die Universität Göttingen und die Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert”, Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen: Eine Vorlesungsreihe, ed. Hartmut Boockmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), pp. 9–29. Waszek, Norbert, “Die schottische Aufklärung in der Göttinger Wissenschaft vom Menschen”, Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800: Wissenschaftliche Praktiken, institutionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 125–49. Zande, Johan van der, “August Ludwig Schlözer and the Universal History”, Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen Austausch 1750–2000, ed. Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert, and Peter Schumann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 137–56.
6 Ruins and Revolutions* Jacob Berggren on Classical Soil Paula Henrikson
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, European ruin imagination was defined by several concurrent and competing factors. A sentimental cult of ruins, together with a preference for melancholic reflection on human impermanence, was inherited from the eighteenth century, as was a fashion for new ruins, built to enhance the experience of a picturesque landscape. Archaeological achievements, above all the excavation of Pompeii, had added a scholarly grounded perspective of time passing and historical loss. Reflections on the rise and fall of empires and the transience of human endeavours served as correctives and correlatives of an accelerating modernity, aimed at future progress. At the same time, a heightened experience of the relevance of ruins resulted from contemporary history: in revolutionary Europe, where damage and destruction were never far away, modern ruins loomed large next to ancient ones. In addition, ruins left behind by natural disasters such as the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon demonstrated that nature was just as ruinous as man. At the start of the 1820s, several of these factors converged in the Eastern Mediterranean region. To the abundance of ancient ruins and the associations these entailed were added an unstable political situation, local conflicts, and the “Greek Revolution”, as it was called in the regular reports in European press. In a Western understanding of the Greek war of independence, old and new were intermingled; ancient history was used as a tool to grasp contemporary political processes, while contemporary Greece could inversely be perceived as a pathway to ancient Hellas – for example, through contemporary Greek song culture, seen as an offspring of Homeric tradition. The Eastern Mediterranean also became an arena for rivalling European interests. France and England had been competing for imperial influence in Egypt, and the relationship with the Ottoman Empire was vital for the trade and commerce of many countries in Western Europe. Western travellers sought botanical, geological, and geographical knowledge that was unknown in their home countries. They wished to bring home archaeological objects that would * I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Michael Boyden and Fredrik Thomasson for valuable criticism, suggestions, and remarks.
Ruins and Revolutions 159 bring them fame, and they attempted to describe landscapes that their readers had not yet heard of in travelogues and itineraries. In this way Western travel in the Levant was driven by individual career ambitions as well as national competition, led by the larger European powers. From the margins the scene looked a bit different. Historian Fredrik Thomasson has suggested that Swedish travellers, less affected by the competition between England and France, were able to identify to a greater extent with local actors and criticise imperial ambitions.1 Hence, by taking into consideration travelogues by less-renowned travellers from the European periphery, dominating narratives may be challenged. In this chapter, I will examine the role of time and temporality in a travelogue from the Ottoman Empire written by one of these travellers, Jacob Berggren (1790– 1868). His three-volume travelogue describes his journey from 1819 to 1823 and was published in Swedish in 1826–28, then in German translation in 1828–34. During his travels the political unrest in the region led to the Greek war of independence, and observations recorded in his travelogue regard antiquities as well as ethnography and contemporary conflict. I will examine Berggren’s ways of relating to the competing temporalities of his journey and of the region: the layered temporality of antiquity and modernity; biblical and Homeric temporalities; an imperial temporality; the ruptural temporality of revolutions and political unrest; and his own, personal temporality, oriented at individual progress and career. The plurality of times that these layers reveal made Berggren’s journey a constant negotiation between past, present, and future. The discussion will focus on the ambiguous emblem of the ruin, pointing at the same time towards persistence and loss, anticipated catastrophes and redemption. These competing temporalities should also be understood in relation to the publication history of the travelogue. In his correspondence from 1819 and 1820 Berggren was framed by himself and his friends as a Romantic traveller into an ancient land. A first wave of sympathies for the Greek uprising was expressed in the Swedish press while Berggren was away in 1821–22. The first volume of his travelogue was published in early 1826, just before the second wave of Swedish philhellenism, which originated from a call published on May 3, 1826, and resulted in a society organised to support the Greeks.2 Hence, the first volume was certainly influenced by early philhellenism and Berggren’s experiences, but not by the strong emotions that this short campaign in 1826 gave rise to in the Swedish press, while the last volume appeared after this wave in 1828. Taken together, the three volumes can be said to describe two parallel travels: Berggren’s travels in 1819–23, but also the changes in the expectations of the Swedish audience between 1826 and 1828. The travelling subject in the travelogue had been edited by the writing subject, who was influenced by his readers’ ideas, and also by Berggren’s conjectures of what would be favourable for him in his future career. These narrative layers of history, present time, and future prospects all contribute to the three-volume travelogue as it was published in the late 1820s.
160 Paula Henrikson
Between Antiquity and Modernity Berggren arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on June 12, 1819, sent there to serve as a chaplain at the Swedish legation. In August 1820, he embarked on a journey that took him to Syria, Egypt, and Palestine, but when he returned to Constantinople in March 1822, the city had been changed in the recent conflicts, and he saw no reason to stay. He applied for permission to leave, which was accepted by the Swedish authorities in October 1822.3 In December he left the “blood-stained shores of Bosphorus” and boarded a ship for Smyrna (İzmir), where he expected to find a naval ship that could bring him back to France or Italy.4 On March 13, 1823, he arrived in Toulon, after 45 days at sea.5 Berggren, born in 1790, had a background as a student of classical Arabic and Greek in Uppsala and as a friend of young, Romantic authors in Sweden. He had previously served as a private teacher and as a librarian in Stockholm, and the position as chaplain at the Swedish legation was expected by him and others to be his first step on and a qualification for an academic or clerical career. On his way home from Constantinople he spent three months in Paris attending the lectures of the renowned Arabist Silvestre de Sacy. Berggren’s most important work turned out to be the dictionary Guide français-arabe vulgaire des voyageurs et des Francs en Syrie et en Égypte (1825–44), but his intended career failed: he spent most of his life as a vicar in Skällvik, a parish in the south of Sweden, where he died in 1868.6 Berggren’s travels in the Ottoman Empire were shaped by the turbulent time of his mission, characterised by social and political unrest, leading to the Greek war of independence. Asked by his friend, author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, to salute “the classical Soil you walk on”,7 Berggren came to the Middle East saturated with Romantic Hellenism, and, like so many other European travellers of his time, he viewed this journey as a journey to “an antique land”, to use Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous and oft-quoted phrase.8 When Berggren in his travelogue described present Hellas as “just a mourning ruin of the holy soil of Song, Freedom, and Beauty”, it was with an explicit reference to the eternal Hellas preserved in and maintained by imagination, but now in a ruinous state.9 However, the experiences of revolutionary upheavals made this travelling in time, or, in Nigel Leask’s words, this “temporalization of space”, less smooth than he may have expected and led him to encounters of an unexpected kind.10 His travelogue is filled with considerations on temporal matters, reflecting the ambiguous temporalities of the space he travelled through. A privileged emblem for Berggren’s reflections on historical and revolutionary time was the heavily loaded figure of the ruin. Art historian Nina Dubin, in her study of the modern ruins in paintings by Hubert Robert, has emphasised that in the late eighteenth century “ruins were appreciated less as remnants of a disappearing world than as a proof of
Ruins and Revolutions 161 a precarious one”.11 Dubin draws on Anthony Giddens, whose focus on notions of risk in modern society implies the idea of a “colonisation of the future”, leaving the security of tradition behind.12 The tension between future prospects and historical consciousness that can be observed in Robert’s paintings was not only characteristic for Berggren’s personal situation at the time of his departure from Sweden; it also had a general relevance for the mission he was sent on. In the 1820s, Sweden already had a long history of diplomatic contacts with the Ottoman Empire. The first Swedish chargé d’affaires in Constantinople had been appointed as early as in 1734, with the commission to promote Swedish trade in the Eastern Mediterranean.13 The diplomatic contacts between Sweden and the Ottoman Empire were intense during the eighteenth century, leading to the Swedish palace being built in Pera, on ground bought in 1757. Due to political developments, Ottoman–Swedish contact was declining in the early nineteenth century,14 but activities at the Swedish legation continued, even though a fire hit the Swedish palace in the spring of 1818. This fire, leaving the palace in ruins, may be seen as symbolic for the changing character of Berggren’s assignment. Chaplains had been appointed since the 1730s to uphold a Protestant congregation, but after Berggren’s leave in 1822, no new chaplain was sent out from Sweden until 1859. Berggren and his predecessor were also selected based on partly new criteria. As stated by historian Nils Staf, the new idea was that the candidates should have “a knowledge of classical and oriental languages, the idea being that during their sojourn in Turkey they should increase their knowledge not only of the languages, but also of the manners and customs of the Middle East, so that their increased experience and knowledge could be put to good use in Sweden after their return home”.15 Consequently, Berggren’s mission was multifaceted. To serve the Protestant congregation was a minor duty; his more vague responsibility was to gather knowledge and competence of a kind not entirely specified, but focused on future politics and trade as well as the collection of material and intellectual goods that seemed useful to modern society and universities. Berggren’s travelogue and his extensive archives should be read as accounts of his attempt to fulfil such an imprecise mission, focused on future prospects in the context of a future-oriented time regime dominating post-revolutionary Europe, as suggested by François Hartog. Modernity, in Hartog’s sense, relies on a Koselleckian detachment from history: “If history still dispensed a lesson, it came from the future, not the past. It resided in a future that was to be realized as a rupture with the past, or at least as a differentiation from it […]”.16 This focus on future and modernity was in Sweden’s case dependent on a slowly modernising society, where the forms and procedures of Ottoman relations were inherited from the previous century. In addition, however, Berggren was influenced by a new kind of Romantic historicism, which modified the incentives for investigations into the historical and contemporary
162 Paula Henrikson languages and arts of the Middle East. Speculations about Eastern origins of language and religion assigned a temporal dimension to travel as well as to ethnographic and philological study. In this way, Berggren was torn between a modern mission and an interest in ancient history and culture, which looked backward in time. That Berggren’s journey was explicitly designed as the starting point for his possible future career can be seen in his restless focus on what might be helpful, prospective, and forward-thinking in his experiences. He was collecting ancient inscriptions, antiquities, and botanical specimens, as most travellers did, but also, encouraged by his Romantic countrymen, evidence of contemporary song culture, proverbs, and lists of presentday vocabulary.17 He was also eager to add modern Arabic, Turkish, and Greek to his previous knowledge of classical Arabic and classical Greek. His wide range of interests may seem to lack focus in regard to his mission. Apparently, in the early nineteenth century it was no longer clear what kind of objects or knowledge that would prove useful. Ephemera like theatre advertisements, olive seeds collected at the place where Jesus cried, soil from inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and flowers from Klopstock’s grave did not contribute to a collective stock of knowledge but only to Berggren’s personal story as a traveller and tourist. At the same time, the academic career system was changing: travels and collections tended to be of less importance than they used to, while academic writing and publishing were increasingly relevant. Illuminating the “temporal exchange” that travel writers were involved in, “whereby European modernity was exchanged for the archaic, the curious, and the picturesque”, Leask draws attention to the exchange value of the “antique lands” (and in particular its antiquities) in the symbolic or explicit trade with antiquity and modernity.18 In Berggren’s case, however, the colonial interests that underpin Leask’s framework are of less importance.19 Berggren, a Swedish traveller, did not start from the centre of empire and travel to its margins, but, on the contrary, came from the European margins to “the capital of the world”, as he labelled Constantinople.20 Even though Berggren, too, brought manuscripts and objects with him back to Sweden, the exchange value assigned to antiquities by such a traveller from the margin was of a less obvious kind. Thomasson states that the role as “third-party observers” made it possible for Berggren and his compatriots to be critical towards the looting in a way that French and English travellers generally were not: “Being observers from a country that was not involved in the ‘war for antiquities’ gave them the possibility to see the removals from a different perspective”.21 Such an attempt to criticise Western plundering of ancient sites may be seen as an attempt at moral superiority and self-righteousness from a once-powerful country that had gradually been pushed into the margin: what had been lost in political power could be gained in
Ruins and Revolutions 163 moral authority. But at the same time, Berggren’s view was not consistent, and he did not hesitate to adjust his judgements to what was required by the circumstances or by his ideas of future gain. The enhanced focus on contemporary history also modified the symbolic value of ruins. In his discussion of postrevolutionary melancholy and ruin imagination in Europe, Peter Fritzsche has emphasised the national and historical specificity that was associated with ruins in the early nineteenth century. Ruins, related to particular events in historical time rather than the cycles of natural time, were interpreted as the result of “specific economic or political disasters”, located in history, and were at the same time regarded as evidence of national and indigenous culture rather than imperial conquest.22 Through his flexible attitudes, Berggren’s voice contributes to a multifaceted picture of European interaction with Mediterranean antiquity in general, and of the symbolic value of ruins in particular – ruins as at once promises of persistence, demonstrations of impermanence, and manifestations of plural possibilities. Berggren entered the Eastern Mediterranean infused by multiple, even contradictory temporalities. His interests in the historical and present state of the region, combined with unexpected events around him, made his journey progress jerkily and in unpredicted ways, just as his travelogue is filled with sudden turns, interruptions, and displacements and is characterised by (self-)irony and distorted humour.23 His repeated references to temporal issues should be read in this light and as a way to come to terms with historical, ideological, and geopolitical uncertainties.
Ancient Myths and Modern Clocks In connection with his very first Mediterranean passage from Trieste to Constantinople, Berggren was caught between the persistence of myth and the threats and promises of modernity. The name of the ship he embarked in Trieste was Argo (Argos), a fact that led Berggren to fantasise in his travelogue about the ship’s captain as Jason and the passengers as Argonauts, thus framing his own present-time travel into an ancient land with ancient myth.24 When in the first days of June in 1819 the ship anchored close to the Troad, this conventional language of time-travel was taken further through Berggren’s precise descriptions of Homeric geography, meticulously aimed at adjusting the present landscape, “this epic area”, to the imagined topography of the Trojan War.25 However, when Berggren stayed at the house of a Greek priest living close to Cape Yenişehir the following night, his host told him about the Sigeion stele and bas-relief, which had been taken to England by Lord Elgin in 1799.26 While this act seems justified in Berggren’s travelogue, it is followed by a description of Lord Elgin’s “sacrilege” (“helgedomsrån”) of
164 Paula Henrikson the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis, which he “plundered completely on all the richness and splendour that Xerxes, Philip, Sulla, Alaric and the ravaging Time itself for thousands of years have spared”.27 The mentioning of Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Gothic rulers having threatened Athens put Lord Elgin in a perspective that diminished a man whose reputation was already waning.28 In Berggren’s narrative, the eternal value of Greek antiquity is rhetorically contrasted with the compensation that the inhabitants of Athens were offered by Lord Elgin: a clock. William St Clair states that the Thebans, possessors of probably the only other town clock in the Ottoman Empire, “were far more proud of their town clock than of any ancient buildings”.29 In 1836, the clock in Athens was commented on with appreciation by Irish traveller Robert Walsh, who also described Lord Elgin as rescuing “from destruction what remnants the hand of time and accident yet had spared”, and as forwarding these items to “the British Museum, where they will now continue everlasting memorials, protected from further violence or decay”.30 However, in Berggren’s account the reader is told that the Athenians were forced to raise this town clock on a tower “next to the temple of Jupiter, where it is now erected with the Lord’s name, to show Hellas the passing of time”.31 The juxtaposition of the two phrases, italicised in the original, of “the ravaging Time” that had spared Greek antiquities and “the passing of time”, as the symbolical compensation for their robbery, contrasts Time with time, the tremendous force that had brought about illustrious kings as well as the Jupiter temple with modern, profane, imperial clock time, to which modern Athens was forced to adjust. Condemning the plundering, Berggren concluded that it seemed better to do without museums, as Sweden did.32 Sour grapes, certainly – but also, possibly, a way of turning Swedish poverty into a moral advantage. Simultaneously, Berggren seems to align himself with a mythical temporality, as opposed to imperial modernity. A parallel reservation in regard to modern clock time is found in Berggren’s description of his journey with a caravan from Aleppo to Laodicea (Latakia). Starting from Aleppo on June 3, 1821, the journey coincided with Ramadan, which, Berggren explains, made the precise time of sunset and dawn essential: “Since my clock was considered the most reliable one, I was constantly asked about the time of day”.33 According to St Clair, foreigners’ watches were generally trusted,34 and we can see in Berggren’s detailed cash book that he had his clock repaired regularly, with intervals spanning from 2.5 to 14 months.35 However, in Berggren’s narrative the trust in exact clock time soon turned out to be exaggerated: “As I had once proclaimed mealtime, and the Muslims in that moment sat down to eat and drink, I was much alarmed as a moment later I still saw the sun shine between the peaks”.36 This distrust in clocks seems confirmed in the next morning’s decision to let the bright morning star be
Ruins and Revolutions 165 the sign for departure. By leaving it to the sun and the planets to measure the hours of the day, Berggren seems to renounce Western modernity in favour of the Syrian landscape.
Layered Temporalities The conflict in Berggren’s account between ancient myth and modern clock time, where the latter seems to lose, was, however, not an easy one to solve. The simple juxtaposition of antiquity with modernity worked well in Romantic literary theory but less well in the encounter with a more complex world. Berggren’s multitemporal awareness is a recurring feature of his narrative, evident from the beginning of his account with his very first sighting of Constantinople, in which he recaptured the temporal layers of the city: “[B]efore long I saw with my own eyes the renowned city, Byzantium of the Greeks, Constantinople of the Romans, Stambul of the Turks, Miklagard of the Varangians, Zargrad of the Varegians, the capital of the world”.37 The list of succeeding empires reminds the reader not only of Constantinople’s lasting greatness but equally of the futility of human endeavours. A similar rhetoric repeatedly occurs in Berggren’s reports from ancient sites. In his description of a visit in February 1821 at the ruins of Bosra in southern Syria, he quickly reviews parts of the city’s history from the time of the Hebrew Bible to the Middle Ages. In his account of Bosra’s ruins, the ongoing process of historical transition is emphasised: From several of these eras you can see marks of remembrance in the sad ruins: Here the Roman Antonius Lucius has erected a grave monument for his wife; there the holy Sergius rests; here is the mausoleum of a Heathen, there of a Christian and a Muslim; on this theatre one has once strewn flowers for Thalia and Euterpe, and this arena laureated strength and courage; on this altar and in this arch of pillars one once sacrificed to the gods of Athens and Rome; in this temple Christ was worshipped and in this mosque Muhammad; here a Jewish princess, there the archonts of the emperors, the metropolitans of the patriarchs and the generals of the Sarracenes have had their palaces and castles.38 The lesson to learn from this process has to do with human impermanence – Berggren continues: “On the theatre stands Time alone, shaking its heavy, tempestuous wings over the gravel, while the arches of pillars echo from owls’ approving cries, and snakes and lizards compete for the prize on the running track […]”.39 While human culture had abandoned the ruins, animals took its place, a fact that also assigned a certain simultaneity to the historically separated layers of the ruins. Being reduced to
166 Paula Henrikson counterparts of an ominous nature, the continual human changes that the ruins exemplify seem to lose their character of genuine change. Time flies, cultures come and go, ruins are left behind, but nature persists. This experience of plurality and impermanence takes priority over the Romantic project of reviving ancient Hellas that Berggren took with him from home. For Berggren’s Romantic friends in Sweden, Troy was seen as an embodiment of Homeric poetry in a way that corresponded to the philhellenic idea of reviving Greek antiquity in a modern Greek nationstate. But in Berggren’s description of his encounter with the Homeric landscape and the poetic place of Troy, the Homeric immortality can only be experienced with the backdrop of the constant process of historical transition: One has hardly entered this epic area before one recognises the immortal poet who has sung of it. These awe-inspiring burial moulds, which for millennia, with their sacred memories and tales, have loomed verdantly to the foreign pilgrim above the urns they keep; these ruins – still bleeding between the thorn and the thistle – where the worshippers of Pallas, the Cross, and Muhammad, in the ravaging course of time, have taken turns to quarry their temples and castles in order to erect them in other parts of the world, where they have fallen again; Ida and Gargarus; Simois and Scamander still reflect, albeit in the figure of mourning, the scenes of the Iliad and the battlefield of the Homeric heroes, and they bear sufficient witness to the richness and splendour of those cities that here have successively risen on one another’s dust.40 Even though Berggren states in this winding quote that his focus is on Homeric reflections in contemporary nature, his actual attention seems transferred to a less permanent and more layered history. In his ambivalence between immortality and impermanence, or between Homeric poetry and a history of cities that have risen and fallen on previous cities’ dust, Berggren adds to the romanticising melancholy a confirmative sentiment of plural possibilities.
