Memory, History, and Autobiography in Early Modern Towns in East and West [1 ed.] 9781443881975, 9781443877657

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Memory, History, and Autobiography in Early Modern Towns in East and West

Memory, History, and Autobiography in Early Modern Towns in East and West Edited by

Vanessa Harding and Kōichi Watanabe

Memory, History, and Autobiography in Early Modern Towns in East and West Edited by Vanessa Harding and Kōichi Watanabe This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Vanessa Harding, Kōichi Watanabe and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7765-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7765-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Kǀichi Watanabe, translated by Machi Sasai Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Vanessa Harding Part I: Autobiography Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 Dwellers and Their Self-Awareness in the Metropolis of Edo Reiji Iwabuchi, translated by Hisashi Kuboyama Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 Civic Consciousness, Urban Experiences and Personal Identities in Urban France from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution François-Joseph Ruggiu Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 The Intelligentsia’s Perception of Itself and Society in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Seoul: Case Studies of Park Je Ga and Sim No Soong Hyun Young Kim, translated by Sung Hee Kim Part II: Memory Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 77 The Self, Family and the Social Group in the Memory of Early Modern Japanese Towns Kǀichi Watanabe, translated by Hisashi Kuboyama

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Table of Contents

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 95 Constructing the Self and Constructing the Civic in Provincial Urban England, c. 1660-1800 Rosemary Sweet Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 109 Memory, History, and the Individual in the Civic Context: Early Modern London Vanessa Harding Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 121 Transcending the Self, Constructing a Collective Memory: The Birth of a Civic Consciousness in Early Modern Venice Dorit Raines Contributors ............................................................................................. 135

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 4-1 The treasure storehouse and the monument. Fig. 4-2 The special box for shuinjǀ. Fig. 7-1 Rafain Caresini, Cronaca, written between 1383-1386, Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 770 (=7795). Fig. 7-2 The first page of the Diarii by Marin Sanudo (1466-1536), Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 228 (=9215). Fig. 7-3 Cronica Veneciana e Cronica Foscara, chronicle written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 2773.

PREFACE

This book publishes in English seven papers from an international symposium titled ‘Memory of Individuals and Groups in Early Modern Towns’ held on 27th and 28th September 2014 at the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo. The symposium also included two comments focusing on Chinese history and Islamic history respectively. The direct trigger for this symposium was the International Research Seminar ‘Approaches to “Private Documents”’, hosted by the ‘Multilateral Comparative Study on Documents from the 9th to the 19th Centuries’ project (2010-2014, principal investigator: Kǀichi Watanabe) mentioned below. At this seminar, held in 2012 in Tokyo, we had the opportunity to understand one aspect of research into ego-documents through FrançoisJoseph Ruggiu’s paper.i Looking for a suitable theme for the symposium to be held in the project’s final year, I wondered whether combining research on ego-documents with the study of memory, with which we are more familiar, could be an interesting theme. A year after the seminar, I had a meeting with Vanessa Harding, Rosemary Sweet, Filippo de Vivo and Hyun Young Kim at the University of London. We agreed in broad terms on holding a symposium on memory in early modern cities. I had observed, through the seminar already mentioned, the trend in the historiography of early modern Western Europe to investigate how strongly individuals were supported by families or social groups. This trend was predictable since I had understood that the classical idea of an individual as a disassembled atom had long been relativized. In Japan too, the individual, in the classical sense, was relativized some time ago. However, in the historiography of early modern Japan, scholars have long dismissed the concept of the individual in favour of a more collective personal identity: he/she only existed as the head of the family, his wife, his child and so on. As a rule, any official positions were considered to be taken by the head of the family. At the beginning of the present century, however, a new trend of study appeared, looking at persons, not families. In this way, the established idea that people were subsumed into families has been relativized, and the individual emerges in contemporary society. This raised the possibility that both historiographical approaches could meet and engage with each other.

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Among the European contributors, Vanessa Harding, who also contributed to an earlier project of mine, has written a new introduction for readers in the English-speaking world. I am grateful to her generosity. Rosemary Sweet has studied memory in the city in the past since the 1990s, and I asked her to join the symposium with an introduction from Yoh Kawana, a Professor at Tǀhoku University, whose study areas include the history of early modern Western European cities. I am grateful to both of them. Filippo de Vivo, who was not able to give a paper at the symposium, introduced Dorit Raines and she readily agreed to join the symposium. I appreciate her effort to prepare her paper in a short span of time. I would also like to express my gratitude to two contributors from East Asia, Hyun Young Kim and Reiji Iwabuchi, both of whom I have worked with in the past. The mother tongues of contributors vary. Four papers concerning Europe were written in English. The other three papers on East Asia were translated into English from other languages: Kim’s paper was originally written in Korean and Iwabuchi’s paper and mine were in Japanese. I am grateful to Sung Hee Kim and Hisashi Kuboyama for their translation. The success of the symposium is owed to two project researchers, Machi Sasai, who majors in the history of medieval English cities, and Jirǀ Araki, who majors in the history of early modern Japanese villages. All the practical business for editing this book including contact with Cambridge Scholars Publishing was done by Sasai. I really appreciate her work. My thanks go to many other people who helped me in various fields. I am grateful to Mina Ishizu, researcher in early modern English economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who worked as an interpreter at the meeting at the University of London. I am also indebted to those who proofread papers written by authors whose mother tongue is not English: Séamus Moloney for the papers of Iwabuchi, Kim and Raines, Anne McCulloch for Ruggiu’s paper, and Michael Brooman for mine. I am grateful to two postgraduate students at Ochanomizu University, Matsurika Isobe, whose major is medieval French history, and Ai Saito, whose major is medieval English history. They formatted the manuscripts. A version of this book will be published in Japanese for readers in Japan. It will include translated versions of papers by Ruggiu, Kim, Sweet, Harding and Raines as well as the two papers on Japanese history partially revised for Japanese readers. Moreover, two other articles based on the comments at the symposium will be included. Therefore, while this present book in English can be regarded as the proceedings of the symposium, the Japanese book will be an independent publication

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developed from the symposium. This means that this book and the Japanese version will to some extent have different characters as well as content. This book is one of the achievements of the ‘Multilateral Comparative Study on Documents from the 9th to the 19th Centuries’ project (20102014, principal investigator: Kǀichi Watanabe), which constitutes a part of the National Institutes for the Humanities’ inter-institutional research project ‘Comprehensive Research on Human Cultural Resources.’ I wish to thank the National Institutes for the Humanities for adopting this research project. Last but not least, I am deeply grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which willingly took on the publication despite the fact that the proposal came from so many miles away. Kǀichi Watanabe Tokyo Translated by Machi Sasai

Notes i

See papers by Jin-Han Park and François-Joseph Ruggiu, their question-andanswer session, and summary of general discussion in ‘3rd International Research Seminar: Approaches to “Private Documents”’, in The Multilateral Comparative Study on Documents from the 9th to the 19th Centuries Annual Report 2012, National Institutes for the Humanities, 2013.

INTRODUCTION VANESSA HARDING

Over centuries and in most societies, towns have been the locus of literary activity, historical investigation and writing, and the conscious memorialization of the past. The town itself plays a part in this, not just as subject, but as conditioning environment and sometimes as censor of what can be written. Towns have been credited with freeing the individual to articulate himself, to construct an identity, but the voices that emerge often have a distinctive urban accent. Early modern societies in east and west, where manuscript traditions continued to flourish alongside the newer medium of print, offer rich examples of the way that personal selffashioning could use the materials of memory and tradition, and conversely, how the individual could write himself into civic or collective history. The essays in this volume, ranging in focus from Renaissance Venice to nineteenth-century Edo (Tokyo), and from capital cities to provincial towns, aim both to illustrate particular cases of this kind of symbiotic development, and to illuminate larger questions about the construction of memory. An important concern for the symposium and collection was the relationship between the individual and the group and the very different historiographies of this topic in east and west. While historians of western cultures have for some time been exploring the construction of the individual and the ‘rise’ of ‘individualism’, historians of eastern societies have tended to focus on the family and the group, and to see the early modern individual primarily in terms of his identity as member of a group. As these essays show, however, there is not a simple dichotomy: eastern historians are paying more attention to the individual, the conscious self, who emerges more fully realised against the background of the group, while western historians are re-emphasising the importance of family and group identity in the formation of the individual. In both east and west, the town offers a prime arena to explore these relationships and their development. All seven essays were written with the same concerns in mind, and seek to address the same issues, even if the worlds on which they focus

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Introduction

may seem to be far apart. All the essays, to some degree, discuss the historiography of their own topic or focus. The potential of comparison for generating new insights was central to planning the symposium at which these papers were given; it is important that the collection is being published in both English and Japanese, and that each of the papers was written within the culture it explores, so that readers will be able to compare less-familiar approaches and historiographies with those they know better. Obviously, translation presents challenges for the discussion of both concepts and phenomena, but we believe that it is possible, in spite of social, political, economic and cultural differences between the societies being studied, to find commonalities and consistencies as well as striking contrasts. The geographical span of the collection is wide but not comprehensive: two essays each on England and Japan, one each on France, Italy, and Korea. We certainly do not suggest that other countries and historical traditions could not be compared with equal value and interest, and indeed hope this collection may encourage such comparisons. ‘Early modern’ is taken in its broadest sense as a phase of development rather than a calendar period, in order to allow the juxtaposition of studies separated in chronological time. What early modern societies seem to share is an urban sector of comparatively small (if increasing) size but with a disproportionate cultural and social influence. Before the contemporary era, only a minority of almost any national population lived in towns, but as Ruggiu notes, urban-dwellers predominate among early modern firstperson writers. The first section of the collection, with essays by Iwabuchi, Ruggiu, and Kim, under the heading ‘Autobiography’, aims to trace the relation between the individual’s realization of himself in writing—whether in autobiography in the classic sense or one of the broader genres of ‘personal writing’—and the urban background from which he came, while the second, with essays by Watanabe, Sweet, Harding, and Raines, entitled ‘Memory’, brings in the city as an active agent in its own autobiography. ‘History’ is fundamental to all the contributions, both because of the brief for the symposium and collection, and because of the background from which we all write.

Autobiography An important theme through this section of the book is the way in which the experience of the town stimulates and encourages selfconsciousness and shapes the self that emerges. Whether the individual

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sees himself as an insider, an outsider, or even an exile, the town plays a part in his formation. The essays in this section show how the town influences writing about the self, both directly, through the lived urban experience of the writer, and through the genre of writing about the town. The latter provides topics and models for more autobiographical writing and allows its authors the freedom to express and present themselves while ostensibly writing about something else. At a practical level the town supplies education or literary training, professional employment, literate company; at a more abstract one it offers an array of events, experiences, features, characters and characteristics from which the individual can fashion his narrative of himself. At the same time, however, the urban individual is not entirely freestanding: he remains a family member, member of a class or caste, with a personal history as well as the historical context within which he finds himself. Most of the autobiographical, first-person, or ‘personal’ writings discussed here are consciously constructed, through a process of selection and arrangement. Some are didactic or homiletic in purpose, aiming to convey valuable moral truths to the reader, especially the reader of a future generation; some construct the self in dialogue with a personified interlocutor. The Korean Sim No Soong exemplifies both of these, with his autobiography Jajeosilgi intended for posterity, and the lengthy ‘exchange diary’, A Collection of One Hundred Daily Self-reflections (Irilbaekseongjip), which he wrote explicitly for exchange with his brother. Family is an important presence in these dialogues. The broader genre of writing about the town usually also has a particular audience in mind. In the case of Harada’s Edo Jiman, a description of or introduction to Edo, discussed by Iwabuchi, the reader is envisaged as the visiting samurai, anxious not to appear rustic or ignorant in the sophisticated milieu of the metropolis. While apparently effacing himself, the author in fact places himself at the apex of a triangle of mutual relationships, mediating the interaction of the samurai visitor and the town itself. Edo is defined by what the author thinks it worth noting, and his portrait of the city reflects his own preferences, choices, and practices. And as Ruggiu’s essay shows, even those writing from rather than about the town reveal themselves, in their silences as well as their explications. Edo Jiman, in its present form, is the result of a sequence of compilation and copying, but the authorial voice still comes through strongly; he is by no means an impartial guide. He is conscious that his own identity as samurai has shaped his encounters in Edo: people were

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Introduction

polite and helpful to him because of his rank. By implication, the same will be true for his readers, and there is no need to discuss the common people with whose problems they will not be concerned. The author of Edo Jiman takes it for granted that his readers, like himself, are familiar with Wakayama, and that the best way to explain Edo to them is by comparing it with Wakayama—in climate, in social custom and ritual, in language, and most of all in food. While he expresses a personal preference for styles of flower arranging, for example, food is the subject that most clearly reveals his likes and dislikes. His tastes have been formed by the food of his homeland, and while he can praise certain aspects of Edo’s food culture, on the whole he—and he assumes the visitor —prefers the familiar to the exotic. As Iwabuchi notes, however, change is possible: after spending time in Edo, the author of Edo Jiman begins to like the food more, and accepts that the urban environment has altered him. But the close connection between food and identity, and the way in which eating particular kinds of food constitutes the individual both physically and spiritually, remains important. The same attention to food, though in this case in the familiar trope of urban abundance, is found in Park Je Ga’s writing about Seoul. His Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital report on the markets and goods for sale, including the many varieties of grains, spices, vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish. Park Je Ga perhaps situates himself as an onlooker or observer rather than a participant in the urban bustle, but descriptions of food markets and the street-food stalls always conjure up the image of the consumer and remind the reader that he or she has a body as well as a mind. Sim No Soong also cites the kinds of foods available in Seoul, in his case in a litany of loss and longing for the town from which he is exiled, his Daily Records of the Exile in the South; he even seeks to reproduce Seoul food in Gijang. For him, food stands for the urban resident he used to be. Regional variation in food and diet was certainly true of Ancien Régime France, but for those who lived in particular towns—as apposed to those who visited and commented on different towns—it seems to have been taken for granted. Also in the background of autobiographical writings emerging from within towns was the urban landscape. Ruggiu draws attention to the scarcity of topographical detail in such writings, contrasting with the profusion of chronological incident and reference. Visitors might remark on buildings, landmarks, routes and sights, but for those who lived there these passed without comment. Present-day historians are very conscious of the physicality of the early modern urban environment and the ways in which it might have shaped the lives and

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perceptions of its inhabitants, but for those inhabitants themselves it was below the level of everyday awareness. As Ruggiu notes, the personal writings of eighteenth-century townspeople that he studies ‘do not provide a precise account of the spatial practices of their authors’; from the point of view of their inhabitants, towns and cities were made more of history than of geography. Even phenomena as obvious as the walls and ramparts shaping and defining many towns play no part in the life-stories narrated by their residents. It takes an outsider, or a consciously distanced observer, like Park Je Ga in his Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital, to see the city as a material object, its roof-ridges and roof-tiles like ‘carp… swimming in the swelling water’. An important theme of the interaction between urbanity and autobiographical identity is the perception of the town as the place for selfrealization. This is sometimes explicit, as told by Iwabuchi in the case of the sons of Hachibei, from a wealthy farming family. The three eldest sons all struggled against the grip of family, leaving for Edo—‘absconding’, in the eyes of the family—and returning. The eldest, Heiroku, on whom the burdens of expectation and obligation weighed most heavily, sought to renounce his future as head of the family, but did not succeed; indeed, he co-operated with his father and another brother in putting pressure on Rynjsuke, the second son, who nevertheless succeeded in settling in Edo and fulfilling his scholarly ambitions there. Rynjsuke supported the third brother, Hanji, in his attempts to leave and settle in Edo, but the latter eventually returned home and took on the headship of the family. The letters exchanged between the brothers articulate the conflicting desires and constraints: Heiroku said he was prepared to accept the loss of status that separation from the family would entail, Rynjsuke urged Hanji to ‘stay in Edo however hard it might be’ if he wanted to realise his talents, and himself chose to stay even though his scholarly calling brought him little financial reward. For all three, Edo offered tantalizing possibilities and opportunities which life at home foreclosed. Watanabe makes a similar point in his essay in Part II of the volume, in his discussion of the role the samurai Shǀsuke played in mediating between his hometown and the capital. Both the figures discussed in Hyun Young Kim’s essay produced major autobiographical works in middle or later life which show some marks of influence from their background in the Korean metropolis. The poet and government official Park Je Ga enjoyed the benefits of Seoul in his youth, especially the opportunity to belong to the intellectual circle of the White Pagoda group. Metropolitan culture was a stepping-stone to

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Introduction

cosmopolitan awareness, since through contacts in Seoul he gained direct or indirect access to Chinese and Japanese culture. It also freed him, to some extent, from the constraints imposed upon his career and social ambitions by his birth as the son of a concubine: in Seoul, he could engage with a range of others for whom birth was not the prime consideration. His later desire for a country retirement was based, not on dislike of the town, but on the fact that even in the town he could not entirely break free from his background. Despite the king’s favour and his own abilities, high office was closed to him; as an alternative, therefore, he hoped to pursue his writing and the life of the mind in a modest rural retreat. He took with him, however, his contacts with a wider world: his engagement with Chinese intellectuals, for example, detailed in Anthology of International Exchange (Hojeojip) compiled from his own memoirs by his son, can be traced back to contacts made during his life in Seoul. Sim No Soong, half a generation younger than Park Je Ga, likewise owed much the metropolitan milieu in which he was formed, though he moved in different literary circles. He was more successful in his government career, and did not suffer the disillusion and frustration that Park Je Ga experienced. Political reverses brought a five-year exile to Gijang in mid-career, but this also stimulated the production of a major work of autobiography in the form of a journal. Although one of his works in exile was called Joyful Writings in Mountain and Sea (Sanhaepilhui), as noted above he clearly missed and longed for the sophisticated and cultured life of the city, including its familiar foods. Both Park Je Ga and Sim No Soong belonged to highly cultivated and literate circles, where writing in a number of genres was both expected and celebrated. Both were responsible for a remarkable quantity and quality of outputs, but the desire to position themselves in their society through their writings is very noticeable. Park Je Ga, perhaps because of the facts of his birth, seems to have valued voluntary friendship particularly highly, referring to friends as ‘brothers without blood ties’. His autobiography, Sojeon, was written not for family reasons but to introduce himself to Chinese intellectual circles. While he married and had a son, who indeed collected and edited some of his writings, the group with which he most identified himself was a community of intellectual interests. Sim No Soong, more conventionally, identified himself with family and its chronology. Writing consciously for posterity, he praised autobiography as ‘a better source through which the following generations can learn about their ancestors’. He wrote a self-chronicle or chronology, Jajeoginyeon, in part at least because his younger brother’s death deprived him of both a literary correspondent and his expected future biographer. Subsequently he

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wrote a fuller autobiography, Jajeosilgi. For both, autobiography is not fundamentally about interiority: it is about communicating and presenting the self to a chosen audience. The connection between urbanity and the articulation of identity is underlined in the second section of Ruggiu’s essay, where he considers the expression of civic ambition in autobiographical writing and the formation of civic consciousness. Unlike the Korean government officials, whose desire for office is freely admitted, Ruggiu’s Ancien Régime townsmen do not confess ambition in so many words. In that, they conform to the urban tradition in which office is an obligation to be accepted rather than pursued, and the complementary one in which appointees are expected to disclaim ambition and act out a show of reluctance before accepting office. But it is clear that early modern urban culture prized high civic office and gave respect and honour to those who held it; it is not surprising that citizens aspired to such status. They had internalised both the set of values which placed high civic office at the pinnacle of a man’s career, and the discourses of service and self-effacement which surrounded it. If ambition could not therefore be spoken it is still perceptible, in the relief and pleasure with which appointment to office was privately greeted. Once achieved, though, the satisfactions of honour and status could be enjoyed: Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay wrote frankly that office-holding ‘gratified my vanity and my inclination’. Attaining civic office reinforced and fulfilled his sense of himself. Sweet, in Part II of the volume, shows also that in early modern England, beginning to make or keep personal chronicles often coincided with achieving a civic ambition. It is striking that, in Ruggiu’s account, some of these traditions of selfdenial and dissimulation in approaching office were dissolved by the Revolution, which brought ‘a sudden widening of…political and social horizons’. Men were freer to admit ambition and to pursue it; civic politics became sharply competitive and partisan. It was legitimate to seek office in pursuit of a political rather than a personal agenda. Pierre-Philippe Candy’s career and wealth prospects expanded, while Eustache Hua acknowledged his manoeuvres in pursuit of his ambition—unfulfilled, as it turned out—to gain elected office in his hometown of Mantes. The essays in this section deal in different ways with the consciousness of the townsman, and the way this can be traced in his writings. As noted, these do not have to be first-person or explicitly autobiographical to reveal the influence of the city on the individual; nor does he have to show full awareness of this influence. The tension between collective identity—

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Introduction

family, caste, or group—and the individual is an important concern, revealed in widely differing contexts.

Memory The memory of the individual, in the form both of recollection and memorialization, is the principal material from which his or her personal history or autobiography is constructed. Without memory, there is no fixed identity, and towns and corporate institutions need memories and histories to anchor their identity as much as individuals do. As Sweet says, ‘In a sense these [urban] chronicles and annals can be seen as an “egodocument” of the civic self’, while Raines notes the Venetian attempt to narrate the city’s history through the figure of the Doge, ‘in a sort of collective res gestae of the rulers’. But the town does not write itself: town histories had authors, in both senses—agents and recorders—and the roles often overlap. This section moves to consider the memory of the town, and how the individual helped to shape that memory and even to inscribe himself within it. The essays focus on the interplay between the personal and the collective, and in some instances on that between the family group and the civic collective. There is a long tradition in both east and west of writing town histories or biographies. The motive was often said to be modestly practical—so that things would be remembered which ought not to be forgotten—but there were larger issues at play too. Town historians might be inspired with a desire to celebrate their town and secure its rightful place in a larger chronology, or against a constellation of other towns—a motivation that as is well known can lead to the invention of detail or documentation to fill out an unsatisfactory historical record. Or the histories might be written or commissioned from outside, as a means of gaining knowledge and control, as in the case of the castle towns of Tokugawa Japan. Competition for control of the story was natural: the official, civic, history of Venice told through the Doges was refashioned from within, but successfully asserted its dominance as the prevailing narrative over other forms or versions of the city’s history. Writing town history was never a completed project. The passage of time added new events to be chronicled; new approaches to history might prompt revisions of style and content; new political circumstances might require correction of the older narrative. As Venice evolved from an island-republic to a territorial empire, its sense of its own history changed, and the story had to be retrospectively reshaped to connect with the new reality. Manuscript town chronicles in England evolved over the fifteenth

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and sixteenth centuries, as Harding and Sweet show, in both form and coverage, and with many hands contributing and updating. They were influenced by the larger project of writing a national history, the Tudor reconstruction of the past, and by the explosion into print of chronicles, annals, chorographies, and county histories. In the case of collections of town laws and customs, a new generation of townsmen might be inspired to continue the work of their predecessors, ensuring that the civic memory embodied in these collections remained alive and relevant. Despite their best efforts, however, nobody could guarantee that future generations would value or preserve their work, or even have a proper understanding of it. Notwithstanding the purposeful collection of historical materials in seventeenth-century Banshnj Miki to create a civic memory, only a century later much had been forgotten and a renewed effort was needed to assert the achievement of the past. Town histories had authors, and most were not reluctant to assert their authorship. Thomas Damet and Henry Manship put their names to their books on Great Yarmouth, Nathaniel Bacon to his on Ipswich. The contents of the books themselves served as an example to future generations, but so too did the activity of their authors: in claiming credit for their effort they sought to show that was worthy of imitation. Print gave a particular point to the assertion of authorship, since its wider circulation brought recognition beyond the limited circles of the urban élite. It also, however, opened up the author to challenge and criticism. John Stow, compiler and epitomist of English chronicles in the late sixteenth century, engaged in a running battle with Richard Grafton, another chronicle-publisher, in which each attacked the other’s reputation, reliability, and critical insight. The role of author gave the opportunity to correct or rebalance history in the author’s own interest. Sogawa Yojiemon, author of two successive versions of Banshnj Miki’s civic history, actually perpetrated a falsehood in his family’s favour when he wrote that they had kept the keys to the town storehouse hereditarily and by implication continuously, when in fact they had had to cede them to another family on account of financial problems. John Stow put much of himself into his Survey of London (1598), speaking often in the first person and alluding to events in his own life; he also explicitly refused to commemorate those who themselves had defaced the memorials of others. He did not present himself as an actor in the historical drama, however, as John Watts of Reading did, writing to ensure that ‘my own transactions during the time I was twice Mayor of the Corporation of Reading’ were recorded for posterity.

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Venetian writers seem to have stepped back from this kind of selfpromotion: according to Raines, ‘astonishing as it may sound, the writers rarely included in their narration any personal testimony. They may have commented sometimes harshly on different situations, but rarely told their own story’. Instead, the individual was subsumed into the civic, so that in telling the city’s story the chronicler told his own. As Raines shows, the myth of Venice was not merely a myth of origins, but one of cohesion, harmony, and unanimity. The alternative to the civic was not the individual but the family, so that the official narrative was complemented and counterpointed by family-centred histories. Histories written for personal use and interest, including memoirs and autobiographies, might be adopted into a more official narrative at a later date. The English historian John Strype, who revised and updated Stow’s Survey of London, certainly read Henry Machyn’s personal manuscript ‘cronacle’ as well as the versions of Stow in print. The memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon was intended for himself and his descendants, and dealt with topics of personal interest such as his own ill-health; he cannot have expected it to gain wide currency, and it remained in obscurity for over a century, but it was ‘rediscovered’ in the nineteenth century and given official status as a key element in the story of Kawagoe. As this suggests, those who wrote town histories relied on a variety of sources. The most important were obviously the archives of the city, to which civic officials had access but which might be closed to others. The city’s memory was embodied in its written records, which might include foundation charters and records of privileges, civic legislation, records of court proceedings, accounts, minutes of meetings, and correspondence and interactions with the outside world. Obviously, the ability to read these historical documents, and to retrieve records as needed, was essential. The town clerk mediated between the archive and the civic government; familiarly acquainted with the form and content of the archive, he was often the one to digest its contents into historical narrative, as the town clerks of Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, and later Norwich did. Although the title of ‘Remembrancer’ in the city of London denoted a senior legal official rather than the town clerk, it marked the importance of recollection and precedent in defence of the city’s privileges. All institutions are to some extent protective of their ‘secrets’. In Venice, while the medieval civic archive was voluminous and wellorganised, the increasingly secretive and bureaucratic structures of government meant that access to the city’s records was strictly limited. As a city-state, of course, Venice’s records contained much about its relations

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with other states and entities, often sensitive diplomatic material including confidential ambassadorial reports, but the desire for ideological control of the narrative was an important motive for closing the archive to outsiders. As Raines notes, ‘this decision certainly limited chroniclers wishing to accurately narrate the history of Venice’. The town of ƿmi Hachiman had an added incentive to keep its letter or shuinjǀ from Tokugawa Ieyasu private, since the letter did not specifically mention exemption from land tax, a key privilege claimed by the town. As Watanabe notes, it was important to obscure the fact that this document did not substantiate the claim. Other sources for town histories derived from private individuals, such as the historical materials collected by the bibliophile Richard Smyth, subsequently utilised by Strype in his Survey of London. As already noted, the memorandum of the seventeenth-century Kawagoe merchant Enomoto Yazaemon was a private document, and only became incorporated into official histories of the town in the nineteenth century. The actual form in which memory was embodied—an object or artefact, a practice, a text, and if a text in what genre or format—could vary; although here we are principally concerned with texts, they themselves had a material existence and could acquire iconic object status. Archives and muniments, of course, had long been kept in treasuries, as is illustrated in Watanabe’s account of the preservation of the core documents of ƿmi Hachiman in ‘a specially made box which contained four-stacked sub-boxes’. The records of Banshnj Miki were likewise kept in a ‘treasure storehouse’ (hǀzǀ). In English towns, archives were kept in locked coffers with the keys often distributed among officials, and the keykeeper bore both honour and responsibility. But histories, even though secondary to the sources from which they had been compiled, could also merit such treatment: Banshnj Miki added its eighteenth-century history to the archive, and in nineteenth-century Kawagoe the seventeenth-century manuscript Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon was placed in a paulownia box, guarded by inscriptions praising its value and urging its safe-keeping, thus elevating it to the status of primary source or even relic: ‘This special box was made to keep the book from insects and to prevent it from getting scattered away. May this collection not be lost in time’. The materials of memory included visual images and artefacts as well as written texts. As Sweet notes, civic portraiture in early modern England and its role in civic memory have been studied by Robert Tittler. Enomoto Yazaemon commissioned a portrait of himself, and portraits played a part in Japanese merchant families’ practice of ancestor-worship. Kim’s

12

Introduction

protagonists, however, preferred the written portrait to the visual, as a truer representation, but nevertheless admitted the importance of the physical image or visualization in the commemoration of the individual. Venetian family histories made much play with heraldic representation, a clear allusion to lineage and noble descent over many generations, central to the identity of the Venetian ruling class, and perhaps symptomatic of their elevation of the family over the individual. Respect for images of authority, whether rulers or their symbolization in coats of arms, figured in both east and west. In England, town seals and coats of arms embodied corporate identity, but the memory of the town might be also be manifested in a monument or building. The architecture of town halls and civic buildings expressed wealth, power, solidity, and endurance, commemorating the past and planning for the future. Historical information might be literally inscribed on such a monument, and even if later generations were unable to read the words, as Watanabe thinks possible in the case of Banshnj Miki’s memorial, the sense of authority expressed may have lingered. The meaning of physical monuments was reinforced when they served as the focus of ritual activity, or as a stage in an urban perambulation or pilgrimage. The town of ƿmi Hachiman promoted the remembrance of the Tokugawa Ieyasu, grantor of its privileges, by establishing a close relationship with Asakusa Tǀzenji temple in Edo, visiting it to pray to Ieyasu’s sacred portrait and fundraising for the temple. Civic ritual, investing an official with authority and formally presenting him to the people, was of enormous importance in European towns and cities, from the great Venetian celebration of the ‘marriage of the sea’ from which the city’s wealth derived, to the more modest mayoral processions of English provincial towns. Historical scenes, pageants, and reference were common in these ceremonies, sometimes literally re-enacting history on the city’s streets, reviving and reinforcing memories of the past. When subsequently these memorializing performances were themselves memorialised— accounts of royal entries feature prominently in town chronicles, while John Stow is our major source for London’s medieval ceremony of the Midsummer Watch—the circle of history and remembrance was complete.

Conclusion To conclude, perhaps the most self-conscious urban identity discussed in this collection is that of Edokko, a quality shared by permanent residents of the city. Birth and upbringing in Edo were essential but not sufficient: moral and cultural values were needed too. Writing and reading about Edo

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helped to construct and communicate Edokko among the urban élite. It could be claimed autobiographically, and might be attributed to others, especially by outsiders who did not possess it. Strictly unique and untranslatable, Edokko nevertheless stands for that compound of self, family, group, and civic identity that characterised the early modern townsman and that constituted him the author—in both senses—of the town’s history.

PART I: AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE DWELLERS AND THEIR SELF-AWARENESS IN THE METROPOLIS OF EDO REIJI IWABUCHI TRANSLATED BY HISASHI KUBOYAMA

Introduction Based on ego-document studies in Europe, I examined the family precepts of Kitamura Hisatomi, a provincial merchant who had a shop in Edo, and demonstrated that the family in Japan created and then preserved private papers with a view to continuing their family.1 I also used diaries of Edo kimban bushi 2 to consider the realities of their daily lives and pointed out that the entries in their diaries were meant to be types of reports of which would show examples for their families and colleagues to follow.3 There exist a number of private papers from the Edo period, and they were all written with their families in mind. Diaries were not used for self-expression: literary works such as poetry served that purpose. However, as Kǀichi Watanabe discusses in his essay, writing about the individual self does not necessarily contradict belonging to a family and a group. My essay aims to consider the self-perception of those who lived in the metropolis of Edo by examining ego-documents of newcomers to Edo and also works of those who lived or stayed there for a long time. There exist many journals of short-term sojourners, but that is not the focus of this essay. Instead, the focus is on the life experience of people in the metropolis.4

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Dwellersȹthe emergence and dissemination of the sense of dwelling in a metropolis It was not until the late seventeenth century that Edo became a city and came to be regarded as one of the three major cities in Japan, along with Kyoto and Osaka.5 In the late eighteenth century, the word Edokko began to appear in literary works. 6 Matsunosuke Nishiyama has studied the word and identified about fifty examples of its usage from its first appearance in senrynj in 1771 (Meiwa 8). 7 All the usages of the word share several characteristics of Edokko: 1. born in the same city as the Tokugawa shǀguns; 2. generous; 3. a noble upbringing; 4. brought up in Edo; 5. possessing iki (sophistication) and hari (a rebellious mindset). The word only appeared in literary works, making it difficult to comprehend how it was actually used, but it is likely that the dwellers of the metropolis of Edo emulated and developed those characteristics by reading those literary works.8 Thus, among the metropolitan dwellers there emerged a distinctive sense of dwelling in a metropolis which could be described as Edokko. Metropolitan dwellers also started to be regarded as such by outsiders.9 At the same time, as interest in ‘history’ (rekishi) and ‘roots’ (yuisho) grew in the late eighteenth century, bibliographical and historical studies (kǀshǀgaku) started to flourish and produced works relating to Edo. I would like to examine works published by the Saitǀ family, who were a kochǀ nanushi10 in central Edo. The core of the Saitǀ family’s publications is Edo Meisho Zue, the first ten volumes of which were published in 1834 (Tempǀ 5) and the latter ten in 1836 (Tempǀ 7). Following the example of Kyoto’s Miyako Meisho Zue, published in 1780 (An’ei 9), it is a richly illustrated guide to popular attractions in Edo and was published in the Kansei era by three generations of the Saitǀ family, Gesshin, his father, and his grandfather. They all carried out research and wrote the text. According to its explanatory notes, its purpose was to ‘let people from other domains know about Edo’s prosperity’. Takizawa Bakin, a wellknown writer, in a letter to a friend in Kyoto, commented that it might be useful for those far away from Edo to know about the metropolis, but offered nothing new for those who lived in the metropolis of Edo. Why exactly the family published it is not known,11 but the Saitǀs were not scholars or professional writers, and the publication was not in order to make a profit because they did not gain financially from this publication.12 It is also unclear whether they regarded themselves as Edokko, but it is certain that the family, who had been involved in the metropolitan government and felt that they were metropolitan dwellers, spread ‘Edo’s

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prosperity’ to people living in other domains. Saitǀ Gesshin also published Tǀto Saijiki in 1838 (Tempǀ 9), which described rituals and events in Edo, and Edo’s chronicle Bukǀ Nempyǀ (1850, Kan’ei 3). Shǀsei Suzuki regards Edo Meisho Zue as a work of space, Tǀto Saijiki as one of time, and Bukǀ Nempyǀ as one of history.13 Kǀichi Watanabe also argues that Gesshin, as a kochǀ nanushi, catalogued and compiled laws of the town and that his compilation was closely related to writing history and topography.14 To date, Gesshin’s three books have had a considerable impact upon how Edo’s image was formed, and were distributed as Edo’s ‘memory’. He continued writing volumes of Bukǀ Nempyǀ until he died in 1878 (Meiji 11). These volumes were published in 1882 (Meiji 15) and, having been edited and expanded, are considered to be a chronicle of Edo.15 What is interesting in these books is a lack of reference to the samurai class. Masaki Chiba points out this lack of samurai elements in Edo Meisho Zue, which gave a description of Edo castle and the samurai class in the background. At the same time, Tǀto Saijiki only dealt with events concerning townspeople rather than the government, 16 and in Bukǀ Nempyǀ, Gesshin explained that the book focused on ‘those lower than middling sorts’ and omitted information about the government. It is possible that Gesshin avoided writing about the government and the samurai class as he feared he might be prevented from publishing his books. However, these books can be regarded as a representation of the people of Edo by its own townspeople.

