Andrea Ammonio, protégé of Pietro Carmeliano

History without palaeography is a story half told. Here is a small example from the first decades of the sixteenth century. It comes from my monograph on The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain which I am presently completing. I present to you, in part, because I want to invite you to comment on the evidence I have for you.

It is often said that the Brescian humanist, Pietro Carmeliano, was the man who introduced the italic hand into England. The situation, as I explain in my book, is rather more complicated than that, but that is not the issue today. It is also said that he was the first person appointed as the king’s Latin secretary in the mid-1490s. It is true that he revelled in that title, though quite what it signified is open to discussion. He certainly produced a substantial quantity of correspondence for Henry VII; the first sign we have of his acting as a royal scribe (this evidence seems to have been overlooked) is from 1488. If you want not just to see his elegant script but to own a specimen, you may be lucky: not all are in public collections and some do appear for sale. One was up for auction last year and by the look of the note added at the top it somehow strayed (presumably in the nineteenth century) from the Archivio di Stato in Milan.

Another letter written by him was sold at Christie’s a few years ago; the auction house kindly tells me is now in private hands.

The story also told is that Carmeliano’s fortunes withered in the wake of Henry VII’s death. Other humanists celebrated the accession of his son as a new golden age. One of these poets was Thomas More, though, as I argued many, many years ago, his praise of the young Henry VIII was not as straightforward as it at first appears. Its classic statement, though, was provided in prose by an Italian, from Lucca, who called himself Andreas Ammonius (and who is now known as Ammonio). In a letter to Erasmus he ghost-wrote for William, Lord Mountjoy, Ammonio declared that this would be a new era of liberality, and he himself benefitted from it. In an act which is seen as a symbolic changing of the guard, he took on the role of the king’s Latin secretary, being first mentioned as that in 1511; Carmeliano, it is suggested, was yesterday’s man.

Let us leave aside that Carmeliano did not quit the scene and continued to be referred to as Latin secretary himself. That is significant for what I have to say here only in as much as it suggests that the position was not an exclusive one — and earlier evidence suggests that there was more than one secretary for Latin correspondence in earlier years. These men, in fact, included Andrea Ammonio himself.

There do not seem to be many images of Ammonio’s script available on the web (if you find one, please tell me) but here is one:

A royal letter, signed by Andrea Ammonio, dated 24th June 1515.

This, as you will see, is dated from June 1515, four years after the first reference to him as Latin secretary. This script, though, appears in earlier unsigned letters. At this point, I am going to have to ask you to open another tab and visit the wonderful Portal de Archivos Españoles site. On the page Inventario Dinámico choose the Archivo of Simancas, and under their Colecciones, choose Patronato Real. You are then looking for ‘Leg. 54’ and for two particular items in it. The first to find is document 99. It is a letter to Ferdinand of Aragon dated 30th July 1509 and signed by the new king Henry VIII (it also appears as item 52 in the catalogue of the 2009 British Library Henry VIII exhibition). Look at the script and compare it with what you see above: can you see the similarity? If not, take time to survey the details: look at the tick used sometimes on final e, and the left-turn on the foot of p and q, or look at the shape of the g, or the st ligature. There are so many shared characteristics in detail and in overall aspect that I am confident in proposing that this is by Ammonio as well. If you do not share my confidence, then your next challenge is to tell me: who else could this be at this date? Incidentally, note how fitting it is that he should be employed for a letter on behalf of Henry’s friend and the person from who Ammonio drafted the letter to Erasmus, William, Lord Mountjoy.

This, though, is not all. In 1509, Ammonio had already been resident in England for four years. Now find the document known as Leg. 54, Doc. 70. You will see that this is dated 18th October 1506. Your first impression might be that this is by a different hand from the others you have just seen and certainly the script is thinner, more upright and less assertive — it seems to be by a person learning their trade. Then look more closely, comparing the 1509 and 1506 letters together: look for the ornate ‘quam/quan’ abbrevation, or the placing of the suspension mark for ‘que’ or, indeed, the styling of the serifs. This, I suggest, is once again by Ammonio, not yet settled into his role and essaying his own humanist cursive. In developing his practice, he would have turned to exemplars he had to hand or to a colleague — that is, most likely, to Pietro Carmeliano. The implication of this evidence, in other words, is threefold. First, Andrea Ammonio was involved in the production of royal letters alongside Carmeliano. This, in turn, suggests that we might need to rethink our impression that there was a simple sequence of office-holders: it seems more likely that the title of secretary was an honour given to those who produced the letters, rather than being an exclusive post available only to one person at a time. Finally, what these letters also suggest is that Ammonio may well have owed his first entrée into working for the crown to Pietro Carmeliano. This, of course, does not mean that a rivalry may not have later developed, though we should also not assume that Carmeliano was cast out into darkness when the sunshine of Henry VIII’s munificence shone on Ammonio. In later years, Carmeliano was a rich man. What is more, though he was Ammonio’s elder, he outlived him: the younger humanist succumbed to sweating sickness in the summer of 1517. In 1520 (and, again, this has been undernoticed), Carmeliano was describing himself as secretary to Henry VIII.

The point of this tale is to remind ourselves as historians that reading documents, however subtly, is not enough if we want more fully to reconstruct events like those around 1509. By close attention to the palaeography, with due care and attention to its pitfalls, of course, we can move towards a richer understanding. This might be expressed as a paradox: to delve deeper, we have to appreciate these sources at their face value.