Flight into Egypt To the simple juxtaposition between modern clock time and mythical or natural time, on the one hand, and the multi-layered temporality that ancient ruins convey, on the other, is added in Berggren’s travelogue a more acute experience of revolutionary disruption and modern ruins. In Berggren’s narrative this disruption, changing his plans and travel route, is introduced in the second volume of the travelogue, under the heading “Flight from Sidon into Egypt”.41 The apparent allusion to the flight
Ruins and Revolutions 167 into Egypt of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus is not explicitly followed up on in his text; perhaps the comparison was at the same time too obvious and too blasphemous to further dwell on. However, the figurative biblical framing of Berggren’s abrupt detour to Egypt assigns temporal and mythical depth to his sudden decision, making it seem like a vital and integrated component of his mission. The decision to leave his planned route through Syria for a detour to Egypt was grounded in Berggren’s fear of remaining in a region of complex uprisings among several different groups, including military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and Persia, as well as his fear of the plague, cholera, and earthquakes: Everywhere, close as well as far, war and disorder together with nature’s disastrous revolutions had broken out, so that the entire East could be said to be set on fire, and to be a common battleground for war and massacre, and for the mutual hostility of the world’s powers.42 Berggren’s association of political unrest with earthquakes was commonplace and implied that governmental disturbance was mirrored in nature. Notably, the concept of “revolution” is associated by Berggren not primarily with the “war and disorder” of the region, but with the violent seismic disasters. While the concept of revolutions was long used in astronomy, geology, and geohistory for changes of any kind, whether “slow and gradual” or “sudden and violent”,43 the sudden-and-violent component was acutely accentuated in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake on the one hand, and the French Revolution on the other. The most comprehensive historical dictionary of the Swedish language confirms this association: the first recorded evidence of revolution denoting a “violent or sudden change inside the earth or of the crust etc. […]; in technical language of older times esp.: catastrophe” dates back to 1791.44 Simultaneously, the frequently drawn parallel between social upheaval and natural catastrophes corresponded with the conceptual development in the natural sciences through which the understanding of revolution as a cyclical concept gave way to associations to linear and radical change.45 This can be seen also in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenäum fragment 424 (1798), where he connects the revolution in France with natural disasters: “One can regard the French Revolution as the greatest and most remarkable phenomenon in the history of states, as an almost universal earthquake, as an immeasurable flood in the political world”.46 By introducing the revolutionary state of the earth’s crust and the region, “so that the entire East could be said to be set on fire”, Berggren puts forward the revolution as an overarching frame of his experiences, no more linked to a specific event or conflict but, rather, emblematic for a turbulent modern world order. The different time scales represented by the social time to which human upheavals belong
168 Paula Henrikson and the deep time in which geological changes take place seem to convene: nature mirrors humans, and humans are inscribed in nature. With his flight into Egypt, Berggren also entered an area of competing interests. Leask, focusing on British and French travellers, states that “colonial travellers in ‘antique lands’ more often wore military uniforms than oriental costume, their itineraries determined by the motives of strategy and intelligence-gathering rather than disinterested ‘curiosity’”.47 Berggren – who bought his oriental dress on September 24, 1820 at the price of 217.13 Ottoman piastres48 – was not unaffected by new models of Western travelling in Egypt, but he reacted from his position in the margin more as a spectator or witness. Accordingly, in his account of his visit to the pyramids of Giza in the end of July 1821, where he was guided by Italian Egyptologist Giovanni Battista Caviglia, Berggren attempted a neutral summary of ancient, medieval, and modern positions on the origins and functions of pyramids, but he saved for himself the role of an unbiased observer, providing references and raising critical questions but not siding with any of these positions. Aristotle claimed the pyramids were monuments of tyranny; Pliny, that they were demonstrations of wealth and power; and Herodotus and others, that they were graves of kings, Berggren stated, but recent findings were not sufficiently explained by such theories. Along with descriptions of evidence from previous investigations and his own observations, he recorded the shortcomings of human theories when confronted with the enigma of the pyramids. If they were temples, “Time itself has indeed, with its storms and vicissitudes, forever joined in this cult and worship”.49 If they were memories of slavery and despotism, “the tears of the oppressed forever cry out towards the sky, against the tyrants who in the underworld roll their Sisyphus’s rocks for the pyramids of their pains”.50 If they were graves, no other monument had to this extent “survived history itself, to remind of the futility of seeking immortality on earth”.51 In Berggren’s account earthly disagreement fades when confronted with the timelessness of the pyramids. More than anything else, the encounter with the pyramids appears for Berggren as an aesthetic experience. Observing the dawn from the top of the Great Pyramid on his last day in Giza, Berggren shows a burst of emotion: To observe the creation from the top of this largest and oldest of all human wonders, and to recall in thought what has passed, while observing what is present, must necessarily evoke emotions that […] escape your understanding! From this place you can see Mizraim’s ancient land, and it is as if you can still hear the sound of the Memnon statue while Helios is rising […].52 The reference to the Memnon statue, whose sound could be heard by imagination only in this state of sublime exaltation, works in the
Ruins and Revolutions 169 travelogue as an allusion to Berggren’s reference to this monument some 20 pages earlier, in a discussion of the looting of Egyptian antiquities. Seemingly respectful regarding Caviglia’s efforts to bring Egyptian antiquities to museums in London, Berggren let a more critical position surface in his discussion of the “trade with the bones of the dead”, offered to the travellers, and every year entire ships full of these ancient Egyptian relics are brought to Europe, in the same vein as the head of Memnon is now found in the London Museum, even though one cannot hope that it will sing for the rising sun on the banks of the Thames, as in past times it did at the Nile.53 In past times and in its original environments the head of Memnon (actually a bust of Ramesses II54) was reported to sing at dawn. Although the singing is said to have ceased some 1,600 years earlier, in Berggren’s account the bust’s silence is associated with its transport to London, thus working as a metaphor for a kind of imperial silencing of the local. In this vein the sound that could be communicated in the sublime experience on the top of the Great Pyramid suggests that there still remains a poetical presence in the landscape, even in its ruined state, that is in reach for imagination. In his reference to the pyramids as “monuments of tyranny” (“monumenter af tyranniet”), Bergggren referred to Aristotle’s claim in Politics that the pyramids offer an example of how a tyrant may discipline his people.55 However, in this context Berggren’s comments on the pyramids seem also related to Constantin François Volney’s more recent work, the famous travelogue Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte from 1787. In the eyes of the radical philosopher Volney, the beauty of the pyramids did not excuse the price paid; “we shudder at the numberless acts of injustice and oppression these tiresome labours must have cost […] and we are inflamed with indignation at the tyranny of the despots who enforced these barbarous works”.56 His opinions should be read in the context of the French–English competition. According to Leask, Volney’s indignation at the historical tyranny of the pyramids corresponded to his understanding of modern Egyptians as “the abject victims of Mameluke tyranny”.57 In his travelogue Volney explicitly expressed his wish to see “Egypt under the government of another nation, rather for the happiness of the people, than the preservation of the ancient monuments”.58 In Leask’s analysis, this wish was linked to Volney’s ambition to avoid temporalising nostalgia as well as the personal, anecdotal narrative of the travelogue, which ran the risk of being seduced by the details. According to Volney, to be capable of rational, distanced analysis, the traveller must refrain from curious interaction with the antiquities as well as with contemporary inhabitants.59
170 Paula Henrikson Berggren did not share Volney’s wish to see Egypt possessed by another nation, nor did he adhere to Volney’s ideal of a neutral, distanced voice in his travelogue.60 In his condemnation of the pyramids’ tyranny Volney avoided temporalising nostalgia, while Berggren, leaving open whether the pyramids represented slavery and despotism or sublime wonder, actively interacted with the temporal layers of the lands he travelled through.61 Berggren’s fascination with the pyramids sprang from an interest in local particulars as well as historical curiosities. He enjoyed the anecdote with a twist, as well as spectacular details, and more than once he laid claim to the role of the third-party observer that Thomasson singled out as characteristic. In a description of the mummy looting in Egypt, Berggren combined these elements: Several of the foreigners living in Cairo, especially the French and English consuls, here engage entire bands of grave-diggers, who rather often quarrel about the findings and about the stretch of soil to be investigated, so that many of them are brought to the mummies, and will probably one day, by turns, appear as skeletons in the museums of London or Paris.62 Consequently, Berggren tells in passing that he had sacrificed two “disgusting mummies” to soothe a storm outside Cyprus. He had received these mummies, which seemingly contained the corpses of two Egyptian priests, as a gift from the Swedish consul in Alexandria and brought them with him on the ship when leaving. However, one of his fellow passengers required him to throw them overboard: “Since the required sacrifice was far smaller than the risk to hurt a religious and deeply rooted superstition, it did not take long until the priests were deep in the sea […]”.63 Berggren’s interest in the local and peculiar motivates a narrative style tending towards the subjective, circumstantial, and contingent, rather than a strict and rational analysis. His focus on phenomena like local customs, food, and contemporary poetry may in this vein be understood as linked to an idea of local distinctiveness in a Herderian sense rather than an imperial system. This tendency can also be observed in the way he makes use of narrative rhythm to emphasise the close relationship between his historical reflection on pyramids and contemporary impressions of political conflict. In Berggren’s narrative, his detailed descriptions of the pyramid sites, which he visited for “several days” (Giza area) and two days (Saqqara, Dahshur), stretched over 27 pages of the published book. They are followed by a contrastingly short transition, from his stay in Cairo to his departure on a ship from Alexandria to Cyprus, where he arrives less than two pages after leaving the pyramids. These two pages correspond to nearly two months of travelling, but the abrupt and rapid narrative shift in scope makes the pyramids appear in the immediate
Ruins and Revolutions 171 narrative context of the Cypriotic neighbourhood, which “was now, through the Greek Revolution, completely transformed”; “many houses were abandoned and spattered by blood”.64 From the temporally distant context of Egyptian ruins, the reader is brought to the ongoing productions of ruins, which skews temporal perspectives and makes historical times interact. After his sojourn in Egypt Berggren travelled to Jerusalem. He was back in Constantinople on March 16, 1822, but intended to leave the region as soon as this was arranged from Sweden. This took time, but the period of eight months of involuntary sojourn left barely any trace at all in his travelogue. In contrast, his lengthy descriptions of the voyages that eventually took him first from Constantinople to Smyrna, then from Smyrna to Toulon, seem metaphorical for Berggren’s increasing anxiety as well as the political situation in the area. He left Constantinople in December 1822, on a Genovese ship under the Russian flag, which on Christmas Eve ran into a storm. The captain had to backtrack from the area of Lesbos to the sea outside Tenedos (Bozcaada), where the ship remained until, on Christmas Day, they were catched in a new storm. This time the ship advanced into the Chios Strait, where the captain took refuge in the harbour of Çeşme. In the third and last volume of Berggren’s travelogue (printed 1828), the history of this area is summarised in a kind of narrative parallel to the story of the Troad from June 1819 (printed in the first volume, 1826): At Çeşme, Antiochus’ fleet was once destroyed by the Romans, and in the eighteenth century the Ottoman fleet had been destroyed by the Russians in the battle of Çeşme. But this time the history of destruction spans all the way into present times, as Berggren continues with a description of his walk through the harbour of Çeşme and of the doors, windows, and walls that in the recent upheavals had been hit by bullets. When in the next sentence he mentions “the ruins of Chios”,65 the phrase may seem ambiguous. For a Romantic traveller seeking antiquity revived in the Greek landscape, “the ruins of Chios” would have referred to the island’s ancient ruins, but this time the ruins were of a more recent date: “Streets and lanes were scattered with skeletons, which had attracted a tremendous amount of birds of prey and jackals”.66 The ruin here became an emblem for the contemporary Greek war of independence. Berggren travelled to the Mediterranean as a Romantic traveller with the ambition to walk on “classical Soil”, as his friend Almqvist wrote to him, and with an expressed interest in present Hellas as “just a mourning ruin of the holy soil of Song, Freedom, and Beauty”. However, he returned with an idea of the ruin as not only a means by which to travel back in time but also a metaphor and reality of modernity. This way his use of ruin imagery was transformed through contemporary politics, but also through the time of travel, the time of writing, and the time of publishing.
172 Paula Henrikson
Notes 1 Fredrik Thomasson, “Justifying and Criticizing the Removals of Antiquities in Ottoman Lands: Tracking the Sigeion Inscription”, International Journal of Cultural Property 17, no. 3 (2010), pp. 493–517. 2 For a German perspective on these two waves of philhellenism, see Regine Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus während des griechischen Freiheitskampfes 1821–1827 (München: Oldenbourg, 1984), pp. 125–39. On Swedish philhellenism, see Carl Hallendorff, “Grekvännernas sällskap: Välgörenhet och kanonaffärer”, Svenska Dagbladet, June 13, 1924; Carl Hallendorff, “Nationalinsamlingen för grekerna 1826”, Svenska Dagbladet, July 14, 1924; Erik Wikén, “Sveriges hjälp till grekerna på 1820talet”, Svensk tidskrift 28 (1941), pp. 347–52; Göte Jansson, Tegnér och politiken 1815–1840: En skalds syn på sin tids samhällsproblem (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948), pp. 88–105; Mats Petersson, “Nordens sköldmö och Pallas Athena”, Biblis 1, no. 3 (1998), pp. 30–37; Natalie Klein, “L’humanité, le christianisme, et la liberté”: Die internationale philhellenische Vereinsbewegung der 1820er Jahre (Mainz: von Zabern, 2000), pp. 107, 109; Petra Pakkanen, August Myhrberg and North-European Philhellenism: Building the Myth of a Hero (Helsinki: Suomen Ateenaninstituutin säätiö, 2006); Paula Henrikson, “Filhellenism i svensk romantik: Exemplet Atterbom”, Ett möte: Svensk och dansk litterär romantik i ny dialog, ed. Gunilla Hermansson and Mads Nygaard Folkmann (Göteborg: Makadam förlag, 2008), pp. 72–87; Pär Sandin, “Norsk litterär filhellenism 1821–1832 och dess svenska kontrast”, Samlaren 132 (2011), pp. 90–106; Paula Henrikson, “Swedish Philhellenism and the Question of Transnational Exchange”, Forum Vormärz Forschung: Jahrbuch 2012, ed. Anne-Rose Meyer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013), pp. 215–39. On Swedish volunteers in the Greek war of independence, see also Birger Schöldström, Damer och knektar: Minnen och anteckningar (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1902), pp. 172–92; Börje Knös, “Officiers suédois dans la guerre d’indépendance de la Grèce”, L’Hellénisme Contemporain 3 (1949), pp. 319–34, 404–16, 535–54; Erik Wikén, “Med svenskar i 1800-talets Hellas”, Mitt Grekland, ed. Roland Hentzel (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1958), pp. 81–92. See also William St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence [1972], rev. ed. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008), p. 356. There is no room in this chapter for a discussion of the wider intellectual network that Berggren was a part of. However, I agree with the claim made by Suzanne L. Marchand that philhellenism should be regarded “as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope, rather than as a personal passion”. Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. xix. 3 Jacob Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1826); vol. II (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1826); vol. III (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1828). Here: vol. III, p. 107. The German translation was printed as Reisen in Europa und im Morgenlande, vols. I–III, transl. F. H. Ungewitter (Leipzig and Darmstadt: C. W. Leske, 1828–34). 4 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. III, p. 119: “Bosphorns blodbestänkta stränder”. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 5 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. III, p. 137. 6 See Robert Murray, Till Jorsala: Svenska färder under tusen år (Stockholm: Verbum, 1969), pp. 182–99; Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen, “Berggren, Jacob”, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, vol. 3, ed. Bertil Boëthius (Stockholm: Bonniers,
Ruins and Revolutions 173 1922), p. 508–11; Ture J:son Arne, Svenskarna och Österlandet (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1952), p. 297; Carina Lidström, Berättare på resa: Svenska resenärers reseberättelser 1667–1829 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2015), pp. 33–34, 551; Paula Henrikson, “Ungdomsbrev av Almqvist i Halle (Saale)”, Spänning och nyfikenhet: Festskrift till Johan Svedjedal, ed. Gunnel Furuland et al. (Möklinta: Gidlunds, 2016), pp. 151–69; Paula Henrikson, “En grav av vitaste marmor: Almqvist och Grekland, 1805–1822”, Almqvistvariationer: Receptionsstudier och omläsningar, ed. Anders Burman and Jon Viklund (Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2018), pp. 24–47. 7 Letter from Carl Jonas Love Almqvist to Jacob Berggren, June 27, 1820, Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Halle (Saale), Jacob Berggrens Nachlass, B 58b (164): “den classiska Jorden du går på”. See also Henrikson, “Ungdomsbrev av Almqvist i Halle (Saale)” and Henrikson, “En grav av vitaste marmor”. 8 See Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) and Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), both alluding to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: “I met a traveller from an antique land”. David Constantine notes: “The sentimental accompaniment of this focussing on Greece was nostalgia. Though it was possible to recover, clarify and substantiate the Hellenic Ideal, that ideal remained, as an ideal, unrealizable, lost. Visiting the land itself, recovering the sites and the works of art, enhances the sense of loss, in that one sees more clearly what once was”. David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 4. 9 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 224: “endast en sörjande ruin af Sångens, Frihetens och Skönhetens heliga jord”. 10 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 46. 11 Nina L. Dubin, Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), p. 2. 12 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 111. 13 See Bengt O. H. Johansson, Svenska palatset i Konstantinopel: Sveriges kyrka och ministerhus i Konstantinopel under sjutton- och adertonhundratalen (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1968), p. 9. 14 Fredrik Thomasson, “‘With the Sabre in One Hand and the Koran in the Other’: Turkish Seamen in the Baltic and the Decline of Swedish–Ottoman Relations in the 1790s”, Forum navale 66 (2010), p. 40. 15 Nils Staf, De svenska legationspredikanterna i Konstantinopel (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977), p. 204. On Swedish travel to the legation in Constantinople, see also Christian Callmer, In Orientem: Svenskars färder och forskningar i den europeiska och asiatiska Orienten under 1700-talet (Stockholm: Vitterhets-, historie- och antikvitetsakademien, 1985), pp. 47–55. While Rome was easily accessible (on a relative scale) for Swedish travellers, Greece was not. However, the claim by Emin Tengström that no Swedish traveller visited Greece during the first half of the nineteenth century is wrong (Emin Tengström, Broar till antiken: Antikens inflytande på svenskt samhälls- och kulturliv 1780–1850 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället, 2014), p. 145). One may mention Nils Gustaf Palin (1765–1842), Johannes Hedenborg (1786–1865), and volunteers in the Greek war of independence such as Nils Fredrik Aschling (1790–1840) and Fabian Gustaf Åkerhielm (1792–1869). The dominance of Rome in Swedish
174 Paula Henrikson ruin imagination is acknowledged in Carl Fehrman, Ruinernas romantik: En litteraturhistorisk studie (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1956), pp. 29–72. 16 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 105. 17 On ethnological curiosity, see Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing. On European interest in modern Greek song culture, see, for example, Sandrine Maufroy, “Die ‘Stimme des griechischen Volkes’: Sammlungen neugriechischer Volkslieder in Deutschland und Frankreich”, Graecomania: Der europäische Philhellenismus, ed. Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 329–53; Chryssoula Kambas, “Das griechische Volkslied Charos in Goethes Version und sein Bild des neuen Griechenland: Mit einem Ausblick auf die Haxthausen-Manoussis-Sammlung”, Graecomania: Der europäische Philhellenismus, ed. Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 299–328; Constanze Guthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 3. 18 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 16; see also pp. 43–53. 19 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, pp. 2–3: “In the decades after 1790 the antique lands were increasingly caught up in a power struggle between Britain and post-revolutionary France for ideological control of the meanings of antiquity. As the century progressed, and in a manner rather different from Italy or Greece, the extra-European antique lands became increasingly subject to the quantifying and typifying scrutiny of colonial surveillance, as well as to European aesthetic judgement”. 20 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 73: “verldens hufvudstad”. 21 Thomasson, “Justifying and Criticizing the Removals of Antiquities in Ottoman Lands”, p. 510. 22 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 101– 06; quote p. 101. 23 Berggren’s burlesque humour (“en burlesk, ibland nästan makaber humor”) is observed in Murray, Till Jorsala, p. 183. See also the anonymous review in Stockholms Posten, no. 91, April 21, 1826. 24 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 49. 25 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 61: “detta episka område”. 26 The Sigeion stele and bas-relief are the focus of Thomasson’s article; see his comments to Berggren in Thomasson, “Justifying and Criticizing the Removals of Antiquities in Ottoman Lands”, p. 501. 27 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 67: “all den rikdom och pragt, som Xerxes, Philip, Sylla, Alaric och den härjande Tiden sjelf, under årtusenden skonat”. 28 One may, of course, note that the Parthenon was not yet built at the time of Xerxes’ destruction of Athens. A similar anachronism is found in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s painting The Death of Eucles (1829), celebrating the battle of Marathon against the backdrop of Parthenon. Timothy Rood has demonstrated how Haydon, who attached “ideological importance […] to the Marbles”, established a link between the Persian wars, Greek fifth-century art, and the Napoleonic wars: “By including the temple in the background of
Ruins and Revolutions 175 his Eucles, Haydon was showing the far-off fruits of the successful resistance to Persia – the glorious artistic heritage of fifth-century Athens”. Timothy Rood, “From Marathon to Waterloo: Byron, Battle Monuments, and the Persian Wars”, Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, ed. Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 271–72. 29 William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles [1967], rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 206. 30 Robert Walsh, A Residence at Constantinople during […] the Greek and Turkish Revolutions, vol. I (London: Westley and Davis, 1836), p. 125. See also Thomas Smart Hughes, Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania, vol. I (London: Mawman, 1820), p. 267. 31 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 67: “bredvid Jupiters tempel, der det nu med Lordens namn står, och visar Hellas hvad tiden lider”. As St Clair states, the “tower was built […] in the bazaar near the Tower of the Winds”. St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, p. 207. 32 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 68. 33 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 186: “Emedan mitt ur ansågs för det säkraste, blef jag stundeligen tillfrågad hvad tiden lider”. 34 St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, p. 206. 35 H 45:7 (unpag.), University Library of Gothenburg. 36 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 186: “Då jag en gång utropat mattimmen, och Muselmännen i samma ögonblick satte sig att äta och dricka, blef jag helt förskräckt, att, en stund derefter, ännu få se solen framglänsa mellan bergstopparne”. 37 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, p. 73: “snart såg jag med blotta ögonen den berygtade staden, Grekernas Byzans, Romarnes Constantinopel, Turkarnes Stambul, Wäringarnes Mycklagård, Waregernas Zargrad, verldens hufvudstad”. 38 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, pp. 104–05: “Från flera af dessa tidehvarf, ser man ännu minnesmärken i de sorgliga ruinerna: Här har Romaren Antonius Lucius upprest en grafvård åt sin maka; der hvilar den helige Sergius; här är en Hednings, der en Christens och Muselmans mausolé; på denna theater har man fordom strött blommor för Thalia och Euterpe, och på denna arena lagerkrönt kraften och mannamodet; på detta altare och i detta pelarhvalf har man hemburit offer åt Athens och Roms gudar; i detta tempel har Christus, och i denna moské Mahomed blifvit dyrkad; här har en Judisk Prinsessa, der Cæsarernas archonter, Patriarkernas metropoliter och Sarrasenernas härförare haft sina palatser och borgar”. See also Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, pp. 106–07. 39 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 105: “På skådeplatsen står Tiden ensam, och skakar sina tunga, stormdigra vingar öfver gruset, medan pelarhvalfven genljuda af ufvars och ugglors bifallsskrän, och ormar och ödlor täfla om priset på rännarbanan”. 40 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I, pp. 61–62: “Knappt har man beträdt detta episka område, innan man igenkänner den odödliga skald, som besjunget [sic] det. Dessa vördnadsväckande grafhögar, hvilka under årtusenden, med sina heliga minnen och sagor, för den vallfärdande främlingen höjt sig grönskande öfver urnorna de innesluta; dessa mellan törnet och tistlen ännu blödande ruiner, der tillbedjarne af Pallas, Korset och Mahomet, under tidernas härjande lopp, ömsevis brutit sig tempel och borgar, för att uppresas i andra verldsdelar, der de åter fallit; Ida och Gargarus; Simois och Skamander återspegla ännu, ehuru i sorgens gestalt, Iliadens
176 Paula Henrikson taflor och de Homeriska hjeltarnes tummelplats, samt vittna tillräckligt om de städers rikedom och glans, som här vexelvis höjt sig på hvarandras grus”. 41 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 238: “Flykt från Sidon till Egypten”. On the assimilation of “biblical and Christian elements” in the “catastrophic interpretation of modern history”, see Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 103. 42 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 238: “På alla håll, både nära och fjerran, hade krig och oroligheter, i förening med förstörande natur-revolutioner utbrustit, så att hela Österlandet kunde sägas stå i låga och vara en gemensam tummelplats för örlig och blodsutgjutelser, samt för verldskrafternes inbördes fiendtligheter”. 43 Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 102; see also p. 200. 44 Ordbok över svenska språket, vol. 22 (Lund: Lindstedts univ.-bokh., 1959), R 1678: “våldsam l. plötslig förändring i jordens inre l. av jordskorpan o. d. […]; i ä. fackspr. särsk.: katastrof”. 45 See Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution”, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 43–57; Reinhart Koselleck, “Revolution: Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg”, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd 5, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck [1984] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), pp. 653–788; Bernard I. Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 205; and Guthenke, Placing Modern Greece, pp. 103–06. 46 The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and transl. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 122. Orig.: Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. 1. Abt., Bd II (Charakteristiken und Kritiken I), ed. Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1967), p. 247: “Man kann die Französische Revolution als das größte und merkwürdigste Phänomen der Staatengeschichte betrachten, als ein fast universelles Erdbeben, eine unermeßliche Überschwemmung in der politischen Welt”. Michael Gamper describes Schlegel’s connection between revolution and earthquake as metaphorical, concisely representing the effects of the revolution on masses of people as similar to the effects of an earthquake followed by a tsunami, as they were known from the Lisbon earthquake (Michael Gamper, “Menschenmasse und Erdbeben: Naturund Bevölkerungskatastrophen im 18. Jahrhundert und bei Kleist”, Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastrophendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert [2008], ed. Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014), pp. 526–27). See also Göran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 227. 47 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 103. 48 H 45:7 (unpag.), University Library of Gothenburg. 49 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 279: “så har i sanning Tiden sjelf, med sina stormar och skiften evigt slutet sig till denna dyrkan och hyllning”. 50 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 280: “ropa de förtrycktas tårar evigt till himmelen mot de tyranner, som i underjorden hvälfva Sisyphs-hällar till sina marters pyramider”.