Long-term sojournersȹsharing the experience of a group I would now like to turn my attention to a book known as Edo Jiman.17 This book was written roughly between 1832 (Tempǀ 3) and 1852 (Ka’ei 5) by a doctor called Harada, who worked for the Andǀ family, a tsukegarǀ of Kishnjhan. 18 The introduction says that it is based on the information in a guidebook Edo Hanjǀki, 19 which had already been published and that it provides information for readers ‘so that they won’t be scorned as countrymen’. This book, therefore, is a guidebook about Edo by Harada for his colleagues (retainers of the Andǀ family) who served their daimyǀ as kimban bushi. The experiences of those samurai who stayed in Edo were shared with their colleagues through diaries, letters and word of mouth. It seems that this book compiled tales of their experiences so that they would be widely shared. The material we can read today is a transcription by Inagaki Yoshitsune of a copy by Matsuo, a colleague of Harada, who had borrowed the original from Harada.

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Chapter One

It is now a commonplace to describe kimban bushi as countrymen (Asagiura), a typical character in literary works such as senrynj. But this image was created by Edo’s townspeople who lived in the metropolis as the meaning of Edokko was established. Some samurai actually visited Edo frequently, so although they might have behaved differently from Edo’s dwellers, they were surely not ignorant of Edo. The image of samurai as countrymen is their representation by Edo’s dwellers. At the same time, samurai relied on printed materials such as books and ukiyoe for information about Edo, and what they gained and understood from those materials was the stereotypical image of ‘Edo’, which was disseminated from Edo. Edo Jiman consists of seventy-nine chapters, and the next section looks at what it dealt with as knowledge which could not be gained in advance, and also considers how such information influenced readers’ recognition. The first chapters concern the natural features and climate of Edo. In terms of Edo’s size, Edo Jiman contradicts the widespread notion of Edo consisting of ‘eight hundred and eight wards’ and instead argues that it was much larger. In terms of the climate, it points out that ‘Edo’s winter is three times as cold as that of Wakayama’, contrasting it with Wakayama’s mild and humid climate. It also mentions cherry blossoms, particularly those in the Denznjin temple, in relation to the vegetation of Edo and says that they are no match for the ones in the Dǀjǀ-ji temple in Wakayama. At the same time, it believes that pine trees in Edo did not grow very well compared to ones in Wakayama, whilst pointing out that there was no machilus in Edo (a species of laurel), which was common in Wakayama. Furthermore, it compares Edo’s firewood which derived from trees grown near the paddy fields with that of Wakayama’s, concluding that the former did not generate as much heat as the latter. The firewood was required to generate enough heat for cooking and other purposes. Edo Jiman mentions Edo dwellers’ traits, which may have been useful for samurai who stayed in Edo. Merchants, it says, were polite and humble, ‘completely different from their counterparts in Wakayama’. Fishmongers and vegetable shops came to the residences of the samurai every day, never failed to offer them seasonal gifts such as chnjgen and seibo and presented them with handsel money (toshidama) according to their level of purchase. All the goods they sold had their own fixed prices, so samurai never had to worry about being cheated. Despite Edo being ‘a major city where people come from all over the country’, merchants used measurement units for transactions in all kinds of goods and foods including alcohol, vinegar and clams, which was a different practice from Wakayama. The author also describes with amazement how people,

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including the rough and the poor, in Edo were kind to him, even stopping what they were doing when he asked for directions. In general, Edo dwellers could be described as rough but kindly. The author also wrote of his experience of eating at a noodle shop (soba-ya) where he needed to choose between noodles in soup and noodles with soup on the side. While he was thinking about which one to choose, the staff urged him to ‘hurry up and decide’. This appears to demonstrate Edo dwellers’ impatience and outspokenness. The author thus thought highly of Edo’s dwellers. However, the merchants he described were those whom he dealt with, not Edo’s merchants in general. He also warned readers of street stalls which would sometimes sell counterfeit goods. There is also the possibility that people treated him with respect and politeness because of his social class as a samurai. At the same time, the author commented on samurai in Edo, particularly hatamoto, as soft and gentle and, unlike samurai in Wakayama, ‘lacking an unyielding spirit which Wakayama bushi possessed’. He assumed that this was caused by the fact that they lived in ‘a big city’. He also said that he became nervous when he met Edo samurai for the first time, and that many of them turned out to be insincere and superficial. Understanding language is important to live in a foreign land. In early modern Japanese society, the written language was practically unified, whereas there were a number of regional dialects. Even a dictionary of Edo’s language and regional dialects was published to help samurai staying in Edo. Edo Jiman cites sixty words which were frequently used for shopping and eating in Edo. Interestingly, Edo dwellers’ speech was high pitched with a rolled tongue, which the author regarded as vulgar and mean. The author writes that, because of this high pitch, Bungo-bushi (a form of entertainment performed in Edo) sounded flat, had little richness in its song, and was therefore boring. He also found the lyric of Kiyari-uta, a song sung by firefighters in Edo, difficult to understand. Both Bungobushi and Kiyari-uta originated in Edo, and the latter is now regarded as a fine example of Edo culture. But people from Wakayama found it odd. Edo had a rich food-service industry including shops serving sushi, noodles (soba) and sweets. Harada praises the quality of sushi in Edo, stating that it was ‘far superior to the oshizushi in Kyoto and Osaka’. He did not like soba noodles in Tokyo for which wheat, not eggs, was used to combine the buckwheat, saying ‘it’s too hard, the texture isn’t great, it’s difficult to slurp and impossible to eat more than three mouthfuls’. At the same time, he loved the soup, writing ‘its taste is absolutely outstanding’, and imagined ‘eating Wakayama’s soba noodles with Edo’s soup,

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Chapter One

combining the beauty of bothȹmy stomach might explode with joy’. He also writes about cooking and presentation. On cooking, he commends cooks’ skills, while criticising seasoning as ‘they use sugar, mirin (sweet sake) and sake, making everything too sweet and not appropriate as an accompaniment to sake’. He even considers why seasoning was too sweet, guessing that it was because Edo had so many daimyǀ that its taste became ‘refined’ and this affected the seasoning for ordinary people. At the same time, he thinks that the presentation was impressive, saying ‘they use large bowls in which food is nicely presented, which is very refined’, whereas he described presentation in Wakayama as ‘crude—piling food in small bowls, which makes it look like dung’. The author spent many pages describing the seasoning and ingredients, mainly about levels of distribution, price and taste, citing Wakayama as a standard and also giving the examples of Kyoto and Osaka. He generally prefers the taste in Wakayama and praises cheap and tasty food such as clams, sweet potatoes, sake, Japanese persimmon, whitefish, prawns, scallops and arrowhead. As in the case of seasoning, he likes the taste of his homeland, indicating that a person’s taste in food is largely determined by where the person was born. However, gradually his taste began to change. He initially described vinegar in Edo as ‘thin, watery, smelly and disgusting’, but went on ‘about one year and a half after living in Edo, I tried a vinegar from Wakayama, but it was too strong and I didn’t like it. Maybe my taste has changed and become similar to that of Edo dwellers’. If a person stayed in Edo for a long time, his or her taste could change. He also commented negatively on fish in Edo, saying ‘the fish here tastes bland, it feels as if I am eating vegetables’. But he said that was not because of its freshness, but because of the environment in which fish grew and lived. Moreover, he compared Edo’s whitefish with Wakayama’s, saying that the latter is menjǀgyo (noodle-shaped fish). This indicates that he obtained an objective viewpoint which helped him to realise that his homeland was not the best in every field. The author mentions yose (popular theatres) where no alcohol but only tea and sweets were served, and where ‘everybody is watching the show very seriously’ even when the performance was not of the highest standard. He also writes about hanami (cherry blossom viewing in spring), praising how Edo dwellers enjoyed themselves: ‘Edo’s ordinary folks go out every day, playing the shamisen, but they don’t indulge in food or drink.’ At the same time he criticises Wakayama’s hanami for spending too much effort on food: ‘If cherry blossoms could talk, they would laugh at the people of Wakayama who only enjoy eating, instead of admiring the

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beauty of the cherry blossoms.’ However, he also criticises chrysanthemum viewing which was popular in Edo: ‘In Edo, they attach 200-300 chrysanthemum flowers to one stem, showing a variety of flowers of the same size, which is interesting at first but quickly becomes boring. Chrysanthemum dolls are pretty ugly. I think the way they do it in Kyoto and Osaka, where they attach two-three flowers to a stem, mixing different ones, is more beautiful.’ He mentions annual events and rituals in Edo which were unique to the place, or which he thought were different from Wakayama. Interestingly, he mentions Tanjǀe in April (a festival to celebrate the birth of Buddha) and moon watching in autumn as fine examples of Edo’s culture and customs from which Wakayama people could learn. In terms of Tanjǀe, he writes that, in Edo, unlike in Wakayama, they did not elevate bamboo stems and place flowers in them, rather they placed them on the ground, which he found more appropriate. In addition, he writes that songs sung at Tanjǀe in Edo were better. In terms of moon watching, the dumplings used in Wakayama were ‘wide at the bottom, narrow at the top’ and similar to those used for a seasonal festival in May, whereas dumplings in Edo were round like the moon. He concludes that Wakayama should follow Edo’s examples by using differently shaped dumplings for different seasons. Based on Edo Hanjǀki, Edo Jiman thus contains information for outsiders so as ‘not to be scorned as countrymen’ and matters the author was interested in. I would now like to discuss three points: First, the author spent many pages writing about subjects short-term stayers would be interested in. This is why there is so much about language and eating. His comments on things to do concerned what people should not do in terms of behaviour in places such as soba shops. Secondly, his behaviour as a samurai. While Edo Hanjǀki, on which Edo Jiman was based, criticised Edo’s society, the author did not pay attention to the lower classes or the vulnerable people in Edo. Being a samurai meant that he was afforded kindness and that people behaved politely to him. Thirdly, his position. The author described himself negatively as ‘a countryman’ in the introduction and chapters eight and thirty-three of Edo Jiman. However, he did so in the introduction when he was writing about Edo dwellers’ point of view, and in chapter eight, he described himself as a countryman because he could not distinguish between the accents of Yamanote and Shitamachi. He regarded Yamanote, where he lived as ‘the countryside’ in Edo. In chapter thirty-three, he described himself as a countryman when he criticised seasoning in Edo. In fact, the word

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Chapter One

‘countryman’ was not used in contrast to Edojin or Edokko. Edojin was a counterpart of Wakayamajin. He therefore did not regard himself as a ‘countryman’. He did so simply because he was called a countryman in Edo. It is worth noting that in Edo Jiman, Wakayama, the author’s homeland, was used to set a standard for his awareness and expression. When a person becomes aware of a different culture, the person uses his/her own culture as a frame of reference. As in Edo, ‘discoveries’ of the area and history of Wakayama were made in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.20 At the same time, the idea of ‘national interests’ encouraged domains to monopolise trade in their own areas. It was the time when ‘the country’, which the author described as ‘my Kinokuni’ (Wakayama), was discovered. Using awareness of his ‘own culture’ as a background, the author added new awareness gained through his experience of Edo. So, he criticised Edo at one time and his ‘own culture’ at another. In other words, he managed to rediscover and rationalise his ‘own culture’ as he experienced and understood Edo. In the process, his taste and the rituals which he had developed in his own culture might have changed when the author acquired the dual viewpoint of someone who understood both ‘Edo’ and ‘Wakayama’. 21 And the author’s new awareness came to be shared as knowledge among the samurai of Wakayama.

The newcomers—leaving ‘the family’ and the metropolis Lastly, using the papers of the Satǀ family,22 wealthy farmers in an area currently in Niigata Prefecture, I examine private letters of those who left the family23 and tried to settle in the metropolis.24 It is now understood that, at least in the eighteenth century, there emerged a sense of family among wealthy farmers and that they established the practice of single inheritance by the eldest son.25 I would like to examine the mindset of those who were cut off from the family by looking at the sons of the fourth head of the family, Hachibei (1710-1788). He was adopted by the Satǀ family from the Uranos, a family of merchants in Takada. He had four sons. After retirement, he was succeeded by his eldest son Heiroku. The third son, Hanji, became the sixth head of the family, whilst the fourth son, Matsugorǀ, established a branch family. Considering what these sons did, they all contributed to the continuation of the Satǀ family. However, except for the fourth son, they all attempted to live in Edo, against their father’s will.

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Heiroku, the eldest son (1731-1769) In 1753 (Hǀreki 3), when he married a daughter of the Yumoto family, Heiroku offered his right of succession as the head of the family to his brother Rynjsuke, which angered his father Hachibei. In 1754, he wrote a letter to his father stating that he would not be the next head of the family, and moved to Edo. There, he was apprenticed to Egawa Tarǀzaemon, a magistrate, which means he was employed as a junior officer of the government. However, his father sent him a letter which told him about the shame he had brought on the family and urged him to return as his abandoning the family was cowardly. His grandparents also wrote to him and he was eventually persuaded to go home. He became the fifth head of the family in 1762 (Hǀreki 12). He absconded from the family again in 1765 (Meiwa 2) but returned after persuasion. Afterwards, he remained as the head of the family. He explained the reasons for his second departure in a letter to his parents. He wrote that: 1. the family should continue for a hundred years; 2. he was not suitable to succeed to the headship of the family and would offer the right to be the family head to one of his brothers because he had lost people’s trust after his grandfather’s death; 3. he had no intention of making his oldest son his successor and would ask the next head (his brother) to look after his wife and children; 4. he would leave the matter to ‘the family and relatives’. He also wrote that his decision had been made when he left for the first time, saying, ‘I would not mind becoming a socially useless person’, and making it clear that he would not succeed to headship of the family. He did not clearly state the reasons why he was not suitable to head the family, but presumably what he had in mind was that his relationship with his father had soured when he recommended his father concentrate on the village’s administration and family matters. Little is known about his time in Edo, but he regarded himself as the outcast of the family, absconding from it twice and trying to work as a junior government officer. In the end, after succeeding as head of the family, Heiroku became seriously ill during a visit to his brother in Edo and died there.

Rynjsuke, the second son (1740-1804) He studied under Naitǀ Shikan in the neighbouring village of Tsunodori. He then studied with Muramatsu Rokei (1715-1787),26 Naitǀ’s master, who had trained as a scholar in Edo and ran a private school in the castle town, Takada. In 1755, a year after Heiroku first returned from Edo,

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Chapter One

Rynjsuke went to Edo to pursue his studies. He came back in 1756 and was adopted by the wealthy Oda family, which was related to the Satǀ family, in the neighbouring village of Takenao, and became its heir. In 1763, however, he left the Oda family to go back to the Satǀs and then left for Edo again. In 1764, after being persuaded by the family to return, he went back to his family, but went to Edo yet again in 1769. He came back to the family, under pressure from his father, but returned to Edo once more. After studying in Edo, he became a scholar, called Kokuzan, one of the four great Confucianists in the Hokuetsu area (part of the Toyama and Niigata prefectures), and spent the rest of his life in Edo. He went back to Takada only on the death of the head of the Oda family, by whom he had been adopted, in 1776 (An’ei 5). He became a scholar and stayed in Edo, presumably to avoid becoming the head of the Oda family. He was the second son of the Satǀs and therefore did not feel the pressure of succeeding as head of the family, but after being adopted, he was harshly criticised for not fulfilling his role as the heir to the Oda family. After returning to the Satǀ family between 1764 and 1769, Rynjsuke wrote to his brother Hanji, who was staying in Edo, recommending that he not return. He wrote that he had been ‘bullied’ by his brothers Heiroku and Matsugorǀ, and each time he was bullied he fled to his relatives or his grandfather’s house in Takada. His father and Heiroku were supportive of Matsugorǀ, who attacked him when he was ill. After writing about his indignation and hardship, he expressed his fears about Heiroku and Matsugorǀ, who he thought ‘could do me any harm imaginable’. He said to Hanji, ‘You must now be an Edo Otoko, and your talent is greater than anybody else’s so you do not need to come back here, but if you do, you will suffer as I do now, so do stay in Edo however hard it might be.’ In 1784, after establishing himself as a great scholar, even teaching daimyǀ, and managing to live in Edo as a scholar, Rynjsuke replied to a brother who asked him to come back, saying ‘I wouldn’t even want to look in its direction.’ This is because: 1. he was committed to his work as a scholar in Edo; 2. he was worried about peace and security back in Kakizaki, which had witnessed a series of riots; and 3. he could not settle at home as people had mentioned imprisoning or banishing him. The home he disliked was a result of a society which did not allow him to separate himself from the family and to enjoy his study—something that was typical of the early modern Japanese community.

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Hanji, the third son (1742-1772) Hanji worked as a junior government official in Edo, the Echigo Domain and the Kai Domain. By 1764, when he was twenty-three years old, he had left his hometown and begun a career. After he eventually went to work in Edo, his brother Heiroku passed away in 1769, and he went back home to succeed to the headship of the family in the next year even though, being the third son, he was not under much pressure to do so. His brother Heiroku warned him that he should not change jobs or where he lived so frequently, but Heiroku did not ask him to come back. Hanji must have thought that he would eventually live outside his family. Three sons of the fourth head of the Satǀ family thus all tried to get away from the family. They all aimed to work for the government or to become scholars in Edo. Edo thus became a place which accepted people who had become estranged from the family. However, depending on the individual’s position in the family, their actions and results differed. Also, it appears that living apart from the family and staying in Edo required good abilities and strong will. Of the four sons, it was only Rynjsuke who managed to stay in Edo. Life there was not so easy. Heiroku’s fifth son, Rokuzaburǀ, turned to Rynjsuke for help when he went to Edo. But he wrote in his letter to his brother, ‘I thought that uncle was rich, having a number of disciples, but I found out that he has no savings and uses fees paid by his disciples for rent and living expenses. I am really surprised that he is poor.’ Despite Rynjsuke’s success as a scholar, his life in Edo was not financially stable. Rokuzaburǀ also wrote, ‘I am still not used to living in Edo, and every time I buy something, I am cheated and end up paying more because they regard me as “a countryman”.’ It is clear that he was seen by Edo merchants as ‘a countryman’. It is also noteworthy that he was always thinking about the family after he left it. In Edo, they were supported and helped by those who came from the same area. For instance, when Heiroku became ill in Edo, people such as Ikuemon from the Bashǀmen village, who happened to be in Edo to pay tax, Daikokuya Denpachi, who was from the same area as Heiroku and provided him with accommodation, and Komuro Kynjzǀ, who was also from the same area as Heiroku and had been adopted by a samurai family in Edo, also helped him.

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Conclusion This essay first argued that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there emerged a sense of being metropolitan dwellers among merchants in Edo. However, metropolitan Edo did not consist only of its permanent inhabitants. This essay therefore examined written works of those who came to and stayed in Edo regularly, that is samurai, and also the letters of a farmer’s sons who became estranged from their family and aimed to live in Edo. The samurai regularly went back and forth between Edo and their homelands. They shared their knowledge and information so that they would not be regarded as ‘countrymen’. However, they belonged to their domains or retainer groups, and they were aware of their being ‘Wakayamajin’ (people from Wakayama) surrounded by ‘Edojin’ (people from Edo). As they began to understand the culture of Edo, they rediscovered their own culture. The farmer’s sons separated themselves from the homeland of their family and went to Edo. However, in Edo they felt that they did not belong and that they were countrymen. At the same time, they could not set aside the family and were unable to sever their ties. Their life in Edo depended on the network of those from the same area as them. The metropolis of Edo was a place where these people lived and interacted. In fact, the presence of such newcomers and samurai must have been quite substantial. As Matsunosuke Nishiyama argues, it is reasonable to think that the representation of ‘Edokko’ was created as a result of interaction with these people. There was a variety of people in Edo, and dwellers became aware of their distinctiveness as those who actually lived there, and this awareness led to their metropolitan-dweller sense. However, the image of the metropolis they disseminated was that of the ideal, selfportrait. Historians need to examine carefully this metropolitan-dweller sense and representation, as well as the image of Edo that derives from them.

Notes 1

Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Characteristics of Ego-Documents in Edo Period Japan (16031867)’, in Les Usages des Écrits du For Privé: Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe (The Uses of First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe), ed. FrançoisJoseph Ruggiu (Bruxelles, 2013). 2 In early modern Japan, about 250 daimyǀs, or feudal lords, served a shǀgun. Each

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daimyǀ had to live in Edo, where the shogun resided, every other year, to serve him. When a daimyǀ moved to Edo from his domain, he was accompanied by his retainers. Such retainers, who moved to Edo with their lord, were called kimban bushi. 3 Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Un Guerrier dans la Ville. Obligations de Service et Sorties d’un Samouraï en poste à Edo au XIXe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine 29 (2010), pp. 27-66. 4 According to historians who view travel as a ‘place of learning’ which distanced people from terakoya and helped them objectify their knowledge, it is possible for people to rediscover the self and come up with new ideas by distancing themselves from the family and the community. Rie Suzuki, Kinsei Kindai Ikǀki no Chiiki Bunkajin (Local Intellectuals in Transition from Early Modern Period to Modern Period) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2010). 5 Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Edo no Daihatten ga Santo wo Unda (The Great Development of Edo created the Three Cities)’ [in Japanese], in Shin Hakken: Shnjkan Nihon no Rekishi (Newly-Discovered Japanese History) 30 (Tokyo, 2013). 6 There was a word, Edomono, but this was used universally to describe where someone was from. It was also used by others, not only those living in Edo. This makes it very different from Edokko. 7 Matsunosuke Nishiyama, Edokko [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 1980). 8 Nishiyama argues that there were two classes of Edokko. One was the upper-class Edokko, such as fudasashi (finance brokers) and kanjǀshogoyǀtashi (merchants working for the government). The other was the lower class which came about after the late eighteenth century. Nishiyama also points out that, based on his consideration of characters in kabuki, there is an element of the modern ‘individual’ who was free from the community and the family in the mindset of Edokko. However, it is not easy to relate characters in kabuki to actual social class and mentality. This essay understands that there was a word Edokko and also that there existed people who started to be conscious of being so. 9 For instance, the Marugame Domain attempted to raise money by promising the donors the religious benefits to repair harbours and piers, but it was suggested by Edo’s officials that ‘the customs of Edo are that people would dare to buy and eat expensive hatsugatsuo and borrow money for festivals by pawning their wives and children’. Therefore, the domain felt that it would be wiser to allow the people to donate money little by little, as it wished to avoid the attention of the bakufu, the shogunal government: Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Buke Yashiki no Simbutsu no Kǀkai to Toshi Shakai (The Relationship between Urban Society and the Exhibition of Images of Deities in Samurai Residences)’ [in Japanese], Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan Kenkynj Hǀkoku (Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History) 103 (2003), pp. 133-200. 10 Kochǀ nanushi were the seventy-nine families in kochǀ between 1624 and 1644. They were regarded as particularly noble and influential. 11 Shǀsei Suzuki guesses that this is an expression of ‘a sense of pride as Edokko’ and to let readers in other domains know about Edo’s prosperity and to the fact that the Saitǀs were nanushi. Moreover, he argues that this was ‘Edokko’s attempt to establish and maintain its identity’, and that gradually the difference between ‘Edokko such as Gesshin’ and ‘newcomers who were not Edokko’ started to

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disappear: Shǀsei Suzuki, Edo no Meisho to Toshi Bunka (Landmarks in Edo and Urban Culture) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2001). Masaki Chiba also argues that the Saitǀ family wrote down the disappearing prosperity of central Edo: Masaki Chiba, Edo Meisho Zue no Sekai (The World of Edo Meisho Zue, The Topography of Edo) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2001). 12 Matsunosuke Nishiyama, ‘Edo no Chǀ Nanushi Saitǀ Gesshin (Saitǀ Gesshin, a Chǀ Nanushi in Edo)’ [in Japanese], in Edo Chǀnin no Kenkynj (Studies on Townspeople in Edo) vol. 4 (Tokyo, 1979), has information about fees from the book printer. Natsuo Ichiko and Kenichi Suzuki, ‘Edo Meisho Zue wo Yomutameni (For the Reading of Edo Meisho Zue)’ [in Japanese], in Natsuo Ichiko and Kenichi Suzuki, Shintei Edo Meisho Zue (Edo Meisho Zue, Newly Revised Version), supplement vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1997), describes how Gesshin himself tried to find the publisher. 13 See Shǀsei Suzuki’s work in note 11. 14 Kǀichi Watanabe, ‘Nihon Kinsei no Shuto Gyǀsei ni Okeru Chikuseki Jǀhǀ no Mibunkanbunynj to Riyǀ (The Sharing and Using of Accumulated Information among Various Social Groups under the Administration of Edo in Early Modern Japan)’ [in Japanese], in Chnj-Kinsei Archives no Takokukan Hikaku (Multilateral Comparative Study on Archives on Medieval and Early Modern Times), ed. Kǀichi Watanabe, Department of Archival Science, National Institute of Japanese Literature (Tokyo, 2009). 15 Two bibliographical scholars, Kitamura Intei and Sekine Shisei, as well as Asakura Musei, edited and noted it. 16 See Shǀsei Suzuki’s work in note 11. 17 Held by Tokyo University Library. Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Edo Kimban Bushi ga Mita ‘Edo’: Ibunka Hyǀshǀ no Shiten Kara (‘Edo’ Seen from Edo Duty Samurai (Edo Kimban Bushi): From Perspectives of the Representation of Other Cultures)’ [in Japanese], Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan Kenkynj Hǀkoku (Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History) 140 (2008), pp. 59-96. 18 Tsukegarǀ means senior vassals which the government sent to the Owari Domain, the Kishnj Domain and the Mito Domain for supervision and assistance. 19 Edo Hanjǀki is a five-volume guidebook about Edo published by a vagabond Confucianist Terakado Seiken between 1832 and 1842 (Tempǀ 3-13). As he described Edo’s ‘prosperity’ including its dark side and pretension, the first and second editions were banned. 20 In Wakayama, the Kishnj Domain lords were developing its culture and the study of Japanese classics and ordered the compilation of Kii Zoku Fudoki, 1806-1839 (Bunka 3-Tempǀ 10). Kiinokuni Meisho Zue was also published (1811-51, Bunka 8-Kan’ei 4). 21 The author’s own culture was, first of all, Wakayama, and then ‘my Kinokuni’, which indicates that he regarded his homeland as Kishnj, which included the family domain and Kǀyasan. 22 Held by National Institute of Japanese Literature. The Satǀ family, from the time of the the first head, was involved in local administration and also became a big landowner after purchasing land in the area. 23 In this context, ‘family’ translates as ‘ie’ in Japanese. Ie is the house as an

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institutional group and a patrilineal and patriarchal stem family. Ie was to last perpetually for generations beyond each family. Family business, kagyo, and family property, kasan, were both inherited from ancestors. It was the duty of the head of the family (kacho) to protect the family name, kamei, and to conduct a religious ceremony in order to worship the ancestors. Family members also devoted themselves to perpetuating ie. Hereafter, I use the word family in the sense of ie. 24 Reiji Iwabuchi, ‘Kinsei Jǀnǀsǀ ni okeru ‘Ie’ to Seiin (The ‘Family’ and its Members in Wealthy Farmers)’ [in Japanese], in Kinsei Beisaku Chitai no Sonraku Shakai: Echigonokuni Iwademura Satǀke Monjo no Kenkynj (Village Society in Rice Monoculture Area in Early Modern Period: Study on Satǀ Family Documents in Iwade Village, Echigo), ed. Takashi Watanabe (Tokyo, 1995). This essay explores composition of ‘the family’ and struggle of continuation of ‘the family’ by taking into account insights gained from gender studies, particularly ‘history of men’. 25 Osamu ƿtǀ, ‘Kinsei ni okeru Nǀminsǀ no ‘Ie’ Ishiki no Ippanteki Seiritsu to Sǀzoku (Formation of ‘Family’ Consciousness and Inheritance among Farmers in Early Modern Period)’ [in Japanese], Nihon Bunka Kenkynjjo Kenkynj Hǀkoku (Reports of the Research Institute for Japanese Culture), supplement vol. 12 (Tokyo, 1975). In terms of the family of middle and lower class farmers and peasants, some historians do not recognise the existence of a sense of the family, but it is widely understood that, from the late seventeenth century onwards, there emerged a sense of the family after peasants came to own land and their agricultural management became stable. 26 He was from Niigata Prefecture and learned from Hattori Nankaku. In 1754, he worked for the Sakakibara family, the lord of the Takada Domain, and made him switch the official schooling of the domain from Shushigaku and Jinsaigaku to Soraigaku.

CHAPTER TWO CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS, URBAN EXPERIENCES AND PERSONAL IDENTITIES IN URBAN FRANCE FROM THE ANCIEN RÉGIME TO THE REVOLUTION1 FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH RUGGIU

From the Middle Ages first-person writings mainly emanated from urban dwellers, a great part of them exercising a legal profession, a trade or a craft. As Pierre Monnet writes about medieval German cities, James Amelang about sixteenth-century Barcelona, Giovanni Ciappelli on Italy, or Sylvie Mouysset and François-Joseph Ruggiu about early modern France, these personal texts routinely expressed a powerful civic consciousness. 2 The personal and social identities of the writers were mixed up with their membership of different parts of the civic system, either civil or religious, like confraternities; professional guilds; parishes; wards; or the various municipal councils and authorities. The history of the town where they lived, the main events of their lifetime and the description of civic festivals generally formed an important part of their texts. By the end of the eighteenth century, French towns experienced wide transformations. 3 Some of them grew rapidly through the growth of commerce and the beginning of industrialization and immigration. Everywhere, the national and local political turmoil due to the Revolution and its aftermath accompanied impressive alterations of the social structure, especially for the élites. If the transformations of urban political structures and cultures during this troubled period are well known, their influence on the civic identities of their inhabitants has rarely been investigated despite the growing numbers of texts written just before or in the wake of the French Revolution. Following a strong trend in French

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historiography, I thus intend to study the personal experiences of ordinary urban writers at this period, and especially their relations to urban power.4 In doing so I would also like to explore more thoroughly the precise nature of the urban dimension in personal texts. Personal writings have been much used by French historians to approach social experiences of the town, and this kind of text has also often been exploited to offer vivid illustrations of social life, or of the mores of the French at the end of the Ancien Régime.5 However the spatial dimension of personal writings, and their links with the definition of personal identities, has been rarely explored and it is worth comparing it with the historical and chronological dimensions of these texts, which are more often evoked by historians. For both these enquiries, first-person writings are a wonderful way into personal reflections or intimate perceptions even if they are very complex to use.6 This essay is based on the reading of a set of texts written during the second half of the eighteenth century and often covering the first years of the French Revolution. I did not try to collect a great number of texts but rather to read carefully a small sample, and to analyse how the relations of their writers with the town where they dwelt are expressed. I gathered different types of personal writings—diaries, memoirs, autobiographies— without making a distinction between immediate and retrospective writings. My aim here is not to draw decisive conclusions but rather to explore several themes related to the inclusion of individuals in towns, that may be later studied on a wider scale, and which offer a comparison with the same kind of texts in different cultural contexts, in Europe as well as in Asia.7

Personal writings and the city There is no accurate figure about the exact residence of the authors of first-person writings either for the early modern period or for the nineteenth century, but it is assumed that they mainly inhabited towns and cities.8 Some samples have nevertheless been tested. Sylvie Mouysset has studied around 200 ‘Family Books’ from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, mainly located in the south of France. 9 She observed that the majority of writers dwelt in towns, although not large cities but rather middle-sized or small towns. In early modern France, large cities were uncommon and the ordinary town was well under 20,000, and even under 10,000, inhabitants. A focus on 118 texts written inside the boundaries of the present-day district of Tarn10 shows that the distribution of texts almost mirrors the urban hierarchy with the county town of Albi (23)

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predominating, followed by the market towns of Gaillac (12) and Castres (11). This prevalence of urban residence was largely related to the professions of the writers, who were, in the sample collected by Sylvie Mouysset, mostly inferior judges, petty lawyers and traders. The craftsmen, generally from the most skilled trades, are less numerous and appear mainly from the eighteenth century. There were few clergymen amongst the authors of personal writings despite their high levels of literacy.11 Priests or canons were more inclined to write scholarly studies, especially local histories, for example, or histories of their order, their cathedral and even of their town. Authors of personal writings were overwhelmingly male even if the proportion of female writers increases during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 12 Of a sample of 1,870 personal writings from the end of the Middle Ages to 1914, 85 per cent of writers were male, and 53 per cent of the 127 female writers identified lived during the nineteenth century.13 Men of these social categories were, of course, used to handling writings in their professional life. Their personal writings often intertwined with their personal accounts and their professional papers. One of the most surprising account books of the early modern period was thus written by Pierre-Philippe Candy, a notary of the small town of Cremieu, in Dauphiné. He penned two texts in parallel in the same volume: the first one was a classic account book (‘un livre de compte contenant l’emploi de l’argent que j’ai reçu à compter de ce jour’, or ‘Ledger containing the use of the money I received from this day’) and the second one was a narration, sometimes coded, of his life and especially his sexual life.14 These parts are not opposed but complementary, as historian René Favier observes in his comments: the account book, influenced by the journal, progressively shifts towards a life-narration, and the journal unveils the meaning of some of Candy’s expenditures.15 This prevalence of urban dwellers in the corpus of personal writings is perhaps also due to a selective process of conserving texts. The provincial scholars who searched for Family Books at the end of the nineteenth century, and who urged their preservation, cared more for texts written in an urban context, because they were prone to praise their own ‘patria’. Yet it is more likely that there was a real disparity between town and country in this matter. There are, of course, examples of Family Books, diaries or journals penned by farmers, especially during the eighteenth century,16 but it does not seem that a strong tradition of peasant writings existed in France, 17 unlike in Catalonia 18 or in Denmark, 19 for example. A great number of rural texts have been composed either by nobles, or by bourgeois who have settled in the countryside. Both these categories often

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held both an urban house and a rural residence. And the rare rural writings which have been kept show nevertheless the place of the small town (the bourg) or of the local county town in the ordinary life of Frenchmen during the last decades of the Ancien Régime. Pierre Bordier, farmer at Lancé, had a close proximity with Vendôme, 20 the county town about twelve kilometres from his house. He rented a stable there and he recorded the different interactions he had with urban life either in person or from the news he heard: the markets and fairs; the uses of the numerous courts located in Vendôme; the public ceremonies held by the royal or ecclesiastical authorities; or the punishment or public executions of criminals. 21 There are very few differences between his notations about Vendôme, where he did not live, and those penned by Georges Mellier, a haberdasher, who lived in Abbeville22 at exactly the same period.23 Louis Simon, a petty textile worker, who resided in the village of La FontaineSaint-Martin,24 during the last decades of the Ancien Régime, also testified how the opening of the great Route Royale from La Flèche to Le Mans triggered major changes in countryside life. These changes were linked to the flow of news, goods, and cultural values which travelled to his small village from both these county towns.25 Despite being a rural craftsman, Louis Simon made, during his youth, a small ‘tour de France’, exactly like an urban member of a guild, and he described how important his urban experience was to him. So to write personal texts is, at least in France, an urban experience in itself.