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What’s the purpose of a conference? Reflections on RSA2015. Part II

I have suggested that it would be worth the Renaissance Society of America going meta and studying the anthropology of its own ‘Annual Meeting’. The advantage of this little proposal is that it would help us stand outside our own experience and look in at ourselves. At this point, I should probably put my hand up and admit to not being a habitué of the RSA’s annual get-together. The last time I attended was ten years ago, when it was in Cambridge (UK – not MA). There have been several reasons why I have been unable to attend in the intervening years, but I have tended to justify my absence with reference to the conference’s amplitudinous nature – how can, I ask, an event which is so gargantuan continue to have the quality of a conference? Aristotle described how a city could be so large that it failed to have the character of a city. We too might wonder at what stage a conference becomes the equivalent of a megalopolis and is too massive to retain a single identity. I must stress that I enjoyed my experience of the RSA this year and was glad to have been persuaded to contribute (thank you, Piers Baker-Bates, Tom True and Oren Margolis). I did hear a few shockingly poor papers (given by established academics) and some very stimulating ones (many – but not all – given by early-career scholars). I feel guilty that I did not sit in on more panels; struck by end-0f-term exhaustion, I crept away on the first afternoon to preserve my energy for presenting the next day, and on that day, the sessions were so stimulating – excepting (modesty forces me to say) my own intervention – that I was drained by the evening without the stamina to go to the plenary lecture I had very much wanted to hear (I am getting old). Perhaps, though, I should not be too hard on myself: my absence was not, I sense, egregious. Yet, that such selective non-attendance – like Poggio Bracciolini travelling away from Constance – was perhaps not just acceptable but the norm says something about the expectations of the event. The worry is that those expectations clash with the basic concept of a conference, as I at least have seen it practised on other occasions.

The differences of concept were reflected in an exchange of views I had with another attendee the day after the RSA ended. I would like to claim the exchange was full and frank but, as we were both British, it naturally fell short of that. The person with whom I found myself in discussion complained that there was no consistency between sessions about when questions were asked so that it was difficult to time moving between papers; her preference would have been to have a 30 minute slot for each paper, including questions, with the chair’s job to be making sure that each paper and discussion on it was confined to that half hour. She may have been thinking aloud, or felt goaded to suggesting it by my own joking proposal that at the start of each panel, the door should be locked to avoid the disruption to the session caused by people entering and leaving when they please. For my interlocutor, moving between sessions is an established habit at such a conference and helps ensure one can attend as many papers of interest as possible. For me, in contrast, it is both ill-mannered and counter-productive. The organiser of a panel has taken the effort to bring together a group of speakers with some sense of connexion between their topics. This, of course, works better in some sessions than others but, unless a session is obviously a medley of disparate elements without any rationale, then, to my mind, we should show respect to both the organiser and the speakers by attending the whole session, however interesting another panel might be elsewhere.

That explains in brief why, on my submission, panel-popping offends good manners; that is not to say that there may be occasions on which for an individual it is nearly unavoidable but it is to suggest that it should be discouraged as an element of conference etiquette. I said a moment ago, however, that I also consider the practice counter-productive and I should explain that. If the intention of moving between sessions is to maximise one’s intellectual stimulation then it can only do that if one is not interested in hearing or engaging in the discussion section of a session. Personally, I find that at times the most exciting part – when the chair or members of the audience can draw out threads that linked the papers together and when a discussion can develop involving all speakers and some of the others in the room. That, I would suggest, is at the heart of what a conference is – it is a collective experience where speakers and attendees alike learn from each other and develop their thinking through the exchange of ideas.

Yet, of course, a conference where part of its claim to importance is its very size – like not only the RSA but also the International Medieval Congress at Leeds – can never manage to hold all its delegates together as one collective. The fact that such events tend to be organised in significant cities where there are plentiful distractions in itself must dissipate that to some extent (I know that Kathleen Kennedy would point out that Kalamazoo, home to another International Congress of medievalists, is an exception in being a small venue for a heavy-weight event). Such conferences’ need to have multiple parallel sessions – in Berlin, it was over 50 to each time slot – encourages the proposing and organising by societies or groups of a series of panels on one subject area, with the result that there are several mini-conferences happening in the same place, often with delegates who have paid to travel from afar sitting in a room speaking mainly to colleagues they could more cheaply have gathered together elsewhere. Those involved in such sessions are not unaware that it makes little economic sense to work this way but they calculate it has advantages – the fact that many of the arrangements are another’s responsibility, let alone the attraction of being seen at the ‘premier’ event – which keeps them doing it. These mini-conferences act like the rioni or quarters of a medieval city, with the conference itself being the municipality which gives them space – and which ensures they do not come to blows (not that I have ever heard of such things happening at the RSA or IMC but, then again, perhaps I am out of the loop). Yet, if one is not a full member of such a mini-conference or, as few of these strands run through the whole of the event, when ‘your’ section is not in action, then the structure demands that one creates an individualised experience of the conference. In such a context, the pattern of panel-popping my partner in conversation was proposing as appropriate behaviour is not simply likely to happen, it is, in effect, encouraged. The question is whether that matters.

Some, obviously, would say not – or would, indeed, celebrate such structures, pointing out that as a metropolis gives an individual the opportunity to be who they want to be, not controlled by the collective habits that mark out village life, so these large events give opportunities that break down established structures of authority and empower the individual. There is undoubted merit to that argument and it could be taken as a rationale for the organisers of a large conference facilitating as many sessions as possible, though, as the argument over the lack of women among the RSA’s plenaries shows, size does not necessarily ensure diversity. There is a further danger about continuing expansion: I wonder when the metropolis turns into the megalopolis and the individualised becomes the atomised. That aside, and to repeat my central point, if we see a conference as an event which fosters a collective identity and a sharing of thought-processes among contributors (speakers and listeners), then the RSA or IMC would not fit the definition. Admittedly, neither of those two gatherings actually calls itself a conference. The RSA has its ‘annual meeting’ – though, with so many present, there are so few you do actually meet: you bump into friends you did not even realise were going to be there, and you fail to find others who are lost in the mass of people and of sessions. IMC, like Kalamazoo, terms itself a congress, hinting at the difference of its nature from smaller-scale or more old-fashioned (and more human-sized) gatherings. What is at stake, though, is not an issue of terminology – though this could help if, that is, we are alert to the nuances of terms and share a single language; that in itself must be in doubt considering the slippage that seems to occur between ‘colloquium’, ‘symposium’ and ‘workshop’, for instance. What I want to insist matters is that we all – as organisers and as attendees – consider reflectively the implications of size has for the nature of intellectual engagement at an event. Perhaps others do this and I am slow on the uptake but the way in which the patterns of sessions alters little between different types of conference suggests otherwise. The RSA (to continue with this example) envisage ‘panels’ and ’roundtables’, to which are added ‘plenaries’ as the basic structure. If, though, we want to foster more interaction and more exchange, are there not additional ways in which to achieve this – could not, for instance, there be occasions where the chair of each session or an appointed rapporteur feeds back to a wider audience? And does social media – beyond twitter feeds and storify (take a bow, Liesbeth Corens) – give opportunities to achieve such a sharing of experience (always remembering that a substantial proportion of the delegates are likely to be off-line during the conference itself)?