Ruins and Revolutions 177 51 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 280: “som öfverlefvat sjelfva häfden, till erinring, att menniskan förgäfves söker odödligheten på jorden”. 52 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, pp. 289–90: “Att från höjden af detta största och äldsta af menniskounder, betrakta det af skapelsen, och för tanken återkalla det flydda, under blicken på det närvarande, måste nödvändigt uppväcka känslor, som […] förlora sig för fattningen! Härifrån öfverser man Mizraims urgamla land, och tycker sig ännu mot den uppgående Helios höra ljudet af Memnons stod […]”. 53 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 271: “handel med dessa de dödas ben”; “och årligen öfverföras till Europa hela skeppsladdningar af dessa de fordna Egyptiernas reliker, liksom sjelfva Memnons hufvud nu står i Londons Museum, ehuru det icke är att hoppas, att det på Themsens strand skall ljuda mot den uppgående solen, såsom fordom på Nilens”. Thomasson states that Berggren “would strongly criticize the looting in Egypt in the 1820s”. Fredrik Thomasson, The Life of J. D. Åkerblad: Egyptian Decipherment and Orientalism in Revolutionary Times (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 177. 54 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 103. 55 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 277; see Aristotle, Politics, transl. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 461 (Aristot. Pol. 5.1313b): “And it is a device of tyranny to make the subjects poor, so that a guard may not be kept, and also that the people being busy with their daily affairs may not have leisure to plot against their ruler. Instances of this are the pyramids in Egypt and the votive offerings of the Cypselids, and the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus by the Pisistratidae and of the temples at Samos, works of Polycrates (for all these undertakings produce the same effect, constant occupation and poverty among the subject people) […]”. 56 Constantin François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784, & 1785, 2 vols. (Paris: Desenne & Volland, 1787), translated as Travels in Syria and Egypt, during the Years 1783, 1784, & 1785, vol. I (Perth: Morison, 1801), p. 197. 57 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, p. 114. 58 Volney, Travels in Syria and Egypt, p. 198. 59 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, pp. 112–15. 60 Berggren meant that the French consul Regnault, who regarded Volney’s Les ruines as “his Bible” (“sin Bibel”), seemed to overestimate this work (Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 200). 61 In an article from 1792 the Swedish author Carl Gustaf af Leopold also referred to Roman ruins as remnants of tyranny, see Fehrman, Ruinernas romantik, p. 43. 62 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 293: “Flera af de i Cairo bosatte Frankerne, isynnerhet franska och engelska Consulerna, hålla på dessa platsar [sic] hela skaror af dödgräfvare, hvilka icke sällan komma i delo med hvarandra om fynden och om jordsträckan, som skall undersökas, så att mången af dem blir samlad till mumierne, och kommer väl äfven en gång, i tur och ordning, att figurera såsom benrangel i Londons eller Paris muséer”. 63 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. III, p. 101: “Emedan det begärda offret var vida mindre än faran att såra en religiös och djupt inrotad vidskepelse, så dröjde det icke länge innan presterne voro i hafsens djup […]”.
178 Paula Henrikson 64 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. II, p. 297: “Men allt hade nu, genom Grekiska revolutinonen [sic], förändrat utseende”; “många hus stodo öde och blodbestänkte”. 65 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. III, p. 122: “ruinerne af Schio”. 66 Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. III, p. 122: “Gator och gränder voro allestädes beströdde med benrangel, som ditlockat en otrolig mängd roffåglar och schackaler”.
Bibliography Manuscripts Jacob Berggrens Nachlass, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Bibliothek der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Halle (Saale), Germany. Jacob Berggrens papper, H 45, The University Library of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Printed Works Anonymous, review of Berggren, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, Stockholms Posten, no. 91, April 21, 1826. Aristotle, Politics, transl. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). Arne, Ture J:son, Svenskarna och Österlandet (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1952). Berggren, Jacob, Resor i Europa och Österländerne, vol. I (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1826); vol. II (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1826); vol. III (Stockholm: Rumstedt, 1828). Berggren, Jacob, Reisen in Europa und im Morgenlande, vols. I–III, transl. F. H. Ungewitter (Leipzig and Darmstadt: C. W. Leske, 1828–34). Blix, Göran, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Callmer, Christian, In Orientem: Svenskars färder och forskningar i den europeiska och asiatiska Orienten under 1700-talet (Stockholm: Vitterhets-, historie- och antikvitetsakademien, 1985). Cohen, Bernard I., Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Constantine, David, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Dubin, Nina L., Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). Eisner, Robert, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). Fehrman, Carl, Ruinernas romantik: En litteraturhistorisk studie (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1956). Fritzsche, Peter, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). Gamper, Michael, “Menschenmasse und Erdbeben: Naturund Bevölkerungskatastrophen im 18. Jahrhundert und bei Kleist”, Das Erdbeben
Ruins and Revolutions 179 von Lissabon und der Katastrophendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert [2008], ed. Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014), pp. 520–35. Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Guthenke, Constanze, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hallendorff, Carl, “Grekvännernas sällskap: Välgörenhet och kanonaffärer”, Svenska Dagbladet, June 13, 1924. Hallendorff, Carl, “Nationalinsamlingen för grekerna 1826”, Svenska Dagbladet, July 14, 1924. Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Henrikson, Paula, “Filhellenism i svensk romantik: Exemplet Atterbom”, Ett möte: Svensk och dansk litterär romantik i ny dialog, ed. Gunilla Hermansson and Mads Nygaard Folkmann (Göteborg: Makadam förlag, 2008), pp. 72–87. Henrikson, Paula, “Swedish Philhellenism and the Question of Transnational Exchange”, Forum Vormärz Forschung: Jahrbuch 2012, ed. Anne-Rose Meyer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013), pp. 215–39. Henrikson, Paula, “Ungdomsbrev av Almqvist i Halle (Saale)”, Spänning och nyfikenhet: Festskrift till Johan Svedjedal, ed. Gunnel Furuland et al. (Möklinta: Gidlunds, 2016), pp. 151–69. Henrikson, Paula, “En grav av vitaste marmor: Almqvist och Grekland, 1805– 1822”, Almqvistvariationer: Receptionsstudier och omläsningar, ed. Anders Burman and Jon Viklund (Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2018), pp. 24–47. Hughes, Thomas Smart, Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania, vol. I (London: Mawman, 1820). Jansson, Göte, Tegnér och politiken 1815–1840: En skalds syn på sin tids samhällsproblem (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948). Johansson, Bengt O. H., Svenska palatset i Konstantinopel: Sveriges kyrka och ministerhus i Konstantinopel under sjutton- och adertonhundratalen (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1968). Kambas, Chryssoula, “Das griechische Volkslied Charos in Goethes Version und sein Bild des neuen Griechenland: Mit einem Ausblick auf die HaxthausenManoussis-Sammlung”, Graecomania: Der europäische Philhellenismus, ed. Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 299–328. Klein, Natalie, “L’humanité, le christianisme, et la liberté”: Die internationale philhellenische Vereinsbewegung der 1820er Jahre (Mainz: von Zabern, 2000). Knös, Börje, “Officiers suédois dans la guerre d’indépendance de la Grèce”, L’Hellénisme Contemporain 3 (1949), pp. 319–34, 404–16, 535–54. Koselleck, Reinhart, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution”, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 43–57. Koselleck, Reinhart, “Revolution: Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg”, Geschich tliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd 5, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck [1984] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), pp. 653–788.
180 Paula Henrikson Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Lidström, Carina, Berättare på resa: Svenska resenärers reseberättelser 1667– 1829 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2015). Marchand, Suzanne L., Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Maufroy, Sandrine, “Die ‘Stimme des griechischen Volkes’: Sammlungen neugriechischer Volkslieder in Deutschland und Frankreich”, Graecomania: Der europäische Philhellenismus, ed. Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 329–53. Murray, Robert, Till Jorsala: Svenska färder under tusen år (Stockholm: Verbum, 1969). Ordbok över svenska språket, vol. 22 (Lund: Lindstedts univ.-bokh., 1959). Pakkanen, Petra, August Myhrberg and North-European Philhellenism: Building the Myth of a Hero (Helsinki: Suomen Ateenan-instituutin säätiö, 2006). Petersson, Mats, “Nordens sköldmö och Pallas Athena”, Biblis 1, no. 3 (1998), pp. 30–37. Quack-Eustathiades, Regine, Der deutsche Philhellenismus während des griechischen Freiheitskampfes 1821–1827 (München: Oldenbourg, 1984). Rood, Timothy, “From Marathon to Waterloo: Byron, Battle Monuments, and the Persian Wars”, Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, ed. Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 267–97. Rudwick, Martin J. S., Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Sandin, Pär, “Norsk litterär filhellenism 1821–1832 och dess svenska kontrast”, Samlaren 132 (2011), pp. 90–106. Schlegel, Friedrich, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. 1. Abt., Bd II (Charakteristiken und Kritiken I), ed. Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1967). Schöldström, Birger, Damer och knektar: Minnen och anteckningar (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1902). St Clair, William, Lord Elgin and the Marbles [1967], rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). St Clair, William, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence [1972], rev. ed. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008). Staf, Nils, De svenska legationspredikanterna i Konstantinopel (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977). Tengström, Emin, Broar till antiken: Antikens inflytande på svenskt samhälls- och kulturliv 1780–1850 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället, 2014). The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and transl. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Thomasson, Fredrik, “Justifying and Criticizing the Removals of Antiquities in Ottoman Lands: Tracking the Sigeion Inscription”, International Journal of Cultural Property 17, no. 3 (2010), pp. 493–517. Thomasson, Fredrik, “‘With the Sabre in One Hand and the Koran in the Other’: Turkish Seamen in the Baltic and the Decline of Swedish–Ottoman Relations in the 1790s”, Forum navale 66 (2010), pp. 16–43.
Ruins and Revolutions 181 Thomasson, Fredrik, The Life of J. D. Åkerblad: Egyptian Decipherment and Orientalism in Revolutionary Times (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Volney, Constantin François, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784, & 1785, 2 vols. (Paris: Desenne & Volland, 1787). Volney, Constantin François, Travels in Syria and Egypt, during the Years 1783, 1784, & 1785, vol. I (Perth: Morison, 1801). Walsh, Robert, A Residence at Constantinople during […] the Greek and Turkish Revolutions, vol. I (London: Westley and Davis, 1836). Wikén, Erik, “Sveriges hjälp till grekerna på 1820-talet”, Svensk tidskrift 28 (1941), pp. 347–52. Wikén, Erik, “Med svenskar i 1800-talets Hellas”, Mitt Grekland, ed. Roland Hentzel (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1958), pp. 81–92. Zetterstéen, Karl Vilhelm, “Berggren, Jacob”, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, vol. 3, ed. Bertil Boëthius (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1922), p. 508–11.
7 Jerusalem in Every Soul* Temporalities of Faith in Fredrika Bremer’s and Harriet Martineau’s Travel Narratives of Palestine Anna Bohlin On leaving Palestine in April 1847, the British writer Harriet Martineau (1802–76) reflected on her travels through the Holy Land: The “origin and progress” of the Christian faith had been traced “from hill to hill, by valley, lake and river along our road”.1 Time, it would seem, had become visible through the landscape. In Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848) Martineau presents the entire journey from Egypt, across the Sinai Desert on camelback to Palestine, and, finally, via Damascus to Beirut, as “the progress which religion had made”.2 Following the footsteps of Moses, she witnessed the scenery that, in her opinion, gave rise to the Jewish faith, but the narrative is as much an account of the creation of the Hebrew people, of a “nation”. The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) arrived in Jerusalem in January 1859, a little more than a decade later. Evoking the Celestial City of Revelations, like so many pilgrims before her, she immediately contrasted the timeless biblical city to the quite different impressions imposed by the busy, contemporary city before her eyes – an equally common trope in pilgrim literature over the centuries.3 The past time of biblical history, the narrator’s present time, and eternity were common temporal points of reference for any pilgrim narrative of Jerusalem. However, Bremer expanded on the genre’s frame of reference using a theory of the new academic discipline, geography, to argue that the course of history was inscribed in the very topography of Palestine. A Christian conceptualisation of evolution had determined the landscape. This temporality had consequences for her view on which people could claim the right to belong. In her travel narrative Life in the Old World (1860–62),4 Bremer suggested that some people in the multi-ethnical, multi-religious Palestine were simply the wrong people – a suggestion corroborated by a connection between the barren land and the veiled Muslim woman, tapping into Orientalist stereotypes. This chapter disentangles the complex relationships between temporality and topography in Martineau’s and Bremer’s travel narratives of * I am grateful to Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse and Åke Wibergs stiftelse for funding the work on this chapter.
Jerusalem in Every Soul 183 Palestine and examines differences in the resulting views on the nation. In this case, temporality primarily refers to the history of humankind conceptualised according to a pre-Darwinist notion of evolution. Different concepts of temporality are used to analyse the relationships to topography. At their core, the differences between Martineau’s and Bremer’s accounts reflect different temporalities of faith, and these differences are explored using the concepts kairos and chronos as analytical tools. Developed as a concept in ancient Greek philosophy and rhetoric, particularly by Aristotle, kairos represents “the right moment”. In Christian theology kairos denotes the moment of eternity breaking into temporality, defined in opposition to chronos, denoting rectilinear, measurable time. Though kairos may be used to refer to any historical turning point resulting from God acting in time, it also refers to the unique moment in the Christian belief of the appearance of Christ.5 In the latter sense, kairos denotes a qualitative split in time, the idea being that God entering history to redeem the world would change temporality itself. The analysis will start with Martineau’s vision of the past and move on to Bremer’s allegorical geography before arriving at the concepts kairos and chronos, to address the issue of how the different temporalities of faith affect the temporalities of modern nationalism. Imagining the past of a nation as a prerequisite for the present and a promise of the future, the temporality of any nationalist narratives is fraught with a paradox. Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of this paradox as a “double-time” is useful in making sense of the differing temporalities in Martineau’s and Bremer’s travel books. He points out that “the people” occupies a dual position as both the object and the subject of nationalist narratives, which results in a paradoxical understanding of time. The people as an object of nationalist pedagogy necessarily entails continuity, whereas the idea of the people as a subject, producing the nationalist characteristics over and over again, must be conceived of without a reference to the past and, thus, necessarily rests on a non-continual performativity.6 Therefore, the temporalities of faith have an impact on which people is understood as producing the “correct” characteristics, according to the two travellers. Martineau and Bremer were two travel writers who shared many features but still differed in their understandings about the relationship between temporality and topography. Harriet Martineau was known to her contemporaries as a “governess to the nation”, and Fredrika Bremer, known after her time as “the forerunner of the women’s movement”, found great inspiration in Martineau’s work.7 The British journalist, Bremer’s junior by only one year, became a prolific writer from an early age and a national celebrity when her 25-volume series Illustrations of Political Economy were issued in 1832–34. She was presented as a populariser of political economy, explaining the theories of Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill to ordinary people by fictional stories enacting abstract principles in everyday life.
184 Anna Bohlin However, she also earned a reputation as an expert, particularly on abolition, based on the two travel books, Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and Society in America (1837), along with numerous articles following her journey to North America from 1834 to 1836.8 Another outcome of the American journey was the methodological How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), seen as “possibly the earliest sociology textbook written”.9 Bremer was well acquainted with Martineau’s writings on political economy, and Society in America had an impact on Bremer’s radicalised views on female suffrage and contributed to her decision to travel to America herself.10 By the time she finally reached the US in 1849, where she stayed for almost two years, Bremer was a famous novelist across the Western world, having been translated into several languages since the early 1840s.11 On crossing the Atlantic, she read Martineau’s Eastern Life and commented on the book in her three-volume travel narrative The Homes of the New World (1853–54). She was pleased with the way in which Martineau contrasted East to West as different periods of time in the education of humankind – the Old and the New World – and she rejoiced in the “noble spirit” and “beautiful thoughts” she recognised from Martineau’s earlier works.12 Still, she was critical of Martineau’s “endeavour to force her own religious opinions upon the life and history of antiquity”.13 In a sentence omitted in the English translation in order to prevent unnecessary pain, Bremer called it a “thoughtless” handling of ancient history, “lacking in depth”.14 Later on, she was absolutely appalled by Martineau’s commitment to mesmerism in Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851) – written in cooperation with the phrenologist and mesmerist H. G. Atkinson – as was indeed a large part of Martineau’s audience, including her own brother James.15 Presumably, this was the reason why Bremer did not meet with Harriet when she visited James Martineau on her way back from America.16 Bremer’s novels promoting women’s education and independence without refuting the sanctity of family life were much appreciated – even worshipped – by radical circles close to Martineau, thanks to Bremer’s translator Mary Howitt. Howitt was herself an immensely popular author and a prominent figure in the loosely tied group that historian Kathryn Gleadle calls “Radical Unitarians”. Martineau’s Unitarian background secured her an uncommonly thorough education for a girl at the time and provided opportunities to write articles, book reviews, and religious tracts for Unitarian publishers.17 She ended up translating and condensing Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive in 1853, leaving her Christian faith altogether for positivism and natural science. In hindsight, the journey to the East and the experience of Egyptian mythology preserved in the Judeo-Christian tradition proved to have had a transformative impact on her own progress of faith, but at the time Eastern Life was published, she still believed God to be the mover of
Jerusalem in Every Soul 185 the evolutionary process and its teleological end. Bremer and Martineau shared liberal views on politics in general and on women’s rights in particular. Furthermore, they shared a common influence from Romanticism and a Protestant background, although Unitarians recognised Jesus as a model human rather than God, whereas Bremer had come to terms with Christian faith in a Christocentric version. Different temporalities ensued from this theological discrepancy. A few words are needed on political power at the time of Martineau’s and Bremer’s visits to Palestine. By the end of the eighteenth century, geographical accounts in English discussed Aleppo and Damascus but hardly mentioned Jerusalem.18 Nineteenth-century colonial expansion and steamships would change that. Since the sixteenth-century, Palestine was included in the Ottoman Empire and administered as part of the province of Syria – except for a short period of time, from 1831 to 1840, when Mohammad Ali’s campaign for Egyptian independence from Ottoman rule led to military action under his adoptive son Ibrahim.19 Egypt and Palestine became of great interest to the British Empire, eager to secure commercial routes to India. The Russian Empire had equally expansionist ambitions and encouraged pilgrimage to Palestine – the government even provided means of transport to increase the number of pilgrims, to gain influence over the region as protector of the Orthodox Christians.20 Various cultural institutions such as schools and hospitals were established throughout the Ottoman Empire, especially in Palestine, by all kinds of Christian denominations with different national affiliations in order to undermine the Ottomans’ authority over the territory.21 Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land also became popular during the nineteenth century due to the first regular service of steamers between London and Alexandria, which was started in 1836 by the Oriental Steamship Company.22 Steamships made Egypt and the Holy Land accessible, and mass tourism followed.23 However, when Martineau and Bremer took the steamboat to Alexandria and Jaffa respectively, they did not set out just to see the sights. They wanted to make sense of the world.