Writings and the living experience of town In the texts studied here, there are surprisingly few physical or aesthetic descriptions of the towns where the writers lived. This is all the more striking as some authors do not hesitate to insert, in their memoirs or diaries, travelogues which entail more or less accurate depictions of the towns they came across. Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay (1737-1817), for example, often travelled to Paris where he made extended stays during his youth. Alone or with his wife, he widely visited the capital as well as Versailles and the cities along the road: ‘Nous nous déterminâmes à revenir par la levée pour voir les villes intéressantes qui se rencontrent sur cette agréable route. On travaillait encore à la cathédrale d’Orléans qui passe pour une des plus belles de France, nous en admirâmes la structure et la richesse; nous vîmes le pont et la Rue neuve dont tous les bâtiments uniformes sont parfaitement alignés….’26 Like modern tourists, Le Prince and his wife visited next Amboise, Chanteloup, which was the country house of the duke of Choiseul, then prime minister of Louis XV, the abbey

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of Marmoutiers, and Tours. Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay summarises the recent beautifications of these urban sites, as he made it out, a few years later, when he toured with his brother in eastern France, Switzerland and west Germany.27 It is obvious that his comments, during these three months of travel, were drawn from his own observations but also from his reading of guides or travel books, which were used to prepare the journey.28 Like Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay, the authors of many first-person writings had the knowledge, the vocabulary and the curiosity needed to describe their native or residential town, but they rarely do so. Pierre Bruno Jean de la Monneraye (1759-1832), a naval officer, describes at length the towns he traversed in France or in Italy during his travels for leisure, 29 or even those where he stayed during his naval expeditions, like Boston or Algiers.30 Yet he had no words for Rennes where he lived between two cruises. 31 At most, the authors were interested in the embellishments they could observe. Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen, born in 1748 to a noble family of the Boulonnais, in northern France, who lived in the county town of Boulogne-sur-Mer and then in the neighbouring parish of Saint-Martin Boulogne, where he owned a country house and an estate, regularly entered in his diary some notes on the transformations of Boulogne. The headings he inserted next to the notices where he alludes to the city—‘Administration’, ‘Monuments à Boulogne’, ‘Fontaine’, ‘Embellissements’ 32 —are characteristic of an approach to the urban landscape and fabric through renovations.33 It is true that personal writings are full of mentions of places, streets, buildings or churches. It could seem easy to project these apparently accurate indications onto a map to locate the points, the sites or the spots of its city frequented by an author. In some cases, for example when a public ceremony is described, it is even possible to draw an itinerary. Daniel Roche has thus reconstructed the areas haunted by Jacques-Louis Ménétra, a master glazier who lived in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. He showed the contrast between the wide extent of the errands of Ménétra’s youth and the narrow spatial routines of his maturity.34 We may even go as far as to imagine drawing up mental maps of early modern towns like the ones shaped by geographers and planners from surveys and oral enquiries.35 But there are several dimensions which must be distinguished when studying the relations between authors and urban space. The first dimension concerns location. The second is about their personal perceptions of the urban spaces and the last one is about the actual spatial practices of the authors.36

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Personal writings are usually devoid of precise mentions of locations. To take an example from an earlier period, when Jean Pussot, a master carpenter who dwelt in Reims at the turn of the sixteenth century, narrated the extraordinary death of the governor of the city, by the hand of the mighty duke of Guise himself, he gives to his reader all the spatial particulars of the scene: Advint le lundy à six heures du matin XXVe apvril 1594 jour de sainct Marcq, ledit sieur de Sainct Paul se partit de son logis qui estoit la maison première du cloister, du costé du marché…pour aller prendre lesditz sieurs du Mayenne et de Guise…. Et les trouvant venant d’ouyr la messe à sainct Pierre aux nonnains audit cloistre sur le pavé au-devant de la maison Monsieur Le Vasseur, chanoine, vis-à-vis de la porte du [derrière] du palais….37

Such accuracy, which allows whoever who knows Reims to visualise the scene, is unparalleled in the texts of our sample. It is indeed very rare to have such a wealth of precise data. For example, Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen, although he was interested in the house-rent market of Boulogne and registered several transactions, usually gives the name of the street where these houses were located but does not add details. 38 Pierre Lacour, a painter, evokes the house of his youth in Bordeaux, next to ‘celle qui fait angle dans la rue du Palais Gallien, et dont la façade principale ouvre sur la place Dauphine’, only because ‘On pouvait entendre le bruit sinistre que faisait le couteau fatal en tombant sur les victimes que le tribunal révolutionnaire envoyait à l’échafaud.’39 FrançoisYves Besnard describes precisely the interior of his great-grandmother’s house at Doué ‘parce qu’elle sert à donner une idée de la très majeure partie de celles qui étaient occupées par la bourgeoisie de Doué’.40 But he neglects to situate it in the town. 41 The urban dimensions of personal writings by women are similarly thin. The memoirs of Marie-Julie Cavaignac (1779-1849) are, for example, strikingly devoid of mentions of places, except those where she lived.42 During her youth, she spent her life between unspecified houses in Paris and some places in the suburbs, at Sceaux, near the ‘barrière d’Enfer’, then at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where she resided during the summer.43 She reproduced the same pattern during her stay at Naples, where her husband held an upper position in the government of Joachim Murat.44 Her moves were strongly linked to her family, especially to her mother, 45 and the only long account she gave about one of her dwelling houses, in the faubourg Saint-Germain, was connected to a sentimental affair of her older brother.46 Like Marie-Julie Cavaignac, Henriette Dillon (1770-1753), marquise de la Tour du Pin, just

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mentions her residential moves, which were also linked to family events. In 1788, she is compelled to leave the Hotel Dillon, after a quarrel with her formidable grandmother, and thus simply remarks: ‘Ma tante, Mme d’Henin, nous recueillit, en 1788, dans sa maison de la rue de Verneuil. Elle me logea au rez-de-chaussée, qui donnait sur un petit jardin, excessivement triste.’47 There is thus a striking difference between a poor recording of location and the great sensitivity that the authors of personal writings showed to the passing of time. Historians have often remarked this specific attention to the hours of the days or nights, which is particularly true in urban areas, where the concentration of bells facilitated the notation of hours or the calculation of durations.48 But such precision does not appear about location. Authors readily recorded what time it was when they did something worth noting, but they did not feel the same obligation to register where they were in the town. This deficiency of locations tends to give a fragmented image of the city, which is often reduced to a few symbolic places or to a set of landmarks. Jean-Baptiste Curmer (1782-1870), a manufacturer and merchant of Rouen, evokes thus the Vieux-Palais, ‘où j’avais joué avec tant de bonheur durant ma première enfance’, but only incidentally and to remark that it was demolished during the Revolution. 49 It is almost the only monument mentioned in his Souvenirs d’un bourgeois de Rouen, with the ‘vieille abbaye, qui n’était pas encore l’Hôtel de Ville’. 50 Indeed writers often failed to give a precise account of their perceptions of the urban space. It is yet not uncommon for authors to move their dwellings during their lifetime. Writings mention, but rarely comment on, these movements in the urban space. For example, Jean-Baptiste Curmer plainly signals in his memoirs: ‘A la ville, j’habitais une maison que je possède encore, située rue des Arsin; elle ne m’était revenue en capital qu’à onze mille francs et valait bien mille francs de loyer; elle était agréable et je l’occupais seul.’51 The financial value of the house seems the only element worth specifying. Jacques César Ingrand, vicar of a parish in Châtellerault,52 is one exception, when he wrote: ‘J’entrepris une bâtisse que je destinais autant pour mon usage que pour me satisfaire (désirant aussi donner l’exemple, encourager à bâtir autour du champ de foire, surtout d’un long de ce côté où il n’y avait aucune bâtisse, que des murs de jardin).’53 Ingrand is keen to give an urban dimension to his decision to build a house next to the fairground in order to encourage the development of this part of the town. But it is very suggestive that he puts this observation in parentheses, and he is one of the rare authors to make such a remark. Also the very notion of quartier, in its social and geographical

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meaning, which is different from the administrative meaning (‘ward’), is almost never found. 54 An exception is the marquise de Ferrières who briefly alludes to the ‘area of our acquaintances’.55 Authors rarely qualify the social composition of the part of the town in which they live even if some of them, like François-Yves Besnard, who seeks to provide an account of the customs and values of the time along with his memoirs, use the socio-economic vocabulary of the period. Finally, writers often seem indifferent to the aesthetics of the surrounding buildings as well as to the practical accessibility of the town56 or to environmental issues. Joseph François Labat de Savignac, a magistrate at the Parlement de Bordeaux, in the early eighteenth century, recorded his frequent departures from the city, to go to Caudéran, a suburb where he owned a small country house, or to visit to his rural estate. But he never mentioned passing the gates through the massive walls which still enclosed Bordeaux, the demolition of which was only begun a few years later by the intendants. François-Yves Besnard noted the existence of these walls at Doué as well as at Angers but it seems that they had no effect of the ordinary life of the inhabitants. 57 Until the end of the eighteenth century, the gates were a major divide in the urban fabric but they do not seem to have been experienced as such by the inhabitants. 58 Labat de Savignac also signalled some carriage accidents, for example in 1708.59 But it is one of the rare mentions in his diary of a direct street experience, besides the recording of urban spectacles and festivals, which constitutes in many texts the majority of the comments made about outside scenes. To conclude on this point, it seems that personal writings do not provide a precise account of the spatial practices of their authors. They are full of places and even, in some cases, of itineraries, and they do offer an account of urban life in its social dimensions, but they do not give to the reader a representation or a living experience of the urban space. From the point of view of their inhabitants, towns and cities were made more of history than of geography.

A new civic consciousness at the dawn of the modern era? ‘Item et darrieyrament parlas suau en cossolat et a autras part tant quant vous poyreys/Enfin, parlez aussi doucement que vous pourrez au consulat et ailleurs.’60 This was the last advice given by Pierre Benoît to his nephew, Etienne Benoît, who scrupulously recorded it, in his Family Book, for his own edification and that of all members of his family now and in the future. Etienne Benoît was a member of a powerful bourgeois

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family of Limoges during the fifteenth century and his uncle, Pierre, lived at the end of the fourteenth century. Benoît’s text is one of the oldest spotted by historian Jean Tricard in his investigation on medieval and Renaissance Family Books.61 The second theme I would like to approach is the civic consciousness of individuals. Like the Benoît family, many eighteenth-century writers were directly involved in the exercise of power and their writings testified to the political charges that they assumed. However, texts reveal how much political power was spread in a great variety of roles and responsibilities. Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay is, again, a good witness to this trend because he partly organised his memoirs by activities: ‘8. De la jurisdiction consulaire’; ‘14. Société littéraire et patriotique du Mans’; ‘16. De la Société d’Agriculture’; ‘19. De l’administration des hôpitaux’; ‘22. Du bureau de charité’; ‘23. De l’administration provinciale’; ‘26 De la mairie’; ‘27. Du tribunal de commerce’. Authors rarely explain their motivations for wishing or agreeing to undertake municipal or professional responsibilities. Above all they never suggest that they lusted for power. Georges Mellier, an eighteenth-century haberdasher from Abbeville, in Picardie, wrote in his diary, the day he became provost of the guild of haberdashers: ‘Que Dieu nous fasse la grâce d’arriver au bâtonnage, si c’est sa sainte volonté!’62 He added that the present chairman was nominated in 1725, ‘the very year I was born’. To become chairman could thus appear to be his aim but, as for his contemporaries, his discourses speak only of honour, of reputation and of service to the community. Yet the texts which have been written just before the Revolution sometimes sound different. During the 1780s, Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen was a member of the provincial administration established by the declining monarchy, but he was quickly led to take on more important responsibilities. Indeed, in 1788, he wrote hopefully: ‘Il ne sera pas difficile d’y [en Boulonnois] maintenir le bon ordre, si l’on s’attache surtout à former des sujets capables de le conserver. Il y en a dans ce moment à Boulogne et il ne s’agirait que de bien choisir….’63 Abot de Bazinghen clearly thought that he was one of these men. And, in 1790, he presents himself as ‘une cheville ouvrière de cette nouvelle Machine (la Municipalité)’ and asserts that he ‘saisirai tout ce qui doit différencier notre nouveau régime de l’ancien’.64 At the end of the eighteenth century, the provincial first-person writings often show a sudden widening of the political and social horizons of their authors due to the French Revolution. At first, Pierre-Philippe Candy tells us nothing of the Parisian events during the spring and the summer of 1789. But the turmoil of the Revolution gradually tiptoes into

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his ledgers: ‘Dimanche 26 [juillet 1789]…j’ai été obligé d’acheter une cocarde pour me mettre à l’unisson de toute la ville qui m’a coûté chez la Pichon une livre et dix sols.’ 65 Pierre-Philippe Candy was already a member of the political élite of Crémieu before the Revolution,66 having been nominated overseer of the town’s finances in January 1789 and having been active in the political debates related to the convocation of the Etats-Généraux. But the Revolution clearly gives to this moderate individual a political momentum which led him to assume the office of mayor of Crémieu, from 1794 to 1796, and again from 1796 to 1799. The Revolution also offers Pierre-Philippe Candy a wonderful opportunity to get richer through the sales of the Church properties, launched by the State in December 1789. As a member of the municipal council, Pierre-Philippe Candy participated in the evaluation of these properties: ‘Jeudi 23 [décembre 1790], soupé à la maison et travaillé aux tableaux de la vente des biens nationaux jusqu’à minuit que je me suis couché’. 67 He then bought one of them, the convent of the Capuchins, where he settled with his family in September 1791. In some cases, the local dimension of the writer seems secondary, compared to its national dimension. Eustache Hua, who passed through the turmoil of the French Revolution, not without difficulty as he lengthily explains to the readers of his memoirs, is a good witness to such an evolution. Hua was originally from Mantes, a small town in the surroundings of Paris. His father owned a tannery, but Eustache, who was educated in Paris, worked there as a lawyer during the last decades of the Ancien Régime. His memoirs are silent on his youth at Mantes and on his relations with the town before 1791. With the advent of the French Revolution, Hua found himself involved in politics and became a member of the Legislative Assembly, representing the district of Mantes. He sat on the right wing with the moderate royalists and was forced to flee during the Terror. He came back to Paris after Thermidor in order to find a stable situation in the revolutionary administration, but to no avail. Finally, he chose in 1800, at the death of his father, to settle in Mantes to establish his growing family and to run the family business. His reasoning was the following: ‘Je songeai que ma translation de domicile à Mantes me ferait nommer député. J’étais bien sûr de ne jamais l’être à Paris, mais à Mantes…où je jouissais toujours de la confiance publique, où je ne pouvais rencontrer que des concurrents peu redoutables, ma nomination était presque certaine…On dut croire que je venais à Mantes pour le commerce, et je n’y venais que pour l’ambition.’68 His schemes were not successful: though he was appointed mayor just three months after his arrival, he never became a député. His long stay in the city was ultimately

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a financial and political failure and he went back to Paris when he was appointed a senior judge after eleven years of provincial life. Besides the political success or the political failures linked to the Revolution, the second half of the eighteenth century seems to show69 a transformation of the inner relation between élites and power. JeanBaptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay illustrated this trend when he wrote: ‘De toutes les fonctions publiques auxquelles j’ai été appelé celles d’administrateur des Hôpitaux, que j’ai exercées pendant neuf années, avant la Révolution, ont le plus flatté mon amour-propre et mon inclination.’70 The general idea developed in this excerpt seems trivial but we must bear a close attention to the very words chosen by the author. They indicate that Jean-Baptiste Le Prince d’Ardenay has not only sought, in these kind of civic commitments, to acquire honour and social esteem or to perform a pious work, which would please God. He has also searched to satisfy an inner aspiration (‘inclination’). It looks as if serving the community becomes, besides an estimable service to his fellow citizens, a way to develop his own personality. Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen expresses exactly the same feelings. Imprisoned during the Terror, he was released just before Thermidor and re-entered in the committee of safety of his village, ‘autant par inclination que par reconnaissance à faire le plus de bien possible’. 71 During the Hundred Days, Jean-Baptiste Curmer, a staunch supporter of Napoleon, just turning thirty, became in charge of the municipality of Rouen. He bitterly concludes the evocation of this period and the failure of the Emperor: ‘Ce fut, je n’ai pas besoin de le dire, un cruel chagrin pour moi que le désastre de Waterloo et le renversement de la grandeur française qui entraînait la perte de mes espérances personnelles.’72

Conclusion This essay is based on a scientific ambition shared nowadays by a great number of French specialists of personal or first-person writings. They are willing to study texts for the knowledge they convey about the life experience of their authors, and not only for the information that they give on a particular topic, in this case about the political upheavals in prerevolutionary and revolutionary France or on urban life at the end of the eighteenth century. From this cross-reading, we can construe several conclusions. The first one concerns the global perception of the town by the writers at the end of the eighteenth century. Cities were for them a political and social arena more than a network of streets, houses and buildings. Authors, who freely gave an urban description of the towns they

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visited as tourists, were unwilling to describe or to comment on the urban characteristics of the town where they dwelt. They can give many details on their interiors, especially the disposition and the uses of rooms, when they investigated the social life of their family or of their social group, but they are generally silent on the social composition or on the physical description of their immediate surroundings. The very notion of quartier either in its administrative meaning (‘ward’) or in its social meaning (‘neighbourhood’) is conspicuously absent. This lack of geographical or topographical interest is all the more surprising given that the relation of writers to time is very different, and also that the writers were perfectly able, when visiting a foreign place, to use and to reproduce the codes of the travel guides which were widespread from the end of the seventeenth century. When writing on their own city, it is probable that the writers tried rather to imitate the numerous tableaux moraux which flourished at the end of the eighteenth century.73 The second major conclusion concerns the evolution of the relations to power of the writers we have studied and who were mainly men from the lower strata of the élites. It seems to become progressively more intimate and more linked to personal aspirations rather than to the traditional dedication to the service of the community. We intend to pursue this double inquiry on a greater sample of texts and to connect these findings with more general developments about the transformation of the French society from the 1760s, and the changes in relations between community and individuals.

Notes 1

I would like to thank heartily Ms Anne McCulloch for her thorough revision of the English text of this contribution. 2 Pierre Monnet, Les Rohrbach de Francfort: Pouvoirs, Affaires et Parenté à l’Aube de la Renaissance Allemande (Genève, 1997); James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations: 1490-1714 (Princeton, NJ, 1986); Giovanni Ciappelli, Memory, Family and Self: Tuscan Family Books and Other European Egodocuments (14th-18th Century) (Leiden, 2014); Sylvie Mouysset, Papiers de Famille: Introduction à l’Étude des Livres de Raison: France, XVe-XIXe Siècle (Rennes, 2007); François-Joseph Ruggiu, ‘Pour une Étude de l’Engagement Civique au XVIIIe Siècle’, Histoire Urbaine 19 (2007), pp. 145-164; Idem, ‘Les Discours Annalistiques Comme Discours de Soi’, in Car C’est Moy que Je Peins. Ecritures de Soi, Individus et Liens Sociaux, ed. S. Mouysset, J.-P. Bardet, and F.-J. Ruggiu (Toulouse, 2011), pp. 261-277. 3 G. Duby, ed., Histoire de la France Urbaine, tome 3, La Ville Classique, de la Renaissance aux Révolutions (Paris, 1981); Guy Saupin, Les Villes en France à l’Époque Moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe Siècles (Paris, 2002).

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For a recent example of this approach, see the special issue of the Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, ‘Vivre la Révolution’, 373 (2013), and especially the introduction by Annie Duprat and Éric Saunier, ‘Vivre la Révolution’, ibid. pp. 3-10, and Sylvie Mouysset, ‘‘Silence de Mort et Craintes Extrêmes’: La Peur en Son For Privé à l’Époque Révolutionnaire’, ibid. pp. 11-34, who focuses on the emotions expressed in personal writings during a period of political terror. 5 On the necessity to end the use of personal texts as a reservoir of anecdotes, stories or illustrations, see Michel Cassan, ‘Les Livres de Raison. Invention Historiographique, Usages Historiques’, in Au Plus Près du Secret des Coeurs? Nouvelles Lectures Historiques des Écrits du For Privé, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris, 2005), pp. 15-28, at p. 23. 6 Natalie Petiteau, Ecrire la Mémoire. Les Mémorialistes de la Révolution et de l’Empire (Paris, 2012). 7 François-Joseph Ruggiu, ed., Les Usages des Écrits du For Privé: Afrique Amérique, Asie, Europe (The Uses of First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe) (Bruxelles, 2013). 8 See Michel Cassan, ‘Ecrits du For Privé et Évènements’, in Les Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris, 2015), pp. 129-162, especially pp. 131-135. For interesting analysis of local situations, see Mathilde Chollet, ‘Les Écrits du For Privé dans le Haut-Maine à l’Époque Moderne’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 115:1 (2008) (March 30, 2010), accessed November 29, 2014, http://abpo.revues.org/360; or Valérie Piétri, ‘Le Livre de Raison en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: Entre Livre de Compte et Livre de Famille’, Provence Historique, 54:217 (2004), pp. 315-328. 9 Sylvie Mouysset, Papiers de Famille, pp. 106-111. 10 Département du Tarn, région Midi-Pyrénées. 11 See, for example, Un Chanoine de Cavaillon au Grand Siècle: Le Livre de Raison de Jean-Gaspard de Grasse (1664-1684), édition critique présentée et annotée par Frédéric Meyer (Paris, 2002). See also Stéphane Gomis and Philippe Martin, ‘L’écriture du Croyant’, in Les Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris, 2015), pp. 223-250. 12 On the rarity of female writers, see Jean Tricard, ‘Les Livres de Raison Français au Miroir des Livres de Famille Italiens: Pour Relancer une Enquête’, Revue Historique 624 (2002), pp. 1005-1006; Sylvie Mouysset, Papiers de Famille, pp. 120-127. 13 Elisabeth Arnoul, ‘Le Recensement des Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914: Bilan des Dépouillements de 2008 à 2001’, in Les Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris, 2015), pp. 259-273. 14 Pierre Philippe Candy: Orgueil et Narcissisme. Journal d’un Notaire Dauphinois au XVIIIe Siècle, texte présenté par René Favier (Grenoble, 2006). 15 Ibid., p. 28. 16 Jean Vassort, Les Papiers d’un Laboureur au Siècle des Lumières. Pierre

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Bordier: Une Culture Paysanne (Seyssel, 1999). 17 See Jean Tricard, ‘Les Livres de Raison Français’, pp. 993-1011, at p. 1007. 18 Xavier Torres, Els Libres de Familia de Pagès. Memòries de Pagès, Memòries de Mas (Segles XVI-XVIII) (Girona, 2000). 19 See Bo Larsson and Janken Myrdal, eds., Peasant Diaries as a Source for the History of Mentality (Stockholm, 1995); Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt and Bjørn Poulsen, eds., Writing Peasants. Studies on Peasant Literacy in Early Modern Northern Europe (Kerteminde, 2002). 20 Département du Loir-et-Cher, région Centre. 21 Jean Vassort, Les Papiers d’un Laboureur au Siècle des Lumières, pp. 89-94. 22 Département de la Somme, région Picardie. 23 Adrien Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, ‘Livre de Raison d’un Bourgeois d’Abbeville (XVIIIe Siècle)’, Bulletin de la Société d’Etude d’Abbeville 5 (19001902), pp. 143-164, 189-228, 233-247. 24 Département de la Sarthe, région Pays-de-Loire. 25 Anne Fillon, Les Trois Bagues aux Doigts: Amours Villageoises au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1989). 26 ‘We decided to return through the levee to see the interesting cities which are on this pleasant road. They were still working on the cathedral of Orléans that passes for one of the most beautiful in France; we admired its structure and rich ornamentation; we saw the bridge and the Rue Neuve, where all the buildings are identical and perfectly aligned’. Mémoires d’un Notable Manceau au Siècle des Lumières, 1737-1817: Jean-Baptiste-Henri-Michel Leprince d’Ardenay, texte préparé et présenté par Benoît Hubert (Rennes, 2007), pp. 79-80. 27 Ibid., pp. 101-113. 28 The diffusion of guidebooks as a genre, during the eighteenth century, has been extensively studied in Paris by Gilles Chabaud, ‘Images de la Ville et Pratiques du Livre: Le Genre des Guides de Paris (XVIIe-XVIIIe Siècles)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 45:2 (1998), pp. 323-345. See also Les Guides Imprimés du XVIe au XXe Siècle. Villes, Paysages, Voyages, textes réunis par Gilles Chabaud, Évelyne Cohen, Natacha Coquery, et Jérôme Penez (Paris, 2000). 29 Pierre-Bruno-Jean de la Monneraye, Souvenirs de 1760 à 1791, ed. Philippe Bonnichon (Paris, 1998). See for example, the accounts of his travels to Rome and Naples, pp. 239-264, or across France, pp. 334-344. 30 Pierre-Bruno-Jean de la Monneraye, Souvenirs, p. 172 for Boston, and p. 323, 1788: ‘Alger m’a paru une assez grande ville, en amphithéâtre sur le penchant d’une montagne, couronnée d’une forte citadelle. Les toits des maisons sont en platte forme; le port est vaste et son entrée difficile’. 31 See the contrast between the urban descriptions, quoted above, and the brevity of his mentions of Rennes, for example: ‘Je passais à Rennes une partie de l’hiver de 1784 à 1785….Nous vivions dans notre petit intérieur, ma mère, mon frère, ma sœur, et moi. Une de nos nièces…habitait avec nous la maison de ma mère. A ça près de nos très proches parents, nous ne voyions personne’: ibid., p. 289. The family lived at Rennes from the early sixteenth century. 32 Alain Lottin, Boulonnais, Noble et Révolutionnaire. Le Journal de Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen (1779-1798) (Arras, 1995), pp. 47, 53, 54, 72, 78, 110, 134.

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33 The eighteenth century was characterised by a general beautification of French provincial towns. See, especially, Jean-Louis Harouel, L’embellissement des Villes. L’urbanisme Français au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1993) and Youri Carbonnier, Maisons Parisiennes des Lumières (Paris, 2006). 34 Journal de ma Vie. Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Compagnon Vitrier au XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Daniel Roche (Paris, 1998), pp. 355-377, and, especially the map pp. 362-363. Daniel Roche thus opposes the sinful spaces that Ménétra has frequented before his wedding, and the theatre of the more monotonous life in which he got stuck during his marriage. Reiji Iwabuchi has developed a similar analysis about the errands and strolls of a samurai in residence in Tokyo in ‘Un Guerrier dans la Ville: Obligations de Service et Sorties d’un Samouraï en poste à Edo au XIXe Siècle’, Histoire Urbaine 29 (2010), pp. 27-66. See especially the maps given pp. 36-37. 35 A mental map is a subjective representation of the urban space drawn by a resident. The sketching of mental maps is a method introduced by the American urbanist Kevin Lynch, in L’image de la Cité (Paris, 1969) (English version, 1960). For an application to a French modern town, see Bob Rowntree, ‘Les Cartes Mentales, Outil Géographique pour la Connaissance Urbaine: Le Cas d’Angers (Maine-et-Loire)’, Norois 176 (1997), pp. 585-604. 36 I use here the triad defined by the French sociologist and philosophe Henri Lefebvre in La Production de l’Espace (Paris, 1974): the perceived space; the conceived space; the lived space. For a comment on this division, and on its ambiguities, see Jean-Yves Martin, ‘Une Géographie Critique de l’Espace du Quotidien: L’actualité Mondialisée de la Pensée Spatiale d’Henri Lefebvre’, Articulo—Journal of Urban Research 2 (2006) (December 1 2006), accessed May 31, 2014, http://articulo.revues.org/897, DOI: 10.4000/articulo.897. 37 Journalier de Jean Pussot, Maître Charpentier à Reims (1568-1626) (Villeneuve d’Ascq), 2008, p. 119: ‘It happened that at six o’clock in the morning on Monday April 25, 1594, day of St. Mark, the aforesaid Sieur de Saint-Paul departed from his house, which was the first house in the cloister next to the market...in order to go to fetch the aforesaid lords of Mayenne and de Guise...and he found them having heard Mass at Saint-Pierre-aux-Nonnains, on the pavement in front of the house Mr. Le Vasseur, canon, vis-à-vis the door behind the palace...’. 38 It is worth remembering that town houses were not numbered until the end of the eighteenth century. 39 ‘…which marks the angle with the rue du Palais Gallien, whose main facade opens onto the Place Dauphine’; ‘You could hear the ominous sound made by the fatal knife falling on victims that the Revolutionary Tribunal sent to the scaffold.’ Pierre Lacour, Notes et Souvenirs d’un Artiste Octogénaire, 1778-1798 (Bordeaux, 1989), p. 25. He successively inhabited place du Marché-Royal, then rue Fondaudège, and lastly, by 1791, rue du Palais-Gallien. 40 ‘…because it serves to give an idea of most of those who were occupied by the bourgeoisie of Doué…’. 41 François-Yves Besnard, Un Prêtre en Révolution: Souvenirs d’un Nonagénaire, texte préparé et annoté par Martine Taroni (Rennes, 2011), p. 31. 42 Marie-Julie Cavaignac, Mémoires d’une Inconnue, édition présentée et annotée

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par Raymond Trousson (Paris, 2013). 43 Ibid., p. 96: ‘Mon père vendit sa maison de Sceaux, devenue odieuse à ma mère (après la mort de son fils)’; p. 117: ‘Mon père avait une maison près d’une barrière, qu’il trouvait trop éloignée pour habiter, avec un jardin de neuf arpents, l’un des plus beaux de Paris…j’allai m’y établir à la belle saison avec mon mari et sa soeur’; p. 127: ‘Comme j’étais nourrice, mon mari ne voulait pas que je restasse à Paris et lui (son beau-frère) demanda de nous louer la moitié de sa maison (à Fontenay-aux-Roses).’. 44 Ibid., p. 182 : ‘Au commencement de l’été, je fus m’établir à la campagne, au Vomero, dans une délicieuse habitation peu distance de la mer…’. 45 Ibid., p. 242: ‘Lors de mon arrivée à Paris, n’ayant pu me loger dans la même maison que ma mère, je m’étais mise dans son voisinage, rue de Tournon, à la porte du Luxembourg, pour y faire conduire ma fille tous les jours.’. 46 Ibid., pp. 262-273. 47 ‘My aunt, Madame d’Henin, welcomed us in 1788 in her house in the Rue de Verneuil. She put me up on the ground floor, overlooking a small garden, which was excessively sad’: Mémoires de la Marquise de la Tour du Pin (Paris, 1989), p. 93. See also p. 286: ‘Enfin, vers le mois de septembre, nous nous décidâmes à partir pour le Bouilh. Nous avions vendu notre maison à Paris assez mal. Elle était située dans un vilain quartier, la rue du Bac.’. 48 Historians often insist on this point in their editions of texts. For a general appreciation of this trend, see the meaningful analysis made by Arianne Baggerman, ‘Lost Time: Temporal Discipline and Historical Awareness in Nineteenth-Century Dutch Egodocuments’, in Controlling Time and Shaping the Self. Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth-Century, ed. Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker and Michael Mascuch (Leiden, 2011), pp. 455-540. See also Anne Béroujon and Clarisse Coulomb, ‘Temps de l’Écriture, Écritures du Temps’, in Les Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris, 2015), pp. 195222. 49 Deux Bourgeois en leur Temps. Documents sur la Société Rouennaise du XIXe siècle, textes présentés et annotés par Jean-Pierre Chaline (Rouen, 1977), p. 41. 50 ‘…where I had played with so much happiness during my early childhood…’; ‘the old abbey, which was not yet the Town Hall…’: ibid., p. 55. 51 ‘In the city, I lived in a house which I still have, in the Rue des Arsin; it only cost me eleven thousand francs in capital and was well worth a thousand francs of rent; it was nice and I occupied it alone’: ibid., p. 76. See also p. 55 for the house of his great-parents, rue Herbière, and of his father, rue de l’Hôpital. 52 Département de la Vienne, région Poitou-Charentes. 53 ‘I undertook a building that I intended as much for my use as for my satisfaction (wishing also lead by example, and to encourage them to build around the fairground, especially on one side where there was no building, only gardens’ walls)’: Mémoires de Jacques-César Ingrand, Né en 1733 (Bonnes, 1999), p. 63. 54 See Alain Cabantous, ‘Le Quartier, Espace Vécu à l’Époque Moderne’, Histoire, Économie et Société 13:3 (1994), pp. 427-439. 55 Mémoires de la Marquise de Ferrières, Née en 1748, recueillis par le vicomte

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Henri Frotier de la Messelière (Bonnes, 1998), p. 53: ‘Notre fortune étant plus aisée…nous achetâmes une maison à Poitiers….Cette maison était grande, dans le quartier de nos connaissances.’. 56 We still have to measure, for example, the effect in personal writings of the promotion of the promenade as an urban leisure during the eighteenth century. See the brilliant analysis of Laurent Turcot, Le Promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 2007). 57 François-Yves Besnard, Un Prêtre en Révolution, p. 15: ‘La ville de Doué était entourée de murs, destinés à protéger la perception des droits d’entrée sur tous les articles qui y étaient assujettis…on ne pouvait y entrer que par cinq portes…’; p. 82: ‘La ville d’Angers était alors environnée de murs élevés, parsemés de grosses tours, revêtus de fossés larges et profonds, percés de 6 portes….Un seul pont vis-àvis la rue Bourgeoise ouvrait les communications entre les deux portions de la ville à peu près égales en étendue que le Maine avait formé.’ François-Yves Besnard gives some urban details like the lack of illuminations of the street at night (p. 96) or the creation of the botanical garden, established around 1785 in a suburb (p. 97). 58 On this point, see the important paper by Daniel Jütte, ‘Entering a City: On a Lost Early Modern Practice’, Urban History 41:2 (2014), pp. 204-227, which renders the physical and cultural impact of the walls and gates on the early modern cities. 59 Caroline Le Mao, Chroniques du Bordelais au Crépuscule du Grand Siècle: Le Mémorial de Savignac (Bordeaux, 2004), pp. 44-45: ‘A 11h du matin, mon cocher…ayant pris le tour du carrosse trop court vis-à-vis l’échoppe Saint-Pierre et la roue s’étant embarrassée dans le ruisseau, mon carrosse a entièrement verse, moi dedans…en sorte [que] je suis sorti par la portière du carrosse…’. 60 ‘At last, think to speak softly, at the corporation council and elsewhere!’: Louis Guibert, ed., ‘Le Livre de Raison d’Etienne Benoist’, Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique du Limousin 29 (1881), pp. 225-317, p. 253. 61 See Jean Tricard, ‘La Mémoire des Benoist: Livre de Raison et Mémoire Familiale au XVe Siècle’, Actes des Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public 13 (1982), pp. 119-140, DOI : 10.3406/shmes.1982.1389, http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/shmes_12619078_1983_act_13_1_1389. 62 ‘May God grant us the grace to obtain the mastership, if it is His will!’, quoted in François-Joseph Ruggiu, ‘Pour Une Étude de l’Engagement Civique’, p. 152. 63 ‘It will not be difficult to maintain order there [in Boulonnois], if one focuses mainly on training subjects able to enforce it. There are some of them at this moment in Boulogne and one has just to choose well...’: A. Lottin, Boulonnais, Noble et Révolutionnaire, p. 158. 64 A. Lottin, Boulonnais, Noble et Révolutionnaire, p. 186. 65 ‘Sunday 26, I was forced to buy a cockade to put me in harmony with the city that cost me, at Pichon’s shop, one livre and ten sols’: Pierre Philippe Candy, p. 499. 66 His father and his grandfather had been members of the municipality of the town (consul) before him: Pierre Philippe Candy, p. 17.