That is, of course, assuming that such sharing, with the assumptions of a single collective identity, is desirable at such an event. But have I misunderstood the anthropology?

What’s the purpose of a conference? Reflections on RSA 2015

In the summer of 1435, the Artois town of Arras was over-run. This was a peaceful invasion, unlike others in its history, for Arras was to be the site of a congress intended to end the major international conflict of northern Europe between the kingdoms of France and England by bringing them – and the allies of the English, the dukes of Burgundy – to the negotiating table. The congress was overseen by the Bolognese cardinal, Niccolò Albergati, in whose entourage were two future popes, Nicholas V and Pius II. Whatever the future greatness of some of his household, his companions formed a relatively modest following, particularly when compared with that of England’s premier cleric, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, who rode into town with a retinue of five hundred. Attendance at the congress, moreover, was not drawn simply from the main protoganists and the representatives of the papacy – its participants came also, as one orator presented noted, ‘from Cyprus, from Denmark, from Poland…’. For a town whose population was probably in the mid-twenty-thousands, these visitors must have swelled its numbers in a way that both provided economic possibilities and stretched its resources to near-breaking point. Where would all of Beaufort’s retainers stayed – in tents outside the town walls? How would the taverns have coped with the increased demand for food which there surely must have been, even if some of the attending dignitaries came with their own cooks and supplies? And the Congress of Arras, let us remember, was one of the smaller international conferences of the early fifteenth century. It could not compare with the General Councils of the Church – with Constance or Basel (especially in its early days) or with Ferrara-Florence (the pope’s riposte to Basel at which the Christian churches beyond the Catholic West were represented). Spare a thought for the locals of each of those towns who had to suffer as well as profit from the influx of strangers, with their colourful clothes, curious manners and incomprehensible languages.

The dress code among modern academics offers more subtle variation between national types than was the case in the age of the Councils. At an event like the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America that ended a week ago in Berlin, there were some differences on display: the wearing of what looked suspiciously like pre-made bowties was considered appropriate fashion by some of one nation, while a few brave souls (and I use ‘brave’ in the sense of foolhardy) of another country unblushlingly sported braces (Amer.: suspenders – but let us not pursue that difference in usage). And this is only to comment on the practices of male couture. These examples remind us that the RSA, like the congress at Arras, was highly cosmopolitan, but without the advantage of having a universally owned lingua franca between scholars (ubi colloquia in lingua latina erant?); the event had instead to be polyglot, with at least lip-service paid to speaking in tongues. This contrast with Arras is one among the many significant differences, but, standing in the reception of the Humboldt University, I could not shake from my mind the sense that this ‘conference’ – and I will explain the scare-quotes in the second part of this discussion – with its 3,200 delegates, plus its support industry like the well-stocked book-stands (one of the few temptations to which the latterday academic fails to be immune), shared something of the character of one of those quattrocento Councils or Congresses. Moreover, I would humbly suggest, a future RSA could usefully include a panel or two on those Councils seen through the anthropology of the RSA.

I mooted this suggestion with a few of those attending – when I say a few, I mean roughly 0.15% of the delegates. They proposed some interesting topics. Of perennial fascination is the contrast – and sometimes conflict – between different styles of presentation, usually assumed to be a matter of national educational traditions, though the panels often also provide evidence of the movement or assimilitation of others’ habits; this could provide insight for those of us considering the process of the international adoption of humanist techniques of oratory in the fifteenth century. Equally valid would be to consider the range of audience engagements in a panel, from styles of questioning to the tradition of the intervento. Related to these subjects might be the sub-cultures created among attendees by what they do away from the conference venue – so compare the adventures of a Poggio Bracciolini at St. Gallen (or, indeed, Baden-Baden) with the opera outings of colleagues or the late-night drinking sessions (the membership of these events may be found to overlap). Such escapades could also allow a study of the impact of the sudden arrival of so many people on the local economy; there were certainly mutterings that the Berlin restaurants were caught unawares by the dietary expectations of the members of the RSA. Then, as was pointed out, there is the nature of gift-giving at such events which in itself reflects patterns of patronage some of which pre-exist while others are created at the event, either for its duration or with longer-term results. That, too, is linked to the matter of the after-tremors of the earthquake which is such a congregating of people: to the flurries of e-mails and follow-up meetings we may now be having could be parallelled the possibilities of renewed contact that were nurtured by an acquaintance made at a General Council. And, beneath and beyond all these smaller issues, the anthropological approach could allow us to consider the range of purposes and results of such an outsize gathering, in a such a way that we would be invited to consider how those other elements enhanced or undermined its ostensible raison d’être. It is, indeed, on its declared rationale that I want to concentrate in the second part of these reflections.