Martineau’s Vision of the Past The landscape in Martineau’s account served several different functions for exploring temporality, first and foremost as an opportunity to develop an imagined, close relationship to the historical person Jesus by sharing the same sensory perceptions. After crossing the border to the Holy Land Martineau perceived Jesus at her side: So I already saw that vision which never afterwards left me while in Palestine, – of One walking under the terraced hills, or drinking at the wells, or resting under the shade of the olives: and it was truly a delight to think that besides the palm and the oleander and the
186 Anna Bohlin prickly pear, he knew, as well as we do, the poppy and the wild rose, the cyclamen, the bindweed, the various grasses of the way-side, and the familiar thorn.24 Although Martineau considered herself more of a researcher than a pilgrim, at this point she echoed the increasing number of Protestant pilgrims of her time. As anthropologist Glenn Bowman has argued, pilgrims of the Roman Catholic faith – in the nineteenth century and still today – regard churches built on holy sites as manifestations of the Christian community of devotion, whereas Protestant pilgrims – in the nineteenth century and still today – tend to perceive them as monuments blocking the access to the sacred site. They prefer to imagine Jesus walking by their side in an unadulterated landscape with a clear horizon; hence, they privilege inner sight over external, contemporary facts.25 Charles Lock has called this a Protestant optic: a contemplation of the landscape governed by distance and command over bodily expressions of devotion as well as of inner emotions.26 To know the plants and herbs that Christ knew invokes an intellectual intimacy: Placing one’s own body at a spot where Jesus had stood would, in Martineau’s account, foster a new “sense of the familiarity of his teachings”.27 Furthermore, Martineau developed the Protestant optic of inner sight into a historical drama projected onto the contemporary scene. When she reached the plain of Esdraëlon (Jezreel) in northern Palestine, she conjured up a play with ghosts: “To the eye of the historical and religious philosopher, the dead rise here, to give account of the life of the Hebrew nation, from their first entrance upon the land to their expulsion from it”. Before the reader’s eyes a “ghostly array of the tribes following Joshua” appeared, followed by the Kenite woman Jael and the story from the Judges of how she murdered the Hebrew leader Barak.28 Six episodes of Old Testament warfare were enacted before “at last, after the march of more armies on errands of destruction, how sweet is the calm which settles down upon this wide field of history when the Messenger of Peace come hither”.29 War and peace are contrasted in a pedagogical drama projected on the landscape, serving as a screen for visions of the past. However, this passive function of the landscape in the inscription of temporality is countered by considerably more active functions. The landscape in Eastern Life also functions as a time-vessel. As Lila Marz Harper puts it, the past was for Martineau “contained within the landscape”, which therefore had the ability to transport the traveller in time.30 In this sense the desert was superior to all other kinds of landscape that were bound to change by either human hands, volcanic activity, or by rivers changing their course, while the desert remained “unaltered and unalterable”: “There it is, feature by feature the same as when those events occurred which make it holy ground”. The direct access to the scenery of the Exodus was paramount to Martineau as it improved her
Jerusalem in Every Soul 187 access to history: “there is no impediment to one’s seeing Sinai as it was when Moses there halted his people”.31 Access to history was imperative to Martineau as she conceived it to improve her understanding of God. In fact, in Martineau’s views, a correct temporalisation of the landscape made her a better Christian and enabled her to contribute to the future development of the world with improved accuracy and resolve. She was sharply outspoken on this matter: devoid of a context for the Bible in time and space, Christianity appeared “entirely superstitious” and “nearly worthless”.32 Clearly, for Martineau the Bible was not the sole authority of truth. She vehemently rejected the inspirational understanding of the Bible as “superstition” and “bondage of […] the Letter” quoting Paul: “‘the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive’” (2 Cor. 3:6).33 The Gospels, Martineau contended, must be understood as historical records, and she did not soften her words on “the awful error of mistaking the Records of the origin of Judaism and Christianity for the messages themselves”.34 She even took one step further, claiming that “the history of man is truly the Word of God”.35 This argument was in line with her fellow Unitarians’ beliefs. The most distinguishing feature of the Unitarians is that they regarded Jesus as a model human and not the son of God. Established as a dissenter congregation towards the end of the eighteenth century, their religious beliefs were informed by Enlightenment rationalism and the materialist philosophy of Locke.36 They were powerful advocates of science and technology as a consequence of a cosmology based on the universe being “governed by laws, laid down by God”. Gleadle summarises the ethical implications: The object of a Unitarian life was to try and discover these laws so that one might better follow the Maker’s divine plan. […] Indeed, Unitarians held that scientific investigation was a means of fulfilling their duty to apply their God-given powers of reason to discover the truth.37 Martineau thus carried out a religiously motivated duty in her scientific approach to travel writing. In the nineteenth century, the influence of German Romanticism encouraged historicist studies of the Bible, creating tensions in the Unitarian community. Gleadle notes that “new sources of religious authority” were needed; Martineau found her source in the landscape, second only to the Bible.38 Reading repeatedly fell short of seeing the site in her account.39 One day in Sinai was enough to see more than [one could learn from] many years’ reading of the Pentateuch at home. How differently the Pentateuch here reads, from the same worn old bible which one has handled for five-and-twenty years, I could not have imagined.40
188 Anna Bohlin As Shelagh Hunter notes, in Eastern Life “landscape and revelation are inseparable”.41 The landscape changes the biblical text: it reveals truths. The significance awarded to the landscape might not have been disturbing to Unitarians, but Martineau’s idea of the progress of faith was: she contended that religious beliefs evolve from one another. She was certainly not the first to publicly voice this idea. Still, Eastern Life was blamed for “infidel tendencies” by a Unitarian newspaper, her publisher turned down the manuscript, and although the reviews show a mixed response, it was “widely regarded as a poisonous book” – a clergyman was even reported to have burnt the book, sheet by sheet, with “holy satisfaction”.42 Martineau did indeed question quite a few of the Christian dogmas as she drew attention to elements of Egyptian myth in the Bible. For example, she argued that the motif of Annunciation as well as the Incarnation are found in Egyptian myth and were understood in their context as allegories.43 Martineau implored the reader to recognise the great educational benefit of her route, arriving at the Holy Land through the desert from Egypt44 – the very same route as was taken by the evolution of successive religions, progressing towards what she considered to be a more spiritualised faith. “[T]he progressive faith of the Hebrews, and that of the first Christians, [is] enhanced by the lights which travel concentrates upon the spot of their origin and expansion.”45 The landscape not only transported the traveller to the past and provided a more accurate assessment of historical truth, but it also exposed progress. In this sense to travel was to her mind to discover time itself. Eastern Life has been criticised for “an uneasy coalition of materialist and spiritualist perspectives”, but Martineau was certainly not alone in that respect; a tension between determinism and subjectivity permeates the entire nineteenth century, pre- and post-Darwinian thought alike.46 Martineau’s way of solving this tension was not entirely unusual. Furthermore, her teleology was not absolute; it admitted serious setbacks – such as a major part of the entire Christian tradition. Martineau’s object was to arrive at the true teachings of Jesus – an object common to all Unitarians.47 Understanding the original teaching required thorough knowledge of Jesus himself and his point of departure: the Jewish faith and Hebrew society at Jesus’s time. Although her method to achieve this end was securely founded on the Radical Unitarians’ interest in imagination and feeling to convey truths, her claim to see with Moses’s and Jesus’s eyes and report on their thoughts was possibly what provoked her audience the most. This is probably what Bremer had in mind when she remarked on “thoughtless” handling of ancient history, and Roberts concludes that the inauthenticity, the “rather vulgar habit of calling up historical fancies”, as one reviewer had it, would undermine Martineau’s authority.48 Still, Martineau identified not only with Moses and Jesus but also with Egyptian slaves, sun-worshippers in ancient Syria, and the
Jerusalem in Every Soul 189 Hebrew people. She aspired to enter the mind of the Other to perceive the world and make sense of it from a perspective utterly foreign to her own. For Martineau, imagination was a faculty of knowledge, and she used it to recover the significance of Jesus’s teachings and to try to overcome prejudice. More importantly, it enabled her to bear witness to the progress of an idea, not originated in, but delimited and formed by a landscape. Entering the minds of people in the past that, in her view, carried the truths in decisive moments for the future would reveal the Maker’s divine plan. Topography, functioning as a passive screen for inner sights of historical events as well as an active time-vessel, would make temporality – past, present, future – appear.
Bremer’s Allegorical Geography The relationship between topography and temporality is quite differently envisioned in Bremer’s travel narrative of Palestine in Life in the Old World. Bremer and Martineau shared the Protestant ambivalence in regard to pilgrimage. Even though Bremer embraced a pilgrim identity in a more straightforward manner than did Martineau, Bremer kept repeating: “Whether it were exactly here or there is of little importance to the spiritual mind”.49 Still, place obviously mattered since she visited holy sites and shrines. Bremer was broadminded for her age in terms of ecumenicalism, and one of her chief motives for going on her extended journeys to America and to Southern Europe and Palestine was to examine congregations of different denominations.50 Like Martineau, she believed that the Christian faith was part of an on-going evolutionary process that would result in a higher Christian church, anticipated by certain religious personalities in history. Nevertheless, her assessment of different Christian denominations rested on standards that are clearly Protestant. The Roman Catholic Church, dismissed by Martineau, did indeed contain valuable insights for Bremer; theologian Sven-Erik Brodd has shown how Bremer’s ecclesiology involves the Roman Catholic Church in a dialectics with the Protestant churches in Life in the Old World.51 Still, she insisted that Catholicism makes a person unfit for democracy. As for Martineau the word from Paul – “for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life” – was a corner stone in Bremer’s thinking. Bremer and Martineau both agreed with their contemporary British and American Protestant pilgrims in dismissing almost all the sites where biblical events were supposed to have taken place, and they mocked the religious practices of pilgrims of other Christian denominations at the shrines.52 Martineau claimed that the true spot for the Annunciation was the synagogue in Nazareth, where Jesus would have first announced his teachings – not the Church of Annunciation.53 Bremer, on the other hand, reassigned significance to the sites and, in particular, to the landscape.
190 Anna Bohlin The debate of her time on the correct location of Golgatha was, in Bremer’s mind, decided by the “touching symbolism” of the view from the site suggested by Evangelical archaeologists.54 The symbolism of topography guaranteed truth.55 Whereas Martineau strived to recover the historical scenery as it would have appeared to Moses or Jesus in order to access a more accurate account of religious history, Bremer was concerned with reconfiguring the historical events as the spiritual meaning of contemporary sites. However, even though historical truth may not be accessible to Bremer through the landscape, to her the landscape was already invested with history. Carl Ritter, a leading German geographer of his day, was, together with Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of comparative geography. He taught that history does not simply act on nature but is determined by the shape of the earth’s crust. Furthermore, he argued that as the earth exists in time as well as in space, it has developed – indeed, the very concept of time originates from the earth coming into existence. The earth, like human beings, has a purpose and is involved in a teleological progress.56 Bremer embraced this idea wholeheartedly, she quoted at length from Ritter and referred to him in the discussion on how “the peculiar position” of Palestine “exhibited the plan of Providence”.57 The isolation, the sea on one side and the desert on the other, provided excellent opportunities to develop a belief in one God, while the contact with neighbouring cultures on three continents made the message sure to spread around the world after the destruction of Jerusalem.58 The notion that the landscape was moulded to ensure a certain course for history not only applied to Palestine but to the whole world. As holy sites for Bremer took on new meaning as the landscape symbolised biblical stories, the topography of the entire world was in her view determined to spread the Christian faith. Bremer argued that God’s plan for humankind was announced in the Gospels, in particular the Great Commission – “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). The earth’s crust was accordingly shaped to ensure this course of history. Thus the Maker’s plan, that is history, was prefigured and represented by the landscape. Though Bremer herself called this a symbolic interpretation, strictly speaking this is an instance of allegory: just as the New Testament according to the Christian teachings is prefigured by the Old Testament, the landscape in Bremer’s travel narrative is prefigured by the progress of the Christian mission according to God’s plan, revealed through the Gospels. Therefore, I have elsewhere called this concept allegorical geography; Bremer’s geography was based on an allegorical operation, turning the expected order of time on its head.59 Her allegorical geography was clearly based on a different temporality from Martineau’s progress of faith. These different temporalities of
Jerusalem in Every Soul 191 faith had a profound impact on their different views on the progress of faith and on the progress of nations.
Temporalities of Faith: Kairos and Chronos The kind of temporality underpinning Bremer’s allegorical geography is a Christian notion of time, defined by the concept kairos – eternity breaking into temporality, most notably with the advent of Christ. Martineau’s temporality of faith, on the other hand, is characterised by chronos – a rectilinear temporality of progression. The opposition between kairos and chronos is useful for analysing the different temporalities of Bremer’s and Martineau’s travel narratives – and the differences are most conspicuously played out regarding their respective attitudes towards Islam. Martineau’s reliance on chronos as a foundation for her evolutionary thoughts resulted in an unusually high esteem of Islam for a Protestant Christian writer of her time, based on the argument that Mohammed appeared after Jesus. The worst form of superstition in her view was idolatry, which is why she invariably preferred Muslim mosques to nonProtestant Christian churches.60 As the progress of faith moved towards a higher spiritualised religion, she accused non-Protestant Christian denominations of holding on to the idolatry belonging to an earlier age, and she even expressed sympathy for the Muslim contempt of Christianity – given the fact that they were only acquainted with Christianity in its Eastern, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, forms, which in her view were corrupted by ancient idolatry.61 Islam, as the most recently born world religion and obviously a successful one in terms of fulfilling people’s spiritual needs, did indeed constitute a step forward in the progress of faith. Nevertheless, the Christian prerogative prevailed, for according to Martineau Islam “cannot serve the purpose of the whole race [i.e. humankind]; and herein lies the inestimable superiority of Christianity; – of the Christianity of Jesus himself”. However, what Martineau considered to be the true teachings of Jesus, teachings that “introduce [the human race] to the prerogative of their own reason, conscience, faith and affections” was yet to be realised – and would be followed by a new religion even more spiritual than Christianity.62 For Bremer, on the other hand, while equally indebted to an evolutionary frame of reference, God’s incarnation as Christ had changed the course of history. In line with the notion of kairos, progress after this moment consisted of carrying out the truth already revealed. She did read the Quran, and she acknowledged the close relationship between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths, but Islam in her opinion represented the arrest of time. By constructing Islam as unable to promote progress, she replicated the temporal scheme underlying Orientalist thought.63
192 Anna Bohlin
Nations and Orientalism When Bremer had reached Jerusalem and evoked the image of the Celestial City, she concluded: “Because we all yearn towards a home of light, of freedom and perfection, and there is, in every human breast, a voice which silently cries: ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’”64 Like innumerable Christians over the centuries, Bremer considered Palestine to be “a spiritual native land” of every Christian, even “of the human race”, and to her mind, Christianity represented the true spirituality of humanity.65 In the era of rising nationalism, this idea took on new connotations. National independence is an important theme throughout Life in the Old World. At the beginning of the first volume Bremer stated: “Man, nation, humanity – eternal union! The day I realised your connection was the day I understood myself and my life properly”.66 Bremer belonged to the liberal tenet of early nineteenth-century nationalist thought, which understood nationalism as part of a democratising movement. Autonomous citizens – men and women, in Bremer’s view – would unite and create an “imagined community”, in Benedict Anderson’s term.67 Bremer wholeheartedly supported the contemporary European national independence movements, arguing that if “a people seek freedom and independence on the grounds of pure and noble human interests”, it would be “ready to leave the state of incapacity and assume political authority”.68 Still, her dismissal of imperialism was never clean-cut. She did, in fact, support “the ordering hand of England”, “a wise, if sometimes too strict, educating guardian” of “underage nations”, but nevertheless sincerely wished that Italy would unite under the leadership of Protestant Piemonte, and she sided with the movement on Corfu to join the independent Greece and cast off British rule.69 Two aspects decided her attitude towards independence: a Christian faith and a national consciousness. By “awakened national consciousness” the people of Corfu “feel attached” to Greece, she argued.70 The liberation of the people should guide national affiliation of the territory. However, in Palestine, this logic was turned upside down. There was, in Bremer’s view, a need for liberation – though not of the people but of the territory. The modern nationalist concept of the nation developed only slowly.71 At the mid-nineteenth century, many pioneers for nationalism, including Bremer, conceived of the nation as a step in God’s plan for humankind.72 The Christian conception of evolution informing Bremer’s nationalist thought resulted in attitudes wide open to postcolonial critique. In Life in the Old World, Muslims did indeed function as the “Other” in Bremer’s construction of a Western, Christian, autonomous, and progressive self. In Bremer’s version of the Orientalist temporal scheme, the arrest of time was represented in a metaphorical and causal connection between infertile soil and the veiled Muslim woman. Most Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land repeatedly contrasted the densely populated biblical
Jerusalem in Every Soul 193 landscape of milk and honey to nineteenth-century Palestine, desolate and barren. A common view among British Protestants was that the success of their own nation was due to their Protestant faith. In line with this argument, some believed the infertile soil of the Holy Land to be a punishment by God for denying Jesus.73 Martineau rejected the idea that Palestine was barren, and Bremer also dismissed the theory of the cursed land but maintained that the infertile state of the soil was indeed a great problem – a problem caused by the Turks’ and Arabs’ mismanagement and not as a punishment by God. The Turks, in particular, were targeted as the counter-image to Western selfhood in Life in the Old World. In Bremer’s view, the fertility of the spiritual homeland was cut off by the Ottoman Empire. According to Bremer, “life rotted” under Turkish rule.74 In her historic account of Greece, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is described with a clear reference to the Muslim veil: “everything went dark”. Bremer continued: “All public life ceased to exist, all progress crushed, all movement stopped. The veil of silence and night covered this face, once so brilliant” (my italics).75 In Bremer’s version, the veil signified the political state of society, underscoring temporality: the veil implicated immobility. Cultural historian Meyda Yeğenoğlu claims that the veil in Orientalist writing has been “turned into a privileged concept-metaphor in the construction of the reality of Orient; its very ontology”.76 In Western travel writing, the veil has a long history of representing the inaccessibility of Ottoman society sexually, religiously, and politically. As literary historian Frédéric Tinguely has shown, the harem, hiding women’s faces and bodies, represented the “nodal point” of different modes of opacity as early as in French sixteenth-century travel narratives of the Levant.77 In Orientalist imagery, the veil representing Ottoman society took on a temporal association, summarised by Yeğenoğlu: “The ability of the Orient to modernize itself is assumed to be possible only by its radical break from tradition”, and as the veil functioned as “the sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire tradition”, the result was that “unveiling and thereby modernizing the woman of the Orient signified the transformation of the Orient itself”.78 Bremer shared this view. In opposition to Western male travellers, female travellers to the Ottoman Empire were often invited to and reported on harems. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the “harem visit” could actually be regarded as a subgenre in women’s travel writing of the East.79 Women were obviously part of and reinforced Orientalist paradigms, but they modified and used them for their own ends, and their accounts of the harem were by no means all negative. Historian Billie Melman and literary historian Jill Matus show how Victorian travellers domesticated the harem in terms of their own bourgeois homes, omitting the sexual implications, whereas art historian Mary Roberts draws attention to the visual pleasure expressed by many female writers and artists visiting
194 Anna Bohlin harems, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who inaugurated the subgenre in the eighteenth century.80 Her Turkish Embassy Letters are famous, among other things, for celebrating the veil as an opportunity for liberty in a “perpetual masquerade”.81 A third strategy, which has been called feminist Orientalism, used the harem to promote feminist issues at home, a rhetoric introduced in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721).82 Patriarchal customs were labelled Oriental in order to establish feminist conceptualisations of women’s freedom as a Western norm. Bremer’s descriptions of her visits to different harems in Jerusalem employ all three approaches. When meeting veiled Muslim women in the street, Bremer invariably referred to them as “ghosts” and compared the veil to “grave clothes” even though her several visits to harems were full of life: talking, praying, smoking, eating, and watching. Bremer immediately started to question the harem women on their religious beliefs and practices.83 She drew the conclusion that there was no lack in aptitude but a need of “light, freedom, careful education, nobler objects in life, than mere earthly pleasures and Mahomet’s paradise”.84 Matus points out that British Victorian anthropologists frequently used the state of women as a “barometer of civilization”.85 Like Martineau, Bremer expanded on this analysis, arguing that the condition of women had a direct impact on the progress of the nation. They held that women as mothers and companions had a special responsibility for family life and were the “moral force […] as the moving power of society”, according to Martineau.86 Adhering to feminist Orientalism, Bremer conjured up a feminist vision of Western society – apparently a persuasive rhetorical figure rather than a realist description – claiming equality between the sexes in Christian family life, distinguished by monogamy. Monogamy, she argued, raises the position of women both in an emotional and a practical sense, as they will share every burden with their husbands: “Therefore Christian nations must of necessity advance both forward and upward, whilst the nonChristian must by an equal necessity go downwards. For family life is the mother of the life of the State”.87 This point is further enforced when she states: “The disorder of the harem is reflected in the State”.88 To Bremer’s mind, the conclusion is that the entire Turkish people must convert to Christianity to “lift the veil from the soul of the Turkish woman, and to render her capable of giving birth to and educating a free people”.89 The veil in Life in the Old World is constructed as the opposite of life itself. Bremer elaborated on this Orientalist trope in relation to the infertile soil of Palestine. She assured repeatedly that if properly cultivated, the earth would be productive. There was life in the ground: The Jordan and Kedron flow as heretofore; the olive, and the fig, and the pomegranate have not ceased to yield their fruit; the soil under the layer of stones and rubbish which covers it shows, with
Jerusalem in Every Soul 195 every attempt at cultivation, that it is rich in nutriment and force of growth. Nevertheless, the stony covering lies on the face of the whole earth, and the people of the country have neither comfort nor peace. (my italics)90 Whereas Martineau called the stony, barren soil “uncovered”,91 Bremer’s imagery, on the contrary, implies that the problem of infertility was precisely because of the cover. A source of life was waiting to burst forth underneath a surface of societal failure, preventing human success – the same rhetorical figure represented the Palestinian soil and the veiled woman, extending the Orientalist privileged concept-metaphor of the veil to the infertile earth of the Holy Land. Bhabha points out that “the people” of the national narrative is constructed in a paradoxical temporality, a “double-time”. On the one hand, “the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”, hinging on a temporality of continuity and accumulation; on the other hand, “the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification”. In order to give evidence of the nation as a “living principle”, endlessly and unalterably reproducing itself, “any prior or originary presence of the nation-people” must be erased. In this case the temporality is defined by the repetition of performativity. Bhabha notes that the production of the nation as narration emerges out of the split between these different temporalities, the accumulative and the performative.92 However, this split can also be widened to a gap to suggest a people’s lack of the proper nationality, as in Bremer’s travel narrative. The Arab people had a long history of continuity in Palestine, a fact that Bremer acknowledged, but when she searched among the Arab population of Nazareth for a boy looking like Jesus or a woman who could have been Mary, she was disappointed.93 The people of Nazareth did not repeat the physical properties, nor hold the religious beliefs that Bremer considered to be the correct properties for the people to claim ownership over the land. In Bhabha’s terms, the people of Palestine in Bremer’s travel account are denied the position as subjects in a national narrative. Despite her mistrust of imperial interests when it came to European independence movements, she nevertheless trusted the Christian imperial powers England, France, and Russia to gain rule over the entire East. She even pleaded with them not to “pause with the merely outward conquest”.94 As kairos determined the nationalist temporality in Bremer’s thought, she argued that the wellbeing of the nations demanded that Jerusalem should be pushed into every soul. Martineau, on the contrary, had no sympathy for the Mission Society; Deborah Anna Logan calls her “both a cautious advocate and severe critic of British Imperialism”.95 She did not see any point in trying to convert Jews since they had a perfectly well-functioning religion of their own.96 In her eyes, the Christian faith had failed. It had not brought peace, nor had it managed to make all nations brothers of the same Father. In Eastern
196 Anna Bohlin Life her preoccupation with the nation did not concern conversion, but the creation of the living principle of the nation – of any free nation. As chronos determined Martineau’s nationalist thought, she followed the footsteps of the model nation of nineteenth-century nationalism.