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‘Thursday 23, supper at home, and then I worked at the tables of the sale of the ‘biens nationaux’ until midnight when I went to bed’: Pierre Philippe Candy, p. 581. 68 ‘I thought that changing my residence to Mantes would bring me appointment as député. I was sure that this would never occur in Paris, but in Mantes...where I still enjoyed the confidence of the public, where I could meet only feeble competitors, my appointment was almost certain....One must have thought I came to Mantes for trade, when I came for ambition’: Alice Peresan-Roudil, Eustache-Antoine Hua (1759-1836). Mémoires et Papiers Privés d’un Magistrat et Député. Edition Critique des Mémoires d’Eustache-Antoine Hua, thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste-paléographe, Ecole nationale des Chartes, 2014, sous la direction de Christine Nougaret et François-Joseph Ruggiu, p. 339. 69 Jean-Baptiste Leprince d’Ardenay, Mémoires d’un Notable Manceau, p. 163. 70 ‘Of all the public functions to which I was called, that of member of the Hospital’s board, that I held for nine years before the Revolution, was the one which has most gratified my vanity and my inclination’: ibid., p. 163. 71 ‘…by inclination as well as by wish to do the greatest possible good’: A. Lottin, Boulonnais, Noble et Révolutionnaire, p. 245. 72 ‘It was, I did not need to say, a cruel grief to me that the disaster of Waterloo and the overthrow of the French grandeur which caused the loss of my personal expectations…’: Deux Bourgeois en Leur Temps, p. 102. 73 The Tableau de Paris written by Louis Sébastien Mercier, and published from 1781 to 1788, is held as the model of this genre. Like François-Yves Besnard, Gabriel Abot de Bazinghen explicitly claims to wish to be a social observer: ‘1783 [...] I will try, for my pleasure and that of those in whose hands this manuscript may fall one day, to describe here the private life of the nobility, of the traders, affluent and well-off people of my city and of my province, and of the countryside’s people, about manners in general, modes and ways to live in each station of the life, how to live etc. etc.’: A. Lottin, Boulonnais, Noble et Révolutionnaire, p. 83. See Jérôme David, ‘Les ‘Tableaux’ des Sciences Sociales Naissantes: Comparatisme Statistique, Littérature’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 5 (2001), pp. 37-59. .

CHAPTER THREE THE INTELLIGENTSIA’S PERCEPTION OF ITSELF AND SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTHAND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SEOUL: CASE STUDIES OF PARK JE GA AND SIM NO SOONG HYUN YOUNG KIM TRANSLATED BY SUNG HEE KIM

Preface Even in pre-modern Korean society, where urban development was somewhat slow, the capital Seoul and a few other local administrative centres were starting to assume some characteristics of a city. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Seoul in particular experienced several aspects of urban development as the population increased and commerce was jumpstarted. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, King Jeongjo commissioned his vassals to write poetry in praise of Seoul’s developed appearance. This study aims to elucidate the development of cities between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century in Korea and to analyse how the intellectuals of that time recognised individuals and groups and how their thoughts are recorded in their writings. This research project will primarily examine the works of Jeongyu Park Je Ga (1750-1805) and Hyojeon Sim No Soong (1762-1837), who lived in Seoul during this period. Several studies of Park Je Ga and Sim No Soong have recently been produced by scholars of that era’s literature, which was written in classical Chinese. Numerous studies have also been conducted on the urban development of Seoul.1 Many studies in the field of Chinese classics are

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concerned with the literary significance of the diary form, whereas the field of Korean history approaches the diaries in terms of microhistorical research. Since materials in diary form have great significance in the sense that they can reflect the inner world of the people at the time, many studies based on these materials are emerging. On the basis of these studies, the present study will investigate how Park Je Ga and Sim No Soong viewed their families, colleagues, and friends, and how their perceptions of these groups of people are reflected in their writings. This research is also concerned with the condition and preservation of these materials.

The urban development of Seoul in the late eighteenth century According to census information collected in the Joseon period, the kingdom’s population increased significantly from the time of the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592-98) to the mid-seventeenth century. From that time, however, the population of the kingdom, along with the population of Seoul, remained unchanged until the final years of the kingdom. In 1657, the population of Seoul comprised 15,760 households and 80,572 inhabitants. In 1669, it had increased to 23,899 households and 194,030 inhabitants. From that time until the late nineteenth century, the number of households increased, but the population stayed virtually the same. In 1789, the period upon which this essay focuses, Seoul had 43,929 households, twice as many as in 1669, while the numbers of inhabitants (189,153) had actually decreased. In the late eighteenth century, owing to rapid developments in agricultural productivity and commodity-based commerce, the population just outside the city walls, especially in the area near the river, increased significantly.2 This resulted in a number of songs and poems which were written in praise of Seoul’s urban development. Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital (Hanseongjeondosi), Lyric Poetry of Seoul (Hangyeongsa) and Song of Seoul (Hanyangga) reflect the progression of Seoul during that time. In 1792, King Jeongjo, who was trying to correct what was perceived as a ‘vulgar’ style of writing, had his vassals in Gyujanggak Royal Library write a hundred works of poetry about the flourishing and peaceful features of Seoul, which were depicted in the folding-screen painting, ‘Detailed Painting of the Capital’ (Seongsijeondo). Many of his vassals, including Shing Gwang Ha (an administrative secretary at the Ministry of Defence), Park Je Ga (a librarian at Gyujanggak Royal Library), Lee Deok

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Moo (another librarian at Gyujanggak Royal Library), Yu Deuk Gong, and Lee Man Soo (an honorary official), participated in this praise of Seoul’s development. Park Je Ga, who was working as a librarian, also participated in the event by devoting Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital to the king. King Jeongjo chose six works that he deemed to be of high quality, and made written comments on each. Park Je Ga’s work came second only to Shin Gwang Ha’s, which received the compliment of ‘a singing painting’ (Yuseonghwa), and was awarded the title of ‘a speaking painting’ (Haeeohwa) by the king. Park Je Ga named his house ‘the home of a speaking painting’ (Haeeohwajae) after this title. Lee Deok Moo’s work was praised as being ‘A’ (elegant or sophisticated) and his pen name became ‘Ajeong’.3 According to the studies on the existing Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital, Shin Gwang Ha’s work depicted Seoul in a formal and old-fashioned way, whereas Park Je Ga vividly described the secular aspects of everyday life in the city. Using two hundred phrases and one hundred rhymes, his work reflects the various facets of Seoul at that time. First, he describes the physical appearance of Seoul and then he depicts its busy market streets. These lines describe the city’s appearance: Forty thousand roof-tiled houses are standing in a row. Carp are swimming in the swelling water.4

These lines liken the numerous rows of roof-tiled houses to the scales of a fish, and the people living in the houses to fish in water. In 1789, during the reign of King Jeongjo, Seoul actually had 43,929 houses and 189,153 inhabitants. His song, therefore, reflects an actual feature of Seoul, albeit with a certain amount of embellishment. Seoul was able to undergo such rapid development in the eighteenth century as a result of the Gongnapje (tribute tax system) that had been implemented in the previous century. The new policy promoted commerce around the Han River, and markets were formed in the capital to supply commodities to the leisure class. Park Je Ga also vividly depicted these aspects of the city. Yi-hyeon, Jongru, and Chilpae, the three major commerce centres in the capital city. All kinds of artisans working shoulder to shoulder, all kinds of carts carrying goods for sale.5

These lines depict the bustle of daily life in Seoul’s three biggest markets: Yi-hyeon, Jongru, and Chilpae. It describes various kinds of craftsmen and

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merchants working next to each other and cartloads of wares being carried into the market. These goods were supplied not only from around Seoul, but from further afield also. The products included such items as cotton flannel hats from Liaodong, silk from Beijing, linen from Hamgyeong province, and ramie from Hansan. Seoul was the final destination for these kinds of goods, which were acquired through commercial activity. Various goods are mentioned in Park Je Ga’s poetry: grains such as rice, beans, and millet; spices such as ginger and mustard; vegetables like garlic, green onions, and leeks; fruit and nuts like grapes, jujubes, chestnuts, tangerines, pears, and persimmons; meat, including dried beef and poultry; and fish such as dried fish, croaker, flatfish, salmon, and gizzard shad. His work also describes the methods of transport, which included cows and horses. Other diverse features of the city are also set out in detail: leisure activities that people enjoyed during their spare time—such as Korean lute and bamboo flute recitals, plays, puppet shows, and rope dancing (his comments explain that even Chinese envoys came to watch these shows); lanterns for celebrating Buddha’s birthday; the tradition of eating noodles on the first full moon day of the year; drinking establishments; the blind; dog butchers; various kinds of people such as servants, petty officials, female servants, eunuchs, female entertainers, thieves, and policemen; the presence of high officials; and luxury goods such as bamboo tobacco pipes, tobacco cases decorated with mother-of-pearl, and plantain fans. Park Je Ga was among the first to enjoy the fruits of Seoul’s urban development. He grew up studying with his friends, and as his studies progressed, he visited the writer Yeonam Park Ji Won, a great literary mind of the time, at his house behind the White Pagoda in downtown Seoul. Subsequently, an association grew up between them. The time he spent with his contemporaries in the White Pagoda Group were the most beautiful moments of Park Je Ga’s life. Indeed, it would be fair to say that his Discourse on Learning Qing China (Bukhagui) was a product of the conversations he had with the White Pagoda Group members. He discussed the need for an active adoption of the Qing Chinese civilization and institutions as well as the need for extended trade with foreign countries. These ideas of his may well have been derived from his academic relations and the information he acquired in the centre of Seoul. Sim No Soong was born twelve years after Park Je Ga, but he also had the opportunity to enjoy Seoul life. While he was living away from Seoul, he recognised the differences in the way of life outside the city and missed the sophisticated and flourishing culture of the capital. When he was exiled to Gijang in Gyeongsang province, an oceanside village 400 kilometres from Seoul, he suffered most from the differences in the food

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culture. Eating a largely fish-based diet made him miss the fancy cuisine he had enjoyed in Seoul (entry dated 25th June 1801, Daily Records of the Exile in the South (Namcheonillok)). When his student Jeong of Dongrae brought him a small portion of high-end dishes, he complimented them by saying that they tasted like the kind of dishes he used to get from the female street vendors in Seoul (entry dated 9th April 1802). This comment made by Sim No Soong indicates that there were vendors selling side dishes in Seoul at the time. He asked one of his young students, Palsibi, to make him some side dishes similar to the ones he had eaten in Seoul. Palsibi even had the idea of going to the capital to get quality ingredients to make the side dishes and then compare them to the ones made by Sim No Soong’s female servants in Seoul (entry dated 22nd December 1802). On the basis of this entry, one can infer that there were differences between the food culture of Seoul and that of other areas. His daily entries include various thoughts he had during his exile. He wrote about the custom of devoting rice cakes to the spirit of the household on the first day of the year and on the first full moon day of the year (entry dated 1st December 1802). He compared the hardships suffered by the local children, who lost their fingernails making Go stones (Go is a board game based on capturing territory by placing stones on the board), a well-known local product, to the privileged life that children of noble birth led in Seoul. When he saw a child with fingernails that were broken from making Go stones, he denounced the lazy lifestyles of rich children, which merely consisted of good clothes, fancy food, and plenty of amusement but no studying (entry dated 24th March 1801). When he hung his nephew Wonyeol’s calligraphy on the wall, his students all came to study its style, remarking that it represented the literary style of the Seoul child (entry dated 6th July 1801). He also mentioned the Seoul proverb that states ‘to learn about the middle class (joongin), one should visit a drug store’, and recorded his experience regarding the language differences between Seoul and Gijang (entry dated 21st April 1801).

Park Je Ga’s self-perception and his longing for a quiet life in the countryside Park Je Ga’s life and his relationships with Chinese intellectuals Park Je Ga’s life can be divided into three periods: his young adulthood (spent with other young intellectuals in the White Pagoda Group), his years working as a librarian and as a local administrator, and his life in exile after King Jeongjo’s death. He met Lee Deok Moo through his

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neighbour Baek Dong Soo and connected with young intellectuals from the White Pagoda Group, including Park Ji Won and Yu Deuk Gong. Many intellectuals (Park Ji Won, Lee Deok Moo, Yu Deuk Gong, Lee Seo Gu, Yu Geum, Lee Hee Gyeong, etc.) lived in the area around the pagoda. This was at a time when he could freely develop his intellect and pursue his dream. By the age of nineteen, he had already compiled his poetry collection, Poems of Chojeong (Chojeongsigo), and added Lee Deok Moo’s preface to it. During this time, Park Ji Won moved into the area north of the pagoda, and Park Je Ga visited him and learned from him. In 1775, when Park Je Ga was twenty-five, a collection of the poetry of Park Ji Won, Lee Deok Moo, and Park Je Ga, entitled Poetry Collection of the White Pagoda Acquaintances (Baektapcheongyeonjip), was published by Lee Hee Gyeong.6 The 1767 mission to Japan from Korea was an important influence on Park Je Ga’s ‘theory of Learning Qing China’ (Bukhagnon), and its value as a civilization. His friends from the White Pagoda Group, including Seong Dae Joong and Won Joong Geo, were part of the mission and it is clear that Park Je Ga was affected by their experience. Even though Park Je Ga himself never went to Japan, his poetry (Hoeinsi) includes mention of five Japanese people of particular renown. This suggests that he was inspired by his friends’ accounts of Japanese culture, such as the life of Kimura Kenkado, a merchant from a common family who was an important figure in Japan’s cultural scene at the time. His ideas about initiating commerce with the Jiangnan and Zhejiang areas in China seem to have been inspired by the trade between Nagasaki, Japan, and Jiangnan, China. Therefore, it is also possible to assume that the most progressive part of the ‘Learning Qing China’ theory, which was its argument in favour of foreign commerce and trade with Zhejiang, China, was also influenced by Japan.7 When Park Je Ga was writing Discourse on Learning Qing China (Bukhagui) following his first trip to China, he was more preoccupied with his country than with his family and himself.8 His main concern was how to increase his nation’s wealth. The first thought that occurred to him during his Chinese trip was to make wider use of transportation units such as ships and carts so that his country could become more prosperous. In 1790, accompanied by Yu Deuk Gong, Park Je Ga made his second trip to China as a member of the entourage of Seo Gil Soo, who was Joseon’s vice-ambassador of envoys dispatched to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the Jianlong Emperor. During this trip, he established connections with distinguished Chinese intellectuals including Ji Yun, Weng Fang Gang, Luo Pin, Zhang Wen Yao, Tie Bao, and Peng Yuan Rui.

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Upon returning from the trip in March 1791, he wrote fifty poems about fifty figures in Qing China, Emulating Jiang Xin Yu (Bangjangsimnyeo). In 1801, he was sent to China again with orders to acquire a copy of Chu Hsi’s writings. This trip with Yu Deuk Gong was his fourth visit to China. During his stay he met Li Tiao Yuan and Chen Zhan, who subsequently wrote a preface for Park Je Ga’s book Concise Collection of Jeongyu’s Work (Jeongyugoryak). This encounter led to the book being published by Chen Zhan and others in China in 1803. Concise Collection of Jeongyu’s Work was later featured in Wu Xing Lan’s Pearls of Dust from the Ocean of Arts (Yehaejujin).

Park Je Ga’s perceptions of himself as an intellectual and as the child of a concubine A person’s way of thinking is determined by his or her social position. Park Je Ga was a Seoul intellectual, born to a concubine in a Yangban family. As a young adult, he gave himself the pen name ‘Chojeong’ since he enjoyed Songs of the South (Chosa) by Qu Yuan. When he was acting as a librarian, he gained the favour of King Jeongjo and also happened to reside near a particular pine tree the king loved. Accordingly, he gave himself another pen name, ‘Jeongyu’. He also used the pseudonym ‘Haeeohwajae’ since the king commented that his Poems for the Detailed Painting of the Capital were ‘a speaking painting’ (Haeeohwa). When he was advocating open commerce with China, he called himself ‘Wihangdoin’, and when he was in exile, he referred to himself as ‘Nanong’ as a nod to his circumstances. In Joseon society, social discrimination meant that the sons of concubines could not have successful careers, even if they were highly talented and capable. As a marginalised man, Park Je Ga had to create his own identity. Although he was a member of the Yangban class, he was, at the same time, excluded from it. However, he was not discouraged by the unfair circumstances he faced since he chose to live a humble life by ‘trying to associate with noble, but solitary, men and avoiding people with money and power’.9 In essence, Park Je Ga’s perception of social status was affected by his own social status. Park Je Ga’s inner thoughts and emotions regularly found expression in his work. He introduced his early poems, along with those written by other members of the White Pagoda Group, primarily Lee Deok Moo, Park Je Ga, Yu Deuk Gong, and Lee Seo Goo, to China in the form of Sagasi (Poems of the Four Masters, later published under the title Hangaekgeonyeonjip, or Small Collection of the Korean Wayfarer). Park Je Ga was introduced to China through his friend,

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Yu Geum, and wrote a short autobiography, Sojeon, so as to better introduce himself to the intellectuals he met there. In the Short Autobiography (Sojeon), he wrote that he was born in Joseon in 1750 as a member of the Parks of Milyang and that he was a descendant of the Silla Kingdom. He also commented that his name ‘Je Ga’ was from Daehak (the Great Learning), and he gave himself the pen name ‘Chojeong’ on account of his fondness for Departing in Sorrow (Isogyeong). An excerpt from the autobiography reads: A man with the forehead of a water buffalo, sharp eyebrows, blue eyes, and white ears. He struck up friendships with solitary men but stayed away from powerful people. His incongruity with the world constantly subjected him to poverty. He gained literary knowledge in his youth, and he devoted himself to the study of state administration and poverty relief. He spent days away from his home but still went unrecognised. He was only concerned with significant and just things and remained ignorant of mundane issues. He pursued reason and justice, withdrew into himself, and through his studies conversed with people of ancient times. He observed natural phenomena, such as clouds and fog, and listened to all kinds of birdsong. He could sense minute changes in things such as grass, trees, insects, fish, frost, and dewdrops, but he could not put the knowledge into words nor express its flavour with his mouth and tongue. But still he believed that he sensed and knew things no one else did.10

Park Je Ga depicted himself as a man with a prominent forehead, sharp eyebrows, blue eyes, and white ears. He tried to distinguish himself from others in his appearance, taste, and literary style. The excerpt above is his self-introduction to the Chinese intellectuals that he admired. Park Je Ga’s portrait was painted by the Chinese artist Luo Pin, someone he eagerly anticipated connecting with. On his second visit to China, Park Je Ga developed a sincere friendship with him. When it came time for them to part Luo Pin described the good scholar Park Je Ga as the personification of a plum blossom. Met a visitor from a remote foreign land, made a portrait of this good scholar. Your excellent poems are without compare, you are the personification of a plum blossom.11

Park Je Ga had many acquaintances from various classes of society: sons of concubines, martial artists, and technicians, for example. His social network ranged from his neighbours, such as Baek Dong Soo, to intellectuals from the White Pagoda Group with whom he shared his

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academic pursuits and worldview, to intellectuals in China and Japan. In fact, he saw wide social interaction as a method through which he could achieve his life’s goal. Departing from the ‘vertical’ relationships based on the traditional caste system of Joseon society, Park Je Ga built his social milieu around ‘horizontal’ relationships with like-minded friends. These were relationships in which he could determine his own social status. Of the five basic tenets of Confucianism, he was especially concerned with the one that refers to ‘Bunguyusin’ (faith should reign over the relationship between friends), and it is this principle upon which the horizontal perspective is based. 12 However, the social hierarchy at the time was extremely rigid, and the majority of society thought it right to continue discriminating against sons of concubines. This social reality drove him to seek out the open-minded intellectuals of the White Pagoda Group, who accepted horizontal relationships and freely befriended people from foreign countries. His association with the Cheonaejigi (sincere friends in a remote place),13 cultivated over his four trips to China, was recorded in Anthology of International Exchange (Hojeojip) by his son Park Jang Am.

Park Je Ga’s perspectives on his family and friends Park Je Ga’s web of horizontal relationships can be seen as his attempt to break free of the traditional social hierarchy. His circumstances, however, were ultimately inescapable. When he was appointed as a librarian, and regularly dispatched to China on the basis of his superior literary ability, it seemed his hopes of transcending the limitations of his social status had finally been realised. Unfortunately, he found himself coming up against the crushing force of the traditional social order on a daily basis, and, in the end, he failed to achieve his dream of social selfdetermination. By analysing the perspectives that Park Je Ga had about his family and friends, it is possible to understand how he saw himself. Park Ji Won, when he was magistrate of An-ui county, wrote a letter to a friend, the contents of which suggest certain aspects of the relationships White Pagoda intellectuals developed with each other. Park Ji Won inquired after the health of Lee Hee Myeong, Lee Jae Seong, Lee Hee Gyeong, and Park Je Ga and expressed his concerns about Park Je Ga following his discharge from the office of Buyeo county magistrate and the loss of his wife as well as his cherished friend, Lee Deok Moo. The letter reads as follows: I have heard that Jaeseon [the courtesy name of Park Je Ga] was discharged from the office of Buyeo county magistrate and has returned home. How many times have you seen him? Already he has lost his wife

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Park Ji Won was well aware of the intimate friendship Park Je Ga had had with Lee Deok Moo and compared their bond to that of Zhong Zi Qi and Bo Ya. He understood Park Je Ga’s devastation at losing a close friend. Because of his social position and what it meant for his work prospects, Park Je Ga did not particularly value a successful career. Instead, he devoted himself to his involvement with the leading intellectuals of the time and to sharing with them his academic views and taste in art. To him, friends were ‘brothers without blood ties and wives living in different houses’. 15 He was not lonely because he had friends such as Lee Deok Moo, Yu Deuk Gong, Lee Seo Goo, Seo Sang Soo, Yu Geum, and Baek Dong Soo, whom he saw as being ‘the same person as himself’. Park Je Ga was favoured not only by his friends, but also by King Jeongjo. In May 1793, Park Je Ga was discharged from the office of Buyeo county magistrate. He was impeached after a secret royal inspector for the Hoseo area, Lee Jo Won, found a problem with the relief aid Park Je Ga was responsible for. The king tried to protect him from this punishment by ordering a re-investigation of the case since he believed Park Je Ga was being discriminated against based on his family background.16 Moreover, Park Je Ga was one of the king’s closest vassals. In July 1797, Park Je Ga was impeached a second time for the ‘Hosang [a Chinese chair] issue’ by Sim Hwan Ji. On this occasion, the king once again saved Park Je Ga from punishment and opted instead to place stricter regulations on the matter.17 The king’s affection for Park Je Ga attracted the jealousy of the nobility. Park Je Ga’s impeachments were the result of that envy. The outspokenness that Park Je Ga had developed among his acquaintances was frowned upon by the government. Park Ji Won continually admonished Park Je Ga about this.18

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Longing for a quiet life in the countryside His friend Yu Deuk Gong experienced similar circumstances as Park Je Ga in that he could not own a house or even a small patch of land to cultivate. Park Je Ga and Lee Deok Moo were renowned figures in China, but they were not recognised in Joseon, and, therefore, did not even own a house. Have you not seen that? Among tens of thousands of houses in this flourishing capital, none is in my possession. Have you not seen that as well? There is fertile soil all around the world, but none of it belongs to Hyepoong [pen name of Yu Deuk Gong]. The list of dignitaries has many names; none of them are our close relatives. Such defeat is our lot in life, but still we have our dignity since our names are known.19

The final part of Singing Loud on Leaving (Banggahaeng), which states his plans to retire to the country and continue writing, suggests that Park Je Ga was aware of his social position. For the sons of concubines, whose parentage automatically excluded them from society, working as government officials was merely a way to secure a steady living; they could only dream of living as retired intellectuals in the countryside, spending their days farming and writing. Park Je Ga hoped that he would be able to retire to the country after he saw his friend Hyeon Cheon (Won Joong Geo) do so. It was then that he vowed to his good friend Lee Hee Gyeong that they would live a quiet retired life together in the future. Park Je Ga was always aware of his social circumstances and thus he fantasised about living a peaceful life in the countryside with his friends, working during the day and studying at night. However, he entered into government service after being suddenly chosen by King Jeongjo. He had already seen the social limitations that sons of concubines faced in intellectual society by witnessing the lives of his friends Seong Dae Joong and Won Joong Geo. His farewell poem, written when he was twentyseven and dedicated to his friend Won Joong Geo, who was then retiring to a mountain valley in Jipyeong, Gyeonggi province, shows us his thoughts on life and success. He had enough social consciousness to point out the harmful effects of such things as the state examination, noble families, and political factions, and to criticise the discrimination against sons of concubines. At the same time, however, he envied Won Joong Geo’s quiet life in the countryside. As a member of the Joseon mission to Japan, Won Joong Geo gained fame in that country as a great literary mind. People at

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the time addressed him as ‘Hyeoncheon Seonsaeng’. However, he could not get any position that his ability would have qualified him for. He could only plant trees in the south of Seoul and later buy a farmhouse in Jipyeong from the sale of those trees. He retired to this house to live with his family. He chose the retired life not because he wanted it, but because the world afforded him no other option.20 Park Je Ga praised Won Joong Geo for fulfilling his duty, maintaining his integrity, and bringing honour to his name even though he was up against harsh social circumstances and the vicissitudes of life. He respected Won Joong Geo for making the difficult decision to go back to where he originally came from. Park Je Ga berated himself for not being able to do the same. He was well aware of the unjust reality, which demanded that one have a certain family background in addition to state examination degrees in order to become a government official or, failing that, a merchant. Still, he could not give up the hope that he might achieve success despite the unfairness of the world. Park Je Ga must have always longed for a retired life in the country. He once expressed his hope for his future lifestyle, and it was for a quiet farmer’s life in harmony with his neighbours, not the life of government officials. He did not study only to secure a means of living, though. His study was focused on the running of the state and relieving people from poverty. Since society refused to grant him his due on the basis of his parentage, he thought he would make use of his study within his household and his community. He reasoned that it would be possible to manage a comfortable life with enough books for people from ten households to read. He envisioned circulating commodities using carts, and engaging in farming and weaving with his neighbours. The things he learned from his trips to China could have been utilised in his household administration.21 He also thought about how his friends would be included in his retired life. His thoughts about Lee Hee Gyeong’s retired life in the country are expressed thus: Build a house right next to a small field, cultivate it with my sons. Even with the wisdom to rule the state, no desire to make my living from government service. For reading, I pursued Piya, for writing, I pursued Nanjing. Planned to live together in a hermitage, a shame it has not been followed.22

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Park Je Ga had previously planned to retire with Lee Hee Gyeong. Although he had an ambition to reform his country, he knew his social status made doing so impossible.23 When King Jeongjo made an exception and granted him a high position in Gyujanggak Royal Library, he justified accepting the position by telling those who might envy him because of the king’s help that he had originally planned to retire and follow the plough. Similar comments were made when he was appointed to different offices.24 Park Je Ga was ashamed of himself for not following his original plan and regretted that he was spending his life in such a way. He expressed his longing for the same kind of lifestyle that Won Joong Geo had chosen. He also mentioned his desire for retirement to his friend Lee Han Jin, who was living in a mountain valley near Park Je Ga’s office in Yeongpyeong, where he was working as a magistrate. Lee Han Jin, whom Park Je Ga had frequent contact with at the time, was also unable to secure a proper government position on account of his social status as the son of a concubine, regardless of his ability. Park Je Ga wrote a farewell poem for Lee Han Jin when he was retiring to his family farm in Yeongpyeong; his longing for a retired life is expressed in the poetry as well.25

The arrangement of his writings As mentioned above, Park Je Ga’s early poems were introduced to China in a book titled Small Collection of the Korean Wayfarer (Hangaekgeonyeonjip). Poems of Chojeong (Chojeongsigo) was published as well, and he explained to the world his ideas about running the state by writing Discourse on Learning Qing China (Bukhagui). His writings from the prime of his life were compiled in Concise Collection of Jeongyu’s Work (Jeongyugoryak). This book was posthumously published as Complete Collection of Jeongyu’s Work (Jeongyugakjip). Anthology of International Exchange (Hojeojip) is unique among his writings. It was compiled in two volumes by Park Je Ga’s son, Park Jang Am, and it contains his memoirs detailing his relationship with Chinese intellectuals over his four trips to China. Even though it was put together by Park Jang Am, it is actually the work of Park Je Ga. Anthology of International Exchange has a distinctive structure. The content follows chronological order, but there is one separate book titled Compilation (Chanjip). This book comprises a list of the names of the Chinese intellectuals Park Je Ga associated with as well as brief information about them, including their state examination grades, names and pen names, titles and ancestry, and other relevant information. The ‘Chan’ from the title denotes Park Jang Am’s intention to collect what he heard from his

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father and to present Park Je Ga’s existing writings about his Chinese acquaintances. The letters exchanged among them were arranged in another book, Organization (Pyeonjip); here, ‘Pyeon’ means that the book is a collection of the writings contained in these letters.26 Since Anthology of International Exchange consists of the written exchanges that Park Je Ga had with his Chinese friends, it has great significance with regard to our understanding of Korean and Chinese cultures at the time.