‘Sagacity’ Middlemore, the man who gave us Burckhardt

Mention to an English-speaking Renaissance scholar the name of Middlemore and you are assured at least a flicker of recognition. Many – if not without some brain-wracking – will identify him as the translator of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Some might be able to provide his initials but few could add further details. It has recently been noted on-line that little information about him is easily available. The only recent, brief discussion is by Ben Kohl in a valuable essay which sadly appeared only after his own death in the important collection edited by John Law and Bernadette Paton, Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. As will be seen, Kohl’s brief discussion can be supplemented and corrected in certain respects. Beyond his paragraphs, there is a notable silence : S. G. C. Middlemore does not gain an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or in the on-line Dictionary of Art Historians, or on the encyclopaedia du jour, Wikipedia – as yet. The man who introduced the Anglophone world to Burckhardt’s ‘essay’ – a foundational work that society is still struggling to forget – surely deserves more attention: it is through his eyes that Burckhardt’s vision is reflected for the crowd of scholars who first encountered Civilization in translation as an undergraduate and who have not later felt the need to compare it to the other versions, either in the original German or (for instance) in Italian, that exist. I myself have done that only briefly, in preparation for a paper given five years ago at a symposium organised by Oren Margolis in celebration of the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Burckhardt’s work. One outcome of that event was a recognition of how personal Middlemore’s choices as a translator were – where ‘personal’ might be, at times, a euphemism for ‘misleading’. This is a point Kohl also makes in his article, and our appreciation of this essential insight should make us all the more interested in knowing the man who has shaped for so many scholars their understanding of Burckhardt and, thus, of ‘the Renaissance’.
We might add to this the remarkable fact that the sole English translation of Civilization was published in 1878 when Middlemore was only thirty, and also throw in the nugget that it was not his only foray into Renaissance studies, for he wrote a short survey, The Great Age of Italian Painting, which appeared in print in the last days of 1889 – weeks before Middlemore’s early death. This, I hope, will be sufficient to persuade you that a brief rehearsal of his biography is a worthwhile addition to the treasure-trove of information which is the internet. I will admit, at once, that what follows is a work-in-progress, based to date on ‘soft’ research, drawn partly from what is available on-line but more substantially from a single printed source, the privately printed Some Account of the Family of Middlemore of Warwickshire and Worcestershire of 1901, by W. P. W. Phillimore assisted by W. F. Carter. This work is the origin of the synopses provided by the Visitation of England and Wales, vol. viii (it is to this that Kohl refers) and by the Biographical Register of Christ’s College [Cambridge], with both having some omissions and minor errors. I have supplemented this information with my own reading of Middlemore’s Great Age.
Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore was born on 16th November 1848 into a large Birmingham family. His father, William (1802-87), inherited and directed the saddlers’ company of Middlemores on which the family’s wealth was based. He was also a Baptist, a philanthropist and a Liberal city councillor. One of Samuel’s elder brothers, John Throgmorton Middlemore (1844-1924), followed his father into politics, though in loyalty to Birmingham’s mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, when he entered Parliament in 1899, it was as a Liberal Unionist. Of Samuel’s own politics I am not yet aware but, as we will see, in religion he moved away from his family’s non-conformist commitment.
Samuel, like John, was educated at Edgbaston Proprietary School. In October 1866, he went up to Merton, Oxford, but his higher education was to be dogged by illness. It seems that he spent only a few terms in Oxford and, presumably for health reasons, travelled to the Continent and became an educational tourist: he attended Heidelberg, Zürich and Dresden, and would later mentioned in The Great Age hearing lectures from ‘one of the most eminent living specialists in historical studies in Germany’ on universal history. It is not clear whether during this trip he either ventured further south into Italy or came to know the work of Jacob Burckhardt. He returned to England and matriculated at Christ’s, Cambridge in early 1871; he was elected to a scholarship the following year but, in September 1873, again left university due to ill health. ‘Thenceforward his life was spent in literature and travel’, according to Phillimore’s Account. ‘He had a perfect knowledge of German and Italian, spoke and wrote French fluently, and had a fair literary knowledge of Spanish, besides being acquainted with some of the Swiss and Italian patois’.
It was in the following years that Middlemore came to work on Burckhardt’s Civilization. It was on 20th December 1875 that he wrote, in German and from Birmingham, to ‘Herr Professor’, expressing his hope that Burckhardt would give his blessing to an English translation. The work, as is well known, appeared three years later, published in two volumes by Kegan Paul, who described it as an ‘authorised translation’. Around this time, Middlemore seems to have moved to London: he was a correspondent for The Saturday Review and became a member of the Savile Club. One of his acquaintances was Robert Louis Stevenson who, as a play on his initials, nicknamed him Sagacity Middlemore, saying ‘it suits his type, his eye, his character’.
I do not yet know where or when Middlemore met his future wife – it was in Florence on 18 April 1881 that he married Maria Trinidad Howard Sturgis (known as Nina, to her friend Emma Lazarus). She had been born in the Philippines on 26 July 1846, the daughter of the American consul there. Like her husband, she was a traveller and an author, translating from Spanish Round a Posada Fire (1883), Spanish Legendary Tales (1885) and Songs of the Pyrenees (1887). She was Roman Catholic and Samuel entered the communion, in London, in December 1886; soon after, they moved to Malvern and a house called ‘Sunnyside’. Their move may partly have been encouraged by the opening of the town’s School of Art where Samuel was to give the lectures which formed the basis of The Great Age of Italian Painting. The preface of that book is dated ‘November 1889’ but soon after the author was, once again, back in Italy. Whether he travelled ill and in the hope of recovery or was taken sick in Rome is unclear, but on 27th January 1890, he died of pneumonia at the Hotel Bristol. His wife, back in Malvern, was not to be a widow for long: on 11th February 1890 she too died. It is a sad end to our tale.
There is, patently, more to be discovered. As yet, I do not know what happened to Middlemore’s library, let alone his letters or papers – and I would, of course, welcome any information. I certainly wish to consider more the light his lectures shed on his reading of Burckhardt and on his knowledge of Italian art. There is (to confine myself for now to a single comment) a story to be told about how his interest in the German’s works – both the Cicerone and Civilization – was part of an English reaction against the fashions promoted by the pre-Raphaelites. On that, more another time and in another place.