The Hebrew People: The Model Nation Like many of her contemporaries, including Bremer, Martineau assumed that topography formed the characteristics of the people – an offshoot of Montesquieu’s and Herder’s climatology in pre-Darwinist thought. In Eastern Life this idea motivated the replacement of people to bring forth a certain set of qualities: according to Martineau’s account, Moses intentionally moved people into the desert in order to procure a nation: No one knew better than Moses at this time, the privileges of life in the Desert. He had witnessed the hardihood, the self-denial, the trusting poverty, the generous hospitality, and the comparatively pure piety of the Arab tribes who lived in tents in Nature’s ascetic retreats. These were the very qualities the Hebrews needed, and could never attain elsewhere.97 Moses looked for a landscape that might educate a virtuous people, a landscape that would foster virtues to transform slaves into free people. Martineau went on to clarify this point: “Discipline was what they needed; and not that discipline from the hand of man which must include more or less of slavery; but the discipline of Nature, whose service is perfect freedom”.98 Hardships foster virtues because “submission to Nature […] is as great a virtue as submission to Man is a vice”.99 Thus Moses had taken the next step “in order to prepare them for their future nationality”, that is “the giving of the Law”100 – a key moment for modern nationalist thought. Anthony D. Smith, one of the founders of nationalism studies, draws attention to the significance of the Hebrew Bible to the ideology of modern nationalism. Even though the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe were subjected to increasing anti-Semitism, the biblical Hebrew people became a model of the modern nation. Smith distinguishes six features of the Hebrew nation in the Books of Genesis and Exodus that would inform the concept of the modern nation: the Covenant, the Torah, the Election, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Sacred Kingship. In later Christian reinterpretations the “old Covenant, the Torah of Moses, had been exchanged for Jesus’ new, universal Covenant” and liberation “no longer signified collective deliverance after the manner of the Exodus from Egypt, but the new freedom found by the individual through acceptance of Christ and his message of love”.101 Smith states that “the ideal of
Jerusalem in Every Soul 197 a homeland, a historic territory deemed to belong to a particular ethnic community or nation” is based on the Old Testament Promised Land, and the idea of a nation chosen by God in direct response to the biblical Israelites is indeed found on many occasions in Christian history, but they multiplied in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century.102 The mission of liberating an ethnic group by entering into a covenant and securing a homeland was the trajectory of the Israelites, mirrored by modern nationalism.103 Martineau and Bremer both reflected on the birth of the nation by referring to the Israelites in the Sinai desert. The temporal relationship established between the model Hebrew nation and later-days’ repetitions differed between them, depending on the temporal frame of reference: Different temporalities of faith had an impact on the concept of the chosen people. According to Martineau, the great accomplishment of Moses was the democratisation of worship, “to admit to the divine knowledge which he held, every individual of the people he belonged to”.104 More importantly, he was led to this course of action by a “truth” he was the first to know: “a truth so holy and vast that even yet mankind seem scarcely able fully to apprehend it; – the truth that all Ideas are the common heritage of all men”.105 To Bremer, on the other hand, there was nothing new about the teachings of Moses. On the contrary, “it is the primal religion, the primal consciousness of God and the humanity which was in the heart when God created man in his own image”.106 Moses simply rediscovered the original relationship with God, “darkened by the Fall”, Bremer claimed.107 She did acknowledge the Hebrew nation as a sacred people, and stressed the importance of the Covenant and the Law – the Old Testament Jewish people were indeed understood as a model nation. Ultimately, though, their main purpose was to expect and prepare for the arrival of Messiah.108 In this way, kairos guides Bremer’s account of Moses and the Hebrew nation as a model for modern nationalism. In Martineau’s view, Moses’s aim was for Hebrews to become “a nation – a people with One God and a single faith” united by a “national spirit”.109 The development of nationality – virtues, the Law, democratic ideals, national spirit – that she took such care to elaborate on, nevertheless proved to constitute the limits of Moses’s significance. While Moses’s “recognition of the spiritual rights of Man was the fullest and noblest that has ever been obtained, or can, perhaps, ever be obtained”, God was to Moses a national and therefore restricted god.110 Progress would, according to Martineau, make the spiritual rights of Man universal. Claiming to retrieve the past, she was prescribing the principles of the nineteenth-century nation-state to the biblical Hebrew nation, guided by chronos as a temporal framework. Different temporalities of faith result in different ideas of chosenness: In Bremer’s argument, informed by kairos, the Hebrew nation was chosen to prepare for the Messiah, whereas
198 Anna Bohlin in Martineau’s argument, informed by chronos, they were chosen to further the spiritual rights of Man.
Landscape, Time, Nationalism Bremer and Martineau shared the view that Christianity was superior to other religious beliefs based on the notion that Christianity aspired to universality. However, because of their different temporalities of faith, Bremer and Martineau drew different conclusions from the fact that this goal was not yet achieved. The model people of nationalist thinking in Martineau’s account was the Hebrew nation. Nevertheless, since her concept of temporality relied on chronos, the people living in the Promised Land at that time, although mixed in origin and faith, still were the proper people, engaged in a world-encompassing progress of faith. The “double-time” of the nationalist narrative, simultaneously accumulative and performative, confirmed the people’s ownership of the land. Christianity had failed and would in time be replaced by even more spiritual religious beliefs. The chronos temporality affected the concept of the sacred people, understanding chosenness as contributing to the universal rights of Man. To Martineau, the landscape was crucial in the process of arriving at a correct understanding of history and thus of the future. Temporality was inscribed on the landscape: first, the landscape had a passive function as a screen on which the biblical historical drama could be projected, and second, the landscape was engaged in a more active function as a time-vessel, transporting Martineau to decisive moments in history and enabling the imaginative entering into the minds of Moses and Jesus. Thus, topography made the plan of God – past, present, future – appear. As kairos is the guiding principle of Bremer’s conception of temporality, the failure to produce a brotherhood of nations, freedom, and peace was due to the fact that Christianity had not (yet) conquered the world. Islam and the Muslim veil were construed as an arrest in time, preventing progress by covering women’s faces and their souls as well as political life as a whole and the fruitfulness of the soil. As a result of kairos temporality, the people of the Holy Land were considered to be of the wrong people, and the territory itself in need of liberation. The landscape was equally important as for Martineau in discovering religious truths, but in contrast to Martineau, history in Bremer’s account lay within the landscape from its creation. The Great Commission spelled out God’s plan for mankind, which had determined the shape of the earth’s crust. Thus, topography for Bremer not only gave access to God’s plan enacted in history but also gave evidence of the Gospels prefiguring the landscape. Her reliance on a kairos temporality – the advent of Christ as a qualitative split in time – entailed that the landscape was determined by the Gospels: an allegorical geography. This temporality of faith opened up for her critical reassignment of significance to holy
Jerusalem in Every Soul 199 sites. Whereas Bremer trusted imperialistic interests to push Jerusalem into every soul, Martineau considered Jerusalem to be of mere historical interest. Precisely because “the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life”, Jerusalem was dispensable for the future. Different temporalities of faith in Bremer’s and Martineau’s travel narratives of Palestine resulted in opposing views on core elements of nineteenth-century nationalism: the relationship between landscape and history, the concept of chosenness, and national belonging.
Notes 1 Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life: Present and Past, vol. III (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), p. 272. Since Palestine was the name for the region at the time, I will use it throughout this chapter to avoid anachronisms. 2 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 79. 3 See Frédéric Tinguely, L’écriture du Levant à la Renaissance: Enquête sur les voyageurs français dans l’empire du Soliman le Magnifique (Genève: Droz, 2000), p. 72; Tracing the Jerusalem Code I. The Holy City: Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (1100–1536), ed. Kristin B. Aavitsland and Line M. Bonde (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020); Tracing the Jerusalem Code II. The Chosen People: Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750), ed. Eivor A. Oftestad and Joar Haga (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020); Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–1920), ed. Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 4 Out of Fredrika Bremer’s three-volume travel narrative Lifvet i gamla verlden: Dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland (1860– 62), only Part II on Palestine was translated into English by Mary Howitt under the title Travels in the Holy Land, vols. I–II (1862). Since my investigation will cover all three volumes of the Swedish original, I will use a translation of the Swedish title, Life in the Old World, throughout the chapter. 5 Historisches Wörterbuch der Philisophie, vol. IV: I–K, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe & Co Verlag, 1976), pp. 667–69: Kairos. 6 Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–322. 7 Shelaugh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 38–58. 8 Hunter, Harriet Martineau, pp. 9, 38–58, 148–94; Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 82–132; Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 10–51; Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 67–95; Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 338–52.
200 Anna Bohlin 9 Harper, Solitary Travelers, p. 97; Harriet Martineau, How to Observe: Morals and Manners (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1838). 10 Carina Burman, Bremer: En biografi (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2001), p. 281; Fredrika Bremer, letters to Per Johan Böklin May 25–27, 1834, June 6, 1834, and Dec. 22–24, 1837, in Fredrika Bremer: Brev. Ny följd, vol. I, ed. Carina Burman (Hedemora: Gidlund, 1996), pp. 62, 64; Fredrika Bremers brev, vol. I, ed. Klara Johanson and Ellen Kleman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1915), pp. 477, 558. For a discussion on Bremer’s The Homes of the New World, see for example Anna Bohlin, “Fredrika Bremer’s Concept of the Nation during her American Journey”, Ideas in History 7, nos. 1–2 (2013), pp. 43–70. 11 Carina Burman, Mamsellen och förläggarna: Fredrika Bremers förlagskontakter 1828–1865 (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi Uppsala universitet, 1995); Åsa Arping, “A Writer of One’s Own? Mary Howitt, Fredrika Bremer, Translation, and Literary ‘Piracy’ in the U.S. and Britain in the 1840s”, Gender and Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception, ed. Isis Herrero López et al. (Québec: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre, collection Vita Traductiva, 2018), pp. 83–106. 12 Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, vol. I, transl. Mary Howitt (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1853), p. 8. Fredrika Bremer, Hemmen i den Nya Verlden, vol. I (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1853), p. 10: “Några stora och vackra tankar gå dock igenom boken som en uppfriskande vind. I dem känner jag igen den ädla ande, inför hvilken jag ofta böjt mig i kärlek […]”. 13 Bremer, The Homes of the New World, p. 8. Bremer, Hemmen i den Nya Verlden, vol. I, p. 9: “Men jag störes i Miss Martineaus bok af hennes tydliga bemödande att tvinga sina egna religiösa föreställningar på forntidens lif och historia”. 14 Bremer, Hemmen i den Nya Verlden, vol. I, p. 9: “De förra [forntidens lif] sakna djup, och för de sednare [historia] saknar hon – ögon, och behandlar dem stundom med ett lättsinne, ej värdigt hennes kallelse eller hennes ande”. Bremer, letters to Mary Howitt Sept. 2–3, 1852, Dec. 15, 1852, in Fredrika Bremer: Brev. Ny följd, vol. I, pp. 456, 462. 15 Hunter, Harriet Martineau, p. 23; Roberts, The Woman and the Hour, p. 176; Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movements, 1831–51 (Basingstoke and London: St. Martin Press/New York: Macmillan Press, 1995), p. 16. 16 Burman, Bremer, p. 333; Klara Johanson, “Orientering”, in Fredrika Bremer, England om hösten år 1851, ed. Klara Johanson (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1922), p. xvii. 17 Gleadle, The Early Feminists, pp. 42–48, 60, 95–106, 181; Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, pp. 96–130. 18 Edward L. Queen, II, “Ambiguous Pilgrims: American Protestant Travelers to Ottoman Palestine, 1867–1914”, Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1996), p. 210. For a thorough investigation of the changing significance of Jerusalem in Scandinavia over the centuries, see Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vols. I–III. 19 Ruth Hummel and Thomas Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred: English Protestant and Russian Orthodox Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995), p. 2; Jill Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’: Martineau and Nightingale Visit the Harem”, NineteenthCentury Contexts 21, no. 1 (1999), p. 67. 20 Hummel and Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred, pp. 2–4, 39–44.
Jerusalem in Every Soul 201 21 Hummel and Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred, pp. 35–38, 58–62; Roger Heacock, “International Politics and Sectarian Policy in the Late Ottoman Period”, Patterns of the Past, Prospects for the Future: The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas Hummel, Kevork Hintlian, and Ulf Carnesund (London: Melisende Fox Communications and Publications, 1999), pp. 20–31. See also M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 22 Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’”, p. 67. 23 Hummel and Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred, p. 2; Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 9; Anka Ryall, Odyssevs i skjørt: Kvinners erobring av reiselitteraturen (Oslo: Pax Forlag AS, 2004), p. 46. 24 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 54. 25 Glenn Bowman, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities”, Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michal J. Sallnow (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 115. 26 Charles Lock, “Bowing Down to Wood and Stone: One Way to Be a Pilgrim”, Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage, ed. Simon Coleman and John Elsner (New York: Bergham Books, 2003), pp. 110–32. 27 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 54. 28 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 213. 29 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 217. 30 Harper, Solitary Travelers, p. 129. 31 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 263. 32 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 80. 33 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 69, 71. 34 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 70. 35 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 72. 36 Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 10. 37 Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 11. 38 Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 17. 39 See for example Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 79–82. 40 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 263. 41 Hunter, Harriet Martineau, p. 5. 42 Roberts, The Woman and the Hour, pp. 147, 161; Deborah Anna Logan, Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 188–89; Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 253. 43 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 222–23. 44 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 79. 45 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 81. 46 Roberts, The Woman and the Hour, p. 148. See also Melman, Women’s Orients, pp. 245, 249. On tensions between transcendental philosophy and the materialist Lockean roots of Unitarian ideology, see Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 17. On the nineteenth-century tension between determinism and subjectivity, see Andreas Schach, Carl Ritter (1779–1859): Naturphilosophie und Geographie: Erkenntnistheoretische Überlegungen, Reform der Geographie und mögliche heutige Implikationen (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1995), pp. 132–68. 47 Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 45.
202 Anna Bohlin 48 Roberts, The Woman and the Hour, p. 162. 49 Fredrika Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, transl. Mary Howitt (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), p. 136. Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden: Dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland, vol. II:I (Stockholm: Adolf Bonnier, 1861), p. 108: “Precist här eller der betyder föga för det andliga sinnet”. 50 Torsten Bohlin, “Fredrika Bremer och kyrkoläran”, Årsbok för Kristen Humanism (1966), pp. 70–85; Sven-Erik Brodd, “‘Jag är mer katolsk än så’: Ett bidrag till frågan om Fredrika Bremers kyrkouppfattning”, Den kommunikativa kyrkan: Festskrift till Bernice Sundkvist på 60-årsdagen, ed. Birgitta Sarelin and Mikael Lindfelt (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2016), pp. 197–228. 51 Brodd, “‘Jag är mer katolsk än så’”, pp. 197–228. 52 Hummel and Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred, p. 16; Queen, “Ambiguous Pilgrims”, p. 217; Anna Bohlin, “Att kyssa olivträd: Fredrika Bremer som ambivalent pilgrim till det Heliga Landet”, Fiktion och verklighet: Mångvetenskapliga möten, ed. Anna Bohlin and Lena Gemzöe (Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2016), pp. 147–69; Robert Murray, Till Jorsala: Svenska färder under tusen år (Stockholm: Verbum, 1969); Dan Landmark, “Pilgrimsresan berättad: Om svenska resenärer i det Heliga Landet”, Svenska överord: En bok om gränslöshet och begränsningar, ed. Raoul Granqvist (Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion, 1999), pp. 167–80; Tracing the Jerusalem Code III, ed. Zorgati and Bohlin. 53 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 222–27. 54 “[E]n rörande symbolik”. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:II, p. 74. The English translation is not literal in this instance and has changed the phrase to “historically and symbolically”. Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. II, p. 57. 55 For an expanded discussion on Bremer’s critical method, see Bohlin, “Att kyssa olivträd”; Bohlin, “Geography of the Soul – History of Humankind: The Jerusalem Code in Bremer and Almqvist”, Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. III (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 56 Carl Ritter, Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen der allgemeine vergleichende Geographie als sichere Grundlage des Studiums und des Unterrichts in physikalischen und historischen Wissenschaften, Theil XV: Palästina und Syrien I (Berlin: Reimer, 1850), pp. 6–7; Carl Ritter, Läran om jorden. Betraktad ur vetenskaplig synpunkt: Föreläsningar, transl. Gustaf Thomé (Stockholm: F. Svanström, 1862), p. 15; Andreas Schach, Carl Ritter, passim; Hanno Beck, Carl Ritter: Genius der Geographie. Zu seinem Leben und Werk (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1979), passim. 57 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 273. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 217: “[D]en försynens plan, som tydligen röjer sig i Palestinas egendomliga läge […]”. 58 For a further discussion on Ritter and Bremer see Bohlin, “Geography of the Soul”. 59 For a further discussion of the notion of Bremer’s allegorical geography, see Bohlin, “Att kyssa olivträd”; Bohlin, “Geography of the Soul”. 60 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, pp. 15, 122, 187, 263; Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 275, 297. 61 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, pp. 274, 291. 62 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 296.
Jerusalem in Every Soul 203 63 For a discussion on the temporal implications of Orientalist thought, see for example Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Roberts, Intimate Outsiders; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 64 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 97. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 78: “Ty alla längta vi till ett ljusets, fridens och fullkomlighetens hem, och i hvarje menniskosjäl bor en röst, som tyst ropar: ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’” 65 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 279. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 222: “[E]tt menniskoslägtets andliga hemland […]”. 66 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. I:I (1860), p. 19: “Menniska, nation, mensklighet – eviga förbund! Den dag då jag fattade ert samband, den dagen först fattade jag mig sjelf och mitt eget lif rätt på allvar”. Translations of Parts I and III are mine since only Part II of the Swedish original text was included in Mary Howitt’s translation into English. 67 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983] (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 68 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. I:II (1860), p. 77: “Men då vi se ett folk söka frihet och rätt att bestämma sig sjelf på grund af de renaste och högsta menskliga interessen, då är det mig klart, att detta folk är moget att utträda ur sin omyndighets period och att blifva myndigt fritt […]”. For a discussion on Bremer’s concept on the nation in The Homes of the New World, see Bohlin, “Fredrika Bremer’s Concept of the Nation during her American Journey”. For an analysis of nationalism in Bremer’s novels, see Anna Bohlin, “Den svenska 1840-talsromanen som nationell kartografi”, Samlaren 137 (2016), pp. 58–86; Anna Bohlin, “Female Citizenship in Scandinavian Literature in the 1840s”, Rethinking Scandinavia – CSS Publications Web Quarterly 2, no. 1 (July 2018), www.css.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/ CSS/CSS_Quarterly/_2/RS_2_-_Anna_Bohlin_-_Female_Citizenship_in_ Scandinavian_Literature_in_the_1840s.html (accessed March 5, 2020); Anna Bohlin, “Magi och nation: Häxor i finländsk och svensk 1800-talslitteratur”, Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 93 (2018), pp. 47–78, https://doi.org/10.30667/hls.66680 (accessed May 14, 2020). 69 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. III:II (1862), p. 266: “Englands ordnande hand! […] för omyndiga folk: en god, klok, om än stundom alltför sträng, uppfostrande förmyndare”. 70 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. III:II, p. 266: “Jonien känner sig genom natur, nationalitet, historia, språk, framför allt genom kärlek fästad – icke vid England, utan vid Grekland […]”. “[D]en politiska enhet, hvartill […] vaknadt nationelt medvetande nu berättiga dem”. 71 For a thorough discussion on the historical sources of modern nationalism and the notion of the nation, see Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 72 Bohlin, “Geography of the Soul”; Bohlin, “God’s Kingdom on Earth: Liberal Theology and Christian Liberalism in Sweden”, Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. III (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 73 Hummel and Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred, p. 33. On the theme of the infertility of the Holy Land, see also Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. III, 2020. 74 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. III:II, p. 57: “Dock, under Turkiets välde blomstrar icke längre någon stat. […] [L]ifvet möglar […]”.