Sim No Soong’s self-perception and his affection for his family Sim No Soong’s life and publications Sim No Soong’s life events are recorded in detail in his self-chronicle, Jajeoginyeon. Sim No Soong used Taedeung as a courtesy name; his pen names were Mongsangeosa and Hyojeon. He once dreamed that he climbed Mt. Taishan and he subsequently gave himself the courtesy name Taedeung, which means ‘climbing Mt. Taishan’. The pen name Mongsangeosa also has a connection to the dream since it means ‘man who dreamed of a mountain’. He published a large volume of unofficial history, Unofficial History of Korea (Daedongpaerim), along with thirtyeight volumes of his own writing, Collection of Hyojeon’s Work (Hyojeonsango). Sim No Soong passed the expanded state examination (Jeunggwangsi) in 1790, earning a second class licentiate degree (Jinsa), and started his official career through the line of protected appointments for the sons of high officials (Eumjik). He was the first son of a former Jeju county magistrate, Sim Nak Soo. Sim No Soong’s father was a member of the Party of Expedience (Sipa) in the Elder Group of the Western Faction (Noron). He spearheaded the political warfare waged against their rival, the Party of Principle (Byeokpa). Sim No Soong’s younger brother, Sim No Am, prepared for the state examination with him, and he completed it in 1795, earning a second class classics licentiate degree. However, neither of them passed the literary licentiate examination. Sim No Soong had quite a frail constitution. He was fond of Chinese novels such as Four Great Classical Novels (Sadaegiseo) and Romance of the West Chamber (Seosanggi). He enjoyed the arts during the time he spent going back and forth between his home and his father’s place of work. He was also engrossed in his preparations for the state examination and was deeply absorbed by poetry and prose. In 1797, he was appointed guardian of Younghee Depository of the Portrait of a King (Yeonghuijeon), on the

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recommendation of Jeong Min Si. When the Party of Principle took control of government in 1801, his father, Sim Nak Soo, a core member of the Party of Expedience, was expelled from office, and Sim No Soong was exiled to Gijang county, Gyeongsang province, in February 1801 on the charge of ‘Baechiuiri Janghaeseonllyu’ (betraying fidelity and harming the virtuous). When the government under the Party of Principle collapsed after the death of Queen Jeongsoon in 1806, he was released from exile. He restarted his official career as assistant governor in the Royal Inspector’s Office (Geumbudosa) in 1809, but his younger brother died in 1811, and in the following year, his mother also passed away. His brother Sim No Am’s death caused him intense grief since he regarded his brother as his companion in research and in life. For the five years following Sim No Am’s death, Sim No Soong did not produce any poetry. In 1815, he was appointed section chief of the Ministry of Justice and served as county magistrate in Noseong, then as county governor in Cheonan and Incheon, and as an administrator in Gwangju. After being discharged from office in Incheon, he lived the rest of his life in Paju and passed away in January 1837 at the age of seventy-six. He fathered one son and three daughters with his first wife; all but his second daughter, however, died young. His first wife died in 1792, and he later remarried and had a son, Won Sin, in 1811 at the age of fifty. Sim No Soong was twelve years younger than Park Je Ga. Even though they lived in Seoul at the same time, they did not associate with each other. Sim No Soong regarded Park Je Ga as a literary person with a ‘vulgar’ style who followed the tradition of ‘the harmony on the Piloon Rock of Mt. Inwang’ (Pirundaejo) and thus became a target of King Jeongjo’s literary style renewal. When Sim No Soong read Poetry Collection of Elegance from the West Capital (Seogyeong), the poetry collection exchanged among Won In Son, Lee Bong Hwan, and Hong Sin Yu while they were in Pyeongyang, he thought the works in that collection were frivolous. At the time, this kind of literature was known as ‘the harmony in the Piloon Rock of Mt. Inwang’ among commoners in the streets of Seoul. While Kim Chang Heup and Hong Se Tae were associating with the common people, they grew to appreciate this style of writing. Lee Cheon Bo and Cho Gwan Bin carried on this tradition, and Lee Deok Moo and Park Je Ga also adopted the style. Even though Sim No Soong enjoyed the informal literary works produced by the common people, he tried to avoid adopting this ‘vulgar’ style in his own work.

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Perception of self Sim No Soong took great pleasure in documentation. He wrote his selfchronicle, Jajeoginyeon, at the age of fifty, and, in his later years, he collected various writings about himself and his acquaintances in his autobiography titled Jajeosiligi. After the death of his younger brother and lifelong friend Sim No Am, he did not expect to live much longer himself. Accordingly, he arranged a chronicle of his life for his nephew, Won Yeol. He thought that a chronicle would provide a much better reflection of himself than a portrait could. He says in the chronicle: When an elder passes away, his or her descendants or followers make a book about the life of the deceased. It is written in chronological order and is thus called a chronology. A chronology is of great significance for a person. When a person accomplishes something distinctive and thus becomes a part of history, that person’s name can be included in the official or unofficial record; such a person has no need for a chronology. For all others, though, a chronology is the only way to pass down their life stories. Since it is the deceased’s sons and students who record the person’s life, the influence of their personal emotions could easily render the contents inaccurate. Therefore, it is best if the person writes about his or her life while still alive. A portrait is used in the memorial ceremony of the deceased, but it rarely reflects the true self of the person even when it is made in a sincere manner. For these reasons, a chronology containing the person’s life and achievements is a better source through which the following generations can learn about their ancestors.27

In Sim No Soong’s opinion, in order to leave an accurate record of oneself, a chronology was better than a portrait. He expected his younger brother would compile his life history following his death. Since his brother predeceased him, however, he worried he would not be able to arrange his personal records. Therefore, eighteen years after the compilation of Jajeoginyeon, he wrote his autobiography Jajeosilgi, with more accurate and detailed records. Jajeosilgi contains a vast amount of information about himself and the time in which he lived. The work includes chapters about his appearance (Sangmo), personality (Seonggi), works of art (Yesul), and two chapters on knowledge (Mungyeon). He states in the autobiography: If even one strand of hair is different, then it is not the same person anymore. How can any writing reflect a person’s true self when a drawing cannot do so? However, sometimes a piece of writing can do something that a drawing cannot do.28

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Sim No Soong was confident in his powers of description. He believed he could depict a person much more vividly through writing than by drawing a portrait. From the time he was young, he had always loved portraits, so whenever he encountered painters he asked them to draw his picture. But among the dozens of portraits he had, none reflected him properly. So he stopped requesting portraits and decided that the written word was more accurate than a picture, provided it was based on the truth. His autobiography, Jajeosilgi, was written with such assurance. In the chapter on his appearance, he described the way he looked and even the way he sounded: My head is wide and round, and it is flat and broad on top. My forehead protrudes. My eyebrows are not thick, but their tails are more prominent than my eyes. My eyes are big and my pupils clear. My nose sits higher than my cheek and its end is hooked. The sides of my nose are round. My ears sit above my whiskers and are thick, with round earlobes. My cheekbone is neither bulging nor flat. My chin is raised but does not cover the upper jaw. My mouth is small; my lips are thick and red. My moustache does not cover my mouth. Loose whiskers touch my ear and neck. My nose and cheeks are pockmarked. My face is fairly pale and slightly yellow. My voice is high-pitched but heavy at the same time. The physiognomist described me in the following words: ‘appearance of iron and soil, voice of iron and water’, which were not false claims. There is an energy between the eyes and eyebrows which is hard to gather but easy to overlook; it is not easy to describe or evaluate it. When I look back on the path of my life, there were many wrongs but few rights. It has even been said that when there is pleasure, it will be snatched away by pain, and this must be so. My body is lean and weak and slightly shorter than average. My back is round and slouching, my belly wide and drooping. I was so weak that I was not even able to carry clothes on my body, so my relatives whispered behind my back that I would die young.29

In the chapter on personality, he wrote various things about himself: he had a pathological fear of germs and was quick-tempered; his wife tamed his hot temper through advice; he was easily frightened; he bought expensive items at the stationery store; he did not enjoy looking at complex accounting books; he disliked noisy and busy places and much preferred to live in a quiet suburban area. He did not have a cruel personality and could not say mean things to people. He also did not enjoy showing off or exaggerating when he spoke. He was even warned by his father that he was too kind to others. He reflected on his art and his studies to try to understand why he could not pass the literary licentiate examination. He regarded the two

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kinds of study, one for the state examination and the other for literary art, as one, and he believed that excelling in one form of study would improve the other as well. He took great pleasure in writing, and he recorded every single piece of knowledge he had in the two chapters he wrote on knowledge.

The arrangement of his writings Sim No Soong had a unique reason for keeping journals. When he became middle aged and began his exile in Gijang, he began to document things in detail. Each day’s journal entry was one small essay in itself about his daily life, emotions, and the memories he cherished. The entire set of records constitutes a great collection of his work. The following excerpt explains why he kept journals: The reason I keep my journal, I think, is to supplement my letters to my distant home. Exchanging letters is the only way to communicate with my family, and if you write letters just before you mail them, you could easily forget things you want to include. In my journal, small and big things can be written about in detail, and reading it is better than playing chess or playing Go since I can forget my troubles as I read. Sending journals instead of letters is a bigger comfort as well. Through journals, the changes in weather and other daily affairs can also be recorded—this is another reason to keep daily journals. So my journal writing is not just writing. It is rather, a complete record of the things I see, hear, and think about. Sometimes I study things to write about them. Even though I know that this is not always enough, it helps me to forget my sorrow.30

Sim No Soong kept journals in order to communicate with his family. Through the letters he exchanged with his family once or twice a month, he intended to share his daily life and thoughts in detail. Journal writing was also a hobby that helped him assuage the boredom of his life in exile. His younger brother, Taecheom (Sim No Am’s courtesy name), also wrote a journal titled Facing Each Other over a Long Distance (Cheollidaemyeonnok) and sent it to his brother, Taedeung (Sim No Soong’s courtesy name). They were writing what are known as ‘exchange diaries’. Sim No Soong called his diary A Collection of One Hundred Daily Self-reflections (Irilbaekseongjip) to express his intention to reflect on his failure regarding the literary licentiate examination. They chose names for each other’s exchange diaries that had special meanings, and sent them to each other monthly or once every several months. Even though Sim No Am’s diary, Facing Each Other over a Long Distance, no longer survives, one line from its preface remains: ‘even in times of peace,

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one should not forget the difficult things. Even in times of pain, one should not pursue safety. And this is the reason I keep this journal’. This line suggests that they were trying to support each other during their trying circumstances. Sim No Soong compiled his writings into thirty-eight volumes of Collection of Hyojeon’s Work (Hyojeonsango), arranged the achievements of his ancestors in eight volumes known as Virtuous Achievements of a Distinguished Family (Jeokseonsega), and published his father’s collected works, Collection of Eunpa’s Work (Eunpasango), as well as an unofficial history book, Unofficial History of Korea (Daedongpaerim). His literary philosophy was based on moderating and controlling his emotions; this distinguished it from the Neo-Confucian idea of literature, which hinged on restricting the free expression of various human emotions. Sim No Soong regarded the natural display of diverse and honest desires and emotions as the fundamental element of literature. He vehemently rejected a pseudo-classical style (Uigomun) of writing modelled on older literature, which excessively formalised literature, and instead pursued a more sincere and vivid style of literature that featured a certain amount of secularity. Sim No Soong’s Daily Records of the Exile in the South (Namcheonillok) is an extensive volume totalling 4,097 pages. Collection of Hyojeon’s Work (Hyojeonsango) is the title on its cover, with the subtitle, A Collection of One Hundred Daily Self-reflections (Irilbaekseongjip). The epilogue, by his nephew Sim Won Yeol, refers to it as Daily Records of the Exile in the South. It contains daily records of Sim No Soong’s exile in Gijang, Gyeongsang province, from 29th February in the first year of King Sunjo’s reign (1801) to 15th June in the sixth year of the king’s reign (1806). The journal is written in chronological order. It starts from the day he left his family to go to Gijang and ends on the day of his release from exile. The book records sixteen days of travel between Seoul and Gijang and 1,949 days of his life in exile. He wrote about his feelings, knowledge, good and bad governments of the past and present, virtues and vices, the geography and climate of Gijang, insects and fish, and day-to-day issues. Sim No Soong took great pleasure in writing. He started writing poems at an early age, and he regularly wrote essays on specific topics when he encountered them. He was especially productive during his six years in exile. He kept his journal so that he could engage in self-reflection hundreds of times a day and wrote exchange diaries to communicate more precisely with his family. Writing was his hobby and an effective way of venting his anger. These daily records were collected in the vast volume,

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Daily Records of the Exile in the South, and the new knowledge he acquired during his time in Gijang is compiled separately in a book titled Joyful Writings in Mountain and Sea (Sanhaepilhui). Besides Daily Records of the Exile in the South, he wrote many other books. He collected the history of his father and ancestors in Questions and Answers Exchanged under the Mountain (Sanhamundap), Recorded Sayings of Jeogok (Jeogokeorok), Records of Ambitions (Jisarok), and Account of Forefathers’ Aspirations (Sulseonji); the poems he wrote to deal with his stress and anger during his exile are collected in Poetry Collection of the Years of Hardship (Pobingyeotongjip); he wrote Jajeoginyeon as a selfchronicle after the death of his younger brother Sim No Am, whom he expected to make a chronology for him. He also produced various records during the course of his official career. He wrote Records in Nosan (Nosanrok) while he was the county magistrate of Noseong, Daily Records in Hwachukgwan (Hwachukgwanillok) while he was the county governor of Cheonan, Daily Records of the Exile in the South while he was an administrator in Gwangju, and Records in Garim (Grimnok) while he was the county governor of Incheon. His experience serving in the Office of Royal Stables (Saboksi) as an assistant governor was recorded in Daily Records in Glorious Office (Gyeongsiillok), and his life after retirement is recorded in Daily Records of Suburban Life (Seonggyoillok). Change of Burial Site (Cheonjoji) and Records in Yulcheon (Yulcheonji) are records of the relocation process of his parents’ grave. He wrote Advice for Posterity (Ihurok) on his sixtieth birthday to impart ten pieces of advice to his young son, Wonsin. This advice covered areas such as health, study, respect for ancestors, the memorial ceremony, funerals, marriage, asset management, virtuous deeds, official careers, and social intercourse. His writings, including Advice for Posterity, seem to have been widely read and copied within the intellectual circles of the time, since he was exiled to Buan after being impeached by the students of the Confucian Academy for defaming ancient sages in Advice for Posterity. His exile in Buan is recorded in Records of Nightmare (Angmongnok). His life experience following the publication of Jajeoginyeon in 1811 was also annexed to Jajeoginyeon. Other records that could not be included in the chronology were written in Jajeosilgi. It contains detailed writings about his appearance, personality, works of art, and knowledge. In addition to his own writings, he also collected vast amounts of informal literary works produced by commoners in Daedongpaerim. It is a great collection of unofficial history containing a great deal of unique material, some original and some which was carefully reproduced. The significance of Daedongpaerim has long been recognised in academia.

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Closing remarks In the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, due to rapid developments in agricultural productivity and commodity-based commerce, Seoul began to assume some of the characteristics of a city. The increase in population inside and just outside the city walls created a new class of consumer who did not directly participate in the production of goods. People from the leisured classes, mostly from the Yangban class, consumed copious amounts of luxury goods and so an entertainment culture arose around them as well. Park Je Ga and Sim No Soong, with whom this study is concerned, were renowned as literary men. Park Je Ga, who was born the son of a concubine, associated with the intellectuals in the centre of Seoul despite his limited social status, and was appointed as a librarian at Gyujanggak Royal Library and gained the favour of King Jeongjo. He formed connections through his writings, and hoped to build friendships with the Chinese intellectuals outside his socially limited existence in Joseon. Even though his dreams were realised, he was always restrained by social limitations and his official titles in Joseon, and he always longed for a quiet life in the countryside. As a result of his relations with Chinese literary men, his writings and the writings of his friends were read, copied, and published in China. His early poems were compiled in Small Collection of the Korean Wayfarer (Hangaekgeonyeonjip), along with the poems of his friends, and they were widely distributed. His poems written when he was middle-aged were published by his Chinese friend Chen Zhan, and they were also included in Wu Xing Lan’s publication Pearls of Dust from the Ocean of Arts (Yehaejujin). Park Je Ga built a bridge between Joseon and Qing China so that people from the next generation, such as Choosa Kim Jeong Hee and Jaha Shin Wi, were able to maintain that connection. His association with approximately 110 Chinese literary men that he met during his four trips to China is recorded in Anthology of International Exchange (Hojeojip) by his son Park Jang Am. Sim No Soong was a member of the Elder Group of the Western Faction (Noron) and he spearheaded the Party of Expedience’s (Sipa) waging of political warfare against its rival, the Party of Principle (Byeokpa). When the government under the Party of Principle was established, he was exiled for six years. During his exile, he began keeping a journal to communicate and share his emotions with his family. Sim No Soong took significant pleasure in writing. His direct and enthusiastic writing covers every detail from his daily life, emotions, and thoughts. He

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was ultimately impeached for the contents of one of his writings, but he never stopped writing. Sim No Soong’s writing was solely for his family. He did, however, intend to reflect on his inner self in his writings and to have his brother and lifelong friend Sim No Am, his daughter, and his son to understand and carry on his philosophy through them. Sim No Soong’s personal writings were copied and read by his friends and contemporaries, but were not widely distributed in the form of a printed book. His books were only hand copied by himself and kept in his possession.

Notes 1

Jeong Woo Bong, ‘Writing of Inner Confession and Family Communication in Sim Nosung’s Namcheonilrok’ [in Korean], Journal of Korean Literature in Hanmun 52 (2013); Jeong Woo Bong, ‘Autobiographical Literature of Sim Nosung’ [in Korean], Korean Classic Studies 62 (2014). 2 Go Dong Hwan, The History of Commercial Progression of Seoul in the Late Joseon Period [in Korean] (Paju-si, 1998). 3 Ahn Dae Hoe, ‘A Poem for ‘Seongsijeondo’ and the Landscape of Seoul in the Eighteenth Century’ [in Korean], Korean Classical Literature Studies 35 (2009). 4 Park Je Ga, Hanseongjeondosi (Poet on the Full Landscape Map of Seoul), Jeongyugakjip (Complete Collection of Jeongyu’s Work) (Seoul, 2001). All references to Park Je Ga’s works are to this edition unless otherwise stated. 5 Ibid. 6 Nam Jae Cheol, ‘A Study on the White Pagoda Literary Group’ [in Korean], Journal of Korean Literature in Hanmun 49 (2012). 7 Lim Hyung Taek, ‘The 1763 Mission to Japan from Korea and Silhak (school of practical learning) Intellectuals’ Perception of Japan’ [in Korean], Creation and Criticism 85 (1994). 8 Park Je Ga, Hyojaseohoe (Writing Memories in Dawn). 9 Park Je Ga, Sojeon (Small Autobiography). 10 Ibid. 11 Chijihoesucheop (Drawing Pad in Pocket), unpublished. 12 Jeong Min, ‘A Study on Byeongse (Contemporary) Consciousness of Joseon Intellectuals in the Eighteenth Century’ [in Korean], Korean Culture 54 (2013); Lim Hyung Taek, ‘Park Chi-won’s View of Friendship and Direction of His Moral Consciousness’ [in Korean], Journal of Korean Literature in Hanmun 1 (1976). 13 The friendship between Hong Dae Yong (1731-1783) from Seoul, Joseon Korea and Yan Cheng (1732-1767) from Hangzhou, China is a representative example of the association between Korean and Chinese intellectuals. Their companionship is known as Cheonaejigi. To learn more about the theory of Cheonaejigi, please refer to the aforementioned essay in note 12. 14 Park Jee Won, Yeoin Anuisi (To a Person at Anui), Yeonambyeoljip (Additional Anthology of Yeonam) (Seoul, 1932).

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Park Je Ga, Sukgangsan (Staying at Gangsan). Entry dated 27th May, seventeenth year of King Jeongjo’s reign. Jeongjosillok (Annal of King Jeongjo) (Seoul, 1955); entries dated 6th and 7th July, seventeenth year of King Jeongjo’s reign. Seungjeongwonilgi (Diary of Seungjeongwon) (Seoul, 1961). 17 Entry dated 25th February, twenty-first year of King Jeongjo’s reign. Jeongjosillok (Annal of King Jeongjo). 18 Park Jee Won, ‘Daphongdeokboseo (Letter to Hongdeokbo)’, Gongjakgwanmungo (Anthology of Gojakgwan), Yeonamjip (Anthology of Yeonam) (Seoul, 1932). 19 Park Je Ga, Banggahaeng (Loud Singing). Considering the fact that this poem was inserted after Hyojaseohoe it is possible to assume that it was written before Park Je Ga was appointed as a librarian in Gyujanggak Royal Library. However, the line in this poem that states that Park Je Ga became well known among Chinese intellectuals suggests that it could have been written at a later time. 20 Park Je Ga, Songwonhyeoncheonjunggeoseo (Epilogue to Farewell of Wonheoncheonjunggeo). 21 Park Je Ga, Jasulhwayunsa (Self Statement to Yunsa). 22 Park Je Ga, Girisipsamhyeopgeo (To Risipsam on His Living in Valley). 23 Park Je Ga, Jikjung… (In Night Duty…). 24 Park Je Ga, Jingnyasochwi (Slightly Drunken in Night Duty). 25 Park Je Ga, Songgyeongsanipoui… (Farewell of Gyeongsanipoui…). 26 Beonye (Explanatory Note), Park Je Ga, Hojeojip (Anthology of International Exchange), ed. Park Jang Am, unpublished. 27 Sim No Soong, Jajeoginyeon (Chronicle of Autobiography), Hyojeonsango (Collection of Hyojeon’s Work), 22, unpublished. 28 Sim No Soong, Jajeosilgi (Episode of Autobiography), Hyojeonsango (Collections of Hyojeon’s Work), 33, 34, unpublished. 29 Sim No Soong, Sangmo (Figure), Jajeosilgi (Episode of Autobiography), Hyojeonsango (Collections of Hyojeon’s Work), 33, 34, unpublished. 30 Entry dated 26th May 1801, Sim No Soong, Namcheonillok (Daily Records of the Exile in the South). 16

PART II: MEMORY

CHAPTER FOUR THE SELF, FAMILY AND THE SOCIAL GROUP IN THE MEMORY OF EARLY MODERN JAPANESE TOWNS KƿICHI WATANABE TRANSLATED BY HISASHI KUBOYAMA

Introduction This essay considers the relationship between the individual, the local group (chǀ), and the town by examining collective memory in provincial towns in early modern Japan. By looking at three case studies, it explores possible forms and expressions of memory in early modern Japanese towns, whilst paying close attention to their relationships with the government and metropolis. To provide a historiographical context, this introduction first looks into how historians have considered the individual as a subject of historical inquiry. In the study of the history of ideas in Japan, the individual has long been a preferred subject, although historians in the twentieth century mostly examined the ideas of prominent individuals such as great thinkers and popular religious leaders. Some historians also paid attention to what upper-class townsmen thought, and, despite the long-standing negative evaluation given to it as an example of ‘feudalistic ideology’, the evidence that they, particularly Nagura, uncovered is still useful.1 Historians such as Masaki Wakao have recently considered ‘the formation of the self’ by looking into people’s mental effort for establishing their sense of self and identifying that they were adequate in a given historical time.2 Wakao has also shed light on how the individual as an agent of an historical narrative emerged.3 At the same time, Katsumi Fukaya has long considered the sense of order which was shared by the ruling and the ruled (such as hyakushǀ naritachi (peasants’ maintenance) and osukui (poor relief)) by examining

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popular protests and politics, eventually proposing the concept of ‘the early modern man’. It is important to note in the context of this book that the early modern self, in Fukaya’s definition, involves keeping a diary regardless of social background. Fukaya has also described the individual personality of his subjects as the early modern self.4 In addition, historians of women have discovered ‘the narrating self’ of women who made an effort to secure the succession as head of the family. 5 Furthermore, by paying particular attention to the fact that pre-modern people possessed more than one ‘attribute’, historians of hidden Christians have proposed the ‘attribution’ theory to better understand how believing in the forbidden religion of Christianity and being the early modern self could have coexisted in the minds of those Christians.6 From around the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians of early modern Japan have thus rapidly developed their understanding of the historical individual. This essay follows this trend.

An overview of the early modern Japanese town and an historical narrative Apart from the study of historical demography, historians of early modern Japan are not particularly interested in statistical data and figures. So what I have written below is not based on specific research, but on the broad understanding shared by me and many other historians of early modern Japanese towns. The population of Japan increased rapidly from 1601, when a new dynasty, the Tokugawa government, which would continue for 268 years, was established, for about a century, a period which historians of demography call ‘The Age of Great Clearing’ (Daikaikon Jidai). It grew three-fold from ten million to thirty million. From the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, a great number of castle towns were being built, and, as a result, the urban population increased too. The population of Edo, seat of the Tokugawa government, grew to a million by the end of the seventeenth century. It is often noted by Japanese scholars that the population of Edo was far larger than that of London or Paris at the same period. However, in China and the Muslim world, cities with more than one million people had existed well before that time, showing that both Japan and north-western Europe were on the periphery of the world at that time. Edo, a city of a million people, sat at the top of the early modern Japanese urban hierarchy. Below Edo, there were cities of 300,000400,000 people such as Osaka (the national centre of distribution) and

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Kyoto (a manufacturing city with the Imperial Court).7 There were also castle towns such as Nagoya and Kanazawa (with 100,000 people) and Sendai, KagoSima and Hiroshima (50,000 people), used as the governmental base of large domains. The size of the castle town depended on that of the domain, with the smallest ones probably having less than 3,000 people. The total number of castle towns can be estimated as about 200. Kawagoe, which this essay deals with, had about 10,000 people. About half of the castle town’s population was the samurai class, with the other half being merchants and artisans. There were also provincial towns (zaikata-machi) which had a very small samurai population. The provincial town had a variety of functions. Some were port towns, others post towns, and there were also industrial towns. The largest had over 10,000 people. There were many of them, and no historian has ever counted the total number. ƿmi Hachiman, which this essay deals with, had about 7,000 people, whilst the population of Banshnj Miki was about 3,800. The general pattern of population change in early modern Japan was this: the castle town grew until the later seventeenth century, and then its population stagnated until the mid-nineteenth century; the newly developing provincial town grew from the late eighteenth century. These towns and cities, regardless of their size, presumably produced their own historical narratives. At the same time, not only towns and cities, but also some villages produced foundation histories or historical narratives.8 This could be seen as characteristic of early modern Japan. The historical narrative of the castle town was mentioned in the history of the Tokugawa government or of the domains, and sometimes it was written as part of the domain’s project to compile its own history or it was written individually by retainers. At the same time, merchants also wrote historical narratives. Castle towns tended to produce a historical narrative which praises the town’s founders such as the Tokugawa government or the lord of the domain. In particular, many castle towns had their own version of the ‘Ashihara Legend’, which tells a story that the founder perceptively spotted the potential advantage of land on which grew nothing but common reed and subsequently built the town.9 The historical narrative of the provincial town was written by its townspeople, not by samurais. It is not a story about particular individual heroes, but about a social group whose main constituents were townspeople. There were two periods in early modern Japan when such historical narratives were written. The first one is from the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Many histories were written in this period probably because, with a hundred years passing since the beginning of the

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early modern period, there was a need to write down the memories of the past. 10 It was also a period when many political, social and economic systems were established. The second period of historical writing is the early nineteenth century when problems of those systems began to emerge. In other words, it was a period when the existing social order was breaking down, and people turned to the past for ideas and solutions. This is why historical narratives were written by all sorts of institutions and people, from the Tokugawa government at the top to peasants at the bottom. It seems that more histories were written in the second period than in the first, because of increasing levels of literacy and also of the flourishing of commercial publishing as well as copy-taking and the sophistication of the commercial distribution system. The historical narrative of early modern Japan is often included in the genre of topography. It is said that this is due to the influence of Chinese topographical writing. 11 As discussed below, the government compiled topographies and histories because of the tradition in East-Asian society that the national government was expected to undertake such history writing projects. Provincial society also held this kind of tradition and history writing in early modern Japan appears to be related to that in China in the sense that the provincial town in both countries produced its own historical narrative.12

The self, the family and the social group This section considers the relationship between the self, the family and the town by looking at memory in a smaller town, Banshnj Miki.13 The memories of this town were created in 1677. Miki had had the privilege of land tax exemption, but this historical privilege came under threat when the national government undertook a survey of land and households in order to raise tax. To stop this, the town sent a petition to Edo, where the government was based. For this purpose, a tradition that an order given by Hashiba Hideyoshi14 in 1580 exempted Miki from paying land tax was invented. Hideyoshi’s notification was utilised as an evidential document for the town’s privilege. The town later amassed its evidential documents including a land register, records of land tax exemption granted by lords, and papers relating to the petition to Edo, forming a small collection of thirty-odd documents. To strengthen the establishment of the town’s land tax exemption, three memorial devices were made from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The first was a storehouse specifically used for the preservation of the town’s evidentiary documents. The storehouse was built

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Fig. 4-1 The treasure storehouse and the monument (on the right). Photo by the author.

in 1694 and later called hǀzǀ (treasure storehouse). In it, the Hideyoshi order was preserved in a specially designed box, whilst other evidential documents were put in solid wooden boxes. The second was a ritual. An annual event for airing or displaying the evidential documents started in 1703. This event is still held in Banshnj Miki. The third was a monument. The monument was erected in 1707 and commemorated the petition sent to Edo in 1677. It had a classical Chinese or Kambun inscription describing the history of the town’s privilege of land tax exemption. However, the remembrance of the town’s historical privilege had almost disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century. In response to this, the town’s élite in the 1790s made an effort to make the event and ritual larger and more elaborate, while starting to write the town’s historical narrative. The town’s history mainly described how the privilege of land tax exemptions was obtained and maintained and also gave details about the 1677 petitioning, making it a very important part of the town’s heritage. After it was completed, the town’s history book was presented to the storehouse on the day of the ritual and subsequently kept in it. The townspeople also came to talk about the history book on the day of the ritual once a year. The three devices to preserve the town’s memory were

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thus very closely related. The town’s history was written in 1790 and 1821. Judging by his reading list,15 the author did not read many Chinese classics, although he did read a lot of popular literature such as war chronicles and revenge dramas as well as books of moral philosophy and popular Buddhist texts. In the Edo period, not many ordinary people read and fully understood Chinese classics. Those who read Chinese classics were mostly from the highly educated élite who had a very high level of literacy. However books of popular literature were written in plain Japanese and read by many ordinary people who only had a basic level of literacy. The reading list therefore indicates that the author of the town’s history belonged to the latter group of ordinary people with a lower level of literacy. It also shows that, out of eighty-nine books he read, forty-nine were borrowed from other townspeople, temples, and shrines, which indicates a network of reading people who probably lent and borrowed books between them. The 1790 history contained many misunderstandings and factual errors, even failing to mention the 1707 monument. This might be because the inscription on the monument was written in classical Chinese, and therefore the author of the history did not read it when he was writing the first history. However, it appears that the author developed his literacy and bibliographical skills remarkably. His second history written in 1821 showed this development, containing references to the town’s evidential documents and quotations from them and other documents with explanatory notes. At the same time, his style of writing changed between 1790 and 1821. His first book had a strong moral undertone, whilst the second one was dramatised in a style which is similar to that of war chronicles. This shift of style might be related to what he read when he was writing those histories. This could indicate that his style of historical narrative was shaped and influenced by his reading list. It could also suggest that the mode and style of historical narrative in a certain period were based on the documents preserved and available in that period, and possibly related to the existing network of reading townspeople, temples, and shrines. It is important to note that the memories of a certain group were articulated and established by its leading individual who managed to develop and improve his own literacy skills, and also that his personal style was reflected in the manner the collective memory was expressed. However, it is also important that the author did not necessarily write the town’s history simply as a service to the town. The description in the 1821 history of the keeper of the storehouse’s keys is incorrect, in that, while he wrote that the keys had been hereditarily kept by his family since

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1703, the family in fact needed to ask another family to keep them on its behalf owing to financial problems. In other words, the author portrayed his family (which produced the town’s hereditary officials) as playing the vital role of key-keeper throughout the town’s history in the 1821 version. By doing so, he deliberately and cleverly interwove the memory of the social group with that of his family. The author obtained a license as a master of flower arranging in 1815 and afterwards taught several pupils. 16 Around the time when he was writing the 1821 history, he was not only improving his literary skills, but also developing his cultural taste. His case is an example of the improved level of cultural understanding and taste among the ordinary people of this period. 17 It might be that the individual’s effort, like the author’s, to improve his/her cultural taste could be considered as an act of selfexpression. This act of self-fashioning, contributing to the formation of the self in late early modern society. To summarise: the act of putting the memory of the document preservation ritual into words, i.e. narrating history, was expressed as a part of an individual’s effort to form his self. This effort involved the exercise of confirming that the author’s family played a historically important role in the society. His individual ability notably contributed to a continuation of his family and the social group. In reality, the difficulty of his family’s situation remained, but it is evident that he intended to uphold his family’s importance and also contribute to the town. Although it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this case shows how memory was formed by an individual who belonged to a certain social group—the primordial memory of an individual, a family and a social group.

Memory of the provincial town and the metropolis In ƿmi Hachiman, memory of the social group was also based on the preservation of historical documents and a compilation of them. 18 ƿmi Hachiman was built in 1585 by those who moved from Azuchi, which lay a few kilometres north of the town. In 1577, when they still lived in Azuchi, these residents were granted a land tax exemption by letters of the authorities. This tax exemption included Rakuichi-Rei (edict of free markets), which is so well known that it is even taught in high schools in Japan. In the Edo period, ƿmi Hachiman received another three letters of tax exemptions from the government, and the townspeople preserved these as the most important documents of the town. They include a letter sealed in vermilion ink (shuinjǀ) granted by Tokugawa Ieyasu19 in 1600 which did

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Fig. 4-2 The special box for shuinjǀ. Photo taken in 1940. The existence of the box has not been confirmed.

not specifically mention land tax exemption. However, it was included in the other important documents which did serve as evidence of the town’s tax exemptions. It would seem as if a tradition was invented here. Ieyasu’s shuinjǀ was kept away from the public to conceal its fabricated function as an evidential document. In the early nineteenth century, it was considered extremely important, almost sacred even, so that no-one outside the social group was allowed to see it. This probably explains why the shuinjǀ was stored in a specially made box which contained four stacked sub-boxes. This special box was kept by about a dozen influential townspeople who took turns keeping it for a month each. In addition, they compiled a collection of documents (cartulaire) which consisted of twenty-two sections of wide-ranging information on the town’s past including disputes with neighbouring towns over provision of labour duties. The town’s five evidential documents for land tax exemptions were contained in the first section of the collection. In the early nineteenth century, the town’s memory was expressed in the form of popular direct action. In 1822, when the town’s exemption from labour duty came under threat by the Edo government, the town’s leaders attempted to show Ieyasu’s shuinjǀ to the government officials, whilst the ordinary townspeople opposed this move and held a gathering. Despite these divisions present in the town, it was agreed that a petition was to be sent to the capital Edo to maintain the town’s privilege. This is therefore an action as a social group.