Cromwell on the Box

What would Geoffrey Elton’s reaction have been to Hilary Mantel’s novels, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies? He most likely would have treated them with the disdain of professorial silence – even in his most rabid character-assassination of Thomas More, he was able to avoid mentioning A Man for All Seasons, though the success of Robert Bolt’s play surely rankled with him. But if, as we are dealing with fiction anyway, we are allowed to imagine for a moment a meeting between the don and the novelist, I do wonder what they would have had to say to each other. Mantel takes up the challenge of making Cromwell a sympathetic figure but what she provides is hardly The Tudor Revolution in Government: the novel (the cruel could say there is already enough fantasy in Elton’s thesis). Her Cromwell is rarely seen working as a bureaucrat – a master of detail, certainly, someone who can sense how to use the inner workings of the machine for grander political ends – but the genius with which she endows her character is a heightened ability to read humanity. And the human was hardly central to Elton’s histories; for him, the march of civilization was surely greater than any detail of an individual. He felt no need for a biography of his hero, let alone story-telling about him. Before, though, he emits a gruff snort and walks away from Ms Mantel, perhaps she would have a chance to explain her deeper agenda: Wolf Hall (in particular) is not only about an imaginative creation of Henrician politics; submerged beneath that, there is struggle in which Mantel pits Cromwell against More and in which what is at stake is modernity and Englishness. Perhaps, if she had chance to explain that, a smile would have curled Elton’s whiskers.
Mantel’s concept of modernity is revealed by a minor factual slip. In the days after his wife’s demise (in the narrative of Wolf Hall, it is elided with the later deaths of his daughters), so, in 1527, Cromwell ‘has got Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, Principalities; it is a Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which seems to have passed through many hands’ [p. 105] – which is impressive, considering that Il Principe was, in the year of Machiavelli’s own death, not yet printed, let alone in a Latin translation. The first printed edition was that of Filippo Giunti in Florence in 1532; Silvestro Teglio’s Latin version did not appear until a couple of decades after Cromwell’s death. The text certainly did circulate in manuscript in Machiavelli’s own lifetime, so we might say that Mantel’s error is a matter of detail, of no consequence to her larger tale. It seems to me, though, that her determination that her hero should know Machiavelli’s most notorious work – not just at this point but also later in the first novel [pp. 488, 501] – is revealing of her construction of her hero. We might infer that her sense of Machiavelli is like that of Burckhardt: a man without hypocrisy who describes things as they really were, stripped of all comfortable pretence. And her Cromwell is a man in his image; a worldly man, who returns to old England a foreigner, enriched by his experience and by his brush with the modernity that is the Renaissance. There is something yet more Burckhardtian about Mantel’s Cromwell, at least in Wolf Hall: he is not just acquainted with new thinking – be it Machiavelli or Luca Pacioli [pp. 363-4] – but he is himself so endlessly inventive, it reminds me of the visual gag in the film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the main characters are repeatedly seen accidentally inventing Leonardesque machines. Cromwell has something of the l’uomo universale, the man not many-sided but all-sided who, for Burckhardt, epitomises the Renaissance.
So, this Machiavellian, Leonardian Cromwell returns to the land of his birth; he has seen the future and he lurks in the shadows until he can impose it on his unwilling, ungrateful countrymen. A future defined by the Renaissance and, of course, the Reformation. Cromwell is not just ready to question tradition, he is determined to stamp on its face. There he stands pitted against Thomas More, depicted by Mantel as a man so ensnared in his conservatism that he cannot tolerate modernity. By some paradoxical twist, that cosmopolitan scholar becomes a parochial stick-in-the-mud, suspicious of Cromwell’s well-travelled career: ‘you are an Italian through and through, and you have all their vices, all their passions’ [p. 567]. Except, of course, for Mantel, Cromwell is also the future of Englishness – a new England (for ‘England is always remaking itself’ [p. 649]), modernised by being receptive to foreign ideas. That sounds encouragingly liberal: the low-born Cromwell takes on privilege and established power and shakes it to the foundations. In the process, let us remember, he helps destroys the fabric of a church that he sees as corrupt. If we were to look for a modern parallel for Mantel’s Cromwell and think of an outsider who used every wile to challenge tradition and to break the accepted way of doing things, then the closest may be Margaret Thatcher.
Mantel, of course, would hate that, her bête noire morphing into her hero in the black cloak. Perhaps she would not recognise such parallels and, even if we can find them, perhaps they do not matter – after all, these are only novels. Except that they are not: they have somehow become a cultural phenomenon. I am not sure how that has happened: I still am perplexed at the decision to have a painting of Hilary Mantel at the top of the stairs to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room. How has she become such a household name? Has she filled a gap left by the end of J. K. Rowling’s time as favourite author? If so, it still cannot explain the hyperbole by which Mantel has taken on the mantle of being ‘our greatest living novelist’ – even ‘our’ most accomplished historical novelist might be excessive (Robert Harris provides strong competition). However, though, it has come about, the cult of Mantel and, in particular, of her Cromwellian novels, demands further questions: are they so loved simply for their evocation of character and context? Or is their attraction deeper and is there an affinity with its projection of ‘Englishness’?
This is where, finally, we come to the television adaptation of the novels which began this week. I will admit that I am in the lonely position of not yet being a fan. There are some fine actors in the production but I cannot help thinking there is serious miscasting: it is always good to have Jonathan Pryce on screen but he has nothing of the smooth-skinned corpulence needed for Wolsey – like Shakespeare’s Cassius, Pryce is a lean man; I would he was fatter. Yet more of a problem is that Mark Rylance simply looks too old to be Cromwell in his late thirties and early forties – the actor is the age now that Cromwell was when his head parted from his body and, even given the changes in aging, he looks too world-weary. This, though, is a small difficulty alongside the greater problems of transferring novels with so much internal monologue into an ensemble performance in which the eyes are on Cromwell rather than our seeing the world through his eyes. What surprised me most was that writing which can be so visual seemed not to survive the move from page to screen. Many of the scenes and the words are there, but not the aura of the work. The dull palette used – presumably in conscious contrast to The Tudors – created an ambience which, at worst, was lacklustre or, at best, homely. And it is that homeliness that concerns me most.
The homely is unthreatening. So, we are invited to view a ‘Tudor world’ as we know it or, rather, as we would like it to be. For instance, I was struck by how classless the society was – social gradation seemed to have disappeared both in the interactions and the interiors. There was little sense (as there is in the novels) of the heavy distaste for a man of such lowly birth as Cromwell’s; there was limited hauteur in a Norfolk or, indeed, the king. Meanwhile, the buildings which were home to Cromwell – still, at this point a lawyer in Wolsey’s service – seemed to lack none of the late-medieval conveniences afforded to the higher born and bettered housed. This is a world which has been domesticated for us so that it is tame, familiar and quintessentially English. Wolf Hall, in other words, as heritage product – ‘our’ great novel depicting ‘our’ Tudor forefathers. The battle of conceptions of Englishness that drives Mantel’s telling of the tale is wiped away by television’s evocation of a world we think is ours. But if the battle has gone, who won it? The arch-modernisers like Mantel’s Cromwell, full of dangerous and destructive if revivifying new ideas, or something more traditional? Is this Henrician politics showing how we can break the mould or is the BBC offering us a vision of how we should be happy to be moulded by ‘our’ inheritance? Is, by some convoluted route undertaken in the process of move from book to programme, Wolf Hall, the TV adaptation, a sort of revenge for the conservative, that is, for Mantel’s Thomas More? Cromwell’s on the box but is he also back in his box?