204 Anna Bohlin 75 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. III:I (1862), p. 131: “Allt offentligt lif upphörde, allt framåtgående tillintetgjordes, all rörelse afstadnade. Tystnaden och natten bredde sina dok öfver detta anlete, fordom så strålande”. 76 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 48. 77 Tinguely, L’écriture du Levant à la Renaissance, p. 162. 78 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 99. 79 Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, p. 12; Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’”, p. 68; Melman, Women’s Orients, pp. 30, 78. 80 Melman, Women’s Orients, pp. 137–62; Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’”, pp. 63–82; Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, p. 82; Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, pp. 12–13, 60. For a discussion on the response to Western female travellers by the later Ottoman feminist Fatma Aliye Hanim (1862–1936), see Rana v. Mende-Altaylı, “Die Reaktion der osmanischen Frauenrechtlerin Fatma Aliye auf das muslimische Frauenbild in Reiseberichten europäischer Frauen”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient: Reisebeschreibungen europäischer Frauen im Vergleich, ed. Mirosława Czarnecka, Christa Ebert, and Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 109–31. 81 Mary Wortley Montagu quoted in Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, p. 96. For a discussion on Lady Montagu, see also Agnieszka Brockmann, “Eine aufgeklärte Dame im Harem: Lady Montagu und Denise Zintgraffs Beschreibungen einer Reise in den Orient”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient, pp. 275–98. 82 Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre”, Signs 18, no. 3 (1993), p. 594. 83 Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk compares Bremer’s representation of Jerusalem to Selma Lagerlöf’s representation in the novel Jerusalem (1901–02) and draws the conclusion that Bremer has a far more dynamic idea of Jerusalem and breaks with stereotypical images of the Orient to a greater extent than does Lagerlöf 40 years later. Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk, “(Un)heimliche Exotismen: Schwedische Orientbilder in den Reisebüchern Fredrika Bremers und Selma Lagerlöfs”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient, pp. 99–108. On Fredrika Bremer’s “ethnographic authority” in her travelogue from Cuba see Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (Lanham, Maryland and Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 156–64. 84 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 204. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 163: “Hvad som felas är ljus, frihet, fostrande vård, ädlare mål, än jordiska njutningar och Mahomets paradis”. 85 Matus, “‘The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’”, p. 76. 86 Melman, Women’s Orients, p. 137. See also Deborah Anna Logan, “Harem Life, West and East”, Women’s Studies 26, no. 5 (1997), p. 462, https://doi. org/10.1080/00497878.1997.9979179 (accessed May 14, 2020). 87 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 266. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 212: “Derföre måste de christna folken gå framåt, uppåt, de icke christna nedåt. Ty familjelifvet är statslifvets moder”. 88 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 204. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 163: “Harems oordning afspeglas i staten”. 89 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. II, p. 324. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:II, p. 288: “Det behöfves icke mindre än en döpelse af hela turkiska nationen, en omvändelse till christendomen för att lyfta slöjan från den turkiska qvinnans själ och gifva henne förmåga att föda och uppfostra ett fritt folk”.
Jerusalem in Every Soul 205 90 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 278 (my italics). “Jordan och Kedron flöda allt ännu; olivträden, fikon- och granat-äppleträden hafva ej upphört att bära frukt; jorden, under lager af sten och grus, som ymnigt täcker den, visar sig, vid hvart odlingsförsök, rik på saft och drifkraft. Ändå ligger stentäckelset öfver jorden och menniskorna i landet hafva ingen trefnad eller frid”. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 221. 91 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 194. 92 Bhabha, “DissemiNation”, p. 297. 93 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:II, p. 142. 94 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. II, p. 41. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:II, p. 61: “Må de framför allt icke stadna vid den blott yttre eröfringen”. 95 Logan, Harriet Martineau, p. 9. 96 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 112. 97 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 205. 98 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 205. 99 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, pp. 205–06. 100 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 241. 101 Anthony D. Smith, “Biblical Beliefs in the Shaping of Modern Nations”, Nations and Nationalism 21, no. 3 (2015), p. 411. 102 Smith, “Biblical Beliefs”, p. 409. For earlier Scandinavian examples of the idea of a chosen people, most notably in seventeenth-century Sweden, see Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. II, 2020. Anthony D. Smith further develops his argument in Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), where he also stresses the fact that the notion of a sacred people, playing into more or less secular nationalism, is not restricted to the Judeo-Christian tradition. 103 Smith, “Biblical Beliefs”, p. 419. 104 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, pp. 203–04. 105 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 202. 106 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 289 (Bremer’s italics). Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 230: “[D]et är Ur-religionen, ur-medvetandet om Gud och menniskan, som var i hennes hjerta när Gud skapade menniskan till sin afbild […]”. 107 Bremer, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, p. 289. Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, p. 230: “[F]örmörkad af fallet […]”. 108 Bremer, Lifvet i gamla verlden, vol. II:I, pp. 227–37. 109 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. III, p. 60. 110 Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. II, p. 203.
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206 Anna Bohlin Bhabha, Homi K., “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–322. Bohlin, Anna, “Att kyssa olivträd: Fredrika Bremer som ambivalent pilgrim till det Heliga Landet”, Fiktion och verklighet: Mångvetenskapliga möten, ed. Anna Bohlin and Lena Gemzöe (Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2016), pp. 147–69. Bohlin, Anna, “Den svenska 1840-talsromanen som nationell kartografi”, Samlaren 137 (2016), pp. 58–86. Bohlin, Anna, “Female Citizenship in Scandinavian Literature in the 1840s”, Rethinking Scandinavia – CSS Publications Web Quarterly 2, no. 1 (July 2018), www.css.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/CSS/CSS_Quarterly/_2/RS_2_-_ Anna_Bohlin_-_Female_Citizenship_in_Scandinavian_Literature_in_ the_1840s.html (accessed March 5, 2020). Bohlin, Anna, “Fredrika Bremer’s Concept of the Nation during her American Journey”, Ideas in History 7, nos. 1–2 (2013), pp. 43–70. Bohlin, Anna, “Geography of the Soul – History of Humankind: The Jerusalem code in Bremer and Almqvist”, Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. III, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Bohlin, Anna, “God’s Kingdom on Earth: Liberal Theology and Christian Liberalism in Sweden”, Tracing the Jerusalem Code, vol. III (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Bohlin, Anna, “Magi och nation: Häxor i finländsk och svensk 1800-talslitteratur”, Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 93 (2018), pp. 47–78, https:// doi.org/10.30667/hls.66680 (accessed May 14, 2020). Bohlin, Torsten, “Fredrika Bremer och kyrkoläran”, Årsbok för Kristen Humanism (1966), pp. 70–85. Bowman, Glenn, “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities”, Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michal J. Sallnow (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 98–121. Bremer, Fredrika, England om hösten år 1851, ed. Klara Johanson (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1922). Bremer, Fredrika, Hemmen i den Nya Verlden, vol. I (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1853). Bremer, Fredrika, Lifvet i gamla verlden: Dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland, vols. I–III (Stockholm: Adolf Bonnier, 1860–62). Bremer, Fredrika, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, vol. I, transl. Mary Howitt (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1853). Bremer, Fredrika, Travels in the Holy Land, vol. I, transl. Mary Howitt (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). Brockmann, Agnieszka, “Eine aufgeklärte Dame im Harem: Lady Montagu und Denise Zintgraffs Beschreibungen einer Reise in den Orient”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient: Reisebeschreibungen europäischer Frauen im Vergleich, ed. Mirosława Czarnecka, Christa Ebert, and Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 275–98. Brodd, Sven-Erik, “‘Jag är mer katolsk än så’: Ett bidrag till frågan om Fredrika Bremers kyrkouppfattning”, Den kommunikativa kyrkan: Festskrift till Bernice
Jerusalem in Every Soul 207 Sundkvist på 60-årsdagen, ed. Birgitta Sarelin and Mikael Lindfelt (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2016), pp. 197–228. Burman, Carina, Bremer: En biografi (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2001). Burman, Carina, Mamsellen och förläggarna: Fredrika Bremers förlagskontakter 1828–1865 (Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi Uppsala universitet, 1995). Fredrika Bremer: Brev. Ny följd, vol. I, ed. Carina Burman (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 1996). Fredrika Bremers brev, vol. I, ed. Klara Johanson and Ellen Kleman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1915). Gleadle, Kathryn, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movements, 1831–51 (Basingstoke and London: St. Martin Press/New York: Macmillan Press, 1995). Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Harper, Lila Marz, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (London: Associated University Presses, 2001). Heacock, Roger, “International Politics and Sectarian Policy in the Late Ottoman Period”, Patterns of the Past, Prospects for the Future: The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas Hummel, Kevork Hintlian, and Ulf Carnesund (London: Melisende Fox Communications and Publications, 1999), pp. 20–31. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philisophie, vol. IV: I–K, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe & Co Verlag, 1976). Hummel, Ruth and Thomas Hummel, Patterns of the Sacred: English Protestant and Russian Orthodox Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995). Hunter, Shelaugh, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). Landmark, Dan, “Pilgrimsresan berättad: Om svenska resenärer i det Heliga Landet”, Svenska överord: En bok om gränslöshet och begränsningar, ed. Raoul Granqvist (Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion, 1999), pp. 167–80. Leerssen, Joep, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Lock, Charles, “Bowing Down to Wood and Stone: One Way to Be a Pilgrim”, Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage, ed. Simon Coleman and John Elsner (New York: Bergham Books, 2003), pp. 110–32. Logan, Deborah Anna, “Harem Life, West and East”, Women’s Studies 26, no. 5 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1997.9979179 (accessed May 14, 2020). Logan, Deborah Anna, Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010). Martineau, Harriet, Eastern Life: Present and Past, vols. II–III (London: Edward Moxon, 1848). Martineau, Harriet, How to Observe: Morals and Manners (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1838). Matus, Jill, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’: Martineau and Nightingale Visit the Harem”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21, no. 1 (1999), pp. 63–87.
208 Anna Bohlin Melman, Billie, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718– 1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Mende-Altaylı, Rana v., “Die Reaktion der osmanischen Frauenrechtlerin Fatma Aliye auf das muslimische Frauenbild in Reiseberichten europäischer Frauen”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient: Reisebeschreibungen europäischer Frauen im Vergleich, ed. Mirosława Czarnecka, Christa Ebert, and Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 109–31. Murray, Robert, Till Jorsala: Svenska färder under tusen år (Stockholm: Verbum, 1969). Peterson, Linda H., Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Poovey, Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Queen II, Edward L., “Ambiguous Pilgrims: American Protestant Travelers to Ottoman Palestine, 1867–1914”, Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1996), pp. 209–28. Ritter, Carl, Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen der allgemeine vergleichende Geographie als sichere Grundlage des Studiums und des Unterrichts in physikalischen und historischen Wissenschaften, Theil XV: Palästina und Syrien I (Berlin: Reimer, 1850). Ritter, Carl, Läran om jorden. Betraktad ur vetenskaplig synpunkt: Föreläsningar, transl. Gustaf Thomé (Stockholm: F. Svanström, 1862). Roberts, Caroline, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Roberts, Mary, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). Rodenas, Adriana Méndez, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (Lanham, Maryland and Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014). Ryall, Anka, Odyssevs i skjørt: Kvinners erobring av reiselitteraturen (Oslo: Pax Forlag AS, 2004). Schach, Andreas, Carl Ritter (1779–1859): Naturphilosophie und Geographie: Erkenntnistheoretische Überlegungen, Reform der Geographie und mögliche heutige Implikationen (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1995). Smith, Anthony D., “Biblical Beliefs in the Shaping of Modern Nations”, Nations and Nationalism 21, no. 3 (2015), pp. 403–22. Smith, Anthony D., Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Szewczyk, Grażyna Barbara, “(Un)heimliche Exotismen: Schwedische Orientbilder in den Reisebüchern Fredrika Bremers und Selma Lagerlöfs”, Der weibliche Blich auf den Orient: Reisebeschreibungen europäischer Frauen im Vergleich, ed. Mirosława Czarnecka, Christa Ebert, and Grażyna Barbara Szewczyk (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 99–108. Tinguely, Frédéric, L’écriture du Levant à la Renaissance: Enquête sur les voyageurs français dans l’empire du Soliman le Magnifique (Genève: Droz, 2000).
Jerusalem in Every Soul 209 Tracing the Jerusalem Code I. The Holy City: Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (1100–1536), ed. Kristin B. Aavitsland and Line M. Bonde (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Tracing the Jerusalem Code II. The Chosen People: Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750), ed. Eivor A. Oftestad and Joar Haga (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–1920), ed. Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Yeğenoğlu, Meyda, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Zonana, Joyce, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre”, Signs 18, no. 3 (1993), pp. 592–617.
8 Temporalities of the Anti-Modern Angel Ganivet’s NeoRomantic Mapping of Western Civilisation Peter Stadius In nineteenth-century travel literature, temporality is not only about chronology and days following each other; the movement in space is itself a movement in time. Walter Benjamin describes the Western city, using Paris as the grand example, as a palimpsest where different times have produced visible layers of human activity.1 In a similar fashion, travelogues may offer an entrance into temporal structures: the physical presence of time in urban and rural landscapes is exposed for the traveller/author and brings a temporal dimension to the observation and experience of space. Medieval cathedrals, modern town plans, and Haussmannian boulevards all communicate competing temporal dimensions. This chapter investigates the works of the Spanish author and diplomat Angel Ganivet (1865–98) with a special focus on his literary production connected to both spatial and temporal dimensions of European and Western modernity. Ganivet’s travel letters, Cartas finlandesas (Finnish letters), published between 1896 and 1898, represent a mapping of Nordic/ Scandinavian Europe from a Spanish and southern European point of view. The question of modernity arises in his comparative endeavours, through which he establishes a dichotomy between North and South that becomes a key to much of Ganivet’s writings about the Spanish nation and on modernity. This spatial dichotomy also addresses questions of temporality, mainly in the form of a critique of a linear time conceptualisation focused on modernity and progress, related to what François Hartog calls a modern time regime.2 In addition to Cartas finlandesas, some other key texts will be analysed, mainly Granada la bella (Granada the Beautiful, 1896) and Idearium español (Spain as an Idea, 1897). In his work Ganivet developed a programmatic anti-modern stand, often referring to the superiority of past traditions,3 among which he would count two of his passions, Greek antiquity and especially Seneca, and his home town Granada. These and other motifs are recurring in
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 211 Ganivet’s critique of modern Western rationality and progress and are developed into what José Antonio González Alcantud has called Ganivet’s two main themes: nationalism and the city.4 Notably, his nationalism is situated in the context of the fin-de-siècle crisis in Spain and, more generally, the anti-positivist movements in Europe.5 His systematic revocation of the historic tradition in Spanish society and its past greatness is essentially anti-modern and neo-Romantic. As Javier Herrero has pointed out, Ganivet was concerned about the Spanish national spirit, which he saw as an untouched virgin under attack from modern European ideals, such as capitalism, liberalism, the urban bourgeoisie, and industrial progress.6 This connects to Ganivet’s second theme, the city, which he processes through the lens of traditional local Granada architecture as an antithesis to modern and rational town planning as well as the constant influx of new technology into modern industrial cities. Both of these themes are part of a chronopolitical critique of a dominant modern world view and social order. As Johannes Fabian has shown, geographical power relations are constructed through a chronopolitical discourse that posits different nations and regions as belonging to different times. Discourses of backwardness vs progress become part of geopolitical othering and power asymmetries.7 This spatial order of progress and backwardness is also reflected in divisions within Europe: the denial of coevalness in the Fabian sense is also an intra-European affair. Ganivet’s critique can be understood using the scholarly theories developed around the World Social Forum during the last decades, especially by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who argues that a Northern- and Western-led progressive world order produces imagological hierarchies.8 When discussing alternative knowledge systems, de Sousa Santos does not refer to a spatially fixed South but, rather, uses “South” as a label for any alternative to what he sees as a dominating “Northern” epistemology and world view. As Roberto H. Dainotto has pointed out, the European legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism produced an internal North/South division, where the latter was subordinated into semi-otherness, denied as backward and less apt for progress.9 He refers to a “rhetorical unconscious” as a long-term collective Western/ European tradition of hierarchical divisions of European space.10 Ganivet’s work questions the chronopolitical supremacy of a Western universalistic claim for progress. While his often-satirical and seemingly random observations challenge a modern conceptualisation of time, they also represent a search for alternative ways of envisioning a good life and future social order for Spain. I will look particularly at his method of comparison between different nations, their peoples, and their artistic expressions: How did Ganivet refer to temporal layers when describing Northern and Southern spaces, and what meanings did he assign to these
212 Peter Stadius layers? Drawing on de Sousa Santos’ and Dainotto’s work, I suggest a partial reinterpretation of Ganivet’s work, examining where his texts are usefully interpreted in light of recent theories of epistemologies of the South.
Angel Ganivet, His Work and His Time Angel Ganivet is generally referred to as a precursor to the Spanish Generation of ’98, a literary and intellectual generation concerned with domestic social and political questions who participated in a Spanish national self-conceptualisation. The year 1898 refers to the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the last overseas colonial remains of the old empire, and the end of the Spanish-American War. What made Ganivet a precursor to this generation was his sudden death by suicide in 1898, at the age of 33 when he drowned in the Dvina River in Riga, placing him early in the chronology of this generation. Also, his posthumous recognition as an influencer, especially in the work of Miguel de Unamuno, solidified his place in the Spanish fin-de-siècle literary canon. There has been some debate among Ganivet scholars whether to call him a precursor11 or a full member of the Generation of ’98, some opting for the latter.12 The Generation of ’98 in Spanish intellectual history cannot be regarded as a coherent group but, rather, as a conceptual grouping of important and intellectuals who were active during the same period. Ganivet’s personal contacts and literary production clearly place him within this sphere, even if he is not as well known to wider audiences as Unamuno, historian Rafael Altamira, and authors Pío Baroja and Ramiro de Maeztu were. Ganivet served as a diplomat from 1892 to his death in 1898 and was stationed in Antwerp, Helsinki, and finally Riga, and his literary production is almost exclusively written during this period of six years. The first two service destinations, Antwerp and Helsinki, had a visible impact on his literary work. Ganivet published two novels during this time. Los trabajos del infatigable creador Pío Cid (1898) was a strongly autobiographical novel depicting intellectual life in Madrid through his alter ego, Pío Cid – an clear reference to the medieval hero El Cid and the twelfthcentury epic Cantar de Mio Cid.13 The second novel, La conquista del reino de Maya (1897), was a satirical depiction of a colonising adventure in Eastern Africa, a product of Ganivet’s recent interest in King Leopold’s Belgian Kongo while stationed in Antwerp. The novel bears similarity to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, as Ganivet repeatedly has the main character compare what he finds in Central Africa with conditions in Spain and Europe at large. Montesquieu’s work had already inspired Ganivet’s compatriot José Cadalso to write his Cartas marruecas, published
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 213 posthumously in 1789. This work seems to have been an intertextual reference for Ganivet, who would name his depictions from Finland Cartas finlandesas. In these Finnish letters, published in the local newspaper El defensor de Granada, Ganivet developed his comparatist method. During his stay in Finland, Ganivet also published nine essays on Norwegian authors, later collected and published under the title Hombres del norte (Men from the North). While in Finland, Ganivet published his main nationalist philosophical pamphlet, Idearium español (1896). When studying Ganivet’s thinking, it becomes clear that this intellectual testament on the present problems and future prospects of the Spanish nation is his single most important work, and it has also been considered as his most influential. It has been called a “Fin de siècle imperial melancholia”, referring to the national historical nostalgia Ganivet developed as an anti-modernist position in face of the contemporary society he lived in.14 Ganivet’s productive Helsinki years, apparently born out of a personal preference for solitary work, produced yet another text, Granada la bella, a pamphlet of which the first edition was printed in Helsinki. This essay is an anti-modernist and traditionalist defence of Ganivet’s home town Granada. Ganivet’s long stays abroad brought a strong element of concern for and sensitivity in analysing spatial relations. In particular, his analysis of different ethno-cultural elements of the Western world had a focus on the contrasts between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon worlds. In Ganivet’s mind the former represented a world of ideals and the latter a pragmatically oriented dystopian misunderstanding of human needs. Ganivet remained unknown to the greater public during his lifetime, though he enjoyed some recognition as a public figure among his peers in Granada.15 His stay in Madrid during the summer of 1891 coincided with Miguel de Unamuno’s when they were competing for a university chair in classical Greek, and some years later they would engage in a correspondence over literary and national themes. This correspondence was published posthumously under the title El porvenir de España (1903), “The future of Spain”, and Ganivet’s contact with and possible influence on Unamuno was the starting point for his ascendance into national importance shortly after his early death. In 1903 a memorial act was celebrated as an homage to Ganivet at the literary society Ateneo in Madrid, where Ganivet himself had been an active participant. Leading intellectuals of the Generation of ’98, Maeztu and José Martínez Ruiz (later known by his nom de plume Azorín) all spoke on the legacy of Ganivet’s work and thus laid the foundations for his posthumous literary fame. A text in memory of Ganivet written by Unamuno was read by the young philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.16 Without them it is quite likely that the work of Ganivet never would have been included in the canon of the Generation of ’98.17
214 Peter Stadius During the 1920s Ganivet’s position as one of his home town Granada’s great intellectuals was confirmed by a group of his old friends. A monument in his honour was erected in the vicinity of the Alhambra, and in 1925 his remains were transferred from Riga to Granada, where his second funeral turned into a public celebration. His local admirers upheld his memory, and after the Civil War ended Ganivet was often seen as one of the two tragically deceased local literary heroes, the other being poet Federico García Lorca. The Granada-based historian and ethnologist José Antonio González Alcaud has rightfully pointed to the distinctive functions of the two in relation to their home city. While García Lorca is a universally appealing figure not only for Granada but for all of Spain, Ganivet is the local hero, virtually unknown to the rest of the world.18 This is his legacy, but Ganivet’s localism also contains elements that recall de Sousa Santos’s notion of an “artisanal path”.19 This refers to the recognition of local customs as resources of empowerment rather than signs of backwardness. Reading Ganivet in this way gives new nuances to his documented anti-modern protest. The point is not to make claims aimed at uplifting Ganivet towards the heights of Garcia Lorca’s public stature worldwide but to propose a slightly new way of reading his anti-modern works.