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What turned out to be useful was that one of the town’s representatives had a brother in Edo. Noda Shǀsuke, a brother of Noda Mashibei, one of the representatives, lived in Edo and taught the art of spearmanship as a master. Shǀsuke therefore had a number of acquaintances in the samurai class and was able to make the most of his network on the representatives’ behalf.20 Shǀsuke approached senior government officials who would give a ruling on the town’s petition and even attempted to bribe them (or ‘give something glittering’ as it was then expressed).21 At the same time, when one of ƿmi Hachiman’s representatives proposed approaching senior government officials publicly in a procession and handing the petition directly to them, Shǀsuke opposed the proposal and dissuaded the representatives from doing so because he wanted to avoid causing unnecessary trouble.22 This shows that he controlled how the representatives should lobby the government, and it could be that his involvement was a part of fulfilling himself. His life in Edo as a master of the art of spearmanship was part of the self-fashioning that separated him from his family or the ƿmi Hachiman social group, although by helping the representatives of the town he expresses another part of his identity. He thus possessed two different attributes. In addition, upon the success of the town’s petitioning, he wrote to ƿmi Hachiman: ‘Nothing pleases me more than this success as the notification from the government officials of the desired, positive results was announced. Dear gentlemen of ƿmi Hachiman, please never forget your careful, humble attitude and do not pride yourself too much.’ In this letter, he expressed a sense of unity with the townspeople.23 Thus, in this way, he shared in ‘the memory of the town’. Moreover, Shǀsuke was very keen to contribute to the continuity of the family which he was from and asked the family’s neighbours to help with it.24 He sought the survival and prosperity of his family, neighbour group, and the town. Herein lies the similarity between the case in the previous section and Shǀsuke, despite the fact that Shǀsuke had left the town and no longer belonged to it. It is therefore evident that his expression of self and the values based on the social group coexisted without any contradiction. In other words, the prosperity of the social group was closely related to self-expression. Shǀsuke also introduced a practice of worshipping Ieyasu to ƿmi Hachiman. During the petitioning movement in 1822, the town’s representatives visited the Asakusa Tǀzenji Temple to pray for the success of the petition, and worshipped Ieyasu’s portrait which was considered sacred. When their prayer was realised, they visited the temple again to mark their gratitude. These ritualistic visits and worship were a part of the

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result of Edo’s becoming a tourist town in the eighteenth century. Many tourist attractions were established in Edo, and not only Edo’s residents, but also visitors such as petitioners visited those places during their stay. ƿmi Hachiman’s representatives went around Edo to visit temples and shrines including the Asakusa Tǀzenji Temple. Afterwards, ƿmi Hachiman established a close relationship with Asakusa Tǀzenji Temple and collected a donation for the temple’s repairs. It also established an event to celebrate Ieyasu which helped strengthen the prominence of Ieyasu in the town’s memory. Throughout this, Shǀsuke played a key role as an intermediary between the town and Asakusa Tǀzenji Temple. He was therefore very much involved in reshaping the town’s memory. One of the reasons that he managed to fulfil himself was clearly that he lived in the metropolis Edo. He seems to have risen to the samurai class by making the most of his art of spearmanship and then establishing himself as a master. This was only possible in Edo which had enough samurais for such a profession to thrive. A successful individual who left the social group for a place where he could fulfil himself not only shared the memory of the social group, but also helped reshape it. The social group’s memory was shared not only by those who belonged to it. In order for memory to exist in that manner, there appear to be three requisites. 1. 2.

3.

The existence of a large city where various professions and occupations could thrive (from the late seventeenth century onwards). The introduction of Edo’s cultural characteristics which could affect the memory of the town from which city dwellers originally came. This required the emergence of Edo as a tourist city, therefore from the late seventeenth century onwards. The establishment of Edo as a cultural consumer society where selffulfilment through specialist skills and abilities became possible. This was a social process taking place from the late eighteenth century onwards when not only martial arts, but also other types of performing arts, thrived. 25 This section highlighted the art of spearmanship merely as an example.

The next section deals with a case of early seventeenth-century private papers which became the source of a town’s memory only after the practice of compiling local history was introduced from outside by the government. The compilation of local history was one of the most sophisticated forms of intellectual and analytical investigation in that period.

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Materials, memory and the government In Kawagoe, a provincial castle town which lay forty kilometres northwest of Edo, the town’s history was written more than once like many other towns. A memorandum written in the seventeenth century became the basis of future history writing as well. Let’s look at the relationship between its materials and narrative. The first material to look at is the ‘Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon’. 26 Yazaemon was a salt merchant, purchasing in Edo and selling in Kawagoe and its surroundings. He had a base for purchasing and storage in Edo. One of the most prominent and influential merchants in Kawagoe, he obtained permission to be received in audience by the lord of the Kawagoe domain. His memorandum consists of a memoir of his life and one of his trade activities. The overall tone of the memorandum is clearly that of an autobiography written for his family’s descendants, and therefore what is written in it formed the basis of the family’s memory. It contains a number of stories and episodes of his life, and they can all be read and understood as moral lessons for his descendants. However, stories similar to adventures and heroic tales in his youth can also be read not only as moral didactic, but also as self-promotion, signifying that his memorandum was an exercise in self-expression that went beyond moral lessons. The author showed the memorandum’s parts on moral lessons to four other merchants in Kawagoe and Edo in 1680. He wrote that he did this because he knew he was dying. This act could be understood as his attempt to gain approval for the succession to the headship of the family from those who had important relationships with his family. One of these four merchants was based in Ise-chǀ in Edo, whilst the other three lived in Kawagoe. This means none of them lived in Motomachi, where the author lived, and that he did not show the memorandum to anybody in the neighbourhood group to which he belonged. When Yazaemon had a dispute with his brother and uncle, three people intervened, of whom one was a salt merchant in Edo’s Ise-chǀ and another was Yazaemon’s important creditor. No one from his neighbourhood society was involved. For Yazaemon, the social circles that were important to him appear to be ones relating to his trade and the influential merchants of Kawagoe. This is characteristic of upper-class merchants of the Enomoto family. Yazaemon’s memorandum rarely mentions Kawagoe. Rather, it is almost exclusively focused on his own life and his trade. As he suffered ill-health, he described his medicine in great detail. Detailed description is also given to salt pans in Setouchi (600 kilometres west of Kawagoe). He

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also wrote a lot about the weather which affected prices of rice and salt. These features of the memorandum were of course due to his personal preference, but it is likely that he thought they would be useful for his descendants. Yazaemon also commissioned his portrait. With his memorandum and as someone who restored the fame and prosperity of the family, he must have been the key figure in the family’s history.27 He was a person who used his personality for the perpetuation of the family. In the late eighteenth century, Kawagoe saw the compilation of two local topographies (which included historical narratives). One was written by samurais of the Kawagoe domain in 1753. The other was written by a merchant in 1804 and contained a number of drawings. None of these has any reference to ‘Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon’. The one written in 1753 mentions the Enomoto family in a list of ancient merchant families in the town (at the top in the second group of seventeen families). The 1804 one contains a story of the building of the Enomoto family’s house in the 1630s which was related to a high-ranking priest who was a political advisor to Ieyasu. This priest was certainly closely related to the biggest temple in Kawagoe, but his association with the Enomoto family is not based on any evidence and could well be made up. None of these two local topographies therefore has any mention of Yazaemon’s memorandum. However, an extensive compilation of local topography and history of the areas surrounding Edo by the Edo government in the early nineteenth century after its organizational reform does mention the memorandum.28 The government’s topographical compilation department carried out research on the local area in August 1817 (Bunka 14).29 A copy of the memorandum is also kept in the Edo government papers, with the stamp of the topography compilation department on it. Moreover, the department compiled bibliographical notes for some of the older books collected from all over the country, and the memorandum was one of them (Shinshnj Chishi Biyǀ Tenseki Kaidai, iii, p. 138). Nevertheless, this memory of an individual and his family was acknowledged by the Edo government as material for compiling Kawagoe’s local history. On the back of the lid of the paulownia box which keeps ‘Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon’, it was written that: ‘This book lets you understand the culture, customs and language of one hundred years ago, and its plain, old-fashioned style encourages you to imagine the simplicity of life. Who dares not love this book? This special box was made to keep the book from insects and to prevent it from getting scattered away. May this collection not be lost in time.’ Clearly this inscription was written by someone outside the family, a person who belonged to a higher

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social class than the Enomoto family.30 This note was written in May 1818, nine months after the government’s research. The note at the back of the box’s lid, the history of the Enomoto family, and the Edo government’s research all suggest that the memorandum, despite its private nature and incoherence, came to be acknowledged by the ruling class of the Kawagoe domain as material to create the town’s memory. In the case of Kawagoe, it was the national government that had a considerable impact upon the way the town’s memory was created.31 One hundred and fifty years after it was written, the memorandum was ‘discovered’ as an embodiment of the town’s memory by the officials of the topography compilation department who possessed outstanding analytical skills and high intelligence. The memory of an individual and a family was about to be elevated to representing the whole town’s memory. The Enomoto family in the early nineteenth century was suffering from financial problems. It eventually went bankrupt—one of many examples of powerful merchants associated with the authorities who did so—and was managed by a trustee who helped rebuild its finances. There were dozens of creditors in Kawagoe, many of whom were merchants in the castle town. In this situation, some relatives of the family suspected that the trustee was lining his pockets and eventually sued him, although the details are not the subject of discussion here. What is interesting in this incident is that both the plaintiff and defendant claimed the legitimacy of their cases based on the continued existence of the Enomoto family.32 It could be that, as the Enomoto family had existed since the sixteenth century, the townspeople of Kawagoe shared an understanding that it needed to continue to exist at all costs. It is possible that letting old families continue was considered to be beneficial to the town’s common good. This signifies that what constituted the town’s memory were not only objects such as documents, tools, monuments and old buildings, but also long-standing, old families. This is why the Enomoto family preserved those historical documents of the distant past that were ‘discovered’ by the scholars and officials of the government’s department for history compilation who were regarded as possessing the best intellectual abilities and analytical skills.

Conclusion To summarise the relationship between the individual, the family and the town based on the three case studies: 1.

The primordial aspect: an analysis of memory as historical narrative.

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2.

3.

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It is clear that a desire for prosperity and continuation existed through the layers of the family, the local group, the town, and the government, and also coexisted with a sense of fulfilling the self at the individual level. Historians used to understand this individual sense merely as something buried in the community, but it is now positively understood as a need that the individual who lived in the family and in the community successfully fulfilled himself, or even that the individual could only fulfil himself within the family and community. This understanding appears to be widely shared by historians. Society’s role in defining memory. The metropolis greatly influenced how memory was maintained and preserved in the provincial town. The individuals who fulfilled themselves outside the community from which they came contributed through their skills and abilities to the community of their origin and established a sense of unity with the family, the local group and the town. This was in line with the development of the individuals’ primordial ties, but what is important here is that their contribution had a considerable impact upon the memory of their community of origin. The individual changed himself in accordance with the changes in the metropolis and eventually fulfilled himself. He then introduced the fruit of his cultural development and sophistication to his community of origin, which altered its memory. One of the conditions for this to happen is that the town had the memory of popular direct action. The influence of national government. The Edo government could have a considerable impact upon memory at a local level, particularly when the memory was created as a result of highly sophisticated analytical and intellectual investigation. Not only could this highly developed investigation provide the town’s memory with new material, but also the documents discovered in the process offered a solid basis for memory seen through the situation of the continued existence of old families. The individual and family memories were connected to the memory of the town.

Notes 1

Tetsuzǀ Nagura, ‘Shǀnin teki ‘Ie’ Ideology no Keisei to Kǀzǀ: ‘Enomoto Yazaemon Oboegaki’ wo Chnjshin ni (The Creation of the Ideology of ‘Family’ in a Merchant Family: An Analysis of ‘Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon’)’ [in Japanese], Nihonshi Kenkynj (Journal of Japanese History), 209 (1980). 2 For an analysis of the ruled, Masaki Wakao, ‘‘Shomotsu no Shisǀshi’ Kenkynj Josetsu: Kinsei no Ichi Jǀsǀ Nǀmin no Shisǀ Keisei to Shomotsu (An Introductory

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Study of the Ideological History of Books: The Formation of Ideas by Farmers and Reading of Books in the Early Modern Period)’ [in Japanese], Hitotsubashi Ronsǀ (Hitotsubashi Review), 134:4 (2005). 3 Idem, ‘Edojidai Zenki no Shakai to Bunka (Society and Culture in the First Half of the Edo Period)’ [in Japanese], in Iwanami Kǀza Nihon Rekishi (Iwanami History of Japan) 11 Kinsei (Early Modern Period) 2 (Tokyo, 2014). 4 Katsumi Fukaya, Kinseijin no Kenkynj: Edojidai no Nikki ni Miru Ningenzǀ (The Study of the Early Modern Man: Case Studies of Individuals in Diaries in Early Modern Edo) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2003). 5 As for ‘family’, see note 23 of Iwabuchi’s essay. Yutaka Yabuta, ‘Shǀka to Josei: Kawachi Zaikata Shǀka Nishitani Ke wo Jireini (Merchant Family and Women: An Example of the Nishitani Family in Kawachi)’ [in Japanese], in Edo no Hito to Mibun 4 Mibun no Naka no Josei (People and Class in Edo, 4, Women in the Classes), ed. Yutaka Yabuta and Keiko Kakitani (Tokyo, 2010). 6 Yukihiro ƿhashi, ‘Itan to Zokusei: Kirishitan to Kirishitan no Ninshikiron (Heterodoxy and Attribution: The Method of Recognition about Kirishitan (Actual Underground Christianity) and ‘Kirishitan’ (Imaginary Christianity) in Early Modern Japan)’ [in Japanese], Rekishigaku Kenkynj (Journal of Historical Studies), 912 (2013); Idem, Sempuku Kirishitan: Edojidai no Kinkyǀ Seisaku to Minsynj (Latent Kirishitan: Official Prohibition of Christianity in the Edo Period and People) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2014). 7 Kǀichi Watanabe, ‘The Formalization of Commercial Associations and the Urban Social Structure in the Early Modern Japan’, conference paper, The 6th International Conference for Urban History (Edinburgh, 2002). 8 Tetsuya Shirai, Nihon Kinsei Chishi Hensan-shi Kenkynj (Study on the Compilation of Topographies in the Early Modern Edo Period) [in Japanese] (Kyoto, 2004); Kiyomi Iwahashi, Kinsei Nihon no Rekishi-ishiki to Jǀhǀ Knjkan (Historical Consciousness and Information Space in Early Modern Japan) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2010). 9 Kǀichi Watanabe, Nihon Kinsei Toshi no Bunsho to Kioku (Document Practice and Memory in the Early Modern Japanese Town) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2014). 10 Eiji Yamamoto, ‘Chiiki to Shnjkyǀsha: Fnjrinkazan no Kioku to Yuisho (The Region and the Religious People: The Memory of a Regional Lord in the Sixteenth Century)’ [in Japanese], in Kinsei no Shnjkyǀ to Shakai 1: Chiiki no Hirogari to Shnjkyǀ (Religion and Society in Early Modern Japan 1: The Enlargement of the Region and Religion), ed. Synjichi Aoyanagi, Toshihiko Takano and Kaoru Nishida (Tokyo, 2008). 11 In China, history of a dynasty had traditionally been compiled by the next dynasty. From the eighth century to the ninth century, Japan followed this tradition and compiled history of the dynasty and topography of the country. This stopped in the medieval period, when strong central authority did not exist, but the Tokugawa government revived the tradition in the seventeenth century, compiling histories and topographies. 12 Tetsuya Shirai, Study on the Compilation of Topographies. 13 This section is based on Kǀichi Watanabe, Machi no Kioku: Banshnj Miki Machi no Rekishi Jojutsu (Memory of a Japanese Early Modern Town: Historical

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Narrative of Miki in Harima Province) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2004); Idem, ‘Chiiki no Kioku to Sǀchi (Memories and Devices for its Preservation in Local Communities)’ [in Japanese], in Edo no Hito to Mibun, 5 Kakusei suru Chiiki Ishiki (People and Class in Edo, 5, Awakening of Local Identity), ed. Masaki Wakao and Isao Kikuchi (Tokyo, 2010). In this essay, I intend to add new findings on the author of the historical narrative of Banshnj Miki. 14 Hashiba (Toyotomi) Hideyoshi, who ended the Sengoku period that continued from the fifteenth century. At this time, he was a retainer of the lord who established the former government. 15 National Institute of Japanese Literature Archives, Paper Copies, F9302. I regard this as a reading list as comments or notes of some kind are given on nineteen out of eighty-nine books listed in it, and also as for fifty-one listed books it provides the names of people, temples and shrines which appear to be the lenders. Judging from the period it was made, I believe this list was made by Sogawa Yojiemon, who wrote the historical narrative. The list consists of two main parts: the first one, made around 1786 (before Sogawa Yojiemon’s succession as head of the family), is a list of thirty-four books, including many Japanese and Chinese war chronicles (of which five were clearly borrowed), some books on morality and only two Chinese classics. The second one was made around 1796 (after Yojiemon succeeded as head of the family and he wrote the first historical narrative) and lists fifty-five books of which many are war chronicles. However, it also lists many Buddhist texts borrowed from temples and shrines. Notably, he borrowed twelve books from branches of the shrine where he served as ujiko sǀdai (something like a churchwarden). Many of these books are Shingon Buddhism texts, and some are books of kyǀka poetry. He borrowed six books from the Seirynjji Temple, including Jǀdo-shin and Jǀdo Buddhist texts and The Tales of Ise (a tenth-century collection of over a hundred brief stories in which poems are the central elements). These books suggest that temples and shrines played the role of a library at that time. He also borrowed two war chronicles from someone who was borrowing them from another person. These and the other forty-nine borrowed books in the list suggest the existence of a reading network within the town. 16 His father obtained a license from the same school in 1798 (Kansei 10) (Hǀzǀ Bunsho 1326). The background to this could be that a brother of the founder of that school of flower arranging was employed by the local government and stayed in Miki, teaching flower arranging to many people: Miki-shi Shi (The History of Miki City) [in Japanese] (Miki, 1970), p. 211. 17 Michio Aoki, Nihon no Rekishi Bekkan Nihon-bunka no Genkei Kinsei Shomin Seikatsu-shi (History of Life and Culture of Ordinary People in Early Modern Japan) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2009). 18 The description below is based on Kǀichi Watanabe, ‘Chiiki no Kioku to Sǀchi (Memories and Devices for its Preservation in Local Communities)’, (see note 13). For this essay, the present author carried out new research on residents in Edo. 19 Tokugawa Ieyasu is the man who achieved supremacy in Japan after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 20 Not much is known about Noda Shǀsuke except for the fact that he lived on a hatamoto’s property and about forty letters written by him survive to this day.

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Those letters show that he was happy that he drew the attention of a junior counsel when a sergeant asked who he was while taking part in his disciple’s demonstration of spearmanship skills at the Edo castle (Nodaya Chǀbei Ke Monjo (Nodaya Chǀbei Family Documents), 2-26). Shǀsuke had pupils, who were sons of hatamoto samurais. Those involved in ƿmi Hachiman’s petitioning addressed him in their letters to him as ‘Master Shǀsuke’ (Ibid., 2-51). In 1804, the government forbade the merchant class to learn martial arts, and the law referred to masters as ‘yashiki kerai’, which meant vassals of daimyǀ and hatamoto (Edo Machibure Shnjsei (Collections of Municipal Laws) [in Japanese], 11288). 21 Nodaya Chǀbei Family Documents, 2-51. 22 6 October Bunsei 5. Diary of Ichida in Edo (The archives, Faculty of Economics, Shiga University). 23 Nodaya Chǀbei Family Documents, 2-20. 24 Nodaya Chǀbei Family Documents, 2-18. 25 Between 1803 and 1818, the government five times banned the distribution of printed leaflets advertising songs, puppet shows (jǀruri), flower arrangement, calligraphy and drawing (Edo Machibure Shnjsei (Collections of Municipal Laws), 11159, 11318, 11596, 11768, 11788). I described this as ‘cultural consumption’ as the emergence of such cultural activities was based on mass selling and mass production by woodblock printing. 26 Mizuo ƿno, ed. and comp., Enomoto Yazaemon Oboegaki: Kinsei Shoki Shǀnin no Kiroku (Memorandum of Enomoto Yazaemon: A Merchant’s Notes in Early Edo Period) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2001). The original copies are kept at Kawagoe City Museum. 27 See Tetsuzǀ Nagura’s essay in note 1. According to Reiji Iwabuchi, there are examples of merchant families which used portraits of the founders or those who restored the family’s fame and prosperity to worship the family’s ancestors. 28 Dainihon Chishi Taikei 12: Simpen Musashi Fudokikǀ 8 (An Anthology of Topography of Japan 12: Traditional Records of the Culture and Geography of Musashi) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 1932), p. 299. However, only a brief mention that the family’s ancestors were Buddhist priests and that the memorandum existed at all was given. The government did not make good use of the rich content of the memorandum. 29 Tetsuya Shirai, Nihon Kinsei Chishi Hensanshi Kenkyu (Study on the Compilation of Topographies in the Early Modern Edo Period) [in Japanese] (Kyoto, 2004), p. 191. This research was conducted by the government, and the Kawagoe Domain was not involved. 30 According to the Enomoto family’s tradition, the lord of the domain had a read of the memorandum and let his retainer write the note. (The explanatory notes, Enomoto Yazaemon Oboegaki.) 31 I got the suggestion from Tetsuya Shirai, Nihon Kinsei Chishi Hensanshi Kenkynj (Study on the Compilation of Topographies in the Early Modern Edo Period) [in Japanese] (Kyoto, 2004). 32 Kawagoe Shishi Shiryǀhen Kinsei 2 (The History of Kawagoe City: Historical Documents, Early Modern Period 2) [in Japanese] (Kawagoe, 1977), pp. 241 and 690.

CHAPTER FIVE CONSTRUCTING THE SELF AND CONSTRUCTING THE CIVIC IN PROVINCIAL URBAN ENGLAND, C. 1660-1800 ROSEMARY SWEET

The early modern period, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, have frequently been associated with the emergence of a stronger sense of individualism in British society. The growth of a capitalist economy, the influence of Protestantism, with its emphasis on a personal relationship with God and spiritual introspection, and the impact of Lockean models of understanding human consciousness, have all been associated with a stronger sense of individual subject-hood and a relative decline in group or collective identities.1 One of the manifestations of this emergent sense of individualism in Britain, it has been argued, is the proliferation of ego-documents. The huge expansion in personal diaries, memoirs and autobiographies which can be traced from the seventeenth century onwards cannot be accounted for by higher literacy rates alone. More opportunity, there may have been, but the genre of autobiographical writing is a powerful testimony to the stronger sense of individualism; moreover, in the process of writing an autobiography a stronger sense of personal identity was constituted. The agency of the self as author, suggests Mascuch, becomes the agency of the self as actor.2 More broadly, in Western European historiography, it has been argued that the Catholic communion of saints, the solidarity of medieval guilds, and the networks of extended family and kinship were eventually displaced by a society where relationships were rationalised and utilitarian, a product, in Weber’s analysis, of secularization, modernization and industrialization. Citizenship of modern society was based upon a sense of individual rights and responsibilities rather than collective identity or

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communal obligations. In line with these changes, historians also identified a shift towards a more tightly defined nuclear family, rather than the looser affinities of extended ties of kinship and friendship, which supposedly held earlier societies together. 3 Such changes have been particularly associated with urban areas and for obvious reasons: capitalism was dominant in the urban economy from an early period; higher rates of literacy facilitated the spread of new ideas and the articulation of individual identities; higher concentrations of people, combined with greater mobility, engendered a society where interpersonal relationships were harder to sustain and were replaced by the structures and organization of the state. This is the interpretative model of the transition from ‘gemeinschaft’ to ‘gesellschaft’, first propounded by Tönnies, Weber and Durkheim. It is a model which has exercised considerable influence over historians’ understandings of social change in urban society and how we approach and understand questions such as individual and collective identities.4 If we move away from a whiggish model that identifies a linear evolution from communal collective identities to modern individualism and urban anomie, we arrive at a rather different picture and one that is more complex and interesting. The more recent historiography of early modern Britain has succeeded in adding complication and nuance to some earlier assumptions and has shown that the emergence of individualism in society was far less clear cut than is suggested by schematic models. In particular, historians have been paying more attention to the networks of family, kinship and friendship and to the importance of collective as well as individual identities. Jonathan Barry’s analysis of associational activity amongst the middling sort of eighteenth-century England, for example, has demonstrated the ongoing importance of collective identities in urban society: it was this, rather than the bourgeois individualism of civil society, that underpinned the myriad corporate bodies, associations and clubs which held urban society together and which shaped people’s sense of their own place in a community.5 He, and many other historians, have also highlighted the continued importance of the household as the economic unit of production and the role of familial networks. Studies of merchant communities in London, Leeds, or Hull, for example, have stressed the significance of family connections within the business networks. 6 This argument has been most forcefully made by Richard Grassby, who undertook an intensive analysis of 28,000 business men between 1580 and 1740. Grassby found that approximately half of business partners came from immediate family or kinsfolk, with no decline towards the latter end of the period.7 Capitalism was founded upon family

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units and did nothing to undermine the importance of family and kinship ties. The triumph of individualism, traditionally associated with the rise of capitalism, was, Grassby argues, ‘fundamentally a triumph of the individual household within a kinship structure’ (my italics).8 Tradesmen, businessmen and the gentry alike were driven by the same impulse to provide for the family and future generations, rather than mere profit accumulation, and were able to draw upon their relatives for aid and support. 9 In a similar vein, David Cressy has argued for the continued importance of and awareness of the wider networks of kinship, which may not have been called upon on a daily basis, but which acted as a kind of ‘reserve account’ of emotional and financial support when needed.10 Taking a different approach, Naomi Tadmor has challenged the way in which modern historians have read eighteenth-century texts, both egodocuments and novels, making twentieth-century assumptions about contemporary language used to describe friendship and family relationships. Her analyses of novels and of the diary of the eighteenthcentury Sussex shopkeeper, Thomas Turner, have convincingly shown up contemporaries’ inconsistent and ambiguous usage of words such as family, sister, brother, and other terms which historians today have associated with the nuclear family.11 Instead of describing inward-looking nuclear units, the family was a flexible framework which expanded or contracted as servants, apprentices and other dependents—as well as children—joined or left the household. Subtle gradations of language enabled men like Turner to distinguish between kin and non-kin and to indicate degrees of kinship. Moreover, even within the supposedly more egalitarian, contractual relationships of a middle-class nuclear family, Tadmor suggests that hierarchical values of lineage and primogeniture were perpetuated and commemorated. As much as any member of the aristocracy, Turner’s construction of his own self and his place in society was framed by an awareness of his family’s lineage. Few diaries of the quality of Turner’s survive from eighteenth-century towns but it is possible to find in others a similar awareness of lineage and of the ties of kinship: key events that are recorded tend to include the births, deaths and marriages of family members. Diaries were used to record events of importance, but were also a means of memorialising family relationships.12 In this essay I will focus more closely upon the relationship between individuals and the collective identity of the civic community in provincial urban society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Civic identities were strongly held and sustained by a collective memory of inherited rights and responsibilities which was perpetuated through various forms of memorialising activity. But in this essay I will focus

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particularly upon the interplay of individual and collective memories and identities as articulated in the traditions of urban chronicles and history writing. Firstly, some background on provincial urban society in this period. Although London was the largest city in Europe by the turn of the eighteenth century with a population of over half a million—and growing fast—the size of Britain’s provincial towns was much smaller. Unlike France, where there were a number of regional centres of considerable size, London was bigger than the next largest provincial towns by a factor of over ten. In 1670 the two biggest towns after London were Bristol and Norwich, each at around 20,000 inhabitants; and around twenty further towns could boast populations ranging from about 5,000 to 12,000. These figures are, however, highly provisional, due to the unreliability of the data. In the course of the eighteenth century there was significant urban growth—not just in London, but in the provinces. Whilst London expanded to around 675,000 by mid-century and around one million by the time of the first census in 1801, provincial towns were also showing growth: Bristol had 50,000 by 1750 and Norwich 36,000, and by 1801 there were at least seventeen towns with populations over 20,000, when in 1670 it had just been Norwich and Bristol.13 This essay will concentrate on a sub-group within these towns: the incorporated town. These were towns which had been awarded a charter of incorporation. A charter delegated authority from the crown to an incorporated body—the corporation—which ruled in the interests of the community as a whole and which could own property and other forms of wealth. Incorporated towns were independent of the authority of surrounding landowners and possessed economic and political privileges, such as the right to hold markets free of toll or to return an MP to Parliament. Most of the larger towns of the seventeenth century were incorporated, as the economic and commercial privileges associated with incorporation had been essential for urban prosperity in earlier periods. In the later seventeenth century and the eighteenth century these traditional economic structures and regulations were being eroded, while towns such as Birmingham which had never been incorporated rose to prominence. The civic community of the incorporated town, however, provides particularly rewarding material with which to pursue questions of individual and collective identity and the role of memory in sustaining these identities. We should first establish who belonged to the civic or corporate community: it was not commensurate with the entire population of the town by any means. No two incorporated boroughs were exactly the same,

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but in most towns it would have included the adult male householders who had taken up the freedom of the town (freedom could be inherited, earned through apprenticeship or purchased). The freemen would have the right to trade freely without having to pay tolls, to vote in civic and parliamentary elections, to take civic office, and would also have been eligible to receive civic charity and to have access to common land belonging to the corporation. In some towns a woman was able to inherit the freedom and associated privileges and confer them upon her husband, and a number of guilds admitted women as members. In general, however, women were largely passive members of the civic community: they might participate in civic rituals and ceremonies or be the recipients of civic charity, but their identification with the civic community would have been experienced primarily through male family members. 14 Within the civic community, there was almost always an élite group who held civic office as members of the governing body of the corporation. This civic élite was an oligarchy, either self-selected or elected to office by the freemen of the town. It carried with it certain privileges and social status, but also obligations of public service.15 Membership of the civic community was not automatic, and would have been most meaningful, in terms of the construction of self-identities, for those who took on civic office and who comprised the social and political élite, but it is also important to remember that civic office-holding could include a broad spectrum of the community and that the privileges of the freedom could be of considerable value and were similarly more widely distributed.16 Membership of the governing civic élite conferred upon the individual a powerful sense of being part of a longer tradition and of a responsibility to pass on the memorials and remembrances of their own time to a future generation. Whilst not everyone assumed civic duties with equal conviction, it is also equally clear that for many membership of a civic community, and the privileges and obligations which that entailed, was powerfully felt.17 Good governance and the maintenance of the ‘common wele’ or common good was held to depend upon the observation of historical precedent and respect for the past. Unlike mere mortals, corporations were permanent bodies: their membership might be renewed, but the corporate body never died, unless dissolved by a royal fiat or by an act of parliament. It was this permanence that made the corporate body particularly important as a symbol of continuity in a society that was constantly challenged by change and flux and as a repository of inherited information. Further, the very age of the corporation was a matter of considerable pride: antiquity of foundation was a means of asserting superiority, and a genealogy of mayors and civic officers performed a

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similar function to the genealogies of the landed gentry which were similarly being elaborated during this period. Town halls were hung with portraits of the civic élite, just as the galleries of country houses displayed series of ancestral portraits.18 The importance of memory and a sense of the past for the civic community was reflected in the annual cycle of rituals and ceremonies on days such as the swearing in of the new mayor or the anniversary of the granting of the charter which reminded the participants and spectators of the traditions to which they belonged and the rights and privileges which had been inherited. 19 Unlike the religiously inspired urban ceremonies of Corpus Christi or Whitsun, which largely disappeared in the seventeenth century, the rituals of urban civic life continued through the eighteenth century and beyond. More practically, elaborate provisions were laid down for the storage of civic records, often in heavy locked chests, to which only certain office holders had the key.20 The importance of the memorialisation of the past for the good governance and welfare of the town is very clearly illustrated in a trend towards compiling historical collections for the benefit of the corporation that can be found in a number of towns from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. These collections were in effect an exercise in constructing and sustaining a collective memory for the good of the community and were undertaken by individuals who were inspired by their own sense of responsibility to that community past, present and future. In Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, for example, the most important coastal port in East Anglia, we find the town clerk Thomas Damet compiling collections he called ‘Great Yermouthe: the Booke of the Foundacion and Antiquitye of the saide Towne’ in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century with ‘the intent that thes thinges mighte remayne for a memoriall to all of this Corporacion whiche now be, and that herafter shall succeede to be provident for the upholdinge of the state of the said Towne’,21 as a reminder of the ‘libertyes and prevyledges’ and the benefactions that had been bestowed. A generation later, another town clerk, Henry Manship, compiled ‘The History of Great Yarmouth’ in 1619.22 Manship explained that his motive for undertaking the work was that ‘the posterity to come, especially such as been chosen into the body of the Assembly, may know how things have passed, and that they all should not (as hitherto they have been, to the unspeakable damage of the whole corporation) be kept in ignorance’.23 Their efforts did not go unacknowledged; both collections were preserved amongst the corporation records and Manship was paid fifty pounds in recognition of his services. Similar treatment was afforded to Nathaniel Bacon, author of the ‘Annalls of Ipswich’. These were compiled