Italian Renaissance – a few primary sources

This post might equally be called ‘what I did in the Christmas vacation’. This term, for the first time, there is a new module at the University of Essex entitled ‘Terror, Murder and Bloodshed: the civilization of Renaissance Italy, c. 1400 – 1527’, which I designed and am running. As I prepared for the teaching, it became clear it would be useful for the students to have some short, focussed extracts from primary sources around which we could centre our seminar discussions. There are, of course, many resources available already on-line. The full text of Vasari’s Lives is uploaded, in Italian (both the 1550 and 1568 editions) and in the ‘standard’ translation of de Vere. There are some very useful collections of documents and images in English, like that provided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. These can be supplemented by the webpages of exhibition which remain available – those for Rome Reborn continue to be an excellent resource of images and discussion. Individual academics have also built up helpful websites – to give just one example, there is the work-in-progress of Mikael Hörnqvist of Uppsala University.

What I am adding to the available corpus is intentionally very limited. As already explained, there is a particular audience in mind of second-year undergraduates. What I wanted to provide was a set of short pieces which would introduce some of the key concepts but not overwhelm with a mass of text or of new information. I set myself a limit, then, of four typed pages for each extract (admittedly, in one cases, I overstepped the mark but, in my self-defence, the five pages also include relevant images). That meant that I could not simply link to existing resources, even where a translation existed. What is more, as we know with the de Vere translation of Vasari, the existing translation can at times mislead rather than inform. So, increasingly, I realised that my Christmas would be spent less with mince pies than with the Latin and Italian texts.

Only a few have not had previous English renditions – those exceptions include the passages I provide from Leonardo Bruni’s Funeral Oration on Nanni Strozzi, Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile and parts of Platina’s De principe (here there is some overlap with Nicholas Webb’s sections published in those very useful volumes of the Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, edited by Jill Kraye – available only in hard-copy). In some cases,  as with the extracts from Bruni’s Praise of the Florentine city, I worked independently of the existing translation, in this case the deservedly well-thumbed version in Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt’s Earthly Republic – not because I believe there to be significant problems with it, but that I judged that another rendition (albeit very limited) could help by providing a different perspective on Bruni’s style. In others, as with Vasari (where I have used his lives of Giotto and Simone Martini, Paolo Uccello, Antonello da Messina and Pietro Torrigiano), I started from the de Vere version but revised it freely to bring it closer to Vasari’s original and to assist students by adding some light annotation. Similarly, the short section from Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata is much endebted to the edition by Jeffrey White in that excellent new resource, the I Tatti Renaissance Library, and can only claim any advantage in that it provides a little more footnoting than is the norm for that series.

I have put all these now on-line as a page on this website: you can find them under the heading ‘Resources on the Italian Renaissance‘, a few lines down on the right-hand side of this site’s homepage. I would naturally be grateful for any comments that you have – and even more interested to learn if you have found them helpful. I put them up in the hope that they can help others in their teaching: all I ask is that you acknowledge their source and let me know when you use them.

You can’t judge a Burckhardt by its cover

Can there be a less appropriate cover for Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy than this?

The cover to the audio book of Burckhardt, released in 2011

Admittedly, if this was an awards category, there would be stiff competition. There is, for instance, the image advertising an e-book version that seems to have mistaken Burckhardt for Huizinga: Or there is the 2003 edition which appears to have read the first pages, where the ‘despots of the fourteenth century’ (in the English translation – the noun in German is ‘Herricher’) are discussed, and (perhaps assuming the rest would be similar) thought a detail from the Lorenzetti brothers’ mid-trecento frescoes on good and bad government for the Republic of Siena might be the thing:

Any anachronism here pales besides that perpetrated by the audio book that I am promoting as the prize-winner. Perhaps the designer thought an image of Venus rising from the waves – any image – would fit, forgetful of Burckhardt’s claim that what made humanism was the revival of antiquity combined with ‘the genius of the Italian people’. Or perhaps a tyro assistant was sent off to find ‘you know, that birth of Venus picture’ and on a quick search found William Bouguereau’s painting. Never mind that it was produced in 1879, nineteen years after Burckhardt’s ‘essay’ was published, and a year later than the translation – still standard – by Samuel G. C. Middlemore (on whom, more another time).

Of course, it might be suggested that there is a deeper truth, in that the image demonstrates a nineteenth-century classicising tradition which so clearly reached back to the fifteenth century. Perhaps it could be defended by saying that to use the painting which Bouguereau so clearly could not shake from his mind would have been too obvious – though that has not stopped other cover-designers.

Aonia Edizioni (2011)

As Botticelli’s painting was iconic for the nineteenth century, so has it been in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, from Warhol to Lady Gaga (there is a useful gallery of its reuses on-line, to which so many could be added, like Marvin Bartley’s Jamaican re-imagining, to name just one). It stands for successive generations as the epitome of the Renaissance celebration of beauty and of love: what, then, could be more appropriate for Burckhardt’s volume? There is, however, an inconvenient fact: Burckhardt himself never mentions this painting; indeed, in his text, he does not mention once Sandro Botticelli. For Burckhardt, the artist of ‘The Birth of Venus’ and the ‘Primavera’ played a less substantial role than he did for his contemporaries like Bouguereau. In other words, a cover like this – and there are several others which take a work of Botticelli’s to conjure up Civilization‘s subject – projects onto the ‘classic’ work rather different constructions of the Renaissance, however distant they may be from Burckhardt’s conception.

Nor, on this count, is Botticelli the only inappropriate reference-point. For British audiences, the best-known cover of the work is probably that on the Penguin Classic:

The procession of richly dressed figures might seem to capture the extravagance of the Renaissance, and to be particularly apt when we remember this fresco of Bennozzo Gozzoli is in the chapel of the Medici family palace in Florence. What is more, the designer has taken a section from the cycle which includes the figure of the artist himself waving at the viewer – a symbol, if you want, of the painter’s individualism. Yet, this work too does not register in Burckhardt’s text and  both in this case and with Botticelli, the absence was not an accidental oversight. Neither artist was central to the Swiss historian’s encapsulation of what he saw to be the Renaissance, that paradoxical, Janus-faced movement which, in his depiction, has its heyday after Gozzoli was dead and Botticelli an old man – in the early sixteenth century, with the achievements of Leonardo and Michelangelo, each an embodiement of the ‘many-sided man’ whom Burckhardt celebrates as the apogee of Renaissance achievement.