Conflicting Time Conceptualisations The modernisation or secularisation of Western time, or at least of what we can refer to as a Western time conceptualisation, is a dominating feature of the nineteenth century. The process of national standardisation of local village and town time was a consequence of new modes of communication, like the railroad and the telegraph. Industrialisation was another important factor. As Peter Osborne has noted, the modern conceptualisation of time was linked to the introduction of labour time disciplining of factory work, and it signified a shift from a rural, cyclical and pre-modern temporality to a stricter and more controlled modernity.20 The factory became the place for the modern discipline of everyday life.21 As Adam Barrows argues, all this bears evidence of the clear political dimensions of modern time, creating a normative time conceptualisation of “imperial time control”, forged to support global homogenisation as well as capitalist and colonial expansion. He argues that “representations of the Greenwich Observatory, Greenwich Mean Time, and temporal standardization more generally are tightly bound up in modernist texts with representations of an authoritarian management of bodies, communities, and nations”.22 Modern time is measurable and linear and, thus, perceived as more valuable, instrumental, and controlled, in contrast to a cyclic time conceptualisation deemed characteristic for the premodern and medieval Christian culture of temporality. The new ideas about
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 215 time tied the modern human being to a new form of living. The massive experience of modernisation deriving from the industrial revolution created new categories of place, such as the train station and the factory, that embodied modernity, progress, and the future.23 Most of the spaces and practices mentioned have in common that they reduce distances and, thus, also save time: stepping onto a train became an act of stepping into the future. The spaces of modernity thus also were spaces of temporality. Ganivet constantly plays with and challenges the technological standardisation of time as part of his critical stance towards the physical signs of modernity. The train is one central symbol of modern technology, which comes into focus in Ganivet’s comparison between North and South in the sixth letter of Cartas finlandesas: In Spain we have trains, but not only do we keep them in a bad state, but actually in some cases our ill will has led to the defeat of the trains by the diligence [of horses]. In our province we find this rare phenomenon. Here [in Finland] the railroads are owned by the Finnish state, and despite the scarce population they make considerable money. In terms of service they compete with the German [trains], the most perfect in Europe.24 The example of the horse-driven diligence in Ganivet’s home province Andalucia is a deliberate ironic play, with the exotic gaze projected on this Southern region of Europe. Unlike many other Spanish travel writers at the time, Ganivet did not judge the uneven comparison of trains to Spain’s disadvantage. Instead, he referred to the dangers to human vitality and creative strength that new technology brought with it. In the same letter with the heading, “Where the Finns’ love for progress is discovered and the reasons for that affection explained”, Ganivet tells the story of the Cordoban bullfighter Lagartijo, popular at the time in Spain. According to an anecdote the bullfighter had been asked about what the greatest danger of his profession was, and Lagartijo had stoically answered: “the train”. By being subjugated to train rides, the vitality of this “noble bullfighter” was inactivated by the mechanically produced power, Ganivet reasoned. The bullfighter, here apparently a representative of an entire culture, became an endangered species in the new and changed habitat, which was that of the modern Western world, with trains, factories, timetables, and telegraphs. The single name form Lagartijo was for Ganivet a sign of a connection to Greek antiquity, with its prominent beacons with single names such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, not to mention Lagartijo’s Cordoban compatriot Seneca. Ganivet saw the great Greek philosophers and the contemporary bullfighter as free human beings, the latter expressing “himself in his element when fighting, when his activity
216 Peter Stadius is free and intelligent in front of the bull”, but when “closed into a [train] wagon”, he becomes passive and weak.25 Ganivet’s romantic view of Lagartijo assumes an anti-modern time conceptualisation, and it was inspired both by the classical Greek tradition, springing from Ganivet’s idolising of Seneca, and by an identification with a specific Pan-Latin identity. A Pan-Latinist movement had developed during the second half of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, promoting the idea that all countries and regions connected to a Latin linguistic and cultural tradition would join common cause in a contestation of what was seen as a northern German, Anglo-Saxon and to a certain extent Scandinavian hegemony. The omnipresent clash between old and new in fin-de-siècle, anti-modernist neo-Romanticism was, by Ganivet, conceptualised in spatial terms. Ganivet placed modernity outside the realm of Spanish tradition and transferred the domestic and national debates and struggles to a larger global-civilisational space, interpreting this debate as a contest between Spain and other European nations.26 Hence, Ganivet sketched a conflict between a perceived PanLatininst tradition and an Anglo-Saxon modernity, South against North. This clash also implied considerable dimensions of chronopolitics. In Cartas finlandesas, Ganivet spent much ink on proving the misconception of progress, which he found embedded in a false sense of material progress. For him the modern utopia, which he identified as the North, had a strong dystopian element. Instead of a linear time conceptualisation, a legacy of Enlightenment, he advocated for a cyclical time conception, neo-Romantic in its essence, challenging the temporal concept of “backward”. In his critique of Western science, and specifically anthropology, Johannes Fabian refers to the act of classifying societies based on their level of development and progress. He developed a model with three general forms of times. Besides “physical time” and “mundane time”, he coins the notion of “typological time”, which refers to a scale of comparison between societies and cultures, with Western society as the constant standard for progress.27 When using the Fabian toolbox for the analysis of an intra-European discourse of a division between North and South, the idea of a specific Latin genius and cultural essence comes into focus, which was also a central context in the fin-de-siècle debates on the Spanish crisis. The loss against USA, a former colony, in the SpanishAmerican War between 1895 and 1898, became a trauma, much like the French defeat against Prussia in 1871 and the military reverses of Italy in Africa during the late nineteenth century. For some, the answer was to be found in modernisation, the emulation of the progressive northern countries, while others sought to find a regenerative force in a Pan-Latin cultural heritage.
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 217
Pan-Latin Chronopolitics Lily Litvak has shown how a discourse on a specific civilisational and cultural Pan-Latin essence developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century as a counter-narrative to the perceived Anglo-Saxon supremacy.28 Societies and journals appeared to spread this message in various parts on what was defined as the “Latin world”, ranging from Romania to Quebec and from France to Chile. Latin civilisation, as defined by the Pan-Latinists, generally comprises values such as chivalry, idealism, and the heritage of classical antiquity, suggesting a cultural capital superior to that of northern nations. In one passage of Cartas finlandesas, Ganivet rejected the idea of Pan-Latinism, as he was critical of any pan-national movement, shying away from large territorial political projects.29 Ganivet’s almost anarchist hostility towards superstructure organisations, be it church or state, is well documented.30 The pan-movements were essentially modern movements of the nineteenth century and, consequently, did not appeal to Ganivet. After all, France, the home of positivism, was by many in other Latin nations considered the centre of this Latin civilisation and a beacon of a Latin interpretation of modernity. However, much in Ganivet’s argumentation bears a considerable resemblance to the central Pan-Latinist ideas, defending Latin culture as essentially superior. According to José Ortega y Gasset, Ganivet had, together with some of his closest friends, planned to write a book titled ¿En qué consiste la inferioridad de los anglosajones? (What is the essence of the Anglo-Saxon inferiority?).31 The title was a direct paraphrase of the French reformist pedagogue Edmond Demolins’ work À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? (What is the essence of the Anglo-Saxon superiority?) that had appeared in 1897, and upset many supporting the Pan-Latinist cause. The domestic debate pondering a perceived state of Spanish political decadence was tied to an insecurity about the capacity of all Latin nations. During the 1890s the re-generation advocates like Joaquín Costa had systematically urged for “Northern” modernisation measures, which included modernising measures for industries, institutions, and transportation infrastructure as well as the mechanisation of agriculture. However, Ganivet chose to defend what he saw as Spanish values against these “Europeanisation” ideas.32 Those were more or less identical to what ardent Pan-Latinists defined as core Latin values. This leads us back to Ganivet’s reference to the horse and diligence mentioned earlier. The horse was a strong metaphor both for the discourse of Latin essence and for a pre-modern world. The etymological connection between horse, knight, and chivalry – caballo, caballero, and caballerocidad in Spanish – was used as a strong symbol for the noble
218 Peter Stadius character that the Latin culture was understood to stand for and, thus, also a symbol of lost virtues in the new, northern way of life. The concern for the future of Latin civilisation was simultaneously articulated in Latin America. The movement named “Arielismo” especially popularised Latin values. Named after the novel Ariel, published by the Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó in 1900, this movement advocated a unique Latin spirituality and artistic imagination, confronting an Anglo-Saxon world order based on power and earthly wealth. The novel is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Prospero, the experienced teacher, is guiding his young disciples by referring to Ariel and Caliban, the forces of good and evil in Rodó’s interpretation. The former was for Rodó the symbol of positive idealism, while Caliban, the half man and half monster, represented the negative tendencies in human nature. Rodó addressed his work to the Latin American youth, offering the classical Western tradition as a remedy for the dangers brought upon Latin society by the monotonous production work in modern factories.33 Rodó’s Ariel propagated a rejection of what was referred to as nordomanía, the attraction of North America and Yankee materialism. Like Ganivet, Rodó stressed the importance of regional identity and how it should be rooted deeply into every country’s own traditions. Besides Ariel, the other main influence to Pan-Latinism and antianglosaxon sentiments around 1900 was Máximo Soto Hall’s novel El problema (1899), a pastiche of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807). The novel bears a similar dystopian warning as Rodó’s concerning the future of Latin culture in America, though in this case it is directed particularly at Central America. The young engaged couple Julio and Emma, the former a Latino and the latter half Latina and half AngloSaxon, are denied happiness by their parent’s generation. Emma’s future is arranged as the wife of an older and wealthy Yankee businessman. The final scene is metaphorical as regards the potentially troublesome future for the Latin youth: The love-torn Julio, riding his horse, sees the train taking his Emma from him, as she departs for her honeymoon. Raging in despair and pride, Julio gallops, heading straight for the front of the train, and “in the puffs of steam and metallic sound of the wheels, bones could be heard crushing and the primal outburst of a horse, while the train smashed the last representative of chivalry and glorious race”.34 The death of Julio is to be interpreted as the decline of the Latin culture and traditions, a consequence of the impotence of earlier generations to defend national interests under the pressure of northern expansion. The horse against the train: this was the metaphor Soto Hall offered as a programme for the regeneration of the civilisation. Also Ganivet’s reference to the horse and diligence was a defence of the South, not necessarily as an embodiment of a pure Latin civilisation, but rather as a
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 219 Southern alternative to the positivist gospel of progress. Ganivet found the fundaments of his civilisation partly in different waters than his Latin American contemporaries but arrived at similar conclusions. His version of Ariel and Caliban was Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. In Idearium español he developed a very similar dichotomy to that of the nordomanía critique provided by the Latin American so-called arielists. He developed the idea that “every people have their own real and imagined ideal type, which embodies its own qualities”. Ulysses was for Ganivet the Greek type, and, “our Ulysses is don Quixote”, Ganivet proclaimed, while, “if we search for a modern Ulysses outside Spain, we will not find anybody superior to the Anglo-Saxon Ulysses, Robinson Crusoe”.35 According to Ganivet, this Northern and Anglo-Saxon type represented by Robinson Crusoe was only suited for the struggle against nature or against challenges posed by the physical environment. Crusoe’s capacity for tackling spiritual questions and fostering grand ideas was, according to Ganivet, limited and definitely inferior to that of the Quixote type, the idealist knight fighting for ideas on his horse Rosinante. Ganivet states that “Sancho Panza, after having learned to read and write, could become a Robinson”, and inversely that Crusoe, in an event of hardship, would lose his air of supremacy and conform to the role of Quixote’s servant, the simple donkey-riding realist, incapable of forming idealist abstractions.36 The metaphor of the horse and chivalry is implicitly present here as well; don Quixote would be unthinkable without his horse Rosinante, while Crusoe sees the horizon standing barefoot on the ground. The Ganivetian chronopolitics also implied the longing for a revival of a cyclical time conceptualisation, fitting into a national narrative of historical destiny and change. In this interpretation, the decline Spain experienced was not a result of defects connected to any religious, cultural, or social factors but should be interpreted as Spain representing a temporal avant-garde: Spain was the first European nation to reach grandeur through conquest and political expansion, and it has also been the first to decline and end her material evolution […]. Because we, even if inferior in political influence, are superior and more advanced in the stage of our natural evolution.37 Ganivet’s quite original interpretation contains a paradoxical affirmation of a linear dimension of cyclical time. He attempted to show that Spain, by being in decline, was actually ahead of other developed nations. By refusing modernity, the Ganivetian chronopolitical position was that of national introspection with a strong element of historical revivalism as an alternative path. Ganivet played with the vocabulary of scientific progress,
220 Peter Stadius alluding to the “natural evolution” of the Spanish nation, more advanced in its cyclical stage. He deliberately sought the original Spanishness beyond the powerful institutions of the Catholic Church and the Spanish monarchy (even if he to a certain extent contradicted himself).38 This fits within the context of fin-de-siècle national Romantic thought; the critical reaction to industrialisation and the fear of cultural and civilisational decline and dystopian development at large was common. In contrast, Ganivet’s anti-modern vision pointed to a stage beyond the discourse and politics of progress and linear reason, towards a Spanish regeneration fostered by a purifying return to a pre-modern society.39
On the Relativity of Progress In his sixth letter, “Where the Finns’ love for progress is discovered and the reason for this affection is explained”, Ganivet seems to mock this modern, Northern society. He described the rustic satisfaction and enthusiasm with which technology was made use of to make the Finns’ life easier and more practical. “The telephone here is like any other household gadget”, he wrote, and pointed to how all new inventions were accepted and incorporated into use rapidly by all classes.40 Besides the train and the telephone (together with the telegraph), Ganivet’s anti-modern criticism was directed at the bicycle. In Helsinki he saw a “complete delirium for bicycles, and the women have accepted them as an instrument of emancipation”.41 He depicted a humorous scene of women bicycling on the streets of Helsinki and described how even bicycles were provided with licence plates. The use of humour in order to diminish objects cherished by modern progressives here serves to question the entire northern concept of progress. The idea of bicycles as instruments and symbols for female emancipation was common in northern Europe, and women were often photographed in studios with bicycles.42 Ganivet made the bicycles part of his critique of false progress and liberation, which he saw as too onesided in its fascination for technological inventions: “What now needs an answer is principally, what do they understand as progress here? […] The general idea today about progress is unfortunately too material. Almost no significance is given to family life in each nation, relationships of love, and friendship”.43 Ganivet repeated his idea about a false understanding of modern progress, seeing the Finns’ enthusiasm for technological inventions as laziness and striving for an easy and practical life, as well as the incapacity to sacrifice oneself for anything higher: The unconscious mind sees the feverish activity of a man spending his life on trains, giving orders via telegraph and telephone, and running around like greased lightning on a bicycle, as the sign of an
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 221 extraordinary power of the mind, while, in fact, all this has to be seen as an organic imbalance.44 The simple northern (mis-)understanding of progress was, in Ganivet’s mind, focused on practical endeavours, and in order to back his claims, he turned to the cultural capital offered by Greek antiquity: The streets did not know pavement in Athens, and there you could see many more splendorous people walking the streets than you can today. Maybe, if they would have dedicated themselves to trimming gardens and paving streets, they would have disappeared without a trace.45 Ganivet’s attention is not just turned towards the legacy of Greek antiquity but also towards the modern city and the hegemonic position of the Haussmannian doctrine of urban planning. In his essay Granada la bella, Ganivet developed this theme further, making it a vital part of his anti-modern, Latin, Mediterranean, and Hispanic counter-narrative. Granada, the old Moorish stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula and the home of the Alhambra, was also changing, and Ganivet saw how his fellow townsmen were given new professional tasks, resulting not only in an economic but also a psychological change. Ganivet lamented that people who had dealt with horses and carriages were now turned into train operators, and young shepherds were train ticket collectors: “They were brains, and now they are mere hands”.46 Further, “the diabolical project of destroying cities” made Ganivet question the necessity for implementing the same modern rules everywhere.47 He argued that cities in the North needed light and sun, and that therefore wide streets were appropriate. In contrast, the Southern cities were in need of shade and cool, hence they had narrow streets and small windows. Like different plants need different climates to survive, Ganivet questioned the sensibility in making Granada “an essentially Meridional city”, subject to the fashions of modern, and in his mind Northern, city planning. For him, Granada was the way it was, with medieval irregular streets, because this was the most appropriate character for it, and it should not submit “to the constant aspirations of having straight and wide streets, only because ‘the others’ have them”.48
On Coevalness: Was Ganivet a Precursor of Southern Epistemologies? As has been demonstrated in this chapter, a central theme in Ganivet’s literary production was his protest against modernity and modern times. He was cautious about the foreign essence he saw hidden in modernity and
222 Peter Stadius advocated for national authenticity as a way of stepping onto an alternative path of national development. National tradition, expressed both as folk culture and centuries-old development of the civilisation, constituted an imperative of independence and autonomy in the Ganivetian conception of time and space. As Jésus Torrecilla has noted, “Ganivet does not conceive of the clash of new and old within the national frame and his own society where he lives, but rather, and mostly, as a battle of Spain with other European countries”.49 Ganivet has been considered a precursor of the Generation of ’98 in Spain, a notion that is part of the modernist narrative of Spanish intellectual history. His anti-modernism has mostly been seen in a critical light, and as a consequence of him not “following his time”, has made him a sad and quixotic figure. The conservative element in Ganivet’s reasoning contains various aspects, ranging from hostility to female emancipation to the urge for artisanal revival in town planning. However, in terms of chronopolitics his ideas have certain elements of current interest, including both the intra-European divisions of mental mapping and a critique of modernity. When de Sousa Santos, coining the notion of “epistemologies of the South”, discusses “the historical problems of internal colonialisms, between North Europe and South Europe”, and their return in recent policies of the European Union, he urges for an awareness among academics and policy makers about the “deep histories of such debates”, a history to which Ganivet belongs.50 Ganivet’s case is special among the Generation of ’98, since he exclusively lived abroad while writing most of his works, until his premature death. This personal circumstance may constitute an explanatory factor for understanding the spatial dimensions of Ganivet’s anti-modernism and the function of Spain and his hometown Granada in his work. Ganivet’s anti-modernism implies a refusal to be subordinated as backward, which is partly just a sign of standard chauvinism of the time but also an attempt to interpret this lack of coevalness in his and his nation’s favour. In this endeavour Ganivet’s hometown, Granada, was used as the symbol of a time-space that should remind the modern human of what might be lost by modernity. As a neo-Romantic, or national Romantic, Ganivet looked back in time, seeking for lost virtues of his own nation. To him, the present seemed depressing, and hence his idea of the future implied a programmatic promotion of a cyclical time conceptualisation, which included an eschatological vision of current western and northern progress and modernity. Quixote would in his mind outlive Crusoe, the latter being only a practical doer creating physical comfort without spiritual substance. This dormant vitalism was, in the end, a product of his national agenda and can be put in context with several similar Pan-Latin thinkers of that time. While ironically writing about the intra-European othering, Ganivet produced a relativist view on Western progress. His long stays abroad form a backdrop for his systematic protest against the
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 223 chronopolitical intra-European asymmetries between North and South, a division he made even more systematic by excluding modernity from his interpretation of Spanishness.
Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, transl. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 105. 3 José Antonio González Alcantud, “Nudo biográfico y escritura compulsiva: Para una lectura antropológica de Ángel Ganivet”, Revista de Antropología Social 7, no. 7 (1998), p. 95; Antonio Robles Egea, “El neoidealismo y la rebelión de Ángel Ganivet contra el positivismo: Sobre Alfred Fouillée y la teoría de las ideas”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1997), p. 201. 4 González Alcantud, “Nudo biográfico y escritura compulsiva”, pp. 101–02. 5 Robles Egea, “El neoidealismo y la rebellion de Ángel Ganivet contra el positivismo”, pp. 201–21. 6 Javier Herrero, “Spain as a Virgin: Radical Traditionalism in Ángel Ganivet”, Homenaje a Juan López-Morillas: De Cadalso a Aleixandre: Estudios sobre literatura e historia intelectual españolas (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), p. 248. 7 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31. 8 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Epistemologies of the South and the Future”, From the European South 1, no. 1 (2016), p. 17; Joep Leerssen, “Introduction”, Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 38. 9 Roberto H. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 10 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), pp. 7–8. 11 Julián Marías, “El 98 antes del 98: Ganivet”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1998), pp. 121–28. 12 González Alcantud, “Nudo biográfico y escritura compulsiva”, p. 94. 13 María A. Salgado, “Pio Cid soy yo: Mito/auto/bio/grafía de Ángel Ganivet”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1997), p. 224. 14 Javier Krauel, “Ángel Ganivet’s Idearium español as Fin de siècle Imperial Melancholia”, Revista Hispánica Moderna 65, no. 2 (2012), pp. 181–97. 15 E. Inman Fox, “Introduccion”, in Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990), p. 12. 16 Laureano Robles, “Don Marcelino visto por Unamuno”, Cuadernos de la Cátedra de Miguel de Unamuno, no. 45 (2008), p. 109. 17 Antonio Espina, Ganivet: El hombre y la obra (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972), p. 15. 18 González Alcantud, “Nudo biográfico y escritura compulsiva”, p. 99. 19 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of the Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 1, 15. 20 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), p. 10. 21 Kevin Hetherington, “Moderns as Ancients: Time, Space and the Discourse of Improvement”, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 49–72.