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for the use of the corporation of Ipswich in the second half of the seventeenth century. Bacon, like Manship and Damet, was a member of the urban élite; he was Town Clerk and Claviger (key-keeper) of Ipswich, and was MP in 1654, 1658, and 1660. He explained that he had set about his ‘Annalls’ because he had come to realise that there was no-one who was aware of ‘the trew nature of government, and therefore could not exactly conform themselves to the ancient rules’. For the perpetuation of good governance and the common good, he advised them to remember and refer to the actions of their predecessors. For Bacon and others like him, full participation in the corporate life of the community depended upon the memorialisation of the actions of their predecessors, and further, part of their civic duty was to ensure that such information was passed on to their successors, so that ‘by perusall of this booke, those that mind the government of this Towne may see what their predecessors have done, and wherein they failed, that thereby may be found a more perfect rule of a more righteous and peaceable government’.24 We have further evidence of the relationship between memory, the corporate community, and the individual in the many manuscript chronicles or histories of towns which were in circulation in urban communities and in individual possession (rather than in the corporation archives) through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were frequently the work of more than one individual; copies were annotated or handed down to the next generation to be brought up to date, indicating that they were not just a record, but represented conscious acts of memorialisation. Thus almost half of the chronicles surviving in Chester were continued by more than one person.25 Many seem to have enjoyed a limited circulation amongst the urban élite, as multiple copies of the same basic history survive in several towns where individuals clearly commissioned copies to be made when they entered upon civic office. In Chester, for example, thirty-seven separate chronicles or historical collections have been identified, and in Coventry there were at least fourteen.26 Many more have been lost: an eighteenth-century historian of Leicester, for example, referred to the several different versions which were known to be in the possession of the civic élite, but none of these have come down to the twenty-first century.27 By the end of the sixteenth century it is estimated that chronicle histories were in existence in at least thirty different towns and these were added to and new copies were made through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries.28 The fact that members of the civic élite maintained these chronicles for personal reasons rather than as an official responsibility, kept them among their family papers, and handed them down to future generations, is illustrative of the

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elision between personal and civic identity which was characteristic of urban society at this period.29 These urban chronicles were not histories in the modern sense of the term: they did not explain or impose an interpretation, they were rather chronicles of events and memoranda, recording matters of import for the civic community. There is no sense of historical relativity: rather in these chronicles past time was part of a continuum with the present. The history of the town was important, not simply because it could be used as a source of precedent, but because it represented continuity and tradition and a shared sense of civic purpose. Yet, although these chronicles essentially comprised a chronological recitation of events, there was still considerable room for variation. Some divided their material up according to the monarch’s reign, others might record their material as it occurred in the context of the civic year. Some focused on the activities of the corporation, others recorded events of more general interest as well.30 The names of the office-holders reflected the nature of the town’s government and its corporate identity, the continuity of civic office, and symbolised the independence of the citizen body from any other source of authority. The liberties and charters enshrined the privileges which had been won by the citizens through their own efforts and which were common property, and which distinguished them, not only from the inhabitants of the rural hinterland, but also from the inhabitants of other less privileged towns. This was all the more important in view of the palpably transient nature of urban life, where high levels of mobility and immigration and high mortality created a fluid and mobile society in which a sense of the past was needed for urban society to anchor itself. One of the most impressive collections of chronicles is at Bristol where over twenty have survived. These were first listed in any detail by Samuel Seyer, a Bristol schoolteacher and local historian, in the early nineteenth century when he was himself preparing to write a history of the town.31 Even at this date, Seyer was aware that a century earlier there had been far more manuscripts in circulation: possibly as many chronicles as forty or fifty. Seyer analysed the manuscripts to establish their relationship to each other and identified a number of ‘original’ manuscript chronicles which had been compiled in the seventeenth century and which were subsequently copied, distributed, amended and extended by different hands through the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. It is clear that election to membership of the civic élite was often the point at which a copy of the chronicle or annals was acquired, or added to. Arthur Taylor of Bristol, for example, added ‘A list of Common councillors as it stood when I was elected a member Sept 30 1715’ to the version of a chronicle

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which he owned, as well as a list of the mayors. John Latimer, another nineteenth-century historian, noted that Taylor’s version of the chronicle was one of several which had been copied by the civic sword-bearer in the late seventeenth century and which were continued into the eighteenth century by different hands. 32 In addition to their focus upon the corporation and the affairs of civic life, one of the distinctive features of the surviving chronicles and historical collections from Bristol is the heavy emphasis upon traditions of charity, represented in lists of charitable benefactions and their donors.33 Such lists not only prevented the bequests from disappearing into oblivion, but were a reminder of the spirit of charity and fraternity which underpinned the civic community. Given that such gifts were very often restricted to the freemen or their families in incorporated towns, both giving and receiving charity was therefore a means of enacting one’s membership of a larger community. Thus the lists of charitable benefactions gave permanent written expression to that membership and ensured the perpetuation of the memory of the deceased donors, endowing them with a kind of life after death. As we have seen, manuscript chronicles and annals were continued into the eighteenth century, even after the advent of newspapers and the wider availability of printed materials. Indeed individuals clearly often used newspapers as a source for updating their chronicles and some urban histories were published with blank pages to enable the owner to continue their own annals after purchase. The fate of one manuscript history in Norwich illustrates the continued engagement with maintaining a civic chronicle. 34 In 1755, it was owned by a member of the Corporation, Thomas Johnson, who claimed that it had been copied from another manuscript by a parish clerk called Benjamin Nobbs. Nobbs had passed it on to another member of the civic élite, Justice Fromanteel who ‘was but a bad penman’, so he handed it on to Johnson on condition that he finish it, ‘which I have done by the assistance of friends as you will observe from the difference of hands’. After he left Norwich Johnson passed it on to the town clerk Elisha de Hague, who added much material of a civic nature from the eighteenth century. It is clear that members of the urban élite such as Johnson and de Hague attached great importance to possessing a copy of these annals well into the eighteenth century and in a sense these chronicles and annals can be seen as an ‘ego-document’ of the civic self. By looking at more conventional ego-documents such as diaries, memoirs and autobiographies it is possible to get a sense of the importance of being a part of the civic community and a long-standing civic tradition for the construction of self: diaries record memories of what the individual or society deems it important to remember, so in this context it is

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significant that quite a number of diaries appear to have been written as a consequence upon taking civic office. The diary of Samuel Newton of Cambridge, for example, which dates from the late seventeenth century, began with the day on which he took out the freedom of the city, and when his brother, wife and sister in law were similarly made free.35 Subsequent entries recorded in regular detail the events of the civic year: his participation with his colleagues, identified by their office, and the rituals which were handed down year by year, reminding the participants of their place in a longer continuum of civic office-holding. Civic office was clearly a source of considerable personal pride and a key constituent in Newton’s self-identity, but it was predicated upon a strongly felt membership of a wider community that transcended his own individual fortunes. In another incorporated town, Reading, John Watts had become a freeman in 1716 and on two occasions in the 1720s he assumed mayoral office. In 1730 he started to write memoranda regarding his period of office for his own private use: ‘The occasion of the following sheets were designed for the refreshing my own memory in the severall little particulars of no use to any body but my self, wheresoever I have occasion to look back into my own transactions during the time I was twice Mayor of the Corporation of Reading.’36 The diary covers many aspects of his activity as mayor and provides a vivid insight into the very varied range of duties and responsibilities that was expected of civic office in those days and of the problems faced by early modern urban authorities. But in terms of understanding the eighteenth-century construction of self and its relationship to collective identities, it is also significant that Watts, like Newton, chose to compile the memoranda specifically around his period of civic office-holding. Compiled with his personal memoranda, Watts drew up a list of all the other mayors who had held office prior to him and all the members of parliament who had represented Reading in the past: ‘As to the historicall lists of the gentlemen that hath done the Corporation the honour to represent them in Parliament, and the many gentlemen who have had the honour to be chief magistrates of the Town.’37 Watts clearly had a strong sense of himself as part of a tradition: in recording the names of those who had gone before him, he was honouring their memory, but in compiling the memoranda, in which his own actions were of course the principal focus, he was also ensuring that his own name would not be forgotten by future generations: ‘I shall now make use of a few words of Pliny (who says) nothing employed his thoughts more, than the desire he had of perpetuating his name, which in his opinion was a design worthy of

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a man, at least of such an one, who being conscious of no guilt, is not afraid to be remembered by posterity.’38 Alongside his memoranda of his time in office and his lists of mayors, Watts also collected materials relating to the history of the borough, which he hoped might be of use or interest to others. In compiling these memoranda, and even more so in collecting historical material relating to the town and corporation of Reading, Watts was engaging in behaviour that was very similar to that of Thomas Damet and Henry Manship discussed above. Nearly one hundred years later in 1816, another resident of Reading, John Man, published a history of the town, explaining that his aim had been to give his fellow townsmen a ‘more detailed account of the various changes that have taken place in the government of the borough and the rights they possess, than has hitherto appeared’.39 Man’s reference to the ‘rights they possess’ is an interesting one here: given the timing, seventeen years after the French Revolution, one might assume that he was referring to individual rights to liberty. However, it is more likely in this context that he was referring to the inherited rights of the civic community: the rights of the freemen to the parliamentary and civic franchise, the freedom to trade, and other related privileges. These were privileges that, as we have seen, were granted to a community by the crown; they did not belong to the individual but were either inherited or were acquired through apprenticeship or purchase and they were defined by place. 40 Although by the time that Man was writing, attitudes to corporate bodies and inherited privileges were changing, the appeal to a common sense of civic identity and civic traditions still represented a very powerful rhetoric, and was frequently mobilised, particularly at elections. 41 Man was in fact part of a long civic tradition in which members felt a personal responsibility to their fellow citizens to preserve the memory of their shared rights and traditions, for the welfare of the community and the perpetuation of good government.

Notes 1

Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and the Social Transition (Oxford, 1978); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957). 2 Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591-1791 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 22. For a recent discussion of the expansion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical writing see Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A Social History of the Industrial Revolution

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(New Haven, 2013). 3 The classic statement of this thesis is to be found in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1550-1800 (London, 1979). 4 For a summary of these theories, see Michael Bounds, Urban Social Theory: City, Self and Society (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1-62. 5 Jonathan Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 84-112; Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112:4 (2007), pp. 1016-1038. 6 G. Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1972), pp. 95-129; R. G. Wilson, Gentleman Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700-1830 (Manchester, 1971), pp. 207-212; N. Rogers, ‘Money, Marriage, Mobility: the Big Bourgeoisie of Hanoverian London’, Journal of Family History 24 (1999), pp. 1934. 7 R. Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580-1740 (Cambridge, 2001). 8 Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism, p. 395. 9 See also M. Prior’s study of family networks in Oxford, Fisher Row: Fishermen, Bargemen and Canal Boatmen in Oxford, 1500-1900 (Oxford, 1982); P. Lane, ‘An Industrialising Town: Social and Business Networks in Hinckley, Leicestershire, c. 1750-1839’, in Urban and Industrial Change in the Midlands: Trades, Towns and Regions, ed. P. Lane and J. Stobart (Leicester, 1998), pp. 139-166; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680-1780 (Berkeley CA, 1996). 10 D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 113 (1986), p. 69. 11 N. Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 151 (1996), pp. 111-140. See also her Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001) and ‘Dimensions of Inequality among Siblings in EighteenthCentury English Novels: The Cases of Clarissa and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’, Continuity and Change 7:3 (1992), pp. 303-333. The flexibility identified by Tadmor is mirrored in a study based on a rather different type of evidence by B. Reay, ‘Kinship and the Neighbourhood in Nineteenth-Century Rural England: The Myth of the Autonomous Nuclear Family’, Journal of Family History 21 (1996), pp. 87-104. 12 See for example W. H. D. Longstaffe, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes, Late Merchant and Sometime Alderman of Newcastle upon Tyne, vol. 50 (Durham, 1867). 13 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town 1680-1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow, 1999), chapter 1. 14 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Women and Civic Life in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 21-41.

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Sweet, The English Town, especially pp. 33-72. Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-Holding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded 1500-1800, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153-194. 17 Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship and State Formation’, pp. 1016-1018, 1033. 18 Robert Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 19 Robert Tittler, ‘Reformation, Civic Culture and Collective Memory in English Provincial Towns’, Urban History 24 (1997), pp. 283-300; idem, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture 1540-1640 (Oxford, 1998); Phil Knowles, ‘Continuity and Change in Urban Culture: A Case Study of Two Provincial Towns, Chester and Coventry, c. 1600-c. 1750’, PhD thesis, University of Leicester (2001), pp. 33-60. 20 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Borough Archives and the Preservation of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Towns’, in Du Papier à l’Archive, du Privé au Public, ed. Philip Genet (Paris, 2011), pp. 129-148. 21 T. Damet, A Booke of the Foundacion and Antiquitye of the Towne of Greate Yermouthe, ed. C. J. Palmer (London, 1847), p. 3. 22 Paul Rutledge, ‘Thomas Damet and the Historiography of Great Yarmouth’, Norfolk Archaeology 33 (1965), pp. 119-133; idem, ‘Thomas Damet and the Historiography of Great Yarmouth: part 2’, Norfolk Archaeology 34 (1969), pp. 332-334. See also Robert Tittler, ‘Henry Manship: Constructing the Civic Memory in Great Yarmouth’, in Idem, Townspeople and Nation: English Urban Experiences: 1540-1640 (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 121-139; idem, Reformation and the Towns, pp. 287-291. 23 H. Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth, ed. C. J. Palmer (London, 1854), p. 194. 24 N. Bacon, Annalls of Ipswich, ed. W. H. Richardson (London, 1880), pp. ii, vii. 25 Knowles, ‘Continuity and Change in Urban Culture’, pp. 117-118. 26 Knowles, ‘Continuity and Change in Urban Culture’, pp. 103-106. 27 John Throsby, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town of Leicester (Leicester, 1791), pp. 84, 182. 28 Peter Clark, ‘Visions of the Urban Community: Antiquarians and the English City before 1800’, in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliff (London, 1983), pp. 105-124. See also Alan Dyer, ‘English Town Chronicles’, Local Historian 12 (1977), pp. 285-295 and M. M. Rowe, ‘Seventeenth-Century Exeter Annalists’, in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries (1974), pp. 22-24. 29 This conflation of the personal and the civic can also be seen in the tendency amongst many members of the civic élite to treat the civic archives, not just manuscript histories, as personal property: It is not uncommon to find cases where the corporation in later years had to take measures to recover documents from the families of deceased civic officials. See Sweet, ‘Borough Archives’. 30 See the four sets of annals copied in Bristol Central Library MS 10163 for a contrast in format and style. 16

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31 Samuel Seyer, Memoirs Historical and Topographical of Bristol and it’s Neighbourhood from the Earliest Period Down to the Present Time, 2 vols. (Bristol, 1821-3), vol. 1, p. vii. 32 Bristol Central Library MS7950 fol. 90. 33 Jonathan Barry, ‘The Cultural Life of Bristol 1640-1775’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1985), and ‘Provincial Town Culture, 1640-1780: Urbane or Civic?’, in Interpretations of Cultural History, ed. J. Pittock and A. Wear (London, 1991), pp. 198-234. For chronicles including lists of benefactions see e.g. Bristol Central Library Mss 10166 (ii); 10095; 10162. Tables of charitable benefactions were also displayed in public spaces such as the town hall. 34 Norfolk Record Office MS 453. 35 J. E. Forster, ed., The Diary of Samuel Newton Alderman of Cambridge (16621717) (Cambridge, 1890), p. 2. The women took up the freedom purely to enable them to trade: they could not assume civic office. 36 K. G. Burton, ed., The Memorandums of John Watts Esq: Mayor of Reading 1722-23 and 1728-29 (Reading, 1950), p. 7. 37 Ibid., p. 9. 38 Ibid., p. 10. 39 J. Man, The History and Antiquities, Ancient and Modern, of the Borough of Reading in the County of Berks (Reading, 1816), p. iii. 40 This is one interpretation of the English constitution and the existence of rights such as the franchise. Whereas the Tory view was that all power and rights were delegated by the crown to the boroughs, there were others who argued that such rights derived from an earlier Saxon (or even Roman) period, and had simply been recognised by the crown after the Norman Conquest, and that originally such rights had been much more widely and evenly distributed. More radical reformers made the case for universal manhood suffrage. 41 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Freemen and Independence in English Borough Politics, c.1770-1830’, Past and Present 161 (1998), pp. 84-115.

CHAPTER SIX MEMORY, HISTORY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE CIVIC CONTEXT: EARLY MODERN LONDON VANESSA HARDING

This essay aims to explore the interaction of memory and history, individual and family, in the formation of identity in early modern London, by tracing the relationship between chronicle, history, and egodocument in the writings of a sequence of Londoners between the midsixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. Information, interpretations, manuscripts and printed works passed between these individuals; the textual and historical traditions of London which they shared and transmitted contributed to a wider urban consciousness. But in many cases their writings also document a personal consciousness, revealing the circumstances of the writer’s life and the sources of his public identity.

Writing London’s history Early modern London was a diverse and populous metropolis, rapidly growing and changing. By far the largest British city, it attracted a flow of migrants from the English provinces and beyond, swelling from perhaps 50,000 inhabitants in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and over 500,000 by 1700. High rates of immigration, mortality, social mobility and population turnover might well have undermined the links between individual and family, and the sense of a personal and communal past embodied in a familiar social and material environment. It was certainly possible to live and die disconnected and nameless in the metropolis. But for others the challenge of urban life seems to have strengthened ties to neighbourhood and built environment; to family, conjugal, lineal and extended; and to the sense of a civic community.

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Institutions played an important part in the creation of urban identity and the perpetuation of civic memory. The city of London, at the core of this expanding metropolis, had a long tradition of civic life and ceremony, promoting the status and value of citizenship. Citizenship was linked to membership of one of the city’s guilds or livery companies (so called from the matching liveries or costumes worn by members on formal occasions), which were themselves active in the perpetuation of civic ceremony and tradition, for example through their participation in the visible enactments of community in pageant and civic ritual. Less formal, but still significant, were the rituals of parish life, especially as these focused on chronology and community: marking life-stage events, especially funerals; commemorative sermons; charitable collections and the distribution of bequests. Equally important, however, for the creation of a civic identity in this period was the expansion of writing and printing and the way this enabled a community of shared knowledge. London had higher literacy rates than the rest of the country and literate practices, including personal recordkeeping, were increasingly commonplace. Over the sixteenth century, Londoners’ lives were increasingly documented both by the state (in the form of tax records and population surveys, and the registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials) and in their own personal productions. Citizens kept manuscript records in varying forms, from commonplace books to personal annals. Londoners had a long tradition of civic writing from the fifteenth century, demonstrated in the proliferation of manuscript chronicles, vernacular productions created by and circulating among the mercantile and commercial classes. These interleaved civic chronology— the succession of mayors and sheriffs—with events both local and national, asserting the primacy of London as the scene and focus of action. The English print industry was centred in London from the 1470s and flourished through the sixteenth century; the Stationers’ Company was chartered in 1557, and the associated crafts of printing and bookbinding grew. By 1600 London presses were putting out about 250 titles (including new editions and reprints) a year, rising to nearly 600 a year by 1640. Print production, especially topical and ephemeral, exploded with the collapse of censorship in the 1640s, leading to the rapid circulation of news or gossip in printed form. The chronicle itself became a popular print genre in the sixteenth century, stimulating much historical and antiquarian research, and competition for publishing success. The printed chronicle reached its apogee of popularity in the 1580s, followed by its decline as a genre, to be replaced by a multiplicity of other derived or parasite forms including

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politic histories, newsbooks, historical drama, almanacs, and personal writings.1 One of the most important successors to the printed chronicle was the Survey of London compiled by John Stow, already a successful author of chronicles and summaries. It combined an enumeration of the city’s principal features, from bridges to fortifications to charitable endowments, with a topographical perambulation of the city, ward by ward, describing and summarising the history of streets, buildings, churches, and monuments. It concluded with an encomium, probably not by Stow himself, of the city’s government.2 First printed in 1598, the Survey was revised and reprinted by Stow himself in 1603, and after his death more substantially revised, updated, and expanded, first by Anthony Munday in 1618 and then by Munday, Humphrey Dyson, and others in 1633. Munday, Stow’s friend and designated literary successor, was among other things pageant-writer for several city companies; Dyson, a notary, was also a collector of printed works, especially Tudor proclamations and statutes. Every educated Londoner of the first half of the seventeenth century would probably have known the Survey in one form or another, not least since all parishes were required to own a copy. Its contents were extensively plagiarised and copied in the later seventeenth century, for example in James Howells’ Londinopolis (1657), and it remained current and popular enough for there to be a series of attempts to produce a further edition, finally realised in John Strype’s massive folio edition in 1720.3 Civic identity was thus constructed in practice through participation in the rituals and social practices of citizenship and company membership, and textually in both manuscript and print forms. To some extent this process and its media overlapped and interacted with the evolution of more private forms of textual identity construction. The mid-sixteenthcentury Londoner Henry Machyn’s ‘cronacle’ is a chronological list of London funerals and other public spectacles interspersed with a few family events of note, possibly intended for wider readership. It was ‘capable of being presented as a record of public events as well as a personal memorandum book…a work of urban middle-class ambition’. 4 It is notable that Stow put much of himself into the Survey, not just in explaining the processes of research (‘I read’, ‘I saw’, ‘I remember’), but in the judgments he passes on, for example, the defacers of others’ monuments or examples of fraternal betrayal, and more subliminally, in the topics he promotes or silently omits.5 But others wrote in effect a dialogue with the self—in some cases, with God as an auditor—as did the modest Puritan turner Nehemiah Wallington or the more middling widow Katherine Austen. Despite the privacy of the

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reflections, however, these writings were much influenced, and in part constituted, by their authors’ textual environment. Both Wallington and Austen copied, extracted, and epitomised other texts and sources of information and incorporated them into their own writings, sometimes recognisably, sometimes not. Useful and worthy texts were copied out, and some formed the occasion for longer written meditation. In this they were not unlike the earlier commonplace books. Austen’s notebooks appear to have a chronological order (the surviving ‘Book M’ covers a discrete period, 1664-6, and implies the existence of earlier volumes), so might be considered a form of spiritual diary. Wallington’s numerous notebooks take a variety of approaches, and are usually labelled by topic rather than date, but some of them, such as ‘A record of Gods Mercies’ and ‘The growth of a Christian’, offer a chronological narrative of private events, while in ‘A record of mercies continued’ Wallington reacts to the flow of rumour and printed news of events of the civil wars and disturbances of the 1640s and 1650s. 6

Richard Smyth The chances of loss and survival (we have only a fraction of the writings Wallington and Austen actually produced) must also mean that many more Londoners of the seventeenth century were writing in this vein than we can now identify. One of these lesser-known writers, though not anonymous or untraceable, offers an example of an urban individual whose identity was constructed from many different sources—personal, civic, professional, historical, literary, and bibliographical—and is revealed in his writings and the record of his activities. Though he produced neither an ego-document to rival those of Wallington or Austen, let alone Pepys, nor any published work, and is at best of minor literary interest, this bricolage of materials for a composite identity, part public, part private, must have been true of many middling Londoners. He has a place in this analysis of urban identity for two reasons: his role as a collector and transmitter of historical information, and his own writings, most notably the manuscript that has come to be known as his Obituary. Richard Smyth was born in Buckinghamshire in 1590, the eldest son of an Anglican clergyman and of the daughter of a gentry family. 7 He went to Oxford, but like many contemporaries did not take a degree. He came to London in his teens, obtaining a post in the legal system of the city of London, probably through family connections. The city had a number of civil and criminal law-courts and an associated range of minor and major gaols, and Smyth served as a junior clerk in the Poultry Compter, one of

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the two sheriffs’ prisons, from around 1608 or 1609. He remained a clerk in the Compter from the 1610s to the 1640s, presumably rising in seniority though not in actual rank. His major promotion, to the post of Secondary or chief officer of the Compter, in 1644, was a fortunate windfall, due to the upheavals of the time: the office was normally bought and sold, but when the incumbent was dismissed, apparently for political reasons, Smyth stepped into his shoes. The Secondary was an office of both responsibility and profit, effectively acting as under-sheriff, head of a staff of law-officers and clerks. The office was said to be worth several hundred pounds a year, derived from a share of the fees and profits of justice there. Smyth served as Secondary until 1655, when (aged sixty-five, and following the death of his son John, to whom he had intended to pass the office) he sold the office and retired. The Poultry Compter, and the City’s legal system, seem to have been the focus of Smyth’s whole career, and he built up an extensive acquaintance among the law-officers, clerks and personnel of the City’s courts and prisons, and also contacts with the Inns of Court.

Bibliography and historiography Both before and particularly after his retirement, Smyth was able to pursue his passion for book-collecting. A contemporary reported that he made the rounds of the booksellers’ shops daily, and he knew many of London’s booksellers in person or by repute. By the time he died in 1675 he had amassed a library of some 8,000 works. Its sale by auction in 1682, eagerly anticipated by other collectors, ran over several weeks, and realised over £1,400 (perhaps £120-130,000 in today’s money). Smyth’s interests and expertise are revealed by the areas covered in his book collection. Over half of the works were in Latin. He had a significant number of early printed works, from both British and continental presses, a substantial working collection of books on English history, religious and ecclesiastical history and theology; political history; philology; legal matters, especially the law and customs of the city of London; and aspects of science and medicine. He acquired a quantity of printed ephemera and pamphlets, and owned a number of manuscripts on paper and parchment. The contents of his collection are principally known through the surviving printed sale catalogue, which is not a wholly accurate record since the bookseller added a number of works from his own stock to Smyth’s collection for the purposes of the sale. 8 But there are also several fragmentary catalogues in Smyth’s own hand, which establish his ownership of some sections of the whole, and which also document the

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way he listed and categorised his books. 9 Also highly important is the evidence of how he used the collection, in the translations, compilations, and excerpts in his own hand.10 The sale catalogue notes Smyth’s practice of collating his books and manuscripts, comparing impressions and correcting defects, and entering in his own hand ‘memorable and very useful remarks…wherein certainly never man was more diligent and industrious’. A number of books bear notes in Smyth’s hand.11 We do not know when Smyth began to collect books, but a very important milestone was his acquisition of many items from Humphrey Dyson’s collection after the latter’s death in 1633. Dyson, probably born before 1580, was somewhat older than Smyth, born in 1590, but they were neighbours in the parish of St Olave Old Jewry in the 1630s. William Jumper, attorney, of the neighbouring parish of St Lawrence Jewry, appointed by Dyson to sell his books, was also known to Smyth. While no full catalogue of Dyson’s extensive library survives, his notebooks list his large collection of statutes and proclamations, and it is clear that ‘R.S’., whose initials appear throughout the notebooks, purchased a large proportion of them.12 In the years before his death Dyson was collaborating with Anthony Munday on the revision of Stow’s Survey, published in 1633, contributing new sections and documents, especially on the city’s laws and customs, no doubt based on his own extensive collections.13 While there is no evidence that Smyth made any contribution to the 1633 edition, over the next decades his own collection of historical works and manuscripts increased, to become ‘perhaps the best and largest collection of that kind that is in any private library in this Nation’, so that ‘the most learned men in these parts…were wont frequently to have recourse to THIS, for Things not to be had elsewhere’.14 In Smyth’s library were numerous printed English chronicles, dating from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, and probably including every significant author if not every edition. Strikingly, he appears to have owned a copy of Richard Grafton’s 1570 Abridgment of the Chronicles of England with critical annotations in the hand of John Stow. 15 Smyth also owned a number of chronicle texts in manuscript, including one of Geoffrey of Monmouth to which he added a list of contents. It is possible that he bought some or all these from Dyson’s sale, but he evidently went on collecting historical works through his life. Smyth also positioned himself in the historiography of London, identifying himself with the city and its history not through citizenship— as far as we know he was not a citizen or member of any city company— but from his employment in the city’s legal system and his professional

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interest in the city’s laws and customs. He had many printed and manuscript works of this kind in his collection—books of oaths and precedents, copies of the city’s charters, law cases, ‘Divers tracts & Papers treating of the customs & Priviledges of the City of London’, an early printed book known as ‘The customs of London’ with material (‘much defective’) on the city’s charter, and ‘A verie faire MSS Booke concerning divers Customes & proceedings in the Courts of the City of London, curiously written in quarto’.16 These must surely have been of practical as well as antiquarian value to him or to his colleagues. His wider interest in the history of London is demonstrated by his ownership of the 1633 edition of Stow’s Survey, published after Dyson’s death, as well as a copy of Howell’s Londinopolis (1657). Smyth is acknowledged by Strype as a contributor of valuable information to the latter’s work updating the Survey. 17 His contribution may have been literary and posthumous, so to speak, but it included works of his own compilation, including ‘a Scheme of the Companies, drawn up many Years ago by Mr. Richard Smith, some time Secondary of the Compter; whereby, under one View, may be seen their Order, and the particular Streets or Lanes where the respective Halls stand, or stood’, 18 and an account of the saints to whom the city churches were dedicated.19 Strype also noted the monument in St Giles Cripplegate to ‘Mr. Richard Smith, a very learned Antiquarian: Who left a most noble Collection of choice Books and MSS. behind him’. 20 Information credited by Strype to the antiquary John Bagford on the chapel of St James within Cripplegate probably derived from a manuscript earlier owned by Smyth.21 Smyth thus established himself as a man of learning and a resource for other researchers, even if he published nothing original himself. His interests were not limited to history and London—he evidently kept an eye on current events, had a taste for theological debate, and also a good collection of technical and more popular medical works—but as the foregoing suggests, his approach seems generally to have been that of the bibliographer rather than the imaginative speculator on knowledge. He was interested in compiling and ordering information, classifying, making lists, and correcting imperfect texts, and London and its history, customs, and features was an important focus.

Chronology and identity: the Obituary These traits—compiling, ordering, classifying, an interest in chronology—are also strongly represented in Smyth’s most personal work, the closest to an ego-document that he produced. This is a manuscript

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compilation that he apparently kept and added to for nearly fifty years, which he entitled ‘A Catalogue of all such persons deceased as I knew in their life time, wherein are set down the several years of Our Lord, and the dayes of the month when every one of them dyed or were buried, from the year of Our Lord M.DC.XXVIII [1628] successively’. This text is better known as Richard Smyth’s Obituary, the title given to the edition published by the Camden Society in 1849, the term Obituary is used for convenience in this essay. It is a list, in chronological order, of the names and dates of death and burial of some 1,900 people, usually with a few extra biographical details.22 The record begins in 1628, though a retrospective note of the death in 1606 of his maternal grandfather, Paul Dayrell, has been inserted before the first entry. The surviving manuscript does not date from 1628, but may be some decades later: it appears to begin as a fair copy made from some predecessor text or texts, but becomes looser and more episodic in its compilation over time. Entries were copied in large batches, if not all at one time, up to about 1663, in some cases with later additions or amendments. Thereafter the form varies, with some sections where several entries were written in continuously and others where entries were made one at a time. By the later 1660s it is both rougher and fuller, with more information on the individuals named. The last entry in Smyth’s hand is dated 19 February 1675; the last entry of all is a note of Smyth’s death on 26 March 1675, written and signed by his friend and colleague Augustine Newbold, whose family appears several times in the pages of the Obituary. The date at which the majority of the text may have been copied, the early 1660s, when he was retired and with leisure to devote to scholarship and bibliography, fits with Smyth’s other known writings. But the motivation to begin such a compilation, and to keep whatever was the original form or forms for several decades, is much less clear. In 1628 Smyth was nearly forty years old, established in his profession, a householder, the father of a family; perhaps he was beginning to be aware of wider horizons or looking to place himself in a bigger world. He may have been prompted by a sense of being at the centre of important events: the first proper entry is the lynching in Old Jewry of Dr [John] Lambe, ‘kild…by a rud multitud for wch the City was fined’. If the narratives of the event, in which Lamb took temporary shelter in a lawyer’s house in the Old Jewry to evade his assailants, are accurate, then Smyth may have been closer to the scene of action than his laconic comment implies.23 The next half-dozen entries in the Obituary are either family members or notable figures, the latter including the murders of the duke of Buckingham and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Despite the title, ‘all such

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persons deceased as I knew in their life time’, many of the deaths were of public figures at court and in government, grandees of the church or the law, or notorious criminals, few of whom is he likely to have known personally. Victims of sudden and remarkable accidental deaths also feature. This might suggest that Smyth was combining the conventional genres of family record-keeping with the memorialising of notables or notable events, for example like Machyn’s chronicle. The murders could also be read as judgments, of the kind Nehemiah Wallington recorded, though Smyth conveys no sense of the providential intervention that colours the latter. However, almost immediately the focus opens out and Smyth begins to document a much wider range of individuals. The catalogue expands to include names that meet other criteria of interest: neighbours in Old Jewry and other localities of the city; judges, leading lawyers, and officers of the city lawcourts; booksellers and stationers; a few scholars; friends of friends or other family members. Many modest tradesmen, shopkeepers, servants, and children are noted. The number of deaths recorded increases, partly as the range of individuals expands, but partly as Smyth himself ages; senior figures in his profession, older family members, and ageing contemporaries, were increasingly likely to die. In the 1630s and 1640s, when there are a few gaps in the record, he noted on average thirty deaths per year. By the 1650s he was noting some fifty deaths a year, though with sharp variations: ninety-eight deaths were attributed to the plague of 1665. By the 1670s there are few notables in the list, and most of the deaths are of family members, neighbours, and city tradesmen and local figures. As the number of deaths increases, so does the detail; by the 1660s Smyth often records further information on the individual, the circumstances of his or her death, or the funeral ceremony. A few deaths, such as those of his eldest son and his own wife, evoke expressions of grief and dismay; other deaths are more calmly reported. Occasionally there is a brief but usually positive epitaph: ‘a right honest man and of a good estate’, ‘a woman of good report, sober, discreet, and good conditioned’, ‘a constant churchman’. Criticism or castigation is rare. Smyth’s sources of information must have varied. Some deaths, such as close family, were direct personal knowledge. Others were most likely communicated in conversation, as when he noted deaths of people connected only through some intermediary, such as John Crosse, ‘an honest butcher in Newgate Market, well known to my brother Walter, his customer’. Deaths connected with more distant family members, such as the fifteen deaths in or associated with King’s Langley, Middlesex, where his sister-in-law lived, may have been mentioned in correspondence. News

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of deaths in legal circles must have circulated in the general gossip of the Guildhall law courts or the Inns of Court, though perhaps intermittently: several deaths in the law were recorded with approximate dates, ‘about this time’ or ‘in this vacation’, or while on circuit in the provinces. Bookselling was another world, in which Smyth heard of the deaths of tradesmen and their families, and noted unusual circumstances. Peter Cole, bookseller, was ‘reported to be distracted’ when he hanged himself in December 1665.24 The former stationer John Nicolson died in 1673: ‘some report he starved himself through miserableness, though since his death there was money sufficiently found, by him, to have satisfied all his wants’.25 Smyth may have heard of some London executions through law circles, but those of public figures were the subject of newsbooks and broadsides as well. The trial and execution of the notorious earl of Castlehaven in 1631 were widely reported; Smyth noted his death, but also owned a 1642 tract on the trial.26 A terrible fire in Lothbury, in 1662, in which all seven inhabitants of the house died, was noted by Smyth, but also by Samuel Pepys (who heard the story a couple of days later in Westminster Hall), Peter Mundy, Thomas Rugge, and Henry Townshend; at least two opportunistic pamphlets spread the story.27 Smyth’s Obituary complements the understanding we have of him as a lawyer, scholar, historian, and bibliographer, from his public career, to give us a picture of the overlapping worlds of public knowledge and personal acquaintance, and the numerous circles within the larger city to which one man could belong. It also shows how an individual’s networks evolved over time, as his professional contacts declined and local and family ones prevailed. It is very noticeable that his move in the early 1650s from Old Jewry to Little Moorfields, only a few hundred metres but to a new parish located outside the city walls, reshaped the flow of information and his sense of neighbours and neighbourhood. The purpose of the Obituary remains obscure. As the foregoing shows, it was not a family chronicle, though sixty-eight family members are named. Smyths and Dayrells are prominent, and Smyth owned, or perhaps compiled, an illustrated MS of the arms of Smith, but relations by marriage or through collateral and female descent were important and indeed furnished some of his closest ties. The Obituary, like other manuscripts in Smyth’s hand, was not included in the auction of his library, and may have passed down in the family. It is evident that antiquarians and collectors were interested in Smyth’s bibliographical works and seized on the manuscript catalogues of the library when they became available. 28 What the Obituary does for posterity is to link the

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worlds of historical scholarship and private life, and to illustrate how the flows of immediate contemporary information could be organised to provide a narrative of evolving urban identity.