This is to say that when The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is dressed up in any of the covers that we have seen, it comes in disguise. It gives a sense of what ‘speaks’ to the designer and the publisher of the Renaissance or of artistic achievement more generally, but there is little dialogue with the work of Burckhardt itself. Civilization certainly gave Europe a distorted, mis-shapen Renaissance, so maybe there is some justice in it being distorted itself in its many reprints, e-books and audio versions. The worry, however, is that it is not being done consciously and that there is a failure to recognise how different ‘our Renaissance’ is from his. Is the distance so great, in fact, that it is impossible for a publisher now to provide a cover which is appropriate to the work?

More on Greenblatt, Lucretius and Poggio, or waiting for the Renaissance

It is in the nature – it is, indeed, the delight – of discussions that they travel in directions that are unexpected, that the interaction of voices forms its own identity or, as it were, develops its own voice. And, so, yesterday, in the discussion of Stephen Greenblatt, Poggio and Lucretius, I had not anticipated we would end up placing Greenblatt’s The Swerve. How the Renaissance Began within the continuing (or perhaps revived) legacy of Jacob Burckhardt. I should probably have anticipated that something like that might happen, given we were sitting in the refined surroundings of Merton College, under the chairmanship of David Norbrook who had written, over twenty years ago, a seminal article on the associations in Greenblatt’s earlier works with Burckhardt (Raritan, 1989). Convinced, as I am, that Burckhardt constituted a wrong turn for Renaissance studies, I was hoping we could avoid his name, but I should have been prepared for how the discussion swerved. And, it certainly proved a fecund re-direction.

I was there to shed medieval darkness on the light of the early modern: to elucidate Greenblatt’s discussion by placing it within the historiography on Poggio Bracciolini. The outline of my narrative can be easily detected from the handout – talking of Poggio’s influence in England from the time when, while resident in London, he took an English mistress, to outlining the range of Poggios presented by scholarship in the last century: the book-hunter, the inventor of a scribal revolution, the proto-archaeologist – all of which gain some mention in The Swerve. What, I noted, was not present was Poggio the civic humanist. It does not matter for our present purposes what purchase remains in Hans Baron’s thesis of Burgerhumanismus or civic humanism, a concept most closely associated with Leonardo Bruni who was, as James Hankins has put it, Baron’s ‘Exhibit A’ for Baron’s interpretation. What matters is that a cluster of pro-Florentine attitudes – a re-dating of the city’s foundation, a questioning of whether princely government can ever be anything other than tyrannical – these attitudes were championed by Poggio as they were by Bruni. Greenblatt tends to draw distinctions between these two characters (e.g., p. 126), but if there were any duel between Florentine and ‘tyrannical’ humanists, Poggio could have stood as Bruni’s second. The absence of ‘civic humanism’ in Greenblatt’s depiction of Poggio has, yesterday’s discussion suggested, a wider significance.

That absence also, it strikes me now, separates The Swerve from a discussion of Poggio with which, in other ways, it has several similarities: the Life published in 1802 and written by William Shepherd. That Liverpudlian Unitarian Minister constructed his biography over a century before Baron began to envisage his thesis but in his work, as in those of his friend, William Roscoe, there is a pride in the achievements of a mercantile city that creates for them a strong link between their own Liverpool and the Florence of the quattrocento which they admired (but – and this is often counted against them – never saw). While this marks a difference from Greenblatt’s approach, there is a likeness in their style of presentation: Shepherd was criticised for the ‘tedious’ digressions from biography into wider cultural history in his Life – moments we might find the most interesting, and a method that is obviously there in Greenblatt. There are more specific parallels too: both react with a sense of incomprehension against the genre of invective in which Poggio and his contemporaries often immersed themselves; and both find Poggio praiseworthy at the moment that he praises the calm dignity of the heretic Jerome of Prague when sent to die in flames at the Council of Constance.

This is an iconic moment for both authors because it apparently speaks of a tradition of tolerance to which both are sympathetic. Shepherd as a non-conformist in a Protestant country was attracted to any signs that Poggio might have had doubts about his Catholicism; for Greenblatt, it is a moment that relates to the wider theme of his book, to the recovery of a text that he sees as a call to reject superstition or fanaticism – a call, it seems, that Greenblatt senses is very relevant for our modern world.

I have described the urgent call for an end to fanaticism as a product formed in the shadow of the lost twin towers, though, as was pointed out yesterday, that is an added context for an attitude that was present before September 2001. What I sense not just in Greenblatt’s latest book but in other writings to have appeared recently is an attempt to come to terms with not just the bombings of the 11^th September but also with the aftermath – the ‘war on terror’, the invasions, the ineffectual increase in security measures. The response is a revulsion with both those political policies and the heritage of western thinking that has allowed them to occur; an intellectual expression of ‘not in my name’ against recent governments and against longer cultural traditions. What I find problematic in this is that ‘not in my name’ is an expression of disengagement, washing one’s hands of responsibility that is, at the same time, a turning away or perhaps even turning a blind eye. Can responsibility be so easily cast off? It would clearly not have been in a culture of civic humanism, where engagement in one’s city was essential to it survival, let alone its thriving. A citizen may suffer exile but to choose to exile oneself, to retreat from the civic space, could be interpreted as an act of disloyalty.

It might, of course, be said that Poggio’s civic humanism was a comfortable position in support of the status quo, taken by someone who could distance himself from it, anyway, by his long-term presence in the ultimate court of monarchy, the papal curia. All this is true, though that should not let us sidestep the question of whether disengagement can ever be a responsible act. Meanwhile, if that criticism of Poggio has any traction, it in itself raises issues about Greenblatt’s depiction of him. The discussion yesterday highlighted elements that I glossed over or perhaps tried to screen out: it was emphasised how Poggio is presented as a masterless Renaissance individual in the Burckhardtian mould. This is harder to sustain if you focus on Poggio’s political career: his continual pursuit of a master, his achievement of status as a papal secretary in which role he wielded a significant influence. Here was not someone struggling to break free of the chains of tradition – something which Greenblatt perhaps senses and which explains his own ambivalent attitude towards his main character. If Poggio did achieve his own distinctive voice (as Riccardo Fubini describes it), it was in his own dialogues and what surprised me most in Greenblatt’s work was how these did not take a more central position, for their complex use of rhetoric and their use of irony makes them open to the sort of analysis at which Greenblatt excels; with closer attention, their ‘philosophy’ (for Poggio was often seen, in his writings, as a philosophus) could have provided a more subtle understanding of how this humanist related to and transformed the traditions in which he worked.