224 Peter Stadius 22 Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Oakland: California University Press, 2010), p. 2. 23 Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch, “Einleitung”, Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2005), pp. 9–10. 24 Ángel Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas: Hombres del norte, ed. Antonio Gallego Morell (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998), p. 90: “En España tenemos ferrocariles; pero no solo los tenemos de mala manera, sino que en algunos casos hemos llevado nuestra mala voluntad hasta el extremo de que el tren sea derrotado por la diligencia. En nuestra provincial existe ese raro fenómeno. Aquí los ferrocarriles son del Estado finlandés, y, pesar de lo escaso de la poblacón, dan ingresos muy lucidos; en cuanto al servicio, casi compite con el alemán, que es el más perfecto de Europa”. 25 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 93: “Un torero de raza se halla en su elemento mientras lucha, mientras su actividad libre e inteligente está enfrente del toro, y se fatiga de ir incrustado en un vagón […]”. 26 Jesús Torrecilla, “La modernidad de Ganivet”, Insula 615, no. 3 (March 1998), p. 4. 27 Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 23. 28 Lily Litvak, Latinos y anglosajones: Orígenes de una polémica (Barcelona: Puvill, 1980). 29 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 54. 30 Nelson R. Orringer, Ganivet (1865–1898) (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1998), p. 28. 31 José Ortega y Gasset, “Prólogo”, in Angel Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas: Hombres del norte (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998), p. 40. 32 Inman Fox, La invención de España: Nacionalismo liberal e identitad nacional (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), p. 57. 33 Gordon Brotherston, “Arielismo and Anthropophagy: The Tempest in Latin America”, The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 216–17. 34 Máximo Soto Hall, El problema (Costa Rica: Impr. y librería española, 1899), pp. 165–66: “[…] en los suspiros del vapor y el metálico ruído de las ruedas, se oyó un crujir de huesos, y el ahogado relicho de un caballo, mientras el tren […] pulverizaba al ultimo representante de una raza caballeresca y gloriosa”. 35 Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990), p. 177: “Si buscamos fuera de España un Ulises modern, no hallaremos ninguno que supere al Ulises anglosajon […]”. 36 Ganivet, Idearium, p. 178: “Sacho Panza, después de aprender a leer y escribir, podría ser Robinson […]”. 37 Ganivet, Idearium, p. 157: “España ha sido la primera nación europea engrandecida por la política de expansión y de conquista; ha sido la primera en decaer y terminar su evolución material […] porque nosotros, aunque inferiores en cuanto a la influencia política, somos superiores, más adelantados en cuanto al punto en que se halla nuestra natural evolución”. 38 Ken Benson, “El yo escindido: La narrativa de Ángel Ganivet entre la tradicionalidad senequista y la renovación modernista”, Estudios sobre la vida y la obra de Ángel Ganivet, ed. Maria Carmen Díaz de Alda Heikkilä (Madrid: Castalia, 2000), p. 41. 39 See also Herrero, “Spain as a Virgin”. 40 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 90: “El teléfono es aquí tan usual como los trastos de cocina”.
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 225 41 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 90: “Por el velocípedo hay verdadero delirio, y las mujeres lo han acceptado como instrumento de emancipación”. 42 Elena Lindholm Narváez, “The Valkyrie in a Bikini: The Nordic Woman as Progressive Media Icon in Spain 1891–1975”, Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region, ed. Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 197–218. 43 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 86: “Ahora lo que falta saber es lo principal, es decir, lo que aquí entienden por progreso; […] la idea corriente hoy por hoy sobre el progreso es, por desgracia, demasiado material: no se apenas importancia a lo que es en cada pueblo la vida de familia, las relaciones amorosas, el trato entre amigos”. 44 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 91: “La opinion irreflexiva ve en la actividad febril de un hombre que se pasa la vida rodando por los trenes, dando órdenes por telégrafo y por teléfono o yendo como una centella en velocípedo, una prueba de robustez cerebral extraordinaria; cuando en realidad lo que debe verse en todo eso es un desequilibrio orgánico”. 45 Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas, p. 88: “En Atenas no fue conocido el entarugado, y andaban por las calles personas de más viso que las que hoy se echa uno a la cara: quizá, si allí se hubiera dedicado a afeitar jardines y a adoquinar calles, hubieran desaparecido sin dejar rastro”. 46 Ángel Ganivet, Granada la bella, ed. Fernando García Lara (Granada: Diputación provincial de Granada, 1996), p. 80: “Eran cabezas, y ahora son brazos”. 47 Ganivet, Granada la bella, p. 94: “[…] el proyecto diabólico de destruir la ciudad”. 48 Ganivet, Granada la bella, p. 88: “[…] la aspiración constante es tener calles rectas y anchas, porque así las tienen ‘los otros’”. 49 Torrecilla, “La modernidad de Ganivet”, p. 4: “Ganivet no concibe el enfrentamiento entre lo antiguo y lo modern como un asunto meramente interno de la sociedad en que vive, sino también, y principalmente, como una pugna de España con otros países europeos”. 50 De Sousa Santos, “Epistemologies of the South and the Future”, p. 17.
Bibliography Barrows, Adam, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Oakland: California University Press, 2010). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, transl. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Benson, Ken, “El yo escindido: La narrativa de Ángel Ganivet entre la tradicionalidad senequista y la renovación modernista”, Estudios sobre la vida y la obra de Ángel Ganivet, ed. Maria Carmen Díaz de Alda Heikkilä (Madrid: Castalia, 2000), pp. 39–48. Brotherston, Gordon, “Arielismo and Anthropophagy: The Tempest in Latin America”, The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 212–19. Dainotto, Roberto H., Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, “Epistemologies of the South and the Future”, From the European South 1, no. 1 (2016), pp. 17–29.
226 Peter Stadius de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of the Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Espina, Antonio, Ganivet: El hombre y la obra (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Fox, E. Inman, “Introduccion”, in Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990), pp. 9–35. Fox, Inman, La invención de España: Nacionalismo liberal e identitad nacional (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997). Ganivet, Ángel, Cartas finlandesas: Hombres del norte, ed. Antonio Gallego Morell (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998). Ganivet, Ángel, Idearium español (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990). Geisthövel, Alexa and Habbo Knoch, “Einleitung”, Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2005), pp. 9–14. González Alcantud, José Antonio, “Nudo biográfico y escritura compulsiva: Para una lectura antropológica de Ángel Ganivet”, Revista de Antropología Social 7, no. 7 (1998), pp. 93–119. Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time [2003], transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Herrero, Javier, “Spain as a Virgin: Radical Traditionalism in Ángel Ganivet”, Homenaje a Juan López-Morillas: De Cadalso a Aleixandre: Estudios sobre literatura e historia intelectual españolas (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), pp. 247–56. Hetherington, Kevin, “Moderns as Ancients: Time, Space and the Discourse of Improvement”, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 49–72. Krauel, Javier, “Ángel Ganivet’s Idearium español as Fin de siècle Imperial Melancholia”, Revista Hispánica Moderna 65, no. 2 (2012), pp. 181–97. Leerssen, Joep, “Introduction”, Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. xv–xxii. Lindholm Narváez, Elena, “The Valkyrie in a Bikini: The Nordic Woman as Progressive Media Icon in Spain 1891–1975”, Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region, ed. Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 197–218. Litvak, Lily, Latinos y anglosajones: Orígenes de una polémica (Barcelona: Puvill, 1980). Marías, Julián, “El 98 antes del 98: Ganivet”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1998), pp. 121–28. Orringer, Nelson R., Ganivet (1865–1898) (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1998). Ortega y Gasset, José, “Prólogo”, in Angel Ganivet, Cartas finlandesas: Hombres del norte (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998), pp. 33–41. Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). Robles Egea, Antonio, “El neoidealismo y la rebelión de Ángel Ganivet contra el positivismo: Sobre Alfred Fouillée y la teoría de las ideas”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1997), pp. 201–21.
Temporalities of the Anti-Modern 227 Robles, Laureano, “Don Marcelino visto por Unamuno”, Cuadernos de la Cátedra de Miguel de Unamuno, no. 45 (2008), pp. 91–130. Salgado, María A., “Pio Cid soy yo: Mito/auto/bio/grafía de Ángel Ganivet”, RILCE 13, no. 2 (1997), pp. 223–42. Soto Hall, Máximo, El problema (Costa Rica: Impr. y librería española, 1899). Torrecilla, Jesús, “La modernidad de Ganivet”, Insula 615, no. 3 (March 1998), pp. 3–6.
INDEX
Abbott, Andrew 13 Abendana, Isaac 109–12 Acerbi, Guiseppe 83, 85–86, 93 Acosta, José de 58 Adam of Bremen 27 Alexander the Great 30 allegory 132–33, 189–91, 198 Allestree, Richard 107 Alleyn, Henry 104, 114 Allgemeine Historische Bibliothek 140 almanacs 7, 15, 101–31 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love 160, 171 Altamira, Rafael 212 Altdorf University 145 Anderson, Benedict 8, 192 Anne of Austria 62 anthropological turn 139 antiquity 7, 16, 25, 55, 60–61, 65, 77, 79, 88, 90, 118, 159–64, 171, 210, 215, 217, 221 Antoine, Régis 53 Apiarius 39 Arendt, Hannah 19n25 Aristotle 9, 33, 57, 168, 169, 183, 215 Astley, Thomas 133, 139, 143 astrology 113–15, 116, 118–19 Atkinson, H.G. 184 Azorín 213 Bacon, Francis 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 5 Banks, Joseph 136 Baroja, Pío 212 Barrows, Adam 6, 214 Bauman, Zygmunt 7 Bedwell, William 110–11 Belon, Pierre 42 Benjamin, Walter 8, 210 Bentham, Jeremy 183
Benz, Maximilian 14, 25–51 Berggren, Jacob 16, 158–81 Besson, Grégoire 9 Bhabha, Homi K. 183, 195 Bignon, Jérôme 52 Bodensele, Wilhelm von 27, 29 Bohlin, Anna 16, 182–209 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne Lignel 139 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de 3, 135–38, 143, 145 Bowman, Glenn 186 Bremer, Fredrika 16, 182–85, 188–99 Breton, Raymond 65 Breydenbach, Bernhard von 38 Brodd, Sven-Erik 189 Cadalso, José 212–13 calendars 7, 8, 30, 101–03, 107–08, 120n1; exotic 109–13, 123n41; perpetual 111, 120n2 Cantar de Mio Cid 212 Cão, Diogo 77 Castoriadis, Cornelius 9 Caviglia, Giovanni Battista 168–69 Celsius, Anders 86, 88, 90 Certeau, Michel de 55 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 13 Charles XI of Sweden 78 Charles XII of Sweden 76, 84–85 chronopolitics 12, 55, 216–20, 222 chronos 183, 191, 196–98 chronotope 5 The City and Countrey Chapmans Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1690 104 Clarke, Robert 5 Classen, Albrecht 5 clocks 7, 8, 36, 118, 163–66
Index 229 cognitive mapping see mental maps Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 52, 57–58 collectivity 27 colonialism 8, 12, 15, 55–60, 66, 108, 135, 146 colonisation 7, 15, 53, 55, 59, 64–65, 68, 138, 143, 161 Columbus, Christopher 54, 136, 138, 141–42, 144–45 Commissioners of Longitude 115 Compagnie des Isles de l’Amérique 56 Comte, Auguste 184 Constantine, Emperor 25, 36 “contact zone” 13 Cook, James 135–37, 140–41, 143, 145 Corberon, Nicolas-Augustin 75, 78–81, 83, 86 Costa, Joaquín 217 Council of Nicea 25 Countryman’s Kalendar 114 cultural diversity 112, 136, 140, 142, 144–46 cyclical time 17, 33, 214, 216, 219, 222 Cyril of Jerusalem 26 da Gama, Vasco 77 Dainotto, Roberto H. 211–12 Dalrymple, Alexander 136, 138–39, 143–44, 146 Dampier, William 136, 143 Das, Nandini 4, 10 de Brosses, Charles 136, 138–39, 143–44, 146 deep time 1, 27, 36, 92–93, 168 Defoe, Daniel 117 Demolins, Edmond 217 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 211–12, 214, 222 de Staël, Madame 81, 218 Dias, Bartolomeu 77 Diderot, Denis 144 Dobie, Madeleine 55 Dubin, Nina 160–61 Du Four, Magdeleine 80 Dunbar, James 137 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste 14–15, 52–74 Ecklin, Daniel 14, 28, 38–41 Elgin, Lord 163–64 Elias, Norbert 7 Emmanuel, Marthe 86 English East India Company 117 Ette, Ottmar 5
Etzlaub, Erhart 36 Eusebius of Caesarea 25 exploratory travel 5, 8; maritime 132–57 Fabian, Johannes 12, 54, 134–35, 146, 211, 216 Fercourt, Claude Auxcousteaux de 75, 78–81, 83, 86 Ferguson, Adam 136–37, 144–45 Flaubert, Gustave 11 Forster, Georg 140–41, 143 Forster, Johann Reinhold 140–41, 143 Frederick I of Sweden 88–89 French Academy of Sciences 77, 86 French Revolution 145, 167 Fritzsche, Peter 163 Fryer, John 117–18 Gadbury, John 105, 108–09, 114 Galaup de la Pérouse, Jean-François de 135 Ganivet, Angel 16–17, 210–27 Garraway, Doris 62 Gatterer, Johann Christoph 16, 140–42, 144, 146 Geertz, Clifford 13 Gemelli Careri, Giovanni 136 Generation of ’98 (Spanish) 212–13, 222 Genette, Gérard 9, 62 genre 2, 10, 20n39 Gleadle, Kathryn 184, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2, 3, 5 González Alcantud, José Antonio 211, 214 Göttingen University 16, 140–46 Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 140 Greek war of independence 8, 16, 158–60, 171 Green, John 139 Gustav I of Sweden (Gustav Vasa) 78 Gutenberg, Johannes 102 Gyllengrip, Gabriel, 77, 86, 87, 88 Hakluyt, Richard 133 Harlay, Achille II de 52 Harlay, Achille III de 52 Harper, Lila Marz 186 Hartley, L.P. 12 Hartog, François 3, 7, 55, 161, 210 Harvey, David 6 Harweg, Roland 11 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 174n28
230 Index Heeren, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig 142 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 147 Helgesson, Stefan 2 Hennin, Pierre Michel 93 Henrikson, Paula 1–24, 158–81 Herder, Johann Gottfried 140–41, 144, 170, 196 Hermes 44n21, 133 Herodotus 53, 57, 168 Herrero, Javier 211 heterochronia 59 Hills, Henry 109 historical chronologies 103, 109–13, 116–17, 119 historical time 4–9, 27–28, 32, 58, 110, 160, 163, 171 historicity, regimes of 3 Historisches Journal 140 Howitt, Mary 184 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 89–90 Humboldt, Alexander von 190 Hunter, Shelagh 188 Hunt, Margaret R. 15, 101–31 individuality 27–28 indulgences 36, 38, 41 Iselin, Isaak 144–45 isolario 58 Itinerarium Burdigalense 25–27, 42n1 James II of England 109 Java Half-Yearly Almanac and Directory for 1815 111–12, 115 Jean II of Portugal 77 Johannes of Würzburg 27 Jordheim, Helge 2 Juterczenka, Sünne 15–16, 132–57 kairos 183, 191, 195, 197–98 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 137 Kiening, Christian 14, 25–51 Klein, Olivier 1 Klinckowström, Otto Wilhelm 84 Knox, Robert 117 Koselleck, Reinhart 8, 123n35, 161 Kullberg, Christina 1–24, 52–74, 75n Lafitau, Joseph-François 64, 136 Lagartijo 215–16 Lagerlöf, Selma 204n83 Lämmert, Eberhard 9 La Motraye, Aubry de, 15, 76–77, 82–86, 84, 92–93
Las Casas, Bartolomé de 55, 58, 64, 66 Leask, Nigel 160, 162, 168–69 Leclerc, Sébastien 52 Léry, Jean de 56 Lestringant, Frank 56, 62–63 Le Tellier de Louvois, FrançoisMichel 80 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 3, 17, 64 Lind, James 136–37 linear time 1–3, 9, 14, 33, 54, 59, 63, 108, 167, 210, 214, 216, 219–20 Linnæus, Carl 88 Lisbon earthquake 158, 167 Litvak, Lily 217 Lock, Charles 186 Locke, John 187 Logan, Deborah Anna 195 Lorca, Federico García 214 Louis XIII of France 57, 66 Louis XIV of France 57, 62–63, 80 Lubin, Père A. 79 Luther, Martin 38 Maeztu, Ramiro de 212–13 Magellan, Ferdinand 143 Malthus, Thomas Robert 183 Mandeville, Jean de 14, 28–34, 42 Marboury, Christian 55 Martineau, Harriet 16, 182–90, 193–99 Martineau, James 184 Matus, Jill 193–94 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 15, 76–77, 86–93 Mazarin, Cardinal 62 Mead, Braddock see Green, John Meiners, Christoph 141–44, 146 Melman, Billie 193 Melzer, Sara E. 55 mental maps 106, 119 Michault, René 79 Mill, James 183 missionaries 11, 14–15, 55–57, 65, 105, 112 modernity 2, 6, 11–13, 16–17, 158–65, 171, 210, 214–15, 219, 221–22 Molière 76, 81 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord 137 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 194 Montesquieu 194, 196, 212 multi-temporality see polytemporality
Index 231 nationalism 8, 16–17, 183, 192, 196–99, 211 nation-building 8–9, 197 Nautical Almanac 115 navigation 55, 86, 105, 115, 135 Newton, Isaac 86 Nicéron, Jean-Pierre 81 Nixon, Rob 1 nostalgia 17, 64, 68, 169–70, 213 Oderico de Pordenone 29 Orientalism 16, 182, 192–96 Ortega y Gasset, José 213, 217 Osborne, Peter 214 Ouellet, Réal 63 Oviedo y Valdés, Fernández de 58 Pavel, Thomas 59 Peabody, Sue 66 Peirce, William 105 Pettinger, Alasdair 4 philhellenism 16, 159 pilgrimage 5, 8, 25–27, 29, 34–41, 182, 189 Piso, Willem 58 Plato 215 Pliny the Elder 57, 168 Pocock, John G. A. 145 Polo, Marco 27 Polybios 139–40, 146 polytemporality 2–3, 5, 8, 13, 16, 101–31, 159, 166 Poole, John 114 Pratt, Mary Louise 12–13 Prester John 29, 33, 110–11 Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine François, 91, 133, 139, 143 Ragor, Hans Huldrich 38, 41 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 133 Regiomontanus, Johannes 36 Regnard, Jean-François, 15, 75, 76–86, 90, 92–93 Requemora-Gros, Sylvie 15, 75–100 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de 56 Rieter the Younger, Sebald 33–34 Ritter, Carl 190 Robert, Hubert 160–61 Roberts, Caroline 188 Roberts, Mary 193–94 Robertson, William 138, 140 Roberts, Russell 67 Rochefort, Charles de 57
Rodó, José Enrique 218 Rood, Timothy 175n28 Rosa, Hartmut 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 54, 144 Rubiés, Joan-Pau 55 ruins 4, 16, 31, 64, 158–81 Ruiz, José Martínez see Azorín Sacy, Silvestre de 160 Sahagún, Bernardino 105 Said, Edward 134 salvational time 5, 14, 27–28, 32, 39, 42, 66 Scaliger, Joseph 112 Schefferus, Johannes 79 Schiendorfer, Max 38 Schiller, Friedrich 145 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 6 Schlegel, Friedrich 167 Schlözer, August Ludwig von 16, 141–42, 144, 146–47 Schönsperger, Johann 34 Schwabe, Johann Joachim, 132–33, 132, 135, 139, 143 Seaman, Henry 115 Selwyn, Pamela 25n Seneca 67, 210, 215–16 Shakespeare, William 218 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 160 simultaneity 8, 12 slavery 55, 57–58, 66–68, 138, 141 slave trade 59, 66 Smethurst, Paul 5 Smith, Adam 138, 183 Smith, Anthony D. 196–97, 205n102 Smyth, Adam 119 social time 6–9 Socrates 215 Sorg, Anton 34 Soto Hall, Máximo 218 spatial turn 4, 7 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 13 Staden, Hans 42 St Clair, William 164 Stadius, Peter 16, 210–27 Staf, Nils 161 standardisation of time 6–7, 214 Sudheim, Ludolf von 35 surface time 27 Surinaamsche Staatkundige Almanach voor den Jaare 1793 111 Sylvester, Pope 36 Szewczyk, Grażyna Barbara 204n83
232 Index temporalities: archaic 90; biblical 16, 159; Christian 66; colonial 57, 64–67; competing 4–5, 15, 16, 56, 68, 159; conflicting 16; contradictory 53, 60, 68, 163; cyclical 17, 214; discrete 13; eschatological 5; evolutionary 12; of faith 16, 182–209; future 63; heterogeneous 33; Homeric 16, 159; imperial 159; layered 16, 58, 63, 159, 165–66; local 3; measurable 30; multiple 2, 5, 13, 15, 17; mysterious 92; mythical 164; narrative 58; personal 159; progressive 60; religious 38; revolutionary 8, 159; salvation-historical 28, 32; secular 8, 38; simultaneous 3; subjective 28; universal 134 temporal pluralism see polytemporality temporal turn 7–8 Thevet, André 42 Thomasson, Fredrik 159, 162, 170 Thompson, E.P. 108 Tinguely, Frédéric 71n32, 193 Todorov, Tvetzan 55 Torrecilla, Jésus 222 Trojan War 163 Trolley, Olivia 75n Tucher, Hans 14, 28, 34–38, 42 typological time 216
Übersetzung der Allgemeinen Welthistorie 139 Unamuno, Miguel de 212–13 Universal History 139–41, 146 Uppsala University 79, 83 Velser, Michael 29–30, 34 Virgil 76 Volney, Constantin François 169–70 Voltaire 93, 139 Wahn, Hermann 104 Walcott, Derek 52, 60 Walsh, Robert 164 Waltheym, Hans von 35 Wegelius, Johannes, 77, 86, 87, 88–89 Wharton, George 110 Wiklund, Karl Bernard 83 Will, Georg Andreas 145 Wolfzettel, Friedrich 10 World Social Forum 211 Wrightson, Keith 107 Yeğenoğlu, Meyda 193 Youngs, Tim 4, 10 Zwingli, Huldrych 38