Notes 1

D. R. Woolf, ‘Genre into Artefact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 19:3 (1988), pp. 321-354. 2 John Stow, A Survey of London (from the 1603 edition), ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1908, repr. 1968). 3 Julia F. Merritt, ‘The Reshaping of Stow’s Survey’, in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype: 1598-1720, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 52-88. 4 Ian Mortimer, ‘Tudor Chronicler or Sixteenth-Century Diarist? Henry Machyn and the Nature of His Manuscript’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 33:4 (2002), pp. 981-998; J. G. Nichols, ed., The Diary of H. Machyn, Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London, from AD 1550 to AD 1563, Camden Society 42 (London, 1848). 5 Ian Archer, ‘The Nostalgia of John Stow’, in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge, 1995). 6 P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, CA, 1985); David Booy, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654, a Selection (Aldershot, 2007); Sarah Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in Women in English Society: 15001800, ed. Mary Prior (London, 1985), pp. 181-210; Barbara Todd, ‘“I Do No Injury by Not Loving”: Katherine Austen, a Young Widow of London’, in Women and History: Voices of Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith, (Toronto, 1995), pp. 207-237; Sarah C. E. Ross, ed., Katherine Austen’s Book M. British Library Additional Manuscript 4454 (Tempe, AZ, 2011). 7 H. Ellis, ed., The Obituary of Richard Smyth, Secondary of the Poultry Compter: London: Being a Catalogue of All Such Persons as He Knew in Their Life, Extending from AD 1627 to AD 1674, Camden Society 44 (London, 1849), pp. vxxi; V. Harding, ‘Richard Smith or Smyth, Law-officer and Book Collector’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). 8 Bibliotheca Smithiana SIVE CATALOGUS LIBRORUM in Quavis Facultate Insigniorum: QUOS In Usum suum & Bibliothecae ornamentum multo Aere Sibi Comparavit Vir Clarissimus Doctissimusque D. RICHARDUS SMITH Londinensis. Horum AUCTIO habebitur LONDINI, in Area vulgo dicta Great St. Bartholomews Close, in Angulum ejusdem Septentrionalem, Maii die 15. 1682. Per Richardum Chiswel, Bibliopolam. 9 British Library (BL) Harley MS 6207; BL Add MS 21096; BL Sloane MSS 1071, 771; Bodleian Library (Bodl) MS Rawl. D 1377. 10 Papers of Richard Smith, Folger MS V.a.510, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC: see http://findingaids.folger.edu/dfosmithr.xml 11 Bibl. Smith.

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12 N. Ramsay, ‘Dyson, Humfrey (d. 1633), book collector’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; T. C. Dale, ed., The Inhabitants of London in 1638 (London, 1931), http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=176, pp. 8485, 171-172; William A. Jackson, ‘Humphrey Dyson’s Library’, Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 43 (1949), pp. 279-287. 13 Julia F. Merritt, ‘The Reshaping of…’, pp. 52-88. 14 Bibl. Smith., preface. 15 BL Add MS 21096, f. 132r. 16 BL Add MS 21096, ff. 102v., 107v. 17 John Strype, A survey of the cities of London and Westminster...written at first in the year MDXCVIII by John Stow...now lately corrected, improved and very much Enlarged...by John Strype (London: A. Churchill, J. Knapton, R. Knaplock, J. Walthoe, E. Horne, B. Tooke, D. Midwinter, B. Cowse, R. Robinson, and T. Ward, 1720), Preface ch. 3, p. vii. 18 Ibid., 5.15.247. 19 Ibid., Preface ch. 6, p. xxix and 5.1.7 20 Ibid., 3.6.86 21 Ibid., 3.6.81; Bibl. Smith., Manuscripti diversis voluminibus p. 367 no 25; BL MS Harley 6207, f. 111. 22 Cambridge University Library Mm.iv.36. BL MS Sloane 886 is a fair copy, of late seventeenth-century or early eighteenth-century date, made with considerable though not complete accuracy. This version is the one transcribed by Ellis, who was not aware that the original survived: H. Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth. 23 H. Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, p. 3; A. Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early SeventeenthCentury England’, Past and Present 200 (2008), pp. 37-76. 24 H. Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, p. 35. 25 H. Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, p. 70. 26 Bodl MS Rawl D 1377, f. 108. 27 H. Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, p. 57; Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1660-69, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (1970-1983), p. 296 and n. 4; Bodl MS Rawl D 1377, f. 116v; A great and wonderful discovery of The Bloudy Villains, and inhumane Murtherers, committed to Newgate and other places; since that great and lamentable Fire, at Mr Delaun’s house in Lothbury…London, printed for J. J […], 1663. 28 E. G. Duff, ‘The Library of Richard Smyth’, The Library 8 (1907), pp.113-133.

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSCENDING THE SELF, CONSTRUCTING A COLLECTIVE MEMORY: THE BIRTH OF A CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN EARLY MODERN VENICE DORIT RAINES

Retracing multilayer-memory elaboration means in early modern Venice, linking two distinct phenomena: locating the existing geometries of power with their principal actors, and at the same time analysing the written products left behind in family and State archives: unofficial and official ones, or better still, the passage from a set of different voices into the emergence of a unique leading one. This essay will focus on the ways Venetian society shaped its own historical narration using recollection and oblivion in order to convey its ideals. It will moreover identify the principal actors involved in the production of memories and highlight the turning points in these collective narrations, when the recollection process is subject to suppression or when other types of remembrance begin to emerge and sometimes challenge the official version. A thousand years of memories can result in an unbearable burden. More so, if the community’s origin is made up of a number of distinct immigrant groups, each with its own version. If we assume that memory is one of the principal parameters that shape any community’s civic identity, then mapping the entire gamut of ‘memory products’ that Venice generated in its millenary existence—from chronicles to individual diaries, to family histories and down to official historiography—may enable us to trace the different steps individual memories underwent in order to form family ones, that in turn were elaborated into the narration of the collective self. Unlike other medieval European societies where the learned ecclesiastic circle (sometimes in court service) had mainly been the chief

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narrator of events, Venetian society enjoyed a high literacy rate due to its mercantile character. This led in turn to a more diffused habit of putting into writing past and present experiences. Yet, in a society where the family was the basic social unit and the individual had the right to exist socially and politically only through his family, individual memories could not have been accepted as ways of telling the history of the city, but they could have been used as examples of proper civic conduct. The Venetian élite in fact blocked any outer voice other than its own and produced as of the fifteenth century two different genres: 1. the official history as a continuity of the chronicles which followed the chain of important events, completely disregarding individuals as historical actors unless they had given their lives in the service of Venice; 2. a variety of products, generated by individuals and families who used their histories and memories in order to convey the Republican ideals and create civic consciousness in the Venetian citizens. Yet, in order to understand early modern Venetian narration and the reasons for the triumph of the collective memory type, rather than the expression of individual or family, one has inevitably to start in the middle ages, when the burgeoning chronicle structure shaped and conditioned for centuries the leitmotiv of Venetian story and history. Our knowledge of Venetian medieval chronicle-writing technique is only partial. We can, however, distinguish between two types: the rulers’ version (annales maiores), in our case a chronicle written by the court chaplain, Deacon John, which narrates the history of Venice from its origins through the reign of Doge Pietro II Orseolo (991-1009),1 and later chronicles which narrate the events of a single community or ethnic group (annales minores)2 like those of Grado, Aquileia and Altino, all written between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.3 None of these chronicles is concerned with a sort of civic Bildung as a guide for developing civic consciousness. The rulers’ version was more concerned with establishing the Doges’ and Venice’s claim to power, while lightly touching upon the ideal of liberty and freedom that will be excessively underlined later through the narration of the way Venetians fled Attila the Hun in the fifth century and established their own rule on the lagoon islands. The later version followed Carolingian practices and was more a preparatory work for a future compilation: it usually contained a series of lists of rulers, popes, Roman emperors, patriarchs, along with some passages probably copied from other sources.4 The Venetian Commune period, which began in 1143, and saw the establishment of the Great Council in 1172, saw the first attempt to proceed to a sort of a unified narration of events.5 The great novelty is the

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attempt to narrate Venetian history through the Doge’s figure as eikonimago, in a sort of a collective res gestae of the rulers. It is a homogeneous narration that divides the history into separate units defined by the Doges’ reigning periods. Yet, it does not relate to the person of the Doge as an individual or as a heroic figure but as an exemplification of virtues that the author wished to underline.6 A century later appeared the first narration dedicated to the city and its inhabitants, written between 1267 and 1275 by a citizen, Martino da Canal, ignoring the ruling élite’s point of view and simply concentrating on events, accompanying them with his own commentary.7 This narrative type which provided mature consideration of the city’s history, based less on official sources than other ones, was destined to remain the only contemporary attempt to experiment with a more individual narration. Indeed, the confusing political events of the first half of the fourteenth century, resulting in a rebellion against the ruling élite in 1310 and then in 1355 in an attempt to topple the government by the Doge himself, had led to a closing of the ranks and to a rather odd situation where the families’ power, the backbone of the political structure, was judged incompatible with the principle of collegial rule, established in 1297 with the Closing of the Great Council, the sovereign political organ. When the ruler of Venice, Doge Andrea Dandolo, wrote his Chronica extensa between 1343 and 1352, he discarded all chronicles written before his time as being biased or the opinion of a person or of an ethnic group.8 The Doge had a far more ambitious programme in mind: he wished to create a unifying version out of different narrations in circulation. In doing so, he wished to consign to oblivion the immigrant origins of the lagoon society and the persistent divisions between ethnic communities. 9 The ‘phantoms of remembrance’, as Patrick J. Geary called the ‘relics by which the past continued to live into the present’,10 were already haunting Venetian society. Collective memory, as well as collective oblivion, became instrumental in the ever-going conscious effort to (re)shape reality to Venice’s identity aggregation purposes. Dandolo’s urgent dilemma was what should be consigned to the wastebin of history and what should be highlighted and praised. The selection process he undertook was based on the assumption that only official records could witness ‘the truth’. He therefore discarded all other helpful sources that could have shed light on city life or that could complete the Venetian historical narration he wished to present.11 Perhaps as a reaction to Dandolo’s effort to set a unique linear version based on the Doge’s figure as a leading theme, the élite families could not renounce their own narration and role in Venetian history. Contrary to

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Fig. 7-1 Rafain Caresini, Cronaca, written between 1383-1386, Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 770 (=7795). Any reproduction is prohibited.

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Florentine families and their individual diary tradition,12 Venetian families chose to collectively narrate the history of Venice through their memories. They produced small narrative portraits of each family, a sort of heraldic chronicle, added to the end of a quick-reference chronicle. The novelty lay in their structure: a sort of ‘database’ made of easily removable, small informative units, an easy target for textual manipulation. The structure of each family’s portrait, made up of taxonomic categories, turned in fact into an experimental ground: it could have been manipulated by omitting, adding or changing a category without damaging the basic textual structure.13 In fact, the outcome of the constant data elaboration reveals the way in which the Venetian patriciate constantly manipulated different ethnic historical narrations in order to create a unified version of the formation of Venetian society. It eliminated completely the immigrant nature of primitive Venetian society, claiming for a select group of families social and political pre-eminence by ancestral right. The tension between these two challenging approaches to historical narration, on the one hand, an official impersonal version based on chancellery records and on the other, the collective family underlining their specific privileged status, had in a sense laid the foundations for the emergence of a new genre. Based more on merchant letters, gossip, discussions and official records, the fifteenth-century chronicle was an immediate success. The thirteenth-century chronicle by Martin da Canal was perhaps ahead of its time: his personal commentaries were seen as an attack on a fragile system that had not yet reached the political maturity fifteenth-century Republican Venice could now boast about. The ideologically-structured chronology was relegated in this new genre to the mythological part regarding the origins of Venice and the identity of its people, while the more modern part sketched a vivid and sometimes colourful image of the triumphant city-state and empire that Venice had come to be, thanks to the progressive conquest of the mainland area from Udine to Brescia. This vast territory and the additional areas of Istria, Dalmatia, and Greece, also under Venetian hegemony, constituted a haven for the circulation of information, a useful commodity for merchants and rulers. The new genre of chronicle then was heavily conditioned by the circulation rhythm and quantity of information and by the awareness that Venice was no longer a small lagoon island, but the capital of a vast empire. The creation of the Secret Chancery in 1402 coincided with the mainland conquest and the need to keep secret records apart from other sections. From that point on, only chancery employees and a few others would have daily access to the Senate and the Council of Ten’s records.

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This decision certainly limited chroniclers wishing to accurately narrate the history of Venice.14 The Humanist taste for writing, for keeping track of the past, the growing civic consciousness, all of these brought about a fervent chronicle activity. People started keeping diaries, adding as a historical part an elaboration of a copied chronicle or chronicles, following the medieval practice of chronico more; those who succeeded them re-edited the diary part, maintaining the shape of the Doges’ lives as a main framework, and made it more compact by eliminating irrelevant facts and rendering the text more elaborate. Doge Andrea Dandolo’s huge work was not pursued in this way. It lacked the raw material—State records as dispatches, ambassadors’ reports and government’s decrees, among others. Hundreds of chronicles were written in the course of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century. The Venetian empire, slave of a mythological past, turned now to the present in order to discuss its extraordinary achievement in conquering a huge territory. If until now it had to ‘manage’ past narration through the chronicles, it sought to control from this moment the narration of the present day through diaries mostly kept by members of the ruling élite. Some of the authors remained anonymous, others signed their names, but astonishing as it may sound, the writers rarely included in their narration any personal testimony. They may have commented sometimes harshly on different situations, but rarely told their own story. This can be seen, for example, in the case of the chronicle of Giorgio Dolfin (1396-1458), which covers Venetian history from its origins to 1458, or that of Antonio Morosini (1368-after 1433), which covers the years 1094-1433,15 or the case of one of the best known diarists of the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Venetian patrician Marin Sanudo il Giovane (1466-1536), whose fifty-eight volumes of meticulous gathering and copying of records, letters, decrees, lists of magistrates over a period of thirty-seven years (1496-1533), is even today a keystone for historical investigation.16 Likewise, the patrician merchant Girolamo Priuli (1476-1547), author of other diaries largely based on contemporary merchant letters, had a strong tendency to heavily criticise his fellow citizens for their poor management during the war of the League of Cambrai when Venice was bitterly defeated in 1509 and lost almost all of its mainland territory.17 But an empire could not have continued without an authorised version of facts in order to justify its power and territorial conquests (as Doge Dandolo had done). Faced with the Florentine humanist outpouring of State historiographical production by chancellors Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Bartolommeo della Scala,18 the Venetian authorities, in

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Fig. 7-2 The first page of the Diarii by Marin Sanudo (1466-1536), Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 228 (=9215). Any reproduction is prohibited.

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need of rhetoric and explanation, sought the services of the renowned humanist Flavio Biondo. As he was unavailable, they turned to Marcantonio Sabellico, the first public historiographer, who published in 1487 Decades rerum Venetarum.19 From that point on it became clear that the official historiography would mainly deal with diplomacy and international relations—in fact all appointed historiographers were either statesmen or diplomats, while the Lives of the Doges chronicles still continued to be copied in the course of the sixteenth century, although with less vigour. Some diaries were still kept, such as that of Francesco Molin, written at the end of the sixteenth century, but the popularity of the genre soon began to wane.20 The dialectic established between official historiography and unofficial chronicle-writing diminished even more the role of individuals in the process of history telling. It was the city of Venice, intended both as the lagoon island and as the Republic-empire, which became the main actor in a growing web of international relations. It was as if Venice represented a synthesis of all patricians and élite families in the name of republican equality. The praise of magistrates who ruled the mainland cities, printed in small booklets from 1490, was tolerated as long as they complied with the rule that the magistrate had to serve as an example of the just rule of Venice. Commemorative orations for Doges (but also for known intellectuals), as well as panegyrics and eulogies written in their praise when they were in office or after their death, also had to set an example more than to sketch a real portrait.21 All became subservient to the highest goal: service to the State. The notion of ‘empire’ became synonymous with that of the triumphant city, ‘republic’ with its renowned form of government. The myth of Venice reached its height in the mid-sixteenth century: Europe celebrated the myth and tried to understand the basic principles of a political system enjoying such longevity. Venice itself came to believe deeply in its own myth: it further eliminated any hint of dissent and at the same time set out to reinvent its origins claiming the city had been founded by the rich and noble families fleeing from Attila the Hun. The aftermath of the Cyprus war with the cession of the island to the Turks in 1573 was seen in Venice as the failure of an incompetent ruling class. The Venetian patriciate received a heavy blow to its reputation and dissent grew more and more apparent. Venice had lost one of its major sources of wealth but it also witnessed a diminishing importance in the European theatre both politically and economically. The debate within the ruling élite grew bitter. One channel to challenge the official narration by public historiographers was the constitution of a group of intellectuals

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around the figure of the patrician Gianfrancesco Loredan, head of the Incogniti (‘Unknowns’) Academy founded in 1630. The idea was to mock the existing literary and historical genres, mixing real with invented information (as did Ferrante Pallavicino) or to write an alternative version to the official one (such as the works of Girolamo Brusoni). Yet, the Academy’s members never dared to write an alternative history of Venice.22 Simultaneously, the growing awareness among the ruling élite of its noble status and the decrees promulgated in 1506 and 1526 which had led to careful control of noble births and marriages, enhanced the conviction of the patrician families of their exclusive role in Venetian history. From the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century the triumph of the patrician family as a crucial element within Venetian life was more than evident. Books narrating the history of families written by genealogists, histories of families told through the lives of their members in manuscript form and even a pictorial history of the Grimani family, depicting all the achievements of its members, were on display to all visitors to the family library: all these testify to the fact that the concept of family came forcefully to the foreground and challenged the monopoly that Venice—the city—had over public narration.23 As the Venetian political system was slowly becoming weaker and unable to respond to basic requirements such as finding an adequate number of members of the ruling élite to fill offices, and as families began to sense they could no longer draw benefits from a disintegrating system, the narration of the events under discussion came to a halt. Indeed, the last official historiographer, Pietro Garzoni, elected in 1692, was not succeeded by another colleague after his death in 1735. 24 As other historiographical genres appeared, more analytical and retrospective in character, people turned again to diary writing: a pharmacist, a patrician, a scholar, a lawyer, each with his own approach, making daily annotations of everyday life in the city or a thematic treatment of the last fifty years of Venice.25 Yet, even these genres cannot be considered an expression of personal or intimate memories. In the course of the eighteenth century two famous individuals dared to write their own personal stories: the adventurer and author Giacomo Casanova, and the playwright Carlo Gozzi.26 The self was considered in Venice to be a private and intimate sphere. One could entrust one’s feelings to private letters but as far as identity was concerned, it was inevitably linked to Venice, both in the geographical and political sense.

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Fig. 7-3 Cronica Veneciana e Cronica Foscara, chronicle written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Saint Mark’s National Library, Venice, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 2773. Any reproduction is prohibited.

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If until now I have merely concentrated on the description of the complex process that led to the formation of a collective memory and consequently also to a collective narration of the history of Venice in the early modern period, I think it is time to try and understand why an urban community of merchants which usually develops an individual entrepreneurial spirit, which endeavours to have the maximum of liberty in order to act, and is characterised by what is called a ‘bourgeois’ ethos, wholly concerned about incrementing or maintaining possessions and wealth, and behaving in a respectable manner, comes to be a closed community where collectivity and the city—the geographical location— become the emblem of society and its government. As much as it is difficult to grasp, especially after a confrontation with other Italian citystates where individuality and the self were cherished and praised (for example, the Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s Life written in the second half of the fifteenth century is a typical celebration of the self),27 Venice deplored any form of individual excess and regarded it as destructive to the harmonious climate it sought to establish. Furthermore, Venetian legislation regarding the governing élite clearly indicated that the individual patrician juridically depended on his parents for his political and social privileged status. Patricians were expected to subdue every personal interest first to that of the State and then to that of the family. Even marriage was governed by familial, not personal, choice; individual careers were decided on the family’s interests and financial means.28 It seems that medieval and renaissance inclinations toward a more comprehensive definition of the self,29 did not undermine the tenacious Venetian conviction that a rigid social order and the sacrifice of the self for community’s sake were the only guarantee against social and political upheavals. Collective memory and its narration had to follow that logic. Eliminating throughout the ages all possible hints of borderline situations, usually created by ‘misplaced’ ambitions, and conversely exalting virtuous conduct through the examples of the lives of the Doges, led in the end to the waning of a wide spectrum of voices, not necessarily antagonistic to the Venetian formulation of social order, but alternative to mainstream thinking. The collective and harmony-driven component strongly embedded in the logic of the Venetian community was revealed to be much stronger than the individual inclinations or expectations of its members. ‘Self’ in Venice had quite some difficulty in emerging, heavily subdued by the hierarchical structure the Republic had maintained for centuries.

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Notes 1

G. Fasoli, ‘I Fondamenti della Storiografia Veneziana’, in La Storiografia Veneziana Fino al Secolo XVI. Aspetti e Problemi, ed. A. Pertusi (Firenze, 1970), p. 13; Giovanni Diacono, Istoria Veneticorum, ed. L. A. Berto (Bologna, 1999). 2 On these two types: M. McCormick, Les Annales du Haut Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 16-17. 3 For the Cronica de Singulis Patriarchis Nove Aquileie, written in the first half of the eleventh century, and the Chronicon Altinate (dated between 1081 and 1204), see Cronache Veneziane Antichissime, ed. G. Monticolo, vol. 1 (Roma, 1890), p. xiii; Fasoli, ‘I Fondamenti’, p. 13; A. Carile-G. Fedalto, Le Origini di Venezia (Bologna, 1978), p. 44; Origo Civitatum Italiae seu Venetiarum, ed. R. Cessi, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, vol. 73 (Roma, 1933). For the Chronicon Gradense, a fragment of the Chronicon Altinate, written between 1237 and 1249, see Cronache Veneziane Antichissime, p. xiv. 4 Fasoli, ‘I Fondamenti’, p. 13; R. Cessi, Le Origini del Ducato Veneziano (Napoli, 1951), p. 79; McCormick, Les Annales, pp. 15-16. 5 On the Annales Veneti, written after 1220, see H. V. Sauerland, ‘Annales Veneti Saec. XII’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto 7 (1894), pp. 5-8; G. Monticolo, ‘Gli Annali Veneti del Secolo XII nel cod. 8 della Raccolta del Barone von Salis Presso la Biblioteca Civica di Metz’, Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 17 (1894), pp. 237-245. On the Annales Venetici Breves, written at the beginning of the thirteenth century, see Annales Venetici Breves, ed. H. Simonsfeld, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vol. 14 (1883), pp. 69-71; A. Carile, Aspetti della Cronachistica Veneziana nei Secoli XIII e XIV, in La Storiografia Veneziana, p. 76. 6 See the Historia Ducum Veneticorum, written around 1230, in Historia Ducum Veneticarum, ed. H. Simonsfeld, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, vol. 14 (1883), pp. 72-88. Cf. G. Cracco, Il Pensiero Storico di Fronte ai Problemi del Comune Veneziano, in La Storiografia Veneziana, p. 46; C. Beremond and J. Le Goff, L’Exemplum (Turnhout, 1982). 7 G. Fasoli, ‘La ‘Cronique des Veneciens’ di Martino da Canal’, in Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 2:1 (1961), pp. 42-74. 8 On the different versions: A. Carile, La Cronachistica Veneziana (Secoli XIIIXVI) di Fronte alla Spartizione della Romania nel 1204 (Firenze, 1969); D. Raines, ‘Alle Origini dell’Archivio Politico del Patriziato: La Cronaca ‘di Consultazione’ Veneziana nei secoli XIV-XV’, Archivio Veneto 150 (1998), pp. 557. 9 Dandolo in referring to the first Doge’s election, speaks of ‘many people’ who lived on the lagoon islands, without explaining their different ethnic origins. Andreae Danduli Chronaca Extensa, ed. E. Pastorello, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 12, pt. 1, 2nd ed. (1939), pp. 105-106. 10 P. J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), p. 7. 11 M. Pozza, ‘La Cancelleria’, in Storia di Venezia III: La Formazione dello Stato Patrizio, ed. G. Arnaldi, G. Cracco and A. Tenenti (Roma, 1997), pp. 365-387.

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12 See C. Klapisch-Zuber, La Maison et le Nom. Stratégies et Rituels dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Paris, 1990), pp. 19-36. 13 The first chronicle, edited between 1355 and 1357 by an anonymous author, is now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (BNM), Cod. Marc. Lat. X, 36a (= 3326). The other chronicle, edited by Pietro Giustinian in 1357 is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Cod. Lat. 5877 (autograph of Pietro Giustinian). See A. Carile, ‘Note di Cronachistica Veneziana: Piero Giustinian e Nicolò Trevisan’, Studi Veneziani 9 (1967), pp. 103-126; Raines, ‘Alle Origini’, pp. 24-26; R. Cessi and F. Bennato, eds., Venetiarum Historia Vulgo Petro Iustiniano Iustiniani Filio Adiudicata (Venezia, 1964), pp. xvii-xviii; D. Raines, ‘Social Debate and Harmful Publication: The Family Chronicles of the Venetian Patriciate (Eleventh-Eighteenth Centuries)’, in Scripta Volant, Verba Manent. Schriftkulturen in Europa Zwischen 1500 und 1900. Les Cultures de l’Écrit en Europe entre 1500 et 1900, ed. A. Messerli and R. Chartier (Basel, 2007), pp. 281311. 14 G. Trebbi, ‘La Cancelleria Veneta nei Secoli XVI e XVII’, Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi 14 (1980), pp. 65-125. 15 G. Dolfin, Cronicha dela Nobil Cità de Venetia et dela sua Provintia et Destretto (OriginiĮ1458), ed. A. Caracciolo Aricò, 2 vols (Venezia, 2007-2009); Il Codice Morosini: Il Mondo Visto da Venezia (1094-1433), ed. A. Nanetti, vols. 1-4 (Spoleto, 2010). 16 G. Cozzi, ‘Marin Sanudo Il Giovane, Dalla Cronaca alla Storia’, in Ambiente Veneziano, Ambiente Veneto, ed. G. Cozzi (Venezia, 1997), pp. 87-108; A. Caracciolo Aricò, ‘Marin Sanudo il Giovane: Le Opere e lo Stile’, Studi Veneziani, n. s. 55 (2008), pp. 351-390. 17 I Diarii di Girolamo Priuli: aa. 1494-1512, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 2nd ser., vol. 24, pt. 3 (1912-1941). 18 D. J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1969), pp. 1-31, especially pp. 2-7. 19 G. Cozzi, ‘Cultura Politica e Religione nella ‘Publica Storiografia’ Veneziana del ‘500’, Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano, vols. 5-6 (1963-1964), pp. 215-294. 20 S. Maggio, Francesco da Molino Patrizio Veneziano del ‘500 e il Suo Compendio, Ph.D. thesis, University of Trieste, 2008. 21 D. Raines, L’invention du Mythe Aristocratique. L’image de Soi du Patriciat Vénitien au Temps de la Sérénissime (Venezia, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 181-236. 22 M. Miato, L’accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan, Venezia (1630-1661) (Firenze, 1998). 23 Raines, L’invention, vol. 1, pp. 495-521; vol. 2, pp. 770-790. 24 A. Stouraiti, ‘Una Storia della Guerra: Pietro Garzoni e il Suo Archivio’, in Venezia e la Guerra di Morea. Guerra, Politica e Cultura alla Fine del ‘600, ed. M. Infelise and A. Stouraiti (Milano, 2005), pp. 242-270. 25 The pharmacist’s diary is in BNM, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 1620 (=7846), ‘Libro de Memorie [composto da Antonio Benigna]’, 1714-1760; Notizie d’arte Tratte dai Notatori e dagli Annali del N. H. Pietro Gradenigo, L. Livan, ed., Miscellanea di Studi e Memorie, vol. 5 (1942); ‘Memorie degli Ultimi Cinquant’anni della

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Repubblica di Venezia di Antonio Lamberti’, in BNM, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 1454-6 (=9345-7), Giovanni Rossi, Documenti, vols. 31-33. 26 G. Casanova, Histoire de Ma Vie (first published in 1822-9); C. Gozzi, Useless Memoirs (1777, published 1797). 27 L. Boschetto, ‘Tra Biografia e Autobiografia. Le Prospettive e i Problemi della Ricerca Intorno alla Vita di L. B. Alberti’, in La Vita e il Mondo di Leon Battista Alberti (Firenze, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 85-116. 28 J. C. Davis, Una Famiglia Veneziana e la Conservazione della Ricchezza: i Donà dal ‘500 al ‘900 (Roma, 1980); V. Hunecke, Il Patriziato Veneziano alla Fine della Repubblica: 1646-1797: Demografia, Famiglia, Ménage (Roma, 1997). 29 C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200 (London, 1972); A. J. Gourevitch, La Naissance de l’Individu dans l’Europe Médiévale (Paris, 1997).

CONTRIBUTORS

Vanessa Harding is Professor of London history at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests focus on early modern London and especially on population, mortality, and the family. Her publications include ‘Family and Household in Early Modern London’, in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Malcolm Smuts (Oxford, forthcoming 2015). Reiji Iwabuchi is Professor of Japanese history at Gakushuin Women’s College. His publications include Edo Bukechi no Kenkynj (Residential Area for the Ruling Class in Edo: The Social History of Early Modern Edo) (Tokyo, 2004) and ‘Characteristics of Egodocuments in Edo Period Japan (1603-1867)’, in Les Usages des Écrits du For Privé: Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe (The Uses of First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe), ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu (Bruxelles, 2013), pp. 107-122. Hyun Young Kim is a Senior Research Fellow in National Institute of Korean History. His publications include Social History of Joseon Period Seen from the Diplomatics [in Korean] (Seoul, 2003) and Tongshinsa (Diplomatic Mission to Japan in 17-18 Century), Linked the East Asia [in Korean] (Seoul, 2013). Sung Hee Kim is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Korean History. His publications include ‘Memory, History and Ideology: A Shift in the Zeitgeist of the Late Joseon Period’ [in Korean], Quarterly Review of Korean History 93 (2014), pp. 297-331. Hisashi Kuboyama is an independent historian and translator. He studied at Waseda University, Tokyo, and also gained a PhD in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. Dorit Raines is Assistant Professor of history of libraries, archives and documentation at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Her publications include L’invention du Mythe Aristocratique. L’image de Soi du Patriciat Vénitien au Temps de la Sérénissime (Venezia, 2006).

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Contributors

François-Joseph Ruggiu is Professor of early modern history at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Centre Roland Mousnier, UMR 8596 CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne). His publications include L’individu et la Famille dans les Sociétés Urbaines Anglaise et Française au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 2007) and, with Jean-Pierre Bardet, Les Écrits du For Privé en France de la Fin du Moyen Âge à 1914 (Paris, 2015). Rosemary Sweet is Professor of urban history and co-editor of the Urban History at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. Her publications include Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, 16901820 (Cambridge, 2012). Kǀichi Watanabe is Professor of early modern Japanese history at National Institute of Japanese Literature, National Institutes for the Humanities and SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies). His publications include Nihon Kinsei Toshi no Bunsho to Kioku (Document Practice and Memory in Japanese Early Modern Towns) [in Japanese] (Tokyo, 2014).