However that may be, let me conclude by lingering on the relationship between Greenblatt and Burckhardt. If is true that the latter is the context in which we should place the former – a context, I have admitted, I struggled to avoid applying to him but which the seminar discussion demonstrated was relevant – we would foreground the tale of individuality, though not as one triumphantly achieved in Poggio’s life. We would, however, also have to concede that there is something quite anti-Burckhardtian in The Swerve. In The Civilization, Burckhardt notoriously wanted to re-define humanism away from its classicising definition, emphasising it as an individualistic mindset which happened to be demonstrated through engagement with ancient texts. Greenblatt’s claim turns this on its head: Lucretius, his work implies, was so different, so other, that, if it did not sit on the desk before one, its contents would be unthinkable; present, it could unleash the changes in mindset that Burckhardt describes. In short, specific classical texts were not incidental to the Renaissance, but, rather, the Renaissance was impossible without them. If, though, this were true, and if we were to take a sober look at the limited influence of Lucretius in the Quattrocento or, indeed, in subsequent centuries, we might have to ask when the Renaissance is going to happen.

Greenblatt on Lucretius — and our friend Poggio

Lucretius is the name on everyone’s lips at the moment. Not only is there Alison Brown’s slim Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence but also Stephen Greenblatt’s lively and readable The Swerve, with its different sub-titles depending on which side of the Atlantic you live: in the big, brash United States, the tale of the ‘rediscovery’ of Lucretius is about ‘how the world became modern’; among the diffident British for whom periphrasis is a way of life, it is merely ‘how the Renaissance began’.

Merely? Even the British sub-title involves a grand claim. And if we are to associate the Renaissance with one newly popular text, most would not choose the admittedly seductive poetry of Lucretius but the helpful guides to oratory of Quintilian or Cicero, or some of the latter’s speeches. But, then, it seems that Lucretius is seen to speak to our atomised post-po-mo selves, wracked with fears and self-loathing as we struggle to make sense of our place in the shadow of the lost Twin Towers.

With Lucretius, of course, must come reference — if only passing — to the humanist who brought him back into the world, Poggio Bracciolini, with whom I have long acquaintance. What Greenblatt provides is more than a cursory nod: Lucretius is the hero of his book, but Poggio is certainly its main character. His book has been reviewed well, if not kindly, in The Washington Post; I myself am attending a discussion on the book, chaired by David Norbrook, this afternoon. I will be beginning the proceedings, in fact, with a short discussion on ‘Stephen Greenblatt and other English-speaking admirers of Poggio Bracciolini’ — I will not second-guess what I will say, but I will provide you with a copy of my handout.

Roma caput mundi

I have been chided for not adding anything to this site recently. It is not that I have refrained from writing; simply that the well-turned phrases are composed in my mind. That, and the recent distractions of being in Rome, albeit briefly.

The Rinascimento a Roma exhibition, held in the cramped space of the Palazzo Sciarra, tells the familiar tale of exuberant creativity in the generation of Michelangelo and Raphael, followed by despair in the wake of the Sack of Rome and then the renewed religious fervour we call the Counter-Reformation. To be fair, some of the show’s display might raise questions about that well-known narrative: the desolation of 1527 did not stop Maarten van Heemskerck travelling there a few years later and painting a penitent Jerome surrounded by a capriccio of the gargantuan remains of ancient Rome; Paul III saw no conflict between austere piety and the ostentation of his family residence, the Palazzo Farnese. But the exhibition appears comfortable living in a familiar world of clichés.

A cliché about clichés is that there are oft-repeated because they have a kernel of truth. So it may be: an early section of the exhibition talks of Rome in the early sixteenth century being the centre of the world, the caput mundi. I had seen evidence to support this statement just a few days earlier. Within the embrace of the ancient circular church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, out on the Celian Hill, beyond SS Giovanni and Paolo, there is a memorial slab to a member of the curia, the Hungarian Janos Lazai, who died on 17th August 1523. The inscription beneath his feet draws attention to the fact of his foreignness and asks the viewer not to wonder how he came to be here — for Rome is the homeland of everyone.

Inscription on the monument to Janos Lazai, Santo Stefano Rotondo, Rome

Rome as a universal homeland — acknowledgement, surely, even in the first years of the Reformation, of its long-standing status as caput mundi. And, yet, what struck me was that the author of the lines imagined that the viewer might be surprised to see a Hungarian here, and might need to be told Romana est patria omnium. Was this particularly trite when it was written or was it expressing a truth only then becoming to be acknowledged?

Of course, Rome as the centre of the then only church had a long charisma. Even in the Avignonese years, it was still a centre for pilgrimage and it was promoted as such by the declaration of a jubilee in 1350, when travel to the relevant sites would gain the pilgrim plenary indulgence. And during the Schism, still the devout would make their way to worship at the apostolic shrines — so much so in 1400 that, in effect, an unofficial jubilee occurred.

Yet, at the same time, the papacy’s grasp on Rome was weak and liable to slip, as it did when Eugenius IV had to feel the city up the Tiber, his boat being pelted with stones.  It was over a decade before he returned to his ‘capital’. His successor, Nicholas V, worked to glorify the city in architecture and ritual — he declared a jubilee for 1450 — but this did not save him from the threat of conspiracy in 1453. His courtiers celebrated Rome as the centre of the world; his successors continued his policy but one wonders how permanently a pope felt secure in his palace in a restive city, which for most of them, was alien. Perhaps, even in the early sixteenth century, the repeated statements of Rome’s pre-eminence were less an expression of an obvious truth than an aspiration, a pious desire never quite rid of doubt. Rome was as much a project as it was a place.